Buying ads on Twitter is about to get easier for small businesses as the online messaging service adds a key piece to its moneymaking model.
Twitter is unveiling a long-awaited automated system that will enable advertisers to manage their marketing campaigns and budgets without having to deal with sales representatives.
Before Twitter opens the system to all comers later this year, the self-service approach announced Thursday will only be available to advertisers who accept or use American Express cards.
(via gofuckingnuts)
(via 3h-nick)
Preventing scams is critical for social networks – but no one seems very interested in indentifying bogus fans or followers.
Because they depend heavily on advertising, preventing scams is critical for social networks such as Facebook or Twitter. In Facebook’s pre-IPO filing, I saw no mention of scams in the Risk Factors section, except in vaguest of terms. As for Twitter, all we know is the true audience is much smaller than the company says it is: Business Insider calculated that, out of the 175m accounts claimed by Twitter, 90m have zero followers.
For now, the system stills holds up. Brands remain convinced that their notoriety is directly tied to the number of fan/followers they claim – or their ad agency has been able to channel to them. But how truly efficient is this? How large is the proportion of bogus audiences? Today there appears to be no reliable metric to assess the value of a fan or a follower. And if there is, no one wants to know.
(via ckings)
Government attempts to knock out file-sharing sites in the battle against music and film piracy could be doomed.
A new file-sharing software called Tribler cannot be knocked out by governments or anti-piracy organisations, its creators claim.
’The only way to take it down is to take the internet down,’ says Dr Pouwelse of Delft University of Technology.
Tribler is a variant on the popular BitTorrent file-sharing software, but is designed specifically to stay online under any circumstances - including attacks by governments and anti-piracy organisations.
‘Tribler is designed to keep BitTorrent alive, even when all torrent search engines, indexes and trackers are pulled offline,’ says file-sharing news site Torrentfreak.
Moves such as the seizure of the Megaupload domain by U.S. authorities would not work against Tribler.
(via diebr0nzed)
If you’ve just purchased your first Android phone or you’re looking to round out your existing collection, here’s a list of 20 must-have apps that every Android owner should consider. They’re all free, too!
Apple is expected to hold a media event during the first week in March to introduce the iPad 3, reports AllThingsD. The article cites unnamed sources as saying that Apple will unveil the new iPad in San Francisco; if the event truly takes place the first week in March, that would peg it on either a Thursday or a Friday.
Facebook is the strangest Internet company ever to make it big. Compare Mark Zuckerberg’s site with Amazon, which just wants to sell you stuff—an old business in a new medium. By contrast, Facebook’s all-encompassing mission to “make the world more open and connected” seems positively zany. It’s not only that Facebook is ambitious; lots of Web companies, especially Google, strike the same revolutionary tone.
What’s different about Facebook is its product: Facebook is us. You go to Google for Web pages, you go to Apple for computers, and you go to Amazon for stuff. What does Facebook give you? Me and you and everyone we know. Or, to quote another movie: It’s people! Facebook, is made out of people!
