Twitter wins battle over ownership of 'tweet' trademark

Published on 12 October 2011 by The Independent.ie in Social Networks

The word "tweet" is to become a registered trademark of the online messaging service Twitter, it has emerged.

Executives at the firm said they had resolved a long-running legal dispute over ownership of the term by US advertising company Twittad.

Zynga Devises a New Plan to Break Its Facebook Habit

Published on 12 October 2011 by The Wall Street Journal in Social Networks

Zynga Inc. moved to reduce its reliance on Facebook Inc.'s social network, saying Tuesday it will start distributing its games directly to users online or on mobile phones.

The San Francisco social-games maker, which in July filed for an initial public offering that could value the company at $20 billion, has long depended on Facebook's platform. Zynga games such as "FarmVille" and "CityVille" are played on Facebook by 230 million monthly users.

Facebook acquires Q&A startup friend.ly

Published on 10 October 2011 by Gigaom.com in Social Networks

Facebook has acquired friend.ly, a Mountain View, California-based startup that makes a Facebook app for asking and answering questions with other people on the social network. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Mostly, the deal seems to be an acqui-hire: The friend.ly app will continue to work as it always has, but going forward, friend.ly’s 10-person team will be working on new products at Facebook, friend.ly said in a blog post announcing the deal.

Twitter plans to hyper-localize content discovery: Will it hurt the service?

Published on 4 October 2011 by The Next Web in Social Networks

While trying to decide what seat I should use on public transportation this weekend, I joked about the “next big thing” in location-based check ins — that is, foursquare at its most atomic unit: Checking into seats on buses or cubicles in the office, etc. 

Facebook Timeline reveals the future of sharing

Published on 2 October 2011 by Charlene Li in Social Networks

Leading up to Facebook’s f8 conference today, my biggest concern about the rumored new “Read. Watched. Listened” buttons was that Facebook was becoming more and more superficial in its interactions.

This was especially the case when compared to the deep interactions and engagements found on Google+ (which suffers from the problem of not having nearly enough people on it to sustain those deep conversations, but that’s another post).