I’ve been saying this for a while, to anybody who will listen. I have a major issue with Groupon. Or should I say, with the furore around Groupon and the ludicrous valuation placed on it by both Google, and their predicted IPO.   Read more »

Yesterday, Google announced their latest development in their social strategy with the integration of Google+, their own social offering, into their search results. Users, who are logged into their Google+ account, will now start to see comments from the connections appearing in the search results for relevant queries.

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Image courtesy of technorati

There was a lot of talk recently about the launch of the new Facebook communication system, encompassing email, Facebook mail and messaging but not much about why they are so keen to keep expanding their product.  Facebook is in a position of supreme dominance in the social networking world and moves into well established markets such as email could be seen as taking them away from their core strengths. Read more »

After the creation of Please Rob Me, a service allowing you to see who may not be at home at a particular time, there has been more bad press today for location based social tools.  The US military are now advising their officers, quite sensibly, to be careful how they use social networks as they could be used by the enemy forces to locate troops. (according to the BBC) Read more »

Google’s latest change to their search engine restuls pages (SERPS) have seen local listings appearing for a far wider range of search queries. But is this change actually to the benefit of their users or is it producing a poor user experience?

The number of celebrities using twitter seems to be growing by the day and it seems particularly prevalent in the world of sport. Some of the biggest and brightest names in sport us the microblogging platform on a daily basis and provide an insight into their daily lives.  Many of them also use twitter to communicate between themselves and engage in light hearted banter, much to the amusement of their followers.  Over the weekend however this banter got a little out of hand as jibes were taken to heart and harsh words exchanged. Read more »

Fousquare responds to the launch of Facebook places by improving functionality aimed at promoting continual usage.

Facebook launched its location based tool last week allowing Facebook users to “check-in” to places and inform the social network and their friends of their location at any one time. With the only real discerning differences between Facebook Places and Foursquare the ability to “check in” your friends when out with a group the question is raised as to whether this service is going to be the catalyst for the growth of such services or the downfall of Foursquare, Gowalla and the like due to the scale of the Facebook user base.

According to data from hitwise reported in new media age, Facebook is reaching a point of saturation in the UK. After two years of rising user numbers and page views the graphs are starting to plateau as share of UK page views and average session time level out. This is when the real challenge begins for the social network.

The world of social media loves to go looking for the next Facebook, and any start up which shows promise invariably gets branded with the label at some point. But will there ever be another Facebook?