"social networking" entries
Facebook Growth Regions and Gender Split
Since we began tracking Facebook demographics in late May, weekly growth has held steady, usually in the low single-digits on a percentage basis. More importantly, it's fair to say that the company has successfully expanded overseas. With close to 128M users, the share of U.S. users is down to around 30% from 35% in late May: Over the last three…
DisasterTech: "Decisions for Heroes"
One of the most interesting DisasterTech projects I’ve been following is “Decisions for Heroes” led by developer and Irish Coast Guard volunteer Robin Blandford. Decisions is like Basecamp for volunteer Search & Rescue teams. The focus is on providing “just enough” process to compliment the real-world workflow of a rescue team, without unnecessary complexity. One of Robin’s design goals is…
Publishing Lessons from Web 2.0 Expo
A collection of publishing-centric takeaways from the recent Web 2.0 conference in New York City.
Open Question: How Do You Use Web Video?
Joost and other Web video services are searching for the right combination of technology and content, but are they headed in the right direction? How do you use Web video? What do you want to see? Please share your thoughts.
Facebook Growth By Age Group: Share of College-Age Users is Declining
With the U.S. now accounting for only about a third of all Facebook users, we are starting to see a gradual shift away from its original demographic of college-age users (18-25): 46% of all users are 18-25 years old, down from 51% in late May. The number of users in the 18-25 segment is growing, but at a slower pace…
Portable Contacts API Starts to Get Real
This evening Joseph and John of Plaxo and I have been hosting a hackathon at Six Apart for the Portable Contacts API (video about PorC). The Portable Contacts API is designed "to make it easier for developers to give their users a secure way to access the address books and friends lists they have built up all over the…
Lulu Adding WeRead's Social Networking Tools
Lulu is teaming up with weRead, a book-centric social network. From The Bookseller: The agreement would combine Lulu.com's free self-publishing tools and distributions capabilities with weRead's independent ratings and reviews and readership communities on social networks. (Via Jose Afonso Furtado's Twitter stream) Related Stories: Free Ebooks with Embedded Ads Via Scribd-Lulu Partnership POD Opens Door to Magazine Experiments and Customization…
Seesmic Starts Adding Features
Seesmic is a company built specifically to encourage asynchronous video conversations. We spent a few hours recently with Seesmic founder and CEO Loic Le Meur, who kindly gave us an update on the company. Four weeks after opening its service to the public, Seesmic recently announced a product roadmap heavily influenced by users. After focusing on making sure the service…
On Friends, Followers, and the Top Twitter Users
An easy way to increase Twitter's signal-to-noise ratio is to follow less people. I'm sure you've heard of Twitter users who follow several thousand twitterers. How they keep up with that many micro-blogs is beyond me. Unfortunately, spammers have discovered that to increase their "following", they simply follow thousands of other users, a small percentage whom will politely start following…
Twitter Availability & Response Times: A Mixed Bag
From an all-time low of 76% registered on May 20th of this year, Pingdom.com’s uptime statistics for Twitter has slowly been increasing. Ideally, you want extended stretches of near 100% uptime, something that hasn’t occurred since mid April: Daily uptime has hovered around 98% over the last week. Sound impressive? To put things in perspective, 2% downtime means that twitter.com/home…