What’s the Next Big Thing after social networking?
This has been a favorite topic of much speculation among tech enthusiasts for many years. I think we are already witnessing a paradigm shift – a move away from simple social sharing towards personalized, relevant content.
The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social Graph. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google are already working on delivering relevant content, a slew of startups are focusing exclusively on it. → Read More
It was only a year ago that Tweetmeme declared their intention to be the king of retweets. And for most of the past year, that was the case. Their retweet button was everywhere. Of course, that was before Twitter launched its own button last month. The result of that introduction? An immediate 20 percent drop off in button impressions per day, Tweetmeme found Nick Halstead noted today.
Luckily for Halstead, Twitter let him know their button-killer was coming and gave Tweetmeme a chance to get out of the way. Twitter even agreed to license some of Tweetmeme’s technology and enter into a business agreement with them about the button. The phrase, “killing me softly” comes to mind. → Read More
Today on their blog, URL shortening service Bit.ly unveiled a cute new feature: Clickabit. It’s a Twitter account that surfaces some of the “surprising and bizarre” links being shortened and shared across their network. But the feature also hints at something we’ve been talking about for a while: Bit.ly Now.
“We’re currently hard at work on several systems that will expose some of the interesting data we’re playing with. In the meantime, we’d like to introduce @clickabit,” Bit.ly writes in the post. They key part is obviously the first half. We’ve known for a while that Bit.ly has been planning some sort of service to expose the best links being shared across the web — kind of like Tweetmeme or Digg. But Bit.ly links are shared on email and Facebook too; it would be about more than Twitter. → Read More
Slowly but surely, Twitter is taking control of all the key features that make it such a powerful communication medium. Today, it is introducing the Tweet button, a way for Websites to get visitors to share stories and links with one click. Of course, this already exists in various forms, the most popular of which is the Retweet button created by TweetMeme, which is on so many sites (including ours) that it currently generates 750 million impressions a day. Well, that is all very likely going away. “We expect people to switch,” says Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead, “and we support that.”
Twitter is killing TweetMeme’s Retweet button, but with love. It is licensing some of the technology developed by TweetMeme and has a business agreement in place. However, the code that powers the new Tweet button was written from scratch by Twitter. TweetMeme Pro will continue to exist for Websites that want more customized solutions and analytics, but TweetMeme is shifting is business to a new product that has yet to launch called Datasift, which will focus on curating different realtime streams. From Twitter’s perspective, head of product Jason Goldman says, “We think that there is an experience that we can offer that is more integrated with the Twitter accounts people already have.” → Read More
Yesterday we showed a teaser of our conversation with Loic Le Meur of Seesmic, and Nick Halstead of Tweetmeme. Here’s the full video, in two parts.
This is a debate around the recent decision by Twitter to compete directly with third party developers who are making Twitter applications that Twitter has deemed to be mere “hole fillers.” A variety of third party apps are now competing directly with Twitter.
Most developers we’ve spoken with are upset, and say that Twitter gave them guidance that they wouldn’t compete with them. And in the past Twitter has been consistent in saying that they want to provide the plumbing for the Twitter ecosystem. Now it’s quite clear that they want to build on top of that plumbing, too. → Read More
We had Loic Le Meur of Seesmic, and Nick Halsted of Tweetmeme at TechCrunch today to talk about the ongoing Twitter developer ecosystem story. It was a fairly contentious discussion as we tried to wade through all the b.s. and get to the meat of the story.
We’ll post the full video tomorrow, but here’s a teaser where I debate Loic on whether or not he saw the direct competition coming. I’ve been critical of his changing position on the matter. → Read More
You know how TweetMeme started out trying to be the Techmeme of Twitter before it ventured off plastering its ReTweet buttons on every blog on the Web? Well now there’s a site that just launched today that wants to be the TweetMeme of Google Buzz called ReBuzzThis.
It is not much to look at right now—five lame links as of this writing. But the site wants to encourage blogs and other sites to add its ReBuzz buttons to posts and articles. The posts that get ReBuzzed the most shoot up the homepage just like on TweetMeme with ReTweets. Except that TweetMeme tries to count all retweets, not just those done through its buttons. ReBuzzThis seems to only count Rebuzzes done through its site and buttons, so it is not really capturing the most Buzzed about articles and posts. → Read More
Toyota has been dealing with negative backlash from the massive safety recalls of its vehicles; and is even suffering in terms of sales. So what does the company do to repair its image? Turn to Twitter, of course! The Japanese auto giant has launched a branded channel on TweetMeme, in partnership with Federated Media, which aggregates and organize Twitter conversations regarding Toyota.
Called Toyota Conversations, the site brings together the top stories being Tweeted about Toyota, from news articles to press releases. The site also shows visitors the most popular videos and images being shared about Toyota on Twitter. And the channel includes a Featured Tweets from Toyota’s Twitter account and press room as well as AdTweets, which are Tweetmeme’s retweetable ads for Toyota. → Read More
Now that Twitter did away with its monolithic Suggested User List, everyone can fight for followers on a more equal footing. Tweetmeme wants to help you gain followers with a new Follow Button you can place on your blog or Website. It looks very much like Tweetmeme’s ReTweet button, which is on 100,000 sites and registering 7 billion monthly impressions across the web, except it says “Follow” instead of “Retweet.” When you click on the Follow button, a window pops open that lets you sign into Twitter and follow the account tied to the button (usually the person or publication of the site the button is on). → Read More
Last summer, we wrote about the launch of Retweet.com, a Tweetmeme knock-off with a killer name. Mesiab Labs, a company associated with some spammy Twitter projects like Hummingbird, launched it in August with some fanfare. However, since then, Tweetmeme has remained the king of the space. And now Mesiab Labs has put the killer domain up for auction.
As you can see on this Flippa page, the current bids for Retweet.com stand at $20,000. This is a huge increase from yesterday when the bids hovered around $10. So far, there are 27 bids. The listing on the site claims the domain gets 12 million uniques a month, and 26 million pageviews. If that’s the case, you have to wonder, why sell? → Read More
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics, as Mark Twain once said. A couple days ago, I wrote a post titled, “What Happened To bit.ly’s Market Share” after I noticed some new statistics on TweetMeme which suggested that the market share for short URLs has shifted in the past few months and is actually diversifying as more and more short URLs inundate the Web.
John Borthwick, the investor who incubated bit.ly and then spun it off from betaworks, didn’t like that headline because it called into question bit.ly’s continued dominance. He also didn’t like it because there was a problem with the underlying statistics. Previously, the TweetMeme stats showed only the top 5 URL shortening services in a given 24-hour period. But then TweetMeme took down the stats for a couple months while it reworked the underlying architecture to better scale with the incredible growth in these kinds of links. When the stats quietly came back over the holidays, they looked different. Instead of bit.ly showing a 70 to <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/despite-all-the-angst-around-its-demise-trim-wil → Read More
It seems like everyone and their mother now has their own URL shortening service, or at least their own short domain. Short URLs have almost become a branding thing. But as the use of short links keeps going up, the market share among different URL shortening services is fragmenting. The biggest URL shortening service is still bit.ly, with more than 2 billion links a month, but it now only has a 56 percent market share of short links on Twitter, compared to nearly 80 percent last summer. The drop wasn’t noticed before because TweetMeme, which keeps statistics on short URL market share, pulled its stats page for a couple months as part of a site upgrade to make it more scalable. But now that stats page is back up, and it is tracking 3.1 million unique links per day compared to 2.5 million last November..
So what accounts for bit.ly’s 24-point drop? When TinyURL was the default service on Twitter it had a 75 percent share, and now it has only 8 percent, so these things can shift quickly. But bit.ly is still the default link shortener on Twitter.com and many Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck. Some of the decline can be attributed to the launch of bit.ly Pro, which is a white-labeling short link service for publishers. We use it to publish links to our posts on Twitter with our tcrn.ch domain, which used to be bit.ly links. Even though bit.ly is still powering those links, it doesn’t get credit for any custom domains. In fact, tcrn.ch is now one of the top 100 short domains (see below). So to the extent that large publishers such as AOL, Bing, foursquare, the Huffington Post, Meebo, MSN, and the New York Times switched to custom bit.ly Pro domains, those are no longer counted for bit.ly in the stats above. → Read More
Editor’s note: As the capital markets heat up and the economy continues to rebound, the deal flow is starting to open up again. We’ve already given you our top ten IPO candidates for 2010. In this guest post, Kelly Porter, an M&A expert at Woodside Capital Partners, proposes ten digital media deals he’d like to see. None of the companies mentioned in this editorial are clients of Woodside Capital Partners.
Digital media M&A activity is expected to pick up in 2010—big acquirers have significant cash on their balance sheets, share prices are up, and many good acquisition candidates are on the landscape. With this in mind, I’ve put together the following list of 10 interesting Digital Media M&A deals for 2010. Some are longshots, some are slam dunks; all would create compelling new opportunities and possibilities. It’s a list that was compiled in recent weeks over coffee with some of the brightest and most connected folks in the valley. Without further ado, here are the deals we envisioned: → Read More
If you’re interested in finding hot news on the web it’s not too hard — provided the topic is technology. Twitter, Tweetmeme, Techmeme, Digg, and the like all offer up a mixture of what’s hot in technology with varying degrees of success. But for other topics, it’s not so easy. That’s why Topicfire was built.
Topicfire is what co-founder Ryan Sit calls a “realtime hot news aggregator.” It uses what the service dubs its “HeatRank” to rate any particular story on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 representing the hottest stories. These stories are broken up into dozens of categories so users can drill down to find just what they want, and easily sort the stream to find just the hottest stories. → Read More
You know the retweet button you see on content spread throughout the web? You can thank TweetMeme for that. Long before Twitter’s new Retweet functionality existed, this button was the way to share on Twitter. And it still is for content not on twitter.com. But now it’s time for TweetMeme to think about making money. And they’ve come up with a way that people are either going to love or hate.
At our Realtime CrunchUp in San Francisco today, TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead has unveiled AdTweets. As you might expect, this involves ads that appear on your site — but with the addition of a retweet button. Yes, you can also retweet these ads just as you would any piece of content. → Read More
We wrote that Twitturly filled a bit of a void when it was launched in April 2008 as a sort of Techmeme for all that gets linked on Twitter. Much of the initial excitement over its link tracking abilities ebbed away rather swiftly regardless, and competitors like Tweetmeme and Topsy have stolen much of Twitturly’s thunder since its launch.
Joel Strellner, who started the project, finally put Twitturly up for sale on Flippa ten days ago, and the auction just ended. Only five bids came in, and the sale ultimately netted no more than $8,500 – Strellner was hoping for double that amount. → Read More
Real time search and discovery engine Topsy is releasing a bunch of new products and tools this afternoon.
Topsy is all about the power of the ReTweet on Twitter. When the service first launched publicly in May we noted that ReTweets are the new currency of the web. And it isn’t just the number of retweets that matters (which is subject to large scale spamming efforts). It’s the authority of the people doing the retweeting, too.
One way Topsy is distinguishing itself from competitors like OneRiot and TweetMeme is by holding on to data forever. Most real time search engines are focused on right now, which is exactly what people want. But they dump data periodically, and anyone looking for older stuff won’t be able to find it. Here’s a sample search for “skype andreessen” on OneRiot (4 resutls), TweetMeme (0 results) and Topsy (37 pages of results, which can be sorted and filtered by time). So when you want to look up old Tweets around a link, Topsy has the data that no one else is currently showing. → Read More
There is a lot of chatter about TweetMeme’s rather robust growth to over 18 million unique monthly visitors on Compete.com. That puts them ahead of well known sites like LinkedIn and gmail.com with 15 million and 9 million visitors, respectively, on the service). In fact, Tweetmeme currently sits as the 68th largest site on the Internet, according to Compete.
What does TweetMeme do? They offer other sites a “retweet” button that makes it easy for readers to send story links to Twitter. We use it on all our sites, you can see it on the top right of this post. They also have analytics around tweets sent via the service, and a home page that shows the most retweeted Tweets at any given time. It competes with Digg, TechMeme, Google News and other news aggregators to show breaking news.
But is TweetMeme really so big? The short answer is no. → Read More
TweetMixx, the newly launched service from social voting site Mixx that allows you to find relevant links on Twitter, is venturing into new territory today with the launch of TweetMixx Channels. The service basically lets brands, celebs and companies consolidate their Twitter traffic and mentions on one page.
TweetMixx Channels features branded, customizable pages, with the brand’s current Twitter feed, tweets and updates from fans, and links relevant to content about the brand, company or topic posted automatically. The tool also serves as a tracking and monitoring tool for mentions and conversations about a brand taking place on Twitter. → Read More
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