Bebo is a genius. They have a plan... to have plan

Bebo is like a bad case of herpes – it just keeps coming back. They sold to AOL for $850 million in 2008. Then AOL, under new management, sort of just shut it down for tax purposes, selling it for next to nothing to Criterion Capital Partners. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong called the whole thing a huge distraction.

But if you think you’ve seen the last of Bebo, you’re wrong. A whole new team is in place, and with just 20 or so employees the site is profitable and growing with 6 millionish active users. So what next?

That’s exactly what I asked CTO Akash Garg today at Google Zeitgeist in Phoenix, Arizona. The interview is below.

How will Bebo carve out a place for itself in a Facebook world? Tagged seems to have done it by focusing on dating. Garg says the team is currently deciding what’s next. “Self expression, mobile and video will be strong components,” he says. But beyond that he won’t elaborate.

And when I asked if Bebo cofounder Michael Birch is involved with Bebo today, the answer was clear: “Michael Birch is not involved in any official way right now.” Is he involved unofficially? Watch below to find out.

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Bebo

Tagged

Facebook

AOL

Criterion Capital Partners

Tim Armstrong

Google

Akash Garg

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3% of Twitter at anytime is Justin Bieber

Would you believe that Justin Bieber and his legion of fans use up 3% of Twitter’s server at any given time — such a large amount of activity that “racks of servers” are dedicated to Bieber mania?

So said a Twitter employee, according to web designer and blogger Dustin Curtis. Yesterday he sent out the following tweet:

“At any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3% of our infrastructure. Racks of servers are dedicated to him. – A guy who works at Twitter”

When we asked Curtis who the Twitter employee is, he said his source is someone “who would know such things. I obviously can’t give you his name. But I trust that the information is absolutely correct.” So maybe you’d better believe it. Bieber consistently appears on the top Twitter trends chart we publish each weekend, and he topped a “Twitter’s most listed” chart too.

We shot an e-mail Twitter’s way to confirm, and while the Twitter rep we contacted didn’t confirm the figure, she didn’t discourage us from believing it, either. “While we don’t break out metrics like this, everything around and about Justin Bieber is consistently popular on Twitter,” she said.

Curtis also tweeted that “most of the popular users on Twitter have dedicated servers for their accounts.” He believed the Twitter employee and tweeted what he said in part because he thinks the numbers make perfect sense:

“Every time Bieber tweets, his messages have to be delivered to more than five million people who then endlessly retweet it. Apparently, his account receives more than 60 @-replies per second for a while after he tweets, which is something Twitter wasn’t originally designed to handle.”

He’s certainly no Justin Bieber, but Curtis isn’t totally unknown on Twitter himself. He appeared in our “10 Web Design Bloggers You Should Follow” list a couple of months ago.

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Twitter

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Shoutitout Android coming Monday... probably

According to a Shout today by @shoutitoutmobile Shoutitout Android is coming out on Monday of next week. The site has been working and delays this launch since February so we are thinking its going to be pretty nice app. We are also thinking about how this could really hurt things like Twitter for Android and Twidroyd. Twitter for Android currently being the official app for Twitter which Twitter has had for sometime and hasn't really had it explode in popularity. We believe this will hurt Twitter for Android even more. Also currently the biggest Shoutitout and Twitter android app Twidroyd may be effected by this as well. We aren't sure what will happen since Shoutitout doesn't have all of its features in API like Check-ins the Android app will have a clear edge. We will keep you updated and see how this rolls out!

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Shoutitout

Twitter

Twidroyd

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Googles logo is excited about something probably coming out tomorrow

By now, you’ve likely noticed the interesting, kinetic logo Google has had up today. While there is still no official word from the search giant as to exactly what it means, they are letting out some hints. And based on those hints, a good guess seems to be that the logo has to do with what they’ll announce at their big search event being held in San Francisco’s MOMA tomorrow morning.

Earlier today, Google tweeted out: “Boisterous doodle today. Maybe it’s excited about the week ahead…” Meanwhile, a Google representative told Search Engine Roundtable that “today’s doodle is not related to a birthday but is fast, fun and interactive, just the way we think search should be.” This led the blog to speculate that three things may be announced tomorrow: AJAX-powered search results, 30 results per page, and streaming results as you type. In the case of AJAX and streaming, Google has been testing both of these (in the AJAX case, since early 2009).

In terms of the search event itself, Google sent out invites to members of the press last week with the title “Search on.” The fact that it’s at an art museum is interesting, though perhaps not entirely relevant. But the speaker line-up definitely is:

Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience
Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management
Ben Gomes, Distinguished Engineer
Othar Hansson, Senior Staff Software Engineer
As Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan pointed out last week, the first three are all heavily involved with Google’s search user interface — so again, expect a revamp. A revamp that is “fast, fun, and interactive.”
One other side note is that Google has quietly launched a new tool in Labs called Google Scribe. As Google Operating System notes, it’s a tool that auto-suggests phrases in documents as you type. Yes, this is similar to what Google currently offers with their search box. And yes, it’s also fast, fun, and interactive, like Google’s odd logo.

We’ll be at the event tomorrow to find out!

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Marissa Mayer

Danny Sullivan

Google

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Shoutitout gets there first dogs... literaly

Shoutitout has gotten its first dog members, the account has 3 Shouts and subscribers. The account is for a pair of beagles owned by @ashton named Max and Bandit (as far as we can tell) the account @max_bandit seems to have had some popularity at the moment but nothing major yet. None of there Shouts have made popular Shouts yet but we do think that will change soon we also expect this account to get huge popularity as it gets older. It has already been recommended by @willy and @ashton.

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Shoutitout

William Parish

Ashton Rainey

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The endless pit of Google money just got smaller

Google has agreed to pay a hefty sum to make a class action lawsuit concerning Google Buzz disappear — $8.5 million, to be exact.

The lawsuit dates back to February, when lawyers filed a class action complaint against Google on behalf of Eva Hibnick, a 24-year-old Florida resident and Harvard Law School student. The complaint alleged that Buzz violated several communication privacy laws related to protecting user privacy.

Google Buzz caught a lot of flak for its auto-follow and opt-in features, so much so that Google quickly made privacy fixes after launch. They weren’t enough to quell the criticism though, so Google launched a privacy reset for Buzz, giving users a new opportunity to adjust their privacy settings.

According to the settlement, these changes addressed the key privacy issues surrounding Buzz. “Google has made changes to the Google Buzz user interface that clarify Google Buzz’s operation and users’ options regarding Google Buzz,” it stated.

That’s not all, though. While the settlement acknowledges that Google Buzz’s privacy issues have been resolved, it says the company must do more to educate users about Google Buzz’s potential impact on privacy. The $8.5 million from the settelement will go towards lawyer fees (30%) and the seven named plaintiffs (up to $2,500 each), with the remainder going towards organizations and non-profits focused on Internet privacy.

Now that the privacy issues have been settled, Google can focus on a more important problem: actually producing a winner in the social media space.

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Google

Google Buzz

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Twitter 145,000,000 members strong 300,000 apps

When I read Twitter CEO Evan Williams post tonight about the state of Twitter from a mobile perspective, the first thing that jumped out at me what that Twitter for Android, an app Twitter worked hard on, isn’t even in the top 10 most-used apps for the service. But Williams also used the post to whip out some impressive numbers. Chief among them: Twitter now has over 145 million registered users (though presumably less than 150 million, or he would have said that). And there are now nearly 300,000 registered apps in the Twitter ecosystem.

The latter number above is technically the number of registered OAuth apps in the ecosystem (and includes multiple instances of some apps). Twitter made the switch over from basic authentication to OAuth a few days ago, leaving behind some apps, such as the old Tweetie (which was reborn as Twitter for iPhone). Williams says this number of registered apps has tripled since their Chirp conference — which was only this past April.
Other big numbers thrown out there by Williams:

Mobile users have jumped 62% since mid-April
16% of all new users to Twitter now start on mobile (it was 5% before Twitter started doing branded mobile clients)
46% of active users use some sort of mobile Twitter experience
78% of people who interact with Twitter still do so through twitter.com — though that number includes people who use more than one appm.twitter.com is the second most-used Twitter interface at 14%
SMS and Twitter for iPhone are tied at 8%
Lastly, he throws in that Twitter’s Promoted Products (read: their first big monetization pitch) has “exceeded our expectations.” No word on if that means Twitter has turned a profit, but that seems pretty unlikely. Still, revenues are undoubtedly growing.

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Twitter

Evan Williams

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