Foursquare users around the world have been hearing that Facebook would roll out a location-aware feature, but today is the day they finally get to see what it’s all about. In a short time (I’m writing this in real-time) the world will tune in to Facebook’s newly-launched livestream application and hear, straight from Palo Alto, about the new location-based elements of Facebook. Since we want our readers, friends, and colleagues to be informed not only about the news, but what it means for them, we’re staying late here at SCG to bring you the coverage…

4:44 p.m.

I just finished writing that opening paragraph, so there’s nothing to new report other than the fact that there are a ton of people in the chat asking when it starts.

4:50 p.m.

I submitted a question through the “Ask a Question” box, but it just disappears and doesn’t give any indication that it’s been received or anything. So, we’ll see if they answer my question I guess.

4:55 p.m.

In order to match the location shift (so subtle, Facebook) the journalists on location went through, I moved to Feran’s desk across the pod.

5:11 p.m.

Randi Zuckerberg was audible for a second, but then went away. Now she’s back. Looks like we’re ogin to hear from execs, then devs, then  a Q&A. The scene behind her looks like it could be filmed in a college dormitory common area.

5:13 p.m.

Worst. Hold. Music. Ever. Also, the furniture in whatever building there in looks it belongs on the front porch of someone’s summer cottage.

5:23 p.m.

Zuck is on stage! He’s talking about the tradition of launch nights being something bigger than an employee or partner event, but about the community (including journalists and other people). Now he lost his train of thought.

Talking about how Facebook works to create new tools on Facebook (no deadlines?).

It’s called Places and has been in testing for a couple months. Zuckerberg is telling a story about being out in Menlo Park with his GF and showing her how it works. His GF noticed that their friends were nearby and said “hey, let’s have dinner with them.” Wow.

Facebook’s location tools are about:

1. Helping people share in a social way
2. Connecting with others
3. Discovering new places

5:27 p.m.

Video about places which is very, very Apple-like. Lots of cool looking people connecting with other cool looking people. The word serendipitous has been used three times so far in this livestream.

A big emphasis put on creating a trail and having it for all time. Going back on your timeline and seeing what you were doing 10-15 years ago at a certain spot.

5:29 p.m.

Product manager for Places Michael Sharon is up on stage. The new features will be available on touch.facebook.com and a new iPhone application available later tonight.

Places are listed as what Facebook feels will be most interesting to you.

The general use of the application looks and feels a lot like Foursquare, Whrrl and Gowalla.

“It’s not about broadcasting your location to the world, it’s about sharing where you are with your friends”

Here Now is a listing of who is where you are at that time (friends and others).

5:33 p.m.

The Places addition lets users tag friends who are with you wherever you may be similar to tagging people in status updates.

Having tagging makes it easy to incorporate people who may not have a smartphone with them, but stil want to be a part of the story.

5:36 p.m.

Differing levels of security broadcasting levels “Allow” and “Not now” make it easy to change how you are sharing your info.

Separate privacy controls are available to change who can see your actions.

You have to be checked in somewhere to tag a friend there (so you can’t say your friend is at a strip club if you’re not there too) and you can always remove tags.

As a final kill switch, you can change your privacy settings to disallow all tagging.

5:40 p.m.

Not only is this a new application for users, it’s a new API that will be available to partners (read, write and search – in closed beta) like: Gowalla (surprise), Foursquare (wow, again) and Yelp! (remember them?), and Booyah (creators of MyTown). The Foursquare guy definitely took a bit of mic time and talked a lot about future things for Foursquare. Yelp will also be pulling your Facebook friends places into their iPhone application in the near future (tomorrow). Booyah is creating a new product called InCrowd which will be half-game half-social utility (built in three weeks) based on the Places API.

Check out the dev info here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/#places

5:50 p.m.

Chris Cox (VP of Prod. Management) gets up on stage and makes a poor joke about sociology. Then actually breaks it down: home (where you wake up, go to sleep, where your family is, where you eat, and where you reflect on your day) work (the economic engine of society, where you work your brains and muscles, where you invest in creating something that’s greater than ourselves), the third place (the bar, the restaurant, the library, the street outside, the barbershop, the newsstand, the places where we go and share our lives with each other — the most-important). Oldenberg made a hypothesis that the technology of today is in danger of destroying the third place.

Facebook Places aims to be the opposite of that. “Technology does not need to estrange us from one another.”

Cox gives a story about what might come in the future and it seems pretty awesome: sharing stories, sharing memories from your friends and getting recommendations – our collective memory. OK, he just said “that’s dope.”

OK, this is getting a bit sappy… talking about our children visiting somewhere in the future and their phone letting them know that their parents had their first kiss there and shows pictures, comments, etc.

5:58 p.m.

Q&A time! Questions about privacy, monetization and more. I’m not going to write these out, but I’ll throw a link in here later if they release transcripts.

Holy cow, they actually have traditions that are pretty awesome. Gong. Launch switch. Watch the video and check them out!

That’s it!

Numbers and Stats:

• Portuguese, Arabic, and Spanish lead growth of Facebook’s top languages.
• Windows Live Messanger is this week’s fastest growing Facebook app.

Changes and Additions to Facebook:

Brand News:

…Increases video time limit to 15 minutes.

Numbers and Stats:

 

Facebook announces 500 Million users! Zuckerberg announced this on Facebook’s blog.

This took them 5 months since they had reached 400 Million users.

Every Facebook employee thanked us. Aww, how nice.

Image from Inside Facebook

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Changes and Additions to Facebook:

 

There’s now a Facebook Page for Page admins. It’s Q&A based and lets you ask and answer any questions you have about running a Page. All questions and answers are logged to be seen by anyone. The Page is made by Appbistro.

Wildfire is launching a Facebook app that allows you to make your own group deals like Groupon or LivingSocial. Could be very useful to many brands out there.

 

Image from Inside Facebook.

Brand News:

 

Levi’s uses events marketing on Facebook beautifully. Ties to ads that ask people to RSVP to their brick and mortar sale.

 

Ford will unveil its 2011 Explorer on Facebook. – Mashable article

Twitter claims they’re the bulk of their engineering efforts to make the site more reliable.

World Cup! Below is an info graphic made by Twitter to show the global conversation using it’s service. The bullets are quotes from Twitter’s blog post.

• “The World Cup final was the largest period of sustained activity for an event in Twitter’s history.”
• “Throughout the match, Tweets-per-second (TPS) were much higher than average; during the game’s final 15 minutes, this jumped to more than 2,000 TPS (Spain’s winning goal in the final scored a 3,051 TPS.)”
• “During the final, people from 172 countries tweeted in 27 different languages.”
• “At the moment of the winning goal, people from 81 countries tweeted in 23 different languages.”

… reaches 100 million checkins!

Summer’s here, so why not buy a drink for your friend… on Facebook! That’s right, a REAL drink. Check it out.

Here’s some other cool and interesting stuff that happened this week in Facebook and Twitter. It’s stats and info in bullets:

Numbers and Stats:

• Facebook hits new traffic record with 141 million unique visitors in the US in June. Last year, this number was only 77 million.
• All of the below stats pertain to women aged 18-34 (Mashable reported on this)
• 1/3 check Facebook as soon as they wake up.
• 42% of women think posted photos of them “visibly intoxicated” are ok.
• 57% interact with people more online than face-to-face.
• 39% call themselves Facebook “addicts.”
• 21% check Facebook in the middle of the night.
• 63% network on Facebook.
• 58% use Facebook to keep tabs on “frenemies.”
• 50% are fine with being Facebook friends with complete strangers.

Changes and Additions to Facebook

• Microsoft launches Outlook Facebook integration. A Mashable exclusive.



• Microsoft’s Docs.com now lets Pages upload docs.



• Did you know that Facebook has a “Known Issues” Page?
• Facebook gives starter advice for new Page admins. In the pic is what they say to do.

Brand News

• Starbucks is the first brand to reach 10 million Facebook Likes. Congrats guys! 2M in a month, wow.



• Also, Facebook will always be free! Woo hoo!

• Twitter’s @earlybird has launched! Their first promotion was this week for a 2 for 1 deal to see Sorcerer’s Apprentice.



• Twitter search results now show people too reports Mashable.

*Microsoft is a client of Spring Creek Group.

What do you think? Will you see it?

Numbers and Stats:

• Facebook accounted for 75.73% of all social networking visits in the US in May.
• About 16B minutes are spent on Facebook a day.
• Facebook has about 60K servers.
• More than 3 billion photos are uploaded each month.
• 6B pieces of content are shared weekly.
• 1M photos are viewed every second.

Changes and Additions to Facebook:

• Facebook asking some people to set it as their default homepage.

Brand News

• Facebook “Like” buttons coming to email marketing. A report by Mashable.
• Ads work on Facebook according to Mulley Communications.
• Facebook only picked up 320,800 new monthly active users in June, compared to the 7.8 million it gathered in May. Info from InsideFacebook.



• Lady Gaga (the Page) became the first person on Facebook with 10M fans.
• Kraft Foods focuses messaging on Facebook by heavily promoting campaigns associated with Wheat Thins, Oreo, and Crystal Light. To note, they made their Oreo Facebook Page “more global.” Something other brands might consider.
• Windows Messenger leads this week’s list of fastest-gaining Facebook apps by daily active users (DAU). They gained 334K new DAUs.
• Facebook gifts die.

• Twitter search volume is up 33% since April reports Mashable.
• April = 600M search queries per day.
• June = 800M search queries per day.
• @earlybird – A new Twitter handle started by Twitter itself that tweets special offers to its followers. Link to Pete Cashmore’s CNN special column.
• Twitter’s official BlackBerry App exits beta thanks to beta testers.
• Rumor – Twitter may let users pay for self-promotion says Mashable.
• LeBron James gets 150K followers in 7 Hours and now has over 400K.

Thanks to InsideFacebook, Mashable, and CNN for providing being our resource for most of the content here.

I’ve noticed a good amount of Seattleites lined up for these giveaways, but in taking a look at the event page this morning, I noticed a great deal of venom being spouted in the comment section – mostly from spurned Sonics fans.

Even the Seattle Weekly’s recently crowned Best Online Presence – Sports winner stops by to drop comments (and comment on other’s posts as well):

Now, Starbucks is known for their enterprising uses of social media to interact with customers and fans, so the fact that Sonicsgate has actually been responding to users more on the page than Starbucks is a bit of an issue, but kudos to them for letting users express themselves.

While the company can’t and shouldn’t have to answer for their CEO’s actions in the sports world, this is definitely one case where we find out what happens when a few bad (and vocal) apples take the microphone and start overpowering the positive majority.

How do you think they can make this better?

It’s a new month and for some the coming of June means the arrival of summer. Here in the PNW, we know that our summer won’t really start until about July, but we’re a bit hopeful we may get some sun soon. Here are the stories we’re looking at today to keep our minds off our vitamin D deficiencies:

Facebook Quitters Count to Three, Only a Few Jump Ship

If you saw Mashable’s poll the other day asking if people really truly were going to ditch their Facebook accounts, you’d know the movement wasn’t really gaining much steam.

34,000 people actually committed to quitting Facebook the other day, but how many (if any) actually did remains a mystery. Will it be like people who say they supported Barack Obama, but didn’t actually vote for him?

Say those 34,000 people did actually quit, that’d be what, 0.0085 percent? Way to stick it to the man.

Popular Mechanics iPad Application Struts Its Stuff

While many have been touting the magazine experience on the iPad, there haven’t been that many great looking examples out there (until WIRED, which I’ll actually review here on the blog tomorrow). Then, Popular Mechanics unveiled their application and BAM… everything’s different.

Without going too deep, let me say that the full experience of magazines on the iPad is incredible. There, that’s all you get for now.

Check out Gizmodo’s piece on the latest PM for iPad.

“Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” Debuts Trailer on Facebook

Movie previews aren’t just for making you hate going to the movies, they’re also for Facebook. The new film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World trailer actually debuted on Facebook recently, bringing the social networking platform to a new level of cool – Michael Cera cool.

It’s still yet to be seen if the movie follows the Michael Cera movie formula… I’m guessing it does.

ately there’s been a lot of chatter about Facebook privacy, many are worried that the site is sharing their personal information with the world. Some also feel that there has been a breach of trust with this latest privacy shakeup. What really chaps my ass about this bellyaching is the fact that you have a choice over what you want to share on Facebook and who you want to share it with. Your account is not permanently set to share all of your personal information and status updates with the world. Personally I don’t share anything on mine. I’m amazed that I even have friends on Facebook considering my wall is hidden, my photos and videos are private and I never do status updates. I got my sh*# on lock.

But some people use Facebook like Twitter, they make all of their posts public and (fingers crossed) are careful with what information they include in their profile. If you haven’t seen the Openbook website yet, it aggregates posts by users who share all of their updates with the entire network. This site is meant to be a wakeup call to users about what Facebook is sharing. In my evil little SMM mind I see it as a cool tool for measuring conversation on Facebook (thanks guys!).

Finally there are the people who just don’t know what they are sharing. I recommend that anyone who’s not sure use this tool to analyze exactly what information of theirs is leaking on to the internets: http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/

Remember folks, what you share is your choice.