“Welcome to the world of tomorrow!” No, that’s not right. Let me try again: “Welcome to the world of the last seven days!” That sounds better! There’s a lot to show-and-tell, so without any further ado, let’s jump straight into last week’s social media news. Read the rest of this entry »
Microblogging-platform Pownce announced its shutdown on 15th of December yesterday. The company was bought by Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type and TypePad. The team will continue to work for Six Apart on new projects – seems the company saw no light at the end of the infamous twitter-tunnel: while Pownce hat a couple of unique features to offer, the community never reached the critical size that turns microblogging-fun into a profitable business. Read the rest of this entry »
Bite, lick, or tackle them back, or click here to theorize about what this all means. I’m very happy to publish the first guest posting here on datadirt. Kim De Vries, who I met via Facebook, wrote a very interesting paper about the symbolic kind of communication we all know so well from social networks like Facebook. “He who never superpoked shall throw the first rock” – enjoy the reading! Dr. Kim De Vries is working at the California State University Stanislaus, you can reach her at kdevries [at] csustan.edu Read the rest of this entry »
While US, Indian and Australian users are still able to fully use twitter’s great SMS features, European twitter fans dearly miss the fastest and most direct way to receive updates, a proven system that even works with a 10 year old mobile. I was pretty shocked about the seemingly impossible mission to find a partner for the European market, as one would guess that players like T-Mobile should actually be pretty interested in hugging twitter closely. And I don’t believe that a few cosmetic design touches will make up for missing SMS support. I hope that twitter finds a way to enable short message service usage in Europe again, but on the other hand that’s the best market-entry point for competitors, as long as they are able to offer SMS integration. Read the rest of this entry »
The social web is all about user participation, right? Well, maybe. Kind of. But the truth is that the web 2.0 these days is all about syndication: call it cross-, auto- or whatever-posting, feeds are running wild. Just take friendfeed: ff posts to facebook, twitter posts to facebook… soup.io, an Austrian Startup, also has nice and nifty auto-syndication features. The same can be said about tumblr. So what happens when you let these two mighty beasts battle, umm, I mean talk to, each other? Read the rest of this entry »