General Electric Co has changed the way it communicates with Wall Street over the past month, sharing news with investors via a relatively new company blog, Reuters reports. The blog, GEReports.com is accompanied by a YouTube channel.

The Reuters story carries two quotes from GE spokesman Gary Sheffer which illustrate that the social media communications message seems to have hit home at board level. It even goes so far as to provide a link for ‘Press/Blogger contacts’.

“This is a tough environment, a lot of misinformation in the marketplace,” Sheffer said. “This is just a fast and simple way to punch through it and to make sure that you tell your story in a simple and engaging way.”

Commenting on GE’s blog post about an internal restructuring of GE Capital, Sheffer said: “We typically wouldn’t have even put out anything on an internal reorganization. And it would leak, eventually somebody would say, ‘Hey, they reorganized Capital,’ and then we would respond to it. This is a way of recognizing the inevitability that internal is external these days and acting on it.”

Google kills Lively
Another defunct service heads to TechCrunch‘s deadpool with the news that Google will be killing Lively, its browser-based virtual world.

Commenting on a Google WebTrends chart that clearly demonstrated Lively’s lacklustre performance, Erick Schonfeld says: “Maybe Google didn’t kill Lively so much as mercifully pull the plug. This is a good sign actually that Google is willing to weed out non-performing products. What else is being cut at Google? What else should be?”

Jack Schofield at The Guardian muses along the same lines, though he at least has an opinion: “These are tough times and it’s no surprise to see Google cutting a failed project. But it inevitably raises the question: What else could go? The awful Knol must be top of most people’s lists. Google Video looks surplus to requirements. Orkut could perhaps do with a mercy killing. Google Sites? Google Base? Notebook? Does anybody actually use those?”

Rick Turoczy at ReadWriteWeb wields Occam’s razor in his analysis, saying: “It seemed like a good idea at the time. But, in actuality, Lively didn’t offer Google any relevant data. And that, ultimately, is what killed Lively. The world of Google – everything on which Google focuses its time and effort – is built on relevant data. A portion of that world involves making that data searchable. But the far more lucrative portion of that world involves analyzing how users are accessing that data and finding ways to monetize those behaviors.”

The Register‘s Chris Williams helpfully predicts: “Look out for much more of this in the coming months as Silicon Valley executives realise setting towers of cash on fire would be more profitable and entertaining than many of their webtarded ‘pre-revenue’ products.”

Yahoo! Glue now available in the US
Bloggers across the pond are very excited by the launch of Yahoo! Glue, a variation on search that the company has trialled in India since May this year, and which is now available to users in the US. Very similar to Mahalo‘s approach, Yahoo Glue incorporates web search, images, news, blog search, Wikipedia and YouTube videos, with the results weighted in favour of the target audience. Yahoo’s example page about Barack Obama demonstrates the concept.

In her blog post announcing the launch, Julie Dempsey reassures the world: “For those that may be wondering, our intention with Yahoo! Glue™ beta is not to replace the Yahoo! Search experience in the US. We’re always challenging ourselves to explore innovative new ways to deliver great experiences. Glue is one of those experiments, with a goal of giving users one more visual way to browse and discover new things from across the Web.”