How sites like MegaUpload make millions from pirated video
This story originally appeared on CNET and is republished with permission.
For the scope of this article, I am leaving all of the commentary on SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and such aside for others much more well-versed than I to discuss.
A lot of people have been asking me the same question lately: Just how do file-sharing sites like MegaUpload — recently taken down by an international collection of law enforcement — make hundreds of millions … Continue Reading
Obama shows further mastery of social by tweeting Spotify campaign playlist
Many analysts think President Obama won the 2008 election partly due to his campaign’s ability to use social networks and the web to rally and influence voters. And now with the 2012 election season upon us, Obama is showing he still gets it with the release of a subscribe-able 28-track Spotify playlist.
Obama’s official Twitter account today posted a new Spotify playlist titled “2012 Campaign Playlist” with the message: “A little Wilco, a bit of … Continue Reading
Extole turns regular customers into brand ambassadors, raises $10M
Nearly every company has a social presence these days, but personal recommendations are often a more powerful way to boost sales. If you’ve never heard about a company before, but your friend has, you’ll likely trust her opinion over that of a complete stranger. But keeping track of how much customer referrals really help your business can be hard, so Extole has created a way to track word-of-mouth marketing.
The service seeks to find and … Continue Reading
How Twitter captures the heartbeat of current affairs (infographic)
In 2008, the tweets per second record during the Super Bowl was 27. Four years and 12,206 more tweets per second later, the volume of Super Bowl-related Twitter activity is evidence of something more significant than a societal preoccupation with football’s greatest game or brands’ advertising gambles.
A look at the escalation of tweets per second over the years tells us that Twitter has blossomed into the social network of record for current affairs.
The … Continue Reading
It pays to time your tweets: SocialFlow debuts self-serve platform and eyes new funding
SocialFlow, which helps brands and publishers optimize their performance across Facebook and Twitter, is launching its self-service platform today. The company has had a banner year, growing from just 2 employees to more than 30 and graduating from the betaworks building to their own office on the east side of Manhattan.
To get a sense of how the company works, let's take the example from one of their clients, The Economist. With SocialFlow, which guides which messages The Economist puts out to its followers and when, the venerable publishers has grown its social media fanbase five times faster than average and increased engagement with its audience at a rate eight times greater than before it used Social Flow.
Not total bunk, case of “stolen” Twitter followers moves forward
The case of the “stolen” Twitter followers may or may not have merit, but its claims passed a second litmus test this week.
In the matter of PhoneDog versus Noah Kravitz, a U.S. district court judge ruled to allow the plaintiff, mobile review site PhoneDog, to move forward its suit against former employee Noah Kravitz with amended claims.
Kravitz, currently the editor-at-large at TechnoBuffalo, is being sued for allegedly misappropriating trade secrets by changing the … Continue Reading
Twitter a truly global tool with 72% of accounts outside of the U.S.
Twitter is growing in popularity across the world, with U.S. accounts now representing just slightly more than one quarter (28.1 percent) of the total Twitter population, according to new data.
With 33.3 million accounts, Brazil now outranks Japan (29.9 million accounts) as the second most Twittering country, but Japanese remains the second most used language on Twitter after English, according to Paris-based social media research company Semiocast.
Semiocast said it analyzed the explicit and implicit … Continue Reading
SocialFolders backs up your Facebook photos & Google Docs on your hard drive
With cloud computing all the rage these days, we often have files and bits of data that live exclusively on a server far away from our hard drives. And while that’s often really awesome, sometimes you want and need a backup of that information on your computer. Enter SocialFolders, a service that backs up your social and cloud data to your hard drive.
“SocialFolders was basically created to help people manage their content on social … Continue Reading
Social media’s role in politics
You’ve read how Facebook and Twitter fueled the Arab Spring uprising. You are watching the videos coming out of Syria on Facebook. But most likely you have not witnessed the power of social media impacting politics in near real time right here at home in America. Sure, activism groups and politicians have tapped social media to raise money. But to date, no flash mob has ever stopped a bill in its tracks or beaten down … Continue Reading
73 percent of people say they would use social customer support (infographic)
As businesses use social media to promote and protect their brands, digital help desk Zendesk is seeing customer service move to the social world as well.
The automated customer service representative annoys all of us. We have all navigated numerical menu options (press one for ‘I want to bash your product against the wall’) that make us wait for a solution until we yell, “Can’t I just speak to a human?” We’ve also dealt with … Continue Reading
The FBI wants to spider social media to prepare for the worst
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is creating a tool that will crawl Facebook, Twitter and more to catch emergencies before they happen.
According to a posting on the Federal Business Opportunities website, the FBI’s Strategic Information and Operations Center (SOIC) is feeling out the IT industry to see if anyone can create a “social media application.” The application should be able to spider through public content posted on social media sites such as Facebook and … Continue Reading
Facebook added $15.3B and 230k jobs to European economy in 2011
Facebook added $15.3 billion in value to the European economy in the past year, COO Sheryl Sandberg said at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich Tuesday.
Sandberg, in her closing keynote on how social media is reshaping opportunities for economic growth, added that the social network added 230,000 jobs in Europe in 2011.
Sandberg cited the findings from a joint study between Facebook and Deloitte, being released today, and also announced that the company … Continue Reading
Tumblr now reaches 120M people each month
Tumblr’s quirky blogging platform and community network reaches 120 million people every month, founder and CEO David Karp disclosed at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich Monday.
Karp, citing the startup’s latest Quantcast figures, shared that the social network and blogging hybrid now sees 15 billion page views each month.
Interviewed by entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, Karp talked about the company’s early growth, its decision to take the road less traveled in social networking, the … Continue Reading
Google+ steps toward web domination with automated signups for new Google accounts
Google, as it has long promised, is taking another step toward unifying all its web products under the Google+ umbrella by making Google+ a big part of signing up for a new Google account.
Today, the astute webmonkeys over at the Google Operating System unofficial blog noted that joining Google+ was automatically included with starting a new Google account.
However, this feature has been rolling out since last November, a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat in … Continue Reading
Twitter acquires Summify, as if tweets aren’t summed up enough
Twitter is grabbing more talent, this time out of Vancouver. Summify, a social news aggregator, will shutter its technology and be absorbed by the social network starting today.
“Cristian Strat and Mircea Pasoi have created a product that curates the best and most important stories in your Twitter timeline and Facebook newsfeed,” a Twitter spokesperson told VentureBeat in an e-mail. “Cristian and Mircea and their team of three engineers will join our Growth team and … Continue Reading
Facebook’s biggest change yet: Actions are here
It’s the worst-kept secret on the Internet: Facebook Actions, a new way of interacting with apps, content, and brands, are coming to the social network.
At a private event in San Francisco Wednesday night, the social network announced a slew of new partners are using Actions, the Facebook feature that will let developers make just about any verb a semantically cross-indexed link.
What does all that mean? Let’s take a simple example as an illustration.… Continue Reading
Michelle Obama joins Twitter
Michelle Obama has finally joined Twitter, just in time to support her husband’s reelection campaign.
The First Lady’s first tweet (and her Obama Biden 2012-themed avatar) make it clear that the account is a part of the Obama political reelection machine. It reads:
“We’re excited today to launch @michelleobama as a new way for you to connect with First Lady Michelle Obama and the President’s campaign.”
However, the account, which is managed by the campaign … Continue Reading
400K publishers rejoice: Facebook’s commenting system now works on mobile
The online comment is a troubled entity, often abused or under-appreciated by the anonymous masses. But Facebook thinks there’s a better way.
The social network pushed out an update today that makes its Comments Box third-party commenting plugin work on mobile devices.
Facebook’s Comments Box has undergone many revisions over time, but its purpose remains the same: “To make commenting more social and authentic.”
The plugin first appeared in 2009, but was dramatically improved in … Continue Reading
Twitter is huge in Japan — bigger than Facebook, actually
Twitter is getting to be kind of a big deal globally, at least among marketers and the digerati.
But in Japan, the microblogging service already trumps Facebook in traffic.
According to stats from comScore, Japan sends around 25 million monthly unique visitors to Twitter. Facebook, on the other hand, sees around 15 million monthly unique visitors from Japan.
Still, until recently, neither site has been as big in the region as Mixi, Japan’s homegrown and … Continue Reading
Tumblr releases Fan Mail for private messaging
Popular blogging platform Tumblr is out with a new feature Wednesday designed to help its growing user base send private messages to each other.
The new feature is called Fan Mail and it enables Tumblr members to send stylish messages to the blog owners they follow.
“I’m very pleased to introduce Fan Mail, a beautiful new way to share those sweet, inspiring, or otherwise thoughtful notes with your favorite bloggers,” Tumblr founder and CEO David … Continue Reading
