The latest from TechCrunch
- (The) Greatest Thing Facebook Ever Did Was Drop The "The"
- Yahoo's Head Of Engineering For Communication Products, An 11 Year Vet, Latest To Sign Off
- Another Key Feature Of Google +1: Massive-Scale Social Video Conferencing
- Yahoo Just Killed… Consumer Confidence In Them
- Wildfire Launches A 'Compete.com' For Twitter And Facebook Accounts
| (The) Greatest Thing Facebook Ever Did Was Drop The "The" | Top |
| Or so argues this music video about ex-Facebook president Sean Parker’s mythical contribution to humanity. Behold as a goofily dressed and bewigged Parker sings about the apocryphal moment (as seen in The Social Network ) where he convinced founder Mark Zuckerberg to drop the “the” in TheFacebook and just go with Facebook. The fictional rapper Parker goes for broke, urging that the lesson be applied universally to stuff like The Marines, The Pope, The Liberty Bell and Smokey The Bear. Yeah, what’s the deal with “The” anyways? Anyways while I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first rap song to refer to the Napster founder, it’s sure to be the funniest. My favorite lyric? “That’s my status so go ahead and ‘Like’ it.” Hot. CrunchBase Information Sean Parker Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Yahoo's Head Of Engineering For Communication Products, An 11 Year Vet, Latest To Sign Off | Top |
| At the risk of sounding like we’re kicking a dead horse — then lighting it on fire — we’ve been able to confirm another significant departure from Yahoo this evening. Raj Vemulapalli , Yahoo’s Head of Engineering for Real Time Communications, is leaving, the company has confirmed to us. Vemulapalli, amazingly, has been with Yahoo for over 11 years. Over that span he has worked his way up the engineering ranks, culminating in his position leading some of the few products that have been bright spots for Yahoo in recent years. That includes the massively-used Yahoo Messenger product, and all of the other messaging integration across the various Yahoo products. As he puts it in his LinkedIn profile , these products, “ deliver billions of messages per day, delight 250+ million monthly unique users and generate $150+ million in revenues for Yahoo! “ Naturally, as seems to be the norm with Yahoo recently, the situation surrounding Vemulapalli’s departure is a bit odd. We had heard that today was actually his last day at the company. But when reached for comment, he told us that he had not yet decided on his future with the company and was still “contemplating” it. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s communication team at first had no response to our inquiry about the situation, then gave us a “no comment”, then confirmed his departure with no further details. Okay then. CrunchBase Information Yahoo! Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Another Key Feature Of Google +1: Massive-Scale Social Video Conferencing | Top |
| Over the past few weeks, we’ve been able to dig up a bunch of details about Google’s secret forthcoming social service. The service, previously codenamed “ Emerald Sea ” but currently being called “ +1 “, essentially seems to be a toolbar that exists along the top of Google’s various properties to allow for easy sharing. We even were able to snag a picture of it . But there’s also quite a bit more to it, based on what we’ve been hearing. For one thing, we’ve been hearing a bit of talk about specific mobile applications , which may or may not be called “Loop” — after one of the key features of +1 (think: groups). But another feature of +1 is apparently large-scale video conferencing. Video conferencing is hardly a new phenomenon, but Apple’s Facetime, Cisco’s Umi , Skype and others have driven some renewed interested in the concept. Apple’s iChat software has long supported up to four people at once on a video call. But this Google entry, which may be known as something along the lines of “Hangout” or “gConferencing”, can apparently support well over a dozen people at a time — and maybe even more. People with knowledge of the feature say it works very well. It could be tied into your Loops — you just pick the friends you want to video chat with and hit a button and you’re good. Apparently, a key to all of this is multiplexing — multiple digital streams being sent over shared resources. It may seem a little weird that such a feature would be a key part of +1, but again, from what we’re hearing, while the toolbar thing is the main entry point, it’s hardly the only part of the service. (And no, the picture in this post is not of the feature.) [photo: flickr/ flype ] CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Yahoo Just Killed… Consumer Confidence In Them | Top |
| It has been fairly amazing to watch this Yahoo “sunsetting” news over the past 48 hours. It seemed to go from a bad leak, to huge backlash, to PR disaster, to confusion, to worse PR disaster. Now Yahoo, by way of Delicious (the most prominent service being “sunset”), has responded by lashing out at all the press for the coverage of the fiasco. Danny Sullivan just did a great job of ripping them a new one for this nonsense misdirection. But the issue actually goes much deeper. Yahoo may not be killing Delicious, but they have killed something else: consumer confidence in them. The entire time I was reading the back and forth of this fiasco, I had one thought on my mind: I need to get my pictures out of Flickr, pronto. No, Flickr wasn’t on the list of companies being “sunset”, but how do I know that in a year it won’t be? Hell, maybe even 6 months from now? I don’t. In fact, I’d say it’s 50/50 that something similar happens with that service. Sure, Delicious has been largely stagnant over the past few years (which, of course, is Yahoo’s fault), but it has long been one of the mainstays of the so-called “Web 2.0″ movement. In fact, the sale of Delicious to Yahoo was one of the first stories that TechCrunch broke back in 2005. There are a ton of people that have a ton of data in it. It’s still a valuable tool to those people. It has millions of users. Yahoo just gave them all the middle finger. Mathew Ingram argues that the moves makes sense from a business perspective. Maybe. But the key ingredient of Yahoo’s business is people using their services. If they’ve showing that they can just kill off such a big one on a whim, I’m just not sure how they can convince us that all of them aren’t at risk. Yahoo says that Delicious isn’t “a strategic fit” for the company anymore. How is Flickr? I know the CEO Carol Bartz has a hard time explaining what Yahoo is, but of the dozen answers she has given, one hasn’t been “photo-sharing service”. It’s true that plenty of other large companies kill off products all the time. Google, for example, “sunset” a number of services like Dodgeball and Jaiku in early 2009. But that was a different time. The entire U.S. economy was collapsing. Everyone was making cuts everywhere. And none of those services were the size of Delicious. Yahoo’s plan now is to try to find a buyer for Delicious. That’s great, but it might not be so easy. Even though they just likely drove down the price with this fiasco, they’re still going to want a pretty penny for the company. It has been a part of Yahoo for so long that there’s likely a lot of proprietary code behind it, and they’re not going to part with that for nothing. Even before all of this info got leaked, we had heard there was interest from other Bay Area companies taking Delicious off of Yahoo’s hands. The hold-up was and likely still will be the price. I’m sure they will be able to find a buyer, but it’s not going to be as easy as they’re making it seem. And again, that’s very troubling. What if it’s a death-by-default situation? And Flickr is a thousand times more troubling. That service is so large that the only ones who could likely buy them off of Yahoo are one of the big boys. That means Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc. And again, there’s likely a lot of code in there that Yahoo may not want companies that they still see as competitors in some ways buying. The whole situation is just sad. Yahoo has become a shadow of what it once was. Even with massive layoff after massive layoff, they still have tons of talented people working there. But those people can’t do anything about big picture product direction decisions coming from the top as Yahoo tries to morph into some kind of something that will make shareholders happy. And that’s the thing. Yahoo is all about the shareholders now. It’s all about the bottom-line. That’s all that matters. It’s not about the users. It’s not about building or maintaining great products. It’s about finding the ones that make the money and slicing the rest. People often express their growing concerns about putting data into Google for privacy reasons. But I now have a problem putting data into Yahoo out of the concern that it could just disappear one day. That’s really terrifying. [photo: flickr/ dev null ] CrunchBase Information Yahoo! Flickr delicious Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Wildfire Launches A 'Compete.com' For Twitter And Facebook Accounts | Top |
| For many years, the tech industry has gauged the success of websites by tracking usage stats like the number of unique visitors and page views the site receives each month. Wildfire , a service that helps companies run contests and social media campaigns via Twitter, Facebook, and email, is launching a new tool that looks to do the same for social media presences — in other words, it lets you visualize who has the most Twitter and Facebook followers, and how quickly they’ve grown over time. You can access the new monitor at http://monitor.wildfireapp.com . The tool is pretty straightforward: enter the Twitter or Facebook accounts that you want to compare, and the site will plot out the total number of follower/fans they have. If you don’t want to bother finding the appropriate links to each profile, you can just enter the name of the company, and the tool will associate it with the proper social media accounts automatically (enter ‘Wal-Mart’, and it will show you Wal-Mart’s Twitter and Facebook accounts). Media Monitor will add a little context to the data by showing the percentage change over recent time periods, and you can overlay multiple company profiles onto the same graph. It’s a neat tool, but Wildfire isn’t the first service to offer these kind of analytics. TwitterCounter lets you easily visualize a user’s growth over time, and AllFacebook’s Pages tool does something similar for Facebook fans. InsideFacebook also has a PageData tool for Facebook. Disclosure: We recently used Wildfire to run a sweepstakes for the Cr-48. CrunchBase Information Wildfire Campaign Builder Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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