There are many social networks in many counties. Most people only know a few and probably use even less of them 
I personally use Hyves, Netlog and Facebook.. mostly for professional/development purpose (especially the first two).
But who is winning the social network battle? What network will we be on in 10 or even fewer years?
I think it has been clear for some time.. but checkout the nice World Map of Social Networks. If this were Risk who do you think is winning?
And actually when you’re holding a meeting.. play Bingo! and don’t forget to turn on the meeting ticker :).
Twitter should be more like Facebook.. 
I’ll tell you why:
Ever got a friend on Facebook that was using a Facebook Application called Farmville or Mafia Wars? Good change you have.. Since Farmville has around 69.000.000 monthly users and their mobile version is also called a ‘smash hit‘. So if those are unique users, a smashing ~20% of all 350.000.000 Facebook users is using this game. Of your (average) 130 friends there is probably one that uses it.. not even including Mafia Wars (26.000.000 monthly active users :)).
But.. for everybody who has never used Facebook or has no friends I included a screenshot below.
As you can see on the screenshot, Facebook gives you the possibility to ‘hide’ the message. This actually has been proven extremely useful (at least..for me). I don’t want to know if somebody just “completed level 1 of Strawberries mastery”, “found a pig in his backyard” or even “killed a neighbor farmer because he stole the pumpkin that I grew for seven years because I had nothing better to do”.
But recently I got the following in my Twitter stream…
Aaaaaaaah.. people that normally tweet interesting stuff now tweet an overload of uninteresting messages. Obviously this is in the interest of Foursquare and some people might find it very interesting.. but not me. I don’t care if you have finally got the “I’m constantly drinking coffee at the Startbucks”-badge or you “are the mayor of a trainstation”. Seriously.. if I want to know I will start using Foursquare, become your friend there and start sharing also.
Coming to the conclusion: Twitter should make the ’source’ part of a tweet useful and allow users to block or hide certain sources like Foursquare, Gowalla or even more spammy ones!
Until they have implemented this.. I probably have to unfollow all Gowalla and Foursquare users.. or..
People that want to earn badges, become mayor or the local cafeteria, or something.. could not automatically share those messages via Twitter.
People that want to share a location, could use geo-tagging. Please also stay tweeting interesting stuff.. I don’t care if you’re “taking a sh*t” geo-tagged somewhere.. except maybe here.
Google is doing a lot.. so this post is nothing new but it seems that Google is putting more effort into local search. Some examples I ran into..
Ads for their Business Center..
I haven’t found localized versions of those ads.. but probably they exist already.
New ways of promoting your business
They recently introduced new ad units for local businesses. Those ads appear on both google.com as on the maps.google.com. They are just local listings (as in address info).
Furthermore they’ve put ads on the iPhone Google Map
Aggregating info from other pages and creating their own
And last but not least Google has introduced Places pages. They get information from the web (eg. from Yelp, etc) and put it on their own page. These pages then pop up in the search results.. so they directly compete with the pages the information is aggregated from (Yelp, ..).
So Google is doing some interesting stuff in the area of Local Search that is going to make it harder for the old traditional Yellow Pages companies but also for the new hip and UGC sites like Yelp, Truvo, Qype, TrustedPlaces, YelloYello, ..
PS. Don’t know if ‘warpath’ is actually a word.. but you Dutch people know I mean ‘oorlogspad’
What will the future of local search look like? How much information will we have ?
A very nice presentation on Social Media!
Yahoo’s Fire Eagle was the first step towards letting websites know where you are.. but slowly this is getting mainstream. FireFox 3.5 has this build-in called Location-Based Browsing.
“Firefox gathers information about nearby wireless access points and your computer’s IP address. Then Firefox sends this information to the one and only default geolocation service provider, all information gathering scary ad-monster privacy killer Google Location Services, to get an estimate of your location. That location estimate is then shared with the requesting website.”
Google maps has it already integrated!
Here is a list of browsers supporting location services:
Browsers that still must follow .. let me know if you have an update or other browsers (plugins) that enable Location-awareness.
Edit: Check geo-location-javascript on google code. It names some more devices!
There recently came along some new Rails plugins: SearchLogic and AuthLogic. Both are coming from Ben Johnson (BinaryLogic). He seems to have some more logic..
SearchLogic makes it easy to do search and ordering for your models. There is a nice and shiny new version (v2) .. only thing is that it has some bugs.
AuthLogic makes it easy to do authentication. See the AuthLogic RailsCast. Only thing that I miss is a list with known plugins.. so here are some I’ve found:
Let me know if you know Twitter, Google or any other.. or how they are supported using one of the above..
Update:
Since the Ruby Hyves API wrapper is not being maintained (at least not by me :)).. I put it on GitHub to be able to do the maintenance more easily.
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