That’s because this commercial featured several references to Internet “memes.” If you are asking what is a “meme” then you’re one of the people who didn’t understand the commercial.

A “meme” is usually a video, image, story, trend or joke that spreads throughout the internet via social networking sites and for lack of a better term, take on a life of their own.

Basically, a meme starts with one thing that has a basic meaning, whether it’s a picture, animation, or viral video. Then it is copied, altered in some fashion, and then shared. This process repeats creating multiple versions of the same “meme.”

There are hundreds of “memes” on the Internet. But advertisers are finding that some “memes” are more popular than others. You may have heard of “rick-rolling,” “honey badger,” or perhaps “keyboard cat.” If you have not heard of any of these, then you need to spend more time on the Internet.

“Memes” are now becoming the new spokes person for brands. Instead of celebrities, companies are hiring famous “memes” to be in their commercials or Internet ads. Using “memes” appeals to the Internet generation because they recognize and acknowledge them.

Vitamin Water’s Super Bowl commercial featured 7 currently popular Internet “memes” in their commercial. It featured the star of the sexy sax man video, a person planking, a person doing the worm, cats with limes on their heads, a parody of a video of someone getting hit by an antelope, prisoners in orange jumpsuits dancing another spoof of a video and a cameo appearance of Nyan cat.

Anyone who has spent time on the Internet recognized all of these characters and could identify which viral video they came from. Showing that your company is up to date with current Internet trends is another way of establishing brand image. Internet users can associate your product as “cool” with the hopes that eventually they purchase your product.

But “memes” can work in the opposite way. Companies are now using “memes” about them to their own advantages. For example, on the Internet there was a popular “meme” of the main character of Futurama, Fry, called “Not Sure If…” It consists of a picture of Fry with squinty eyes giving the allusion that he is thinking. This image has many difference captions such as “Not sure if I am in a bad mood or everyone is just annoying” and “Not sure if I actually have free time or I’m just forgetting something.”

Capitalizing on the success of “memes” Comedy Central, which airs new episodes of Futurama, started to run commercial spots with this “meme.” This time the caption states “Not sure if happiness is due to life getting better or just new Futurama.”

“Memes” are gaining in popularity by the second. “Memes” can be a useful tool to in marketing because it shows that you understand the Internet, the Internet generation, and their humor. As previously mentioned, “memes” can be helpful in establishing a unique brand image which will hopefully increase your business.

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Like the board game, you pick from a pile of cards. These cards aren’t of random characters but of your actual Facebook friends. You have the option of choosing mutual friends with the person your playing against, you can choose from their friends, or you can even have the game chose the selection for you by selecting the random button.

Once you and your challenger pick your person, you ask yes or no questions back and forth to each other trying to narrow down which possible Facebook friend your competition picked. Asking the questions is extremely simple. You just type it in as if you were texting. Answering the questions is just as easy; you just type yes, no or I don’t know back.

Asking good questions is a little bit harder. In the board game, if you asked if it was a girl and the answer was yes, you eliminated 95% of the candidates. This is clearly not the case when it comes to your facbeook friends. This makes the game more fun and interesting, as you have to be creative to which questions to ask.

This really made the game fun for my friend and me. Simple questions like hair color and eye color were clearly not going to cut it. I found myself asking things like “Is he always drinking?” “Did I kiss him in high school?” “Is he a nerd?”

To eliminate people from the pool of choices you just tap their picture and they disappear. Once you think you have the correct answer you just hold their picture down to guess. I of course defeated my friend. And a big congratulations popped up on screen and gave me the option to post this on Twitter and Facebook.

One aspect that I really love about Face-Off is the fact that you can unlock achievements, which really gives the game an addictive quality because you just want to keep unlocking them! The one thing that I really didn’t like, but like most social media games are the ads that interrupt game play. But this can simply be fixed by purchasing the ad blocker for a dollar. Another cool feature is that they offer additional card packs for $1.

Overall, it was a really fun game. Taking a classic board game and giving it a super modern edgy twist. I found myself playing it for hours and laughing myself silly. I really recommend downloading it by clicking here. Or use the QR code. 

In my opinion, none of this resistance matters. Aside from the most recent changes, no one can even remember what Facebook looked like before? If history has taught us anything when it comes to redesigns on the web, people will be resistant to the changes at first, then grow accustomed to them, then forget about life before those changes entirely.

While it’s still fresh in our minds, let’s review what the most recent “enhancements” were. The chat function was converted from a small tab in the bottom right hand corner to the entire right side of the screen resting beneath a second news feed updating in real time. Another change mad was the creation of twitter-like rss which one can subscribe to.

Now, as Facebook, as it is want to do, makes recommendations to its users.  Today my recommendations are a “person you may know” that I actually did go to high school with, and a popular rss feed belonging to Sean Parker, who is listed as a director at Spotify.

Hold on for a second…. Justin Timberlake?

More seriously, how did this happen? This guy is genius. Despite recent detractions, Spotify may be the first real competitor itunes has had. Personally, I find the program’s layout slightly more user friendly. Also if I actually paid for my music it would make a lot more economical sense to use Spotify.

Don’t just take my word for it, look at Parker. The man single handedly changed the way the world bought music a little more than ten years ago, and then helped reshape the way humans connect only a few years later. All signs point to this guy being a magnet for success on the internet so why should Spotify be any different.

Aside from the cost effectiveness of Spotify premium, my favorite part of the Swedish music service is the ability to sync your account with Facebook. Now I can make playlists for my friends and see what all the people I know are listening to. It’s just another way Parker has allowed us all to stay connected.

Theresa May, the government’s home minister said the purpose of the meetings were not to “discuss restricting Internet services,” but to “crack down on the networks being used for criminal behavior.” Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said the government was exploring its options. “We’re going to look at whether or not it might be right to do this.” He assured the BBC “We are not going to become like Iran or China. We are not going to suddenly start cutting people off.”

A Facebook spokesperson said: "We welcome the fact that this was a dialogue about working together to keep people safe rather than about imposing new restrictions on internet services." The company stressed the positive role Facebook played during the riots, such as keeping people in contact and organizing cleanup events. "There is no place for illegal activity on Facebook and we take firm action against those who breach our rules," said the spokesperson.

Social media has also played an instrumental role in the Arab spring. It is the only bastion of free speech an emerging class of intelligent young people has access to and its message of free speech and liberty is the only narrative the Middle East has seen that is more powerful than that of Jihad against the West. Western governments should be encouraging a universal acceptance of social media and free communication, not attempting to limit it.

Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan and Jordan Blackshaw were jailed for four years for Facebook incitement

Google accused the Chinese government of disrupting its Gmail service in March. The NY Times reported cell phone calls that mentioned the word protest more than once were immediately disconnected. Hosni Mubarak attempted to shut down the internet during the revolution. If liberal western governments threaten to block internet access or dole out harsh sentences to young men for creating Facebook events it will set a disturbing example for the emerging world about the government’s power over free speech.

Facebook’s new products included an upgraded sidebar, group chat, and the very buzzed about feature: video chat in partnership with Skype. But most interestingly was their collaboration of major messaging systems: email, SMS, and IM. Zuckerberg described the idea for this new product, saying, “We don’t think a modern messaging system is email.” Though, he did later elaborate that he doesn’t expect the product to replace emailing, and he certainly doesn’t expect people to immediately shut down their email accounts and only use the new facebook.com email address.

But he did explain why emailing isn’t modern. He listed seven concepts people want out of their electronic communication as seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal, and short. Records show that 4 billion messages are sent across Facebook daily—most of which are one-on-one and private via the Messages feature or the instant messages of Facebook’s Chat, supporting Zuckerberg’s theory.

And on top different types of Facebook messaging systems, people have SMS and emailing, and different people prefer each method. So Facebook thought to centralize all of this into one, life-long stream of one-on-one conversation. If your friend prefers e-mail, and you prefer Chat, you can both communication using your medium of choice. You can view the history of your conversations as a timeline across all the mediums, not just in separate chunks of email, texts, etc. No matter where you are or what medium you use, you can pick up where you left off.

That covers the seamless messaging and conversation history idea, but course, that’s not all. The new product includes a 3 part social inbox that automatically filters messages based on who Facebook knows you care most about. Messages (including your emails, SMS and Facebook features) will be divided into “Messages”, “Other”, or “Junk”.  You can also manually move different people into folders and set privacy settings to limit messages to people you’re friends with.

Andrew Bosworth, Director of Engineering for Facebook, insisted he be called Boz, then continued to tell heartwarming stories and scenarios that all concluded with the need to use Facebooks new message features. Like his Grandma kept all of her letters from his Grandfather since they were early dating, he could view the first messages with his girlfriend from “it was nice meeting you” to their apartment buying and cat naming plans. Basically, Facebook is appealing to real life emotions and relationships.

So it looks like Facebook is still in the running against their soon-to-be major competition Google+. But if you’re wondering what’s so innovative about Google’s social media, here’s a quick summary:

Google+ includes three main features called Circles, Sparks, and Hangouts. The Circles feature allows you to easily share things with certain people, without complicated privacy settings. The Sparks Feature will keep you coming back to your Google+ homepage whenever you’re bored, because it automatically feeds you news and media according to your interests. And of course, Hangouts allows for group video chat.

Currently, Google+ is still a project, so accounts are only available to some people. Likewise, not all of Facebook’s new features are available to the whole network. They’ll continue to add more people, clean up the glitches, and eventually (soon!) expand to everyone. We’ll have to wait a little longer to see how the Google+ versus Facebook battle turns out. In the meantime, you can go group video chat with your Facebook friends.

10:25 AM By Ann Smukler

Photo credit: Valli, Kane & Vagnini

Matt Weitzman, of MJW Media, has been named Internet marketing specialist at the Garden City law firm of Valli, Kane & Vagnini. The Port Washington resident will be responsible for all website design and development as well as web promotion and social media integration for the practice.

Original article www.newsday.com