The company said People Powered Stories will be the first of several social advertising products Microsoft plans to launch in the coming months. The product's release comes at a time when there is growing evidence that people are more likely to purchase a product recommended by a friend, while simultaneously showing a reluctance to purchase products directly marketed through social networks.

In a blog post and at a presentation in New York, Jenn Creegan, GM for Display Advertising Experiences at Microsoft Advertising, said the company was partnering with Bazaarvoice to offer People Powered Stories. The platform will allow advertisers to "tap into Microsoft's highly social and engaged audiences across multiple screens and deliver relevant ads in a way that is targeted and more measurable than is available for social advertising on the web today."

The announcement was coupled with the release of a study Microsoft commissioned of 713 social media marketers.

According to Creegan's blog post:

• The top two reasons advertisers invest in social media is to drive word of mouth and brand awareness (27% and 26% respectively).
• 72% of advertisers said measuring ROI on social media campaigns is too difficult.
• Advertisers believe 65% of word of mouth misses the intended audience.
• 73% of those advertisers surveyed said they want to make sure the ratings and reviews they curate online reach their target audience (which is more than likes, tweets or any other sources the survey asked about).

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.

The public beta launched in March 2011 and has racked up 30,000 registered users at 2,800 companies since then. But the most attention-grabbing number is that the average user spends nearly three hours per day using it. Those are hours Nimble users aren't spending jumping between disconnected inboxes across various networks. Nimble lets them manage their contact and customer relationships in one unified place.

Nimble 2.0 has an all-new UI. It tracks your social interactions from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Skype, Foursquare, LinkedIn and more, all in one stream. It also unifies that dang red notification number across your various networks.

Messages can be sent on any of those services, as well as email, all within Nimble. It lets you consolidate all those networks' annoying email digests into one message, which the Nimble user controls. It now includes Facebook brand pages and Google+ contacts, and it integrates with a bunch of outside services for reaching customers.

It connects to Wufoo forms, MailChimp email campaigns and HubSpot inbound marketing leads, so you can spot new people right away, connect with them, and save their contact info. Once a contact is saved to Nimble, the user can add notes, events and custom info related to that person.

And that's the free version.

For $15 per user per month, businesses and multi-user teams can share one set of contacts. It's like a shared Outlook address book, except it tracks those contacts across various social networks. At any time, anyone on the team knows where a contact or customer stands, who on the team is in touch with them and so forth. Tasks can be assigned to team members within Nimble, so everyone knows who's responsible.

Nimble 2.0 also adds privacy settings for messages, so communications between one team member and a contact in Nimble don't have to be shared with everyone.

If you have to maintain lots of online relationships across various networks, you need a tool like this. Nimble is geared towards businesses who value personal relationships with their clients and associates.

Nimble is free for individual users. The first 200 ReadWriteWeb readers to sign up here will get free access to the business version of Nimble for 90 days. If you try it out, let us know what you think in the comments.

The campaign is tied into Social Media Week, and you can play along at home: the company is giving away a Kindle Fire to the best strategy shared via Twitter or Facebook by noon on Wednesday. But even if you don't play along at home, we've found the videos a good way to kill some time this morning. They range from the practical to the odd to the downright annoying.

• Distill Media owner Kate Gardiner making a much-needed case for good writing in social media. "if you don't care about your headlines, if you don't care about your content, if you don't care what it says, you're not engaging your audience."


• New York City Street Photographer Ricky Powell feeding squirrels while pontificating on Facebook being the next wave of public access television.


• Deep Focus communications manager Joanna Firneno urging brands to act like people. "When you're a brand, your friends don't want to hear everything that's going on with you. They also want to hear what you have to say about what's going on in the world."


• DJ Onionz sharing a somewhat overwhelming list of social media platforms he uses. "I have to have my social media rocking at all times.....if I don't, fuggedaboutit."

At the 2012 Grammys, Perry rolled on-stage with a blue wig and her hit song "E.T.", then abruptly transitioned into "Part of Me," which pop news sources have attributed to her break-up with Russell Brand. (There are lines like "So you can keep the diamond ring," for example.) Things just haven't been the same since Perry's religious parents have tried to hook her up with Jesus-lovin' Tim Tebow.

Yet Perry was formerly the queen of cotton candy cloud sensuality, of references to sucking Snoop Dogg's lollipop and a hyperfemininity that only a white girl of pastor parents could muster. Sweet and adoring in her innocence, Perry doesn't stand a chance against hardcore female rapper Nicki Minaj, who stole the 2012 Grammys with "Roman Holiday." Both a tribute to and a pushback against the movie "The Exorcist," Minaj's performance engaged the short attention spans of social media users, compelling them to post their own thoughts on Minaj's "interpretation" of Catholicism, exorcism and the use of highly charged religious imagery in pop culture social media spectacle.

In "Roman Holiday," Minaj performed an exorcism of her alter-ego, Roman Zolanski. By the end of the performance, she was levitating high above fires and clergy members. EOnline called Minaj's performance the "worst spectacle" of the 2012 Grammys.

"As much as we like the rap pixie, Nicki Minaj offered up a Lady Gaga-lite scary religious movie that was way too long, kinda silly and way annoying coming so late in the show," writes Erik Pedersen. "But hey, at least she can always ask her Pope-date for absolution!"

Whereas Katy Perry is a softcore, singsongy teenage dreamer girl who is stuck at last Friday night's drunken party, Nicki Minaj exists in a space of highly charged religious imagery, relying on a male narrative yet occupying space as a female body. This just one of the reasons "Roman Holiday" shook things up. Says Racialicious' LaToya Peterson quoting Menda Francois' thesis "Step Your Pussy Up: Nicki Minaj and the Signifyin(g) Tropes of Hardcore Female Rap":

Implicit in Minaj's Signification onto the male narrative is a strategic process of identity construction, relying primarily on the male narrative and male voice to help shape the hardcore female rapper's public image. Essentially, by engaging in dialogue with the male narrative, Minaj is aligning herself with male rappers and creating her identity as one of (pseudo)masculinity, an asset valuable to her role as a hardcore female rapper. It is within this genre that femcees operate as performers of gender and are most harshly judged by an injurious rubric of masculinity.

Unlike Perry's "E.T.", which relies on the fetishization of black male rapstar Kanye West as "alien" in a sci-fi trope, Minaj's "Roman Holiday" transcends this othered "outer space." Minaj's exorcism of her male alter-ego Roman Zolanski completes her transformation into hardcore rapper, one who is capable of simultaneously being both and neither. If she had possessed demons before the Grammys, she certainly does not now.

Yet some social media users took Minaj's performance too literally. "Nicki Minaj possessed by Demon Grammy Performance," reads an FTD News headline. YouTube commenter iJared TV announced that he was vehemently against any sort of "religious type thing" in pop culture music videos.

"If you bring in any religious type thing, like a Catholic priest...you're gonna lose a lot of your Catholic audience," he says in his YouTube video commentary. "I'm not Catholic or anything, but you don't disrespect religion in your music or anything." But Minaj was not disrespecting any sort of Catholic audience. Her on-stage transformation was her own, and out of it came her alter-ego, Roman Zolanski.

Did Nicki Minaj Save the Grammys?

According to NPR, she did. Her performance catapulted the event from just another awards show into a social media spectacle complete with Twitter and second screens:

We all well know that this is how mainstream pop music survives in the single-download age. No one style dominates, and as artists compete for attention, they're turning ever more hyperbolic. At the Grammys, this was best illustrated by Nicki Minaj's wild debut of the title track from her upcoming second album, Roman Holiday. A tribute to The Exorcist that more closely recalled a florid Dario Argento horror opera, the number included mock clergy, levitation and Minaj singing "I Feel Pretty" in an accent that would horrify Downton Abbey admirers. "Roman Holiday" sent the Twitterverse into hysterics. And it's impossible to think that wasn't part of the reason it was approved.

Minaj has officially and fully entered into the Twitterific pop culture mindshare. In fact, her entrance was christened by a friendly email from the Catholic League, who was very concerned about the "exorcism" of Minaj's male-gendered alter-ego and, implicitly, her use of the male narrative. Indeed, anything involving non-normative gender is cause for concern.

Some Twitter users like @savory1, a self-described "hard working soccer mom" in Orland Park, Illinois, defended Minaj's performance: "It was art get over it." Minaj fired back on Twitter with a few words, slamming the Catholic League and everyone who for some reason may fear their own alter-ego, or just themselves.

• "Were they offended by 'the devil inside'??? Shut-up & watch the movie b**ch!"
• "Not, 2, Not 1...I wish I at least had a point five percentile worth of f**ks to give right now."
• "And more importantly, love people for WHO they are. #nohate #nojudgement #nocondemnation."

Now, is that something Katy Perry could have said? Not without a lot of sugary sweet sentimentality.

Image via Flickr.

The Salary Guide, which gives the top 20 markets as well as salary ranges for top job titles in each metro area, is coupled with a post on career advice from leading marketers. Not surprisingly, the left coast remains one of the better places to head to if you want to make a living blogging, tweeting or managing brands on social networks, but don't rule out the northeast - particularly New York (which tops the list) and Boston (which checks in at number five).

Well, maybe. Depending on your definition of "smarter."

For example, does it make me smarter to know that New England Patriots fans on the Wisdom network like Narragansett Beer and New York Giants fans prefer Hennessy? Or that fans of both teams prefer Dunkin Donuts? And why is Wisdom still teasing its analysis of Super Bowl fans nearly a full-week after the game?

The U.S. Election breakdown is slightly more telling. Based on "likes" of candidates on Facebook in the last 12 months, it shows a handsome U.S. map showing which states favor which candidates, then shows the demographic makeup of each candidate's followers (in other words, the same information found in almost any decent political poll).

You can also drill down and look at your friends. You can see who has posted on Facebook the most in the past 30 days, the average number of words they used in each post and other trivia.I now know that in the past 30 days Maya Angelou and David Sedaris were the most popular authors among my friends, and U2 and Johnny Cash were the most popular musicians. Nine of my friends have made a combined 27 trips to Fenway Park, and one of my friends has been to the same hospital six times (whoever it is, I hope everything is okay).

I can also look at whom I interact with most. There are loads of other data, but not as much as you'd think: I can generally check every chart and figure on Wisdom within five or 10 minutes. And even as the network increases in size, not much changes on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis.

Among other things, Wisdom lets you check where your Facebook friends have been checking in to find places you may want to go to.

Wisdom gives you a chance to do some very limited number crunching of your own, but not much. The design is beautiful, and it seems somewhat addictive the first time you play around with it, but then you realize there's not much you can do with the data aside from look at it.

And that's the problem: Every time I finish scanning through Wisdom, I'm left with that "Now what?" feeling we get when we don't really know what else to do with an app. The data is interesting, but there's not much I can do with it: I can't download it, I can't even access it from my desktop, making it harder to crunch.

Wisdom has some recommendations on how to use the app, including finding places to go when traveling and finding out what's popular. I have loads of other apps that do all of the things Wisdom claims to be able to do, and, since they're focused (finding the best place to eat, keeping me up-to-date on news and trends), the information in those apps comes off as being far more manageable than the artfully-presented glut I get in Wisdom.

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.

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.

With the rise of social TV and the first-ever 2,800-square-foot social media command center, fans who have trekked down to Indianapolis and people at Super Bowl parties across the country can now opt to have a super-connected experience.

This marks the first time that the NFL has partnered with a Super Bowl host city. Like a Midwestern truck stop that has a restaurant, convenience store, bathrooms, random coin-operated claw games (that you can't ever win) and gas, the Super Bowl social media command center seeks to be all things to all football fans. Receive mobile updates about navigating the city. The Super Bowl Social Media Command center will answer your Twitter (@superbowl2012) and Facebook questions. Follow the blog here. It's the customer service center of your Friday Night Lights dreams.

The Super Bowl is a Social TV Event

Various social TV apps are already available for Facebook. Entertainment social network GetGlue gives users an opportunity to check-in to sports events. ConnecTV is another free social platform that serves as a "second screen," which means users can talk to friends while watching the Super Bowl. Users can sync shows, and then watch them with their friends while chatting in real-time.

The Super Bowl seems to be making up for the lack of social media at the London 2012 Olympics. In fact, not one of the Olympic volunteers can make a comment about the games without permission, according to Sysomos. At Super Bowl 2012, expect the exact opposite.

The entire point of StumbleUpon, for the user, is to build up a taste graph that will better deliver stories that the user would like. But many sites depend on referral traffic from StumbleUpon, which is something outside of the StumbleUpon user's direct stumbling experience.

StumbleUpon's response is that, well, they were "just trying to improve the user experience." And besides, they told us, two-thirds of users use the Web bar.

In other words, if you do want to see direct links, just don't sign in.

What a great solution. Truly. Not only will StumbleUpon not be able to get an idea of that user's taste graph, that user will miss out on the entire community aspect of the site.

Leibowitz cited accidental clicks on the "X" button of the Web bar as StumbleUpon's main reason for getting rid of the Web bar entirely.

"People would accidentally click the button - they don't have an extension such as Chrome or Firefox extensions, so they can't go back to their Stumbling unless they go directly to StumbleUpon.com."

This sounds like a complicated solution for a pretty easy problem. It would it have been pretty easy for StumbleUpon to just add a box that pops up when the user clicks "X." It could say something simple like: "Are you sure you want to close this page and leave StumbleUpon?" Instead, StumbleUpon says, it is thinking only of the users - not the people who receive tons of referral traffic from the StumbleUpon discovery engine.

"The trade off is that we have to make some concessions around the way we show the URL," Leibowitz tells us. "There's no way we can change the way the URL is displayed in the address bar, but there are some ways we can make it easier to copy and paste the source code."

For StumbleUpon users who are still looking for a way to see the direct URL, try using a StumbleUpon Firefox add-on or Chrome extension.

What Will Happen to StumbleUpon Referral Traffic?

"My website used to get 70-80% of referral traffic from StumbleUpon," writes ReadWriteWeb commenter Jeffrey Davis. "After the redesign, that percentage dropped to 40%. I suspect now that it will drop even further...especially since SU is now hijacking the pageview."

Pinterest is now Davis' number two referrer.

This is only one isolated case, but it's telling. Perhaps it's time for marketers to start shifting their strategy from StumbleUpon to Pinterest. Because it doesn't look like StumbleUpon will be backpedaling on its latest decision anytime soon.

Has referral traffic to your site suffered since the StumbleUpon redesign? Tell us about it in the comments.

If you've read this far, you've probably already downloaded the app for your iPhone, Android, BlackBerry or Windows phone, and are contemplating not reading the rest of this because you're too busy salivating over your next meal. Get ready for the complete food-pornification of Facebook, curated by you.

FoodSpotting is calling itself a "Pandora-like interface for discovering and rating dishes around you." Except the difference here is that Pandora would never spam your Facebook Timeline like FoodSpotting has the ability to do.

Eating is Social. Period.

Despite all our whining about food porn on the Web, there's something charming about FoodSpotting. As a user, I do want to know what my smart, interesting FoodSpotting friends are eating, why they're eating that, and if I should eat it, too. Eating is one of those inherently social activities. And the FoodSpotting app isn't creepy like many of the other 60-or-so Facebook social apps. The social aspect of food might overshadow the negative impact food porn photos could have on the social Web, and specifically Facebook. But do you really want your Facebook kingdom to look like this?

Photos courtesy of AmateurFoodPorn and Shutterstock.

The newest SU update removes all direct links. Previously, once you were inside StumbleUpon, you could "X" out the page and go straight to the original site. Now if you're logged in, you have to say in the iframed version of the site. There is one way to get out, but it's super clunky.

As you can see, there's no "X" option. If you want to go to the direct link, you'll have to copy and paste out the link above and delete the StumbleUpon URL. Here's what one of those clunky SU link looks like:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1PrjAd/www.modernarttimeline.com/

Would you really take the time to copy and paste the tail of that link into another tab or browser? That's what it'll take to get the direct URL.

StumbleUpon is trying to build up its ecosystem, keeping users inside rather than sending them out to the Web and other social sites. By keeping everyone inside, StumbleUpon will no longer offer prized SEO value that it once did. This will negatively affect referral traffic, especially for sites that rely on StumbleUpon for that nice traffic jolt.

Remember when this happened at Digg? Users revolted, and then-CEO Kevin Rose decided to make the DiggBar optional. Rose even said that framing content "is bad for the Internet."

In its S-1 filing today, Facebook outlined a litany of risks for the company going forward. Monetizing the mobile user base in a system dominated by its competitors will be a major challenge going forward. Diversifying its portfolio away from its reliance on advertising will be a big task, one that Google has never quite figured out. We take a deep dive into Facebook's risk factors below.

Jump to:

What Are the Risks?

Facebook's risks are fundamentally tied to the fact that nearly 85% of the company's revenue is related to advertising. When most of your assets are tied to one cash vertical, any fluctuations can lead to dramatic swings in performance. Facebook also has concerns with competition, global expansion, infrastructure and retaining top talent. Here is the summary breakdown from the prospectus, with the exception of some specific stock risks.

We enlisted Antone Johnson, founder of the Bottom Line Law Group to help with the analysis of Facebook's risk factors. Johnson is a respected Silicon Valley lawyer who has spent 15 years representing technology and media companies. He was vice president of legal affairs at eHarmony as well as assistant general counsel to Intermix Media, which included serving as director of business and legal affairs at Myspace, culminating in the company's $650 million sale to Fox.

Johnson on Facebook's reliance on advertising:

"Main story here is the drop from 98% to 85% of revenue being generated by advertising. Obviously a good risk mitigation approach to diversify with revenue from virtual goods, etc. Again, mobile jumps out as an important theme; given they admittedly don't make ad revenue from mobile users, this could be a significant headwind for FB in coming years as smartphones become near-universal and people become accustomed to using them as their primary means of accessing social media.

"The rest of this risk factor is par for the course."

Mobile

According to the S-1, around half of Facebook's users access the website through mobile devices. Facebook has a robust mobile presence and it iterates its native apps constantly. As an advertising-based business, Facebook has a distinct problem here.

It does not serve ads in its mobile apps.

Facebook has 425 million monthly active users on its mobile platform as of December 2011. Mobile is rapidly becoming a replacement for personal computers and that threatens Facebook's advertising model. The key for Facebook will be to turn mobile users into mobile dollars.

"They are forthcoming about the challenges," Johnson said. "No revenue currently generated from mobile advertising; unclear how much mobile use could be monetized; failure to solve this puzzle combined with a dramatic shift toward mobile usage could be a serious problem for FB; and per the next risk factor, they don't control the iOS and Android platforms. Frankly, if there were one thing that persuaded me not to invest in FB (given the growth assumptions built into current valuation), this would be it."

As we have written before, Facebook iterates constantly. Its philosophy in mobile is to "move fast, break things and fix things fast," the company's managing engineer for mobile, Dave Fetterman, said at Facebook's f8 developer conference last September.

"Being able to write it once today and ship it tomorrow? That is something that Facebook is really good at and that we love doing and that is at the center of being able to move fast," Fetterman said.

Now that Facebook is a public company, will it be able to keep that mentality? When things break, that directly affects a company's stock price.

Reliance on Mobile Platforms

Facebook also has the problem that it does not control the mobile platforms that carry its app. That means part of Facebook's prosperity is tied to the stability of Apple's iOS, Android, BlackBerry etc.

Many of the major technology companies are dependent on the others. The Big Five (Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon) have something of an incestuous relationship. Each is a pillar that supports a much larger structure. When one of those pillars is weakened, another may become stronger but the overall ecosystem may suffer. This is exemplified in Facebook's mobile predicament.

"The best way to view this might be as the 'Google Risk Factor,' and I think recent Android sales/market share figures must have FB running scared. Apple has never been a significant player in social and seems unlikely to be anytime soon," Johnson said.

Elaborating, Johnson compares the Google/Facebook relationship to the trouble caused when Microsoft built Internet Explorer into Windows in the late 1990s and how that affected the biggest player at the time, Netscape.

"'Any changes in such systems that degrade our products' functionality or give preferential treatment to competitive products' presumably means Android being optimized for G+ in every iteration going forward, giving it unfair advantages vs FB mobile. (Shades of Microsoft building IE into Windows years ago?) It would probably raise some serious antitrust concerns, but the wheels of antitrust enforcement turn so slowly that it might not matter much in the end (as was the case with Microsoft and Netscape)."

Competition

Right next to reliance on advertising, one of the biggest risk factors is the fact that Facebook faces a vibrant social ecosystem that wants to chip away at the company's user base. Google+ and Twitter are both mentioned in the S-1 while other entities worldwide, such as Orkut, could hinder Facebook growth.

The way Facebook defines itself in the S-1 is directly correlated to how it describes the competition. More or less, that means the denizens at Google at this stage.

"Competition is always a highly ranked risk factor, in this case the broad range of what FB considers competitive is striking," Johnson said. "This is also the second 'Google Risk Factor' with references made to G+, Orkut, 'Google Search plus Your World,' Android, and war chests for acquisitions (presumably Google and Microsoft's). International competition plays a greater role than I would have expected, but it make sense given how much of FB's growth in recent years has been driven by international."

User Growth, Retention and Revenue

Facebook's first bullet point in its risks section is the ability to retain users and get them to spend more time on the site. While Facebook is the dominant social platform on the Web, its position as the top dog is not guaranteed in the long run. Look at what happened to Myspace.

Johnson's analysis:

"'We anticipate that our active user growth rate will decline over time' reflects the 'law of large numbers' - i.e., don't expect metrics to grow at these rates forever. This is a common-sense observation. What will be interesting is how FB responds. 'To the extent our active user growth rate slows, our business performance will become increasingly dependent on our ability to increase levels of user engagement in current and new markets.' That suggests FB is rightly focused on increasing site engagement per user over time rather than merely squeezing more revenue out of each user through aggressive monetization tactics. This language sends the right message that FB is focused on the product/user experience long-term and is willing to trade off short-term monetization against that principle.

"The striking contrast here is MySpace. I didn't see this myself because I left in August 2006, but many MySpace execs who stuck around longer argue the UX was degraded and ultimately ruined post-News Corp. acquisition because the mandate to hit revenue targets undermined the product itself. This risk factor might as well go on to name MS explicitly the way it continues, 'A number of other social networking companies that achieved early popularity have since seen their active user bases or levels of engagement decline, in some cases precipitously.'"

Zynga and the Zynga Ecosystem

When Zynga filed for its IPO, we noted that the company was overly-reliant on Facebook for all of its revenue. We also wondered why Facebook does not just buy Zynga. That would eliminate this entire risk category. Well, the inverse is also true. Right now, Zynga drives about 12% of Facebook's revenue. Zynga is important to Facebook in two aspects: direct advertising revenue and payments. Much of Facebook's Credits program is tied to games and Zynga is the largest provider of games to Facebook. Overall, Zynga contributes 80% to Facebook Credits revenue.

Zynga is not exactly a company conquering the world right now. Its own stock has been more or less flat since it went public, its management has been criticized heavily and, outside of a few major hits like Mafia Wars and Words With Friends, many of its titles are lackluster. It is also in Zynga's best interest to diversify its portfolio and rely less on Facebook. That will include its own mobile strategies, websites and social platforms like Google+.

Zynga is also indicative of the third-party ecosystem that Facebook relies upon. The growth of the Facebook application ecosystem ties in with the company's ability to grow the platform and monetize each user either through ads or payments.

"Much of this just sounds like variations on the theme of trading off user experience vs. monetization - in this case through viral promotion of social gaming," Johnson said. "The wording, 'We are continuously seeking to balance the distribution objectives of our Platform developers with our desire to provide an optimal user experience, and we may not be successful in achieving a balance that continues to attract and retain Platform developers' suggests that users will always win (probably wise) at the expense of developers. Reliance on Zynga apps for Payments revenue is also a theme."

The Zuckerberg Effect

To its credit, Facebook recognizes that its mercurial CEO is one of its biggest assets and could be one of its biggest detriments. Zuckerberg owns the single biggest majority of Facebook's post-IPO stock and hence has a great degree of control over what the company does. With that comes a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders. We will see how well he handles that responsibility.

"As a stockholder, even a controlling stockholder, Mr. Zuckerberg is entitled to vote his shares, and shares over which he has voting control as a result of voting agreements, in his own interests, which may not always be in the interests of our stockholders generally," the report states.

"This may be the first time in history a sole founder has had this degree of enduring voting power over a company going public at such a size and valuation -- not just for the foreseeable future, but beyond the grave," Johnson said. "I'm frankly shocked to see language that would allow all of Zuckerberg's extraordinary governance rights to be transferred to his designated successor in the event of his death. That's admittedly a remote occurrence given his young age, but as an investor or Board member, I would vehemently object to that provision. It's one thing to have complete trust in Mark to run the company, quite another to entrust his appointed successor with that kind of domination as a matter of corporate governance. It has the feel more of a family dynasty business than of a modern publicly traded tech company."

The S-1 also mentions Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg specifically several times. Many of Facebook's original founders have left the company to start their own enterprises. Zuckerberg is the important pin, but Sandberg is important glue to hold the company together on a day-to-day basis. One of the biggest jobs for Sandberg will be to monitor Zuckerberg and remind him of his responsibility to the stockholders. Neither individual is going to relish that position but as Facebook grows up and goes public, it is a necessary for the C-suite to police itself.

Last week, my esteemed Internet ReadWriteWeb-y colleagues Jon Mitchell and Curt Hopkins cooked up this insanely hilarious story about the grossness of amateur food porn. Amazingly, every single photograph in his story was shot by an amateur. And every single time, the food looked totally disgusting. The amateur food photographer is not trying to make their food look gross. In fact, quite the opposite, this person is just trying to share the food that they think is delicious and beautiful. But no matter what, the food photos just don't communicate that sentiment.

"You need a light source from the side," says Stephen Hamilton, a Chicago-based professional food photographer. "You need to bring up the detail of the food, which you can't do with a single light source."

"You're in a dark restaurant, you have to use a single frontal flash, it looks like shit," Hamilton says. "Not even a portrait looks good when you're taking a photo of friends."

To prove that it is possible to take better food photos from a smartphone, Hamilton goes out to restaurants every week and shoots food photos with his iPhone. Then goes back to his studio and touches them up. He documents the entire project on his blog, The Restaurant Project. Here's a short video he produced with tips for taking better food photos. Some of the ideas: Avoid incandescent light. Blow out the background. Use simple light and propping.

"The majority of people who are posting photos to Facebook and Twitter are doing it for the pure pleasure of it. They're not getting business out of it," says Hamilton. "Whether it's going to a restaurant like NEXT or going to McDonald's, they're still Facebook-ing about it."

Instagram Filters Won't Help You Make The Photo Less Food Porn-y

Jon and Curt decided to take this food porn idea too far, creating a horrible Tumblr blog full of all the bad photo photographs you've ever dreamed of. A photo I shot has been added to this Internet hall of shame. Here it is.

It's gorgeous, right? That's what I thought. So, I tweeted it to Jon and Curt, looking for some sort of approval. "I would argue that this is not food porn," I said, proudly. I could single-handedly beat food porn.

Curt replied with a typical, quotable Curt line: "GOOD GOD!" "It is to food porn as amateur porn is to porn - even worse."

Shocked, I tried a few other similarly desperate tweets. Then at last, I admitted defeat: "@curthopkins @jonmwords Nooooo! I've cornered myself into an art food porn-ified corner of hellish green triangles."

Then Jon added my photo to the Tumblr food porn hall of shame.

Why did this photo become food porn? The rest of this conversation occurred on Facebook with ReadWriteWeb's Editor-in-Chief, Richard MacManus after I commented on his horrific photo of bean slop.

I think we can all agree that those beans look disgusting. But Richard admitted to purposely making the food look more horrific, for Jon's benefit.

After I asked him, he honestly explained to me why my green cake looked gross.

"It was very artistic, I'll give it that :) I think the green is what creates the opposite effect..." he FB commented to me. "Well, artistically the photo definitely works - the triangle shaped table, the brown / green colors, etc. In terms of whether the photo makes the cake look more edible, honestly the Instagram filter makes the green look a little sickly (color wise) and it also somehow heightens the sugariness of the cake. It's shiny and kind of glistens," he said.

I appreciated his honesty. Interestingly, in this case, it was my seemingly awesome use of an Instagram filter, which I thought might save this from amateur food pornification. Instead, it was the very thing that actually sent my photo straight to amateur food pornland.