Despite all the refinements Facebook has forced on its change-phobic user base over the years, the social network's commenting system hasn't gotten a lot of updates. That's finally changing as the company tests rated comments - promoted with Likes - and nested replies with a small test batch of users. (Facebook is also toying with a new notification "ding" to boost engagement - we can almost hear the backlash now). 

Commenting Is A Shouting Match

The tweaks, engineered to boost enagagement, should be a boon for Facebook's one billion plus users as well as the brands that try to reach them.

For brands in particular, Facebook comments are a total mess. Say you've got a few thousand followers. You post something that riles them up and you've got a deluge of comments rolling in. Suddenly it's a conversation, right? Not exactly. There may be 200 comments on your latest post, but each one is the equivalent of a someone walking up and stapling their thoughts onto a telephone pole.

Tenacious engagers might cruise back around or even wade into the comment pool and tag users by name to reply, but it's mostly just a tangle of people shouting over each other in chronological order. Popular comments might attract a lot of likes, but they don't move up or down the totem pole or get called out in any way. 

Likes Get A Bigger Role

As the screenshot shows, the new commenting system adds a one-layer-deep level of replies. Users can respond to a comment on the original post, but (thankfully) won't be able to reply to a reply. This basic improvement should help clear up the confusion about who is talking to whom in an ongoing Facebook comment thread. Better yet, comments that garner a bunch of likes will rise to the top, highlighting more interesting or on-point comments.

Of course, many sites already provide some kind of yea-or-nay feedback system that encourages quality content to rise to the top, user-generated or otherwise. Google introduced the +1 to its social search results. The painstakingly tuned commenting systems on sites like Gawker mercifully let readers downvote stupid comments into oblivion. Buzzfeed's social curation offers a veritable viral buffet, with buttons encouraging users to LOL or OMG (WTF).

Facebook's Like button has been many things to many users since the company first introduced it in 2009. Now, Likes look poised to evolve into a less dynamic version of Reddit's upvotes, the social ranking machine that makes the latter site go 'round - and keeps its users coming back for more. Facebook is no doubt hoping its new system will do the same.

After watching the U.S. Presidential debates, it's clear the country could really use a non-combative way to discuss issues and disseminate information. Sites like Procon.org do this for national issues, ranging from legalizing marijuana to illegal immigration, but sometimes the most heated political discussions happen on the local scene. Instead of relying on fact-checking websites, the University of Washington started the Living Voters Guide, a site dedicated educating voters on issues and referendums in Washington state. 

The site is set up like a pro/con list, with issues and referendums clearly defined and pros and cons from users on either side. It's an open discussion about the issues in the state's political system that gives voters a clear idea of their fellow citizen's views, without all ( or at least most) of the bickering. And here's the coolest part: voters can request to have statements on the user-generated pro/con lists fact checked by librarians from the Seattle Public Library System within 48 hours.

Not Fact-Checkers, Fact Finders

To get the facts straight, librarians at the Seattle Public Library use the typical tools of their trade: news articles, scholarly research, policy analyses and the Washington State Voters guide. Bo Kinney, Special Collections Librarian, says that a lot of this information is freely available to anyone online, but it may be buried within a lengthy article or report. "We are skilled at finding and evaluating the exact information that is most useful to answer a specific question."

Kinney admits, though, that there are some questions the librarians aren't qualified to answer. These are usually ones that require legal research or are based on hypothetical or opinion-based claims. In those cases, librarians will point to research materials that might hold answers, and they can spotlight facts within opinions.

"We're not the final word on what is the truth," Kinney says. "In fact, we expect that users may add additional information beyond what we are able to find. But we think that our efforts will help support informed discussion of political issues." 

This election year is the first time the service will be offered on the site and will carry over to the California edition in collaboration with the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley. 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Zynga's logo walked into the boardroom with its tail between its legs today as the company presented its third quarter earnings. On the call, CEO Mark Pincus announced the company's plan to wrap a tight tourniquet around its ongoing losses.

How to turn things around? Pincus said development teams would cut costs even further, ramp up mobile app development, and pursue gaming models with higher engagement and monetization opportunities, namely by expanding into virtual casino games that pit players against eachother with real cash at stake.

In the third quarter, the company surpassed its own standards -- but that isn't saying a lot. Zynga reported $316 million in revenue, and lost $52.7 million, or 7 cents a share, beating out its own intentionally rock-bottom forecast of losing 12 to 14 cents per share on an estimated $305 million. In the same period last year, Zynga raked in $12.5 million in profits on $306 million in revenue.

What's more addictive than virtual farming? Gambling.

Beyond emphasizing mobile app launches, the company will get its hands dirty with "real money gaming." Through its partnership with online gambling company Bwin.Party, Zynga will launch U.K.- exclusive real money gambling games.

Real money gaming is a departure from the company's existing model, but not that much of one, all things considered. The kind of micro-transactions -- think buying virtual garden gnomes to decorate your digital farm with real cash -- that power Zynga's arsenal of casual games are already capitalizing on psychologically addictive models to have users turning their wallets inside out.

Moving into straight-up virtual gambling just subtracts the layer of artifice populated by digital denizens tilling the virtual fields. 

Out With The Old, In With The Profits

On the heels of yesterday's 5% workforce reduction, Zynga also announced that in order to remain afloat it would be "sunsetting 13 underperforming older games" and slowing development of The Ville, Zynga's copycat of publisher EA's endlessly remixed franchise The Sims. Pincus also noted that Zynga's Boston homebase would be shuttered, with tentative plans to follow suit with Zynga's Japan and UK studios.

According to an internal letter sent to the Zynga team yesterday by CEO Mark Pincus, "These reductions, along with our ongoing efforts to implement more stringent budget and resource allocation around new games and partner projects, will improve our profitability and allow us to reinvest in great games and our Zynga network on web and mobile."

Risky Reliance On Facebook

Unsurprisingly, Zynga's symbiotic relationship with Facebook is a noted earnings liability. The company noted its "relationship with Facebook" and potential unforseen "changes in the Facebook platform" as major risk revenue factors. Facebook-related earnings represent a whopping 80% of the company's total bookings, with mobile filling out the remaining 20%, so it's no surprise that Zynga is looking to tip the scales toward the latter. 

It probably doesn't help that Facebook made a distinction between the troubled Zyngaverse and the rest of its online gaming ecosystem in its own earnings call yesterday. As Zuckerberg snarked, "Overall, gaming on Facebook isn't doing as well as I'd like, but the reality is that there are actually two different stories playing out here. On the one hand, our payments revenue from Zynga decreased by 20 percent this quarter compared to last year. But the interesting thing is that the rest of the games ecosystem has actually been growing."

Ouch.

But Zynga doesn't only have Facebook to blame. Pincus admitted to lapses in game execution, mostly failing to innovate to keep players interested in major titles like CityVille and then being too slow to the market with new games to offset those drooping numbers. 

Oddly enough, Zynga's stock popped up a tiny bit after the earnings announcement. Then again, Wall Street now values the company at only $1.6 billion, which is about what it has in cash. Not exactly a vote of confidence.

The 2012 U.S. presidential election isn't the nation's first social media election. This time around, though, the contest is shaping up to be a newsfeeding frenzy.

There are lots of ways to participate in the upcoming election online, but social media provides more opportunities than ever. Four years ago, slightly more than 20 percent of U.S. citizens used social networks. That number has snowballed to 50. Since 2008, Facebook membership has increased nearly 10 times, Twitter membership by a factor of five. Barak Obama’s list of friends and followers has ballooned by an order of magnitude. Similarly, Mitt Romney has more than 10 times as many as John McCain did last time around (though still only about a pitiable quarter of the incumbent's social-network following).

How are the candidates taking advantage of all their newfound connections? Not so well.

See also: How To Watch The U.S. Presidential Debates Online

At first glance, the president appears to be on the ball: He tweets 29 times a day to his challenger's one. That said, Barry's tweets are boilerplate newsbites reported in the third person, clearly written by a harried flack. Mittens', on the other hand, are somewhat personal statements in his own somewhat combative voice. (I know which candidate I'd subscribe to, if I were in a subscribing mood - never mind which one I support.)

For more perspective on how social media is shaping Election 2012, check out this fascinating infographic from marketing firm Vertical Measures.

In the fifth and final part of our series, Social Books, we explore how the "big six" book publishers use social media. So far in the series we've looked at the largest social network for book lovers (Goodreads), a new social network for book writers (Writer's Bloq), how public libraries use social media, and whether book highlights are being successfully socialized. We've learned so far that almost everything to do with books - writing them, reading them, borrowing them, making highlights in them - has been impacted by Web technologies. So surely the biggest book publishers in America will have adapted to online technologies too, right? Let's find out!

The so-called "big six" in trade book publishing across North America consists of Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, Random House and Simon & Schuster. There are hundreds of other publishing firms, some of them subsidiaries of the big six. But for the purposes of this post, we'll focus on the biggies and highlight three of the main social networks they use: Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

Twitter Book Clubs

Penguin USA has done an innovative thing with Twitter, holding a monthly book club with the help of hashtags and tweeting authors. Every month Penguin staff selects a book by one of its authors and invites people to tweet about it using the hashtag #readpenguin. It holds "mini book club meetings" during the course of the month, in which the book author answers questions from readers. The current book of the month is Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures by Emma Straub.

Simon & Schuster also runs book club type activities on Twitter, plus Facebook.

Facebook - Differing Strategies

The big six don't all use Facebook in the same way. Hachette irregularly updates its Facebook page (there are only 3 updates in September so far) and probably as a result it only has 3,998 likes currently. Compare that to Random House, which appears to do 3-4 Facebook updates per day on average and has 38,369 likes.

However, it could be that Hachette is simply trying a different Facebook strategy from the norm. Because instead of focusing on its corporate brand page, Hachette promotes the Facebook pages of its authors and fan pages for Hachette books.

One of Hachette's leading authors, novelist James Patterson, has 3.4 million likes. Patterson appears to be regularly - and personally - updating his Facebook page. He's not quite as prolific as Paulo Coelho, the master of social media among authors, but it's still a good effort.

Tumblr Is Popular With Book Publishers

Blog advertising company Blogads did some research In January this year and found that Tumblr is especially popular with book publishers.

HarperCollins, which has a presence on just about every social media service, has a couple of good Tumblrs. The corporate HarperCollins Tumblr features blog posts by staff, alongside quirky promotional ideas like "Seen on the Subway" (photos of everyday people reading HarperCollins books). One of the company's divisions, Harper Perennial, also does a colorful Tumblr.

The Author & Reader Take Center Stage

That's just a taste of what book publishers are doing with social media. I got the sense that it's incredibly varied and that each of the big six is experimenting with social media in a different way. They all had one thing in common though: the author and her audience is paramount when it comes to social media.

Whether it's helping promote an author's Facebook page, blogging about an author on Tumblr, or organizing a Twitter discussion between an author and her readers, the publishing houses understand that the Social Web is all about authors engaging with their readers.

Like many of you, I'm connected to the Internet virtually every waking hour of my day - via computer, tablet and mobile phone. Yet I still regularly visit my local public library, in order to borrow books, CDs and DVDs. Which made me wonder: are these two worlds disconnected, or is the Social Web being integrated into our public libraries? In this fourth installment in ReadWriteWeb's Social Books series, I aim to find out!

The American Library Association (ALA) released a report earlier this year entitled The 2012 State of America’s Libraries. The report states that "Facebook and Twitter in particular have proven themselves useful tools not only in publicizing the availability of online collections, but also in building trusted relationships with users."

According to a survey conducted by the South Carolina State Library, 88% of respondents (all library workers) claimed to use Facebook in their work. Twitter was second most popular, at 46.8%.

So what are libraries using Facebook for and what does "building trusted relationships with users" mean? The ALA report elaborated:

"Social networking is used to publicize library events such as gaming nights; to alert users to additions to collections; to provide links to articles, videos, or Web content that might prove relevant or helpful to patrons; and to provide a conduit for community information. Social media also play an important role in fostering relationships with the community by allowing patrons to ask questions or provide feedback about library services."

This is precisely how my own local library, Wellington Library, uses Facebook. It's on a raft of other social media platforms too - including Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. Wellington Library even updates its Facebook page using IFTTT, a syndication service beloved by Web geeks.

Enhanced Catalogs & Mobile Apps

But there's more that libraries can do to create a social experience for their patrons, other than being active on Facebook. LibraryThing for Libraries is a set of services offered by the company LibraryThing. It features catalog enhancements (such as user-generated book reviews and recommendations) and a customizable mobile app called Library Anywhere.

In June, LibraryThing for Libraries had 800,000 "professionally vetted reviews." While library users could just go and get reviews and recommendations from Amazon or Goodreads, it does seem useful to have them integrated into a library's catalog.

In a discussion in Branch, Portland librarian Justin Hoenke called LibraryThing "the ultimate social reading tool for libraries." Although Sarah Houghton, Director of the San Rafael Public Library in California, cast some doubt on whether library patrons use the reviews regularly.

Reimagining The Library Book

Some libraries are experimenting not just with socializing the library catalog, but the reading process itself. New York Public Library has released an interactive website called Candide 2.0, a community annotated version of Voltaire's 1759 book called Candide. The NYPL version is described as an "experiment in public reading and communal annotation."

It'll be fascinating to track how libraries continue to bring the Social Web to their organizations. I haven't even touched on the increasing prevalence of e-books inside libraries - another trend that potentially creates a more social experience for library patrons (for example, with social book highlights).

How about you, do you still go to your local library? If so, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how Web technologies are being deployed by your public library.

My next series of posts is entitled Social Books. Over five posts, I'm going to explore how book readers and writers use social networking tools. Three of the posts will be from the point of view of readers, starting with this one today about the leading social network for bookworms: Goodreads. In the remaining posts, I'll be checking out a brand new social network for writers and investigating how book publishers are using social media. So let's get started with far and away the most popular social network for book lovers in the world, Goodreads. Its user base has almost doubled in 2012, which made me wonder whether Goodreads has any real competition now...

Goodreads was launched in January 2007 and currently has over 10 million registered users, who have collectively added 370 million books to the site. Goodreads has experienced strong growth over the past 18 months. It had 5 million registered users in May 2011, increasing to 6 million by December. In 2012 the growth of Goodreads went up another level, thanks mainly to its integration with Facebook Timeline in January.

Goodreads: Onto A Good Thing

In Goodreads you're encouraged to add books into custom shelves (a.k.a. lists), such as "Currently Reading," "Read," and "To Read." That way, anybody you have connected to can see what you're reading or intend to read - and vice versa. Goodreads also has all the other common features of a social network: discussions, ratings, reviews, messaging.

Goodreads also has groups galore. Founder and CEO Otis Chandler told ReadWriteWeb in April that "we have 20,000 groups on our site, such as The Sword and Laser (part of the new Geek & Sundry YouTube channel), The Next Best Book Club and small, private, meet-in-real-life groups like the Boston Book Club."

The foundation of Goodreads is providing social recommendations. As Chandler wrote, when explaining why he built Goodreads, "when I want to know what books to read, I'd rather turn to a friend than any random person or bestseller list." That core functionality got a huge boost from the Facebook integration in January. After all, the more friends you can connect to on Goodreads, the more books you'll discover.

One interesting thing to watch is Goodreads' partnerships with publishing houses and authors. Chandler wrote on Quora last year that "we work with all major book publishers and many mid-majors to help them launch their books to our audience of book readers." It also helps self-publishers promote their books.

Even authors who aren't officially connected to Goodreads have their own profile on the site. For example, I'm a fan of Michael Lewis on Goodreads - his page features biographical information, book links, blog posts (from his Blogspot site), video and more.

Are There Good Alternatives To Goodreads?

Goodreads competes with LibraryThing and Shelfari. Both are far behind Goodreads in number of users, however Shelfari remains a threat because of its owner: Amazon. Indeed, as Goodreads has grown, its reliance on Amazon's product advertising API for book information became untenable. That's why in January of this year, Goodreads announced that Ingram, the largest wholesaler of books in the U.S., was its new primary data partner.

Whatever qualities LibraryThing and Shelfari have - and both have a better design than Goodreads - it's hard to go past Goodreads, due to its large user base and excellent Facebook integration. When it comes to getting social recommendations for books, those are the two key factors.

The two biggest threats to Goodreads now are: 1) if Facebook decides to do book reviews itself; and 2) if Amazon gets its act together and starts pushing Shelfari (or Kindle Profiles, its own semi-serious social experiment). However I think the chances of either Facebook or Amazon ruining Goodreads' good thing is slim, at least in the short term. Facebook is better off supporting and partnering with Goodreads, as it does with other specialist networks (like Spotify). Meanwhile Amazon is too busy trying to control the e-reader and book retail markets, so Shelfari will probably continue being largely ignored by Bezos and crew.

2012 has been a good great year for Goodreads. If you're a bookworm like me, I recommend you check it out - and friend me there!

As streams of information become more popular on the Web, we need better ways to consume and manage them. Apps that allow you to aggregate content from different sources - Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news websites and more - may become very popular. That's if they can overcome the increasingly walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter. Which makes creating a streams app a risky proposition, because there is no guarantee they'll be able to access all of a user's social data. A new service called State is trying, though. It came onto my radar this week and it passed my initial "I'm still using it after 30 minutes of tinkering" test.

State is currently in private beta. At first glance, it looks part FriendFeed, part TweetDeck, part iGoogle, and part something wholly new.

In an email to me, co-founder Joshua Lewis explained that he and his business partner Galen Wolfe-Pauly built State to try and answer the question of "what the future of the web looks like when you replace static content with streams of data".

I mentioned a few services that State reminded me of, but for the founders it's more like "the Photoshop of cloud data." Lewis said that State is "a general purpose tool to manipulate, filter and publish streams of data." Incidentally, State's founders are already worried about the future of Twitter integration in State. It added App.net support soon after, partly as a hedge against Twitter pulling its data completely.

How State Works

You can add streams of content from up to four services (so far): Twitter, App.net, Instagram and Dropbox. This is the part that reminds me of a start page, like early Netvibes or iGoogle, because you end up with panels of content across the web page. You can also connect to Instapaper, enabling you to save content for later reading.

Then, like TweetDeck, you're able to view various aspects of the stream. For Twitter, you can select to view content by home timeline, mentions, user, place, tag, search and list. The same principle applies to content from App.net and Instagram.

While State only connects to five services so far, you can imagine it eventually hooking into many more. This is where State reminds me of FriendFeed, the early feed management service acquired by Facebook just over three years ago. At the time it was acquired, FriendFeed could connect to 58 services.

One feature I really like in State is the ability to "follow" a page of streams that someone else has created. The State team has created several of these pages: News, Magazines, Food. Each page - or "workspace" to use the service's parlance - is made up of many different streams of content. The Magazine one features the Twitter streams of various magazine publishers. There is limited ability to filter - for example, you can select to view only images from a stream. But I imagine more filtering options will be added over time.

By default your pages are private, but you can choose to share or make them public.

To get a tour of some of State's other features, check out this demo. The service is in private beta, but you can register your interest here.

It's clearly early days for State, but already I'm enjoying playing with it and building pages of streams. Keep an eye on this young service.

One of the five reasons why Web publishing is changing is the emergence of streams of information. In other words, a constant flow of information ordered chronologically and (ideally) topically too. In the near future, the theory goes, it won't matter where you enter content - a blog platform, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etcetera - because all of it will be accessible to other people as a stream. Yet this rosy future may not happen, if Twitter and Facebook have their way.

The key about streams is that they are much more than a static web page. In the near future, your stream may be delivered in any number of ways: as an RSS feed to your Reader of choice, a Reader app built using App.net, or even through a good old web page.

The Present: Simple Streams, Twitter Features

Much of the vision about streams is currently either experimental or hasn't been built yet (like the App.net example I mentioned). But as it happens, there is a good early example of streams from a mainstream publisher: The Wall Street Journal.

On a blog post by streams evangelist Anil Dash, provocatively entitled Stop Publishing Web Pages, Laura Holder from The Wall Street Journal left this comment:

"Although of course still publishing traditional articles, at The Wall Street Journal we've started opening streams around event-based news topics, such as Apple Keynotes, Olympics, Campaign 2012 and a 24/7 Markets Stream, compiling a dynamic river of topical articles, tweets, live blogs, photos, videos. They work on mobile, engagement is high, filtering will come, and I suspect advertising integration will evolve."

The election stream is mostly made up of WSJ news articles and tweets from WSJ staff. There is the odd video too, plus sharing options to Facebook and Twitter.

Probably the best feature is that it's easily digested via mobile.

This is early days for streams and The Wall Street Journal's effort is fairly basic, although very nicely implemented using Wordpress.

The Future: Twitter & Facebook Don't Want You To Control Your Stream

So what can we expect of streams in the future? It's difficult to say, because there is no guarantee that popular publishing services will even support streams in the future. We're looking at you, Twitter.

There is a battle going on in this era of the Web for control over user content. The most popular social services, Facebook and Twitter, are both trying to keep a hold over their Walled Gardens. Neither company wants its users to have control over their own content. That makes it difficult for third party developers to build stream apps (in other words, interfaces to view streams), because they won't necessarily be able to access all of your content created in Facebook and Twitter.

This is where App.net is potentially an important development. If it can become the de facto stream for microblogging, then App.net combined with RSS - the syndication format supported by almost all publishers nowadays - may become the standard for streams.

But not if Facebook and Twitter have anything to do with it. So it will be interesting to see how streams evolve over the next couple of years. Let me know in the comments how you think this will pan out.

This week I'm exploring why topic pages are getting traction on the social Web. But one potential flaw in topic pages is that they are typically closed networks. Wikipedia, The New York Times, Branch, Medium - these are all tightly controlled, essentially closed knowledge networks. Sure you can wrangle an invite to Branch, or eventually convince a Wikipedia editor not to keep deleting your contributions. But the reason why the controls are there in the first place is to maintain quality. After all, what is a topic page without quality control? (About.com? No, that's just being mean...). Quora, a Q&A site that is open to anyone to join and participate in, defies the conventional Web wisdom that quality = closed.

There are caveats, however, so let's start with those. Just like The New York Times, Quora has a topic page for Todd Akin, the Republican congressman from Missouri who caused a media storm with his comments about rape victims.

However, Akin's topic page on Quora shows a couple of the drawbacks of using Quora for topics. The first is that sometimes there will be far more questions than answers on the page, which is the case with Akin's topic page. The second drawback is that a topic like Todd Akin will invariably attract a lot of subjective opinions.

This doesn't mean that Quora is a bad place to go for topical information, but it does tell us that Quora is best suited to factual or knowledge-based topics. Quora is in effect a place for people to show off their expertise on a topic.

This is where Quora becomes a great complement to media and encyclopedia knowledge bases. The New York Times has journalistic expertise, Wikipedia has crowdsourced expertise. Both have excellent topic pages, in large part because they are closed networks and rigorously edited. This is why Branch and Medium are restricting access to their networks, because they have seen this strategy produce quality content elsewhere on the Web.

So why would you need to go to Quora, in addition to Wikipedia or The New York Times? To answer that question, let's look at this topic: Olympics 2012.

You can read a ton of useful facts and figures about this year's Summer Olympics on Wikipedia and The New York Times. But you likely wouldn't find out the answer to this question: why are the 1st and 9th lanes in track and field deemed the worst to start in?

The answer with the most votes in Quora, 55, was by Aaron Ellis, a high school track coach. Here is his abridged answer:

Lane one is viewed as an inconvenience in certain sprint races (mainly the 200m) because sprinters are a bit slower running curves than running straightaways, and the curve in lane one feels like it goes on forever.

[...]

Lane nine is viewed as an inconvenience in curved sprints because the athlete can't see the competition. This is especially true in the 400, where it's easy to run too fast or too slow in relation to the rest of the pack. For that reason, athletes who are not good at setting their own pace dislike lane nine.

This then is the reason why Quora being open pays off - and why Branch and Medium accordingly might have problems. If Quora wasn't an open network, the chances are that Aaron Ellis would never have contributed his expertise.

Imagine a Medium "collection" (similar to a topic page) called The Art of Running Track, which doesn't have the nugget of knowledge about lanes that Aaron Ellis knows - but probably very few others do. Or imagine a Branch thread about track running strategy, but no Aaron Ellis-type experts were invited.

The point is that there is a place for a completely open knowledge network in the world of topic pages. Quora has proven that being open doesn't diminish quality for many topics. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Yesterday we outlined five reasons why Web publishing is undergoing a sea change, via new services like Medium, Branch, Svtle and App.net. In today's post, we turn our attention to the readers. We're all readers, in some capacity. So the changes we're witnessing in publishing affect us all. Here's what it will mean to you and how you can adapt.

The Rise of Gated Communities

One of the curious factors in the new wave of publishing services is that they are restrictive in nature. In all four of the services we mentioned - Medium, Branch, Svtle and App.net - you cannot write to them unless you have been given permission to do so. Essentially, they're read-only by default. In other words, this new crop of services is less democratic than what came before - Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger and even Twitter.

The reason why they're restricting access is because of a drive for quality. Rightly or wrongly, these companies have decided to tackle the Quality problem by creating gated communities. Most of us can peek through the bars of the gate and read the posts. But unless you've been granted access to come inside, you're effectively discouraged from joining the conversation.

Over time Medium, Branch, App.net and others will open their gates to more people, but you have to wonder what advantages those with early access are gaining - and what effect that will have on the future of reading on the Web. Will we become segregated communities of readers? Will those of us locked out now, revert back to mainstream media to get our fix of reading ("Well if they don't want my opinion, I'll go back to reading the newspaper!").

We don't know what the effects of these new gated communities will be, but the whiff of elitism is unsettling.

How to Keep Up

Over 2012, the number of services to consume content from has expanded dramatically. Pinterest, App.net, Medium, Branch and others have joined the content creation fray over the past year. This is putting even further strain on our already over-taxed capacity to keep up.

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy to manage your online reading. If you're an uber-geek with a ravenous informational diet, then ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell has some great suggestions for you. But most people don't need or want to consume that much content. So for the rest of us, here are a couple of simple guidelines:

1. Make choices about which social media services best suit you and ignore the rest.

If looking at pretty pictures every day isn't a requirement, then stop using Pinterest. If you're not a developer (or someone who follows what developers do), then App.net probably isn't for you. If you find that Twitter is too distracting and the conversations aren't satisfying, then (sacre bleu!) drop out of that network.

2. Focus on content that is important to you.

This sounds like a no-brainer, but every one of us has been distracted by content that - if we're honest with ourselves - we didn't really need to know. Will you gain anything by reading the latest iPhone 5 rumor? That 24-page slideshow about a blogger in that other blog? Resist the temptation to click on those links and apply quality control to what you read. Quality is a philosophy driving Evan Williams and his Medium team; and it can just as well be adopted for own personal reading habits.

Topic-based organization of content is easier with these new publishing tools, which is great for readers. You'll be able to follow topics that interest you - and disregard others. It is of course good to be eclectic and open to new things, but topical browsing helps focus your reading.

Learning to Swim in The Stream

More content, streams of data, topic structures, (theoretically) better quality - all of these trends in online publishing require an equivalent shift in our online reading habits.

Our advice is to choose your content sources wisely, apply your own quality control, try and focus on topics of particular interest, and dip in and out of the stream as it suits you.

Yesterday we looked at how online media is covering the London 2012 Olympics. We gave our virtual gold medal to the New York Times, for its sleek design and muscular content. Today we review the major social media sites: Facebook, Twitter and Google+. To continue the Olympics theme, we award each of the three a different colored medal. Which one gets the gold? Read on to find out...

Gold: Twitter

This may surprise you. After all, most of the media coverage about Twitter in regard to the Olympics has been negative. The company's partnership with the much maligned NBC didn't help, but it was the banning of a reporter that really got Twitter in hot water. And it wouldn't be a major sports event without at least one athlete posting an offensive tweet.

Nevertheless, Twitter came into its own over the course of the London Games as a way for athletes and fans alike to express themselves. The Twitter activity by and about Usain Bolt is a great example. The most popular athlete of this Olympics has actively tweeted to his 1.3 million followers throughout the Games.

Bolt has also attracted the most attention from tweeting fans. According to the official Twitter account, @usainbolt set "a new Olympic Games conversation record with over 80,000 TPM for his 200m victory." TPM = Tweets Per Minute. That prompted one Twitter wag to reply: "@twitter Too bad the East Coast of the US won't see it for another 5 hours. #NBCfail". You can't win 'em all...

How about the official accounts? They were active, although fairly vanilla. The official London 2012 Olympics Twitter account has 1.5 million followers and most of the tweets have been factual updates of results. The official Olympics organization account has 1.6 million followers and has posted a lot of photos.

Overall, while Twitter stumbled a couple of times in its biggest Olympics yet, what won us over was the vibrancy of the conversations on Twitter among Olympians and fans. It's been more fun than most of what we've seen on Facebook, with the possible exception of Kobe Bryant's Facebook Page...

Silver: Facebook

People magazine has a good summary of athletes who have "obsessively Facebooked about the Games." They include basketballer Kobe Bryant, hurdler Lolo Jones and gymnast Jordyn Wieber.

Kobe's Page is the most popular, helped by his enthusiastic and entertaining updates.

The official London 2012 Olympics Page has 1.5 million likes and has been updated frequently, with fun photos and an engaging style ("We think a World Record deserves a Like - how about you?"). The official Olympics organization Facebook Page looks a little dour by comparison. It has 3.6 million likes. While there has been no shortage of comments or likes on both Pages, and across the mammoth Facebook network in general, the real-time back and forth on Twitter has been more interesting.

Update: Evangelos Papathanassiou commented that Facebook's role as a traffic hub for media, sponsors and others should be mentioned. Also Instagram, owned by Facebook, was well used (for example by Usain Bolt, as seen above). Thanks Evangelos for the great comment!

Bronze: Google+

The Olympics organization and London Olympics both have official Pages on Google+, with 940,000 and 780,000 followers respectively. There's also an Olympics hub on Google.co.uk, which features live results and doodles.

As for fan activity on Google+, it has been solid. For example, Usain Bolt is trending right now and there is a ton of content to consume if you so desire. But as always, Google+ can't quite foot it with Twitter and Facebook. Few popular Olympians have an active Google+ Page. For once, Usain Bolt is nowhere to be seen.

There you have it, our medal winners in social media for the Olympics. Let us know whether you agree with our picks in the comments.

(This is Part 3 in a series of articles about social discovery. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 here.)

The people at Powerhouse Factories, a brand strategy consultancy, point to recent statistics that show people are spending less time on Facebook. The change isn’t massive - yet - but Powerhouse social media expert Taylor Wiegert believes that the trend reflects people splitting Facebook time with more specialized social networks like Pinterest, Tumblr and Deviant Art. All these sites focus on social discovery: finding new connections, ideas and products through social media.

The concept behind social discovery is nothing new, but it erupted at the South By Southwest Festival in March 2012. If this is the first time you’ve heard the term, it certainly won’t be the last. Web companies are trying to figure out how best to integrate social discovery  and help people easily find what they want based not only on their own preferences, but the preferences of their social-network contacts.

“It’s not in place of Facebook - it’s in addition to,” Wiegert said. “People are still spending time on Facebook, but they’re also going on these niche social networks where they can connect around their passions.” 

Wiegert and his colleague, Emily Worstell, say the niche social networks help marketers find the early adopters and influencers. Reaching those people with targeted messages via social discovery is much easier than wading through the masses on Facebook. Worstell said, “We’re tapping into the very potent numbers. It can give a brand a very good idea about who their influencers are.”

Adding Local to Social Discovery

Sometimes those influencers aren't on Facebook but just down the street. Nextdoor, a social network for people who live in the same neighborhood, is an engine of social discovery based on household problem-solving. (For more on Nextdoor, see our earlier profile). With Nextdoor, neighbors (who may not want to share personal information among each other the way they do with Facebook friends), ask questions ranging from “Know a good electrician?” to “Why are there fire trucks down the block?”

“Has Facebook dropped the ball by not integrating local social discovery?" Nextdoor CEO and founder Nirav Tolia asked. “I don’t think so. Different social networks have different uses. Facebook and Nextdoor are miles apart.”

But maybe not for long. Following last week’s earnings release, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg hinted that Facebook may be contemplating a local push into a potentially lucrative market segment. "The problem is local businesses are not very tech savvy," Sandberg told earnings analysts. "Something like 40% don’t have any Web presence." If Facebook can entice them to set up shop on the social network - which, after all, is easier than setting up a custom URL and homepage - the company will have a good shot at covering the local end of social discovery.

Social Discovery Is Not Private

Social discovery is most effective if it can draw on large volumes of personal information, which increasingly includes physical location. Especially as people use mobile devices to discover who and what is around them, they may start to wonder whether they're sharing too much. 

“Consumers have to think about what they are comfortable with sharing and if they want people around them to know about them,” said Jeff Tinsley, CEO of MyLife, a service that unifies messaging from various social networks. We’re “living in a world where people are a lot more comfortable sharing information, but [social discovery] can certainly test the limits.” 

And given that Facebook has repeatedly tested those limits with frequent and often intrusive changes to its user agreement, it may not be the leading candidate to make users feel secure as social discovery comes to play a larger role in their choices.

“People have started to become increasingly dissatisfied with Facebook because of the ads and because of privacy concerns,” Wiegert said. “These niche platforms are starting to chip away at Facebook as people reevaluate what they’re getting out of Facebook.”

ReadWriteWeb’s Dave Copeland will be speaking at the SocialDiscovery.org’s next Social Discovery Conference on Aug. 6-7 at the Fairmont San Francisco. ReadWriteWeb readers can get a discount of more than $1,000 if they register by August 3.

To read more about social discovery, see Social Discovery is Pushing Search & Social Closer Together and Hooked Media Group Uses Social Discovery to Fine-Tune Game Recommendations.

(This is Part 2 in a series of articles about social discovery. You can read Part 1 here.)

Social discovery is philosophy of online search that holds that people are more likely to accept a friend's opinion or advice than that of a general crowd or a search algorithm. Having been built on algorithms, Google and Bing are looking for ways to include social discovery in their traditional search results.

“We know that most people trust peer recommendations over advertisements, and about 25% of search results for the world's top 20 largest brands are linked to user-generated content,” said Jennifer Peck, director of engagement at Banjo, maker of a social-discovery app that shows people's social profiles based on their location.

“Searching the Internet for [Olympic swimmer] Ryan Lochte, for instance, will pull up lots of content," said Peck. But along with the undiferentiated mass of data will be "the latest photos and posts coming straight out of London from thousands of fans who are updating their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Path [accounts]? Surely," she said, "The latter is more relevant.”

Social Search Is the Web’s New Disruptor

Nearly two years ago, executives at Gigya, which has provided online social tools to ABC, Pepsi, and Verizon, noticed a dramatic shift in how people found their clients' sites. More people were landing via social networks. In some cases, traffic driven by Twitter and Facebook eclipsed traffic coming from Google, according to chief executive Patrick Salyer.

“User behavior has been changing ever since, and search engines are changing to recognize this trend,” Salyer said.

Since then, there has been a shake up of the Internet, particularly when it comes to content. The Washington Post, once seen as an old-line media company that understood online culture better than many of its peers, watched as traffic to the Huffington Post surpassed its own. The Post had a new rival, and almost solely because HuffPo better understood social discovery's relationship to search.

“In many ways, [social discovery] is similar to how SEO works, except there are so many more competing technologies and ways to analyze the patterns,” Salyer said. 

Wisdom of the Crowds

Much of the push to make everything sharable and social revolves around a rethinking of how we search for things on the Internet, and Bing may be a step ahead of Google. 

I signed into Bing using my Facebook account to search for “Boston Marathon training plan,” and I got a fairly standard page of results. But Bing has added an element on the right that shows me Facebook friends who, based on their Facebook posts, might be able to answer my question.

Indeed, three of the five people displayed have run the Boston Marathon at least once, and one coaches charity runners. The fourth person lives in Boston and recently started running, and the fifth is a chef in Boston whose restaurant ran a marathon-day special. Not bad.

“Activity on social networks has increased significantly in the last 12 to 18 months. Search engines are in the business of information retrieval, and so the thinking for them went that, increasingly, there was relevant information to be retrieved from the social networks,” said Nathan Safran, research director at SEO technology maker Conductor. “Also working to the search engines’ advantage is that consumers still turn to search overwhelmingly more frequently and in more information-retrieval scenarios than social, and that is a trend that they want to maintain. Rolling social into search hedges their bets.”

Google doesn’t dig as deep into my friends’ social-media profiles, mainly because it is still trying to push Google+ results. Inclusion of Facebook content has been slow. Most of the people interviewed for this article expect that to change. 

“I think Google will eventually include more social information in its search results,” Salyer said. “Businesses are really configuring the way their sites work to adapt to social.”

ReadWriteWeb’s Dave Copeland will be speaking at the SocialDiscovery.org’s next Social Discovery Conference on Aug. 6-7 at the Fairmont San Francisco. ReadWriteWeb readers can get a discount of more than $1,000 if they register by August 3.

For more on social discovery, see Hooked Media Group Uses Social Discovery to Fine-Tune Game Recommendations.

Social discovery is the latest buzzword on the Web, but it has limits. Here's how one company is trying to use (but not over-use) social discovery to figure out what game you want to play before you even know you want to play it. 

(This is Part 1 in a series of articles about social discovery. You can read Part 2 here.)

There are zillions of Flash games online, and finding the one you want to play at the time you want to play it can take far too long. Particularly if you’re looking for something to kill a few stray minutes while you're commuting or waiting for a friend who's running late for a dinner reservation.

That’s where Hooked Media Group steps in. The San Francisco-based app developer takes advantage of users' social connections to predict what games they'll enjoy. This approach to recommendation is a form of social discovery, a phrase that describes peoples' tendency to follow recommendations from friends rather than vested interests like vendors or publishers, or even disinterested parties like search engines. “The number of apps keeps growing,” said Prita Uppal, Hooked Media’s CEO. “We’re trying to help consumers sift through all that content and find the right game - something they’re actually going to like.”

Games People Play

Hooked Media’s app is currently available for Android, with an iPhone release expected later this year. The company combs through a wide range of data points to customize its recommendations. As it turns out, finding the right game is serious stuff.

Some of the data points are personal rather than social. The type of game you play on the subway on a Monday morning, when you may be trying to jumpstart your brain while heading into work, is much different than the game you want to play on a Friday night when you’re winding down after a week at work. Other apps and games on your phone give the Hooked algorithm hints about what you like, as well as how much time you typically spend playing.

More recently, however, Uppal noticed that by adding social discovery elements into the algorithm, the matches got even better. What your friends like may also be a good indicator of what you like. Hooked displays live feeds of friends playing games and has found that people are more likely to play a game if the game icon is displayed next to a friend’s name as opposed to the friend’s profile photo. Additionally, by tying into social networks, Hooked can pull information from your social graph, making it easier to figure out your likes and dislikes. 

“We’re not only trying to understand you, but we’re trying to understand you and your friend,” she explained. When the Hooked app asks you if you want to recommend a game to your friends, it doesn’t present an alphabetical list, but instead prioritizes the list to show you the friends most likely to enjoy the same game. 

Finding The RIght Balance

Social discovery is a powerful set of tools, but Uppal cautions that it has limits. “People sometimes try to take it too far," she said. "Just because Megan is your friend doesn’t mean you’re going to like the same games as Megan.”

Thus, for Hooked, social discovery is just one element in narrowing down its recommendations. It uses social information to identify games you might like, and combines that with other data points to zero in on a game you might love. 

Recommendation engines that draw from a variety of data sources may very well be the future of online discovery, Uppal said. “We will begin to see social discovery combining recommendation technologies - and this in turn will evolve app discovery.

"Think about it. With this method, you would not only receive recommendations based on your purchasing and browsing history, but you would also be tapping into the influential recommendations from our social friends. The result is tailored recommendations that are based on algorithms and analysis as well as human interest.”

ReadWriteWeb’s Dave Copeland will be speaking at the SocialDiscovery.org’s next Social Discovery Conference on Aug. 6-7 at the Fairmont San Francisco. ReadWriteWeb readers can get a discount of more than $1,000 if they register by August 3.

To read more about social discovery, see Social Discovery is Pushing Search & Social Closer Together.

The online social world can put consumer actions in context, which makes the targeting of retail offers eerily more precise. No wonder the world’s biggest retailer also wants to be the world’s biggest social-shopping company. Here’s how Walmart's @WalmartLabs division is doing it.

Retailers have long relied on transaction data to get a sense of their customers. Buy Fage Greek yogurt at the supermarket and you may receive a coupon for competitor Chobani's yogurt with your receipt. Buy a Batman DVD and you may get advertisements for other superhero films.

But what if didn't buy that DVD for yourself, as the retailer's messages assumed? What if it was a last-minute gift bought on your way to a friend’s birthday party? That context was not captured by the transaction data.

“Transaction data often works, but it often fails, in large part because it’s so narrowly focused,” said Robert Yau, the director of project management for @WalmartLabs, the retailer's social strategy division. “With the growth of social media, we have more data points we can use to better target recommendations.”

Yau was working for Kosmix, an advertising-supported Internet directory, when Walmart bought the firm last year and renamed it @WalmartLabs. (He will be the keynote speaker at SocialDiscovery.org's Social Discovery Conference, which will take place August 6-7 in San Francisco.) Already, his team has developed Shopycat, a gift-finder app built on top of Facebook. 

How Interested is the Consumer?

The key to delivering effective retail messages, Yau says, is identifying a customer's interests. Social media provides context that makes it possible to do that. 

Yau breaks customer interests into long- and short-term. A Facebook profile is particularly useful for identifying long-term interests. For example, Yau's own Facebook profile says he is an avid runner - and has since he created the it - signaling a long-term interest. Counterintitively, he views long-term interests as a negative indicator for sending retailing messages related to those interests.

“People who have those long-term interests are very knowledgeable and know what they like,” he said. “It’s very hard to make a recommendation to me about running shoes.”

Short-term interests are more promising, since potential customers haven't yet developed biases such as brand loyalties around them. Retailers can divine shoppers' short-term interests by following newsfeeds (in aggregate) rather than profiles. On a given day, a West Coast heat wave might prompt a migration to the beach in Los Angeles and a cloud of barbecues in San Francisco. As fall approaches, feeds might point to renewed strong interest in the television show Glee.

Contextual data like this can guide programming everything from Walmart.com to individual stores.

The Promise of Pinterest

Yau is also watching for ways to take advantage of social discovery. Sites like Pinterest help users discover new interests and products by presenting collections that have been curated by other users.

Social discovery is “huge for us,” Yau says. However, he views it a long-term opportunity because will take time to a way to find a way generate consistent returns from Pinterest data. “There’s a lot of expecation, but no one has really nailed it down yet.”

The Privacy Issue

Yau is quick to point out that the company collects social data on individual customers only if they opt in through the Shopycat app. But with a billion shoppers, Walmart has access to loads of social data that can help pinpoint regional trends and stay ahead of what shoppers want.

“There are a lot of misconceptions around social shopping and social discovery,” Yau said. “The way I look at it, we go to the store with an idea of something we need to purchase, and the retailer wants to try and upsell us. If you’re going to try to upsell me, you need to get it right, and social data helps us better focus those offers. It gives us the ability to figure out that Batman DVD was for a friend and not something you have a personal interest in.”

ReadWriteWeb’s Dave Copeland will be speaking at the SocialDiscovery.org’s next Social Discovery Conference on Aug. 6-7 at the Fairmont San Francisco. ReadWriteWeb readers can get a discount of more than $1,000 if they register by August 3.

While Google+ topped the survey's social media category, Facebook was dead last. Users are angry over the way it handles just about everything they care about: privacy, advertising and the way they interact on the social network. The survey suggests that if Facebook doesn't dramatically improve customer happiness, people could leave when given an alternative. "We know that consumers go where they're satisfied," said Larry Freed, president and chief executive of ForeSee, which partnered with the ACSI in releasing the survey.

Facebook's bottom-of-the-barrel ACSI score of 61, 17 points below Google+, indicates that Facebook has done a dismal job of coddling users during the many changes the site has gone through while trying to build a business around advertising.

"A reasonable person would say Facebook at some point has to make money, but users aren't always reasonable," Freed said.

Facebook's Latest Stumble

How a company handles change plays a big part in determining whether customers stay or head for a competitor. Facebook's latest flub came with Timeline, the user interface introduced in January that transformed users' bulletin-board-like profile into a visual scrapbook of their lives. The ACSI found that the switch to Timeline was users' most common complaint.

Many people were shell-shocked when the switch to Timeline became permanent. Facebook could have helped users with the transition by letting them switch back and forth between the two interfaces for a much longer period of time.

"You want to make changes, you want to make improvements, and yet, if you make them too drastically, consumers struggle," Freed said.

Other Reasons to Hate

The ACSI survey also found that users don't trust the company to ensure their privacy. This skittishness continues despite Facebook's efforts to give users more privacy controls. People also remain concerned about their data being sold to advertisers and whether it is sufficiently secure.

Another user concern is control of their own experience. This month, for example, Facebook caused an uproar on the site by switching users' default email addresses to @facebook.com without notification.

Increased advertising on the site also bothers users. Many see Facebook ads as intrusive and as having no relevance to them. Facebook will have to find a balance to avoid alienating people further.

"Satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect," Freed explained. "The expectations over the years have been not a lot of ads, if any, and now either Facebook will have to adjust or consumers will have to adjust."

Google+ as Competitor?

For now, there's still no place for disgruntled Facebook users to turn to as an alternative. Google claims that 150 million people log into its Google+ social network at least once a month, with half of those signing in daily. That's a mere fraction of the more than 900 million "monthly active users" claimed by Facebook. But Google+ is only about a year old. It could still grow into a viable alternative to Facebook, particularly if it continues to satisfy its users. Google+ made its debut on the ACSI with a score of 78, tied for number one with Wikipedia.

As things stand, Google+ doesn't have the heft to encourage people to leave Facebook. Instead, Google highlights things it claims the service does better, such as tracking topics people care about and acting as the social glue across Google's other products, including YouTube, Blogger and Gmail. But Freed predicted that could change over time: "As they grow that network, at some point, it may be big enough to be a direct competitor."

The fledgling social media platform, which has increasingly been seen as more of a threat to Facebook and Twitter, just took another step towards social media maturity with the release of some new hooks to let other social media management tools connect directly to Google's social network.

Businesses and organizations have been chomping at the bit for these APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), so that social media management tools like HootSuite and Buddy Media can fully connect with Google+ pages, ever since Google introduced its Pages feature to the social platform back in November.

Some conections were available, but only to a select few software partners, according to Google developer Eduardo Thuler.

"In recent months we've been been previewing a new set of Google+ management APIs with some of these companies (including Buddy Media, Context Optional, Hearsay Social, HootSuite, Involver, and Vitrue)," Thuler wrote on his Google+ page.

But even that access to Google+ Pages was limited. HootSuite, for instance, was not allowed to let too many users access the social media management app to control a Page account. So only paid users of the app were given this access.

Now that the APIs are available to all, no such restrictions are in place, and social media management is a wide-open field for Google+.

Businesses Only

The APIs only let third-party tools manage a brand or business page, not a personal Google+ account. But this is a huge help for businesses that want to capitalize on Google+, because now they can use third-party tools to schedule, monitor and track posts as needed.

This represents a big change for Google+, if only because businesses will start to take it much more seriously. Google+ was slammed at its initial launch for having little to no tools for businesses to make their presence known on the platform, and even after Pages were introduced, Google still guarded its APIs strongly.

If anything, today's change means that Google+ has shaken off any "lab" reputation it might have had, so Google's annoying tendency to drop services that people still like probably won't apply to Google+.

Google+ is growing fast, thanks to all the new Android users who get signed on when they activate their phones. That's a big audience to tap into, and the new APIs make it easier for businessesto climb on board to be a part of the experience.

Michael Lazerow, CEO, Buddy Media

Salesforce.com's willingness to shell out $745 million for Buddy Media shows the confidence Salesforce has in the social advertising specialist's ability to turn people's love of conversation to an advertiser's greatest tool.

Salesforce announced the acquisition Monday with the intent of making Buddy's marketing tools available to the tens of thousands of companies that use Salesforce to manage customer relations from sales to support. With Buddy, these companies get the chance to quietly insert their brand into people's conversations on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks.

Buddy Media is not about posting banner ads. In the world of social advertising, content becomes ads and ads are the content. There's little separation between the two. Getting people to discuss new products and promotions is marketing in its most subtle form.

Companies set up Pages on Facebook to promote their brands. Buddy enables companies to collect fans and then use the content on Pages to get people to talk about products.

"Content is content, so the same post that you make – photo, video, event post, status update, application stories – anything that is published to your Page can be an ad," Michael Lazerow, co-founder and CEO of Buddy, said in a recent interview with Forbes magazine.

Lazerow goes on in the same interview to explain how effective a brand discussion can be on a site like Facebook. "When I say you have to test drive this car, because I think it's a great car, that's amazing," he said. "When 10 people say that in a socially enabled ad that's gold."

Once a company is able to get the conversation about its brand going, it can then use Buddy's tracking tools to watch which ads or content gets the most likes. In this way, companies can continuously fine-tune how they promote the brand and products to get the highest return on investment. The system also analyzes which combination of text and images generate the most fan feedback.

ProfileBuddy, ConversationBuddy

Buddy has two main social-marketing tools. How the software is used with Facebook provides a good example of their value.

ProfileBuddy can push out exclusive offers just to Page fans, in order to encourage non-fans to convert. In addition, the tool has ways to push fans toward becoming "brand evangelists" by making it easy for them to distribute promotions and other brand-related content to their friends. ProfileBuddy also lets companies build Pages that incorporate the language and culture of individual countries, while keeping the look and feel consistent.

The second tool, ConversationBuddy, is used to post content on the company's Wall and News Feed. The tool can also post content that links to a company's website outside of Facebook.

While measuring the effectiveness of content, ConversationBuddy can also track and flag negative comments and fans' questions and concerns. The software does this by watching for certain words and phrases. Clients can then respond directly to the fans or delete offensive language. Mentions of competitors can also be flagged.

Overall, this is sophisticated stuff that tries to subtly control people's conversations about brands, starting initially with happy customers who are likely to seek out a company's Facebook Page or Twitter profile page.

Whether Salesforce got its money-worth remains to be seen. While Buddy's form of advertising is much more understated than a screaming banner ad, it may not be as effective as advertisers would like.

A poll by Reuters/Ipsos found that four out of five Facebook users say neither ads nor conversations on the world's largest social network have ever steered them toward buying a product or service, the Los Angeles Times reported.

If the poll is on the mark, then it is back to the drawing board for Facebook and Buddy.

Photo by LeWEB11

You've got a new piece of content you want to share, but where do you put it? Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, your Wordpress blog... all of the above?! With these and many other options to choose from, posting on the Web can be confusing - even a little stressful. But never fear, ReadWriteWeb is here to help. We've identified three main social media profiles, based on the Big 3 networks: Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

We're not suggesting to choose one of the Big 3 and ignore the other two. Many people use each of the three for different purposes. What we're saying is: why not choose one as your main account. It will make it easier for you to manage your social media life.

Here are the three types of social media users we've identified:

The Google+ Pundit

This person favors Google+ because of its topic-focused discussions. They enjoy writing their thoughts on topical issues of the day and (unlike Twitter) Google+ doesn't restrict them.

Tim O'Reilly, the founder of O'Reilly Media and father of Web 2.0, is a Google+ fan. In a recent post there, he explained that he uses Google+ because it has "meaningful groups that are growing organically out of my various communications." In other words, he finds like-minded people to talk with on Google+.

He uses Twitter and Facebook too, but Google+ is his preferred network. Here's an example of Tim posting his thoughts onto Google+ first, then following up with a tweet that points to Google+:

The Talkative Tweeter

This person is very good at thinking out loud and tends to post to Twitter regularly throughout the day. Twitter is ideal for people who love real-time discussions. These conversations can be topical or just everyday social, but either way it all happens fast and in the moment.

ReadWriteWeb's own Jon Mitchell is a great example of this profile. He posts once or twice a day to Google+ and Facebook, but about every 5 minutes to Twitter. Well, maybe not that much, but as I've been writing this very sentence there have been 2 updates to his Twitter stream! I really enjoy following his tweets, even though I am not a heavy tweeter myself.

The Facebook Socializer

Facebook is the most difficult of the three big social media sites to figure out. It's mainly a social network, for keeping up-to-date with your friends and family. But you can also subscribe to people you don't know, or "like" their "Page". Or you can subscribe to their public profile and like their Page. In a nutshell, Facebook is trying to be all things to all people - which has created a whole lot of confusion for content producers and consumers alike.

Despite all this, the most effective Facebook users are ones who regularly post for social purposes. Often they pipe in their Twitter updates, too. My friend Chris Saad is a great example. Chris is a successful Web strategist who lives in San Francisco; and he also has a social life that many of his friends are politely envious of. So his Facebook profile is a mix of savvy technical commentary (much of it syndicated from his Twitter profile) and photos of him living it up in San Francisco.

So there you have it: three types of social media users to model yourself on. There are of course a plethora of specialist services, too: Tumblr for curation, Pinterest for images, Wordpress for blogging, and so on. If what you do is a good fit for a specialist service, then use it as one of your primary services alongside one of the Big 3. For example, if you're a visual person and love to post images, then Pinterest should be one of your main social media sites.

Which of the Big 3 social media profiles do you fit?

p.s. You don't need to be a white male with a beard to answer. Sorry about that, occupational hazard!