Sean Parker Joins Yammer’s Board Of Directors

Sean Parker Joins Yammer’s Board Of Directors: "

Sean Parker is no stranger to Internet success. He’s 28 years old and has already helped start four very well-known services on the web: Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and of course, Facebook. And now he’s taking his impressive resume to Yammer, where he is joining the enterprise microblogging service’s Board of Directors, we’ve learned.

Yammer, which won the top prize at last year’s TechCrunch50, recently rolled out a bunch of updates to its web version, as well as its Adobe Air-based desktop client. We use the service on a daily basis for work, and those of us with iPhones are all eagerly awaiting the release of the new version of the iPhone app with Push Notifications.

As the core concepts behind Yammer are quickly becoming features that others in the enterprise space are realizing they will need to compete, Parker’s guidance should help the company maintain an advantage, and push forward.

Parker is currently serving as the Chairman of Causes, one of the most popular social networking applications, and is a Managing Partner at the VC firm, Founder’s Fund. He is perhaps best known for serving as Facebook’s President during the time it was founded. That role is about to get the Hollywood treatment in David Fincher’s upcoming movie, The Social Network, based on Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires, about the early days of Facebook.

Parker also served as an expert panelist at this year’s TechCrunch50 a few weeks ago.

Mr. Parker joins George Zachary, Keith Rabois, Adam Ross, Adam Pisoni, and David Sacks on Yammer’s board. The later two serve as Yammer’s VP of Technology and CEO, respectively.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

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Facebook’s Internal Stats Show People Are Sharing More

Facebook’s Internal Stats Show People Are Sharing More: "

When Facebook announced that it had reached 300 million monthly active users last week, it also updated granular statistics about what its users are doing on the site. Here’s a closer look at how these numbers have changed versus the last set the company released in July. Most striking is the increase in overall shared items, the number of photo and video uploads, and the rapid rise in mobile adoption.

As a baseline comparison, we’re looking at these numbers versus Facebook says its overall traffic is. On July 15th, when the last set came out, it said it had 250 million users. So the company’s overall monthly active user base has grown 20 percent. All of the numbers that it updated last week show at least as much growth as Facebook’s overall traffic. In other words, these stats are not growing purely because the total number of Facebook users is growing — instead, it appears that Facebook users actually are sharing more as time goes on.

Status updates: 40 million users are updating their statuses at least once each day, a 25 percent increase from the 30 million who did as of July. [Update: This isn't quite right, as the terminology has changed since July. Now, it says 'More than 40 million status updates each day' -- which does not necessarily mean that there are 40 million users updating their statuses once a day.]

Pages: 10 million users became fans of a page each day, up 20 percent from the 8 million who did in July.

Videos: 14 million videos are now being uploaded each month, up from 40 percent from 10 million.

Photos: 2 billion photos are now being uploaded each month, double the 1 billion before.

Shared content: 2 billion pieces of content, whether links, posts, photos or anything else, are now shared each week — doubling shared items as of July.

Mobile: Earlier this month, Facebook said that 65 million people accessed the site through a mobile device. In July, only 30 million people did — that’s a whopping 117 percent increase.

Facebook’s overall goal is to get more people sharing more information, in part so it can learn more about them, and then target ads to them more accurately. The numbers suggest that this plan is working, no doubt aided by ongoing improvements to features like status updates and video uploading. These sharing increases — not just overall traffic growth — could be contributing to Facebook’s revenue growth.

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Awe.sm Lets You Track Articles Shared Into Facebook

Awe.sm Lets You Track Articles Shared Into Facebook: "

Web publishers have no great way to keep track of how many times articles gets shared on Facebook, as the company keeps that information private. So, if you’re trying to figure out how frequently your content is being shared on Facebook, the best way to approximate is simply to watch your analytics for how many visitors to any given content come from Facebook.com.

Awe.sm has devised a button-style widget called fbshare.me that lets readers share an article on Facebook, and then tracks clicks through that link. The service shows you the total number of times your article has been shared through the button, as well as the number of times those shared links were clicked on. Note that this number includes all shares of your article through Awe.sm, including from services like Sociable and AddToAny.

It’s not quite the same as the Retweet button for articles on Twitter offered by companies like Tweetmeme and Backtype, as those show you the total number of retweets across all of Twitter. But it could shed some light on the world of Facebook sharing.

The button was built as a weekend project on top of the company’s “Aggregate Data” API, which shows you anonymized, aggregated data for a given URL shared through the service. Awe.sm is more generally a URL shortening service with an analytics service layered on top, so this is another way for the company to get traffic to measure. Every time somebody shares content through Awe.sm, a unique link is generated. This link is encoded with metadata about the shared item, including where the link is being shared to — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Among other details, the button comes in either large or small sizes, and also lets you include parameters for Google Analytics.

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Diditz Makes It Easy To Post Facebook Photos To The Web

Diditz Makes It Easy To Post Facebook Photos To The Web: "

There are already a number of applications that allow sharing of photos and videos from a Facebook album — including the company’s own widgets. But a new application called Diditz lets you post photos to the web in ways that make them especially accessible.

When you connect to your Facebook page through Diditz, the application automatically picks up your albums and allows you to create pages for them one at a time. You can select which photos from the albums to include on the shared page, add a brief description and searchable key words, then assign your album one of Diditz’s existing categories.

You have the option of sharing the page with only Facebook friends or opening up the page to the public. It’s then accessible from a link that the site provides — and of course you can post the new page to your Facebook news feed. If you choose to allow unlimited access to your page, anyone can find it and view your albums and videos from the Diditz home page. Facebook users that view your pics can even leave comments or post links to your photos in their own news feeds.

The application isn’t fancy, but that’s what makes it appealing. It’s especially useful to businesses trying to reach a web-wide audience. For example, if your album is public, it can be spidered by search engines and so could show up in search results. For those organizations with Facebook pages, there is an option for creating albums intended for pages.

And, for individuals, it’s a great way of sharing select photos and videos with someone that may not have a Facebook account and access to those albums otherwise.

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DORI, Twilight Lead Boom in Facebook Pages Top 20 List This Week

DORI, Twilight Lead Boom in Facebook Pages Top 20 List This Week: "

It got harder to make our PageData Top 20 leaderboard for this past week versus the week before. Overall, the top 20 pages this past week gained a total of 3.45 million fans, versus 1.89 million from September 13th to the 19th. At the top were two exceptionally big gainers, the page for Pixar’s DORI fish character from the movie Finding Nemo, and the page for teen pop vampire show Twilight.

DORI gained 741,000 fans to reach 1.75 million, while Twilight gained 432,000 to reach 3.73 million. Both appeared to have grown because Facebook manually folded unofficial pages for the brands into these official pages, something the company has been doing a lot lately. Of the top 20, at least six pages in total appear to have made the list through adding fans from unofficial pages.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	DORI	1,754,984	+741,401	+73.15
2.	Twilight	3,728,327	+432,229	+13.11
3.	Stride Gum	348,619	+300,356	+622.33
4.	Dancing With The Stars	394,498	+249,569	+172.20
5.	Amy Winehouse	785,461	+230,253	+41.47
6.	Starbucks	4,056,459	+209,175	+5.44
7.	Saw	1,032,315	+169,181	+19.60
8.	Mafia Wars	4,378,787	+135,550	+3.19
9.	Grey’s Anatomy	1,999,225	+111,164	+5.89
10.	Cadbury Wispa	778,624	+108,730	+16.23
11.	David Guetta	1,241,501	+99,139	+8.68
12.	Taylor Swift	2,288,335	+88,546	+4.03
13.	House	2,284,275	+85,034	+3.87
14.	Fame	126,301	+75,851	+150.35
15.	Texas Hold’em Poker	3,178,621	+72,527	+2.33
16.	Hulu	122,784	+70,822	+136.30
17.	The Bible	609,191	+70,260	+13.04
18.	Facebook	5,222,654	+70,156	+1.36
19.	Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts	873,141	+68,873	+8.56
20.	Glee	336,773	+61,737	+22.45

Also in the top 20 this week were Taylor Swift, whose page has been growing in popularity since the Kanye West incident a few weeks ago, Cadbury Wispa, which we took a look at recently, and popular TV shows Grey’s Anatomy and House.

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Google Books hearing officially delayed

Google Books hearing officially delayed: "

The judge overseeing Google Books settlement has agreed to the plaintiffs' request for a delay of the final hearing scheduled to approve the controversial settlement, which is being reworked by the parties.

Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York had been scheduled to oversee a October 7 hearing about whether to approve a 2008 settlement between Google and several groups representing authors and publishers. However, the settlement, which gives Google sweeping rights to digitize out-of-print but copyright protected books, has drawn staunch opposition from many corners of the literary world as well as the U.S. Department of Justice.

As a result, the settlement is in the process of being reworked, and Judge Chin agreed to give the parties more time to rework the settlement following a request from the plaintiffs filed earlier this week. 'Under all the circumstances, it makes no sense to conduct a hearing on the fairness and reasonableness of the current settlement agreement, as it does not appear that the current settlement will be the operative one,' Chin wrote in a letter sent to both parties.

Instead, the parties will hold a status conference on the 7th to figure out what to do next. Chin noted that this case has been in the works for over four years, when groups representing authors and publishers sued Google in 2005 for digitizing books without explicit permission.

Originally posted at Relevant Results

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Twitter phishing scam spreads via direct messages

Twitter phishing scam spreads via direct messages: "

A new phishing scam is spreading through Twitter via direct messages, according to several reports.

Itamar Kestenbaum writes on his JewNews.net blog that he received a direct message on his Twitter account from someone he didn't know that said 'rofl this you on here?' followed by a link to what appeared to be a video-related Twitter page.

The page looks like a legitimate Twitter log-in page but nabs your credentials if you type in your password, he warns.

Meanwhile, a posting on the Mashable blog said the site had received multiple reports of the new phishing scam and that someone there had even received one of the phishing-related direct messages themselves.

No word on this yet on Twitter's official blog or from a Twitter spokesperson. We'll keep you posted as we hear more.

In the meantime, if you clicked on the phishing link and typed in your credentials, you should change your password immediately.

Update at 5:30 p.m. PDT: Twitter acknowledged the phishing scam in a tweet on Wednesday that said 'A bit o'phishing going on--if you get a weird direct message, don't click on it and certainly don't give your login creds!'

JewNews.net captured this screenshot of the phishing-related direct message Twitter users are receiving and the fake log in page the link directs to.

(Credit: JewNews.net)

Originally posted at InSecurity Complex

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Another $100 million for Twitter?

Another $100 million for Twitter?: "

Twitter's long-anticipated business plan had better be close on the horizon, because according to the Wall Street Journal, the site has some new investors on board: Mutual fund T. Rowe Price, Insight Venture Partners, and a handful of others have reportedly pumped $100 million into the microblogging phenomenon.

TechCrunch reported last week that Twitter was putting together a round of funding at around a $1 billion valuation. But that report suggested that the company would do so by raising about $50 million--half of what it actually has, per the WSJ, in a deal expected to close Thursday.

Twitter still doesn't make significant revenue. But its founders have said that paid corporate accounts, in the form of a sort of 'analytics dashboard,' are imminent. Advertising isn't out of the question either, despite what some of the company's executives have said in the past.

The company's initial round of Series B funding last year valued it at about $80 million, but soon added to the round in a deal that upped the valuation well into the hundreds of millions.

Originally posted at The Social

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Modest Share Gains for Bing Continue

Modest Share Gains for Bing Continue: "

Comscore's monthly ratings are out and Bing continues a slow but steady gain in share, to the slight expense of Google and Yahoo. Bing has a massive marketing push on right now, but also, I think the service is starting to gain footholds with users who see it as a regular alternative to Google. I am also a fan of the recently unveiled visual search interface - I think it augurs some serious new - and useful - approaches to sifting through massive amounts of related data.

From the Thomas Weisel's analyst coverage, sent to me in mail:

Google maintains dominance within 'core search' but Bing Nudges Up m/m at Yahoo's and Google's Expense: Core search excludes searches conducted on video, local and map portions of the companies' websites. Google's U.S. query share of core search queries was down 11bps m/m to 64.6% in August but increased nearly 1.3 percentage points from August 2008. Yahoo's share was flat m/m at 19.3% in August and decreased 39bps y/y. Microsoft's share increased 35bps m/m to 9.3% in August and up 89bps y/y. Ask.com's share were was flat m/m at 3.9% in August but decreased 45bps y/y. AOL's share decreased 14bps m/m to 3.0% in August and decreased 133bps y/y.

Our take: Google continues to dominate audience market rankings in the U.S. while Microsoft has shown some signs of stabilization and a modest uptick with the launch of Bing in June. Yahoo, while having shown signs of stability over the past 12-18 months, has recently started to lose market share again, declining from 21.0% in January to 19.3% in August. Taken together, Yahoo and Microsoft represent 29% of the core search market in the U.S., flat with the previous month. Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, was launched at the beginning of June alongside an $80-100mn advertising campaign. This is the third month of data reflecting Bing's impact. While the data indicates a very modest near-term bounce, we will be watching closely to see if any query pickup is sustainable.

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Watch Out Google, Facebook Is Gaining in PPC

Watch Out Google, Facebook Is Gaining in PPC: "

Alex Salkever has written a post on Facebok's self service CPC platform, which has been getting a lot of traction lately and is largely responsible for the company's recent boasting about being cash flow positive. From it:

I chatted with nearly two dozen people who are buying ads on Facebook. Many of them are also purchasing ads on Google (GOOG) and other online venues. The overwhelming sentiment? Facebook ads are actually more effective and do a better job of getting them in front of their target audiences.

The piece is worth reading and really contemplating. How many of you use Facebook ads? Do they work better than AdWords?

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