Welcome to another Friday 5. Facebook continues to make negative news. First, it comes out that they are trying to trademark the word ‘face.’ Seriously, how ridiculous is that. In fact, I made fun of it in a post called Facebook Needs to Face Facts About Face Suit on my ‘by Ron Miller’ blog.

Meanwhile, Facebook is refusing run ads from Sony Pictures for the upcoming Facebook movie. Makes me wonder sometimes if that company is making money in spite of itself and not because of any particular business acumen. Meanwhile, Apple, released its own social network this week called Ping and new comer Disapora marched closer to reality.

This weeks’ five links, for your reading pleasure:

• Guess Who Is Trying To Trademark The Word “Face”? (And Guess Who Is Trying To Stop It?) – TechCrunch.
• Facebook Won’t Run Ads for “The Social Network”, But Facebook Users Like It Anyway – Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD.
• What Does Your Twitter Profile Say About You? - The Legal Watercooler.
• Older Adults and Social Media – Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.
• foursquare – Am I mayor yet? – foursquare Blog.

Welcome to this week’s Friday 5, my five favorite links in social media. The big news this week was the release of Facebook’s geo-location service, Facebook Places, and that has dominated the news (as we wrote here in Facebook Foray into Geo-location Not a Slam Dunk), but it was not the only thing happening, even in the height of summer vacation season. Let’s have a look at this week’s Friday 5:

• Facebook Places: A Field Guide. Mashable.
• How to disable Facebook Places. ReadWriteWeb.
• How to optimize your LinkedIn Profile. Socialmedia.biz
• The Science of Sharing. AdWeek.
• N.Korea uses Twitter for propaganda offensive. Yahoo! News

Photo by Theilr on Flickr. Used Under Creative Commons License.

By now, you’ve probably seen the trailer for the Facebook movie, aka The Social Network. The folks at Rated Awesome decided to make fun of the Social Network trailer and Twitter at the same time, and the result is very, very funny. Check it out.

Sorry, I missed last weeks, folks, but it was a busy one and the Friday 5 needed a week off. This week we look at some fun, interesting and informative links. My favorite is the NYT recently banning the word ‘Tweet.’ It could help explain why newspapers are dying in the US when old media is dictating to its writers not to use a word that has become part of the common social media vernacular.

LinkedIn is about to upgrade its group sharing tools, which should be welcome. I haven’t had the opportunity to see them yet, but I look forward to the changes. In other news, when the Idaho attorney general tweeted (oh my I hope the NYT language police don’t come after me for using the word Tweet), about an imminent execution, it raised yet another issue about what’s appropriate on Twitter. Nobody would have questioned him texting a reporter who then reported the news, so why shouldn’t he communicate directly.

Twitter started placing ads inside the Twitter stream on the web site and one writer wondered if it marked the end of Twitter as we know it. I’m not so sure, but it’s a compelling post.

Finally, we have a couple of nice how-to posts from Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media who explains some content SEO tricks and Chris Brogan, who explains the advantages of using Google Wave for Collaboration.

Anyway, here we go with this week’s links:

• ‘New York Times’ Bans the Word ‘Tweet’ – The Awl by Choire on The Awl.
• Tweeting About an Execution: Why Not? – Matthew Ingram on GigaOM
• Toy Story 3: The Beginning of the End For Twitter? – Matt Cheuvront on Life Without Pants
• 9 SEO Mistakes Businesses Make with Content – Lisa Barone on Outspoken Media
• Catch the Wave – Chris Brogan on ChrisBrogan.com

Photo by Moe on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

The other day I clicked a link posted on Twitter by my friend and colleague, John Blossom (who is president of Shore Communications, Inc. and the author of the book Content Nation). Instead of a traditional blog post like this one, I found myself on Google Buzz. I read Blossom’s post (an analysis of the web access capability in the new Barnes and Noble Nook) and decided to respond. From then, on I was drawn into an interesting discussion, all taking place inside Google Buzz and updating me in Gmail.

You can enter Notes in Facebook of course (as I wrote in Facebook: Writing Notes) and have an online conversation, but what I like about Buzz is that I get an email with Buzz updates and I can respond right there without explicitly opening Buzz to do it. Each time the Buzz gets updated, I get a new email with the entire thread. You can also get email responses with Facebook, but it is not smoothly integrated into the email experience as Buzz is (because Google has the advantage of owning both the email and social networking tools).

The entire Buzz email conversation is threaded so you  aren’t getting a bunch of separate emails, and if you get annoyed, you can mute the conversation and you won’t be bothered again.

Blossom has embraced both Google Buzz and Google Wave, and his work has encouraged me to look at this more carefully. If you dismissed Buzz after the initial, well, buzz, then you should give it another shot. It provides an interesting forum for debate and discussion, one that I hadn’t really considered until I saw Blossom’s use of the tool.

Photo by Thomas Hawk on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Welcome to the latest installment of the Friday 5. Facebook was still trying to get out from under the cloud of bad publicity regarding its privacy tools this week. The update was an improvement, but still needs a lot of work to simplify it even further. In yet another bizarre episode, however, the San Francisco Weekly explains the strange insignia spied on Zuckerberg’s hoodie.

Meanwhile Facebook and Yahoo! announced a deal to play together, while  Twitter announced a new link policy it will implement over the coming months. In a bizarre announcement, Viacom, the owners of MTV, basically put a gag order on its employees regarding personal blogging. Not sure how well that will go down with the courts, but I guess we have to wait and see.

Not quite as dramatic as a Zuckerberg meltdown, but still another interesting week in the ever evolving world of online social media.

• Yahoo! strikes deal with Facebook in bid to be the ‘largest social network’ in the world, Emma Barnett, Telegraph UK.
• Twitter to Change Links and How They Are Displayed,  Ben Parr, Mashable.
• Zuckerberg’s Bizarre Facebook Insignia Revealed, And What It Means, Alexia Tsotsis, SF Weekly.
• Facebook hopes new privacy page can quell unrest, Sharon Gaudin, Computerworld.
• Viacom/MTV Issues Intense Employee Gag Order, Basically Takes Ownership of Blogs, Thoughts , Joe Coscarelli, Village Voice

You can’t talk about social media this week without mentioning the on-going Facebook privacy brouhaha as I wrote yesterday in Reactions to Facebook Privacy Changes Vary.

But without a doubt, my favorite social media story this week came from the GOP, which tried its hand at social media and got a bit more than they bargained for when they opened up a social site to decide on their Fall Congressional campaign agenda.

Not far behind was Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren, who posted a poll on her blog asking who was dumber: her or a critical viewer who wrote her to tell her how dumb *she* was. Turns out most people thought Greta was dumber by a large margin.

Sometimes that Internet can be a harsh mistress. And with that, this week’s five links in social media:

• Republican’s new web site not exactly what they hoped it would be by Dana Milibank on Washington Post.
• Fox News Anchor Asks the Internet: Am I dumb? on Gawker.com
• Revenge of the Facebook Users by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols on ITWorld.
• How is being new to Twitter different in 2010 by Shannon Paul on her Very Official Blog.
• Why BP Should Embrace the Fake BP Twitter Account by Lisa Barone on Outspoken Media Blog.

Photo by eliztesch on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license.

Welcome back to another Friday 5. We’ve seen FourSquare mature a bit this week and Facebook continue to take hits. A group of NYU students took direct aim at the social media giant by trying to establish an open source social media platform that actually respects your privacy and security. Imagine that. As though, they needed more fuel for their trek, Mashable reported this morning that Facebook and others were caught selling user data (actual user data) to advertising platforms.

With all that as a social media backdrop, let’s take a look this week’s five links in social media:

• Three Training Tips to Become a Better Blogger by James Chartrand on Copyblogger
• Twitter for iPhone Now Live in the App Store by Christina Warren on Mashable
• Why we need to kill “social media” by Rob Key on iMediaConnection.com
• Facebook Apologists Miss the Point: Facebook Isn’t the Future by Stowe Boyd on StoweBoyd.com.
• And finally, something new this week, a link to a social tool. This week, I recommend Micropoll.com, which lets you create a poll and embed it in your blog or web site. It’s simple to use and it’s free.

Foursquare and Starbucks announced a joint venture this week that could change the way we think about these geolocation services. We’ve all seen announcements on Twitter and Facebook from Foursquare and Gowalla (among others) about where our friends are right now. To be honest, I’ve found most of these announcements to be boring wastes of bandwidth as I wrote in Foursquare: I Really Don’t Care Where You Are.

But my snarkiness aside, I do see the commercial value of trusted friends’ recommendations. If my friend eats at a certain establishment, perhaps I will too. Starbucks this week raised the geolocation stakes when it announced a deal with Foursquare to reward people who report frequently from Starbucks. For those who aren’t familiar with Foursquare, it’s set up like a game, so the people who report most often from a given location are given “Mayor” status.

The Foursquare-Starbucks deal gives Mayors a special reward they can unlock. It’s actually a great way for businesses to reward those customers who frequent their businesses most often. I could see smaller rewards for non-Mayors who report their location as well.

While the current implementation can be annoying, this kind of deal between Starbucks and Foursquare could represent the future of the business model, and it could be something we all care more about if it involves saving money at places we frequent anyway.