Last week’s two-hour Twitter outage was inconvenient for some, devastating to others. Whether it affected you at all is irrelevant; it proved that social media has become omnipresent.

I sure will be happy when it finally gets itself settled. Every day the media feeds us findings of new studies, fresh reports, and the latest arguments from industry experts about social media’s productivity-boosting power or time-sapping potential.

The outrage over the outage proved that social media matters.

Here are highlights from this week’s stories:

Marines: The Few, The Proud, The Banned
Last week also brought news of the United States Marine Corps banning sites like Twitter and Facebook on military networks. The Marines cited security concerns. We think they’re just too rigid to wrap their minds around the whole Web 2.0 mess.

CIO.com blogger C.G. Lynch responded to the Marine social media ban with a post urging other organizations not to follow the military’s lead. For organizations that don’t have national security at stake, he asserted, banning Twitter and the like is hasty. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Social Media FACEBOOK, productivity, Twitter, U.S. Marines