It might take a trip to the local post office to get started with the social network Nextdoor, but the startup is seeing success by taking an old-school, privacy-based approach to creating online communities for neighborhoods. Read more »
Twitter is expected to reach $1 billion in revenue by 2014, according to unnamed sources, suggesting that it feels confident about its ability to make money through social advertising. Read more »
Social dining network Grubwithus has raised $5 million in Series A financing, which the startup will use to expand its basic business premise: getting likeminded strangers together in a physical restaurant to share a meal. Read more »
Facebook’s rise has come on the back of astonishing international growth — but it needs to keep expanding everywhere, and in every way, to keep up with investors’ expectations. Where can it find the silver bullet? And how will it happen? Read more »
If Facebook’s future is mobile, it may not be enough for it to merely secure a piece of the mobile ad market. It will need to have an outsized impact on the industry. Read more »
Instead of focusing on Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie, investors and analysts should pay more attention to what Facebook flagged in its latest securities filing: that its mobile business is underperforming on the ad-revenue front and it doesn’t really know whether it can fix it. Read more »
LinkedIn turned in a strong quarter and announced a smart acquisition. It seems to have proven staying power and growth potential, addressing some vulnerabilities (e.g., mobile, sales efficiencies) even if it hasn’t cashed in on its platform or identity management ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Russian investor Yuri Milner plans to sell $1.5 billion of Facebook stock when the company goes public later this month — making more than a billion in profit. But it’s Silicon Valley that should be thanking him, not the other way around. Read more »
Facebook set out more details about its long-awaited IPO in a new filing that reveals that an initial share of the company’s stock will sell for between $28 and $36. Read more »
Some of Silicon Valley’s biggest technology companies keep rejecting comparisons with news organisations.
But they nevertheless think they have the prescription for what news media must do next… Read more at paidContent »
Google-co-founder Sergey Brin recently said he believes the future of the “open Internet” is at risk. Then why is the company trying to build its own closed network? Because the open vs. closed debate is more complicated than it first appears when it comes to Google. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
London-based social network Badoo is trying to jettison its saucy reputation and crack the lucrative American market — where its outsized Spanish-speaking audience is driving growth and expansion. Read more »
Facebook is giving users the chance to download more of the information that it holds about them than ever before, but the small group of Austrian law students who forced the change say the social network is still holding back. Read more »
French business networking site Viadeo has long played second fiddle to LinkedIn. But with a fresh round of funding in the bank, the company plans on becoming the world’s leading player thanks to growth in countries like China, Russia and Brazil. Read more »
Video discovery app maker Fanhattan is getting a lot more social, integrating with Facebook’s Open Graph to allow its users to share what they’re watching with friends. It’s also rolling out a Facebook app for discovering web-based videos from directly within the social network. Read more »
Springpad has long been compared to Internet note-taking sensation Evernote, but starting today Springpad will likely be compared to another darling of the startup world, Pinterest. On Wednesday Springpad evolved into its third iteration, transforming the information capture service into a social networking engine. Read more »
Saavn has been hailed as India’s Spotify. But with much of its customer base being in India and much of its catalog being Bollywood fare, things work a little different for the company. One example: Saavn has high hopes for its Blackberry and Symbian apps. Read more »
It’s hard to imagine Instagram’s rivals feeling good about the company’s $1 billion sale to Facebook. But at least one competitor suggests that users fleeing from the photo app could actually boost other services. Read more »
Ever find LinkedIn too noisy to be useful? Siblings Jonathan and Susanna Gebauer say their ExploreB2B — launching in English for the first time — offers a service tailored to establishing category experts, solving problems and making new business leads. Read more »
Facebook’s stunning $1 billion acquisition of Instagram appears to be the largest deal ever for a company built entirely around a single mobile app experience, either proving that the mobile app business has truly arrived or that there’s a new bubble in town. Read more »
A new Facebook app called Pipe will let users transfer large files to their friends, through a peer-to-peer service that makes novel use of Adobe’s AIR technology Read more »
Google+ is looking much better on mobile web browsers this morning, thanks to a relaunch of the mobile web UI that takes some hints from the service’s Android and iOS mobile apps. Still missing is a native Google+ app for iPad users. Read more »
Facebook has been slapped down again by the German authorities over privacy problems with its Friend Finder feature — but while reports suggest the social network has fixed the problem, the consumer group that launched the complaint says it is still not happy. Read more »
Everybody who has watched The Terminator knows about Skynet, the computing system that becomes self-aware and decides to destroy humanity. But I look at cloud computing and automated systems and I fear something much more depressing: the total leisure paradise of the movie Wall-E. Read more »
Zynga’s move to create its own social gaming network outside Facebook is a positive shift to reduce its dependence on someone else’s social network. But being a platform provider and aggregator of entertainment options is a hard business and not one to be taken lightly. Read more »
Facebook is giving brands new tools for managing the way they interact with users on the social network, with updated Pages that will provide a better visual experience to users and advanced administrative tools for responding to user messages. Read more »
Tiny Review is a photo-sharing app with a twist: instead of adding filters and sharing with your social network a la Instagram, Tiny Review makes it easy for users to add up to three short lines of text to their photos. Read more »
Mobile usage is the fastest-growing part of LinkedIn’s business, but it’s not a big revenue driver — yet. That could soon change, as LinkedIn plans to test out advertising across mobile devices, now that it has gotten the product and user experience right on those platforms. Read more »
Path and Pinterest are getting some significant backlash because of recent decisions that appeared to put their interests ahead of their users and a lack of disclosure about that behavior. It’s a welcome reminder that the trust of users is not something to be taken lightly. Read more »
Open-web advocates may long for a revolt against walled gardens, but in the end the success of a social network is determined by the willingness of users to put up with its restrictions. For Facebook, that is both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness. Read more »
In its IPO filing Facebook mentions the word “mobile” 123 times but didn’t use the term in positive ways. In fact, Facebook’s S-1 filing is one big warning to investors: Its growth is being driven by user behavior that it has so far failed to monetize. Read more »
The latest version of Showyou includes new ways to navigate content by category or by the social network that they’re pulled in from, as well as a way for users to search and see all content curated by hashtag on Showyou and via Twitter. Read more »
According to Edward Aten, founder of Swift.fm, Facebook is recreating and competing with nearly every significant Internet product of the last few years. It’s an unprecedented pivot that threatens Facebook’s core products and may eventually benefit the very same startups Facebook is trying to crush. Read more »
In the letter to shareholders included in Facebook’s IPO filing, co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes it clear his vision goes beyond just a social network. He wants to fundamentally rewire the way the world works, from interpersonal interactions to commerce to even government. Read more »
Mobile video startup Klip will now let its users share their videos with just a select group of friends and family. The app maker has enabled this with the rollout of “Circles,” which is what it calls the private groups that users can set up. Read more »
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said Google has all the data it needs to present Twitter in its search results right alongside Google+. That’s the latest public word from Twitter after Google began pushing its own social network in search results while keeping out Facebook and Twitter. Read more »
Personalized algorithms and social recommendations are great for a lot of things. But when it comes to getting news, these technologies can create an echo chamber, where our existing beliefs are reflected back to us. Uberpaper, a new site from Dmitry Shapiro, wants to combat that. Read more »
Apple has apparently re-introduced code references to Facebook integration to the most recent iOS 5.1 beta that were once present in pre-release software but later removed. It doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily see Apple include Facebook sign-in at the system level, like it’s done with Twitter, but it definitely makes it more likely than before. Read more »
Facebook on Thursday debuted a new “listen with” feature that lets groups of people listen to the same song at the same time. The new feature is most directly comparable to turntable.fm, which lets people create music listening rooms and share DJ duties with their friends. Read more »
If asked to imagine the drawbacks of connecting online via social networks, most of us would probably suggest something like the time-wasting attractions of the likes of FarmVille. But a new survey suggests another surprising possible drawback of heavy social network use: lower ethical standards. Read more »
