1. Twitter: "You don't know what you're missing."

If you choose to ignore your Twitter account, you'll receive an email within a few weeks saying, "We've missed you!" More than that, Twitter lists everything you're missing out on, from the latest news to plain happiness.

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You might expect social media superstars to be giving virtual high fives and tweeting with delight at the idea of a suggested users list on Google+. It’s a way to be surfaced for new users, meaning more followers, and that’s a good thing, right?

Wrong — for some.

Since Google released the list late last week, web personalities have been speaking out against it. Tech blogger and commentator Robert Scoble even asked to be removed from it, citing 13 reasons the move made sense for him.

“I totally understand why Google did this list,” Scoble said. “It just isn’t a well curated list and so I don’t want my name associated with it.”

Scoble pointed out that Paris Hilton made the list, further fortifying his reasoning. However, Google+ VP of Product Bradley Horowitz said deeper personalization functionality is on its way. For now, it lets users in different regions and languages get different recommendations — but the goal is for it to become more topic based.

Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer, admits that lists are useful for the technorati. For average users, it makes less sense.

“A suggested user list will never help this tool go mainstream or keep the ‘regular people’ around,” Camahort Page said.

Another concern is that less-followed users making extraordinary contributions to the Google+ community will be overlooked. Alida Brandenburg, an accountant at Pandora, begs to differ.

“I ended up on there and I don’t even have 6,000 followers,” she said. “That may seem high compared to the average user, but then you put that against people listed in the same category as me, like Dane Cook, Paris Hilton and William Shatner, and it’s clear that this was not simply a numbers game.”

The list rotates featured users, so there’s no worry about anyone having a monopoly over it.

So what are Google+ power users so riled up about? Their new favorite network becoming a popularity contest.

“It’s going to alienate people and lead to an inevitable followers war that can hurt the health of the social network and inflate people’s ego,” said Craig Kanalley, a senior editor at The Huffington Post.

The suggested user list wasn’t created for older users like the ones quoted here. Rather, it appears for new users to help them get acclimated to the service. It’s up to them to ignore it or use it as a guide for finding accounts to follow.

Do you think the suggested user list is a good move by Google? Or could it create the toxic follower competition some users fear? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

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Inviting your friends to Google+ just got a lot easier, thanks to a subtle change that Google+ has rolled out to its users.

The update gives you the ability to share Google+ invites by simply sharing a link. By sharing your unique link with your friends, up to 150 of them can instantly sign up for Google’s social network. The search giant still offers inviting friends via email as an option.

The update was announced earlier this week by Google+ engineer Balaji Srinivasan. “Since we’re still in field trial, we’re limiting sign-ups from these links to 150 per person for now,” Srinivasan noted in his Google+ post.

While Google has decided not to make Google+ public yet, this should provide yet another boost to Google+’s growth. The social network has amassed approximately 25 million users in its first five weeks, and it continues to grow. One study even predicts that Google+ could have more users than Twitter and LinkedIn within the next year.

To kick things off, I thought that I would share my 150 invites with Mashable‘s readers. If you’re fast enough, you can get an invite by clicking here. And if you need some people to follow, you’re always welcome to add me, Pete Cashmore or the entire Mashable staff to your circles.

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Nova Spivack has several ventures in production that focus on the real-time stream, including Bottlenose (for filtering the stream), StreamGlider (a new mobile stream delivery platform), Live Matrix (the schedule of the live web), and The Daily Dot (a new online daily newspaper about what’s trending online).

The social media landscape is changing quickly, but this change won’t be immediate, or for that matter, efficient. And that’s going to be a big problem for all of us.

I believe that Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn are fundamentally different, and thus, should not be in competition. However, I’m not sure the companies themselves see it this way. It’s likely they will continue dedicating resources to competition instead of differentiation.

And while the social media gods fight it out in the clouds above us, what will happen down here on Earth? What about all of us, the little people — the users?

We’re entering a new era of social network chaos, and this, in turn, is going to create new needs and opportunities for startups.

The Sharepocalypse

Welcome to he “Sharepocalypse,” a new era of social network insanity.

In the Sharepocalypse hundreds (if not thousands) of online friends share content with us across various social networks, culminating in massive information overload. Our lives will become more fragmented, we will lose productivity, and we’ll perpetually be playing catch up.

Granted, we’ve heard this song before. But I argue that the movement will reach a fundamentally new level of chaos — and the data from my portfolio of companies bears this out.

The Sharepocalypse causes (and is caused by) social overload — an evolution of information overload. Because the distinctions between each social network are not entirely clear, we feel obligated to maniacally juggle different apps and social networks just to keep up and be heard everywhere.

It would be one thing if all our social messages were part of a single, parsable, filtered stream. But instead, they come from all different directions. The Sharepocalypse is aggravated by social streams that originate in many competing silos. We spend nearly as much time hopping between networks as we do meaningfully digesting and engaging the content within.

Furthermore, the more we engage in cross-posting, the more noisy and redundant each network will become. Social overload begets more social overload. In a room where everyone is shouting to be heard, the mob shouts even louder.

And it’s not just one room full of people shouting — it’s many. Among the social networks of Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and other social outlets, which network is the most appropriate forum for any given post? But wait, it gets worse. Now we have to choose among Circles as well.

Google+ circles are mini virtual sharing networks, and they’re potentially infinite in number. What circle or list or group should you share with? But first, how well organized are your circles? Do they overlap? Are you sure that by only sharing with certain circles you can reach everyone you need to? No.

On top of all the social noise we experience, look forward to new noise from brands. Brands are becoming more lost and confused about how and where to communicate than ever before. Predictably, they will try to reach us redundantly, everywhere, all the time to make sure we see them. Social media consultants, on the other hand, will have a total field day, because ultimately they will benefit most from the chaos.

To make matters worse, it looks like Microsoft may now be on the verge of launching a new kind of social sharing service. And many other companies will follow, I’m sure. Why not every mobile company, for that matter? Why not every big brand? Even celebs may start their own social networks in which fans can share and compare their adorations.

And I’m not talking the micro-networks like Geni and Dogster. We’re moving toward a landscape in which social networks and sharing mechanisms will be built into the DNA of every site and service.

As Mark Zuckerberg has argued, everything that can be social will be social. I agree…and that’s the problem.

Choice Overload

Nobody is going to know where to share or where to look.

How will you know if you missed anything important? Which networks will you visit to get updates from friends, from brands, from publications you follow?

The sad truth is that you can’t get it all in one place.

In fact, choosing with whom to share is going to become harder and will require more thought. Ironically, by trying to solve this problem using “circles” and other gestures, Google+ may just be piling on more disparate channels. Therefore, many people will simply opt to quickly and easily share everything with the public, rather than denote a special group or circle with which to share.

The fact is, when people have to ponder a choice, they often opt for the easier alternative: don’t choose at all. This is classic choice overload theory. Many studies have shown that choice overload leads people to make fewer choices. People become stressed when they have to choose from too many options at once.

It’s a perfect storm: A massive expansion of networks on which to share and track information, but all the while, its users have less and less energy to make choices. The result will be a lot more confusion and noise.

Soon we will long for the days when we were unplugged, cut off from the global brain, and able to, at least once in a while, enjoy that rare feeling of being up-to-speed.

A New Category: Social Assistance

The Sharepocalypse will generate an expanse of new problems. However, this will generate a new opportunity for social assistance — a new category of software and services — and therefore, a ripe environment for startups.

Social assistance will be the next frontier spawned from social networking, and we’re all going to need it. We’ll require help managing our online relationships, tying our streams together, sifting through the noise, keeping up with what matters personally, finding who and what we need, and remaining productive.

Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Microsoft will all struggle to deliver acceptable signal-to-noise ratios to their users. But they will be focused on solving this problem within their silos, rather than across all platforms. I call this approach “vertical social assistance” because it focuses on assisting people only within particular networks. Because each service is biased toward its own social graph and content, it’s unlikely that any of them will help solve the horizontal overload. Understandably, it’s not in their interest to enable users to make better use of competing services.

This world of fragmented messaging systems is akin the early days of email in the 1980s, when users of one network were unable to communicate with another. It was a mess. Eventually, email gateways were created to link these disparate networks. But the problem wasn’t fully solved until everyone adopted a single set of standards, and all the email networks connected into one common fabric.

Unfortunately, the unification of email networks and standards immediately killed of a lot of the smaller email networks and client makers. But through simplification, the world became less complex and more connected.

The question is, will something like this ever happen for social media? Will we see the social networks connect into a common fabric anytime soon? Right now, the major social networks own the content — it’s captive on their platforms. If that were to change, and you could read any social media message anywhere, they would have to compete on features alone — and that’s another can of worms.

What I call “horizontal social assistance” is the opportunity to access and use social media messages in a unified way. This approach is different from the vertical social assistance approach because it would span across all networks. The users of social networks need this capability in the same way they needed email unification. However, until all the social networks agree on standard profiles, messages, contacts, groups and streams, it’s not going to happen. And to be frank, such an agreement is highly unlikely in the near future.

But it could happen if some neutral party takes the initiative.

In the meantime, many other social assistance resources will emerge that target a range of different needs and opportunities, including:

• Social Relationship Management (SRM): : Services that help people create, organize and manage sets of social network relationships — for example, sets of people to follow and/or share with on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc.
• Social Awareness: Services that help people keep up with their social networks, especially among a user’s friends.
• Social Curation: Services that help people organize and make sense of their streams and messages.
• Social Personalization: Services that help people sift through the network noise for information most relevant to their particular needs and interests.
• Social Analytics: Services that help to measure online social behavior and trends, optimize engagement, monitor activity and communicate more appropriately.
• Social Automation: Services that help to automate activity in social networks, like automatically updating your status, helping to increase your influence, suggesting what to share, matchmaking, alerting, and using bots to intelligently interact with and assist users.

Because social assistance will become so necessary, both vertical and horizontal social assistance could mean interesting opportunities for startups. Ventures that provide vertical social assistance for particular networks, like Google+ and Facebook are going to be early build versus buy acquisition targets. These are rapid innovation opportunities for individual developers or small teams.

Ventures that attempt to solve the harder problem of horizontal social assistance will have a chance at building longer-term independent value. Some may become strong stand-alone ventures, or larger exits, but they will also be more technologically challenging, requiring larger teams and more capital.

One thing is certain: The Sharepocalypse is here and, as a result, social assistance will soon be the cutting-edge of social media innovation.

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, Kileman, and Flickr, World Bank Photo Collection, zipckr

More About: facebook, Google Plus, information, Overload, social analytics, social media, social networking, twitter

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In 1962, drummer Pete Best (right) was on the receiving end of one of history’s cruelest firings. His bandmates had just won a recording contract, but decided he wasn’t quite talented enough to stay in the band. They intended to replace him with a friend from a rival group: Richard Starkey (left), also known as Ringo Starr.

Best, beloved by the Beatles’ earliest fans, had to watch from the sidelines as his former bandmates and Starr became the biggest group on the planet. Now, thanks to a Facebook campaign, he is getting a little compensation from the city where it all started.

A group on the social network calling itself “Name a Street After Pete” aimed to persuade Liverpool City Council to honor Best; it gained more than 10,000 supporters. The council was persuaded, and announced Wednesday that Best would get not one but two street names in a new housing development — one for himself, and one for the Casbah, a club started by his late mother Mona, where the Beatles played some of their earliest gigs.

“We only name a street after a living person if it is an exceptional case,” councilor Malcolm Kennedy told the website Click Liverpool. “Pete Best is certainly one of those exceptional individuals — he has made a significant contribution to the musical heritage of our city, and he is a worthy recipient.”

The BBC spoke to a proud and humbled Best; you can see that interview here. A decade ago, Best received a quiet payout of up to £4 million for his part in the Beatles Anthology project, which features several tracks with his drumming. Getting a street named after you is a pretty big deal in a historic city like Liverpool, however, and we think the 69-year-old Best much prefers the recognition to the cash. Money, as his former bandmates once observed, can’t buy you love.

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Already using Google+? Follow Mashable News for the latest about the platform’s new features, tips and tricks as well as our top social media and technology updates.

Ever since it’s launch on June 28, the tech community has been rushing to join Google+ — and Mashable staffers are no exception.

We’re learning how to use the newest social network right along with you, and would love to interact with you there. We’ll be posting Mashable stories, tidbits about what we’re working on and asking for feedback about the platform.

Here’s a list of individual Mashable employees using Google+ that you can add to your circles. You can also follow Mashable News. We look forward to engaging with you there!

+Ada Ospina – NYC Office Manager

+Adam Hirsch – COO

+Adam Ostrow – Editor in Chief

+Amy-Mae Elliott – Features Writer

+Andrew Reedman – U.S. Director of Sales

+Ben Parr – Editor at Large

+Brenna Ehrlich – Associate Editor of Media & Entertainment

+Brian Anthony Hernandez – Copy Editor

+Brian Dresher Director of Business Development

+Brie Manakul – Ad Ops Manager

+Charlie White – Senior Editor

+Chelsea Stark – Community Intern

+Christina Warren – Mobile and Development & Design Reporter

+Connie Preti – Community Intern

+Emily Banks – Assistant News Editor

+Erica Swallow – Partner Content Associate Editor

+Frederick Townes – CTO

+Jennifer Van Grove – Startups Reporter

+Josh Catone – Features Editor

+Karen Hartline – Events Director

+Kate Hayden – Events Assistant

+Lauren Drell – Partner Content Assistant Editor

+Lauren Indvik – Marketing & Media Associate Editor

+Louis Dorman – Art Director

+Matt Silverman – Associate Features Editor

+Meghan Peters – Community Manager

+Pete Cashmore – Founder and CEO

+Robyn Peterson – Senior VP of Product

+Sana Ahmed – Executive Assistant

+Sarah Kessler – Startups Reporter

+Sharon Feder – Publisher

+Stacy Green – Communications Director

+Stefanie Rennert – HR Manager

+Stephanie Buck – Editorial Intern

+Stephanie Haberman – Community Assistant

+Tamar Weinberg – Community and Global Advertising

+Tanya Salah – West Coast Sales Director

+Todd Olmstead – Community Intern

+Todd Wasserman – Business and Marketing Editor

+Zachary Sniderman – Social Good Assistant Editor

+Zoe Fox – Social Good Intern

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Making the Twitter rounds on a super-sized scale today (under the hashtag of #seriouslymcdonalds) is this obviously fake sign that’s allegedly in a McDonald’s restaurant. It claims that “African-American customers are now required to pay an additional fee of $1.50 per transaction.” The picture originated on twitpic and has gone viral from there.

The key tipoff that this is a fake? That 800 number you see at the bottom goes to a KFC customer service line. But really, think about it: Would any McDonald’s franchisee or employee tape such a sign on the door of a McDonald’s restaurant? It would be career suicide.

Further proof: On McDonald’s official Twitter account, the company says it’s a hoax:

Even so, we have a call and an email into the McDonald’s corporate offices, and we’ll update this post as soon as we get an official statement.

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Tennessee residents: Come July 1, 2011, the state may punish you with jail time or fines should you “transmit or display an image” online — social networks such as Facebook and Twitter included — that has the possibility to “frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress” to anyone who sees it.

The state of Tennessee amended Tennessee Code Title 39, Chapter 17, Part 3 of its harassment law, which was previously focused on malicious person-to-person communication, to apply to anyone transmitting potentially offensive images on the web.

The exact language of the law now reads:

(a) A person commits an offense who intentionally:

(4) Communicates with another person or transmits or displays an image in a manner in which there is a reasonable expectation that the image will be viewed by the victim by [by telephone, in writing or by electronic communication] without legitimate purpose:

(A) (i) With the malicious intent to frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress; or

(ii) In a manner the defendant knows, or reasonably should know, would frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress to a similarly situated person of reasonable sensibilities; and

(B) As the result of the communication, the person is frightened, intimidated or emotionally distressed.

No electronic communication is safe under the new law, as subsections have been added to included images shared via social networks where the victim could possibly see it. The bill now includes language that requires social networking sites to hand over the offending materials to the government if there’s a warrant or court order or if the person who posted the images provides consent.

The vague nature of Tennessee’s amended harassment law has many calling it unconstitutional, including UCLA School of Law professor Eugene Volokh.

Volokh describes several behaviors that will soon be illegal:

• “If you’re posting a picture of someone in an embarrassing situation — not at all limited to, say, sexually themed pictures or illegally taken pictures — you’re likely a criminal unless the prosecutor, judge, or jury concludes that you had a ‘legitimate purpose.’
• “Likewise, if you post an image intended to distress some religious, political, ethnic, racial, etc. group, you too can be sent to jail if governments decisionmaker thinks your purpose wasn’t ‘legitimate.’ Nothing in the law requires that the picture be of the ‘victim,’ only that it be distressing to the ‘victim.’
• “The same is true even if you didn’t intend to distress those people, but reasonably should have known that the material — say, pictures of Mohammed, or blasphemous jokes about Jesus Christ, or harsh cartoon insults of some political group — would ’cause emotional distress to a similarly situated person of reasonable sensibilities.’
• “And of course the same would apply if a newspaper or TV station posts embarrassing pictures or blasphemous images on its site.”

The amendment was passed May 18, signed into law May 30 by Governor Bill Haslam and will go into effect July 1.

This is not Tennessee’s first foray into controversial digital legislation. The digitally-conscious-but-not-exactly-savvy state previously made it illegal to share passwords to sites such as Netfix.

[via Ars Technica]

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, jonathanparry

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Two-year old online game Moshi Monsters has just reached a sizable milestone: 50 million registered users.

Moshi Monsters is a social online game/community that allows kids 6 to 12 to adopt virtual pets, tool around a virtual land called Monstro City, play games to earn virtual currency and communicate with other kids in a moderated, safe environment. The franchise also includes toys (coming soon), books, video games, trading cards and a Moshi magazine. Moshi will also soon begin its foray into music, live tours, a TV platform and film.

Moshi, founded by London-based startup Mind Candy, also reports that it has more than 15 million registered users (out of the total 50 million) in North America. Apparently, the game gets one signup per second.

Fifty million is a pretty hefty community, but it makes sense considering the rise of the digital native we have been privy to lately. In October, a study conducted by Internet security firm AVG found that 92% of children in the U.S. have an online presence by the time they are two, compared to 73% in western Europe.

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If life is comprised of moments defined by people, places and time, then startup Conga is a matchmaker, weaving together these elements to help users turn missed connections into shared experiences.

Conga, launching in public beta in New York and San Francisco Wednesday, defines itself as a proximity-based social network. It’s designed to connect individuals from different social spheres who have or will gather at the same place at the same time.

“It started with a simple idea,” explains co-founder Ryan Kennedy, “What if it was possible to go back in time, to nearly any moment in life, and reconnect with people around any of the places we’d ever been?”

Kennedy tells me that part of the motivation for starting Conga came from a personal desire to uncover missed romantic connections — he was, of course, single at the time. Now happily off the market (but not thanks to Conga), Kennedy still believes that there’s something magical about making missed connections not so missed.

“We go through life and interact with all these people, but how do we tap into relationships with people sitting right next to us?,” he says. “We’re looking to fill that gap.”

Conga is structured around the notion of the moment, tapping into the user’s location history via Foursquare and Twitter to build out a replete record of where he’s been and who else has been. The user can manually enter moments as well.

Each moment has its own page and serves as a point of rendezvous. The site manufacturers a layer of collaboration over these moments to introduce users who have crossed paths and give them a means to communicate and share information.

The startup’s most intriguing feature is its ability to list the people the user “congas” with (ie. crosses paths with) under the People tab. Here, Conga unravels the mystery of the unknown and presents the user with his most frequent missed connections. I can, for instance, see that I’ve crossed paths with Noah, someone I do not know, at least 13 times. Clearly, Noah and I have more in common than we may realize. Conga has merely surfaced these commonalities to subtly suggest that we should connect.

But Conga’s purpose extends beyond these person-to-person connections. The founders speak of Conga as a place to reconnect with people you’ve interacted with in the real world. Weddings, conferences, reunions and other group gatherings are all Conga-worthy because users can come together around a specific place and time to share things that happened at that moment.

The service has a few drawbacks. At launch, it’s limited to users in New York and San Francisco, the site is a bit difficult to navigate and overlapping activity will be minimal until more users sign on. Still, there’s certainly something to the notion of using location data to fill in the blanks.

Conga is self-funded by co-founders Ryan Kennedy and Todd Fast. The startup is in the midst of raising an angel round to finance operations.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, RonTech2000

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