Twitter is starting to give personalized recommendations for people to follow, as it pushes to increase retention of new users. The company will suggest accounts based on who you currently follow and who those accounts follow, according to a blog post today. Users will also see recommendations for people to follow when they look at other Twitter users’ profiles. It’s like a PeopleRank of sorts, a social play on Google’s original PageRank algorithm, but with humans at the center instead of web pages. Many startups and even larger companies are building variations of this for their consumer-facing products or to serve as a backbone for other services.
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A PeopleRank powers Twitter’s new user suggestions feature
Google said access to its search properties is normal and hasn’t been blocked. A spokesperson told us: “Because of the way we measure accessibility in China, it’s possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage. That seems to be what happened last night when there was a relatively small blockage. It appears now that users in China are accessing our properties normally.” Earlier today, a Google status page which publicly tracks access to its services in China, reported that there was full blockage, or that search was unavailable between 67 and 100 percent of the time. It’s a big deal because relations between the search giant and the Chinese government have been testy over the past year. Google stopped censoring its search results earlier this year after discovering that hackers had attempted to break into its data and access information related to human rights activists
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Just kidding. Google says there is no blockage to search in China
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eWise , an online payments and financial management solutions company, has secured $12.1M in funding, it announced today. The round was led by prominent European tech investor Balderton Capital, and included Total Technology Ventures, Patagorang, and Allen & Co. Founded by Alexander Grinberg, who also heads the company, eWise is headquartered in the United Kingdom, and has expanded its market services to the United States, Australia, and China
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Online payments startup eWise raises $12.1M
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Facebook and Amazon partnered today in what could be one of the social network’s most important integrations yet. Amazon.com now offers a personalized page, where consumers can see product recommendations influenced by friends and their own tastes. They get notifications on when friend’s birthdays are coming up and suggestions on what to buy for them. It’s a big deal for a number of reasons
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Why the Facebook, Amazon integration is bigger than you think
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Yahoo’s net income rose by more than 50 percent from the same period a year ago, but overall revenue fell short of analysts’ estimates. Analysts had estimated on average that the company would pull in $1.16 billion in sales excluding revenue passed onto partner sites, Bloomberg reported. The company had sales of $1.13 billion instead. Its overall revenue rose 2 percent from the same period year earlier The company pointed to a number of key initiatives like its deeper integration with Facebook, its acquisition of Southeast Asian social network Koprol and a new social games area with titles from Zynga. Asia is the company’s fastest-growing region, with revenues up 39 percent from the same quarter a year earlier.
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Yahoo’s second-quarter revenue rises by 2%, misses estimates
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz seems to remember that the company’s beginnings had a lot more work and a lot less sex than the recently released trailer for David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Network” depicts. Moskovitz, who is now building Benchmark and Andreessen Horowitz-backed productivity startup Asana, gave his take on the upcoming film on Quora , a question-and-answer site from other Facebook alums. He surprisingly thought that the trailer ended up portraying Mark Zuckerberg in a positive way, despite its largely critical source material from Ben Mezrich’s fictionalized account, “The Accidental Billionaires.” He wrote: “It is interesting to see my past rewritten in a way that emphasizes things that didn’t matter (like the Winklevosses, who I’ve still never even met and had no part in the work we did to create the site over the past 6 years) and leaves out things that really did (like the many other people in our lives at the time, who supported us in innumerable ways).
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Facebook co-founder Moskovitz says movie has more sex, booze
Google has acquired Benchmark-backed Metaweb to improve the structure in its search results. Over the past few years, Google has evolved beyond the “10 blue links” paradigm (where search results delivered only simple links) and begun breaking out specialty news, video or data snippets atop search results
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Google acquires MetaWeb, says Freebase will become “more open”
Twitter’s new flash deal service, EarlyBird , kicked off today with an inaugural deal from Walt Disney Co. for a free ticket to see its latest film, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” The new service gives Twitter yet another revenue stream on top of search ads, promoted trends, and data deals with search engines like Google. Disney also worked with the company a few weeks ago, buying its first Promoted Trend to advertise Toy Story 3. Deals will pop up on the account several times a week. Some of them will come from flash sale or group deal companies like Groupon and Gilt Groupe, showing that Twitter is eager to partner and not compete with them right away. After four years of brushing off questions about its business model and raising about $160 million in capital at a more than $1 billion valuation, Twitter is in full experimentation mode with potential revenue streams. Starting last fall, it sold access to its full real-time feed of data to Google and Microsoft.
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Twitter’s new deal service, EarlyBird, takes flight with help from Groupon, Gilt
San Francisco-based Zendesk has launched a way for businesses to feed tweets through their customer support system. Twitter has long been used to manage customer complaints by local businesses and tech startups, which make up a big part of Zendesk’s clientele. The integration is pretty simple. It doesn’t feed in all tweets that mention a company’s name. Instead, it lets employees watching the Twitter stream “favorite” or select certain tweets to forward onto customer service reps. After that, the tweets turn into regular inquiries in Zendesk’s system, which tracks e-mail and messages from customers and forwards them to the right people in a company.
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Zendesk turns tweets into customer support “twickets”
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A breakout hit for real-world mobile payments in the U.S. is still a year or two off, despite the emergence of superphones and rich ecosystems with hundreds of thousands of apps, said panelists at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat2010 conference today. While there are notable mobile payments startups cornering the virtual goods market, like Zong, a viable phone-based rival to the credit card has yet to emerge. The primary barrier isn’t the technology itself, but rather the level of credit penetration in developed markets. In contrast to the U.S., in Asia and Africa, where the majority of phone owners have virtually no access to credit, sophisticated SMS-based mobile payments systems like Safaricom’s M-Pesa have emerged. “The value-add has to be clear,” said Tarang Shah, the senior vice president of innovation at Bank of America. “In developing countries, the pain of moving cash is high.
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A mobile payments breakout is still a few years away for the U.S.
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