Rally Round the Fire 2.0 (Episode 35)

Facebook vs. Google: The Billion Dollar Battle to Be Your Default Social Profile
“What’s next in social media?” It’s among the most popular questions out there. But while most folks currently answer with “location-based services” (i.e. Foursquare, Gowalla) or “group purchasing” (i.e. Groupon, Twongo, Living Social), the real battle may be between Facebook and Google.

The fight between these two Internet giants to become your default social profile has been brewing for a long time, and the prize is an enormous potential revenue stream. Let’s take a closer look.

[via mashable]

Twitter Starts Rolling Out Contributors Feature, Salesforce Activated
Back in December, Twitter noted a new feature it was testing out, Contributors. Basically, this allows multiple people to tweet from one account (with individual attribution below the tweet). Twitter noted that the feature wasn’t quite ready for prime time yet, but they started using it on their @twitter account. Today, the service has started rolling out to others.

The Salesforce account had the feature turned on about an hour ago. As you can see, they’re already using it.

[via techcrunch]

Twitter’s new homepage for non members:

[via cnn]

Facebook Privacy and 6 Steps to Protect Yourself.
As we have all been made aware time and time again through various news articles, Facebook loves to change their privacy policies and are not afraid of the risks. However, more importantly, unlike governments, the people of Facebook don’t seem to say too much about it. The question is do they just not care? Or are they uninformed?

[via techcrunch & pcworld]

Rally Up: A Location-Based Social Network for Your Real Friends
Without a doubt, location-based services and social networks are one of the hottest topics on the Internet right now. Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt and many others are vying for users, but strong privacy concerns are still holding back the mainstream adoption of these kinds of services. Rally Up for the iPhone is a new location-based social network that puts a very strong emphasis on privacy and also features some innovative new concepts.

[via readwriteweb]