*808 Girl Media*

On Saturday, May 8th 2010, join your neighbors in stamping out hunger in your own backyard.

…

You CAN help stamp out hunger:

1. Place non-perishable food products in a bag
2. Leave the bag or bags at your mailbox on the morning of Saturday, May 8th 2010
3. Your letter carrier will pick up…

Before even reading this post on Mashable, I thought to myself, “There’s no way Foursquare doesn’t win this matchup.” Much like a sports announcer might say there’s no way USC gets beat by Oregon State. Oh wait… :D

But I digress.

Let’s just say that Foursquare kicked some major Gowalla-by booty. It had already been speculated that Foursquare had a “tremendous” SXSW; but ViralHeat brought the proof in the pudding. The infographic above shows that the West was won by Foursquare…by quite a bit.

I’ll be honest - I don’t even think I KNOW anyone who uses Gowalla? Do you?

A visual interpretation of the stats also published on the LA Times “Go Mobile” blog today. I’m a fan of the visual presentation, myself!

Of couse, these stats make no mention of the large percentage of Twitter users who sign up for the service, but never use it. I also don’t know who updates from their “mobil” phone…maybe that’s a regional thing?

from keithmoore:

Social media is not as influential a source of product recommendations as previously thought, according to a survey by online advertising company ARAnet, conducted by Opinion Research Corp. According to the poll, only 18% of respondents indicated that they prefer to receive their recommendations for products and services. In comparison, 60% cited they rely on information gathered from colleagues, 40% rely on TV broadcasts, and 39% find their recommendations through search.

Clearly, the respondents were allowed to choose more than one answer, which leads me to ask a follow-up question. If so many people are part of social networks, wouldn’t gathering information from your Facebook friends count as “information gathered from colleagues?”

Sure, in the case of “professional” social networking, LinkedIn still reigns supreme, but there are many Facebook users who connect with business colleagues as well. In this case, many of them hold recommendations from business and industry contacts in high regard.

Read the entire article on BtoBOnline.com, and let me know what you think. Would you consider product information gathered from social networks to be “information from colleagues”?