Path was uploading iPhone users' address books to its servers without asking. Today's update, version 2.0.6, now prompts users to opt-in to the "Add Friends" feature, which is not mandatory. Path has deleted all the existing contact info from its servers.

There are some additional security measures Path could use with this contact information, as Matt Gemmell suggested in yesterday's thread with Morin. The app could hash the information locally and then upload it. Path hasn't taken that step yet, but it assures users that the connection is encrypted, and the data are stored behind a firewall. And now that it's all opt-in, users are in control again.

So Path recovered as gracefully as possible. Do you accept its apology? Or did yesterday's revelation do too much damage for you to trust the company again? It's important to remember that you pay for free apps with your data. They're going to do what they can to collect it, because that's how they make money.

They should always ask the user for permission first. Apple requires app developers to ask the user for permission before gathering location data, and perhaps it should do the same for contacts. But the bottom line is that responsibility for user data starts with the user.

How much do you care about privacy when it comes to data like this? Is the price of free apps worth it? Share your responses in the comments.

My audio-tweet was from Srini Kumar, developer of TinyVox. He wanted to know what I thought of the app's "voicemail on Twitter" approach and its retro cassette tape aesthetic. I said I'd be happy to check it out on the condition that we conduct our interview asynchronously, back and forth over TinyVox. So we did, and I learned more about communication than any social app has taught me in a while.

Srini:

@jonmwords cool path article - stealing the News Feed? taped with audio app TINYVOX

The metaphors are all over the place with this app. Srini called it, at various times, "voicemail on Twitter," a "mix tape," an "audio brainstorm" that can be a "throwaway" just for getting ideas out, and "podcasting for everyone." It was hard to decide how to use it. I figured concision was a good rule of thumb, so I just shot off a brief question about the medium itself.

Jon:

Question 1: About whether or not this is a new kind of medium taped with audio app TINYVOX

Srini came back with a huge response, full of passion and color and drama... and it was really, really long. But it was clear that he intends the app to be all of those things and more. Whatever we can do with our voice, Srini wants TinyVox to help us do more.

Srini:

The Tyler Durden effect ? taped with audio app TINYVOX

I loved what he had to say about the honesty and unsettling newness of communicating this way, aloud, spontaneously, without constraints. But exchanges of 10-minute messages didn't seem sustainable to me. This began to seem like a problem with the way the app works. Tweets are constrained to 140 characters, and that's why the medium works. These "audio-tweets" break that wide open.

So I asked Srini whether he agreed:

Jon:

Question 2: On the tendency (temptation?) to go long in this medium. taped with audio app TINYVOX

Honestly, I sort of expected him to take a hint and rein it in for the next answer, but he didn't. He came back with another six minutes of rhapsody, pushing me on the cultural norms that made me want short, tight answers. It's hard to concentrate and really listen to someone, even when they're sitting right in front of you. Would we be better to each other if we worked on that?

Srini:

we're spanning time taped with audio app TINYVOX

So I did. I practiced the art of paying attention, and I listened to every word. I found myself sympathizing with his whole message much more deeply than I do on Twitter. A Twitter person is just a picture, a handle and a burst of text. But committing to listening to a six-minute tape of someone's voice makes you follow his train of thought wherever it goes. I learned much more about where his head was at than I do about people in a comment thread.

For my last question, I let myself open up the same way. I asked him about the nostalgia and sentimentality of TinyVox itself and where the app is going:

Jon:

Question 3: about how the TinyVox recipient gets to keep the sentimental metaphor of the mixtape. taped with audio app TINYVOX

Srini's answer was vast again, but it was really exciting to hear from a developer with so much love for the interaction he's designing. Rather than summarizing where TinyVox is going, I'll leave you with Srini's audio answer. TinyVox is available for iOS and Android, and I'd be interested to hear how you find ways to use it. Share them in the comments here.

Srini:

the mixtape in the cloud taped with audio app TINYVOX

Note: the timestamps are off for the recordings in this exchange because I didn't realize that TinyVox is better about privacy than I initially thought. It doesn't post clips to the Web unless you explicitly tell it to, so I had to ask Srini to re-upload them after we were done.

"Facebook will always be free," it tells us, so free is now the standard. Free apps are expensive, though; we pay with our data. Whenever Facebook or Google messes with our privacy, this is the cost of doing business for free. Path is no different. It's already using our personal data in ways we didn't expect. Arun Thampi discovered today that it uploads the entire iPhone address book to its servers. Surprised? Don't be.

It's a secure exchange of information between Path's servers and your phone, and it's not necessarily doing anything flat-out wrong with the information. But Path never asked its users if it can do this. It may be using our contacts for the benefit of our user experience, for finding friends on Path, for example. But we need an explanation.

Why didn't we know about this until an enterprising hacker stumbled over it by accident? Is this a sign of how Path will treat user data in the future? What do Path's adoring users do now? Well, they should get used to it. This is the price of free.

The functionality is opt-in on Android, and CEO Dave Morin says it will be opt-in on iOS soon, but the fact is, the app added it before asking.

All I want @Path to say is "Oops, our mistake. We'll update the app and our servers to keep only hashes, and be opt-in. We're sorry."

— Matt Gemmell (@mattgemmell) February 7, 2012

UPDATE 11:53 a.m.: Path CEO Dave Morin replied to Thampi's post in the comments:

"We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and effeciently as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path. Nothing more.

We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval."

Translation: We did it first, and we'll ask you for permission in a little while. Also, this makes clear that Path uploads Android contacts as well.

Developer/blogger/legend Matt Gemmell raises three questions missing from Morin's explanation:

"1. Why are you uploading the actual address book data, rather than (say) generating hashes of the user's email addresses locally, then uploading just those hashes? You'd be able to do friend-finding that way, and similarly if you uploaded hashes of all email addresses in the user's address book, you'd be able to do your notifications of when a friend joins. At no point would your servers ever need to see the actual email addresses or phone numbers from our contacts.

2. Why wasn't this an opt-in situation to begin with? Isn't that against Apple's own T&Cs?

3. How can we have our contact information deleted from your servers, if we wish to do that?"

UPDATE 12:22 p.m.: Morin responds to Gemmell's questions point-by-point:

"1. This is a good alternative solution which we'll look into. Thanks for the idea.

2. This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information. However, as mentioned, we believe users need further transparency on how this works, so we've been proactively addressing this.

3. As I mentioned in the previous answer, we are rolling out this functionality for 2.0.6. In the meantime, if you would like your data deleted from our servers please contact our service team at service@path.com. We take this same policy for any of your data, if you'd like your account deleted, including all data, we're happy to do this as well. We fundamentally believe that you as a user should always have control over your information and data and you can always email our service team and we will remove anything you'd like from our servers."

The response is in the right spirit, but Path should now see the repercussions of setting it up this way. The only opt-out for users is to manually email the support team, and the opt-in version is coming to the App Store after the fact. If Path had just asked its users before adding this functionality, and if the app hashed the sensitive info locally before uploading it, everyone probably would have said "yes," and this wouldn't be a story.

Are you using Path? What do you think about this news?

But like on any social network, it just depends on whom you're following. On Pinterest, you have fine-grained control over what pins appear in your feed. In fact, for all Google's efforts to figure out how to control unwanted social stuff with Circles, I daresay they got it backwards. Pinterest is the reverse of Google+ circles, and it's better for users.

Facebook's Smart Lists and Google+ Circles have popularized the idea that we need the ability to share different things with different audiences. That lets us have fun with some people and be boring with others without having to maintain two profiles. But neither of those networks offer much control for the person on the receiving end.

Facebook's News Feed algorithm is a bit of a magic soup. You can tell it you want more or fewer updates from certain things in certain situations, but for the most part, if they're sharing it with you, you're going to get it. Google+ lets you turn down the volume on your circles, so you can adjust the noisiness of groups you're following, but the people in those circles are just sharing wherever they share. The recipient has to do her or his best to keep all the senders organized.

Pinterest Is the Reverse of Circles

But Pinterest nails the mechanics of this. On Pinterest, users create "boards" for different things they want to share. When you follow a person on Pinterest, you follow all their boards. You can also follow individual boards. If someone you like has a board for "desserts," which you like, and a board for "spaceships," which you love, but they also post to their "cute puppies" board all day long (and you hate puppies), the solution is simple: You unfollow "cute puppies," and everything else remains.

Both the pinner and the follower only have to think about their own tastes. They don't have to guess what other people are like. People are more likely to enjoy themselves that way. Because hey, if Pinterest teaches us anything, it's that we have impeccable taste.

Do you use Pinterest? Do you need an invite? Let's get some invite gifting going in the comments.

Before long, I could tell why I was chosen. It was a civil case, and practically all the character evidence was in the form of email, Facebook and Myspace posts. That's all we had to juxtapose with the in-person testimony and figure out who was telling the truth. It was a bit embarrassing at first. What did this have to do with justice? But that became clear. There are lots of new lessons to learn about being civil in an online society, and judges and juries are how we common-law countries work that stuff out.

It was fascinating to watch these former colleagues testify for and against each other's character. We had to be judges of performance. We had massive binders full of of printed online exchanges to weigh against the testimony, and that was how we were to make our judgment.

This was a lesson in how the Web has become a part of our character in both our professional and personal lives. Too much overlap, especially online, can dissolve the work/life boundary altogether. And here we were, 13 jurors tweeting, Facebooking and emailing on breaks, doing our best to reassure our networks that we weren't just AWOL for a whole week.

I mostly used Path to document the experience, an awesome answer to all my questions about that app. The plaintiff and the defendant were more into Myspace.

I learned so many lessons about the Web on jury duty last week. Here are just a few.

Write Like What You Say Will Be Read To A Jury

I'm not speaking abstractly here. If you document your life dramas online, and if those dramas end up in court, the lawyers will dig it all up. Work emails are one thing, but people in this case admitted private Facebook messages as character evidence.

The plaintiff deleted one message that would have been a key part of the testimony, and the very omission was damning. After so many of these people's emails and wall posts had been read to us in the courtroom, we knew what that message said.

Your Online Life Is Your Character

More precisely, if you share your life online, that life can substitute for your character. If these people hadn't waged so much email war, we would have had to use more traditional methods of assessing their testimony.

Instead, we could weigh their spoken testimony against the words they wrote and sent to one another years ago, when the events of the case were taking place.

You see why they wanted a tech blogger on the jury? Most of us were tech-savvy people. One guy read the New York Times on his Nook Color tablet every morning. I had never held one of those before. On breaks, many of us were tweeting or IMing, and if not, we had to talk about anything but the case. So we talked about what we had been reading, watching and listening to lately. By and large, that meant we were talking about the Web.

This case required the jury to understand and extract meaning from online communications. That was all the evidence we had. And these were not super-nerd early adopter people in this case. They were just people who worked in an office together, and they sometimes used Myspace and Facebook to flirt and fight with each other.

Work/Life Imbalance Online Makes A Mess

We should all know this one by now, but we don't. The people in this case brought their work dramas home and their social dramas to the office, and email and social networks tied it all together. Ranting about work on Facebook is not smart. Remember, your rants can be read to a jury, and if you delete them, the jury will notice that, too.

Likewise, if you have personal problems with someone in the office, emailing your other coworkers about it is not a great way to handle it. What we saw on the jury was lots of lost productivity and wasted time, as well as unnecessary and damaging tribalism in the office. That's nothing new. What's new is a work email that says "OMG, look what so-and-so said about me on Facebook last night."

Don't Friend Your Colleagues... Unless They're Your Friends!

This is the bottom line. I read an illuminating interview with Tiffani Jones Brown in Contents magazine about her work on the content strategy team at Facebook. These people choose the words you see on Facebook very carefully.

The word "friend" could be any number of things. It means something very different from "follower." Contrast "friend" with Google+, which doesn't have a word for your connections. It just says "in your circles." What do you call people, then? Circlers? Encirclements?

Whatever. That's Google's content strategy problem. Facebook chose "friends." It did so early on, when the only users of Facebook were college friends. Facebook has hundreds of millions of users now, but the word "friends" is still there.

Suffice it to say that, after a while, the people in this case were no longer friends. They didn't "unfriend" each other until it was too late, though. They ranted in status updates, taking passive aggressive stances they each knew the other would see. It screwed up their whole lives, both socially and professionally.

After seeing what transpired on the witness stand last week, I know this: Facebook is for "friends." Twitter is for "followers." LinkedIn is for "connections." Those words are hints. These networks facilitate our lives now, if we're the kinds of people who read (or write) tech blogs. We need to use them with good judgment.

Coincidentally, Dan Benjamin and Andy Ihnatko released this awesome podcast about documenting our digital lives last week. I was listening to it when I took the picture above. I highly recommend it.

Have you served on a jury before? Did the Web factor into the case? Share your experiences in the comments.

Google+ also launched this year. It's not just a new social network; it's what Google+ chief Vic Gundotra called "the + part" of the new Google. Every part of the Google experience, especially search, involves social connections now. And Twitter was no also-ran in 2011. It became a system-level part of every iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch on Apple's new iOS 5. In the ongoing war of the social networks, this year's pivotal battles were over three key territories: identity, location and sharing. How did it play out?

Now that the whole Web is social, more or less, the key players are vying to be our universal online credentials. For the big social networks, power over the whole Web is at stake. They want to be the go-to place to find someone online, and they want to be the way we log in to every Web service we use.

Google+

Google+, by the very act of launching, made identity an essential layer of the way Google works. Google+ and the +1 button are a form of social SEO now, personalizing ever more parts of the Google experience.

Google+ doesn't have anywhere close to Facebook's reach yet, but as Sergey Brin and Vic Gundotra told us at Web 2.0 this year, Google isn't concerned. Practically everybody on the Web uses Google for something, and now Google+ is woven into every bit of it.

Facebook

Facebook, for its part, has wanted to be your one true login since long before 2011. This year, Facebook concentrated on its internal notion of identity, re-imagining the profile as Timeline, an illustrated history of our entire lives, like a scrapbook or photo album on the Web.

Timeline is beautiful, but it's a little creepy. Even Facebook must think so, because the launch of Timeline has been delayed for months with no explanation. It finally launched in RWW's home country of New Zealand this week, but there's no telling how long the worldwide rollout will take.

Facebook's hesitation might be warranted. There's a mounting feeling around the Web that this monolithic, siloed identity, like Facebook and Google are promoting, is not the way to go. Chris Poole, a.k.a. moot, articulated this view for us at Web 2.0. "Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror," moot said, "but in fact, we're more like diamonds." That is, we're multi-faceted.

Twitter

Poole said that Twitter is the only major social network doing it right, allowing pseudonyms, multiple accounts, and parody accounts, all of which are bannable offenses on Google+ and Facebook, but which Poole points out are vital, real-life, necessary ways for us to express ourselves.

And Twitter was no slouch this year when it comes to identity. Just as Apple launched the blockbuster new iPhone 4S, it added Twitter to the operating system as a single sign-in service. Anything one does on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch can now use one's Twitter accounts for identity. The day after iOS 5 launched, Twitter sign-ups from iOS tripled.

(Update: this article initially stated that "Twitter sign-ups tripled" after the iOS 5 launch. This was a widely reported interpretation of CEO Dick Costolo's remarks on stage at Web 2.0. He later clarified on Twitter that he meant Twitter sign-ups from iOS, not overall.)

Identity Winner: Twitter

Note: At Web 2.0, Vic Gundotra told us that pseudonyms are coming to Google+. We'll believe it when we see it.

Next page: Where Are You, and What Are You Doing?

Location: Where Are You?

This year, all the major social networks took big steps in mobile apps and services. Location services in particular played a part in this strategy.

There's a big opportunity for Facebook, Twitter and Google+ here, because 70% of Americans still have no idea what geolocation apps are. Location helps social networks find nearby stuff for their users to do, and it also provides great data for advertising and revenue streams for local commerce.

Twitter

Twitter's location services are, in a word, a mess. Pretty much all you get from location services on Twitter is a list of what inane nuggets of hashtag nonsense are trending in your area. Twitter got beaten pretty badly by Facebook and Google+ in location this year.

Facebook

Has anybody else ever noticed how the Facebook Places icon looks like a four in a square? I just thought that was interesting.

Facebook overhauled its mobile apps this year to bring a more full-featured, consistent experience to handsets (and the iPad, finally). Its mobile usage is set to explode. And with the new Timeline, location sharing on Facebook takes on an element of storytelling. By checking into a place on Facebook, you're recording it in your personal history.

Notably, Facebook bought Gowalla, the ailing Foursquare competitor, but it looks like the location data from that service won't be incorporated in any way. This is probably just an acquisition of design talent for the Timeline project.

Google+

Google+ also built a great mobile service this year, at least for Android users. For iOS users, we will note that there is, at least, a Google+ app. It's lame. There's no way around that. But it does support location.

Google has great reasons to extend location services into its social network. Local shopping and search is the next frontier of Google's business. One obvious way Google+ will factor in is through check-in deals. Google bolstered its daily deals services this year, and now it looks like check-in deals are coming to Google+.

This is one of the main ways Foursquare and Yelp do business, of course, but nobody uses dedicated location services. As Google executives are keen to remind us, everybody who uses Google is exposed to Google+. If any location service is going to take off, Google+ seems like the one.

Location Winner: Google+

Sharing: What Are You Doing?

Sharing is the most important part about any social network. The things our friends and followees share are the main reasons we visit these sites. The three main players in social networking all fleshed out their visions of how sharing should work, and they're radically different.

Twitter

Twitter is a simple service, so its core functionality doesn't change much. It did get a few nifty sharing upgrades this year, though. Everything shared on Twitter is wrapped in a link, and Twitter rolled out its t.co link wrapper this year, changing the way all links are shared. T.co allows Twitter users to see more of the full URL, so they get some context about where the link goes.

Twitter also launched its own image sharing, replacing the need for third-party services, and it built image galleries on profile pages to go along with it. Your last 100 tweeted photos are automatically displayed in a nice gallery on your Twitter profile. This is a great way to quickly scope out someone to see if they're worth following.

Finally, Twitter enabled photo sharing for SMS users, and this shows something cool about the essence of Twitter. Twitter's very format was formed by the constraints of SMS, and it remains to this day the most mobile-friendly social network. Its support for SMS makes it accessible to billions of people. That doesn't mean billions are using it, but it could happen.

Google+

Google+ is the first big way to share things on Google at all, and it's a massive effort. The Google+ stream supports animated graphics, big embedded videos, and rich snippets of articles and Web pages. The new Google Music store puts giant music players right in the G+ stream. You can even share whole Google Maps on Plus.

As a result, Google+ feels very loud. Plus, the stream is always moving; when new content appears, it bumps the whole thing down. It's like a big game of information Tetris. (Someone brilliant said that on Twitter. Remind me in the comments.) Google's working on great tools for exploring the sharing data, though. But the trending stuff, while leaps and bounds more interesting than Twitter's trending topics, is still crudely implemented, and Ripples might be a bit too geeky for mass adoption.

The major innovation for sharing on Google+ was supposed to be Circles. You can share selectively to your circles, and you can read your circles' shares individually. That part works great. But managing circles is a pain, and the information Tetris problem makes the whole thing hard to read.

Facebook

At its f8 developers' conference this year, Facebook transformed itself. It launched Timeline, and it also introduced "frictionless sharing," its new vision of Facebook's Open Graph platform. It makes some sharing automated, so users don't even have to think about it.

That's a controversial move. We've weighed the pros and cons of frictionless sharing here at RWW. Some of us don't like it at all. But it's just an option. The old ways of sharing on Facebook are still available.

And they're even easier to control. Facebook is much better about selective sharing now, offering a clear drop-down menu next to every post to control who can see it. It also launched its smart lists this year in response to Google+ circles, and it's actually a better feature in many ways. Instead of making you busily manage your lists, Facebook sorts friends into smart lists automatically. Google bought Katango to work on this problem, but for now, Facebook is ahead of the pack on selective sharing.

Sharing Winner: Facebook

What do you think? Do you take sides in the social networking battle? What new features do you expect in the coming year? Do you think any newcomers can threaten the Big 3? Share your thoughts in the comments.

For users logged into their Google Accounts, searches will now display public Google Plus posts from people in their circles as search results, right alongside web pages. If it's a link, for example, that link will show up like any other Web result would, but the person who posted it will be displayed underneath it, along with the date of the post.

Google launched social search in 2009 as a way of adding personalization to search results. Facebook's partnership with Bing puts a big squeeze on Google's ability to provide the most personalized results. But in response, Google has begun to roll out social search worldwide, along with its +1 button for voting up content, and the integration of Google Plus posts will now begin to bring your friends' names and faces into your search results, all using data controlled by the search giant.

Do you think this will improve your search experience? Let us know in the comments.

Audiosurf employs user-generated content and both friendly and competitive online social layers. It's not just for racing; you can discover and share new music along the way.

It's amazing enough as a racing game, but the fact that it's also a music-sharing social network takes it to the next level. Audiosurf's daily scoreboard, which you can view on the website, can be filtered by song and by artist, which can lead players to discover new music and "unlock" new levels in the process.

But what's most unique about this app is the way it reformats the text for the small screen. The "floating text" reading experience, which gives the app its name, reflows text originally formatted for the Web for better reading on mobile devices.

This floating text experience has its roots in the technology Scribd introduced last year, when it began offering a way to convert Adobe PDF documents into HTML5. At the time, the company learned a lot about how to transform and rearrange text from one format and one type of interface to another.

In the new native iPhone app called Float, the team leveraged that expertise so that you can now zoom in on text using pinch gestures, and then see that text automatically reflowed for that particular zoom level. You can also scroll left or right in the app, as you would with a book or magazine.

Content Sources

The content in Float comes from over 150 websites, including The Associated Press, Fortune, CNET, HuffingtonPost, Engadget, Entertainment Weekly and People, but it also comes from the information your friends are sharing on social sites like Facebook, Twitter and, of course, Scribd. And you can share content from the app back to those same sites, too.

A special browser bookmarklet lets you save items you find online for later reading on Float.com or within the iPhone app.

A Unique Mobile Reading Experience

Does the idea of yet another "social reading" app leave you dry? This is, after all, a crowded space - filled with apps like Pulse and Flipboard and others like them. But Scribd says its key differentiating factor is its focus on the reading experience, particularly the small screens of smartphones. In addition to the reformatted text, Float offers an Instagram-like "reading styles" option which lets you choose between different formats that work better for different users, like e-ink, high contrast as well as fun ones like "Gutenberg," because, well, just because.

The app itself exists in a unique niche - somewhere in between the social news readers and the "Read It Later's" or Instapaper's of the news consumption world.

In the future, Scribd will look at different business models to aid its publishers - for example, offering them the opportunity to insert ads into the articles in a better format than is typically possible on mobile. It will also attempt to bring in premium publishers offering subscriptions, and is now in talks with newspapers interested in exploring that option.

At launch, Float is available for the iPhone and Web only, but an iPad app and Android version will launch this fall. You can give Float a try for yourself, here.

With Google Plus, Google now has an interesting opportunity to make similar organizational choices for me, without any manual effort on my part. In other words, I'm ready for automatic Circles. Are you?

What do I mean by "automatic Circles?"

Just think of how many signals Google could borrow to make intelligent choices about surfacing content, auto-creating Circles or recommending users. There are the people I email with, the things I star or share in Google Reader, the (Blogger) blogs I've commented on, read, or followed, the +1'ed items from Google Search, my friends on Picasa, the videos I liked or shared on YouTube, the places I've searched in Maps, the music I stream on Android, the people I chat with, the people who phone me on Google Voice (and those I ignore) and so on.

Google, if you think about it, knows a heck of a lot about you.

And I'd be willing to opt in to sharing data from one part of Google with another, especially if it meant making my life easier. That wouldn't be creepy - it would be amazing.

You may disagree, of course.

The Circle Management Burden: Not Just for Power Users

I've been concerned about the overhead in dealing with Circle management, and have been called out for being an edge case by some previous commenters. No one follows thousands of people, I'm told.

But that's not true.

Google Plus is the first social network that actually encourages you to follow more people, not less, because of its categorization capabilities. 200 "friends" in a Circle called "Favorite Bloggers?" Not a problem. A hundred more who share gorgeous photos? Sure, why not? The beauty of Google Circles is that you can keep the streams separate, sharing with the appropriate ones at the appropriate times, and consuming this stream or that one, as you like.

As the network grows, you won't be duplicating your Facebook experience here - that is, to friend or not to friend - you will be creating a more layered network of your relationships. It's why something like (the still bare-bones) news reader Sparks even exists within Google Plus. It's to facilitate and inspire sharing based on interests. This, proclaims Google, is the future of socializing.

Ideally, the end result of all this categorization is a network where you don't have to be as choosy about friendships because of concerns over cluttered streams or News Feeds. However, it's also a network where taking the time to develop and manage the Circles that could enable that vision becomes too time-consuming and cumbersome to manage on a day-to-day basis.

Circles Google Builds for You

The obvious fix: automatically, algorithmically created Circle suggestions...based on all the other stuff about you Google knows. These would be opt-in, of course, as invasive dives into your personal data always should be.

Automatically suggested Circles would be like Twitter's recommended users, but better. It would be more like recommended lists, and yet, even better than that. Unlike public Twitter lists, these Circles could be used as starting points for customization, or merged with other Circles, as need be. Oh yes, Twitter should be very scared.

Will Google develop such a feature: these intelligently created, highly personalized Circles which I crave? Will it take the step of burrowing deeper into our data to make a next-generation Facebook built on top of both interests and interactions? I hope it will. I think it should.

Update: I discovered the first automatic Circle creation tonight - a Circle dubbed "Latitude Friends." Read more about it here on Google Plus.

Through a mobile app running on customers' phones, marketers can offer a variety of follow-up actions to the TV viewer, including coupons, reminders, contact info and more. In total, there are 10 follow-up actions offered. And the consumer is in complete control of which ones, if any, they respond to.

The company behind WiO, WiOffer, is the creation of Andrew Pakula and Matthew Greene, both of whom have experience working in and with major media, tech and digital marketing firms, including DoubleClick, Yahoo and Ogilvy. This experience, Pakula explains, has allowed them to learn a lot about what customers respond to and how.

How the WiO-Enabled TV Commercials Work

Before a customer can use the WiO app, the commercial or TV show has to first be WiO-enabled. To do this, the advertiser sends WiOffer their asset - that is, their commercial or the portion of the show where the product placement is visible and/or mentioned by the characters within the program. Using the clip as a digital ID, the mobile WiO app running on customers' phones can then "hear" when the commercial plays and pop up a screen offering more information.

There are 10 different options a customer can choose from, some of which are subject to what the advertiser is providing. These include access to coupons, PDF brochures, app downloads, website addresses, retail locators, contact information, calendar events, reminders and even one option which will auto-dial the advertiser directly, in the case of TV commercials where a phone number is displayed. The unique thing about connecting TV to the mobile platform in this way is how many of these tasks are automated. For example, choosing the reminders, calendar event or contact info options will instantly save that information to a customer's phone, with no manual effort required on the customer's part.

In addition, when coupons are provided, the customer can save these "WiOffers" on their phone, where they will be accessible until the expiration date. To use a coupon, the customer just has to show their phone to the retailer.

Meanwhile, on the advertisers' side, metrics surrounding customer response can be tracked in real-time, allowing them to adjust their advertising and offers on the fly to boost engagement, as need be.

Competition in the New TV Landscape

WiO is not the only company with this same idea. The music identification app Shazam recently raised funds to push into television. Some TV shows and ads now tell viewers to "Shazam" them in order to receive bonus content and discounts, AllThingsD reports. Another company, IntoNow, uses audio recognition to encourage users to "check in" to what they're watching on TV. GetGlue offers something similar. Even Microsoft is getting into the action with its NUads advertising platform, which uses the voice and gesture control in its Kinect for Xbox 360 to create interactive TV ads.

But unlike with Xbox, WiO is device agnostic, Greene says. He insists that WiO is different than the so-called "social apps," too. Even though WiO allows for sharing to Facebook, Twitter, SMS and email, its goal is not to socialize the TV-watching experience. "Check-ins are a bit of distraction," says Greene, "if not an enormous distraction." And, referring to Shazam, he claims the idea of connecting a music app to actual transactions is a bit complicated. The Shazam ads point you to a mobile landing page, he notes. WiO aims to connect the brand directly to the customer so they can start talking immediately.

The WiO app will launch in a few weeks, first on iPhone. It will arrive on Android 60 days later. The company says it can't comment on its advertising partners at this time, but from what we saw, there are some well-known brands in talks with the company now.

Recently added sprites (see images below) include a question mark, icons for dining, movies, map pushpins, star ratings, emoticons and more. One of those icons (see bottom), which looks like two little people, could be involved in some kind of social search feature, Rohrweck guesses.

He also found an icon with a chess symbol on it, backing up his earlier discovery where a product called "Google+ Games" was referenced by name.

Shared Circles

However, the most intriguing find had to do with four icons, all whose names begin "shared_circle." This seems to imply that Google+ will allow you to create Circles containing other Google+ users, and share those with others. This would serve a function similar to Twitter lists, where power users can take the time to create lists on various subjects (e.g. "top tech," "humor," "politicians,"), fill those lists with related Twitter users, then make those lists public so anyone can subscribe to them. That would certainly help with the administrative overload of Circle management, for those who want to use Google+ to follow industry peers of some kind.

It also could serve as an easy way to get family, friends and other non-tech-geeks (read: Facebook users) to join the network. Instead of those users having to configure all their Circles for themselves, they could start off with some sample Circles, shared by you. Perhaps these Circles, once shared, could be edited and added to by authorized participants, Rohrweck wonders. And we're curious if the Shared Circles could even copied to a user's personal profile to serve as the basis for a Circle of their own. That last feature is one that Twitter lists decidedly lack - you can't use someone else's Twitter list as the starting point of your own, without manually recreating it yourself.

Other sources, and great follow-up reading: Google Plus: Why Facebook and Quora Should Worry & New Images Suggest "Shared Circles" Coming Soon in Google+

But does Banjo have the winning formula? What about the others? And will anyone really use these services?

Banjo is most similar to another app called Sonar, which launched in May at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. Like Banjo, Sonar only uses publicly available information to locate people nearby. It also doesn't require to you to connect to your social networks, like Facebook and Twitter. But if you choose not to, you miss out on the app's key feature: the way it identifies your friends and your friends of friends that are nearby.

When at a venue, Sonar ranks the people there by how many friends you have in common. This is most helpful, obviously, to those who already participate on Facebook and Twitter, but it's also a big difference from how Banjo works. On Banjo, it's less about how you're connected to others, and more about just who's there right now. Sonar is also restricted to nearby users, while Banjo lets you expand your radius or even look up far away locations.

In addition, Sonar only gathers location data from Foursquare currently. In the future, the company plans to add both explicit check-in services, like Facebook Places and Gowalla, and services where the check-in is implied, like Meetup and Eventbrite. However, it's stopping short of mining other social networks for the geotagged posts and media, which Banjo uses.

Finally, there are some slight technical differences, too: Sonar requires users run the latest version of the iPhone operating system, iOS 4.2, while Banjo works on older versions of the software, starting at iOS version 4.0 and up. Banjo currently has an Android app, but Sonar's is in the works.

Lokast: These Apps are Just Features of Our App

Sonar is hardly the only app playing in this space these days. It's just the most similar to the latest entry, Banjo. Other newcomers include the photo-sharing startup Color and the like (see: Trover, Tracks), which focus on photos as the jumping off point for location-based networking.

Meanwhile, location-based startup Lokast sees all its competitors, from local public chatting app Yobongo to group texting apps like Beluga and Groupme, as startups building entire companies on top of one of its feature sets, either current or on its roadmap.

Lokast is still struggling a bit with design (the new, but still unpublished design, not shown here, is better). It has some of the most interesting technology under the hood. Although it doesn't yet use the publicly available geodata like Banjo and some others do, the upcoming Android version promises something unique: Qualcomm's AllJoyn, a peer-to-peer technology that works over Wi-Fi, or given OEM integration, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Still somewhat experimental, this technology provides a way for the app to use the built-in radios on the phone to connect to whoever's nearby, and form ad hoc networks, as well as share data. With AllJoyn, the connection is more accurate and faster than a similar connection made using GPS and 3G.

In addition, when Wi-Fi direct becomes more prevalent, Lokast found its ability to pinpoint people's locations using this technology increased by 900% during simulations. The eventual goal is to increase location accuracy down to three to five feet, the company says. This is only two to three years away, given ubiquitous device-to-device technology, says Lokast's CEO Boris Bogatin. In the meantime, Bogatin predicts that the company will be at sub-10 meters within a year or so, on a fairly consistent basis, most likely on Android first.

Lokast has two patents pending, one for its content distribution technology and another, a location ID system, whose technology the company believes it's already seeing in some of its competition's software. To determine a physical location, the system uses a wide range of both relative (person is X# of feet away) and absolute (person is standing in corner at this exact spot) location techniques. Instead of using signals like sound (see: Shopkick) or light (see: Color), it uses wireless RF to determine location, which is more accurate.

In terms of functionality, Lokast offers "disposable" social networks tied to a location. You can chat with a public location-based group, similar to Yobongo, and share media, or you can start private groups where you text, share photos, videos, links and more. Once you're in that private group, the group becomes elastic, like Beluga and GroupMe offer - you can communicate with members even after you've left the location. And a friending feature allows for private, one-on-one communications, also unbound from the location where you first met.

Will Mainstream Users Come?

But winning the mindshare of the mainstream takes more than technology, it takes design, marketing and a certain viral effect. Group texting and chat apps were the hit at SXSW in Austin this year, where a great crowd of people spread out all over town, heading to different events and parties and needing a way to keep up with friends. But outside of that more unique use case, where do these startups fit in with users' daily lives? Anecdotally, we've seen usage of these apps taper off dramatically in the months that followed.

Which startup has the ability to push forward to become a new social behavior? It's probably too soon to say. But for anyone looking for the "post-Facebook" social networks, they're already here.

Sharing music with friends? Sounds like the final death knell for MySpace, doesn't it?

According to Malik, there will be deep integration of music into the social networking site, including a prominent link on the left-side of the screen alongside other popular destinations like "Photos," "Friends," "Places," "Groups," "Deals," "Pages" and "Games." Clicking the link will open up a music dashboard where users will be able to stream songs from Facebook's music service partners.

On this page, you'll see recommended songs from your friends, notifications of which friends listened to your recommendations, top songs and albums among your friends, recent listens from friends and a "happening now" ticker showing real-time information about the music your friends are presently playing.

Also included in the Facebook music roll-out will be a persistent playback and pause button at the bottom of the page, next to the chat icon. When you mouse over the button, you can see what's playing, and pause or play tracks.

The integrations, as described, sound like an obvious next step for the word's largest social networking service, as music is often a social experience. But oddly, it's been an area Facebook has historically avoided. Outside of third-party applications, there has not been a "Facebook Music" experience offered to the site's over half-a-billion users. That may soon change, it appears, if this report is true.

Killing MySpace at Last, Maybe Even Apple's Ping

The news comes at a time when Facebook's one-time competitor, the music-focused MySpace, is struggling to find a buyer. While MySpace's time has clearly passed, it was, at one time, the place where many people learned about bands, artists, and even recommendations from friends, albeit the latter often through the use of blaring, auto-playing tracks that bombarded you upon visits to a friend's glitzy profile page. With Facebook, the integration sounds better planned, even subtler in some ways. It's there for those who want music to be a part of their Facebook experience, but can be safely ignored by those who don't.

According to Malik, the music service will build on several of Facebook's core strengths - Facebook Connect, which allows users to log into external services using their Facebook ID and password, the now ubiquitous "like" button which may be used for "liking" shared tracks or bands, and, of course, the connections between friends.

Facebook's music service has the potential to succeed where Apple's own version of social music sharing, the iTunes service known as "Ping," has famously failed. With Facebook integration pulled at the last minute because Apple couldn't agree to Facebook's "onerous terms," Ping, not surprisingly, has failed to gain traction. Social, apparently, was an area where Apple should have realized how critical the Facebook integration truly was - Apple needed Facebook, but it seemed to think it was the other way around.

Now Facebook is stepping in to trounce both Ping and MySpace while avoiding having to deal with record labels itself, a battle it leaves up to its music partners. It's a formula that will likely work, further solidifying Facebook's status at the only social network you need, even if what you need is to hear some new music.

How People Use Social Networking Sites and Facebook

According to Pew, out of the 79% of American adults using the Internet, nearly half (47%) use at least one social networking website. 92% of these social networking users are on Facebook, 29% on MySpace, 18% are on LinkedIn and 13% use Twitter.

While those percentages seem to imply popularity, that's not the case. By measuring engagement alone, Facebook and Twitter come out on top, with 52% and 33% of users logging on daily, respectively, compared with 7% who visit MySpace daily and 6% who do the same on LinkedIn.

On Facebook in particular, participation, as opposed to passive consumption, appears to be a common trend. 15% of users update their status on an average day, 22% comment on another's post or status, 20% comment on others' photos, 26% "like" another user's content and 10% send a private message to a friend.

Results of Regular Use: Real Friendships, Emotional Support

This daily use and engagement leads to generally positive feelings among Facebook users, specifically in how they perceive their relationships with others, and the world around them. Facebook users who use the site multiple times per day are 43% more likely than other Internet users to be trusting of others - that is, they feel that most people can be trusted. It's your typical "glass half full" outlook on life.

Regular Facebook users are also, on average, 9% more close to their friends than other Internet users. And they score higher when it comes to social support than other online users. Pew says they are 5 points higher in total support, 5 points higher in emotional support and 5 points higher in companionship than Internet users with similar demographics. (More study details can be found here).

The study also showed a general increase in the use of social networking services to stay in touch with close friends. In 2008, only 29% of users said they had friended all of their core "confidants." Today, that number is 40%.

Users tend to revive their "dormant" relationships (high school friend requests, anyone?), too, and these can become important sources of information, even though they're not active relationships.

Finally, Facebook users are more engaged with politics, no doubt thanks to the numerous political conversations that occur online via status updates and political cause pages.

Conclusions

What this study shows, says Pew, is that there is little validity to claims that people who use social networking sites have smaller social networks, less closeness with others or are exposed to less diversity. In other words, your Facebook friends are real friends because Facebook allows you to mirror your offline connections via the Internet, it does not isolate you from them. It may even enable you to have more close ties, with frequent use.

That said, the study fell short of concluding that it's Facebook itself that's actually causing people have these types of close relationships, support networks or impacting their engagement levels with various causes. Americans with deficits in these areas, and who are closed off to other viewpoints, untrusting of others and disengaged with their community and society are not like this because of how they use technology. Instead, these deficits may stem from other factors, like lower educational attainment.