Google plans to roll out several major improvements to its social network, Google+, during the next three months.
One early improvement will be Google Doc integration. This enhancement is expected to be available within a week.
Future improvements include deeper integration with Google search, YouTube, Google Maps, and the company's mobile operating system, Android.
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At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Fransisco last night, CEO Dick Costolo unveiled numerous mind-boggling statistics about his real-time, microblogging social slash information network platform thingy (read: Twitter).
Twitter now delivers 250 million tweets per day—up from 100 million at the start of 2011—which equates to nearly 175,000 tweets per minute. These tweets are coming from more than 100 million active users, including over 50 million daily users (now pause to consider the fact that Justin Bieber has 13.5 million followers). Now seeing almost two billion tweets per week, Dick notes that it took the startup over three years to reach its first billion tweets.
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I recently attended Marketo's Revenue Rockstar Tour in Toronto at the Pantages Hotel.
While Marketo says they are the number two automation company behind Salesforce in their respective niche of targeting small to medium sized businesses, they say the best way to generate leads with their platform is through content marketing.
Toronto-based Eloqua founded automation over ten years ago and Doug Wotherspoon of Algonquin College has found it effective for generating sales from alumni and tracking prospective students, but that's just basic measurement man.
A few months ago AOL announced their "prove portrait" feature that shows where to best optimize your display ad on a webpage for increased click-thru rates and interaction time through varying biometrics as I explained a few weeks ago.
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Somehow, the formula of "Dear Noun, statement of opinion" has become popular online. Sometimes it's good—"Dear Yaletown, I love you. Sincerely, Yorkshire Terrier." But usuallly it's bad. Case in point: tonight's consumer response to RIM's outages this week.
Trending even hotter than "Downloading iOS 5," "Dear BlackBerry" is making the rounds big time on Twitter tonight and it's not to spread the love.
read moreWith lots of talk about HootSuite being swallowed up by Facebook, the social media upstart made news this morning with an acquisition of their own. HootSuite has acquired fellow Vancouver startup Geotoko.
Geotoko is HootSuite's fifth acquistion following What the Trend, Twapper Keeper, TwitterBar and Swift App.
Geotoko is a geo-aggregation tool which gathers audience information from check-in tools like Facebook Places and Foursquare. The addition of this tool within the HootSuite dashboard will round-out the existing geo-capabilities and help brick and mortar businesses with multiple locations to understand the nuances of their audience based on location, sentiment and demographic. Then savvy companies can outreach with specific offers, promotions and adjustments to campaigns.
In May 2010, Founder Adarsh Pallian launched Geotoko at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield and earlier this year Pallian (along with HootSuite's Ryan Holmes) was named to Techvibes Digital Media People to Watch in BC list for 2011.
Pallian has had some success building on Twitter in the past - in 2009 Howard Lindzon's StockTwits purchased Pallian's Chart.ly for an undisclosed amount.
A new report has revealed that in settling a lawsuit, Twitter has finally gained control over the trademark of the word "tweet."
Once a sound reserved for describing the utterances of our feathered friends, "tweeting" has become ubiquitous thanks to the tremendous rise of social microblogging platform Twitter.
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UPDATE 3: Invoke Media and HootSuite were initially quiet about the rising speculation that Mark Zuckerberg was visiting Vancouver to acquire the social media dashboard. However, after the Wall Street Journal picked up our story, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes tweeted, "@facebook isn't buying @hootsuite anytime soon."
The last bit—"anytime soon"—is open to interpretation. It could mean they are in the early stages of discussion… or it could just mean it's not happening (ever).
UPDATE 2: The Facebook CEO could very well be in town to discuss acquiring social media dashboard HootSuite, if growing rumours can be belived.
People have guessed numerous reasons why Zuck is in Vancouver, but the most common reason noted across comments (below), tweets, and private messages has been talk of an acquisition. And interestingly, HootSuite is the name that's been floating around as the specific company. Local radio station The Beat 94.5 was discussing this possibility today as well.
It would certainly make sense: HootSuite, born from Invoke Media, is Vancouver-based and also a logical target for Facebook—especially considering the social network company is trying to be more active with acquistions.
Back in May, semi-competitor Twitter bought TweetDeck for $40 million.
HootSuite has continually expanded its offerings, adding analytics tools to its roster of services and most recently integrating with LinkedIn.
UPDATE: So far he's been reportedly seen at Gastown on hastings, near UBC in a BMW rental, and at a furniture store with a woman. But it has not yet been confirmed officially why he is in town.
ORIGINAL: Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is hanging out on the wet West Coast here in Vancouver.
Evidenced online by a Facebook status update (that had location on), Zuck is definitely in town but the "why" of it all is unclear.
Vancouverites were surprised to see the hoodie-clad social network creator strolling down Hastings Street in the historic Gastown yesterday.
Could he be here for the acquisition of a Vancouver startup? Perhaps. Opening night for the Vancouver Canucks? Unless he has a thing for the Penguins—sans Crosby, too—probably not. Maybe he just likes how pretty Vancouver is (although he's a month late on catching any rays).
If you know any details please share them in the comments.
Photo: @Felix_K_
The Ontario provincial election wrapped up last night with the Liberals unofficially narrowly missing a third-straight majority, as Dalton McGunity remains premier of Ontario despite being over a dozen percentage points down in the polls prior to the start of the election. The election Twitter tracker was also very accurate in the early measurements of the election showing how the Liberals had caught up in a previous article I wrote.
For measurement purposes, I am comparing the Twitter sentiment results to that of the popular vote in last night's election to see how accurate E.L.E.C.T is. Is it more accurate than the 19 out of 20 or 5% margin of error traditional standard political research pollsters predict? The numbers I've used are an average from seven different days since the debate as recorded on the Edelman E.L.E.C.T site (including the night of), up to October 5th, the day before the election.
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#occupywallstreet, which is a movement that began out of the radical revolutionary magazine AdBusters grew to over 50,000 protestors in Liberty Square of New York City on the 19th day of protests yesterday.
AdBusters Canada is also responsible for the precedent setting action against the CBC which will enshrine the right of citizens to equal airtime.
The National Post reported Sunday that the Occupy Wall Street movement will be coming to Toronto, Montreal and Calgary on October 17th. Basically, an Occupy Bay Street for Toronto.
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Most non-techsters will know him as Justin Timberlake in The Social Network.
Sean Parker, cofounder of Napster and Plaxo, is also the founding president of Facebook, which is probably why he's never had a Twitter account.
Sean Parker is now gaining new Twitter followers every second (he's gained several hundred while writing this post). So far, he has just one tweet:
Sorry Zuck, I had to do it eventually. (Actually @scooterbraun made me do it.)
Sean has had a Facebook Page for a while with an enviable URL and 30,000 subscribers. We'll see if he continues to maintain or catches the Twitter bug. Either way I fancy he'll fetch a lot more than 30,000 followers.