Category: Gigaom

Digg has been through a fairly rough period since it launched a redesign of the site several months ago — users reacted badly to the loss of certain features and the site’s new focus on more “mainstream” sources of content, and the new CEO spent his first few weeks apologizing and rolling back many of those changes. Now the site has added human curation in what seems to be an attempt to recover some of the magic the network used to have.

As a staffer describes in a blog post, a new “breaking news” module has been added to the site, which appears regardless of whether the user is looking at the My News, the Top News or the Upcoming view (the My News section — which shows links from people and sources you follow, Twitter-style — was added with the redesign, while Upcoming was removed, but has since been restored). The module is designed to highlight stories that the site’s editors (it’s not clear how many) feel are worth reading but haven’t made it to the front page yet.

More than anything else, this seems to be an admission by Digg that the site’s ranking algorithm — and/or the way that people are using the network — is no longer enough. The idea behind Digg originally was that users would vote for the content they liked, and that would inevitably drive the best or most interesting links to the front page, apart from the occasional experience with the “bury brigade” (which would gang up and vote down certain links). It was one of the first large-scale experiments in what some would call the “crowdsourced” aggregation of content.

Digg isn’t the first site to decide that an algorithm isn’t enough to highlight all the best content that can be found online: Gabe Rivera, the founder of the technology link-aggregator Techmeme, added human editors to the site two years ago because he said the human element added something that even the best algorithm couldn’t. But Digg was different from a pure aggregator — it was effectively powered by humans from the beginning, and their votes theoretically determined the look of the site. That no longer seems to be enough. But will human editors change how users look at Digg?

The bigger question, of course, is whether any of these changes can help the site recover from the traffic plunge it has suffered over the past year — a decline that has come in part as a result of the redesign, but also due to growing competition from other link-sharing networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and has led some (including me) to wonder whether it is relevant any more

When Apple first launched Ping — a music-based social network within iTunes — it was widely criticized for not being connected to any external networks such as Facebook or Twitter. That “walled garden” approach changed today, with an announcement from Twitter that users of Ping can now connect their accounts on both networks and share links to songs from within iTunes. So Apple gets to piggyback on Twitter’s network of almost 100 million users — but what does Twitter get out of the deal? Neither side is saying.

As Darrell has described in his post, Ping users can now add links on Twitter to songs they have purchased, and anyone looking at their tweet at the new Twitter website will see — in the site’s right-hand “media pane” — the cover art for the song, as well as an audio-preview button that plays the standard 30-second clip (which Apple recently said would be extended to 90 seconds).

The benefits this deal has for Apple are obvious: the Ping network was so walled off from the rest of the web before that it had little hope of growing virally beyond a group of already devoted iTunes users. And while partnering with Twitter doesn’t give Apple the same boost as a deal with Facebook’s 500 million users would (Steve Jobs said there were discussions about such an arrangement, but Facebook’s terms were “too onerous”) it is still better than nothing. Sharing links that go directly to iTunes is smart, although not everyone sees this as a good idea.

And what does Twitter get? The best-case scenario would be a revenue share with Apple on any songs purchased from those links passed to the network, but it’s not clear whether that is part of the deal, or might become part of it in the future (a Twitter spokesman said that the company doesn’t comment on the financial details of its partnerships). In any case, one thing that Twitter could get from this arrangement — at least potentially — is more traffic to its website, since the media pane with cover art and song previews will only be available there, at least until third-party developers find a way of adding that functionality to their apps.

Om said after the initial launch of Ping that he saw the Apple-based social network as the “future of social commerce,” because it not only allows music lovers to connect and share their recommendations, but is also hosted within the iTunes e-commerce platform, and therefore ties those recommendations directly to purchasing behavior in a way that few other social networks do. Twitter now gives Apple the ability to take that idea and run with it throughout the expanding Twitter universe, which could be very powerful indeed.

Want to import your Gmail address book into Facebook? Google is happy to let you do that (although it doesn’t want to make it easy). But first, it wants you to be aware of what you are doing — namely, that you are importing them into a place where you will never be able to get them back out again. Hence, the new message that greets anyone trying to use this feature, which has the wonderful title: “Trap my contacts now.” In the serve-and-volley that has been going on between the two web giants over data portability in the past week, call this one a drop shot.

The Google message asks users: “Are you super sure you want to import your contact information for your friends into a service that won’t let you get it out?” and notes that the site the user was redirected from (Facebook’s name is never mentioned) “doesn’t allow you to re-export your data to other services, essentially locking up your contact data about your friends.” Google says it “strongly disagrees” with this kind of data protectionism, but is willing to let users export their information because it believes they should control what happens to it. The notice also contains a checkbox that allows a user to “register a complaint over data protectionism,” although it’s not clear what exactly that does.

Just to recap what has been going on for the past few days, Google changed the terms of its contacts API, which third-party developers use to automatically import email address books from Gmail, so that users can find their friends on a network or service. The change required that anyone making use of this feature also allow users to export their data, including email addresses — and this was a clear shot at Facebook, which doesn’t allow this (although you can download names, wall posts, photos, etc.) Facebook responded by linking directly to Google’s download feature, which is why the new warning appears.

In the only official comment that has emerged from Facebook, platform engineer Mike Vernal suggested that Google is being hypocritical about data portability, and is only concerned about it because Facebook is more popular and is a competitive threat. According to Vernal, allowing users to export email addresses is something Google should be required to do, but not something Facebook should have to do — because users on Facebook control their own contact info, but not their friends.

As several sites have noted, however, Facebook happily allows users to bulk export the contact information for all their friends from the social network to partners such as Microsoft and Yahoo, but not to Google. So it appears that there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around — and even more tangible signs that Google and Facebook are in the middle of a social war, and your contact information is one of the main weapons.

If you want to test someone’s belief in freedom of speech, the easiest way is to bring up something morally abhorrent — topics such as the defence of pedophilia, incest, the denial of the Holocaust, and so on. That’s where Amazon found itself today, after word got out on Twitter and elsewhere in the blogosphere that the online retailer’s Kindle e-book library includes a book entitled “The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure.” Hundreds of commenters have complained and asked Amazon to remove the book, but the company has refused to do so, saying it does not believe in censorship.

It’s not clear why the book started getting attention today, since it was self-published almost two weeks ago by someone named Phillip R. Greaves II. But it started attracting comments and soon there were hundreds (there were almost a thousand at last check, although Amazon moderators have reportedly removed several hundred offensive ones), of which the vast majority were calling for the online retailer to take the book off its virtual shelves. Many said that they planned to boycott Amazon as a result of its decision not to remove the book. But in a statement, the company said:

Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable. Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.

Part of what Amazon has been selling with the Kindle and the e-book store is the ability for virtually anyone to self-publish whatever they wish, something that I have written about in the past as a good thing. But obviously the downside of that ability is that people can publish reprehensible and disturbing things as well, such as the book in question — which the author says is “my attempt to make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them, by establishing certian [sic] rules for these adults to follow.”

A few commenters on the book have defended Amazon’s decision, saying the company should be congratulated for not giving into pressures to censor such material. And some observers have pointed out that the retailer has been down this particular road before, with books that involved the same topic, and in those cases it has also made the same argument — that censorship is not right, regardless of how disturbing or reprehensible the content might be.

With the explosion of self-publishing that the Kindle and other tools provide, this is probably not the last time Amazon will have to make that choice. For what it’s worth, I hope that they continue to defend free speech, as difficult as that might be.

The creators of Lost and Heroes, two of the hottest television shows of the past decade, told the NewTeeVee Live conference this morning that now is one of the most exciting and fascinating times to be a storyteller, because the web — along with social networks and mobile devices — allow writers to take their stories in new directions. And one of the best parts about this evolution of TV, according to Tim Kring of Heroes and Carlton Cuse of Lost, is that the fans of a show take part in creating those stories.

Kring described how even before Heroes launched, the show went to ComicCon, the national comic-lovers convention, and talked about what was coming — and the result, he says, was that “we had thousands of fans who went out and set up literally hundreds of websites devoted to the show,” so that by the time it launched a few months later, “there was this quiet, underground, early-adopter, blogosphere world of fandom that had built up around the show” that gave it a real boost in terms of popularity (of course, Kring also joked about how some of those fans were “400-pound guys in Harry Potter costumes”).

Lost creator Cuse said that “the real essence of the revolution we’re going through is that the conversation is two ways now… so you have to think, how do you engage that audience that wants to talk back to you?” One of those ways is by using online extensions of the narrative in the show, and even “alternate reality games” or ARGs that viewers can get involved in and help build. Lost had one called the Dharma Initiative and members could actually advance in the community by completing certain tasks and then would get a title like Dharma Scientist.

“This was all done by the hive mind — it was not controlled by us,” says Cuse. “We created the framework, but we had hundreds of people pouring massive amounts of their time and energies into it.” Kring described the approach that Heroes took as “using all parts of the buffalo,” saying there were often storylines or aspects of the show that didn’t fit on the regular TV portion of the show, so it would “live in these other platforms” online or through blogs or other offshoots of the show. The Heroes creator said he could see more shows taking this 360-degree approach to their creations.

Both TV show creators said that this was a great time to be a storyteller. “It’s a really exciting time, because there are so many new avenues to tell stories,” said Cuse, while Kring said it was a fascinating time to be a storyteller in part because “the stories are literally going with you, they are mobile — the phone is both a device for content consumption and a content-creation device.”

Although television has become more fragmented thanks to the web, millions of people still tune in for event-driven broadcasts such as the Emmys and MTV’s video awards. The real-time conversation that Twitter allows makes it a perfect companion for those events, staffer Robin Sloan — who works on the social network’s media-partnership team — told attendees at GigaOM’s NewTeeVee Live conference this morning. Sloan said that the network gets 90-million-plus tweets every day, and “a lot of those tweets are about TV shows.” As an example, he showed a graph of tweets about the show Dancing With The Stars, and the huge peaks in traffic coincided exactly with new shows, meaning people were tweeting about the show as it was happening.

The Twitter media evangelist talked about three things that using Twitter can do to make such events more powerful, including:

• Synchronous show tweeting: in which channels such as Discovery get a scientist or some other knowledgeable person to tweet along with a show about a specific topic, to add information. This is “simple, but can be very powerful,” Sloan said.
• Social viewing: Taking advantage of the fact that viewers are tweeting about the show is “the new campfire,” said Sloan — a way of showing people that they are not alone. True Blood has a whole website that just aggregates tweets about the show, so that viewers don’t have to remember hashtags, etc.
• New kinds of content: During the MTV video-music awards show, Sloan said the network tracked all the tweets in real time and had a “Twitter jockey” on screen who watched them and picked out examples. The show also had a 95-foot-wide monitor showing the number of tweets and votes for specific stars.

  This kind of “conversational choreography” is becoming a crucial part of any major TV event, Sloan said — just as important as focusing the stage lights or charging up the microphones — and can become a new way of reimagining content thanks to the “incredibly powerful force” that is the real-time conversation about that content.

Facebook has responded to Google’s recent data blockade by effectively going around the barrier, according to a report today. Last week, Google changed the terms of use for its contacts API, which allows third-party services to pull the info from your Gmail address book automatically, and said that this would only be allowed if other services did the same — making it crystal clear that this was aimed directly at Facebook, which doesn’t provide that ability. Now Facebook is apparently using Google’s own contact-download feature to get around this blockage.

Now, instead of automatically pulling in your Gmail contact list so that it can find those users on Facebook, the giant social network has a button that lets you download your contacts from Google and then upload the file to Facebook, thereby accomplishing pretty much the same thing without Google’s approval. As The Guardian notes, this effectively takes advantage of the web giant’s own data-liberation policies, which make it easy for users to get their information out of Google’s databases. While Facebook recently added a feature that allows users to download their photos, wall posts and other content, it does not make it easy to pull your contacts’ email addresses (according to one of our commenters, however, this is possible if you use a Yahoo Mail import tool).

A source familiar with Google’s thinking said that the company made a deliberate choice to go after Facebook on the issue of data portability. Although some observers were concerned about the impact that Google’s reciprocity statement might have on smaller players, the source said “this is not a blanket policy. [Google] is effectively enforcing it on a case-by-case basis — and Facebook is clearly the biggest, and the most closed” in terms of its data-portability policies. Google only went the API route, this source says, because negotiations with the giant social network went nowhere. “They tried the carrot approach and it didn’t work, so now they are bringing out the stick.”

The problem for Google is that now Facebook has used the search company’s own data-liberation policies to avoid that stick. Google could change the terms under which users can download their own data, or alter the process in order to make it harder for Facebook to get it, but then that would look bad — and risks irritating users. In effect, Google is trapped by its own commitment to openness, and has to allow Facebook to import contacts without providing the same download feature. For now, at least, it seems that the social network’s “roach motel” approach to data will continue.

The war of words between Facebook and Google over who controls a user’s contact information just got ramped up another notch: an engineer with Facebook’s platform team has posted a comment on a TechCrunch blog post about the affair, accusing Google of changing its tune on data portability because of the competitive threat posed by Facebook. According to Mike Vernal, the social network has no intention of changing its mind on its approach to email addresses, and the engineer makes it clear that Facebook believes it is more open than Google where it counts.

While Google wants users of Facebook to be able to download or export the email addresses of all their friends, Vernal argues that this is not up to Facebook to allow, because users own their own information — including their email address:

The most important principle for Facebook is that every person owns and controls her information. Each person owns her friends list, but not her friends’ information. A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums.

Just to recap for those of you trying to follow this at home, Google recently changed the terms of its contacts API — which allows third-party developers to auto-import a user’s contacts — to require that anyone making use of this feature also allow the same thing in return. The web giant said that it was doing this primarily because large players like Facebook weren’t allowing users to export their information (although Facebook allows you to download some of your content from the network, that doesn’t include the email addresses of your social graph).

Facebook then got around the block by linking directly to Google’s own contact-downloading tool, and asking users to download their friends’ addresses and then upload them manually to the social network. A Google spokesman said that the company was “disappointed that Facebook didn’t invest their time in making it possible for their users to get their contacts out of Facebook” and that the company believed that “people should be able to control the data they create.”

But Vernal makes the point that Google didn’t always believe this. Less than a year ago, he says, Google blocked users from exporting their contact info to Facebook from Orkut, and at the time, the company released a statement saying that “mass exportation of email is not standard on most social networks — when a user friends someone, they don’t then expect that person to be easily able to send that contact information to a third party along with hundreds of other addresses with just one click.” Vernal says:

This functionality was not a problem when Orkut was winning in Brazil and India but, as soon as people starting preferring Facebook to Google products, Google changed its stance. First, Google simply broke their export feature and hoped people wouldn’t notice… then, when they got called out on it, they changed their policy completely. Today, the same thing is happening with Gmail.

This may seem like a lot of playground bickering or competitive posturing between two web giants — and it clearly is that — but there is also an important question at stake: do you own the right to export your friends’ email addresses and then import them into another program? Facebook seems to be saying that it is not only okay for Google to export email addresses, but that it must do this, because it runs an email program — but because Facebook is a social network (whatever that is), it doesn’t have to play by the same rules. Does that sound fair? Not to me.

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