I’ve been testing out, using, and utilizing Google+ now for 5 days.  I’m proud to say that I was in on Google+ on Day 1,  because it’s like being in the ground floor of a building that’s being built around you.  There’s tons of activity, lots of potential, and builders who are actively listening to the ideas and concerns that their new tenants have.  Let me introduce you to the basics first, then I’ll share my overall thoughts.

What is Google+

Google+ is Google’s answer to Facebook/Twitter, in a nutshell.  In it, you can divide people into “circles”, share content with them as you see fit, upload photos and video, and communicate with them however you se fit.  Those +1 buttons popping up over the web are being put to good use now, serving as the “like” button that Facebook users are so used to.

The community is still small and intimate at the moment, and there’s lots of great discussions going around.  I’m privileged to see social media superstars like Chris Brogan and Scott Monty dropping by my updates to leave their insight or comments.  Ashton Kutcher is there getting his groove on as always, and even Newt Gingrich is poking around to see what this is all about.  Still, I’ve seen more discussion (legitimate discussion) happening over the last week on topics than I ever did on Twitter or Facebook.

Circles

You share information by categorizing people into “circles” – you can name them whatever you like, and those become the holes in which you fill your content.  You can take the fire-hose of content if you wish, but you can also only consume “friends” or “chess club members” to really dive down to who’s saying what.  It also controls who gets to see the content you produce.  If I put Holly into the “family” circle, and only share the update with her, she’s the only one that sees it.  What happens when Luke and Kieran are old enough to join? We get our own family communication board that no one sees but them.  Pretty cool

Picasa Photos

Anyone who has used Picasa knows what it’s all about.  It’s photo storage.  If you use Google+, you get any photo under 2048×2048 resolution stored free – which isn’t too shabby considering most monitors display up to less than 2000px at the moment.

Hangouts

You can start a video chat with up to 10 people – that’s 4 more than Skype – and open it up to let anyone who wants to jump in and chat.  I see a lot of potential here.

The Bottom Line

Google+ has hit the ground with Hussain Bolt speed.  There’s a lot of stuff going on that has quite a bit of potential, and they’re already doing a LOT of stuff right.  Look for this to get even better as it expands.

By the way… if you’re on, find me whydoncha?

So, as promised a few weeks ago on Twitter, I decided to give a few services a try, and weed out the ones that I felt like weren’t serving my purpose well.  After almost a month of testing, I’ve finally narrowed it down to the two top contenders: Foursquare and Gowalla.

IF all things continue as they are, however, Foursquare is likely to be my contender of choice.

Why?  Because I can actually use it everywhere.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love Gowalla.  I think it has a nicer interface, its “trips” section lets you get out and explore major cities, and the concept of items intrigues me (it could allow for a lottery type system to reward people who visit your store and receive your item, for example). But, for the life of me, I can’t get the freakin’ GPS to work all the time.

Actually, I can’t get it to work nearly half the time.

Foursquare, without fail, lets me check in to every single place I go to.  Gowalla’s GPS, while somewhat good, still lacks because it’s very off-center.  A Gowalla check-in could get me anywhere from 250 – 500 meters off location.

So, for now, Foursquare has my attention.  If Gowalla can get its GPS onpoint, then it has a real chance, but until then, if I can’t use it… well, I won’t.

NOTE: I didn’t make this decision because it’s foursquare day, but it is very fitting.  Happy Foursquare Day!

I had the great fortune on Friday to have experienced a true Internet phenomenon – the picture of the new NBC logo I designed for fun got picked up by several high profile websites, and I had my 15 minutes of fame, so to speak (if you want to get technical, I had 17 minutes, because that was for precisely 17 minutes I was on the trending topics of twitter).

So, I wanted to dissect my findings, and just see exactly where everyone came from as best I could.

First, the raw numbers (as of 9am today):

• 8,503 views on TwitPic
• 300 RT (Retweets) to the TwitPic Site
• 1,537 RT to the Mashable article
• 217 RT to FunnyOrDie
• 116 RT to The Hollywood Reporter
• 49 RT to the Digg Article
• 32 RT to the Daily What
• over 200 other various RT’s to other sites.
• 987 Diggs
• 8 Reddit Bumps
• 251 Facebook Shares
• 67 Facebook Posts
• oh, and as an added (uncounted) bonus, my own website got 500 new hits (not too bad considering I never published the site on the twitpic – people tracked it down themselves).

That means that there was a total of 12,267 tracked* impresssions.  And those are only the most popular ones – who’s to say that there aren’t more that I didn’t know about?

But, out of those numbers, I found out some really interesting results.

Digg is good for numbers, but not positive feedback

We all know that Digg has went from a socially accepted way to find popular information to… well… the bridge in which trolls live.  While I did get a lot of diggs from the post, an overwhelming majority of the comments (over 50% if I counted right) were non-related or unnecessarily pessimistic.  Elsewhere on the internet, 99% of the comments were overwhelmingly positive.  I still got traffic, but it’s not good for constructive criticism.

Viral doesn’t necessarily mean video

An image that went viral – sure, it’s not a viral video, but it still put up some impressive numbers.  Don’t think that video has to be the first option you choose – sure, a video will be more likely to be widely spread, but for people who have zero time to watch a video, a quick glance at an image will do just the trick.

People still found my website, even though I didn’t post it.

And I think I actually got a client out of it, perhaps.  But I didn’t post on my blog, or even mention the viral activity, until after it happened.  And I never put my website address on the twitpic comment – I just posted the image and let people do their thing. 

Total self promotion of image: 2 tweets

After i posted the image, I made two tweets about it – one on Thursday night, and one on Friday night. Everyone else did the rest.

So, anyone can have something go organically viral – where others are spreading it around with far little effort on your part.  Make something that’s good content, be passionate about it, and people will recognize the effort and will share it with their friends.

Thanks again, by the way, to everyone who clicked on the Retweet button, the digg button, or sent it to their twitter or facebook friends – it’s cool knowing that I made a little piece of history that day (hey, I beat out Twitter Location Based Trending Topics as a story of the day on Mashable!)

I’ve been watching the twittersphere react to what NBC is doing to Conan O’Brien, and while searching around this picture seemed to come up on nearly every site (woot.com even has this image on their product of the day):

The artist is  Mike Mitchell, and you can find other work he’s done on his website

So I’ve been doing my research trying to figure out which of the two location-based metagaming services are going to come out on top.  There are two that have risen to the top of the pack: Foursquare, my first choice, or Gowalla, the Austin based startup.  Both platforms bring their own set of features to the table, and each has their pros and cons, but here’s what I’ve learned so far:

Foursquare

• it’s competitive – you score points and get on a leaderboard
• the prizes are harder to obtain – they don’t tell you up front exactly how to win badges, so unless you visit wikipedia you have to earn them blindly
• strictly business – not a lot of bells and whistles
• precise – you have to have an exact address to add a new location
• Mayorship – only one mayor per place.

Gowalla

• more dressed up – I like the interface of Gowalla better than Foursquare
• easier to obtain badges – you get stamps, stickers, items, etc for doing just about anything
• I like the item aspect – it’s cool to see who has had items, dropped them, and then claimed them and dropped them again before you came along – a sisterhood of the travelling pants sort of thing (I mean come on, how awesome is it to pick up Tacos at Swanky’s Taco Shop [purely by coincidence])
• WP-Walla (the WordPress plugin) functions nice – the WordPress foursquare plugin does not.
• Foundership – you can leave an item for free for someone to become a founder and claim that place as your own.  But then again, so can other people.

So far, I think Gowalla is winning the location-based gaming war, but I’m going to give it a fair shot (1 week) to see.  What do you guys think?  Do you have any special reasons for choosing one over the other?

There’s a new social network in town.

At first, when I heard people talking about it from New York, Atlanta, and Austin, I really didn’t see what the big deal was.  I used Brightkite, and stopped using it because there was no real value other than telling people what I was up to (after all, I was already doing that with Twitter – why add to it with another social network?)

But, after giving it a good weekend testing, and getting my wife horribly addicted, I can safely say that foursquare is the next big thing in social networking.

“Mitch, that’s a bold statement to make,” you might say.  Well, that may be, but after using foursquare for only a weekend I’ve already found tons of utility in having businesses get themselves on the map with foursquare.

So, what is foursquare?

Here’s the short version: times during work hours don’t count, but anytime after and on the weekend you can visit locations and “check-in”.  It will show you who else using foursquare has checked in, can alert you when your friends check in to different places (so you can meet up with them), and will even award people a “mayor” title for being a frequenter.  There are also badges, and more features coming to award people for being adventurous (and punish people for being overly habitual).

(People also put their own workplaces on foursquare… after all, who wouldn’t want to be the mayor of their job, yes?)

Let’s back up one second, though.  It displays who on foursquare is your potential number one customer.  It’s like every business now has an opportunity to give back to those who support them.

So, what’s the point if I run a small business?

What kind of giving back?  What about giving anyone who checks in a dollar off of one drink?  Small price to pay for people to advertise their favorite bar to their friends (and potentially get them to meet up with you and buy more drinks!).  Are you the mayor?  Congratulations!  You get a few free drinks!  If I ended up getting free drinks from a business just because I went there a lot (and talked about it on foursquare) you can bet I’d be going back more than a few times.

There are a few businesses on the West Coast taking advantage of foursquare to give out promotions and specials (the mayor drinking free special is ripped straight from the headlines of the foursquare blog).  But, even though the site is new (and lots of other features are coming), I think there’s a huge potential for businesses to jump on board early and get their name out as fresh, innovative supporters of a fun new way to socialize with friends.

OK, but what if I’m a customer?  What’s the big draw?

Meta-gaming.

Earning achievements for doing stuff that you do normally (going out to clubs, coffee shops, shopping, stores, etc).  The XBox Live has made meta-gaming one of the most addictive aspects of the games.  There are blogs dedicated to what games have the easiest achievements and how to earn points to boost your gamer score.

But what if you could earn a badge for going to 5 different spots in one night? (That’s the “Crunked” badge for those of you curious as to the existence of such a badge).  Or for hitting 10 different locations (“Adventurous”)?  It takes 10 seconds to check in (more if you need to add the venue, but not that much more) and you’re in.

And you get stats every week to look at your patterns.  Who wouldn’t like to know just how habitual they can (or can’t) be?

Foursquare is still relatively new, but I think that if enough businesses take the small step (aka, mention on a flyer, on Facebook, on Twitter, or to their customers) that it could really take off and go places. Who wouldn’t pay a dollar for a free advertisement to their customer’s friends?  Who wouldn’t give away a few drinks one night to the mayor (and make a big deal out of it) to get lots of great photos of people having fun and get their customers talking about it for weeks?

A lot of people don’t know this about me, but I grew up in a small town in Kentucky.  I mean really, really small. Here’s a hint: I share a hometown with the latest “America’s Got Talent” winner.  I’ll let you do the math on that one. Anyway , the whole town had about 10,000 people in it, zero Starbucks (heck, no coffee-shops of any kind), and didn’t even have high speed internet until right around the turn of the century (how I got from there to here is a completely different story entirely). But, if you ask around in town, especially to the “old-timers”, and mention my last name, chances are the question about my grandfather or parents will come up.

My grand-dad works at the local funeral home as an usher.  He put in his years at the Goodyear tire plant in Union City, TN until he retired, but (being the ever active person he is) he decided to keep working doing something he loves – interacting with people.  He’s the song-leader at a small Baptist church, and also helps out with a friend of his who’s an auctioneer on the weekends.

But, doing all this, I swear he knows every single person in town.

Why is he so well known?  Does he have money?  Not a lot.  I mean he has enough to get by, but what he does have he’s always willing to share with a friend (or in some cases, a complete stranger).  He’s always working, as you can tell, but he’s never too busy to help out someone who needs to borrow a truck or tractor.  And at the funeral home, I guarantee that if you wanted anyone telling you that things were going to be OK, it would be my grand-dad.  People still tell me that he was one of the people that helped them get through their grieving loss.

Thing is, my grand-dad gives, and gives, and gives, without a single thought of how or even if others will pay him back.  He doesn’t expect a reward out of it – he does it simply for the thought of seeing how it can help anyone and everyone around him. 

And when he does help out people, word gets around.  People talk about the kind gentleman who handed them a tissue at the funeral home and told them everything would be OK.  They talk about the guy who brought a plate of food to their house when they were sick or bedridden.  They mention my grand-dad, who loaned them a tractor – a huge, metal farm machine – when theirs broke down, without even a mention of cost or payment.

Little by little he changes their lives, even if in a small way.  And, in doing so, I’m sure his own life is changed as well – and that keeps him doing the great things he does for people.

Those of us who truly “get” the power of social media have a power on our hands that no one has really come to realize yet.  Sure, that sounds totally cliché, but think about the people that you meet on a daily basis.  Sure, you may not have 10,000 followers (or maybe you do!) but chances are the network of reach you have on your friends list equals out to a small city, or even a small subdivision or neighborhood (around 300 people). 

Did you get that? You have the potential to impact an entire neighborhood of people.

You have the ability and means to take someone’s life, make it a small bit better, and then watch them pay the favor out to their neighborhood of influence.  The effect is truly viral in nature.

Go out and do something nice for someone else today.  In a world that reeks of bad vibes, rudeness (more and more as of late than ever), and self-serving people, a good deed is one that hardly goes unnoticed.

And once you’ve done it, don’t talk about it.  That’s the hard part, but the biggest sacrifice that we as social media users can do is not bragging about how awesome we are online.  Do your deed, step away, and know that you’ve changed someone’s life… even if it’s only one small thing, you’re making a world of difference to someone else.

So I had the privilege of testing out the TwitCam service today, and (since I had nothing better to talk about), I decided to do one of my favorite summertime activities: Grill Hamburgers!

Sure, it was a little awkward at first, especially because I’m more accustomed to being behind the camera instead of in front of it.  But I’ve been looking for a great excuse to start recording events, random musings, my speaking, etc.

But, I think it was a huge success.  Can’t wait to keep using it.  Now, I need a widget to show my latest video on my WordPress page (hint, hint!)

If you look to the top right of this post, you’ll see a really cool button.  The service I’m using is called “Tweetmeme”, and you can use it to retweet post titles that sound worth sharing to your friends. 

There was a point when I actually cared enough about Digg to say that digging posts was worthwhile.  But, since gaming Digg is a sport for the high posters, trolls run rampant, and I rarely get enough traffic from Digg to even bother with it, this is a great alternative to be able to get my posts out to other people.  In one day, I’ve seen my twitter traffic go up, and I’m sure that as it continues to gain popularity more and more people will see the potential.

And if you use WordPress, you’re in luck!  Tweetmeme has a nifty plugin that does all of the work for you!

I’ve been following the story out of Chicago about the Bonnen v. Horizon Realty Group (latest post on Mashable is that Horizon is backpedaling) with some keen interest.  Here’s a tenant who says something bad about her (former?) landlord, to 20 people (the number of followers she has) and it ends up leading to a huge social-network-fronted outcry from the company.  It’s the first time that a company has sued someone over a tweet (to my knowledge).

The question is, does this really have any ground?  I can only hope not.  If Horizon wins this one it’ll mean that any company can sue you for anything they deem wrong that you say on Twitter.  It’ll mean that the free speech atmosphere of Twitter will be jeopardized and that we’ll have to constantly be looking over our shoulders to see if what we say will get us in legal trouble.

It’s a bad precedent.  Horizon Realty, I hope you really know what you are doing.  You’re on the verge of opening a very bad can of worms.

Anyone else care to weigh in?