So before you think, “Wow, Drew’s a self-promoting jerk,” which I’m really not, I want to tell you a story about a little girl named Alex Scott. Alex and her family hail from my home city of Philadelphia. As she turned 1, she was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer. The doctors didn’t think she’d made it.
When she was four years old, she decided that she wanted to start a lemonade… → Read More
It’s not quite as cool as working next to other startups on a boat in international waters, but when it comes to appealing settings in which to build a business, the Rocky Mountains aren’t half bad. Founded in Boulder in 2006, TechStars and other startup networks/accelerators like it have been on a mission to turn the Rockies — and the cities that lie in their shadows — into vibrant… → Read More
Zynga announced this morning that it has acquired game developer November Software for an undisclosed amount.
The acquisition apparently occurred back in the spring, but Zynga is only announcing it now, in part so that it can drop a few hints about the game that the November team is working on. Back in September, the company had already signaled its intention to move into mid-core gaming (which… → Read More
How does Facebook know what features are good enough for its main smartphone apps? It tests them on the power users of its standalone apps Camera and Messenger. If the guinea pigs dig a new gesture or option, it gets called up to the big leagues — the 100 million+ user Facebook for iOS and Android apps. → Read More
Facebook hasn’t exactly had smooth relations with Europe. In September it had to turn off facial recognition in the EU, for instance. But operating conditions in Europe look set to get a whole lot tougher for the social networking giant in the next few years if the European Commission’s proposals for comprehensive reform of EU Data Protection law come into full effect. → Read More
Twilio was founded four years ago with the goal of creating a scalable API that would provide developers with an easy way to add SMS and calling tools to their applications. The company has grown quickly over the last two years and is now servicing 40 countries and has signed on over 250K developers. Its international development took another step forward last month, when it broke into Japan with… → Read More
Facebook has a little-known feature called Friendship Pages that shows all the wall posts, updates, and photos you’re tagged in with someone. Today it’s getting a redesign, and Facebook is launching the facebook.com/us quick link for couples to see their Friendship Pages. The previous design was stuck on the ugly, old profile format, but now they look like a shared Timeline. → Read More
Social news startup Nuzzel has raised more than $1.7 million in seed funding.
I say “startup,” but at this point the only person working full-time on the project is Jonathan Abrams, who previously founded or co-founded Friendster, HotLinks, Socializr, and the Founders Den. With the new funding, Abrams is ready to start hiring — you can browse the list of available positions here. As a Nuzzel… → Read More
While it started in a Massachusetts dorm room, Facebook’s measure of presidential election mentions shows it’s become an international news carrier. There were 88.7 million election-related mentions outside the US, compared to 71.7 million state-side. “Vote” was the most popular word said on Facebook while to polls were open, while “Obama” took the top spot later in the day. → Read More
100 petabyte clusters! 60,000 hive queries a day! Facebook’s latest 1,800-word engineering blog post has one goal: proving to the world’s top programmers that if they want a challenge, they should work for the social network. There’s not much for the layman beyond that Facebook’s data warehouse is 2,500 times bigger than in 2008. This is back-end geek porn, and it’s critical to Facebook’s success. → Read More
Twitter has responded to us with a statement regarding the password reset situation.
For those of you just waking up or catching wind of this, a lot of folks have been reporting that their account password has been reset because it was compromised. → Read More
As we continue to search for answers on what’s going on with the Twitter password reset situation, the company is giving us information very slowly. The situation is very complex, because the users who are getting the emails, if it’s not being sent to spam, think it’s a phishing scam and are not resetting their passwords.
This is a pretty big problem for the Internet, and we don’t know why or… → Read More
Keep your eyes peeled, Twitter users: Twitter is sending out emails to some of its users telling them it has reset their password and asking them to create a new one. If you can’t log into your account that may be why. Lots of users are affected judging by the amount of people tweeting about password problems. → Read More
As the Web evolves and hundreds of sites collect data every day on who we are and what we love to do, personalization has become fundamental to user experience to help users find signal amidst the noise. Some companies utilize our social graph to provide recommendations from the people we trust, while others mine Big Data, incoming data from APIs and more. The problem, however, is that most… → Read More
The No. 1 thing about the Internet that fascinates me is the fact that information can travel at the speed of light. One moment, something can happen in one part of the world, and seconds later, someone on the opposite side of the world can know about it. That is absolutely epic in my opinion. Be it a video, link or tweet, things travel quickly, but we rarely see how they travel. → Read More
Unmetric, a company that scores the social presence of brands, has launched a new tool called SatisfactionMetrics, which offers details about how companies handle customer service on Twitter.
The new modules look at a brand’s replies to customer tweets, then breaks them down into five common responses — apologies, prompting customers to send direct messages, prompting customers to call a… → Read More
We cover a lot of startups using social data, but Eldar Sadikov, co-founder of a company called Jetlore, said whenever someone else wants to build a social app, they have to “reinvent the wheel again and again.” That’s why Jetlore is launching a platform designed to power these kinds of services.
Sadikov said he wants his platform to serve as “a layer that sits between social networks and… → Read More
People have been screaming bloody murder, claiming Facebook purposefully reduced how many users see Page posts in the news feed to get Pages to pay to reach their fans. But that’s just not true, and I have the data to prove it, plus Facebook on the record saying the rumor is false. Facebook did make spammy Pages less visible in the feed, but that was to make the feed better, not to earn money. → Read More
With the recent Foursquare changes, it’s becoming very clear that the service is trying to spread its wings into the mainstream population. It’s about discovery and exploration now, not just check-ins.
Today, Foursquare wanted to let everyone know that you can check-in with a friend, even if they’re not using Foursquare. This is important because the service has been around for a while and… → Read More
Pinfluencer, a popular Pinterest analytics solution, is today announcing a new Pinterest ROI and Pin-to-Purchase tracking system for marketers and brands, as well as support for integrations with other analytics providers, including Adobe Omniture, Coremetrics, and Google Analytics. → Read More
Last week, the increasingly popular traffic and navigation app, Waze, launched a redesign that brought a deeper level of social integration to its user experience. Along with redesigned maps and a new interface, the startup added Facebook single sign-on and features that allow users to share their drives, pickups and meetup spots, communicate their status from the road and check-in at a… → Read More
In the same way that LinkedIn has become the home of your professional identity, and Facebook the home of your social identity, founder and CEO Adam Lieb wants to turn his startup Duxter into the center of your gaming identity.
There are plenty of other gaming social networks, but Lieb argued that they’re too focused on specific aspects of the gaming experience. Raptr, for example, is mostly… → Read More
As I’ve noted before, Google’s shift to social as a company comes with great responsibility. As the company makes this transition, there are a lot of things to think about when building social layers to scale to the masses. One of those responsibilities is the safety and security of its users.
Today, the company rolled out new safety and security controls for Google+, and they include comment… → Read More
Today, Facebook is encouraging its legions of users to declare civic enthusiasm to their friends, with a prominent “I’m A Voter” botton at the top of the newsfeed. Large-scale, experimental research shows that simply clicking the button, and sharing your voting intention, could do more to increase voter turnout than any other partisan rant or news story you may share today. With a Single Message… → Read More
In response to the unworldliness of uber-marketplaces like eBay, Shpock (“shop in your pocket”) is a new iOS and Android app from Austrian startup, Finderly, which wants to return the local classified ads model used for selling goods peer-to-peer, to something resembling its original simplicity. It does this by taking advantage of the proliferation of camera-enabled and GPS-powered smartphones to… → Read More
It seems that Bazaarvoice is no longer content with simply being a suped-up marketing analytics company. The competition in social media marketing is intensifying (think Salesforce’s acquisition of Buddy Media and Oracle’s purchase of Vitrue), with the bigs beginning to move into the space. So, today, the public company is officially beefing up its social commerce platform with advertising. → Read More
Don’t trust the release notes. Facebook has just added photo filters to its iOS app, though the feature wasn’t announced in the version 5.1 “What’s New” that highlights multi-photo uploads, slide-out chat buddy list, and Gift giving. Here’s a look at the new features in v5.1 and what I think will be added in the next release. There are reports of serious bugs, though, so consider waiting for a… → Read More
David Karp, the CEO of New York-based Tumblr, revealed some fresh stats about the micro-blogging platform’s growth today. The company is seeing 20 billion pageviews a month, up from 15 billion at the beginning of the year, Karp said at GigaOm’s Roadmap conference in San Francisco today. That’s a growth rate of more than 30 percent per year. Compare that to 13 billion pageviews a month in… → Read More
800,000 Instagrams were tagged [Hurricane] #Sandy, and Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom thinks that makes it the most digitally captured event in history. But “how do we mine all these photos, make sense of them so you can consume the most interesting photos about Sandy?” he asked today at GigaOm’s RoadMap conference. His conclusion was “We’re going to need to be a big data company.” → Read More
Given how well LinkedIn has been doing of late, the headline for this post may seem a bit out of place. Just a few days ago, LinkedIn yet again exceeded Wall Street’s expectations, posting strong third quarter results and increasing revenue for the sixth straight quarter. While its profits are fairly low compared to revenue, they, too, are growing steadily, and the company predicted another strong… → Read More
The 6th Annual Crunchies Awards
San Francisco
New York City
