Clint Boulton

Yahoo is extending a deadline for nominating candidates to its board, a move that analysts see as a stall tactic as Yahoo negotiates to make a deal with another company, or a bluff to get Microsoft to sweeten its bid to buy the company for $31 per share. Yahoo said in a statement March 5 […]

Facebook has taken a lot of flak for its approach to socially driven ads, but the situation could improve significantly in 2008. The social network has poached Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s vice president of global online sales and operations, to run its sales, marketing, business development, HR, public policy, privacy and communications. No pressure there, but […]

Social media software maker Demand Media acquired, March 4, Pluck Corporation, a white-label social network that lets media companies offer blogs syndicating RSS feeds, forums and photos, and video tools that they can brand as their own. Demand Media, of Santa Monica, Calif., offers customers a platform stacked with social media applications, such as social […]

During a keynote at Graphing Social Patterns West 2008, David Glazer, the Google engineering director responsible for OpenSocial, pumped up Nicholas Carr’s “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google,” recommending it for people who don’t know a lot about cloud computing.But because a lot of people already know about the cloud he […]

Since OpenSocial launched on Nov. 1, the set of APIs for enabling users to move data between social networks has moved fairly quietly into the social site ether, gathering partners and adopters. But don’t call it a Google-owned framework, or you’re liable to tick off David Glazer, director of engineering for Google and the lead […]

Google on March 3 introduced Google Gears for mobile devices to allow users to work with certain mobile applications offline. Initially available for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 and 6, the software could be valuable for mobile professionals who need to access their e-mail, word processing and spreadsheet applications from their mobile […]

SAN DIEGO-Open-source collaboration platform maker MindTouch has unveiled Wik.is, a free version of its Deki Wiki hosted online for enterprise workgroups that could put a crimp in Google’s plans for its free Sites application. The wiki specialist, based here, is also now supporting Microsoft’s Silverlight, Microsoft ADO.NET Data Services and Windows Live services to improve […]

Forrester Research’s Charlene Li, who has become the poster analyst for social networking technologies, offered some interesting prognostications on where the space is heading at the Graphing Social Patterns in San Diego this morning. Li believes social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, and those leveraging Google’s OpenSocial framework, will basically cross-breed with e-commerce giants […]

SAN DIEGO-If the people who are building applications on the back of the Facebook platform can’t tell us when we will see some legitimate enterprise-oriented applications built on the site, who can? That’s one of the messages people learned at the Graphing Social Patterns West 2008 show in San Diego on March 3. Following a […]

Prospero’s social media software, which lets companies put blogs, social profiles, message boards, real-time chat, live event chat, and ratings and reviews on their sites, will be rolled into the Mzinga platform to help customers of the Burlington, Mass., company communicate more efficiently. Catering to marketing, human resources and customer service professionals, Mzinga makes a […]

Just days after comScore unwittingly put the fear of a recession into financial analysts and search engine marketers, the research firm’s founder took pains to explain that it is likely certain “quality initiatives” and not a softening economy that is responsible for a decline in Google’s paid clicks for January. Phew. I’m glad we can […]

One of the things that’s great about the Internet is that people have become so spoiled by the click syndrome. Hyperlinks and Google take people everywhere they want to go, helping them find blogs, podcasts, photos and video. They don’t have to know anything beyond a search query to find the information they’re looking for. […]