‘Nets Big Thing

Archive for the ‘Net Worthy News’ Category

AP – Farrah Fawcett is being treated for anal cancer that has spread to her liver and has been hospitalized for a complication from a routine treatment, a producer who worked with the actress and her doctor said Monday. read more

Editor’s Note: Social networks are taking off in China. The following guest post by George Godula. David Li, and Richard Yu explores how Chinese social networks are pursuing different business models than their American counterparts, relying more on micropayments and the sale of virtual goods. George Godula is the founder of Web2Asia, an East Asian incubator and also a consultancy for Western startups trying to enter markets in China, Japan and Korea. David Li is a developer of social networking applications such as Growing Gifts, and he also was the developer of OnChat, an early in-browser graphical avatar chat system. Richard Yu is a Seattle native living in China, where he consults for Shanghai-based web startups while writing his blog.

Despite China’s massively growing internet market, international giants like Google and Facebook are having trouble making gains with the 300 million Chinese online users. China’s netizens are on average very young – 66.7 % of them are younger than 29 years old and 35.2 % of them are teenagers—with social networking and entertainment applications being the most popular. Read the rest of this entry »

The default mode for Google Analytics and other Website tracking software often makes you wait an entire day to find out what is happening on your site. There is a 24-hour delay (although this can often be changed in settings). Speed up the feedback loop, and Websites in theory could become even more responsive to traffic and attention peaks or to unexpected sluggishness. Betaworks, John Borthwick’s startup holding company which has stakes in Twitter and Tweetdeck, and spun off bit.ly, has just launched Chartbeat.

Keeping with Betaworks’ focus on real-time data services, Chartbeat offers a dashboard for Website owners that monitors how many people are on their site at any given second, where they are coming from, which pages visitors are looking at the most, as well as conversations and links from Twitter. It also shows average load times, what percentage of current visitors are returning, how many are reading, how many are actively writing in comments or engaging with the site in some other way, and how many are simply idle. All it requires is one line of Javascript to be inserted on a site and then it pings Chartbeat every 10 seconds. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a heck of a rumor that we’ve sourced from two separate people close to the negotiations: Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter. We don’t know the price but can assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding.

Twitter turned down an offer to be bought by Facebook just a few months ago for half a billion dollars, although that was based partially on overvalued Facebook stock. Google would be paying in cash and/or publicly valued stock, which is equivalent to cash. So whatever the final acquisition value might be, it can’t be compared apples-to-apples with the Facebook deal. Read the rest of this entry »

Actress Camilla Belle has dismissed rumors she has split with teen singing heartthrob Joe Jonas.

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Today at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, a company called Nomee is revealing a new software application for the purpose of aggregating all your social networking sites into a single desktop experience. In a way, this software is somewhat reminiscent of the web-based PeopleBrowsr in the sense that it’s attempting to pool all your networks and identities into one single window. However, unlike PeopleBrowsr, Nomee is not just aggregation software – it also functions as a social identity management tool, letting you control which identities are shared with which people. That makes Nomee more like a next-gen social address book than anything else. Read the rest of this entry »

In today’s do-it-yourself online world, self-publishing your own content can be accomplished in a plethora of ways. If, however, you’re looking to create and distribute a polished e-book made up of either text, photos, audio, and video, or a combination of all four, Myebook is a solution with a slick interface for creating and viewing e-books worth considering. Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone sent out an Email earlier this afternoon to a number of users who had previously enabled ‘autofollowing’, stating that the company is planning to shut the feature down. Read the rest of this entry »

Convincing people to pay for nothing, or rather for things with zero marginal cost to produce, is a great business model—in theory. In practice, there are so few examples to point to, and most of them are overseas, such as Helsinki-based teen virtual world Habbo. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you remember what came in between printed encyclopedias and Wikipedia? For many, the answer is Microsoft Encarta, which was distributed starting in the 90s via CD-ROM and more recently on the Web via MSN. Today, Microsoft announced that it’s discontinuing Encarta later this year, offering symbolic confirmation that Wikipedia is the world’s definitive reference guide. Read the rest of this entry »