Author: Mathew Ingram

New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell’s erudite skewering of various cultural phenomena, something he has become famous (or possibly infamous) for, tends to produce a strong reaction in those who are close to the topics he takes on, and his recent analysis of Twitter and its potential uses as a tool for social activism is no exception. In the several weeks since he wrote the original piece, over half a dozen essays and blog posts from a variety of sources have come out arguing that he is wrong, and today The Atlantic magazine joined the fray with a guest essay by none other than Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

Gladwell’s article was entitled “Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” and started with an evocative image: a group of black college students holding a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, to protest racism — an event that triggered subsequent rallies and demonstrations throughout the southern U.S. All of this, Gladwell says, “happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.” The author then goes on to puncture the conventional wisdom that Twitter had anything much to do with revolutions in Moldova or Iran, and says that there is something wrong with “the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.”

The New Yorker writer’s point is clear: real activism involves sit-ins and getting shot at by corrupt governments, not sitting at a keyboard posting things on Twitter or text messaging. And it’s hard to disagree with this — no one would argue that posting a comment to Twitter while sipping a latte at Starbucks is activism, simply because you happen to use the #iran hashtag. But is Gladwell making a fair comparison? I don’t think so. As other critics such as Anil Dash have also argued, setting up a contrast between Twitter and anti-racism demonstrations in the 1960s is effectively a straw-man argument, which allows the author to slam the social network for not doing things that no one has ever really claimed it was trying to do.

One of Gladwell’s central points is that Twitter and other social media tools emphasize and are powered by what sociologists call “weak ties” between individuals (a term coined by Mark Granovetter) — that is, the kind of ties that you have to your co-workers, or friends from high school, or people who belong to the same clubs as you. Gladwell says that real activism only occurs as a result of strong ties, the kind that people have to their churches, their families, and to strong leaders, and that real revolutions require a hierarchy that is antithetical to social media like Twitter. In his Atlantic essay, Biz Stone says: “Gladwell is wrong. Big change can come in small packages too.”

By that, the Twitter founder means that even weak ties can help pull people together around causes in ways that matter. He uses several examples, including the case of Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese dissident who is in prison for writing about human rights, and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Has Twitter led to his release? No. But as Stone argues, it has given Chinese citizens a way of talking about him, something that they would otherwise not have — as described in a blog post by Hu Yong, a professor of Internet studies at Peking University, who said Twitter was “the only place where people can talk freely” about Liu and his ideas, and that it has become “a powerful tool for Chinese citizens.”

In her response to Gladwell’s piece, author Maria Popova describes several cases in which Facebook helped spark “real” social activism, including public protests in Colombia in 2008 that saw close to 5 million people participate in protests against the country’s armed forces, and a campaign in Bulgaria in 2009 that resulted in the largest public protests since the fall of communism, and led to the resignation of several Parliament members. As others have noted in their critcisms, Gladwell seems to see activism as an either-or propostion — either you use social media, in which case it’s ineffective and useless, or you gather in the streets and do real activism. But wouldn’t some of those demonstrators in 1960 have loved to have better ways of getting their message out to as many people as possible? That’s what social media provides.

While I was reading Gladwell’s piece, in my head I replaced any mention of Twitter or Facebook with the words “the telephone” — and then it became a diatribe about how people talking on the telephone has never amounted to anything in terms of social activism. That is probably just as true as his criticisms of Twitter. But would any modern social effort or campaign or demonstration be effective without someone making phone calls? Twitter and Facebook are just tools, and they can be used for social good in the same way any other tool can. And those “weak ties” can eventually grow into strong ones. As Stone notes at the end of his essay: “Rudimentary communication among individuals in real time allows many to move together as one — suddenly uniting everyone in a common goal.” And that is a positive thing for social change, not a negative one.

Facebook has been caught in another privacy-related dust-up, after the Wall Street Journal reported that a number of the social network’s most popular apps and games have been sending “personal information” to third parties, including companies that compile data on users for sale to advertisers and marketers. In the context of Facebook’s ongoing issues with privacy, it seems like a fairly major problem, and the tone of the WSJ piece suggests that it is a major breach of privacy by the social network — but is it really?

The information that the Journal is referring to in its report is the user ID that each member of Facebook gets when they join. According to the newspaper, all of the top 10 apps on the social network — including FarmVille and other popular games — were transmitting user IDs of Facebook members to advertising networks and other third parties, and in some cases those apps were sending the ID numbers of a user’s friends as well (the ad networks and other companies who received this information told the Journal that they did not collect or make use of these numbers, or any user profile info related to them).

So ad networks and other companies may have been getting your user ID. Should you care? As Facebook has pointed out in statements to the media and in a blog post on its developer blog, the user ID does not contain any private information, and even if someone plugged that ID into Facebook, all they would get is whatever public information you include in your Facebook profile (you can use the social network’s privacy settings to control what information — if any — gets sent by the apps that you use). In most cases, that’s your name and possibly your date of birth and where you live, as well as a list of your friends.

It’s easy enough to find the ID of a Facebook user, because Facebook provides it to developers through its open graph protocol — just go to http://graph.facebook.com/user-id and replace “user-id” with someone’s Facebook user name. There are also a number of tools that will show you exactly what information the social network is sharing about you, including one that gives you an overall “privacy score”. Even before the latest Journal report, Facebook had already taken steps to reduce the likelihood that a user’s ID number would be passed on via their browser (although it still faces a lawsuit as a result of this issue).

The reality is that passing on user ID numbers and even public profile information isn’t really a “privacy breach,” because the only data that advertisers or anyone else can get through this process is information that users have chosen to make public already. As some Facebook defenders such as new-media guru Jeff Jarvis have noted, many companies — including media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal — sell information about their subscribers to a variety of third parties, who in turn sell it to marketing firms and advertising agencies. Is it fair to hold Facebook accountable for the behavior of third parties when we don’t hold others accountable in the same way? Some would argue it is not.

After all of the negative attention Facebook has gotten over the past year from advocacy groups and governments because of changes to its privacy settings, it’s not surprising that the company — and its critics — would be sensitive to any suggestion that personal information was being misused. But maybe we should save our outrage for cases that involve real breaches of privacy, rather than seeing potential scandals in every dark corner.

A study released today has drawn a lot of attention in media circles for suggesting that stories on “serious topics” such as the Gulf oil spill and the mortgage crisis draw more revenue for online media outlets than stories about celebrities like Lindsay Lohan. “Traffic Bait Doesn’t Bring Ad Clicks,” says a piece in the New York Times, while the Columbia Journalism Review writes that “Celebs Are Loud, But Hard News Pays.” But is that really what the study by Perfect Market shows? While the message is undoubtedly a welcome one for media companies who would rather focus on serious content than celebrity-chasing, the reality is probably a little more complicated than the study suggests.

The study comes from what Perfect Market calls the Vault Index, a new ranking of the most valuable news topics that the company came up with as a way of publicizing its services, which involve helping media sites and other content publishers aggregate and monetize their content (the company is a spin off from Bill Gross’s Idealab). According to a description of the study, Perfect Market looked at over 15 million news articles from 21 U.S. news sites — including The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Chicago Tribune — from June to September of this year, and ranked the most valuable topics on a scale from 1 to 5. It arrived at a definition of value by looking at the RPM or “revenue per thousand” for pages about those topics, based on how much each paper was charging for advertising on those pages.

So, for example, articles on mortgage rates had an average RPM of $93, and immigration reform an average of $26, while pages about Lindsay Lohan’s court appearance averaged RPMs of $2.50, according to Perfect Market. Articles on social security pulled in average revenue of $129 per thousand, the study said. In a blog post, the company’s chief revenue officer said that even when the larger amounts of traffic to stories about celebrities like Lindsay Lohan were factored into the equation, serious news stories about things like immigration still brought in more revenue for the newspapers it studied. “Publishers end up chasing trends to increase raw page views, but that is not necessarily the best revenue strategy,” Tim Ruder said. “And it’s a disservice to their readers who want credible and important news.”

While it’s nice to hear that writing about serious news issues is more valuable than writing about celebrity court cases, the reality isn’t quite as one-sided as the study makes it appear. All the RPM data really shows is that advertisers are more interested in having their ads appear on pages that are about social security and immigration reform than on pages about Lindsay Lohan. This isn’t surprising: not only are readers of articles about social security more likely to have incomes that appeal to advertisers, but advertisers almost always want to be on pages that are about “serious” topics.

That said, however, they mostly want to be on pages that are about serious topics at websites that are racking up millions of pageviews and unique visitors — and one of the ways to boost those numbers is to write about Lindsay Lohan, a topic that almost everyone clicks on, even if they don’t want to admit it. Advertisers aren’t likely to stick around and pay those hefty RPM averages for pages on websites that aren’t getting any traffic. And if you try to run a site that is just about social security or immigration reform, that is pretty much where you will be.

The line between what we call a “book” and something that is just a really long chunk of published text — what you might call the “not-quite-a-book” category — continues to blur in the electronic publishing world. In one of the latest examples, Borders has joined forces with a service called Bookbrewer to provide a simple service that allows bloggers or anyone else with an idea to publish what is effectively an e-book, and get it distributed through all the major e-book platforms. In a similar move, Amazon recently launched its Kindle Singles program, which is also designed for publishing less-than-book-length writing online.

The Bookbrewer service allows writers to upload their content — which can be any length — set their own suggested price (within the boundaries set by the various e-book retailers like Amazon, Apple and Borders itself) and then publish an e-book in the open ePub format that can be downloaded for the iPad, the Kindle, the Kobo or any other e-reader. The service has two tiers: one costs $89.99 and gives authors an ISBN, the universal book-tracking number used in the publishing industry, and the $199.99 advanced package also gives the author a master ePub file they can share or upload wherever they wish.

Amazon says that its Kindle Singles, which launched earlier this week, is designed for pieces that are between 10,000 and 30,000 words — or between 30 and 90 printed pages (about twice the length of an article in The New Yorker or several chapters of a book). The company said that it is looking for submissions from outside the traditional publishing industry, including “serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers.” It’s not clear what the Singles will cost, or how much of that revenue will make its way to the author.

When the iPad was first rumored to be launching soon, I wrote about how the tablet and others like it, including the Kindle, could become a platform for authors of all kinds to find a larger market for their works — not just authors of traditional books (many of whom love the e-book revolution for a variety of reasons), but bloggers and other thinkers with interesting ideas, academics with interesting research papers, anyone with something they might feel deserves a larger audience (although obviously not all of them will). In some ways, it’s like the early days of the Gutenberg revolution, when authors published short manuscripts and “chapbooks” and everything in between.

The advent of tablets and e-bookstores dramatically lowers the barriers to entry for these kinds of writers, who would previously have had to find an agent and a publisher willing to take them on — and would have had to pay them a handsome share of any revenue as well. Now, through services like Bookbrewer and Kindle Singles, they can reach what is potentially a much larger audience, and maybe even make some money as well. Amazon and other e-book publishers pay authors as much as 70 percent of the revenue their books make. And the e-book market as a whole continues to grow rapidly — the latest figures from the Association of American Publishers show that sales climbed 172 percent in August.

As Om has pointed out before, the book as we know it is undergoing a fundamental transformation, just as so many other forms of content are. People still read traditional printed books and many will likely continue to do so in the future — but even more interesting is how the definition of what a “book” is becomes so fluid online. So is the book dead? Yes. Long live the book.

You probably have a favorite game you like to play on Facebook — which may or may not involve killing virtual mafia kingpins, or tending to your virtual crops on a farm — but what happens when you leave your computer or your browser and start using your mobile device? A startup called Uken Games is trying to solve that problem by creating games that synchronize your player profile and other game-related data across platforms, so that when you shift from PC to phone, you can pick up right where you left off.

I sat down with founder and CEO Chris Ye recently for a short interview about the company. He and partner Mark Lampert started Uken in February of 2009, after seeing the rise of social games on Facebook and elsewhere, such as Mafia Wars and Mob Wars. In March, the company launched its first game, called Superhero Alliance — which can be played on Facebook as well as the iPhone and the Android platform — and it has since launched several other games, including Villains and Forces of War, all of which can be played on multiple platforms.

Uken got some seed funding from Toronto-based Extreme Venture Partners, and raised a second round of $250,000 earlier this year. The company has just four full-time employees and several co-op students, but its games are among the top most-downloaded free games in the iTunes store, says Ye, with 400,000 installs on the iPhone, about 30,000 on Android devices and 300,000 monthly active users on Facebook. Uken’s revenue model is based on selling virtual goods such as weapons and other special items that can be used in its games, an approach similar to that employed by massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft.

Making its games cross-platform is accomplished by using HTML5 and Ajax, says Ye. “We’ve been able to solve a lot of the problems associated with synchronous play across platforms, and we think that’s a pretty important step.” Because it uses those technologies for its games, the company was also able to port one of its titles to the iPad in less than a day, the Uken founder says, and expects to release the iPad version within the next month. While social-gaming giant Zynga is obviously a competitor, Ye says, “it can only put out so many games,” and the upside of Zynga’s presence in the market is that people have become used to playing social games and paying for virtual goods.”

Can tying two rocks together produce something that will fly with investors? That’s the question that leaps to mind upon reading that AOL is mulling some kind of takeover/merger bid for Yahoo, which may or may not involve a restructuring of Yahoo and backing from private equity firms, according to a somewhat confusing report in the Wall Street Journal late Wednesday. A subsequent report by Bloomberg says that Yahoo has hired an investment bank to handle any overtures from AOL and private equity, which sources told the wire service are in the works. All the sources involved say the talks are preliminary and warn that a deal may never take place, and it’s a good thing that they do, because frankly an AOL-Yahoo merger sounds like the worst idea since… well, since AOL and Time-Warner.

To recap that mind-boggling train wreck for anyone who might not remember it, AOL merged with Time Warner just as the Internet investment bubble was peaking in the late 1990s, and the combined company quickly started to hemorrhage billions of dollars in market value, making it arguably one of the worst business deals since the dawn of recorded history. A combination of AOL and Yahoo may not be quite that bad, but taking two old and faded Internet giants and roping them together sounds more like a desperation move or Hail Mary pass than it does like a coherent strategy for growth or success — for either company.

AOL’s new CEO Tim Armstrong has had some success in laying out his vision for the company, which involves turning the former portal into a media and content producer via ventures such as Patch.com — which is spending $50 million on hyper-local journalism — as well as a blogging strategy that led to the recent acquisition of TechCrunch. And the AOL chief executive has arguably done a better job of selling this vision than Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has of convincing investors (or users, for that matter) that the company has any kind of over-arching strategy, apart from selling off or outsourcing virtually everything, including search, and trying to build its own blogging/content model.

The reality is that both companies — and Yahoo in particular — have failed to show any compelling evidence that they understand what the real-time web is about, or how they are going to get from where they are to where they need to be in order to take advantage of that fundamental shift in how the web functions. It’s true that both companies still have millions of unique monthly visitors, and advertising-based businesses that cater to those users, but the future of that kind of platform is murky at best. The two former portals are like fish trying to grow legs and run — not an easy transformation to engineer, and it’s not clear how merging into one giant old former mega-portal is going to help them do that.

Of course if such a deal does actually proceed it will probably be fun to watch, in the same way that people often slow down to watch a car accident.

With all the fuss surrounding the recent “AngelGate” meetings and the tension between angels and super-angels and traditional venture funds, it’s instructive to listen to one of the legends of the Silicon Valley VC business — Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine — talk about the approach and the thinking that led to his investments in companies like Apple, Cisco, Google, Yahoo and Zappos. In the video embedded below, he talks to a group of students at the Stanford University graduate school of business about what matters and what doesn’t.

Valentine says that many people assume that the reason Sequoia has been so successful is that the fund backs “the best and brightest, the greatest managers and all that stuff [but] we do not.” The only thing that really matters, he says, is the market.

We have always focused on the market — the size of the market, the dynamics of the market, the nature of the competition — because our objective always was to build big companies. If you don’t attack a big market, it’s highly unlikely you’re ever going to build a big company

As a result, the Sequoia founder says that the fund isn’t really interested in where an entrepreneur went to school, or whether they have any actual business credentials — all Sequoia is interested in is the size of the potential market they are trying to attack, and the potential value of the problem that they are trying to solve.

“We don’t spend a lot of time wondering about where people went to school, how smart they are and all the rest of that. We’re interested in their idea about the market they’re after, the magnitude of the problem they’re solving, and what can happen if the combination of Sequoia and the individuals are correct.”

In some cases — as with Apple — an idea about the potential market can lead to multiple investments in all of the various players in that ecosystem, Valentine says. Apple “had in mind the idea of you all having your own computer,” he tells the graduate class at Stanford, and the implications of that involved the need for memory makers and disk-drive companies and manufacturers of all of the other parts that were needed for personal computers. So Sequoia wound up investing in more than 15 companies in the PC category, including game-maker Electronic Arts, which was created in the Sequoia office.

The Sequoia founder also says that he had an advantage over some other VCs because he “could see the future” — meaning he understood the transformation that personal computers and microprocessors were going to unleash because he worked at Fairchild Semiconductor and co-founded National Semiconductor. For Valentine’s thoughts on Steve Jobs’ marketing abilities, the failure of Sony and Xerox (which he calls “one of my favorite tragedies”), the importance of storytelling and the launch of Cisco, please see the full video at YouTube.

As website owners try to boost the amount of time their users spend online, the all-in-one site toolbar is becoming more and more popular. Wibiya, which makes a social toolbar that websites can add in order to allow users to chat, share links on Facebook and use other social features, said today it is launching a developers platform and open API to allow third-party applications to integrate with its application marketplace. The two-year-old startup, which is based in Israel and was seed funded by ICQ founder Yossi Vardi, also announced that it is partnering with Yahoo, Bit.ly and AddThis.

Wibiya says that its toolbars, which can be installed on any website and customized with a variety of apps and services, reach more than 175 million unique users a month and appear on over 80,000 websites, even though the company only came out of beta earlier this year. Wibiya CEO and co-founder Dror Ceder says that about 25,000 new websites have been joining the toolbar network every month, and the company has seen 15 to 20 percent growth in activity in just the past two months alone. Wibiya plans to add several additional APIs in the future, Ceder said, including a mobile one and an API that makes it easier for apps to connect to a user’s other social network profiles.

You may never have heard of the company, but you’ve probably seen the Wibiya toolbar if you go to websites such as TheStreet.com, Philly.com or Playboy.com. Each site has a customized version of the toolbar, with a different look and different services built in, including live chat (or video chat, in the case of Playboy.com), a translation tool, sharing functions for Twitter and Facebook, and links to popular news or features from the site. Wibiya’s toolbar competes against similar bars from companies such as Meebo, the web-based chat provider, and Facebook also offers its own sharing and chat toolbar for websites. Google has a Friend Connect toolbar, but it doesn’t seem to get used much.

I confess that I am not a big fan of website toolbars in general. I find they generally clutter up the screen, and don’t really provide a lot of functionality that I would use most of the time, and even when they do — in the case of sharing on Twitter or Facebook — those functions could be just as easily handled with a button on the site near the content. Its obvious that some users share my lack of enthusiasm, because a number of companies have either killed their toolbars outright (as Digg did when Kevin Rose took over as CEO), or made a point of de-emphasizing them, as both Stumbleupon and GetGlue have done.

That said, Wibiya’s growth stats are impressive, and the fact that the company is trying to open up and become a platform for any third-party service — as well as building in useful features such as Bit.ly support — is a positive sign. Whether it can become the dominant player by becoming more open remains to be seen, however.

The Wibiya network reaches more than 175 million unique users a month
Today there are over 80,000 active websites using the Wibiya web toolbar.
Over 25,000 new websites join the Wibiya network each month.