Twitter COO Dick Costolo, speaking today on a panel at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp event in San Francisco, shed some light into the micromessaging service’s revenue plans, promising that it will begin taking a cut of its partners’ advertising revenues “early next year.” Meanwhile, it will “foster mechanisms that allow partners to do more sophisticated things” with its APIs. Twitter also plans to offer commercial accounts that contain premium features like analytics dashboards and multiple authors, according to Costolo. Continue »

As AOL lays off a third of its work force as it prepares to go independent, it’s looking to drop its ICQ and MapQuest units, according to reports by Kara Swisher. But with the deluge of information hitting web users these days, location and presence are two of the most promising ways to parse the online world (GigaOM Pro sub. required). They’re also two of the most innovation-rich veins of the last year, with projectile growth of mobile location apps and the ongoing real-time status arms race. While AOL is busy revising itself to be about content and advertising, both of those areas of focus benefit greatly from context and relevance.

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Chrome OS is a natural evolution of the work that’s been done on the Chrome browser, Sundar Pichai, VP of product management, and Chrome OS engineering director Matthew Papakipos said when they unveiled it at Google’s Mountain View campus on Thursday. The operating system is designed to imbue web applications with the “full functionality of desktop applications.” As for the reasons behind the development of the new platform, they pointed to rapid growth in the netbook market — where Chrome OS is aimed — and cloud computing. Continue »

Employee shares of Facebook are selling for $21 on SecondMarket, valuing the social network’s common stock at $9.5 billion, Bloomberg is reporting today. That’s up 42 percent in the past four months, which SecondMarket takes to mean that an IPO is nigh, but could also just reflect Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s cash-flow positive. And $9.5 billion doesn’t include the preferred shares issued to investors. Continue »

Salesforce.com today announced Salesforce Chatter, an application that provides a social network for enterprise businesses. Salesforce Chatter incorporates social networking and real-time connection features as well as integrates Facebook and Twitter status updates, making it unique from other enterprise collaboration offerings from Cisco and Microsoft, which revolve more around traditional IM screens, video conferencing and presence awareness inside an email program. For internal use, Salesforce Chatter gives employees profiles, feeds and groups. With the Salesforce Chatter platform, developers will be able to build social enterprise applications that can contain status updates, create Facebook apps, and hook into APIs from Twitter so enterprises can track comments about their brand or from their employees. As employees use more social-networking applications while at work, the security of those applications and how to harness them for corporate use have become increasingly common concerns in IT.

The Pirate Bay is shutting down its tracker technology, its crew announced in a blog post that only accentuated the positive, in a move that follows a multiyear hailstorm of legal machinations, jail sentences thrown at founders, and constant public scrutiny. The positive spin in the blog post is reminiscent of the founders’ claims that their jail sentences represented “an epic win.”  But now that the site will switch to decentralized distributed hash table (DHT) technology for pointing to torrent sources, what is the likely impact on downloaders and freeloaders? They will have to turn to new alternatives, but those choices will take shape. Continue »

Consolidation appears imminent in the free streaming music sector, as MySpace is on the verge of acquiring social music site Imeem. A source with knowledge of the situation confirmed that negotiations are in process, but no deal is set. If it happens, the buy would be MySpace’s second fire-sale acquisition this year, following its mid-summer deal for iLike at a bargain-basement price. Imeem’s valuation, once reportedly above $200 million, was said to have fallen below $10 million at the time of a recapitalization round earlier this year. Continue »