Archive for April, 2009

Yahoo will cuts its workforce by 700 people following a 78% plunge in its Q1 profits to £80m. New chief executive Carol Bartz admitted that Yahoo was, “not immune to the ongoing economic downturn. We had a lot of people running around telling people what to do but nobody was doing anything,” she said. Yahoo cut 2,500 jobs last year. Bartz said Yahoo will now focus on creating, “kick-ass experiences for its users.”

In a counterintuitive move for a search engine, Google has released some research into the US claiming that display, video and text ads on its content network are just as effective as search. In a study Google conducted last year, ads in its content network, which reaches about 80% of internet users in the U.S., was more cost-effective for advertisers than search. Among advertisers that use both, the cost of reaching a consumer who ultimately clicks on an ad cost 2.6% less on Google’s content network than in Google’s search results. In total, 51.6% of Google advertisers got better returns from the content network than search.

Imeem, a new social music service that sees music fans stream music and video for free, develop playlists and find friends with similar tastes, is gaining momentum. In ComScore’s list of top social networking sites in the US it was ranked at number 13 with 6m unique visitors last December. Registered imeem users can also embed their playlists in their profiles on other social networking sites like MySpace.

Twitter’s co-founder, Biz Stone has said that he’s not convinced traditional advertising will be a ‘good model’ for the microblogging service as it strives to reach critical mass. The Japanese arm of Twitter has experimented with advertising, but this is because it is partly-run by a marketing company. Stone added that while he has seen “lots of great signs of potential business models,” it will first aim to build a “strong, robust, worldwide network” that becomes “part of everyday life for people, organizations and companies.”

The coffee shop Groundz Coffee from Houston in Texas has just started offering its customers the chance to order their coffee via a Twitter post. Groundz customers are happy with the new service, with their numbers doubling since tweeting orders began.

Twitter, the microblogging service was attacked by a malicious computer programme or ‘worm’, designed to automatically reproduce itself once it was clicked on. The worm staged four different attacks last week but did not steal personal information from Twitter’s users according to co- founder, Biz Stone.

YouTube has signed major deals with Hollywood studios such as Sony Pictures and MGM, in a move that will enable the leading video site to offer premium content to its users. YouTube will now be able to stream thousands of TV shows and full-length films for its US users. It will also offer a new vehicle for advertisers by inserting ads into the programme breaks via its TV Ads Online format.

In a nod to concerns among its users that Facebook was stealthily taking ownership of their content infringing privacy rights, the social network will let its users choose how to govern the site. Users will now be able to vote for their favourite terms and conditions from the revised version released in February that incorporates feedback and the old terms released last year. The vote makes good on Facebook’s pledge to involve its 200m users more directly in the governance of the site.

Friendfeed has launched a new version of its lifestreaming service, seeing user messages and comments pop up ‘live’ on the web page, without needing to be refreshed. The constant stream of news and comment has led bloggers to hail a new trend of ‘real-time functionality’ . Some are warning that there is a danger that the bigger players like Google and Microsoft may be left behind. Less well-known than other social networks, Friendfeed is gaining momentum as a real-time aggregation service that automatically incorporates updates from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and other online content published with a RSS feed.

Facebook now has more than 200m users worldwide. According to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, if Facebook was a country it would be the fifth largest in the world, bigger than Brazil, smaller than Indonesia. The Facebook team has also revealed that of its 45m active users, 80% are voting age.