Wednesday, August 26, 2009

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Facebook Reiterates That You Can Reject Friends Without Looking Like A Jerk Top
Last night, I wrote about the largely unstated but well known rule-of-thumb for Twitter: That people with more followers than the number of people they are following, tend to be better people to follow. Such a ratio cannot exist on Facebook because unlike Twitter, it has a symmetric social graph — if you friend someone, they have to accept your friend request or else there is absolutely no connection (not including Fan pages). This puts additional pressure on you to accept all friend requests. It can be a burden. And I think Facebook realizes that, which is why we’re getting a post today on its blog basically explaining that it’s okay not to accept all requests. Specifically, the post notes that if you click the button to ignore a friend request, the person who requested you will not be notified about it. Likewise, if you accept someone as a friend, but then later un-friend them, they will not be notified (though they will no longer be able to see your information, nor will you be able to see their’s). And if you don’t want to accept them, but don’t want them to be able to attempt to friend you again, Facebook recommends simply leaving their request pending in your queue. It’s interesting that Facebook felt the need to go over this again. That seems to speak to confusion over the symmetric nature of its social graph in a world of Twitter and other social services in which the “follower” is more common than the “friend.” Of course, there are benefits to this type of network, the key one being privacy. But the problem is that as Facebook continues to grow and evolve, we’re getting more and more requests from random people that we don’t actually know. But many of us are using Facebook to spread information just as we do with Twitter (status updates, sharing links, etc), and there is some desire to allow these random people to be able to see some of what you are doing on Facebook. This is why Facebook created the “ Everyone Button ” and Fan Pages, but both of those seem to complicate the social graph, rather than simplify it. The solution that I employ is to accept all Facebook friend requests but limit the people I do not actually know to a very basic profile using Facebook’s filters. I then hide many of these people from my main News Feed. The problem is that they still show up when I do things like search for something. It’s a less than ideal solution. Plus, many users of Facebook probably still aren’t using filters (or at least not using them well). It will be interesting to see how Facebook deals with this issue going forward. Remember that they just purchased FriendFeed , which features a combination of an asymmetric social graph with great filters. I can’t help but wonder if Facebook won’t eventually switch to something like that. Of course, we’re also hearing that they’re very close to launching their location functionality (just like Twitter recently did ), which will once again highlight the importance of privacy. Almost all location-based services are currently symmetric, because while it’s one thing for random people to read your words or see what links you’re sharing, it’s another for them to know where you are. Because of that, on services like Loopt and Foursquare I stick pretty firmly to only accepting users that I actually know. As they approach 300 million users, Facebook continually has the tough situation of having to deal with these issues while figuring out how to educate all their current users if they intend to make a change. Of course, having 300 million users is a problem a lot of social networks would like to have. Update : Former TechCrunch writer Mark Hendrickson also shared some great thoughts about Facebook’s social graph on his personal blog recently. Here’s one particularly interesting paragraph: The main problem is that people's real-world social graphs change often and automatically, while their virtual representations on Facebook change mostly uni-directionally and manually. In other words, friends come and go in real life; but on Facebook, they usually just come. Friend lists tend to get bloated over time because users have a harder time defriending each other virtually than in real life. And even if they are going to defriend each other virtually, it has to be a deliberative effort, unlike in real-life when you just stop seeing certain people. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Sony And Google Try To Take On The Kindle With Open Books Top
When you are coming from behind, embracing openness is always a good strategy. That is exactly what Sony is doing with its electronic book reader, which is up against the Amazon Kindle. The key to the Kindle’s success is that it is paired with the largest book store in the world, where most people likely to buy an electronic book already have accounts. Sony is trying to fight this advantage by being more open and thereby attracting other large players into its sphere of influence. It’s biggest ally in this fight is Google, whose M.O. is to attack closed industries with open technologies. Today, Google is making available more than one million public domain books in the open ePub format, which also happens to be the linchpin of Sony’s open strategy. Yesterday, at the unveiling of Sony’s latest electronic book reader at the New York Public Library, the head of its ebook division, Steve Haber, emphasized: “”You want a ubiquitous experience: open, open open.” He repeated the mantra in the way that Steve Ballmer says, “Developers, developers, developers,” except he said it a little softer since he was in a library. As I’ve mentioned, the key to its open strategy is Sony’s commitment to adopt the ePub format , which is an open format for electronic books. As a result of embracing that format, Sony announced yesterday that libraries, starting with the New York Public Library, would be able to “loan” out digital editions of books in their collection for 21 days to people with Sony Readers. Furthermore, book chains could start selling their own digital books without going through Sony’s digital bookstore as long as the books are in the ePub format. With an open digital book format like ePub, anyone can sell or distribute electronic books. It doesn’t have to be Sony, which after all is more interested in selling Readers than in selling the books. Amazon’s strategy is the opposite. It wants to sell as many electronic books as possible in case people transition away from paper books. The Amazon Kindle does not support ePub. The Kindle is tied to Amazon’s book store. Its sole purpose is to drive sales of ebooks on Amazon. If you could buy an ebook at Barnes and Noble and read it on the Kindle, that would not make Jeff Bezos happy. As long as Amazon remains the market leader in electronic books, it can stick to its closed format much like Apple did with the iPod and teh AAC music format for many years. Eventually, though, open won and Apple added MP3 songs to iTunes as well. The same will happen with the Kindle and Amazon, but not until Amazon feels that it has a safe enough lead so that Sony, Google, and all the booksellers in the world combined won’t ever be able to catch up. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
NetVibes Gets Into Website Design Top
NetVibes, the startup that lets you assemble all your favorite widgets, feeds, social networks, email, videos and blogs onto a customizable homepage, is rolling out a new feature today that lets users create personalized widget-based web pages. NetVibes’s tool, called Theme Publishing, is a visual design editor that lets users personalize and edit every part of their page’s’ theme, from images to background. The layout of the editing tool is fairly simple. Users “click and pick” on the page:, meaning they click which part they want to edit and pick options from a color palette and design option menus. NetVibes offers a directory of themes or you can create your own theme. You can also publish your theme to the gallery for other NetVibes members to use. Every change is shown live in a preview pane, making it easy to see how a particular design will look. Plus, users can add widgets, feeds, social networks and more to their pages. The bonus: it’s all free. While the new feature is sure to attract users, it is also likely to attract the attention of brands. NetVibes says that ad agencies, including Ogilvy and Razorfish, are already using NetVibes’ theme design tool to create interactive, uber-personalized microsites for clients that are branded and contain customized widgets for social networks and feeds. NetVibes is also offering a new XML-based Theme API, which will enable web designers to create animated themes on their pages. The startup recently launched "drag and follow" widgets for Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, making it easy to create custom widgets around followers or feeds. Although NetVibes was a pioneer in personalized widget homepages, it has since been overshadowed by iGoogle. At TechCrunch's Real Time Stream CrunchUp in July, Netvibes previewed a new live feed reader and instant update architecture to make RSS real-time, which will be officially launched in the near future. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
TechCrunch50: Don Dodge, Paul Graham, Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Schroepfer join Panel of Experts Top
We’re pleased to announce Don Dodge (Microsoft's Emerging Business Team), Paul Graham (Cofounder of Y Combinator), Jason Hirschhorn (MySpace Chief Product Officer), and Mike Schroepfer (Facebook VP Engineering) will be joining our on-stage panel of experts at TechCrunch50 . They’ll judge the fifty launching startups in front of a crowd of 2,000 or so eager attendees. They’ll join the already announced expert lineup of Marc Andreessen, Roelof Botha, Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman, Tony Hsieh, Marissa Mayer, Tim O'Reilly, Sean Parker, Kevin Rose, Robert Scoble, and Yossi Vardi. This will be Don’s third year judging. Paul, Jason, and Mike will be making their first appearances. And we’re not stopping here - additional judges will be announced next week. All the details for the conference are here . TechCrunch50 is an action-packed conference where fifty new startups launch over two days. The event will be held at the San Francisco Design Center, a huge and beautiful venue where we packed nearly 2,000 participants last year. Tickets for the event can be purchased here courtesy of Eventbrite. We've slashed our early-bird prices from 2008 to $1995 through August 31. (Prices escalate to $2,995.) If you’re interested in demoing your product, we have a few spots left in our DemoPit ( e-mail us for details). Additionally, exhibitor passes are available for $8,000, which include entry to the conference for 4 people, a 5' exhibitor table, and other goodies . More on the TechCrunch50 blog . Don Dodge Don Dodge is a veteran of five start-ups including Forte Software, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet, and Groove Networks. Don is currently Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team . Don has been in the software business for more than 20 years. He started his software career with Digital Equipment, aka DEC, in the database group. He worked with 5 software start-ups over the next 12 years. Forte Software was the first multiplatform object oriented development environment. AltaVista was the first search engine on the web. Napster was the first P2P file sharing network. Bowstreet was the first web services development environment. Groove Networks was the first secure P2P collaboration platform. Now he is at Microsoft… “the biggest start-up in the world”… working with VC’s and start-ups in the greater Boston area. Paul Graham Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. In 2002 he described a simple statistical spam filter that inspired a new generation of filters. He’s currently working on a new programming language called Arc , a new book on startups, and is one of the partners in Y Combinator . Paul is the author of On Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1993), ANSI Common Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1995), and Hackers & Painters (O’Reilly, 2004). He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. Jason Hirschhorn Jason Hirschhorn is Chief Product Officer for MySpace . As one of the company's foremost senior leaders, Jason is dedicated to transforming the MySpace brand and product by providing an unparalleled user-experience. His unique approach emphasizes innovation, rejects the notion of the media company as tastemaker, and lets the audience guide the direction of product and content offerings. Mike Schroepfer Mike Schroepfer is the Vice President of Engineering at Facebook . Mike is responsible for harnessing the engineering organization's culture of speed, creativity and exploration to build products, services and infrastructure that support the company's users, developers and partners around the world. Before coming to Facebook, Mike was the Vice President of Engineering at Mozilla Corporation, where he led the global, collaborative, open and participatory product development process behind Mozilla’s popular software, such as the Firefox web browser. Mike was formerly a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems where he was the Chief Technology Officer for the data center automation division (”N1″). He was also the founder, Chief Architect and Director of Engineering at CenterRun, which was acquired by Sun. Mike worked with several startups at the outset of his career, including a digital effects software startup where he built software that has been used in several major motion pictures. Mike holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degrees in computer science from Stanford University and has filed two U.S. patents. Great partners make great conferences We’re really lucky to have the corporate support of some of the best names in the business. Sequoia Capital , Charles River Ventures and Perkins Coie all returned quickly to support us for the third year in a row. Google , Founders Fund , Microsoft and MySpace are back for their second year of partnership, and this year Bing stepped forward as a first-time partner. Additional partners will be named in the next few weeks. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Branchr Advertising Acquires Online Collaboration Software Maker Atomplan Top
Branchr Advertising , the CPC (cost per click) based internet advertising company that allows fair ad distribution without contracts or setup fees, has acquired small business project and contact management application Atomplan (formerly Avecora OnDemand ), we’ve learned this morning. Financial details were not disclosed, but Branchr Advertising Director/Founder Christian Owens mentioned that the deal was a cash and equity acquisition. Atomplan is a small business organization and team collaboration suite, delivered on the web, on-demand. Among Atomplan features are task and deadline management, group messaging, calendar, contact management and allocation, wiki pages, and Twitter-style status updates. The service was formally run by startup Avecora , which is now moving its focus from web applications to consumer electronics, we’re told by the company’s 17-year old CEO Mark Bao . Branchr self-reports currently serving 100 million ads per month, across more than 2,300 websites. Its competitors include Fusion Ads , which claims to have served nearly 18 million ad impressions last July, and The Deck . Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
What Michael Birch Did after Selling Bebo and How He Thinks You Should Celebrate Your Birthday Top
For all the billions of dollars created here, Silicon Valley is remarkably stingy when it comes to giving. I first wrote about this when I moved here in the great Web 1.0 Internet bubble. Back then, as companies went public all around us, one-third of households earning $100,000 or more gave $1,000 or less to charity—roughly half what the rest of the U.S. gave per dollar earned. And those were the fat times. I don't have comparable data to back it up, but anecdotally it seems the Web 2.0 generation is doing a better job at giving. Or at least Bebo founder Michael Birch is. Birch has spent the last six months working with a team of two other people to build a social giving site for the popular organization, Charity:Water. It launched its beta site today, and with just a Tweet announcing it nearly 400 members have already raised some $3,000. Charity:Water's accountability and simplicity of purpose has made it a popular charity in New York, Hollywood and increasingly the Valley.  Here’s the value proposition: One-out-of-six-people on the planet doesn't have access to clean drinking water. $5,000 buys an African village a well. Every dime you donate, goes to these wells. You can even watch the wells being tapped for the first time via Web video. The non-profit is turning three in a few weeks, and it's raised more than $10 million over that time—much of it in $20 increments from a base of some 60,000 donors. It was Obama-fundraising-math before that was invented. As a result some 700,000 people in the world now have access to clean drinking water. It was all started three years ago when Scott Harrison, reformed bad boy and Charity:Water founder, asked people to come to a huge New York party for his September birthday and donate $20 at the door instead of giving him a gift. He raised $15,000 and built six wells in Uganda. (They were cheaper than the wells Charity:Water usually builds because three were shallow wells and three were rehabs of existing wells.) Like any great accidental entrepreneur, Harrison knew he was on to something. In addition to all kinds of creative fund raising, detailed in the video below, the following year, Harrison opened his birthday to everyone via the Web, asking them to donate $32 dollars, since it was his 32 birthday. That year, he raised $59,000 and other September birthday babies brought the total to $150,000, which went to wells in Kenya. Not bad, but they had to HTML hand-code each participant’s site. Pretty laborious work for a small non-profit. The next year he got more September babies to “give up” their birthdays, and a company called InspEnv.com built them a site, but it wasn’t hugely social or scalable. Still 800 people "gave up" their birthdays and raised some $965,000 dollars to bring some 50,000 people clean water in Ethiopia. But Harrison knew that the value of a lot of micro-giving campaigns like Kiva and the popular Facebook application, Causes, is rooted in the ability to make small donations super-easy to solicit and to make via existing online social graphs. He was trying to figure out sites that knew when a huge number of people's birthdays were and after MySpace and Facebook, he came across Bebo. Early last year, he cold-emailed Bebo founder Michael Birch to ask if he'd be willing to send a note out to his September born users and Birch wrote back that it was "a bad time." It was actually a great time for Birch—he was selling the company to AOL for $850 million . Once the deal was done, Birch called Harrison and suggested he build him a site that could help people born in any month instantly "give up their birthdays" for Charity:Water's mission. It was fitting since Birch’s next project was his pre-Bebo project, a site called Birthday Alarm . Nine months later, Harrison is about to turn 34, Charity:Water is turning three, and Birch has finished the site. For a free project, it’s a pretty nice looking site. The recession makes this perfect timing. If you’re panicked about money and job loss, giving up your birthday is an easy way to give to those less-fortunate without having to spend a dime yourself. My husband has a September birthday and has already signed up . I plan to sign up for my birthday in December. You can create your own campaign in a matter of moments and with a few clicks, share it via all your existing social networks. I’m sure the coders who were up until 4 a.m. last night will have mixed feelings about this, but this is one time I really want to see TechCrunch users break a beta site. [Photo credit: Scott Harrison] The story of charity: water - The 2009 September Campaign Trailer from charity: water on Vimeo . CrunchBase Information Michael Birch Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 

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