Author: Mathew Ingram

I don’t have an iPad, but watching this amazing video (embedded below) demonstrating the Alice in Wonderland app made me want to run out and get one — and if I had a young child, it would make me want to get one even faster. I know that many people believe reading should be a quiet and relaxing activity, and that there’s nothing quite like communing with the pages of a well-read classic, but this video makes reading “Alice in Wonderland” look like…well, it looks like a lot of fun. And I have a feeling if Charles Lutwidge Dodson (i.e., Lewis Carroll) could see his story represented like this, he would probably think it was kind of fun as well.

The app comes from Atomic Antelope, which makes iPhone apps, including one called Bauble that lets you turn your iPhone into the world’s most expensive Christmas card. The Alice app brings an interactive element to the pages of this children’s classic, with features that are based on the original illustrations and allow readers to stretch Alice’s body when she comes to the table with the “Drink Me” bottle, to throw tarts at the Queen of Hearts and watch them bounce off her, and to rock the baby that turns into a pig. The app costs $8.99, although there’s also a free “lite” version. Chris Stevens, one half of Atomic Antelope, wrote about creating the app here.

So is this the future of e-books — every book its own app? It’s certainly a great example of the kind of full-color and interactivity and motion (using the accelerometer) that isn’t possible on other e-readers. These kinds of apps could certainly help the tablet app market hit the $8 billion-mark that GigaOM Pro analyst Mike Wolf forecast it would in a recent report on the sector (sub req’d). It’s also a sign of the creativity that traditional publishers seem to lack, as they try to maintain their traditional stranglehold on book prices in the online world, as Paul Sweeting detailed in this recent GigaOM Pro analysis. Now I’m trying to imagine what a Dr. Seuss book would look like as an iPad app.

Facebook said today that it’s upgraded its Safety Center — which contains advice for parents, young people, teachers, law enforcement and other groups about how to use Facebook responsibly and safely — based on suggestions from its Safety Advisory Board. But the site stopped short of adding a so-called “panic button” to its pages that would take users younger users directly to a page of safety information, which is something critics and advocacy groups in Britain have repeatedly requested, most recently in a meeting between Facebook representatives and the head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre.

British groups want a button that would take younger users to a page with information about how to respond to various behavior such as cyberbullying and sexually suggestive material or otherwise inappropriate content. Chief constables from England and Wales, including the head of Scotland Yard, have signed a letter supporting the panic button. The campaign gained steam following the death of a 17-year-old female student last October: Ashleigh Hall was raped and murdered by a man she met on Facebook, who is now in prison. It’s not clear, however, what use a panic button would have been in the girl’s case, or how it would have stopped her from meeting the man.

The Facebook blog post describes how the site has changed its Safety Center:

It offers new safety resources for parents, educators, teens and members of the law enforcement community. We’ve quadrupled the safety content available, and we’ve created cleaner, more navigable interfaces to help you find answers to safety questions fast. This portal — which we’ve been testing during the past few weeks — draws multimedia content from Facebook and from independent organizations specializing in safety and security online.

The site’s Safety Advisory Board consists of representatives from several organizations in the U.S. and Europe, who describe themselves as follows:

• Childnet International: a UK-based charity working domestically and internationally to help make the Internet a great and safe place for children and young people, alongside enabling them to use interactive technologies safely and responsibly.

• Common Sense Media: an independent non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families by providing trustworthy information and education that kids and families need to thrive in a world of media and technology.

• Connect Safely: the leading interactive resource on the web for parents, teens, educators — everyone — engaged and interested in youth safety on the fixed and mobile social web.

• The Family Online Safety Institute: works to make the online world safer for kids and their families by identifying and promoting best practice, tools and methods in the field of online safety, that also respect free expression.

• WiredSafety: the largest online safety, education and help group program in the world and provides help, information and education to Internet and mobile device users of all ages, especially on cyberbullying matters.

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Why New Net Companies Must Shoulder More Responsibility

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Google launched a new feature for Google Buzz today that makes it easier for web site publishers — including GigaOM — to add a button to their content so that users can directly share it on the Gmail-based social network. We and others came up with a way to do the same thing after the service first launched in February, but it was a kind of a hack, which involved using Google Reader as a way to funnel the blog post through to Buzz. Not only was it a workaround, but it didn’t work for people without Google Reader accounts. Now there’s an official way to do the same thing, and GigaOM is one of the first sites to implement it, along with a number of other publishers including The Washington Post, YouTube and The Huffington Post.

Google Buzz has gotten its share of criticisms since it launched in February, including those centered around privacy concerns — which the service quickly responded to with a series of changes — and some complaints (including some from me) that it was confusing and difficult to use. And it’s not clear how much the service has been growing, since Google hasn’t provided any numbers after saying “millions of users” had tried it out following the launch. Even the Google Buzz team doesn’t seem to have been using it that much lately.

However, part of the reason why people haven’t been using the service more could be that it hasn’t been that easy to post content, something Google has acknowledged in its blog post about the new buttons. Hopefully this new feature will simplify the process, and help readers share content — including ours. If you want to add a Google Buzz button to your own site, you can grab the code to do that here.

TweetPhoto, a service that allows users to share pictures through Twitter, said this morning that it has closed a Series A funding round of $2.6 million from Canaan Partners, Anthem Partners and angel investors. So is this a case of a “hole-filler” getting funded? Last week, both Twitter investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and CEO Evan Williams talked about how there were various apps and add-on services that were simply “filling holes” in Twitter’s feature list, and that some of those would inevitably either get acquired or see competition from features launched by the company itself. Within days of those comments, Twitter bought the Tweetie iPhone app and released an official BlackBerry app, causing consternation among some third-party app developers.

For what it’s worth, TweetPhoto made sure to note in its press release and public statements that its service can be used to share photos — and other media — across multiple networks, including Facebook, Foursquare and LinkedIn. The company also said that its APIs (application programming interfaces) support features that include commenting on photos, favoriting and voting, meta-data filters, geo-tagging and location-based search. It said the funding will be used to accelerate the development of a “real-time media sharing platform for the social web.” In other words, it’s not all about Twitter.

So does that mean the company will be changing its name? Because TweetPhoto sounds a lot like something that just works on Twitter. And does that mean the company’s real competition are services like Flickr and Picasa, or apps like Pixelpipe, which also allow photo sharing to multiple networks? I’ve got a request for comment in to the CEO, and will update if and when I get a response. In addition to the recent funding, Kodak also owns an equity stake in the company.

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As Twitter Develops, Developers Quiver in Fear

During the rise of the Beat movement in the 1950s and ’60s, avant-garde writer William S. Burroughs developed a process he called the “cut up” technique, in which he would literally cut out sentences and passages from poems, stories and books (both his own and those of other writers) and stitch them together. If Burroughs had ever decided to automate this process and develop an online encyclopedia, it would probably look a lot like Cpedia. The new offering from Cuil — a startup (pronounced “cool”) that launched in 2008, claiming to have developed a better and faster search engine than Google’s — is destined to do at least one thing very well: make even the most poorly-researched Wikipedia page look like the repository of all the world’s knowledge.

Cpedia launched last week with a blog post from Cuil co-founder and former IBM staffer Tom Costello, who described a meeting he had with Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy when Costello and his wife Anna Patterson (a former Googler) were trying to raise money for Cuil. Joy told Costello that people didn’t need a new search engine that just returned a list of results, they needed something that would write an article based on a search. A note on Cpedia topic pages reads: “We find everything on the Web about your topic, remove all the duplication and put the information on one page.”

It’s important to note that this doesn’t say the service finds everything on the Web and makes sense of it and then puts it all on one page. If what you want are snippets of articles from somewhere (links to source pages are difficult to find) mixed up seemingly at random and then displayed as though they were a coherent encyclopedia entry, even when they are not, then you are going to love Cpedia.

To take just one example, in the entry on Philo Farnsworth, the man who many credit with inventing the modern television, the article starts with a reference to — and a large picture of — an actor named Jimmy Simpson, who apparently played Farnsworth in a movie. There is some history about the development of television and the race with RCA (which reverse engineered Farnsworth’s patents and took credit for the discovery), but it’s all mixed up with references to Simpson and the movie, along with random people including actor Sid Caesar and Jonas Salk, as well as snippets of Farnsworth-related information that appear without any reference to anything.

In his blog post launching the service, Costello says that Cpedia “is very different from a traditional search engine, and not at all like Wikipedia, but that is its strength; it is something new and different.” The Cuil founder is almost certainly right. Unfortunately, being new and different doesn’t necessarily mean that it is either good or useful. Other users who have tried it out describe it as “sentence after sentence of automated nonsense,” and Tumblr and Instapaper developer Marco Arment says that “if this feature is meant to become a serious product, I truly feel bad for them.”

If nothing else, Cpedia proves that there are some things that algorithms and automated processes can’t do — and one of those things is to make sense of all the information that exists on the Internet. Perhaps human beings are good for something after all.

courtesy of Flickr user Kellan

In its latest acquisition — its first-ever in the UK — Google has bought a small visual search startup called Plink, which makes a mobile app that recognizes works of art. The acquisition appears to be an attempt to add some horsepower to its Google Goggles visual search project. Plink’s two founders — Mark Cummins and James Philbin, both of whom have PhDs from Oxford — say in a blog post announcing the deal that they will no longer be developing their app, but instead will be working on Goggles. A Google Labs experiment that currently runs only on Android devices, Goggles lets users search for landmarks, books, documents and other objects by taking photos with their mobile device.

The Plink purchase is the latest in a string of acquisitions by Google. Last fall, CEO Eric Schmidt said that the search company planned to acquire an average of one small company a month, and that the deals in most cases would be “in lieu of hiring.” As Liz pointed out in a recent post, many of these purchases — or “acqu-hires” — have involved former Googlers, including the founders of Aardvark, AppJet and ReMail.

Plink’s app — which is called PlinkArt, and runs on iPhones and Android devices — allows users to get information about works of art. When a user takes a photo of a painting with their phone, the app recognizes it and pulls up information about it. The Plink founders apparently got Google’s attention when they won $100,000 in an Android developers challenge last year. Google Goggles was released last year, and the company has said it plans to support iPhones and other platforms soon as well as Android. In February, the company showed a prototype version of the app doing text recognition and translation of a German restaurant menu (video embedded below).

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Why Mobile Search Is Still Anybody’s Game

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Stefan

It’s become obvious over the past year that location-based services are the new black, to the point where some are speculating that Yahoo might acquire market leader Foursquare for as much as $100 million, and explorers are racing to the North Pole to be the first to win a special badge. Although it’s still not clear whether location-based services will go mainstream or not, the theory is that if companies can tie location to something tangible — advertising messages or marketing offers, direct sales, etc. — they could drive significant revenue, and that’s going to appeal to everyone from Yahoo and Microsoft to Facebook and Google.

Angel investor and startup advisor Dave McClure, however, says that all the talk about badges and game mechanics is nonsense, and that location-based services need to come up with ways to tie their behavior to cash incentives before anyone is going to care about them. Check-ins are “a classic case of early-adopter lust for shiny objects,” he says, and don’t have anything to do with “long-term sustainable mainstream consumer behavior.” McClure argues that no one normal is ever going to consider doing it “until you give them $5 off their next beer or 5-dollar foot long.”

His other main point is that accomplishing this — going mainstream with enough scale to make it worthwhile — is going to require huge sums of money, and that only a few players have that kind of heft and resources, including: Microsoft, Apple, Google and possibly Facebook. McClure says he believes that Facebook will win. With 400 million users and an active user base, as well as users’ familiarity with connecting through Facebook Connect, “they are the easy pick front-runner.”

Bijan Sabet disagrees. The Spark Capital partner, who has invested in both Twitter and Tumblr, says that there are “tons of non-geeks using Foursquare right now,” including his wife and other friends, and that badges and the utility of being able to see where friends are is enough to get people using the service, even without payments. Sabet also disagrees with the “Facebook can offer this and kill everyone” argument, and says that the ‘focused startup’ has many advantages over “the big, broad based established players.”

So who has the edge in this debate? I think McClure does. The reality is that location-based services don’t have an obvious utility for “normal” people (i.e., non-geeks). In fact, many people I know think that telling people your location all the time is madness, and the creation of Please Rob Me probably didn’t help that impression (even Om is skeptical of their appeal). So how do you convince people to check in somewhere? You reward them. And badges probably aren’t going to be enough for the vast majority of people — in other words, your service either remains FGO (for geeks only), or you broaden it by adding real incentives like discounts on merchandise.

As for Facebook taking over as the king of location-based services, I think there is a good chance it will. Without seeing what kinds of features the social network has planned, it’s difficult to say whether they will dominate, or whether they will federate (i.e., make it easy for Foursquare, Gowalla, etc. to work within Facebook). But the most important point — as Om noted in a post earlier this year — is that location doesn’t feel like a service all by itself — instead, it feels like a feature that belongs inside something else, such as a mobile app or platform, or as part of a web service or network. Regardless of whether users are paid in some way, that feels like the ultimate end-game.

Why The Location Wars Are a Dead End

The past week has seen a lot of drama around Twitter’s relationship with third-party app developers. Fred Wilson’s post about the company’s evolution seemed to touch off a powder keg of emotion about what the company’s approach to new services might be, and that was still bubbling when Twitter announced that it had bought Atebits, maker of the iPhone app Tweetie, which touched off a new round of criticism. Developers have protested on a Google group, formed a Twitter group with the hashtag #unionoftwitterapps and made caustic comments about the company in blog posts, podcasts and pretty much everywhere else.

Wilson’s post suggested that Twitter had grown so large and ubiquitous that it had reached an “inflection point,” where it could become the center of a developing ecosystem or infrastructure of other products and services. But the acquisition of Tweetie put a different spin on that message: the implication seemed to be that Twitter had become so large and ubiquitous that it could (and possibly should) either acquire or compete with the third-party apps that have grown up around the company. And the reason it wants to do that is pretty obvious: to own the relationship with the user.

Developer Ben Metcalfe has some suggestions about what Twitter could do next week during the Chirp conference to create opportunities for third-party developers in a number of areas, as a kind of “exit strategy.” But as Chris Dixon of Hunch points out in a blog post, the biggest remaining hurdle for both Twitter and third-party developers is the fact that neither side knows what the company’s eventual business model will be (or if Twitter knows, it isn’t saying). That vacuum is what is causing a lot of the tension, and it likely won’t go away entirely until the vacuum is filled.

Some companies might think: “Why should we care whether developers are mad at us or not? We own the ecosystem — without us, they would have nothing, so they can just sit there and take it, while we compete with them or buy one of their competitors or whatever else we want to do.” But the reality is that many of those third-party apps did provide a substantial amount of functionality that Twitter was missing, whether it was photo uploading or URL shortening or geo-location. Maybe some developers did take a ride on Twitter’s coattails — but others did add value, and as a result helped Twitter become the global phenomenon it is now.

And trying to extend some kind of olive branch to the developer community that has built up around Twitter isn’t just a nice thing to do. As large as it is, and as much money as it has now, the company can’t realistically build all the things it needs or acquire all the things it needs tomorrow. It is still going to need lots of help, and the benefits of a thriving developer ecosystem are manifold: not only does it produce valuable add-ons that might never have occurred to Twitter HQ, but it is also a very powerful form of marketing, both for the product and for the company itself.

“There’s some misunderstanding around platforms,” Evan Mr. Williams told the New York Times. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk to developers about this.” Hopefully the Twitter CEO has found a way, because the company’s Chirp conference is next week, and there are going to be plenty of people looking for answers.

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How Human Users Are Holding Twitter Back

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Image Munky

Just two days after comments by Twitter investor Fred Wilson made third-party Twitter developers nervous about what the company might do, those fears have become reality: The company announced Friday that it has acquired Atebits, the maker of Tweetie, one of the top Twitter apps for the iPhone. According to a post by co-founder and CEO Evan Williams on the Twitter blog, the app will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and will now be free (previously, the pro version of Tweetie cost $2.99 to download). Developer Loren Brichter said on his blog that he is joining Twitter’s mobile team and will be developing Tweetie for the iPad.

Developers and other observers immediately started analyzing the purchase as soon as the news broke. Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon connected Fred Wilson’s comments — which the VC blogger denied were about any specific future action by the company — with the Tweetie acquisition, saying: “Wow, weird coincidence! a Twitter board member blogged about killing twitter apps the same week Twitter released/bought 2 clients!” Engadget editor Nilay Patel said that Twitter buying Tweetie was “roughly equivalent to Microsoft building it’s own WP7 phone – bye bye, ecosystem.”

Former Engadget editor and gdgt co-founder Ryan Block said: “As of today, if your app depends on Twitter for anything other than identity or content syndication, you are officially on notice.” Some developers even formed their own unofficial “union” with a Twitter hashtag — the #unionoftwitterapps. And Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber wrote that “there’s going to be some heavy drinking tonight from developers of other iPhone OS Twitter API clients.”

On Wednesday, a blog post by Wilson raised some hackles in the developer community because he said that some of the features third-party apps have provided, such as picture-sharing and URL shortening, should have been part of Twitter to begin with. The suggestion seemed to be that Twitter would either be developing some of those itself, or possibly acquiring them, as it did when it bought Summize and renamed it Twitter Search. Some saw this process as a natural one, since companies have been acquiring third-party apps and add-ons or developing their own services that mimic external ones for years. One developer said after the fuss over the Wilson post blew up that it was totally expected, and that he supported the company’s desire to build in some of those features.

In an interview with the New York Times just before the recent controversy, Ev Williams also said that this process was inevitable, and suggested that the company might buy certain apps, and others it might simply compete with. “There’s some misunderstanding around platforms,” he said. “There’s both a natural win-win relationship between a platform provider and third-party developers, and there’s a natural tension.” He added that there are “tons of opportunities created by the Twitter platform, and things that people will probably be disappointed if they invest in. It’s a question of what should be left up to the ecosystem and what should be created on the platform.”

Clearly, having an iPhone app was crucial to what Twitter felt it needed to provide for users, as opposed to allowing a number of developers — of apps such as Tweetdeck, Twitterific and Echofon — to fill that market need. What other things will the company decide it needs to do? An official desktop app perhaps? Or maybe a URL shortener with built-in analytics, such as Bit.ly (which shares some investors with Twitter already, including Ron Conway). And if it decides to move into these markets, will it build or buy? Nervous developers everywhere are placing their bets, and will no doubt be asking some pointed questions at next week’s Chirp conference. Loic Le Meur of Seesmic and Iain Dodsworth of Tweetdeck appear to have seen this coming and have expanded the utility of their products. Le Meur also wrote a long blog post about how he sees his app stacking up against Twitter and his view of the relationship between the company and third-party developers.

All Voices, a “citizen media” site that is trying to create a kind of crowd-powered newswire service, today announced an ambitious expansion into 30 countries that it believes aren’t getting enough coverage from traditional media, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Egypt and China. In effect, the company is attempting to create a Reuters-style service that brings news and insight from places that traditional media entities aren’t covering, either because they don’t care or because they’ve cut back their foreign reporting budgets.

Once the service gets well-established in those countries, Aki Hashmi of All Voices — a former Knight-Ridder and Reuters executive — says the service plans to expand into 30 more. Hashmi says the site has grown by over 400 percent in the past year and now has 337,000 contributors in 180 countries generating 4 million unique visits per month.

“If you look at AP and Reuters, they have about 40-50 percent of the world covered,” says Hashmi. “But how do you cover the rest of the world? You need a global network of professional and citizen reporters.” All Voices already has contributors in some or all of the countries, he says, but the proposed expansion will take the company deeper into those areas and create virtual news desks, consisting of both citizen journalists and professional journalists who are either freelancing or have been laid off. While All Voices won’t be approaching or hiring specific journalists in these areas, Hashmi says the service has found that journalists inevitably come forward, because they want their content to reach a larger audience, and to potentially get paid for it.

The service — which was founded in 2008 by former Sevin Rosen venture capitalist Amra Tareen based on a trip to her home country of Pakistan following a devastating series of earthquakes — is even modeled on a wire service or professional media outlet such as Reuters or Associated Press. Writers begin as “stringers,” which is the common term in the journalist business for a freelancer who files occasionally for a newspaper, wire service or broadcast network. As their content is rated, both by readers and by All Voices’ ranking algorithm, they gain reputation within the system and can be promoted first to “reporter” level and then to the top level, known as “anchor.” The site has no editors, although it has a community manager.

One writer who calls himself “California Mike” says he is 60 years old and is “a crazy old coot who probably should have inhaled more often during the ’60s, danced more during the ’70s, had more sex during the ’80s, made more money during the ’90s and been more patriotic during the ’00s.” According to the ranking shown below, he has contributed 386 reports and 789 comments and his stories have generated over 800,000 page views. Many of his reports are more like blogs posts, with his thoughts about current events. Hashmi says that writers can use nicknames, but that if they want their contributions to be syndicated through Google ) News or to be paid by the site, they have to use their real name.

No one is going to become rich writing for All Voices, however, even with page views like California Mike’s. Much like other user-generated content sites such as Demand Media, AOL’s Patch.com or Associated Content, the rate of pay at All Voices is low — and it isn’t seen as payment so much as an incentive program. Once a contributor builds a certain reputation within the site by contributing stories and having others rank their content for credibility, they can earn anywhere from $2 per thousand page views (for a stringer) to a maximum of $4 per thousand (for an anchor). Writers also gain rank within the system by promoting their content through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

By comparison, Demand Media pays about $15 for a 500-word piece and about $7.50 for shorter items, while Examiner.com pays based on page views, but the exact rate is set based on how much advertising the site gets for its pages, as well as other factors (some writers who have worked for the site say it works out to about 3 cents per page view). Examiner — which is part of the portfolio of companies controlled by oil and real estate billionaire Philip Anschutz — recently acquired Vancouver, British Columbia-based “citizen journalism” outfit NowPublic for a reported $25 million. It says it has contributors (which it calls “examiners”) in 50 cities in the U.S.

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Developers, Meet Your Hungry New Market, the News

A Twitter designer has provided a sneak peek of some of the features that might be in an upcoming redesign, by uploading a screenshot to Dribble, a site used by designers for sharing their work (hat tip to Icodom for noticing the screenshot first). It doesn’t show much, but it looks as though Twitter is adding some analytics to a user’s profile page — the screenshot (which appears to be the upper-right corner of a profile page) shows not just how long a user has been using the service, but also indicates their activity level by showing how many tweets they post per day. The site also appears to be going with pulldown menus for sending messages and other actions involving the user.

The screenshot was uploaded by Twitter’s creative director Doug Bowman, the former lead visual designer at Google, where he worked on projects including a redesign of Google Calendar. In a comment on the Dribble page he called it a glimpse of what could be “a significant redesign,” but said that it wasn’t final. Twitter’s current profile page shows a user’s name, location, a Web link, a short bio and then numbers for their followers, how many they are following and how many tweets they have posted.

There’s a lot of interest around the Twitter redesign, in part because of the tension over features the service might add that could compete with third-party services. In February, Twitter engineer Alex Payne posted a tweet (which has since been deleted) that said new features were coming to the web site that would make people reconsider using third-party apps. He later said his comments were taken out of context, after TechCrunch wrote a post based on his tweet saying Twitter was going to be competing with third-party developers.

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Kontagent, an analytics platform for Facebook-based social applications that describes itself as “Google Analytics for the social web,” announced new features and an enhanced dashboard for Facebook marketers this morning, along with a new round of funding that brings the company to a total of $1.25-million. Co-founder Albert Lai, who started and later sold a photo-sharing site called Bubbleshare in 2007, also said that Kontagent has landed a number of major social-gaming companies as customers in the last two months — including PopCap, Gaia Online and TenCent — and is now tracking more than 50 million monthly active users through its platform.

Among the company’s new investors are Jameson Hsu, co-founder and CEO of Mochimedia;, James Hong, co-founder and CEO of HotOrNot; Benjamin Sun, co-founder and CEO of CommunityConnect; Auren Hoffman, founder and CEO of RapLeaf; Greg Thomson, founder of TallTreeGames and Mike Sego, Chief Product Officer of Gaia Online. They join Kontagent’s original seed investors, who include Naval Ravikant from The Hit Forge and Extreme Venture Partners. The company, which has offices in San Francisco and Toronto, was also one of a group of startups that won $225,000 from the Facebook Fund in 2008, and the only one in the group that wasn’t an application.

Kontagent’s software, which it calls its Social Analytics and Marketing-Automation Suite, has a dashboard that looks very similar to analytic software such as Google Analytics or Omniture (which large sites use to track incoming traffic), with a number of tabs that allow users to sort through different views of the data that Kontagent collects from Facebook about their apps, games or services. But instead of pageviews and referrers, Kontagent lets companies look at metrics to see if something went viral, how engaged people are and retention.

The dashboard shows how many people were convinced to sign up for an app or service after receiving a notification from Facebook or clicking on a mention in someone’s feed or stream. Companies can see what kind of response rate their invites are getting, track the “K factor” — a measurement of virality — and even do A/B testing on their emails or notifications to see which gets the best conversion rate. Lai says Kontagent now has a demo account where users can see all the features of its new platform.

The Kontagent CEO says that users are “fed up with existing tools” for tracking users, because they don’t measure what’s important for the social web. “A speedometer and RPM indicator are just not enough telemetry to fly a plane any more,” he says. “All these other metrics are what you really need to fly in this current environment.” Competitors for Kontagent include Webtrends, which recently launched a Facebook analytics add-on, as well as similar offerings from Omniture and Coremetrics.

The software is free to use provided a company agrees to share the data from its applications or services. That data is then aggregated, and allows companies to benchmark their own performance in a variety of areas against others in the network. Large enterprise users can buy an annual pre-paid version that doesn’t include the data-sharing component, Lai says. Although Kontagent just supports Facebook at the moment, the co-founder says that the company is planning to support Twitter in the future. Facebook provides its own data analytics to users, but Lai says that his platform provides a far greater level of “granularity” that companies need when designing applications.

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Twitter investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures may have thought he was just musing aloud about the Twitter ecosystem and whether it has reached an “inflection point” in his recent blog post, but it seems as though some third-party app developers took his comments about Twitter features as a thinly-veiled declaration of war. Why? Because the Twitter VC suggested that the social network should have had features such as a URL shortener, a picture-uploading service and other additional services built in, rather than relying on third-party developers to come up with these add-ons later. The implication, according to some observers, is that Twitter is going to develop its own versions of these features and squeeze out third-party companies. Programming guru Dave Winer put some of these fears into words in a blog post.

In some ways, Wilson’s post seemed more like a thoughtful exploration of Twitter’s future (which is how I interpreted it), but it’s clear that the tension surrounding Twitter and its eventual business model — or models — has risen to the point where even an offhand observation by a VC can cause a flash fire to erupt.

This isn’t the first time that developers have gotten their knickers in a knot about Twitter and its intentions, however: Twitter developer Alex Payne caused a minor ruckus In February when he mentioned (in a tweet that has since been deleted from his stream), that there were some cool new features coming to the service’s web site and that once people saw them “you might not want to use a third-party client.” TechCrunch wrote a post speculating that this meant Twitter was going after third-party apps, and Payne decided to stop blogging in part because he thought his comments had been misconstrued. Twitter staffers later tried to smooth the waters at an open house with app developers, video of which is embedded below.

But even if Fred Wilson was firing a shot across the bow of Twitter developers (which he denies), should any of this really come as a surprise to third-party app companies? After all, we’ve seen this movie before — Microsoft’s “embrace and extend” policy was built on that kind of behavior. The bottom line is that as Twitter continues to grow, it is going to do whatever is in the best interests of the company, and if that means gutting the “ecosystem” then so be it. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that Twitter has to compete with every third-party service — it could decide to buy them, as it did with Summize (which became Twitter search). Hopefully the industry will get a better sense of the company’s strategy at the upcoming Chirp conference.

One developer of Twitter apps told me: “Ever since I started developing applications based on Twitter, I knew about the risk that they could do some of the things I was working on themselves. So none of this should be a surprise to anybody. If anything, I think they took too long. It’s in Twitter’s best interest to incorporate some of these applications into their platform.” It’s also worth noting that just because Fred Wilson suggests something doesn’t mean Twitter will necessarily do it — something the VC pointed out in a comment on a post at Business Insider, saying “That post was my work, not Twitter’s work. While I am on the board of Twitter, I don’t work there and I don’t speak for them.”

But even if Twitter does add those features and squeeze out third-party add-ons, it will be another example of a valuable lesson: if you build your service on someone else’s platform, there is a good chance that they will wind up drinking your milkshake. Or as Twitter product manager Josh Elman said on Twitter: “In the history of platforms, hole filling has always been a great place to start, but never a great place to end, right?”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Malu Green

We told you about Parker Liautaud, the 15-year-old who is trying to be the first to check in at the North Pole using Foursquare, as part of an attempt to raise awareness of the environment in the Arctic. If he makes it, he will win a special Last Degree badge from Foursquare, and become one of the youngest people ever to ski to the North Pole. But it turns out Parker has some competition: David Newman, the 44-year-old CEO of a British insurance company called Carole Nash, is also heading for the North Pole, and wants to be the first to check in via Foursquare. He even has some special gear — a smartphone tethered to a satellite phone — that will allow him to do so, a spokesperson for his team says (Foursquare has been cracking down on people who check in from places they aren’t actually at, in order to win mayorships or badges).

Like Parker, the British adventurer is also sharing the details of his arduous expedition (he is walking to the North Pole, while the teenager is skiing) via the web, including a Flickr group and a Twitter account for updates and regular audio podcast posts. Newman, who says he has been on several Arctic expeditions before, has joined up with a team of British and Norwegian explorers and is raising money for a group called Riders for Health as well as a brain injury treatment center.

Carole Nash CEO David Newman

Parker Liautaud’s quest has likely gotten more than a little support from his family: his father is Bernard Liautaud, who co-founded Business Objects and later sold the company to SAP in 2007 for almost $7 billion. His expedition is also being sponsored by General Electric. His competitor, however, says that his trip has been completely paid for without sponsorship (Carole Nash is apparently the largest motorcycle insurance firm in the United Kingdom). It’s not exactly Amundsen and Scott racing for the South Pole, but now at least it’s a contest.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Kenyai

Venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson says he believes that Twitter has reached “an inflection point.” Since the Union Square Ventures partner is one of the company’s financial backers, it’s not surprising that he would choose to see the service as playing that kind of pivotal role. But Wilson is also a keen observer of the web and particularly the social web, so it’s worth looking at what he has to say. In a nutshell, he says that Twitter could be at the edge of an inflection point — or what pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell chose to call a “tipping point” in his book of the same name — similar to the one that the computing industry hit in the 1980s, when PCs became commonplace.

Interestingly, while some have argued that Twitter was smart to allow others to build on its platform, Wilson says that the company “really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience” (a comment that has some third-party Twitter services concerned). He also compares the kind of point Twitter is at with the development of Facebook-based businesses:

When Facebook platform launched, we saw a massive number of new products and services launched on The Facebook. But many were slight variations on existing Facebook features (like Superwall) or holes in the Facebook service. As Facebook closed up those holes and enhanced their own feature set, those apps fell to the wayside. But there was one entirely new business that got created on top of the Facebook platform and that is social gaming, which industry analysts project will be a $1.6bn market this year and I think that number is low.

There’s no question that Twitter has spawned a micro-industry of apps and services that make use of the Twitter API (application programming interface) or the Twitter “firehose,” including real-time search as implemented by Google and Microsoft. The Programmable Web says that it now has 43 Twitter-derived APIs in its directory — in other words, services that offer their own APIs that are based on content pulled from Twitter. But are services that offer features like the “Auto Follow Friday” API really analogous to the kind of market-changing innovation Wilson is talking about in the 1980s? If any of them are, it isn’t obvious.

The Union Square founder describes some places where he sees the potential for “killer apps” based on Twitter to emerge, including social gaming, vertical applications and services such as Stocktwits, enterprise services such as CoTweet, discovery tools such as TweetMeme and analytical services such as Radian6. But even Wilson admits that there are few major successes to point to in any of these areas so far. Does that mean that Twitter can’t support the kind of business model and innovation that Fred is talking about, or that it just hasn’t gotten to that point yet? Maybe we’ll see some real innovation at the Chirp conference next week.

For what it’s worth, I think Twitter is much more like email or instant messaging — or Skype — than it is like a platform such as Facebook, upon which other major business segments can be built. Have there been any real new businesses or innovation built on email or IM or Skype? Not really. But you can’t say they haven’t changed the way people behave or the way businesses operate in a variety of ways. In a sense, they have infiltrated our lives in ways we hardly even understand. Maybe that’s ultimately a bigger deal than even Fred is talking about, but it’s a lot harder to measure, and a lot harder to value.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): How Human Users Are Holding Twitter Back

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy Flickr user boxchain

Rupert Murdoch, the octogenarian chairman of News Corp., was at it again during a recent National Press Club interview at George Washington University — it being his routine bashing of news aggregators such as Google and Yahoo (although Google is typically the only one Murdoch mentions during his tirades), along with a call to arms for the newspaper industry, which Murdoch says must eventually embrace paywalls whether it wants to or not. Readers might not like them, the News Corp. founder said, but will wind up paying for the news “when they’ve got nowhere else to go.” The Murdoch-owned Times of London and Sunday Times are both expected to launch pay access in June. According to a number of reports about the interview, Murdoch said:

We are going to stop people like Google or Microsoft or whoever from taking stories for nothing…there is a law of copyright and they recognise it. They take [news content] for nothing. They have got this very clever business model.

He also said of the iPad:

I got a glimpse of the future last weekend with the Apple iPad. It is a wonderful thing. If you have less newspapers and more of these…it may well be the saving of the newspaper industry. It doesn’t destroy the traditional newspaper, it just comes in a different form.

But it is Murdoch’s comments about “having nowhere else to go” that are the most revealing when it comes to the aging newspaperman’s real agenda, because the reality is that News Corp. putting up paywalls at all of its newspapers isn’t going to really succeed unless everyone else does so as well. Ever since he decided not to remove the paywall at the Wall Street Journal — something he had hinted he might do before buying the paper — Murdoch has been trying desperately to get a bandwagon rolling on the issue, to get as many other major newspapers to join him in erecting paywalls.

Even if News Corp.’s strategy is more about shoring up the declining readership of the print product than about reaching new online readers, the fact is that Murdoch is going to have a hard time of it if he is the only one blocking off his content.

Then readers will have somewhere else to go — to his competitors, such as The Guardian, which has repeatedly argued against paywalls and has an entire content distribution strategy based on free access and an open API (application programming interface) that allows anyone to use the paper’s content. A bandwagon of one isn’t going to do much good, and Murdoch knows it — which is why whenever he’s handed a microphone he sings the same song.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user World Economic Forum.

gdgt co-founder Ryan Block

Peter Rojas and Ryan Block, who used to rule the world of gadget blogs at Gizmodo and Engadget, have raised $3.2 million in financing for what they see as the future of gadget reviews online: a site simply called gdgt — so hip and futuristic it apparently needs no vowels whatsoever — where users talk about and review gadgets they either want to buy or have already bought. The financing round, which closed last month, was led by Spark Capital and True Ventures (see disclosure below) and also included funding from Betaworks, AOL Ventures, Lerer Media Ventures and a number of private individuals, including Betaworks partner Ron Conway, John Josephson and Gillian Munson of Allen & Co., Jason Calacanis and SB Nation CEO Jim Bankoff.

Unlike traditional review sites, such as the ones that the founders used to work for, gdgt has no paid reviewers who hold forth on the benefits or flaws of new devices or leak product photos before they are launched. Instead, it has what Rojas and Block say are hundreds of thousands of registered users who come to the site to talk about and learn about the devices they want to buy, and to comment on products that others are interested in buying. When you set up a profile at the site, you are presented with three options: 1) say something, 2) ask a question and 3) get support. You can also set up a list of products you want to buy or have recently bought, so you can track conversations about them.

In many ways, gdgt feels like a more modern version of a site like Epinions (now owned by eBay), where buyers talk about and rate things they have purchased, or like an updated and enhanced version of Amazon user reviews. According to recent posts there by Block and Rojas, the site is trying to come up with ways to give users “reputation capital” in return for providing good content, and to highlight their contributions based on how much capital they have within the system. Rojas also told the Wall Street Journal that the company is looking at forming relationships with marketers and distributors of the kinds of products its members are looking to buy, so that they can be shown relevant content while they are browsing or using the site.

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

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

What the VC Industry Upheaval Means for Startups

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy Flickr user Thomas Hawk

Zynga, the leading social-gaming company behind Facebook hits such as Farmville and Mafia Wars, would likely be worth as much as $5 billion if it were publicly traded instead of privately held, according to SecondShares.com, a group of former equity analysts who spend their time researching the value of private online companies such as Zynga, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. SecondShares based its estimate of Zynga’s value on the number of outstanding shares, estimated revenue per user, growth rate and other metrics, and projected that by 2015 the game-maker could have a theoretical market value as high as $10 billion.

The authors of the report — former Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs equity analyst Lou Kerner, former Sanford Bernstein research analyst Eli Halliwell and Gamers Media CEO Jay Gould — say Zynga is the leader in the social gaming market with 237 million monthly active users and 6 of the top 7 social games. That gives the company more than four times as many monthly active users as Playfish, which was recently bought by Electronic Arts for $400 million. China’s Tencent Holdings is the only online game company that is larger than Zynga, the report says, with 400 million monthly active users.

Based on an estimate of what Zynga likely makes in revenue from the average user, Second Shares projects that the company will pull in about $500 million in revenue this year, and could be making as much as $1.6 billion per year in five years. The analysts say that shares of the company are currently trading in private, illiquid markets at about $9 a share, but would likely be worth almost twice as much if Zynga were to go public, and that Zynga has a number of strengths that justify a premium valuation, including the fact that it can cross-market games to users of other Zynga games, and that it is quickly able to duplicate other successful games that competitors come up with.

As with Facebook, Twitter, and other high profile private companies, you can buy Zynga shares in the (illiquid) private market, where about $6 million worth of shares traded hands last year through marketplaces like SecondMarket.com. Only accredited investors are allowed to participate. Currently, the ask price is about $9/share, implying a market cap for Zynga of $2.8 billion.

Toward the end of its research report, however, Second Shares mentions a number of potential risks for Zynga and its valuation, including:

• Farmville currently accounts for an estimated 50 percent of the company’s revenue, and “appears to have peaked in terms of popularity.”
• Facebook blocked applications from providing notifications in newsfeeds last month, removing “a major source of free advertising.”
• Four of Zynga’s six major game hits “appear to have peaked or to be in decline.”
• Zynga is dependent on Facebook, and growth at the social network could slow, or the network could harm Zynga somehow.
• Online gaming is a risky, hit-driven business, and there are a lot of competitors.

In February, a research firm called Next Up estimated that Zynga was worth as much as $3 billion, in a report it did for a private share-trading site called SharesPost.com, where Zynga is currently valued at $2.6 billion. Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies invested $180 million in Zynga in December.

In November, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities said Zynga could be worth as much as $1 billion, given the $400 million that Electronic Arts paid for Playfish. At that point, Inside Social Games estimated that Zynga would have revenue of $210 million for 2009 and $355 million this year, and a statement from the company said that 1 million of its 200 million active monthly users were buying virtual goods.

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

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Amanda Bake It Pretty

You think you’ve gone out of your way to earn a Foursquare badge? Not as far as Parker Liautaud, who hopes to be the first to check in at the North Pole using the mobile social network later this month, which will earn him the specially-created Last Degree badge (pictured below). Oh, and he’s 15 years old, which will also make him one of the youngest explorers ever to ski to the North Pole. Parker, who was born in California but goes to school at the prestigious Eton College in England, is trying to raise awareness about and funds for environmental issues facing the Arctic. His expedition is being sponsored by General Electric.

Although Parker’s willpower and determination is not in question (he is also accompanied by experienced Arctic explorer Doug Stoup), mounting such a resource-intensive expedition is probably helped by the fact that his father is Bernard Liautaud, who co-founded Business Objects and later sold the company to SAP in 2007 for almost $7 billion. Parker has a Facebook page set up for his quest, where he has been posting videos, and fans can also sign a petition that the young adventurer hopes to present to world leaders or they can record and upload a video expressing their thoughts about the environment. Parker also has a YouTube channel and is on Twitter.

Embedded below is a video of Parker talking about the expedition and the various kinds of cold-weather gear and equipment he has to pack into his sled.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Beverly & Pack