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Ticlr.com is an example of how Facebook is evolving into a network of networks, a trend that could someday remove any sense of a website having a beginning and end

The Winchester, Mass.-based company depends on getting permission to use members' Facebook contacts in order to make it easy for them to send gifts purchased on Ticlr.com. The gifts can be big to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries or small to break the ice when trying to get a first date.

Tradesparq.com reflects a social networking trend in which sites leverage who a person knows as a way to add credibility to potential business deals. Without LinkedIn, Tradesparq.com would be just another business-to-business site. With the professional network, the company can use a buyer's LinkedIn contacts to put him in touch with people who know the Chinese supplier bidding on a product request.

"It's interesting. Do I want everything I read to be broadcasted? To be honest, I'm not sure I always do," Herman says. "Which is why, on Storify at least, I cancel it when it's not something I want to share." Should readers have to be on guard and take that extra step? And what's the upside of frictionless sharing? Why is this good for readers? "I mean, clearly it's more meaningful when someone decides to actively share something," Herman says. "It would be bad if a share from just happening to read something through Open Graph got the same weight as something that you actually shared."

Instead of a willful act of sharing, which says to your Facebook friends, "This matters to me," frictionless sharing is just a broadcast of your Internet habits. There's no benefit for you except as a kind of vain performance, and there's very little benefit to your friends, since the signal-to-noise ratio goes way up.

[Facebook is] doing some tweaking with the algorithm to make it less prominent," Herman says. "I guess they're realizing, you know, maybe these things aren't as engaging as they thought they would be."

If people are seeing stories from these papers on Google+, they either don't like them or they aren't bothering to tell Google. The New York Times, with over 360,000 followers, receives an average of 26,665 +1s per week. That's fewer than one +1d article a week for every 10 followers. The Times only posts to Google+ a few times per week, and it's not always posting links to NYTimes.com pages. But few of its Google+ posts have more than 50 +1s, and they theoretically reach 360,000 people.

What's even weirder is that The Washington Post, with 5% of the followers The New York Times has, gets more +1s than any other newspaper. With 33,206 +1s per week on average, the Post is the only major U.S. paper (with more than 200 followers) that gets a significant multiple of weekly +1s per follower. It gets 1.7 +1s per person encircling it, and the rest of the leaders get a small fraction of their follower count.

But so does WSJ.com, the #2 U.S newspaper in terms of Google+ followers, and its +1s are still a small fraction of its number of followers. All these papers have about the same level of activity on their Google+ pages, and their +1 activity on those posts is about the same.

the stand-alone website, in all of its pixilated glory, is becoming obsolete. Yes, you do need something for potential customers to bring up in their browsers when they type in companynamedotcom. But you also don't need to put a lot of effort into its creation. Here is why.

The days of building community are happening outside of your own dot com. It used to be that you created brand awareness and a destination for your customers by having your own site. No longer. Now, there are plenty of others who will do it for you, and often they will do so without you having to pay them.

Yes, she does have her own business website. She does need it to give her business a sense of legitimacy and purpose. But that site gets dozens of visitors a week, rather than the hundreds or thousands that the other sites do.

The news audience is evolving faster than news providers, though. Gingras told us that, only a few years ago, 50% of the inbound audience went to the front page, and the other 50% went straight to stories or other pages. By now, 75% of traffic is going to stories. A minority of visitors ever see a site's front-page curated presentation of the news.

the value of information is not just in the knowledge of it; it's in what you can do with it.

News isn't just about information. It's also storytelling. Anyone can publish text, photos or even video to the Web now. But technology enables new, compelling storytelling techniques that could shine in the hands of dedicated news organizations.

49% of American wineries (19% of French) have a dedicated marketing manager who creates and publishes content on social networks. 30% of American wineries have been using Facebook ads to promote their winery (only 7.6% of French wineries).

72% of American wineries and 69% of French wineries say they will be increasing their activity on Facebook in 2012. Twitter isn't seen as so important, with 61% of American wineries and 45% of French wineries saying they will increase their activity on Twitter in 2012.

The new laptop, which Apple unveiled last week, already has Web designers and developers trying to figure out how they're going to create sites and Web apps that look good on the new machine without leaving the rest of the Web's population behind.

One of the key advantages of these high-resolution displays is their crisp, highly readable rendering of text. That particular buck stops with the Web browsers, which are much more varied on the desktop than on mobile devices. Naturally, Safari supports retina-friendly text, but Chrome is still working on it, and other browsers will presumably follow.

For image-heavy sites, swapping out higher-resolution images can have a substantial impact on page load, which in turn affects user experience and even search engine rankings.