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Taking advantage of the increasing importance of social media management for businesses, Spredfast , a finalist at this year's Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, has received $1.6 million in funding from Austin Ventures. Featured here on ReadWriteWeb in January, Spredfast is the first enterprise-class social media management system. Sponsor Spredfast supports companies at both the enterprise and SMB levels, allowing businesses to manage their social media campaigns through a single dashboard. Spredfast incorporates data from multiple platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and most blogging platforms (such as WordPress, Blogger and MoveableType). As the information from these platforms is in one location, and as the service integrates both Omniture and Google Analytics, Spredfast facilitates social media automation and then ties social media analytics with Web analytics to secure "click to conversion" metrics. The pricing for the services range from free to $100 per initiative per month. Since its public launch in January, Spredfast has attracted Oracle, AOL, HP and IBM to its customer base. "We've been working to establish Spredfast as the 'Omniture for social media', a valuable tool for anyone trying to effectively manage and measure a social media initiative," said Kenneth Cho, Spredfast's CEO. "Our relationship with Austin Ventures, specifically with AV partner Mike Dodd previously of Omniture, is great validation of the huge gap Spredfast is filling in the social media market and the reception so many customers are having toward the product." Discuss
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Social Media Management System Spredfast Secures Series A Funding
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Location based social networks - are you over it already? It feels like location is all we ever hear about anymore, especially this week leading up to SXSW . We're excited about location too; see our enthusiastic write-ups What Twitter's Geolocation API Makes Possible and The Era of Location as Platform Has Arrived . But it's getting a little ridiculous. We offer below a few thoughts to consider about all this location madness. Sponsor That Phrase: "Location, Location, Location" You're going to hear journalists use it far too much. Want to know where it came from? Language sleuth William Safire investigated for the NYT last year and concluded that the phrase was probably first used in a 1926 real estate classified ad in the Chicago Tribune: "Attention salesmen, sales managers: location, location, location, close to Rogers Park." Don't you feel more savvy now? Too Many Startups? We're under embargo on almost all of them, but we can tell you there are at least 25 companies making location-related announcements at SXSW this week. Probably more. The Dunbar number of startups in a particular market, if you will, is something like 5. More than that and most people stop taking new entrants seriously. It's one thing to offer different technologies along the value chain of location, but sharing your location and aggregating messages by things like hashtag are two very crowded niches right now. One of my favorites is SitBy.Us , an app that lets you see where your Twitter friends are sitting in a conference session. That's pretty cool. You've got to wonder if and when Location will Jump the Shark and what consumer exhaustion for it might mean for the long-term prospects of the market. Everyone wants to be "the Twitter of SXSW 2010" but the fact is that SXSW represented a statistically insignificant increase in Twitter usage , historically speaking. Location Startups "Not Playing Nice" There are loads of ways to post your location but it's very hard to get a feel for who exactly is where. SimpleGeo launched a site called Vicarious.ly today that aggregates check-ins across scads of services, all around Austin. It doesn't work very well, though. SimpleGeo's Matt Galligan told us today that the site is really just a proof of concept and that our perception that these startups aren't playing very nice together is very true. "And it's a real shame," he told us. It's hard for a 3rd party service to clearly identify whether these competing services are really talking about the same location, for example. No one tells their users what users on competing services are up to in the same location. Gowalla's Josh Williams says he doesn't know what the problem is and that Gowalla is very open about user data by open standards. Update: Galligan pinged us after publication to clarify: "I mostly meant the problem with venue data was because of how awful the *business listings* market is. There's certainly issues with non-connecting venue data but it's a *very* hard problem to solve, so I don't blame them right now. It can, however, be solved in the future." We Need Cross-Service Venue Tracking If you're thinking of going to a place, or you're there and wonder who else is, what you need is a place where you can see who has checked in there across all services. For the place to be at the center of your experience, not the service. Michael Arrington says the new AOL Lifestream lets you track particular locations, but that service only supports Foursquare among location services. What we need is something like that across any and every check-in service. That's the kind of thing that data standards can enable. Google's Chris Messina told us that the Activity Streams standard has a namespace for "place" and would probably add support for GeoRSS soon, but that so far Google Buzz is the only location service that seems to be supporting it. Gowalla Doesn't Get Enough Love Gowalla's API is read-only, meaning that 3rd party apps can't publish check-ins to the service like they can to Foursquare. Gowalla says they are working on it, but they are the underdog already and this isn't helping. AOL's cool new Lifestream product , for example, only supports Foursquare, not Gowalla. That's a real shame. You know what's nice about Gowalla, though? You can see who has checked into a place and when, even if they aren't friends of yours. That's not something that's easy to do with Foursquare at all. It's also much prettier than Foursquare and uses peoples' full names, instead of grade-school-style first names and last initials. Gowalla's API just isn't seeing the adoption that Foursquares is, though. Have you seen Avoider.org for example? That's pretty funny stuff and it's built on top of Foursquare. The above is for illustration purposes only. I like both these guys just fine. Imagine the Future, It's Going to Be Different If location based services ever become popular with the mainstream, every urban area might end up looking like the Foursquare map of downtown Austin this weekend. That means services are going to have to come up with creative and interesting new ways to make that data usable day-to-day and not overwhelming. Likewise, when you think about the future, imagine Facebook being a player in this market, because they are going to be soon. It's possible that Facebook and Twitter could be where all these other services meet-up. Brightkite has different features than BlockChalk but we can see what our friends are doing across any of these apps on Facebook, perhaps. And Facebook is where your mom checks-in, if she's not an early adopter. Finally, will location tracking be persistent? Loopt right now uses mobile carrier tie-ins to track your location constantly and expose it to a circle of trusted friends. Is that something that all services will enable in the future? Gowalla CEO Josh Williams told us "no way" does he think that will be the dominant model, but Adam Duvander, author of the forthcoming book Mapscripting 101 , says he agrees with Loopt: that the value in persistent location tracking will be so compelling that everyone will end up going for it in the end, once proper privacy settings are figured out. What do you think, do you think persistent location tracking is the future of location based services? These are some of the things I'm thinking about location this week. Discuss
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6 Thoughts About Location Madness
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According to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project , 61% of Americans now get some of their news online, though local TV stations are still the most popular means of finding out about the news. Local print newspapers still reach 50% of Americans and 17% read the print versions of national papers like the New York Times or USA Today. While 38% of Americans still rely solely on offline sources for their daily news, only 2% of adults in the U.S. get their news exclusively from online sources. Sponsor The majority of news consumers in the U.S. (59%) now get their news from a combination of online and offline sources. News Portals Are the Most Popular Sources - Younger Internet Users also Rely on Social Networks When online, American Internet users generally rely on 2 to 5 different sites to get their news. Interestingly, 65% of online news users say that they don't have a favorite online news source. The majority of Internet users (56%) rely on news portals like Google News , AOL or Topix. Younger Internet users under 29 also tend to use social networks to look for interesting stories that their peers share with them (44%) and 13% specifically follow news organizations or individual journalists on social networking sites. Only 4% of all Internet users follow Twitter updates from journalists and news organizations to stay on top of the news. News podcasts are far more popular than Twitter for getting news updates. About 15% of online news users over 18 listen to news podcasts from organizations like NPR or the New York Times. What About RSS? Sadly, the Pew study did not ask users if they used RSS feeds and feed readers to consume news ("RSS" doesn't even appear in the report). While a lot of Internet users probably use RSS to consume news on portal sites and news aggregators without knowing it, it would be interesting to see how many people use services like Google Reader to consume news. Sharing News Three-quarters of all adult Internet users in the U.S. say that they get news forwarded to them by email or through posts on social networking sites. A quarter of these Internet users, however, also says that they barely ever read these stories. Demographics Marketers and the advertising departments for online news sources will be happy to hear that news users tend to be younger than the average population (68% are under 50 and 29% are under 30) and are likely to be employed full-time (50%) and have at least some college education (67%). Their household income also tends to be higher than the U.S. average. These users are also have faster broadband connections (84%) than the average Internet user. The heaviest consumers of online news are between 30 and 49 years old and likely to live in a household with an annual income of over $50,000. What do they look for? The vast majority of Internet users goes online to find out information about the weather (81%). News about national events (73%), health (66%), business and finance (64%) and news about international events (62%) are also among the top 5 most popular categories among online news consumers . Tech news is the sixth-most popular category. Get RWW News on Facebook You can become a fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook and get our news and analysis about the changing web delivered directly into your News feed. Discuss
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Study: Only 2% of U.S. Adults Rely Exclusively on Internet for Getting News
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Due to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints filed by Microsoft, whistleblower website Cryptome [link to a backup version of the site] has been disabled by its ISP, Network Solutions. The complaints were due to the fact that Cryptome published a 22-page Microsoft Global Criminal Spy Guide. Microsoft claimed copyright infringement, Cryptome's editor refused to budge, and the site was taken down this afternoon. Cryptome has previously published similar guides from Facebook, AOL, Yahoo and Skype; the site has been threatened but never before actually disabled. Sponsor The Microsoft document was originally published on Feb. 20. Microsoft demanded that Cryptome remove the PDF, and when the editor refused, Cryptome's ISP sent a warning: If the document was not removed by Thursday, the site would be disabled. However, the site was taken down Wednesday afternoon. The reason Cryptome refused to remove the PDF of Microsoft's so-called "spy guide" was that editor John Young believed its programs, which make it easier for law enforcement to obtain user data, showed "improper use of copyright to conceal violations of trust toward its customers," according to an interview with Geekosystem. "Copyright law is not intended for confidentiality purposes," he continued. "We think all lawful spying arrangements should be made public Microsoft should join the others who openly describe [their] procedures." Young named Cisco as one such company. Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a call today, "We find it troubling that copyright law is being invoked here. Microsoft doesn't sell this manual. There's no market for this work. It's not a copyright issue. John's copying of it is fair use. We don't do this anywhere else in speech law." For example, in cases involving libel or trade secrets, said Cohn, "You go to court, you make a case and you get an injunction. You don't just file a form. DMCA makes censorship easy." Cohn also noted she feels the reason Microsoft actually wants the document removed from the Web is because, for a large corporation with millions of users and an aggressive PR agenda, the document raises concerns and sparks conversations the company would rather not confront. "It's part of a very intense political debate about the role of intermediary companies like Microsoft aiding surveillance for law enforcement. It's embarrassing for Microsoft for their users to see how much the people who carry their email have arrangements with law enforcement. "All of the people who carry our communications are an easy conduit for our government to spy on us, and a lot of people are unhappy about that. It's a legitimate public debate, and Microsoft doesn't want to be part of that debate." We hope that Microsoft does, in fact, release their stranglehold on Young and his site and take part in a conversation with their users about how their data can be accessed by others, including law enforcement. We've reached out to them for comment and will update this post if and when we hear back. In the meantime, let us know your thoughts in the comments. UPDATE: Still no word from Microsoft, but here's that document they really don't want you (or anyone else) to see. We hope to hear from a Microsoft representative soon to discuss the intentions and implications of this guide. Thanks to Glenn Davis of Geekosystem for the tip. Discuss
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Microsoft Kills Watchdog Website Due to Leaked Documents
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Dan Kantor, the man behind de.licio.us's Playtagger and Firefox extension, has brought us a new toy to play with that literally makes the web your musical oyster. ExtensionFM is a Chrome extension that automatically scrubs the websites you visit, finds embedded music, and adds it to a library of online music. As time has gone on, we've found fewer and fewer reasons to actually download music and ExtensionFM gives us one less. Sponsor Kantor has done some big things in online music over the years. He created Playtagger , a music player that made mp3 bookmarks in de.licio.us playable right there on the page, and founded Streampad , a social web-scale music application that was acquired by AOL in 2008. If you use the Firefox plug-in for Delicious, Kantor built that too. Until 2009, he was the product director of AOL Music and now he brings us ExtensionFM. Kantor pre-released the music plugin just over two weeks ago with little to-do, but we can't get enough of it. ExtensionFM runs quietly in the background as you browse, collecting any and all tracks and archiving them. If you decide you'd like to listen as you go, you can simply click on the icon and play individual songs, queue songs, or play or queue them all. If you decide that you like a song enough to own it, you can simply right click on it and chose "Buy", which sends you to the song on Amazon. But even if that were to not work, the program keeps the link to the site where it originally found the song. Then, when you switch over to the full screen extension, all of the tracks you've discovered while browsing are neatly organized by artist, album, track name and even the site where it was originally discovered, with a link, so you can go back and find out more about tracks you like. When you first start up ExtensionFM, it has six featured sites, including Spinner, Live Music Archive, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Daytrotter and Tuneage, making it easy to get going. What's even more, ExtensionFM will let you "scrobble" to Last.fm, which means it will follow along and keep track of your music listening habits and send them to your Last.fm account. We got in touch with Kantor this afternoon and he told us that he does have plans to make ExtensionFM available as a Firefox add-on at some point in the future, but for now it is only available for Chrome. He also said that right now, music can only be played when the user is online, but that offline playing is another feature they're looking into. Because we have a supply of just 50 beta invite codes, we've put information on how to get your invite on our Facebook page . Head there now to be one of the lucky few, and if you're so inclined, we'd love it if you added us to your Facebook friends, as well! Discuss
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ExtensionFM Makes the Web Your Personal Music Library (Invites)
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