Posts under ‘Social Media’

Google have shown Twitter who they’re effing with, by pimping out their own impressive roster of celebrity users. (You can of course follow any number of real A list celebrities on Twitter, and if you use the social network then chances are you do anyway.) Well, now you can use the muscle of another platform to stalk your favourite stars.

Google have exposed their own brand of celebrity obsession and invite you to join in. They are launching an iGoogle celebrity showcase, in which you can see the homepage of some pretty cool people (examples in above image).

The current site showcases iGoogle homepages from celebs such as Rachael Ray, Al Gore, and Katie Couric. The showcase also highlights web celebs like Kevin Rose, Arianna Huffington, and Seth Godin.

The iGoogle Showcase lets you copy your favorite celeb’s iGoogle page to your own, or browse through the collection and choose different gadgets and themes to include from varying pages. Some celebs have created customized gadgets that you can embed. For example, Ryan Seacrest’s gadget lets you keep up with all the latest entertainment news. Donald Trump’s gadget offers advice to entrepreneurs, Martha Stewart shares recipes and tips, and Anderson Cooper delivers headline news and extras from his CNN show AC360. (via iGoogle and WashingtonPost)

I’m totally too lazy to get into all this. I got Twitter and FaceAche and can only just be bothered to harass people I barely know on them. If you have more energy than me it may be worth a look.

This is so not about celebrity, but it made me LOL and think about how some of the more established social networks are starting to really go down the pooper.

Tom from MySpace, the guy who annoyingly befriends you when you sign up even though you would rather he did not clutter your page, is about to be fired (ThisIs50 via ONTD).

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which owns MySpace is O.V.A.H. working with Tom Anderson and his co-founder and partner Chris DeWolfe.

News Corp’s recently appointed digital chief, Jonathan Miller, had been considering getting rid of MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, Peter Kafka reported on Wednesday afternoon on his Media Memo blog, which is part of All Things Digital.

News Corp officials have been gauging former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Don Van Natta’s interest in replacing him, Kafka reported. The Wall Street Journal reported that News Corp’s Miller is considering replacing DeWolfe and the company’s other co-founder, Tom Anderson.

This is another example of social media effery and big companies thinking that they can engineer something as organic and creative as a social network. Who is going to run the site and be its face? Who is going to send you annoying welcome emails and stare at you from your friends list until a month later when you finally figure out how to delete him?

Only time will tell what’ll happen to the fail whale website – the pair’s contracts expire later this year.

This is not 100%, but it is being reported by two particular sources, whom I find to be overall thorough in their reporting, WashingtonPost.com and LALate.com. The gossip is that after (wisely) turning down an initial offer of half a billion dollars from Facebook, Twitter may be considering a new bid from Google.

All of the reports on this made my head hurt. The world would have become dark/ day turned to night and whatnot, if Facebook had successfully bought and inevitably ruined my favourite social network. They would have swallowed it whole, burped and then pooped it out, suddenly with lots of removed features and reduced usability.

Google could be a FAR superior offer. They managed to not totally fuck up YouTube when they bought that. I trust Twitter in their hands far more than anyone else.

Today’s deliciously well-articulated conjecture on the subject is thus, from The Washington Post (via LA Late):

Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter. We don’t know the price but can assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding.

If this is accurate, it’s a brilliant deal for Google – the value of Twitter is only going to go up over time. And it will be Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s second sale to Google – they sold Blogger to them just five years ago. But there’s one big question – where’s Microsoft in all this? Letting Twitter go to Google only hurts them, badly, in the long term search game. This is an asset they need to be competing for aggressively.

Of course, it’ll be sad to see Twitter become just another subsidiary of Google, if this happens. I would have liked to have seen the company spread its wings a little longer to see what it could do. My expert and completely un-asked for opinion is that this would be a good move. After All, if Twitter had more funding, then perhaps they could operate at capacity and not have so many damn load errors and ‘Over Capacity’ warnings!