Amazon to Acquire Book Lovers’ Network Goodreads (SocialTimes)
Amazon has reached an agreement to acquire Goodreads, a community for book lovers. Founded in 2007, the San Francisco-based company has a member base of 16 million avid readers who have collectively formed more than 30,000 book clubs.
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Petition to Save Google Reader Reaches A petition on Change.org to save Google Reader, the RSS platform that Google plans to cancel, has reached more than 100,000 signatures. When asked if the company planned to respond to the petition and what the company’s next step would be, a Google spokesperson told us: “We’ve given an overview of our reasoning and plans on our blog posts on the Official Google Blog and the Google Reader blog, and we’ll be communicating directly with our users as we make these changes. We don’t have anything more to share than what was in the posts.”
Instagram has pulled its integration with the Twitter “cards” display format, making viewing Instagram photos on the microblogging site much less appealing. The move highlights growing competition between the two networks since Instagram was acquired by Facebook in April. Twitter has played the aggressor in other integration wars, also increasingly pushing for its content to be viewed on its own website, and few tech insiders publicly shed any tears for the company.
High-profile investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban today joined those criticizing Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, which controls which posts, including those by brands, make it into a user’s timeline. He argued that Facebook is wrong to base rank on engagement, when users go to Facebook to be passive recipients of information.
