MySpace Sold for $35 Million, but Still Cool Enough for Justin Timberlake
June 30, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Back in 2005, News Corporation paid $580 million to acquire MySpace. At the time, the pioneering social media site received, in the United States alone, 20 million unique visitors monthly. Today, what’s left of the network was just sold for a not-so-cool $35 million. Specific Media, an online advertising company from Irvine, CA, is the buyer.
Another harsh figure, inspiring more than a few sly smiles (here’s looking at you, Tom Freston) is the difference from a peak revenue of $605 million to a modest $183 million. It’s been reported that since the 2005 purchase, the News Corporation division that was home to MySpace only managed to make a profit once. Massive layoffs were carried out yesterday inside the company — about 200 people lost their jobs.
But the deal has a Hollywood twist. Justin Timberlake, who played Facebook’s Sean Parker in David Fincher’s film “The Social Network,” has taken a real-life 5-percent stake in Specific Media, along with an office at MySpace and a six-count staff. He’ll be working as a kind of creative director focused on “reinvigorating” the site.
For now, other MySpace workers are staying busy by attempting to “quickly publish a crowdsourced book” about themselves. It’s being written on Google Docs while, along the once-higher rungs, MySpace ex-vice presidents are using Twitter give others tidings of their last days at the company. Yes, the medium is a message unto itself.
http://allthingsd.com/20110629/employees-already-crowdsourcing-a-myspace-history/
Google’s Very Own Facebook Is Out
June 28, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
If you’ve gotten an invitation, you can now start using Google+, which is Google’s still-in-development, but quite nifty, version of Facebook. It promises to give you one more place to make status updates, share last night’s scrumptious dinner pictures, see what your friends are up to, and let your boyfriend know that the two of you are definitely no longer an item. As a bonus, Google is throwing in some services like group video chatting and texting.
As things stand, Google+ is the search giant’s most pointed rebuttal to Facebook. It’s also Google’s most polished social networking service. Given the adverse fallout of its previous social networking belly dives — Buzz and Orkut, which engendered a punitive settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and zilch popularity, respectively — Google is being scrupulous about its new network’s sharing mechanisms. As the Official Google Blog takes pains to explain, sharing will not be done wholesale, but piecemeal through designated groups.
The New York Times was not alone in highlighting the following facts:
In May, 180 million people visited Google sites, including YouTube, versus 157.2 million on Facebook, according to comScore. But Facebook users looked at 103 billion pages and spent an average of 375 minutes on the site, while Google users viewed 46.3 billion pages and spent 231 minutes.
Google knows it’s losing its once firm grip on the web’s information because a great deal of online data remains cloistered inside Facebook. Clearly in an attempt at differentiation, Google has left out Facebook’s infamous Friend moniker for the people you add to your groups. Other than that, it seems an awfully lot like Facebook and it can’t be too long before you get an invitation to try it out and compare.
Read More:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/technology/29google.html?_r=1&ref=technology
Silicon Valley Roars Up an Arms Race for Washington Power
June 23, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has just nabbed Larry Summers for the board of Square, his latest tech start-up. In case anyone thinks they’re mistaken, that really is Larry Summers — former Treasury Secretary, ex-president of Harvard (the one who couldn’t live down a no-confidence vote after denigrating women’s aptitude for science) and very recent Obama economic advisor. As for Square, it’s an app for electronic payments through mobile devices, and a company that’s been around only since last year.
Square calls San Francisco home and was founded by Dorsey and Jim McKelvey in 2010. Currently, its rumored valuation passes the $1 billion mark. Keith Rabois, with ties to Paypal and LinkedIn, is Square’s chief operating officer; Roel of Botha, of Sequoia Capital, and Vinod Khosla, Sun Microsystems co-founder, are on the board.
Summer’s entry into the tech start-up world is likely to have struck many as startlingly unexpected. However, as an arms race for political clout has clearly erupted along the greenback pastures of the Silicon Valley, the move is most definitely anything but fluky. For its score, Facebook most recently set up its own team of Washington lobbyists and hired a former White House press secretary (Joe Lockhart) to be its vice president of global communications.
With undoubtedly strategic blandness, Mr. Dorsey provided the following public welcome to Summers: “We are proud to have Larry join our board and we welcome his insight and decades of leadership to our growing company…Square is at a key point in our trajectory and we know Larry will contribute tremendous wisdom and expertise toward our continued success.”
Read More:
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/welcome-to-silicon-valley-larry-summers/
Twitter and Facebook the New Nielsen?
June 21, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Twitter rankings and Facebook Likes have been all the rage for some time now. If someone isn’t bragging about the number of followers or Likes they’ve so far accumulated, they’re probably busy (breathlessly) citing as proof of importance the number of followers someone else has been piling up. Although there’s hardly a soul left who’s not yet taken note of the accommodating nature of Twitter and Facebook data for ranking purposes, there aren’t very many trying their hand at what SocialGuide.com is trying to do: provide TV ratings from the perspective of social media.
Hailing from Brooklyn and founded by Sean Casey, SocialGuide.com has come up with Social 100, a ranking of what’s most popular on TV according to an analysis of Twitter and Facebook comments. Social 100 is published once a week. A “snapshot” of last week’s audience, as created by the start-up, consists of a total of 966,261 unique watchers who posted 2,305,128 comments about 1,930 TV programs. (Only comments posted while the programs are on are counted.)
Mr. Casey has said that these numbers will prove vital to TV producers when it comes time to figuring out audience tastes and ways to elicit responses from viewers. He’s has also stated his awareness of the potential of social networking to tie viewers together through commenting and shared watching. Beyond that, it seems the Brooklyn people are trying to give the Nielsen ratings a run for their money.
Social 100 -> http://beta.socialguide.com/social100
Read More:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/06/socialguide-providing-a-social-feed-for-tv.html
Congressman Resigns After Hitting the Wrong Button to Sext on Twitter
June 17, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Thursday was Anthony D. Weiner’s last day as the U.S. Representative for New York’s 9th congressional district. The former Congressman issued his resignation from the same senior center in Brooklyn that once saw him announce his successful 1991 run for City Council.
Just last month Weiner was being thought of as NYC’s next mayor, but his misuse of social media has rendered uncertain his once bright political future. It all started when his political opponents, keeping a very close eye on his Twitter account, noticed that Weiner had sent an indecorous photo of his lower half to a Washington State undergrad. It turned out he had tweeted the photo publicly when he had meant to send it as a private message — a case of Twitter sexting gone very bad. Although Weiner initially claimed his account had been hacked, he was all too soon offering public repentances for the photo and for many more such incidences.
Mr. Weiner joined Twitter in 2009 and in March of this year, Time Magazine praised him for being “able to upload pictures,” having an “actual understanding of hashtags,” and not being “afraid to make fun of himself,” adding, “I mean, just check out his profile picture.” It would only be a few months before Time added the following notice to its feature:
Update: On June 16, Weiner resigned his Congressional seat, ten days after admitting that he’d accidentally Tweeted out at least one lewd photograph of himself. So… perhaps we overstated his savvy just a bit.
Some consolations for the former congressman include TV job offers from the “Entourage” production team and a “20 percent increase over his congressman’s salary” if he joins Flynt Management Group, whose top boss, Larry Flynt, just told the Huffington Post: “I feel that [Weiner’s] unfortunate resignation is a prime example of unfounded political pressure and the hypocrisy that has invaded democracy in Washington D.C.”
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2058946_2059021_2059018,00.html
Facebook’s New VP of Global Communications is Joe Lockhart, Ex-White House Press Secretary
June 15, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Joe Lockhart was White House press secretary during Bill Clinton’s indelible Monica Lewinsky years, and next month, in a testament to Facebook’s increasingly significant presence on the world stage, Mr. Lockhart will become that heralded company’s VP of global communications.
For the new gig, Lockhart is saying goodbye to his present post as managing director of Glover Park Group, a communications firm he helped establish, and which has represented the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo. But Lockhart isn’t the only D.C. heavy-hitter to recently bolster Facebook’s ranks. Lockhart is joining two very recent hires with close ties to the Washington scene: Joel Kaplan and Myriah Jordan, FB’s newly minted lobbyists. Kaplan was the White House deputy chief of staff under the last Bush while Jordan, as listed in her LinkedIn, worked in the same White House as a Bush Deputy General Counsel and Special Assistant to the President for Policy.
If it seems Facebook is gearing up for treacherous times, it’s likely due to the fact that the company’s incredible growth — it has over 600 million users — and projected-for-the-fall IPO is sure to make some very hefty demands of the current management. It’s speculated that the impending IPO will place the company’s value at a figure upwards of $100 billion dollars. And finally, the company can’t seem to stay out of the spotlight of criticism and praise. Blame it on its rough-handling of user privacy and its innovation.
Read more:
http://allthingsd.com/20110614/facebook-hires-former-white-house-press-secretary-joe-lockhart/
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/56978.html#ixzz1PNxR9YRg
American Grad Student from Georgia Fesses Up to Authoring “Gay Girl in Damascus” Blog
June 14, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Writing from Istanbul, Turkey, the American grad student Tom MacMaster, currently studying at the University of Edinburgh, confessed to being the “sole author” of the blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus.” MacMaster began the blog in February and featured entries of the fictional life led by Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, a young lesbian blogger half-Syrian, half-American who had only recently relocated to Damascus. However, Amina Araf sprouted entirely from MacMaster’s head and his readers were unaware.
That’s why whirlwind media coverage ensued last week when a posting, supposedly written by Amina’s cousin, delivered the news that Amina had been taken at gunpoint by men of the Baath Party militia to an unknown location. Social media was used extensively to get the word out about Amina’s abduction and to campaign for her liberation. The poster at the right was one of the images used by activists to petition for Amina’s cause. It’s believed that even the U.S. State Department opened an investigation into Amina’s disappearance.
He himself a committed activist for Middle Eastern causes, MacMaster issued a more than somewhat half-hearted apology for deceiving the world’s media outlets and the blog’s readership. The apology was posted on the “Gay Girl” blog which was, perhaps begrudgingly, re-titled “A Hoax.” Snippet one: “While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground.” Snippet two: This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.”
Although the cause was a false one, this episode shows the effectiveness with which social media can be used to disperse information quickly and organize masses of people around it.
Read More:
http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/gay-girl-blogger-a-975766.html
http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com/2011/06/apology-to-readers.html
Facebook’s Facial Recognition Feature Rolled Out to Rest of the World
June 7, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
At just about half a year old, the still relatively new facial recognition feature that enables Facebook photo tagging assists first became available to American users in December. Now, the Zuckerberg group is nearing completion of a worldwide roll-out.
Many are glad. The next time a photo album is uploaded, it will no longer be necessary to tag people individually on each photo because with the new tool, the process becomes more automatized. But others have already taken issue with the network’s insistence on introducing new sharing features by way of default privacy setting changes issued across the board.
If you find yourself undesirably tagged in an uploaded picture or two, you’ll have to untag yourself one picture at a time because there’s no way to opt out completely: if Facebook recommends your image for tagging, there’s nothing in place that can prevent your friends from heeding the recommendation. Justin Mitchell, a Facebook engineer blogging officially for Facebook explains it like this: “When you or a friend upload new photos, we use face recognition software — similar to that found in many photo editing tools –to match your new photos to other photos you’re tagged in. We group similar photos together and, whenever possible, suggest the name of the friend in the photos.”
It is possible to disable the suggested tags so that at least your name will not be suggested. This is probably a good time to have a closer look at your Facebook account settings.
Read More:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/229689/security_firm_issues_alert_on_facebook_facial_recognition.html
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=467145887130
Lady Gaga and Eric Schmidt Invest in Backplane, a New Social Network
June 6, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
The new entertainment- and sports-focused social network in not up and running quite yet, but tidings of its forthcoming existence has just hit the electronic presses courtesy of Evelyn M. Rusli at the New York Times. Rusli tells that Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s business manager, and his friend (in high-tech places) Matthew Michelsen are the proud founders of Backplane, a new startup set to release an online networking platform very soon.
It seems Carter was inspired by the work that both he and Gaga did for Steve Jobs, which is to say, provide some crucial feedback on Apple’s Ping. Most appropriately, considering Carter’s background in entertainment, Backplane’s platform will focus on enabling a more seamless management of celebrities’ fans across the big online networks. In Carter’s words: “We needed a more concentrated base.” Lady Gaga has a 20 percent stake in the Backplane venture and so far it has raised $1million from investors, among which Google emblem Eric Schmidt is to be found.
Although it is hoped the new network will not prove to be one more means of making fatally clumsy — at least for one’s mayoral ambitions — pseudo-amorous overtures à la Weiner, techies everywhere know that that’s a most unlikely scenario. In any case, as he prepares the big launch of his platform, Troy Carter must still sort out the business of the Lebanese “impounding” of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” at Beirut’s international airport. At least the album hasn’t been officially banned in that country. Good luck to Carter and good luck to the Lebanese fans.
Read More:
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/a-force-behind-the-gaga-effect/
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2011/06/lebanon-l.html
Shaquille O’Neal Passes the Ball to Tout, a San Francisco Startup
June 3, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Everyone knows Shaquille O’Neal is the proud owner of very many special things, enviable height, brawn, wit, and hooping talents among them. But did you know he’s also credited with owning the very first verified celebrity Twitter account? He is.
And on Wednesday, in one more show of his social media dominance, Shaq publicly announced his retirement by way of a 15-second video clip made on Tout, a new app. It’s used for sharing short videos that present “‘Life as it Happens’ instead of ‘Life as it’s Written’ in 140 characters of text,” to go by the San Francisco startup’s warring words of marketing — rather baldly aimed at Twitter.
Unsurprisingly, the Shaq announcement was a huge coup for Tout; only 30 minutes had gone by since O’Neal first tweeting of the Tout link when it received 35,000 clicks. The awesome baller has already acquired some equity in the company and presides as an advisor.
Tout works with the iPhone and the iPad and its videos, postable to Twitter and Facebook accounts, can also be sent by Snail Mail 2.0, email. Plainly seeing itself as Twitter’s direct competitor, Tout calls its service “Video Status Updates” and provides features like finding and following other users on its site, www.tout.com.
For the curious, the Big Shamrock did let the San Fran folks know he’d be making an important announcement through their service. Seems everyone’s been duly rewarded.
Read More:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=90284#ixzz1OFcsAbsS
