Whitepages.com Acquiring Snapvine, Focuses On Community Development
WhitePages.com is acquiring Snapvine, a service that allows people to associate audio files with various resources like social networks, photos, text, and blogs. Snapvine enables facilitates voice blogs, similar to podcasting, but perhaps with a little greater ease.
WhitePages states on their blog that they’ll use Snapvine’s technology to provide their users with free, private voicemail boxes. In addition, WhitePages will roll out other features such as email and SMS services.
I think this signals that WhitePages.com will be pursuing community development as an ongoing strategy to maintain and build their traffic. This could be a really strong strategy — encouranging community engagement could drive up usage and associated ad revenues considerably for the residential listings directory. WhitePages.com also offers yellow pages directory service through a partnership with Idearc’s Superpages.com.
Considering the rise of Twitter and other mobile phone services, VOIP applications like Snapvine could be poised to be the next big thing.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that the deal likely comes in below previous valuations for Snapvine.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 06/05/2008 | Permalink | 
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Filed under: Local Search, News, Yellow Pages, technologySnapvine, Social-Media, voip, white-pages, WhitePages.com
Google to launch ‘Friend Connect’ tonight
Google’s newest foray into social media will launch tonight in preview release at Campfire One. Google’s announcement about Friend Connect states that webmasters may use the service to easily set up social media sharing services on their sites, encouraging online communities to develop and potentially help to promote the site. Google Friend Connect functionality includes user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, reviews, and third-party applications provided through Google’s OpenSocial developer community. (more…)
Popularity: 19% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 05/12/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, Social Media OptimizationFriend Connect, Google, Social-Media, Web-2.0
LinkedIn Beta Tests New Homepage Layout
So, I’m at the SMX West conference tonight, hopping around networking with people and every so often updating my Flickr pix or sending work emails when I noticed that LinkedIn is apparently beta-testing a new homepage layout on me. Check out the screengrab of what I see now when I login to LinkedIn:
So, they want feedback on their new design, so I’ll give it here.
Popularity: 14% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 02/28/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Design, Social Media Optimizationlinkedin, Social-Media, website-design
Organic Search Marketing in 2008: Predictions
If you’re even the slightest bit aware of what’s been going on in organic search marketing, you couldn’t help but know that Google made a number of changes during 2007 which impacted the natural search marketing programs for many webmasters. So here’s my little post predicting where I see the trends pointing and what we can expect in 2008 and beyond… (more…)
Popularity: 42% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 01/10/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Design, Google, SEO, Search Engine OptimizationGoogle, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Social-Media, usability, User-Centered-Design
Antisocial Media Optimization
Techcrunch amused me greatly by mentioning Hatebook, the “anti-social utility that connects you with the people YOU HATE.” If you’re already a member you can “Bog off”, and it invites you to “upload blackmail material”, “publish lies”, and “get the latest gossip from your enemies”. The jokes abound on this antisocial networking site — check out the stuff on the “edit your profile” screen I saw when I signed up:
The site made me stop and think: would it be possible to optimize through antisocial networking?
Popularity: 9% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 10/15/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Social Media Optimizationantisocial, antisocial-media, antisocial-networking, Social Media Optimization, Social-Media, social-networking
Not a Stumble - eBay to Acquire StumbleUpon
In yet another social media acquisition move, eBay has announced today that they’re acquiring StumbleUpon for approximately $75 million.
This closely follows Fox Interactive Media’s acquisition of Photobucket and Flektor along with CBS Interactive’s purchase of Wallstrip.com and fm.com. If you recall, Google has purchased YouTube while MySpace is already owned by Fox. Yahoo! has been buying social media types of sites for quite some time now, what with their earlier purchases of Flickr, del.icio.us, and such.
All the exuberance and hefty valuations seem to smack a bit of the over-valuation and acquisition craze just prior to the dot-bomb i-apocolypse. Purchasing a social media web 2.0 site or two just seems so trendy at the moment. These sites have some undeniable amounts of traffic and associated marketshare, but won’t there eventually have to be a bit of fallout? Won’t users eventually migrate over to a primary dominator in any given type of site?
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 05/30/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: General, NewseBay, Mergers-&-Acquisitions, Social-Media, StumbleUpon
How Web 2.0 Affects SEO Strategy
My colleague, P.J. Fusco just wrote a great article over at ClickZ on How Web 2.0 Affects SEO Strategy. In it, she provides a good overview of what’s good and bad about “Web 2.0″ stuff, and how some of the technology involved can challenge the goal of natural search optimization of a website. It’s well worth a read if you’re unfamiliar with these issues.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 05/23/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: SEO, technologyAJAX, SEO, Social-Media, Web-2.0
