Back in September, I had posted a sneak peak teaser video from Myspace starring one of the site’s major sponsors: Justin Timberlake. And if anyone could bring sexy back to the once major player in social media, it is definitely Justin.

I'm not quite sure how I think Mittens and the Prez did in the debates this evening, but one clear winner was Twitter. 

The conversation in the Twitterverse was intense and played a truly significant role in the debate. Have we ever had such a participatory discourse over politics before in an election? Surely, all this armchair punditry means people are thinking about issues and that's got to be a good thing. 

What wasn't so good was what it exposed for some of the social media gurus out there. 

There was some hype on the twitternets yesterday that Twitter would make a big announcement on the Today show today.

I predicted Tim Cook would now be signing Dick Costolo's paycheck. I was wrong.

Instead, Twitter announced that thelong-awaited brand profileshad finally arrived.

As social media evolves from novelty to business practice we see a lot of interesting strategies that brands are utilizing to engage with users. From incentives to customer service, brands are trying anything and everything to get users to like, follow and share their social media programs. Some strategies are smart.  Others are just desperate.

Twitter yesterday introduced a new feature called the Activity tab.  It's a move reminiscent of Facebook's Beacon fiasco a year back.

Will people revolt?

I recently attended a webinar about social media analytics. I’m always wary of these webinars as they tend to try to sell you something and since this was a Q&A panel, I was also wary that the discussion would be all over the place. I was pleasantly surprised it was neither.

Hubspot hosted the webinar with a panel of speakers taking questions via Twitter hash tag. There were approximately 5,000 people in attendance, so you can imagine that the feed went really fast (and easily a trending topic on Twitter within minutes). The speakers represented different perspectives of social media measurement from the small business/entrepreneur business side to the software analytics side.

Although there were lots of good points in the webinar, I’ve filtered the hour long Q&A to the following key takeaways...

(And how to get it back.)

About four years ago, I saw @ev speak at a Commonwealth Club event in San Francisco (that's co-founder Evan Williams to the untwitterized out there). Evan was astoundingly candid about the technical problems and downtime that led made the Fail Whale part of our cultural lexicon. 

"It's amazing we've been so successful," he shared.

Last week, Faun posted an interesting article about The Dichotomy of Free vs. True Brand Value. It got me thinking about the ironic situation we've created by giving our work away for free.

The Twitter Media blog posted an interesting analysis of the rise and fall of an entertaining hashtag that popped up recently, and there are some interesting lessons here for social media marketers.

With the new "gold-rush" of mobile app development in full swing, their are some scruffy developers out their taking advantage of these unprotected new stomping grounds to squeeze users for more coin.