Real-time social shopping with your friends online is a growing area with huge potential for brands, offering a higher level of engagement than standard ecommerce, but also greater insight into consumer purchasing behaviour. Read More »

The Washington Post has given the clearest indication yet that it does not plan to launch a paywall any time soon as it unveils a personalised news site called Trove.com that aggregates news across subjects of interest and important headlines of the day.

Relying on a combination of old fashion editorial expertise, social media and a heavy dose of Facebook Connect Trove creates a customised  “news experience” that factors in a reader’s likes and dislikes aggregating from around 10,000 sources. It also promises news advertising opportunities with Ford on-board as the first sponsor. Read More »

Troubled Yahoo! is apparently planning to offer its own version of Facebook’s Facebook Connect, which it is going to call Y Connect. Original..

Facebook Connect has been a huge hit for Facebook allowing web users to login and comment on multiple websites with their Facebook ID. Read More »

Here’s one that seems to have slipped under the Brand Republic radar as Diesel unveils its innovative Diesel Cam that allows you to share cool pics of yourself wearing Diesel clothes on Facebook right from its store. Read More »

Interesting move by The Huffington Post as it ups its social media creds with the launch of a dedicated Twitter edition of the site across its 19 news and comment sections.

The move adds to its social news idea it introduced with Facebook Connect last year and the introduction of sponsored Tweets on some areas of the site. Read More »

YouTube unleashed its sleek new interface on the public today, with a dashboard of extra features, foremost a dropdown menu full of viewing and sharing statistics.

Ad space has gained prominence, but subtly so, as has the ‘Subscribe’ tag, moved to the top, directly under the title.

The redesign is a notable investment in user experience for YouTube, the result of eight months’ worth of user research, feedback and data analysis. Read More »

Will advertisers “like” Facebook’s decision to dump the ‘Become a Fan’ button for its branded pages? It’s very, uh, likely, given the social network’s claims that users hit ‘Like’ twice as many times as they do ‘Fan’.

In an effort to increase user engagement, Facebook revealed in a letter to advertisers it will phase-out its ‘Become a Fan’ function in favour of an across-the-board thumbs up, which users hit regularly to ‘Like’ their friends photos and status updates.

The average user ‘Like’s’ nine things a month, compared to four ‘Become a Fan’s’. This “light-weight” action and language consistency will mean more connections, Facebook said in a letter to advertisers.

“This lighter-weight action for connecting to a page on Facebook means that users will be making more connections across the site, including your Facebook page.

“The core functionality of page s remains unchanged. For instance, your page will still have distribution into news feed . The purpose of this change is to maintain pages’ powerful communications channels, while making it easier for users to connnect with pages,” Facebook said.

For the record, more than 1.5m businesses have active Pages on Facebook and more than 20m million users become fans of brand pages each day. So far, these pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.

And if Facebook users aren’t busy enough liking everything under the sun, new partnerships with Yahoo! and YouTube will provide a boon to content sharing.

This week, Yahoo and YouTube gave an endorsement for the nascent Facebook Connect web-passport.

YouTube users have been able to connect their accounts to Facebook since December, yet now the YouTube homepage will show the YouTube videos their friends are sharing on Facebook.

Yahoo is also stepping up its Facebook integration, announcing today that Yahoo Mail users will be able to update their status from their inboxes. Users can also see friends’ Facebook profile photos in their inboxes. This follows the Yahoo Mail’s ability for to add Facebook friends’ e-mail addresses to their e-mail contacts.

And for some more downright unfathomable Facebook figures, the website’s recent milestone of 400m users (half of which log-on everyday) to be a small footnote on its path towards a membership base of only-God-knows type levels.

Can Facebook conceivably crack the one billion user mark? The inaptly named Facebook Zero could be the key. Not to be confused with Facebook Lite, a different, yet similarly stripped-down Facebook network.

Zero, a text-only, mobile Facebook has the potential to push  user growth even further, as mobile internet use becomes the access-style of choice (or not by choice) for internet users around the world, especially for the millions in developing countries.

Last month it was reported that more than 100m users are now accessing the social network via their mobiles, doubling the user base in six months.