Wondering where to dump that stray $50k you have lying around so that you can spend the presidential inauguration swagging out in some palatial, gold-plated estate? Look no further than D.C.’s Madison Hotel, which is offering an elite “Inaugural Town and Country” package to visitors of the capital for whom a night at the Four Seasons just ain’t cuttin’ it. Read More
At the GigaOM RoadMap conference in San Francisco yesterday, Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey shared some very high-minded thoughts about possibility that technology could bring us closer together. Read More
There’s an interesting legal case brewing in San Francisco with potential legal ramifications for social mediaites. A federal judge in San Francisco this week refused to dismiss a lawsuit between a cellphone news site called PhoneDog (yes, there is a such a thing) and Noah Kravtiz, its former reporter.
When Mr. Kravitz, who tweeted under the handle @phonedog_noah, left his job, he changed his Twitter moniker to @noahkravitz and took the 17,000 Twitter followers he picked up while associated with PhoneDog with him. In response, PhoneDog issued a complaint arguing that both the password to the Twitter account the identity of followers were trade secrets. Read More
Guest of a Guest is worried that the next mayor of New York won’t use the Foursquares and the Twitters. “Technology and social media has taken over the world and has even inserted itself into the heart of Mayor Bloomberg … He has made the use of technology important and a priority to the city’s growth and well-being.” The writer cites Mayor Bloomberg checking into Duane Reade on Foursquare and tweeting about the opening of the Twitter office as evidence that the next mayor has “pretty big tech boots to fill.” Read More
Path, a social network focused on sharing with a limited circle of close friends and family, was launched with much hype by Dave Morin, formerly of Facebook. Path allowed users only 50 friends. But last week the increased that number to 150, sometimes referred to as the Dunbar number, after Robert Dunbar, a sociologist who posited that 150 was the upper limit of meaningful social connections a single human could have.
“The problem with 50 is that it is annoying but not structurally useful,” said tech intellectual Clive Thompson, who has written extensively on Dunbar’s number. “When I first heard of path my thought was, don’t go with 50, go with 10 or 3, make it really interesting, like, this is a group for me to pay serious attention.” Read More
Uncram, a buzzed about New York startup launched this week with a flattering proposition: Your thoughts, ideas, and insights are just too multi-faceted to be limited to the blurb-and-link, blurb-and-link format, aren’t they? Shouldn’t the world experience the full splendor of your story-telling instead of standard tweet or status update?
To give social mediates a little more breathing room, CEO Ariel Porath created an extender that functions like a souped-up Deck.ly. Rather than just allowing users room for more text, it also lets you add photos, videos, topics, maps, and links “to get your story across.” Read More
If you’re anything like Betabeat and routinely find yourself chasing down founders and venture capitalists (it’s all very professional, we assure you), chances are you’ve come across more and more About.me profiles recently.
The San Francisco start-up, which AOL snatched up last December, lets users create a free splash page-like personal profile with a big photo, short bio, and handy little buttons connecting to your other profiles scattered around the web (Twitter, Foursquare, WordPress, etc.). Users can also access analytics in terms of traffic to their About.me page.
In the battle to become your “single online identity,” About.me certainly certainly has an aesthetic and utilitarian edge over say, your drab Google profile. And its list of advisers–Kevin Rose, Om Malick, Tim Ferriss, Andy Weissman–is impressive. But we have yet to see anyone outside of the tech world’s earliest-of-adopters latch on. Which might be why the start-up is making an aggressive push into the streets of New York. Read More
If you experience a real-world phenomenon and don’t tweet/check-in/post about is the new if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest. Go ahead, get your cool kid badge and check-in to the Earthquakepocalypse. In the time it took us to write this sentence, about a 1,000 more New Yorkers did, currently clocking in at 9,007 and counting. (Thanks for the tip, Read More
On his Tumblr today, former Vimeo co-founder Zach Klein took a break from his summer project building what looks like an off-the-grid cabin in the woods to announce a scholarship opportunity Peter Thiel would be proud of. To promote the value of peer-to-peer education, as opposed to that no good very bad institutionalized kind of book learning, Mr. Klein is offering $1,000 (total, not per person, sorry). Until the funds run out–or August 19th, whichever comes first–anyone who signs up for a class at Skillshare, where Mr. Klein notes he led the seed investment round through Founder’s Collective, can be reimbursed up to $20 worth of the ticket price. All you have to do is email your receipt to skillsharescholarship@gmail.com. Read More
Visitors who clicked over to the website for Beta620 could be forgiven for thinking they happened upon some cutesy social media start-up. The clean minimalist interface! The wacky adorable animal illustrations! In actuality, it’s a public beta testing site launched yesterday by The New York Times to let users experiment and weigh in on new features. (“620″ refers to The Times‘ street address on Eighth Avenue.) It appears its the beta-testing site may have had its own beta-testing issues, as the launch was delayed from last summer, due to the small matter of trying to figure out how to get readers to plunk down money for a paywall. Read More
