Though U.K. start-ups PopJam and Huddle may be doing relatively well, everything else I’ve heard from British Web company founders since I got to town has been terrifyingly negative. But I’ve realised that, for an expert in dot-com failure, the recession is a seller’s market.
Facebook’s announcement that they are opening up API access to user’s status updates (and more) is big news. The status update has become the ultimate social gesture. All last year, Facebook, who is the leader in social networking, focused on morphing the user experience, first to the news feed and ultimately to the status update as the primary user experience.
Social networks are front and center in the latest redesign of AOL’s AOL.com homepage, which the company announced Thursday and says it will start to gradually roll out to users over the next few weeks (unless they choose to opt in earlier).
It read like the teenage party from hell: a riot of sex and wanton damage fueled by underage drinking that only ended when the police arrived. According to media reports, the mother of the teenage hostess was so angry with her daughter that she punched her.
OK, the title may be a slight exaggeration, but the data from a new study by the social-contact search site Rapleaf is nonetheless interesting.
In what they claim is the largest social-network study ever done, Rapleaf looked at the social connections of both men and women. All told, they collected data from over 30 million people on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, Hi5 and others.
I’m not sure whether to call this data portability or just making it easier for social-networking services to spam a user’s contacts. But either way, Microsoft has announced partnerships with LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Bebo and Facebook, to enable Windows Live Messenger users to look for contacts on either of the five social-networking sites and vice versa.
There is a new casual gaming network in town that’s got some serious cross-platform chops. Don’t be fooled by the cutesy graphics. Today, Mytopia is simultaneously launching across Facebook, Bebo, MySpace (currently pending approval) and its own Web site with eight games (chess, backgammon, sudoku, dominoes, bingo, spades, hearts and video poker). On Monday, it will release the same games across the major Web and desktop widgets: iGoogle Gadgets, Apple Dashboard Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and Windows Vista Toolbar Widgets.
Clouds are gathering over Silicon Valley’s consumer Internet companies. The sale of social-networking company Bebo comes at a time when private investors are changing their tune. They’re no longer pumping money into start-ups at the same huge valuations they were doing last year.
Poor Bebo. I feel for the residents of their hip and convivial apartment block. It has just been bought by a slumlord.
AOL–which is paying $850 million for the social-networking site, the other Facebook–is where innovations go to die. Remember Netscape? Bought for $4.2 billion and now dead. AOL bought a mess of advertising platforms–Advertising.com, Quigo, Tacoda–and can’t make them to get along.
AOL, the online division of Time Warner, is buying fast-growing social network Bebo for close to $850 million in cash, the company announced today. AOL is talking some gobbledygook about marrying AIM, ICQ with a real social network. Whatever!
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