As you may have heard, if you’ve been paying attention, MySpace/News Corp are currently in the process of trying to sell Photobucket, the video and image sharing service it acquired for $250 million dollars with an additional $50 million earnout in 2007. The buyer is a company called Ontela, who come with 40 million backing from Disney’s Steamboat Ventures arm. The deal with Ontela is thought to be at an advanced stage though sources close to both companies are putting the valuation at around $60 million, an 83% reduction from what MySpace paid. (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…)

Paying yet more lip-service to Twitter, co-founder Larry Page has today stated that Google is losing out to Twitter in terms of real time search. “People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it, I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis,” Page stated at Google’s Zeitgeist conference. (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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Of course, the charge against Twitter as a search engine is that it’s mainly short emotional responses to things, though that could also be a strength. If you want to find out hard facts then Google exists though if you want to get a general sense of how something is going down in society then Twitter is a godsend. It would take you hours of reading traditional blogs before you got half the range of opinions you would from five minutes of Twitter searching.
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These days we’re used to Google trying things that don’t quite have an obvious profit model. Stuff like Google Earth, their space exploration competition, the whole non-profit wing, to name but a few. Since rumours that Google were thinking about buying Twitter surfaced the blogs have been awash with comments of the ‘here they go again’ variety, denouncing the move as a vanity purchase, or an impulse buy.
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Well, I suppose it was only a matter of time. TechCrunch has it from two separate sources that they’re describing as ‘close to the negotiations,’ that Google are about to buy micro-blogging site Twitter. According to the normally reliable technology blog, the search engine giant in the latter stages of a deal that would see them take possession of one of the hottest properties on the Internet.
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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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For a group of people who are supposed to be right at the vanguard of modernity, Facebook users aren’t half stuck in their ways. Every time the webmasters change so much as a hair on their beloved Facebook’s head they go into hysterics, suddenly ‘I hate Facebook’ groups are set up left, right and centre, by people apparently unaware of the irony of setting up Facebook groups to denounce Facebook and there’s a bit of a furore for a few weeks or so. Then, they promptly get over it.
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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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