Month: November 2010

Among the interesting questions that have been asked on Quora, the question-and-answer site (whose cofounder I interviewed recently) is one about “personalized news” and why so many startups had tried to solve the problem and failed. Thoughtful answers have been posted by Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera and VC Eghosa Omoigui, among others, but I think the most recent one hits the nail on the head. It comes from Idealab founder Bill Gross, a legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur (he pioneered search-related advertising at Overture, for example). In a nutshell, he says the “Daily Me” is already here, and it is delivered via Facebook and Twitter.

Gross says that personalized news has not failed at all, but is here “in disguise.” The Idealab founder says that he has been “dreaming about ‘The Daily Me’ for 20 years, and I think it has finally wildly succeeded – it’s called Facebook and Twitter.” The two social networks effectively function as personalized news platforms, Gross says:

Important information to you. Curated by others. Refined by you. Serendipity included. Many people doing the filtering. Humans plus some algorithms, but mostly humans.

Gross adds that Twitter and Facebook also have another important feature, in that they are “good enough out of the box to get you going, and then you improve over time – over years even. Always giving you just enough to keep you in.”

I think Gross is right. Not that there is no room for a personalized news service that can bring something new to the table (Flipboard perhaps), but for many people Twitter and Facebook are taking the place of other avenues for news. As I have argued before, Twitter has become a news platform, for better or worse, and the social aspect of friends and people you follow sharing those news links is an extremely powerful force. In an attempt to take advantage of that, Google has reportedly been experimenting with using Twitter as a social layer for its news service, and startups like Paper.li are effectively constructing what are personalized online newspapers.

If you were looking for the bigger picture behind the tit-for-tat war that has been going on between Google and Facebook over the ability to export your email contacts, another piece of the puzzle may have just fallen into place: the giant social network is making a major announcement on Monday, and one popular theory is that it will launch an email service it has reportedly been working on, code-named Project Titan. While many see this as an attack on Gmail, the bigger goal is likely to strengthen the ties (or chains) that bind Facebook to its core user base. But do they want — or need — Facebook email?

The recent tug-of-war over data exportability (“Battle of the Web Giants!”) has seen Google block Facebook from automatically importing Gmail contacts, followed by a workaround that the social network implemented to take advantage of Google’s open-door policies, and finally a snarky message from Google warning users about trapping their contacts inside Facebook. The backdrop to all of this is that those contacts — and the connections and relationships and messages sent between them — are at the core of what Facebook is, and of what it offers both to users and advertisers.

Facebook’s defence of its actions was interesting, in the sense that the network seemed to be arguing that Google should have to allow users to export their contact info from Gmail, because it is just an email program — but Facebook shouldn’t have to do the same because it is a social network, and the rules around ownership of that contact information are more complex (and yet, Facebook routinely allows users to move their contact data to services offered by partners such as Microsoft and Yahoo). But the real reason for the network’s reluctance to allow this is that it is a fundamental part of the “social graph” that it offers to users.

Adding a full-featured email service to the network would strengthen those ties to users, and particularly to younger users, who are still a large part of Facebook’s user base — and who have either not adopted email at all, have mostly given it up in favor of Facebook messaging, or are still using Hotmail accounts they set up when they were teenagers. Adding the ability to use an @facebook address for all Facebook-related contacts, including messaging and status updates or other information from the network, could lock those users in even further.

One other point: Offering an email service is an opportunity for Facebook, but it is also a potential risk. Why? Because in order to be really attractive — particularly to older users who already have other email accounts, including those they access through corporate clients such as Microsoft Outlook — it’s only going to work if it is as open as possible, and that means integrating with other email programs (and possibly even Microsoft’s Office Web Apps) as well as potentially offering support for mail on custom domains, the way Google does.

In other words, a fully extensible email service is going to be a pretty big door into (and out of) Facebook’s walled garden. Among other things, it’s going to be a lot harder for Facebook to argue that it can’t export email contacts when it is running an email service identical to the one its giant competitor offers. But the bigger question is: Does anyone really want or need an @facebook.com email address?

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.