Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Tagged

Tagged Acquires Natural Language Processing Company Topicmarks

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:46:33 +0000

is a social network that focuses on providing friend suggestions. Tagged has recently acquired natural language processing and machine learning company Topicmarks. Topicmarks will be used to analyze the 100 million registered users on Tagged and match people with similar interests. Topicmarks’ CEO, CTO, and three senior engineers will be joining Tagged in exchange for cash and stock. Topicmarks will continue to remain active for the time being.

Tagged has been profitable for four consecutive years because of their 10-20 million monthly active users. The company currently has 150 employees which includes 17 from acquisitions. Tagged also owns game discovery platform WeGame and instant messenger software Digsby.

Topicmarks has the ability to scan text and return short content summaries. Topicmarks processes news articles, RSS readers, desktop files, and cloud storage services. Now Topicmarks will be used for reading messages, comments, and Tagged user statuses.

Tagged Buys Digsby Instant Messenger Software

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 01:36:21 +0000

Social networking company Tagged.com has acquired dotSyntax. dotSyntax is best known for developing the Digsby instant messaging service. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. All seven of dotSyntax’s employees will be joining Tagged.

Tagged CEO Greg Tseng said that they plan to keep developing Digsby as standalone software. “They have expertise and technology in real-time communications which we want to use to push into instant messaging, group chat, video chat, etc. IM is our most requested feature on Tagged,” stated Tseng.

Digsby has about 3 million registered users and dotSyntax has raised about $500,000 in funding. Tagged has over 100 million users.

[TechCrunch]

Social Network Tagged Hits 100 Million Users

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 17:40:46 +0000

Tagged is a San Francisco based social network that has ended 2010 with 100 million registered users and they have hit its third year of profitability. This also means that Tagged has more users than LinkedIn, but less than Facebook and Twitter. Tagged made over $32 million in revenue and their virtual currency revenue is up 71% since 2009. Tagged plans to double their staff and give all employees a 10% raise. Investors in Tagged include Mayfield Fund, Horizon Technology Finance, and Leader Ventures.

Its About Time Someone Sued Tagged, But I Did Not Expected It To Be New York

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:23:55 +0000

Out of all the social networks that exist, I think that I hate Tagged the most. Yup, I hate it more than Yaari. The way that Tagged grew was by sending unsolicited e-mail invitations after taking over the contact list of user e-mail accounts.

It was inevitable that Tagged would be attacked legally by someone, but I seriously did not expect a whole state to sue them. The attorney general of New York announced earlier that they plan to sue Tagged for deceptive email practices and privacy invasion.

“This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people,” stated New York Attorney General Cuomo in a press release. “Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologize to all their email contacts for Tagged’s unethical – and illegal – behavior. This very virulent form of spam is the online equivalent of breaking into a home, stealing address books, and sending phony mail to all of an individual’s personal contacts. We would never accept this behavior in the real world, and we cannot accept it online.”

Tagged started in San Francisco about 5 years ago and claims to have 70 million registered users with 4 billion pageviews per month. The company was founded by Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith.

“Today’s announcement by New York Attorney General Cuomo is disheartening,” stated Tagged founder Greg Tseng in a blog post. ”Identify theft and invasion of privacy are very serious allegations and it is not accurate to portray Tagged, or any other social network, in this regard.