Social Media

The days for college guidebooks like The Princeton Review could be numbered: Unigo.com, a start-up founded by Wesleyan ’04 Jordan Goldman, provides reviews, pictures and videos created by those who know the school best–its students.

Wetpaint, the Seattle-based provider of social publishing platforms, is powering over 1 million sites from small grassroots organizations to big media brands including HBO, Discovery and others.

The 2009 Amgen Tour of California–America's largest cycling event, taking place this Saturday–will allow fans to watch the tour live online and track the progress of Lance Armstrong and other cyclists using Adobe Flash technology, Adobe announced today. The online Live Tour Tracker application is a showcase of the versatility of Flash's uses and will […]

Small blogs with an audience of 10,000 to 20,000 viewers might have a difficult time selling advertising, but advertisers should sure be listening to what they're saying, according to Jon Gibs, VP of Media Analytics at Nielsen Online. Nielsen's BuzzMetrics services can help turn the collective influence of the blogosphere and other social media channels […]

At Beet.TV, we cover a lot of stories around online video, but a reverse phenomenon is going to reach half of the television homes in America this year, according to Dalen Harrison, CEO of interactive TV company Ensequence.

Tumblr is the fast-growing, multimedia micro-blogging platform which has gotten lots of  attention from the downtown hipsters and big users including the Presidential Inauguration Committee.  The New York start-up is  is reading a subscription service, founder David Karp, 22, told The Deal's Mary Kathleen Flynn in this interview published last night.

The intersection of social media and advertising doesn't have to be on Facebook–or even online, according to Kevin McKeon, Executive Creative Director of highly regarded ad agency StrawberryFrog. "I consider everything we do to be social," he says. "…If we do a television commercial we want people to talk about it. If we create a […]

Interesting video interview up on TechCrunch from Michael Arrington from Davos where he interviews Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, writes in The New York Times that the custom-label social network platform has been deployed on 600,000 networks. She is the guest author of the article.  In September, we caught up with Gina on the campus of MIT where she was keynote speaker at the EmTech08 conference.  Handling the interview […]

Kaltura, the company which provides an open source video platform that allows the public to edit video in a "Wiki-like" environment, just announced its first, prominent media company implementation with Public Television’s flagship Station, WNET/Thirteen New York.  The Kaltura player is being used first on Worldfocus, the show about international events. It is featured on […]

How will the hugely popular micro-blogging platform Twitter make money?  Caroline McCarthy, the lead social media reporter for CNET News.com, says that while speculation is rampant about various monetization strategies for Twitter, she expects the sale of analytics and non-public data is the most likely scenario. This is the second of two interviews with Caroline […]

It was a big week in social  media with news that Facebook and MySpace will allow their platforms to be integrated into other web sites. While there is excitement about spreading social media outside of their destination sites, there is growing evidence that major advertisers are not comfortable with placing ads on these networks.  Caroline […]

Social entertainment center Boxee has been one of Beet’s favorite start-ups since its alpha launch this summer. It’s been improving steadily since then, and today it announced that Netflix subscribers can now stream movies through the site’s Watch Instantly feature and that is has expanded its television content to include thewb.com shows like Buffy The […]

StumbleUpon, the content recommendation site owned by eBay, has extended it premium service to several new publishers including Funny Or Die, Atom, Scientific American, and 5min.com, according to a report in CNET this morning.

MySpace just announced a program to allow users to pull premium content from Hulu and other 150 other licensed video sources onto their MySpace pages.  It’s called the Primetime Application. In June in Beverly Hills, I interviewed Jason Kirk who heads up MySpaceTV.  He spoke about the role of MySpace as "home" — a destination […]

Chris Hughes, 24, one of the three co-founders of Facebook, left the start-up in early 2007 in sunny Palo Alto for Chicago to join the nacent Obama campaign. Hughes went on to mastermind the digital strategy for the long-shot candidate and the MyBarackObama.com social networking site. Sarah Lai Stirland has a story in Wired this […]

Two thirds of the videos on MySpace are viewed on user profiles and are discovered primarily through social referral, MySpaceTV Director of Content and Marketing said during the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable today. The MySpaceTV toolset makes video a part of the social media experience, he explained to Andy in an interview yesterday evening at […]

Barack Obama has been more challenging to characterize from a comedic standpoint than McCain, according to JibJab CEO Gregg Spiridellis. Spiridellis spoke on a panel at the TimeWarner Politics 08 Summit last week about politics and comedy on the web. JibJab had the first online video political comedy hit way back in 2004 with “This […]

MySpace has launched several major initiatives this election season to get younger voters involved in the political process. It formed MyDebates.org in partnership with the Commission on Presidential Debates, conducted a poll with NBC News and the Wall Street Journal Online geared toward younger voters, and is working with major voter registration groups like Rock […]

Create-your-own-social-network platform Ning announced today that over 30 OpenSocial applications will be available for its 500,000 online communities. OpenSocial applications, developed by Google, work across social networks like Friendster, Hi5, and MySpace.