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Facebook acquires FriendFeed

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The big social network news of the day is Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed.

facebook-friendfeedFriendFeeds’ cofounder Bret Taylor spoke of the two networks’ “common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends”, while Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg spoke of how he “admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information” ever since he first used FriendFeed.

For the moment, FriendFeed will continue to run as a standalone service, while all FriendFeed’s staff will work for Facebook and its directors will take new senior positions. [Read more…]

Originally posted on August 10, 2009 @ 6:43 pm

Vodafone UK offers “free Facebook” for customers

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vodafone_logoWell isn’t Vodafone the friendly mobile phone operator at the moment? Not content with slashing mobile roaming rates (forget the fact that they’re unfair and should never have been so exorbitantly high in the first place) and offering up Twitter love to its customers, it’s now announced a week of free Facebook access for its users.

Yes, from Friday 24th July, for one week only, those with funky cell phones capable of viewing the web (the Nokia N97 for example) will be able to surf the social network for nothing.

Presumably, the hope is that you get so hooked that, when it stops being free, you’ll carry on and pay Voda’s data rates for the privilege. [Read more…]

Originally posted on July 22, 2009 @ 7:20 am

Shozu lowering cost of mobile multimedia sharing

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shozu-swirlShozu, which connects mobile users with various social and media networks, has announced a partnership with MAXroam that will allow users to send multimedia files for much lower cost across 139 countries.

Initially marketed to iPhone users, who can download the ShoZu app for $4.99, the application will also be rolled out across Windows Marketplace, Ovi, and the BlackBerry App World (no Android Marketplace?).

With the app comes a coupon code offering them a $4.99 credit on a MAXroam account. [Read more…]

Originally posted on July 23, 2009 @ 10:43 am

Ning Valued at $750 Million

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Social networks are hot. People like to connect, and marketers could potentially make a killing with access to your social graph. Facebook alone is currently valued at $6.5 billion. Even Google’s getting in on the action through Google Friend Connect.

Imagine, then, the value of a service to create your own social networks. Ning, the hosted social network solution from browser inventor Marc Andreessen, just raised $15 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners. This latest investment round values the startup at — get this — $750 million. That’s pretty good for a freemium service without its own advertising platform, especially since only three percent of its network creators actually pay for ad-free service.

Free self-hosted social networking scripts abound on the Internet, but the average community leader has neither the time nor the patience to install and maintain such scripts. Ning could do for social networks what Blogger once did for blogs — idiotproof them for the masses.

Originally posted on July 22, 2009 @ 5:46 am