Social Media

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--If you 're an entrepreneur looking for money today on the famous Silicon Valley venture capital row known as Sand Hill Road, yes, that is the sound of crickets you hear.

That's because today is Y Combinator Demo Day, and the lion's share of the biggest tech-oriented VCs in the Valley are packed into one auditorium here, listening to 65 early-stage companies pitch their wares.

The list is a veritable who's who of investors: Ron Conway, Tim Draper, Jeff Clavier, Mike Arrington, Stewart Alsop, and many, many others. And they've got their checkbooks … Read more

Another week has flown by in social-media land, which means, you--and I--have missed a lot of developments, new products, etc. Most of them, of course, don't matter, but these Week in Review posts (March 19; March 12; March 5; February 26; February 19) are meant to help you catch up with the ones that do. Wherever I can, I insert Twitter handles so you'll have some new folks to follow. Each week, you can help by posting links in the comments section or e-mailing me or tweeting with @sree or #sreetips.

First stop: Mashable's 53 Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed&… Read more

If you ask a friend where to eat or for their favorite dish at a specific restaurant, you'll probably give their suggestion a lot more weight than an automatically generated one, especially if that friend knows your tastes in food.

That's the basic premise behind Jybe, a brand-new iPhone app that launched today. Built by a small team led by three longtime search industry veterans, the app is designed to give users highly relevant suggestions for restaurants--including specific dishes--as well as movies, books, and other things.

These days, there's plenty of ways to get recommendations and reviews … Read more

If you had to track down fugitives hidden in five cities around the world, would one day and a $5,000 reward be enough to succeed? And if so, how?

That's what the people behind the TAG Challenge want to know--and what the whole world will soon find out.

On March 31, mug shots of five "suspects" will be published, and it'll be game on in a global hunt for "jewel thieves" in Bratislava, Slovakia; Stockholm; London; Washington, D.C.; and New York City, each of whom will spend 12 hours that day in … Read more

In my social-media workshops around the country, the statement I make that gets the most incredulous response is always the same one: I take three to six minutes crafting each tweet I send.

Yes, that's right. I sometimes take even more than that much time to get every aspect of my tweets as right as possible. No typos? Check. Accurate link? Check. Accurate handle of writer I had to hunt down? Check. Accurate "via" to give credit? Check. All of that takes time and patience.

The reason for this much care is that my tweets reflect on … Read more

If you're not playing Draw Something by now, at the very least, you probably know someone who is and can't stop raving about it. The addictive turn-based game, which is available for iOS and Android, lets you draw items of varying difficulty for your friends to guess and vice versa.

The game reached more than 20 million downloads in its first five weeks and tops the download charts for both free and paid apps. It also caught the eye of Zynga, as the social-networking-games company snatched up OMGPOP, the creator of Draw Something, for around $200 million this week. … Read more

It took just 18 minutes for Twitter to go from family-friendly to potty-mouth.

At 12:50 p.m. on March 21, 2006, then-Odeo employee Jack Dorsey upended publishing forever when he posted these fateful words: "just setting up my twttr."

Political movements would never be the same. Local news would forever be scooped on earthquakes. Cat videos would speed around the world at lightspeed. Serious forward progress had been made.

And at 1:08 p.m., it all went downhill with this (probably NSFW) tweet from @jeremy: "Oh, s--t, I just twittered a little."

In all … Read more

If you go to one of the sites that tell you how long a Twitter account has existed, and ask about @jack, @ev, and @biz, you'll find something interesting: All three accounts were registered on March 21, 2006.

For those keeping score at home, that's exactly six years ago. And that makes a lot of sense since those three accounts belong to Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone.

Indeed, today is Twitter's sixth birthday, a number that seems impossibly large. Could it really be that long since then-Odeo employee (and now Square founder and … Read more

Another week has flown by in social-media land, which means, you--and I--have missed a lot of developments, new products, etc. Most of them, of course, don't matter, but these Week in Review posts (March 12; March 5; February 26; February 19) are meant to help you catch up with the ones that do. Wherever I can, I insert Twitter handles so you'll have some new folks to follow. Each week, you can help by posting links in the comments section or e-mailing me or tweeting with @sree or #sreetips.

First stop: Mashable's 46 Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed&… Read more