Since it went public in May, LinkedIn has seen a surge in traffic and is now the country’s second largest social network. A new service called Job Change Notifier lets you to track and receive notifications when one of your LinkedIn contacts changes jobs. How can this help SMBs? READ MORE
If you haven’t taken your business to Twitter yet, you might want to jump on the bandwagon. After all, even the White House is now using it as a serious medium to communicate with constituents. President Obama sat down Wednesday to publicly answer a bunch of tweets posed to him using the hashtag “#askobama” in an event moderated by Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey. More than 169,000 tweets were posted and the president answered questions about jobs, the budget, taxes, education, and housing. According to TechCrunch’s MG Siegler, the event “seemed like the logical evolution of the townhall format. READ MORE
“Email is an absolute nightmare in my life. I dread it in the morning, I dread it more right before I go to bed. It’s always in the back of my mind, lingering,” writes TechCrunch’s MG Siegler. Many of us, also drowning in e-mail every day, can relate to the subtle and incessant pressure created by a constant influx of messages. Siegler’s solution? He’s quitting email, at least for a month. READ MORE
With several tech companies already having gone public and more companies planning to do so in the next six months, 2011 may just go down as the year of the tech IPO writes Leena Rao for TechCrunch, who summarizes what’s happened so far and what to expect going forward. READ MORE
It wasn’t long after we started hearing about a Google Chrome extension that lets people extract Facebook contacts into services like Google+ that Facebook started blocking it. “Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove emails of your friends from your profile by July 5th. (The extension) will no longer work for many people,” writes Mohamed Mansour, the extension developer, who says he will build and maintain a new version. READ MORE
It appears Mashable is touting its own job board horn. In a recent promo, the tech news site says its job boards are a place for socially-savvy companies to find talent. Every week, it features coveted job board listings for a variety of positions, including those in the social media and communications realms. If you’re a company looking to throw out a wider recruiting net you might consider listing open positions with Mashable, considering even its two-paragraph plug got about 600 tweets. TechCrunch’s job board is a similar option. READ MORE
Earlier this month we wrote about Google’s +1 feature, which allows people with a Google profile to “+1″ a web site while they’re on it, similar to how you can “like” something in Facebook. Every time you +1 a site, it’s saved to your profile so others can see your site recommendations. Regardless of the fact that some people aren’t convinced +1 is catching on, or noticeably increasing page views, Google just made a way for Website owners to see exactly how much of an impact +1 is having on site clickthrough rates. READ MORE
Go to www.wdyl.com and you’ll be visiting Google’s new service called What Do You Love, a simple search box that returns results in one portal window from more than 20 different Google services, including Google Translate, Trends, YouTube, Maps, and Groups. As TechCrunch’s MG Siegler points out, the best queries are for broad terms like “love,” that will return pictures of love, patents about love, love on Google Trends, videos about love, how to say love in different languages, books about love, etc. A more specific search for say, “Keen girls sandals size 12″ isn’t going to be very useful considering there likely aren’t many blogs, books, or videos on the subject. Search for a celebrity, however, and you can see all sorts of things, such as the fact that in the last 12 months Matthew McConaughey was most popular in the beginning of March. Read more at TechCrunch and Mashable.
Another note from the “Rumor Has It” files says PopCap Games, makers of popular titles such as Bejeweled and Zuma, is in late-stage acquisition talks with Electronic Arts. Though not officially confirmed by either company, reports from two sources are that EA is willing to pony up $1 billion for entry into the lucrative mobile gaming space, says Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch. READ MORE
According to a recent Forrester estimate, there will be 50 million tablet users worldwide by the end of 2012. Onswipe, a platform that makes it remarkably easy for publishers of all sizes to make their content and ads beautiful on the iPad and other tablets, is coming out of beta and will be available to the public reports Alexia Tsotsis for TechCrunch. READ MORE
