Facebook is quickly becoming the primary social communication channel in our everyday lives. Yes, primary. We spend much more time obsessively interacting with people on Facebook than we do by phone and for some a life-line. I think that they could take it one step further by implementing video chat capability — a functionality that has garnered 521 million users for Skype (not the only reason for its success). Apparently last year Facebook began to include hints in its code that it may be implementing such a feature, but no news of it has been released since.

ReadWriteWeb has a great piece about the social needs that Chatroulette — the video chat site that pairs people randomly — fills for users: the craving for peeking, face-to-face online, control, and the “no commitment effect.” I want to focus on the need for face-to-face communication with people.

I don’t have the numbers for this, and if you have them I would love to see them, but anecdotally I have a lot of friends that are growing discontent with social networking starting to feel impersonal or detached, at least when it comes to conversations and chats on Facebook. Short, brief blurts of conversation back and forth with friends or family. Waiting for the slow reply as their friends multi-task. The conversation can be disjointed. This experience is of course does not represent a majority of the people out there, and I don’t really mind my experience on Facebook chat (or other chat service), but I can still empathize.

More people want a face-to-face communication, especially with family members who are far away. The default right now is Skype, but not everyone has the service, and some people use Google Chat’s video feature. Again, not everyone has a G-mail account. Imagine if Facebook had an option for you to chat with friend using a video chat feature.

Next, this could be integrated into its mobile application, allowing you to chat and communicate with friends on-the-go (of course this would require phones with two video screens). Not sure if the folks at Facebook are working on this already, but I sure hope they are at least thinking about it. Would love your thoughts on this. Here is an example of what it would look like (taken from Facebook chat and G-Chat and meshed together):

So what say you Mark Zuckerberg?

The Startup is a four-chapter video documentary with interactives on a young tech startup trying to make it in New York City. My colleague Alex Hotz and I followed the entrepreneurs behind TeamHomeField.com for the past four months as they develop and grow their web-based video application for sports teams. It’s being hosted on NYC30.com, but I wanted to feature the intro for the project here, which is included below and includes the likes Fred Wilson, Nate Westheimer, Charlie O’Donnell and more.

The intro briefly explores how the New York City’s start-up community is growing, evolving and becoming more collaborative. In 2008, 95 seed and early stage startups could be found in the Big Apple. In 2009 that number shot up to 150, according to Union Square Ventures. Many of these start-ups are technology focused, gaining prominence and growth in recent years. In many ways, the scene is reaching a new level, 3.0. This is the inspiration behind “The Startup” and its hosting website, NYC 3.0. The project was quite time-consuming and both Alex and I learned a lot. We hope you check it out at NYC 3.0 on our homepage. Also, take a look at the interactive timeline of TeamHomeField and a map of some of the tech startups in the city. This is the first project of its kind I’ve completed and have learned a lot about producing an in-depth multimedia piece.

I took the excerpts from Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism “State of the News Media 2010” report and inserted them into wordle to get a word cloud of the text. It’s interesting that “pay” comes up as one of the dominant words. I am guessing it will be a theme for this year.

Here are a few takes on the report for you to digest:

• “Pew: Online News Users Don’t Want To Pay—Or Look At Ads” - PaidContent
• Most Online News Readers Use 5 Sites or Fewer, Study Says - The New York Times
• State of the Media, By the Numbers - Columbia Journalism Review
• The State of Newspapers? Think of Sand Falling in an Hourglass, Pew Report Says - Editor and Publisher

With South by Southwest Interactive Conference beginning, there’s been a lot of talk about who will take the reign in location-based services and apps. With Twitter rolling out its new geotagged tweets and Facebook on the verge of allowing users to share their location, the spotlight and pressure seems to be on the likes of Gowalla and Foursquare. Both have rolled out some significant updates recently, but who will take the lead?

CNN thinks it will be Foursquare. I was interviewed for the article and had these thoughts:

“I think it’ll be a while before it really reaches a mass audience,” said Vadim Lavrusik, a tech journalist, social-media consultant and graduate student at Columbia University.

“For us techies, we sometimes tend to exaggerate how quickly these things are going to grow because everybody in our circles is using it. But that doesn’t mean the general public is using it.”

Still, he said many of the criticisms he’s heard about Foursquare are eerily similar to the ones he heard from people saying Twitter would never take off.

“People say, ‘Why would people want to know where I’m at? Will my friends actually come and join me if they’re on it?’ ” he said. “I say, ‘If they’re on it, yeah, they will.’ “

Would love to hear what you think?

Here’s an idea that Shane Snow and I have had for a site and I’ve been meaning to share it for quite some time. The basic idea is to solve a problem in location-based restaurant information apps and websites: fragmentation. The rough name we were throwing around was Socially Edible (sociallyedible.com).

Let’s create a one-stop shop that combines online restaurant reviews (Yelp), location-based social gaming (Foursquare), and online food ordering (SeamlessWeb), and sprinkle in some journalist-produced restaurant reviews to create a connected user experience for foodies.

Why not start with a specific location, say, New York. These features with the combination of social media and mobile technology would make it easier for New Yorkers to get food news and information on the go, as well as the ability to order from our site.

A person looking to get some information on a restaurant can not only read what a reporter has written, but also what website users are logging in to say. On top of that users can also see what the buzz is on social media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) through trending topics as well as specialized social sentiment reports for each restaurant page (perhaps by using social media mining software?). In addition, users can explore new restaurants in their area by searching with their address or zipcode and browse through search results on a map or list.