This month Digg  CEO Jay Adelson has made multiple interviews and appearances as well as introduced a new version of Digg that unfortunately is not available yet. Yesterday, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday had an interview with the CEO of Digg. The interview, which was just over eight minutes long, provided some great insight into the “crowd sourcing” giant. Below are two snippets from Adelson which were particularly interesting. The first of which, sheds some light on Digg’s past and their bright future.
 

Web users are finding their news in a manner that may not be considered a “traditional” way of Web news navigation. In February Hitwise published a report which found that Facebook beat out Google News in sending visits to top news and media Web sites. It was the fourth largest source of visits behind only Google, Yahoo, and MSN (still ahead of Yahoo Search and Bing). A recent follow up report shows that Facebook news getters are more loyal to news and media Web sites than are visitors from Google News.

Google has announced a Google Buzz widget for Android. The new widget works with Android running 1.6+, when before Buzz Mobile worked only with Android 2.0+. Google Buzz Mobile was released in Feburary, and has a bunch of great features including integration with Google Maps to show Buzz around your area (or the area of your choice).

Yesterday Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced a new addition to Twitter that goes far beyond the twitter.com domain. The feature dubbed “@anywhere” was announced at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) Event. SXSW 2010 is being held in Austin, Texas, and lasts for ten days (March 12-21). The event combines music, film, and interactive. SXSW has been running for over twenty years. 

Over the weekend Google announced new control features for Google Buzz. It seems that although the service was designed to be super user friendly (running almost entirely in Gmail) it seems that many users felt like the Buzz just made too much noise in their inboxes. The two new features should go great lengths to reduce Gmail box clutter.

You hear it in business all the time… Location location location, but now it’s becoming even more important for social networking. Yes Twitter connects information and people from all over the world, but up until recently it wasn’t always that easy (or accurate) to find information locally. Yesterday Twitter introduced “Tweet With Your Location” feature. Users will see the option when writing their next tweet, but must opt-in to receive the service.

Twitter has been in the news a lot over the past few months because of their efforts to team up with other online powerhouses. In October Tweets began appearing in both Bing and Google search results, and only one week ago Twitter announced their partnership with Yahoo Search as well. Yesterday, however, Twitter took another big step to further affirm that they want to improve content flow across the Web and around the world.

The conversation hasn’t faded yet.  Although the topic has been bounced off of Twitter’s “popular topics right now”, it has remained as a popular topic of the day. YouTube, more specifically CitizenTube, offered a Web forum for anyone to comment, ask questions and vote for the best questions. In all over 50,000 votes were cast for 1,957 questions to be asked to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader John Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The future is bright for Twitter integration with Yahoo.  The only integration at this point, is Tweets into real-time Yahoo Search results, but this is only the beginning. Yahoo has already announced features coming soon. The list includes:

Yesterday both the Twitter and Yahoo blog published posts relating to the newly formed alliance. This was only the next step for Twitter. Just another sign that Twitter and real time information sharing is becoming an important part of search result offerings. Also goes a long way in further solidifying social networking and a true testament to its longevity.

Yesterday over at the Twitter blog a graph which displayed the growth in tweets was posted. The growth is just sick. The most current information is estimating an average of 36,000 tweets per minute. This has come a long way from their 2007 daily average of 5,000 tweets.

Because of a misconfiguration, the WordPress servers were down for almost 2 hours on Thursday.  Thanks to the use of Twitter, WordPress was able to keep its users and followers up to speed since obviously they could not inform them on a non-working site.  A tweet on Thursday, February 18th at about 1:45 pm states "WordPress.com is down, we're working on restoring service now." 

Sponsors were using social media (Facebook, twitter, websites) to push their advertising even before the games began.  NBC was creating buzz on their social media sites to push the Olympics long before it began (obviously they would, they're the station holding it) and like I mentioned previously, Visa allowed viewers to watch their commercials on youtube before they were set to air. 

As if it wasn’t enough that you could use AIM to update your Facebook, now AOL has added Lifestream to the Mail AIM plug-in. The ongoing trend to let Web socialites get an assortment of their social Web updates in one place is continuing. With Lifestream, you can now receive updates from your AOL buddy list as well as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook announced earlier this week that mobile usage had topped 100 million users, but thats not all the news Facebook has this week. noFacebook Chat now ill be accessible via a variety of desktop instant messaging programs. The feature will let users stay connected even when they aren’t actually on Facebook. To make it all possible, Facebook will be utilizing Jabber’s Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). XMPP is an open messaging protocol supported by many of the most popular instant messaging programs.

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