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Social Media News 11/14/09

Sunday, November 15, 2009

It’s been known for a while that Rupert Murdoch has no love for Google. However, this week was the first time the leader of the second largest media conglomerate (News Corp.) said that he will prevent his news from being indexed by Google. That’s including sites like WSJ.com. It sounds like Murdoch is quite serious about the claim, even though sites like WSJ.com could lose 25% of its traffic or more, according to some estimates.

Then a few days later, TechCrunch Europe published this article detailing a secret presentation by Microsoft to various leaders of UK news media. According to the article, Microsoft is developing something known as ACAP, “Automated Content Access Protocol,” to index content like news stories on Bing in a more robust way than Google’s robots.txt protocol. If a significant amount of news media corporations get on board with the new indexing protocol, it will have a serious damaging effect on Google’s popular news search, news.google.com.

Though it may be bad news for Google in the news media industry, the communications industry might be looking up. On Thursday Google announced that it had purchased Gizmo5, which will power Google Voice with VoIP capabilities. This move makes Google Voice a serious competitor for Skype, and could also be a really nice addition to Google Wave.

In the same week, Google also purchased the popular mobile advertising platform, AdMob, for $750 Million. With this deal, Google now has a powerful mobile display advertising product that it can add to its existing mobile search advertising offering.

Twitter is in the process of rolling out its Retweet feature, though the public launch of the feature may take a little longer than expected. Prior to this announcement, retweeting has been an established norm in the Twittershere but has not been officially supported by the Twitter API. Due to its enormous popularity the Twitter developers have been working on incorporating the retweet action to become an official part of Twitter.com, but apparently they are still trying to figure out exactly how to do it.

Now here’s an interesting story in the world of social gaming. Personally, I avoid Facebook games like Farmville, Mafia Wars and Sorority Life like the plague, but I’ve always known that these games are popular among my friends. And I wouldn’t have guessed that a game maker like Playfish, the creators of games like Pet Society and Word Challenge, could be worth a whooping $400 Million. Last Monday, Electronic Arts (EA) acquired Playfish in a move that signifies just how lucrative social gaming has become. Be sure to check out this Mashable article, The Future of Gaming: 5 Social Predictions.

Social Media News 10/23/09

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Twitter made multiple headlines this week. Most significant of which, Bing and Google will now index Tweets in real time and display them along with search results. Bing has a public beta now available, but as far as I know Google hasn’t disclosed when they will begin to integrate. If you can’t wait for the official release, check out a new broswer plugin called Kikin. The plugin will allow you to integrate content from multiple social networking sites (like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even eBay and Amazon) with search results from your favorite search engine.

The Twitter announcement was made Wednesday at this year’s Web 2.0 Summit held in San Francisco. At the same conference, venture capitalist Sean Parker gave a presentation that has spurred a lot of conversation. Parker made the distinction between “network services” like major social networking sites, and “information services” like search engines. In his slide deck, Parker claims that network services will trump information services and ultimately shape the future of the internet. “Companies that harness the power of networks will dominate the internet. Collecting data is less valuable than connecting people.”

If Sean Parker is right, then the Bing and Google deal with Twitter is a good move. This week, the Pew Internet Project reported that Twitter and other microblogging services are used by 19% of internet users, which has increased from 11% of users 6 months ago. Also this week, Twitter hit a significant milestone on Monday with the 5 billionth Tweet, now known as the “Pentagigatweet”. (The Tweet has since been deleted by it’s author Robin Sloan, for whatever reason.)

The final word on this week’s Twitter news comes from co-founder and chief executive Evan Williams. The New York Times reported on Williams’ remarks from the Web 2.0 Summit, at which he announced that later this month Twitter will release its “Lists” feature, currently in beta for a few thousand users. Lists allow Twitter users to better organize Twitter feeds that they are interested in, and I believe it’s going to be very similar to Amazon’s Listmania feature.

Facebook debuted a new feature of its own this week with a redesign of the Facebook user home page. Users can now toggle between “News Feeds” and “Live Feed”. The change was made without much explanation to Facebook users, thousands of which were left wonder what the heck was different between the News and Live feeds. Here’s I how explained the difference: The Live Feed are all the status and news updates that Facebook users are accustomed to seeing on their homepage; The News Feed is the feed of events from the Live Feed that the site believes will be most interesting to the user, based on how popular the post is, and based on the user’s past interactions on the site. This feature was developed in response to user feedback, but as with any major site change, there has been a minor backlash to the upgrade.