Archive for the 'Social Media' Category

Facebook Unveils a Location-Based Service

Published on August 19, 2010 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: .

2010 is the year of location–at least in blogs focused on social networking, which is a Montana-sized “at least”–and Facebook’s entry into the increasingly crowded field has long been expected. Today, the company officially announced its plans, by the name of Facebook Places.

Facebook’s Places borrows heavily from location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, which allow users to check in at places and broadcast their location to friends. But those companies, as well as others like Yelp, said they saw Facebook’s Places as a complement to their own services and as an opportunity to gain additional distribution.

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Google Gets Semantic

Published on July 17, 2010 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 1 Comment Tags: .

Google has acquired Metaweb Technologies, a five-year-old San Francisco startup that maintains a massive open database that details all sorts of real-world stuff in an effort to “build a smarter, more connected Internet.”

“The web isn’t merely words—it’s information about things in the real world, and understanding the relationships between real-world entities can help us deliver relevant information more quickly,” Google said in a blog post.

Google’s emerging rival Facebook recently announced the Open Graph, a way to map all objects on the web like movies and places and peoples’ relationships to them. The metadata required for this would create a rival structure to what Metaweb has built. And because Facebook has the “like” data recording the preferences of its 500 millions users, it would be in the best position to harness the metadata to create a compelling search product.

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Facebook is Pushing a Platform Strategy

Published on July 14, 2010 in Global Strategy and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Facebook is going to go beyond rolling out standalone applications for iPhones, Google Android devices or feature phones and start considering itself a platform for developers to distribute mobile apps with.

“Where we’re going from here is a platform strategy. We’re going away from a one-off app strategy,” said Erick Tseng in his first public appearance since joining Facebook as head of mobile products. Speaking at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference today, he said the company will start building out this effort over the next several months [Source].

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The Most Influential Women in Technology

Published on April 26, 2010 in High Tech & Media and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Last year, Fast Company raised plenty of eyebrows by publishing a ranking on “Most Influential Women in Technology”. To compose an updated 2010 ranking it received an overwhelming number of nominees and fresh names proved that. Nonetheless, women in tech remain at a distinct disadvantage by almost any metric (average salary, top-management representation, etc). However, there is also plenty to celebrate and be inspired by. Fast Company categorised those woman into seven categories respectively:

  • The Executives
  • The Activists
  • The Media
  • The Entrepreneurs
  • The Evangelists
  • The Gamers
  • The Brainiacs

Also check out the list of “Most Influential Women in Web 2.0” published in 2008 by Fast Company.

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21 Twitter Tips From Socially Savvy Companies

Published on April 24, 2010 in Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Adapted from his book Engage, Brian Solis presents his list of suggestions to help businesses learn how to engage customers on Twitter through the examples of those companies, from Dell to Zappos, already successfully building online communities. You can find the complete article here. A summary of the top 10 tips are listed below:

1 ) Special Offers
2 ) Ordering
3 ) Word of Mouth Marketing
4 ) Conversation Marketing
5 ) Customer Service
6 ) Focus Groups
7 ) Direct Sales
8 ) Business Development
9 ) Curation
10) Information Networks

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Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2010

Published on April 20, 2010 in High Tech & Media and Social Media. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Software upstarts such as Playdom, Posterous, and Foursquare capitalize on Web users’ desire to make social networks more useful and fun.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s have surveyed the tech sector to identify a fresh crop of the most promising technology startups and the young people, age 30 and under, who are steering them. Seven of the 13 startups on this year’s list are building Web and mobile-device software that extend the capabilities of social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.

It’s not surprising that many startups want to ride the coattails of popular social networks. The rapid ascent of traffic to social networking sites can draw lots of attention for startups that offer new tools or diversions to their members. “Facebook and Twitter have become platforms in the same way Microsoft’s Windows became a platform 20 years ago. The complete special report can be found here.

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Silicon Valley Gears Up for M&A

Published on April 4, 2010 in High Tech & Media and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Silicon Valley companies looking to put their cash to work may drive a wave of mergers this year, bankers and venture capitalists say.

Companies are eager to make acquisitions because many of them have cut research budgets. Meaning many of them are not as able to fall back on their own ingenuity to fuel growth. More businesses are relying on acquisitions to find their next new product or service [Source].

Venture capitalists had their busiest quarter (2010Q1) in recent memory, with nine venture-backed companies going public and a record-breaking 111 companies changing hands in mergers and acquisitions according to a report released Thursday by Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (Source: Charts). Out of the 111 M&A deals, 81 took place in the information technology sector.

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Facebook More Popular Than Google?

Published on March 18, 2010 in Social Media. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

According to the latest Hitwise analysis, Google’s lost its crown as the most-visited Web site in the U.S. last week. The new king of Web site traffic is, of course, Facebook.

During the Winter holidays there were a few momentary spikes in traffic which placed Facebook on the top, but if you check out the graph of the long term trend shown above, you can see Facebook’s meteoric rise is now on target to meet or beat Google. And if that curve continues on its trajectory, which it may well do for a while (its market share is 185% up over the same week in 2009, for example,) Facebook will become number one by a huge margin, versus the tiddly little 0.04% separation it currently has above Google’s 7.03% share of average weekly market share.

Nonetheless, Facebook is now in a position to leverage those user visits to seize control of the online ad-placement business from Google–advertisers will begin to do the math and work out which site will get their ads in front of more eyeballs. And while Web 2.0 has been with us for a while, the fact that more people are visiting Facebook than Google indicates that this interactive revolution has really changed online habits [Source].

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News Browsing by Network Analysis

Published on February 28, 2010 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Intuitively, we all know that big news topics relate to other big news topics–when you read about Google, you’re likely also reading about Microsoft. This new tool from Slate makes those connections a bit more concrete.

News Dots automatically scans all of the articles from major publications, and then tags them using Calais, an automated tagging engine created by Thompson Reuters. When two stories share a tag, it records the results:

The hope, of course, is that as the tool develops, “social networks” will develop in clusters, the same way that Facebook friends tend to cluster around college acquaintance.

The interface is currently hideous. But you wonder if something like this isn’t the future of news browsing. Can you imagine what happens when tagging technology gets truly semantic–when stories can be linked not just with keywords, but ideas? [Source: Flowing Data]

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Google vs Facebook

Published on February 12, 2010 in Global Strategy and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , .

For years Google has stayed on the fringes of the social-networking industry, leaving the field largely to the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Now, however, it is making a determined foray into online friendships. On February 9th the search giant unveiled Buzz, a networking service that will be closely integrated with the firm’s e-mail offering, Gmail. Google no doubt hopes Buzz will help it catch up with the leaders of the networking world—but the chances are slim. Mashable made a comparison here. [Source 1] [Source 2].

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