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….

Let’s look at the lighter side of social media. With so many privacy concerns rolling around, turmoil around the world fueled in many ways by social media, and general shenanigans dominating status updates, we want to lighten things up a bit and have a chuckle or two. What would happen if social media sites were actually your neighbors? That’s the questions that our infographic designers at Column Five Media tacked in their latest take on offbeat visual news. Click to enlarge. …

If there’s only one certainty in life, it’s change. If there’s only one certainty in social media, it’s that people will hate Facebook changes for a little while, but will get used to them and adapt. It happens every time. This will be no different. There has been outrage over the recent changes and more keep rolling in from f8. We will moan. We will gripe. We will swear off the site, but that won’t last. Eventually (within days, even hours) we’ll be back on Facebook figuring out where they moved everything and realizing that, once again, the change wasn’t as bad as we thought. Here’s Timeline. It’s a…

We know where to look to see what Johnny had for breakfast, how little Timmy slid into 3rd base, and what’s happening with Lady Gaga. There is no doubt that social media has connected us to our friends, family, and current events in ways that we couldn’t even imagine a decade ago. When it comes to business, that’s where things get a little more gray. Is it really working? Let’s face it – most who have tried to use social media for business purposes have been met with certain levels of disdain and abuse. They get called spammers. They’re get unfriended, unfollowed, blocked, banned, or publicly ridiculed….

Social media is often a paradox. For many, it’s the convergence of our private lives with public access and scrutiny. As a result, many companies are starting to use social media as a litmus test when hiring the same way they use criminal background checks or credit checks. Companies can now legally compile information about you and your public activities on Facebook, Twitter, and everywhere else. If it’s public, it’s usable. If it’s usable, chances are slim that anything you have on your social profiles can help you get a job. They can only hurt. This graphic by our friends at MindFlash breaks it…

Evernote, LinkedIn, Mint….Walmart? The retail giant is now among Mountain View’s leading startup companies following its purchase of Kosmix, the company behind real-time Twitter filter site TweetBeat, medical search engine RightHealth, and topic-specific engine Kosmix. The company has now been transformed into Walmart’s @WalmartLabs division, which aims to create technologies and businesses around social and mobile commerce. Kosmix founders Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, as well as the entire Kosmix team, are expected to stay on-board as part of the newly formed…

If the statistic is true (and there’s no reason to believe otherwise – heck, it’s on the internet!), then there was an average of 30 million daily tweets between June 13th and July 13th this year that mentioned the Copa America Tournament in soccer (football). Stat. Blows. Mind. According to the same study, there were 7,196 tweets per second during the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup Final. Apparently, only a few came from Barack Obama. More amazing statistics: Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona acquired 6.6 million “likes” on his Facebook page… in one hour. A stadium in Kansas City can handle 18,000 WiFi…

As it does with most trends in marketing, the automotive industry has gone from way behind just a year and a half ago to shaping the venues and carving the path today. There have been some missteps to say the least, many in the business from car dealers to manufacturers are fully embracing social media as a venue to get their brand and message out to the masses. Earlier this year we wrote about how the industry is embracing new media. Now, we’ve compiled a breakdown of the major manufacturers and how their current social media presence ranks in this competitive world. By the numbers There’s an old saying:…

There is so much that can be learned about a people through social media data. People don’t always act the same way online as they do in the real world, but if anything it allows likes and interests to be more genuine based upon the anonymity associated (for now) with online activities. In other words, social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Tagged may know more about us than our friends and family do. In this graphic, we explore various pieces of data that help to paint a pretty clear picture of Americans and their online activities. We may all be aware that Americans love video games, but did you…

Bitly, whose mission is to reinvent how people discover and share content on the web, has officially acquired Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed allows bloggers to “feed their blogs to Twitter,” Facebook, and other services using RSS. The acquisition will be used to bring the enhanced sharing functionality of Twitterfeed directly to bitly.com, making it easier to collect, organize, shorten and share links. Currently, Bitly is one of the leading URL shortening services. It was even Twitter’s preferred shortening service until the company decided to develop their own. “For years now, we’ve…