media

When you write about something called "social media one-night stand, the temptation, so to speak, is to fill it with bad puns and jokes about its name. But this is a post where that's the last double entendre.

Instead, I wanted to bring you social media tips and lessons from my most recent session, which is nothing more than a fancy name for an advanced social-media workshop.

I am just wrapping up a week in the Pacific Northwest. I spent time in digital offices as different as MSN News and Big Fish Games in Seattle, and the Oregonian … Read more

Bing is drumming up some interest for its Snapshot feature by adding social media shortcuts into search results.

When you search for people in Bing it brings up their Wikipedia entry -- or, if they don't have an entry, their LinkedIn profile -- in a Snapshot box alongside its results. The box will also have shortcut buttons to the person's various social media accounts.

The Snapshot box is powered by Bing's Satori technology, which sounds similar to Google's Knowledge Graph.

In addition to professionals on LinkedIn and famous people, the Snapshot box will also pop up … Read more

Twitter turns seven today, and to commemorate its birthday, the social networking service has released a video that highlights its many accomplishments, including surpassing 200 million active users.

The service has come a very long way since co-founder (and now patent holder) Jack Dorsey posted the first-ever tweet on March 21, 2006: "Just setting up my twttr."

Of course, it turns out that that tweet was not unique to Dorsey. Many Twitter employees tweeted the very same words that day, evidence of automated language on day one.

just setting up my twttr

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Ad creep creeps are getting creepier -- a couple of the strangest ad-placements ever.

- You know Best Buy is doing poorly when a positive customer review is news.

- How manufactured smells are making people shop longer and kill better.

- Jack from our 404 Subreddit created an RSS feed of every 404 episode. Thanks dude!… Read more

The Telegraph published an article titled "Why women constantly lie about life on Facebook." My first thought was, "Do they really?" I'm a woman on Facebook. I'm not constantly lying about my life.

It turns out the article with the somewhat inflammatory title is about a survey commissioned by Pencourage, a social-media site with where people post anonymous journal-like entries. According to the results, nearly one in four women admitted to exaggerating or lying about key aspects of their lives on social media between one and three times per month. The survey of 2,000 women was conducted by OnePoll.… Read more

Membership in Amazon Prime, the subscription service that offers rapid shipping as well as streaming movies, now tops 10 million, according to a new report from Morningstar.

Amazon doesn't disclose subscription numbers for the service. But Morningstar analyst R.J. Hottovy arrived at the number using a survey of Amazon shoppers conducted by market-research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners last November. Hottovy, whose report was first covered by Business Intelligence, also wrote that Amazon Prime now accounts for about a third of Amazon's operating income.

As Geekwire reports, it's a particularly startling number given that just a … Read more

Facebook rolled out its big News Feed news yesterday. The result is more emphasis on photos and a "following" tab that will let users actually see all the updates from pages and people that they want to, instead of relying on Facebook's mysterious algorithm to deliver posts to their attention.

If this sounds a lot like the way Twitter works, that's not a coincidence. Twitter has a reputation as a breaking news source, a place to follow the commentary as it happens. The Facebook changes could put it in a similar position. All you would do is hit up the "following" tab to watch the information flow in from your favorite sources.… Read more

Pandora Media, the company behind the Web radio service, posted big fourth-quarter revenue gains as advertising revenue jumped 51 percent from the year-ago period.

At the same time, the company's losses widened 78 percent to $14.6 million.

"Pandora has been hiring top talent in local radio markets to further increase our share of the $15 billion radio ad market," Pandora Chief Executive Joe Kennedy said in a statement. "We are now effectively the largest radio station in almost every major market and begin fiscal year 2014 with extraordinary momentum."

Separately, Kennedy announced that he'… Read more

The social media analytics company PeopleBrowsr won a victory against Twitter in court today.

Federal District Court Judge Edward Chen ruled that the case was to remain in San Francisco Superior Court. While this doesn't seem like a big deal, it is actually quite significant because it means that PeopleBrowsr's service won't be shuttered during litigation.

The lawsuit between the two companies is complicated, but it basically boils down to Twitter restricting access to its tweets and data -- which PeopleBrowsr needs for its service.

According to PeopleBrowsr, it paid Twitter $1 million a year for the … Read more