Nick Cifuentes

Look out, because here they come! Foursquare, the ever-growing location-based social network is quickly digging its clamps into the mainstream as CEO Dennis Crowley reveled that the community is adding about 15,000 users per day. The announcement was made at this Business Insider’s Startup 2010 event in New York City this morning.

Foursquare first made it’s major debut at the SXSW 2009 Music, Film & Interactive Festival last year in Austin, where it was dubbed “the next Twitter.” With such a gracious title, the location-based network has exploded, recently surpassing the one million user mark, and now adding a substantial amount of new users a day.

Addressing the crowd this morning, Crowley said he very excited to provide a violable platform that businesses can utilize, offering “Google Analytics but for local merchants.” For example, allowing a small cafe to see its demographics and identify its most influential customers. These are powerful statistics that businesses can leverage to turn visits into meaningful data, very useful for future business strategy, as well as gathering consumer insights.

Foursquare has struck a number of recent media partnerships that have helped propel the community into the limelight. It’s recently announced deal with Starbucks, where Mayors of each location will receive a $1.00 off a drink is just the tipping point of what they have achieved so far. Bravo, Zagat, MTV, The Wall Street Journal, History Channel, and a number of other deals have been struck that have sent this new type of community channel soaring above its competition.

It’s main competitor, Gowalla, has not seen the kind of numbers it thought it would when it had it’s showdown with Foursquare at SXSW this past March. Both spurred a major amount of buzz, however, Foursquare seems to the be the clear winner so far.

Compete.com reports that more than 2 million + unique visitors a month are now heading to Foursquare, as opposed to just a little more than 500,000 for Gowalla. And this doesn’t account for it’s sole use in the mobile space, imaginably much more active.

Foursquare vs. Gowalla

Despite Foursquare’s dominance, Crowley believes competition in the location space will expand, and for Foursquare to carve its niche, he said he needs to provide a unique experience, as opposed to what larger sites could end up doing.

Guess who just had a birthday - YouTube! The video channel that has established itself as the ’standard’ when it comes to watching videos online, announced there 5th birthday, and that the platform has exceeded 2 billion video views per day.

As part of its 5th Anniversary, YouTube is launching the YouTube 5 Year Channel to help celebrate its story and retell the history of YouTube and how it first began. This is all part of a larger campaign just launched, “My YouTube Story” , where users can submit their YouTube story and explain how its community has impacted their lives. Documentary filmmaker, Stephen Higgins, has been assigned the task to help pull all these moments together on the channel.

It’s quite amazing what YouTube has become. In just five years time, it has more than 2 billion video views per day, nearly 1/3 the world’s population. In addition, there is more than 24 hours of video uploaded every minute to the site, every day! Also on the YouTube 5 Year Channel, you can see an interactive timeline of the key moments in YouTube’s growth - starting at the beginning, back in 2005.

What do you think of the new achievement, has YouTube made an impact on your life?

Internet video has changed the way we consume online media, with video watching have evolved in just 5 years with YouTube, we are still going through the juvenile moments, and most marketers are still trying to grasp how to properly use video in their marketing channels.

Justin Foster, Founder and President of the Video Commerce Consortium, and
Co-Founder and VP Market Development at Liveclicker, said “any retailer that is unable to, on a product level, drive conversion rates up at least 25% through the use of video, is not implementing video effectively.”

Recently, eMarketer.com released a study that estimated 66.7% of US Internet users—147.5 million people—are watching video online each month. By 2014, that figure is forecast to rise to 77% of Internet users, or 193.1 million people. In the same period, online video advertising spending will surge from $1.4 billion to $5.2 billion.

Surely there will be quite a bit of experimentation in 2010 with online video, but if you are not currently using video in your marketing programs - there could be a wide loophole you are currently ignoring.

You think you know Facebook? They’re just getting started. With its latest round of plug-in updates, Facebook has unleashed a monster that means it will soon dominate the scene as the web’s most popular destination after Google.

But what does it mean for us? The major announcements at the recent F8 Developer’s Conference in San Francisco unveiled a plan to intensify and expand FB’s ever-growing empire beyond its website, and turn every site across the Internet into satellites where users can interact with friends at all times.

Social Plug-ins

The F8 conference saw a combination of plug-ins released for developers to integrate onto their sites-here’s a quick wrap-up:

• Like Button and Like Box: This allows the Like feature to be added to any piece of content, typically an entire page. Users click on these buttons to Like a site and share a link on Facebook, which is permanently stored on a user’s profile and points back to the original site.

• Activity Feed and Live Stream: These are the plug-ins that show static and dynamic activity on a site. Activity Feed displays recent Likes and comments from the site, while Live Stream shows a real-time view of activity on the site and is intended for interactive events.

• Login with Faces and Facepile: This type of publisher plug-in enhances Facebook Connect, and makes it easy and compelling to sign in by leveraging appropriate Facebook cookies and displaying faces of your Facebook friends who are already members of the service.

• Recommendations: This plug-in allows site developers to personalize recommendations for the user based on what friends and everyone else is Liking on the site. This plug-in is intended to drive users to other pages on the site.

For more on Facebook’s plug-in plan, click here

A Personalized Recommendation Engine…

It is now simpler to integrate these plug-ins on your site-they use a seamless code that binds Facebook with your website. In addition, these plug-ins have another characteristic-they became smarter.

Publishers who use the Open Graph protocol can integrate their web pages into the social graph by identifying what an object is on a page: a book, a movie, a recording artist, an event, etc.

This changes how Facebook defines and structures knowledge for the web. For example, if I were to ‘Like’ a movie on IMDB.com, that information will be stored on my Facebook page. Now, fast-forward several months, and Facebook not only feeds that information to my Facebook page, but I now receive an additional recommendation from Facebook telling me I should follow a certain actor or actress’ page because they are also in that film.
With this new plug-in release, Facebook becomes a valuable new marketing tool to help promote content to the right targets. Now, information like our favorite books, movie, sport team, song, etc., will become permanent and more widespread on our profiles.

Users… Beware?

With these updates, users will absolutely be trading privacy for personalization. It’s clear that personalization-and ultimately more information-cannot be had without users telling a system about their interests.

More than a few people have said Facebook is becoming the new Google, with access to too much information about us.

But let’s be honest about the situation-Facebook users are not going to stop using Facebook. In fact, the ability to personalize content and the overall experience will make Facebook an even richer platform for individuals who like to create their own look and feel with content that is attached to Facebook.

Advertising is a major function of the Facebook platform, and this new “experience model” for users will likely draw further targeting. When this happens, then we’ll see how much users enjoy their privacy.

Competitors… Beware the Monster.

Facebook has a mission behind this announcement-to slowly own the web one set of eyeballs at a time. With just one plug-in, connected to a 450+ million-user base, Facebook is attempting to do more than just connect people together-but people with their things, all across the web.

Competitors don’t have much of a choice but to either innovate and build against it, or more likely embrace this technology and build on top of it.

All the big players- Google, AOL, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay-should be a bit worried about this. Facebook is literally cherry-picking social interactions all across the Web and bringing them to their platform.

(And Microsoft? They’ve already decided “why fight the power when you can join the fun,” and their idea of partnering is most likely the smartest move in their court.)

What’s Next for Facebook?

Open Graph will surely define how we consume content in the social web. Their system is smarter, more useful, better targeted, and reliably adaptable-more so than any social system previously.

As time goes on, developers and site publishers will come up with a bevy of applications and functions that will roll out in the next couple of years, depending on how Facebook allows developers to build on top of the Open Graph.

With this announcement, Facebook is just continuing to feed the beast. Not only are they biggest social network on the planet, Facebook is becoming the biggest network of people on the planet.

This blog entry is also posted on the Loomis Group Blog