Twitter announced an update to its mobile client last week that may render third-party, multi-account Twitter clients obsolete. Third-party Twitter mobile apps have always been a few steps ahead of Twitter when it came to ease of use and features, but that will no longer be the case.
In the past two months alone, Twitter and Google+ have added company pages, following in Facebook's footsteps. The usefulness of each service depends on your company's needs, but to help you prioritize your efforts, here's what each has social network has to offer companies looking to engage with the public.
Internet darling, Regretsy, is a site and community built around poking fun at strange and weird offerings on the handmade goods site Etsy. Regretsy is also known for its charitable funding efforts, which have helped Etsy sellers in need and charities to the tune of over $100,000 since 2009.
If your business isn't leveraging Cloud technology as part of its daily operations yet, there's a good chance that it will be within the next few years. According to Cisco, the global Internet traffic generated by the use of cloud computing services will increase 12-fold by 2015.
In the last 13 years, PayPal has expanded far beyond its initial growth spurt on auction Websites. According to its second-quarter results, the online payment service busted through the $1 billion-earnings mark and is processing more than $315 million a day in online payments.
One of the great things about the Internet, and Web-based tools is that they make the world a smaller place and enable virtual teams to work together remotely. Recent acquisitions and new tools from Mindjet are making cloud-based collaboration even easier and more productive.
Facebook announced Tuesday that it will be introducing a handful of privacy changes to their 750 million users. AllthingsD reports that the new privacy features will go into effect on August 25, initially to only one percent of all Facebook users.
In anticipation of the fall release of iCloud, Apple this week set icloud.com live for developers. iCloud represents a revamped version of Apple's existing Mail, Contacts, and Calendar, and integrates the document sharing features of iWork.com.
Google has removed third party review sites from Google Places. Previously, Places pulled reviews from Yelp, TripAdvisor, Urban Spoon and CitySearch, as well as their own Google Places reviews. When the service initially launched about a year ago, these third party sites griped that their content was unfairly being used by Google, and that the Places reviews were appearing above their content.
Online storage service Dropbox made an embarrassing error Monday, turning off password authentication for millions of users.
In a surprise move, virtualization and cloud infrastructure specialist VMware has purchased online presentations tool SlideRocket. VMware purchased e-mail collaboration suite Zimbra earlier this year and this latest acquisition indicates VMware is staking a claim in the productivity cloud marketplace.
Facebook is often touted as a must-have tool for small businesses as a means to boost their brand awareness and to reach existing and potential customers. However, the social network does not necessarily translate into more sales if you are an e-tailer. In fact, a Facebook page will have little or no impact on an e-tailer's sales, Forrester Research says. And using Facebook to boost revenues remains "elusive" for e-tailers.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer has created some ripples in the browser sector lately, which could have implications regardless of whether you are in the Microsoft Internet Explorer camp.
One of the world's most venerable IT manufacturers is flying into the cloud. The new boss of Hewlett-Packard, Leo Apotheker, has announced that HP intends to compete with Google and Amazon, both of which dominate the nascent cloud services field. According to Apotheker, HP intends to have a cloud offering for every level of customer, from consumer through to enterprise.
I was pleasantly surprised during an online presentation about Salesforce.com's Service Cloud 3. At first glance, it looks like a simple and powerful customer relationship management (CRM) tool that takes advantage of social networking to help connect with customers.
