What also took mere minutes was the indignant faction who were either annoyed, offended, or downright angry. While watching the BCS game (which is an entirely separate argument we won’t discuss), I found myself in a heated debate with a friend as to the effectiveness/harm of posting your bra color for breast cancer awareness. Her key point was that “hollow gestures threaten to undermine substantive action” and she circled back to her favorite rant topic: the aligning of twitterers with the Iranian democracy revolt last summer. I disagree strongly; people turning their avatars green has no effect – negative or positive – on Iranians’ fight for democracy, just as typing the word “beige” next to my name on Facebook isn’t going to set breast cancer research back 10 years.

What it does do however is a couple of other important things. It serves a very real sociological need for affiliation. Humans define themselves, at least partially, by their causes. “I’m against Prop 8; therefore I am liberal and open-minded.” “I’m a member of the NRA; therefore I am conservative and like to kill things.” (Sorry. I’m only human.) So when you glom onto to one of these silly online memes – and yes, they are mostly silly – people feel they’re defining themselves a little bit.

The second point is one that’s much more salient. Last night’s bra-color game was a hint of what is possible when you combine social causes with social networks. Even those who were offended as hell have to admit: we’re talking about breast cancer now. Yes, of course, we were talking about it before. On occasion. In October when every household object on the market is tinted pink. But it did in fact, achieve precisely what it set out to do – raise awareness. The Huffington Post wasn’t focusing on the anger and raw emotion of a breast cancer survivor last week. The rage that cancer engenders was not getting ink in the Washington Post. And the Komen fan page on Facebook, for whatever good it does, had far less fans yesterday morning. Now the efficacy of ‘awareness’ is most definitely up for debate. But if one little meme involving a color can take hold that quickly, and make that much of a splash in less than 12 hours, what’s going to happen when someone – and I’m betting it will be a political candidate – figures out how to really utilize our personal networks?

Because I’ve argued enough this week, I’ll let my friend have the last word. Kind of.

If tech and social media wants to be taken seriously as a potential cure for that ill, action has to make a leap from status updates to the real world.

I couldn’t agree more. She goes on to posit, though, that online actions make people feel they’ve done their part and therefore won’t contribute more substantive action in the real world. Perhaps, with some people, yes. But I can pretty much guarantee those folks weren’t going to contribute much to begin with.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in emerging technology, it’s that you can’t start at the top. You lay the groundwork at the very bottom and hope that subsequent companies and technologies will build on it in your wake. No, we didn’t cure breast cancer last night. But I’m certainly willing to keep playing these little games until we do.

News from the Social Media Vortex

–This is biased but I don’t care. If you haven’t read Chris Shipley’s response to the latest Calacanis rant on angel investors, please do so posthaste. Surprise – she actually agrees with him! But she has some fun with it too.

–If a Nordic country falls from the Internet and no one notices, does it make a sound? Due to a typo in a script, Sweden dropped completely off the Interwebs for an hour and a half Monday night.

–Comic book fans now have reason to join Twitter. Neil Gaiman is conducting a storytelling experiment on the service, enlisting followers to help him create an audiobook. Madlibs for nerds, if you will.

–In news that surely made old-media stalwarts curl into the fetal position, the Huffington Post passed the LA Times and Washington Post in site traffic this week.

–It’s pretty hard to win the Worst. Post. Ever. award. When you consider the millions of blog posts that appear each week – many of which feature piano-playing cats – one would have to write something really painfully awful to win this award. So let’s all send hearty congratulations to John Biggs at MobileCrunch.

Apps on the Radar

–Jason Meserve pointed me to the super-cool AutoStitch app, which lets you create panoramic pictures on your iPhone.

–During a search for a friend, I was referred to Get Apps Done, something of a clearing house for iPhone app developers and the people who need them.  Love stuff like this – a simple, logical concept that is needed by a large group of people.

–Were it 1989, I’d be excited about this.

–And finally, thanks to Apple’s new policy allowing developers to build paid upgrades into free applications, the follow-up (or part of it at least) to hugely popular game Rolando is now available for free.

Tweet of the Week

–It’s rare that the winner triumphs so easily but you’d be hard-pressed to trump Billy Ray Cyrus this week. After his daughter Miley threatened to leave Twitter, he responded with this:

Miley. You are a light in a world of darkness. You were born “Destiny Hope Cyrus” for a reason. You can’t leave everyone now. We r countin on u.

If I’d known the messiah was going to come in the form of an autotuned child star, I’d have watched more Disney Channel.

The subject got a bit of attention this week when BrewPR’s Brooke Hammerling called for industry-wide standards in video analytics in a post for Silicon Alley Insider. She argued that terms such as “views” are too open to interpretation and manipulation. One commenter, Greg Stuart, former CEO of the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), parried back that the “view” term has been clearly defined – “at least as it’s defined for advertising” – by the IAB. The Washington Post weighed in on the topic yesterday, reiterating the lack of industry-wide standards. It’s also worth noting that advertisers are fickle bunch; they go where the results are. If there is no ability to measure results effectively, and no way to connect views with specific actions, then advertisers have no meaningful way to directly evaluate their online video ad spend. Thus, the huge opportunity in this space: not just for effective tools, but to define the terms of the competition.

We featured Visible Measures at DEMO 08, a company that interprets user behavior at significant intervals of viewing. As we said then, views – however you define them – are the easy part; understanding exactly how viewers interact with a video is a tougher nut to crack. With an average of 20-40 different events occurring during viewing, including rewinding, fast forwarding and the like, a rich field of user behavior would lie fallow without services like Visible Measures.

To evaluate effectively, you have to follow your users across all viewing platforms and mediums, which brings us to Divinity Metrics, a company whose product chases your video around the Web, delivering analytics on all occurrences of a video across the Internet. The majority of analytics companies today focuses on measurement within the video; important to be sure, but the very nature of viral video demands a tool that can extend beyond walled gardens to the places viewers are congregating. Divinity Metrics’ Scope product measures viral video in real time and delivers all manner of analysis on user behavior to its clients. This is not a tool to track the viewings of your cat playing the piano. It’s aimed at interactive marketing agencies and major brands who must continuously shape online strategies in order to compete effectively in the new media marketplace. Divinity Metrics’ analysis is an aggregation of all relevant channels online, including YouTube, MySpace and BitTorrent sites, so clients get a one-stop dashboard shot of every behavior and user associated with a video. Through analysis of the social activity around a video, and the type and quality of traffic garnered, clients are able to plan campaigns that resonate effectively with audiences.

The company won’t disclose names of specific clients at this point – they plan customer announcements soon – but the roster consists mainly of film and television networks, ad agencies, music companies and video producers. They’ve been around for a couple of years and are super smart about the sector, a fact immediately evident with just a glance at the product dashboard. Divinity Metrics has built an impressive product and service – entirely Web-based with the ability to export data via xml – that answers a real need. It isn’t alone in the field, with last month’s launch of YouTube Insight and its closest competitor, TubeMogul, which also distributes video for its clients, getting much more play in the media. But from what I’ve seen in this space, Divinity Metrics is an expertly designed, high-end analytics tool for those entities with a large stake in the online video business. If you’re ready to get serious about in-depth analysis of your brand online, they’re definitely worth a look.