As we consume more and more content via real-time streams that come to us through Twitter and Facebook and newer platforms, how does that affect advertising? Everyone wants their ads to look like just another form of content, but that’s a lot harder than it sounds. Read more »
With nearly 80 million members and 4 billion photos that are growing by hundreds every second, Instagram is taking an ambition step ahead by using geo-data to create a better photo consumption experience. The new version could lead to possible business opportunities, or so I think. Read more »
Evan Williams and Biz Stone have launched a new web-publishing platform called Medium that they hope will be part of a reinvention of digital content. But apart from founders with a great pedigree, it’s not immediately clear what Medium offers that other services don’t. Read more »
What is Twitter’s company identity? One clue may be found in a series of slogans it is posting on office walls and inscribing on employee laptops. Read more »
Smartphones can enable an amazing level of connectivity, but they can also allow that activity to be monitored and used in controversial ways. But for mobile marketing to realize its full potential, consumers may need to sacrifice their privacy to one degree or another. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Federal investigators viewed the Facebook profile of an alleged gangster in the Bronx by asking his informant “friend” to show it to them. A judge ruled this was not unconstitutional because Facebook users can’t control what other people do with the information they post. Read more »
Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams Tuesday unveiled their latest publishing platform, Medium. The new tool aims to give people a collaborative, lightweight way to express themselves online with images and text. Read more »
In the era of cloud computing and big data, chief marketing officers can either sink or swim depending on their ability to recognize the importance of the consumer information available to them and are able to capture and put it to use. Read more »
Most critics of Dalton Caldwell’s App.net project seem to see it as a replacement for Twitter, only with users paying for the service rather than advertisers. But what the service really wants to be is a central messaging bus and open ecosystem for the social web. Read more »
This week marks the 21st anniversary of the world’s first website, and as new social-web platforms like Twitter and Facebook spend more and more of their energy trying to control and monetize their networks, it’s worth remembering some of the choices that the web’s creator made. Read more »
As Twitter pushes for more control over the platform in order to monetize the content flowing through it, some prominent critics of this move argue the company is making a big mistake by focusing on the needs of advertisers rather than the needs of users. Read more »
The Financial Times and New York Times are at or close to the point where subscription revenue exceeds advertising revenue. This means their paywalls are working, but it also means advertisers are fleeing — and the implications of that for journalism could be significant. Read more »
A group of researchers has developed a machine learning model that can detect tweets relating to bullying, and even identify bullies, victims and witnesses. Next, it wants to add sentiment analysis to determine individuals’ emotional states. But if they see trouble, how do they intervene? Read more »
The way Facebook and Twitter have been controlling and/or closing down their platforms to outsiders may have parallels to the way other technology leaders have behaved in the past, but both companies need to be careful that they don’t ruin their platforms in the process. Read more »
Digg, the social-news community that New York-based incubator Betaworks acquired part of last month, has been relaunched with a new look and new plumbing, but it doesn’t have anything like the kind of community Digg had — something that is hugely valuable and difficult to build. Read more »
Big data and data science have already proven their worth in the worlds of online advertising and marketing, and now they’re being turned to elections. Here are five sites to follow if you want to impress your peers with data-driven insights on who’ll win in November. Read more »
Twitter’s decision to suspend the account of a British journalist raises a host of questions about the company’s behavior, but one of the important ones is to what extent Twitter’s filtering and curation features could make it legally liable for the content flowing through the network. Read more »
Twitter set off its first major public relations crisis this week when it suspended the account of a journalist who had been criticizing the social media site’s corporate partner, NBC, over its Olympic coverage. It is finally trying to fix things. Read more »
Twitter has restored the account a U.K. journalist who is at the center of a firestorm over corporate control of media and speech. And the tweet that landed him in trouble is still visible on his timeline. Read more »
As Twitter tries to evolve from being a real-time information network into a multibillion-dollar commercial media entity, it is having to face the inherent conflict between those two goals, and many critics see the suspension of journalist Gary Adams’ account as a symptom of that conflict. Read more »
With the growth of sensors and microelectronics, the potential uses of wearable-computing technologies now reach to health and fitness, gaming, fashion, disabilities and augmented reality. Most importantly, the widespread adoption of wearables will drive the form function and market for mobiles in vital ways. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
NBC asked Twitter to suspend the account of a journalist who has been a prominent critic of its Olympics coverage. Twitter — an NBC partner — complied. Is this censorship or is there some other explanation? Read more »
According to the New York Times, Apple has had discussions with Twitter about making a substantial investment in the real-time network. A closer relationship between the two — which has been rumored in the past — would make some sense for both companies. Read more »
Companies doing business on the web and in the cloud must spend a lot on infrastructure to stay running and to support new services. Here’s what Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Zynga spent in the recent quarter, and what it might mean. Read more »
If Twitter wants to remain opaque about its practices, that’s fine — but it shouldn’t expect any slack from upset users or investors. Blaming a two-hour outage on an “infrastructural double-whammy” after remaining mum on even where its data centers are located doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Read more »
Twitter is reportedly in talks with Hollywood producers and network executives about creating one or more reality-style TV shows that would be integrated into the network — but if it does decide to do this, the company risks alienating its core users and diluting its fundamental value. Read more »
Remember when Friendster was the hot social network, publishers doubted that ebooks would ever sell, and Netflix thought DVDs in red envelopes was the future? We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Read more »
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says the company wants to become more of a media player, and also wants to become a Facebook-style platform inside which developers build applications — but can the company find a balance between competing with third-party providers and working alongside them? Read more »
Twitter is launching a partnership with NBC Universal to create a real-time news hub around the Olympic Games — the latest step in the company’s transformation into a media entity, a move that is a double-edged sword for other media outlets. Read more »
The debate continues over which model is better for social networks: free and ad-supported or paid for by users? Dalton Caldwell says the latter and is building a paid alternative to Twitter, but VC Fred Wilson argues that free is the only model that works. Read more »
As newspapers continue to lay off staff, one question is what will help to fill the gap that is left — where will that journalism come from? We’ve seen signs this week of one partial answer: amateur journalists making use of social media. Read more »
An insensitive tweet has trigged a rightful cascade of contempt that could stain a dress shop for years. At the same time, the fallout from the tweet shows how social media is changing the nature of crisis communications. Read more »
The way that communities like Reddit can come together to produce real-time reporting on incidents like the mass shooting in a Colorado movie theater shows how a new form of journalism — one that blends traditional reporting and crowdsourced reports — is starting to take shape. Read more »
What one thing would you tell your younger self if you had the opportunity? Hacker News posed the question — borrowed from the Twitter@ayoungerme account — to its community and got some interesting results — some flip and some philosophical. Read more »
Twitter announced today that it is filing an appeal in a case that is helping to define privacy rights in the social media era. Read more »
A simple news service like Evening Edition — which a group of web designers came up with as a side project — contains a number of lessons that mainstream media outlets might want to consider, such as serving readers’ information needs instead of their own. Read more »
Pocket, the web-content-saving company formerly known as Read It Later, has raised $5 million in a Series B funding round and will use the money to expand its platform. The company now has nearly six million users. Read more at paidContent »
Trapit, an AI-based discovery engine for Web content from the group behind Siri, is releasing its iPad app Thursday after launching a Web version last November. Trapit wants to compete against news reading apps like Flipboard by offering better content. It’s planning publisher partnerships, too. Read more at paidContent »
Apple and Google still dominate the smartphone space, but look out for Microsoft, which finally has some muscle behind its mobile strategy. Meanwhile mobile-browser developers went head-to-head with native apps, and Facebook continued to buy mobile expertise via acquisition. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Comparing a traditional news story about a recent shooting with a news report from a Reddit user — who pulled together Twitter messages from the perpetrators and victims — provides a glimpse of what a real-time, crowdsourced newsroom of the future might look like. Read more »
