Best Buy has announced that it would be trying out an advanced geo-location social shopping application called Shopkick for mobile phones in its US retail stores by October 1. From what we’ve seen, the app has a simple yet powerful rewards system with an ultra-sensitive location determiner to reward shoppers for walking around the store and browsing specific items. With this new level of geo-location shopping geekiness, Facebook moving to roll out its own geo-location service and Foursquare membership soaring, are we seeing the next digital battlefield forming on the geo-shopping front?

Ad spending on social networks in the U.S. will grow to $1.7 billion this year and $2.9 billion in 2011, estimates eMarketer in a new report published today. That’s much improved on its previous estimates for 2010. Facebook is the major catalyst, but it’s but one driver. Here’s our take on which social media channels will be the primary drivers of social ad growth.

Three days after the most epic on-the-job resignation of the decade, the Steven Slater Facebook page has grown to 172,500 supportive fans. The mainstream press has been all over it. The Late Night With Jimmy Fallon show produced a song in honor of Slater, and even ex-autourny Headline News host Nancy Grace publicly cheered Slater on. But who’s the only one not talking about Steven Slater? Jet Blue airlines, one of the most social media-savvy and customer-friendly companies out there.

When companies want to advertise on Twitter they will now have someone to call. Twitter is hiring an ad sales team to boost its revenues through Promoted Tweets, and it is giving advertisers and third-party developers an open application programming interface (API) to develop the catchiest pay-for-view Tweet tactics. With Twitter’s popularity going through the roof and easier access for ad-hungry brands, we may finally be seeing the start of a profitable ad platform.

Big brands are going where the money is: social gaming. As Facebook boosts its advertising revenue due to a surge in membership and traffic, brands are buying in to get a piece of the viewing time. Meanwhile, Google is making moves to get into the social gaming arena. Could this be the perfect social gaming storm?

Our social networking addiction is growing. Add more time and more people and the implications are (not surprisingly) very clear: social networking has established itself as one of the fastest-growing and most used communication channels today. Combined with the explosion of our ‘always on’ mobile society this has cemented the Twitter’s and Facebook’s of the world as valuable customer service goldmines.

It’s never an easy decision to kill off a brand, particularly a geeky brand that was all the rage just a year ago. So, not surprisingly, Google’s announcement yesterday to pull the plug on Google Wave, a real-time communication/collaboration app, is not going over so well this morning with die-hards who’ve taken to Twitter, Facebook and blogs to voice their displeasure with Google. In real-time.

A whopping 1.8 billion people have access to your most intimate details. That’s the finding of a creepy new study by Word Stream Internet Marketing that concludes basically anyone with a cheap laptop and a wifi connection can snoop around, check out your friends and hobbies, and even know when you’re away from home, thanks to the proliferation of social networks like Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla and Twitter. Facebook, in particular, is the big culprit.

That’s the conclusion of the latest comScore study which finds that women spend far more time than men online connecting with their social network of friends and acquaintances. Perhaps that’s not surprising until you consider that women, on average, spend roughly 90 minutes more per month on social networks than men. That amounts to 5.5 hours/month for women on the likes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube compared to about 4 hours for men.

Reuters’ Leslie Gevirtz kicked up a bit of a fuss earlier this week when she reported how French winemakers are still a bit too snobby when it comes to social media marketing, particularly when compared to more net-savvy New World producers. She based some of her reportage on a recent study conducted by My Social Winery that detailed just how anti-social French winemakers are. The results may surprise you.