Archive for 'Social Media'
Le Web: Facebook Connect now reaches 60 million people on 80,000 sites
Facebook just updated stats on Connect — its effort to bring social functionality to sites and apps across the web. Facebook Connect now reaches 60 million users and 80,000 sites (that’s up from the 15,000 announced earlier this fall.)
“We don’t aspire to be only a web site,” said Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook Developer Network. “We aspire to be a technology that allows people to connect people with the things they care about.”
Beard gave a few prominent examples of how Connect has helped drive traffic to partners. Huffington Post, which launched Social News earlier this year, got a 500 percent increase in referrals and 50 percent boost to comments and doubled its user base.
Beard also pointed to Facebook’s rapid growth overseas — two years ago, 70 percent of Facebook’s users came from within the U.S. Now 70 percent come from abroad.
Le Web: MySpace opens up its real-time stream of data to developers
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MySpace launched a real-time stream application programming interface, letting other developers mine its public status updates and shared links for trends and viral content.
That means when MySpace users share links or music videos, that data can show up in other places like on search engine OneRiot, which is a launch partner. Because of MySpace’s focus on music, its data could probably be used to find emerging artists or new music videos. MySpace COO Mike Jones says the site handles about 46 million updates every day. Some obvious applications could be ultra-refined ‘Top 40′ charts for very specific genres of music or for bands in specific cities. (more…)
Le Web: Twitter releases data firehose to everyone, now has 50,000 apps
Twitter said it’s opening up its data stream of tweets to all developers, not just Bing and Google. Ryan Sarver, who is on the platform team at Twitter, said details will be hashed out later next year.
Sarver said Twitter’s business model will be to drive and split revenue with the ecosystem of developers that have built applications around it. (more…)
Le Web: Q&A with Google VP Marissa Mayer on the future of search
Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search and user experience is on-stage at the Le Web conference in Paris. I’m live-blogging as we go:
Michael Arrington asks about the search announcements earlier this week (namely Google Goggles, local search and real-time search). (more…)
Le Web day 1: End of day show report
Here’s my end of day show report for Le Web, the Web 2.0 conference in Paris. I’ve been in Paris for the week reporting with the Traveling Geeks (watch video of us on a train). Watch the video for a quick summary of the companies I saw, plus a quick story at the end about an outbreak Robert Scoble had at the expense of the French entrepreneurs.
Companies and links mentioned in the video: (more…)
Niklas Zennström at LeWeb
By Karsten Lemm at LeWeb 2009 – “If you want to be successful, swim against the stream, follow your own path.” That was Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström’s advice to aspiring entrepreneurs at the LeWeb conference in Paris. The serial entrepreneur, who initially gained fame and fortune with file-sharing service Kazaa, pointed out that none of the potential investors that he and co-founder Janus Friis approached wanted to put money into Skype. “The VCs in Europe felt that Skype was way too risky” and had little future, Zennström said. The Internet phone service became a big success, of course, and was sold to eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion.
Dating tech service Wuiper offers a fun way for people to meet
Unless you’re incredibly suave, it can be difficult to impossible to meet someone you want to date. Just walking up to a stranger in a public place and thinking of a way to strike up a conversation and make a connection is not easy. That’s why we have a market for dating technologies, such as online dating sites and devices. All dating technologies have one simple goal: finding a simple, fun, and non-threatening way for people to meet.
Wuiper (pronounced “Whipper”) is a social networking site where people are introduced through physical numbered tags that you can stick on someone’s bag. Geared towards high school students, I can see this being a fun way to leave “secret admirer” messages. Messages can be sent and retrieved via an SMS or via the Wuiper site. All these tags have a code that you use to send a message to initiate a conversation. And then you can continue the conversation through the Wuiper site or take it online or offline.
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LeWeb: Chad Hurley, CEO of YouTube
Chad Hurley spoke a few moments ago at LeWeb in Paris and told us that now YouTube streams over one billion videos a day! Although he did not want to disclose the revenues, he shared that Youtube’s top users (only a handful) earn about a million dollars each. Chad Hurley briefly talked about the YouTube Formula 1 project, a blog from where Formula1 events videos are available. Chad has another pet project, the clothing brand Alaska, and he plans to open two new stores, one will be located in San Jose, California.
How Dell handles customer service and sales through social media
At the Le Web conference in Paris, I spoke with Richard Binhammer, better known as @RichardATDell on Twitter. Three years ago Richard, who was and still is working in public affairs, was told by his boss to start getting engaged in blogger relations. It appears that Binhammer’s move into social media was one of the many responses to the 2005 Dell Hell outburst initiated by social media consultant Jeff Jarvis, who wrote an open letter to Dell complaining about Dell’s customer service. At the time, Dell’s response was, “We don’t respond to bloggers.”
Marissa Mayer Talks About Wave, Music Search and the Future of News
In an interview with TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington at LeWeb today, Google’s Marissa Mayer discussed some of the new product that Google announced over the last year, including the recent integration of real-time news streams into the default search pages, Google Music Search and Google Wave. Talking about the future of search, Mayer expects that people will soon do searches by talking to their phones, or through services like the newly announced Google Goggles.
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