Category: Gigaom

This post is the third of four stories about my experiences snooping on my kids and their online behavior over a period of years. Part one is here, part two is here and the final instalment is here.

In the first two installments of this series, I talked about how I started eavesdropping on our two younger daughters’ behavior online — out of a somewhat misplaced desire to protect them from a variety of imagined dangers — and how I learned something about them along the way, despite misgivings about my surveillance activities.

Our youngest daughter proved to be even more of a revelation in some ways, both because of the way the social web has evolved since I started my family spying program about a decade ago, and because of how her reaction to my monitoring made me rethink what I was doing.

In many ways, the evolution of our daughters’ use of the web has been a kind of microcosm of the broader changes in the internet over the past decade: When I started paying close attention to what our oldest was doing online as a teenager (she is 24 now), it was primarily instant messaging — which now seems like an ancient relic of the web, thanks to the rise of texting and apps like SnapChat or Instagram — as well as some websites where you could play rudimentary games or do puzzles. So a simple keystroke-logging program allowed me to eavesdrop quite easily on most of her activity.

The rise of Facebook and the social web

By the time I started monitoring our second-oldest daughter and her online behavior as a teenager (she is now 19), she spent some time on websites with games or jokes, but she also started to spend a lot more of her time with sites and services that were more like prototypical social networks: virtual worlds like Habbo Hotel, where the engagement with other users was far more important than the actual surroundings or the simplistic games that were played — and sites, like Gaia Online, that offered the ability to write interactive fiction with others who were passionate about the same topics.

In much the same way, we’ve seen the internet evolve from being just a series of static websites through the dawn of what used to be called “Web 2.0” or the interactive web, to the rise of full-fledged — and globe-spanning — social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Interestingly, all three of our daughters have used Facebook (which started to become popular just as our oldest reached teenager-hood), but their usage waned substantially as they grew older — and it is also a much smaller focus for our youngest daughter than it was for our other two at the same age.

In some ways, they seem to see Facebook as almost a necessary evil, like email is to an older generation, rather than something they want to spend a lot of time on for their own purposes. My colleague Eliza Kern has written about this phenomenon, which I think is fairly widespread with younger users.

Facebook gives way to Tumblr and Twitter

If our middle daughter started the trend in our family of being more interested in sites with a social element rather than just games or other activities, our youngest continued it — beginning with sites like Club Penguin as a child, and then moving on to Facebook and others as she became a teenager. What was interesting about her use of the web, however (as opposed to the usual teenager behavior like texting) was how quickly it started to center around Tumblr and Twitter, and how that more or less stymied my attempts to monitor her online activity the same way I had with her older sisters.

While keystroke-logging software worked with a one-on-one IM conversation, it was of no real use for texting (I didn’t really investigate whether there were similar tools for phones, because that seemed a little too draconian even for me) and it didn’t help much with trying to keep an eye on what she and her older sister were doing on Tumblr or Twitter either. All I got was a mess of text without any kind of reference point for who or what they were talking to or about, which didn’t help much.

And so I did what I’m sure plenty of other parents have done in a similar situation: I more or less gave up on the automated snooping and turned to stalking, by friending them on Facebook and following them on Tumblr and Twitter. The difficulty there, of course, is that following someone is a very difficult thing to keep hidden from the person you are following — it becomes obvious as soon as you do it, unless you create a secret account under a pseudonym just for the purpose, which seemed like a lot of effort to go to.

I decide to stop stalking my kids

My daughter’s response to this was fairly predictable: She hated the idea that I was somehow looking over her shoulder while she interacted with her friends and other fans of the TV shows she talked about on Tumblr and Twitter, and I’m sure she felt much like I did when my parents would sit in the dining room and watch my friends and me trying to have a party in the living room — like a giant wet blanket had been dropped on her online life, smothering any chance of spontaneity. When I asked her to change her online name because it seemed a little offensive, she rolled her eyes and complied, but I could tell I had crossed a line.

Both her response and that of her older sister — who also spent most of her time on Tumblr, live-blogging Teen Wolf and Doctor Who and other favorite shows with an online community of fans — somehow made me feel worse than I had felt before, when I was just anonymously snooping on my daughter’s IM conversations. The idea that even my virtual presence on Tumblr or Twitter might prevent them from being able to express themselves or interact with their friends (some of whom they have never met) in an authentic way made me feel like I was robbing them of one of the most powerful features of the social web.

I had become increasingly concerned over the years about the broader invasion of privacy that my monitoring represented, and had also come to the conclusion that all of my surveillance was achieving very little — since it didn’t actually help me understand what they were going through or where potential trouble spots might lie.

But it was the interference with their development as fully functioning social human beings (whatever that means in an online context) that really gave me pause, and finally made me step back from all of my monitoring.

Now I am back to crossing my fingers and hoping for the best, like most parents have done since the beginning of time.

Monday: One of my daughers talks about what it was like to have a snooping parent.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Lightspring and Flickr user Gabrielle Colletti and Shutterstock / ollyy

After seven years with Twitter as a part of the social-media ecosystem, we’ve become pretty accustomed by now to the idea that the service functions as a real-time news platform — a cross between a social network and a news-wire staffed by millions of volunteer journalists, reporting on everything from a revolution in Egypt to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Was there a turning point when Twitter stopped being just a plaything for nerds and started becoming a journalistic entity? Co-founder Jack Dorsey says there was: the day an airplane crash-landed in the middle of the Hudson river in 2009.

Dorsey, who famously sketched out the idea for Twitter in 2000, talked to CNBC as part of the network’s recent documentary entitled “The Twitter Revolution,” and described it as the moment when the world started looking at the service as a potential news source rather than just a tech startup with a funny name. “It just changed everything,” he said. “Suddenly the world turned its attention (to us), because we were the source of news — but it wasn’t us, it was this person in the boat, using the service, which was even more amazing.” You can hear more from Dorsey about creating the experience of Twitter at our RoadMap conference in November in San Francisco.

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A sea change in the way the news works

Those comments from Dorsey resonated with me personally, because the landing of US Airways Flight 1549 was definitely a turning point in the way that Twitter was perceived by the traditional newspaper journalists I was working with at the time. Some of us had already begun to see the service as a powerful way of connecting with readers around our work, but few had seen the potential for Twitter to become an actual source of news — a way for the “sources to go direct,” as blogging pioneer Dave Winer has put it.

Even before the Hudson landing, there had already been a few incidents where Twitter had shown a glimpse of that potential: a rash of fires in California, an earthquake in China, and so on. But for whatever reason, the airplane rescue captured the imagination of many more people — journalists and otherwise — perhaps in part because it was such a miraculous event. And the photographer who took the iconic photo, Janis Krums, inadvertently became the prototype of the Twitter-enabled “citizen journalist.”

Over the next two years, Twitter became a larger and larger force not just in the delivery of traditional news but the actual creation of news — in the sense of those “random acts of journalism” that Andy Carvin of National Public Radio has talked about, like the one in which a computer programmer in Pakistan live-tweeted the U.S. special forces attack on Osama bin Laden’s compound. And by 2011, Carvin would be using Twitter as a crowdsourced real-time newsroom to report on the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere (he has given the Smithsonian the iPhone that he used to do a lot of his Twitter curation).

A megaphone for the world to use

To reinforce that point, in another clip from the CNBC special, Bahraini activist Maryam Al-Khawaja talks about how Twitter has changed the way that dissidents in her country and elsewhere in the Arab world get their message out and connect with others who can help them or who are fighting similar battles:

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The CNBC documentary has other segments as well, including one that follows Twitter CEO Dick Costolo to the gym for his workout, and a look at how social media affected the environment around a high-profile rape case in Torrington, Conn. — but for me, the comments from Jack Dorsey about Twitter’s role in the media just reinforced how far we have come in such a short time.

In many ways, the transformation that was triggered by that photo of Flight 1549 is still underway. Twitter is struggling to figure out what that means for it as a company, and also how it will deal with the conflicts between its own interests in doing business around the world and the restrictions that some countries want to place on the freedom of speech that it allows. But there is no question that, for better or worse, it has changed the way the news works forever.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Lightspring and Shutterstock / Vlad Star

This post is the second of four stories about my experiences snooping on my kids and their online behavior over a period of years. Part one is here, part three is here and the final instalment is here.

When parents stoop to spying on their children, it’s usually because they are afraid something terrible is happening that they don’t know about — and often they turn out to be right. In my case, I chose to do it partly as a way of learning how to use the tools and partly as a kind of research project into my own children and their online behavior. And I learned a lot.

In the first part of this series, I talked about how reviewing some keystroke-logging software in the early 2000s — designed primarily for businesses to monitor their employees at work — lured me into eavesdropping on my three kids over the course of a decade, using a variety of tools that at times made me feel like I worked for the National Security Agency.

Tracking the online behavior of our first daughter didn’t reveal all that much, apart from the usual teenager angst, but things were somewhat different with our second daughter — in part because she was a different person, obviously, but also because the way she used the internet was different.

As I tried to point out in my first post, I am well aware of the ethical quandary that I dove into when I started this monitoring process, and if I wasn’t already aware of it when I started, I was regularly reminded of it whenever I brought the topic up with friends and fellow parents. Many of them accused me of acting like the secret police, and of not trusting my daughters enough — and yet, at the same time, I thought I could see in some of them a secret jealousy of my abilities, since they all felt the same parental desire I did: namely, to watch over our children in every way possible.

The dawn of the social web

Our first daughter was kind of an experiment, since I was new to the tools available, and the social web was also relatively new: there was no Facebook yet, and no Twitter, and blogs were only just becoming popular with a small group of hardcore nerds. LiveJournal was fairly prominent — although my daughter didn’t really use it — but the really big deal, especially for teenagers, was instant messaging via AOL and MSN Messenger and ICQ (anyone remember them?). As far as my oldest was concerned, that was the entire internet.

Apart from one brief mention of marijuana experimentation at a friend’s party, trolling through my daughter’s IM conversations and emails via the aforementioned keystroke-logging software didn’t produce much of interest. There were no secret messages to older men arranging to meet them at a shopping mall, or any of the other bogeymen that parents have been taught to fear when it comes to the internet. And of course, the fact that it was boring was very reassuring.

Our second daughter used instant messaging a fair bit, and I continued using the keystroke-logging program for that purpose, as well as some other tools that pulled in email, etc. But as she moved into her teenage years, she started to spend less time on instant messaging and on childish websites playing silly games, and more time on another category of sites that I had never heard of before: sites that when I look back on it were like early prototypes of social networks — but aimed exclusively at teenagers rather than broadly targeted ones like Facebook or MySpace.

Habbo Hotel and Gaia Online

Habbo Hotel was one example of this phenomenon: a site that used cheesy eight-bit graphics from some old handheld computer game to create a world where residents of a giant hotel could set up their own rooms for a variety of purposes — including music, games, or just chat — and then invite people into their rooms and interact with them. At one point, Habbo (which was owned by a Finnish company) was a huge internet traffic story, and my daughter and her friends spent hundreds of hours a month on it. In some ways it was the Facebook of its day.

The hard part for me and my NSA-style surveillance program was that Habbo also proved to be very difficult to effectively monitor using most of the tools I had — except maybe the one that took random screenshots at regular intervals, which used up a lot of resources (my brother-in-law actually blocked Habbo Hotel at the router level so that his teenaged children wouldn’t go there, and eventually had to shut the internet off at night because they still managed to find a way around his block).

The most interesting aspect of my daughter’s internet use was the amount of time she spent on a site called Gaia Online, which as far as I could tell was devoted to games and socializing primarily around Japanese anime TV shows. But my keystroke-logging program picked up something fascinating after awhile, which I admit I wasn’t expecting: My middle daughter, who hadn’t really shown any interest in writing for school purposes, was spending hours every day writing interactive fiction on Gaia Online — long and involved, emotionally complicated stories based around characters from anime shows.

An unexpected insight

Gaia Online was one of the first sites I came across that engaged in this kind of interactive fiction, where one writer would start a story and then others would add to it or take it in a different direction — or suggest different plot twists for the original author. This is almost exactly what Wattpad does now — the Toronto-based startup financed by Khosla Ventures allows authors (including some prominent ones like Margaret Atwood) to upload unfinished work and get feedback from readers.

The upshot of all this was that my snooping revealed not so much the questionable behavior I had been afraid of finding, but a whole side of my daughter that I had never really expected to find — a side that voluntarily spent hundreds of hours writing fiction and interacting with friends around that fiction. And while my daughter hasn’t become a famous writer (yet), she still carries on this behavior today, only now it occurs on Tumblr and is based around TV shows like Doctor Who and Teen Wolf. In a sense, this has helped to shape how she interacts with media as an adult, which I find fascinating.

This revelation made me feel even more torn when it came to my surveillance of her: On the one hand, I still felt bad for invading her privacy — something we have talked about since she stopped being a teenager — but I was also grateful in a sense for being able to discover this other side of my daughter, one that was filled with talent and a love of language and creativity. Does that make it worth all the snooping? That’s hard to say. I wouldn’t really wrestle with that question directly until I started to apply the same surveillance approach to our third and youngest daughter.

Tomorrow: How — and why — I decided to stop snooping on my kids.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Lightspring and Shutterstock / Vlad Star and Shutterstock / noporn

This post is the first of four stories about my experiences snooping on my kids and their online behavior over a period of years. Part two is here, part three is here and the final instalment is here.

This isn’t an easy thing to admit, but I felt a secret twinge of shame when I was reading the recent leaks about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program — the one that allows them to index all the phone calls of suspected threats, scoop up emails and other internet traffic, and even reportedly listen in on real-time voice and text chats. Why? Because I have either used or tried to use similar types of tools (on a much smaller scale, obviously) to snoop on, creep, stalk and otherwise digitally eavesdrop on the behavior of my children over the past decade or so.

While the tools may have changed over the years, and the websites and mobile apps and social networks they used have also evolved — from simple instant messaging and gaming through virtual worlds like Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin, all the way to Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr — the ethical and social dilemma remains the same for many parents I think.

The NSA and its defenders have argued that what the agency does is justified — even though it may technically be against the Fourth Amendment — because it allows them to identify potential terrorist threats to the U.S. I made a similar argument to myself about the surreptitious monitoring of my daughters’ online activity: namely, that by doing so, I was helping to identify potential threats to them in the form of drug abuse, poor relationship decisions and other hazards of teenage life. Was I right to do so? To be honest, I’m not sure.

Invasion of privacy or parental right?

I do know one thing: when I casually mentioned to a friend and fellow parent several years ago that I was spying on my then-teenaged daughter while she was on the internet — capturing instant messaging logs, reading emails, even at one point using “keystroke logging” software to track what she typed — my friend was not supportive at all. Instead, she was horrified. How could I do this, she asked, when it was such an invasion of my childrens’ privacy?

At the time, I made the same argument that legions of parents before me have probably made, which is that my children really have no expectation of privacy while they are under my roof. In a sense, I figured they were subject to my laws rather than those of the Constitution — within reason, of course — and if I believed that invading their privacy was what was required in order to keep them safe, then I figured I should be entitled to engage in whatever behavior I saw fit. Shouldn’t I?

The hard part about all this, however, is that there’s a lot more involved than just reading your child’s diary or picking up the extension in the living room to try and eavesdrop on a call they are making from the basement. Although I have stopped snooping on my three daughters — since the oldest is now 24, our middle child is 19 and the youngest is almost 16 — I expect that there is so much technology out there that will allow you to track their every click and status update that you could (as I did) find yourself getting sucked far deeper into monitoring than you ever intended to go.

When I look back at it now, after almost a decade since I first began monitoring their online activity, I can see a number of lessons, some of which are more obvious than others. And I can see how in some ways it was a mistake, but in other ways it showed me things about my children — worthwhile, valuable things — that I would never have learned otherwise. And what’s also interesting is how different all three have been in a number of ways: in their use cases for the internet, in the technologies they chose, and in how all that affected my own approach to eavesdropping on them.

Keystroke capture meets teenager

My interest in all this got triggered in the early 2000’s, when I decided to do a review of some software that allowed anyone with access to a computer to capture the keystrokes of a user and store them in a file for viewing later. The software was targeted at employers, but parents were also a potential market — as an alternative to earlier “gatekeeping” software such as Net Nanny, which could be used to block certain websites from young children.

At the time, my oldest daughter — who was then about 13 — had been spending a lot of time talking with friends using Microsoft’s Instant Messenger, and I thought the software would allow me to eavesdrop a little bit on her conversations while also reviewing the software. I installed it as directed (it was just a driver that loaded before the keyboard driver, and stored all the information sent via the keys) and soon I was reading all of my daughter’s chat conversations.

For the most part, this was incredibly boring, I’m happy to say. Our daughter wasn’t the kind of troubled child who cried out for internet monitoring, so there was nothing outlandish like plans to meet up with some 35-year-old in Detroit. There was a lot of talk about boys and homework, and TV shows or books she liked. There wasn’t even any sign of “cyber-bullying,” which had become a big topic of conversation in the media, and which a niece of mine had been subjected to during her teenage years (another reason I was curious to try out the software).

A permanent loss of trust?

The only thing remotely interesting that turned up was a conversation about smoking pot one night at a friend’s party. Since 13 seemed a little young to be encouraging that kind of behavior, my wife and I had a little chat with our daughter about the wisdom of that kind of activity — without telling her how we found out about it — and that was pretty much the end of it. Eventually, I stopped looking at the emailed chat logs that the software forwarded me (it would send them based on certain word triggers as well) and went back to not paying much attention to what my daughter did online.

After the discussion with my friend and fellow parent who was shocked about my invasion of our daughter’s privacy, I did tell our kids that we had ways of looking over their shoulders online (without going into too much detail) and that we wouldn’t hesitate to use these powers if necessary. Better to be vague, I thought, so that they wouldn’t know what we were capable of — another echo of the NSA’s approach.

Obviously, my daughters’ emotional turmoil and fondness for certain bands isn’t even remotely comparable to the dangers of terrorism, but the parallels with what the NSA does (and what American citizens allow it to do in their name) still seem pretty strong to me. I believed that what I was doing was justified because I wanted to protect my daughters from themselves — but in the end, I decided that the loss of trust was actually much worse than anything I was theoretically saving them from. Is there a lesson for the NSA in there?

Thursday: My surveillance program continues with our middle daughter, and I discover something unexpected about her.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Lightspring and Shutterstock / Denis Vrublevski

While in New York this week for a GigaOM event, I had coffee and lunch with a number of media-industry insiders and observers, including Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky – two people I think are among the smartest media analysts in the business. And one thing that kept coming up is what I have chosen to call the “barbell problem” for media, and specifically for newspapers: in other words, the feeling that while both ends of the journalism spectrum are probably going to be fine, the middle is getting squeezed to the point where its future is uncertain at best.

So the New York Times, for example, is going through the same kind of uncertainty and upheaval as the rest of the industry – having to lay off staff, cutting costs, selling assets. But while the paper’s paywall and other measures may not totally fill the gap caused by erosion of advertising revenue, the NYT has enough resources to not only survive but do well. Likewise, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal will probably survive and prosper, along with some other large brands.

Some prominent journalism brands will likely be fine

This is exactly why Shirky and his coauthors on the recent “Post-Industrial Journalism” report from Columbia specifically excluded any discussion of the Times from their analysis of the future of journalism. As Shirky described it, it’s like the average driver measuring themselves by looking at someone who races on the Formula One circuit. Practically speaking, there are very few meaningful lessons other newspapers can learn from the New York Times.

That’s one end of the barbell. The other end is the ultra-small, hyper-local newspaper – the daily or even weekly broadsheet that serves a small town or region, where the disruptive forces of the Web haven’t made themselves felt as strongly and local shopping flyers are probably still a pretty good business. This is the kind of newspaper that billionaire Warren Buffett is buying up – the kind that still has a lock on a local market. Paywalls may work well here because of the lack of compelling alternatives.

And what’s in the middle? Everything else – medium-sized papers like the Miami Herald or the San Francisco Chronicle or the Boston Globe, as well as most of the larger metro papers like the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. What does their future look like?

Many of these papers have been trying to make paywalls work, but for most the results appear to be fairly lackluster at best – even the Boston Globe, which is far from the worst newspaper in a medium sized market, has attracted just 28,000 subscribers after more than a year. Its owner the New York Times has put it up for sale and may get less than $100 million for it, and that’s after removing the single most damaging part of the business from the equation – namely, the paper’s $200 million or so in pension obligations.

What happens to the news that doesn’t pay?

Those pension obligations are one of the biggest mill-stones around the neck of traditional media entities. And the bottom line is that even with some reader support, as Rosen and I discussed, these papers are going to have to shrink dramatically or come up with new forms of revenue, which is why the Washington Post is experimenting with what has come to be known as “sponsored content” (something we’ll be talking about more at paidContent Live on April 17)

In a recent post at Slate, writer Matt Yglesias responded to the somewhat fatalistic tone of coverage around the recent Pew report on the state of the media by arguing that as news consumers, we are better off now than we have ever been, thanks to social media and other forces. And it is easy to see how that is the case for certain topics and certain parts of the world – but as Dan Mitchell pointed out in a rebuttal to Yglesias, it isn’t the case for much local coverage of things like municipal affairs and public-policy topics.

So what happens to that kind of coverage as newspapers shrink and even die? If all the things that have subsidized that kind of journalism have been removed – the car ads and travel writing and so on – all these papers are left with is the kind of content that advertisers aren’t interested in and readers don’t want to pay for. What then? ProPublica and the Texas Tribune are interesting publicly supported models, but how scalable are they? Is every state or region going to have one?

Will some form of “citizen journalism” be able to fill this gap – whether it’s local bloggers or some kind of automated Twitter feed etc.? Perhaps. Will newspapers use outsourced services like Journatic or even robot journalists like Narrative Science? In all likelihood it will be a combination of all of these, and possibly other things we haven’t even thought of yet. At this point, the answers are a whole lot murkier than the questions.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly and Jan-Arief Purwanto

There’s been a lot written over the past few years about the future of the news industry — how the rise of the web and social media have disrupted it, and how traditional players like the New York Times and others can recover from this disruption and repair their business models by using things like paywalls. But a new manifesto from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University says that trying to figure out how to repair or rebuild the news industry is a waste of time: the paper’s authors argue that there is no such thing as the “news industry” any more, in any realistic sense, and the sooner both new and existing players get used to that idea the better off everyone will be.

The authors of the Tow report are well known to anyone who pays attention to the future of journalism: Clay Shirky is a journalism professor and author of books like “Here Comes Everybody,” C.W. Anderson is an assistant professor at the College of Staten Island and a frequent commentator on media and cultural theory, and Emily Bell is the former head of digital at The Guardian newspaper and now director of the Tow Center. The paper — which Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab has done a nice summary of — is a combination of analysis of the current situation, philosophical statements about the nature of the problems facing the industry, and recommendations for how to adapt.

“[This paper] is not, however, about ‘the future of the news industry,’ both because much of that future is already here and because there is no such thing as the news industry any more. There used to be one, held together by the usual things that hold an industry together: similarity of methods among a relatively small and coherent group of businesses, and an inability for anyone outside that group to produce a competitive product. Those conditions no longer hold true.”

Note: This was originally published at Gigaom, where I was a senior writer from 2010 to 2015. The site still exists but the archive is gone.

Continue reading “The Tow Center report”

Facebook’s initial public offering is one of the most eagerly anticipated technology IPOs since Google went public in 2004: It is a launch that values the social network at more than $100 billion, and it has sparked a number of debates about the future of the company, including whether social advertising is effective or not and whether the company is failing to take advantage of mobile properly. But there is another issue investors should be concerned about when they look at Facebook, and it is arguably even more important than any of these operational questions: namely, the iron grip co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has over the shares of the company.

For someone who only just turned 28, Zuckerberg wields an almost unprecedented amount of power over the fate of Facebook — not just over the votes that go along with shares of the company but also over the board of directors. The secret to this tight grip is buried in the history of the social network and in particular in the advice Zuckerberg received from former Napster founder Sean Parker, who was a mentor to the Facebook founder and at one time was president of the social network. The implications of what he helped Zuckerberg construct are profound and create a substantial investment risk.

Sean Parker helped Zuckerberg take control of the company

Long before Facebook became the giant it is today, with almost a billion users and revenue of more than $2 billion, Parker advised its young CEO that he should do everything he could to hang onto control of his company. This advice was based on Parker’s own experiences at Napster and another company called Plaxo, where he was removed by the board. So when Facebook took its initial funding round in 2005, he convinced Zuckerberg to push for control over two seats on the board of directors. And when Parker left the company that same year (after some bad publicity over a drug charge), he gave Zuckerberg his seat as well.

That gave the Facebook CEO control over three of the company’s five board seats. But that was just the beginning: In 2009, the board (which he controls) created a new class of “super-voting” shares that have 10 votes per share, compared with the single vote normal shares have. Through his ownership of a chunk of these super-voting shares, Zuckerberg controls almost 30 percent of the votes in the company. Plus, he has proxy agreements with a number of other shareholders, including co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, that give him control over their shares as well.

In all, these various arrangements give the Facebook CEO control over the board of directors and about 58 percent of the votes in the company. If Zuckerberg decides to do something, he doesn’t even have to ask for permission from the board or put it to a shareholder vote (or if he does the latter, he knows he can prevail). Investors got a tangible example of what this means last month, when Facebook announced it would be acquiring the hot mobile photo-sharing service Instagram for $1 billion. According to a number of reports, Zuckerberg told the board of directors about this billion-dollar deal later — via email.

Super-voting shares are popular, but are they wise?

The visionary founder who controls the progress of the company he founded with an iron fist has become a Silicon Valley archetype, thanks in large part to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who was famously ejected from the company he co-founded due to his erratic behavior. He returned later to rescue Apple from certain disaster and transform it into one of the most valuable companies in history, giving every startup founder a reason why he too should be allowed to control every aspect of his company, regardless of things like shareholder rights.

Google also helped popularize the idea of multiple-voting shares, which gave co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and former CEO Eric Schmidt effective control over the company. In Google’s offering prospectus when it went public in 2004, the co-founders argued this kind of arrangement was necessary in order to ensure Google remained true to their long-term vision rather than getting sidetracked by questions of short-term financial value.

A number of other tech companies have chosen this same route, including both LinkedIn and Zynga. They have also made the argument that dual-class shares are necessary to protect the company and its vision from the vagaries of the daily stock market. (What many of these companies don’t say is that such structures also make it a lot harder to acquire the company, something that has made multiple-voting shares popular with media companies such as the New York Times and Washington Post.)

Multiple-voting shares are a double-edged sword

So why should investors be wary of multiple-voting shares? Because while they protect the long-term vision of the founders of a company, they can also protect the founders from the kind of shareholder action that is often necessary when a company loses its way. Yahoo and AOL, for example, have both been the target of lobbying efforts by activist shareholders who argue they have been mismanaged and that their share price has been damaged. If either AOL or Yahoo had provisions like Facebook does, there would be no hope of ever changing anything at either company.

As a number of shareholder-rights groups and activists pointed out in advance of Facebook’s IPO, tapping the public markets for funding is supposed to bring with it certain responsibilities on the part of corporate executives — including a duty to be answerable to common shareholders and for any failure to act in the best interests of those investors. If companies don’t want to abide by those rules, the argument goes, they should remain private and seek funding from banks or private venture-capital groups.

In a recent report about Facebook’s voting structure, the activist group Institutional Shareholder Services said the dual-class structure is “an autocratic model of governance” that makes Facebook “less viable than a competitor whose governance gives owners a voice proportionate to the economics they have at risk.” The group also criticized the growing trend for such super-voting shares, saying, “Facebook appears to have taken the same outdated dance lessons as many other recent tech sector debutantes.”

Having Zuckerberg control 58 percent of the votes at Facebook isn’t likely to be a problem for anyone as long as the company is making smart decisions about what to do with its money and as long as the stock price is going up. But if it starts to go south and Facebook makes some unwise decisions, it will become obvious that such voting structures are a fair-weather friend: They are great to have when things are going well, but they can become a huge liability.

Before Steve Jobs had even passed away, people had already started playing the “who is the next Steve Jobs” game — trying to come up with names of technology and design visionaries who might be able to don the mantle of the Apple co-founder and CEO. Jeff Bezos of Amazon? Napster and Spotify founder Sean Parker? Those names and others have been floated by industry watchers, but listening to Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference on Thursday made me think that he is at least as strong a contender for that mantle (if such a thing even exists) as any of them. Could Dorsey change the way we interact with technology and the world around us in as profound a way as Jobs?

Why do we even need an heir to Steve Jobs? The obvious answer is that we don’t. Jobs was unique, in both positive and negative ways, and the precise combination of those features made him who he was and thus made Apple what it was. No one is going to be the next Steve Jobs because they will have a different combination of strengths and weaknesses, and they may not be as lucky or as smart in specific ways. But when it comes to the role that Jobs played in technology — the role of visionary designer, creator, instigator and disruptor — we need those people more than ever, because visionaries inspire others, even if the things they do themselves don’t always succeed. They change the way we look at the world in fundamental ways.

I haven’t spent a lot of time around Jack Dorsey, but based on his conversation with Om at RoadMap, he clearly spends a lot of time thinking about the big picture behind the technology that he is involved in. So it’s not just about Twitter and how it works — or what it looks like or even how to monetize it — but how it connects us to our own “humanness” as he put it, and enables us to experience things and see through the eyes of others. He described how he found this an incredibly powerful thing during the protests in Iran, and I think others have had a similar response to the events of the Arab Spring and the earthquakes in Japan and Haiti.

And when it comes to Square — the other company that Dorsey is helping to shape and create — it’s not just making payments easier or more efficient that interests him, but how making that easier can help artisans and individuals become fully functioning businesses more easily, and how that could help change society.

Dorsey’s roles with two very different companies have also sparked some comparisons to Jobs, who helped revolutionize animated films with Pixar while also changing the personal electronics industry at Apple (the differences between Square and Twitter are arguably even more dramatic than Pixar and Apple, since Square is a device that people pay for and Twitter is a service). And Dorsey was also forced out of the company he founded, much like Jobs was — after a dispute with former CEO Evan Williams, who funded the company in its early years — and then returned to become the product visionary.

One of the things that is very different about Dorsey and Twitter stems from the fact that Twitter is a service rather than a product. Under Steve Jobs, Apple excelled at product design, but it has been notoriously inept at anything service related: iTunes, to take just one example, is a total mess when it comes to usability and design despite years of evolution, and things like Ping have effectively been stillborn. One of the most powerful things about Twitter, however, is the way in which the service was transformed by its users, with additions like the @ mention and the retweet — features that were never even imagined by its creators. Steve Jobs, by contrast, wouldn’t even let people replace the battery in his products.

From what I can tell, Dorsey also seems to be missing what could charitably be called the “difficult” elements of Jobs’ personality (other people have more blunt terms for it), which are detailed in Walter Isaacson’s biography: the shouting, the merciless humiliation, the ruthlessness even with friends, the crying in meetings, and so on. One of the questions that this description of Jobs raised for me is whether those things were a necessary part of his success as a visionary and designer, or were they simply character flaws? Would Apple products have been the same, or been as revolutionary, if he were a different kind of person.

So is Jack Dorsey the new Steve Jobs? Probably not. But that said, he clearly has a vision about two fairly significant areas of the technology sphere — the way in which even a simple service like Twitter can change the way we interact with each other and distribute information in a digital and connected world, and the way a simple payment service like Square can potentially transform entrepreneurialism and small businesses. And he is thoughtful about the implications of those things in a way that many product or business-focused technology executives are not (he even has a fascination with the application of Zen Buddhist principles to design, as Steve Jobs did).

Dorsey has already altered the media landscape with Twitter — whether he knew that was what he was doing or not. And he is trying to alter the payment landscape as well with Square, which could ultimately help make it easier for entrepreneurs and small businesses to get paid. Whether those changes will be as massive and transformational as the ones Jobs unleashed remains to be seen, but we could definitely use more visionaries.

A decade ago, Microsoft finally settled a long-running antitrust case that was launched against the software giant by the Department of Justice, based on accusations that the company was using its monopoly on computer operating systems to crush competitors. Now it is Google’s turn to face the antitrust spotlight: Although it is not the subject of a formal government case yet, the search behemoth is involved in an official inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating whether Google is distorting the market for web search and search-related advertising.

What makes this case more difficult than the one against Microsoft — and ultimately a lot harder to prove — is the question of what a monopoly even means in the age of the web, when the browser has taken over from the operating system as the primary way in which we use our computers and mobile devices. Does Google have a monopoly in any real sense? And if it does, can it be shown that the company is using that position unfairly, causing harm either to competitors and/or to consumers of web services?

Critics of the company argue that both of these things are true. And the list of Google’s enemies is a fairly long one, including fellow giants like Microsoft — one of the main proponents of the antitrust allegations, somewhat ironically — as well as large web services like Expedia and the recommendation service Yelp, who argue that Google is giving its own competing services preferential treatment and thereby distorting the market. And Google isn’t just facing antitrust inquiries in the U.S.: It is also under investigation in several European countries for similar alleged offences.

A monopoly on search and search-related ads

The charges being leveled at Google are twofold. One is that it has a monopoly on search and on search-related advertising and that this gives it an unreasonable amount of control over how content is found online — since search is the primary way that many people discover websites and services — as well as an ocean of cash from search-related advertising. The second allegation is that Google uses the money from its advertising monopoly to develop or buy services that compete with those from other companies and that it then uses its control over search to give those services preferential treatment in its search results, which provides an unfair advantage.

So in the case of Yelp, whose founder and CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, testified in a recent Senate hearing regarding Google’s behavior (which wasn’t part of the official FTC investigation but raised many of the same issues), the claim is that when Google couldn’t acquire the company for its local recommendations, it first tried to steal Yelp’s content and use it without asking, threatened to remove Yelp from Google’s search results altogether and then bought a competing service called Zagat.

This effectively pulls in all the different aspects of the antitrust case against Google, to the extent that there is a case: the use of its giant cash reserves to try and take over Yelp; the “scraping” of Yelp’s content for use in Google’s own local service, Google Places; the pressure on Yelp to play by Google’s rules or face deletion from its all-powerful search index; and finally, the acquisition of a competitor, to which Google is allegedly giving preferential treatment in its search results. Expedia made similar allegations about Google following its purchase of ITA, which provides travel-related information that is used by Expedia and other services (a deal that was reviewed by the FTC).

Having a monopoly isn’t enough for antitrust

As I tried to explain in a recent GigaOM post, antitrust law in the U.S. doesn’t make having a monopoly in a particular market illegal. What the Sherman Act is designed to fight are monopolies that have been achieved through illegal means (i.e., collusion or restraint of trade) and/or monopolies that are being used to harm a particular sector. But it’s even more complex than that. Unfortunately for Yelp and Google’s other critics, it’s not enough just to show that a company with a dominant market position is being unfair to its competitors. It has to be proven that being unfair has some tangible impact on the market, either by restricting choice or raising prices or both.

So Yelp might argue that Google is being unfair by a) taking its content without asking and b) giving its own Zagat results a higher ranking in search (assuming it can even be shown that Google is doing this). But does Google’s behavior have any impact apart from being unfair to Yelp? Does it restrict consumer choice when it comes to recommendations services in any real way? And if it does, will consumers have to pay more for those services? Similar questions would have to be asked about Google’s dominance in search itself or search-related advertising. Does that dominance affect consumers in a tangible way?

Thomas Barnett, the former head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, argued in a presentation to the Senate committee that Google’s control over search-related ads would lead to higher prices for those ads and that consumers would pay more because the companies buying those ads would inevitably pass those higher costs on to their customers. But this is not obvious at all. Even if someone could prove that prices for search ads are higher than they should be (whatever that means), an antitrust case would then also have to prove that companies were passing those costs on instead of just absorbing them.

One of Barnett’s counterparts, a former antitrust specialist with the New York attorney’s office who worked on the Microsoft case, argues that Google simply doesn’t fit the description of an illegal monopolist in the same way that Microsoft did. One of the main reasons for this is that Google provides a web service that is free to anyone and that has multiple well-funded competitors (including Microsoft itself). Users are not forced to search in Google, nor are they forced in any real sense to pick Zagat’s reviews over Yelp’s, or Google Travel’s results over those from Expedia or Travelocity.

Dominant web players rarely last long

I’ve argued before that one of the most powerful arguments against a federal antitrust case against Google is that such investigations rarely have much impact, in many cases because they drag on too long and involve so much complicated testimony that is difficult to prove. Also, the market for technology itself usually does a good enough job of destroying or disrupting monopolies without the government’s help. A research paper that looked at several high-profile cases, including Microsoft’s and AT&T’s, came to a similar conclusion. In almost every case, technological change had more of a tangible effect than any government investigation or penalty did.

Google, for example, is under significant pressure from the socialization of the web. The way that people find content and services is being altered by the popularity of social networks like Facebook and Twitter — to the point where search may no longer be the primary way that people find new services. Google is trying to take advantage of that phenomenon by building its own Google+ network, and by adding “+1” recommendation features to its search. But will this be enough? It’s entirely possible that Facebook’s social search (which is currently powered by a partnership with Microsoft) could become a significant competitor to Google.

If and when Google does wind up testifying to the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice, it might even argue that Facebook is the real threat — due to its control over the social-networking market, its refusal to release data to competitors such as Google and its powerful relationships with Microsoft, Skype and other competing services. That might seem like a legal gambit, but there is a lot of truth to it as well. The web is still changing so quickly that even a seemingly unassailable monopoly like Google’s could be over before the government gets around to investigating it.

Many traditional media entities have embraced social-media services like Twitter and Facebook and blogs — at least to some extent — as tools for reporting and journalism, using them to publish and curate news reports. But newspapers in particular seem to have a hard time accepting the “social” part of these tools, at least when it comes to letting their journalists engage with readers as human beings. A case in point is the new social-media policy introduced at a major newspaper in Canada, which tells its staff not to express personal opinions — even on their personal accounts or pages — and not to engage with readers in the comments.

The policy, which I received from a source close to the Toronto Star, has a number of sensible things to say about using social media, including the fact that these tools “can be valuable sources for story ideas and contacts for journalists, and as a means of connecting directly with the communities we cover.” The paper also says that it “encourages journalists – reporters, columnists, photographers and editors – to take advantage of social media tools in their daily work.” But it warns that any comments posted using such tools “can be circulated beyond their intended audience.”

This all makes perfect sense. Social media is useful for journalism, and it does connect reporters to the communities they cover — better than just about anything else does. And yes, it is wise to be aware of the unintended consequences of even offhand remarks.

No talking about what you do

Then comes the part about being impartial and objective, and that’s when the trouble starts. The policy says that reporters and editors should “never post information on social media that could undermine your credibility with the public or damage the Star’s reputation in any way, including as an impartial source of news.” And that’s not all — the document goes on to say that:

Anything published on social media – whether on Star sites or personal platforms – cannot reveal information about content in development, newsroom issues or Star sources. Negative commentary about your colleagues or workplace will not be tolerated.

In other words, no posting about stories that are being worked on, no comments on newsroom-related topics, no talking about people who might be used or are being used as sources for Star reporting. And this prohibition doesn’t just apply to Star accounts or services under the newspaper’s name — it applies to any comments that a reporter or editor might make on their own personal accounts as well. Obviously the paper doesn’t want staffers bad-mouthing each other or talking about sensitive internal issues (something the New York Times also confronted last year), but a blanket ban on anything related to content seems unnecessarily harsh, not to mention completely unrealistic.

Never talk to your readers

It gets worse. The policy goes on to say that journalists who report for the Star “should not editorialize on the topics they cover,” because readers could could construe this as evidence that their news reporting is biased — and then tells reporters and editors that they shouldn’t respond in the online comments on stories. It says:

As well, journalists should refrain from debating issues within the Star’s online comments forum to avoid any suggestion that they may be biased in their reporting.

This last prohibition is a classic case of missing the point completely. According to the Star, apparently, comments on news stories are something that exists to allow readers to talk amongst themselves, not something that a reporter or editor should get involved in. That’s just wrong. As someone who was intimately involved in social-media strategy for another major metropolitan newspaper in Canada (full disclosure: this paper competes with the Toronto Star to some extent), one of the main features of having comments is the ability for readers to interact with writers and editors at the paper.

Treating the comments section as something that journalists shouldn’t get involved in turns it into a ghetto, and also contributes to the problems that many newspapers have with flaming and trolls and other issues — why should anyone behave properly in a comment forum if none of the staff at the paper are going to bother getting involved?

Never express an opinion on anything

The Star is far from alone in this short-sighted approach. Apart from a few staffers here and there who make use of Twitter and other social media, most major newspapers have still failed to take advantage of these tools when it comes to building relationships between their writers and readers. The biggest single factor holding them back seems to be fear — namely, a fear that they will no longer be seen as objective, something NYT executive editor Bill Keller reinforced in a recent column, in which he suggested that the paper was one of the few remaining holdouts in a world where everyone feels free to state their opinion.

Here’s a news flash for Bill, and for the rest of the newspaper world: that particular genie is already out of the bottle and has been for some time now. As journalism professor Jay Rosen has argued, the “view from nowhere” that mainstream media continues to try and defend is not only dying, but arguably does readers a disservice — since it often distorts the news in order to maintain a perfectly balanced (and unrealistic) view of events. Some journalists, like ** in a recent column in The Atlantic, have started to admit that they have personal interests and causes, but that remains rare.

The point that newspapers and other traditional media are missing is that social media is powerful precisely because it is personal. If you remove the personal aspect, all you have is a glorified news release wire or RSS feed with links to your content — and that has very little power any more. The best way to make social media work is to allow reporters and editors to be themselves, to be human, and to engage with readers through Twitter and Facebook and comments and blogs.

Is there a risk that someone might say something wrong? Of course there is. But without that human touch, there is no point in doing it at all.

Update: Toronto Star spokesman Bob Hepburn got back to me and said that the paper’s policy was “well in line with what mainstream media organizations have always done. We’ve always placed some limitations on journalists in terms of them expressing their opinions, either in the newspaper or outside of the newspaper.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user World Economic Forum

Does Facebook have a little Twitter envy? The smaller of the two social-media tools has become virtually synonymous with journalism — thanks in part to the fact that it is more of an information network than a social network, and to the example set by journalists such as the NPR’s Andy Carvin in how to use it for journalism. Now Facebook seems to be trying to reach out to the media industry by offering more resources for journalists, including a dedicated page that the giant social network launched Tuesday.

The Facebook page says that it plans to become an ongoing resource for journalists who want to figure out the best ways to use the network as part of their jobs, and will be highlighting “best practices” engaged in by a number of media outlets and reporters who use it well. The blog post announcing the launch of the page also points out that Facebook has been helping media companies become more social for the past year or so by integrating plugins and “like” buttons as well, which the social network says has produced “a greater than 300% increase in referral traffic from Facebook” on average.

Although it is a much smaller service in terms of the overall number of users (how much smaller exactly remains a matter of some debate), Twitter seems to have realized relatively early on that it is a perfect tool for journalists — both the professional kind and the amateur kind. This became fairly obvious even before the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, during news events such as the Hudson River plane landing in 2009 and the Haiti earthquake last year. And Twitter has been working to capitalize on that for some time.

The service has had a media page that shares best practices — including lessons on how to think about hashtags — for almost a year now, and has a media team that includes Chloe Sladden — who was featured on the cover of Fast Company magazine recently — and well-regarded writer and blogger Robin Sloan. Among other things, the team has talked regularly at conferences (including GigaOM’s NewTeeVee Live) and elsewhere about how Twitter can be used to amplify and extend the reach of media events such as the Academy Awards.

The one thing that Facebook has going for it over Twitter, of course, is sheer reach. Over half a billion people go to the site daily, and millions more interact with Facebook content via its open-graph plugins and “like” buttons. News sites such as The Huffington Post have made great use of this kind of integration to drive engagement and traffic, and Facebook is clearly pushing this idea as part of its latest launch. Things like hosting a live address by President Obama will probably help as well.

There are also some great examples of journalists using Facebook, including New York Times writer Nicolas Kristof, who has been posting to his page from the Middle East and elsewhere, and is perhaps one of the most engaged mainstream journalists I know of. His page has 200,000 fans, and he routinely gets hundreds of comments on the things he posts, which in some cases appear only on Facebook. NPR under Andy Carvin has also made great use of Facebook, as I described in a recent post.

Those examples aside, however, the challenge for Facebook is that while Twitter seems perfectly designed to be a real-time news and information network, many users still likely think of Facebook as a place to socialize rather than be informed — a place to play games, or look at funny pictures and videos, but not necessarily a place where journalists are active. Those things may not be mutually exclusive, but it’s going to take some work to make them feel like they belong together.

Why do people like to fool each other — or at least try to — on the first day of April? No one really knows for sure, but it’s one of the most enduring unofficial holidays of modern times, celebrated (or in some cases, barely tolerated) in dozens of countries around the world. And for whatever reason, the technology world is even more fond of this holiday than probably any other. In this post, we’ve collected some of our favorite pranks and bogus news stories from today for your amusement — if you come across any that you particularly enjoyed, feel free to add them in the comments.

But before we get started, it’s worth noting that one of the biggest April Fool’s jokes of all time might be the day itself — no one can seem to agree on how or why it became popular. One theory is that it started with the change to the Gregorian calendar in 1582, which moved New Year’s Day from the last week of March to January. Those who continued to celebrate in March (a celebration that usually lasted until April 1) were called April Fool’s. The only problem is that there are references to the idea of April and fools that pre-date the change to the Gregorian calendar.

Another theory is that it started with the Persian tradition of playing pranks on people on the 15th day of the New Year’s celebration of Norouz, which usually falls on April 1st and is known as Sizdah Bedar. This tradition apparently goes back to 536 B.C. And to make things extra confusing, plenty of countries celebrate something like April Fool’s on other days — like the 28th of December (if you want to see what April Fool was like in 1861 in the United States, check out this fascinating post from the NYT).

And now, on to the monkeyshines, drollery and shenanigans:

• Hulu Time Travel: points for effort goes to Hulu, which set up a complete homepage as the service would have appeared in the 1990s, complete with links to actual episodes of Newsradio, Kids In The Hall, 21 Jump Street and other shows — and featuring a modem-connecting noise when you click to watch. Well played, Hulu.

• Gmail Motion: the web giant says it is launching a Kinect-style interface to its email service that will let people navigate with physical gestures — the video with this one is worth watching, if only for the guy who gets to illustrate the movements (according to a blog post, Google is also changing all of its sites and services to Comic Sans, the most hated font ever invented).

• The Swiss WikiLeaks Scandal: according to a leaked cable, the Swiss government has been hiding surveillance systems in ceremonial cuckoo clocks that it has been giving to foreign diplomats for the past 30 years.

• The PlayMobil Apple Store: the gadget and gift site ThinkGeek has become a staple of April Fool’s for nerds, in part because its fake products are so perfectly believable — and this year it’s a PlayMobil replica of the Apple Store. Fake items from previous years have become so popular that the site has actually produced them as real products, included the TaunTaun Sleeping Bag and others listed here.

• ShopSavvy Becomes GreyScale: poking fun at the recent blockbuster financing — and associated controversy — by the iPhone photo-sharing app Color, this is a nice touch from ShopSavvy: the tagline for the new service GreyScale is “share photos — with no one.” But will Color think it’s funny?

• HuffPo’s Pay Wall — Just For the NYT: Some April Fool’s pranks have a kind of edge to them, and this new pay wall just for New York Times employees has that feel to it: not only is it a poke at the NYT pay plan, but a jab at the paper that has slammed Huffington for aggregating its content (bonus points to Arianna for testing the new feature in Winnipeg). The special terms of the paywall — all links from Facebook are free, provided they lead to stories about animals with extra limbs — are also hilarious.

• Sir Richard Branson Buys Pluto: the founder of Virgin Records, Virgin Airlines and about 300 other things named Virgin likes to do things large, so it’s fitting that he says he is buying Pluto and will have it reinstated as a planet.

• LinkedIn Recommends Robin Hood: the best April Fool’s jokes are ones that play on the core features of a service, and LinkedIn has done a pretty — and, unlike many other pranks, subtle — job with its “you may know” feature today, which suggests people like Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg (“this may be Werner Heisenberg’s profile”) and Robin Hood (“activist, chief fundraiser at Nottingham”).

(screenshot courtesy of Dan Hocking)

• Seth Godin Introduces Whitespace Ads: points for creativity should go to marketing blogger and author Seth Godin, who announced the launch of a new advertising vehicle that will use the white space in between paragraphs for links that will be highly targeted, location-based and unobtrusive — mostly because they will be invisible.

• Flattr Partners With North Korea: for true geek cred, you can’t get any better than a donation service started by one of the founders of The Pirate Bay — “brokep” describes how Flattr is going to be used by North Korea to manage the entire economy. Knowing North Korea, this isn’t really that far-fetched.

• Mozilla Launches “Do Not Fool” Standard: this one is so meta that it hurts: Mozilla has a browser header that allows you to automatically inform websites that you do not want to be fooled — a play on the “Do Not Track” header proposal for privacy protection from advertisers. Going to install this one now.

If geekish pranks are your thing, the site Hacker News is collecting them — including a new product that acts like AdBlock does in the web world, but in real life: a pair of goggles that automatically remove advertising from whatever you are looking at. And even Wikipedia has gotten into the April Fool’s Day game — but what appear to be fake articles are actually links to factual information that isn’t really what it seems, like the fact that Batman is half female.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Mykl Roventine

What is the thread that ties together the rapid rise of companies as different as Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, The Huffington Post and Quora? Wedbush Securities, a brokerage firm that analyzes the valuations of private companies, says they are all players in what it calls the “Second Internet.” Wedbush says there are certain attributes that allow such players to grow and thrive while more traditional players — including some of the leaders from the early days of the Internet — fail to prosper and gradually recede into history. The most important of these attributes, the firm says, is an understanding of the value of the social web.

The social nature of this new wave of Internet companies is such a major factor that Wedbush also calls it the rise of the “Social Internet” in a new report on the sector, and says successful companies are powered by similar features, including:

• Platforms open up their API to developers
• Continuous and rapid pace of innovation (see Facebook)
• The company/brand must listen to the dialogue and participate with customers
• Customer contribution is a large percent of the value/experience
• Every customer has a personalized experience
• Social graph connections drive discovery rather than search

The report looks at the value of Facebook — comparing the growth of the company to the growth of Google — as well as the rise of other key players such as Quora, The Huffington Post and Zynga, and how each of them effectively took over from a leader of what it calls the “First Internet.”

So by the brokerage firm’s reasoning, The Huffington Post took over from CNN, Quora took over from Yahoo Answers — which in turn took over from Encyclopedia Britannica — Zynga has taken over from MiniClip, which took the place of former leader Electronic Arts, and Jive Software has taken over (or is taking over) from Google Docs, which took over from Microsoft Office. One of the few early Internet companies that seems to have what it takes to bridge this gap is LinkedIn, the firm says (although some might argue the opposite).

As part of the report, which also looks at the rise of players such as BranchOut — the Facebook-based business network that is trying to give LinkedIn a run for its money in that market — Wedbush also looks at Facebook’s potential market value, and comes to the conclusion that the company could one day be worth as much as $200 billion. That’s up from a recent private-market valuation of about $75 billion and would put Facebook firmly in Google territory.

According to the analysis by Lou Kerner, who also does secondary-market valuations of private companies like Facebook and Twitter for the website Second Shares, the giant social network could actually have even higher profit margins than originally forecast (as high as 50 percent, it says), and could grab an even larger share of the growing market for online social advertising and marketing dollars (as high as 15 percent of the global market, Wedbush estimates).

There are some caveats worth keeping in mind when reading the report, of course. For one thing, some of the leaders that it identifies could easily be replaced by something else — Quora, for example, may well have peaked in terms of awareness and growth after a recent surge in popularity, and it’s not clear whether it can continue and become mainstream in any real sense. And when it comes to Facebook and Zynga, the firm is part of a hot private market for the shares of those companies, and so has an obvious interest in making them appear as desirable and highly valued as possible.

That said, however, reports like this one help put the spotlight where it should be: on companies that have been able to take advantage of the social nature of the web — what at one point was being called “Web 2.0” — and how that has allowed them to grow at a speed that hasn’t been seen since the early days of Google. Sometimes we are so close to these events and companies that it’s easy to lose sight of how big a transformation they have helped create in our online lives.

It also helps reinforce how difficult it is for even early Internet leaders to adapt to and take advantage of these changes, as Google is trying to do by bolting social features onto its services through moves like its recent +1 launch. Leading in one wave is no guarantee that one can lead in another — and in some cases may make that even less likely to happen.

Author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell caused some controversy last year when he said that social-media tools like Twitter aren’t worth much as a tool for social activism (or at least not “real” social activism). After the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt — both of which involved extensive use of Twitter and Facebook by demonstrators and revolutionaries — many wondered whether Gladwell would alter this stance based on some powerful evidence to the contrary, but the author made it clear in a recent interview with CNN that he is still skeptical about how much of an effect such tools have.

In the interview (transcript here), the New Yorker writer says that Twitter and Facebook may have been used during the recent uprisings in countries like Tunisia and Egypt, but it isn’t clear that they were crucial in any way to the revolutions there. Gladwell argues that other similar events have taken place in the past — including the demonstrations in East Germany that eventually led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall — and they didn’t require any such tools:

I mean, in cases where there are no tools of communication, people still get together. So I don’t see that as being… in looking at history, I don’t see the absence of efficient tools of communication as being a limiting factor on the ability of people to socially organize.

This is the same point Gladwell made in a short note about Egypt that he posted at the New Yorker site in February, in which he wrote that “people protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along.” As more than one observer has pointed out, this isn’t much of an argument — there were political uprisings before guns and tanks came along too, but no one would deny that guns and tanks changed the nature of social revolutions considerably. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci called arguments about how revolutions occurred before X or Y was invented “intellectually lazy.”

Gladwell also argues that social media and other such tools can just as easily be used dictators and governments to crack down on revolutions:

[Y]ou could also make the opposite argument that some of these new technologies offer dictators a – give them the potential to crackdown in ways they couldn’t crackdown before. So, my point is that for everything that looks like it’s a step forward, there’s another thing which says, well, actually, you know, there was a cost involved.

This might as well be called the Morozov principle, since it is a cornerstone of political writer Evgeny Morozov’s argument — in his book Net Delusion and in his columns at Foreign Policy magazine — that the Internet is as much of a danger to social movements as it is a benefit, because government forces can monitor Facebook to see what demonstrators are up to, and track their movements using Twitter and other social tools.

But even this argument acknowledges that social-media tools have changed the nature of social activism in significant ways. They may not be 100-percent beneficial, as Morozov alleges some “cyber-utopians” believe, but they clearly have altered the landscape — and in many cases this appears to have tipped incipient revolutions in places such as Tunisia and Egypt over into real-world uprisings, something that you might expect would interest Gladwell, the author of the much-hyped book The Tipping Point.

For whatever reason, the New Yorker author seems determined to downplay the effect that social media has in such situations, despite the evidence to the contrary.

Rumors have been circulating for some time now that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey might be taking on more of a role at the company, and today Dorsey confirmed he is going to head up product development at Twitter as executive chairman, while also continuing in his existing role as CEO and co-founder of mobile-payment startup Square. The move to give Dorsey more authority at the company appears to be an attempt to show that Twitter is putting more emphasis back on the product, rather than just on making money — something that the social network has been catching a lot of flak about lately. But can Dorsey help steer the company back onto the right track?

The most recent dust-up for Twitter was the response to new rules around using its API for pulling data into third-party applications. In contrast to the more open approach the company took in its early years, where developers were encouraged to create apps and services that leveraged the growing social network, the new rules seemed to clamp down on many aspects of Twitter’s ecosystem. Combined with some heavy-handed responses to Twitter app providers such as UberMedia, this struck many as showing a different — and less attractive — side of the company.

There was also some sharp criticism from users about a recent update to Twitter’s official mobile clients, which introduced a new feature called the Quick Bar (quickly dubbed the “dick bar” after CEO Dick Costolo) — one that seemed designed primarily to push the network’s new advertising-related services. Some users said they felt that Twitter was closing off avenues for alternative app suppliers at the same time as its own apps were becoming less useful.

Dorsey’s return to prominence at Twitter is a reversal of fortune in some ways for the Twitter co-founder and his former boss Evan Williams. Dorsey started Twitter in 2006 as a side project within Odeo, a media startup created by Williams after selling the Blogger platform to Google. It soon became obvious that Twitter was more interesting than what Odeo was originally doing, and Williams shifted his attention to the new service — effectively forcing Dorsey out as CEO, something Dorsey compared to “being punched in the stomach” in a recent profile for Vanity Fair.

Last year, Williams stepped down as CEO to devote more time to Twitter’s product development, and was replaced by former Feedburner chief executive Costolo. So far, there has been no mention of what Williams will be doing in light of Dorsey’s expanded role in developing the product, and sources within the industry say the former CEO is no longer actively involved in Twitter (although he did interview Lady Gaga at the Twitter offices recently).

The big question for Twitter, and for Dorsey, is whether the network can push forward with its attempts to control its ecosystem and find new sources of monetization, while still maintaining the strengths that made Twitter so appealing in the first place. That’s a tough assignment for someone who already has a full-time CEO job at a different company, and the stakes for Twitter continue to rise along with its market valuation.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Luc Legay