Why does Twitter allow users to have pseudonyms, while Google and Facebook require real names? Because Twitter realizes it can provide plenty of value for both users and advertisers without having to know your real name. On the social web, it’s all about reputation and influence. Read More »
Bio:Mathew is a senior writer with GigaOM, where he covers media in all its forms — social and otherwise — as well as web culture and related issues. He is an award-winning journalist who has spent the past 15 years writing about business, technology and new media as a reporter, columnist and blogger. Prior to joining GigaOM, he was a blogger and technology writer for the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, and was also the paper’s first online Communities Editor. Mathew is also one of the founders of mesh, Canada’s leading web conference. You can find more about him here.
Latest Tweets
- @kcarruthers @engochick @greenj: agreed -- there's so much else we could have talked about
- @kcarruthers @engochick @greenj: it was fun -- thanks for having me on
- @wmougayar: yes, for some reason Livestream doesn't make its feeds available on mobile devices, which is a pain
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Recent Posts
Some critics say that Facebook is the new Yahoo: a giant web entity with hundreds of millions of users, but so lacking in creativity that it is reduced to copying Google+ and Twitter, and declining in popularity. But is there any truth to those claims? Read More »
Police across the country have been arresting people for taping them with cellphones, but a recent decision by the First Circuit Court of Appeals makes it clear that such behavior is protected by the First Amendment, and that people doing this are effectively acting as journalists. Read More »
News.me, the social news-curation app that was developed at the New York Times and then incubated by Betaworks, has been spun off as a separate company to sink or swim on its own. But can it compete with giants like Flipboard and other newer competitors? Read More »
Facebook has added a new feature that allows users to “subscribe” to updates from people they aren’t actually friends with, which brings an asymmetrical aspect to the giant social network. So should Twitter be concerned about this Twitter-fication of Facebook? I don’t think so. Read More »
What drove Walmart to acquire OneRiot and make it part of Walmart Labs is the same thing plenty of other companies — particularly media entities — should be interested in: namely, making sense of all the data that is coming in from users on social networks. Read More »
Twitter’s launch of an analytics dashboard that shows who is interacting with a site’s content and when is clearly designed to try and prove to advertisers and publishers its effectiveness as a distribution and engagement platform, as Twitter tries to monetize its growing network. Read More »
More Must Reads
Since 2004, Google has been trying to scan the world’s books but has run into opposition from authors and publishers. Now a lawsuit has been launched against the universities who were its partners. Is this the final nail in the coffin of the global library? Read More »
Amazon is allegedly planning to launch a Netflix-style subscription service for books. While this idea is bound to get some criticism from book lovers — not to mention book publishers — it seems like a natural step in the ongoing evolution of the book. Read More »
Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger says that while Amazon has revolutionized the traditional book industry with the Kindle, digital storytelling still isn’t really social — which is why his firm has led a $3.5M Series A financing round for Toronto-based social-reading startup Wattpad. Read More »
Thinking about September 11 makes me realize how much the media landscape — particularly on the web — was transformed by those events, and how very different the world is now when it comes to how we experience real-time news thanks to social media like Twitter. Read More »
The idea that AOL might want to merge with Yahoo — as a news report on Friday said it does — isn’t surprising, since the company has tried to arrange a similar deal at least twice. The only question is which metaphor for failure should apply. Read More »
Google’s purchase of Zagat is a small deal, but the ripples it creates could be much larger — the purchase takes Google even further into the area of content ownership, and that could give “search neutrality” advocates and the FTC more ammunition against the company. Read More »
Twitter’s 100 million active users may pale in comparison to Facebook’s half a billion, but then Twitter isn’t really a social network — it’s a real-time information network. In other words, it’s a media entity, and the sooner it starts acting like one the better. Read More »
Carol Bartz may be gone, but there’s another CEO who has also spent two years trying — and failing — to turn around a former web giant: namely, AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong. How much longer does he have before he gets the chop as well? Read More »
In response to the upheaval in the media industry and what they see as the problems that the web has created for journalism, some are arguing that journalists should be regulated and licensed — but such solutions would create worse problems than they claim to solve. … Read More »
John Paton has been pushing an aggressive “digital first” strategy at the Journal-Register Co., and now he has been named the chief executive of Media News, the second-largest newspaper chain in the U.S. Is he the savior that the newspaper business has been waiting for? Read More »
Ever since it emerged from Chicago’s small startup community in 2008, Groupon has had nothing short of a spectacular story in terms of its growth: With estimated annual revenues of more than $4 billion after just three years of existence, the poster child for the “group …
Reports say Groupon has put its hotly awaited IPO on hold. But was it market volatility that pulled the rug out from under the offering, or the repeated missteps by the company and its CEO, combined with growing skepticism about the viability of its business model? Read More »
Some news sites such as The Huffington Post use badges and other kinds of reward systems to encourage user engagement and positive behavior in their online communities. Could doing this help Google overcome the downsides of anonymity without banning users who don’t use their real name? Read More »
Dave Winer says journalism as we know it is “obsolete” because everyone can do it. Is he right? Yes and no. One thing is for sure: journalism is being transformed by the web and by real-time publishing. Whether that’s good or bad depends on your viewpoint. Read More »
Are defined hours of work an anachronism that’s holding us back from becoming more efficient? Or is the freedom to work whenever we want something still reserved for a select few, and/or a trap that causes us to work more rather than less? Read More »
The idea that newspapers need to become more social and transparent in order to build trust with their readers is not a new one — but few have put it as well as a student journalist did in a recent column for The Daily Californian. Read More »
Author and social-media critic Malcolm Gladwell has argued that Twitter and Facebook haven’t played any kind of important role in “real world” revolutions like those seen recently in Egypt and Tunisia. But sociologist Zeynep Tufekci makes a strong case for why Gladwell is wrong. Read More »
Amazon has launched a new feature that allows readers to ask questions of authors from their Kindle e-book readers — which looks like yet another step in the online bookseller’s ongoing quest to cut publishers out of the equation and build relationships directly with authors. Read More »
If CNN is smart, watching what happens inside Zite’s news-reading app could give it something that all media companies are in desperate need of — whether they know it or not: real-time insights into what people really want to read about and why. Read More »
While every other aspect of traditional publishing has been disrupted by digital forces, there is one large market that remains undisturbed — academic journals. Why has this business been able to resist the tide of change that is sweeping through the rest of the industry? Read More »
Google chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt admitted in an interview in Edinburgh on the weekend that Google is taking a hard line on the real-name issue with Google+ because it sees the social network as an “identity service” on which it can build other products. Read More »
Just as CNN created the 24-hours news cycle for television, Twitter has accelerated that to the point where news breaks every minute, and a tweet is almost as good as a page-one scoop for a political reporter. Not only that, but anyone can do it. Read More »
The technology world may be obsessed with the departure of Apple CEO Steve Jobs this week, but another geek icon has also stepped down: Rob Malda, creator of the pioneering online community Slashdot, which was the place to talk about tech before it became mainstream. Read More »
Steve Jobs dropped a bombshell on the tech world Wednesday night, when the iconic founder of Apple announced that he was stepping down as CEO of the computer company. Here’s a selection of some of the responses from tech industry and other observers to the news. Read More »
If Google wants Google+ to succeed, it needs to get better at communicating clearly with the users of its new community. But the company has consistently failed to do this, and in fact has made things worse. Is being transparent something Google is incapable of? Read More »
The recent decision in the copyright case against Mp3Tunes is only the latest skirmish in a battle founder Michael Robertson has been fighting with the music industry for over a decade. Without him, we might not have many of the things we take for granted today. Read More »
Facebook is making changes that are designed to give users more control over how they share information, and to compete with Google+. But will these changes make people less likely to share content on these networks — and how will that affect the social web? Read More »
The Daily Dot wants to be the “hometown newspaper for the Internet,” but how many of its stories about Reddit photos or YouTube videos will be of interest to anyone outside of those communities? And does the newspaper metaphor make any sense for an online-publishing venture? Read More »
In the latest sign of the disruption of the book-publishing business, John Locke — who earlier this year became the first self-published author to sell a million e-books — has signed a deal with Simon & Schuster that shows how the industry is having to adapt. Read More »
Google’s requirement that users of Google+ be known by their real names has been the source of a firestorm of criticism since the launch of the network. But the recent launch of “verified” user accounts shows what could be a way out for the web giant. Read More »
A number of lawsuits have claimed that tracking cookies installed on users’ computers are a breach of privacy, especially new forms of “zombie cookies” that can recreate themselves even if they are deleted. But so far the courts have not agreed that this actually causes harm. Read More »
Many of the issues that users of Google+ are likely to be irritated by are the same kinds of problems that Twitter also faces — including the issue of noise in the stream and the discovery problem, neither of which is an easy problem to solve. Read More »
Some newspaper publishers have said that introducing Facebook comments has cut down on offensive commentary and boosted traffic. But it’s worth remembering that Facebook is not the cure for bad behavior, and that handing over comments to the social network means relinquishing control over something important. Read More »
Some critics argue that Groupon’s fast-growing business is a financial house of cards and that the company has no viable way of generating profits. Will CEO Andrew Mason be able to prove the doubters wrong, or will Groupon become the new millennium’s version of Pets.com? Read More »
While plenty of newspapers and other media entities are happy to use social tools like Twitter and Facebook to promote their content, few are really engaging with their readers on a regular basis, says Reynolds Journalism fellow Joy Mayer — but that is the future of … Read More »
Google’s launch of social games for Google+ seems to have struck a nerve at Facebook, with one executive dismissing the offering as an inconsequential copycat effort. That and other moves make it clear the competition is keeping Facebook awake at night, which is a good thing. Read More »
As Britain ponders a crackdown on social media and uses facial recognition to try and identify looters, it reinforces the fact that spending more of our time on public networks such as Twitter and Facebook gives police and governments even more ability to observe our behavior. Read More »
A class-action lawsuit alleges that Apple conspired with the book industry to implement the “agency model” of pricing, which has kept e-book prices high. But was this an actual conspiracy, or just an attempt by Apple and publishers to compete with Amazon’s dominance in the market? Read More »
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