Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Burning Man participants refer to the sphere of work, chores, shopping and Web surfing - the things that occupy the other 358 days of the year - as the "default world." This is my first day back in it, having just returned from my annual rite of passage at the desert festival. As always, the planned disconnection from the Web was an immense relief. When surrounded by such works of human days and hands that deserve complete attention, framed by a vast and serene natural environment, the last thing I want is for a white number in a red box to pop into my field of vision and distract me.

Playa Technology

But the influences of high technology at Burning Man are impossible to ignore. Fast computers, original software, and touchscreen interfaces enable more interactive and engrossing works of art. They also power, in a manner of speaking, Burners' thoughts about the default world. My friends at Camp Above The Limit hosted the Saraswati Speaker Series this year, which featured founders and principals of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and science-fiction author Cory Doctorow. Their views on the future of data-driven society made for invigorating topics of conversation. Moreover, the camp's technical wizards provided Internet access on the playa, which enabled these dedicated info warriors to join us out there without having to retreat from the fight.

Other uses of Web technology enhance the Burning Man experience for all participants. A new Facebook app called Burner Map allowed Burners to input their camping locations and print out a city map prior to leaving, enabling us to find each other's camps when we arrived. I taped mine into the front cover of my notebook. Many of the Web's most popular services brought Burners together before the event, too. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram connected many of us with new friends, and the massive art projects that made the whole event possible, like the Temple of Transition and the 1MileClock, were able to use Kickstarter and other viral methods to raise the funds they needed.

Online and Over the Line

However, somewhere out in that sandy place, there's a line to be drawn, and it is occasionally crossed. Whereas Burner Map is printed before the event, an iOS app called iBurn has provided a digital playa map for two years running, creating the expectation that devices are part of the social milieu out there. Though that app is designed to work offline, there was also occasional cellphone service on the playa this year, which I only know because I saw people taking advantage of it in the most absurd settings. And at the burning of the Trojan Horse on Friday night, someone right in front of my group was holding up an iPad to take video, obstructing the view of everyone behind him with a 10-inch screen showing a washed-out perversion of what was actually happening. My friend Mischa had to step in front of him to take a picture, after which he put down his camera and continued watching with his naked eyes.

Social Expectations

The problem with the Web at Burning Man is that the social expectations are flipped. On the last morning, just after sunrise, my friend Rain Doll and I experienced a few moments of wonder as we considered what chat or IM services could do for Burning Man participants, but that wonder quickly rotted into nauseous aversion. We shivered with visions of people making that long, bottom-lit stare down their arms toward a small black device instead of staring wide-eyed all around them.

"In the default world," Rain Doll says, "the assumption is that groups of people hanging around in the park don't want to interact with you. They're already with their friends... Where are yours? At Burning Man, the assumption is that everyone around you does want to interact and is just a friend you don't yet know."

Immediate Experience

The social Web empowers us in the default world by giving us an excuse to start a conversation. It gives us hints into each other's interests and friends, and it creates the expectation that it's all right to approach strangers. Maybe we need that here amidst all our distractions. But Burning Man is enough of a common context, and it's built around the principle that it's okay to approach one another unconditionally. Could we use that principle in the default world as well? Good social Web technologies break down barriers to interactions, as well as enhance their speed, range and bandwidth, but is there a point where technological solutions can no longer solve social problems?

What are some good principles for the social Web? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Jon also writes for the official Burning Man blog. You can read his entries here.

Photos by Mischa Steiner
Lead photo by dmitrysumin

What made waves in the mobile realm this year? We take a look in our third installment of ReadWriteWeb's top products of the year. Our founder Richard MacManus kicked us off with social products and Jon Mitchell took a look at web-based consumer products. To make the mobile list, a product had to be built to fundamentally work inside mobile platforms, hence the platforms themselves (iOS, Android flavors etc.) do not make the list. Take a look at our list below and let us know what we may have missed in the comments.

To understand Square is to fundamentally understand the changing nature of money as information and the ability to turn money into digital bits that can be transferred anywhere without the use of hard currency. The example we like to use at ReadWriteWeb is the ability to pay at your local farmer's market or in a taxicab. With its dongle reader, Square aims to make mobile payment transactions a ubiquitous and accepted activity. The company did not rest on its laurels this year though. It cannot, especially with so much competition in the mobile payments dongle space from companies like Intuit, Verifone and Erply among others.

This year, Square introduced the concept of Amazon-style one-click buying to real world merchants with the Square Card Case. It also turned the iPad into a point-of-sale terminal with Square Register. Square updated its app to be speedier and more efficient and the Card Case evolved to the point where it is more or less like having an open tab at your favorite retailer tied to your bank account. Pain points at the point of sale? That is what Square is trying to alleviate and it took great strides this year to that end. Square also went to the 2.75% flat fee on transactions, lowering the industry standard and forcing every one else in the ecosystem to play catch up. It has been a good 12 months for Square overall, starting the year with a big round of funding in January and iterating and refining the product throughout the year. That is a far cry from the hiccups of 2010 when dongles did not work with the iPhone 4 and the company was embroiled in a lawsuit. The opportunity for increased success for Square rests in the company's own hands.

2. Nuance & Swype

Apple brought you Siri, the virtual assistant inside the iPhone 4S. Yet, Nuance is a leader in the field with its innovative and speech-to-text functionality and ability to understand various languages and dialects. The Dragon Speech SDK can be dropped into almost any iOS or Android application to take advantage of speech-to-text capabilities. What Siri did with that technology was then tie it to a search engine and give it a personality that can talk back. What Nuance is doing is working on new and exciting ways for users to interact with the input methods on mobile devices. Nuance is working with app developers to create and entirely new breed of application that is speech aware and reactive. The company is working with mobile developers through its mobile developer program and we have seen some of the fruits of its labor in the area already.

Nuance also made another large splash this year by acquiring Swype, one of the biggest third-party touchscreen keyboard input methods on mobile devices today. Swype has been downloaded over 50 million times to Android and Symbian devices. When Nuance bought Swype, we wondered if the company's friendly relationship with Apple could eventually bring Swype to the iPhone. When Siri was announced by Apple for the iPhone 4S, our Marshall Kirkpatrick lamented that it should have been Swype. If you have not used Swype, it is a keyboard input method where you keep your finger on the touch screen and input letters by moving to them. If you are a Swype user that has that capability taken from you (by getting a device that does not use Swype), it is definitely missed.

3. Facebook Mobile + Messenger

It is very difficult to ignore the most used mobile app in the world. Approximately 350 million people have accessed Facebook through mobile devices across the world. That, to put it mildly, it outrageous. Facebook Mobile continues to evolve as well. One significant subplot to much of the news in mobile development circles this year would be how and where Facebook would move and if it was coming to come out with an HTML5-based mobile Web app store. We have since found that is not going to be true but Facebook does have some big mobile projects cooking around bringing its app ecosystem to mobile. There will just be no specific app store as Facebook believes users will create viral apps by sharing them along the social graph. Facebook's mobile strategy lays within those two elements -- the Web browser and the open social graph. Every thing that the company does is influenced by those two guiding factors, mobile is no different. Facebook also came out with an iPad app this year, which is essentially a mobile Web-based application wrapped up neatly to use the native capabilities of the iPad through iOS. We studied this year at length how Facebook mobile was designed to write once, run everywhere and how HTML5 is the future of the how Facebook interacts with the mobile Web.

Facebook also released its Messenger application this year, a stand alone product from the normal Facebook app. Really, if Facebook had not acquired group messaging service Beluga this year, that company would have probably found its way on to this list. The Messenger app further cements Facebook's status as not just a place to share ideas or thoughts, but as a true communications platform that can be accessed from anywhere at anytime. Facebook Mobile is only going to grow in 2012 and we will begin to see some of the ways the company is fundamentally changing the applications, sharing and communications through mobile devices. Facebook has put the argument of Web apps vs. native apps front and center on all mobile developers minds, something that was not true a year ago.

4. Google Wallet

There has been nothing that has done more to bring near field communications (NFC) payments into the mainstream mind share this year more than Google Wallets. We often say that Google is a company that is always in beta and the Wallet program is no exception. NFC technology may eventually have the type of ubiquity to completely change the payments industry but at this point the major in payments are still testing the idea or toying with various implementations, like Coke machines. It will take a while before the Google Wallet project is spread far and wide and a lot of that has to do with its current constriction of partners. You have to be a very specific person (use CitiBank, have a MasterCard and be a Sprint customer with a Nexus Android smartphone) to use the NFC capabilities of Wallet at this point, but those partnerships will lose exclusivity by the end of 2011.

NFC adoption, or the lack thereof, has been a significant source of debate this year in mobile circles. Some see it as the greatest thing to happen since touchscreen devices while others are not convinced. Google Wallet is near the center of that debate and anything that can cause that amount of conversation among different industries such as technology and the financial sectors deserves a spot in the top mobile products of the year.

5. Angry Birds

Mobile developers are leading the field in application development for any kind of computing system. They are pushing the bounds of what can be done with computing, on smaller processors with smaller screen sizes and graphics rendering. Within the realm of mobile developers, mobile game developers are the ones truly leading the charge. Other developers have seen the type of success that Rovio has had with Angry Birds and it has started a bit of a gold rush to create the newest viral sensation. Cut The Rope, Tiny Towers and Infinity Blade (I and II) are examples of successful mobile games as well.

Angry Birds is not just some one hit wonder though. It came to the Chrome browser and the Chromebook, opened a bank, toyed with the idea of NFC and partnered with Nexage to monetize all of those flying fowl. Rovio also came up with a bit of Magic at the ReadWriteWeb 2Way Summit and soon there may be Angry Birds everywhere.

Next Page: A reader, a browser, location and security

6. Pulse

We debated long and hard what reader app we wanted to be part of this list. Zite was up for consideration, as was Flipboard and News.me, Newsy, Showyou, Qwiki and Feedly. The reason that Pulse beat them all out is the fact that it is the only truly cross-platform reader that brings its full user interface, fully intact, to iOS, Android smartphones and tablets including the Barnes & Noble Nook and the Kindle Fire as well as Windows Phone 7. When looking for an app that fits our definition of what we were looking for in a mobile product (built off the specific mobile platforms or of the mobile Web), Pulse was one to truly stand out.

The Pulse reader works by bringing in feeds from a variety of sources and laying it out in a dynamic UI with horizontally scrolling tiles. During the year it expanded to Pulse.me, an Instagram/Read It Later like function for personal archives, Pulse Connect, a self-service publishing tool. It was named to Apple's App Store Hall of Fame and was an Android Market Editor's choice. To be fair, several other apps in this list and others that we have covered through the year also have those particular distinctions. Pulse expects to have 10 million users by the end of the year, after starting 2011 with about one million.

7. Google+ For Android

Google took its time and created a dynamic social network that it released in late June. We got access the day it came out and the consensus among the ReadWriteWeb staff then (and now) is that Google+ is pretty cool and very useful. Google did not lag on publishing an Android application for Google+, which was available the same day as the browser-platform. Google+ is one of the rare Web-based products that I was actually introduced to from a mobile first perspective and everything that needs to be there is present and accounted from. It has its own messenger program (called Huddle when it first launched and now just Messenger), the news stream, profile editing and, the most important of all, photos.

The photo sharing capabilities of Google+ for Android are what set the application apart from almost any other photo sharing service on the Web. The genius behind photos with the app is that photos are individually loaded to a personal cloud in Google+ (and can be accessed through the Web version of Picasa) without the need of the user to manually upload them. This capability does freak some people out but it can be turned off easily in the app's settings. Photos can also be individually uploaded, up to eight at once. That is about seven more than Twitter and Facebook can do. When Google+ rolled out, we called instant uploads its killer feature. We also compared the Google+ app to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and found that while each platform has its strengths, Google+ for Android stood out amongst the pack.

8. Foursquare

Foursquare redesigned its website in November, turning it from sparse to useful. The platform is tinkering with using NFC to check-in's to local merchants and partnered with Groupon to bring deals and offers to local shoppers. There have been so many tweaks to the Foursquare platform this year that it is hard to list them all in one place. It now has real-time notifications and hackers have been working on the Foursquare API to create some interesting tools, like 4sqwifi and Foursquare, Poorsquare. It released its Push API in September and expanded to checking into things like movies and events. Say what you want about the validity of the Foursquare platform in the long run, the company continues to create new products that have utility to users on every mobile platform.

9. Opera Mobile

There has been an explosion in third-party mobile browsers this year, but if we are to only choose one, Opera takes the cake. In consideration were also Dolphin HD, Bolt, Skyfire and Firefox. The only two on that list that are free on both Android and iOS though are Dolphin and Opera and in a race between the two, Opera wins for its versatility, ubiquity, speed, cloud connections, sharing connections and the ability to sync between the desktop and mobile browser. It also has the fastest iteration cycle of all the mobile browsers, pushing out updates at Mozilla-like paces.

Opera, like some of the other mobile browsers, tied its functionality to the cloud to save users' data connections when browsing the mobile Web. Opera is also one of the best third-party browsers, especially on Android, to run HTML5 Web-apps. Firefox also has good HTML5 integration and rendering but for most of 2011, the Firefox browser for Android has been bug-prone and terrible to use. Opera, as it is known to do, zips right along in comparison.

10. Lookout

In many aspects, 2011 has been the Year of Mobile Malware. More precisely, Android malware. It started with DroidDream early in the year and has risen to unbelievable levels throughout the year. Most users will be safe if they follow some common sense security rules. One of those rules is to make sure you have a security app on your Android device and if you are to pick one of the several choices, Lookout is one of the best. It has safe browsing capabilities for the mobile Web, protects users by not only scanning apps as they are downloaded, but scanning the app store itself and ties all the functionality to its servers in the cloud. Lookout even had the audacity to put out a security-style app for iOS.

Lookout does mobile first and that gives it a bit of a leg up on the competition. It understands mobile and the dynamic that apps live in better than any other security company. Bitdefender released an Android security app recently that compares favorably, but Lookout has been doing it nearly all year. In addition to scanning apps for malware and permissions, Lookout also has a privacy advisor, backup capabilities and the ability to find a missing device. When it comes to stand alone mobile security outside of common sense or enterprise grade mobile device management policies, Lookout is the choice.

Conclusion

App stores are reaching critical mass. Imagine anything that you could do with a mobile device and there are some developers somewhere looking in how to do it. Our 2011 list includes location services, security, social networking, payments, HTML5, NFC among other topics. The next year will be fascinating to watch these platforms grow into things that normal people would have never dreamed of creating. In December 2012 this list will have more HTML5 components and NFC will be in the hands of many more people.

There are some honorary mentions that deserve to get a nod. Zite, the iPad-based reader, barely lost to Pulse. Location services Geoloqi and Life360 are strong candidates to make this list next year but need time to evolve to push past the consumer mindshare that Foursquare already has. In the games department, Tiny Tower and Infinity Blade lose out to Angry Birds and its millions of users. In payments, PayPal is the leader in the space but not as innovative in emerging spaces as Square and Google Wallet are.

What should be added to our list? What should be taken off? Let us know in the comments.

The tech "world," or "scene," or whatever it is, is in love with this app. It tingled with excitement when Path went "stealthish" in 2010. It launched later that year weirdly lacking in features, and the blogerati still fawned over it. What is it about Path? How does "love" arise from Objective-C and 3.5 inches of glass? By evoking the people in your life, of course. And Path does that, just as Facebook does. It's a life stream. An ego trip. "Share life with the ones you love," especially yourself.

Path, in the exact manner as the conspicuously not-shipped Facebook Timeline, makes your life into a story, and your friends and family are the characters. You, of course, are the protagonist, the narrator, the star. Choose a profile picture. Choose a cover image. Share what you're doing. Are we talking about Facebook or Path? Exactly.

But Path's attention to detail puts Facebook to shame. Granted, that's easy to do when you don't have to bleed money out of your users' eyeballs yet.

Path is a closed network. You can syndicate to Facebook or Twitter if you choose, but within Path, it's for a limited number of close friends. It's full of cute signals of feeling and emotion, including emoticons and Instagrams - I mean, photo filters. The user interface is damn awesome, eye-poppingly original, soft and intimate. You can go to sleep and wake up in it, and the icon changes with the phases of the moon.

Doesn't that sound nice? Sure, it has that whole single-player-mode, where-are-my-friends problem, but it's so sexy and flattering, even when I'm alone! Just invite them all. They'll all join in. Right?

Stickiness & The Social Web

I didn't do a poll or anything, but crawling the blogosphere every day, I get the sense that people aren't satisfied with the Web. Why should we be? Bandwidth is expanding, interfaces are improving, the hardware is more responsive than ever. The Web is a communication medium that spans the globe, and by the measure of any engineer, we should be communicating better than ever. We probably are. But we aren't satisfied.

We've wound up with a social Web in which tools have to be "sticky" to catch on. Facebook is the stickiest, because that's where "everyone" is. But, - no offense, Windows people - Facebook is like the Windows of Web 2.0. It's the most broadly compatible system, but we all resent using it a little. Do you know anyone who loves Facebook? It keeps getting noisier, more confusing, and less secure.

But 800 million people use it anyway. It's "sticky." "Everyone" is on there. "I don't use Facebook" is the new "I don't have a cell phone," it is said.

So, here's Path. What Facebook should be, some say. It's for real friends, supposedly. not "friends" like the 2,000 people on Facebook. You can use Facebook like that, but then there's all the politics: can I unfriend this person, maybe I'll just mute them, what if I want to see their photos, &c, &c, &c. Sometimes it's nice to get a fresh start.

But then you have the Google+ problem. You have to convince your real friends to join in. And you, as the kind of person who would try an app like Path, say to them, "You guys. It's so cool. We can share everything with each other. Look at the moon!"

Then your friends go to the App Store or the Android Market and they peer into this uncanny valley of ego-streaming, and what do they do? Well, when Facebook introduced Timeline, what happened? A million or so (roughly 0.125%) users turn it on, Facebook looks at the data and panics. Launch date after launch date blows by. Facebook turns its attention to privacy concerns and doesn't mention Timeline.

Path is just like Timeline, only more elegantly constructed. Unlike Timeline, Path is readily available now. Go ahead. Try it out. Gaze at yourself. Does it make you want to share?

ThinkUp lets you archive all your social network activity. It's free and open-source, so it's a totally extensible platform with a growing community of developers. You can search, browse, publish, analyze and visualize your content and data in all kinds of ways. Under the terms of service of your social networks, they can delete everything you've created without warning. ThinkUp lets you own your content. This isn't a review; this is a public service announcement. Go get it.

ThinkUp began in 2009 as a labor of love by Gina Trapani, developer, tech writer and media mogul. She's now a project director at Expert Labs, which leads ThinkUp's development. Expert Labs is a nonprofit that helps the government harness the power of the social Web. Expert Labs' director of engagement is Clay Johnson, formerly the director of Sunlight Labs. He's helping bring agencies on board to use ThinkUp, promoting this open and transparent way to help the government listen to its citizens.

Expert Labs is founded and directed by Anil Dash. Dash brought ThinkUp to Washington, D.C., partnering with the Obama Administration, which now uses ThinkUp to manage its social media efforts.

Alongside Trapani, ThinkUp development is managed by Andy Baio, the Internet renaissance man who brought us the likes of Kickstarter and the 8-bit Miles Davis tribute Kind of Bloop. He joined Expert Labs in 2010 to hack on ThinkUp. "I'm particularly excited to tackle ThinkUp's ability to separate signal from noise, making it easier to derive meaning from hundreds or thousands of responses, using visualization, clustering, sentiment analysis, and robotic hamsters," he said at the time.

Now, after 20 months in development, ThinkUp has reached 1.0. It's features and documentation are complete, it's secure, and it's "reasonably bug-free." Here's what it can do for you:

Analyze and Visualize Your Social Networks

From tracking retweets and replies, to watching new followers, to identifying the client apps used by your friends and followers, ThinkUp lets you analyze and visualize your data in countless ways. You can even plot responses on a map of the world.

Archive, Search and Export Your Content

Ever tried to search Twitter for something specific you said a year ago? Forget about it. ThinkUp lets you archive and search all your social network content back to day one.

The data is all yours. Even if Facebook or Google+ tries to delete it in the dead of night, it will still be on your server. Using ThinkUp, you can always export your data as an Excel spreadsheet.

Publish and Browse Conversations

On top of all that, you can also use ThinkUp to publish and embed social content on a blog or website. You can also browse and review the things shared on your network.

You Have To See It To Believe It

ThinkUp is a powerful application for agencies or organizations, publishers and regular old power users alike. The best way to see if it will help you is to try it out. You can see the tool in action on the White House's live, working instance of ThinkUp, which will allow you to dive right in and see what you can do with it. If you'd prefer, you can also check out the ThinkUps of Gina Trapani or technopundit Leo Laporte.

For the grand tour, visit thinkupapp.com. If you're ready to jump in, ThinkUp's source code is under the GNU General Public Licens, and you can download it from GitHub.

What do you think of ThinkUp? Could you use it? What for? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Those aren't the words of a mere curation tool. That sounds like a news site. The homepage of Storify is now a destination that displays the big stories of the day according to citizens of the Web. That's homepage material for anyone who spends time on social networks, which means it's a natural place to put some ads and turn Storify into a media business.

Storify reflects a belief that real news - not just idle chatter - unfolds on the social Web, and it provides tools to help us capture and share them. "Our vision is that the world needs a new information network to make sure we can remember what's happening and what's being reported by people on social media," says Storify co-founder Xavier Damman.

But the new features are also about surfacing the work of members, who can be anyone, not just journalists. "We want to help our users get the attention they deserve for their stories," Storify co-founder Burt Herman says. In addition to the homepage, all story pages now display a list of related stories.

Making Moments Into Stories

Storify is an excellent tool for journalists, providing embeddable, search engine-friendly stories compiled from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or most anywhere on the Web, if you put your mind to it. I recently posted a how-to post of my favorite uses of Storify on ReadWriteWeb, all of which are made possible by the great input of our faithful readers.

But Storify's new editing interface released last month makes it even easier for anyone to turn social media moments into lasting stories. It's worth a try, even if all you want to do is share an inside joke among friends. But the new homepage makes it possible for anyone's great work to become big news on the Web. It also means ReadWriteWeb has to be on the lookout for ace social Web reporters like you!

Follow ReadWriteWeb on Storify.

Have you ever used Storify? Share your favorite stories in the comments.

This PRM stream appears on the 'Home' screen, from which you can launch all kinds of searches for old classmates, colleagues, singles and such, using MyLife's existing people searches, already in use by over 60 million people. It's a 'freemium' site, and the paid features give you more access to features like 'Who's Searching For You,' showing you people with whom you aren't already connected.

The sign-up process might try to fool you, but don't worry; the basic features are free. Once you click through to sign up, there's a teeny link in the top-right corner that says 'Continue with limited access' to let you past the paid signup that confronts you before you get to see what the service does.

The free MyLife.com service is pretty pushy. It pops up huge, meaty pictures of cheeseburgers in your face and asks you to sign up for MyLife Deals emails. But that's the price of free, and for someone looking for a Web service to manage one's online life in a centralized place, you can't ask for more than this in terms of features.

Make sure to check your spam folder for your sign-up email, because ours ended up there.

Upcoming Features

CEO Jeff Tinsley says that MyLife will release mobile apps later this month, and that's a great use case. One app that lets users manage Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will save lots of icon space. Google+ integration is coming soon, as are Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail and AOL Instant Messenger. It's an interesting proposal to open a social media dashboard up to email and IM, too, so watch for upcoming releases later this year.

How do you manage your online social life? Share your solutions 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?

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.

Let's not get into whether Diaspora can take credit for features of Google Plus and Facebook. There are things about Diaspora that still are unique among its competitors. Not only is it open-source, it's decentralized and distributed. Users are encouraged to set up their own servers. But these are not features for normal human users. In that category, the social networking superpowers seem to have Diaspora cornered.

Circles and Aspects

Diaspora has been called the anti-Facebook for its strong privacy stance, and it had "aspects" before anyone knew about Google Plus and its circles. But Plus exists now, and Facebook is coming around to this whole "privacy" thing. And really, for Facebook, it was just an interface problem, anyway. Why does everybody forget that Facebook has had publishing to select friend lists for a really long time?

If Google Plus has taught us anything, it's that normal people don't feel like leaving the social networks where they already feel settled. Diaspora lets users post their updates to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, but it still wants to be a destination of its own. Now that all Diaspora's user-facing features are available in the dominant social networks, that looks like a tall order.

Social Networks are Sticky

Sometimes, Diaspora seems like it is only a dream; it's still in closed alpha, so nobody's home. It's real, though; I promise. I've had alpha access for about a year, although I've only convinced 10 of my friends to accept my invites. And some of them haven't added so much as a profile pic yet. And none of us, myself included, has posted more than once.

Social network inertia is real. Has Google Plus killed Facebook yet? No. Diaspora can take credit for Google Plus circles all it wants, but Google reached beta first. I'd be happy to show you more Diaspora screenshots, but it's really mostly white space and things that look like Google Plus.

Diaspora's Defense

Yosem Companys, Diaspora's chief evangelist, insists that we do need a new home on the social Web. "Facebook really was fun for a while there," he says. "People who showed up revealed and shared their authentic selves. ... Today, what we see is people using Facebook only to say the most innocuous personal things, to market their own services, or to forward content created by others. As a result, Facebook has become boring and even depressing. We still go there because it's part of our routine, and for fear of missing something, but it's like an old favorite TV show on its 8th season, when the original magic is gone."

That's anecdotal, though. I've been a Facebook user since 2005, and it got depressing for a while, but I think certain recent features, particularly the Groups overhaul, have made it as fun and fulfilling as ever in its current incarnation, if you can get over the ads. But that's all just opinion. The data, however, show that Facebook is absolutely crushing it as far as traffic, and it is offering new mobile extensions of its network into the real social world where people have fun. Diaspora use is a desk activity.

Regarding Google Plus, Companys hits the new kid on the block where it really hurts: the real names policy: "All kinds of people have good reasons to be inhibited by this policy, including people looking for work, women, people expressing views different from their parents', famous people, and pretty much anyone outside the mainstream of the community where they live." Diaspora has no such policy, and it offers progressive new ways for members to self-identify, such as an empty text field for gender.

But is this enough to convert the hundreds of millions of people who have already settled into social networking habits? Only if Companys' anecdotal evidence is true, and that remains to be seen.

Whither Diaspora?

Is there anything Diaspora can do? I think so, but it's a departure from it's current incarnation, which is an awful lot like Google Plus (or vice versa, or whatever). It's unrealistic to expect a mass exodus from one social network that works to another of which no one has ever heard. Diaspora's potential is in its ability to syndicate to our other services (currently Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr) while still allowing us to own our data. Companys notes that "our service already includes outbound syndication ... and it will include inbound syndication, too." So this use case sounds like it's in the cards.

If Diaspora is built as a publishing platform that lets us own our content and direct it to our existing networks - and especially if we can read from them, too - it would be an awesome, welcome tool that even Dave Winer could love. But if the launch of Google Plus wasn't splashy enough to start a mass Facebook exodus, a later launch of a service that looks the same is not going to do it.

What isn't working for you about the social Web? What would you like to see change?

Playa Technology

But the influences of high technology at Burning Man are impossible to ignore. Fast computers, original software, and touchscreen interfaces enable more interactive and engrossing works of art. They also power, in a manner of speaking, Burners' thoughts about the default world. My friends at Camp Above The Limit hosted the Saraswati Speaker Series this year, which featured founders and principals of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and science-fiction author Cory Doctorow. Their views on the future of data-driven society made for invigorating topics of conversation. Moreover, the camp's technical wizards provided Internet access on the playa, which enabled these dedicated info warriors to join us out there without having to retreat from the fight.

Other uses of Web technology enhance the Burning Man experience for all participants. A new Facebook app called Burner Map allowed Burners to input their camping locations and print out a city map prior to leaving, enabling us to find each other's camps when we arrived. I taped mine into the front cover of my notebook. Many of the Web's most popular services brought Burners together before the event, too. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram connected many of us with new friends, and the massive art projects that made the whole event possible, like the Temple of Transition and the 1MileClock, were able to use Kickstarter and other viral methods to raise the funds they needed.

Online and Over the Line

However, somewhere out in that sandy place, there's a line to be drawn, and it is occasionally crossed. Whereas Burner Map is printed before the event, an iOS app called iBurn has provided a digital playa map for two years running, creating the expectation that devices are part of the social milieu out there. Though that app is designed to work offline, there was also occasional cellphone service on the playa this year, which I only know because I saw people taking advantage of it in the most absurd settings. And at the burning of the Trojan Horse on Friday night, someone right in front of my group was holding up an iPad to take video, obstructing the view of everyone behind him with a 10-inch screen showing a washed-out perversion of what was actually happening. My friend Mischa had to step in front of him to take a picture, after which he put down his camera and continued watching with his naked eyes.

Social Expectations

The problem with the Web at Burning Man is that the social expectations are flipped. On the last morning, just after sunrise, my friend Rain Doll and I experienced a few moments of wonder as we considered what chat or IM services could do for Burning Man participants, but that wonder quickly rotted into nauseous aversion. We shivered with visions of people making that long, bottom-lit stare down their arms toward a small black device instead of staring wide-eyed all around them.

"In the default world," Rain Doll says, "the assumption is that groups of people hanging around in the park don't want to interact with you. They're already with their friends... Where are yours? At Burning Man, the assumption is that everyone around you does want to interact and is just a friend you don't yet know."

Immediate Experience

The social Web empowers us in the default world by giving us an excuse to start a conversation. It gives us hints into each other's interests and friends, and it creates the expectation that it's all right to approach strangers. Maybe we need that here amidst all our distractions. But Burning Man is enough of a common context, and it's built around the principle that it's okay to approach one another unconditionally. Could we use that principle in the default world as well? Good social Web technologies break down barriers to interactions, as well as enhance their speed, range and bandwidth, but is there a point where technological solutions can no longer solve social problems?

What are some good principles for the social Web? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Jon also writes for the official Burning Man blog. You can read his entries here.

Photos by Mischa Steiner
Lead photo by dmitrysumin

Gaza Youth are a group from the Strip who have taken Facebook by storm, printing a manifesto that is so uncompromising and so full of rejection not just for Israeli occupiers but the bullies and schnorrers in their own communities that reading it is like coming up for air.

GYBO

Here's an excerpt from their manifesto. If you're of a sensitive disposition, well, you could probably insert your name in there somewhere.

"Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community! We want to scream and break this wall of silence, injustice and indifference like the Israeli F16's breaking the wall of sound; scream with all the power in our souls in order to release this immense frustration that consumes us because of this fucking situation we live in; we are like lice between two nails living a nightmare inside a nightmare, no room for hope, no space for freedom. We are sick of being caught in this political struggle; sick of coal dark nights with airplanes circling above our homes; sick of innocent farmers getting shot in the buffer zone because they are taking care of their lands; sick of bearded guys walking around with their guns abusing their power, beating up or incarcerating young people demonstrating for what they believe in; sick of the wall of shame that separates us from the rest of our country and keeps us imprisoned in a stamp-sized piece of land; sick of being portrayed as terrorists, homemade fanatics with explosives in our pockets and evil in our eyes; sick of the indifference we meet from the international community, the so-called experts in expressing concerns and drafting resolutions but cowards in enforcing anything they agree on; we are sick and tired of living a shitty life, being kept in jail by Israel, beaten up by Hamas and completely ignored by the rest of the world."

These aren't witless stone-throwers or kids who just want to rage. "We do not want to hate," they say, "we do not want to feel all of this feelings, we do not want to be victims anymore. We want three things. We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that too much to ask? "

They're also smart about how they use social media to get their message out. (Their message, not the creaking, self-defeating message of their bankrupt elders.) Although they also have a blog, their primary online presence is their Facebook page, which is "liked" by almost 12,000 people so far.

As of today, however, Facebook has blocked them from uploading anything more! (Anyone who thinks social media is free by its very nature needs to have their head examined.)

"Pls consider supporting us by taking one or more of the following actions:

1) Promoting our manifesto by sharing it on your profile on Facebook
2) Sending an email to your friends asking them to like our page FB
3) Translating the manifesto to your language and sending it to us (we have it in Arabic, Hebrew, French, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Greek, Chinese, Russian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Estonian)
4) Sending the manifesto to journalists in your country
5) Making organizations in your countries that are concerned with the Palestinian issue and/or youth rights know about our existence
6) Posting links about violation of youth's rights in Gaza on our wall
7) Suggesting us ideas for reaching out to a greater number of people"

Angry Youth

The Brookings Institution describes this group:

"These young men and women often use the Internet and other channels of political discourse to publicly express their critical views. Their hyper-nationalistic and often anti-American sentiments, which first emerged in the late 1990s and are widely disseminated today, stand in sharp contrast to a generation of Chinese youth just 20 years ago."

In his keynote to a Brookings conference on this topic, Kai-Fu Lee, founder of Microsoft Research Asia and founding president of Google China, described them much more completely. He has reservations about the term "angry" (as in "enraged") and prefers to highlight their passionate engagement and impatience; he also credits them with patriotism but disagrees with characterizing them as "nationalistic."

"(W)hen we talk about angry youth, I think we're talking about post- 80's, people born after 1980, that they had access to the internet, and that they often use it to vent their frustrations and that frustration often comes from either their patriotism or their desire to seek which is righteous, fair, true, and transparent. They care about social issues. They're concerned, and they feel they need to be outspoken to have their voices heard, and they often use the internet to gain knowledge and to have their voice heard."

What have angry youth done?

• Descried plagiarism among academics and set up a website to battle it
• Created a help-and-resource platform to assist people and communities crushed by the Chengdu earthquake
• Created a site to list earthquake donor levels among China's rich
• Banded together against the high-powered manager of a multinational who abused his young secretary and got him fired

These were not all positive, as any anonymous group can do things that no sensible person would do in the light of day. They set up a website to help others harass a husband whose wife committed suicide, as well as his lover and their families. They also promoted the rumor that a chain of foreign stores, Carrefour, supported Tibetan independence. People boycotted and protested and the store had to shut down countrywide until the furor died down.

Compare and Contrast

Although China is huge and Palestine small and the fenqing less coherent as a group than GYBO, both share a number of things in common. Although they love their people and their country, they're fed up with what's been done to it. They're not just at their wits end with "the enemy" but with those who have set themselves up as "the opposition." They're suspicious of authority in general. They're devoted to the truth: finding it, embracing it and sharing it, largely online. They're technically literate and impatient with common wisdom. They're young, energetic and growing.

Anyone who ignores or minimizes these groups does so at their peril. These kids are going to either rule the world or wind up in a host of unmarked graves. Anyone who believes in their right "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" will want to step up and get their backs.

But the members of these groups also have a part to play in ensuring they go forward in a way that ensures they don't self-destruct. The American writer Delmore Schwartz famously said, "in dreams begin responsibilities." The responsibilities of the youth in these groups is to carry the reason, empathy and desire for truth forward, even as they are powered by their anger and impatience, to translate their vision to those who aren't part of the digital world even as they acknowledge the social Web's help in defining those ideas. (Lord, I'm André Gide over here.)

These aren't the only groups like this, of course. Nor are Palestine and China the only countries with such groups. So, if you're a part of one, or know of one, in another place, speak up in the comments.

Gaza photo by Free Gaza | China photo by Irish Typepad | Armendian photo from Wikimedia Commons | other sources: Barking Robot

Disconnect, similar to his earlier project, blocks a number of third-party widgets from sites like Digg, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo, as well as de-personalizes search at the cookie level, allowing you to remain logged-in to services like iGoogle or Gmail without having your search queries attached to your Google profile.

Kennish said that, while the tool is in a primitive state, he hopes it will have a larger effect on the debate over privacy on the Web.

"Realistically, Disconnect won't have a significant direct impact on the average user's privacy -- Adblock (and I mean the whole suite) is the most successful browser extension and used by less than 1% of the Web population," said Kennish. "So government policy and what browser vendors ship natively is more important to me. I'm hoping to show a better way through software and have a butterfly effect on policy and browser implementation."

Kennish calls the "Do Not Track" method of opting-out "a bad model for defending online privacy because phones ring and get your attention, where Web bugs are invisible and go unnoticed."

Indeed, last summer one online advocacy group released a browser extension that alerts you "whenever your personal information is being sent to Google servers." The result was a near constant barrage of alarm bells - if your phone rang this often, you would go insane. Disconnect takes a less obnoxious method, showing a running tally of how many calls have been blocked in the extension's toolbar icon. Clicking on the icon also allows you to quickly allow for unblocking because, no matter our privacy talk, these tools are also useful in our online lives and not always unwanted. Kennish's point is more that the user should be allowed to opt-in, rather than needing to opt-out - an oft-heard refrain in online privacy discussions.

Kennish said that he started with blocking standard third-party social widgets "because I consider them the most dangerous third-party resources and there didn't seem to be another tool that blocks them out of the box. The prevalence of these widgets means they can report on almost all your browsing activity, which can then be linked to databases full of the social data you intentionally share."

While Disconnect may be in early stages and not have a "significant direct impact" for the average user, the tool could be useful for those concerned about how different social tools are keeping track of your browsing habits. The extension is available for both Google Chrome and RockMelt.

Earlier this month, Google tested Twitter integration with "friends" to news results, but the inclusion of multiple social networks is looking like a bold and significant change.

We saw that Google Social Search launched in Labs last October, so this development isn't coming as a complete shocker for everyone. But where they're going with it is interesting to observe. In Sullvan's post, he drills into what people are seeing when they follow the breadcrumb trail, providing a glimpse of what could be just the beginning of Google's move toward becoming a force in the social sphere: becoming a social utility.

Clicking on the "Shared by" links takes you to Google Realtime search, where you are shown all the people who are sharing that particular news story through services such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

In The Wake Of Bing & Facebook, Google Web Search Tests Getting More Social (searchengineland.com)

Plixi: It's Not About Tweeting Photos, It's About People, Places and Events

The most important difference between TweetPhoto and Plixi is a new feature involving user-created events and places. Anyone on Plixi can create an event or place using the new service, and these can be either public or private, as desired. An event could be something as large as a rock concert or as small as a 4-year-old's birthday party. Plixi users at these events can upload their photos to a collective pool via a unique email address or the new Plixi iPhone application (awaiting approval). This allows all the photos from a particular event to be gathered into one place instead of being "scattered all over the Web," says Sean Callahan, Plixi's co-founder and CEO.

The company stresses that it's not jumping on the geo-location bandwagon, however, but has "always" focused on geo-location since its very launch. Photos come in from mobile applications and devices, but it was never about checking in, explains Callahan. It was about "my friends and what they're doing."

With Plixi, the company will also focus heavily on privacy. Instead of re-creating your social graph by importing your Facebook and Twitter friends, you create a new social graph on the site. While that seems a bit tedious, it also allows you to get a fresh start by specifying who can see what photos as they are shared.

If, however, you used TweetPhoto within one of the many client applications, the change will be transparent - the new places and events features will be available only to those who browse to the website and create an account.

Plixi Says: We Did Location From the Very Beginning

Plixi's vision for a location-based service - that it should be about people and photos, not check-ins - isn't a bad one, necessarily. But it's a little naive to think that you can get everyone at a particular gathering to use Plixi for their photos instead of uploading them directly to their preferred social network of choice, like Facebook or Flickr, for example. At least as "TweetPhoto" the service was obviously filling a hole in the Twitter ecosystem. Since there's no way to upload directly to Twitter itself, services like TweetPhoto, TwitPic and yFrog found a niche in serving as a middleman between mobile photos and the micro-blogging network. But the lack of a photo-sharing feature is likely a problem that Twitter will soon remedy, either via an acquisition, partnership or the introduction of a native feature. And then what will become of these services?

As for Plixi, the photo-sharing service is hoping it can ride the wave of renewed interest in geo-location, while trying to appear it has had the idea all along. While that's inaccurate, really - mobile photo-sharing is one of the original location-based services, we suppose - the question is why now? Why not three months ago or six months from now? Maybe Plixi knows that it's only a matter of time before Twitter makes irrelevant services whose only feature is tweeting photos, at least whichever one isn't blessed as the "official partner" the way bit.ly was with shortening links. Maybe now is as good a time as any to make yourself stand out from the herd.

But will users agree that there's a real need for these "collective photo memories," that Plixi delivers? Or will seeing yourself tagged on Facebook be enough?

The acquisition is the third this month and leaves little doubt over Google's intentions to make a push in the social gaming arena.

Google has made big investments in the social and gaming realms over the past month, starting out in late July with a $150 million investment in Zynga, the game developer behind massively popular social games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. In August, the company spent $182 million on Slide, with Slide CEO Max Levchin stating that they would be working "to make Google services socially aware". It followed the next week with the purchase of Jambool, which last year had created the Social Gold platform for online payments and in-game virtual currency.

According to The Canadian Press, Google Canada spokeswoman Wendy Rozeluk said that SocialDeck would be "a perfect addition to our current team of engineers [...] to continue to innovate in the social and mobile web."

Morrison contends that that "addition" will be based on SocialDeck's Spark, a "non-game product it offers" that "provides social integration across Blackberry, the iPhone and Facebook." We would have to agree, as each acquisition has offered a unique contribution, and SocialDeck looks like the piece that makes Google games available on more than just Android-based phones.