Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s “Telephone” Premieres on Vevo [VIDEO]
Fresh off having the most popular music video in YouTube/Vevo’s history (“Bad Romance” with 140 million views and counting), Lady Gaga’s latest – “Telephone” – featuring Beyonce, has made its debut on the Web.
The video is choc-full-o Lady Gaga shock value, and at more than nine minutes in length, could probably classify as a short film. Dating site PlentyOfFish somehow managed to get prominent placement (fast forward to 4:27 if you’d rather skip the rest of it).
Early indications are that “Telephone” will be every bit as popular as recent Gaga hits, with the song, its participants, and even a string from its URL already dominating trending topics on Twitter ahead of its official premiere on E! later this evening. It also briefly took Vevo — YouTube and the record labels new music video website — offline.
Here’s the embed for what could be the latest member of the 100 million view club (“Just Dance” also recently broke the milestone):
Update: It looks like someone might have jumped the gun at YouTube/Vevo, as the video seems to be going back and forth between private and public. Here’s a few images we were able to grab while we had it open:
Update #2: Vevo now tells us the video will be back at midnight ET.
Tags: beyonce, Lady Gaga, music, telephone, trending, vevo, youtube
Conan O’Brien Launches TeamCoco.com to Promote 30-City Comedy Tour
We now know how Conan O’Brien plans to leverage the huge swell of support he found online in the wake of being forced out at NBC: a nationwide comedy tour.
The comedian announced on his Twitter account this morning the launch of TeamCoco.com, where fans can buy tickets to one of 30 shows, kicking off in Eugene, Oregon, on April 12. The tour, fittingly enough, is called “The Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour,” a reference to the deal he made with NBC that keeps O’Brien off the air until the fall.
A comedy tour has been rumored since shortly after Conan stepped down, and we suspected something might be in the works when he finally joined Twitter (and immediately found a huge fan base, and changed one random girl’s life along the way). Now, Conan officially has an outlet to keep the momentum going while he determines his next move on TV.
Are you going to go see one of Conan’s shows? Let us know in the comments!
Reviews: Twitter
Tags: conan o’brien, team coco, trending
Twitter Takes on Phishing with New Security Features
Spam and phishing have been ongoing problems at Twitter for some time, and tonight the company announced that it is stepping up its efforts to stop them with some new features, described as being able to “detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links.”
In a blog post, Twitter writes that the protection works by “routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service … even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.”
How exactly they do that, we’re not sure, but Twitter notes that you’ll start seeing short links using its own “twt.tl” URL shortener in direct messages and email notifications. As users who have been victimized by phishing scams (and those annoyed by the constant barrage of dodgy DMs) can likely attest, it’s a feature whose time has most certainly come.
Reviews: Twitter
Tags: phishing, security, twitter
Watch Out, Topeka: Greenville, SC, Also Wants to be Googletown, USA
Google’s call for medium-sized cities to pilot its high-speed broadband network has attracted the marketing wit of another locale: Greenville, South Carolina.
Citizens of Greenville have launched the “We Are Feeling Lucky” campaign –- an obvious play on Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button — an effort that will culminate in citizens trying to form “the world’s first and longest human Google chain.” Glowsticks will apparently be involved in the event, scheduled to take place on the evening of March 20.
The site makes heavy use of Google products and services — likely not a coincidence — in getting its message across. There’s also a social media component, with “We Are Feeling Lucky” having a YouTube channel featuring citizen videos, a Facebook event for the “Google on Main” event and a Twitter hashtag: #LuckyGVL. Here’s one of the YouTube clips featuring a variety of Greenville residents:
While citizens work to spread the message and draw Google’s attention, a formal proposal from the city is in the works to be submitted to Google by the March 26 deadline.
Greenville joins a growing list of cities that are getting creative in hopes of landing Google’s fiber. Topeka, Kansas, drew headlines when it unofficially renamed itself Google, Kansas. Duluth, Minnesota, went viral (to the degree a video about a public infrastructure proposal can) with a YouTube video. Columbia, Missouri, has 5,000+ fans of a Facebook Page supporting Google Fiber in their town.
When Google announced its plan to launch the fiber network test, the company made it clear to us that it has no plans to become an ISP. Nonetheless, it appears that lots of cities would be more than happy to serve as the test bed for its vision of a faster Internet, which its claims will have speeds of up to 100x typical connections.
Which campaign for Google Fiber has been your favorite so far? Let us know in the comments.
Reviews: Google, Twitter, YouTube
Tags: Google, google fiber
Retweet.com Sells for $250,000
Retweet.com, which put itself up for sale last month, has sold for $250,000 in an online auction on Flippa. The auction saw a fair amount of interest with 45 bids in total, but it appears that the winning party came in with a “buy it now” offer for $48,000 more than the current bid to take ownership of the Tweetmeme competitor.
Like Tweetmeme, the site aggregates the most popular links on Twitter, and also provides third-party websites with buttons that lets their visitors easily retweet articles. Although the service isn’t as popular as Tweetmeme, it has been able to accumulate respectable traffic, and it’s ideal name give it significant branding power. According to the company’s listing on Flippa, there is not yet any revenue.
At this point, we don’t know who the buyer is, though we heard rumblings last month that a major social news site was interested. We’re looking for more information and have contacted the team behind Retweet.com for details. We’ll update if we learn more.
[thanks Matt Binder for the tip]
Tags: retweet, tweetmeme, twitter
Facebook to Launch Location Features Next Month
Facebook’s move into location has seemed inevitable for some time, and it now appears that the company will officially reveal its plans at next month’s Facebook developer conference –- f8.
According to The New York Times, the social network will incorporate location in two ways: (1) its own features for sharing location and (2) APIs to let other apps — like Foursquare and Gowalla –- offer location services to Facebook users.
Presumably, Facebook will make sure to address privacy issues with its location features — for example, perhaps with settings that allow you to share your location only with a select group of friends. The Times’ report doesn’t detail the specifics of such features, though it notes that the social network updated its privacy policy late last year in preparation for a location launch.
Facebook will be rolling out its location features to an enormous user base — there are now more than 400 million users of the social network in total, 100 million of which access the site via mobile regularly. The company also has its own native apps for all of the major mobile platforms. All of this gives Facebook’s location features an enormous edge over the competition.
The Times’ report suggests that the competition isn’t the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla, however, but rather Google and its huge base of local small business advertisers. Of course, the startups aren’t ignoring this opportunity either — earlier today, Foursquare shared details of upcoming features it plans to release to help local businesses utilize checkin data.
With Facebook entering the space, though, the other players will need to look to create value in ways beyond checkins and knowing where your friends are located at any given point in time. That’s why Foursquare seems to be so focused on partnerships and gaming, while Gowalla is making moves (as recently as last night) in virtual goods.
In any event, location remains the huge trend so far in 2010, and literally each day seems to bring new indications of which way it will all play out.
Reviews: Facebook, Foursquare, Google, Gowalla
Tags: facebook, foursquare, social networking, trending
Cisco CRS-3: Download Library of Congress in Just Over One Second
Cisco has announced a new routing system that it says is going to speed up the Internet in a big way. According to the company, Cisco CRS-3 — currently being tested by AT&T — is three times faster than its predecessor, which was introduced in 2004.
The company offers a few intriguing sound bites about the CRS-3 and what it enables:
- the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress to be downloaded in just over one second
- every man, woman and child in China to make a video call, simultaneously
- every motion picture ever created to be streamed in less than four minutes.
Of course, that’s not for end users, but ultimately allows the telecom companies (Cisco’s customers) to route traffic around the Internet faster. Speaking to the reasoning behind the new speed push, Cisco CEO John Chambers says in the video below that he expects Internet traffic to grow at “200-500 percent per year” as bandwidth-intensive activities like downloading and streaming video continue to explode.
At the same time, Google has its own ideas for speeding up the Internet, and is currently looking to test its own fiber network to deliver 1 gigabit per second Internet connections (and Topeka, Kansas wants in!). One way or another, it looks like the Internet is only going to continue to get faster.
Here’s Chambers’s video and another with more of the nitty-gritty details of CRS-3:
Reviews: Google
