Yesterday during their Places event, Facebook showed a video highlighting the thoughts of the team of developers who actually built the functionality. It's slick as hell -- very nicely done. In fact, we weren't the only ones who initially thought that it looked like an Apple video. Read on

Jennifers reaction: This seems to be just another re-packaging of a piece of technology that's widely available on the internet, just on different platforms! Is it really necessary to try and fill the gap between our offline and our online worlds with this? I know it's the "hip" thing these days to post statuses about everything and anything, but the example about the Golden Gate bridge is ridiculous. I don't want nor need to know what every other person thought of it- the reaction is fairly standard. This is just another outlet for mundane updates, despite the subtext to this video screaming "Facebook users are cool! We don't just sit on the computer all day! We actually hang out, ZOMG, lulz!".

Come on Facebook, I don't know about other users but certainly I don't want my "friends" (including actual friends, people I met once and those randoms I accepted for the hell of it) to know where I am 24/7. If I want to go and see them for coffee, I'll organise it myself- rather than virtually "bumping into" them!

Is this just another example of Facebook providing an opportunity for our privacy to be disregarded? How many people are going to 'opt-in' for this service unintentionally- possibly putting their safety on the line?

Today (well, yesterday American time) Facebook held a press conference in which Zuckerberg and Co officially revealed what many of us have been waiting for for awhile: Facebook s official push into location based social activity, Facebook Places. You can read the live blog of the event on what was revealed and what went down on Mashable, but what I actually want to talk about is what I was surprised wasn't revealed. Read on

Brads reaction: Location based services will certainly be a mainstream part of our lives in the future. Facebook obviously has the advantage if they do it right. At the moment it looks like Facebook are going to sit back and dabble for a while and see where things go.

Last month, I wrote a blog post about Linkedin and interviewed the very well-connected Iggy Pintado about how to get the best out of the social networking platform. This month, I want to expand on that and share with you the 15 things you should be doing with Linkedin but probably aren t. 12 of the 15 things are absolutely free. Let s start with the free stuff: Read on

Brads reaction: Excellent tips for getting more out of Linkedin. Make sure you joion the Digital Ministry Linked in group and get involved with its very active community.

Google is preparing another attempt to crack the social networking world owned by Facebook, and to a lesser extent, Twitter. Why is Google traveling down this path once again? Aren't the failures of Dodgeball, Orkut, Jaiku, Buzz, Wave, etc. enough for Google to realize that it just doesn't understand social networking? Maybe, but Google can't afford to watch the web become social without it. Read on

Brads reaction: Some fantastic insights into Social behaviour.

When Google launched Buzz, a microblogging social network, several months ago, the company boasted that the network had been generated automatically, by algorithms that could connect users to each other based on communications revealed through Gmail and other services. Read on

Johns reaction: Algorithms that claim to understand the nature of social connections. However they can still miss identifying the most intimate connections because these are likely to be face-to-face rather than digital communication. All getting a bit creepy if you ask me.

The importance of Facebook's Open Graph announcement cannot be overstated. By providing a 'Like' button that developers can add to any website, for any content or subject, Facebook is becoming the central hub for its users tastes and preferences. Imagine the potential. Amazon can recommend films for you to buy based on what you've been looking up on IMDB, Pandora in turn can play music you'll like based on your friends' Amazon purchases. Suddenly the web is connected in a far more cohesive way than has ever been possible before. Some of it will be used to promote products to you but there will be a lot of scope for developers to create amazing, new, social services that feed deep into your social graph. Read on

Brads reaction: There has been quite a few announcements come out of the Facebook Developers conference. This one I think will have the most impact.

Do you allow your employees to access social networking sites at work? I meet PR professionals and marketing managers each week who can not access Facebook from their work computer as it has been blocked. I also see that in some organisations there is an area often near the reception or staff restaurant where certain PC s have been allowed access to social networking sites. Yet other organisations I meet allow all of their staff to access social networking sites from their work computer as they are confident in their firewall and they have clear codes of conduct, social media policies and a culture that is about their staff delivering against their goals so that it s the outcome that matters. Read on

Brads reaction: This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Facebook has become the channel for personal email at work.

Honda has unveiled a crowd sourced journey to celebrate the launch of the CR-Z, the first ever sporty hybrid car Read on

Johns reaction: Users log on and submit their own ideas for journeys across Europe. This can be accompanied by a story and video as justification to why they want to do this particular trip; maybe to visit friends, follow a band around the country, track down relatives or as one keen entrant has already suggested, to track down every single one of his 186 Facebook friends take pictures of them and compile a real life 'face' book.

Two weeks ago, we ran an excerpt from a piece the Village Ventures partner Bo Peabody wrote for the Washington Post about how Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks would always be lousy businesses. Bo brings an interesting perspective to this argument, given that he founded and ran community-site Tripod in the late 1990s. Bo's piece generated many questions, from us and others. Happily, he had a more complete version on hand that answers many of them. Read on

After news about the landing of US Airways 1549 in the Hudson first broke on Twitter in January 2009, the microblogging service quickly captured the imagination of a new group of potential users. Throughout the first months of 2009, Twitter grew at a rapid pace, peaking at a growth rate of 13% in March 2009. Now, however, according to the latest data from HubSpot, Twitter's growth is slowing dramatically. In October 2009, Twitter's growth rate had fallen to 3.5%. On a positive note, though, the average active user on Twitter today is more engaged than six months ago. Read on