Pool Party: Google Has ...

Back in March, we first exposed Disco , a group messaging app that the Slide team within Google had built. And that’s not all they’ve been working on. Say hello to Pool Party , another secret project by the same team within Google. We don’t know much about Pool Party other than it’s a photo-sharing app that the Slide team has built. The emphasis is said to be on creating group albums (“pools”) that show new photos in real time. The app is currently in invite-only beta testing. And Google was able to secure the poolpartyapp.com domain for it — not quite as sexy as disco.com, but it will do. What’s perhaps most interesting about this is that Slide is building these new apps within Google while other teams at Google work on similar projects. For example, Google+ features both a group messaging component (Huddle) and a mobile photo sharing component (Instant Upload). When I asked the Google+ leads, Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, why they weren’t just using Disco inside of Google+, they both said they had no idea what I was talking about — while smiling. It’s believed that Slide is allowed to work autonomously on their own projects within Google, and both of these apps appear to be very much proof of that. The question is if and when Google will use its own clout to promote these things. Disco is already on version 2 with no Google promotion yet. Sadly, unlike Facebook’s secret photos app , we were only able to secure two photos of Pool Party. Enjoy. Update : A Brodie Duncan notes on Twitter, look what’s in the Android Market already  — with 0 installs! It’s not clear if you’ll be able to use Pool Party this way since it’s in private beta, but get downloading! Update 2 : And look at that, it’s in the App Store as well ! We previously believed it would be Android-only, but clearly that’s not the case.   CrunchBase Information Google Slide Information provided by CrunchBase

LinkedIn Is Sending Us ...

If I asked you which of the major social sites you thought sent us the most traffic, you might think it was Twitter. After all, the TechCrunch Twitter account  has over 1.7 million followers. When you compare this to the (just under) 250,000 fans our Facebook TechCrunch page has, it should be no contest, right? Wrong. The truth is that if this were October of last year, you would have been right in thinking that Twitter was our top referrer in terms of social websites. But since that time, Facebook has far surpassed Twitter in terms of traffic coming our way each month. In fact, Facebook.com is now sends nearly double the traffic that Twitter.com does. This is probably due to the fact that last November, we added Elin , our excellent community manager, who curates and engages with people from our feed on Facebook. I also suspect it has to do with the rise of the Like button. Ever since it was released last year, Facebook has been steadily referring more readers our way. But this info, while interesting, isn’t all that surprising. After all, Facebook is by far the largest social network in the world. With over 750 million active users , it still dwarfs Twitter. The really surprising thing is that Twitter isn’t even our number two social referrer in terms of websites anymore. As of this month, that distinction goes to LinkedIn. And it’s not even close. Yes, LinkedIn, the professional social network which just went public is now by far our second biggest referrer of social traffic. That’s crazy when you consider that just last month, it was around half the size of Twitter (in terms of referrals), and trailed sites like Hacker News. And two months ago, it was roughly 1/8th the size of Twitter, trailing Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and others in terms of referral traffic to TechCrunch. But the biggest stat of all is that a year ago, traffic coming from LinkedIn was 1/50th what it is today on a monthly basis. So what changed? As far as we can tell, this is all about LinkedIn Today , the social news product the service launched back in March. It was around that time that was saw the first big bump in terms of traffic coming from LinkedIn. In March, it roughly doubled from February. Then April was pretty flat — it was still much higher than previously, but not growing. Then in May, traffic went up 5x. And in June, it more than doubled from that. The growth has been astounding. Of course what’s perhaps most interesting about that is that LinkedIn Today is powered by Twitter. Twitter shared links determine what shows up on LinkedIn Today, but the traffic does not go back through Twitter. Again, this is just traffic from LinkedIn to TechCrunch. And the truth is that with its cross between technology and business, LinkedIn may be the most perfect social network for regular TechCrunch readers. But talking with some other bloggers, they’ve been noticing the exact same thing. All of this is undoubtedly buoyed by the LinkedIn social buttons that have been appearing all over the web as well. recently (and on TechCrunch recently). The bigger question in my mind is what this means for the future of Twitter’s website as a disseminator of news? While Twitter has attempted to help journalists and bloggers a bit with things like the recently-launched Twitter for Newsrooms tutorials, they haven’t had much in the way of new features to better surface information. Referral traffic from Twitter had been steadily rising over the years, but it was only as we gained more Twitter followers incrementally. And in the last year, that traffic has flattened completely. And now in just a couple of months, LinkedIn has shot by it when a hot new product. Part of the explanations on Twitter’s side may be the increased use of HTTPS , which likely scrubs referrer information in traffic sent. But Facebook and LinkedIn both have HTTPS options as well, and again, those numbers are rising fast, Twitter is not. Also a part of this is the use of Twitter mobile clients. But again, Facebook has hugely popular mobile clients too (though, admittedly, LinkedIn’s mobile clients don’t appear to be as popular, so most of their traffic will likely be from linkedin.com). If that trend is true on a larger scale, that’s not good news for Twitter. It’s substantial traffic that can’t be ignored, obviously, but the numbers point to it stalling out as others come along. In the same year timespan that Twitter referral traffic has flattened, Facebook referral traffic has gone up six-fold. Again, that doesn’t look good for Twitter. Digg was once the undisputed king of referrals as well. Last month, they were in 17th place in terms of referrals to TechCrunch. Update : Twitter says the lack of growth on twitter.com is due to the soaring of Twitter mobile usage and says they will share some stats soon which I’ll post here. Though that would also suggest that people are turning away from the website in order to use mobile, which would be interesting. Either way, I altered the title to better reflect that Twitter.com is mainly what’s being discussed here. Update 2 : Twitter has pointed to these previously stated numbers to share in terms of mobile growth.

Twitter Reaches 200 Mil...

Twitter just crossed another huge milestone. People are now sending 200 million tweets per day across the service. This is up from 65 million tweets per day a year ago, or about 200 percent growth in a year. Last March, Twitter reported 140 million tweets per day last March. Way back in January, 2009 people were only sending 2 million tweets per day. Well, “people” is perhaps a generous term. Twitter is filled with automated bots Tweeting out, as well as feeds from publishers. It is not clear how many of those 200 million Tweets a day are automated versus individually hand-crafted. And a small percentage of power users (maybe 20,000 total) reportedly account for half of all Tweets. But other data suggests that Twitter’s audience keeps on growing. ComScore estimates that Twitter.com alone attracted 139 million unique visitors worldwide in May, 2011, a 54 percent annual increase. On a worldwide basis, Twitter is bigger than MySpace. In the U.S., however, traffic is up only 12.5 percent to Twitter.com, which attracted an estimated 27 million unique visitors in May, 2011. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase

Google’s Uphill Battle ...

NMA continues in its tech blog baiting campaign, this time capturing Google’s multiple attempts to crack the nut of social in subtitled CGI format. Our ingenious Taiwanese friends have chose to represent the Buzz debacle as a guy who conspicuously resembles Mark Zuckerberg spying on a woman in the shower and Google Wave as a group of people trying and failing to surf. Google+, in contrast, is depicted as a Pandora’s Box, which ultimately contains only hope in the form of the product’s true innovation, Social Circles. It’s perfect. For a completely opposite but equally brilliant take on Google’s struggle to be social, check out Steven Levy’s brilliant essay, “Inside Google+” . CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase

Google Takeout, An Easi...

Lost in all the buzz around Google+ is an important new feature rolled out alongside it that makes it way easier to take all your data out of Google. It is called, appropriately enough, Google Takeout . It’s got it’s own separate site and is also part of settings within Google+. In settings, you click on “Data Liberation” and then you are given the option to download all of your profile data, stream data, photos from Picassa, Buzz data, Circles and Contacts. The Data Liberation group inside Google has long been making personal data portable, but up until now it’s been a clunky process involving APIs and going to each Google service separately to get it. With Takeout, all your Google data across its services is available in one place. You can download it and do what you want with it. (Although downloading it does not erase it from Google’s servers). I downloaded all of my Buzz updates, just for fun, and it came in a 17.5 MB file. When I unzipped it, it was a folder filled with HTML documents—one for each Buzz update. I am not sure what I would do with that data, but it’s nice to know I can get it all. The contacts are probably more useful, and come in a more handy .vcf file which can be imported into other address books. Data portability is a big battleground between Google and Facebook. And Google is winning right now with Takeout in terms of paying more than lip service to the concept. Facebook also allows you to download a zip file of your photos, friend lists, messages, and wall posts, but it is not in a format third party sites can use. So it’s not really free . Not that 99 percent of people would ever even want to do any of this. But it’s like the Data Liberation folks say in the video below: if you know you can take your data out, you might feel more comfortable about putting it in. CrunchBase Information Google Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase