Russian startup Unface.me has created a new social network inspired by the Gossip Girl TV series which lets users create an alter ego to — let’s face it — troll their friends, or even post even worst types of gossip entirely anonymously. The site connects with Facebook and Russian social network VKontakte so it can pull in users’ genuine friend networks, then let them dish salacious gossip. → Read More
Urturn, the social expressions platform that soft-launched as stealthily as possible last year by intentionally hiding under a really boring name, is getting ready to turn the volume up to 11 to start seriously recruiting teens and trend-setters to its meme-stuffed, fashion-friendly, music-loving platform. Today it has announced a $13.4 million Series A funding round, led by Balderton Capital with… → Read More
Rando only launched in March but the anti-social photo-sharing app that deliberately eschews the standard social network clutter of likes and comments and connections — simply letting users share random photos with random strangers and get random snaps in return — has blasted past 5M photo shares after a little over two months in the wild. It is now averaging around 200,000 shares per day. → Read More
About.me, the online identity platform that spun out from Aol* at the beginning of the year before acquiring the one-time Digg spinout Wefollow, is now lifting the curtains on its plans to generate revenue, with today’s debut of About.me Premium. Via this new, paid tier to the service, the company is adding some of the more advanced features users have requested, including domain mapping… → Read More
MavenSay, a social recommendation app, just got a surge of unplanned downloads coming from Indonesia, and its founders are moving quickly to include Southeast Asia in its expansion plans as a result. The company’s Toronto-based co-founder, Jesse Dallal, said the two-month old app got 100,000 downloads over the past fortnight. It has a total of 130,000 downloads so far, and the sudden surge… → Read More
The latest to join the cadre of startups offering tools for more private sharing outside of Facebook’s massive footprint is not, in fact, another startup, but rather another media giant: Disney. Citing its “rich heritage in storytelling,” Disney’s Interactive division, best known for games, sites, and virtual worlds like “Where’s My Water?,” “Temple… → Read More
New research released by the U.K.’s telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has flagged up significant growth in social networking among older Internet users — which is helping to offset lower rates of growth in younger age groups. The report indicates that more than a third (35%) of 55 to 64 year-old Internet users created a social networking profile last year — up by half in just one year (24% in 2011). → Read More
Following its beta launch at the end of January, just.me, the mobile messaging startup from Keith Teare, co-founder of TechCrunch and partner at incubator Archimedes Labs, has launched its first app, available initially for iPhones and iPod Touch. Just.me had planned on an earlier release of the app but said today it held back so it could launch at DEMO Mobile to garner more attention. → Read More
Famil.io, a new service for privately sharing photos and videos with your family across web and mobile, is today officially launching to the public. The sharing platform can serve as a complement to Facebook, where most families network today, though in a more restrained fashion. Or for those family members who aren’t even active on Facebook, Famil.io can, to some extent, serve as a… → Read More
Line, an app made by South Korea’s Naver Corp which has grown rapidly since its launch in summer 2011, is typically labelled as a messaging app – and compared to the likes of WhatsApp, Viber and Skype. But in reality Line’s feature-set positions it closer to being a social network. In other words, Line is going after disenchanted Facebookers as much as it’s hoping to woo Skype calling… → Read More
Apple has been granted a patent today (via AppleInsider) in an area where it hasn’t had tremendous success: social networking. But the system described in the patent isn’t specific to Apple’s own social services, and instead describes software that could be integrated into iOS and made accessible to other apps and services as an API to help regulate and maintain a common… → Read More
At The Pool, the Los Angeles-based social discovery platform, is today rolling out a big re-design that sees the startup becoming laser-focused on creating the “anti-Facebook” social network for young people. In its February 10-K report, Facebook said that it is at risk of losing young users to other services that are similar to or act “as a substitute for Facebook.” → Read More
Kik announced a fairly significant change in direction at the end of November, with the introduction of Kik Cards. Today, the company revealed to TechCrunch that over 2 million of its 30 million total users had already used Cards within one week of the feature’s launch, and introduced an update to its apps which brings a mobile-optimized Reddit browsing experience to the messaging service. → Read More
Ping.it, a Norwegian startup that wants to cut down on social networking noise by building a more controlled sharing platform — described as a cross between email and social networking — has launched its platform in open beta today. The startup was shortlisted at this year’s Dublin Web Summit’s startup competition, one of 100 to make the final shortlist. → Read More
Browser maker Opera has released its 2012 State of the Mobile Web report which measures social networking popularity by looking at the number of Opera Mini users who visit them. Data is aggregated from the servers powering the browser’s data compression — enabling the company to build up an (anonymous) picture of the mobile social web across more than 190 countries. → Read More
U.S. parents are worried about the reputational damage of their teens’ online activities, according to a new report by the Pew Internet Project and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, called Parents, Teens and Online Privacy. The research found that many parents are also continuing to take steps to mitigate and monitor their children’s online activities. → Read More
Given how well LinkedIn has been doing of late, the headline for this post may seem a bit out of place. Just a few days ago, LinkedIn yet again exceeded Wall Street’s expectations, posting strong third quarter results and increasing revenue for the sixth straight quarter. While its profits are fairly low compared to revenue, they, too, are growing steadily, and the company predicted another strong… → Read More
When I started using LinkedIn (in 2008) the service put a lot of emphasis on only connecting with people you had indubitably ‘done business with’. Which made it pretty straightforward to decide when to click ‘accept’ and when not to. But in recent years I’ve been getting increasing numbers of LinkedIn requests from strangers. So the old rules of interaction aren’t working anymore. → Read More
Everloop, a social network for children backed by $3.1 million in seed funding, is today introducing its first mobile application. Called “Goobit” (remember folks, this is an app for kids), the new app brings the Everloop interface mobile, and includes one of the network’s more popular features – “goobs,” the silly pranks which let kids do things like splatter virtual bugs or toilet paper each… → Read More
Interesting development today in the browser wars, with the latest battlefield being who is best positioned to guard users’ privacy. Mozilla today announced that it has started to test new social functionality inside its Firefox internet browser — a foray into sharing and social activity, it says, with user privacy in mind. The first service to join the Social API platform for testing is Facebook… → Read More
Today Autodesk, best known for its AutoCAD product, announced that it has acquired enterprise social networking company Qontext from the India-based incubator Pramati. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. → Read More
Rootsy is the latest entry in the private, family-focused social networking space – an area which has seen a surge of startups in the wake of Facebook’s rise to become the largest social network worldwide. With little hope of taking on the Facebook behemoth, the new companies are attempting to carve out a niche for more personal sharing. With Rootsy, the angle is that it lets users build their… → Read More
Joining a new group of companies looking to build services on the backs of users’ social networks, Irrive is debuting its social scrapbooking website, soon to be followed by its mobile apps. The company was founded by Steven Cohn, whose previous startup BuyYourFriendADrink was acquired by LivingSocial back in 2009, helping LivingSocial to enter the daily deals market. Irrive’s focus – although… → Read More
Based on downloads, Facebook’s iPhone app was no longer the most popular mobile social networking app in many Asian countries and elsewhere from July 2011 to June 2012. This, according to the latest report from app store analytics firm Distimo, which took a look at trends surrounding mobile social networking applications over the past two years. Distimo found that apps like LINE, WeChat and Viber… → Read More
Deets is a newly launched mobile app that lets you organize your contacts and keep everyone’s information up-to-date automatically, but that description alone sells it a bit short. This new iOS app is a little bit of everything – it’s a communication hub, a contact synchronization utility and even social networking service. The idea is somewhat similar to the concept of Google+ Circles in the… → Read More
Figures out today from eMarketer estimate that in the U.S., just under 82 million consumers, or 26% of the population, will access social networks from their phones this year, rising to nearly 117 million by 2014. But if you are a social networking startup that sees that low-penetration figure as an opportunity, be aware that at the moment Facebook has all but cornered the market, and that the… → Read More
Admittedly, I have a negative bias towards overhyped startups. If a company gets a lot of attention before they do anything significant, I’m less likely to try their product and when I do, less likely to have a positive feeling about it. I realize this is a weakness I need to overcome, but it’s the way my mind works.
There are few better examples over the past few years of overhyped startups… → Read More
Q&A site Formspring is today announcing what the company says is its biggest news since its original launch back in 2009. Yes, Formspring has been overhauled. The company is shifting its focus from social Q&A, to a site that’s more focused on conversations built around interests. To complement this change, Formspring is also rolling out a completely redesigned website to highlight the… → Read More
OK, this is cool. A new networking utility called Hachi is taking some of the best functionality offered by LinkedIn (searching by name, company, title, etc. and seeing how you’re connected to other users), and is merging that with your social graphs from other services like Facebook, and soon Google contacts, Twitter and even your Outlook address book. That way, you can see who you know where … → Read More
Do you want to get a slot as part of the next batch of Y Combinator startups? Are you curious about what the founders chosen for the program did to get there? If your answer is yes to either of those questions, then read on.
Today, FamilyLeaf — a kind of “Facebook for families — and one of the companies that presented earlier this week during the Demo Day, decided that they would make public… → Read More
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