Twitter on Thursday debuted a cute mothers day video campaign. The featurette shows members of Twitter’s staff talking about how their moms use Twitter, while a blog post has been setup to fight your moms objections for not using the service, such as “I don’t have anything to say.”

Twitter also hints at why your parents joining Twitter is less embarrassing than Facebook, for example, they probably won’t know how to use TwitPic and therefore you don’t have to worry about embarrassing photos from your childhood being posted. Heck, even if your mom does learn how to use TwitPic, your friends probably won’t be following her.

The company also urges users to show their mom how they can follow their favorite stars on Twitter, such as Martha Stewart who often provides tips and advice plus links to her best content. With personalized streams of information your mom might just find a useful reason to actively engage with her Twitter account.

Here’s the Twitter “propaganda” video: read more

RenRen, China’s most trafficked social network will launch an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, an IPO that is expected to raise $734.4 million and value the company at approximately $5 billion.

According to Mashable’s Jennifer Van Grove:

Renren is offering shares at $12 to $14, a 30% increase over its suggested offering of $9 to $11 per share just one week ago.

If the company reaches the $13 mid-point it will have a valuation of $5.1 billion, not bad for a company that has only 117 million users of which only 31 million actually access the site at least one-time per month.

RenRen is in many ways a Facebook clone, when Facebook announced a “Like” button, RenRen shortly followed suit, when Facebook announced Groups, RenRen again jumped onboard. The one big difference is that RenRen charges brands upwards of $90,000 to create a fan page, an offering made available by Facebook for free. read more

Late Sunday evening my Facebook news stream was bombarded with posts exclaiming Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was captured and killed. An elite operation that required tactical precision took out Bin Laden and his supporters over the course of minutes. The raid was live streamed to the President and his cabinet but a very different picture unfolded over Twitter.

Around 1 AM as a US helicopter closed in on Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, an IT consultant some miles away live Tweeted the entire raid unaware of what was really going on. Sohaib Athar under his handle @ReallyVirtual Tweeted that a helicopter was hovering around the area and later crashed from gun fire.

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TweetDeck will soon be under the control of Twitter. Sources close to the deal explained to TechCrunch on Monday that the social network has agreed to pay somewhere in the vicinity of $40 million to $50 million for the software company, money that will be paid out in cash and Twitter stock.

In February Bill Gross and his UberMedia company offered to buy TweetDeck for upwards of $30 million, however Twitter quickly made a counter offer and then spent the next several months working out the deal.

The move makes sense for Twitter who on the one hand have slowly begun to stifle 3rd party developer requests in an attempt to reign in their production and on the other hand it ensures they retain their control over a major Twitter program.

UberMedia already runs UberTwitter, EchoFon and various other Twitter startups which could help provide them with leverage over Twitter should they continue to purchase and retain the rights to major Twitter 3rd party applications used by millions of the networks customers.

Twitter officials are not commenting on the rumor, Tweeting: read more

I strongly believe that every business should have a blog to keep the lines of communication between you and potential customers open. The target of this article is to reveal 7 effective ways a blog can help you grow your business.

1. Blogging Boosts Brand Awareness

Corporate blogs create a unique opportunity to share your thoughts, ideas and offerings with not only your readers, but their readers as well, which eventually brings in more prospects. Guest blogging is another great strategy to build up an audience. Plus, new employees and outsiders can get a better chance to know company’s product launch, innovation and strategy.

2. Blogging Personalizes Your Business

Blogging puts a human touch to your business and keeps your audience updated on new and exciting things happening in your company. Blogs are all about being personal, so let your personality flow with blogging. Write in your own name. Share your personal experiences about running your business and being part of your niche. Being personal builds trust, so write with a conversational tone so people can understand and relate. read more

Two hours after news broke that Osama Bin Laden was killed by U.S. Special Forces the “Osama Bin Laden is DEAD” Facebook page has went viral with more than 220,000 page “Likes.”

Every minute thousands of more “Likes” are being added to the page, while users continue to share their stories on the pages wall and mostly rejoice in the death of the FBIs number one fugitive.

The page, originally setup a while back was meant to propagate the idea that Osama was actually killed a long time ago.

According to the page description: read more