Entries Tagged 'Social Media' ↓

Social media channel of the hour, Twitter, announced that they have received $15 million in another round of funding backed by original investor Union Square Ventures and (reportedly) Spark Ventures.

I am really happy for them.

Maybe now they can afford to find a team of engineers that can scale the platform and fix their infrastructure. Twitter is great, when it works. When it doesn’t, it’s just another over-hyped, under performing web 2.0 time suck.

Enough said, I have some “Tweets” to send out.

London, UK based startup Kindo.com has received an undisclosed sum from Ambient Sound Investments (ASI), the Estonian-based VC house started by some of Skype’s founding engineers.

Kindo.com has a similary story to Facebook in the sense that it is continuing to thrive well but not without stiff competition. Just like Facebook has competition from myspace, linkedin etc. Kindo.com is facing the heat from Geni, Amiglia, MyFamily 2.0, FamilyLink, WeRelate, MyHeritage and the larger Ancestry.com. But I think there’s so much to Kindo that is actually taking it in a different direction from the above mentioned family networks.

Way to go guys, keep it up Kindo.com and long live the spirit of social networking in families and friends.

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New Social Media site, The Social Times has been launched by our very own Facebook Wizard, Nick O’Neill. As explained, it is not just a blog but a comprehensive summary of all the events, mixers and rounds of conferences across the U.S. All the breaking news, right there centered in and around social web comes in The Social Times.Here’s something very interesting - The Social Times is gonna host events all over the U.s. to connect minds in the social web space. Also, there are a few tools planned for release to assist users in staying connected.

For those of you who want to know more about it, don’t miss-out the official Social Times Launch Event. A fantastic opportunity for organization in the Washington area to demo at the event.

The name is cool, btw

I’ve been trying to get my mom to join Facebook. She’s a Scrabble fiend, so she’d be one more person I could play Scrabulous against (and get my ass kicked by), and I think she’d enjoy some of the other features of the site. But she’s not too interested in joining a group of college-age kids.

Now the UK has launched SAGA Zone, a Facebook-esque site aimed at the over-50 demographic. The main site promises concrete applications like creating a profile page, participating in forums, and creating “your own web diary, or ‘blog.’” No confusing pokes, virtual gifts or complicated friend wheels. Just a way to chat with your peers when things are slow in the office.

It’s nice that there’s a place for people who might find Facebook a little overly hectic, but I’d rather see Facebook eventually expand to be a multi-generational service. I’m reminded of the beer gardens I saw when I was in Munich, where several generations of one family would come together to sit in the sun. It didn’t feel like a family-oriented theme park, as multi-generational places do in the U.S. It was just a lot of differently-aged people hanging out together.

Can Facebook, which was originally (and remains) targeted at the college crowd, ever become a place my mom wants to visit? What happens when the current users grow up and graduate? It will be interesting to see how the demographic changes over time.

In the meantime, for those of you who feel uncomfortable with Facebook, there’s SAGA Zone.  Although those of us in our twenties who are already starting to feel a little long in the tooth for Facebook will have to wait 30 more years to join SAGA’s over-50s crowd.

Noteful Nuggets From This Past Week

As usual, it was a busy week in the social media space. In case you were glued to Facebook Observer and did not get a chance to read up on what was going outside of Facebook here are some great social media posts from the past week.

• Personal Branding and Social Media - Social media is a great way to build your personal brand, if you do it the right way. Chris shows you how you can easily reinforce your personal brand in five easy steps. If I had to add one more easy, yet sorely under-used tactic, it would simply be to participate! Don’t be a wallflower, start participating in forums, blogs, wiki’s and don’t be afraid to send someone you want to know and email.
• Social Media Warnings - Don’t forget that someone might be watching your every move on a MySpace, Facebook and the like. Kristina tells the tale of an employer uses MySpace and Facebook as a research tool on prospective employees. Social networks are meant to be fun, but remember that what you do, say and expose might come back to bite you.
• eBay Adds Social Networking - “Social commerce” as I call it is the next big thing for Internet retailers. eBay’s Neighborhoods are a great example of what companies can do to foster social interaction in hopes of increasing consumer interaction that will result in not just and increase in sales, but loyalty. After all if your site is more then just a purchase destination, it is more then likely to be trafficked more often.
• Is Techmeme Overrated? - I tend to agree that getting your site on Techmeme does not result in the same sort of traffic spikes that getting to the front page of Digg or a strong Stumbleupon will give you, but Techmeme is the best site to keep in touch with what is going on in the tech sector. The real question here is, Are you obsessed with their new leaderboard?
• Google Making Big Moves In Social Media - It is not a shocker that Google is taking a hard look at social networking. After all, it is the hottest topic in the tech sector right now. But I don’t really care. Why? because besides search, everything else that Google has done has either sucked or not been a major threat to a major competitor. I bet the Google guys were at the Graphing Social conference just to get a few days of the ‘plex.

Well, that is it for the first round up. But, I’ll tell you what, if you have a story that you think is worth mentioning, share it with all of us by posting it below in the comments!