Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

Even though summer doesn’t become official until next week, we think it’s already time to hit the beach!

We’re going to work on our tans and enjoy our Summer Fridays policy with these stories in mind:

Facebook To Debut Real-Time Bidding On Advertising Prices

Facebook took a step towards the inevitable distributed ad network by launching Facebook Exchange. According to Bloomberg, the service will allow marketers to target ads to users on Facebook based on sites they have visited around the web. AdAge says the demand-side ad platform signals “a new age of marketing”.

Experience more with expanded Tweets

Twitter is embedding more of the web shared through it’s service into twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com (coming soon to their iPhone and Android apps). This should give users more reason to visit Twitter’s own sites rather than consume their Twitter feeds via 3rd-party apps such as HootSuite and TweetDeck. This, in turn, allows Twitter to display more of their promoted tweet ads and encourage people to see their new editorial content.

Continued Rise Of Pinterest And Visual Social Networks

This week saw Michelle Obama join Pinterest and Project Runway launch a “Make It Work” campaign that runs on Pinterest, Instagram, Piictu and Viddy. These apps have been able to grow quickly thanks to integration with Twitter and Facebook’s login features and open graph. Brands have been jumping on these secondary networks in hopes to stand out compared to the crowded major social outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but we’re already starting to see saturation. On a side note, we just stumbled upon Mashable’s “Everything Pinterest” pinboard. So meta.

Microsoft to Buy Yammer

Speculations have been brewing all week, but the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft indeed agreed to buy Yammer for $1.2 billion. Assuming the acquisition completes, Microsoft now goes up against Salesforce who’s Chatter enterprise social network is the closest competitor to Yammer.

Social Media Integration Via RFID At Music Festivals

We’ve gotten to witness several friends keep us updated with their whereabouts at Coachella, Bamboozle, and most recently Bonnaroo. Wristband makers ID&C are bringing RFID to the masses this year at many major festivals. The technology makes a ton of sense for a music festival (much like it does for ski resorts) and we love the intersection of offline and online social activity. The Facebook integration at Bonnaroo merely checked you into the festival and put the stage and band you were watching in the message that accompanied the checkin. We think much cooler integrations could be enabled by integrating Facebook’s Open Graph to provide a richer experience including a Timeline aggregation of all the bands you saw, most popular stages, etc.

Did we miss a bit o’buzz? Did you ever see a cat’s eyes in the dark and wonder what they were? Let us know here and join in on the conversation!