Anyone who has tried to track dozens of Twitter streams or hundreds of Facebook updates simultaneously knows the social web can be an intimidating ocean of information. A startup called Swift River is trying to find ways of filtering and understanding that ocean in real time. Read more »
Flipboard, a new content-browsing app for the iPad, raises many of the same thorny copyright issues that Google has been dealing with for years on Google News and Google Books. Is it a value-added service that content publishers should be thankful for, or a copyright-infringing parasite? Read more »
Chris Dixon, co-founder of Hunch.com, says there is more than just one kind of social graph — he argues there are actually half a dozen different graphs, relating to things such as location and recommendations. But one thing is clear: Facebook wants to own them all. Read more »
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PayPal continues to be the primary engine of growth within eBay, judging by the online retailer’s latest quarterly results, and the company’s CEO says that within the next few years, the online and mobile payment business could be larger than eBay’s core online marketplace business. Read more »
Hi5, a former up-and-coming social network that shifted focus last year and is now trying to become a social-gaming hub, has launched a portal for game developers, and president Alex St. John says that the company is prepared to take on Facebook in a head-to-head battle. Read more »
Facebook now has over 500 million registered users, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg announced in a blog post today, more than three times as many as it had in January 2009. Along the way, the company has faced privacy critics as well as unflattering stories about its co-founder. Read more »
The media industry may be in upheaval as a result of the web, but having the government step in isn’t the right response, Google has told the Federal Trade Commission. The search company’s comments are a response to the FTC’s proposed policy changes to support journalism Read more »
Jive Software has raised a $30-million round of financing from legendary Silicon Valley venture capital funds Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and Sequoia Capital, which the company says will help it take the concepts of social media and Web 2.0 and integrate them into the enterprise. Read more »
BranchOut wants to bring LinkedIn-style business networking to Facebook using an application that pulls information from your friends’ profiles about what companies they work for, along with any other business-related details. Should LinkedIn be afraid of this new competitor? Yes and no. Read more »
A new survey has ranked Facebook lower than both the airline industry and the cable television business when it comes to customer satisfaction. ForeSee Results said that Facebook got the second-lowest score out of more than 200 companies in the survey, just ahead of MySpace. Read more »
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The lives of journalists online are increasingly hectic and frenzied, according to a somewhat sensationalistic piece in the New York Times. But the underlying phenomenon the Times is describing seems far more universal than that: it is the increasingly “real time” nature of all our lives. Read more »
Estimates are that a paywall at the Times of London has led to a drop of 65 percent in online readership. But owner Rupert Murdoch may not care, because the wall is as much about keeping existing print readers in as keeping new web readers out. Read more »
As Twitter has continued to grow, the company has been facing increasing pressure to monetize that user base. The latest attempt to do this — a special account called @earlybird that promotes discount offers — differs from Twitter’s other monetization efforts in an interesting way. Read more »
Foursquare is in talks with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft about deals involving the service’s location-based checkin data, CEO Dennis Crowley told The Telegraph. None of the search providers have confirmed this, but such deals would make sense given their interest in making their results more real-time. Read more »
As Twitter continues to see dramatic growth, the social network is busy trying to expand the monetization of its growing user base. The latest piece of that puzzle emerged this week with the launch of a Twitter offering called @earlybird. Whether users will respond to this ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Apple CEO Steve Jobs responded to complaints about antenna problems with the new iPhone 4 by saying the issue had been blown out of proportion, but he also offered users free cases that could fix the phone’s reception issues. But will that be enough? Read more »
Is the rise of Facebook partly a result of “white flight” away from MySpace? That’s the argument made by sociologist Danah Boyd in a chapter from a recent book based on her research into how teens use social networks, but her case is far from convincing. Read more »
Just two weeks after launching a new version of its Google News site with additional personalization features, the web giant has changed the design in response to complaints from users, giving them the option to revert to a design more like the old version. Read more »
In a surprising move, the New York Times has thrown its weight behind calls for a government inquiry into Google and its search algorithm, raising the prospect of a government investigation into and/or regulation of the company in an editorial published in the newspaper on Thursday. Read more »
Can building a network of local bloggers turn online journalism into a money-maker? Two new media ventures are hoping that it can. One is Washington-based startup TBD. The other is a traditional media entity that is trying to remake itself online: Philadelphia-based Journal Register Co. Read more »
Half of all U.S. residents who have a profile on a social-networking site are concerned about their privacy, according to a recent poll by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion. Close to half of those who were concerned about privacy described themselves as “very concerned.” Read more »
BillFloat, a startup that wants to pay your bills in order to give you more time to come up with a payment, launched officially today. The company also announced a $4.5 million Series A funding round from First Round Capital with participation from Venrock and PayPal. Read more »
Squarespace, a hosted-content publishing service that competes with companies such as WordPress, Tumblr and Posterous, has closed a $38-million financing round from Accel Partners and Index Ventures. The investment — the company’s first — could ratchet up the level of competition in the online publishing industry. Read more »
Google has a lock on the web habits of millions of users, but has failed to translate that into anything approaching a social network. Why does being social elude the web giant? Writer Adam Rifkin says it is because Google caters to pandas instead of lobsters. Read more »
Newspapers are in a tough spot, with circulation flat or declining and advertising revenue looking weak. So how can they become more efficient? The chief technology officer of the Telegraph Media Group says more papers should take a cue from startups and make use of cloud-computing services. Read more »
As if Google didn’t have enough on it plate already, this week saw the web giant fighting hard to keep its head above water on two unrelated fronts — privacy issues and China. Despite small victories on both fronts, neither battle is close to being over. ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
To make it easier for dissidents in countries such as China and North Korea to communicate without government sanctions, researchers have developed software that can hide information inside messages posted to Twitter, as well as in images that can be uploaded to sites such as Flickr. Read more »
Facebook has agreed to allow British users to install a “panic button” application that will allow younger users to report harassment or abuse to a child protection agency. British police forces and child advocacy groups have been pressuring the site for months to allow the application. Read more »
Google has invested $100 million or more in game developer Zynga, the company behind popular Facebook games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars, according to a news report. The web giant is said to be planning to launch a gaming platform to be called Google Games. Read more »
Among the announcements at Twitter’s first “Chirp” conference was the launch of a new feature called Annotations. But unlike some of the other features announced there, Annotations aren’t so much a product as a substantial rethinking of the way the service functions on a fundamental level. Read more »
As part of a settlement with the Australian Privacy Commissioner, Google has apologized publicly for inadvertently collecting personal data from unprotected wireless networks via its Street View cars. But the company still faces potential legal sanctions in a number of other countries for its behavior. Read more »
The Chinese government has renewed Google’s license to operate in that country after the search giant changed the way it handles visitors to the Chinese version of its website. But despite the renewal, the tension between Google and the Chinese government seems unlikely to disappear completely. Read more »
Unlike some of Twitter’s other services, the upcoming launch of Annotations doesn’t involve a product, but a rethinking of the way the social network functions. The changes involved could have a tremendous impact on not just on the network, but on the nature of the web ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Twitter has claimed the job of another journalist, this time a CNN editor who expressed sadness over the death of a Hezbollah cleric. Her departure is the latest sign of the how traditional media continues to struggle with social networks and their impact on journalistic objectivity. Read more »
Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind the massively multiplayer — and massively popular — online game World of Warcraft, has touched off a firestorm of controversy in the gaming community by requiring that users divulge their real-world identities when they post comments in the company’s WoW forums. Read more »
The Pirate Bay, the file-sharing network based in Sweden, has apparently been hacked by a trio of Argentinian programmers. The group claims to have downloaded the site’s entire user database, including the names, IP addresses and email addresses of the network’s 4 million registered users. Read more »
Sam Lessin, founder of media startup Drop.io, is shutting down his blog and has started a subscription email newsletter, much like the one Weblogs Inc. founder Jason Calacanis started in 2008. Lessin has also started a service called Letter.ly to allow others to follow his example. Read more »
For more than a year, Digg has been working on a major redesign of the site, one that makes the social features of the site much more obvious. But the new look could actually make it harder for Digg to stand apart from the social crowd. Read more »
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the service has seen its search volume climb by more than 30 percent in the past few months, with over 800 million queries being handled every day, growth that could help explain why Twitter has been throttling access more than usual. Read more »
Twitter and Facebook users have gotten used to to asking their social networks for tips on what are the hot restaurants, bars and other spots. Now Foursquare and the Independent Film Channel have teamed up to create an offbeat travel guide using the same kind of crowdsourcing philosophy. Read more »
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