GigaOM

Mobile browsing has clearly moved beyond 9-to-5 users and made inroads among the happy hour set. A recent survey by Opera showed about 40 percent (and about 60 percent in the United States, South Africa and Indonesia) of Opera Mini users visit social networking sites when surfing on a mobile. For those unfamiliar with the [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

Widgets are taking social media by storm and becoming a valuable online marketing platform for interaction with consumers. Last June, comScore estimated that widgets reach 177 million people every month, or 21 percent of the worldwide online audience.

ComScore’s tracking methods are debated (see also Techcrunch: “The Widget Kings” and GigaOM: “ComScore Widget Metrix, more […]

There go the social networking neighborhoods! Google, Yahoo and MySpace are taking a page from the Mozilla Foundation by creating a nonprofit foundation to control and maintain the OpenSocial code, which allows developers to build applications that work on a variety of social networks. The core companies will still contribute to the code, but as […]