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It’s easy to forget how good something is until it’s gone. I guess this is also the case with the king of pop, whose musical career wasn’t exactly soaring in the past decade, but now that Jackson has passed away, everyone remembers him for the good, old, unforgettable hits he’d given us in the 80s. And, apparently, everyone is buying them, because, based on preliminary sales numbers from Nielsen SoundScan, 2.6 million Michael Jackson (his work with Jackson 5 and the Jacksons included) digital downloads were sold in just one week.

The week before his death, 48,000 Michael Jackson songs were sold, which makes this week’s numbers a staggering jump. But for an even better idea of how big these numbers are, suffice to say that no artist has ever sold more than one million digital songs in one week. Furthermore, eight Michael Jackson albums have found themselves in the top 10 bestseller list, and 25 of his songs are in the top 75-position Hot Digital Songs chart.

Topping the album charts was “Number Ones” with 108,000 copies sold, with “The Essential Michael Jackson” following with 102,000 copies. “Thriller,” Jackson’s most popular studio album, is third with 101,000. When it comes to individual songs, “Thriller” has sold 167,000, which earned it the second place, behind Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling.” In the week before Michael’s death, 5,000 copies of “Thriller” were sold, which makes this week’s results an incredible 3,551 percent increase.

Tags: digital music sales, michael jackson

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There’s good news and bad news for Gmail users today. The good: Gmail is releasing “drag and drop” for labels. This means that if you want to label a mail, you can simply drag and drop it over the label in your left sidebar and you’re done.

Gmail is also adding “hiding” to labels to prevent them taking up too much sidebar space: your most-used labels will show there, but you’ll need to hit “more” underneath the box to see them all. You can decide which labels to show or hide in the settings.

For the first time, however, Google is also killing a Gmail Labs feature: “Right side labels”, which allowed you to move your labels to the right sidebar to get them out of the way, is no more. Google argues that it’s not needed with the new space-saving “hide” feature. It’s a sign for caution among Gmail users: don’t get too reliant on Gmail Labs features, because Google can take them away at any time.

Reviews: Gmail, Google

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Ever have one of those conversations that culminates in someone saying “I’d give you $20 to _____”? That’s the premise of a new site PayPal has launched: Do Stuff For Money.

The site is rather straightforward: input your name, who you’re offering money to, how much you’re offering, and what that person has to do, and PayPal sends them the offer, either by email or via Facebook. For the latter, the site uses Facebook Connect, so you can browse your friends list and post the offer to someone’s wall from the Do Stuff For Money website.

If your friend accepts the offer, you’ll get an email from PayPal, which prompts you to send money to your friend. This is the “why” in the equation: if the service takes off, PayPal sees more transactions taking place on its site, which translates into more transaction fees and money in the bank.

The Do Stuff For Money homepage shows some recent offers, some of which are fairly entertaining. See if you can spot mine below:

Reviews: Facebook

Tags: paypal

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As we reported earlier today, Facebook has announced some sweeping changes to user privacy settings in an effort to both make it easier for users to understand them, and also beef up the amount of public content sharing that takes place on the site.

The company ran through the changes with members of the press on a WebEx this afternoon, but now they’ve made the slides from their presentation available to all. In them, you’ll find additional screenshots of the upcoming changes, as well as some insight as to how Facebook views them (“a key step in emulating Twitter” is not included in the deck ).

Check them out below:

Meanwhile, Facebook has also updated their blog with a lengthy overview of what users can expect to see over the next few weeks.

Reviews: Facebook

Tags: facebook

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Over the past couple weeks, we’ve learned a lot about upcoming changes to Facebook that will significantly change the nature of the site. For example, a new publisher option will allow you to post completely “public” updates, or post them to select groups of friends. Meanwhile, you’ll soon be able to become a “fan” of a user profile (in addition to fan pages), in the same way you can follow someone on Twitter.

Today, Facebook held a press event to discuss these changes in detail. The key announcement, beyond what we already knew, is Facebook’s upcoming “transition tools,” which the social network is launching to try and get users opted in to the new settings with limited chaos.

What’s New?

The transition tools – of which there are several – allow users to change their sharing settings in one quick action – to “recommended,” custom, friends-of-friends, only friends, or the everyone option. An important point is that Facebook is not changing anything by default (users were clearly concerned about “everyone” becoming the default).

Most of these settings were available previously, but rather complicated because of how many options Facebook currently gives you – for example, making photos available only to a custom group of “close friends,” but letting everyone in your work network see your status updates. That complication, Facebook believes, has lead to many users simply avoiding these settings.

When’s It Launching?

Odds are you won’t see these changes today – Facebook is currently testing its 6 different transition tools with just 40,000 users, will expand that to 80,000 users next week, and then begin a gradual rollout to all users later this month as it determines which tools users respond to most favorably.

What Does It Mean?

Ultimately, Facebook users that are deeply concerned with privacy can breathe a deep sigh of relief – your profile will remain just as private as before if you want it to. Meanwhile, for those that want to broadcast their updates publicly like they do on Twitter, have them indexed by search engines, and link to them from their blogs and other social networking profiles, those features are on the way.

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter

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One of the unique aspects of Bing is the background images it uses on its homepage, that include information about the picture when you roll over various parts of it. The feature actually originated on the previous incarnation of Microsoft’s search engine – Live.com.

Now, the search engine is turning over the homepage image to Facebook users, at least for a day. The company has launched a Facebook application that lets users upload their own photos (with a summer travel theme) for consideration and vote on those uploaded by others. Ultimately, the Bing team will select finalists from the highest rated photos and then let users vote again to determine which image will be featured on the homepage on August 3rd.

The app also features some sharing features, so when you upload or rate photos, you can share them with your Facebook friends. That should give the promotion a bit of a boost, especially as avid photographers find out about the opportunity to have their work featured in front of Bing’s millions of daily visitors.

It’s worth noting that Google also turns over its homepage to users one day per year, as kids compete in the Doodle4Google competition for a shot at having their quirky interpretations of Google’s logo seen by millions.

Reviews: Facebook, Google, bing

Tags: bing, facebook, photography

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Tweetdeck users have noticed tonight that their hourly API call limit has been increased from 100 to 150 per hour, essentially meaning you can get more frequent Twitter updates if you require them. Twitter, however, has made no announcement, and the API Wiki still states 100 as the limit.

It’s not just TweetDeck that saw the change: we’re seeing rate limit increases in Twhirl: this would suggest a rate limit increase across the board, although that’s yet to be confirmed. The blog SocialGeist also spotted the change, and sent us the news.

If the change applies beyond TweetDeck, it’s great news for developers and those who use Twitter with remote applications.

Have the rates increased for your app? Let us know in the comments.

Reviews: TweetDeck, Twhirl, Twitter

Tags: api, twitter

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In mid-May we published stats that measured the scale of the #iranelection coverage on Twitter, as tracked by social media tracking service Trendrr. Mashable’s Ben Parr remarked that we were “approaching one million tweets on the situation”, although this only counted tweets mentioning the exact term #iranelection.

Now the Web Ecology Project has gone a step further and published a thorough report entitled “The Iranian Election on Twitter: The First Eighteen Days”. Rather than just looking at specific terms like “#iranelection” or “iran”, the study includes 12 terms related to the Iran situation, giving a more complete overview of events.

We’ve highlighted the key findings here, but stat heads may wish to dig into the methodology noted on the report itself, embedded in full below.

Iran Election on Twitter: Key Stats

- From June 7th till June 26th, the study recorded 2,024,166 tweets about Iran

- An estimated 480,000 Twitter users contributed to the conversation

- Of those that Tweeted about Iran, 59.3% tweeted once – this accounted for 14.1% of the Tweets

- The top 10% of Iran Twitterers accounted for 65.5% of the Tweets

– 1 in 4 Tweets about Iran were retweets

Iran Election Stats by Keyword

- ahmadinejad: 1,765 Tweets

- basij: 3,295 Tweets

- gr88:151,038 Tweets

- iran: 903,193 Tweets

- iranelection:: 857,401 Tweets

- iranian:- 9,929 Tweets

- khameni: 1,409 Tweets

- mousavi: 16,970 Tweets

- mousavi1388: – 325 Tweets

- neda: 97,872 Tweets

- rafsanjani: 77 Tweets

- tehran:- 85,019 Tweets

Full Report – The Iranian Election on Twitter: The First Eighteen Days

This is an embedded version of the Web Ecology Project report, available for download at their site [warning: PDF link].

Reviews: Mashable, Twitter

Tags: iran, iranelection, twitter

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I remember being excited about Joost. I had access to an early beta version, and the service did what it promised to do: it brought high quality premium video content to my computer. It also had a good interface with plenty of features, and – considering it was a beta – it worked quite well.

From the business perspective, it had everything you could dream of: celebrity founders, huge funding, and a promise of support from large content providers. All that wasn’t enough – Joost basically closed shop yesterday; CEO Mike Volpi stepped down, and Joost will focus on a white label video solution, cutting up to 90% of its workforce.

Om Malik lays down a good analysis, and yes; in hindsight, it’s easy to see why Joost failed. One key reason was the fact that the service was initially not browser-based and it required a download, which stifled viral growth. Another was the fact that, ultimately, Joost did not deliver enough interesting content as content providers moved on to other projects such as Hulu.

But what’s striking about this story is the fact that, despite all of its problems and shortcomings, Joost was a good project. It was very hard to predict, back at its beginnings when it generated an enormous amount of buzz, that it would go down in flames in 2-3 years. The buzz that surrounded the service was justified: it was Hulu two years before Hulu; it was what YouTube lacked and obviously, it was what people wanted.

The lessons learned? Sometimes you can’t predict what will work and what won’t. Sometimes only one or two years can make a world of difference in a market, and sometimes a project that has everything going for it can fail. But most importantly, if your entire business depends on third parties – in Joost’s case, content providers such as Viacom and CBS – then you’ll sink pretty fast when they turn their backs on you. Remember that the next time you embark on a business project.

Reviews: Hulu, YouTube

Tags: joost

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There’s a growing fascination with the so called “real-time Web,” with Google, Facebook, and Twitter all reportedly working on major changes to their search tools that leverage status updates and tweets to do a better job of indexing the Web. But Microsoft’s Bing has beaten them all to the punch – at least in being able to say they include Tweets side-by-side with Web search results.

The implementation actually isn’t very exciting. Essentially, all Bing is doing is showing recent tweets from well-known people, and only when you search for that person’s name and Twitter in the same query. And it’s all just done via Twitter’s API, making it not a whole lot different than simple widgets that show someone’s most recent tweets.

The Bing team explains on their blog:

“Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres. This includes Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest.

Starting later today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results. For example, if you type “Kara Swisher Twitter” or “Kara Swisher Tweets” or even “@karaswisher” as your search query, you’ll see something like the below. (Note this feature will be rolling out gradually over the course of the next few hours so you may not see it right away.)”

This feature would seem to have fairly limited appeal – after all, most famous people simply use their own name as their Twitter handle, or you can quickly find it using Twitter’s existing search tools (or, Google). Nonetheless, it’s the first in what will likely be many big announcements concerning search engines and the indexing of real-time data from Twitter and other sources.

Reviews: Facebook, Google, Twitter, bing

Tags: bing, Search, search engines, twitter

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