Archive

Twitter announced that it will be opening up its data stream (otherwise known as the Firehose) in early 2010. This means the number of Twitter apps will skyrocket, and the potential for functionality in existing Twitter apps will be greatly increased. That means good things for developers, and most likely great things for Twitter.

Facebook is rolling out new features today to allow users to have more control over how they share content with others. Users will be able to control who sees each individual piece of content they post. Facebook's new Publisher Privacy Control will allow people to select a privacy setting for every post they make at the time they create it. By making selections in a drop-down menu, users will be able to control what they want to share with friends, family and co-workers.

Google announced that is now including Google Groups in the Premier and Education editions of Google Apps. The company says Groups is one of its most widely-used applications, so it only makes sense. When a group is set up, employees/students can share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, shared folders, sites, calendars, and videos with the group, rather than having to include individual email addresses or try to remember who joined or left a certain group.

In Google Docs, there is a new sort-by-relevance feature for search results. When you search in Google Docs, your results will be organized by relevance, rather than "last modified date", which has been the way of the past. There is a menu on the right side of the toolbar that lets you decide how you want your results sorted.

An advertising campaign can have miraculous effects, causing people to feel better about a company and give it more time and money.  Or it can be as effective as burning a pile of cash (on primetime TV, no less).  Luckily for Yahoo, Nielsen data indicates that its "Y!ou" campaign is imitating the first formula.

Online holiday spending has reached nearly $16 billion, marking a 3 percent increase compared to the same time period last, according to the latest data from comScore. The most recent week ending December 6 reached 4.6 billion in holiday spending, heavier than any individual spending week in 2008 but still below two individual weeks in 2007. The week began with strong weekday spending, led by $887 million on Cyber Monday, but ended on a quieter note with negative year-over-year growth rates during the weekend.

MySpace has announced a new set of APIs. These include APIs for real-time streaming, status and mood commenting, open search, photo uploading, and an updated version of the post to/share API.

Let's not kick Yahoo while it's down; after a glance at some financial charts, it'd be sufficient to say that the company hasn't done as well as Microsoft and Google in recent months (the three companies are up 6.6, 19.1, and 28.0 percent since September 9th).  But circumstances are likely to change, according to Carol Bartz, who made some interesting remarks at a conference today.