Social Media

(Yet Another) Rumor Surfaces About Twitter Acquisition

This time, however, it’s not Facebook or Google that’s reportedly got its eye on Twitter–it’s Apple. And the rumored deal,which could be finished as early as June 8, the date of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, is said to be worth as much as $700 million, far more than previous offers, both real and fictional.

Just what would Apple do with Twitter? The most obvious result of an acquisition would be meshing of the iPhone with the numerous Twitter applications that allow mobile updates. Others have speculated that an Apple-Twitter deal would be more of a statement about Apple’s position in the Internet sphere than anything else.

But, as with almost all Twitter rumors, no sooner had this one launched than it was called false. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wrote, “We’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations. If these discussions are happening, Twitter is keeping them very quiet indeed.”

And All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher also nixed the latest round of Twitter talk, saying,”Despite very serious interest in Twitter by every company that can afford considering such a thing, getting across that late-stage line would require major investors in the microblogging service to be involved, and they are not as yet.”

In addition, Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone said in March that the company is committed to building a “strong, independent” brand rather than vetting offers. In this case, all signs of a Twitter acquisition seem to point to no.

But the Interweb sure does love to get all a-titter about a juicy Twitter acquisition rumor.

A-D-V-E-R-T-I-S-I-N-G  : iClimber offers Twitter Marketing and social media marketing services. We know you don’t have the time to bother with this stuff, so hire a pro to do it.

What the Heck is This Twitter Business About, Anyway?

That’s the question that WebProNews posed to its readers. The catch was that responses were limited to one word. As you can imagine, the answers were varied. Some people said “aggrandizement,” “egos,” or “useless,” while others offered up “communication,” “relationships,” and even “possibilities.”

If pressed for an answer, I’d have to say “experimentation.” I know that in the virtual world, one month is the equivalent of about five years, but I still think it’s too soon to concretely and objectively evaluate Twitter’s utility–for communication, for search engine optimization, for anything.

Besides, Nielsen Online recently did a study showing that Twitter’s retention rate sits around 40%. When MySpace and Facebook were in their emergent states, as Twitter is now, their retention rates were nearly double that.

What do you think Twitter is all about?

S-P-O-N-S-O-R : If you need Twitter Marketing visit iClimber. Sometimes it’s wiser to let a professional handle your online marketing, specially if you don’t have the time.

Online Video Watching up 11% in March

According to ComScore’s Video Metrix service, online video viewing increased 11% between February 2009 and March 2009. U.S. Internet users watched some 14.5 billion online videos, mostly on Google Sites, which captured 40.9% of the market due to the continued strength of YouTube. The second most popular video property was Fox Interactive Media with 3.0% market share.Hulu made a big leap into the top three, capturing 2.6% market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.3% market share.

ComScore also reports that in March, U.S. Internet users watched an average of 97 videos per person.By comScore’s estimates, that adds up to five-and-a-half hours spent watching videos per person per month. That’s a lot of videos and a lot of time spent watching them. As videos become more popular, it’ll be interesting to see the inveitable productivity statistics that accompany increased watching. I, for one, know that I’d be more productive if YouTube wasn’t an option…

How Popular Is Social Media–Really?

How popular is social media? Perhaps less popular than we think, according to Harris Interactive, who reports that 51% of Americans do not have Twitter, MySpace, or Facebook accounts. (Gasp!) And just five percent of Americans use Twitter, Harris says, despite the ultra-mega-huge gains in traffic that the site has been posting every month. Of course, now that Oprah has started tweeting, that could very well change…

Of the 48% of Americans who are social network users, Harris found that Facebook and MySpace accounts are more popular with the 18-to-34 crowd than the 55+ crowd (no surprise), while people with college education/college degrees tend to engage in social networking more than people with high school education/degrees.  Hmmm, interesting. Wonder what the implications of that might be…

Other findings include that women tend to engage in social networking more than men and that Twitter has broader appeal across a larger age range than social networks, although social networks continue to be more popular–for now–than Twitter.

So even though it might feel like everyone you know is jumping on the Interweb for networking and microblogging purposes, there are probably less people tweeting and Facebooking than it seems.

Twitter Writhes with Worms, Google Puts News Articles in a Timeline

Over the Easter weekend, Twitter was hit by two worms created by a 17-year-old from Brooklyn. The “StalkDaily” and “Mikeyy” worms proved to be more of a nuisance for the Twitter team than a serious security breach, but Michael Mooney (who claimed he unleashed the wigglers partly out of ennui and partly to exploit a vulnerability in the Twitter code) still managed to foul up hundreds of accounts and send some 10,000 spam Tweets before the damage could be fixed and the accounts secured.

Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone hinted, before Mooney came forward, that the company would take legal against against the perpetrator. Mooney’s reaction to the potential legal repercussions of viral actions was that of a typical teenager–incongruous with a dash of blasé. “I feel pretty bad about it, but it’s not me that left the vulnerability out in the open,” he said. “I’m not worried, though. I know that it could land me in jail.”

Next time Mr. Mooney is feeling bored, he might take a walk or read a book instead. Or just realize that monotony is a part of life.  That flat, listless, empty feeling? Not worth jail, kid.

In other news, Google has created a timeline feature for its news articles to show which sources break stories and how the stories develop over time. News aggregators’ inability (or just unwillingness) to “point users to the latest and most authoritative sources of breaking news” was one of the AP’s chief complaints when it announced last week a new initiative to track AP content online. Although Google CEO Eric Schmidt denied that the AP’s allegations of “misappropriation” included the search engine,  Google could be trying to cover its bases, nonetheless.

YouTube and Universal Music Group Partner to Form Music Video Site

After announcing partnerships with ESPN and Disney-ABC Television Group and expanding its Click-to-Buy program last week, YouTube has taken another step towards better monetizing its services by partnering with Universal Music Group (UMG) to create VEVO, a new music video site. VEVO will feature premium video content from UMG—and potentially other major labels in the future—and will be owned by both YouTube’s parent company Google and UMG. The companies will share ad revenue from the site.

On the YouTube blog, Partnerships Director Chris Maxcy explains, “This service will blend UMG’s broad catalog of artists and content production capabilities [UMG is the world’s largest recording company] with our video technology and user community—in other words, we’ll provide the technology infrastructure that will power VEVO and host UMG’s extensive library of professionally-created music videos on the new site. This content will be exclusively available through VEVO.com and a new VEVO channel on YouTube through a special VEVO branded embedded player. It launches later this year.” Per the agreement, users will also be able to create and watch videos containing UMG sound recordings.

According to The New York Times, YouTube is hoping VEVO will reproduce the kind of success that Hulu, an online video site from NBC and Fox, has had in the past few months. Although Hulu is less than a year-and-a-half old and attracts a smaller audience, it has been able to pull in strong advertisers. Moreover, Hulu viewership is growing steadily, increasing 55% between January 2009 and February 2009 to reach 7.8 million visitors.

The UMG partnership should also help YouTube circumvent some of the legal troubles that it has faced in the past over the use of copyrighted music. Google is currently embroiled in an ongoing $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom. Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the Times that the agreement with UMG could become the model for resolving future conflicts between media companies.

Is Web 2.0 the New Industrial Revolution?

Consider this excerpt from Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 classic Winesburg, Ohio:

In the last fifty years a vast change has taken place in the lives of our people. A revolution has in fact taken place. The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new voices that have come among us from overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth of cities, the building of the interurban car lines that weave in and out of towns and past farmhouses, and now in these later days the coming of the automobiles has worked a tremendous change in the lives and in the habits of thought of our people of Mid-America. Books, badly imagined and written though they may be in the hurry of our times, are in every household, magazines circulate by the millions of copies, newspapers are everywhere. In our day a farmer standing by the stove in the store in his village has his mind filled to overflowing with the words of other men. The newspapers and the magazines have pumped him full. Much of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also a kind of beautiful childlike innocence is gone forever. The farmer by the stove is brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will find him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us all.

Reading those lines, it’s hard not to think about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, news aggregators, blogs, and the like. In this age of info-dumping, have we traded our “beautiful childlike innocence” for immediacy? And, more importantly, in this new Age of Reason, what becomes of individual minds “filled to overflowing with the words of other men”?

From the Annals of MySpace: Hometown Rant Ruled Not Private

For anyone who’s fled his or her stomping grounds for sunnier skies, the feeling of one’s hometown as a provincial backwoods is not unique and often engenders a considerable amount of derision from those who have manged to “escape.” But for one such expatriate–Cynthia Moreno of Coalinga, CA–angry hometown feelings caused a number of negative and even dangerous consequences.

According to WebProNews, the problem started when Moreno, now a student at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote a post on her MySpace page entitled “An Ode to Coalinga” that included a litany of Coalinga and its denizens’ faults. Moreno erased the post after a week, but not before the prinicpal of Coalinga High School, Roger Campbell, saw the post and forwarded it to the local newspaper, the Coalinga Record.  The paper printed the rant as a letter to the editor, complete with Moreno’s name.

As you can imagine, the town of 19,000 didn’t receive Moreno’s critique warmly. Her family was targeted with death threats, and someone even shot at the family home. Moreno’s father eventually closed his business, and the family moved out of town. Later, the Morenos sued Campbell, the Coalinga school district, and the newspaper’s publisher for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.  However, the court ruled against the family, saying that by posting on MySpace, Moreno made her rant public and available to anyone with a computer–thus, any claim to privacy was moot.

The jury’s still out on the emotional distress claim, however, and is trying to decide if Campbell’s actions were “extreme and dangerous.” While I’m inclined to agree, on principle, that MySpace information is public, I do think Campbell was out of line. And it’s also strange that he visits MySpace and looks at former students’ pages.  Was he hoping to find something just like this? At any rate, the case speaks clearly about need for discretion when posting information online.

YouTube, Sony Pictures Discuss Partnership

Tired of pirating movies from the rough seas of the Internet? If a rumored deal between YouTube and Sony Pictures comes to fruition, you may be able to snag some movies for free on the online video site, though perhaps not enough to hang up your tri-cornered hat just yet. CNET reports that the two companies are in talks to offer full-length movies on YouTube via Sony’s video property Crackle; however, CNET speculates that the number probably won’t exceed 15 and no word on possible titles yet. At present, there are about 60 Sony films available on Crackle, including such titles as “Groundhog Day,” “Wild Things,” “El Mariachi,” “Ghostbusters,” “Idle Hands,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” “Rudy,” “The Karate Kid” (all three installments), and more. Sony could choose to make a portion of these public on YouTube, provided that YouTube uses the Crackle video player, which would allow Sony to retain control of the advertising. But the videos would have limited usage, as the studio does not allow its partners to syndicate its content. That means YouTube users wouldn’t be allowed to post their favorite videos into their blogs, Facebook pages, etc.

Still, YouTube needs to develop ways to monetize its services further to avoid losing money, even though online video sites are growing faster than ever. According to global financial services firm Credit Suisse, the company could lose as much as $470 million in 2009 due to inflated bandwidth and content licensing expenses. Recently, YouTube has struck deals with ESPN and Disney-ABC Television Group to try to drive advertiser demand. We’ll see if a Sony Pictures partnership could also help YouTube avoid landing in the red this year.

Rumors Fly Fast and Thick about Google Twitter Acquisition

The blogosphere loves a juicy Google rumor, but just like any rumor mill, some of what gets pushed through is true and some isn’t. In the case of the recent TechCrunch-fueled rumor about Google being in the late stages of acquiring hot microblogging service Twitter, most of the talk seems confined to the realm of hearsay. Michael Arrington said “Here’s a heck of a rumor that we’ve sourced from two separate people close to the negotiations: Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter. We don’t know the price but can assume it’s well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding.”

However, BoomTown’s Kara Swisher shot back with this headline: “Sorry to Get You All A-Twitter, but Google Is Not in ‘Late-Stage Talks’ to Acquire the Hot Microblogging Service.” Well, it doesn’t get much clearer than that, right? According to Swisher, the two companies have been discussing products and things such as real-time search, but nothing more.

Swisher’s assessment certainly fits better with Twitter’s past response to acquisition attempts; last fall, the San Francisco-based startup rejected a $500 million offer from Facebook. Also, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said last month that the company intends to hold onto its money for now, which it seems to be doing, cutting advertising programs such as Radio Ads and letting go of some 200-300 employees at the end of March.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone also (indirectly) tackled the rumor on The Colbert Report, saying that the company wants to remain independent for now—the subtext being independent AND profitable, which Twitter hopes to do by launching paid commercial accounts in the future.

Still, there’s a lot of incentive for Google—or any major search player, for that matter—to try and woo Twitter into its ad-serving arms, if for no other reason than Twitter’s ability to provide instant information-sharing. Twitter also has a history of breaking news stories such as the Hudson River plane crash in January in advance of major news sources.

So, no, it doesn’t appear that Twitter is in eminent danger of being swept into the Google empire. But in Silicon Valley, as we all know, everything’s for sale at the right price.