The Social Media Minute 10-17-08

By John Conroy Oct 17, 2008

Social Media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here's the week's big stories from the Social scene, in scan-friendly format.

This Week:

MySpace to Trounce Facebook With US$1 Billion '08 Sales
Jobs Cut at Seesmic, but Digg is Hiring
Twitter Gets New CEO
Yahoo! Launches New Profiles, Social Strategy
Browser Wars 1: New FireFox Beta 3.1 has Geolocation API
Browser Wars 2: Flock Upgrade
Twitter-Watch: Joe the Plumber

MySpace to do a Billion Dollars in '08 Revenue

VentureBeat reports that MySpace is on target to bank a billion dollars in revenue this year. Surprisingly, they report that this is far in excess of Facebook's revenue expectations of around US$300m.

Twitter meanwhile can't figure out a way to turn its success into hard cash, as Bernard Lunn at ReadWriteWeb 'helpfully' points out. Some interesting suggestions in the comments here regarding how they might go forward and monetize the product.

Seesmic Sheds Jobs, Digg Launches Recruitment Drive

Loic LeMeur’s Seesmic is a video-sharing platform for video conversation. It enables quick and dirty video-blogging, kinda like a Twitter for webcams and phone-cams, and offers a range of services to enable stuff like video comments on your blog and so on. If Loic or anyone else there wants to give us a better quick description of what Seesmic does, by all means do so.

Unfortunately, owing to the impending downturn, they're having to “make some tough decisions around expenditure”, and are letting seven people go. Seesmic is headquartered in San Francisco with outposts in Paris and Romania.

While we can expect a lot more of this as the economy goes into lock-down, it's not all doom and gloom on the jobs front. Digg has announced “a major expansion effort – the largest we’ve undergone in our history”. In order to attract the best and brightest they've assembled a list of the primary reasons why you should go work there, including a Dig-Dug machine, a surfeit of smelly dogs which patronise the office, and “Wine Wednesday”.

Twitter CEO Dorsey Steps Down, Replaced by Evan Williams

Twitter Chairman Evan Williams and CEO Jack Dorsey have switched places in the boardroom, as things settle down after a hectic period of restructuring, funding, changing location, and fixing severe service disruption. Dorsey and Williams are co-founders of the project, along with Biz Stone.

Yahoo! Launches New Profiles, Social Strategy

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch reports that Yahoo! wants to become “one big social network”. Yahoo! themselves talk about a 'new social foundation' for the company.The launch of a radically expanded Yahoo! Profiles, which “… is a centralized control panel that lets you manage your identity, activities, interests, and connections across Yahoo! — and eventually the entire Web”. It's all part of the Yahoo! Open Strategy, which was hammered together last year with genuinely Open principles as an attempt to square up to Google and Microsoft's ever-increasing tentacled embrace of the social space.

Arrington explains what happens now:
“Over the next few months, they say, Yahoo properties will begin to integrate with the new profile. So if you answer a question at Yahoo Answers, for example, the activity will show up in your feed update. Eventually the front page of Yahoo Mail will show what your friends are up to as well. And one thing I really like - emails from your connections will be highlighted, so you can read them first.”
For more details, go to the Yahoo! corporate blog announcement.