Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently a writer for TechCrunch.
Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook, where he covered Facebook product changes, privacy, the Ads API, Page management, ecommerce, virtual currency, and music technology.
Prior to writing for Inside Facebook, Constine graduated from Stanford University in 2009 with a Master’s degree in Cybersociology, examining the influence of technology on social interaction. He researched the impact of privacy controls on the socialization of children, meme popularity cycles, and what influences the click through rate of links posted to Twitter.
Constine also received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors from Stanford University in 2007, with a concentration in Social Psychology & Interpersonal Processes. He became fascinated with social networking theory after joining Facebook as a freshman a month after the service first launched.
Josh Constine has spoken at the South By Southwest Interactive and Music conferences, and has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, The Atlantic, BBC World Magazine, Slate, and more.
You shouldn’t have to squint at Like and retweet counts to discover the best content your social network has to offer. So with one simple design choice, Google+ for iPad (and Nexus 7 ) has created a better tablet feed reading experience than Facebook or Twitter. As Google announced at I/O, on tablet, Google+ posts with more engagement are shown larger.
The Google+ iPad app launched today feel more like Flipboard, where surging seas of information turn into smooth sailing thanks to visual cues to what’s crucial. Browsing update after update doesn’t feel monotonous. In fact, it’s quite refreshing and addictive, enough so it might help Google+ finally shake that ghost town label. → Read More
An all-hands meeting at wireless network provider Meraki just closed with a bang: it’s raised $40 million and is now looking for a 100,000 square foot office according to my sources. The financing comes mostly from existing investors that likely include Sequoia and Northgate. Much of the $40 million is debt with the principal to be repaid within five years. Details on exact investors are still coming together because Meraki hoped to keep the round quiet as not to rile up competitors.
Meraki will use the funds to keep a cash cushion, pay for its new headquarters, and aggressively hire in sales so it can break away from competitors like Aerohive and Cisco. If all goes well, I hear an IPO is on the horizon. → Read More
Old world online marketers must build, buy, or die, and Oracle has made its choice. Oracle just agreed to acquire Involver, only a month after the giant bought its competing social marketing platform Vitrue. Involver will be rolled into Oracle Cloud marketing suite, and the deal is expected to close over the summer (Update: though the purchase price may have been quite low).
Oracle has been on acquisition spree as of late, buying Vitrue for publishing, Collective Intellect for monitoring, and Right Now for customer service, Involver will give Oracle a powerful toolset for helping brands create custom applications as they adjust to sea change in marketing brought on by social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Here we dive deep into the two-year trend of social M&A that Oracle is driving, and ask if mobile marketing is the next industry to see a roll-up. → Read More
It takes a lifetime to build up social capital, but now it’s easier than ever to burn it all to earn some discounts via new ecommerce discovery site affiliate programs. But why should Fab, or The Fancy, or other Pinter-esque services care? They’re not the ones getting spammed. It’s Facebook and Twitter’s problem.
But that’s bullshit.
By incentivizing aggressive sharing with monetary discounts — not a spot on some leaderboard, or (gasp!) a sense of altruism, these ecommerce sites are growing and making money at the expense of financially-strapped users and the social networks they frequent. → Read More
Tagged photos are Facebook’s lifeblood, and it would be happy to suck them out of other apps. That’s why I suspect Facebook will resurrect Face.com’s facial recognition API, even though it just shut it down less than a month after acquiring the Israeli company.
Reopening the API will let other apps’ users easily tag their Facebook friends in photos…which can then be shared back to Facebook where they generate notifications, return visits, and engagement the social network can monetize with ads.
It’s all part of Facebook’s on-going quest to become the Omni-news feed, collecting content from everywhere for data-mining and display. → Read More
Yahoo and Facebook signed a contract today that says they cannot sue each other over patents. Yet Yahoo may be trying to convince investors that Facebook would still pay to buy or license some Yahoo intellectual property. But according to a source familiar with the exact wording of the Yahoo-Facebook contract, the two companies have rights to each other’s entire patent portfolios, so Yahoo would have no leverage to extort money or value from Facebook.
I smell something fishy. Let’s investigate. → Read More
Twitter has just implemented a massive set of improvements to search, allowing you to search just within tweets of people you follow, autocomplete, and related results including similar hashtags and usernames. These will all help you find what you’re looking for even if you’re unsure of the exact hashtag or someone’s handle.
Today’s updates are already live on Twitter.com, and related search suggestions, autocomplete, and spelling corrections are also now available in Twitter for iPhone and Android. You can try them out now with a search for “Jeremy Lin” which returns his username and the real names of teammates as suggestions, plus a filter for tweets from People You Follow. → Read More
Facebook and Yahoo are calling off their heated patent lawsuit battle, and in fact have just agreed to cross-license their entire patent portfolios to each other without money changing hands, sources directly familiar with the deal tell me. Sources also confirmed that the two web giants are entering into an ad sales partnership that will let Yahoo show Like buttons in its ads, as first reported by Kara Swisher of AllThingsD this morning.
Update 1:15pm PST 7/6: Facebook has just confirmed the patent portfolio cross-license agreement as well as the ad sales and distribution partnership in a press release.
However, Swisher noted the companies would only cross-license “some key patents”, and Facebook might have to pay to license others from Yahoo. The patent deal is actually much larger. It encompasses their entire intellectual property stockpile such that they won’t have to pay be able to use each other’s patents, and won’t be able to sue each other over them either. → Read More
The USA was founded by entrepreneurs who said “England has become bloated with bureaucracy. Let’s disrupt it by starting our own agile, more innovative nation.” But on the country’s 236th birthday, we find some democracy’s machinery needs a tune up. Political news, campaigns, and voting itself require an update for the 21st century.
Considering our roots, its only fitting that entrepreneurs would be the ones to rise to the occasion and use technology to make this great nation greater. Here a look at five bold startups putting the power of democracy back in the hands of the ordinary person. → Read More
Facebook’s news feed is so slow to give you the goods, you could almost call it prude. But you’re about to get lucky. Now the feed will load faster, as it will be pulling in fewer stories to start so you can get browsing immediately, Facebook just told us.
Plus, if you don’t want to see every little move your friends make, there’s a new “Hide Ticker” button in the top right of the web home page.
But the real hotness is still bottled up. My sources say Facebook is about to release a much faster version of its mobile apps that will load the urgent elements first so it’s more snappy. That’ll be nice considering that whenever I launch my Facebook app currently, it’s like I’ve drunk a bottle of cough syrup and gone into some sort of slow-motion trance. → Read More
We’re on the cusp of a global conflict that will see the three most powerful consumer Internet companies fighting to win control of interpersonal communication. The war will pit Facebook’s unified Chat / Messages / Email vs Apple’s cross-device iMessage system vs. Google’s Gmail / GChat / Hangouts. If one emerges as the definitive victor, it could sway the future of digital human interaction.
Read on as we survey the battlefield, review the weaponry of each company, and assess who could win the epic message war and the fortune that comes with it. → Read More
Click ‘Messages’ on Facebook and then “Other” in the right sidebar and you might find emails missing from your Gmail or other personal and work accounts. Without giving you any warning or notification, Facebook last week changed your profile to hide any email addresses you’ve previously listed and instead show only your little-known “@facebook.com” address. Any messages sent to you or your @facebook.com address that weren’t sent from friends, friends of friends, or email addresses registered to their Facebook accounts ends up there, easily missed.
Now Facebook’s unauthorized change to your preferred contact info is auto-syncing with address books for some mobile devices, so people don’t even realize they’re not pinging your Gmail, they’re sending messages to your Other black hole. But rather than apologize, Facebook has implied to ReadWriteWeb that users are merely confused. Yes, users are confused…because Facebook changed their contact info without consent! → Read More
Poof. Vanished. Gone. Many Facebook users are no longer seeing the real-time news “Ticker” on the right side of their home page, but apparently it should reappear soon. While nothing was posted to Facebook’s Known Issues Page, one Twitter user relayed that his friend who works at Facebook said Ticker “will be back online soon”. There’s a chance the removal could be more permanent, though.
The Ticker is essentially Facebook’s firehose, showing abbreviated stories about nearly every action taken by your friends, no matter how insignificant. If Facebook did remove the Ticker, it could make it harder for third-party apps to grow, but give Facebook more prime real-estate above the fold to show ads. → Read More
“There’s an oligarchy in the media and that needs to be broken up” Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker tells me. So he’s building #waywire, a news site that features original and syndicated video content, but that also lets viewers record and share their responses.
“Traditional news sources aren’t in any way talking to millennials” Booker says, so #waywire is designed to deliver them content from their perspective. It’s now taking registrations for its upcoming private beta.
#waywire’s got big name investors including Eric Schmidt and Oprah, some serious digital expertise, and a mission to disrupt both traditional news outlets and the social networks that surface them. → Read More
Facebook will give investors and the world their first official look at its post-IPO earning for Q2 2012 at 2pm PST on July 26th, according to a brief note posted to its investor relations page just now. There’s been no indication of whether CEO Mark Zuckerberg will participate in an earnings call or if more business focused execs COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman will be the ones fielding questions.
The company pulled in $1.058 billion in Q1 2012 revenue with a net income of $205 million. Critics will want to see both of those increase and will likely focus on its mobile revenue. Facebook only began showing ads on mobile at the end of February, but monetizing the medium is believed to be the linchpin of Facebook’s future success. → Read More
“Oh you know Johnny? Then let’s get naughty.” Whether it’s for one night or forever, we’re more likely to choose mates who have Facebook friends in common with us. This comes according to a new study by Coffee Meets Bagel, a startup that shows you a suggestion of someone to date each day and connects you if you both fancy each other.
Out of Coffee Meets Bagel’s 44,000 matches, people with mutual friends are 37.2% more likely to both give each other the thumbs up. Women are much more influenced by the mutual friends effect. And there’s even a magic number of acquaintances in common that makes you 90% more likely to want to get frisky… → Read More
Practice Fusion is the frontrunner in the fevered race to become the electronic medical record platform, and today it finished raising a $34 million Series C led by hedge fund Artis Ventures to make sure it wins and lead it towards an IPO. Practice Fusion’s valuation is now around a half a billion dollars, it tells me. Startups trying to compete? “We’re squashing them” founder and CEO Ryan Howard tells me. It now hosts 40 million patient records of its 150,000 doctor and other medical professional clients, up from 25 million records and 130,000 clients seven months ago.
The money will fund a patient acquisition strategy, the build-out of its app platform, hires, and attracting more docs to ditch pen and paper for more efficient, accessible electronic records. Howard beams ”We’re excited to light it up. The company’s on fire, growth is maddening. The problem needs to be solved.”
→ Read More
Ads, not payments, are the future of Facebook monetizing mobile, but it needs content to show them beside. The new Follow action announced today could deliver that content by letting you follow someone in a mobile app, and then sending the updates you’d normally see in that app back to your ad-laden news feed.
More content -> more engagement and return visits -> more ad impressions, more money, and more reason for investors to buy. It will send referral traffic to developers, and it’s actually convenient for users too. Why trapse from site to site and app to app when you can see everything your friends are doing everywhere, all from your news feed? You won’t. You’ll sit right there where Facebook can advertise to you. → Read More
While people were skydiving into I/O, Google quietly made a massively important announcement about a new feature called Google+ History, which gives apps an API to auto-share content to a private holding tank on your G+ profile, which you can then choose to share from. Developers who integrate History will score added discovery and referral traffic from the 75 million daily Google+ users the search giant announced today.
Testing begins now and Google admits it will be bumpy. But it has the potential to populate Google+ with desperately needed content and make it a destination people actually want to visit.
→ Read More
Today at Google I/O, Google announced it has 250 million total users, 150 million monthly users, and 75 million daily users, with more usage from mobile than desktop. It released an Android tablet version too, and an iPad version is coming soon. Both as well as Google+ for Android smartphones offer brand new navigation, a new ribbon bar, new notifications, and brand new profiles.
Google+ today launches Events, with a focus on beautiful invites, a deep integration with Google Calendar, and real-time automatic photo uploads through Party Mode. → Read More
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CrunchUp & August Capital Party 2012
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