It seems right now that Apple just can do no wrong. With record sales of its devices and huge amounts of money sat in the bank, it’s all very rosy over in Cupertino. But other companies have had successful periods before, only for things to go a little awry in future years.

Despite great results from Apple ever since Steve Jobs returned to the company back in 1997, it wasn’t really until the iPhone’s introduction in 2007 that the world really took notice of what was going in at 1 Infinite Loop.

Now it’s a worldwide phenomenon, with people owning iPhones who would never have contemplated picking up a Mac.

Throw in the beginnings of a tablet market that is still being dominated by the iPad, and Apple have every right to feel smug. But it may not last forever…(...)
Read the rest of Why Apple Must Not Rest on its Laurels

"Why Apple Must Not Rest on its Laurels" is an article by iDownloadBlog.com.
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The iPad 3 hysteria is reaching a fever pitch, and even I am getting swept up in the excitement. So much so that I just sat down and made a short list of the things I would most like to see Apple add to its next tablet device.

Before I unleash my list upon the unsuspecting masses, I must reiterate that I do know that some of these are never going to happen, but that’s kind of the fun of a wishlist, right? Asking for things that would be mind-bendlingly awesome but are almost impossible, or just highly improbable.

With that out of the way, onwards we go to my iPad 3 feature wishlist…(...)
Read the rest of The iPad 3 Wishlist

"The iPad 3 Wishlist" is an article by iDownloadBlog.com.
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Chris Saad is VP of strategy at Echo, the world’s leading provider of comment/conversation technology to Tier 1 publishers. He is also the co-author of the Synaptic Web Strawman, co-author of the Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML) specification, and co-founder of the DataPortability Project.

Last week, I wrote a post calling out Mark Zuckerberg for making a correlation between Facebook’s privacy issues and their altruistic pursuit of data portability.

Today I’d like to do something a little different. I’d like to examine some of the reasons why Facebook is finding it challenging to either a) implement data portability, or b) communicate about issues of privacy or data portability — and why ultimately, that might be OK, in the sense that it leaves room for the rest of the web to innovate.

I will examine the issue in three parts. These parts, I believe, make up the crux of any reasonable criticism of Facebook at this time.

Data Portability vs. Interoperability

First, Facebook tends to discuss data portability without acknowledging the significance of open standards and interoperability.

Data portability is not just allowing users to access their data. There is a silent “Interoperable” before the phrase that means the data, and the protocols to get it, need to be based on open standards and be interchangeable. Letting people code against your API is not the same as building the API in such a way that others (i.e. social aggregators or networks) could participate in the transactions just as easily.

Facebook’s challenge, however, is that they are pioneering many of these interactions and can’t necessarily wait for standards to emerge or crystallize before acting.

Standards emerge after a good pattern gets established. In many ways, Facebook’s leadership in demonstrating these patterns at scale shows the way (and provides the market momentum and emotional fuel) for standards to emerge. See the OExchange announcement earlier this week, for example.

The challenge for Facebook here is to balance their need (and obvious appetite) for innovation with architectural choices that allow for open standards and interoperable protocols to be absorbed by their system. To show true commitment, they must also quickly adopt standards as they emerge.

Taking these steps would put them in good position to avoid the Internet-scale forces that often reject proprietary platforms as fast as they emerge. In addition to decisive action, if Facebook clearly acknowledged this to stakeholders, it would go a long way.

Will they make these decisions rather than pay lip service? That seems unlikely.

Social Contracts vs. Open Culture

Second, Facebook confuses privacy concerns with anger over a violation of their social contract with users, specifically with regard to people pushing back on the general goal of human openness.

The potential for social media to make the world a more transparent and connected place is real and significant. I don’t think that any rational person who seriously considers the trends could argue against the idea that people sharing more in public, and reading more about others, could reduce fear born from any sense of ‘us’ vs ‘them’.

I don’t think that anyone really challenges Mark Zuckerberg on this point when he makes it. They shouldn’t.

The challenge for Facebook, however, is they began with a social contract — a promise to their users — of a private place for sharing amongst mutually confirmed friendships.

To their credit as a company, they want to continue to push the boundaries, and innovate and evolve as quickly as the market. And the market has evolved. Thanks to Flickr, Twitter and others, public is the new default, and Facebook needs to keep up. For them to change direction towards these open defaults, however, they must declare this intention clearly and unequivocally.

The team at Facebook tries to talk about the need for an open and connected society, and have continued to make incremental steps in this direction. But they have really failed to put it in the context of their history and our future. They need to tell the story of a cultural trend towards openness and explain that while they started as private place, their (new) unashamed goal is move towards a public one.

Doing it in small steps without explaining the end goal or the reason, or even acknowledging the fundamental shift, is a big (and unnecessary) source of criticism.

Open Culture vs. Open Technology

Third, Facebook tends to use the word ‘open’ without drawing a distinction between culture and technology

When the team at Facebook talks about wanting to make the world more “open,” I, and others who care about such things, hear them cloaking themselves in the mantra of Open Technologies when they are actually talking about open/transparent/public culture.

Trying to draw the distinction between Open Technology vs. Open Culture is difficult for Facebook, considering that their audience is not that of our little echo chamber but rather a very mainstream community that does not understand such nuance. So in some regards, glossing over these distinctions is understandable given their target market.

The problem, though, is that making the world a more open place using closed technologies all routed through a single company is not the way it can or should work.

A more interoperable, peer-to-peer method of achieving cultural transparency is critical for there to be true openness (of both kinds). There is an architecture that would allow each node (read: user/site/service) to be a first class citizen on the interoperable social web and to choose how public or private it is when it comes to sharing.

Facebook might know this, but their job is not to create an interoperable social web. They are the market leader — the clear winner — and as Dave McClure likes to say, “Open is for losers.” The nice thing about the web, though, is there are a lot of big, important, well funded and motivated losers who will ensure that Open will win in the end.

Facebook’s job, however, is to capitalize on their momentum and network effects to create maximum value for their shareholders. This is not ‘evil’ or even necessarily undesirable. Because like with open standards, oftentimes until someone shows the industry how it’s done (and frankly lights a fire under its butt), it’s often hard for us all to collectively imagine what the future might look like.

The challenge for Facebook — one they are more than capable of facing – is keeping up with the inevitable opening of the walls and the peering of the nodes. They are the most agile and innovative company at scale that has ever existed on the Internet. If anyone can do it, they can. The only question is, can the rest of the community execute as well?

Conclusion

In these three areas — Data Portability vs. Interoperability, Social Contracts vs. Open Culture, Open Culture vs. Open Technology — Facebook has made big moves and very high profile blunders. Their challenges are great and their ability to execute with ambition first, ask questions later and quickly clean up the mess is the very reason for their success.

Are these blunders a series of accidental missteps (a combination of ambition, scale and hubris) or a calculated risk to force their world view on unsuspecting users (easier to ask for forgiveness)? Only the executives at Facebook can ever truly answer this question.

What’s clear, though, is that their platform is tightly coupled with countless other websites and applications across the web, and their financial success is aligned with many influential investors and actors. At this stage, and at this rate, their continued success is all but assured.

But so is the success of the rest of the web. Countless social applications emerge every day and the rest of the web is, and always will be, bigger than any proprietary platform. Through its action and inaction, Facebook offers opportunities for us all. And in the dance between their moves and the rest of the web’s, innovation can be found.

The only thing that can truly hurt the web is a monopoly on ideas, and the only ones who can let that happen are web users themselves.

More Facebook resources from Mashable:

- Why Facebook’s Privacy War Is Not Over
- Why Facebook Must Get Serious About Privacy
- 4 Tips for B2B Marketing on Facebook
- In Defense of Facebook
- The Local Advertising War Will Be a Clash of the Internet Titans

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, alwyncooper

Tags: data portability, editorial, facebook, open technology, privacy, social contracts, social media

Dallas Lawrence is Managing Director of Burson-Marsteller’s Proof Integrated Communications. He is a Mashable contributor on emerging media trends, online reputation management and digital issue advocacy. You can connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence.

The recent firestorm over Facebook’s approach to securing the privacy of its more than 450 million users continues to reverberate around the globe this week as thousands of news outlets cover the unfolding drama with almost breathless zeitgeist. And while traditional outlets are grappling with what it all means for the future of Facebook, online denizens have trumpeted their angst about the company’s most recent changes with more than 25 million blog posts.

The current crisis of confidence leveled against Facebook once again centers on the core issue of how the social networking platform manages access to its users’ information. PC World columnist JP Raphael noted earlier this month that with the significant new changes announced by the Palo Alto-based social giant, “achieving maximum privacy on Facebook now requires you to click through 50 settings and more than 170 options — and even that won’t completely safeguard your info.” According to news reports this week, the company may finally be reversing course (again) and returning to a streamlined security process.

To be sure, Facebook is no novice when it comes to navigating the controversies of privacy in the online marketplace, and it will very likely emerge from the current crisis singed, but not terribly worse for the wear. What is surprising however, and perhaps most troubling for a company that nearly all watchers agree must prove its mettle with a public offering in the next 18 months, is the voraciousness of the global opposition the recent controversy has sparked, and the apparent lack of corporate agility at Facebook to respond effectively to even the most basic crises inherent to an organization so intertwined in the daily lives of half a billion users.

The Lessons Facebook Can Learn from Google

Purported 7-year old texts from CEO Mark Zuckerberg are now lighting up the online community with an amusing, and some may say prescient peek into the then 19-year old’s views on privacy. The constant and steady drip of opposition forming around the most valuable social media property in the history of the Internet is beginning to paint a picture of a company that has failed to fundamentally understand that what got it to where it is today will not make it into what it wants to be: A wildly profitable public company rivaling the reach and prominence of Google.

The $200 billion search behemoth learned these same painful lessons of accountability earlier in the past decade as they became the public whipping boy for privacy issues. Regular Congressional hearings, editorial columns and tech-savvy thought leaders all lampooned Google for their approach to user information. Many began questioning its very core mantra of “don’t be evil” that had mightily bound Googlers for more than a decade. Google’s response was to aggressively educate global regulators and privacy experts while dramatically expanding their Washington, DC footprint. They further ramped up public policy and communications outreach efforts to ensure they were accessible and accountable to those most concerned about their industry and how they as a company approached the prickly issue of online privacy.

Transparency is Key to Facebook’s Maturation

As regulators and privacy watchdog groups from the EU, Canada and the U.S. begin to catch up to the social media revolution and the inherent policy concerns that came with it, Facebook’s maturation has reached a seminal moment in the platform’s life cycle.

For a brand built on the ideals of transparency (sharing your life updates with your friends and family), Facebook must begin to embrace the mantra of a transparent and accountable organization while remaining free from the constraints of life as a publicly traded, heavily regulated, investor-driven company.

Facebook’s chief policy guru Elliot Schrage appeared at least to grasp the challenges that lie ahead for the company during a question and answer session with The New York Times last week. “Another painful element comes from professional frustration,” Schrage wrote. “It’s clear that despite our efforts, we are not doing a good enough job communicating the changes that we’re making … We may not always agree about the speed and comprehensiveness of our response but I’m here because I’m confident Facebook’s future success depends on our ability to respond.”

Tough words and sound perspective from a smart, well-respected industry insider. If heeded, they may finally drive the internal changes necessary for Facebook to complete its startup evolution and graduate into the world’s most dominant — and profitable — communications platform.

More Facebook resources from Mashable:

- How Facebook Can Become a Money Making Machine
- Facebook vs. Google: The Billion Dollar Battle to Be Your Default Social Profile
- 5 Essential Facebook Privacy Tips
- 4 Tips for B2B Marketing on Facebook
- The Local Advertising War Will Be a Clash of the Internet Titans

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, malerapaso

Tags: analysis, facebook, privacy, social media, social networks

As the most popular social network in the world, Facebook has become the de facto destination for web denizens to share their thoughts, photos and videos, and connect with loved ones. With so many people using Facebook, the site has become like an online home to many, serving as a safe and contained environment where one can settle down.

In fact, Facebook has become so comfortable that most users don’t consider quitting, even after the newly introduced “Like” buttons were accompanied by semi-controversial privacy settings (which tend to be ignored), and multiple bugs in recent weeks put user privacy in jeopardy.

This brand affinity affords the social network significantly more implicit trust than startups with brighter ideas or bolder purposes. What Facebook seems to realize is that they have the power to introduce some of these bleeding edge notions to their hundreds of millions of members and make them feel safe, familiar and normal.

A Look at the Bleeding Edge

There are a handful of web services that are pushing the envelope of online mores and social acceptability.

In this bucket we can dump Google Latitude, Foursquare, and Gowalla, and categorize them in the location-sharing department. Blippy, and now Swipely, are taking purchase-sharing to the extreme, so throw them in the bucket too. You could even toss Square and Venmo into the mix, as their alternative mobile payment systems aren’t something the general population will race to embrace.

What it boils down to is that the majority of the population does not see the significance or utility of location sharing or going social with their credit cards. We’ve already explored in depth on Mashable why it matters, and what the future holds, but for the average person, telling the world where they are and what they’re buying is still a scary concept.

While these services appeal to early adopters by pushing the envelope, ultimately that boundary pushing helps to normalize the behaviors, so that Facebook can step in and make once bleeding edge concepts acceptable, or even logical, to mainstream users. Edge services introduce new concepts to early adopters, Facebook makes them normal for everyone else. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before.

Facebook is Familiar

When it comes to the web, users tend to gravitate towards the familiar. In search and e-mail sectors, Google is familiar, and Yahoo can be a comforting place for the everyday news seeker.

In the social media space, Facebook is like family. You may not always agree with your family, but at the end of the day, you trust them to have your back. On the other hand, for the average user, services like Foursquare, Swipely and Square are like a “friend of a friend.” You don’t really know her, so a face-to-face encounter might feel awkward and unnatural at first.

Fear of the Unknown

The psychological concept of the “other” highlights the basic human tendency to place what we experience into one of the two buckets — things we know, and things we don’t. It’s a common device of modern fiction, and very much a part of the mystery created by the hit television show Lost in its first and second seasons. Viewers know that The Others are people whose mere existence is completely foreign and troubling to the identify to the survivors.

In applying this concept to the web, social media, and the average individual, Facebook is what we know, and the bleeding edge sites fall into the category of otherness.

What’s especially interesting though, is that Facebook has the power to make the unknown known. For instance, Facebook’s “Like” button is not scary. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. For most users, it’s like a door mat that reads “welcome home,” and sends the message, “you know Facebook, you’re safe here,” regardless of whether or not that is actually the case.

Application developers and publishers recognize the power that Facebook familiarity carries, and proof can be seen in the fact that the new social plugins are now on more than 100,000 sites.

Facebook Normalizes the Extreme

With Swipely’s private beta launch, the conversation around real-time social shopping is bound to become heavily discussed and debated.

On one side you have early-adopters eager to share their credit card purchases with the world in the hopes of being first to a new trend (some of them are already doing so on Blippy). On the opposite side, you have web users horrified by the notion of being so public with their sensitive information.

In the middle, there’s Facebook and those welcoming “Like” buttons that are now plastered across the web. In much the same way that Blippy and Swipely create community around shared purchases, Facebook “Like” buttons give users the ability to share their favorite songs, movies, TV shows, sports teams, restaurants, and news items back with Facebook friends and integrate them into their profile.

You may not equate the behaviors as the same, and there are obvious differences, but essentially Facebook has normalized the practice of product-sharing in a way that users can and want to embrace. Behaviors of this variety, previously considered extreme, feel safe simply because of the Facebook brand name behind it.

Location-sharing and mobile payments can also feel extreme from unknown sources, but Facebook has the power to normalize these activities too. When Facebook launches its location features, they will play a major role in bringing checkins to mainstream users.

In terms of alternative payment options, Facebook will also help the general population feel safer with their offering — Facebook Credits. Right now, Facebook’s virtual currency can be used to buy gifts and virtual goods inside Facebook, but we see a future when users will be able to pay with Facebook for real goods, either purchased within Facebook’s walls, on sites with Facebook integration, and potentially in the real-world via SMS in a fashion similar to what Venmo now supports.

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More Facebook resources from Mashable:

- HOW TO: Find Long Lost Friends on Facebook
- HOW TO: Add Facebook “Like” Buttons to Your WordPress Blog
- What Facebook’s Open Graph Means for Your Business
- HOW TO: Disable Facebook’s “Instant Personalization” [PRIVACY]
- Facebook Open Graph: What it Means for Privacy

[Img credits: Jamie_Pichora, massdistraction, AHMED..., Klaire_Lee]

Tags: blippy, facebook, foursquare, location, Opinion, privacy, swipely, venmo

The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.

All eyes are on Facebook. Ever since Facebook revealed Facebook Open Graph, the world’s largest social network has been getting hammered by tech pundits, mainstream media and its users.

Facebook’s used to this type of uproar after it changes something, but in my time tracking Facebook, I’ve never seen anything like this. Not even the Facebook News Feed fiasco of 2006 had U.S. Senate scrutiny. Facebook Open Graph has clearly struck a nerve with a lot of people.

Is Facebook betraying its users, though? Has Facebook compromised user privacy? After taking a lot of time to absorb the arguments and the big picture, I’m weighing in, and I doubt that my conclusion is going to be popular.

The central problem is that people believe that Facebook and the web in general should be able to protect the information we post online. I argue that this is untrue, because it goes against the fundamental design of Facebook, social media, and the web itself. We should be relying on ourselves for our privacy, and not turning Facebook into our convenient scapegoat.

True: Facebook Should Have Communicated Better

On April 21st, Facebook announced Open Graph, a platform for personalizing the web browsing experience on third-party websites and without logging into Facebook. It makes sense: Open Graph is spreading the tentacles of the social network across the web, making its presence and power known through the social plugins and “Like” buttons now plastered across the web.

The media and some of Facebook’s users haven’t fallen in line, though. Some technology pundits have deleted their accounts, all in the name of privacy. Mainstream media is hammering Facebook. There are even Quit Facebook Days being planned, although it’s unclear how many people will actually bite the bullet.

While I’ve seen Facebook’s users exude more anger than this in past incidents, this is the first time I’ve seen the media pile up so much on the world’s largest social network.

Clearly Facebook screwed up. Critics have a legitimate point saying that Facebook’s privacy options are too complicated. More importantly, Facebook hasn’t been communicating with its 425+ million users like it should: a Q&A with Facebook VP Elliot Schrage on the New York Times blog just doesn’t cut it.

I’m especially critical about Facebook’s lack of communication on the situation. I expected Mark Zuckerberg to write a blog post letting users know that Facebook is listening, despite previously stating that privacy is dead. He has done this before, and it went a long way to appeasing the angry masses.

Mark, better late than never. You need to personally respond in an open letter on the Facebook blog.

The Truth About the Web

In 2006, while I was still a junior at Northwestern University, I started a group called Students Against Facebook News Feed. It was the largest protest group against News Feed, which had recently launched at the time. My concern was privacy: I thought that Facebook was violating my privacy and not giving me enough options to control it. 750,000+ other Facebook users agreed — nearly 10% of the user base at the time.

Facebook appeased us with more privacy controls, but they didn’t take down News Feed. It has turned out to be the right decision. News Feed has become a central pillar of Facebook and indeed of all social media. Here’s what I said about News Feed, two years after the controversy:

“Here’s the major change in the last two years: We are more comfortable sharing our lives and thoughts instantly to thousands of people, close friends and strangers alike. The development of new technology and the rocking of the boat by Zuckerberg has led to this change.”

I actually agree with Mark: Privacy is dead, and social media is holding the smoking gun. Facebook, social media, and even the web itself are designed to share information. While you can be (justifiably) angry about Facebook’s lack of communication over the privacy issue, to believe that information on Facebook or other social networks is inherently private or “yours” is just wrong.

I don’t care if you have taken every precaution to keep your information private to just a few people: all it takes is one friend copying and pasting that information and posting it somewhere else to “breach” the privacy wall.

The truth is that the privacy wall didn’t exist in the first place. The web makes the transmission of information easier than ever. Social media makes spreading that information an even simpler task. An embarrassing picture can go from Facebook upload to public blog post in a matter of minutes. Even if you don’t participate in any type of social media, someone can still take what they know about you and put it online.

The web is a network of information, and information has no walls.

Protecting Our Privacy Is Up to Us, Not Facebook

The web is now the world’s social platform, and expecting any privacy controls or security settings to protect us is just irresponsible. Facebook’s not the enemy: it’s just the latest scapegoat for our fears and concerns surrounding the new world in which we live.

Before the web, if you wanted to keep something private, you didn’t talk about it. It was easier to track whether or not someone was spilling your secrets because you didn’t have as many suspects. That’s not true if you post information online, though. What was once gossip is now a “privacy leak.”

Why do we still expect anything to stay private in the YouTube and Facebook world? More and more, our habit is to share the pictures we take on our camera phones on Facebook, to share what we say over Twitter, and to upload the videos we record on our Flips. Almost everything is being caught by some form of social media these days.

Protecting our privacy starts with us, not Facebook. While the company should have more clearly communicated its recent privacy changes, if you didn’t want your pictures shared with the rest of the world, you shouldn’t upload them in the first place.

Actually, in the social media world, you shouldn’t be placing yourself in positions where people can take embarrassing photos of you. Yes, it’s unfortunate that the dumb mistakes teenagers make are getting posted online for the world to see, but that’s how the world works now.

Facebook isn’t to blame for how the web has changed our world. They are just embracing emerging trends and making the web more efficient in their wake. Being able to broadcast what I like on the web to all of my friends is smart, and making it easy for me to do that (via “Like” buttons) is brilliant.

I defend Facebook’s ambitious Open Graph project, because it does make the browsing experience better: syncing the interests I’ve posted to the website I visit is a natural extension of the Facebook platform, not a coldly-calculated invasion of my privacy. It will prove to be an innovation that makes the web more useful and more social.

Facebook Is the Wrong Target for Our Anger

I think what I said a year ago about social media, Facebook News Feed, and privacy still sums up my feelings best, so I want to quote my past self one more time:

“The thing we’ve realized is that we still have control over our privacy. It’s called choice. If you’re uncomfortable with speaking to people digitally, you can decline to sign up for those social media websites. Or you update them differently than others. I can either block relationship updates from News Feed or, in my case, I just never update about it.

News Feed truly launched a revolution that requires us to stand back to appreciate. Privacy has not disappeared, but become even easier to control – what I want to share, I can share with everyone. What I want to keep private stays in my head.

All of this in just two years. Just imagine how social media will change our society in two more.

I look forward to sharing my life and my experience with even more people. I’m not afraid of losing my privacy anymore. You shouldn’t be, either.”

I defend Facebook because it is the wrong target for our anger. It has done more to bring people together than any technology of the last five years, and the good it has brought far outweighs the bad. We made the decision to turn our personal information over to a private company, and for the most part Facebook made good use of it.

Quitting Facebook won’t solve the privacy conundrum: common sense and better education about how privacy has changed will. This debate has once again exposed the gap between how the world has changed and our assumptions about how the world works or should work. Attacking Facebook won’t help us come to terms with our society’s struggle over the changing nature of privacy.

Tags: Column, facebook, mark zuckerberg, Opinion, privacy, The Social Analyst, trending

When Google upgraded their Local Business Center to Google Places, it launched the opening salvo in what we expect to be a long war for local advertising dollars.

With local advertising revenues expected to reach $144.9 billion in 2014 according to BIA/Kelsey — and more and more dollars are shifting away from traditional media toward digital media buys — the new war for local ad spend will be a battle between the Internet titans and social networks.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Foursquare, Yelp and even Apple are all attempting to carve out their own niche offering for local advertising dollars. Who will succeed remains to be seen, but this is a fight you won’t want to miss.

The War of the Worlds

The challengers fighting for local advertising budgets can be separated into three categories: Search, consumer review sites and social networks. The mobile component to each sector is also quite significant, especially given that the mobile web is taking over the world, and that mobile search is still a nascent space — one that appears to be more app-driven than search-engine driven.

Each category also has its own distinct advantage and key players, but what Google has managed to do with Google Places is straddle all three sectors with an extremely valuable proposition for local businesses that includes free stuff, cheap advertising rates and the promise of exposure.

Google also has a very strong mobile presence, but their adherence to the standard search model for discovery could make them susceptible to competitors vying for local ad dollars.

Search

In the local search space we can include the obvious players: Google and Microsoft, the latter of which will grab more share once the Yahoo search deal is implemented. Both behemoths are fast-adding features to their search services to better facilitate local search queries. Bing even has Foursquare data in maps.

For businesses, the advantages of being highlighted in local search results over competitors is significant. Sure it’s 100% paid media, but it’s also exposure at one of the primary touch points for service and restaurant queries on the web.

Google clearly recognizes the value of a targeted ad. With Google Places they also re-introduced a simpler, faster, cheaper way for their local business customers to advertise (formerly called enhanced listings). Business can pay a $25 per month flat fee to use Tags to make their listings more prominent on Google.com and Google Maps. Included in Tags are Posts, which are like status updates for Place Pages and will appear as part of the search listing.

Tags show up as yellow markers that users can scroll over to view promoted features or coupons. While Tags are ads, they’re essentially Google’s take on Promoted Tweets, and make listings stand out from the crowd. If done right, they could be useful for both businesses and consumers.

When thinking about local search, don’t forget about Twitter. The social network also happens to double as a search engine, and they’re aggressively moving in the local direction with tweet geotagging that can identify points of interest. This extra layer of data will enable Twitter users to search locally, and see a real-time stream of nearby tweets.

Couple these new Twitter features with Promoted Tweets — Twitter’s definition of search advertising — and you have a situation ripe for local businesses. The key here is whether or not Twitter can prove why users should share their location and why local businesses should care.

In thinking about search, remember that mobile will factor into the future in a big way. Steve Jobs believes that most mobile search happens via applications, which means that Apple — which now owns alternative mobile search application Siri — could play an important role in the mobile local advertising battle.

Consumer Review Sites

For the purpose of this post, consumer review sites like Yelp and City Search are being distinguished from other social networks because their primary focus is on user-generated place reviews.

The advertising opportunities on these sites are certainly geared towards the businesses that consumers are reviewing. That could create a conflict of interest for some networks, and in the case of Yelp, many small businesses felt that they were being bullied to pay to advertise in order to remove negative reviews. Yelp has maintained that this was absolutely not the case, and was a misunderstanding of their review filtering process.

As such, they’ve made changes in recent weeks to lessen the confusion, but now that Google Places offers a handful of business-friendly features, we could easily see local businesses jump ship with their advertising budgets.

On this feature front, the addition of service areas is quite significant. So too are the QR code window decals and free business photo shoots. Plus, if Google opts to take Google Maps inside businesses, there will be even more incentive for companies to own their Google Place Page.

In a previous post, I made a case for how the new consumer review is all about you, and that location, premium content and relationships are critical to the relevancy of the consumer review.

In this sense, Foursquare certainly factors into the consumer review equation. Their tips and content partnerships mean that their location-aware mobile social network is perfectly poised to deliver up tightly packaged consumer reviews that are place- and time-relevant. This means that smart local businesses will allocate more of their budgets to checkin rewards and mayor specials.

Lest we forget, there’s a Foursquare-esque component of Google’s Place Pages. All Place Pages include consumer reviews with both text and star ratings. These reviews are also easily accessible via Google Buzz for Mobile and Google Maps.

Social Networks

The primary social networks embroiled in the local advertising war include Twitter, Foursquare, Google and soon Facebook.

Google’s social networking endeavors have left plenty to be desired. Google Buzz launched to an excited tech audience but enthusiasm has since faded away. There’s also Google Latitude — an always-on location-sharing service that started as a Loopt clone — which now has 3 million active users. It’s the intersection of Buzz and Latitude on mobile devices that will help Google nail down local advertising dollars.

Between Buzz for Mobile’s checkin model and Latitude, Google has a lot of information that they can both display for consumer/business use as well as use behind the scenes. Since Buzz checkins are associated with Place Pages and Place Pages have dashboards, Google has the opportunity to compete with Foursquare’s business dashboards. They also have the data to create accurate behavioral analysis around location, based on the implicit location-sharing of Latitude users. Take that and the Google name, and you have something quite compelling.

Unfortunately for Google, Facebook is most certainly moving into the same space. Given their size and trendiness, we can assume that Facebook will be a strong competitor and a viable contender for local advertising dollars. The leaked McDonalds-Facebook location partnership tells us that diners will be able to check-in at restaurants with activity and food items being posted back to Facebook. How exactly this will work or function we don’t know, but what is certain is that once Facebook knows where their 400 million members are, they can target advertising by location.

Twitter is really trying to ramp up relevancy of geo-located tweets, but they’ve never quite been able to do what Foursquare has done — demonstrate the significance of location-sharing. As discussed above, there could be a perfect storm brewing for the day when geo-aware tweets are tied to places and Promoted Tweets are available to all potential advertisers.

Once that happens, we predict that advertisers will be able to target their Promoted Tweets by location and not just keywords (as it stands now). Should they go down this path, this could be their real secret sauce, especially given what we’ve already seen from Virgin America in the Promoted Tweets department.

In the social networking space, don’t count out David — a.k.a. Foursquare — amongst these internet Goliaths. Foursquare has pioneered the location-sharing movement by making checkins valuable, if not cool. The company is hotter than ever, and its partnerships — especially with the likes of Starbucks — continually ensure that it has something the competition doesn’t. Its user base is growing astronomically, and now that the users are there, businesses are clamoring to catch up.

Foursquare has also been nimble in finding ways to cater to local businesses. Early on, it allowed business owners to offer specials to mayors and those that check in. More recently, it introduced a simple way for businesses to sign-up and gain access to the business dashboard with checkin analysis. Its offering not only parallels what Google is doing with Place Pages, but bests it.

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More social media resources from Mashable:

- Facebook vs. Google: The Billion Dollar Battle to Be Your Default Social Profile
- Why Hasn’t Location Reached the Mainstream Yet?
- How Facebook Can Become a Money Making Machine
- 8 Tips for a Successful Social Media Cause Campaign
- 5 Ways Government Works Better With Social Media

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, bubaone

[Img credits: jef safi, Thomas Hawk and courtesy of iStockphoto, yuri4u80.]

Tags: facebook, foursquare, geolocation, Google, local businesses, MARKETING, place pages, twitter