REI Leverages Facebook Check-In / Places for Marketing:
I thought this was really clever, while in REI over the weekend I noticed this sign below. Basically REI thinks is worth it to pay a dollar to a charity if you broadcast to all of your your 200 or so friends (that are most likely local folks) that you are at REI. 
How to avoid your friends, NYtimes.com reports on Anti Social Networking using FourSquare
Twitter Does 19 Billion Searches Per Month, Beating Yahoo & Bing (Sort Of) – Even if not an apples to Apple comparison, 19 billions queries per month is still really impressive!
Check Out This Amazing Facebook Fact Sheet – Cool timeline of Facebook history. Thought it was an interesting compared to my last post. In Dec 2005 Facebook had 5.5 million users, and raised 27.5 million in April 2006. What ever the valuation was then, I bet it still wasn’t close to$133/user.
Facebook Status Update Leads To Burglary – To avoid getting robbed, stop Facebook friending degenerates.
iGroups: Apple’s Welcome to the Social – iGroups creates a virtual social network based on proximity without the need for a login. This is the future of Social Media.
Google one of the biggest traffic drivers for..Bing? Searching for a search engine. … I wonder how many people “google,” Google from a tool bar just in order to get back to the homepage?
Google Sees Price Of Mobile Ads Higher. Rise Of Social Networks Could Stop This – Has Facebook & Twitter had any affect on Adwords on PC? I wouldn’t think so..
On Bing, #0044CC blue is worth $80 million – Interesting user test on a link color, good job Bing.
The 20 Hot New York City Startups You Need To Watch
Sweet Tweets – Dunkin Donuts quantifies it’s efforts on Twitter, this is interesting to me, being in ecommerce, i am frequently asked how different channels are quantified, and if they are quantifiable. Social Media is usually in question.
SAI – Revenue per Unique Visitor – Great chart of the day, back to a point I was made the other day about the Facebook passing Google on traffic.
Growth in Search Ads Problematic for News Sites – This article states, “Growth in search advertising and a corresponding decline in display advertising is creating a depressing trend for news-based sites”. I disagree, it seems that there has been a surge in display ads, worth more to advertisers due to more and better targeting and new technologies like re-targeting.
Google sees mobile ad rates passing PC rates – This sound premature, let alone unlikely. I guess you could look this a few ways. First thought is that I would think that a PC = more engagement/commitment vs mobile, yielding higher conversions and which inturn enables advertisers to pay more for traffic. Perhaps though with mobile there is only enough ad real estate to sell to 1 or 2 top advertisers vs the 10 now on search engine results pages there raising the average EPC or CPM since the lowering bidding advertisers will not be shown. Second, there are a few areas like very precise targeted geo specific ads, time sensitive, intent driven ads with a geo location that may drive higher CPCs due to high conversion rates that could result.
Facebook ousts Google as most popular U.S. site – I have always thought that your traffic numbers as a metric are secondary to how you monetize the traffic you do have, which in this case, google wins, buy a lot. But this is still impressive: