Author: Mathew Ingram

AOL (it recently gave up the all-caps moniker) is planning an ambitious expansion of its hyper-local Patch.com venture, the one that it bought from a group of investors — including AOL CEO Tim Armstrong — last year, according to a report by Business Insider. But can AOL find success in hyper-local journalism when so many have failed?

The report quotes an internal company memo that describes AOL’s plans to expand Patch to “hundreds” of local news sites by the end of this year from some 30 today, with the goal of being “leaders in one of the most promising ‘white spaces’ on the Internet” (a phrase that got under the skin of former journalist and new media consultant Ken Doctor). Patch has already expanded considerably since it was acquired in June of last year, when it had operations in just five towns and cities in New Jersey and Connecticut.

For at least a decade now, local journalism on the web has been viewed as a kind of can’t-miss, slam-dunk success just waiting to happen. And yet, it has stubbornly missed and generally failed to happen on any number of occasions, including via the efforts of numerous startups backed by actual journalists — such as Mark Potts, a former Washington Post scribe who co-founded Backfence.com in 2005 (it closed in 2007), and digital journalism veteran Dan Gillmor, who started and then later closed a site called Bayosphere (you could argue that CitySearch and Microsoft’s Sidewalk were similar failed experiments back in the late 1990s).

That’s not to say there aren’t hyper-local journalism efforts that are working — Howard Owens, for example, a former executive with the regional newspaper chain Gatehouse Media, seems to be doing well with The Batavian in upstate New York, and journalism professor Leonard Witt has been expanding his “representative journalism” model, which I wrote about at the Nieman Journalism Lab. There’s also a new startup called Oakland Local, founded by former AOL VP Susan Mernit, that seems to be growing rapidly, and there are some other interesting experiments going on as well, including Outside.in and Placeblogger (and Everyblock, which was acquired by MSNBC).

But the field is littered with the bodies of those who tried and failed, including the Washington Post’s Loudoun Extra project. Why did Backfence and other local news startups fail? Any number of reasons, in most cases — a failure to find enough local advertising, lack of sufficient marketing, a dearth of compelling content. In a post after Backfence died, Mark Potts did a great job of listing some important factors in doing local news well, including the need to engage with and listen to the community, and the fact that “[I]t’s not news, it’s a conversation.”

Many hyper-local efforts have been largely automated, in an attempt to keep costs down, but as a result much of the content seemed homogenized and stale. Both AOL and a similar effort from the New York Times called The Local — which is relying on journalism students to power one of its local sites — are trying to avoid this problem by hiring people to work in each of the local centers they’re covering.

That approach can get expensive very quickly, however. And while there may be plenty of out-of-work journalists around due to newspaper industry layoffs, are there enough talented writers and reporters to staff all of the local sites Patch.com has in mind? If not, then the company will quickly have to come to grips with the wildly varying quality levels that “citizen journalism” can produce (each Patch site has a single professional journalist who works with volunteer and freelance staff). Some feel that whatever happens with AOL and its expansion, it can’t help but be good for business.

A Patch expansion would be a tangible sign that Armstrong is starting to put some muscle behind his vision of a new journalism model, one which involves Patch.com on the hyper-local side and Seed.com on the user-generated side (Seed, which is being directed by former New York Times writer Saul Hansell, contracts out content to freelancers in the same that Demand Media and Associated Content do). The AOL CEO started building the foundations of that model even before he arrived at AOL, by investing in Patch.com when he was still a senior executive at Google, through his private investment company Polar Capital (he also invested in Associated Content).

Can Armstrong succeed where so many others — including experienced journalists — failed so miserably? He’s certainly devoting an awful lot of AOL’s money to the attempt. If he too comes up short, it will be the biggest blow to hyper-local yet.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Clappstar

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Since its launch two weeks ago, Google’s new Buzz service has generated a flurry of privacy concerns — concerns that have caused considerable anxiety and outrage in at least one high-profile case, and led to privacy complaints being lodged with both the Federal Trade Commission and the Canadian Privacy Commissioner. So what was Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s response? To suggest that users are overreacting, that “no one was harmed,” and to effectively blame users for misunderstanding the terms of the new service. Blaming your users — that’s pretty classy.

According to The Guardian, the Google CEO told telecom industry types attending the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that the claims about Google publishing private information were “not true,” and that most of the problems were due to “confusion” on the part of users as to what would be publicized when they connected the service to their Gmail accounts. Although he said some of the miscommunication was Google’s fault, he added that “the important thing is that no really bad stuff” happened as a result. In other words, nothing to see here — move along.

For a guy who threw a fit when personal details about where he lives and how much money he makes were revealed — using public information sources — by a CNET writer (which resulted in a ban on contact with the publication that was later lifted), this is a pretty laissez-faire response to the concerns of Google Buzz users. And Schmidt has made similar statements about privacy before. Hey Eric — would it be so hard to just say “We’re sorry?” You can say it now, or you can tell it to the FTC.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user World Economic Forum

There’s been a lot of talk about privacy concerns when it comes to Google’s Buzz, with both the Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s office and the Federal Trade Commission looking into the service, people complaining about their contacts being exposed without their knowledge, etc. For me, that stuff isn’t really an issue — rightly or wrongly, I’m pretty much an open book on the Internet when it comes to social networks. As far as I’m concerned, the biggest issue with Buzz is just this: I’m not sure it works.

I’ve tried to like it and find ways to use it, I really have. And I’m not saying I’m giving up on it completely. But I’m skeptical about whether Buzz really fills a critical need in my life, and whether it adds enough value to keep around or devote more time to it. Could this be a result of social networking fatigue? Possibly. But to be honest, Buzz just seems too convoluted and cumbersome in so many ways, the user interface too chaotic and hard to filter, the settings difficult to understand and configure, and the potential use case too hard to figure out.

I’ve been trying to use it as an aggregator for other things — Twitter, Facebook, etc. — but that doesn’t seem all that useful. I check it from time to time because the “unread” number keeps nagging me, but then when I get into it there are just tons of comments on posts by Pete Cashmore and Matt Cutts and Robert Scoble (who I eventually had to unfollow — sorry, Robert). And each time there’s a new comment, Google puts the post back at the top. I thought Google’s mission was to help me make sense of all the information clutter out there, but Buzz really isn’t helping. And it’s not just me: Jyri Engestrom, who co-founded Jaiku and helped create Buzz, has set up a Google Moderator page for suggestions about “How To Fix Buzz,” and thousands of people have voted already.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s great to read through a discussion with Matt Cutts about domain registrars because his wife is looking to buy a domain name. And now and then I come across something interesting that is worth reading or commenting on, like a conversation started by Google engineer DeWitt Clinton or David Cohn. But there’s still just a ton of noise, and I can’t figure out whether that’s my fault or Google’s. Is it the way I’m adding people, or the way Google is filtering (or not)?

A lot of people make the same complaints about Twitter — a high noise ratio, a lack of interesting posts, difficulty figuring out who to follow, etc. But I’ve managed to get Twitter to the point where it works for me, where I’m following a combination of people who provide interesting links and commentary on a fairly consistent basis. Could I get to the point where Buzz works like that, too? I thought it would be fairly simple, since I could just add people I also follow on Twitter through Gmail and the Buzz interface, but it’s still not there yet, and I’m not convinced it will be any time soon.

I’ve tried using Buzz on my phone as well, and as a standalone app (on a Mac, you can turn any URL into a standalone app using Fluid) and that gets closer to being useful. The geolocation for the mobile version — which has suffered its own problems, with a bug that could allow your account to be hacked — is an interesting feature, and I could see how viewing Buzz posts related to a venue would be useful, in the same way “tips” on Foursquare can be. And it’s easier to browse through a standalone desktop app (Google is apparently thinking about offering a standalone version at some point), but then I always get the feeling I’m missing something, due to Google’s obscure sorting algorithms.

In many ways, as David Pogue points out in a recent column, Buzz suffers from a bewildering oversupply of features. It’s a little like its lesser-known cousin, Google Wave — it’s chaotic, hard to filter, and more or less overwhelming. For example, there’s no easy way to collapse comments on posts in Buzz, to get to the new and/or good stuff — but then some conversations collapse by themselves, and I’m not sure why. Other conversations disappear altogether into a window-shade style format (although they can be expanded), and I don’t know why that happens, either. Google’s algorithms at work again, no doubt.

As for disconnecting from Buzz, give this a read and see if you can figure out how it works, because it isn’t straightforward or intuitive by any stretch of the imagination. So I guess I’m stuck with it, whether I use it or not.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Doug88888

In one of the few multimillion-dollar donations to be disclosed via a tweet, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales confirmed late Tuesday that Google had donated $2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation, the not-for-profit entity that runs Wikipedia and several other sites including Wikinews (board member Mitch Kapor actually blabbed about it first on Twitter). The foundation itself eventually put up a press release at the Wikimedia site describing the donation, which comes on top of the $7.5 million that the encyclopedia managed to bring in through donations last year.

The $2 million cements a kind of symbiotic relationship that has existed between Google and Wikimedia — and specifically Wikipedia — for some time. As most people have probably noticed, when you do a search for almost any topic, there is usually a Wikipedia link high up in the results (the site apparently gets about 60-70 percent of its traffic from Google searches, according to a recent estimate by Jimmy Wales). But is that just good content winning, or is it preferential treatment?

Google and Wikipedia maintain that pages from the user-edited encyclopedia show up high in search because the site has a large amount of particularly high-quality content, gets linked to a lot, and therefore ranks highly based on the criteria that Google uses for PageRank and sorting of search results. As one Wikipedia editor put it in a discussion about the issue on the encyclopedia’s site, pages at Wikipedia “suck less than most of the Web.”

Others complain, however, that Google is giving Wikipedia preferential treatment over other sites with high-quality content. Why would the search engine do that? One theory is that Google does this because it is effectively acting as Wikipedia’s advertising partner — since the site itself doesn’t carry any ads, Google gets to monetize that traffic using its AdWords and AdSense programs. Wikipedia gets lots of traffic and attention, and Google gets to keep the ad revenue. A marriage made in heaven?

The only sign of any friction between Google and Wikipedia came when the search engine launched a new service called Knol, which sounded very much like the open-source encyclopedia — pages that anyone could edit, with an added feature: an expert curator who would make sure the information was high quality. Despite much fanfare about the launch and the competition with Wikipedia, however, Knol has failed to make much of a splash, and its pages rarely show up in Google searches.

In a statement about Google’s donation to Wikipedia on Tuesday, co-founder Sergey Brin called the site: “one of the greatest triumphs of the internet” and “an invaluable resource to anyone who is online.” For better or worse, it sounds like Wikipedia and Google will be joined at the hip for some time to come — not just because of the money, but because the relationship benefits both sides equally. So is this symbiotic relationship a good thing? Let me know what you think in the comments.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

Rightly or wrongly, many people have a picture in their minds of the average online gamer, and it probably involves someone not yet old enough to vote, huddled in their parents’ basement killing dwarves with mystic powers in games like World of Warcraft. A growing category of what are called “social games,” however, appeals to a much different demographic, according to a recent study. The study — sponsored by PopCap, creator of popular social games such as Bejeweled and Insaniquarium — looked at game players in both the United States and the United Kingdom, and found that the average player of these online social games is a 43-year-old woman.

More than 24 percent of those who responded to the survey (full results in PDF form here) said they regularly play social games, a category that includes Facebook games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars and Happy Aquarium. According to survey company Info Solutions Group, that level of response suggests a total social gaming population of approximately 100 million. Social gamers were defined as those who said they play games on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace at least once a week. The market for social games has been growing so quickly that companies that make them, such as Zynga and Crowdstar, have become investment and acquisition targets.

Social gaming seems to appeal to a much older demographic than traditional video games, perhaps in part because social games are easier to play for short periods of time, are largely free, and don’t involve sophisticated equipment or gratuitous violence. According to a recent survey by Royal Pingdom, the average age of social networking site users in general is also older — the largest single group is between 35 and 44 years of age. More than 60 percent of Facebook users are over 35.

The PopCap study showed that 55 percent of all social gamers in the U.S. are women, as are almost 60 percent of those in the UK. The average age in the U.S. is 48, which is substantially older than the 38-year-old average in the UK, and 46 percent of American social gamers are 50 or older, compared with just 23 percent in the UK. Only 6 percent of all social gamers are age 21 or younger.

According to the survey, women make up the majority of avid social gamers, with 38 percent of female social gamers saying they play social games several times a day, vs. just 29 percent of males. Women are also more likely to play social games with their real-world friends than men are (68 percent vs. 56 percent) and are nearly twice as likely as men to play social games with relatives (46 percent vs. 29 percent). The vast majority (95 percent) of social gamers play multiple times per week, and nearly two-thirds play at least once a day.

The largest single group of social gamers — 41 per cent of those surveyed — work full time, while 13 percent are retired and 11 percent are homemakers. In terms of educational background, less than half of those who play social games in the U.S. are college graduates. One-third of those in the U.S. earn less than $35,000 a year while 17 percent earn between $35,000 and $49,000; 21 percent make between $50,000 and 75,000 and 21 percent earn more than $75,000 a year.

Other points of interest from the study include:

• More than 60 percent of social gamers say their average session lasts more than half an hour, and 10 percent say it lasts 3 hours or more. About a third (35 percent) say their consumption has increased over the past three months, compared to 10 percent who said it has decreased.
• Facebook is by far the most popular destination for social gamers, with 83 percent of those surveyed saying they play games there, compared with 24 percent who play on MySpace, 7 percent on Bebo and 5 percent on Friendster.
• Social gamers spend 39 percent of their time on social networking sites/services playing games, compared with chatting with/messaging friends (17 percent) and playing solo games (15 percent). Nearly half (49 percent) said that when they connect to social networks, they do so specifically to play social games.
• The most popular games are Farmville (69 percent of those who play it say they play once a week or more), Bejeweled (65 percent say once a week or more), Texas Hold’em Poker (63 percent) and Cafe World (61 percent).
• A little over half (53 percent) of social gamers say they’ve earned and/or spent virtual currency in a game, but only 28 percent have purchased virtual currency with real-world money and only 32 percent have purchased a virtual gift.

“This study establishes social games as a fast-growing and quickly maturing pastime for an enormous portion of the population,” Robin Boyar of Thinktank Research said in a statement. “With more than 80 percent of social gamers stating that playing social games strengthens their relationship with friends, family and colleagues, social gaming reinforces the core appeal of social networks.”

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Olivander

With the web becoming more ubiquitous and companies getting used to outsourcing to online freelancers, the market for online work is increasing, one recent study says. According to online outsourcing firm Elance, the pool of online workers that the company tracks made more than $70 million for online work of various kinds in 2009, up 45 percent from the beginning of the year.

The company said that the volume of hiring done through its online service also grew by more than 40 percent over 2008, and the total earnings of independent contractors working through Elance since the service began in 1998 passed the $245 million-mark. The survey shows that residents of all 50 states are now earning income online, with California, New York and Texas ranking as the top three states and San Francisco, New York and Dallas among the top cities for online income.

Elance said that some emerging trends for skills in 2010 include:

• Mobile: Demand for mobile development was one of the fastest-growing skill subcategories, with a 180 percent increase in earnings in 2009. Android is also rising fast in the ranking of skills in demand – up 400 percent in the past 6 months with more than 170 projects posted in the last month alone.
• The iPad: Within 24 hours of the Apple iPad announcement, 20 iPad application development jobs were immediately posted on Elance. As of mid-February, there were 70 open iPad jobs on the site.
• Marketing: Demand for both online and traditional marketing talent continued to grow rapidly in 2009. Top marketing skills — including Search Engine Optimization (#1), Internet Marketing (#2), Lead Generation (#3) and Social Media Marketing (#7) — showed 46 percent growth in earnings.

Elance VP Ellen Pack said in a statement that online outsourcing is growing because “companies continue to look for greater flexibility and efficiency, more skilled professionals are choosing to work independently, and managing online work has become easier than ever due to sophisticated web applications, mobile devices and cloud computing platforms.”

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A little over a year after coming up with the idea for a web-based service for backing up online services such as Flickr albums or Twitter tweets, Charlie O’Donnell of First Round Capital announced Tuesday on his blog and on Twitter that his venture firm and several others — including venture investors Betaworks and General Catalyst, and angel investors Chris Sacca and Jason Calacanis — have invested $900,000 in a second financing round for startup Backupify. But will users be comfortable backing all their data up with a cloud-storage startup that they’ve never heard of? Backupify will need to clear that hurdle and many others in order to achieve success.

The idea behind the company, O’Donnell says, was to provide a single place where users of various web services such as Twitter and Flickr could back up their data. Although there are a number of cloud-based solutions for backing up documents and information from a desktop (including services such as Mozy, Carbonite and Symantec), he writes that he couldn’t find any “cloud to cloud” solutions that were designed to back up data from web-based services. So he asked a friend, Rob May — founder of BusinessPundit.com — to build something, and Backupify was born.

Users who sign up with the service, which launched in beta last year, get one gigabyte of storage for free, and the company has said that it plans to offer paid accounts with up to 10 gigabytes of storage for $5 a month or $50 a year. After users tell Backupify which services they want to backup, and log in with their credentials, the service pulls the data from those sites using their open APIs (application programming interfaces).

While closing a financing round from some high-profile investors is a nice coup, the main problem for Backupify is that it suffers from all of the privacy and reliability concerns that tend to cluster around any cloud-based service — and then some. After all, some users don’t even like storing their documents online with giant players such as Google or Microsoft; why would they want to do so with a tiny startup? And if backing up your desktop data to the cloud takes a leap of faith (due to some high-profile data losses), it’s likely to take an even bigger one to back up data that’s already in the cloud with another cloud-based service.

Documents and information that start out on a desktop PC remain there when they’re backed up, but what about data that begins and ends in the cloud? Backupify notes that users can download the backups to their PC for added security, but that’s another step people have to take — many of whom are so time-challenged that they fail to do regular backups as it is. Backupify also notes that for some services such as Twitter, it won’t be able to restore the data fully but will simply send you an XML data file that it admits “is not easily readable by human eyes” (the company says it is working on other formats).

Backupify doesn’t host your data itself, the company points out in a FAQ. Using public APIs, the company extracts your data from various cloud-based services — Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Google Documents, etc. — and sends it to Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service). In other words, Backupify is more or less a middleman that stands between your social web services and Amazon’s cloud storage offering. While this might assuage some concerns about the reliability of the backup, however, it’s likely to raise others, since S3 has been known to have issues itself.

If nothing else, Backupify’s latest financing will give it the time to try and answer some of those questions. This is the second round of funding for the company, which raised $125,000 in seed financing last year from a number of angel investors including Hubspot co-founder Darmesh Shah, who also joined as a co-founder.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user tipiro

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Google, after scrambling to alter certain features and add new settings to Buzz several times since its launch a week ago, has admitted that it rushed the service out the door. However, the search giant says it’s working hard to adapt to what users want and has set up a “war room” dedicated to responding as quickly as possible. The company told the BBC that while most Google services go through some testing with a small group of beta users, Buzz was released into the wild without this level of testing. Buzz product manager Todd Jackson admitted that many users of Buzz were “rightfully upset” and said Google was “very, very sorry.” He added that: “We know we need to improve things.”

Within hours of the Buzz launch, users were complaining about a number of features (or flaws) in the service, including the fact that their Gmail and GTalk contacts were publicly revealed for everyone to see, and that the setting for making that public or private was enabled by default and/or difficult to find. Users also said blocking followers wasn’t as easy as it should have been, that they couldn’t unfollow someone if they didn’t have a Google profile, and that it wasn’t clear who would be shown in their list of followers.

Many of Google’s new products and services first undergo testing with what the company calls its Trusted Testers program, in which a small group of users — primarily friends and family members of Google employees — get early access to the service and provide feedback before it’s rolled out in open beta. This was not the case with Google Buzz, the company told the BBC, although it had been used for some time internally by Google employees themselves. “Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild,” Jackson said.

According to both the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, the company has set up a “war room” at Google headquarters that monitors what users are saying about Buzz, and that the company plans to make further changes to the service in response to that feedback. The most recent changes to the service — in which Google switched from an auto-follow approach, where users found themselves following Gmail and GTalk contacts automatically, to a “suggested follow” approach — was made on Saturday by a group of Google engineers and senior executives including VP Brad Horowitz and senior engineering VP Jeff Huber. The changes are being rolled out this week.

While the company has been applauded by many for its rapid response to user complaints and the addition of new features, that doesn’t seem to have placated some privacy advocates, who say Google’s approach was wrong from the beginning. According to the LA Times, the Electronic Privacy Information Center is planning to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over Buzz. “”The bottom line is that self-regulation is not working,” center director Marc Rotenberg told the newspaper. “Google pushes the envelope, people scream and they dial back the service until the screaming subsides.”

Post photo courtesy of Flickr user So Gosehn

Facebook is now the top source of traffic for major news and entertainment portals such as Yahoo and MSN, according to traffic analysis firm Compete, and is “among the leaders” for other sites as well. Although far from conclusive, this is just another sign of how the “social web” is becoming an increasingly dominant force in terms of driving traffic flows on the Internet — and that in turn makes it a growing threat for major web players such as Google, MSN and Yahoo. If your core business depends on controlling and/or getting a piece of the web’s traffic flow, as it does for all of those companies, the social web is something you ignore at your peril (which helps explain the launch of new services like Google Buzz).

Compete’s director of online media and search told the San Francisco Chronicle that a snapshot of web traffic from December showed 13 percent of the traffic to major web portals like Yahoo, MSN and AOL came from Facebook. Traffic from Google generated just 7 percent, which Compete said actually put it third in traffic sources behind eBay, which accounted for 7.6 percent.

It’s important to note that Compete’s analysis is just another data point, and probably shouldn’t be taken as definitive. The jockeying for top spot as the web’s No. 1 traffic source has been going on for some time, and every measurement firm has its own numbers, which often conflict with each other because of differences in their methods. But there’s no question about the overall trend: Facebook has been growing strongly in terms of overall traffic to the site and the traffic that it drives to other sites.

Steve Rubel of Edelman Digital says that he sees Facebook becoming an increasingly powerful competitor to Google. “I see Facebook starting to look more like Google while Google tries and stumbles at becoming more social,” he writes. “Social networking is here to stay. It’s where attention spirals are flowing and no one looms larger than Facebook. And while Facebook has plenty of critics and they run into the occasional privacy concerns, I believe that they will dominate the landscape the next few years.”

Billionaire entrepreneur and sports team owner Mark Cuban noted a similar phenomenon in a blog post last year, saying the traffic coming to his blog from Facebook and Twitter was increasing while the traffic flow from Google was “declining significantly.” He called this phenomenon “huge, because of the behavior implications for users, and because of the business implications for Twitter, Facebook and Google.”

It’s worth pointing out that while Facebook may be driving more traffic to portal sites and to blogs — particularly those like Perez Hilton, which gets far more referrals from the social network than it does from Google, according to Hitwise — that doesn’t mean it’s going to replace Google any time soon. And Google, along with Microsoft and Yahoo, is doing its best to integrate social web content from Twitter and Facebook into search results, through indexing arrangements with those sites. But the balance of power is definitely shifting.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user 27147

A new web chat service called ChatRoulette has been getting a lot of attention of late, in part because it’s about as raw and unfiltered a form of social media possible: not just chat with random strangers (something that Twitter and other tools also allow), but video chat with random strangers. The addition of video — not surprisingly — brings out the exhibitionist tendencies in some people and the voyeuristic tendencies in others, and ChatRoulette subjects its users to plenty of both. As Ivor Tossell of the Globe and Mail described it in a recent column: “Naked guy. Click. Naked guy. Click. Naked guy.”

If nothing else, this raw and unfiltered experience has gotten ChatRoulette plenty of attention — and not just from the media, but from one of the web’s best-known investors, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. Given the fuss that people have been making about the site, its probably not surprising that people would start trying to track down the founder, and the New York Times finally managed to do just that. The paper did an email interview on Friday with the 17-year-old Russian who created ChatRoulette, Andrey Ternovskiy, who talked about setting the site up for fun and how his parents had helped fund it (we can only assume that his parents have never used their son’s site.)

In the wake of that interview, Wilson wrote a blog post saying he was interested in the site and was planning to invite the founder to come to New York, and that he was considering investing in ChatRoulette:

I think we’ll reach out to Andrey and offer him a visit to NYC. I’m still not sure if this is something we should invest it, but I’d sure like to meet this guy. He reminds me of many great young entrepreneurs we’ve worked with and his story sounds so familiar.

In a response to a comment from someone who describes ChatRoulette as “not investable” because of the random adult content, however, Wilson says he agrees, but that he still wants to talk to the young man who started it about his ideas. In another comment, he says:

CR already has more users than delicious, foursquare, tumblr, and a number of other investments we’ve made had when we made them…of course that doesn’t mean we can or should invest. i’m concerned that the use case for the most part today is online freak shows and that doesn’t seem like a sustainable or monetizable proposition.

Wilson isn’t the only one who finds ChatRoulette fascinating. New York magazine has also written about the bizarre glimpses of humanity it provides, and so has Bobbie Johnson at The Guardian. Anil Dash, formerly of Six Apart, used the site as one example in a post about the power of the audience and of shared experience. Not everyone is interested in investing in the site, however: Brad Feld, one of the co-founders of Foundry Group, didn’t seem all that attracted to the idea in a tweet he posted on Sunday. But if nothing else, Ternovskiy has managed to pique Wilson’s interest, and will probably get an interview with every web-connected VC in the U.S. if he wants one.

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user John Wardell

Google, just two days after making substantial changes to Buzz, and less than a week after the service first launched, has again altered the terms of its new chat platform to try and respond to privacy concerns from some vocal users. But will the latest changes be enough to dampen the flames of criticism and get people to focus on the service’s positive features instead of its negative ones? In his blog post about the latest changes, product manager Todd Jackson said the Google team had been “working around the clock” to respond to users’ concerns, including the auto-following of contacts from Gmail and GTalk, which some found disturbing. He wrote:

With Google Buzz, we wanted to make the getting started experience as quick and easy as possible, so that you wouldn’t have to manually peck out your social network from scratch. However, many people just wanted to check out Buzz and see if it would be useful to them, and were not happy that they were already set up to follow people.

Now, instead of auto-following everyone in your Gmail contacts, Buzz will simply show you a list of the contacts you are connected to whom you might want to follow, and then let you decide whether to do so or not. As more than one person has pointed out, this changes the service from an explicitly opt-out process to an opt-in one — which is likely to be a lot less intrusive for those who are sensitive about displaying their email contacts to the world.

In two other notable changes, Google will no longer connect your Picasa web albums and Google Reader shared items automatically (even though that just displayed content that was already public). And a new Buzz tab has been added to the settings in Gmail, which will allow users to either hide Buzz or disable it completely. This is no doubt a response to the numerous “How to disable Buzz” blog posts and discussion threads that sprang up in the wake of the service’s launch.

The fact that they need to make this many changes to Buzz may be further evidence that the members of the Google Buzz team are nerds at the dance, but at least they’re dancing as fast as they can — and they’re not shy about saying they need help learning the steps. But wouldn’t it have been easier if they asked people about this kind of stuff before they launched the product?

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Google Buzz’s True Home Is In the Enterprise

Post photo courtesy of Flickr user teo_ladodici

It’s a little sad, and yet at the same time kind of hilarious watching Google try to get jiggy with the whole “social media” thing. Even before the fuss over Google Buzz revealing people’s email contacts, which has caused significant privacy issues for some people — including one anonymous blogger who is being targeted by an abusive ex-husband (warning: graphic language) — Google’s approach to Buzz seemed kind of ham-handed. Not that there was anything wrong with the launch from a technical perspective, but it seemed to be missing something.

A friend described the much-hyped launch presentation as “a bunch of engineering grads” trying desperately to be likable, which pretty much sums it up. Brad Horowitz and Todd Jackson and Vic Gundotra were earnest, and definitely seemed smart when it came to the various features and the implementation of Buzz, including the various mobile enhancements, etc. But it felt a bit like listening to a stereo geek tell you all about how many watts his amplifier puts out, without saying anything at all about the music itself, or how it makes you feel, or should make you feel.

That focus on features seems to have contributed to some of the negative reaction to Buzz. While it’s true (as Jackson argued in a somewhat defensive blog post about the recent changes) that Google did tell users their email contacts would be displayed publicly, it didn’t really make that terribly obvious. And why not? I think it’s because the company was thinking about all the great features that Buzz would have, not about how actual human beings would use the product in the real world.

Umair Haque has a great post along these lines at the Harvard Business Review site, in which he describes how Buzz fails many of what he calls the “five principles of designing for meaning,” one of which is what he calls the Hippocrates Concept, based on the ancient Greek philosopher’s principle of doing no harm. Buzz pretty much failed that principle right out of the gate. Haque also mentions that, like many companies, Google often relies on people following complicated instructions, which is rarely a good idea. As he writes:

Google’s working hard to fix the issue, but its fixes still rely on people “following instructions”. In the real world, almost no users follow instructions. If it’s that complicated, you might have just already failed. Nobody wants to spend an hour figuring whether a service might just do no harm — or tweaking it to do no harm.

Haque also mentions something others have complained about, which is that Buzz doesn’t really do what Google claims it wants to do, which is to organize and make sense of the world’s information — instead, it throws even more massive quantities of the stuff at you and makes it difficult to sort through. Haque says opening up Buzz is “like being punched in the face with a giant fist of information.”

It’s not like Google isn’t trying to understand more about what the social web requires. The company has even put together a kind of social media SWAT team that includes luminaries such as open web advocate Chris Messina and the former chief technology officer of Plaxo, Joseph Smarr. But even here, Google seems more focused on the plumbing and the programming rather than how people actually use the social web. Does it have anyone working on the team who actually uses social media a lot, and understands it and lives and breathes it?

Maybe in the case of Buzz, Google let good become the enemy of great.
Or maybe what the company really needs is a soul.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user PaDumBumPsh

According to recent statements by an Icelandic member of parliament, described in a post at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab blog, that country’s government plans to put forward legislation on Tuesday that could create an international repository for leaked documents, exposed corporate and government secrets, and other information provided by investigative journalists and whistle-blowers alike. If that sounds a lot like what the Wikileaks web site does, it should — the founders of Wikileaks have been instrumental in pushing Iceland to make the proposal.

Iceland has been receptive to such ideas because the country’s economy has been shattered by the recent banking crisis, which many believe was the result of government incompetence and exacerbated by corporate and governmental secrecy. It led to a change in government and a series of legislative moves to protect whistle-blowers, freedom of information, etc. It’s not clear how the Wikileaks founders got in contact with Iceland’s political representatives, but talks have reportedly been continuing for some time.

Wikileaks has been engaged in a struggle for funding to carry on its non-profit crusade to expose corporate and government corruption and ineptitude, a crusade that has gained a high profile through such incidents as the Trafigura scandal in Britain, the release of thousands of text messages sent during the 9/11 attacks, and a case involving former presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s email account. Wikileaks recently said it had received enough financing to continue operating.

On a somewhat ironic note, given the freedom-of-information slant of the news, the Nieman Lab post appears to have broken an embargo on the story to which some other parties had agreed. Nieman Lab head Josh Benton justifies his decision in a comment on the blog post, saying that: a) he didn’t agree to any embargo, b) the information involves a government and is therefore newsworthy and arguably not subject to embargoes, and c) the information is already widely known.

Although it’s not clear whether the proposed legislation will be successful in Iceland, the Nieman Lab post says the idea has the support of the leaders of the Left-Green Movement, the Social Democratic Alliance and the Citizen Movement, representing a total of 38 of Iceland’s 63 parliamentary seats. In the video below, from the 26th Chaos Communications Congress — an annual hacker conference held in Berlin — two of the founders of Wikileaks describe their vision of what a freedom-of-information haven in Iceland might look like and how it might function as what they call a “Switzerland of bits.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user orvaratli

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Now Gmail isn’t the only Google offering with a “labs” section that offers experimental features: A reader tipped Google Blogoscoped off to the addition of the lab’s green flask icon to Google Maps, which has been given some cool new features as well. Among them are a new “aerial imagery” setting that has been added to the existing map, with terrain and satellite buttons at the top of the map view. While similar to satellite view, it gives viewers a different angle to look at, rather than the typical straight-down view that satellite imagery provides. Google says aerial images (which appear to have been taken by a plane) are only available for certain locations though, including — of course — the Googleplex itself, which appears in the photo at the top of this post.

The other features that have been added include:

• Drag ’n’ Zoom — Lets you click and drag the cursor to create a square around any point, and then zoom to that point
• What’s Around Here? — Adds a second search button that looks for key sights and features around a specific location
• LatLng Tooltip — Displays a tooltip next to the mouse cursor that shows the latitude/ longitude of that spot
• Where In The World Game — Lets you test your knowledge of world geography by guessing the name of the country from satellite imagery
• Rotatable Maps — Lets you drag and rotate the compass to see the map from any direction
• Smart Zoom — Stops the map from zooming in to a detail level where no imagery exists, and prevents the message “We don’t have imagery at this zoom level.”

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Amid the hubbub over the launch of Google Buzz, one aspect of the new Gmail social platform has grown more and more contentious: the fact that many people wound up exposing their email and GTalk contacts to the outside world without realizing this would happen (see here for one example — warning: strong language). Some users said they had turned Buzz off as a result, while others said they had avoided following friends because they didn’t want to expose their profiles or emails in this way. Others complained that they couldn’t block users who didn’t already have a public profile, and that it wasn’t clear who would be shown on their public following list and who wouldn’t.

So what did Google do? It listened, and even though the feature has only been available for two days, it has made changes to respond to these criticisms and more. As the company explained in a blog post, it has made the “public or non-public” setting in Buzz more obvious so that users make that decision explicitly, and it has also made it possible for users to block those they don’t want following them regardless of whether that user has a public profile or not, and to see who will be on their public list.

Even though some have argued that the privacy concerns were overblown, it’s nice to see Google responding to its users and making changes so quickly. The company also said in its blog post that in just two days since the launch of Buzz, it has seen more than 9 million posts and comments from users, and that it has been getting over 200 posts per minute from mobile phones around the world.

It’s a constant battle that entrepreneurs face when planning a new product or service: How do you know which features to include and which features to leave out? One of the hallmarks of a great design-oriented company like Apple is that it knows the answer to that question (or does a good job of pretending it knows) and pursues it with a laser-like focus, understanding full well that the days and weeks after a new product launch will be filled with criticisms about all the missing features. Witness the famous Slashdot review of the first iPod: “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

If that’s something you think about a lot (and it should be), Gmail creator and FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit had a great post recently entitled “If Your Product Is Great, It Doesn’t Need To Be Good.” In it, he says:

What’s the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product — the rest is noise.

So in the case of the original iPod, it was small enough to fit in a pocket, had enough storage to hold a lot of music, and was easy to sync with a Mac, but was missing all kinds of other potentially useful features (FM radio, voice recorder, etc.). “No wireless, no ability to edit playlists on the device, no support for Ogg,” says Buchheit. “Nothing but the essentials, well executed.” The former Googler says he took the same approach with Gmail: it was fast, had a lot of storage, and had an innovative interface based on the idea of threaded conversations. “The secondary and tertiary features were minimal or absent…if the basic product isn’t compelling, adding more features won’t save it.”

By focusing on only a few core features in the first version, he says, “You are forced to find the true essence and value of the product. If your product needs ‘everything’ in order to be good, then it’s probably not very innovative (though it might be a nice upgrade to an existing product). Put another way, if your product is great, it doesn’t need to be good.”

If you view the iPad in this light, Buchheit says, it looks well-engineered to do one or two things extremely well — namely, to make browsing media of various kinds easy and nice to look at, and all through a well-implemented touch interface, something that no other device apart from Apple’s iPod touch and iPhone have, but which could fundamentally change the way we interact with media. And it doesn’t have a lot of the features a laptop would have — in fact, if it had them, they would just get in the way. Think about that the next time you are designing something.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user ruurmo

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Things seem to be humming along in the Facebook game market: Zynga, the leading Facebook game company, with popular apps such as Mafia Wars and Farmville (whose users recently sent half a billion valentines to each other in 48 hours), has agreed to acquire fellow game maker Serious Business, whose apps include Friends For Sale. And Bloomberg reports that Microsoft is in talks to acquire Crowdstar, another leading maker of Facebook games, whose apps include Happy Aquarium. The report notes, however, that a deal is not final, and that informed sources said Crowdstar may “choose to stay independent with investment from a private equity firm.”

The value of the Zynga deal hasn’t been disclosed, but Serious Business has about 6 million total registered users of its Facebook games — including Friends For Sale, Happy Hour and Rock Legends — according to analytics provider AppData. That puts it at No. 36 on the Facebook developer leaderboard. The company was founded by several former employees of search engine technology company Powerset, and got $4 million in financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners in 2008.

Zynga, which got an investment of $180 million from Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies in December, has a total of about 232 million registered users for its games and apps, including Texas Hold ‘Em, Farmville and Mafia Wars. According to the Bloomberg report, a deal between Crowdstar and Microsoft could be worth as much as $200 million. If the software maker does wind up buying Crowdstar, it will be interesting to see how (or if) that changes Microsoft’s relationship with Facebook, since it owns a stake in the social network (Digital Sky also owns a stake).

AppData says that Crowdstar has about 50 million registered users for its 11 Facebook apps and games, which include Happy Aquarium, Happy Pets and Know-It-All Trivia — although Happy Aquarium is by far the largest with more than half of the total. AppData has Crowdstar at No. 4 on the Facebook developer leaderboard, just below Facebook itself. Second place is held by RockYou, which has 90 million registered users of games and apps such as its Horoscopes service. RockYou raised a $50 million funding round in November from SoftBank.

The Facebook and “social gaming” market got a huge boost last fall, when Electronic Arts — whose PC and console game business has reportedly been suffering from lower sales that have hit the game maker hard — bought Facebook game company Playfish in November for $400 million. Playfish has about 60 million registered users for its games, including Pet Society.

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Peter Sunde, apparently not content with having co-founded the world’s most popular index of copyright-infringing movies, music and software (the BitTorrent tracker known as The Pirate Bay) as well as inspiring the creation of an actual political party dedicated to anti-copyright causes (Sweden’s Pirate Party), seems to have his heart set on revolutionizing the world of online payments as well. Sunde recently launched a micropayment service called Flattr that’s currently accepting beta testers.

Judging from the demo video below, Flattr is a combination of an all-you-can-eat payment system and a tip jar. Users sign up for the service and pay a monthly fee, which then gets distributed to the various web sites or individuals who have registered to receive payments through Flattr — but the payments are based on users clicking the Flattr button on each web site to which they want to donate. The service says it’s designed for musicians, artists, software creators, programmers and anyone else who wants to give users or fans an easy way to pay for their content.

It’s not clear whether Flattr is an attempt to compensate for all of the music, software and other creative works that The Pirate Bay has helped people download without paying for (after the site was successfully sued in Sweden last year, it agreed to be acquired by a gaming company that planned to stop illegal downloads, but the sale later fell through). What is pretty clear, however, is that Sunde is going to have quite a job on his hands with his new startup — not only is he associated with The Pirate Bay, but micropayments are an idea that has defeated virtually everyone who has ever tried to implement them, including NeBill, Millicent, CyberCash, DigiCash, Peppercoin, Beenz and half a dozen others that I’m probably forgetting about. On the other hand, at least Sunde is thinking big.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Dunechaser

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Some music blogs skirt the edges of legality (and some completely ignore it) when it comes to posting mp3 files of their favorite songs. But a number of popular music blogs say Google deleted their blogs without warning, despite the fact that they had the legal right to post the songs they did — in many cases because they were given the tracks by record labels themselves as a promotional effort.

According to The Guardian, among the music blogs that have been deleted (all of which used Google’s Blogger platform) are Masalacism, I Rock Cleveland, To Die By Your Side, It’s A Rap and Living Ears. Each now brings up a “blog not found” message (Living Ears has put up a new blog here). One blog, Pop Tarts Suck Toasted, has put up a separate WordPress-based (please see disclosure at the bottom) site to mirror the deleted one, with a post that states:

Sorry for the mass nature of this little note, but as you may have noticed my blog – http://poptartssucktoasted.blogspot.com – was murdered by the villainous conglomerate known as Goggle (Blogger) yesterday morning. due to copyright infringement or however they want to spin.

The publisher of I Rock Cleveland, meanwhile, has posted a comment in the Blogger support forum asking why his blog was deleted, and noting that the blog has never posted anything but legally acquired tracks:

Today I received notice that I had been found in violation of DMCA regulations and my blog had been deleted. However, without knowing which post had been in violation I have no way of knowing what caused the violation and whether I can defend myself against the allegation…I assure you that everything I’ve posted for, let’s say, the past two years, has either been provided by a promotional company, came directly from the record label, or came directly from the artist.

Google’s deletion of these blogs is just the latest episode in what has been an ongoing battle involving bloggers, Google, record labels and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As the official Google Blogger response to the latest incident notes, a similar series of deletions occurred last year, causing an uproar in the music blogging community. Google responded by updating how it responds to DMCA complaints, but the latest incidents clearly show that the process is still not working properly, as Mike Masnick at Techdirt points out.

Many of the music bloggers whose blogs were deleted say they didn’t receive proper warnings that deletion would be occurring, and in many cases the DMCA notices they received didn’t even specify which songs were the subject of the complaint, making it impossible to rectify the situation (which involves a complicated series of steps prescribed by the copyright legislation) to avoid deletion. If nothing else, this kind of behavior might speed the emigration of more bloggers from Google’s lagging Blogger platform to WordPress, Tumblr or other competitors.

Disclosure: GigaOM and WordPress owner Automattic have a common investor, True Ventures. Om is a venture partner in True Ventures.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user cotidad

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Google Buzz, in case you hadn’t noticed, has been getting lots of…well, buzz since being unveiled yesterday. Depending on your perspective, it’s either a huge Facebook-Twitter-MySpace-Yelp-Foursquare killer, or it’s a giant disappointment and therefore an epic fail (our own Liz Gannes thinks it’s somewhere in between). Like many of the new things released by companies such as Google and Apple, it seems to function like a Rorschach test for the geek crowd, a blank sheet upon which everyone’s highest hopes and/or deepest fears can be projected. Google Buzz is brilliant or Google Buzz is stupid; Google Buzz changes everything or Google Buzz changes nothing. And so on.

Google’s new service looks and feels a lot like many other social media tools and networks. The primary input is a box for status updates, just like Twitter and Facebook. You can use @ replies, just like Twitter, and you can share photos and other media content easily (there’s even a photo gallery function like Facebook’s). If you’re mobile, you can give Google Buzz your current location and get comments about that location, just like Foursquare and Gowalla and Yelp. But the single biggest difference between Google Buzz and all of these other services is that Buzz is tied to email.

Although you can get Twitter updates in your inbox, and you can get email notifications from Facebook of new messages (and can now respond to them via email as well), those two services aren’t explicitly integrated into email the way Buzz is. But is that integration a strength or a weakness? That probably depends on how you feel about your email. If, like some people, your email is a place where you mostly get spam, and where you find yourself paddling hard to keep your head above water with all the new messages coming in, then getting a ton of new stuff in your inbox that amounts to social chatter is not going to strike you as a great idea.

At the same time, however, being tied into email is one of the big strengths of Buzz. Instead of having to remember to go and check a separate web site or start up a separate app, all those discussions and content sharing come right into the thing you use most — your email inbox. And if you get overwhelmed, you can always unfollow someone, or mute their conversations. Some people who responded to the Buzz announcement, including TechCrunch writer Erick Schonfeld, said that they were more likely to use Buzz because it was integrated into their mail. Others, however, seemed irritated by the connection, especially the fact that Google publicly reveals who your most-emailed contacts are.

I think one of the biggest problems for Buzz is that sharing short, status update-type messages or having discussions about ephemeral topics is a very different type of communication than what most people use their email client for. If you do work through your Gmail, then you’re getting longer messages, some with attachments, responding to questions about projects, and so on — that doesn’t really jibe with a Twitter post or a Facebook message from your friend about a great Lolcat video or the photos from his trip to Tuscany. Twitter and Facebook are streams into which you dip from time to time, whereas email is much more a task-specific type of tool. Do they belong together? Let me know what you think in the comments.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user bcostin

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