The term “social network” is of course synonymous with online networks like Facebook. But think about what you’re actual social life is like for a second. Are you really closest to the people whose items you “like” the most on Facebook? What about the people you @reply or retweet on Twitter? The people you reblog the most on Tumblr? If you’re anything like me, probably not. Instead, the best indicator of who I actually interact with socially the most in real life are the calls I make and the texts I send — it’s all mobile interaction.

I’ve written before that I think location is the bridge between social networks and actual social life. But why do we even need that bridge? Why are so many startups content to build on top of the Facebook or Twitter social graph, when a lot of them can access your actual social graph in your mobile contact book? We’re seeing more and more apps go “mobile first, web second” these days, and that’s likely to increase going forward. This means that they start as services on mobile devices. So again I ask, why not just get to your actual social graph through your contacts there?

Sure, many do that to some extent already. APIs for Android and the iPhone give you access to contact list information to varying degrees. But most startups are still approaching that idea as a secondary tactic after they’ve hooked in your social graph through Facebook or Twitter. But I think we may start to see some that go right to the heart of your contacts on your mobile device. In fact, I met with one in the making last week, Addappt.

While they’re still building out the product, the core idea of Addappt is to connect people through their contact lists (in this case, on the iPhone). Specifically, their app scours your contact list to see which of your friends are signed up to go to various upcoming conferences. But you can easily see this concept transferred to any number of social utilities. “When was the last time the address book saw any innovation?,” is the way co-founder Mrinal Desai puts it. And he’s right.

It seems that companies like Apple and Google are sitting on a treasure trove of actual social data with these contact lists. Calls, texts, emails, it’s all right there. Google obviously has tried (and failed) to build a social graph through your email contacts before — but they went about it wrong, and they did so on the desktop. Mobile is the key to this.

Currently, we’re also seeing Apple also struggle in its first real attempt at social networking, with iTunes Ping. Their network is way too closed to be of much use — but at least they get that mobile should be a component of it.

But imagine if Apple built social tools right into your Contacts app? Maybe it would start with short status updates (maybe this would even pull in tweets), and then it would move to something like instant messaging. Then imagine if they did something with location? All of this would be opt-in, of course, but it could be very powerful.

And think about FaceTime. It’s an amazing product, but it’s far too hard to use because you never know when someone else is available to chat. Apple won’t accept the FacePlant app which solves this, so I have to believe they’re working on their own solution. The Contact app would be perfect for this. You load it up and see who is available to FaceTime.

Obviously, using your mobile contact book isn’t ideal for all types of social applications. But for the ones you want to use with just your closest friends: location, photos, short messages, events — it could be a killer set of data.

When Twitter bought Atebits, the company behind the excellent iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie, there was some concern it would slow down development of that app. Luckily, it doesn’t look like that has happened. As today, Twitter for iPhone version 3.0.1 has just launched, and with it comes suport for both iOS 4 and iPhone 4.

In fact, while other huge apps on the iPhone, such as Facebook, lag behind in supporting the newest iPhone functionality, Twitter is one of the first to implement some of the useful new features.

So what they are supporting with this update? The actual App Store page only vaguely says the app has updated “OAuth support” and has a “Stuck top tweets fix”. But having downloaded the app just now, I can confirm that it is enabled to “multitask” — meaning you can quickly switch into and out of the app and into other background enabled apps. The app also has been customized for the new iPhone 4 Retina display, developer Loren Brichter confirms.

You can find Twitter for iPhone here in the App Store. It’s a free download.

Last month, Erick wrote a post calling for the creation of an open database of places. As location-based services continue to gain popularity, each of them is building up these massive databases of places themselves, and this is going to become an issue as services like Twitter and potentially Facebook attempt to federate all this data. And Erick is hardly alone in thinking about this — nearly all the companies involved in the space talk about such an idea enthusiastically, and regularly. Yet no one seems to be doing much about it just yet.

Back in March, I moderated a panel featuring key members of Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Twitter, and Plancast. When I raised the idea of a unified place database, all seemed to be in agreement that it would be a good thing. Even when I brought up that their own place databases were a way to keep their users around, everyone seemed to think there were better ways to do that, and that the benefits of a unified place database would outweigh any costs. Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley reiterated that to Erick last month, saying that a “‘Facebook Connect of places’ would be amazing.“

This past week, at Web 2.0 Expo, the discussion started up once again, with a different group of people in the space. This time, key members of Twitter, Google, and Brightkite talked about the idea. Of those, Martin May of Brightkite seemed to be the most adamant about it. When moderator Brady Forrest asked if Brightkite could build such a database, May responded with, “We could.” He went on to say that they’ve spoken with several other companies about such an open place project.

May also hinted that Brightkite may open up the data they’ve gotten from Check.in, their service that allows you to check-in to Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite via one application. Because that app has to search each of those services’ databases to find the correct place to check-in at across all three, Brightkite likely has some interesting data tying at least some of these places on the different databases together.

Steve Lee of Google (working on Latitude) jumped in to say that he likes what Brightkite is doing with Check.in, but thinks that it’s still too cumbersome. “There should be a standard, but it’s not without complications,” Lee said. These include technical challenges and licensing issues, Lee noted, saying that it would be difficult for Google to do this because so much of their [place] data is licensed from third parties.

“Google is interested in solving the problem, but it’s not easy,” Lee concluded with.

Twitter’s Elad Gil (who came over when Twitter bought GeoAPI) was more much more optimistic about a solution. In fact, he’s positive it will come, and thinks that all of the various location applications need to be prepared when it does with ways to truly differentiate themselves. “All these applications have ot think about how to differentiate. It’s hard to build out the database of locations, but fundamentally the technical problems will go away,” Gil said.

That rings true. But the question remains: who will build it? Twitter seems to be passing the buck to Google, who seems to be passing it right back to Twitter. Brightkite clearly wants to, but will any of the other players really trust a rival with their data? If not, will they start to restrict their APIs to make it harder to access the place information in bulk?

The obvious solution is to have a completely open database, as Erick laid out. But again, that is easier said than done. We’ve seen that time and time again with a number of different initiatives. “Open” sounds great until someone has to actually do it, be in charge of it, and get users to use it.

That leaves the 800-pound gorilla: Facebook.

As they get ready to unleash their location-based component, one that will supposedly integrate with venues, I wouldn’t doubt that they’ll be not-so-slowly gathering up and organizing a massive database of places. They’ll open this up, via the Open Graph API, but everyone will complain that it’s not really open. Then Twitter will step up with their solution (they’ve been accumulating the necessary data for some time now). Then Google will too. It’s amazing what a little competition can do.

Of course, if that happens, we’ll be left with the same problem, just at a higher level. And the dance will continue.

[photo: flickr/pedrosimones7]

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has modest goals. He wants to rule forever (term limits were ended last year). But he also wants to rule Twitter. His head of communications said as much a few days ago. Or, at least, those around him think he will rule Twitter. “I’m sure he’ll break records for numbers of followers,” Diosdado Cabello told Bloomberg. Of course, at the time, he didn’t yet have a Twitter account set up. Now he does. And he’s gaining users fast.

Chavez’s account (freshly verified) is here. As you can see he already has over 100,000 followers after just two days of tweets — and just two (rather mundane) tweets. That’s pretty solid considering that it took famous Americans Conan O’Brien and Bill Gates months to reach just 800,000 followers. Still, Chavez has a ways to go before he gets anywhere near the top of the Twitter mountain. Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears are currently racing to be the first users to 5 million followers.

Meanwhile, Chavez is following just 5 people. One, unsurprisingly is the one tied to Cuban leader Fidel Castro (though someone else tweets for him) Chavez’s mentor. The others Chavez follows appear to be fellow Venezuelan political leaders. As his background he appears to have chosen the same red found on the Venezuelan flag. His bio reads, “President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Bolivarian Soldier, Socialist and Anti-Imperialist.” And he’s tweeting using UberTwitter which means Chavez (or whomever is handling his account) may well be a BlackBerry user.

The best part though is his Twitter username: chavezcandanga. “Candanga” apparently literally translates into “the devil” — though, I’m told, people also use it to describe someone who is strong-willed, or fearless.

As I wrote about back in February, ManageTwitter is easily one of the most useful third-party Twitter services out there. While there are plenty of services that help you find new people to follow, there simply aren’t enough that help you prune those that you already follow. For those of us who have been using the service for years now, and have accumulated a lot of people we follow over that time, this is a problem. ManageTwitter solves it brilliantly. And now Twitter is going to kill them.

As the service posted on its Posterous blog yesterday, Twitter has sent the service an email letting them know that they’re breaking one of their rules. Specifically, this is what Twitter wrote:

We’re writing to let you know that your application, ManageTwitter, breaks our Automation Rules and Best Practices (http://help.twitter.com/entries/76915). Specifically, it facilitates bulk automated user unfollowing, which is not allowed. It’s best for both our users and your users if your application follows the rules, so please make the necessary changes, such as removing the “Select All” option (and requiring users to decide on each user individually) to bring your application into compliance.

The problem is that ManageTwitter’s service isn’t automated at all. It simply offers up suggestions for who you should unfollow. As ManageTwitter writes:

Yes our application does facilitate bulk unfollowing BUT ManageTwitter does not facilitate any *automated* bulk unfollowing, the user has to filter based on criteria. The user is still required to do significant processing to unfollow groups of people. Furthermore the system only allows unfollowing of up to only 100 at a time.

They go on to note that they understand Twitter’s rule, but again, do not believe they are breaking it. It’s possible that the portion Twitter doesn’t like is that the checkboxes next to usernames are automatically selected for deletion (I don’t particularly like this either because most users — even many of the ones they suggest — I don’t want to unfollow) — and if so, that’s an easy fix. I have an email into Twitter asking them if that would be good enough and will update when I hear back.

I can certainly see Twitter not approving of the name for trademark reasons — but they’re apparently not disputing that at the moment, just the bulk unfollow bit.

Or maybe Twitter just doesn’t like the fact that ManageTwitter has managed to help 35,000 users unfollow nearly 6 million people on the service. I can’t imagine any social network would like a third-party service changing the social graph in such a way. But again, this service is very useful to many users, and I believe makes Twitter better — even if it is slightly less connected.

ManageTwitter is asking that you retweet this tweet in support of them.

[Thanks Courtenay]

I didn’t have the same problems at SXSW this year that some people did. Was it too crowded at some events? Sure. But there were plenty of alternative things to do. Did some of the keynotes bomb? Yes. But there were plenty of other things to listen to. Did AT&T fail? No. Actually, they did an awesome job keeping the network up. Instead, I had a problem of a different kind: check-in fatigue.

Seeing as location was this year’s Twitter at SXSW, and seeing as I write a lot about location, I wanted to try to use as many of the services as I could during the actual conference. I drastically underestimated how much work that would actually be.

At first, I was using all of the services I had on my phone to check-in when I arrived at a place in Austin. This included: Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite, Burbn, MyTown, CauseWorld, Hot Potato, Plancast, and (at certain places) Foodspotting. Even with great AT&T service, this would take a solid 10 minutes or more to check-in to all of them. And it took even longer when I’d have to pause to explain to my friends what the hell I was doing on my phone all that time.

This was at every venue we stopped at. The situation simply wasn’t tenable.

By the second day, I had cut the services I would check-in to in half. It still wasn’t close to being something I would consider doing on a regular basis. By the end of my time in Austin, I was down to using only two services — yes, the two in the midst of the “war” — Foursquare and Gowalla.

Pretty much everyone I knew in Austin were also using both Foursquare and Gowalla to send out all their check-ins. And all seemed to agree: it was still too tedious to use even just two services to do the same thing. In the end, there should be only one.

And so it should be no surprise that a few companies are already working on a solution for this problem. One is by the creators of Brightkite, who managed to obtain the killer check.in domain name. The team showed me a preview of the app at a party one night, and I immediately knew it was exactly what I needed (see a preview of it here).

But there’s a problem with this solution too. Currently, Gowalla’s API is read-only, which means you actually can’t use another app to check-in to the service. I spoke with CEO Josh Williams a bit about this just prior to SXSW, and he noted that the main thinking behind this is to maintain the user experience Gowalla is looking for (a very Apple-like argument). But, he did say that eventually he thinks they will open up a two-way API — maybe once they have time to create some best practices documentation, he noted.

Another problem is that currently each of these check-in services has their own places database. That means that a place on Foursquare may be slightly different than a place on Gowalla, even though they’re technically the same place. Worse, there are plenty of duplicates for some venues since people are allowed to create their own. Check.in works around this place problem by doing a look-up on each service and letting you pick the correct check-in spot. But it’s a bit slow, and still seems rather tedious.

A better solution would be for the various services to adopt a standard for places. The Activity Streams group is working on such a concept. Yahoo may also be able to implement such a system on top of its WOEID system. Of course, any service that adopts such a standard would be risking at least part of their business since these place databases are one of the keys to each service.

Meanwhile, Facebook is thinking about aggregating data from both Foursquare and Gowalla for its own upcoming location implementation. Might that be the one location stop to rule them all (of course, the writing back to Gowalla would still likely be an issue)? Not if Twitter has anything to say about it.

I love that all these startups are emerging around location right now (at least a dozen more have emailed me just since I’ve been back from SXSW). But I’m starting to worry that this is going to turn into a repeat of the social wars, where we all have 15 different profiles we constantly have to update across a range of networks.

During our Realtime Crunchup last year, I brought up this issue during our panel on location. All the players on stage (including Twitter, Foursquare, Hot Potato, Google Latitude, GeoAPI, and SimpleGeo) seemed to want to say that they could all get along and play nicely together for the betterment of location as a whole. I didn’t buy it then, and I’m definitely not buying it now.

From a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense for these guys to all play nicely with one another and make it so you don’t have to use their services. The need to take steps to ensure that you will use their service, and will do so instead of a rival service. That’s the way it works, and that’s the way it has always worked. And that’s why it’s a war. Right now, it’s just the early stages where all sides are arming themselves. Soon, they’ll try to kill one another. And that may not be such a bad thing.

[photo: flickr/intagiblearts]

While a lot of the smaller startups like Foursquare and Gowalla are getting much of the buzz at SXSW, Twitter isn’t sitting idly on the location sidelines. Sure, they launched location integration on their site a few days ago, but they’ve also apparently set up a sub-site totally around location for SXSW. But here’s the weird thing: It’s only for stalking their employees.

As co-founder Evan Williams tweeted out earlier, sxsw.twitter.com shows you a Google map of Austin, Texas (where SXSW is held) with tiny Twitter logos overlaid on it, showing Twitter employees at the conference tweeting.

The site, which is clearly tailored for mobile usage (it looks great on the iPhone, for example), has two areas: “Twitter People” and “To Meet.” The Twitter People area is the one that shows the map and the tweets overlaid on it. The To Meet area is interesting because it asks, “Which of these sound like awesome things to work on?” and gives you a few different options to click on.

For example, if you click on, “Making fast and sexy applications” it takes you to a list of various Twitter employees at SXSW that you should meet. If you click on “Partnering with Twitter,” you get a different list. Clearly, Twitter is using this site for both new employee recruitment, platform expansion, and partnership opportunities.

Twitter, while now fairly commonplace in the mainstream (especially the media), first rose to fame among early tech adopters during SXSW three years ago.

If you are still wondering why Google is pushing so hard with its new product Buzz, it is because it wants in on social traffic. For many sites on the Web, social traffic coming through Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace is beginning to rival, and in some cases overtake, search traffic as the single biggest source of traffic. This traffic comes from shared links, photos, and videos. By its own numbers, 5 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every month.

What isn’t easily appreciated is the extent to which such social sharing is tied to different identity and authentication platforms across the Web. If you can log into a site easily using your Facebook or Twitter account, it is easier to broadcast links from that site to your friends.

To get a sense of which services on the Web drive the most sharing, I asked Gigya for some stats. Gigya powers sharing widgets on more than 5,000 content sites, including ABC.com. NBA.com, PGA.com, Answers.com, and Reuters. Consumers can click a share button on these sites and send an article link, photo, or video via a menu of different services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and AOL. Over the past 30 days, people have shared almost a million items over the Gigya network. Facebook and Twitter dominate with about three quarters of all shared items between them. Here is how the services break down (note that these are relative numbers) :

Distribution of shared items
Facebook: 44%
Twitter: 29%
Yahoo:18%
MySpace:9%

It makes sense, people prefer to broadcast links rather than share them one at a time via email. Although Yahoo makes a strong third-place showing. When it comes to authentication, simply using your existing username and password to log into another site, Facebook is still the most popular via Facebook Connect, but only just barely. Google via Gmail and Yahoo are almost equally popular, at least on certain types of sites where people are just reading for themselves like news sites. On entertainment sites where people are more likely to share content, Facebook Connect makes up the majority of logins.

Here are the stats:

Share of Authentication By Platform:

News sites:
Facebook: 31%
Google: 30%
Yahoo: 25%
Twitter: 11%
AOL: 3%

Entertainment sites:
Facebook: 52%
Google: 17%
Yahoo: 12%
Twitter: 11%
MySpace: 7%
AOL: 1%

Facebook Chat is also a strong option, making up more than half of all live event chats measured by Gigya.

Live Event Chat:
Facebook: 56%
Twitter: 28%
Yahoo: 9%
MySpace: 7%

Twitter just recently launched a new Twitter Engineering blog, and to kick things off, one team member, Ben Sandofsky, decided to share a video he made representing Twitter’s development history. The video was made using Code Swarm, a software tool used to visualize data.

As Sandofsky notes, “it isn’t exactly scientific, but it still goes to show Twitter’s explosive growth mirrored in engineering.” More importantly, it looks awesome. You can see the shift in Twitter development from Jack Dorsey in the early days (2006) to Blaine Cook to Alex Payne to Twitter’s now large team of developers. Each team member is represented in the video by their Twitter avatar.

Watch it below. It’s mesmerizing.

Twitter Code Swarm from Ben Sandofsky on Vimeo.

A lot of people use Twitter as a primary way of getting information quickly these days. Accounts such as BreakingNews are hugely popular because they offer up stories to their 1.6 million followers (and even more through retweets) instantaneously. Topicfire, a realtime news aggregator we covered in December is now trying to extend that concept to all different topics.

While there are no shortage of services attempting to leverage Twitter to distill information for different topics, Topicfire’s streams seem pretty solid thanks to the use of their HeatRank technology, which is the same thing that powers Topicfire itself. While there are a few factors that go into HeatRank, the main driving force behind it are comments on stories. If they’re coming in fast enough, the HeatRank will get pushed to 10.

If a story hits 10, it will then get tweeted out automatically to its specific Twitter account with a link to the original story as well as the story’s page on Topicfire. This method of curation ensures that followers won’t get overwhelmed by stories that perhaps aren’t that important.

You can see the full list of the 24 Topicfire accounts here. As you can see, they range from Apple news, to design news, to skiing news, to surfing news (though ski and surf don’t have a ton of news items).