Category: Social Media

Blogs posts related to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Foursquare etc.

Its time to say ‘Bye’ to Old Twitter

After moving away from Old Twitter ten months ago and asking users to shift to New Twitter, now its time to say ‘Bye’ to Old Twitter. All users will be upgraded (seems like a package 🙂 ) automatically within this week.

For Nine months the message displayed at the top of screens was just asking users to switch to the new updated Twitter, however the message changed last month to “You will Automatically be upgraded to New Twitter very, very, soon.” (See the pic below).

The color of the top bar was also changed to dark yellow with black text. It also supports a “Switch to New Twitter now!” in white text and blue background.

There are still some people who have a preference for Old Twitter however it seems that the number is very low as compared to the user base of 200 Million.

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LinkedIn IPO at $45 per share

LinkedIn’s shares will be traded under “LNKD” symbol in New York Stock Exchange and its shares will be offered at $42 to $45 per share. It is expected that LinkedIn will raise a sum of $350 million from its initial public offering on Thursday which is almost double than the initially planned $175 million in January.

The sources from the industry valued LinkedIn at a whopping $4 billion and also its founder Reid Hoffmen’s stake at $855 million considering $45 per share price. Though, few industry experts are terming it as an aggressive valuation but the investors seems interested in purchasing stocks of the most widely used professional social network.

2 Tools for Tracking Twitter Unfollowers

Its always good to follow people who tweets matching your interest area but its equally important to unfollow spammers and dead accounts. There are several websites available over the internet which helps you identify and understand your Twitter followers. I discussed about Qwitter around couple of years ago which sends you a weekly email telling about people who unfollowed you.

One of the tools under discussion today will tell you about your followers and other will let you follow or unfollow them.

TwitterCounter

This website generates a line graph for number of followers in a weekly, monthly, quarterly or 6-monthly formats. You can also generate similar graph for following i.e. accounts which you follow. It also allows you to create a bar graph for number of tweets made by you over the same time frame. You can also select an option to receive these stats delivered in your email on a weekly basis.

This website provides you few useful stats regarding your account such as average daily change in followers and following in addition to you global ranking on the basis of your number of followers. You can also compare your stats with 2 other twitter handles to track your growth with other users.

Another nice feature of this website predicts your follower growth after analyzing the past trend or activity of your Twitter handle. You may also get suggestions to improve your twitter account using their Profile Checker feature.

Friend or Follow

This service is an easy way to find all those Twitter accounts that you follow but they are not following you back. This will help to easily identify people whom you can unfollow or more importantly generating a list of people whom you can not send DMs.

Simply enter your Twitter handle (like @thekunalmathur) in the big text box on Friend or Follow homepage and it will generate a grid of accounts that are not following you. You may hover on Twitter display pics to get more information like name, location, bio, following & follower count , number of tweets and last tweet. You may further filter down these stats by Verified, Protected or Normal accounts and have a functionality to view it in List or Grid view.

It also allows you to find out your Fans – people who follows you but you don’t follow them and Friends – people who you follow that follows you.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a microblogging and social networking website which allows you to tell the world, “What are you doing?” by short text messages of 140 characters in length, called “Tweets“. These tweets are  displayed on your profile page called as “Timeline” and gets posted directly on your friends Twitter timelines who are called as “Followers” in Twitter terminology. You can also receive tweets by visiting the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, email or via a third-party application such as Tweetdeck, Hootsuite etc. In addition to Tweets you can also send “Direct Message” to your connections which works similar to emails.

Twitter can be used for both personal and business purposes. It’s a great way to keep in touch with friends and people you want to get connected to such as personalities from Media, Sports, Politics, Entertainment Industry etc. Twitter is a way to quickly spread any information about where you are and what you’re up to. For example, “I’m going for a movie tonight. Anyone wants to join me?”

Businesses can tweet about their company’s latest news, product launches, blog posts etc. With the use of Twitter, companies are interacting with their prospects, clients and customers. Twitter has drastically reduced the time of interaction between clients and companies. In the recent past, we have seen that people are posting their problems on Twitter rather than writing emails or making calls to the companies. This also holds good in case of appreciating any brand or product by actual users.

How are you using Twitter?

Facebook Values Itself at $3.7 Billion (Or Less)

When Microsoft bought a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook back in October 2007, it paid 240 million dollars for the preferred stock, which meant that the company was valued at roughly 15 billion dollars. A big discussion broke out over whether Facebook was really worth that much, or 15 billion was an unrealistic number.

It turns out that it was, since Facebook values itself at somewhere around 3.7 billion dollars. We know this, because the Associated Press was able to retrieve some details from the transcript of a June court hearing held over a legal settlement between Facebook and ConnectU.

How the AP did that is interesting in itself; they copied and pasted the blacked-out portions of the document into another document. I’d be surprised, but here at Mashable we were also once able to retrieve information in a similar way, due to a sloppy conversion of a Joost-related Powerpoint presentation to a PDF document. It’s hard to believe that things like this happen in multi-million dollar deals, but they obviously do.

The most interesting bit of information that AP was able to retrieve is Facebook’s own assessment of its worth: $8.88 per share, which gives the company a market value of around $3.7 billion.

This puts Facebook into a very uncomfortable situation for several reasons. First, it’s never good when the value of your company is suddenly perceived as being 4-5 times less than before. Secondly, although preferred stock may (but that’s debatable and depends on the nature of the stock) be worth more than common stock, I doubt that Microsoft is happy to realize they’ve severely overpaid their share in Facebook. And thirdly, the fact that the economic situation has been steadily worsening after June 2008 doesn’t help matters at all, and one can argue that Facebook is probably worth far less – by their own standards – than the aforementioned 3.7 billion. That’s the danger of being overvalued and overhyped; if presented with evidence to the contrary, you might soon find yourself sinking far lower than you realistically should.

Courtesy: Mashable.com

Who Unfollowed you on Twitter? Find out using Qwitter

It feels good to get a mail whenever someone follows you over Twitter but losing a follower is not so happening event.  Even worse, you can not figure out that who stopped following you (in case you have a good number followers).

To solve this problem, you can now use Qwitter to track people who stopped following you. The application requires your Twitter handle and an email address to send you a weekly email showing all your Twitter unfollowers (see below pic)

Now, you can find out that which Tweets made you lose followers. This is a Free application so go ahead and make best use of it.

Signs of Facebok Addiction

Do you have an account on Facebook? Are you pretty active on it? Then you could be an addict to Facebook. Facebook is growing the number of its attractive apps which are helping it to increase the active users database. However now it looks that Facebook is taking over people’s lives. We are becoming addicted to Social Media Networking websites, primarily Facebook.
Do you deny being an addict to Facebook? Then read the following points:
  1. Do you procrastinate your important work to check your Facebook account?
  2. You update your status message atleast 3 times a day. You let everyone know what’s happening with you.
  3. You are in a race with your friends to increase your connections.
  4. Even if you are at your friend or relative’s home you lookout for internet to check your Facebook account.
  5. You spend atleast an hour checking out the new applications and reading wall posts.

Next time you connect to internet and the first website you open is Facebook then you dont even need to read the above points. 😉

Now you can use Gtalk in Facebook

Facebook has integrated GTalk application which means that now you’ll just need to have an existing Google account in order to use this application on Facebook. Both your Facebook friends and your Google friends will appear in your buddy list and you can chat to them from within the Facebook.

Its a nice feature which will help users to spend more time on Facebook as they can save the time shifting between Gtalk & Facebook 😉

Twellow – A search engine for Twitter

There is a new search engine in the online world. Is it another competitor to the daddy of search engines called as Google? No, its a new search tool for discovering Twitter users that may change the way people use the microblogging service and it has been named as called Twellow.

Twellow has indexed approximately 300,000 Twitter users and sorted them into categories such as marketing, graphic design, entertainment, education and several others. This will help to find users at a same place who have mentioned these keywords in their Twitter biographies. They have also created sub-categories as well for example, Entertainment has television, humor, entertainers etc. as its sub categories.

By default, if you search for some keyword, results are sorted according to number of followers. However, you can also sort the list as per most recent activity. If you are unable to find yourself over Twellow then you may also add yourself. It also provides you an option to subscribe for RSS feeds for each category and its sub-category which will be very useful to track tweets or follow contacts from a specific category.

Living without Twitter with No Regrets

I was going through my normal routine this morning of IV’ing my daily allotment of caffeine into my system, reading my email, going through my blog feeds in FeedDemon and then finishing up with a good round of FriendFeed when I realized something. My Twitter client wasn’t running, and in fact, it hadn’t been running for almost three days.

You know what?

I hadn’t missed not seeing all those tweets go by one little bit, which made me wonder if this whole thing about being available all the time wasn’t as important as it is cracked up to be. After all, I successfully get all my important stuff dealt with through either email or IM. As a matter of fact someone who wanted to talk to me about something specific got a hold of me with no problem via both Skype and MSN Messenger because that information is right there on my WinExtra blog’s About page. It wasn’t until this morning when I was checking my email that I even knew that he had followed me on Twitter.

Sure I use FriendFeed and some will say that is the same thing, only a little different. Well if it is the same or even the same but a little different, why do I need to worry about Twitter anymore? The funny thing is that I probably wouldn’t have been interested in Twitter as much as I have been if it wasn’t for the fact that I wrote a desktop client for it at one time. I might have gotten caught up in it the same way that I have with FriendFeed but there is the rub – why do I need both anymore?

As it is, I have enough communication tools running at any one time on my system that if someone really needs to get a hold of me they can. Whether it be by email, IRC, IM or even FriendFeed, I am reachable. Do we really need to have this feeling that we must be in constant contact with people? What is this pressure for constant contact really bringing to the table for us? I always joke in the WinExtra IRC chatroom that “Just because it’s called a chatroom doesn’t mean you have to chat” and I have seen the better part of the day go by before anyone says anything other than “pass the coffee.”

Communication is a great thing but over-communication I think can also be a detriment. We seem to want to spend so much time talking about literally nothing in order it seems to justify our use of these tools. Communication tools are meant to enhance our lives and our work but it seems that they have become more of a means to lose ourselves in the mundane instead.

Do you really need this hyper-connectivity or could you live without Twitter as well?

Courtesy: Mashable.com

LinkedIn launches Facebook like application

Linkedin has launched a Facebook application called “My Company’s Hiring” for users to post open positions in their company. This application works best for Facebook users that are actually in charge of hiring process. You’ll need to manually input the positions and their desriptions, and you can include an external link for additional information as well. The positions will show on your profile and the newsfeed as well with the external link included. While the application was created by LinkedIn, there is no direct relation between this application and your LinkedIn account, so there’s no good way to leverage your actual LinkedIn contacts or account information for this application.

Twitter Got $15 Million in Funding

Twitter finally cleared all silent whispers regarding the $15 Million funding. Still not confirmed but according to the rumors, Boston based Spark Capital is the new lead investor in this funding. Existing investor Union Square Ventures also participated in the funding. This new funding will bring Twitter’s valuation to about $80 million.

This funding is timely as Twitter is clearly experiencing a growth spurt in users with constant server outages. The interesting trend to watch will be the advertising standard that will be used in micro-blogging services like Twitter.

Man sent to Jail for Fake Facebook Account

An IT engineer of Morocco, Fouad Mourtada; aged 26 year-old  has been arrested for making a fake Facebook profile of Prince Moulay Rachid, the younger brother of King Mohammed VI. While the fake profile was created just as a prank but it landed Mourtada in jail. He’s now facing up to 5 years in prison. Mainly the countries with monarchies don’t like when the fun or prank is directed to the royal family. The authorities considered such a joke to be classified as identity theft, and don’t find the situation funny in the slightest. However, the question is that for how long can a person be punished for creating a fake account?

Facebook Expands Data Center Space

Facebook has leased space in a state-of-the-art data center in Ashburn, Virginia to power the huge growth of its social networking service. The addition of 10,000 square feet of space in a new facility built by DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) will allow Facebook to expand its server infrastructure. The lease is for the second phase of a $375 million facility, 300,000 square foot facility that is scheduled to come online Nov. 1. It is not known when Facebook will begin moving equipment into the facility, known as ACC4.

The lease, which was signed on Oct. 15, was reported in an SEC filing in which the tenant was not named. DuPont Fabros executives identified Facebook as the tenant in a presentation to investors in advance of its IPO.

The 10,000 square foot lease is not enormous by data center standards. But Facebook has positioned itself for substantial growth, as the second phase of the ACC4 facility is currently 56 percent leased, with more than 37,000 square feet of raised floor space available. This gives Facebook the option of leasing additional space in the facility as its Internet infrastructure grows. Yahoo (YHOO) and MySpace are among the other tenants in ACC4.

Facebook had 30.6 million visitors in September, according to data from comScore. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday at the Web 2.0 conference that Facebook has “almost wrapped up” a round of funding that is rumored to value the company at more than $10 billion.

Facebook’s infrastructure has grown enormously as the site has grown beyond its initial market of college students to add high school and professional users. That growth sometimes threatened to get ahead of the young company’s back-end capabilities, according to chief operating officer Owen Van Natta, who discussed Facebook’s data center operations earlier this year. Van Natta said Facebook was “one of the largest MySQL Web sites in production,’ referring to the widely-used open source database.

The industrial-strength infrastructure at the new DuPont Fabros facility will be sturdy enough to handle Facebook’s growth. ACC4 is a seven-acre facility supported by 36.4 megawatts of power. More than 40,000 square feet of data center space is dedicated to housing diesel generators to provide backup power.

Courtesy: Data Center Knowledge

Is Facebook feeling Threat from Twitter?

Facebook started a new concept of copying other websites to enhance its features. The users  can  now post their “Status Updates” just like Twitter allowing them to  tell their friends what they are doing at any point of time. So Facebook has copied or imbibed a feature similar to Twitter with a minor change enabling the posting and reading with status updates via SMS. It’s a move that kills off any possibility of a link up between the two. Google and Yahoo are most likely to be interested in buying Twitter these days. Yahoo would most likely buy it because it’s cool and then recently it failed to acquire Facebook. That said, Yahoo is currently ahead of Google when it comes to interest in expanding to big social media networks.

Google and Yahoo willing to acquire Rediff

Google and Yahoo are trying to acquire Rediff.com India Ltd, which runs one of India’s most popular consumer Internet portals. Rediff is one of the India based Nasdaq-listed company and they are in talks with the global companies for a negotiated takeover deal.

It has to be noted that India is now emerging as a strong global economy with a growth in both telephone penetration and Internet in urban areas. Rediff.com is an online provider of news, email communication, entertainment and shopping services.

Rediff’s stock took a sharp jump in share price and volume on Nasdaq during the last week. On July 12, Rediff shares  closed at $26.46 and more than 3.3 million shares traded hands. The company has a current market capitalisation of $738 million. It is speculated that if the deal gets through then the valuation may be close to $1 billion dollars.

Microsoft Attempts Another Low-Cost PC Solution for India

AMD and Microsoft, two great tastes that taste great together, are teaming up to sell a new PC, the IQ, in Bangalore and Pune, India for about $513.

The PCs run Windows Vista Basic — no flying windows for you, kids — and Works along with some test prep and English learning programs as well as an MSN IQ Education Channel. The PCs will be distributed by Zenith Computers.

Courtesy: techcrunch.com

Now, Feedburner is a Google Company

Feedburner, a useful RSS (RDF Site Summary)Management firm have announced that they have been acquired by Google. Feedburner was founded in 2003 in Chicago and raised around $10 million in venture capital funding. This website allows users to manage their RSS feeds and track usage statistics of their subscribers as well.

Feedburner can be integrated with Google analytics and can be incorporated into its ads systems. This also means that Google will definitely include Feedburner its current offerings and future growth.

The all new Netscape Navigator 9!

One of the oldest players in web browser market, Netscape made their 9.0 Beta 1 live and available for download. This is the first in-house Netscape browser production since Netscape 7 as AOL outsourced development of Netscape 8 to Mercurial Communications in 2004. This time Netscape also used the word ‘Navigator’ after their Netscape Navigator version 4.08. This new version is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.

This updated browser includes URL-self correction feature which autocorrect common URL misspellings. News Menu and Sidebar, In-browser voting, sidebar mini browser are some other noticeable features in addition to social network browsing features.

Similar to Netscape 8, this advanced Navigator 9 is compatible with latest Firefox 2 and have full support of all Firefox add-ons and plugins. Netscape has also been releasing some of its features as extensions for Firefox, such as Site Mail Notifier, Friends’ Activity sidebar, Digg Tracker and the new default theme for Netscape 9.

Leader of Social Media Network – MySpace

MySpace remains king of the social networking category, according to Hitwise, taking in 79.7% of visits to sites in this category ofr the Month of April, 2007.

Facebook is second, with 11.47% of visits, and Bebo comes in third with 1.28% of visits. MySpace’s traffic has increased 70%. Facebook’s increase in traffic is largely due to their opening up of its site for anyone, instead of its previous limitations to those with college and high school email addresses, allowing its traffic to grow 106%. And to illustrate how influential MySpace is for the entire social networking ecosystem, nearly 25% of clicks to the 19 other top social networking sites came directly from. This also highlights the fact that many people have more than one social networking persona.

While Facebook has received a good amount of backlash for several of the changes it’s made to the site in the past year, opening it up to all Internet users and adding news feed updates (we’ll see how the community reacts to Facebook’s upcoming announcement for its development platform), all the changes have paid off handsomely, increasing the valuation of the company. Great for an IPO, right?

Courtesy: Mashable.com