At most times, this could be the perfect way to break the ice with someone. The moment you learn someone’s name, you can look him or her up from your Facebook account on your mobile, and walk up with a great line like, ” Oh I seem to recognize your name; aren’t you friends with my colleague from work? I’ve heard so much about you”. And if you meet a stranger who’s a little more with it in the social networking scene, you could even have a little fun, and explore what friends you have in common. Once they know that they have a certain number of friends in common with you, they absolutely will have to take you on too. Twitter could never do something like this; Twitter is about following people, and not about being friends with someone.

No other service grows at a half-million new members a day; pretty soon,you could be looking up people in a room, not just by who they know in common with you, but what interests they share with you. If you catch someone at a party about whom you get an alert for Facebook that he enjoys the music of the same rock group you do, you are in business.

Social networks always had a hard time trying to protect your privacy while encouraging you to share as much with your online friends at the same time, to make for a more enjoyable social networking experience all around. Protecting your privacy has become more difficult now ever since real-time search entered the Facebook equation.Facebook has tried every kind of balance between privacy and openness, and still doesn’t seem to be quite comfortable.

The policy adopted by Tumblr, Twitter and Yelp over privacy when you are on these networks ask that you only put out anything on the services that you don’t mind having everyone hear about. Location-based apps like Foursquare and Loopt are services that have the luxury of not really needing a formal privacy policy. If you are on these, you’re supposed to want to share freely. Privacy is the currency these services use too; although there is really no need for it. You only get to look into others’ lives, as far as you let them into yours. And everyone is supposed to share freely. Indeed, Foursquare is set to become the Twitter of this year. Twitter got people addicted to sharing the banalities of their everyday lives. Foursquare gets people addicted sharing with everyone the places they’re going to all the time.

The only real guarantee to privacy is not in any policy anymore; it is about self-restraint in curiosity over other people’s private lives. You only need to share anything if you wish to look into other people’s lives yourself. But when the entire point of a service is the fun of giving up any semblance of privacy, why have a privacy policy at all? If it helps everyone save money?

When people in the 90s sat down for the first time to sign up to their first e-mail account, they would typically take the password part of the form either very seriously or completely casually. The very serious would dream up an impossible mish-mash of numbers and letters to keep safe from spies. The more regular types among us would treat the password as a joke – who would it even occur to, to want to hack into our worthless accounts? Why not pick 12345, we would wonder. As people got more and more inured to the dangers of poor security on the Internet, websites and e-mail services began to require that people used six characters at least, with at least one number. So now, Internet security has been raised immeasurably to the use of abc123.

A couple of months ago, a company called RockYou, that makes software for the social networking sites, made a mistake and allowed a hacker to copy and publish their entire database of tens of millions of passwords. It wasn’t online for very long before it was taken down, but lots of people interested in computer security, managed to download a copy. No one has ever had this kind of window into the password habits that people have. You have to be in law enforcement to have access to something like that. As for insight, students and computer antivirus experts pored over the lists – and they quickly found that of all those millions, one in 100 just used 123456 as password, and an equal number did 12345. Lots of people used their girlfriend’s first name, or a popular car model name. There was a collection of 5000 very common passwords that were used by one in five.

All that a hacker would need then is, an automated program that can try the 5000 passwords one by one, until something hits. If making more than three wrong guesses within three minutes locks them out of an account, they’ll have the program just make no more than two attempts at a time, and come back after three minutes. It’s not like they don’t have millions of accounts to try to break into while they’re waiting. People don’t really need to make the best and strongest passwords out there to stay safe; they only need to be somewhat better than people who choose elementary passwords. They only need to stay one step ahead of the simpletons. When there are so many of them to be caught, why would any hacker want to waste his time guessing a slightly more difficult password?

It’s not that YouTube lacks the content; they once said that viewers pumped a couple of dozen hours of video every minute into YouTube’s servers. They have the content; they only need a way to help viewers find the things they like, and watch them. It could take YouTube through the the roof. And this barely profitable company could really begin to pull in advertising.

What is the biggest search engine on earth after Google? Well, it’s YouTube search, of course. And YouTube searches are much more difficult for search algorithms to decipher, because there is actually nothing in the videos that actually has any keywords that the algorithm needs. No search engine actually understands the images in a video; they depend entirely on the tags submitted by the uploader. They need all-new approaches for YouTube search; kind of like the data mining that eBay or Amazon use, to give you recommendations based on what you already are known to like. Maybe they need to announce a search design prize like Netflix did, to improve recommendations.

And of course there is negative marking; if their recommendations are often wrong, they could turn visitors off.YouTube and Google figure that they need personal information for this; much, much more than what they have already. They’ll need to spy on your e-mail, look at what you do on Facebook, look at what your friends do on Facebook, before they can get something right.

They figure that perhaps users need to be given a more TV-like experience if they are to compete with it. Maybe if they could get their viewers to relax a little, and have instant gratification like with TV, they could get somewhere. If YouTube could just move away from having users used search to discover videos; if users could just flip through stacks of videos with the minimal buffering wait period, then YouTube will finally have it made.

But Facebook is not done with tweaking its own ReTweeting feature. They’ve just released a Facebook feature called Via. It lets you repost something a friend shared with you, and it stamps the originator’s name on it with a Via attribution. It’s online already; you just need to pick up an item a friend has posted in your News Feed, and click on the Share button. You’ll get a Via option here with the name of the original friend stamped on it. When you finish sharing it, it will show up on your profile, with a link that goes to your friend’s profile too. Your friends will also find them on their News Feeds, and that is the closest thing to the ReTweet that you can imagine.

But Via Is only useful for links that someone’s posted. You can’t Via a status update, or your picture for instance. But it’s a first step, and it could evolve. They have the most useful kind of reposting feature up now with the link reposting ability, and that is what counts. Facebook will probably have a service like Tweet meme tracking how far a reposting of anything goes, and it could make Facebook really valuable in a world where instant real-time search is becoming deeply mainstream.

Certainly these are improvements, but most interesting about them is the fact that it gives us some clues as to how Bing is trying to outdo Google. Take the innovation at Bing that they call entity cards. Searching on subjects like celebrities, travel destinations, or disease
symptoms, little “entity card” boxes pop up with what Bing considers to be useful asides. If there are a lot of people around the world searching for the same thing, say the city of Paris, Bing will reckon that it must be some event in Paris, and try to offer a hotel and travel information, and listings of important events in those entity boxes. Or if you are looking for information on a pop music personality, Bing will fill those boxes with tour dates and ticket availability information.

All the major search engines have great integration with the important social networks; but Bing is looking for ways to take it higher. In Twitter, Microsoft allows you to sort tweets by celebrity, and look up the busiest Twitter celebs first. Bing’s Facebook plan is to lay your friends out on a grid and allow you to choose among the most active ones in lots of convenient ways. Bing isn’t about real revolution yet; it is about thoughtfulness, trying to think like the user, and plying them with lots of delightful little cosmetic touches. This seems to be working, in an age of short attention spans. We’ll get to see if it is a Google beater, not long from now.

But children on the whole seem to be in better and control of their dependencies than working adults. Businesses in America and the UK are increasingly finding that they need to block access to social networking sites at the company’s server, to keep this habit from lowering workplace productivity. And of course, employees are certainly not taking a hint at this; they and are finding workarounds, such as accessing Facebook through their e-mail. For the less-than-responsible, a service called MoDazzle lets you do this.. You just send an e-mail to MoDazzle, and it fetches you all your latest updates through your e-mail. You can do most of the stuff on MoDazzle that you would get to do on Facebook.

It isn’t just the matter of self-control that Facebook brings up at work and at home. In America, the state of Florida has ruled that lawyers and judges cannot be Facebook friends. There is the matter of being responsible, and then there is something like this that is clearly silly. Lawyers who are friends, are not suddenly going to turn strangers just because one of them got promoted to being a judge.

When Google planned to map out in real time the spots in the world where diseases spread, they said that this proved stupendous new possibilities. Location-enabled Twitter, could actually alert you to how many location-tagged messages are coming in from doctor’s clinics in any given area. If you have a political cause in mind, say, veganism, you don’t ever have to wait for a poll of any kind to find out what part of the country would be the friendliest your views – you can merely check out the number of vegan-related political tweets coming in from any given location. And then you could move out there, either to live in, or to participate.

What if you are waiting in line at your local superstore for a hit Christmas toy that would be just the gift you need, and it is reported to be running low on stocks? If people at different locations around a geographic region could put out a location-tagged tweet about what kind of stocks there were to be found in their local store, that would give a whole new meaning to guerilla shopping.

Any time you are in a given location, newspapers online could send you stories that were reported from that area in the last day. Or, you could be given a running subtext on your mobile phone, by Wikipedia, of all the interesting stuff that it has on its records, that have to do with your location. And of course,if there is a new story being covered in your immediate neighborhood at the very moment you are passing through, news sites could alert you to those too.

Google’s Near Me Now, a service that’s a month old now, runs off your mobile, and automatically finds all the top-rated entertainment, eating places, or anything else you are interested in right on your screen. You don’t need to manually search for anything anymore. It’s almost enough now, to put Yelp to rest with.

Consider the Fiesta campaign that Ford undertook on the social media recently. What Ford did was to round up a hundred regular people off the street, to drive and review the latest Fiesta on Twitter, primarily, but also on Flicker and YouTube. It did work exactly as they planned; viewership on YouTube has been through the roof. Twitter has seen nearly five million impressions of the whole Fiesta deal. But the more important question here is,has it actually sold anything for Ford?

Companies do not look to social media to help them sell anything, although it must be committed that their Fiesta movement certainly got a lot of sales inquiries from potential customers. With the whole buzz they generated from this, they got lots of user input on how to improve the Fiesta, and make it better for the American customer. It’s easy for those corporate executive types to grow too insulated from the everyday people who make their company profitable. They gain a valuable ability to actually see the dialogue blossom between the car designer and car user, filled with the kind of urgency, the emotion that goes with car ownership. This has to be one of the best uses that the social media have found so far. Of course, GM tried it recently, and they were not pleased. You do have to have a certain amount of basic goodwill to go on, before you go asking people what they think of you.

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It would be difficult for the provider of any online information or service, to top a search engine in user traffic: search engines are our first port of call when we open a browser. For the first time though, social networking sites are pulling in more visitors, then even the search engines. Once an Internet portal has an irresistible product, it brings power that allows it to change the very way the Internet is run. For instance, YouTube has achieved a certain critical mass of videos on such a variety of subjects, and that there are a good number of young people who feel no need to search on Google to read about anything. They just search on YouTube, for a video on the subject they are interested in. In fact, YouTube is now the second largest search engine after Google.

So what happens if the social media sites become so enormously popular, that even search begins to take second place? To begin with, people would be subscribing to updates on Twitter and Facebook, more than RSS ever succeeded in getting us to do. Perhaps the very concept of the browser would be threatened. And just as free access to all the newspapers of the world is driving publishers of physical books and papers to bankruptcy, and throwing up protests of how quality in publishing will suffer, free access to information on people’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, would perhaps send up another wave of protests that there will be no way of determining quality, if people begin to look directly to sharing with Internet friends, as a way to gain basic knowledge. Such a fundamental game changer, would shake up the established business plan that Google controls now.

Businesses want to know if the fans you have on your Facebook, really do make you a minor celebrity in your circle. If they paid you for it, could you endorse a product for your social network fans, and make a difference to your sponsors? If your fans follow you on Twitter, will they follow your choice of restaurants, movies or soft drink? The idea has really taken off, and advertising promoters exist who work exclusively on product promotion on the social network scene. It is their job to convince advertisers of the effectiveness of product placement on Facebook and Twitter, and also to find influential members whose opinions and endorsements will matter.

A social network where you spend time with your friends is one of the last places you would expect to be pitched a product; that element of surprise is what the advertisers are looking for. Amazon even has a proper service in place for this, and they call it Amazon Associates. They’ll pay commissions to anyone who will refer buyers to the online retailer’s website. Friends on a regular tweet from someone they subscribe to, will, in the middle of it all, suddenly see a tweet like “Yo! Check out Bobby Crusoe’s latest track on Amazon.com – it rocks!”. Actually, a few minor television stars actually earn upward of $25,000 for a single commercial tweet. Regular people with sizable fan followings on Twitter, can make a couple of thousand dollars for a commercial tweet.

Twitter advertising companies like Izea first started placing advertisements with Twitter members with no specific warning at all. If there was a celebrity chef, and he was tapped to place an ad for a particular brand of butter, there was nothing that would tell his followers that it was not his personal opinion they were reading. Izea has made sure that that doesn’t happen anymore, after they received protests. With those initial teething problems over, social networking advertising is all set to becoming the next greatest thing in advertising.