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Social Tech News
Facebook Privacy Plan
Dec 9th
Facebook have been planning to change their privacy settings for a number of weeks now, this has been long overdue. All facebook users will have seen last week a letter from founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg that let everyone know about the plans for the changes, and now the day has finally come. The privacy settings are ready for the update!
Today, facebook plans to start asking all 350 million of its users to review and update their settings as they have now make a simple interface in which you can decide on your privacy settings. This has been done to make it easier for the users. (The old ones really were quite complex) it’s also all about encouraging them to share more stuff publicly by letting them choose an “everyone” option each time they post something. Using the everyone option is a key thing for facebook, alike twitter whos posts are entirely public they encourage people to use the everyone option to help the use of real-time search, where both are now integrated in Google. Although it has many times more users than Twitter, to date, most Facebook data remains private and, hence, inaccessible to search engines. We’ll see how that starts to change after today.
Twitter Targets Businesses With External Sign Up
Dec 7th
Twitters growth problems just might have found a solution, the popular social networking website has stalled in growth over time. This hopefully will give a jump-start to the website and bring new users. It also could be an aid to finding a business model for twitter.
Twitter is launching a new API this will enable you to sign up for twitter using a “third party website” or it could just be on another website. The new Twitter Sign-Up API is not available for public use as of yet but is seen being tested on the popular online local guide Citysearch.
They have made this intergration very simple, take for instance the “citysearch” website, if you have a profile on a website like this you can easily link the accounts together, and if you dont have a twitter account it will let you create one within the website for its purpose. If you create a new profile or claim one for your business (this is a new feature as of today), these options will also appear. Afterwards, tweets from your business will appear on your Citysearch business page. This new feature will be the first time anybody has been able to sign up for Twitter externally.
Twitter was able to grow at a really fast speed for the first 6 months of the year, although hit a barrier recently that it hasn’t been able to overcome, hopefully this will be the boost it needs to get going again. It makes sense to give people the ability to sign up through other popular websites and apps.
The API also may be a sign of Twitter’s future business model. With the likelihood of paid accounts for businesses and brands coming this year, it’s understandable why Twitter’s focusing on these businesses and business users. Businesses keep looking for new ways to integrate with Twitter and this may be the biggest thing for them for 2010!
Friendster To Be Sold For $100 Million
Dec 5th
Friendster the ultimate prehistoric internet social networking website, which predates Facebook and MySpace in the social networking space was founded in 2002. But it quickly lost ground to other social networking sites in the United States. Friendster is now mostly used in Asia where more than half of its registered 100 million users are from.
Friendster will be sold to an Asian company that do not wish to be identified as the information inst actually yet public! But how bigger risk are they taking by spending all this money? It is estimated to be sold for more than $100 million in a deal set to be announced by the end of the month.
TechCrunch, an industry blog, said in July it valued Friendster at $210 million, a small proportion of Facebook’s estimated $10 billion valuation.
Friendster, like Facebook, has been struggling to find an effective monetisation strategy. The firm rebranded its main website on Friday targeting a younger audience! China’s largest Internet firm by market value at $35 billion, was among the short-listed bidders, while Facebook also showed interest but was turned down due to competition. Friendster holds five U.S. patents related to social networking according to the United States Patents and Trademarks Office.
Myspace Gets NEW Mobile Site
Dec 5th
Myspace have just launched a new version of their mobile website designed for many handsets. Those popular amongst are the: iPhone, Android and Palm WebOS users. The now-improved site at m.myspace.com offers quick access to your profile, including comments, your activity stream, your status, your inbox and more. Also available is a button dedicated to your photos, which makes it easier to browse through your albums.
However, the most notable of the new features is the built-in instant-messaging function which makes the new mobile website a communication tool in addition to being just another social-networking app. As i said the new version of the mobile website is aimed at alot of smart phones although is accessible to any phone with internet access, the new site is specifically designed to take advantage of features present in the advanced web browsers present on those devices. Users visiting from other phones will still visit the older site, which itself was revamped at the beginning of the year, with a new look designed to make it more closely resemble the original, desktop-based website.
Myspace have said that, 75% of its user base accesses the mobile web site, so im guessing this could explain why they’ve focused on updating the site first before updating the web based site along with the apps. However, it’s likely that the majority of their mobile web visitors are those without expensive smartphones, and so are being redirected to the older site.
So are you a myspace user, own a smartphone and want to check out the new site?
Simply from your mobile browser visit: m.myspace.com. The new changes are live for everyone as of now.
Grow Your Followers? YES!
Dec 1st
Ive been searching the web the last few weeks for different ways to grow twitter followers.
Heres a story unrelated to twitter, this blog was created as a test to see the powers of blogging, and had 100’s of trackbacks within weeks! The 2 posts without submission were picked up by search engines and the site deemed popular,
Alike the growing of a blog the growing of twitter intrigued me, i found twitterfriends.org through google, and they get roughly 200 members join a day, the site is built to sign up, submit your profile and trade follows for credits and vice versa, this is a free service and i would well recommend it.
Within 24 hours i have gone from 56 to 250!
Try It out for yourself today: twitterfriends.org
