Facebook has acquired its third company, Malaysian startup Octazen Solutions. Facebook says this is largely a talent acquisition, according to GigaOm. Octazen has a slightly different story on their home page, saying Facebook acquired “most of the company’s assets and to employ those assets in a different direction.”

Either way, it’s leaving some people scratching their heads. Said one senior engineer at a competing company that we spoke to this evening, “Facebook just bought the web’s most talented and creative scrapers that have gotten around everyones rate limits and detection systems.” Said another person we spoke with this evening who is knowledgeable of Octazen’s product, “Facebook is so sanctimonious about protecting their own user data through Facebook Connect, but Octazen has been scraping user data for years off terms of service and then reselling it.” Both sources asked to remain anonymous.

Facebook, for their part, have not yet responded to our request for comment.

What exactly has Octazen been up to? The company is mostly about above-board contact importing from one service to another – signing in to Gmail from Facebook, for example, to import your contacts there and add them as Facebook friends. Much of this is done via OAuth and APIs, but Octazen is known to dive much deeper for data.

One example – Octazen will sometimes collect and store user credentials directly, and sign into large social networks and other sites as if they were the user, say multple souces. Then they’ll download the address book and social graph. A percentage of your friends on that service might be users of the service (now Facebook) paying Octazen, and you’ll be asked to friend them. But there’s a big question about what happens to the rest of the data as well, and if Octazen is storing a shadow social network in violation of terms of service to recommend user connections down the road. And they may look deeper at data than they should – at email header information, for example, to get a better understanding of who you communicate with the most.

But the most unnerving part of Octazen, say our sources, is the fact that they are very, very good at scraping data at scale without being detected. They may hit a service using lots of different IP addresses, for example, and remain undetected. Octazen could, they say, scrape very public sites like Twitter, where the social graph is on each profile, in a way that Twitter wouldn’t know it’s happening.

In 2007, for example, People were buying and running Octazen scripts to scrape contacts in a very sketchy way: “So we use this toolkit from Octazen to scrape contact lists off of various sites. Our ever eager users (ab)used this feature so much that hotmail blocked us.” The poster found a way to access Hotmail’s API instead of just scraping to get the data, and Octazen responded, saying “Very nice indeed”

Our understanding is that Facebook already uses Octazen to mysteriously determine your long lost friends and suggest that you re-connect with them (leading to scores of emails into our inbox that Facebook is somehow reading emails or otherwise getting data they shouldn’t be).

The big question is why Facebook would need to acquire a company located half way around the world if all they were doing is standard address book imports via OAuth and APIs, or proprietary but well documented protocols like Facebook uses. The implication is that these guys have serious expertise in data gathering at scale that may sometimes be in violation of the terms of service of the sites being harvested.

This is obviously just one side of the possible story, albeit based on hard evidence of Octazen’s shady prior practices and via multiple sources. But until Facebook explains this acquisition in more detail, we don’t have much more to go on.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Octazen: What The Heck Did Facebook Just Buy Exactly, And Why?

Google Buzz launched with more than its fair share of privacy issues, leading to a significant backlash from some users. Fortunately the Buzz team is fixing these issues at a brisk pace. Today, they’ve rolled out a fix to a bug that would let users inadvertently expose their friends’ private email addresses using Buzz’s @reply system. Now, instead of sharing these private email addresses with the public, Buzz will simply show everyone a series of asterisks.

The bug stemmed from the way Buzz handles @replies. To send a message to someone you do it using their Email address, and Buzz makes this easy by showing an autocomplete box as you start typing their name. Unfortunately if you happened to pick an Email address that wasn’t associated with a Google Profile (which is quite easy to do given how many people use multiple accounts), Buzz would expose that Email address to the world.

Earlier this week Google helped allay privacy concerns with some other changes to Buzz, including a more prominent option to hide your follower lists (which could be used to figure out who you frequently exchange emails with).

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Google Buzz Privacy Update Has Users Seeing Stars (Instead Of Your…

Monica Keller, a MySpace Group Architect who has played a key role in advancing MySpace’s initiatives in activity streams and openness, is leaving the company to join Facebook. Keller announced the news in a blog post this evening. She will be joining Facebook as an Open Source and Web Standards Program Manager, where she’ll be joining a team that includes David Recordon and Luke Shepard. MySpace confirmed that Keller had left the company but declined to comment further.

Keller played a key role in launching MySpace’s Real-Time Stream API, helping to design the Real Time Stream using PuSH and architecting the network’s Twitter Sync Ingest.  Keller was involved with the technical aspects of the Stream, and was also involved with the design of MySpace’s developer platform. She’s also represented MySpace on numerous conference panels.

While Keller has some nice things to say about the struggling company in her post, she clearly wasn’t pleased with the way some things were handled at MySpace:

But I have chosen to leave. While I was able to have some temporary creative freedom this is not the norm or part of what other engineers enjoy and I do not feel there is one cohesive push to deliver the best we can deliver anymore.

To my friends and colleagues at MySpace, some parting advice:

It is imperative that MySpace puts in place strong technical leadership who can attract good technical talent and make well-informed decisions. It is important that they stay connected to rest of the world and work on interoperable standards and solid products which benefit the end user. Many of my fellow engineers have fantastic ideas and a plan for phased delivery.

This is a loss for MySpace, but it certainly isn’t the end of their real-time and open initiatives (which have been more progressive than Facebook’s).  We hear that these are still being spearheaded by recently promoted MySpace co-president Mike Jones, and that Christina Wodtke, who recently joined the company after running the activity stream product at LinkedIn, is involved in running the team’s day-to-day operations.

Image by Adam Tinworth.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

MySpace Stream Architect Monica Keller Jumps To Facebook

In the film Fight Club (the book has a slightly different plot), the members of Project Mayhem’s main goal is to blow up the buildings that contain credit card companies’ records so that everyone’s debt is reset to zero. (Yes, I know this wouldn’t actually work, but never mind that for now.) Yesterday, two Twitter users, Allen Stern and Louis Gray, proposed the same idea for Twitter. That is to say, with the new suggested users list (SUL) now in place, they’d like to see Twitter reset the follower counts of users (either just those that have been on the SUL in the past, or everyone) to zero, and start over.

The core idea behind this is that anyone on the SUL leading up to the change has gotten an unfair advantage in terms of the number of followers they now have on Twitter. Leaving aside the fairness of it, it certainly is true that just about every person with over a million followers on the service only got that many because of the SUL. And while you may wonder why anyone cares about the number of followers they have, for some accounts, such as those tied to blogs, a huge number of followers is beneficial in terms of clicks coming into the site when links are tweeted out. TechCrunch has certainly benefitted from this, as have a number of other large blogs on the SUL.

As we showed yesterday, the new version of the SUL has drastically altered the rate at which new followers are being added to these accounts. And in many cases, people on the list are now actually losing followers. But as I noted, those who were on the old SUL are unlikely ever to be caught in terms of followers by anyone else now given these new rates — hence, the call for the resetting of the counts.

It’s an interesting idea, but not one that is likely to happen. After all, if Twitter did a reset of users on the old SUL, it would mean breaking all the relationships accumulated over months or even years by those accounts — including plenty completely unrelated to the SUL. And while that may seem more fair to some, to at least as many, it would just be annoying — you would have to follow those accounts all over again. Meanwhile, resetting every user on Twitter to zero followers would just piss everyone off. And the complete distruction of the social graph could even threaten Twitter as a service itself. All social networks, whether they are Twitter or Facebook, are only as strong as their social graphs. Twitter wiping it own out, giving user less of a reason to return would be foolish.

So where does that leave us?

Well, as I said, in reality, nothing is likely to change. While it is a bit odd that the users on the old SUL (including @techcrunch) will continue to have follower counts in the millions while no one else does (except for maybe eventually the hard-charging @billgates), there really isn’t a good solution (or at least one that Twitter would be willing to do). But one thing Stern is concerned about with regard to the inflated follower counts is that anyone who was on the list can use it to their advantage for publicity. A simple solution to that would be to remove the follower count entirely. I wrote about this in length back in April. If Twitter were to simply not tell you how many people are following you, it would remove a huge part of why it matters so much (to both those on it and not on it): vanity. Of course, that wouldn’t be a perfect solution either because it wouldn’t take a smart third-party developer long to figure the follower numbers out through Twitter’s API.

Twitter is well aware that the original SUL was a less than ideal solution. No less than co-founder Evan Williams admitted back in October that he wanted to kill it off. But the fact remains that it did and still does serve a purpose. Without a suggested users list, most people who sign up for Twitter would have absolutely no idea who to follow and would simply leave. While statistics point to a good number of users doing that even with the SUL, Twitter is unlikely to have gotten to where it is today without this type of feature. It would have been the classic problem of: no one I know is using the site so I’m not going to use it either.

As I see it, Twitter’s only real solution is to keep improving this new SUL. While they say it’s already being dynamically updated frequently as determined by a number of unnamed factors, they should really work to make even more personalized. Maybe you get the default category SUL (as it is now) when you first sign up, but depending on your tweets (assuming they’re public), Twitter could offer you more personalized recommendations on who to follow. And they could also do what Facebook does and suggest friends based on other friends you have in common (something which it is promoting even more now, so it must be working).

Thanks to their new geolocation API, Twitter could also do some interesting things with recommending users who are nearby to you at any given moment. That may sounds a little creepy, but as long as it’s opt-in, it might be useful for some.

Undoubtedly, whether they say so or not, Twitter sees this type of SUL backlash as a minor bump in the road. After all, they have their goals set much higher then the millions of users they currently have. They want Facebook numbers, and beyond. If that happens, users will a million followers won’t be so uncommon, and the old SUL advantage will be rendered moot. It’s still a big “if,” but I would bet that’s their thinking on the matter.

[images: 20th Century Fox]

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Twitter’s Project Mayhem Dilemma

Use of the location-based service Foursquare is on the up and up. But it’s use is mainly limited to mobile phones currently. That makes sense since the service is all about sending your location when on the go. But it would be nice sometimes to use it on your computer (beyond visiting the rudimentary mobile site from your browser). Enter FoursquareX.

This new application built by software developer Eric Butler is easily the best way I’ve ever seen to interact with Foursquare on a computer. Using Foursquare’s API, Butler has made a OS X client that not only allows you to see where your friends are, but even allows you to check-in at venues. And when paired with the notification application Growl, it’s a great way to get alerted about what’s happening on Foursquare without having to check your phone every few minutes.

The app is mainly meant to run in the background in your menu bar to serve you notifications (again, via Growl) when friends check-in places. But the more interesting part of the app may be its map component. If you open that up, you’ll get a window displaying a Google Map with all of your friends’ Foursquare icons overlaid on it to show where they are in the world. You can zoom in or out to show more detail of where they are. Or you can click on their names displayed in a timeline to the left of the map to bring up more details about their latest check-in.

There’s another view to this map too which gives you a visual representation of the Foursquare venues close to where you currently are. Clicking on any of them allows you to easily check-in. To the right of this map view there is a list of the venues currently trending on Foursquare (where multiple people are checking-in) as well as your “favorites” (the venues you check-in to the most).

There is also a setting for the app that lets you get notifications when other people check-in to the same venue you’re checked-in at, even if you don’t know them. Some people may not like that, but if you’re interested in meeting new people that you have at least one thing in common with (your use of Foursquare), it’s kind of an interesting way to do that.

Again, this app is currently Mac-only (and specifically, Snow Leopard-only), but if you’re addicted to Foursquare, it’s a must-have. Find it here.

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

FoursquareX: Foursquare Addicts Need To Get This Desktop Fix…

Are you tired of living in public, sick of all the privacy theater the social networks are putting on, and just want to end it all online? Now you can wipe the slate clean with the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. (Warning: This will really delete your online presence and is irrevocable). Just put in your credentials for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or LinkedIn and it will delete all your friends and messages, and change your username, password, and photo so that you cannot log back in.

The site is actually run by Moddr, a New Media Lab in Rotterdam, which execute the underlying scripts which erase your accounts. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is a digital Dr. Kevorkian. On Facebook, for instance, it removes all your friends one by one, removes your groups and joins you to its own “Social Network Suiciders,” and lets you leave some last words. So far 321 people have used the site to commit Facebook suicide. On Twitter, it deletes all of your Tweets, and removes all the people you follow and your followers. It doesn’t actually delete these accounts, it just puts them to rest.

The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine runs a python script which launches a browser session and automates the process of disconnecting from these social networks (here is a video showing how this works with Twitter). You can even watch the virtual suicide in progress via a Flash app which shows it as a remote desktop session. You can watch your online life pass away one message at a time. Taking over somebody else’s account via an automated script, even with permission, may very well be against the terms of service of these social networks.

From the FAQs:

If I start killing my 2.0-self, can I stop the process?
No!

If I start killing my 2.0-self, can YOU stop the process?
No!

What shall I do after I’ve killed myself with the web2.0 suicide machine?
Try calling some friends, take a walk in a park or buy a bottle of wine and start enjoying your real life again. Some Social Suiciders reported that their lives has improved by an approximate average of 25%. Don’t worry, if you feel empty right after you committed suicide. This is a normal reaction which will slowly fade away within the first 24-72 hours.

The light-hearted video below explains the benefits of committing Web 2.0 Suicide and disconnecting from “so many people you don’t really care about.” Unplugging from your social life online will leave you more time for your real life, which you’ve probably been neglecting. With the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, you can “sign out forever.” Not that we are recommending you do this in any way. But you may enjoy the video.

web 2.0 suicide machine promotion from moddr_ on Vimeo.

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Wipe The Slate Clean For 2010, Commit Web 2.0 Suicide

Here’s a tip for all you iPhone app developers out there. If you want to make sure your app doesn’t join the long list of rejected iPhone apps out there, make sure it doesn’t advertise a competing product, especially if that product runs the Android operating system. Swavv Apps (creators of Beer Pong) learned that lesson recently when they tried to get their iDroid app past the App Store censors.

The iDroid didn’t do much. It didn’t replicate any Droid features or take over any functionality of the iPhone (that would have made it a worthwhile app). All it did was display the glowing red Droid eye. If you tapped on the eye, it then showed some marketing bullet points about the competing phone such as the fact that it can run simultaneous apps and has a slide-out keyboard (something the iPhone lacks). The second page also shows a picture of the Droid with its keyboard out.

Apple rejected the app because it was nothing more than an ad for a competitor. I kinda have to side with Apple on this one, although I think it would have been smarter for them to let the app through.

Sure, the iDroid was an ad for the Droid phone. But what’s the real message it would have sent? What it says is that the iPhone is a powerful marketing vehicle for anything mobile, perhaps even more powerful than Times Square billboards or Google’s homepage.

If you can get someone to download an app to their iPhone and show it to their friends that’s more likely to make a lasting impression than a glaring billboard. Now, why anyone would want to download the iDroid app other than to get the increasingly-familiar, if somewhat spooky, Droid eye on their iPhone as a lark is beyond me.

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

iDroid App Rejected By Apple. Well, Duh.

Yesterday I spent the day at TechCrunch’s ‘Real Time Crunch-up’. This despite having no idea what a ‘Crunch-up’ actually is.

The important thing is that Erick had asked me to help moderate his panel about marketing within ‘real-time streams’, which is a subject close to my heart. So close in fact, that had he asked me to help moderate a panel about child rape and it’s place in the public school system I couldn’t have been keener to weigh in.

I’ll get back to my own contribution in a moment, but first, as a courtesy to my paymasters, I should probably relate a few of my  ‘key learnings’ from the event.

1) There is such a thing as a ‘key learning’, a phrase which I heard at least three times during the day, and which I gather is what an ‘opinion’ becomes when spoken by an idiot.

2) Gabe Rivera from TechMeme loves bookmarks. How else to explain his glee when he discovered that each of the four million free copies of Marc Benioff’s ‘Salesforce.com Playbook‘ scattered about the conference contained a little strip of cardboard sponsored by Amazon. “Cool. I can use these for my other books,” he exclaimed, removing each bookmark and pocketing it before carefully placing the books back on the table.

3) Even with a back-cover quote from Neil Young, you apparently can’t give away Marc Benioff’s ‘Salesforce.com Playbook‘. At the start of the day, there were towering piles of the thing on every surface – one free for every attendee. By the end of the day: towering piles of the thing on every surface, ready to be returned to the publisher. Perhaps Benioff should have taken a leaf out of his own playbook: Play #42 reads “Don’t Dis Your Product With A Discount”, with Benioff explaining that “I wouldn’t even give my own grandmother a discount.”  Yet apparently he wouldn’t think twice about giving the whole book away to a room full of the only people who are likely to actually buy the thing. (My book didn’t win its Congressional Medal Of Honor by being given away free).

4) At TechCrunch conferences, even the food is patriotic. After the American flag next to the judges table debacle at TechCrunch50, I was worried that Arrington might shy away from overt displays of Americanness at future events. Not so – inside the meal box provided to each attendee was a disposable handwipe, packaged inside a little stars and stripes pouch. To reaffirm my love of this country, I stuck one of the pouches to the front of the podium on the stage.

5) Dogs frighten room service waiters, but love Gabe Rivera from Techmeme.

And so to my panel – and to be honest, I was a little anxious at the thought of it given that my fellow participants were Erick and five marketing experts – Sean Rad of Ad.ly, Ryan Amos of DailyBooth, Jesse Engle of CoTweet, Philip Nelson of NewTek and Robin Bechtel who acts as ‘digital agent’ to Britney Spears amongst others.

Erick was on my side, of course, but even he and I have a checkered history, due in large part to the fact that I keep finding excuses to bring up his Last.fm story. Keen to smooth things over beforehand, I went via CBS’s San Francisco HQ on my way to the conference and picked up a Last.fm tshirt for him. You know, as a peace offering. He didn’t wear it, but I know he appreciated the gesture. (”You fucker,” he said, which I gather is New York for “thank you.”)

Even with Erick placated, I was still terrified by the marketers. I’m an editorial person and so these are not My People – in fact I’m obliged to close my ears whenever the subject of monetizing my words is raised. What I do is Good and Pure; what they do is Bad and Dirty.

Worse still, these weren’t even the usual kind of marketers – people who sell banners and display ads and the like – but rather a new breed who made their living by trying to slip commercial messages into our every day interactions. Take Bechtel – her most recent professional triumph was convincing a gaggle of Perez’ Hilton’s celebrity friends – Lady Gaga, Katy Perry et al – to promote a new Warner recording artist by Tweeting the words “Who is Sliimy?” to their armies of followers. Sure enough, within a few hours, the question made it to the top of the trending topics list, presumably resulting in a whole load of record sales for Sliimy. To Bechtel this is a great result, whereas to my mind the idea of one Warner artist whoring and shilling for another that they hadn’t even heard of is just about the most hideous abuse of fandom since Jordy Chandler.

(Sliimy, by the way, is pronounced ‘Slimmy’ rather than the more appropriate ‘Slimy’. Also, he’s French, famous, and entirely irrelevant to the wider digital conversation. I expect he’ll be at Le Web.)

And then there was Ad.ly’s Sean Rad. If you’re not familiar with Ad.ly’s product, then put a pencil between your teeth and read this profile of them by the NYT’s Brad Stone. I quote… “Tuesday was another typical day for John Chow, blogger and Internet entrepreneur in Vancouver, British Columbia. Mr. Chow treated his 50,000 Twitter followers to a photograph of his lunch (barbecued chicken and French fries), discussed the weather in Vancouver and linked to a new post on his Internet business blog. Then he earned $200 by telling his fans where they could buy M&M’s with customized faces, messages and colors.”

Get thee behind me, Ad.ly.

During the panel, Rad explained more about his business and his view that Twitter streams should be seen as ‘real pieces of content’ that should therefore be ‘monetized’. In response to Erick’s suggestion that people might not welcome this ‘monetization’ of their conversations, he responded that many of the company’s advertitweets included an appeal for followers to ‘please retweet’ the ads posted in their friends’ streams. According to Rad, thousands of people did precisely that, proving that people were embracing the ads. I politely disagreed, pointing out that people – by and large – are fucking idiots who will retweet anything if you tell them to. A couple of weeks ago, as a comment against the ridiculousness of those who beg their followers to ‘please RT’ the most mundane of messages, I twittered the message “I’m going for lunch. Please RT!”

People did.

And yet, despite the jovial back-and-forth – at one point I accidentally called Rad a dick – we actually managed to end the session with something approaching a consensus. The trigger for this consensus was Erick inviting Robert Scoble to come on stage and explain his vision of the future of monetized twittering.

Scooby’s vision is the ‘Super Tweet‘, a taggable, more contextual tweet that would enable advertisers to serve commercial messages based on what people were already talking about. Critically, these messages would appear in a separate panel in the Twitter client, rather than invading the stream itself. It’s a vision that seemed at odds with that of Twitter’s COO Dick Costollo who, speaking earlier in the conference, hinted that the company’s upcoming ad strategy might blur the old church and state lines. “We want to do something that’s organic and in the flow of the way people already use Twitter” he said, “and not Here’s the tweets and here are the ads.’”

Scoble argued that “you can display ads in the Twitter client but you don’t fuck with editorial” – and as such his idea seemed totally fine to me – why shouldn’t Starbucks deliver ads to people who tweet about going for coffee, as long as those ads appear in a clearly demarked window? And, hell, why not go one stage further: perhaps some of that revenue could get kicked back to the people making the tweets – the “content creators”? That would certainly be better than sponsored tweets.

It’s a testament to Scoble’s vision, and the marketers’ passion that I left the stage agreeing that, even if we disagree on format – there was nothing inherently wrong with monetizing the Twitter stream through targeted advertising. To his credit, Rad even offered to share with me some of their raw numbers so I could see how people interacted with the various commercial messages generated through Ad.ly.

I’d say my feeling of agreement lasted about ten minutes before it was replaced with one of searing outrage.

What the hell was I thinking? Nothing wrong with monetizing the Twitter stream though targeted advertising? There’s everything wrong with it. And here’s why…

A tweet isn’t a “piece of content”. It isn’t editorial. No matter whether we’re talking about what we’re having for lunch or suggesting a new movie or sharing a piece of news, what we’re really doing is having a good old-fashioned conversation. Following people on Twitter is like organising the world’s largest cocktail party – we’ve decided who’s opinions we trust, and we’ve invited them to come into our homes and talk to us about things they are genuinely interested in. The moment people start screwing around with that principle, the whole system collapses.

Just look at the conceptual abortion that is the new retweet functionality: everyone in their right mind hates it, but few of us can quite explain why. Let me try. When someone retweeted under the old system, it was the equivalent of standing at the cocktail party and saying to our friends “oh, Dave said something interesting the other day…” and then going on to quote Dave, along with our own comments on what Dave had to say. The quoting of Dave was contextual and appropriate.

By contrast, the new retweet function is the equivalent of us snapping our fingers and making Dave himself suddenly appear in the middle of the party. And, then, without so much as an introduction, Dave starts talking. No context, no invitation – just some crazy dude called Dave talking at us, at our own party.

Adding sponsored tweets will have an even more poisonous effect on the party. There we are, listening to a friend talking about the weather or sports and suddenly – boom – he’s trying to sell us a personalised pack of M&Ms. It doesn’t matter if he explains that he’s been paid by the company to promote their products – the fact is, there’s some dickhead at a party trying to sell us M&Ms. He’s even more unwelcome than Dave.

One of the most popular ideas amongst social marketers is the idea that we will listen to commercial endorsements from our friends because we trust them. Thus, by putting brands into our friends’ mouths, we will somehow trust those brands more by extension. Not for the first time, the marketers have got it backwards. The reason we trust our friends so strongly is precisely because we know that their opinions are not commercially motivated. The moment that ceases to be the case – or we even suspect that it has ceased to be the case – the bond of trust between friends is destroyed. The cocktail party is ruined, society crumbles, the apes take over the world.

Separating the ads from the conversation might be a less egregious solution but it doesn’t alter the fact that our words are triggering the appearance of commercial messages on the walls of a party. Inevitably marketers will try to further affect these messages by paying commission to popular tweeters, and the less principled of our friends will sign up to whichever ad networks provide the best incentives for monetizing their updates. From then on they’ll be constantly wondering if there’s a way to wedge in a brand, or a product that could bring them a few cents into their tweets. Even if they think they’re just making pocket money from the things they’d talk about anyway, their conversations will become inevitably altered by the presence of commercial influences.

Meantime, the anti-commercial-minded amongst us will resist this new development by avoiding using certain brand names in our conversations, knowing that they are simply giving an excuse for those brands to make money from our friends. Instead of Starbucks and McDonalds, we’ll be sure to criticize S*arbucks and McD%nalds so as to deprive them of the click-throughs. And yet by the simple conscious act of avoiding commercial pressures, we’re forced to consider them – and so the spontaneity and purity of the conversation is destroyed. Either way, the cocktail party is ruined, society crumbles, the apes take over the world.

Our blogs are already affiliated-linked up to the eyeballs, our TV shows are product-placed to hell, radio has succumbed to payola, even our schools are brought to you by the letters COCA COL and A. Human conversation is the last area of communication to hold out against the relentless march of commercialisation and it’s our duty, as humans, to make sure it stays that way. So, screw consensus. And shame on me for starting to lean towards it yesterday. Give me ad-free conversation, or give me death.

(Please retweet.)

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

NSFW: Give me ad-free conversations, or give me death (please RT)

I’d probably feel slightly smug, if I didn’t feel so sick.

Smug that after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view.

Unfortunately it’s hard to feel smug – hard to feel anything but sadness and nausea – when thirteen innocent people are dead.

I’m talking, of course, about Thursday’s Fort Hood shootings. Better informed and more sensitive commentators than I have written about the massacre itself and what it means for the US army, and in particular for the thousands of Muslim soldiers currently fighting – and dying – for this country. How do you even begin to process the idea of an American soldier shouting the takbir, before mowing down his comrades in arms? On American soil? At the home base of the Combat Warrior Stress Reset program? Yes, that’s definitely one for the experts to parse.

And yet, the first news and analysis out of the base didn’t come from the experts. Nor did it come from the 24-hour news media, or even from dedicated military blogs – but rather from the Twitter account of one Tearah Moore, a soldier from Linden, Michigan who is based at Fort Hood, having recently returned from Iraq.

When Major Nidal Malik Hasan began his killing spree, commanders immediately put the base into lock-down in accordance with military procedure. Movements in and out were severely restricted, as was the flow of information to the news media. Official statements from army spokesperson Lt. Gen. Robert Cone were the only way for reporters to find out what was happening, while other base personnel focused on treating the wounded, and ensuring the threat had been dealt with. Or at least that’s what the commanders thought was happening. In reality Ms Moore’s was tweeting minute-by-minute reports from inside the hospital where the wounded were being taken for treatment.

Reports like (in no particular order)…

[T]hey just brought a CART full of boxes w/transplant parts in them. Not good not good. #fthood

Ok we just saw a soldier on a stretcher w/2 armed guards walking by He didnt look like he was in great condition.

Maj Malik A Hassan. He shouldn’t have died. He should be in the worst suffering of his life. It’s too fair for him to just die. Bastard!

A FUCKING MAJOR? Are you kidding me? A MAJ! For those of ut hat don’t know, Army MAJ have pretty serious rank. Dick

Someone just started shooting in Commanche 4 which is on post housing. What are these people thinking?!?

The poor guy that got shot in the balls http://twitpic.com/oejh5

That last twitpic link was particularly amazing: it showed a cameraphone image – of a wounded soldier arriving at the hospital on a gurney – taken by Moore from inside the hospital. Unsurprisingly, Moore’s – coverage was quickly picked up by bloggers and mainstream media outlets alike, something that she actively encouraged by tweeting to friends that they should pass her phone number to the press so she could tell them the truth, rather than the speculative bullshit that was hitting the wires.

There was just one problem: Moore’s information was bullshit too.

As we now know, Major Hassan was not killed, but rather captured alive. Reports of a second – or third – shooter also now appear to be inaccurate. Whether someone was shot “in the balls” hasn’t been publicly confirmed and, for the sake the of the victim’s privacy, let’s hope it never is – but the point is that many of Moore’s eye-witness reports weren’t worth the bits they were written on. They had no value whatsoever, except as entertainment and tragi-porn.

Two weeks ago, I wrote here about how the ‘real time web’ is turning all of us into inhuman egotists. How we’re increasingly seeing people at the scenes of major accidents grabbing their cellphones to capture the dramatic events and share them with their friends, rather than calling 911. Last week I went even further with my doom-mongering, suggesting that the trend of adding people’s homes to Foursquare without permission was indicative of a generation that prioritised their own fun over the privacy of their friends.

In the actions of Tearah Moore at Fort Hood, we have the perfect example of both kinds of selfishness.

There surely can’t be a human being left in the civilised world who doesn’t know that cellphones should be switched off in hospitals, and yet not only did Moore leave hers on but she actually used it to photograph patients, and broadcast the images to the world. Just think about that for a second. Rather than offering to help the wounded, or getting the hell out of the way of those trying to do their jobs, Moore actually pointed a cell-phone at a wounded soldier, uploaded it to twitpic and added a caption saying that the victim “got shot in the balls”.

Her behaviour had nothing to do with getting the word out; it wasn’t about preventing harm to others, but rather a simple case of – as I said two weeks ago – “look at me looking at this.” (I don’t know about you, but if I spotted someone taking a picture of one of my friends or relatives in a hospital then they would probably need a hospital bed of their own. “Tell me, Ms Moore, exactly how did the iPhone end up in your lower intestine?”)

Perhaps fittingly, I posted some of these thoughts on Twitter yesterday, as events were still unfolding. Many people agreed with me – replying with links to the specific military codes that cover what information solidiers can share, and the HIPAA which deals with patient privacy. But plenty of others felt that by criticising Moore I was advocating censorship.

As one reply put it, sarcastically: “Yes indeed, let’s moderate twitter and vet all tweets…” Others pointed out that it was just this kind of photography and ‘citizen journalism’ that ensured that the truth got out during the Iranian elections. What about the global outrage at seeing the famous YouTube video of Neda Agha Soltan, shown dying after being shot by (alledgedly) pro-government agents?

Yes – what of it?

For all of our talk about “the world watching”, what good did social media actually do for the people of Iran? Did the footage out of the country actually change the outcome of the elections? No. Despite a slew of YouTube videos and a couple of thousand foreign Twitter users turning their avatar green and pretending to be in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still in power. It’s astonishing, really. Despite how successful ten million actual voters marching through Washington, London and other major cities in 2003 were in stopping the invasion of Iraq, a bit of entirely virtual cyber-posturing by foreigners didn’t lead to real change in Iran.

And so it was at Fort Hood. For all the sound and fury, citizen journalism once again did nothing but spread misinformation at a time when thousands people with family at the base would have been freaking out already, and breach the privacy of those who had been killed or wounded. We learned not a single new fact, nor was a single life saved.

What’s most alarming about Moore’s behaviour is that she probably thought she was doing the right thing. Certainly, looking at her MySpace page and her Twitter account (before the army finally forced her to lock it down) we see the portrait of a patriot. Someone who clearly cares a great deal about others, and who – despite the rhetorical question “remind me why I joined the army again” on her profile – is proud to serve her country. In tweeting from the scene, and calling out the media for not reporting the rumours from inside the base, I’m sure she genuinely believed she was helping get the real truth out, and making an actual difference.

And that’s precisely the problem: none of us think we’re being selfish or egotistic when we tweet something, or post a video on YouTube or check-in using someone’s address on Foursquare. It’s just what we do now, no matter whether we’re heading out for dinner or witnessing a massacre on an Army base. Like Lord of the Flies, or the Stanford Prison Experiment, as long as we’re all losing our perspective at the same time – which, as a generation growing up with social media we are – then we don’t realise that our humanity is leaking away until its too late.

As I’ve already said – and I’m even starting to bore myself now – the answer isn’t censorship (which won’t work), but rather in our social evolution catching up with the state of technology. We need to get back to a point as a society where – without thinking – we put our humanity before our ego. With that in mind, and in the hope of hurrying the process along slightly, I’m going to draw these three nay-saying columns to a close, not with yet another appeal to the better nature of social media addicts but rather with two videos that everyone should watch.

The first is a clip from This American Life which I stumbled across on the blog of the comedy writer, Graham Linehan (Father Ted, The IT Crowd). It’s a thing of beauty. And absolutely terrifying. Just watch it.

The second video is much less heartwarming, but far more terrifying – because it’s entirely real. So real in fact, that I don’t want to embed it here. I want you to make a conscious decision to click through and watch it. It’s the video of the final moments of Neda Agha Soltan’s life.

Even if you’ve seen the footage before, you should watch it again. But this time bear in mind the following: the cameraman was not a professional reporter, but rather an ordinary person, just like the victim. And what did he do when he saw a young girl bleeding to death? Did he run for help, or try to assist in stemming the bleeding? No he didn’t.

Instead he pointed his camera at her and recorded her suffering, moving in closer to her face for her agonising final seconds. For all of our talk of citizen journalism, and getting the truth out, the last thing that terrified girl saw before she closed her eyes for the final time was some guy pointing a cameraphone at her. “Look at me, looking at her, looking back at me.”

Here’s the link.

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen…

Following its meeting with developers yesterday, Facebook announced some changes to people’s homepages today.

As expected, one of the biggest changes is an attempt to fight application spam. Notifications from apps that you sign up for are being curtailed so that you can opt to only see those notifications that your friends explicitly send to you. That should get rid of all those random updates about Joey sending some virtual bananas as a gift to someone else you don’t care about. Facebook will also allow users to specify which applications may contact them via email and for what purposes, much like when you register for any Website and they ask you if they can send you marketing newsletters.

Applications, however, will be easier to access. An “Applications” link will appear in the left-hand navigation column. Clicking on that will show you all of your Facebook apps. And in a sign that shows the growing importance of social games in Facebook, “Games” will get their own link in the left-hand dashboard, even though they are a kind of app. Games are special that way.

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Facebook Fights App Spam, Gives Games Its Own Dashboard Link

So much for the first generation of big Facebook/MySpace social application startups. Slide and RockYou both got huge valuations in venture rounds. But a new generation of application developers has taken center stage and are racking up big revenues and their own eye popping valuations: Zynga, Playfish and Playdom.

All three own popular social games on Facebook and MySpace. Zynga’s Farmville has 61 million monthly users. Playfish’s Pet Society has 21 million monthly users on Facebook. And Playdom has 16+ million monthly users of Mobsters on MySpace and Facebook Combined.

All three companies are getting a ton of press and investor attention. Zynga wants to go public next year. Playfish probably already got bought by EA for $400 million or more. And Playdom probably raised an unannounced big chunk of venture capital over the summer.

These three companies may be generating as much as $300 million annually on sales of virtual goods. Need a shotgun to do that next job on Mobsters? No problem. Pay with a credit card, paypal, or your mobile phone and it’s all yours. And people are obviously very willing to buy these virtual goods. Nothing new there.

The goal of all of these games is to get to a higher level, and generally have more fun growing things or killing things faster than your friends. Get addicted to the free version, then start spending to move things along more quickly. Once people are committed, it’s easy to get them to pay. You can read all about it on Business Week.

Except Business Week didn’t mention the dark side of the business at all.

All three companies are willing to give game currency in exchange for offers. Sign up for Netflix. Buy a ringtone subscription. Or energy drinks. Sign up for a credit card. Get car insurance. Take an IQ survey that requires a $9.99/month mobile subscription to see the results. We even found one for arthritis medication. Here’s how it all looks. One executive we spoke with says that 70% of total revenue from these applications may come in from lead generation, not direct payments. Netflix alone will pay $30-$40 for a free trial (requires credit card).

Three companies control most of these lead generation offers: TrialPay (appears to have the most legitimate offers), Offerpal and SuperRewards.

There’s nothing wrong with basing a business off of lead generation, although some of the offers are pretty sketchy (long term credit card or mobile subscriptions for little or not value). And the FTC does tend to take a swipe at them periodically. But the bigger problem is that advertisers may not be getting much for their payouts. As the higher quality advertisers bail, pressure to add the scam artists increases.

The cycle of all of these games is pretty standard. Get new users playing for free, give them incentives to message all their friends to signup, hit them hard for cash or lead generation for revenue, and move them up the levels. Rinse. Repeat.

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Social Games: How The Big Three Make Millions

It’s fall, and that means it’s football season. And while Madden has long been the dominant force in Football video games, he’s getting some new competition this year that’s looking to tap into the same market that has made fantasy football and coaching sims incredibly popular. One of these games, which we covered last week, is called Quick Hit. And today sees the launch of another: gaming studio Challenge Games has just launched GridIron Live, a Facebook-based football coaching sim that features 3D graphics.

For those that aren’t familiar with the genre: GridIron Live and QuickHit have the same high quality graphics as most modern video games, but they don’t feature the twitch-based gameplay you’ll find in Madden. Instead, you act as your team’s coach, picking plays and watching as your digital players fare against your opponent’s play calling. This can be a bit frustrating at times when something out of your hands goes wrong, but that’s true for any coaching job. And it’s a genre that’s become quite popular, though most of the other coaching sims have been far more basic.

The biggest difference between QuickHit and GridIron is that QuickHit requires a downloadable client built in Adobe AIR, whereas GridIron Live is built in Flash, doesn’t require a download, and is a Facebook app. This means that GridIron has a much lower barrier to entry (which is going to be key, as it’s a Facebook game), but the experience is less immersive, as everything is constrained to the Flash pane within Facebook in your browser. In terms of looks, GridIron looks great for a Flash game, sporting 3D graphics that are about on par with the original Playstation (CEO Andrew Busey says it’s the first 3D football game on the web). In contrast, QuickHit uses sprites which look cleaner and more polished, but aren’t in 3D.

Off the field, GridIron will allow gamers to purchase better players, as well as new plays that they can use to expand their playbooks. To buy these, gamers can use the tokens they earn in-game as they complete various tasks, or they can purchase them using real money. QuickHit uses a similar virtual goods model.

One of GridIron’s greatest assets is its integration with Facebook, which will be key in helping it spread virally. Whenever you finish a game you’re given the option to share your greatest in-game accomplishment (for example, your longest pass ever) with your friends.

Challenge Games is the Sequoia-funded studio behind hit games like Duels and Baseball Boss. Now, the studio is looking to bring its tradition of high quality games over to Facebook. Along with GridIron Live, Challenge is planning to release a handful of other games to Facebook in the next 60 days.

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GridIron Live: A Rich, 3D Football Game On Facebook Platform

Last month, I published Part 1 of my Guide To Music On The Web, which covered music recommendation sites, Web radio, independent music sites, playlists, and music visualizations. Today, in Part II we’ll take a tour of music search engines, Web players, ways to share music on Twitter, and music mixing apps.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading all of your comments and insights on my previous post and of course, took them under consideration while creating this second part. Please bear in mind that I can’t list ALL the music applications out there. I really tried to find the best and the most used applications that will probably still be here to serve you tomorrow too.

So readers’ main concern was the companies’ business model. You are right. A few of the services might make an exit, and most of them are probably not going to have one, and some are just for fun. I think music services can make money by being innovative enough to get it. Anyway, I don’t want to get into the business model stuff too much, but I will tell you this: The Internet is too competitive, you may be succeed by just being simple, but you may also need to be sophisticated. The era where creating an application first, then two years later thinking how to make money from it, is bygone now, and companies will need to think how to make money sooner than later if they aim for it – This is where innovation comes in and usually wins.

Music Search Engine:

Back in 2007, SkreemR was truly my favorite MP3 search engine. SkreemR locates MP3 files on blogs and webpages, then indexes them on its site, allowing anyone to listen to their favorite music right on the spot. There is no registration required, all you need to do is to search for your desired song/artist, and browse the results. See something that you like? You can play it, rate it, buy it on Amazon, get the song lyrics, watch the video, find related photos on flickr, find concert tickets, download as a ringtone, and finally – yes – you can also share and tweet about it. Unfortunately, now SkreemR has jumping ads all over the site. I understand the need to make money, but did they have to choose the most annoying way to achieve that goal?

I remember the hype around Songza when it first launched… it is a slick Ajax-designed service, which makes it easy to stream music on the web. Well, it still does. Songza became popular for its great usability and the fact that you can easily create playlists, and share music with your friends. At first Songza aggregated music from Seeqpod, then switched to YouTube videos and imeem (where imeem = 30 seconds of a song, and Youtube = full video, low quality). Somewhere around October 2008, the service was acquired by Amie Street for its marketing potential.

Another acquired service is FoxyTunes, this time by Yahoo! in February 2008. FoxyTunes Firefox toolbar extension (launched in 2004) enables control of your favorite music player from the Firefox browser. It supports almost any media player and lets you also find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more – all from the comfort of your browser. Today, it has more than 50,000 weekly downloads, and a cumulative total of nearly 11,000,000 downloads! FoxyTunes also released an additional add-on called TwittyTunes, which allows you to post your currently playing songs to Twitter with a click. On their behalf I have to say, they where the first to offer that. Their search engine: FoxyTunes Planet, is a mashup Netvibes-like page, that gathers music information from Rhapsody, Yahoo!, Flickr, Last.fm, Youtube, Pandora, Amazon, and more.

I sure noticed the difference when I tried Mufin. Looks like they put an emphasis on the site’s usability and design. The interface is so clean and easy to use. Like other services, Mufin will search for your favorite music and will play it on the spot, via Youtube (what else?) It also lets you create playlists in a snap. But what makes it unique is its visualization tool (vision) that lets you discover more music, based on similar artists. Mufin also provides a player which can be downloaded to your desktop for free. The player will help you organize your music, create playlists, find similar music, share tracks with friends on Last.fm, Twitter or Facebook, and so much more.

Fizy’s search engine has no special feature really, it’s just built really well. The service has a simple look & feel, which allows you to listen to music that streams from Youtube, and create playlists if you are logged in. You can connect your Twitter, Friendfeed or Facebook accounts, and share with your friends’ music in realtime. There’s not much to say other than that.

Qloud has quite an impressive history since they launched way back in 2006; At first, it was just a plug-in allowing you to organize your own library better, so you would be able to find the right song at the right time. Then Qloud released ‘My-Music’: A music app for social networks (Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Myspace, etc), which led them to 1M Facebook users! And finally today, it’s all of the above, plus a real-time music search engine, and a pretty good one. You can search and find music that you like, save and organize your favorites, share music with friends, or find new friends based on shared music taste. You can also import your iTunes or Windows Media Player library, and play your playlist directly from your browser. There’s a rumor that Qloud was acquired by Buzznet last year, but I couldn’t find any formal confirmation about this at either site (Qloud or Buznet).

And finally MySpace Music: A massive hub of free music on the web. MySpace Music gathers all of its music accounts into one searchable page by genre. You can see the entire discography of your favorite artists from anywhere on the globe: view the artists’ music pages, listen to their music, track local concerts and much more. You can also search entire collections of free-to-watch video uploaded by artists or users. Read reviews by users, blog posts by both users and artists, and basically dive into an endless amount of content. Addictive.

Worth mentioning: Wearehunted, which is a playable chart of the most popular songs on the Web..

Web Players:

From your Desktop to the Web, Moof allows you to have a full back up of your own music. Export an xml file of your iTunes library, and listen to your favorite music from any computer. If you don’t want to do that, you can still browse through the Moof music library and play any song you like on-demand from the Web. Moof looks and behaves like a desktop player, with the additional ability to share and see music from friends. If your friends are on Moof, you can browse their entire collection of music, and add favorites to your own personal library. Overall, it’s a great way to find new music. Note that Moof has the coolest registration form ever

Spool.fm is so awesome, but fails to explain the service to its users. What you see when you enter the site is a Web Music Player that lets you find the music you want, then play it right away. What you don’t see is the powerful feature that allows you to see what your friends are listening to in real-time! How it works: Just sign up for the service, invite your friends to join in, and each time you play music on the site, your friends will be able to see what you’re listening to as you listen to it, and vice versa. The music streams from all kinds of free sources—not Youtube.

Like most of the Web Players, Grooveshark allows users to find any song in the world and listen to it instantly. But there are several things that makes it different than the rest; first off, the application’s UI is stunning, and the experience using this site is absolutely a joy. Other than that, there’s so much that you can do: search, find, organize, favorite and add music that you like. Also interact with people in the community, and discover new music from others’ choices. With a team of 40 people they must have a business model (or a lot of VC cash).  Grooveshark has a paid VIP version with some exclusive features, and a special interface for VIP users ($3/month or $30/year)

Youtube probably has the largest music database in the Internet, but finding music can be very frustrating since it’s not well organized. I’ve already recommended Jogli as a service that gathers Youtube music into albums in the first part of this guide. JukeFly does the same but also lets you listen to the music as if it was on your desktop music player, only it’s on the Web. JukeFly prepares everything for you, so you don’t really need to create playlists, you just need to choose from a variety of content already made for you. Additionally, JukeFly can stream music from your desktop, but you’ll have to download their plug-in to be able to do so. The player has more features and functionality, which you may or may not need, so don’t be surprised if eventually you find yourself using it as your new music center on the Web. JukeFly is working on a newer version, which will include an iPhone app, concert information, chat, fan-clubs, and Internet radio.

MixTape.me searches an entire database of songs in addition to the millions of songs indexed by MP3 search engine SkreemR to bring you the best results possible. If you sign up for the service you will be able to save your favorite songs, create playlists by simply dragging & dropping tracks into a box, and share playlists with anyone. Users can upload custom album art to any playlist, then embed the playlist at their blog/site. All from a sexy web interface.

How disappointing is it to find out that Lala works only in the U.S when everyone keeps telling me how great this service is… Anyway, I can give you a brief overview of the service from the information I picked up on the site. Windows users can move their entire music collection from the desktop to Lala on the web. Most of your music will be matched to Lala’s catalog and will be available online in minutes; The rest and unmatched music can be uploaded to Lala. If your personal music collection is not enough, you can play over 7 million songs once for free. If you’d like to add songs to your collection, it’ll cost 10 cents per song, and your first 25 songs are free.

JustHearIt plays music over a nicely done application with a great visual experience. The application was created by two students trying to change the stereotype that access to free music is an illegal activity while immersing the user in a unique visual experience. So what can you do at the site? You can listen to music you like, create online music collections & multiple playlists, and hopefully share favorite tracks with friends (it doesn’t say this anywhere, but I presume it does) – not much different from the rest of the services here, except for its nifty UI. BTW, even with their goal to show the world that music can be free and legal, they use Youtube like most services, so I’m not sure what’s unique about that.

Since Seeqpod.com’s service is mostly dead, every service that used them switched to Youtube instead. The pros: Its video ability. The cons: The music quality (but hey, at least we have free music). Same applies to Streamzy, an Ajax-based media player that lives on the web and allows users to create quick playlists from their favorite music. Streamzy says it merely provides search results for media being hosted elsewhere on the Internet – Well, I can’t argue with that. Anyhow, sign in if you want to save playlist, or use it as an alternative music player occasionally.

Post Music on Twitter:

Blip.fm is by far my favorite Twitter music service.  It is also the first service that allowed people to send music to twitter in a very easy way, which is what made it what it is today. What makes it so great is that you can use it with or without a Twitter account. Some use it via the Twitter connection, other use it as their main music playlist and enjoy the community within the site only. Anyhow, you can discover new music, and new friends based on your collections. Once you sign up to the site, you can set Twitter to send notifications each time you suggest a new song to friends. It looks like Twitter, it behaves like Twitter, but angled around music only.

Grooveshark’s project Twisten.fm, came out a bit later than Blip.fm and offers pretty much the same service. Sign-up with your Twitter credentials, and share music with your friends on Twitter. The site streams music from Grooveshark, allowing you to enjoy the quality of music played there (blip.fm streams music mostly from Youtube). Overall, it’s a cool place to save your music into playlists, and share directly with your Twitter friends. I wish that both Blip.fm & Twisten.fm would allow people to buy mixed CDs created from their playlist, instead of having to buy each song separately.

Funnel is the new kid on the block, basically the same as Blip.fm and Twisten.fm except with a killer tool—a nifty Bookmarklet! While you play songs on Youtube or Myspace, you can immediately add them to your playlist in Funnel. Another unparalleled feature is the ability to integrate your Twitter account or Tweet only the songs that you want. This way, you don’t feel bad about inundating your Twitter stream with too many of those annoying music updates. Also, you can easily comment on songs that you like.

If you wish to share MP3 links with your Twitter friends, you can do it with the help of Song.ly. Enter an MP3 link, and Song.ly will generate a small player for easy listening over the web. I have to admit that the whole process is somewhat an unnecessary hassle.  After all, who’s uploading songs these days when everything is searchable on the web already? On the other hand, you can enjoy a list of songs that’s already been uploaded by others, and are of very good quality, of course. I’d summarize it as a user generated MP3 search engine.

Another successful service, is Twt.fm which finds music that you like and posts it to Twitter in a cool way. All you need to do is to log in via Twitter, type in an artist/track and click preview. Twt.fm then generates a track page using your Twitter page design. Post it on Twitter and your friends will be able to leave you comments on the same page – Example.

Worth mentioning: Listento.fm, and Twones.

Mix & Share:

Not a pure mix service but it still falls into this category, 8tracks allows you to create a Mix (playlist) with your favorite songs. It’s actually very similar to a service that already shut down, Mixwit—so if you missed it, you might as well try 8tracks. Once you sign up to the service you can start searching for music, or uploading it from your computer to build your Mix. You can publish a Mix of no more than 8 tracks and only two of these can be from the same artist. Visitors at the site can listen to Mixes without signing into the service—but for creation and music uploads, you’ll have to become a member.

A fun service to close the list with, Jamglue brings music and fans together. Any artist can sign up for a free Jamglue account and upload music in multi-track format for others to remix. There are several Creative Commons licenses to choose from.  These licenses allow others to share and remix work, as long as they follow the artist’s restrictions. Fans can remix other folks’ stuff, and share the results.

Conclusion:
To summarize this whole guide, I have to admit that I’m somewhat concerned: Let’s say Youtube closes its doors tomorrow or decides to stop streaming music—there goes about 80% of what I’ve listed. Which brings me to my next point, the future of music on the Web doesn’t looks so bright right now. Not if every service depends on Youtube so heavily as its music source. For once, I wouldn’t mind paying a yearly fee if it meant listening to an unlimited source of any music that I like with good streaming & with awesome quality. And, I don’t even need to download the songs to my computer, all I really want is a place where I can play my favorite music based on monthly/year fee.  Is it too much to ask?  Oh wait, this is exactly what Rhapsody offers; Unfortunately, only in the U.S. . . .

For now, I suggest you try the services above and enjoy them as long as they last. For some reason, music services don’t stay around very long but I guess that’s the way they roll.

Since I can’t list them all, please feel free to add services that I’ve missed in your comments and make them handy for everyone.

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Your Guide to Music on the Web, Part II

This guest post was written by Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg. It is the first in a series of posts he’s writing about the decisions a young entrepreneur needs to make when she/he is first starting a business. The timing is perfect, there is more than a little overlap with Vivek Wadhwa’s guest post on venture capital earlier today. We’ll update this post with links to his further installments.

I was one of those kids who just couldn’t stop trying to start a company. I think I just really feared working for the Man. Problem was, I seemed to suck at the whole startup thing. Multiple attempts followed by multiple failures. At some point I just said, “screw it, I’ll get a high paying job.” Problem was, I couldn’t stop thinking of the next great thing that got me ridiculously excited. Turns out, it wasn’t so much that I was the problem. Rather, I didn’t have anyone around me familiar enough with startups to tell me that I was doing it all wrong.

This is the first post in what’s going to be a series of blogs on how to go from nothing – no connections, no team, no money and no knowledge of how the startup industry really works – to operating a growing business. I mentioned to Mike that I was going to kick this series off over on the Meebo Blog, but he suggested I start it here. Gladly! So for this first post, here’s the best advice I can give you: join an awesome founding team and get your product out the door ASAP. Then, forget everything else, VCs included, and just build.

One of the things I do as a founder of a later stage startup is to meet with early stage entrepreneurs to help them get their companies going. Nine times out of ten, the meeting ends with them asking me for introductions to VCs. Little do they know that, even if they could raise VC, it’d start them down the wrong path. So, this is what I tell them:

At the exact moment you had your idea, ten other people had the exact same idea. There was just something in the environment that made it the right time for folks to think that one up. The race has already begun! Who’s going to execute first? Who’s going to execute best? If you want to waste nine months trying to raise VC money for that idea, great. But six months in, you’re gonna cry when you see someone else put out that same product you’re pitching me right now. Like I said, forget everything else and just get your product out the door. Now.

Inevitably, the excuses begin: I need to hire people to build the product. I don’t know any developers. I need money for the servers. I want to get that last promotion at my current company first!

Here’s the rub: in consumer internet (and often enterprise), if your founding team doesn’t have the chops to get a prototype of your product out and in the hands of a blogger to test and write about, you might as well save yourself a lot of pain – you’re not going anywhere. Need proof? Just look at some of the most successful tech companies in the last decade: eBay, YouTube, Sun, Oracle, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Google. All of them share a couple common traits: they launched before taking outside investment, and they were able to do it because they had a set of founders with the skills to build the initial version of the product themselves. Only eBay was founded by a single individual – the rest were team efforts.

With that background, let’s get to the three most important things you can do to go from nothing to a kicking startup.

First and foremost, find a great founding team. One person is almost never enough. You just can’t do it all. Rather, team up with one or two other people who have skills synergistic – not overlapping – with your own, but with similar goals and passions. I can’t tell you how frequently teams of three business school students tell me they’re going to start the next great consumer Internet company. When I point out that they’re all business people, and wonder who’s going to build the product, they almost always fall back on “we’ll get a couple of undergrads to do it,” or, “we’ll outsource it.” If I hear either one of those, I know the startup’s already dead. Sorry, folks. Harsh, but probably true.

The best composition is probably one engineer whose passion lies in the pixels on the screen and another engineer whose passion is making bits fly really fast through servers. In Meebo’s case, for example, I was lucky enough to partner up with Elaine and Sandy. Elaine is a JavaScript wizard who has a great visual eye and makes sure every pixel is in its place. Sandy is a straight C nerd and is all about efficiency. Together, they built the first versions of Meebo from scratch. Now, if you have a business guy along for the ride, that works too. But let me tell you, the sum total of my contribution to Meebo prior to our launch was getting us incorporated (read: easy) and suggesting that “the button might look better over there” (read: not much). Post launch, if you gain traction, is where the business person will help take the load off of the technical folks. The business person can take all the meetings while the technical folks work on making the product better.

Second, like I said, forget everything else and just get your product out the door. No office. No phone system. No hiring. No press. No legal muck. No raising money. No looking for partnerships (who’s going to partner with you anyway?). The success or failure of the adoption of your product is what will create 99% of the initial value of your company. If no one ever uses your product, you have no value. Oh, and for the record, raising VC does not help get traction – in another blog post, I’ll argue that if anything, it hurts. So just forget everything else and focus on what matters – getting an alpha of your product out the door and into the hands of your friends and family. Use some URL like www.mygreatstartup.com/shhh.html. Then, once you’ve fixed the initial bugs and incorporated a feature or two that everyone requested, go live. Remember: keep it simple. The initial product you build is for you – you don’t know what features everyone else wants. Launch fast and light, and listen to your users for feedback. In the product, always have a way to ask for user feedback. Remember, once TechCrunch or GigaOm writes about you, you’ll most likely get crushed with a single surge of traffic (we fondly call it the “blog spike”), only to watch almost all of it flitter away. Take advantage of that surge to learn and iterate.

Finally, get good mentors. If someone had been there and just told me “join a great founding team, focus on the product, and forget everything else,” I would have saved a lot of time and heartache. A good mentor is someone who has been part of the startup community themselves – someone who has a realistic understanding of some of the basic dos and don’ts of starting up. You don’t need many – one or two to begin. In Meebo’s case, two of our friends, Todd and Cam, gave us a ton of pre-launch advice. Every time we started straying down a wrong path, like flirting with just talking to that one VC or even thinking about approaching a company about a partnership, they’d always come out with something like, “is that going to get the product out faster?” Trust me, once you’ve launched and achieved traction, you’ll have your pick of mentors, VCs, partners and all the legal expenses you need.

I hope that some of this hit home for those of you who’ve been working on your own startups. In later posts I’m going to get into more detail on specific topics like hiring, raising money, what types of ideas have the potential to get big, finding your founders, and the like. You can follow them over on the Meebo Blog, so bookmark this post and Mike tells me they’ll link to subsequent posts. Alternatively, follow me on Twitter (@sethjs) where I’ll mention when I put up a new post.

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

From Nothing To Something. How To Get There.

After raising a total of $11.2 million since its founding in 2005, Tiny Pictures sold to Shutterfly on Friday for $1.3 million in cash and another $1.3 million in restricted stock to employees, which has some performance triggers. If you back out the earnout, investors only got back about a tenth of what they put in.

Those investors include Mohr Davidow, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and angel investors Reid Hoffman, and Joi Ito. The company’s last venture round was $7 million led by Draper Fisher in February, 2008. But Mohr Davidow, which held preferred shares, might have been the only investor to see any of those proceeds at all. Shutterfly disclosed the acquisition in an SEC filing, which only mentions Mohr Davidow as a recipient of some of the $1.3 million in cash.

It also mentions that Nancy J. Schoendorf, a managing partner at Mohr Davidow, sits on the boards of both companies. Although she did not vote on the acquisition, the connection raises the question of whether or not Mohr played a role in bring the deal to Shutterfly in the first place.

Tiny Pictures operates Radar, a mobile photo sharing app which never got a lot of traction beyond a core following. The service is actually pretty slick, centered around a photo commenting stream. You snap photos with your mobile phone which instantly is shared with your friends who also have the app. They can then comment on the photos.

It sounds simple enough, but the app never achieved a critical mass of users. The service is focused more on sharing life moments through photos with people you actually know than creating a public photo stream. So if you don’t know anyone who uses it, there is little reason to join yourself. The friends-and-family aspect must have appealed to Shutterfly, however, which is based on exactly that type of picture sharing. It already has a rich database of people who like to share photos with one another. Radar helps them extend that to mobile phones in a social and fun way.

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Shutterfly Buys Tiny Pictures For A Tiny Price

Facebook is big. Really big. So it comes as little surprise that every tweak made to the site (like the subtle change to the header a few days ago) can have a pretty substantial impact on the way people use the social network. Earlier this week Facebook’s Engineering team posted a note written by intern Zizhuang Yang, who has spent the summer researching how changes in things like load time can affect users. Yang writes about three main experiments he conducted over the last few months, including one involving overall site speed and two in the way pages load, and the results are quite interesting.

The first experiment examined how Facebook users would respond to a general slowdown. Yang found that regardless of site speed, users spend around the same amount of time on Facebook. That might sound like good news (at least they don’t get frustrated and leave immediately), but it means that if the site is running slowly users are going to be seeing fewer pages in the same amount of time, which Facebook obviously doesn’t want. So — no surprise here — Facebook is striving to make the site as fast as possible.

The second experiment involved the order in which items on the page should load. Yang writes that Facebook has been internally debating whether the page should display everything as quickly as possible, even before some necessary scripts to actually interact with the site have loaded, or to show a white page until everything is good to go and then render it all at once. Yang writes, “In all groups of users, keeping the page blank resulted in lower usage statistics. Thus the debate was resolved.” So if you’re ever on Facebook and you find that a certain button isn’t working for the first second or two after a page loads, this would explain it.

The third experiment involved loading stories in the News Feed. Regular Facebook users have likely noticed that the site will automatically fetch more News Feed stories as you scroll down the page. This feels like a nifty new feature, but it was actually designed by Facebook to cut back on load times — News Feed used to show 30 stories at once; now it loads 15 at first and only shows the next 15 if you scroll down the page. What Yang found, however, is that when people do scroll beyond the initial 15 stories they’re shown, they’re happy to wait the extra second or two for 30 new stories to load, which results in a signifiant boost in engagement. This makes perfect sense — if I’m actively reading through the News Feed (as opposed to just seeing it because it’s Facebook’s home page) it’s because I’m killing time or trying to catch up on my friends’ past posts. The more stories shown during this ‘catch-up’ time, the better.

Also interesting to note is that Facebook seems keen to put its internship program in the public eye — just last week the site’s blog included a post from an intern who build the Facebook Pages to Twitter syndicator, and now we’re seeing the fruit’s of another intern’s summer experiments. This may well be part of the company’s plan to attract new talent during its recent hiring spree.

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

A Look Behind The Curtain At Facebook’s Optimization Efforts

This guest post is written by Geoff Cook, cofounder and CEO of social networking site myYearbook. Everything about Twitter is looking up these days, except for a few pesky uptime issues of course. But a number of recent reports also suggest teens are one demographic that just doesn’t seem to be embracing Twitter like the rest of us. So while I’m excited to see Robert Scoble proclaims that Twitter is worth a cool $10 billion, it might be a good idea to analyze a little data to try to understand why teens just don’t think Twitter is as rad as the rest of us.

Over the last few months everyone has weighed in on the question of “Why Don’t Teens Tweet” — except, it would appear, teens. We recently ran a survey of 10,000+ US teens aged 13 – 17 to see if we could add anything new to the question. As it turns out, the question itself is flawed.

To date, reasons given for the alleged aversion of teens to Twitter have ranged from the condescending “Because they have nothing to say,” to the responsible “Because it doesn’t feel safe,” to the Letterman-like “Because they can’t afford it” — at least without a mobile data plan.

Of course, all of these reasons are predicated on the widely accepted notion that “Teens Don’t Tweet” — that there is a phenomenon that needs to be explained. As recently as last week even, the New York Times cited the fact that only 11% of Twitter is teen as evidence of Twitter’s unpopularity to that group.

The implication is that 11% is a small number, but if we look deeper, it turns out that Twitter has a higher concentration of teens than Facebook. You can see in the chart below that Facebook is only 9% teen, so Twitter is actually more teen than Facebook, which rightly has never been perceived as having a “teen problem.” Facebook has so many users that teens just can’t be that large a percentage of the service, by definition.

Nielsen also suggested that “Teens Don’t Tweet” in a report that was destined to become a trending topic on Twitter itself. Almost as quickly as it came out, a number of bloggers, including Danah Boyd, debunked the study for charting the age group 2 – 24 and yet drawing conclusions about teens, noting there are not too many 2-year-olds on Twitter.

To be sure, the truthiness of the headline “Teens Don’t Tweet” is persuasive. It really does feel true, and on one level it is: the vast majority of teens don’t tweet. Of course, the vast majority of the adult population doesn’t tweet either.

As it turns out, teens actually tweet more than the general population, prompting Silicon Valley Insider to say yesterday, “Kids Don’t Hate Twitter Anymore.” According to comScore, Twitter’s unique visitor composition index in the 12 – 17 age group is 118 (a value over 100 represents a higher concentration of unique visitors from that age group as compared to the age group’s concentration across the entire web). More interestingly, Twitter’s 12 – 17 composition index of 118 is higher than its composition index in the 25 – 34 and 35 – 44 age groups. The bottom line: Twitter actually skews more teen than the average site, and much more teen than Facebook.

Similarly, the teens who visit Twitter do so 5.2 times per month, more often than users aged 25 – 44, who visit fewer than 5 times per month.

But, there is a lot more to the story than widespread misinterpretation of data. After all, why don’t the majority of teens tweet? The issue of teens and Twitter first got legs when Morgan Stanley published an influential report written by Matthew Robson, a 15-year-old intern from the UK, which became an instant hit. Here is the reason the report suggested that teens don’t tweet:

Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realize that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit).

To validate this explanation, we ran a survey asking thousands of US teens whether text messaging charges have anything to do with whether or not they use Twitter, and over 90% said: “No — I wouldn’t use Twitter anyway.” (Note: unlimited texting plans are common in the US, whereas the Morgan Stanley report was written from the perspective of a UK teen.)

Robson also observed his friends and classmates in the UK signing up for the service and then never using it again, a pattern that proves very similar in the US. In fact, in our survey, we found that 45% of teens aged 13 – 17 who have a Twitter account don’t tweet. Most send a few and stop altogether, and 17% never sent a single one.

Similarly, we looked into the idea that maybe teens are turned off by Twitter’s openness and consider it unsafe. We found no support for this hypothesis either, with almost no one citing “It’s too open” or “It’s not safe” as reasons they don’t use Twitter, as the chart below shows.

So why? Why doesn’t Twitter engender passion in even most of the teens who take the plunge and sign up for an account? The answer lies in the reasons teens do use Twitter. Of teens with a Twitter account, the top 4 reasons cited for using the service are, in order:

• Update My Status
• Keep Up With My Favorite Musicians, Bands, or Celebrities
• Stay Current with What’s Going On in the World
• Keep Up with Friends I Know

If we break down those top reasons one by one, a clearer picture emerges of why Twitter is not more popular among teens.

• Teens already update their status religiously on other sites like Facebook, MySpace, and myYearbook.
• Teens use MySpace to keep up with musicians and celebrities, which MySpace differentiates on.
• As a group, teens are not major consumers of news from any outlet, making “staying current” a poor driver of mainstream adoption — though of course there are exceptions.
• Teens use both MySpace and Facebook to keep up with friends they know.

Given the above, it is no surprise that teen penetration is not higher. The value proposition of Twitter to the majority of teens is the issue.

No doubt, this is why most teens describe Twitter as “not for me”, and also why most teens who are not on Twitter cite the generic reason why as “Because it’s lame.” Twitter doesn’t help most of them do anything new, so to them, it is lame. Of course, for those teens who are celebrity hounds or compulsive news followers, or those looking for an audience for their status updates, Twitter is invaluable.

But now we have come full circle. Most teens don’t use Twitter because it doesn’t enable them to do anything they can’t already do elsewhere, which is the same reason most adults don’t use Twitter. It has nothing to do with any teen-specific concerns like texting plans or safety. It comes down to something more simple: delivering value beyond Facebook and MySpace — a competitive moat that Facebook is bridging one move at a time, from the Everyone button to the acquisition of FriendFeed to the centrality of the stream itself.

The question of “Why Don’t Teens Use Twitter?” is the question of “Why Doesn’t Everyone Use Twitter?” The answer, it would seem, is both obvious and heretical … maybe Twitter isn’t for everyone.

Additional Teens & Twitter Survey Results:

Disclaimer: Here is some more info on the panel of teens we surveyed. We don’t claim the 10,000+ survey results represent the definitive survey of teens in the US. We do, however, claim that our users look very much like the users of other social networks and that our audience overlaps significantly with MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, and that the insights of myYearbook teens may be useful to this analysis.

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked Over 10,000 of Them.

We’ve written about Foursquare a number of times. It’s a really nice tool for keeping track of where your friends are, while at the same time playing this oddly competitive social game. As a stand-alone app, it’s great. But the data it’s collecting may be just as interesting, and the service SocialGreat is one of the first to make use of it.

The idea behind SocialGreat is very simple: To show the most popular places in cities during set periods of time. As the tagline says, “Where’s the crowd?” But here’s why it’s better than a regular rating system: You vote with your feet. As in, if you go to a place, and check-in there, it gets a point on the leader board.

The service launched in New York City a couple weeks ago, and last week it added San Francisco. This allowed it to track the movements of nearly 3,000 people, which provided some interesting data about how groups migrate from place to place. But starting today, it’s now available in all the cities that Foursquare is available in. This will undoubtedly mean a lot more data points, and even more interesting information.

SocialGreat uses Foursquare’s API to pull your information. When you visit the site, you click the “Join” button and you’re taken to a Foursquare page to allow your data to be sent via OAuth. Your data is then entered into the information pool.

SocialGreat’s main page keeps it simple: You can track the hot places based on hour, day, week, or all-time. A list shows you how many people have been to that place, as well as the recent trend of people going or not going there (expressed in positive or negative numbers, respectively). To the right of this list, all of the popular places are shown on a map. From there you can click on any of them to get their address.

One downside is so many people check in at airports. That’s why in the image above you see “San Francisco” leading the pack (it’s really SFO, the airport). The same is true in New York. Still, that should be easy enough to filter out if the service chooses to.

As I said, it’s a simple idea and application, but it’s potentially a very good idea to track trendy places based on a very real metric — people actually going to them. Of course, it will be more useful the more people who sign up and use Foursquare, and in turn allow SocialGreat to access their data.

SocialGreat is the brainchild of Pepper Lillie’s Bill Piel and Googler Jon Steinberg (which is kind of interesting since Foursquare itself is the similar, follow-up service to Dodgeball, which Google bought in 2005, only to let it die). The duo also go the help of Drop.io CEO Sam Lessin.

Update: As Piel notes in the comments, the full range of cities aren’t quite live on the front-end of the site yet (they will be tomorrow), but you can probably figure out the URL for the city you’re looking for pretty easily.

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

SocialGreat Starts Tracking Trendy Places For All Foursquare Cities

This guest post is written by Marcelo Calbucci, the founder and CTO of Sampa — a personal homepage creator that will be shutting down next month. He’s writing a series of posts about the lessons learned from the venture at http://blog.calbucci.com. He’s also the publisher of Seattle 2.0, a web resource for tech entrepreneurs and startups in Seattle.

Consumer startups are tough. You have two basic choices: A paid offering or a free offering (or freemium). If you charge people a penny, you’ll turn off the bulk of your visitors. If you offer free services, you might grow to be the next YouTube, WordPress or Facebook. Most entrepreneurs are not risk-averse and the dream of being big is just too appealing and the majority of us take the “free-route”.

Once you offer something for free, all shades of people will try to benefit from your service. You’d think a service like Sampa with a strong family and baby branding would just repel small business, teenagers, criminals, etc. but that’s not the case at all. And I suspect most blogging services; photo-sharing or web-site building solutions face the exact same issue we did.

Most entrepreneurs and investors will look at data analysis and talk about averages or totals: Averages number of blog posts per user per week, average number of sign-ins per user per month, viral coefficient, total number of active users, etc. Entrepreneurs who are more sophisticated will split their “averages” and “totals” in two or three groups. For example, fixing one of the dimensions into users that sign-in 30 or more times per month (very engaged), between 10 and 29 times per month (engaged), and between 0-9 times per month (on the brink of leaving) and then run the averages and totals for the different groups (e.g. “very engaged users upload 25 pictures/month, engaged users upload 7 pictures/month, etc.”)

Very few startups actually look at demographic and psychographic data as a way to group their users. Primarily, because it’s hard to get gender, age, income, interests and intentions without asking the user, and once you ask them you might just scare them way or get the wrong information.

One time we went to pitch Sampa to a VC in Seattle, and out of the blue he mentions this other startup growing amazingly fast – had nothing to do with our business. After the meeting I went to check the startup website. Their Compete and Alexa growth was just amazing. Their website contained profiles of all users since it was a public social network. So I clicked on the profile of the 20 people featured on their homepage (“most recent users to join”). Of those, about 75% were girls between the age of 9 and 13 – likely the worst demographic to make any revenue from.

Did the startup know about this? Oh, yeah. Did that VC that was looking at investing on them? Likely not.

In the middle of 2008 we decide to do a qualitative analysis of our user base. People of all kinds were creating sites on Sampa. There wasn’t an automated way to know if it was a baby site, a family site, a small business, a technology blog, etc. We looked at more than 300 sites, randomly selected and created a spreadsheet with the category, the demographic of the author (if we could figure out) and we plugged that into our own analytic system to split our averages and totals for each site category. The results sucked!

Just 20% of our users were on the target audience. That meant 80% were not building any kind of family or baby site. Ok, maybe we can live with that. But it turned out that more than 25% were by pre-teens. There are two problems with that: First, It’s actually illegal in the US and most countries to allow a younger than 13-year-old to sign up to your service without parental consent. Second, pre-teens are not a great audience to build an advertising-based business model.

However the data showed an even worse picture. Pre-teens were a quick burning flame. They would come, upload lots of pictures, write lots of blog posts, “bling” their site, invite 20+ friends and they would be completely gone in a month. That behavior skewed our data enough that once we looked at our growth, viral rates, and everything else, our business didn’t look so great.

Being Proactive Can Backfire

Can you force uses to comply with your Terms-Of-Service and still be successful on a UGC service? Yes, you can. Facebook manage to be very aggressive on the enforcement of their TOS, and so did Flickr. However, if you look at most Web 2.0 startups, they are not doing that at all. The most prominent case is YouTube, which allowed copyright infringement on their website and can plot a $1.6B exit based on their “turn a blind eye” strategy.

We didn’t do that at Sampa, and I’m sure we could have seen 2 or 3 times more growth if we had used the same strategy. We proactively removed pre-teens websites. They weren’t easy to find, but every time we found one, we would remove the website and notify the owner she was 12-years-old. They would be mad at us and tell that “Jamie, Emily and Sally also have a website on Sampa”, and we would say thank you and delete all their friends websites too.

We would also proactively delete porn websites. There is nothing wrong with porn. It’s not illegal or immoral in my view, but it didn’t go well with our family-oriented business proposition. Also, most UGC porn sites are infringing in someone else copyright and we just didn’t want to deal with DMCA or lawyers.

We also found criminal websites, from people trying to steal credit-card and passwords to the ugly side of online pedophilia. We had the FBI come over twice to collect evidence.

And let’s not forget link-farms. Although we had CAPTCHA and email confirmation for new websites, every once in a while someone managed to create dozens of websites in a single day all full of links to some bank, real estate agent, mortgage broker, auto dealer, etc. I’m sure the business that were benefiting from it didn’t know they hired a “black-hat” SEO.

Pretty much every Social Network-builder, website builder or content sharing site deals with the same issues we dealt with. A good number of entrepreneurs (and most investors) will be oblivious to those facts and just think that everything is going great and the growth is sustainable and proof they are creating great value and soon will be able to turn a huge profit or to sell for hundreds of millions of dollars, until someone takes the time to figure out what people are using their service for and finds out it’s really not what they thought it was.

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

The Little Secret of Web Startups

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington recently was interviewed by Charlie Rose for a chat about the latest news and events in technology. Michael gave his take on the Google vs. Microsoft rivalry, saying that each tech giant is going after the other’s core businesses. Michael also touched upon the latest news around the CrunchPad and Apple’s much hyped and potentially similar product, the large form iPod Touch, which is reported to hit the market in early 2010.

Of course, Rose unsurprisingly delved into the whole Twittergate controversy, which Michael gave a lot more insight into, including the discussions with Twitter and the ethical decisions he faced in his decision and why he published the documents. Michael also weighed in on mobile social mapping startup Loopt, the iPhone, the Palm Pre (which he says is a “great phone”) Facebook’s viability as a money-making enterprise and more. Read below for the full transcript of the interview. You can see Arrington’s other Charlie Rose appearances on Crunchbase.

Full Transcript:

Michael Arrington is here. He’s the founder and editor of TechCrunch,
one of the most widely read blogs in Silicon Valley. TechCrunch was
founded in 2005, and now has separate sites covering specific countries and
technologies. Arrington has also formed a company to develop a tablet
computer primarily to use the Web. It is called the Crunchpad. I’m
pleased to have him back on this program. Welcome, sir.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Hello, Charlie.

CHARLIE ROSE: Google versus Microsoft. We now have Bing, their
search engine at Microsoft, and Chrome, which is going to be an operating
system, a browser and an operating system.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Yes, it’s fascinating, because you think of Google
as a search engine company, which most of the revenue is derived from
search marketing, and Microsoft as a sort of software company. Windows and
Office, that’s where they get a lot of their revenue. And yet these two
companies are competing head on, viciously, because Microsoft wants search
share. There’s so much money in it. So they’ve got Bing and they’re
trying to do things with Yahoo! And Google, I don’t know if they want —
if they want sort of revenue from Office and the operating system, but they
certainly want to take that revenue from Microsoft. So you have them with
Chrome OS and Google Docs competing directly with Windows and Office. And
they’re going at each other’s core businesses, and it’s fascinating to
watch.

CHARLIE ROSE: But do they really look to have great success in that?
Do they expect to take away a lot of Microsoft’s operating system?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: If you listen to Eric Schmidt at Google, he seems
pretty serious, that they want — they want to do innovative things in the
operating systems space.

I don’t know what their projections are around that, but…

CHARLIE ROSE: There was a story that Eric was the one resisting going
ahead with Chrome as an operating system.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Oh, I don’t know if he resisted or not, but he’s
certainly behind it now that it’s public. And they also have Android, of
course, the mobile phone operating system that is also based on Linux.

CHARLIE ROSE: There’s also Bing. So, Bing got very good notices.
People in the business, the Walt Mossbergs of the world.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Yes. Bing is a great search engine. They
launched it, what, two months ago now. And it’s a little too early to tell
what kind of market share gains they’ll have, if any, but it’s definitely a
great search engine.

One of the problems with search — and all the guys who do search
testing will tell you this– it doesn’t matter what the results look like
if you have a testing group sort of blind sampling. If you put the Google
logo on top and ask them what they think of the search results, they like
it more than they like it otherwise. And so Google just has the brand in
search, and it’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of money.

CHARLIE ROSE: And a lot of people have to say Bing was better.
Someone said to me this interesting point, that what Google sometimes
worries about if somehow Microsoft computers, PCs, wouldn’t take Google.
Does that make sense to you?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: I think that Microsoft in the past has made
changes to Internet Explorer that stopped the gathering of information by
the browser — by Web sites. The browser sort of puts up not a firewall,
but you can imagine something like that. I think that’s part of the reason
why Google decided to back Firefox so heavily and also to create their own
browser, to stop that from happening. But I think with Google…

CHARLIE ROSE: So, it wouldn’t be Explorer?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Yes. Right. And Explorer’s market share is
dropping.

But I think Google wants to get Microsoft out of the PC entirely. And
they’re offering alternatives across the board to Microsoft software, which
makes that battle so fascinating.

CHARLIE ROSE: Speak to me about mobile phones and mobile technology
and where are we?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: We’re in an awesome place. I mean, think back. I
know you talk about the iPhone quite a bit. The iPhone changed —
absolutely changed the mobile landscape. And people said, you know, some
people said that Apple couldn’t do this, they won’t do it.

CHARLIE ROSE: Because they began to see it as a computer in itself?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Well, yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: That’s what…

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Although not just that.

CHARLIE ROSE: And it looked good and everybody wanted to have one
because they thought it was so cool.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: They also figured out Web surfing on a phone with
a small screen that’s a touch screen, but it’s small, but they figured out
the gestures to zoom in and out, and it’s actually an adequate Web surfing
experience that they figured out. No one else had done that before.

CHARLIE ROSE: And what about the Palm Pre?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: It’s a great phone.

CHARLIE ROSE: It’s a great phone. Why is it a great phone?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: The operating system I think is as good or in some
cases better than the iPhone. The operating system is quick, you can have
lots of apps open, it’s a great operating system.

The hardware on the phone I think was a little rushed and feels a
little cheap, so for me I’m sticking with the iPhone, but I came close to
choosing the Palm Pre, partially because of the physical keyboard. I think
it’s really nice, and also because I feel like I’m getting a little bit too
tied to Apple.

CHARLIE ROSE: OK. Tell me what Crunchpad is.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: About a year ago — and I really like where the
industry is going with this — about a year ago, I realized I just want a
big iPhone. I want a computer that I can sit on the couch and surf the Web
without having a weird keyboard stuck to it that doesn’t really work when
you’re not sitting at a desk. And so we started this project on TechCrunch
just talking about it, saying we want to build this and we want help from
the community, and great things happened over the course of a year. We’ve
hired a team. We’ve had lots of people, partners come on board and
contribute their time, their resources, suggest partnerships.

CHARLIE ROSE: Did you go get venture money?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Well, you know, I’m not going to answer that
question.

CHARLIE ROSE: Why not?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Because I haven’t — I don’t want to answer the
question.

(LAUGHTER)

CHARLIE ROSE: We have our ways, sir.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: But I’ll say this. I think that Apple — so
there’s rumors — forgetting the Crunchpad and the fact that I want to
build that — Apple is talking about coming out with a tablet computer,
which is going to be a large-screen iPod, or iPhone or iPod Touch. I think
that’s a good thing. I think they’ll sell a lot of them.

Google’s new operating system, Chrome OS, is a Linux-based operating
system with a browser on top, and the idea is you never see the operating
system. You never go to the desktop on the computer. It goes right to the
browser, which is what we’ve been talking about for a year. They’ve been
working on it for a long time. I’m not suggesting we had the idea first.
I have no idea. But the point is, it’s coming to market as a free
operating system. I think that’s really good, and we’re going to see
netbooks without keyboards. We’re going to see computers with other input
mechanisms besides keyboards, or alternative input mechanisms that I think
are going to — really exciting stuff.

CHARLIE ROSE: Facebook versus Google. Is that a big competition?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: You know, last time we talked, it was Facebook
versus MySpace. And the funny thing is, that’s not the question anyone
asks anymore.

CHARLIE ROSE: It’s what is Facebook becoming?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Right. And what is Google becoming. I think it’s
almost like everybody is chasing Twitter right now, and Facebook clearly
is. But when it comes down to it, the social aspect of Facebook, where
your friends are recommending things to you, which could be products or
news items, and it’s the constant sort of logging into the site 25 times a
day is something that Google needs to address. And right now they…

CHARLIE ROSE: So that’s Zuckerberg’s argument. Look, I mean, who
better to go for a search than your friends? If you know and trust.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Exactly. Exactly. Yes. Why not?

CHARLIE ROSE: Because they will know who you are and what you like.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Some of the startups that buy traffic on Google
search are talking about the conversion rates from those — conversion
rates meaning a purchase or a signup that they get from that purchase
traffic from Google is good, but not nearly as good as the conversion rates
they are seeing from Facebook and Twitter. So if I just send out a link
saying, wow, I just saw this movie and it sure is good, and you click on
that, you’re more likely to go see the movie than you are if you do a
search for it and click on a paid ad from Google.

Google is very aware of that. The free stuff on Twitter and Facebook
is better than the paid ads on Google. And that has to be freaking them
out a little bit.

CHARLIE ROSE: So, what did you do? You published some internal
financial documents from Twitter?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: There’s this hacker…

CHARLIE ROSE: I know that.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: This French guy that got these documents from
Twitter because of these guest books (ph)…

CHARLIE ROSE: Right, and so what did you do?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: I’ll get to it. He — so what he did was, he
wanted to warn Twitter that, you know, your security is awful. And also he
wanted to get credit for doing this as hackers and crackers do. So, he
went to the French media, and a French journalist — he was told about it,
this French journalist went to Twitter and said what happened, Twitter
wouldn’t respond. So he dropped it, came to us and said…

CHARLIE ROSE: Who came to you?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: This hacker, anonymously, and said, here are all
the documents and sent us all these documents. Started this fascinating
discussion about…

CHARLIE ROSE: What was in the documents?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: It was hundreds of documents taken from Twitter’s
employees’ attachments to e-mail accounts. And it included interview
schedules, people they interviewed in Silicon Valley, prominent people that
work in other companies that didn’t end up at Twitter. So very
embarrassing stuff. Credit card information for many of the employees. E-
mails, inbox screen shots, executive meeting notes, financial projections,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Just the whole sort of thing. And we
looked at that and said, we’re going to post some of this. Some of it
we’re not. But we said…

CHARLIE ROSE: Like credit card numbers, you’re not going to post
that.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: We’re not going to post the credit card numbers or
things that would embarrass people, but some of this was — we thought was
pretty darn newsworthy, particularly the financial projections and the
executive meeting notes from the last few months. And so we engaged in a
dialogue with our readers, where we said, look, we have got these
documents. We haven’t decided yet what we’re going to post, we think a
couple of documents. We talked to Twitter, sent them all documents, so
they knew what was going on. Talked to our lawyer…

CHARLIE ROSE: So, what did they say, go ahead and post them?

(LAUGHTER)

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: They said…

CHARLIE ROSE: We have no problem with this?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: The ultimate answer was, we know you’re going to
post a couple of these, and that’s OK, but for most of these, we’d really
rather you not, and so that’s not a problem, we absolutely won’t. And we
worked with Twitter on the back end to make sure they closed up some of the
security holes that they had. But the interesting thing to me wasn’t the -
- the documents were fascinating. The interesting thing to me was the
discussion that was generated around whether we should publish them or not.

And there are people that have come out, major journalists who have
come out said it was unethical for us to do this. And there were
journalists who had come out and said it was absolutely fine and ethical
for them to do this. In fact, their readers deserve that kind of access.

And obviously I have an opinion because I’m in the middle of the
story, but just taking myself out of it, I think it’s a fascinating
discussion, because I know in the old days, when “The New York Times” or
“The Wall Street Journal” got documents like this, they weren’t — they
didn’t have that discussion with the readers.

CHARLIE ROSE: It’s interesting how you did it, you know, engaging
your community.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: I engaged them, and I would say that 80 percent of
my readers disagreed with me. And let me know about it.

CHARLIE ROSE: So, why did you do it?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Because I think — well, you know, it’s funny.
When I make decisions with TechCrunch on whether to publish or what
position to take, often I’ll look back after everything is played out and
say, would I do things differently with the benefit of hindsight? And
there are a couple of instances in the past where I would have probably
done things differently. In this case, I think I absolutely did the right
thing, and I wouldn’t do things any differently. So.

CHARLIE ROSE: Do you know the site called Loopt? It’s amazing.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: It’s this mobile social networking. And it’s all
about location.

CHARLIE ROSE: Wherever you are, you know everybody in your block.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Yes. I can turn mine on — I mean, I don’t have
my phone with me, but I can turn it on when I get out of here and see
everyone around me who’s a friend. Actually, mine is set up a little
differently, so I’ll see everyone who wants me to see them. And it’s a
different way of networking socially.

I love it. In fact, I’ve written about this, where you can imagine a
time where you walk into a bar and you pull out your phone and you see —
for everyone that wants you to see it, you see — and you laugh and it’s
funny, but it’s also big business. Everyone’s picture who’s the opposite
sex or whatever your sexual preferences are, who is single and maybe wants
to — you can see all of them. And that way you know, you know, you can go
and flirt with them on the phone and it sort of helps you meet people in a
bar.

Or you go into a business cocktail setting, and you see people on your
phone that you’ve met before and maybe it helps you with their first name
or to remember things. I think that’s the kind of thing that Looped (ph)
and others are doing that is going to change social networking.

CHARLIE ROSE: So, tell me how you see the future of social
networking? I mean, is it…

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: I don’t know what it is. I mean, it’s hard to
define. It’s — if you look at Facebook, it’s really the plumbing behind
the interactions online between people and helping them map to the real
world. It’s clear that people love interacting with each other on Web
sites. And it’s clear that Facebook has been able to get third parties to
build applications on their platform that leverage you having your friends
sort of seeing what you’re doing. And it’s clear also that they can then
take that — if you saw what they did with CNN around the elections, and
then you can comment and your friends can see you comment, you know, what’s
going on during the election.

That’s all — it’s sort of really fascinating. What’s unclear is
whether it can really become profitable over the long run. Because
Facebook has these massive expenses, and the revenues are growing rapidly,
but it’s unclear if in the long run, they can make that vastly profitable
like Google has.

CHARLIE ROSE: What about the Kindle space?

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: The ebook reader space is very interesting, and I
wouldn’t expect Apple to stay out of it for much longer, to be honest, but
Amazon has been successful in selling the Kindles. I think they — the
estimates are they might sell a million or so this year. They sell lots of
books on top of it and subscriptions, so it’s a great revenue stream for
them.

I’ve argued that Amazon should not be building a hardware device
specifically. They should be building the software or the device and let
anyone build a Kindle if they want. These are forcing Sony and Barnes &
Noble and Apple and others to come up with their competing sort of closed-
off ebook systems. And so I think that Amazon should really say, look,
we’re going to do the books, we’re going to do the software for the Kindle,
but other people build the hardware.

CHARLIE ROSE: You take care of the hardware. Yes. TechCrunch, thank
you.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Thanks very much.

CHARLIE ROSE: Michael Arrington.

Thank you for joining us. See you next time.

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