Enterprise social network Tibbr has had a strong emphasis on mobile access for some time but today it has taken another step forward with newly designed apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry 10.

Tibbr is the enterprise social networking solution made by Tibco, the 15-year-old $3.5 billion enterprise software company. It competes against solutions Microsoft’s Yammer, Jive Software, Salesforce’s Chatter, and Moxie. Tibbr now serves more than 1.5 million paid users across 157 companies.

It makes sense to see Tibco push Tibbr’s mobile capabilities to a new level, especially in light of competitors like Chatter upping its mobile game recently.

Ram Menon, president of Tibco’s social computing division, told VentureBeat the new apps are about making sure workers have access to the service and collaboration tools no matter where they are. Even in the office or at home with computers nearby, many workers want the flexibility to respond and check feeds on their smartphones and tablets.

“Mobile has always been our strong point,” Menon said. “We want to make it easy to see what’s happening in your network. Irrespective of device we’ve got you covered.”

The new apps are all unified with a similar design and feature sets. Each app takes advantage of Tibbr’s “Enterprise Social Graph” to make sure employees see people’s updates and important documents. Through integrated apps, you can even edit and open documents from other services from within Tibbr. For example, if someone in your feed has posted a document from Box, you can tap on it and it will open the file in the Box app. Menon said the apps only do this with apps like Box, Salesforce, Oracle, and SharePoint, but Tibco plans to add more.

Two other handy features in Tibbr’s mobile apps are called “Links” and “Files.” In the top photo, which shows the iPad version of the Tibbr, you can see these sections of the screen near the top. Menon said “Links” and “Files” give a strong visual representation of what the content has been shared on your network.

Take a look at what the iPhone version looks like the photos below.

Photo via Tibbr

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has faced a lot of criticism recently as his company has struggled to define itself as a full-fledged business. Today, he acknowledged those negative perceptions and defended Foursquare.

“We’re not the shiny new thing anymore,” Crowley said today on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. “We’ve been around for four years. People are still skeptical of whether we can pull this off or not. … We’ve seen other people, like Facebook, go through this as well.”

Foursquare recently raised a $41 million loan to help keep the company growing and heavily shift its focus on helping people explore good places to eat, shop, and more. The loan generated more criticism, but Crowley said the company is growing and generating revenue.

“There’s a lot of perception we’re not growing — that’s totally false,” Crowley said. “A lot of folks think we aren’t generating revenue or that we don’t care about revenue. They’re wrong. … This past March was our highest-generating revenue month so far. We expect to see that going forward.”

One of Crowley’s most prominent recent attacks came from former Square COO Keith Rabois. Crowley said that Rabois is on the board of Yelp. Because Foursquare provides similar data, it’s clear Rabois can’t be considered a fair source.

“If I was on the board of Yelp, I’d be nervous, too,” Crowley said.

The most important thing to Crowley now is building a good product and creating the best location data on the web. Apps like Instagram, Uber, and Path all use Foursquare’s API, and more companies will likely come to rely on that data.

“People get caught up in the story and not the things we’re actually doing,” Crowley said. “Facebook has built the social layer of the Internet. We’re doing the same thing around places. … That’s one of the biggest assets we have.”

Dennis Crowley photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Swipp, the much-hyped app for sharing your opinions, has nabbed an additional $2 million in funding.

Swipp’s app asks you to share your opinions

After emerging from stealth mode in June 2012, Swipp has marketed its app to consumers. Sign up via Facebook to share with other Swipp fans (and brands) how you feel about products, news, and other topics. You can also access a real-time stream if you’re simply curious about what people think.

With its new infusion of funding, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company also announced the launch of “Swipp Plus,” a new business offering. Brands can pay to access relevant data; for instance, a major retailer might be interested to learn about how customers are reacting to its new spring line.

I downloaded the free app and gave it a try. The experience felt a bit awkward — I don’t personally know many of the folks on my Swipp stream — and frankly, don’t really care what they think about a scene from Die Hard. But Swipp is betting that most people love to share and that this information will prove useful to big brands.

Moreover, the data brands are collecting from Facebook and Twitter is often unstructured and scattered. So Swipp may have a real opportunity to pull in revenues if it can reach a critical mass of consumers.

Brands like Macy’s or McDonald’s can use the app to pinpoint top influencers — those who frequently “Swipp” their products. The company says marketers can also use the app to keep tabs on the competition and track how their products are perceived over time.

A Swipp Plus dashboard for brands

Swipp is hoping you’ll use the app as an alternative to — or alongside — Facebook and Twitter.

“We look at social as it is today as version 1.0. It’s really just the first instance,” Swipp CEO and co-founder Don Thorson told VentureBeat in a recent interview. “What kind of applications would the world come up with if you had everyone persistently connected on the globe?”

Swipp isn’t the only app that is gauging consumer sentiment. Knotch uses a color scale (as opposed to Swipp’s smiley face) and asks consumers to express how they feel about anything from the latest Game of Thrones episode to their experience at the gym. Likewise, Knotch intends to make money by helping brands target consumers. ”For marketers, this data is really valuable,” Knotch’s CEO Anda Gansca said in a recent interview.

This new infusion of cash brings Swipp’s total funding to $5.5 million. Venture firm Old Willow Partners lead the previous funding round.

Curalate released a visual analytics product today to answer that question — the first analytics solution to consolidate both Instagram and Pinterest reports in a single dashboard.

“Images drive emotions with an immediacy that no other medium offers,” Apu Gupta, Curalate’s CEO and co-founder said in a statement. ”We’re helping brands see the bigger picture — to engage audiences across networks based on what’s most relevant rather than what’s most recent.”

Curalate’s solution will allow companies to see which images are most popular, merge customer conversations about their images on both visual social networks together, and create promotions for Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook simultaneously. In addition, Curalate will help brands distinguish between engagement with content that fans have posted and content that the brands themselves have posted.

Analytics for social media networks are superhot right now.

Offerpop just released a new Facebook analytics solution, as did ePrize, and Pinfluencer introduced a very sophisticated image-searching solution for Pinterest a week ago. Curalate’s solution also uses image recognition algorithms to identify shared images.

Curulate says that customers like HGTV, Nine West, and designer Michael Kors use the solution.

Updated at 7:45 a.m. after the outage was resolved.

Social media titan Facebook was down for a large number of users Monday morning, leaving those affected people less than thrilled but still willing to make a few jokes.

Last week, a Facebook issue took down websites as large as CNN, BuzzFeed, and Yelp, whose visitors were redirected to a Facebook error page, so scrutiny of the site’s performance is higher than normal.

Two VentureBeat writers and and the site Down For Everyone Or Just Me confirmed that Facebook was not functioning normally this morning. The site Down Right Now indicated that based on usage, Facebook was suffering a “likely service disruption.” However, two VentureBeat writers said Facebook was working smoothly for them.

Some folks on Twitter used the opportunity to crack jokes about the situation:

Heart attacks crossing many states.Facebook is currently down for “numerous” users.

— Kevin Clamato (@KevinClamato) February 11, 2013

Facebook is down. Pope resigned. Apocalypse obviously coming. #facebook instagr.am/p/Vl9mqWEAko/

— Alex M Morales (@QbanWong) February 11, 2013

#Facebook is down. Productivity goes up 500% at offices worldwide..including here @majic100ottawa #MajicMornings

— Stuntman Stu (@stuntmanstu) February 11, 2013

We’ve contacted Facebook about the outage and we will update this post if we hear back.

Mark Zuckerberg photo via Guillaume Paumier/Flickr

Viddy CEO and cofounder Brett O’Brien has been ousted from his role as head of the company after losing much of its buzz to Twitter-owned Vine and reportedly turning down an insane buyout offer from Twitter.

First reported by PandoDaily, this story is a surprising and sad one. Video-sharing app Viddy attracted $30 million in funding in May because it had 30 million users and was growing quickly. By December, the service was still chugging along but with less momentum, so it finally released an Android app.

But the game for social video changed when Vine launched a few weeks ago. You use that service to share six seconds of video, and you can cleverly piece together these videos to tell stories or do other creative things. (I posted a Vine about the Puppy Bowl during the Super Bowl blackout last weekend.)

But Viddy could’ve potentially been where Vine is if it had accepted an offer from Twitter. PandoDaily reports that it was a “high eight- to low nine-figure acquisition offer.” Battery Ventures general partner and Viddy board member Brian O’Malley told Pando that that offer never happened.

But if the offer did happen, it’s a little crazy to consider that O’Brien turned that down, and a decline of that sort of offer could explain O’Brien’s ouster. Perhaps he thought Viddy was going to be the true “Instagram for video” app that would eventually own the landscape. Arguably, that title may now be Vine’s, but its porn problems could hurt that perception.

Now Viddy is left with “4 to 5 million uniques a month,” which is down from its high of more than 30 million, and facing strong competition from Vine. It will need to do some magic to return to the spotlight.

O’Malley indicated that version 2.0 of Viddy will launch in the next few weeks. Viddy also circulated a statement that it is conducting a search for a CEO.

But will that be enough to turn it around?

Twitter handily beat Facebook and Google+ during the Super Bowl in social media mentions, according to an informal analysis by Marketing Land.

During the Super Bowl, brands are fighting almost as hard as the players to out-perform the competition. They use whatever marketing tricks they can to score points, including mentioning social networks and other sites where fans could connect with the brand during or after the game.

Marking Land’s Matt McGee counted the number of mentions Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ got during the ads that aired during the Super Bowl. He only counted the 59 national commercials that aired after kickoff and before the game clock hit 0:00.

In order of mentions, here’s his breakdown:

• Twitter or hashtags were mentioned in 50 percent of ads
• Facebook was mentioned in 8 percent of ads
• Google+ was mentioned in 0 ads
• Instagram was mentioned in 1 ad
• YouTube was mentioned in 1 ad

For Twitter, he counted a hashtag, a logo, or a URL. Other mentions required a logo or URL.

Now, to be fair, hashtags are most commonly associated with Twitter, but they are sometimes used in Facebook and Google+ posts. So brands are showing a preference to Twitter, but it’s not like those marketing messages can’t leak out elsewhere.

Twitter also racked up some impressive stats during the game itself. These moments sent the most tweets flying:

- Power outage: 231,500 tweets per minute (TPM)
- 108-yard kickoff return for Ravens TD by Jones: 185,000 TPM
- Clock expires; Ravens win: 183,000 TPM
- Jones catches 56 yard pass for Ravens TD (end of 2nd quarter): 168,000 TPM
- Gore TD for 49ers: 131,000 TPM

Facebook’s wrap-up of Super Bowl activity doesn’t mention number of posts but does identify the biggest moments of the game shared on the platform:

1. Ravens win the Super Bowl
2. Beyonce’s halftime performance
3. Blackout in the Superdome
4. Jacoby Jones’ 108-yard kickoff return for a Ravens touchdown (and Justin Tucker’s field goal kick)
5. Joe Flacco’s 56-yard pass to Jacoby Jones for a Ravens touchdown (and Justin Tucker’s field goal kick)
6. Joe Flacco’s 13-yard pass to Anquan Boldin for a Ravens touchdown (and Justin Tucker’s field goal kick)
7. Frank Gore’s six-yard run for a 49ers touchdown (and David Akers’ field goal kick)
8. Destiny’s Child surprise appearance with Beyonce during the halftime show
9. Ray Lewis’ retirement
10. David Akers’ field goal kick from 27-yard line

Looking over these charts, there’s a clear difference in the type of content shared. Twitter prioritizes big and small events happening in real-time, like the power outage and the 108-yard kickoff return. Facebook’s users clearly focus on big, flashy moments, with the Ravens’ win and Beyonce’s performance in the top two slots.

As for which brands made the most impact using social media, Oreo was the clear winner. The brand used the Super Bowl’s blackout as an opportunity to run a clever ad on Twitter and Facebook that was shared an enormous amount of times. Oreo’s executive team pulled the trigger on the spontaneous ad just after the blackout happened, according to Buzzfeed.

As of this morning, Oreo’s clever blackout ad was retweeted more than 14,500 times and re-shared on Facebook 6,740 times.

Take a look at the witty Oreo ad below:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Just as Path was beginning to put last year’s controversy over its access to user address books behind it, the social networking app is in hot water again over location data within images.

The Federal Trade Commission announced today that it has reached a settlement with Path, wherein the company will create a comprehensive privacy policy and receive privacy assessments for the next 20 years. Path will also have to pay an $800,000 fine over collecting information from children without parental consent.

But yesterday another privacy issue reared its head: Security researcher Jeffrey Paul noticed that Path will still use the location data within an image to geotag your posts, even if you’ve disabled the app’s access to your location within your iPhone’s settings.

“I don’t think it’s malice. I think it’s just carelessness,” Paul said in an interview with CNet. “But the net effect is the same to me. They have published information about me personally that I have expressly attempted to prevent them from publishing.”

Path product manager Dylan Casey responded to Paul’s discovery on his blog this afternoon:

Hey, Jeffery, thanks for alerting us to this. We take user privacy very seriously here at Path. Here is what we have discovered and how we are responding:

1. We were unaware of this issue and have implemented a code change to ignore the EXIF tag location.
2. We have submitted a new version with this fix to the App Store for approval.
3. We have alerted Apple about the concerns you’ve outlined here and will be following up with them.

One note to clarify: If a Path user had location turned off and an image was taken with the Path camera, Path does not have the location data. This only affected photos taken with the Apple Camera and imported into Path.

It certainly doesn’t sound like Path was maliciously trying to publish location data, but it’s a shame that a company that’s already been under privacy scrutiny overlooked this issue. It’s likely that plenty of other iOS apps have a similar loophole when it comes to location data, so Apple will have to issue some sort of fix down the line as well.

In a blog post today, published after the FTC decision but before this image location data issue, Path’s explanation over its settlement seemed bittersweet:

We want to share our experience and learnings in the hope that others in our industry are reminded of the importance of making sure services are in full compliance with rules like COPPA. From a developer’s perspective, we understand the tendency to focus all attention on the process of building amazing new things. It wasn’t until we gave our account verification system a second look that we realized there was a problem. We hope our experience can help others as a reminder to be cautious and diligent.

Photo: Path founder Dave Morin via Robert Scoble/Flickr

Facebook has updated its popular iOS application with the ability to record and share videos and voice messages, a big improvement to the already well-featured app.

The Facebook mobile experience is one of the most important aspects of Facebook these days because more than half of the social network’s 1 billion users are accessing the app through phones and tablets each month. And so, it must continue to make the native app experience better. Video recording is especially important, as Facebook can now encourage users to record and share directly on its platform, rather than via apps like Vine.

On top of the voice and video recording, Facebook has also improved the Nearby tab, which gives you information about restaurants and local businesses nearby.

The updated app promises the following additions:

• Send voice messages when you have more to say
  
• Record and share videos right from the app
• Share and connect with your favorite places using the improved Nearby tab

Take a look at the new version of the app in the photos below:

Mark Zuckerberg photo via VentureBeat

Formerly huge social network Myspace has opened up a completely revamped version of its site to the public today.

Under the new ownership of Specific Media and part-owner Justin Timberlake, Myspace’s goal is no longer about competing with the other major social networks. Instead, the site is focused on cultivating a new focus on both mainstream and underground music groups. The slick new version of the website first debuted back in November, as VentureBeat previously reported.

Myspace is doing its best to pique interest by former and new users. Not only is it making a new single by Timberlake and rapper Jay-Z available for free, it’s also allowing you to sign up with your Facebook, Twitter, or old Myspace account.

Upon signing in, you’ll notice a set of music player controls along the bottom of the page and another ad plugging the single. I was expecting Myspace to prompt me at least three times to “find friends” but it was far more interested in explaining how the bottom music player functioned.

Do you like the new Myspace? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.

Click here if you’d like my weekly column sent directly to your inbox. It takes less than a minute to sign up, and you’ll get the stories before they’re published on VentureBeat.

It’s time to take back our social networks.

It’s time, because the networks we rely on have been gradually making it clearer and clearer that we are not in control. What they mean by sharing is not what the web used to mean by sharing.

Facebook recently updated its terms of service, removing a sham user voting policy that it had in place for a few years. It also updated the terms of service for Instagram, giving itself the right to sell your location and other data to advertisers — and even to feature your photos in advertisements, although it subsequently removed that clause.

Meanwhile, Twitter is steadily restricting the ways you can use tweets. While the company did just start letting people download an archive of all their tweets, it’s increasingly resistant to letting you do anything else with your data, such as integrate it with services like If This Then That.

So, fine: These companies are entitled to run themselves the way they want, and you can participate or not, as you choose.

But I want to suggest a third way, which leaves you in control of your own stuff.

It’s called blogging.

That’s a bit of a retro suggestion, because blogs have taken a back seat to other forms of expression in the past few years. The RSS feed never engendered the kind of reciprocal sharing and commenting that a well-designed social network does, and as a result, many people have migrated away from blogging.

“I’ve used many social networks. Friendster, Facebook, everything. But they come and go. But my blog has always been my home on the web,” Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, told me last week. ”What’s changed in the past few years is that blogging started to feel a bit more lonely, because it wasn’t connected to these social news feeds.”

Like Mullenweg, those of us who have had blogs for a decade or more have been using them less and less, drawn to the ease of tweeting and the warm, friendly responsiveness of Facebook.

But now it’s possible to circle back to the blog without giving up the social networks. In fact, it’s increasingly easy to use a blog as the center of your social universe.

That’s because, while social networks like Facebook and Twitter are reluctant to share data out, they are eager to bring your data in. (This is why Twitter no longer lets you update your LinkedIn status from Twitter, but you can do the reverse and update your Twitter status from LinkedIn.)

So if they won’t share, fine: Make your own website the source, and share it out to various other networks as a way of staying in touch with your friends there.

If you’re a WordPress user, a feature called Publicize makes this super-simple. (It’s built in to WordPress.com, and for people who host their own blogs using the open-source WordPress.org code, Publicize is now available through the Jetpack plugin.) With Publicize, you connect your blog to the social services you want to update: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. You may also connect it to Yahoo’s profile updates, but I don’t know anyone who uses those. It doesn’t have Google+ integration, a minor downside if you are one of the few who uses Google+. Once connected, every post you publish on your blog posts to the social networks you chose.

This, I’ve found, creates a subtle shift in the way I think about blogging. Blog posts are more integrated into my social networks — plural — and in turn, my social networks are tied into the posts I write.

Sure, I’ll still get @ replies on Twitter and comments on Facebook, and I’ll still post short updates that are unique to those networks. But with this setup, I’m less dependent on any one social network.

If I get tired of one network — say, Instagram pisses me off with a terms of service update — it’s far easier for me to relocate somewhere else, like Yahoo’s long-disused Flickr service, which just added a new iOS app that has its own Instagram-like photo filters. (It’s easy to post photos from Flickr onto a WordPress blog, and from there to your social networks, but going the other direction — from blog to Flickr — is trickier, probably because Flickr isn’t tied in to those Yahoo updates I mentioned above.)

Flickr, by the way, has been sending me a flood of notifications about new people following me, something I haven’t seen in several years on the service. I’m not the only one to notice this. Apparently, its new app has caught people’s eyes.

Bringing blogs and social networks together is exactly what the makers of WordPress were thinking with the Publicize add-on.

“We found that when we hooked them up, you can have the best of both worlds,” Mullenweg told me. “We’ve been trying to just close that loop.”

WordPress has more clout than you might think: According to at least one estimate, it powers 17.5 percent of the world’s websites. (That includes VentureBeat, which runs on WordPress.com, as well as my personal blogs.) And it’s an open-source system, not controlled by any one company, and not beholden to advertisers or data miners or other interests.

If the WordPress plan works, more people may return to blogging, not just as a form of self-expression but as a way of organizing their online social lives. As that happens, it might — just maybe — encourage a slightly longer attention span than you can manage with 140 characters.

“WordPress users are some of the most savvy users on the web,” Mullenweg told me. “They have accounts everywhere. They already have a Facebook and a Tumblr and so forth. So it’s a challenge to provide something different, something that’s geared more toward longer-form content, rather than something that’s a distraction, that you check while you’re busy.”

Imagine that. Along with owning our own words, we might actually start to think a little more deeply about them, too.

Photo credit: Vicki’s Pics via photopin cc

Google has added 24 new features to its Google+ service and updated its beautiful Android and iOS apps inyet another show of commitment to the social network.

Despite issues with getting people to spend a lot of time on Google+, Google claims 500 million users have upgraded to Google+ accounts, while 235 million are actively using Google+ features (like +1-ing apps or following friends in Google searches.) The company says 135 million users are actively using the Google+ stream proper. So it makes sense to keep refining the network.

For coordinating holiday gatherings, Google+ has added new event-planning features. Through Google+ Events, you can send messages to specific guests and see who’s viewed your invitation. There’s also a way to invite people by simply putting a link to your Google+ event into an email. Guests can also RSVP for how many people they will be bringing.

If someone can’t make your event, you can have them attend a Google+ “Hangout,” the social network’s version of group video chat. Handily, Google+ Hangouts now can run on lower bandwidth so even more people can try it. You only need 150 KB of bandwidth to take part in a session.

And here’s a list of what’s new in Google+’s updated Android app:

• New feature: Google+ Communities
• Support for full resolution photo uploads via Instant Upload
• Subscribe to any circle for notifications
• Support for time zones in Events
• Basic profile editing
• Integration with Google Now to send birthday wishes to friends
• Support for animated GIFs
• Express your mood via animated images in posts
• View and explore Photo Sphere images (Android 4.2+)
• Add the Google+ widget to your device’s lock screen (Android 4.2+)

The iOS app’s update isn’t quite so extensive, but it’s still seeing some decent changes. You can now:

• Swipe through photo albums inline
• Tap once to view photos in all their glory
• Now applies a subtle pan-zoom-scale effect to pictures in the stream

Photos via Google

Time to update your Twitter photos! No. 2 social network Twitter will roll out its bigger and bolder profiles to all users on Dec. 12.

As you can see in the photo above, the new profiles include a large header photo behind your main picture. This allows you to personalize your page more and make it more colorful. I’ve got a kick for nature photography, so my page is decked out with scenic pictures.

The company announced the rollout in a short blog post:

A few months ago, we introduced new Twitter profiles so that you could make your profile beautiful and display your style on your profile page. By uploading a header photo on twitter.com or our mobile apps on iPhone, iPad or Android, you can make your profile more uniquely yours. We’ve seen a lot of cool takes on these new profiles –– including shots from Mars, silly themes, and brands and celebrities expressing themselves in clever ways.

On December 12, we’re rolling this out to all users: you’ll automatically get this new version of the profile on twitter.com. If you don’t upload a header photo by then, you (and everyone else) will only see a default grey image on your page. That’s not fun! To get inspired about what you can do, check out this video to see how to make your profile a little more “you”, less generic. Have fun out there.

Check out the video below for more.

Along with announcing a new Communities feature for Google+ today, Google also finally gave us some updated stats on Google+.

More than 500 million users have upgraded to Google+ accounts, while 235 million are actively using Google+ features (like +1′ing apps, or following friends in Google Search), Google Senior Vice President Vic Gundotra said in a blog post today.

135 million users are active in the  Google+ stream proper, the service’s equivalent of Facebook’s news feed. The numbers show significant growth from June, when Google+ only had 250 million total accounts and 150 million monthly active users.

“This enthusiasm, we think, stems from our building tools that build real relationships — in a live hangout, around a breathtaking photo, or with an inner circle of friends,” Gundotra wrote.

While far from Facebook’s 1 billion monthly active users, the growth shows that Google+ isn’t something to be ignored. Even if you don’t use the service as a true Facebook replacement, it’s becoming increasingly complementary to Google’s other services. That makes it something of a social networking Trojan Horse for Google, and an increasingly bigger threat to Facebook.

‘Tis the season for reflection — through data crunching, of course!

The folks at sharing platform AddThis have stepped up to the task and tallied a year’s worth of social shares on their platform to uncover 2012′s biggest takeaways.

Facebook was the most popular network in the realm of sharing and accounted for 51 percent of all shares during the year, according to data pulled from the AddThis platform, which reaches 1.3 billion unique users each month and tracks shares on more than 14 million domains.

A share is defined as any time a user shares a piece of content to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and so forth, from a site within the AddThis network. Tallied shares include those occurring through the AddThis menu, buttons, or copy-paste in the address bar, a spokesperson said.

Taking about 15 percent of the sharing pie, Twitter was a distant number two to Facebook, but it grew shares by 55 percent from last year. Meanwhile, Pinterest, the digital collector’s paradise, showed the most growth in shares; it closed the year with 379,559 percent growth, making it the fastest growing service since Facebook, by AddThis’ calculations.

MySpace, the in-transition site for creatives, unsurprisingly slid backward in 2012, and was down 62 percent in shares from last year.

Some other bits for your consideration: Tim Tebow was the most talked about athlete of the year, the U.S. election was the most shared event, the iPhone 5 was more buzzed about than its miniature cousin, and Batman was the most shared superhero flick in 2012.

Both in the U.S and globally, people are accessing the web more frequently and for longer periods, using smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and smart TVs. We’re still using PCs as well, but personal computer usage of social media is just about the only category that’s down: 4 percent fewer Americans connected to the Internet via a PC in 2012, while 82 percent more connected via the mobile web and 85 percent more connected via a mobile app.

Source: Nielsen

Mobile app and mobile web use were both up — way up.

Overall, total time on the Internet in 2012 is up 21 percent to 520 minutes a month. A staggering 17 percent of that is spent on one service: Facebook.

And it’s social networks that are seeing huge growth, with 85.5 million accessing social networks via a smartphone or tablet app in July 2012 versus 44.8 million in July 2011, and 81.1 million using the mobile web in July 2012 compared to 43 million in July 2011. PC use is still the largest, with 171.8 million Americans using a laptop or desktop machine to get social online, but that’s just slightly up from 163.6 million in 2011.

Interestingly, while Facebook’s PC’s audience declined by 4 percent in 2012, Twitter’s grew 13 percent. Google+ grew 80 percent, and Pinterest grew 1,047 percent, but that has a lot more to do with the growth cycles of those two sites than transformative change in how users are accessing them. Facebook’s app audience increased by 88 percent, and its mobile web audience increased by 85 percent, more than offsetting the slight PC decline, and underscoring Facebook’s recent efforts to monetize its mobile services.

Another insight from Nielsen: Pinterest’s growth flattened — and even disappeared in early 2012. It had grown from an audience of perhaps 2.5 million in July 2011 to almost 25 million in February 2012, but it plateaued at that level for three months, and then actually decreased in May before taking off again in June.

Still, Pinterest is a massive force online, especially among women, who make up 70 percent of its web audience, 84 percent of its app users, and 72 percent of its mobile web audience — and spent about 2.1 billion minutes on the site in 2012.

The second-screen phenomenon is on the increase as well, as TV viewers continue to use Twitter as a way to sound off, comment on, and chat with others about what they are watching:

Almost a quarter of 18- to 34-year-olds comment on social media sites about their TV shows while they’re watching, and the numbers are growing through 2012.

That’s a low percentage, globally, with 47 percent of people in Asia-Pacific countries using a second screen while watching TV, and a staggering 63 percent of people in the Middle East and Africa chatting online while watching.

The surveyors talked to 1998 U.S, adults, but the global component of Nielsen’s report surveyed 28,000 people in 51 countries.

The full report is available from Nielsen.

photo credit: ocean.flynn via photopin cc

At least according to Dr. Uri Nitzan of Tel Aviv University, who just published a report on psychotic symptoms he’s found in a number of Facebook users.

Some of his patients experienced delusions about people they were connected with on Facebook, including one who experienced tactile hallucinations, “believing that the person beyond the screen was physically touching her.”

So does using Facebook drive you crazy? Well, at least not crazy about the fact that you’re crazy. But in some circumstances, Nitzan highlights, vulnerable people who have recently lost love ones and have limited experience with technology look for connection online and go a little too deep, causing real psychotic symptoms.

As they developed extremely intense online relationships, sharing too much private information led to feelings of hurt and betrayal. And more:

In each case, a connection was found between the gradual development and exacerbation of psychotic symptoms, including delusions, anxiety, confusion, and intensified use of computer communications.

A caveat: Nitzan’s report is based on three case studies, not a full in-depth scientific study. So it’s impossible to draw strong conclusions about the effects of Facebook on people in vulnerable situations. But none of his patients had a history of mental illness.

Perhaps the most important point of the paper? Mental health professionals can’t ignore Facebook when they’re treating individuals.

“When you ask somebody about their social life, it’s very sensible to ask about Facebook and social networking habits as well as Internet use,” Nitzan said in a statement. “How people conduct themselves on the Internet is quite important to psychiatrists, who shouldn’t ignore this dimension of their patients’ behavior patterns.”

The good news? All of the patients had a full recovery.

photo credit: macwagen via photopin cc

Mark Zuckerberg is surely smiling today. Facebook’s shares have shot up about 10 percent in early-hours trading, with the lockup period for nearly 800 million FB shares expiring today.

Facebook’s stock price has seen some serious ups and downs since its IPO debut back in May. The stock debuted on the Nasdaq exchange at $38 per share but quickly fell below that just a few days after opening.

The 800 million Facebook shares that are held by employees not named Mark Zuckerberg are now eligible for sale on the open market. While you’d think that could drive the price down, the market clearly anticipated the selling of these shares. It likely has bounced because this was the last big lockup expiration, which should mean no more crazy price drops due to many employees selling at once.

As of this writing, the stock is trading at $21.95, up 10.52 percent over its close yesterday of $19.86.

Mark Zuckerberg photo via TC/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has taken its integrations one step further and made it incredibly easy to share files from Google Drive to its Google+ social network, the company announced in a blog post today.

Google Drive launched in April and has likely taken away at least some business from Dropbox, Box, SugarSync, and other cloud storage players. In June, Google said it would bring Drive to iOS and Chrome OS. And since then, Drive has added more features to make it a more robust offering. Now it’s got deep Google+ integration.

When you’re inside of Drive, all you need to do is click the Google+ icon to share your content to the social network. Or you can simply copy and paste a link from your Drive file into a post on Google+.

Google Program Manager Louis Gray writes:

Google+ is already a great place to share photos, videos, updates, and ideas. Google Drive is your cloud destination for all this content and more. Starting today, you can share content from Drive right here in your stream. I’ve been looking forward to this launch in a big way, and it’s incredible to see it here. Go forth and share.

Photo credit: Google/YouTube

Twitter has announced that it’s building an official app for Microsoft’s Windows 8 OS, which was released Friday.

“#Windows8 needs a great Twitter app,” the company wrote on Twitter Mobile account. “So we’re building it. Looking forward to sharing it with you in the months ahead.”

It’s clearly a smart move to have a client on Windows 8, which includes its own app store for buying and downloading new software. But here’s the question — why is Twitter just announcing this now? Did it really need to wait until Microsoft announced 4 million people had purchased Windows 8 before pulling the trigger?

Developers from around the spectrum have been building great Windows 8 apps for months. Twitter could easily have been in the first batch of apps, but instead Tweetro was the first eye-popping Twitter client out of the gate. And based on the tweet, we’ll have to wait “months” to see what Twitter cooks up for Windows 8.

We’ve contacted Twitter to ask what the hold up was and why it’s announcing this after Windows 8′s big launch.

Twitter bird image via Zoo-chan/DeviantArt

Tagged has acquired location-based social discovery app Urbantag, a move to help the popular social network for meeting new people make more inroads in mobile networking.

Urbantag is Tagged’s fifth acquisition, following the 2011 purchases of hi5, Digsby, TopicMarks, and WeGame. Thanks to the acquisitions, the Tagged network now claims more than 300 million members worldwide.

“Urbantag’s expertise is a perfect complement to Tagged’s product efforts as we are working on taking mobile to the next level and digging deeper into local,” Tagged CEO Greg Tseng told VentureBeat via email. “[Urbantag CEO] Andrew Hoag’s mobile savvy matched with [Urbantag co-founder] Emma Van Niekerk’s design prowess make the team a perfect fit for Tagged.”

Tagged and Urbantag did not reveal terms of the deal.

San Francisco-based Tagged recently raised $15 million in new funding led by Lighthouse Capital Partners and Comerica Bank, bringing the company’s total funding to $23.7 million.

Dogs high-fiving via Susan Schmitz/Shutterstock

Recently, California made it illegal to ask prospective employees for their social network credentials. But it seems if you’re already hired and give your user name and password to a coworker, she can take over your social profile with no legal repercussions. At least under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, according to Ars Technica.

Over the past year, job interviewers made news for requesting the social network login credentials so they could do their own background-check on candidates. People quickly poo-poo’ed the practice, even Facebook spoke out saying it breached their terms of service, and in September, California became the first state to ban it. But a U.S. court wasn’t as quick to come to Laura Eagle’s rescue when a former coworker took over her LinkedIn profile after Eagle was fired from Edcomm.

Eagle willingly handed over her username and password to the coworker, according to Ars Technica, to help manage the social profile. LinkedIn helps people keep track of their business-relationships and includes a history of that person’s working experience. When Eagle was fired from the company, the coworker changed the LinkedIn profile password and locked Eagle out of her own account. The LinkedIn account was changed to reflect the profile picture and name of the person who replaced Eagle.

She brought Edcomm to court citing that her reputation had been harmed and that she lost a number of business opportunities. But a court ruled that because there are no direct, monetary, damages such as those associated with replacing a computer or computer component, it will not hold up under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

It’s a fairly nasty move on the employer’s part. How hard is it to start a new LinkedIn account? As it stands, however, Eagle will try other routes and has a number of other charges against the company separate from the CFAA.

Faceless image via Shutterstock

Dick Costolo, the chief executive of Twitter, has tapped his background as a former professional comedian to run what has become one of the most important companies in Silicon Valley, according to a long profile in the New York Times.

San Francisco-based Twitter is often mentioned as the next major initial public offering candidate in the social media space. But that’s only going to happen if Costolo guides the firm in the right way. (Some critics think a Twitter IPO is very unlikely, after Facebook’s weak performance. Twitter’s revenues for 2012 are expected to be about $350 million this year.

And Costolo isn’t just winging it. He’s embracing improvisation and is communicating both inside and outside in a way that taps his stand-up comedian skills. Costolo can stand up in front of all of the employees and “just work the crowd,” the Times quoted one employee as saying. One way that Costolo has become more comfortable as CEO is that he says he doesn’t mind so much that he’s older and bald, in contrast to the spate of social media startup CEOs who are young and svelte. He thought about his “un-CEO demeanor,” he says, and concluded that he doesn’t care. The story doesn’t dwell that much on Costolo’s decision to oust some third-party applications from Twitter, a move that angered developer partners.

One of the interesting parts of the story is the reason for the reduced role of Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter. Dorsey left to found Square and came back to help Twitter. But the Times quotes one person as saying that Dorsey didn’t get along with the employees so well and that he isn’t decisive. Costolo, on the other hand, is decisive. And he’s ad-libbing.

The enormity of Facebook has given rise to a plethora of private experiences such as Path and Everyme. But sometimes a person wants to share a social moment with a few folks right when the mood strikes. For those occasions, you’ve got Go-Matic.

Go-Matic is a new mobile application for creating mini-social networks on the fly. You can use it with select group of friends for any purpose, such as coordinating an outing or creating a back-channel for conversations about an event.

The application allows for group chat and photo-sharing, and includes location features to help members locate each other and discuss places.

“Services like Path and Pair also recognize that most of the time we don’t want to share with everyone we know or barely know. But they merely take the Facebook model and limit the number of people in your network,” the company said in a statement to VentureBeat. “We built Go-Matic … on a very different model, one that mirrors how we socialize with and work with friends and colleagues in the real world. A model that allows people to create an instant network of any size with the people they need and want to connect with in the moment.”

“I think the piece about not having to be permanent friends is a really interesting concept,” said Tracey Isacke, the Director of Business Development at Telefonica Digital. “We are all at an event where we want to share photos, but only with this transient groups of friends.”

Go-Matic hails from San Francisco-based Go Factory. The 1-year-old startup also makes the behind-the-scenes, cloud-based platform Go Machine, which supports the creation of these spontaneous networks. The patent-pending technology also enables developers to add the same type of instantaneous sharing functionality to their own applications.

Go Factory is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

If anyone has deep thoughts about the future of advertising, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen would be among them.

Today at the IAB MIXX conference in New York City, the pair sat down with veteran interviewer Charlie Rose to discuss just where the ad industry is headed, as well as where technology is taking us in general. The conference is just one of several events happening in NYC as part of Advertising Week (think of it like a Comic-Con for Mad Men types).

Rose kicked off the conversation by asking Sandberg how advertising will evolve as we move to new digital platforms, and she was quick to point out the trouble with existing markets: “Most of the marketing is to large anonymous groups of people, it is a relationship which is one business to many consumers all at once … those advertisements are one time and one way.”

And how will Facebook offer a better alternative? “Rather than just talk at large anonymous groups of people, businesses can relate to a consumer and establish an ongoing relationship,” Sandberg said. “And importantly, that consumer has an average of 130 friends, so when they’re talking to that consumer that person brings their friends along.”

Rose later tried to pry additional details about Facebook’s tumultuous IPO from Sandberg, but she deftly avoided commenting. Sandberg pointed back to Facebook’s missteps with HTML 5 in its mobile apps, which chief executive Mark Zuckerberg called the company’s biggest mistake, in response to Rose’s question about one area where Facebook’s  assumptions didn’t pan out.

But Sandberg was clear to point out that she didn’t see the HTML5 situation as a major setback. “We are more afraid of losing by standing still than by not changing,” she said.

Andreessen, who’s also a Facebook board member, backed her up, saying, “you want these companies taking risks.”

Later on in the conversation, Andreessen geeked out about his vision of the future. “these [smartphones] are going to be the essential devices in our lives,” he told Rose. “These are going to become the control devices for a lot of things in our life.”

He pointed to Apple’s Airplay functionality as one example. Not only can it control what we’re watching on our TVs, it can also be the source of media. “I think all of the big screens in our lives are going to be controlled through these devices,” he added.

Beyond mobile, Andreessen also pointed out his fascination with wearable computing, which he believes will be controlled by smartphones. That’s not too surprising, considering his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, poured a whopping $49 million in Jawbone last year, creator of popular Bluetooth headsets (and a failed health tracking device).

Andreessen also said he believes the PC is still a very useful device for people who actually do work. He said he was impressed by Ultrabook laptops and that he also still sees a place for big screens for desk work. Eventually, he said, screens will cover entire walls.

Check out the full interview here.

As far as user milestones go, 20,000 is usually nothing to boast about. But for App.net, a nascent for-charge social platform, the modest achievement means the company can reduce its prices.

App.net is a Twitter-like social network where consumers pay to post in an ad-free environment. It’s also a framework that allows developers to not only build applications as they see fit but also make some moolah in the process. The service launched in beta two months ago following a successful Kickstarter-style funding campaign.

“The membership of App.net is just about to cross the 20,000 user level, which creates some economies of scale for us,” founder and CEO Dalton Caldwell penned in a blog post. “Because of this momentum and scale, we’ve decided to introduce a couple of updates to our pricing model.”

From here on out, App.net members can opt to pay $5 per month or $36 a year. Previously, the startup offered one member-tier plan that cost $50 per year. Members who paid the $50 free are being gifted a few additional months of service.

Unfortunately for App.net developers, who pay $100 per year to build applications, the discounts aren’t open to them. Last week, however, the company rolled out a developer incentive program to begin rewarding the best app-markers with cash for their machinations.

There are currently 10 App.net iOS apps, three Android applications, one Windows Phone app, four Mac desktop clients, and several browser plugins, Caldwell said.

Photo credit: timparkinson/Flickr

With new investment in the bank, Bottlenose is angling for dominance in the social media monitoring and analytics space.

The company, which helps companies make sense of what’s happening right now on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, launched its public beta in May. Today, it received just under $1 million in seed funding from ff Venture Capital and Prosper Capital. As part of the investment, John Frankel, a partner at ff Venture capital, has joined the company’s advisory board.

Bottlenose infuses social elements into your search “stream” — a term the company uses to refer to the sea of status updates and news. Search for a term on the website, and Bottlenose will surface what the world thinks, organized by relevance to you. Social search is Google’s greatest weakness — fixated on Google+, it does not do the job of incorporating results from the leading social networks.

Bottlenose has spent the better part of two years building out its technology. During that time, the 10-person startup received three acquisition offers (one from Twitter, we suspect). In December 2011, it launched its first product, a social media dashboard. Since then, the search tool has nearly 100 million topics and 10 million URLs analyzed to date, with more being added continuously.

CEO Nova Spivack told me that the tool proved to be particularly useful for advertisers during the Olympics, who used it to “deliver target messages and gain attention for their brand during the games.”

As we reported, the Olympics — termed the “social Olympics” — enabled social media analytics companies to flex their muscles.

The startup is highly similar to Topsy Labs, which also claims to deliver “instant social insight.” Both companies offer free access to their tool to anyone and are building out a premium service for business users. Bottlenose told me it will release its pro offering as early as Q1 in 2013. New advisor Frankel will assist the company in building out its pro service and attracting the attention of Fortune 500 companies.

Like Topsy, the company’s three dozen customers are primarily agency types, advertisers, professional bloggers, and digital marketers. It’s still early days, so Bottlenose is not yet in a position to disclose any of its customers by name.

According to Spivack, Topsy does not deliver on its promise to bring real-time results. Bottlenose has patented its StreamOS tool, its chief competitive advantage, which uses natural-language processing, analytics and trend detection to surface results in a matter of seconds. Bottlenose is building more advanced analytics into the technology, which Spivack hopes will rival Radian6, the social monitoring tool acquired by SalesForce.

To learn more about how it works, check out the video.

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Surprising exactly no one, Apple yesterday announced that it was shuttering Ping, its failed social network project.

Launched in 2010, Ping is a music-oriented take on services like Facebook and Twitter that’s built directly into  iTunes. The social network, however, never attracted much attention from iTunes users, which is why Apple has decided to shut it down later this month.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook was clear on how he thought things had played out.

“We tried Ping and the customer voted, and we said, this isn’t something I want to put a lot of energy into,” he told AllThingsD earlier this year.

So what’s next for Apple’s social networking ambitions? From the company itself, very little. Instead of creating its own social network (which it will surely attempt again at some point), Apple plans to more tightly integrate its devices and operating systems with Twitter and Facebook.

“Apple doesn’t have to own a social network, but does Apple have to be social? Yes,” Cook said earlier this year.

Wildly popular photo-sharing service Instagram has now surpassed 100 million users, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.

“It just crossed 100 million users,” Zuckerberg said on stage. “They’re killing it.”

Instagram officially became part of Facebook last week after the deal was approved by various regulators. The deal is now valued at around $750 million due to Facebook’s stock price dropping.

Instagram passed 80 million users in July, so its user growth has been stunning. ComScore reported a week ago that Instagram’s website is the 56th most popular site in the U.S., with 22.7 million monthly unique visitors.

After a steady stream of complaints, Facebook will now delete photos from its servers within 30 days of getting a request instead of letting them languish for people to access later.

Facebook told Ars Technica that it has put new photo storage systems in place that allow for permanent deleting. In February, the company claimed that photos from the early days of Facebook were stored on older systems and that in turn produced many bugs and prevented photos from being deleted.

“As a result of work on our policies and infrastructure, we have instituted a ‘max-age’ of 30 days for our content distribution network (CDN) links,” Facebook told VentureBeat. “However, in some cases the content will expire on the CDN much more quickly based on a number of factors.”

A little backstory on the problem: To delete a photo from your Facebook profile, you click the “Delete This Photo” link under the image. While the photo is removed from your profile, a direct link to the photo itself can keep it floating around the web unless Facebook deletes it from its servers. So anyone with a link could still view that embarrassing frat party pic from college.

Even if you’re not Facebook friends with me, you can see this picture of a beer I took. Even if I delete that photo from Facebook, that link may still recall the photo. But now Facebook is saying it will completely rid its servers of that photo if I choose to scrap it.

This doesn’t mean Facebook’s many privacy troubles are over, but it’s at least a step in the right direction.

Embarrassing party photo: Andrew Ratto/Flickr