This week: Being Human = being social; Stellar social media; A blog entry, my dear Watson; Super Me SIMS like a good idea; Emmerdale's gone all Ooh-arr 2.0; Netflix gets in on the channel game; Verrrry Pinteresting...; Hangin' out with the President; Will TV soon let it all Hangout too? Search plus a search minus? Facebook ads killing Google - do you buy that? The timeline is nigh; The chilling effects of Twitter censorship; Who has time for playing games?; Death at one's elbow... 

Recent BBC social media news and launches.

 Being Human made a bloody and tearful return to BBC Three on Sunday 5 February. The fourth series shows no sign of losing its social capital and credibility, with much of Twitter seemed to be losing its hive mind with grief over the deaths of... Oh, wait. Spoilers!

As well as the lovely, fan-feeding Being Human Twitter feed and 620K+ fans strong Being Human Facebook page, the Being Human blog has set the transmedia fans afire with clue-hunting to solve the mystery of the scrolls that underpins the story arc of this fourth season. It's a show that really knows its audience, is confident in opening up its narrative and understands that the TV is only the first screen for one hour a week - the rest of the time it's all eyes online.

Stargazing LIVE enjoyed a phenomenal run over its three days of events, gathering over 10,000 people to its Cover It Live events on bbc.co.uk, as well as trending nightly on Twitter and clearing the nations' telescopes from the shopkeepers' shelves! The Stargazing interactive team were on fire and hosted the events and the Flickr group brilliantly. The Sky at Night with Stargazing LIVE Flickr Group now boasts over 16,000 astrophotography images shared by its members.

Buzz of the Week

More potential spoilers, but this time for Sherlock, and really, if you haven't seen the first episode by now, then...! But risk it anyway, because Cyberology's blog post Sherlock: A Perspective on Technology and Story Telling is an excellent consideration of why this reboot of the Sherlock mythology works so well now and could only worked this well because of the distinctive, stylised ubiquity of technology it uses as prop and foil throughout. It's a great post that really nails how bad Sherlock could have been if they'd made it five years ago and how bloody good it is now. More about Buzz.

Social Media Elsewhere

Channel Four have released a new educational online gaming experience about 'being better at life' called Super Me. It centres around an animated sitcom using an old trick -machinima - that is using video games characters to act out dramas (ie the game provides the animations, the camera angles, the sets - you provide the script and actions), a famous version of this being the hilarious Red vs Blue using Halo on the Xbox.

Aside from the improvised SIMS avatar drama, Super Me is a site full of applications, games, videos and rewarded activities designed to build users' self esteem and build their confidence in dealing with the trials of being a member of society. Although the actual full nature and aims of the sitcom/game have left some people a bit flummoxed... Interestingly, to sign up to the game, you log in with Facebook and use the Super Me Facebook app; nothing else. So if you're not on the world's biggest social network, you'll get no help with your self esteem or life skills here, losers... 

Not to be outdone ITV have announced the huge news that Emmerdale is going multiplatform! Paul Bennun of digital agency Somethin' Else (who also make Super Me) states: "Once Emmerdale told stories only on TV. Very shortly it will become the first truly multiplatform drama aimed at a mass audience, its characters coming alive in a playful, social way. It's an honour to be working on a property of this scale with such a forward-thinking broadcaster." Details are still scarce, but the word's out that the 21st centurisation of the long-running rural soap Emmerdale is about to go down.

Netflix (US video on demand streaming service like LoveFilm, now available in the UK) is pushing its original programming strategy (shall we call it a channel strategy...?) in earnest. This newsletter mentioned the long-awaited David Fincher / Kevin Spacey adaptation of BBC's House of Cards, but Netflix is pressing home that that was no side project, with further high profile series such as Lilyhammer arriving and more to follow.

Pinterest got a lot of focus at the end of 2011 as being a site / social network of huge growth - but what is it? Well, it's kind of a cross between Tumblr and Delicious (social bookmarking), although entirely visually focused like a photo-sharing site. It's been described as a place to create mood boards from the things you discover and like online, and that's very close to the feel of it. Essentially Pinterest allows you to clip and store images on sites in a categorised area (pinboard) in your Pinterest account. It's a very nice user interface and pretty simple to get a hang of, and already visually strong brands (such as The Travel Channel, The Weather Channel and of course the socially ubiquitous Jamie Oliver) are making headway on the site as a referrer to their pages (apparently more effective for driving traffic to sites than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined!).

However, buyer beware, Pinterest has also recently come under scrutiny for apparently undisclosed monetisation by link tracking users' pins on the site. Not uncommon practice online, but the lack of declared interest has bothered some. Worth a look though, as it’s currently a leader in a field of many such bookmarking sites. It's still behind an invite only beta (but you can get invites, just leave your email and wait a week or so). 

Google continues to push the Google+ social network, with Hangout events featuring Barak Obama talking to several users at a time. Mashable and others recounted and evaluated Obama's Hangout - you can make your own mind up by watching below:

So the question everyone is asking... Ok, some people are asking, is will Google+ Hangouts transform traditional TV broadcasting? Well, likely not the likes of Being Human, but maybe News and other live shows. BBC College of Journalism's multimedia trainer, Ramaa Sharma has written a piece considering Google+ Hangouts and their potential role in engaging with the users in news - including her own video of a hangout she took part in with Hangout / Journalism pioneer Sarah Hill from local US news outlet KOMU.

(Psst. Want to see what Google's thinking about when it comes to developing stuff for Google TV? Probably not - it's very techy. But this Google Guide for developing for TV has some insights into the Google's vision of connected television.)

More controversially, Google has launched Search+ in the US, which brings more results from the Google+ ecosystem to the fore, to the point that commentators observe this is not only skewing results to promote Google+, but arguably delivering poorer, less relevant results as a consequence.  NB - this appears to be largely a Google.com, rather than google.co.uk issue at the moment, but it's likely to become relevant soon.

This point has been helpfully hammered home by a collective of developers who have created a browser plug-in called 'Don't Be Evil'. This plug-in will allow you to run a search on Google, view the search+ results, then press the don't be evil button to reveal the search results you would get without Google's new approach. The results shown on the video below are remarkable and could be troubling to brands with social media investment not currently focusing on Google+.  

Who are these developers behind Focus on the User and the don't be evil app? They're disclosed as employees of Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. I think the cold war of Social Search just went to DefCon 2. 

Talking of search and social media advertising, I'd like to highlight a brilliant blog post Is Facebook killing Google? No, but... by author Jeff Andrews. The post compares Google's advertising search model with Facebook's social advertising. Google's ads are completely serving a desire to discover / buy at that moment, but Facebook ads are like demographically targeted adverts on cable tv. Fascinating reading.

Facebook Timeline for brand pages. It's coming. So start thinking about your Facebook page in a more visual, chronological way. BUT also bear in mind that many users may only visit your FB page once. They receive updates via their newsfeed and react from there - click links, like, comment etc. from within their own news feed. Nevertheless, your shop front is about to undergo a remarkable change - possibly in the next month. We'll keep Facebook Page owners updated.

Interesting stuff emerged from Twitter around the ability of a nation state to request a tweet be censored from view in a given geography - not removed from Twitter as a whole, mind, only obscured from view for users registered in the country that has requested the tweet be censored for breaching the laws of that state. Not as shocking as it sounds, Twitter has always had recourse for people / states to remove tweets that break laws, but the system has been adapted to make this redaction more transparent.

But fear not the boot stamping on a human face - forever (at least not this time round). There are several avenues for the free interneteers out there - Twitter posts all requests to remove tweets from its service on the EFF's transparency site Chilling Effects - not the full details of the tweet, but a record of the takedown request and the reasons given by the named party. Furthermore, Twitter's geo-location censorship is based entirely upon user declarations. IE: you see trending topics in London on Twitter because you've told Twitter you're in London. Tell it you're in Damascus and voila - you're looking at trends in Damascus. Likewise you fall upon a censored tweet while in China, say - just flip your location to New York and it's freedom of speech all the way, baby.

Infographic of the week: who are social gamers?

We hear a lot about social games like FarmVille, but what's the fastest growing social game today? And who are these people playing these things? The numbers and demographics on this infographic detailing the latest study on social gamers may surprise you.

 And Finally...

Author, Chuck Wendig, has decided to crowd source ideas for his latest novel. Part of adark fantasy called Blackbirds, one of the characters is able to foresee a person's death by touching them. So rather than sit through an interminable 6 episodes of the Final Destination franchise for inspiration, Chuck's thrown the doors open to Tumblr to ask people to submit their possible deaths to This Is How You Die for a shared experience of the experience we all share in experiencing alone...

Er...?

This dark and psycho Barbie is definitely one of my favourites so far!  http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lytky7bqv21r00j7yo1_500.jpg

Please note: this is my personal blog. This post is in no way an official communication from the BBC. I write a fortnightly update for BBC Vision staff interested in social media on and off bbc.co.uk. The items covered are on and about the social web; I post the notes here for anyone interested in the hope that they may spark further ideas or knowledge-sharing. Listen to my Off The Wall Post podcasts here.