Predicting Twitter popularity is all about probability
How can you predict which tweets will get more views, and more viral retweets? A new study developed a statistical model to estimate the popularity of tweets. Read more »
Netflix goes social, turns on Facebook integration for U.S. subscribers
Netflix rolled out its Facebook integration for U.S. subscribers Wednesday, offering them an easy way to see what they friends are watching on the service. Read more »
It’s not you Facebook, it’s me — okay, it’s partly you: Why I unfriended almost everyone
I recently unfriended almost 80 percent of the people I was connected to on Facebook. Part of the problem was the way I was using it, but part of the problem was that Facebook has simply become a lot less relevant to me. Read more »
Facebook’s Graph Search mastermind shares a few tech secrets
Facebook Director of Engineering Lars Rasmussen held an Ask Me Anything session of Reddit on Thursday to talk about Graph Search. Here’s what he had to say about the infrastructure underlying it. Read more »
Facebook’s graph search and the end of privacy by obscurity
photo: Flickr / Alan Cleaver
Facebook’s new social-graph search may look like a fairly boring feature of interest only to marketers, but the information it is able to reveal highlights how much we make public without even realizing it. Read more »
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How to compete with Facebook in 2013
Specialist networks cater to diverse consumer segments, but Facebook’s sheer ubiquity means 94 percent of all social networkers use it. The bottom line: If any generalist network is going to gain mass-market traction, it will be at the expense of Facebook, not in addition to it. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Social-TV apps and consumer behavior
Social TV is any application, website or software that allows viewers to interact with television programming and share that interaction with others. Startups in this space hope to combine ubiquitous second-screen technology with well-established audience behavior to drive new value around shows. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Fan service Moviepilot steams into Hollywood with $7m round
The Berlin-based IMDB rival Moviepilot, which is already working with film studios to give them better understanding of their projects’ fanbase, has secured funding to put a sales team in LA Read more »
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Potential Facebook-Instagram impact
Don’t be too quick to think that Facebook is abandoning its HTML5 mobile strategy in favor of apps. As a defensive movie, acquiring Instagram would lock down Facebook’s strong position in photo-sharing, leaving little room for would-be competitors, but it gives Facebook few new weapons and ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Say goodbye to search and hello to BrainSpace
PureDiscovery, a Dallas-based big data startup, thinks it has the has the answer to outdated enterprise search technology, and it’s called BrainSpace. Its goal is to let users find information that matters without having to search for it, to bring data to users. Read more »
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NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
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 »
Reasons why the social graph deserves to die
In a smart essay on the technical origins of today’s social networks, Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski explores the idea of why the social graph doesn’t work in the way we need — and explodes it in the process. Read more »
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NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media
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 »
Get your hands off that contact info, says Facebook
Facebook has shut down a service from Open-Xchange that allowed users to export the email addresses of their contacts, which makes the Germany company the latest to run afoul of the social network’s ongoing attempts to maintain control over the information of its users. Read more »
Shufflr.tv Curates Videos From Twitter Celebs
Want to know what kind of YouTube videos Paris Hilton is tweeting about, but don’t care about the other four tweets she’s sending out per hour? Then you might be interested in Shufflr.tv, which uses the Twitter accounts of celebrities to curate your social video feed. Read more »
