Social Media: Latest Online Marketing And Social Media Stories

Court Ruling Will Expose Viewing Habits of YouTube Users

2008-07-02T22:02:33Z

Yesterday, in the Viacom v. Google litigation, the federal court for the Southern District of New York ordered Google to produce to Viacom (over Google's objections): all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website The court’s order grants Viacom's request and erroneously ignores the prote

Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Histories to Viacom

2008-07-02T23:16:00Z

Google must turn over records of everyone who has watched YouTube videos to Viacom, which is suing the internet giant for copyright infringement. A rights group says the order violates the law and invades users' privacy.

Judge Protects YouTube’s Source Code, Throws Users To The Wolves

2008-07-03T10:04:33Z

The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over massive amounts of user data to Viacom. If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle. Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United [...]

Identi.ca Early Adopter Tips

2008-07-03T04:51:13Z

If you haven’t heard the news (where have you been?), a new Twitter clone service launched today called Identi.ca. (You can read the ReadWriteWeb coverage here). Of course, because the service just launched, there are still some Twitter-esque features that have not yet been added. However, according to this FAQ, they are all coming [...]

Identi.ca Apps & Why It Could Blow Twitter Away

2008-07-03T05:36:52Z

I’m on Identi.ca and I’m loving it. Discovered it via Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post on ReadWriteWeb (Identi.ca: May A Million Twitters Bloom). I’m also on the phone with Sarah Perez discussing what the latest verb for identi.ca will be. Yes, we’re true social media fanatics and yes every microblogging service needs a verb. You can [...]

Swurl: Your Lifestream, Made Beautiful

2008-07-03T22:23:38Z

RSS is magic and the things we do online are often beautiful - so why are all the interfaces for displaying the feeds of our activities so ugly? Enter Swurl, a visually stunning system for displaying a timeline of your activities on various sites around the web. Developer Ryan Sit specializes in leveraging the visual to create new interfaces for data, his ListPic application lets users browse Cr

Twitter refugees find a new home (at least for this week): Identi.ca

2008-07-03T05:18:53Z

First everyone was going to leave Twitter for Jaiku. Then everyone was going to leave Twitter for Pownce. Then everyone was going to leave Twitter for Plurk. Then everyone was going to leave Twitter for FriendFeed. There’s just one problem. Everyone is still on Twitter. A new service lauded as the latest Twitter destroyer launched today, [...]

Google Talk for the iPhone

2008-07-02T23:57:02Z

Posted by Adam Connors, Software Engineer, Google mobile teamWe've just released in the US a new version of Google Talk designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch browsers. In addition to sending your friends Gmail messages from your iPhone, you can now chat with them while you're on the move, too! In your iPhone browser, just go to www.google.com/talk, sign in and start chatting. That'

July's Jewels: Five Obscure Blogs that Sparkle

2008-07-03T07:08:26Z

Near the beginning of each month, I try to highlight five bloggers who have recently caught my eye, who I think you should take a look at, who are offering good insight, especially into the world of tech or social media.While there's no specific criteria for naming what's well known or what's obscure, each of the blogs mentioned don't get mentioned often alongside so-called A-List bloggers, and ra

Yahoo Pursues Talks With Potential Partners

2008-07-03T00:23:00Z

Yahoo has picked up discussions with Time Warner over a combination involving AOL. News Corp. has also been hovering around Yahoo.

Does Microsoft + Powerset Beat Google?

2008-07-03T09:39:30Z

What can the plan be with Microsoft's purchase of hot startup Powerset? The 3-year old company, founded by Dr Barney Pell, recently launched a semantic search experience for Wikipedia. It is doubtful that Microsoft bought the company just to enhance Live Search. Possibly the plan is to replicate the Wikipedia solution, then incorporate Powerset into Internet Explorer. In this post we look at what

It's Official: Firefox Downloads Set Guinness World Record

2008-07-03T02:19:16Z

We already knew that Mozilla had a record breaking day on June 17th when Firefox 3 was downloaded close to 8 million times, despite the download site not working for at least part of the morning. Now, Mozilla has announced that Firefox 3 has indeed made it into the Guinness Book of World Records with 8,002,530 downloads. Mozilla had set itself a goal of only 5 million downloads. digg_url = 'http:

Finally, A Windows Mobile Facebook App!

2008-07-04T13:55:15Z

For users of the Windows Mobile platform, visiting Facebook while on the go meant loading up the mobile web page in their device's browser. Meanwhile, Blackberry users have had their own downloadable app since late 2007. But now, as of today, there is at long last a downloadable application just for Windows Mobile users, FriendMobilizer. Today Macrospecs, Inc. has launched FriendMobilizer, a new

Yahoo Might Offer Carl Icahn Two Seats–But, Uh-Oh, He Wants Four

2008-07-03T10:15:11Z

Yahoo leadership, trying to stave off a major clash at its annual meeting on Aug. 1 with activist investor Carl Icahn, is contemplating offering him two board seats to assuage him, said several sources close to the situation. The problem? Icahn, who has put up his own new slate of directors to replace Yahoo's entire current board as part of a proxy fight, wants at least four, sources said.

Viacom Gets YouTube User Data

2008-07-03T17:53:57Z

In the ongoing copyright litigation between Google and Viacom, a judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York has ordered Google (PDF) to hand over data on every YouTube user, including username, the associated IP address, and a list of all the the videos that user ever watched. In this lawsuit, Viacom is seeking more than $1 billion in damages because of alleg

Mapstraction Takes Map Mashups To A Whole New Level

2008-07-03T18:02:42Z

If you're a developer who loves to build mashups - especially map mashups - then you have to check out the library provided by Mapstaction. (And if you're end user, wait until you see the demos!) Mapstraction is library that provides a common API for various mapping APIs already in existence. This allows developers to use the Mapstraction API to build a mashup that supports nine of the major mappi

Iran Parliament to Debate Death Penalty for Bloggers

2008-07-04T18:48:57Z

The Iranian parliament is set to debate a draft bill that would add a number of crimes to the list of those that can result in execution, among them "establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy." Apostasy means the abandonment of a religion. The official Iranian news agency reports that the bill is intended to "toughen punishment for harming mental security in

Regator: Mainstreaming RSS Aggregators - 100 Invites

2008-07-03T19:54:48Z

While quite a few mainstream users use RSS daily on their personalized homepages without ever knowing it, more traditional RSS aggregators are only slowly expanding beyond the early adopter crowd. Regator, which released a private beta today, is courting these mainstream users by giving them a very straightforward and easy way to browse RSS feeds while keeping the layout of more traditional RSS ag

SeeqPod Launches PodLists

2008-07-03T14:30:50Z

The music search engine SeeqPod has just announced a new service for music fans: "PodLists." Because of the massive amount of playable search results available on the SeeqPod service - 12 million at the moment and ever-growing - it can be difficult to find music that you like. Sites like Last.fm rely on social recommendations to help you find new artists, but SeeqPod's take is a bit different. Ins

Hitwise: Yahoo Would be Just Fine Without Search

2008-07-03T23:00:14Z

Hitwise Intelligence took an interesting look at the breakdown of Yahoo's properties today. They come to the conclusion that, even if Yahoo sells off its search division, Yahoo's other properties probably wouldn't be too affected by this, as they get most of their traffic from Google's search anyway. Only Yahoo Image Search, Games, Maps, and News get most of their traffic from Yahoo Search. digg_

Poking Holes In The Long Tail Theory

2008-07-02T22:15:18Z

Just because the Internet makes it possible to offer a near-infinite inventory of goods for sale does not mean that consumers will start wanting more obscure items in any great numbers. That is the conclusion Harvard Business School associate professor Anita Elberse comes to in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review that [...]

Google's Street View Challenged in the UK

2008-07-04T17:33:45Z

Google's Street View launched in the US last May, but expanding the service to Europe is proving to be a bit more difficult for Google. The Google Maps blog today announced the release of Street View for the route of the Tour de France, but privacy activists in England are anything but amused by the prospect of Google starting to photograph the streets of London. England's Privacy International

What comes next in this series? 13, 33, 53, 61, 37, 28...

2008-07-03T21:32:01Z

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User ExperienceLate one night in the summer of 2000, I found myself answering user support emails in response to two new features we had just released, Advanced Search and Preferences (at the time catchily called "Language, Display, and Filtering Options" :)). Busy crafting answers about how to set Safesearch or change the number of results offered by

Angry Businesses Organize Anti-Yelp Websites. This Is A Sure Sign Of Their Success.

2008-07-03T00:40:46Z

Yelp, a user-generated database of customer reviews of local businesses, first launched in October 2004. Users rate and leave reviews for local businesses, participate in forums, and can generally get social around local businesses. Yelp almost immediately caught on organically in San Francisco, but founders Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons ran into some early criticism. Rumors [...]

Google Closing Dallas, Denver Office

2008-07-03T17:15:44Z

Google is closing its office in Denver and Dallas, as someone at Friendfeed posted today. "Employees have to choose relocation or severance," a former Google employee (according to her blog's about page) wrote, adding that the reason was consolidation; "Someone decided the ROI wasn't there." I asked Google for a statement and they say: Following an operational review, we are consolidating our o