Plaxo.com, the company acquired last week by Comcast for a rumored $160 million, was launched back in 2001. The company faced heavy criticism for aggressive spam techniques which used user contact lists to send out false invites to users. Reunion.com has decided to leverage a similar tactic in hopes of rapidly expanding their user base.

While [...]

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The invite only social network site for worldwide jetsetters, a Small World, has been trying to go public for the past few months but unfortunately has not been able to. According to the founders, the market was too choppy and will stay that way for the next 12 months. The challenges facing the four year [...]

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By Nick O’Neill

I came across Andrew Chen’s post arguing that Metcalfe’s law is “a DIRECT reason why these networks want to get as big as possible, and have a social graph that’s as comprehensive as possible, and why they should ultimately be opposed to Data Portability.”

Andrew is echoing my original thoughts that I posted [...]

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The latest statistics in from Nielsen have showed a decrease in traffic for Facebook U.S. users month to month. According to Adam Ostrow, this most recent Nielsen numbers show a 10 percent month-to-month decline in traffic for Facebook. Compete.com statistics have also shown a 4.2 percent decline month over month. Does this mean the [...]

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When Facebook released their pages service at the end of last year, they hoped that small businesses would take advantage of the new service. Facebook Pages is tightly integrated into their SocialAds offering and the only way to promote these pages is through “organic” viral channels and paid advertising. Unfortunately for Facebook the numbers don’t [...]

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Facebook is in the process of launching the redesigned version of user profiles. They are also focused on a number of other initiatives including Facebook Connect which is one of the sources of the data portability discussion over the past few days. One thing I’ve been wondering about a lot more frequently is why doesn’t [...]

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Facebook has highly simplified their new design down to a single bar. The left navigation is gone and advertisements will be displayed on the right hand side of the site. The new design looks pretty bare but there are no screenshots of what the other pages will look like. Putting ads on the right hand [...]

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Dear Plaxo member,

We are excited to announce some of the biggest news in the history of Plaxo. Plaxo has signed a definitive agreement** to be acquired by Comcast, the nation’s leading provider of entertainment, information and communications products and services. We’ve got at least a few months to go before the acquisition is completed, but [...]

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This weekend has been a weekend of data portability discussion among a number of blogs. It has become a hot button topic for a few of us. On Saturday, I even turned against some of the data portability evangelists. I still stand by a lot of what I said including the fact that data portability [...]

Posted in General, Internet Marketing, Social Networking 1 Comment »

AOL has announced that they’ve completed the purchase of Bebo, and as such, formed a new business unit called “People Networks” that combines the social network with AIM, ICQ, and other recently acquired businesses including Yedda and Goowy. Integration plans aren’t overly specific at the moment, but include “[letting] users merge AIM and Bebo profiles [...]

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