Social Networking Watch

Twitter CRM Service Raises Series A Funding

TECH CRUNCH -- July 9 -- CoTweet, the web based Twitter collaboration platform for businesses, has announced a Series A round of funding totaling $1.1m.  The investors are Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Maples Investments and Freestyle Capital. CoTweet helps companies and brands, like Whole Foods, Microsoft, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and the City of San Francisco’s 311 manage their Twitter accounts as a marketing channel. CoTweet also launched into public beta today — meaning anyone can now sign up for the service. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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23andMe Launches $99 Kit To Spur Its ‘Research Revolution’

TECH CRUNCH -- July 8 -- It’s hard to call 23andMe “affordable” for most people. The price has come down drastically from the $1000 to $399. And today 23andMe has announced that it’s launching a much cheaper $99 version of its product as part of a new Research Revolution, which is meant to help 23andMe initiate research studies on genetic diseases that would otherwise require major logistical hurdles and funding. Here’s how it works: 23andMe has picked out ten different diseases that it’s looking to study first. Users visit the site and “pledge” to one disease. The first disease to reach 1000 votes will be the first one studied by 23andMe researchers. Voting will run through September 2009. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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News Corp Won't Buy Twitter, Won't Sell MySpace

REUTERS -- July 8 --  News Corp is not interested in buying popular microblogging site Twitter and will not sell its struggling MySpace, said the CEO, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch said Twitter would be a tough investment to justify because it has not yet come up with a sustainable way to make money. Asked about selling MySpace, he said, "Hell no." He expressed confidence in MySpace and criticized Facebook. "Facebook is like a directory," he said. "How they make money is another matter." FULL ARTICLE @ REUTERS

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Social Media Marketing Spend To Hit $3.1 Billion By 2014

MASHABLE -- July 9 -- Forrester Research is out with their Interactive Marketing Forecast for the next five years, and estimates social media marketing to grow at an annual rate of 34%. Forrester estimates that $716m will be spent on the medium this year, growing to $3.1 billion in 2014. At that point, social media will be a bigger marketing channel than both email and mobile, but still just a fraction of the size of search or display advertising ($31.6B and $16.9B, respectively). FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE

Leader Of Japan’s Networking Pack

FINANCIAL TIMES -- July 7 -- Tomoko Namba is one of Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. Her company, DeNA, run Japan’s most popular social network for mobile phones called Mobagetown – derived from “mobile game town”. Mobagetown it has signed up more than 14m users, a 10th of the population. Last year, the company made a net profit of Y8bn ($84m). Mobagetown’s initial success was down to its simple games, which users could play for free, but it has expanded to offer a variety of entertainment, from fortune telling to a new form of literature: mobile phone novels written by site users for their peers. Overseas expansion is also on the agenda. FULL ARTICLE @ FT.COM

Mobile Entertainment Seeking Players And Payment

REUTERS -- July 8 -- Online entertainment has increasingly moved to the mobile handset. According to the trade association Mobile Entertainment Forum, the global mobile entertainment industry is now worth $32 billion. The industry also remains confident that it can continue to grow strongly despite the current economic challenges, predicting average revenue growth of 28 % for 2010. CCS Insight analyst Paolo Pescatore believes the most popular sites such as Facebook might struggle to charge on mobile as users would still expect the service to be free. Other services that could prove to be successful will be those which offer a core aspect for free and then charge a small fee for premium content. One online and mobile service that has followed this route is Flirtomatic, a fun dating social network that allows users to post their profiles and rank each other from "freak" to "off the radar." Over 1m profiles have been posted so far. FULL ARTICLE @ REUTERS

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Slide Lays Off Ad Sales People

SF BUSINESS TIMES -- July 7 -- Slide, high-profile maker of social networking applications like Super Poke and Top Friends, has laid off much of its ad sales force as it reorganizes to focus on larger-budget advertising campaigns. Company spokeswoman Lily Lin said that 7 to 10 employees would be leaving. Slide has grown hugely since it was founded in 2005, but it has seen ad sales suffer this year. FULL ARTICLE @ SF BUSINESS TIMES

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Facebook Has Killed Off Its Great Apps Initiative

TECH CRUNCH -- July 7 -- Last summer Facebook announced two new programs designed to help surface some of the best apps on Facebook Platform. The first, called Verified Apps, the second step was a program dubbed “Great Apps”, which was meant to reward the very best apps. Facebook has now killed off Great Apps or rather combined it with Verified Apps. Facebook decided to simply give the benefits to the Verified Apps instead. Verified Apps are currently being more prominently displayed than their unverified brethren, and Facebook has recently been testing out some new features, like its payment platform, with a handful of them. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Domain4Sale: FriendshipDirect.com

SNW -- July 8 -- Friendshipdirect.com and FriendshipDirect.co.uk are for sale by jack.knowles@forces365.com for 35k GBP all in. "You probably know that 'friendship' is fast becoming more popular on the internet and 'DatingDirect.com' is a very well-known domain."  They've had offers on the domains close to this pricepoint, apparently.  Contact Jack directly if you're interested.

Got a domain or site to sell?  Send 'em our way and we'll list them for free.  Just let us know when they are sold and for how much so we can list that as well. 

Google Chrome OS?

SNW -- July 8 -- I love Google Chrome. It's simple, maximizes my screen real estate for browsing, and is the fastest browser I've used yet. IE, Safari, Opera move over. Chrome rocks. Now Google has announced that its going to build it into a simple OS for netbooks for the web-inclined. Nice move, but how about the Mac version? I'm using the Chromifox Extreme skin on Firefox while waiting for the Mac intro. This Chrome hack for Mac wasn't so stable. Anyway, rant aside, what implications does this have for the iDating/SNS industry. Flock is nice, but I'd expect more integration opportunities for iDating/SNS services within a Chrome OS. IM providers should definitely take note of this news. Userplane's Desktop app never got traction but there's still an opportunity for an integrated and reliable ever present app melded into a Chrome OS. Dating sites and SNS have an opportunity to get one step closer to being ever-present in front of their users, when the Google Chrome OS is introduced. Your comments please.

This post also appears on OnlinePersonalsWatch.