Schmooze with your buddies from around the world on .Friends

You and your friends from all over the world walk into a bar on New Year's Eve. The music is great, the bartender is friendly, and you and all your friends are dressed up in your favorite outfits. Your friend from London decides to pick a different song from the jukebox, your friend from Brazil decides to listen to the band instead, while the buddy you just met from Istanbul decides to play a cool YouTube video on the wall of the bar. You head out to the dance floor, whip out some amazing dance moves that are straight-out of a movie, and then the cute guy or girl you've been checking out comes over and buys you a drink. Before long you’re chatting it up like you've known each other forever, so you decide to have a video chat to get to know each other better.

The best part of all of this is that you never have to leave your living room.

The great virtual night out I just described is possible with .Friends (Dot Friends), a brand new app on Facebook that launched last week. The whole point of the app is to have fun, party with your friends and to meet new ones as well. You go into a virtual world, pick a hot spot from the world-map, and then live it up while chatting with your friends and meeting new ones.

I'm a heavy Facebook user so I know what an amazing platform it is for connecting with people. But Facebook is missing the unique element of personal interaction that is so important. That's where .Friends comes in. It lets you create a virtual "you" and provides a bunch of cool places where you can party and hang out. .Friends provides a new way and a new venue to interact with people and lets you get together with people from all over the world and hang-out as if you were all in the same spot.

This should sound familiar to tech watchers since a similar app has been making waves recently and raised a "bit" of money as well. But where I think .Friends really shines is in its stunning visuals which make the app a lot more fun to use. Not only that, but you have a ton of options in terms of how you can look in the .Friends world. There's a huge selection of hair styles, clothes and accessories to create a perfect look. After all, how can you meet people in a virtual world if the virtual 'you' doesn't represent who you are and your own individual style?

It's east to get started with the app. You can either follow the tutorial when you enter the app or just click on the .Friends logo on the top left. This will open a pull down menu that will enable you to navigate through the world, see the different venues around the globe, change your clothes and more. When you're in a location and you see someone interesting, you can click on them and then you’ll get a menu of options such as writing them a private chat or buying them a drink. Be careful though, people notice when you buy the cheapest drink on the menu. .Friends also lets you start-up a video chat with someone right from the app making it a convenient and fun way to meet people face-to-face.

While all of this already makes .Friends addictively fun, I think one of the coolest features is still to come. The team at .Friends is putting the finishing touches on a feature that lets you build your own location in the .Friends world. So if you've always dreamed of opening up your own bar or club and turning into a world-leading entertainer, you can do it all on .Friends.

Facebook and other social networks are transforming the way we communicate and stay in touch with our friends, making it easier than ever to maintain relationships that span the globe. .Friends - and other social tools that duplicate real-world scenarios - are going to extend the range of interactions we have on the web, add new depth to our online experiences, and strengthen our relationships with friends on social networks.

Disclosure: Blonde 2.0 handles .Friends' social media activity.

If you want to tar and feather your sworn enemy online using social media, now’s the perfect time to do it! Blog, tweet, and Facebook your slander or meritless accusation; make a chastising video, post it, promote it, and kick it to viral! Turn it up to 11! If you have an axe to grind or a bee in your bonnet, and want to get sweet, sweet revenge, a once-a-year opportunity is upon you … Christmas!

We’re entering a time when most companies — and people — are ill-prepared to defend their online reputations while they’re spending every last minute of their “use it or lose it” end-of-year vacation time! Suckers! From now until some time in January.

If you’re interested in committing mischief, it’s time to put all your resources online.

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Everloop: The social network for kids from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Got kids? Then you'll want to know about a social network that does a solid job of providing a social experience for children and tweens that's safe, secure — and not totally lame.

I first met Everloop CEO Hilary DeCesare at the Stanford Summit last year, and caught up with her a short while back at the Silicon Valley Innovation Summit, the third name for the perenniel event put on by the AlwaysOn Network at Stanford University.

Everloop fills an important gap in social networking, giving kids up to age 13 a secure online environment where they can interact and communicate with their friends and peers. As the site says: Sorry, no grown-ups allowed (except for site moderators).

Everloop helps kids, at school or at home, learn and play in "a safe, secure social loop," Hilary says. It's evolved into a digital learning platform that allows children to explore their curiosity in the areas of gaming, sports, entertainment and other areas, she says. And as more tweens now use mobile phones, the site offers EverText as the kids' answer to Twitter.

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Slate as it looks on the iPad thanks to OnSwipe.

Free service lets you enter the new world of tablet publishing

One of my favorite discoveries of the past few weeks has been OnSwipe, a service that enables you to optimize your website for the iPad — for free!

If you go to most websites using an iPad, the experience is hit or miss. Website navigation is quite a bit different from tablet navigation, and as a result reading on a tablet can sometimes prove to be a chore. Not so with an OnSwipe-enabled site. Your home page looks completely different — see Slate.com at top — and the entire experience is one where you touch instead of click and swipe instead of search for a scroll bar.

Call up Slate.com or SFGoodwill.org on the iPad and you'll see what the experience feels like. If you're game, it takes about 5 minutes to set up, and it's free. Go ahead, do it for your business or brand and be hailed as a rock star when you show it off in the C-Suite.

OnSwipe: 'Make your site look beautiful on Web tablets'

The other day I interviewed Jason L. Baptiste, co-founder and CEO of the New York-based startup, which has 16 staffers.

"It's a very simple idea," he said. "We let the publisher of any website make the site look absolutely beautiful on Web tablets. It's for the new world of touch and swipe."

It works like this:

CEO Jason Baptiste: Tablets are the TV of this generation. There’ll be millions or billions of channels.

You don't need to add any code to your site or blog, and the end user doesn't need to download an app. All you do is head over to onswipe.com and register. The process takes you through four quick steps, where you plunk in your site's url, RSS feed or feeds, desired layout, hit Save and you're done.

The service still has a few rough edges: For example, when I first registered my site Socialbrite, I entered my name under "Username" when I should have entered "Socialbrite," and the url wound up being onswipe.com/jdlasica. And including your Twitter feed makes your tweets show up in a clunky way.

But those are quibbles. Just minutes after you register, call up your site in Safari (or another Web browser) on the iPad and you'll see a marked difference. Your home page is transformed into a series of vertical strips holding your latest posts as well as photos, videos and more. Click on any of them and you'll be able to read stories in a magazine-style format. Swipe and you'll see the next story. Nice.

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In response to The Social Media News Release explained in detail, Jonathan Rick asked me, “Isn’t this essentially the same thing that Pitch Engine offers?” Jason Kintzler then added, “Yes Jonathan, exactly! Did I mention you can do it all for free?!” (See Socialmedia.biz's earlier writeup on PitchEngine: A social PR platform for the new era.)

Well, my response is the topic of this post today: “The article is only about the what and why of the Social Media News Release and not the how. Pitch Engine is a how!” I then added, “Pitch Engine doesn’t take away the work: writing/collecting compelling copy and assets. You do that work” and then “Our SMNR is just a platform and structure. 90% of one’s time should be spent writing amazing content” and then, finally, “Installing WordPress, an amazing platform, does not an amazing blog make; Pitch Engine  is amazing but content is king”

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Last week I dissected a blogger outreach pitch email line-by-line in Detailed analysis of the perfect blogger pitch as a way of proving that no matter how brief and conversational one of Abraham Harrison's blogger pitches may appear at first blush, the effortlessness takes a lot of work and the time of three senior agents. Today I plan to go through, line by line, a site we create to support all of our blogger outreach campaigns. You can call it a Social Media News Release (SMNR) or a microsite, a resource site, or a fact sheet. To those of you who are in communications, you'll recognize the structural similarity between it and a traditional news release or press release.

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