microblogging

Microblogging service Tumblr is being acquired by Yahoo.

Yahoo announced the deal early Monday, along with a "promise not to screw it up." The Internet pioneer is paying $1.1 billion for Tumblr, "substantially all of which is payable in cash," Yahoo said.

The news had been expected. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the Yahoo board had approved the deal.

Under the terms of the deal, Yahoo will allow Tumblr, which has over 300 million monthly unique visitors, to operate as a completely separate entity that retains "the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and … Read more

Tumblr has resisted putting ads on its site for years, but little by little the idea of advertising has become more acceptable. Now, the company seems to be jumping in with two feet.

The microblogging site has hired sales guru Lee Brown, according to All Things D. Brown joins Tumblr from his position of senior vice president of national sales at Groupon. Before that, he was the vice president of East Coast U.S. and Canada sales for Yahoo.

Brown is slated to report to Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp, according to All Things D, which should be fun … Read more

Twitter is trying to do more than just spotlight trending stories and events -- it's trying to be part of the spotlight as well.

Dick Costolo, the microblogging company's CEO, told The Wall Street Journal that Twitter was ramping up its effort to help users sort out tweets surrounding major, live events by increasing its presence associated with the event. That effort is embodied by a partnership Twitter has formed with NBCUniversal to create a page that would corral millions of tweets sent by athletes, fans, and TV personalities during the Olympics in London.

With the live events … Read more

Last month it was blog users, this month it's blog owners. The Chinese government announced today that it will tighten restrictions on all Internet service providers for blogs, microblogs, and online forums -- forcing them to act as Web police, according to the Associated Press.

This is just the latest in a long list of restrictions that the government is enforcing on its citizens. According to the Associated Press, China began requiring real-name registration on all microblogs in December. However, people still seem to be sneaking under the radar.

The new restrictions entail making the Internet providers act as … Read more

Twitter announced today that its Web site is getting new enhancements geared toward being "optimized for speed." Besides getting rid of the hashbang (#!) in URLs, the social network is also focusing on reducing the "time to first Tweet" and ensuring only what's necessary will load with each Web page.

"To improve the twitter.com experience for everyone, we've been working to take back control of our front-end performance by moving the rendering to the server," Twitter engineering manager Dan Webb wrote in a blog post. "This has allowed us to drop … Read more

China's Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo has followed through on a promise to institute a "contract" with users over their conduct on the communication platform.

Sina Weibo's new code of conduct, introduced today, takes aim at users who attempt to post messages that speak unkindly of China's constitution, harm the "unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity" of the country, or reveal national secrets, according to Reuters, which was first to report on the news. The code also bans users from spreading rumors and promoting "evil teachings and superstitions."

Sina Weibo earlier this … Read more

Just a couple of weeks after Chinese censors lambasted the social network Sina Weibo for "rumor" mongering, the Twitter-like service announced plans to establish a "user contract" by the end of this month. This comes shortly after the uberpopular site also promised to fight against rumors on the Internet.

According to tech news site The Next Web, which got its hands on the contract and translated it, there are several points that look like they could impede the free flow of information.

It seems as if, for Sina Weibo, the point of the contract is to … Read more

It's no secret Tumblr is big and growing, but now, the time has come for the company to start generating some cash. Just don't expect ads to play a role in that.

Speaking to AdAge in an interview published today, Tumblr CEO David Karp made it abundantly clear that his company has no interest in placing ads on its service, saying that the microblogging tool is "selling our desks to avoid that, it's a complete last resort."

Still, the temptation to bring ads to Tumblr, which has yet to effectively monetize its growth, might be … Read more

Tumblr is on a roll.

The company's founder and CEO David Karp spoke at the Digital Life Design (DLD) Conference in Munich earlier today, and revealed that Tumblr is visited by over 120 million unique users each month, helping it tally over 15 billion monthly pageviews. What's more, the nearly 42 million microblogs currently in operation are re-blogged via RSS, Twitter, and Facebook an average of nine times, dramatically expanding their footprint across the Web.

The Next Web was the first to report on Karp's comments.

Just four months ago, Tumblr announced that it was generating 13 … Read more