Google’s reworking of its social network, Google+ shows that the company has started to marry data with design and craft new experiences. Will that be enough to turn you and I into active participants? Who, knows, I am just happy it doesn’t look like Facebook. Read more »
One of the biggest drivers for LinkedIn’s business isn’t the consumer-facing side that you see — it’s the set of tools the company provides professional recruiters to match people with jobs. And the company is using data and technology to improve those tools. Read more »
As sites like Facebook work with data companies and advertisers to collect more of our personal information, tools like Disconnect may be our best hope of preserving privacy. The company just put out a major update that stops the data flow and lets you see what companies are tracking you. Read more »
The controversy over writer Nate Thayer’s failure to credit his sources, which some alleged amounted to plagiarism, is just part of an ongoing debate over how we use — and give credit for — information in a digital age. Read more at paidContent »
The media outlets apart from bringing readers news and information now have to embrace a new role: become amplifiers of the right kind of news including that directly shared by sources. Here is why I think so. Read more »
On the heels of the release of its realtime search product for consumers this summer, Bit.ly is releasing an API Tuesday that will make the capabilities available to developers interested in incorporating Bit.ly’s realtime data into their apps and products. Read more »
Mobile technology and social networks aren’t just disruptive to existing industries like communications and media, they are also helping the change the way that students learn and how education is delivered both in North America and around the world. And the disruption is just beginning. Read more »
As election season heats up, the Pew Internet & America Life Project looks at how democrats and republicans compare in their social behavior online. The study found that two-thirds of U.S. social media users have taken one of eight political or civic actions with social media. 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 »
A lot of hopes were riding on Facebook having a superstar IPO, including the hopes of venture investors that it would help trigger a wave of interest in other social-web companies, which could then also go public. But now those rosy assumptions are in question. Read more »
New York startup Percolate, which helps brands sort and curate content to share on Facebook, Twitter and other social channels, has released its newest version. Read more »
A Facebook social search engine, which is becoming more of a reality every day, would completely change the way we approach search. As an SEO specialist at The Search Agency, I’ve been closely monitoring this paradigm shift away from indexing billions of pages. Read more »
Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten wants to plug Pinterest in to purchasing, after leading a $100 million investment in the social pinboard curator. Read more at paidContent »
The team behind London-based photo app developer Lightbox are joining Facebook. But it’s a long way from Instagram’s billion-dollar deal: in fact, while the company’s employees are rejoicing, users and investors appear to have been left out in the cold. Read more »
The appointment of Ross Levinsohn as CEO is a sign Yahoo wants to focus on media as the core of its rebirth, but does the company have what it takes to succeed as a new-media entity? There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. Read more »
Email marketing may seem like an old-school, if not quaint, tactic. But LiveIntent is convinced it can bring sophisticated web targeting tools to the aging medium to help companies get the most out of what it considers to be their most valuable asset: email subscribers. Read more »
Hyperlocal mobile advertising is at a critical juncture: Leading analysts predict that mobile ad spending will increase by more than five times between 2011 and 2015. But what are the forces at play, and how effective are HyLoMo ads? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Rapid adoption of OS X Mountain Lion would clearly threaten Microsoft. But after digging into Apple’s new operating system, Edward Aten of Swift.fm thinks it poses a threat to another, less obvious, company — the current leader in the consumer cloud, Facebook. 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 »
SocialFolders, a freemium application that launched last month to let you store and manage any file created on the social web, rolled out an integration with Evernote on Tuesday that lets users drag-and-drop content such as Tweets, Facebook updates, Instagram photos into their Evernote accounts. Read more »
Thanks to an almost unprecedented grass-roots awareness campaign conducted by his friends through Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and other social media over the past three months, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Amit Gupta was able to find a compatible bone-marrow donor whose cells could help him conquer acute leukemia. Read more »
Kontagent on Thursday announced it has raised $12 million in fresh venture funding, bringing the company’s total VC investment to $19.5 million. The company says it’ll put the new money toward R&D on deep tech such as big data processing and predictive analytics tools. 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 »
Janrain, the Portland, Oregon-based software-as-a-service company, has closed on $15.5 million in funding. Janrain, which makes a social log-in platform, plans to put the money toward general growth initiatives such as hiring and product development, CEO Larry Drebes said in an interview. Read more »
The summer of 2011 has (arguably) produced a bubble around social media, with valuations for social media companies soaring and a dozen massive IPOs in the works or completed, like LinkedIn’s and Pandora’s. Will any of that social magic rub off on consumer-facing clean-power and energy-efficiency ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Maybe it’s the influence of Google+, but suddenly everyone seems to be talking about what’s wrong with Twitter. First, blogger Robert Scoble said it was “boring,” and now Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo says it needs to lose the 140-character limit. Both are missing the point. Read more »
If you’re curious about the technology behind Google+, you’re in luck. The project’s technical lead, Google engineer Joseph Smarr, is currently hosting an online question and answer session about the service, sharing details about the social platform’s development, technology, and plans for the future. Read more »
A lot of the attention on Google+ has focused on whether it’s a “Facebook killer,” but it’s actually more likely to become a competitor for Twitter than Facebook. Is the Google network just benefitting from “shiny new object” syndrome, or could it pose a real threat? Read more »
Web discovery engine StumbleUpon is now the biggest traffic driver among social media websites in the US, according to global web analytics service StatCounter. The company unseated Facebook at the top during June 2011 .The ten-year-old StumbleUpon has been working diligently at its comeback since 2009. Read more »
Google launched its much awaited and highly anticipated social networking platform today. Dubbed Google+, the service may take its cue from social networking giant Facebook, but in reality it is about the harsh reality of Google saving and enhancing its core franchise — Google Search. Read more »
As Turntable.fm has shown, a new era of social music may be upon us, one that is less about scaling wide, but more about going deep. The third era of social music is about immersion as sites add more immediacy and intimacy to the experience. Read more »
When Cisco all but confirmed it had shut down an ambitiously named Entertainment Operating System, I suspect some folks at Facebook may have chuckled to themselves. After all, Facebook may have designs on becoming for real what the Cisco product was only in name. Read more »
Memolane, the social media aggregation startup, has launched an embeddable version of its social web activity timelines. Memolane, which pools together a user’s various social web identities from sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Blogger into one searchable timeline, launched in public beta last month. Read more »
Klout — one of a number of services that are trying to measure influence in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter — has closed an $8.5-million funding round from Silicon Valley powerhouse Kleiner Perkins, and adding Kleiner partner Bing Gordon to its board of directors. Read more »
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster says Google has “given up on social,” because it doesn’t stand a chance of competing with Facebook. The problem with doing this, he says, is that as advertisers continue to chase the social graph, Google will have little to offer them. Read more »
Om claimed that Ping is the future of social commerce, but its sole focus on purchases and its presence behind a walled garden may hinder that bright future. Here are the four main issues Apple has to work on quickly for Ping to be successful. Read more »
Twitter is trying to spread the message that using the social network will have beneficial effects on your life both online and offline. “Twitter Tales,” which launched today, is a collection of stories from users about how the service has helped them or affected their lives Read more »
Facebook and Zynga, two of the largest social web companies and longtime business partners, recently had a falling out. But they’ve realized that they can’t live without each other and made up earlier this week. Here’s a GigaOM graphic showing their codependency. Read more »
Who said that the advertising models of print and yesteryear would be sustainable online? Everyone just hoped they’d translate, because porting old models onto new platforms didn’t require much innovation or effort. Read more »
Google is rolling out a confirmation screen where Buzz users can check who they are following and see whether they are displaying that information publicly. The service has seen a number of changes as a results of privacy concerns raised after it went live in February. Read more »
