Social networking is old school these days it seems. A certain group of people, mainly late-twenty and thirty-somethings are tired of sharing everything with everyone on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Smaller has become better as we’ve learned by watching the growth of Path and the impact of Pair.

Intimacy is a difficult thing to mimic with technology, particularly on the small real-estate offered by a mobile phone. There are quite a few companies working on the “less is more” solution, and one of them is launching some really cool stuff at our TNW Startup Rally in Amsterdam.

VCNC, a company founded by Jaeuk Park, Youngmok Kim, Sungwook Cho, Kyungjae Woo, Junghaeng Lee, based out of South Korea, is offering an app called Between that helps you keep track of your personal relationship. It doesn’t have to be with a significant other, but it’s definitely suited for it.

We’ve covered Between before, long before Pair launched, and what they’re launching is definitely worth checking out.

Going global

Previously, we noted that Between was aimed at Asian users, who don’t like to share personal moments publicly. However, the team is taking great steps to move outside of the market and go global. that look back at their special moments. Now the couples know where their relationship is stored.

At The Next Web Conference, Between will be adding support for five more languages, in addition to its current four. By the end of May, Between will be supporting a total of 13 languages. App translation is completely important to appeal to more markets, as we learned by Path’s latest initiative to crowdsource its translation efforts for twenty languages. The fact that Between is ahead of the curve here is impressive.

The nice thing about Between is that it’s a mix of Path and Pair, in that it groups together your “moments” by day so you can go back and check everything out that you’ve discussed or shared in the past. This is where Pair lacks quite a bit, as it’s just a continuous stream of a conversation, much like SMS.

The Event Box

Since Between’s launch, the app has had a feature that was closed to its users called “Event Box”. The curiosity as to what this feature will be is now over, as the Event Box is officially open as of The Next Web conference.

Get this, the Event Box is a “business model”. Imagine that, right? Basically, the Event Box is a place where businesses can interact with couples. Couples will be able to find out about cool products and services, and the businesses get exposure.

During the conference, the company will be sending out a “Between Box” to companies all over the world, filled with products for couples, sponsored by LG Healthcare. It’s called ‘Delivering Happiness’. We will be delivering a ‘Between Box’ to 100 couples all over the world. The ‘Between Box’ is filled with our customized products and cosmetics, sponsored by global companies like LG Healthcare. Check out this page for more details.

Between has had over 690,000 downloads since its launch last November. It’s available for both iOS and Android and is totally worth checking out.

➤ Between for iOS | Android

If you’re still wondering why Facebook ponied up a cool billion dollars for photo sharing app Instagram, Experian Hitwise might have just shed some light on it with some interest statistics.

According to Hitwise, Instagram became the 10th most visited social network in the UK last month. That’s absolutely massive, considering that most people see it as “just an app”. Of course, a lot of those photo views come on the web thanks to sharing functionality that blasts photos out to Twitter and Facebook.

In March 2012 alone, Instagram had almost 13 million UK visits on the web, an increase from 300,000 from the same time last year. It’s that type of growth that definitely got Facebook’s attention. That, and the fact that analysts were starting to consider the service a “social network”, which is the space that Facebook must own as it moves forward with going public.

Most of the usage for Instagram still comes from the US, as the service saw 3.8 million visitors in just one week last month.

Interestingly, Facebook is the number one source of traffic for Instagram photos, at least in the US:

Was Instagram a real threat to Facebook overall? Probably not, but when it comes to photos, the app was definitely stealing marketshare quickly. Whenever you see something like Instagram pick up stream in multiple countries, you know that you have a hit on your hands.

There’s been a lot of buzz the past few days about a service called Pair, which lets you interact with your significant other in an intimate way. Think of it as a “Facebook for lovers”, a “Path for couples”, or “Super-SMS”. In just its first few days, the app has seen over a million messages sent using the platform.

However, as it usually goes in technology, the first to execute on an idea isn’t the one that generates the most buzz or sees the most success. The rise of Pair is a perfect example of that, as we’ve seen quite a few apps that are “social network for couples”, but didn’t catch on like Pair has.

Facebook wasn’t the first “social network” and Google wasn’t the first “search engine”. Some of the success of those two companies can be attributed to being at the right place at the right time, along with quite a bit of hard work of course.

The idea of sharing things intimately with people, rather than with the whole world, has only just caught on, and Path’s latest success has a lot to do with it. Version 2 of the app was released at the end of last November and took a few months to gain traction. During that time, we heard about a few apps that wanted to focus on just you and that special someone.

The Others

In early November last year, I wrote about an app called Cupple, which I said would be absolutely perfect for long distance relationships. At that time, its CEO Tim Allison told me this during our interview:

Cupple allows the two people in a relationship to have fun sharing photos and building a feed of memories and there is no concern over how that might be viewed by their wider social network. Email and SMS certainly have their place but they have become very functional and often just blur into the daily routine. Cupple is a richer, more connected sharing experience. And of course, completely mobile.

Sound familiar?

In December of last year, we wrote a post called “4 startups prove that technology can bring couples closer together“, which featured Kahnoodle, Duet, Tokii, and Between. Those apps all had similar features with the same premise; share things with only the person that you love.

None of these apps ever picked up much steam when it comes to getting mentioned in technology press. In addition, none of my non-geek friends used them either. When I mentioned Cupple to my fiancee, she said “why don’t we just use Facebook or texts?”.

Right Place, Right Time

When I told her about Pair yesterday when I came back from Y Combinator Demo Day, she said “Didn’t you already tell me about this app?”. So the idea isn’t new, the features have some differences, but perhaps Pair has the benefit of some “extras” that these companies didn’t have.

First and foremost, being a part of a program like Y Combinator definitely helps entrepreneurs get attention from technology press. Also, Pair was able to watch what others were doing and hone in on a few special features like “Thumbkiss” that would make it stand out. Pair has gotten so much interest that Path’s founder Dave Morin decided to invest.

All of this is a perfect storm that could make Pair stand out from the rest. For everyone else, instead of being frustrated that they didn’t get the same attention, they should be glad that there is now a “space” for their idea, which will allow them to innovate, execute, and perhaps get some funding of their own. Perhaps with all of this new found attention on “social networking for couples”, some of our non-geek friends will start trying some of these apps out for themselves and tell us which ones they like the best. Until then, Pair is the darling.

Just like Microsoft was the dartboard of the Internet for so many years simply because of its sheer size and “power”, Google has become the latest easy target.

Over the weekend, Danny Sullivan wrote a post alerting the world to the addition of a Google+ share box on Google’s homepage. We’ve known that this change was coming for two weeks, but it appears that Sullivan just got the update and it doesn’t sound like he’s a fan.

In his post, Sullivan states the following:

Personally, if (sic) find it intrusive. I don’t get why I want to go to the Google home page to share content on Google+. Rather, I’ll go to Google+, if I want to do that.

Ok, so Danny Sullivan doesn’t like the homepage change. Interestingly enough he goes on to share the following thoughts about the feature towards the end of his post:

Disappointingly, the box has no intelligence to it. If you’re on Google Maps and want to share a link to a location, you have to use a different sharing option. On Google News and want to share the page you’re viewing? Copy and paste the URL is the option. Done a search and want to share those search results? Copy and paste again.

Here’s the part where I get completely confused. He’s not a fan of the feature on the homepage but wished it were better? That’s the problem with how people are handling anything that Google does these days. It seems like everyone wants them to do absolutely nothing, stand pat on what it has, and cease to innovate. Either that or everything they do is flat out wrong. This approach of course goes against everything that makes the Internet so amazing in the first place.

Folks, we can’t have our cake and eat it too. We can’t sit back and complain about every single thing that Google does while we continue to use its existing services on the daily. It’s not only annoying, but it’s completely counter-productive to the web’s ecosystem.

Pando Daily’s Sarah Lacy takes Sullivan’s thoughts to a new level:

We simply don’t need another social network, no matter how great your circles are or how badly Larry Page wants to have one.

She even bolded that statement in her post entitled “This Is Just Getting Sad, Larry: Google’s Latest Effort to Prop Up Google+“. You didn’t even need to read the article to grok how Lacy feels about Google’s entrance into the world of social.

How dare Google change anything at all? How dare Google attempt to make itself a more valuable company by allowing people to share things? How could a company so large make so many stupid mistakes? Maybe they’re not making any mistakes at all and the only mistake being made is the fact that a few folks just don’t like change and need something to bitch about.

Lacy states matter-of-factly that Google is “six years too late to the party” when it comes to social. Last time I checked, Apple was later than that to the mobile phone party. The whole “late” argument is tired and old in and of itself, so I think we should start scoring Google on the merits of its actual work and evolution.

Forget the numbers and the fact that Google+ is barely six months old and start giving some credit where credit is due. All of the reasons why Lacy illustrates as reasons why Google should just “sit this one out” are exactly the reason why it’s rather impressive that Google is building its social products right before our very eyes. Instead of low blows and shallow doubts, I’d much rather continue to watch Google evolve and complain when it’s fair to complain.

For example, I completely agree with Danny Sullivan on the point that the Google+ share box that is viewable on all Google products should be smarter. Is it a complete failure though? No, absolutely not. What’s happened though is Google is too big for us to hug and have drinks with anymore. It’s not a startup, it won’t listen to and value every single word the tech press prints. Therefore, it must get shit on regularly. Just like we shit on Microsoft.

What Lacy and Sullivan aren’t pointing out is that the social features the company are incorporating to its already popular products are a complete shift for the company and its culture. For the first time ever there are Google employees interacting with its users, getting feedback on features, and being quite open with the press. Google isn’t building a social network, it is becoming a social company. Show me an example of a company who has made that move.

Just because it’s going public, Facebook doesn’t own the world of social networking. If we subscribed to that line of thinking we’d all still be using Friendster because Facebook was “late to the party”.

Also, and this is just a reminder, you don’t have to use any of Google’s social features at all. You can turn them off for search and you don’t have to click the share button anywhere else.

Google recently announced and rolled out some changes to the Google Bar that follows you wherever you go while using its products. While it might not have seemed like a big deal, we actually pointed out that some services were getting the front and center treatment with the update. One of those services was Google Docs.

The search giant is slowly but surely getting all of its ducks in a row to become more of a complete solution for consumers. For the first time ever it seems like Google knows exactly what it wants to be when it grows up, which is pretty much everything to everyone. A lofty goal for sure, but since it launched its social network Google+, the entire company has shown a renewed interest in how consumers view and use its products.

Today, the Google Docs team launched its own Google+ page which it will use to announce new features, share tips, and discuss feedback with the community. Here’s what the team had to say about its new presence on Google+:

Here we’ll share user stories, tips and tricks, plus updates from our team. We’re kicking off our new page by featuring a tip and a Hangout for each of our five editors over the next few days – be sure to watch this page closely for announcements.

To learn more about what’s happening with our team and our products, just add us to your circles. Feel free to +us anytime to let us know what you think – we’re looking forward to hearing more from you.

The key line from this short announcement was: “we’re looking forward to hearing more from you“. That’s a phrase we’ve been hearing consistently from the company since it launched Google+ last year. It’s a phrase that you can’t just throw out there as a company because people will absolutely take you up on it. So far, Google has backed up its word and is actually discussing its products with real users. Out in the open.

Have you ever tried to use Facebook’s help and support section? It’s flat, not very social, and doesn’t offer much help. While the teams at Google aren’t promising that they can help you out with every problem in any certain amount of time, the fact that all teams are adopting the practice of doing support and interaction out in the open is nothing short of impressive.

While there are more than 90M users on Google+ as of its last announcement, there are definitely more people who use its products. If those people start to learn that they can take to Google’s social network for support on those products, the userbase will grow.

So while it might not seem like a big deal that the Google Docs team is now on Google+, think about how fast Google has made the transition from a pretty boring and untouchable entity into an absolute social machine, especially when it comes to its own products. By eating its own dogfood, the company is showing everyone else why Google+ has legs and stands for something more than just a “Facebook killer”.

“Social” isn’t a word that people would have used to describe Google until Google+ launched, but just like everything else on the web, the times they are a-changin’.

With all of the talk about how Pinterest usage is skewed towards women, Google+ is apparently dominated by men as more than two-thirds of its 90M members are guys. This is good news for brands who are trying to reach a male-centric audience.

According to report by NetworkWorld citing research by Website-Monitoring.com, Google’s social network is the anti-Facebook, where 55% of users in the United States are female.

Here are some other interesting facts from the research:

- Students are by far the most popular occupation for Google+ users, accounting for just over 20% those sampled. Other popular professions for Google+ users included software engineers (2.65%), consultants (1.99%) and managers (1.72%).

-The United States and India are the two countries with the most Google+ users, as the U.S. accounts for 31.5% while India accounts for 13.7%. The Indian city of Bangalore has the most Google+ users of any individual city, accounting for 3.86% of all Google+ users.

-A 42% plurality of Google+ users are single, while 27.45% are married and 19.3% are in a relationship. Just 4.4% of Google+ users list themselves as engaged, little more than the 3.4% of users who list “it’s complicated” as their relationship status.

-Britney Spears, Snoop Dogg and Google CEO Larry Page are the three most popular individuals on Google+ in terms of total numbers of followers. The three most popular brands on Google+ are H&M, Samsung USA and Pepsi, while the three most popular media pages on the site are ESPN, BBC News and Mashable.

These stats should give brands an extra incentive to get a page going on Google+ if they haven’t already. By knowing that the Google’s social network tends to be used primarily by men, the content that companies share can be written and distributed with that in mind. Some brands that are popular on Facebook probably won’t get as much traction on Google+ since there’s such a lean towards men.

We’ve talked about how companies are seeing a lift of traffic from Pinterest, including sites like Fab and the newly launched Wittlebee. It makes sense because as you can probably tell, those two sites probably skew towards females.

All of this means that if someone out there is looking to promote a brand or service that men would love, Google+ would be the place to focus on.

The “hacktivist” group Anonymous, which took down various government and media sites last week in protest of Megaupload’s takedown and arrests has a new site in its crosshairs, Facebook.

In a video posted today, Anonymous says that it fully intends on bringing down the social networking giant on January 28th at 12 AM:

Our first target… Facebook… While it is true that facebook has at least 60,000 servers… It is still possible to bring it down

While I can appreciate any effort that can bring thousands together to make an important voice heard on the war against maintaining our freedom on the Internet, I have to say that this latest effort seems more like trash-talking than it does a real meaningful campaign.

With very few people understanding what actually went on with the Megaupload case, which was two years in the making, Anonymous was able to take advantage of those who wanted to belong to something, anything. While I don’t condone the attacks on government websites, it was definitely a campaign to remember, and it left a lasting impression on those who supported proposed acts like SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA. Basically, the message from Anonymous was heard loud and clear.

However, I’m going to go out on a ledge and say there are many reasons why these latest efforts from Anonymous are not only misguided, but have no chance of becoming a reality.

60,000 servers and quite a few hackers

You have to remember that Facebook has a culture of hacking. The notion of “hackatons” at the company aren’t just for show or feature films, its developers and engineers eat, sleep, and dream code. When you have a culture that understands the guts of engineering, you must assume that Facebook have thought of what to do in the event of a DDoS attack.

Facebook has been building its infrastructure to near-perfection since Mark Zuckerberg started coding it himself from a dorm room in 2004 and has hired his staff to do the same ever since. In April 2011, we wrote about how the company employs security-minded people for things just like this:

To protect itself from possible compromise, Facebook employs internal whitehats to continually probe and test the security of its website. Engineers constantly monitor data, keeping an eye on machine crashes and look to see if user trends change, working to push out priority fixes with hours. On a typical day, engineers will push numerous updates each day, submitting feature additions/fixes with varying urgency levels.

No real reason

Unlike the attacks on government websites like justice.gov, there is no real battle cry for people to join the ranks of Anonymous and carry out an attack like this. Watch the video below and see if you can find anything like the takedown of Megaupload that Anonymous can use to fuel any potential fire and angst against Facebook:

Back on November 5th of last year, many thought that Anonymous would make an attempt to bring down Facebook, but that turned out to be not the case. The reason was that not all members of Anonymous agreed on the attack, most likely because there was no real reason to carry one out.

This latest threat appears to have one battle cry; “Let’s do it because we can”. Well, nobody can in my opinion.

People actually like Facebook

In five days, Anonymous hopes to find enough people to carry out this hollow attack on Facebook. The only problem is that Facebook has over 800 million global members. It’s very unlikely that it could find enough people to even make a dent on Facebook’s “60,000″ servers, let alone bring them to a standstill or halt them entirely.

Asking users to attack Facebook is like asking them to punch their mother in the face, why would you hurt something that means so much to you? Facebook is a lifeline of communication for many, so the idea of bringing it down is absurd, even if it was possible. There just aren’t enough people who hate Facebook enough to download a tool and waste their time just to say that they did it.

By the time the Megaupload arrests went down, people were already hot and bothered over SOPA, with Wikipedia and Google making a huge stance against the proposed act. Basically, the timing and targets set forth by Anonymous were a perfect storm. This time, not so much.

It won’t happen

In the age where an act like SOPA comes so close to being a bill, I would say that any group who is willing to pull themselves together on behalf of a larger section of the world should be applauded. The attacks against federal websites were against the law though, so it’s a bit difficult to support a group in breaking the law at a large scale when it’s fighting something it sees to be unjust.

As long as there is an Internet though, there will be people who see these types of actions as defensible, therefore Anonymous isn’t going anywhere. In this case, the group leaves itself open to be questioned for its determination to protect other Internet users, especially when it wants to attack something that people genuinely rely on. This latest threat appears to be an empty one, and even if it’s not, it will turn out to be empty when all is said and done.

Thanks to a company called SpinningHat, you can forever memorialize your favorite profile design forever. Or as many times as you plan on taking a shower.

The “Social Shower Curtain” will set you back $23, but it’s worth it for the “lol” factor. Plus, it’s retro already, isn’t it?

The unauthorized Facebook shower curtain comes complete with a transparent window where your profile picture would normally go. If someone dares to enter the bathroom during your morning splash-session, they’ll be able to check your status in real-time. The shower curtain is set to ship in February.

Let’s hope Facebook doesn’t plan on suing like Apple is over the Steve Jobs doll.

➤ Social Shower Curtain

As you know, there is no quick way to share Google+ posts on any other social network. It’s the type of feature that used to drive traffic back to popular conversation engine FriendFeed before it was purchased by Facebook.

In the same way that FriendFeed was a great place to have a full cohesive conversation, Google+ lets you chat with people in real-time without being as fractured and incoherently assembled of an experience as replying to people on Twitter can be.

What Google+ lacks in features, third-party developers are more than making up for with extensions and add-ons for Google’s web browser, Chrome.

One handy Chrome extension is called Extended Share for Google Plus, and it does exactly what it sounds like it does.

Bat signal +

Starting a conversation on Google+ and sharing that link on other social networks is kind of like sending a bat signal out to your friends and followers, asking them to come to a place where “chatting” is better supported.

When you install this Google+ Chrome Extension, you’ll notice that a new “Share On” button pops up next to the existing share button that simply lets you share someone’s Google+ post on your stream.

Now you can send out any Google+ post link to a slew of services including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Tumblr, Posterous, Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon. The preferences for Extended Share let you choose the services you’d like to see show up when you click “Share On” within Google+.

While sharing Google+ links could annoy your Facebook and Twitter friends, it is quite useful if you’re really looking to generate a worthwhile discussion about the topic you’ve posted about. I’ve found that Google+ beats out most services for group conversations, and while the comment system isn’t threaded like it should be, it’s extremely easy to follow a real-time conversation on the service.

While this is a feature that the Google+ team could easily integrate into the service, it’s best left to third-party developers to figure out what services should be included in such a sharing list.

➤ Extended Share for Google Plus

With Facebook’s Timeline coming “Soon”, according to project managers at Facebook, there will be many new things for you to take notice of once it becomes live.

We know that there are all new things to “worry” about when it comes to who sees what on your Facebook profile, but the company will be asking you to worry about what you’re sharing even more by asking you to add “Life Events” to the service.

What are those suggested life events you ask?

They’re broken up into five sections: Work and Education, Family and Relationships, Living, Health and Wellness, and Milestones and Experiences. At first glance, this seems pretty reasonable considering that Facebook is made up of your friends and family for the most part.

After a deeper dive, some of the optional life events seem like over sharing, and shows off Facebook’s insatiable taste for more and more of your data.

Got a piercing or Tattoo?

Facebook seems to be primed to be the digital scrapbook of your entire life with its Timeline product. The layout is quite gorgeous, and even though it can be a bit confusing on why it displays the data that it does and where, it’s definitely a visual upgrade from your current profile.

However, in the status box, you’ll notice the “Life Event” tab.

Adding life events are completely optional of course, but it will be very interesting to see how many people actually dig down deep in their past and share everything that has ever happened to them.

For example, one health and wellness life event asks you to enter any past illnesses.

Even though I very publicly fought cancer myself, I was a bit hesitant to enter this information in. I’m not worried about who sees it as much as I’m interested in how the company will use it. Could they use the data to advertise to me directly? Absolutely. But what else is possible with all of that information about one person. Only Facebook truly knows.

Here are some of the more interesting suggested life events for you to enter into the site’s database:

Some of them seem rather benign and silly like “Got a Piercing or Tattoo”, but then you’ll notice ones like “Changed Beliefs” and “Lost a loved one” which seem creepy to even ask for. I personally would not enter that information into anyones database, let alone a social network’s.

Yes, there are privacy controls on each other, and you could enter these things for only your eyes to see, but it’s kind of disturbing to think that people might be adding these very personal events into a public platform.

There are “Other” options along the bottom of each section, which lets you add your own life event in any category. At what point is this to be considered over sharing, though? Do we really want Facebook to be the one place that has all of our information, past and present? Adding all of this past activity could take hours upon hours, and I’m wondering how many will actually dedicate the time to this.

Will you add the dates of ended relationships, piercing additions, instruments you learned to play, and more once Timeline is released to everyone? Tell us in the comments.