social media Archives

Startup Bloodbath in Social Media?

Posted on December 14, 2009 ·

Google announced their own URL shortener. Great. But some startups may be panicking. The TechCrunch title says it all: Bit.ly Just Got Fu.kd: Facebook And Google Get Into The Short URL Game.

Of course bit.ly is not the only possible casualty, but they are the dominant one in the URL shortening space – or at least they have been so far…

But what most commentators haven’t noticed is another feature from Google: FeedBurner social, which might very well kill TwitterFeed. Yes, why bother with an intermediary when we can now have FeedBurner send our blog post to Twitter directly? Check out the URL for this very post on Twitter: it’s the shiny new goog.gl variety.

And it’s not over yet.. just as we’re absorbing what all this means, here’s news of Twitter testing business features, including the ability of multiple users posting on behalf of one organization.. Somehow I don’t think CoTweet, HootSuite and a bunch of others are too happy about it.

Are they all doomed? Not necessarily – right now they all offer additional features (multiple accounts, scheduling, stats..etc), but nevertheless, it must not be very comforting when the Ultimate Giant enters their space…

Oh, yeah, I know … we’ll soon see the statements from all these startups welcoming Google, validating their markets…etc. 🙂

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )

Filed Under: SaaS, Startups · Tagged: bit.ly, CloudAve, competition, cotweet, entrepreneurship, facebook, feedburner, Google, hootsuite, social media, Startups, Twitter, twitterfeed, url shortening

Brits, the Masters of the Universe… the Facebook Universe

Posted on June 12, 2009 ·

Image via Wikipedia

The University of Salford in Manchaster will offer a Masters degree in Social Media, focusing on Facebook and Twitter.

Salford claims to be the world’s first to offer a Masters course in social media, but they are not. That title goes to Birmingham City University which announced their one-year course in Social Media in March. For a cool £4,400 ($7,200) you get a Master’s Degree of … well, let’s just say questionable value.

Filed Under: Marketing / PR, Social Networking, Software · Tagged: facebook, online degrees, social media, Twitter, xfer

LA Earthquake: Twitter Reports First – Again. Fake Video Caught.

Posted on July 29, 2008 ·

Google thinks I am an earthquake expert simply because I pointed out Twitter was the first to report the recent earthquakes in Japan and China.

Today the same happened: Twitter was on fire with user reports of the Los Angeles earthquake 9 minutes before the first AP wire came out.

It’s an undeniable trend – but is it important?

I received some flak in comments to the previous two posts, for neglecting to mention that I was comparing apples to oranges. New agencies have the responsibility to verify information and it takes time. Reliability over Speed. Fair enough. ReadWriteWeb asked the question: Did Twitter Really ‘Outshine’ the Mainstream Press?

The only thing Twitter does better than the traditional news is speed. It doesn’t do depth, it doesn’t do fact-checking, it doesn’t do real reporting. It does breaking news, and it does that very well — in many cases these days better than the mainstream press (in terms of how fast it breaks news).

Very well said, and I think we need both: speed and depth. Ironically, MG Siegler’s post @ VentureBeat describing twitter’s power in such situations provided an example for the opposite by including what appeared to be the very first video footage of the LA quake.

I watched it without sound first, but was immediately suspicious:

I wonder what this video shows. It’s NOT the building shaking. The movement is too fast, and it’s inside the room, relative to the window frames we see. It looks more like a camera quickly moved left and right.
If this was an indication of how the building moved, we’d see a lot less movement behind the window (inside) and a lot more outside.

It did not take long to get confirmation on Venturebeat:

Update 2: The 12seconds vid was fake, posted after the fact, a co-founder of 12seconds confirmed.

So there you have it. People do take advantage of the relative naivete of social media and don’t hesitate to post fake news to gain 5 minutes of fame. But that doesn’t undermine the importance of speed, which in some cases can provide early alerts and potentially save lives. We need both.