What we're reading in digital news this week: Facebook is growing like crazy, expanding, adding new features, and trying to optimize social search. In the meantime, Foursquare is exploring search engine partnerships that could change the way we view and use location-based checkin data. And a major hat tip to Colin Delany for his help with assembling this week's top headlines:
It's Official: Facebook Passes 500 Million Users. In more Facebook news, the world's largest social networking site hit a major milestone of 500 million worldwide users today -- a tremendous feat in just six years. For social media marketers, it's a reminder that while it's important to innovate and keep up with new platforms, Facebook is still king of the social networking world.
Facebook Allows Advertising Accounts to Have Multiple Users: This new functionality will make it easier for brands to implement and manage Facebook ads by allowing them to be shared by multiple Facebook users - finally!
Foursquare in Talks with Major Search Engines: Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley confirmed this week that the location-based social networking application may be partnering with major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing sometime in the near future. What does this mean for us? crowley says Foursquare could anonymize check-in data and allow people to see what places are trending based on frequency and volume of checkins.
Can Facebook Best Google With Social Search? One of the things we at NMS often talk about is the ways that social and search will converge together in the future. In the meantime, Facebook and Google are racing to see who can create the most effective social search first. And if they do, will users prefer it over the traditional search?