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Twitter now Boasts Nearly 200 Million Visitors —

Twitter now Boasts Nearly 200 Million Visitors is a post from Chris Pirillo

During the CM Summit today, Twitter COO Dick Costolo informed the gathered crowd that Twitter now has approximately 190 million visitors per month. Collectively, those people send out about 65 million tweets per day. Holy Twitter client – that’s a lot of updates. ““We’re laying down track as fast as we can in front of the train,” says Costolo. These numbers are up slightly from 180 million self-reported unique visitors per month back in April, and 50 million Tweets per day in February.”

The number of visitors to the site is not the same thing as the number of registered users. Costolo reminded us that most users never send out a single tweet (though I cannot imagine that!). Instead, they use the site to consume information and news. It’s also not clear how many of those 65 million tweets come from spam bots and the like.

Twitter is much more than just a place to update your friends and family. It’s honestly the fastest way to find out the latest news – usually while it is happening. For instance, my assistant Kat used Twitter two nights ago to track the deadly and destructive tornadoes that ripped through Illinois. She has family in and near the locations where the damage was the worst, and couldn’t reach them during the storms. She kept her eyes glued to Twitter, finding out information there far quicker than she did on any other source. The local newspaper website (and tv site) didn’t have ANY information about the storms until more than an hour after they happened. However, people living through the catastrophe were live tweeting every moment.

Social networking is about staying connected – with the world. When you open up your mind to the possibilities that are out there and learn to take advantage of them, you’ll find yourself learning new things every moment of every day.

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Yahoo has laid off part of its search team as part of a new restructuring move, we’ve learned. Yahoo declined to comment on the number of people who were affected, but did confirm that there were layoffs in its Search group and gave us the following statement:

“Yahoo! remains focused on innovating the overall Search experience over the long-term, and the Yahoo! Search group is hard at work on some new experiences that we believe will convert Yahoo! users to Yahoo! searchers. To accomplish our new product objectives, we have decided that we need a different combination of talent and are making changes within the search group in order to more deeply invest in other areas of the group. “

Yahoo is, of course, outsourcing its search engine to Bing as part of a deal that was forged between Yahoo and Microsoft last year. It’s unclear if the layoffs are directly related to the deal, but it seems likely. Soon after the search deal was announced, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz alluded to future layoffs as a result of the integration.

Yahoo previously held a major round of layoffs last spring, when it cut 5% of its staff, or around 700 people.

Last week, comScore released its U.S. Online Video Rankings for April 2010. We noted that Vevo in particular saw big growth in its first couple of months on the Web.

But as Clickz this morning wrote, social networking site Facebook has shot up the rankings, too. With 41,335,000 unique U.S. viewers in April alone, the site is no match for Google Sites (which includes YouTube and Google Video), as the leader of the ranking for top online video properties in the United States boasts a combined viewership of more than 136 million users per month.

Facebook is climbing the rankings fast, though: comScore pegged its number of unique U.S. viewers at 13.3 million in April last year, so that means its viewership more than tripled in a year, according to the audience measurement firm.

Thus, Facebook has quietly nestled itself in the number 5 spot, just behind Yahoo Sites, Fox Interactive Media and Vevo. According to comScore, Facebook videos currently draw a bigger audience than known names like Microsoft, CBS, Hulu and Viacom.

Even if surprisingly few videos get viewed by users on average (5.6, compared to 96 on Google Sites and 24.7 on Hulu), the site seems poised for growth in this segment. With more than 400 million active users, the site could soon surpass Yahoo and Fox as one of the leading video destinations on the Web as far as the United States goes, and will likely fight a hard battle with Vevo for the number two spot in the rankings.

And as Clickz points out, a lot of the video content currently available on Facebook comes in the form of embedded YouTube units, but comScore counts views of those to Google Sites, so Facebook’s role in delivering video content to users is larger than the numbers actually suggest.

It would probably also help to stop hiding the ‘video’ page under the ‘Photos’ tab, which makes zero sense to me.

A few weeks ago, a handful of web companies lead by Meebo and Google (with moral support from Yahoo!) announced their support for a new protocol called XAuth. The idea is very simple and seemingly appealing – create a sort of shared-cookie service for sites to use to store and find which identity providers a user prefers, solving the OpenID NASCAR problem. It is a similar idea to existing commercial products such as JanRain’s RPX.

I’ve heard about this proposal a few months ago and have been rolling my eyes ever since. Why? Because this is – to borrow from one of my son’s favorite book – a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea. It is a dangerous and over simplified hack aimed at solving a complex problem – how to manage online identities and improve the usability of distributed identity providers.

The XAuth proposal is a privacy and security nightmare. It relies on the use of a single, shared domain name which is currently under the control of one company – Meebo. While I have nothing against Meebo, other than proposing and promoting this, I certainly don’t trust it to manage the web’s identity preference layer. I heard suggestions of handing control over to the OpenID Foundation, but I don’t trust it either. If it is controlled by a single entity, it fails the most basic test of distributed identity services.

In addition, XAuth is a cookie-like mechanism that suffers from all the same problems, and as such, is an easy target for abuse and manipulation. And guess what – it is an opt-out mechanism per browser.

This is a misguided attempt to solve a problem browser vendors have failed to address. It is true that getting browser vendors to care about identity and innovate in the space is a huge challenge, but solving it with a server-hosted, centralized solution goes against everything the distributed identity movement has tried to accomplish over the past few years.

As for the name, I resent the association between XAuth and the OAuth brand, using a cloned logo and a very confusing name. This is especially true considering it has nothing to do with OAuth, and everything to do with OpenID. And by the way, the name is already taken.

I think I’ll move to Australia.

(Image adapted from the book “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” by Judith Viorst, illustrated by Ray Cruz.)

Yahoo is clearly positioning itself to become a stronger player in the online content game, as evidenced by its recent acquisition of Associated Content. But we are hearing that the real prize they want is the Huffington Post. The two companies are currently in negotiations over a deep content partnership, according to sources close to the situation. There are also rumblings that Yahoo wants to buy the Huffington Post outright, but it may be too expensive. In any case, the Huffington Post seems to be more interested in doing a content deal than selling.

Yahoo needs high quality articles and videos, and the Huffington Post needs more traffic and pageviews. A content deal could conceivably include articles, videos, and advertising integrated across Yahoo News and other Yahoo properties. Who knows, maybe that deal could lead to something else. There are many ties between the two companies. Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau sits on Yahoo’s board, and president Greg Coleman used to be head of sales at Yahoo.

The Huffington Post is killing it right now. It is the biggest blog on the planet, with 26 million unique visitors worldwide in April, according to comScore. It is already bigger than NYTimes.com. The HuffPo has expanded well beyond politics to cover more than 20 different news categories, and it is embracing social networks as a way to drive pageviews through sharing. It is even experimenting with badges and other game mechanics to reward loyal readers and sharers.

If content is once again becoming king, online media companies need a lot of it and they need it to be good. An acquisition by Yahoo would accelerate the HuffPo’s growth, while at the same time give Yahoo a strong anchor for its content business. Sources with knowledge of the HuffPo’s thinking insist it is not for sale. But everything is for sale at the right price.

Buying the Huffington Post would not be cheap. When it last raised $25 million in December, 2008, that round gave the company a $125 million valuation. It would want multiples of that now. The company is on track to generate $60 million in revenues next year and $100 million in 2012. It still has cash in the bank, and could turn profitable by early next year. If you figure an acquisition multiple of 6X or 7X next year’s revenues, Yahoo would have to pay at least $360 million for HuffPo today, or much more a year from now. If Yahoo wants to focus on being a media company, there are worse things it could do than buy HuffPo. But is it really worth that much? A content deal lets Yahoo dip its toes in the water and find out.

Photo credit: Flickr/NeoGaboX

Delicious Founder Joshua Schachter Leaves Google —

Shared by mangini
Esse título do post ficou gay, hein? :-)

Over a year after joining Google, Joshua Schachter, the founder of Delicious and a Yahoo exec until June 2008, is leaving the search giant, according to a Tweet he just sent out. Schachter sent out another Tweet shortly after the first message stating that he has “no clue what he’s doing next.” Schachter confirmed to us that he is in fact leaving Google.

When asked why he was leaving Google, Schachter told us that he “Felt like doing something new,” but apparently doesn’t know what that new project is. Yet. Schachter joined Google last January as an engineer and also continued his role as an independent angel investor. He tells us that he may slow down his investments in this next stage of his career.

Schachter of course is best known for founding bookmarking service Delicious, which was acquired by Yahoo in December of 2005. Schachter has been fairly vocal about his displeasure with the direction of Delicious and even launched his own threaded Twitter conversation application last Summer while at Google.

Schachter’s angel investments include Foursquare, SimpleGEO, Square, DailyBooth, Bump Technologies and most recently BlockChalk and 4chan founder Moot’s new startup Canvas Networks.

Yahoo Redesigns Image & Video Search Pages To Show Trending Results — Yahoo announced they have redesigned the home page for Yahoo Image Search and Yahoo Video Search to include trending search results. The new pages are no longer dull looking, they show up to “five pages of topics that are trending in search,” in a sleek black background. You can scroll through the pages [...]

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