Wave 6, the latest edition of social media research by Universal McCann media agency, highlights an interesting difference in various nations’ attitudes towards privacy in social networking sites. Of course, any conclusions based on opinion polls tend to oversimplify the image of reality. However, the study seems to provide additional arguments in favour of two theses. Firstly, social media play an important role in terms of building social capital in countries where other forms of self-expression are limited.

When John Kerry took to Twitter on his first day as US secretary of state, he joined an army of diplomats using social media to reach out and connect directly with people around the world. "Exhilarating to walk into @StateDept today and get to work with remarkable team. Dad on mind! -JK," Kerry wrote in his first personal tweet. In less than 140 characters, the new US top diplomat instantly signaled he intended to carry on and deepen a commitment to using social media begun under his predecessor Hillary Clinton.

Most North Koreans can’t access the Internet, and only foreigners can use the country’s brand-new 3G cellular network. But the country has still developed its own rudimentary social network — which you can now see for yourself, thanks to a SXSW panel the Associated Press’s Jean Lee gave this weekend.

Alec Ross, the State Department's first senior advisor for innovation, is leaving after nearly four years of spearheading the department's lunge into the twenty-first century...In a conversation with Mashable, Ross reflected upon helping to build what he and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton call "twenty-first century statecraft" and shared some advice for his successors.

Moscow seems to be placing high hopes on the new tool. The new draft of the Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation, signed by Vladimir Putin in February, states that "new information and communication technologies will be widely utilized" in order to "create an objective perception of Russia in the world" and "develop effective domestic means to exert informational influence on public opinion abroad."

Our hosts were all in their late 20s or early 30s, surprisingly younger than I had expected. Yet I quickly read two messages from that: 1) public diplomacy remains an experimental endeavor, to which new ideas might contribute more than years’ experiences; 2) our meeting was likely to be more informative than official. The second message turned out to be only partially true.

While the the outcomes of revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East are far from certain, what is clear is that the world has seen historic changes that can be in part attributed to so-called connection technologies. After Ross announced on Twitter and Facebook that he would be leaving the State Department this month, we connected to discuss about his plans and reflections on his tenure.