The new DataSift Historics can examine Twitter feeds going back two years — something that consumer product and other companies might find very useful in their product design, pricing and promotion decisions. The service will be available in April.
A new survey funded by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark looked at public attitudes toward the news media and found that only a tiny fraction of those surveyed care whether a news source is the first to report something. The most important quality by far was trustworthiness.
Contacts startup Rapportive has officially been acquired by LinkedIn, the company announced on its blog Wednesday. The deal follows weeks of speculation after rumors surfaced earlier this month. Rapportive will continue to support its popular Gmail plugin, but its acquisition could lead to greater integration with LinkedIn.
Tiny Review is a photo-sharing app with a twist: instead of adding filters and sharing with your social network a la Instagram, Tiny Review makes it easy for users to add up to three short lines of text to their photos.
Search engine Yandex is looking to extend its dominance in Russia through a deal to access Twitter’s firehose — allowing users to search millions of incoming tweets in real time.
Is Twitter a publisher of information like a newspaper, or a dumb pipe like a telephone network? A case in Australia — in which a man is suing over a defamatory tweet — highlights the difficulties Twitter could have as it tries to expand globally.
Harvard Business Review’s Tammy Erickson ponders a puzzling question for forward-thinking businesses – while most workers have trouble turning off the likes of Facebook in their personal lives, getting the same folks on board with enterprise social is a challenge. Why is that?
Engagio, which launched on Wednesday backed by seed funding from Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and other angel investors, pulls in comments and replies from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and a number of other social services and sites to create a one-stop social dashboard.
Tumblr hits 500 million page views a day, deals with 40,000 requests per second and sends more than a terabyte of data into its Hadoop cluster. Here’s how it went from nothing to a startup that needed to serve 15 billion page views a month.
Instead of appearing on TV or in a newspaper, events like the death of Whitney Houston are as likely to be reported in a tweet or on Facebook — and in the long run, this shrinking of the traditional “news cycle” could be a good thing.
