David Gelles

Everyone is happy on the farm. That’s the message from Zynga and Facebook, which just announced a “five-year strategic relationship.”

For two companies attached at the hip, that may sound like stating the obvious. Zynga makes social games like Farmville that are played by hundreds of millions of users on Facebook’s platform, and in turn spends lots and lots of money advertising on Facebook.

But the announcement comes after weeks of speculation that Zynga was growing fed up with Facebook, and might even be considering leaving the platform.

David Gelles

When it comes to the long-term success of stand-alone “check-in” services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Booyah, it’s all about incentives.

Sure, a few hundred-thousand early adopters might find social value in sharing their location with the world. But in order for checking-in to go mainstream, these companies will have to offer users a compelling answer to the question “Why?”

Foursquare is inching towards a meaningful response with a bevy of partnerships, including its latest promotion with Starbucks.

David Gelles

Want to find the best beret shop in Paris, or the finest crepes in Avignon? Now you can turn to Yelp for those answers. The popular user reviewed local directory just launched in France with its first non-English site.

The new site continues Yelp’s gradual international colonisation. The San Francisco company’s first cross border foray came more than a year and a half ago, when it launched in Canada. Early last year, Yelp came to the UK, and then opened shop in Ireland.

But the pace of new offerings looks set to pick up. “We will continue to roll out in Western Europe in the months ahead,” said Yelp chief operating officer Geoff Donaker.

David Gelles

It was only in March that LivingSocial, the number two group buying site, took $25m in Series B funding. That, apparently, only tided the fast-growing company over for six weeks. Today the company is back with another $14m in funding, largely from the same investors.

That may seem like a lot of cash to take on in a few short months, and it is. But it pales in comparison to the $135m that Groupon, the leader of the pack, took from Digital Sky Technologies and friends a few weeks ago.

David Gelles

Never mind that his campaign website is a virtual knock-off of Facebook.com.

Chris Kelly, Facebook’s former chief privacy officer who is now running for California Attorney General, is not taking it easy on his former employer.

Candidate Kelly today used strong language to distance himself from Facebook’s recent changes and said that if elected he would hold the company accountable if it violated state laws.

“Facebook’s recent changes to its privacy policy and practices with regard to data sharing occurred after I left the company,” Mr Kelly said in a statement.

David Gelles

Calls to regulate social networks in the US are growing louder as Sen Charles Schumer (D-NY) has called on the Federal Trade Commission to set guidelines for how companies including Facebook and Twitter handle user data.

In a letter to the FTC, Sen Schumer said he was concerned that users were unwittingly sharing data they assumed was private with the entire internet, and that the sites made it too difficult for users to opt out of new settings that make information public by default. “The opt-out procedure is unclear, confusing, and you might even say hidden,” he said during a press conference.

David Gelles

At Chirp, Twitter’s first ever developer conference, co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone finally revealed some key statistics about the company.

  • 105,779,710 registered users. This is the number everyone was waiting for. Previous guestimates had put Twitter users in the range of 60m. But the revelation that Twitter now has more than 100m users is big news for a company founded just three years ago. Sceptics who doubted that Twitter was catching on can put those fears to rest. Twitter did not, however, disclose the number of active users it has. That number is likely much smaller.
  • 300,000 new users per day. That works out to about 10m new users a month, which could put Twitter on pace to double in size this year. It’s not quite as fast as Facebook is growing, but Twitter has escaped earth orbit.

David Gelles

Twitter has unveiled its long-awaited monetisation plans. Through a programme called Promoted Tweets, the company will allow businesses to bid on keywords, similar to Google’s highly successful AdWords system.

Twitter gave details to the New York Times and AdAge, which posted their stories late on Monday night San Francisco time.

According to those reports, the system will allow advertisers to bid on keywords on a CPM basis. When a user searches for a term on search.twitter.com, one ad will show up at the top of the stream and be identified as a “promoted” tweet. Initial advertisers include Starbucks, Virgin America and Best Buy.

David Gelles

venutre capital funds and dollars raised down nvcaThe tough times for venture capitalists in the US persist.

The first three months of this year marked the slowest opening quarter to any year since 1993. The $3.6bn raised for new funds was down 31 per cent from the same time last year, and the 32 funds marked a 44 per cent decline, according to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (pdf).

The sluggish opening to the year is probably the result of the stubbornly closed public markets. “Many firms have been waiting until the exit market improves before embarking upon their fundraising efforts,” said NVCA president Mark Heesen. “This wait has been considerably longer than many firms anticipated.”

David Gelles

Social gaming company Zynga seems attached to Facebook at the hip.

The vast majority of Zynga’s 120m monthly users come from Facebook, and the slightest change in the Facebook news feed can have a major impact on how Zynga promotes its games.

As of December, Zynga and Facebook even share the same investors.

Mark Pincus, Zynga’s chief executive, sat down with the FT to talk about Facebook, the iPad and the future of social gaming.

FT techfeed

Tech Blog

Analysis & reviews

About this blog Blog guide
Richard Waters, Chris Nuttall and April Dembosky in the FT's San Francisco bureau share their views - plus tech insights from Tim Bradshaw and Maija Palmer in London and Robin Kwong in Taipei.



Read about the authors


To comment, please register for free with FT.com and read our policy on submitting comments.

All posts are published in UK time.

Contact the FT Tech Hub team: richard.waters@ft.com, chris.nuttall@ft.com, april.dembosky@ft.com, maija.palmer@ft.com, robin.kwong@ft.com and tim.bradshaw@ft.com.

See the full list of FT blogs.

Archive

« AprMay 2012
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  

Tech analysis and reviews

Coding for dummies

Execs learn geek techniques

Time for smartwatches?

Sony synchronises watches with smartphones

Tags

advertising android apple AT&T Electronic Arts Europe Facebook funding google hacking hewlett-packard HP htc instagram intel iPad iphone IPO kindle fire Lenovo London megaupload microsoft Mobile Netflix Nintendo nokia nokia lumia nook patents privacy samsung smartphones social media social networking Sony SOPA Spotify story of the week Tablets Toshiba twitter venture capital Yahoo Zynga