Google+ has never looked and felt as it good as it does right now. Alas, looks aren't everything.

A massive overhaul of the service, announced Wednesday during a keynote at Google's I/O conference for developers, has brought it in line with the most modern and functionally powerful Web design principles. It now has a multi-column layout, scrolling menu bars, and enormous images. Google also rolled out an umbrella messaging service called Hangouts, a standalone app for Web and mobile that neatens up the sloppy mess that was Voice, Talk, and Google+ messaging.  

All of this is great news for heavy users of Google+ who have been awaiting a design push that looks and feels like 2013. But there's still one giant problem plaguing the service and Google's entire social platform at large: the hub of your Google life is still an email address, and that's a nightmare for users with multiple Gmail accounts.

Since taking over as CEO in 2011, Larry Page has been talking up the notion of "One Google" to unify the search giant's disparate services. But the reality is that it's very hard as a user to experience a unified Google until Google realizes that a person is a person, not an email account.

At best, the complex process of trying to manage multiple Gmail accounts with Google+ and all the various apps involved slows users down. At worst, it could keep some users from adopting the beautiful new services altogether. 

Two Accounts, Twice The Pain

"For me personally, I have two Google accounts: I have a corporate and personal [account], and it is a pain," admitted Seth Sternberg, director of product management for Google+, in a roundtable discussion with reporters in San Francisco Thursday. And Sternberg is definitely not alone. Many people have two Google email accounts—a personal Gmail and a corporate Google Apps account. Those ought to be Google's best users. Instead, they're the most frustrated ones.

And many people set up multiple email accounts for other reasons. Social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn let them associate multiple email addresses with a single personal or professional identity. Google doesn't.

What that ends up doing is disrupting the entire process of laying the Google+ social net atop the Web. Every time a user tries to +1 a link, log into a website with Google+ sign-in, or personalize search, they're confronted with Google's fragmented view of online identity.

So for Google, the email-as-account concept disrupts users' ability to seamlessly use Google+, which in turn makes the network's constantly increasing integration with the rest of the company's apps and services more and more painful with every turn. And for users, it's just plain obnoxious having to use incognito browser windows and all sorts of other workarounds to try and simply manage their online identity.

No wonder Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are the go-to networks for finding friends and sharing information.

Identity, If And When You Want It

Google says it's trying to get better.

"We sanded off all the rough edges," David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google, said in the recent roundtable event. Google, to its credit, has introduced an account chooser that makes it easier to stay logged into multiple accounts.

But those fixes don't address the core problem—Google's email-linked identity model.

What Google really needs is something above an email address that could be used as an identifier for all of a user's various accounts. This higher-level identifier could be something akin to a Twitter handle or a Facebook username.

This new Google login could have a registered primary email address—the way Apple and Amazon handle logins to their online accounts—but it should sync up your other Google+ accounts.

Separating personal and professional sharing could be simply handled with a strongly established Google+ concept: Circles, or lists of contacts.

(And, of course, you should still be able to establish a Gmail account for an unlinked, throwaway identity—for, say, a Craigslist posting or mailing lists.)

Umbrellas Are Good

Google showcased its ability to neatly fold up services with Hangouts, and the strategy is a no-brainer. It resolves so many problems users face when a company's products are all around them, yet they have no idea how to manage them all and end up just turning away from what they feel they don't need. 

An umbrella strategy to Google+ and Gmail is a much taller order, but it's one of the biggest impediments standing between the search giant and a more steady, fuller-scale adoption of its social network. So Google, please give us that umbrella, and you'll likely see more people standing underneath it if its done right. 

With a whirlwind of announcements at its Google I/O developers conference this week, Google's vast suite of social products is finally starting to look like it was created by a single company and not cobbled together via a series of haphazard acquisitions. Here are the highlights of what's changed:

Hangouts: Google Messaging, Unmessy At Last

According to a statement from Nikhyl Singhal, Google's head honcho of real-time communications, Google Voice will be folded into Hangouts too (Yay!), though there's no word on when.

Google+ Gets A Lot Of Love

Messaging may have been the messiest area of Google's social services, but Google+ is the big umbrella that covers them all. Amidst the company's epic 3-hour-plus Google I/O keynote yesterday, Google+ guru Vic Gundotra announced approximately one million updates to Google+, the social network that the company launched two years ago. Okay, he pegged the number at 41… but that's almost a million.

The updates are extensive. As a regular Google+ user, it's actually difficult to get a sense for what changed, since the redesign looks and feels right in stride with Google's recent overall changes in user interfaces that runs from Google+ to Google Glass to Google Now and Android. So here's a list of some of the most notable of the 41 updates:

• A multi-column layout. This can be toggled off, if you're still into the Blogger single-column-era.
• Photos and videos get even bigger. Google is really into making media massive - and we would be too if the average person knew how to share properly high-res photos.
• New animations. Things are flipping and sliding all over the place in there.
• A third dimension. You can scroll up and down through your social stream, but Google wants you to be able to scroll in too. Now you can take a deeper dive on a given Google+ post -or is it a Card? I think we're suppose to call everything Cards now -- via related hashtags, which will lead you to more content of interest. It will also take you further down the Google+ rabbit hole, of course.
• Lots of treats for photographers. Google+ has a thriving community of awesome photogs, and Google is keen to do right by them. Photos in Google+ now have all sorts of cool bells and whistles. A few I'm particularly stoked about include "auto highlight," which de-emphasizes duplicate and blurry pics, automatically picking the best shot out of a batch. I've yet to test this extensively, but since I have a habit of bracketing (taking multiple shots at different exposures) - even on my phone - choosing the best photo of a set can be a major timesuck. This feature could help there. Another feature, "Auto Awesome," can stitch together shots in a series to make a playful Photobooth-esque picture or even a Vine-like animated gif.

For a full breakdown of Google's social updates, hit the company's official blog post or just cruise around in Google+ for a while. The  the social network has been the butt of many a joke over the last few years, and we're happy to see Google take the time to spruce things up a little.

 

Photos by Nick Statt for ReadWrite. 

Would you trust the "wisdom of the crowd" over your own doctor? CrowdMed thinks you might. The San Francisco start-up has an audacious plan to use crowdsourcing techniques to tap the "collective wisdom" of strangers to help diagnose patients - particularly those who've bounced from doctor to doctor for years trying to understand uncommon symptoms. 

While many may worry that healthcare is too important to trust to strangers, I think this is awesome. 

After all, crowdsourcing is already used to help find missing persons, track down terrorists, answer life's vexing questions, pick stocks - and to select our President. SETI uses crowdsourcing to search for extraterrestrial life. Why not employ crowdsourcing to help our multi-trillion-dollar healthcare industry? 

CrowdMed recently received $1.1 million in seed financing from some of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms, including NEA, Greylock Partners, Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz. 

Ask Your Doctor? No. Ask the Crowd.

CrowdMed works like this: Patients pay a $199 fee to list their case on CrowdMed. They fill out a "patient questionnaire" that details their symptoms, case history and personal information. Though CrowdMed founder Jared Heyman declined to say exactly how many patients have enrolled so far, he claimed that there has been "pretty strong demand." Without the fee, Heyman explained, the site would be overwhelmed with patients who might not get diagnosed.

Once a case is posted, the crowd, what CrowdMed somewhat coyly terms "MDs" - for "medical detectives" - can review the patient's information and offer up what they believe is the correct - or most likely - diagnosis. 

According to Heyman, "close to 3,000 people have signed up as medical detectives." He said CrowdMed's "MDs" include doctors, residents and "regular people that like solving medical mysteries." Why sign up to be a medical detective? First, there's the chance to help patients. Second, CrowdMed awards its detectives "points" for the diagnoses they correctly predict. 

CrowdMed utilizes a so-called prediction market methodology to help glean the correct diagnosis. For example, when a detective selects a case to review, they use up some of their points. They use up still more when they suggest a diagnosis or vote up (or down) other suggested diagnoses. Essentially, it "costs" to play. The more accurate their predictions, however, the more points they are ultimately awarded. 

Points do not have any cash value, however. For now, they can be exchanged only for donations to Watsi, an organization that helps fund medical treatments in the developing world. Heyman did not say how much CrowdMed is donating.

While it's true that CrowdMed's detectives may not always correctly diagnose a particular patient, if they can narrow the likelihood of someone's illness to, say, two or three likely options - those that garner the most points, for example - that could speed up decision making and help point to which tests should be perfomed. 

In Crowd We Trust?

The obvious question: Can a crowd of strangers with unknown amounts of medical expertise be trusted to safely and correctly diagnose baffling medical problems? CrowdMed claims that after "four years of development" it possess a patented "unique technology" specifically designed to optimize group intelligence for medical diagnostic purposes. From its site:

Groups hold far more knowledge collectively than any individual member, no matter how brilliant. With hundreds of minds working in parallel, groups can process information much faster than individuals.

Heyman told me that his sister suffered for three years from a rare disease. Once it was finally correctly diagnosed, doctors were able to significantly ease her symptoms. CrowdMed used her case to help validate its model - Heyman says it accurately diagnosed her within days. 

What Do Real MDs Think?

The first rule of medicine is primum non nocere, Latin for "first, do no harm." It does not necessarily apply to the crowd. Not surprisingly, the CrowdMed approach bothers many real doctors.

Dr. Hubert Chen, the Associate Medical Director for biotech pioneer Genentech, said, "I want to be enthusiastic, but I have concerns about it." Dr. Chen's primary concern was the potential for numerous "false positives" that CrowdMed's "detectives" might generate: "I've seen many patients misled by the Web. Doctors often have to un-educate them."

Dr. Aaron Roland, wo runs a family practice in northern California and is an associate clinical professor at UC San Francisco, had different concerns. "I wouldn't pay $200," Rolan said. He also wondered whether CrowdMed could attract the scale it needs. "Crowdsourcing is good when there's a lot of people in the crowd," he said, "but until you get that crowd, I'm suspicious."

Industry Connections

To help attract the required crowd, Heyman recruited Clare Martorana, the long-time editor of WebMD, to help support CrowdMed's outreach efforts. 

Not surprisingly, Martorana was very positive about the concept. There are many "experts," she said, not necessarily doctors, who may have suffered from a particular disease, or have a family member who has suffered, and whom can now contribute to the site.

She hopes to "reach out" to staffers - not just doctors - at medical research, counseling and support organizations that concentrate on specific issues - think, autism, for example, or Parkinson's dioease - and encourage them to participate in CrowdMed.

Martorana also suggested crowdsourcing diagnoses could be a boon for health insurance companies: "If you are insured and going to multiple specialists, but not getting relief, that costs a lot of money - you, your employer, your insurer all must bear those costs. At some point, there probably will be a pretty significant revenue stream for CrowdMed coming from insurance companies. Right now, their cost numbers are staggering."

Staggering Potential

The relatively paltry $1.1 million CrowdMed has raised so far suggest that investors remain unsure of the idea's potential risks and rewards. But connecting patients with chronic medical symptoms to experts, regardless of their titles, clearly holds massive disruptive potential. CrowdMed's ambitious, even inspiring idea is to use connectivity, collaboration and collective intelligence to help people avoid needless suffering. Despite the risks, it seems like it's a worth a try to me.

See also

• Social Revolution: Crowdsourcing For Change
• The Problem With Crowdsourcing Crime Reporting In The Mexican Drug War
• The Key To Crowdsourcing: Smarter Crowds

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock. Images of Jared Heyman and Carly Heyman courtesy of CrowdMed. Image of Clare Martorana via LinkedIn.

If you've got a lot of selfies, your tapping finger is in for a major workout. Today, Instagram pushed version 3.5 of its app to the iOS App Store and Google Play — and it's a big one for brands and users alike. 

Instagram 3.5 adds the ability to tag other Instagrammers in the photos you take. Unlike Facebook, where photo tagging has been routine for years, Instagram devotees have relied on a bare-bones system of @tags in the comments section below photos to give other users the heads-up that a given image is relevant to them.

I asked an Instagram rep if the new tagging feature is a play for making more money off mobile use — a revenue stream Facebook has square in its crosshairs. The company denies it: "At this time Instagram isn’t focused on monetization. [Instagram] rolled out this new feature because it was a missing piece to let people tell their stories... and to make it easier to add people and things to photos."

According to Instagram's business blog:

Photos of You also gives people a new way to explore photos of your business or brand. People can now add their favorite band to their concert photos from last night, the clothing brand they’re currently wearing or the coffee roaster who brews their morning cup of coffee. As a business or brand, Photos of You gives you a new way to curate and share the photos that best showcase your brand your brand[sic] as documented by your biggest fans.

Instagram's Biggest Update In, Well, As Long As We Can Remember 

Instagram hasn't made many major overhauls to its winning formula since launching in October 2010. Over the course of the last year, the app has trickled in a few new photo filters, a map view and a web interface, but not too much has changed — even after the great Instagram ToS debacle of last December.

Considering the level of loyalty that the company enjoys — particularly when compared to peers like its oft-disdained parent company — not tinkering with its recipe is smart. But, happily, so is this update.

Since version 3.5 was a simultaneous launch across platforms, Android and iPhone users eager to get their tag on can download the new app now. Update 3.5 also boasts improvements to image quality for photos uploaded on Android 4.0 and above (a relief for any Instagrammers who wonder why those Android photos never look quite right). 

Once you've got it downloaded, a pop-up will point to the new section, which lives on the far-right profile button (click the little image that looks like a driver's license).

In the profile view, you'll be greeted with a very Facebook-like silhouette of a person, again on the far right. This "photos of you" section compiles exactly that, though it will remain private until May 16 to give you time to pick your best selfie angles and curate accordingly. 

Why Brands Should Be Taking Notes

While other recent feature tweaks haven't shaken things up too much for Instagram, version 3.5 has all the trappings of a game-changer. Users will be pleased to have photos taken of them heaped into one neat little memory pile, while brands should be thrilled with their higher visibility on the young advertising platform. With photo tagging enabled, Instagram's platform should provide some unique perspectives on brand reach and the demographics of who is engaging and why. 

Plenty of brands have launched heavy-handed hashtag campaigns in an effort to figure out what makes Instagram users — ahem, potential customers — tick. Now, with the tagging feature, Instagram users will have a natural incentive to tag not just the "who", but the "what" and "where," too. Which should, in turn, spur more businesses to rev up their Instagramming.

But just remember, brands: Keep it real. An awkward hashtag is a fate worse than a grainy, Hefe-filtered selfie.

Editor's Note: This is part 1 of a 3-part series covering Len Kendall’s abstinence from the “Like” button throughout April.

Amidst the Boston Marathon tragedy, Facebook on Monday was a fascinating environment to observe. There was so much to NOT "like" that day—gruesome pictures shortly followed by inspirational images and quotes. Either way, merely hitting a button seemed inadequate to me. 

Good thing I'd already decided I wasn't going to "like" anything this month.

I ended up just donating money to the Red Cross Blood Collection service and then staying fairly silent.

The tragedy merely confirmed my decision to change a behavior that I, like many, have adopted into my daily activities. I'm not going to “like” anything on the internet. Anywhere. Not on Facebook, and not on websites featuring a similar “like” button.

Let me back up.

Not so long ago, there was a much wider gap between the various methods for acknowledging online content. At one end, you had the option of reading something and then doing absolutely nothing. On the other, you had things like leaving a comment, emailing the post to a friend, or writing a blog post in response to another you read elsewhere.

But in early 2009, an extremely low-impact feature came to exist: the "like." It was a brilliant addition, and it quickly has become a staple of daily Internet activity across the world, websites, and devices. It wasn't the first or last of its kind, but the "like" did ultimately become something that now gets billions of clicks. Facebook alone generates somewhere around 3 billion "likes" a day.

This weekend I stopped to evaluate my own usage of this button and came to the following unscientific but plausible conclusions:

• Only 5% of the time when I “like” something on the Web am I doing so to share it explicitly with my network. I do believe, though, that clicking “like” within Facebook helps drive what content becomes popular for my friends and myself. Sometimes it’s a big life moment like a wedding, other times it’s an Amazon review for a Banana Slicer.
• Hitting the “like” button on Facebook itself has stopped me from writing comments (and articulating actual thoughts) in response to items others are posting. I feel like I've already done enough by clicking a button.
• I’ve hit the "like" button thousands of times out of obligation, for worry that I might hurt someone's feelings or make them feel ignored.

So reviewing all the points above, I wondered about the following question: Who exactly is benefitting the most from me hitting this button? That’s the question I'm trying to solve for with this experiment.

In the meantime, here are a few observations from my first 72 hours of not hitting the “like” button—an action that I have taken everyday for probably the last two years.

1) I already slipped up once and had to go "unlike" something I "liked." It bothered me how mechanical the act of reading Facebook posts and "liking" had become.

2) I started leaving 10x more comments on posts, and have spent more time articulating my responses to longer discussion threads.

3) While my time spent on Facebook has continued to decrease, taking away the act of “liking” has further reduced my time on the social network and increased it on Twitter, Reddit, and get this…email.

4) I’ve continued to check Facebook immediately when a notification flag has popped up to see who has liked my posts. I suspect this won’t change throughout the experiment.

I may be overanalyzing here, but my hope is that it will spur others to reflect on their own low-impact, low-investment habits online. I’ll be providing a report in the next week or so with further observations. For now, I encourage you to either join me in this experiment, leave a comment below, or ... do absolutely nothing.

Just don't click that button.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Guest author Justin Smith is product engagement manager for BloomReach.

Understanding what people do on different social networks is the key to effectively using those networks for marketing. Companies currently spend 8.4% of their marketing budgets on social media, and that’s expected to grow to 21.6% in the next five years. But with so many social networks competing to grab marketing dollars, determining the most effective channels can be extremely difficult. To illustrate, let’s look at how Facebook and Pinterest stack up against one another.

Different Networks For Different Reasons

While both Facebook and Pinterest offer deep customer segmentations and user engagement, it would be a mistake to target audiences in the same way across both networks. For example, you wouldn’t market your product to someone shopping at a trendy boutique the same way you would to someone walking down the street with their friends. In a store, you’d likely look to make a sale, while on the street you’d probably have more luck building brand awareness.

Similarly, BloomReach’s analysis consistently shows that Pinterest has a higher concentration of people who are in a ‘buy’ state of mind, while Facebook users are more interested in interacting with friends - and brands. (According to Paul Adams, Facebook’s global head of brand design, Facebook’s strength is relationship-building, noting that many lightweight interactions over time can help promote brands.)

Traffic Analysis Tells The Tale

That is borne out by BloomReach’s analysis of total traffic – 46,277,543 site visits – for a set of retail clients from Sept. 20 through Dec. 31, 2012. We looked at five key metrics: total traffic, revenue per visit, conversion rate, bounce rate and average pages viewed. While Facebook delivered more than 7.5 times the traffic, Pinterest handily won the remaining four areas:

• Pinterest traffic spent 60% more than did traffic coming from Facebook.
• Pinterest traffic converted to a sale 22% more than Facebook.
• Facebook traffic bounced 90% of the time, compared to 75% for Pinterest.
• Facebook users viewed an average of 1.6 pages. Pinterest users saw an average of 2.9 pages – an 81% difference.

The average revenue per visit for Pinterest traffic was more than $1.50. But while Pinterest is able to drive highly lucrative leads – and the release of Pinterest’s Analytics Tool for Businesses should help companies make use of them - it can deliver only a relatively limited set of eyeballs.

Facebook Still Rules Awareness

If a company’s goal is to simply reach a larger audience to create or maintain brand awareness, Facebook remains the best option. Its sheer volume of users – 1.06 billion active monthly users, 680 million mobile users and 618 million daily users – and the army of people ready to sell impressions make it an easy channel to leverage. But it may be difficult to realize an immediate return on marketing investments on the network.

Perhaps the best approach is to look for ways to optimize Facebook campaign while expanding Pinterest presence. Both Facebook and Pinterest should become larger parts of the media mix model as visitor referrals from these sites grow. At the end of 2012, only 2.7% of total traffic in our analysis came from the networks, demonstrating that social commerce is still in an early stage. In the meantime, though, it seems fair to say that Pinterest is a more efficient marketing channel than Facebook.

If I can recommend a great local restaurant, leave a review for future patrons, alert my followers on Twitter, update my Facebook friends on my great new find - all in a few seconds - using only Yelp and my iPhone, why can't I similarly promote those businesses whose values I support?

Why is it so easy to tell thousands of people, literally, how awful a coffee shop's service is, for example, but I can't as easily steer people away from a store whose values I deplore? 

It seems to me there should be an app - or maybe lots of apps - that make it easy for me to find, check-in, rate, review and recommend those businesses whose values align with mine. Forget pet friendly - are they gay friendly, Earth friendly? Do they seek a massive reduction in the size of government, do they refuse to buy from China, will they never cross a union picket line and can I count on them to support a strong national defense?

With the Yelp app, for example, I can easily set various parameters for a restaurant search: proximity, price range, type of food and customer ranking. But values is not one of the choices. This seems like a rather significant gap within the mobile-social-local nexus. 

Values Equal Profits

There does not yet exist a robust analog for finding and supporting businesses I want to promote because of their values, and not simply their price, location or customer service. Why is that? In today's connected world - when anyone can get anything from anywhere, and always at the best price - values can become a core differentiator.

I don't want my money going to a business that is opposed to gay marriage. Perhaps that's exactly what you do want. Why not incorporate a "values" layer into Foursquare, for example and discover and share those businesses that have the very best lattes - and the strongest support for the values most important to me.

Foursquare users, for example, can "discover and learn about great places nearby, search for what you’re craving, and get deals and tips along the way." The app's 30 million users have checked in to various establishments more than 3 billion times. Consider the potential social good Foursquare could foster if values were made into a searchable variable. 

The Trust Issue

Can people be trusted to not list a business as, say, homophobic, just because they were angry over the price or a long line to check out? Is it possible to know if a business legitimately supports climate-change improvements, for example, or is really working to limit poverty? It may be hard for a business to lie about its prices but all too easy to claim social and political stances that it doesn't back up with actions.

Fortunately, with more than a hundred million smartphones in use in America - more than 1 billion worldwide - the aggregate numbers and big data "smoothing" of billions of values-based check-ins and reviews should mitigate any lies or mistakes. For example, Amazon product reviews can generally be relied upon as a valid barometer of popular sentiment, even though they're completely subjective.

A few websites already provide a limited form of "values-based" recommendations for businesses. For example, OutGrade, launched earlier this year, lets users "rate places by gay friendliness or homophobia." Users rate establishments on a scale from -5 to +5, and the site color codes businesses based on their overall score: red is homophobic, green is " gay friendly." The OutGrade site accepts ratings for any business: restaurant, dentist office, pub, hotel, etc. and in three months has garnered reviews on more than 3,500 businesses. 

OutGrade plans to release a mobile app "in the coming weeks." This is vital as it allows users to simply pull out their smartphones and find acceptable places in their immediate vicinity. While a website may offer a more robust experience, only an app can provide real-time location-based ratings and reviews, while boosting the reliability of recommendations by letting users initiate reviews on the spot.

One More Step

Why not an app that alerts me to a store's values as I walk inside? Or that alerts me to a product whose maker I want to support? For example, when I stare at that massive beer selection in the grocery store, perhaps my "values app" can remind me that Bud Light used social media to support gay marriage.

Plenty of apps and sites focus on a specific value or set of values, or utilize a top-down approach, where those who create the app set the rankings. This is a good start, but does not fully empower smartphone user to personally rate businesses by the values that matter to them. 

For example, the Good Guide site rates an array of products that are "healthy, green and socially responsible." While useful, the information covers only selected products and is rated by a "team of scientific and technology experts," not actual users.

The FishPhone app offers a similar service and provides the seafood ratings system for Whole Foods. Of course, Whole Foods' CEO was famously opposed to Obamacare. The app would never tell me that. 

This is a critical problem with single-focus and those not maintained not by the end users. For example, Ceres, "a network of over 130 investment funds, environmental organizations, unions and interest groups" promotes major companies that are making significant progress on sustainability goals. Ford was a recent winner. That's great, unless you believe that a large automobile manufacturer should never be included on a list of sustainability leaders.

Getting Comfortable With Controversial Topics

The issue preventing a user-driven values based shopping app is not a technical one. The larger issue is that too many of us are not yet comfortable with the very idea of values-based recommendations.

When it comes to choosing goods and services, we have spent our whole lives focused on price, quality and convenience. Values are fuzzy, harder to quantify - and can lead to difficult decisions. What if your friendly, neighborhood grocer, for example, turns out be a climate change denier - and you live in area prone to flooding? Once you learn the values of a business and determine you are in opposition, would you continue to shop there? Will supporting only businesses whose values align with yours merely serve to divide society instead of promoting the values in question?

The technology to make this possible already exists, so it's likely we'll have the answers soon enough.

iPhone image courtesy of Apple.

In honor of Opening Day, digital marketing firm Silverpop analyzed the social-mobile activities of all thirty Major League Baseball teams and their fans. Even better, they put their data into an infographic.

What have we learned? The New York Yankees, despite embarrassing themselves in last year's playoffs, are the most social team in baseball. (No Derek Jeter jokes allowed.)

The Yankees and the Red Sox have the most Facebook fans. (The SF Giants, whose home field is just a city block away from ReadWrite HQ, trail in fourth place, surprisingly enough.) Meanwhile, the Brewers-Rockies game in Milwaukee, somewhat surprisingly, produced the most Foursquare check-ins among all stadiums on Opening Day.

Expect advertisers and social media platforms to continue to reach out to baseball fans in the stadium, even during those high-drama moments. Baseball fans clearly like to have their smartphones with them at the game.

One of the big promises of social networking is that it will inject your networking skills with PED (performance enhancing data), able to give you the biggest network on the block. If you're a believer in the raw power of oh-so many social connections, that's OK. But if you're like me, you'll already hearing Janet Jackson's hit, What Have You Done For Me Lately? playing in your head. 

The problem with most social media is that the quality of your network degenerates as it grows. At first, best friends and business connections are added. Only to be followed by many requests from friends with few benefits. That sentiment may be harsh but in this day and age of Time Compression, the greatest value of business networking lies in its ability to improve daily dealings.

Unfortunately, as I'm sure you've already discovered, many of your "extremely well-connected" network contacts turn out to be, more often than not, less than stellar. So expect the next generation of social networks to devote a lot more attention to the purview of social capital.

Doing It The Analog Way

One company that provides a peek into the future of social networking is New York-based Relationship Science, a company founded by Neal Goldman, who reportedly raised the first $3 million of his $60 million investment in just three days.

Relationship Science has built the ultimate business Who's Who directory, relying on a staff of more than 800 people, located mostly in India. The data gathered over the past two years is derived strictly from publicly available information, Relationship Science CMO Josh Mait tells me.

What sets the company apart from most online directories is its interface. As Mait describes it, Relationship Science offers "institutional grade data in a consumer-friendly interface."

To use the data effectively you need to identify people you know well. Once your relationships are tagged, the system will show your total number of first-degree connections, which in Mait's case was about 18,000 connections produced by just 50 tagged relationships.

Relationship Science has cataloged millions of people and organized their affinities, connections and special interests in the ultimate networking directory, also conveniently available via iPad, as this image demonstrates.

Finding A Path

One of the most powerful features of Relationship Science is Path Finder, which lets you visually see how you're connected to someone else, say for example, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. Relationship links are color-coded as either strong, average or weak.

These relationships are based on many data elements, including education, memberships, interests, affiliations, career, boards, committees, non-profit donations, public holdings, awards and events. Anyone in sales will really appreciate this level of data granularity, all delivered in a simple interface.

Mait adds, "Our investors invested in the product because they saw themselves in it, networking is how they became successful." I truly believe that social networks like Linked In could learn from Relationship Science, although the company vigorously denies that it's a social network or a "traditional CRM system."

I predict that a lot of social innovation will come in the area of superior connection building. The watchword of the future being "social capital." People who blow other people off without communication will in the very near future be anonymously rated by their social media peers.

And those ratings will pop up in social capital databases that everyone will tap into. We can't wait to see how this futuristic science of relationships helps us all perform better. Until then, I suggest you spend $3,000 a year on Relationship Science. There's no better way to get to Howard Schultz.

Images via Relationship Science.

Editors Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly noted the cost of the Relationship Science service as $3000/month. It is actually $3000/year, and the article has been updated to reflect that amount.

Social networks like Facebook and Google+ are suddenly more image-happy than ever. And that's awesome, in theory. But images ≠ photos. And that's an important distinction. 

(See also Facebook Updates News Feed With Dedicated Feeds, Bigger Photos and Google+ Update Adds Crazy Big Cover Photos + Other Stuff.)

According to Facebook, today the News Feed is comprised of about 50% "visual content." What began as a spartan little text entry box is now a full-fledged multimedia monster, for better or worse. But the advent of Facebook's new "bright beautiful stories" may just mean more visual detritus to brush away from the content we really want to see, assuming it's out there at all.

Goodbye Clutter?

Trying to get a screen capture of the new News Feed Photos page earlier today, I had to refresh about ten times before anything worthy of being highlighted bubbled up. But even then, the rest of the stuff on the page was such an eyesore, I just went with the Facebook PR team's stock shot. My Photos tab (and the News Feed at large) remains a confusing mixture of Someecards and random images that people scoop up from around the Web and don't attribute. I've probably been guilty of this too, but whatever - I'm the one writing this story. 

In the News Feed example images, everything looks so good. I mean, if all of my friends only posted high-res photographs of their amazing blue-skied skiing adventures, I wouldn't be complaining. Maybe I need to friend more of Facebook's staff - they can clearly afford vacations chock full of photo opps. (Maybe they'll bring me along? I'm a pretty good time. Just sayin'.)

(See also An Early Sneak Peek At Facebook's New News Feed [Gallery].)

The Memes Come Marching In

The invasion of the meme might be partly to blame. I remember when memes hit Tumblr and then took off. I'd been blogging there since 2009. Back then I'd post original photos and original writing and the people I followed did the same. Then suddenly, one day it just flipped - Tumblr became a place for recycling jokes and reposting lolcats. I lost interest in it immediately and haven't really blogged there since. Now that Facebook is dominated by image updates, the News Feed is a morass of recycled content - and again, I'm losing interest.

Instagram's Unspoken Rule

Facebook may own Instagram, but the social photo sharing network has its own set of rules - many of them unspoken, selfies aside. Instagram made generating original content fun again. Sure, we're just taking little snapshots and posting them in quasi-realtime, but that's a hell of a lot more interesting than a retweet or a video gone viral. If anyone on my Instagram posts a screencap or a picture lifted from a different source, I unfollow them. Instagram is training people to populate and curate their own little photo portals - and it encourages even first-time photographers to  develop a unique aesthetic. It's no surprise that the most interesting images in my News Feed are all imported from Instagram. Instagram is a viewfinder, not a recycling bin.

(See also #Me: Instagram Narcissism And The Scourge Of The Selfie.)

Call me old fashioned. I like actual photos. I like text. I will not for the life of me watch a viral video unless I'm absolutely convinced it will be earth-shatteringly funny - and if I have to sit through an auto-play ad first, forget it. I'd take user-generated content on a sparse web 2.0-style personal blog over multimedia Web-recycling any day. Remember when people used to blog? Now most of us just move other people's content from one place to another and point at it. 

Content Other Other People Create

Chris Cox, Facebook's VP of Product, summed it up this at Facebook's big announcement Thursday morning: "Fundamentally we're a container for content other people create." But most Facebook users don't create content, they just borrow it from someone else who probably borrowed it from someone else after it made the rounds on Tumblr a few months ago. None of this is Facebook's fault. I've been test-driving the redesign and it looks and works great. It's a web culture issue - one accentuated by the new News Feed's "bright, beautiful stories".

Maybe I'm just cynical. Or maybe there really is nothing new under the sun. But if you ask me, social sites need more content creators - and fewer diligent meme mules ferrying viral junk from point A to point B with their heads down. 

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Facebook and Someecards.

Facebook just announced the biggest change to its design since Timeline shook things up back in 2011 — and actually, it looks pretty awesome. The big, popping visuals that Timeline introduced certainly heralded the News Feed redesign that Facebook announced today at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.

Big Changes Rolling Out Gradually

Facebook learned its lesson from that redesign too: the new News Feed will be rolling out, starting today, very gradually — folding in user feedback all along the way. The new News Feed design even includes a button that lets you revert to the old design, you know, if you're the afraid-of-change type.

But even if you are that type, this interface overhaul will probably strike your fancy. I didn't even realize how long in the tooth Facebook was starting to look until I activated the new design.

If you're anxious for a peek at the new News Feed, we've got plenty of images outlining the major new features. And don't panic — change can be a good thing. 

If you see this pop up on your News Feed, take the new design for a spin like so.

A new drop down menu makes it easy to hop between revamped News Feed hubs like Music, Games and Photos.

The new Music stream ties into apps like Spotify as well as posts by musicians, like Mr. Bowie.

Memes are bigger than ever now, literally.

A separate stream for accounts that you "follow" turns News Feed into, well, a news feed reader.

Now everyone will know about your quadruple word score.

Has the News Feed redesign popped up on your Facebook account yet? Let us know what you think!

Apparently it's not enough being a former Facebook marketing manager, owner of your own self consciously hip-yet-somehow-bottom-feeding media company, executive producer of the Bravo realityfest dot-bomb Silicon Valley, and social-media manners maven. Oh, right, and Mark Zuckerberg's sister.

So the notoriously shy and retiring Randi Zuckerberg, who has never traded on her better-known billionaire brother's success and influence to further her own ambitions, has decided to grace the world with what the Associated Press describes as a "memoir/lifestyle book" about her time at Facebook. Titled, naturally, Dot Complicated, which coincidentally is also what the demure Ms. Z calls her invitation-only "modern lifestyle newsletter." About which a little more in a moment.

A Good Zuckraking

What's RZ going to tell us? HarperCollins tells us she'll relate her "entrepreneurial journey" through her time at Facebook and beyond. You can probably count on her to give a whitewashed version of her parting of the ways with Facebook, which so far sounds pretty spicy. (Ms. Zuck herself has previously described herself at the time as being "a little irresponsible with my creativity" and going "a little rogue.")

You'll also doubtless be fascinated to learn that RZ'berg will also enlighten the masses on – believe it or not – "the multifaceted complications of our socially transparent world today, including issues of privacy, social identity, authenticity, crowd sourcing and the future of social change." Surely the ethics and human decency of photo sharing deserves its own chapter.

(See also Yes, Randi Zuckerberg, Please Lecture Us About 'Human Decency')

But wait, that's not all! Dot Complicated will also come as an enhanced e-book with "innovative and engaging interactive components," including a "platform for crowd sourced stories and social media integration" – whatever that is. Who wants to wager that Ms. Zuck will herself skillfully navigate the multifaceted complications of our socially transparent world by steering entirely clear of any controversies involving privacy, social identity, authenticity, crowd sourcing and the future of social change?

The divine Ms. Z had this to say for herself in the HarperCollins press release:

Technology has changed virtually every part of our lives, resulting in a modern, digital society that feels a lot like the wild, wild west. I am thrilled to be working with HarperCollins to share some of my own crazy experiences on the front lines of social media, and to inspire people of all ages to embrace technology, as well as the new set of social norms that come along with it.

As for what to expect from the "lifestyle" parts of the book, you can't do better than to sample Z's Dot Complicated newsletter and blog. (Invites to the newsletter are apparently pretty easy to come by, as I had no trouble acquiring one – though you never know when the velvet rope will go up.) The blog, for instance, currently features:

• Helpful business tips such as "Today, tech companies need to go to crazy extremes to stay 'hip' and recruit top talent" (from a post about tech-firm Harlem Shake videos that completely coincidentally leads off with two clips from the textbook-rental startup Chegg where ArrZee's husband works)
• Reviews of "ridiculous dating apps," including one that purports to rate your bedroom performance via smartphone motion/sound sensors and a timer
• Shout-outs to RandiZ's famous friends

But even a talent as unassuming as Randi Zuckerberg can't be confined to one book. She'll also publish a children's picture book simultaneously with Dot Complicated, about which she and HarperCollins had virtually nothing else to say. If you needed a new reason to fear for the next generation, you're apparently in luck.

Both books are due out in the fall. At least you have plenty of time to brace yourself.

Photo via Flickr user nrkbeta.no under CC 2.0 license.

Guest author Rob Tarkoff is the president and CEO of Lithium Technologies.

It's 2013. Social media is no longer new. It's a mature medium, one that has been woven into the fabric of consumer life online. So why are brands still determined to act like naive tourists, blundering around a foreign land and upsetting the natives? It's time to take back control.

Brands have been lectured for the last few years on the need to let go of the vice-like grip on their brand, to hand over control to their customers in social media. And it's true that social media has ushered in a new age of transparency, where customers want a far greater stake in any brand they interact with.

But this doesn't mean you can shrug your shoulders and simply launch your brand unguided onto a social network. In fact, it's your responsibility to guide your customers' social experience. And that means welcoming them back to your home online.

Almost all of the most embarrassing recent social media blunders took place on Facebook and Twitter; which offer brands little control over their campaigns or messaging.

Forget Likes, Fans & Followers

It's frankly shameful so many brands are still asking social media to deliver likes, fans, followers, views and channel performance indicators, not business results.

Forward-thinking brands ask social media to deliver things that make business sense. Things like higher customer satisfaction, greater loyalty, reduced support costs and increased revenue.

Social media can be a game-changer, but only when we get serious about the social customer experiences. It's really not that difficult.

First, we must face the facts about social networks like Facebook - they just don't constitute a viable social media strategy. They're almost certainly not where you want to make your home. Only .5% of fans ever mention the brands they like on Facebook and just 2% of fans return to Facebook brand pages a second time.

If you really want to engage with your customers on social channels, you need to engage on your own social hubs: customer forums, blogs and communities.

When cosmetics retailer Sephora realized it had little ability to truly engage its nearly 1 million Facebook fans, for example, the company built its own social hub, Beauty Talk. Sephora now has the ability to engage and enlist their social customers to participate - and Beauty Talk members spend 10x more than the average customer.

Driving this kind of outcome is simply not possible on Facebook.

Social Media Is Not A Silo

Today, only a shocking 11% of companies say their social strategy is guided by insights from other business groups. This means 89% of social strategy happens in a silo. To drive social customer experience to the strategic level, it's essential to get others involved - across marketing, support and sales.

Next, stop playing. Experimentation is great. Endless experimentation is not. Make social engagement a core part of how you interact with your customers. Some 63% of consumers now search for help from other customers online. For example, Hewlett Packard has saved $50 million since launching its social support solution.

Measure What's Important

Now, start measuring the actual impact of your social media strategy. Ban the pointless hunt for buzz, likes, comments, high fives - what do they really mean for your business?

Instead, move to the same metrics you apply to any other area of your business, like reduced costs, greater satisfaction and increased revenue.

Once you have these foundations in place, it's time to scale. A single Twitter campaign can create an ocean of comments. How do you deal with that flood? By enabling your social customers to help each other. Skype community members help more than 3 million customers per month and resolve 70% of cases on first contact. Hewlett Packard's social customers handle 20% of the company's global support. 

With nearly 1.5 billion people using online social networks today, social media can no longer remain an afterthought - a sandbox for dabbling. Brands need to treat their social media investment as a core part of their long-term business transformation, not as a specific activity that you want to check off the list. Anything less just isn't serious.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guest author Mat Young is senior director of products at Fusion-io,

In recent years, big data and technology have infiltrated nearly every part of our lives – and dating is no different. Today, approximately 20% of relationships begin through some sort of online or mobile dating service. It’s estimated that there are 90 million single people over the age of 18 in the United States. According to Match.com, 40 million of them online dating services – more than 40% of the country’s single population. If those numbers don’t seem big enough, China is the world leader in online dating, with more than 140 million users looking for a match online.

(See also Top Dating Apps For iPhone, iPad and Android)

The unsung hero of online love is the infrastructure that supports these dating applications. As more people turn to online and mobile dating, databases containing profile info, photos and messages between users continue to grow as well. The scale means that innovative tools are needed – along with more powerful infrastructure – to keep matching up potential pairs.

Cupid’s Changing Industry

It’s estimated that in 2010, users spent more than twice the amount of time connecting to dating websites than they did using mobile dating apps. Just one year later, in 2011, these numbers flipped, as users began spending slightly more time on dating apps than websites. Whatever platform users prefer, online dating is booming as services use technology to match up people with shared interests and values.

Today, the number of people using dating apps is growing faster than all other apps combined. Of note is that the average age of the online dater is 48 – proving that Baby Boomers are more connected than ever. This coincides with general trends showing more adults than ever are connecting via mobile devices – the same devices they are using for mobile dating.

These well-connected users have helped propel the online dating industry to top $1 billion in annual revenues, providing online dating websites with even more reason to continue searching for innovative solutions.

Of course, this kind of growth adds more stress to mobile and wireless networks, not to mention the servers hosting the applications – a welcome challenge for online dating providers.

Match.com found out how important scalability was when it began struggling to keep up with a growing user base and its 70 terabytes of data. With an upgraded SQL Server solution from Microsoft, Match.com was able to move user data across more than 100 servers in two seconds, while also providing sufficient infrastructure for future growth.

Big Data Meet Online Dating

While many users may not see, or care, how data is crunched to help them find the perfect mate, database admins, Big Data scientists and mathematicians all play an important role in formulating the perfect match.

When a user signs up on eHarmony, for example, they are required to fill out a 400-question profile outlining personal preferences, physical traits, hobbies and many other telling details. Using that data, an Oracle 10G database makes a few suggestions for possible matches.

Then the real magic happens.

The system compares the users extensive list of answers to the site’s 20 million other users – a process that requires a billion calculations for each bachelor or bachelorette. After comparing information using a sophisticated algorithm, the site provides the user with matches. eHarmony’s dataset alone exceeds 4 terabytes of total data, not including photos and other information.

These fine-tuned formulas and powerful datacenters are the trade secret of these online dating services. As users change preferences, provide feedback on proposed matches and refine their profiles, eHarmony uses that information to refine search results for proposed matches.

Optimizing For True Love

Just like with any database, the quality of output is based on data input. Users who accurately answer questions and provide truthful information are likely to receive the best love matches.

Considering the human element, though, perfect matches venture far beyond math and science. Even if every user tried to be completeley honest in their responses, personality matches might not be completely accurate. People often perceive themselves differently than how the rest of the world sees them.

Some observers look for an objective system of understanding potential compatibility, while others believe a completely automated matchmaking service that removes human input could never work.

Most likely, the next innovations in compatibility science will be come through a technological love triangle, where advanced hardware and software solutions in enterprise and hyperscale datacenters will enable development of unique new applications that can help real people find true love more efficiently.

(See also Taking My Dating Mobile: A Social Experiment)

Yahoo's mobile gameplan is shaping up fast - or its stable of mobile apps is, anyhow. Yahoo has now acquired Alike, a mobile location-based suggestion engine app à la Foursquare. The news broke on the same day that CEO Marissa Mayer took the stage of the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference to repeat her clarion call for Yahoo's new direction.  

Paring Down Yahoo's Mobile Mess

At the conference, Mayer took a verbal machete to Yahoo's existing tangle of apps, announcing plans to cull Yahoo's ridiculous current mess of 60 to 70 apps down to around a dozen core mobile products. 

At the same time, though, Mayer also keeps adding apps. In her tenure at Yahoo so far, she has already brought two other mobile apps with social tendencies on board: Stamped, a social-suggestion network that could be interwoven with Alike's DNA, and OnTheAir, a livestreaming app that facilitates video chat.

There's no word yet on how much Yahoo paid for the small Seattle-based company, which will integrate into Yahoo's San Francisco and Sunnyvale offices. In a statement on its website, the team behind the now-discontinued Alike app announced the big news.

Alike To Join Yahoo In The Sunshine State

"We’ve always been passionate about the growing power of intelligent mobile experiences," read the statement from the Alike team. "We believe that distilled information, deeply personalized and made accessible anytime and anywhere, is what makes mobile experiences a part of our customers’ daily lives. In Yahoo! we've found a team as excited about this vision as we are, and who are serious about making it real."

While pruning Yahoo is no small task, Mayer is making decisive moves toward her roadmap for the ailing internet giant. With a trio of nimble mobile teams under her wing and a clearer vision for a company recently known for trying to do everything at once, she just needs to stay her own course.

Facebook is no stranger to being sued, but a new lawsuit filed against the company this month might be the weirdest to date. 

As of February 5, Facebook is being sued by deceased Dutch programmer and apparent social web pioneer Joannes Jozef Everardus Van Der Meer, who passed away in 2004 - the year of Facebook's founding. The late Van Der Meer's justice will be sought by Rembrandt Social Media, the company that now owns his patents, and the law firm of Fish & Richardson. 

Thomas Edison's Legal Team v. Facebook

The lawsuit, filed in the state of Virginia's federal court, alleges that Facebook infringed upon two of Van Der Meer's patents. The first, U.S. Patent No. 6,415,316, introduced a "Method and apparatus for implementing a web page diary," which the suit will contend was a precursor to Timeline. The second, U.S. Patent No. 6,289,362, outlined a "System and method for generating, transferring and using an annotated universal address," and has the Like button in its sights. The patents were filed in 1998 and issued to Van Der Meer in 2002 and 2001, respectively. So both pre-date the 2004 launch of Facebook. Social bookmarking company Add This is also being sued for violation of the second patent.

While it's hard to imagine that such a strange case will have much ground to stand on, Fish & Richardson has deep roots in intellectual property, counting Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers among its early clients. Facebook's legal team hasn't been around since 1878, but isn't exactly new to this sort of thing. (And hey, it's hiring - this might be a long one, after all.) 

Patent-holder Rembrandt claims that the patents "represent an important foundation of social media as we know it" and is seeking royalties on this so-called foundational knowledge until 2021.

Um, Surfbook?

According to Ars Technica, it gets even weirder. Around the time he filed the patents, Van Der Meer also owned www.surfbook.com, though what he intended to do with the domain is a mystery. According to a Whois search, surfbook.com is now owned by brand protection group MarkMonitor. 

The IP claim on "web page diaries" would seem to have some big implications for pretty much the whole internet. Besides, some of us were already avidly documenting what we had for lunch on sites like Open Diary and LiveJournal in the internet dark age of 1999, back when Timeline was only a twinkle in Zuckerberg's eye. 

Image of Mark Zuckerberg by Taylor Hatmaker

After it had an unfortunate bout of hardcore porn top its charts, the social video sharing app Vine has upped its age rating to 17+. By bumping up its age bracket, Vine is trying to remain Apple's good graces - and in the App Store. The great Cupertino moral arbiter has been on a something of a rampage lately, protecting us from ourselves by blocking apps like 500px, probably the classiest photography app around.

Frequent, huh? Vine version 1.05 also adds the ability to report or block a user, which is a decidedly more useful tool for warding off a phalanx of auto-playing phalluses in your video feed. The age restriction itself is nominal at best. Rather than implementing any actual robust parental controls like those woven into the Kindle Fire ecosystem, Apple is content dotting its i's and crossing its t's. 

Apple has a long track record of moral policing and arbitrary, occasionally anti-competitive gestures toward the apps that make their way into its (supposedly) carefully curated stable. With its new 17+ rating, Twitter's Vine app joins the ranks of "Free Sex Positions Decision Maker," a 2-star App Store gem and a personal favorite for those times you're feeling indecisive and need to consult your iPhone. Meanwhile YouTube, Flickr and a host of other content-sharing apps remain friendly for those ages 12 and up. 

Vine update 1.05 also added the ability to share Vine videos on social networks after shooting them, resolving our main complaint from the time we got a little loopy with Vine on launch day. 

Well, that's it folks. It's all over. Instagram has come to the web - and not just via static web profiles like the company introduced last year.

No, Instagram is on the web now. It's a full blown web-based social network with a companion app. Forgive me while I totally freak out for a minute over here.

This is what I've been afraid of. 

For Instagram, The Rules Were Different

Instagram is special. It's why we Instagram acolytes almost start a holy war every time Facebook so much as looks at its billion-dollar acquisition. But what makes Instagram so different? The app has a lot going for it, sure. The interface is lovely, with both social networking and social discovery built right in. But that's not it.

The thing that makes Instagram special is that - until today - it was a social network with no web presence. There's an inestimable charm to how Instagram feels walled-off in its mobile-only realm.  You just don't interact with Instagram on desktop. The rules are different. It's like when the power goes out and you have to play board games. And it's really, really fun. 

Mobile-Only: The Final Frontier Of Play

Look at how (and why) we love to hate Facebook. As a social network, Facebook is woven into the fabric of our workday lives - namely we use it on on our desktop computers when we're supposed to be doing something else entirely. That fact makes a site like Facebook feel less like play and more like a professional tic. A social network with a ubiquitous presence across platforms becomes something we shove into every micromoment of the workday - and most of those happen while we're zoning out sitting at a desk.

Instagram wasn't like that - it was serendipitous and social and creative in turns. But that may have all just changed. Now, in every inbox lull and pre-meeting chunk of lagtime, we'll open a new tab and feel the tug - why not just check Instagram? 

The Unbearable Lightness Of Instagram

There's a heaviness to all of this attentional straying. It's the dopamine surge that lures us back to places like the Facebook News Feed, even though we know that little pleasure spike in our brain is as empty as it is ephemeral. Then we're back to the unshakeable guilt of what we were abandoned when we wandered off the trail. 

Mobile is monomaniacal — even with Android's multitasking and iOS's relatively nascent notification center and fast app switching, we pick a portal and enter into it. But on a computer, we partition our screen off into hostile factions warring for our attention - and we never seem to be on the winning side. But on mobile, choosing to open Instagram is just that: a choice and not a tic. 

Instagram is meant to be us at play, capturing the world and parceling it back out to our friends who are out there doing just the same. For Instagram, mobile is more than just a platform. It's a mindset.

Sure, Instagram's web feed will boost engagement and provide new opportunities for monetization and so on. But it could prove to be a major paradigm shift for the kind of unconditional positive regard that the company has enjoyed to date. 

We'll soon be wallowing in our newly compounded web ennui, scrolling back through our web feeds to remember what the good ol' days were like, way back when Instagram was still fun. 

Remember?

The Ravens may have walked away with Sunday's real glory, but Super Bowl XLVII was also an epic day for Twitter. The social media service is a natural choice for up-to-the-minute news and commetary of a nation glued to the game. Across 24.1 million tweets, Super Bowl watchers cheered for their team of choice (@ravens or @49ers), commented on the chaos when the lights went out and chatted up 5.5 million tweets about half-time performer and all-around pop culture demi-goddess Beyoncé.

According to Twitter's official blog, the top most-tweeted moments of Super Bowl XLVII were as follows (measured in Tweets-per-minute or TPM):

1. Power outage: 231,500 TPM
2. 108-yard kickoff return for Ravens TD by Jones: 185,000 TPM
3. Clock expires; Ravens win: 183,000 TPM
4. Jones catches 56-yard pass for Ravens TD (end of 2nd quarter): 168,000 TPM
5. Gore TD for 49ers: 131,000 TPM

Twitter Tops Facebook

Twitter also made an extremely strong showing in the commercials, the real meat of the game for some viewers. With 26 mentions (counted as a hashtag, a URL, a logo or a verbal name drop) in the 52 nationally aired Super Bowl XLVII commercials, Twitter bested Facebook for advertisement shout-outs by a factor of more than six . Facebook scored a surprisingly low four mentions. Last year, out of 59 national commercials, Twitter and Facebook were both mentioned eight times each. 

Brands with Twitter mentions in their Super Bowl XLVII commercials, courtesy of some real-time tallying over at MarketingLand: 

1. M&Ms – #betterwithmms
2. Audi – #braverywins
3. Hyundai – #pickyourteam
4. GoDaddy – #thescore
5. Doritos – #doritos
6. Best Buy – #infiniteanswers
7. Disney Oz – #disneyoz
8. Fast & Furious movie – #fastandfurious
9. Toyota – #wishgranted
10. Doritos – #doritos
11. Calvin Klein – #calvinklein
12. Cars.com – #nodrama
13. Bud Light – #herewego
14. Hyundai Sonata – #epicplaydate
15. Volkswagen – #gethappy
16. Subway – #15yrwinningstreak
17. Subway – #FebruANY
18. Bud Light – #herewego
19. Subway – #FebruANY
20. Bud Light – #herewego
21. MiO Fit – #changestuff
22. Pistachios – #crackinstyle
23. Speed Stick – #handleit
24. Budweiser Clydesdales – #clydesdales
25. Tide – #miraclestain
26. Samsung – #thenextbigthing

Which hashtags actually scored the most social traction during the big game? According to Networked Insights, the following brands came out on top:

• #Doritos (Pepsi Frito-Lay)
• #Clydesdales (Budweiser)
• #CrackInStyle (Wonderful Pistachios)
• #CalvinKlein (Calvin Klein)
• #GodMadeAFarmer (Ram)

Taking other social networks into account, including Facebook, blogs and other forums, these were the top 10 ads by social mentions:

1. GoDaddy's "Perfect Match"  (255,121)
2. Taco Bell "Viva Young"  (213,125)
3. Calvin Klein "Concept 30"  (209,539)
4. AB InBev "Brotherhood"  (154,037)
5. Ram "Farmer"  (96,326)
6. Orea "Cookie v Cream" (65,373)
7. Wonderful Pistachios "Crackin' Style"  (58,938)
8. Tide "Miracle Stain"  (55,770)
9. Doritos "Goat"  (51,053)
10. Doritos "Fashionista"  (47,962)

What Does It All Mean?

Facebook has 1.06 billion members and isn't going away. But now that everyone and their grandma is on the social network, Facebook may not be the frontier of social cool it once was.

And since Super Bowl commercial slots are among the most coveted in the entire year, brands are well-served to put their best, brightest, hippest face forward, and this year that meant nudging couch potatoes toward their Twitter account or hashtag in real-time - exactly what Twitter does best.

Image via cloud.li.

Ready to take those empty threats to the next level?

You and me both. Right now, a ton of people I know (plenty of RW staffers among them) are at the digital breaking point. It's why we have ReadWrite Pause. It's why we occasionally totally freak out and take a harsh light to the virtual habits that increasingly dictate the course of day to day life, our moods and even our subjective experience of happiness. 

Something's Gotta Give

In a moment of clarity two nights ago, I decided to carve out the biggest timesuck/brainsuck/sanitysuck that I could identify, or the one with the least everyday returns: Facebook. Yesterday afternoon I archived all of my data and I pulled the trigger. 

Don't get me wrong, as much as I criticize it (and think doing so is absolutely necessary for an entity with so much power and reach), Facebook is an amazing tool for connecting and reconnecting with friends and acquaintances. Yet it does reel us into compulsive web habits, the likes of which I'm trying to break. Even my friends who never appear to be active on the site admit to spending hours trawling their News Feeds every day in stealth-mode. We creep and like and share and tag and ... I'm just not sure what it all adds up to. It feels like increasingly less than the sum of its parts. 

On Facebook Since Day 1

I joined Facebook in the spring of 2004 as user #806,469. I've used it pretty steadily with only occasional lapses since the day I signed up. Then I used it to meet people I didn't know before I moved to New York to go to college. Now I almost exclusively use it to find and discover local events, concerts, cool talks, parties and the like, and to collect the photos I take of my friends. 

Really?

An Experiment In Subtraction

I disabled my account a) to see how long I can go; and b) how it affects my digital and non-digital life. My friends and community are really active about Facebook Events, so I imagine it'll be a bit more of an analog effort to know what's going on. But if I like the tranquility of a non-Facebook addicted life enough, maybe I'll stick with it awhile. Maybe I'll do the same thing with Twitter, though that one is the real necessity in this whole tech blogging line of work thing. (Or maybe it just feels like one.)

I didn't go nuclear. I just deactivated my account, rather than deleting it. I've been on Facebook for so long I'm going to have to work up to that bit if I go that far. For the record, since I report on Facebook constantly, I have another dummy account that I use to test new features. I won't be using that one to sneak in any News Feed time, though. Stay tuned to see what happens, and if I'll spend my entire weekend inside as a social pariah with a Netflix account.

lev radin / Shutterstock.