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Posts Tagged ‘tweetmeme’

You know how TweetMeme started out trying to be the Techmeme of Twitter before it ventured off plastering its ReTweet buttons on every blog on the Web? Well now there’s a site that just launched today that wants to be the TweetMeme of Google Buzz called ReBuzzThis.

It is not much to look at right now—five lame links as of this writing. But the site wants to encourage blogs and other sites to add its ReBuzz buttons to posts and articles. The posts that get ReBuzzed the most shoot up the homepage just like on TweetMeme with ReTweets. Except that TweetMeme tries to count all retweets, not just those done through its buttons. ReBuzzThis seems to only count Rebuzzes done through its site and buttons, so it is not really capturing the most Buzzed about articles and posts.

But it may be onto something. One of the top feature requests on Google Buzz is a Rebuzz button. So we may see an official version of ReBuzzThis come out on Google Buzz itself.

Now that Twitter did away with its monolithic Suggested User List, everyone can fight for followers on a more equal footing. Tweetmeme wants to help you gain followers with a new Follow Button you can place on your blog or Website. It looks very much like Tweetmeme’s ReTweet button, which is on 100,000 sites and registering 7 billion monthly impressions across the web, except it says “Follow” instead of “Retweet.” When you click on the Follow button, a window pops open that lets you sign into Twitter and follow the account tied to the button (usually the person or publication of the site the button is on).

The Follow button comes in different shapes and sizes, shows how many followers you have, and is tied into analytics services such as TwitterCounter, Twitalyzer, and TwitterGrader. The data from the Follow button should also appear in Tweetmeme’s own analytics. But it doesn’t yet. The Follow buttons are geared more towards advertisers, and indeed they can and will be placed in ads as well as on editorial content. Tweetmeme is also working on turning its ReTweet button into an advertising platform with AdTweets.

Follow buttons are nothing new, but Tweetmeme has a lot of distribution muscle with its Retweet buttons. The question is, how many buttons are you going to gunk up your site with? Should we add a follow button to every post?

This strange app is a touchscreen interface that connects people, places, and things using “clouds” of items and people. It basically makes Venn diagrams of your contacts and allows you to share and explore content and messages.

This looks way too weird for the average user but clearly someone out there may want to move Sven and Nikola to a timeline and figure out which emails came from each person and which emails overlap.

The text input system is actually quite cool, however, because it predicts the words you’re about to type. Pop over to 4 minutes in to see how that system works.

Video after the jump.

Last summer, we wrote about the launch of Retweet.com, a Tweetmeme knock-off with a killer name. Mesiab Labs, a company associated with some spammy Twitter projects like Hummingbird, launched it in August with some fanfare. However, since then, Tweetmeme has remained the king of the space. And now Mesiab Labs has put the killer domain up for auction.

As you can see on this Flippa page, the current bids for Retweet.com stand at $20,000. This is a huge increase from yesterday when the bids hovered around $10. So far, there are 27 bids. The listing on the site claims the domain gets 12 million uniques a month, and 26 million pageviews. If that’s the case, you have to wonder, why sell?

Well part of the reason has to be that Twitter itself is trying to trademark the word “retweet.” Mesiab Labs was also apparently tried to trademark the name, though it’s not clear if that failed or if they are simply moving to sell before that happens. Twitter also tried unsuccessfully to trademark “tweet” last year.

We also asked Mesiab Labs about the auction. Here’s what they had to say:

When we initially conceptualized Retweet.com, we realized the importance of the new shift that social media sites like Twitter are making on how we filter and consume news.  We developed and fostered Retweet.com and its resulting network to help explore this concept. It has been quite exciting to see stories break before some of the major news media outlets and to watch blogs gain near mainstream status.  It’s also exciting to watch the pulse of the social world shift and sway.  But more than novelty, we are demonstrating incredible new ways to apply crowd-sourcing to answer the question ”What matters, right now.”

There are some truly remarkable things about the term ReTweet. First, as we all know it was created by the users of Twitter – NOT by the Twitter itself. Second, like “Googling” something has become synonymous with using a search engine, “Retweet’ing” has become synonymous with the act of spreading online content virally.

While we aren’t the only ones in this space, we feel privileged to participate.

Now that we’ve grown and scaled the Retweet network and infrastructure, we’re ready to pass it on to someone who can truly push it to the next level. We’re excited about the opportunity for a new passionate owner to foster and grow Retweet.com and continue to tap the potential of what is undeniably becoming a monumental shift in news consumption.

They go on to note that if they don’t find a suitable buyer in 30 days, they’ll continue to operate the site themselves. It is a pretty killer domain, but is it worth the risk if Twitter gets the trademark?

There’s nothing like finding and getting rid of junk on eBay, especially if you’re a gadget hound looking to offload last month’s toys for the latest and greatest. While it’s entirely possible to manage your eBay account on your phone’s browser, a dedicated application would make life so much easier.

The new eBay app for Android could make shopping, paying and selling through the online auction site a breeze.

Read the rest of this story at MobileCrunch…

As we first reported on Friday, Microsoft is adding some social hooks into Outlook 2010. Outlook will gain the ability to pull in profile information, photos, and update streams from LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace. You can try the LinkedIn plugin now in beta. The other social networks will be added later when Outlook 2010 goes on sale, probably in July.

The new social features make it look a lot more like Xobni, the social email startup backed by Vinod Khosla that Microsoft looked at buying nearly two years ago. Well, a poor man’s Xobni. With Xobni, which itself is a plugin for Outlook, you can pull in relevant contact information, photos, and social stream data from both LinkedIn and Facebook today. It also supports Twitter, and Hoover’s information on companies. Salesforce integration is currently in beta, and SharePoint is coming soon.

The idea behind bringing social streams into Outlook is that as you are reading or composing an email, you can see recent status updates or pictures of the person you are corresponding with to give you some instant context. The Outlook plugins are built on top its “Social Connector,” and was previewed last year. The Social Connector was really created for Microsoft SharePoint, which supports corporate profiles and file sharing. Getting the major social networks to write their own plugins directly for the Social Connector means that Outlook can support additional social streams down the road. Of course, these have to be written in .Net and sent out as executable files, but that’s a different issue.

The bigger issue is that the Social Connector will only work on Outlook 2010, whereas Xobni works on every version going back to Outlook 2003. Companies tend to replace Outlook at a glacial pace, but it is clear that Microsoft is trying to make Xobni a feature of Outlook. And it only took two years to announce. And even now, many of the comments on Microsot’s blog post are complaining that the beta is crashing their computers. Some examples:

SocialConnector.dll crashes my 32-bit Outlook 2010 beta on Win 7 64 bit.

After installing this, Outlook will no longer start up. I’ve have removed the connector, but it still crashes outlook, not the computer. I’m using 64bit Win 7 Ultimate, with 32bit Office 2010.

Xobni could still be doomed, but it does have a few things going for it. The plugin has been downloaded more than 4 million times, its users are rabidly loyal, and the company will eventually expand to other email systems beyond Outlook. It also does email search a lot better (at least right now) than Outlook and can resolve different identities to the same person in your contacts list.

Most people don’t sign up for Facebook or even LinkedIn with their corporate Outlook email accounts. If the email addresses of your contacts in Outlook don’t match their email on LinkedIn, Facebook, or MySpace, you won’t be able to see their profile information or stream data using the Outlook Social Connector. Xobni does a better job resolving the multiple identities people choose to have on the Internet. That doesn’t mean the folks at Xobni should be breathing easy. Microsoft has endless patience and eventually it gets things right.

Google Calendar may not be the sexiest product Google offers, but, as with Gmail, there are plenty of people who use it to manage their business and personal lives (and wind up staring at it for hours each week as a result). Today, we’ve gotten our hands on a screenshot showing what appears to be an internal build of Google Calendar, giving us an idea of what a forthcoming UI refresh might look like. We’ve included photos of both the internal version and the current version below for comparison’s sake (be sure to click on the photo for a larger version).

As far as we can tell, the changes are all aesthetic and fairly minor but they add up to make a difference — the new version looks more modern, and it also looks more like Google’s other Apps. The new version replaces many of the text-based navigation links with the sleeker silver buttons, which are also found throughout Gmail and Google Docs. The calendar has been spruced up a bit, and the entire interface is now surrounded by a colored border (in the current version, some text and links and hover above the calendar, which looks a little less polished).

You’ll also notice a worldwide clock in the screenshots of the new UI. These aren’t part of the default Google Calendar site now, but you can activate it through Google Calendar Labs, which launched last summer.

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It seems like everyone and their mother now has their own URL shortening service, or at least their own short domain. Short URLs have almost become a branding thing. But as the use of short links keeps going up, the market share among different URL shortening services is fragmenting. The biggest URL shortening service is still bit.ly, with more than 2 billion links a month, but it now only has a 56 percent market share of short links on Twitter, compared to nearly 80 percent last summer. The drop wasn’t noticed before because TweetMeme, which keeps statistics on short URL market share, pulled its stats page for a couple months as part of a site upgrade to make it more scalable. But now that stats page is back up, and it is tracking 3.1 million unique links per day compared to 2.5 million last November..

So what accounts for bit.ly’s 24-point drop?  When TinyURL was the default service on Twitter it had a 75 percent share, and now it has only 8 percent, so these things can shift quickly.  But bit.ly  is still the default link shortener on Twitter.com and many Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck.  Some of the decline can be attributed to the launch of bit.ly Pro, which is a white-labeling short link service for publishers.  We use it to publish links to our posts on Twitter with our tcrn.ch domain, which used to be bit.ly links.  Even though bit.ly is still powering those links, it doesn’t get credit for any custom domains.  In fact, tcrn.ch is now one of the top 100 short domains (see below). So to the extent that large publishers such as AOL, Bing, foursquare, the Huffington Post, Meebo, MSN, and the New York Times switched to custom bit.ly Pro domains, those are no longer counted for bit.ly in the stats above.

I should also mention that these stats represent only a 24-hour snapshot and they are only for Twitter (but Twitter is where the lion’s share of these short links are being passed around). And TweetMeme is now including things like tumblr.com and Justin.tv.  Bit.ly says that its own analysis of Twitter’s “garden hose” of Tweets (which is a more limited sample) shows that it is maintaining a 70-to-80 percent share.

Gettuig back to the TweetMeme stats, if you look at bit.ly’s biggest competitor, it is not TinyURL (7.88%), ow.ly (3.92%), is.gd (3.05%), or tumblr.com (2.79%), it is “Other” (26.58%).  TweetMeme provided me with a breakdown of the top 100 URL shorteners and their respective shares (see table below).  And while some of them are bit.ly Pro accounts, they still don’t add up to bit.ly’s former share.  What you see is just a lot more competition, from youtu.be, Goog.le, yfrog.com, Facebook’s fb.me, MySpace’s lnk.ms (which is down significantly from last September when it was No. 2), ping.fm, and StumbleUpon’s Su.pr.  Here is the the full top 100 list.  I’ve bolded some interesting names.  Note that 4sq.com (No. 27) has twice the share of gowal.la (No. 35) and five times that of loopt.us (No. 59).  In live video, ustre.am (no. 28) is ahead of justin.tv (No. 37).  And flic.kr (no. 31) and digg.com (No. 33) are further down the list than you might expect.  Also, the data in teh table belwo is from yesterday, so it is slightly different from the chart above which is from today and formspring.me is No. 6 in the table because it got some attention yesterday and a lot of people were trying it out.

Top 100 URL Shorteners On Twitter

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iYogi, a company that provides remote tech support directly to consumers and small businesses, has raised a Series C round to the tune of $15 million.

The round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and joined by prior investors Canaan Partners, SAP Ventures, and SVB India Capital Partners. The Gurgaon, India-headquartered firm earlier raised $3.1 million and $9.5 million in two rounds in 2007 and 2008, respectively.

iYogi offers a number of tech support services like PC installation and recovery, anti-virus/spyware, data back-up and PC speed optimization. Its annual unlimited tech support plan starts at $139.99. Most of its tech support services are centered around Microsoft software, but Google and Apple products are also listed on iYogi’s website.

iYogi says it will use the additional capital to expand its team of Global Tech Experts, which are basically people who help consumers and SMBs solve their computer problems from a remote location. iYogi says that today, it has more than 100,000 annual subscribers and provides thousands of incident sessions every day on a 24/7 basis.

The company claims that it has seen a 300 percent growth in revenues and subscribers since 2008, and that it currently boasts an employee workforce of 1,200. iYogi intends to grow the number of Global Tech Experts to 3,000 worldwide in 2010.

iYogi delivers its services in partnership with companies like HP, Microsoft and Cisco and counts Amazon and Walmart among the retailers that have worked with the company to enhance customer service.

Have you ever used iYogi? Is it something you would recommend to your less tech-savvy friends and/or relatives?

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Chinese Internet search giant Baidu this morning announced plans to set up a new independent company to provide licensed, advertising-supported online video content to Chinese Internet users.

Reuters earlier this week caught wind of the company’s plans to launch the Hulu-like destination site, and also reported that Hulu investor Providence Equity Partners was going to have a significant stake in the venture.

It cited local websites who reported that the joint venture company had received about $60 million in private equity funds, with Baidu investing about $10 million into the new firm. Baidu didn’t provide any details about the size of its investment (let alone names of other backers) in today’s statement.

According to the release, the new company will work with content providers to provide copyrighted video content including movies, TV series, sporting events, animation and other varied content to Internet users through an ad-supported model.

It’s worth noting that Baidu took a 8.3 percent stake in UiTV, a Chinese online TV firm, back in September 2008. It is also an investor in PPLive, a Chinese website that streams licensed movies and video for free.

Yu Gong, formerly president and COO of China Mobile’s 12580 business, has been appointed CEO of the yet unnamed new company. Prior to his position as 12580, Gong was chief operating officer of SOHU.com, a Baidu rival in online search.

According to eMarketer, China will have 518 million Internet users in 2010. The size of the country’s online video market was approximately 162 million yuan ($23.73 million) in Q3 2009, according to data from research firm Analysys International, and analysts expect sales to triple in the coming years. Not everyone is as optimistic, though.

Other popular (and well-financed) Chinese video sites include 56.com, Ku6, Tudou and Youku.

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