Tumblr wants users to discover content by themselves, rather than pushing it out to them. The updates to its iOS app Wednesday are aimed at helping users share and save Tumblr posts. Read more at paidContent »
Last.fm ‘scrobbled’ your music tastes in order to recommend tunes you may not have heard. Co-founders Felix Miller and Martin Stiksel, who have since moved on, reckon their new service, Lumi, can do the same for general web content. Read more »
Twitter is at a crossroads: It’s inarguably a mainstream communications technology at this point, but it’s also generating controversy around its developer and user policies as it expands. Join us in sharing thoughts on Twitter’s role in the industry — both now and in the future. Read more »
Media issues like advertising and discovery along with commerce dominated the activity in social and real-time Web technologies during the first quarter. Google raised some hackles, Facebook responded to demands from traditional advertisers, and Yahoo got a new chief executive. Read more in the full report. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Outbrain, a content discovery platform that helps online publishers drive engagement, has raised $35 million in a Series D round led by Index Ventures with participation from existing investors Carmel Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. That brings Outbrain’s total funding to $64 million dollars. Read more »
Last week, companies including Google, Facebook and NetShelter introduced new products and services that, while unrelated, all promise to be new vehicles for web content discovery. And with so many new offerings coming to market, content companies must evaluate whether and how to best use services ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
YouTube introduced a new homepage Thursday that puts more of a focus on personalization and social features, highlighting the content that’s most relevant to its users. But it does a poor job of showing off all the new content that YouTube is investing heavily in. Read more »
Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Last quarter’s big headline in social media and real-time technologies came from Google, which launched Google+, its first social tech product that seems legit. In the third quarter, things were back to normal. Google+ is still growing, but Facebook’s platform update dominated the news. And as Google+ passed 25 million users and won some raves from the digerati, its competition with Facebook intensified. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Zynga, Salesforce, BranchOut and Foursquare. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Is anyone else a little tired of being pushed towards certain content because of mined personal information? It’s kind of like having that friend who resembles you a little too closely; eventually they become tiresome. Here’s how we might try doing recommendations differently. Read more »
One of the biggest challenges on the web is discovering new types of content. Last week, I wrote about similar-site.com, a web site that helps you find web sites akin to ones that you’re currently viewing. We came across two other services that accomplish the same […] Read more »
