Two very interesting acquisitions in the social media monitoring space took place recently: 1- SalesForce bought Radian6 for a mere $326M in March 2- Google acquired PostRank last month for an undisclosed amount Up until now, acquisitions in this space had been small (20/30M) and focused on marketing/pr (like MarketWire buying Sysomos). What sets these [...]

Tags: acquisition, Brian Solis, charlene li, google, integrated enterprise data, integrated social data, market transformation, Radian6, SalesForce

We have been having a very interesting internal debate lately about Twitter’s eventual business model(s).  There was an interesting post yesterday that spoke to the heart of our debate.  This post talks about Twitter challenging Google as a major player in the next generation of search.  Since I am the one writing this post, I [...]

Tags: business model, google, search, twitter

Since yesterday’s announcements from Google and Facebook (a couple of hours apart) that they would both make their social ID standard available to all sites, the (micro)blogosphere has been quite active to look at the merits of each solution and try to predict who will emerge victorious. Social data standards are paramount to TRAACKR and [...]

Tags: api, facebook, facebookconnect, google, openID, standards

I was reading last night about the launch of Microsoft’s live search cashback, described in Sillicon Valley Insider as a “disruptive development”. Intrigued, I signed up this morning to try it. Painless process except that I had to remember my Hotmail password – not easy as I usually only use this account for spam… After [...]

Tags: cashback, google, livesearch, Microsoft

Last week, we announced the battle for standards for social data among Google, Yahoo! and Facebook (btw, let’s shed a tear for Microsoft, absent from this short list. They’ll probably come up with their own standards in 6 months, stay tuned). Yesterday, the first shots were fired in this battle with Facebook announcing they will [...]

Tags: facebook, google, standards, traackr, yahoo!

Last night I had a nightmare. I sat at my computer, and my Vista morphed into a Web app called Woogle, which included a productivity suite, a default search page, alerts, news, a Web analytics page, and all my social networking stuff in one place (and much, much more, all for fwee). I turned around [...]

Tags: google, open standards, OpenSocial

Traackr has been on the forefront of advocating for the standardization of users’ social data – see our article from a few weeks ago about this. The calls for standardization have gotten a lot of traction this week, starting with MySpace announcing on Thursday they will join the DataPortability project and partner with eBay, Yahoo, [...]

Tags: api, ebay, facebook, google, linkedin, myspace, socialdata, socialnetworks, standards, traackr, twitter