On the heels of announcing a payments partnership with Facebook, PlaySpan is making another announcement regarding the startup’s UltimatePay payments product. PlaySpan is launching UltimatePay Mobile, a virtual currency and micropayments monetization widget for smartphone platforms. The initial private beta launch will support Android phones and Nokia phones with WebRuntime installed.

UltimatePay is a ‘Monetization as a Service’ platform for apps, games, videos and digital goods. Based on the user’s location, the payments platform draws from over 85 different payment options. Because of its vast variety of payment options (which include PayPal, pre-paid cards, and a number of credit cards), UltimatePay is designed for a global audience.

UltimatePay Mobile gives smartphone developers a way to deliver a one-click payment experience to mobile gamers, and provide a comprehensive payments offering. The platform allows players to view their balance and transaction history, while allowing them to purchase items in-app without ever having to leave the game.

Of course, PlaySpan isn’t the first startup or company to bring in-app payments to Android phones; PayPal, Boku and Zong all offer in-app payments libraries to developers.

PlaySpan, which recently raised $18 million in new funding, already has a number of partnerships with a number of gaming and media companies, including Ubisoft, Sanrio and others. Perhaps the company can leverage some of these relationships to offer UltimatePay in publisher’s mobile games.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

PlaySpan’s Ultimate Pay Brings In-App Mobile Payments To Android…

After a Summer spent in “Lockdown”, Facebook apparently got quite a bit of work done. They’ve already had a number of events just in the past few weeks. And now they’re having another one.

We’ve just been alerted about an invite-only press event taking place next Monday, November 15 at 9:30 AM in San Francisco. At the bottom of the invite, it notes that “This special event is in advance of Mark Zuckerberg’s conversation on 11/16 at Web 2.0 Summit.”

So what will Facebook be talking about? Who knows. The invite has chat bubbles on it, but as we’ve learned in the past, these often have nothing to do with the event.

After Facebook’s last event, in which they unveiled some big updates to their Places product including Deals, we asked Zuckerberg if the company had any other big things to launch this year. He indicated that more was on the way, but at least one more big thing was coming soon.

Is this the big thing or a smaller thing? Tune in Monday to find out.

Update: Actually, looking at their icon again, you’ll notice it is their Inbox icon (at least on the iPhone) and not their chat icon. Could this be the unveiling of the new Facebook mail product — Project Titan? Let the speculation begin!

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Facebook Holding Yet Another Event Next Monday In San Francisco. Inbox…

Yesterday Facebook released a clever way to continue to download Google user data, despite Google banning Facebook from using their APIs. It looks to me like they aren’t going to try to stop Facebook from using this more manual approach. Instead, for now, it’s being escalated only via words:

We’re disappointed that Facebook didn’t invest their time in making it possible for their users to get their contacts out of Facebook. As passionate believers that people should be able to control the data they create, we will continue to allow our users to export their Google contacts.

That’s a nice swipe there in the beginning, about how they wish Facebook had spent time giving people a way to liberate their own Facebook data rather than building tools to end run around Google. That last bit though, about “people should be able to control the data they create” doesn’t quite hit the mark though in my opinion.

We’re talking about your Facebook friends list and their email addresses. You create your list of friends, of course, but you generally aren’t uploading email addresses to Facebook, your friends do. Still, I think there are excellent logic arguments for allowing users to download friends’ email addresses, too. More on that later.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Google’s Response To Facebook’s Response To Google’s Facebook…

Our post earlier tonight about Google shutting down Facebook’s access to Gmail data exports makes me think two things. First, I’m not sure there’s much data that Facebook doesn’t already have with it’s 600 million users (although 1.3 billion people visit Google sites a week, so they’re not exactly slumming). And second, the data protectionist era has now begun in earnest.

Trade restrictions, tariffs, etc., called protectionism, is always a double edged sword. It has the short term benefit of helping domestic companies stay competitive and profitable, and that also protects jobs. On the downside the consumer is hit with higher prices on whatever industry is being protection. And protected industries tend to lag behind competitively, so when/if the restrictions are lifted they are in a very bad situation.

But here’s the very worst part of protectionism. If you start it, you can expect the other side to start it to. That’s when you get what’s called a trade war, and lots of potential economic gain evaporates.

I’m seeing all the signs of a “data war” beginning now. It’s not among nations, though. The players are the big Internet companies who have lots of user data today, and want more (all of it) tomorrow.

For a long while the webmail companies have generally been lenient about exporting user data via an API to other applications. It’s what the user wants, and most everyone is reciprocal. Or, they’re too small to matter yet. This is a “free data trade” type situation with the best economic consequences.

Well, everyone but Facebook. They’ve just pretty much refused to let users export social graph data, even though they import it like crazy from every source they can get their hands on.

This is a game theory situation. One party isn’t playing ball, but’s reaping the benefits of open data policies by all it’s big competitors. That forces competitors to protect their data as well (Google’s done it in a surgical way to avoid fallout with other non-Facebook companies). But once this ball starts rolling, and it has, it’s pretty hard to stop it.

Expect it to get worse from here.

Ultimately that’s very bad for the companies involved, but it’s also bad for consumers who now have fewer choices with what to do with their…err..Google’s data. In other words, we all lose.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Data Protectionism Begins In Earnest

Amazon-owned IMDb released a nifty iPad App earlier this year which allowed customers to access more than 1.5 million movie and TV titles with information on millions celebrities, actors, actresses, directors and crew members. The Movies and TV app also allowed users to access movie trailers, find localized movie showtimes in the U.S., and more. Today, the company is releasing brand new iPhone and iPad apps with a bunch of new features and functionality.

First, the apps now include international movie showtimes for 13 countries including the UK, Canada,
Australia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, New Zealand Argentina and Chile. Fans will also be able to rate movies directly from the app.

The homescreen has been redesigned to integrate the latest trailers of movies, and the apps both feature updated entertainment news from hundreds of media outlets. Another addition that could be useful for hardcore IMDb users is the ability log-in with IMDb Pro accounts from the app to access contact information and representation listings. Pro users will also be able to place calls from the app (for the iPhone app). The company is also pushing its IMDb “everywhere” strategy by allowing users to log-in with their Facebook account, and share information to Twitter and Facebook from the app.

IMDb’s apps are fairly popular so these new additions should only help increase downloads. The Movies & TV app for the iPhone and iPad has been installed by “millions” and is being downloaded at a rate of nearly 1 million per month. The site is also undergoing a complete redesign as it hits its 20th anniversary and released an Android app in June.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

IMDb Goes Global With New iPad and iPhone Apps

CE-Oh no he didn't!: Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg says 'the iPad's not mobile, it's a computer' originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Nov 2010 14:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

CE-Oh no he didn’t!: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg says ‘the iPad’s not…

Today at its mobile event, Facebook executives Mark Zuckerberg and Erick Tseng gave some (vague) answers as to why there still isn’t an official iPad application.

Zuckerberg was pretty blunt when it came to explaining why there wasn’t an iPad launch during today’s mobile event: “The iPad isn’t mobile”. He later qualified this statement to say that Facebook loves working with Apple, but that the iPad isn’t as mobile as a phone (he’s right).

Tseng stepped in to add that the rise of tablets isn’t going to be about the iPad alone — we’re going to soon see numerous additional devices running on Android and possibly other platforms. And given Facebook’s limited resources, it doesn’t really make sense to hone in on a single platform.

Facebook needs a solution that will let it deploy features across multiple devices quickly, so there isn’t a lag time like there has been between the Android and iPhone apps. In other words, we’re going to see a web-based mobile application that’s going to be targeted specifically at the tablet form factor.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Why Facebook Still Doesn’t Have An iPad App

We don't know how this one slipped past us, but somewhere in the past few weeks (on October 19th as far as we can tell), HP and Palm's logos got together to form what you see to the left: the HP Palm logo. The new, hybrid logo is on both Palm's website and Facebook page, so this should quell any fears that the world might lose Palm's branding all together. We don't know what you think of the new logo -- personally, we were a little partial to our own mock up.

HP Palm quietly debuts new HP Palm Logo originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Oct 2010 09:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Phone News  |  Palm, Facebook  | Email this | Comments

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

HP Palm quietly debuts new HP Palm Logo

All the hoopla over the Wall Street Journal’s so-called Facebook “privacy breach” article, it’s subsequent and curiously-timed MySpace followup, and also the New York Times’ take on the ability of Facebook advertisers to target ads for nursing schools to gay men is unwittingly creating cover for a social networking privacy issue that’s much bigger.  It might be surprising to some, but it turns out that U.S. federal agents have been urged to “friend” people in order to spy on them.

The feds operate such social sting operations aided by the fact that there are very few individuals that actually know every single person in their “friend” list on Facebook.  For instance, it is typical to connect to someone because one thinks they might have met them.  Or, a connection might take place because two people share common interests and want to view each other’s news posts going forward.  But that’s not how the government sees it.

In a memo obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) discovered that the Feds see Facebook as a psychological crutch for the needy.  Here’s a direct quote from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) memo: “Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of “friends” link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know.”  And it gets worse.

The memo explains that these “tendencies” provide “an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities.”  Translation: spy on unsuspecting people on Facebook and MySpace in order to catch the bad guys.

Such tactics are decidedly creepy (how many completely innocent people are they spying on), but the argument could be made that if you have nothing to hide, then why worry?  Here’s why: many people post items to their profiles that they forget to update or that are not necessarily true, and which they certainly wouldn’t be saying if they knew they were under investigation.  Indeed, a recent study initiated by UK insurance company Direct Line concluded that “people are more likely to be dishonest when chatting using technology, such as Twitter, than they would be face to face.”

Why is it that people might lie more on social media than in person?  According to Psychologist Glenn Wilson, “we sometimes use these means of communication rather than a face-to-face encounter or a full conversation when we want to be untruthful, as it is easier to fib to someone when we don’t have to deal with their reactions or control our own body language.”  This leads to a few common sense conclusions.

First, government officials need to take note that one should not believe everything one reads on the Internet—even if it is generated by a “person of interest.”  Second, as the EFF’s Jennifer Lynch pointed out, “the memo makes no mention of what level of suspicion, if any, an agent must find before conducting such surveillance, leaving every applicant as a potential target.”  In a country that prides itself on freedom of speech, government should not be in the business of creating an atmosphere that could chill expression.

On October 18^th, Congressmen Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Joe Barton (R., Texas) sent Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg a letter in which they expressed their concern about marketing companies that “gathered and transmitted personally identifiable information about Facebook users and those users’ friends.”

To many tech folks, it seems more than a bit hypocritical for government representatives to be going after Silicon Valley companies for using social networking data when the government is doing exactly the same thing itself (and more).  In addition to bureaucrats urging agents to befriend targets, the EFF also discovered that the Department of Homeland Security used “a ‘Social Networking Monitoring Center’ to collect and analyze online public communication during President Obama’s inauguration.”  And, recall how Google Maps has been used to track down hoes with “unpermitted” pools in Long Island, NY.  Those Big Brother moves are much more disconcerting than Facebook applications using referrer URLs to better target ads.

Editor’s note: Guest author Sonia Arrison is a senior fellow in technology studies at the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute and has been writing about privacy issues for over a decade. Follow her on Twitter @soniaarrison.

Photo credit: Flickr/nolifebeforecoffee.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

The Real Privacy Scandal On Social Networks: The Feds Are Spying On…

Causes, the startup that helps users leverage Facebook and other social sites to raise money for charity, has closed a $9 million Series C funding round led by NEA with participation from Founders Fund, Marc Benioff, Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, and Karl Jacob. Scott Sandell of NEA will join as an observer on the Causes board. Causes CEO Joe Green says that the company will be using the money to build out its team, including some senior hires (the company is currently seventeen people). Causes will also be moving from Berkeley, CA to San Francisco.

As we’ve recently reported, Causes is transitioning from living primarily as a Facebook canvas application to running off of its standalone website Causes.com, with social connectivity through Facebook Connect. This change, along with some other optimizations, led to a two-fold increase in the amount of money the site raises in donations from its ‘Birthday Wish’ feature on a daily basis — $20,000 a day, up from $10,000 two months ago. It raises money though other channels, too, taking in a total of around $40,000 in donations a day.

The company has also recently landed a deal that will put Causes gift cards in every Safeway and Vons location in California. After buying one of these gift cards, users can sign onto Causes.com and donate it toward the charity/cause of their choice.  Causes earns revenue (it’s a for-profit company) by asking users for tips between 10-20%. Green wouldn’t disclose revenue figures, but says that Causes has 119 million installs on Facebook and has 25 million monthly active users.

Causes has now raised over $16 million, including a previously unannounced $5 million Series B round led by Case Foundation and philanthropist Ray Chambers’s MCJ Foundation, with participation from Founders Fund. That round closed in March 2008.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Causes Raises Another $9 Million To Help Spread Philanthropy Online

Today at Y Combinator’s Startup School, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down for a lengthy interview with Jessica Livingston. The topics discussed ranged from Facebook’s beginnings (including a brief discussion of The Social Network) to the social network’s strategy in China, which has proved to be problematic for other Western tech companies like Google.

Zuckerberg says that for years Facebook didn’t have a strategic plan for international growth — each month, the site would take off in a seemingly random country with no apparent pattern (obviously this approach paid off). But there are still a handful of countries that Facebook isn’t winning in, or isn’t on a path to win: China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia.

“China is extremely complex,” Zuckerberg says, and the site is taking its time to make sure it approaches the world’s most populous country with the  right strategy. The hope is that if Facebook can show that, as a Western company, it can succeed in a place where no other Western company has before (like Russia), that will help it get the momentum to figure out the right partnerships it needs to succeed in China.

With respect to openness in China (or lack thereof), Zuckerberg says that different countries around the world have different values, which Facebook has historically respected. For example, in Germany it’s illegal to post content about Nazism, so Facebook blocks it in Germany (but not in other countries). It has a similar policy with regard to drawings of Muhammad in Pakistan, where it’s illegal to post that content.

Zuckerberg says that he’s spent a lot of time personally examining Chinese culture (including daily Chinese language lessons) to help with this. Above all, it’s clear that Facebook would like to establish a strong presence in China down the road, explaining, “How can you connect the whole world if you leave out 1.6 billion people?”

Oh, and about Zuckerberg’s wardrobe? He says that while The Social Network got a whole lot wrong, he actually owns every shirt and fleece that appears in the movie.

Image by Robert Scoble

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Mark Zuckerberg On Facebook’s Strategy For China (And His Wardrobe)

I like to apologize to Google CEO Eric Schmidt for impersonating him on Facebook today.

It’s actually pretty easy, too easy, to do this. A reader emailed earlier today letting us know that someone had been impersonating them on Facebook based on a real, but unused, email account.

I tested this by creating a fake Facebook account for Eric Schmidt based on his real email address. I tried to do this with a few Facebook execs first but it didn’t work because the emails I have for them are already associated with their real accounts.

The email address I have for Schmidt, however, isn’t associated with any Facebook account. It worked.

Of course I could have created a fake Eric Schmidt account without using his real email. But by using that email address Facebook immediately started suggesting friends to me – presumably people who have uploaded their contacts, including that email address, to Facebook in the past.

I created a profile and quickly started adding friends. YouTube founder Chad Hurley accepted, as did Facebook Vice President Elliot Schrage.

The profile isn’t particularly believable, but after a few high profile people became friends and were linked on the profile, the invites started pouring in.

You Don’t Have To Verify Email Addresses To Use Them With Facebook

As soon as the account was created I was asked to verify the email address. I ignored that and instead just turned off all email notifications. But I can still use the account to add friends, accept friend requests, like status posts, and send and receive messages.

Messages occasionally pop up saying “Before you can interact with other people on Facebook, you need to confirm your email address.” But most activity isn’t restricted at all.

I’m fairly certain that the account will be disabled shortly. But what if I had faked a less high profile individual, and didn’t write on TechCrunch about it?

The person being impersonated may see the Facebook confirmation email. But since they didn’t just create an account the obvious thing to do is to ignore that email, not to click on the link. But by ignoring it they are letting me continue to pretend to be them.

The fix for this is easy – Facebook shouldn’t let people do anything at all with an account until they’ve verified their email address. But that creates extra friction with account creation, which is probably why they let people do so much before they verify.

And lots of services do the same. But with Facebook, I immediately have access to a pretty robust social graph. All those suggested friends are people that have Eric’s email address, and as I showed it’s pretty easy to fool people into thinking I really was Eric. One person even sent a fairly private message to me.

If Facebook doesn’t change this there’s one easy way to protect yourself. Just add every email address you use to your Facebook account. If there are old emails you don’t have control over any more you can’t add and verify them, so there’s still some exposure though.

We’ve emailed Facebook for comment. I actually almost just messaged Elliot Schrage via the fake Schmidt account for comment, but that seems like poor form.

ps – Max Hoat, the CEO of Livestream, just sent an email in to tips@techcrunch saying how funny it is that Schmidt only has six friends. He asks us to credit him if we post, so we are. This shows how believable this is. Here’s his email:

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Being Eric Schmidt (On Facebook)

OpenID software creator JanRain is launching a new iPhone SDK today, called JanRain Engage, which allows an app developer’s visitors to sign-in to the app with their existing accounts on Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn or other networks and then publish their comments, purchases, reviews or other activities from the app to multiple social networks.

The social networking product, which is available through an SDK, allows developers to choose from a list of up to 12 login providers and specify the order in which they appear via the Janrain Engage dashboard. Janrain Engage will also remembers an app user’s preferred network on return visits and will provide a single-click return experience. And Janrain Engage allows a developer’s iPhone application to authenticate users through iPhone’s native UI.

For app developers, the benefits of integrating a comprehensive social network login product helps create between 6 to 25 new referral visits for each social action a user shares with friends. JanRain also offers an OpenID iPhone technology, which launched earlier this year. The company raised $3.25 million in Series A funding last year.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

JanRain Engage Offers Social Publishing For The iPhone

“The concept of “liking” things is very old, likely older than the words we use to describe it…”

– Facebook Engineer Andrew Bosworth

We can’t get enough of Quora these days, basically because it connects people who have information to people who need it, and especially to those that didn’t think they needed it. One of the things you thought you didn’t need to know? That the Facebook “Like” button started out its life as the “Awesome” button.

In an epic Quora thread, Facebook Engineer Andrew Bosworth delineates the history of the “Awesome”/”Like” button, what eventually turned out to be a way to connect Facebook users with the entire Internet — with the added bonus of rerouting all activity through the Facebook platform.

Other than the whole “Awesome” thing, which Mark Zuckerberg ended up vetoing in favor of the more bland “Like,” other ideas that got tossed aside in the design process were stars and a plus/minus sign.

Attempting to dispell the commentary that Facebook copied Friendfeed’s “Like” feature, Bosworth’s timeline pinpoints the word “Like” being proposed internally to a less than enthusiastic response on on August 22, 2007, in contrast with the Friendfeed’s official launch of their “Like” button on October 30, 2007.

According to the timeline, Facebook was ready to to launch the button by November 12th but Zuckerberg put a kibosh on the plan:

“Final review with Zuck surprisingly doesn’t go well. Concerns about the whether the interaction is public or private, cannibalizing from the share feature, and potential conflict with Beacon. Feature development as originally envisioned basically stops.“

So Friendfeed gets its out first, and it takes Facebook another two years to push its universal “I enjoy this” button out the door launching it on their own platform in February 2008 and then expanding it to all websites in April 2010. Bosworth adds regarding the Friendfeed button launch, tongue in cheek, “As far as I can tell from my email archives, nobody at FB noticed. =/.”

Going by Bosworth’s retelling, it seems like Facebook came up with the concept first but never actually went through with an “Awesome” button, until after Friendfeed launched theirs as the “Like” button. While Facebook engineer Tom Winah states, “the launch of Like on FriendFeed wasn’t on our radar at all, “ in some sense Friendfeed basically did Facebook’s “Like” button quality assurance for two years.

And despite initial lukewarm “Like” response, Facebook ended up going with the same name; “We were all stubbornly insistent that no word could be more awesome than “Awesome” and Zuck was the main person to recognize it wasn’t a good choice,” confirms Facebook engineer Tom Whitnah.

To everyone involved’s credit, people have been both liking and thinking things were awesome since the origin of the species.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Facebook’s “Like” Button Used To Be The “Awesome” Button

There were two surreal moments for me at Disrupt last week. The first was during the SV Angels Party when Hammer was dancing. It wasn’t just because MC-Freaking-Hammer was doing to Hammer dance in a tux and nerd glasses in front of me. It was because the CEO and founder of the media company I work for were on stage looking awkward and white, but dancing none the less. It was because I’ve hung out with Hammer at parties and conferences like the Lobby– two unlikely people sucked in to the Web 2.0 vortex. It was because I ran into the founders of Digg, separately and in different rooms at the party. They were like brothers the first time I met them, and now– no matter what they politely say on stage– they were estranged, with one ousted and the other trying to turn the once-hot company that helped start the Web 2.0 wave around. It was a feeling that something was ending.

The feeling was echoed the next day watching Kevin Rose and Michael Arrington on stage. For my corner of the Web 2.0 world these were two of the most seminal figures. I put Rose on the cover of BusinessWeek at the beginning of the wave, an article that got me a book deal that ensured I’d spend the next year surrounded by people like Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and others. And Arrington was the only other reporter I knew back then who wasn’t a total cynic about Web 2.0 companies’ chances. Eventually I’d find we were so like-minded that I wanted to work with Mike– finally leaving my old-media roots behind. One word has summed both of these guys for a while now: Tired.

The first wave of Web companies never got here, most grew so fast they went public or raised an unsustainable amount of money, hiring an unsustainable amount of employees and when the spigot of free capital was gone they had no choice but to implode. But that didn’t happen in Web 2.0– precisely because it had happened so recently in the late 1990s. People like Kevin and Mike were cautious. They ran their businesses at break even, raised money cautiously, and outsourced business processes– like ad sales and even some underlying technology– that weren’t core to the business. For all the talk about a second Web bubble, most of the companies on covers of magazines were pretty conservatively run. As a result they had plenty of money in the bank when the recession hit. Sure there were employees cut here or there, but most of that was to get rid of people who were underperforming or make a show of belt tightening for investors.

But it was still a wave, an unsustainable ride of hope, big dreams, a feeling of invincibility that had to crash– and for me, mostly ended last week when TechCrunch was sold. But the recession didn’t crash this one– exhaustion did. Building media companies– which is what most Web 2.0 businesses are– is a grind. You can’t build a huge business with less than 20 million monthly uniques and getting there is a brutal day-in, day-out grind of producing great work, making the site as intuitive as possible and continually finding reasons to remind people you are worth 5 minutes of their day everyday. This is the part of the story we don’t tell enough on TechCrunch. We make startups sound easier and more glamorous than they are. Everyone in the game knows that–but we probably do a disservice to people who think all they need is a Super Angel and in two years they’ll get a deal from Google.

On stage Mike asked Kevin what the most amount of money he’d walked away from was and he said $80 million. Mike asked if Kevin regretted not taking it, and he didn’t really answer the question. It was clear from his body language that at least part of him did. In that moment, they looked like two men both slightly jealous of each other– one because the other said yes and one because the other said no.

In any Silicon Valley wave there are the clear huge winners– Facebook and likely Twitter and Zynga. There are a few clear huge businesses, and I’d argue LinkedIn is in that category. And loads of companies that are clever-but-doomed. And then there are a bunch where we just don’t know. They are clearly worth something, in the case of Slide or TechCrunch and, hopefully, Digg they’re worth enough that the founders who worked so hard for so long make a life-changing amount of money. But in some ways, when these founders finally succumb to the grind, it’s almost sadder for those of us who were along on the journey– whether investors, employees, friends or just users of their sites.

I remember the day when the Industry Standard– the magazine that chronicled the 1990s bubble and held weekly rooftop parties– went out of business. I covered the news for the tiny weekly business journal I wrote for back then, and drove up to San Francisco as employees were forlornly cleaning out their offices– all of them. It reminded me of the last day at college, when everyone takes every scrap of their life out of a dormroom never to return. I did an interview with the Editor that made me feel like an ambulance chaser. His dream was in shambles all around him and his staff of hundreds were out of jobs. Media people are impossible at faking how they feel. I couldn’t do it when TechCrunch announced it was selling, and this guy couldn’t do it now. One of his star writers told me it was like that scene in Goodfellas where the crew feels on top of the world like they own a town– and then they get sloppy and everything goes to hell.

Back at the Hammer party, it was my Goodfellas moment, albeit a far less dramatic one. I didn’t have an office to pack up and we all still have jobs, but I couldn’t help feeling like it was all over. Not TechCrunch or Digg or Facebook or the other companies we associate with the wave, but the wave itself. It has crashed on a beach of exhaustion, and people who said they’d never sell for less than $1 billion doing just that. More of it is coming.

TechCrunch has been unlike any other media organization for which I’ve worked– whether newsweekly, magazine, television, or big media portal. We could all leave in three years and start another one but it won’t be the same, Web companies are organic things shaped by a million little small decisions and dozens of people who pass through that companies life every day. There’s a magic that catches or doesn’t. Business professors and journalists can later dissect what companies did right, but frequently at the time pivotal decisions were a fluke.

There’s an endless debate about the good and bad of selling a company that’s still growing in the Valley right now. There’s the obvious macro-economic answer: Everyone selling too early is bad, because no new tech giants are created. There’s the obvious micro-answer: A few million dollars is life changing for most people, and those entrepreneurs deserve to make a life-changing amount of money. In a lot of ways, Disrupt was in the middle of that debate all week. The same Michael Arrington who called out investors who just fund “dipshit $40 million companies” sold his company for a reportedly similar figure the next day. Like most people, I find both arguments compelling. But the important thing to know is this: You can do it again, but you will never create the same company twice.

At that Hammer party I ran into a friend who has built several successful companies– and always refused to sell at their headiest point. He asked me what I thought of the AOL deal. I asked what he thought. He laughed and said, “You’re talking to someone who has managed to evade seven successful exits, don’t ask me.” Yeah. That sums up the end of the Web 2.0 era angst.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

If Web 1.0’s Kryptonite Was the Bust, Web 2.0 Kryptonite Was the…

Remember three years ago, when Microsoft paid a quarter-billion dollars for 1.6% of Facebook and the exclusive right to run banner ads across Facebook.com? Tell the truth, how many of you thought that was a killer business decision? I can’t say I did at the time. But as that deal is about to expire in 2011, Facebook’s status as a revenue juggernaut is rarely questioned any more.

In fact, I have been mulling over data from both companies, and I’m ready to declare in public my belief that Facebook will be bigger in five years than Google is right now, barring some drastic action or accident. Futhermore, Facebook will grow without needing to cut into Google’s core business of text ads, which are still 99% of Google’s profits. Even if every single Facebook user performs just as many searches with Google as ever—including Google Instant, mobile search, and YouTube—Facebook will inexorably grow as big as Google is today and maybe bigger, because Madison Avenue’s brands are less interested in targeting than they are in broadcasting to vast mother-loving buckets of demographically correct eyeballs, and Facebook has become the perfect platform for that.

What do I mean by bigger? Facebook already has more page views than Google. People already spend more time spent on Facebook than Google. I’m referring to the life blood of any business: revenues.

Google’s 2010 revenues will be $28 billion, give or take a billion. The goal of this writeup is to illustrate the ways that Facebook’s annual revenues could grow from $2 billion to more than $30 billion in five years a diverse set of revenue streams that have one thing in common: people. Facebook’s future revenue streams, like their applications, are naturally social, and engage consumers with social intent, not just a widget or “social layer.” We repeat: social is not a layer you add; it is core to monetization.

Facebook has figured out its business model, and wants to keep it out of the public eye as long as possible. Facebook’s alleged revenue has grown from $275 million in 2008 to $635 million in 2009 to a rumored $2
billion this year, which is much higher than the also-impressive $1.2 billion number circulating earlier this year. Let’s pause and reflect for a moment. Facebook is allegedly already earning double the
revenues Google reported when it filed to go public.

When we do the archaeological dig of Google’s actual revenues during its private years, we discover similar pattern to Facebook’s: $86 million in 2001, $440 million in 2002, and $1.4 billion in 2003 . . . and so on. Note, however, this divergence:  Google Web Sites earned more than twice the revenue in 2009 as the gross evenue brought in through Google Network Web Sites, even though in 2004 they were roughly the same. The value of properties Google owns has been much greater and faster growing than all of the external Web sites with whom Google shares revenue. This will almost certainly be even more true of Facebook, given the private nature of much of its content. For many consumers, Facebook is the Web.

Facebook’s second-mover advantage affords the company the luxury of offering both types of Internet money-making product: Advertising and Commerce.  As a result, instead of an open Web-like ecosystem, Facebook could choose to partner with a few friends—Microsoft, Amazon, Zynga, perhaps even Apple—and also lock out Google and anyone else, big or small, who Facebook deems not a friend, to best serve its revenue goals.

So, how does Facebook ride Advertising and Commerce into a future of more revenues than Google? By creating a virtuous cycle of cross-promotion: targeted lead-generations and subsequent transactions feed into the next series of even-better-targeted lead-generations and subsequent transactions, naturally.

Facebook Advertising does not directly compete with the text advertisements of Google’s AdWords and AdSense. Instead Facebook is siphoning from Madison Avenue TV ad spend dollars. Television advertising represented $60 billion in 2009, or roughly one out of every two dollars spent on advertising in the U.S.; the main challenge marketers have with the Internet till recently has been that there aren’t too many places where they can reach almost everybody with one single ad spend. Facebook fixes that problem. Specifically, Sheryl Sandberg went on record in August saying that some brands have increased their spending twentyfold in the past year:

Two years ago the big brands were experimenting with us.  They started buying with us a year ago. Now, they’re going big.

She took this observation even further in a recent BusinessWeek article, “Facebook Sells Your Friends“:

Davide Grasso, Nike’s chief marketing officer, says Facebook “is the equivalent for us to what TV was for marketers back in the 1960s. It’s an integral part of what we do now.”

…

In 2008 [Sheryl Sandberg] left Google for the experience of running a startup—and because she believed Facebook was the better bet to win in brand advertising, which accounts for 90 percent of the $600 billion ad market. “We are in a much bigger market than Google, and we have much, much more runway,” says Sandberg.

She’s not the only one who believes how huge this market opportunity is. Just in the last week, TechCrunc quoted Paul Buchheit in his belief that people are significantly undervaluing Facebook compared with Google, and interviewed Peter Thiel about his conviction that Facebook is undervalued at $30 billion. Of course, these are all self-interested insiders.  I scratched my head at this week’s declarations of undervaluation, until I took the perspective of Mad Men.

Facebook Ads employ demographic characteristics (Age/ Sex / Location and Interests), which corporate brand managers and television ad buyers have been accustomed to purchasing for half a century. By contrast, Google AdWords target on the intent revealed by search queries, a practice that has seemed odd and new to Madison Avenue for the past decade and frankly has many of them worried for their jobs.

But it’s not just Madison Avenue. I keep thinking about putting BusinessWeek’s $600 billion ad market in context; Google seems to be having as hard a time getting into brand advertising as Microsoft had getting into search. By contrast, Facebook is making this look easy. Yahoo just paid $1 per like, and buying fans is only going to get more expensive as the lifetime value of a “fan” is better understood.

Five years from now, could enough brand managers and television ad buyers be so impressed with their returns from Facebook campaigns that they collectively increase their spending on Facebook fivefold to $10 billion annually? Heck yes, even if that entire budget comes out of the current $60+ billion annual TV ad budget (and remember, that is just in the U.S.).  Especially if the entire budget comes out of that, because Facebook is more targeted, has better analytics, and engages its audience directly and interactively through conversations—aka chat and photos.

Plus, Facebook is getting stronger at developing products for advertisers, and once they set their mind on adding algorithmic search and/or an AdWords or AdSense competitor, I’m sure some of the over 100 ex-Google engineers who are now at Facebook will volunteer for the job. Could that also represent a multi-billion dollar advertising stream by siphoning some market share from Google for searches placed within Facebook? Perhaps, though I note again that they don’t even have to go there to reach $30 billion in annual revenues.

Five years from now, billions of dollars of advertising will be spent to direct consumers from one part of Facebook . . . to another part of Facebook, where we’ll be offered real items to buy for ourselves or others (birthday alarm, anyone?), premium services to subscribe to, virtual goods to procure and play with, and deals-of-the-moment available for immediate purchase (or we’ll miss out forever!).

This is where the manyfold revenue streams of Facebook Credits become apparent, and they all have in common this observation: if you give Facebook users a few free Credits with the block of Credits they buy (at Target, online, and soon anywhere), they will spend all of those Credits and then want to purchase more. Rather than a straightforward discount, the new math of Facebook Credits means that consumers will never quite be sure if they’re getting a discount or cash back or more for less. Kind of like frequent flier miles where we’re never quite sure what the conversion rate is. Or eBay auctions where we “win” the ability to spend money.

Facebook Credits are poised to be this generation’s American Express: an “affordable luxury” lifestyle brand and credit card with reward programs, frequent flier miles, and other incentives built right in so that the more you use it, the more you earn.  ”Facebook Platinum”, anyone? I would have thought they’d need a better brand name than “Facebook Credits” but then again, I would have thought they’d need a better brand name than “Facebook”.

Off the top of my head I can think of five potential billion-dollar revenue streams that dovetail into Facebook Credits—Games, Groupon/Pages & Places, Amazon/Commerce, Inbox, and Photos—and if you really pushed me I could probably think of more, like Banking.  (Remember when Peter Thiel thought part of PayPal’s business model was to capture the float? Well, guess who’s bringing sexyback…)

Games. Facebook is running the real mafia wars, taking 30% while letting the game developers do the heavy lifting. (Hello, Disney, EA, and Zynga!).  Can worldwide virtual goods and other in-game payments represent $10 billion annually floating through Facebook in 5 years? You betcha; more so if “social gambling” Zynga-style becomes more en vogue (that is: legal authorities say it’s okay). Facebook’s 30% cut of that? A cool $3 billion.

Groupon / Pages and Places. This one’s simple: Facebook should just copy 2010′s Flavor of the Year, Groupon, and make it self-service for every Facebook Page and Facebook Place.  Early bird got the worm; Facebook will get the gold. (All that glitters is not Gilt.) Imagine if any Facebook Page or Facebook Place could make Groupon-like deals with its fans any time it wants. Now there would be an actual reason to pay Facebook money for ads that can augment the fan base of a Page or Place!

Holy carp, Batman, they’ve been teaching us to fish all along:  Suddenly consumers have a reason to LIKE Facebook Pages and Facebook Places!! LIKE something, get a deal: it’s that simple.  Groupon’s Gap promotion grossed $11 million in a single summer day in 2010; imagine, five years from now, millions of Facebook Pages and Facebook Places offering regular but expiring deals to their fans every single day.  Wild guess: in aggregate an average of $100 million in deals sold every day worldwide, or $36.5 billion of deals sold every year. At a 30% cut that’s a solid $10 billion straight into Facebook’s pocket per year. In the words of Keanu Reeves, Whoa.

Amazon / Commerce. Amazon was so smart to partner with Facebook: my informal survey of 5000 Facebook friends found many of them willing to make their purchases (and share them!) from within Facebook in exchange for extra Credits.  The details remain to be determined for consumer rewards: will it be like Discover (1% cashback on purchases) or like Visa (earn points! get entered in drawings!) or something else entirely? We’ll see.

If Amazon helps Facebook figure out how to make malls-with-walls and consequently make real shopping money, I have no doubt other e-tailers will follow. If PayPal’s 2009 revenue was $2.8 billion with 87 million active accounts, it’s not a stretch to predict that five years from now Facebook too will have 100 million to 150 million active Credits accounts (at least!) bringing in $5 billion in revenue from this business unit alone. Commerce is the grease that accelerates everything, so it seems like it’s just a matter of time before Facebook can acquire PayPal (for its volume, its risk management, and its fraud detection expertise) and fold it in together representing let’s say $12 billion in annual revenue five years from now, creating a true new currency for the world economy.

Inbox. Hotmail Plus, Yahoo! Mail Plus, and Gmail Storage all charge $20/year for premium features. So could Facebook Inbox if it became more mail-like, which is within grasp since Facebooker Paul Buchheit is the creator of Gmail, and he’s highly influential even if he’s not building the new system himself. Bonus points for throwing in an Address Book and Skype-slaying social phone features like Social Voice for free to anyone who purchases Facebook Inbox Pro.  50 million pro accounts at $20/year is a cool $1 billion Inbox product. Nice.

Photos. Fred Wilson may have mocked photos, but they represent big money now that Facebook is by far the world’s largest photo site. And the Facebook Photos product suite is about to be vastly be improved—now with high resolution!—thanks to the addition of the smart, energetic Divvyshot team during Lockdown.  Partners could be literally everyone in this space—Snapfish and Shutterfly and Kodak and Walmart, and a plethora of smaller companies like Zazzle and Picaboo! Five years from now could Facebook help sell 100 million picture books and photo schwag a year, extracting $10 per item from partners?  Easily. $1 billion annually without even thinking hard.

And Photos are just a harbinger of more social applications to come.  Bret Taylor has already hinted at ten other revenue streams. Because he thinks like a startup.

One of the biggest differences between a startup like Facebook and a big company like Google is that at a startup, everyone gets asked all the time how the product plans to make money. This imposes a discipline on the product and the people who develop it. At a big company, every boat does not necessarily have to sit on its own bottom—and this can lead to a “monoculture mindset” that stunts new lines of business and ultimately leaves the corporate ecosystem vulnerable to external forces.

The most famous example of this in our industry is Microsoft’s inability to come to terms with the Web.  When Windows and Office were making money hand over fist, text ads were as small as mouse balls. In some ways, Google is even more extreme, because for the most part no one at Google has appeared to lose sleep over where revenue growth will come from, for a decade. Those entrepreneurial muscles have atrophied, and future revenue potential does not appear to be the driver of any new Google product except Android and Google Instant, and even they follow the simple rule that mo’ searches mean mo’ money, because every search makes Google a dime.

So yes, Google will continue to grow its base of text ads, and other revenue streams like mobile, display, and YouTube should help with starting the growth engine that the recession slowed.

Getting back to Facebook, if I add my rough numbers for Facebook’s TV ad siphoning ($10 billion) + Games ($3 billion) + Places & Pages deals ($10 billion) + Credits & PayPal ($12 billion) + Photos ($1 billion) + Inbox ($1 billion) + Some of Bret Taylor’s other ten applications (???) = over $30 billion (actually, closer to $40 billion)  in annual revenues five years from now. Which is more than Google has in annual revenues today.

Is this analysis sloppy, hasty, laden with assumptions, and likely incorrect? Sure. But does it illustrate the possibilities of a very powerful Facebook five years from now? Yes. Yes it does. The main message that I want to send with this note is: This is not a game, because this is a very big market. The stakes are very real.

This is not about the revenue streams Facebook has; it’s about the revenue streams they’re about to have. Take to heart the hockey lesson from Wayne Gretszky’s father: “skate
where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.“

Remember a better time back in 2004 when Jason Kottke boldly predicted that Google would become “the biggest and most important company in the world in 5-8 years” by selling access to the world’s biggest, best, and most cleverly utilized map of the web?  Kottke was right except for one detail: the most improtant company in the world is Apple, not Google. In any case, I am going to make a similar prediction:

Facebook is going to become the biggest and most important company in the world in 5-8 years by selling access to the world’s biggest, best, and most cleverly utilized map of the closed Web that’s been shared among friends.

If Google agrees and wants to avoid that future, what should Google do with its $35 billion in cash and its Google Me team? Unfortunately, Google can’t friend Facebook. Maybe they should friend the Quora community? I’ve found that illuminating.

Talking on Quora with a woman who interned for Google and then Facebook (and now works for Quora), I was struck by her words:

I’m afraid another failed social effort might mean the beginning of a serious decline [for Google]. This is both a function of external perception and internal sentiment. Users will only have so much patience for Google’s experimentation, and things like pulling the plug on Wave can’t be good for the company brand.  Plus, Google needs to be able to sustain employee morale, especially given the highly publicized talent wars of late… I also think Facebook needs some competition.

I concur.

Mark Zuckerberg told Michael Arrington that to make insanely great social products, “you have to design [social into products] from the ground up.” I wholeheartedly agree! My question is, why does everyone think that Facebook has won the social networking game and that no one else should even try to make a better social network? They only have a 600 million person head start; that’s less than a tenth of the planet, people.

Doesn’t anyone with resources even want to build a better social network anymore? It sure doesn’t seem like it. Google is developing an abstract social layer; Twitter calls itself an information and content network; LinkedIn is a professional network with sprinkles of social pixie dust; MySpace is a discovery channel; Yahoo is a mumble mumble; and the last great hope, Apple Ping, is a faux-ial network, unwittingly proving Zuckerberg’s main point to Arrington with how much it blows:

As 2010 draws to a close, only a movie and an open source project (Diaspora) have the chutzpah to call themselves a social network. The future of social networking may very well depend on those of us without resources to invent an alternative to Facebook, to create more choice for consumers. Does anyone have the brains, the heart, and the courage to travel down this yellow brick road? Maybe this article ill offer a smart but scrappy entrepreneurial engineer in a garage somewhere the inspiration she or he needs to build a better social network. I just gave you thirty billion reasons why I believe this market is the market to go after if you want to make a fortune, have fun, and change the world. And I will do anything in my power to help you. I know a venture capitalist ready and eager to put $25 million to work to get this party started. And heck, I might even consider coming out of retirement for this opportunity. Call me. Or better yet, Google Me.

Editor’s note: Guest author Adam Rifkin is a Silicon Valley veteran who organizes a networking group for entrepreneurial engineers called 106 Miles. His last guest post was about his frustrations with Gmail.

Image credit: Mister Sweaters; Photo credit: Erick Tseng.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

How Facebook Can Become Bigger In Five Years Than Google Is Today

Much has been said about Apple’s foray into “social networking” (at least into what they consider that term to entail) with the introduction of Ping, part of the company’s iTunes software.

Some are positive about its chances, saying it is merely the seed of amazing things to come, others much less so.

I concur with the latter group and deem the product to be horse dung, 160 million potential users be damned.

Yes, they recently did make it a thousand times better when they added the ability to like / share a song you’d already purchased in the past.

But that only tells me just how badly it reeked before that (I’m actually quite positive some people at Apple got stomped for not adding support for Ping within users’ existing iTunes library from the get-go – at least I should hope so).

And it appears to me that it’s still a product no one quite seems to have been waiting for.

Yes, you say, but had Facebook and Apple not jointly pulled the plug on Facebook integration at the last minute, I’d see things more clearly. I would realize how awesome it will be once you can actually connect with your real friends, transfer music recommendations and share purchases in and out of Ping, courtesy of Facebook.

Well I say it wouldn’t make the product suck that much less, and it won’t once it eventually gets implemented in some way (Facebook’s CTO is “very confident” it will, apparently).

I’ll happily stick my foot deep in my mouth if it turns out Facebook integration is what Ping needs to shine, but I’m bearish on the chances of that happening any time soon.

Don’t get me wrong: Ping needs Facebook integration to make it a little more useful, or fun for that matter. But a little useful or fun is not what people want – there are so many better music discovery and relevant social networking services out there that the only thing Ping has going for it is its potential audience thanks to the success of iTunes. But purely as a product, it simply stinks right now (particularly on the desktop), and people realize as much.

We’re a month in since Ping made its debut. No doubt, you’ve checked it out en masse. You’ve started following some of your friends and perhaps even a couple of artists, and some even people started following you. But have you really used the product a lot since? Have you discovered a lot of music thanks to it? Have you effectively connected with any of the people you follow, let alone with the artists pimping their wares on the service?

I simply don’t see any of that changing fundamentally when Facebook integration ever comes to fruition, if it ever does.

Upon introducing the service, Jobs talked about Ping along the lines of “Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes. But it’s not Facebook, it’s not Twitter.” He was absolutely right. There’s no Facebook or Twitter element whatsoever, so only iTunes showed up to that particular party.

And as a result, it’s not a very lively one.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Tell You A Secret – Even With Facebook Integration, Ping Will Still…

How do you know when a Facebook PR person is lying? When their lips move (or they issue a statement!) ba-dum ching!

We’ve been taking a beating today on our story about Facebook working on a branded mobile phone. Just like last year with the Google Phone, lots of people threw tantrums about how we made the story up right up until Google launched their own branded phone, the Nexus One.

And that’s what’s happening today, due in no small part to Facebook PR issuing what looks like a blanket denial of the story this morning. “The story is not accurate!”

Except the story is accurate. Facebook has been working with hardware manufacturers to explore building their own phone. We don’t know the timing, and we don’t know how deep the software stack is that Facebook is contemplating building, but we know that as of very recently the project was alive and well.

Here’s how Facebook is able to issue a blanket denial to a true story and get away with it:

First, give a solid soundbite that everyone will love. “The story is not accurate. Facebook is not building a phone.”

Note that those two sentences sound like they’re supposed to go together, but they aren’t. Technically what they’re saying is that at least one fact in the story is wrong. Also, Facebook is not going into the hardware building business. But what most people read is a flat denial. The story is wrong! Tabloid journalism!

Except, uh oh.

Second, Insert a ton of additional sentences that seem to support the initial dramatic statements. But what they’re really doing is putting in language that they can point to later that shows they weren’t technically lying. “Deeper integrations!” “INQ Phone!”

Third, and this is purely optional, add a good kick in the nuts on the way out. Maybe something about how people tend to exaggerate things to get headlines.

This is the statement that Facebook sent to everyone in the news business today, except us. Despite us asking for it.

So why did Facebook do this? Normally they would just say “we don’t respond to rumors and speculation” when anyone talks about leaks around future products. But this was different. Here’s the reason – they don’t want to freak out Google and Apple and everyone else. They work closely with these partners on on Facebook’s existing applications. A Facebook branded phone may disrupt those discussions. Case in point.

Also, this project is likely just getting started. Two of the three rock stars just joined the company (Tseng and Papakipos from Google, Hewitt has been with Facebook since 2007). It could be a year or more before the phone hits the market. And any number of things could happen to make them kill the whole project off.

All we learned today was that the mobile space is so important that Facebook was willing to lie (while technically just spinning) about their plans. And they were so pissed off about the leak that they took that final shot at us as well. Nicely done Facebook.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Anatomy Of A PR Spin (AKA How To Lie Like A Pro)

According to Media Culpa a blog that apparently obsessively tracks these things, photo-sharing site Flickr has hit the 5 billionth photo milestone today with the above, uploaded  by Flickr user yeoaaron. Media culpa blogger Hans Kullin also points out that Flickr has been growing at about 1 billion photos per year, over the past 3 years, eclipsed in market share by social giant Facebook which hit 15 billion photos uploaded in April of 2009.

As Facebook claims it was uploading over 2.5 billion photos a month in February of 2010, we’re loosely guestimating there are somewhere between 30 and 50 billion photo uploads on the site currently. I’ve contacted both Flickr and Facebook for more info and will update as soon as they respond.

In the meantime sit back and enjoy Aaron Yeo’s artistic interpretation of the view of the Woodward’s Building in Vancouver.

Thanks: Media Culpa

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Flickr Hits Its 5 Billionth Photo, And Here It Is

Facebook’s geo-locational service Facebook Places is now working in the United Kingdom. Want up to the minute proof? Check Twitter.

The Next Web reports that a conference for the formal announcement of Facebook Places United Kingdom happened at 8am BST, where Facebook Places product manager Michael Sharon walked British press through the service. If you are in the UK and you’d like to find out more about Facebook Places or how to claim your Places venue, you can read more here.

This is Facebook Places’ first full on launch in a European country after having launched in Japan last week. Users have previously reporting the ability to check in from places like Canada and even Paris due to a wifi glitch.

Notably, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg left a trail of Facebook Places check-ins on a recent trip to London. Hmm …

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Facebook Places Goes Live In The UK

Mike Elgan criticizes Google for being condescending in a recent column on one of the dead tree IT rags. His first point is that Google PR exec Gabriel Stricker started off a recent press conference with a quip about how fast paced Google innovation is:

He said that the reason Google holds events like this one was that “we hear from a lot of you that with the kind of breakneck pace of innovation that we go through at Google, it’s nice for us to kind of let you catch your breath.” He went on to tell the audience that they would “hear from our Search rocket scientists in a second who will hold your hand through the latest and greatest of what we’re up to.”

So Google is so awesome that the company has to pause so the rest of the world can catch its breath? And we’re all so stupid that Google geniuses have to “hold our hands” as they explain things?

He backs up his point with recent comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt on what users want Google to build, and on privacy issues.

So first off this looks to me like an example of media mass manipulation I wrote about recently. At first blush, knowing how the whole press game works, Elgan is pissed off at Google for something or other and wrote this post.

But even if it really is something that’s been nagging him for some time, I just don’t see it. Google is far less arrogant than they were even a few years ago. And even I, possibly the most sensitive and defensive person you’ll ever meet, don’t see Elgan’s examples as condescending in any way.

Remember when Google blackballed CNET in 2005 for posting information about Schmidt?

That was a year after they went public, when companies are typically at their peak of arrogance. And boy was that a condescending thing to do.

More recently I’ve seen a Google that’s been humbled by droves of engineers leaving for Facebook and Twitter, a Google humbled by China, and a Google generally terrified of an upcoming decade where they may not be the center of attention on the Internet.

The Google I’ve seen recently is a humble Google. A Google that appreciates press more and that seems more willing to consider change. Most of the arrogance I see is across town at Facebook, which is exactly what I’d expect from a company on the rise.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Google Arrogance? I’ve Never Seen Them So Humble

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.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

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.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

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.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

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.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

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