Author: Josh Wolford

Whenever a country that has a history of internet censorship gains better access to one of the internet’s most important tools, it’s big news.

And that’s exactly what has happened today. Starting today, Pakistan’s largest provider of cellular services has announced that its prepaid customers can tweet away – for free.

“Data charges for accessing Twitter have been made ZERO for all Mobilink prepaid subscribers. Subscribers don’t require to subscribe to this offer since it is available for all prepaid subscribers by default,” says Mobilink.

That means that users can tweet and retweet all they want without incurring any data charges. This removes one of the impediments from Pakistani Twitter users, who have faced state censorship of Twitter in the past.

#Mobilink prepaid customers can now access #Twitter for free! For details visit goo.gl/HRY15

— Simply Mobilink (@SimplyMobilink) April 2, 2013

Back in May of 2012, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority shut off Twitter access for the entire country for approximately 8 hours following the circulation of content deemed blasphemous on the network. Some speculated that the move had less to do with the specific content and more to do with a simple test as to whether a state-wide blockage was feasible.

As far as the rest of the internet goes, the Pakistani government has a history of censorship in the areas of so-called blasphemy and pornography. Recently, that censorship has moved to content that falls in the realm of political speech. In a country with this track record, free access to Twitter is a significant opportunity for its people – considering access remains open.

There are some caveats to the deal. Mainly, tweets must be sent via mobile.twitter.com – not Twitter’s native apps.

Also:

“[G]oing on external links will result in data charging. Whenever a subscriber clicks on an external link, he will be shown a notification indicating that standard data charges apply to view the link. External link will be opened after subscriber’s consent only.”

But for the purposes of simply communicating (being that all-important amateur reporter), this is a great thing for Pakistani tweeters.

If there are two things that my future children will be acquainted with at an early age, its Little Golden Books and Bioshock.

One artist has put the two together (along with Portal and Skyrim) to create some killer mashups.

“As the sun sets on this current generation of video games, I’ve been thinking about some of the classic games that people will still (hopefully) point to years from now and hold them up as games that made a difference, and possibly, for some child out there, Portal or Skyrim will be a memory from their early childhood,” says the artist, Joey Spiotto.

Right on. Hopefully, my kids will sleep with a Mr. Bubbles. Maybe even a Dovahkiin doll. Maybe, if I have a daughter, she can don the orange pants and white tank-top of our Portal heroine for Halloween. Those are the kinds of thoughts that occur to me while looking at these wonderful little prints. Bravo.

You can purchase the 3-print set for $50 over on Etsy.

[Joebot via Kotaku]

In a move that should surprise absolutely nobody, HBO has officially announced that the hit fantasy series Game of Thrones will be back for a 4th season. Congratulations, this means that you can keep torrenting the latest from the realm well into 2014.

“#GameofThrones is renewed for a fourth season. RT & share this update with your friends across the realm,” tweeted HBO’s official Game of Thrones Twitter account this afternoon.

Before today, there was technically a doubt as to whether or not HBO would pick up the show for another season. Technically. The show has been a huge success for HBO, and is one of the network’s most-watched shows (along with True Blood).

#GameofThrones is renewed for a fourth season. RT & share this update with your friends across the realm. twitpic.com/cgh7ze

— Game Of Thrones(@GameOfThrones) April 2, 2013

4.4 million viewers tuned in for Sunday night’s season 3 opener, which is a couple hundred thousand more than tuned in for the season 2 finale – and even more than watched the season 2 opener.

But that 4.4 million number isn’t really representative of everyone who has watched the Game of Thrones premiere in the past few days.

Today we learned that the season 3 premiere broke BitTorrent records. In just a few hours after the first torrent of the show was uploaded, 163,088 people were sharing the single torrent – 110,303 actively sharing and 52,786 still downloading. That broke the previous record of 144,663 peers on a single torrent set after a Heroes season premiere. TorrentFreak estimated that over 1 million people had already downloaded the season 3 premiere. So your 4.4 million is looking more like 5.5 million and maybe even more who have actually watched the show since Sunday.

With numbers like this, Game of Thrones is well on its way to reclaiming the distinction of the most pirated show around – an honor the show took in 2012.

And some at HBO couldn’t really care less. HBO programming head Michael Lombardo recently said that Game of Thrones piracy is really more a compliment than a threat, and that it surely didn’t hurt DVD sales. He made a point to say that HBO still doesn’t support piracy of its content (obviously), but that they “haven’t sent out the Game of Thrones police.”

Ronan the sea lion knows how to keep a beat. Just turn on some disco or some late 90s Backstreet Boys, and she’ll nod her head and keep time. Incredible.

Here’s what the University of California Santa Cruz’s Pinniped Lab had to say about Ronan:

One of our resident sea lions, Ronan, is the first non-human mammal shown able to find and keep the beat with musical stimuli. This challenges earlier evidence from humans and parrots suggesting that complex vocal mimicry is a necessary precondition for flexible rhythmic entrainment.

All I know is that she’s a much better dancer than I am.

If you have room in your budget and are looking to add another streaming service to your options, Warner Archive Instant has launched out of beta and is offering a two week free trial.

Warner Archive Instant is a much more specialized streaming service than the likes of Netflix or Amazon Prime – so much so that’s it’s hard to really call them competitors. Warner Archive Instant offers hundreds of classic and often rare films and TV shows from Warner Bros., MGM, RKO, New Line, Monogram, Allied Artists, Lorimar and more.

The content ranges from the 1920s to a few selections from the 90s. Everything has been upconverted, and you can stream many titles in 1080p HD via Roku.

Some of the most popular selections currently available on the service include classic films A Face in the Crowd and The Prince and the Showgirl, as well as TV shows like Adventures of Superman and 77 Sunset Strip.

They say that new selections will be regularly added to the catalog.

The price per month, once the free trial expires, is a competitive $9.99. As of right now, there are only two way to stream Warner Archive Instant – on your computer via Silverlight or on your Roku device. Warner Archive says that they are currently working on adding more devices.

Like I said before, I don’t really see this new service as a true competitor to wider-reaching streaming services – its content selection is simply too narrow as of right now. But for fans of this type of classic and rare content, it looks like it’s definitely worth a look.

As expected, President Obama has officially announced a bold new brain-mapping project that will attempt to do for the human brain what the Human Genome Project did for human genetics.

The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) project “promises to accelerate the invention of new technologies that will help researchers produce real-time pictures of complex neural circuits and visualize the rapid-fire interactions of cells that occur at the speed of thought.”

In a post on the White House blog, Director of the National Institutes of Health Dr. Francis Collins and Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Dr. Arati Prabhakar say the project will help scientists better understand the human mind and that could lead to breakthroughs in the prevention and treatment of many brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, and epilepsy.

The President calls the project ambitious, but achievable.

BRAIN will be supported by $100 million in governmental funding (per Obama’s 2014 Fiscal Year budget) – coming from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). It’s also getting a good chunk of private funding, from sources like the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Kavli Foundation, who have pledged an annual spend of $60 million, $30 million, and $4 million, respectively.

“Like sequencing the human genome, President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative provides an opportunity to rally innovative capacities in every corner of the Nation and leverage the diverse skills, tools, and resources from a variety of sectors to have a lasting positive impact on lives, the economy, and our national security,” says the White House.

If you still want to experience the superb new drama House of Cards but aren’t a Netflix subscriber, you’ll have to wait until the summer.

A little over four months after it premiered as a Netflix exclusive, the Kevin Spacey-led David Fincher-produced policial series will get a physical release.

Amazon is now listing the complete first season on both DVD and Blu-ray.

You can snag the Blu-ray set on Amazon for $52.99 and the DVD set will run you $44.99. Both the DVD and Blu-ray sets will launch on June 11th, coming to you from Sony Pictures.

Back in 2011, Sony Pictures Television signed on to handle the distribution of the show once Netflix’s streaming window ended.

Just a couple of weeks after Netflix released all 13 episodes of season 1 to a hungry subscriber base, House of Cards became the most-watched thing on the entire streaming service. Shortly after that, the show topped IMDb’s list for the most popular show in the world. After about three weeks, we learned that around 3 million Netflix subscribers had streamed at least one episode of the show.

[via Engadget]

Last month, online comedy site Funny or Die announced that they had already made their own Steve Jobs biopic and were planning on launching it on April 15th.

The film, called iSteve, is set to run over an hour – much longer than most Funny or Die projects. The film stars Justin Long as Jobs (Dodgeball, Accepted, Waiting, and the “Mac” in those old PC vs Mac Apple ads). Lost‘s Jorge Garcia stars as Steve Wozniak.

Today, Funny or Die has dropped the official teaser trailer – and it doesn’t seem all that funny. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course. Just, unexpected.

iSteve will be the first of three noteworthy Steve Jobs biopics to land, premiering on April 15th. Jobs (formerly titled jOBS), or the Ashton Kutcher one, was originally slated for an April 19th release – but was recently pushed back for additional marketing. Then there’s the biggest-budget Steve Jobs biopic, Sony’s still untitled project based on Walter Isaacson’s bestselling autobiography Steve Jobs. That’s currently being penned by The Social Network and The West Wing‘s Aaron Sorkin.

A U.S. District Court Judge has ruled that a lawsuit between Facebook and Timelines.com will in fact go to trial, after denying Facebook’s notion that the trademark-infringement lawsuit should be killed due to overly-generic trademarks.

Back in October of 2011, fresh off of unveiling the new Timeline profiles at the f8 conference, Facebook was sued by Timelines.com – a site that lets users create chronological historical records. The site, which launched in 2009, claimed that Facebook was infringing on their trademark with their new “Timeline” feature.

A few months later, Facebook countersued. They claimed that the term “timeline” is generic, citing the fact that a Google search of the term yields nearly 200 million results.

“Given the generic or at least merely descriptive nature of the term ‘timeline’ when used to identify chronologies of events and related information (or tools for their creation), as well as the prior and widespread use of the term by third parties, Counterdefendant does not own exclusive rights in the term ‘timelines’ as used in connection with timeline creation and collection services,” said Facebook.

Now, a Judge has ruled that the trial must go on, saying that Facebook has “failed to demonstrate, as a matter of law, that the marks are generic.”

He claims that Timelines.com has “millions of dollars invested in its business and more than a thousand active users,” and that it’s reasonable to believe that “timelines” has its own specific meaning to Timelines.com users.

A couple of months ago, Facebook updated investors on the situation, saying:

“We believe the claims made by the Timelines plaintiffs are without merit, and we intend to continue to defend ourselves vigorously. Although the outcome of litigation is inherently uncertain, we do not believe the possibility of loss…is probable.”

The trial is set to kick off April 22nd.

[Above image is Timelines.com’s Facebook Timeline]

Considering it was the most pirated show of 2012, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the new season premiere of Game of Thrones was downloaded quite a bit this weekend.

But the sheer volume it pretty staggering – in fact, it broke records.

TorrentFreak has the numbers: In just a few hours after the first torrent of the show was uploaded, 163,088 people were sharing the single torrent. That broke down to 110,303 actively sharing and 52,786 still downloading.

That’s a record in the world of BitTorrent tracking – the largest previous swarm belonging to a season premiere of Heroes with 144,663 peers.

If you take into account all of the torrents, TorrentFreak reports that estimates put the total number of Game of Thrones season 3 premiere downloads at over a million. That’s a performance that even a hard-to-satisfy Lannister patriarch can be proud of.

If you break down the numbers, the majority of sharers came from the United States (12.9%), barely topping the U.K., who took 11.5% of the pie. Australia came in third with 9,9% of the total downloaders.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons that so many people decided to torrent the show. It has a huge following, first and foremost. HBO’s international release delays don’t help either. Plus, there’s a large contingent in the U.S. (and elsewhere) that simply don’t subscribe to HBO and can’t get HBO GO because they don’t have cable. Many of these people would pay for a standalone HBO streaming service, but HBO is yet to offer that outside a few Scandinavian countries (although the prospects have gotten a bit better as of late).

But according to one HBO exec, this piracy is more of a compliment and less of a problem.

“I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts,” HBO programming head Michael Lombardo recently told EW. “The demand is there. And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network.”

If you’re like me, you’ll never get tired of idiot criminals doing idiotic things. This bag thief definitely fits the bill, running through a glass door at full speed in his attempt to flee the scene.

According to The Telegraph, what you’re seeing is from Perth, Australia. Our thief was able to make an escape, even after flying through the glass at full speed. According to reports, he had a getaway driver waiting nearby in a stolen car.

Police have apparently released the video in the hopes of identifying the man.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is facing some serious allegations made in a Facebook post.

Jenn Allen, founder and CEO of RTist.com, claims in a recent post that Arrington was physically and emotionally abusive in a past relationship. She also claims that he threatened to murder her if she told anyone about the abuse.

You can read the entire post below:

Last post on someone i’m completely over. I’ve never been lonelier in my entire life. To all my friends who loved me for who I am – thank you. Power hungry people, I loved Michael Arrington for 8+ years starting when i implemented Eurekster search at the time on Techcrunch in 2006 and throughout the years i didn’t know he cheated on me multiple times, then tells people it was me immediately after he did it. It hurts when you love someone borderline and they can’t feel anything at all for you, and threaten to murder you if you told anyone about the physical abuse – all for keeping his reputation. The emotional abuse was equally bad. On a positive note, it can’t get any worse than this and I can’t get myself of this bed.

Gawker, who first spotted the post, was able to confirm that the two did in fact date at some point – specifically in 2006. Allen’s Facebook post indicates that the relationship lasted for “8+” years. There are plenty of photos of the two together back around 2006 – you can check them out on Flickr. So it doesn’t appear that the relationship is in question – but these are some pretty serious allegations for a public figure.

Obviously, this is a developing story.

[Image of Allen via Facebook]

In one of my favorite internet-related April Fools jokes of the day, SoundCloud has just introduced the Dropometer (trademarked, of course).

The Dropometer is simple, but oh so very useful. All it does is tell you the exact point in a dubstep song at which you can expect the drop.

“The drop in a track can be unpredictable and surprising. Some of you have even told us that you find it unsettling, not knowing when to expect that sense of overwhelming euphoria. Inspired by your feedback, we’ve invented the Dropometer. Using a unique algorithm (patent pending), the Dropometer is designed to help you prepare yourself for the big moment, whether that means getting in the mental space where you can really break it down, or fixing yourself a fortifying snack,” says SoundCloud.

While the Dropometer was created with dubstep in mind, you can find it on plenty of other songs from other styles of music. But you shouldn’t expect the “drop” in that Beatles song to blow your mind.

Some people over on the SoundCloud blog are kind of missing the point.

“I really don’t see the point of this…where’s the fun in ruining the surprise of a drop? writes one angry commenter.

“This is probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. Ever. Just to be clear, you guys think we’re complete retards right? That’s the only way something like this can be even thought of,” says another.

It looks like some SoundCloud users forgot to check the date.

[Photo via Sharif Sharifi, Flickr]

Last month, we told you that YouTube co-founder and former CEO Chad Hurley was cooking up a new video site.

Today, Hurley dropped the first piece of the puzzle in a tweet first spotted by The Verge. The site is called MixBit, and it proclaims that “the future of video is launching soon.”

“YouTube is shutting down. Instead of sitting around, we thought you’d want a new site to not only watch cat videos, but create them…together!” says the site’s landing page. Here, they are referencing today’s YouTube April Fools joke. The prank has Google announcing a shut down of YouTube, so that they can finally select a winner. Yep, that’s all YouTube ever was – one giant contest.

Since @youtube is ending, we’re launching a new video site… Welcome to MixBit.com! @mixbitapp This time it’s not a contest!

— Chad Hurley (@Chad_Hurley) April 1, 2013

That little blip also teases the collaborative focus of MixBit. We don’t know a lot about how the new video site will work, but we do have a general outline thanks to Hurley’s remarks back in March.

He said that MixBit would be ““primarily video-based,” with “flexibility for people to work together and create content.”

Hurley also said that he wasn’t looking to kill YouTube and that “there’s always going to be a place for YouTube.” MixBit will just focus on being a “platform better suited for collaboration.”

On April 2nd, Google is celebrating naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian with a beautiful Doodle featuring various forms of small wildlife – butterflies, caterpillars, a lizard, and more.

German-born Maria Sibylla Merian is known for both her plant and animal illustrations. As a botanic artist, Merian published three collections of plant engraving from 1675 to 1680. Shortly after that, Merian began to study insects. She is famous for her metamorphosis depictions where all stages of the insect’s life were depicted on the same page.

Closely studying insects wasn’t too common in her time, and her depictions of metamorphosis lead some to categorize her as an important figure in entomology.

In her time, Merian chronicled the metamorphosis of nearly 200 different species.

This painting, showing the metamorphosis of Thysania agrippina, was completed in 1705:

Merian also drew other creatures such as snakes, iguanas, spiders, and frogs – and these drawings are still highly collectible.

She died in 1717 after suffering a stroke a couple of years earlier. Erucarum Ortus Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis, a collection of her work, was published later by her daughter. Today’s Google Doodle celebrates her 366th birthday.

HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones is one of the most downloaded shows on television. By some accounts, it’s the most pirated show around.

And apparently, not everyone at HBO thinks that this is completely terrible.

HBO programming head Michael Lombardo recently spoke with Entertainment Weekly, and referred to the rampant Game of Thrones piracy as a “compliment of sorts.” Also, it’s not really hurting DVD sales.

“I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts,” Lombardo told EW. “The demand is there. And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network.”

Lombardo also confirmed that per season, Game of Thrones is HBO’s #1 money machine.

Delving deeper in to the issue of piracy, Lombardo cited a concern that doesn’t have anything to do with HBO’s bottom line. He worried that viewers who download the show may be seeing an inferior product.

“One of my worries is about the copies [downloaders are] seeing. The production values of this show are so incredible. So I’m hoping that in the purloined different generation of cuts that the show is holding up.”

This isn’t HBO condoning the piracy of one of its most-popular shows. He make a point to remind us that HBO still attempts to stop piracy when it can. But, they “haven’t sent out the Game of Thrones police.”

Lombardo isn’t the first person associated with HBO to talk about piracy in this manner. Last month, frequent HBO director David Petrarca (GoT, Big Love, True Blood) hinted that shows like Game of Thrones rely on “cultural buzz,” and that downloading is part of that.

He quickly backtracked those comments, saying that Game of Thrones piracy was only a signifier of its popularity, not a cause of it.

HBO had this to say in the wake of that:

“Game of Thrones is sold worldwide, available legally on a large variety of viewing platforms and is one of HBO’s most popular series. With that kind of success comes a great amount of social media chatter, so can’t say we see an upside to illegal downloads.”

While we’re not seeing any monumental shift in the way one of the top cable content providers around views piracy, we are seeing a shift in how some people associated with that content think about it. Of course, if you’re serious about combatting piracy, ease of access to content usually helps – and this is something that HBO has been accused of failing on recently. Last month, HBO CEO Richard Plepler hinted that just maybe, HBO may offer HBO GO apart from cable subscriptions – possibly as a bundle with an ISP.

If there’s one thing that the internet lacks, it’s quality handwritten content. For decades, computers have been slowly but surely killing off the need for actually writing anything down. Lucky for us, Wolfram Alpha is here to bring a little bit of handwritten flair to the web.

Today, Wolfram Alpha is introducing the Wolfram Alpha Handwritten Knowledge Engine, which they describe as a “more personal way of delivering computed answers.”

Ok, it’s an April Fools’ joke. But it’s a clever one.

According to a blog post, each of your queries will be transcribed and illustrated by a real live human!

“We had a thought not long ago that it would be nice to get you (the internet) a gift. One of those “just because” things to spread a bit of happiness around the world. Conventional wisdom holds that the best gifts are handmade. But making gifts by hand for over 2.2 billion people? It was a daunting challenge,” says Wolfram Alpha.

But they pulled it off, and are now offering “artisanal answers.”

Like this important question about whether or not they are, in fact, Skynet.

Even mathematical computations get the handwritten treatment.

For more April Fools’ Day fun, check here.

Attention SEOs: Bing is finally rewarding you for all your hard work. Starting today, new Bing SEO tags let you tell Bing exactly where your page should rank. Easy as that.

The new SEO tags cut out the middleman and let you insert a couple of tags into your page code that direct Bing as to where to place you on results pages. There are two new tags, “set to position” and “must be before.”

<link rel=”SEO” query=”weather” set_to_position=”2″ />

<link rel=”SEO” must_be_before=”*.mycompetitor.com/*” />

Now you can make sure that your page always ranks on spot ahead of your competitor’s page. It’s so easy!

Along the way, some SEOs abused the systems to try to game the results. Back and forth for years, the engines and so-called “black hat” SEOs have waged a behind-the-scenes battle to position content on the Search Results pages. It’s pretty easy for the engine to win this battle in the long run, though, as we own the pages.

As time has progressed, we’ve been able to tackle spamming issues at many levels. In most cases today, most websites follow the known best practices and simply do the right thing. They’re too busy running a business to try trickery to rank better, trusting we will sort the rankings properly. And now it’s time to reward that trust and your hard work.

For a year, you’ll only be able to use one “must_be_before” tag, so choose wisely. Bing says that next April 1st, they’ll give you 50!

“To ensure compliance with this request, should you insert more than one “must_be_before” tag this year, we’ll simply contact your host and arrange for the server hosting your site to be put into a low-earth orbit for the following 365 days.”

Harsh.

For more April Fools’ Day prank fun, check here.

It’s kind of become a tradition as of late that every year, on April Fools’ Day, tech companies try to one-up each other on who can announce the craziest product and maybe catch some unsuspecting blog readers off guard. This year, Twitter’s entry into the April Fools’ prank pool is simply terrifying.

Today, Twitter has “announced” Twttr, the new no-vowel Twitter service that will now become the default service for all users.

If you want your vowels back, you’re going to have to pay $5 a month.

“We’re doing this because we believe that by eliminating vowels, we’ll encourage a more efficient and “dense” form of communication. We also see an opportunity to diversify our revenue stream,” says Twitter.

Don’t worry – you still get the letter “y.”

“Because our users come first, we believe that ‘Y’ should always be free to everyone — today and forever. You’ll notice in the Twttr example above, the ‘y’ is clearly visible. Also, the vowels in URLs will be also be free for everyone, forever. You can also Tweet in non-Latin characters based languages, like Japanese, Chinese, Arabic or Korean. These languages will remain unaffected by our service change.”

Twyttyr? Why byy vywyls whyn yyy gyt “Y” fyr fryy? Syckyrs! #nvwls

— Joan Rivers (@Joan_Rivers) April 1, 2013

Yikes. Twitter is already a minefield when it comes to navigating grammar – forcing 140 characters makes even the best of us resort to devious tactics. But no vowels? The mere thought is nightmare-inducing.

Alongside the no-vowel prank, Twitter also says that they’ve expanded Promoted Tweets to 141 characters, for an additional fee. One extra character is it, though. Don’t try to buy two.

Good thing this one is only a joke. If you want to get in an the fun, write your no-vowel tweets and include the hashtag #nvwls. Or, if you’ve decided to pay the fee to get your vowels back, you can tweet using the #icanhasvowels hashtag.

On Thursday Amazon announced its acquisition of Goodreads, the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations.

At its core, Goodreads functioned as a social network for ardent readers. With this acquisition, Amazon has snatched up an independent network that has the ability to shape reader perceptions on hundreds of millions of books – and was, in essence, their largest competitor when it comes to book reviews. Reports indicate that Amazon paid about $150 million for Goodreads.

The Authors Guild isn’t too happy about the move, calling it a “devastating act of vertical integration.”

One example should make it clear how formidable this combination is. For “Animals Make Us Human” by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Amazon has 123 customer reviews, and B&N has about 40 (they report 150, but that figure includes ratings as well as reviews). Goodreads swamps these figures, with 469 reviews and 2,266 ratings for the book.

As an independent platform, Goodreads, with its 16 million members, posed a serious competitive threat to Amazon. No more.

“Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads is a textbook example of how modern Internet monopolies can be built,” said Scott Turow, Authors Guild president. “The key is to eliminate or absorb competitors before they pose a serious threat. With its 16 million subscribers, Goodreads could easily have become a competing on-line bookseller, or played a role in directing buyers to a site other than Amazon. Instead, Amazon has scuttled that potential and also squelched what was fast becoming the go-to venue for on-line reviews, attracting far more attention than Amazon for those seeking independent assessment and discussion of books. As those in advertising have long known, the key to driving sales is controlling information.”

Goodreads launched in 2007 and since then has built up a user base of 16 million members, who have added 525 million books and 23 million reviews. The Authors Guild warns that with this acquisition, Amazon’s garden walls are about to grow much higher.

[via PaidContent]