Facebook continues to grow but there is something wrong big time with MySpace. Not only is it lagging behind Facebook but the social network is doing so bad with its traffic that it might actually cost News Corp $100 Million. The once leading social network had signed up a $900 Million ad deal with Google back in 2006. The deal covered up the $580 Million cost of MySpace but that will cost News Corp dearly as it fails to maintain a minimum traffic level. Sadly MySpace is the only entity of News Corp which has registered a very negative output compared to others it owns. So what exactly is going to happen with MySpace? It’s definitely not going to shutdown, but what is going to open up the Pandora box of success for it? Facebook committing suicide perhaps.
Facebook continues to grow exponentially. Oh please it’s a cliché for sure as the social network grows like a wild creeper without a stop while all other social networks continue to be dwarfed next to it. It now has crossed the 325 million mark and I am sure by the time I finish writing this piece and you end reading this and ReTweeting it, a thousand or so more would have joined it. Why this growth? In my opinion the rapid rise is primarily because it is not bound to be a network for a particular age group, although it started solely for the purpose to connect college students. You will find everyone, be it a young kid or a 50 year old guy, from absolutely useless quizzes to extremely addictive applications, there is every reason there for anyone to join the network.
I just wonder what or when is it going to stop? Any clue or prediction, leave it in the comments please.
Twitter is making its interface more active and bringing the features the third party desktop applications offer to its page. We have seen the filtering of followers with the List feature and today it tested the retweet with a few users. We have been noticing this for quite some time which is pretty good, given that it earlier relied solely on third party apps/developers to keep an eye if a tweet has already made it to a stream. With this feature, it will show the original tweet plus have the retweets appear under it as roots.
An achievement being announced by you is always special, especially if you are a newly appointed COO. That is exactly big for Jason Rosenthal, Ning’s new COO who announced the social networking platform reached 37 million users. Big news but that’s not it as it also boasted on having 1.6 million networks created using its platform. The network has definitely grown exponentially with major partnerships on the way with and how effectively each network has an average of two Ning applications installed. The other major announcement was of the launch of the Appathon contest to bring more developers in the ring to create apps using its platform for developers. And to encourage more developers step up, it will offer $5,000 to the best application [original] plus prizes for the second and third placed application.
Bad day, very bad day at Microsoft as it cut short its staff by 800 or so employees. The worst part: firing Don Dodge, Director of Business Development for Emerging Business Team. Why exactly did that happen or needed to happen? The guy has been one of the most active people at Microsoft attending numerous conferences and events that are startup focused and to be honest it is a huge error laying off such an active person. The guy is definitely not slurring abuses at Microsoft and still honors the company, but in my opinion he simply wasted his time and energy for a company that didn’t return him with the same favor.
When do you know that your service is the best? When users are actively engaged with it, something that’s quite a drawback with Twitter and many other services. Lately the micromessaging service has been making some efforts to make it more interactive with the launch of List feature and widget, etc. Today however it made another important move with the release of Notifications, though it is only available to a limited number of users at present. What it does is simply notify users when ever there is a new tweet in the line by indicating it just above the tweet list. Of course with the notification right there, users will be more active and might just be triggered to see what the new tweet is about and spent a few extra minutes on the site. Good work, I say Twitter is making itself better by the day.
I don’t believe that I missed out the birthday of one of my favorite TV shows; The Sesame Street. The educational series will be celebrating its 40th birthday on November 10. This would make it the longest running show on TV with more than 4,000 episodes to date. And how exactly I came to know it? Google all the way, as we know the search giant has the habit of changing its logo in accordance with the special days, events.
It was only a week back when we informed that the apps at the App Store had crossed the 100,000 mark. Today however, Apple confirmed the numbers as the official report confirmed reached the milestone. And that is more than impressive in just a little under a year and a half. The chart above shows category wise distribution apps at the app store and the games lead the shares with a 16% share followed by books and entertainment at 13%.
So what are the predictions for the coming year? When is it crossing the 200,000 mark?
[image with thanks]
There appears to be some problem with Gmail as users log in to find their inbox with zero unread emails. The reason? Well a bug is behind all this, minor or major I am not sure, but the problem is like sporadic and not widespread. The problem is primarily owing to the way Google handles the IMAP message body, but I guess users should not worry about their accounts being hacked or something of the sort and I hope it is fixed quickly.
Please let us know which one of our readers are experiencing the issue of any sort?
Music Onebox search from Google, which we thought to be coming in due time has been rescheduled to release early. Many artists will be offering songs and numerous downloads for the Music Search. Just search for the artist’s name to grab the exclusives. Well that in no manner means that those songs will only be available on Google sites but also on the sites where they are hosted. A few artists available at present are Tim McGraw, Phoenix, Mos Def, to name a few.
First the deal with O2 in Germany to Yahoo and now we have more trouble for Google as the Turkish Government fined it with $47 Million. The purpose? The authorities found that the search giant was involved in a tax fraud. The authorities require Google to pay taxes on the revenue it generates through the registered companies in the country. Google on the other hand says that no wonder it leads the search market in Turkey, but the entire ad network is based in Ireland, which exempts it from paying taxes to Turkey. There has been no final settlement on the issue and both parties are still involved in talks for some sort of settlement. By the way do you think that every other region finds it easy to squeeze cash from Google or Google uses its leader position to escape from the clutches of laws, etc? Do give us your opinion in the comments.
If you are looking for an on demand web based solution for social collaboration service, OfficeMedium provides you an efficient and easy to use platform. Be it any work, from event coordination, file sharing or contact management, the platform offers users a wide variety of functions to communicate and collaborate with colleagues. The dashboard is pretty neat with easy to navigate options and numerous features which include advance search, calendars, file sharing, etc. And the winning part is definitely the computing on cloud, which eliminates the need to have backup servers at your workplace as well as eliminating the need for software installation and management. I mean what else would you want to smoothen your office work? The pricing model itself is pretty simple: instead of choosing between annoying packages and chunks of user accounts, you simply, automatically get billed each month based on your current amount of users and memory consumed ($6/user, $1/gig, free 512MB).
When you have more than 600 million visitors a month, maintaining a traffic server becomes quote hectic, which is exactly the same issue with Yahoo. Tomorrow Yahoo will be taking a step ahead of its initial server to adopt an open source version and the code is available via Apache Software Foundation. The purpose of a traffic server is to ensure efficient working, management and routing of the information across the cloud and ensures a much faster response to all requests made. The Traffic Server is pretty efficient itself handling more than 30,000 requests and at present caters to more than 400 TB of data each day. Along with that yahoo will also be updating its Distribution Hadoop, which is at work across its data centers and will numerous new features and fixes for bugs. The same Hadoop provides framework for Yahoo’s services like Yahoo Mail, Search, etc.
Not all news from Germany can be bad news for all and this one is definitely good for Yahoo as Yahoo signed up a much needed deal with O2 Germany to become a mobile search and services partner. The bad part is that Google was previously the partner for the same. With this O2 subscribers will be able to access Yahoo Search across its mobile portals and Yahoo will offer sponsored ads along with the results. I just wonder how effective would this be given that it will only place Yahoo’s search box on O2 site. I mean who uses that when you have Google which is so widely used? As for facts, Google still has a 70% mobile market share in Germany compared to Yahoo 8.2%.
After it gave its users the power to create lists with the List feature, Twitter is expanding with the launch of the List Widget. We all know what the widget will do, don’t we? Well you can place it on your site or blog and it will display you the status updates from those you have chosen and if they have made their status updates public. The widget just a simply notifies of status update, meaning you can not tweet using it. To be honest this list feature is cool, given that you can filter out your followers or those you follow to ensure that you get tweets that matter the most to you and customize as to how many tweets need to be shown, interval between each update and hashtags. To be honest it makes Twitter a bit more neater.
Google will soon be everywhere and that is exactly what it wants. It reigns supreme on the Web, continually expanding it influence and the Android has given it the key to step in the dimension of the Mobile area. The search is its key playground and the mobile devices are its primary focus at present and voice search is one of the best efforts it has made to ease search. While this option had been available for the Android, iPhone in English, the same has now extended to the Chinese language plus it is also supported on the previous versions of the S60 phones. Now if anyone of you happens to be using it we will be more than happy to hear the feedback you have on how the feature works for the Chinese language and leave your comments.
After almost four months in talks, Amazon has finally pulled the shutters on the Zappos deal as it acquired the online retailer for shoes for $1.2 Billion. That’s almost $400 Million more than what had been anticipated. I guess Zappos will be more than happy with that, rather would have waited a bit longer if it could have fetched an even higher price. The management team at Zappos will remain as it is and will continue operations in its head quarters in Las Vegas, NV.
Orkut is set to redesign its web page and as always doing things when Facebook has actually done it ages back. The redesign will make site much faster and every action is now placed right in front and the center, again like Facebook and other networks. Plus it has also cut short the number of pages making it easier to keep an eye on all updates as well as comment on statuses. It has also integrated numerous features from Google Maps, etc as well. Orkut might not be able to get over Facebook, but it can definitely hold its lead in India and Brazil where it still reigns supreme.
Things are quite problematic when it comes to StudiVZ, the German Facebook. It began with allegations that said it copied the Facebook design all the way to falling prey to hacker attacks. However the young hacker who gave StudiVZ a real nightmare by hacking close to 50,000 users’ detail in just a few hours and threatened to sell that information to gangs if not paid the ransom. He was caught, thrown in prison and now he has committed suicide. The guy was found dead in his cell and administration at the prison stated that the accused had shown no intentions to commit suicide. Suspicion and trouble for the social network as it has given many a folks to point fingers at it. Lets see how it all works out and what do investigations have to show up.
