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Facebook app allow users to refer and earn

Minic Rivera — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:51:40 +0000

ReferQuest.com and its Facebook version has launched, allowing its to state what they’re looking for, along with the reward they’ll pay the person who finds it for them.

Money can be earned also by promoting requests, finding matches, and earning the offered rewards. ReferQuest.com currently offers over $40 thousand in rewards. Small businesses can use the free application to offer finders’ fees to reward customer acquisition. Posting requests is free, and users only pay when they’ve found what they’re seeking.

It’s straightforward: Offer rewards for the results you want. We will see though how this new site progresses.

Bing Parody Ad

Mike Abundo — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:08:28 +0000

To many in the Silicon Valley developer crowd, Bing stands for “But It’s Not Google”. Even at its very announcement, Bing was thunderously upstaged by Google Wave. Even the public equates search with Google, so much so that searching is “googling”. Despite Ballmer’s chair-throwing hatred of Eric Schmidt, Bing is still far from a challenge to Google.

College Humor rubs all of that in Microsoft’s face, with a parody ad that encourages you to google stuff on Bing.

Mad Avenue Blues

Mike Abundo — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:59:38 +0000

With the rise of new media comes the fall of old media, and with the fall of old media comes the fall of old advertising models. Mad Avenue Blues brilliantly laments that fall, to the tune of American Pie.

When it comes to earning ad dollars in this technologically-enabled age of accountability, algortihms and analytics trump martinis and golf. Call it the revenge of the nerds against the suits. Sing along with me now, while the Long Tail wags and Madison Avenue burns.

(Via Nalts.)

Facebook Connect: Ace in the Hole

Mike Abundo — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:57:12 +0000

Nicholas Carlson reports that Facebook Connect, the service that allows Facebook users to log into third-party sites using their Facebook credentials, is seeing rapid adoption. Just seven months after launch, over ten thousand sites have integrated the service — from mainstream hangouts like Hulu, to geek havens like Digg, to personal WordPress blogs through a plugin.

So what’s so hot about Facebook Connect, especially in competition with Google Friend Connect? I’ve compared the two services in a previous post, but here’s what Facebook itself has to say about the benefits of Facebook Connect:

Registration: sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites.

Engagement: sites with Facebook Connect see a 15-100% increase in reviews and other user generated content

Traffic: For each story published in Facebook, we see roughly 3 clicks back to the site. Nearly half the stories in the Stream get clicked on. This creates opportunities for the site to encourage more user actions – knowing that each one may result in 3 new visits to their site. With other models like search, there’s nothing you can do to increase user traffic besides optimizing for keywords.

Note that last line comparing Facebook to search. Facebook’s people-driven, walled-garden approach to organizing Web content is in direct opposition to Google’s machine-driven, open-Web approach. The social startup has no qualms about openly challenging the search giant with that approach. With advertisers ever-hungry for personal information and social graph data, not just on Facebook but across the Web, Facebook Connect may be Zuckerberg’s ace in the hole.

Bing gains but still way too far to challenge Google

Minic Rivera — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:35:52 +0000

Bing has increased Microsoft’s share of the search market by 1% in the US according to analysis for June conducted by StatCounter. Google, obviously, still dominates the US search market.

Microsoft (Bing, Live Search and MSN Search in total) had 8.23% market share in June, behind Yahoo! at 11.04% according to monthly analysis by StatCounter Global Stats. Google has fallen back slightly from 79.07% in April to 78.48% in June but maintains its strong foothold on the lead. Nothing to worry for Serge and Larry.

Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter, said:

“At first sight, a 1% increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive. Steady if not spectacular might be the best way to describe performance to date.”

Data is based on an analysis of 1.316 billion search engine referring clicks (336 million from the US) which were collected from the StatCounter network of over three million websites.

Aggregated Twitter page for federal government launches

Cristina Ledesma — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:22:04 +0000

Nextgov.com has launched a new Web 2.0 tool which aggregates official Twitter feeds from federal government agencies.

Dubbed “The Feed,” Nextgov’s Twitter page pulls together the official Twitter feeds from dozens of federal agencies, allowing readers to monitor government activities in real time by visiting a single web page at www.nextgov.com/thefeed.

Visitors to The Feed can opt to see all federal tweets in one place or they can select to see only certain categories of tweets, including business and finance, defense and diplomacy, law enforcement, government at work, and the White House.

The Pirate Bay sold to gaming company

franky — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:04:46 +0000

The team behind The Pirate Bay have announced that they have sold the site to Global Gaming Factory. Rumours say the site is sold for €5.6m, half cash half stock in Global Gaming Factory. The Pirate Bay team will have a press conference in the next minutes.

TPB is being sold for a great bit underneath it’s value if the money would be the interesting part. It’s not. The interesting thing is that the right people with the right attitude and possibilities keep running the site.
As all of you know, there’s not been much news on the site for the past two-three years. It’s the same site essentially. On the internets, stuff dies if it doesn’t evolve. We don’t want that to happen.

We’ve been working on this project for many years. It’s time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die. And letting TPB die is the last thing that is allowed to happen!

If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And – you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That’s awesome and will take the heat of us.

The old crew is still around in different ways. We will also not stop being active in the politics of the internets – quite the opposite. Now we’re fueling up for going into the next gear. TPB will have economical muscles to let people evolve it. It will team up with great technicians to evolve the protocols. And we, the people interested in more than just technology, will have the time to focus on that. It’s win-win-win.

The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don’t worry – be happy!

Global Gaming Factory also acquired Peerialism. Combining both platforms, GGF wants to establish itself as a major player in the digital content distribution sector.

BillieTweets, awesome Twitter-Youtube mashup in tribute to Michael Jackson

franky — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:57:18 +0000

After the sad news about Michael Jackson last weekend, their has been an increase in searches related to Mj and music sites have seen spike in the popularity of MJ’s songs. And it certainly is no surprise that tribute sites for MJ will be created as well. Expect to see many of those over the next days.

The first one I noticed is BillieTweets, a rather simple but very cool mashup. The concept couldn’t be simpler actually. BillieTweets has the “Billie Jean” video integrated and will pull tweets and highlight in every tweet one word to display the lyrics of the “Billie Jean” song.

Amanda Palmer earned $19,000 in 10 hours with Twitter

franky — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:09:04 +0000

Amanda Palmer, from the Dresden Dolls and solo artist in conflict with her label, earned $19,000 in 10 hours via Twitter (Warning: Offensive language). Amanda Palmer is a self-promoter and has managed to create a genuine brand as a solo artist. She has 34.000 followers on Twitter and is one of the more active music artists on the network. Around a month ago she spend several hours on Twitter, both with friends and fans, and earned as a result more than $19.000 in less than a day. How did she manage this?

1. FRIDAY NIGHT LOSERS T-SHIRT, $11,000

by the end of the night, we’d sold 200 shirts off the quickie site (paypal only) that sean had set up. i blogged the whole story the next day and in total, in the matter of a few days, we sold over 400 shirts, for $25/ea.
we ended up grossing OVER $11,000 on the shirts.

2. WEBCAST AUCTION, $6000

a few nights after that, i blogged and twittered, announcing a “webcast auction” from my apartment. it went from 6 pm – 9 pm, my assitant beth sat at my side and kept her eyes on incoming bids and twitter feed.

total made on twitter in 3 hours, including the postcards, was over $6000.

3. TWITTER DONATION-ONLY GIG, $1800

a few days later, i twittered a guest-list only event in a recording studio in boston, to take place a week later.
total made at last-minute secret twitter gig, in about 5 hours = $2000

Amanda concludes in her typical style, hitting out at her label Roadrunner:

TOTAL MADE THIS MONTH USING TWITTER = $19,000
TOTAL MADE FROM 30,000 RECORD SALES = ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

You can read the complete entry, inclusive offensive language, here.

Microsoft enters energy management space with Microsoft Hohm

franky — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:09:20 +0000

Microsoft is reported to launch a new energy management service today, Microsoft Hohm. According to reports read, the service is a recommendation engine based on the user’s input. You can enter details about how you consume energy and Hohm will recommend you to close windows, turn the heating down or isolate the windows better. Right at the moment only a landing page is available with option to request access. The landing page information is also rather limited:

Microsoft Hohm is a free online beta application that helps you save energy and money. With Microsoft Hohm you can better understand your home energy usage, get recommendations to conserve energy and start saving. As with any recommendation engine, Hohm will provide increasingly more accurate and relevant suggestions for energy conservation as its users contribute home energy input and feedback. One of the objectives during our beta period is to refine our tool and further increase the value our product can offer to you.

A video posted on MSN doesn’t make us much wiser either.