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MySpace and Facebook are currently locked in a fight for the top position among social networks. In the U.S., Facebook definitely has the momentum going for it, but there is also clearly some life left in MySpace. We just received the latest data from MySpace, which argues that the site saw a significant spike in user engagement last month. At the same time, though, while overall page views were up, the number of unique users only remained stable.
Why didn't we think of this? Project management startup Smartsheet released a new core feature this week - integration of Amazon's outsourcing service Mechanical Turk. The Smartsheet interface will now let you set up Turk research jobs that thousands of anonymous workers around the world will split up and perform quickly for a very low price.
In the example the company provides on its product page, the user publishes a series of small work orders for research on the names and profiles of top CEOs around the country. That kind of drudgery would take hours to perform, but with Mechanical Turk it can be done on the cheap, quickly.
Twitter is falling prey to a major security flaw right now. The service is getting swamped with messages that say: "Don't Click" and a URL. Apparently, this hack has been around for over two weeks, but it only really took off today. If you actually click on the link while you are logged into Twitter, another "Don't Click" message will be posted to your Twitter account, which then propagates the cycle.
Alex Chitu spotted a new 'purchases' section in his YouTube account today and YouTube just made it official: YouTube's partners can now offer their videos for paid downloads. While Google has always given its partners the option to offer downloads of their videos under the Creative Commons license, some of Google's partners will now also be able to charge for their videos.
Over the weekend at the Schmoocon hacker conference in Washington D.C., security researcher Charlie Miller presented a new vulnerability in Google's mobile OS Android which allows hackers to remotely take control of the phone's web browser and related processes. If a phone became compromised, the hackers could gain access to the saved credentials stored in the browser and browser history. They could also snoop on your web transactions, even if encrypted.
Two former Microsoft employees, Shan Sinha, a former Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Server strategist, and Alex DeNeui, also a SQL strategist, are attempting to do what (so far) Microsoft has not: compete head-on with Google Docs by transforming Microsoft Office into online collaboration suite. To do so, they've launched a company called DocVerse, an early-stage startup that aims to simply document sharing and collaboration.
We first reported on VC Series A deals in the web-tech sector in October 2008, following the financial meltdown, and we updated our coverage in November, reporting some improvement. Now it is time for the good news from December and January. The amount invested by VCs in Series A deals for web-tech ventures went up from $19.1 million in November to $28.8 million in December, and up another notch to $30.3 million in January. Looking very good.
Brett Brewer, who co-founded InterMix Media - the company that developed MySpace - and turned a tidy profit when that company and MySpace were sold to NewsCorp for $580 million, says MySpace's ongoing battle for social network supremacy with Facebook won't last much longer. In his opinion, Facebook has already won - but it won't remain a winner for long.
Twitter OAuth - oft promised but lagging in delivery - had begun to take on a mythical status, leaving many to wonder if it would ever be released. Now, that naysaying could be coming to swift end. It appears that Twitter OAuth has been released into the wild as part of a limited beta.
