Month: June 2007

Since I am at the Ingram family homestead in the wilderness of northern Ontario, where cellular service is spotty and Internet access is of the dial-up variety, posting will likely be light — possibly even non-existent — for the next couple of days. If you look at the picture below and concentrate really hard, you can probably imagine me lying in a hammock somewhere.

I haven’t been able to log in to the site for the past few hours, and it seems as though some other people have had trouble too. Growing pains?

and… we’re back. Life can return to normal 🙂

Update:

Just got an email from Matt Hicks, who’s in communications with Facebook, and he said there was a power failure at one of their data centres this morning, but everything is back to normal now. That’s pretty fast — not the server repair, but the PR response. Impressive.

Time magazine managed to land an exclusive interview with Rupert Murdoch (maybe it was by promising him the cover and a cover line like “The Last Tycoon”), and — as is typical for the blunt-spoken Australian — he holds nothing back. While some of the reporters for the illustrious Wall Street Journal took some unauthorized time off to protest Murdoch’s acquisition of the paper, the billionaire came out with jewels like this:

— “They’re taking five billion dollars out of me and want to keep control,” Rupert Murdoch was saying into the phone, “in an industry in crisis! They can’t sell their company and still control it — that’s not how it works. I’m sorry!”

— “The price of the Journal,” says Murdoch, “is $60 plus vitriol.”

— “When the Journal gets its Page 3 girls,” he jokes late one night, “we’ll make sure they have M.B.A.s.”

and finally:

— “What if, at the Journal, we spent $100 million a year hiring all the best business journalists in the world? Say 200 of them. And spent some money on establishing the brand but went global — a great, great newspaper with big, iconic names, outstanding writers, reporters, experts.

And then you make it free, online only. No printing plants, no paper, no trucks. How long would it take for the advertising to come? It would be successful, it would work and you’d make … a little bit of money. Then again, the Journal and the Times make very little money now.”

Classic Murdoch. Kevin Maney says in Portfolio magazine that he hopes Murdoch starts a bidding war for journalists.

Google appears to be setting up a kind of widget incubator program — like a Y Combinator/Startup Camp for widgets — according to a post over at Read/WriteWeb tonight. Marissa Mayer apparently announced the windfall… er, program at the Searchonomics Conference in Santa Clara. There’s a brief description of it here, and a FAQ here.

The program (Danny Sullivan has a good overview) is aimed at “bootstrapping an economic ecosystem around gadgets,” and involves two kinds of monetary offers to developers: the first gives Google Gadget developers a chance at a grant of $5,000 to develop their gadgets further (those with gadgets that have at least 250,000 page views a week are eligible), and the second is a “seed investment” of $100,000 to developers who want to build a business based on the Google platform. This second stage — which sounds a little like an angel round — is open only to those who have already had a grant.

The upshot? As Richard puts it: “It’s Christmas for third-party developers.” I would expect to see companies like Slide.com, the Max Levchin-owned developer that has several popular Facebook widgets and has been buying others, jump on board this gravy train. It will be interesting to see whether Google Gadgets spread farther than just the Google ig page. There’s a post about it on the Google blog, and one at the Google code blog.

I have to confess that I was somewhat skeptical — okay, really skeptical — when I read in the New York Times about a deal between 20th Century Fox and a group of guys who had put together an “homage” video about the Die Hard movies. As the story describes, the original video was a compilation of action sequences from the three movies, with a rock-style song as a voiceover, including the immortal words “Yippee-ki-yay, motherf***er” as the chorus.

The movie studio forced YouTube to take the video down, since it uses a whole pile of clips from the copyrighted movies, etc. etc. Standard bone-headed movie industry activity, in other words. But at some point, a light bulb clearly went on over someone’s head (either that or a studio executive under 30 attended a meeting) and Fox approached the group and offered to not only let them post the video again, but offered to pay them as long as they included some clips from the upcoming movie (which is in theatres now). In other words, turn an homage into a preview.

When I read the NYT story, I thought “Well, that’s going to wreck it — it will no longer be a tribute, but just a paid ad for the movie.” And when I read a quote from a Fox executive saying “Why should something that people enjoy be any less ‘cool’ because it is supported by a film studio?” I thought to myself that he must be a moron. Obviously, having the studio involved would ruin the whole “user-generated” nature of the thing.

But I think I might have been wrong. Not only has the new clip been viewed more times than the original, lots of commenters on YouTube like it better — and you know what? It’s actually pretty good. The studio left the creators alone, and obviously didn’t even mind the “motherf***er” chorus, which is a crucial part of the both the movie and the tribute video. The whole thing kind of works. (the clip is not for childish ears, obviously).

If you’ve been reading news about India or Pakistan, or the Middle East, Salman Rushdie being knighted by the Queen, you may have seen photos featuring a young Islamic man who has come to be known (at least in some circles) as “Islamic Rage Boy.” In almost every photo, this bearded man is clearly agitated, yelling into the camera, waving his fist in the air, etc. And it’s not until you look at a site like SnappedShot that you realize he shows up in picture after picture, about different events, always with the same expression.

Photo-journalists like nothing better than to have a photo of riots or protests, and whatever group Rage Boy belongs to seems happy to oblige. There’s a recent photo of him in a group of Islamic protesters during the recent worldwide “Day of Rage” against Salman Rushdie being honoured (since the author is still the subject of an Islamic fatwa, or death sentence, as a result of insults to the Prophet Mohammed contained in his book The Satanic Verses). Last fall, he was striking almost the exact same pose during protests over comments that Pope Benedict XVI made about the Prophet during a speech. There are also wire photos of what appears to be the same man protesting the publication of anti-Muslim cartoons in a Danish newspaper, and the use of the Prophet’s face on a playing card, and a visit by President Bush.

Rage Boy has become such a popular icon of Islamic fundamentalism that author Christopher Hitchens uses him as a metaphor in his latest column at Slate.com. In true Web icon style, he even has his own T-shirt. And blogger Mike Elgan of The Raw Feed compares Rage Boy to Everywhere Girl, a young woman named Jennifer Chandra, whose stock photo has become ubiquitous in online advertising, as chronicled by The Inquirer in Britain and several other outlets. Her blog is here.

(Note: Just so we’re clear, this is not meant as a judgment of any kind — positive or negative — about the validity or sincerity of any specific Islamic or Muslim protest, cause, or viewpoint. I just thought it was interesting. If anything, it’s a comment on the laziness of wire-service photographers and/or editors)

Update:

Mike at The Raw Feed notes that Islamic Rage Boy has now been unmasked as Shakeel Bhat, a 31-year-old former armed militant.

It’s interesting to see that a market for Facebook applications — or widgets — is developing, although the prices are still small. In one of the latest transactions, Inside Facebook notes that Slide.com (run by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin) has bought the app Favorite Peeps for a reported $60,000. Another site, FaceWatch, has also written about the purchase — and Josh Catone has a look at the phenomenon at Read/WriteWeb. Update: Fred Wilson has a good post up about it as well.

Favorite Peeps apparently has over one million users and was developed by Dennis Rakhamimov, a software engineer at a company funded by Peter Thiel — another PayPal co-founder, who is also an investor in Facebook. Inside Facebook notes that the deal values each user at less than five cents, compared with the $25 per user paid by Viacom for the Xfire gaming site and the $36 per user paid by News Corp. for MySpace. Another Facebook app, Extended Info, was recently bought by a travel company called SideStep — although no purchase price was disclosed. The creator of the app, Trey Philips, just finished his third year of university and said he put the widget together in a few hours at the Facebook F8 hackathon. Within days it had 60,000 users. VentureBeat has also noted the rise of the Facebook app-buying market.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r0pROzHY5M&w=425&h=350]

Although I hate to jump on the whole “Day The Music Died” thing — which I think is a little over the top — I find it interesting that while a whole bunch of Web radio companies, including Yahoo Music and Pandora, are turning off their streams in order to protest the increase in licensing fees for Web broadcasting, Last.fm has decided not to, which has caused some consternation in the blogosphere, including this post at TechCrunch by Duncan Riley.

Riley says that the Last.fm decision could risk a backlash from users, and in a follow-up post at TechCrunch, Mike Arrington raises the issue of whether the company’s decision has something to do with it having become part of CBS, the media conglomerate that bought it for $280-million not too long ago. Last.fm, in a blog post in its defence, says: “We do not want to punish our listeners for our problems, period.” The company argues that royalty rates are a fact of life, and that because it is based in the UK it has had to deal with them for a long time, etc. It says the industry should fight for fairness, but that turning off Internet radio even for a day “is just plain wrong.”

While the idea that users should come first is an appealing one — and companies like craigslist.org have certainly prospered by making it a mantra — Last.fm’s argument seems a little disingenuous. If the doubling of radio royalty rates takes effect (Stan Schroeder at Frantic Industries has a nice overview of the issues, as does the SaveNetRadio site), small streaming companies could go under. That would obviously leave Last.fm in a pretty sweet position.

I’m not saying that’s why Last.fm made the decision it did. I don’t know the company or the founders, so I can’t judge. I’m just saying it looks kind of fishy — especially when Yahoo and RealNetworks and others have joined the protest. Turning off the stream for a single day doesn’t seem like a huge issue to make a point, and I would bet that Last.fm’s users would probably support the move.

(Incidentally, Pandora has been inaccessible to Canadians for more than a month, after the company turned off access to Canadian IP addresses because it couldn’t afford to reach licensing deals with all the record labels for Canada as well as the U.S.)

From Paul Kedrosky comes this video clip of Niklas Zennstrom — co-founder of Kazaa, Skype and Joost — giving a presentation at Zeitgeist.

http://www.kyte.tv/flash.swf?embedId=3106042&appKey=MarbachViewerEmbedded&uri=channels/7062http://www.kyte.tv/images/updatenotice.swf

Matt Marshall over at Venture Beat has a post up about Friendster with a “returning from the dead” kind of vibe: Matt points out that the site — which is kind of the poster boy for early social-networking success, followed by equally rapid failure — has had what he calls a “massive” 40-per-cent jump in page views in May, to 9 billion (Facebook gets about 11 billion a month).

Of course, Matt also explains most of the reason for that growth by saying the site has adopted similar techniques as are used by Facebook and MySpace — which generates a mind-boggling 3 billion page views every day — including forcing you to click multiple times to get anywhere. Is that something to be proud of? Not in my book. There’s also a table in Matt’s post that tells a different story — and what I think is a far more worthwhile one when comparing sites: it’s a table of unique visitors at the different social networks.

Over the past six months, Friendster’s unique visitor numbers have grown by about 30 per cent, while MySpace’s have grown by about 20 per cent. And Facebook.com? Over 100 per cent in the same period, and close to 30 per cent in the last month alone. To me, that’s the whole story right there — something I wish Megan McCarthy had pointed out at Valleywag instead of just pointing to Matt’s post. I wish we could get away from the focus on page views.

Danah Boyd, a sociologist and researcher in the U.S. who specializes in youth culture and online social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, has posted a draft version of a new paper she is writing on what might loosely be referred to as “class divisions” between the two popular social networking sites. Although she says that the differences between the two audiences are not strictly class-based, there appears to be a clear difference between teens who gravitate to one versus the other.

For the most part, Boyd says, the younger users on MySpace are what she calls “subaltern” — a term meaning subordinate, or lower in station — in the sense that they are outcasts in some way or another, either because they are involved in a social sub-group of some kind (i.e., they are gay, or goth) or they are a member of a racial or cultural group that is non-mainstream (i.e., Hispanic, Asian, etc.). As she puts it:

“The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college… they are primarily white, but not exclusively.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm.”

Boyd admits that some of these differences are likely a result of the ways in which Facebook and MySpace evolved. The latter started as a social network for music fans to share information about their favourite bands, whereas Facebook started as a social network that was restricted to university students and faculty — and therefore has had a collegiate type of appeal ever since.

The different approaches taken by MySpace and Facebook extend to design as well — MySpace is much more chaotic and colourful, while Facebook is more clean and austere — and therefore the ways that the two sites are perceived by their users is different too, Boyd says:

“Teens who use Facebook see MySpace as “gaudy, immature, and “so middle school.” They prefer the “clean” look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is “so lame.” What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as “glitzy” or “bling” or “fly” (or what my generation would call “phat”) by subaltern teens.

That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year.”

Boyd has a blog post with comments about the paper here, and some of the comments are well worth reading.

Update:

Nick Denton injects some of his patented Valleywag skepticism here. And Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla was at a recent presentation at the Harvard Berkman Center on Internet and Society that Danah gave about her research, and he has an extremely comprehensive set of notes if you’re interested in more detail. And Danah has posted her own thoughts on the reaction her post has gotten.