A new lawsuit filed against Facebook in the Superior Court of California in Orange County is one of the more entertaining documents we’ve had the pleasure of reading recently. A lot of lawsuits against Facebook are fairly serious, but this one certainly isn’t — we haven’t seen litigation this amusing since the Attorney General of South Carolina set his sights on Craigslist to kick-start his campaign for governor.
Plaintiffs in the case appear to have engaged in run of the mill socializing on Facebook: sharing photos, writing status updates and similar things. They’re then complaining that privacy, copyright and other rights are violated as people look at the photos, read the updates, etc. It’s sort of like jumping into a pool and then complaining that you’re wet.
The lawsuit complains about or at least insidiously describes pretty much every single part of Facebook, from the nefarious “wall” to a potentially incriminating “Data Analyst” job listing the company posted in 2007. Oh, and the best part? The AP and WSJ just reported the case straight, without the slightest suggestion that the Plaintiffs might be a little off. We’ve embedded the full, 40 page suit below.
So what are the Plantiffs accusing Facebook of? The suit alleges that that Facebook is at its core a “data mining company.. [that] seeks to open and/or disseminate private information to third parties for commercial purposes and economic benefit” and that “Facebook has created a business model and apparatus designed to harvest as much personal and private information as possible in easiest, quickest, and most innocuous-looking manner possible.” Cue the ominous music. It gets better.
The complaints from the individual Plaintiffs involve everything from swine flu to “accomplished actresses”. We’ve excerpted a couple of them below.
“Plaintiff Xavier O. is an 11-year-old minor residing with his parents in Orange County, California. Plaintiff Xavier O. has a Facebook account that was opened without the knowledge or consent of his parent or guardian. Plaintiff Xavier O. has uploaded personal information, videos and photographs, including swimming and/or partially clothed photographs of children ages 5 to 11. On or about August 8, 2009, Plaintiff Xavier O. posted “Xavier O. has swine flu… Please pray for me… God Bless.” Upon learning of the Facebook account and the posting of an uncertain medical condition, Plaintiff Xavier O’s parents removed the medical condition posting from Facebook. Xavier O. and his parents have been unable to learn where the minor’s medical information may have been stored, disseminated or sold by Facebook.”
Plaintiff Elvina Beck is an accomplished actress and model residing in Los Angeles, California. Plaintiff Beck has multiple commercial representatives/agents for print, commercial and theatrical work. Plaintiff Beck’s name, likeness and photos are highly valuable commercial assets. Plaintiff Beck appears in national print advertisements, commercials and films, and she is compensated for such work. Beck’s filmography includes Love Hurts, Privileged, CSI: New York, and ESPN 25. Plaintiff Beck’s digital images have been disseminated by Facebook without her consent, knowledge, or compensation.
Another Plantiff is apparently objecting to the fact that Facebook has changed over the years from a college-only social network to a much broader one, and is unhappy with the way the site’s Terms of Service were modified over the years. Except it’s quite common for sites to change their ToS without giving notice. There goes that idea.
In short, the Plantiffs are complaining about many of the very mechanisms that make Facebook a social network. They’re also complaining about issues that have been addressed before — some of the concerns over content ownership issues are pretty explicitly spelled out in the site’s Terms, which state “You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how we share your content through your privacy and application settings.” There may be some nuggets of validity hidden in here, but you’re going to have to look hard to find them.
Facebook has given us the following brief response regarding the suit:
We see no merit to this suit and we plan to fight it.
As much as we'd like the Tapplet, or iPad, to make its debut next month, it's looking like that won't be the case — as we've heard. "Sources close to the company" say that the event will be on September 9th and will most assuredly not be Tablet-related. Instead, like last year's September announcement, it'll be new iPods and possibly that fancy new iTunes we've been hearing about. While the inclusion of yet more services into Apple's increasingly bloated all-purpose media player may be seen as excessive, you can always count on Apple to at least sell it.
As promised, Google has just launched bookmark syncing for users on the dev channel of its Chrome web browser. This allows you to keep your browser bookmarks in sync no matter which of your computers you are using.
Syncing has been a standard feature of Apple’s Safari browser for some months now, but you need to have MobileMe for it to work. And Firefox users could download add-ons like Xmarks (previously called Foxmarks) to get the functionality, but with Chrome it will be built-in, and most importantly, unlike MobileMe, free. Google notes that the bookmarks are stored on users’ Google account alongside Google Docs and sync via XMPP.
To get the feature working, you apparently have to launch the dev version of Chrome with the “–enable-sync command-line flag”. If you understand what that means, you’re good to go. If not, you’ll probably want to wait for the feature to hit the regular release channel, something that will probably happen relatively soon.
Bookmark management appears to have been temporarily disabled on the latest versions of Chromium for Mac, after they were first turned on last week. When they come back, hopefully this syncing will work for Macs as well. To stay up-to-date on the latest versions of Chromium for Mac, check out our updater tool.
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Just in from a source involved with the transaction - the $100 million Facebook Employee share buyback has been oversubscribed (its not clear by how much), and ex-employees are being cut back significantly.
The program was announced on July 13. Up to $100 million in employee common stock was to be purchased by Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies, which also funded a separate $200 million venture investment in May 2009. Employees, ex-employees and other common stockholders could participate, and had to indicate their intention to sell by early August.
People were limited to selling up to the lesser of 25% of their total holdings or $1 million. Shares are being purchased based on a $6.5 billion valuation.
Employees were given first dibs on stock sales, we’ve confirmed. Ex-employees were notified up front that they’d be able to sell only after current employees. And it turns out it made a difference - the ex-employees were cut back to “a small fraction” of the original amount requested. Some executives and larger shareholders may be able to sell additional stock via a separate arrangement, says our source.
Facebook declined to comment on this post.
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What were you doing in 1999? Maybe you were following the Kosovo War. Maybe you were starting to use Napster. Maybe you were entering your senior year of high school (I was). Or maybe you started blogging. After all, on August 23, 1999, Pyra Labs launched its Blogger product, which would go on to become the biggest blogging platform in the world.
Yes, on Sunday, Blogger turns 10 years old. And to celebrate, the Blogger team (which is now a part of Google following a 2003 acquisition) is promising a bunch of gifts to users in the form of new features. Without naming anything specifically, Blogger points to this list as a good reference point for some of what they’ll be rolling out over the next few weeks. Of note on that list are a better commenting system and WordPress-style pages (About page, etc).
It’s worth noting that Blogger’s roots are deeply tied to the new hot web platform of choice: Twitter. Pyra Labs was co-founded by Evan Williams, who is now the CEO (and co-founder) of Twitter. Also a part of Pyra Labs were Jason Goldman who now runs product development for Twitter, and Jason Shellen who now runs Thing Labs, the makers of Brizzly, a much buzzed-about new Twitter client.
Biz Stone, another Twitter co-founder, joined the Blogger team at Google before leaving with Williams in 2004 to start Obvious Corp. which would eventually birth and turn into Twitter. (An interesting side note is that Williams’ Pyra co-founder Meg Hourihan, eventually married Jason Kottke, who is best known as being one of the web’s most popular bloggers.)
These days, while the web is abuzz over Twitter, no one really talks much about Blogger despite millions of people using it everyday. The fact is that as a platform, it has fallen behind the more nimble blogging platforms like WordPress and Tumblr in recent years. Still, in terms of straight up simplicity in setting up a blog, it’s easy to see why Blogger is still popular among users (and, unfortunately, spammers).
Another month, another report that Bing is chiming slightly louder. Analytics firm comScore has just released its latest figures on search market share, and once again Microsoft’s search engine has managed to grow while its competitors have seen modest losses.
Bing launched to the public on May 31, when Microsoft held 8.0% search marketshare. Over the course of June and July, the site has gained nearly a full percentage point — it’s up to 8.9%, and growth was actually higher for July than for June, when the site was getting all of its launch attention. Of course, Bing’s marketshare still pales in comparison to Google’s dominant 64.7%, but at least Microsoft is heading in the right direction.
Once again, it looks like Bing’s gain comes at Yahoo’s expense, at least to some extent. Since May, Yahoo has dropped from 20.1% to 19.3%. Google has dropped a more modest .3%, from 65% to 64.7%. We saw a similar pattern last month, when we pointed out that Yahoo was losing marketshare both from below (Bing) and above (Google).
Since then though, the landscape has changed dramatically: Yahoo search will soon be powered by Bing. When the Yahoo/Microsoft search deal was announced Yahoo EVP Hillary Schneider discounted the impact of this market share erosion, stating, “seeing Bing as a live experience was a nice assurance but did not change our rationale or timing.” But it’s hard to believe that Bing’s strong start didn’t have an impact on the deal.
Once that deal comes to fruition Bing will have to face the real test: can it continue to take market share away from Google, or will it simply continue to eat away at itself as users move from Yahoo’s portal to the Bing homepage?
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Let’s not beat around the bush: The G1 was not a very good phone. That’s not to say Android isn’t a good mobile OS — it is, it’s just that the initial hardware built to run the OS didn’t do it justice. It was poorly designed and had a fairly cheap feel. And now, it appears that the G1 may already be on its last legs as Android engineers aren’t sure if the phone will be able to handle the upcoming updates to the Android OS.
While nothing is set in stone yet, it’s looking pretty grim. The latest “Cupcake” Android update apparently pushed the G1’s memory to the limit. And subsequent updates should only require more. But what’s crazy about this is that the G1 was launched just 10 months ago. Certainly, the devices will keep working with the current flavor of Android, but just imagine the pain early adopters must feel if their device is already a dinosaur that they can’t upgrade, not yet a year into its release.
I’ve used the G1 pretty extensively, having obtained a demo unit from Google shortly after its launch. From just about day 1, I didn’t like it. The obvious comparison was to the iPhone, but it was a hard one to make since the device’s were so different. The G1 had a physical keyboard, no multi-touch support, and could run applications in the background to name a few things. The better comparison is to the so-called “G2″ also known as the “Google Ion” or the myTouch 3G. That device, also built by HTC, is similar to the G1 but improves on it in just about every way. It’s faster, thinner (thanks to the removal of the awful keyboard), has better battery life, and just feels nicer.
The myTouch is actually the device Mike switched to after rejecting the iPhone, and as I hear from him every time I see him, he loves it. I don’t hear anyone say that about the G1. Sure, there are plenty of people who use it, and some like it, but I think all would concede that there are better phones out there. And if they won’t yet, when a new Android update comes out that the G1 can’t handle, I’m sure they will.
So big deal, a phone that a few hundred thousand people use is passing away before its time, right? Well the issue behind it is a potentially more larger one. The G1 going out of date speaks to a problem the Android platform has: Its open nature and the desire to support as many phones as possible is always going to leave some devices out in the cold.
Of course, that is hardly an Android-only problem, it’s a problem with just about every platform besides the iPhone. While the original iPhone has been out for over 2 years now, it was still able to be upgraded to the latest iPhone firmware, 3.0, this year. Granted, some of the features were disabled because the hardware has evolved, but it can still do the majority of things that the other iPhones can do.
With so many different devices, and many more said to be coming by the end of this year, the Android platform will continue to get fragmented in a way that is likely to be confusing to consumers. And that doesn’t even speak to the fragmentation of developers developing for phone-specific features of Android devices when more come out.
Of course, there are upsides to this openness, and we should see plenty of applications and features that aren’t available on the relatively-closed iPhone. But it’s a tricky trade-off if consumers are buying a device that they’re not sure will work with all the applications on the platform, and worse, the newest versions of the OS itself.
Really, I just wanted to write a eulogy for the G1. I’m looking forward to some good Android phones in the future, the G1 was not one of them.
As more details emerge about the MySpace-iLike acquisition, all sorts of interesting observations and questions pop up. A few thoughts:
The Facebook Angle
This is by far the most interesting angle to the deal. iLike is the most popular music application on Facebook, and is the de facto Facebook Music app. That company will shortly be owned by MySpace, Facebook’s primary competitor. That puts Facebook in a lose-lose situation. They can let iLike continue to dominate the music scene on Facebook and let MySpace own all that. Or they can ban iLike and lose all credibility with their platform - everyone would know iLike was banned because of the acquisition by MySpace. And it doesn’t have to be an outright ban. Facebook has plenty of subtle ways of trainwrecking an application they don’t like. Keep an eye on this.
Why didn’t Facebook just buy iLike? A matching or slightly better offer than the $20 million MySpace is paying would likely have gotten the deal done. And it may have saved Facebook from an embarrassing situation.
If I were MySpace, I’d focus on getting their free streaming music into the iLike Facebook application as soon as possible. Advertisers will love it.
This deal also shows what a top Facebook app is worth. Most of iLike’s activity comes through Facebook. They have 10 million monthly active users, and 31 million total Facebook installations (iLike has a total of over 50 million registered users). MySpace has valued that and the rest of iLike at $20 million, but has to factor in the possibility that Facebook will derail the application, subtly or overtly. If that risk wasn’t there, my guess is iLike would be worth 2-3x as much.
Why is MySpace and not MySpace Music buying iLike?
We’re hearing two reasons.The first is that MySpace Music, a joint venture with the music labels, isn’t going too well. The venture will lose at least $20 million this year on the back of massive royalty payments to the labels, and when the Google search deal ends next year the financial prospects of MySpace Music may get much, much worse. The last thing MySpace wants to do is put good money after bad and throw more assets into MySpace Music. Plus, the deal would likely have required notice to, if not the approval of, the label partners who own equity in the joint venture.
There’s another reason being talked about by our sources as well, though. iLike isn’t just about music and music recommendations. The platform they’ve built to facilitate artist-to-user publishing and user-to-user recommendations can be used for content beyond music, such as videos and games. Our guess is MySpace intends to integrate iLike’s technology into more than artist pages. So having the assets at MySpace makes sense.
MySpace Now Has Its Own Music Download Deals With Labels.
iLike launched its music download store last week. MySpace Music has streaming rights to music but not download sales rights. Today Amazon powers MySpace Music downloads. I’m sure MySpace is now considering (or already decided to) moving to a direct sales approach via iLike’s deals and software.
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I believe in Twitter. I believe people want to use it and that it is useful to them. I’m less sure of its susceptibility to monetization, but then again, I cover cameras and ramen-bots, not internet business. Still, since I’m coming down to the TechCrunch 50 conference in a few weeks, and will likely be the only person attending who does not use Twitter, I felt I should furnish an explanation. Not that I think it really matters to anyone whether I use it or not, but by striking preemptively, I’ll avoid talking myself hoarse in explaining it repeatedly to those of you I meet. I’m also curious to see if there are any other “abstwainers” (or better yet, “Tweetotallers,” either way I’ve coined a term) in the TechCrunch readership, and if so, what your perspective is.
Now, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been waiting for a chance to express myself on this (which may be why it is so very long (though my parenthetical style of writing shares the blame)), but it seems relevant enough and the timing is right. Please bear in mind that these are my own reasons for not using the service, not reasons for you to stop; I don’t mean to proselytize. I’ll start with my primary assertion: that a tweet is fundamentally valueless.
Tweets have no value
What is a tweet? It is a quantity of data which I believe to be useless, at least in this context. What can be said in 140 characters is either trivial or abridged; in the first case it would be better not to say it at all, and in the second case it would be better to give it the space it deserves. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule: “It’s a boy!” for instance, is both sufficient and worth telling everyone you know (incidentally, congratulations to CrunchGear writer Matt on the new baby), but I think we all know that the bulk of Twitter is not life-changing announcements or granules of compact wit and wisdom. Nor is it meant to be — but intentions aren’t admissible in my court, sir.
To proceed: the “this context” I mentioned above is simply that tweets are broadcast indiscriminately. I think this further devalues them; an otherwise acceptable message (”Brunch at Hi-Spot at 1!”) becomes impersonal and meaningless when it’s sent to so many. Yes, there is @ for specifying another tweet or Twitterer (would that they had called the site something else, this accursed bird-based jargon drives me mad), but that just exacerbates things. I like to think of it this way: Twitter is a bunch of friends sitting around a table, all shouting at the same time — and shouting mundanities at that. The @ function just means you shout somebody’s name before the mundanity. Everyone else still has to listen. Conversation is impossible; every exchange is telegraphic (as is, unfortunately, increasingly true in other media).
But the tweet can have a link in it, of course, which makes it more versatile — except links are subject to the same value reductions as simple text. Tweeting a link is a lot like sending it to your whole address book. If you think everyone you know should see it, it better be worth shouting from the mountaintops. How rare that is! If you like other people finding your content for you, on their schedule, this isn’t a problem, but for me it is. Add in the fact that probably half of tweets are automatically generated, and what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate anything of value.
The natural objection to this is that you choose to follow people, you don’t have it forced upon you. True! I say, then, if someone is so regularly finding content of merit, why don’t they have a blog where the content can be given context, discussion, and perhaps a preview so people aren’t going in blind? I like reading interesting blogs. I don’t want to receive links every time someone find something they think everyone should see. Twitter just adds another layer to the equation — and I don’t like layers.
So there you have it. Every tweet out there is either unnecessary or unnecessarily abbreviated. Why would anyone want to be the owner of such an awkward little package of data?
It’s incomplete
This one might be controversial, but I embrace controversy. I make it uncomfortable. I put my hands in its back pockets. I kiss it on the lips. Twitter, therefore, I say is an incomplete and clumsy service. The halo of Twitter meta-services is indicative (in my opinion) less of the popularity of the service and more of how it falls short of the mark. When it isn’t down, Twitter provides A; people want A, B, and C.
It’s just text, sure, that’s what makes it Twitter — but simplicity isn’t the same as elegance (though the two are often seen together). URL-shortened image hosting services suggest people want to put their images right in the tweet-stream, or whatever you call it. Twitter applications like Tweetdeck (that’s one, right?) suggest that the web service is inadequate. And so on.
One could exaggerate the scope of Twitter’s service to being an alternative communication protocol at a basic level, like email or IM, and say that clients are a natural extension of that — but I think that’s disingenuous and wrong. Wrong because Twitter is meant to be simple, not fundamental. It’s a significant difference. Disingenuous because you know that’s not the case: if it were, Twitter would be better integrated with existing services.
I’m not blaming Twitter for not being what I would have liked it to be — but to jump on a service that looks like a transitional form, so to speak, seems unwise if there is no utility in it. I’ll get on at Twitter 2.0, thanks.
It replaces nothing and adds nothing
What did you do before you tweeted? It’s the social equivalent of an all points bulletin, or… a quasar or something. What did you do before when you needed to send something of little consequence or urgency to a bunch of people who may or may not want to see it? The only thing that comes to mind is skywriting. Nowadays there are more ways than I can count. Twitter is certainly a big one, but is it really better, easier, or faster than its competitors — say, Facebook’s feed? To the untrained eye (that is to say, to my eye), it looks as if Facebook has Twitter humbled in many ways (though if I’m honest, I’m not much of a Facebooker either).
Twitter is certainly more mobile — that much I grant it; Facebook should be much better at that, and the FriendFeed acquisition should sew that up pretty tight in the months to come. Twitter is certainly much better for featurephones (as opposed to smartphones), but that’s a bit of a moving target, since featurephones are getting smart and smartphones are getting cheap. If I took a picture of something crazy with my phone, I’d rather send it to Facebook than Twitter, though with Twitter it would probably reach more people, because Facebook’s feed is almost as simple, and far more robust. It’s worth mentioning here that I’m pretty much talking out of my ass, though, because I’m not an especially active user of Facebook, and I may have mentioned that I don’t use Twitter at all. But if you would forbid the argument ad ignorantium, well, there goes the entire internet.
News breaks alike on the followed and the unfollowed
As for spreading news, there I can see it might be helpful for some. Not that the same news that gets broken on Twitter couldn’t have been broken somewhere else, but Twitter news does have a certain something. A certain urgency, since it’s part of an expanding wave of retweets, and you’re expected to tweet it forward. I’m sure some of you are wondering how a blogger can get by without using Twitter (Matt Hickey is, at least). I would remind you that this article is appearing on TechCrunch, the world’s leading source of Twitter-based news. Every tweet coming into existence has to be personally approved by Mike and MG before it appears for the rest of the internet. With these guys on watch, I’ve got nothing to worry about. (They could stand to filter a bit more though)
The point is that I don’t see any particular reason to use Twitter rather than, say, relying on Facebook or RSS or even email. If it’s hot, it’ll spread one way or the other. And unfortunately, I can’t think of a less suggestive way of saying that.
Besides, (and I hate to trot out this old argument, but I think it’s applicable here) weren’t we saturated with information before Twitter came on the scene? Do we really need a constant hail of tweets in addition to the emails, IMs, messages, posts, votes, invitations, events, feeds, and god knows what else? I say thee nay! And on that point:
It’s pure vanity
This may sound a bit rich coming from a professional blogger, but I don’t like to broadcast myself. Before this post I have tried to restrict my self-reference on this blog and CrunchGear to things like “I’m more of a Canon guy, but…” or “SNES will always be superior to Genesis.” I think advertising yourself overtly or deliberately drawing attention is in poor taste, whether it’s tweeting your latest action, or having really big hair, or making everyone listen to your joke at a party. Vanity! Twitter encourages it. This is more of a philosophical point, so I won’t argue it too much here, but it’s my position that people should be saying fewer, more meaningful things, directed at people to whom they are relevant — as opposed to the equivalent of sending up a signal flare and screaming that you super hate mondays, blah!
It appeals to the reptilian part of the brain, I think. It’s an alpha male thing, having followers. When you’re broadcasting, you get to think people are paying attention, and who doesn’t like attention? But our attention is spread so thin these days that the portion devoted to something as minor as a tweet may as well be none at all. Broadcasting may console the ego, but it’s false consolation. What it is a surrogate for (meaningful attention) can’t be gotten that way.
Why do you tweet?
But enough of that. I could probably rattle off a couple more paragraphs on this and that, but I don’t want to abuse the reader’s patience. 1800 words is 1796 too many, when I could have simply pulled a Bartleby and said “I prefer not to.” You must understand, I thought it worth a thorough examining, considering TechCrunch and Twitter are joined at the hip. I console myself in that this article, though overlong to a degree you all will be revealing to me shortly, has still far fewer words than are found in an average week’s posts on Twitter.
So here’s my question to you. Why do you, or why don’t you, use Twitter? This isn’t a trap; I’m genuinely curious, since it seems to provide some things for many, many things for some, and nothing to a (talented and handsome) few. Anything so polarizing is worth discussion, so — discuss.
I only forbid one answer: “because everyone else is doing it.” That’s the same reason people wore Hammer pants.
[Update: Good to see so many responses. Very interesting. So much venom, though!]
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Let me be clear, going open source is a great idea, I’m not sure if it will help Tr.im all that much, but on paper it sounds great. That’s what they should have done originally. But in a post today on Tr.im’s blog the service first apologizes for this whole fiasco, and then attempts to place blame elsewhere. As I read it, it’s either Bit.ly’s fault for making a low-ball offer to buy the Tr.im, Twitter’s fault for picking Bit.ly over Tr.im as its URL shortener of choice, 301works.org’s fault for being a “public relations stunt”, and yes, even TechCrunch’s fault because we “simply repeat vertbatim what twitter/bit.ly feeds [us]“.
Let me again be clear: We received no shortage of tips from very good sources last week about what Tr.im was doing behind the scenes while all of this played out. Not one of those tips was from either Bit.ly or Twitter or anyone directly related to them. Instead, they came from third-parties who were actively or passively pursuing a Tr.im acquisition. For example, we heard the $80,000 to $100,000 figure Nambu wanted for Tr.im from no less than three sources. And even more sources came forward to say they had heard that general price range as well and thought it was unreasonable, especially considering how Nambu handled the Tr.im situation, losing user trust in the process. So is it really any surprise today that they announce they’re going open source?
Does it suck that Twitter’s choice of Bit.ly made it hard for services like Tr.im to operate? Sure. But plenty of others are still out there doing it rather than descending into conspiracy theories. And it’s just poor form to drag other services into this mess, like Gnip, which is trying to do a good thing with 301works.org. Yes, it was Bit.ly’s idea, but Gnip is now handling it as a independant third-party, and no shortage of other URL shortening services have joined on. Obviously, some of those services probably don’t like that Twitter chose Bit.ly, but they deal with it and realize that a movement like this is worth teaming up with rivals for the good of all of them.
“It saddens me that this is how Tr.im is portraying 301works,” Gnip’s Eric Marcoullier told us today. He went on to reiterate that Gnip is simply serving as an independant third party for the project, attempting to do something good and useful. And while a ReadWriteWeb article on the matter today seemed to suggest that Tr.im was working actively with Gnip for this new crowd-sourced Tr.im, Marcoullier notes that anyone is free to push data through Gnip, but that he hasn’t specifically talked to Nambu about how Tr.im will use it. He also notes that since Tr.im will now be open source, he hopes the community behind it makes its data a part of 301works.
We have reached out to Tr.im to try and clear up their misplaced anger about this, but have yet to hear back. If we do, we will update.
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Live video streaming service Ustream is being sued by Square Ring, Inc, a boxing promotional company owned by professional boxer Roy Jones, Jr. The suit alleges that Ustream has committed “massive and blatant copyright infringement” by allowing 2,377 users to view a broadcast of the fight Roy Jones Jr. vs Omar Sheika free of charge. Furthermore, the suit says that Ustream has ignored repeated requests by Square Ring Inc. to gather more information about the infringement. From the suit:
Following the illegal exhibition of Plaintiff’s Copyrighted Broadcast on USTREAM’s website on March 21, 2009, notifying Defendants of the copyright and trademark infringements and, in a good faith effort to avoid litigation, requested information pursuant to Rules 26 and 34 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Plaintiff’s letter further advised Defendants that, to Plaintiff’s knowledge, they permitted approximately 2,377 users to view Plaintiff’s pay-per-view program completely free of charge, in violation of Plaintiff’s rights. To date, Defendants have neither complied with Plaintiff’s request nor responded to Plaintiff’s letter…
The court document, embedded below, also details Square Ring’s attempts to proactively prevent the event from being pirated. According to the suit, Square Ring sent Ustream four notices in the week leading up to the fight, asking that the service either provide a ‘take down tool’, or that it have staff actively monitor and delete any streams of the fight. The document says that while some other sites did provide take-down tools, Ustream did not cooperate.
Ustream has given us the following statement regarding the suit:
Ustream is serious about complying with the copyright laws and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and we’re aggressively taking short- and long-term steps to work with the content industry to meet their needs. We believe the Square Ring lawsuit does not have merit and that we’re fully protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Safe Harbor provisions.
Piracy is a problem that has long plagued live video sites like Ustream and its competitors, which include Justin.tv. Because content is being streamed by users, it can be difficult for the services to monitor and prevent copyrighted material from being streamed. But while they’d never admit it, piracy can also help these sites establish sizable user bases — one need only look to YouTube for proof, which was a hotbed for pirated material in its early days and was later acquired by Google for $1.65 billion.
Local news always seems to get the short end of the stick, both in terms of coverage and advertising dollars. And as the entire newspaper industry continues to struggle for survival, the prospects for local news looks particularly bleak. It just doesn’t pay to have a reporter cover a neighborhood farmer’s market when she could be covering the Mayor’s office or something with broader appeal. And so traditional news organizations are abandoning local and hyperlocal news.
Don’t worry, though. Media consultant, blogger, and CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis has a few ideas for how to replace the local newspaper with new business models for news at the hyperlocal level. He just gave a presentation at an Aspen Institute forum on journalism today (live stream).
His answer is to organize local bloggers and citizens into a metro-wide network in each of the top 25 markets, and sell local ads across their sites. Each hyperlocal site would remain independent but join a loose federation for ad sales, distribution, and shared costs. Jarvis sketches out what a new news organization might look like at the local level, and goes out on a limb by offering actual spreadsheets showing some assumptions about audience size and how the business model would work. There is also a spreadsheet for doing this through a non-profit.
As everyone from Esther Dyson to Michael Kinsley and Marissa Mayer pointed out at the forum, the numbers don’t look very realistic. The model assumes in a metro market of 5 million people, the hyperlocal network will be able to get 1.75 million readers (35 percent penetration) in Year 1, growing to 3 million readers (60 percent penetration) in Year 3. The corresponding revenues for each market go from $5 million in Year 1 to $20 million in Year 3.
For a large local blog, that could translate into total revenues of $126,976 in Year 1, going to $331,640 in Year 2, with corresponding income for the blogger of $42,777 in the first year, going to $148, 269 in the third (see table below).
These numbers are way too optimistic. In order to get to those revenue numbers, the model had to be pumped up with SMS alerts, Twitter coupons, a “donation system for watchdog journalism,” and other lines of revenue which may never an out. Most people are just not that interested in what is going on in their neighborhoods. A local blog network would be lucky to get 20 percent of a metro area’s population as regular readers across multiple sites.
Former Slate editor Michael Kinsley asked Jarvis, “If it is as easy as you make it sound, why aren't you off doing it?.” Google product chief Marissa Mayer was a little more diplomatic, but suggested the numbers need a “sanity check.”
To be fair, Jarvis and CUNY are presenting the models for discussion and to show how an alternative, semi-distributed local news organization might emerge that can pay for itself. The numbers are wrong, but that hardly matters. They are a starting point for a reconception of how local news can be organized.
“Aren’t you reinventing the wheel?” Kinsley asked him. “I think it needs some reinvention,” responded Jarvis. “We wanted to see if there is a vision for the future of journalism.”
When Jarvis was asked who the dominant species would be in this new ecosystem, he answered: “No one owns the whole thing anymore. No one can afford to own it anymore. So the key thing is how do you take part in the network.” His numbers might be way off, but at least he is trying to rethink the news.
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The aptly named Bryan Appleyard had an interesting profile in the Times of London. He wrote about Steve Jobs without actually being allowed to talk to the man and the resulting tale sounds more like a Mark Oliver profile of the Bilderbergers than a fluff piece on a popular company. However, what Appleyard did come away with was a picture of a company so strange and dysfunctional it makes most Communist dictatorships look like fantasy football leagues.
One of the best paragraphs describes Apple’s development style:
The answer is that, along with computers, iPhones and iPods, secrecy is one of Apple's signature products. A cult of corporate omerta — the mafia code of silence — is ruthlessly enforced, with employees sacked for leaks and careless talk. Executives feed deliberate misinformation into one part of the company so that any leak can be traced back to its source. Workers on sensitive projects have to pass through many layers of security. Once at their desks or benches, they are monitored by cameras and they must cover up devices with black cloaks and turn on red warning lights when they are uncovered. "The secrecy is beyond fastidious and is in fact insultingly petty and political," says one employee on the anonymous corporate reporting site Glassdoor.com, "and often is an impediment to actually getting one's work done."
That’s right: when you’re working on the new iPhone they’re going to watch you and turn on a Red Light Special lamp over your head. As Jef Raskin notes, Jobs would have been an “excellent king of France.”
But will we listen? Will we ever tear down this cult of personality? Probably not. Apple does what Apple does and we - though increasingly fewer of us - walk in lock-step. Writing about the company is surprisingly hard and going past the obvious PR and marketing layer is difficult. Even Appleyard had a heck of a time and it shows in this piece. Instead of Jobs being described as a nice guy who drives to work and makes phones he becomes a “productive narcissist” with daddy issues and who could be compared with a syphilitic Bourbon potentate.
I’m going to write a few more words and then encourage you to go read the piece. Today when I went to Apple.com for something or the other I felt a little tinge of revulsion. This has been Apple’s summer, whether it wanted it to be or not. We’re talking about Snow Leopard and tablets and prototypes and all this jazz and we’re all amped up on fermented Apple juice. I kind of feel that no, Apple, doesn’t deserve all this attention and that Windows 7 need a little love and what about the Creative Zii…
But just as no IT guy will get fired for buying Microsoft, no blogger will get fired for writing about Apple. For better or worse Jobs’ strange strategy worked. Comparing Apple with other computer companies is almost impossible. Through force of will and a strange internal culture, Apple has left the map entirely and is operating in its own rarified astral plane. I wonder, however, how many of us want to keep looking up when there’s great stuff right in front of us.
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Even though they haven’t really found a big audience yet, hyperlocal news sites are becoming a hot commodity. In June, AOL bought Patch for $7 million, and today MSNBC acquired EveryBlock. EveryBlock was previously funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation, which ended in June. The five employees will now work at MSNBC.
The price was not disclosed, but like the Patch acquisition, it is not an audience acquisition. Rather it is a hyperlocal platform play which MSNBC can now plug into its site and push in a major way. EveryBlock is a hyperlocal news aggregator, bringing in geo-specific feeds from neighborhood blogs, Flickr, Yelp, Craigslist, and elsewhere to give readers a picture of what is going on in their town or neighborhood.
EveryBlock currently covers only about 15 cities in the U.S. and comScore estimates its U.S. audience to be only 143,000 unique visitors a month (July, 2009). In contrast, competitor Outside.in attracts 800,000 unique visitors in the U.S. These are relatively small numbers, but these services do a good job of collecting neighborhood news without the expense of actually reporting it.
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We're a few weeks away from the official release of Snow Leopard and I'm here to tell you things are really heating up in the realm of Exchange Support, OpenCL, and being able to click on an icon to make all of its windows appear. Sorry. I'm just a crank. Every time Apple comes out with a new version of OS X I expect bells, whistles, and dancing dogs. This is an incremental upgrade, as we described it back at WWDC, and it's a strong one. However, it's not nearly as exciting at first blush - at least visually - but it does give countless IT guys some serious tentpole action especially considering built-in Exchange support. This review is based on the purported Gold Master, 10A432, the version that will be shipped to stores world-wide this September. It may or not be the official final version but I've been using versions of Snow Leopard for about two months now.
BlogTalkRadio is a popular podcasting site with about 4.5 million listeners a month. And it’s no stranger to large-scale live podcasts, as some pull in more than 20,000 listeners while they’re going on. But on Wednesday, the service is likely to see their popularity taken to the next level as none other than the President of the United States will be on a program live for the site.
President Obama will be making an appearance on a special program called “40 Minutes For Health Reform” which will stream live exclusively on BlogTalkRadio. Specifically, the President’s part will be the last 10 minutes of the show after he listens in on the first 30 minutes during which there will be a roundtable discussion about the topic with the leaders of the non-profit group, Faithful America.
Faithful America are the ones that came up with the idea of doing a program on BlogTalkRadio, as they were looking for a platform to have moderated dialogue in a social media environment. The White House was open to the idea as they look to garner support for their health agenda. It’s a subject which has gathered quite a bit of controversy in the past few days, as there is talk that the administration may have to back away from some of its original plan.
For many of its shows, BlogTalkRadio utilizes social media outreach via the normal channels: Twitter, Facebook, etc. But this program should spread faster than the others given that the President will be on it talking about something which is now somewhat controversial. Still, the administration hasn’t shied away from using these new forms of communication to get messages out even though things aren’t quite as controlled as they might be with the standard outlets.
"I've been impressed by how President Obama has adopted innovative social-media technology during his campaign and into his administration," says Alan Levy, CEO of BlogTalkRadio. "We're honored that he has selected BlogTalkRadio as his newest requisite platform for communicating directly with the American people."
The show will air live on Wednesday at 5 PM ET (2 PM PT) on both BlogTalkRadio’s program page found here, and on the Faith For Health site.
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MySpace is close to acquiring popular social music service iLike, we’ve confirmed with multiple sources. The deal, which should close this week, will be MySpace’s first acquisition since new CEO Owen Van Natta took control of the company in April 2009. The price is “around $20 million.”
iLike, which launched in late 2006, is a social music recommendation service that now has more than 50 million registered users. It tracks what you listen to and like and gives you recommendations on new music based on that data as well as what your friends are listening to. It is the top music application on Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 and just about every other social network other than MySpace, which has MySpace Music.
iLike also hosts band pages which are second in popularity only to MySpace Music. By acquiring iLike, MySpace solidifies their already leading position as the most popular online identity for bands. Last week iLike also launched their own music download store.
Details are still flying in, but at first blush the deal is particularly interesting for two reasons.
First, simply because iLike is so deeply integrated into the Facebook experience. Nearly 10 million Facebook users use the iLike application every month. And iLike has also been a key part of Facebook’s ongoing struggles with what-to-do-about-music. MySpace is now going to own this.
Second, it’s MySpace, not the MySpace Music joint venture with the music labels, that is acquiring iLike. We’ll have more to say on this shortly. We’re hearing that a key driver of the deal is the iLike team, particularly founders Ali Partovi, Hadi Partovi and Nat Brown, and the underlying technology.
Competitor Last.fm was acquired by CBS in 2007 for $280 million. June 2009 Comscore stats show Last.fm with 12.9 million monthly unique visitors. iLike had just 3 million monthly unique visitors, but that doesn’t take into account the massive usage of the service on social networks.
The company has raised a total of $16.5 million from the founders, Scott Banister, Bob Pittman, Vinod Khosla and Ticketmaster to date. But their last round of funding was in 2006, where Ticketmaster put the bulk of the capital in via a third round of financing that valued the company at a whopping $53.2 million.
In Q4 2008 Ticketmaster wrote down a number of their venture investments, including a $5.8 million charge for iLike. Internally, they valued that $13.3 million investment at just $7.5 million. Last month we reported that iLike was considering a new round of financing that would cash TicketMaster out of the company.
Neither MySpace nor iLike would comment on this story.
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Benchmark Capital is investing in Danish startup Zendesk, and led a $6 million B round of funding. Benchmark’s rock star partner Peter Fenton is joining the board.
Zendesk just raised money in May in an A round from Charles River Partners, which also participated in this latest funding.
We'll probably have some more details on this later today, but we're able to spill some of it now seeing as much of it just went live on Samsung's own site. If you haven't been keeping up with all the latest in Samsung news, here's what you need to know: Samsung's got a widget interface called TouchWiz, which they've been rolling out across their touchscreen phones since around June of last year. You've got a drawer containing some widgets, and four flickable pages to toss these widgets onto. So far, they've got it up and running on Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Samsung's own proprietary OS. TouchWiz looks and behaves more or less identically on all of these platforms, providing some degree of uniform user experience across vastly different interfaces. We haven't been huge fans of TouchWiz thus far, largely because of its lack of expandability. Each TouchWiz-enabled device came with 10-15 widgets, and that was that. If you wanted to download more, you were out of luck. If you wanted to make your own, that was just too bad. That's all about to change.
We first broke the news about Dell releasing a smartphone exclusively for the Chinese market eight days ago. Some pieces of information on the so-called Mini 3i leakeda few days after, and today the Android device finally saw the light of day during a China Mobile event in Beijing (China Mobile is the world's biggest phone carrier and distributes the phone in that country).
One of our reliable sources told us today that they had reason to believe both CBS/CNET and Amazon were considering acquiring the company. After some digging, we’ve confirmed that CBS has considered investing in GDGT and that their subsidiary CNET has ongoing partnership discussions, but isn’t considering an acquisition right now. Amazon, though, is more interesting. They’ve been doing quiet background due diligence on GDGT’s founders and developers, we’ve heard, which is an indication that they may be interested in buying.
Amazon has experimented with pure content sites the last few years, launching a bunch of blogs and even buying UK-based DPReview, a camera review blog, in 2007. Content, particularly reviews, are great for SEO and cross promotion. And to Amazon’s credit, they haven’t defiled DPReview much at all.
…and GDGT is certainly off to an amazing start. They had a massive 4.7 million pageview traffic day back in June, before they launched the main site. Compete shows a nice spike in U.S. visitors, without the usual post launch sag (yet).
Having witnessed the extent to which humans are involved in transcribing messages for SpinVox (the voicemail to text service), I have become concerned about the privacy of my data and personal communications. Although I’ve now cancelled my SpinVox subscription, I know (because CIO Rob Wheatley told me) that SpinVox, like Google, keeps data - which in SpinVox’s case means recordings of your messages - “for as long as possible”. Based on a quick search of my inbox, I reckon SpinVox are holding recordings of about 250 messages that were left for me between April and July of this year.
But that’s not really the problem. After all, Google knows a lot more about me than that and I’m sure my ISP and the government do too. My concern is that I believe the majority of my messages were listened to by a person I don’t know in another country. That’s the point at which SpinVox may be falling foul of UK and European data regulations, and it’s the weak link in the privacy chain. So it’s time to find out if SpinVox is being honest enough with its customers about the proportion of messages that are read by humans - and also about how much of those messages are seen by call centre staff. Here’s how:
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Last month, our post about MySpace debuting Pearl Jam’s new single turned into a debate over who could rightly claim to be the true kings of grunge. Regardless of where you stand on that, let’s agree that Pearl Jam’s new album is starting to sound great.
How do I know? Because a few more songs have just been unveiled by way of the new short documentary about the making of Backspacer, that debuted tonight exclusively on MySpace once again.
Check the video out below. It features the new songs “Got Some” and “Just Breathe” on top of the first single off of the album, “The Fixer.” As a bonus, there’s some nice footage of the band doing some axe throwing. Pearl Jam’s new album will be out in about a month.
Wakoopa tracks your desktop application usage in order to recommend new software, games and web applications. It has two main groups of users: professionals and hedonists. The professionals are using it to track their working hours, while hedonists use it to track their gaming. These users are stereotypical early adopters; what they use today we may all be using tomorrow. The company just released its latest State of the Apps Report showing trends in application usage in Q2 2009.
The report is based on 110K users of which 88% are male, although female users account for half of the top users. So what’s new? Well, Firefox has clearly won the browser war in this group with 55% of users. It is the most popular browser across all platforms. Facebook is the dominant web site with 17.9% of usage time followed by Gmail at 10.5%. Interestingly, although Twitter usage is growing steadily it still only accounts for 4.32% of usage time even though 25% of Wakoopa users are on Twitter - too busy developing to hang our on Twitter? Speaking of which, we get a window into the lives of how developers work, which may well interest a few startups trying to motivate their teams after 4pm.
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A team of Yahoo veterans who built its behavioral targeting advertising technology are publicly launching a hybrid ad network today called Rocket Fuel, which they’ve tested over the past year with major brands including Nike, Dell, Microsoft, and American Express. Despite keeping quiet, Rocket Fuel’s ad network reaches 40 million people and shows them about 100 million ads per month.
CEO George John calls Rocket Fuel a “hybrid ad network” because it combines all sorts of targeting data (social, behavioral, contextual, geographical, search) to figure out what works best at any particular moment. “We saw how important it was to let the data tell you which ad to show,” says John, who came from Yahoo along with president Richard Frankel and CTO Abhinav Gupta.
Rocket Fuel’s algorithm considers everything from a consumer’s online behavior and location to the time of day and what particular ad was shown. If people who listen to electronica music are more likely to click on an ad than those who listen to jazz, or people who log in from work respond better than people from home, Rocket Fuel tries to ferret out those details and feed them back into the mechanics of the ad campaign. John explains:
We let the date tell us what works and what is important. Instead of inflicting on customers thousands of targeting options, we figure out which options are working well and move inventory in that way.
Sounds simple enough, but apparently this is not the way most ad targeting is done. Instead, advertisers and ad agencies typically are given a confusing array of targeting options and are left to their own devices to sort through them all. Rocket Fuel is automating that testing process and speeding up the feedback loop so that advertisers can hone in on whatever combination of targeting is working at that second.
But does the world really need another advertising network, hybrid or otherwise? If Rocket Fuel can deliver better advertising campaign ROIs, advertisers will give it a shot. That’s all that matters. If it can’t, it won’t make it off the launchpad.
The companyl raised $6.8 million in a series A round a year ago from Mohr Davidow, Labrador Ventures, and individual angel investors.
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A new lawsuit filed against Facebook in the Superior Court of California in Orange County is one of the more entertaining documents we’ve had the pleasure of reading recently. A lot of 
As much as we'd like the Tapplet, or iPad, to make its debut next month, it's looking like that won't be the case — 
As 
Just in from a source involved with the transaction - the 
What were you doing in 1999? Maybe you were following the Kosovo War. Maybe you were starting to use Napster. Maybe you were entering your senior year of high school (I was). Or maybe you started blogging. After all, on August 23, 1999, 
Another month, another report that 
Let’s not beat around the bush: The G1 was not a very good phone. That’s not to say Android isn’t a good mobile OS — it is, it’s just that the initial hardware built to run the OS didn’t do it justice. It was poorly designed and had a fairly cheap feel. And now, it appears that the G1 may already be on its last legs as Android engineers 
The myTouch is actually the device Mike switched to after 
As more details emerge about the 
Tweets have no value
It’s incomplete
It’s pure vanity
So here’s my question to you. Why do you, or why don’t you, use Twitter? This isn’t a trap; I’m genuinely curious, since it seems to provide some things for many, many things for some, and nothing to a (talented and handsome) few. Anything so polarizing is worth discussion, so — discuss.
Oh, this is rich. 
Live video streaming service 
We're a few weeks away from the official release of Snow Leopard and I'm here to tell you things are really heating up in the realm of Exchange Support, OpenCL, and being able to click on an icon to make all of its windows appear. Sorry. I'm just a crank. Every time Apple comes out with a new version of OS X I expect bells, whistles, and dancing dogs. This is an incremental upgrade, as we described it back at WWDC, and it's a strong one. However, it's not nearly as exciting at first blush - at least visually - but it does give countless IT guys some serious tentpole action especially considering built-in Exchange support. This review is based on the purported Gold Master, 10A432, the version that will be shipped to stores world-wide this September. It may or not be the official final version but I've been using versions of Snow Leopard for about two months now. 
We'll probably have some more details on this later today, but we're able to spill some of it now seeing as much of it just went live on Samsung's own site. If you haven't been keeping up with all the latest in Samsung news, here's what you need to know: Samsung's got a widget interface called TouchWiz, which they've been rolling out across their touchscreen phones since around June of last year. You've got a drawer containing some widgets, and four flickable pages to toss these widgets onto. So far, they've got it up and running on Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Samsung's own proprietary OS. TouchWiz looks and behaves more or less identically on all of these platforms, providing some degree of uniform user experience across vastly different interfaces. We haven't been huge fans of TouchWiz thus far, largely because of its lack of expandability. Each TouchWiz-enabled device came with 10-15 widgets, and that was that. If you wanted to download more, you were out of luck. If you wanted to make your own, that was just too bad. That's all about to change. 
We first broke the news about Dell releasing a smartphone exclusively for the Chinese market 
Having witnessed 
Last month, our post about 
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