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You’ve probably heard that ReadWriteWeb has just announced the 2010 Mobile Summit , which – judging by last fall’s real-time web summit – is going to be a bang-up event. (With Kaliya Hamlin facilitating, how can it be otherwise?) This one’s in honor of the summit… and in honor of all of us for whom ubiquitous connectivity means you’re never really 100% present in physical space. Sponsor Oh, sure, it has its drawbacks – the car accidents, the walking into parking meters, the wedding that got called off because you just had to Twitpic a photo of the moment to your tweeps, which was awkward as you were the bride. But let’s admit it: We’re part of the hive mind, and we’re proud of it. Onward to Mountain View ! More Noise to Signal. Discuss

I saw the first episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s marriage counseling comedy/reality show The Marriage Ref tonight, and after watching the first round of bickering couples,  my first reaction was — where can I sign up? Just kidding Honey, if you’re reading this But seriously, the couples featured on the show got a free vacation for simply telling their troubles to a celebrity panel. Not a bad reward for complaining that your hubby wants to preserve his dead dog. (Yep. That was actually one of the problems discussed.) So, is The Marriage Ref still casting? The answer is yes. The show is still looking for couples to share their hilarious stories on national television. A casting call posted at NBC says: Whether you argue about parenting, pets, fashion, money, in-laws, weight, housework, chores, communication, neatness, jealousy, past history, friends, sex… Whatever you argue about, we want to hear from you. Tell us why you absolutely NEED a MARRIAGE REF to weigh in and decide who is RIGHT and who is WRONG. Head to the casting page for more info . Good luck! Is The Marriage Ref Casting? originally appeared on About.com Reality TV on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 23:54:45. Permalink | Comment | Email this

In the summer of 2008, J.R. Johnson sold Virtual Tourist to Expedia for $85 million dollars. While Johnson seems like the type of laid back Los Angeles entrepreneur that would take some vacation time, his quest for relevancy had him launching a new community the following March. Lunch.com is Johnson’s attempt to cut through the noise that has proliferated since he first started in the user-generated-review space in 1999. Says Johnson, “When I started, people asked me why anyone would want to read an amateur review. Now the environment has changed and there’s even pay-per-post happening across the net. Virtual Tourist is travel-specific and you increase relevancy by picking a niche topic on which to base your community. With Lunch I’m trying to solve something new.” Johnson spoke to ReadWriteWeb about some of the ways he’s managed to ensure that his community is more than just search engine bait. Sponsor 1. Identity and Interest : In addition to requiring that individuals use their real names and specify topics of interest within the site, Lunch uses an interesting member matching system. Similar to OK Cupid , users rate a series of topics and the “similarity network” matches them with like-minded members. In order for a spammer to target a specific user, they’d have to answer multiple questions in the same way as their target and trick the matching algorithm into displaying a higher percentage of compatibility. In this way, spammers are deemed less relevant while passionate users are matched by the percentage of overlapping interests. 2. Opinion History : Johnson explains that just because people share common interests it does not mean that they share common opinions. Even at ReadWriteWeb we’ve seen Republicans and Democrats converge on the same comment thread in completely different ways. Lunch lets users view opinion ratings, past reviews and popularity rankings. From there you decide whether or not to follow others or look for additional commentary. 3. Top Review Ratings : The Lunch users rate each other and can review that history of rating over time. Ratings can be about a specific topic, on a specific review and on a specific user. In some cases a contributor with lackluster cooking reviews produces one standout piece about a specific type of food. It’s important to be able to find those gems and weed out the reviews that are less relevant to you as a community member. 4. Existing Networks : Lunch allows users to pull information from their social graph via Facebook Connect in order to follow existing friends. Users can track topic reviews, member reviews and article reviews created by friends. I was actually surprised to see how little I had in common with my own social graph in terms of topic interest; however, where we converged was our opinions on other reviewers. 5. Frequent Contributors : By listing the top contributors to a community, Lunch is able to ascertain those with the most interest in a specific topic area. Johnson gives the example of Wikipedia’s community as one where frequent contributors are also an indication of topic-based expertise. Explains Johnson, in Wikipedia, a community member that takes ownership of a page and can be seen as one of the page’s top contributors (without deletions) is likely to offer more relevant content than those that do not contribute often. Coupled with opinion ratings this adds an additional level of user legitimacy. While Johnson continues in his quest to thwart spammers and trolls, his site is already flourishing. For those attending SXSW Interactive, he is hosting a March 16 panel entitled, Trolls Suck , where he will continue to explore ways to ensure that thoughtful online contributors remain the majority in community sites. Discuss

We already knew that Facebook had usurped Yahoo’s spot as the Web’s second-most visited website in the U.S. in January, but today, Web analytics firm Compete also released its data for the rest of the top 50 sites in in the U.S. Unsurprisingly, most shopping sites registered a large drop in unique visitors since December, while tax services are seeing some of the highest month-to-month growth rates. Sponsor Shopping Sites Down Shopping sites like Walmart.com , Target and BestBuy both saw a substantial monthly decline of around 35% compared to December. Amazon , however, only lost 5%, which suggests that the world’s most popular online shopping destination relies less on seasonal traffic than most of its competitors. Top 10 Sites in the U.S. by Unique Visitors Google.com – 147.8 million Facebook.com – 133.6 million Yahoo.com – 132 million Youtube.com – 97.7 million MSN.com – 94.5 million Amazon.com – 81.5 million Live.com – 79.3 million eBay.com – 72 million Wikipedia.org – 67.8 million Microsoft.com – 58.8 million Tax and Travel Up With the tax season in the U.S. in full swing, it doesn’t come as a surprise that services like HRBlock.com , Intuit.com and Taxactonline.com saw solid growth since December. In total, Compete notes that sites in its “Financial Services: Accountancy and Tax Service” category were up 292% compared to December 2009. Maybe even more importantly, these numbers are also up 11.5% compared to January 2009, which is a strong indicator that more and more people now prepare and file their taxes online. Last week, we talked to representatives from Intuit’s Turbotax division, who also noted that the company’s online services now post some of Intuit’s largest growth rates. As travelers start to plan their 2010 vacations, sites like HotWire.com (up 32% month-over-month) and TripAdvisor.com (up 24%) also posted solid gains. Other Notable Numbers: New York Times, CNet, Twitter and Bing Among news sites in Competes top 50, the New York Times (#50) booked a solid 10% gain since December, while CNN (#32) saw a 1.6% gain. The number of unique visitors to CNet, however, dropped by almost 13% compared to December, and is down 24% year-over-year. Twitter, which registered a solid 294% year-over-year growth, only saw a 3.35% growth since December. Bing , Microsoft’s new search engine, is now the eleventh most-visited site. It’s worth noting that the combination of Live.com and Bing.com attracted around 133 million unique visitors in January 2010, which is on par with Facebook’s and Yahoo’s numbers. Discuss

Location-based social networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Google Buzz are currently among the fastest growing new mobile services. All of these apps have one thing in common: they encourage you to share your current location with the rest of the world. By doing this, though, you are also telling people where you are not: at home. A new site, PleaseRobMe , plays on this theme and displays real-time updates from Foursquare users who broadcast their check-ins on Twitter. Sponsor According to the trio of developers behind the site (Barry Borsboom, Frank Groeneveld and Boy van Amstel), “the goal of this website is to raise some awareness of this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc.” There are also ads on the site, so the developers clearly also had something else in mind when they started this site. No matter the developers’ motivations, the visceral reaction to PleaseRobeMe on Twitter , shows that the developers have hit a nerve. PleaseRobMe doesn’t show anything new that a regular Twitter search for the 4sq.com domain wouldn’t uncover, but it’s the first time that a service has made this information so blatantly obvious. We don’t think that a lot of thieves are actually trolling the Internet for information when people leave their homes, though we have already seen some burglaries where status updates may have played a role. Besides robberies, there are also other reasons why you might want to keep your Foursquare profile private. Do you, after all, really want to tell your future employer that your spent all those weeknights at the local bar? Privacy Concerns: The Limiting Factor for Location-Based Networks? More importantly, though, this service highlights the privacy implications of regularly broadcasting your location. Some people are willing to take the risk and are perfectly fine with broadcasting their location and services like Foursquare reward these check-ins with virtual badges and real-world discounts for their most active users. For a lot of people, however, sharing location data takes online transparency one step too far. Ultimately, the success of location-based networks will be limited if they can’t find ways to make users feel safe when using these services. How to Stay Safe? If you really feel the need to share your location with the whole world, then you have to accept the risks. This isn’t just limited to location-aware applications, though. Posting Twitter updates from your vacation also make it pretty obvious that you are not at home. When it comes to location-aware services and geo-social networks, we prefer services that allow their users to send location updates privately to a select group of friends and trusted contacts. BrightKite – one of the older geo-social networks – for example, allows you to set very granular privacy controls on a per-post level. Of course, you could always resort to using a completely anonymous service like BlockChalk or a permission-based one-on-one service like EchoEcho , but with these, you can’t update your friends about what bar to meet them at either and the social aspects of these services are limited. It would also be nice if these services allowed users to select the level of granularity of their check-ins. While this won’t discourage burglars (and doesn’t work for FourSquare-like apps), being able to just point to “Houston, TX” as your location instead of the actual hotel your are staying in could alleviate the fears of a lot of users. The Dangers of Mixing the Virtual and the Real World PleaseRobMe points out the dangers of location-based social networks. Services like Foursquare, Brightkite and Google Buzz bridge the gap between the virtual world of social networks and the real world, which is something we are not accustomed, to. It’s easy to think that the information we share online doesn’t have any influence on the real world, but PleaseRobMe makes it pretty clear that there can be real-world consequences to sharing your location. What Do You Do? What is your policy for staying safe on location-aware social networks? Do you avoid them at all cost? Do you think that the positive aspects outweigh the potential risks? Do you use a pseudonym and a fake avatar? Let us know in the comments. Discuss