Month: November 2010

Instagram has gotten a lot of attention for growing to 300,000 users in a matter of weeks, but a new cross-platform chat application called Kik makes that look pale by comparison: within just two weeks of its release on October 21, the app had signed up over one million users, and co-founder and CEO Ted Livingston says that based on its current rate of growth, that figure should cross the 2 million mark by tomorrow. But even as he is celebrating — and trying to cope with — that viral growth, Livingston is having to apologize for the way that Kik got there, which involves what some would call email harvesting.

When you sign up for the service on your iPhone or BlackBerry, it automatically ingests your contacts from the device and then cross-references that against the Kik user database — and it doesn’t ask you first, which many believe is a privacy no-no. Users are then pinged by the service with messages saying “You may know…,” with the user name of someone who matches a name in their contact list. Livingston stressed in an interview with me that the service doesn’t auto-add anyone, and doesn’t store any of the information, but only uses it once and then discards it. But the feature has still made some users nervous — and is probably against Apple’s terms of service.

“We really just wanted to make it as easy as possible for users to get started, and to find people they might know,” the Kik co-founder says. While understandable, however, this is the same rationale that Google used when it launched Buzz, and auto-populated people’s Buzz contacts with everyone from their email address book — something that caused a huge outcry from privacy advocates. Livingston says that Kik doesn’t make public any user information other than a user name, and doesn’t send other users anything but your Kik contact info, but he admits that not asking for permission before ingesting people’s contacts was a mistake.

“We feel really, really bad about that, and we have apologized across the Internet for doing that,” the Kik co-founder said. “And we have a fix ready for upload, just as soon as Apple approves it, that will allow people to opt out of that feature. It will be crystal clear.” Livingston also added that the company has gotten a lot of feedback from users who love the fact that Kik connected them with people they knew who were already using the service. “It’s a very small subset of people who don’t like it,” he said. And the auto-suggestion feature has likely played a huge role in helping Kik go viral so quickly, unlike some social services (Apple’s Ping, for example) that require you to add people manually.

In an interesting twist, Kik didn’t start out trying to create a chat application. Livingston says the startup was originally focused on a music-sharing service that allows any cellphone user to take control of any web browser and play music or videos through it. The Kik co-founder says that service should be ready to roll out soon, once negotiations with record companies are complete, but while the company was waiting the founders decided to use the platform they had built to experiment with a dead-simple chat application, and Kik was the result.

“There are three parts of texting that most people hate,” he said. “It is unreliable, it is slow and it’s expensive.” There are other companies that have focused on making it free, says Livingston — including Pingchat, which shares office space with Kik at a startup accelerator in Waterloo, Ontario — but “we wanted to make it blazingly fast and reliable.” So Kik shows you when someone has received your message, when it has been read, and even when someone is typing a response. And the response has been incredible, Livingston says: the service has been adding more than 200,000 users a day for the past week or more, and had to fly new servers in to beef up the data center it uses because of the demand.

When it comes to being passionate and engaged, nothing — with the possible exception of a religious cult — matches the kind of devotion that sports fans have to their local teams. Those fans are the heart of sports-based media company SB Nation, which just closed a $10.5-million round of funding led by Khosla Ventures, along with Accel Partners and Comcast Interactive. Chairman and CEO Jim Bankoff says the company plans to spend the money on expanding the network of team-focused and regional blogs, including investing in sales and marketing, and implementing a mobile strategy.

The SB Nation network encompasses blogs that are focused on almost 300 separate brands, including those devoted to individual teams, leagues and sports coverage in a number of cities and major regions. In an interview Monday, Bankoff said the company has more than 400 writers under contract, which makes it a little like AOL’s Patch.com hyper-local news project, but for sports instead of general news. SB Nation also has a proprietary content-management platform that Bankoff said provides bloggers with real-time analytics but also the “deep community and social interaction” that the network sees as a core value.

What eventually became SB Nation grew out of a sports-themed blog called Athletics Nation in Oakland, started by Tyler Bleszinski — who is now the company’s editorial director — and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, better known as the founder of the political commentary blog network called Daily Kos, in 2003. The two developed a broader network of fan-based blogs called SportsBlogs Nation and in 2008 got a round of financing from Accel Partners, Allen & Co. and a number of individual angel investors, and Bankoff joined the company as chief executive.

The idea of topic-focused blogs with real-time content and a passionate readership was a natural for Bankoff — he is a former senior executive at AOL, where he was in charge of developing the blog strategy that led to the creation of the massively successful entertainment blog TMZ, as well as the acquisition of Weblogs Inc., which brought to AOL such leading blogs as Engadget. “I have always believed that online publishing is getting more targeted, more social and more real-time,” Bankoff said. The CEO said that SB Nation’s traffic and readership numbers have tripled in the past year, and that the network now gets about 17 million unique visitors a month.

Bankoff said SB Nation doesn’t believe that targeted niches like sports are only good for readers — advertisers are also interested in the kind of engaged community the network offers, he says. “You can have a much deeper and more focused conversation as a member of these communities,” the SB Nation CEO said, “and that’s what advertisers care about.” Bankoff’s former employer AOL has also been going after the sports-blogging market, building out its FanHouse network by hiring a number of prominent sports journalists, and Yahoo has built up its own sports-oriented media-blogging strategy as well, and is now trying to extend that to news and politics

We wrote recently about a Pew Research Center report that showed how location-sharing “check in” services such as Foursquare still have a ways to go before they become anything close to mainstream, and a recent offer from The Gap (s gps) that used Facebook Places to offer free pairs of jeans provides a real-world example of just how far that kind of idea has to go. The reality is that, in the short term at least, both retailers and services like Facebook and Foursquare are going to have to do a lot of educating and hand-holding for users.

According to a piece at Fast Company, the Gap promotion — which offered users a free pair of jeans if they “checked in” at a Gap store using the Facebook Places feature — was a “huge success.” A survey of stores, the magazine said, showed that they had given away all the pairs of jeans they had, and that customers had been checking in with Facebook Places. But the comments on the Fast Company story suggested something different: one user said:

Have you looked at the GAP Facebook page to see everyone’s feedback? This thing looks like a huge flop. People are super confused, nobody knows what Places is or how to check in, and the “first 10,000” wording is super-misleading when it’s really the first handful or so of customers at each individual location.

Sure enough, if you go to the page that The Gap set up on Facebook for the promotion, there are a whole pile of bewildered users — most of whom appear to have been going to the Facebook page and typing the words “check in.” Others said they had gone to a Gap store and didn’t have “the coupon” they needed for jeans. Most clearly didn’t understand that checking in required the Facebook Places feature, and that the offer also required users to do this at a specific Gap store location, using an iPhone or an Android device.

That confusion was on top of the details of the offer itself, which involved 10,000 pairs of jeans distributed over hundreds and hundreds of retail outlets. From the comments on the store’s Facebook page, many stores seem to have only had 10 or 20 pairs of jeans to give away, and those who got pairs of jeans were typically people who lined up before the store had even opened. So many people who did understand how “checking in” works with Facebook Places still didn’t wind up actually getting jeans through the promotion. At least one store seems to have given away jeans to anyone who showed up and even mentioned the promotion, rather than actually checking in.

At this point, location-based discounts seem like a great idea, but in practice they may take a bit more effort from both the companies offering them and the services that they are based on, such as Foursquare and Facebook. Until location-sharing becomes more mainstream, “checking in” is still going to seem like a foreign concept to many, unless you are talking about getting a room at a hotel.

In a move that is being interpreted by many as a cannon shot across Facebook’s bow, Google has changed the terms of service on its API — the programming interface that developers use to do things like pulling your contacts from Gmail, etc. The meaning of the change is simple: third-party apps and services can’t pull data automatically from Google without allowing Google to do the same with their data. Think of it as a declaration of data reciprocity.

Depending on how you feel about Google and its vast reach, quasi-monopolistic status, etc. this move is going to seem like a) an attempt to impose Google’s vision of how the Internet should operate on helpless little companies, or b) a laudable attempt to force openness on companies — such as Facebook — who might otherwise want to keep your data locked down within a walled garden (this is clearly the view that Google itself has, not surprisingly). I lean towards the second of those viewpoints. Too many services want to be a roach motel for your data: they will let it in, and make use of it for their own purposes, but they don’t want to make it easy for you to take it out.

Facebook is a classic example. It’s obvious that the company sees the user data that it collects, whether it is email addresses or click patterns or connections between users — i.e., the “social graph” — as the core of what it has to offer both users (in terms of recommendations, etc.) and advertisers. But it sure doesn’t make it easy for you to get all of your information and activity back out of the Facebook universe. Yes, you can now download some of your content, including photos and wall posts, but you can’t download the email addresses and other info of your contacts and so it is not true data portability.

There is an argument that this data doesn’t exactly belong to you — in other words, that Facebook might be criticized for letting you download all your friends’ email and contact info. So why is it okay for Facebook to have it, but not the person who created those connections? It’s interesting that one of the factors that kept Apple from allowing the automatic import of Facebook contacts into Ping, according to comments from Steve Jobs, was that the company’s terms for making use of this kind of data were “too onerous.” Facebook seems to see its control over that data as giving it a pretty big bargaining chip when it comes to dealing with other services.

To me, the contact info of my friends is *my* social graph — not Facebook’s social graph or Google’s social graph. I should be able to take it wherever I wish. My only criticism of Google’s move is that it has taken way too long. The issue of data openness and data portability with respect to Facebook arguably first blew up over two years ago, when Robert Scoble got in trouble for trying to scrape his personal info. Why has it taken ** for Google to make such an obvious change to its API rules? In that time period, Facebook has gone from something like ** million users to over half a billion, and that kind of influence is going to make it easier for the company to just ignore the whole data portability issue.

One of the things we have been writing about a lot at GigaOM — and particularly on our Web Worker Daily blog, which you can find under the “Collaboration” link above — is the future of work, in all of its various manifestations, and what it implies for our lives, both from a human standpoint as well as a technological one. It’s not just about tools like Skype and Jive Software and Yammer and Rypple, although it is partly about that (and some of them are very cool). It’s also about how working remotely changes our lives, for better and for worse, and how freelancing changes us, and how the entire nature of what we call work is evolving and blurring online.

Unlike our parents’ generation, the vast majority of people working now will have multiple jobs — in many cases, dozens of them — during their lifetimes. Many of those working now don’t even have what their parents would consider “real” jobs at all: they have contracts with a variety of different clients, or they outsource themselves and their skills through a third-party service like Elance or ODesk. The companies they work for and with may not even know what they look like, or where they live. This is the reality of what we like to call “the human cloud,” and it is changing us (and the companies we work for) in ways we may not even fully realize yet.

At GigaOM, we believe that this is such a fascinating and ultimately important topic that we aren’t just writing about it: we’re having a whole conference on the subject, called Net:Work. It’s coming in December — the 8th, to be exact — at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF (and you can register here). We’ve got some great speakers lined up, including two giants in the field of technology and human behavior: John Hegel, of **, and John Seely Brown, the founding director of Xerox PARC, the research center that gave us things like the graphical UI for PCs and the mouse. We’ve also got ** from Cisco, which is involved in telepresence, and many others (the full list is here).

The idea of a “human cloud” is sort of shorthand for the disruption that the web and broadband has created, and is still creating, in the way we work — in the same sense that high-speed Internet access and other web technologies have disrupted the corporate IT market and led to what we call the “cloud.” In the IT sense, that means the web-enabled infrastructure that allows companies to store their data and even run their software from servers owned by Joyent or Amazon. When it comes to the human element, the “cloud” refers to freelancing and outsourcing and telecommuting and co-working, and all the other developments that are changing the way we work.

If you want to read more about these changes and their implications, and the tools and companies that are making them a reality, you can find some of our recent coverage here, as well as recent stories on co-working, the impact of collaboration on businesses and some great analysis from Web Worker Daily editor Simon Mackie in a recent GigaOM Pro report (subscription required) entitled “Opportunities Abound as the Rules of Work are Broken.” And please stay tuned to Web Worker Daily and to GigaOM in general, because we will be posting more updates about who is coming to the Net:Work conference and what they will be talking about.

Anyone who has spent much time using Twitter knows that it is a little like a giant bar or party, with hundreds or even thousands of different overlapping conversations and comments — some interesting and some, well… not. And that’s great if you just want to be social and wander around popping in on the chatter. But what if you want to talk about something specific without the noise? Then you need a private room. That’s more or less what StockTwits is, says co-founder and CEO Howard Lindzon: a social network for those who just want to talk about stocks and the market.

“I used to call it the social Bloomberg,” Lindzon said during a recent interview in Toronto (video of which is embedded below), referring to the trading and news terminals that are ubiquitous in the offices of stockbrokers and bankers. “But now I like to call it Facebook for finance.” Not surprisingly, given the company’s name, it is also a little like Twitter but more focused. Users of StockTwits choose who they want to pay attention to, and can share their thoughts and stocks they like with only a small group, and there is even a Twitpic-style service for posting stock charts for discussion.

Interestingly, although the “twits” in StockTwits comes from the fact that the service was originally built on Twitter, it is completely separate the social network now — although messages can be sent to Twitter and comments can be pulled from it as well, provided the person posting the tweet uses a dollar sign and the stock symbol of the company they are talking about. Lindzon said the reliability and uptime issues Twitter had last year convinced StockTwits that it had to build its own network, which it spent months doing and relaunched in May 2009, after originally launching in February.

“We were trying to be a real-time conversation about stocks, but the information wasn’t real-time” because of the repeated problems and outages, the StockTwits co-founder said. “You can’t make a business out of selling someone else’s product if it doesn’t work.” Because StockTwits is trying to be a more exclusive, niche-oriented social network, it doesn’t have the scaling issues that Twitter does — the network has about 50,000 core users, Lindzon said, while Twitter has several times as many. And StockTwits spends a lot of time trying to cultivate its community, he said: “We kick about 50 percent of the people who join.”

In most cases, that’s because users try to post about “penny” stocks (i.e. those that trade for less than $1 — Lindzon said they are too speculative and attract scam artists, so StockTwits doesn’t cover them), or use offensive language. “We want to be like Quora, but for a very specific vertical” or topic interest, the StockTwits CEO said, referring to the Q&A site that has gotten a reputation for having a very high-quality community. And the service is using every social-media tool in the book to do it: for example, it recently launched the ability to follow not just other users but specific stock symbols. “We’re giving each stock symbol its own social graph!” said Lindzon.

Public companies have the ability to “claim” their ticker symbol, which creates a verified account for them and their stock, so investors know when information is being posted that it is from a reliable source, and private companies can create their own virtual ticker symbols, and then follow what investors or interested users are saying about them. For the future, StockTwits has some interesting developments coming around stock portfolios and the sharing by users of their stock trades, as well as potentially aligning with various e-trading services to facilitate actual trades, said Lindzon.

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

Do you use a location-based app or service like Foursquare or Gowalla? Then you are a member of a tiny minority of Internet users, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. The survey found that less than 5 percent of online adults use any service that allows them to share their location with friends, and on any given day just 1 percent of Internet users are making use of such services. The multimillion-dollar question is whether the launch of Facebook Places, and particularly its recent mobile Deals feature, will change those numbers and make location services go mainstream.

It’s not surprising that a small percentage of Internet users overall have made use of a location-based app, but what about those who typically go online via their smartphones? According to the Pew report, only 7 percent of those adults who go online via their phones make use of a location-based service regularly. The study found that a larger proportion of younger users — those between 18 and 29 — use such services, but still only 8 percent. And men use these services far more than women do: twice as much, in fact, with 6 percent of men using them regularly and just 3 percent of women. Interestingly enough, the survey also found that significantly more Hispanics use such services — 10 percent, compared with 3 percent of whites and 5 percent of blacks.

The study’s overall conclusions about location-based services are not a surprise: a Forrester research report in May came up with similar numbers. It found that less than 5 percent of U.S. online users had ever used a location-based application, and almost 85 percent of those surveyed by the research company said they were not familiar with location-based apps at all — in other words, had never even heard of them. But as the Pew report points out, it wasn’t that long ago that Twitter reached a similarly tiny proportion of Internet users, and it has effectively achieved mainstream status, with almost 25 percent of survey respondents saying they use it.

One thing that could help catapult location-based services into the mainstream is the arrival of Facebook Places. The new feature is only a few months old, but according to a statement by CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, it already has more users than any other location service or app. By way of comparison, Foursquare has about ** million users, although it’s not clear how many of those are regular users of the service. And Facebook has just launched an add-on to Places for mobile: a service called Deals, that allows retailers and other merchants to offer discounts to users who “check in” to a specific location. The social network has already signed up several major advertisers for the service, including The Gap, Starbucks and McDonald’s.

Getting a discount is a great incentive to check in somewhere, but it’s not obvious that that is going to convince large masses of people to adopt location services. The biggest issue for many users, including some friends I have spoken with, is that sharing one’s physical location breaches a personal privacy barrier that many people are uncomfortable with, even if it is only being broadcast to one’s friends — and the fact that your friends can tag you at a location through Facebook Places just adds to that uncomfortable feeling. Facebook may have 500 million users, but even that kind of reach may not be enough to move location-sharing into the mainstream.William Hook

We all know that Google is huge, right? Like, really massive. A globe-spanning colossus, in fact. But every now and then we come across a tangible sign of just how broad the company is, and how many different pies it has its fingers in. For example, take a look at this list of the company’s “developer advocates.” They’re the ones that work with third-party developers on applications and services that integrate with some of Google’s various business units. And there are over 75 of them.

That’s a pretty huge list — in fact, it takes several pages just to get through the names that start with A, B and C (they are also sorted alphabetically by first name for some reason, which seems a little odd). They are broken down into categories as well, including Ads and Commerce, Cloud, Geo, Google Apps, Mobile, Social and TV/Video, and then there’s a whole category called “Other Google APIs.” And there are some bona fide stars on the list, including former Napster executive and former Microsoft evangelist Don Dodge, as well as Android advocate Tim Bray, former director of web technologies at Sun Microsystems and co-developer of XML.

Having so many evangelists is a good thing in many ways. Google, unlike a lot of other large technology companies, provides public and open APIs for dozens of different parts of its business, from maps and search to images, Android and YouTube. These open interfaces allow developers to plug into the giant company’s databases and create incredible features and services using that content, and even some things that may not be all that useful but are still pretty amazing — like MapCrunch, which takes you to a random location somewhere in the world via Google’s Street View.

That said, however, there is still a risk of spreading the company’s resources too thin. Although it is a huge entity, with a massive pool of more than $40 billion in cash and a market value of $200 billion, even Google is potentially at risk of losing focus by trying to do too many things at once. For every two or three developer advocates on that list, there is a different line of business that the company is either trying to expand or doing its best to support. Pretty soon, Google will need a VP of Evangelism (if it doesn’t already have one) to keep track of all its developer evangelists.

Aol managed to turn in better-than-expected revenue and profit numbers for its third quarter today, but much of the bottom line improvement came from one-time gains due to asset sales as the company restructures. Meanwhile, advertising revenue — which continues to supply much of the web giant’s cash — fell off another small cliff, dropping by 27 percent across all of Aol’s properties. In other words, even as CEO Tim Armstrong tries to turn the ship around, it is still taking on water in a number of places. Can the company repair or rebuild itself faster than the water is coming in?

Although Aol’s revenue of $563.5 million beat analysts’ estimates for the quarter, it was still down by more than 25 percent over the same period a year earlier. And while the company, which was spun off from Time Warner a year ago, turned in a profit of $171.6 million for the latest quarter — up from $74 million in the same quarter of the previous year — that number was boosted by the sale of assets such as the ICQ instant messaging service, which was sold to Russian holding company Mail.ru for $187.5 million, and the Kayak travel service, which was sold for $19 million. Excluding those and other one-time factors, Aol’s earnings were flat over last year.

And while Tim Armstrong has been spending cash freely to expand Aol’s hyper-local Patch.com effort into more communities, and to make content-related acquisitions such as its purchase of TechCrunch, the video-distribution company 5Min and social-media developer Thing Labs (maker of the Twitter client Brizzly) — a group of deals that cost $120 million in total — the sources of that cash continue to dry up. The company’s subscription revenue, from users of its Internet access service, dropped by 24 percent, and advertising revenue plunged by almost 30 percent. Within the ad business, international display ads fell by more than 50 percent, and search-related advertising dropped by 28 percent.

As Armstrong described in a recent interview with Om, the company is trying to rapidly build a content and advertising business while the bulk of its existing businesses are declining rapidly — a little like trying to build a ship while the one you are sailing is disintegrating from the stern forward. On the company’s conference call, the Aol CEO talked a lot about building a “distribution network” for content and advertising, with landmark assets such as Patch and TechCrunch being “exits” from that network.

Armstrong also said that the company — which has $623 million in cash on hand — plans to continue making acquisitions to build this content-distribution business. Aol investors will have to keep their fingers crossed that the cash holds out until their CEO is finished building the new Aol.

There are plenty of bad-news stories in the media industry, so it’s nice to hear from a company that is not only beating its revenue and traffic targets, but seeing what it calls “hockey stick” growth. The company is The Texas Tribune, an independent and non-profit publisher based in Austin whose focus is on public-service journalism. The company turned one year old yesterday, and CEO and co-founder Evan Smith says the Tribune has exceeded almost all of its targets, despite the fact that it didn’t really have a road map of what to expect. In a blog post on the anniversary, he said the startup was “humbled and energized and elated and tired.”

“It’s important to note that we more or less made all this up as we went,” Smith, a former editor of Texas Monthly magazine, said in an interview with me on Tuesday. “The world of online non-profit journalism isn’t really very big — there was no real playbook to follow.” Among the small group of similar startups are ProPublica, a non-profit that does investigative journalism, in many cases in partnership with existing media entities, and MinnPost.com, a non-profit in Minnesota.

Some of the questions the Tribune didn’t really know the answer to before it started, Smith says, were: “How much money could we raise? How much traffic would we have by December, 2010? How much should we charge corporate sponsors? All that stuff we more or less made up.” As it turns out, “we were right much more than we were wrong, thankfully.” In particular, the company exceeded its fundraising goal by the end of last year — it raised $3.6 million — and is on track to beat its goal for this year as well.

When it comes to traffic, the Tribune has also beaten its internal expectations by a wide margin, the CEO says — the site hit its traffic goal for the year in February, when it topped 150,000 monthly unique visitors. By the end of the year, Smith says he expects to have double that number along with pageviews per month of about 3 million, and traffic continues to grow rapidly. “It is hockey-sticking,” he said. “I don’t think we have even scratched the surface, frankly.” The Tribune co-founder said he expects the site is out-growing most of the mainstream media in the state.

The Tribune launched last November as an ambitious experiment in covering a state from one end to the other, and in depth — not just quick-hit news items, but longer and more research-oriented stories about important public issues, the kind of thing that many newspapers lack the resources to do as a result of cutbacks and losses. Co-founder John Thornton, a venture capitalist with an interest in public issues, put $1 million of his own money into the company and also helped raise a total of $3.6 million by the time the site launched, from both individual and corporate donors, as well as several charitable foundations.

The company now has 26 full-time employees, Smith said, and half of those are reporters. The startup’s journalists now make up more than one-third of the entire state capital press corps, a sign of how much cutting there has been at mainstream media outlets. The Tribune also doesn’t just rely on sponsorships and donors, the CEO says — it also has a growing live-events business and also syndicates its content, including through a recent partnership with the New York Times.

So if growth has been easier than expected, what has been harder than the company expected? Smith said building up a membership of donors — like any non-profit entity must — has been difficult, and in particular “getting existing members to renew and getting new members has been harder than we thought it would be. We haven’t done as much there as I think we should.” The site has about 1,800 individual member/donors, the Tribune CEO said, and a goal of having more than 2,000 by the beginning of next year. The site has done better with corporate sponsors, he says, and now has more than 124 — and 95 percent of those who signed on for the first year have renewed.

After months of speculation about the impact of reader paywalls at two News Corp. newspapers in Britain — the Times and the Sunday Times — the media giant finally released some official numbers today, and it’s not a pretty picture. While the Murdoch-owned publisher claims to be “very pleased” with the results, the figures show that the two newspapers have lost a huge proportion of their previous readership, and only a tiny fraction of those readers have chosen to pay for the company’s product. If News Corp.’s intent was to wall itself off from the Internet, however, it seems to have succeeded.

According to the company’s release, the two newspapers “have achieved more than 105,000 paid-for customer sales to date.” About half of that number are monthly subscribers, News Corp. said, while the rest were single-copy or pay-as-you-go customers — and the figure also includes people who have paid for the papers’ iPad apps and Kindle editions. On top of that number, the company said that 100,000 subscribers to the print versions of the Times and Sunday Times had activated their accounts and gotten access to the web version or the iPad app (which subscribers get for free).

The bottom line is that News Corp. has managed to attract just over 50,000 new monthly subscribers in the four months since it has been running its paywalls at its two British papers — which charge $1.60 for a day’s access to the site or $6.40 for the week — and along the way has managed to sign up 100,000 or so who were already subscribing to the print edition, who are paying nothing (although holding on to those subscribers is likely a key part of Murdoch’s strategy).

This looks even worse when you compare it to the total readership the Times and Sunday Times had before the paywalls went up, which according to Nielsen was about 3 million unique visitors a month. In other words, News Corp. has managed to convince just a little over one-and-a-half percent of its readers to pay something for the newspapers’ content — and has only been able to convert half of that already tiny figure into monthly subscribers. Meanwhile, the site’s overall traffic has collapsed by almost 90 percent.

Times editor Jeremy Harding told the BBC that the paper is okay with the loss of readership because “we were engaged in a quite suicidal form of economics, which was giving our news away for free,” while adding that online media was mostly a “huge echo chamber” anyway. News Corp. executive Rebekah Brooks, meanwhile, said that the company was pleased with the results, and that “each of our digital subscribers is more engaged and more valuable to us than very many unique users of the previous model.”

It’s hard to see how much more valuable they could possibly be, however: a number of major advertising players have said they are less interested in working with the Times and Sunday Times now as a result of the paywalls, and even an optimistic estimate of the amount of revenue the company is bringing in from its paywalls and iPad app only comes to about $8 million (and that’s before Apple’s cut for the iPad app) which for News Corp. is almost a rounding error. Meanwhile, the newspapers have been cut off from the news flow on the broader Internet, and the potential benefits of attracting links and commentary from other sites that could help to promote its content.

If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you’ve probably already seen Twitter spam — messages from normal-sounding accounts that pop up with links they would like you to click on, or marketing messages. If you check their profiles, they are usually being followed by no one, and in many cases have sent out thousands of tweets despite only having been on Twitter for a matter of months. More recently, Twitter has been hit by the political version of this phenomenon — also known as “astroturfing” — in which dummy accounts either re-tweet links to attack ads and articles, or post other comments designed to get a specific hashtag or link to trend or show up in search.

Researchers at the University of Indiana have set up a project to try and detect and analyze these kinds of tweets — and they clearly have a sense of humor, since they named the project Truthy, after the satirical idea of “truthiness” popularized by comedian Stephen Colbert on his faux news show The Colbert Report. As MIT’s Technology Review describes, the project was inspired by a research paper that earlier this year that looked at a 2008 special Senate election, and found almost a dozen Twitter accounts were repeating the same negative tweets about the candidates. Truthy’s algorithms come up with “diffusion networks” for individual memes, which can sense when they are likely to be real and when they could be manufactured.

The point of astroturfing, of course, is to create the illusion of grassroots support for something (hence the name), by generating what appear to be genuine messages about a candidate or an issue. So, for example, Truthy noticed during the runup to today’s mid-term elections that several Twitter accounts — including ones named @PeaceKaren_25 and @HopeMarie_25, both of which Twitter has since shut down — were tweeting and re-tweeting tens of thousands of identical messages aimed at linking to and/or promoting House minority leader John Boehner’s website.

In another case, a 10-user group was using the hashtag #ampat to promote the website Freedomist.com and to distribute negative attacks on Democrat Chris Coons, and an account called @GoRogueRunSarah promoted links to a website displaying pro-Palin and anti-Muslim propaganda. According to researcher Filippo Menczer, the Truthy team noticed that certain terms were tweeted so much they actually showed up in Google trend searches. Twitter, of course, would much rather have companies and political parties buy one of the company’s “Promoted Trends,” as the Washington Post did by paying for the hashtag #election during today’s elections.

That astroturf is occurring on Twitter shouldn’t really come as any surprise. Just as the rise of email gave birth to spam, and the rise of Google and other search engines produced an entire industry devoted to SEO rigging of search results, so Twitter’s rise as a real-time communications medium has made it a convenient platform for the same techniques — used in ways that take advantage of the social nature of the network. As Twitter continues to grow, it’s likely that we will see more of this kind of thing rather than less. Hopefully tools like the Truthy project will make it easier in the future to detect whether PeaceKaren_25 is a real person or a bot.

I asked Twitter for a comment on what Truthy has been discovering in terms of astroturf attempts, and Del Harvey — the service’s head of Trust & Safety — said the company routinely flags accounts that are either highlighted by its back-end spam detection systems or reported by users. Twitter evaluates these reports “independently of subject matter [as] part of our context-free policy,” she said, presumably so that there are no suspicions about the service playing favorites. Harvey also added that “we’ve been aware of Truthy’s work and have suspended some incriminated accounts [and] the investigation is ongoing.”

Being a kid can be a lot of fun, but eventually you have to grow up. It happens to all of us, and technology startups are no exception. Until recently, Twitter seemed more like a cool experiment thrown together by a few guys as a side project than an actual company — probably because that’s exactly what it was. But when you have 175 million users and over $150 million in venture financing, you have to start getting serious, and for better or worse that’s exactly what Twitter has been doing. The latest signs of that maturation are the departure of Evan Williams as CEO and the company’s renewed interest in cracking down on things like who can use the word “tweet” and when.

The first of these steps is explored in detail in a New York Times piece published this past weekend, in which Williams is described as a visionary when it comes to product design, but more or less an abject failure when it comes to managing people, and the kinds of difficult financial and structural decisions required of a CEO. Williams himself admits this, saying: “I’ve screwed up in many, many, many ways in terms of managing people and product decisions and business.”

It’s a tribute to the Twitter co-founder’s own maturity level that he came to realize this and stepped aside in favor of former chief operating officer Dick Costolo, an experienced startup executive with what most people seem to agree are the necessary chops for such a task. Some of the Williams’ maturity may have come as a result of some painful experiences along the way — including some bad blood related to his previous startup, Blogger (which was bought by Google), and the forcing out of Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s co-founders and the original CEO of the company.

Some of what Twitter has been doing as it matures is structural: expanding its headcount dramatically, fixing its stability issues, redesigning the website, launching of official apps for the iPhone and Android, etc. But much of what Costolo has done is also aimed at making Twitter a “real” business — not just a cool service that doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up, but a business with revenue (via things like Promoted Tweets) and rules. And flexing its muscles as a business and enforcing those rules has caused some tension with what developers call the Twitter “ecosystem.”

The first eruption of this came earlier this year, after Twitter acquired the Tweetie app for the iPhone and investor Fred Wilson talked about the need to “fill the holes” in the company’s feature set. Many developers took that as an attack on them, and some clearly felt betrayed, since many of these third-party apps had helped promote and build Twitter into what it was. This weekend saw a small flashback to that tension, when Twitter’s rules around the use of the word “tweet” and other trademarks got some attention in the blogosphere.

In a nutshell, the company says it wants companies to avoid the use of the word “tweet” in their name if their app or service does things other than access Twitter — a clear shot across the bow of services like Tweetdeck. Although there was a lot of grumbling about these directives, it seems like a natural move for Twitter to make. Investor Chris Sacca noted in a Twitter exchange with Hunch co-founder and angel investor Chris Dixon that Facebook has done the same thing with respect to apps and services that use terms like “face” and “book” and “wall.”

More than anything else, the response from the blogosphere and from Twitter developers sounds a little like friends criticizing their former childhood pal because he has started wearing a suit and has gone “all corporate,” and is therefore no fun any more. Twitter isn’t out of adolescence just yet: even Williams describes the company as “a 6-foot-tall sixth grader” with a “lack of maturity, despite size and the perception of outsiders.” But there is no question it is becoming more of a business, as it should. Twitter’s challenge now is to maintain some of that spirit of fun — and the support of its ecosystem — as it grows into adulthood.

When it comes to the group-buying market, Groupon is clearly the 800-pound gorilla, with 20 million subscribers, over $160-million in venture financing and a market value of more than $1 billion. So how do you compete with that kind of presence? If you’re Tippr, you don’t — you arm websites and publishers with the weapons to do that themselves. The Seattle-based startup today launched a white-label group-buying platform that does exactly that: gives companies an alternative to signing up with Groupon, by providing them with both the software and support to run their own group-buying campaigns.

Tippr founder Martin Tobias — who is also a venture partner at Ignition Partners in Seattle, and founded a streaming-media company called Loudeye in 1999 — says the company began as a spinoff from another company he started called Kashless.com, which offered local businesses a local classified-advertising solution (that business is in 130 cities and has 700,000 users, he says). When Tobias talked to his clients about an advertising offering, some mentioned that they were looking at offering deals through Groupon and LivingSocial. “They said it was just like advertising, except they didn’t have to put any money up front and it got people to walk in the door,” Tobias recalls.

So Tobias set up Tippr.com, but says the idea behind the site was always to use it as a proof-of-concept for the company’s eventual white-label offering, which has been in beta testing with several large publishers for the past few months. “We thought of Tippr as a kind of owned-and-operated version of our service, as a way to show clients our ability to provide a white-label group offering,” he says. Despite the fact that the company wasn’t really focusing on the site itself, Tobias says that Tippr.com is the number three group-buying service in many major markets, behind Groupon and LivingSocial (it is in 13 markets in total, and the site gets about 700,000 unique visitors a month).

Tippr’s pitch to publishers is that deals with Groupon and its traditional competitors, which a number of newspapers have signed recently — including a deal with McClatchy, publisher of the Miami Herald and other papers — effectively sign over control of the relationship between a reader and an advertiser to Groupon, and cut the publisher out (although they get a share of the revenue). Tobias says that in talking with potential clients for the white-label version of Tippr, many companies said they didn’t want to do this. “When that McClatchy deal was announced, my phones started ringing off the hook,” he says. “I’ve talked to a number of publishers who see Groupon and LivingSocial as fundamentally being in competition for marketing dollars that they feel they should be getting.”

The white-label solution, the Tippr founder says, gives publishers and other sites full control over the relationship with both advertisers and customers, and anything that happens remains within their brand. “We even do customer service as well,” says Tobias, “so that when a user calls they think they are dealing with the publisher, but it’s our people helping them print a coupon or whatever.” One media company in Baton Rouge, he says, heard that LivingSocial was coming to town and decided to do its own promotion using Tippr, “and their weekly deals outsell LivingSocial’s by a factor of 10 to 15 times, every time,” according to Tobias.

While some publishers like McClatchy might see partnering with Groupon or LivingSocial as a shortcut to riches in the group-buying game, others may see things differently, and resent giving someone else control over the advertising relationship. Tippr’s white-label offering seems like a reasonable compromise — and as big as Groupon gets, there are likely to always be companies that prefer the other option.

It may not be quite as big a deal as the presidential elections in 2008, when Barack Obama’s campaign team used social media and social networks to mobilize supporters and win the White House, but the mid-term state elections happening tomorrow have some of their own social tools — including a special Foursquare badge, a Facebook “get out the vote” pitch from the President, and a geo-location app for tracking polls. There’s also a cool Twitter visualization from the brainy nerds at the New York Times and an analysis of whether the number of Twitter followers can predict who wins the election.

Foursquare Maps: As we’ve noted before, the location-based service has been gradually extending its virtual game-world of badges and achievemenets into the real world, and the special election badge it has created is another example. But it’s not just a badge — Foursquare is planning to track activity and display it in real time on a map, and says it sees the mid-term elections as a kind of training ground for the national elections in 2012.

Vote with a check-in: GeoPollster is another election visualization app based on Foursquare: you select which political party you currently support, and then each time you “check in” at a Foursquare venue, GeoPollster counts your check-in as a vote for that party. The site then tracks votes across the various states based on activity. Obviously this isn’t likely to correlate with actual voting patterns, but it does produce funny headlines like “Democrats seize control of LL Bean outlet in Pittsburgh.”

Challenge your friends! Organizing for America has a Facebook app called The Commit to Vote Challenge that is aimed at getting people to publicly display their intention to vote, and to challenge their friends and acquaintances to vote as well. According to the site, the average use who commits via the app has passed along the message to 10 friends, and nearly a third of those who have committed to vote and provided a reason are first-time voters.

Twitter bubble view: The programmers at the New York Times have done some fascinating things with data visualization and elections in the past, and this time around they have come up with a real-time view of Twitter activity that looks at tweets that come from, are directed to and are about each of the candidates. Bubbles grow and shrink depending on the volume of activity. What does it mean? We’re not sure, but it’s fun to watch.

Do followers = voters? Dan Zarrella, a social-marketing researcher, looked at the official Twitter accounts for 30 senate, governor and house of representatives candidates, and then correlated the number of followers with the performance of those specific candidates in early polls. In more than 70 percent of cases, the candidate with the most followers was also ahead in the polls. Of course, this suffers from the “correlation vs. causation” problem — did the leaders get more followers because they were leading, or were they leading because they had more followers? Klout has a similar ranking of candidates based on their Twitter influence score.

Not to be left out of the action, Google has a mobile app/website that will show you where your polling station is and keep you up to date on any news related to your area. And we wrote recently about a candidate for the Senate whose programmer son came up with an election game that uses Facebook Places check-ins as way of encouraging people to get out and vote. Fred Trotter said that he hoped using social networks would help the U.S. move away from a brand of politics based on heavily financed interest groups and polarized viewpoints on the major issues.

We’re not sure whether that will actually happen or not, but it looks as though the “gamification” of elections is increasing, for better or worse — so go out and get your badge.Rob Boudon