Who will be the universal sign-in?
Now Facebook is intensifying its efforts to expand its empire beyond its Web site; the company wants to turn scores of sites across the Internet into satellites where users will be able to interact with their Facebook friends.
"For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube."
Tech Crunch interviews Marc Andreessen, who more or less brought the web to the masses when he started Netscape, the first serious web browser (more recently he’s been some of the money and brains behind Ning):
[Andreesen] believes that all the talk once again from big media companies about erecting paywalls or somehow charging for news, articles and video online is shortsighted at best. He comes back to the simple fact that the open Web is where the users are. Talking about paywalls and paid apps is like saying, “We know where the market is and we are not going to go there.” Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount,” Andreessen acknowledges, “but shift happens.” You’d have to be crazy to burn the boats. Crazy like Cortes.
Excerpt: “This means significant changes are happening across the Facebook ecosystem that marketers and brands need to be aware of and account for in their products and strategies.”
Many of us have noticed that Twitter has been replacing RSS in our lives. We’re ignoring the site feeds that we used to read with Google Reader and signing up to them via Twitter. Many of the top RSS feeds are channeled through Feedburner, which Google bought a few years ago. Today’s news that Twitter has hired up Feedburner’s founder means they’re looking seriously at the Twitter-as-Feed phenomenon too.
Hitler’s not happy about FriendFeed!
A great service that will geocode addres databases in tab-separated format. See also: USC’s Geocoding resources and their Batch Geocoding service.
By Michael Nielsen:
A good example is the popular technology blog TechCrunch, by most measures one of the top 100 blogs in the world. Started by Michael Arrington in 2005, TechCrunch has rapidly grown, and now employs a large staff. Part of the reason it’s grown is because TechCrunch’s reporting is some of the best in the technology industry, comparable to, say, the technology reporting in the New York Times. Yet whereas the New York Times is wilting financially, TechCrunch is thriving, because TechCrunch’s operating costs are far lower, per word, than the New York Times… Unfortunately for the newspapers, there’s little they can do to make themselves cheaper to run…Here’s the kicker. TechCrunch isn’t being any smarter than the newspapers.
Via Tim O’Reilly.
From NYTimes: “Alongside the explosive growth of online video over the last six years, time spent on social networks surpassed that for e-mail for the first time in February, signaling a paradigm shift in consumer engagement with the Internet.”
See also: my recent articles: “Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites” and “Nonprofits and Social Media.”
"Having someone in a video that purports to celebrate our geek culture say that they don’t play D&D, like playing an RPG is something to be ashamed of, is profoundly offensive to me, because I play D&D. In fact, it’s the chief reason I am a geek. D&D isn’t anything to be ashamed of, it’s awesome. I don’t recall seeing that in the script I was given, and if I had, I never would have agreed to be part of this project. I loved the idea of creating a video that celebrates our culture and shows that we’re proud to be in it. That’s what I thought this would be, but I feel like we ended up with some kind of self-promoting internet marketing thing that plays right into established stereotypes, and hopes that The Cool Kids will let us hang out with them."
It’s not exactly a silent spring, but a change made to Twitter’s settings this afternoon has already greatly reduced the tweets its users are witness to. In what the company called a small settings update, users no longer see public replies sent by friends to people they themselves are not following. (Fragmented conversations, they are called.) This isn’t a small change at all; it’s big, and it’s bad. The new setting eliminates serendipitous social discovery.
RT @avinashkaushik: Straight fm the Inventor: Why text messages are limited to 160 characters: http://tr.im/kuVB
