• With a little help from my friends. Facebook is reportedly testing a new mobile application feature that permits users to search by keyword through old posts from their friends. This innovation—much like the search functionality in cloud-based mobile mail applications—could make it easier for people to revisit otherwise difficult-to-find content, content that may have been “pushed off the page” in light of the chronological structure of social media news feeds.
  • All together now. What if hundreds of thousands of people all agreed to tweet at the same time? It happens! Although countless folks flock to social media sites on or around New Year’s Eve, according to Twitter’s Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering, most users in Japan “tweet-in the new year” precisely at midnight local time—for example, take January 1, 2012, when Twitter “ground to a halt” as users in Japan tweeted over 16,000 times per second. Wired provides an interesting take on Twitter’s “stress testing” framework, aimed at handling incredibly high-volume traffic like this.