An Irish rock band named The Script claims that social interaction with fans is the way to music chart success. The Script says blogs, downloads and online chats are the secret to success. On the Script's website you can see that they have set up a number of social networking sites. However, they don't seem to have latched on to microblogging yet.
Eons, a social network focused on baby boomers, is cutting 1/3 of its staff according to BizJournals.
Mass High Tech reports the Charlestown, Mass.-based startup, which was launched by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor, recently laid off 24 employees or approximately 35 percent of the staff prior to the restructuring.
MHT said the layoffs included some members of the executive team, but the company did not disclose specific names.
Eons, which has the slogan "Loving life on the flip side of 50," will focus on social networking going forward.
Eons debuted in August, 2006 when it was kicked off with a launch featuring actress Jane Seymour. The company says it will focus on social networking going forward. Xconomy has more on Eons' layoffs.
TechCrunch is reporting that eBay has signed a deal to acquire the StumbleUpon website. StumbleUpon allows people to create a profile and share webpage recommendations and reviews.
High-flying startup StumbleUpon has been rumored to be in acquisition discussions since at least last November. Recently we've heard that talks have heated up again, with Google, AOL and eBay as potential suitors. A source with knowledge of the deal now says the company has signed a term sheet with eBay to be acquired. The price is somewhere between $40 - $75 million. (update: GigaOm is now reporting the price at a $40 - $45 million).
StumbleUpon lets users rate websites via a browser toolbar. At any time a user can click "Stumble!" and will be taken to a website highly rated by other StumbleUpon users who tend to vote in a similar way as the person "stumbling." More often than not, it's something almost serendipitously interesting to the reader. The company expanded into video referrals in late 2006.
People who are passionate about StumbleUpon say they like it because of the surprise factor in what they see next, and the fact that the product has such a high hit rate in delivering interesting new content. The StumbleUpon site says they have 2.1 million users, up from 1.7 million in December 2006. 4+ million sites are "stumbled" daily.
StumbleUpon has only raised a single $1.5 million round of seed financing.
GigaOm blogs that eBay could connect the StumbleUpon toolbar with Skype and "do an end run around Google's dominance of the search business." Several bloggers (see here, here, here, here, here and here) are noting a new Google feature launched just today that helps you find new websites based on your Google search history. Outside of the website recommendations this new Google toolbar feature really isn't much like StumbleUpon but it could become more like it. StumbleUpon includes profiles and social networking type features that the new Google toolbar feature doesn't provide.
Does Firefox Really Need Social Networking Features?
Startup Meme reports that Mozilla is planning to add social networking features to the Firefox browser called the Coop. A sidebar would be added to the browser where people could have an avatar and exchange photos, links, and videos. You can see a mockup of the Coop sidebar here. Startup Meme says Coop will be tough on Flock which was planning to launch a social web browser using Mozilla's code.
The release of Coop will be a killer blow to Flock, a privately backed social browser that is being built on top of Mozilla code base. Flock aims to do exactly what Mozilla has just announced, in fact their is such an overlap of features that the Mozilla team decided to put the snapshot of Flock in their wiki page as an example. Above all it teaches us that building upon others technology is just like building castles on sand. We have now seen this numerous times, first Alexa shutting doors to Statsaholic and now Mozilla decided to build an in house version of Flock.
Another impact of the browser would be on the social networks that rely on the generation of massive page views by users while they are browsing each others profiles. The status information on your friends in the browser sidebar will remove the need to view the profiles on the social networks itself.
Until Mozilla actually launches this feature there is no good way to determine if it will be popular. Web users already have lots of ways to trade links, pictures and videos and it is not clear that they need this feature to be part of the web browser. A post on Zoli's blog explains how many people are much more concerned about the browser's performance than about whether or not it has a nifty sidebar that lets you trade pics with your pals. (via Good Morning Silicon Valley)
Microsoft officials are working to fix a variety of problems that didn't show up until the service hit production. Among them: performance bottlenecks, HTML rendering issues, Firefox compatibility, and more. No word when Microsoft expects all of the issues to be resolved.
Here is a typical angry response from a Spaces user.
One of the new features are Gadgets, which are customizable add-ons that can be added to a Spaces profile. A list of gadgets can be found here. You can also write your own. You can also view a list of recent updated Spaces profiles.
Microsoft will want to get the bugs ironed out so they can continue their rapid growth. The change should also result in yet another URL change for MSN Spaces customers. There have already been two URL changes.
Friendster Inc. recently won a social networking patent and now a new Wall Street Journalarticle says Friendster execs are evaluating what to do with it.
Now, company executives are weighing their options, including whether to sue rivals. "We want to protect our intellectual property," says Kent Lindstrom, Friendster's president. "We're evaluating what we should do."
Patent controversies have become a familiar hazard on the Web as companies seek protection for emulating real-world concepts in virtual environments. For Friendster, patents could be an important new asset as it tries to reinvent itself. Many Web users have ditched it in favor of trendier rivals like Facebook Inc. and News Corp.'s MySpace. In June, the number of monthly U.S. visitors at MySpace tripled from a year earlier to 45.8 million, and visitors at Facebook doubled to 7.9 million, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which tracks Web traffic. The number of visitors to Friendster is still under one million.
The WSJ article also shows a graph with soaring traffic growth for MySpace, strong growth for Facebook and a flat line for Friendster. (via Eat the Press)
A new PDF report from Nielsen//NetRatings reports that April's top 10 social networking sites collectively grew 47% since last year -- a climb from 46.8 million uniques in April 2005 to 68.8 million in April 2006. Nielsen//NetRatings says these social networking sites reach 45% of active Web suers. MySpace led the other social networks with 38.4 million unique
visitors and growth rate of 367%.
"Social networking sites are the reality television of the Internet," said Jon Gibs, senior director of media, Nielsen//NetRatings. "The content is relatively inexpensive for publishers to produce, and social networking is not a fad that will disappear. If anything, it will become more ingrained in mainstream sites, just as reality TV programming has become ubiquitous in network programming."
Classmates Online is primarily a fee-based service so that would restrict it from growing as much as the others. AOL Hometown's dismal performance shows why the company is launching AIM Pages to try and compete with the rapidly growing MySpace.com. Why Yahoo Groups is listed instead of Yahoo 360 is questionable -- possibly they do not have enough traffic yet at Yahoo 360.
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