The funniest part about all of these "flirting" apps is that they all really serve one purpose: For you to get some virtual attention from another user. Will you take it a step further and actually make something happen offline?

SKOUT finds you people to flirt with, and ups it a notch with the "wink bomb" feature. If winking and chatting aren't doing it, go to the "flirt buzz" feature which acts as a news feed for users who are looking for dates, or just wanting to share some sort of question. One user writes "Anyone need a date tonight?" while another writes "HAPPY VALENTINES DAY." SKOUT also tells you that if the person you're contacting is online, how far away they are and what photos they are posting.

Flirtomatic helps users "flirt" through a fast connection and a small chat screen. It is instant gratification - find someone, flirt them, exchange some pics and then...connection? Because the entire point of this app is to flirt with as many people as possible, quickly find another person and flirt them down.

Moonit connects you with users nearby based on astrology. So if you're a Libra looking for a Gemini...you are in luck. One thing that makes Moonit different from the others is that this app is about finding both friends and flirts. (Just don't combine the two.) Users can also collect friendship stickers based on the types of people you connect with. Moonit also offers an opportunity to connect with Facebook friends through the app, further clumping together all aspects of one's life into one space.

FlirtMaps helps users meet people and "break the ice" without ever leaving the house. Entirely location-based, FlirtMaps gives users an idea of where other people are located, almost exactly. Find a user, locate their exact location, send a gift or a text. Because FlirtMaps knows where you are and what you're looking for, it locates available people nearby.

One-Liners & Such

If flirting apps are too much of a commitment, try these one-liners from apps FLIRT and Breakup Lines. 'Nuff said.

Things are moving too fast. Here's a good breakup line, especially for those intimate virtual relationships.

Today is the Day to Break Up... or Just Figure Out What Happened

If Valentine's Day is just another day to sit around and feel sorry for yourself...try doing something else instead. Why not try to figure out why your last relationship failed using a strange feedback request form that reads like a developer's bug report? WotWentWrong.com is not available for an iPhone or Android because it requires a bit more interaction and thought. Enter the details of your last relationship, including your full name, the first name of the person you dated, that person's gender (unfortunately it only gives you a male or female option), how long you went out and the method for ending the relationship (no phone call, didn't return my call, in-person break up, phone break up, text message/email break up, other).

WotWentWrong tries to help you craft the email you're going to send to your last significant other by providing a template type ranging from "please elaborate" to "flattering." If you have the guts, complete the form and email it to your ex or that person who quietly snubbed you. Here's what the request form looks like. If email feels like the best way to approach that person, then try this app. If not, why not just move on?

What Is Love, Anyway?

There's this myth floating around that, if you aren't coupled up you're really and truly missing out not just on Valentine's Day, but on life. On a day like today, it's important to remember that that is absolutely not true. Love is first and foremost about you, not other people. I just saw this on my Facebook news feed from a friend who shall remain nameless.

"Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it and it can never leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form. In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature...this is the realization of oneness. This is love. " (Eckhart Tolle)

And there's no app for that.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

CNN reports that the popular virtual pinboard social network site has been "appending affiliate links to some pins," particularly those featuring goods from Amazon, eBay, Target and thousands more merchants. If someone clicks on one of those affiliate links and buys a product featured in one of the pins, Pinterest makes money. But no one would have known this if the following blog post on LLSocial.com had not appeared.

Pinterest's TOS pretty much allows them to do anything they want with users' pins. This is not surprising. The question now is, how many users actually read the terms of service before signing up for Pinterest? As LLSocial.com points out, Pinterest's broad language makes it easy for them to rationalize using content on the site as they wish:

you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content

Pinterest isn't legally obligated to disclose their affiliate link modification. It uses Skimlinks, and CEO Alicia Navarro is quite upfront about that. Says Navarro:

With respect to FTC rules on disclosure of affiliate links, the law is that any content creator that is *endorsing* or *recommending* something and obtaining financial benefit as a result of this endorsement, needs to disclose it. In this case, Pinterest are not pushing people to buy something because they get paid for it, they provide a platform that drives traffic to retailers and they are being rewarded for providing that service.

In other words, Pinterest is acting as the vehicle for traffic, much like Reddit or Digg. Should Pinterest have disclosed its affiliate links? Probably. But if it had, users would have been suspicious. As LLSocial writes, link modification as a form of monetization is "unobtrusive, provides revenue, and really only affects retailers and those who want to pin affiliate links on Pinterest for their own profit." Still, most people who responded believed that Pinterest should have been more clear about their practice. Navarro states that Pinterest has been using Skimlinks for over a year, and that this has always been a form of monetization.

Pinterest has been picking up steam, quickly becoming the Web's hottest new social network. It utilizes the interest graph - you pin stuff you like, and cluster around other users who have the same interests - whereas Facebook is more focused on the social aspect. Just like Facebook makes money off of its personalized ads, Pinterest needs to have some sort of revenue stream. But if Pinterest had disclosed this from the start, would it have made a difference?

"Were they purposely being murky and not transparent? It's possible," CEO of strategy firm Webmedia Group Amy Webb told CNN. "I would think that they would let people know from the beginning that things they're posting potentially carry affiliate links. But it's a free network. No free network carries zero costs."

A new study from Pew finds that for the most part, adults are kind to each other on social media sites. In fact, 85% of adults say that most of the people they come across on social media are rather kind; only 5% say that people are "mostly unkind," which would imply rude or mean. An additional 5% say that it's all situational. On the whole, adults have positive experiences on social networking sites. A total 68% of SNS users had an experience that "made them feel good about themselves," 61% said something on social networks "made them feel closer to another person." Of the generous and helpful variety, 39% of users said they saw acts of generosity and 36% said they see other user behaving in generous and helpful ways.

Not everything is peaches and cream, though.

There are some social media users who don't feel so happy-go-lucky. Not everyone experiences kind, helpful behavior on social networking sites. That would be about 18% of users; another 5% claim to never see any generosity or helpfulness at all.

Sometimes interactions on social networking sites have negative outcomes. Of the people surveyed by Pew, 26% of adults experienced negative outcomes. Of that percentage, 15% said bad experiences ended friendships, 12% resulted in a face-to-face argument or confrontation, 11% said those interactions caused family-related problems, 3% got into a physical fight with someone based on an interaction, and 3% got into trouble at work. About 13% of adult SNS users say that someone else acted rudely toward them in the past year.

Unless you live in a world that resembles the movie Young Adult, you probably don't think of yourself as an adolescent. On social networking sites, adults tend to be more positive and less negative than teenagers; 41% of SNS-using teens had at least one bad experiences versus 26% of SNS-using adults.

Dear White Guys, Please Read This

Pew points out that non-white people, women, parents and millennials are more likely to see content that offends them. Of that group, 42% of black SNS users and 33% of Hispanic SNS users frequently saw language, images or humor that they found offensive compared to 22% of white SNS users. Taking a look at this in terms of age, 34% of millennials (ages 18-34) found some material offensive, compared with only 17% of Gen-X users (ages 35-46). The survey doesn't even give the tiny percentage of Baby Boomers who felt offended by material on SNS sites. Additionally, 29% of women were offended versus 22% of men, and 29% of parents with small children found offensive material versus 24% of nonparents.

Who Did Pew Survey?

Pew surveyed 2,260 adults ages 18-and-up over the period of July 25-August 26, 2011. Of the people surveyed, 1,047 were SNS and Twitter users. The margin of error is plus-or-minus three percentage points. A total 64% of adults surveyed used social networking sites. 87% had a profile on Facebook, 14% on MySpace, 11% on Twitter, 10% on LinkedIn and 13% on other social networking sites.

Images courtesy Shutterstock.

Do your friends on social networks make you feel good about yourself? Share your experiences in the comments.

One of the bigger misconceptions in the comments was that LinkedIn is primarily a job-hunting site. But there are reasons to use LinkedIn even if you have a job you love, aside from the obvious benefits of keeping up on your industry and making connections with potential business partners.

• LinkedIn is a great contact manager. Not all of your contacts will have their phone numbers in their LinkedIn profile (and if you don't, you should add it, according to networking experts), but almost all of them have a Web site and primary email address that you can access. LinkedIn also lets you add notes for each contact, much like a regular address book, so you can keep track of interaction with a contact and add information like best contact phone numbers, birthdays and other information you want to remember.
• LinkedIn Today curates news you care about. Every time I log into LinkedIn I'm presented with three news stories that the site thinks will be of interest to me, based on my industry (tech journalism and higher education). I can click through to LinkedIn today and get more stories, as well as recommendations for additional industries I may be interested in. The stories, in my experience, tend to be more enterprising and more focused on trends than the breaking news that fills my RSS, Twitter and Facebook feeds.
• LinkedIn Groups increase the number of people in my business network. Almost every employment and social media expert I spoke with in compiling last week's post stressed the importance of finding, joining and participating in LinkedIn groups related to your industry. "Join alumni groups, industry groups and professional interest-based groups," said Kelly A. Lux, a social media strategist at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies. "Post links of interest to the group, ask and answer questions and search the group members for new connections."

Even though financial institutes have increased social networking activity, ComScore says that only 18% of customers knew that their financial institutions had a presence on social networks. A total 59% had no idea, and 24% were unsure of what their financial institutions were doing on social media sites.

For institutions that are creating a presence on social media sites, take heed: customers are not interested in solving customer service issues on those sites. If Facebook did update its brand pages to include private messaging options, this might change. For now, however, customers who do follow their financial institutions on social networking sites are mostly interested in retail, credit card and online shopping offers.

As social commerce continues to try and find its place on Facebook thanks to new social apps, and payment services like PayPal build a presence on Facebook, will banking be the next move? Or are social networking sites just a place for banks to build their brand? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Image via Shutterstock.

So we aren't reporting that it has happened, but we're bracing ourselves in case it does. Since Rapportive is the most useful plug-in ever, we're concerned about something bad happening to it. But if it had to be somebody, an acquisition by LinkedIn could be a good choice.

LinkedIn already has lots of the pieces of a customer (or contact) relationship management (CRM) service like Rapportive. In January 2011, it bought Cardmunch, a mobile app that turns photos of business cards into online contact info. In October, it acquired Connected, which let users manage, tag and sort contacts across platforms, enter notes (which Rapportive does, too), and view recent communications. That's a lot of smoke around the idea that LinkedIn's building a CRM service. But again, we haven't seen any fire.

It sure would make sense, though. LinkedIn is already the go-to network for work contacts. It's the most comprehensive professional profile most people have. Plus, it's already openly making moves to be a more extensible service, bringing its human resources know-how to other sites that need it. For example, last year, it launched a plug-in that lets employers use LinkedIn for job applications on their own sites. Gmail is another obvious place to put LinkedIn information, as Rapportive has proven.

And just for fun, here's another tidbit. Rapportive is currently a browser extension that works on Gmail. If LinkedIn bought it and threw its weight behind it, imagine the enterprise power of Rapportive for Outlook.

Scuttlebutt is that #LinkedIn has acquired #Rapportive - my favorite in-Gmail SocialCRM tool. Hope they don't close it down...

— Ben Kepes (@benkepes) February 7, 2012

@eileentso Sorry, can't comment. But publishing articles on the basis of rumour and speculation is a dubious practice imho.

— Martin Kleppmann (@martinkl) February 7, 2012

Will Rapportive continue to support all the other apps on its platform if LinkedIn acquires it?Will there be Salesforce integration?

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) February 7, 2012

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

In the beta stage, SocialFlow increased clicks per tweet between 40% and 60%, on average. But the service comes at a cost: plans covering one Twitter and one Facebook account starts at $99 per month. As part of today's launch the company is offering the first month of service at any of its pricing points for $1.

"Social media has gotten to where it is now through gut and intuitions. There's been a whole lot of art but not much science behind it," Michael Chin of Social Flow said in a demonstration of the product Friday afternoon. "This looks at what conversations your followers are engaged in, compares it to the message you want to send and figures out the best time to send it."

Users can use SocialFlow to schedule messages in much the same way they use HootSuite or TweetDeck, but the real advantage is the site's optimization feature. Messages wait in a queue and are sent when they reach a certain score between one and 100, with 100 meaning the message is sent at the most optimal time.

The service also allows users to integrate their Google Analytics account to track connections to social media, as well as a complete set of analytics tools.

"There's a bottleneck when it comes to attention in social media - attention is the scarce commodity," Chin said. "When you keep getting the message wrong, people start ignoring you. You've burned away that commodity of attention."

In addition to social media scheduling and optimization, SocialFlow offers users detailed performance analytics.

In fact, according to Networked Insights' data, the Super Bowl topic that trended in third place was "Brady," but when you break that topic down, you realize it may actually have been more about Mrs. Tom Brady - supermodel Gisele Bundchen, who appeared on camera perhaps once during the game, whom Tweeters evidently referred to as "Mrs. Brady" or perhaps "Lady Brady" - than about the New England Patriots quarterback.

Though it may not be entirely surprising that commercials constitute the bulk of online chatter during the event, it's astonishing to see that TV commercials make up some 42% of all Super Bowl-related online chatter. Although New York Giants running back Ahmad Bradshaw scored what Super Bowl history may record as the most awkward game winning touchdown - slowly being seated on the goal line after trying to stop himself short at the 1-yard line - his maneuver only elicited a minor wave compared with Mrs. Brady.

A spokesperson for Networked Insights told RWW this afternoon that part of the reason for the lopsided topic mix may have to do partly with the game. It was a low-scoring game with only one interception, whose outcome was only sealed when the clock reached zero. It may have been such a nail-biter, in other words, that true football fans may have been biting their nails rather than tapping their keys.

"It's not surprising to see viewers' commentary of Super Bowl advertisements surpass those of the game itself," Dan Neely, NI's CEO, tells RWW this afternoon. "Brands can partly attribute this social lift as a by-product of a low-scoring game that allowed viewers to discuss the commercials."

A word about the volume of tweets: Naturally, NI's tracking included tweets that included the hashtag #superbowl. NI estimates tweets to that hashtag alone to have numbered around 1.6 million, though it will have updated, hardened data later in the week. That's as many tweets as are normally archived in a single day, the NI spokesperson tells us.

As an analysis firm for advertisers, NI itself was concerned more with the commercials than the football. Gaining the most overall viewer response among celebrity endorsers was the tattooed, underwear-wearing veteran of what "far'ners" call football, David Beckham. His shorts reached out to 39% of folks talking about just the Super Bowl commercials (as opposed to the game), according to NI's figures. This is what NI means by "share of value." Sentiment among chatting consumers was 23% more positive than negative, suggesting the H&M undies went over well. Coming in second was Clint Eastwood, whose two-minute ad that may have been for Chrysler but may really have been for the city of Detroit, had 21% "share of value," while 9% of the discussion was more positive than negative.

Though NI gives Chrysler kudos for choosing Eastwood, it notes that the resulting chatter was three times more about him than about Chrysler.

By comparison, as much as 28% of folks chatting about Super Bowl topics during halftime were discussing Madonna's halftime show. Their discussion constituted 32% of Super Bowl-related social traffic by volume. Sentiment for Madonna was generally negative (-21%), with tweets about her staying relatively short, with a particularly negative peak towards the end where the lights converged to reveal the message, "WORLD PEACE." By contrast, sentiment for her on-stage co-star MIA - whose little birdie expressed exactly the opposite sentiment - ran generally positive at +6%, commanding 3% of the discussion. The star of the halftime show ended up being Nicki Minaj, whom perhaps more viewers recognized than Clint Eastwood. Minaj commanded a 7% share of value, with 26% of it more positive than negative.

Breaking down just the Madonna comments, MI found that as much as 2% of this subgroup were making comments about her age (53). This group was split down the middle as to whether she looked great for her age, with the negative group making snarky comments about such things as her "veiny" arms. Sentiment turned positive when she began singing "Like a Prayer," which was originally released in 1989, though it tipped downward to -11% after she began her latest single, "Give Me All Your Luvin.'" (NI does not appear to have data regarding consumer sentiment about its spelling.)

"The takeaway for networks, producers, and sports leagues is the need to create multiple engagement points around content that is in sync with the interests of a target audience," states NI's Dan Neely. "Going forward, the winners will be the programs that leverage social technology to drive participation."

What the Twitterers of the world may have missed Sunday night was the terrific sense of community and shared excitement. Just the NFL Experience - the week-long slate of activities in downtown Indianapolis among football fans who love the game and who keep their phones mostly in their pockets except to take pictures - pulled in some 265,000 people over a nine-day period, according to the latest estimates.

So that has left little time to give love to my profile on LinkedIn, which is, depending on how you look at it, either the biggest niche social network or the smallest of the big, all-encompassing social networks. Some people will tell you that sooner or later, all of our networking, social and professional, will be centrally located on Facebook. Others will insist that you need a LinkedIn profile, if only to protect the eyes of potential employers from falling on photos of you wearing an ugly shirt and a stupid grin at last year's company cookout.

I know the basics we've all heard - have a photo, make sure its a professional photo, make sure your profile is 100% complete and don't link Twitter or Facebook to automatically update your LinkedIn status. But I still wasn't seeing the results that had other people swearing by LinkedIn. I reached out to the career coaches, social media experts and hiring managers for the best strategies for making LinkedIn work.

Avoid Back-Scratch Recommendations

One of the LinkedIn features that wouldn't work on Facebook is the Recommendation, where clients, past bosses, and former and current co-workers can give you a mini-reference letter. With a few keystrokes they can give you a recommendation that is often more effective than the old photo-copied reference letters we used to keep in file drawers.

But here's the catch: potential employers can not only see who has written references for you, but can see who you have written references for. It doesn't look good to hiring managers when the only references you have are from people you have written references for. In small industries, where people may know one another, that problem can be compounded when you write a recommendation saying someone is great, when everyone in the industry knows that person is anything but.

"You want to limit how many recommendations you write," said Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs and a professor at Columbia University's Journalism School and organizer of last week's Social Media Weekend in New York. "You probably don't want to write too many more than 10, depending on what industry you're in."

Connect

LinkedIn makes you go through a series of extra steps when you try to connect with someone. You have to demonstrate how you're connected, which helps cut down on potential spammers. Some career experts say this is a good thing, as, unlike Twitter, where you try to collect as many followers as possible, you should limit your connections to people you have worked with.

Sreenivasan thinks differently and said once people get through those verification hoops, he accepts their requests on his LinkedIn profile.

"If anyone in this room asks to connect on LinkedIn, I'll accept," he said to a lecture hall full of several hundred people at Social Media Weekend on Sunday. "Of course I would! You're all here, so it's like you're customers."

Use Keywords

LinkedIn has a feature still in beta that lets you search job-specific keywords (for example, writing, reporting, editing in my case). It will also show you if those keywords are being searched more or less on LinkedIn, and offer some suggestions for additional keywords to consider adding to your profile based on your search.

"Search engine marketing is very passive, but proactive participation on LinkedIn can be very helpful in this type of situation, where targeting is very important, and where displaying your expertise can be more productive in gaining qualified leads than blatant advertising," said Philippa Gamse, author of 42 Rules for a Web Presence That Wins. "Yes, it takes some focused time, but can really pay off."

On Wednesday, while killing time waiting for Facebook to announce its IPO, I added some keywords to my LinkedIn profile. Within 24 hours of adding the keywords "public speaking" to my profile, someone had emailed asking me to speak at a conference about using social media in college classrooms.

LinkedIn Is Not Your Resume

One of the biggest mistakes people make is simply cutting-and-pasting their resume into LinkedIn profile fields, according to Kristina Jaramillo, who runs the Website Get Linked In Help. It's a common mistake, which means people who do that are stuck in the crowd.

"The majority of profiles that read like resumes are not engaging and are not prospect or customer focused. Most business professionals' headlines just state their position," Jaramillo said. "Their summaries are written in third person and they do not explain how they can help and the results they achieve for clients."

Explore Apps

Kelly A Lux, a social media strategist at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, said LinkedIn's iPhone app "is one of the best mobile social app user-experiences you will find."

Lux also likes the Cardmunch app for scanning business cards and automatically connecting with people you meet in real-life networking on LinkedIn, as well as the Job Change Notifier, which will shoot you an email everytime someone you're connected to lands a new position.

But that's just the start. Lux advises people to add custom Web site apps to their LinkedIn profile, like the Amazon's Reading List app to show what they're reading and TripIt, which shows where you are traveling.

TripIt is "great if you want to meet up with connections in cities you're visiting," she said.

Laura Skelton, owner of Prix-Prix, told me about Pinterest months ago when we met up one chilly Chicago morning for brunch. "Have you tried Pinterest?" she asked me with a glint of excitement in her eyes. I shook my head no. "Try it out, but be careful, you'll get addicted." I am always wary of that caveat because I do end up getting addicted. I decided to stop by just to see what was up. I registered for an account and then left. Everything looked too pretty. Then, a few months later, I started receiving a slew of notifications: "So and so is following you on Pinterest." It was around then that Pinterest blew up.

AdAge's David Teicher wrote about how Pinterest is driving traffic to sites like design magazine RealSimple. But more importantly, he writes, "the true potential in Pinterest may be in its ability to impact purchases, which is why retailers like Etsy, Nordstrom, and Lands' End have taken to developing a presence on, and strategy for, this new platform."

We've written about how Facebook is trying to make social commerce work. Or, in less market-y terms, how Facebook is trying to become a mall. The launch of Timeline social apps seemed like a step in that direction, as it included fashion and shopping apps from Fab, Oodle, Pose and Lyst.

Still, Pinterest is showing increasingly strong signs that it is a more effective as a social commerce platform. New data from Monetate show that referral traffic from Pinterest to the websites of five specialty apparel retailers jumped 389% from July-December 2011.

Only 1% of Facebook "fans" engage with brands. Will this change? Right now you can buy donuts and earn Facebook credits through a new loyalty program from Plink. Last year Facebook announced integration with eBay.

Still, Facebook wrongly conflates the social graph with the interest graph, assuming that if your friends like it you will, too. Facebook is organized around the social graph first, whereas Pinterest is focused on the interest graph. Sure, your Facebook friends are probably all on Pinterest, but the true focus of Pinterest is not social. It's interest. Users organize around interests, making Pinterest a natural space for shopping. The visual focus doesn't hurt that, either. Facebook is too focused on the user experience and social, which ends up making it a difficult space for shopping. Plus there's that whole, you know, user distrust over Facebook's long-standing privacy issues, including EPIC's latest request that the FTC look into Facebook Timeline's possible privacy violations.

For more on how businesses are using Pinterest, check out this story by ReadWriteWeb's Dave Copeland.

"Facebook is a great project, but the international art market is very closed and the requirements especially for this market are really different in comparison to other markets," says My-ArtMap CEO Stefan Sebök. "Facebook and Google are too big and not specialized enough for the art market!"

The site's news feed is known as the NewsCafe. Much like Facebook, it surfaces stories posted by fellow users. But unlike the Facebook algorithm, My-ArtMap does not differentiate between highlighted and most recent stories.

The "Galleries" section allows users to create their own virtual art galleries around specific topics. These images can either have a certain theme, or could be a collection of artwork. For some reason, even though I set the language to English, the text in this section keeps popping up in German.

Users can also create groups around a specific topics.

The site still has quite a few quirks. It's unclear how the NewsCafe algorithm sorts stories, and sometimes the text doesn't translate. Still, this is an interesting project that seems like it could become a very useful tool for the social networked Art World.

The reason for that requirement, Mixel co-founder (and former NYTimes.com design director) Khoi Vinh explained, was real names. Vinh wanted to build the Mixel community around real names, not anonymity or pseudonyms. "We think this is essential to the kind of experience we're building: a family-friendly environment that's suitable for just about anyone," he wrote.

At the time, Facebook was pretty much his only option. But that is starting to change. And as proving your online identity becomes more important, it's a valuable race for the players involved to win.

Twitter, too, is a worthy competitor in the online identity race. The company famously doesn't verify real names — mainly for celebrities and brand partners — and it's hard to imagine a time when Twitter would require your real name.

But Twitter does seem to be favoring real names these days: They are now displayed by default — when available — on its website and in its official apps.

Twitter may have other reasons for that — the number of "pretty" usernames without numbers will eventually run out. But Twitter also clearly has interest in serving as an identity tool — its co-founder Jack Dorsey, also a founder of mobile payments company Square, even speaks of using your Twitter account as one way to justify your financial trustworthiness. So if Twitter can serve as a reliable source of your consistent online identity — even if it's not your official, real name — that seems valuable.

Other large companies, such as Apple, Amazon, AT&T, and Verizon, boast tens of millions of real-name accounts, many with credit cards attached to them. That is incredibly valuable to those companies, as it permits frictionless authentication and commerce for new services and devices, such as Apple's App Store and Amazon's ever-growing digital marketplace.

But with high public sensitivity over financial information and the idea of identity theft — plus the competitive advantage of keeping that data in-house — it seems unlikely that Apple, Amazon, or the others would simply open their identity services to developers. So for now, inherently "social" services like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn — each with many millions of users — seem most useful as web identity-verification services.

This all begs a bigger question, though: Whether real, birth names are actually the best way to identify ourselves in an increasingly digital society.

To varying degrees, governments and financial-type companies mostly require you to have and use a name, as they have for centuries. The digital revolution, however, started within our lifetimes, and may eventually dictate new identity norms. In many online communities, anonymity — or at least the ability to use pseudonyms — is expected and sometimes demanded. If that becomes more common, who knows what offline human naming conventions will look like in a few decades.

Google, for one, recently announced an interesting new policy change for Google+: In addition to real names, it will also start allowing individuals to use consistent, established "alternate names." These range from established offline pseudonyms like Madonna to online nicknames "with a meaningful following." It still seems to prefer real names — see Google's naming policy — but there's some wiggle room now.

For now, it seems the more formal a digital community, the more your real, proper name matters — or at least a provable, consistent alternate. And as long as that's the case, the race to hold, secure, and pass along your identity will be a valuable one.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, speaking at the DLD conference in Munich this week, attributed the trend "from anonymity to authentic identity" on the Web as one of the main reasons that social media has become such an important part of daily life. "What we do online is increasingly about who we are," she said. "We are our real identities online."

You can be confident that Facebook enjoys its status as the top identity gatekeeper, and is very protective over it — it's worth a lot.

Meanwhile, Mixel — the company that got flack for its Facebook/real-name login requirement — has been integrating Google+ authentication support into its product, and it eventually plans to support the new "alternate" names feature.

"We like what Google+ is doing for alternate names — an 'authenticated' or 'established' name is good for us too," founder Khoi Vinh says.

Photo: Paulo Brandão via Flickr (cc)

Pinterest's users are 80% women, according to recent data from Google Ad Planner, as presented by Ignite Social Media. The site is biggest among the 25-34 age range, followed by 35-to-44-year-olds. These site's popularity among people in their late 20s and early 30s is illustrated (quite literally) by the proliferation of images related to wedding planning and home decor.

Gizmodo described the service as a sort of "Tumblr for ladies" and cited internal staff discussions in which the men expressed confusion and uncertainty and the women expressed enthusiastic approval. That's just anecdotal evidence of course, but it's supported by numbers from the likes of Google and ComScore.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, the guys are a little more receptive to the Pinterest and its potential use cases. In "A Guy's Guide to Pinterest", Dave Copeland outlined why the site isn't exclusive to women and detailed his own experience getting started with it. Fellow colleague Jon Mitchell thinks Pinterest actually tackles sharing better than Google+ does, in part because it lets users follow things more granularly and selectively than Google's "circles" model.

"It helps me bookmark visual things, which I only had text-based ways of doing before, and that has proven to be a surprisingly large amount of the stuff I take in on a daily basis," Mitchell told me in an IM conversation.

Personally, I've been using Pinterest somewhat passively for a few weeks, checking in semi-regularly and periodically pinning stuff. I've started focusing on curating imagery and content related to "the future of music" since that's a topic I track quite closely at ReadWriteWeb. I've also started a board dedicated to Instagram photos taken in my neighborhood in Philadelphia, figuring it's worth experimenting with the value of local-centric content on a fledgling social service like this.

I'm still waiting for that "Ah ha!" moment in which I realize why I'd want to use Pinterest on a daily basis, but so far I'm digging it and I certainly understand the value people see in it, regardless of gender or age.

It's arguable whether investors really needed a sophisticated sentiment measuring analyses to predict Netflix's shares would drop after what has been called the worst business decision since the introduction of "new" Coke in 1985. But social media sentiment analysis is growing more sophisticated and may soon become a key component investors look at before making a decision to buy or sell stock.

How Twitter Beat The Mainstream Business Media On iPhone 4S

"People don't really tweet about stock ticker symbols, at least not in any predictable or useful way," said Rishab Aiyer Ghosh of Topsy. "But they do talk about companies and products."

Ghosh pointed to the launch of iPhone 4S, which was initially greeted with lots of negative reviews from the mainstream media. Those negative articles fueled a steep decline in Apple's share price on the first day iPhone 4S was available. But on social media, early reviews were mostly positive with normal people tweeting about how they liked and wanted the latest version of the iPhone.

"Ten days after the launch Apple announced they had the biggest backlog for a product in its history," Ghosh said. "The day of the release the Twitter chatter was more positive than negative: as an analyst, if you had known that, you would not have sold your Apple shares and you would have made a lot of money."

Later this year, Topsy will begin marketing its historical and real-time data to trading firms and equities analysts. Ghosh, like everyone else interviewed for this article, stressed that the social media sentiment data was just one component used by Wall Street to build trading models.

"The big-picture social media content data we provide can augment, if not totally replace, the news media content," he said. "One of the advantages of the news media is its curated and it doesn't have a lot of noise; what we do is take the noise out of the social media sentiment data."

Do's And Don'ts Of Trading On Social Media Sentiment

How much of an advantage does social media sentiment give a trader? Last year WiseWindow commissioned an independent researcher to track its stock-picking model as it followed four stocks - Ford, General Motors, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines - for the first six months of 2011. The model imporved performance between 30% and 48% on an annualized basis.

"One area we haven't really been able to get into these models is consumer sentiment: survey data," said Marshall Toplansky of WiseWindow. "If you do a traditional survey, you may be able to get 1,200 or 1,500 comments. With social media we can get tens of millions of comments per month."

For Toplansky, there are several keys to using social media sentiment to predict movement in an individual stock, including:

• Using data from several different platforms, including Facebook, blogs and even comments left on YouTube videos. "Twitter on its own is not a leading indicator," he said. "You have to take into account all of the different forms of social media."
• Tracking conversations on a stock or a $ thread on Twitter won't cut it either. Toplansky found that the biggest predictor of a stock's price are comments about product quality, which often don't mention a ticker symbol or even the company by name.
• That can mean tracking up to 2 million social media messages in a month, as opposed to the few thousand WiseWindow would uncover if it only focused on discussions about a company's share price. "You continually have to go out and look for patterns -- it's almost a 24-7 kind of thing," Toplansky said. "You have to do the math over time and see what trends evolve and emerge."

Strategy Doesn't Work For Individual Investors - Yet

And therein lies the problem for individual investors, as well as many investing firms: Sybase's McGovern said the upfront costs and the lack of a proven track record make it difficult for most investors to justify adding a sophisticated sentiment analysis component to their trading models.

"The reason all of this is appealing to people is there's a general understanding that shares obviously don't just move on the underlying aspects of the company," McGovern said. "The fact that stocks can go up 5% or10% day, which is unusual but not unheard of, can often be because of rumors in the market. This all seems to make sense to people in the markets as a way to be able to tap into those rumors and help their short-term trading strategies."

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