Video chat has been big for a while now, but with the launch of Google Plus’ Hangout and Facebook’s Skype integration, the buzz around the “Alive Web” is bigger than ever. A new infographic from Column Five Media and Rounds compares the top players in the video chat game.
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone will be profiled on Bloomberg Game Changers Thursday at 9 p.m. ET.
The episode will also feature interviews with Twitter chairman Dorsey, Floodgate founder and managing partner Mike Maples, O’Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O’Reilly, GigaOM founder Om Malik, Blogger.com co-founder Meg Hourihan, Wired.com writer Ryan Singel, and Wedbush Securities vice president of equity research, social media and e-commerce Lou Kerner.
News that Guardian Media Group — parent company of The Guardian, The Observer, and paidContent — will undergo a restructuring brought about a Tweet exchange Sunday evening between two tech-site founders: Om Malik of GigaOM and Rafat Ali, who left paidContent at the beginning of July.
Malik to Ali: @rafatali maybe u should buy back paidcontent from them while they are at it
Ali to Mailk: @om I exited the news industry, and happier for it. You should buy the assets, I say.
Malik to Ali: @ rafatali haha. maybe only if you can help me with it 
According to paidContent, the print edition of The Sunday Times reported that new Guardian Media Group CEO Andrew Miller will restructure the company by separating The Guardian, The Observer, and their respective Web sites from the rest of its multimedia assets, including its holdings in Trader Media Group and Emap, as well as radio stations and property Web sites.
AOL is nearing a deal to acquire online blogging network TechCrunch, with an announcement possible at the latter’s Disrupt SF conference in San Francisco, which began Monday and runs through Wednesday, GigaOM reports, adding that it could not reach TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and AOL had not returned calls for comment.
GigaOM founder and senior writer Om Malik wrote:
On a more personal note, I think this is great news for Mike and his crew. I remember Mike starting out by writing long reviews of Web startups in 2005. We often talked about the world of technology and discussed where it was all headed. In the years that have passed, he turned his blog into a company and brought in Heather Harde to run his operation. The company has launched series of events, with TechCrunch SF being the latest. I want to congratulate Mike and his crew on their success.
URL-shortening startup Bit.ly is in in the early stages of acquisition talks with internet giant Yahoo and others, according to a report by GigaOm.
Bit.ly lets users submit long URLs (Web addresses), and spits out corresponding short ones that are only a few characters long. The service is widely used on Twitter, which limits the number of characters that users can put in a post.
“The interest in the company has increased over the past 60 days or so. Conversations are said it to be in early stages,” wrote tech blogger Om Malik, citing anonymous sources.
A Bit.ly buyout would fit right in with Yahoo!’s recent business strategies, according to Malik. To become more of a real time information company, Yahoo! was also eying location-based startup Foursquare.
Earlier this year Bit.ly entertained buyout offers from Twitter and Google, but failed to come up with a deal.
Bit.ly became the default URL shortener for Twitter in 2009, helping it breeze past its competitors. However in April, Twitter registered the “twee.tt” domain, leading some to speculate that Twitter was building its own in-house URL shortener.
Greetings, Social Timers — I’m joining the team here to occasionally cover virtual worlds, a space that often gets overlooked amid the social game hype, but is still doing quite well, thank you very much. Prior to Nick and Neil bringing me on, I was a writer and designer at ohai, the massively social gaming start-up of my friend Susan Wu (who spoke at the last Social Gaming Summit), where I mainly wrote the storyline, dialog, and mission flow for City of Eternals, the groundbreaking (in my very biased opinion) social network MMO that Neil loved.
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Now that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is out, GigaOM‘s Om Malik has a piece on what the portal should and shouldn’t do next.
“Yang’s decision to move on isn’t a surprise—it was clear from his talk at a recent industry conference that he was tired and perhaps a little out of his depth,” Malik writes. “His choice to head the company that was looking down a deep abyss a while back was an ineffectual one, and a total and absolute failure on the part of Yahoo’s board of directors.”
Malik writes that Yahoo shouldn’t sell out to Microsoft at today’s prices, although $20 per share would be more reasonable. He also thinks they should hire a CEO from another company instead of promoting from within, since it’s pretty clear that they need some new blood after all this.
More significantly, he writes that the company should focus on Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Flickr, Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Search, as well as Yahoo’s e-commerce platform and particularly its mobile offerings, “for this is one area where its independence can help it win friends amongst [wireless carriers] who are worried about Google, Microsoft and Apple,” he said.
GigaOM is reporting that pink slips have been handed to some of the employees of San Francisco-based BitTorrent. The article said that the layoffs stem from an ill-fated attempt to spin off a “consumer distribution effort” to Best Buy for $15 million, which eventually fell through.
GigaOM founder Om Malik said he thinks BitTorrent can save itself, mainly because it’s so popular, and because it’s a strong infrastructure for distributing large video files in addition to music—something that partners could eventually make good use of. “BitTorrent has been working with a handful of set-top box makers such as Pace Micro, and is trying to embed its technologies into other devices,” Malik wrote. “The funny thing is that even [wireless] carriers want to work with them. All of this makes this company salvageable.”
