Posts Tagged with ‘gigaom’

During 2007, the former college student-limited social network known as Facebook experienced its most successful year to date in terms of growth and traffic. All eyes were on Facebook for the now widely-mimicked developer API, as well as the advertising platform designed to help monetize its surging crop of applications. Facebook was even supposedly valued at a worth of $15 billion (according to Microsoft’s $240 million investment), which is not bad for a company whose CEO is just 23 years [...]

Since the early days of the web, the online subscription model has existed. For many companies it was a primary source of revenue, and as subscribers increased, so did profits.
Now, with so many free services popping up during the web 2.0 phase of the internet, it seems that fewer and fewer people are willing to pay anything for content online. More and more companies are ditching the subscription model in favor of other methods.
Is it just me or are their [...]

Tired of all the social networking news circulating the blogosphere? You’re not alone. There are lots of folks who can’t take the headlines about Facebook, MySpace and all the rest.
But the venture capitalist crowd feels the complete opposite.
Yes, they’re still very bullish, apparently. Very recently word filtered around that Hi5, a very popular and quickly expanding network due to increasing interest outside the US (Alexa now ranks the network as the 11th most popular site on the Internet) [...]

It was bound to happen. All that attention lavished on Facebook, some of it warranted, some not. It eventually got under MySpace’s skin.
So the agitated crown keeper has decided to launch a PR offensive to combat what it clearly feels is ostentatious favoritism in the journalism space and especially among notable bloggerati for its less-ugly-but-still-not-purty foe. And in a way, the frustration is understandable. How dare Facebook fans and the folks that cover them in the “presses” write MySpace off [...]

Thanks to a hand injury, I've had a lot of time the past two weeks to read news but not a lot of opportunity to write about it. In some ways, that's been good, because I've been able to sit and think about some issues I might otherwise have written a knee-jerk reaction to.
I've spent a lot of words here at Profy discussing the new media and the concept of citizen journalism, mulling over how Web 2.0 has changed the [...]

We covered a product called Jaman (a P2P video client that connected users with inexpensive purchase-to-own downloads and over-the-Web rentals of films produced on the independent circuit, many of which have found audiences across international divides) when it was quite a young one several months back. Today, we check in to see where it’s at and what it’s done with itself.
As it turns out, its creators have done quite a bit. Some alterations. Some enhancements. Some more polish. It’s [...]

Yesterday, we covered Newscorp’s alleged interest in selling MySpace off to Yahoo!. Today, we’ll take a big step back and ruminate another potential transaction: The sale of Yahoo! itself.
Now, this is all hearsay at the moment, but we can’t simply discount the murmurs on the subject as noise. There’s got to be something to the speculation, yes?
Who knows. What we do know is Yahoo! isn’t in the healthiest it could be, and the fact that the internal structure [...]

A good amount of discussion has been taking place over the past week or so following Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s declaration of the company’s plans to expand and become, in the words of GigaOM’s Liz Gannes, a “social OS.” The way they intend to do it is to open their doors to lots of Web apps and services. If Facebook is going to make this stunt a success, they’re going to have to be very, very careful.
Sure, [...]

Hakia recently initiated “The Search for Better Search” initiative via a focused poll taken from some of Web 2.0's best technical blogs. The results reveal an overwhelming and compelling need for a better search capability. Make no mistake about it; raising the bar for the people at hakia has nothing to do with hype or beating Google really, but about the art of transcendence. The vision there is about elevating the world's expectations and thinking so that search and the Web can transcend [...]