In the run-up to Friday’s big IPO, here are 10 startups that owe (at least part of) their success to Facebook. Read More »
If drawing is the universal language, Doodle.ly wants to be the app for that. But first it has to solve a problem: A lot of people are pretty bad at drawing. Read More »
The latest data from Nielsen’s State of Media: Advertising and Audiences report. Read More »
Tumblr CEO David Karp said the company is looking to make its mark by enabling creators to express themselves. It’s also in a bid to start monetizing the service. But Karp believes these two goals can converge, with Tumblr making money by empowering creators. Read More »
Germany may be Europe’s biggest economy, but Twitter has relatively low take-up there. So why does the company appear to be preparing to set up shop in Berlin? Read More »
As Salesforce.com trots out the integration of its social networking-oriented HR tools into CRM and Chatter, Microsoft is touting new research about why companies need to have workplace-oriented social tools. One problem: Some of these tools are more annoying than useful. Read More »
Start-up Pixykids is emerging out of stealth and is hoping to become the Facebook for kids with a platform that blends social networking, virtual worlds, video chatting and self-expression and invites the entire family to participate in a child’s activities. Read More »
The tools that have revolutionized the way we live are only just starting to have an impact on scientific research. Now ResearchGate — the “Facebook of science” — is hoping to speed up the change, with a new round of investment from Founders Fund to make … Read More »
Facebook on Wednesday updated its S-1 document to the Securities and Exchange commission for its planned initial public offering, and it’s a veritable data dump of new information about the social networking company. We dug through it so you don’t have to. Read More »
Klout, the San Francisco-based startup that measures people’s “influence” across a variety of social networks, has made its first acquisition with the purchase of Blockboard, a Twitter-like mobile app that functions as a community bulletin board for posting messages viewable to your neighbors. Read More »
Facebook is in the process of converting all user profiles to the Timeline design. But according to a poll, the majority of people aren’t so keen on the new look. Seventy percent of all respondents disapproved of Timeline, as did 90 percent of people over 65. Read More »
Summify’s sale to Twitter this week was good news for the startup, but bad news for many of its users, who expressed frustration that the news aggregation service would be mothballed post-deal. But startups News.me and Percolate are now vying to take on Summify’s users. Read More »
More Must Reads
At a press event in San Francisco on Wednesday evening, Facebook unveiled a host of new apps — more than 60 in total — that integrate with its Timeline user interface. The social networking company also announced it will begin approving Timeline apps from all developers. Read More »
Employees who are super active on social networking sites have a very different idea of what is appropriate workplace behavior than other workers, and run into on-the-job ethical violations more often, according to a new study published this week by the Ethics Resource Center. Read More »
With its dramatic new redesign, Twitter is now trumpeting itself as a better option than Facebook or Google+ when it comes to showing the world who you are via an online profile. “This is the best place to represent yourself on the Internet,” Jack Dorsey said. Read More »
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, said the social network and Google are nothing alike. Sandberg, a former Google VP, laid out some of the differences at a conference on Thursday, noting the focus and priorities of the two companies and how they go about developing products. Read More »
WalmartLabs, the new commerce research lab created out of Walmart’s acquisition of Kosmix, is formally launching its first product, a gift-finding Facebook app called Shopycat. The app enables users to take the likes, shares and interests of friends and turn them into intelligent gift recommendations. Read More »
Back in January 2011, LinkedIn acquired a startup called CardMunch, a very handy iPhone app which scanned, transcribed and organized business card information. On Tuesday, the company is announcing a relaunch of the CardMunch iPhone app with a new look and feel. Read More »
The second chapter of the Cisco 2011 Connected World Technology Report shows that young workers are weighing their job decisions based on factors like social media access, choice of device and the desire for remote working arrangements, which can trump salary considerations in some cases. Read More »
If you’re like most people, you probably don’t know your neighbors all that well — if at all. That’s where a startup called Nextdoor wants to help. Nextdoor lets neighbors create private websites where they can exchange local information while getting to know each other better. Read More »
An Android version of Trover, the snappy mobile app aimed at letting travelers share photos of their off-the-beaten-path discoveries, is now available. For a social app like Trover, which is only as good as the content its users contribute, expanding to Android is key. Read More »
LinkedIn has finally started spending some of that cash it raised in its May 9 stock market debut. But given the company’s $7.3 billion market cap, its first post-IPO acquisition — of husband-and-wife startup “Connected” — is not quite as splashy as some might have expected. … Read More »
Last week, the Wall Street Journal updated its online privacy policy to actually give it more rights to our information. The resulting lack of outrage highlights that we have a long way to go to get online privacy where it needs to be. Read More »
What do Belichick defensive schemes, Tom Clancy novels, Google+ and Facebook have in common? The answer is that all are so byzantine that they leave people scratching their heads to figure them out. Somewhere along the way social media lost sight of keeping things simple. Read More »
Timeline is more than a design change: It’s a bigger push by Facebook to mine the opportunity in the past. Timeline means there can be a point to all of this sharing: a lasting repository that helps paint a picture of your life. Read More »
Facebook’s big f8 conference is now less than two days away, and it’s shaping up to be one of the hottest tickets in tech. Facebook has some splashy launches lined up to keep the crowd at the one-day conference happy — here’s what to expect. Read More »
Facebook has added a new feature that allows users to “subscribe” to updates from people they aren’t actually friends with, which brings an asymmetrical aspect to the giant social network. So should Twitter be concerned about this Twitter-fication of Facebook? I don’t think so. Read More »
Virgin America was the first U.S. airline to add in-flight Wi-Fi. Now the tech-savvy Bay Area–based airline is taking it up a notch by announcing it plans to make some Wi-Fi connectivity available through its soon-to-be-upgraded seat-back entertainment system, starting sometime in 2012. Read More »
Badgeville is introducing Social Fabric, a technology allows a website to quickly add a host of real-time social features on their site that charts user behavior, updates users on their on-site activities and allows people to follow any piece of content or fellow users. Read More »
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo lifted the veil on Twitter user statistics Thursday morning. Besides revealing the company’s active users, he talked about features it’s working on, the expansion of promoted tweets, and why he’s “excited” that 4 out of 10 active users don’t tweet. Read More »
Seesmic, the company best known for making consumer-facing social networking apps, has shifted its strategy for the second time in its four-year history, this time to focus on building mobile apps for the enterprise. Can the third iteration of Seesmic finally bring the company success? Read More »
Skype’s acquisition of GroupMe and Facebook’s Beluga-based Messenger are part of something much bigger than group text messaging: The landscape of personal online communication is changing. In the next generation of social media interaction, users will communicate in ways that mirror their real-life interactions. Read More »
Proposals to give police the power to shut down social networks in Britain — proposed as a dramatic reaction to the riots that spread across the country this month — appear to have been dumped by the government. A victory for sensible people everywhere, or a … Read More »
If Google wants Google+ to succeed, it needs to get better at communicating clearly with the users of its new community. But the company has consistently failed to do this, and in fact has made things worse. Is being transparent something Google is incapable of? Read More »
Obvious Corp, a new venture launched by Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, has announced its first partnership with Lift, a startup founded by entrepreneurs Tony Stubblebine and Jon Crosby, who are looking to encourage human potential through positive reinforcement. Read More »
Facebook is making changes that are designed to give users more control over how they share information, and to compete with Google+. But will these changes make people less likely to share content on these networks — and how will that affect the social web? Read More »
Google’s requirement that users of Google+ be known by their real names has been the source of a firestorm of criticism since the launch of the network. But the recent launch of “verified” user accounts shows what could be a way out for the web giant. Read More »
We surveyed 400 of the newest generation, the Millennials, ages 20 through 29, on their attitudes and behavior around at-work technology and tech support, communications preferences and problem-solving styles. Here are the trends IT needs to address to make these workers productive and avoid potential problems. Read More »
Now closing on its second month, the Google+ social networking platform has seen rapid growth — and lots of attention — in its short lifetime. But new research indicates that the majority of Google+ users do not actually pitch in on the site very often, if … Read More »
GroupMe, a top contender in the group messaging app space, was born out of a hackathon but managed to find success by executing on its vision. The founders sat down with me and looked back at how the first year has gone since the service launched. Read More »
Fab.com, which began as Fabulis, a gay social networking site, has managed to find success by pushing a funky curated catalog of unique design products and trying to be as social as it can. The startup is now revamping a core feature called its inspiration wall. Read More »
When Britain’s teenagers aren’t rioting, they’re spending their time ogling each other on a hot website that’s just scored significant investment from a Canadian web mogul. But can Snog.com turn itself into something useful — or will it fade into obscurity? Read More »
Twitter has rolled out two new features to help users know which of their tweets resonate with their social graph, and to get a better look at the activity of the people they follow. The new features appear to be designed to boost Twitter’s “stickiness” factor. Read More »
It’s become clear in recent years that smartphones are going to be increasingly ubiquitous for the foreseeable future. And a recent study indicates that many people are using those devices to access Facebook more often than for, really, anything else. Read More »
Everyone seems to be looking to blame Twitter, Facebook or BlackBerry for the recent London riots, but these tools are just aspects of our increasingly real-time, mobile and connected digital lives — and that can be an incredibly powerful force for both good and bad. Read More »
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