The rumor mill has been churning Monday afternoon with reports that Twitter is working on its own photo-sharing service that would compete with the likes of Twitpic and Yfrog . TechCrunch first reported the tip, citing multiple unnamed sources, Monday afternoon.
In the competitive world of business it can be hard to stand out. A creative business card can help differentiate you from others and one way in which we’re seeing people attempt this is through augmented reality. Augmented reality cards can provide a wealth of information including additional text, images and even video just by holding the card up to a webcam.
Sunday was Indy 500 day, and our thoughts turned to fast cars, the latest automotive tech, the 100th anniversary of the Indianapolis 500, and … world-record truck jumping? That’s what happened at turn 4 of the Indianapolis 500 race track, when stunt driver and Top Gear star Tanner Faust warmed up the crowd by setting a new jumping distance world record for a 4-wheeled vehicle. Driving down a huge ramp designed look like a Hot Wheels “V-Drop” track as part of a “Fearless at the 500″ promotion, Faust picked up enough speed to launch his specially modified “Pro 2″ truck a world-record 332 feet. That was more than enough to beat the previous record of 301 feet. Until the day of the jump, Faust’s identity was kept secret. He’d been practicing for months — he tells his story in this video, revealed for the first time on Sunday: And the video teaser that led up to the jump: More About: cars , Indianapolis 500 , indy 500 2011 , indy 500 truck jump 2011 , jump , Memorial Day weekend , Tanner Faust , trending , truck jump 2011 , video For more Tech & Gadgets coverage: Follow Mashable Tech & Gadgets on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Tech & Gadgets channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad
Valuations of social media companies are starting to remind us of 1999. But are they overvalued? Now that Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion, LinkedIn’s IPO valued the company at $8.9 billion after its first day of trading , and Facebook’s estimated value is pushing $100 billion , you might be starting to wonder if buying into user numbers rather than revenue is a good idea. Social media site G+ , a community of professionals, entrepreneurs and academics, put together this detailed infographic that lays it all out in front of you
The great Gil Scott-Heron died Friday at age 62, and across the Internet, the American poet, musician and author is remembered for his groundbreaking music and influential style. One of his most popular compositions was “ The Revolution Will Not Be Televised ,” but when he recorded that poem and song back in 1970, he didn’t realize that a lot of his work would be immortalized on YouTube decades later. We’ve scoured YouTube and found the 5 most popular official videos of Gil Scott-Heron ‘s work, giving you a small taste of his recording and performing career that spanned four decades. Gil, you’ll be missed: Gil Scott Heron - Washington D.C from black wax gil scott music poet Gil Scott-Heron | We Almost Lost Detroit Gil Scott-Heron and his Amnesia Express from March 14, 1990 in London, UK. Gil Scott-Heron - The Bottle Video clip for Gil Scott-Heron's The Bottle. Gil Scott-Heron - 'I'm New Here' (official video) Gil Scott-Heron - 'Me And The Devil' (Official HD Video) Graphic courtesy The Guardian More About: Gil Scott-Heron , rip , the revolution will not be televised , trending , videos , youtube For more Video coverage: Follow Mashable Video on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Video channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad
If event registration site Eventbrite’s experience is any indication, social media marketers looking for monetary returns on their efforts might get more value from Facebook than Twitter. The company announced Wednesday that an average tweet about an event drove 80 cents in ticket sales during the past six months, whereas an average Facebook Like drove $1.34. The study, which used in-house social analytics tools to track ticket sales on the site, was a continuation of a similar analysis the company released in October after analyzing data from a 12-week period. That study also indicated Facebook drove more sales for Eventbrite than Twitter, although the difference between the two networks’ sales per post was greater at that point than throughout the entire six-month period. In addition to each individual Facebook Like driving more sales than an individual tweet, the study also revealed cumulative activity on Facebook was greater than activity on Twitter for Eventbrite.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has stepped down, more than two weeks after the protests that began January 25 in the country — and launched a flood of #Jan25 and #Egypt tweets as well as media coverage that broke the mold — to remove the president from power. From the beginning, the revolution in Egypt was propelled by the use of social media. It at least partly began on Facebook with the creation of Facebook groups that gained hundreds of thousands of members and promoted the early protests in Cairo. Subsequently, the government blocked Facebook and Twitter and eventually shut down Internet access completely. And with the outside world following the unfolding revolution online, political leaders and others, including Twitter, spoke out against the violence and freedom of expression issues at risk
Facebook’s putting up some big numbers in terms of U.S. web traffic. Right now, the site accounts for one out of every four pageviews in the United States — that’s 10% of all Internet visits. According to data from analysis and intelligence firm Hitwise , Facebook’s year-over-year growth has been phenomenal. We reported in June that the social network was set to eclipse Google in web traffic; now, Hitwise is showing that in the past week, Facebook.com saw 3% more web visits and almost five times more pageviews than Google.com. By these metrics, Facebook is by far the single most popular website in the United States. Still, other sources with other measurements and criteria show some variance. comScore has also released stats showing huge growth from Facebook — a 55% year-over-year increase , in fact. But comScore places Facebook at 151.13 million U.S. uniques for October 2010, slightly behind Google’s 173.3 monthly uniques, which means the search giant is the social network’s sole competitor for web traffic domination. The company has been growing at a breakneck pace all year. It announced that its network had reached the extraordinary milestone of 500 million members in July. And at Web. 2.0 Summit this week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the audience that half of those members visit Facebook on a daily basis .
Facebook is set to launch a new “modern messaging system,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a press event this morning in San Francisco. Zuckerberg says more than four billion messages are currently sent through Facebook each day. He also shared that Facebook believes that modern messaging is seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple and minimal. “It’s not e-mail,” he said. Interestingly enough, Facebook is handing out facebook.com e-mail addresses to all users. The system, however, is really modeled after chat according to Andrew Bosworth. “People should share however they want to share,” he says. The new messaging system is composed of three parts: seamless messaging, cross-platform conversation history and the social inbox. The latter is an inbox for filtering the messages you want, organized by the people you care about. It’s designed to highlight conversations with your real friends and be spam free. According to the Facebook blog post , “Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key.” The messaging system is also designed to be platform-agnostic, so users can send and receive messages via mobile, IM or Facebook. It’s designed to make it simpler for users to communicate in real-time with their real friends, wherever they are.
Some Facebook applications have been leaking user information – specifically, Facebook UIDs – to third party companies, the Wall Street Journal reports . The apps in question have a huge combined userbase; according to the WSJ , all of the 10 most popular Facebook apps are guilty of giving away user IDs to third parties, specifically Internet research and advertising companies. These include Zynga’s FarmVille, Texas HoldEm Poker and FrontierVille; according to AppData , FarmVille alone had more than 80 million users in February 2010. Facebook confirmed some of the issues in a blog post , claiming most of the apps in question shared the user IDs inadvertently, due to “technical details.” “Our policy is very clear about protecting user data, ensuring that no one can access private user information without explicit user consent (…) Recently, it has come to our attention that several applications built on Facebook Platform were passing the User ID (UID), an identifier that we use within our APIs, in a manner that violated this policy. In most cases, developers did not intend to pass this information, but did so because of the technical details of how browsers work,” the post said. Earlier this weekend, Facebook has blocked LOLapps, one of the biggest social games providers on the Facebook platform, due to “violations of Facebook’s terms.” The WSJ claims that some of the apps created by LOLapps were also transmitting user info to third parties. LOLapps (whose apps have now been reinstated on Facebook) has confirmed this was the case in a blog post , claiming it shared the info inadvertently. Facebook also said that “knowledge of a UID does not enable anyone to access private user information without explicit user consent.” This is true, but Facebook UID can be very revealing, depending on the user’s privacy settings. Knowing the ID of a Facebook user who shares information with “Everyone” can potentially give you access to his/her name, phone number, e-mail, photos and other personal info. Even if a user has set the strictest possible privacy settings on his/her account on Facebook, the ID may still reveal his/her name and Facebook friends. And then there’s the issue of scale. If an application with tens of millions of users shares Facebook UIDs with an advertising company, that’s a lot of data. Depending on your privacy settings on Facebook, this particular advertising company now may only know your name and the names of your friends, or much more