Nick Cifuentes

When Facebook first debuted, I graduated from college that year, and saw it as something a bit passé for my taste, and figured I’d most likely would never touch. Well, after hitting my head several times on my monitor for being completely foolish, I woke up and become cheerfully addicted, and since then has helped shape my career as a digital marketer.

However, one aspect I was never really able to experience was being in school with the power of a social network, to see who was on my campus, what insane things happened at a certain dormitory, or pictures of that kegger that I’ll regret forever. Ahhh…well fast-forward life 8 years later, and now there’s a chance! The college youth of world finally can take back social networking with a newly launched site from NY-based entrepreneur Josh Weinstein, CollegeOnly.

The site is restricted to college networks only; sorry gang, you need an official college email to join. So now sharing photographs, trading juicy gossip, and obsessing about that girl in Physics II can all be experienced in the privacy of your very own social network!

And Weinstein has a good idea of what college kids want as well, he has already launched two start-ups in his youthful career, both geared toward the student body. RandomDorm, which was basically Chatroulette for college students, and GoodCrush, a collegiate matchmaking service.

Constructing this network of college-oriented sites had Weinstein thinking of building one centralized site that can handle the power of both previous sites and wrap it into an exclusive social network experience for just college students.

The site just launched last Wednesday, and is currently in beta for just a few select schools, but Weinstein said that it’s already exceeded their expectations in sign-ups. And more schools are going to be added over the coming weeks, Weinstein said, and could soon be arriving at YOUR university or college.

Do I Like This?

I asked for a login or demo to try the platform out, but I was shun! And it’s OK, it should be that way - college kids only! But, from the media kit, it appears similar to Facebook where you can see status updates of EVERYONE (not just your friends/connections), what’s happening on campus, pictures and events. And all within the comfort of knowing your parents, employers, and high school friends won’t ever get to see what you are doing. In addition, students will be able to post messages in certain categories, such as “Missed Connections,” so students can obsess over other classmates - I mean that in a good way. Another group labeled “After Party” will also help students connect and gossip over all the weekend’s past events.

And from what I can tell, it seems the picture feature is going to be quite the draw, imagine pictures of all those crazy times that just you and your college friends can see.

Who Pays For This?

Good question! The project in fact does have a notable backing behind them, with venture capitalists that have invested nearly $1.15 million; from SoftBank Capital, FirstMark Capital, as well a noteworthy angel investors, David Kidder & Peter Thiel. He was one of the early investors in Facebook.

Calling Security

Now, you can’t have a social network and not have privacy issues, that’s just blasphemy. But seriously, you can’t; so referencing the CollegeOnly blog, the team is being very careful about who has access to the site.

First off, each college seems to have a moderator or two attached to it, and I am sure that will grow with popularity, including current students on-campus. Secondly, what if a teacher or over-friendly janitor wants to join in the fun? Well, thankfully there is a repository of email addresses that CollegeOnly will be able to cross-reference and restrict from the website. In addition, users can also submit a list of email addresses of any teachers or administrators so they can be permanently banned from the site as well.

The Future…CollegeOnly

With Vampire Weekend’s song “The Kid’s Don’t Stand a Chance” playing ever so softly in the background at the moment, and most people questioning why bother battling what Facebook already does brilliantly? I simply cannot agree with that - I think CollegeOnly has a tremendous opportunity here.

If we look at the space as it is now, every kid and their mother is trying to get into this game, and Josh has done something very simple, and brilliant at the same time - he’s gone back to the original “Facebook” roots and is intending to keep this as a closed network that will be exclusive for each individual campus. And if Josh and his team are as smart as I think they are, and with angel investors like Thiel involved in the project, they are priming this venture for a large scale build-out.

Truthfully, there is no real site in existence that is both a trustworthy and spam-free website that can call itself a college only social network. The potential for Josh and his team to take advantage of the market at this time is prime. One site that I wrote about last year, CampusLive, seemingly might be similar at first glance, but they act more as an aggregator of a user’s current social networks and specific campus resources, as compared to CollegeOnly that acts as an entirely new experience just for YOUR campus. Once viewership increases and additional schools start to come aboard, I see a great potential for CollegeOnly to generate revenue in terms of school partnerships and other media opportunities.

Of course, viewership needs to grow before getting to this stage, and Josh confirmed that CollegeOnly has no plans for generating revenue any time soon. As it should be, and as the other big boys have done it, his intentions are to grow first, monetize second.

See CEO Josh Weinstein Explain his social network:

While social media use has grown dramatically across all age groups, older users have been especially enthusiastic over the past year about embracing new networking tools. Social networking use among internet users ages 50 and older nearly doubled—from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010.

• Between April 2009 and May 2010, social networking use among internet users ages 50-64 grew by 88%–from 25% to 47%.
• During the same period, use among those ages 65 and older grew 100%–from 13% to 26%.
• By comparison, social networking use among users ages 18-29 grew by 13%—from 76% to 86%.

“Young adults continue to be the heaviest users of social media, but their growth pales in comparison with recent gains made by older users,” explains Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist and author of the report. “Email is still the primary way that older users maintain contact with friends, families and colleagues, but many older users now rely on social network platforms to help manage their daily communications.”

• One in five (20%) online adults ages 50-64 say they use social networking sites on a typical day, up from 10% one year ago.
• Among adults ages 65 and older, 13% log on to social networking sites on a typical day, compared with just 4% who did so in 2009.

At the same time, the use of status update services like Twitter has also grown—particularly among those ages 50-64. One in ten internet users ages 50 and older now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves or see updates about others.

Read the entire report from Pew Research here

As ubiquitous a term Facebook has become, it’s hard to imagine it as a small company. But a recent infographic from JESS3 titled, “The Geosocial Universe” illustrates how large Facebook & other social network’s opportunity given a mobile market reaches nearly 5 billion people.

Will Facebook’s announcement of “Places” yesterday help boost these numbers quicker for the social giant?

Facebook Places Has Arrived

It feels a bit like Christmas morning. Well, maybe not that joyous, but for geo-location nerds out there - the day has arrived.

Facebook has announced its new geo-location feature, Facebook Places. With Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, BrighKite, Scvngr, and a bevy of other players trying to build engagement for users and brands while following you wherever you go, their adoption rate has been slow, and audience even slower. But now with Facebook’s announcement, the 500 million + users of Facebook have quickly become the biggest geo-location social network out there.

However, let’s back up one minute, first, they are launching U.S. only in this first phase - so it’s only a little under 200 million users who will be able to take part at first.

Secondly, Facebook is doing something great with this feature, they are not trying to squash the competition, they are joining forces, and opening special partnerships with the main geo-location social network stars, such as Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla and Booyah. They will be utilizing the Places API and integrating the feature into their current applications and be working exclusively with Facebook, rather than against them.

Around 5:23 p.m. PST, Facebook made the announcement of Places, as it is was created to share where you are with your friends, see where your friends currently are, and see what places are around you. The product will launch on the iPhone app later this evening, and on all advanced mobile browsers.

Follow-up story coming with more details early tomorrow…But read all about the new Facebook Places here in the meantime.

Will you be using Facebook Places?

A newly-released report from Nielsen said social networking is consuming twice as much of our online time as any other digital activity.

The statistics said sites like Facebook and Twitter account for 22.7% of time spent on the internet, with social games being the next most frequented activity at 10.2%.

And with all our time being eaten up by Facebook, you’d expect drop-off somewhere, and activities like email and instant messaging are taking the brunt of it. Email activity plunged from 11.5% to 8.3% from June 2009 to June 2010. Instant messaging also took a hit with a 15% decrease.

However, in a less obvious surprise, the mobile market is picking up for the drop-off in email usage as it rose from 37.4% to 41.6% - obviously coming from the rise in smart phones and mobile devices.

In a just-released Forrester research report, it said that most marketers should refrain from location-based services, citing that just a mere 4% of the US online adults have ever checked in on the “location game.” And only 1% update these services more than once a week.

The study revealed some interesting statistics, as it looked at a large number of location-based sites, including popular players such as Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown and Loopt. And to add to the study, a whopping 84% of respondents said they had no idea or were not even familiar enough with such types of apps. This study comes at an interesting time, since 2010 was marked the year of location-based services, igniting fires under social media marketers - all trying to integrate location-based strategies into their marketing programs.

And to add to the bottleneck, the report said almost 80% of location-based service users are male, with close to 70% of them between the ages of 19 and 35, and 70% have college degrees or higher. Forrester also discovered that 38% were more likely to say friends and family ask their opinions before a purchase, in addition, this crowd was very open to mobile coupons and offers as well. This vertical is also more resourceful with research prior to a purchase where nearly 20% are more likely to consult their phones before buying to conduct more research and read customer reviews.

Location-Based Reality Stinks?

This certainly brings most marketers back to reality before jumping on the location game bandwagon.

Although this data cuts down a very small segment to target, it’s still very approachable when you consider products that live in the gaming, consumer electronics, and sportswear verticals. These are the verticals that lead the way with testing these applications, according to Forrester. However, the location space is full of brands that are already proving they are not just for the male audience. Big players such as Starbucks, Oil of Olay, Bravo, Gossip Girl, Campbell’s Soup, Louis Vuitton, Bon Appétit, Lucky Magazine, TLC, and PepsiCo are all currently experimenting with location-based services.

But as in any new technology, there is always the question of adoption rate, and to be honestly blunt, these networks are very much in their infant stages. Foursquare has just over 2 million users; Loopt has 4 million, and MyTown with 2.5 million - barely a drop in the bucket from a marketing standpoint.

And the next question is scale, when this will happen? As of now, the digital social network rulers such as Facebook, Google and Twitter are not fully involved in the location game. When their entrance takes place, this will help set the market more efficiently, creating a much higher adoption rate. And a drastic shift in competition for the current market.

Thoughts…

As Forrester always does well, and does often - it reports the facts. I don’t think marketers should completely avoid location-based service programs, nor is Forrester saying that. They are however saying that you should tread lightly and not expect any massive returns as you start to experiment in this sort of advertising.

However, the market always moves quickly, as we all have become aware of over the past several years in social media’s popularity. If digital adoption rates stick, I’d say we would be in a good place to give this just a bit more of time before more users begin amass on each of these networks.

Depending on your specialty, I’d say it’s reckless to not at least consider location-based services when considering new social media programs. Your brand’s demographic might not fall directly into what Forrester reports, however, you should consider the question of “When?” At exactly what point will the ‘branded’ location-based network space take off in popularity? When will they eventually act like your Facebook branded community does now?

I think the real question is: Do you want to get involved now, or several months or years from now when every brand on the planet is doing it?

These types of applications will grow; they will be built beyond a cliché, cornball badge to tell your friends on Facebook or Twitter about. Monetary, if not branded products will soon replace these and be offered in place of  a ‘real’ incentive for checking-in. We already have started to see this in mobile coupon deals that Starbucks offers.

These incentives will get better and will have a stronger support system as the adoption rate increases.

We’ve just started in this game kids…just give it time.

*This image is courtesy of Facebakers.com and was made exclusively for Mashable

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

I know where you are, I know where you could be, I know pretty much everything about you.

And I’m not even your friend – at least (REAL) friend. It’s no surprise that social networking allows me to know this about you. I can see what you just ate, because you tweeted it, what you just got for Christmas, because you put it on Facebook. And now I can even see where you are all the time, because you went ahead and checked-in on Foursquare, or you Google Buzz-ed a random thought, and oh yea, you forgot to shut off that geo-location feature that is set to be on automatically when you activate your Google Buzz account…doh!

Sure, these publicly announced check-ins, random personal thoughts, and location-sharing networks might get you a cool new pseudo badge and allow you to become the Mayor of your workplace or the supermarket next door, maybe even the Target down the street – but one key thought that revolves around all of this – I know what you are doing, I know where you are, I know pretty much everything about you.

Social Networks & Privacy?

Privacy seems to be the 800-pound gorilla in the room that everyone notices is a big problem, large enough to be spoken about daily, but we more or less undermine it and sweep it under the rug and think it will clean itself up later somehow – aka….someone else will deal with it… or even worse – maybe nobody cares?

In the past, we’ve gone through the trials and tribulations of privacy wars on Facebook, and after that battle, their new policy now allows for more individual control and openness at the same time. That battle has slowed, and has now turned into the discussions around the new dangers of location-sharing networks such as Foursquare, Google Buzz, Loopt, even Yelp’s new check-in feature, maybe even clever Twitter or Facebook searches will yield some good results as to where you might be. As each of us get caught up in the novelty and bonuses associated with our behavior – what dangerous doors are we opening by taking part in this?

This leads into a larger discussion around the privacy associated with social networks, but to be honest, if we are taking part in this phenomenon daily – do we care about privacy? Sure there are certain Facebook pictures you want to keep targeted to just a select group of friends, and on Twitter you want to grant permission to a select group of people to see your tweets; privacy exists – but what is privacy if we are taking part in social reality anyways?

The 24/7 personal openness we display as social media users ties to our inherent behavior to play to our strengths. Social media has changed the way we live on and offline and has us living in much more “open” environments, compared to our parents and other Generation X’ers who lived in “closed” worlds and had “separate” behaviors. Social reality now combines all of that for us!

All of this sharing allows people to play to their virtues, even more in a social media world. People find their triumphs in social media accomplishing and well deserved from a societal standpoint, as well as a boost in their own individual behavior (aka EGO). If I tweeted from the top of mountain and said “About to hang-glide from 4,000 feet in Peru, what a life!”, compared to “Watching ‘Charles in Charge’ reruns on Mondayz…”; clearly it’s cooler I am doing the first rather than latter, but social media, despite its privacy concerns, allows us to live that behavior and feel accomplished for letting the world know what WE are doing. Does it matter that it related to hang-gliding or watching mundane television – no… I am letting the world know because I feel that I need to, to maybe feel that accomplishment in society.

I am not going to break this down from a psychological level, but I am sure there is some reality to this opinion in how people perceive themselves and why they take part – not caring about the privacy concerns we always feel so bullied with. In a recent study from the Future of Privacy Forum, 42% of Internet users are concerned that websites are collecting too much information about them, but then again with Facebook recently overtaking Yahoo! for the #2 top spot on the entire Internet - I don’t know if that reflects privacy as much of a concern anymore?

The ageless metal-rap rockers, Rage Against the Machine, are making noise again, and this time it’s by pure accident. The political-driven rock group hasn’t released an album since retiring back in 2000, however, they surfaced last week on the UK’s biggest radio station, BBC Radio One, to talk about how they suddenly emerged on the UK pop music charts for the much fought over “Christmas Number One” title for 2009.

The UK “Christmas Number One” title has normally been held by the UK series, X Factor, winner - a version of American Idol produced in the UK. For four straight years, the “Christmas Number One” winner has been held by the X Factor winner, and this year it was Joe Mcelderry, who was expected to win the title for singing the Miley Cyrus song “The Climb.”

However, a Facebook inspired campaign that was launched by UK resident Jon Morter as an entertaining (joke) protest against the mainstream pop that in most ways does dominate music charts across the globe these days. Morter’s Facebook group “Rage Against the Machine for Christmas Number 1″ quickly grew to 800,000 fans, and was overspread with users who pledged to buy the track to help push the band to the top of the charts. The Facebook Group currently has more than 970,000 members as of Dec. 20.

The mainstream news picked up the story after the first two weeks of December when the Facebook group, which launched in the beginning of December began to grow quickly, and while going offline many times during the beginning days of December, prompted some to make several claims of foul play - however it didn’t slow the Rage Against the Machine victory.

And once Joe McElderry’s track was released in a hard copy on CD, unlike Rage Against the Machine, the X Factor winner from the UK began to close the gap on the suddenly popular American rock band and their 1992 produced single “Killing in the Name Of.”

On December 20, BBC Radio One announced the final winner, and thanks to a surge of downloads via blog posts, Facebook comments, and Twitter tweets - the infectious campaign influenced social media channels and led to a Rage Against the Machine victory.

**The charts above include only a limited set of data, due to a number of other keywords that could have been used in Twitter, Facebook Updates and Blogs; keywords like “Rage”; which were too broad to analyze more specifically at the time of this posting. The above posts do however represent the trending to their exact details.