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Craigslist Founder Launches craigconnects: “The Biggest Thing In My Life”

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has just launched craigconnects, which he says is a long-term initiative to “connect and protect organizations that are doing good stuff”.

Newmark on the site’s homepage says craigconnects is “the biggest thing” of his life, and that he’s committing 20 years to the project, which will initially focus on non-profits and public service organizations that “get stuff done on a sustainable basis”.

To be clear, craigconnects isn’t a fundraising or grant-making organization, but an entirely different beast with a big bold vision (getting everyone in the world together for the common good via the Internet). The overall purpose of the project is explained here.

It’s all a bit hazy if you ask me (the welcome message video, embedded below, didn’t quite help either) but who would like to bet against Newmark to turn something rather basic into something enormous using the power of the Internet?

Microsoft: How To Reassure Users When Your Site Goes Down, Using Twitter

Microsoft has teamed up with Psychster, a research firm that apparently specializes in “the psychology of social media”, to study how companies should use Twitter to address a site outage, unscheduled downtime or interrupted service. Provided Twitter is available, I might add.

Anyway, you can download the whitepaper here (PDF).

According to the collaborative study, people are increasingly turning to Twitter in the case of an online service outage, while companies often don’t know what to say, who should say it, and what the impact of all that ‘joining the conversation’ will be.

Microsoft Learning and Psychster conducted a multivariate scenario study (see survey) to explore how best to reassure users during an outage, and how tweets affect brand perception and support call center demand.

The results showed that half of the (120) respondents in the sample would consult a Twitter feed to get information about an outage, and that negative feelings about the downtime would reduce if they find out the responsible company seemingly cares enough to tweet about it.

According to the study, acknowledging an outage and giving an explanation also reduces users’ likelihood to contact support – but only when the tweets were posted by an employee/social media manager rather than ‘the company’ or its executives.

What also helps reduce call center demand during outages: informing users about the breadth of the impact rather than stating whether it was a frequent or expected occurrence.

Facebook, Skype, Tumblr, Foursquare, WordPress and … Twitter: the whitepaper can be downloaded here. It’s free of charge, no registration required.

AdSense For Images Pixazza Now Seeing 20 Billion Image Views Per Year

Pixazza, a Google Ventures-backed photo tagging service that has been compared to an “AdSense for Images,” has hit a major milestone today. The company’s in-image advertisements now reaches more than 70 million unique visitors per month, which is an 80 percent increase in reach in just five months.

Pixazza allows publishers to identify, tag and match products found within online images on their sites and then link them back to the inventories of Pixazza’s network of advertisers. The service, which can be integrated in a site by adding a single line of code, allows consumers to browse the photos featured on a site and mouse over it to reveal information and pricing about similar products, and if desired, click to purchase.

As of last July, the startup reached 25 million unique visitors per month through its 75-plus publishers, which include US Weekly and Access Hollywood, and was serving 8 billion image views per year. Asof March 2011, the number of publishers in the Pixazza network has grown by 15 times, and Pixazza now enables images at a rate of 20 billion image views per year (Similar to the way that page views are used to measure web site traffic, Pixazza tracks image views, which count the number of times a web publisher serves a Pixazza-enabled image).

So why is Pixazza growing so fast? Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Pixazza, says the answer is simple. With three trillion images on the web, says Lisbonne, publishers realize that they can do more with images, monetize and increase engagement rates.

The startup, which has raised nearly $20 million in funding, faces competition from Image Space Media, GumGum and others.

Information provided by CrunchBase

YC-Backed Like.fm Is A Social Network For Tracking Songs

Recently funded by Y Combinator, Like.fm is a way to keep track of and share what music you’re playing. Right now the service uses a Chrome, Firefox and Safari extension to automatically track what you’re listening to on YouTube, Pandora, Rdio, Meemix, Grooveshark and Earbits and a desktop client to track what you’re listening to on Winamp, iTunes, MediaMonkey or Windows Media Player.

Founder Chris Chen says that its emphasis on song tracking is what separates the Like.fm from streaming services like Last.fm and music buying networks like Apple’s Ping (which he describes as “a step above adding share buttons to the iTunes store.”) says Chen “Like.fm isn’t meant to be a destination music site, it’s meant to be a place to find songs that you like. It’s not meant to be a Pandora but a compliment to it, it’s a place for sound discovery, where you go and listen to music.”

At the moment very barebones and work-in-progress (there’s a lot of “Coming Soon” on the site) Like.fm uses Facebook Connect to automatically follow your Facebook friends on the service.  Through the Top Played chart on your Dashboard the service allows you to track the songs most played by people you followed and lets you play songs by linking to the corresponding video on YouTube (if it exists).

On a Like.fm profile you can view a Summary of the top songs a user has listened to, their entire song History or the songs they’ve set up to listen to in the Queue. Users can also easily download all their play history.

Aside from letting you comment on songs and manually share/recommend links, the service also lets you set up Auto-Share to Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm for songs that you rate at four or five stars on iTunes or Windows Media Player (Chen says that in-app rating should be coming in the next couple of weeks).

Chen hopes to eventually add more robust recommendation features like Songs You May Like, based on stuff your friends have listened to that you haven’t heard. He also hopes to build a mobile version soon and add better data visualizations like custom charts of your chronological music listening history, “I’d like to create charts of the YC Class, and what days they listen to music the most. You can guess what time people sleep by the music they play, with the YC class I’m guessing it’s probably around 5am.” That sounds about right.

comScore: Android Passes iOS And RIM For U.S. Smartphone Subscriber Share

comScore’s monthly smartphone data is in and it looks like for the first time Android OS has surpassed both Apple’s iOS and RIM in terms of U.S. smartphone subscriber share. The data, which measured smartphone usage from October 201 until January of 2011, showed that 65.8 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during period, which is up 8 percent from the preceding three month period. While Android passed iOS in terms of subscriber share in the previous period, this is the first time the Google-developed OS has unseated RIM from the number one spot.

Google’s Android platform led smartphone platforms for the first time in January with 31.2 percent market share; RIM ranked second with 30.4 percent market share, followed by Apple with 24.7 percent share. Microsoft followed with a 8 percent market share, with Palm taking 3.2 percent share.

In terms of total mobile device usage, 234 million Americans ages 13 and older used mobile devices for the period. With respect to manufacturers, Samsung ranked as the top OEM with 24.9 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers, up 0.7 percentage points from the three month period ending in October. LG ranked second with 20.8 percent share, followed by Motorola (16.5 percent), RIM (8.6 percent) and Apple (7 percent).

Mobile content usage continues to increase steadily amongst U.S. consumers. In January, 68.1 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device, while browsers were used by 37.0 percent of mobile subscribers, which is an increase of 0.8 percentage points.

And 35.3 percent of the mobile audience used downloaded applications, representing an increase of 1.6 percentage points. Accessing of social networking sites or blogs increased 1.1 percentage points, representing 25.3 percent of mobile subscribers. Playing games represented 23.7 percent of the mobile audience, while listening to music represented 16.5 percent (up 1.1 percentage points).

While Android has been eating away at iOS market share, this month’s data shows that the OS is also taking some of RIM’s market share. comScore’s data represents one report in a sea of many similar findings that show that Android is growing fast. But a recent Nielsen report pointed out that because RIM and Apple create and sell their own smartphones with their operating systems, these companies are actually in a better position in the three-way race (in terms of device manfuacturers). Because Google licenses its OS to device manufacturers, the Android ecosystem is more fragmented.

While Android is looking strong, the race has not been won yet.

Information provided by CrunchBase

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