Yahoo is quickly going the way of AOL in that it’s becoming a place that simply isn’t “cool”, at least to the emerging internet users and those 20- and 30-somethings who still want to be cutting edge (and 40-, and 50-…). Everyone knows it, even Yahoo itself. “One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.” They started heading in the right direction by getting a hip, young CEO to run the…

Microblogging platform Tumblr has seen exponential growth in the last few years, and there’s no sign of slowing in sight. Tumblr now generates 6.5 billion pageviews each month from its 30 million blogs, making the site one of the most formidable players in social media. Tumblr’s steady growth has also attracted new venture capitalists. Yesterday, the company announced that it had raised $85 million from a financial round led by Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners, and the Chernin Group. Richard Branson, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and Sequoia Capital also contributed….

Posterous, the creator of a simple blogging service via email, has dramatically shifted its focus. The company now revolves around a new product called Posterous Spaces, which allows users to privately share photos and videos with friends or family. With Spaces, Posterous will compete less with other blogging platforms, such as Tumblr. This could be a wise move for Posterous considering that Tumblr just announced it had surpassed its 10 billionth post, and over the past year the service had grown from 7 to 28 million blogs. At one time, both microblogging services were growing at a similar pace,…

Although Tumblr has only been around for about four years, the microblogging platform now hosts most blogs than Wordpress.com. As recently as January of this year, Tumblr was home to just 7 million individual blogs. However, that number has ballooned to more than 21 million blogs today. While Tumblr’s growth has always been impressive, it hasn’t come without pitfalls. Last December, Tumblr experienced a monumental crash, causing the site to be down for approximately 24 hours. Since then, the company has focused almost entirely on scaling. New features were put on hold as Tumblr hired executive…

Microblogging platform Tumblr has finally launched its own ‘Share on Tumblr’ button, following in the footsteps of other popular blogging and social media services. Tumblr’s share buttons will allow users to share content on their Tumblogs as a link, pull quote, photo, or video embed. The buttons are a bit overdue, considering that Tumblr now attracts 26 million visitors per month globally, according to comScore. Despite their tardiness, the multi-faceted ‘Share on Tumblr’ buttons are just as user-friendly as the microblogging platform itself. With the launch of this product, it…

Jaiku was a service that the entered microblogging scene at the right time in 2007, arguably offering a superior service to Twitter. The company’s explosive growth and keen grasp of mobile led to its sale to Google in October 2007.. While at the time co-founder Jyri Engeström believed the purchase would ultimately help to broaden the service’s user base, he recently told 37 Signals that Jaiku was “put on life support” at the height of its popularity. Under the assumption that he and his team would instead be building a new, more scalable service that would be tightly integrated with a small…