The Webby Awards have announced their 12th annual list of nominees up for this year’s Webby Awards. I always take time to check out all the sites nominated, as I often discover interesting sites that I would never have known about otherwise. It is an incredibly useful tool for folks in advertising, as it provides a wide palette of sites that feature the best in design, navigation and overall best practices.

I also use it as a historical reference, as a zeitgeist of what is popular at a given time on the Internet. It is fun to also check out nominees and winners from earlier years to see how this space has evolved in the past 12 years. And now, the fun bit begins–take some time to check out the People’s Voice Awards, which allows the public to make their opinions heard about the best on the Internet and in mobile.
(Full Disclosure: I am a judge for the Online Advertising category at IADAS, the organization that selects the nominees for the Webby Awards. That means that any sites that I have a conflict of interest with getting a nomination, I did not personally vote for.) 

Suddenly, there are a whole slew of mobile social network tools coming out. Sure there’s Google’s Dodgeball, the recent launch of Moblastic, and now, coming soon, to a mobile phone near you, is Street Hive, from VC-funded mobile company Wavemarket. Wavemarket also is known for their “electronic leash” Family Finder program that is used by Sprint and other CDMA based providers as a way for parents to track where their children are, since all recent CDMA handsets are GPS enabled. Ah, to be a child these days, where your parents can track your every move. What ever happened to simply trusting your children? (Er, well, maybe that has always been an issue? But I digress.) The service currently does not work with GSM phones as the tower triangluation method of tracking is not nearly as accurate as GPS.

Street Hive follows the same logic as Family Finder (and only works with CDMA phones), where you can pinpoint the location of your friends on a map, read profiles of people who are hanging out at the same bar as you, and share photos. This is all well and good, and sure, there are great benefits to these types of tools. Group message broadcasting is nice, and definitely there is something neat about learning intimate details about your fellow bar brethren before you approach them to start up a conversation. (”Do you come around here often?” changes to “OMG we like the same music!”) But, there is a bit of creepiness that this type of openness provides, that I haven’t quite adjusted to yet. From an advertising POV, this is an area to tread lightly, as I’m not sure that people are ready to handle the fact that they being tracked not only by their friends and family, but also by marketers.