Economist: A Special Report on Social Networking

Online social networks are changing the way people communicate, work and play, and mostly for the better - download full report - click here.

Social Media and Baby Boomers

A summary of Media Post's take on social media and baby boomers --

Include social media in plans to reach Boomers: it is clear that social networks are not a passing phase for Boomers. Like others, they are finding that online social networks enhance their existing relationships.

Tea Party Trying to Organize Offline

Tea Partiers held their first national convention this weekend in Nashville, TN.  The convention is part of the movement’s attempt to organize offline and become a legitimate political party.  The convention’s organizer, Judson Phillips, said ,”If 2010 is another year of rallies, we’ve lost.”  Tea Partiers have organized and communicated almost entirely through social networking sites.  Having a convention is a step in the right direction for the Tea Party but they have a long way to go if they hope to become an established political party.

What's Next for Geolocation? Apps, Apps, Apps

Geolocation social networks are set to be in 2010 what microblogging was in 2008 - the next big thing. Currently the space is being dominated by Foursquare, with others like Gowalla, MyTown and Loopt  trailing in its wake.

Google Creating Twitter Clone for Gmail

As soon as this week, Google might be rolling out a "Twitter-killer" feature for Gmail users, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Gmail users can currently broadcast status messages via the Google Talk feature. The main difference between the current offering and the new feature is that status messages aren't available in a timeline format. With the new "Twitter clone," they will be. 

Reaching Millions with Twitter: The Whole Foods Story

Have you ever wondered how a business handles more than a million Twitter fans? Want the inside scoop from the largest retailer on Twitter?

Even if you’re a small business, there’s some great insight to be gained from Marla Erwin, Interactive Art Director for Whole Foods Market. Marla was instrumental in creating Whole Foods’ acclaimed social media program and the results have been phenomenal! For example, in the first year, Twitter.com/Wholefoods gained a million Twitter followers. It has now surpassed 1.75 million people.

How to Market your Business with Twitter Lists

Twitter is a networking haven for businesses. But is there an easy way to draw the right people to you with Twitter?

The answer is yes and there’s a great Twitter feature that can help you: Twitter lists.  Twitter lists can grab the interest of people you most want to meet, help you make a great first impression and can help you with marketing segmentation.

And finally, check out this video from TechPresident, From the Bloomberg Campaign, Social Media Stats.

From Mashable:

Facebook had already shared its plans to help you clean up your now-cluttered profile, thanks to all those applications, and today the new feature has arrived. A new option for an extended profile basically offers a “page 2″ of sorts, so visitors to your profile can choose to see all those extra, bottom rung applications if they want to. Instead of seeing an ongoing stream of applications on your profile, they’ll now see a truncated version, with the option to see more.

From the looks of it, Facebook will detect which applications display at the bottom of your profile. You can select to move one or all of these apps to your extended profile. This can be edited at any time, in case you tire of another application that’s showing on your profile. A link on your profile will let you view your extended profile as well.

I've been watching the MySpaceification of Facebook for a while now, and shaking my head the whole time. It's proven to me very clearly that a lot of people, simply put, have no taste.

From a Facebook user's perspective this is great news, more control over my own profile to highlight what content I care about.

But from the perspective of someone who builds applications, this makes my life that much more difficult. Having your application shunted to the bottom/second page of a profile reduces its visibility exponentially.

But all is not lost, you just have to build an App that's cool and engaging enough that a user will want to place it on their profile's mainpage.

As a Facebook addict, I've been closely following Facebook's new open API. This allows outside developers to create widgets/applications for Facebook, which users can allow to access their profile information and can then embed on their Facebook page.

I count 212 applications so far. However, under the politics tag there are only 4.

The most powerful application created so far is by Obama's campaign. Here's a good review of the app itself.

The power of the app is how it interacts with your Facebook info. For example it searchs your list of friends and then tells you who lives in a early primary state and allows you to send them a message to support Obama. Grassroots organizing online...

I'm not surprised that Obama's the first to jump on this bandwagon-one of the founders of Facebook left the company to work for Obama's campaign. Obama may have the lead right now, but it can't be too long 'til the rest of the field gets on the bandwagon (this includes Republicans, I hope!).