Syber News

Two years ago, when social networking was all the rage, a lot of dedicated community websites for specific (and often very small) groups of people were launched by entrepreneurs trying to cash in on the hype by carving out a certain niche. The strategy proved successful for some, but for others ... not so much. And now that the economic crisis is weighing down on the entire industry, with advertisers cutting their overall budgets and the online spend decreasing rapidly, the wheat is getting separated from the chaff faster than expected. One niche social network shutting down is Sneakerplay, an ...

Read the rest of this entry »

As we speculated last month, Facebook is about to hand over its official classifieds listings to a partner, and that partner is Oodle, we have been able to confirm. An announcement may be made as early as tomorrow. What is interesting about this deal is that Oodle already powers the classifieds on MySpace. Even though Facebook and MySpace are archrivals, this makes sense because in classifieds scale matters. The more listings and the more people seeing those listings, the better.

Read the rest of this entry »

With 2008 on the way out and right around 10,000 iPhone apps behind them, Apple has released a bunch of lists outlining which applications scored the most downloads since the App Store's launch back in July. The lists are separated by whether the the application is paid or free - first as an overall look, and then by each major category (games, entertainment, utilities, social networking, and music). While the overall top applications should come as no surprise to anybody who takes an occasional glance at the iPhone's built-in top downloads page, there are a few interesting gems hidden ...

Read the rest of this entry »

It's that time of the year when everyone announces their "Top" list. Top this, top that. Feeling left out, Apple has launched a special section of iTunes that lists the top iTunes downloads of 2008. This includes not only movies, TV shows and music, but also App Store purchases for the iPod Touch and iPhone.

Note that Apple does not release individual sales figures for each item, so we have no idea how many of ...

Read the rest of this entry »