Yahoo needs an open platform to build its future on. Whether Tumblr will turn out to be the right platform, and whether its long-term potential is worth $1.1 billion now are obviously important questions. But I don't think they're what drove the deal.…
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Facebook has nothing to fear, except itself
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 MoreTwitter begins larger rollout of enhanced brand pages
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 MoreStudy: Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google+, nearly on par with Twitter
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 MoreSocialFolders plugs into Evernote to be your social media diary
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 MoreUberpaper aims to kill the echo chamber of social news
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 More1000memories integrates with Facebook to fill Timeline with old photos
San Francisco startup 1000memories has integrated its ShoeBox app for scanning and sharing old physical photos online with Facebook's Timeline user interface. This means that people will be able to easily fill in the gaps on their Timeline between their birthdates and when they joined Facebook.…
Read MoreFacebook data: Thousands of journalists now have a Subscribe button
According to Facebook, reporters have been especially receptive to the Subscribe button feature launched in Sept. 2011. The number of journalists who have enabled the subscribe button is now in the thousands, and the average journalist has seen a 320-percent boost in subscribers since November.…
Read MoreFacebook starts converting all profiles to Timeline
Facebook said Tuesday it will convert all users' profiles to the new Timeline interface over the next few weeks. Soon Timeline, which shows each user's life over an expandable Timeline that dates all the way back to his or her birth, will be the only design available to all Facebook users.…
Read MoreNews.me, Percolate vie for Summify users after Twitter buy
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 MoreFacebook code reappears in iOS beta: here’s hoping it sticks around
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 MoreGnip and WordPress deepen ties, expand data partnership
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 MoreProblems at Posterous: Possible outage, private messages shared
UPDATED. Posterous encountered "server connectivity issues" that made the blogging site inaccessible to a number of users Wednesday. The apparent outage occurred after at least one Posterous user received a series of email posts from random Posterous groups, some of which were meant to be private.…
Read MoreWow: Instagram’s website gets 300M page views per month
Instagram's website is currently receiving 10 million page views each day, adding up to some 300 million page views per month, GigaOM has learned. This is especially interesting given that the Instagram experience is tailored to users of the app, not viewers on the web.…
Read MoreWho’s winning in Twitter photos? Hint: Not Yfrog or Lockerz
When Twitter debuted its native photo-sharing feature earlier this year, some people worried that it would harm the existing ecosystem of third-party photo sharing apps. New data indicates that those concerns were well justified: Twitter now powers 45 percent of the photos shared on its site.…
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