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| Summize to be Rolled Into Twitter Posted: 15 Jul 2008 01:15 PM CDT Twitter has made the news official, they have acquired Summize and will be rolling it into Twitter (as pictured below). I had been skeptical of the news last week given that the sources were incredibly sketchy. Josh Chandler, a practically unknown blogger, somehow got the scoop on the story. It appears to be a freak instance that ended up turning out to be right. Regardless, the acquisition of Summize makes a lot of sense and it will definitely be welcomed by Twitter users. I temporarily stopped using Twitter following all of their crashes and the API service not working but thanks to the new iPhone I have been using it again on a regular basis. For the time being Summize has immediately been shifted to search.twitter.com (makes a lot of sense). If you haven’t used Summize before, you are in for a treat. This is the most user friendly search tool for Twitter out there. The search is real-time and when you enter a query, the page will automatically notify you when new search results are found. Acquisition of Summize was a no brainer for Twitter. While I may have been skeptical of the source last week, I still suggested it was a smart idea. Looks like Twitter was listening to the community and decided to move forward with the acquisition. Great move for Twitter! It looks like things may be slowly starting to shape up for the company after a couple challenging months. |
| Reunion.com Experiences Remarkable Growth, Not Shocking Posted: 15 Jul 2008 11:59 AM CDT
As I’ve previously covered, Reunion.com spams the friends of everybody that joins the site. It encourages users to check their email contact list to see if their friends are on the site. If their friends aren’t on the site it automatically sends an email to their contact list without notifying the users. This is a standard tactic which has been used countless times including by Plaxo which initially grew their user base with aggressive spam tactics. As I wrote earlier this month, this isn’t the only violation of privacy that Reunion.com has made. As one article put it, “Reunion.com's privacy policy says the site 'prohibits registration by and will not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under 13.' But that doesn't address the site's own data-gathering.” There is a very good chance that all of these privacy violations, regardless of the company’s remarkable growth is going to result in a lawsuit. According to sources of mine, there are individuals that are looking to sue the company for overly aggressive marketing techniques. The funny thing is how public Reunion.com’s tactics are. Perhaps this is one thing that would protect them in court. If you Google “Reunion.com”, the first page contains multiple articles referencing the company’s email spam tactics. Growth is great for the company but sacrificing user privacy and user trust to grow your company isn’t a solid long-term strategy. |
| The True Test for FriendFeed: Facebook Comments Posted: 15 Jul 2008 09:01 AM CDT Last month Facebook released the first version of mini-feed comments. I claimed that it was another step for Facebook toward FriendFeed functionality. Apparently not enough people were commenting though because Facebook has since made a slight change as MG Siegler pointed out yesterday. Rather than displaying a plus sign which potentially didn’t signify “comments” for some users, so Facebook has decided to go ahead and spell it out. Ultimately this is an extremely small change but if Facebook users aren’t commenting on mini-feed stories, perhaps the concept of FriendFeed is just a bunch of Silicon Valley hype. Personally, I think it’s a little hype combined with great functionality. I think what Facebook is instead missing is comments from their main feed. Most users don’t spend a lot of time navigating their friends mini-feeds (as far as I know). Conversely when a user first logs into Facebook the first thing they see is newsfeed items. Rather than going to a user’s profile and posting on their wall about a news story, it would be easier simply to comment directly from within a news item. Even with good design, it may be that users simply don’t want to comment on each others’ news stories. If that’s the case, FriendFeed is officially a bunch of hype and will remain limited to an extremely small group of users. I don’t think that’s the case though. Do you think FriendFeed is more hype then actually being useful? Are you a regular FriendFeed user? Do you comment on peoples’ mini-feeds in Facebook? |
Today I received a press release from Reunion.com notifying me that they had successfully added a whopping 1.6 million new members in June, beating out LinkedIn according to comScore. This is nothing compared to the more 9 million added by Facebook in the same month but Reunion.com is in another class. So how did they get the boost in traffic?
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