Technology, Social Media | featured news

Foursquare is rolling out its first revenue product as the company moves from focusing on user growth to generating cash. The new Promoted Updates enables businesses to send promoted content to users. These updates will appear at the top in a prominent position in the “Explore” tab in Foursquare. That’s the section of the app that is for users to find businesses nearby. The Promoted Updates, like Google search ads, there is “intent” there while users are looking for a restaurant, bar or other business nearby, says Steven Rosenblatt, Foursquare’s chief revenue officer. Businesses pay on a “cost per action” performance basis for these ads. In some ways these updates are also like Twitter’s promoted Tweets.

Wal-Mart's Facebook page has more than 17 million fans and the company also pays to advertise on Facebook. Expanding its reach online is key for Wal-Mart as shoppers increasingly shop on their computers, tablets and smartphones.

Once relegated to sleazy red light districts and the darker corners of the internet, porn stars are now gaining followings in a surprising place: twitter. They are using the social media site to engage directly with their fans and build their individual brands.

YouTube has added a tool which automatically blurs out the faces of people appearing in uploaded videos. It said the function would be of use to activists wishing to share footage of protests involving participants who wanted to remain anonymous. It hinted other features would follow, describing the move as "the first step towards providing visual anonymity".

A new study has found that YouTube is emerging as a major platform for news, one to which viewers increasingly turn for eyewitness videos in times of major events and natural disasters....

Facebook now uses your name to post the things you "liked" maybe long ago, in a way that can get you in hot water in the here and now.

Digg rose to prominence years ago by changing the way people share news online. But its subsequent downfall – and $500,000 sale to Betaworks on Thursday – underscores the swift evolution of technology that is helping people discover content online.

Sun Valley and self-driving cars aside, the story of the day today is that social news site Digg has sold its remaining assets for $500K to the NYC-based tech firm Betaworks. While that number is indeed in the ballpark, we’re hearing from multiple sources that the total price of the Digg acquisition was around $16 million, including the price paid for IP by a previously unreported acquirer, LinkedIn.

Believe it or not, it's been seven years since Digg launched. To date, we've had over 350M Diggs, 28M Story Submissions and 40M Comments. We're extremely proud to have helped pioneer social voting on the web.

The design of Tumblr, the blogging tool and social network, is guided by feeling. In particular, the feelings of David Karp, the company’s 26-year-old founder, whose instincts tend to run counter to current Web conventions. Tumblr does not display “follower” counts, for example, or other numerical markers of popularity that are viewed as crucial social-media features, because Karp finds them “really gross.” The culture of public friend-and-follow reciprocity that theoretically expands a social networking service can, in his view, “really poison a whole community.”