Are you a senior at Facebook, but maybe a freshman at Twitter? Well, now there are two new social networking sites you’re going to want to log into:  Foursquare and Gowalla. It may sound like the games you used to play on the playground in elementary school, and…an energy bar or drink? But no, they are the two newest and trendiest websites to keep in touch with friends, tell your plans of your day, and keep track of others’ whereabouts.

Both sites were created in late 2008, but didn’t make it under the popular eye until 2009.  By March 2009, Foursquare stole the show, drowning out any fanfare that the then-buggy Gowalla tried to muster. But now the challenge has risen; nine months later and millions of dollars poured into getting Gowalla up into space, CEO and found Josh Willams, explains that there are well over 20,000 people logging into the site each day in over 1,000 different locations around the world.

So what’s really the difference between the two sites? Both have iPhone applications available, but have thousands of users logged in and many more joining the site, as well as millions of dollars behind them for funding to succeed.  But it depends on who you talk to, one will favor the other. Many claim the combo of Twitter, Yelp, Google Latitude, with a mix of social gaming and some privacy procedures gives you Foursquare; ecstatically declared, “next year’s Twitter.”  On the other hand, Gowalla is quickly creeping into the spot light and socially around the world. The widely expressed criticism with Gowalla is that it focuses on you more then what your friends are doing/interested in.  Part of joining Gowalla is to name your exact whereabouts and tell all your friends as soon as you login; surrendering your privacy.  The reason Gowalla demands this from you is because the information is crowd-sourced, which allows the app to quickly track in certain locations around the globe; giving the website more recognition for more users to join.

Many would say Gowalla trumps Foursquare in the lay-out of the website and accessibility, but Foursquare wins the race in terms of check-in location accuracy, tech support, supervising friends without stocking, and many other desirable and user friendly features. Regardless of which way you look at them, both are making strong efforts to get onto your smartphone for 2010. We are living in a world where you can get out of work and log into a site to find out where your friends are. Is this how socializing is going to be in the future? Edging out phone calls and texting only to keep technology booming and let personal connections plummet?  And in the competition between Gowalla and Foursquare, who gets your vote?

The media landscape has changed over time from the printing press to the telephone to radio waves that allowed TV and radio.  However, the internet is the first source of media that gives us the man-to-many conversation pattern, rather than the one-to-one pattern of the phone, or the one-to-many pattern of radio and television.  Everyone is a listener, everyone is a producer – it’s like having a phone that could turn into a radio if you pushed the right buttons.  Listen to Clay Shirky as he addresses how this powerful paradigm shift has affected how we receive news – from all around rather than the top down – and how that affects the workings of the world and the politics within it.  This is an amazing talk about the power of social media, and the power that social media endows people with.

Just how many of us have a Facebook account in the world? To even think about it you know the number is going to be astronomical; the question is “who doesn’t have a Facebook account?”  By December 2009, Facebook single handedly attracted 469 million visitors, putting them at the No.4 most viewed website in the world.  Sound like just a number to you?  More than 31 million people signed onto Facebook in December 2009 then in November – Yahoo had 31 million viewers in the entire year of 2009.  That’s right, Facebook had that many hits in just thirty-one days.  The social networking site is quickly climbing the ladder to becoming the third largest Web property in the world (booting out Yahoo as number three, and closely behind Google (No.1) and Microsoft (No. 2)).

All in all, Facebook has grown by almost 250 million viewers in 2009.  If Facebook continues to attract this number of people, it will surely pass Yahoo as the third most viewed website in the world by the end of 2010.  But how many viewers does it need to take on the No.2 and No.1 websites? To pass Microsoft, Facebook would need well over 727 million hits worldwide, and Google of 899 million viewers, which may take more time then the 11 months left to 2010.

On the other hand, Facebook surpasses both Yahoo and Microsoft in many other aspects.  For example, Facebook’s page views grew an estimated 141% last year to 193 billion in December, Yahoo only received 100 billion while Microsoft pulled in 109 billion.  Although Facebook passed these two head honchos, Google still holds the top spot for 274 billion a month. When all’s said and done, Facebook is making exceptional growth in today’s market of most viewed websites. So keep checking out your friends, updating your status and pictures, and let’s move Facebook to the number three spot!

We’ve all heard of Facebook, MySpace, Linked In, and Twitter.  Maybe you have an account on one or the other, or even all four.  You, with millions of other users, are along the ride of being available 24/7 to have friends, family members, and other networks to see your information, profile, and pictures.  Now being able to share posts on your daily life exercises and thoughts, we- as a social networking obsessed world- are now officially spend 82% more time on these sites compared to the amount of time we put just a year earlier.

So much time that some of us are putting in the number of hours equivalent to a full-time job – a full-time job that doesn’t take a break on weekends. If the average person spends around five and a half hours a day, seven days a week, that leads one to a little shy of forty hours. Didn’t think you spent that much time each week, did you?

And it’s not just the United States that is infatuated with social networking. Australia, Switzerland, Brazil, Japan, Italy, Spain, and the entire U.K is shortly behind us. In Fact, the US may have the most people belonging to these groups, but Australians have the lead for times-per-day visits. Around the globe, people are interested in having people follow them and have people interested in what they are doing; all day, everyday.  Are we in a self-obsessed world, or just a world that loves to communicate with each other? With social networking up by 82% from last year, how much longer will it be before all of our time is spent on the computer?

People have been concerned since the initial creation of social media that it will disconnect us – that the digital world will replace the “real” world and as such, relationships will suffer.  Here, Stefana Broadbent argues the opposite.  She’s an ethnographer who studies human interaction, and her research shows how communication tecnology is capable of cultivating deeper relationships, bringing love across barriers like distance and workplace rules.  What do you think – do you think the internet enables or prevents intimacy?  How has it affected the relationships in your life?

We posted on Friday about how YouTube is beginning to charge for content, starting with a selection of Sundance movies for a $3.99 rental.  The NY Times has been examining strategies that would allow them to charge for their content, either by adopting a Wall Street Journal model of having some parts of their site be free, while others are pay-for-access, or having users be able to view one or two articles before hitting a “pay wall” after which all content would need to be paid for.  Which all begs the question – how is the internet going to change as it becomes the primary source of content for most users?  After years of the internet being a supplement for magazines and newspapers, traditional media is nose diving at a peak rate – major magazine publisher Conde Nast is closing magazines and laying people off by the thousands, the book world is struggling with the gap between digital and print by introducing products like the Kindle, and newspapers are losing readership at rapid rates.  And yet, internet advertising still doesn’t pay enough to give on-line publishers viable revenue, leaving us in a strange gap where we get our content on-line, but the purveyors of that content haven’t yet figured out how to profit from it.  How do you think sites like the New York Times, YouTube, Hulu, Twitter, or blogs are going to start making money in large enough amounts to support them as companies? Given that one of the large advantages of the internet is the anyone can put thoughts out there for anyone to read format, do you think some content should remain free of charge?  How can we reconcile how the internet is different from traditional media while still having it retain the viable money making abilities of the traditional form?  Share your thoughts with us!

Oh, the power of YouTube.

We all know, watch, and laugh at videos on YouTube.  From the hilarious thirty-second home videos people share to the minutes long music videos and professional filmed broadcasts.  We all can agree, YouTube is America’s Funniest Home Videos of the Internet.  Now YouTube is coming from a whole new direction: movie rentals.  YouTube plans to sell five full-length independent movies drawn from the 2010 and 2009 Sundance Film Festivals in February 2010.  These five films include the award winning, “The Cove,” “Children of Invention,” as well as “Bass Ackwards,” “Homewrecker,” and “One Too Many Mornings.”

While movie rental competitors include Blockbuster, RedBox, and iTunes, YouTube is offering the bargain price of $3.99 for 24-48 hours per video rental. This small fee will be split between YouTube and the content provider. The viewer must use Google Checkout services to legally pay for the film and have it for the complete rental period.  This is all part of Youtube’s “Filmmakers Wanted” campaign which helps to attract more film makers from Sundance but to also broaden their client spectrum of the entertainment industry to having health and education sectors come on board soon.

The minimal selection of five movies may not be enough to grab your attention quite yet, but YouTube hopes to accomplish the idea of going global within the year; providing a plethora of movies to choose from in the comfort of your own home and on your lap.

We’ve talked a lot this week about how social media can help us in the event of a crisis, but today we’re going to talk about something else social media and the tools of the internet gives us that we’ve never had before:  access.  In the wake of the tsunami in Asia, or the earthquake in Eureka, sites like YouTube were bombarded with hand shot videos that gave us a first hand notion of what it was like to experience these events.  Before, we might see clips like this – after they were filtered through a news station or other traditional media outlet, if the media outlet even knew the clips existed at all.  Now, “normal” people all over the world can play news anchor, and the audience can get a much wider scope of all sorts of events – be them horrific or celebratory.  If knowledge is power, then social media has become one of the largest feeders of that power.  Below, we share two clips, one of the recent 6.5 earthquake in northern California, and one of the tsunami.  What has social media given you new access to in your life?

By now, everyone’s heard about the devastating earthquake in Haiti: as we write this, over 100,000 are feared dead.  We posted on Tuesday about how social media can save lives, and suddenly, we’re given the opportunity to witness it in action.  According to CNN, a fundraising campaign done solely through text messages and networking sites like Twitter and Facebook has raised more than $3 million for the Red Cross’s relief work in Haiti.  Mass text messages went out on various carriers last night, urging users to text “HAITI” to 90999 in order to donate $10 to the relief effort, to be added to their phone bill at the end of the month.  IPhone developer Justin Williams jumpstarted the idea of Mac and IPhone developers decided to donate a day’s worth of sales to Haitian relief efforts.  He tweeted his idea, blogged about it, and got a bunch of developers behind him.   The result? IndieRelief, where companies and individual developers can choose an organization for a day’s worth of sales to go to.

The crisis in Haiti is heartbreaking, but it’s wonderful to see the tools we use to talk about our lives and promote our business to be used to spread widespread good in this way.  With the types of social networks we have in place worldwide, it hardly takes any effort to mobilize millions of people, and that’s an amazing thing.

For more information and updates on Haiti, click here.

As more evidence of the reach of social media, we leave you with some TwitPics of Haiti, taken by @CarelPedre and @MarvinAdy.  And if you have any more information on relief efforts through social media or otherwise, please share!

[via Mashable]

In the recent post by Twitter’s CEO, Evan Williams, he tweets: “Across all metrics that matter, yesterday was Twitter’s highest-usage day ever. (And today will be bigger.)” All well and good, but this raises the question:  why the concern? Why the defiance? Twitter’s doing all right… isn’t it?

Doing a bit of sleuthing, we uncovered the following social media trends over the past year:

Facebook’s number of visits, as perhaps expected, are on an upward trajectory. But Twitter and LinkedIn are a different story: the number of visits are completely flatling.  The website Compete allows comparison between various sites. Go to Compete’s website > click the green “try it for free” link > create a login. Once thats done you can click on the link “compare sites” and fill in the boxes with sites you want to compare statistically. We put in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and clicked the one year link to see the data over the past 12 months.  This is what we saw:

What do you think are the reasons for this?  Are LinkedIn and Twitter simply trends that have passed their prime?  And what allows Facebook to be eternally popular – the increase in services, the changing interfaces, or simply the wider market?  Let us know your thoughts!