Social Networking Watch: News on the Social Networking and Social Media Industry

Foursquare Raises $20 Million

NY TIMES BLOG - June 30 - Foursquare, the social network that allows users to broadcast their location to friends from a mobile phone, has raised $20M from venture capitalists. Since it was introduced last March, Foursquare has amassed more than 1.8M users and says it is adding new ones at the rate of ~10,000 a day. Foursquare previously raised $1.35M in cash from a well-known list of financiers, including O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures, which has financed Web companies like Twitter, Tumblr and Etsy. The new investment places the company’s valuation at $95M. FULL ARTICLE @ NY TIMES BLOG

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Hulu Announces Monthly Subscription

READ WRITE WEB - June 29 - The rumors about a paid subscription service coming to Hulu have turned out to be true, as the online video hub has announced Hulu Plus - a premium service that will give users access to more content on more platforms for a monthly fee. For $9.99, subscribers will be able to access full seasons of shows on Hulu.com, on apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, on Internet-enabled TVs and BluRay players, and on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 gaming consoles. Non-subscribers will still get the same new content at the same time, but subscribers can access a deeper back-catalog of shows. FULL ARTICLE @ READ WRITE WEB

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Yelp Says It's Not Afraid Of Foursquare

READ WRITE WEB - Jun 28 - Location based social network Foursquare is the darling of the media's eye these days and appears to be growing very fast. Is old-school local social network Yelp scared? No, says Eric Singley, Yelp's Director of Consumer and Mobile Products. Singley told us he finds Foursquare's user numbers "hard to quantify" and said "they don't blow my mind." Foursquare may be fun, he says, but Yelp remains the best place to find good restaurants and bars to patronize. Yelp is also much bigger than Foursquare. Tonight the company is making a number of mobile announcements. Local businesses that have created free accounts and claimed their listings on Yelp will receive additional analytics specific to mobile user traffic: the number of times they've shown up in mobile search, the number of times mobile users have clicked to call them by telephone and the number of times users have clicked for directions to their business. FULL ARTICLE @ READ WRITE WEB

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Facebook Hiring 500 People In India

TECH CRUNCH - Jun 28 - Facebook recently announced it would be opening an office in Hyderabad, India, to be able to provide better round-the-clock and multilingual support to its ever-increasing number of users, advertisers and third-party developers. According to Business Standard and India Times, the company is set to launch its India operations from the ‘City of Pearls’ – its first office in Asia – within the next two months. Facebook, which has ~8M users in India and ~500M users across the globe, would reportedly invest $150M in the initial phases. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Social Media Up 230% Since 2007

INFORMATION WEEK - June 28 - Two-thirds of Americans now use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and other social media sites, up about 230% from the 20% penetration in 2007, and 43% are visiting these sites more than once a day. Multiple visits are up 28% compared with last year, the Simmons New Media study determined. "The rise of social networking tracks closely with that of Facebook. As of April 26, 2010, 46% of the U.S. online adult population reported having visited Facebook in the past 30 days". FULL ARTICLE @ INFORMATION WEEK

MySpace Hopes Ads Boost Its Profiles

LA BUSINESS JOURNAL - June 28 - MySpace executives are betting that a partnership with online advertising broker Ad.ly will help them retain members by giving them a service they’ve wanted. Until now, Ad.ly was designed only for Twitter, allowing high-profile Twitter users – celebrities, large companies or people with prominent Twitter pages called “influencers” – to earn money from their Twitter accounts by promoting companies through tweets. The agency connects these high-profile Twitter users with companies looking for advertising, who in turn pay the celebrities, or their employees, to tweet as part of a marketing campaign. The June 3 deal with MySpace makes the same process available to influencers on MySpace. Instead of posting advertisements as tweets, users will post them to their live MySpace streams, a feature for the site that works similar to a Facebook status update. FULL ARTICLE @ LA BUSINESS JOURNAL

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BoyAhoy Fastest Growing Gay App For iPhone

PR WEB - June 28 - BoyAhoy is operated by Skout Inc. and is officially the fastest growing gay app for the iPhone. While BoyAhoy has been ranked #30 the past month in the iPhone App Store’s Social Networking Category, Grindr has consistently been ranked below #50. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB

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Social Networking Affects Brains Like Falling In Love

FAST COMPANY - July 1 - Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has discovered, for the first time, that social networking triggers the release of the generosity-trust chemical (oxytocin) in our brains. "Neuroeconomics," an emerging field that combines economics with biology, neuroscience, and psychology. Oxytocin is now, thanks largely to Zak, recognized as the human stimulant of empathy, generosity, trust, and more. It is, Zak says, the "social glue" that adheres families, communities, and societies, and as such, acts as an "economic lubricant" that enables us to engage in all sorts of transactions. As Zak and others deepen their study of oxytocin, we may better understand why people with friends live longer and get sick less, and why we are compelled to be social animals online and off. Over the next few years, Zak launched a flurry of oxytocin experiments. One showed that men personalize negotiations over money, while a second indicated that they react hormonally when not trusted. Another study found that when a man was given a dose of oxytocin, he was more willing to allow someone else to control his investments. Other research showed that touch will trigger release of oxytocin, as will massage. Late last year, Zak attended a wedding in England and took blood samples from the wedding party before and after the ceremony. Predictably, the bride had the highest levels of oxytocin, followed by her mother. But the groom also experienced a rise, and immediate family measured higher levels of oxytocin than friends. FULL ARTICLE @ FAST COMPANY

Foursquare Poised To Get New VC Funding

CNET NEWS - June 26 - Foursquare is in the final stages of striking a funding deal with the very venture firm--Andreessen Horowitz--that had publicly dissed the hot social-location site and walked away from earlier talks. The deal is likely to be completed and announced by early next week, at a valuation of about $80M. In addition, Foursquare had recently been in serious acquisition talks with Yahoo as well, along with endless rounds of chatter with a variety of prominent Silicon Valley VCs--including Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners, and Institutional Venture Partners--over the last several months. FULL ARTICLE @ CNET NEWS

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The Top Viral Video Ad Campaign, Updated June 24, 2010

Brand: Volkswagen
Campaign: Driven By Fun
Agency: DDB
Source: VisibleMeasures.com

Zynga’s FarmVille Now Rolling Out To The App Store

TECH CRUNCH - Jun 23 - FarmVille is finally coming to the iPhone. The game is now available in the New Zealand App Store, and appears to be propagating to other countries worldwide — expect it to go live in the US later this evening. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Geni Goes Global

TECH CRUNCH - Jun 23 - Genealogy site Geni is going global today with the addition of its site translated into 22 new languages, including Spanish, German, French, and Hebrew. The site will add dozens more languages in the coming weeks. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Zynga’s FrontierVille Breaks 5 Million Daily Active Users

TECH CRUNCH - Jun 22 - On June 9th, social gaming powerhouse Zynga launched its latest creation: FrontierVille. Today, less than two weeks after launch, the company says that it has 5.2M daily active users. Zynga’s Farmville has ~18M daily active users according to Inside Network’s AppData leaderboard. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Foursquare Now Adding 100,000 Users A Week

TECH CRUNCH - Jun 22 - Foursquare, the location-based service has just tweeted out that they’re now past 1.7M users. Impressively, that’s up 100,000 users from just about a week ago. At this rate, Foursquare will surpass 2M users in July. MyTown, another location-based network hit that number in May, but it’s more of a game than a standard location-based network. Another location-based network, Brightkite, hit 2M users in February. Meanwhile, rivals Loopt and Google Latitude both have 3M users. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Teens Engage In Risky Online Behavior

INFORMATION WEEK - Jun 22 - That's the finding of a survey of 955 people aged 13 to 17 commissioned by security company McAfee and conducted by Harris Interactive last month. The survey asked teens to report on how they use the Internet, what they read and download, as well as their behavior online. 69% of teenagers have included their physical location in a social networking status update, nearly one-third chat online with people they don't know in the offline world, and nearly half share their real first name with strangers. In addition, 24% have shared their e-mail address with strangers, 18% a photograph of themselves, and 12% their cell phone number. The study also found that girls are more likely to chat with people they don't know -- 32% of girls, versus 24% of boys. Younger girls are more likely than boys to share a description of their physical appearance. At the same time, girls were also more likely to report that they had been harassed or bullied online than boys. FULL ARTICLE @ INFORMATION WEEK

Chatroulette To Clean Up Its Act

TONIC - Jun 22 - Andrey Ternovskiy, the teen founder of the controversial video chatting service, is reportedly considering implementing software that senses and blocks users who use Chatroulette inappropriately. Thanks to cutting-edge genital detection software (no joke), the video chatting service may soon go PG. FULL ARTICLE @ TONIC

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U.S. 2010 Market For Mobile Virtual Goods To Be Estimated At $168M

PRESS RELEASE - Jun 22 - Virtual goods purchased on smartphones are a new emerging market in the United States. According to a study "Magid Media Futures 2010 Wireless and Consumers", Americans spent $168M on mobile virtual goods in the last year. Magid estimates that over 70M Americans now own smartphones – that’s 23% of the population. With 45% of those smartphone owners playing mobile games and 16% of those spending an average of $41 per year on in-game virtual goods, the market has already exceeded $168M.