My top social media news picks for the week of April 17-23, 2011

Happy #EarthDay!

Many online users are taking to Twitter and Facebook to show their support for Earth Day. You can join in the conversation on Twitter by using the hashtag #EarthDay or keep updated on Facebook by liking The Earth Day Network.

Some Earth Day deals to be aware of:

• Starbucks: Bring a reusable mug to Starbucks for free java or tea
• The Disney Store: Bring in 5 disposable plastic bags for them to recycle and receive a free reusable shopping bag.
• Lowe’s: They will be giving away 1 million trees on April 23rd.
• National Park Service: For Earth Day, The National Park service has made all National parks free from April 16-24^th.

 

Noisy Tweeter Feature

Twitter is testing a new feature to deal with noisy Twitter users. The feature appears to hide tweets if a user posts several times in a row. As the following image shows, the users most recent tweet will still be displayed and will be followed by a collapsed bar that you can expand if you want to see the other tweets. Learn more at TNW.

 

I “Like” Birthdays

Happy Birthday to the Facebook “Like Button.” The like button debuted only one year ago at the f8 conference and has since become one of Facebook’s most popular features.

InsideFacebook highlighted some of the stats behind the button:

• 10,000 websites integrate with Facebook each day
• More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook (including over 80 of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites)
• Over half of the 25 fastest growing Comscore U.S. retail sites use Facebook
• Media sites that adopt the Like button average a greater than 300% increase in referral traffic from Facebook

High-tech Dining

Check out the article E la Carte: Table-Top Computers Bring Restaurants To The Future (With Bonus Trivia!) by TechCrunch. It highlights a new high-tech way to dine. E la Cart, a computer based restaurant system, debuted this week. At the lucky 20 restaurants using these systems, diners are given a portable tablet-like device complete with the restaurant menu, games, and more. Diners order by selecting what they want on the device and their requests are sent right to the kitchen. And when they’re all finished, diners can even even pay with E la Cart. It is certainly an interesting concept to keep an eye on.

Can Not Cloud Compute

On Wednesday, Amazon experienced major connectivity and latency issues with their cloud computing system, which eventually led to a temporary system collapse. As CNN reports,

“The trouble was apparently due to excessive re-mirroring of its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes — this essentially created countless new backups of the EBS volumes that took up Amazon’s storage capacity and triggered a cascading effect that caused downtime on hundreds (or more likely thousands) of websites for almost 24 hours.”

Foursquare, Quora, Hootsuite, and Reddit were among those affected. As FathomDB founder Justin Santa Barbara pointed out, “Cloud computing is still in its infancy, and today’s events make it clear that we still have a lot of work to do.”

-Anna (@alucas9)