LinkedIn revenue up 105% in fourth quarter 2011

LinkedIn announced its earnings today, with revenue making an impressive jump up 105 percent, beating street estimates.

The company is a business-centric social network that aims to connect people for networking, job opportunities, resources, and more. In May of 2011, the company completed its initial public offering, to a good reception, but then leveled out in the third quarter. LinkedIn’s revenue topped at $167.7 million in the fourth quarter, 67 percent of which was revenue … Continue Reading

Founder of Facebook for Russia donates $1M to Wikipedia at DLD

The founder of Russia’s largest social network proclaimed his love and support for Wikipedia today by promising to donate $1 million to the not-for-profit organization while onstage at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich.

Twenty-seven year-old entrepreneur Pavel Durov founded Russian social network VKontakte, or VK for short, five years ago. The site has grown to 33 million daily unique visitors, 17 million monthly active users and a total of 160 million registered users. … Continue Reading

Social network Piazza connects students with their teachers, raises $6M

Piazza, a social network that connects students to their professors, raised $6 million in its first round of funding, the company announced Friday.

Piazza is a social network and “online gathering space” that encourages student collaboration under the guidance of professors and teaching assistants. Students can ask their professor questions regarding assignments, collaborate with fellow students on projects and engage in discussions day or night.

“The inspiration [for Piazza] started with the idea to emulate … 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

Create a more personal social network with Ourspot

Want to share memories with your significant other without sharing to your entire social network? Or maybe show videos and photos to your best friend and no one else? Meet Ourspot, a new website that creates a space to share videos, links, notes and memories between you and one other person.

“Most sites on the Internet are egocentric. With Ourspot, we want to make everything relationship centric, focusing on the relationship between two people,” Ourspot … Continue Reading

Microsoft launches its social network — but it’s not what you think

Microsoft’s anticipated social network So.cl has arrived, but don’t expect it to be the Google+ or Facebook challenger it was widely rumored to be — at least not yet.

So.cl, pronounced social, is being billed as a site for student collaboration and information gathering. For now, Microsoft is calling it just an “experimental research project” and only making it available to students studying information and design at the University of Washington, Syracuse University and New … Continue Reading

Dude, you’re not a lady! Luluvise launches, but only for women

Luluvise, which launches today, aims for “girl time all the time” by recreating online the experience of private chats with your girlfriends. The all-female service has, however, attracted a lot of interest from a surprising source: men.

“We had a lot of guys submitting their emails to get access to the beta, and we must have sent out over 500 emails telling them Luluvise is for ladies only,” says founder Alexandra Chong. The company was … Continue Reading

Demo: Patisco turns B2B communication into a private social network

Patisco, a new service by Taipei-based Xinosys, aims to make companies more efficient by letting them form private social networks with their clients, associates, suppliers, and anyone else involved in their business.

By making communication between the many different parts of a business easier, Xinosys hopes to help businesses run more smoothly with its cloud-based business-to-business trading platform.

Typical e-commerce platforms are rife with limitations, says Xinosys CEO Even Chung. For example, suppliers frequently don’t … Continue Reading

iQU launches marketing and analytics service for online games

Gamer-profiling company iQU is launching an analytics and marketing platform to help online games find more users through mobile and social networks.

The Haarlem, Netherlands-based company was formerly known as MMOTraffic.com and MMO Life, but now it is expanding in the U.S. and rebranding itself as iQU (pronounced “eye-cue”). The company’s goal is to help online game publishers target the right potential customers with promotions and increase their income as a result. If it works, … Continue Reading

Reddit’s former information cowboy joins Netflix

News aggregator Reddit’s first systems engineer and employee number one Jeremy Edberg has joined video rental and streaming company Netflix.

He is joining the company as the “lead cloud reliability” engineer — a prod at the company’s recent history of infrequent downtimes — he announced on his Twitter account. Edberg also indicated that the “cloud reliability” team was hiring.

Edberg recently left Reddit after working at the site for 4 years to pursue personal projects, … Continue Reading

Anonymous readies its own social network after Google+ ban

Hacker group Anonymous plans to launch a new social network called AnonPlus where there will be “no fear of censorship,” after Google+ banned several accounts related to the group.

“As some of you know we got banned from Google+ due to some of our content,” wrote YourAnonNews in a blog post. “What we didn’t know at the time is that we were just one of a handful of Anonymous accounts that was silenced. This is … Continue Reading

New “Facebook for Every Phone” app aims to boost international usage

Facebook is aiming to boost international usage with the debut of a new “Facebook for Every Phone” app, which offers full access to the social network on over 2,500 mobile phones across the globe. The company’s mobile team announced the new app in a blog post today.

While the company is estimated to have 750 million active monthly users, some speculate that user growth in North America is slowing or even in decline. However, Facebook … Continue Reading

Pool Party photo sharing app: Google’s other service you didn’t get an invite for

Google has spent most of the week talking up its new social service Google+, which aims to revolutionize the way people communicate online, including how they share photos. However, that isn’t stopping the company from launching other photo-related projects at the same time.

Last week, the company quietly launched Pool Party, a photo-sharing service with an emphasis on creating and sharing group photo albums in real time.

The new service has applications in both Apple’s … Continue Reading

Justin Timberlake takes a stake in Myspace

Myspace’s new owner, Specific Media, said Wednesday that Emmy- and Grammy-Award winning artist Justin Timberlake will take an undisclosed stake in the newly acquired company.

Timberlake will play a major role in developing the strategy and creative direction of Myspace, according to Specific Media. Both parties plan to unveil details of Myspace’s new direction later this summer.

“There’s a need for a place where fans can go to interact with their favorite entertainers, listen to … Continue Reading

News Corp. finalizing $30M sale of Myspace

Myspace’s parent company News Corp. is in the final stages of selling the under-performing social network for $20 – $30 million, reports All Things Digital.

News Corp. is apparently in a rush to complete an acquisition deal by Thursday — its fiscal year-end. The media giant probably doesn’t want MySpace to blemish its 2012 financial records, especially given the lackluster revenue predictions.

Backing up earlier information, the report indicates that significant cuts in staff and … Continue Reading

Facebook reaches 750 million active monthly users

Massively popular social network Facebook has reached a total of 750 million active users per month, reports TechCrunch.

Facebook has yet to make a statement on the current number of total users. Some speculate that the company is holding off an official announcement until reaching a billion users, but it’s just as likely that Facebook is still waiting to achieve the 750 million mark.

The last time the company made an official announcement about its … Continue Reading

Turntable.fm adds 140K users a month after launching

Music sharing social network Turntable.fm has gained over 140,000 users since launching to the public earlier this month, reports Betabeat.

Turntable.fm turns its users into DJs who can share musical tastes within specific virtual rooms classified by subject or  genre. Only five DJs can share music in a single room, but anyone can enter a room to listen. And unlike actual rooms featuring a performing DJ, people using Turntable.fm can rate extremely good or bad … Continue Reading

Reddit’s first employee bids adieu

Jeremy Edberg, the first employee of social news site Reddit, has announced that he is leaving the company after working there for 4 years.

Edberg joined the company when it first started with co-founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman and site engineer Chris Slowe. He served as the site’s “Information Cowboy,” which involved serving as the site’s sys admin as well as handling a hodgepodge of outreach, public relations and general hellraising. While working at … Continue Reading

Another Facebook co-founder shows evidence of alleged fraud

When Paul Ceglia claimed that he owned 50 percent of Facebook and sued Mark Zuckerberg last year, not many people believed him.

Ceglia had waited seven years to file his lawsuit and was a convicted felon who had been charged with fraud on an unrelated company. Facebook dismissed his claims as fake. Now it looks like this is one headache that won’t go away and could cost the company a lot of money in legal … Continue Reading

LinkedIn reaches 100 million users, but how many are coming back?

LinkedIn, the social network centered around professional networking, has announced this morning that it has crossed 100 million registered users, making it the fourth American social network to do so after MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter.

In a blog post about the announcement, CEO Jeff Weiner highlighted that the site is growing by a million new users every week, with its fastest markets being Brazil, Mexico, India, and France. To date, the service has 44 million … Continue Reading