Facebook is planning to rely more on flash drives in places where most companies have used spinning disk, and based on conversations with sources and hints from Facebook, I think one of those places will be in Facebook’s cold-storage photo facility it’s building in Oregon. Read more »
Sambreel made news last year for injecting unauthorized ads into Facebook and Google. Now, the company and its questionable tactics are spreading across the internet. Read more at paidContent »
Social media technologies continue to permeate marketing and enterprise collaboration, even if investors felt let down in the third quarter by their consumer-facing businesses like Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga. So B2B technology offerings in support of marketing and collaboration will soon steal all the social tech attention. This quarterly wrap-up analyzes these events, and provides a near-term outlook for trends, technologies and companies to watch in the next 18 to 24 months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The third quarter saw many parts of the traditional media business in flux. Other developments included the rollout of new device-based content ecosystems, red flags and red ink for traditional consumer electronics makers, and a resurgence of consumer purchases of movies. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Media companies and publishers of all kinds spend a lot of time measuring their online traffic patterns using analytics that track where readers come from — but Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic argues that they are overlooking a huge contributing factor that he calls “Dark Social” traffic. Read more »
When the man at the center of the ‘Twitter Joke Trial’ had his conviction quashed, it seemed some sanity had returned to the British legal system’s approach to online offensiveness. But that’s not how things worked out. Read more »
After a judge blasted a proposed Sponsored Stories settlement that would have paid $10 million to lawyers and nothing to users, the company is back with a new offer. It calls for a $10 pay out but the fine print means that is unlikely to happen. Read more at paidContent »
The way that social-media tools like Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram have changed our lives is often taken for granted, but the way that they can inject some much-needed serendipity into our lives is often overlooked — even by those who use them a lot. Read more »
Facebook is now up to 1 billion monthly active users after launching in 2004. The milestone was expected but it’s a major accomplishment for the social network. The company is looking to mobile to reach its next billion users. Read more »
We know that Facebook is building a storage facility next to its Prineville data center, but in a conversation ahead of our Structure Europe event this month in Amsterdam I spoke with Facebook’s Jay Parikh to learn more about Facebook’s data center for digital packrats. Read more »
Prismatic founder Bradford Cross doesn’t come from a traditional media background — he is a data scientist who specializes in machine learning — but what he is doing with content recommendations says a lot about how the media business is evolving and what the future might look like. Read more »
Thanks to the rise of online business, companies must now get their products and services to market as fast as they can, and releasing software now means small releases that occur very frequently. Enter devops, which is disrupting traditional assumptions about the roles of development and operations. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
People and processes are just as important as servers when it comes to scale. A Facebook engineer explains how the social network built a culture and tools to help it keep up with its ever-expanding hardware infrastructure and software toolsets. Read more »
Facebook knows something about big data — it collects more data and has built more tools than almost anybody else. Here, Facebook’s Jay Parikh and Accel Partners’ Ping Li talk about what lessons big data startups can take from Facebook to build businesses that can succeed. Read more »
New research from the Pew Center into news consumption habits shows that the impact of mobile and social continues to grow. Almost twice as many users got news from a mobile device compared with 2010, and almost three times as many got news from a social network. Read more »
A French tabloid set off a temporary worldwide panic that Facebook had published the private messages of its users. France’s privacy regulator has now accepted the company’s explanation that this didn’t happen — but did blame Facebook for stirring up confusion. Read more »
Welcome to the fast-growing world of work media, a class of social tools oriented toward the needs of enterprises. Their emergence is due to the shifting expectations of an increasingly social workforce and the sense that older approaches to work like email are arguably approaching obsolescence. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Two-thirds of mobile developers in a new survey believe that Facebook can get disrupted by a mobile-first startup. And most developers are unhappy with the state of HTML5. The results help explain why Facebook bought Instagram and why it has backed off supporting HTML5. Read more »
The New York Times article on data center power consumption got a few things wrong but a couple things really right. Read more »
Facebook is turning on new streamlined carrier billing mobile web payments thanks to an integration with Bango. The payments, which can boost conversions up to 77 percent compared to 40 percent for traditional carrer billing payments, are going live in the US, UK and Germany. Read more »
I was an AirBnB sceptic for a long time, but trying the service made me realize just how disruptive it could be — and how it also shares a lot of the same characteristics of other disruptive businesses that are powered by the social web. Read more »
Private social networking apps like Path and the SMS-based GroupMe are trying to capitalize on the fact that most people only communicate regularly with a relatively small set of contacts. That requires thinking about social networking and content in a new context. Read more »
Whether it’s the iPhone 5, the importance of LTE, or BYOD trends disrupting the enterprise, there are always technologies, trends, and companies changing the way we define mobile. Here are some noteworthy segments to watch in the coming months, from location-based shopping to apps to wireless networks. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The ability to distribute real-time information through social networks like Twitter is a powerful thing, but a new study points out that one of the downsides of this phenomenon is the fact that much of the content that gets linked to eventually disappears. Read more »
More people watched video on the Internet through YouTube than any other site by a wide margin during August, as Google continues to enjoy the benefits of having the most engaged online viewers. Still wondering if Google is a media company? Read more »
Facebook had a problem ensuring that its tens of thousands of caching servers were performing at their peak. If they bogged down, so did that site. So Facebook created Claspin, a heat map of the health of its caches that builds on its institutional knowledge. Read more »
New guidelines for the design of wider data center racks are available for discussion, according to the Open Compute Project. In theory, racks designed using the Open Rack 1.0 specification will allow more flexible, energy-efficient design of data center resources. Read more »
Facebook is testing out the ability for advertisers to buy mobile ads through Facebook on mobile apps and websites. It could be part of a larger play to build an offsite ad network. Read more »
News-filtering service Prismatic has just launched a new “friend following” feature. Although this may look like a social-networking copycat move, founder Brad Cross says it is all about increasing the amount of data the service has about its users so that it can make relevant recommendations. Read more »
Listening platforms — or social media monitoring, analysis, and engagement tools — are bringing massive amounts of new information to businesses’ marketing departments. These tools are also leading the way in the growth of social media information and access throughout organizations so that customers’ wants and needs can be better understood and, presumably, satisfied. This report analyzes how the adoption of listening platforms is transforming marketing departments, their relationships with central IT, and the core systems that run the enterprise. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Will Microsoft be the latest Internet company to buy fuel cells from Bloom Energy to provide power for its data centers? Microsoft says it is looking for backup power sources that could use natural gas and could replace its diesel generators. Read more »
If you think fake online reviews are bad now, just wait a few years. Gartner predicts that in two to three years, 10 to 15 percent of all online reviews will be bought and paid for by businesses. Read more »
In the five years since the iPhone hit the market, Apple and Google have delivered more than 40 billion cumulative downloads of apps. Other sources predict the app marketplace will swell to surpass 66 billion downloads in 2016, a growth fueled by tablet, entertainment, and enterprise apps. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Researchers are taking a nod from Internet leaders and using big data mining techniques to quickly calculate the carbon footprints of products. New software like this can enable companies to calculate the carbon footprints of products using non-expert employees and for less cost. Read more »
A patent troll, working with the University of California, gained infamy by filing patent suits claiming to own the world wide web. Even though Amazon and Google knee-capped it earlier this year, the troll marches onward. Read more »
Kids have always said bad things about teachers and gotten into trouble with their classmates. But today, it’s much easier for schools to overhear them by accessing a student’s Facebook account. One judge has put the brakes on this. Read more »
Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams has launched a news-filtering service called Nuzzel that is powered by social-networking activity. But while his previous ventures have been early to the market, his new offering suffers from the opposite problem — the market is already saturated with similar services. Read more »
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the social network is already handling a billion search queries per day, and that it is interested in launching a social search engine powered by the activity of its users — something that could turn out to be Google’s worst nightmare. Read more »
Twitter is fighting a major privacy case that will help determine who has rights in social media. Unfortunately, the case is before a judge who has been disciplined for misusing Facebook. His track record suggests that he is the very last person who should be deciding these issues. Read more »
The growing data center clusters in Oregon and Washington could suck up 10 percent of the regions power by 2030, if the facilities and infrastructure don’t become more efficient, according to a report. Read more »
