Make mine a pint, and a Foursquare check-in

Post-Facebook Places, it’s not as if proof is really needed that location-based social media applications went mainstream this year.

Nevertheless I was surprised to see this Foursquare poster in the door of a local Wetherspoon’s pub recently. It turns out the pub chain has been running the promotion since September in its 780 establishments across the UK.

The company has taken the responsible, and cheaper, option of only applying the 20% discount you win by becoming ‘mayor’ of your local to food purchases rather than the drinks bill.

Yahoo and Delicious, cultural trends in Google Books, Orkut badges

Long-time users of Yahoo’s email service are already used to the company’s frustrating ways. Unnecessary clicks after login before you see your inbox (check), poorly executed social networking integration (check) and unnecessary news portal (check), but the company surpassed itself this week when news leaked that its popular online bookmarking service Delicious was to be closed down.

Yahoo responded with a masterful demonstration of crisis management PR smarts, only taking 24 hours to address the situation and eventually claiming Delicious was actually going to be put up for sale. The company then blamed the media for … reporting things.

But – quicker than you can search ‘export Delicious bookmarks’ – the damage had been done, raising further questions around Yahoo’s commercial strategy and even the future of its photosharing site Flickr.

Where next for Facebook’s global expansion?

The intended message from this clever visualisation by a Facebook intern was probably one about the ubiquity of Mark Zuckerberg’s company.

But of course it shows a little more than that.

WikiLeaks and the cloud, YouTube goes long, everyone’s a publisher

Causing the sort of diplomatic incidents that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-il and Prince Philip couldn’t even imagine (and if that line up doesn’t scream ‘dream dinner party’ to you then I don’t know what will), this week WikiLeaks has hardly been out of the news.

The whistle-blowing site’s release of thousands of secret US cables last week has even seen cloud computing displace social media on tech blogs – at least for a time. Thankfully, attempts by pro-WikiLeaks hackers to shut down Amazon, after it withdrew its cloud hosting services, were unsuccessful, thereby averting a real diplomatic catastrophe had Christmas shopping plans been thwarted.

In the meantime, spare a thought for the co-founders of the Pirate Bay. Not only is the filesharing site no longer the web’s enfant terrible, but Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom are still guilty of illegal filesharing after they failed to overturn their convictions on appeal and their fines have been bumped up from £1.3 million to £4.1 million.

WikiLeaks hits the fan, Google investigation, how social informs search

Rumours Tesco is poised to revoke Julian Assange’s Clubcard remain unsubstantiated made up. But the WikiLeaks founder has put more than a few people’s backs up, among them Amazon (which withdrew its cloud hosting) and PayPal (which has frozen the whistle-blowing website’s account).

The US political establishment is also rather peeved about the release of over 250,000 of its diplomatic cables. Although they are probably less shocked than some by the confirmation that politics can be a dirty business, and diplomats are … diplomatic (in public at least).

Meanwhile, Assange remains unrepentent and claims the use of Amazon’s hosting services was a deliberate ploy to separate “rhetoric from reality” over their “free speech deficit”. Certainly the company does seem to have conveniently found its recently misplaced moral compass.