"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.

Then you have arrived at Fab.com, the Web's fastest growing flash sales site specializing in design. Today it launched an irresistible (and I do not use this word lightly) new feature it likes to call Live Feed, which uncreepily surfaces what other Fab.com members are buying, liking, tweeting and sharing across the Web. Unlike Facebook's opt-out privacy features, Fab.com made the live feed on this new feature completely opt-in. You can choose to reveal your username whenever you purchase something, or not. If you don't want other Fab.com members to see what you've purchased, you'll just be known anonymously as "A Fab User."

Not long ago, I wrote about the epic fails of Facebook commerce (f-commerce). Facebook is not a mall, and f-commerce is not the future. To be fair, Facebook's one shot at f-commerce may come with the recent Facebook-EBay integration.

Facebook is still a site where people go to socialize, to enjoy photos and videos of babies and children and events, to share links they like and to, of course, stalk their ex's. A Pew Research Study revealed that 67% of online adults use social media to stay in touch with friends.

Fab.com has 1.4 million members to date. CEO Jason Goldberg, a serial entrepreneur who, in a previous life, worked for Bill Clinton in the White House, writes that Fab.com is "going to take social shopping to the extreme." With a site that's both beautiful and non-invasive, this might actually be the truth.

The site originally launched in April 2010 as a social networking site specifically for gay men. CEO Jason Goldberg called it a "cross between Facebook and Yelp", a site for gay men to discuss cites their travels. One year and 400,000 users later, Fabulis.com transitioned into the design-focused flash sale site Fab.com. It raised an additional $40 million in funding earlier this month.

"Online shopping is continuing to evolve, and we believe we are in the beginning stages of e-commerce 2.0," Goldberg tells us. "Moving forward, we think online shopping will be more about discovery than search, and at Fab.com we are developing a very unique and innovative browsing experience that is more akin to someone walking down 5th Avenue browsing items in the store windows, and being inspired and wanting to find out more about certain items."

Favo.rs looks a lot like LinkedIn and Facebook. There's a central news feed, a home navigation button in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, a centrally located search bar and notifications. Users gain a reputation through earning points. Favo.rs brings in a gamification element with four status levels (rookies, participant, advocate and benefactor) that users can achieve if they help one another enough.

Don't people already use Facebook or Twitter for these types of questions? Yes, they do, but because of the huge quantity of information on both of those sites, it's easy for stuff to get lost. Plus, while Facebook is focused mostly on friends, family members and work friends (you don't necessarily want to be Facebook friends with your boss, for example) and Twitter is more about interests, Favo.rs bills itself as a space entirely dedicated to asking favors from other professionals. It aims to both build and facilitate professional relationships right on the site. That's not to say Facebook friends and Twitter followers can't help. Favo.rs gives users the option to broadcast their favors to Facebook and Twitter in order to cast a wider net. In fact, Favo.rs also works as a Facebook app.

Transparency will encourage users to share more. Each user has a profile that includes who helped, who the user helped, who is following the user and who the user follows. Theoretically, the relationship starts off on the right foot, with a favor, and is easy to build from there.

Will Favo.rs fulfill that tiny ease-of-introductions niche need that LinkedIn lacks?
Favo.rs, however, is a network for professionals, thus making it seem more like LinkedIn. While it is easier to "meet" people on Favo.rs, it's hard to say right now because the community is still relatively small. The "introduction" mechanisms that Favo.rs provides does make the approaching new contacts feel much simpler than on LinkedIn, where it's difficult to connect with someone you don't know.

The site currently has about 1,200 users who have asked about 450 questions over the site's six-month-long private beta.

Favo.rs is an interesting idea, but will it actually take off? If it does, it will need to make clear why professionals would want to use it in addition to LinkedIn and Twitter.

But what about the people in your real-life, honest-to-goodness neighborhood?

Enter Nextdoor, a Menlo Park, California-based startup that launched earlier today. The platform gives neighbors in specific regions the opportunity to create private websites for exchanging local information and events.

Do We Really Need Another Social Network?

Not long ago, I friended my landlords on Facebook. They reside in the basement of our Chicago two-flat. It felt sort of awkward since I didn't really want them to know much about my personal life - but alas, I was just trying to be friendly. We never interact on Facebook, but occasionally I'll receive emails about neighborhood goings-on, like the farmer's market.

If Nextdoor was around at that time, I could have just invited my landlords to connect on the social network. They could have posted something about the farmer's market on there, giving the entire neighborhood a chance to check it out.

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Nextdoor wants to make sure users really are who they say they are by asking them to register with their real name and physical address. Then, Nextdoor will verify the address by either sending a postcard, calling the phone number listed, linking the person to a billing address from a credit card they've provided, or providing an invitation from an already-verified neighbor. If neighbors are more in-person oriented, that's no problem at all: Nextdoor gives users the opportunity to print semi-custom flyer invitations to the network that they can easily hand out to everyone in the neighborhood.

Neighbors create the boundaries of their neighborhood on top of a Google map. As the group evolves, boundaries can change.

Nextdoor has tested the site in over 175 neighborhoods across 25 states. The results have been positive, says Tolia: "It's the same kind of pattern we're seeing in almost every neighborhood. In a very short period of time, it becomes a public utility for the neighborhood."

Tolia was inspired by the early days of Facebook which, when it launched, required college email addresses in order to sign up. That kept people within a specific network that they were already a part of in the real world. If Nextdoor can create trust within its userbase from the get go, this could be a social network that actually works.

Perhaps a socially focused neighborhood network is the key to engaging new users. Neighborhood news sites, as ambitious as they were, didn't quite make it.

Our intrepid gumshoe at Fusible.com has poked around some more, and now we have specifics about the kinds of features we can expect to see on mqVibe. It will sport tight Facebook integration, and it will combine reviews and popularity votes on neighborhoods and businesses into a "vibe score." AOL really is going to take a shot at Google Places and Yelp.

No, we didn't get an invitation. I guess we've been working too hard to blow mqVibe's cover. But denverpost.com did, and the embargo goes up early tomorrow morning.

JB at Fusible.com took some good guesses for other URLs around mqVibe and then viewed the source. By looking at the elements visible in the code, he uncovered tons of specifics about mqVibe's features. Here are the highlights he found:

• The subtitle for MQVibe is "Neighborhood Hotspots, Rankings & Reviews".
• The site will be integrated with Facebook. The Facebook page for Neighborhoodvibe will be located at: http://www.facebook.com/NeighborhoodVIBE
• You will be able to invite your Facebook friends to vote on hot neighborhoods and local hotspots and post items to your Facebook wall.
• Neighborhoods and hotspots will receive a vibe rank that you'll be able to vote up or down.
• Each place in MQVibe will be described by its vibe score and its underlying factors. These factors are based on crowd-sourced user behavior and physical characteristics of the place, such as the category and location of local businesses, density, features of the urban geography, and demographics.
• You will be able to quickly search by neighborhood or city according to a search form on the home page.
• MQVibe appears to be or is in alpha testing, according to a "Send Alpha feedback" link that appears at the top of several internal pages http://about.nvibe.com/help/report-issue/
• The Report Issue page offers some of the most telling information about the site's features (shown in the picture above). Using the Report Issue page, users can: suggest a hotspot, or correct a hotspot name or boundary; suggest adding a business that is missing; suggest a correction to the details of an existing business; report an issue with the ranking of a local business; report a business that is closed is still in the rankings; and report an issue with the neighborhood scores (Vibe Score, Walkability, Popularity, Edginess, etc.).
• Neighborhoodvibe will be the website's blog and will use WordPress as its publishing platform. The blog will be located at http://nvibe.mapquest.com/.
• The placeholder page for MQVibe online help can found at http://mqhelp.mapquest.com/mqvibe/.
A link in the footer refers to MQVibe as "Business Center".

Something Cool is Coming...

"Something cool is coming to your neighborhood," the mqVibe splash page reads. Really? Are any of the above features going to stand out? As we wrote when we confirmed mqVibe's existence, Google has a lot of these features, and they're already live and in use.

The Facebook integration could be interesting, since so many local businesses use their Facebook pages to interact with their customers, but that just makes AOL dependent on Facebook. Google is offering businesses something more tangible, though: a point of sale. Both Google Offers and AOL's Patch Deals can compete to give local customers the best deal, but AOL's hurdles to get users to adopt this service are so much higher.

What do you think? Does mqVibe have a chance? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The study also measured the length of the average user's Facebook session and found that Brazilians spent comparatively little time on Facebook. While Singapore users spend nearly nearly 39 minutes per Facebook session on average, Brazilian users spend less than half that, just over 18 minutes.

The Hitwise study measured market share of social networking sites versus total Internet usage as its metric of overall social Web use:

Market share for social networks and forums:

1. Brazil -- 18.9%
2. Singapore -- 16.4%
3. U.S. -- 15.4%
4. India -- 14.0%
5. New Zealand -- 13.9%
6. France -- 15.1%
7. Australia -- 13.1%
8. U.K. -- 12.2%

Hitwise also measured the length of the average user's Facebook session around the world. ReadWriteWeb's loyal Kiwi supporters will be proud to know that New Zealand wins the silver medal, at 30 minutes and 31 seconds:

Average time spent on Facebook in August 2011 per session:

1. Singapore -- 38 mins 46 sec
2. New Zealand -- 30 mins 31 sec
3. Australia -- 26 mins 27 sec
4. U.K. -- 25 mins 33 sec
5. U.S. -- 20 mins 46 sec
6. France -- 21 mins 53 sec
7. India -- 20 mins 21 sec
8. Brazil -- 18 mins 19 sec

Other interesting takeaways:

• India had the fastest growth in Facebook use since last year, increasing in market share by 88%.
• Facebook gained in market share by 5% in the U.S. since last year.
• 18% of Singaporeans jump directly from one social network to another during their browsing sessions.

How long do you use Facebook for in one sitting?

Amid the continued growth of these social networks, there has been much excitement about how the rest of the Web would soon be infused with all things "social": social search, social commerce, social deals and more. And yet the effort to socialize the rest of the Web has so far failed to live up to its promise. Why?

Facebook's master plan, articulated by founder Mark Zuckerberg, was that once its site had built a map of everyone you've met or known, you would be able to leverage that information across the Web, to see what your "friends" are searching, buying, watching, liking or saying.

Since 2008, Facebook has attempted to roll out this strategy by using "Facebook Connect" to extend its social graph into millions of other websites, and by incorporating new functionality into its own site. Yet many of the most anticipated social integrations so far have failed to take off:

• Social commerce: When Delta Airlines launched a Facebook "ticket window" last year, it was seen as the future of e-commerce, with every ticket purchase shared socially to the customer's friends. Yet, one year later, nearly all of us still buy our tickets on dedicated airline or travel sites.
• Social search: When the Bing search engine started highlighting Web pages that the user's Facebook friends "liked," it heralded the arrival of a long-awaited "social search." Yet, the fraction of "liked" pages was so tiny that the social feature was nearly invisible.
• Social deals: When Facebook moved into the daily deals space, it was seen as a potent challenger to Groupon. But four months later, Facebook announced it was closing its local deals business.
• Social viewing: When Facebook offered its first streaming movie this spring, on a Time Warner Facebook app, it was heralded as an opportunity to make movie viewing social. Yet, this experiment failed to produce much customer interest.

At last week's F8 conference, Facebook unveiled much more ambitious efforts to integrate outside web brands into its site - from a full-fledged Netflix movie player, to a music player drawing on Spotify and several other streaming music services.

But for any of these, or other social integrations to succeed, Facebook and its partners and rivals will need to learn from past mistakes. To date, their vision of how to make the Web more social has been based on a fundamental misunderstanding of our digital behavior.

Understanding Social Graphs vs. Interest Graphs

In order for social networks to truly reshape our experience of the rest of the Web, developers must first understand the relationship between our social graphs and our interest graphs.

A social graph is a digital map that says, "This is who I know." It may reflect people who the user knows in various ways: as family members, work colleagues, peers met at a conference, high school classmates, fellow cycling club members, friend of a friend, etc. Social graphs are mostly created on social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, where users send reciprocal invites to those they know, in order to map out and maintain their social ties.

An interest graph is a digital map that says, "This is what I like." As Twitter's CEO has remarked, if you see that I follow the San Francisco Giants on Twitter, that doesn't tell you if I know the team's players, but it does tell you a lot about my interest in baseball. Interest graphs are generated by the feeds customers follow (e.g. on Twitter), products they buy (e.g. on Amazon), ratings they create (e.g. on Netflix), searches they run (e.g. on Google), or questions they answer about their tastes (e.g. on services like Hunch).

Photo by duchesssa

Next page: The Fallacy of Social Web 1.0

The Fallacy of Social Web 1.0

The fundamental stumbling block of the social Web to date is that it has conflated social graphs with interest graphs. But in reality, who you know does not always translate into what you will like.

For example, I have a particular taste in movies. But I do not share that same taste with most of the people whom I have friended on Facebook - a motley mix of high school classmates, work colleagues, PTA committee members, and fellow jazz buffs. Nor do we, as a large and heterogeneous group, all share the same taste in travel, or fashion, or much of anything else. So when Facebook attempts to improve my movie-viewing experience by revealing the tastes of everyone in my entire social graph, the value to me is quite low.

The Future of the Social Web: Integrating the Graphs

So far, the job of mapping users' social graphs has been taken up by social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Meanwhile, interest graphs have been best built by e-commerce sites such as Netflix and Amazon that focus on highly customized recommendations.

The future of a truly social Web will rely on getting these two types of graphs to work together. We are just starting to see some interesting attempts at this:

• Social circles: On Google+, users explicitly place each member of their social graph into one or more "circles" based on common interests and the type of content they want to share with them. In response, Facebook has just re-launched its own feature to manage social circles.
• Feed lists: Twitter's lists feature allows users to create sublists of people and brands to follow based on different topics (e.g. news headlines, favorite celebrities, fellow sports fanatics, or authors you admire).
• Single-purpose graphs: Niche services aim to map out just one particular circle of shared interest, such as micro-social-network Path (for mapping your 50 closest friends), or social music site Turntable.fm (for sharing playlists with likeminded music lovers).

In the near future, we should see new and better solutions to integrating social and interest graphs.

For Now, Pick the Right Graph

Until this kind of integration is achieved, though, Web services should consider carefully when to utilize the customer's social graph, and when to use their interest graph.

Then the service should pick the graph that adds value to the customer experience. Because the real social Web will be all about the customer.

Earlier this month, we reported on a slew of domain name purchases and trademark applications that indicated some kind of AOL social network was in the works. At the time, we figured it could have just been speculative. But no, it looks like AOL is serious. MapQuest will be the hub of AOL's effort to get on the social networking map.

The original Internet behemoth purchased NVIBE.com, NeighborhoodVibe.com and mqVibe.com this year. All of those domains point to the new "coming soon" page. AOL also registered a big portfolio of trademarks for each of these domains that indicate a location-based social networking service. Here's a selection:

Serial Number: 85419192
Online social networking services; online local and community social networking services

Serial Number: 85419185
Providing a website that enables users to connect with people in a particular neighborhood or city; Providing user-defined content and content of others selected and customized based on the known or estimated geographical location of users

Serial Number: 85419176
Providing neighborhood and community information in the fields of education, entertainment, local events and activities, current events, shopping, arts, culture, and sports; Providing information about community and neighborhood livability

Serial Number: 85419162
Providing geographic information, destination information, interactive maps, and driving directions via computer and communications networks; Providing information, news, and commentary in the field of travel via computer and communications networks

Serial Number: 85419151
Providing information and news in the field of local business

Now that we have a hint on the MapQuest website, it looks like we can expect a map-powered social network that combines location-based services for individuals, local news, information, entertainment and shopping, and travel directions like those MapQuest already offers. This is a space Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp and others are all vying to control. AOL has been silent about this, but it's strongly positioned to make this play.

Google Maps may rule the roost, but MapQuest is good technology. Moreover, Patch, AOL's network of local news sites, is dying for a sustainable business model. AOL launched a daily deals platform tied to Patch in June, and a map-powered social news network would be an ideal place to market it. AOL has all the pieces it needs to build this thing. It just needs to put them together.

Can AOL Outdo Google?

It will need to do it well, though. Google is going wild in all of these areas. It bought The Dealmap to integrate its own daily deals into its Maps product, and it keeps expanding Google Offers to more markets. It bought Zagat to provide content for local business guides, a shot across the bow at Yelp. And Google's even going where AOL can't by pushing NFC payments for smartphones with Google Wallet, which would close the payments loop on all of these local business plays. If AOL is going to win this game, it has to swing for the fences.

Thanks very much to Fusible for three excellent scoops on the domain purchases and trademark applications.

Do you think AOL has a shot with its mqVibe neighborhood social network? Sound off in the comments.

Today is Friday, and on Twitter that means it's #FollowFriday. It's a hashtag holiday that's all about sharing people. There are no algorithms, no "People You May Know" (well, those are in the sidebar, but ignore them). It's just a real social gathering on the Web at the end of every week. #FollowFriday is a much maligned phenomenon, but it's just misunderstood. Read on to find out how #FollowFriday really works.

Facebook is turning its "profile" into a "timeline." Funnily enough, Twitter also calls its most important page your "timeline." There are uncanny differences, though. Facebook's timeline is for things that already happened. Twitter's timeline is what's happening right now. The Facebook timeline is all about you. The Twitter timeline is full of other people.

Twitter is for sharing people. It's for watching geniuses work. We all try to get our stream as full of geniuses as possible, and in order to do that, we need to churn. We need to constantly follow new people that seem interesting while always unfollowing those who aren't.

To help us discover new Twitterers to try, Micah Baldwin (@micah) created a holiday. It's called #FollowFriday. Happy #FollowFriday, everybody.

A Hashtag Holiday

#FollowFriday is a weekly chance to expand our minds by discovering users recommended by the people we follow. It's also a chance to tell our followers about the interesting or amusing people whose quick messages we choose to see every day. To contribute, just think of someone whose tweets you like and craft a tweet introducing that person to your followers. Just be sure to include one or more of the hashtags, such as the original #FollowFriday, the shorter #Follow or the character-conserving #FF.

Here's an example:

@JonMwords
Jon Mitchell

#Follow @hotdogsladies, AKA Merlin Mann. His toots are funny, and he knows how to make people and devices happier and more productive. #FF

7/15/11

Seems simple enough, doesn't it? But finding new people on Twitter hasn't always been this easy. Like so many of Twitter's most important features - including @ mentions and #hashtags - a user had to invent #FollowFriday.

Introductions Matter

Not long ago, Twitter didn't offer much help for users trying to discover new people. For a while, there was only the Suggested Users List, which was a bunch of hand-picked Internet cool kids sorted by broad categories. It was a blunt instrument. Baldwin started #FollowFriday in 2009 to let people power solve the problem. The users, after all, are where Twitter's content comes from.

"When #FollowFriday started," Baldwin says, "the only thing that Twitter had was the Suggested User List, and it was absolutely a popularity contest." Twitter was still relatively new at the time, Baldwin says. "Really, at scale, probably about a year. So people were still figuring out how to use it, and there was a lot of noise. There was no real, good way to find anybody."

Baldwin says the hashtag holiday started as a joke between friends, a bit of healthy competition to gain followers, but it took off so quickly that he knew he'd struck on something at the heart of the way Twitter works. "To me," he says, "it spoke to the fact that people want to meet really cool people, and they want to meet them in a trusted format. Introductions matter."

A Bane and A Boon

Just how quickly did #FollowFriday take off? The way Baldwin tells it, "We sent it out, we went to the office, and a couple hours later it was something like one out of every two tweets had #FollowFriday in it."

Basically, Baldwin and his buddies had built a new feature of Twitter, meaning Twitter had to scale up to handle it. "I think, for Twitter, #FollowFriday became more of a bane than a boon from a structural standpoint," Baldwin says. He notes that in the top Twitter trends of 2009, #MusicMonday was present, but #FollowFriday was not, though "essentially, they're the same thing." This suggests to him that the topic might have been deliberately left off the list.

Baldwin doesn't think there was any ill will involved, but the noise and volume of #FollowFriday put a strain on the system. It also solved a problem Twitter itself needed to solve, but it did so in a way that was out of the company's control. Whatever its reasons, Twitter began building features that competed with #FollowFriday for solutions to the discovery problem.

@thatdrew
drew olanoff

#ff everyone

9/16/11

Feature Creep

Twitter canned the suggested users last year as part of its efforts to implement more sophisticated ways to recommend users manually and algorithmically.

Shortly before that happened, they added the retweet button, one of the most significant additions to the 140-character messaging service since Twitter made user-created features like @ mentions and #hashtags clickable. Now, instead of just copying and pasting a tweet to quote somebody, users could push a tweet from someone they follow into their followers' timelines, with the name, face and everything. Retweets are marked with the user who shared them, so you know who recommended the person. So that was nice. Twitter made it easier for its human users to recommend one another.

But then Twitter ditched the Suggested Users List and started dropping in all kinds of automated suggestions, just calculated based on the web of accounts following one another. They even added a Who To Follow tab to the main toolbar. In the boldest effort to out-suggest #FollowFriday so far, Twitter created an experimental robot account called @twittersuggests that auto-tweets suggested users to you. If it bugs you, you can opt out... but only by blocking the account.

It's always great to get more follow suggestions on Twitter and keep taking new people for test drives. But as Baldwin says, "Introductions matter," and on a social network powered by personality, no algorithm can substitute for a familiar, human introduction.

How To #FollowFriday

#FollowFriday could be such a sublime and useful tool, but it has fallen prey to humongous growth and rampant abuse and misunderstanding of Twitter's radically easy publishing platform. #FollowFriday and #ff are rife with noisy and unhelpful messages. But remember, if the people in your stream are doing it right, it doesn't matter what the masses are doing. This is precisely why it's important to follow quality people. But a look at the hashtags confirms that lots of Twitter users seem to miss the point of #FollowFriday.

The quality has been diluted by marketing, which on Twitter is often better described as human spam. "There are tons and tons of 'social media experts' telling everybody how to tweet and what to do," Baldwin says. Many users treat the platform like a contest to gain followers, or they think having thousands of Twitter followers is some kind of business objective in and of itself. For users like that, there is little or no conversation. "Twitter is one percent a marketing platform," Baldwin says. "If there's a way to create perceived value, i.e. followers, marketers will exploit it."

Finally, there's a scaling problem with etiquette on Twitter. Everyday users don't realize that accounts with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers often get too many @ mentions to keep track of, especially on a day like #FollowFriday. It's a feedback loop; if a person is popular on Twitter, lots of people will follow her or him, and in turn lots of people will recommend that person to their followers on #FollowFriday, cluttering up the person's @ reply feed. Baldwin believes the noise level created an air of ill will toward #FollowFriday among influencers on Twitter, causing it to fall out of favor. (Boo hoo, right? Poor them. It sucks to be popular. </sarcasm>)

It doesn't have to be this way, though. We don't have to follow the social media guru-ninja-Jedi-rockstars back. We can overcome those forces with the power of word-of-mouth. #FollowFriday is a people-powered solution to a great problem to have: not enough interesting people to listen to every day.

Read on for examples of How To #FollowFriday.

Doing #FollowFriday Wrong

#FollowFriday gets used for all sorts of purposes other than recommending people. Users promote their other accounts, or their colleagues accounts, or they use it as thank-yous for following or retweeting. Some even use @ mentions in #FF tweets as a sort of elbow in the ribs to get people to follow them. The worst is when someone can't contain their long list of mentions to one tweet, and they post three or four tweets in a row consisting of nothing but names. I don't mean to pick on @AndrezDamage here (in fact, I'm probably doing him a huge favor), but he's given us a great example of doing it wrong:

@AndrezDamage
Andrez Harriott

#FF@RasDamage @JadeJonesDamage @NoelDamage @SwitchmanUK @OfficialDamage @officialroyston @Char_Grant @AleshaOfficial @CarlaMarieUK

9/23/11

Why should I follow them? I don't know who they are. All I get is "damage," and maybe I'd know what that means if I followed @AndrezDamage, but that doesn't explain all of them. If they're really all related, surely a couple words of explanation could help. I wouldn't even mind if this was split up into several tweets, just as long as each of them contained some information about why I should click on these names.

Doing #FollowFriday Right

It really isn't that hard. Just think about what kinds of recommendations you would want to see from someone you're following. Tweets are short, but one tweet is enough of an intro to describe one person (or a couple, if they're similar). A good #FollowFriday tweet should give enough of a taste to help your followers figure out whether this is someone they want to follow.

Here's a great example from @robinsloan:

@robinsloan
Robin Sloan

Rare #FF from me: Love following @MarianaVZ's instagrammed adventures around the world w/ @darren_foster. Recently: Colombia, Vegas, Mexico

9/16/11

That tweet is full of adventure, and so, I presume, are the people it recommends. Sloan has conveyed in a few words that these people are big travelers who take pretty pictures and post them to Twitter. If you don't need that cluttering up your stream, that's great. You know what to expect, and you can pass. But if it sounds like a nice escape from the dreary contents of your timeline, then you're only a couple of clicks away.

Twitter Is For Sharing People

By recommending new users to each other, we're improving each other's Twitter experience. That's really cool, isn't it? Sure, we can share photos and music and videos and all of that, the things we usually call "sharing" on the Web. But on #FollowFriday, we can share the public thoughts of people we like. That does justice to the word "social."

Be sure to follow @micah and check out all the cool stuff he and his colleagues are doing at Graphicly, which lets you read, share and discover comics on all your devices.

What are some of your favorite Twitter accounts? Share them in the comments.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker announced the grants on his Facebook page this morning, signaling what the city hopes is beginning of a long-running process to build a Web tech presence, and improve teaching into the city's school system.

Newark is one of many urban centers plagued by high dropout rates, but peppered with promising charter school networks and education upstarts that are trying to fix the problem.

Companies that make mobile apps, social networks dedicated just to teachers and students, as well as live video teaching platforms are just a few of the thousands of startup ideas being incubated by venture capitalists or fueled by angel investors.

Facebook image comes from Douglas Crets' news feed

Ad revenue for the site, which has over 750 million registered users, will miss the expected $4.05 billion mark, according to analysts, but the slowdown in growth is explained as a diversification into other revenue streams like Facebook Credits.

The numbers suggest that attempts to drive consumption and spending across games, credits and other Facebook add-ons is fleshing out the bigger ad revenue picture.

When all streams are taken into consideration, total revenues at Facebook should reach $4.27 billion this year, eMarketer estimates. That more than doubles the $2 billion Facebook is estimated to have earned in 2010. Ad revenues will make up 89% of the total this year, down from 95% in 2009, says the site.

The $4.27 billion should beat FB's internal estimates, which were about $4 billion. Based on earlier reports, Facebook has been moving at a fast clip, doubling its first half revenues. An earlier report showed that it had doubled its half-yearly revenues.

Revenues in US territory will do just as well. Ad revenues here are expected to pass $2 billion in 2011, making for over half of the company's total revenue. Overseas ad revenue will continue to eat away at the US chunk of the market as mobile penetration and broadband to the home increases across developing nations, especially in Asia.

Overseas ad dollars is predicted to represent 50% of the pie next year and a slight majority by 2013.

The move is an improvement in relevancy of information feeds in social profiles and it demonstrates an intelligent system for delivering information and encouraging interaction on the world's largest social network.

One format is an updates ticker that allows for joining real-time conversations based on customized selection options. The other is a news aggregator, which functions as a newspaper, to keep users informed of the most important events and posts they have missed while they have been away.

The ticker is the most simple and straightforward feature. It makes it very easy for you to select whom you want to receive news from, and how often you want to hear from them.

When those people post updates - and they are selected as someone you want to hear from more frequently - you will immediately be alerted to join the conversation. Less relevant people will not signal as often or immediately.

It's kind of like being able to predict frequency and then assign a value to the number of times your annoying Aunt Betty calls you to tell you again about the neighbor's cats. In this way, you are judging just how close you want to be to Aunt Betty - and her cats - regardless of how close Aunt Betty wants to be to you. It's a subtle move by the engineers at Facebook.

Facebook is also changing its news feed, moving away from the rather clumsy "Most Recent" and "Top News" tags.

Facebook has made it so that if you are one of those people who spends a few weeks away from Facebook at a time, the next time you log on, you will see all the most important things you missed while you were away, arranged like it was a magazine or newspaper, with big pictures and easy to navigate buttons.

The rollouts today bring some solutions that calm the information storm fired up after the company rolled out Subscriptions recently.

Once it became possible to follow anyone (if they enabled the feature), the noise to signal ratio went haywire. Suddenly, it was Aunt Betty updates to the nth power. With this new feature, I can pretty much customize my feed so that everything makes sense, and I am not overwhelmed by noise.

Finally, it appears that a social network with over 750 million users has finally figured out how to act socially.

Image via Facebook.

A survey of 2300 adults, conducted by Harris Interactive and sponsored by the VOIP service Rebtel, found that Americans still overwhelmingly prefer to communicate by voice. 74% of respondents said that the phone was how they keep in touch with friends and 81% said it's their preferred method of communicating with family members.

The survey looks at the preferences for communicating with friends, family, significant others and co-workers. In three of those four categories, voice is the number one choice. When it comes to our work colleagues, however, we prefer to send email: 43% of respondents said they would choose email, 33% would choose voice/phone, 12% would text, and just 6% would use social networking sites to communicate with co-workers.

It's interesting, despite pronouncements about the death of email, to see that method continue to rank so highly. In fact, there was very little difference in the usage of phone and email across these groups, with the notable exception of communicating with a significant other: 85% use the phone, 58% text, and just 56% use email.

Photo credits: Flickr user plenty.r

The Ustream integration will let Ning users embed both live and recorded video into their sites. In addition to the video content, the new feature will also make available live chats so that people watching the event can also participate.

Ning boasts over 2 million Ning networks, and the video broadcasting integration is well-suited for many of these, particularly ones associated with education. The Ustream feature is only available, however, to Ning Plus and Pro subscribers (not to the Ning Minis, which are free for educators).

But with the possibility to broadcast tutorials or workshops or discussions, it does seem as though this video integration will make upgrading to a paid subscription very appealing for many users of the social network.

Microsoft Bing, the number two search engine on the Web, announced this morning that it has begun including Tweets within news results and and a tighter Facebook integration in its search results.

According to the Bing Team, the inclusion of social media in these search results will help users "make more informed decisions in search by surfacing the kind of information you can only get from your friends, often in real-time."

Rather than altering search results according to what your friends share, Bing will show a feed of relevant Tweets alongside headlines on Bing News.

In terms of Facebook, however, Bing had already been doing what Google released last month - altering search results according to what your friends "like." 

The latest update moves in the opposite direction. Now, users can post to Facebook directly from within Bing search results for movies, artists, musicians and television shows.

Microsoft has had a tight relationship with Facebook since 2007, when it beat out Google in a $240 million investment in the social network. Since, Bing has become the default search engine powering Facebook and a number of deals between Microsoft and Facebook have followed. The beginning of a more two-way relationship was inevitable.