Social Media
Content-Search Deals Make Twitter Profitable
Data-mining deals signed in October will bring in $25 million in exchange for rendering Twitter’s tweets searchable on Google and Microsoft Bing
Twitter is ending 2009 on a high note. The microblogging site has reached profitability after inking $25 million of deals that make its content searchable by Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT), Bloomberg BusinessWeek has learned.
In October, Twitter said it had struck multiyear arrangements that make users’ short blog postings available on Google.com and on Bing, which is run by Microsoft. Those agreements carry sufficient value to help Twitter achieve a small profit for 2009, say two people familiar with the company’s finances, who asked to remain anonymous because Twitter’s books are not Continue Reading
eGether: A Social Network For Pitching And Getting Pitched, Without The Email Overload
The overflowing inbox. It’s a problem many a journalist or blogger has had to deal with, but it’s often a necessary evil. After all, we’re all on the hunt for the next big story, cool gadget, or interesting startup, and Email has long been the standard for receiving pitches. Unfortunately, Email is really bad at filtering through the noise, so it’s easy for good stories to fall through the cracks. That’s where eGether comes in. The new site is looking to offer an alternative to the pitch-by-Email method. It’s essentially a social Continue Reading
LinkedIn works with Twitter, and vice versa
Today we’re announcing a partnership between LinkedIn and Twitter – and new features that we think are going to make both Twitter and LinkedIn more powerful for you.
The idea is simple: When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing. And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections as well, from any Twitter service or tool.
Why? Because when you’re trying to get something done, you want Twitter and Continue Reading
Salesforce Chatter: A Real-Time Social Network For The Enterprise
We’re here at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual cloud computing event in San Francisco. CEO Marc Benioff is delivering the keynote and we will be live-bogging the news below. Salesforce has had a banner year, reporting strong earnings yesterday for the third quarter, launching a new version of their fastest growing product, Service Cloud 2; and rolling out a lightweight contact manager for small businesses. So what is the future? Benioff has long praised the virtues of the real-time cloud and said recently that real-time technology is not only crucial to Salesforce’s offerings but is the future of the company’s products. Benioff has even praised Twitter for making the transition between the cloud and real-time web seamless.
Today, Salesforce is making its own venture Continue Reading
LinkedIn Reveals New Look, Better Navigation
Some LinkedIn users will have noticed a change to the navigation and user interface of the LinkedIn.com website, announces a company blog post. The business-focused social network is in the process of rolling out an updated design that aims to improve and simplify site navigation while also offering a cleaner, less-cluttered look. Does the fresh coat of paint hit the mark?
What’s New: Navigation Improvements, Lots of Whitespace
One of the main new features of the revamped LinkedIn is the global navigation bar at the top of the page which links to all the site’s Continue Reading
Facebook U.S. Visits Increase 194% Over Past Year; Tagged is Beating Twitter?
New data released from Experian Hitwise reconfirms what we’ve known for 
some time: Facebook is killing the other social networks. Nowhere is that more true than here in the U.S. where they found that the visits to the site have increased 194% from September of last year to September 2009. However, it’s Twitter that’s seen the largest year-over-year increase in visits – during that same time period, they’re up 1170%. But one of the oddest findings being reported is how the social Continue Reading
Yahoo Mail Suffers Outage
It appears that Yahoo Mail is suffering from an outage. Complaints from Yahoo Mail users are all over Twitter. It’s unclear how extensive the outage is and what is causing the issue but we’ll report back when we find out.
Yahoo Mail is currently the No. 1 Web mail service with 300 million people using it worldwide, so even a smaller outage could result in a large amount of people not having access to their email accounts. Competitor Gmail also succumbed to a serious outage recently, leaving users with nearly eight hours of Continue Reading
Upgrading To Windows 7? Easily Install Multiple Software Programs With Ninite
Now that Windows 7 is being met with mostly positive reviews and green-lighting by software professionals, no doubt many will be making the switch to Microsoft’s new operating system in the next couple of weeks. Which is a bit of a pain if you stuck with Windows XP and skipped Vista altogether, because then the best thing for you to do is perform a complete clean install after backing up your data and programs.
Wiping out your data is one thing, but you’ll also need to install all your applications from scratch again once you get Windows 7 up and running on your Continue Reading
Microsoft To Announce Bing Deals With Facebook And Twitter
Microsoft will announce the integration of real time status updates from both Twitter and Facebook into Bing at the Web 2.0 Summit today, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deals. The announcement will be made by Qi Lu, President of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, later this morning.
The deals will integrate real time updates from users of the services into search results. Google and Bing aren’t good at pulling in this real time data today because of the need to constantly index user pages, and the difficulty in knowing when those pages have been updated. Users have Continue Reading
Payvment Enables Retail Storefronts On Facebook Via PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API
In an effort to compete with Amazon’s Flexible Payments API, PayPal recently announced its version of the API, called Adaptive Payments (which we scooped over the summer). PayPal’s API gives developers full access to PayPal’s features, allowing them a lot more freedom in building applications, which includes the ability to accept and distribute payments. Over the course of the past few month, PayPal has been working with several startups as part of a pilot program to show the capabilities of the API in anticipation of a broader rollout in November. Payvment, which powers online shopping cart technologies and uses PayPal as a payment mechanism, is launching a potentially revolutionary new Facebook app that would let anyone set up a retail storefront on Facebook.
Payvment was Continue Reading
The New Technorati
Technorati relaunched its site tonight, changing and adding key features. Most notable is an expanded and fresher top 100 blogs list, and a new feature that lets authors post their content directly to the site.
In 2007 Technorati redesigned the look and functionality of its home page three times. Here’s the first. And the second. The last change, made under the direction of incoming CEO Richard Jalichandra, has stayed more or less constant since then.
In the meantime, Technorati has focused on expanding it’s business in other areas, particularly in handling advertising for other sites. Today, only a small percentage of Technorati’s total network traffic of 25 million U.S. unique visitors per month actually visit Technorati.com.
But that doesn’t mean the Continue Reading
The Today Show Jumps On Mommy Blogger Bandwagon With TodayMoms
As Mommy bloggers steadily grow in ranks, the segment is beginning to wield more influence in both the blogosphere and on the web as a whole. And it looks like NBC is waking up to the potential power of this audience. The media company is launching a web-based offshoot of the Today Show, called TODAYMoms.com. Unsurprisingly, the site is currently sponsored by Walmart.
The site will offer parenting news, advice and tips from the show, and wants to engages web-savvy mommies in engaging with the site. There will be a considerable amount of web-exclusive content, and NBC says that they want to create a mobile destination for the site, and perhaps in an iPhone app. It appears that the site will be partly a social network, as moms will be encouraged to create a profile, share photos Continue Reading
Searchtastic Throws Its Hat Into The Twitter Search Engine Ring
There are a plethora of startups that are trying to harness and improve upon Twitter’s real-time search functionality, including Collecta, One Riot, Scoopler and TwitterTroll. The simple fact is that there is considerable value for users in searching Tweets, and even the big guns like Microsoft and Google are beginning to wake up to this. Today, Searchtastic, which bills itself as “smart Twitter search,” is launching its own Twitter search engine.
Like other Twitter search sites, Searchtastic lets you search Tweets for a particular keyword or hashtag. What makes the search engine interesting is the ability to pull up Tweets from weeks or months ago, which Twitter’s own search engine doesn’t allow you to do. Twitter’s search currently lets you see Tweets from a week Continue Reading
Wufoo Launches Integrated Payments Feature For Online Form Builder
Wufoo, an online HTML form builder that helps anyone create contact forms, online surveys and event registrations without writing a single line of code, has launched a new feature that now lets users collect money. When you design a form with Wufoo, it basically does all the heavy-lifting for you and builds the database, backend and all of the scripts needed to collect and understand data, which is hosted by Wufoo. One you build a form, you can either embed the code on your website or blog or provider access to the form via a Wufoo link. We previously wrote about Wufoo, which was funded by startup incubator Y Combinator, here.
Now, Wufoo is integrating payments into its forms, letting users create forms with payment collection options, including PayPal Payments Pro and USA ePay. Continue Reading
NeighborGoods: Sharing Returns To Its Physical Roots
Everyone loves to share stuff on the web (I just want to do it faster), but a potentially more compelling business model is using the web to share physical stuff. That’s the idea behind NeighborGoods, a new service launching its public beta program in Los Angeles today.
I’ve had a chance to look around the service for a few weeks, and the idea seems like a very solid one. Here’s a perfect use case: I don’t have a vacuum cleaner, but someone I know does, and they’re sharing it on Continue Reading
MySpace Expands Twitter Syncing To Six New Countries
Yesterday MySpace launched two-way syncing with Twitter for U.S. users, something Facebook has shied away from to date.
This evening, they’ve extended the functionality to the UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and India. You can sign up for the service at myspace.com/sync.
MySpace says they’ve also got a bunch of celebrities, comedians and musicians to sync their MySpace and Twitter accounts: Lenny Kravitz, John Legend, Rachel Zoe, Margaret Cho, George Lopez, Jamie Kennedy, David Spade, Slash, Cat Deeley, Chamillionaire, Jim Gaffigan, David Alan Grier, Larry The Cable Guy, and John Witherspoon. And I’ve done it too.
Continue Reading
LinkedIn Reaches 45 Million Users
LinkedIn tonight celebrated their 45 millionth user sign up, according to LinkedIn’s Marketing Project Manager Florina Xhabija’s Twitter message.
According to comScore, LinkedIn had 16 million worldwide monthly unique visitors and 331 million page views in June 2009, up from 7.7 million and 114 million a year ago, respectively.
The company was valued at around $1 billion in its last (2008) round of financing, and says they’ve been profitable for 2+ years.
LinkedIn has gone through numerous changes at the CEO role with founder Reid Hoffmanchanging the guard once again in June of this year after yet another change in December of 2008.
source: techcrunch Continue Reading
Brandtology Raises $1.35 Million For Advanced Social Media Tracking
Google Patent Unveils Link Penalties
