Wednesday, May 13, 2009

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CBSNews.com Goes From Cluttered With Information To Cluttered With Pictures Top
CBSNews.com is undergoing a major overhaul and redesign of its sites to make them easier to navigate, more visually compelling, faster and more focused on driving users to content. The new home page features a rotating list of top stories on the left, next to the list of the latest and most important headlines. CBS News programs, as well as the latest videos, photo galleries and blogs, are all highlighted on the page. CBS News also plugs its program sites, including Evening News, Face the Nation, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, and Sunday Morning, on its homepage. CBS says that the company applied technology from its sister site, CNET.com, to deliver pages from its servers to users’ screens more rapidly. Dan Farber, CNET’s editor-in-chief, oversaw the redesign. Here’s what CBSNews.com used to look circa 2000 (left) and currently (right): As you can see from the screenshot of the new design at the top of the post, this is a big improvement. The additional of images definitely make the site more aesthetically pleasing and easier to scroll through. But it seems that the new site is now a little too cluttered with pictures. Farber says the news site has undergone two major redesigns over the past ten years. A small percentage of random visitors to CBSNews.com will see the new look for pages on the site. CBS Says the site is still a work in progress and is undergoing changes and upgrades frequently. This new redesign may be part of an effort to catch up to ABCnews.com and MSNBC.com (NBC’s news site). CBSNews.com only drew 3.2 million unique visitors in U.S. in April compared to 4.4 million for ABCnews.com and 30.7 million for MSNBC.com, according to ComScore. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Review: Verizon MiFi 2200 Mini Hotspot Top
Short version: We've loved the MiFi mobile router since we first laid eyes on it back at CES . After a few days of playing with the Verizon MiFi 2200, we still love it just as much - but with one hangup: the nasty monthly bill. After a trivial hiccup with the activation, we had 4 computers up and running in minutes. Speeds in our area are about average for the local EVDO Rev-A network, and we've had absolutely no connectivity drops in our 2 days of testing.
 
Kindle Publishing Now Open To All Blogs Top
One of the neat little sub-features of Amazon’s Kindle is being able to subscribe to blogs on it. You have to pay for the privilege, but for heavy Kindle users, it makes sense as you can get the content delivered to you wirelessly for your favorite blogs. You know, like TechCrunch . But the biggest limiting factor of this so far is that only the big blogs have been included in the blog directory. Starting today, anyone can make their blogs available via the new Kindle Publishing for Blogs Beta program. All you have to do is make your blog’s feed available to the Kindle Store, and Amazon will do the rest, formatting your content for the device. According to the email from Amazon, after a few easy steps, your blog should be up and ready to go in the Kindle Store after about 12 to 48 hours of processing. Not bad. As with blogs currently in the program, these new blogs will get 30% of the monthly blog subscription price for every subscriber Amazon signs up. In a world where mobile app developers traditionally keep 70% or more of the revenues, 30% seems awfully low. And exactly how much Amazon will charge for each blog isn’t totally clear, other than Amazon says it will “define the price based on what we deem is a fair value for customers.” Most blogs currently go for $1.99 a month. Unfortunately, even if you want to, you can’t give your blog away for free on the device. Amazon has that WhisperNet to maintain, after all. As a Kindle owner, I currently subscribe to a few of my favorite blogs, but for most of the rest I use Instapaper to bookmark article and sync them over email to my device (which does cost a ridiculous $0.15 an email unfortunately — but Instapaper sends only one digest a day). The bottom line is that with 30% of the subscription price going to publishers, this isn’t likely to be a big source of income for most sites. There are simply too many blogs and the Kindle market is simply not that big. And the people who will pay for blogs on it is even less. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
KISS FAIL. You Can Now See Twitter Replies Sometimes, Except When You Can't. Top
Remember Twitter, that super simple service for sending messages? Well, last night they instituted a change that should have made it more streamlined, but users revolted because it’s never a good idea to take away features. So today, Twitter relented and gave users the feature back. Only they did so in a way that is hilariously convoluted. Previously, if you wanted to see another user’s @replies even if they were talking to someone you weren’t following, you had to select that option in the settings. Some people had, and enjoyed it. But the default setting for that was off, so Twitter simply removed the option to turn it on. But some users loved it so Twitter is now turning it back on — kind of. Apparently, soon you will be able to see these @replies again but only when a person is using them when not clicking the “reply” button. So basically, you can see when someone is replying to someone else but only when they’re not really replying to them. Yeah, this is going to confuse the hell out of people. Remember “ Keep It Simple, Stupid “? Yeah, this is the opposite. I consider myself a pretty savvy Twitter user and I had to read it twice to understand just what the hell Twitter meant. I also just had a hilarious conversation with fellow writer Jason Kincaid, where we debated just what exactly Twitter meant. The fact that we had to have that conversation is not a good sign. Twitter also claims to have second fix in mind, that will involve giving users more control over what exactly they see from which users. This is getting really complicated, quick. It sounds like the convoluted settings mess Facebook has become. This whole situation has turned into an absolute disaster. Twitter claimed it was just removing a feature that relatively few people used, but if it really believed that, it should have stuck with it. Instead, it admitted that the move was done to help with scaling issues. “We learned a lot,” is the title of Twitter’s post. That’s really code for, “a lot of people bitched, and so we’re half going back to the old way.” Don’t go half. Either do it or don’t do it. You may have been taught a lesson by your users, but you’re not heeding the lessons of other services in the past that have over-complicated things. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
DocStoc Charges Out Of Beta With DocCash, APIs, And More Blog-Like Homepage Top
A year and a half after launching at our first TechCrunch40 conference, document-sharing service Docstoc is taking off its “beta” label with a homepage redesign, open APIs, and a new revenue-sharing model called DocCash. The service is growing at a healthy clip, with 3 million documents uploaded and 1.6 million unique visitors a month in the U.S., according to comScore. (The company’s internal Google Analytics shows 4.8 million unique visitors worldwide). DocStoc is still much smaller than its rival Scribd , but hopes to catch up with some of its changes (as does Issuu , another document-sharing service that keeps adding features ). In order to encourage more activity and higher-quality document uploads, DocStoc is introducing DocCash . The company will be splitting AdSense revenues 50/50 with anyone who uploads documents and wants to opt into the service. Right now the ads only appear on Docstoc pages, but will eventually include Flash ads in DocStoc’s embedded Flash player as well. (See video tutorial below). DocStoc is also unveiling a new homepage with a much more blog-like feel. Featured documents a will be selected by an editorial team, more images will be highlighted, and different document categories are highlighted on the left (including business, technology, legal, and current events). Former TechCrunch writer and Website designer Mark Hendrickson worked on the new homepage. It looks much cleaner now, with topical documents and those related to breaking news now being highlighted (I’ve embedded Barack Obama’s tax return below—his income was $2.7 million last year!). Finally, it is opening up its APIs so that other sites can integrate DocStoc functionality into their own sites. These APIs allow other sites to include previews and document embeds, document search, use DocStoc’s document viewer, and upload documents directly to DocStoc. If DocStoc is ever going to catch up to Scribd, it will have to keep adding features and make sure the best docs are uploaded to it service. The APIs and DocCash might help, as well as little things like upload speeds (DocStoc seems faster to me). But with rising popularity also comes rising headaches. Already authors are beginning to complain about book piracy . Uploading copyrighted works is against the terms of service of both DocStoc and Scribd, but policing such usage becomes harder and harder with the number of documents getting into the millions. Barack Obama 2008 Tax Return - Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Imeem About To Expand iPhone Music Storage By Way Of The Cloud Top
Easily my favorite app on the Android platform is Imeem . It’s simple, fast and powerful, allowing you to listen to a huge range of music for free. And now it’s coming to the iPhone, we’ve learned. The Imeem app has already been submitted for App Store approval and could be released any day, we’re hearing from a reliable source. In terms of what it will offer, you can probably expect it to be about the same as the Android version . That means access to Imeem’s library of music and perhaps more importantly, access to your own collection of songs from the cloud, if you use Imeem’s MyMusic service to put your music on their servers. Of course, you have to pay for that. But if you’re willing to shell out $99 a year for their most premium plan , it means you can access 20,000 of your songs from your iPhone from anywhere (there are lower-cost version with less storage as well).That’s around 80GB of music, obviously a lot more than an iPhone or iPod touch can hold. But one tricky thing about this on the iPhone is its close ties with iTunes, which means that many of its users probably have some DRM-protected music, which won’t work over Imeem’s streaming service. But I assume the new iTunes Plus, DRM-free variety (which the entire iTunes store was recently converted to) will. And I’m sure you’ll be able to buy new music you hear on the Imeem app with one click that takes you to the iTunes store on the iPhone. This has been working out pretty well for Pandora . Cloud-based streaming of music makes a lot of sense. It gives you a single place to access your music from anywhere, without taking up valuable space on your devices. Lala is another service doing this with a still unreleased iPhone app that we got an early look at. It makes so much sense, in fact, that I suspect Apple will eventually get into this game as well. It almost has to with HD movies and television shows at some point because most people simply do not have enough storage space even on home systems to buy that content to their heart’s content — which of course, Apple would love. Naturally, Apple would want to have an option to pull your music off of the cloud to take on trips where you don’t have web access as well — that’s something that won’t work so easily with Imeem’s solution. Imeem’s iPhone application will undoubtedly have another major downside that the Android version does not: The inability to run in the background. That’s one of the killer features of the Android version — I can turn it on and leave it on while I do something else. Compare this to Pandora on the iPhone which shuts off as soon as you exit it. Seeing as Apple doesn’t allow third-party apps to run in the background, that will be the case with Imeem too. Still, given the range of music Imeem offers and this cloud-based option, I’m definitely looking forward to this iPhone app. The Android version actually won the Crunchie this year for Best Mobile Application — even beating out Pandora for the iPhone. Look for the iPhone version soon in the App Store. CrunchBase Information Imeem iPhone Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Hookers No Longer Welcome On Craigslist Top
After coming under increasing scrutiny from various state attorney generals for the open prostitution listings in its “erotic services” category, Craigslist is now folding in the face of criminal charges. The company said in a blog post that it will replace the erotic services category with a new “Adult services” category where each ad will be individually reviewed before posting. Existing ads in the erotic services category will remain for seven days, but already new ads are not being accepted in that category. People trying to place an ad in the adult category are reminded : “Ads suggesting or implying an exchange of sexual favors for money are strictly prohibited” and “Ads including pornographic images, or images suggestive of an offer of sexual favors are strictly prohibited.” A quick glance at the erotic service s section for New York City shows a lot of flesh with ads promising “IT’S NOTHING LIKE THE FIRST TIME!!” and “ASIAN HOTTIE . . . TO FULFUILL YOUR DREAM . . . WILLING AND READY.” Meanwhile, the adult services section for NYC is slightly less explicit. It has a lot more listings for “massages” and “sensual bodyrubs.” The first screenshot below is from an adult services ad, the second is the erotic services page. So much for truth in marketing. Update : in a blog post about to go up entitled “Striking a Balance,” which Craigslist just sent us, the company states: As of today for all US sites, postings to the “erotic services” category will no longer be accepted, and in 7 days the category will be removed. Also effective today for all US sites, a new category entitled “adult services” will be opened for postings by legal adult service providers. Each posting to this new category will be manually reviewed before appearing on the site, to ensure compliance with craigslist posting guidelines and terms of use. New postings will cost $10, but once approved, will be eligible for reposting at $5. It also points out that its moderation system is “the most successful system ever conceived for eliminating inappropriate activity from a massive internet community,” whereas inappropriate listings in print classifieds can’t even be removed. Of course, there are also many more listings on Craigslist than in any single paper and up until now there has been no pre-posting review whatsoever, so I am not sure that is something to brag about. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Twitter Waffles About Why @Replies Were Dumbed Down Top
Surprise, surprise. Last night Twitter abruptly decided to disable an option in the way @replies worked. The feature, while not widely used, was very popular among so-called ‘power users’ because it helped expose them to new users and conversations. Users have been up in arms since the change, venting their complaints in the highly trending channel #fixreplies . It’s been a disaster. At the time of the change co-founder Biz Stone wrote an oddly condescending blog post, stating that the feature was an “undesirable and confusing option” which was exactly why they took it away. This didn’t make much sense given the fact that the option was nestled in the settings menu and wasn’t the default. Most people didn’t even know it was there. This morning in a new blog post titled Whoa Feedback , Stone has revealed the true reason behind the change: it’s an engineering problem. Stone writes “The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt—it wouldn’t have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever.” This is a PR failure on Twitter’s part. The company was totally misleading about their motivation for killing the option, and now they’re forced to fess up because they’d have a tough time re-enabling it. Granted, most people don’t use the feature, and it is confusing. But those are merely supporting arguments - the company could have easily tucked the feature away in a set of advanced options for power users. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
A Revolution Begins: OpenCandy Has A Board Meeting And No One Shakes Hands Top
Over the weekend I wrote a post on the disgusting habit of hand shaking: Hand Shaking Is So Medieval. Let's End It . 500 comments later, about 40% of readers seemed to agree with me. The rest think I have OCD or some other psychological condition that needs treatment. Or just have no social skills. If I could take a poll, though, it’s clear that the people who have hands thrust at them more than they thrust hands at others are more likely to be opposed to hand shaking. CEOs and journalists, for example, tended to agree. Business development and sales types hate the idea. But whatever people’s individual feelings on hand shaking, one thing is clear. Some people are using this as a cue to stop the barbaric practice once and for all. And yesterday one brave company and its board of directors were willing to publicly admit that they held an actual board of directors meeting where no one shook hands. That was unthinkable a week ago. From Chester Ng , who twittered this morning: “ @arrington’s “handshake revolution” has begun! We kicked off our BOD meeting w/ awkward yet sanitary fist-bumps w/ @davidcowan @jamescham “ David Cowan , a partner at Bessemer who was at the meeting, agrees : “Arrington makes sense: Hand Shaking Is So Medieval. Let’s End It. » link to Hand Shaking Is So Medieval. Let's End It. by @arrington. The objections are ridiculous.” A revolution has begun. lol. All we need now is a proper logo for the cause, because sooner or later Marvel is going to send us another letter threatening a lawsuit if we keep using the Iron Man image. Create one that we like and win a free TechCrunch Tshirt. Just link to it below. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Don't Fight The Stream: Facebook And FriendFeed Redesigns Are Paying Off Top
When Facebook redesigned its homepage in early March in a wholehearted embrace of the real-time activity stream as its primary user interface, everybody complained . “Why on earth does the world need 2 Twitters?,” asked one of my friends on Facebook. Twitter-envy aside, some early data suggests that embracing the stream was the right decision after all. Since the redesign went into effect, Facebook’s growth has accelerated. After flat 0.3 growth in February, Facebook added nearly 4 million unique U.S. visitors in March (up 6.6 percent over February), and another 5 million in April (up 10.3 percent over March) to end at 67.5 million domestic uniques, according to comScore. That puts it within kissing distance of MySpace’s 71 million unique U.S. visitors in April, by the way (see chart below), and keeps a healthy 50-million visitor gap with Twitter, which added 8 million U.S. visitors in April alone. Facebook is not alone when it comes to wading in the stream. AOL has found religion as well and is injecting “lifestreams” into everything from Bebo to Socialthing to AIM. On the other end of the spectrum, is tiny FriendFeed , which is one big activity stream. Despite leading on the innovation front, FriendFeed has been struggling when it comes to gaining users. But a redesign that went into beta in early April, and is now the default homepage seems to be paying off with a 28 percent rise in unique visitors in April and more time spent on the site ComScore only estimates 188,000 unique visitors in that month ( Quantcast puts it a bit higher at 241,000), so it is still extremely niche, but at least its numbers are now headed in the right direction. The redesign makes the whole feed update continuously now so you can really watch your what your friends are doing on the Web as they are doing it. Complain all your like, but the stream is here to stay and it will only get stronger. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Mo'Minis Finds Mo Money For Mo Games Top
Mo’Minis, an Israeli-based startup that provides developers a platform to create mobile games and entertainment applications, has secured $1.5 million in Series A funding from BRM Capital. The company says that the funding will be used to improve the current development platform, strengthen its community of developers and close strategic partnerships with distributors operating mobile carriers worldwide. Launched in 2008, Mo'Minis raised $400,000 in seed money from private investors. Mo’Minis’ platform allows advanced as well as non-skilled developers to create rich media casual games from scratch, without the need of programming, and have them seamlessly supported on a wide range of mobile handsets. Furthermore, developers can collaborate, share game assets with Mo’Minis developers’ community members and can monetize their games through Mo’Minis various distribution channels. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Skydeck Mashed Up With Google Voice Could Be The Perfect Combination Top
One of the few necessary evils that accompanies the uber-cool and recently launched Google Voice service (which was officially released in March) is the necessity to convert all of your numbers (cell, landline, office) to one number. It can be an annoying and daunting task to change your cell phone number, especially if you are reliant on your cell for business and personal communications. Mobile startup Skydeck’s new mashup with Google Voice may help you avoid the hassle of changing at least your cell phone number while still letting you use Google Voice. While Google Voice is all your numbers online, Skydeck’s service, which came out of beta earlier this year, is just your cell phone online. Via an app on your cell phone, all your calls, text messages, voicemails and contacts are backed up on Skydeck.com and you can search, read, and reply to your messages (by voice or by text) from Skydeck as if it were your cell phone. If you don't answer a call, Skydeck takes a voicemail, converts the speech to text, and sends you an email. If you are at your desk, you can call or text people from Skydeck. The call appears to come from your cell phone, so your friends will know who it is. Similar to Google Voice, you read a transcribed version of each voicemail (via SpinVox ). It works best on Blackberry and Android phones (although most of the features work on nearly any phone), and costs $9.95 a month. By offering a free service to Google Voice users, Skydeck hopes to acquire new customers who may be receptive to its service. The catch with Skydeck is that it can’t help you with your other phones, i.e. office and home lines, and the full version of Skydeck isn't free (like Google Voice). Google Voice, which was formerly GrandCentral (a service Google acquired for $50+ million in 2007) ties all your phones together with one new number that rings them all. It definitely simplifies your phone correspondence and management. That is, once you switch over all of your numbers to a new number. You give out the one phone number, administer it with a website or voice menu, and forward calls to various devices depending on who's calling and when. Google Voice lets you accept and send text messages, transcribes voicemails, and lets you specify settings for certain callers (whether they go directly to voicemail). In addition, Google Voice’s interface is a comprehensive Gmail-like inbox (and is also added to the list of links in your Google Apps) with tabs for voicemail, SMS, Recorded calls, Placed calls, Received calls and Missed calls. And all SMS and transcribed voicemails are searchable and taggable. Both Skydeck and Google Voice are extremely useful services, especially considering the slow death of voicemail. But if you use your cell phone most of the time and don’t want to go through the hassle of changing your phone number and operating it through Google Voice, Skydeck now offers you the option of using a free or paid version Skydeck to manage your cellphone and Google Voice to manage your other phone lines. Skydeck will configure your phone so that the calls you miss on your cell will go to Google Voice. Messages will still be copied to Skydeck so that your cell phone calls, texts and voicemails are in the same place. While I wish I could not have to change my cell phone number and still have all the numbers in my life be controlled by one service (like Google Voice), I have realized that I can’t have my cake and eat it too. One of the sole drawbacks to Google Voice is the requirement to change your phone number and for those of you who, like me, completely rely on your cell phone and don’t own a land line, that’s a big sacrifice. In a way, Skydeck’s offering gives you the best of both worlds. And you can access most of the key features of Skydeck, mashed up with Google Voice, for free. Here’s a video which demos the new mashup: Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Blerp Aims To Turn The Web Into One Big Forum Top
San Francisco startup RocketOn , the company behind a virtual world platform that bares the same name, has more tricks up its sleeve and is today showing off the second product it created. The web application it’s introducing today is dubbed Blerp , and its ambition is to turn the Web into a giant interactive message board by making it possible for visitors to add text comments and multimedia to existing web pages and share them with their friends. Under the motto ‘layer the web!’, Blerp aims to enable people to enrich web pages with an additional layer of content with the ability to let others join in on the fun at any time. RocketOn is calling the concept Hyperlayers, and if the idea makes you think of social annotation services like Reframe It , Diigo or Fleck , that’s because it’s taking an extremely similar route with Blerp. The app basically creates a virtual space on top of websites that you visit in the form of a sidebar and a header, which allows you to post text, photos, videos and interactive elements like polls and ratings on top of the page while still being able to see and interact with it. Blerp users get a personal homepage dubbed My Stuff that gives them an overview of what’s being discussed by their friends online, and are able to jump right into the conversation from the interface. In Digg, or rather StumbleUpon fashion, users can ‘hype’ certain discussions to help it get featured on the Blerp homepage, with the extra ability to favorite (aka bookmark) live discussions and share them with friends by e-mail or through a variety of social networking services. There are two types of discussions: user-owned and community discussions. The former are created and controlled by specific users, while community discussions are created by the startup’s system and are not owned by anyone. There’s a community discussion on every site Blerp users visit, and you can view one I started for TechCrunch here . I don’t see myself becoming a regular Blerp user any time soon, but the original idea seems to be well implemented. Note that the service is still in alpha mode, so expect to run into a few bugs here and there. RocketOn is backed by $5.8 million in venture capital (judging from the members on its board by Bertram Capital next to DE Shaw’s Venture Group whose investment in the company we covered earlier) and says it initially developed Blerp as a feature for its parallel virtual world but quickly realized that it could function as a stand-alone tool just as well. Time will tell if it was a sensible decision to make. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Intel Fined Over €1 Billion For Violation Of European Antitrust Laws (Updated With Intel Statement) Top
The European Commission today announced that it has fined Intel a record €1.06 billion ($1.45 billion) for abusing its dominance in the market for computer chips to exclude its biggest (and frankly, the only serious) rival AMD by paying computer manufacturers Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and NEC as well as retailers to postpone, cancel or downright avoid using or selling the latter’s products. That’s one hell of a fine, considering the previous record for similar abuses in the EU was ‘only’ €497 million (Microsoft, back in 2004). The European Commission has ordered Intel to stop the exclusion practices immediately, and said it would closely and actively monitor Intel’s compliance with its decision. E.U. regulators first began investigating Intel in 2001, after AMD filed a complaint in Brussels the year before. The commission estimates the world market in the specific chip set in question (x86 CPUs) to be worth about €22 billion a year, with Europe accounting for approximately 30% of that (€6.6 billion). Intel currently maintains a share of about 80 percent of the European market. Intel has not commented yet, but the general expectation is that the company will appeal both the fine and orders to change its business practices to the European Court of First Instance. Update: Paul Otellini, Intel Corporation president and CEO just issued the following statement: "Intel takes strong exception to this decision. We believe the decision is wrong and ignores the reality of a highly competitive microprocessor marketplace – characterized by constant innovation, improved product performance and lower prices. There has been absolutely zero harm to consumers. Intel will appeal." "We do not believe our practices violated European law. The natural result of a competitive market with only two major suppliers is that when one company wins sales, the other does not. The Directorate General for Competition of the Commission ignored or refused to obtain significant evidence that contradicts the assertions in this decision. We believe this evidence shows that when companies perform well the market rewards them, when they don't perform the market acts accordingly." "Intel never sells products below cost. We have however, consistently invested in innovation, in manufacturing and in developing leadership technology. The result is that we can discount our products to compete in a highly competitive marketplace, passing along to consumers everywhere the efficiencies of being the world's leading volume manufacturer of microprocessors." "Despite our strongly held views, as we go through the appeals process we plan to work with the Commission to ensure we're in compliance with their decision. Finally, there should be no doubt whatsoever that Intel will continue to invest in the products and technologies that provide Europe and the rest of the world the industry's best performing processors at lower prices." (Image via BusinessWeek ) Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Ning Gets A Star Studded Boost From The Collective Top
Over the last few months celebrities have become something of a currency on the social web as services vie to attract big-name stars (and gather the resulting media coverage and new users in the process). Twitter has garnered the most attention for its roster, which includes celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Oprah . Facebook too has been making strides in this area, especially since releasing its redesigned ‘Pages’ that allow celebrities and brands to broadcast their updates to fans. Another contender in the celebrity hunt is social network platform Ning , which is already home to a number of social networks dedicated to celebrities, politicians, and musicians. Today, the company has announced that it has forged a partnership with The Collective, a management company whose clients include Enrique Iglesias , to create custom networks for a number of The Collective’s biggest clients. Along with Enrique, Collective clients including comedian Eddie Izzard, and actors John Leguizamo and Taylor Momsen will be deploying their own social networks on the platform. And some clients, including The All American Rejects , Staind , and the Plain White T’s have already launched their own Ning networks as their homepages. I spoke with The Collective partner Aaron Ray, who says that while the company’s artists will continue to maintain presences on other networks where appropriate, Ning has offered a greater degree of access to support personnel than other social networks have - clearly the site is going out of its way to foster its relationship with celebrities. But Ning SVP of business operations Jason Rosenthal says that the company is only interested in working with celebrities that will use their Ning networks to truly connect with fans, not just as vanilla corporate celeb properties. Rosenthal also says that while many celebrities maintain presences across multiple sites, they tend to use Ning as their central hub, with their other profiles serving as satellite ’spokes’ linking back to their social networks. This isn’t surprising given the increased level of control a celebrity has over their Ning network, than say, a Facebook page. But celebrities won’t be dropping the other services any time soon - a Ning network may offer a richer experience, but casual fans are more likely to subscribe to a celebrity’s Twitter feed or Facebook page than they are to join an entirely new social network. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Blah Girls Jumps From The Web To TV, As Kutcher Does The Opposite Top
Ashton Kutcher got his start on the small screen. His roles in That 70s Show and development of the MTV show Punk’d (which is being kind of reborn with Ustream ) allowed him to become a movie star. But these days he seems more interested in using the web to further his career. His recent race with CNN to be the first user with a million Twitter followers was just one facet of what he’s doing online. He also has his own web-based show Blah Girls . But now he’s sending that the opposite way: Back to television. Katalyst Media, the production company Kutcher runs with Jason Goldberg, has signed a deal with CBS Television Distribution (CTD) to distribute Blah Girls on television. Specifically, the show will run as one-minute interstitials between segments on the entertainment magazine show, The Insider. While the show has run on the web since its l aunch during TechCrunch50 last June , a television distribution deal has always been a part of the broader goal for the content. And CBS has a larger development deal with Katalyst Media, so this is simply an extension of that. Still, it’s a bit odd that Kutcher is taking the show to television after going on and on about how his race to a million followers showed that individuals could trump huge media conglomerates. And he beat CNN, but he still apparently needs CBS. Why? Because there’s money there of course, and it’s still tough to monetize an online video venture. But Blah Girls will continue on the web as well, and I’m sure the CBS gig will get it some good exposure. Find a Mother’s Day episode of Blah Girls below. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
iLike Launches Custom iPhone Apps, Syndication Platform To Help Artists Connect With Fans Top
iLike , the popular music discovery site with a huge presence on social networks, is launching a set of new syndication services for musicians. Beginning tonight, iLike now offers extensive integration with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, allowing artists to distribute content to each of their online presences from a single control panel. In addition to these, the company is also launching a new self-serve platform for building customized iPhone applications for artists, allowing them to establish themselves on the App Store with a minimum amount of effort and resources. While most readers probably associate iLike with music playlists and streaming, the service is also home to 300,000 artists who use its services to help manage and distrbute their content. Before today’s annoucement, the service offered more limited syndication options, allowing them send data through the iLike Facebook application, its iGoogle widget, and an iTunes plugin. But the new options go much further. One of the most significant changes is the release of a new ‘Music’ tab for an artist’s Facebook pages, which will allow them to incorporate their music, videos, and concert information (previously artists would have to rely on the iLike Facebook application). The service has also expanded its support for Twitter, allowing artists to import their Tweets from elsewhere and distribute them to their social network profiles, or to syndicate them directly from the iLike dashboard. Other additions abound: artists can now sync their videos between YouTube and iLike, so they won’t have to post them in multiple places. They can create their own ‘dot-com’ websites, which they can manage from the iLike dashboard. They can syndicate their content directly to their Ticketmaster profile pages. And iLike’s concert app and event pages on MySpace have also gotten a boost, allowing fans to purchase tickets directly without having to go elsewhere and including more social features (like being able to see who else is going to a certain concert). Finally, in what is easily the biggest departure for the company, iLike is also rolling out a platform that will allow artists to create their own iPhone applications, which can include dynamically updated photos, music, blog posts, and other content (you can see a demo of the app below). iLike is charging artists a one-time fee of $99, and will also participate in a rev-share deal for those that want to charge for their applications (the current plan is for a 50/50 split). Artists that give their application away for free will only have to pay the initial fee. The iPhone is quickly becoming a very popular and powerful way to connect with fans, and there’s no doubt even smaller bands are eager to appear in the App Store. But iLike won’t be alone in trying to tackle this market - other companies like Mobile Roadie and Kyte are offering similar platforms for building custom iPhone apps. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
MySpace Wants To Avoid This Whole Holocaust Denial Thing Top
Lots of heat is being put on Facebook over Holocaust denial , ranging from blogs to CNN to pissed off moms who still can’t post pictures of their breasts on their Facebook pages. Facebook is standing firm in their defense of the deniers. Meanwhile, MySpace is just hoping no one looks their way. In an email to MySpace forum moderators today, MySpace asked moderators to “keep an eye out for anti-semitism and derogatory comments.” Based on the text of the email, some of which has been redacted, it looks like moderators are expected to remove this content promptly and even perhaps ban offending users. MySpace’s motivation to deal with the problem may be fairly sad (just to avoid bad press), but at least they’re doing the right thing by getting this hate speech off the site. MySpace’s terms of use are similar to Facebook’s - specifically hate speech is banned. Here’s the email: Holocaust Denial This is a hot topic right now. Keep an eye out for anti-semitism and derogatory comments. If you ban a user for this, please leave the ban info here. [redacted] Please include links of deleted posts as well. Thanks guys. We’ve reached out to MySpace for comment on their official policy on Holocaust denial. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Twitter Decides We're Not Smart Enough For @Replies, Changes Them Again Top
Twitter is officially getting dumbed down. For the second time in less than two months, Twitter has changed its @reply system, this time by removing an option that has existed for many months in an effort to appease confused newcomers. The basic premise behind the @reply system is that it allows you to create a semi-public conversation with another Twitter user. To prevent you from having to listen in to conversations you might not care about, the default setting has long been to only show these @replies if you were following both people in the conversation. And that’s the choice most people stuck with. But there was an option to receive all @reply messages from any users you were following. This led to an increase in noise, but it also exposed you to new Twitter users and conversations that you might have otherwise missed out on. I’ve had it turned on for over a year. But apparently that option has confused too many people, so Twitter is killing it. From the Twitter blog: We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option. Confused? That’s understandable and exactly why we made the update. Gee, thanks Twitter. I didn’t realize that an option I manually activated was undesirable. Any other things I shouldn’t like that you’d like to make me aware of? If there was anything undesirable about the old system, it was that Twitter did a poor job of explaining it, not that the functionality itself was unwanted. And given that the option was not the default and was buried under a settings menu, why would it matter anyway? If too many people are getting confused, why not simply make it more hidden (perhaps under an ‘advanced’ tab)? In the months since Twitter has grown in mainstream appeal, and especially since it made its debut on Oprah, some of Twitter’s early adopters have expressed fear over a change in the service. With a growing number of celebrities and media presences (not to mention spammers), they worry that the service will lose its tight-knit feel. Before tonight I never paid much attention to this train of thought - after all, on Twitter, I can just follow the people I care about and ignore those I don’t. But it’s clear that Twitter is concerned with appealing to a more mainstream audience, and if that takes making a very simple service even more simple, then by golly, that’s what they’re going to do. Update 1 : Many Twitter users are up in arms about the change, voicing their complaints under the channel #fixreplies , which is currently the top trending term on Twitter. Update 2 : Twitter CEO Evan Williams just tweeted about the change: “Reading people’s thoughts on the replies issue. We’re considering alternatives. Thanks for your feedback.” Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Google Takes Steps Towards A More Structured Web Top
Earlier today Google announced that it was going to begin limited support of RDFa , a framework that allows web developers to incorporate structured metadata into their sites. To most people, this probably doesn’t sound particularly exciting, but it’s an important step that may indicate that the search giant is going to embrace structured data on the web - something that it has long shied away from. I’m not going to get into the specifics of the RDFa standard (if you’d like a more thorough explaination you can find one here and here ). But the benefits of using such semantic tagging can be seen in a few basic examples. If I was to write a post that mentioned “The President” without naming him, Google probably wouldn’t realize that I was talking about President Obama - it might think I was referring to another US president, or perhaps the leader of a company. But using RDFa I could tag the words “The President” with “Barack Obama”. That tag would be visible to machines spidering the page for indexing (resulting in smarter search results), but wouldn’t be shown to users reading the post. In effect, it’s a way to tell search engines about your content without exposing your visitors to extraneous text. RDFa tags will also allow search engines to identify structural data on a web page and present it in search results (Google is using it to generate its rich snippets ). And browsers could potentially read the data and use it to present maps or other elements outside of the web page. Mark Birbeck , who first proposed the standard and will be speaking at a conference on the semantic web this June, says that this is a big step for Google. He explains that Google has always tried to use its algorithms to derive context from the content on webpages. This usually works pretty well, but as we’ve noted before, there are some things that algorithms just can’t identify properly (at least, not yet). Now, it may be some time before we start seeing any real benefits from Google’s implementation of RDFa. For starters the search engine is only using it in a limited fashion, and it isn’t clear how long it will take for Google to begin incorporating it in other ways. But the standard is already spreading without Google’s help - Yahoo supports RDFa, and many sites including the UK government are implementing it too. Of course, with its dominant market share Google’s stamp of approval is huge for RDFa’s acceptance, and we’ll probably begin to see more services follow suit (Drupal 7, for one, will include it by default). That said, not everyone is happy with the way Google is using the standard. There are complaints that Google is using a hobbled implementation of RDFa, ignoring some of the established conventions that many webpages have already used to tag their data. Birbeck acknowledges that Google could have implemented RDFa better, but says that “the only reason they can even raise the question of whether Google used the right vocabulary is because they are using RDFa now.. And that is huge.” Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Real-Time Search-Off Top
Today saw the launch of two new real-time search engines, from OneRiot and Tweetmeme . While the two are slightly different in ways that I went into earlier , all that really matters are the results you get. So I put those two to the test along with Twitter Search , Google Search , FriendFeed and the recently launched Scoopler . To see which would give the best results based on a current event. One bit of news I was interested in was the space shuttle, because it received some damage today while venturing into space. I decided to do a pretty generic search for “Space Shuttle,” since that is likely what most people would enter of all the possible combinations of words. Here are the results: 1. Google: The top result was from a Google News story about the shuttle damage. That’s good, that’s what I was looking for. The rest was historical information I didn’t want or need. Sure, I could have used a Google News search, which would have no doubt returned more relevant results (but maybe not that relevant ), but most people still use just regular old Google.com, so that’s what I did. 2. Twitter Search: The first result is pretty telling: “Just watched the space shuttle go overhead — so cool” That’s nice, but gives me absolutely nothing in terms of what I’m looking for. The second and fourth results were good and gave me links for more info — now you see why Twitter wants to (and should) get into the business of crawling links for its search results. 3. FriendFeed: The top two results are good, but the rest are just general information about the launch. This is an interesting set of results because unlike Twitter Search results, FriendFeed filters everything through my friends by default. That’s good for certain searches, but maybe not so good for big, meaningful searches when you’re frantically looking for information. 4. Scoopler: With its mixture of live tweets coming in and popular content, Scoopler gives me some pretty solid results for what I’m looking for. And it’s presented in a way that’s pretty easy to follow. I like this one, a lot. 5. OneRiot: The top two results in the “Realtime” view are good, but the others aren’t what I’m looking for. The Pulse view isn’t much better. The relevant results come from Twitter or OneRiot itself. There’s nothing from Digg in terms of what I’m looking for. (OneRiot scans Twitter and Digg.) 6. Tweetmeme: Tweetmeme’s search defaults to the “Best Match” area which gives you a solid result for the number one and three items. When sorted by “Age,” the results are all over the place. Second test : For a second test (not pictured), I did a query for “Miss California” — another hot topic on the web right now. Being as this one is a little less time-sensitive, the results were better across the board. OneRiot showed quite a few Digg results this time around, and even Google had some relevevant links beyond its Google News top area hits. Scoopler had some good popular results, but its Live area was dominated by tweets mostly making jokes to friends about the beauty queen. Tweetmeme’s “Highest Tweets” area really shined here. Conclusion: It’s hard to declare one single winner because results vary based on how fresh the topic being queried is. Scoopler seems to work very nicely for breaking news as it mixes in an auto-refreshing Twitter search stream (as I keep going back to, it’s dominated by tweets) with popular items. Tweetmeme seems to work very well for slightly older items that have been retweeted a lot. OneRiot is nice in that it crawls the individual pages to get better content, but for breaking news, I’m not sure that it actually works better than a quick topical scan of a bunch of items. And FriendFeed’s search is great if you want to see what your friends are saying about something, but trickier if you go outside your social circle. It seems pretty clear why Google is interested in adding a real-time layer to its search capabilites, while Twitter wants to crawl pages with its engine — the combo is pretty killer. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Kanye West Is Mad As Hell At Twitter — And He's Not Going To Take This Anymore! Top
Celebrities love Twitter, right? Just look around, Ashton Kutcher, Jimmy Fallon, P Diddy — they won’t shut up on it or about it. But not every celebrity loves it. Take hip hop artist Kanye West, for example. Apparently mad about people pretending to be him on Twitter, he went on a Peter Finch-style rant today on his blog about the service. He specifically calls out the “heads of Twitter” a few times. Let’s see if @ev @biz and @jack are listening. ( Update: yup ) - Hopefully, he doesn’t have the caps keylock on for nothing. Here’s what he had to say: (This spaz comes courtesy of losers making fake Kanye West Twitter accounts) I DON’T HAVE A FUCKING TWITTER… WHY WOULD I USE TWITTER??? I ONLY BLOG 5 PERCENT OF WHAT I’M UP TO IN THE FIRST PLACE. I’M ACTUALLY SLOW DELIVERING CONTENT BECAUSE I’M TOO BUSY ACTUALLY BUSY BEING CREATIVE MOST OF THE TIME AND IF I’M NOT AND I’M JUST LAYING ON A BEACH I WOULDN’T TELL THE WORLD. EVERYTHING THAT TWITTER OFFERS I NEED LESS OF. THE PEOPLE AT TWITTER KNOW I DON’T HAVE A FUCKING TWITTER SO FOR THEM TO ALLOW SOMEONE TO POSE AS ME AND ACCUMULATE OVER A MILLION NAMES IS IRRESPONSIBLE AND DECEITFUL TO THERE FAITHFUL USERS. REPEAT… THE HEADS OF TWITTER KNEW I DIDN’T HAVE A TWITTER AND THEY HAVE TO KNOW WHICH ACCOUNTS HAVE HIGH ACTIVITY ON THEM. IT’S A FUCKING FARCE AND IT MAKES ME QUESTION WHAT OTHER SO CALLED CELEBRITY TWITTERS ARE ACTUALLY REAL OR FAKE. HEY TWITTER, TAKE THE SO CALLED KANYE WEST TWITTER DOWN NOW …. WHY? … BECAUSE MY CAPS LOCK KEY IS LOUD!!!!!!!!! [thanks Auston] Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Ebay's Nazi Ordeal A Decade Ago Mirrors Facebook's Plight On Holocaust Denial Today Top
In 1999 eBay was under heavy fire for allowing the sale of Nazi memorabilia. Their policy approach at the time mirrors almost exactly what Facebook is doing now with Holocaust denial groups , namely banning behavior in certain countries to comply with local laws, but allowing it everywhere else. From a 1999 New York Times article: “eBay…said that the company already prohibited the sale of such items in Germany because they are outlawed there. But he said it generally polices the sales of banned items only after receiving complaints from users” From a PCMag article in May 2009 on Facebook: “We have recently begun to block content by IP in countries where that content is illegal, including Nazi-related and Holocaust denial content in certain European countries,” the Facebook spokesman said. “The groups in question have been blocked in the appropriate countries.” By 2001, though, eBay had changed its policies to ban all sales of Nazi memorabilia across its sites. The ban includes sales of Holocaust denial items. The current policy is here . Part of the balancing act eBay uses when making a decision on a listing is to ban items which “lack substantial social, artistic, or political value.” It goes on to state “this includes items that may be deemed inappropriate or insensitive to victims of natural disasters or human tragedies.” Facebook doesn’t want to be the last reasonable entity standing on the wrong side of the Holocaust denial issue. But it’s sure looking like that’s how this is going to play out. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 

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