Facebook announced today that the company will launch group chat, video calling with Skype and a redesigned chat side bar to make communication on Facebook easy and powerful.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new features at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. This announcement follows up on Zuckerberg's portent of "something awesome" last week. Skype video chat will be fully embedded into the Facebook ecosystem with an extension that is designed to make it as easy to use as possible. Essentially, video chat within Facebook is two clicks away.
As a company, Zynga has made a big bet on the concept of "play." Now, the company is asking for investors to buy into their concept of play as well.
The social gaming company filed for an initial public offering today, which makes it the fourth major Web 2.0 company to travel down the IPO road this year. It follows LinkedIn and Pandora (both now trading) and Groupon (currently in the "quiet period" after filing earlier in June).
In case you hadn't noticed, spam and phishing attacks through the social networks has been on the rise. Security company Symantec released a report yesterday detailing socially-engineered attacks to determine where they are coming from and what techniques malware criminals are using to lure victims into their traps.
One of the most interesting trends that Symantec has noticed is that social spam and phishing has been cyclical, moving from network to network (see above graph). For instance, attacks will focus on Facebook for a period of time before falling off, then focus on Twitter or YouTube before coming back to Facebook. In the cat-and-mouse game that is malware verse security, these trends make sense as exploits are closed on one network and found another.
Content aggregation and ranking engine StumbleUpon is releasing a new widget for publishers today that can be placed on a website or blog to help users find meaningful content relevant to them.
The StumbleUpon Widget can be used by publishers to surface content on the site with the best shelf life. The widget will come in three sizes and requires a line of script to be embedded on to a webpage. The widget will surface stories and videos suited to the users' interest based on what has been rated highly by the StumbleUpon community of 15 million users.
There are reports that Facebook is coming out with a comprehensive new photo sharing application for the iPhone that will disrupt the entire iOS photo application ecosystem.
According to documents obtained by TechCrunch, the application is codenamed "Hovertown" or "WithPeople" and will incorporate the best features of the existing market leaders in the photosharing market such as Color (a technological leader, if not an actual market leader), Instagram and Path. The questions become: Is the app as innovative as its hype suggests? And how disruptive will it really be?
RockMelt, the "social Web browser" built on top of Chromium, the open source version of Google's Chrome browser, has now partnered with Facebook on a new version, RockMelt Beta 3, out today. The updated software includes over 30 new features, including improved Facebook Chat and notifications, and a smart feature that knows when you're on Facebook.com. When Facebook.com is detected, RockMelt will deliver a more streamlined appearance where certain Facebook features are removed from the website and displayed within the Web browser itself.
Back in the salad days of ecommerce, I worked for a website that sold cars. Sounds a little odd but it worked, though not well enough to best its competitors, one of whom absorbed it. As the only marcom guy there, I was approached often for the inevitable side-projects my co-workers were launching. One gentleman was leaving in order to start his own company and wanted to hire me to edit his web copy. To this day, I am proud that I was able to master my expression as I looked over his draft. His company was an online dry-cleaning service. Go ahead and re-read that last sentence. It was the dumbest idea I had ever heard and it remains my hallmark for dumb ideas to this day.
Now we are in a new era, that of the Social Web. But just as we take our positive qualities with us through time - intellect, compassion, inventiveness - we also take our dumbness. Today I came across two ideas - one a process, the other a product - that shot me back in time to the moment I first read about online dry-cleaning. Both, horribly enough, are food-related; and both are profoundly dumb.
Photo by Ed Schipul
Groupon has had a terrific ride. Since pivoting from a community action site, it has dominated the mindshare of Internet commerce. Its IPO filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission lays out a lot of that success, including growing from 3 million to 83 million subscribers in one year and generating nearly as much revenue in the first quarter of 2011 as it did in all of 2010.
But that, as they say, is past performance. The key question for potential investors is "How will Groupon do in the years ahead?" There, the IPO filing, doesn't provide much guidance.
Here are five concerns I see.
The latest battle in the land of search engines is social search - the addition of signals from social graphs to bring users increasingly personalized search results. To that end, Google has been working on its offering the longest, first introducing the idea back in 2009 when it launched in the U.S.
Today, the company announced that it is "bringing Social Search to more users around the globe" and that it has plans to bring its most recent social addition - the +1 button - with it.
Paulo Coelho is one of the most successful fiction writers today and he actively uses social media to engage with his readers. For the past 25 years the Brazilian author has written many inspirational books, which have garnered him a huge fan base all around the world.
I recently discovered Coelho's writing and have been busy devouring his books ever since. I've also been checking out his online presence, which is based around 3 main platforms: blogging, Facebook and Twitter. Writers and publishers can learn a few tricks from how Paulo Coelho uses social media.
