Even with the purest of intentions, people have bias, which can rise from an infinite number of sources, be they financial, personal, emotional, career-oriented, or any other. The topic of bias and disclosure flares up often in the increasingly complicated world of blogging and journalism, and as many of us both participate and cover the world in which we work, new rules are being adapted, usually with some push back by those for whom the existing set of rules worked well. In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) tried to step in and provide guidelines for bloggers with conflicts, asking those who received compensation for their efforts to disclose it. But even if you assume they intend to eliminate bias, they're not even close to answering for all potential bias cases. Not even my gimmicky and fun set of disclosure icons, put together at the end of 2009, can correctly anticipate every situation.

With this weekend's flareup over TechCrunch founder (and AOL employee) Mike Arrington's CrunchFund making headlines again, more lines are being drawn in the sand about what is appropriate for a man of Mike's position to do. His employees have explained they operate independently of his activities. His employer says the rules are different for his organization. His critics have called him names and penned him as having crossed the line. But this topic isn't a new one. It's just got an intriguing name behind it, someone that many of us watch, who draws attention good and bad, depending on your view, thanks to his being visible and arguably, on top, in his field.

More than three years ago (In August 2008), I wrote that "If you look hard enough, conflicts of interest are everywhere." The first topic I brought up back then was if bloggers should cover companies they invest in, and at the time, I said "Investors in a company usually know it very well, especially if it's an early-stage situation, where they will know it better than the general public. It's no secret they'll likely be more positive on the company, but if they're fair and disclose the relationship, you may learn a great deal." In this post, I also said "disclosure is needed" if bloggers joined boards, took day-job positions with a company, or participated in starting or buying a company. It's always good, at least for me, to have the body of work to point to when issues like this come up, as they do regularly. At the end of 2008, again discussing bias, I said, regarding my own preferences, "Even though I like these products, these people, and their ideas, the idea is to continue to be trusted. What liking a product doesn't do is force me to make up things that they don't do, or gloss over clear issues."


It's not my place, as a mere tech blogger and Silicon Valley marketeer, to assess the appropriateness of Mike's new fund. I am not involved, had zero knowledge of it in advance, and don't believe I am impacted by its existence. The story is interesting, and that's it. But the tumult over the discussion is really all about detecting bias and trying to divine one's intent out of their writing - to see if their words can be less trusted due to their outside interests. And that's the crux. Being genuine, transparent and truthful, despite any perceived bias, will always win. Being honest and direct and overdisclosing to the point of amusement, is always better than having to disclose after the fact.


Maybe I should disclose to you that despite never having worked for Mike (we're still talking about Mike Arrington), and having minimal contact over the years, I have never had a bad experience with him. Every experience has been good, be it in person face to face, be it in conversations on the phone, by email, or even Twitter DMs and Facebook messages. The last time I saw Mike was at a swanky Los Altos gathering where we talked briefly. He shook my hand (not something he likes to do) and said it was good to see me. We even talked a bit about Seattle and how he's writing less at TechCrunch. Mike previously invited me to TechCrunch headquarters in Palo Alto (when they were located there) and even gave me the scoop (by a few days) that he had hired MG Siegler away from VentureBeat. You might even try really hard and say that I am biased in favor of TechCrunch because I've previously worked for a company that was covered by the site (when I was working at my6sense), that TechCrunch covered my joining Google, and maybe it's in my best interests to be nice to Mike and the TechCrunch family if I ever want products I am associated with in the future to be viewed nicely. But this points out how hard it is to really determine what's in the author's head. You can't tell me why it is that I wrote something when I did, and you can't know what prompted me to do it.

Enough about Mike. He's a great firestarter for topics though, right?

At the end of last week, there was a quick story on Mashable that listed a few tips on how you could score your next job using social media. It's a pretty typical story for the site - a list style post that has a small number of things you can do to improve your life using the Internet. In the post, the author referenced my joining Google by saying, "take a tip from Louis Gray, whose demonstrated love and dedication for Google+ got him hired as a product evangelist."


With all due respect to the author, whom I don't know, his fast summary was balderdash. I didn't ever say in my post that my love and dedication for Google+ was the reason I was offered a job with Google and he didn't ask. It should be noted I underwent the same hiring process as any other candidate looking to join Google. The same 10+ interviews you have read about, and the interview process started months ago - before Google+ existed. The way I found out Google+ launched was by way of a tweet from Matt Cutts. I didn't get any early look at the product, and didn't get tipped as to when it was launching. The process for my being hired into the social team at the company was well under way before Google+ launched, and I would like to think that reasons I was hired were more tied to my body of work and job history than any excitement about the project itself. (I also haven't cleared this post with Google PR or anyone at Google, and don't plan on making that a habit)

That leads to another level of bias to discuss. After Google approached me late this Spring about possibly joining the company, I was cautious in terms of what I would say about their products or planning. I was cautious not in the perspective of making sure not to say anything that would talk them out of hiring, but in fact, the reverse. I made sure to be just as fair as I always have been, calling out issues that made sense, and praising where it made sense, so that if I were hired or not hired, readers of the blogs would not see any change in my approach. For example, in the months after our discussions began, I said it would take several days to move my music library to Google music and continued to praise Spotify. I even said in mid-July, after more than a half dozen interviews, that I thought Google+ should leverage smart algorithms to personalize the content. I also railed against people pointing their own domains to Google+ instead of their own content, saying "I am hesitant to endorse forwarding your identity to a third party domain you do not control."

But where could I have disclosed "I am currently in the interviewing process at Google"? I couldn't, of course.

Similarly, in the past, I could not disclose if a company I was working with was seeking a venture capital round, an acquisition, a partnership or any number of things where the guarantee of non-disclosure, by agreement, trumped the request for disclosure here. What's more important than seeing if you need every single potential source of bias listed out on the page, as I often do, is if the author has established a record of being truthful, genuine and open to their biases. My posts here and elsewhere are biased, and the number of potential biases that impacts my choices of what I use and what I write about is legion.

Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was really on to something when one of the hallmark statuses available to Facebookers was that of "It's complicated." Life is complicated. It becomes more complicated based on who you know, what you do, who you interact with, what value they provide you, what they say to you and all who impact you and so on. I am confident that even though I am working hard to impact a great project at a visible company, my body of work stands for itself and I stand for something. Bias is complicated and the best way to classify bias is if you can find a direct link to an action that delivers another action which would not have happened without the first. You can try all day to divine the intent of the source, but you can't read their mind. Them being genuine first and always clears it all up.

Following HP's acquisition of Palm last year, David Temkin, the VP for the Developer Platform at the company, exited stage left to AOL, joining forces with Brad Garlinghouse, Tim Armstrong and the new management at the firm which is working to redevelop and revamp one of the best known Web brands which comes with the baggage of significant history, with more than its fair share of ups and downs. With the move, Temkin gained an incredible role, running all of mobile for the Internet giant, at a time when mobile content is growing faster than any other segment and users are more likely to add new behavior to their repertoire, unlike on desktops, where users are less likely to change their habits. On Thursday, Temkin updated members of the media on recent product launches and how the company approaches the important world of smartphones.

AOL is no slouch when it comes to the world of content and demanding users' attention - so much so that Temkin said "AOL is in the attention business," adding, "You gain attention by going to the users where they are."


Users are increasingly going to their mobile devices to consume content, which has led the company to create 30 or more applications for iPhone and Android, with simple presentations of content, focused on delivering a "delighting user experience". With just under a year's tenure at the company, Temkin started with reaching out to all the disparate brands at the company and working with them to take the content they were already producing and making a strong mobile experience. While the most popular app, by a long shot, is Engadget, others include Moviefone, which hit iPad less than a month ago, and Popeater. In fact, the Engadget app drives more page views than the Web site itself - excellent numbers.

With dozens of popular iPhone apps on the roster, AOL recently shipped an Android-only music application, called Play, which was quickly featured on the Android Market, scoring more than 300,000 downloads in just two weeks. As users are still finding which applications deserve their time, Temkin sees the mobile market as having serious greenfield opportunity, gaining new customers and pushing others to switch their preferences.


"On mobile, people are still establishing their habits," he said. "User behavior on the desktop is fixed and difficult to change. It's an uphill battle."

That AOL is dropping dozens of new applications and new brands on multiple platforms is a far cry from the environment Temkin joined in mid-2010, when even the main company site was optimized not for smart phones but for feature phones, without rich media capability.

"AOL.com on mobile, when I joined, was a slightly upgraded WAP site," he said. "Now it's buzzword compliant and we have more than doubled in the year the number of users we have coming in. It's a nice thing to improve the product and see the kind of results we have."


Still on the docket for release is the much-anticipated Editions magazine, coming for iPad in the vein of Flipboard and Zite, but driven by algorithms based on the users' interests and preferences - yes, much like my6sense and others have made their focus. As Temkin described, the application will not be an editorial publication, but driven by artificial intelligence, pulling in content as if there were an editor driving the magazine.

"Your cover will be unique to you, with the topic you are most interested in and what the publication thinks is most important," he said. "We are scanning thousands of sites. We track what you like to read based on what you click on and explicitly what you say you like by subject. Algorithms drive the layout."

If AOL is in the attention business, tracking your own attention to its properties seems like an obvious next step. As smart phones get more capable, and AOL pushes to have its content in front of as many eyes as possible, you should expect to hear the name David Temkin a lot, for he is running the strategy of the fastest growing piece of one of the biggest Web brands in the business.

As AIM head Jason Shellen quipped Thursday, AOL "has become a powerhouse for smart people, and it should become a not so quiet revolution soon. It's about bringing the brand up a level."

Disclosures: my6sense has similar functionality to that promised in Editions and other news readers with advanced personalization capability. I am VP of Marketing at my6sense. Additionally, HP is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am managing director of new media.

Montenegro, a small country tucked into Southeast Europe, bordered by Bosnia and Hezergovina, Serbia, Croatia and Abania, has just over 600,000 residents. Among its most valuable exports of late has been its attractive .me domain, the country code TLD behind fast-growing personal page service About.me, who was snapped up by AOL almost immediately after public unveiling, and now says they are nearing 1 million unique accounts - well beyond the population of Montenegro itself, after being open for about 4 1/2 months. Company founder Tony Conrad, also known for selling Sphere into AOL back in 2008, recounted the story behind getting the brand name at a Media Roundtable day at AOL West Coast headquarters yesterday in Palo Alto, and says adoption has been phenomenal.

About.me was initially referred to as "Pumpkinhead", but was never intended to go by that name even from the service's inception. Conrad said the plan all along was to acquire the about.me domain, and it took considerable cajoling and back and forth calls with Montenegro government representatives between 11 at night Pacific time and 4 am to push for the service's getting the attractive name. All told, he said there were thirteen phone calls, each one going higher up the food chain and having a larger audience. Eventually, he gained the domain name, telling the Montenegro officials that the exposure of the new TLD would be more enough payback for giving up the lucrative URL.

"If you call them, they will say it was the best thing they have ever done," Conrad gushed yesterday. "About.me was the perfect marriage with the product we were about to offer, and it was going to get them incredible exposure."


The idea behind About.me came from the far-flung URLs many of us are using to define ourselves, be it our blogs, our Twitter accounts, Facebook profiles, LinkedIn resumes, and more. Conrad wanted to offer something controlled by the individual that could aggregate content from disparate sites, present a clean visual appeal, and avoid the step of going to Google to "dumpster dive" and find the right person in a sea of names.

"The opportunity was to create a page that was truly about myself," he said, "something simple that you could put in your email signature that makes sense."

The appeal of a simple "About Me" page has struck a chord with initial users, who are reportedly adopting the service faster even than well-known sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare, something Conrad gave credit to Twitter for, as the service has been leveraged to increase virality and visibility of the service. Now, he sees many people using the platform in creative ways beyond a simple dynamic business card, including "tons of baby announcements", and job searches.

Wanting to avoid the common aggregator problem of enabling scads of far-flung third party services (see FriendFeed or others), About.me will be introducing an API in Q3 that lets external sites integrate with the platform directly - beyond those that were "obvious and strategic for us to do", Conrad said.


For those of us initially skeptical on About.me's mission in a world crammed full of start pages and abandoned aggregators, the approach seems to be working - letting people creatively describe themselves with simple onboarding. This has been a key focus for the company even after becoming part of AOL - Tony's second stint there, and one he swore up and down is more fun than the last.

"That regime (following the sale of Sphere) was a bummer," Conrad said. "Under the old regime, I would not have come today (to the media briefing.) I would have been sick. But when I left, Tim Armstrong asked me to be a special advisor and I stayed around the table in a very abstract way. "

Continuing his proximity to AOL, upon About.me's founding, the company was funded by AOL Ventures to the tune of $25,000. During a regular check-in call, Conrad says Armstrong said, 'I want to own more', which came as a surprise as the product was barely off the ground and was considered a project.

"To his credit, he understood the vision we were working towards," Conrad said. "He made a very generous offer that impacted my team in a positive way."

About.me is rapidly approaching a million unique accounts. You can find my About me page here: http://www.about.me/louisgray. Tony Conrad's is here: http://about.me/tonyconrad. The company is hoping to further kickstart registrations and use with a partnership with MOO cards, so if About.me represents you, the URL should look great on your business card.

One small and unwritten bit of subtext in July's rumors of a Foursquare and Brizzly engagement was knowledge of Thing Labs' Dolapo Falola moving to New York from the Bay Area. While Thing Labs ended up at AOL later in the year, not part of Foursquare, Dolapo eventually did. The former Googler, Thing Labber and AOLer is now part of the 50-plus strong contingent at Foursquare trying to make the world a geosocial place.

Dolapo (@dolapo) started his software engineering career at IBM before 4 years at Google and moving to Thing Labs in the summer of 2009, where reunited with Google Reader teammates Jason Shellen (@shellen), Chris Wetherell (@cw) and Ben Darnell (@bendarnell), the team created a new Web-based approach to real-time feeds from Twitter and Facebook, spawning the group chat platform, Picnics, now part of AOL's AIM property.

His addition to the Foursquare team pushes employees at the company beyond 50, according to the firm's team Twitter list. (http://twitter.com/#!/foursquare/team/members) The list also includes product manager Noah Weiss (@noah_weiss), another former Googler whose joining was mentioned by Business Insider in mid-January.

It's said often that where there is smoke, there is fire. In early July, I tried to read the smoke signals emanating from Brizzly co-founder Chris Wetherell and investor Mike Hirshland on Twitter about a myterious "buyout offer" and "legalese", incorrectly guessing the social media client was going to be joining up with Foursquare. It turns out that my hunch correctly had sniffed out fire, but completely whiffed on the suitor. Instead of a 2010-era nimble startup, Brizzly's acquirer is the 1990s-era AOL, who can now be confirmed is picking up Thing Labs (makers of Brizzly), including the company's well-respected small team, and all company assets, from the Brizzly Web and iPhone client, the Brizzly Guide, the URL shortener, and even its colorful mascot, Phineas T. Brizzly the bear.

The acquisition is said to be at $18 million guaranteed, with potential earnouts to near $30 million. The company's founders, Jason Shellen and Chris Wetherell will be running AOL Instant Messenger and the company's lifestream service - giving the pair high profile roles that could impact millions of users immediately.

It was this acquirer that set off the curious tweets in July, putting the team in an odd position of having to deny they were being sold to Foursquare. What was not said, however, was that no sale was taking place, period - because, indeed, those gears had started to turn at an Old Media company speed.


That Thing Labs would be the target of potential M&A activity is no surprise. Shellen and Wetherell are given a good amount of credit for their work at Google on Reader and Blogger, with Shellen's work dating prior to Google's acquisition of the Ev Williams-co-founded Pyra Labs back in 2003. The team is very sharp, and had created not just "yet another" Twitter client, but one that had deep ties into the social graph across multiple networks, and a lightly heralded, but very cool, collaboration system called Picnics.



Mike Tipped Us M&A Was On, But It Took Months to Bake

It's Picnics that has AOL ready to take Brizzly out for more than a mere lunch.

The combination of a top-notch team and intriguing technology saw Thing Labs enter into potential acquisition talks with multiple partners this summer, some who eventually found the product not to be a perfect fit with their portfolio, and still others, who were rejected by the company's team out of fear they would be part of a soulless "talent buy" who would take Brizzly off the map. Meanwhile, as these distractions emerged, the company retained the opportunity to initiate the raise of a Series B round of funding, following their $600k Series A round completed in late 2009. Other potential acquirers included Yahoo! and Google, both of which Thing Labs was said to have turned down.

Yet the somewhat unlikely partner of AOL, a media giant with a damaged brand, especially in the mind of Silicon Valley and startup entrepreneurs more specifically, has emerged as the victorious buyer, following due diligence not just from their team to see if Thing Labs would be a solid complement to their still-popular with millions of people Instant Messenger client, but also from the Thing Labs developers, who wanted to be sure of the quality of AOL's development team, especially as some of them had experienced less than satisfactory relationships with younger gung-ho teams at large Web services previously in their career.

As has been reported by AOL-watchers like Kara Swisher and Mike Arrington over the last couple years, the company is trying to gain a respectable presence in Silicon Valley, under the leadership of former Googler Tim Armstrong. But with company headquarters in Dulles, Virginia, and much of the leadership in New York, AOL is struggling to attract and retain top talent in the Bay Area. The prospect of being acquired by a Web 1.0 property like AOL initially tugged at Thing Labs' leadership, while recognizing the financial benefits for the company's 7 employees, who for the most part, excluding the cofounders, could be seeing a tax bracket upgrade after this transaction settles. While the deal is officially being reported as $18 million, the contract calls for significant earn-out clauses, which could drive the eventual price up to as much as $30 million, serving to provide Golden Handcuffs to the team's talent and locking them up to the company that once flooded the USPS with floppy disks promising free hours each month of dial-up service and a walled garden.

AOL is obviously on an acquisition spree, rivaling only Google in terms of buzz in the last few months. The Thing Labs acquisition follows news today that the company also picked up TechCrunch itself, bringing the tech blog titan into the content-focused Web pioneer. The company also purchased 5 min yesterday.

Interestingly, with the TechCrunch acquisition, AOL has Crunchbase, and with the Thing Labs acquisition, AOL also has the Brizzly Guide - a more real-time directory, edited by users. The two could be complimentary, separate or one could be retired. It's said the Brizzly Guide will be used for real-time home page news curation.

Additionally, the work with Foursquare turned out not to be completely empty after all. While not part of the M&A transaction, Brizzly announced integration with Foursquare overnight, letting you view checkins alongside updates on Twitter and Facebook in the service.

As a sidenote, this continues the unique career path of Thing Labs' Ben Darnell, who in the space of just a little over a year, has worked at Google Reader, then FriendFeed, then Facebook, then Thing Labs and now, AOL. But this time, he probably made a little bit of money. Ben has recently been known for his contributions and leadership to the Tornado Web server project. AOL might be seen as old tech, but it picked up some serious new media leadership here.

Official word of the deal should break soon.

textPlus, the popular application for iDevices and Android that lets you text or group text for free, launched version 2.5 of their app on Thursday with a major new enhancement that delivers a pinch of nostalgia, thanks to the debut of communities based on topics that are reminiscent of the Web gone by - harking back to early AOL and Compuserve forums when "A/S/L?" meant a lot more than DSL. The searchable communities database brings with it the potential to connect people of similar interests across the Web - to chat, via text, in real time.

Just like the AOL chatrooms of old, practically any sensical term searched already has results, initiated by textPlus users fanatical about any topic - be it to discuss television shows American Idol and Glee, to adore cute little puppies in the Dogs room, or the mainstays of public forums, sports, technology, and yes... porn (although I assume text porn is pretty tame).


textPlus has gained a significant following for its free alternative to carrier-based texting, and the option to carry on conversations with a group of friends through the app - something US telcos have not yet solved, even as international carriers have. The company's move to create topic-based discussions, no matter the source, helps transform the product to a portable community for any Apple or Android mobile device.


Since I first tiptoed into textPlus last year, the product has added several new features that provide serious polish. You can opt out of its add-supported model for a full 12 months by paying $2.99 (which I did), and you can even scan your local address book (at least on the iPad version) to find which of your friends are already using the app, making them very easy to send texts to. The iPad app is especially sharp, bringing text chats into both portrait and landscape modes in full screen.


If you find communities in textPlus that strike your fancy, click "become a member" and you will be following that community's updates. You can also leave any community by swiping left to right and choosing "Leave". The product's simplicity was welcome, and might even be too easy to join or start communities, as many rooms feature just the initial creator, while others, like one on "Dogs" was at its limit of 100 registrants. I would be intrigued by textPlus opening the option to more than 100 active users for hot topics, and seeing the conversation blossom.


You can find more about textPlus' new app and its free texting communities at http://www.textplus.com/ or on iTunes and the Android Marketplace. textPlus is a product of Gogii, a Kleiner Perkins-funded startup based in Southern California.

On Tuesday, Twitter added computer security veteran Bob Lord to the company's expanding employee roster as the manager of network and infrastructure security, bringing with him 20 years of experience focused on electronic security systems at large companies, most recently including Red Hat, AOL and Netscape. Highlights in Lord's background include his building security and encryption features into the Netscape browser, iPlanet servers (an alliance with Sun and Netscape) and the AOL Communicator product, which also included Mail, Address Book, Instant Messenger and Calendar. Since leaving AOL, Bob has worked with a team of cryptography experts to add security features to many projects including FireFox, Mozilla Thunderbird and Red Hat Linux.

Bob's LinkedIn profile shows praise from colleagues who gave him credit for ensuring successful releases of complex application suites at AOL, as well as his being recognized as a "visionary" with energy and intensity, while at RedHat. Bob is also a patent-holder for his development of temporary digital certificate proxies that can be used for a specific amount of time.


As Twitter's Web site and activity become more critical in the way the planet is communicating, so to will its need increase for security to protect that which is private to remain private, and enable accounts to be secured. It's also not unexpected that the company's core offerings will get increasingly complex - maybe not to the level of AOL Communicator, but expanding nonetheless.

We should be seeing what Bob will be bringing to the Twitter team over the next few years, or just keep tabs on his updates at @boblord.

See Also: Twitter Is Worth A Lot More Than $250 Million

In the Web 2.0 space, it would be extremely difficult to find a more-successful, faster-growing service than Twitter, who has carved out a significant niche for itself in the microupdates space, as people from around the world tell you what they're doing, right now, even if you didn't ask. The service has an estimated 6 million active users, and recently surpassed the 1 billion "Tweet" mark, if you count all updates. But the company hasn't yet made a buck in traditional revenues. (Although I can't claim to be privy to their books, and they just might have recognized something somewhere) Word comes this weekend, via TechCrunch and others, that Twitter is embarking on a new funding round that could see the company valued at $250 million. And while I already made the case that Twitter will get its funding, and could end up being worth a lot more than that number in short order, it is pretty easy to also poke holes in that analysis.

Quite simply, now is a very difficult time to attain a high valuation. Venture funding is dropping dramatically, and positive exits for companies are rare. Practically nobody is talking about going public, so to make money, you would have to do it the old fashioned way, through profits. And Twitter has grown its user base rapidly, but has done so on the backs of users who are used to getting something for nothing. We've already seen users revolt when Magpie launched with the possibility of inserting ads in one's tweets, and you could expect to see the user base shudder when being asked to shoulder any of the revenue themselves - so you can practically forget about monthly fees. Given that scenario, site ads and ads inserted in third party applications, like TweetDeck, would have to be one option, but an unattractive one, as the ad market itself is tailing downward.

Additionally, what Twitter does is incredibly basic. It's sole functionality is one that it is easily replicated. You can provide status updates on Facebook, on GMail, on FriendFeed, and the whole process rolls back to AOL instant Messenger, when you would set an "Away" status to say you were "At Lunch" or "In a Meeting". So that's not hard.

A recent post by Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed, called Communicating with Code, showcased a prototype offering of FriendFeed that borrowed heavily from the look and feel of Twitter. Given FriendFeed updates include those from Twitter, and then build on with additional services, it can be considered a superset, while Twitter is simply one service of many. So the barrier to entry to compete with Twitter is not that hard, leaving the company's major assets as the community and its developers.

But communities are incredibly fickle. None of Twitter's six million users were using the service five years ago, and maybe, five years from now, they will be doing something else. If people use Twitter for conversation, they can replace that with e-mail, with IM, with FriendFeed, Facebook or other social destinations. I've talked about the five stages of being an early adopter before. One of the final stages is when you grow tired of an environment, and leave, begging your followers to come along. It happens with news groups. It happens with e-mail lists, and it just might happen with social networking tools, including Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter and others.

Today, Twitter is among the hottest, fastest-growing brands out there. But no matter how you multiply its current revenue to try and guess at a market capitalization, the answer is still zero. At a time when real brick and mortar businesses are seeing their own valuations decimated, how can a virtual company with a free user base and a low barrier to competition expect to be valued so richly? Whoever does invest should exercise extreme caution.

Guest Post By Adam Singer of The Future Buzz (FriendFeed/Twitter)


image credit: pshab
I've written previously that Facebook and MySpace are the modern AOL and Prodigy. I stick by that. The great walled gardens of the web live on more than a decade later, resurrected by Web 2.0, but just as closed off, spammy and unexciting as before.

I have been thinking about how little time I spend on Facebook and why the open Web and other social sites are far more interesting. Here are some observations:

There is no interesting content in Facebook itself

People who create great content don't do so within Facebook - they know better than to contribute their hard work to an area they don't control. The best content creators do so on the open web because they want to retain the value of their efforts. If you are a content creator (or a marketer) be careful with the amount of time you spend contributing content to a closed network.

I get it, you need to fish where the fish are - but use Facebook to draw people to a place you control, not one where you have to play by the rules of another network - that is dangerous. They could change the rules at any time, or there could be a mass exodus of users from the network as we have seen time and time again in the social areas of the Web, rendering all your hard work worthless. Use Facebook as a part of your outpost strategy, but draw visitors back to a unique spot that is yours.

Content sharing on Facebook is far behind the curve

I will see something compelling on Reddit/Digg, message boards/forums, blogs, StumbleUpon and other areas of the open web, and then days or even weeks later it ends up on Facebook. Facebook is fine at sharing friend-centric content like pictures of your last social gathering with a group, but it's simply not a place for discovering news, interesting blogs, or other valuable content. The content eventually gets into Facebook via links but by the time this happens, it is old news. In fact, just use FriendFeed and easily get everything in one place, customized exactly how you want it.

Facebook wants to keep you on Facebook

Their network is built to keep you on their site, which is something that never sat right with me about walled gardens. Google's OpenSocial platform and now Friend Connect are much nicer and I personally like their strategy more - integrating social elements with web properties that already exist and with tools that have real value. They seem more willing to let go and allow users to drive the network, not vice versa, a strategy I agree with.

No option to opt out of third party application invites

It is either all or nothing. You can use apps, but you don't get a choice to opt out of requests from others to add applications. Of course not, because Facebook wants to inspire developers to spend time developing apps purely for their system. It leads to me having to click "ignore all" when the end of every week looks like this:

Why would I want to add any of these apps? I have used Facebook since I was in college and it was a student-only network, and have watched it slowly degrade into a place equally as spam-filled as MySpace. Just because the layout is cleaner doesn't mean it isn't spam.

Facebook advertising is broken - both for advertisers and users

Many have reported that Facebook advertising results have been lukewarm at best. The ads they serve me are pretty terrible as well. I'll give you a quick example: I am single, so Facebook tries to serve me ads for dating sites. I have no interest in using online dating services, thus the ads are irrelevant to me. Facebook has the option of giving feedback on ads, so each time a dating ad is served, I actually take the time to give them feedback that the ad is irrelevant to me and vote it as such.

Concurrently, they serve me ads about marketing and music, things that are of interest to me and actually a good fit. So not only do I click the relevant ads, I go a step further and give them feedback that these are good ads, please serve me more of them. Yet I am continually served dating ads. I have a hard time taking them seriously as a marketer when they clearly have a system in place to improve the user experience but don't bother to use it.

Here are the ads Facebook is serving me (I took a quick screengrab):

Facebook gives you the option to click the "thumbs down" where you can let them know feedback:


I have been letting them know these ads aren't relevant to me for several months and they are still serving them. But why even bother giving feedback if no one is listening? Their system just doesn't learn.

You don't hear career success stories from time spent on Facebook...

Yet we hear great stories about people building their reputations or scoring jobs through LinkedIn or a blog all the time. All we hear about Facebook (and MySpace) is people losing their jobs or not receiving jobs due to inappropriate photos/content on the profiles.

For well-connected individuals, the "people you may know" function is useless

I can't remember the last time I actually knew someone in the "people you may know" section of Facebook. Yet they show these right on the homepage daily to all their users. As an example, I was served this today:

Facebook is offering these people as connections to me merely because we both went to UF (University of Florida)? That is hardly what I would call a connection, the number of people who went to UF is staggering, and just because we both went to UF doesn't make someone relevant to me. If that is the best they can do, they shouldn't even offer this feature at all. How about instead of people I may know, what about people with similar interests? That would actually be useful.

For example, I list some relatively obscure electronic music artists in my profile under musical preferences. If they connected me with others that have similar taste in music, that would actually be interesting. Also connecting me with other public relations or marketing professionals would be interesting too.

The way they are currently trying to guide my hand in building a network isn't very useful. It just seems like they have so much meta data on all of us but aren't using it in ways that actually would build value and draw us deeper into the network.

Difficult, perhaps impossible to gain critical mass with anything directed outside the Facebook platform

Again, this is by design - Facebook seeks to keep its users on their network as long as possible so they may gain more ad impressions. Applications, pages and groups within Facebook can easily spread within the network, but I haven't seen many ways to easily direct Facebook traffic outside of Facebook. MySpace too. This is all by design of course and why I mentally file Facebook in the "closed off" section of the web. I know Facebook just launched their connect tool, but I'd be interested in seeing what the actual results of that are for site owners. I'm not talking about sites like TechCrunch that already have critical mass, I'd be interested to hear the results from sites in the long tail.

The conversations on FriendFeed, on blogs, on Reddit, Digg, Twitter, etc. are far more interesting

The conversations on Facebook are not even close to the level of the open web, or even other social sites. Do you notice the same thing? Perhaps it is the poking, the cheesy applications, or the general nature that people carry on within the network, but I see far more compelling conversations outside the walled gardens. Perhaps it is because people with deep interests seek out specific networks or build their own, and view the general networks as less specific and relevant to them.

Wrapping up...

Facebook is actually useful for things like staying updated on what you're friends from years past are doing, but this doesn't provide any real value other than fleeting entertainment. The people I am interested in staying connected with I am already connected to in more useful ways.

My use of the internet is not to develop fleeting social relationships for entertainment, but to develop more valuable relationships with people to work and collaborate with on projects and ideas we're passionate about.

As it stands right now, Facebook just isn't all that interesting a place to spend time if you are seeking compelling content or looking to build a subscriber base, it is merely an outpost. Your largest opportunity is to build an audience for your brand or yourself in a place that you control. Remember, these monolithic social networks can fall out of favor quite quickly and hemorrhage audiences.

Devoting too much effort to any one platform, especially a social network like Facebook, is far riskier than working on a place you control where you can build multiple traffic streams to. This way if one stops producing you'll still have other options.

It's not that I dislike Facebook, it is just I have found the site to offer a better user experience in years past - and that is the opposite of what I would expect for one of the leaders in social networking. The experience on Facebook should be getting better, not worse. I know from conversations with colleagues I am not the only one who feels this way - hopefully they are listening and will work to improve things in the future.

Read more by Adam Singer at The Future Buzz

It's really getting to the point where I believe my iPhone can do anything. You've already heard me say I sleep next to it, and that it should practically run unopposed in the smartphone market. But what you don't understand is that it is rapidly finding new roles and new ways to get intertwined with my life. The newest role is helping to put the twins to sleep, thanks to the AOL Radio application, and that app's Lullabies radio station - which shockingly extends beyond the Brahms Lullaby, offering music even I found fun to hear, from new mixes of U2's "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" to a cover of Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters."

It's true I already have gigabytes and gigabytes of my own music on my iPhone. But, truth be told, my music is usually for getting energetic, with beats from Underworld and Paul Van Dyk or DJ Tiesto, instead of calming music aimed to lull people to rest. That's where AOL Radio steps in.


AOL Radio Features a Lullabies Channel
The application features many genres, from Blues and Country to Dance/Electronic and Metal. But if you choose the Kids genre, there are six channels, including one called "Lullabies", featuring "Soothing sounds for your baby and you." Trust me, I was quite skeptical of this channel, expecting to mock it - but the channel manages to deliver songs that are not only calming to both Matthew and Sarah, but also good enough to keep us entertained.


From Mozart... to Metallica Covers!
Tonight, following one Beach Boys cover and Adagio from Mozart, I heard the familiar strains of "Nothing Else Matters" stream from the iPhone, reminding me of unsuccessful junior high school crushes and long-ago settled debates over who was the best hard rock band... Metallica or Whitesnake. And guess what? The cover song was good enough I would have played it again, if given the option. (Listen to it here.)

AOL Radio does a lot more than play lullabies. It's actually also a good application for playing local music and other songs from just about any type of music you like. And it's free on iTunes. Find it here.

Google is the best-known Web company that gives its logo a frequent revamp for holidays and other occasions, Halloween being no exception. But the search engine giant is far from alone in their creativity. Last year, I highlighted YouTube, Technorati, Yahoo! and FriendFeed as companies who went the extra mile to add pumpkins and other Halloween gear to their logo, and in 2008, many are back at the drawing board.


This Year's Entrants to the Halloween Logo Ball
As of midnight Pacific time on Halloween, Google has once again carved out a jack-o-lantern, replacing its two O's with the pumpkin and a seed scoop. The L in google? A candle dripping with wax.

In an attempt to seem similarly hip, AOL turned their O into a pumpkin and their logo is infested with bats. Yahoo! is displaying a Flash-based Halloween scene with pumpkins aplenty. Ask.com, an also-ran in the search rankings, tries to win out by making their entire page Halloween friendly, showing trick-or-treaters on a Fall day.

FriendFeed is back at it, with more attention to detail, as a youth in ghost costume springs up as the "n", arms aloft as one shoelace dangles untied. The two "e"s are jack-o-lantern ies, with toothpicks keeping the letter intact. Meanwhile, their real-time search engine has its unfair share of cobwebs.

Zuula brings up the rear of the alphabet, but doesn't lag in design with its own silhouetted pumpkin and Halloween scene.

Unlike last year, YouTube and Technorati are not yet in the Halloween spirit, nor are other brands, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or the long-forgotten portals of Excite and Lycos, which deserve their own cobwebs, if you ask me. Also not participating - Digg, Reddit and SocialMedian.

Added via the comments:


PopURLs: http://popurls.com/

Find any good Halloween logos this year? Let me know in the comments. And have a Happy Halloween!

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

A lot of discussion is going on around the blogosphere right now about whether Twitter may not be around much longer, because they have not yet implemented a business plan and have no immediate plan for enabling access to the "firehose" of data. It's a valid concern - yet at the same time, it's beginning to go "mainstream", with the adoption of sites like CNN.com and by pop figures like Britney Spears, people and businesses are really beginning to rely on this service. Will it have been in vain?

I asked on Twitter, "How many of you use Twitter as your sole update source? (e.g. you don't update Facebook with it, you're not on FriendFeed)". Surprisingly, of the responses I received, not one of them used Twitter as their sole update service. Here are the responses I received:

@bethevans: Not me. On FriendFeed.

@Bwoolley: Primarily Twitter, some Friendfeed

@shylie: I only update through twitter. I have it linked to Facebook and I have Pownce, FriendFeed, etc. accts but I rarely use them.

@jojeda: I use all, but most with effort and reluctance; only Twitter feels easy and fun.

@kenburbary: On FB, on FF, but use Twitter to update them for me. Twitter is the dashboard

@AgentJon: I use twitter to update my facebook, that is all...also when i send a twitpic i also send to facebook as well...

@erikmagraken: I use Twitter along with LinkedIn

@tatango: I have facebook also

@mclaughj: I'm on FriendFeed but the only thing I update is Twitter, not sure how that fits in...

As you can see, every single person responding was using Twitter as a gateway into some other service that they use. Some were using it to update their Facebook. Others FriendFeed. Others use Twitter, but at the same time they use a service such as LinkedIn, which has its own status feed. Not a single person was using Twitter as their sole source for networking and updating friends. No one seems to be completely reliant on Twitter, but they all seem to think they are.

Back in the late 1990's, when I was working tech support for my Uncle's Freeservers.com, at the time a fledgling startup in the back room of an old skating rink trying to compete with the likes of Geocities, it seemed that the topic of portals would come up regularly. Back in the day, before the "first bust", everyone predicted the future would be full of "portals", where people would come to one or two sites to get all the information they needed. Everyone wanted to be that site, and advertising was going to power it all. Unfortunately many of those portals did not succeed, and we saw sites like AOL.com and Netscape.com quickly fail as users wanted content from the source, through means such as search and RSS.

What this study on Twitter has made evident to me is that, whether that vision of portals ever really came true or not, Twitter itself has become one of those portals in regards to community. While each individual has their own community on Twitter, it would appear, were there a way to organize that community into groups, each individual on Twitter's network is nothing but a set of fragmented communities from other sites. Twitter has built a portal around the combined communities. No other community considered "mainstream" out there is so fragmented such as this.

It's an interesting concept, but as technology evolves around this concept will better ways of managing those communities come about? I'm worried that Twitter is in a fragile state that, while it disguises the whole community as its own, seems to really have no unified community in reality that can truly say they only care about Twitter. Having each user on Twitter belong to a subset of multiple other communities seems like a fragile state to be in.

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Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.