Has Pinterest created an entirely new way for users to share content? A survey conducted on GigaOM asked just that question, and a new GIgaOM Pro report delves into the various implications for the social network. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Pinterest’s recent changes to get on the right side of copyright law highlight how the legal system continues to lag behind what the Internet makes possible. Until that issue is resolved, virtually every Internet-powered content-sharing service is at risk. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Twitter announced it has acquired blogging and sharing platform Posterous in what appears to be acquisition of talent. No details about the acquisition were released but Posterous Spaces will remain up and running for the time being, though it’s unclear how long that will last. Read more »
The Kony2012 campaign from Invisible Children is one of the most viral social-media campaigns of all time. But is it a sign of how powerful social media can be as a news-distribution mechanism, a sign of how dangerous it can be or both? 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 »
Engagio, which launched on Wednesday backed by seed funding from Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and other angel investors, pulls in comments and replies from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and a number of other social services and sites to create a one-stop social dashboard. Read more »
French startup Pearltrees just scored another $6 million to help scale up its social curation service that helps people save, sort and share what they find on the web. But with dozens of services in play, is this a bubble waiting to pop? Read more »
Tumblr hits 500 million page views a day, deals with 40,000 requests per second and sends more than a terabyte of data into its Hadoop cluster. Here’s how it went from nothing to a startup that needed to serve 15 billion page views a month. Read more »
This report outlines the myriad issues at play in Facebook’s move, from examining how CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to rewire the world to understanding the company’s infrastructure dependency. But from every angle, it’s clear the effects will ripple throughout the startup and tech communities. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
Exclusive. Gnip is making it very clear it’s not just about Twitter anymore. The company, which provides aggregated API access to a variety of social media streams, has significantly expanded its partnership with Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com. Read more »
MySpace, the grand daddy of social is still wheezing along, comScore says. In fact it is bigger than Tumblr and Google Plus. Infact, people spend more time on MySpace, a dying platform than on Google Plus. Pinterest just cracked the top ten list! Read more »
Pinterest is one of the hottest startups around these days and represents the latest buzzword in the Valley: curation. Here are some of my thoughts on why Pinterest and other such companies are getting attention and gaining traction with younger Internet users. Read more »
Edward Aten of Swift.fm noticed a shift in priorities this year. Visual experiences are starting to become the gold standard of web success; the successful web companies of 2011 and beyond are just simply better looking. Read more »
Siri went down on Thursday for its first extended outage — around five hours, according to most counts. Five hours is hardly three days (like another noteworthy recent mobile service blackout), but the reaction of media and users show Apple’s personal assistant is making its presence felt. 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 »
Google added yet another app to its stable of software for the iPhone on Thursday. This time, it’s the official Blogger app, which lets users publish and edit posts to Google’s blogging service. But with no shortage of competition, is there anything special about this app? 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 »
Most mainstream news websites still look like newspapers because most of them still approach the journalism they do in a traditional way — and until they embrace the idea of real-time and “news as a process,” the way that their websites look is unlikely to change. Read more »
Fresh off its $50 million in funding, note-taking and memory service Evernote is preparing for its first-ever developer conference next month, where it will outline its broader strategy and how it plans on becoming a 100-year company by building a productivity platform. Read more »
San Francisco–based VidCaster is taking the beta tag off its online video distribution platform, opening for anyone to sign up. For example, companies that want to use video for marketing but don’t have the resources to build and maintain a whole site themselves. Read more »
GigaOM conducted a survey over the Fourth of July weekend of GigaOM readers regarding Google+’s chances for success, its competitive weapons and its likely impact on the competitive social media environment. Here’s a snippet of what we discovered about the prospects for Google’s latest social venture. Read more »
Tumblr, the combination blogging platform and social network, continues to grow at a phenomenal rate — racking up more than 8.4 billion pageviews a month, which puts it in the top 25 sites in the world. But will it ever figure out how to make money? Read more »
Spike TV is teaming up with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Shazam, Foursquare, Tumblr, Smilebooth, GetGlue and GroupMe for its Guys Choice Awards show. The social media blitz is designed to raise awareness and increase tune-in while also tapping second-screen apps to help drive engagement with viewers. Read more »
Steve Rubel, a VP of digital strategy at Edelman, recently moved his blog to Tumblr and deleted all of his old posts. He says Google is paying more attention to social signals now, and so a social platform is more important than just having a blog. Read more »
MTV is betting big on social media to drive viewers to its big movie awards show. The cable network, which has increasingly tapped into social networks, plans to leverage Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr in a social media blitz during this Sunday’s MTV Movie Awards. Read more »
With all the bad news about recent outages of Amazon Web Services and Sony’s Playstation Network, cloud-based services and the cloud industry needs to more proactively educate users to protect the “cloud” brand. Read more »
It’s not exactly news that the Millennial Generation (loosely defined as people born between 1980 and 2000) spend a lot of time on websites like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. But according to recent research findings, the constant social networking isn’t all fun and games. Read more »
More than half the employees at web video start-up Blip.tv are active Tumblr users, which has created a public awareness of the company’s internal culture. It’s a unique example of how corporate communications can incorporate social media, but would it work for any ol’ start-up? Read more »
A New York Times story says that blogging is on the decline, especially among young people, who are using social networks like Facebook instead. But blogging is arguably still growing rapidly — it’s just that the form it is taking is evolving in different ways. Read more »
More exciting than examining the previous quarter is looking forward into the next 12 months and using the trends of 2010 to predict the realities that will surface in 2011. Throughout this past December, GigaOM Pro’s curators did just that, making trend predictions, pointing out companies to watch and even telling us what not to expect. Connected Consumer curator Michael Wolf’s thoughts, analyses and predictions are compiled here in a single report. Companies mentioned in this report include Netflix, Hulu, Facebook, Apple and Boxee. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Some might call this past quarter in the infrastructure space transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance might be coming to an end, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast new light on the legal aspects of cloud computing. Big data got bigger, meanwhile, as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded, and amid all these cutting-edge technologies, two archaic topics — Novell and Java — proved they aren’t going anywhere soon. Companies mentioned in this report include Intel, AMD, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Yahoo, Appistry, VMware, Joyent and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Micro-blogging service Tumblr has raised $30 million in new funding with backing from Sequoia Capital, Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. The latest funding, which follows up on Mathew’s report last month that the company had raised another round, brings Tumblr’s total to about $45 million. Read more »
Tumblr, the web-publishing platform that has seen spectacular growth over the past several months, has landed a huge new round of funding led by veteran Sand Hill Road VC firm Sequoia Capital that values the three-year old, New York-based startup at about $135 million. Read more »
In Silicon Valley, there’s an elite group of companies whose valuations defy gravity. These are companies with momentum, whether real or perceived: Zynga, Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. Add Groupon, RadiumOne, Tumblr, Cloudera and RightScale to this list. Plus, they are all in the money. Read more »
Vanilla Forums, which I wrote about last year, has added several new features. Notably, forums can now be embedded in other website using simple JavaScript code. The embedded forums can use your site’s theme and CSS, or can use one of the many Vanilla themes. Read more »
Blogging platform Tumblr has raised another round of financing from its existing venture backers, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures, putting pressure on the company to start generating revenue. It is exploring various options, but founder David Karp has said that he is “opposed to advertising.” Read more »
When I last wrote about ZooLoo I mentioned how ambitious a product it was, and how that could make it overwhelming, especially for the small business audience it was trying to attract. The new release seem to have addressed a lot of my concerns. Read more »
New York is the capital of media, advertising, and finance, but historically Silicon Valley and Boston have overshadowed New York’s efforts to encourage and fund technology entrepreneurs. In the past two years, this has changed, especially when it comes to media-related ventures. Read more »
When I made the jump to the iPhone 3G it was most definitely a platform play for me. As a web worker who can be on and off client sites all day, I still want access to my personal web properties, especially my blogs, which serve […] Read more »
