Blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick is leaving his job at Read/Write Web to start a company called Plexus Engine, which he says will offer data-filtering tools he has used as a tech journalist. Kirkpatrick joins a growing group of bloggers who have left to join the startup world. 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 »
Plenty of people seem to be ready to pronounce Google+ dead in the water, or at least doomed to fail. But there are good reasons to believe that it will be around for awhile. If anything, it’s only beginning to show its real power. Read more »
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 »
Even with all the expert and amateur reviews available on the web today, people still like to get recommendations the old-fashioned way: asking their friends for advice — aka, polling the “lazy web.” That’s where a brand new iPhone app called Wikets wants to help. Read more »
Vevo gets into the real-time collaborative media consumption game with a new feature called Vevo Rooms that allows music fans to program playlists and chat with one another while they’re watching music videos together, Turntable.fm-style. Vevo Rooms is launched in collaboration with Chill. Read more »
Frontier Communications is trying to find new ways to provide value to subscribers and is rolling out one of the most comprehensive video portals online. With TumTiki, Frontier is bringing together more than 700,000 video assets from a combination of traditional broadcast TV and online sources. Read more »
The race to become the default identity platform for the social web continues to intensify, but while both Facebook and Google are determined to win and have substantial resources to throw at the problem, there are some compelling reasons to believe Twitter has the upper hand. Read more »
The fact that books are digital now means it should be easy to share our favorite books or passages, but competing rights, standards and platforms mean these features are available on a tiny fraction of books, and that keeps most readers inside proprietary corporate silos. Read more »
Users are outraged about changes that Klout has made to the way it calculates online influence, and some argue these scores are meaningless. But measuring “reputation rank” is clearly a huge potential market, and Klout is far from the only one interested in doing it. Read more »
New social networks — such as the newly launched Unthink, as well as the open-source Diaspora — are pitching themselves as alternatives for those who are upset with or afraid of Facebook. But as Myspace found out, a social network really requires one thing to succeed: utility. Read more »
Reports that Google will include social features in its new music service reinforce what the rise of Spotify and other services have already made obvious — namely, that Apple and iTunes are falling behind in the social-music race, which could have significant consequences for the company. Read more »
In an interview with GigaOM, UberMedia CEO Bill Gross — who is launching his new content-based social network, Chime.in, today — says existing social networks like Facebook and Google+ suffer from a signal-to-noise problem and a monetization problem, and that Chime was designed to help with both. Read more »
Entrepreneur Bill Gross is launching a content-focused social network called Chime.in that will compete with Twitter, Facebook and Google+, as well as link-sharing sites like Digg. He says there is a need for a better way of filtering content, but the odds are stacked against him. Read more »
Despite recent reports about a dramatic decline, Google+ still appears to be growing relatively strongly. But the network still has a substantial mountain to climb in terms of gaining a broad user base, and it’s not clear what Google has to offer that’s radically different. Read more »
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 »
Facebook has made some changes to the analytics it offers to brands, to try and get them to focus more on engagement with their users and customers instead of just looking at clickthrough rates. It’s a message that suits Facebook’s interests, but will advertisers bite? Read more »
Facebook’s recent launch of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “frictionless sharing” has caused a lot of controversy over whether the feature is an invasion of privacy. But the reality is that Facebook is simply adapting to the increasingly social way we are living our lives online. Read more »
Twitvid has raised a Series B of $6.5 million and plans to use the money to hire more people and build out its infrastructure. The company has managed to stick around while others gave up. But can it compete with a likely video play from Twitter? Read more »
The success of Tumblr — which has raised $85 million in funding and sees 13 billion pageviews a month — contains lessons for media companies, and the main one is that social sharing can be an incredibly powerful force if you make it as easy as possible. Read more »
The changes that Facebook launched this week have clearly upped the ante for Google, which desperately needs the signals that come from social activity to feed into its search and advertising algorithms. But Twitter is playing a somewhat different game than either Facebook or Google. Read more »
Since there isn’t one social network to rule them all just yet, I have at least a half-dozen apps on my smartphone to navigate the crazy social currents. But LiveGO for iOS aggregates Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ along with support for several IM services. Read more »
Cloud video editing startup Magisto is coming to market with a new service that will take raw video files and make them worth sharing with friends and posting on Facebook. The company is also announcing $5.5 million in financing from Horizons Ventures and Magma Venture Partners. Read more »
The fact that we all have technology at our fingertips has caused a disintermediation within traditional commerce, and significant disruption for retailers big and small. Innovation is no longer an option. Rather, it is paramount to survival. Read more »
Some critics say that Facebook is the new Yahoo: a giant web entity with hundreds of millions of users, but so lacking in creativity that it is reduced to copying Google+ and Twitter, and declining in popularity. But is there any truth to those claims? Read more »
The ouster of CEO Carol Bartz last week punctuated a disappointing couple of years for Yahoo, and nowhere is that disappointment more glaring than in mobile. Yahoo’s presence has waned as the iPhone and Android have fueled a surge in mobile data consumption. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s traffic on ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Fanhattan has integrated with social networks, which will not only provide more interesting content for users to watch but will also allow them to share their interests with friends. Users can now get recommendations from their social graph, including movies and TV shows their friends like. Read more »
Thanks to Facebook and other social networks, if we can accurately put a name to a face, there’s a lot of personal information available online to tell us about that person. And recent experiments unveiled at this year’s Black Hat conference showed that soon all it ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
Ever since it emerged from Chicago’s small startup community in 2008, Groupon has had nothing short of a spectacular story in terms of its growth: With estimated annual revenues of more than $4 billion after just three years of existence, the poster child for the “group ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Social media is playing an increasing role in enterprise IT, with companies like Jive Software and Telligent jockeying with IBM, Microsoft and Cisco to tap into corporate IT spending. Today, they build social platforms customers use for both employee collaboration and consumer marketing objectives. Vendors need ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The idea that newspapers need to become more social and transparent in order to build trust with their readers is not a new one — but few have put it as well as a student journalist did in a recent column for The Daily Californian. Read more »
One of the things social media marketing will need if it’s going to live up to its aggressive $5 billion spending forecast is more differentiation between marketing and collaboration platforms. Companies like Jive Software, Lithium, Mzinga and Telligent offer social network platforms aimed at both employees ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Google chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt admitted in an interview in Edinburgh on the weekend that Google is taking a hard line on the real-name issue with Google+ because it sees the social network as an “identity service” on which it can build other products. Read more »
Hurricane Irene is heading toward the East Coast. New York City, Washington D.C. and many other large cities are in its path. It appears Twitter has replaced TV as a tool of information and hysteria, which is both good and bad. Read more »
With the stock market in flux, do tech startups stand a chance when it comes to luring investors? To find out, we polled GigaOM readers on what’s hot, what’s not, which sectors might favor buyouts versus IPOs and how it all will change in the near ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Pixable is trying to tame the explosion of social photo sharing by applying search engine intelligence to organizing photos, helping people make sense of all the pictures that are flying back and forth within their various social networks. It added support for Twitter photos on Wednesday. Read more »
Social games and app developers got a bit of a shock when Facebook snuck out some Platform Policy changes. So what can an app developer do to get the most out of Facebook and insulate itself as much as possible from Facebook changes? Build its own ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The Apple Store went down this morning, and there’s still no official explanation as to why. But one thing did change: all Mac Pro and iPod classic models now feature drop down arrows that let you share the product on either Facebook or Twitter. Read more »
Did you know that nearly 40% of all tweets come from a mobile device. Nearly 56% of Twitter users are women and 70% of Twitter accounts are based outside of the US. These and more Twitter facts can be found this infographic. Read more »
