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 »
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 »
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 »
More Must Reads
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 »
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 »
By Mathew Ingram
Mar. 30, 2010, 3:00pm PT
Comments Off
Plenty of authors take to Twitter to promote their new books, but few of them have the stature of Margaret Atwood — and even fewer of them take to it the way the Canadian fiction writing legend has. She says it’s like “having 33,000 precocious grandchildren.” Read More »
Some younger Facebook users are changing their names — using their middle name instead of their last, and so on — to try and keep their profiles hidden from prospective employers. But that could play havoc with Facebook’s claims about the verified identity of its users. Read More »
Random Guardian is an app that Guardian developer Chris Thorpe and a colleague came up with after an offhand remark during a Clay Shirky presentation about “ChatRoulette for news.” But while it may be trivial, it taps into a powerful force — a desire for serendipity. Read More »
Wikileaks, the crusading non-profit web site that publishes documents companies and governments don’t want released, is alleging that the U.S. State Department and possibly the CIA have been spying on the group, following them on airplanes and even monitoring their meetings in an Icelandic fish-and-chip restaurant. Read More »
Wikipedia says it is close to rolling out a new design for the site that it hopes will make the encyclopedia easier to use for new visitors and will encourage more contributions. The new design, code-named Vector, will start to be rolled out in April. Read More »
A British public health official has blamed Facebook for a rise in cases of syphilis, in the latest example of a wave of stories blaming social networks such as Twitter and Craigslist for most of the evils of mankind, regardless of a lack of evidence. Read More »
Composer and conductor Eric Whitacre auditioned singers via YouTube video clips for a performance of a piece called Lux Aurumque, and then stitched together 185 of the clips that were submitted in order to create a virtual choir composed of individual singers from a dozen countries. Read More »
Swiss and German privacy regulators say they are taking a close look at the practice by Facebook and other social networking sites of allowing users to upload photos, email addresses and other information without the consent of all the individuals who own or appear in them. Read More »
Technology blogger Amit Agarwal has launched a Twitter-based application called Sleeping Time, which interprets a user’s tweets in order to estimate when they are usually asleep. The service joins a growing number of similar “lifestream analysis” applications such as Please Rob Me and Hunch’s Twitter Predictor.TW Read More »
Thanks to World of Warcraft and social games on Facebook, gaming is becoming a bigger part of our culture than it has ever been. Web sites like Wikipedia and Slashdot use game-style principles to control behavior, and some see these principles moving into education and the … Read More »
Craig Newmark talks about how he thinks the web needs to develop a “distributed trust network” to allow users to monitor and manage their own reputations and the reputations of others online. He says this is the next big problem that the Web has to solve. Read More »
Hitwise research shows that less than 0.2 percent of Twitter users go to news and media sites after they visit the social network’s web site, which says more about the failure of media outlets to take advantage of Twitter than it does about Twitter users. Read More »
After weeks of speculation about what Twitter was going to launch at SXSW, the company unveiled @anywhere. But even after founder Evan Williams’ keynote, it’s not clear what the new service is exactly, apart from the fact that it provides popup windows on participating sites. Read More »
As Google continues to try and adapt Buzz to the changing needs of users, debate continues over whether the service should be its own separate publishing platform, like a blog, or whether it should be used to aggregate content from other social networks such as Twitter. Read More »
In the wake of the plagiarism case involving New York Times writer Zachary Kouwe, blame has been placed on the high-speed nature of blogging. But the real issue lies with the paper’s failure to understand the culture of the web and the value of the link. Read More »
One in four Facebook users now come from Asia or the Middle East, according to O’Reilly Media research analyst and blogger Ben Lorica — about 100 million people. And the number of users from Asia is growing much faster than any other major geographic region. Read More »
Researchers at IBM found many bloggers run out of ideas, so they came up with a recommendation system they called Blog Muse that allowed users to suggest topics they wanted to read about. Posts written through the system got more views, more comments and more “likes.” Read More »
A recent survey of social media use by Liberty Mutual shows that men are more positive towards and use social networks more frequently than women, but this conclusion is the exact opposite of the gender breakdown that several other surveys based on user-profile data have reported. Read More »
GetGlue, a social network that offers a toolbar with related content to users browsing the web, along with recommendations from their friends on the network, has launched a new feature that provides the same kinds of content and recommendations through popup widgets on any web site. Read More »
Twitter engineer Alex Payne says he is putting his personal blog on hiatus, in part because of comments he made about additions to the service were misinterpreted. Payne says he will continue to use Twitter, but will be more careful about what he says there. Read More »
Citibank has admitted that a staffer blocked the bank account of gay-networking startup Fabulis and threatened to terminate the company’s account because of what it termed “objectionable content” on the Fabulis blog, but says it has now clarified its internal policies for Internet business accounts. Read More »
Google has launched a new feature in Street View that allows users to navigate through a virtual 3D panorama of a location using photos that have been uploaded through Panoramio and Flickr. The feature is similar to Microsoft’s Photosynth, but is available to anyone with Flash. Read More »
Most Commented
Popular Now
