The new DataSift Historics can examine Twitter feeds going back two years — something that consumer product and other companies might find very useful in their product design, pricing and promotion decisions. The service will be available in April. Read more »
A new survey funded by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark looked at public attitudes toward the news media and found that only a tiny fraction of those surveyed care whether a news source is the first to report something. The most important quality by far was trustworthiness. Read more »
Contacts startup Rapportive has officially been acquired by LinkedIn, the company announced on its blog Wednesday. The deal follows weeks of speculation after rumors surfaced earlier this month. Rapportive will continue to support its popular Gmail plugin, but its acquisition could lead to greater integration with LinkedIn. 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 »
Search engine Yandex is looking to extend its dominance in Russia through a deal to access Twitter’s firehose — allowing users to search millions of incoming tweets in real time. Read more »
Is Twitter a publisher of information like a newspaper, or a dumb pipe like a telephone network? A case in Australia — in which a man is suing over a defamatory tweet — highlights the difficulties Twitter could have as it tries to expand globally. Read more »
Harvard Business Review’s Tammy Erickson ponders a puzzling question for forward-thinking businesses – while most workers have trouble turning off the likes of Facebook in their personal lives, getting the same folks on board with enterprise social is a challenge. Why is that? 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 »
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 »
Instead of appearing on TV or in a newspaper, events like the death of Whitney Houston are as likely to be reported in a tweet or on Facebook — and in the long run, this shrinking of the traditional “news cycle” could be a good thing. Read more »
VC power player Kleiner Perkins is reportedly considering a new fund that will be dedicated to cloud computing companies. Whether or not it follows through, KPCB has already backed big-time cloud plays including Zynga and brought a former Twitter exec in as senior partner. Read more »
The BBC has issued a new directive to its journalists telling them they must post updates to editors first rather than breaking news on Twitter, another example of how traditional media entities are struggling with their relationship to Twitter in an era of real-time, distributed news. Read more »
A new policy from Sky News bars reporters from posting anything other than work-related content on Twitter, and even forbids them from retweeting anything that doesn’t come from a Sky account. As with so many other similar policies, this completely misses the point of social media. Read more »
At just 2.5 years old, Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, has become a tech industry institution with holdings in Facebook, Twitter, and more. GigaOM talked with Andreessen to get his thoughts on Silicon Valley and the larger tech landscape. Read more »
The latest version of Showyou includes new ways to navigate content by category or by the social network that they’re pulled in from, as well as a way for users to search and see all content curated by hashtag on Showyou and via Twitter. Read more »
According to Edward Aten, founder of Swift.fm, Facebook is recreating and competing with nearly every significant Internet product of the last few years. It’s an unprecedented pivot that threatens Facebook’s core products and may eventually benefit the very same startups Facebook is trying to crush. Read more »
Twitter on Wednesday switched on enhanced brand pages for accounts owned by National Public Radio, NBC News, Volkswagen, and others. This is the first batch of premium Twitter pages from companies other than the handful of launch partners who unveiled enhanced brand pages in December. Read more »
Mobile video startup Klip will now let its users share their videos with just a select group of friends and family. The app maker has enabled this with the rollout of “Circles,” which is what it calls the private groups that users can set up. Read more »
It’s clear that Pinterest is really hot, but a new study shows just how powerful the virtual pinboard company has become. Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn combined, according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 Referral Traffic Report. Read more »
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said on Monday that the company is not a media entity, but in most of the ways that matter, it clearly is — and that’s why its recent decision to selectively censor content that flows through its network is so important. 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 »
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said Google has all the data it needs to present Twitter in its search results right alongside Google+. That’s the latest public word from Twitter after Google began pushing its own social network in search results while keeping out Facebook and Twitter. Read more »
New York Times media writer Brian Stelter says the ability for sources to “go direct,” as Rupert Murdoch has done with Twitter, is a generational shift in the media industry. But is it a good thing or a bad thing for journalism and news consumers? Read more »
Almost a year after it angered users with its ‘quick bar’ advertising, and several months into its new Promoted Tweet service, Twitter’s ad platform seems as shaky as ever. Is targeted advertising a myth, or can Dick Costolo and team turn it around? Read more »
The news that Twitter will be censoring tweets has reinforced for many the fact that our freedoms exist at the mercy of the companies whose networks we are using — and being used by. How much trust should we have in these new information gatekeepers? Read more »
Personalized algorithms and social recommendations are great for a lot of things. But when it comes to getting news, these technologies can create an echo chamber, where our existing beliefs are reflected back to us. Uberpaper, a new site from Dmitry Shapiro, wants to combat that. Read more »
Twitter says it has implemented a new system that will allow it to remove tweets from specific countries if required to do so by law, but that it will try hard not to do this, and will be as transparent as possible if it does. Read more »
Big data has gotten very, very big if the elite talking heads at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, are talking about it. And they are talking about it. Sessions include “Decoding the data deluge” and “Personal data: the ‘new oil’ of the 21st century.” Read more »
iTunes may be great for syncing your iOS devices, or buying songs, movies, apps and books, but it’s not exactly the most nimble music player anymore. Here are five great Mac-compatible alternatives that focus on the music, without the bloat that iTunes brings. Read more »
Is Google’s new privacy policy another sign it has broken its promise and is becoming more evil? Or is the fuss over the new version — which will allow the search giant to share data among its various services — a tempest in a privacy teapot? Read more »
If businesses have any doubt about the importance of Facebook data, they should talk to MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor. MicroStrategy makes business intelligence software that companies use to sift their way through data and visualize trends. But their data is worth less without Facebook data. Read more »
Yahoo’s newly appointed CEO Scott Thompson wants the discussion over whether Yahoo is a media or tech company to come to an end — according to him, Yahoo can be both. But in this age of increasing specialization, is that a realistic goal? Read more »
The back-and-forth between Google and Twitter over Google’s new social-search results is only the latest manifestation of a much deeper problem with the relationship between the two former partners. The reality is that both sides need each other more than they would probably like to admit. Read more »
There’s been a lot of journalistic finger-wagging over a student website that filed an erroneous report on the weekend saying Penn State coach Joe Paterno had died. But that student site behaved better than some other traditional news sources, both before and after the report. Read more »
A team of developers led by Facebook’s Blake Ross has launched a browser plugin called “Don’t be evil” they claim presents Google’s search more fairly — but is this a war Facebook can win, or just a chance to make cheap PR points against Google? 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 »
Twitter’s purchase of Summify, which delivered an email summary of interesting links from a user’s social networks, shows Twitter is trying to get smarter about how it filters the flood of information users are exposed to. It’s a challenge that’s only going to grow. 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 »
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) may be shelved by the U.S. House of Representatives, but the Senate’s PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) still looms and Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman just can’t believe the stupidity that got us all into this mess. Read more »
Apple has apparently re-introduced code references to Facebook integration to the most recent iOS 5.1 beta that were once present in pre-release software but later removed. It doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily see Apple include Facebook sign-in at the system level, like it’s done with Twitter, but it definitely makes it more likely than before. Read more »
