Posts Tagged ‘facebook’
Found|Read
Larry Chiang
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Friday, May 16, 2008 |
3:00 PM PT |
Networking has always been a high art in business. Just ask Susan Roane, my mentor and author of the seminal tome, “How to Work a Room.” (I know a handful of VCs and startup kings on Sand Hill Road who have her book tucked into a drawer.) I’ve been showcasing Roane’s lessons for founders in my Found|READ series, “What They Don’t Teach You At Stanford Business School.”
By now it’s time to address the latest, and arguably the most powerful, networking tool in any founders’ arsenal: Twitter. It’s simple. If you’re not “tweeting,” you’re missing half the conversation. Just ask Sarah Lacy. (How different Lacy’s now-infamous SXSW interview of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg might have been had she been plugged into the tweets flying around the conference room floor!) Don’t know how to use Twitter? No sweat. Here are my 8 Tips for How to Work a Twitter Party.
(Photo credit: News.com. SXSW Tweeters celebrating before the ill-fated Zuckerberg interview.) Continue »
Om Malik
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Thursday, May 15, 2008 |
1:04 PM PT |
This is hilarious. Google ignores MySpace. Facebook blocks Google’s Friend Connect.
Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.
They all think they are open. Google and Facebook trying to out anti-open each other.
Alistair Croll
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Thursday, May 15, 2008 |
10:25 AM PT |
MySpace this week won a ruling against Samford Wallace and Walter Rines, reinforcing the fact that there’s no love lost between big web sites and spammers. But it’s also a sign of an escalation of the war on spam.
Spammers are finding virgin territory in emerging messaging tools, including SMS and social networks. Ferris Research projects that Americans will receive 1.5 billion unsolicited text messages in 2008, double the number sent in 2006. And Nielsen calls mobile social networking the next big thing, estimating 2.8 million unique mobile MySpace users and 1.8 million mobile Facebook users in December 2007.
According to antispam firm Cloudmark, spammers are already embracing these new technologies: Between 15 percent and 30 percent of friend requests on some of the largest social networks lead to a spammy profile.
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Stacey Higginbotham
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Thursday, May 15, 2008 |
10:13 AM PT |
Neither Om nor I are shy about talking infrastructure, but the High Scalability blog has gone totally geek and parsed the details of how Facebook plans to scale its new Jabber chat service to 70 million members using a hella lot of servers and Erlang. As Sandy Jen over at Meebo can tell you, chat is a challenge to scale because it requires a constantly open connection to the servers and low latency. That’s a recipe for a lot of hardware and some flexible architecture. Good thing Facebook has $100 million to spend, but bad news for the firm if the money spigot closes.
Wagner James Au
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Tuesday, May 13, 2008 |
6:01 AM PT |
What began last March with Warbook, a no-frills Facebook fantasy strategy game first conceived by an intern, has lead to today’s announcement: Social Gaming Network, a startup still based in a Palo Alto garage, is getting $15 million in Series A funding from a VC team comprised of Greylock Partners, Founders Fund, Columbia Partners Capital and Novak Biddle Venture Partners. Originally incubated at the Novak Biddle and Columbia-backed Freewebs, where Warbook was first developed during a hackathon session, SGN now boasts a small library of casual game titles which claim an aggregate of one million daily players and 50 million installs in Facebook.
This influx of cash comes at a moment of fierce consolidation and competition in the social gaming space, with SGN and rivals like Zynga and Rock You jostling for dominance. Last week I had a chance to chat with SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar, and got a glimpse at some of the company’s future battle plans.
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Stacey Higginbotham
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Monday, May 12, 2008 |
5:15 PM PT |
Last week, I pointed out that MySpace’s Data Availability efforts were welcome in that they expand the number of sites on which a user can use her MySpace data, but that MySpace still had a lock on the user data since it hosted and determined who could display that data by approving site partners. If MySpace’s efforts were three steps forward in opening up user profiles, then Google’s Friend Connect represents two steps back. Continue »
Om Malik
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Sunday, May 11, 2008 |
9:16 PM PT |
Last month, I wrote about Facebook’s insatiable hunger for hardware. Over the weekend, Spencer Ante of Business Week reported that Palo Alto-based social networking company had raised about $100 million from Triplepoint Capital, a venture lending operation. “It will be used entirely for servers,” Facebook Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu told Business Week’s Ante. That gives us a sense of how much hardware is gulping down.
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Stacey Higginbotham
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Thursday, May 8, 2008 |
10:05 AM PT |
MySpace today launched announced a data availability initiative that will allow users to opt in to sharing their MySpace information on a variety of partner sites. While not exactly complete data portability (the social networking company also said it was joining the Data Portability Project), it’s a start.
MySpace is launching its data availability efforts with Yahoo, eBay, Twitter and Photobucket some time within the next several weeks. Steve Pearman, SVP of product strategy at MySpace, says other partners will be able to join “in a few weeks,” after agreeing to some basic terms and conditions aimed at preventing user data from being abused. I asked if someone could port their MySpace info onto their Facebook page if Facebook asked to join, to which Pearman responded by saying he wouldn’t want to tell anyone where they could or could not port their data. Continue »
Stacey Higginbotham
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Saturday, April 26, 2008 |
12:02 AM PT |
As data moves into the cloud, many storage companies are evaluating their use of memory in the data center as they try to strike a balance between easily accessible cache memory powered by flash and slower-to-access disk memory powered by hard drives. At the same time, they’re trying to make their storage easier to provision and more reliable by looking at some form of virtualization. Both trends will change the dynamic for large storage vendors in the years to come. Continue »
Om Malik
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Friday, April 25, 2008 |
10:00 AM PT |
Updated: Facebook these days is doing everything in its power to imitate Google, recruiting the search giant’s sales people, poaching its senior executives and — most importantly — using infrastructure as a competitive advantage. Like Google, Facebook has figured out that the right web infrastructure is the difference between user delight and dismay. And like Google, Facebook is finding out that it isn’t cheap.
I’ve been trying to get a handle on Facebook’s infrastructure for some time, but so far have been unable to get the company to open up. The last time I reached out to them, back in January, I was hearing that they had between 1,200 and 1,500 servers, along with storage and switches from EMC Corp. and Force 10 Networks respectively. As it turns out, those server numbers weren’t even close to the total servers used by them.
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