I was told recently via a very reliable source of an extremely wealthy private equity player, one of the richest people in the UK, who had a despairing experience at the worlds best restaurant.

El Bulli, in Southern Spain is held by those in the know as the world’s finest restaurant. The sort of place where when you ask for a reservation they’ll tell you the date, sometimes months away, when they’ll fit you in, regardless of your social or financial status. The story is that the private equity player wanted to take some long-term clients to lunch at el bulli. Now, as you may expect when dealing with people of this stature, there is an awful lot of planning, airplane hiring, helicopter scheduling, diary management and triple checking. This private equity player has three secretaries who handle his various diaries and activities.

They had followed the due protocol and had made a reservation for el bulli. One of the secretaries was tasked with double checking to see if everything was confirmed with the restaurant and duly rang them up to be told that there was no record of the reservation. When told of the restaurant’s abject failure to undertake one of the central, and most basic functions of a decent retail-leisure establishment he hit the roof. He was heard shouting ‘Those F**@King amateurs!’ . Somehow I don’t think he’ll be returning to that particular restaurant, or telling his friends about how ‘great’ it is.

All too often organizations and websites, forget about getting the basic operational elements right before they leap ahead into peripheral esoteric marketing and branding messages. From the customer view they really want to get to the end destination, if the website becomes a hurdle on the journey then they’re less likely to convert to the action point that actually delivers business to the organization.

 Welcome to eModeration’s round-up of all that is intriguing,
alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate
Williams. For more social media snippets, follow her on @emodkate – or
for general twittery, @KateVWilliams.

This week: Facebook’s humour deficit; apocalypse and anomie with Chatroulette; and ‘C’ for ‘Counter-Intuitive’.

THE HEADLINES …

The social web is quite a-flutter with talk of Chatroulette
– the apocalyptically-named video chat-site which arbitrarily pairs
strangers for what might, one minute, be urbane oenophiliac debate; the
next, naked frat-chat – according to the whim of each party.

If, like me, you are inclined to doom-mongering and despair, the site
will seem the very definition of post-cultural atomisation and anomie.
Nevertheless Chatroulette, created just three months ago by a Russian
seventeen-year-old, is daily gaining thousands of users – and a
considerable media profile.

The Conservatives appeared last week to have sleep-walked into a second viral nightmare: the strap-line of their latest campaign seemed to invite the kind of cheerfully-profane customisation which propelled mydavidcameron.com
to instant virality in January. And sure enough, “#IvenevervotedTory” -
followed by punchlines of varying hilarity – was within the hour a
Twitter trending topic. But hold on just a Tory minute – another Conservative marketing #fail … or a cunning stroke of viral genius?

Meanwhile Brand Republic reports
that, as the general election approaches, Labour is increasingly
focused on social media. They’re using real-time social network
monitoring to fine-tune their campaign, while candidates and
campaign-organizers have been new-media-trained to within an inch of
their lives.

Google’s social-media week, on the other hand, has been something of a Curate’s Egg.

Despite the scramble to fix
Buzz’s most gaping privacy holes – namely the ‘auto-follow’ feature
which allowed users to see who else their contacts were emailing – The Guardian
reports that a privacy group has filed a complaint with the Federal
Trade Commission. The group demand that Google make the entire service
opt-in only – and they’re jolly cross that the onus is still on each
user to block followers thrown up by Google’s revised ‘auto-suggest’
feature.

From another corner of the Googleverse comes an item to which the only
reasonable response is a violent shake of the laptop to check it’s not
broken. The search monster has announced that it has officially become an energy-provider.
Yes! Just like British Gas and nPower. While it’s tempting to imagine
that this story concerns the monetization of Buzz’s
potentially-limitless supplies of hot air, I must reluctantly report
that this is, in fact, a quite-difficult-to-understand story about
Google’s plans to go carbon-neutral, by selling excess power back to
the national grid.

And talking of renewable energy and vast internet behemoths, Facebook
have sparked a storm of protest over plans to power a brand-new
data-centre with old-skule coal. By Monday, following criticism of its
power plans by Greenpeace in the Huffington Post, Change.org had harnessed a cool 5740 signatures urging The ‘Book to go green.

The Israeli Embassy lobbed a ball onto the social media court this week – with debatable success.
In a whimsical play on the tennis-gear sported by the alleged Mossad
assassins of a senior Hamas Commander in Dubai last week, the embassy
tweeted “you heard it here first: Israeli tennis player carries out hit
on #Dubai target”. The tweet – which displays a remarkable (though
perhaps unwarranted) confidence in the wisdom of combining Twitter,
puns, and generally frowned-upon death-squads – in fact links to a
story about the Israeli team’s success in a recent Dubai tennis
tournament.

Elsewhere, Facebook has been evincing a somewhat restricted capacity
to take a joke. The Argentinian author of a satirical book on the
world’s favourite social network found that his own Facebook profile –
and a 30,000-strong fan page – had suddenly and mysteriously gone
‘pouf!’. Uproar in the South American press followed, but it seems that
the profile was only restored when Venturebeat picked up the story, a
full month later. The book’s promo video (mildly racy – we’re talking
Argentina, after all) can still be seen here, on YouTube.

The hack attacks at the heart of Google’s ongoing Chinese tribulations have been traced back to two educational facilities
in mainland China, reports the New York Times. The Chinese authorities
– who last week claimed already to have identified and shut down an
entirely different set of hackers – have denied all knowledge. If
you’re intrigued by the murky world of Chinese hackery, which differs
substantially from its Western counterpart, the Wall Street Journal offers an absorbing snapshot.

The eminently-social Robin Hood Tax
campaign – created by ‘Four Weddings’ director Richard Curtis, to
promote a Tobin tax on all banking transactions – appeared to have
suffered a setback last week, when ‘No’ votes whooshed dramatically
from 1400 to 6000 in five minutes. Upon close examination however, it
emerged that most of the Anti’s had come via the servers of monolithic
investment institution Goldman Sachs: the silly-billies had failed to
disguise their IP.

Online viewers of Tiger Woods’s ‘apology’ last week witnessed what may well prove to be a turning-point
in YouTube’s history. The golfer’s much-mocked mea culpa – the cause of
near-universal buttock-clenching, and widespread
watching-from-between-fingers – was a strategic experiment in live streaming-video.
The addition of the real-time service is thought by many to be the
logical next-step for YouTube, as internet TV-enabled devices
increasingly squeeze traditional cable and satellite.

THE LOWDOWN …

Scene 1: Airline interior. In line with his employers’ questionable
policy of forcing the wide-of-beam to buy two seats, a flight attendant
escorts a humiliated passenger to the exit. Scene 2: Oh no! – the
overweight passenger is revealed to be none other than Kevin Smith,
alt-Hollywood director and proud owner of a Twitter-following
approaching two million. “What are the chances, eh? What are the
chances?”, as our beloved Harry Hill might say.

Poor Gordon Lightfoot. An Ottowan tweeter – perhaps realising that all Canadian news would be Olympics-themed for, like, ever – appears to have flipped, and completely invented
the death of the Ontario-born singer-songwriter. The news tore through
the Twittersphere, so you’ll no doubt be relieved to hear that the
sonorously-timbred composer of ‘Sundown’ is alive and well, and
consoling himself with the spike in his airplay.

After many, many years of research, engineers at Stanford University have produced electricity-generating fabrics
which could act as chargers for mobile devices whilst their wearers are
on the move. Had they asked, I might have mentioned that my wardrobe of
bri-nylon garments produces similar results – but they didn’t. Ach,
this relentless pursuit of progress.

In the latest – but, we’re quite certain, not the last – in our
tactfully-named “File Under ‘C’ for Counter-Intuitive” series, Mattel
is launching a dog collar
which will post random Twitter updates whenever your canine companion
makes a move. Heart-warming examples include “I bark because I miss
you. There, I said it. Now hurry home.” No, nothing further, m’lud.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced that they’re developing their own virtual world
for use both as a collaborative tool, and for training and simulation.
To which we say, ‘Farmville not good enough for you, huh?’.

IN OTHER NEWS …

Facebook and Paypal have announced the cessation of hostilities:
in a move which is clearly designed with social gamers, and the 70% of
Facebook users who live outside the US, in mind, users will now be able
to purchase Facebook Credits using Paypal. Till now it had been thought
that the ‘Book was pitching its Credits service in direct competition
to its long-established rival.

Hulu’s streaming video service will be available on the iPad (hoorah!) for an undisclosed fee (boo!). CNET reports
that the Hulu’s three main backers favour an arrangement where a paid
mobile service supports a free desktop service – and surveys the
bewildering array of tech and legal decisions required to make the plan
a reality.

And in a further Hulu hoo-ha, The Telegraph
reports that the UK launch-date is retreating once again (hiss!). This
time the delay is due to a combination of management-upheaval at ITV,
and the difficulty of agreeing terms with Channel 4 and Five, whereby
Hulu would sell ad inventory round content.

Last week the BBC launched a roster of free apps which will allow
mobile devices to access its news and sport services – to the dismay of
the Newspaper Publishers Association, which immediately declared that
the apps were counter-competitive.

Finally, Google CEO Eric Schmidt says a mammoth shift of ad revenue
from the fixed web to mobile platforms is inevitable, reports
Netimperative. Schmidt predicts something as game-changing as the
transfer of ad-spend from print to the net, and stresses that marketers
already know far more about mobile users: ”For a start, we know where
they are.”

That’s all folks!

In the subterranean basement of Somerset House, attendants of London Fashion Week 2010 were treated to catwalk shows, experiencing a raw and edgy space that was transformed specially to present the work of young emerging designers as part of the Fashion East exhibition.

The space was discovered last year by veteran catwalk producers Sara Blonstein, head of event management company Blonstein & Associates, and Lulu Kennedy, the founder of Fashion East. The two discovered the neglected underground treasure, that once served as burial vaults, and shared a vision to transform it into a dramatic fashion runway.

When Blonstein, who is known for staging theatrical parties and events, first produced runway shows in what she now calls The Vaults of Somerset House, it attracted international press and celebrities, including Victoria Beckham, who loved the unusual venue last year. This past Saturday, about 300 guests were invited for the second year of Fashion East’s residency in the Somerset House vaults.

“It was a risk for Lulu and I to use this space, and we had to clean out what was an infested mess of pigeons and rats to make it possible,” Blonstein said. 

When the international fashion press and other guests took places inside The Vaults, it was clear that all were in for one of the highlight shows of the week, featuring the creations of designers Nasir Mazhar, Heikki Salonen and Michael Van Der Ham. Models walked the extra long, winding runway through cave-like rooms, passing guests who were lined up along benches against the stone walls.

Backstage, Blonstein’s crew of seasoned show producers were able to skilfully direct models and designers through the labyrinth of the cavernous venue, with all running smoothly. Drawing from their creative East End roots, Blonstein and Kennedy brought London Fashion Week a dose of inspiration that matched well with Fashion East’s reputation for showcasing the best of London’s new, young designer talent. To witness the end result of two women’s shared artistic vision for a challenging venue made for one of the most exciting moments in this year’s London Fashion Week.

For Topshop, the sponsor of the event, the attention from supporting Fashion East has drawn millions of media impressions to the brand, an important aspect that Blonstein says is key for any company looking to establish visibility and creative positioning among a key demographic group. She hopes more brands will take Topshop’s lead and be adventurous in working with her company this year to deliver events that stretch imaginations.

It was great fun watching the Blonstein and Associates team in action at Fashion East, who invited bloggers to shadow them backstage during production of the catwalk shows. You can listen to an Audioboo interview with Sara Blonstein here.

I was glad to have the opportunity to take a quick peek behind-the-scenes at London Fashion Week,

-Lisa 

(Photo: Sara Blonstein preps The Vaults in Somerset House for Fashion East at London Fashion Week 2010) 

He wasn’t making it up at all. Last month Twitter co-founder Evan Williams hit back at claims of falling usage and this week the stats are in the Twitter’s traffic has taken a leap.

Williams made his comments after a bunch of posts suggested a falloff, but since that things have only looked up for Twitter. He said Twitter’s growth was going to pick up and he wasn’t wrong, according to new ComScore traffic figures.

ComScore data shows that the number of unique visitors to Twitter jumped by around 9% between December and January to 21.79 million, which is an all time high.

That beats its previous high of 21.25 million in July 2009. The jump is in part being attributed to Google’s real-time search service, which launched in December early, according to Hitwise. That has become incredibly useful way to interact with Twitter and personally I am using this most days. Clearly, I’m far from alone.

LeeAnn Prescott has taken a closer look at the data and says in a post that Twitter’s traffic coming from “Google increased by 9% when comparing the week ending December 5 to the week ending February 13 (from 12.8% to 14%)”.

She said that Hitwise also showed a modest increase of 5% in market share of US visits to Twitter in that time period.

But it is more than that. Earlier this week I blogged about the growth of Twitter among 24 year olds and younger and how that was helping to fuel Twitter’s growth beyond its original older demographic.

Clearly, as with the broadening of its demographic base the rise in traffic is great news for Twitter as its continues to grow in its more mature markets like the US and the UK and powering ahead elsewhere internationally.

Overall internationally comScore says Twitter hit 73.5 million unique visitors in January, up 8% from 65.2 million in December.

Into this Twitter mix comes Google Buzz and Facebook Zero, which are both looking for larger slices of the real-time market. It is too early to say what will happen with Buzz. I still maintain what I said at the start (in a tweet) that I don’t have the time. I could change my mind, it is always a possibility.

Facebook Zero is something else preparing to bubble up. Will that impact Twitter? Well it could hit Twitter’s growth among teens who are already big Facebook users and mobile owners. That’s a clash waiting to happen.

Follow me on Twitter

This week I’ll be taking quick peeks at the behind-the-scenes happenings at London Fashion Week 2010, as I shadow, and blog about, veteran fashion event producer Sara Blonstein, who heads Blonstein & Associates.

Sara made her name in the early nineties when she ran her Pussy Posse parties, tied to an anti-AIDS awareness campaign. These parties won national press attention, and she found herself launching her event production business, nearly two decades ago, with the mission of meeting demand for an industry that didn’t want the same old boring corporate party. Her reputation as a creative leader in Experiential event marketing has lead her company to work with many big brand names including Vivienne Westwood, MTV, Channel 4, The British Fashion Council, Fashion East, Pernod Richard, Stolichnaya, Jameson, The Reindeer, Selfridges, BAFTA, LG, Victorinox and Amnesty International. 

Companies often turn to Sara to transform unusual spaces into theatrical masterpieces that make dramatic impact on how a brand is perceived by press and influencial audiences. The experiences she creates have been among the most memorable and talked about creative events in London, and are the result of her investment of personal passion and refusal not to compromise standards and vision for executing her productions. She combines her productions with talent from the worlds of theatre, dance, art and film, and the end result is spectacular.

“We love finding a space that most people would think is impossible, and transforming it to create something really special,” she said.

Sara is also an East London trailblazer, who was one of the first to set up business in Brick Lane, and was part of the community that helped transform Shoreditch into the trendy, boutique destination it is today. She lives in Bethnal Green, a short walk to her office, where she transformed her home into a stylish abode with oriental flair.

I’ll be watching Sara in action at events at the Somerset House, and sharing blog posts and tweets about this experience. Follow along!

-Lisa

Football and social media are perfect bed-fellows.  Football teams command great allegiance from their fans and accordingly strong communities are built  – each community gathering online to discuss their team’s latest game / transfer / scandal.  For the majority, the online community is the only way they can connect with other fans given only a minority of fans have the chance to go to a live match.

So the big question for football teams is how can they maximise the potential of these latent communities, and the social (and £) capital within them.  As a starter, last week we ran some desk research looking at how socially connected the Premiership clubs were – and for fun our Rubber research team have created the “Social Media Premiership” – charting how the various teams rank, based around some social media basics: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc.

Man City are arguably way in front of the competition at the top of the league – where I’m sure Roberto Mancini would love to be in the real league.  Although they haven’t traditionally had the biggest supporter-based of the Premiership teams, they’ve impressively built strong online ties with their core fan-base.

At the bottom of the league you’ve got Tottenham who inexplicably don’t have any official social media presence at all, which I’d hope will change in the coming months as it’s bizarre for a club to ignore the potential of social media.

Having said that, getting your social media strategy right isn’t as easy as you’d think, especially when it comes to maximising value re: cold hard sales – something that all Premiership clubs are no doubt keen to do.  So maybe Tottenham’s social media reticence is down to a tactical slow and steady approach – pretty similar to Everton’s progress in the real league this year ; – )

*Notes on the research data: all data was collated the week ending 5th February.  The number in brackets represents their league position at that time, and the blog numbers came from Google blog search.  All other data came from the specified channel source.  Position and ranking has been scored taking into account a club’s traditional size of fanbase and its social media optimisation (hence Man United’s position at 5, even though they 285,000 Facebook fans).

@Rubber_Republic

Here’s Yahoo on YouTube (oh the irony) explaining the deal, cleared today by the EU Competition Commission. 

And here’s the note from Microsoft explaining the benefits. The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is a major initiative between
our companies to create a competitive choice in search for advertisers
and consumers. The combined scale will assist both companies in
speeding the pace of innovation to improve the search user experience,
as well as help advertisers get better results and help improve
monetization for partners. 

When the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is implemented, both
companies will continue to have differentiated consumer search
experiences. However, Microsoft will manage the technology platforms
that deliver the algorithmic (powered by Bing) and paid (powered by
adCenter) search results. Yahoo! and Microsoft will each provide customer support to different
advertiser segments: Yahoo!’s sales team will exclusively support high
volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their
clients. Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition,
Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns. 

Even when you add Microsoft and Yahoo together, you still get less than 10% of the search engine
market in Europe, with Google controlling 90%. One merger doth not necessarily a competition make, perhaps? Obviously, some of you will want to know if the alliance will offer standard match type
categorization across all paid search platforms, whether advertisers will be able to target Yahoo and Bing search pages separately, or whether there will be a reporting dashboard better than or equivalent to Google’s. The rest of you should be wondering how long Yahoo’s going to last.

Sick as I am of the hype around the iPad, you’ve got to admire the Apple publicity machine. And now the magazine publishers will be getting in on the act with, no doubt, rather clumsy versions of the paper editions, faster than you can say “hold the front page.” Because now you can, literally. Take a look at Wired’s versioning efforts on this neat film and see what you think.

And if that doesn’t work, try this link. Gotta love irony.

 Welcome
to eModeration’s round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in
the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams. In this update: we’re still Buzzing; those Bing Maps chaps; and Facebook’s five billion bits.

ON GOOGLE …

Less than a week since the launch of Google Buzz, and already if feels like forever (but in a good way).

There’ve been tears, and joy, and tears of joy; and massive privacy
holes, and the lightening-speed tightening of same: truly, a
rollercoaster of emotion for us all this week. But in case you didn’t
make the height restriction, here’s a speedy up-sum of the vertiginous
highs and lurching lows.

Tuesday: Buzz appears, causing mild bafflement in both analysts and public. Wednesday: Competitors get snarky. Thursday: Huge privacy issues are revealed. Friday: Huge privacy issues are fixed. Saturday: Stats show Buzz is a Facebook-and-Twitter-rivalling game-changer with over 160,000 Buzz posts and comments per hour.

If you require a little more detail, Mashable’s analysis of Google’s ‘nuclear bomb’ is well worth a look – they also usefully reprise Ari Milner’s tips on how to turn Buzz into your ‘social command centre’.

While the social media world was all a-Buzz this week, the launch was by no means Google’s only news:

Ay Caramba! At least six music blogs were deleted from Google’s Blogger
and Blogspot services – entirely without warning – for
copyright-releated TOS violations. Their owners received notification
after Google had already removed the blogs – in some cases destroying
‘years’ of archives in the process – but many insist they operate with
the permission of record labels and artists, reports the Guardian.

In a somewhat inscrutable update on Google’s ongoing Chinese conundrum, co-founder Sergey Brin said that the company wants uncensored search results
“within the Chinese system”. Though he postulated that such a thing
might come to pass “maybe in a year or two”, Brin acknowledged that “a
lot of people might think I am naive – and that might be true.”

Sparking futurist visions of a technology which truly melts geo-cultural borders, the Times reports
that Google is developing mobile software which would allow two people
to converse in real-time, though neither spoke the other’s language.
The software would combine Google Translate, and its voice-recognition
system – but won’t be available for several years.

Meanwhile, Google announced the launch of Google Maps Lab,
which will allow users to test new features as they’re developed.
Commentators speculate that Google is feeling some Microsoft heat,
following the recent stream of new features rolled out for the
Silverlight-powered version of Bing Maps: this week saw the launch of their Streetside Photos app, which matches geo-tagged Flickr images with their real-world locations.

ON FACEBOOK …

Though Buzz is doubtless giving Facebook HQ a tension headache, they
needn’t panic quite yet: last week The ‘Book announced they’d zipped
past the 400 million user post without a backwards glance, and this
week new stats reveal that over 100 million of us are using the site via our mobile phones – a near 100% rise over six months, and a vindication of the simplified design of their mobile site.

Elsewhere in the Facebook compound, the chaps in the Dept for the
Immediate and Continuing Expansion of Social Games must be jolly
pleased: according to TBI Research, the head of an (un-named) social
gaming companies says that Facebook’s new payment platform has seen sales of virtual goods jump by 25%.
This is enough to absorb the considerably higher commissions which
Facebook charges (30%, versus 10% by competing payment services).

And last month, five billion pieces of content were whistling through the cybersphere
courtesy of Facebook users – a 500% leap on mid-2009. After launching
its ‘Share’ buttons and – of course – Facebook Connect, the social
giant is shapeshifting before our very eyes, and looks set to become as
much of a content portal as a social networking space.

Unsurprisingly, brands are increasingly focusing on social networks as
a means of ‘fishing where the fishes are’ (as Coca-Cola’s social-media
team neatly puts it.) eModeration’s most recent white paper covers the
notoriously tricksy topic of how to deal with user-generated content on
these rapidly-evolving and markedly varied platforms – if your brand is
keen to dive in, but perplexed by what’s required, it’s well worth a look.

ON TWITTER …

There’s been a bit of a hoo-ha recently about whether or not Twitter stats have truly stalled. This, from Royal Pingdom, seems to come down firmly in the No camp: new figures reveal that a mind-boggling 1.2 billion tweets were sent last month.

What’s more, January 12th was Twitter’s biggest day yet
“across all metrics that matter” according to an understandably
smug-sounding CEO Evan Williams. The figures neatly coincide with the
news that Twitter is hiring Ali Rowghani – till now, Pixar’s financial
capitane – as chief financial officer: a wake-up call to those who
think that Twitter has anything but profitability in its sights.

ON YOUTUBE …

Crikey, those birthdays just keep on coming, don’t they? No sooner have
we surreptitiously pricked the balloons left over from Facebook’s
sixth, than YouTube announces its fifth birthday. To celebrate, new Nielsen research
reveals that, while overall US online video growth has slowed to 5.2%
year on year (down from 16% the previous year), Youtube is far and away
the biggest online video property with 113.6 million unique viewers
last month – up 6.7% on December.

Coincidentally, the Wall Street Journal
reports that Veoh, one of YouTube’s initial competitors way back in
2005, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy this week. YouTube done good (or
at least, done clever).

BRANDS GET SOCIAL …

Nokia has given fans the chance to shoot and cut their own video for
Noisettes’ new single ‘Saturday Night’: 80 of them have used their
Nokia N95 and 5800 handsets to film the band performing, and have uploaded their footage to a dedicated microsite where other fans can view and edit it.

Pizza Hut took advantage of Valentine’s Day to pull Twitter users in – they asked them to tweet their smoothest pick-up lines, followed by the hashtag #iluvPH. Free “chocolate-topped dessert sticks” (good lord!) went to the most creative entries.

To coincide with Fairtrade Fortnight, Tate & Lyle have launched a
website to promote their Fairtrade products, which include Divine
chocolate, Café Direct coffee and Traidcraft raisins. The website
allows users to make their own virtual cakes,
and share cake-based content across social networks: the creator of the
most delicious-sounding recipe will have their cake whisked up for them
for real – by The Ritz, no less.

Mars has partnered with the Daily Mirror to challenge four Snickers fans
to a series of tasks, each of which will be shown as webisodes on the
Mirror’s website. The campaign – titled ‘More Nuts’ and featuring tasks
like the not-very-gruelling-sounding ‘kicking and catching footballs’ -
will also be aired on Facebook and YouTube.

Aids project (Red) has launched a campaign called ‘Get Pucke(Red) Up’, which allows Facebook users to send lip-smackingly audible kisses
to their friends. The initiative offers six different kissing styles,
from the ‘Platonic Peck’ to the more emphatic ‘Can’t Get Enough’, and
highlights the various real-world gifts which (Red) hopes users will
buy to support their work in the developing world.

Dennis Publishing, which numbers techie titles Mac User, Computer
Shopper and online-mag Gizmo amongst its publications, has launched a
new consumer technology review site. Expertreviews.co.uk offers – well, expert reviews, as well as user-generated ones aggregated from previous buyers by Reevoo.

ON MOBILE …

54.5 million smartphones were sold in the US in Q4 of 2009 – a giant leap of 39% on the previous year’s figures. According to comScore,
much of this continuing growth is Apple-shaped: the iPhone increased
its market share from 24.1% to 25.3% on the previous quarter. Google’s
Android doubled its share from 2.5% to 5.2%, but the leading operating
system by some considerable way is still Blackberry’s RIM, with a
whopping 41.6% of the market.

On both iPhone and Android phones, social networking is by far the most popular activity.
Socnet apps were used at double the rate of news applications, and four
times the rate of mobile games, according to Flurry – though users tend
to consume news in longer chunks than they devote to social media, at
an average of ten minutes per session.

Meanwhile, UK firm Synchronica has developed an affordable smartphone
which could be life-changing for users in the developing world, where
monthly incomes would barely scratch the price of a regular smartphone.
One of Synchronica’s models offers a basic push-email and messaging
service, the other a full HTML Web browser, and access to social
networking sites.

Finally, when US teens aren’t in school or asleep, they send a thumb-numbing average of 10 texts an hour, according to new Nielsen figures – that’s 3,146 texts a month, compared to less than 500 for all mobile users combined.

THINKING …

If you have any time left over from the giddy social whirl this week, may we recommend the following?

Two books, one detailing the rise and rise of Facebook, the other the
rise and – well, who knows? – of MySpace, are reviewed in fascinating
detail in the New York Review of Books this month.

And here, Brian Solis charts the process by which brands are becoming their media, and explains why success depends on the quality of the content they provide.

For more social
media snippets, follow Kate on @emodkate – or for general twittery,
@KateVWilliams. That’s all folks!