Author: Mathew Ingram

In the history of modern media, it’s unlikely that anyone — at least, no one of similar size or scale — has embraced open principles more than Wikipedia. Co-founded by Jimmy Wales, the so-called “open-source encyclopedia” has grown to the point where it now encompasses 3.2 million articles, and is almost certainly far more influential than print-bound predecessors such as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Although the site has a team of editors, known internally as “the cabal” (a wink to conspiracy theorists), and occasionally locks down contentious articles, the vast majority of the site is still open to anyone to edit.

As part of our ongoing series on the tension between “open” and “closed” across a range of industries and markets, I spoke to Wales via Skype from London. Our conversation follows, edited for clarity and length.

GigaOM: Where do you stand on the debate between open and closed standards? I’m assuming that given the nature of Wikipedia, you would probably come down on the open side.

Wales: Well, there are benefits and costs to both approaches, and a lot of those are well known at this point — although I do think that today, the open approach still isn’t as well understood as it should be, because it is a newer approach. There’s a big tendency to gravitate towards a closed and proprietary approach too easily, because it’s what [companies] know, it’s what they’re familiar with, and sometimes thinking up your business model in an open context is a lot harder. When you’ve got something closed and top-down and proprietary, you pretty much know what you’re going to do — you’re going to make something and then you’re going to put it in a box and sell it; and the box might be a downloadable box in the modern world, but it’s the same concept. Whereas with the open approach, it’s more about fostering an ecosystem and then making money in various other ways. What I would encourage people to do if they’re looking at doing something is to sort of step back and recognize the downsides of a proprietary approach.

GigaOM: Taking a more or less closed approach doesn’t seem to have hurt Apple — if anything, it seems to have succeeded more than anyone ever imagined, despite being closed. What are your thoughts on that?

Wales: If you look at the emerging competition between iPhone and Android, clearly the iPhone has the early edge, and of course Apple is quite good at what they do, their extreme controlling nature allows them to do certain things quite well. But at the same time, we’re seeing the beginning of a flood of new phones coming out from all kinds of different manufacturers…because of the open nature of the Android platform, and that’s going to pose a very interesting kind of competition. Google, in this instance, ironically, is more playing the Microsoft role here, to Apple’s Apple. One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they’re viewed as proprietary. But the truth is that compared to a lot of other companies, they really embraced a very open set of standards and had a very open platform, and it enabled them to gain dominance.

GigaOM: And what about the open approach when it comes to desktop software? Being open may have helped Microsoft in the early days, but it doesn’t seem to have helped Linux become competitive. Why?

Wales: One of the key pieces there for me is that there are some business models around Linux, but those business models — like Red Hat — have tended to focus on the server market, where certainly in the web-surfing world, the LAMP stack [Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP] is dominant. And it is dominant in that area in part because there emerged business models that made it possible for people to do things in a sustainable way, whereas Linux on the desktop so far hasn’t really generated a business model. If you think about Android, it can be open source, or very nearly open source, and that doesn’t hurt its chances of succeeding simply because Google has a business model around it that has nothing to do with selling the software. They can fund it, they can support it, and it makes business sense for them to do so, in a way that it has never made a lot of business sense for anybody to really spend the money to get Linux on the desktop to that kind of polished state.

GigaOM: So even if you are taking an open approach, you need to have a business model?

Wales: I’m not sure about the term business model, because if you think about Wikipedia, Wikipedia has a business model, but it’s not a business it’s a charity, and its business model — so to speak — is getting people to donate, because they love Wikipedia. So there isn’t a good buzzword for this, but you need a sustainability model; you need a model that brings in enough attention, revenue, whatever resources you need to make something happen in order to actually get it done. And what we’ve seen is that in open-source software, in some areas it’s worked and it’s great — so if you want a fabulous web server, and you want to scale up a web farm, the tools are free, they’re out there, there’s a whole ecosystem of developers, and it makes a lot of economic sense for people to participate in that ecosystem and it works. On the other hand, if you want to get your mom a laptop, I’m still not recommending Linux right now, because there hasn’t been an ecosystem, a sustainability ecosystem around making that happen in a really professional way.

GigaOM: There seems to be a belief that open systems are more free, but that they are also more chaotic and in some cases ugly, and that a closed approach like Apple’s works because it produces a uniform experience and high-quality design.

Wales: There’s definitely a lot of truth to that [but] at the same time, I don’t think it’s the whole story. We don’t have enough data points, really. We have Apple at one extreme and Linux at the other extreme, and Microsoft somewhere in the middle; so at one end you’ve got the highly controlled thing from a very controlling company that is obsessive about design; it’s proprietary, it’s top down, and it’s gorgeous, beautiful, elegant, simple design. And the open source thing is chaotic, hard, difficult, complicated — but also embodies a lot of amazing values, and it’s highly customizable, and really enjoyable if you like tinkering. You can do all kinds of things with it; it’s very powerful. We shouldn’t be too quick to judge the two. We can envision, for example, a proprietary system that is also complicated and difficult, but powerful because of the complicatedness and difficultnes. But we can also imagine an open-source process that produces a really simple and clean design — I think probably Firefox is the best example.

GigaOM: And why did you decide that Wikipedia should be built on a completely open approach?

Wales: Nupedia (Wikipedia’s predecessor) was top-down and not very open — it was open source, but in terms of management it was centrally controlled. But it failed, because it wasn’t fun for the people who did it; it didn’t harness the passion of the individuals who were involved in that project. I think it’s fair to say that we couldn’t have built such a huge project with literally thousands of people without taking that kind of open approach — it just wouldn’t function. I suppose with a lot of money and time we could have created a traditional encyclopedia, but couldn’t have done this.

GigaOM: But Wikipedia has added controls to the system through the use of moderators and editors and so on, yes?

Wales: Yes, we’ve had to add some features like that. My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged. It’s a balance that you have to strike, where if you leave it alone then the trolls take over, but if you’re too central and controlling, then you can crush it, and we try to strike that balance.

GigaOM: I’m trying now to imagine what Wikipedia would be like if Steve Jobs ran it.

Wales: It would be interesting — it would probably be prettier, too.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Fabbio and Tony Duarte

The Huffington Post — taking a cue from Foursquare, the location-based social network that allows users to win “badges” for checking in at various places — has launched a similar feature for regular readers of the news site. The beta offering includes three badges that readers can win — known as the “Networker” badge, the “Superuser” badge and the “Moderator” badge — based on the amount of activity they engage in on the news site. For example, connecting with other readers on the site will earn you a Level One “Networker” badge, and connecting your Huffington Post reader account with either your Facebook account or your Twitter account will bump you up to a Level Two Networker, and your comments on the site will be a different color from those posted by non-Level Two users.

The badges are just the latest offering aimed at implementing social features on the site: the Huffington Post was one of the first to implement Facebook Connect when it launched, and the service was tightly integrated into the rest of the site — for example, showing readers who connected their accounts a special sidebar with news that had been read and/or recommended by their Facebook friends. The badges extend that idea, and are clearly designed to encourage readers to spend more time on the site.

A FAQ describes the different badges: Networker is based on connections with other readers and with Facebook or Twitter, while Superuser rewards readers for commenting on stories and for sharing them through services such as Twitter and Facebook, and Moderator is based on how many comments a reader flags. It’s not clear how much of a given activity you have to engage in to win the badges, however. The Moderator badge says you have to have flagged 20 comments to get a Level One, but only says these flags have to display “a high ratio of good flags to mistaken flags.” I’ve asked Huffington Post for comment on why the requirements aren’t defined, but it’s likely so that the site has some leeway in deciding who gets rewarded.

The way Huffington Post is using badges makes much more sense to me than something like the Wall Street Journal’s recent partnership with Foursquare. Offering news tips and Foursquare badges based on where readers are checking in with the location-based network is a nice marketing gesture, but the conversion rate from Foursquare user to WSJ reader is likely to be fairly low. Huffington Post’s badges, on the other hand, may seem a tad gimmicky but they’re focused on the right thing: increasing engagement with readers.

It’s a similar approach to that taken by sites such as Slashdot, which has one of the most devoted reader communities online: Regular readers who behave properly by providing a real name, posting and/or flagging comments and contributing in other ways get “karma points” which then enhance their status on the site. It’s a reputation management system, and one that is functionally identical to the way that players of World of Warcraft and other games “level up” through their activity in the game (which is why everything is becoming a game). The idea is that being rewarded for behavior encourages more of that behavior, and also builds a stronger relationship with readers.

It will be interesting see what kind of response Huffington Post readers will have to the badges, and also what kind of effect they will have on metrics such as time spent on the site, repeat visits, etc. According to CEO Eric Hippeau, the implementation of Facebook Connect had a dramatic impact on reader activity such as commenting.

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Match.com has sent a strongly worded letter — written by the company’s lawyer — to competitor Plenty of Fish, accusing the free dating service of making unsubstantiated claims about its traffic and number of users. The letter, which Plenty of Fish founder Markus Frind has posted on his blog, lists a series of almost a dozen claims that the site makes about how many dates its members have been on and how many people sign up every day (20,000 people, according to Plenty of Fish). Match.com’s lawyer Marshall Dye in the letter alleges that these claims “cannot be supported and are misleading and/or false.”

The letter from Match.com — which is owned by entertainment and media giant IAC — goes on to demand that Plenty of Fish “immediately cease and desist from making these false claims.” But then it takes a dramatic shift in tone, with the Match.com lawyer offering an olive branch to its largest competitor:

If your position is that these claims are substantiated, please promptly provide me with substantiation for each of these claims by return letter. If disclosing the substantiation data concerns you, Match.com is open to entering into a confidentiality agreement.

Judging by the tone of Frind’s response on his blog — not to mention the posting of the letter itself — there doesn’t seem to be much chance of such a friendly and confidential meeting. He notes that Match.com tried to launch its own free service called Down to Earth to compete directly with Plenty of Fish (which has always had a free service), but that it has since backed away from that attempt. Frind has also posted what he says are the comScore metrics for the top dating sites worldwide, which puts Plenty of Fish in the No. 1 spot with 1.2 million average daily visitors, almost twice Match.com’s average of 680,000.

As one commenter noted on the Plenty of Fish blog post, the letter from Match.com is very similar to one that Quicken sent to competitor Mint last year asking for proof of its claims. Could the letter to Plenty of Fish be a prelude to a marriage of some kind between the two sites? Match.com has been expanding recently, and acquired Singlesnet in February. Plenty of Fish, which Frind started in his Vancouver, British Columbia apartment and still runs with only a handful of people, is by far the company’s biggest competitor, and reportedly gets over a billion page views a month.

In an ironic twist at the end of his blog post about the Match.com letter — which refers to claims about how many users of the service eventually marry one another — the Plenty of Fish founder notes that he doesn’t have a lot of time to pay attention to his competitor’s threats because he’s tying the knot this weekend.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Mark Sebastian

If there was any doubt that location-based services such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Hot Potato are the next hot web thing, the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin in March hammered the point home (Om has called 2010 “the year of location”). The annual gathering of technology geeks was the site of thousands of “check-ins” from different venues, and the emergence of “flash mobs” as all the attendees saw crowds forming at various spots and rushed to join them. Watching a time-lapse visualization of those check-ins is like watching the outbreak of a virus on a medical show, or the firing of synapses in a brain.

Foursquare has gotten the most attention of all the location-based mobile applications, with Gowalla and Brightkite taking second and third place, although Hot Potato is coming up in popularity quickly. In part, Foursquare’s profile is a result of having attracted the most users — it recently hit one million users, a number that doubled in less than three weeks, and it only launched a year ago. There have been unconfirmed reports recently that some Internet giants are looking to acquire the startup: one rumor has Yahoo looking to pay as much as $100 million for the company.

So there’s no question that such services are popular — but are they a business, or are they just a feature that belongs inside another business or service? And if they are a business on their own, how do they make money? I’ve explored these questions and more in a report for GigaOM Pro (subscription required), looking at the major players and their prospects. At the moment, none of them are likely generating much revenue, since they are focused on building out their user base, but several have signed deals with media companies and other partners. Foursquare has done deals with services such as Zagat, the travel guide company, as well as several entertainment companies including HBO and Warner Brothers — and recently formed a partnership with the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, two of the giants of social networking — Twitter and Facebook — are also busy integrating location into their networks and services. Twitter has implemented geo-tagging of tweets, partly by buying MixerLabs for its geolocation API, and Facebook is widely expected to launch some form of location-based features (although it didn’t do so at its f8 conference, as some anticipated).

As Om described in a post earlier this year about location, many mobile industry insiders believe that location will eventually become a core offering of major platforms such as iPhone, Android and BlackBerry, or major web platforms such as Twitter or Facebook or Google. With that kind of integration, users will be able to use location in virtually any app — such as watching a movie and checking in with Flixster or checking in at a restaurant with your Urbanspoon app — instead of using a specific app like Foursquare or Gowalla.

For a more in-depth look at this market, see my GigaOM Pro report. We’re also discussing these issues and others at our GigaOM Bunker Session today; you can view a live stream of this exclusive event here.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Dunechaser

Harbinger Capital partners has reportedly hired Sanjiv Ahuja, the former chief executive of Orange — the wireless unit of France Telecom — to run its proposed Long Term Evolution wireless network, according to the Wall Street Journal. Harbinger, a private equity firm, wants to construct a next generation wireless network using both satellite and terrestrial components. SkyTerra, a Harbinger portfolio company, would provide the satellites, but Harbinger still needs a partner or billions of dollars to build out the terrestrial network.

According to the WSJ, Harbinger is in talks with potential investors such as Qwest Communications International and SK Holdings, and is attempting to raise between $1 billion and $2 billion to fund the venture, but there have been disputes over how much equity each partner will get in the entity. Harbinger has spent four years and more than $2 billion on the venture so far, and wants to keep as large a stake as it can, the Journal said. But without backing from industry partners, it is unlikely that Harbinger’s ambitious project — estimated to require at least $6-billion — will get off the ground.

It’s not clear whether Qwest’s impending merger with CenturyLink would make it more or less likely to be a partner in the project. The deal creates a giant telecom company, but one without a wireless division to backstop its existing wired business. Getting access to wireless from Harbinger’s proposed LTE network would be one way of filling that gap, but CenturyLink’s CEO has said the company has no plans to get into wireless.

Harbinger has said that it plans to use its combined satellite and terrestrial network to offer wholesale wireless that telecom and cable companies can use to bolster their high-speed offerings in areas their existing networks don’t cover. In addition to the satellite network and all that entails, the plan would require a phone and data card that supported the service, as well as a terrestrial cellular network to handle the calls.

If Harbinger has hired Ahuja, a former IBM executive who ran the Orange mobile network from 2004 to 2007, it would help to show investors and potential partners that the venture has some operating experience at the helm. One of the biggest hurdles for Harbinger is the perception of satellite wireless as a money pit with a history of failure: the 1990s saw two companies — Iridium and GlobalStar — soak up billions of dollars trying to build satellite networks.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of NASA

Firefox has thrown down the gauntlet in the race to take charge of your online identity, saying it will soon add identity-management features to its browser, and hopes at some point to build recommendation services into the browser as well. The move pits the Mozilla Foundation and its open-source model against the proprietary approach taken by Facebook, which recently launched a series of features that it hopes will convince users and websites to use Facebook profiles as their default log-in for online services, and to implement the social network’s “Like” plugins as a universal standard.

The new addition to Firefox is called Account Manager, and it effectively transfers authority over logging in to various websites and services to the browser. Using a single menu in the main toolbar of the browser, next to the address field, Firefox will be able to log a user — or multiple users — into and out of multiple services, and will even be able to generate random passwords for users who don’t want to come up with their own. The service will apparently also support any standard for authentication such as OpenID (or presumably OAuth as well, which Facebook now supports), and is designed to be an open standard.

Firefox has effectively promoted the Account Manager plugin (or add-on, as it calls them now) from its Labs experimentation project to the official browser development stream. The add-on is available as a beta here, and after some testing and development will be added to the shipping version of the browser. The Firefox team said it is looking to “ship this feature as soon as possible,” and that adding support for it to an existing website or service should only take “as little as fifteen minutes of hacking.”

It’s clear that Firefox sees the browser as the primary agent that stands between a user and the services and websites she wants to visit. That effectively means Firefox is going to go head-to-head with Facebook, which also wants to be the primary means by which users login to websites and services. According to the Firefox blog, the Account Manager add-on is just part of a larger “online identity concept series” that Mozilla Labs has been working on, which includes looking at all the ways the browser can help users interact with the web:

Your Web browser, as your most trusted relationship in your life online, has nearly perfect knowledge of everything you do on the Web. We envision a world where your browser will play an even more active and critical role in helping you control and shape your online experience. To realize this vision, we need to increase the browser’s understanding of your online identity and provide a platform for building new capabilities that securely take advantage of this rich, dynamic set of data that represents the digital “you.”

According to Mozilla Labs, some of the ideas it is working on include managing account information, but also questions such as “How can your browser help when you discover something cool on the Web that you want to share with your friends?” and also “What can your browser do to enable you to securely share data with websites and third-parties in return for context-rich Web experiences?” Those are both goals that will also bring the Firefox developer into direct competition with Facebook for access to user’s data and personalization or recommendation features.

Identity online seems to have gone from being a two-way race, with Google and Facebook, to being a three-way contest. May the best service win.

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Interested in finding out what information Facebook is sharing about you through the company’s new open-graph API? Developer Ka-Ping Yee has come up with a simple tool that shows you everything the social network sends to anyone whose app or service decides to plug in to the new feature — all it requires is a user ID or user name. You can find out what information you’re sharing via your public profile by looking at your settings within Facebook,too, of course. But Yee’s tool shows you exactly what data a developer would get when it asks Facebook for info via the API, such as your name, birth date, location, etc. and also any public information such as your “likes” (formerly pages you were a “fan” of), your photos and so on.

As of yesterday, the tool was also showing some information that most users had not made public. Yee — a Canadian-born programmer who works for Google’s charitable arm, Google.org, and developed the “people finder” tool used after the Haiti earthquake — found that the API was showing what events he had recently attended, and even those he was planning to attend, information he didn’t recall giving Facebook access to (another developer says the old API provided this as well).

Thanks in part to Yee flagging the issue in a blog post and contacting the social network, Facebook now appears to have fixed it so that the API no longer makes this available by default (the developer says that his experiments with the Facebook API were the result of “personal dabbling” and don’t have anything to do with his work for Google).

Even though this glitch has been fixed, however, Yee’s tool has managed to surprise even some of the savviest tech users with what it reveals. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch.com, for example, on Twitter called it “immensely useful [and] potentially scary. I’m a sophisticated privacy vet & found things I hadn’t known I was sharing!”

Facebook has come under fire from a number of sources over privacy related to its new features, particularly the fact that users have been “opted in” to services such as “instant personalization,” which allows several sites that Facebook has partnered with to show users personalized content by drawing on their Facebook profile. Four senators sent the social network a letter today complaining about this kind of behavior, one of whom has also written a letter of complaint to the Federal Trade Commission.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user dirac3000

Four senators have sent a joint letter to Facebook asking that it make changes to the way it handles privacy, the latest salvo of privacy-related criticism to be directed at the social network. One of them, Charles Schumer — a Democratic senator from New York — also sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission on Sunday asking that the agency investigate Facebook for breaches of privacy legislation. The latest criticisms appear to have been fueled by Facebook’s recent launch of new features at its f8 conference, including social plugins for websites, an open graph protocol and a so-called “instant personalization” feature that’s being implemented on several sites, including Microsoft’s Docs.com and Yelp.com.

The letter from the four lawmakers says they’d like Facebook to make privacy-related changes “opt in” instead of turning them on by default and requiring users to opt out if they don’t want their information shared. A number of critics, including Search Engine Land writer Danny Sullivan, have complained about the same thing, saying Facebook should not have enabled instant personalization and other services by default, but should have allowed users to decide first whether they wanted to have those features.

The senators are also opposed to allowing websites and services to retain information on users that they receive from Facebook for longer than 24 hours, another recent change made by the company. And they dislike a new feature that adds users to “connection” pages based on topics or places they have expressed an interest in through their Facebook profile. “Social networking sites are a Wild West of the Internet; users need ability to control private information and fully understand how it’s being used,” they said in a news release.

Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes told the Associated Press that the company has “powerful tools to give our users control over what information they want to share, when they want to share it and with whom,” but that not everyone has found it easy to discover what they’re opted into and what information they’re sharing — or how to turn it off (we recently posted a simple guide to doing this). Finding out what information is being shared through Facebook’s new open graph protocol and API is not easy, although one developer, who happens to work for Google’s charitable arm, has come up with a tool that shows you on a single page what information of yours Facebook is sharing.

In other privacy-related news, the Commerce Department recently launched an Internet Policy Task Force to investigate whether privacy policies are limiting innovation, and has asked average citizens as well as companies and public agencies to send comments on that issue to the government. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said the task force intends to explore “ways to address the challenges of the new Internet economy and society in a manner that preserves and enhances privacy protection.” It will also investigate cyber security and online copyright protection, the department said.

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

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Dooley

Hardly a week goes by now without Google buying another company, as it continues an acquisition spree first described by CEO Eric Schmidt last fall, when he said the company would likely buy one small company a month. This week’s winner is an Israeli startup called Labpixies, which develops casual games for both the web and mobile devices. The company’s games — which include Flood-It and Round ‘Em Up — are among the most popular on iGoogle, the start-page service that the search giant created back when Netvibes was all the rage. Google said in a blog post that it acquired Labpixies outright because “we decided we could do more if we were part of the same team.”

Google’s last acqu-hire was a London-based company called Plink, a visual-search startup it bought to add more horsepower to its Google Goggles mobile visual search project. The search company has also bought several startups that were founded by former Google employees, including Aardvark, AppJet and ReMail.

In addition to games, Labpixies has also developed a number of the more popular apps and widgets for iGoogle — including the New York Times crossword widget, a horoscope app, a Travelocity widget and a YouTube app. According to Google’s blog post, the company was the first developer to create an independent widget for the iGoogle service. Many of the company’s games and widgets are also available for the iPhone and Android.

Could the Labpixies acquisition be a sign that Google is interested in moving further into the casual-gaming market, which has been a huge success for Facebook and Zynga with “social games” such as Mafia Wars and Farmville? The search company recently named game veteran Mark DeLoura its “game developer advocate,” a new position designed to reach out to the gaming industry, which seems to be a sign that it wants to expand in that market.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): How the Next Zynga Could Reinvent Social Gaming

In one of the most controversial technology stories of the past few months, the gadget blog Gizmodo got hold of (and dissected and displayed with great relish) a prototype of a next-generation iPhone, after an Apple engineer apparently left the device in a Silicon Valley bar. According to the blog’s description of events, someone picked up the phone after the engineer left it behind, and then sold it to a Gizmodo editor for $5,000. The initial story ultimately turned into a series of stories, and sparked a firestorm of criticism over the blog’s behavior in buying the phone rather than returning it to Apple, which some said was inappropriate and possibly illegal.

Criticism from bloggers and tech industry types aren’t Gizmodo’s only problems, however: on Friday, a police task force raided the home of editor Jason Chen and seized several computers and other belongings, carrying a warrant that they said authorized them to investigate a crime involving the sale of the iPhone prototype. In response, some — including Gawker Media COO Gaby Darbyshire, who is a lawyer, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation — have argued that the police breached the so-called “journalist shield law” in California, which protects media outlets from search and seizure. On Monday evening, the district attorney’s office said that it was reviewing the case.

By buying the phone, some have argued that Gizmodo was simply practicing modern journalism, which for some tabloid outlets such as TMZ can involve paying sources for their stories. Gawker Media founder Nick Denton has said that he is happy to practice “checkbook journalism” in return for a good story, and that he is a “gossip merchant” who only accidentally engages in journalism. Others, including John Gruber of Daring Fireball, have maintained that Gizmodo was guilty of theft by buying a phone that the blog knew was not the lawful property of the person they bought it from.

What do you think? Was Gizmodo justified in paying someone for an iPhone prototype that they knew (or should have known) didn’t belong to the person they were buying it from? Or should they be subject to legal repercussions as a result of doing so?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user SD Kirk

The Wall Street Journal, which has waded into a fierce battle for local New York readers with the New York Times, has turned to the uber-hip social networking service Foursquare for some reinforcements. The Journal announced today that readers can get news and reviews about local spots in the Big Apple through a partnership with Foursquare, and can win special badges that have been created for the newspaper, including the “Urban Adventurer” and “Lunch Box” badges. It seems like an interesting extension of the Journal’s core mandate to deliver news and information, but the important question is whether it will help the paper in any tangible way.

The news and review items are tagged by the Journal with specific locations, so that when a user checks in at that spot with Foursquare, they appear as related “tips.” A recent visit to the Journal’s page on Foursquare showed that news items included one about the George Washington Bridge:

Police were told to stop and search would-be subway bomber Najibullah Zazi’s car in Sept. 2009 as he drove up to the bridge — but waved him across without finding two pounds of explosives hidden inside.

There was also one about a local restaurant called Aureole:

For lunch, served from noon to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday, the most popular entrees are the miso Alaskan black cod ($26) and the grilled burger with bacon and pickled ramp dressing ($19)

And local attractions such as Citi Field:

Watch out for the Mets’ power-hitting outfielder Jason Bay: He’s one of the 10 streakiest hitters in baseball, either very hot or ice cold — and, so far this season, the latter.

Interesting links, but are they relevant to users of Foursquare? That’s hard to say. The restaurant news was 12 hours old, and the George Washington Bridge item appeared to be about something that happened a year ago. There were also items about new events at the Lincoln Center, how Alex Rodriguez is the slowest runner on the New York Yankees, some info about The Mark Hotel’s financial woes and some SEC financial news tagged to the headquarters of Goldman Sachs.

This isn’t the first partnership Foursquare has formed with a news outlet; earlier this year, it signed a deal with Metro News International to provide news items related to local venues in Toronto, and more recently the location-based social networking provider did a deal with the Financial Times to offer points to students who check in at specific locations (Harvard, the London School of Economics, etc.) which can later be redeemed for access to articles behind the paper’s paywall.

The Journal’s experiment with Foursquare is worth applauding, if only because there is so little experimentation coming from some traditional media outlets. But it’s still an open question as to whether it will have tangible results for the WSJ. Are Foursquare users potential Journal subscribers? Will the paper pursue potential advertising connections with Foursquare locations in addition to offering reviews and/or news? That might be better done via Foursquare or Yelp, since they are in that space already — and so what kind of payoff does the Journal get from these partnerships apart from looking cool and hip? Perhaps that is enough for owner Rupert Murdoch.

GetGlue, apparently undaunted by the looming threat of a 400-pound gorilla named Facebook moving in on its social recommendation turf, has rolled out some new features for its service, which provides users with movie, music and book suggestions and reviews from friends in their network. The service, which New York-based Adaptive Blue launched last year, consists of a website that shows you all the recommendations from your friends, a toolbar that provides access to reviews and comments from your network as you browse the web, and a recently launched popup feature that shows you relevant content and reviews when you’re on almost any page or website that has the GetGlue plugin enabled.

All of which, if you’ve been following the news from Facebook over the past week or so, probably sounds more than a little familiar. The giant social network has launched an ambitious attempt to extend itself out into the broader web through the use of an “open graph protocol” and social plugins, which allow users of any site to click a button and share their recommendation with friends, or to see the activity of their friends related to that site.

GetGlue, which had previously been reluctant to divulge stats, said today that the number of registered users of its service is north of 400,000 and growing; Facebook’s users, meanwhile, recently topped 400 million. The larger company is also busy integrating its services into virtually all the major media and content websites, either through partnerships or through its open graph protocol and open API. Presumably such information will ultimately be aggregated by the network and shown to users and advertisers in some way.

So how does GetGlue see this encroaching monster? “Overall, we’re viewing it as a net positive,” said Fraser Kelton, director of business development. For one thing, he says, the fact that Facebook is going after social recommendations with such an aggressive launch “validates our vision.” Kelton also said that GetGlue believes it can still provide value despite Facebook’s entry into the market, because it’s been filtering that kind of data and generating personalized recommendations for several years now.

“I think we can thrive and plug into and extend that ecosystem,” said Kelton. “We’re going to thrive because we can now get data from 400 million users, and we’re going to move pretty quickly to capitalize on it.” The GetGlue executive said that founder Alex Iskold and the rest of the development team “are already working on some things in the lab” that will allow the service to incorporate Facebook-related likes and recommendation data. “So overall we are excited about it,” Kelton said.

Whether the company can add enough value to make users excited about using GetGlue instead of Facebook remains to be seen. In an interesting twist, GetGlue founder Alex Iskold helped develop a proposed tagging scheme for web pages that would do something very similar to Facebook’s open graph protocol — it was called “abmeta” and was developed with Peter Mika at Yahoo. Kelton said he’s not sure what will happen to abmeta in the wake of Facebook’s launch, however. “We’ll have to figure that out internally, whether to continue with it or not,” he said. Iskold is also active in the Open Like community, which has proposed an open standard for recommendations.

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The Open vs. Closed debate, which we’re covering as an ongoing series on the GigaOM Network, continues to bubble and boil around Facebook and the social networking site’s attempts to extend its “social graph” out into the broader web. Is this move by the company truly open, or is it a cynical attempt to co-opt the rest of the web and aggregate value for Facebook — or could it be both? That all depends on what the term “open” really means. Can a company or a service be partly open, or is it a binary thing? Can a service start out as mostly closed and then become open? And is it OK for a company to be open with some things and closed with others?

Chris Dixon, co-founder of Hunch, launched a project last week called Open Like, which he says is intended to jump-start an open standard for recommendations, as an alternative to Facebook’s open graph protocol. After a series of Twitter debates with Keith Rabois — VP of business development for Facebook app maker Slide — and startup investor and adviser Dave McClure about the benefits and meaning of the term “open,” Dixon tried to come up with an overview of the different ways in which companies and platforms can be open as well as the tradeoffs involved by using the following table from Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann:

So, in other words, Windows is open for “demand-side” users and “supply-side” users (developers) but closed when it comes to design and intellectual property, meaning the look and the underlying code can’t be changed or used by anyone other than Microsoft. An open-source platform like Linux, of course, is open in every sense of the word. And while the iPhone is open for users, it’s closed to developers and anyone who wants to change the platform. Even these definitions are open to debate, however: Dixon says that some see the iPhone as only partly closed to developers — a truly closed platform wouldn’t allow third-party apps at all, as most phones didn’t before the iPhone.

The point is that different services, companies and platforms can be open in some ways and closed in others. As Dixon described in a recent interview about the Open Like project, a company like Google is happy to be open when it comes to mobile operating systems or browsers — things that aren’t core to its business — but when it comes to the details of its search and advertising algorithms, not so much. This just makes economic sense, he says, and is known in economic terms as “commoditizing the complement.” In other words, companies benefit by being open with things that will help drive demand for their core product or service.

Being closed, Dixon argues, may make sense for a company such as Facebook or Twitter or Google, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for the industry as a whole, or for society.

Chris Saad of DataPortability.org also took a crack at defining what “open” means, both in a post on his own blog and at the Data Portability site. What he calls “Torvalds open” works for software such as operating systems (Linus Torvalds is the founder of Linux) but doesn’t work as well for web-based products and services, because in those cases “the software itself has less value than the network effects and up-time provided by a branded, hosted experience.” Running Twitter as open source wouldn’t matter, he argues, because “Twitter’s lock-in is not their software, but rather their name space (@chrissaad) and their developer ecosystem.”

As for Facebook and its new features, Saad says that “when Mark Zuckerberg talks about open, he is not talking about technology. He is talking about human interactions.” He add that:

[Facebook has] gone to great lengths to redefine the word Open to mean the way people interact with each other. In doing so, they have managed to, in large part, co-opt the word and claim their platform makes people ‘more open’.

Saad says that his view of what open should mean is “interoperable and distributed.” Twitter wouldn’t meet this definition, he says, because while it has an open API, it controls the “namespace” (i.e., user names such as @chrissaad), limiting what you can do with the API and when, as well as charging for access.

Open advocate David Recordon, who is now working at Facebook, has also written about his view (and presumably Facebook’s view) of what is open about the new services and features the site has launched, including the fact that the open graph protocol is licensed under Open Web Foundation standards. His blog post came in response to comments from Chris Messina — another prominent open advocate who now works at Google — about how the company’s “open” protocol and API weren’t really open. The bottom line, Messina said, is:

[I]t’s dishonest to think that the Facebook Open Graph Protocol benefits anyone more than Facebook — as it exists in its current incarnation, with Facebook accounts as the only valid participants.

And so the open vs. closed debate continues. Who is the most open? Who is open where it really matters, as opposed to just being open where it’s convenient or low-risk? Who can convince users, developers and — most importantly — advertisers and other businesses to join their open or closed platform? More than anything, this appears to be shaping up as a battle between Google (which published an “open manifesto” late last year) and Facebook over who can out-open the other. All we can hope is that users will ultimately benefit.

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Post image courtesy of Flickr user Tony Duarte