It was, in a word, creepy.

WhosHere, another social discovery application used primarily for dating, is trying its hardest to fight that stereotype.

“We’ve put a tremendous amount of effort into not being creepy,” CEO and co-founder Bryant Harris told me. Users can fill out profiles however they wish, using a pseudonym or an avatar that isn’t a shot of their face. If two people are interested in one another, they can communicate via text or VoIP call within the app itself, without requiring phone numbers.

But there comes a point in e-dating where two people must take things to the next level. And texts and even phone calls can only tell a person so much.

In-app video chat, a feature that WhosHere is launching on Wednesday, is the next natural step for the app. It’s a way of moving forward in connecting with others without the peskiness of having to take the full leap of meeting in person. It’s also a way to verify someone is who they say they are before meeting in the flesh. After all, you never know who’s actually on the other end of a profile.

“Just like in the real world, you go through a progression of how you interact,” says COO Stephen Smith.

I’m not entirely convinced that the world is ready to move to dating via smartphone. But the app has garnered more than five million iOS installations since 2008, so at least some folks are smitten with the premise.

In January, as the freshly crowned CEO of Yahoo, Scott Thompson initiated a series of dramatic acts to get the company back on track. The most notable was to make the boldest — or most boneheaded — move the head of Yahoo could make: Filing a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook.

The controversial move was wildly unpopular in Silicon Valley, and even among many Yahoo employees.

But after a drawn-out weeklong controversy over a fake computer science degree on Thompson’s resume, he is reportedly headed out, and global media head Ross Levinsohn is in the driver’s seat as interim CEO.

Now one of the big questions is: Will Levinsohn take steps to repair Yahoo’s relationship with Facebook, especially since it has proved to be one of the most fruitful the ailing Silicon Valley Internet giant has seen in years?

Sources say that some members of Yahoo’s board, as well as the top exec, would welcome a settlement with Facebook on the litigation. Thompson was the main advocate of the in-your-face strategy against the social networking giant, levying a barrage of legal claims at a critical time — the quiet period before Facebook’s public offering this month.

So, if Yahoo wanted to turn back the tide of rancor toward Facebook, now is the time it could happen.

The lawsuit essentially deemed Facebook a thief of Yahoo’s social innovation, claiming that were it not for Yahoo’s many years of research and development, products such as Facebook’s News Feed, privacy settings, advertising models and more would never have come into existence.

“Facebook’s entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles for and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo’s patented social networking technology,” one line from Yahoo’s lawsuit reads.

It’s unclear how much Levinsohn, acting as temporary CEO, will be able to change, in terms of the progress of the lawsuit. But if he’s looking to dial things back, his first call could be to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who would be instrumental in reaching some sort of detente in the case.

The initial act of aggression from Yahoo caught many in technology — including Yahoo’s employees — by surprise.

That’s because the various partnerships that the pair have struck in recent years have been hugely successful.

Yahoo’s Facebook-integrated Social Bar application, for example, has essentially been a traffic funnel from Facebook to Yahoo, with nearly 40 million monthly active users accessing the application, according to AppData statistics, and it is now one of the top Facebook apps.

It’s what Director of Product Development Jonathan Katzman called, in an interview last year, “the future of social for Yahoo.”

Finding a middle ground in some sort of settlement with Facebook could win back Yahoo detractors, a culture that praises innovation and largely rebuffs the practice of patent litigation as an act of trolling.

Facebook declined to comment, as did Yahoo, but several sources said to expect some movement sooner than later.

The new Bing features a three-panel layout, with the left-most a pared-down list of straight search results. The second column appears when users hover over a certain result, and shows dedicated visual results for 150 different categories like restaurants, transit, movies and hotels that include maps, ratings and other information.

This “Snapshot” screen tries to help users take action on those results — for instance, to make a restaurant reservation or check availability at a certain hotel — without leaving the Bing page.

The third column is the most radical change from the traditional search layout — it’s a social friend list and feed that stays on the page at all times over to the right. For each query, Bing will automatically suggest Facebook friends who know about a topic as well as relevant experts from Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, LinkedIn, Google+ and Blogger.

When a user asks one of those people to help with a query, the conversation shows up in an activity feed on the sidebar and also back on Facebook.

Microsoft had considered giving users the option to broadcast — with their permission — all their Bing search queries to Facebook through its Open Graph API. That would have been super controversial, and it was dropped from the release over the last couple of weeks.

Bing search director Stefan Weitz told me that there are a couple of goals for this launch. The first is to show users that “Bing is for doing stuff.” And the second is to acknowledge that search has become too crowded, with additions like social seeming to randomly sprinkle Facebook profile photos throughout the results page.

The new interface’s three panels are, in order, “what the Web knows,” “what Bing knows,” and “what friends know,” Weitz said.

One thing that’s not clear to me is how a three-panel design that’s dependent on hovering will work within the constraints of small mobile touchscreens. Microsoft is demoing that and more at a San Francisco launch event that’s being live-streamed here.

Update: Qi Lu, Microsoft’s president of online services, replied at the event that the three-panel approach should actually ease translations to various form factors, including phones and Xboxes.

“Separating aspects allows us to customize for different form factors, so the experience can be consistent,” he said. Lu added that hovering would be replaced by swiping between panes on mobile devices.

The new Bing won’t be available to all users immediately, but people can sign up to be notified about it here.

It has been relatively quiet there in the Utah desert ever since, which is odd, because it had been such a chatty company, throwing parties to kill old outdated identities, holding complicated math contests to guess its new name, things like that.

Now it’s about to get noisy again. Effective today, you’re going to start hearing a lot more from Domo and from its employees, and not because its new product is ready. Not quite. (James tells me the company will be talking about it this summer.)

No, starting today, all employees — everyone in the company — will be required as a condition of employment to get seriously engaged on social media in all its various forms in order to make Domo part of the wider conversations taking place on Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare and Pinterest and the rest. It’s called the #Domosocial experiment, and will last eight weeks. James puts it thusly in a post on the company blog:

“The program is designed to get everyone here engaged with and learning from consumer and social technologies. The goal is to help us develop a better product, understand the viral nature of web offerings more effectively, assist in getting the Domo brand out there, enable better customer conversations and see what impact it all has on our business.”

Part of the intent, James told me, is a matter of geography and culture. Being based in Utah, Domo employees are probably better than their equal numbers at other Utah start-ups when it comes to being facile with the ebb and flow of the daily global conversation that takes place on all the social spaces. But they’re probably not as familiar with it all as their rivals in Silicon Valley.

James has seen this sort of thing before. He started Omniture in Utah in 1996 and by 2009 sold it to Adobe for $1.8 billion. “With Domo, I wanted to ensure that we are every bit as adept at understanding and leveraging social as any other bleeding-edge startup,” he wrote.

But on top of that, he’s turning the effort into a live case study to see just how much of a difference it makes in Domo’s business prospects, if any. The company will track important metrics and share them with the world. “We’ll track how things change week after week. The good, the bad and the ugly, it’s all going to be public,” he told me.

Though not about everything. There’s a list of “don’ts.” Don’t tweet about deals in the pipeline, don’t debate with or quarrel with the boss on Facebook. Don’t post about meetings or leak financial information.

What do employees stand to benefit? The best among them will be getting cash rewards for their performance, extra days off, that sort of thing.

What does he expect? He’s been exploring social media pretty seriously for the last six months, and occasionally now gets stopped in the local mall by people who recognize him. “You start having influence in ways you didn’t before,” James told me. He learned with a 10-page article he shared on Twitter, where he has about 12,000 followers, that he experienced a 15 percent click-through rate. “The influence will increase dramatically,” he told me. Also, Domo’s development team will have their eyes opened to the finer points of what works and what doesn’t with social features that are under development at Domo. “We don’t want to re-invent what Facebook and Twitter did, but if you’re not intimately familiar with how those things work, then how can you learn from their mistakes?”

I’ve written my own critiques of Google. But the big G is more on par with Microsoft, IBM and other perennial brands than with Myspace. Google may have its ups and downs, but it’s not going anywhere.

Here’s why:

Google is a utility, not a toy

Google isn’t just a fun toy. It has become a utility for the vast majority of Internet users. It’s a major driver of commerce for businesses. And it collects and redistributes data in a way that no other tool or site has been able to replicate.

Myspace wasn’t a utility. It was a place where teenagers gathered to trade messages. Bing and Yahoo? They never approached the market share — or the effectiveness — needed to become as important.

Google has become a tool we constantly use. It’s integrated into web browsers and phones, and now it’s testing the waters of wearable computing. It powers the flow of content around the Internet. And it isn’t going anywhere.

Social isn’t a “new way of thinking”

Jackson says that Google’s failure to move into social media (we can debate that) is a major weakness, because social media and the structures it creates are replacing search:

Why has Amazon done so little in social? And Google? Even as they pour billions into the problem, their primary business model which made them successful in the first place seems to override their expansion into some new way of thinking.
There are a few problems with this statement:

• Social isn’t replacing search. It can’t, any more than a walnut can replace a bicycle. Social and search are completely different: Social media generates content and relationships. Search engines help us sift through content and relationships. There’s very little overlap.
• Social media isn’t new. It has been around since AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. Truthfully, it’s been around since humans could communicate. It’s not disruptive. The ways innovators apply it is disruptive. But that application doesn’t threaten Google.
• Google is desperately clawing at social media because the publicly traded company needs revenue growth, and because it wants to tap social media as another portion of its search algorithm.

Social really does not pose a threat to Google. If Facebook were to introduce a first-rate search engine, that might reduce Google’s market share. But even that wouldn’t drive it out of existence.

People

Even with its post-IPO brain drain, Google has an unparalleled ability to attract and retain top-rate engineers. Google is a unique engineer’s paradise, if you like the environment there. Between its culture and the mountain of cash upon which it sits, Google can have first or second pick of the best talent in the industry.

Until it becomes a truly entrenched, mature corporation with all of the baggage that brings, no one can really touch Google’s talent pool.

What could destroy Google

There is one potential Google-killer out there: Legal action.

Google’s moving into dangerous territory and could end up getting carved up through government action:

• It dominates search, and isn’t afraid to use that dominance to acquire some competitors, crush others and generally move the industry as it sees fit.
• It has access to mountains of analytics data across different online channels, and can potentially use that data in ways that should give regulators hives.
• Its promotion of Google+ seems awfully similar to Microsoft’s promotion of Internet Explorer 2001-2005. It has locked out other social networks when it controls more than 85 percent of the search world. That alone might force antitrust action.

The federal government could, if forced, order Google to break up into separate units around search, social, applications and email. Or it could force the company to completely abandon some initiatives. That would be nearly unprecedented. But then again, so is Google.

Ian Lurie is CEO of Portent Inc., an Internet marketing agency that he founded in 1995. He co-published Web Marketing All-In-One for Dummies and wrote the sections on SEO, blogging, social media and web analytics. He also wrote Conversation Marketing: Internet Marketing Strategies.

Only app administrators could create new Wallit walls, and users had to be in relative proximity to a place to properly use the app.

Wallit has now torn down those walls to the app. Starting today, users can create a virtual wall anywhere, from their office to their living room to a party at a friend’s place.

Since the whole idea of writing on virtual walls could be a bit confusing to those who haven’t seen the app, there’s a video below to help show how it works.

Basically, Wallit app users have the option to leave a note on a virtual wall that’s superimposed over a real location. Depending on whether the wall is private or not, users within Wallit’s social network can use their phone’s camera to capture an image of that building or structure — such as the Golden Gate Bridge, for example — and see what people have written around it, as well as other data that might be available.

Augmented reality apps that show contextual info based on your location are hardly new, though Wallit does add an interesting social twist to AR. Mobile apps like Wikitude and Google Goggles display info about your surroundings on a smartphone screen and, of course, Google’s Project X glasses aim to remove the smartphone from the whole equation, and instead show relevant local information through a wearable device.

The Wallit app is free, and right now the 700 existing walls don’t show any ads. However, Wallit creator Veysel Berk says that “value walls” may be a part of the app in the future, where brands will customize certain walls. Whether that means ads will appear on already existing virtual walls, or whether the ad walls will be completely separate, is still unclear.

The app can be found here in the iTunes store. It’s currently only available for iOS devices, though Berk says an Android version is in the works.

iStockphoto | A-Digit

You’re not that special. Turns out you might fall into a category of digital consumers just like yourself.

IBM’s new Digital Consumer report, which surveyed 3,800 adult consumers in China, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the U.S., showed a large increase in usage of digital devices and content services over the past few years, with 78 percent of consumers calling themselves digital device adopters this past year. It also identified four distinct personalities when it comes to digital consumption:

Efficiency Expert: This is the digital consumer who uses digital devices and services to simplify things. They use the fewest devices but still access the Internet via mobile phones, send emails rather than letters, use Facebook to communicate with people, watch video on demand at home and shop online. However, some surveyed still prefer in-store shopping to online.

Content King: There’s a reason why it’s “king” and not “queen.” This category is composed mostly of males, but represents just 9 percent of the global sample. According to Saul Berman, global strategy consulting leader of IBM’s Business Services division, these digital consumers are the gamers, the newshounds, the movie buffs. “They prefer everything to be connected to their console or TV, often watch TV shows online, they regularly download their media and play games with people online,” Berman said.

Social Butterfly: Some 15 percent of consumers surveyed reported that they frequently maintain and update social-networking sites. This group has a strong female skew, with a high frequency of digital consumption. They might own fewer devices, but they maintain more social-networking profiles, they visit these sites several times a day, they’re “tagging” others on sites, and they’re often viewing what friends are posting.

Connected Maestro: This group is indicative of where the future is headed, Berman believes. About 35 percent of those surveyed take a more advanced approach to media consumption by using mobile devices and smartphone applications to access games, music and video, or to check news, weather and sports. They use instant messaging. They own the greatest variety of digital devices, and they combine some of the behavior of a Content King and a Social Butterfly. This group also has a slightly male skew and, as Berman said, “the majority of this group say they now read digital books over printed ones.”

Interestingly, the study notes that age is no longer the most distinct segmentation when it comes to putting digital consumers into boxes. A full 82 percent of digital adopters are now between the ages of 10 and 64. “Contrary to popular belief, not all early adopters are college age; in actual fact 65 percent are aged between 55-64,” the study notes.

“Making tech simple for that audience is a key factor,” Berman said, “and they’ve seen the benefit in potential by watching people who were the initial early adopters.”

That still doesn’t necessarily mean you’re off the hook in terms of setting up printers and fixing the Internet when you’re visiting home for the holidays.

Readers: Which category do you fall into?

(Image: iStockphoto | A-Digit)

The travel site is launching a new Friend of a Friend feature today, allowing users to see if a hotel has been reviewed by Facebook friends and their friends’ friends. It’s sort of like playing the Kevin Bacon game, but instead of six degrees of separation, TripAdvisor is only using one.

TripAdvisor’s VP of Global Product, Adam Medros, said that by adding connections, visitors are 10 times more likely to see reviews written by people in their network — even in obscure locations, ranging from Istanbul to Duluth, Minn.

“It’s always been a little hit or miss,” Medros said, about the likelihood of a friend having reviewed a hotel in the city you were searching. “Now, we’ve stretched the coverage by going out by one degree.”

The new feature is the latest move by TripAdvisor to make the 60 million reviews on its site more social. The company first got involved in Facebook five years ago, when it launched an app called Cities I’ve Visited, which lets you mark on a map where you’ve traveled.

With the help of that application and other efforts, TripAdvisor is the 18th most popular application on the social network, with 18.5 million monthly visitors, according to AppData.

The announcement today continues to leverage a partnership with Facebook, which gives TripAdvisor permission to personalize their Web experience using data from the social network. Only seven other companies have similar permissions.

To use the new Friend of a Friend feature, visitors to the site must log in using their Facebook account. Once they’ve done that and have conducted a hotel search, a little bubble will highlight that a review was written by a friend or someone a friend knows. In a search under Istanbul, I had no immediate friends who had reviewed hotels, but thanks to my friends’ friends, I had 10 reviews within my expanded network to check out.

It’s worth noting that TripAdvisor does not disclose any personal information about the friend, like their name or picture.

“We’ve always had this interesting challenge, where we have so much content for properties around the world — at some point, that’s helpful, but I’d love to see reviews from people like me,” Medros said.

Of course, there’s no telling if your friend’s friend is like you. “It still requires some weeding out,” Medros acknowledged.

He also said that the company has discussed the value in extending it even further. “It’s a running joke that if you take it out to three degrees, that everyone is a friend of everyone. I think we’ll stick with one degree for now.”

And now another social media app is introducing “Pinterest-like” boards: Timehop.

Timehop, in case you’e never used it, is a nifty social media aggregator that sends you daily emails to remind you exactly what you were doing a year ago today. Checked in on Foursquare at your favorite lunch spot? Timehop refreshes your memory. Tweeted that you were eating lunch? Timehop helps you recall that excitment, too. Instagrammed a picture of your lunch? Timehop reminds you of the time you treated your burrito as though it were an Annie Leibovitz subject.

Now when Timehop sends those daily emails, there will be an option for users to “favorite” certain posts and add them to a Pinterest-looking board on Timehop’s Web site. While these items can be added only through the daily email, this is Timehop’s first real Web feature. Until now, Timehop’s site has primarily just been a place for people to sign up for the service.

The boards right now are private, and users can only have one, which by default is called “Favorites.” Eventually, Timehop says it wants to allow people to have multiple boards and make their boards public to spur social interactions with friends online.

“Basically, we’re making Timehop more social and interactive and turning it from a purely consumption experience (read a daily email) into more of a place for social interactions on the Timehop website,” co-founder Jonathan Wegener said.

Formerly known as Foursquare and Seven Years Ago, and then PastPosts, Timehop first launched during Foursquare’s hackathon event last year. Like other social media apps — such as the maligned Girls Around Here app — Timehop aggregates all the data you’re sharing through other social media networks. But you have to give Timehop explicit permission to do so when you first sign up for the service, and until now the core of Timehop’s service was sending data through private email.

Timehop’s Wegener has also said in the past that the company might look to aggregate data from personal calendars to add value to the service, something that Greplin already does by culling and organizing user data from various mail accounts and calendars.

What gives?

With all due respect to Lewis, who is one of the greatest innovators in media, I left realizing that there are different ideas of what “social” can mean on the Web, and that not everyone knows where the gold lies. Putting the whole picture together, there are four different models for social that, despite sharing the same name, are completely different concepts.

• Social = Viral Hit
  For those on the marketing and advertising side especially, the word “social” often means that you or your client are jealous of someone else’s success. Viral hits are largely based on breakthrough creative, though great distribution is an often-forgotten second factor. Who wouldn’t want to be responsible for the next Old Spice guy? Of course, these kinds of hits are easy to ask for and hard to achieve. And if you do achieve it, you’ll need another viral hit to bring your audience back again.
  Verdict: Good luck!
• Social = 1,000,000 Fans
  
  Here, the theory goes that social means getting lots of fans, and then something magical is supposed to happen. Like the boys’ adventure with the “South Park” underpants gnomes, it usually ends up with a lot of time and money spent, a big collection achieved, and a big question mark over “what now?” It doesn’t matter how low your cost per fan was, if the value per fan is near-zero. It’s not the size of the fan base that matters — it’s what you do with it.
  Verdict: Bad strategy.
• Social = Comments
  Another concept of “social” is that it’s a medium for conversation. With programs like @ComcastCares, brands have used this approach to shape their brand images and reputations — and it has worked. On the publishing side, the Huffington Post and other publishers have succeeded in using social engagement to drive deep participation and connection among an inner circle of its audience. Hosting a conversation certainly builds a relationship. A “Like,” comment, or share from a user can all get you more exposure on the margin, but, as Lewis noted on our panel, the friends who come that way don’t stay very long and don’t come back much. They came for their friends, not for your Web site. That’s why, even though engagement strategies are great for your core audience, they won’t single-handedly drive the large, loyal audience we all crave.
  Verdict: Smart, but it’s not enough.
• Social = Lasting Relationship
  A lasting relationship with an audience is the holy grail of every brand online. In fact, it has made Amazon the most valuable e-commerce company on earth, and it’s made Disney and the NFL valuable over decades. But what some haven’t realized yet is that the most valuable mode of social is in keeping these relationships connected.

  Do you have any idea how valuable a “Like” is? Any seventh-grader goes all atwitter when his crush says, “I like you.” It’s permission to see someone more, get to know them better, and talk to them all the time — not just once, but every day. If you are doing it right, a “Like” or a “Follow” begins a two-way relationship: One where your audience is asking for programming from you every day, week and month; and giving you their interest data about what works and what doesn’t. With that relationship, you can choose what content you create, and when and how you share it. That relationship isn’t once-and-done — it’s ongoing.

  And data from our experience shows that it translates into a million visits a week from our fan base — almost one visit for every fan, not to mention dozens more impressions right in their home page, the Facebook news feed. Done right, social can already drive more traffic than search, making a new top venue to recruit, and more importantly, retain an audience.

  More and more, I talk to marketers and publishers who have hundreds of thousands or millions of fans and followers, and yet have no idea what to do with them. They haven’t realized that they have subscribers at the ready, waiting for great content and experiences — the currency of their relationship.

  Nor do they understand the tremendous value of those subscribers: If you give your friends what they are after, they’ll keep coming back for more, and they’ll bring their friends. This is exactly how companies like Groupon and Zynga have reinvented their categories and created businesses worth billions of dollars in the process.
  Verdict: There is nothing more powerful than a lasting relationship.

Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of next-generation Web publisher Wetpaint, and author of the Digital Quarters blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile (NILE).

It’s one thing to not be targeted in any regulatory action that strafed your competitors, but SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert used the opportunity to tout just why his company missed the bullets.

In an unusual and interesting post on social answer service Quora, Silbert gave a long answer to the question entrepreneur Jason Calacanis asked there: “Why wasn’t SecondMarket part of the SharesPost/secondary market SEC action today?”

That would be the investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which filed charges, as Arik Hesseldahl wrote earlier this week, “against two managers of private funds that had raised more than $70 million to acquire and trade pre-IPO shares of Facebook and other tech companies with misleading investors and charging undisclosed fees. It also brought charges against SharesPost, saying it had engaged in securities transactions without being registered as a broker-dealer.”

The move was part of a year-long inquiry aimed at secondary markets, where firms trade privately owned shares and options of pre-IPO companies.

Silbert, who runs one of the biggest companies in this sector, apparently decided to make hay while the Feds shone (up). In the Quora post, he noted: “I am proud to say that SecondMarket is not among those investigated or charged, which only reinforces SecondMarket’s ongoing commitment to being the trusted, compliant and fully-regulated marketplace in the startup and private company ecosystem.”

If he does say so himself!

All kidding aside, it is actually a novel way to turn a story that could tarnish everyone nearby into a plus. (Plus, ABC — Always Be Closing!)

Among the reasons that Silbert said SecondMarket was not part of the government probe: “Fully regulated, soup to nuts, from the start” (the company is a registered broker-dealer; “close coordination with private companies on all transactions” (“customized secondary markets,” he noted); “rigid accreditation process” of buyers; and “no disclosure of private company valuation and pricing.”

In a SXSW session called “A Crash Course in Becoming SuperBetter,” McGonigal promised attendees at least 7.5 extra minutes of life with her new online and mobile game, SuperBetter.

In the game, “bad guys” are things like mental blockers, headaches, and pressure. Quests are things to accomplish in the next 24 hours, future boosts are events players indicate they’re looking forward to and power packs are packaged game solutions that help players accomplish certain goals, for a fee. The score of the game is based on resilience, which fluctuates depending on how players are feeling on any given day or how engaged they are in the game.

McGonigal referred to a recent report that came out on the top five regrets dying people have. Things such as “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard,” “I wish I’d stayed in touch with friends” and “I wish I had let myself be happier” topped the list. McGonigal acknowledged that “I wish I’d played more video games” was nowhere on the list — but said she hears the potential for it.

Games, she said, can bring families together, help facilitate social interactions and alleviate depression and stress.

Essentially, McGonigal is looking to eradicate the image of the unproductive, couch-potato videogame player and show how such games can actually be beneficial.

Some 72 percent of American households play computer and video games, according to recent data from the Entertainment Software Association; 68 percent of parents believe that game play provides mental stimulation or education, while 57 percent believe games encourage their family to spend to time together.

McGonigal cited Google’s social goal management platform, a new app called Everest and the Lift project, an “application for unlocking human potential through positive reinforcement” from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, as evidence that life improvement programs are using game mechanics and taking shape across digital and mobile platforms.

McGonigal also said she doesn’t believe playing virtual games means people aren’t embedded in reality. The opposite of virtual isn’t real, she said; the root of virtual is “virtus, which meant excellence, potency, efficacy.”

McGonigal’s career in the gaming world began in 2009, after she suffered a brain injury that left her feeling suicidal. She developed a game called Jane the Concussion Slayer — playing off the popular TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” — and uploaded a video of the game to YouTube. Shortly afterward, she said she began receiving letters from people who were applying the principals of her recovery game to other challenges, such as depression, PTSD, quitting smoking, knee surgery, and even chemotherapy.

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There’s something else happening this week: SXSW Interactive, where techies gather to share ideas and drink and flick their barbecue-sauced fingers over their smartphones as they rave about the next big app that’s going to connect them to the person … standing right next to them.

AllThingsD will be there in full force, as my colleague Liz Gannes wrote. And it’s a good thing she did, because SXSW travel planning tends to be so haphazard that it’s hard to know if you’re going or not until it’s in writing. For ourselves, and for others who are heading down to Austin, we’ve put together the Essential SXSW Tech Toolkit for the five days of the festival.

RSVP to All Your Parties With One App
At this point, whether you’re going to SXSW or not, you’ve probably received a hundred or so party invites, and have painstakingly responded to them one by one. On the off chance that you still need to RSVP, there’s an app for that. WillCall, nicely profiled on TheNextWeb, is a last-minute-ticket-purchasing app that’s letting techies RSVP to 50 SXSW parties in a few clicks. WillCall’s standard mobile app runs on iPhone and Android devices, but for SXSW RSVPs, users will have to log in to this Web app through Facebook Connect.

You’ve RSVPed. Should You Bother Waiting in Line?
Now that you’ve responded to all those party invites, how do you determine which ones are worth waiting in line for? Localmind, a Quora-for-Foursquare app that lets users pose live questions to people in various locations, is working with a mobile karaoke lounge called (RV)IP to give real-time information to app users about what’s happening in downtown Austin. Localmind users will be shown all of the parties and events going on, and will be able to send questions to people at the events to get the scoop on what’s going on inside the party. (During the afternoon, the kararoke RV transforms into a mini spa, offering free massages, treats, and maybe most importantly, phone charges. What more do a bunch of overworked geeks need?)

The Official SXSW Mobile App
Okay, parties aside: We’re in Austin for work. And that means navigating the maze of venues, panels and pop-up stands. Womzit, a recently-launched “word of mouth” iPhone app that lets users make a recommendation by snapping a photo, rating the object or place, and sharing it with friends, is powering the official app of the conference, called SXSW GO. SXSW GO lets users browse panel schedules and speakers, search for venues, view full maps, and offers various social options, including the ability to post photos, share via Twitter and Facebook, and check out conference attendee profiles. The app is available for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7.

Because You Can Never Have Too Many Photo Apps
Pixable is like a Pinterest for Twitter and Instagram, only you log on through Facebook Connect. (I know, my head hurts, too.) Here’s what you need to know: During SXSW, Pixable will be showcasing shared Twitter and Instagram photos in a real-time updated stream, provided that the photo posts are tagged with #SXSW. In order to access the feed, log into Pixable and select the Hashtags dropdown in the upper right-hand corner. The app is available on the Web, on iPhone and on Android phones. Pixable will also be showing off its SXSW photo feed at the FEED House, a 20,000 square foot art space in downtown Austin that’s being transformed into an interactive experience by Twitter and Samsung.

Get in (Rain) Gear
Sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but it’s supposed to rain in Austin this weekend. Before you leave your sleeping quarters to hightail it or hail a pedicab to the Convention Center, check your smartphone’s weather app. And pack an umbrella, just to be on the safe side. Opportunistic tech start-ups, now’s your chance to put your stamp on a range of wet-weather gear. You’re welcome.

How to Get Around Town
Peer-to-peer services are all the rage: You can use Airbnb to rent out your apartment, TaskRabbit to outsource your chores, ParkatmyHouse to share your driveway, and Done to do it all for a good cause. Since getting around SXSW can be challenging, why not rent someone else’s car? Getaround helps people “un-idle” their cars by offering an online marketplace for them to rent them out. After launching last month in Portland, Ore., it’s now bringing its services to Austin, just in time for SXSW. Rental fees start as low as $3 an hour — though the typical compact car costs about $45 a day — and each rental is insured for up to $1 million.

What About the Local Mobile Social Craze?
What about Highlight, you ask? Or Sonar, or Glancee, or Kismet, or NTRO? Some of those mobile social discovery services have already been pretty hyped-up. We’ve got them on our radar, as well, and are going to take some time to evaluate how the apps work, both in a crowded tech space and IRL (that’s Internet speak for “in real life”), to see which ones stand out from the pack.

What we’re really interested in are the next next big mobile social discovery check-in apps, ones that would invite us to parties that haven’t been planned yet, allow us to check in to bars that haven’t been built yet, or connect us with people that don’t exist yet. Like Foursquare, only … Futuresquare. You read it here first.

(Feature photo courtesy of Flickr/DHGatsby)

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The move is supposed to foster a more social gaming environment that’s focused just on games, without other social media updates getting in the way.

Zynga is also opening up its game platform — which consists of 240 million monthly active users and 54 million daily active users — so third-party developers can create their own Zynga games. Developers will have access to something called Zynga’s Active Social Network, or ASN, which will tell them not only how many people are playing their games but also measure engagement levels.

So what about Zynga and Facebook’s codependency? While it may initially seem as though Zynga is staking an independent claim, it’s still cozy with Facebook when it comes to its own gaming site.

Users will still have to log in to Zynga.com through Facebook Connect in order to play the games — which will include CastleVille, CityVille, and Zynga Poker. (And, for fans of the Words With Friends mobile app, it’s going to be available on Zynga.com, as well.)

Players can start a game on Zynga.com and then easily pick it up on Facebook, and vice versa. There are still the same sharing functionalities, in terms of sharing scores and progress.

In terms of revenue sharing, it’s unclear whether Facebook will glean revenue from ads on Zynga.com. Zynga.com will launch with ads, a Zynga spokesperson confirmed, but said the company is not revealing financial details at this time.

However, while Facebook hasn’t been sharing revenue with Zynga from ads that appear on its own social network, there are agreements in place for Facebook in the future to sell advertising on a site hosted by Zynga, according to a story my AllThingsD colleague Tricia Duryee wrote.

There are some notable ways in which Zynga’s own gaming site differs from the experience of Zynga games on Facebook, though. Zynga.com offers a clutter-free news feed that’s only about gaming, unlike a Facebook feed dotted with Zynga game scores amid status updates and photos of food experiences and kids in Halloween costumes. There’s also a live chat box for real-time communication among game players, which, unlike Facebook’s IM box, keeps the game going while you’re chatting; and Zynga players can become “zFriends” with each other, without having to be Facebook friends.

“We know that our users, whether it’s for gaming or not, spend time on Facebook,” Manuel Bronstein, general manager of Zynga Direct, said. “They wake up in the morning, they check Facebook. And the reality is, we need to reach the players wherever they are.”

Bronstein stressed that the company wanted to keep gamers active by creating a truly social gaming portal and by adding more games from outside developers. In some cases, Zynga sees a big dropoff in engagement when a player is waiting days or longer for a friend to play their turn, or send a gift back. The company is hoping that, by creating more of a multiplayer environment, it can expedite the wait time in between plays and just keep people playing.

Zynga first unveiled its plans for “Project Z” back in October 2011, alongside 10 new games. The company said then it would still be a Facebook Connect-enabled platform, but also said it would be an environment tailored just for games.

As was pointed out at the time of the Zynga event, there were a few areas of gaming that Zynga had not yet entered, which had left opportunities for competitors to succeed on Facebook. With Zynga’s new games and the plans for “Project Z,” the gaps narrowed.

In Facebook’s recent S-1 filing, the social networking giant revealed just how dependent it was on Zynga, with Zynga accounting for around 12 percent of Facebook’s $3.7 billion in revenue last year. Facebook said social games are currently responsible for “substantially all of” its revenue generated from payments (outside of advertising revenue.)

First it was the baggage fees, and charging for legroom. Then it was denying us our Words with Friends. Now, the New York Times reports, it’s bringing Facebook and LinkedIn to the seat-selection process, so you can gather more information on customers … I mean, pair up fliers with similar interests.

Soon enough, we’ll hear people’s no-longer-serendipitous tales of purposely meeting their soul mate, or maybe selling their company to the passenger in seat 24E.

I’ve got one word for you, airlines, or really, one word that’s used twice to create another single word: GoGo. Wasn’t it just a few years ago that Internet broadband access became an in-flight possibility, allowing us to bury our heads in laptop screens, plow through work while 30,000 feet above the ground, and effectively avoid human interaction? Even the subject at the top of the Times story, Jeff Jarvis, grumbles that he usually has work to do.

And now, you want us to talk to people while we fly? (How does one do that, anyway?)

In case you missed the story, KLM Airlines and others have recently integrated aspects of social media with customer profiles, allowing prospective passengers to share personal information and choose seat buddies based on their profiles.

Sharing the social info is completely optional, and if a customer is uncomfortable with the person who has chosen to sit next to him or her, the seat can be changed up until two days before the flight.

As the story points out, this is likely to appeal to business travelers who are interested in real-life networking, not just social networking.

On one hand, providing more personal info to airlines could help them tailor the flight experience to suit fliers’ preferences, going beyond just the standard meal selection.

And one of the services mentioned, Hong Kong-based Satisfly, lets fliers indicate their preferred level of chattiness during a flight. So the tired mom might not get the talk-shop guy, and maybe the fearful flier won’t get paired with another white-knuckler. (In the videogaming world, I’m told, multiplayer gamers find this kind of feature to be invaluable when they create profiles, so jabberers and silent Halo-ers can peacefully coexist.)

But allowing fliers to handpick their seatmates based on social profiling could also have its pitfalls. As Jarvis aptly says, “Pity the poor venture capitalist who gets seated with the start-up guy who talks his ear off for four hours.”

Which might present another opportunity for airlines: Charge extra for high-tech noise-canceling headphones …

Readers, what do you think? Would you use a social networks to choose a seatmate on a flight, or opt not to share your profile?

(Photo courtesy of Flickr)

More than 60 percent of social media users said last year that they deleted people from their friends lists, up from 56 percent in 2009; and 26 percent of users who keep their profiles private say they apply additional privacy settings to limit what some friends can see.

Profile “pruning” — deleting comments friends leave and untagging photos — is also on the rise, the report says.

Women are significantly more likely to keep their profiles private, and are more likely to unfriend people than men are, with 67 percent of women saying they’ve removed friends, compared with 58 percent of men. Young people are more likely to manage their social media presences by deleting comments and untagging photos.

Some 48 percent of social media users say they experience some level of difficulty managing privacy controls on their profiles — but 49 percent say the process is “not difficult” at all. A tiny sample of those surveyed say it’s “very difficult.”

The report highlights a divide between those who may care about privacy when it comes to social networks and those who seemingly do not. As Pew notes, it could be interpreted that avid users of social networks, who share lots of personal details, have abandoned any expectations of privacy, or are “uniquely unconcerned” about online privacy.

On the other side, Pew says, privacy advocates say the public still “cares deeply about their privacy online but those sensitivities have been ill-served by technology companies.”

The report comes just as the White House has moved to create a privacy bill of rights, aimed at governing online data tracking. One of the issues at hand is a “do not track” tool which Web companies like Google have just agreed to support. Last week, Google was reported to be using deceptive practices to track Web users in certain browsers.

As The Wall Street Journal notes, though, a “do not track” button would allow for some Web data collection — such as the data gathered through Facebook’s “Like” button.

Pew is careful not to point to Facebook directly throughout the report, but notes that Facebook is by far the most popular U.S. social network (in its recent S-1 filing, Facebook showed that its user base has ballooned to more than 845 million). Pew’s report says that the term “privacy settings” — as well as “unfriend” — are part and parcel of the Facebook experience.

The Pew survey on Internet usages was conducted between April and May of last year, and sampled more than 2,200 U.S. adults 18 and older. The survey found that two-thirds of U.S. Internet users had profiles on social networking sites, up from just 20 percent in 2006.

In terms of who was more likely to post things on social networks that they later admitted they regretted, males were almost twice as likely to do so, with 15 percent copping to it, than were females, at 8 percent. Young adults, age 18 to 29, were also more likely to post content that they’d later regret on social networks.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr/Oli Dunkley)

The maker of digital media delivery software reported $80.2 million in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2011, a decrease of 5 percent from the previous quarter and an 18 percent year-over-year decrease. That included a 21 percent decrease in games revenue to $21.6 million.

And its net loss for the year was $27.1 million, compared to a $5 million profit a year ago. In its outlook, RealNetworks said it expects revenue from each of its segments to decline sequentially and year over year, as new CEO Thomas Nielsen continues to restructure and simplify its businesses.

But, amid a growing social gaming market, RealNetworks is clinging to its GameHouse business — at least for now. The company has said twice before it was planning to spin off the unit, but is still holding on to what it believes could be a social gaming “powerhouse.”

While RealNetworks doesn’t break out gaming data other than the aggregate games revenue, the company’s declines were offset somewhat by gains in its social gaming business, it said.

RealNetworks’ GameHouse, as my colleague Tricia Duryee explains here, concentrates on casual games, such as puzzle games, slot machines or what might be described as “match-three” games. Currently some of its best titles are UNO, Scrabble, Collapse! Blast and its latest, Bayou Blast. Its revenues are generated from microtransactions of virtual goods.

Over the past year, GameHouse has been edging toward a top 10 ranking in terms of game makers on Facebook.

And it’s seeing a boost in daily and monthly active users that is encouraging to Matt Hulett, who’s been running the gaming arm as its president for the past year.

GameHouse’s daily active users have now hit 1.3 million, up from 700,000, Hulett said, and its monthly active users increased around 3 million to more 7.5 million. (For perspective, Zynga now has 240 million monthly active users.)

Hulett also said that GameHouse’s daily user traffic is up 75 percent quarter over quarter. Users seem to like the new Blast games, Hulett said, which he’s hoping will drive growth in the first quarter, and GameHouse plans to introduce two or three new games in the next few months, including a slots game. It also plans to expand its 270-person staff by about 45 people by the end of this year.

But on the earnings call, RealNetworks’ Nielsen would say only that GameHouse “could” be a business the company might anchor itself around, and that if it focuses entirely on gaming, the other parts of RealNetworks, which include digital video delivery and download tools and the Rhapsody subscription music service, would no longer fit into RealNetworks. (In January, RealNetworks successfully sold $120 million worth of software and patents to Intel, as the chip maker looks to use the technology in current and upcoming video streaming products.)

Another scenario could be that previously mentioned spinoff as RealNetworks looks to streamline. And the market is ripe for social gaming companies: In recent months, DoubleDown and PopCap have sold to bigger gaming companies for $500 million and $1 billion, respectively.

“We have perhaps been sniffed more times than a dog at a dog park,” Hulett said, reiterating that there’s been a lot of inbound interest for GameHouse.

Whether one of those sniffs has come from a gaming company named after a dog — Zynga — Hulett declined to say. “When we’re ready to do something, we’ll do it.”

The start-up quickly fixed the bug, as Betabeat reported, and issued a cheeky apology. The gaffe was probably annoying to some users who might not have wanted repeat reminders of what they did on hearts-and-flowers day 2011. But Timehop is still hitting the right nerve at the right time.

In other words, it’s trying to be funny, capitalizing on social media nostalgia in its efforts to chronicle all things pertaining to your digital history. And it’s looking beyond social networks as it bulks up the service.

A little Timehop history: A couple of months ago, you might have noticed, as I did, that you started to receive emails from “Timehop Abe,” with a Twitter message or Foursquare check-in you posted a year ago. And if you’re sensitive to email spam or simply lose track of all the services you sign up for, as I often do, you might have wondered, why am I getting this email?

Turns out you might have signed up for Foursquare and Seven Years Ago, which was the name of the app created at Foursquare’s first hackathon last year; or maybe PastPosts, a later iteration of the app. In December, the group behind those apps became Timehop — encompassing Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram posts.

But Timehop isn’t like Facebook’s Timeline, compiling a digital album of your past social media activity, said its co-founder, Jonathan Wegener. And it’s not an app that conducts a search for old tweets or status updates — something avid social media users complain can be an arduous task. It’s a small, digestible slice of the past, sent via email.

Shortly after the name change, the New York-based start-up snagged $1.1 million from a Who’s Who of New York tech start-ups, including Bryce Roberts, Spark Capital, Foursquare’s co-founders and GroupMe’s founders.

It was an interesting show of faith in the company, since Timehop — despite the fact that it works with mobile app APIs — has no mobile app of its own, is tied to Facebook Connect for Web sign-ups, and has no real moneymaking strategy in the works. Its user base is in the tens of thousands.

“It’s a ‘user-first’ model, like Twitter and Foursquare,” Wegener said. “Making money just isn’t something we’re thinking about yet.”

Email is the company’s biggest asset right now, Wegener said. “Our open rate is great — over half of the emails we send out get opened and, if nothing else, we could have some sort of killer email advertising business.”

Wegener said the company realized a while back that it had to change its approach with the daily emails being sent out. Some users complained they were too harsh, including one user who received a jocular reminder that he was at a cemetery for a funeral the year before. Timehop has since hired a part-time advertising writer to craft quips for them.

Timehop is also starting to add more context to its emails, such as references to what was going on in pop culture and the news a year ago to the day.

Eventually, the company hopes to tap into other data — such as users’ calendar events — to compile an even bigger digital glimpse of the past, something that Greplin has gotten a jump-start on.

“The data you have on your calendar, the photos you have on your phone and desktop — that’s the stuff we’re finding really interesting from a context perspective,” Wegener said.

With more and more concerns emerging about the sharing of personal data through Web and mobile apps, Wegener is quick to say that Timehop is a private product that doesn’t post on your “walls” or anyone else’s, and that the company doesn’t share email addresses or scan contact lists.

But in order to work, the app does require access to your social networks — leaving users to decide whether a good laugh from a daily dose of the digital past is worth it to them.