Just noticed that Wikipedia is down. Looks like a server issue, well they’re saying it is,

‘Our servers are currently experiencing a technical problem. This is probably temporary and should be fixed soon. Please try again in a few minutes.’

So that’s another significant bit of downtime for a major site. This of course coming hot on the heels of the many Gmail, Facebook, MySpace outages earlier in the year. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for an explanation. When I know, you’ll know.

By the end of the year many MySpace users will have their very own ‘@myspace.com’ email address. The launch, scheduled for late 2009, will be low key and initially limited only to the USA. The scheme is intended to be rolled out to the rest of the world, though a plan for this is yet to be drafted. Sources within the popular social networking site have called the email plan the ‘logical extension’ of the brand and its existing ‘instant messaging tool.’ (more…)

With so much of the world now poking, tagging and micro blogging their way across the social networking landscape, you’d be forgiven for thinking that social networking didn’t have much room to grow. Well, apparently not. According to Nielsen Online, the amount of time the USA spends on social networking sites has risen by a whopping 83 per cent over the last year. (more…)

That’s right, Apple have become the latest company in a (very) long line to be linked with a move to buy twitter. (more…)

Doubts have been cast over the longevity of social networking site Twitter after a report from Nielsen Online revealed that as many as 60 per cent of new twitter users stopped using the site a month after signing up. Now, in many other industries a retention rate of four out of ten might well be seen as pretty good, however in the cut throat world of social networking the fact that so many people are quitting after such a short period is very troubling. (more…)

Due to her fairly low profile on this side of the Atlantic British people often don’t quite realise the huge impact that talk show host, publisher and entrepreneur, Oprah Winfrey has in the USA. To put it in perspective for Brits, she fronts the highest-rated talk show in American TV history and has done for almost 25 years, she can basically decide the top ten bestsellers list through her show’s literary segment and for a long time, she was the world’s only black billionaire.

She is, to put it mildly, very popular in the US.

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Exciting news guys! Last week we finally launched our company Twitter page. From now on, me and the rest of the TCM blog team will be using the micro blogging site to keep the public updated with our first thoughts on all the breaking stories of the day before we expand on those thoughts in our official blog.

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It won’t come a surprise to anyone to learn that Twitter usage is rising fast, though the sheer rate of the expansion of the site’s membership is still absolutely astounding. The micro blogging site’s membership rose to 9.3 million which represents a 131% rise on February, itself a growth month.
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Even if not quite an overnight sensation, Twitter has certainly skyrocketed in popularity over the last few months. Inevitably, a site with this many new members suddenly signing on is going to attract the attention of people looking to publicise themselves and/or their companies. This is not something that Twitter is discouraging; in fact, they’re even adjusting the site to accommodate this type of user.
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Facebook has granted users power over their own privacy, with a range of new options to control exactly how public/private you want your profile to be. The measures are being widely viewed as a response to the outrage that Facebook caused amongst its users last month when it changed major sections of its user agreement without properly consulting its members.
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Its official, in 2008, Myspace and Facebook suffered much less downtime than the other main social networking sites. That’s according to a report from Pingdom, an outfit which monitors websites around the world. The group studied 15 of the world’s more popular social networks for the entirety of 2008 and found significant differences in outages and down-time.
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For those who don’t know, Burger King recently designed a Facebook app that offered users a free Whopper if they deleted ten of their friends. The idea was that everyone has several Facebook friends that they never see or barely even know who could be sacrificed for a burger quite easily. Once the ‘friends’ had been dropped they were sent a fairly mean message informing them that their erstwhile friend prefers one tenth of a burger to them. It’s all part of Burger King’s new angry image to fit in with their new range of burgers.

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The 15 billion valuation of Facebook negotiated in their Microsoft deal last year appears inflated to many. Nevertheless, it has given the social networking site some clout financially. Enough, reportedly, to offer a buyout worth $500 million dollars worth of Facebook stocks to Twitter, the personal blogging site. A deal that Twitter have apparently rejected out of hand.
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