How to Backup Your Social Media Life

Now that Facebook has made it easy to download the data you've entered on the site, what about the other social networks into which you pump photos, status updates, and messages to your friends? How can you download your stuff on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Flickr? Not all of them make it easy to get out what you put in. Here are the best ways to export and archive your social media life on the most popular networks.
Facebook
While the backup service hasn't rolled out to all Facebook accounts--it's not yet available on mine--you can visit your Account settings and click on the "Download Your Information" link to export your Facebook data. You'll receive an email with a link in it to a zip file that contains your Facebook photos, status updates, videos, messages, and friend list. A video walks you through how it works.
The disadvantage of a one-time export feature like this is that you have to repeat the process by hand on a regular basis, if you want keep your copy of your Facebook data current. That's where an automated service like Backupify comes in. Facebook users who want to set up backup and forget about it should can use Backupify to archive their Facebook data, as well as their information on other multiple social networking tools like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and popular blogging services. Backupify's free personal account archives data from each of those services (from one account only).

Twitter

Here's a little known Twitter fact: if you've tweeted more than 3,200 times, your earliest tweets are not accessible on the web site or in search results. Poof! Gone. Twitter's API only lets you retrieve up to 3,200 of the tweets you've entered into the system. If you have tweeted 3,201 times, your first tweet is gone -- for now, anyway. Twitter has said that the cap is a temporary one in place for performance reasons, but it's freaked out packrats enough to spawn several third-party services that archive tweets.
For example, BackupMyTweets is a free Twitter backup service. Sign up for an account, and it automatically archives your tweets on a daily basis, and lets you export that data to a browser-friendly HTML file or machine-readable XML or JSON formats. Geeks who want to back up tweets to their own server should check out the promising new TweetNest software, which you install on your own web server like WordPress. I'm personally working on a beta web application that archives your tweets and Facebook posts as well called ThinkUp.
The bad news: if you've tweeted over 3,200 times and you start using BackupMyTweets or a similar service now, you still won't have access to your earliest posts. (Hey Twitter, fix this pronto!)
LinkedIn

LinkedIn doesn't offer a one-click export feature like Facebook does, but you can manually export the two most important parts of your LinkedIn life: your connections and your profile.
To back up LinkedIn contacts, click on "My Connections" and then click "Export Connections." Choose either an Outlook-friendly CSV file or a Mac Address book-compatible VCF file. To save your LinkedIn profile data, click on "Edit Profile" and then click the PDF icon on the right sidebar to export it to PDF. You can also use Backupify to archive your LinkedIn data automatically.
Flickr

Unless you pay for a Flickr Pro account, you can only view the most recent 200 photos you've posted on Flickr, and the app doesn't offer an easy way to export a full backup of all the photos you've uploaded there--but several third-party tools and services do. Backupify can archive your Flickr photos automatically for you, or you can use a desktop downloader backup tool like FlickrBackup.
Picasa Web Albums
It's less popular than Facebook or Flickr to share photos, but Google's Picasa Web Albums offer complete and easy backup for your photos. The online service is a companion to the desktop Picasa software, and features two-way sync from your desktop to the cloud. (Picasa is my favorite desktop photo organizer for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it's free.)

Simply set an album inside desktop Picasa to sync to the web, and any changes you make on the desktop will automatically sync to the online version. Any changes you or your collaborators make to the online album automatically syncs to your desktop too.
However you do or don't decide to backup your social media life, just remember: when you post something online, it may not be where you left it a few years from now.

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How Predictive Analytics Can Make Money for Social Networks

You’ve likely been experiencing a deluge of online information coming at you in recent years — an overwhelming number of status updates, e-mails, tagged images and so forth. You’ve probably also seen, and potentially been alarmed by, the growing accuracy of targeted advertisements — “People You May Know,” and other “offers” online.
As the quantity of irrelevant information has exploded online, so too has the market for the delivery of targeted offers and information. Social networks, in theory and in practice, expose many people to contact and influence. Without precise models, people will continue to be bombarded with ineffective offers and other irrelevant information. Predictive analytics, a branch of data mining concerned with predicting future probabilities and trends, applies a filter to users’ online interactions with the aim of delivering more value from a sea of irrelevance.
With increased value comes the potential for social networks to make money as well. Here’s a look at some specific ways in which predictive analytics will make social networks money.

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Recruiting

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Many recruiting sites out there on the web, from LinkedIn to SelectMinds to Monster, promise to be able to match candidates with job requirements in unique and increasingly accurate ways. Predictive analytics is at the core of their business model, as it automates the process of making these matches.
When a recruiter posts a job description, a predictive algorithm runs through candidates and calculates compatibility. The technology is, in many cases, embedded in search applications. The most accurate and efficient of these analytics will deliver the most value and see the greatest adoption over time. Those recruiting and talent acquisition sites that allow businesses to leverage the existing social networks of their current and former employees are the best positioned to monetize their users’ employment data in new ways. Businesses can get value from these existing networks without the time and resource commitment it takes to build their own.

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Sentiment Analysis

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As sites like Twitter and Facebook gain value to the business world, many companies have cropped up to analyze and establish what the sentiment is of the collective online intelligence and also to identify individuals with influence and authority. Companies including Klout, ViralHeat and Radian6 all scan blogs and other social media channels with predictive models to determine if the content surrounding a brand or person is negative, positive or neutral. As this information becomes increasingly valuable to businesses of all sizes, these sentiment analysis companies are expected to grow rapidly.

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Market Fluctuation

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Social media channels are open to everyone. Day traders, retail investors and analysts are cruising around on Twitter and Facebook. What these types of people say and do online is not insignificant in an era when [Flash Crashes and Fat Fingers] are being closely scrutinized and regulated. New models are cropping up to predict stock fluctuations based on Twitter posts. Similar to sentiment analysis, these companies are able to look at the total number of tweets, as well as positive and negative comments to predict whether a stock price will go up or down. These types of companies will become a hot commodity as investors begin to rely on the wisdom of crowds.

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Recommendation Engines

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No one likes to be bombarded with irrelevant offers and content while using their favorite social network. But the more active you are online, the more effectively predictive analytics can work to deliver targeted and relevant offers.
Sometimes it feels like Facebook knows you better than you know yourself. RSVPed “Yes” to that big gala? You may see a discount offer for Saks. [Are you a woman between the ages of 18 and 34? A Facebook ad may tell you how you can lose those extra inches around your waist.] These offers are no longer random and are therefore increasingly effective. Leveraging the existing data from your previous activity to predict what will happen in the future is becoming, rightly, more prevalent and valuable to social networks that can sell this promise to businesses and intermediaries.

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Location-Based Marketing

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Do you walk down the same street at dinner time every day? Wish restaurants on that street would compete in real-time for your business?
As social networks add in more location-aware features like Facebook Places and whole new businesses are built on the promise of geo-location including SCVNGR and ShopKick, predictive analytics deliver insights into where groups and individuals will be and when, not to mention what their interests may be. For businesses, there is big money to be spent on location-based advertising in the coming years. As a result, social networks can run their existing location data through predictive models to provide companies with future insights into where to allocate their marketing and advertising budgets for the biggest returns.