Category: Archive

Just in time for the holidays, a financial expert has given a sort of present to Yahoo.  Or, perhaps, given everybody else a way to spend whatever cash they receive.  Regardless, Kaufman Bros. analyst Aaron Kessler has upgraded his rating on the search company from "hold" to "buy."

The number of seniors actively using the Internet has increased by 55 percent to 17.5 million over the last five years, according to a new report from Nielsen.

Among people 65+, the growth of women in the last five years has outpaced the growth of men by 6 percent.

More seniors are also spending more time online. Time spent on the Internet by seniors increased 11 percent in the last five years, from 52 hours per month in November 2004 to just over 58 hours in 2009.

Facebook (96%) is now the most popular communication tool, followed by SMS (93%) and email (91%), according to a new survey from Prompt Communications.

When consumers were asked which method they used most frequently to communicate, 37 percent said SMS followed by Facebook and the phone at 28 percent. Respondents feel that email is now less important than social media, but only 20 percent said they could live without it entirely.

About 62 million people should now find it rather easier (or perhaps, for the first time, possible) to use Twitter.  Last night, Twitter acknowledged the world’s Italian-speaking population by announcing support for the Italian language.

Twitter first moved beyond English by launching in Japanese in April of 2008.  More recently, it’s added support for Spanish and French.  Obviously, every time Twitter does something along these lines, it allows for the possibility of adding a lot more users.

Real-time search is, appropriately enough, going to become quite visible very soon.  Google announced today that it’s rolling out real-time features, and the comprehensiveness of this effort is almost unprecedented as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are all onboard.

Google’s list of partners doesn’t stop there; FriendFeed, Identi.ca, and Jaiku are also cooperating.  Plus, standard blogs, news sites, and other Google properties (like YouTube) are contributing to the stream of information that’ll become available following a standard search.

Google’s share of the search market inched up by 1 percent in November accounting for 71.57 percent of all U.S. searches conducted during the month, according to Hitwise.

Yahoo trailed landing in the second position with 15.39 percent of the search share representing a 5 percent decline from October. Bing also saw a dip of 2 percent and ended up with 9.34 percent of the search market.

Ask saw its search share rise 1 percent to 2.65 percent in November.

DVR and online video continue to show considerable growth in the U.S., up 21.1% and 34.9 percent respectively, in time spent in the third quarter of 2009, according Nielsen’s latest Three Screen Report.

In Q3, the average American watched 31 hours of TV per week, with 31 minutes spending playback mode with their DVR.

In addition, each week the average consumer spent 4 hours on the Internet and 22 minutes watching online video.

Twitter announced that it will be opening up its data stream (otherwise known as the Firehose) in early 2010. This means the number of Twitter apps will skyrocket, and the potential for functionality in existing Twitter apps will be greatly increased. That means good things for developers, and most likely great things for Twitter.

Facebook is rolling out new features today to allow users to have more control over how they share content with others.

Users will be able to control who sees each individual piece of content they post. Facebook’s new Publisher Privacy Control will allow people to select a privacy setting for every post they make at the time they create it. By making selections in a drop-down menu, users will be able to control what they want to share with friends, family and co-workers.

Google announced that is now including Google Groups in the Premier and Education editions of Google Apps. The company says Groups is one of its most widely-used applications, so it only makes sense.

When a group is set up, employees/students can share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, shared folders, sites, calendars, and videos with the group, rather than having to include individual email addresses or try to remember who joined or left a certain group.