Since schoolFeed launched in July 2011, the networking site dedicated to connecting high school classmates has gained over 7 million users, and their userbase is growing every second.  The target crowd of schoolFeed are those aged 35-55 who didn’t have social networking sites “in their day” to keep them in touch.

“It’s amazing how many alumni have wanted to find old classmates.  We’re creating over 15 new connections per second.” said Lance Tokuda, co-founder of schoolFeed. “There is a huge market for people that would really want to interact with old classmates. We are excited to offer them a network that meets their needs which is complimentary to Facebook’s social graph.”

schoolFeed features:

• Find and connect with hundreds of old classmates in just one click
• Share an online yearbook with your graduating class
• Follow classmates based on interests
• Earn virtual currency as you engage with other users

And the best part about schoolFeed, apart from reconnecting with high school classmates, is that it’s free and it connects with Facebook.  This leveraging of Facebook’s existing social graph has been key for schoolFeed’s growth, enabling a faster rate of expansion than even RockYou saw during its early days, and later as an initial supporter of the Facebook platform.

But as schoolFeed competes with the likes of Classmates.com more so than Facebook, the newcomer will have to utilize a different monetization scheme for a demographic well accustomed to paying out for direct connections on social networks.  Tokuda thinks it’s high time direct monetization schemes were changed.  schoolFeed will be using its fresh funds to build out new features, as well as its marketing efforts.

“With RockYou there wasn’t a clear way to monetize social media,” Tokuda explains.  ”MySpace was big but advertisers didn’t want to advertise there initially.  Now there’s a clear route for monetization on social media.

“We’re targeting the same people that often used RockYou–a lot of soccer moms, those that play social games.  And even on the brand side, they’re valuable, with a lot of consumer brands targeting them as well, so we think it’s a good fit.  We find that mature demographics have higher monetization rates–they’re the more nostalgic.”

One new feature schoolFeed will offer this mature demographic is event-planning, specifically for school reunions.  They’ll also be building out their search functions, which are still relatively limited at this time.  They’ve already dipped into the highly monetizable social gaming pool with a version of Bingo already engaging users on the site.

schoolFeed Gets $1.7M to Connect Classmates that Missed the Facebook Boat is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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With rumors of an IPO coming as early as this week, Facebook is, for once, making headlines for something other than mandatory profile updates and privacy concerns.  While there’s fear an IPO could ruin Facebook’s “startup” appeal and slow down innovation, an initial public offering could raise enough capital for Facebook to more aggressively grow its verticals.  Two areas of importance for Facebook moving forward include mobile and social television.  It’s part of a larger “connected device” trend that’s delivering content through more channels, and as this space expands, Facebook will need to monetize the social aspects of these channels as well.

Facebook Mobile

Facebook’s mobile strategy has been pretty limited to apps so far, favoring iOS in terms of launch schedules and feature updates.  And Facebook’s actual apps center around social interaction and accessing account information, doing little to extend their platform’s ecosystem for Facebook apps, particularly games.  This is where Facebook will really need to build out its ecosystem if it hopes to gain ground in the mobile sector, where Google, Apple and even Microsoft are already ahead.

Looking at the latest rumors, Facebook’s plans for mobile include a handset of its own.  This isn’t likely the way to win in the mobile arena–there’s enough devices on the market, and plenty of competing operating systems.  Even Android is diversifying across niche devices like the Kindle Fire, which has a stripped down version of Google’s mobile OS, adding to the fragmentation woes that plague developers, retailers, carriers and consumers alike.

What Facebook needs is a solid mobile extension of its own platform, that will enable better points of integration for the companies building apps for Facebook’s site and/or mobile marketplaces.  Sure, you can tap Facebook contacts for a round of Words with Friends, but this is still a segmented initiative on the part of the game publisher. Unifying a web and mobile presence will be a key software development for Facebook moving forward.

We’re already seeing the necessity of this with Zynga, which is making its appeal to mobile gamers and forced to leave Facebook behind in the process.  Increasing gamers on tablets and smartphones in today’s market means diversifying away from the very platform that brought Zynga to the point of success to launch its own IPO, especially with Facebook imposing a 30 percent tax on revenue made on its website.  In order to retain the value of its ecosystem, Facebook will have to support the mobile transition for its developer community, and possibly better incorporate its offerings with the mobile market mainstays, like Android and iOS.

Facebook already has a budding relationship with Microsoft, one of its high profile investors, which has already integrated Facbook’s social graph into its search results and facilitated deals like Skype’s video calls on the network.  As Microsoft continues to layer up its own platform, tying efforts with Windows 8, Windows Phone and Xbox, Facebook could make room for an easier transition on this front.

Facebook on TV

Facebook is a term associated with nearly all things social, whether online or off.  The worldwide network has set national revolutions in motion, held firm as a platform for religious and political debate and enabled a new sense of globalization as far as culture and access are concerned.  So when we think of TV’s future as being a social one, it’s hard to avert a discussion about Facebook as well.  But even more than mobile, Facebook’s absent from the social TV trend in many regards, though it presents a grand opportunity for extended channel distribution as well.

You don’t have to look further than the first month of 2012 to realize the growing importance of socializing the tube.  The Super Bowl is rank with advertisers seeking ways beyond Facebook Pages and tweets to engage viewers, reeling in participation from General Motors, Coca Cola and Shazam.  These brands in particular are leveraging mobile devices to send viewers directly to a website where they can gain more information about a product, unlock free content and qualify for prizes.  With approximately 60 percent of all Super Bowl viewers expected to be within arm’s reach of a smartphone or tablet, mobility is becoming an important avenue for television to become more interactive and social.

The first week of 2012 also brought a slew of connected device expectations from TV set makers like Sony and LG.  Not only are they building out their own integrated system, but many are looking to Google TV as a platform to extend the newest social TV trends.  At CES this year we saw the future of TV, and it’s a highly social one, with in-screen chats, recommendations, sharing functions and rewards systems.  And Google’s much further ahead on this initiative than Facebook, given its Android platform and default social interactions that are cataloged every time you use a Google-powered app or service.  Apple, too, has demonstrated initiative in this space, though its personal media cloud approach is lacking social capabilities.

Leave it to apps, and even cable providers to fill in the missing gaps here.  Even Comcast’s jumping on this bandwagon, testing a social TV experience dubbed Xcalibur in Georgia.  It involves a recommendation engine and “friend trends” powered by Facebook.  Companies like GetGlue have also run with the social TV trend, building insight around marketing trends while rewarding viewers all the while.

Facebook’s ads = social monetization

Beyond merely powering existing gaming and TV efforts, Facebook will namely benefit from these extended channels by finding a way to loop things back into its own ecosystem.  Facebook’s true value lies in its ability to access users and their preferences, creating hoards of useful marketing data alongside an audience that can be monetized in a series of socially oriented ways.  It’s true that marketing has become very social, but above all, accessibility matters.  Facebook’s building a presence in the mobile and TV space, but it hasn’t reached a major point of influence for its own monetization or ad distribution.

There’s a new age dawning for socially driven marketing, and TV is a great way to attract the biggest budgets in media to the socially situated.  Social content management provider thismoment recognizes the convergence of connected devices and the future of marketing, a challenge that their new CMO John Bara will take head on.  Thismoment is building the technology for big ad shops, simplifying the transition for brands like Coca Cola, and bridging gaps for the likes of Google.  This all effectively leverages thismoment’s Digital Engagement Channel, a platform where brands and agencies can create, distribute and optimize branded and UGC content across Facebook, YouTube and beyond.

Facebook’s IPO will create jobs for the company, no doubt.  And those jobs will likely further Facebook’s goals around mobile and TV verticals as part of a larger scale approach to new media marketing.  Social is one of many considerations encompassed in new media marketing, and Facebook will have to find away to continuously ad value to its social platform amidst the growing network of associated platforms currently overlapping its space.

Facebook IPO: Bubble or Bargain? Success Hinges on Mobile, TV is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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And so the war begins.

A team of engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, in consultation with several other social networking companies, launched the “Don’t be Evil” bookmarklet featured on the “Focus on the user” site.  The point of this little project is to include other social networking sites in looking for results, not just G+.

A walkthrough video (see below) found on the site provides a better understanding on how the “Don’t be Evil” bookmarklet works.  First off, they did not use other search engines, they used Google and Google’s search tool, which identifies the social profiles within the first ten pages of Google results (top 100 results). The ones Google ranks highest — whether they are from Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, Crunchbase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, Github or Google+ — replace the previous results that could only be from Google+.

Second, you need the code for the “Don’t be Evil” bookmarklet, which is found on the site.  You just drag the bookmark link onto your bookmark bar.  Once you click on the bookmarklet, the search results will now show information from more relevant social networking sites.  You don’t have to click on the bookmarklet every time you do a search as long as you don’t click away from Google.

But before you go and try it out, check first if “Search Plus Your World” is already integrated in your search–it hasn’t really rolled out everywhere, just a few regions in the US. If you can’t see G+ results in your search, then you don’t have it, which means you can’t try the “Don’t be Evil” bookmarklet.

Is this a smart move?

This actually made me think of SiliconANGLE’s Tom Foremski’s question, “Is it wise for Google to gamble further loss of search quality and relevancy, just so that it can show rising usage of G+?”

Google boasts that they have over 90 million G+ users in which 60% of them use G+ each day, and more than 80% each week.  If they are so confident with G+’s performance, why are they so desperate in integrating it in/with all of their products/services?

They built their empire on search, toppling Yahoo! in the process.  They are known as “The Search Giant” because they deliver relevant and pertinent results, though some still say they are biased.  But if they focus solely on G+ for social results, which, let’s be honest, not everyone really uses their G+ accounts, they would be delivering useless data.

So if you want unbiased search results that includes social networking site data, go ahead and “Don’t be Evil.”

“Don’t Be Evil” Takes On “Share Plus Your World” is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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In April 2011, the Association of Coupon Professionals held an Industry Conference in Atlanta to address the present and future state of couponing. The industry had seen unprecedented growth in the past decade due to a combination of factors, one of which was the United States’ economic recession. “The rise of couponing in late 2008 coincided with the recession of the late 2000s;” this factor combined with an increased consumer interest in mobile technology and devices led to an unprecedented decline in print media.
Due to the combination of these factors, marketers began to more heavily fund digital platforms.  The coupon industry specifically saw record growth within the digital realm, and by 2010 “49 million people [had] used an online coupon.”

The benefits “digital interactions” have and continue to offer coupon companies are vast. For starters, online couponing allows for great promotion of brands and wider distribution; not to mention it also allows companies to better reach & track consumer preferences and patterns. Precise analytics allow companies to “measure online distribution of coupons by tracking the printing of web pages and page views;” a significant advantage with digital.

What these and other analytics showed was that the digital coupon consumer base was  “young, married, and had disposable income.” Groupon specifically has targeted this demographic, lending digital couponing a social reputation. “Daily deal” couponing continues to be a popular tool among consumers and marketers, and many major companies have implementing their own version of the trend.

Statistics from 2008 show that digital couponing has rapidly grown but has yet to outpace paper coupons. At that time, digital accounted for “less than 1/10 of all coupons distributed.” But subsequent statistics have also shown that “online coupon access [has] increased 92 percent and redemption of Internet deals [has] leapt up 360 percent;” with more growth predicted in 2012. All-in-all one study found that “1 in 5 people who receive an Internet coupon redeemed it;” so clearly digital couponing is more than just “another distribution channel,” as some analysts have previously stated.

Problems Daily Deal Couponing Presented for Business Owners

While intriguing for consumers, daily deal couponing platforms like Groupon have not always been beneficial for business owners who often see a spike in business with little retention of those customers.

“A study conducted by Rice University’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business found that 66 percent of the 150 businesses surveyed reported that Groupon promotions [were] profitable. However, more than 40 percent of the organizations said that they wouldn’t run a Groupon offer again.”

But what Groupon (and Living Social’s) platforms have revealed is the social nature of contemporary couponing. For example, Cornell University reported that many Groupon users see themselves as “marketing mavens”… “on the front edge of market trends and price information.” Additionally, users claim they “would not have tried a restaurant [or store] without a coupon offer.” What theses statements reveal is the social branding that has been bestowed upon contemporary couponing thanks in great deal to the popularity of “daily deals.”

Social Leads to Social Sharing

The social, daily deal strategies that Groupon (and Living Social) made popular have certainly spawned many copycat initiatives within the social, digital couponing realm. One such example is SocialTwist, a platform that “allows users to share in order to receive a better bargain.” The basic concept being that consumers can turn a $1 coupon into a $4 coupon simply by sharing it with 4 other people. According to one study this method has proven popular as “SocialTwist’s social coupons receive a 50-80 percent redemption rate.”# It has been predicted that this method will continue to increase in popularity in 2012. Evidence of this was seen in late November 2011, when Foursquare announced they will be incorporating a new “social sharing” button on their site.

Getting Mobile-Ready

Given these newer strategies companies are mobilizing their virtual and physical platforms to better reach and retain these social, mobile customers. Most companies are aware now more than ever that their mobile presence has to be dynamic and user friendly. With roughly 91% of the population using mobile devices and 26.3% accessing the Internet, it is important to have a “mobile ready” site for easy mobile reading and utilization.

In addition to this, “Google has reported [that] 95% of smartphone users have searched for local information,” while using their mobile devices- proving that location based, deal searching is another important aspect of mobile coupon use.

“The study also found 38 percent of users would use a mobile device to find a store location, 34 percent to compare prices, 28 percent to research deals and coupons, and 27 percent to find a product review.”

These statistics provide even greater incentive for businesses to have mobile ready sites so that they can engage local users looking for discounted goods and services.

Resolving Mobile Couponing’s Redemption Pitfalls

Mobile couponing, an obvious extension and result of digital distribution, has been popular despite its “mechanical” issues. With the rise of digital coupons, so came a rise in consumers using their mobile devices to reference coupons visually on their smartphones. Unprepared for this development, the redemption process, i.e. the scanning of digital coupons on mobile devices, has proven difficult until recently.

“Mobile coupon redemption has always struggled with ensuring a seamless experience at the point of sale,” contemporary research states. So, business giants like Walgreen’s Drug Store have “retrained salespeople to handle the process [and] equipped stores with hardware that can recognize 2D codes on LCD displays.” This nationwide initiative was just launched and will undergo testing during the 2011 Holiday Season.

“A re-release of the Walgreens app for iOS, BlackBerry and Android included a new coupons section that will issue up to three new deals each week exclusively for customers using the mobile apps. Rich Lesperance, head of digital marketing and merging media, Walgreens, says the program is the largest deployment of in-store mobile coupon scanning of which he is aware.”

Looking Ahead to the “Social-Local-Mobile” Strategy

According to an article published on December 1st, 2011 in Search Engine Land, the “social-local-mobile” trend is the next cutting edge move for digital businesses and a necessary consideration for coupon brands. Social-local-mobile (SLM) gets specific when it comes to targeting your ideal market and allows your ideal consumer to find you. A win for both parties, as well as the logical next step for consumer activity based on current digital engagement.

An impressive “two-thirds of holiday shoppers would make a purchase from mobile phones if prompted by coupons, discounts, text alerts, gift cards or loyalty points. That’s an increase from the 32 percent that responded positively last year,” claims
a new survey by Sybase 365 and the Mobile Marketing Association. In short, businesses looking to stay on top of the digital couponing trends need to focus on the being strong on three fronts: social, local and mobile. As the combination of the three provide the ultimate benefit.

Editor’s note: this is a guest post by Jeff Hudson, co-founder and CMO of Grocery Coupon Network.

The Future of Couponing: How So-Lo-Mo has Changed the Game is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Yesterday, Facebook officially launched Timeline Apps which can be simply described as an easier way of letting everyone know what you’re up to.  So it’s not just about “liking” something anymore, with these apps, it can be more specific as a variety of verbs replace the world “like.”

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed “Cooked” and “Ran” as possible examples of Open Graph Actions during his speech. “Eating, traveling, shopping, running, or taking pictures” were also mentioned as actions the apps can share on your Timeline.

There are over 60 apps categorized into Music, News, Giving, Travel, Food, Shopping and Fashion, Fitness, Entertainment and Other.  here are just some of the apps available: Soundcloud, Rdio, Yahoo! News, Washington Post Social Reader, Livingsocial, Fab etc.  To see the full list of available apps, click here and to learn more about Timeline Apps, click here.

“Soon, there will be apps for all types of interests, as more apps will launch over time” director of platform products Carl Sjogreen said at the launch. ”Whether you love snowboarding, gardening, hiking, or knitting, or something else, there will be an app for you.”

Facebook security for Timeline Apps

As for security issues, Sjogreen stated that each app will come with their own permission so users have the option of not sharing anything with a given app and just use it as a private application that only the user will know of.  Aside from this, users can group related apps together so that their Timeline would not look like someone decided to scatter apps on it.

But of course, if you’re not using Timeline, then Timeline Apps won’t be available for you. But don’t fret, Timeline is said to be rolling out as a mandatory update later this week, so to those people who postponed upgrading to the Timeline profile, better brace yourselves for the major changes that are about to happen.

New Facebook Timeline Apps bring New Privacy Questions is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Cloud: The King Center Imaging Project

King is a historic figure who will always remind the human race of social equality and economic justice. His legacy is a treasure. In this regard, cloud-focused services are creating technological enhancements to ensure that this inheritance will be nurtured as part of global education. Known as The King Center Imaging Project, will be a successor of The JFK Presidential Library, an AT&T’s Synaptic Storage as a Service. EMC’s cloud-based services will partner JP Morgan Chase and AT&T for this altruistic endeavor.

Joe Tucci, EMC’s Chairman and CEO, briefly explains how this project will pan out to benefit the society.

“EMC is proud to be a Philanthropic Technology Provider to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Center’s digital archiving project. By digitizing Dr. King’s words on human dignity, equality and non-violence, future generations will have greater chances to be inspired by his courage and appreciate the ways he shaped our history and society.

The archives of more than a million of documents from Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists will be browsed through The Think Center website, which is expected to go live today.

Twitter Rejoices MLK Day

Hashtags #ThingsMLKwouldntApproveOf and #HappyMLKday have been worldwide trending topics on Twitter even before the actual MLK holiday. The support and love have been overflowing, especially within the United States region. People are tweeting and re-tweeting quotes of Martin Luther King from his infamous public dialogues and write-ups. His “I Have A Dream” speech is already considered a classic and has been an inspiration to countless citizens around the world. Many are thankful for his bravery in fighting for social justice and civil rights amidst anonymous death threats. Some are routing their efforts to social work and charity.

Volunteerism Uses Facebook

Students from all over the country have joined several monumental commemorations of for MLK Day. The Iowa youth have volunteered to do community service. Volunteering was made easy by technology, thanks to websites like Serve.gov and Facebook. Not only the American students became aware of the social work campaigns, the words have spread across the planet and many students have pledged their support. The Millennials and the Generation X have come together to enact the noble deeds of a hero whose life is a testimony of peaceful struggles for equality.

Michelle Obama Sends Invite Via Twitter

The Twitter-verse has given First Lady Michelle Obama warm welcome, garnering over 260K followers in just 24 hours. But, she has been rather prudent in posting on the microblogging site. She’s tweeted just 6 times in a timeframe where a normal person would have splashed more than a hundred tweets. In one of her posts, Mrs. Obama invited everyone to commemorate the Martin Luther King Jr. Day today, January 16^th.

A crusader of equality amidst diversity, MLK has showed us how peaceful revolution can change the present and the future. The social justice he has protected and fought for is enveloping several dimensions of our modern lives: health, politics, economy, workforce and technology. The latter has been thriving with miscellany and differences for some decades now. In fact, diversity has made it an enviable platform for growth and innovation.

The Tech World Remembers MLK Day is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Above, is a demonstration of how Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, uses a proprietary monitoring technology called “Social Cockpit” to analyze the flood of social media buzz generated by the massive Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The Intel system works in real-time to identify and track individuals that have said anything online that’s related to a brand, a competitor, or a specific topic. The monitoring technology determines who they are, where they work, their job, their level of online influence, and records what they said, where they said it, and when.

[Cross-posted at Silicon Valley Watcher (http://s.tt/15co2)]

An Inside Look at Intel’s Social Media Tracking Technology in Action is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Last year, Google+ launched. It was Google’s latest attempt at social networking.  With that, Google decided that people aren’t only searching about content on the net, people are now interested in finding others and knowing about them, so they came up with Social Search to connect more people.  And just a few day ago, they added three new features to the service:

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages which helps you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

The service, along with the added new features, make up Searh Plus Your World, which blends photos, comments and news posted on Google+ into search results – cool huh?
Not really, especially if you’re Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center who thinks that this is another way of Google manipulating search results which they think the FTC should really look into.

“We believe this is something that the FTC needs to look at,” Rotenberg said.  ”Google is an entrenched player trying to fight off its challenger Facebook by using its market dominance in a separate sector.  I think that should trouble people.”

This raises privacy issues as well since anyone who has a Google+ account can be Googled by anybody.

“Although data from a user’s Google+ contacts is not displayed publicly, Google’s changes make the personal data of users more accessible,” EPIC said in a note on his website.

Google Fellow Amit Singhal answers this concern by stating that Google has taken significant steps to make its new feature private and secure. He also said that Google was open to including information from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

“However,” Singhal said that “it has to be done in a way that the user experience doesn’t deteriorate over time and that users are in control over what they see from whom and not some third party.”

It’s easy for people to get riled up over just about anything Google does to change its search process, and layering in personalized content is something Google’s going to have to defend tooth and nail.  It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Google wants to incorporate its social network with search–everything Google does has an ulterior motive of looping back to its search technology, and when it comes to leveraging the wider social graph, aiding its primary search function is the primary reason for launching such an integrated Google+ network in the first place.

As with most things Google does, they’ll have to carefully consider how, when and where Google+ is integrated with their main search tool, and ensure that all privacy measures are taken to pacify the public.

Google’s “Share Plus Your World” Raises More Privacy Issues is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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According to Allen, he’s been having a team from Elance run “hundreds of queries” based on various surnames and compiled the resulting data into models that show that not only is G+ growing at a current rate of 625,000 daily but that rate has been accelerating ever since Google put the social media project online.

The results are pretty compelling:

July 13 – 10 million

August 1 – 20.5 million

September 1 – 24.7 million

October 1 – 38 million (Larry Page announced “more than 40m users” on Oct 13th)

November 1 – 43 million

December 1 – 50 million

December 27 – 62 million

Allen notes that if the signups rate remains the same, he predicts that Google+ will reach 100 million users on Feb 25^th and 200 million users on August 3^rd of next year. This means that G+ could walk out of 2012 with 293 million users.

However, this expects that the rate does not increase over that time and Allen argues that Google+ is snowballing. Google’s product is still extremely simplistic—especially compared to the almost overloaded with items Facebook—that they still have a lot of devices and outlets they haven’t yet entirely integrated into. As they spread themselves into more devices, Android phones, tablets, and mobile that they will reach an even larger audience and draw more people in.

“As more users sign up, the value of the network will increase for everyone. The network effect will become powerful,” Allen explains. “It won’t be long before new users start encountering family and friends as well as the thriving tech and media sharing community that embraced Google+ early on.”

In fact, enterprise marketing is already piling on board in order to take advantage of the level of community arriving in Google+. As the numbers of consumers on this social network swell, advertisers and marketers will continue to put more effort into drawing them in.

Right now, the G+ is an oncoming competitor to Facebook and since this about numbers, we should talk numbers. Facebook has over 800 million users and 50% of those log in daily; the average user also has 130 friends. Even if Google+ exceeds 250 million at the end of next year, they’ll still have another few hundred million users to go in order to rival the total value that Facebook represents. While G+ has a current mighty showing—almost good enough to be the social network of 2011—it’s unlikely to unseat the sheer momentum of Facebook.

What we’re probably going to see from Google+ is a branching away from the comment-and-app based approach of Facebook and more likely an all-in-one-social-media center. Already, Google is hooked up directly to YouTube; it provides personalized search results, a profile, a hookup with Gmail, and Gtalk. Altogether, these different services all come together alongside Circles (as a tight sharing mechanism) as a way for groups to clique together and use rich media to communicate.

As we see more people get on board with Google+ the use of YouTube and Circles with mobile devices will drive the use of G+ as an organ of viral communication. Even recently YouTube and Blogger connected with the G+ profile and now people can see their G+ Circles +1s on YT adding another sphere of influence for users to see what their community is up to.

Allen ends his predictions by making a bold statement about where he sees this acceleration going: “I predict that 2012 is going to be a breakout year for Google+ and that it will end next year with more than 400 million users.”

Google+ Surpasses 62 Million Users as Growth Continues to Accelerate is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Facebook Blocks Chrome Extension for Exporting Friends to Google+
• Coming Really Soon: Pseudonyms and Branding Pages in Google+
• Google Plus Expands API to Include Search
• Google Hangouts get API, Days before Facebook f8
• Business Intelligence Uprising Centers on Social Media Data
• Real Names Getting Real Attention

on their website, CEO and CO-Founder of Clever Sense, Babak Pahlavan formally announced the Google acquisition. A portion reads:

“Today, we are excited to join Google and start a new chapter in curating the world around us! Together with the Google team, we will accelerate our efforts toward this shared vision. Google helps local businesses connect with potential customers, and its worldwide presence can bring the value of Clever Sense to a much larger audience.”

Clever Sense: The Bridge Between Online and Offline Worlds

Clever Sense sifts through the real world and curates vast amount of data, both structured and unstructured. It is engineered to connect the online and offline world, collecting bits and pieces of information using time, place and intent. Clever Sense’s bedrock lies with its primary segments: the extraction engine and serendipity engine.

The extraction engine forms the base of the Interest Graph—a social graph that uses social interactions (which Google has plenty, obviously) like check-ins, likes, share and ratings. A more creative mind describes the serendipity engine. It’s personalized and goes beyond the typical recommendations engines by utilizing information on a user’s profile, time stamp, location, intent and other social context.  Earlier this year, Google’ s Maria Mayer talked about serendipity and why they want it in Google products.

Clever Sense: Does It Have The Staying Power?

Google has a strong reputation of acquiring something today and shutting it down in no time. The company went on a killing-the-sleeping-assets spree months ago, shutting down several services that include Google Buzz and Google Wave.  Considering Google’s own goals with its location based apps like Places, people are already curious if Clever Sense just signed their death certificate, or if it be a prodigy that will propel the organization’s dream of building strong frontiers for Places, Maps and Deals.

Other 2011 Acquisitions

Perhaps the most talked about deal that Google entered this year is with Motorola. However, there are numerous issues and EU regulations that are impeding the closure of this acquisition.  Some expect Google to face a fate similar to the AT&T-T-Mobile merger. But the same is true for the AdMeld deal, which has moved forward with the blessing of the US Justice Department. If this deal pushes through, Google will shell out a whopping $400 million to buy the online display advertising firm. Less than a week ago, the music arm and Youtube.com receive a big boost with the purchase of music royalty manager, Rightsflow.

My imagination couldn’t begin to guess how much data Google’s daily traffic produces, but one thing’s for certain–Google’s keen on putting that data to work in every way possible. The Clever Sense purchase is a clear advance not only for curation of large amount of information, but to also leverage language processing and improve data algorithms.

Google Data Needs Clever Sense… Until When? is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Google Caught in the Web of Lawsuits, Faces 9 More from the EU
• Google’s Big Opportunity in Location, Location, Location: SXSW 2011
• Google Maps on Android Brings Us 3D and Offline Access
• McAfee 2.0 Tops This Week’s iPad, Android Tablet Business Apps
• Android Developers Get Support from Google, Bootcamps
• Our World of Mobile Phones [Infographic]