Read Write Web may have said it best:There’s very little gray area on this one: You’re either completely excited by the potential for built-in facial recognition combined with smartphones and social networks, or your entirely creeped out and afraid for the future of the planet.

Watch the video about video and face tagging (and how it can be synchronized with augmented reality mobile software) and let us know what you thought in the comments:

Viewdle – Photo and Video Face Tagging from Viewdle on Vimeo.

An AdAge article article looked into the Foursquare check-in statistics from the shopping-filled day – and determined that many of the stores who angled the most of Black Friday check-ins fell short.  Case and point – Radioshack. This retailer has not typically served as a ringleader for Black Friday deals, but it was offering Foursuare users a discount of 10% for checking in, 15% if they’re the mayor, and 20% for unlocking the “Holiday Hero” Badge. Nonetheless – as you can see in the graph – Radioshack failed to crack into the top 10 most-checked-in retailers on Friday.

It is also important to note that without any special promotions or discounts, Starbucks beat out every retailer with over 25,000 check-ins throughout the course of Black Friday.

Engaging a tech-savvy consumer was a good marketing idea for the electronics company,  but when it came to the sheet volume of check ins  – it fell short.  This does not mean that partnering with Foursquare to offer deals to customers is an ineffective idea  – (Gap accomplished it effectively on Facebook Places this month) – but measuring the impact of social media and geo-location campaigns can be tricky when larger retailers are crowing out the little guys when it comes to volume. For more information on IW’s media monitoring tools, click here.

(image source: mashable.com)

Using the ImpactWatch Social Media Monitoring tools, this version of SLURP   140 can serve as your go-to guide to seeing what kind of information is presented during this set of TED talks. If you are unable to attend, watching this SLURP-stream should allow you to glean the most important facts and tidbits from the speakers. We will also be tracking the conference hastags and seeing which users stand out as the event’s shining (twitter) stars.

Interested in going to the always-informative TEDx event yourself? The details for the event are as follows:

• Sidney Harman Hall in Washington, DC
• Time: All Day (8am – 8pm)
• Number of speakers: 22
• Number of attendees: 750

IW's Social Media Monitoring

Social Media Tracking: Facebook and Twitter integration in ImpactWatch

Did you know, that in addition to tracking keywords and news across the blogosphere and open source media – that Impact Watch can also integrate real-time Facebook and Twitter information? ImpactWatch offers users the ability to look for certain keywords across unprotected and publically-available tweets and facebook messages. This includes messages posted to users’ walls, public groups, as well as Facebook Fan Page posts by companies and businesses who mention tracked keywords.

The data generated through Twitter aggregation (using a souped-up version of SLURP140) will be able to be graphed and charted, just like the standard IW-generated reports.  The the data gleaned through a real-time use of twitter will enable many organizations to use Twitter to detect new trends and hot-button issues in their business realm. With ImpactWatch, your business can have it’s very own trip-wire reporting system – with all the generated data coming from Twitter.

The advanced social media monitoring features within ImpactWatch enable users to search through hashtags and keywords within both Facebook and twitter posts – allowing businesses a greater understanding of their market and business climate. These social media features enable companies to stay in tune with the rapidly changing public perceptions and trends, while simultaneously being able to track changes through a customizable dashboard.

Of course, this social media information tracking is an addition to the already-extensive list of IW features such as

• Customizing report generation for your company’s needs
• Simplifying clip collection and tagging across open source media AND the blogosphere
• Creating custom graphs and metrics
• Automating daily email briefing

Based on Slurp140 technology, the new Twitter stream updates automatically to display new tweets, a leaderboard of most frequent tweeters, and stats on your tweets over time.

Best of all, you can instantly reply to or retweet any mention right from your tweet stream!

The new Twitter tool complements ImpactWatch’s existing range of feed sources which includes print, online or broadcast news, and social media sources. Depending on your monitoring and measurement needs we can customize your platform with the sources that are important to you.

Graphs and statistics also update in real-time on the Dashboard page, so you can see the who, when and what of your Twitter coverage.

We have a lot of features on the way in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for more. Sign up for a Demo Account now to check it out!

Below is a chart of the various social media channels that respondents to their survey claimed they had used when gift researching this year.

I find it interesting that user reviews influenced purchases more than expert reviews.  Consumers obviously value recommendations from others, but the expertise level of the source doesn’t matter quite as much.  Also, don’t the numbers for Twitter seem kinda…low?  I would have expected the amount of those following a company and those influenced by a friend’s tweet to be at least a combined 10%.

The release also contains a graph showing the amount of online purchases by week leading up to New Year’s Day.  The recession doesn’t seem to be affecting online holiday shopping for 2009, although this may be due to consumers hoping that the Internet will provide them with better deals than stores.  The week beginning with Cyber Monday (November 30th) sees a huge jump in online spending, although as this Focus article explains, Cyber Monday is never the biggest online shopping day of the year.  It typically begins about a week or two later, though still on a Monday.

On October 21^st, when the announcement was first made, well over 1500 tweets were linking to various articles about the announcement.  Most Twitter users seemed more surprised than anything else.  Nearly all of the tweets were a simple headline and URL link.  On October 22^nd, the number of tweets about Bing and its inclusion of social media search were down to approximately 1350 tweets.  As of the writing of this post, October 23^rd tweets on the topic are around 250.

In contrast, Google partnered with less and garnered more attention than its competitor.  There have been over 1500 tweets every day since the announcement on the topic of Google’s deal with Twitter.  Bing may have prepped the user base for Google’s announcement by letting the public know only hours before Google did.

The vast majority of the tweets were simply passing along the information in the form of links and headlines.  Approximately 20 tweets were negative, fearing privacy issues, especially with Facebook.  Below is one such example.

Social networking users have some reason to be concerned about privacy.  After all, Jeremiah Owyang makes a very good point that Facebook is going to have to make more content public in order to compete as these two search engines wage war.  Jared Newman expresses eight big concerns about the process; my favorite of which is how Bing and Google will filter out this information in searches for people who don’t care about social media.  Most of the time, I probably won’t care what the Twitter-world is saying about the topic I want.  I can see that being easily the most frustrating thing to filter out.

Overall, it’s no surprise that these search features would eventually come to light.  Twitter user-ship has increased by over 700% in the past year.   With more celebs and non-celebs picking up the habit, most ways to search for them were inevitable.

As a sidenote, people forget that Google and Bing aren’t the only search games in town.  18 other useful (and in many cases, MORE useful) search engines are listed in this fantastic article.

While most status updates are little more than time-wasters on the bus ride home, several have made national headlines.  Let’s look at a couple:

The Trapped Girls – Two adolescent girls were trapped in a drain for hours.  Rather than call 911, they updated their Facebook status about the situation.  A friend noticed the update, contacted the authorities, and the girls were saved.  Oddly, they could have easily called 911…seeing as how they used their smartphone to update their status.

Status: Robbed – According to a report by Belinda Goldsmith, many users post their holiday plans on Facebook, including times that they are not at their residence.  Being that it’s incredibly easy for criminals to target people using social media, Goldsmith likes to call it “Internet shopping for burglars”.  Might I suggest “iBurgle” for that Web 2.0-y flair?

Diamonds are Temporary – In September 2009, a robber broke into a house, pocketing a couple of diamond rings.  Before he left, he checked his Facebook page…and forgot to log out.  Police followed the trail of the obsessed social networker all the way to the big house.

Updates from my Vaca! – Criminals should really just not use Facebook.  This week, police followed the trail of Maxi Sopo through Cancun after he commited bank fraud.  They got a break in the case when they realized that one of his Facebook friends worked for the Justice Department.

The Pursuit of (Virtual) Happiness – Recently, Facebook introduced a Happiness Index.  Working with psychologists and users, the social network created a list of happy and sad words. The list of positive words includes “happy,” “yay” and “awesome,” while negative words include “sad,” “doubt” and “tragic.”  This really isn’t news, but it’s certainly creepy.

Since Facebook status messages can now save kids, catch criminals, and rate intangible concepts, it’s not long before they get a full-blown book deal.

I’ve talked to several people who ‘de-friend’ or ignore colleagues who updates their status too often.  Do most people feel this way, or our those annoyed by it in the minority?  I personally subscribe to the “once-a-day but no more than three-times-a-day” school of thought.

Cross posted from The Bivings Report

Anyone that has been to a tech conference the last few years knows that there is a huge amount of back channel communication that occurs on Twitter.   People provide live coverage of the talks they go to.  People organize dinner plans.  People stage revolts against panelists.  The conversation is constant, unfiltered and takes place in real time.

The preeminent poli-tech conference, Personal Democracy Forum, takes place next Monday and Tuesday in New York City.  Since we are a sponsor and partner of the Personal Democracy Forum, we decided to launch a tool that will aggregate conversation around the conference.  Check out Twitterslurp for #pdf2009.

We are finishing up details, but here is a list of Twitterslurp’s key features:

• The site will ingest any posts tagged as “#pdf09″, “#pdf2009″ or “Personal Democracy Forum” onto our main page in real time.  We can expand the words we track if other phrases/tags are used.  This will allow us to ingest the entire conversation, and not limit us to only pulling in mentions of a single hashtag.
• Twitterslurp features a leaderboard listing the top Twitter users at the conference based on volume.  Later today, we are going to expand this to feature a fuller leaderboard.  Our hope is that this directory of people tweeting about the conference will make it easy for people to make connections with others at the conference.
• Twitterslurp features a stats page that analyzes the volume of tweets that are coming in.
• We’ll be able to use our backend system to filter out spammers.  At the end of the conference, we’ll also have a database of all the relevant tweets which will allow us to do a full analysis of the conversation post-conference.

Most importantly, we’ll be releasing the code behind Twitterslurp to the open source community next so that other conferences/organizations can use the tool.

Check out Twitterslurp, and follow @bivings for the latest about the release of the tool.

DailyRT is another retweet aggregator that ranks tweets by the number of times it is repeated. However, unlike most other aggregation services that simply rank and record top tweets, DailyRT offers several additional functions that make it valuable for social media monitoring and research.

The service features:

-Direct Retweet – sign in to join the retweeting action.
-Hot Tweets – sorts tweets by rank so you can quickly find the most popular.
-Live Tweets – real-time updates instantly update you on which tweets are on the move (great for events).
-Archive – system saves tweets so you can search past trends.
-Filtering by Topic – sort tweets by keyword or hashtag.
-Filtering by User – sort tweets by # of followers or filter to only those users that you follow.
-Filtering by Time Period – search past tweets by date range.
-Trends – select hot topics suggested by Twitter.
-My Searches – Save searches to easily check updates on your topics.

Of course, a large portion of the top Retweeted are twilebrities with such massive followings that even a small percentage retweeting takes them to the top. But there are also tweets that are just so funny or so interesting that everyone who sees it feels compelled to share.

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DailyRT provides the fun of finding tweet gems but also a powerful search interface that allows real tracking and analysis of Twitter trends.

Click on any RT to get detailed information on the originator.

Follow Hannah on Twitter.