Author: Liz Gannes

Google, in response to what it called “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure” aimed at penetrating the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, said today it will cease censoring results on Google.cn. The move will likely trigger Google to be blocked in China, and the company to shut down its offices there.

Gmail and Google search are not the same product, so the fact that Google has connected them signals a broader distrust of the Chinese government and the way it controls Internet access for those who have not figured out how to punch through the Great Firewall. A Google blog post authored by David Drummond, SVP of corporate development and the company’s chief legal officer, refers to “these attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered.”

Drummond said that at least 20 other companies were targeted in the attacks, and that the Chinese human rights activists’ accounts were being “routinely accessed” through phishing and malware. He doesn’t state whether Google knows who the attackers were.

To date, Google is the only foreign Internet company that has been able to build its own market share in China; by contrast, Yahoo, eBay and MySpace fell apart, and Facebook is blocked. To operate within China a company must get a license, store its servers there and comply with censors, something Google began doing in 2006. At the time, it justified the move by saying it was expanding access to information to more users.

As of December, Google had 17 percent search market share in China, compared to 77 percent for Baidu, according to the Chinese search company.

Drummond writes today that:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Google also took pains to say that it has already improved its security and that it believes the attacks had nothing to do with the safety of cloud computing. 

Image by Flickr user googlisti.

After contributing Thrift (scalable cross-language services development), Hive (data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Apache Hadoop) and Cassandra (inbox search, but now used more broadly) to the Apache Software Foundation, Facebook is today joining the foundation as a “Gold” sponsor.

That’s only a $40,000-a-year commitment, but it fits into a broader effort to open source Facebook’s infrastructure and developer tools, according to David Recordon, senior open programs manager at the social networking site (who also spends half his time on open standards efforts for the company).

Facebook owes a lot of its existence, from way back in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room development days, to open-source software such as Linux, Apache, memcached, MySQL and PHP, said Recordon. The company now has originated and contributed to more than 20 open-source projects, with companies such as CBS, Digg, hi5, last.fm, Rackspace and Twitter making use of them and/or continuing their development.

These technologies haven’t been cheap for Facebook to develop, and open sourcing them should make it easier for up-and-comers to scale up to the company’s size and compete with it. Recordon said Facebook asks itself when making the decision to open source, “Is it really core to business or something that really just helps Facebook scale, or helps us extend the site?”

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

Though Google’s social strategy has been catch-up at best to date, the company does have a master plan — at least according to engineering director David Glazer, whom I spoke with last week at Google HQ. He said across a variety of products, Google wants to make it valuable and easy to harness social information.

In 2010, Google plans to expose and elicit more of the social network built into the tools that many of us already use — Gmail, Google Talk, etc. If you use Google products, the company already knows who your most important contacts are, what your core interests are, and where your default locations are. Glazer said to expect many product and feature launches that start to connect that information in useful ways.

“Everything is better when it knows who I am,” said Glazer, who is responsible for working on developer platforms that include social aspects — a more distributed role than he had at Google in the past, Glazer said, when he was working on social exclusively. That’s an improvement, he said, since social products are no longer siloed within the company.

What does “social” mean to Google? “Who I am, who do I know, what do I do,” said Glazer.

One of the early examples of this approach is Google Social Search, launched as a labs product last October. When a user opts into the feature, you see on the search results page (way way down at the bottom) results from people in what Google considers your “social circle.” That’s people you’re connected to on services you’ve listed publicly, like Twitter and FriendFeed; people in your Gmail or Google Talk chat list; and people you’ve placed in contact groups on Gmail.

Another example of a social layer is Google Latitude, where you can see your participating friends’ location on a real-time map.

The other main pillar of Google’s social strategy is to support interoperable, open community-driven standards. So while OpenSocial and Friend Connect may not be beating out their rivals Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect, Glazer can say it’s all part of the master plan — to have a “distributed, open social ubiquitous web,” not to be the one company who owns people’s online identities. To that end, Google has this month brought on strategists Joseph Smarr and Chris Messina, both widely known for their advocacy of the open social web.

Glazer reeled off a family of Google-supported technical standards that “are just about done”: OpenID, OAuth, OAuth WRAP, PoCo (portable contacts), Activity Streams, OpenSocial for Gadgets, OpenSocial wire protocols, PubSubHubBub, Salmon (to “let comments swim upstream”), WebFinger (see a person’s public feed of information) and the Social Graph API.

That’s a pretty geeky and theoretical list, and one that will surely take more than a year to permeate the experiences of normal web users. It’ll be good to see when Google drops down into the present day to make the product launches Glazer is promising. It’s one thing to take the long view on social, but the present-day web is moving more quickly than that.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Real-time social applications for the enterprise have real products and real customers and about 18-24 months of lead time, but 2010 is the year that startups making such apps will be faced down by the likes of tech giants such as Microsoft, IBM and Salesforce.com. A new report from GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d) by analyst Sameer Patel sets the stage for the impending battle for enterprise hearts and minds.

In 2010, expect to see the concept of the real time enterprise ascend the hype cycle. Enterprises will begin to analyze how real-time access can help discrete business processes such as customer interaction, sales intelligence, lead generation, partner interaction and employee project collaboration, and they’ll begin to evaluate the switching cost of moving their systems and data to platforms that have real-time as part of their solution sets. Customers and prospects are interacting with each other and with enterprises in real-time making it imperative for the enterprise to structure its own internal and external processes to respond to customers as fast as possible. Expect this shift to be one of the primary drivers for considering a real-time architecture.

But as Patel notes, the real-time enterprise isn’t a foregone conclusion. Key stumbling blocks are integration with other enterprise systems, information overload, existing enterprise norms and portability. While startups such as Yammer, Socialcast,* Jive Software, Telligent Systems, NewsGator and Socialtext are off to a promising start, Patel sees Microsoft and IBM being most likely to capitalize on their existing enterprise relationships with the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 and subscription-based pricing for Lotus Connections, respectively.

*Disclosure: Socialcast is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Palm is applying for a U.S. patent centered around the concept of notifying a mobile device based on the proximity of another one. Such a feature could come in handy when you happen to be within range of a friend and you don’t know it. The patent was filed in March 2009, but just recently published online (found via GoRumors).

Meanwhile, Apple is applying for a patent on a similar concept: “Geographic location data is sent from a first device to a second device with a modified message to signal the presence of geographic location data associated with the message,” according to the filing made in June 2008.

It’s funny that both Apple and Palm (who share a love for rolling in the IP mud) think they can patent this concept — it seems like a fairly natural extension of location awareness, and it’s something companies have been trying to do for years. Google, for instance, has a beta feature of its Latitude product that alerts you when your friends are nearby. Maybe the only reason the idea seems novel is because none of these products have gone mainstream yet. But that doesn’t mean additional companies aren’t still setting out with the same concept. For instance, we received this pitch yesterday:

MOSION (pronounced [moh-shuh n] is the latest in real time location based social network for the smartphone. While many social networks aim to connect you with your friends, what about the people you do not know? Yes, those sitting across from you at this very moment!

Earthquakes are the perfect Twitter phenomenon. You feel something weird, you want to share it and confirm it with the world. That’s what happened yesterday in the San Francisco Bay Area, when we experienced a 4.1 quake centered near Milpitas.

It’s such a canonical example that Twitter CEO Evan Williams used it in a recent blog post about Twitter improving its location integration. “As a dramatic example, twittering ‘Earthquake!’ alone is not as informative as ‘Earthquake!’ coupled with your current location.”

The forward-thinking scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey want to figure out what they can do with this user-contributed data, and to that end have started the Twitter Earthquake Detection Program using funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (found via Ecopolitology via The Business Insider). They look for earthquake-related keywords and map them to locations, filtering out tweets about Dairy Queen’s Earthquake brownie desserts, for example.

Yesterday’s 4.1 quake produced 296 quake-related tweets per minute, which is comparatively very high — but then, the Bay Area is also an epicenter of Twitter use.

Clearly, the USGS already has tools for predicting and measuring earthquakes, and Twitter isn’t going to improve them (unless perhaps they start monitoring tweets about dogs acting funny). Twitter is most helpful in less populated areas, according to USGS Seismologist Paul Earle, which often also have fewer measurement instruments, and data about earthquakes takes longer for scientists to verify and publish. The data will also improve dramatically as Twitter users start sharing their location more specifically through tools like Twitter’s geo-tagging API, as opposed to just their home city in their profile.

That’s when this project could be really useful — collecting precisely located first-person accounts (and potentially even photos and videos as well, especially for larger quakes).

Twitter didn’t disclose the terms of its acquisition of geo platform Mixer Labs in December, but some of the details have since emerged. Today paidContent reports on a new SEC filing that says Twitter issued $5.17 million worth of common stock and Series E preferred stock alongside an acquisition — and connects the dots that it was probably for Mixer Labs. There may also have been cash or additional terms in the transaction that weren’t disclosed in the filing.

We also reported earlier this week that Mixer Labs had raised funding from Sequoia Capital, something the startup hadn’t previously disclosed.

Mixer Labs, which Twitter said it bought to help it understand the local context of tweets, is still offering its GeoAPI keys as “a service from Twitter,” but today it appears that Mixer’s original product, local guide TownMe, has been taken offline.

In 2010, Facebook is setting out to structure a social layer of the web, indexing web pages and objects by harnessing what its users say about them, including whether those users like them or not, and what they tag within them.

Already, Facebook Connect offers authentication services for more than 80,000 web sites, soon to include the mega-portal Yahoo, in order to inject them with its users’ social relationships and sharing. As a broad trend, it’s clear at this point that nearly everything — even credit card transactions — can be made social.

Om and I had the chance to spend some time at Facebook this week and hear a bit more about where the company is headed this year. Here’s my analysis of what they told us.

People Are the Web

Facebook’s core asset is its social graph — a diagram of people and their connections. Now that it’s successfully mapped people to one another, it wants to map their connections to the rest of the web and by extension, the rest of the world.

The goal in doing so, as the folks at the company told us over and over again, is to build an understanding of Facebook users’ identity — what they like, what they associate themselves with, who they are. The corollary of making something social is making it personalized.

Privacy concerns notwithstanding, this wealth of information and customization can be put to a greater good. As Marc Davis, former chief scientist of Yahoo Mobile and founder of Invention Arts, said at a recent GigaOM bunker series event (see related GigaOM Pro write-up, subscription required): “Human beings understand context from their relationships, but computers do not, so if we can use metadata to help computers understand where, when and how the metadata was created, we build better context for data.” That’s what Facebook is after. But in order to do so, the company needs to look beyond the confines of its own web service. And it is.

Facebook.com: Means To an End

Facebook.com is just a web site, or as platform engineering head Mike Vernal described it, “info aggregation with a great photos app.” Now the company wants to blur the barriers between it and the rest of the web. Already, the site’s “Fan Box” widget — which allows users to become fans of a company or person from their web page — gets 15 billion impressions per month. “We want these actions to become possible wherever they’re most natural,” said Vernal. Soon, using the company’s announced open graph API, users will be able to become a fan of any page on the Internet. The API essentially turns a regular web page into a Facebook page, giving it the ability to collect fans, publish stories to their Facebook stream, and appear in the social networking site’s search results.

That little action could initiate a huge shift. On the one hand, becoming a fan of a web page rather than a Facebook page gives power back to sites so they can host their own experiences instead of sending people to someone else’s URL (aka facebook.com/absolut). On the other, it gives Facebook an immense amount of information about what people like, and could allow the company to reorganize the web via a sort of next generation of Google PageRank — call it “FriendRank.” Facebook will have a better understanding of what web pages are relevant and interesting because it knows how many people, and specifically people you know, are fans of it.

Though Facebook fan pages on the surface seem like a response to Twitter — allowing celebrities to collect fans who are not actually their real-world friends — they’re bigger than that. Facebook has trained 350 million users to publicly post personal endorsements. In other words, it has an army of volunteers ready to organize the web on its behalf.

In Google’s Face

Now, Facebook is clearly poking Google. Where Google is about the wisdom of crowds, Facebook is about the wisdom of friends, said Elliot Schrage, VP of global communications, marketing and public policy — who formerly held a similar role at the search giant.

As Om wrote last year, this is actually a significant threat to Google (“Why Google Should Fear the Social Web,” subscription required):

In our modern, highly networked lives it is getting increasingly difficult to find relevant information on the web, quickly. The 10 blue links paradigm, popularized by Google, appears to be reaching its limits. While this seek-search-and-consume methodology has become part of our basic Internet behavior and turned Google into a gazillion-dollar company, it may be time for us to look for alternatives.

And this isn’t just about “fanning.” Besides being a fan of a brand or friends with a person, a third kind of Facebook relationship is that of being connected to a photo, post or video because someone else tagged you in it. That’s another thing Facebook wants to extend beyond its site. For instance, said Vernal, if you were tagged in a photo on Flickr, Facebook would bring that photo into its own list of photos of you.

So can Facebook achieve this vision? Not in a single year. And probably not without becoming more open (on that front, Om and I also visited with Facebook’s Senior Open Programs Manager David Recordon, but that’s a whole ‘nother story). But if the web is going to become people-powered, Facebook is the company that’s going to do it.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Gauldo.

Chris Messina, self-titled “open web advocate,” will take that official title at Google starting Monday, he announced today on his blog. He joins Joseph Smarr, the former CTO of Plaxo, who will also start working for Google later this month. Smarr and Messina are both board members of the OpenID Foundation. The two have been frequent collaborators on open web projects, and co-host the podcast TheSocialWeb.tv (where Messina also announced the news — embedded below).

Much of Messina’s work will remain outside of Google, though clearly the hope is that he’ll affect the company’s social web products. Messina, who had previously formed Citizen Agency, the consulting firm, and worked with Mozilla, Vidoop and Flock, says he hopes to help create an “OpenID Connect” to compete with Facebook and Twitter Connect. He added via email that he’d like to build out openweb.org as a sort of app store for open web technology that would be a “clearinghouse and promotion factory” for such projects.

Google, which lags far behind the competition on social products, recently announced a public commitment to “openness” that met mixed reviews, seeing as it still holds its search and advertising businesses close to the vest. However, the hiring of Messina and Smarr gives the company more credibility in these areas. Meanwhile, Messina and Smarr get a much bigger stage to try to embed their ideas into products. Messina writes,

I want more success in turning my ideas into tangible outcomes, and in doing so, prove the power that I see in open, interoperable standards that can make the web a richer and more intricately spun space.

Google’s AdSense is brilliant in that it very simply provides relevant contextual ads across millions of web pages. But what if you make that process a little less automated and provide ads that are endorsed by the creators of those web pages? So instead of an algorithmically matched text ad appearing next to a blog post about the same topic, readers see an on-topic product recommendation by a writer they trust. It’s something that could get very messy very fast — and it already has, in the form of outrage over paid tweeting and blog posts with undisclosed sponsorships.

San Francisco-based MyLikes.com is wading into those waters with full awareness of the potential pitfalls, but a hope that it can evade them and in doing so steal AdSense’s $6-$7 billion per year in revenue. The startup comes from two former Googlers, including the former tech lead for AdSense, Arvind Sundararajan. He and wife Bindu Reddy, the former head of product management for Google Apps, have co-founded the company, are its only employees, and have invested into it $200,000 of their own money.

So why not start the same product within Google? “Doing stuff inside the company always takes longer,” Reddy said in a phone interview. And what about taking outside investment? Well, for one, Reddy and Sundararajan didn’t have to — but as she explained, “Getting capital right now would be similar to Google — you’d have to answer to someone.”

In an effort to offer an endorsement service that’s decidedly not scammy, MyLikes started out by building a consumer product, Likaholix (see Om’s write-up from March). “We were afraid that if we started an ad product with no consumer product, people would not be genuine,” said Reddy. Now, the company is extending its network of 30,000 members and 300,000 “likes” as seeds for its sponsorship program.

On the new site, which launches Wednesday morning, each user has a profile, and earns an “influence score” based on their presence on Twitter and their blogs. They can post one ad every two days on their sites, which they write in their own words. The ads either appear in a post that discloses the relationship with the sponsor or in an AdSense-like unit. They receive 20-60 cents per click. MyLikes (which was formerly called Likes.com, but switched names after Like.com complained about its trademark) currently doesn’t take a cut, but will at a later date from for-profit users (users also have the choice of donating their proceeds to charity).

MyLikes and its affiliate ads face competition from the likes of Ad.ly and Sponsored Tweets. Federated Media also does similar work on what it calls “conversational marketing” with larger publishers. My concern would be that as such services become more widespread, lifestyle blogging will be so littered with product placements that it will be polluted and boring. (In some cases, that’s already happening.)

Reddy said that she thinks MyLike’s model of full disclosure (which is what the FTC now requires) and performance-based payments will incentivise effective ads. Plus, bloggers will be limited to one ad every two days.

So if you can only run one ad every two days at a 20-60 cents CPC, is there actually a real business here for bloggers/tweeters, and eventually MyLikes the company? Reddy thinks so, because as compared to an impersonal AdSense placement or a banner, “our ad is going to be better.”

Quora, a new startup from ex-Facebook employees including former CTO Adam D’Angelo, wants to inspire a massive user-created question-and-answer site to compete with Yahoo Answers and Wikipedia. It’s currently in closed beta. We had a chance to talk to co-founder Charlie Cheever (who previously led Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect) in Palo Alto today.

Quora is a very nicely designed site that requires users’ real identities (via their Facebook accounts) to participate, and uses a system of authority (via peer endorsements and personal bios) and voting to inspire good contributions. Once a question is asked and tagged into categories, users with that subject knowledge are alerted to answer it and even revise the question itself for clarity. Users can sign up to follow individual questions, each other and topic areas, and each time they check into the site see the latest updates from each in their feed.

The goal of Quora is not objectivity, said Cheever, but canonical consensus. Quora’s self-defined measure of success will be the number of pages that provide better information than anywhere else on a topic.

In the way that Facebook can be attributed for democratizing the personal web page — which 10 years ago was only available to someone with the chops to put it up — Quora wants to inspire a much broader group of contributors than Wikipedia, said Cheever. At first, it is managing its growth to establish a high standard of contribution. It’s not including any gaming elements, or the concept of a closed (aka satisfactorily answered) question. Everything on the site is very structured — though at the moment it’s somewhat hard to browse.

Along with Wikipedia and Q&A sites, Quora will compete with a range of products trying to provide authoritative or crowdsourced information rather than patching people through to the web to answer their search queries, such as Mahalo, Hunch, Aardvark and Microsoft’s Bing.

Right now Quora is weighted towards information about tech, startups and Palo Alto. It’s rich gossip for a tech journalist — for instance, it was through the site (verified elsewhere) that I learned Mixer Labs, the geo startup recently acquired by Twitter, had been funded by Sequoia Capital. To the extreme, there’s also a page about “How many intra-Facebook marriages have taken place since the company launched?”

However, Cheever described more mainstream (and competitive) uses of Quora such as restaurant and consumer electronics recommendations, as well as even more obscure uses — for instance, he is personally interested in professional players of the video game StarCraft, and asked on Quora “Which non-Koreans have made serious attempts to become professional StarCraft players in the Korean Proleague since 2005?” (At the moment, he’s also provided the site’s only answer to his question.)

With 197 million augmented reality-capable smartphones set to be in the global market by 2012, up from nearly 91 million in 2010, the building blocks are falling into place for people to merge digital information with their view of the physical world. But while we’re just getting to the point that normal users can see the promise of augmented reality for themselves, there’s still a long way to go.

Right now AR is a big load of hype (and why not? it’s super cool), but the market will supposedly be worth anywhere from $350 million to $732 million by 2014, according to projections by ABI Research and Juniper Research, respectively. How do we get there? GigaOM Pro (subscription required) this week has a great report by John du Pre Gauntt on the technical and business challenges and opportunities ahead for consumer AR apps. They include:

Pinpointing Geo: Today’s AR apps depend mostly on location information, but location data is only accurate to 10-20 meters. The most pressing priority, says du Pre Gauntt, is to make geolocation data more granular and optimized. And mobile social networking apps could actually help us get to a mapped globe quicker, writes du Pre Gauntt. “Foursquare and Gowalla have the potential to be foot soldiers for geotagging the world.”

Opening Eyes: The next area of development will be image recognition, something Google is working on with Google Goggles and Nokia with Point and Find. These early systems are often out of their element unless they can depend on scanning formal markers like barcodes. But a barcode experience tends to take the user out of the lens of AR to bring them to a web site or another resource.

The Apple Roadblock: Though AR developers have begged for access, Apple has a lock on the iPhone’s video feed API. As du Pre Gauntt puts it, “Without a public API to access live video in real time from the iPhone’s camera, it is impossible to do effective image analysis of the object in front.” This barrier could foretell an Apple push to innovate image recognition on its own, or it could mean that more open platforms (aka every other smartphone) are able to harness developer enthusiasm to get ahead.

Teaming Up: The hybrid nature of AR means it’s ripe for cooperation. Diving into today’s major AR app categories of navigation, location overlays, geo-information services, and gaming, du Pre Gauntt finds companies like Mobilizy and Lonely Planet, and Layar and Zehnder collaborating on some very cool travel and event apps. But cooperation seems to only make things more complicated; the implementations require both an AR browser and an app or a separately purchased guide.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr wilgengebroed.

Seesmic, in its efforts to be the Grand Central Station for social network updates, has “acq-hired” Ping.fm. Where Seesmic has mostly focused on the ability to consume social web information on various platforms — Android, BlackBerry, web, Windows Silverlight and Adobe Air — Ping.fm supports a variety of posting options — by email, SMS and chat, and to 50 social networks. (Seesmic previously only supported Twitter and Facebook.)

Tulsa, Okla.-based Ping.fm only had two employees, co-founders Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough, who will keep on working on the product for Seesmic. The company had raised angel funding last year from Reid Hoffman and Joi Ito.

Seesmic has “hundreds of thousands” of daily users and more than 3.5 million app downloads to date, said CEO Loic Le Meur. With Ping.fm’s 500,000 registered users and thousands of sign-ups per day, Seesmic expects to have more than 1 million users later this year, Le Meur said. Asked how the acquisition will help Seesmic monetize, Le Meur responded, “Given our funding, we are in no rush to monetize and focus on the market share, but we will start monetizing in 2010 with both nonintrusive advertising and premium services, on the successful Evernote model.”

Seesmic’s previous acquisition, of Twitter client Twhirl, had helped the company gain a user base and add major functionality — before that it had been a video Twitter. The company has raised $12 million from investors including Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners.

Have you noticed that online shopping actually works great lately? The product pictures are appealing and zoom-worthy, the checkout pages don’t lose your credit card info after you accidentally leave out your zip code, the free shipping is doled out generously, and the prices are often discounted.

You’re not alone. In fact, customer satisfaction with the top 40 U.S. online retailers during the holiday season was higher than it ever has been before, according to a newly released survey by ForeSee Results. Amazon set a new high on ForeSee’s index, scoring 87 of 100 (80 is excellence), with Netflix one point behind, and sites for Macy’s, The Gap and Overstock saw their scores jump at least 10 percent. Circuit City and Nieman Marcus had the lowest customer satisfaction, at 73.

Holiday e-commerce sales increased 15.5 percent year-over-year, according to MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse.

Now if they could only get the darn UPS guys to leave my packages in the right place…

Photo by Flickr user Alisdair.

Give, give, give — that’s all I (and other social web users) do. We share a lot of information about ourselves these days, and we get a lot out of that experience (monetarily speaking, the companies that provide the social web environment get even more). But I hardly know what happens to my status updates, comments and photos. Where do they go, how do they get spread, and who has access to them?

I think it’s about time for a personal dashboard to track and view what happens to what we share online. This would have two primary uses: 1) Privacy: I’d have a better idea of what’s publicly known about myself, and 2) Analytics: Like any content publisher, I’d be interested in checking my stats and trends.

Current Examples

There are already some services that give me glimpses into where my data goes and who sees it:

• You can get analytics of who your Twitter followers are and how they respond to your content through services like this one from Ad.ly and PeopleBrowsr.
• Facebook has a somewhat buried privacy feature called “How others see you” that allows you to look at your profile through the eyes (and privacy settings) of any other user.
• LinkedIn has a “Viewers of this profile also viewed…” feature that can get a little creepy, but shows potential overlaps with people who may be in your line of business.
• Bit.ly provides analytics for the shortened URLs it creates, so if you share a Bit.ly link you can find out when, where and how people found it.

Privacy

Web users are becoming more aware of privacy issues, though random conspiracy theories may actually be better circulated than legitimate changes, like Facebook’s recent privacy settings change that made much of its users’ content public by default. Still, when we live so much of our lives online it’s hard to know what’s private and whether services are treating our information with the proper respect.

In an emotional and compelling guest post on TechCrunch over the weekend, Angstro founder Rohit Khare complains that social networks and application developers over-complicate and under-deliver on privacy. His conclusion: “Enforce your ToS [terms of service] and obey others’ ToS — or else stop setting unrealistic expectations and just let users have their data back!”

Just knowing where your information goes would help us out of this mess. Eventually, some kind of centralized and independent identity dashboard where you could actually manage, control and delete that information could be the next step.

Analytics

In some ways, this idea would be an evolution of the ego search. Today we look at how many web pages display our name, and how high we rank on Google. Tomorrow, we could look back at everything we’ve emitted to the web, and where it’s traveled. It would be even neater if this hypothetical dashboard functioned like the Internet Archive, so we could get a time capsule about what was known about us online at any one time.

I ran some of these ideas by open web advocate Chris Messina, who compared them to a “digital food chain” in the manner of the whimsical and informative annual reports put together by Daytum founder Nicholas Feltron. Messina commented via email,

How you get to that place, though, well, that’d require a lot more transparency into where data goes, where it comes from, and having some kind of omniscient player standing in the ether and able to track all this stuff. Without owning the stack yourself, I’m not sure the privacy gods would allow such a system to exist.

Messina suggested that if this were to work, users could eventually even sell insights about their personal data to advertisers. But that’s a whole new level, where people’s motivations for sharing would become knotty and gamed.

The one big downside of a service like this would be if it got too good — by enabling you to reverse-stalk the people who are stalking you online. If there’s a single person on a certain city block who accesses my Twitter feed through TweetDeck three times per day, that’s probably worth being left out in the 1s and 0s in the ether. After all, one of the core ideas of the Internet is to allow some semblance of anonymity, right? You don’t want to infringe on people’s ability to consume information.

Photo by Flickr user, Cameron Cassan aka Shot_by_Cam.

Updated with a statement from YouTube: Over the past two years, developer Ron Ilan built a site called Totlol that features a moderated selection of YouTube videos appropriate for kids. He hoped to build a business on it — and actually started charging membership fees earlier this year to avoid shutting the site down for lack of money. This week Ilan is crying foul, saying YouTube prevented him from his preferred business model, advertising, by changing its terms of service. What makes Ilan really mad is that he spoke with multiple people from YouTube about Totlol around the time of the ToS change, and none of them mentioned to him that his business was effectively kaput.

Ilan wrote an extensive and dramatic post about his relationship with YouTube, calling out members of its product and developer relations teams by name. When asked to condense his complaint over email, Ilan replied:

What has changed – In the simplest of terms – the ToS were
modified, July 7th 2008, to deprive from Totlol and/or similar sites
the ability to generate any meaningful income using the most common
methods on the web (ads/sponsorship/promotions). Under such terms the
potential for any service is very limited. Most will die. The
exceptional ones (as Totlol is) will survive, but will not
breakthrough. This was done a looooong time ago and they intentionally
hid it.

Specifically, the ToS prohibits the sale of advertising on sites that simply provide embedded YouTube videos without other content on the same page. This is similar to Hulu’s recently enforced embed policy, which stopped video aggregators like Rippol from embedding its video library wholesale. Ilan believes that the YouTube ToS allow him, however, to charge a fee, and he says Totlol has “not so few” paying users. Still, there can’t be that many users; Totlol doesn’t make enough money to keep Ilan from seeking full-time work elsewhere.

A spokesperson for YouTube said he could not comment on the complaint, primarily because the relevant YouTube employees and lawyers are off for the holidays. He did note that YouTube explicitly states it is not a service intended for children (aka those under 13) — so it’s not as if YouTube currently has a competitor to Totlol that it’s trying to promote by stamping Ilan out. Update: A YouTube spokesperson sent the following official statement:

Updates to our API Terms of Service generally take months of preparation and review and are pushed out primarily to better serve our users, partners and developers. When new Terms of Service are ready, we notify our developers through as many channels as possible, including on our developer blog.

The reason Ilan is complaining now is because he just recently looked up the ToS page on archive.org and realized YouTube’s terms changed around the time he was talking to members of its team last year.

So should anyone even try to build a business on top of YouTube? Google does offer a guide to “Using the YouTube APIs to Build Monetizable Applications,” and calls out one area of potential development as “video organization and discovery.” Within that category, it says an example of the Dipity TimeTube app which shows videos on a timeline, and suggests a travel app where users upload videos to maps of their trips. Both of these apps are different enough from YouTube’s site to be monetizable, under the July ‘08 edits to the ToS. However, just filtering the site for child-appropriate content is not.

Though Totlol is (of course!) a derivative site, it provides an alternate view of YouTube that’s useful, and different from what YouTube offers itself. And in the end, that’s exactly what an API should encourage developers to do.

A U.S. district court judge has fined Imeem, the music site, $1.77 million after it failed to appear in court to respond to a copyright infringement lawsuit. The suit, filed Oct. 21 by The Orchard Enterprises, an independent music distributor, had been the final straw for the troubled company before it sold “certain assets” to MySpace for less than $1 million and was promptly shut down.

The Orchard had demanded Imeem hand over its profits from its labels’ music or pay $150,000 per instance of copyright infringement, saying a previous arrangement with the Imeem-purchased Snocap only allowed the site to distribute samples, not full streamed tracks.

Judge Denny Chin, in a default judgment issued Dec. 17, ordered that Imeem pay $1.77 million to the Orchard; discontinue streaming, copying and reproducing the Orchard’s music; and hand over any materials associated with the music.

A MySpace spokesperson today said that the company was not involved in the suit — so it may be that MySpace was able to structure the Imeem deal to acquire whatever assets of the startup were not being sued.

MySpace today promises would-be Imeem visitors on a landing page, “We are working hard to migrate all of your playlists over to MySpace Music. We’ll email you about that as soon as we have more details.” We’re not sure what Imeem assets were retained after the MySpace deal; the acquisition had only kept on four Imeem executives, and just in consulting roles.

Imeem had raised somewhere around $35 million from investors including Morgenthaler Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Warner Music, which had previously sued it as well.

Imeem complaint

Imeem default judgment

Disney’s board today nominated Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to be its thirteenth member. It’ll be put to shareholder vote at the next Disney annual meeting, scheduled to be held March 10, 2010.

Sandberg, who formerly ran global sales and operations at Google and was chief of staff for the Treasury Department, also serves on the boards of Starbucks, the Brookings Institution, Women for Women International, V-Day and the Ad Council. She’s been at Facebook since March 2008.

Sandberg would join others from the tech industry on Disney’s board, including former Cisco CTO Judith Estrin, Sybase CEO John Chen and Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who became Disney’s largest single shareholder after it bought Pixar.

Disney, by the way, has 2.9 million fans on Facebook, which is just a few less than “Flipping the Pillow Over to Get to the Cold Side” and a few more than Oreo.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.