with last Friday’s upgrades to its News Feed and Live Feed features, Facebook also added a Reconnect tool… Apparently, the Reconnect tool got a little cheeky and started suggesting reconnections with users’ exes, current spouses (”Um, wasn’t that what the weekend was for?” wrote Twitter user Davidwinfrey), as well as users’ deceased friends
Google Voice, which provides people with a single phone number that can be used to reach them on their work, home, or cell phones, has 1.419 million users, according to the letter. Of those, 570,000 use it seven days a week
The smartphone is the fifth limb we never knew we needed
Iraqi refugees in Syria will receive UN food vouchers through text messages on mobile phones, the World Food Programme said Tuesday
Telecom executive: Once upon a time, there weren’t any water meters in California. Now most of the major cities have them, and they’ll be required everywhere in a couple of years. Something that was once unlimited became limited, and people learned to conserve. Web executive: The difference is, I can read my water meter. You make a ton of money when people exceed their minutes or message limits, and you don’t warn them before they do it. If you play the same game with Internet traffic, it’ll scare people away from using the mobile web
Among those stories that strike us as perfectly plotted, with those astonishing endings both a complete surprise and a total satisfaction,” Delaney once wrote, “it is amazing how many of their writers will confess that the marvelous resolution was as much a surprise for them as it was for the reader.
Last week, BBC Audiobooks America announced that it would sponsor the creation of a story via Twitter feed, using a first sentence written by author Neil Gaiman as the seed and inviting the public to collaborate in completing it, one 140-character passage at a time. The experiment was widely pronounced “cool,” as such things usually are, then promptly forgotten by everyone but the participants
while the deal does leave Microsoft and Google in almost exactly the same place that they were 24 hours ago … it confers a huge benefit to Twitter, which is understood to be receiving payments from both companies for providing access to its content.
Facebook has been the largest share gainer of online usage over the past 3 years. It is now the number one site in global minutes: 6 billion minutes spent every day. (Number 2 is YouTube)
— Mary Meeker’s latest report
iPhone + iTouch has had the fastest growth in users in consumer tech hardware history
— Mary Meeker’s latest report
when Levi�s appeared in the top spot in both organic and paid listings on a Google search results page 90% of consumers who saw that page later named Levi`s when asked to name one brand of jeans. Only 53% named Levi�s after seeing a page where Levi�s had the top position in sponsored ads but not natural search results; 44% when Levi�s was tops in natural search, but not paid search ads; and 23% when Levi�s wasn`t represented at all.
On the one-year anniversary of the product’s release, the developers decided to undertake an e-commerce experiment. They offered to sell the game (previously retailing at $20) to anyone for whatever price the customer was willing to pay: “…one cent, a million dollars, the usual twenty, or any creative number they let you type into the text field.” In the week that followed, 57,000 additional people purchased the game; the graph above shows what prices they opted to pay. About 17,000 people paid $0.01, but another 16,000 paid $1.00-$1.99, and several hundred paid the full $20.00 original price. Total sales = over $100,000 for the week.
