When Google Buzz launched three weeks ago, the product wasn’t ready. There were basic privacy issues that still needed to be hammered out (and were quickly addressed by Google), but beyond that Google Buzz simply did not work smoothly enough to force feed it to 175 million Gmail users without any warning. ( MG covered some of the usability issues last week). So why was Google Buzz pushed out the door too soon? I have three interrelated theories: Google still wants to buy Twitter, and putting Buzz into Gmail might be enough of a threat to bring Twitter back to the table .  Buzz did not launch in some Google Labs backwater.  It is placed front and center in Gmail.  Buzz is Google’s strongest effort yet to enter the stream .  If Buzz can gain traction it would certainly help Google’s negotiating position with Twitter. Independent of any pressure it may place on Twitter, Google needs to have its own realtime micro-messaging communications system.  The micro-message bus is just a more efficient way to communicate than email for many types of messages so it makes sense to add it as a layer to Gmail: broadcast your public messages via Buzz, and keep private ones on email or chat, all from the same place. The other reason Google needed to establish its own social stream pronto is that links passed through social sharing are beginning to rival search as a primary driver of traffic for many sites.  Part of Google’s prowess stems from the fact that it is the largest referrer of traffic to many other Websites. It doesn’t want to lose that status to social sharing streams such as Facebook or Twitter.  Already, Buzz is helping to  boost sharing through Google Reader .  While Google doesn’t benefit directly from that traffic (yet), simply knowing what links people are sharing and clicking on is valuable data which can help it improve its search results. Google needed to get into this game as fast as it could, even if there were bumps along the way.  The question now is whether Buzz can keep building. Photo credit: Flickr/ Chelseagirl CrunchBase Information Google Buzz Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase

FriendFeed is down right now. It has been down for the past 30 minutes or so. Sadly, that’s not news anymore. Not because, like Twitter of old, it’s down all the time , but rather, because it seems like no one really uses it anymore . Case in point, it’s been down for over 30 minutes and there are maybe 50 total tweets about it (and several are from the same users). That means that of all the tens of millions of people around the world on Twitter, a full 50 of them care enough to tweet when FriendFeed is down. It’s hard to imagine any other service that got to the size FriendFeed did (which, granted, wasn’t huge ), only getting 50 tweets if it goes down. It’s sad, really. FriendFeed was easily one of my favorite services (so much so that I’m still waiting for another service to replace it ). But since the acquisition by Facebook , it has been a ghost town. And now, with its 500 Internal Server Error, it’s really a ghost town. The impressive team behind FriendFeed (most are still with Facebook now) have indicated they wouldn’t let the service wither , but that seems to be exactly what is happening. If it comes back up, I wonder how many of these remaining few dozen passionate FriendFeed users that are tweeting will even notice. Maybe they’ll just give up too. Update : FriendFeed is still down over an hour later. Their official Twitter account blames a “major power outage.” CrunchBase Information FriendFeed Information provided by CrunchBase

MySpace’s new slogan, and the theme of their new product strategy, will be “Discover and be Discovered,” we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. This will be their differentiating factor from Facebook, execs told employees at an all hands meeting last Thursday. The meeting was called in the wake of the firing of CEO Owen Van Natta and the related promotions of Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn to co-presidents. The meeting, which was held in the courtyard of MySpace’s Los Angeles headquarters to accomodate 600 or employees, was also broadcast to other offices around the world. The meeting began, say sources, with a discussion of the drama around the company over the last several weeks. Parent company News Corp’s Digital Chief Jon Miller apparently didn’t mince words, saying that Van Natta wasn’t moving fast enough and that there was too much conflict among the executive team. Hirschhorn also denied rumors that he ever considered leaving the company, which is contrary to the statements of about a dozen sources who’ve said the opposite to us. Miller also reiterated News Corp.’s commitment to MySpace and outlined how the co-president structure will work. “They get along really well,” he reportedly said. Hirschhorn handles product vision, Jones handles execution. More importantly, MySpace’s go forward vision was presented to employees, say our sources, and it was all about a single feature thrust that they’re calling “Discovery.” The idea is to hit users over the head with new stuff when they come to MySpace. New people they should be meeting. Movie trailers they should watch. Games they may want to play (perhaps against other MySpace users), music they should listen to, articles they should read. Etc. The activity stream that MySpace recently launched will be the backbone of Discovery, but other MySpace products will feed into this as well. If they get this right, the thinking goes, people will want to visit the site over and over again to see what new stuff they can do. This is effectively a recommendation engine around new content, says one source, but MySpace doesn’t want people calling it that. Still, the idea is that an algorithm (and advertisers) will determine what stuff you might like (or tolerate, in the case of ads) based on what other users are liking. The goal is to give users something to do on MySpace that’s somewhat different than Facebook. And get them to come back often. CrunchBase Information MySpace Information provided by CrunchBase

Facebook has acquired its third company, Malaysian startup Octazen Solutions . Facebook says this is largely a talent acquisition, according to GigaOm . Octazen has a slightly different story on their home page, saying Facebook acquired “most of the company’s assets and to employ those assets in a different direction.” Either way, it’s leaving some people scratching their heads. Said one senior engineer at a competing company that we spoke to this evening, “Facebook just bought the web’s most talented and creative scrapers that have gotten around everyones rate limits and detection systems.” Said another person we spoke with this evening who is knowledgeable of Octazen’s product, “Facebook is so sanctimonious about protecting their own user data through Facebook Connect, but Octazen has been scraping user data for years off terms of service and then reselling it.” Both sources asked to remain anonymous. Facebook, for their part, have not yet responded to our request for comment. What exactly has Octazen been up to? The company is mostly about above-board contact importing from one service to another – signing in to Gmail from Facebook, for example, to import your contacts there and add them as Facebook friends. Much of this is done via OAuth and APIs, but Octazen is known to dive much deeper for data. One example – Octazen will sometimes collect and store user credentials directly, and sign into large social networks and other sites as if they were the user, say multple souces. Then they’ll download the address book and social graph. A percentage of your friends on that service might be users of the service (now Facebook) paying Octazen, and you’ll be asked to friend them. But there’s a big question about what happens to the rest of the data as well, and if Octazen is storing a shadow social network in violation of terms of service to recommend user connections down the road. And they may look deeper at data than they should – at email header information, for example, to get a better understanding of who you communicate with the most. But the most unnerving part of Octazen, say our sources, is the fact that they are very, very good at scraping data at scale without being detected. They may hit a service using lots of different IP addresses, for example, and remain undetected. Octazen could, they say, scrape very public sites like Twitter, where the social graph is on each profile, in a way that Twitter wouldn’t know it’s happening. In 2007, for example, People were buying and running Octazen scripts to scrape contacts in a very sketchy way: “So we use this toolkit from Octazen to scrape contact lists off of various sites. Our ever eager users (ab)used this feature so much that hotmail blocked us.” The poster found a way to access Hotmail’s API instead of just scraping to get the data, and Octazen responded, saying “Very nice indeed” Our understanding is that Facebook already uses Octazen to mysteriously determine your long lost friends and suggest that you re-connect with them (leading to scores of emails into our inbox that Facebook is somehow reading emails or otherwise getting data they shouldn’t be). The big question is why Facebook would need to acquire a company located half way around the world if all they were doing is standard address book imports via OAuth and APIs, or proprietary but well documented protocols like Facebook uses. The implication is that these guys have serious expertise in data gathering at scale that may sometimes be in violation of the terms of service of the sites being harvested. This is obviously just one side of the possible story, albeit based on hard evidence of Octazen’s shady prior practices and via multiple sources. But until Facebook explains this acquisition in more detail, we don’t have much more to go on. CrunchBase Information Octazen Solutions Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase

Yesterday, in a session on ‘Mobile Communications 2.0′ at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Facebook’s VP of User Growth, Mobile and International Expansion Chamath Palihapitiya shared the social networking giant’s current mobile strategy and its plans for the future. It was in this session that the company for the first time talked about its latest product, Facebook Zero , which is essentially a stripped down, text-only version of the mobile website for the social networking service. The product aims to give mobile carriers a way to offer a basic Facebook experience to their subscribers free of charge and later convert those users into premium data service customers. We recorded the entire 20-minute session and uploaded it to our YouTube account – these are the highlights of the presentation: – Facebook believes 2010 will be a watershed year for mobile – The service is now actively used by more than 400 million people – They want to make Facebook even more ubiquitous and reach billions of users – 100 million users (25% of total number of users) actively uses Facebook’s mobile products at least once a month – 200 million people have interacted with Facebook on mobile at least once – Over the next 5 to 10 years, Facebook aims to invest heavily in expanding mobile experiences for their users; they expect a lot more growth in this area – Facebook now works together with some 200 mobile operators – and they are striving to convince more about the added value of such partnerships – Mobile users demonstrate twice as much engagement than Web users (2x the pageviews, interactions, consumptions and productions) – They use the above as an argument to convince operators services like Facebook can help drive more sales for more capable phones and heavier data plans – Facebook is traditionally strong in English-speaking countries, but that’s not all – for example, every single user in Indonesia apparently uses Facebook’s mobile products – There are 3 key themes to Facebook’s mobile strategy: * MOBILE WEBSITE: two versions, one for regular phones and one for touch-screen enabled phones – these have now been translated into 70+ languages , covering about 98% of the world population. * SMS: interactions through Facebook using shortcodes – so far there are deals with 80 operators in 32 countries * DEVICES: applications or ‘integrated experiences’, which means Facebook intends to hook its service deeper into the core OS handsets run on – New developments: * VODAFONE UK TRIAL: the carrier offered Facebook mobile free of charge for a week, which not only caused an expected usage spike, but also resulted in an increase of 20% of people who kept using and paying for heavier data plans after the trial * FACEBOOK ZERO: stripped down, text-only version of Facebook’s mobile website – carriers can offer this free of charge for as long as they like, and attempt to transition users to a charged model more effectively – Facebook aims to turn FB Connect into a ‘foundational element’ of the web, whether accessed on mobile phones or not. – In the future, Facebook Connect should become more of a core integration both on an OEM, app and OS level (naming iPhone, RIM, Windows Mobile and Android as examples) – Facebook intends to play a more important role in the app developers ecosystem – The company stressed that their goal is to keep pushing the envelope for users, operators, device manufacturers and developers. CrunchBase Information Facebook Chamath Palihapitiya Information provided by CrunchBase