Foursquare is celebrating! With just over a year of being active, and somewhere close to 750,000+ users 4SQ has flipped the game when it comes to location based social networks. With deals in place with Bravo, HBO and Starbucks it can only stand to grow.

4SQDay which was started on a whim by a Tampa Bay Optometrist, yes and eye doctor who dabbles in social media grew in strength seemingly overnight via Facebook and Twitter. No doubt that when the Foursquare guys heard about all this they were stoked to say the least. With 4sqday.com you can check out whats happening today in over 50 different cities, things like swarm meetups where 50 or more people checkin to a single venue to get the illusive swarm badge, to seeing what venues are promoting deals.

All of this bodes well for the location based startup, and while gowalla and brightkite are also great services, i’m finding there is a bit more heart with foursquare users, myself included. want to watch a neat little video about 4SQ? See below.

Sometimes being “the best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be” just ain’t enough.

Many of you by now have seen our man, El Tabador, but you haven’t seen him like this…

Visit out our new Koodo YouTube channel  for a unique opportunity to “Get in the Ring” with El Tabador himself and make your move against the evil Bloatimus Contractimus.

Also check out “Man Behind The Mask”, a documentary about who El Tabador really is with never-before-seen interviews with the one-and-only Bret “the Hitman” Hart.

Check it out at  http://www.youtube.com/koodo and become fans of El Tabador on Facebook! www.facebook.com/koodo

A great little info graphic on social networking from your friends at flowtown (yes that flowtown). The jist is that in the social sphere creating (like I’m doing in this blog) has shifted to chatting as more and more people opt for social media applications like Twitter and Facebook. It’s all apart of that fast moving train called of ease of use and one click.

Full article

As social media tools begin to be a large part of our daily lives, conversations that may begin in twitter often move over to video chat sites like ooVoo. As video chats become the norm online the question becomes how do brands and agencies take advantage.

Adage article

Need Attention

Vaguebooking: the act of posting an unclear status that prompts, even dares, friends to ask you more.

It begs the questions is their anything wrong with a little mystery, a little intrigue and the need for attention? Whatever it takes to get beyond a voice of one.

Full article

This morning I ran across an interesting site. tputh.com a “Socially Generated, Machine Filtered, Hand Polished, Electronic Newspaper for Geeks, Designers & Venture Capitalists” Wow that’s quite a mouthful. What I noticed the most after really liking the fact that this site aggregates all my favorite topics into a single page was its clean and almost newspaper like design aesthetic, just like it says “newspaper for geeks”. The bold and funny headlines with supporting links to stories from trusted sources I’ve long been reading via RSS.

Will this site replace my RSS addiction I don’t think so. But for people who can’t jump whole heatedly onto the RSS bandwagon in fear of getting to easily overwhelmed this might be a place for you to stop in on a daily basis to get some stories about social media or tech.

tputh.com

This is a little piece of the internet that I hold dear to my heart for various reasons. First off I’m a nerd, I’ve been watching G4tv since it was tech TV oh such a short time ago. Nightly I used to tune in to the Screen Savers, a nightly recap of the tech stories that happened during the day, I used to go to slashdot on the regular and I envied Kevin Rose for being that kid on my television with what I considered to be a sick job.

To say that I’ve lived these last five years as more of a digg reader than a contributor are true. While I find I’m not using digg and its robust community that much I do however digg stories I like and use it to get much of my day to day information, from RSS to my screensaver from the digg labs I’ve been hooked for a long time.

If your not familiar with digg.com then I would hope that you take the 5 minutes and see what its about. Then if your further interested then visit digg.com subscribe to their feed, watch the weekly podcast and maybe even become a user.

p.s. bucket list goal is to be friend with Kevin Rose. (yes I’m a nerd like that)

I’ve blogged about Kickstarter before, so I’ll save talking about it again. But there is a real neat thing happening over at Kickstarter.com and that is the Designing Obama project. Basically this project is about independently funding the production of a book about the design process involved with Obamas presidential campaign. Kickstarter is a great platform to get your ideas produced with the help of backers. This crowd sourcing socially oriented approach fits perfectly with the overall campaign and I encourage you to if your interested in getting a book then you need to pledge via the Designing Obama Kickstarter page. You have 38 odd hours left to get in on this. So head on over there and watch the video about the project and their current new goal of 80k to make the book a bit more fancy.

This looks pretty neat, and when I say neat it has the possibly being a gamechanger in how you can contribute and interact with web pages that you don’t have control over. You’ll need to grab the Google toolbar for Firefox to get the goods.

Read the article from the Google blog.

Get Google Sidewiki

Chatting and texting has not only to do with friends but also with teachers. Social media tools such as Twitter are now giving teachers new opportunities to engage with their students.

On a personal level, my eldest daughter will be starting high school next September and take part in a new program called “Simplix”, which stands for “Engagement”. Each student will be given a laptop and access to internet during the classes.

As a mom, I’m looking forward to follow her on Twitter during her @classes.

Interesting cases:

The Twitter Experiment at UT Dallas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WPVWDkF7U8

Twitter in the classroom?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OxIz_3o3O0