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Beginning next month, Facebook will include location-based status updates into its makeup, allowing all 400 million-plus users to update not just with short text blurbs, but with current location as well.  Twitter activated geo-location on their status as well, just in time for South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas – one of the biggest tech gatherings in the nation.

Twitter activated their geo-location through the API in November, but did not incorporate it into status updates until yesterday.  Facebook, meanwhile, updated their privacy settings (to much controversy) in November, setting a new policy allowing for the location-based updates.  Those updates will launch late next month at Facebook’s f8 conference.

According to the New York Times, Facebook does promise to make the location updates optional so that users can participate (or not) as they wish.

Both Facebook and Twitter have been eyeballing the geo-location apps that have hit mainstream for months and many believed that either would make a move to buy out either or both of the major players in geo-location games (Foursquare and Gowalla).  So far, that hasn’t happened and it’s become clear that Facebook, at least, plans to compete with them rather than try to absorb them.

TechCrunch unveiled the Twitter update, which includes overlay maps of the user’s location when a location-based tag has been added to a tweet.  The update is by no means seamless, however, with some tweets appearing as place names and others appearing as map overlays.  Some don’t appear at all, as I failed to get either to work on my own Twitter account.  It is possible, of course, that Twitter is rolling this out slowly over accounts in the network.

In either case, it looks like the new location-based war is on with everyone getting in on the action.

Social media is taking the business of the Internet by storm and is the marketing wave of the now as well as the future. Yet social media is not nearly as social as people might like you to think. Recent events right here in South Florida proved that many of the so-called social media experts are, in fact, just self-serving marketing whiners. The social media bubble is about to burst.

Recently, the Sun Sentinel announced this year’s Best of Blogs Awards for South Florida in which fans of various blogs could click through to vote on their favorites. The winner will be announced tonight, but the complaining and whining from those who think they should have won has already started. I learned about this because my own blog, WorstPizza.com, was up for the win and outpaced all of these complainers.

Looking at the others who complained, most of which are self-proclaimed social media experts, one thing became very apparent: these blogs have no traffic. Despite being supposed experts in media and social networking, these bloggers have an average of 10 visitors per day versus those on the short list for the win of the BOB Awards, which all have 500 or more visits per day.

Yet these self-absorbed social media mavens are busy crying fowl, calling the awards a joke, bashing those who are on the winners list. Which proves that they are not social media experts, but are instead self-serving media experts. These are people who just don’t understand social media and what it really is. Unfortunately we are living amongst several dozen down here in South Florida.

Sure, social media can be used to gain a lot of traffic and marketing, but it isn’t done by having a thousand (robot) followers on Twitter or a couple of hundred fans on Facebook. For those so-called experts, the bubble is about to burst.

No, social media marketing is about interacting with people, helping one another, and giving value. At the same time these bloggers have been bashing my own website, others on my friends lists have been extremely helpful and have shown what social marketing is supposed to be. Several commented on my great blog, wished me luck, and even asked me to go and vote for them. Most made sure that their networks were also in on the voting, getting the social crowd-sourcing on the task to get out the vote.

Social media users like @thetinyjewelbox, @malcolli (for AutoNation), @midtownchica and @vicequeenmaria are examples of how it should be done. They continually give their South Florida friends help, ideas, and value. One look at their tweets shows that they are interacting, not just playacting to gain a crowd.

Soon, those who are building empty networks and attempting to gain by sucking all they can from those social webs will find their bubble bursting. Those who really understand social networking and media and use it the way it should be used will be the ones who outlast and prevail. No matter how much crying and whining you do!

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, did a live interview at Search Marketing Expo West in California (transcript here).  He said several things that have a lot of people asking a lot of questions and making more than a few conjectures too.  The recent deal with Yahoo! that has received the OK from the European Union and will begin rolling out over the next year plus the question of who’s talking to who at Twitter are hot topics right now.

Ballmer’s remarks on the deal with Yahoo! made it clear that Microsoft wants to roll forward with their advertising and integration, through Bing, quickly.  At the same time, CNBC interviewed Yahoo’s CEO, Carol Bartz, and pointedly asked her not only about the attempted buyout by Microsoft (for which Bartz was not CEO or even at Yahoo), but about whether she would entertain another MS offer today.  Her answer to the latter?  “Sure.”

Now the question there is whether Microsoft would be amenable to offering another buyout.  With Yahoo’s stock down to around the $15 mark per share, it could be a bargain for the Seattle Giant, who offered $33/share a couple of years ago.  The new question now would be whether MS would gain much from the purchase, since Bing is already beat that double-digit market share on its own.

Speaking of that, much of the conversation during the Q&A with Ballmer centered on Bing’s growth and, of course, the search giant: Google.  Ballmer was willing to give props to Google for “getting it right first.”  His implication, obviously, being that being first doesn’t necessarily make them best anymore, but it does give them the King of the Mountain status (for now).

Now for Twitter.  During the interview, the MS CEO was asked about Twitter.  Here’s his resposne to that, which you can judge for yourself:

Q: You mentioned Twitter. Buy them, should you be buying them? Should you get them out there, they’ve got that great data, shouldn’t you just own the whole company and have it out there?

STEVE BALLMER: Not clear. I mean, we have a great relationship and partnership with Twitter. Not clear to me. I mean, I would hate to not have that partnership. Whether we need to own the company or not I think is far less clear. In some senses, as an independent, they have a lot of value and a lot of credibility, I think, with their user community. Would they have that same credibility with the user community if they were captive? Not clear. And they want to be an independent company, which means we want to have a great partnership with them, and do a good job.

Coming from that outspoken CEO, a non-answer like that says volumes.  Obviously, partnership or buyout are just as good as far as Microsoft is concerned.

Up until a few years ago, finalizing contracts or other legal documents online required a lot of overnight FedEx and back-and-forth faxing.  Now, most are sending electronic documents, finalizing terms, then printing and mailing or faxing signed versions.  The next step is obvious and EchoSign.com is working to provide that step.

The site has been around quite a while, debuting back in 2006.  The setup then was simple: finalize your documents together online, upload it to EchoSign, and tell the site who you want it emailed to.  Each person received the document, signed it, and sent it to a fax number for collaboration.

Fast-forward to today and we find EchoSign still going strong, having just reached a million users in September and processed more than $200 million worth of contracts in a month.  The largest change since the beginning has been the addition of electronic signatures, now that most international law accepts those.

EchoSign is based on a freemium model with the basic service being free and extra services and higher-end additions coming at cost.  Prices range anywhere from $14.95 to $300 per month depending on your usage level, options, etc.  Some of those premiums include encrypted PDFs, password protection services, and so forth.

Co-founder and CEO Jason Lemkin says that the huge growth in Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing has taken off.  EchoSign is embedded in many of those business-oriented SaaS platforms like Zoho.

Both DocuSign and Verisign are hot on EchoSign’s heels, but the startup recently pulled in another $8.5 million in funding and, Lemkin says, has been in the black for almost a year, with the new influx of funds going towards new upgrades and expansion.

EchoSign is based in Palo Alto, California.  The site is ridiculously easy to use and straight-forward with accounts ranging from free (1 user, 5 signatures/month) to $299 with 10+ users and unlimited everything.

Today, we’re doing something a little different from our usual here at Rev2. We usually review websites, talk about new applications, and such, today we’re going to look at a whole development framework and some of the training opportunities available.

If you aren’t familiar with the Grails framework for Web development or the Groovy background, then it’s likely that you aren’t a developer or in a business related to that. If you do know what it is and are interested in how it’s progressing as a platform for development, you’ll want to know about the upcoming conferences for Grails and Groovy.

There’s one on each coast coming up, the first is at the end of this month in San Francisco from September 22 to 24 and the other is in New York on November 3 to 5. Both are all-day events for their duration, 9am to 5pm, and have basically the same outline and agenda.

These three-day workshop covers both Groovy and Grails information and will bring updates to the current and near-future upgrades to be made to their standards. They workshops will introduce the programming language of Groovy and then the Grails web app framework to go with it.

The workshops promise to be intense and will be taught by some of the most well-known names in Groovy and Grails today. The idea is to take students (attendees) from the beginning point of literally installing Groovy compilers on their system to being proficient in its use and applying it to the Grails framework for web apps.

It definitely promises to be a definite event for learning with a lot of information. It looks like attendees can expect to see a lot of information in a very short amount of time. Teachers will include Jeff Brown, Graeme Rocher, and Guillaume Laforge, all founders of the Groovy and Grails systems.

Europeans and Asians won’t be left out either, though the teachers and special guests will be different. In Europe, starting also on September 22, conferences will be held in Sweden, the UK, Norway, Amsterdam, Paris, and Brussels. In Asia, starting in December, conferences will be held in three locations in India: Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bangalore.

This is a great opportunity for people who’re in Web development or interested in broadening their knowledge of it to gain some real-world, useful knowledge on Groovy and Grails.

You can find out more at Grails.org.

Google’s YouTube has finally entered the social media stream with the addition of a new feature that allows users to share their videos on Facebook, Google Reader, and Twitter. This is for those who upload videos to YouTube and goes along with the already ubiquitous share button.

Most users are just saying “gee, it’s about time, YouTube.” The release of this new feature was added with little fanfare, but it immediately got some attention around the Web. I learned about it through a tweet from my own stream.

It’s obvious that YouTube probably has this sharing in the works for the “favorites” and may be working towards a FriendFeed-style feed to go with Google Reader. This could mean trouble for startups like TwitVid, which allow for video sharing directly to your Twitter stream.

TwitVid, however, still has the advantage of allowing commentary alongside the video built-in (so your tweet has comments plus the video link) and it publishes nearly immediately. YouTube still has a long lag before the tweet and Facebook updates actually take place—ten to fifteen minutes, generally.

In my opinion, this is a nice little addition to YouTube, but probably is a bit “too little, too late.” There are already so many easier ways to share YouTube videos that I doubt this will get a lot of play. It’s still just as easy to send a tweet with a shortened URL as it is to have it sent automatically in this way. Faster too, generally.

Most in the industry suspect that Google is about ready to quit neglecting YouTube and may have some things up their sleeve for release soon. Google doesn’t generally sit on their haunches and they wouldn’t acquire something as huge as YouTube, shut down their own Google Video service, and then just sit around and look at YouTube wondering what to do with it.

That’s Microsoft’s job. Haha