For anyone who loves taking pictures, the arrival of digital photography has been a huge benefit: for one thing, even the cheapest smartphone has a camera in it whose quality would have seemed almost unimaginable a decade ago. The result is that it is easier than it has ever been to take a good snapshot, but it also means we are drowning in digital photos. And instead of taking up a few shoeboxes in the corner of the basement somewhere, they are piling up on memory cards and hard drives and DVDs, as well as on dozens of incompatible photo-sharing services and social networks. Where are these digital memories going to be when we need them in the future?

I have been thinking about this ever since I got my first digital camera (which had a then-impressive resolution of 1.2 megapixels), and it comes to mind every time I try to organize all the photos I have taken across multiple computers and devices and services. I was reminded of it again on Thursday when I attended the funeral of an old family friend. As with so many life events, there were stand-up photo galleries put together by his daughters and other relatives, with hand-picked prints from his early years: his wedding, his children when they were babies and so on. Afterward, there were family albums to look through, each with treasured (if slightly yellowing) photos of special moments.

Will our digital photos be there when we want them?

There was a DVD of some photos as well, but it wouldn’t play on the funeral home’s DVD player for some reason. That got me thinking about the technological aspect of trying to retain our digital memories — the need to transfer photos and video from incompatible format to incompatible format, from old memory cards or Minidiscs to new ones, the fears about DVDs deteriorating over time until they become unreadable. Printed photos may get yellow, but at least you can still make out what is in them.

Of course, we should all be printing out special photos that we take and storing them carefully so that we will always have a copy. But who has the time to do that? The same people who are scanning all of their old printed photos and saving them somewhere other than a shoebox, presumably. There are services that will do this for you, of course, but that also takes time and is expensive. Like many people, I try to back up my pictures to an external hard drive, and I also use Flickr as a backup. But how do I know Flickr will still be around in 20 or 30 years? Facebook clearly wants to be the main repository for your digital memories with its new Timeline view, which looks better when you upload all of your photos, and it is a useful feature. But what happens if Facebook becomes the next AOL or the next Friendster? Then you have to download all of those photos (if Facebook still has them) and find somewhere to put them.

That is the other downside of digital photography. At the funeral I attended, there were a handful of photos of special moments, and it probably didn’t take all that long to pick them out, even though this friend took a lot of pictures during his life. But with film cameras, most people would wind up with perhaps a few dozen photos during the course of a year, taken at birthdays, on holidays, etc. Now it is so easy to take pictures that it is difficult to stop — I went on vacation for a couple of weeks and took over 300 photos. More than 250 million pictures are uploaded to Facebook every day.

Easier to take but harder to find

Not all of those photos are worth keeping, of course, but when storage is so cheap and sorting through them takes so long, why not just put them all somewhere and forget them? And so they pile up, gigabyte after gigabyte. Some recent research found that 39 percent of those surveyed couldn’t find digital pictures of a recent life event, even one that took place less than a year earlier. Instead of helping us remember the key moments in our lives, digital photos seem to be making it harder.

Apps like Instagram and Path, both of which I love, actually make this problem worse instead of better in some ways. They are great for sharing quick snapshots of a place you are visiting or someone you are with or what you are eating — and you can share those easily to Flickr and Facebook and Tumblr and lots of other platforms (more than 26 photos are uploaded to Instagram every second). But do you want to save all of these for a lifetime, along with the ones you took of your new baby or your sister’s wedding? Probably not. So again, there is a filtering problem.

These problems are compounded when it comes to video, of course: It is just as easy to shoot, takes even longer to process or edit, takes up more space, and yet is likely to be just as ephemeral in nature. And that is not to mention all the videos that are trapped on Hi-8 tapes and mini-DVDs and other formats.

In the past, photographs were treasured because they were so rare: It took so long to make them and the process was so expensive that having one meant a lot. It was like a moment in time had been frozen forever, and the way those photos could trigger memories was unlike almost anything else. Now photos are just another form of digital detritus; there may be treasures in there somewhere, but we don’t have time to find them, if we can even remember where they are. Photography seems to have become more ephemeral, less permanent — whether that is a good thing or not remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Dear Photograph and Flickr user Leon Rice-Whetten

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications

If Google and Twitter were to describe their relationship in one word, it would probably be “complicated.” For the past week or so, the two have been sniping at each other about Google’s new social-search features, and how Twitter doesn’t show up as high as it should in those results — thanks to what it sees as favoritism of Google’s own Google+ network. But this particular brouhaha is only the latest manifestation of a much deeper problem between the two, like a fight over the toothpaste, or who did the laundry last. Both sides need each other more than they would probably like to admit.

When Google launched its new “Search plus Your World,” which the search giant claimed would give users a view of what their social networks were recommending and sharing, Twitter was among the first to point out that all Google was really doing was promoting its own social network in search. Twitter said it was “disappointed” in the move, and suggested Google wasn’t fulfilling its chosen role as an impartial search provider, and Twitter’s general counsel (and former Googler) Alex Macgillivray went even further and said the search company’s move was “a bad day for the Internet.”

Not one to take criticism lying down, Google responded with a somewhat passive-aggressive statement about how it would love to show more Twitter results, but was obeying the “rel=nofollow” rules laid down by Twitter (which are designed to prevent Google from assigning page-rank value to certain links as part of its indexing process). The search company also pointed out that Twitter was the one that broke off the previous deal between the two which gave Google access to the full “firehose” of Twitter data, which formed the basis of Google’s short-lived real-time search offering.

Google: “It’s your fault.” Twitter: “No it’s your fault”

This week, Twitter came back with its own argument, and stuck a thumb in Google’s eye to boot: Developers with the company collaborated with Facebook Director of Product Blake Ross on a browser plugin called “Don’t be evil,” which is designed to show what Google’s search results would look like if the search giant gave content from Twitter and Facebook the prominence it deserves, instead of favoring Google+ results.

In a lot of ways, listening to Google and Twitter feels like watching a divorced couple fighting in court over who gets custody of the kids. And while neither side wants to go into detail about what’s keeping them apart, or what the root of their problems are, there are clues there to be found: For example, Google is clearly miffed it spent so much time developing its real-time search based on Twitter’s firehose feed, only to have Twitter pull out of the deal and leave it hanging. According to several sources, the breaking point in that discussion was that Twitter wanted more money for access to its data.

Twitter, meanwhile, keeps pointing out that Google can and does index its content without any kind of special access. Twitter’s communications team noted Google hits its servers more than 120 million times a day, and Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan has described how there is plenty of content from Twitter in Google’s results. But the real issue is more complicated: According to some observers, including Rakesh Agrawal, Google can’t index all the content that streams through Twitter in real time without special access, because with 250 million tweets a day or so, there’s just too much of it.

Google could crawl Twitter more aggressively and more often, these observers say, but that would cost more time, money and bandwidth — and on Twitter’s side of the coin, if Google were to crawl more aggressively, it could impact the network by slowing it down or even causing it to crash, which Twitter definitely doesn’t want. Having raised almost a half billion dollars in financing last year at a valuation of $8 billion, the last thing the company wants is to have the “fail whale” start popping up because Google is hammering away at its servers trying to catch up with all the new content.

Google and Twitter both need each other

As with most troubled relationships, the saddest part of this whole situation is that Google and Twitter really need each other, and in many ways they should be the perfect couple: Twitter has a huge and rapidly-growing information network, but it has no real search function to speak of — or at least not one that works very well. Indexing and searching 250 million tweets a day is not a small problem. Google, of course, is an expert at making sense of huge quantities of data, and it also needs more social signals in order to improve its search. That’s why it started Google+ in the first place.

Theoretically the two have plenty to offer each other, and plenty to gain from a better relationship — which is why Google has reportedly tried to acquire the company in the past. But Twitter seems determined to build a standalone entity, and appears to be heading towards an IPO rather than an acquisition — and a market valuation of $8 billion or so makes it a rather large mouthful, even for Google. And so we have a classic standoff, in which neither side wants to admit that it needs or wants what the other one has to offer.

Is there some kind of relationship counsellor who could fix this broken couple? No one seems to be stepping up to offer their services.So users wind up with no functional Twitter search, and Google results that are one-sided to the point of being distorted, which as I’ve pointed out before is a breach of the search company’s promise to users when it went public in 2004, not to mention a red flag for antitrust regulators. In other words — as with so many dysfunctional relationships — no one wins.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users fPat Murray and Stefan

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media

With the advent of smartphone and Facebook ubiquity and pervasive GPS services, Highlight CEO Paul Davison says that we now have more information about the people around us than ever before. However, there are few services that bring that data together and combine all the social and location data available to show us when our friends and friends of friends are nearby.

There is Facebook, which lets us connect with friends and share information about our occupations, interests and loved ones. And there is Foursquare, of course, which allows its users to self-select when they share locations with those whom they have marked as their friends. But there are few tools with the ability to seamlessly provide real-time updates whenever a social connection — or a possible social connection — is nearby.

Highlight hopes to create synchronicity in meeting people, to reduce the friction of introductions and getting to know one another if its users already know they have things in common. “I started with the idea that if you can just take two people and connect them, you can make the world a better place,” Davison told me last week.

After downloading and installing the app, users connect their accounts with Facebook, add a few minor personal details . . . and then they sit around and wait. Or move around and wait. Either way, eventually users will be pinged when they get within a reasonable distance of someone they might know or someone their friends know on Facebook.

That might seem creepy, especially when the app pings you to say someone you have never met before is nearby. But Davison maintains that there are some interesting use cases. Imagine, for instance, that you met someone at a party or through a mutual friend and see them a few days later in a completely unrelated situation. If you were both Highlight users, the app would not only notify you that this potential contact was nearby but would also give you important information to help you strike up a conversation — the person’s name, for instance, which can be especially useful if, like me, you tend to forget names but remember faces. It would also let you know what that person’s occupation is and which friends you might have in common.

The app seems perfectly suited for the San Francisco tech scene, where everyone seemingly knows everyone else, or should. And that is where it is focusing its beta efforts, trying to refine the proximity of how and when people receive notifications before expanding to other parts of the country. Davison notes that in San Francisco, letting you know that one of your friends is a couple of miles away probably isn’t very useful, but in smaller cities in the Midwest, where everyone drives everywhere, that kind of data could be useful (especially if you are both in town from other places).

Of course, for Highlight to really become useful, it will need users to actually download the app and opt in, creating a sort of critical mass of connections. I was part of a closed alpha trial and received pings when a handful of people nearby. None of them were close enough to actually say hello, but a few had strong enough personal connections for me to have introduced myself if I were.

It also needs a little tweaking when it comes to recognizing in which situations it should ping users. I found most Highlight activity occurred while I was on a bus or on my bike rather than when I was quietly seated at a cafe, where I might have had a chance to say hello to someone. As the app collects more data, it should be able to refine the experience.

Finally, the persistent location tracking can be a battery drain, which was both my experience as well as that of colleagues that I had test it out with me. Constantly pinging location services in the background made my iPhone’s battery run down much more quickly than usual, causing me to need to recharge by the end of the day. Davison says that is something else that Highlight is hoping to optimize, for instance by recognizing when users have changed location and when they are sitting tight.

If Highlight can tweak those things as it moves beyond its current hundred or so users to potentially thousands and tens of thousands, it could become a useful app for creating seamless real-life connections among people. Given how open users have become about the information they share, it seems like only a matter of time before Highlight — or something like it — manages to become the connective tissue between the social-local-mobile worlds.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt

Crowdsourcing the inventory selection

Firstly, rather than populating its site with objects selected by a group of buyers operating autonomously based on their own taste, LuxeYard is taking cues from its users on what items to sell. LuxeYard members can post photos of the type of items they’d like to buy on social media platforms, and other members can vote up on products they would also like to buy. Essentially, the items for sale on site will be crowdsourced according to users’ wants.

LuxeYard screenshot (click to enlarge)

“We’re really establishing a pattern of listening,” LuxeYard COO Steve Beauregard said in a phone interview Monday. “We’re really trying to build a conversation around certain pieces, and that will help focus our buyers and attune them to our users’ tastes, rather than just buying something they think is interesting.”

Taking group buying one step further

Secondly, LuxeYard is employing truly flexible group buying. This is where members use their social networks to encourage their friends to buy the same product on LuxeYard they’re buying, thereby driving down the price of that item. For example: I could buy a chair on LuxeYard for $150, and then post about that chair on Facebook. If a certain number of other people end up buying the same chair, the final cost for everyone buying the chair could be driven down to $100.

A unique financial starting point

And another unique thing about LuxeYard is that it’s hitting the ground running from a financial perspective. The company has raised $3.5 million from private investors, but has technically already gone public by conducting a reverse merger into a publicly-held shell company. Details are still being ironed out, so there is no public float to LuxeYard’s stock, but it will begin trading under the ticker symbol “LXRD” at some point in the coming months. Access to public market investors will potentially give LuxeYard the monetary wherewithal to compete head-to-head in the flash sales and group buying space already filled with solid players such as Wayfair, One Kings Lane and others, not to mention more general e-commerce sites such as Amazon.

But how long can exclusivity last?

Now, LuxeYard also claims it will be more choosy about the items it selects to sell on the site. According to Beauregard, if a company’s products are already being sold on existing e-commerce sites or major chain stores, LuxeYard will not sell any of its products. That’s an honorable goal, but true exclusivity is not always an easy thing to maintain when you’re also balancing the demand from investors for constant growth. And being that LuxeYard is starting out as a public company with notoriously demanding Wall Street-style investors, that could be an even harder balance to strike. But overall, LuxeYard’s offering seems unique enough that the company has a good shot at success — even in the hyper competitive world of e-commerce.

Here’s one more screenshot of LuxeYard (click to enlarge):

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Going social: Recommendations engines need to factor in consumer reviews
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Polar Mobile already covers a wide range of mobile devices. Its SMART platform provides turnkey solutions for launching native apps on iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry OS, PlayBook, Windows Phone and Nokia devices. It’s definitely a leader in terms of white-label native-app solution providers, but the new funding, led by Toronto-based Georgian Partners, will help it extend its reach further still.

Polar Mobile CEO Kunal Gupta told me the planned HTML5 integration of MediaEverywhere will help Polar Mobile’s clients access not only mobile platforms like those listed above, but also the new wave of connected devices, including gaming consoles, cars, TVs and household appliances, as well as social networks like Facebook. At the same time, it will also offer media companies more opportunities to “leverage audience intelligence (data and analytics) to enable higher engagement and monetization,” Gupta said. He thinks this will help companies improve delivery of personalized recommendations, leading to more profitable business models.

The beauty of MediaEverywhere is that it doesn’t force content providers to choose between apps and web-based offerings; it can work with both app- and browser-based media delivery, depending on what solutions Polar’s media company customers choose to target. When it comes to the debate about whether native apps trump cross-platform mobile websites or vice versa, Gupta isn’t taking sides. He says while “apps include richer advertising experiences, distribution channels and homescreen icon presence,” browser-based distribution offers “discovery and referrals from social networks and search engines, which for many media companies now accounts for over half of their incoming web traffic.”

Polar Mobile’s success is based on the recognition that users want their media accessible anywhere, on any device they happen to be using. The launch of MediaEverywhere will help the company extend the reach of its clients’ products further still, in a connected future where people will seek out the things they love on whatever happens to be in reach, via both the web and native apps.

In addition to launching MediaEverywhere, Polar Mobile also plans to use some of the funding to fuel its international expansion. The company expects to double in size from 40 to 80 people in 2012, and open new offices in New York City and London.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

But a couple of startups have already stepped up to fill any vacancy that has arisen. News.me and Percolate, which both provide personalized news aggregation services, are positioning themselves as a safe haven for Summify users post-Twitter deal.

News.me made no secret of its intentions, writing a company blog post published Friday entitled “Summify Users: We’re here for you. You’re Safe.” News.me said it saw a “massive influx” of questions about its Daily Digest social networking and news aggregation product, directly asked Summify users to share what they liked most about Summify’s product, and asked for advice on what features News.me should implement.

Percolate made a similar play for new customers with a new section of its website dedicated to Summify users. The webpage reads: “Friends of Summify, Thanks for dropping by. Register below to start receiving your Daily Brew: A digest every morning of the top links from your world.”

It’s a great example of how thriving the web startup scene is today. Users are understandably upset when a beloved service goes away, but the Summify situation this week shows that nowadays, where one successful service closes a door, other startups are more than happy to open a window.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt

Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but the five-year-old Escalation is a sizable company, with 33 full-time staff who are all joining 6L post-deal, bringing the company’s headcount to 210 worldwide. Escalation co-founders Tom Mustaine and Marc Tardiff will become design directors for 6L, while co-founder Shawn Green will become the company’s director of engineering. The Escalation team will continue to operate out of Dallas; the majority of 6L operates out of San Francisco and Hong Kong.

The acquisition is meant to get 6L more deeply into the mobile gaming space, which will be especially key as it is focusing on international growth. 6L Chief Product Officer Arjun Sethi said in an interview:

“We’re now the single largest publisher of games across multiple social networks, not just Facebook, and our activity is about 50 percent in the United States and 50 percent international. What’s made us successful on social, we want to adapt and make sure we can run full steam ahead on mobile.”

Despite its somewhat lackluster post-IPO stock market performance, Zynga is still the social gaming space’s clear leader. But it’s also clear 6L isn’t backing down from the opportunity to provide real competition in the space. By taking a stand in the booming international and mobile spaces, it looks like the company is playing its cards very wisely at the moment.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
• NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media
• Post-IPO strategies for LinkedIn

The battle over online identity has been going on for almost as long as the internet has been around. Should users — including members of social networks or commenters on blogs and other websites — be forced to use their real names, or allowed to remain anonymous? Do pseudonyms allow for more open discussion, or encourage trolls and flame-wars? Disqus, which offers a comment-hosting service for websites, came out with some data from its network that seems to show the use of pseudonyms not only produces more comments, but that the comments generated are also of higher quality. But as interesting as the data is, it’s unlikely to settle the debate over how to handle online identity.

Disqus says that it drew the data for its infographic (part of which is embedded below) from the comments on more than one million websites that use its hosted service, a network that the company says accounts for more than 600 million monthly visitors and 60 million comments commenters. While that’s obviously only a small proportion of the overall web, it’s still a fairly large sample — and Disqus says the data shows that “the most important contributors to online communities are those using pseudonyms,” since they contributed over 60 percent of the comments in the sample. Those using pseudonyms were also more active than other commenters, Disqus said, posting more than six times as frequently.

Pseudonymous users made more — and better — comments

As some critics of the report noted on the Hacker News discussion forum, more comments don’t necessarily make for a great community, especially if they are primarily trolls or attempts at flame-bait. But it wasn’t just frequency or the sheer number of comments that stood out, according to Disqus. The company also tried to assess the quality of those comments by looking at how many were rated highly by other users (i.e. “liked”) and how many drew replies, as well as how many were flagged as being offensive, how many were marked as spam and how many were ultimately deleted by the site.

Although many critics of pseudonymous or anonymous comments — including those who have turned off comments on their blogs — suggest that a lack of real names leads to an overwhelming amount of hateful and offensive comments, the Disqus data seems to show that this isn’t really the case. According to the company’s quality rankings, more than 60 percent of comments using pseudonyms were positive, and almost 30 percent were rated as neutral, while only 11 percent were rated negative. In fact, the company says that a greater proportion of pseudonymous comments were positive than those that used real names (that is, logged in with Facebook or some other identity service).

This news was celebrated by some advocates of pseudonymous behavior online, including Christopher “Moot” Poole, the founder of the online community known as 4chan — a group of forums that have become notorious for their bad behavior. Despite that reputation, Poole has spoken a number of times (including at a TED conference in 2010) about the value of anonymity and pseudonymity when it comes to online culture, and how requiring real names is not the right response to negative or offensive speech.

Perhaps a lack of real names doesn’t mean chaos after all

Others (including us) have also argued for a more flexible approach to identity, particularly during the launch of Google+, which required real names from users, and sparked a wave of criticism from those who are routinely known by their online pseudonyms (as some Google executives are, including Google+ lead Vic Gundotra). Google later agreed to modify its policy, although the details about how that is going to work haven’t been fully revealed. Facebook, meanwhile, continues to require real names, although it has made exceptions for prominent users such as Salman Rushdie.

It’s difficult to draw a hard-and-fast conclusion from the Disqus numbers, in part because it isn’t clear whether the distinction between pseudonyms and real names is reliable or not. As commenters at Hacker News pointed out, the company seems to have categorized everyone who used a Facebook login as a real name, and everyone who didn’t as a pseudonym — but some users who don’t log in with their Facebook identity are likely also their using real names, even if they haven’t been verified by a third party (Disqus founder and CEO Daniel Ha said the company plans to expand on the data in a future blog post).

While the Disqus data may not be conclusive, however, it does seem to show that pseudonymous speech doesn’t necessarily lead to worse behavior than any other form of online identity, and may even lead to better behavior (at least for those who see user comments as being valuable at all). And that serves as a bit of an antidote for those who have been pushing a “real names are better” agenda, including Google and Facebook, and a boost for those — such as Twitter — who don’t seem to care what a user’s real name is, so long as they aren’t pretending to be someone famous.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Klobetime and

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How publishers must adapt to multiple content discovery options
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media

For starters, active social networkers — defined in the 2011 National Business Ethics Survey, a study published this week by the nonprofit Ethics Resource Center (ERC) as people who spend more than 30 percent of the workday participating on social networking sites — are much more likely to view their current jobs as temporary. 72 percent of active social networkers polled said they plan to change employers within the next five years, compared to 39 percent of non-active social networkers.

From the 2011 NBES (click to enlarge)

That feeling of transience may lead to such workers feeling like it’s no big deal to swipe a few things from the office supply cabinet: 46 percent of active social networkers said they thought it was acceptable to take a copy of work software home and use it on their personal computer, while just seven percent of non-active social networkers said the same.

Sharing the office’s secrets — good and bad

Not surprisingly, active social networkers are also more likely to be loose-lipped online about what goes on at work. 42 percent of active social networkers said they felt it was acceptable to blog or tweet negatively about their company or their coworkers, while just six percent of non-active social networkers saw such behavior as OK. But it’s not all bad news — a majority of active social networkers (56 percent) said they would also be likely to post about good things their coworkers did.

Another serious finding from the survey is that active social networkers were much more likely than other workers to witness ethical violations while on the job, and were also more likely to have received negative retaliation for reporting such trangressions. It’s hard to determine whether this is due to social networking, or just because of the people involved: Active social networkers account for just 11 percent of all workers who engage with social media, and are primarily males in managerial roles between the ages of 18 to 44, the ERC said.

From the 2011 NBES (click to enlarge)

What it means for big businesses

It’s all very interesting data, especially since it comes from such a reputable source: The ERC has been around for 90 years, and the headline sponsors of the NBES include Walmart, Northrop Grumman, BP and Altria. The ERC seems to take the data gleaned about social networking very seriously, writing in the report that this new environment could pose serious problems for companies:

“One of the key findings of NBES 2011 was the unique–and often troubling–experiences of active social networkers. Active social networkers observe misconduct at a higher rate and are more likely to experience retaliation if they choose to report…

Regardless of their employer’s policy on social networking on the job, employees are expressing a blurring of the lines between personal and professional relationships, and that could pose new risks to companies. Similarly, as employees become more active on social networks, the more they express a tolerant view of questionable behaviors that could pose business risks.”

For many of us, social networking feels like it’s been around forever. But for businesses — especially larger, older ones, like those that sponsor the NBES — this is a brand new thing to contend with. And the people who are heavy users of social networks may just be more savvy than their unplugged counterparts. In this economy, for example, it might just be realistic for people to view their jobs as likely to change in the next few years — not evidence of disloyalty. One thing looks certain: With social networking showing no signs of going away, big companies will have to find a way to deal with the ethical changes that come along with it.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Twitter Annotations and the Future of the Semantic Web

Just as the entire concept of what we call a book is being disrupted by digital publishing, with new formats like the Kindle Single and the Byliner magazine-article-book, so the role of the author is also being shaken up and reinvented. While some authors prefer to emulate notorious recluse J.D. Salinger and remain as unknown as possible, others are reaching out through social tools like Twitter to reach their readers in different ways — and even allow them to influence how a book takes shape. And they’re not just doing it because their publisher is forcing them to, but because they see the benefits of doing so.

The New York Times asked a number of prominent authors for their thoughts about Twitter for a feature in the paper’s Sunday books section, and virtually all of them said that they enjoyed the process of interacting with readers (perhaps in part because doing so through 140 character messages is somewhat easier than having to meet fans in real life, where it’s more difficult to escape). Salman Rushdie, for example, told the Times that he enjoys Twitter because: “it allows one to be playful, to get a sense of what is on a lot of people’s minds at any given moment.”

Twitter lets authors “hijack the promotion plane”

Jennifer Gilmore, meanwhile, said she likes to hear from readers about the influence or effect that her novels have on them, and that Twitter is an efficient way of doing that. “On Twitter, I have a sense that people — those you know and those you don’t — read your work in a way I have not always felt in the world,” she told NYT writer Anne Trubek. Mat Johnson described the people he follows on Twitter as his “dream party guests — interesting strangers whose wit keeps me coming back.” But Johnson also put his finger on another reason that some authors like him have taken to social media like Twitter: the ability to connect directly with potential readers. As he put it:

I’ve never had a single ad for any of my novels, had a movie made or been given a big budget push by a publisher. Usually, they just throw my book out to reviewers and hope it floats. Twitter lets me hijack the promotion plane, sidestep the literary establishment and connect directly to my current and potential audience… It’s a meritocracy; if you’re interesting, you get followed.

Some authors are realizing that this social aspect of their work can be a powerful engine: Earlier this year, author John Green — who writes fiction for young adults — showed that it is possible to hit number one on the bestseller list with a book that hasn’t even been published yet. He was able to do this in part because he had already spent the past couple of years building up a following on Twitter (where he has over a million followers) and on YouTube, where he posts clips of himself reading from his books. The simple mention of a sequel to a book was enough to push it to the top of the bestseller list.

Social media isn’t just for young authors

Other authors continue to resist the temptation of social networks: the NYT piece describes how Jeffrey Eugenides — Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Virgin Suicides — wrote a note for the Facebook page that his publisher made him put up, in which he said that he likely wouldn’t be writing there in the future:

It’s better, I think, for readers not to communicate too directly with an author because the author is, strangely enough, beside the point.

But for every Eugenides there are writers like Susan Orlean, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Orchid Thief, who is a passionate (and funny) user of Twitter. And while authors like John Green may have more success with the social-media approach because they are writing popular novels for the youth market, that hasn’t stopped veteran writers like Margaret Atwood from giving it a go as well: Atwood is witty and engaging on Twitter, and has even taken part in some interesting experiments such as Crowdsourcing author Jeff Howe’s 1book140 social-reading project.

Does every author have to be social and connect with their readers via Twitter or Facebook? No. And some may find they write better if they don’t allow the opinions of their audience to impinge on their creative process. But it seems clear that many others find that connection rewarding — not just in a financial sense, but in other ways as well. And in a world where traditional publishers are becoming less and less relevant every day, being comfortable with those kinds of tools seems like a wise strategy.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Jeremy Mates and Mike Licht

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Working out loud: how work media and social cognition are altering business
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media

The result is a new iPhone app called Kapture that lets merchants, businesses and brands reward loyal users for sharing pictures of a business or product on Facebook. It’s taking a habit that many consumers already do – taking pictures of meals and establishments – and giving merchants a way to leverage that as a marketing channel and also build a better relationship with their customers. And it lets consumers benefit from their interest in certain businesses and brands.

“We created Kapture to take this experience that people already know – taking pictures and sharing them – and we asked: why not reward users for sharing this with their friends,” said Szewczyk. ”With Kapture, the individuals visiting a business become their social media troops in a way.”

Photos ops offer rewards

Kapture is starting at 25 businesses in New York including the Gansevoort Park hotel and Battery Place Market and has many more lined up to go soon. The merchants offer a range of small discounts and free items for users who take a picture and share it on Facebook. For example, Gansevoort Park is offering a free glass of champagne for people who take a picture at its rooftop bar. Spin Ping Pong is also offering a free drink for a picture of a user’s game. The pictures gets stamped with a water mark from the merchant and link back to a landing page from Kapture that tells where it was taken and provides information on any discounts. The Facebook posting itself doesn’t include any discount information so it appears like a regular update.

The app allows users to see what “photo ops” are nearby and when they get to a participating location, they can take a picture through the app. They can then tag friends, share the picture directly to Facebook and then receive a coupon, which they show to employees. Kapture plans to extend support for Android and Twitter next year. Kapture doesn’t actively try to ferret out fraud but does include a button to report abuse. Szewczyk said social pressure on Facebook should also curb people’s desire to spam their friends using Kapture.

A tool for merchants
Szewczyk moved to the Bay Area from New York two years ago to be part of the founding team on Qwiki, which presents search information in short multimedia presentations. He was excited to return to New York and get started on his own venture, which is now up to 7 people. He is in the process of still raising seed funding and has gotten investments from Qwiki CEO Doug Imbruce and COO Navin Thukkaram. He’s also signed on some notable advisors including Serkan Piantino, who is leading Facebook’s New York engineeing office and Alexia Giles, principal of new business development at Google.Merchants can set up their own Kapture account online through a dashboard and set their rewards and what they want users to do in the picture. They can also determine how often they want to run rewards and how many they want to offer each day. Business owners will have a Kapture sticker they can put in their window and they can also put up signs directing people to specific discounts and the app.

Leveraging user generated content

I think Kapture is a smart idea that can be a helpful tool for merchants if it can scale up. Business owners are getting bombarded with offers from companies like Groupon and Living Social. But those deals often require them to offer steep discounts with sometimes half of the revenue going back to the deal provider. That can be helpful for some businesses, who want access to email lists from these deal providers. But for many merchants, they already have an avenue for getting the word out: their own customers. If they can better leverage their existing fans, they can market to a wide audience without having to offer big deals. Using photos is also smart because it’s an action that people already do. I just took a photo of a dish I had in Brooklyn just because I liked the meal. Getting rewarded for that might push me to come back and it would definitely make me appreciate that restaurant more.

CEO Michael Szewczyk

This is a growing opportunity, helping merchants and retailers leverage social actions and user generated content. I recently wrote about Social Passport, another New York company that lets people use QR codes and NFC on their smartphone to trigger social actions such as liking, following, checking-in or posting about a business. Piictu, yet another New York company, launched publicly in September and offers users a way to have conversations through pictures. The company said it sees a way in the future to help brands sponsor picture conversations on Piictu and help create user-generated content. Szewczyk said pictures are just the first step for Kapture, which will eventually become more of a platform for leveraging all kinds of user generated content.

Long term prospects

Kapture still has a ways to go and there are all kinds of companies looking to capture the local advertising budgets of merchants and retailers. And I wonder if this will be a feature that other competitors will try and incorporate into their products. Facebook and Google could also be interested in picking up Kapture if it gathers steam, especially considering their advisor connections. But I’d like to see what Kapture can do on its own. It’s got an interesting take on user generated content and could be a good tool for merchants looking to make better use of social media.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang
• Beyond social: the crowd-based enterprise
• Working out loud: how work media and social cognition are altering business

Updated: There has been a lot of sound and fury lately about a Facebook IPO, with the Wall Street Journal  saying the social network is expected to launch its public stock offering as soon as next spring, and the issue could give Facebook a market value as high as $100 billion. Not only would it be the largest technology IPO in U.S. history, but if the WSJ’s numbers are correct, it would give the company a market value comparable to General Electric. That would reinforce something that has already started to become clear: Facebook — for better or worse — has become a social utility, like the social web’s equivalent of a power company.

A Facebook IPO isn’t a done deal yet, of course. As the WSJ story and others have made clear, the current state of the stock market and the pummeling some other technology issues such as Groupon have received  (the email-marketing service is currently down 42 percent from its issue price) could cause the social network to postpone its offering. Although the company has to start filing its financial results with securities regulators soon, because it has crossed the magic 500-shareholder mark, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will go public. Some have argued Facebook may never do an IPO, since it seems to have no problem raising billions from the private markets.

But in many ways, whether Facebook goes public or not is really beside the point. Whether the company’s real market value is $100 billion or $60 billion or somewhere in between, it has become a central part of people’s lives in a way that would have seemed almost unimaginable just a few years ago.

No longer just a plaything: a social utility

It seems like just yesterday Facebook was still seen as a plaything for university students, or a place to put photos. That was before Zynga showed Facebook could be a massive cash generator for social games (coincidentally, Zynga is also heading toward a public offering soon), and before websites of all kinds saw how much traffic and engagement they could generate by implementing the network’s “Facebook Connect” and open-graph plugins to add “like” buttons and other features. More than 7 million apps and websites use those plugins now, according to Facebook’s official stats.

Many of us have grown used to them, but the numbers behind Facebook are still mind-boggling when you step back and take a look at them: If its current rate of growth continues (and there’s no obvious reason why it shouldn’t), the social network could have a billion active users within a matter of months. According to some estimates, it will soon have more than 16 percent of the display advertising market — a number that’s also growing rapidly — and will likely generate ad revenue of close to $4 billion this year alone (just one of the reasons why Google is so determined to develop its own Google+ network as a competitor).

Although the growth of Zynga and social games is interesting, it was really just the precursor to a much bigger story: the integration between Facebook and a host of other services that have potentially much broader implications. Already, there are some apps — such as the music-sharing app Spotify — that will not work without a Facebook account. If you are determined not to belong to the network, you can’t use these services at all. That may not be a big deal right now, but what about when other more important services are also tightly integrated with a Facebook account?

Media companies such as the Washington Post and The Guardian, among others, have also integrated themselves into the social network in a fairly aggressive way: Instead of just using Facebook’s open-graph plugins to show users social relationships when they are at the newspaper’s website, they have created “frictionless sharing” apps that allow Facebook users to read and share their articles without ever leaving the network. That has benefits for the Post and Guardian in terms of engagement, but it also cements Facebook’s status as the default social destination and default social platform.

We expect much more of a utility than a simple social service

So what happens when Facebook is a social utility: the General Electric of the social web? Governments start trying to regulate the network in the same way they would a telecom company or an electricity provider — as the European Union and other jurisdictions are, particularly when it comes to privacy rules. And the policies of that utility become a lot more important than they were when it was just a simple service used by a few million university students. (Update: Facebook just announced that it has settled a privacy case with the Federal Trade Commission over changes to its privacy settings and its “opt out” policy. Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has a blog post about the settlement, and the FTC release is here).

That’s one reason why Facebook’s “real name” policy has caused so much controversy (which spilled over onto Google when it took the same approach with Google+). Requiring real names is fine when you are just one of many social services, and you want to cut down on trolling and other bad behavior. But what happens when your policy makes it impossible — or at the very least, dangerous — for dissidents in Egypt or China or other totalitarian states to use your platform for social good? The implications are profound, and it’s not clear Facebook has thought them through as much as it should.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote recently in The Economist that we are approaching a future where your online identity merges with what she calls your “authentic identity,” something Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also argued is a natural evolution — and it’s pretty obvious Facebook sees this as a good thing. But is it? Those are the kinds of questions we will have to come up with answers for now that the company has become the General Electric of our social age. And the answers are far from obvious.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Ontario Power Generation

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

As part of the ongoing rollout of its +1 recommendation system, Google has started including +1s from your social graph in its Google News service. Although these recommendations from your friends and followers won’t affect the main news content at the site, there’s clearly the potential for them to do so in the future, and that could turn Google News into a real social-news service instead of a simple aggregator. But has the web giant lost the social news market to Twitter and Facebook, or could the integration of recommendations with the Google+ network allow it to catch up and become a strong competitor?

For now, the +1 recommendations will only appear occasionally in the Spotlight section of Google News, according to a post by staffer Erich Schmidt (not to be confused with chairman Eric Schmidt) at the Google News blog. But just as +1 counts have started showing up in the company’s main search results, it seems likely they will work their way into the Google News algorithm as well. In a very real sense, the +1 is becoming Google’s equivalent of the “like” or “share” buttons on Facebook and of the retweet function on Twitter, and combining that function with news headlines could be a powerful source of recommendations if Google rolls it out for the rest of Google News.

It’s interesting that Google is adding this function to Google News at the same time it’s shutting down or mothballing some other services the web giant has offered, including Google Knol, Google Bookmark lists, Google Wave and Google Friend Connect. That would seem to indicate the company is interested in enhancing Google News rather than ignoring it, which is a positive sign. As I’ve argued before, in many ways, the news aggregator has been under-utilized for years, and even the few social features that have been added over the past year or two seem to be afterthoughts.

Google News has lost ground as news becomes social

In part, this could be a result of Google’s contentious relationship with media companies, which continually accuse it of stealing their content for its service, but it could also be a result of the company’s ambivalence about news as a potential revenue driver. For whatever reason, Google News has taken a back seat in the recommendation wars, as Twitter and Facebook have become the default providers for many news consumers.

Even Yahoo News, the largest aggregator in the news market, has bowed to the power of Facebook as a social-recommendation engine. The company recently connected its service to the social network as part of the rollout of Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” — although it didn’t create an app the way some other providers such as the Washington Post  and The Guardian did, but instead integrated Facebook sharing into its existing site. According to some reports, Yahoo has seen a dramatic increase in both sharing and traffic to its news stories, and other mainstream media outlets have reported similar results.

Facebook may have become the default social-news engine for the outlets that are connecting to it and creating sharing apps, but Twitter is still a powerful driver of traffic for many news sites, and arguably offers even more of a streamlined news experience than Facebook does because of the nature of the network. When it comes to short, real-time news items about events such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, Twitter excels — especially when combined with tools such as Storify and other ways of aggregating or curating the news and providing more context. In many ways, as I’ve pointed out a number of times at GigaOM, Twitter has become a real-time newswire.

Social news could get a big boost from Google+

Could the addition of recommendations for news — integrated not just into Google News but into Google’s +1 network — make Google a competitor for either Facebook or Twitter? As both chairman Eric Schmidt and director of product Bradley Horowitz have pointed out, the company plans to make its new social network a platform that is connected to all of its services, so it seems obvious that at some point +1 recommendations from Google News would be merged with a user’s Google+ stream.

Although there has been plenty of debate about the long-term viability of Google’s new social network, I think there’s a lot more power behind it than many of its critics believe. Part of that power will become obvious as Google connects it to services like Gmail and integrates it even further into search — something that neither Facebook nor Twitter can offer — and social sharing of news will benefit from that broader platform as well. That could give it a substantial amount of ammunition in the battle for attention.

For me, Twitter is still the news-consumption tool of choice, in part because I have created lists that help me filter the river of content that continually flows through the network, and because its 140-character nature makes it easier to consume than either Facebook or Google+. But the apparent success of Facebook’s social-reading apps make it clear a growing number of people are happy to use it as their default social news platform. Whether Google has what it takes to become a strong third player in the news-recommendation market is still very much up in the air.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Facebook released some pioneering social-networking research last night on its blog — the kind that only a company with over 700 million active users and 60 billion connections could help produce — that looked at how closely we’re connected to those around us. The headline everyone pulled from the study was that the famous “six degrees of separation” originally described by psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s has been reduced to less than five, or even four in some cases, on the giant social network. But has it really? What do we mean when we friend someone on Facebook, and how does that translate to the “real world”?

In the study, which Facebook did in collaboration with a number of researchers at the University of Milan in Italy, the network looked at the connections between all 721 million active Facebook users, or more than 10 percent of the world’s population — a staggering 69 billion “friendships.” As the company noted, this makes the research by far the largest social-networking study ever released. By contrast, Milgram’s famous experiment in 1967 (which he based on an idea described in a Hungarian short story from 1929) involved postcards sent by regular mail between just 296 volunteers.

Is Facebook making us more connected to each other?

According to the Facebook post, the number of “hops” or connections required to get from one person to another in virtually any location around the world (any location with Internet access and Facebook users, that is) was six, and more than 90 percent of users were actually connected by five hops — equivalent to four degrees of separation rather than Milgram’s six. And the number of hops has actually decreased over time: Facebook said the average distance was 5.28 in 2008 and it is now just 4.7.

But does that mean we’re more connected than we used to be? Have the ubiquitous connections that social networks like Facebook and Twitter and Google+ allow for brought us closer together, regardless of where we live? In some senses, that’s clearly the case — as “viral videos” and other social-networking phenomena like the current “pepper-spraying cop” illustrate. But just because I choose to share an LOLcat photo or a funny video, or post my Spotify music preferences via Facebook’s new “frictionless sharing” features, does that mean I’m closely connected to the people in my social graph?

There’s no question I’m closely connected to some of those people. As many Facebook users seem to do, I use the network mainly for keeping in touch with family and close friends. I have a large number of people I’ve “friended” for a variety of other reasons — work or other forms of professional relationship, etc. — but I don’t pay very close attention to those connections, at least not on a daily basis (some people are more disciplined about who they friend, but for better or worse I’m not). So in what sense am I connected to these people? In many cases, I don’t even know where they live.

I suppose I could ask them to forward a postcard, as Milgram did in his experiment, but that’s about it (it should be noted that sociologists have criticized Milgram’s research on a number of levels, including the validity of the small pool of volunteers he chose from). If anything, the connections I have to the majority of my social graph are the extreme version of what sociologist Mark Granovetter called “weak ties”: the ones we have to nodding acquaintances, as opposed to the strong ties we have to family, church, etc.

In some cases, even weak ties can be very powerful

So Facebook has arguably improved our ability to create and maintain these kinds of “weak ties,” but it’s still not clear just how much value there is in the ability to see when someone you went to school with decades ago is playing FarmVille or Mafia Wars. Granovetter and other sociologists have argued there’s more value than we think in these ties under certain circumstances, and as one of the researchers who helped with the latest Facebook study noted, this is particularly the case when it comes to spreading news of world events.

But can this spread of information actually influence the real world? In the case of the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, there is some reason to believe it can. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who has studied the flow of information about such events through Facebook and other networks, says one of the biggest ways they can contribute is by making it obvious how many people support revolution — and thus, breaking down the barriers that often stand between talk and action. Status updates and group memberships and photos and videos, she says, can create an “information cascade” that overcomes the typical information vacuum people often experience in such situations.

That suggests the connections we create through Facebook — even the most innocuous, or the weakest of our “weak ties” — can have a profound effect in some cases. Hopefully, Facebook will make more of this kind of research available (instead of forcing those who are trying to do it to delete their research, as data scientist Pete Warden was last year), since we’re all effectively taking part in an unprecedented sociology experiment just by belonging to the giant social network. It would be nice to use that to find out more about how we actually connect with and influence each other in important ways.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen and Richard Engel of NBC

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Beyond social: the crowd-based enterprise
• Working out loud: how work media and social cognition are altering business

Facebook’s implementation of what it calls “frictionless sharing” continues to cause controversy: critics complain that the new feature — which automatically shares songs from Spotify or news stories from social-reading apps — is ruining the site, cluttering up their stream and is generally just creepy. As newly-minted venture capitalist MG Siegler has noted, this kind of backlash is par for the course whenever Facebook makes sharing-related changes, so it’s likely this particular storm will also blow over. But what the fuss does highlight is how Facebook still needs better filters to help users cope with the onslaught of social-sharing information.

Molly Wood at CNET seems to have started the latest furore, saying the new changes at Facebook are “ruining sharing,” because they clutter up a user’s feed and try to badger them into signing up for apps like Spotify or the Washington Post app. Wood calls Spotify song sharing “the new Farmville,” and that isn’t meant as a compliment — and she also notes, as many other critics have, that Facebook is driving this behavior because it wants to collect more information about its users and make that available to advertisers. But one of her main complaints seems to be that instead of reducing the friction around sharing, Facebook is actually increasing it:

In search of “frictionless” sharing, Facebook is putting up a barrier to entry on items your friends want you to see–that is, they’re creating friction. Even if it’s just a onetime inconvenience, any barrier to sharing breaks sharing. The barriers will keep popping up as more content publishers create social apps that have to be authorized before you can view their content.

Noisy? Yes, but also a serendipity engine

I can see Wood’s point. My Facebook page has also gotten noisier, and the incessant links to Washington Post articles — which Liz Gannes at All Things Digital has also complained about — and Spotify music-sharing links can be irritating. But at the same time, those links can also be an interesting way to discover content, and a fairly powerful illustration of the “long tail,” as the Financial Times noted in a post about the kinds of stories that newspapers like the Post are finding get a lot of traffic through their apps. In other words, that sharing can produce a kind of serendipity that is very valuable.

Uber-blogger Robert Scoble writes about how Facebook’s sharing is getting closer to the “freaky” line, where it starts to bother people by being intrusive, but I think MG Siegler is right when he says that Facebook has always been pushing this envelope — right from the beginning of its existence, when it encouraged university students to post their photos and relationship status. When the news feed was first introduced, there was a hue and cry about how intrusive it was, and yet it has become the foundation of everything Facebook is, and millions of users are addicted to it.

Does that mean Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is altering our vision of privacy for his own nefarious purposes? I don’t think so. I think he and others like former Facebook president and Spotify investor Sean Parker have simply been more aware than others of the way that privacy is evolving. It used to be a binary thing — you shared certain things with family, friends and neighbors but kept most of that from the outside world. Now, you can choose to share certain things, like the songs you are listening to or the news articles you are reading, and not share others. Is sharing a song an invasion of privacy? It’s hard to see how. Privacy is now a spectrum, not an on-off switch.

We need better filters, not more privacy

Sociologist and Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd has written a lot about how younger users respond to privacy issues around Facebook, and it’s a lot more nuanced than just saying “kids share everything now.” In some cases, younger users are even more concerned with privacy than older users, and they come up with some interesting ways of dealing with that (like deleting their Facebook accounts every evening, and then reinstating them in the morning, since Facebook doesn’t actually delete anything in case you change your mind). But for many things — particularly social experiences like music — they are happy to share, and so frictionless sharing probably makes perfect sense.

For me, what Facebook’s rollout of frictionless sharing highlights more than anything is that we need better filters to cope with the rising tide of information on social networks, and that includes Twitter and Google+. Google’s introduction of “circles” and Facebook’s addition of “smart lists” are a step in the right direction, but they are still too cumbersome, and require a lot of ongoing management (which many people likely just won’t do). Idealab founder Bill Gross introduced a “partial follow” model with his new social network Chime.in, where you can follow only certain topics that a person posts about, but that also requires a lot of up-front management.

So I have no problem with Facebook’s approach to sharing, and I think it is probably the future (as I mentioned in an earlier post). But if we are sending more and more content out through our activity streams, we need to find better ways to filter it — and maybe that’s smarter recommendations from apps like Flipboard or services like Summify — or we are all going to be swamped by the mother of all signal-to-noise problems. As Clay Shirky pointed out some time ago, the problem isn’t information overload, it’s filter failure.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Luc Legay

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

The company, which recently won the best start-up at the Web 2.0 Expo, offers users a way to contain their social networking credentials in one app that can then interact with NFC tags and QR codes in the real world. The idea is that a merchant or business can post an NFC tag and QR code in their store on a sign and users can then use the app to initiate an action. For example, after tapping their NFC phone, the app pops up and offers a range of options suggested by the merchant, things like checking-in on Foursquare, posting their visit on Facebook, tweeting about the store on Twitter or following the business.

Creating real world share buttons

What’s interesting about this is that the NFC tag or QR code doesn’t take people to a URL, which is what a lot of QR codes do now. It enables social interaction, similar to the way a share button online works. Now, a user can quickly share about a business immediately. Some may just choose to do so because they like a merchant. Or they want to just check-in quickly, which is one scenario that appeals to me. But merchants can make it worth it for a consumer by offering an immediate discount or loyalty points.

That’s where this gets really valuable for businesses and consumers. A business can offer a coupon that can be redeemed immediately at the point of sale and can also be shared online via Social Passport. That gives consumers an incentive to take action and it also allows a merchant to leverage that user’s social network to get the word out about their business. Once a user claims a discount, Social Passport creates a unique 2-D barcode that can be scanned by a merchant’s laser scanners, Android and iOS devices or a web cam.

Groupon alternative for merchants

This could a nice alternative to customer acquisition through Groupon, which involves setting a steep discount and handing over a big chunk of the revenue to Groupon. Instead, businesses can tap their existing users and get them to broadcast their real-world interactions with a business online through their social networks. And they can set more modest discounts that they can afford as an ongoing outreach tool.

“We want to create a platform for businesses to leverage and incentivize social media actions,” said David Merel, the CEO and founder of Social Passport.

Business owners can build their own loyalty programs through Social Passport, rewarding users for visits or purchases. Or they can tie their existing loyalty programs into Social Passport. Business owners access Social Passport through their own dashboard, where they can set discounts and what social actions they want to prompt. And they can see analytics on who has scanned, how many discounts have been redeemed and how many people they’ve reached. In addition to QR scanning and NFC, Social Platform also offers reverse QR scanning so instead of a user scanning a QR code, they can display their own QR code and merchants can scan them.

Solving problems for merchants

Merel previously founded ThinkBright, a long distance and VoIP provider and Merel Technologies, which creates a multi-touch table like Microsoft’s Surface. He got the idea for Social Passport after ESPN looked at his table technology to enable people to create social actions in the real world at the X Games. Merel started creating his own solution in January to address that problem and also solve the needs of merchants, including people like his family who are in the restaurant business. The company has about $350,000 in seed funding to date and is looking to raise more.

Social Passport has only been out for several weeks and it’s being used by about 50,000 users and 1,000 merchants said Merel, mostly in the New York area. The company plans to roll out to Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco in the next couple of years. The biggest hurdle will be to get merchants on board, which can take a lot of manpower. Toward that end, Merel is offering 10,000 free NFC chip stickers to merchants who sign up here. Social Passport is also looking to partner with big chains and advertising firms, who work with retailers. The company is making the service free for the first year for businesses and plans to charge a subscription fee after that.

Showing the power of NFC and QR codes

I’m intrigued by Social Passport because it could be a way for a merchant to tap social interactivity in the real world and make that work for them. Instead of relying on Groupon’s list of customers, business owners can make better use of their own customers and offer them discounts that can be spread virally. Companies like SinglePlatform offer a resource for restaurant owners to handle all their online and social media presence through one dashboard. But Social Passport could be good in bringing in that offline to online component. Google also pushed out NFC tag stickers last year to businesses as part of its Google Places campaign. But that initiative, which was mainly aimed at pushing Google Places, enabled users to get more information about a store from their phone. What’s good about Social Passport is that it can handle all kinds of social networks, so it doesn’t just forward the goals of one company. That is valuable for users who want to share via different channels. Right now, it supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and Foursquare with other services like Google+ and Yelp planned.

It’s still early for NFC, which is still only available on a handful of devices, but Social Passport shows where NFC can be more than just payments and in fact can be a very powerful marketing tool. It can speed people along toward all kinds of actions. That’s the beauty of NFC; it’s just a very versatile wireless technology. I can just tap it and jump toward a specific function. It’s also nice to see QR codes become more valuable to users.

I think Social Passport has a ways to go in getting momentum with merchants and also consumers on board. It’s hard for a company of just eight people to get millions of businesses to respond. But I think this could be a solid option for businesses looking to get more social and bring in more customers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Beyond social: the crowd-based enterprise