Daily Dose of social media: MySpace launching social business directory

MySpace Teams with CitySearch to Launch Local Business Portal – This is exactly the kind of product that newspapers should be developing. It combines social media, a large user base and a business directory. Imagine if newspapers did this for their local communities. It seems like common sense and something that would both serve users well and make money.

Unfortunately, if newspapers and news organizations don’t act fast, partnerships like this could further erode online revenue potential for news organizations. Check out what this partnership could bring to the table:

Citysearch is bringing its database to the table, while MySpace is going to be “socializing” the whole affair. In doing so, businesses will be able to connect with each other, and users will be able to connect with businesses. MySpace Local will over listing pages for small businesses, which will cover three categories at launch: Restaurants, Bars and Nightife. On each listing page, users will be able to rate, review and share media for each business. Users will also be able to add the business to their profile, share a business listing with friends, and add it to their bookmarks.

MySpace Local could also offer up useful channels for direct content distribution to users, sending them coupons, special discounts, exclusive content, and more. This would be especially powerful as there will likely be added integration with MySpace’s own platform, which adds to the viral potential of a business utilizing the Local portal.

Building on MySpace Local will be a slew of commercial opportunities for the businesses as well as for MySpace. It sets the stage for integrated payment options from which users can benefit, as well as extended revenue generation for MySpace, from ads or premium features.

Twitter replies morph into mentions — For those of you who regularly use search.twitter.com or a an app like TweetDeck, this may not seem that revolutionary, but, for everyone else, the Twitter Web interface just got a whole lot more useful. Now instead of just showing tweets @ your username that start with your username, Twitter’s Web interface also shows every time your user name is mentioned.

For Twitter newbies, you may have been missing a lot of times when you were mentioned on Twitter. Now, with the new system, you can see every time you are mentioned (people often @reply to more than one person at once) or when one of your tweets is retweeted (RT).

This simple update also makes the Web interface a lot more useful. This will be especially helpful for journalists who work at organizations that won’t allow them to install an app like TweetDeck.

Tweecious turns Twittered links into Delicious bookmarks — If you’re like me (or worse, @MsBeat) you share a lot of links on Twitter. A big part of what I do is curation. The problem is that while Twitter is great for sharing links, it’s not a great place to store links, unlike sites like Delicious.

Problem solved.

Tweecious is a simple Firefox add-on that turns links you share in Twitter into Delicious bookmarks. It even adds tags. This add-on is still “experimental” but its worth checking out for all those Twitter curators out there.

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