Online publishing company Wetpaint has been undergoing a strategic shift in its business model over the past year. Wetpaint began as a simple wiki/social publishing tool but then started to build entertainment sites for big brands, including MSN. And the heavily funded startup succumbed to layoffs last July and December. But today, Wetpaint is taking the company in a new direction: original content. The startup is launching Wetpaint Entertainment; a TV news site that covers news and gossip from over 15 major TV shows, such as Glee, Grey’s Anatomy, and Gossip Girl.

Each show has a dedicated online channel (the site is launching with 15 channels), and will compile the most popular photos, videos, fashion gossip, and headlines to provide one place for all the information about fans’ favorite shows.

Wetpaint’s founder and CEO Ben Elowitz says that each show will have roughly 20 posts of information per day and will include a live updating news feed on the homepage. Roughly 30 percent of the content on the site will be written and curated by Wetpaint editors while the 70 percent of content will be sourced from other sites. However, Elowitz says that editors won’t simply repost another site’s news with a link; Wetpaint will add its own editorial spin to repurposed content.

Wetpaint’s entertainment platform has also created Facebook pages for each show; allowing fans to interact with content and editors via the social network. The company says that 500,000 fans have joined Wetpaint’s Facebook pages over the past few months. In fact, Facebook, says Elowitz, is currently accounting for 40 percent of traffic to the site (which soft launched a few months ago). He believes that the cross platform integration with Facebook will help differentiate the site from its competitors. And with limited exposure during the soft launch, traffic to the site is growing by 50 percent monthly.

Starting today, Wetpaint Entertainment includes channels for “The Vampire Diaries,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “America’s Next Top Model,” “Castle,” “Hellcats,” “Nikita,” “Glee,” “Dancing With The Stars,” “Top Chef,” “Pretty Little Liar,” “Bachelorette,” “The Bachelor,” “Gossip Girl,” “Jersey Shore” and “The Real Housewives of DC.”

The startup plans to launch mobile apps later this year and may eventually move into other verticals in entertainment and arts. At the moment, the site faces competition from many of the entertainment and gossip news sites that cover TV news such as Entertainment Weekly, People.com, and US Magazine.

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As It Moves Away From The Wikis, Wetpaint Launches TV News And…

There are now customised settings for ‘tagging on start-up’ make the process of identifying a music track faster, a new UI, the ability to search for ringtones and videos on iTunes and better video. You can also share tunes you find via Facebook and Twitter. Shame it doesn’t own its name on Twitter then.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Shazam Launches Major Updates To iPhone app, Now On 20m Users

Just as I was reading Paul Carr’s latest column about quitting social media, my husband looked at his phone and broke into a huge smile. He is a graphic designer and has long been a fan of Chank Fonts. Earlier that day, he’d taken a picture of a retro-looking podiatrist office, posting it on Twitter with the word “Font-o-licious.” It didn’t go viral. It didn’t become a trending topic. It didn’t get him 1,000 new followers or even attract much attention at all. But it was noticed by Chank Diesel of Chank Fonts who Tweeted “I’m gonna dedicate my next font to that type-savvy podiatrist” and started following my husband.

Here in front of me was one of those serendipitous moments of social media collapsing  space-and-time. These moments don’t change the world, but they’re exactly what made social media so addictive in the first place. Imagine an industry hero of yours who seemed untouchable creating a product just because of a random picture you posted on an ever-moving stream of colliding information that he happened to see. Here, in the guise of my beaming husband, was the perfect articulation for why I think people—even my close friends— who declare dramatic social media bankruptcy were just doing it wrong.

What made social media a phenomenon were moments like these. Passively connecting in-and-out of a persistent conversation with people you know and see everyday, people you know but have lost touch with, and people you don’t know but share interests with. People who in a more efficient world, you might have known. It’s about making relationships more efficient. My parents know what I’ve been up to by reading my Twitter feed, so when I call home I don’t have to answer a vague question like “What have you been up to?” I answer a specific question like “What country are you traveling to now?” If a friend is looking for a job at a given company, I can’t always remember who I know who works there, but with LinkedIn, I don’t have to. And seeing what an old flame looks like on Facebook never gets old.

If these selling points sound horribly cliché it’s because they are commonplace reasons most everyday people use these sites, and indeed, the same reasons why the founders of most social media companies started these sites. But the sites worked too well at amassing fans, friends and followers, creating micro-economies where people sought to cash in on their would-be fame and influence. And that is when the problems—and inevitably the fatigue— started. People competed for how many friends and followers they could rack up and how many RTs they could get in a day, seeing it as evidence of how cool or smart or influential they were. That’s when social media got mercenary and soulless.

Here’s a clue: If you find yourself saying “(Fill-in-the-blank-social-media-site) used to be soooooo much better before everyone was on it”– you are using the site wrong. You are following too many people, you are using it too much, you are strangling the pretty, little bunny. The beauty of these sites is you control how many friends you see, and how many of them see you. So if you used to love it and now hate it, well, you know what they say about when you point a finger. Three are pointing back at you.

Sometimes metrics can be a bad thing and beware of any so-called “social media consultant” who tells you otherwise. What’s the value of a Retweet or a Like? It’s roughly the equivalent to sitting next to someone during a keynote who nods his head at a salient point. Someone hitting a button in front of them is hardly a heady endorsement—nowhere near the impact of someone calling you to tell you about a story he read. That actually takes more than one-second of attention and work.

Everyone touts stats showing that recommendations are the most trusted form of advertising. That’s because in the old world recommendations were inefficient. I had to be so moved by, say, the service at a restaurant, that I proactively called people to tell them about it, or it stuck in the front of my mind solidly enough that when someone asked “Where should we go to dinner?” it came flying out. The power of personal recommendation doesn’t carry over in a world where it’s as easy as clicking a button because the caliber of that recommendation is necessarily lowered by taking out barriers.

Of course not everyone becoming fatigued with social media whored themselves out to anyone who would follow or friend them, bartering likes and retweeting anyone who said something nice about them. Indeed, Mr. Carr locked his account and only followed a core group of friends. His biggest complaint was simply that he used it too much—updating any thought in his head so that he didn’t take time to mull and form that idea or joke until it was perfect, and that he was distracted. That’s a fair point.

But I wonder whether the flood of apps may be making the problem worse, not better. You can have too much of a good thing. After some early security glitches when Twitter desktop apps published direct messages, I decided to only use Twitter.com and update by text message to interact with the service.

That’s downright luddite in my TechCrunch/iPhone world, but by going to Twitter, rather than Twitter always flooding to me, I forced myself to keep my Twitter feed as manageable to keep up with as email. What’s more, when I travel to places like China or have a big deadline, I don’t log onto Twitter for weeks. When I come back it’s still here. Both Twitter and I continue to go about our lives without one another just fine.

I don’t think changing an avatar to green saves Iran. But I wouldn’t say Twitter is making us all more detached and stupid either. I just like life with social media better than life without it, for silly little moments like the one my husband had with Chank Fonts. Same thing I’d say about email or a mobile phone or TiVo or a Blackberry.

I realize that doesn’t make gripping blog copy like Twitter-democratizing-the-world or Twitter-totally-sucking, but I think for most of the average users out there, that’s the Twitter they know and the Twitter that will continue to steadily grow, all this hype and backlash aside.

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If You’ve Got Social Media Fatigue, UR DOIN IT WRONG

StockTwits has built a business out of people tweeting their thoughts and actions around various public stocks. SecondMarket has built a business out of people interested in the buying and selling of various private stocks. It seems only natural to shove the two together. Which is exactly what they’re doing today with a new partnership.

As you may be aware, to send a tweet to StockTwits, you have to append the “$SYMBOL” syntax to your tweet. The same idea will now work with these private stocks that SecondMarket tracks. For example, if you’re interested in TechCrunch stock, you’d tweet your thoughts with “$TCRH” appended on to the tweet. For Facebook, you’d use “$FBOOK“. For Twitter, “$TWIT“. And so on.

When you do this, these tweets get pulled into the StockTwits system and you can see a stream of what people are saying about these stocks on individual pages there. SecondMarket then pulls in these curated tweets as well from StockTwits to supplement their own pages.

SecondMarket currently tracks about 500 private companies that aren’t yet public but have interest from outside investors in their stock. The company has made their own proprietary symbols for each of these, and those are the ones (as shown in the examples above) that StockTwits will be using. As more are made by SecondMarket, StockTwits will add them to their system.

SecondMarket has completed some $300 million worth of transactions involving these private stock sales. And there is currently over $30 billion in assets available on the market — thanks largely to companies like Facebook and Zynga which will undoubtedly go public sometime in the next few years. Those two companies and others — like Pandora, recently — have fueled the explosion in interest in these non-public tech stock markets. And StockTwits is smart to attach itself to this wave.

Get tweeting about that hot $TCRH stock.

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SecondMarket And StockTwits Team Up To Let You Tweet About Private…

A couple days ago, I wrote a post wondering if it wasn’t time to change Facebook’s social graph dynamic? Specifically, I called for a simplified system that had two layers: your friends and your followers. I think that their current social management system which relies heavily on friend lists is highly flawed. And guess what? Mark Zuckerberg agrees.

Tonight at a Facebook Developer’s Garage meeting at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Zuckerberg fielded a question about the service’s privacy controls. He said that the ideal solution for sharing different things with different people is to make a friend list. “But guess what? Nobody wants to make lists,” Zuckerberg admitted.

Exactly. While the idea behind friend lists is great, for the average user (in other words, 99 percent of Facebook’s 500 million users) it’s simply not something they’re going to do. Or even if they make them at first, it’s not likely something they’re going to keep up with. Facebook has tried to lower the barrier to entry a few times (most recently a couple days ago) but they are still simply too time-consuming to set up and maintain.

My solution is the two tier system: either someone is a friend and you have to accept them as such. Or they’re a follower — meaning they can opt-in to following your public updates without you having to okay them. When you update on Facebook, there would then be a big switch to decide if you want something to go to just your friends or to your followers (which would include your friends).

I see no reason why there couldn’t be an option to use lists that further filter things beyond that. But friend/follower would be the main list/function that everyone used.

Zuckberg is clearly thinking a different way to solve the lists issue. He thinks it still has to be something like friend lists, but done a different way. He noted that they have to come up with a way for people to control each thing they want to share, but do it in a way so that the tools are really easy to use.

Again, even with such a vague statement, I’m worried that this is going to be too complicated.

To be fair, it’s an insanely difficult problem Facebook is facing — and Zuckerberg knows it. He notes that after over six years of adding various privacy controls over features, things became “really hard to use.”

But he still believes in the idea of sub-groups of friends because the average user has something like 50 friends now — and people who use Facebook more often, have a lot more. Those users might not want to share all their information with even just those people. Or worse, he noted that ”the people who you are most afarid of seeing [some item] are on your friends’ list.”

He also spoke to the fundamental idea of friending someone and them accepting it as what they need to look toward going forward. He also believes the problem may simply come down to design. Again, the idea behind friend lists is correct in his mind — it’s just the implementation that isn’t. I still like my idea.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Zuckerberg: “Guess What? Nobody Wants To Make Lists.”

Up until a few months ago, I was using Facebook the same way I was using Twitter. That is, I was allowing anyone to follow me. But it was different. With Twitter, anyone can follow me without my approval. On Facebook, everyone needs my approval. Though perhaps ill-advised, I was simply blindly approving anyone. Then I stopped.

There was no single reason why I switched my Facebook habits, but I decided that I was going to start using the service the way Facebook made it seem it should be used: befriending only actual friends. I was a bit more lenient — I friended anyone I’ve actually met in person. Everyone else? Gone. I purged several hundred people, cutting my “friends” in half in one day. But now I’m realizing that’s not good enough.

With the launch of Facebook Places, there’s a lot of talk about it being creepy or a potential security nightmare. I think all of that is and will continue to be largely overblown. That said, I’m also sure there will be legitimate causes for concern with the feature — but mainly because people aren’t using Facebook the “right” way. Nor do I think Facebook actually wants them to.

You see, Facebook really did used to be all about friends. As in, your real-life friends that you could connect with online. But in their drive to be the center of the social web and promote sharing (of links, of data, of information, of everything), Facebook is mutating. The problem is that the original social graph isn’t built for this mutation. And we’re going to see that very clearly with things like this new location element.

Facebook wants us to share things more openly, but with Places, they have launched a feature that most people will want to keep close to the vest. They can’t have it both ways, right?

Well, actually they can. But they need to fundamentally change the way their social graph works. It’s a move that would be controversial — but hell, all Facebook moves are controversial. I think ultimately, this would be very beneficial — to both Facebook and the users.

Facebook needs to adopt a friend/follower system.

What I mean by this is that there needs to be a two-tier system for Facebook. On one level, you have the things you share with your friends. On the other, you have what you share with your followers (including your friends). To some degree, you can already do this. But it involves befriending everyone and using Facebook’s convoluted lists to distinguish your real friends. No regular user is going to do this. Ever.

Or, you can use the “everyone” setting (now the default) in your status updates. But I’m still not clear that anyone ever looks at these “everyone” updates besides Facebook, advertisers, and search engines. Facebook needs to allow you to have followers to make this data meaningful.

There should be a simple switch or button on the Status area (and not in some drop-down) that lets you determine if what you’re about to share should be with your followers or with only your friends. And the default should be to share with only your friends (unless you change that in the settings).

Basically, this would morph Facebook into Twitter on one level, and back into the old Facebook on the other. I’ve brought this up before — but again, things like Facebook Places are making this more important.

And it needs to be simple. Currently, the Facebook privacy settings remain a nightmare. Things need to be simplified further — into a followers or friends sharing scheme. All people would be followers unless you marked them as friends. And again, all updates would be done with a big, clearly-labeled switch in the update area — do you want to share this with FRIENDS or FOLLOWERS? It needs to be crystal clear.

Others actually have this sort of system in place. One perfect example that isn’t widely used is Foursquare. The app has a little-known “celebrity mode” feature which allows famous people who sign up for the service to have both friends and followers. Followers are people that you don’t have to explicitly approve, they’re just following you if they choose to. Friends, you still have to explicitly approve. With each check-in, you can chose whether to send the update to just friends or to all those followers. It’s so simple that I almost can’t believe Facebook isn’t doing it.

Since my great Facebook purge, I’ve noticed interaction on the items I post to my profile has gone way down. This is obviously because I have half as many people reading these updates but also likely because many of the ones I purged were followers from Twitter or elsewhere on the web who were more accustomed to the idea of interacting with stuff I share. I miss those people.

But again, I wasn’t actually “friends” with these people, so I’m not sure I want them seeing my location updates or pictures from my vacation. I’d like them as followers, that I can interact with if I chose to.

I know, I know. Fan pages. Facebook fan pages are bullshit. Pure and simple. The fact that Facebook makes you create another profile page that you have to update entirely separately is just lazy. Worse, these pages are crippled. There’s no good way to bring tweets into them (though you can pump them out from the page), nor is there a good way to share your content. They’re just awful. A hassle — nothing more.

So again, why not just befriend everyone and use the lists to managed who can see what? Because that’s also a hassle. And there’s the ridiculous 5,000 friend limit. Can you imagine if Twitter had that?

It’s simply time for Facebook to evolve the social graph. If they want to be the social center of the sharing web, they could do that with such an option. Forget the silly “everyone” button — move to the follower model. Allow people to opt-in to following others but allow that user to determine if they’re actually a friend, and as such, open to more information than a regular follower.

Obviously, this is more complicated than I’m making it seem. But it really doesn’t seem all that complicated. It would just mean a changing of the social graph once again. It would be messy at first. It would mean backlash. But ultimately, I think it would truly make Facebook the center of social sharing.

Until then, all these other networks are going to stick around and continue to grow. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I like the idea of Facebook taking it to the next level. I like the prospect of a network with over 500 million users being open to the concept of following. We would all gain a lot of new followers and also find a lot of new followers. More importantly, we would all gain and share a lot more information.

It would be a better-designed Google Buzz with 500 million users built-in. It would be a richer Twitter with five times the users. It would be a preemptive Google Me-killer. It would be great.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Facebook Follow: The Twitter-Eater, The Preemptive Google Me-Killer

Recommendation site Hunch has been going through a reboot lately. Back in June, it stopped showing results to people who are not signed in, and earlier this month it redesigned its home page to offer personalized taste recommendations across a wide variety of categories such as dog breeds, U.S. national parks, camcorders, soft drinks, luggage, and film directors.

Now it is testing out local recommendations on a map with a sidebar showing restaurants, nightlife, hotels, spas, clothing stores, and more. Hunch local tries to figure out which spots your friends on different services might like (you can sign in with your Twitter or Facebook account) and offers them up at the top of its local search results. Each spot has a corresponding pin on the map. You can filter by different types of venues, and there is also a slider which lets you select more personalized “unique” results or more “popular” ones.

The restaurant recommendations it gave me are pretty decent for an early alpha. In New York City, it suggested Katz’s Delicatessen (a classic), Artichoke Pizza (trendy), Momofuku Noodle Bar (if only I could get in), and Hundred Acres (my wife went there last night! no joke). Each spot contains links back to profiles on Foursquare, Yelp, Hunch, or other places, just like a local search engine.

“It starts out looking at what your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare friends like, and then gets smarter over time as people give feedback,” says Hunch founder Chris Dixon. He notes that the feature just launched in alpha and is far from fully baked. His plan is to partner with Foursquare, Yelp and others to get their direct data feed of all of their places, which should improve the data.

Hunch took a hit when it started requiring that all visitors sign in. According to comScore, the site went from about 750,000 unique visitors in May, to 250,000 in June, but it already started rebounding in July to 350,000. These numbers undercount Hunch’s actual visitors by at least half, but the trend is right. By focusing on its core “taste graph” and giving people actionable recommendations every time they log in, Hunch is making the right moves to get back on track. Before, Hunch was interesting, but vague. I wasn’t really sure why I needed to go there. Now there are more and more specific reasons, and Hunch Local is something I will definitely go back to try out when I need to find a new place for lunch.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Hunch Tries Local Recommendations

The countdown is officially on for the big Facebook location backlash. How long will it be? One week? Two weeks? We all know it’s coming, it’s just a matter of when. And that’s too bad because I think Places is actually pretty great — potentially.

The ACLU wasted little time yesterday trying to start such a backlash (their post on the matter came what, a whole 30 seconds after the press conference ended?). Evelyn already did a nice job deconstructing many of their arguments and showing why a few were ridiculous. All I can add is to say that thank god the ACLU doesn’t design consumer apps — it would be like Facebook’s current nightmare of settings multiplied by a billion. We’d have settings for individual minutes in individual days for when individual users could see individual profiles. It would be the the least social social network ever.

Today, the EFF followed up the ACLU’s post by citing things like pleaserobme.com as an illustration of how sensitive location information can be. Not cited is the fact that most people have jobs which they are at from 9 to 5 everyday, so they’re not likely to be home then, leaving their houses susceptible to robbery.

My point is that plenty of people right now are out there on the hunt for a way to show that Facebook Places is the devil. It’s an easy angle. You take something that already a very sensitive topic: Facebook privacy — and combine it with another sensitive topic: location privacy. Boom. Match made in hell.

I thought Facebook’s presentation (and video) about Places yesterday was great because it focused on the positive. The talk was about serendipitous meetups and friends nearby, not people being stalked or worse. It seems like Facebook fully understands that location has the potential to be the bridge between social networking and actually being social. I’m just surprised it has taken them this long to launch a product.

But clearly they wanted to be careful. And they’re still being careful. Places is about as bare-bones as a location service can be. It is just check-ins. And that’s undoubtedly why they’re paying homage to Foursquare in the Places logo. Without Foursquare, Places would not exist.

But after only one day of using Places I’m seeing the potential here. I’m seeing friends checking-in who I’ve never seen use Foursquare. I’ve seen some friends check-in who I’m fairly positive have no idea what Foursquare is. Earlier, I was in a park near my apartment and I checked-in and saw that 30-some other people that I wasn’t friends with were checked-in there as well.

To some people, that’s creepy (it has been a feature on Foursquare for a while and that’s basically what Loopt was for a while). But to me, I think that’s potentially really interesting for when it comes to meeting people. And the fact that so many had checked-in on day one of the service is impressive.

That’s the power of Facebook’s social graph. It’s a graph that none of the current location players can touch even if you added all of their users together and multiplied them by twenty. Facebook is going to bring location to the mainstream by virtue of their size alone.

But the flip side is that because Facebook has such a large social graph that’s already established, a lot of current users are going to feel this new layer as something being forced upon them. And again, creepy. Of course there’s the option not to use it, but I can certainly see how the friend tagging thing is troubling to a lot of people (particularly because of the somewhat confusing three states).

But it’s also potentially a great tool. Imagine if you’re with a group of friends and only one of you has to check everyone in. That’s the cure for check-in fatigue right there. And when you think about it, this functionality isn’t much different than the tweets we’ve all sent that state something like “at the park with @____ @_____ @_____ and @_______”.

But the real key of Facebook Places is as a platform. Though it is still in the process of being turned on, it’s going to be great to be able to load up one app and see where people from Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, etc have all checked-in. And even better will be when you can check-in on Facebook Places and push it out to these services (so far, only Gowalla has committed to working on this as far as I know).

These services are all going to have to focus on building great utilities on top of this platform because the check-in will finally be completely commoditized. And that’s a good thing. I hope the Places API becomes the Facebook Connect for check-ins so the real innovation can begin. We need to remove the “ugh, another service I have to check-in to” factor.

That’s undoubtedly what Facebook is hoping for too. It’s a potential new branch of the Platform.

While location obviously has risks associated with it, it’s the upside that has all of these startups and now bigger players interested in the space. It’s easy to forget about this upside and instead worry about how everyone is going to be stalking one another. You know, the same things people used to say about the Internet itself back in the day.

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Stalkers. Creeps. Weirdos. Terror. Welcome To Location, Facebook

Here’s some infographic perspective on the eve of Facebook’s copycat Facebook Placeslaunch, which has some ringing the death knell for location based startups Foursquare and Gowalla.

A stroll through the Google graveyard is a lesson in how rarely it works out when already successful companies stop focusing on their core competency to go after the little guys. Between Wave, Jaiku, and Foursquare precursor Dodgeball, Google’s a repeat offender in the “failing to kill the next big thing” department.

With the launch of today’s check-in utility, it seems like the Facebook product team might be following in the search giant’s startup-crushing footsteps. After all, when was the last time you asked a Facebook Question?.

Image: Wordstream

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

There’s No Success Like Failure: Google’s Biggest Product Flops

comScore has released its July video metrix stats today, with the number of U.S. users watching online video content rising slightly to 178 million viewers compared to 177 million total viewers in June. In July, each viewer watched an an average of 14.7 hours of online video. And 84.9 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.

Unsurprisingly, Google Sites, whose viewership is driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube ranked as the top online video content property with 143.2 million unique viewers (compared to 144.5 million in June, followed by Yahoo Sites with 55.1 million viewers (compared to 44.9 million viewers in June). But the real news in the release is in Facebook’s growth as a video destination. Facebook.com jumped one position to capture the third spot with 46.6 million viewers, compared to 43 million viewers in June.

Google Sites had the highest number of overall viewing sessions with 1.9 billion and average time spent per viewer at 283 minutes, or 4.7 hours. Hulu also had high viewer engagement with an average of 158 minutes (or 2.6 hours) per viewer.

comScore also reported video ad metrics, a feature the company launched last month. Americans viewed nearly 3.6 billion video ads in July, with Hulu generating the highest number of video ad impressions at 783 million. Tremor Media Video Network ranked second overall (and highest among video ad networks) with 452 million ad views, followed by BrightRoll Video Network (248 million) and Microsoft Sites (232 million).

Google sites came in behind Microsoft with 219 million impressions but it’s important to note that this metric does not include banner ads, and other types of advertising used on YouTube. Video ads reached 27 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 44.5 times during the month.

The top video ad networks in terms of their potential reach of the total U.S. population were: ScanScout Network at 40.5 percent, BrightRoll Video Network at 39.4 percent, and Break Media Network at 38.7 percent. Video ads accounted for 9.8 percent of all videos viewed.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

comScore: Facebook Now The Third Largest Video Site In The U.S.

The “Girl quits her job on dry erase board, emails entire office (33 Photos)” is indeed a hoax, say its creators John and Leo Resig.

I’d love to pull out some well-worn meta-media analysis about how memes are increasingly where we get our culture and we need to be more circumspect when filtering information yada yada, but I’ll leave that to my betters. Elyse Porterfield or “Jenny,” who went straight from our inboxes to the “1,000,000 Strong for Jenny DryErase to Pose in Playboy” Facebook page, should speak for herself.

New to Los Angeles from Greeley, Colorado, 22-year-old aspiring actress Elyse Porterfield responded to the following ad in Actors Access last Thursday.

The photo shoot, which happened that Friday, was for an image board site called The Chive. The Chive (which gets around 5.6 million unique visits a month, according to Google) is part of a network of viral sites run by brothers Leo and John Resig, who have a storied history of manufacturing Internet hoaxes, most notably the $10,000 Donald Trump tip and the infamous “virgin text messages her dad that she lost her virginity.” Both hoaxes ended up punking various mainstream media outlets including Fox News, Gawker and Jay Leno.

Porterfield told TechCrunch, “When I went into the audition, I didn’t know what it was for — but thought that this couldn’t be too bawdy or promiscuous or else they wouldn’t have me holding a dry erase board. “ The actress’ prior claims to fame include being compared to Angelina Jolie in People Magazine and performing in her college theater troupe. She had not heard of the acronym HOPA beforehand.

The brothers Resig came up with the idea for “Dry Erase Girl” about a month ago at the Kingshead Bar in Venice, CA, and wrote down the details on paper napkins, including the etymology of HOPA (see below). Says John Resig, “We came up with a hoax that was completely relatable. It wasn’t spread by TechCrunch and Reddit. It was spread by Facebook and inter-office email, everyone wants to quit their jobs like this.”

All they had to do was post the images of Porterfield holding the dry erase board on The Chive at around 4:30 am this morning, and College Humor reposted, followed shortly by TechCrunch (Resig says they targeted us because his publicist said that they should try for a TechCrunch write-up. Nice work guys.)  and CBS. When asked if this was done purely to garner traffic get media attention, Resig responded,

“We didn’t do this for the media. I’d did it almost to prove to myself that I had it in me, To make something go viral at 4:30 in the morning before the world wakes up. You get a pure thrill of watching your site go from 15,000 uniques to 440,000 uniques in a single hour, watching yourself sucker every site from a-z who didn’t do their backstory.”

And later, “It struck a personal chord. And people wanted to share it.” To the tune of 238k facebook shares and 31k tweets. Based on what was essentially a lie. The brothers told a skeptical Peter Kafka that Jenny was “real,” they told us that people “want to believe.”

From Resig:

“People, particularly journalists, underestimate America’s appetite for a good story. This story wasn’t primarily done to see how many people in the mainstream media we could hoodwink (though that was fun), it wasn’t done for the publicity, money, nor was it a slapdash reaction to some JetBlue clown; it was done purely for the entertainment of the people first and foremost. The purpose of the hoax was to entertain and inspire, not to inform, so what difference does it make if the story has a single ounce of truth? After our second hoax I remember a reporter telling me, ‘well it looks like you’ve fooled us twice. Won’t get away with this nonsense again.”

Resig still has another media announcement planned for 10 a.m. PDT tomorrow. And he is not sad that the meme is essentially dying with this post, “A hoax has two lives, the initial hoax and the story of how it happened. Even though this is a hoax, people want to see a walking talking Jenny, the people want Jenny.”

In either case, Porterfield, who spent all day reading the comments and having a blast, is still in awe, “A million Facebook friends, I’m going to wake up to a million Facebook friends.”

“I Want to Make a Meme” Photo: Buzzfeed

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Confirmed: HOPA Dry Erase Girl Is A Hoax, Identity Revealed

Facebook‘s biggest advertisers are increasingly spending more on the site, while ad prices have held their ground, which means its revenue may rise to $1.4 billion or more in 2010. That’s one major take-away from this Bloomberg article, based on an interview with chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

More interestingly, in my humble opinion, Facebook reportedly plans to make more and potentially bigger acquisitions in the near future, and is in the midst of recruiting another dealmaker to get them closed.

Vaughan Smith, the company’s director of corporate development (previous jobs involved dealmaking for the likes of eBay and Move Networks), told Bloomberg reporter Brian Womack:

“As we get bigger and our platform gets more stable, I fully expect that we will be doing more significant acquisitions. This is working for us, and it’s working for the people that we’re acquiring.”

He also said Facebook tends to purchase small-sized startup, typically with a dozen or fewer employees, to bring in entrepreneurs at heart who can grow into future leaders within the company. This rings true; Facebook’s recently appointed CTO is Bret Taylor, who joined Facebook thanks to its $50 million acquisition of FriendFeed a year ago.

Smith also told Bloomberg the company intends to keep up its acquisition pace (it recently coughed up $10 million for the purchase of Hot Potato and moved to acquire travel recommendation service Nextstop and, earlier, Octazen, ShareGrove and Divvyshot – this year alone.)

Smith said he plans to hire another corporate development executive, adding to the one person helping him secure deals presently.

The team will be mostly looking at companies focused on virtual currencies and mobile social networking, and startups that can help ramp up advertising revenues from its 500+ million users on its way to an eventual initial public offering.

And to bring more guns to the upcoming war with Google, of course.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Facebook Hiring Up For More, Potentially Larger Acquisitions

By now, I’m sure you’ll be aware that there’s a New York man named Paul Ceglia who claims he owns most of Facebook, which would turn him into an instant multi-billionaire if we were living in his Utopia and not planet Earth.

The wood-pellet entrepreneur filed suit against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last June, claiming 84% ownership of Facebook as well as additional monetary damages based on a web development project contract signed back in April 2003. The company calls the lawsuit ‘frivolous’ and without any merit whatsoever, so that story is to be continued in court.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg tracked down Ceglia for a fascinating face-to-face interview.

In said interview, the man says a number of interesting things, including:

- his arrest and a suit by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo two months later, both the result of complaints related to his wood-pellet business, got him looking through old files to find assets to pay back customers. One of those files held the 2003 contract with Zuckerberg.

- he had forgotten about the contract, which is why he stepped forward so many years later.

- now that he found it, he says he’s “willing to come after” the Facebook CEO, and that “a deal’s a deal”.

- there is more evidence to his agreement with Zuckerberg than the contract, including year-long email conversations.

- Ceglia remembers the 18-year-old Zuckerberg as a great coder but “probably one of the most difficult people that ever worked for me, in the sense that he simply could not finish his work.” Celgia adds: “He just could not keep a deadline.”

- Ceglia said he looks forward to a day when he might employ Zuckerberg again. He is quoted thusly: “If at some point in the future I start running Facebook, I guess I’m going to have to hire him to keep running the company. I really don’t have much interest in it.”

- About a month after filing the lawsuit, Ceglia signed up for a Facebook account. He likes it as it gave him a chance to get back in touch with old friends from high school.

A riveting read.

On top of all this, it turns out there’s a new contestant for ‘owner of Facebook’ in town.

Bloomberg also talked to Andrew Logan, founder and CEO of StreetDelivery, which Ceglia did work for when he set up a competitor called StreetFax in 2003 and hired Zuckerberg to do some coding work on the company’s website.

Logan says that if Ceglia’s contract with Zuckerberg gives the latter an ownership interest in Facebook, that interest may in fact belong to him. His lawyers are said to be looking at the old contracts and settlement papers with Ceglia.

“We’re going to lay claim that I own it,” said Logan. “He was under contract to me.”

Who’s next in line?

Some day, someone should do a Hollywood movie on the origins of Facebook. Oh, wait.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Man Who Claims Ownership Over Facebook Willing To Hire Zuckerberg To…

China may overtake Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy this year. On its heels is India, and countries such as Brazil and Russia are not far behind. What does this mean for entrepreneurs? That, increasingly, the big opportunities lie outside the U.S.  Most people aren’t aware of another advantage in emerging markets: you can freely leverage the wealth of proven intellectual property that has already been created in developed economies. Most countries outside the U.S. and Europe lie in a Patent-Free Zone—where companies have not filed patents because they believe there is no market for their goods. So this intellectual property is available to anyone in those nations who can find a use for it.

Take the iPhone as an example: it has over 1000 patents; yet Apple does not apply for patent protection in countries like Peru, Ghana, or Ecuador, or, for that matter, in most of the developing world. So entrepreneurs could use these patent filings to gain information to make an iPhone-like device that solves the unique problems of these countries. Apple has so far received 3287 U.S.-issued patents and has 1767 applications pending: a total of 5054 (for all of its products). Yet it has filed for only about 300 patents in China and has been issued 19. In India, it has filed only 38 patent applications and has received four patents. In Mexico it has filed for 109 and received 59 patents. So even India, China, and Mexico are wide-open fields.

Now consider diabetes technology.  At the end of 2009, there were more than 12,070 patents issued or pending in the U.S. In Jordan there were only 36, and none were filed in most of Africa. Big pharma considers these markets either too small or too poor; it also hasn’t produced affordable drugs for the millions of desperate people who are increasingly suffering from disease in Africa and the developing world.  But there is nothing stopping entrepreneurs from completing these tasks. The blueprints are readily available in the U.S. patent database.

JiNan Glasgow, a North Carolina–based patent attorney and CEO of NeoPatents, has been researching the global patent system and developing technologies to explore and map the patent databases. She found that only 5–10% of patents that are filed in the U.S. are actually used to provide commercial value. The rest go to waste.

Glasgow also found that most U.S. companies have been ignoring emerging markets and not filing any patents there. When she compared the geography of patent filings with the UN Human Development Index, she noted a strong correlation: the richer the country, the greater the number of patents. This means that the wealth of the developed world’s intellectual property is freely available for use in the emerging regions, where patents are not filed. Glasgow called this the Patent-Free Zone—which covers most of the world, except for the U.S. and Western Europe. BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) have only recently seen increases in patent filings—so all the patents filed in the U.S. over the past few decades are still within the free zone.

The way the patent system works is that when you have an idea that is new and unique and you want to protect it, you file a patent application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). If the USPTO determines that you are indeed the original inventor, it grants a patent, a temporary monopoly that stops others from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing your invention in the U.S. for 20 years. But this is only in the U.S. To restrict people in other countries, you need to file a patent in that country, and to do so within one year of receiving a U.S. patent. Most U.S. inventors don’t care, because they are focused on local markets.  But multinationals do usually file patents in every country where they expect to do business. It is legal for anyone in the countries where patents aren’t filed to use these ideas.  And this opens up big opportunities in those countries.

Take desalination, in which GE is one of the largest players. GE has spent more than $4.1 billion to acquire its part of the desalination business. Yet a decade after commencing, they’re still nowhere close to making desalination affordable and sustainable. GE’s progress depends on the patents it owns. As of 2009, GE invented 47 of the 832 U.S. patents in this field—just 5.6%, or a little more than one-twentieth. Consider the progress that GE could make if it could also use any of the patents that it doesn’t own—of which there are many.

How much better would the world be if we didn’t have to spend another ten years waiting for innovation in the desalination space? There are many areas of collaboration in the Patent-Free Zone that could produce innovative solutions for our world. Solar power, electric cars, mobile technologies for the poor, disease eradication, medical devices, food processing—to name a few. Wouldn’t it be ironic if poor countries ended up solving the problems of the rich? And I’ll ask my entrepreneur friends the same question I’ve asked before: What’s Better: Saving the World or Building Another Facebook app?

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

Images: Women Barefoot Solar Engineers of Africa by Barefoot Photographers of Tilonia, Jerry Stifelman, and United Nations Human Development Index

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Opportunities In The Patent-Free Zone

In January, we broke the news that prolific Silicon Valley angel investor Dave McClure was to set up its own venture capital fund.

Yesterday, the man filed for the fund with the SEC, providing us with more details (hat tip to FormDs.com). The name will be 500 Startups – McClure has long called himself the master of 500 hats – and the initial fund will amount to max. $30 million according to the filing.

McClure has turned to 99 Designs to come up with a logo for the fund (my favorite so far).

Here’s part of the brief for the logo design:

500 Startups is a new, edgy, risk taking seed fund which invests in early stage consumer internet companies.

Incubator/seed investment funds are popping up left and right and we’re looking to differentiate ourself through edgier design. Our founder likes to swear. In public. A lot. Think Ari Gold, but for tech companies and without a suit.

We are not — *not* — your typical fund composed of a bunch of stiff white guys sitting around a board table. We’re young. We’re diverse (Women! People of color!). Our investments are blustering balls of sleepless eagerness, And the markets we’re looking to dominate are murky and emergent.

Our values:

- “Fun at All Costs”… authentic, down-to-earth, *real*
- Creative, Smart, Innovative Environment
- Learn & Educate at Same Time
- Move Quickly, Take Risks, Make [Manageable] Mistakes

Sounds like McClure, alright.

For your reference: McClure has been investing in early stage startups for years.

He is a direct angel investor in a half dozen or more startups, including Mint, Simply Hired, Mashery, bit.ly, UserVoice, SlideShare, TeachStreet and others. And he has invested in dozens more through fbFund, a $10 million Facebook investment fund backed by Founders Fund and Accel, and FF Angel, a Founders Fund early stage fund.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Dave McClure Files For $30 Million Venture Fund: 500 Startups

Businesses both big and small are flocking to social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Foursquare. The fact is that a presence on these platforms not only allows companies to engage in conversations with consumers, but also serves as an outlet to drive sales through deals and coupons.

And while major brands like Starbucks, Virgin, and Levi’s have been participating in the social web for some time now, the rate of adoption among small businesses is increasing too. According to a recent University of Maryland study, social media adoption by small businesses has doubled from 12% to 24% in the last year. But as these businesses look to Facebook and Twitter to connect with customers, many are finding that some strategies work and some do not produce results. We’ll be exploring these questions at a panel on Social Media and Businesses at our Social Currency CrunchUp on July 30. We’ve found some local and national businesses using social media effectively, ranging from Levi’s to a creme brulee cart, whose case studies are below.  Some of these businesses will be sharing their experiences at the CrunchUp (You can buy tickets to the CrunchUp here).

The Creme Brulee Man: Food from street carts have become a foodie favorite for San Franciscans. Food carts travel from neighborhood to neighborhood, offering their delicacies to a range of local foodies. But without a set location, how do these carts let consumers know where they will be? Well, through Twitter of course. Curtis Kimball, the man behind the enormously popular Creme Brulee Cart in San Francisco, has quickly amassed over 12,000 followers in a little over a year. He knows that most of his business comes from people who follow him on Twitter because Twitter is the only way you can find the cart’s location for the day, says Kimball, a former construction worker turned creme brulee expert. “It gives people a valid reason to follow me,” he says.

The other use of Twitter for Kimball is to tell people what flavor of creme brulee he is serving in a given day. And Kimball says that Twitter gives him the ability to develop a personal relationship with his followers and others. He says he tries to engage his followers by asking for suggestions of what type of custard to serve or where he should park his cart, and he always tries to keep things humorous.

Kimball says he has no marketing budget and Twitter has been a great way to amass fans. He doesn’t have as much of a presence on Facebook, and he’s not sure the model is as efficient as Twitter. “Twitter can absorb more than Facebook with very little effort,” Kimball adds. Yelp has also been a valuable source of referrals for the entrepreneur. The cart has 224 reviews and is rated with 4 and a half stars.

Joie De Vivre: Joie De Vivre, a company that operates 33 luxury hotels in California is using a variety of social media platforms to drive sales and marketing for its properties. Central to the hotel group’s strategy is disseminating deals and coupons to followers and fans on Facebook and Twitter. Every Tuesday, Joie De Vivre’s Twitter account will Tweet an exclusive deal to its nearly 10,000 followers. Followers have only hours to book the steeply discounted room rate. For example, this past Tuesday, it offered $79 rooms at the group’s Galleria Park Hotel in San Francisco in November and December. The company also operates similar deals for its 5,000-plus Facebook fans on Fridays.

In less than a year, Joie De Vivre has booked over 1,000 room nights through these types of deals—rooms that otherwise would have stayed empty.  The company has also started a partnership with coupons site Mobile Spinach to offer coupons for the group’s restaurants. And the company has partnered with Foursquare to offer deals for check-ins at its various restaurants. In terms of flash sales, Joir De Vivre has done a number of deals with travel sites like Gilt’s Jetsetter as well as RueLaLa, and Nadeau says these deals have done moderately well.

The company’s marketing VP Ann Nadeau tells me that because of the economy the hotel industry’s marketing budgets have shrunk, and social media efforts have proved to be a great way to both drive sales and build loyalty. The company’s social media efforts are not solely deal based. This summer, Joie De Vivre encouraged consumers to enter its Road Trippin’ California contest, which asked people to submit videos on YouTube that share why they love California. Three winners, out of 270 videos that were submitted, were selected to win all-expense California road trips with stays in the company’s hotels.

In terms of using social media for customer service, Nadeau says that each property hotel manager is responsible for monitoring conversations and reviews on Twitter, Facebook, and Yelp.

Stone Korean Kitchen: Co-founded last November by chef Terry Lin, and LinkedIn employees Robby Kwok and Dan Yoo, Stone Korean Kitchen aims to bring modern Korean cuisine to the Financial District in San Francisco. Yoo tells me that as soon as the restaurant launched, he started a presence on social media sites, including Twitter, Yelp, and Facebook. But the challenge of many small businesses with social media is driving traffic to the right social media channel rather than splitting it between various sites. Yoo says that interconnecting content between the various profiles has helped gain Twitter followers and Facebook fans. Currently the restaurant’s Twitter profile has 65 followers and its Facebook page has 107 fans.  Many of these are repeat customers.  For a small restaurant, it doesn’t take that many loyal customers to keep the kitchen busy.

Yoo says that he consistently Tweets links to comments and reviews on the Facebook page. Of course, Yoo also stresses the importance of managing Yelp reviews and responding to customer complaints on social media platforms.

But what really tipped the scales for Yoo was Groupon (disclosure: my husband works for Groupon).  Yoo says that restaurant saw significant traction in both sales and traffic to its Yelp sites and Facebook page when the restaurant signed up for a Groupon deal in April. Stone Korean Kitchen sold 2600 groupons in one day, and saw a packed house for two months for both lunch and dinner. Now Yoo says that they see around 5 to 10 Groupons per day instead of 30 or 40 but the restaurant is still seeing a good number of repeat customers from the Groupon deal, says Yoo.

One effect of the Groupon deal, besides increased sales, was that there were a flux of Yelp reviews. It took the company six months to accumulate 80 reviews on Yelp and after the deal, the restaurant accumulated 90 reviews within three months. Yoo also says that he’s seen a steady increase in Foursquare check-ins following the Groupon deal.

Of course, since Yoo and Kwok are both LinkedIn employees (chef Lin manages the restaurant on a day-to-day basis), they put their heads together to figure out how they could use the professional social network to drive sales. With the ad targeting capabilities on LinkedIn, the restaurant started serving ads that target lawyers and bankers in the San Francisco area, as both industries are centralized in the financial district. They’ve noticed an increase in foot traffic and corporate catering requests as a result.  In the future, Yoo says that the restaurant is working on a promotion with Foursquare. And he is in talks with Twitter on featuring a deal on the social network’s new Earlybird venture.

Dr. Irena Vaksman, Dentist: Social media and dentistry don’t necessarily go hand in hand, but one San Franciscan dentist has forged an impressive social media campaign to raise awareness of her fledgling practice. She has a Twitter profile, a Facebook page, a YouTube channel and an website. Dr. Vaksman’s husband, lawyer Robert Vaksman, has been the strategist behind her social media efforts. Robert says that his wife is confronted with the challenge of practicing in a building that houses hundreds of other dentists that have more established practices. He says that it’s a no brainer to be looking at as many social channels as possible for marketing efforts.

While the practice is still young, the Vaksmans say that they are starting to see patients and potential patients begin to communicate with them on the Facebook page, which has 70 fans. Vaksman will publish her Yelp reviews from patients on the site as well as YouTube videos containing educational content about dental procedures. Twitter is still a fairly new forum for the practice says Robert, and he’s still trying to determine the best way to engage with potential customers on the network.

Last October, Dr. Vaksman signed up for a Groupon deal in San Francisco, and received 320 new patients because of the deal, which was for a patient exam and x-ray. The Vaksmans say that the deal propelled the five month old business in the right direction and boosted its patient base significantly. Robert is also looking into partnering with Facebook campaign startup Wildfire to set up a promotional sweepstakes for the practice’s Facebook page.

Levi’s: Now more than ever, retail brands are engaging consumers on social networks to offer deals, allow users to socialize around purchases, and more. Levi’s Jeans was one of the brands that was first to use Facebook as a tool for sales and marketing initiatives and has launched a number of compelling campaigns using Facebook.

As one of Facebook’s initial partners using the social network’s new Like functionality, Levi’s allows Facebook users to like products on Levi’s online store and its Facebook page (which has nearly 500,000 likes) and share their favorite items with their friends. Within the first week, Levi’s got more than 4,000 likes, says Inside Facebook.

The jeans giant also promoted a major campaign in conjunction with SXSW this year, partnering with music publication The Fader to promote a music event at the festival. The company worked with brand marketing platform Involver to incorporate music and video into their page, with the hopes of driving music fans to buy jeans from the Levi’s brand. Most recently, Levi’s has begun to promote retail offerings with geo-targeted event advertisements on Facebook.

In terms of Twitter, Levi’s recently enlisted a “Levi’s Guy,” 23-year-old USC graduate Gareth, to engage consumers on the microblogging platform. He has over 6,000 followers and is responsible for responding to and engaging in conversations about the Levi’s brand on Twitter. The company is currently in the process of trying to find a Levi’s Girl, which will serve as a female foil to Gareth.

Levi’s director of digital marketing, Megan O’Connor, told us that the engagement with both Twitter and Facebook is about creating and informing brand ambassadors that will help drive sales through their own actions and word of mouth.

Starbucks: Most experts will agree that Starbucks has one of the best social media strategies out there.  Now that it is giving away free WiFi, it is even more of a magnet for roving laptop warriors.  And with 10 million Facebook fans, Starbucks is now close to surpassing the Facebook fan base of Lady Gaga. The company has held a number of promotions on its page to drive engagement. For example, Starbucks held a promotion for free pastries on its Facebook page, allowing customers to access a coupon that would give them a free pastry with a purchase of a coffee drink. Advertising on the social network has also helped to drive traffic to Starbucks’ page.

In terms of Twitter, Starbucks has also been incredibly active on the microblogging network, amassing nearly one million followers. Not only does the company’s Twitter stream serve as an engagement tool with customers who are talking about the brand on Twitter, but it is also used as a way to spread news from Starbucks. Starbucks has also participated in Twitter’s promoted Tweets program, which allows advertisers to buy sponsored links on Twitter.

The combination of geolocation and social networks is also a huge avenue for Starbucks and the company was one of the first major brands to broker a deal with popular location-based social network Foursquare. In March, Starbucks started offering Foursquare mayors of retail stores special ‘Barista’ badges that would come with discounts on drinks and food. Starbucks also partnered recently with mobile social network Brightkite to give members special discounts on drinks.

Photo Credit/Flickr/Snickclunck

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

How Social Media Drives New Business: Six Case Studies

We’re hearing that Facebook and Malaysian payments company MOL Global will be holding a press conference shortly to announce a significant new partnership around gaming and payments in Asia. MOL, you may recall, was in the news when it acquired Friendster earlier this year.

The press conference is being held in Kuala Lumpur and will begin shortly, we’re told. More details to come…

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Breaking: Facebook To Enter Into Partnership With Friendster Buyer MOL…

One of the greatest things about the Firefox browser is that any developer can expand its features and capabilities with a simple add-on. There are add-ons for everything—Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Digg, feed readers, price comparison, photos, music, and more. Today, every browser supports plug-ins and extensions.

Yesterday, cumulative add-on downloads passed the 2 billion mark. It passed the first billion downloads back in November, 2008. The first billion took three and a half years. The second billion took about 20 months. Many of those are never used again, but a full 150 million add-ons are used every single day at least once.

To celebrate the milestone, Mozilla has put together a collection of the 25 best add-ons. They include StumbleUpon, Glue, Cooliris, Xmarks, Kidzui, Firebug, GreaseMonkey, Adblock Plus, and Destroy the Web (it turns any Web page into a video game). Inexplicably, the list is missing Feedly, the best feed reader of all time.

What else should be on that list?

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Firefox Crosses 2 Billion Add-On Downloads

One thing Silicon Valley doesn’t have enough of are solid product visionaries. The problem is the really good ones tend of start their own companies. Or whoever they work for locks them up so tight that no one can pry them loose. But there’s one guy I’ve kept my eye on for the last few years, Eckart Walther, who seems to be in play. I wonder for how long.

I first met Eckart when he was at Yahoo as a group vice president of product management for search – that was back in the day when Yahoo was still the no. 2 search engine behind Google and had no plans to relinquish that title. Prior to Yahoo he was at Tellme (acquired by Microsoft). And way back in the day, at Netscape. Most recently he parked himself at LiveOps doing God-knows-what.

He’s left LiveOps and has quietly taken a position at Accel Partners as an entrepreneur in residence. That means he’s being paid to sit around and think a lot, and occasionally join a meeting or two. I randomly saw this on his Facebook feed this evening and haven’t had a chance to talk to him about his plans. But he’s likely to either be starting a new company or looking for his next job at a startup.

Keep an eye on whatever he does next, it’s likely to be something worth watching. Follow him on Twitter at @eckartwalther.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Product Guru Eckart Walther Goes Free Agent As EIR At Accel Partners

I’ve read David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect twice now. I’ve also interviewed him about the book twice on stage – once at TechCrunch Disrupt and a second time this evening at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

On a side note, as far as I know Kirkpatrick’s publisher Simon & Schuster is still planning on suing us for copyright infringement. I never heard back from them after their initial legal volley. I’m not holding that against Kirkpatrick, though – he’s a long time friend.

So I’ve spent a lot of time with this book. And I’ve spent a lot of time covering Facebook over the last five years, since my first post in 2005 when the company told us that 85% of college students at covered schools were logging into the site at least once a week.

About two years ago Kirkpatrick decided to write a book about Facebook. At the time the site was growing extremely quickly but it certainly wasn’t clear that it would become the 800 lb cultural gorilla that it is today. But he walked away from his position as one of the most senior tech writers at Fortune to pursue this book. And the end result is a fascinating read.

Here’s my recommendation: If you are interested in startups, or how marketing and advertising are evolving, or just how Facebook is changing the world, buy this book. It’s very readable and gives great insights into how Facebook grew from a dorm room to a huge company. There’s no other book out there that gives such a complete history of the company and of Mark Zuckerberg.

But if you’re looking for an objective and true history of Facebook, this isn’t it. Kirkpatrick really, really loves Facebook. So much so that I’m not sure he’s even close to capable of being objective about the company. He’s Bella staring at Edward, the vampire, with those puppy dog eyes full of deep, meaningful, painful adoration. Edward/Facebook is awesomeness in a bottle.

The result is a book that not only celebrates Facebook’s truly amazing accomplishments, but it’s also a book that makes excuses for, or denies, Facebook’s stumbles along the way. And that’s fine. But it isn’t really the truth. And what we need, eventually, is a book that tells the absolute, brutal truth about Facebook.

Facebook isn’t just a social network or a potentially huge business, says Kirkpatrick. It might also bring world peace. In the prologue he ponders: “Could [Facebook] become a factor in helping bring together a world filled with political and religious strife and in the midst of environmental and economic breakdown?” he adds later: “[Facebook] is altering the character of political activism, and in some countries it is starting to affect the process of democracy itself.”

Oh boy.

I mean, historically speaking all this may certainly end up being true, and more. But it just seems a little early to be talking about Facebook in these terms. In our conversation this evening Kirkpatrick also compared Zuckerberg to Bill Gates, noting how both have a strong desire to mold the world to their vision. That may also eventually be true, but we need to let a little time go by before we put Zuckerberg in the same category as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

I’d forgive Kirkpatrick’s love affair with the company if he was a little more circumspect and careful with the historical facts. The two famous lawsuits that fell out of Facebook’s early days – ConnectU and houseSYSTEM – were characterized more as nuisance lawsuits than real questions about the integrity of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

We don’t need Kirkpatrick to shy away from the ugly details about the early days of Facebook. Sausage making is never pretty. But he gives such a one-sided view of the story that it leaves me wondering what details are being left out.

And plenty of details are left out, apparently. Kirkpatrick says he never actually spoke with the Aaron Greenspan, or the Winkelvoss brothers, or any of the other people who sued Facebook and Zuckerberg. Instead Kirkpatrick relied on the legal documents filed in those cases for their side of the story. That’s just not a good way to get to the truth.

“Zuckerberg clearly stole from the Winkelvoss brothers,” Kirkpatrick said this evening, “but the Winkelvoss brothers clearly stole from everybody else.”

That’s a great conclusion, but Kirkpatrick should have interviewed all of those people, and told the story from their perspective as well as Facebook’s. I think most readers are intelligent enough to look at both sides of the story and draw the right conclusions. Perhaps even the same conclusions that Kirkpatrick came to without even interviewing the people involved.

They say that history is written by the victors. In the end The Facebook Effect reads more like an authorized biography than anything else. It’s the story of Facebook as Facebook wants the story told. It is a wonderful, if flawed, story about the creation of a company that half a billion people interact with regularly. I highly recommend you read it, and then wait for the book that will tell the whole story.

You can buy The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World at Amazon here.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Review: Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect Is A Wonderfully Biased…

There was a time when Facebook was at the forefront of mobile app development. Before there was even an App Store, the web app Facebook put out that was optimized for the iPhone was brilliant. Then the App Store came and with it was a great Facebook native app. Then came version 3 of the app, which was even better. Those days, sadly, are long over.

Everyone already knows that the Facebook Android app sucks. The iPhone app, though, thanks largely to version 3, has remained a bright spot. But while some people are gushing today over the latest iPhone update (3.1.3, the first update in a while), I’m not one of those people.

First of all, Facebook still has yet to release a native iPad app. This is pretty ridiculous considering that undoubtedly a high percentage of the millions of iPad owners have searched the App Store for a Facebook app, and come away with only imitations (which Facebook has demanded be taken down). As I noted above, the original Facebook app for iPhone launched alongside the App Store itself. We’re now almost 3 months post-iPad launch, and there is absolutely no word about when we can expect an iPad app.

Second, while many of the best iPhone app developers have been hustling to get their apps iOS 4-ready (the new iPhone OS launching on Monday), and plenty already have iOS 4 apps in the App Store, this update brings nothing in that department from Facebook. They couldn’t even bother to turn on fast app switching (the most basic iOS 4 multitasking feature) if they were going to update their app anyway?

Third, this update has at least one glaring UI bug. Sure, bugs are a part of the game, but how Facebook overlooked this one is dumbfounding. If you have new messages or friend requests on Facebook, load up the main screen in the app. There you’ll find certain areas badged to let you know there are updates for you to see — but these badges have a dark upper area that clashes badly with the light background of the main screen. I mean, it just looks awful. How did that get through quality control?

Meanwhile, as I said, plenty of folks are gushing over the things Facebook did add with this update. The ability (finally) to be able to see and write on event walls is definitely nice. But the big addition is the ability to view videos in the app. The only problem? It’s really hard to actually find any videos to view. While Facebook has an area on everyone’s profile for pictures, videos are nowhere to be found. You’d think if they were going to do a video-centric update to the app, they’d make a new area for these videos to highlight the feature they added — but no.

So you’ll forgive me if I let out a big sigh upon seeing this Facebook update. Ever since developer Joe Hewitt walked away from the project (over his disgust for some App Store policies) last November, things have gone downhill. And that trend, sadly, continues — even though Facebook promised it wouldn’t. Small updates may be fine or even welcomed by other companies — but Facebook used to lead the way in iPhone development. Now they’re second-rate.

There are some 55 million monthly active users of Facebook for iPhone, according to Inside Facebook. They deserve more commitment to this platform (as do the Facebook Android users).

Find the updated iPhone app here.

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Facebook For iPhone Updated: No iOS 4 Support, No iPad Support, Broken…

Now more than ever, fundraising for charities, campaigns and causes is taking place online. A variety of startups offer simple ways to power fundraising campaigns online, including GoFundMe and Facebook app Causes. Nadanu is another contender in this space, with its Push-K giving solution, offering non-profits a way to power fundraising on the web and mobile devices as well as social networking sites.

Nadanu’s Push-K platform allows register and “drop coins” into a custom receptacle. It is modeled after a traditional charity coin box, and donors can click to drop virtual coins into their eCharityBox and watch it fill up. Once the box reaches a predestinated amount the box is emptied, their credit card charged and an automated tax receipt is sent via email. Payment options include Authorize.net and PayPal.

The interface is sleek and easy to users. On the backend, Push-K allows organizations to deliver content such as video and audio and also serve text messages to users.

Launched a few months ago, Nadanu is already powering e-giving for over 400 charities. Nadanu also has mobile offerings available for the iPhone, iPad, Android and more. And the company has a web offering and Facebook app.

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Nadanu’s Fundraising Platform Streamlines E-Giving

With regard to his recent spat with Facebook we don’t exactly see eye-to-eye with Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis. But this morning, we did when an incident showed just how hard it is to delete your Facebook profile. But after reading that post, someone brought up a very good point. You know where else it’s hard to delete your account? Mahalo.

Seriously, try to figure it out. You won’t be able to because apparently there is no option to do it on the site itself. In fact, according to these two pages you have to email someone at Mahalo to do it. At least Facebook has a (albeit hidden) button!

You know what else you apparently can’t do from Mahalo? Get your data out. This is another thing Calacanis has been bitching about nonstop for the past several weeks. Though it’s undoubtedly much more complicated than he makes it out to be on Facebook, it shouldn’t be nearly as hard to get your social data out of Mahalo. And yet, unless I’m missing it, there is no big export button (which he has called for Facebook to create) there either.

While we’re on the subject, what’s with all the Facebook integration on Mahalo? There’s a giant Facebook Connect login at the top of every page — and each page features one-button sharing to Facebook. If Calacanis is so against it, shouldn’t he put his startup where his mouth is?

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You Know Where Else It’s Hard To Delete Your Account? Mahalo

You may recall Divya Narendra, who co-founded Facebook competitor ConnectU, was been embroiled in a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, and eventually settled the dispute (though according to reports this week, this may not be over). After graduating Harvard, Narendra worked as an associate at hedge fund Sowood Capital Management, where as an analyst he realized that the buy-side investment community was lacking a research-focused Wikipedia where users could share ideas and access data about hedge fund investments. Narendra teamed up with fellow Harvard alum and current hedge fund analyst Aalap Mahadevia, to fill this hole in the space. Enter SumZero, which is a community for buy-side investment professionals (which include hedge fund, private equity and mutual fund analysts) to share their research.

A buy-side analyst generally performs research and makes recommendations on how well an investment will perform and align with a fund’s strategy. Generally, these recommendations and analysis are not available to other funds or outsiders. Until now. Soft launched last year, the site has accumulated over 3,500 hedge fund, private equity, and mutual fund analysts as members, including analysts from some of the most prominent funds- SAC, Blackstone, and KKR.

A private network, SumZero allows analysts to apply to join the site, who are vetted to make sure they are legitimate professionals in the industry. Members can also invite other professionals in the industry. In order to access other buy-side investment professionals’ advice, analysts are required to submit ideas and research reports on the companies they are interested in buying or have bought stake in.

Similar to the LinkedIn model, each analyst has a profile that includes professional experience, educational information, and ideas submitted to the site. Currently, the network has accumulated over 2,000 detailed investment reports written by hedge fund, mutual fund, and private equity buyside professionals.

While these reports are private within the network, SumZero is making one investment recommendation per week from its community available to the public. While the hedge fund industry has been notoriously closed and secretive with its investments tactics, SumZero is opening this world up to any user. Anyone can sign up to receive a weekly recommendation made by these analysts. For example, last week’s recommendation was for China MediaExpress, an advertising company in China. The rec was a 1000-word, detailed report outlining why the company should perform well. Here’s an example of a SumZero report, which was published on Morningstar.

From the responses I’ve received from analysts and professionals using the site, it appears to be a hit in the buy-side investment community. SumZero member and investor Alan Axelrod finds the network as a valuable, daily resource for not only sharing investment ideas, but also to network and connect with other hedge fund and private equity analysts, sort of like a LinkedIn for the community. He also sees value in using the platform as a way to recruit other talent to his firm.

Investment professional Jay Kilroy uses the site to receive critical feedback on investment ideas he has, finding that fellow analysts are willing to point out any flaws in a strategy. “It’s a great resource for idea generation,” says Kilroy, “And the level of transparency raises credibility of the site.” He echoes Alan’s feelings that the site is one of the more addictive web resources he’s seen on the web for buy-side investment professionals.

In terms of competition, there’s the ValueInvestorsClub, which has a similar functionality. The main difference is that analysts can be anonymous and the site is much more exclusive with only 200 members. Narendra says that on the buy side, funds have never historically published their research, so the vast amount of high-quality research available on SumZero from hedge fund professionals is unprecedented in the community. Currently, Narendra says that the site is seeing five to ten investment ideas submitted per day.

While the site is still growing, the scale it has achieved in a community that has traditionally been very secretive about their analysis and research is impressive to say the least. Of course, Narendra and Mahadevia both have hedge fund backgrounds, which gives the site more legitimacy.

And there’s the question of a business model. Currently the team is evaluating what makes sense and declined to publicly state their strategy, but I can imagine there is a tremendous opportunity in terms of data availability.

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ConnectU Co-Founder Launches Professional Investment Community SumZero

A report in the Wall Street Journal this evening reveals that Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and a number of other popular social sites are passing along data that advertisers could potentially use to identify users who click their ads. The article is focused on Facebook in particular, which appears to have been passing along the most data of the aforementioned sites and has also been embroiled in a major privacy controversy.

The Journal article doesn’t get into too much technical detail, but it sounds like Facebook and the others are failing to scrub ‘referring’ URLs that are always passed along whenever a user clicks a link. This is actually normal behavior — typically when you click a link on a website, the site you’re being directed to will get to see where you came from. The issue is that these social sites include some identifying information as part of their URLs; when you visit a friend’s Facebook profile, the resulting URL might include both your friend’s username and your Facebook ID, which could be used to associate you with the ads you’re clicking on.

That said, the Journal reports that the ad companies it contacted had not used the data:

Several large advertising companies identified by the Journal as receiving the data, including Google Inc.’s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.’s Right Media, said they were unaware of the data being sent to them from the social-networking sites, and said they haven’t made use of it.

However, the article doesn’t say that all ad networks that placed ads on Facebook were ignoring the data. We’ve reached out to Facebook to ask if it’s possible that smaller networks could have leveraged it.

The WSJ article notes that the discovery was pointed out back in August by researchers from AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, but that the issue has persisted until this morning (Facebook and MySpace have now “rewritten some of the offending computer code”).

Update: The Twitter issue mentioned in the WSJ seems to be much less of an problem (it doesn’t even have ads yet).
Image via alancleaver

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WSJ: Facebook, MySpace & Others Share Identifying User Data With…

There are a number of group messaging applications that are catered towards business users, such as Yammer or Socialtext. Today, Micromobs is launching a web-based group messaging app aimed towards communication within social groups among friends and family.

On the site users can create and join groups or “mobs” and create a stream of messages uniquely relevant to each user. Users are able to post messages, photos and files and respond in stream to threads, keeping their conversations organized in an ongoing discussion. Users can also push their messages to Twitter and Facebook and make groups private.

Micromobs, which was incubated at the Founder Institute, is designed to fill the gap for a simple group application for the masses. that connects family, volunteer organizations, poker groups, sports teams etc. Micromobs also could be ideal for group communication when planning a next trip, or organizing an event. Ajay Kamat, founder of Micromobs, says that he sees his biggest competitor as email, which is the most common threaded communication for among families and friends. Of course, people use Facebook and other social networking applications for group communications, but the application is hoping Facebook Connect will entice users to be able to use the platform and publish to Facebook at the same time. The startup is also planning to launch mobile apps in the near future.

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Micromobs Launches A Yammer For Friends And Families

Last month, Facebook started experimenting with a new payment option for a select handful of game developers: it began supporting Offers as a way to earn its virtual currency, Facebook Credits. Now, the site is beginning to expand that test — this morning I noticed that clicking the ‘Get More Credits’ link at the top of Facebook’s application page showed me a new option: “Earn for free by shopping”. Selecting that displays 38 different offers through a partnership with offer provider TrialPay.

In other words, Facebook is no longer restricting its Offers experiment to just games. We’ve confirmed that Facebook is currently testing this broader implementation of Offers, though it is currently only being shown to some users.

Offers allow users to ‘earn’ virtual currency without paying for it directly — for example, you get a bonus of 220 Facebook Credits for signing up for Netflix, or 85 credits for signing up for the latest Groupon deal — and they’ve proven to be very popular among app developers.

But Offers have also been a touchy subject for Facebook. Facebook is only now entering the arena itself, but Offers have long been available through an array of third parties, some of whom were tempting users with scammy deals from less-than-reputable sources. The problem reached a head during our 20+ post series on Scamville. Since then Facebook has cracked down on the bad players and the big names have cleaned up their act.

There’s too much money on the table for Facebook to ban Offers entirely, which is why the company is working with TrialPay and Peanut Labs to only promote its own line of officially-sanctioned promotions, all of which are from trusted brands.

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Facebook Begins Testing ‘Offers’ Payment Option Beyond Games

In February AOL added the ability to message your Facebook friends on AIM, giving Facebook users a nice stand alone client to chat with their Facebook friends. Since then, more than 1 million people have used Facebook Connect on AIM to access that Facebook friends list, AOL tells me, and all of these were new installs of the AIM client.

That’s about 5% of the total 21 million monthly AIM users, according to Comscore. And those numbers should rise significantly – recently AOL also added the ability to sign into AIM directly with your Facebook credentials.

AOL is also having success with its Lifestream product that they released in March. That social networking aggregator is built into their iPad application, which is currently the second most popular social networking iPad app after Twitterific. Soon, says AOL, users will be able to sign into the AIM iPad app using their Facebook credentials, too.

We spoke with Brad Garlinghouse, the AOL executive who runs AIM and other community products, late last month about his vision for aggregating social content.

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Facebook On AIM Is A Hit: 1 Million Users

Today at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, a panel of top social gaming executives met to discuss the future of gaming on Facebook. The conversation touched on quite a few issues, including the evolution of social gaming mechanics, monetization, and whether or not the industry would be able to continue its incredible growth over the next few years. One bold prediction: Playdom CEO John Pleasants says that the reach of social games will double in the next 18 months.

The Panelists:
John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
Moderated by Eric Eldon

Pleasants’ prediction came after an audience member asked if the social gaming companies would be able to sustain the growth they saw through much of last year. Zynga COO Vish Makhijani acknowledged that Zynga had seen some slowdown last quarter, but said that signs pointed to that trend changing. And the general consensus seemed to be that there was still lots of room for growth on Facebook, particularly internationally. The group also noted that there were opportunities abroad on social networks other than Facebook.

Another question touched on multiplayer in social games — or, rather, the lack thereof. Look at most popular social games these days, and you’ll notice that most of the interaction between games happens asynchronously, which isn’t really ‘multiplayer’ in the traditional sense. Lolapps CEO Kavin Stewart says this is because there already is a market for synchronous gaming, with games like World of Warcraft and console games. Slide VP Keith Rabois echoed this sentiment, explaining that synchronous multiplayer games are generally time consuming, and that Slide’s research showed that most people use Facebook in quick, 5-10 minute sessions between classes or when their boss isn’t looking. Not everyone agreed that synchronous gaming was out of the picture though — Playdom’s John Pleasants said that we’d probably see synchronous gameplay as an extension of some asynchronous games (I think he’s right).

One audience member asked about the recent report that Zynga was worth $5 billion. Makhijani declined to comment on the report, but CrowdStar’s Peter Relan concluded that it wasn’t off base. His logic? Relan says that casual games can scale to 10x the audience of more ‘hardcore’ games like World of Warcraft, and perhaps even more than that. The revenue models are different for these games (WoW uses recurring subscriptions while social games favor virtual currencies and virtual goods) but he says this huge audience make the valuation reasonable.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the panel was what wasn’t said, at least not directly. During a question on monetization — namely, Facebook’s Credits — there was a lot of talk about how a unified credits system can help developers because it allows for one-click purchases across all games. But there was also a sense that the developers didn’t want Facebook’s currency to become the only option for developers. Slide’s Keith Rabois noted that Facebook Credits are good for paying users, but there are other channels (like Offers) that address a broader audience. In other words, he doesn’t want to be chained to Facebook Credits, at least not yet.

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t always matter what the developers want. When asked if Facebook listened to these game developers when it came to policy changes, most of the execs noted that while Facebook might solicit their input, when push comes to shove it does what it wants.

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Social Gaming Execs Discuss Growth, Monetization, And The Future Of…

Wibiya, a Israeli startup that develops customized web toolbars for websites, has raised $2 million in additional funding from Primera Capital. Previous investors in the company’s last two rounds include Yossi Vardi, Oded Vardi and Jeff Pulver.

Wibiya opened up its platform for creating customized web toolbars earlier this year. Wibiya’s toolbar for blogs and publishers integrates services, social media sites, applications and widgets, including Facebook, Twitter, Cooliris, and Tinychat.

Everything is customizable, giving publishers the ability to add Facebook Connect, enabling Twitter alerts, and more fairly easily. The toolbar has a fairly in-depth integration with Twitter, Search, latest tweets, Tweets about each page and more. Publishers can also bring their Facebook Fan Page stream to the toolbar. Interestingly, Wibiya has an “app store” of sorts, where publishers can customize their bars with a variety of apps, including Google Translate, YouTube, games and more.

Wibiya faces competition from Conduit, Meebo, MySpace, Yahoo, Digg and others.

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Wibiya Raises $2 Million For Customizable Web-Based Toolbars