Facebook For iPhone 3.0 Is Almost Here

The Facebook for iPhone 3.0 will be available for download (probably via the App Store) very soon. The new version of Facebook for iPhone will obviously bring many improvements and additions.

Some of new features include Homescreen, News Feed, Notes, Pages, Events (with the ability to RSVP) and enhanced notifications.

This application also allows you to create photo albums, upload photos, easily tag photos, zoom into photos, and add favorite profiles/pages to the homescreen. Stay tuned for more updates. [UnWiredView]

Facebook’s U.S. Numbers Still Under MySpace’s, Gap Narrowing

Although it was ranked the No. 1 social network worldwide in terms of unique visitors, Facebook has yet to surpass MySpace’s numbers in the U.S. But, according to some recent numbers, Facebook could be passing MySpace in the next few months.

According to TechCrunch, comScore’s data from March 2009 shows that 61.2 million people visited Facebook in the U.S., compared to 70.2 million for MySpace. Facebook’s numbers grew by 6.7 percent in March, with 3.8 million visitors. MySpace, on the other hand, gained 160,000 less visitors than in February of 2009, and attracted 5.8 million less than they had in January.

Facebook is now about 9 million unique U.S. visitors away from passing MySpace. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner. MySpace does have the music thing going for it though, which Facebook is lacking. Although, with Facebook’s fairly new “fan pages,” MySpace’s music pages might see fewer visitors. Unless MySpace changes something soon, they might have to get used to being No. 2 in the U.S.

Source

Is Twitter Killing RSS?

Jeff Nolan wrote an interesting article title “Is Twitter Killing RSS?” I want to respond and decided to respond here on The RSS Weblog, rather than in Jeff’s comments, as I’d like everybody to read this follow-up.

http://jeffnolan.com/wp/2009/04/01/is-twitter-killing-rss/

RSS is a protocol and Twitter is an application. Many publishers are using RSS-to-Twitter gateways to update their Twitter account when new items are publiched on their blog. The protocol and application are not competitive at all. In fact, they are complimentary. Twitter is not an RSS-killer, but rather a use-case for RSS.

Further, Twitter not only can import RSS, but it exposes an RSS feed so that you can inject your Twitter data into other applications. Many social websites are trying to import your Twitter updates. That RSS feed is likely the easiest way to do exactly that. Hmmm! Must play.

Last, could Twitter replace RSS for audience acquisition (as Jeff suggests)? Of course it could for some publishers, but it’d be a bad idea. Remember that Twitter is mostly used by us geeks. Most people are not trying to target geeks, but rather are targeting people like my wife, kids, parents, brothers and sisters. Not one of them have any clue what Twitter is and obviously don’t use it. On the other hand, many of them are using RSS even though they really don’t know what RSS is. That’s because RSS is a protocol (under the hood). Twitter is just an application. Someday, the geeks will get bored with Twitter and move on. RSS is a protocol of the Web and it’s not going anywhere.

Google Might Acquire Twitter? Maybe?

Google and Twitter may be in late-stage negotiations to acquire Twitter.  Or it is early-stage and the two are simply talking about working on a real-time search engine.

Regardless, Tech Crunch quotes multiple sources that Google wants Twitter. If a deal goes down, it would likely be cash and/or stock and some number north of a rumored valuation of $250 million. Facebook offered $500 mil, but that was an all-stock deal, so Twitter took a pass.

Twitter’s value is in real-time search and its huge community of users and brands. The collection and analysis of information embedded in all of those Tweets in real time is big bucks; skip ads and proceed directly to time-sensitive data mining.

Source