Plaxo plans social network

Plaxo plans to release a social network “aggregator” on Monday. Its key features look likely to be an independence from platforms like Facebook, the ability to add information about the social networks your contacts use, feed aggregation and control over your owen data. Plaxo hopes its independence from closed networks like Facebook will give it a competitive edge, although all the evidence is to the contrary right now. While many

Facebook on track to overtake MySpace

A Comscore survey of global visitors age 15 and older highlights how Facebook has grown by 270% in the last year, which would put it on track to being larger than MySpace by the end of this year. In North America it has racked up 68.4% of the total unique visits to MySpace’s 62.1%. Facebook only opened its APIs on May 24th, 2007. Comscore said social networking behemoth MySpace.com attracted

Facebook doubles ad rates inside four months

Since February, Facebook has doubled its ad rates for sponsored groups from $150,000 to $300,000 in the US, reports ValleyWag which has obtained Facebook’s PowerPoint rate-card deck. Facebook now says it’s the top photo site. The minimum sponsorship remains $50,000, and Facebook claims the click-through rate is 20 times that of banners. This higher fee means the number of homepage links and sponsored stories advertisers get also doubles.

Facebook doubles ad rates inside four months

Since February, Facebook has doubled its ad rates for sponsored groups from $150,000 to $300,000 in the US, reports ValleyWag which has obtained Facebook's PowerPoint rate-card deck. Facebook now says it's the top photo site. The minimum sponsorship remains $50,000, and Facebook claims the click-through rate is 20 times that of banners. This higher fee means the number of homepage links and sponsored stories advertisers get also doubles.  

Three signs Aardman for ad-supported videos

UK mobile network Three has signed Aardman Animations, creators of the Wallace and Gromit series of animations, to supply video “snack” content. Has the Aardman’s ‘Angry Kid’ series of video shorts which are paid downloads, but this new package is ad-supported, and will feature old favourites such as Creature Comforts, A Town Called Panic, Purple & Brown and Morph. 3’s ad-supported video service is operated by Rhythm NewMedia. “Launching an

Newser launches human-edited news engine

Newser is a news search engine finessed by human editors. The site has been launched by Patrick Spain, the CEO of Highbeam (cofounder and former CEO of Hoover’s) and journalist Michael Wolff. The mission of the site: “quickly learn more about the most important and most talked about news stories each day, as well as to dig a bit deeper on news topics that interest you.� This is not unlike

Dvorak just doesn’t get it

John Dvorak is an old-fashioned tech jounralist in the US who thinks we’re going to have another dotcom bust: “Every single person working in the media today who experienced the dot-com bubble in 1999 to 2000 believes that we are going through the exact same process and can expect the exact same results—a bust…Today everything from YouTube to the local church has a social-networking angle. And this doesn’t even consider