For FDA, social media's still in trial phase

An army of tweeting thumbs and Facebook Inc.’s planned $5 billion IPO notwithstanding, Margaret Hamburg isn’t quite ready for social media.
“‘Social media’ is a scary term for me,” Hamburg, the top of the food chain in the Food and Drug Administration, told members of the Commonwealth Club this week.
That really comes as no surprise to those who have tracked the FDA’s laborious process for devising rules around how drug makers can communicate with patients using Facebook, Twitter and the like. Two years in, and all that’s emerged are very vague guidelines.

Changing the course of disease, one tweet or 'like' at a time

"New media” or “social media” is helping recruit to clinical trials and maybe — potentially — even reshaping the way trials are done. But take a look at the companies making this happen: Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Twitter Inc. of San Francisco, WordPress developer Automattic Inc. of San Francisco, YouTube of San Bruno.
These Bay Area technologies are connecting people — whether they are fomenting revolution in the Middle East or trying to revolutionize treatment of a deadly disease — are largely due to Bay Area innovators and entrepreneurs.