A collection of interesting stories that I’m digesting around social media and related technologies:

• Coffee’s for Closers – WebGuild discussing who came up with Viral Marketing First
• Presentations from Toby Segaran, the Author of Collective Intelligence
• Monster-acquired Tickle?
• Spat between Facebook and Google over privacy concerns; with Facebook dropped out of Google’s Friend Connect (video demo) launching Facebook Connect.
• Prying Open the Social Graph (GigaOm) talks about OpenSocial::Google I/O
• Finding cracks in Facebook (Fortune)
• eMarketer’s Debra Aho Williamson suggests to Clickz that ad sales have been sluggish on social nets: social media gets downgraded to 6% of all online ad spending in 2009, but then drop to 5.8% in 2010 and 5.1% in 2011.
• Shannon Clark talks about the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab event “Shaking the Money Tree of Multi-Platform Social Networks”in a blog post: Abstractions for Metrics and Targeting
• Dave (Skwarczek of course) and I didn’t have a name for it back at Streams Online Media Development in the Mildred days (1995) but it so worked…social, viral and community.