Author: Mathew Ingram

It’s still a week before Andrew Sullivan’s new independent site goes live with the subscription-based model he announced earlier this month, and the star political blogger says he has already raised close to $500,000 from readers. Sullivan’s move was like a shot across the bow of traditional media, one that is no doubt being watched closely by many high-profile writers and journalists — such as New York Times statistics blogger Nate Silver, whose contract with the newspaper is coming up for renewal soon. Where will the continents lie after this tectonic shift is over?

The reality is that individual brands like Sullivan and Silver now arguably have as much or more power as the traditional brands they used to align themselves with. The big question is how outlets like the Times and others will handle that re-balancing of power, and whether they will ultimately win or lose — and with the ongoing decline of print revenue, the stakes for traditional outlets are higher than they have ever been. (Note: We’re going to be discussing this with Sullivan and several other star bloggers at our paidContent Live media conference on April 17 in New York).

What does the NYT have to offer Nate Silver?

After announcing his split from The Daily Beast on January 2, Sullivan raised more than $300,000 for his new site in a matter of days, and was widely hailed as the harbinger of a new movement towards reader-supported independent writing. The pace of subscriptions has fallen off sharply (not surprisingly), but he is still signing up readers for his $20-per-year plan, with the latest total being $489,000 according to a recent update:

Silver hasn’t said much about his plans for the future since his emergence as a blogging superstar during the recent U.S. federal election, when his statistics-based blog — called Five Thirty Eight, after the number of members in the U.S. electoral college — got so much traffic that at one point it accounted for more than 20 percent of all the visits to the entire New York Times website. But he has hinted that he is considering whether to remain with the NYT or strike out on his own.

And why wouldn’t he consider it? With a book just published to some acclaim, Silver arguably has the kind of personal brand that could be successful as a standalone property like the one Andrew Sullivan is trying to build. And despite the attention the New York Times got from his content during the election, there has been some tension between the newspaper and Silver — including a reprimand from the paper’s public editor over a humorous wager that the blogger wanted to offer to MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on the outcome of the election (a bet that the NYT said was unseemly for a journalist).

Silver said this incident wasn’t a big deal, and that he appreciates being part of the New York Times. But how much does he really need the NYT, and how much does the NYT need him and others like him? That’s the question at the core of the Sullivan model: at what point does it become more of a hindrance than a benefit to be associated with a traditional media brand?

If Sullivan can do it, who else might be able to?

There are a number of other bloggers and columnists who could arguably pull off a standalone, Sullivan-style model: New York Times foreign correspondent Nick Kristof, for example, has a huge following through social media like Twitter and Facebook and is a popular author — although whether he would get access to the people and places he needs to access if he were independent is a question mark. Other columnists at the NYT and similar mainstream outlets like Tom Friedman or Ezra Klein could probably make a go of it, as could some writers such as Felix Salmon at Reuters.

New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson told a media panel on Friday that the newspaper wants to work closely with high-powered writers like Silver, and in the past has used DealBook blogger Andrew Ross Sorkin as a model for what the paper wants to do by building events and other value-added offerings around individuals with star power. But at some point, writers like Sorkin and others are going to ask whether they wouldn’t be better off running such businesses on their own.

In a sense, this is just the latest evolution of a tension that has existed between traditional media and the web since blogging was invented — writers like our own Om Malik gain a profile in traditional media and then go off to start their own media entities, and some high-profile bloggers like Josh Marshall or Mike Masnick manage to turn their blogs into standalone businesses like Talking Points Memo and Techdirt. It’s a little like the music industry: labels try to nurture star talent, knowing full well that in some cases that talent will leave and go independent.

And as the music industry has discovered, there is even less incentive for talent to stick around now than there ever has been, and the barriers to entry for those who decide to leave are lower. Sullivan may have been the first over the wall in this latest iteration, but he is unlikely to be the last.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / ollyy and Shutterstock / Allies Interactive

The push to free up more public information and make government more transparent is one of the primary goals of open data advocates and the “Government 2.0″ movement. But sociologist and Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd warned attendees at the recent Gov 2.0 conference that there’s a downside to such efforts. “Transparency is not enough,” she said (video is embedded below), and raw information without the ability to understand or make sense of it does no one any good.

The issues with transparency are similar to the issues with Internet access and the digital divide. In focusing on the first step – transparency or access – it’s easy to forget the bigger picture. Internet access does not automagically created an informed citizenry. Likewise, transparent data doesn’t make an informed citizenry. Transparency is only the first step. And when we treat transparency as an ends in itself, we can create all sorts of unintended consequences.

Boyd described how laws require the publication of lists of registered sex offenders, which she agreed is a positive thing in most ways. But as she noted, many of the names on them belong to young people who were charged with criminal acts for having a consensual relationship with someone under the age of official consent. Having just the raw information about such types of things can actually make things worse if it’s not interpreted correctly:

Information is power. This is precisely why we want to get information into the hands of more people. But as we do, we need to account for a new twist in all of this: Spinning the interpretation of the information is even more powerful. And the more that we make information available, the more that those in power twist it to tell their story. When everyone has information, information is no longer nearly as powerful as the ability to control its narrative.

Information alone doesn’t empower people, she said, adding that: “Information is never neutral. Neutrality is another one of those lovely ideals. But Wikipedia entries are not neutral nor is the algorithm that produces Google News.” To be able to take advantage of all the transparency and open data that people are calling for, Boyd argued, we need information literacy, which includes the skills to interpret information in context. “If you want information access because you want a better-informed citizenry and a fairer society, you must start embracing the importance of information literacy and the need to provide infrastructure to help people build these skills.”

Boyd isn’t the only prominent figure to raise the issue of the unintended consequences of transparency in government: Harvard Law professor Larry Lessig wrote an essay last year that argued transparency can be a double-edged sword.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why New Net Companies Must Shoulder More Responsibility

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Stardust

---

When it was revealed Wednesday that developer and noted open web champion Tantek Celik was joining the Mozilla Foundation, a wave of congratulations swept across Twitter and the blogosphere. But not everyone was happy to learn that Celik — the former chief technologist at Technorati and before that an open standards advocate at both Microsoft and Apple — was joining the company behind the Firefox browser. Ben Metcalfe, a programmer and startup adviser, said on Twitter that while he was happy for Celik, his hiring meant that “none of the open web usuals remain independent.”

By “open web usuals,” Metcalfe was likely referring to prominent open advocates like Chris Messina and David Recordon, both of whom over the past several years have been among those leading the charge for open standards online, including developing and promoting the OpenID standard. Messina is now a Google employee and Recordon works for Facebook. While both continue to promote open standards — Messina’s title is “open web advocate” and Recordon is “senior open programs manager” — they’re doing it from inside two of the world’s largest web companies, both of which have corporate interests as well as (presumably) a commitment to being open.

Is that a bad thing for the web? When Metcalfe’s post from Twitter appeared on Google Buzz, it drew a comment from a Google engineer named Adewale Oshineye, who said that instead of seeing Messina and the others as no longer independent, “[Y]ou could say that the ‘open web usuals’ have all found ways to make an even bigger impact.” Metcalfe said that he didn’t agree with this argument, however, because “most of them have had to ‘tone down’ their perspectives in their new fancy corporate jobs.” Oshineye subsequently agreed that “there’s a tension between influence and independence.” Indeed.

So do Messina and Celik and Recordon now have more influence over the openness of the decisions that get made at the world’s largest search company, the world’s largest social network and one of the world’s primary browser developers? Or are they spitting into the prevailing wind at these relatively gigantic organizations, all of which have their own corporate agendas? Although both Google and Facebook are open in many ways — Google more so than Facebook — they also have a clear interest in pursuing their own tactics online. And while the Mozilla Foundation isn’t a typical for-profit corporation, it has its own interests at heart as well.

The tension is clear, not just between these open advocates and their respective corporations, but also between those with conflicting views about what it means to be open. After Facebook launched the Open Graph protocol at the f8 conference, Messina wrote a post taking issue with the description of the Facebook initiative as being “open” at all. Recordon then wrote a blog post for O’Reilly in response, talking about how the protocol was a good thing for the open web.

Messina, Recordon and Celik would likely argue that they can have far more influence within the companies they work for than they could ever have by shouting from the sidelines — and that might even be true. But despite their best efforts, and their reputations as longtime champions of the open web, they are inevitably going to be seen (at least by some) as instruments of the corporations and entities that pay their salaries. In the end, all we can hope is that they have some success in moving those large organizations in the right direction, and that other open web proponents come along who can take over the role of independent web champion.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why New Net Companies Must Shoulder More Responsibility

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Duarte

---

As Google tries to extricate itself from the privacy furor over personal data being collected from Wi-Fi networks by its Street View cars, the company says it’s hit a roadblock that prevents it from complying with authorities who want the data turned over to them. According to a statement the company made to the New York Times, it’s refusing to give German authorities the hard drives that contain personal data collected (inadvertently, Google says) from that country’s residents over open wireless networks because doing so would breach the same German privacy rules that were broken by the initial data collection itself. In a statement, a Google spokesman in London named Peter Barron said:

As granting access to payload data creates legal challenges in Germany which we need to review, we are continuing to discuss the appropriate legal and logistical process for making the data available. We hope, given more time, to be able to resolve this difficult issue.

Google admitted recently that it had been accidentally collecting data from open Wi-Fi networks that were passed by its Street View cars. Although the company originally said that no personally identifiable information had been accumulated in this manner, it later admitted that this was not true, and that some emails and other data might have been collected as well. It then pledged to destroy the data, but agreed to do so in a way that would allow governments and other groups to verify that it had done so properly.

The company has subsequently destroyed data that was collected in Denmark, Ireland and Austria, but didn’t allow authorities to see or inspect it beforehand. Several countries — including Britain, Germany, France, Spain and Italy — are instead asking Google not to destroy the data collected from their countries, so that it can be used in potential court cases against the company (Street View has been a contentious program in Europe even before the recent privacy issues over wireless data). Meanwhile, German authorities say they’re contemplating laying charges against the search provider for its behavior, and the chairman of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission told Congress last week that he’s also looking into whether the regulator should take action in the case.

Some privacy advocates say the company’s refusal to allow authorities to see the data it collected raises questions about whether it did so accidentally, and just how much personal data was collected. Simon Davies, director of London-based Privacy International, told the New York Times that “if the company is fighting this so hard, it suggests there is more to this than meets the eye. The real question is: What was Google collecting from unwitting individuals and why? So far, nobody really knows.”

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): As Cloud Computing Goes International, Whose Laws Matter?

---

Managing what’s being said about them online has become “a defining feature of online life” for many Internet users, according to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “especially the young.” The center surveyed 2,253 users over the age of 18 about their attitudes and behavior online, and found that younger users in particular are more likely to both search for information about themselves and modify what they share with others, and also tend to be less trusting of social networks and other sharing sites.

Compared with older users, young adults are not only the most attentive to customizing their privacy settings and limiting what they share via their profiles, but they are also generally less trusting of the sites that host their content. When asked how much of the time they think they can trust social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, 28 percent of users ages 18-29 say “never.”

The Center noted that young adults “are the most active online reputation managers in several dimensions” and are the most likely to customize what they share and whom they share it with. Among other things, they:

• Take steps to limit the amount of personal information available about them online (44 percent of young adults say they do this, compared with just 25 percent of those between 50 and 64).
• Change privacy settings: a majority (71 percent) of social networking users between 18 and 29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online, compared with just 55 percent of older users.
• Delete unwanted comments: Almost half of those users between 18 and 29 have deleted comments others have made on their profile, compared with just 26 percent of older users.
• Remove their names from photos: Over 40 percent of those users between 18 and 29 say they have removed their name from photos that were tagged by others, compared with just 18 percent of older users.

The report also notes that managing your reputation online is increasingly important because it’s where employers are searching for information about potential hires (a claim that’s backed up by other research). In fact, 27 percent of employed Internet users were found to work for an employer that has policies about how they present themselves online, including what they can post on blogs and websites or what information they can share about themselves, while 31 percent of employed Internet users said they’ve searched online for information about co-workers, professional colleagues or business competitors.

The Center said its research showed several major trends, including:

• Reputation monitoring via search engines has increased, with more than half of Internet users searching for information about themselves online.
• More people are creating profiles on social networking sites, with over 46 percent of adults saying they have done this, up from just 20 percent in 2006.
• Many also search for information about their friends: Almost half of those surveyed said they searched online to find information about people from their past or existing friends.

There’s a full version of the report available here (PDF link).

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why New Net Companies Must Shoulder More Responsibility

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Stefan

---

Has Facebook lost touch with the core of its user base, and could that spell doom for the social network? In a post at the Harvard Business Review site, Bruce Nussbaum argues that Facebook has, and it could spell doom. The former assistant managing editor for BusinessWeek, now a professor at the Parsons School of Design, says that Facebook has alienated the “millennials” who have been its primary users since its early days as a university-only network by pushing the boundaries of what they are willing to accept in terms of privacy as they have grown up and gotten jobs and started families. This, he says, is a fatal mistake — and even rolling out new privacy controls, which Facebook is currently explaining to legislators in Washington, won’t help in the long run.

In a nutshell, Nussbaum argues that Facebook has failed to adapt and evolve as its core user base has grown up. While millennials might have enjoyed a more open approach to privacy when they were younger and in university, as they have grown older and gotten jobs, formed relationships, etc. they are less interested in — and even hostile to — the social network’s attempts to get them to share more of their personal data. Nussbaum’s viewpoint is based on what he says are responses from his students at the Parsons School of Design to Facebook’s recent changes:

They live on Facebook and they are furious at it. This was the technology platform they were born into, built their friendships around, and expected to be with them as they grew up, got jobs, and had families. They just assumed Facebook would evolve as their lives shifted from adolescent to adult and their needs changed. Facebook’s failure to recognize this culture change deeply threatens its future profits.

Is Nussbaum right? I’m not sure that he is. Yes, Facebook has alienated some users with its privacy changes, and some have likely canceled or deleted their accounts, as some high-profile users have. And there’s no question that the social network could have implemented its new features in a more open way — including not opting people in by default — and communicated better. But this is not the first time, or even the second time, that Facebook has been through this kind of process. Nussbaum criticizes the network for not evolving, but the reality is that it has evolved considerably from what it once was, and has been testing the boundaries of what people want to share for years now.

That has involved a more or less continuous process of pushing to open things up, getting criticized for it, revising and changing, and so on. We can argue about whether Facebook is trying to change people’s expectations of privacy and sharing or whether it is trying to adapt to them (or likely both), and it’s clear from CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent op-ed in the Washington Post that the company plans to keep pushing, because it sees sharing information with others as a positive thing both for users and for society as a whole. But then so do lots of other people, judging by the speed with which Facebook continues to add users. And even some of its harshest critics, such as sociologist Danah Boyd, aren’t prepared to write the network off just yet.

The other flaw in Nussbaum’s argument is that he sees the millennials who have grown up now as the core of Facebook’s user base, and losing touch with them as a fatal flaw. Given that the network now has close to 500 million users, and their average age is somewhere in the mid-40s, that group of university students who have grown up with Facebook haven’t been the most important segment for the company for a long time now — not to mention the fact that every year millions of younger users have adopted the network as a social hub, and continue to do so regardless of the public outcry over privacy.

Does Facebook have issues around privacy? Of course it does, and it has to be careful not to let that snowball turn into an avalanche. But assuming it can continue to evolve and change its approach to adapt to what the bulk of its users want — and mollify legislators so that they don’t impose onerous regulations on the company — those mistakes don’t have to be fatal.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Could Privacy Be Facebook’s Waterloo?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Crunchies 2009

---

The Guardian isn’t the kind of tech-savvy enterprise one would normally look to for guidance on digital issues or Internet-related topics. For one thing, it’s not a startup — it’s a 190-year-old newspaper. And it’s not based in Palo Alto, Calif., but in London, England. The newspaper company, however, is doing something fairly revolutionary by simply changing the way it thinks about value creation and where that comes from in an online world.

The vehicle for this change is its “Open Platform,” which launched last week and involves an open application programming interface (API) that developers can use to integrate Guardian content into services and applications. The newspaper company has been running a beta version of the platform for a little over a year now, but took the experimental label off the project on Thursday and announced that it’s “open for business.” By that The Guardian means it’s looking for partners that want to use its content in return for licensing fees or to enter into a revenue-sharing agreement of some kind related to advertising.

To take just one example, The Guardian writes a lot of stories about soccer, but since it’s a mass-market newspaper, it can’t really target advertising to specific readers very well. In other words, says Guardian developer Chris Thorpe, the newspaper fails to appeal to an Arsenal fan like himself because it can’t identify and target him effectively, and as a result, runs standard, low-cost banner ads. By providing the same content to a website designed for Arsenal fans, however, those stories can be surrounded by much more effectively targeted ads, and thus be monetized at a much higher rate — a rate of which the newspaper then gets a cut.

Open APIs and open platforms aren’t all that new. But The Guardian is the first newspaper to offer a fully open API (the New York Times has an API, but it doesn’t provide the full text of stories, and it can’t be used in commercial applications). We thought it was worth looking at why the paper chose to go this route, and what it might suggest for other companies contemplating a similar move — and not just content-related companies, but anyone with a product or service that can be delivered digitally. I explore the topic in depth in a new GigaOM Pro report (subscription required).

Why would a newspaper like The Guardian choose to provide access to its content via an open API — and not just some of its content, but everything? And why would it allow companies and developers to use that content in commercial applications? For one simple reason: There is more potential value to be generated by providing it to someone else than the newspaper itself can produce by controlling it within its own website or service. You may be the smartest company on the planet, but you are almost never going to be able to maximize all the potential applications of your content or service, no matter how much money you throw at it.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Fabbio

---

Google said today that the effects of its search and advertising businesses helped generate an estimated $54 billion in economic value for the United States last year. The assertion is clearly an attempt to promote the company’s value at a time when it’s coming under fire from legislators for its size and market clout in a number of areas — as well as some of its privacy-related behavior — and is fighting the telecom companies on the issue of net neutrality.

Google based its analysis on a number of assumptions, Chief Economist Hal Varian explains in a video (embedded below), including how much revenue businesses generate from search-related advertising via Google AdWords, combined with the amount that Google pays publishers that take part in Google AdSense, as well as an estimate of the value generated for businesses when someone clicks on a regular search result. It then added to this figure the amount that it donates to non-profits through the Google Grant program, which provides up to $10,000 worth of advertising for charities.

For example, Varian said, Google estimates that advertisers make $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on AdWords (the company recently made public the revenue split for AdWords and AdSense). Google also tried to estimate the value of clicks on search results: Varian said that on average a search result gets about 5.3 clicks for every click on an ad, and the company estimates that advertisers get about 70 percent as much in revenue for each click on a search result as they get for each click on an ad.

Although he didn’t say how much Google pays its AdSense partners, Varian said that the bottom line from all these estimates is that companies get, on average, $8 in profit for every $1 they spend with Google. As a result, it believes that the average economic impact is eight times its AdWords revenue in each state, plus the amount spent by Google in AdSense payments and the value of Google Grants (maybe the company should have to subtract the estimated productivity decline from its recent Pac-Man playable logo).

There’s no way to determine whether the company’s estimates are correct, of course, since the parts of the equation that matter most are based on figures Google doesn’t release publicly. But it’s interesting to see the search giant trying to quantify its value to the economy (a full version of the report with a breakdown by state is available here). Whether it will help Google in its lobbying attempts in Washington is a much bigger question.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Google Takes the Open Battle to Apple on Multiple Fronts

---

BroadVision, an enterprise software company with a long and not-so-glorious history, today launched a new offering called Clearvale — what it calls a “network of networks” designed to bring social networking to businesses on a large scale, just as earlier versions of the company’s software allowed them to create Web 1.0 “portals.” The company said more than 4,000 businesses are already using the hosted software-as-a-service platform, as part of a year-long beta test. The launch also includes a strategic partnership with Softbank, the giant Japanese telecom and media holdings company.

The idea behind Clearvale is to provide a white-label social networking platform similar to Ning, but focused specifically on businesses. “We were among the first technology companies to help the enterprise understand how to do business on the web, and we feel poised to do it again — but this time for the Enterprise 2.0 era,” said Pehong Chen, founder and CEO. As part of the rollout of Clearvale, the company says it will be offering an app store for social networking tools, driven by an open API.

The name BroadVision may not be as well known as Netscape or Yahoo, but the company was one of the original Web 1.0 superstars. It went public not long after Netscape set the market for web companies on fire in 1995, but failed to make it through the web bust of the late 1990s. The stock was delisted from the Nasdaq for a time, and Chen said that BroadVision spent the past decade or so restructuring financially and becoming a much smaller business and is now ready to be reborn as a Web 2.0 software provider, offering custom social networks for businesses. In effect, Chen said he’s betting the company on this new strategy.

“We were a pioneer of e-business platforms, but we suffered because we overextended ourselves,” Chen told me in an interview prior to the Clearvale launch. “For the last decade we have been consumed with fixing that, mostly financially. We have survived, and have come back with a vengeance, with a solid balance sheet and lots of cash in the bank.” He said after watching the rise of social media and tools such as Facebook, he realized that businesses needed some way of creating “their own community online” and that BroadVision could offer that. Although software such as Yammer, Socialcast and Jive offer elements of this, Chen said no one had an “all-in-one” solution like BroadVision.

Although Clearvale can be implemented as company-hosted software for institutions such as banks and others that need to control their software more closely, Chen said it’s designed to be a social networking platform in the cloud, hosted primarily by Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure but also by major partners such as Softbank, which Chen said intends to offer social networking features to its mobile customers that are based on Clearvale. Companies such as Synaptics and Air Exchange are already using the software to create internal networks for staff and suppliers, he said. (For more on the cloud, attend the GigaOM Network’s annual cloud computing conference, Structure, June 23 & 24 in San Francisco.)

BroadVision’s existing business — building and managing web portals for companies — continues to make money, Chen says, but it has become a much smaller business than it was in the red-hot Web 1.0 days. Last year, the company had sales of $28 million, while at the peak it brought in close to 10 times that amount every year. “We may be smaller, but we are smarter,” Chen said. And what about competition from Microsoft’s SharePoint and other enterprise solutions? The BroadVision CEO said that Microsoft in particular has an existing legacy businesses that it has to protect. BroadVision, one the other hand, “doesn’t really have a lot to lose,” he said.

At first glance, Clearvale looks a little like BroadVision came up with the product while playing Web 2.0 “buzzword bingo” — it has social networking, is in the cloud, has an open API and an app store, and so on. But Chen is right that many businesses are looking for easy ways to implement social networking tools inside their companies, and BroadVision has an established reputation as an enterprise-software vendor. Whether it can make the transition to being a Web 2.0 company remains to be seen.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

---

After more than a year of looking at Yahoo’s operations, CEO Carol Bartz seems to have settled on a new business model — namely, outsourcing various parts of the company’s sprawling web empire to other companies. Today saw two similar announcements: one has online-dating site Match.com taking over Yahoo’s personal classifieds service, and the second has mobile giant Nokia assuming command of a joint venture involving the web company’s mobile email, chat and mapping services. In similar moves made earlier this year, Yahoo merged much of the operation of its health site with Healthline Networks and management of its online shopping service was effectively handed over to PriceGrabber.

In the Match.com pairing — the value of which wasn’t disclosed by the companies — users of Yahoo’s personals site will gradually be transitioned to something called “Match.com on Yahoo.” The web service had been expected by some to sell the personals business outright, with analysts giving the unit an estimated value of $500 million. In the Nokia deal, meanwhile, the Finland-based mobile handset company will provide its mobile mapping technology for use in all of Yahoo’s services, while Yahoo’s email and chat will become the engine behind Nokia’s new Ovi email and chat features.

On the one hand, outsourcing and partnering with others around some of its business units makes sense for Yahoo, where Bartz has been trying hard to rationalize its sprawling empire by cutting costs and improving its return on investment. At the same time, however, many of these deals seem to fall into the category of “too little, too late,” as Kevin noted in his analysis of the Nokia deal. Like the company’s most substantial outsourcing attempt of all — the multibillion-dollar deal with Microsoft to partner on search — they seem to be an admission that Yahoo has failed to make much of these businesses on its own, and is satisfied to simply take a small share of someone else’s business in return.

So if it’s no longer interested in trying to dominate search (at least, not by itself), and it doesn’t want to own mobile in a major way, or be a controlling force in many of the things it used to want to do online (shopping, dating, health etc.) then what does Yahoo want to do? It seems that the company has its heart set on doing the same thing that AOL — another former web star that has seen better days — wants to do: become a major media company. Yahoo, which has been hiring dozens of high-profile journalists to write for its expanding blog network and just bought a content company called Associated Content for $100 million, says it is now “the world’s largest media company” and is betting its future on that status.

That may be an ambitious goal, but at least the company seems to know what it wants to be when it grows up, which is a start — although Bartz seemed less than precise about it in her interview with Mike Arrington at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference, in which she answered the question “What is Yahoo?” by saying that it is a “great company that is very, very strong in content for its users… it’s a place where you can just get it together.” What Bartz needs to do now is to find a way to put some meat on those bones, and to do that she is going to need more than just a talent for using expletives.

Related GigaOM Pro Content (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Yodel Anecdotal

---

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in an echo of previous mea culpas from the social network, has responded to criticisms of the way the company has handled its users’ privacy — but this time he took to the pages of the Washington Post to make his amends, rather than writing a blog post on the Facebook site as he has in the past. Zuckerberg admitted that in trying to give people new ways to connect with each other, “sometimes we move too fast,” and said that Facebook would soon be introducing simplified controls for privacy to make it easier for users to turn off certain services and control how they share information and with whom. But he didn’t say he was sorry, and he made it clear that the network still intends to move ahead with enhanced sharing features.

The Facebook CEO also failed to mention one of the most contentious aspects of the company’s new settings — the “instant personalization” feature that was rolled out at the recent F8 conference, and to which users were opted-in by default — nor did he discuss the moves by a U.S. senator and a group of privacy advocates and consumer groups aimed at getting the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the way the social network handles privacy. Zuckerberg avoided the personalization issue by saying that most of the criticisms were about how “our controls were too complex” and that better controls were coming. He also made it clear that while he’s sorry about the way some of the recent changes were handled, Facebook’s chief interest still lies in getting its users to share more of their information. As he wrote:

People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more. If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world.

As Kevin Kelleher pointed out in a recent post, Facebook has an opportunity to turn things around on privacy, but it needs to be very careful in trying to do so. Users are already hyper-sensitive to the issue, as the recent furor over the transmission of user IDs in web page URLs indicates, and are therefore more likely to be suspicious about the social network’s sincerity. That said, the company’s experiences with previous privacy-related concerns around the news feed shows that users can be convinced to change their views on the benefits of sharing. Whether the current storm of criticism is more like that situation or the aborted Beacon initiative remains to be seen.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Could Privacy Be Facebook’s Waterloo?

---

Call it the “snowball effect,” or maybe the “witch-hunt” effect. At some point, when a company is under fire for something, even the smallest piece of evidence that it might be guilty of that thing can get blown out of proportion. Exhibit A is Facebook and the recent news — reported somewhat breathlessly by the Wall Street Journal, of all places — that the social network sent personally identifiable information to advertisers, after saying that it doesn’t. As Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has noted, this story is a tad exaggerated. The fact is that lots of websites transmit information via the URL of a page, because that’s the way modern web browsers work. In some cases, Facebook seems to have accidentally included user IDs in the URL string when someone clicked on an ad, and according to the Journal has now changed the way it handles those links as a result of the paper’s inquiries.

Despite the scare-mongering from some sites about Facebook “selling your identity to advertisers,” on a scale of 1-10 privacy-wise, this is probably around a 1 or 2 — and it’s not unique to Facebook, either (MySpace uses the same method, according to the Journal). As one commenter at the Hacker News site noted, it could easily be a simple case of programmers overlooking what info is being encoded in a page’s URL. Should the network have had controls in place to prevent this? Probably. But the reality is that Facebook has become a lightning rod for such issues, and therefore even the tiniest speck of incriminating behavior gets sucked into the maelstrom of attention.

In other words, privacy is clearly the new black. Whether it’s concern over Facebook’s transmission of data through URLs or Google’s accidental capturing of Wi-Fi data, consumers and advocacy groups and government agencies are increasingly concerned about what large web companies are doing with consumers’ data. Google has had complaints filed against it with the Federal Trade Commission and is being investigated by German authorities, while Facebook is the subject of letters of complaint and calls for federal inquiries stateside. High-profile users are cancelling their Facebook accounts and others are pointing to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s allegedly aggressive stance on the issue of personal privacy.

Could privacy be Facebook’s Waterloo? As I argued in a recent GigaOM Pro report (subscription required), the company has to start getting serious about privacy if it wants to continue the momentum that has gotten it to 500 million users and a private market value estimated at some $20 billion. One thing it needs to do, as Liz pointed out recently, is to speak clearly on the issue and make its policies and settings as understandable as possible. It’s easy to show that Facebook is still growing, and therefore come to the conclusion that users don’t care about privacy, but that would be a mistake. Once the snowball effect is underway, it can quickly become an avalanche, and by then it’s too late.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why New Net Companies Must Shoulder More Responsibility

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Max-B

---

The controversy over Google’s collection of personal data via its Street View photo-taking program continues to grow, but the company appears reluctant to acknowledge the full importance of the lapse, saying no harm was done. Although co-founder Sergey Brin has admitted Google “screwed up,” CEO Eric Schmidt said at the Zeitgeist conference in the UK that no one was harmed by the incident, and as such, “No harm, no foul.” Others, however, clearly disagree. The company is facing a class-action lawsuit in Washington and Oregon, two legislators in Washington, D.C. in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission have raised the issue of whether Google’s behavior was illegal, a consumer advocacy group has also complained to the FTC and Germany has begun a criminal investigation.

Google recently admitted that its Street View cars had been collecting data from public Wi-Fi networks — then later admitted that, contrary to its initial statements, such data may have included personal information such as the content of emails and other communications. It also said the data was collected accidentally, and that none of it was ever released or used by anyone. Google has since stopped collecting data from Wi-Fi networks, and says it’s consulting with government and policy groups on the best way to get rid of the information so that users and consumer groups will be satisfied it does so properly.

That said, however, the company maintains that the issue was a simple oversight, and nothing worth getting concerned about. And this isn’t the first time Google has played down complaints about its behavior on privacy. After Buzz was launched and a number of users criticized the company for connecting them with all their email contacts whether they wanted to be connected or not — subsequently publicizing those connections without making it clear they would be public — Google CEO Eric Schmidt told attendees of one conference that the issue was blown out of proportion, that there was no harm caused and that the situation was primarily a result of users misunderstanding the service.

Yet the criticisms aimed at Google have continued. Privacy authorities from 10 countries, led by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, sent a strongly worded letter to the company last month about its privacy practices. The group said that Google too often had “failed to take adequate account of privacy considerations when launching new services,” and that it needed to build privacy safeguards and controls directly into new products as they were being designed, rather than trying to apply them later.

In addition to the letter from the two U.S. legislators about the Street View data collection, the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog has sent a letter to the FTC asking it to investigate Google’s practices. The group also launched a site called Inside Google to call attention to what it believes are the company’s failings in various areas, including privacy. As the growing furor over Facebook and its approach to privacy has shown, there is mounting concern about social networks and web companies, what kinds of data they’re collecting and how they’re using it. And yet, like a drunk driver who maintains he did no harm because no one was hurt, Google continues to downplay the importance of what was a serious breach of personal privacy.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why New Net Companies Must Shoulder More Responsibility

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Blyzz

The Guardian newspaper in Britain, which has been providing content to developers through its Open Platform project for a little over a year on an experimental basis, took the beta label off the project today and launched it as a full-fledged business venture. Chris Thorpe, its developer advocate, says the paper wants to use its open API to partner with developers and companies to create sustainable businesses based in part on Guardian content, by licensing and sharing in ad revenue. “The Open Platform is now open for business,” he said in an interview in Toronto in advance of the launch.

One of the partners that The Guardian has worked with to create a custom application using the Open Platform is the British government, as part of the tourism department’s Enjoy England campaign. The newspaper used its open API to create an interactive map for the tourism office that pulls in content from its database for hundreds of locations around the country. The application lives within The Guardian site, but can also be embedded in the tourism office’s site or anywhere else for that matter.

Thorpe said the paper is also working with a number of commercial websites and services that specialize in content based around niche interests such as specific football teams, and is sharing in the advertising revenue that comes from them. The Open Platform offers three levels of access for developers and companies, he said:

• Tier 1 – Keyless : Free access to Guardian headlines, tags and meta data. No registration or key required. Partners can keep any associated revenue earned using Guardian content on their own applications.
• Tier 2 – Approved : License to publish Guardian articles in full. The Guardian embeds ads, performance tracking and a watermark within the articles it makes available. Partners can keep any associated revenue earned. Registration and access key required.
• Tier 3 – Bespoke : Custom solutions for licensing content and integrating rich applications directly within the Guardian network. It offers sponsorship, licensing, revenue sharing and other custom commercial programs.

Unlike newspapers that are closing off their content by putting up paywalls — including the New York Times and the Times of London, which is part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. empire — Thorpe said The Guardian believes it needs to open up its content in order to grow and become successful online, and that the open platform and open API are a key part of that. Thorpe compared what the newspaper is doing to the strategies used by social networks such as Twitter and Facebook and web giants like Google, which have used open APIs to allow developers to create services and applications that connect to or integrate content and features from their networks.

In the video clip embedded below, Thorpe describes the platform. The Guardian developer who headed up the project, Matt McAlister, also has a blog post about the launch, and a slideshow presentation that was done by The Guardian team for it is available on Slideshare. In addition to the Open Platform, the newspaper has also launched its members-only club for readers called Extra, which offers readers who sign up preferred access to live events and special deals. There’s more on that at the Guardian’s website:

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Are Sponsored Apps the Key for Traditional Media in Mobile?

---

---

---

While some newspapers like the Times of London and the New York Times have either implemented or are expected to launch paywalls for their content, The Guardian in Britain has taken the exact opposite approach: Not only does it give its content away for free to readers, but through its “open platform” and API, it allows developers and companies to take its content as well, and do whatever they want with it — including building it into commercial applications. Are the higher-ups at the paper crazy? Not according to Chris Thorpe, The Guardian’s “developer advocate” and a member of the team that built the open platform and helps companies integrate it into their apps and services.

In an interview in Toronto on Monday, Thorpe said that the paper doesn’t want to charge its users for content, but instead wants to enable developers and companies to create businesses around that content and then partner with them. Unlike the New York Times, which restricts developers to only an excerpt of its content and doesn’t allow them to use it in commercial applications or services, The Guardian’s API provides full access to its content and allows developers and companies to use it even in revenue-generating applications.

In fact, “We not only say that you can use the content in a commercial application, we encourage it,” Thorpe said. “It gets our content to places where it wouldn’t be otherwise, and then we can build relationships with content partners around that.” The platform, which is still in the experimental stage, has attracted about 2,000 developers who have signed up for the API and created over 200 apps and web services. Platform developer Matt McAlister has called it an attempt to “weave The Guardian into the fabric of the Internet.”

Thorpe noted that the API — which he said will be coming out of beta soon — may be free, but it does come with strings attached. If you want the full text of articles to use in your app or service, you agree (by signing the licensing agreement) that The Guardian has the right to insert ads into the stream of content it sends you through the API. The paper is also working on partnerships with a number of outside companies and agencies that use content from the newspaper’s database as part of a their service or site, and some of those look to be closer to monetizing the paper’s own content better than The Guardian itself can.

For example, Thorpe said that some sites and services that are focused on a sport such as football will take The Guardian’s content related to a specific team and use that to build out their site. Using the same stories or content on The Guardian site isn’t worth much, because the newspaper doesn’t know when a diehard Arsenal fan visits the site, and therefore can’t serve them related ads. But a dedicated site for those fans can take that same content and monetize it much more effectively.

Thorpe also admits that The Guardian’s ownership structure — it’s owned by the Scott Trust — likely has something to do with the paper’s interest in an open API, and its willingness to provide its content to others despite the lack of any immediate return, since it can afford to think longer term rather than just focusing solely on quarterly earnings. The vision of the paper is to become the leading voice of liberal thought on the Internet, he said, and the newspaper’s leadership firmly believes that becoming an open platform is the best way to achieve that.

In the video embedded below, Thorpe talks briefly about the strategy behind the open API:

---

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales says that despite widespread reports to the contrary, he is “not stepping down from anything,” and is maintaining his role with the user-edited encyclopedia, although he says he has voluntarily relinquished certain editing privileges he had as a co-founder of the site, after a disagreement with other Wikipedia editors. The dispute arose after Wales used his founder’s editing rights to remove a number of images from Wikimedia Commons — a related image-hosting service — that he felt were not appropriate, and that some critics said depicted child abuse and child pornography. Fox News reported that Wales’ deletion of the images led to a “shakeup at Wikipedia” and that the co-founder had been removed from having any ability to edit the site, but Wales called these reports “nonsense” in comments on Twitter, and expanded on those remarks in an email:

The Founder flag is a purely technical matter of little importance – which was precisely my reason for changing its rights – to eliminate an argument about it that wasn’t about what I regard as the core leadership values within our community. I have never led the community through authoritarian methods, and so when people started to focus on technical powers, I wanted to say clearly: not the point, folks.

Wales said that apart from dropping the founder’s editing privileges, which among other things allowed him to delete content without the consent of other editors, his role within Wikipedia today is “no different than it ever was” and that he is still actively editing articles just like any other user. Wales reiterated that he’s also still president of Wikia Inc. — a for-profit sister company — and chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation. When asked if he regretted deleting the images in question, Wales said: “I am proud to have put this issue on the table in a big way, and positive change will come from it – and already has, to a significant extent, though there is much work left to do.”

The Wikipedia community has come under fire recently from co-founder Larry Sanger over some of the images hosted by the related Wikimedia site (both are run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation). Sanger, who has fought with Wikipedia in the past and also started a competitor called Citizendium, says the images constitute child pornography, and he has written a letter to the FBI asking them to take action. That in turn sparked a series of reports on Fox News about Wikipedia hosting child porn.

One Wikipedia insider, who asked not to be identified, said that there was a heated debate about the way that Wales deleted the images, but that the issue has more or less died down, although discussion continues in a variety of Wikipedia forums and mailing lists about which (if any) images should be deleted, and what the site’s role should be in hosting either objectionable or potentially illegal content. This source said that while there are some critics both inside and outside the community, there is no debate about Jimmy’s ongoing role with the foundation or with Wikipedia itself.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Plenty of people have been having fun with some comments that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz’s made in a BBC interview about the company’s competitive position vis-à-vis Google. The notoriously outspoken Bartz, who took over as CEO from co-founder Jerry Yang in 2009, told the British news service that Google was going to have “a problem” if it didn’t diversify its business, and that it was going to have to find a way to do “a lot more than search.” Mike Arrington at TechCrunch suggested that Bartz must have been smoking something in order to come to this conclusion, while Kara Swisher at All Things Digital said that the Yahoo CEO was “trash talking” its larger rival.

Let’s face it, it’s pretty easy to make fun of Yahoo — in fact, in some ways, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. For at least the last several years, it has been a perennial also-ran in virtually every category that matters online, whether it’s social networking or search or keyword advertising or content. After trying and failing to beat (or even match) Google at its own game, Yahoo was finally forced to accept a deal with Microsoft, which was also failing to have much success on its own. The two companies are now propping each other up and trying to do together what they couldn’t do separately, but are still so far from setting the industry on fire they might as well be in a different game.

But you know what? Carol Bartz, who has gained a reputation for calling a spade a shovel, also happens to be right. Yes, Yahoo is sucking wind in most departments, as most people writing about her comments have pointed out, and so the company is hardly in a position to tell Google what to do — especially when Google reported revenue growth of 23 percent in the last quarter, something Yahoo would kill to do. But she is still right: After years of trying to broaden its business, Google is still 99.9 percent search (OK, 95 percent).

Obviously, that business is doing just fine, and Google is expanding it through acquisitions such as AdMob, which does mobile advertising. And the company continues to come closer to generating meaningful revenues from YouTube and other properties. But the reality is that virtually all the company’s revenues still come from search-related keyword advertising. That may be a great business right now, but what if it stops being so great? What if social search and social advertising becomes a bigger threat to that business, as Liz argued in a recent GigaOM Pro report (sub req’d)?

Some analysts are becoming concerned about Google’s lack of ability to broaden its business even a tiny bit. After the latest earnings report, Barclays Capital analyst Douglas Anmuth dropped his price target for the stock to $650, citing a lack of growth momentum beyond search and advertising. “A significant revenue driver beyond core search has not materialized and it’s becoming tougher for the company to beat numbers,” Anmuth said in a research note.

Chris Baggini, an investment manager with Aberdeen Asset Management, also wants to start seeing some other revenue sources. “Google continues to gain share, but I’d be very disappointed if four years from now they were not getting revenue from other sources,” he said. And the way the company has rolled out new products such as Buzz and Wave and the Chrome OS, without any clear model for how they are going to contribute to the business, has some concerned as well. “Google has the problem of too much money and not enough control over what to do with it,” Rob Enderle, an analyst at Enderle Group, said recently. “As a result, they are building complexity at an alarming rate, and that complexity should eventually choke them, much as it did Microsoft.”

Is Google in danger of imploding — or even slowing down substantially — any time soon? Hardly. But that doesn’t mean Carol Bartz is wrong, and we shouldn’t let ourselves be blinded to that just because her company isn’t doing very well.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Yodel Anecdotal

Opera, the plucky Norwegian web browser that’s a perennial fourth- or fifth-place finisher behind much larger players like Internet Explorer and Firefox, has acquired web-based email provider FastMail.fm for an undisclosed sum. The Australian email company has been around for almost a decade, and has a reputation for being fast and dependable, but has been overshadowed in recent years by services such as Google’s Gmail. Opera, which has its own email service built into its browser, clearly has ambitions to move beyond just browser-based mail to mobile and other platforms. The company said in a release that buying FastMail would enable it to “deliver cross-platform messaging to a wide range of devices, including computers, mobile phones, TVs and gaming consoles.”

FastMail, in explaining why it decided to accept the acquisition deal, told users in a note on its website that: “In an increasingly competitive market, we believe we need to make some big investments to take the next steps forward.” Users’ data will be moved over to Opera unless they cancel their account. FastMail also said that some of its staff will soon be moving to Opera headquarters in Norway, while one of its part-time developers who developed its photo gallery feature and new webmail interface will be working for Opera full time.

Opera recently announced that it has more than 50 million users of its desktop browser software as well as 50 million users of its mobile browser, and recently released an iPhone version — which has been downloaded by millions of users already, although Kevin wondered whether many of them are actually using it. Opera also acquired a mobile ad solutions company called AdMarvel in January for an estimated $23 million. And the company has been working on a version of its browser for interactive televisions, supporting a European standard called “hybrid broadcast broadband TV.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user idogcow