Well, finally the long wait is over. Facebook has taken the plunge into the world of geo-location with their long awaited Facebook Places. Not good news for Foursquare as highlighted in Nick O’Neill’s AllFacebook piece “Facebook Punks Foursquare, Gets Them To Announce Nothing”. Foursquare will have to pull something pretty special out of the bag to counteract this maneuver from Facebook. As for the new offering, well essentially according to the Facebook’s Graph API documentation, developers will be able to access the read and search APIs as of today. However the write APIs are to remain in “private beta” with a limited set of partners.

Over the last few weeks Facebook has been tweaking Notes and changing ‘Like’ buttons but this really could be the coup de grace for other LBS services. This announcement now enables a new class of location-powered applications to reach the mass market for the first time and drive significant value to businesses and developers. So what is possible?

Well there are three key components: share where you are, find where your friends are, and discover new places around you. It will be available on mobile devices (web) and on the company’s new iPhone app as of tonight.

Check-ins are part of the platform and so is adding places. It has photo tagging functionality so you can “tag” friends that are with you at a specific location so everybody doesn’t have to check-in on their own. What does this mean from a privacy perspective? Well you can remove any check-in and settings are defaulted to friends only. “Here Now” is on after you check-in and tagging only lets you tag your friends while notifying you whenever you’re tagged. In addition you can remove any tag and turn off being tagged in Facebook Places. On the iPhone app, you can report a place if it’s inaccurate or don’t want it on the system.

And from a developer’s point of view? Well according to Justin Smith from InsideFacebook, Facebook has created new extended permissions for Places. To be able to get a user’s check-ins, developers will need to request the “user_checkins” extended permission. To be able to get a user’s friends’ check-ins as well, developers will request the “friends_checkins” extended permission.

Once that is done, Facebook says developers can do three things starting tomorrow:

1. You can get details on individual check-ins
GET https://graph.facebook.com/[checkin_id]

2. You can get a list of check-in information about specific places, pages, or users
GET https://graph.facebook.com/[place/Page/user_id]/checkins

3. You can search for recent check-ins for an authorized user and his or her friends

Let the games begin!

Tapedtogether is an experiment in crowdsourcing and online content curation resulting in a Summer Playlist for 2010 featuring an eclectic mix of artists from Frank Sinatra to DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, all put together on a website inspired by the iconic artwork of Saul Bass.

Similar to NBCs Olympic coverage, CNN brings you the World Cup Twitter tracker an easy way to stay up to date with the buzz about the games.

David Perez sold his soul for 1 week to Twitter. He wanted to go to the Advertising Festival in Cannes and Leo Burnett agreed to send him, the only condition was he had to partake in a social media experiment where he did everything his Twitter followers commanded him to. What would you get him to do? He’s already tattooed the ‘fail whale’ on his arm!

It’s summer and the weather is nice! Now is not the time to be eating in front of your work computer, get involved and take back your lunch while the sun is still shining!

The extraordinary growth in mobile within the last few months will no doubt encourage more and more people to get involved with the latest online, or more to the point, offline trend of Mass Mingling. According to Trend Watching’s June briefing ‘reality’ is back in Vogue.

Mobile is already liberating people from the shackles of the desktop and allowing them to get back in touch with their locality. The butcher, the baker, and rumor has it, the candle stick maker are all going loco about local as the rise of location based services like Foursquare continue to grow. In a recent TechCrunch piece Mark Zukerberg hinted that location based features are coming to the platform and set to put location on the map.

Meetup recently launched a service for organizations, companies and movements to launch global events via the web. Meetup Everywhere is an open and free platform which aims to spark offline events amongst communities of like-minded individuals, across the globe. The website enables organizers to map the meet-ups and share announcements and updates through users Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Online communities like ReadyMade and Etsy.com are working with DIY crafters to host their own local “craft ups” where organizers receive a free downloadable Craft Party Kit containing crafty project ideas, instructions and templates, along with tips and ideas for hosting their crafty meetup party.

June 14, 2010 if you didn’t know was the worldwide-meet-the-tribe-of-Linchpins Internet guru Seth Godin. If you are part of the Tumblr tribe then you now have the opportunity to put a face to the interesting tumblog you’ve been following.

The power of the Mass Mingling cannot be under estimated from and business and marketing perspective but more importantly for its power to affect real and positive social change in the ‘real’ world. Are you aware of any Meet Up events in Ireland? If so please let us know.

In response to growing concerns about privacy, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook has announced changes to the privacy controls on the site. They will become simpler and easier to use. The roll out begins soon. Here Zuckerberg makes a rare video appearance to explain the new system, apologize for the mistakes they made with the old one and remind us he’s a CEO at only 26.

If there is one topic of conversation that has been prevalent across blogs, social media resources and news sites alike this week, it’s that of  Facebook Privacy. Facebook privacy settings have been criticised for their complexity with users generally unaware of the impact of what having lax profile privacy in place really means for them. According to the New York Times, Facebook’s Privacy Policy is 5,830 words long, while dozens of apps have been developed allowing you to rate your privacy scale on Facebook.

Just as any smart social-led company does today, Facebook has listened to the public cry for a review of privacy settings, announcing yesterday that its privacy settings are due to be simplified within weeks making it easier to protect data such as your age, marital status, religious and political beliefs.

Facebook’s Chief of Public Policy Tim Sparapani stated in a US radio interview “We are going to be providing options for users who want simplistic bands of privacy that they can choose from and I think we will see that in the next couple of weeks.”

But as one commentator put it, ‘The best security setting on Facebook is common sense’. We couldn’t agree more. The social web is a fantastic place and it’s incredibly empowering to be able to voice your opinion and have it shared with others. It’s also great to have some element of control over who you want to share it with, so do the common sense thing and take a read over Mashable’s highly informative article concerning Facebook Privacy Tips. And stay tuned for more updates from Facebook.

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

On the back of Facebook’s open graph announcement and  Zuckenberg’s vision to create meaningful relationships between people and things on the Internet, the theme of the semantic web dominated lunch-time discussions yesterday.

As timing would have it, we later came across a brilliant video explaining the social web, posted on Mashable’s website. The video was created by student Kate Ray, a journalism/psych major at NYU who has done extensive research on the semantic web.

This 14-minute documentary, Web 3.0., is a brief but high-level overview of the semantic web, what it is and why it matters to all kinds of Internet users.

Watch and learn.

The Webby Award Winners have just been announced – click here for the full list.

Representing the best of the web across some 70 categories, some of our favourites include:

Best Navigation Structure:

HBO Imagine

(BBDO New York/ Barbarian Group)

Best Visual Design – Function

The Economist Thinking Space

(Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO)

Blog – Business & Cultural

Mashable

Fashion

Wrangler Blue Bell Jeans

(Kokokaka)

Financial Services

Mint

(Atomic PR)

Green

Love Letters To The Future

(Xenophile Media Inc.)

Best Use of Social Media:

Yearbook Yourself

(Colle & McVoy)

Integrated Campaigns:

Starbuck’s Love Project Integrated Campaign

(BBDO New York)

Mobile & Experience Marketing:

The World’s Biggest Signpost

(FarFar)

Within the Best Integrated Media Plan Category that eBoy Coke/Cybercom were listed as an official Honoree (top 15% of entries), Nike Chalkbot, created by Widen & Kennedy, came out the winner – a worthy winner for sure!

For some serious web inspiration check out the above and others!

In a rare partnership between Google and Facebook, the UK’s Digital Debate has been running on both sites since the start of the election campaign.

More than 5,300 questions were suggested on dedicated pages on both Facebook and YouTube, and the best ten questions (as decided by 180,000 votes) put to party leaders Nick Clegg, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. From today, the answers are online and users can vote for the best responses and the overall winner – to be revealed on 3 May.

And so the question begs, will the online winner mirror the real-world winner on May 6th?

Wow!

The “Like Button” aggregator – www.likebutton.me – gives a one-stop overview of what links your FB friends are sharing across the web as well as providing an overview of the most popular content liked by all FB members on sites such as CNN.com, YouTube.com, HuffingtonPost.com, TED.com etc.

You can’t but feel that you are snooping on your friends’ online activity, but if anything, it stands as  a reminder  that the act of liking is a shared action, unless personal privacy preferences are changed. Either way, Likebutton.me, much like digg.com, is a great resource for getting an instant overview of what online content is trending.

At the recent Twitter Chirp developer conference, Biz Stone revealed Twitter’s long mysterious registered user number: a total of 105,779,710 twitters to be exact. But that’s just the topline numbers view. More interesting is a deep –dive into Twitter, unearthing answers to questions such as “When do people retweet most?”, “What does a tweet’s journey look like?” and “How does a user’s number of followers compare to his (or her) number of tweets?”.

Huffington Post helps answer such questions with a fantastic slideshow of Twitter infographics. Our favourites – Exploring the Journey of A Tweeet & Twitter vs. Facebook Stand-off – are showcased above, but click here to explore more.