Even Facebook is growing and evolving and requires enterprise-level solutions like eBay’s to handle the massive media and content-sharing for its 750 million users. With all that sharing at that scale involves commercial transactions — buying and interacting with major consumer brands and products.
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. 
TechCrunch Disrupt kicked off today in NYC bringing in local talent and talent from afar. “Startup Alley” or rather a long line of mini-startup booths where eager founders show off their product. Lots of guys in the mobile planning space, lots of programs around optimizing personal information, but so far a tool that seems most appealing is Quixey.
Quixey does something interesting, it allows you to search for apps by what they do. Co-Founder Tomer Kagan summed it up as such “You would be surprised at how many apps are out there, even something simple like brushing your teeth has hundreds of apps. If you have a question or problem you are trying to solve, shouldn’t it be easy to find the right app to use.”
When you search for apps the summary in the results is extremely useful and there are already hundreds of thousands of apps that are searchable.
“People use to use Google to solve problems, being a ‘just google it’ generation. Now what we see is we’re becoming a tool generation, how do I find the right app to answer my question?” Kagan continued “we want to make it as easy as possible to find what you need and let apps grow to their potential.”
While there are common themes this week at Pier 94 for TechCrunch Disrupt, so far something simple like Quixey seems like a solid start for a potential winner.
Sure enough, the topical question changed to whether Circles was a trumped-up story or ReadWriteWeb simply jumped the gun. TechCrunch speculated that Circles is a true and will be introduced over a period of time, more accurately, than all at once.
Aol CEO Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington, who will be president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group once the merger between Aol and The Huffington Post closes, spoke at the paidContent 2011 conference in New York Thursday, as captured by Beet.TV.
Huffington said she “won’t mess” with Aol properties such as TechCrunch and Engadget, adding that the platform for bloggers will be larger and more attractive post-merger. Armstrong touched on Aol’s video plans.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas‘ failure to report his wife’s earnings over a five-year period was the subject of the most news links shared via bloggers, while a TechCrunch item defending Aol against a story in The New Yorker was the most-Tweeted news link, and the most-watched news and politics video on YouTube was the Jan. 19 installment of The Philip DeFranco Show, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index for the week of Jan. 24-28.
The Supreme controversy represented 14 percent of shared news links, and it was followed in the blogosphere by: the U.S. economy, particularly a story in The Washington Post stating that President Barack Obama was unlikely to support his deficit commission’s controversial proposals regarding Social Security, at 11 percent; also at 11 percent, a Los Angeles Times post about two teen-agers found dead in an apartment alongside an empty can of caffeinated alcoholic drink Four Loko; a contribution from the British Broadcasting Corp. about a polar bear that swam for more than nine days in search of sea ice, at 10 percent; and another BBC item on the firing of British sports announcer Andy Gray due to allegations of sexist and improper behavior, at 9 percent.
Part two of The Webby Debates, hosted on CNNMoney.com and moderated by that site’s Laurie Segall, featured TechCrunch columnist Paul Carr — who quit Facebook and Twitter in August — discussing the future of social media with Wine Library TV host Gary Vaynerchuk.
At one point in the conversation, they debated how easy or difficult it is to refute a lie once it is shared via social media and blogs, leading to this exchange (video below):
Carr: No, it becomes Obama says that the trip to India didn’t cost $200 million, but …
Vaynerchuk: Well, why do lies … come on.
Carr: … but all these people do say. It’s opinion.
Vaynerchuk: Hold on a minute. If there’s too much noise, why can a lie itself not have … get more attention than the rebuttal itself?
Carr: Because if a lie is seductive enough, and the lie is sordid enough, then that’s much more interesting than someone saying …
Vaynerchuk: I promise you if someone tries to smear the shit out of me that I will fully use social 24, 7, 365, to rebuttal, and it will work.
Carr: But people trust you. People come to it with an idea of what Gary Vaynerchuk is.
Vaynerchuk: They trust me because I … and by the way …
Carr: If you become known as the guy who was accused of a crime on Twitter, and that’s all people know of you, good luck rebutting it, because you’re that guy.
TechCrunch announced the addition of Elin Blesener as community manager, tasked with overseeing the Aol-owned site’s Facebook page, Twitter account, Buzz account, and other social initiatives.
Blesener had been a community manager at Slide, where she worked on its SuperPoke! Pets.
From the post on TechCrunch introducing Blesener, by Jason Kincaid:
Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed that the official TechCrunch Facebook page is more happening than ever, with better updates and, soon, regular weekly contests for our readers. And that’s only the beginning — you’re going to start seeing similar improvements to our Twitter account, Buzz, and, most important, TechCrunch itself. Today, we’d like to introduce Elin Blesener, our community manager.
Revenge is a dish best served cold, and the relationship between Web entrepreneur Jason Calacanis and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has been downright frosty of late, so it didn’t come as much of a surprise that Calacanis is mounting a direct challenge to Arrington.
Calacanis said he will launch a startup editorial project and event called Launch, taking direct aim at TechCrunch, paidContent reported, keeping its focus on writing and editorial. In fact, Launch will debut as an email publication, Calacanis told paidContent, adding:
When I started with Peter Rojas, blogging was a new format that was faster but still had quality and insight. Now it’s even faster but it has lost that quality and insight. You have a bunch of people writing short stuff with no research and knowledge base. They have no credibility.
If you get people to commit to an email relationship, it’s the deepest, most intimate relationship you can have online — much deeper than Facebook and certainly more intimate than a blog.
I want high-quality insider information, a celebration of entrepreneurship and taking risk. I want it serious and insightful rather than salacious and link-baity.
Until then I’m listening to the audience and testing what they like. But I’m going for something that doesn’t exist in the market — not a blogger writing the story in two hours. The world really wants deeper stuff right now.
Reaction continues to pour in on AOL’s deal to acquire TechCrunch, including more insight from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, who spoke with CNN’s Dan Simon for CNNMoney.com (video below).
And Ben Popper of The New York Observer shared his own theory: AOL bought TechCrunch because Gawker has maintained the momentum it gained from its purchase of an iPhone 4 prototype that had been lost by an Apple engineer, and it has skyrocketed past AOL in terms of traffic.
TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington offered his take on AOL’s agreement to acquire TechCrunch in a very logical place: on TechCrunch.
Arrington wrote that the combination of AOL and TechCrunch first came up during a “quick private chat” with AOL chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong after Arrington interviewed Armstrong at TechCrunch Disrupt: New York in May, but serious conversations were initiated in July.
Highlights from Arrington’s post:
The truth is, I was tired. But I wasn’t tired of writing, or speaking at events. I was tired of our endless tech problems, our inability to find enough talented engineers who wanted to work, ultimately, on blog and CrunchBase software. And when we did find those engineers, as we so often did, how to keep them happy. Unlike most startups in Silicon Valley, the center of attention at TechCrunch is squarely on the writers. It’s certainly not an engineering driven company.
AOL of course fixes that problem perfectly. They run the largest blogging network in the world and, if we sold to them, we’d never have to worry about tech issues again. We could focus our engineering resources on higher-end things, and I, for one, could spend more of my day writing and a lot less time dealing with other stuff.
The more we spoke with AOL, the more we saw a perfect fit. They already own many of the top technology blogs. They already have a huge sales team in place (although our own sales team kicks ass and is staying on). And they have an internal events group that we will be able to leverage.
From a product and business standpoint, it’s a perfect fit.
But what put things over the top, and what ultimately led us to discontinue discussions with other suitors, was the AOL management team. I’m not going to gush here because, well, I’m clearly conflicted. But (TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde) and I believe in this team enough to bet our company on them. AOL has a very big vision for the future. They may succeed or they may fail, but at least they are all running in the same direction. No one at AOL complains that they don’t know what the company is trying to do.
So at that point, we were basically sold. But AOL was very aggressive about one last important issue that really sealed the deal — editorial.
