It was only a matter of time. Over two years after its virtual goods marketplace opened, Facebook has cast away its innocence and started to sell virtual gifts emblazoned with celebrity faces and paraphernalia. Leading the charge is worldwide music star Britney Spears, who now has six gifts prominently appearing in the marketplace.
Britney’s set of gifts was designed in collaboration with Susan Kare, the famed designer responsible for creating the icons on the original Macintosh, as well as many of Facebook’s other virtual gifts. The initial selection includes a schoolgirl outfit, a birthday cake, a multicolored balloon, and a classic shot of Britney’s performance with a boa constrictor. And in case you were worried that these digital masterpieces were somehow counterfeited, fear not: the press release we received says that they were all “signed by Spears herself”. Seriously.
Of course, these will sell like hotcakes to Britney’s legions of fans (she has over 2 million on Facebook alone). And they’ll also likely get a fair bit of use from mischievous young men who will send them to their friends and giggle incessantly. Either way, Britney and Facebook win: each gift costs $2 (most gifts cost half that), and you can be sure Britney is getting a piece of the action.
It’s only a matter of time before we see a bevy of other celebrities sporting their own sets of gifts. And in a way, it’s sort of sad — I’ve always enjoyed virtual gifts because they were charming, featuring things like cupcakes and penguins. Granted, there have certainly been some corporate sponsored gifts (someone gave me Coors Light bottlecap at some point), but even then they were usually hand drawn. The photographs of Britney just look out of place.
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A couple months ago, we wrote about the site Blame Drew’s Cancer, which was hoping to utilize the Twitter phenomenon, and specifically the hashtagging of tweets, to raise both money and awareness for cancer. It has already garnered the support of Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG foundation, and now it has a new big-time player aboard to sponsor some tweets: 23andMe.
The genetic testing startup has agreed to donate $1 for each of the first 500 unique tweets that use the hastags #blamedrewscancer and #23andMe. These tweets will start counting after the site reaches its 10,000 person who has tweeted for the cause, which will be sometime tonight. The money will go towards the LIVESTRONG foundation for cancer research.
23andMe is also donating 5 of its new $99 research kits, to be raffled away to Blame Drew’s Cancer followers, also to benefit the LIVESTRONG foundation. Along with that, 23andMe is donating a kit to the namesake of Blame Drew’s Cancer, Drew Olanoff, to add his results to their Research Revolution project. And soon you’ll be able to buy the $99 kits through the Blame Drew’s Cancer site, with $5 of each sale going to LIVESTRONG, Olanoff tells us.
In addition to all of that, 23andMe has agreed to be the main sponsor of Olanoff’s 24-hour Blame-a-thon happening on 9-9-09, and being streamed live to the web.
This is another example of Twitter being used for charitable purposes. Last week, we wrote about TwitCause, a service that wants to spread the word about various good causes on Twitter — much like Causes does on Facebook and MySpace. BlameDrewsCancer is taking more of a grassroots approach, but it appears to be working.
A few days ago, I sent out a tweet wondering how long it would be until Google Reader added a tweet button to the bottom of each feed item. My guess was that it would be very soon. I was quite right. Today, the Google Reader team has unveiled a bunch of new updates to the product, including, yes, the ability to easily tweet any item.
But that’s hardly all this update contains. You can also now easily send feed items to a number of places including Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, Blogger, and others. To enable any of these, simply go to the “Settings” area of Google Reader and enable the ones you want to use. If the services you want aren’t listed, you can even customize the “Send To” feature to enable sending items just about anywhere.
Another new feature allows you to easily subscribe to feeds owned by people you are contacts with. This is an obvious, but nice addtion, as it makes it easier to locate feeds you may be interested in — assuming of course that you’re actually interested in the people you follow on Google Reader. This feature also includes Twitter updates, so you can easily import all of those and see that person’s tweets through Google Reader if you don’t feel like scanning Twitter all day.
But the best feature of the bunch may be the ability to have more control over the “Mark all as read” functionaltiy. We all use the “Mark all as read” button when we’re too far behind on our feeds to possibly catch up, but now you can just mark items that older than a day, a week, or two weeks as read, saving the newest ones for you to still be able to read. That’s a great idea.
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As the most popular video portal in the world, it comes as little surprise that YouTube is also effectively the second most popular search engine, coming after only Google in overall search queries. With that in mind, it’s a bit surprising that the site hasn’t done a better job at featuring this ridiculously popular functionality — instead of placing the search box at the far left or right side of the screen, as most sites do, YouTube has instead tucked it a bit off center, embedded in its somewhat cluttered masthead. In light of this, YouTube has decided to totally revamp the design of the top of its homepage, and will be rolling out a new version today.
The new version has eliminated most of the clutter and color of the old design, in favor of something that’s unquestionably more Googleish. Before now, navigation buttons like “Home” and “Videos” were likely the first thing people looked at — now, there’s no question that the default action on the site is going to be search. The layout also does a better job categorizing the main features of the site: the left side is now dedicated to finding videos, the right is dedicated to uploading and managing the clips you’ve seen.
It may not sound like a huge deal, but just as very small tweaks on Google can have a major effect, a minor change to YouTube’s design may well change the way people use the site. I won’t be surprised if YouTube sees a marked boost in search queries as a result of the new masthead.
New Masthead
Old Masthead
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There’s been talk the past couple of days that the latest developer build of OS X Snow Leopard, 10A432, has been designated the “Golden Master” version, meaning it’s ready for prime time. Multiple sources are now stating it is. So now the question is: When will it be released?
Amazon put Snow Leopard up for pre-order a few weeks ago with the following note: “Please note: Official release date has not been announced by Apple, though they have indicated this product will be released sometime in September.” September is also the timetable that Apple gave at its WWDC event in early June. But with the GM version already out there, there are whispers that Apple may have beaten that goal. Friday, August 28 is the day Daring Fireball’s John Gruber is hearing, and he has a very good track record of being right about such things.
As we noted last week, OS X 10.5.8 was likely to be the last update before OS X 10.6 dropped. But an August ship date would certainly be a welcomed surprise. That would also mean nearly a full 2 month head start over Windows 7, which is scheduled to ship October 22. August 28 is also just two weeks from this Friday, so if Apple is really going to launch it then, expect some kind of press release in the next few days.
Earlier today, AppleInsider gave some details about the Snow Leopard installation process, which apparently has quite a few differences from the OS X Leopard install.
OS X Snow Leopard is going to sell for only $29.99, as Apple is considering it mostly a performance upgrade over OS X Leopard. But the performance improvements are expected to be significant, and the footprint of the install has been significantly reduced (due mostly to the fact that it’s Intel-only).
FanSnap, the startup that we’ve likened to a Kayak for event ticket searches, has closed a $5.2 million funding round led by Highland Capital Partners. As part of the deal, Richard de Silva of Highland will be joining the company’s board of directors. The new round brings FanSnap’s total funding to over $15.7 million, after a $10 million Series A round from General Catalyst Partners last year.
FanSnap allows users to search dozens of ticket providers at once, including sites like StubHub, eBay, and RazorGator. The site now claims an index of 13,169,532 available tickets to 33,653 different events. The site goes well beyond standard price listings too — instead of simply showing a Craigslist-style list of available tickets, FanSnap offers a visual map showing off exactly where in a stadium each ticket corresponds to. It also shows how valuable each ticket is using using a color key and alerts users to tickets it deems to be the best buys.
For more, check out our full review of the service here.
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Yelp keeps rolling out new iPhone apps with compelling features. In April they released version 2 and added the ability for users to leave reviews on local businesses, a much needed feature since people want to chronicle their experiences as they happen.
Version 3, which should be available soon, adds more useful features. The one that really stands out is “Sales And Offers Near You” which lets users find deals that are physically close to them. Sort by distance (in blocks), price, whether the business is open right then, or by neighborhood. Businesses can add special offers for free on their business page.
Other features include movable maps, and new ways for users to add content. Users can vote on reviews with UFC buttons (useful, funny or cool) and send compliments to reviewers. Users can also now follow Talk conversations via the iPhone.
Too bad none of this stuff is available on the Android. I might actually use it. Oh well, at least I can watch via the video below:
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We’ve already written a half dozen times or so about how the Mac version of Google’s Chrome browser continues to surge towards being fully usable on a daily basis. And today brings another update on that front.
The latest builds of Chromium for Mac have added support for the importing of bookmarks and now features a bookmarks bar by default. This was one of the features that many users had been stating they would need before they started using it full time. Well, now those users can.
There’s also good news on another front: Flash is now much more usable in Chrome for Mac. Previously, we wrote when it started working to play videos on YouTube, but now you can actually pause and jump around those videos just like on any other web browser.
One word of caution is a few times, entering HD mode for YouTube videos caused the Flash plug-in to crash. But, as Google has been touting, the crash did not crash the whole browser, instead I just got a small drop-down notification that to plug-in was shut down. Opening a new tab, re-enabled it.
There is also a slightly new Tab homepage in these latest builds. And there is now the ability restore thumbnails that you have previously removed on this Tab page, which is nice. And while I’m not entirely sure that this is new, you can set the default search engine as well. Though, humorously, Bing is not an option, only Live Search is.
While I’ve been using these Chromium builds on and off for casual browsing, mostly just to test them, I think I’ve hit the point where I’m ready to try using it full-time. I’m simply having a hard time finding things that don’t work on it. Sure, plug-in support isn’t fully baked yet, but as a non-Firefox user, I don’t really use plug-ins anyway. And yes, many of the themes are hideous, but the default one looks pretty nice — though I would like to see nicer-looking folders for bookmarks. The yellow ones remind me of Windows 3.1.
As DownloadSquad noted earlier today, these latest builds of Chromium are labeled as version 4.0+. Might we see an official public launch of Chrome for Mac when the software is ready to hit version 4.0? It’s looking possible, and I’d bet that will be sooner rather than later.
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The Onion strikes again, announcing Google Opt Out today, a product that lets people opt out of Google’s information gathering activities by having their home destroyed and moving to a covered villiage complex at an undisclosed location. As always, they nail it. Video is below.
For some additional time wasting this afternoon, see some of Google’s April Fools jokes mixed in with more Onion stories. One of the links below is actually a real product. Try to guess which one before you click on any.
Mint, the popular personal finance site that won 2007’s TechCrunch40 conference, has closed a new $14 million Series C funding round. Silicon Alley Insider discovered the round in an SEC filing this morning, and we’ve just gotten off the phone with CEO Aaron Patzer, who confirmed the deal and filled us in on the details.
The $14 million round was led by DAG Ventures, and also includes newcomer Founder’s Fund. Existing investors Benchmark Capital, Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital, and Sherpalo Ventures all participated as well. Patzer declined to comment on the company’s valuation, but says that it is “decidedly an up round” and that it was preemptive. Mint hasn’t disclosed its revenues, but Patzer says that they’re up 8x year over year.
Since launching at TechCrunch40 in 2007, Mint has grown to 1.4 million registered users, tracking $175 billion in transactions and $47 billion in assets. The site also reports that it has identified $300 million in potential savings offers for its users. It primarily makes its money by generating leads for financial institutions, but it’s also sitting on a goldmine of user data that it hasn’t even begun to tap into yet.
Because Mint pulls data directly from financial institutions, it knows where people are shopping and how much they’re spending. It can use this anonymized data in aggregate to track performance of entire industries or even individual stores. Up until now Mint hasn’t done anything with its merchant level data, but it’s beginning to open that up to press (see the chart below for a look at how the downturn is affecting grocery stores, which shows high end stores like Whole Foods and Bristol Farms taking a big hit in the down economy). This kind of data can be very valuable — don’t be surprised if we start seeing Mint leverage in other, more lucrative ways.
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This is going to end well, and no one will be upset about this. Also, everything I said in that last sentence is probably wrong. When Debian developer Joey Hess started tinkering with webOS, he noticed that it was sending something to Palm once a day. Surely, Palm wasn't sending anything too potentially incriminating without making it blatantly obvious to the user, right? Wrong. Update: Updated with Palm's statement on the matter.
If it wasn’t bad enough that Facebook bought FriendFeed on Monday and turned on real-time search to better compete against Twitter in the Stream Wars, and is playing around with a lite version that resembles Twitter even more, now Twitter really has something to worry about. Facebook is growing faster than Twitter in the U.S., even though it is more than four times larger.
In the month of July, according to the latest estimates from comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the U.S., which was 14 percent higher than in June, 2009. Twitter, in contrast, only saw 21.2 million unique U.S. visitors to its Website, a 6 percent rise compared to the month before. In absolute terms, Facebook added about ten million new visitors in the month of July versus roughly one million new visitors for Twitter.
At 87.7 million uniques, Facebook moves from the sixth largest Web media property in the U.S. to the fifth, passing the combined sites of Fox Interactive Media (80.9 million uniques) and coming within striking range of AOL (104.8 million). That is just in the U.S. Facebook is already the fourth largest site in the world (and Twitter is doing better worldwide as well, with a total of 44.5 million unique visitors in June).
Note that these estimates are only for Twitter.com and do not include mobile or desktop clients such as Tweetdeck, Seesmic, or Tweetie, but it should be a good proxy for overall growth. Even if you double the numbers for Twitter, Facebook still trounced it in July (and the Facebook numbers don’t include activity on other sites other apps via Facebook Connect either).
These are month-over-month comparisons. On an annual basis, Twitter is still growing its audience much faster (2,614 percent ) than Facebook (124 percent) because it is coming off such a smaller initial base of users and this was the year it entered hypergrowth. But that hypergrowth seems to have slowed since the end of April, at least in the U.S. Between April and July, Facebook grew 30 percent in unique U.S. visitors, while Twitter only grew 25 percent, so it is more than just a one-month aberration.
So what happened in June to accelerate Facebook’s growth? I don’t think it was the vanity URLs. Rather, on June 24, Facebook turned on the “Everyone Button.” Facebook members who didn’t have public profiles (i.e. most people) all of a sudden had the option to share items in their stream with everyone else on Facebook, and they could decide to do this on an item-by-item basis.
The more items that are shared publicly, the more people who can see them. I believe this is what happened (and have asked Facebook for confirmation). Not only did this drive more people to Facebook, but it also increased the time spent on the site by a whopping 36 percent in June versus July. Twitter saw its time on site grow 26 percent in the same period, although in the chart comparing the two below you can hardly tell because Facebook users spent an estimated total of 15.8 billion minutes compared to 4.75 million minutes for Twitter. What that tells me is that the stream becomes more engaging the more public it becomes.
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Socialcast, the realtime collaboration software platform, today announced the release of its official developer API after weeks of beta-testing. Essentially, Socialcast lets employees in companies communicate via activity streams, create groups, and share links, file, and knowledge across the enterprise.
With the new Socialcast API, both internal IT folks or outside developers can extend the product with new functionality. And companies who are partners can expose their Socialcast activity streams to each other for cross-enterprise collaboration. Rather than just confining the stream to one organization, this would make it more like a true enterprise version of Twitter, or the recently acquired FriendFeed, where you may follow colleagues inside and outside your company. The API allows developers to build native clients or internal applications, accessing the Socialcast activity stream. To get access to the Socialcast API, you’ll have to already have an account, and from there, you’ll find all the information.
Socialcast Founder and CEO Timothy Young mentioned that Socialcast aims to be a platform, and not a tool like Yammer, or Twitter. Socialcast currently has over 7,000 companies, both free and paid accounts. When asked about the security of the API and Socialcast platform, Young acknowledged that security is a big concern and that Socialcast takes security very seriously with SSL encryption.
Socialcast has raised a total of $1.4 million from True Ventures and is based in the South Park area in San Francisco, Calif.
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Do you guys remember my belt buckle? It's cool, right? What could be cooler than a QR code belt buckle? How about a silver brooch that displays a topographical map? I know, right?! At almost 300 euros the Earth Brooch imposes a pretty hefty premium for a one-of-a-kind gift, but you've got to admit that it is pretty cool.
Apple’s App Store policies have been under fire for months now. It looks like tensions are starting to thaw following a couple of emails from Apple Senior VP Phil Schiller to some vocal bloggers. But it seemed a bit odd that it was Schiller doing this after months of basically nothing on the issues from Apple’s PR team. But today brings a good sign: There is an App Store PR team, and they’re starting to communicate.
Now, to be clear, the email we’ve received has nothing to do with any App Store issues, and is instead just a pretty standard PR email promoting some iPhone/iPod touch apps for the upcoming NFL season. But the key here is that it came from someone in “App Store Public Relations”.
From what I’ve heard, the company fairly recently broke the iPhone PR team in two, with one side focusing on the hardware, and the other on the App Store, and this would seem to be proof of that. In the past, I’ve received similar emails, but they were always from the more general iPhone PR or Apple PR teams.
Of course, this doesn’t ensure that the App Store PR team will be any more responsive to inquiries about problems with the store, but it looks like it could be another positive step in the direction of more communication, which is good.
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iGoogle, a personalized homepage that competes with My Yahoo, My MSN, My AOL, Netvibes and others, will release 19 new in-house and third party iGoogle widgets today that add new social and sharing features to users of the service. An overview of the service is in the video below, and a tour of some of the features and gadgets is here.
In an interview yesterday, Google VP Marissa Mayer and iGoogle Product Manager Rose Yao said they hope to engage users with social games and sharing with friends. We then played a quick game of Scrabble on iGoogle.
We saw some early tests of social gadgets from Google earlier this year.
This is the latest enhancement to iGoogle, which Google launched in 2005 and has been pushing as an alternative home page by periodically promoting it on Google.com. According to the latest Comscore stats, they still trail Yahoo’s 44 million monthly visitors - iGoogle is second with 25 million monthly visitors, followed by My MSN with 4.6 million and Netvibes (which has tried its own social platform) with 1.3 million. Things haven’t changed all that much from 18 months ago. There are a total of 60,000 or so gadgets available on iGoogle today.
The available Gadgets: 3rd party gadgets Access Hollywood - Celebs by Access Hollywood Chess.com - Chess EA - SCRABBLE Flixster - Flixster Movies GoComics - GoComics Huffington Post - The Huffington Post Labpixies - Flood-It! Labpixies - To-do Labpixies - Trivia NPR - NPR News, Music, Daily Quiz NYT - NY Times Crossword Playfish - WHO HAS THE BIGGEST BRAIN? Tarot.com - Today’s Horoscope
Google gadgets Captions Social Photos Tile Game Timeline YouTube
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As Erick pointed out yesterday, IPO registrations are up. But even if all of these companies go out, does this mean VCs are out of the no liquidity woods? Hardly.
Sure everyone brings up LinkedIn and Facebook as the potentially huge homerun IPOs in the wings, but a lot of the companies queuing up look more like OpenTable.
The reservation Web site deserves props for making it out in a tricky time— the weekend it was picking its bankers one declared bankruptcy and another sold itself to a competitor. And yes, the price has impressively stayed above the $20 opening. But take a closer look at the deal: Only three million shares were floated to the public. No wonder the price has held– hardly anyone is in the stock. With a whopping 18 million still owned by insiders and investors, OpenTable looks more like a private company that just did another round of funding than a public company.
Given that insiders of other private companies are increasingly cashing out shares in later private funding rounds, is there practically a lot of difference returns-wise between a heady Series E or a small IPO with such a tiny float?
OpenTable’s real test will be what happens once insiders start selling to get liquidity. CEO Jeff Jordan addressed that in his first post-quiet period interview, shot last week for my Yahoo show, TechTicker. (Clip below, around the seven minute mark.)
Jordan also notes at the two minute mark in this clip that since OpenTable priced, he's been getting a flood of calls from Valley CEOs who are thinking about filing, so expect the mini-registration boom to continue. Actual returns for the beleaguered asset class, however, will be a different story.
So, apparently, Apple's Phil Schiller is starting to talk about Apple's missteps. After months of silence, one of Apple's top executives (and possibly the most public-facing one next to Jobs) has started to reach out to the tech community to help explain Apple's numerous, absurdly embarrassingblunders. Some may be satisfied with Schiller slowly sending private e-mails out to various developers and bloggers. Not me. I want answers. I think many of us do. And not just about specific issues like the banning of one small iPhone app (Ninjawords). Not just one private e-mail to one developer which the rest of us can't even read. That's helpful, granted. And I'm stoked that Schiller was willing to take out the time. But while he's at it, I think the general public of Apple products users would love to know a lot more.
Microsoft and Nokia announced a broad ranging alliance this morning which will bring Microsoft Office and other productivity software to a Nokia phones. The agreement marks “the first time Microsoft will make Office for non windows mobile phones,” says Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop. There are 200 million Nokia smart phones out there, and Microsoft wants its software on all of them eventually.
But initially, the alliance is targeting enterprise customers and will be integrated into Nokia’s E Series business phones. The Microsoft software and features that will be ported to Nokia phones include:
The ability to view, edit, create and share Office documents on more devices in more places with mobile-optimized versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft OneNote
Enterprise instant messaging and presence, and optimized conferencing and collaboration experience with Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile
Mobile access to intranet and extranet portals built on Microsoft SharePoint Server
Enterprise device management with Microsoft System Center
But the alliance aims to go “way beyond email and Office,” says Nokia's Executive Vice President for Devices Kai Öistämö. Microsoft and Nokia are focusing on communication and productivity apps (Office, IM, Sharepoint, OneNote), but the alliance opens up those 200 million Nokia smart phones to future Mobile apps from Microsoft, perhaps including Mesh (which will sync all apps across all devices).
The alliance is an acknowledgment that Windows Mobile is not going to take over the world, and smartly extends the reach of Microsoft’s mobile apps to a huge new audience of mobile professionals. It also positions Microsoft and Nokia in an unholy alliance against the encroachments of the more modern iPhone and Android smart phones. It allows Microsoft to deeply integrate its mobile apps into Nokia phones in a way that might make them more appealing to corporate customers.
“This is not a browser discussion,” says Elop. These mobile applications will create “really rich experiences that bring that device to life.” The apps will start with email and productivity, but will be designed to drive collaboration through instant messaging, presence management, and call control. The alliance for now covers only Nokia phones with the Symbian operating system (not its newer Maemo phones), which lends to its dinosaur feel. It also suggests that Nokia has no intention of ditching Symbian any time soon.
But why do you need an “alliance” to create apps for a mobile computer/phone? Microsoft doesn’t need an alliance to create Office apps for Android or the iPhone because they are (relatively) open mobile platforms, although it hasn’t yet for strategic reasons. What this alliance highlights more than anything else is Symbian’s creaking age. And it’s too little, too late. Mobile Office can’t stave off Symbian inevitable decline.
Boxee, the media center software startup, has won a lot of fans with its open approach to streaming content. And as a result it has won some more money, to the tune of a $6 million second round, led by Boston’s General Catalyst Partners. The new money will be used for growth: Both expanding the team and expanding the service’s reach in the market, we’re told.
But why now? After all, Boxee raised its first round of funding just 8 months ago, a $4 million round with Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital investing. “We’ve seen a lot of momentum over the past couple of months. It seemed like it made sense to go ahead [with a new round],” Boxee’s new head of marketing Andrew Kippen tells us.
Kippen, who previously worked with Boxee in his role at Stage Two Consulting, is the first of many hires Boxee hopes to make over the next couple of months, CEO Avner Ronen says. When it closed its Series A round in November, Boxee was just 11 people, the goal is to ramp up to 20 as soon as possible. This includes engineers but also a strong business team to work on getting Boxee into more devices.
At the same time, Boxee is working hard to get the beta version of its software out the door (it’s still currently in Alpha). Back in June, it previewed that release while also unleashing a huge update to its service which finally included support for Windows. With that important support, the service now has over 600,000 users, we’re told.
General Catalyst Partners accounted for $4 million of this second round, with previous investors Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital each throwing in another $1 million as well. On top of the investment, General Catalyst’s Neil Sequeira is also joining Boxee’s board. Also on the board is Union Square’s Fred Wilson and Spark’s Bijan Sabet.
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Go ahead and clean up the coffee you just spit all over your keyboard. We'll wait. Back? OK. A judge and Texas as ruled that Microsoft Word's XML systems violate patents by Toronoto-based i4i Inc. Word uses XML in reading and writing XML, DOCX, and DOCM files. The lawsuit alleges that MS violated i4i's 1998 XML patent #5,787,449. The injunction will go into effect in 60 days and prevent Microsoft from selling or demonstrating Microsoft Word. MS will have to pay i4i about $290 million in damages.
So, we’ve already explained why the newly revealed “Facebook Lite” at the very least wasn’t conceived to be a “Twitter-killer,” but it does look interesting. The service, which is currently being tested in India (and sadly, not in the U.S. despite the messages sent out last night), has an extremely clean look and feel to it — one that is reminiscent of the old days of Facebook, when its simplified look drew users away from the cluttered MySpace. Of course now, Facebook is itself cluttered with settings, applications and toolbars. So to many, this Facebook Lite design would be welcome.
Check it out in the images below we received from a user, Azhar Chougle, testing it in India. He notes that the third image (the one showing something broken) occurs when you try to go to the Events and Settings, which apparently aren’t ready for Facebook Lite yet. You’ll also notice that “Events” is now in the top nav bar, something which is not the case on the current version of Facebook.
Perhaps most importantly, Chougle notes, “And let me tell you it’s so much damn faster than the normal Facebook.” Though neither he nor us understand what is up with the “Send us Your Feedback” guy in picture number 2 (it’s actually Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s VP of Growth, Mobile and International). The final picture is my own, significantly more cluttered current Facebook homepage.
“I suspect the femtocell has missed its chance,” wrote Charles Arthur in the Guardian recently. Not so fast. It seems the existing shareholders of femtocell manufacturer Ubiquisys beg to differ, because they’ve just pumped a further $11m into the company.
The money will fund a range of consumer and enterprise products, to be deployed globally over the coming year. Ubiquisys’ investors include Accel, Atlas Venture, Google and the T-Mobile Venture Fund.
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GigLocator, a live music aggregator, launches today in open beta. It promises to offer a large collection of gig listings worldwide, sourced from major ticket providers and a number of independents too. It enables users of keep track of their favourite artists and venues while offering a discovery mechanism to help you find more gigs you might like.
It has a smart search engine which knows if you’re looking for artists, venues and so on. Enter multiple Last.fm, Pandora or iLike usernames and the site will keep you informed about your favourite artists’ upcoming tour dates. You can then share the dates with friends via your social network of choice.
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So, the web pretty much exploded tonight over the appearance of something called “Facebook Lite,” a new service that’s apparently being beta tested by Facebook. But users who received the message that they were invited to test it out, were frustrated when the link didn’t work. There’s a reason for that: It was a mistake to roll the test out to most of these users tonight, Facebook has confirmed to us.
But, with the cat out of the bag, everyone is now rushing to reach some conclusions about what Facebook Lite actually is. Most of these assumptions revolve around Twitter and FriendFeed. The reasons for this should be obvious: First, Facebook and Twitter seem to have a nice rivalry going on to see who is the hottest social property. Second, Facebook just bought FriendFeed for $50 million, so it would seem possible that they want to develop a service just like that one. And third, the screenshot of Facebook Lite, which we found earlier, makes it look a lot like Twitter and FriendFeed.
But in reality, Facebook Lite has nothing to do with Twitter or FriendFeed — at least, not right now. Instead, it was designed to be used in parts of the world where broadband speeds vary and can be expensive, we’re being told by Facebook. Given that the initial testing of it has taken place in India over the past several days, this makes sense.
Think about how slow Facebook is to load at times on some broadband connections here in the U.S., and just imagine what that much be like on connections that are several times slower. And then also consider that all of Facebook’s datacenters are here in the U.S. So for the data to get around the world, it creates an even longer natural load time. So Facebook is stripping the site back and allowing Facebook Lite to be a site where new users can quickly write on friend’s walls, send messages and build their social network. The basics.
As we said, it’s testing in India right now, but the plan is for Facebook Lite to hit places like Russia and China as well, we’re hearing.
All that being said, it is entirely possible that the service could find its way to the rest of the world as an option for those who maybe don’t want all the bells and whistles that Facebook provides, and instead just want speed. Facebook didn’t have anything to say on that matter, and specifically not the U.S., but it seems reasonable. After all, MySpace has a “lite” version too.
But don’t buy into the hype that we’re already starting to hear that Facebook Lite is a “Twitter-killer” — because that’s not its intention at all right now.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
LinkedIn tonight celebrated their 45 millionth user sign up, according to LinkedIn’s Marketing Project Manager Florina Xhabija’s Twitter message.
According to comScore, LinkedIn had 16 million worldwide monthly unique visitors and 331 million page views in June 2009, up from 7.7 million and 114 million a year ago, respectively.
The company was valued at around $1 billion in its last (2008) round of financing, and says they’ve been profitable for 2+ years.
LinkedIn has gone through numerous changes at the CEO role with founder Reid Hoffmanchanging the guard once again in June of this year after yet another change in December of 2008.
The company is a strong 2010 IPO candidate. Hoffman told us earlier this year "we can go public any time we want to.”
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
It looks like Facebook has tonight turned on a feature called “Facebook Lite” for some users to test out. We’re getting bombarded by tips about it, and some of us are seeing it as well. Unfortunately, it appears that it may not be fully ready for prime time yet, but we have more information and what looks to be a screenshot below, so keep reading.
[Update: See Facebook's response at the bottom, the test was mistakenly rolled out to more users than intended tonight.]
So what is it? Well, it looks to be exactly what it says it is, a lighter version of Facebook. The beta tester message reads:
We are building a faster, simpler version of Facebook that we call Facebook Lite. It’s not finished yet and we have plenty of kinks to work out, but we would love to get your feedback on what we have built so far.
The URL for the feature is http://lite.facebook.com. So far, users are reporting not seeing much different about the site, if anything.
Update: Okay, while it seems that most of the users who are getting this message now are not seeing much different, earlier this week, it looks like a very select few may have gotten a sneak peak at Facebook Lite. According to their tweets on it, it appears to be a more Twitter-like. One user notes that it, “looks like a simplified version of twitter with comments enabled. On 2nd thought, it looks like simplified FriendFeed.”
Update 2: We just found a screenshot of what this apparently looks like. Again, this was taken a few days ago.
Update 3: FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit shared our story on FriendFeed, so naturally I asked if he knew about this beforehand. “Someone mentioned it earlier today. It sounds very promising,” he says.
Update 4: And here’s Facebook’s official response:
We are currently testing a simplified alternative to Facebook.com that loads a specific set of features quickly and efficiently. Similar to the Facebook experience you get on your mobile phones, Facebook "Lite" is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept Friend requests, write on people's Walls, and look at photos and Status updates. We are currently testing Facebook Lite in countries where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience.
This evening, the test was temporarily exposed to a larger set of users by mistake. We have not opened up access to lite.facebook.com to all users at this time. People who are not part of the test and are trying to access "Lite" will be directed to Facebook.com as usual.
Whoops, looks like someone at Facebook jumped the gun on this new feature. Too bad, looks like most of us will have to wait awhile to try it out.
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