It looks like road trips will never be the same again. Ford Motor Company and University of Michigan students teamed up to create Caravan Track, a new app to connect cars heading out on cross-country adventures.

Twitter is optimizing the way we search for tweets and, more importantly for its future, giving companies fresh opportunities to advertise within a Twitter conversation stream.

Youtube is taking advertising to a whole new level. It is allowing for “do-it-yourself” advertising, and it says that the amount of advertising on its page has increased 10 times in the past year. But will it pay off for social-savy companies?

Edison Research came out with their yearly report on Internet and multimedia usage in the US. The big news is the massive increase in Twitter-awareness, but tweeting participation remains low.

Millward Brown today released a new report ranking the world’s most valued brands. While the research agency mentions the importance of social media in future valuations (it’ll be big, they say), it bases its methodology on more traditional metrics. We thought it might be interesting to do a kind of mashup of the results, taking a look at how their top ten ranked if you added a measure of their social media presence.

It’s been over a week since the release of both Twitter’s @Anywhere and Facebook’s “Like” button. Both promised to change the way people interact with one another and with the issues and brands they feel most strongly about. But only one appears to be living up to the hype.

In yesterday’s post we talked about how Facebook’s Open Graph was going to revolutionize online shopping and advertising online by adding the social touch. But it appears Open Graph is just the tip of the …

At yesterday’s F8 conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg proclaimed there would be “one billion Like buttons on the web within 24 hours after launch.” True to his word, we’re seeing an impressive numbers of “Like’s” …

With Facebook’s F8 conference out of the way and their new additions in play, here are two retailers who are jumping in on the new functions and exploring the promise and limitations of social shopping.

The Facebook F8 conference in San Francisco starts today. Here’s what you need to know about how Facebook is going to change your brand’s online experience.