HootSuite adds support for Digg, Trendspottr, and InboxQ

Popular social networking management service HootSuite announced Wednesday it has added support for more social apps and opened its Engagement API.

Digg, Trendspottr, and InboxQ have joined the HootSuite App Directory; a collection of apps and social media sites that you can manage with HootSuite. Each app has a unique set of features that you can access with HootSuite’s dashboard.

Those who use Digg, a community that shares new stories and videos from all over … Continue Reading

Facebook said to be filing $5B IPO, Morgan Stanley selected to take lead

Social network king Facebook will likely file its first papers with regulators on Wednesday morning for a $5 billion initial public offering, “sources close to the deal” have told Reuters subsidiary IFR.

We heard at the end of last week that the social network could file papers for its initial public offering as soon as Wednesday, so it’s not unexpected that more details are leaking like a well-worn faucet. The timing aligns with a recent … Continue Reading

Larry Page wasn’t lying about the Google+ engagement numbers

Google+ is a social network that is being built backwards. Hundreds of millions of people rely on Google, but not its social network. That makes things awkward in a lot of ways, and certainly Google’s efforts to find a foothold in the social space have seemed, until recently, feeble or forced.

But while my colleague Rocky Agrawal is right that companies often try to woo journalists and their audience with misleading numbers, I think Larry … Continue Reading

GetGlue prepares to take social TV mainstream with $12M in funding

It’s not in the same league as Facebook or a Twitter, or even half the size of Instagram, but GetGlue’s highly-specialized social network for entertainment watchers could be on its way to superstardom.

On GetGlue, more than two million die-hard entertainment fans check-in to television shows and movies, over the web or from mobile devices, to share their enthusiasm and get rewards for their viewing behaviors. Seventy five major television networks have already taken notice, … Continue Reading

Google search gets its biggest change in a decade with a dose of Google+

Well, it’s finally happened. Google web search has been Google-Plus-ified.

Today, Google is bringing some specific new features to Google web search, its flagship and most widely used product. In addition to the usual assortment of links, pictures, news items and shopping results you’d see in a typical Google search results page, logged-in Google+ users will now also find several kinds of Google+ content sprinkled in among the normal search results. There are even promoted … Continue Reading

Google+ reaches 62M users, still not giving Facebook a run for its money

Google+ has reached 62 million registered users and is signing up 625,000 new users per day, according to unofficial Google+ statistician and Ancestry.com founder Paul Allen.

For a social network that was invite-only until July 2011, those numbers are not bad. However, Google+ has a long way to go if it wants to catch up to Facebook’s 800 million users.

Google+ has been adding new users by the tens of millions just about every month … Continue Reading

Google+ adds much-welcomed features to Pages, activity stream and more

Google+ will add a few major improvements to its service over the next few days, including new activity stream controls, welcome changes to business Pages, better notifications and a dramatically better photo experience, the company announced today.

Despite contrary claims from Google, Google+ is a social network that competes with Facebook and Twitter for eyeballs. It has been rapidly adding new features to bring the network up to speed against the competition. One of the … Continue Reading

Glam Media may be checking out banks for a 2012 IPO

Female-focused media and advertising company Glam Media may soon file to go public.

If so, it will join the ranks of Internet companies hitting the trading floor, such as Jive, Zynga and (earlier this year) LinkedIn.

According to Bloomberg‘s sources, the company has already had a “bake off,” in which banks compete to underwrite the Glam Media initial public offering. In the running are Bank of America, Goldman Sachs Group, and Morgan Stanley to lead … Continue Reading

Bottlenose is a social media dashboard that makes sense of the stream (invites)

“The stream is the next big problem after the cloud,” Nova Spivack, co-founder of Bottlenose, told VentureBeat.

In other words, you’re about to get flooded with social media updates from your gazillions of online “friends” — if you aren’t already.

Spivack’s response to this so-called “Sharepocalypse,” or the new era of social network insanity, is Bottlenose. It’s a social media dashboard for the professional who needs to be constantly in-the-know — or for hyper-obsessed social … Continue Reading

Klip version 2.0 brings even more goodies to its video-sharing iPhone app

More than 115 million smartphones were sold during Q3 of 2011, according to the latest Gartner report, and almost all of them have some video capability. But with the spike in video creation comes a new problem: what to watch. Startup Klip tackles this problem by making it easy to track and sort videos from your friends on your iPhone.

Klip is a video sharing app that helps you sift through all that video to … Continue Reading

Opinionaided rebrands as Thumb, targets Facebook with plans for an opinion-based social network

Mobile question-and-answer company Opinionaided has seen massive growth since it launched last year, but its unwieldy (albeit clever) name has likely hurt the company more than it helped.

So the company has decided to simplify things: Today, it’s rebranding itself as Thumb, which is far less of a spelling and pronunciation hazard than Opinionaided, and better reflects the addictive thumbs up and down voting features of its apps.

Under the hood, Thumb’s app, available for … Continue Reading

Watch out Path, here comes Touch: a new messaging platform for close friends

Enflick, the Canadian creator of popular apps like TextNow and PingChat, is taking a big step forward today with the launch of Touch, a new mobile messaging platform to help you keep in touch with your closest friends and family.

Yes, that sounds a bit similar to Path, the year-old mobile social network that recently received a major update. But Touch, available for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry, is more focused on real-time chat rather than … Continue Reading

Activision says Call of Duty Elite service will be stable for Thanksgiving users

Gamer social network Call of Duty Elite will be stable this Thanksgiving and for the subsequent holiday weekend, Activision Blizzard said today.

When the service debuted on Nov. 8 it had a number of issues that made it tough for users to connect. Now, the company says it has stabilized the service and can deliver all of its major features to both paid and free users.

“We are where we should have been at launch,” … Continue Reading

Co-founder of “open-source Facebook” Diaspora dies at 22

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the 22-year-old co-founder of the Diaspora social network — which gained recognition for challenging Facebook — died this weekend, the company confirmed Monday.

The official cause of death has not been reported, but CNNMoney has said that it was likely suicide, according to an anonymous source. Neither the company nor the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s office has released details on the death, and the San Francisco Coroner’s Office has stated that determining the … Continue Reading

Identified: What kind of recruiting tool have Eric Schmidt, the Drapers and DST invested in?

Launching publicly today, Identified is a professional social network for adults younger than 30, that’s built on top of Facebook and backed by $5.5 million from Google’s Eric Schmidt, Tim and Bill Draper and Alexander Tamas of DST.

What Identified hopes to do is create a rich and engaging dialog between young job aspirants, based on their personal and professional data, and potential employers. Identified is different from LinkedIn in that it’s not just a … Continue Reading

LinkedIn posts $1.6M loss for Q3 but exceeds Wall Street expectations

Business social network LinkedIn posted mixed third quarter results this afternoon, with a $1.6 million loss for the quarter, but it’s still managing to beat Wall Street expectations with strong revenues.

LinkedIn went public in May and had to reveal its financials for the first time last quarter. The company posted a surprisingly strong Q2 with a 120 percent rise in revenues and $4.5 million in profits. But this is Q3 and it’s unfair to … Continue Reading

Judge orders alleged Facebook co-founder Ceglia to return to U.S. to hunt for evidence

Paul Ceglia, the man who last year claimed he owned 84 percent of Facebook, has been ordered to return to the U.S. to unearth the one piece of physical evidence that could settle the court case.

Ceglia, who is currently staying in Ireland, was ordered by U. S. Magistrate Judge Leslie G. Foschio to return home to the States to search for one of six flash drives that Facebook says will settle the case in … Continue Reading

MOG’s Facebook users grow by 246% after its social integration

On-demand streaming music service MOG has seen startlingly high user growth through Facebook since its integration with the popular social site in mid-September, the company announced today.

Music streaming companies like MOG, Rdio and Spotify were eager to get integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph platform because it makes sharing music selections and music companies much easier. Turns out that connecting 800 million users with your already-good service really does wonders for exposure and growth.

MOG … Continue Reading

Yammer raises $17M from former Facebook VP to improve enterprise social networking

Enterprise social networking site Yammer has raised $17 million in a new funding round.

Since its launch in 2008, Yammer has made incredible gains with enterprise users, with more than 3 million verified corporate users and more than 80 percent of companies on the Fortune 500 list using the network. It has attracted more than 100,000 businesses in 160 countries. The service tailors Facebook and Twitter-like communication strategies to give businesses activity feeds, private messaging, … Continue Reading

Crimesourcing and how data criminals are like startup employees

“Organized crime is exactly that – organized,” said Marc Goodman at this week’s O’Reilly Strata conference, “especially in the field of cyber crime.”

Goodman knows a thing or two about crime. He started off as an LAPD streetcop before starting the service’s first Internet crime unit in the mid-1990s. After spending a decade working with Interpol he founded the Future Crimes Institute to track how criminals use technology.

Cybercrime is already an agile, globalised and … Continue Reading