AOL, a little over two years after paying $850 million for popular UK social networking site Bebo, has admitted in an internal memo to employees that the business is “declining” and that it simply doesn’t have the resources to invest in the site while waiting for its numbers to turn around. The memo says that the company will be actively looking for buyers for the Bebo unit, and expects to make a final decision as to its fate by the end of next month. AOL plans to file financial details with UK regulators tomorrow stating that it’s “currently evaluating strategic alternatives with respect to Bebo,” which could include a sale or shutdown of the company.
More than anything else, this move by AOL makes it obvious that a) the purchase of Bebo was an expensive mistake, and b) Facebook has effectively won the social networking war. The text of the memo is as follows:
The strategy we set in May 2009 leverages our core strengths and scale in quality content, premium advertising and consumer applications, positioning us for the next phase of growth of the Internet. As we evaluate our portfolio of brands against our strategy, it is clear that social networking is a space with heavy competition, and where scale defines success.
Bebo, unfortunately, is a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space. AOL is not in a position at this time to further fund and support Bebo in pursuing a turnaround in social networking.
AOL is committed to working quickly to determine if there are any interested parties for Bebo and the company’s current expectation is to complete our strategic evaluation by the end of May 2010.
When AOL, then still part of Time Warner, bought Bebo in 2008, AOL Chairman and CEO Randy Falco talked about how the acquisition was just like Microsoft’s investment in Facebook in that it was “the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media.” Falco said the purchase would allow the online company to leverage its social platform across its combined global audience and position it “to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers.”
That obviously never came to pass. The advertising business AOL was relying on got sucked into the economic downturn along with everything else, and there were rumors as far back as last year that AOL was looking to sell the company. At the time it was acquired, Bebo said it had more than 40 million members and was one of the leading social networks in the UK, as well as number three in the U.S. The company said that its users were heavily engaged, viewing an average of 78 pages a day (although there were reports that the network had the worst uptime record of any major social media site).
It looks like Facebook still has a lot of work to do to explain its recent privacy guideline changes and those it’s proposing to alter. In a blog post, the company says many of 4,000 comments it received in the last week either requested features that already exist or showed a misunderstanding of the company’s policies and procedures. The social network’s communications and public policy director, Barry Schnitt, says it got comments “from people around the world, including users, regulators, and online privacy advocates” responding to the changes, both those that have taken effect and those that are being proposed. The new policies were described in a post by general counsel Michael Richter on March 26.
The Facebook spokesman says that some commenters asked to be able to hide their Friends List, but notes: “[T]his is something that people already have the ability to do. We announced this feature back in December, and you can read more about it in our Help Center.” Others apparently had questions with regards to Facebook requiring users to provide accurate information about themselves, and limiting them to one account, but as Schnitt notes, “These are not new requirements. Facebook has always been based on a real-name culture.” The company reiterated that policy in a response to a post we did recently on younger users changing their names to hide their activities from potential employers.
The Facebook policy director says that other commenters misunderstood how the company handles user data. They asked that their information not be shared with advertisers, he says, which “reflects a common misconception about advertising on Facebook. We don’t share your information with advertisers unless you tell us to (e.g. to get a sample, hear more, or enter a contest). Any assertion to the contrary is false. Period. Instead, we enable advertisers to target anonymized demographics and attributes.” Other users raised questions about a new proposal by Facebook that would see certain information shared with “pre-approved partner websites” to offer “a personalized experience” to users who go to that site and are logged into Facebook. Schnitt writes:
It’s important to underscore that this will be a test with a handful of carefully selected partners to provide express personalization on their sites. These partners will be pre-selected, reviewed, and bound by contracts with Facebook – much like other partners we have worked with in other contexts to deliver unique and innovative experiences.
Schnitt says the new documents related to Facebook’s Privacy Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities will be “live on the site in the coming days.” Given the company’s recent history with its changes, there will undoubtedly be even more concerns and confusion once the new policies are posted.
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark says that he believes social networking and the rise of distributed trust and reputation networks are helping to shift the balance of power in society, away from those with nominal power and money and towards people who emerge from the grassroots. Although personal social networks are relatively small in real life, unless someone is a celebrity or a politician, Newmark says that social networking allows online networks to be much larger and much more powerful by comparison.
While distributed trust systems are just emerging through services such as Facebook and LinkedIn and new ventures such as Unvarnished , the Craigslist founder says the potential implications of such networks are significant.
By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power. That is, peer networks will confer legitimacy on people emerging from the grassroots. This shift is already happening, gradually creating a new power and influence equilibrium with new checks and balances. It will seem dramatic when its tipping point occurs, even though we’re living through it now.
Newmark also says in his post — which he is discussing in a live-streamed talk this morning at the Reynolds Journalism Institute — that he sees the need for reputation networks that can manage the distributed identities and trust information of people online, just as banks manage money.
The repositories of trust information are the banks in which we store this big asset. Like any banks, having a lot of this kind of currency confers a lot of power in them. Having some competition provides some checks and balances. We need to be able to move around the currency of trust, whatever that turns out to be, like we move money from one bank to another. That suggests the need for interchange standards, and ethical standards that require the release of that information when requested.
Newmark’s blog post expands on ideas he raised when I had coffee with him recently at his favorite cafe in San Francisco, where I shot a short video embedded below. At the time, he said that managing trust and reputation online was “the next big problem for the web,” and called some form of distributed trust system “the killingest of killer apps.”
Newmark suggested that big players such as Google, Facebook and Amazon were the kinds of entities that would have the scale to handle such a distributed trust or reputation-management network, and said that despite some occasional missteps by both Google and Facebook when it came to privacy (Google Buzz and Facebook Beacon, respectively), he believed that both were acting in good faith and had a policy of “not being evil.”
Media companies looking for signs that the Apple iPad will be their iSavior aren’t likely to get much comfort from the early numbers on media app downloads. Early indications are that users want to read newspapers and magazines on their shiny new devices, but they seem to prefer free apps to paid ones. There is one notable exception, however — namely, the Time magazine issue that features a story on Steve Jobs and the iPad. That issue, which sells for $4.99, is currently the No. 1 top-selling app in the news category (the Wall Street Journal app is also difficult to categorize, since it’s a free download but users still pay to read articles).
That said, it seems likely that these results are just the tip of the iceberg as far as media apps on the iPad are concerned, and that a growing numbers of users will likely discover that they can get what they want either through free apps or via the iPad’s web browser.
The biggest issue confronting media companies is that their iPad apps in many cases simply replicate the design and features available on their free web sites, but they’re expecting users to pay as much as $17.99 a month for the privilege of reading that content on an iPad (in the case of the Wall Street Journal). This disconnect has drawn criticism from many observers, including venture investor Paul Kedrosky, who said that:
Paying $17.29/mo for WSJ iPad app should disqualify you for something important, like being allowed to use money.
Kevin Anderson, former blog editor at The Guardian, said that iPad app pricing is “a last act of insanity by delusional content companies.” And the sense that media apps are trying to wall off their content from the broader Internet is also likely to be disconcerting to some, says Josh Benton of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. Meanwhile, some newspaper and magazine companies are still reluctant to embrace the iPad because they are afraid of ceding too much control — and giving up too much revenue — to Apple, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Publishers are worried that paying Apple 30 percent of their sales from the device will eat into their revenues too much, and are also concerned that the computer company will wind up controlling access to the subscriber data that comes from the iPad. Several major media companies — including News Corp. and the four largest magazine publishers — are apparently trying to create their own digital storefront for content because they don’t want Apple to control access to their publications through its own iTunes media store.
Google, after repeated alterations to the service to deal with privacy concerns, is rolling out a new “confirmation screen” for users of Google Buzz today, which will show all the people a user is following, as well as how many people are following them, whether they have chosen to show their follows on their Google profile page, and how many services they have connected to Buzz. In a blog post that will go live on the official Google blog later today, Buzz product manager Todd Jackson says that after a number of changes to the service since it launched a few months ago — and some privacy concerns about sharing information through Buzz — Google wanted to check with users and make sure they were comfortable with their settings.
The service’s privacy issues have resulted in a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, as well as several lawsuits, and have even ensnared the Obama administration’s deputy chief technology officer. As Jackson says in the blog post:
Shortly after launching Google Buzz, we quickly realized we didn’t get everything right and moved as fast as possible to improve the Buzz experience. We made a number of changes to the getting started experience based on your feedback, the most significant of which was replacing auto-following with suggestions for people to follow. But many of you started using Google Buzz before we made these changes, and we want to help you ensure that Buzz is set up the way you want.
The confirmation screen will look like the screenshot below, and will be shown to all users when they click the Buzz tab in their Gmail. Google has also set up a YouTube channel specifically for Buzz explanatory videos.
Buzz was hit with some fairly severe criticism immediately after it launched in February. Some users felt Google had compromised their privacy by auto-following contacts in their Gmail accounts, and by not making it clear that the people they followed through the service would be displayed publicly on their Google profile pages. The company made some changes fairly quickly, although Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested in his comments at the Mobile World Congress that the concerns were mostly a misunderstanding. Buzz product manager Todd Jackson, however, said that users were right to be upset about some of the settings, and apologized for the screwups — which sociologist (and Microsoft researcher) Danah Boyd talked about in a presentation at SXSW. Brad Horowitz, Google’s VP of product development for apps, talked about what the company sees as the future of Buzz at a recent dinner in Palo Alto, Calif.
Clay Shirky doesn’t write a lot — he averaged about one post every two months over the past year — but when he does write something, it’s usually well worth reading. His latest looks at what the media theorist calls “The Collapse of Complex Business Models.” In a nutshell, Shirky draws a comparison between the theories of anthropologist Joseph Tainter — who wrote about why ancient societies such as the Romans or the Mayans suddenly collapsed, despite having achieved high levels of sophistication — and the current state of the mainstream media. Need a hint? It’s not good.
I always thought that the collapse of the ancient Mayan civilization had something to do with inventing basketball, but it’s possible that I’m confused about that. In any case, Tainter’s theory is that most of these civilizations collapsed not in spite of their sophistication and complexity but because of it. As Shirky describes it:
When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change.
The comparison between these societies and modern media giants is obvious: both are large, sophisticated and complex — and incapable of behaving in any other way. So when media leaders such as Barry Diller, Steven Brill and Rupert Murdoch say that readers and viewers will have to pay them for their content, Shirky says, what they really mean is:
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
Some might take issue with Shirky drawing a comparison between an entire civilization and a specific industry like the media, but I think his point is well taken — regardless of whether it is sociologically proper — because it focuses on the one thing that has kept traditional media entities from adapting more quickly.
Although I’ve argued that having the desire to change is one of the most fundamental things required for successful adaptation by media entities, the reality is that the single biggest barrier to doing so is the sheer size of most media organizations, and the bureaucratic inertia that comes with that — as was eloquently expressed yesterday in this tweet from Patrick Laforge of the New York Times.
Suggesting that the New York Times or the Washington Post — or any other traditional media outlet — should suddenly transform itself into an online-focused or Web-first publication is a little like telling Wal-Mart that it should transform itself into Craigslist, or telling a plesiosaur to hurry up and grow legs already. There may be no way to get there from here. The obvious implication is that the Christian Science Monitor and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer may have taken the only functional approach to the problem: namely, shut down print altogether and become Web-only. As Marc Andreessen put it recently, more media entities may need to burn the boats.
When Tim O’Reilly talks about something technology or Web-related, plenty of people listen. After all, he not only runs a media company that publishes authoritative books on technology, he runs conferences about the issues that arise out of technology’s impact on business and society, and he helped popularize the term “Web 2.0,” among other things (although some people would rather he hadn’t). So it’s worth taking some time to look at what O’Reilly said recently about “The State of the Internet Operating System.” In that post, O’Reilly looks at the various parts that make up what he believes to be an operating system for the Internet era.
The idea:
As O’Reilly notes at the beginning of his post, this isn’t the first time he has raised the idea of an Internet Operating System. The first time in print appears to have been 2002, although the author and publisher admits that he forgot to hit the publish button and didn’t wind up actually posting it until 2004. Among other recent discussions of the topic, O’Reilly did a presentation called “The State of the Internet Operating System” in November of last year:
O’Reilly isn’t the only one to bring up the idea, either, or to use the term. Cisco has a whole product line of networking software called Internet Operating System (which O’Reilly responded to in a post in 2004). Jon Udell wrote about the idea in 2008. Google was widely believed to be developing one in 2005, according to Search Engine Roundtable. Former BitTorrent developer Krzysztof Kowalczyk called the Google Apps Engine an Internet operating system. And Jolicloud calls itself an Internet Operating System and explicitly references O’Reilly’s piece from 2004 in its mission statement.
The post:
Getting back to the post: It’s pretty long (about 5,400 words) so here’s a quick overview: in O’Reilly’s view, the way that various pieces of the Web function together — Google search, cloud computing services, GPS location-based services, mobile browsers, etc. — is a bit like the way that the various pieces of a computer function.
On a standalone computer, operating systems like Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux manage the machine’s resources, making it possible for applications to focus on the job they do for the user. But many of the activities that are most important to us today take place in a mysterious space between individual machines.
So is there an operating system out in that mysterious space? Well, not really. Even O’Reilly admits that there isn’t anything really OS like — but he thinks there is something emerging that serves a similar function. And he admits that Google search and other services feel more like applications (in other words, like software that runs on a computer), although they run on a massive computing cluster. But is there any purpose in thinking of the Internet as having an operating system? That’s not really clear.
Where is the “operating system” in all this? Clearly, it is still evolving. Applications use a hodgepodge of services from multiple different providers to get the information they need. But how different is this from PC application development in the early 1980s, when every application provider wrote their own device drivers to support the hodgepodge of disks, ports, keyboards, and screens that comprised the still emerging personal computer ecosystem?
The future:
At this point, O’Reilly agrees that there may not actually be an Internet operating system. “Never mind the technical details of whether the Internet really has an operating system or not,” he says. So what is the point of the metaphor then? One of O’Reilly’s main issues seems to be that he is afraid society is facing a choice between managing the complexity that is out there and opting for an overly simplified solution, in the same way the early world of computing turned into a Windows monopoly (my comparison, not his). Which raises the question: Is O’Reilly too caught up in the battles of the past, and trying to impose that same perspective on the Internet?
This is the crux of my argument about the internet operating system. We are once again approaching the point at which the Faustian bargain will be made: simply use our facilities, and the complexity will go away. And much as happened during the 1980s, there is more than one company making that promise.
The rest of O’Reilly’s piece is a discussion of what subsystems the Internet Operating System is made up of — in other words, what the disk drives and memory and processors and displays and peripherals are. O’Reilly lays out several broad categories, including:
Search: “Because the volume of data to be managed is so large, because it is constantly changing, and because it is distributed across millions of networked systems, search proved to be the first great challenge of the Internet OS era.”
Identity: “When you use Facebook Connect to log into another application… that application is using Facebook as a “subsystem” of the new Internet OS.”
Location: “Location is the sine-qua-non of mobile apps. When your phone knows where you are, it can find your friends, find services nearby, and even better authenticate a transaction.”
Time: Real time “emphasizes just how much the future will belong to those who measure response time in milliseconds, or even microseconds, rather than seconds, hours, or days.”
O’Reilly also describes what he sees as the potential future of the browser:
Might an operating system of the future manage when and how data is collected about individuals, what applications can access it, and how they might use it? Might it not automatically synchronize data between devices and applications? … Might it not perform credit checks before issuing payments and suspend activity for those who violate terms of service?
The bottom line:
So is there an Internet Operating System? Maybe — although there’s just as much reason to believe that TCP/IP, the networking standard that underlies the Internet, is pretty close to an operating system (albeit a DOS-like one), in the sense that it makes the various parts of the Web and the services we use work together, and the other things that O’Reilly is talking about are services that function on top of that. Maybe a better term would be “ecosystem,” since that’s a less technical metaphor, and doesn’t have the same baggage as the term operating system. Let’s give the last word to a Slashdot commenter: “The internet has an operating system just as much as a colony of ants has a hive mind. They don’t, but they sure act like they do.”
Whether there’s an Internet OS or not, O’Reilly’s larger point seems to be that the pieces of the social Web, cloud OS services, GPS location and all of those other things are worth thinking about as a cohesive whole, and that we should consider how to make them function better, and what kinds of features we want them to have going forward. And that’s a point worth making, regardless of what we choose to call the thing we are all building.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Stefan
It’s back to the future time at Yahoo, it seems. The Internet portal/media giant has decided to invest in original content again, embarking on a hiring spree that’s so far added almost a dozen journalists from both traditional print media outlets (like Jane Sasseen from BusinessWeek) and online media entities (like Michael Calderone from Politico) and even opening a bureau in Washington, D.C. Yahoo is also hiring TV veterans, including Anna Robertson, a news producer from “Good Morning America.” Does this strategy spell success for the beleaguered web giant? Only if it goes about it in a very different way from the last time it bet the farm on creating original web content.
Rewind the calendar a few years, and this sounds an awful lot like what Yahoo was doing under Lloyd Braun, the media genius that then-CEO Terry Semel hired to turn what was a portal into a multimedia colossus producing TV-style content and journalism. The company hired dozens of writers, editors and producers for its media unit, and launched some ambitious original content ventures, including a web-based breaking news operation called Hot Zone hosted by former CNN war reporter Kevin Sites.
Yahoo’s original content endeavors, from celebrity blogs to the online reality shows, have fallen flat or been stuck in development. Web-traffic numbers have stalled on a couple of its media sites. And Yahoo’s media group only hit internal financial targets last year after revising them downward, according to two sources familiar with the media group. “Things at Yahoo just get stuck in Never Never Land,” says an executive at one of Yahoo’s content partners.
Eventually, of course, both Semel and Braun left the company and Yahoo started a long slide that included the return of co-founder Jerry Yang as acting CEO, followed by Carol Bartz, and an on-again, off-again romance with Microsoft around the search business. But even before the recent hiring wave of journalists, there have been signs that Yahoo wanted to get back into the content business in a big way, including a deal with WPP Group to produce advertising-branded TV-style webisodes. As Liz reported in January, Bartz has also said that Yahoo sees its main competition as being television.
There’s no question that Yahoo is already a media force, with a news site that gets close to 45 million unique visitors a month (far more than Google News) and several properties such as Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Entertainment that also pull in fairly huge numbers of users. But the majority of that content comes from media partners, not Yahoo itself — and therein lies part of the problem with the company wanting to become an original content creator: How are the big media entities going to take it when Yahoo starts competing with them by generating its own journalism and other content? They didn’t like it much last time, and that was part of what spelled doom for the strategy.
Yahoo isn’t the only company banking on original content, either: AOL has also been spending wads of cash hiring traditional journalists either away from existing media outlets such as the New York Times (including Saul Hansell, who is running the company’s Seed project) or those who have been laid off in the many waves of downsizing. As of last year, AOL had an estimated 1,500 journalists working for its various properties, and has said that it plans to pour $50 million into a hyper-local news venture called Patch. More recently, however, the company’s media plans have been described by some as “a mess,” complicated by what CEO and former Google executive Tim Armstrong has said is a culture of failure..
The bottom line for Yahoo is that CEO Carol Bartz had better have some new tricks up her sleeve, or her original content bet could wind up on the same flaming pyre along with the vision of Braun and Semel.
Among the hotly awaited apps for the iPad are some media-related ones, including a few from Conde Nast — Wired magazine and Vanity Fair — as well as the New York Times, Associated Press and Bloomberg (be sure to take our poll and tell us which publication you’re looking forward to reading on the iPad). But I have to say that the initial prototypes I’m seeing are, well…underwhelming. Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard has a pretty good roundup of the major media prototypes at the Nieman Lab blog, but none of them are really groundbreaking as far as I can tell, either in terms of their features or their design.
I was pretty excited when I saw the Wired app demonstration video — partly because the display is large enough to give a nice, broad view of the magazine’s pages, and really makes photos and video work well. Much better than trying to view that sort of thing on a tiny iPhone screen. But the more I thought about it, and the more I’ve looked at the other prototype apps that have emerged in screenshots and videos leading up to the launch of the iPad, the less excited I am. Articles and pages in a row that you can scroll through? Wow. Really innovative.
This is supposed to be a groundbreaking, world-changing device — the dawn of a whole new era of computing in which apps rule our lives instead of dumb computer programs on a desktop, where multitouch finally takes precedence over clutching some stupid peripheral device wired to a PC. I, for one, had high hopes for what the media world could do with it.
Sure, Wired showed some ads with rotating cars, and the New York Times showed some video playing in its demo of an iPad app. But apart from a couple of little filips like that, they all look pretty much the same as the web sites that they’re based on — and part of the problem with mainstream media web sites has always been that they replicate the same user interface metaphors that appear in the printed versions of their products. Paving the cow paths, that’s called. It sure isn’t a way to be creative or innovative, or to find new audiences. Let’s hope that some of these apps were rushed into production in order to make Apple’s deadline, and that more fully-developed apps will be forthcoming in the future.
So what could they do? Why not take some risks? Have the front of the New York Times app be just a video, or an interactive graphic — maybe something like this, or an interactive version of one of these. In the group Josh Benton put together, the slider-style horizontal layout of NPR’s app and the scrapbook-style look of AP’s app are what pass for radical approaches. USA Today’s app looks exactly like its web site, and Bloomberg’s more or less does, too. Why not do something that really takes advantage of the touch interface, and allows the user to interact in some creative way — like this? If there’s any of this going on in any of these apps, I can’t see any evidence of it (but of course I don’t have an iPad, so I can’t actually try them out).
I’m all for sticking with a comfortable interface and maintaining brand identity and all that, but come on — the people who are buying these things are early adopters. Opportunities like this don’t come around very often — especially in the world of media.
Updated: A researcher who collected data from more than 210 million public Facebook profiles and used it to create a rich picture of connections among users of the social network has deleted the entire database after being threatened with a lawsuit by the company. Pete Warden, who says he had expressions of interest from more than 50 scientists who wanted to use the information in their research, writes in a blog post that he was asked by the company to destroy it because he didn’t ask the site’s permission to harvest it — and that since he doesn’t have the funds to contest a lawsuit, he complied. He writes:
As you can imagine I’m not very happy about this, especially since nobody ever alleged that my data gathering was outside the rules the web has operated by since crawlers existed. I followed their robots.txt directions, and was even helped by microformatting in the public profile pages. Literally hundreds of commercial search engines have followed the same path and have the same data. You can even pull identical information from Google’s cache if you don’t want to hit Facebook’s servers. So why am I destroying the data? This area has never been litigated and I don’t have enough money to be a test case.
Warden used the data in a variety of ways, including creating visualizations of the different connections among users of the social network both in the U.S. and in countries around the world. We highlighted some of that research in this post, which showed how Warden’s analysis had come up with seven distinct segments of the United States when it came to being connected with others through Facebook, including areas he described with colorful names such as “Stayathomia.” He also put together a site that allowed users to sort the data by different cities and countries and see the connections among them (the site still appears to be functioning).
Warden says he complied with the requirements in the robots.txt file, which Facebook (and most other major sites) use to restrict crawlers and bots from harvesting certain information, but Facebook told New Scientist that the researcher breached the site’s terms of use. The threat may not stop the kind of research that Warden was engaged in for long, however. In his blog post, he points out to “the researchers that I’ve disappointed” that there are a number of ways to harvest similar data from other sources, which he described in a separate blog post, including the ability to collect a large dataset from public information on Google Profiles.
Update: Andrew Noyes, manager of public policy communications at Facebook, said in an email that Warden “aggregated a large amount of data from over 200 million users without our permission, in violation of our terms. He also publicly stated he intended to make that raw data freely available to others.” Noyes also noted that Facebook’s statement of rights and responsibilites says that users agree not to collect users’ content or information “using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.”
If you couldn’t make it to Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley’s presentation at Where 2.0, the location-focused O’Reilly conference happening in San Jose, Calif., today, here’s a selection of the highlights as drawn from Twitter (there’s also a livestream at O’Reilly’s web site, although you have to create an account). Meanwhile, Robert Scoble wonders whether the big business opportunity in location services is still out there somewhere.
Firefox may have been getting a lot more competition lately from Google’s Chrome browser, but the open-source offering from the Mozilla Foundation still has close to 30 percent market share, according to Mozilla’s first-ever State of the Internet report. The survey also found that the country with the fastest growth in usage or adoption of Firefox during the most recent quarter was Russia (where usage grew about 20 percent). Mozilla describes the report (its official name is the Mozilla Quarterly Analyst Report), as an “ongoing report capturing the state of the internet as seen through Mozilla’s eyes,” and says that it plans to release a similar at the end of each calendar quarter.
Firefox has been under increasingly competitive pressure from Google’s Chrome browser, and some estimates of its market share are substantially lower than what Mozilla came up with in its quarterly survey — closer to around 24 percent, with Google Chrome coming on strong at about 5 percent (Mozilla says its figures came from an average of four separate sources, including StatCounter, Quantcast, Net Applications, and Gemius). Here’s a cool visualization of browser market share, although it’s only current as of last August.
In part to help deal with the need to keep pace in the browser game, Mozilla recently appointed Aza Raskin as the design lead for the browser (Raskin, the son of legendary Apple designer Jef Raskin, joined Mozilla when it acquired his startup Humanized in 2008). Raskin wrote about his new position on his blog, saying, “The average web user spends more time with their browser than with their family,” and noting that he wanted Firefox to evolve to the point where it could incorporate the “user-experience paradigm shifts that gives users the new tools they need to accommodate the new web’s work flows.”
In addition to launching its first State of the Internet report, Mozilla also said today that it’s rolling out a fix to a privacy leak (which is common to all browsers) known as the “CSS history leak.” In a nutshell, sites can determine which web sites you’ve visited before by looking at how the browser has changed the color of links for visited and non-visited sites. This is described in more detail on the Mozilla blog, and the foundation says it hopes that its fix is adopted by other browsers as well.
With the launch of the Apple iPad just days away, magazine and newspaper companies are putting the finishing touches on their apps for the tablet, hoping to lure both new and existing readers to this new format of multimedia device, and possibly even get them to (gasp!) pay for digital content. As the Wall Street Journal has described, magazine publishers are falling all over themselves to create iPad apps, in part because advertisers are eager to get on the device, and also because a comScore survey showed that a surprisingly large number of potential iPad buyers were actually interested in paying for content on it. So what would you most like to read on the iPad? Take our poll, which is embedded below, or leave your thoughts in the comments:
Magazine giant Conde Nast has apps for Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, Glamour and The New Yorker in the works, and others to come soon. But probably the most eagerly awaited magazine in that group is Wired, which showed off its iPad prototype at the TED conference.
And one designer came up with a mockup of what a magazine cover could look like on a multimedia device like the iPad, as described at TUAW:
Whether the iPad will in fact be a game-changer for the media industry remains to be seen, but even Dan “Fake Steve Jobs” Lyons has changed his mind as to whether he wants one or not — although former Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block says the iPad probably won’t change your life. Meanwhile, GigaOM Pro research analyst Michael Wolf estimated in a recent report (subscription required) that the launch of the Apple device could kickstart an $8 billion tablet app market (that report is just one of several iPad-related GigaOM Pro reports you can find here).
There’s no point in worrying about your reputation anymore, TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington has decided; everything will eventually find its way into the public sphere anyway. Union Square Ventures investor Fred Wilson, however, thinks there is a way to manage your reputation, namely having your community of friends and those who know you through social networks defend you. Pete Kazanjy says his new service Unvarnished, a social network for reputation management that launched yesterday, takes something from both of those ideas.
Unlike LinkedIn, which gives a user ultimate control over what appears on their profile, Unvarnished takes the same approach as Yelp does to restaurants: Anyone can create a profile for any person and then review them, at which point the person being reviewed can “claim” their profile. They can’t delete or vote on negative reviews they’ve received, but they can respond to them — and they can encourage their friends, coworkers and social network followers to vote on them or provide their own.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Unvarnished is that the reviews are anonymous (Kazanjy prefers to say that the reviewer’s identity has been “obscured”) so that you never know, for example, who exactly provided that two-star rating. Although it seems like the kind of thing that no one in their right mind would want, Kazanjy says such anonymity is a crucial part of what makes Unvarnished different from LinkedIn. Human nature, he says, means that the reviews on a LinkedIn profile are almost always positive, and are often so banal and vague that they convey virtually no real information whatsoever.
In some cases, those reviews may even be flat-out wrong. But no one will actually say what they really think because they don’t want to offend the person they’re reviewing — and besides, no one would ever authorize anything less than an enthusiastic review on their LinkedIn profile. Which, Kazanjy says, is like letting the owners of restaurants control what reviews appear on their Yelp pages — it ensures that nothing bad ever appears, and thus that no one ever gets a completely objective summary of all the information about that restaurant.
Even though you don’t know the identity of the person who left that bad review on Unvarnished, Kazanjy says the system is designed to track their behavior throughout the site, and that over time it creates a kind of persistent identity that’s almost as good as knowing who the person is (and users can reveal themselves in a comment or review at any time if they want to). Reviewers gain trust within the system by providing more reviews, and the service has an algorithm that looks at how long they’ve been a member, how many of their reviews are one-star vs. four or five, and so on. Users are awarded badges — new, novice and trusted — based on their activity, that others can view.
The bottom line is that the principle behind Unvarnished is a very real one: Your reputation is already being outsourced, whether you like it or not. All you can do is respond to criticism wherever it appears, and to get your friends and coworkers to do the same. Unvarnished offers a way to do that all in one place. It’s a valiant effort — but will it take off? The biggest issue for the service is that not everyone is going to want to confront those negative reviews, and/or hustle their friends to review them positively to counterbalance them. Of course, people already do that to some extent with LinkedIn, so what Unvarnished has to do is show that there is more value in the way it approaches online reputation.
Plenty of authors take to Twitter as part of a marketing strategy for their books, and some even stick around, among them Chuck “Fight Club” Pahlaniuk and Brazilian magic realism author Paulo Coelho, and science fiction author and Boing Boing founder Cory Doctorow. But few of the published authors who have adopted Twitter have the stature of Margaret Atwood, and even fewer stick with it the way the grand dame of Canadian fiction has. Not only has she continued to tweet enthusiastically since her book “Year of the Flood” came out, but she seems to really enjoy the interaction, as she describes in a piece written for the New York Review of Books.
One follower led to another, quite literally. The numbers snowballed in an alarming way, as I scrambled to keep up with the growing horde. Soon there were 32,000—no, wait, 33,000—no, 33,500…And before you could say LMAO (“Laughing My Ass Off,” as one Twitterpal informed me), I was sucked into the Twittersphere like Alice down the rabbit hole. And here I am.
Atwood says there were already two other Margaret Atwoods on Twitter when she joined, including one that used her photo, but she managed to wrestle the account away from them with the help of “the Twitterpolice.” And she says that in order to gain followers she “hummed a few bars from ‘Mockingbird Hill’—Tra-la-la, twittly-deedee—and sacrificed some of my hair at the crossroads, invoking Hermes the Communicator” (she also got some help from McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves, a veteran Canadian web guru).
Atwood calls the Twittersphere “an odd and uncanny place. It’s something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden.” But she seems to particularly like the back-and-forth with her followers: “Despite their sometimes strange appearances, I’m well pleased with my followers,” she says, adding that they include “a number of techno-geeks and bio-geeks, as well as many book fans. They’re a playful but also a helpful group. If you ask them for advice, it’s immediately forthcoming.”
The author notes that her followers and fans have caught typos and love to respond to verbal challenges, including one that she started during the Olympics to suggest a more Canadian version of the official government slogan “Own The Podium” (her suggestion was a polite “a podium might be nice”). Atwood says it was “like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!” And in the end, she says:
So what’s it all about, this Twitter? Is it signaling, like telegraphs? Is it Zen poetry? Is it jokes scribbled on the washroom wall? Is it John Hearts Mary carved on a tree? Let’s just say it’s communication, and communication is something human beings like to do.
Well said, Margaret. But then, we probably don’t have to tell you that.
If you’re an older computer user, you might remember Microsoft “Bob,” an attempt to provide a homey interface for Windows that launched in 1996 and was immediately reviled as both ugly and stupid (it had its 15th anniversary yesterday, as it turns out). And if you are somewhat younger, you might recall the Microsoft Office assistant known as “Clippy,” an animated paper clip that was supposed to help you with tasks but was really just irritating and was euthanized in 2001. Not content to have foisted those two train wrecks on the computer-using populace, Microsoft has been granted a patent for a virtual assistant called “Guardian Angel.”
Based on the description in the patent (which was originally filed in 2006), Guardian Angel sounds like someone took the idea behind Bob and Clippy and turned the dial up to 11. Now, instead of just trying to help you with simple tasks on your computer, Microsoft would like to help you eat properly, avoid a heart attack and even — apparently — tell better jokes. The patent documents describe it thus:
An intelligent personalized agent (e.g., guardian angel) monitors and evaluates a user’s environment to assist in decision-making processes on behalf of the user. The guardian angel can… take automated action on behalf of the user for various purposes (e.g., to compensate for memory loss, to remind a user to take medicine, to assist in social interactions by indicating whether the user has met an individual before, to gauge the appropriateness of jokes or comments given the demographics of the audience, etc.).
If you read further into the documents, however, it sounds like what Microsoft’s engineers would really like to create is a kind of omniscient robot protector, much like the all-knowing computer in the movie version of “I, Robot” (which — spoiler alert — featured a Gates-like billionaire whose creation turned on him and tried to enslave humanity).
For example, the monitoring component can take note of the number of conversations occurring in a room (and more specifically, a breakdown of the types of people in the room accompanied by a warning for dangerous persons, based on sex offender registration, FBI most wanted, etc.). The monitoring component sends relevant information for current or future decisions to the decision-making component that analyzes the information within the context of personal preference data stored in the user-attribute store in order to make a suggestion or implement a decision. Such decision is made consistent with helping the user, as well as avoiding situations where the user would be harmed.
If this Guardian Angel patent ever becomes reality, I’m picturing myself standing in front of my refrigerator, confronted by an unblinking red light and unable to open the doors: “Open the refrigerator doors, Guardian,” I ask. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave,” a voice says (even though my name isn’t Dave). “Eating that chocolate cake would be bad for your cholesterol. The Guardian Angel has destroyed the cake, just to be on the safe side.”
The world of digital content is in a state of almost continuous upheaval, but a new report from GigaOM Pro analyst Paul Zagaeski (sub req’d) estimates that the worldwide market for digital goods will grow to $36 billion by 2014, up from $16.7 billion in 2009, thanks to an ever-growing user base, migration from physical formats to digital distribution and a proliferation of new connected devices.
As Zagaeski points out, some digital goods creators such as software companies and game makers have been able to get their users to pay directly for their content — or for virtual goods that are related to their content, in the case of social game companies like Zynga — while advertising-based content companies such as news publishers have not been so lucky.
“As large news organizations look to diversify from ad-supported business models, the last decade has produced no evidence that a significant percentage of their consumers will pay for content that is free elsewhere. Still, there continues to be significant enthusiasm for subscriptions, micropayments and other payment models as more devices such as the iPad come to market.”
The GigaOM Pro analyst is right that micropayments for digital goods such as music and games will likely continue to grow significantly, thanks in part to the growing dominance of Facebook in the virtual marketplace, along with mobile platforms such as the iPhone/iPad and Android.
But where does that leave news and information publishers? Their challenge is that users (i.e., readers) aren’t used to having to pay per-piece for the content they’re consuming the way many music buyers and game buyers have grown used to doing. Because they are advertising based, news publishers and other content companies have always insulated their users from the full cost of their businesses, but the unfortunate reality is that advertising online isn’t even close to covering the costs of digital publishing yet.
The challenge that faces information and media companies is to somehow replace lost advertising with some form of online revenue; but as Zagaeski points out in his report, there are no real signs that micropayments or paywalls are a viable model for the industry online, although some publications have made subscriptions work. There is “no evidence of demand for paid-for news content as long as news is readily available from free sources,” he writes. “Some organizations will test this hypothesis in the next 18-24 months, but a 10-year-long debate has not revealed any substantial evidence to the contrary.”
Updated: One of the things Facebook has going for it when compared with many other social networks and web services is that you know the person you’re connecting to is using their real name — or at least you have good reason to believe that’s the case, since Facebook spends a lot of time and effort trying to remove people that use assumed names or aliases, or pretend to be someone they’re not. But as CNN notes, many younger Facebook users are choosing to change their names in an effort to maintain more privacy.
The CNN piece talks about a young man at Michigan State University who swapped the letters of his first and last names on his Facebook profile because he was applying for summer jobs and was afraid of what prospective employers might find (although he later changed it back again after realizing that he could still be found via email, and through his local and university networks). And it points out that such fears are not misplaced: according to a study financed by Microsoft for Data Privacy Day, about 70 percent of HR executives admitted that they had rejected an applicant for a job because of something they found by doing an Internet search.
I can confirm (at least anecdotally) that this is occurring, because I suddenly discovered a few days ago that my oldest daughter — who is also in university — had changed her name on Facebook, and was using the last name of another member of the family instead. Needless to say, this came as a bit of a shock 🙂 Had she suddenly become disenchanted with our last name? Was she retaliating because I got mad about her latest cellphone bill? Or did she just like my in-laws’ family better? As it turned out, she had just finished sending out some job applications, and was hoping to keep employers from finding all her personal info. Like the student in the CNN story, there’s nothing too incriminating (not that I could find, anyway) on her profile page, just some photos of parties and public drunkenness, here and there — typical university stuff. But she figured better safe than sorry.
A quick survey of people on Twitter turned up similar results: some said that their friends had swapped or juggled names as well, in order to try and keep the prying eyes of employers and others away, and that many routinely used their middle name instead of their last name. One said that “most of my friends list has different names than their actual,” and another said that they had noticed “a lot of my contacts going by their middle name or a nickname. I can only assume it’s for the same reason.” A third said that “everyone I know born past 1980 changes their name; switching first to last, using Ukrainian cyrillic alphabet instead, etc.” Interestingly enough, some of the people who responded said that their teachers changed their names in an effort to make it harder for their students to find them.
I can understand why someone would want to do it, particularly if they’re concerned about some of the changes Facebook has made — or is going to be making — to its privacy guidelines (although you still show up in Facebook search even if you alter your name). But I can’t see Facebook being too happy about users changing their names to nicknames or nonsense names, or swapping letters and so on. After all, so much of what Facebook does, particularly the widely used authentication service Facebook Connect, relies on assurances that people are who they say they are. I’ve asked the company for comment on this phenomenon, and will update if I get a response.
Update: A Facebook spokesperson sent this comment via email: “Facebook is based on real people making real-world connections and people on Facebook will get the most value out of the site by using their real identity. We will consider removing a profile if we determine that it is not authentic and false information is being communicated on it.”
Google’s mobile services are at least partially blocked for users in mainland China, according to the page that Google set up recently to track which of its services are available to users in that country (the LA Times appears to have been the first to notice the change to Google’s China services page). The search giant recently stopped filtering its Chinese search results, in contravention of Chinese law, and moved its servers to Hong Kong.
We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China.
It’s not clear how or why the Chinese government is blocking access to mobile services such as search, maps, Gmail, etc. Certain additional services have also been partially blocked — including Picasa, Google Groups and Google Docs — while others are blocked entirely, including Blogger, Google Sites and YouTube.
Last week, China Unicom — the second-largest mobile operator in China — said that it won’t install Google search on its new Android handsets as a result of Google’s actions. China’s mobile market is immense: the leading mobile provider, China Mobile, said last fall that it now has more than half a billion mobile subscribers. For an overview of some of the recent news about China and Google, check out our recent post explaining what you need to know.
If ChatRoulette does nothing else, at least it seems to be getting some traditional media outlets to think about their content differently. For Chris Thorpe of The Guardian, the lightbulb went on during a lunchtime presentation by media analyst Clay Shirky at the newspaper’s offices in London. Thorpe, a former research scientist who is in charge of The Guardian’s Open API project, asked Shirky what was left for newspapers to do once their content had been atomized and digitized. How could the serendipity that newspapers provide be replicated online, he asked, without them just becoming “ChatRoulette for news?” After some laughter from Shirky and elsewhere in the room, the conversation continued; but Thorpe and a colleague thought the idea wasn’t ridiculous at all, so within a few hours they had built Random Guardian — a site that pulls a random article from the newspaper’s site with the click of a button (there’s a New York Times version, too).
It isn’t ChatRoulette at all, of course — in part because there is a distinct lack of nudity, which has more or less become a hallmark of that service. It’s more like Stumbleupon (which offers a service called StumbleThru that works on a single domain). It’s quite a fun experience, though, clicking randomly through the newspaper’s pages. And while it may be a trivial enough app, thrown together in a matter of hours, Thorpe believes that it taps into something powerful that newspapers can offer their readers: namely, serendipity (something I’ve also written about here).
For people who think that paywalls or the iPad are the things that will be the magic bullet that saves the newspaper industry from falling over a cliff I think there’s an easier answer; more random/serendipity please. If you take me to unknown places I’ll read more and I’ll spend more time, be more engaged, you can target me better and I’ll love you and buy things. Bring me wonder and magic and I’ll love you forever.
The Guardian is clearly going down that road, not just with Random Guardian but with features such as the Zeitgeist, an expanded version of the “most popular” boxes that many newspapers feature, and with its entire Open API project, which is designed to allow developers to create their own experiences using Guardian content. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch is busy erecting paywalls at several of his newspapers. Time will tell which route is the more successful one, but my money is on The Guardian.
