social media

MyLife wants to streamline your online social life

MyLife, a people-finding Web service, hopes to expand its presence in the social media world by offering a new dashboard to organize your feeds and e-mail accounts.

The dashboard, which went live today, takes a user's Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts and combines them with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and AOL accounts.

CEO Jeff Tinsley said people often start their days by accessing their social media, so MyLife wants to simplify the process by putting them all on one dashboard.

"Consumers are just overwhelmed," he said. "They're using many different services and they're jumping … Read more

New Digg is now live, with focus on 'top stories'

Betaworks delivered on its promise and launched the newly redesigned Digg Web site today. In fact, the site even comes a day earlier than expected. Just yesterday, Betaworks revealed that the news aggregation site would have a complete makeover that would do away with the headlines list, add photos, and integrate Facebook and Twitter into Digg scores.

"On July 20, we announced that we were turning Digg back into a startup and rebuilding it from scratch in six weeks," Betaworks wrote in a blog post. "After an intense month and a half, we managed to get the … Read more

Tip or Skip turns online shopping into a game

For me, there are no worse time-sucks than social media and online shopping. Online games, however, have never been a problem. Until now.

Tip or Skip, which launched today with $2 million in funding from 500 Startups, John Ason, Corinthian Group, and angel investors, combines a Fancy or Pinterest-like online shopping experience with a game element.

Started by two childhood friends -- Michael Weiksner, a persuasive-technology specialist who has studied under B.J. Fogg, and Nathaniel McNamara, a mobile-commerce specialist -- the site aims to keep shoppers engaged by appealing to their trend-spotting sensibilities. The idea is that if you … Read more

Facebook and Washington state join forces to register voters

Washington state is the first state to get hip to social media for its voter registration. According to the Associated Press, the secretary of state's office announced today that it will feature an app on its Facebook page letting residents register to vote.

"In this age of social media and more people going online for services, this is a natural way to introduce people to online registration and leverage the power of friends on Facebook to get more people registered," co-director of elections Shane Hamlin told the Associated Press.

The app was designed by Microsoft, which joined … Read more

How the world's biggest companies are doing social media

The graphic above show the 10 most-often mentioned companies on social media among the Global Fortune 100. That's according to the third annual Global Social Media Check-Up Study of how Global Fortune 100 companies are using social media, conducted by Burson-Marsteller and Visible Technologies. You can find the full study at BM.com/social, including the executive summary and an infographic.

Here are five findings highlighted by the authors of the study:

1. The Fortune Global 100 were mentioned a total of 10,400,132 times online in one month. Gone are the days that companies and brands … Read more

Facebook users not as satisfied as Google+ users

Facebook's reputation for customer satisfaction continues to tarnish while Google+ pops up on a customer satisfaction index for the first time and makes it to the top of the social network pyramid.

The story's an old one by now. Facebook is the Web's most popular site with hundreds of millions of users, but people still don't like it.

Now Google+, which has been dubbed by some as a ghost town, is gaining some traction with a higher customer satisfaction rating, according to the numbers released from the American Customer Satisfaction Index today. According to the new … Read more

Can Digg make a comeback?

Digg's painful downfall has finally hit rock bottom. Does that mean Digg can only go up now?

As you've probably heard, the once-mighty social news Web site has sold to Betaworks for a paltry $500,000. The total price of the acquisition was around $16 million, if you include The Washington Post's acquisition of the team and LinkedIn's acquisition of the patents.

That price is still a far cry from the $200 million that Google was ready to spend to acquire Digg in 2008. And those numbers seem paltry in comparison with the billion dollar deals … Read more

Three lessons from changing jobs

This week, after 20 years at Columbia Journalism School (one as a student, 19 as a professor and seven as a dean), I changed jobs. 

I have joined the office of Provost John Coatsworth, who is the highest academic officer of Columbia University. I will be the CU's first Chief Digital Officer, focusing on online learning and social- and digital media.

I will still continue to teach a few classes at the Journalism School, but my priority is going to be dealing with all the dramatic opportunities and challenges in the world of online education. Several units of … Read more

Heads up, LinkedIn users: 93% of recruiters are looking at you

LinkedIn users hunting for a job may want to spruce up their profiles.

A recent survey from Jobvite found that 93 percent of job recruiters tap into LinkedIn to find qualified candidates, up from 87 percent last year and 78 percent in 2010. But the other popular social networks are growing in influence as well.

In second place, Facebook is used by 66 percent of the recruiters polled, up from 55 percent last year. And Twitter is on the watch list among 54 percent of those surveyed, up from 47 percent last year.

Overall, 92 percent of employers and recruiters … Read more