Social Media News & Web tips

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The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.
Did you know that it’s been nearly twenty years since the first website was placed online? Have you ever thought about how the Internet and the web [...]

Today marks the launch of a new premium content portal experience, with Universal Music and Google teaming up on the VEVO service. Like Hulu before it, VEVO is another significant marker in the “premium,” aka “produced by professionals,” content space, this time specifically for music videos. Perhaps its closest analogue is Myspace Music Videos, another [...]

Today YouTube became the latest in a spate of social networks to offer an alternative design to users. It follows on the heels of Digg Lite and Facebook Lite, both attempts to strip down to the bare essentials and reduce the clutter and cruft of all the widgets, related content, menus and other bits of [...]

On Tuesday, Microsoft launched its answer to Apple’s iPod touch with the Zune HD. And while the Zune Marketplace will be offering plenty of content in the way of music and movies, what it won’t be offering is an App Store to compete with the Apple iTunes model.
Market analysts appear to be lining up to [...]

If you’ve been able to access Facebook Lite (original reports said that the feature is live only for users in US and India, but it works here in Croatia, too), you’ve seen what it’s about: a lightweight, stripped down version of Facebook that won’t go too hard on your (slow) Internet connection.
I love it. [...]

Apple has both quietly and not-so-quietly been going about the business of tackling the portable gaming market. Perhaps presaged all the way back to the original iPod’s hidden easter egg game of Brick, the iconic and primarily music-playing device has acknowledged the powerful role of fun on a portable device.
Of course, with the [...]

We’ve reported on the tremendous growth of both Facebook and Twitter month after month in the last year or so, but looking at Compete’s stats for August, we’ve got neither good nor bad news, as the hottest social networks have stagnated when it comes to new visitors.
Part of the reason could have merely been [...]

There has been no shortage of stories on athletes using Twitter and social media to further their personal agendas.
On the flip side, we’ve also seen the organizations behind the professional sports leagues, and the media outlets covering them, struggle between their desire to understand and embrace social media and their fear of losing control [...]

Last week, iGoogle launched a big re-design, which was praised both here and on many other blogs of so-called early adopters. The launch of “Canvas View” – which many of us were familiar with through Google Reader – seemed like something that would make iGoogle “way more useful” as a start page service. [...]