You usually don’t think of profit when you think of instant messaging services, but Paltalk has been making money for years through its subscription service — and the company has just bought back shares from investor Softbank Capital Partners, also …
Facebook doesn’t plan to go public for years, so it’s trying to keep employees happy in the meantime by letting them sell stock to Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies. Employees who own common stock can sell for $14.77 per share, …
I’m here at TechCrunch’s “Real-Time Stream CrunchUp” event in Redwood City, California. Investors Ron Conway and John Borthwick are on stage, talking effusively about how Twitter — and real-time services in general — will end up being a big industry. …
This past April, AOL began testing out a social toolbar for web sites, under the name of a lifestreaming service called Socialthing, which it acquired in 2008. The toolbar is now going through a rough transition into something else, although …
Lifestreaming service FriendFeed is introducing real-time search, so you can search for anything on the site and see it instantly. Real-time search is also live for advanced search options, including search terms that you can save and track through FriendFeed, …
Today, Facebook is announcing simpler ways for users to share information. I’m on a briefing call with a bunch of other reporters, listening to Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly and product manager Leah Pearlman walk us through a presentation …
Meebo is taking another big step towards making its instant messaging service profitable. It’s officially launching a new product that runs interactive pop-out ads within its IM toolbar available on partner sites. You might be on a racing site, for …
Lifestreaming service FriendFeed is getting more and more like Gmail, the popular email service that the startup’s founders built back when they were at Google. Today, FriendFeed is getting themes so users can personalize the site interface — like what …
Facebook chief financial officer Gideon Yu left the company this spring, in somewhat strange circumstances, with Facebook saying it wanted a CFO with public company experience. Now it has one: former Genentech CFO David Ebersman.
While Ebersman worked at biotechnology …
Google product management director Prashant Fuloria quietly slipped across Highway 101 last month, from the Googleplex in Mountain View to Facebook’s new headquarters in Palo Alto, as Inside Facebook first reported today. He’s keeping the same title, and a somewhat …
A single clever word or phrase can reshape how people think about an issue. A just-launched site called WordSmyte intends to take advantage of this phenomenon — and it’s focused on things that people hate.
So, maybe this site will …
It was inevitable, given Facebook‘s rapid growth around the world and especially in countries around Europe. The company has hired an experienced lobbyist, Richard Allen, to represent it to the European Union in Brussels, Belgium, according to The Guardian.
Once …
Twitter users, most of whom signed up for the site and then apparently stopped visiting, are actually coming back, new data from comScore suggests. There’s been a lot of evidence that Twitter’s growth is tapering off by several measurements: monthly …
[Update: Beckstrom has been confirmed as the new ICANN president and CEO.]
ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — the governing body for the rules regarding domain names, among other things — is about to …
There are a wide variety of create-your-own social networking companies out there, with the most prominent one being Ning. But a relatively young — and very scrappy — new competitor called Grou.ps is one the rise. It is seeing 25 …
Facebook wants people to share more information, because more sharing means more data to use in targeting ads, and more chances to serve up those ads. So today, it’s making sharing a little bit easier by allowing people to limit …
Facebook Ads, the social network’s advertising system, could start making more money soon. The company is letting people buy ads in 14 more currencies, including major ones like the euro — this is a big expansion from just having people …
MySpace plans to lay off around 300 of its 450 international employees, and close at least four of its 15 international offices as the it tries to figure out how to survive falling traffic and revenue numbers. It laid off …
For those of you who love browser toolbars, expect more options soon. Conduit, a company that lets web sites make their own, customized toolbars is letting its clients add a couple more features now. Sites can both syndicate their content …
As inevitable as spammy invites, advertising offers are now coming to games that use Twitter. Super Rewards, a leading provider of offers for games on Facebook and other social networks, is launching its service with 140 Mafia, a mafia-style Twitter …
