Visits to MySpace UK have halved in 6 months say sources
UK visits to MySpace have dropped from a from a peak of just under 10 million at the start of the year to around 5m as of the end of June 2010, according to a TechCrunch Europe source.

MySpace maintains the figures “aren’t accurate,” however independent measurement service comScore shows a similar decline in MySpace UK’s traffic over the past 12 months. Interestingly, Facebook is the third biggest referrer of traffic to the site.

Orkut about to fall to Facebook in India
Google-owned social network Orkut’s fortunes in India may soon be changing, as Facebook narrows the gap with the country’s most popular social network:

In May, 2010, Facebook attracted 18 million unique visitors in India, compared to Orkut’s 19.7 million (comScore). In the past year, Facebook grew 177 percent from 6.5 million Indian visitors, compared to 35 percent growth for Orkut.

By contrast, Orkut remains dominant in Brazil, “with 29 million visitors a months versus only 8 million for Facebook”. ‘Western’ social networks can sometimes run into challenges in gaining a toehold against local competitors (e.g. Facebook vs. China’s RenRen, 51 and Kaixin001), but Facebook’s growing popularity in India and Twitter’s rapid adoption in Japan suggest that this is not always the case.

Foursquare launches location layers – this is Big
Two Foursquare ‘location layer’ campaigns announced last week from the Independent Film Channel and Huffington Post signal big moves for the location-based service. The campaigns allow users to ‘opt-in’ to get news/tips/content pushed to them whenever they check in near an annotated location.

The development is culmination of several other experiments by Foursquare with partners, such as the Canadian newspaper chain Metro’s review integration in January, and the Wall Street Journal’s location-based news in April.

Social media boosts Domino’s Pizza’s UK online sales by 61.4%
NMA reports that online sales for the Domino’s have increased by 61.4% in the first half of 2010, in part down to innovative social media marketing over the past year:

Our main Facebook site has in excess of 36,000 fans and there are numerous fans of individual store sites too. In addition, we have led the way with social media initiatives such as affiliate marketing, our superfans programme and the development of a link up with Foursquare, the location-based social media site.

BMI integrates live Twitter feed onsite for city destination pages
BMI destination landing pages for cities around the world now incorporate ‘the uncontrolled madness’ of Twitter, thorough a feed dedicated to Tweets about the city in question. The Feeds are moderated for “swearing, competitors and racial slurs,” and feature alongside travel-related content like maps, tips and things to do. BMI wants to demonstrate their belief in transparency by moderating the feed as little as possible, and note they rely on an automatic filter list to automate most of it, and manually monitor sensitive destinations.

UK Government to use Facebook for ideas on cuts

The UK Government is teaming up with Facebook in the hopes of using the social network to harness ‘civic spirit’ in the country, and allow people to submit ideas for where public money might be saved.  The UK is the second largest country on Facebook, with over 26 million UK users. Users will be able to get involved:

…via a ‘Spending Challenge Channel’ on its Democracy UK page. There will also be microsites specially tailored to focus on key issues open for discussion and debate among the voting public.

The move follows the previous week’s launch of the Your Freedom website which was aimed at allowing users to submit suggestions for legislation they would like to see repealed or modified.

Facebook unveils child safety ‘panic button’ (which is just an app)
Facebook has announced that it will incorporate a ‘panic button’ to the social networking site, aimed at children and teenagers to allow them to easily report abuse to the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop).

Facebook had previously resisted adding a panic button, and its launch follows ‘months of negotiations’ between Facebook and CEOP. But as Techcrunch reports:

while a few media outlets are reporting today that it has launched [a panic button], the reality is somewhat different. What Facebook is launching is a tailor-made marketing application and campaign for a government body which till now had no presence at all on the social network. That’s quite a different thing altogether.

Bebo had previously announced adding a panic button last November (not that it did them much good).

‘One third of young women check Facebook when they first wake up’
A recent study polled the habits of 1,605 adults using social media between May and June 2010, and uncovered some interesting online habits from both men and women on Facebook. Chief among them:

• One third of women aged 18 to 34 check Facebook when they first wake up
• 21% of women aged between 18 to 34 check Facebook in the middle of the night
• 50% are happy being Facebook ‘friends’ with complete strangers

Facebook’s OpenGraph, Three Months Later
Three month’s after the announcement of OpenGraph at the Facebook F8 conference, fbLike has compiled a list of six OpenGraph use cases including CNN, Yelp, IMDB, Fandango, Levis and themselves.

In particular, the simplicity of the ‘like’ button comes into it own for Yelp, IMDB, Levis and Fandago, which allows for easy recommendations to be shared directly across a users’ new feed.

On Monday I got back from a week volunteering (and partying) hard at Glastonbury festival for Oxfam. When I arrived on the first day and received my shift times I was truly gutted to hear that I’d be working through the England Vs Slovenia game.

However, my disappointment didn’t last because, in a stroke of luck, I was posted to work on the edge of the Pyramid stage – right where the game was due to be shown!

Along with my fellow volunteers, and Chris from We Are Social that I coincidentally bumped into, I watched the game from my post whilst continuing to carry out my duties.

At half time a guy with a photographer came out on stage and explained that Orange were going to take a photograph of us all to try and make it the most tagged picture on Facebook. There was a murmur of ooh’s and we thought it sounded like a pretty cool and nice way for a brand to interact with festival goers, gaining new Facebook fans in the process.

So they took the picture and everyone got back to the game and kind of forgot about it. Since coming back to find the GlastoTag page I’ve found and tagged myself (despite being partially obscured by an over sized novelty St. Georges wig), shared it on my Facebook profile and liked their page. There’s currently almost 3,000 tags on the photograph and over 4,000 Facebook likes of the page. With over 180,000 people at Glastonbury, and a reported 70,000 people in this image, I expect this will only increase further.

What stands out from this idea is that you can filter the tags to show just your tagged Facebook friends and I (kind of) feel a small sense of pride that I’m involved. It’s cool to check out all the various tags, especially those of the friends I didn’t know were at Glasto, and this will no doubt stimulate conversation amoungst us on Facebook as well as when I next see them in the pub.

Along with the GlastoNav App, Chill ‘n’ Charge tent and the Glasto Blog, I think that GlastoTag is a great addition to Orange’s already brilliant Glastonbury Festival presence. Well played to everyone involved.

Disclosure: Orange is a We Are Social client, although we weren’t involved in this project. Apart from some of us being in the photo, of course…

Social media helps drive purchases by 10x
Recent research reveals that customers visiting an online store via social media are 10x more like to by something than other users: “whereas 7% of all visitors to an online store make a purchase, a significantly higher 71% of visitors initiated via social media will click their way to the transaction section.” The study showed that while many online stores are good at attracting visitors, a small amount will be converted to customers. But “reassurance from a positive review” and “social media marketing” can be highly effective in closing sales.

Sorrell questions commercialisation of social web
WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell likened social media to letter writing at one of the closing sessions of the 57th Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, and said that it could be “polluted” by attempts to monetise it. On the same panel, Keith Weed, the global chief marketing officer of Unilever, likened social media instead to the modern day equivalent of a pub or bar chat, and that social networking sites “will and they must” find ways to monetise their offerings.

…companies like ours can develop with companies like Facebook or Microsoft. So I think ‘yes’, they will monetise. How they do it, I think [Sorrell is], right they have to be clever.

Facebook commits to UK support
King Mark Zuckerberg was in London last week at the first official London Facebook Developers’ Garage event, and he committed to increasing support for UK brands and content providers. Zuckerberg also “stressed the importance of the UK to the company, and highlighted personalisation and its virtual currency Facebook Credits as key themes for the year ahead.”

Statistics update reveals that more than one million websites are using Facebook’s platform
Facebook has updated their official Statistics page, and announced in the process that more than one million websites have integrated with its developer platform, up from about 80,000 websites.

This difference is due, in a large part, to Facebook’s launch of the Like Box and other social plugins in late April; the company said this week that more than 300,000 sites have already implemented the plugins, and the number appear to still be climbing.

Elsewhere, it was reported in a study by Experian Simmons that half of US web users visit Facebook each month.

Twitter makes it easier to find friends and colleagues, Facebook ‘blocks’ Twitter friend finder
Last week Twitter announced that it was making it easier to find friends on Facebook and connections on LinkedIn, by improving their Find Friends section and tweaking their LinkedIn and Facebook applications.

The Tweets application by LinkedIn allows users to see which of your LinkedIn connections are on Twitter and follow the ones you choose right from the app. Meanwhile the Facebook app was meant to show which of your Facebook friends are on Twitter, but this was blocked by Facebook disallowing people to see which of their friends on the social network also have Twitter accounts.

A whole new way of experiencing LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn groups received their first major overhaul since August 2008, which is one of many that are expected in the coming months. In addition to improving the look and feel and ease of use of groups, LinkedIn has also:

• Made it easier to receive email updates from select group members
• Made it possible to vote up or down content and discussions
• Introduced a way to highlight the most active members/contributors to a group

We expect that these changes could go a long way to changing the way that users interact in groups for the better.

Foursquare hits 1.7 million users, and the threat from spammers looms
Foursquare announced that it had passed the 1.7 million user mark, after having added 100,000 in a mere 10 days. At that rate, the location-based service should hit 2 million users before August.

But with growing popularity, comes a greater threat from spammers. The Next Web notes that while spam is still a minor problem, it is becoming more prevalent as people ‘innovate’ by changing their profile name to a company name in order to raise awareness atop local leaderboards, or by leaving advertising messages as ‘tips’.

Foursquare, Starbucks need better blend of offers
When Starbucks and Foursquare announced their joint loyalty program last month in the US, it generated quite a bit of positive publicity. The offer, $1 discount on Frappuccinos to the mayors of individual Starbucks stores, has since come under criticism from Forrester analyst Augie Ray who laid out five reasons that it has become both ‘noisy and bothersome’, and potentially damaging in the long term.  Fair play to Starbucks for being amongst the first to implement a nationwide Foursquare promotion, but there are certainly some lessons to be learned with respect to offering better targeted and easier to redeem Foursquare offers.

Virgin America Offers Free Flights to Twitter Influencers
Virgin America has partnered with Klout, an analytics service that tracks users’ influence on Twitter, to offer free flights (plus tax) to influencers in Toronto:

The offer includes free round-trip airfare (Wi-Fi included) between Toronto and San Francisco (SFO) or Los Angeles (LAX) between June 23 and August 23. Those who received invitations for the offer — whether or not they decide to accept the flight that comes with it — were also invited to Virgin America’s Toronto Launch Event on June 29.

Interestingly, ‘influencers’ who have been offered the free flight aren’t require to blog or Tweet about the experience, though Klout has requested that users who do accept the offer and chose to write something,  disclose the promotion. Handing out free flights to those with Twitter ‘influence’ is not without its critics however, and some question the validity of ranking people based on an algorithm alone.

JD Sports campaign turns 900,000 visitors into 180,000 sign-ups
A recent campaign for the JD Sports-owned fashion label Bank managed to generate 900,000 unique users and 180,000 sign ups for a competition to become the face of Bank and model the Autumn/Winter 2010 range.

It used Facebook Open Graph – only two clicks to connect with a site and then sending info that they’d signed up or voted for someone into the user’s Facebook profile, which meant that their friends (on average 150 people) also saw it.

LOFT ansers the Facebook call for ‘real women’
Meanwhile, LOFT, a US fashion retailer, received interaction of an entirely different nature on its Facebook Fan Page. The company  posted images to Facebook of a tall, blonde model wearing the brand’s new silk cargo pants, and received a number of complaints that the trousers were not universally flatterig unless you’re a “stick like model”. LOFT quickly responded to calls for ‘real women in photos’ the next day by posting pictures of its own staff – ranged from size 2 to 12, and from 5′3″ to 5′10″ – posing in the cargo pants. In so doing they managed to turn things around, address the negative sentiment head-one and show that they were indeed ‘listening’ to their customers.

Digg redesign takes the fight to Twitter, Facebook
Digg has also recently announced a redesign, and “aims to directly challenge Twitter and Facebook by redefining the way Diggers share, view, and submit content.” Chief among the changes, are the ability to follow friends, publishers, and “taste-makers”; as well as  view content shared/promoted by their friends.

The idea seems to be that Digg will become much more of a true social networking site, but still based around links and news so as to cut out miscellaneous status updates so common to Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, it will now be easier to submit stories to the site, as well as become easier for Top News to spread amongst friends.

Meanwhile, a rumour has been spreading, in part by Digg founder Kevin Rose, that Google is readying ‘Google Me’, a social service intended to go head-to-head with Facebook.

FourWhere now combines Gowalla, Yelp and Foursquare
FourWhere, free service developed by Toronto-based social media monitoring and analytics company Sysomos, now integrates information from the three leading location-based services: Gowalla, Yelp and Foursquare.

If you’re not familiar with Fourwhere, it integrates data from Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp, and displays it using Google Maps API in order to provided users with “ an easy way to discover places and comments for thousands of restaurants, bars, cafes, stores, tourist attractions and other venues.”

Bart De Waele with some excellent home truths for social media:

Gov websites ‘should be hubs for debate’
Simon Dickson has drawn our attention to a statement made by new Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, in response to a parliamentary question raised by Tom Watson concerning the government’s future plans for the Number 10 and Cabinet Office websites.  Maude’s short answer has some big implications on the form and function for future UK e-government sites:

The Government believe that departmental websites should be hubs for debate as well as information-where people come together to discuss issues and address challenges…

Enabling the government’s websites to facilitate debate and dialogue would be a most welcome development.

Yelp goes head-to-head with Foursquare, adds badges & Royal hierarchy
Yelp has announced an updated iPhone app, placing itself in direct competition with location-based social network Foursquare. Having previously added the ability to ‘check-in’ at locations, Yelp has now updated its app with other Foursquare-inspired features such as ‘Yelp badges’ and the opportunity for users to attain a ‘Royal’ status at locations.

As for crowning royalty, Yelp is taking a medieval approach to Foursquare’s mayorship feature. If a user has the most check-ins at a business, they are bestowed with the title of Duke or Duchess. If a user racks up enough of these titles in a specific neighborhood, they become the Baron of that area, or the King at the city level.

Social networking heats up on ‘browsing phones’, according to ComScore
According to a new study from ComScore, social networking is the fastest growing activity among people with smartphones / feature phones that offer Web browsing.

ComScore estimate that approximately 20 percent of mobile users are now accessing social networking sites via their phone, either with a dedicated app or through the mobile browser.

Yahoo! and Facebook announce site tie-up
Yahoo! struck a deal with Facebook to make it easier for users who maintain presences on both sites to share what they do across them. So what does it all mean?

The deal means that people who maintain profiles on Yahoo and Facebook can link the two pages and cross-pollinate both with one update.  It will also mean that those who use Flickr, Yahoo Answers or the social site’s video and music services can pipe any media or data they create to friends who use only Facebook.

Twitter rolls out “You both follow” feature
About 10% of Twitter users have been given the chance to play with a new ‘You both follow ‘ feature when accessing the site via their web browser. “When you click on another user’s profile, you are now given a list of people you both follow.”

Over on The Wall Blog, Jennifer Whitehead notes another (perhaps more useful) use of the feature is to click on people whose profiles you DON’T follow already, so that you can see if you have friends in common: “not a mind-blowing development but useful if you see Twitter as a way to do a bit of marketing for yourself or to start conversations with people you’d like to know.”

It’s Monday, so as usual, have some Monday Mashup goodness, fresh from We Are Social towers.

Twitter to ban third-party ads
Breaking news from Twitter’s blog – they will be blocking any third-party paid Tweets service from using their API. Services such as ad.ly and Magpie are nascent attempts at direct advertising in Twitter – something we largely regard as unconversational and spammy. Twitter’s recent launch of promoted Tweets hopes to maintain the balance between revenue and conversation, and third-party ad services are an obvious threat. Is this heavy-handed monopolism or an attempt to keep the platform clean and spam-free? My view is towards the latter but no doubt detractors will say this is an unwanted restriction on third-party developers and will harm the Twitter ecosystem.

Zuckerberg responds to privacy concerns
Today Mark Zuckerberg made his first public comment in the ongoing controversy around Facebook’s privacy controls. In an email to Robert Scoble, he acknowledges that Facebook has “made a bunch of mistakes” but stops short of making an apology. However he promises “an improved product” which they might preview this week. We wait avidly to see what they will be.

Meanwhile, the continuing controversy isn’t distracting Facebook from pushing for expansion, especially in growing markets. Not happy with laying waste to competitors like StudiVZ in Germany, this week also saw the launch of Facebook Zero, a stripped-down version of the mobile site built for pay-as-you-go customers, which is free for users of more than 50 mobile providers in 45 countries – an attempt no doubt to push mobile access to Facebook beyond the iPhone and Blackberry markets, which are increasingly saturated these days. One place however where Facebook may have trouble expanding is Pakistan, which has recently blocked the site after groups encouraging drawing depictions of the Prophet Muhammad proliferated.

Diesel Cam brings social media into the store
A nice campaign from Diesel, providing Facebook Connect-enabled booths in stores to allow people to share photos of themselves wearing Diesel’s clothes with their friends on Facebook. Some of the most innovative campaigns are now blurring people’s “real” and “virtual” lives:

Lifehacks galore
Lots of useful tools received an update this week – Tweetdeck gained some powerful features, including that to filter out certain keywords (so no more being envious of people at #sxsw, hurrah!). Google Wave came out of beta to public use, although I’ve still not yet found a use for it that doesn’t just replicate existing apps’ functionality. And Twitter finally released an official app for iPhone, an upgrade to Tweetie, which they bought out last month (and by far the best and most stable iPhone app for Twitter I’ve used).

Maturing behaviours on social networks
As social networking takes a firm hold in our collective consciousness, perhaps it’s no surprise that people have grown more conscientious of placing too much sensitive information online or being too liberal with friend requests. A new survey out shows 74% of people are now careful about what pictures they upload, although 87% still believe their online and offline identities correspond with each other. There’s some nice detail on differences internationally – Brazilians have on average 360 friends on their profile (no doubt thanks to Orkut’s dominance there), while Brits have just 173. 1 in 3 Facebook users don’t trust the service, while 55% of users are blocked from using social networks at work – perhaps no surprise that personal social networks rather than professional ones such as LinkedIn enjoy more popularity. The full deck is worth a read.

Real-time influencing traditional media
An interesting report from warc on how television advertisers are increasingly becoming more flexible and innovative in producing their spots around live events. After major live events such as the Winter Olympics and Superbowl, American advertisers commissioned and adapted advertisements with the starring athletes – with feedback from social media playing a key part in which adverts got the heaviest rotation. Our friend Chris Stephenson has some further thoughts which are well worth picking through. While we might not have quite that level of responsiveness in the UK yet (although Simon Pegg got a reply to one of his Tweets by an eagle-eyed continuity announcer), with the World Cup coming up who knows what might come up?

Maybe it was a digital election after all
The new government’s boxes might have only just been unpacked but there’s already some studies on the effect of online on the UK election. A third of respondents to a survey said that online content had influenced their voting decision, although perhaps disappointingly for those arguing it was a ‘Twitter election’, only 5% of voters said they read political content on the site. A lack of comparative stats for the TV debates or newspapers makes this survey a little hard to place in the wider context, though.

Twitter reworks trending topic algorithms
And finally… Justin Bieber no longer features in the top ten trending topics on Twitter – something we should all be thankful for.

Facebook backlash reaches the tipping point?
We’ve reported before in Monday mashups about the growing Facebook privacy backlash, but it looks more and more like a tipping point may have been reached; May 31st has been declared Quit Facebook Day and “how do I delete my Facebook” has become one of the most-Googled search queries of recent times. danah boyd argues that Facebook is now a utility in the same sense that water and electricity are, and should be appropriately regulated as such, while Ben Parr argues in defence of Facebook.

It’s very easy to boil the whole controversy down into “Facebook should better protect its users” versus “users should learn how to protect themselves”, but the points raised are more complex and subtle than just that. Jeff Jarvis’s blog post on what exactly “public” means is a much more informative and nuanced approach to it.

…maybe not just yet
Don’t dismiss Facebook just yet – those pages could still be worth a lot to you and your brand. And then there’s Facebook’s Community Pages. There’s been some confusion about what they are, but Dave Fleet’s analysis is quite helpful – think of it as “earned media” rather than “owned media”. The difference between a Twitter search for your brand name, and your brand’s own Twitter profile, if you like. A brand owner has no control over these pages – which is a double-edged sword; great for finding out what your consumers think of you in realtime, but without any real control or interaction. Jeremiah Owyang points out it’s an example of Facebook’s “Innovation Means Asking For Forgiveness Later” strategy – and it could by no means last; we already have Groups and Pages, and yet another form of brand interaction may prove too confusing or redundant for it to take. Nevertheless Jeremiah’s advice is well worth taking.

Twitter’s Business Center launches
Twitter has been quietly rolling out business features of its own. The new Twitter Business Center offers facilities for brand owners. It allows multiple users to handle the same account (incredibly useful for anyone offering 24/7 support) and allows people to DM brands, even if they aren’t following them, so that sensitive info such as account details and email addresses can be safely exchanged. Meanwhile, the Promoted Tweets programme that was rolled out last month is reported to have been a success by the advertisers in the US who piloted it, with Virgin America recording its fifth-highest sales day in its history the day it went live.

In a separate move, Twitter is now parsing short URLs for keywords in searches, allowing you to get back not just Tweets, but matching URLs for your query. Great news for publishers but also for anyone gathering insights into what relevant conversations are linking to. In both cases, these are useful and timely improvements to the system, and a prime example of what Twitter does very well – innovating iteratively to meet the demands of the community as they evolve, as this excellent presentation by Jack Dorsey discusses.

Engagement rising as brand loyalty falters
Two very interesting surveys caught our attention this week. The first from comScore charts how brand loyalty is dropping compared to two years ago, with consumers deserting their traditional brands; this phenomenon is now spreading to sectors where it has not been previously seen, possibly because of the economic downturn. It looks like brands can no longer count on loyal customers as a base, which ties in with a separate survey by Hall and Partners which notes a positive correlation between engagement and profits. Of particular interest is the growing emphasis on integrity and corporate responsibility as part of brand identity, something which has been shown as evidence by the recent Nestle palm oil furore; it’s further evidence of how integrity is an important factor in how a brand should engage online.

Travelocity: “ChatRoulette FTW!”
Apparently Travelocity’s social marketing team have been hanging around on ChatRoulette a lot. Although they skimp a little on the details, they apparently entail having their mascot hang around and pitching to random people. Spamming? You be the judge of that. But this is the crucial bit for me:

No one in the wider world will know it was ever associated with those elements, unlike on Twitter or Facebook where a negative or disturbing Wall post or tweet can be read by everyone.

Problem is, this means nothing positive can remain permanent either. So when the person they’ve pitched is booking their holiday and trying to remember, or try and tell direct their friends to it, with no permalink, nor any way of finding it on Google, the recall factor is lost.

Finding the right fit between brand and community
News that Ford [disclosure: a We Are Social client] are testing their new cars with Mumsnet brought this revealing post from Reputation Online, advocating that these tie-ins only work if the audience are a perfect fit. While I don’t think they have to be an exact fit (good marketing should never be just about preaching to the converted), the discussion of iVillage was very interesting – they have turned down offers from several brands as they didn’t feel appropriate to the audience. They felt the importance of keeping the community outweighed the advertising revenue – something anyone considering a buy-in to a community site needs to keep in mind, especially when dealing with more traditional buying philosophies.

TopTable gets flak for censoring reviews
An example of how not to meet your community’s needs is TopTable’s recent admission that they delete negative reviews of restaurants. The reason given is that they could face libel accusations – which is no doubt a possibility if the reviews turn out to be maliciously false. But to censor negative reviews altogether destroys the point of the site – people join a reviews community is to give honest opinions about places; being able to get balanced reviews is central to its authenticity. Whether this is common practice across all restaurant review sites is not clear, but we really hope it’s not the case.

Bloggers disagree with one another; film at 11
A PR blogger got annoyed this week at an ill-advised pitch he received. He blogged about it. A lot of other PR bloggers held a different opinion. They blogged about it too. Heated debate followed. That’s it. Move along folks, nothing to see here. But if this a topic that particularly interests you then I recommend the Inconvenient PR Truth survey that is going round right now.

Choose Your Own Adventure on Twitter
And finally… we really liked this innovative “Choose Your Own Adventure” use of Twitter by French Connection – even though the chap in the background looks a bit like Sébastien Chabal…

Facebook unveils Open Graph protocol
At last week’s f8 developer’s conference, Facebook unveiled the next stage of their platform’s evolution, the Open Graph protocol. Described as “Web 3.0”, “winning the Internet”, “advancing the semantic web” or “a great crusade of colonization” depending on which pundit you’ve been reading.

As Stefano detailed so well here last week, the Open Graph effectively extends Facebook to any page on the web. Up until now external tools on a website typically extended to social bookmarking or sharing via services like Buzz, but by accessing Facebook’s vast collection of social interaction data, you can find out who else in your friend group likes the site, and what else they read and like on the site, thus turning Facebook into a mediator of information all over the web.

Already we’re seeing interesting implementations of the protocol come up, such as likebutton.me – a site that tracks what your friends have been liking on popular sites such as YouTube, CNN and Techcrunch. And we wouldn’t want We Are Social’s fans to miss out on the action either – which is why you can now find Facebook like buttons on the bottom of all our posts (including this one).

Every time Facebook releases a new feature there is an inevitable privacy backlash, usually the domain of a few choice experts, but it’s interesting to note that this is extending into the wider Facebook audience as well. A survey out today details how Facebook users are increasingly aware of the privacy implications of the site, with 77% (of an admittedly small sample) having used the site’s privacy tools to customise their privacy options. Could the new Open Graph become hamstrung as more users become privacy aware and opt-out?

It’s not just Facebook

While Facebook makes it all about conquering the web, location-based services are having a flying start in conquering meatspace. This week saw Foursquare hit a million users just over a year since it launched (even Arnold Schwarzenegger is on it). It took Twitter two years to do the same, and as sure as night follows day, this has meant Foursquare becoming the latest startup to be christened “the new Twitter” (seriously guys, can we get this decided once and for all, so the rest of us can get back to enjoying ourselves?).

Pointless analogies aside, the growth of Foursquare and its competitor Gowalla come under more and more scrutiny. This infographic from Mashable shows an interesting trend – Foursquare has far outpaced Gowalla in the popularity stakes since SXSW in terms of mentions, but the feedback on Gowalla is more positive and less negative. As the two continue to slug it out we could be witnessing one of the best case studies possible in whether sheer numbers or member affection is key to a vibrant and profitable social network.

Blogging – for the young and self-expressive
With all the talk of Web 3.0 it can be easy to dismiss blogging as “so 2004″. Yet new research from eMarketer show that the biggest age group amongst those who blog is 18-25; 40.4% of those who write a blog compared to 28.1% from the much larger 26-42 age group. More tellingly, the reasons given were primarily for self-expression rather than making money:

Bloggers of all ages polled by BlogHer and iVillage overwhelmingly blogged for pleasure, with self-expression the No. 1 reason, followed by “fun.” One-half of bloggers wanted to give advice, and fewer than one-third hoped to earn money with their efforts.

A lesson there for anybody wishing to engage with bloggers – understand what drives them to write and engage with their topic rather than consider them as the same as paid-for writers.

#socialmediasfault
As the election campaign in the UK grinds on, the past week saw an interesting divergence in how old and social media have been treating the leaders. After what most commentators have regarded as a strong performance in the new TV debates, the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has been heavily criticised in the mainstream press – so much so even Conservative bloggers such as Iain Dale voiced their concern. Twitter had different ideas, though. The hashtag, #nickcleggsfault, coined off-handedly by Justin McKeating, spread like wildfire as Twitterers all over the UK came up with ever-more sarcastic and nonsensical things to “blame” on Nick Clegg as a parody of the media backlash. While it’s clear this election won’t just be won on social media, it’s a clear sign of the disconnect between the traditional and new media – and this is an issue that will last long beyond the election.

Tuenti switches on local for a location-based future
Spanish social networking site Tuenti, often referred to as the Facebook of Spain, has introduced a location-based feature called Tuenti Places (reads “Tuenti Sitios” in Spanish) allowing users to “add any local place, interact with it, share it with friends, upload images and write reviews.” Each Tuenti place (e.g. bars, clubs, restaurants) will have it’s own unique space for user interaction so unlike Facebook pages, there won’t be any duplicates.

According to TechCrunch, this is a very different strategy from the likes of Gowalla, Yelp, Foursquare or Spain’s 11870 who’ve built a community on top of local:

Tuenti first built a massive and incredibly segmented community and now they’re introducing local, which in itself is social by nature, but they can build in local by crowdsourcing their 8 million active users who are already sharing places…. Overnight Tuenti promises to get thousands of very dynamic local business pages and will shortly introduce new features such as Foursquare-like check-ins.

With everyone expecting Facebook to introduce location very soon, it will be interesting to see how Tuenti’s location-based feature fares.

Middle-aged travellers leading travel social media revolution
The Social Travel Report by independent media agency Total Media, claims that the holiday industry is facing a social media revolution and that middle age travellers are shaping consumer views of the best hotels and holiday destinations. Based on a sample of 1,375 people, the report found what many people have long suspected:

Holiday reviews written by strangers on independent websites such as TripAdvisor, search results on Google and word-of-mouth advice from family and colleagues are more influential than brochures, advertising, media reviews and advice from travel agents.

Some of the highlights:

• Almost half of travellers over 45 are using websites to recommend or warn fellow travellers by posting a review
• 25% of British travellers say that online reviews by strangers help determine their travel plans
• Almost 70% of consumers use the internet to book their holidays
• Expedia was the leading online resource for consumers planning long trips (more than five nights) with 25%, followed by Tripadvisor and lastminute.com with 22%

The Social Media Bubble
Last week Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab, advanced a hypothesis in the Harvard Business Review:

Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.

It makes for an interesting read, and he goes supports his hypothesis by arguing that hate, exclusion and disempowerment are flourishing online, whereas there is no greater trust or a rise in value of relationships.

This created quite a stir, and invited about 188 comments from readers and almost 50 blogs in response.  Two noteworthy blog posts responses came from Bud Caddell over on What Consumes Me and a lengthy post on Stowe Boyd and the /messengers.

In all, Umair’s argument about the devaluation of relationships because of social media is fairly grand one not necessarily supported empirically anywhere within his post.  That said, it’s certainly refreshing (and desirable) to have the social media industry’s thinking about online relationships tested every now and again.