I am a regular user of LinkedIn, using it both for biz dev and recruiting. I am a fan of the service, but still a bit of a skeptic on the business model. I decided to look at alternatives and the one that gave some use was Jigsaw. According to RWW Companies, Jigsaw is "a provider of business information and data services that uniquely leverages user-generated content contributed by its global membership." It claims to have 500,000 members and more than 500 enterprises using the product.
According to the latest data from Hitwise, Google gained yet another percentage point on its biggest competitors last month and now accounts for more than 69.17% of U.S. searches. In the U.K. and Australia, Google's market share has climbed above 87%. This increase comes at a time when, according to Hitwise, more and more Internet users are also relying on search to navigate to key industry categories.
When the Facebook platform debuted last year it was touted as the next big thing.
Media, VC, startups and big companies shared the enthusiasm for its future.
And no wonder: Facebook enabled access to 50 million users.
You no longer needed to bring the audience to your app. Instead your app could be
delivered to one of the largest audiences around the web. And not just delivered,
but injected into a massive social network.
While it started great, it turns out things are not that simple. Three fundamental issues surfaced:
Information overload is a topic that keeps coming up, especially among users of social media services. As you add more friends and more services, the amount of content produced can become overwhelming to keep up with which leads to quality items being lost amongst the "noise." Noise-reducing apps like AideRSS or Moopz (both of which we love) highlight the best content, but their one drawback is that they determine relevance based on what the community thinks - and that may or may not be what you find interesting or important. With the new social search service from Delver, however, you can leverage your social graph to find just the information you're looking for from the people you admire and/or trust and that makes finding content a much more personal experience.
One week ago yesterday we reported that red hot microblogging service Twitter was rumored to have acquired real time sentiment search engine Summize. This morning the deal was confirmed by both companies.
Summize will now power search.twitter.com and its popular API will be folded into the Twitter API. All five Summize employees will move to San Francisco and work for Twitter. That's great news in the product development department; we should see some really exciting things come out of this deal.
In a slew of press releases today, the commenting and profile company SezWho has announced partnerships with social marketing company Izea, blog widget advertising network Entrecard, and blog network Creative Weblogging. SezWho is under a lot of stress from Disqus and Intense Debate and this round of partnerships with relatively small and, in the case of Izea, dodgy companies makes this seem like a somewhat desperate move.
KickApps, the white label social networking platform, has partnered with Userplane to bring Userplane's chat technology to KickApps' affiliates. KickApps will integrate Userplane's Webchat and Webmessenger functionality, though it won't use Userplane's video chat functionality.
KickApps is currently being used by quite a few high profile affiliates, including NPR, ABC Family, as well as a number of professional sports teams.
There are a lot of tech conferences these days and we at ReadWriteWeb get many emails asking us to promote them. We've happily done so in the past, but there are now too many events to keep up with. So this year we've decided to partner with a couple of conferences in particular: Defrag and DEMOfall 08. Defrag is a conference that a few of our writers attended last year, and came away impressed by. With topics such as OpenSocial, Attention, Next-Level Discovery, The Implicit Web, and more, we think this event is right in the sweetspot.
Online self-publishing firm Lulu and social document sharing site Scribd have just announced a partnership in which Lulu will begin using Scribd's iPaper viewer to display Lulu's free e-books online at the lulu.com web site. In addition to making it easier for users to gain access to these free publications, Lulu will also be using Scribd's unique feature that allows for displaying AdSense within iPapers to monetize the free content being provided by the e-books' publishers.
Today we did our fourth RWW Live podcast, which we're running fortnightly on the TalkShoe platform. Today we devoted the whole episode to the iPhone, with a segue at one point into Foocamp (Marshall went to that).
Participants in today's RWW Live were: ReadWriteTalk host Sean Ammirati, Steve O'Hear from our network blog last100, myself, Bernard Lunn and Marshall Kirkpatrick. You can listen to the podcast below.
