One of the Web’s oldest portals, MSN, is about to dive headfirst into one of the Internet’s hottest trends: Social Media. No, Microsoft, which runs MSN, is not launching its own social network. Instead, the 17-year-old content destination is unveiling a new social reader, msnnow, on Facebook, the Web and in a new web-based mobile interface. The initiative is actually two components. According to MSN General Manager Bob Visse, a team of 20 editors will use a new Demand Dashboard to measure velocity and volume of trending topics across Facebook, Twitter, the Bing search engine and BreakingNews.com (a joint MSN/NBC venture). Stories that are trending will appear on msnnow in a constantly updating “Biggest Movers” box. In addition, a team of editors will select topics and stories from among those social (and search) trends and … Continue reading →

The rage in social networks right now is Pinterest, partly because it’s probably the first social network that has a much higher adoption rate by females than males, and partly because it’s an interesting concept: somewhere between visual social bookmarking and scrapbooking. What also might not be immediately obvious is that it’s just “easier” to interact there. In that way, Pinterest has something in common with Instagram, which is community around photos. What I’m interested in, though, is Gentlemint, which I keep calling “Pinterest for dudes.” (Again, because Pinterest has a very high level of female users, the content that flows by my screen there, most often, is female-focused.) I’m not at all interested in the technology. Frankly, Pinterest works much better. I’m not interested in the longevity. Pinterest has millions … Continue reading →

Pinterest, a two-year-old social bookmarking site that lets users collect and share things they like on the web, is driving increasingly significant amounts of traffic to retailers’ websites. The service enables users to create online bulletin boards, or “pinboards,” for popular categories such as home decor, food and wedding inspiration. Members can use Pinterest’s “Pin It” bookmarklet tool and iPhone app to save things they see online and offline, and explore and repin the images their friends collect via their personal newsfeeds. The website is especially popular among women, who account for 58% of Pinterest’s traffic, according to Experian Hitwise. The site’s popularity is quickly growing. Pinterest’s traffic increased more than fourfold between September 2011 and December 2011, bringing in 7.51 million unique visitors in December alone, data from Compete indicates. The … Continue reading →

A little while back, Google rolled out the “ Search, plus your world” initiative. Ostensibly a way to tie your Google+ account into your search results, it also created a new column showing Google+ profiles that are somewhat relevant to your query. Search for movies and you’ll find the Google+ profiles for IMDB and for the actor Hugh Jackman. Search Facebook and you’ll grab Mark Zuckerberg’s absolutely barren Google+ profile. By prioritising its own social network over the likes Twitter and Facebook, some argued that Google’s results were biased. Twitter’s general counsel for policy, trust, safety, and long job titles, Alex Macgillivray, tweeted that the update was a “bad day for the internet”, as it would “warp” searches.

Twitter has complained about changes made by Google to integrate its social network Google+ into search results. The new feature, called Search plus Your World, will automatically push results from Google+ up the search rankings. Tweeting on the news, Twitter’s lawyer Alex Macgillivray described it as a “bad day for the internet”. Google is determined to push its social network in the face of continued rivalry with Facebook.The current changes were about even greater personalisation, it said. It already includes personal search history in its search algorithms.