BTW, one thing no one is talking about yet is Places within the Graph API. You can query recent checkins by users, pages, places: GET https://graph.facebook.com/[place/Page/user_id]/checkins

That alone is SO powerful!

Anyways, starting today, you can immediately tell people about that favorite spot with Facebook Places. You can share where you are and the friends you’re with in real time from your mobile device.

Checking In with Friends

Ever gone to a show, only to find out afterward that your friends were there too? With Places, you can discover moments when you and your friends are at the same place at the same time.

You have the option to share your location by “checking in” to that place and letting friends know where you are. You can easily see if any of your friends have also chosen to check in nearby.

To get started, you’ll need the most recent version of the Facebook application for iPhone. You also can access Places from touch.facebook.com if your mobile browser supports HTML 5 and geolocation.

Go to Places on the iPhone application or touch.facebook.com site and then tap the “Check In” button. You’ll see a list of places near you. Choose the place that matches where you are. If it’s not on the list, search for it or add it. After checking in, your check-in will create a story in your friends’ News Feeds and show up in the Recent Activity section on the page for that place.

Places is only available in the United States right now. But we expect to make it available to more countries and on additional mobile platforms soon.

Checkin Friends

When you check in, you can also tag friends who are with you, just as you can tag a friend in a status update or photo. You can post an update along with your check-in to tell people more about what you are doing.

In the “People Here Now” section, you can see others who are checked in with you at that place. This section is visible for a limited amount of time and only to people who are checked in there. That way you can meet other people who might share your interests. If you prefer not to appear in this section, you can control whether you show up by unchecking the “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in” privacy control.

The next time you head off on vacation or go to a show, check in with Places to find out which friends are there. See who is close by and read the comments from other friends who’ve been there before.

Tagging and Control

With Places, you are in control of what you share and the people you share with. You choose whether or not to share your location when you check in at a place. When you check in, you can tag friends who are with you but only if their settings allow it. When you are tagged, you are always notified.

Only your friends can see when you visit or are tagged at a place, unless you have specifically set your master privacy control to “Everyone.” You also have the choice to set more restrictive customized settings.

When a friend tags you through Places, you will receive a notification on Facebook and on your mobile device. The first time this happens, you’ll be given the choice to allow your friends to check you in to places.

When your friends check you in, it is as if you have checked in at that place yourself. You also will appear checked-in to your friends. If you do not allow friends to check you in, then when they tag you at a place, your name will appear in the same way it appears in a tagged status update. You will not appear checked-in at that place.

You can always remove any Places check-in or tag using your mobile device or on the web. It’s like removing yourself from a photo tag. You also have the choice to turn off the ability for friends to check you in at Places. Go to your Privacy Settings and turn off the setting to “Let Friends Check Me In.”

You may want to share your check-in information with third-party applications that build interesting experiences around location, such as travel planning. Applications you use must receive your permission before getting this information. Your friends will be able to share your check-ins with the applications they use to help create new social experiences with location. If you don’t want to share your check-ins with your friends’ applications, just uncheck the new box in your Privacy Settings under “Applications and Websites.”

Everything happens somewhere. Start exploring your world with your friends by sharing your experiences at the places where you go. Take a tour of Places to learn more.

This is a smart move on Coke’s end. Everyone knows that Coke mainly targets teens, and what if instead of marketing to teens, you get teens come to you, promote you, share, chat, and advocate your brand? Dream came true …

Coke organized this experimental amazing hangout villa they called The Coca Cola Village. They’ve been doing it for a few years, or at least I found videos from 2008 and 2009.

This year’s was a little different though, an Israeli agency called E-dologic — part of Publicis, extended the event in effort to bring the Facebook “Like” to the real world. Not only they invited thousands of teens who talk about this through traditional word-of-mouth, but they used the Facebook Presence-like concept where they distribute teens a wristband, they link it to their Facebook account, and the village automatically digitalize, archive, organize, and share their experience. It makes it easy to re-live the fun, read the comments, see their friends, share activities, and for Coke? instant-massive-ultra-influencing system that leverages teens to promote Coke’s brand among their circles.

Really nicely done. As expected, Facebook will keep penetrating the real-world. Next efforts will probably use the open graph to describe more precise locations and describe relationships among people, places, and objects.

Facebook’s Open Graph offers far more than the ability to “like pages.” It’s Facebook’s play to power the semantic web.

Facebook’s Open Graph can allow for deep personalization of any Open Graph-enabled content — content that reacts to your age, your gender, your friends, your personal preferences and even the things you “like.” The only thing required to fully achieve hyper-relevance would be understanding your location — but a soon-to-be-released update to the Open Graph API will allow developers to integrate location-based services into any website or mobile application. For example, imagine integrating Open Graph into Google’s search results and then think about what type of search results you might get back if you searched for “Caribbean vacation” and it knew that you were married, had two kids, lived in New York, were 34, had “liked” a Windsurfing Brand or a sport team, and were currently posting a search from your home address in the evening.

Facebook’s big mistake when rolling out the Open Graph was trying to hide what I believe is their true intention. They could have avoided the whole privacy debacle if they had asked consumers if they wanted to share some of their details with Open Graph “to allow for a new type of web experience that was truly personalized to their desires.” Many people would be willing to give up some of their privacy if they understood the upside. And those who didn’t could have been given the chance to opt out. They might be able to avoid the subject with consumers, but do they really believe their competition doesn’t see exactly what they’re doing?

Until early this week, I was wondering how Google would maintain their dominance in search if the key to the semantic web was effectively powered by social networks. I just couldn’t imagine Google wanting to leverage Facebook’s Open Graph to influence their search results and then Kevin Rose from Digg leaked that Google would be releasing their own social network called “Me.” I think Google’s true reasons for re-approaching social networks is because they recognize it’s a necessary component to achieving the next generation of search technology. And Orkut just didn’t get them there. As fascinating as it’s going to be to watch these two heavyweights duke it out to dominate our digital lives for the next 10 years, when I look at their past histories with privacy issues I can’t help but ask: should we be more scared than excited?

TechCrunch confirmed today that it’s not a rumor, it’s real.

D’Angelo, who was Facebook’s CTO for years, shared his thoughts as an answer to one of the questions on Quora. Here’s his response:

• This is not a rumor. This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it. I am completely confident about this.
• They realized that Buzz wasn’t enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network. They are modeling it off of Facebook.
• Unlike previous attempts (before Buzz at least), this is a high-priority project within Google.
• They had assumed that Facebook’s growth would slow as it grew, and that Facebook wouldn’t be able to have too much leverage over them, but then it just didn’t stop, and now they are really scared.

Google has failed over and over again in providing any service that’s user friendly, i.e. Buzz, Latitude, Social Search, Google Friend Connect, Wave, Wave again, especially Wave … Though mark my words, Latitude will take off and will be base of amazing LBS services … Anyways, Google usually lacks of good design and usability, which makes it hard to believe they can compete with Facebook.

But the funny bit is that while Google is going after social networking, Facebook is making the move towards search. Shiv shared some thoughts on Facebook Search, and although I have some different thoughts, [Facebook] Open Graph is the beginning of a new semantic search that goes deep as opposed to broad and finds relevant content based on profile, location, and human recommendations.

So my predictions:

1. Google Me will have amazing technology, platform, have geo-social-mobile as a core, leverage elements from Latitude, Buzz, Open Social, and will be native to all new releases of the Android platform, including Google TV. Their success will rely on Google making a massive effort in making it usable, friendly, and having a good design.

2. Facebook will enter the search war, but not before they enter the display advertising arena. Search is a low priority as it provides less direct revenue opportunity for Facebook, whereas serving relevant context / social aware ads on 3rd party websites using the Facebook Open Graph provides a massive immediate revenue opportunity.

Really well done Sony. This projection was again created by NuFormer in the Netherlands and I must say these guys would have to be one of the top mapping agencies out there. The creative concept, mapping precision and execution are simply stunning! I will say that I think the Samsung 3D Projection was still more innovative in it’s concept and execution, but it’s good to see with just 3 concepts out there how different they can be. Now where is the US one? There’s a massive white building in Lincoln road with great exposure that would be ideal for it! Really, I’m sure Sapient will help negotiate and get all approvals to do it

Samsung introduced 3d projections in Amsterdam to promote their new to-be-launched 3d tv’s. I would _love_ to get one for the world cup, but I could only hope.

Samsung was the first to introduce a large-scale 3D-Outdoor projection in the Netherlands, at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. The public was able to view the addition of a new dimension to this historic building.

Now BMW did it in Singapore, and what really stands out with this installation is that it’s set across two separate buildings and an intersection, the  first projection mapping installation to sync two projections together, and the effect is simply beautiful, innovative and hugely engaging from any angle.

So back to my initial statement … to the best of my knowledge, the FTC does not regulate sky ads, so how long would it be before someone figures out a way to project this to the sky and place ads in front of even more eye-balls?

If anyone has any info on regulations for 3d projections please share … won’t take long before we see them all over NY.

It’s easy to get caught up in today’s trends or even focus on the next six months. Some of 2009′s biggest trends included an increased emphasis on real-time search and information distribution, while distribution of marketing content in widgets and other pieces of portable content that worked across devices and social spaces also saw its stake rise. Plus, there were great improvements in social-media monitoring and analytics. And most notably, marketers finally acknowledged that social media was more than just a fad, with almost complete adoption by all major marketers.

Here are the top 11 predictions for what social media will look like in 2012 (based on a full presentation which is available on my blog). Some of these items exist today in their early stages, but this list is about what I believe will become the norm in 2012. Ultimately, share of voice, point of view and community influence will be more important than brand ownership — and marketers will need to get over it if they want to stay relevant in 2012.

1. Privacy expectations will (have to) change
There will be a cultural shift, whereby people will begin to find it increasingly more acceptable to expose more and more of their personal details on different forms of social media. Sharing your likes, dislikes, opinions, photos, videos and other forms of personal information will be the norm and people will become more accepting of personalized experiences, both corporate and personal, that are reacting to this dearth of personal information.

2. Complete decentralization of social networks
The concept of a friend network will be a portable experience. You’ll find most digital experiences will be able to leverage the power of your social networks in a way that leverages your readily available personal information and the relationships you’ve established. We’re already seeing the beginnings of this with Facebook Connect and Google’s FriendConnect.

3. Our interaction with search engines will be different
Real-time information in Google search, e.g. from Twitter, blog results and user reviews, will be more prominent. Google’s Social Search will change the way we interact with search engines by pushing relevant content from our personal networks to the front of search results, making them more personalized. The importance of digital-influencer marketing will increase significantly.

4. Rise of the content aggregators
The amount of content online is growing at an exponential rate, and most online users have at least three online profiles from social networks to micro-blogging to social news sites. Our ability to manage this influx is challenging, and content aggregators will be the new demi-gods, bringing method to madness (and make a killing). Filtering and managing content will be big business for those who can get it right and provide easy-to-use services.

5. Social media augmented reality
Openly accessible information from the social-media space will be used to enhance everyday experiences. For example: the contacts book in your phone links to Facebook and Twitter to show real-time updates on what the contact is doing before you put in the call, real-time reviews from friends and associates will appear in GPS-based mapping services as a standard feature, and socially enabled CRM will change the way companies manage business relationships forever.

6. Influencer marketing will be redefined
As social media continues to permeate more and more aspects of not only the way we interact with digital media but also other channels such as digital outdoor, commerce or online TV, we will see the significance of influencer marketing grow dramatically. As a basic example, the inclusion of Twitter in Google search results or Google’s soon-to-be-released Social Search will permeate search results with content that will not be managed by Google’s infamous PageRank but by social influence and relevance to your social network. Discovering people that can help you to reach your desired consumer will become exponentially more effective and important.

7. Ratings everywhere
In today’s world, having a commerce site that doesn’t have user ratings could actually prove to be a detriment to sales. In the near future, brands and businesses will more frequently place user ratings and accept open feedback on their actual websites. User ratings will become so common that marketers should expect to find them woven into most digital experiences.

8. Social media agents
Managing the customer experience offline and online is already a key concern for marketers and customer-experience advocates. As businesses continue to support customers by monitoring and engaging in the social media space, tools to optimize this experience will become more important. Expect to see a certain percentage of responses handled by natural language engines that can respond to basic commentary such as “my service is down” or “I never received my package.”

9. Riding the (Google) wave
It’s still early days as Google Wave is still primarily limited to developers but it has the potential to revolutionize collaboration and engagement. Wave offers marketers a unique way, at minimal cost, to allow consumers to engage with each other in way that is miles beyond anything we’re currently using. Savvy marketers will develop extensions for Wave that evolve its unique communication toolset into a rich brand experience that is immersive but allows for new levels of interaction from crowdsourced storytelling to crowdsourced product design.

10. Thinking beyond “nowness”
In 2009 we became very focused on the real-time nature of social media. The implications behind consumer feedback and interaction around brands using tools like Twitter or Facebook’s news stream caused marketers to re-evaluate the power of social media tools in parallel to “traditional” digital-media channels such as search. Looking into the future we’ll need to try and evaluate what’s next and the likely answer is based on the next evolution of the web as we know it: the semantic web. In a semantic web world, search engines, for example, will anticipate the best search results we’re looking for based on what they know about us (such as all our public social networking profiles). There will be an opportunity for marketers who push the limits of their imagination to anticipate what marketing will look like in this next stage of the web and creating new and compelling experiences that we’re only touching the surface of now.

11. Social media everything and the return of digital media
Social functions will become so commonplace in digital experiences that the thought of not having socially-enhanced experiences will seem illogical. Digital media by its very nature is inherently social. I hope we’re not talking about social media in 2012, and we just refer to everything as digital media again.

(This post was originally posted on AdAge’s DigitalNext Blog.)

Social Media 2012 focuses on new innovations in social media that are just starting to appear in production or experimental forms and that I believe will be future trends to watch as marketers. Regardless of your knowledge level with social media you will find content in here that you have not heard or seen before and I hope you find it as inspiring to listen to as I found it to research and develop for this presentation.

The abstract / summary described the session as: A focus universe research strategy; imagine using the entire internet as your focus group. Analyze every conversation, visualize trends, compare brands, learn insights, envisage it over time, and get real factual answers, not just amplified assumptions based on focus and control groups. Now add IPv6 to the picture, digital invasion, UGC/MGC user and machine generated content; we’re not that from the day fridges tweet about food needs, tvs’ about programs, subways and highways about traffic, clubs about nightlife, … So now imagine adding that to the picture, a digital blueprint of society.

It covers real-time culture shifts, experience, and expectations with streaming, commerce, collaboration, customer support, and more … tons of very interesting data points.

Feedback always welcome.

American-Statesman: As smartphones have gotten more popular, we’ve been hearing more and more about augmented reality. Can you explain to us what it actually is and how it’s being used?

Augmented Reality (AR) is the ability of combining digital and real-world aspects to provide a greater or enhanced experience. Traditionally, it’s layering a digital overlay on top of a video stream, think NFL first-down marker, or NASCAR car information. It is not new, but due to the recent penetration of web and mobile it has been getting greater buzz. It was originally coined in 1992, used in PCs in 1999, by Sony PS3 in 2007, but it wasn’t until 2009 when adopted by Flash and made available for the masses that it began to gain momentum.

NFL and NASCAR are basic examples of mainstream media using AR, but the true reach is when it’s more personal: enhance computer or phone video streams with digital layers triggered by either some market or symbol in the video, or GPS and compass information, or any data source that can be translated into personalized visualization that adds and provides value to the user. Traditional uses range from recognizing trading cards, to real-size mailing boxes, to visualizing how would your new TV look in your living room.

As smartphones have gotten more popular, mobile augmented reality still has not, but they’re setting the base bricks and platform to allow greater penetration in the future. Location awareness, compass, maps, user generated content, all contribute to greater and richer data sources that will allow for great digital and real world mashups. The best mobile apps right now are TwittARound, Layar, Nearest Tube, TAT Augmented ID, SREngine, and Wikitude AR Travel Guide.

What does the future of mobile marketing/advertising look like to you? Will we find it as intrusive as it sounds now or do you think most people will welcome more targeted location-based/personalized marketing?

The entire advertising arena is shifting to brand actively focusing on providing value, enabling actions or behaviors, or building connections, as opposed to traditional mass-media push advertising. More specifically on the mobile arena, there will be three types of advertising: branded applications, opt-in branded benefits, or ad networks that operate on top of free-mium applications … in all cases the user has to perceive value in order to engage.

In the more traditional scenario which is already happening, application developers opt not to charge for the application and distribute it for free, for exchange of placing an ad from a network into their app. Users do not have to pay, thus providing value or benefit, and advertisers get more eye balls due to the free application popularity. The degree of intrusion is solely determined by the developer, but it has not hit any blocks thus far; at the end, the success of the application will depend on the experience, which is a combination of usability, entertainment, and toleration of advertising.

In the new emerging space, some users will gladly opt-in to location based advertising if it’s targeted to their likes, needs, location, they can opt out at any point, and by opting in the advertiser actually helps them find what they want and provides discounts, rewards, or any loyalty incentive. Services such as foursquare are already proving this, but that’s only the beginning.

We already seem to be drowning in information from all directions — in what ways will companies cut through clutter to get their message out?

More information will be generated in 2010 than the history of human kind until 2009. The more user generated content is out there, the less brand generated content can be found. Brands will have to learn to relinquish control and that they can’t impose messages anymore. It’s not about getting the message out, it’s understanding digital behaviors, environments, and connections. Content and context strategy are more important than ever; it’s all about knowing who to target, when, how, why, providing relevant value, leveraging social circles and influence so spread that message.

Companies that understand social influence and leverage it properly, exponentially augment any of their advertising efforts. There are many tools to understand the digital conversation space, perform user research, benchmark online and offline activities, follow trends and patterns, and once brands understand what the conversations are, where do they take place, what’s the visibility, expectations, then they can decide how to leverage that chatter — not advertise — and get their message across.

Will social networks lose their effectiveness in connecting people with companies once the novelty wears off or will they evolve in new directions?

Social networks were never effective in connecting brands and consumers; no one wants to be friends with their butter, and even the cool brands that have millions of fans, have very little engagement. Brands are still learning how to provide value to online consumers; it’s not just setting up a Facebook page, it’s not just having a Twitter account; those social presences are being used as PR extensions, which does not even begin to leverage their true potential.

Social networks play a huge role into identifying the consumer cross-sites, cross-brands, even cross-channels. Players like Facebook will massively influence the eCRM capabilities for brands, fully integrate, and ease tracking online behavior to better understand the digital ecosystem of properties, apps, sites, networks, widgets, locations, and more.

When it comes to the future of augmented reality, what should we be most excited about?

Augmented Reality is currently pretty limited, mainly by technology: the processing power to superimpose digital elements on top of real time video captures by a webcam or mobile camera is not powerful enough to make it seamless and as integrated as we would wish. The need of the black and white symbol to activate the experience is intentionally designed due to its simplicity for the computer to recognize it and calculate the coordinates many times per second to achieve maximum digital integration. Any other object such as logos, faces, and complex real objects will be able to trigger AR in the future and that’s when AR will totally take off.

The future of AR will seamlessly integrate with the real world, and it all translates into better experience and better data sources. Depending on how far in the future, expect object, logos, and face recognition, environment based experiences, integration with video, sound, even odor. Transition from screens or glasses into projected displays or holograms if we look far enough.

Digital technology is advancing fast, integrating in every traditional aspect of our lives. Augmented reality will cease to be called that way once digital and analog are so seamlessly integrated that non-digital experiences will not make sense anymore. Same applies for social media by the way, and lots of terms we use today. Everything is social, everything is digital, why do we have to restate the obvious?

The original blog post can be found at the Austin 360 blog.