In case you missed it, last night during the Video Music Awards, Kanye West ripped the microphone out of Taylor Swift’s hands as she was delivering her acceptance speech for Best Female Video. Immediately afterward he went on a tirade exclaiming how wonderful he thought Beyonce’s video was attempting gain support from the crowd as he was booed. Read more »
Eight years ago today (September 11, 2001) thousands of men, women, and children lost their lives in a terrorist attack on the United States. It is a day of remembrance for the victims and a date that Americans shall never forget. Memorial ceremonies for those that were killed in the attacks are being held throughout the entire U.S. today. Read more »
Facebook is notorious for adopting popular features from other online services. Well known targets for brand new Facebook features include Twitter and Friendfeed (which it recently purchased). I’m not sure why I didn’t notice it before but it looks as though Facebook might be targeting Gmail to guide improvements for its messaging feature. Read more »
Gmail and Gmail for Google Apps went down today for over an hour and all Gmail users started freaking out on Twitter and Facebook. While the frightening 502 “Server Down” error may be a nightmare for those that urgently need to access their email for deadlines, documents, etc., stressing yourself out isn’t going to get Gmail back online. Read more »
Last month I pointed out that Twitter’s growth rate had slowed from 76% in March to 39% in April according to Compete. Compete statistics that were recently released show that Twitter’s unique visitor traffic growth for May was stagnant at a mere 1%. To make matters worse, Quantcast has Twitter actually losing traffic in May. This should be of serious concern for Twitter and its investors as the life of Twitter’s recent popularity is still in its infancy despite arguably receiving more media hype than any web service to date. Read more »
Keith Rabois posted an interesting article on TechCrunch today which suggested that the root of all eBay’s problems over the past years was primarily due to its lack of fun. He attributes the rising use of sites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube as the culprits for eBay’s loss of users. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Keith, he’s currently the vice president of strategy and business development for Slide. Read more »
Kevin Rose has been eluding to some really big changes over at Digg lately. In his interview with Michael Arrington, Kevin went as far to say that the new directions for Digg are “a ballsy move”. During Digg’s Townhall Meeting that aired last night, founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson announced lots of upcoming changes that include removal of the shout feature, better sharing on Twitter and Facebook, and a redesign of the homepage. Read more »
Microsoft has owned the number three search engine for a long time now but that might be changing soon. Whether it was the migration from MSN Search to Live Search, the simpler design displaying a single search box on Live.com, or the implementation of the Live Search Cashback program, Microsoft appears to be rallying as the against all odds underdog of search. Read more »
It seems like nearly everyone in the tech world is sick of hearing about Twitter so I thought it would be nice to checkup on some of the other microblogging and micromessaging services that are available. When Twitter launched in 2006 and began receiving some decent attention, copycats came out of the woodwork. Fortunately for Twitter, no direct competitors really had the staying power to launch any kind of real threat to the little birdie. Compete’s latest stats show that Twitter’s monthly unique visitors is up by 39% yet many of its direct competitors are dead or barely breathing. Read more »
Microblogging has been a booming success for Twitter but a bust for many other start-ups that jumped on the bandwagon. An exception to this is Tumblr, who seemed to fill the gap between 140 characters and a full service blogging platform. Tumblr has experienced steady growth since its launch in 2007. The latest traffic stats from Compete report that Tumblr received nearly 2.5 million uniques and 7 million visits for the month of April. Read more »
