Planet Voidspace

Recently, I’ve noticed something. If you send me an email, the likelihood that I’m going to respond is pretty small. But if you send me a message on Twitter, the likelihood that I’ll respond is much higher. Certainly, part of it is that I get fewer messages on Twitter. But you might be surprised at how close it’s getting in volume when you add @replies to direct messages. The bigger factor for me, is the length of the messages.

If I open up an email and see it filled with paragraphs of information, guaranteed my eyes are going to glaze over. Certainly sometimes it’s an important message that I do need to read, but most of the time it’s just a core message filled with paragraphs of bloat. I don’t want or need the bloat, I need the core message. And that’s why I love Twitter. You simply cannot go over 140 characters. And more often than you may imagine, that’s enough.

Now, on the face of it, plenty of people will disagree with me on that point. But think about it. In an age where we’re bombarded by tons of information, from multiple angles, all day long, there is something beautiful about brevity.

I used to read screenplays for a living. Trust me when I say that there is no shortage of people who can blather on about something to seemingly no end. But the skill in writing a screenplay often came down to if you could convey what you needed to convey in just a few lines. It’s not an easy thing to do — at all. And while it’s not quite the same because it’s even more compact, Twitter forces you do to a similar thing in its own way. And Twitter is hardly the only form of communication that has done this.

Most users know by now that the 140 character limit of Twitter is actually tied to the limits of text messaging. Text messages can only be 160 characters long (Twitter needed to reserve the extra 20 characters for usernames). But do you know where the 160 character limit comes from?

The LA Times ran an excellent piece a few months ago about Friedhelm Hillebrand, the father of the modern text message. He dreamed up the 160 character limit while working at a typewriter in the mid-1980s, trying to see how long sentences needed to be to convey something. He found 160 characters was the magic number he kept arriving at. But the deciding committee for SMS still wasn’t sure until they looked at postcards and found that most of those had messages of 150 characters or less.

And so you see, while you may think Twitter’s character limit is silly or frustrating, it’s actually born out of two other forms of communication that are widely accepted and used the world over. You may not think of Twitter being just like a postcard, but in some ways it is — one that you can instantaneously send to many friends or acquaintances at the same time. And minus the cost of a stamp.

Even with the rise of technology, the lure of the short message remains. And that was the key reason why I found Twitter compelling when I first started using it over two years ago. I never thought of the limitation in a negative sense, but rather as something that could inspire creativity in messages. And could even spur communication.

It’s liberating to know that you only have 140 characters or less to respond to something. For a lot of messages, that removes a huge burden of trying to say enough to the person you’re talking to so that they don’t think you’re being rude. With a 140 character limit, a correlation between briefness and rudeness doesn’t exist.

And that’s why more and more I’m finding myself telling people, “Just message me on Twitter.” It’s a two-way street. I don’t want to have to read you go on and on about something that could be said in one line, and you won’t have to listen to me go on and on about something in response. Again, it won’t work for all messages, which is why Twitter or something like it will never kill email, but for a lot of messages, it works just fine.

Characters and time are saved. It’s a limitation that is liberating.

[photos: flickr/pink sherbert photography & inlaterdays]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Like most things on the Internet, there’s a good side and a dark side to where the media business is headed.

The good side is very good: thousands of layers of mostly needless middlemen and processes are being eliminated as journalists get a direct channel to their readers. And, because it’s a two way medium, readers get that channel right back. And in the cases where the subject of an article has been wronged, the Web gives them powerful megaphones to fight back. In short, the more everyone has a voice, the more reporters are challenged to make sure they are right, because they will be called out.

Look at what happened with the plagiarism scandal around Chris Anderson’s new book. Anderson says it was a mistake around a change in how they were going to use citations, and I take him at his word. But it’s safe to say any author who’d considered borrowing heavily from Wikipedia won’t now. We like to think that we act virtuously because of personal or professional pride, but nothing enforces those ethics like the real possibility of getting caught and hugely embarrassed.

But the bad side is also very bad. The elimination of those layers – typically fact checkers, editors, lawyers and just time to make sure a work is fully baked—also allows mistakes, lazy reporting, a dependence on rumors, and hot-headed, unfair treatment to subjects. Worse: The metrics around the Web make it crystal clear which kinds of stories drive the most traffic. That leads to salacious reporting for the sake of clicks and comments.

It’s easy to point the finger at blogs, especially by certain members of old media losing money quarter-after-quarter. (Cough, cough.) But this is not just a technology change as most corners of media are fighting for survival, it’s become a cultural change. And this week, I’ve been struck by two non-blog examples that reflect the tension.

Right about now most people reading this probably have guessed the example of salacious reporting and unfair treatment I’m driving at is Ben Mezrich’s new book on Facebook. I’ll say upfront I haven’t read it. Galleys have been very closely guarded. Once I do read it, if everything everyone who has read it has told me is wrong, I’ll apologize for what I’m about to say. But, on a professional level, I find the ethics behind this project disgusting.

It’s essentially a book based on talking to one source who had a falling out with the company just as it was moving to California and becoming more than a dorm room project. That’s like someone writing a book about you based solely on what your old college ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend said.

Mezrich has been clear to say he’s never met or talked to Mark Zuckerberg in the intro and in interviews, but that doesn’t stop him from drawing potentially damaging conclusions about his character and selling it as a non-fiction book that’s getting made into a movie that people will take as fact.

In contrast, I spent years and hundreds of hours interviewing and following the subjects of my last book, which as most people know, included Zuckerberg amid other Web 2.0 figures. And I’m about one-third of the way through research for my next book, which includes spending 40 weeks in other countries following entrepreneurs. It’d be a lot easier to write a narrative without that whole burden of actual reporting. If I could sit in Silicon Valley and make up what I think entrepreneurs in Africa are like, that’d sure help out on my bank account, my health and my neglected personal relationships.

To be clear, I have no doubt Mezrich’s book will sell better than mine and make a juicier movie. But I wouldn’t swap the karma points. I don’t know how you call yourself a non-fiction writer and publish a book about a living person that’s based on you “imagining” what they are like. And let me tell you, having first interviewed him when he was 19 and spent countless hours with him since, the idea that Zuckerberg is some kind of sexed-up lethario is laughable fiction.

Why didn’t Mezrich write a novel or a different non-fiction book that he actually knew something about? It just seems like a cheap way to get a film deal and sales since the “imagined” subject is also leading the hottest private tech company in the world right now. (Indeed, the film rights were reportedly sold before the book was written.)

Even Mezrich’s publicist admits as much, according to a New York Times Blog post where he said, “The book isn’t reportage. It’s big juicy fun.” I’m guessing it’s not fun for the people trying to build a company who Mezrich essentially calls womanizers, drug addicts and backstabbers. Probably not fun for their families, employees and investors either. If this is where media is going on a book level, magazine level or blog level—I want out.

Contrast that to what’s playing out with another hot non-fiction book that was also optioned for a film: Moneyball. Some people accuse Michael Lewis of taking some liberties with facts here or there, but I’ve never met one of his subjects who felt he was treated unfairly, including the subject of Moneyball, Billy Beane. Like his style or not, Lewis did his job: He invested countless hours reporting and wrote a book that told a dramatic story that also happened to be true.

Recently, that book was also being made into a movie, to star Brad Pitt and be directed by Steven Soderbergh. The plug unexpectedly got pulled. It seemed Soderbergh reworked the script to be less a feature film version of things and more a real-life reenactment with some of the actual people playing themselves. Quippy anecdotes and funny lines were cut because they weren’t actually said in real life.

I’ve not been a huge fan of some of Soderbergh’s more experimental work, and I don’t know if his treatment would have made a better movie. But imagine: The people who are allowed to take the most liberties with a “true story”—the filmmakers—hewing more to the truth than an author who ostensibly gets paid to write the truth.

The media world is upside down these days, and I hope when all the volatility is done we wind up on the Soderbergh side of things.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

It's not often that Internet companies last 10 years, but Moonfruit in the UK has proved pretty resilient. It survived the dotcom boom the first time round, launching with VC-backing, growing to 65 staff and cutting back to two staff in the space of a couple of years. It's a wonder why they didn't exit in the most recent boom, but here they are still, plugging away. And their resilience is proving to be an asset as their 10-years old web site building business comes back into fashion, even as more recent competitors like Weebly, Yola, MyDragnDrop and Webnode, and many others, try to capture the market for people who want to build simple web sites. So what's the best way to re-invigorate an internet brand after 10 long years? Get trending on Twitter, that's how. So Moonfruit has been giving away 10 Macbooks for every year of their operation, beginning this week. The result is that it has become the top trending term on Twitter three days in a row, as all people need to do is add the hashtag #moonfruit to their tweet. An algorithm is randomly choosing a winner. There are five days left. By the second day this week it had reached 2.5% of all twitter traffic. But could the stunt backfire as fast as it worked?

• Geisha

It’s not easy to launch a successful WebEx competitor. Most businesses have long since established their “system” for dealing with web meetings, using old standbys like WebEx or GoToMeeting. And those businesses that are willing to venture into the unknown have had plenty of cheaper alternatives to choose from, like DimDim, for quite a while. But that isn’t keeping CallWave from launching one of its own, dubbed Fuze Meeting. And while it’s not going to be an easy space to compete in, Fuze Meeting doesn’t disappoint.

As far as startups go, the history of the company is pretty unique. CallWave was founded in 1998 and went public in 2004, trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CALL. After reaching a peak soon thereafter of over $15 per share, the stock dropped steadily, dipping as low as 50 cents early this year. Deciding to cut its losses, the company delisted itself from NASDAQ on Monday after buying back shares from public shareholders at a 44% premium over the current market value and paying out a total of $10 million. CMO Patrick Moran says that the company did this on its own accord, and that its hand wasn’t pushed by any banks or VCs. CallWave will soon change its name to Fuze Box to reflect its new position as a startup.

While all of this has been going on, CallWave has been building the “fuze platform” that powers Fuze Meeting, which it’s pitting as a sleeker, lighter, and cheaper alternative to services like WebEx. Last fall, the company decided to show off an early version of the product to some press, perhaps prematurely (it was labeled as “incomplete” by CNET). Finally in May, a full eight months after making its public debut, Fuze Meeting finally became commercially available. And only now that the company’s financial wranglings are complete is it ready to really announce it to the public.

I played around with the complete version yesterday, and for the most part I was impressed. The application is slick and intuitive, and unlike some other screen sharing apps, Fuze Meeting requires no plugins — it should work on just about any browser, and also offers support for both the iPhone and BlackBerry. Screen sharing supports high resolution video sharing, allowing presenters to jump to any point in the video as each participant’s screen is updated in real time. Presenters can also annotate video frames, which will likely appeal to marketing organizations.

While the service is currently working on acquiring free users, it is going to operate under a subscription model of $29 a month, or 12 cents per minute for users who would prefer to pay as they go. This is substantially cheaper than WebEx, but other less well known alternatives sport similar price points, so cost won’t be the only thing Fuze can rely on to differentiate itself.

If you’d like to see a video of the service in action, check out the clip below. Warning: it features Moran’s kids, and may be too cute to handle.

Fuze Meeting from Patrick Moran on Vimeo.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The beta testing stage can be the cornerstone to the successful development of a new site. And many startups have to conduct and implement beta testing of sites, surveys and analytics internally, which can be an daunting task when you are launching a site. Prefinery lets startups outsource the whole beta invite process, from start to finish. Prefinery is offering 100 TechCrunch readers with beta invites to test the site. You can sign up here. Use the invitation code "TECHCRUNCH" when signing up for the service. Prefinery's ambition is to create a valuable first experience for beta testers and to help startups in collecting and organizing information that will result in a better product. Prefinery will do anything and everything when it comes to the beta testing process. The service will create a splash page for your product, generate an HTML sign-up form with fields and survey questions, create an automatic welcome e-mail/message, take signups into a queue, approve users, and trigger invite e-mail. The service will also generate invite codes and assign quantities.

I went to Los Angeles, had a sort of a working holiday, came home, and am writing. Working out a lot with the trainer, got a new trampoline. The cherry tree is covered in cherries, and the wild raspberries (red and black) are out in the woods, and I find them when I walk the dog.
Hello Neil,

And finally, there are now more than 666,666 people following me on Twitter. So we had a party. It's still ongoing, the party, over at http://bit/ly/666party and to join in all you have to do is upload a photgraph of you and a Balloon. And once 600 people showed up at the party, the webgoblin made this: a mosaic.

Okay, it’s not exactly the Camp David Summit that took place in 2000 between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but sometimes the littlest gestures can go a long way.

A couple of days ago, upon hearing that Microsoft had officially joined Twitter, the official Linux account sent out a tweet welcoming them. “Welcome to Twitter, @Microsoft!,” they said. The tweet sat unanswered for over a day, and it seemed like Microsoft may never answer. But about a few hours ago, they did. “@Linux thanks, nice to be here,” they replied.

Short, sweet, and to the point. A sign of peace in the operating system ecosystem? Probably not. But it’s something — just look at the shirts that were going around in this war just a few years ago (above).

Twitter is turning into quite the sanctuary for rivals to at least pretend to be nice to each other. Just look at Coke and Pepsi the other day.

[photo: flickr/will hybrid]

[Thanks Russell]

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

I don’t recall how the YouTube user Pruane2Forever, aka “Sexman”, came on my radar, but I definitely remember a few of his videos from a couple years ago. (Here’s a old favorite — Not Safe For Work.) Basically, it’s this kid who does movie and new media reviews that are (or at least used to be) unintentionally hilarious. These days, he apparently has quite the following on YouTube, as he has over 150 videos that range in popularity from tens of thousands of views to over a million.

One of his most popular ones was a video from 4 months ago in which he calls out rapper 50 Cent. Sexman wonders how 50 still has “street cred” after doing endorsements for Vitamin Water, makeup and dildos (I’m not kidding). “What else is he gonna do? 50 Cent diapers for your little gangsta?,” Sexman wonders at one point. He concludes that 50 Cent is “just a media whore!”

Well, 50 Cent has responded. Yesterday, the rapper posted a video alongside Sexman, who apparently flew from Canada to New York to meet up at the rapper’s request.

Pure. YouTube. Gold.

Here’s another old classic. Sexman’s review of the latest Rambo review.

[thanks Corentin]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Despite our best intentions, it looks like the DEMO v. TechCrunch50 war will continue, even with DEMO under new management.

In 2007 we launched the first TechCrunch50 event - a place where companies can launch to rabid fans and tech press. These launching companies are the stars of the show, and they don’t pay a cent to attend. We thought DEMO’s longstanding policy of forcing launching companies to pay a $20,000 fee was ridiculous, and led the conference organizers to make decisions based not on the merits of the startups but simply on who was willing and able to pay. Not only do we let startups launch for free, we give the top one a $50,000 prize.

Our conference has grown rapidly - nearly 2,000 people attended TechCrunch50 last year while DEMO languished in San Diego with a paltry few hundred. To be fair, our events were on the exact same dates, so they were hit doubly hard. This year we moved our dates to give them some breathing room. We thought we were done battling DEMO.

But today DEMO announced that they’re giving away a “massive” prize - $2 million in advertising credits - to the top two startups at the event. The press is eating it up, saying that TechCrunch50 looks paltry in comparison.

Of course, there’s a catch. The “advertising” is remnant stuff on IDG properties (IDG owns DEMO) and will certainly be priced at rate card. They’ll also charge for creative and other expenses. Meaning there is very little actual value. I’m guessing that the amount of advertising actually delivered would be in the tens of thousands of dollars of value, at best. And, of course, every startup launching still needs to pay to launch.

But whatever. You want adverting? We’ll give you advertising.

DEMO says they’ll give away $2 million in advertising (it might be $1 million total, they aren’t very clear). We’ll double whatever they’re giving. We’ll give away $4 million in advertising if they’re giving $2 million. And if DEMO increases their number, we’ll increase ours to stay at 2x whatever they are at. Our ads will be on our various TechCrunch networks sites and via our terrific sponsors, who are going to be adding their own inventory as well. We’ll give half to the top two winners, and half to everyone else who launches.

We’ve always supported the startups that launch at TechCrunch50 in every way we can. Throwing in free advertising is easy.

Let’s just take a look at the two events for comparison purposes.

TechCrunch50: Free to launch, 2,000 attendees, $50,000 cash prize to winner. $4 million in free advertising. Awesomeness in a bottle.

DEMO: $20,000 to launch your startup, maybe 500 attendees, $1 million in remnant unsold advertising on IDG properties to each of top two startups.

The choice seems pretty clear to me.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

I would like to announce release 0.8 of PyODB. This adds a feature request
to allow connections directly to the ODBC database driver using connection
strings.
PyODB is a Python module and provides a simplified set of bindings
to unixODBC ([link]) allowing fast and easy development
of open database applications.

When we reported on Kiva.org’s decision to open up its micro-lending platform to U.S. entrepreneurs, Kiva CEO Premal Shah told us he was concerned about backlash in the community. Shah acknowledged that the decision to open lending to U.S. recipients may draw criticism because it goes against the idea on which Kiva was founded—lending to help development in third world countries where credit options are limited.

It looks like Shah’s prediction was correct. There is now a lending team on Kiva’s community platform titled “Unhappy Kiva Lenders.” The members, which total 375 lenders from around the world, are angry that Kiva is extending loans to U.S. entrepreneurs. The team’s page states that “including borrowers from the USA has undermined the very core of what made [Kiva] so unique and special; small, impactful contributions to entrepreneurs in impoverished situations in developing countries.”

The tirade on the page is harsh, calling the decision “shameful and disgraceful” and a deviation from Kiva’s core mission. The group cites an example of a recent Kiva loan request from a U.S. entrepreneur who had a college degree and a career in architecture who wanted to start a business in website design. The loan he requested was for $7000 to start the business, an amount the lenders suggest could help 7 to 10 different borrowers in other parts of the world.

Kiva’s stated mission is “to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.” The anti-U.S. lenders claim that lending to U.S. entrepreneurs doesn’t alleviate poverty because Americans aren’t living in true poverty, compared to people in underdeveloped countries.

**US borrowers do not have to pay to send their kids to elementary school. **They don’t have to build their own house. **They don’t have to walk miles to get the bare minimum of medical care….if needed they can access FREE, generally high quality medical care. **They have a system of laws and courts in place that work. **They enjoy police and fire protection. **They generally have access to inexpensive and dependable public transportation. **They take for granted electricity, clean water, inspected food and indoor toilets. **

Some of that may be true. On the other hand, Shah makes a compelling case for the need for a micro-lending platform in the U.S. He says more than 10 million U.S. business owners face difficulty obtaining capital—even before the credit crisis and economic slowdown which made lending tight. And there’s no doubt that with the credit crunch creating a drought of lending, small businesses in the U.S. are finding it tough to find funds, especially if their financial history isn’t stellar. Finally, there is nothing wrong with giving U.S. lenders the opportunity to boost entrepreneurship at home, especially at a time where jobs created by small businesses can help lift the economy out of a recession.

It seems to me like the angry protests are misdirected. Kiva’s lending program has long been hailed as one of the more innovative platforms on the web and its ambitions have always been towards helping foster entrepreneurship (as well as alleviating poverty) in various areas of the world. Kiva’s decision to offer microlending to U.S. entrepreneurs reflects a genuine need for additional lending in the U.S. economy. And who knows? Kiva’s policy may attract a new crop of lenders who want to help at home first, and once they get hooked, spread capital overseas as well. The more capital that goes into the Kiva system, the more chance borrowers everywhere will have to eventually tap into it because many Kiva lenders simply recycle their loans as they are paid back.

We’ve contacted Kiva.org for a formal response.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

A few weeks ago I attended a press event that the San Francisco Giants and Shoretel put on. The audio isn’t that great because we’re in the server room for the San Francisco Giants baseball team. Here SF Giants’ CIO, Bill Schlough, is showing off how the Giants saved a million bucks by upgrading its telecommunications equipment.

Remember that the ballpark that the Giants is in was originally named for PacBell, the local phone company. Interesting look at how phone systems have changed in just the past 10 years.

This is a nice win for Shoretel. How often do you get a customer to sing your praises like this? Especially one that so many people in the community like and appreciate?

The system will save the SF Giants about $1,000 a day. Not bad. Plus they got a ton of new features, which lets the Giants serve their customers better.

Start Mobile has managed to get 18 separate iPhone applications approved by Apple. So you’ll imagine their surprise when one of them was recently rejected. But you may be even more surprised to find out why.

Apparently, Apple doesn’t like the way one piece of art in the app depicts President Obama. Is it out of line or tasteless? Well, you can determine for yourself, because you’ve undoubtedly seen the art in question before: It’s Shepard Fairey’s famous “HOPE” image of Obama that was everywhere during his Presidential campaign.

So why on Earth would this be rejected? Well, here’s the wording in the rejection:

It contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states: “Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

“Ridicules public figures”? This image is hanging in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian — yet, Apple apparently finds it inappropriate.

To be clear, the app in question is a free demo app of Start Mobile’s galleries and contains a dozen images, but Apple is clearly just unnerved by the Obama one as you can see in the correspondence below which the developer has shared.

Here’s Apple’s initial rejection letter:

Subject: Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery 1.0: Application Submission Feedback
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 12:27:02 -0700 (PDT)
From: iPhone Developer Program
To: XXXXX@XXXXXXX.com, XXXXX@XXXXXXX.net

Please include the line below in follow-up emails for this request.
Follow-up: 74455381
Dear START MOBILE, INC.,

Thank you for submitting Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery to the App Store. We’ve reviewed Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

An example of a public figure is attached.

If you believe that you can make the necessary changes so that Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery does not violate the iPhone SDK Agreement we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.

Regards,

iPhone Developer Program
****************************

Here’s Start Mobile’s follow-up trying to explain why the image is not ridiculing a public figure:

Subject: [Fwd: Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery 1.0: Application Submission Feedback]
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 21:56:29 -0700
From: John Doffing
To: iPhone Developer Program

Follow-up: 74455381

Apple Developer Program:

The attached image is most certainly NOT content that ridicules a public figure, nor is it in any way “obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory”.

The attached image is an iconic portrait by globally acclaimed artist SHEPARD FAIREY, and is actually included in the National Portrait Gallery!

* http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/7817466.stm

According to the BBC:

“When people think of a portrait of Obama, they think of this image.”
Fairey’s works are also in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

–

THANK YOU!

Best,
John

Now, lest you think Apple is possibly rejecting the app because Start Mobile doesn’t have permission to use the artist’s work, Start Mobile has three other apps featuring the work of Shepherd Fairey that are already in the App Store.

Okay, so maybe Apple’s isn’t comfortable with the bit of legal wrangling that is taking place over the artwork? That’s possible, but that’s not what it says in the rejection. And there are other applications like this one that use the image in question. And, you’ll notice, that’s not even the real version of the image, and it’s being used in the app’s icon. Why Apple would let that slip by and not this app? I have no idea.

And further, Start Mobile actually has another app that also features an Obama image that has been sitting around waiting to be approved for 2 months now, presumably for the same reason. That app features artwork from urban artist Justin Bua, and contains the image of Obama shown on the right.

So why doesn’t the developer just remove the offending images and get these apps approved? Well, because he doesn’t think he should have to, and believes this is just another case of the App Store approval process gone off the tracks.

“You notice that my original email to you didn’t scream CENSORSHIP or anything like that. I am quite sure that this is simply what amounts to a clerical error. A billion apps sold. 50k apps. etc etc. So this is just growing pains on their part. But unfortunately, it effected us directly, and had we not done SOMETHING, the end result would have been what amounts to accidental censorship,” Start Mobile’s John Doffing told us over email.

He goes on to note that he spoke with someone in developer relations a few weeks ago about the rejection, and they indicated that any apps that contain images of Obama may simply be getting rejected outright because there was a lot of “incendiary political content” that was coming through the App Store approval process around the time of the election. Sometimes “‘the baby is thrown out with the bathwater,” is what Doffing was told.

Doffing said that openness about what was going on made him hopeful that the app would find its way to the App Store, but that apparently didn’t change anything.

Sadly, this looks like yet another ridiculous App Store rejection. While Apple has no shortage of developers wanting to make apps for the platform, at some point, all of these ridiculous rejections run the risk of turning developers away.

Apple badly needs to straighten out its policies and get a team in place that doesn’t make dozens of silly mistakes with regards to app approvals and denials. The system continues to be broken.

Sure, Apple can do what it wants, but it’s asking developers to make apps for its store, which move iPhone and iPod touch units and make Apple all that money. Increasingly, the promise is that developers can earn a living off of the platform, or at least supplement their income. But they can’t do that if Apple keeps rejecting their apps for no apparent reason.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

One of the most effective ways to amplify your message on Twitter is to get your followers to retweet it to their followers. Retweeting is also becoming a popular way to pass links around Twitter. They are becoming the new currency of the Web because of the power of passed links. One service in particular, Tweetmeme, is cornering the market on retweets by making it easy for blogs and other sites to add a retweet button to every page. You can see one at the bottom of this post, or the one at right. Just click on it, and it will take you to your Twitter account and populate a message with a “RT,” the headline, and a short link. Go ahead, do it now. Do it again. Okay, thanks.

Lots of sites use Tweetmeme’s retweet button, and it drives a lot of its overall traffic. Nick Halstead, the CEO of Fav.or.it (Tweetmeme’s parent company) says that the buttons are so widespread right now that they are generating 196 million impressions a week month. In other words, that is how many pages load with the buttons every month week, and some portion of those result in actual retweets. Halstead is making some improvements to the retweet buttons. Before each retweet generated by the button would include a promotional “via @tweetmeme.” That has now removed to make more room for the actual headline and link. Next week he is going to introduce an image button which can be included in RSS feeds and emails to spread the retweet love even further. And sites will be able to embed a retweet counter to show how many overall retweets they get every week.

More importantly, the retweet buttons will begin supporting URL shortening service other than bit.ly, and will include an option for sites to choose their own custom short URL. (For instance, we use http://tcrn.ch). Tweetmeme will also offer analytics for site owners to see how their retweets are spreading. Basic data will be free, and Tweetmeme will likely charge for more detailed analyticss. All of this, of course, also turns into valuable data for Tweetmeme to determine the most popular links and stories on Twitter, and makes Tweetmeme itself a better news aggregation site.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Before I go defile myself with burgers and beer I wanted to jailbreak my iPhone 3GS for you all. The process was amazingly simple. Using a Windows netbook - it doesn't work under Windows 7 - I simply installed iTunes and ran purplera1n. It took a second to reboot then it rolled through recovery mode, rebooted, and an app called Freeze appeared. Freeze then installed Cydia and all was right with the world.

Does embattled music streaming site imeem think it can take on iTunes? For the most part, nearly every streaming song on the site has a download button which links to both iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store. But it is quietly testing its own music download store which bypasses iTunes and Amazon and sells MP3s directly. For instance, this is the case with some Sub Pop artists, such as Iron and Wine and The Shins. When you hit the download button on songs for those artists, a window pops up showing the album where that song came from with with the option to download the entire album or any individual song for $0.99 (see screenshot above). You can then pay imeem directly by credit card or Paypal and download the song to your computer.

This imeem music store is obviously an experiment. The vast majority of songs still direct users to iTunes or Amazon for downloads, and you’d expect imeem to provide its own lightweight desktop client to manage and store the downloads, or at least place them directly into iTunes instead of a download folder on your computer. But it is also likely a sign of things to come. After nearly running out of cash because it was paying out too much money to the music labels for streaming rights, imeem went through a sever recapitalization. Warner Music ended up taking a $20 million hit to write down its investment and bad debt from imeem. Instead of walking away, however, Warner renegotiated its deal with imeem to get new shares without putting in any new money.

Imeem is doing everything it can right now to cut costs and find new sources of revenue. Last week, it announced it will soon stop storing user’s photos and videos, an expensive remnant from its earlier strategy to compete with Facebook and MySpace as a larger social network. Now, imeem is focusing on being a music site. It was one of the first sites to strike streaming deals with all the major labels and for the most part has renegotiated those on more favorable terms. Its iPhone and Android apps, which also offer streaming music, are taking off and driving even more downloads.

And that’s where the imeem music store comes in. Currently, imeem gets a dinky 5 percent affiliate fee for every song its users buy from iTunes or Amazon. As part of its renegotiations with the music labels, it is getting download rights along with its streaming rights I’ve been able to confirm. Instead of getting a few pennies for each song from iTunes and Amazon, imeem can capture the roughly $0.30 per song that doesn’t go to the labels. What is more likely, however, is that it is giving the labels more than the 70 percent cut they get from Apple. Even if it splits its share with the labels and takes only $0.15 per song, imeem still stands to triple its download revenue. Add in ringtone sales and its existing advertising revenues (imeem attracted 25 million unique visitors worldwide in May, according to comScore), and imeem might just have a chance to survive. But if it does survive, it probably won’t be because of its advertising model alone. It will be because the free music is driving enough sales of actual music downloads.

Update: Imeem has confirmed that it is planning to roll out this store more broadly, but says that when it does it will continue to offer iTunes and Amazon downloads as an option.

Below are screenshots of the new post-payment window for songs imeem sells itself and the regular affiliate link window which still pops up for most downlods:

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Talk about a serious outage. Payment gateway service provider Authorize.net has been down and out for several hours, a number of tipsters inform us. That has big implications: since the service is used by tens of thousands of e-commerce vendors to accept credit card and electronic checks payments on their websites (example), it likely means millions are being lost during its downtime. PayPal and Google Checkout are still up and running.

It’s unclear when the downtime started exactly, but the consensus is somewhere between 5 and 7 hours at this point (11 AM Eastern), with e-commerce vendors desperately looking for ways to contact the company or get any first-hand information about what’s going on and when the problems will be resolved. Twitter, meanwhile, is buzzing with the news as the United States wakes up (hashtag #authorizenet).

According to some threads in hosting forums, which remain unverified for the moment, there was a fire at a Seattle datacenter during this U.S. holiday weekend which caused a massive technical failure.

We’re trying to get more information about the situation.

Update: nobody is picking up the phone at the U.S. offices of CyberSource, the holding company of Authorize.net. Someone I talked to at their UK offices couldn’t help me and told me I should keep trying the U.S. office.

Update 2: Nathan Cheeley writes:

A fire in Fisher Plaza, Seattle has cause a massive power outage causing leading IP-based payment gateway solution Authorize.Net to go down around approximately 11:15pm PST (last night).

A traffic reporter for KOMO News that operates out of Fisher Plaza tweeted that a fire set off the sprinkler system which fried the generators.

Update 3: Authorize.net has set up a brand new Twitter account to keep everyone updated, confirming the cause of the failure was a fire but also stating an ETA for resolution is not available at this time.

Update 4: a new tweet says backup was in place but that datacenter was impacted as well.

Update 5: tweet number 4 says “transaction processing is back up, with the exception of Global processing.” (12 AM Eastern)

Update 6: Or not. (12:30 AM Eastern)

Update 7: Authorize.net reports that full transaction processing has now been restored with Concord EFS.

(Thanks to everyone who sent this in)

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

It’s been a nice two weeks in San Francisco, but in about 10 hours I’m headed to SFO’s international terminal again. This time, I’m going to London. I’m traveling as part of a group of bloggers, authors and videographers called “The Traveling Geeks,” whose mission is simply to go to various cities around the world and try to learn as much about its tech scene as we can. Our first trip was to Israel last year; now we’re headed to London.

It’s a rag-tag group that includes Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Meghan Asha of Nonsociety, Robert Scoble of everywhere, videographer JD Lasica and many other fine geeks you can read all about at the link above.

As a Sarah-Lacy-bonus-feature I’m sticking around London an extra week, mostly to do some interviews for my book. But I’ll also be meeting with companies, handing out an award at the TechCrunch Europas Awardsfor European startups, hosted by our network site TechCrunch Europe, and—yes, Arrington—writing some posts as well on what I find.

We’re kicking the whole trip off with a Tweet-Up this Sunday night. I think we’ve got about 50 slots left if you act quickly! Yes, there’s a fee to get in, but it comes with free drinks, food and all the Scobleizer you can handle. And, if that’s not enough for you Euro-techies, Intel is giving away a few laptops. (Intel is a sponsor for the trip. For more on sponsors and our ethics statement go here.) Discount code and other details are here.

Hope to see you all there or at the Europas!

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

At the end of last May, Yahoo released an experimental version of Placemaker, a “geo-enrichment” platform. What it does is help developers make applications location-aware by identifying places in unstructured and atomic content (think RSS feeds, web pages, news, status updates etc.) and returning geographic metadata for geographic indexing and markup. In layman’s terms: it can detect places by scanning content and is capable of putting the aggregate data on a map.

While Placemaker does not serve as a geocoder and thus does not perform address recognition on street-level, it is perfectly capable of geo-extracting and indexing documents or atomic units of text, giving third-party developers the means to mark-up and index Web content geographically in a globally-aware, locally-relevant, and language-neutral manner (and Geo Microformats-compatible, too). But the process of parsing the data could sure have been made a lot easier, and if you weren’t a developer there wasn’t really any use for the tool at all.

Enter GeoMaker, a fresh project by the hands of Yahoo developer Chris Heilmann that aims to make the whole process more user-friendly. Now it just takes three easy steps to copy-paste content either by directly entering data or by fetching it from a Web address and create a map based on the places the underlying software can identify. It even comes with its proper API.

To see it in action, jump to this non-embeddable Flickr video that shows you how it works.

To test it, I entered the URL for a post I wrote yesterday about the apparent geographical differences in terms of level of engagement with social networking services. I don’t have access to a free map developer key, or I would have been able to replace the YMAPPID in the embed code with the key and embed the map, but here’s a screenshot of how it came out:

I can see a couple of uses for this, but it’s worth noting Christian is asking for feedback at this stage, which he intends to use to refine and improve GeoMaker prior to making it available as an open-source project on GitHub.

(Hat tip to Programmable Web)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

A follow-up to why ABBA songs are so catchy: Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid, and David Soldier developed a song scientifically engineered to be the most unwanted song ever: By their calculations, "fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece."

Ah, opera rap.

Also check out The Most Wanted Paintings. America's Most Wanted Painting contains "an autumnal landscape with wild animals, a family enjoying the outdoors, the color blue, and George Washington."

Sometime last year a customer wanted to know why the screen goes black when the system automatically hibernates due to critically low battery power. Shouldn't there be some sort of feedback to tell the user, "Hey, like, I'm hibernating, don't worry"?

The power management folks explained that they turn off the screen for a reason: They're trying to save your data while they still can. When the system gets the "Oh no, the battery is about to die!" notification from the hardware, there's no time to lose, and even less power to waste. Keeping the screen lit takes a lot of power, so turning it off might make the difference between a successful hibernation and loss of data.

Mind you, this doesn't all happen without fair warning. Before the battery goes critical, you will get a low battery warning balloon saying "Oh dear, things are getting pretty bad, you really should wrap things up before I'm forced to stop the car!"

It so happens that this particular customer had a system with a buggy BIOS that fails to notify the operating system of changes in power level with sufficient granularity. The power level went from "okay" straight to "critical" with no steps in between. As a result, Windows doesn't find out about the low battery level until it's already at critically low levels.

Note

Observe that I wrote "The power management folks explained". I am not the expert here; I'm repeating what I've heard in the interest of getting information out. Unfortunately, it looks like the the Windows Mobile PC Team Blog has gone dark, so it's not clear to me where you can ask your questions. (There is a more general site on Microsoft and the Environment, however.)

back

buy this print Share on: del.icio.us digg facebook reddit stumbleupon

next

GOZERBOT has a new website !! check it out at [link].
This is all in preparation for the 0.9.1 release and the latest
GOZERBOT beta has been released as well. Please try this version and
let me know how goes.
Install is as simple as .. easy_install gozerbot gozerplugs, see
README.
This release will be used to move GOZERBOT 0.9 into the debian

According to The Hollywood Reporter, movie studio Universal has won a bidding war to pick up the film rights to the classic Atari video game “Asteroids”. Initially released as an arcade game back in 1979, Asteroids featured a triangular space ship that needed to be navigated through an asteroid field.

The object was to shoot and destroy masses of rock and the occasional flying saucer while avoiding smashing into both, so we suspect it will not turn out to be romantic comedy.

Matthew Lopez will write the script for the feature adaptation, which will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the producer of both Transformers movies as well as the 2005 adaptation of the Doom game.

Also wondering how you could possibly build a script around the simple game? Universal is just going to try and see if it sticks:

“As opposed to today’s games, there is no story line or fancy world-building mythology, so the studio would be creating a plot from scratch.”

(Hat tip to The Register, which offers some advice for a story line and potential cast)

Asteroids made by Neave Games

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Different markets have different needs for marketing products or services. We all know that much. But that doesn’t take away the weirdness of a company like Google advertising its core product (online search) by using ink that was printed on paper.

Guilty of this hideous crime (I kid, I kid) is Google India, who apparently ordered some targeted quarter-page advertisements to appear in a variety of city supplements of The Times Of India, the leading English-language daily newspaper in the country.

According to PluGGd.in - who we can also credit for taking the picture of the ad - this isn’t exactly the first time Google India has advertised services in dead tree form. They apparently also ran a print campaign to promote the company’s SMS search service back in November 2008.

But this could well be the first time the Internet behemoth feels the need to pimp its search service in print. Or is it?

Have you ever heard about other countries where Google advertises its search engine in printed publications? Let us know in comments.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

People who've made the switch to dynamic languages seem much, much happier. I was a bit out of sorts from jet lag and travel in general when I entered the Birmingham UK conference and suddenly a wash of good feelings poured over me. "Ahh! Python Programmers!"

George Hotz, the 20-year old hacker who originally unlocked the iPhone, has released a jailbreaking application for the iPhone 3GS codenamed “purplera1n.” It’s currently Windows-only (Windows 7 not supported), and requires the latest iTunes installed, and an iPhone 3GS with the 3.0 firmware.

Hotz mentions in a blog post that the jailbreak for Mac is “coming soon.” The iPhone Dev Team did release a unlock for 3.0 which did not work on the iPhone 3GS, but Hotz’s version does (although it doesn’t free you from your current carrier).

Hotz goes over the process of the jailbreaking on his blog:

Connect your iPhone normally. Click “make it ra1n”. Wait. On bootup, run Freeze, the purplera1n installer app.

Hotz does warn users that you’ll need to backup your data just in case, and emphasizes that the tool is still in beta. Hotz also mentions that normally he does not make tools for the public, and rather have the iPhone Dev Team figure out the unlock process. Hotz continues by explaining that Apple will probably find a fix for the loophole, release an update, and he will go back to work on finding the next loophole.

Update: John Biggs over at CrunchGear goes through the process of jailbreaking his iPhone 3GS using Hotz’s program.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

On Wednesday I spoke with antitrust attorney Gary Reback, the man who spearheaded the push to break up Microsoft in the nineties. The event was hosted by HBSTech at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

If anyone in the world can make antitrust law interesting, it’s Reback.

Much of the hour plus conversation focused on the history of antitrust law and Reback’s experience in big antitrust cases from his new book, Free the Market!: Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive (buy it here). But we also spoke about current events and his concerns that lax antitrust enforcement has led to less competition today in tech than is optimal.

We spent a lot of time on Google. His chief concern is Google Books (jump to the 30 minute mark), and he argues that a DOJ investigation is appropriate. I’m more concerned with competition in search and search marketing, and we spoke about this as well.

One interesting insight from the conversation: I ask Reback if he thinks we’d be in a better world if Microsoft had in fact been broken up into two or more companies as was originally ordered. His response - “no.” The investigation and lawsuits themselves, he said, did enough to force Microsoft’s hand and allow browsers like Firefox, Chrome and others to blossom.

We’re giving away 15 autographed copies of Reback’s book. We’ll determine the winners in the same way we did with Sarah Lacy’s book - retweet this post using the green button below. We’ll select the winners randomly from retweets that occur by midnight California time on July 3rd.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Ctalk 0.0.96a rc3 has been released. Ctalk is an object-oriented extension to C.

This release includes support for defining methods that handle exceptions, and internal improvements.

From: Ctalk 0.0.96a rc3 Released

Squirrel 3.0 alpha 2 has been released. Squirrel is a lightweight, embeddable language with a C-like syntax which offers higher-order functions, delegation, tail recursion, generators, exception handling, automated memory management, and more.

This alpha release includes: the addition of real free variables, a refactored function call implementation, the addition of sq_getfunctioninfo, a SQUSEDOUBLE compile-time flag to use double precision floats, support for cloning blobs, support for instantiating generators by calling sql_call() or closure.call(), bug fixes, and other changes.

From: Squirrel 3.0 alpha 2 Released

Squirrel 2.2.3 stable has been released. Squirrel is a lightweight, embeddable language with a C-like syntax which offers higher-order functions, delegation, tail recursion, generators, exception handling, automated memory management, and more.

This release includes: the addition of sq_getfunctioninfo, the addition of a SQUSEDOUBLE compile-time flag to use double precision floats, the addition of sqstd_format, support for the instantiation of generators using sq_call() or closure.call(), bug fixes, and other changes.

From: Squirrel 2.2.3 stable Released

The 2009 Commercial Users of Functional Programming Workshop has put out a call for participation. "The goal of CUFP is to build a community for users of functional programming languages and technology, be they using functional languages in their professional lives, in an open source project (other than implementation of functional languages), as a hobby, or any combination thereof."

It will be held on September 4, 2009, co-located with ICFP 2009 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

From: CUFP 2009 Call for Participation

ActivePython 3.1.0.1 has been released. ActivePython is a binary distribution of Python from ActiveState, supporting AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windows.

This release includes an update to Python 3.1.

From: ActivePython 3.1.0.1 Released

CHICKEN 4.1.0rc1 has been released. CHICKEN is a portable Scheme compiler that emits C code.

From: CHICKEN 4.1.0rc1 Released

Glasgow Haskell Compiler 6.10.4 Release Candidate 1 has been released. GHC is a portable, open-source, optimising Haskell 98 implementation.

This release candidate includes bug fixes.

From: GHC 6.10.4 Release Candidate 1 Released

Analyst firm Next Up Research has published an extensive report on Linden Lab, the San Francisco company behind virtual world Second Life. The research is based on aggregate data and is available on SharesPost, a site set up to trade shares of privately held companies (if you register, you can download the report for free from that page, or you can find other valuation reports on companies like Facebook and LinkedIn). The report goes rather deep into the valuation of the Linden Lab, which it pegs at somewhere between $658 million and 700 million.

More on that later.

Now that Linden Lab has been around for nearly 10 years, and with its product Second Life celebrating its sixth birthday since launching publicly in June 2003, we thought it would be a good idea to take a close look at the report and see how the company’s doing according to the analysts.

First of all, you may be wondering if anyone is still using Second Life at all. The answer is yes, and users are very active on there. During the past 30 days, one million users logged in, according to Second Life’s own statistics. In average time spent per user per week, Second Life in fact trounces all other MMORPGs, including World of Warcraft and Civilization IV. In another testament to the service’s apparent stickiness, the number of hours users spend on Second Life has been increasing steadily and is currently at historic highs, totaling approximately 124 million hours in the first quarter of this year.

More importantly, Next Up says in-world transactions have recovered after a significant drop in September 2007 - when gambling was banned in the virtual world - and has been steadily increasing ever since December 2007.

Which brings us to the valuation, or at least the estimated value Next Up claims Linden Lab is worth after running a couple of calculations. Using publicly-traded online gaming companies as a proxy, Next Up pegs the median enterprise value (EV)/ Revenue multiple for that group at 7.2x off of 2009 revenues. Subsequently applying this self-proclaimed “conservative” multiple of 7x to the estimated revenue of Linden Lab ($100 million for this year), the current target valuation amounts up to $700 million.

That seems like a stretch. In November 2007, the last time we asked ourselves how much Second Life is worth, we came out somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. The current estimated enterprise value calculated by Next Up falls pretty much right into the middle of that range.

Next Up defends the 7x multiple variable by referring to a two-year-old M&A deal. When Disney acquired Club Penguin for $350 million in cash back in August 2007, it paid out at least a comparable multiple based on Vlub PEnguin’s projected revenue for the year (between $50 and $65 million), despite the fact that it reaches a narrower demographic profile. But things have changed since then: stocks have tanked, valuations have dropped, the IPO market has pretty much dried up and VC-backed liquidity is at a record low. So that implies a major discount, with a valuation between $300 million to $500 million, which is decent but not spectacular, assuming Next Up’s revenue projection is accurate.

Here’s what else Next Up says could have a negative impact on Second Life’s valuation:

- the aging population of its main target markets (U.S. and Europe) and less of a presence in developing nations where its main target audience (people from 13 to 45) is quickly gaining in size.
- limited amount of premium subscriptions (about 1% or 170,000 users)
- possible taxation on virtual monetary transactions in a variety of countries
- cost and complexity of running the technical infrastructure behind the virtual world

If you’re interested in the virtual worlds or Linden Lab in particular, there’s a ton of information and speculation about the market to be found in the report, even if we focus mostly on the financial side of things. To conclude, here are two charts from the report, one on the estimated valuations based off of different calendar years and one on the post-money valuations after the various funding rounds raised by the company.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s dad came to the United States with nothing in his pocket. He worked for less than minimum wage and built up a business, Wine Library, that today sells $50 million a year in wine in a sizeable store in New Jersey.

Today Gary is building on top of his dad’s work and is taking the store global with a video show, Wine Library TV, that gets about 100,000 views a show. I remember when I first saw the impact he was having when I walked into a meeting at Revision 3 and the team was sitting around watching his show and drinking the wine he was talking about.

Here we visited Gary’s store and got more of how he’s using the 2010 web to bash in the skulls of his competitors. He calls it “bringing the thunder.” I call it the most innovative marketing I’ve seen on the web to date. We talked about a range of things from his dad to how he would compete with his show, if someone else had done Wine Library TV and he wanted in on the action.

This is part of our Building43 series of videos. Come over and join the community there, we’re looking for people who are fanatical about the 2010 web and who are looking to help other people and businesses get into this new world.

By the way, I’m a huge fan because Gary has never mislead me and he’s very willing to tell a CEO his/her wine is crap to his/her face (I’ve seen him do it, even after the CEO threw us a party).

Hope  you enjoy, tomorrow Rocky (behind the camera producer at Building43) and me are headed to London to find out what’s happening on the other side of the pond with regards to the 2010 web. Join us on Sunday night at a Tweetup in London.

Google received some unfortunate news today, with the U.S. Department of Justice formally announcing the investigation of the $125 million settlement Google made with the Author’s Guild to pay authors a nominal fee for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web. The settlement has drawn its fair share of critics, including Jeff Bezos. But Google keeps on plugging away, making its book search better and better.

For instance, Google Books recently launched a plethora of new and innovative features to make the product easier for consumers to use, such as embeddable previews and better in-book search. Today, it added one more useful feature relating to search: a visual cue on the right margin showing the pages throughout a book where a search term appears.

When you search within a book, a page appears in a window, with a scrollbar on the right. Little rectangles will appear in the margin beside the scrollbar to show you where your results are located. When your mouse hovers over one of the rectangles indicating where a search term can be found in the book, you’ll get a preview of the search results and the option of jumping directly to that respective page by clicking on the rectangle.

With the previous search function, it wasn’t as easy to find the exact location of the results in a book. With this simple tweak, Google has improved the visual display of search functions, helping users navigate results in a more organized and efficient way. The DOJ will probably hold that against it.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

When I first signed up for GrandCentral a few years ago, I lived in a different city. As such, I had a different area code. And that was fine until I moved and Google, which bought GrandCentral in 2007 and subsequently put it on lockdown, prohibited me from changing it. I didn’t think much of it until my GrandCentral account magically transformed into a Google Voice account a few months ago, taking a good service and making it excellent. Unfortunately, I was still stuck with my old number. But now, there’s an option to change it.

The “Change your number” functionality, as spotted today by Boy Genius Report, is great news for users like me. Unfortunately, it will cost you to change it. There’s a one-time $10 fee, which in my mind is well worth it. Best of all, Google Voice will activate your new number right away and still keep your old one active and forwarding to the new one for three months.

What’s also nice is that in picking your new number, you can search by area code and by a word that you want your number to contain. So for example if I search for area code 408 and the word “tuna,” I can get a 408 number that ends in 8862 (”T-U-N-A” on a keypad).

Here are the details:

There is a $10 one-time fee to change your Google Voice number. Here is how it works:

• Pick a new number in the area codes we have.
• Pay $10 with Google Checkout, using your credit card.
• Your new number becomes active right away.
• Calls to your old number will keep coming to your Google Voice account for three months, so you have time to tell everyone about your new number.

We’re still waiting on number portability (the ability to use your existing numbers as Google Voice numbers), but this is a nice start.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Since the debut of the App Store last summer, my iPhone has become an indispensable part of my workout routine. The phone makes it easy to track your workout progress both in the gym and outdoors, where applications like RunKeeper allow you to use the phone’s integrated GPS to plot your bike or running course on a map. But there’s been one annoyance that’s aggravated me (and many others) to no end: the limited control you have over your music once you’ve launched one of these fitness apps. Fortunately the iPhone 3.0 software update finally fixes this, and a RunKeeper-like application called Fitnio(iTunes Link) has managed to beat some of its more well-known competitors to the punch.

Until the release of the iPhone 3.0 software update, developers were unable to access the phone’s music library. In order to play music as you ran, you’d have to first open up the phone’s iPod application, pick a playlist, then switch over to the excercise app. Once there, you could use your headphone’s multifunction button to execute some basic commands (next song, pause, and previous song), but if you wanted to switch playlists you were out of luck.

Fitnio breaks down this barrier, allowing you to browse through your iTunes playlists and queue one up for the next time you begin a jog. It may not sound like a big deal, but it’s certainly a very welcome change. Unfortunately there’s still no way to jump to a specific album or artist’s songs, but developer Robby Walker says that those will be coming in the future.

Fitnio is a pretty barebones app, without the nice visualizations you’ll see on RunKeeper (it also doesn’t have voice overs announcing your progress, which some people may miss). But it gets the job done, tracking your movements while biking or running using the phone’s integrated GPS, and it’s only a fifth of the price of RunKeeper’s Pro app, coming in at $1.99.

Of course, Fitnio’s musical advantage over the competition will likely be short-lived. Given that all developers have access to the new features in the iPhone 3.0 software update, you can expect similar apps to include this feature very soon. That said, if you’re looking for a fix right now, Fitnio is worth checking out.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Ontario cottage country seems almost archetypal to me. I guess I've probably internalised every Ontario-shot Canadian Tire ad, but there was something about the lake, the loons, the canoe, the sunset. It all added up to be almost suspiciously picture-perfect. This lake was amazing, cool and deep and lake-beast free. If you live in a city, I'd recommend getting out of it on a hot day and going somewhere like this. It'll be worth it.

Just a reminder that there are only 3 weeks remaining to register for
the Open Technology Group's Python Bootcamp, a 5 day hands-on,
intensive, in-depth introduction to Python. This course is confirmed
and guaranteed to run.
Worried about the costs of air and hotel to travel for training? Don't!
Our All-Inclusive Packages provide round-trip airfare and hotel

After months of dismal unemployment numbers, this morning’s continued growth in the unemployment rate from 9.4% in May to 9.5% for the month of June reinforces the fact that the U.S. is still very much in the midst of recession. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Labor reported today that employers cut 467,000 jobs in June, compared to 322,000 jobs in May. Unfortunately, the tech industry is still feeling the heat of the recession, with the rate of available jobs not improving much from the past few months, according to technology jobs site Dice.com.

Tom Silver, senior vice president of Dice.com, told us this morning that Dice.com is reporting a 44% year-over-year drop in job listings for the month of June. May’s year-over-year decline hovered around 45%. And Silver also points to a rise in the Department of Labor’s unemployment rate for the “Computer and Mathematics sector,” (the area best associated with the tech sector). June’s unemployment rate for the tech sector almost tripled year-over year, from 1.9% in June of 2008, to 5.4% in June of 2009. While Silver says that the tech job market is certainly better than during the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, the number of job opportunities have remained stagnant over the course of the past few months.

According to the TechCrunch layoff tracker, layoffs in the tech sector may be slowing down, which we reported in May. Layoffs are still taking place—the tracker has increased by 10,000 lost jobs over the past two months to a total of 340,000 individual layoffs. But there is a marked difference in the pace of layoffs from late 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, when layoffs were increasing by 100,000 every few weeks For instance, it only took three weeks for cumulative tech layoffs to go from 200,000 to 300,000 in February and five weeks for layoffs to go from 100,000 to the 200,000 mark before that in January.

Though companies are cutting back and limiting hiring for the near future, Silver says that there are still certain jobs within the tech sector that are in demand. Developers who are skilled in the areas of virtualization and IT security are among those in high-demand. And Silver maintains that tech companies are always in need of talented and skilled programmers. But for all the marketing and business development folks out there, demand usually picks up in line with the economy.

You can check out CrunchBoard for tech job listings.

Photo Credit: Flickr/Lisa Brewster

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

July 1, 2009 - the day the music wars started in earnest. Last night the guys from Dovecote Records, a small music label based in New York, were hanging out at their local bar. Employees from file sharing startup LimeWire showed up to have a party. There was confusion over the ownership of some pizza, and a riot almost ensued.

From the Dovecote Blog:

Woman: “Who the FUCK are you? And why are you eating our pizza?”

Kosuke and Paul look confused.

Kosuke: Are you joking? Is this a joke?

Woman: No this is definitely NOT a joke. I want to know who you are and why you’re eating our pizza.

Kosuke: Well our friend came in and told us there was free pizza at the bar. We are. So. Sorry. It was a misunderstanding.

Woman: (with unbridled entitlement) This is a company party our CEO is here and you STOLE our pizza. Are you from out of town? Because let me tell you, NOTHING is free in New York City. Nothing is free… well maybe except for the condoms in Times Square.

Paul and Kosuke continue apologizing. They offer to pay for the two slices.

Woman: (didactically snobbish) We don’t want your money. No. Enjoy the pizza, but you can’t steal other people’s things. You can’t take what’s not yours

Again the duo continues their apologies. Kosuke tries to turn the situation around and befriend them.

Kosuke: What company do you guys work for?

Woman: We work for Limewire.

Kosuke’s eyes go wide. Anger festers in his pupils.

Kosuke: Oh ok. Well I work at a record label so fuck you. You’ve stolen from us enough. (Bites pizza. Begins to walk away.)

Then things really got out of hand. One of the Dovecote guys grabbed a whole pizza and tried to run away with it. A Limewire engineer pursues and pours beer on him:

Paul’s anger builds. He stands up. Puts his bag on runs out the door, taking an entire pizza box with him. Matt T., a software developer at Limewire, tries to stop Paul by grabbing him and pouring beer all over his shirt, backpack, laptop, and pants.

We usually side against the labels on just about everything, but in this case we’re with Dovecote. Limewire is a mess and everyone knows it.

Whatever happens in the future with the battle between users and labels, we know one thing. July 1, 2009, the date of the Infamous 2009 LimeWire Pizza Fiasco, was when it wasn’t just about words and lawsuits any more. On that day, the music wars turned humorously physical.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

You may have noticed that Twitter has started hyperlinking hashtags. Those are words preceded by a “#” which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. For instance, try searching for #realtimecrunchup. Now that they are hyperlinked, when you click on a hashtag, you are led to the search result page for the specific hashtag. Others have been implementing this; FriendFeed (big surprise) has been doing this for awhile. Some of the Twitter clients, including the desktop versions of Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop also provide hyperlinks to hashtags.

For Twitter, search is a navigation tool, and this functionality is yet one more way to allow people to easily discover new Tweets outside their group of followers. This trend started when they added the search box to everyone’s home page last April.

Real-time search is heating up. Just earlier today, FriendFeed launched its own real-time search. By linking to hashtags, Twitter is giving people another entry point into its existing search. Now, if you could only track mentions of specific hashtags over time.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Yesterday, we wrote about what Facebook was planning for the next major release of its iPhone app, version 3.0. The big update will contain 15 new features, probably none bigger than the addition of event management to the app, finally. But there was one thing Facebook developer Joe Hewitt didn’t mention yesterday, and it’s a big one: Video uploads from the iPhone 3GS.

Hewitt just started working on the feature yesterday, thinking it would be something that would come in the next release, after this one. But he was surprised at how quickly he was able to get it up and running and so he tweeted out today, “3GS video uploading for the Facebook iPhone app is a go — didn’t plan to include it in the 3.0 update, but it was really easy to code.”

This is excellent news as it gives iPhone 3GS owners another easy outlet to upload video to. We’ve already detailed how simple it is to upload to YouTube from the device, and how doing so from the new Kyte app gives you great video quality. The iPhone 3GS is simply awesome as a mobile video device, and Facebook is an excellent platform for sharing video amongst friends.

Additionally, we’ve heard talk the new iPhone 3.1 beta software which was just released to developers the other day, has some new functionality that should make video uploads even easier. Apparently, the device will be able to change the quality of the video getting uploaded based on your available bandwidth to optimize for the uploads.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Last fall Google launched a revamped version of its Blog Search, converting the site’s frontpage into a automated news portal similar to sites like Techmeme. It has its fair share of issues (for one, it’s subject to the same problems of automated grouping as Google News is), but it was a step in the right direction for the site.

That said, it has been missing some key features. For one, there hasn’t been a good way to track breaking news stories as they happen — generally stories only pop up as they gain momentum and are written about by multiple sites, which can take quite a while (relatively speaking). There also hasn’t been a way to subscribe to a feed of the latest stories via RSS, which nearly every other similar site offers.

Today, Blog Search is finally adding these features. Each feed now offers its own RSS/Atom feeds, as well as an iGoogle gadget that integrates new top stories into your Google homepage. Finally, the site has added sections for both ‘Hot Queries”, which shows the most popular search terms, and “Latest Posts”, an unfiltered view of the latest blog posts indexed by the search engine. These last two features could be quite useful for tracking breaking news, especially given how fast Blog Search is at finding new blog posts.

Unfortunately, they’re not quite there yet. My biggest gripe is that the ‘hot queries’ and ‘latest posts’ sections are not category-specific. In other words, when I’m browsing through the Technology section of Blog Search, I’m still being shown new posts about McDonalds, Exxon, and Asteroids. The Hot Queries section is equally irrelevant. This is especially strange given that Google is already categorizing the blog posts into different sections based on their topic, and I’m hoping that Google will at least offer a filtered view as an option.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Ever since the new Google Blog Search homepage launched, we've been fielding requests for a myriad of different features. Today we're happy to announce the launch of our most requested feature: RSS and Atom feeds. Simply click on the links under "Subscribe" in the left-hand column of the Blog Search front page to subscribe to any topic or story in any feed reader, like Google Reader.

If you don't use a feed reader, we're also offering an iGoogle gadget that lets you embed the Blog Search front page right inside of your iGoogle page or any other page where iGoogle gadgets are accepted. You can browse topics and drill into stories from within the widget, and you can customize the gadget to choose which topics you want to follow.

With these new ways to read Blog Search stories, you might think our homepage was going unloved, but not to worry. We've also added two new features to the Blog Search homepage to better help you discover what people are talking about right now on the web: Hot Queries and Latest Posts.

Hot Queries lists searches currently popular in Blog Search — it's an easy way to quickly dive into the trending points of conversation on the web. Latest Posts, on the other hand, shows new posts from popular blogs. While Hot Queries highlights what people are looking for, Latest Posts lets you find out about stories even before people start searching for them.


There's a lot of great, fresh content being published in blogs every day. We hope these new features help you discover more of it, faster.

Posted by Akshay Patil, Software Engineer, & Dylan Casey, Product Manager

Ever since its redesign a few months ago, FriendFeed has been one of the standard-bearers of the real-time web. That’s because while a lot of sites claim to be real-time, FriendFeed is one of the few that actually updates continuously as data comes in. Starting today, any search you do will also get that same real-time treatment.

Enter any query into FriendFeed’s search box and you’ll see a constantly updating stream of items related to it. It works for advanced searches too. Best of all, it also searches through comments left below items. And these results can even be embedded in other blogs, as you can see right now on the FriendFeed blog (or below in this post).

It will be interesting to see if FriendFeed uses this functionality in a business sense. Given that it is now possibly the most compelling way to in real-time search streams of hugely popular services like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, various blogs — and all the comments related to those — a paid search model would seem to be an obvious choice. So far, FriendFeed has shied away from any business model, but has shown possible hints of what’s to come with its “Shameless Self-Promotion” banners.

And FriendFeed still has a few more things in store, including, yes, track for topics (it already has it for people and groups). “We’re also working on allowing you to subscribe to saved searches, add them to your friend lists, and even get notifications based on search keywords. So stay tuned,” writes Jim Norris today.

The timing of this announcement is also perfect considering our own real-time event is coming up a week from tomorrow. And yes, FriendFeed will be a part of it, along with the other major players in the field.

Below is an example real-time search embed to see what people are saying about TechCrunch in real-time.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

A little over two hours ago, a Google employee posted a note in this Google Groups thread indicating that Google App Engine was “seeing elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates.” He noted that the problem began around 6:30 AM Pacific time and that the team was looking into it. A few minutes later he updated that Google App Engine was going into “unplanned maintenance mode” — over 4 hours later, it’s still not back up.

That’s a long time for any service to be broken, but especially one that is the backbone for many startups’ web apps. What’s worse is that while Google is updating the Google Groups thread, the actual App Engine Status page has been down the entire time as a result of the problems, so people are going there for updates and seeing nothing.

The last update from Google came about an hour ago:

Read-only mode continues. Elevated latency and error-rates persist for Datastore reads. Memcache writes have been reenabled to better soak read-only load. Our engineering teams are looking into the root cause of the problem. Will post more information as soon as it’s available.

Obviously, the natives are getting restless on Twitter. This outage follows the popular hosting service Rackspace experiencing some rare downtime earlier this week.

Update: And it looks like this downtime is even hampering the development of Chrome for the Mac. Here’s was lead developer Mike Pinkerton just tweeted out: “Popup blocking UI is done, but appspot apps are all horked so I can’t get it reviewed. #chrome”

Update 2: 6 hours later, it looks like things are finally back in working order. The latest update from Google in the Google Group thread:

Datastore writes are reenabled and functioning normally! Overall App Engine health is back to normal! We will update this thread if anything else develops, but at this time we anticipate no additional problems. Thank you for your patience.

[thanks Adam and everyone else who sent this in]

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Tomorrow (July 3) by midnight will be the last opportunity for Toronto
PyCamp registration before the late registration period ending July 10.
PyCamp is the original Python BootCamp developed by a user group for
user groups. This year PyCamp is July 13-17 at the University of
Toronto, sponsored by the Department of Physics and Scryent. For

An internal AT&T memo that was leaked today is full of very impressive number regarding the iPhone 3GS — numbers that once again show why AT&T’s exclusive contract with Apple to sell the iPhone in the U.S. is so important.

The iPhone 3GS’s launch gave AT&T its best sales day at its retail stores — ever, its second largest traffic day at retails stores, the most transactions it has ever processed in a day, the most orders through att.com in a single day ever and the biggest features sales day at att.com ever. Oh, and it led to the most upgrade eligibility checks ever, which is not surprising at all, though most were probably disappointed.

What’s crazy about all this though is that while many people were expecting the iPhone 3GS launch to pale in comparison to the iPhone 3G launch, it actually exceeded it in just about every way when it came to actual sales (at least through AT&T’s stores and online). The lines may have not been as long at stores because of pre-sales, but sales overall exceeded the 2008 launch day numbers, and all of the heavy holiday shopping times. And apparently iPhone 3GS sales exceeded the iPhone 3G launch day sales by noon Central time.

AT&T’s exclusive contract with Apple for the iPhone is set to expire next year. There has been a lot of talk about AT&T wanting to extend the deal for at least another year, but there has also been talk of Apple flirting with rival Verizon.

It seems pretty clear that Apple is getting up to the limit of where it take the iPhone with AT&T. The biggest complaint about the device now seems to be the service provider. And if it can sell millions of units in just days on just one provider, imagine what it can do if it were on two — or better, all of them.

Below find the memo. You’ll also note that on the day of Michael Jackson’s death, AT&T saw more text messages sent than ever before — exceeding even that of American Idol finales and New Year’s Eve. That’s pretty insane, especially considering what a rip-off text messages are.

1. Fact of the Week: On June 25, the day Michael Jackson died, text messages sent on our network spiked at 65,000 messages per second — the largest volume ever recorded — surpassing events like American Idol voting and New Year’s Eve, when millions of our customers wish their friends and family a happy new year via text.

2. iLaunch day 2009 was one for the record books, as AT&T customers scrambled to get their hands on the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet.

Here’s a look at some of the milestones we achieved:

• Best-ever sales day in our retail stores
• Second-largest traffic day in our retail stores
• Most transactions processed via our IT systems in a single day
• Most upgrade eligibility checks in a single day
• Largest order day in att.com history
• Largest features sales day in att.com history

On this year’s launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008’s iPhone launch day, Black Friday 2008 and Dec. 26, 2008 — all heavy-volume sales days. In fact, this year we surpassed 2008’s launch day sales at about noon Central time, and sustained our previous peak hour record, also set in 2008, for 11 straight hours.

[photo: flickr/Jen SFO-BCN]

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

What is the best way to sift through a stream of information? The list view seems to be the most popular because it is information-dense and easy to scan, but it can be overwhelming. More visually appealing ways to manage data are needed. Twine, a site which lets you collect and subscribe to different interest feeds, just introduced a new way to wade through its streams.

The new Flash visualization presents your stream of shared links as a deck of headlines which you can shuffle through (see video below). A slider along the bottom, lets you cycle through the deck by time, and arrows underneath let you move sequentially, or you can just click on a deck in the background to move it forward. If you want to learn more, you can flip each deck to read a snippet and link to the full detail page. The semantic tags associated with each item also show up on the side and can be clicked on to navigate through the deck.

It feels like Coverflow on Apple’s iTunes, except that you navigate through the deck front to back instead of side to side. It also reminds me of the deck metaphor on the new Palm Pre. I can definitely see this as a good UI for mobile apps as well where screen size is more constrained. Don’t worry, though, the regular list view is still an option.

My only problem with the visualization is that it takes a while to load (Flash, why do you torture me?). But other than that, it makes sifting through each feed seem more like channel-surfing in the way that SearchMe does for search results and music search or StumbleVideo does for Web videos. But there must be a better way to wade through the stream. What is it?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

There have been discussions on the issues of licensing and accepting contributions to open source projects on the Python-dev and the testing in Python mailing lists. This is an area that can be very confusing, and potentially problematic for open source projects. ... [376 words]

There will be no Python 3.0.2 release or further 3.0.x maintenance/security releases. All users of Python 3.0 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Python 3.1.

Ever since OS. 3.0, the latest operating system for the iPhone, launched on June 17, prices among the top 100 apps in the iTunes App Store have been fluctuating wildly as developers push out apps taking advantage of all the new features in the OS. Some of the new features we are starting to see in apps include push notifications, turn-by-turn navigation, cut-and-paste, embeddable maps, access to external accessories, search within apps, and subscriptions.

Mobile app distribution service Distimo just put out its June iPhone App store report As you can see from the charts above, the average pricing among the top 100 paid apps was pretty steady until the middle of the month, when developers started to test different price points. The most popular price for an app remained $0.99, but the month of June saw more top apps priced at $1.99, $4.99, and $9.99 (the green bars on the chart above).

Distimo also breaks down pricing by category (see charts below). Medical apps command the highest prices by far (on average, about $8), followed by business, navigation, productivity, and reference (all averaging around $4). The category which benefited the most from the new OS was navigation, thanks to the turn-by-turn directions feature. On June 17, the average price among the top 100 navigation apps spiked by about $1. So it looks like navigation apps have gained some pricing power thanks to a the new OS.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

One of the reasons people give for studying a foreign language is to increase the number of people one can communicate with. But what people don't mention is that foreign languages can also be used to impede communications, and that can be just as useful. (Be careful, though, because it can backfire.)

During my visit to Sweden some years ago, I was walking back to my hotel room from the Göteborg train station. I had spent the afternoon visiting the nearby city of Alingsås, whose claim to fame is that they are the birthplace of the man who introduced potatoes to Sweden, although he is probably more greatly celebrated for introducing a related process to Sweden: the technique of fermenting potatoes to make alcohol. Anyway, the reason I was there was not to learn the history of potatoes in Sweden, but rather to pay a visit to one of my Swedish readers.

Oh, wait, I was telling a story. I was walking back to my hotel from the train station, and as I crossed one of the plazas, a man approached me, speaking unaccented American English. He said, "Hey, you look Chinese. We have an organization for Chinese people, and the meetings are conducted in Swedish so you can understand!"

Okay, let's see if we can add up everything wrong with this situation.

1. We're in Sweden, and I "look Chinese", so he decides to speak to me in English?
2. He's speaking English in order to convince me to attend a meeting conducted in Swedish.
3. If I'm Chinese, wouldn't "the language I can understand" be, um, say, some variation of Chinese?

I didn't feel like pointing this out to the gentleman. I just wanted to get back to my hotel, but he kept following me, repeating his spiel. I stopped and mentally enumerated the languages I knew how to speak.

• English: Obviously he knows English. He's speaking it.
• Swedish: We're in Sweden. There's a chance he knows Swedish.
• German: Göteborg gets a lot of German tourists. The tourism signs and tour buses are trilingual: Swedish, English, and German. So there's a chance he knows German.
• Chinese: Seeing as he's assuming that I'm a native Chinese speaker, yet he's speaking to me in English, it's a pretty safe bet that he doesn't speak Chinese. Especially if I pick a minority dialect.

I turned to him and said in my parents' native dialect, "I'm sorry, I don't know what you're saying."

He was apparently not expecting this, because he paused for a moment before saying "Oh, Thai people are welcome, too." I guess he took what I said and tried to map the phonemes to English and somehow came to the conclusion that I said, "I'm not Chinese; I'm Thai."

I merely reiterated my claim not to understand what he was saying and continued onward. He decided not to follow me any further.

I use this technique whenever I don't want to talk to somebody. And the trick works both ways: In Taiwan, when people try to talk to me and I'd rather not deal with them, I speak Swedish.

When Larry Osterman mentioned News Flash: Spaces are legal characters in both filenames and passwords, I was reminded of my own little experiment with passwords and spaces.

Over a decade ago, I tried using spaces in my password, and they were accepted, but I ran into a different problem: Brand name bias.

The password system accepted "Coke adds life" as my password, but it rejected "Pepsi the choice of a new generation". Why did the password system accept a Coke slogan but not a Pepsi one? Hint.

Twenty five years ago, when Steve W. worked for a military subcontractor, he'd often roll his eyes when meetings were denoted "CONFIDENTIAL". It's not that he didn't take confidentiality seriously, it's just that everything they did was confidential. By labeling most everything "CONFIDENTIAL", there was no way of knowing when some things – like performance reviews and should-we-fire-so-and-so discussions – were really, really confidential. At least, not until you were actually in the meeting.

At one meeting, it was was really, really confidential. It was a one-on-one and across the table from Steve sat the Project Manager. These kind of solitary meetings took place either because you're doing something very wrong... or you're getting canned.

"Hey Steve," the project manager started, "I need a fresh set of eyes on a performance problem we've been facing with the EC Unit."

Steve perked up at this. And not just because he wasn't getting fired, but because the EC Unit — EC being short for Electrical Capabilities — was a pretty big deal as of late. It was a "switch" on one of their new automated testing stations with hundreds of relays configurable to variety of electrical ratings: 50 Milliamps at 0.01 Volts, 400 Volts at 200 Amps, you name it. Being about the size of a VW Bug and having a panel of blinking indicator lights which actually meant something, it was an impressive sight... and had an equally impressive budget to boot.

The project manager continued, "it's taking in the neighborhood of eight hours to run through an engineer test script and that is really hurting us on turnaround. If you can crack this nut, you just might be the hero of the project."

A HERO'S WORK

Eagerly, Steve got to work on familiarizing himself with the EC's software. Basically, the idea behind the program was that, as part of a test, the engineer would write a statement like "Apply X amps at Y volts to circuit C with waveform..." and the program would compute the least electrically expensive path.

Developed by the primary contractor, the code weighed in at about 5,000 lines of Pascal and, with a myriad of functions and high math, it was certainaly no picnic. For days, he poured through the logic. After single stepping though the program and creating enough flow charts and flow diagrams to cover two walls, nothing jumped out at him. However, when Steve added a global counter in every function in the application (as there was no profiler available), he hit paydirt.

While most functions were called proportionally to the number of connections to be analyzed, the following worst offending function was called over a billion times.

function eval_strings_are_equal(s1:string[255], s2:string[255]):Integer

    «reasonably efficient string compare function implementation here»
end

The funny thing about that innocent looking function was how the program handled the parameters. Can you see it? No matter what the size of the string data — even as few as two characters — the program would copy two 255 byte sequences to the stack, one byte at a time. Steve found that if he changed the parameter declaration to the *even* number 256, the parameters would be copied to the stack *two* bytes at a time and reduced the runtime by half!

But, was 256 bytes...overkill? Steve looked further and found that the longest strings ever passed would only be 8 bytes long - he reduced the parameter length to match. The end result: an analysis that would ordinarily take an entire business day would be done in a half hour.

No doubt about it - Steve was the man. And better yet, it wasn't even his company's fault: the primary contractor was responsible for that particular module.

AFTERMATH

At their next "CONFIDENTIAL" meeting, the Project Manager started without a word of small talk. "So do you have something for me?"

Steve smirked and nodded, with a smug Yeah, you better believe I do! and handed over the documentation with a very nice "before and after" graph on the first page.

"WOW!" the project manager was shocked, "This is good!...REALLY GOOD!"

Before Steve could even explain how he did it, the project manager jumped in again. "However," he said slowly, "we're going to have to sit on this for now. We can't tell them about this."

Steve shot back a quizzical look as the project manager explained. As it turned out, there was a big political fight going on with the primary contractor about the project. The primary was blaming Steve's company for overall Electrical Capabilities slowness and Steve's company was blaming the hardware supplied by the primary. Not that it really mattered, because there was a planned upgrade to the Electrical Capabilities system that, among other things, promised much higher performance.

"It's only a single line code change," Steve implored, "it would take all of five seconds to explain. Then the users would be up and run-"

"Yeah, yeah," he brushed off, "we'll keep it as our 'ace in the hole' in case they complain about slowness after the upgrade. We'll show 'em that we're not the ones who are causing all the problems."

"But isn't the upgrade several months away?" Steve rhetorically asked, "we can get them to implement it now and save thousands of client man hours in the mean time."

The project manager glared, "you're not going to share the patch information. It's confidential."

As the planned upgrade date came closer and closer, the likelihood of actually upgrading seemed less and less likely. When the date had come and gone, the upgrade project was "put on hold until next quarter". And it stayed on hold for quarter after quarter after quarter.

Five years later, when it came time for budget cuts, the entire Electrical Capabilities project — military personnel and all — was cut for good. Apparently, the auditors weren't too thrilled that engineers just sat around all day, waiting for some program to run.

---

Brought to you by the Non-WTF Job Board:

---

It’s one thing when Internet companies like Facebook adopt OpenID, it’s another when a giant retailer like Sears Holdings Corporation embraces it. Sears has just announced that it will enable over 1 million monthly MySears and MyKmart visitors to use their Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or other accounts to log into the community websites, enabling them to write product reviews and share information about products and services without the need to create a separate account.

Customers will also get access to special offers and coupons in return for their participation in the community.

For the integration, Sears teamed up with Viewpoints Network, a social technology and media company that recently integrated JanRain’s RPX solution into their online community and identification platform.

The question is: is Sears - despite its claims of driving innovation in online retailing, which seems a bit over the top - merely a late adopter looking to try something new or is this a sign of OpenID maturing to a point where it can finally reach that tipping point where it really starts taking off with a mainstream audience?

In my recent interview with OpenID evangelist Chris Messina, he expressed the hope that integrations outside the technology industry - such as the U.S. government - would at some point occur more often, but he also acknowledged that the initiative struggles with branding and getting the word out there.

It’s integrations like these that could really help OpenID gain more traction, but the main question will always be if OpenID is just a solution looking for a problem, or if there’s a genuine need for a decentralized, universal login standard.

Despite the flood of criticism from technology pundits, the jury’s still out on that.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Really curious to find out how this is done exactly, but someone somewhere has managed to change a real trending topic on Twitter - #MrsSlocombe - into something childish, as you can tell from the screenshot above. Strangely enough, when you do a search for the less appropriate trending topic, not a single result pops up (for now).

Update: ok apparently it’s a legitimate trending topic (see origin here, it was meant as a tribute to British comic actress Mollie Sugden on the occasion of her death, so fans, celebrities and Brits in general started to tweet it) but Twitter is just blocking search results from appearing (which is good). Update 2: I’m not ‘pro-censorship’, but in this particular case it’s understandable behavior on Twitter’s behalf, period. I’m sure they didn’t mean to interrupt or ban tributes to a deceased person.

This may seem like something mundane at first glance, but many people (including reporters worldwide) track Twitter trending topics for breaking news, and it worries me that they can be manipulated. I mean, it’s one thing if large groups of people arrange for certain terms to show up in Twitter’s trending topics, but it’s a whole other story when they can be gamed with a hack (see update above).

(hat tip to Samuel Ryan)

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

After we had our Building43 launch party I wanted to explore more why small groups of people are so much better for actually learning something. By the way, Michael Sean Wright put together a neat little video of our launch party. He’s the one who produces Peter Himmelman’s awesome show on Tuesday nights.

Anyway, we’ve found that if you are throwing a party, somewhere around 200 people is the right number (or fewer). I’ve been to quite a few TechCrunch parties with 800 or so, and they just aren’t as satisfying. This holds true for weddings, too. I’ve been to weddings with 100 people and they are really fun. 300? Not so fun, they seem impersonal and more like a conference event.

Why are large numbers not conducive to learning and having a great experience? One reason is sheer noise. I remember meeting Del.icio.us’s founder, Joshua Schachter, at one of the large TechCrunch events with 700 or so and I was literally inches away from him and we both were yelling at each other but I still couldn’t hear him.

Another is distraction. In large groups you feel impelled to rotate through the crowd to meet as many people as you can, and grab their business cards. In smaller groups, like the one at the Building43 party, I didn’t feel that pressure and, if I did, I still could get around and meet most of the people and settle on a small group.

For the past year I’ve been playing with small groups over on FriendFeed. I setup a secret group there that I invited a few people into. Tonight I setup a new Twitter group that does the same thing. I’m studying what it’s like to have a small secret group of people inside a sea of a much much larger set of more public interactions.

Some things I’ve learned already. If you follow about 300 people, even industry luminaries, most of them don’t Tweet very often. So, the flow is very slow. There’s a lesson there. If you only want to Twitter a few minutes a day, keep the number of people you’re following to 300 or less. Once you get into the 1,000s your life is over. Heheh.

Another thing I’m learning? Because I hand picked all my friends in both of these secret groups and only included people I knew and cared about, my engagement level with them is higher than with groups that I don’t know as well (if at all). There’s a lesson in there for Twitter and is one huge reason why Facebook has more engagement than Twitter does. Do you really want to be engaged with Oprah? Not much, no. But your best friend? Or someone from work? Absolutely.

Some people have already started spreading around my “secret” Twitter address. Sorry, I won’t let anyone follow it. It’s a closed secret account and I want to keep interactions there very small and intimate.

I will let you know more about what I learn from these small secret groups, though, just like we shared what we learned at the Building43 launch party. Onward!

I wonder how many other people have secret groups or multiple Twitter accounts?

UPDATE: along these lines, the New York Times has a bunch of good advice for keeping your Twitter work sane. I found this on @steverubel’s Twitter account because he’s one of the secret people I subscribe to.

UPDATE 2: Security expert Bruce Schneier wrote about just this topic yesterday, as it pertains to security. I forgot to mention that my observations match Dunbar’s number and that Schneier’s article explains what that is and how it applies.

comScore has aggregated some data based on its World Metrix audience measurement service and put together a study on social networking worldwide. Surprisingly, it appears that the Russians are more engaged with social networking than the rest of the planet (or the biggest slackers at the office, depends on how you look at it). The study found visitors in Russia to spend 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month on average, at the same time - once again - confirming Vkontakte.ru's leadership in terms of popularity with 14+ million monthly visitors. To put that level of 'engagement' in perspective: the average world-wide is 3.7 hours and 525 pages per visitor. Among the 40 individual countries reported by comScore, Brazil ranked closest to Russia at 6.3 hours, followed by Canada (5.6 hours), Puerto Rico (5.3 hours) and Spain (5.3 hours). The United States is ranked number 9, with 4.2 hours and 477 pages per visitor per month.

I love hearing stories about how people turned their passions into a career. Lou Mongello used to be a lawyer, but he kept going back to a childhood memory: his family kept taking the family to Walt Disney World in Orlando. He turned taking his own family there into a hobby and later quit his job as a lawyer and now has a media company that publishes books, CDs, magazines, and does a weekly radio show, er, podcast, about Walt Disney World. Very popular stuff and he is hitting a monetizable audience: traveling families who will spend lots of money.

Some things I learned in my interview with him: social networks are changing how he’s marketing and interacting with his customers. He uses real time services like Ustream to keep in touch and, of course, he has a Twitter account, where he publicizes meetups at the park.

You can find him at WDW Radio.

Oh, by the way, in the video, we talk about trademark concerns. He says that he worked to find a way to tie his brand to Walt Disney World’s brand without infringing on Walt Disney’s trademarks. That’s very smart and something that a lot of the folks who are using Twitter and Leo Laporte’s trademarks should consider because they are putting their business at significant risk of a trademark lawsuit if they don’t stay clear. Over on Facebook Jesse Stay reports that anyone who uses the word “face” in their Facebook applications will be banned outright. So, choosing a name that stays on the right side of the trademark battle is the best way to go.

In the interview we learn just a bit about Walt Disney World (he has hundreds of his own podcasts if you want to know more) and we cover how he’s using social networking to interact with his customers. You can find all of his Walt Disney World stuff at WDW Radio.

We recently upgraded our database server to 48 GB of memory -- because hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive.

Imagine our surprise, then, when we rebooted the server and saw only 32 GB of memory available in Windows Server 2008. Did we install the memory wrong? No, the BIOS screen reported the full 48 GB of memory. In fact, the system information applet even reports 48 GB of memory:

But there's only 32 GB of usable memory in the system, somehow.

Did you feel that? A great disturbance in the Force, as if 17 billion bytes simultaneously cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. It's so profoundly sad.

That's when I began to suspect the real culprit: weasels.

No. Not the cute weasels. I'm referring to angry, evil marketing weasels.

That's more like it. Those marketing weasels are vicious.

We belatedly discovered post-upgrade that we are foolishly using Windows Server 2008 Standard edition. Which has been arbitrarily limited to 32 GB of memory. Why? So the marketing weasels can segment the market.

It's sort of like if you were all set to buy that new merino wool sweater, and you thought it was going to cost $70, which is well worth it, and when you got to Banana Republic it was on sale for only $50! Now you have an extra $20 in found money that you would have been perfectly happy to give to the Banana Republicans!

Yipes!

That bothers good capitalists. Gosh darn it, if you're willing to do without it, well, give it to me! I can put it to good use, buying a SUV or condo or Mooney or yacht one of those other things capitalists buy!

In economist jargon, capitalists want to capture the consumer surplus.

Let's do this. Instead of charging $220, let's ask each of our customers if they are rich or if they are poor. If they say they're rich, we'll charge them $349. If they say they're poor, we'll charge them $220.

Now how much do we make? Back to Excel. Notice the quantities: we're still selling the same 233 copies, but the richest 42 customers, who were all willing to spend $349 or more, are being asked to spend $349. And our profits just went up! from $43K to about $48K! NICE!

Capture me some more of that consumer surplus stuff!

How many versions of WIndows Server 2008 are there? I count at least six. They're capturing some serious consumer surplus, over there in Redmond.

• Datacenter Edition
• Enterprise Edition
• Standard Edition
• Foundation
• Web
• HPC

Already, I'm confused. Which one of these versions allows me to use all 48 GB of my server's memory? There are no less than six individual "compare" pages to slice and dice all the different features each version contains. Just try to make sense of it all. I dare you. No, I double dog dare you! Oh, and by the way, there's zero pricing information on any of these pages. So open another browser window and factor that into your decisionmaking, too.

I don't mean to single out Microsoft here; lots of companies use this segmented pricing trick. Even Web 2.0 darlings 37 Signals.

Heck, our very own product segments the market.

37signals just does it .. prettier, that's all. They're still asking you if you're poor or rich, and charging you more if you're rich.

Eric Sink also advocates the same "rich customer, poor customer" software pricing policy:

In an ideal world, the price would be different for every customer. The "perfect" pricing scheme would charge every customer a different amount, extracting from each one the maximum amount they are willing to pay.

• The IT guy at Podunk Lutheran College has no money: Gratis.
• The IT guy at a medium-sized real estate agency has some money: $500.
• The IT guy at a Fortune 100 company has tons of money: $50,000.

You can never make your pricing "perfect," but you can do much better than simply setting one constant price for all situations. By carefully tuning all these details, you can find ways to charge more money from the people who are willing to pay more.

This sort of pricing seems exploitative, but it can also be an act of public good -- remember that the poorest customers are paying less; with a one-size-fits-all pricing policy, they might not be able to afford the product at all. Drug companies often follow the same pricing model when selling life-saving drugs to third-world countries. First-world countries end up subsidizing the massive costs of drug development, but the whole world benefits.

What I object to isn't the money involved, but the mental overhead. The whole thing runs so contrary to the spirit of Don't Make Me Think. Sure, don't make us customers think. Unless you want us to think about how much we'd like to pay you, that is.

And what are we paying for? The privilege of flipping the magic bits in the software that say "I am blah edition!" It's all so.. anticlimactic. All that effort, all that poring over complex feature charts and stressing out about pricing plans, and for what? Just to get the one simple, stupid thing I care about -- using all the memory in my server.

Perhaps these complaints, then, point to one unsung advantage of open source software:

Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.

The money is irrelevant; the expensive resource here is my brain. If I choose open source, I don't have to think about licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing. I know, I know, we don't use software that costs money here, but I'd almost be willing to pay for the privilege of not having to think about that stuff ever again.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm having trouble deciding between Windows 7 Smoky Bacon Edition and Windows 7 Kenny Loggins Edition. Bacon is delicious, but I also love that Footloose song..

[advertisement] Interested in agile? See how a world-leading software vendor is practicing agile.

Steve Gillmor has been hard at work putting together an interesting day for those of us who are interested in the real time web.

The speakers lineup includes founders and executives from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, Meebo, WordPress, Seesmic, Virgin America, Tweetmeme, Qik, and more.

But that’s not what will make this interesting. In between all the interesting panels about APIs and search and Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Mike Arrington and I will pit our mobs against each other.

Or, more realistically, have a discussion about what he sees as a frightening trend: that mobs are being formed faster and with more “real” participants now thanks to real time technologies, in particular FriendFeed.

Me? I see that there’s a good part in crowd behavior. I’ve seen charities raise tons of money because of crowds very quickly. News distribution is changing pretty radically thanks to crowd behavior. I noticed that I started watching more TV because the crowd would talk about interesting shows (this weekend, for instance, I saw tons of people talking about the BET Awards).

But there is a downside to mobs. People do get hurt and lives are getting threatened. So, we’ll try to come up with some suggestions for FriendFeed to see if we can find some way to help curtail mobs.

+++++++++++++

To get personal for a moment. This is a problem that’s existed for a long time. Kathy Sierra left her blog (and she’s far from the only one) because discourse about her went way over the line. Even before blogs we have seen trolling behavior online.

But now it’s sped up and I agree that the language is getting worse and the crowds are bigger so the chances that someone will follow through in real life are getting more and more real. Mike’s life has been threatened by someone credible enough to really disrupt his life for a while and he was spit on at a conference earlier this year. While most of us can cheer sports jeers without going over the line there are those among us who are a bit more unbalanced.

It’s also interesting that many many more of us are being seen as “micro celebrities.” I remember being called “weird” and an “outlier” because I had a couple of thousand followers on Twitter. Now that’s a very commonplace thing. So, more of us are going to have to face both legitimate criticism for what we say online as well as trolling behavior, or worse.

Anyway, it should be an interesting discussion.

Just in case we get out of control, though, I’m going to be over in London and will participate via Skype. It’ll be interesting to see how that, too, both helps and hinders the conversation.

Hope to see you there!

From the “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic file”: The new MySpace exec team has promised changes (”we have…laid the groundwork for an exciting new chapter of innovation for MySpace”). And they’re delivering. A couple of hours ago they changed the MySpace logo. No longer does it say “MySpace.com - A Place For Friends.” Now it simply says MySpace. The old logo is below.

We’ve confirmed that the change just occurred this evening, although MySpace PR is as usual not responding. They refuse to confirm that the logo is new, or say why they changed it. It sure is absurd to have a conversation that goes something like “So it looks like you’ve changed your logo this evening? No Comment. Uh huh. Ok, so any official reason why you changed it? No comment.” Trade secrets, I guess. And heck, I’m just happy someone still works there to pick up the phone.

MySpace is also on the warpath to get more users. At login they now strongly suggest you log into your email and invite friends (hopefully they’ll avoid turning this too spammy). And they’ve also added the “people you may know” feature as a widget to all logged in profile pages.

We’re also hearing that MySpace will be removing some of the ugliest ad units that adorn the site today. Whether that’s an effort to clean up the user interface or simply a sign of slowing ad sales, we’ll probably never know.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

In a recent comment, I wrote:

Oddly enough, our cat often does come when called, and is rather good at figuring out what humans want and doing it. A few days ago a photographer came out here to take snaps of me for an AP story on NedaNet and was quite startled when I asked the cat to turn around so her head would face the camera, and she did it.

Our cat’s behavior is not doglike servility, though. She pays careful attention to human hands because she associates them with being petted, and she’s a total friction slut. As a result, you can often fetch her, or get her to move, with hand gestures. I made one that directed her attention towards the photographer.

By an odd coincidence, my wife Cathy insisted less than an hour later that I should watch a video of the Moscow Cats Theater (I’d post a link, but I haven’t found that exact one from here). And we both noticed something; as the cats are walking tightropes and so forth, the human trainers are using encouraging, guiding gestures that seem…familiar to us. And, in fact, the cats often seem visually fixated on the trainers’ hands.

Wild! It looks very much as though Cathy and I have accidentally trained into our cat one of the same responses the Moscow Cats Theater people use to program their far more elaborate tricks.

I am reminded of something I heard a lion-tamer say once; training big cats is not about dominance, it cannot be; it’s about pleasure and reward. Nor does it seem irrelevant that the cats in the video looked happy. I think what we were seeing was not work to them, it was guided play - motivated not by fear of doing poorly but by love of their trainers.

Our cat behaves the same way; she walks towards a gesturing human hand because she loves getting attention from her humans and believes the hand will pet and cherish her. Everything in her experience confirms this. (On the rare occasions we have to discipline, we do it with a shout or a squirt bottle.)

More cat ethology: some time back, I examined the mystery of the purr. My commenters and I never arrived at an explanation of why the cat’s purr is so appealing to humans that I found entirely satisfactory. Now, science may have provided one.

It seems there’s a woman named Elizabeth von Muggenthaler (wonderful name, so redolent of mad science and gothic castles!) who has discovered that cats purr in a range of acoustic frequencies that are widely known in the medical literature to stimulate tissue healing, especially of bone and connective tissue.

Ms. Muggenthaler does not propose to junk the conventional account that cats purr to express sociability and/or contentment, but she suggests that cats purr as a form of self-healing as well, and has designed various clever experiments that appear to confirm this.

She may also have explained why humans enjoy the sound. Like purring itself, the healing effects of gentle vibrations in those particular frequency ranges have probably been significant in the mammalian line long enough for humans to inherit a mild instinctive tropism for them. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the human ability to be come fond of certain varieties of repetitive mechanical noises has a similar ground.

Twitter has long had an official Facebook application that allows users to update their Facebook status with tweets. It’s quite useful for those of us who don’t want to have to spend all day updating multiple services with the same messages. The app has over 250,000 monthly active users. But if you’re not already one of them, I have bad news: You’re not allowed to use it.

For the past several days, anyone who has tried to install the app has been greeted with the following message:

Error while loading page from session test

There are still a few kinks Facebook and the makers of session test are trying to iron out. We appreciate your patience as we try to fix these issues. Your problem has been logged - if it persists, please come back in a few days. Thanks!

A few days? Try a week now. And it seems that despite the issue being “logged” neither side seems to care much about fixing it. And what the hell is “session test”?

Well, it turns out Session Test is actually another Facebook application created by someone called “Bob McTest” — a Facebook profile with two friends and a crazy picture (below right). Session Test has 45,373 monthly active users and 182 fans, despite awful reviews (because as far as I know, all it does is block this Twitter app). Humorously, when you try to install Session Test, you get the same Session Test error message.

At first, I assumed this was some kind of test application Facebook created to log errors, but it says clearly on the page, “This application was not developed by Facebook.” So why is a second app popping up when you try to install the Twitter app? It may be some kind of exploit. When we contacted Facebook about it, they said they would look into it.

On the Sessions Test page you’ll find some rather humorous reviews and discussions from users who are pissed off about not being able to install the Twitter app. The Reviews area for example features messages like, “Steady errors for weeks now… Way to go… update: another week, still nothing….” and “errors!!!!!!!!!! f@ck!!!!” But you won’t find any kind of response from either side there.

And the Discussions area is even better. One thread called “I hate you” features a bunch of annoyed would-be Twitter/Facebook users. Another thread called “TWITTER” features more of the same. Finally, someone made a thread just to point out other apps created to workaround the problem, but really, it’s pretty ridiculous that neither side has even responded to any of this.

One user links to a Get Satisfaction thread also talking about the issue. But again, no response from anyone on either side. I know Facebook and Twitter may not be on the best terms right now following Twitter’s rejection of Facebook’s offer to buy the startup late last year. And the subsequent moves Facebook has taken to become more Twitter-like. But it’s the users of both services who are getting angry here.

After I reached out to both sides about the issue, both said they would look into it. Facebook doesn’t seem to think it’s a problem on their end as VP of Communication and Public Policy Elliot Schrage told us, “this is a question more appropriately posed to Twitter — they built the app!” But it seems pretty clear that one app is exploiting another one, which would seem to be at least partially Facebook’s problem. Meanwhile, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone tells us that he’s looking into it.

It seems hard to believe that neither side would even be aware of the issue, but then again, given that the two seem to be competing more and more, an app that allows you to use one of the services rather than the other is probably not at the top of the priority list for either side.

And the app still works for the users who had it installed before this issue arose. But if you try to change your username or password, you will get the error message as well.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Our Real Time Stream Crunchup is only a week and half away (get tickets here).  We’ve been working hard to pull together the best startups, investors, engineers, and marketers developing products and platforms which take advantage of real-time data and communications in new ways.  The real time stream is fast becoming a dominant metaphor for consuming information, increasingly displacing or at least transforming the traditional Web page. It has implications for startups, venture investors, media, search, and business, in general.  We’ll explore all of these facets in panels, on-stage interviews, demos, and a roundtable.

Twitter to Facebook have already embraced the stream, but they are only the beginning.  An whole new ecosystem of real time stream platforms and apps is emerging before our eyes.  In fact, so many companies wanted to demo their product launches at the CrunchUp that we had to turn some away.  But we still managed to fit in about a dozen demos, many of them will be seen for the first time.

The speakers lineup includes founders and executives from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, Meebo, WordPress, Seesmic, Virgin America, Tweetmeme, Qik, and more.  Individual panels will do deep dives into the market opportunity, the real time platforms, real time search (something I am very excited about), and real time business.  By real time business, I mean how businesses are adapting to the stream as a tool for marketing, brand management, customer engagement tool, internal communications, and even resource allocation.  Putting together this conference has opened my eyes as to how far-reaching the real time stream is already, and these are early days.

I hope you can join us to see for yourself.  Below is the (almost final) agenda:

Real Time Stream CrunchUp

Friday, July 10, 9:00 am - 4:45 pm
Fox Theatre, 2223 Broadway, Redwood City
Get CrunchUp tickets HERE for $295, which includes a ticket and expedited check-in to the August Capital party.  Press contact: Daniel Brusilovsky

9:00 - 9:45 am

The Real Time Opportunity
Q&A with leading angel investors John Borthwick and Ron Conway, moderated by Michael Arrington and Steve Gillmor.

9:45 - 10:00 am
Product Demos

10:00 - 10:45 am
The Real Time Moment

• Jack Dorsey, Twitter
• Chris Cox, Facebook
• Bret Taylor, Friendfeed
• Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch (moderator)

10:45 - 11:00 am
Break

11:00 - 11:30
Real Time Application Demos

• Meebo, Sandy Jen
• Seesmic, Loic Le Meur
• Wordpress, Andy Skelton
• Wowd, Boris Agapiev
• Additional STEALTH demos

11:30 - 12:15 pm
Real Time Search

• Gerry Campbell, Collecta
• Matt Cutts, Google
• Kimbal Musk, OneRiot
• Vipul Ved Prakash, Topsy
• Edo Segal, Investor and founder Relegance
• Sean Stutcher, Microsoft
• Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch (moderator)

12:15 - 12:30 pm
Real Time Mobs
Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble talk about the darker side of the stream

12:30 - 1:45 pm
Lunch

1:45 - 2:15 pm
Real Time Media Demos

• RSS Hub
• Magma, Andrew Baron
• Qik, Bhaskar Roy
• Additional STEALTH demos

2:15 - 2:30 pm
Business Demos

• Bantam, John Rourke
• Salesforce, Kraig Swensrud
• SocialMedia, Somrat Niyogi

2:30 - 3:15 pm
Real Time Business

• Porter Gale, Virgin America
• David Sacks, Yammer
• Maynard Webb, LiveOps
• Eric Marcoullier, Gnip
• Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch (moderator)

3:15 - 3:30 pm
Break

3:30 - 4:45 pm
Real Time Roundtable

• Chris Cox, Facebook
• Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck
• Jack Dorsey, Twitter
• Steve Fisher, Salesforce
• Nick Halstead, Tweetmeme
• David Hornik, August Capital
• Bret Taylor, Friendfeed
• George Zachary, Charles River Ventures
• Steve Gillmor, TechCrunchIT
• Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

All details are here.

Press, please email Daniel Brusilovsky for press consideration to attend the CrunchUp and August Capital outing.

August Capital Tickets

Friday, July 10, 5:30 - 10:00 pm
2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA
Get tickets NOW, courtesy of Eventbrite. They’ll go fast, so grab them now. UPDATE: Round of tickets sold out. Final batch of tickets will be released next week.

Tickets are $20 to help manage the guest list and minimize no shows. Due to extremely limited availability, we regret that tickets are non-transferrable and non-refundable. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door.

Demo tables, photowalls, games and other sponsorships are available to make a memorable impression with MeetUp attendees. Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

Big Time Thank Yous to Our CrunchUp Sponsors

Product Sponsors: Glam Media Lab’s Tinker live conversation moderation, Tokbox live video chat, Ustream live video streaming, Bantam Live, Charles River Ventures and mailspace cc:Betty.

Demonstration Sponsors: Seesmic, OneRiot, PeopleBrowsr, Mashery, IDrive, Sun Start-Up Essentials, Meraki, SocialFeet, Tapulous, Loopt, Grey Goose Vodka, Future Works, Gaping Void and Stormhoek Wines.

Event Sponsors: Eventbrite for ticketing and MediaTemple for hosting, Topix, ReTargeter, Coveroo, Pandora.

Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities. Additional details here.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

While not every tweak to YouTube’s system deserves a post, this one is pretty significant, though very straightforward as well. First, the 1GB file limit for YouTube videos has been doubled to 2GB; this is a boon to many users who have been uploading high definition content more than a few minutes long. Ten minutes of 1080p footage can easily exceed a gig, especially if you’ve been editing it and weren’t careful about re-encoding. A 2GB limit should soothe that particular pain.

Next, the update now allows for direct linking to HD streams, as well as easy embedding of same. While it wasn’t impossible before now to get an HD video by default on your page, or to link right to one, it required a little work. But now YouTube has apparently decided that they are ready for the bandwidth shock as thousands and thousands of users default to HD instead of SD — increasing the average amount of bits being sent by a huge amount.

Linking to HD is unfortunately not integrated with the UI yet. You have to add “&hd=1″ to the end of your link — thusly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDiC26-iAs8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDiC26-iAs8&hd=1

With HD link, without HD link.

And here’s a sample HD embed. It’s not really worth it this size; HQ looks fine and loads faster.

What will the next improvements be? Upload speed is solid, compatibility is good, it goes without saying that they’ve got enough users. More social aspects? More integration with Google Apps? Personally, I’m hoping for a live video broadcast service like Qik — that would make liveblogging things about a thousand percent easier, and I know it’d be Android-compatible. Only Google knows.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

It’s Twitter day at Microsoft, apparently. Not only did the software giant announce that it would start adding tweets to its Bing search results, the company actually started officially using Twitter today.

To be clear, Microsoft had a rather large presence on Twitter before through its various departments/products/services, but now it’s using the main /microsoft account to tweet. The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people. So far there have been only 2 tweets and the account only has about 1,000 people following it. That should change, fast.

So what was its first tweet? “Anyone can make games now, Kodu is available on Xbox LIVE Marketplace http://bit.ly/3wlWKo #microsoft #xboxlive #kodu” Like any good Twitter user, Microsoft has self-promotion down cold. But that’s not nearly as slick as Google’s first tweet back in February.

There’s probably not much to read into Microsoft’s love-fest with Twitter today, but you never know. After all, rivals have been snooping around, flirting with the service.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

TechCrunch and others are saying that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is adding Tweets soon.

Microsoft has finally figured out the strategy to compete with Google. Cut Google where they are weak. Keep cutting. Bing!

This strategy is winning. Google is losing market share and hasn’t yet figured out how to respond.

Hint to Google: your UI is stale. Your search results are, while getting faster (FriendFeed and Twitter posts are now getting into Google within a few minutes) still not real time and you haven’t shown any real time leadership.

But where’s Yahoo? Carol? Hello? Twitter is happening now and you need to get involved in this before Bing Tweets and gives you a headache.

Oh, it’s not on yet. I hate it when news leaks before the feature is ready to test.

UPDATE: My asterisk * is because it turns out that only popular Twitterers will get this feature turned on. That is totally lame and leaves a huge hole for Yahoo and Google to crawl through.

Bing is something of a rarity for Microsoft these days: It’s a product that actually has good natural buzz. And for good reason too, it’s a solid product. For certain queries, it seems more useful than even, yes, Google. (And not just porn queries.) And Microsoft isn’t squandering away this opportunity, it’s keeping its foot on the gas, today attacking what is perceived to be Google’s weakness: Real-time search results.

While that’s a little misleading — Google actually does have plenty of data that gets into its system almost immediately — what everyone seems to mean by real-time results these days is Twitter results. And that’s exactly what Bing is adding. Kind of. As it notes on its blog:

Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres.

While Microsoft is still in the process of rolling this feature out, you can see what it will look in the image below featuring AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher (who also has some more details about the feature). Apparently, Bing will update these Twitter results every minute, reports the New York Times.

But it’s important to note that Bing will not be crawling every tweet that runs through Twitter. Instead, it will focus on only those from people it deems important based on follower counts and volume of tweets. As they note:

We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search. We’d love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.

What else is a bit odd about Bing’s addition of tweets is that apparently they’ll only show up for very specific searches. So, for example, if you search for “Ryan Seacrest tweets” you’ll find them in the results, but presumably you won’t (at least not yet) if you just search for “Ryan Seacrest.” That would be much more interesting.

Google has been doing things in recent months such as adding Google profiles and Facebook profiles prominently in search results. But so far it has shied away from highlighting tweets in their results, even as dozens of other search companies pop up to do just that. Even if these tweet results are rather pointless, this will be seen as Bing doing something Google cannot. And that may just give a few more people a reason to use Bing.

Well played, Bing.

Update: The feature is now live. Here’s my result:

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

It’s been just about a month now since I stepped off of the USS Nimitz. Well, was flown off, more accurately.

I took a month off to let is sink in just what I was there for. It is SO easy to hype up such a trip right after you get back. And I did over on Twitter and FriendFeed.

But I wanted to do a blog post about what I remember of the trip. Not a long one. Enough words have been written by others to occupy your reading time for hours. More on that later.

But just a short one.

Here it is: young people rock.

I remember standing by myself watching pilot after pilot flying aircraft onto a moving deck at night just by watching a small few rows of lights. It is a task that nothing I do in my life will ever come close to in difficulty.

But I watched as 19-year-olds guided the planes to their spaces a foot or two from the water’s edge. I watched as other young people piloted one of the most expensive pieces of machinery around. These were people half my age and I can barely drive my car around, much less do what these young people are doing every day. Yeah, there were a few adults around who had a few scars on their backs, I’m sure, and they were guiding the younger ones and making sure they had the training to get the job done, but the young faces I saw doing the dangerous work of keeping one of the most expensive weapons platforms the world has ever seen working and working flawlessly just takes away any doubt that our next generations will be just fine, thank you very much.

We were there just a few days after five of their crew members were laid to rest thanks to a helicopter mission that had gone horribly bad. That was a reminder that these kids are putting their lives at risk every day to keep me safe.

So, what was I there for? My mission was to study how the social media team on board the Nimitz uses Twitter and other methods to get the word out about what 5,500 people are doing out at sea. I also met the Twitterer who keeps the “FlyNavy” account bubbling along. Families, I’m told by some of the sailors I met on board, watch every word.

I also saw myself as the photographer for the group and rented a huge 600mmF2.8 lens that let me get some of the closer photos of pilots landing.

The Navy, we were told, invites VIPs and others on board every day to be a proxy for all of us who can’t get a tour of a ship that’s spending our tax dollars in a very large way. This was the first such trip of bloggers, so they were watching to see if we’ll do anything different from all the other journalists, movie crews, TV crews, and other VIPs who visit.

Some other things I remember:

1. You gotta be in good shape. Up the stairs. Down the stairs. Up the stairs. Down the stairs. No elevators here.
2. I remember that the pilots said they get afraid EVERY TIME they come in for a landing. Jennifer Jones got a podcast with one of the pilots we met. It’s interesting that you can’t train the human brain to get rid of fear. But you can train it to work around it.
3. The captain — right in the middle of telling me something that I’ve now forgotten — turned around in mid speech and picked up his phone, called someone down on the deck, told someone to get his act together, then turned around and continued his conversation with me without missing a beat.
4. I watched TopGun hundreds of times (we used to play it over and over on the TVs in the store I worked at in Silicon Valley) but take that feeling and ramp it up 1000x when you are 20 feet from an F-18 taking off. There is no HD camera that can capture the sensory overload you experience when on the deck of an active aircraft carrier. I can’t imagine I’ll have another experience quite like that.
5. The Navy is much more open than I expected it to be. At times I couldn’t tell that I wasn’t walking around some high tech company. When we visited the war room they asked that we not take video or photos of the screens (a request I get quite often when hanging out at companies in Silicon Valley) but they let us watch all we wanted. We visited with tons of sailors all over the ship and they never refused to answer our questions.
6. It’s going to be tough for everyone in the Navy to get into social networking. Why? Bandwidth. There are no cell phones out at sea and the bandwidth to satellites is a precious resource that is metered out to those who need it. Much like water in a drought. Sailors can use Twitter and Facebook in the computer room, but getting time on a computer is tough and the bandwidth isn’t fun.
7. I came away with a new respect of the word sacrifice. The sailors are away from their families months at a time and they aren’t able to just turn on their iPhones and call home or do Skype calls due to the limitations in bandwidth.
8. They look for the simplest solution, not the “coolest” or “geekiest.” Especially true of when we visited the guys who keep the database of every plane on board. Hint: it’s not on a computer.

Anyway, Andy Sernovitz wrapped up the trip best. “They are doing it for us.” Andy also linked to all the bloggers and their reports.

I especially liked these reports, but they were all good:

Carroll “Lex” LeFon, former F-18 pilot who hung out with us during the tour (he is retired and got a flight back to see his old buddies). He’s a great writer and gave his impressions of hanging out with a bunch of clueless bloggers.

Guy Kawasaki who noted how close I was to death, in a funny way.

Jennifer Van Grove looks mighty mean holding a gun.

Chris Pirillo said it gave him a whole new respect. So did TechMama Beth Blecherman. That was the overwhelming reaction after we got back to our cars.

Bill Reichert, Silicon Valley VC, pulled out 10 management lessons he gained.

Anyway, thanks to Guy Kawasaki (who is the one who got me onto the list) and Dennis Hall (who puts together these embarks for the Navy) for inviting me.

Check out my complete set of hundreds of photos (they are all in the public domain so you can use them for whatever purpose you want — they are high enough resolution so you can print posters out, for example). I shot a few HD videos, like this one, too (make sure you visit those and watch them in HD, I shot those on my Canon 5D MK II and they are the sharpest videos of anyone in the group):

With the news surrounding the implosion of Joost and the startup’s move towards providing white label video platforms for companies, we thought it would be a good idea to check in with one of Joost’s new competitors. As we wrote in our post about Joost’s prospects as a white label video community provider, there is already plenty of competition, including Brightcove, Magnify, and Ooyala.

Brightcove is perhaps the best-known player in the space. But another one which has been relatively successful in creating interactive video sites for brands is Magnify.net. The video hosting and sharing platform, which launched in 2007, is rapidly growing its white label service and is expected to be cash-flow positive by the end of the year, according to co-founder Steve Rosenbaum.

Magnify has recently partnered with several sites to power their video aggregation platforms, including deals with Etsy, CarsonDaly.TV, and Bicycling.com. Magnify has also created white label video channels for Zappos, New York Magazine and The Weather Channel.

Bicycling.com recently decided to shift from Magnify’s competitor Brightcove to power its platform for original content. The cycling site is launching its Magnify-powered site in conjunction with its coverage of the Tour de France, which starts July 4th. It was attracted by Magnify’s social features, such as the ability to pull UGC videos from sites like YouTube and updates from Twitter. Bicycling.com online editor David L’Heureux plans to integrate Twitter streams onto the platform from cycling all-stars like Lance Armstrong. Magnify also allows the online magazine to aggregate a mix of videos and makes it easy for the site to offer readers external videos and internal media that is created by Bicycling.com.

Additionally, Magnify is creating subject-driven channels, such as IranLive, that aggregates video content around a specific topic and also integrates live Twitter streams with the mentions of that topic. The IranLive Twitter stream has filters that remove any Tweets with derogatory or abusive language.

What does the Joost white-label service do again?

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

It may sound kind of silly, but when I talk to people outside of the tech world about Bing, the first thing brought up is usually how they like the pictures. And now Microsoft has created a contest on Facebook to let one user get their own picture featured on Bing.

The Bing Summer Travel Photo Contest is asking Facebook users to submit their best summer vacation photos. The community will then vote on them, and the winner will get its day in the sun, so to speak, on Monday, August 3 — appearing to the millions who visit Bing on that day.

Naturally, there are some rules for these photos as Microsoft probably doesn’t want kickass keg party pictures on the Bing homepage. Obviously, no alcohol, smoking, guns, violence or nudity will be allowed. But Microsoft also doesn’t want any pictures with recognizable people or any third party trademarked images, so they don’t get sued. Here’s what they are looking for:

* The image should make you want to find out more about it.
* The image should draw you in and be a starting place for exploring Bing
* The subject of the photo must provide enough interest to program all the content that we use to support that exploration.
* Strive for subtlety and poetry. You shouldn’t have to know that it’s Halloween, Columbus Day, or Boss’s Day to enjoy the photo.

In a blog post on the matter, Microsoft also lays out how it goes about choosing the images it uses on Bing. “The images are chosen from a variety of licensed photos with the goal of inspiring a sense of exploration and delight while piquing your interest to learn more.”

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Wiimbledon 2009 has come and gone and I’m happy to report that it was a great success! We had 98 tournament participants and everything went off without a hitch. With the help of generous eBayers, tournament attendees and Barcade, we’ve raised somewhere in the vicinity of $5,000 for the Child’s Play Charity. On behalf of CrunchGear, Wiimbledon and Child’s Play, I’d like to thank the following sponsors for hooking us up.

'twander' Version 3.231 is now released and available for download at:
[link]
The last public release was 3.224. This release fixes a number
of bugs and adds a variety of useful new features. See the
WHATSNEW.txt file for all the details.
------------------------------ ------------------------------ ---------

How do you improve the world if you worked at a charity? Well, in the old days you would do a lot of work just to meet people. You’d use direct mail. You’d hire phone banks of people to call and bug other people during dinner (we get those calls all the time). You’d go to conferences where rich people hang out (I meet charities all the time at Davos and other conferences). You’d work with HR directors at companies to build projects (the United Way did that with Microsoft, for instance).

But there has got to be a better way to raise attention on issues and get people to donate, isn’t there?

Yes, and we’ve seen this new way used quite a few times on Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook.

Now there’s a web site, Socialbrite, that covers how you can improve the world with social media. Started by JD Lasica, it’s an attractive site that tracks, and helps, people and causes who are using social networks to change the world. It’s worth spending some of your attention on.

It’s been a big day for Facebook, with news earlier this morning that the social network will soon be totally revamping its privacy settings and making it easier to share with the entire web. Now developer Joe Hewitt, who is responsible for Facebook’s massively popular iPhone application, has posted a note to the site describing some of the new features we can expect from the latest iteration of the app, which he says is “98% done”. Hewitt doesn’t give an exact release date, but we can likely expect it very soon.

From Hewitt’s post:

1. The “new” News Feed
2. Like
3. Events (including the ability to RSVP)
4. Notes
5. Pages
6. Create new photo albums
7. Upload photos to any album
8. Zoom into photos
9. Easier photo tagging
10. Profile Pictures albums
11. A new home screen for easy access to all your stuff, search, and notifications
12. Add your favorite profiles and pages to the home screen
13. Better Notifications (they link to the comments so you can reply)
14. Quickly call or text people right from the Friends page
15. Messages you are typing will be restored if you quit or are interrupted by a phone call

All of these will be welcome additions, particularly the ability to view and respond to events listings, which were oddly missing in the iPhone Facebook app until now (I routinely found myself having to access the web version of the site in order to look up details). Unfortunately, Hewitt writes that Push notifications, which Apple enabled with the release of the iPhone 3.0 update, will not make it into this release — we’ll have to wait for the next point update later this summer.

Update: Hewitt has provided us with some screenshots of the upcoming app. Looks like a big improvement.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

We all remember TwitPic, right? It was used to snap a picture of the airplane that crashed into the Hudson.

But there are a raft of others that are trying to get Twitterer’s to use them. These are in no particular order.

Radar.net.
Twitgoo.
Img.ly.
2tweet.
Yfrog.
Twicsy.
TweetPhoto.
Picktor.
Pikchur.
Pixim.
TwitnGo.
TwitrPix.
Brightkite.
Ourdoings. (I use this because of its strong real-time integration into FriendFeed and inclusion of location data, which I think is important when I’m using my iPhone to take pictures).
FriendFeed. (you send your photos via email to share@friendfeed.com and it uploads them to FriendFeed, which can then push them to Twitter).
Flickr, now that you can Tweet photos on its service.

Obviously there are WAY TOO MANY photo sharing services out there. I bet only three of these survive and even Flickr, after millions of photos, isn’t making huge money for its owner, Yahoo. So, the key is to be differentiated so that these services can attract an audience.

So, how is TwitSnaps trying to differentiate itself? By offering higher resolution so you can use both DSLRs as well as high resolution cell phone cameras like the new Nokia N97 that’s just coming on the market. They also, this week, are adding video which is something I’ve seen Twitvid.io do so far. In the video I shot yesterday TwitSnaps founder, Simar Sing.

Rev2.org has a good review of many of the Twitter photo sharing services. So does Mashable.

Even those professional reviews aren’t comprehensive, though. They can’t hit everyone. So, which one do you use and why? Are there any others we should check out?

UPDATE: it seems that some of these could run into Trademark issues, so expect names to change. I’ll have more to say on that later. In fact, Leo Laporte owns the trademark to the word “twit” and he’s not happy that people are using that term.

Facebook’s privacy conference call just ended, and it’s clear some major changes are going to be coming to the social network soon. Some of these, like a totally revamped privacy control page, are both long overdue and very welcome. But others, like the Transition Tool, seem ripe for disaster.

Facebook clearly wants its users to become more comfortable sharing their content across the web, because that’s what needs to happen if the site is going to take Twitter head-on with real-time search capabilities. Unfortunately that’s far easier said than done for the social network, which has for years trumpeted its granular privacy settings as one of its greatest assets. Now, those settings are turning into problematic obstacles.

But Facebook sees its redesigned control panel as an opportunity to invite users to start shrugging off their privacy. So it’s piggybacking the new ‘Everyone’ feature on top of the Transition Tool, which is designed to help users acclimate themselves to the new settings. Facebook is planning to test out six different versions of the Transition Tool, and will probably settle on around two different versions for its general release (apparently different tools will be shown depending on your current settings).

To get an idea of just how badly this might mess things up, one need only look at the wording for “Transition Tool 2″, which was shown to the press during the conference call (screenshot below). The tool’s heading invites users to update their privacy settings, which is fair enough given that they’re getting totally reworked. But it also says “While updating your new settings, make it easier for friends to connect with you by making a few fields visible to Everyone. Please note that Everyone means everyone on the Internet.” That may be intended as a suggestion, but it sure sounds like more of a command. And you can be sure that the millions of Facebook users who have no idea what the implications are of sharing their personal data with Google and the world will be happy to tick off those “Everyone” radio buttons.

And that’s my real problem with all of this. Facebook has allowed users to share some of their information with ‘Everyone’ for a few months now, but those options have been nestled under Facebook’s privacy settings (most people probably didn’t even know it was there). Now these users are going to be seeing invitations front-and-center to share with everyone, and Facebook is telling them that this will somehow make it easier to connect with friends. Perhaps Facebook is confident that its users are smart enough to realize that sharing those drunken party photos with the world is a bad idea, but I’m not.

Many of Facebook’s users are still in high school. Some are even younger than that (it isn’t hard to lie about your age on the Internet). And many of these people simply don’t understand that Google is forever. Just look at Facebook’s Vanity URLs for proof: Facebook made it very clear that these are permanent, which means that you’re going to be stuck with the same username five or ten years down the line. Yet there are still countless users grabbing names like ‘drunkdude’. That’s going to look great when your boss tries to add you as a friend.

Fortunately Facebook seems to be preparing itself for the worst. During the call, VP Communications Elliot Schrage noted that while Facebook is using a broad definition for “Everyone” right now — meaning the entire Internet — it isn’t going to actually start sharing the data with search engines immediately. Rather, it sounds like Facebook is going to keep these posts contained inside the social network at first, just in case users start over-sharing with reckless abandon (which they probably will).

In any case, Facebook is going to achieve its biggest goals with these updates: people will soon be sharing far more with the web than they were previously, and the social network will be able to mount a substantial challenge against Twitter. Of course, this isn’t the way Facebook is positioning the changes. One of my favorite parts of the conference call was when ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick noted that Facebook was clearly looking to encourage users to open up their data to the public and asked for the social network’s motivations. Facebook’s response? It wants people to make their data public because it helps disambiguate users with similar names. My phone was muted at the time, but I was laughing heartily.

Image Source

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

I love labels in Gmail. Most email programs use folders, which only let me put mail in one place at a time. With labels, I can organize mail in multiple ways. Combined with filters to automatically label incoming messages, Gmail offers powerful ways to organize email.

When I joined the Gmail team, I was surprised to learn that only 29% of Gmail users had created any labels. At first, I thought perhaps conversation threading and search made the need to organize our mail less important. But when we talked to people who use Gmail, we got a different story. People often asked us to add folders to Gmail, assuming no system of organization existed. As one person said in a usability study, "What are labels... and where are my folders?"

We realized that if you didn't know about labels, it would be easy to assume Gmail had no way to organize your mail. Not only were "labels" unfamiliar, they were kind of hidden. So, we set out to make labels more accessible, as well as more powerful. Most of the changes have been in Gmail for a while, but we're adding some new features today. We thought you'd enjoy a peek at the method to our madness.

The first thing we did was make labels look more like the sticky notes you use in real life. Making the interface mimic things you interact with outside the computer can sometimes improve ease of use.


We also made it easier to remove a label from an open conversation:


Then we worked on the actions you take to apply and remove labels. Before, to put a label on a message, you had to look under "More actions> Apply label." Not only was this option hidden in a generic menu, but the language wasn't what people are familiar with when it comes to organizing mail. We explored several alternatives:

Hang around my colleagues at ThoughtWorks and you soon get the impression that the only good Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a dead ESB. Jim Webber refers to them as Egregious Spaghetti Boxes. So it's not uncommon to hear tales of attempts to get them out of systems that don't need them.

Battle was joined at one client and it brought to mind my younger days playing D&D. Webber swings but misses as the ESB is AC 2, Evan gets a hit and rolls 2d8 for 6 damage. Erik finally kills it by casting "Summon Request Stream Map".

So what was Erik's decisive spell? Essentially the idea was to take a simple request and show how the data for the request and response made their way through the layers of the application. Erik printed out all the code that you needed to read to understand how this would work - which ran to several pages. He also produced this diagram.

It's currently fashionable in agile circles to do Value Stream Mapping as a way to uncover waste in a software development process. I think of this as a request stream map because it similarly takes a request and shows how it moves through the layers allowing us to visualize what's going on and think about the cost and value of the layers.

Layering is an essential tool for building software applications. But like most essential things in life, excess can be almost as much of a problem as too little. A visualization like this (or the multiple pages of code) can help you find where "just enough" is.

One hazard, however. If you do need to transform data from one form to another, it's usually better to a few little transformations than one big transformation. You want to avoid unnecessary transformations not compress the ones you need.

There’s been quite a bit of controversy over the past several hours over words and images related to Twitter being used by third-party developers. Yesterday, Twitter seemed to threaten one party over the use of the word “tweet” and some UI elements that were similar to Twitter’s own. This morning, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone clarified Twitter’s position on this a bit for us, stating that, “As part of this support, we encourage developers of new applications and services built using Twitter APIs to invent original branding for their projects rather than use our marks, logos, or look and feel.”

But there was still some confusion about what Twitter was actually saying, and more importantly, what it was planning to do with violators of this. So now Stone has written a blog post further clarifying things.

Here’s the key nugget:

We have applied to trademark Tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective but we have no intention of “going after” the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter. In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet. However, if we come across a confusing or damaging project, the recourse to act responsibly to protect both users and our brand is important.

So there you go, feel free to use the word “tweet” in your projects. But use it wisely.

However, the use of the word “Twitter” is something the company is going to look down upon:

Regarding the use of the word Twitter in projects, we are a bit more wary although there are some exceptions here as well. After all, Twitter is the name of our service and our company so the potential for confusion is much higher. When folks ask us about naming their application with “Twitter” we generally respond by suggesting more original branding for their project. This avoids potential confusion down the line.

That makes sense since it is the actual name of the company after all. And it does need to do some basic protection of its name.

[photo: flickr/d'arcy norman]

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Dear Python users,
The Moovida team is happy to announce the release of Moovida Media
Center 1.0.4, code-named "All That Matters".
Moovida, formerly known as Elisa, is a cross-platform and open-source
Media Center written in Python.
It uses GStreamer [1] for media playback and pigment [2] to create an

back

buy this print Share on: del.icio.us digg facebook reddit stumbleupon

next

All around Google, we're proud of our work, our culture and, most importantly, our people. In the spirit of celebration, this spring and summer Googlers have participated in Pride celebrations in Tel Aviv, New York, Zürich, San Francisco and many other cities around the world. Pride is a time for the LGBT* community along with families, friends and supporters to stand up for equality, and to honor those who paved the way for us to express sexual orientation and gender identity openly.

In the U.S., this year's celebration is historically important: it's the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City, a response to what was then routine police harassment of LGBT people. Some 75 Googlers, family members and friends marched with several hundred members of New York's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center. Hundreds of Googlers also joined other U.S. celebrations in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Earlier this month, around 50 Googlers and friends gathered to celebrate at Europride, Europe's best-known Gay Pride celebration. This year it was in Zürich, Switzerland. After weeks of sunshine, on the morning of the parade it began to storm, but that didn't deter our intrepid Googlers from being out at 6:30am turning a 28-ton truck into a rainbow-colored nightclub on wheels. Hundreds of nuts, bolts and gallons of helium later, the truck was transformed, the sun came out and we were ready to march through the city streets, cheered on by a crowd of 50,000.

Google is a company that supports its LGBT employees, taking a public stand on issues that are important to our community. This is not the first year that Google has supported Pride, and it will certainly not be the last. We hope you enjoy this photo album of our global celebrations.




*LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered people and is also intended to include people who identify as queer, asexual or intersexed, amongst others.

Posted by Cynthia Yeung, Partner Strategy Team

Last summer we broke the news that Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block would team with former editor-in-chief Peter Rojas to create a new gadget startup. Today that new startup, GDGT, launches. Gadget lovers rejoice - this is a social site where you can obsess over those tiny bundles of tech joy among others just as geeky as you.

GDGT (pronounced “g-d-g-t,” but I like to just say “gadget”) is a highly structured wiki that centers on tech gadgets. Like our own Crunchbase, anyone can edit any information on the site, but everything is structured which allows for lots of slicing and dicing of the data.

The site includes intensely detailed specs on each product and groups products into logical categories. There are over a dozen categories and thousands of products in GDGT now, and users will quickly add more. All that structured data also allows for an incredibly useful Gadget finder tool as well.

Users select gadgets that they own, used to own, or want, and can add reviews and ratings. Blog reviews are threaded into the discussion as well:

GDGT also has a forum feature where users can discuss relevant gadget related topics. Here’s a thread, for example, where people fretting over the decision to buy an iPhone 3Gs can use each other as a sort of support group. Each user has a profile page with their gadgets and contributions to the community.

GDGT isn’t saying much about funding, although we’ve heard they raised around half a million dollars in an angel round led by True Ventures and Betaworks, plus a number of angel investors.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Exceptions are one of the great features of high level languages that making coding less tedious. Instead of manually checking for possible errors and returning error codes we can use exceptions. ... [675 words]

Thanks to the wonder of Twitter I've heard about two different college courses that will be using IronPython in Action as course material next semester. One is Sargeant Reynolds College in America, with a course taught by Kevin Hazzard, and the other is Northtec in New Zealand with a course taught by Tony Meyer.

IronPython is an ideal language for learning programming, it has the great combination of an easy to learn general purpose programming language (Python) with a programming environment which is widely used in commercial development (the .NET framework). Not only these factors, but it is easy to teach good programming practise with Python; things like well structured code, testing, computer science theory including elements of functional programming and so on.

I exchanged emails with Tony who explained why he is using IronPython in Action:

The course is (unimaginatively) titled "Programming" (not my doing!). It's at NorthTec at the Whangarei campus (a couple of hours north of Auckland). It's the second programming course in their Bachelor of Applied Information Systems degree. We switched the first course from VB to Python a couple of years ago, but left this one as VB (because it's their introduction to Visual Studio and .NET).

Early last year I started work convincing people that IronPython would be a good choice, since they can continue with a language they (somewhat) know, but still get the intro to the Microsoft toolchain (plus, I hate VB, and dislike teaching in a language I never use in practice). I was expecting that I'd have to continue on without a textbook, until I saw that IronPython in Action was coming out.

BTW, while it's not like there is much choice in the way of books, yours is an excellent fit. The first section is a good Python refresher and .NET introduction. I introduce unit testing to them in the course, and the book handily has a chapter on that. They do a lot of sysadmin work later in their degree, so the chapter on using IronPython / PowerShell is great. They do ASP.NET stuff later on as well, so that'll be a good reference at that time (I don't expect I'll have time to cover that myself). I introduce them to databases and (since a couple of years ago) web services, and there's a chapter on that. Silverlight is an interesting example, and something I expect they'll be interested in given the later web development work, and there's an introduction to that.

Basically, you couldn't have done a lot better if I'd commissioned it! Thanks! - it certainly has made redoing the course material much simpler than if I was working completely from scratch.

As I mentioned in my tweet, I'll put my course material online at some point in the next couple of weeks (it's not quite finished) in case anyone else is interested in it.

This morning Facebook is holding a conference call/web share for press outlining changes the site is making to its privacy options. Facebook hasn’t given us much of a heads up as to exactly what they’ll be changing, but there’s a good chance it will have something to do with the ‘Everyone’ sharing settings the site has recently been toying around with, which takes the social network one step closer to mimicking Twitter’s functionality. There’s also a chance Facebook will be overhauling its convoluted privacy control pages. The call begins at 10 AM PST.

• Here to discuss latest privacy settings on Facebook. Rolling out some tests in the following week. Here to brief us are Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly and Leah Pearlman
• Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share. Privacy controls enhance this mission.



• Facebook is acknowledging how its current privacy settings have become confusing.



• When people can control who can see their content, they share more meaningfully.
• The publisher privacy control that’s currently in testing is proving quite effective. Anyone anyone wants to share with the public can share more broadly.



• Facebook is removing regional networks. Initially when Facebook started, networks were the ‘bedrock’ of privacy. When they extended beyond colleges/work networks, they opened up regional networks. These generated a lot of confusion. Fragmented the user experience, some networks were far larger than others (SF vs. Australia). 50% of users aren’t in a regional network.



• Facebook is launching new simple settings. FINALLY.
• Anywhere people set privacy on the site, they’ll be able to choose from the same sets of options. There will be a consistent set of options: Share with ‘Everyone’. Can share with ‘Friends and Networks’. Share with ‘Friends of Friends’ (FB says it’s good for photos, restaurant recommendations,etc ). “Share With Friends”. And finally, “Customize”, which lets you specify who can see a certain item.



• Consolidating six different privacy pages into one simple privacy page. There’s a little question mark next to every item so you can see what the section pertains to.



• Third part of these changes are the way people connect. Balancing way people access information with their desire to connect. Now testing ways to opt-in to these new settings.
• The Transition Tool: Facebook wants everyone to know what’s going on, so people understand. Explain to people that if they open key pieces of information, it can make the experience “richer”. Three options people can select for in this Transition tool (there are six different transition tools in testing internally, they’re not sure what the final one will be).



• Transition Tool 2: Users can be usually placed in two categories — one that likes to use granular privacy settings, and another that does more broad settings. This allows them to perform these broad privacy settings.







• The Transition tool is a “Powerful opt-in” to make changes that lets users change how they’d like their privacy settings to default (whether it be public or private).

  Q: It seems you’re encouraging people to share more information with everyone. Is that the case?
  A(Schrage): Trying to manage the digital tension between sharing and privacy. People should be as open or closed as they want to be. We think we can accommodate that.
  A2 (Pearlman): Many people who sign in to Facebook, it’s tough for people to disambiguate themselves when they have the same name. We’re encouraging people to be more open in some cases.

  Q: It sounds like things shared by everyone will be indexable by major search engines, right?
  A (Pearlman): It’s certainly something that we’re talking about. But it’s not like that at this time.
  A2 (Schrage): We want people to be sensitive to this sharing, so we’re defining it in the broadest sense, so people in the test experience it before we make these changes (with the search engines).

  Q: How are you going to educate people about the impact of sharing with ‘everyone’?
  A(Schrage): We think one of the reasons people don’t use settings is that they’re not simple enough, so we’ve spent a lot of time talking with users about making these more simple. And making these changes in real time as they are publishing.
  A2 (Pearlman): When people decide to publish to everyone by default the first time they do it, a dialog will pop up warning them. Trying to catch people when they’re actually about to post.

  Q:Friend of mine is a therapist, some of clients are popping up in ‘people you may know’, which she thought was creepy. Also, you comment on advertisers, wondering how this will play into open stream initiative.
  A (Schrage): Because someone pops up in people you may know, doesn’t mean any information is shared, often results from contact importer. Doesn’t mean there’s that actual connection, just hit the ‘x’ to erase it. With regard to the streams, Facebook isn’t changing anything about the way we share data with advertisers (we don’t share it without user permission).

  

  Q: How are Facebook ad settings for local businesses that may have used regional networks to target their ads?
  A: We’re going to be mapping current regional network information, move to current city. So they may not be in the network, but they can look at their current city. Also have previously used other methods like IP targeting to ensure that ads are delivered more effectively.

  Q: When you roll out the transition tools, will there be one for everyone, or will they be assigned by the bucket a user is in?
  A: We’re going to initially be testing six of them, will probably settle on two different designs that will roll out to everyone. Overall committed to help users reflect settings they have already chosen.

  Q: What will now be public by default?
  A: Historically users have always had control over how they connect and share information. Only can see name and profile picture unless you share more than that.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

In the first 24 hours since its release yesterday, Firefox 3.5 has been downloaded more than 5 million times. (It took only a few hours to pass a million). That is certainly respectable, but doesn’t quite measure up to the mania that Firefox 3.0 set off last summer, when it achieved a “world record” 8.3 million downloads in a single day. Maybe we’ll have to wait for Firefox 4.0 to beat that record. But Firefox 3.5 might still beat the 11 million downloads Safari 4 got over its first three days of availability.

Who’s.among.us has some live usage stats from about 800,000 Internet surfers it is tracking. According to its data, it estimates that Firefox 3.5 already has gained about a 2.4 percent browser market share. Overall, it puts all versions of Firefox at 29 percent. That suggests close to 10 percent of Firefox users have already upgraded. It also puts Safari’s market share at only 2.5 percent, which seems low. (Other stats put it closer to 8 percent).

Looking at our own Google Analytics for TechCrunch, 28 percent of Firefox visitors are already on 3.5, but our readers are big Firefox fans—nearly half of all visitors use some version of Firefox, which is a much higher percentage than for most sites.

I’ve been playing around with the 3.5 release candidate for about a week. It is much zippier than 3.0, and I’m already addicted to the plus-sign feature on the tab bar which makes it easier to add tabs. And I love where it’s going with open video standards. It is also a bit crashy when I have too many tabs open, but that’s getting better. Some add-ons don’t yet work, but nothing crucial. Overall, it’s a much better product.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Gmail is constantly adding features to help people become more organized. Today, Google has tweaked its Labels feature to add more functionality to the labels toolkit, helping users implement labels in a more organized way. Your labels will now be located in a new area on your Gmail interface, above your chat list and grouped together with Inbox, Drafts, Chats and other system labels. You can also now control which labels you’d like to show on your UI and you can hide the rest under a “more” tab.

Of the more innovative features that has been added is the ability to drag and drop messages into labels, just like you can with folders. You can also drag labels onto messages too. It’s also possible to drag labels into the “more” menu to hide them, making it easier to change labels than going to the Settings function. This feature is huge for those people who complain about Gmail not having some of the drag and drop features of Outlook.

Google says these changes will eliminate the need for Right-side Labels, which was an experimental Gmail Labs feature. Apparently, this is the first Labs feature that Google is retiring.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Blended threats. Payload viruses. Spam. If you're one of the more than 15 million people whose work email is protected by Postini's email security products, we hope you don't spend a lot of time thinking about these things. And if we're doing our job right, they certainly shouldn't be showing up in your inboxes. But we process more than 3 billion business emails per day for our customers, culling the spam, viruses, and other threats out, so we do think about this stuff. A lot.

On occasion, we like to share some of what we've learned, so that those of you who are interested can see what spammers are up to. If you're one of those people, head over to our Enterprise Blog for an update on spam trends over the past few months.

Posted by Ellen Leanse, Google Enterprise team

Interactive fashion community StyleCaster has raised $4 million in Series A round of financing from investor Dan Gilbert, the chairman and founder of Quicken Loans.

Launched in February 2009, StyleCaster is a platform that hopes to be the future of online fashion. The site features style tips optimized for each individual, news and content on the latest fashion trends, a niche social network based around style, and a large online retail catalog of brand-name clothing. And the site isn’t just geared towards women—StyleCaster will soon include a community around men’s fashion.

The funding will be used to invest in content creation, web-based and mobile applications, and its advertising network. StyleCaster is an interesting take on combining an interactive community with shopping and editorial and styling content. The site blends several different experiences into the fashion-based platform, creating a one-stop-shop for fashionistas.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Public voting in the The Europas, the tech startup awards from TechCrunch Europe, will close today, Wednesday July 1 at 11.59pm London time (GMT/BST). So best get voting. This public vote will be mixed with voting from our advisory board of European tech luminaries to produce the final shortlist. The awards will take place on July 9 next Thursday, with over 300 people attending from all over the European tech scene. There is more information about the awards here. You can also get breaking news about the European tech startup scene by subscribing to our RSS and Twitter feeds.

A huge thanks to our sponsors for supporting this inaugural event: Thanks to the UKTI for sponsoring the pitches; Viadeo for sponsoring the Best Design category; Bootlaw for sponsoring Best Bootstrapped Startup; Quick.tv for sponsoring Best European Investor; Zendesk for sponsoring Best New Startup; Latitude and Parklane Champagne for the Awards Prizes; oneDrum for sponsoring the drinks party and Mixcloud for sponsoring the DJ.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Some time ago, The New York Times ran a story titled In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop, which mentions that "those on the lower rungs of the business can earn as little as $10 a post."

Dude, if that's what people on the lower rungs earn, then I'm below ground level! (Nevermind that just the previous month, an article in The New York Times wrote about the business of blogging: Don't expect to get rich.)

Then again, I probably shouldn't complain, seeing as what most people took away from the article was that blogging kills.

Slate's Timothy Noah noted in his article Death by Blogging that the New York Times article employs a magic phrase which, once it appears, is a signal to the reader that the subject matter of the story is completely made up:

Give Richtel credit for admitting high up in the story that what follows is purest fancy. Newspaper reporters call these caveat-rich passages "to-be-sure grafs."

The "to-be-sure" paragraph appears as paragraph number six:

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But...

It opens with the magic phrase that says "What you are reading in the remainder of this article is complete fantasy," then adds a few more statements saying that "None of what this article says is true." And then, as if to say, "Let's not let facts get in the way of a good story," it immediately resumes the fabrication with a "But..."

According to MediaPost, The Online Publishers Association yesterday announced that 37 of its members, including juggernauts like The New York Times, Forbes, ESPN, CNN and MSNBC.com are (or are soon going to start) running the new, larger ad units the organization introduced last March. Since the members who are running these campaigns for brands like Bank of America and Mercedes-Benz reach about 68% of the total U.S. Internet audience, there’s a good chance you will soon see them, too.

There’s also a good chance you’ll hate them.

The three new ad units are named and sized as follows:

- The Fixed Panel (336×700) - remains in view as a user scrolls up or down the page
- The XXL Box (468×648), the extra wide side-of-page ad that expands to 936 x 648 and includes page-turn and video capability
- The Pushdown (970×418), which opens big to display the ad and then after seven seconds rolls up to the top of the page (collapsing to 970 x 66).

The first one was actually supposed to be 860 pixels in height, but they reconsidered it and brought it down to 700, reportedly after feedback from publishers.

In order to visualize how big these ads are in their most expanded state, I overlayed the TechCrunch homepage with boxes of the same size:

Here’s how OPA President Pam Horan justified the introduction of the new ad units:

“The real motivation was to provide marketers and agencies with the opportunity to deliver a branded experience directly on the pages of these very rich content sites.”

But what about the children website visitors?

Nobody seems to really care, apart from the fact that OPA recommends their members that the frequency of the pushdown ad be capped at once per day per page. Horan says it passed that recommendation on because they “want to stay close to consumers”. I puked in my mouth a little.

Is it just me or does anyone else think that display advertising units on websites should become more relevant to them instead of just bigger? What’s next, 1200×600 ads?

How do you feel about the new ad units?(survey software)

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

As a postgrad in the late '80s, Neil Bowers made some extra book money by acting as a helper in the computing lab. At the time, undergrads were all working on a grindingly slow VAX-11/780, and Neil and his fellow postgrads were posted there for hands-on help. This tended to be focused at the start of the year, when there were groups discovering Unix and programming for the first time.

One time, an Irish girl asked Neil for some help, saying that she couldn’t understand what was going on: she thought her program looked right, but for some reason, each time she ran it she got partial output, and varying amounts of output each time. The homework assignment she was working on involved writing a program that generated various values and wrote the results in ascii tabular form to a file.

Neil went over to her workstation and had a look at her source code. Everything looked fine. She showed him the file generated by her last run, and indeed, it looked truncated. Hmmm. "Ok," Neil asked, "can you run your program for me, so I can see what happens?".

She typed ./a.out and hit return. Her left hand darted to the keyboard and she hit Control-C. Neil was still mentally processing this when she cat'd the output, and turned to say, "See!" It did indeed contain partial output. Again.

"Um," he paused, "can you just run it again please?" Neil figured that he must have not seen right. But once again she typed ./a.out, hit return, then whap! she hit Control-C. Neil asked her why she hit Control-C every time she ran her program.

"Well," she said confidently, "I discovered that Control-C makes the % prompt come up quicker!"

---

Brought to you by the Non-WTF Job Board:

---

Did you know you can switch tabs in Firefox by making a twisting motion with your fingers on a multi-touch surface? I did. Turns out I've been doing it for months — I thought I was late to the party and was too ashamed to mention it to anybody for fear of an epic internet ribbing ("What, you just figured that out?"). But no, apparently it was top secret and highly experimental. That was in the beta, though; it looks like the official version has reduced it to a hack. Fortunately, mastering this multi-touch-enabling technique will allow you to tweak your gestures, resulting in everlasting glory.

Fifty-seven percent. That’s how much overall venture-backed liquidity decreased in the second quarter of 2009 compared to that of last year: from $6.48 billion to $2.8 billion, if you want the hard numbers. Looking at the chart, I’d say the drop compared to the second quarter of 2007 ($14.6 billion) is even more telling. It’s the bad news from this just-released Dow Jones VentureSource report, with the only positive nugget the fact that three VC-backed companies have been able to complete IPOs (raising a total of $232 million), ending a nine-month drought.

Just half an hour ago, we reported separately that the National Venture Capital Association actually counted five IPOs during the quarter in which a total of $721 million was raised (including DigitalGlobe-$279, SolarWinds-$152 million and OpenTable-$60 million). Also, while the NVCA pegged the number of venture-backed acquisitions at 59 in the second quarter, generating $2.6 billion, the Dow Jones VentureSource report says $2.8 billion was reached through M&As of 67 portfolio companies instead.

Either way, it’s looking very bleak out there, as venture capitalists are not only struggling to take their portfolio companies public but also to sell them. According to the Dow Jones report, M&As were down 60% from the $6.48 billion raised via 89 M&As in the same quarter in 2008. This represents the lowest quarterly M&A deal total since 1999. Furthermore, the median amount paid for a VC-backed company in the second quarter of 2009 was just shy of $22 million, a 46% drop from the nearly $41 million median paid during the same period in 2008.

Jessica Canning, Director of Global Research for Dow Jones VentureSource, commented that the market appears to be correcting the “possibly inflated figures” posted in 2007, but sees the IPO window finally opening up again.

I second Erick’s comment that it’s a bit too early to call it a come-back, but I’m sure a lot of people are happy to finally see at least some IPO activity again, even if it pales in comparison to what we’ve seen from 2004 to 2007.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

After four quarters in which venture-backed IPOs have been dead in the water, a handful finally poked their heads up in the second quarter. The National Venture Capital Association counted five IPOs during the quarter, including DigitalGlobe ($279 million raised), SolarWinds ($152 million), and OpenTable ($60 million). A total of $721 million was raised. Just for a little context, two years ago during the same period, there were 25 IPOs which raised $4.15 billion.

So don’t call it a comeback just yet. But any activity is a sign of hope. And this was the most active period since the fourth quarter of 2007. Will it keep building, or will IPO candidates duck their heads back under water?

On the M&A front, the pace remained lackluster. There were 59 venture-backed acquisitions in the second quarter, which was down from 84 deals a year ago (and 62 deals in the previous quarter). The total value of M&A deals was $2.6 billion.

The average M&A deal size shot up to $198 million, no doubt boosted by Intel’s $884 million acquisition of Wind River Systems and NetApp’s $1.5 billion acquisition of Data Domain. However, Internet deals still represented 29 percent of the total count, with lots of smaller deals such as AOL’s purchase pf both Going and Patch.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The wave of investments in "realtime" is continuing with today's announcement from Cognitive Match that it has raised Series A investment from Dawn Capital. Terms were undisclosed but it's understood the figure was in the £1m+ ballpark, in tranches. The UK company applies artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content to individuals in, you guessed it, realtime. This content can be product, offers, editorial or advertising of course, making it a very interesting prospect for an outfit like Twitter.

We were just forwarded an e-mail conversation between a Twitter API team member and a third-party developer because the latter was using a UI for its web-based service that was admittedly very similar to Twitter’s web application.

The startup of course has the right to protect its assets and do its utmost to avoid confusion with users who might think they’re using a Twitter product rather than that of a developer making use of its API.

But something else caught our attention in the thread:

Hi,

Twitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own. How can we go about having you change your UI to better differentiate your offering from our own?

Thanks,

First of all, I had no idea that the word ‘tweet’ was trademarked by Twitter, and after browsing its Terms of Service and API documentation I couldn’t find any reference on their website about this either. (update: a commenter links to the US trademark application, which was filed April 16, 2009 and another one claims a trademark application has been filed in Europe in June as well)

Second, I’m assuming that the note about the company being ‘uncomfortable’ with the use of the term was in reference to the combination of that with the closely resembling UI of the web application. If I’m wrong and this signals that Twitter wants to move forward with actively barring third-party apps from using the word ‘tweet’ in their names in the same way that it refrains them from using the word ‘twitter’, then this could have consequences for a plethora of developers.

Should TweetDeck, TweetMeme, Tweetie, BackTweets, Tweetboard etc. start worrying?

We’ve asked Twitter management for clarification.

Update: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s response (emphasis ours):

“The ecosystem growing around Twitter is something we very much believe in nourishing and supporting. As part of this support, we encourage developers of new applications and services built using Twitter APIs to invent original branding for their projects rather than use our marks, logos, or look and feel. This approach leaves room for applications to evolve as they grow and it avoids potential confusion down the line.

As we build our platform team, we will be adding more guidelines and best practices to help developers get the most out of our growing set of open APIs. We have healthy relationships with existing developers who sometimes include Twitter logos, marks, or look and feel in their applications and services. We’ll continue to work together in a fair and flexible way to ensure success for Twitter, developers, and everyone who uses these services.”

It’s a rather vague statement that doesn’t really make it clear whether the use of the word ‘tweet’ is now frowned upon or not. We’ll see when the API team puts forward clear guidelines on this in the future.

Update 2: a better statement about this in this Twitter blog post, which basically says developer can tweet their hearts out.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

It’s sad to see a company that we were all so excited about fade further into oblivion. Today Joost, one of the most anticipated startups in 2006/2007, is just an also ran in a sea of big online video sites like YouTube and Hulu. Today CEO Mike Volpi stepped down, the company is laying off most of staff, and refocusing the business to “white label online video platforms for media companies.”

Om has a good monday morning quarterback overview of why they failed, but to me it comes down to just a few things. They over funded ($45 million before they even launched) and they ignored the fact that users were quite willing to sacrifice quality in online video for the convenience of Flash in the browser. Joost waited until late last year to go all Flash - until then users had to use the downloadable Joost software and allow P2P streaming of shows. In the meantime there was no linking to Joost videos. YouTube and Hulu got all that social media and SEO juice that could have gone to Joost.

Founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who founded Skype and Kazaa, see the world in terms of P2P and downloadable clients. The joke about how everything looks like a nail if you’re a hammer is very true with Joost. But what worked with Kazaa and Skype a decade ago doesn’t work with online video in today’s world, obviously.

And this new business focus for Joost - white label video platforms - is a very tough market. Yahoo just bailed on it entirely after investing $160 million or so in an acquisition of Maven Networks last year. And competitors like Brightcove and Ooyala aren’t just going to roll over and let Joost take market share in this space.

Here’s what I learned from Joost’s failure - celebrity founders, celebrity CEOs and tons and tons of cash can be a recipe for disaster. Applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems isn’t an interesting business. And finally, knowing when to throw in the towel and just return what’s left of capital to investors is an important skill as well. That way everyone can move on and focus on real value add opportunities. There’s no room for Joost in the consumer online video space, and there’s almost certainly no room for them in white label video, either. Time to call it a learning experience and move on.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Don’t know what StockTwits is? It’s a way to talk about stocks on Twitter. Is it popular? Yes! Is it popular? Yes! Will it be profitable? I believe so. (Advertisers love an audience of people who are trading stocks). Is it using Twitter in a unique way? Yes!

So, how is StockTwits doing it? Well, Rocky and I traveled to New York to find out and we met up with Howard Lindzon, founder of StockTwits, to find out the inside scoop.

Lindzon is also an investor in other businesses and now owns a stake in Twitter itself.

This video is part of the Building43 community which is for people who are fanatical about the Internet.

This guest post is written by Mary Hodder, the founder Dabble. Prior to Dabble, Hodder consulted for a number of startups, did research at Technorati and wrote her masters thesis at Berkeley focusing on live web search looking at blog data.

Real time search is nothing new. It is a problem we’ve been working on for at least ten years, and we likely will still be trying to solve it ten years from now. It’s a really hard problem which we used to call “live web search,” which was coined by Allen Searls (Doc’s son) and refers to the web that is alive, with time as an element, in all factors including search.

The name change to “real time search” seems a way to refocus attention toward the issue of time as an important element of filters. We are still presented with the same set of problems we’ve had at least the past ten years. None of the companies that Erick Schonfeld pointed to the other day seem to be doing anything differently from the live web search / discovery companies that came before. The new ones all seem to be fumbling around at the beginning of the problem, and in fact seem to be doing “recent search,” not really real time search. While I’m sure they’ve worked really hard on their systems, they are no closer than the older live web search systems got with the problem. All the new ones give a reverse chron view, with most mixing Twitter with something: blog data, other microblog data, photos, creating some kind of top list of recent trends. Some have context, like a count of activity over a period of time, or how long a trend has gone on or a histogram (Crowdeye) which both Technorati and Sphere experimented with in the early years. Or they show how many links there are to something or the number of tweets. All seem susceptible to spam and other activities degrading to the user experience and none seem to really provide the context and quality filters that one would like to see if this were to really work. All seem to suffer from needing to learn the lessons we already learned in blog search and topic discovery.

Publicly available publishing systems starting in 1999 took the value of time and incorporated it into what was being published (think Pyra which is now Blogger, Moveable Type, Wordpress and Flickr, among the many) as well as search and discovery systems for those published bits like Technorati, Sphere, Rojo, Blogpulse, Feedster, Pubsub and others, to walk down memory lane . . . (btw, for disclosure purposes I should state that I worked for Technorati in 2004 for 10 months, and consulted or advised most all the others in one form or another).

I started working on this problem in 1999, at UC Berkeley, and eventually did my master’s thesis on live web data search and topic discovery at SIMS (or the iSchool as it’s now known). From 2000 to 2004, people at SIMS would say to me, “What are you doing with blogs and data, it’s just weird. Why does it matter?” But the element of time was the captivating piece that was missing for me from regular search. It’s the element that makes something news, as well as the element that can group items together in a short period to show a focus of attention and activity that often legacy news outlets miss (until more recently when they decided that live web activity was interesting).

At Burning Man in 2005, under a shade structure during a hot, quiet afternoon, I remember having a four or five hour conversation with Barney Pell (who would later found Powerset) about the Live Web and Live Web Search, how to do it, what it meant, how to understand and present time to the user, how much was discovery and how much was search, how structured was the data you could get and how reliant on the time could you be with the data, what meaning you could make from that data, etc. Sergey Brin was sitting and listening, and finally, after a couple of hours, he asked me, “What is the live web and what is live web search?” Since Barney and I had already been doing a deep dive, I assumed Sergey knew what we were talking about, so it surprised me, but I explained why I thought time was a huge missing element of regular search, and that this was the type of search I worked on. Barney and I continued for a couple more hours. And it got cooler so it was time to go admire the art and that was the end of that. But I have wondered over the years where Google is with the live web and when they might do something with time. Twitter seems to be prodding them.

In 2006, “The Living Web” Newsweek cover story by Steven Levy and Brad Stone poked at this issue for the first time in a national forum.

When I look at the latest crop of search startups, I think: Why are we doing it all the same way again? Reinventing the wheel? Is anyone doing anything original either with data or interface? Is anyone building on what we’ve learned before about the backend or UI’s?

Frankly, our filters suck.. and I suppose that if a name change gets us to think anew about better filters, well, I should rejoice. I’m partly to blame for the bad filters we have to date because in having worked on this problem, I’ve contributed to some of the various live web or real time or whatever the word of the moment is to describe trying to solve this problem. We are very good at publishing our thoughts and visions, with time stamps, but not very good at the filtering side of things. The old method of information search and discovery was to open the paper or magazine, turn the pages with editorially filtered and placed information, and when you were finished, you said, “Okay, I’m informed” (whether you really were or not). But the media got complacent, missed stories and with the ease of blog publishing and sites like Flickr for photos, we could replace paper and supplement our information needs with the whole web. The only problem is, it’s the whole freaking web. An avalanche. We feel anxiety on the web from the lack of filter and editorial grace that one or two printed news sources used to give us.

I did a study in 2002, which I repeated in 2004 and again last year in 2008. I asked users to track their online information intake for one week. There were only 30 people in each study, chosen randomly from Craiglist ads, but what I found across each group of 30 was that the average time spent online with news and information sites was 1.25 hours in 2002, 1.85 hours in 2004 and 2.45 hours in 2008. These people are not in Silicon Valley, but they do all have broadband at home and live in the US. Every one of them reported some level anxiety over the amount of data they felt they needed to take in in order to feel informed. They often dealt with it by increasing the time they took to stay informed. They didn’t know that better filters might actually reduce their anxiety.

As Erick noted, the tension to solve this problem is between memory and consciousness; or as Bob Wyman and Salim Ismail called it at Pubsub: retrospective verses prospective search. And it is part of the issue. But there is more.

Discovery does mean you have to introduce time as an element. The user cannot be expected to know what is bubbling up, or the specific phrases that will name the latest thing.

Some people will say “michael jackson” and some will say “MJ” and some will say “king of pop.” And Michael Jackson as a topic is actually pretty easy. I remember once doing usability tests for a live web search and discovery system in 2003, where we asked users to search on Google News and various live web systems for an incident in Australia where a “giant sea creature” was found. But since all the media covering it originated in Australia, and they’d all called it a “massive squid,” and all the follow-on American sources including bloggers had copied the Aussie language, there were no recent hits for “massive sea creature.” Testers had to think creatively about how to get to the info they knew was there, and yet it was a semantic leap. One search tester actually cried as she refused to give up, she was so determined to find the result in any of the live web systems we were testing. We begged her to stop; it was painful. Good discovery could have helped.

Another key element of discovery and live web search is getting structured data, because spidering, which Google uses to get data from the web for it’s regular retrospective web search, makes understanding time with a published work more difficult. It’s hard to work with time if you only know for sure when you spidered the page. Twitter on the other hand has structured data because everything is published in their silo so the sites they provide their complete stream to get it in a structured format. They know the time of each tweet. Not to mention the data is available through API’s. This is the most efficient way to draw out meaning for search because you know for sure about the context of each piece of data, with time as one of the pivots, for search and discovery.

You also need to get the data model right for the backend search data base, in order to get meaning and link metrics. And you need to understand the different corpuses of data to know what things mean to users (not engineers), and figure out the spam and bad actor problems. There is the original context the data had and there is the UI which is so difficult when trying to make time understandable for many users. In fact some think that communicating the time element to regular users is so hard that making time focused search is really an “advanced search” problem.

If designed poorly, the system can contribute to the unnatural production of skewed data by users. If the system involves some sort of filter for authority or popularity, they are subject to power law effects (Technorati calls their metric “authority” but inbound link counts from blogs are not authority, they’re just a measure of popularity). What’s a power law effect? It’s when a system drives activity to reinforce unnaturally the behavior that caused something to be there in the first place. For example, if one of the metrics of a filter counts the number of people clicking on a top search, then the more clicks, the longer the item will stay at the top of the list of searches, even if naturally it would have fallen off the list earlier. Conversely if a metric for a filter involves a spontaneous act, driven by imagination, like writing a tweet, then exposing those items at the top of the filter might be less likely to drive up activity. However, if you show the results to the users, upon seeing a popular topic, they might begin tweeting about that topic without having thought of it before seeing the popular topic. In other words, by revealing the metrics you focus on, you can push users to change their behavior. By driving behavior, power-law distributions keep things with some power at the top because they are at the top or can drive them higher. It becomes a loop. And because no distinction is made between the quality or strength of a unit or what that unit might mean to a group of users in a topic area, straight number counts just aren’t very smart.

For example, if we made a system that counted Om Malik’s inbound links and called it authority, no matter the topic, I think Om would agree that even he wouldn’t have great authority and insight on the subjects of say, modern dance or metal working, if he happened to mention those words in a blog post. But on broadband issues, he is most definitely an authority. But Technorati, OneRiot, and other services that take a metric count and apply it for all topics, all circumstances, all search result matches, without context, randomize the quality of the information the user sees. They may provide a filter across the whole web, but they don’t give us any real help in judging what is useful or not. It’s why topic communities are helpful, and once you find a good editorial filter, driven by the human touch, you glom onto it for dear life because it’s such a time and energy saver.

I’m under no illusions that we’re remotely close to solving Live Web or Real Time search or even recent search. We are not. Nor are we near solving discovery. But I hope we will. Sooner rather than later. Because I need it now. The opportunity is huge. It means really building algorithmically the editorial filters we have today in the form of people, while balancing the mobs’ activities. Solve that and the prize will be big.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

If you saw this text on a webpage, how would you figure out what it means?

Если вы читаете этот текст, вы, вероятно, уже говорите по-русски. Однако миллионы людей не знают русского и не могут прочитать миллионы русскоязычных веб-страниц.*

You would likely need to translate manually via our language tools or in Toolbar. Today we're excited to announce that translations will be even easier with the newest release of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. We have been working with the Translate team to make translations a faster and more integrated part of your browsing experience.

The Translate feature automatically detects if the language of a webpage you're on is different from your default language setting and allows you to translate it. With one click, you can now instantly translate the page and all of its text will appear in the new language.


Language detection happens only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google until you choose to translate a page. You can find more details about how the feature works in our help center.

If you go to another page in the same language, you will continue to see translations rather than have to translate one page at a time. And if the page has dynamic content, like Google Reader, you will get translations in real-time. Finally, if you frequently translate pages in the same language, Toolbar will let you translate that language automatically without any extra clicks in the future.

The new Translate feature is available in all international versions of Toolbar, including English, and the translation service supports 41 different languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Download Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer to try it out for yourself. We'll add this feature to Toolbar for Firefox soon, too.

* In case you don't speak Russian, we translated the paragraph above for you using our translation engine:

If you are reading this text, you probably already speak in Russian. However, millions of people do not know Russian and cannot read the millions of Russian-language webpages.

Posted by Jerry Tang and Dick Sites, Software Engineers

Bet you didn’t see this one coming. Back in 2007 we wrote about a service called Dial Directions which lets you call a special phone number and verbally ask for directions, which are immediately sent to you via SMS. Today comes news that the company has been acquired by Sakhr Software, a development house specializing in Arabic natural language processing (NLP). And with their powers combined, they’re building a real-time voice translation service that will allow users to translate phrases from their mobile phones on the fly.

It’s a better fit than it sounds. Dial Directions has spent the last few years building mobile applications (it has an app for the iPhone on the App Store), and has also built out the technology required to efficently transfer voice input to servers, where it can then be processed (this server-side processing is also used by Google Voice Search and a number of other apps). Once it makes it to the cloud, this speech will be routed through Sakhr’s software, which is capable of translating English to Arabic and vice-versa. Translated audio and text are then sent back to the mobile phone, all within a matter of seconds.

The companies have jointly produced a beta version of the application for the iPhone and BlackBerry, which you can see in the video below. The application is currently in testing with select enterprise customers, with plans to release a consumer version around the end of the summer.

Sakhr’s customers include the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the technology makes its way out to defense personnel. A Dial Directions spokesperson says that most translation devices in the field abroad rely on a set library of phrases, and says that the new Sakhr translation software should be more flexible. That said, it sounds like this will come with one significant drawback — if your phone can’t reach the network, the software won’t work.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Dial Directions intends to keep its service running for now, though it may not be indefinitely.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

SkyGrid, the nifty, free financial news aggregator, is now publishing a stream of news on Twitter, letting users follow breaking business news headlines via the microblogging network.

The news aggregator, which only features stories about publicly traded companies, not only has an comprehensive Twitter feed for news stories, but the site also has Twitter feeds that are broken down by sector. So users can follow SkyGridHealth or SkyGridEnergy for sector-related news. SkyGrid currently has separate Twitter feeds for 8 different industries. SkyGrid says that the Twitter feed may be especially useful to users who want to access SkyGrid on their mobile devices.

Similar to TechMeme and Google News, SkyGrid clusters related news stories based on keyword analysis, what they’re linking to, etc. SkyGrid also tries to determine the sentiment of each article - red for negative, green for positive.

As we wrote in our earlier review of the services, SkyGrid is an incredibly useful tool, especially now that it is free. But the one element that is missing from SkyGrid is coverage of larger private companies, like Facebook. In order to become a serious competitor to popular aggregators like Techmeme (which also has a Twitter firehose), the site will need to expand its range of coverage. But especially for people in the financial services industries who use Twitter as a news source, SkyGrid is on the right track to providing users with real-time valuable financial news.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

It looks like Apple has already started sending out the beta version and SDK for the next iteration of the iPhone OS, 3.1, to developers.

The iPhone 3.0 software was released just about two weeks ago, ahead of the iPhone 3GS launch. By most accounts it’s pretty stable, though some users have been having battery issues. That’s why it’s a bit odd that Apple would iterate up to version 3.1 already, instead of something like 3.0.1, which it tends to do for minor updates and bug fixes. Could we be seeing a larger update to the OS already?

I’m told that there’s nothing much of interest in the release notes to indicate anything major that is new or changed.

Here’s the text of the email being sent from Apple:

iPhone SDK 3.1 beta and iPhone OS 3.1 beta are now posted to the iPhone Dev Center. These versions are for development and testing only and should be installed on devices dedicated to iPhone OS 3.1 beta software development. Please read the iPhone OS Pre-Install Advisory and the iPhone SDK 3.1 beta release notes before downloading and installing.

Update: I’m hearing a few reports that one change is that MMS is turned on by default. Perhaps AT&T is getting closer to turning it on as well in the U.S.

[thanks Michael]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

How do you advertise on a Web-based instant messaging service without interrupting conversations and annoying the hell out of users? Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg thinks he has the answer: “There is a moment of boredom while they are waiting for a response, that is when they click on ads.” He’s observed this based on how people interact with the ads which began appearing on Meebo.com last March. Today, Meebo is creating an ad network across partner sites which use its new Community IM service, which ads a Meebo IM bar at the bottom of participating sites.

Visitors to one of the 85 partner sites which have implemented the Community IM product (including Current TV, DailyStrength, Flixster, and Webs.com) can chat with their IM buddies without leaving the sites. Today, Meebo is introducing new ad units which pop up along the bottom left of the browser, beginning with ads for the Toyota Piou and AT&Ts. For the Toyota ad, a little car icon pops up on the left of the Meebo IM bar, away from all of the chat activity on the bottom right. If you click on the car, a larger ad 900X400 pixel rich ad overlay opens up which can show a video or any number of interactive ads. “When they click we do not take them away from the conversation,” says Sternberg. During the whole time people is watching the ads, they can still chat with their friends through the Meebo IM column on the right.

These ads are similar to VideoEgg’s Twig Ad bar, except they are integrated directly into each site rather than use a frame overlay. But the opt-in nature of both types of ads are part of a general trend of giving consumers control over when and how marketing messages are presented to them.

Meebo says its IM service reaches 50 million people a month and can target ads on age, gender, or location. Sternberg says Meebo is seeing 1 percent clickthrough rates on the ads. But he is not without competitors. AOL is planning to offer its own IM bar to external sites through its Socialthing for Websites service, which presumably will also be connected to its ad network. The exchange with sites is that they get social IM features without having to reinvent the wheel, and they get a share of any IM-based ad revenue as well.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Twitter has just quietly rolled out a set of changes to its user interface on the “Following” and “Followers” sections of its website. These changes will clearly make it easier to manage who you follow as well as take actions, such as @replying someone or direct messaging them, directly from the page.

There are two new views for looking at these areas. “List” is a compact list of the followers, while “Expanded” offers more details including that user’s last tweet and their real name and location. On the Followers page, there is also a button that allows for one-click following of users who already follow you.

What’s interesting about these icons is that they appear to look exactly like icons that Apple uses for OS X — including some of the ones on the iPhone. Could this mean that we’re about to see a revamped mobile version of the Twitter site? Who knows, but it could sure use an overhaul.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Heh, Tom Foremski reads too much into traffic numbers, he notes that my blog’s traffic is down by half recently. Well, duh! If you don’t blog people don’t read.

But my numbers are way up elsewhere.

Who cares where the audience is? I don’t. Now thanks to working on my FriendFeed aggregator you’ll see my words whether I write them on Wordpress, on Tumblr, on Posterous, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Flickr, on Upcoming.org, on Building43, on YouTube, or a number of other places.

I noticed that traffic on blogs was flat. Techmeme’s traffic hasn’t gone up very quickly. FriendFeed, Twitter, and Facebook have. Here’s a chart comparing Techmeme to FriendFeed.com to Scobleizer.com.

So, I went where the traffic is. By the way, most of the people reading my blog this week came from Twitter or FriendFeed.

So is blogging back? Yes, as a way to feed FriendFeed, Twitter, and Facebook.

Is it a hub anymore? No. My blog used to be the center of where you’d find everything I was thinking and doing. That hub has now moved for me to FriendFeed and for most other people to Twitter or Facebook.

By the way, my experiment of trying to stay off Twitter and FriendFeed this week is going fairly well, I’ve only slipped a few times. But there are some things that need longer than 140 characters and there are lots of things that are lame to do on a blog, like saying I’ve gone surfing.

Dave Winer, though, added that he predicted a return to blogging as people discover that it’s nicer to finish a thought that requires more than 140 characters. That I agree with.

By the way, today FriendFeed got nice new Themes. I like the new Helvetica one.

Item. Thomas Hawk praises Cooliris as the coolest new way to see photos on Flickr.

Item. Mashable has list of six cool Twitter visualizations.

Item: Micah Wittman releases translation engine for FriendFeed.

It’s interesting that I’ve been to several conferences lately and one has really stuck out in my mind: 140: The Twitter Conference by the Parnassus Group. Why?

Out of all the conferences and events I’ve been to lately it was the one that had a lot of developers doing things that no one in the mainstream understands are important. I remember the last time I felt like that. 2000-2002. Right during the last downturn. What came out of that period? Oh, all sorts of blog tools and blog networks.

Jason Preston, who helps plan that conference, wrote why so much is happening around Twitter and notes that Facebook will never be the new Twitter because Facebook is “so damn worried about Twitter not because they want to be the hot new thing, but because they can’t let open, platform-level technologies siphon user activity out of their black hole.” I’m trying to get a writeup of all the Twitter services that were featured at the conference. It was quite a few.

Jason, it’s not just Twitter, either. There are rafts of interesting things going on because of open APIs. Have you ever used TripIt? I love TripIt. It uses APIs to hook up to other travel services to find me all sorts of stuff.

Or, since we’re talking about Travel (I’m headed to London on Saturday, so am interested in the t