New Twitter feature suggests who you might want to follow

Twitter is starting to give personalized recommendations for people to follow, as it pushes to increase retention of new users.

The company will suggest accounts based on who you currently follow and who those accounts follow, according to a blog post today. Users will also see recommendations for people to follow when they look at other Twitter users’ profiles.

It’s like a “PeopleRank” of sorts — a social play on Google’s original PageRank algorithm, but … Continue Reading

Can real-time search make a buck? OneRiot restructures

The biggest of the independent real-time search engines, OneRiot, restructured its management today and laid off an unknown number of employees, including company co-founder Robert Reich.

Kimbal Musk, a serial entrepreneur who served as chief executive, is stepping aside to serve as chairman and making way for longtime president Tobias Peggs to take the lead.

The Boulder, Colo. company, which raised $27 million in venture capital, has pioneered real-time search, a way of looking for … Continue Reading

Just kidding: Google says China hasn't walled off search

Earlier today, a Google status page which publicly tracks access to its services in China, reported that there was full blockage, or that search was unavailable between 67 and 100 percent of the time. But now Google says access to its search properties is normal and hasn’t been blocked.

A spokesperson tells us:

“Because of the way we measure accessibility in China, it’s possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage. That seems … Continue Reading

Error leads to reports that Google search is blocked in China

[Update: Google said its machines may have overestimated blockage to its services and that users are accessing search normally in the country.]

Google says its web search is now fully blocked in China.

A public site where Google has been documenting daily access to all of its services showed that for the first time, web search is “fully blocked” or unavailable 67 to 100 percent of the time.

It’s not clear whether the service is … Continue Reading

Privacy legislation looms as Facebook CEO heads to Washington

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and two other Facebook executives have gone to Washington D.C. this week to explain the company’s stance on privacy as momentum builds for online consumer privacy legislation.

Privacy is a particularly pressing issue for Facebook, whose 500-million-user community publishes a vast amount of personal information online. The company has updated its privacy policies several times, each time drawing waves of complaints, and it has been criticized by many in the technology … Continue Reading

Got a question? Facebook now provides crowdsourced answers

Facebook is making its long-awaited debut in the red-hot questions and answers space today. It’s launching a new product to about 5 million users today that lets them publicly ask and answer questions.

You can ask questions directly from the status update box on the homepage or on your profile, and you can search for answers from the search box at the top of the page. Every question and answer is completely public. Facebook is … Continue Reading

Google's head of Android partnerships departs

Another day, another Android departure.

Google’s worldwide head of Android business development and operations, Tom Moss, has left the company this month. He owned relationships with the major handset manufacturers and carriers for Google and led business development for the Android operating system. He was also a recipient of a Founders Award, which are generous Google stock grants that can be worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and are used to protect employees … Continue Reading

Will Facebook acquire and catch location-startup Hot Potato?

Facebook is rumored to be closing in on a deal to acquire the location-based app Hot Potato, according to TechCrunch.

The app, which is centered around events and things to do, lets you share photos and status updates around concerts, stories or TV shows. The problem is, since it launched at TechCrunch’s real-time CrunchUp last November, it hasn’t quite taken off in the same way that other location services has.

The team is talented and … Continue Reading

Why the Facebook-Amazon.com integration is bigger than you think

Facebook and Amazon.com partnered Tuesday in what could be one of the social network’s most important integrations yet. Amazon.com now offers a personalized page, where consumers can see product recommendations influenced by friends and their own tastes. They get notifications on when friend’s birthdays are coming up and suggestions on what to buy for them.

It’s a big deal for a number of reasons.

A deep Amazon.com-Facebook partnership could help corner Google in the e-commerce … Continue Reading

Facebook puts on the full court press to win over media publishers

Facebook is aggressively courting publishers to get more news media sites to adopt its social tools and log-ins.

Media is the one area where the social network, which recently passed 500 million monthly active users, lags behind competitors as an identity provider. While Facebook dominates third-party logins across the web, more users choose Twitter to connect, comment and log-in on news media sites than the social network, according to a study by social media metrics … Continue Reading

Study shows Twitter lags other social networks in reliability, load time

Under stress from heavy World Cup traffic, Twitter fell to the bottom of the rankings that compare site load times and reliability for social networks, according to AlertSite today.

“Performance dropped significantly compared to Q1,” the company said. “The time it took the website to load nearly doubled, and availability slipped nearly half a percent.”

The company, which offers products to keep web services at peak performance, tracked the response times of five social networks … Continue Reading

Facebook adds commenting to the "like" button

Facebook is adding commenting, a much-requested feature to the “like” button it has spread across millions of sites.

Before, publishers had to choose between the older “Share” button, which had comments, and the new “Like” button, which didn’t. If you’ve implemented the iFrame version of the button and want to enable comments, you need to use the standard layout and make sure the button is about 450 pixels wide. Facebook says comments lead to higher … Continue Reading

Facebook tweaks bookmarks on the homepage

Developers better keep their MAUs (or monthly active users) up.

Facebook is tweaking bookmarks on the left-hand side of the page so that the apps users interact with most frequently appear “above the fold” or above the “More” button.

Whenever a user signs up for an app, a bookmark will automatically be created for them. This is unlike before, when users would have to make their own bookmarks. Of course, not every user took advantage … Continue Reading

300 million tweets reveal the afternoon at work is the unhappiest time of day

If you go by tweets, Americans are happiest in the early mornings and then gradually become more negative as the work day progresses, according to researchers at Northwestern and Harvard universities.

A team of five researchers at the two schools studied 300 million U.S. tweets from September 2006 to August 2009 and performed sentiment analysis on them. They found that the evenings (presumably when people get off work and are socializing with friends) and early … Continue Reading

Live-blog: Zuckerberg and David Kirkpatrick on the Facebook Effect

Mark Zuckerberg and “The Facebook Effect” author David Kirkpatrick met for an on-stage conversation this evening at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

Zuckerberg was much more relaxed, less sweaty and nervous than the last time he was on a public stage in the U.S. at the d8 conference in June. He said that to get to Facebook’s next 500 million users, the company is focused on a handful of markets including South Korea, … Continue Reading

Zuckerberg's "quite sure" he didn't give away Facebook in 2003

Mark Zuckerberg said that he was “quite sure” he didn’t sign any documents in 2003 that could have potentially handed over a majority stake in Facebook. He made the statement during an interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC World News today.

A lawyer for the company said yesterday that she was “unsure” whether Zuckerberg signed a web development contract with Paul Ceglia seven years ago, according to Bloomberg.

“If we said that we were unsure, … Continue Reading

Fred Wilson: Apple is evil and Facebook is just a photo-sharing site

Twitter and Foursquare investor Fred Wilson shrugged off Facebook’s open graph, the social network’s strategy for mapping the web via people’s relationships and tastes, and called Apple evil for its increasing control over devices and the mobile ecosystem.

“Facebook is a photo-sharing site, really. Maybe with some chat attached to it,” Wilson said at the Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco today. “I don’t think the open graph is important. Everybody’s got a social graph. Every … Continue Reading

Six years on, Facebook crosses half a billion users

Facebook crossed a half-billion active users today, a little over six years after it launched out of Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard.

The company is celebrating by crowdsourcing stories from users about how the social network has affected their lives.

This milestone was expected for about a month, and it’s maybe even a little behind considering the company was growing at about 50 million users every two months and said it crossed 400 million … Continue Reading

Yammer, the Twitter for businesses, crosses 1 million users

Yammer, a status update tool for businesses, said it crossed 1 million users today and added that the number of paid users has grown by more than 57 percent from the first quarter of this year.

Sometimes called Twitter for business, Yammer is an internal social network that lets co-workers and teams share what they’re working on continuously. More than 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies are working with it now and overall, the company … Continue Reading

Yahoo's second-quarter revenue rises by 2%, misses estimates

Yahoo’s net income rose by more than 50 percent from the same period a year ago, but overall revenue fell short of analysts’ estimates.

Analysts had estimated on average that the company would pull in $1.16 billion in sales excluding revenue passed onto partner sites, Bloomberg reported. The company had sales of $1.13 billion instead. Its overall revenue rose 2 percent from the same period a year earlier.

The company pointed to a number of … Continue Reading