In a deal that was surprising only in its price, CBS has announced that it will buy CNet, owners of everything from News.com to Download.com to our competitors Webware, for $1.8 billion.
That's 10% more than Google paid for YouTube, and that deal was all for stocks. CBS paid a 45% premium over CNet's closing stock price and it paid it mostly in cash. CBS buying CNet is a big, complicated deal with a lot of possible take aways, but below are ours.
Soulseek, which was creted by former Napster programmer Nir Arbel and visibly resembles early versions of Napster, is not one of the most popular filesharing apps. It doesn't have the mainstream appeal of Kazaa or Limewire, nor does it garner the press attention of BitTorrent. And that's all probably fine with its users, who tend to gravitate toward more independent musical fare. But Soulseek has done something the others haven't -- made the jump to the iPhone.
While social media services such as Twitter and Friendfeed are great ways to start making connections, nothing compares to face-to-face interaction. Mobile social networks like Brightkite aim to bring users together by allowing users to connect with others that are in the same location and interact more honestly with one another beyond the virtual world.
However, the very reasons that such networks exist are also proving to be their weakest points. In this post we look at the current market for mobile social networks and try to understand some of the issues they face.
Blist, the cloud database application, which we covered back in March when they launched into their public beta, just received a big update yesterday. The update addresses, for the most part, stability and performance issues, but it also includes some new social features as well.
In a tragic and surprising turn of events, Brijit, one of the most interesting startups on the web, has announced that the company has run out of money and will cease operations until more funding is found. Brijit offered 100 word summaries of the best long-form content in print, on television and most recently on sites like Digg, Techmeme and YouTube. Review writers were paid $5 per approved review and the angel funded company planned to sell ads targeting high-end periodical readers.
I loved that site and am very sad to see it go. The service was a lot of fun to use. Given how recently the company has received substantial media attention and how loyal its small group of users was, this was a real surprise. Can high-end websites for thinking people ramp up and monetize quickly? This news makes you wonder.
Web 2.0 has brought many wonderful innovations and ideas to the Internet.
We can no longer imagine the web without a social dimension, and we can no longer imagine
an online world that is read-only - it is now a read/write web full of user-generated content.
But there is another fairly recent innovation, which might have just as profound implications. We're speaking of the contextual user interface.
Adobe announced today the release of the Flash Player 10 beta, previously code named "Astro," on the Adobe Labs site. The beta is available for download immediately at the Astro web page and adds a number of compelling features to the Flash player. Adobe, which claims that the Flash player is on 98% of Internet connected PCs, says it has seen an acceleration in the penetration rate for new versions of the player which each new release. It took just 3 months to reach 62% of Flash users for the last version of the player (verion 9), according to the company.
At the end of April, we covered the launch of YackTrack, a new tool that helps fight the conversation fragmentation issues. The service provides a method for tracking the conversations taking place around your content. You just enter a URL and it searches sites like Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and WordPress to find who is saying what.
Communications giant Comcast has acquired social web application Plaxo for an estimated $150m or more. Techcrunch confirmed the deal first but offers an understated critique of the alliance. Many web users familiar with the operations of both companies are much more upset about the deal.
Last week, the fight to manage your social data kicked off in earnest as three major players in the social networking space each announced independent competing approaches to making profile and friend information data portable. MySpace Data Availability was followed by Facebook Connect and then Google Friend Connect after that. With all these competing APIs, how this will play out is anyone's guess. We've created an interactive app from Impact Games that will let you model how each of the major players will impact the data portability movement and share your opinions about what they should do.
