A social-media giant that has been wooed by the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft is now looking at an emerging social-networking play. Facebook recently held acquisition talks with micro-blogging phenom Twitter, according to a report in the Financial Times.
The Times cited people familiar with the matter who confirmed that Facebook offered to acquire Twitter in an all-stock deal.
Twitter is a service that lets users stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one question: What are you doing? It’s a real-time messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices, including PCs and smartphones. And Facebook would reportedly love to add it to its social-networking services.
Last year, Microsoft offered Facebook $15 billion to become part of Redmond’s growing Web 2.0 assets. Facebook declined, and now it appears that Twitter is offering the same response to its social-networking elder.
The Valuation Question
Despite the rebuff, there is lingering conversation over Twitter’s value. Twitter isn’t reporting any revenue just yet. The two-year-old company is still building its user base, yet this darling of Silicon Valley has reportedly been valued at $500 million…
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Whether or not ArticleOnePartners.com, a patent-busting site, is a resounding success, founder Cheryl Milone owes a debt of gratitude to PeerToPatent.org, a nonprofit site that serves as a clearinghouse for pending patent applications. (See “Facebook For Patent Trolls.”)
The brainchild of a New York Law School professor, PeerToPatent just completed its pilot first year under the close watch of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. (Funding for the site comes from tech giants like IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) and Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), along with Nathan Myhrvold’s patent portfolio vehicle Intellectual Ventures.) The USPTO was so pleased with the results of the project’s first 12 months, it agreed to allow the site to run at least through next summer…
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For each Internet social network effort that thrives, there are dozens that fail to generate any interest from the surfing masses.
An early dud was BountyQuest.com, launched in 2000 with financial backing from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The premise was simple: Posters to the site would highlight a patent they wanted to see blown out of the water, and visitors could receive up to $50,000 for presenting evidence that the patent wasn’t, in fact, the first document to describe the invention in question. BountyQuest’s problem was that too few got involved in the action. It fizzled within three years…
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Do you long for Facebook when you tear yourself away to watch a little television? Not to worry, the social networking site announced Monday that it is integrating full-length TV episodes into the site.
“Full-length television is coming to Facebook, via a new generation of applications. Entire shows such as Grey’s Anatomy, Heroes, and The Simpsons and more will be available through a wide range of TVLoop ‘Addicted to…’ applications and Mesmo TV,” Josh Elman, a platform program manager at Facebook, wrote in a blog post.
Much of the content will stream directly from TV network Web sites or via Hulu.com, Elman wrote. “These applications make it easy, not only to watch shows, but also to discuss them, share bloopers, challenge friends’ knowledge of TV trivia, connect with other fans, and see how many of your friends are watching each week.”…
Read it at PcMag
Soon you may not need to squint at distorted letters to prove your humanity.
Sanjay Sehgal thinks the average CAPTCHA, that collection of deformed characters that Web sites ask users to type out when registering for an account, is both too easy and too demanding. The image tests designed to weed out spam-spewing bots often annoy real people–and rarely keep out determined spammers.
The company Sehgal founded a year ago, Pramana, takes a different approach. Instead of submitting users to a test, the Atlanta-based company’s technology plugs into Web sites and invisibly analyzes users’ online behavior to determine who’s a human and who’s a bot. “We don’t demand that users prove they’re human,” Sehgal says. “We simply watch them and decide for ourselves.”…
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In the age of YouTube, online video has opened a world of possibilities for artists like James and Tyler McFadden. Over the last two years, the duo has produced a collection of quirky, short, animated films with their Web-based production studio, GoPotato TV. But all the technology in the world hasn’t changed one thing for the McFadden brothers. “Making money is not an easy thing to do with online video,” says Tyler McFadden, 27, who heads up business development for the company.
Sure, Big Media is starting to see the Web as a source of high-quality video talent; on Nov. 24, Fox Interactive Media (NWS) unit IGN.com said it reached production and distribution deals with a dozen independent Web producers, including Black 20 Digital Studios, CollegeHumor, and ScrewAttack.com. But for every indie producer that lands a deal, scores are struggling to get noticed…
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As the cost and convenience benefits of cloud computing become more compelling, more and more IT departments are taking a close look at moving large parts of their infrastructure out of their data centers.
While a year or two ago it was possible to dismiss many of the cloud offerings as too new and somewhat rickety, that objection no longer applies. For the industry-leading cloud vendors, the growing pains are essentially over and the services for storage, computing, load balancing and other functions are as good or better than what most IT departments are getting out of their data centers and are offered at extremely attractive prices…
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Jordan’s Queen Rania has received YouTube’s first Visionary Award for a daily video Web cast and blog in which she sought to challenge stereotypes of the Arab and Muslim world and encourage dialogue across cultures.
Accepting the award in a YouTube clip posted Saturday, Rania listed 10 reasons for her five-month YouTube series in a spoof of the top 10 list segment on CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman.”
Among her reasons were: “Because anything Queen Elizabeth can do, I can do better” and “I was tired of people thinking Jordan was just a basketball player.”
More seriously, Rania has said she wants people to “know the real Arab world … unedited, unscripted and unfiltered.”
YouTube created the Visionary Award to recognize people who use the video sharing Web site as a platform for positive social change…
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In the fast-paced world of celebrity news, stars are increasingly turning to their own Web sites and blog postings to talk about themselves in a do-it-yourself approach to managing their public images.
By speaking directly to fans on the Internet, many stars have upturned the age-old approach to managing a scandal or personal event, which is to have a publicist speak for them.
“You want to have a constant dialogue with your fans, you can’t just do a news flash every three months and expect people to understand what you’re doing,” said Tyler Goldman, chief executive of Buzznet Inc, a network of Web sites and celebrity blogs that recently signed on actress Mischa Barton.
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Facebook has a won $873 million judgment against a Canadian man who bombarded the popular online hangout with sexually explicit “spam” messages.
The victory, sealed with a judge’s order issued last Friday, probably won’t yield a windfall for privately held Facebook Inc., whose revenue this year is expected to range between $250 million to $300 million.
Court records indicate the alleged spammer, Adam Guerbuez of Montreal, has been difficult to find since Facebook sued him four months ago.
But Facebook is hoping the size of the judgment will scare off other spammers who might be tempted to target the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company’s audience of more than 120 million users…
Read it at CNN
