The Social

It's the ultimate summer Friday news story: CNN Webcasting a press conference hosted by the men who claim they nabbed a dead body of the legendary creature known as Bigfoot.

Bigfoot hunter Tom Biscardi held the press conference in Palo Alto, Calif., in conjunction with Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, the two men from Georgia who claim that they found the corpse while hiking. Biscardi wouldn't actually show the body, saying that he had invited Fox News reporter Megan Kelly to show it on-air and that a number of scientists would be performing an autopsy on Monday.

"Starting Monday I should have assembled some fine scientists that will do the autopsy to find the origin and death of this creature, and at that point in time we will make it known and hopefully we'll get somebody to come in and film it," Biscardi said to listeners, "to show it to the world as it's being done. I want to get to the bottom of it."

That didn't do too much to appease the skeptical audience of the press conference, who were on the verge of heckling.

On the Web it was equally chaotic. Twitter users went nuts, with Twitter Search (formerly Summize) bringing up dozens of posts per minute from users who were watching the press conference online or expressing their opinions within the site's 140-character limit. Third-party analytics site Twitscoop showed a barrage of Twitters that included the word "Bigfoot," and determined the word to be the hottest term on the microblogging site at the time.

People have been Googling it, too. The search query "Bigfoot press conference" hit the top three on Google Trends.

"R.I.P. Harry. The Hendersons will miss you," one Twitter user said jokingly in reference to the '80s comedy Harry and the Hendersons, about a family that adopts a Bigfoot. Others were more skeptical, given the dubious nature of the photos. "That Bigfoot in the box looks so totally fakey, like a bad Halloween costume," another Twitter user said.

But most of the Twitter observers tuned into the press conference seemed to take the whole thing as entertainment. "I'm actually fearful to enter these Bigfoot infested woods in Georgia!" one exclaimed. "He's a Bigfoot dressed up as a Bigfoot, playing another Bigfoot," one wrote in a nod to a line spoken by Robert Downey Jr. in the just-released satire flick Tropic Thunder.

Most Twitterers didn't seem to believe the contents of the conference, probably because there were enough gray areas in the press conference to paint the walls of my office a nice foggy hue. Biscardi denied that he'd participated in a money-scheming Bigfoot hoax in 2005, saying that he'd been duped by a deranged woman who claimed she had two "Bigfeet" in captivity; he claimed he refunded those who'd charged to see a Webcast of the creatures when he realized it was fake. And Whitton shrugged off a series of goofy YouTube videos, most of them now pulled from the video-sharing site, in which he and Dyer reportedly claimed the Bigfoot was a fake and featured Whitton's brother dressed up as a scientist analyzing it.

"We just decided to have a little fun with it," Whitton said. When asked why he didn't call authorities when they claimed to have found the body in early June, he answered, "I didn't see any need to at the time. It seemed like it would create a frenzy."

"I want to protect the species," Whitton continued. "Everyone would be up there hunting for Bigfoot and disturbing the habitat."

Plus, the Associated Press reported that Whitton and Dyer's story had changed, and in the press conference Whitton claimed that he and Dyer hadn't actually been veteran Bigfoot hunters as reported earlier. When they found the creature, they considered the idea of doing guided tours of Bigfoot country, but that was as far as they said they went.

"I didn't believe in Bigfoot at the time," Whitton said.

And if Twitter is to be believed, the Internet still doesn't.

Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. subsidiary that owns social sites MySpace and Photobucket, has signed on as the latest member of the Family Online Safety Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to "identifying and promoting best practice, tools and methods in the field of online safety, that also respect free expression."

As the first social network to become a nationwide teen craze, MySpace became a frequent target for safety advocates--including state lawmakers, who ended up working with the social network to create a safety plan for kids and teens online.

Other prominent members of FOSI include AOL, AT&T, Cisco, Comcast, Google, Loopt, Microsoft, Ning, Verizon, and a number of international telecommunications carriers.

"FOSI has been a dedicated leader in promoting online safety and we look forward to contributing to the work they do," Fox Interactive Media Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a statement Friday. "Internet safety is a key priority for us as we strive to keep all teens safer online. This new membership will further strengthen our efforts and will also allow us to share our expertise with other members."

FOSI holds an annual conference about online safety: this year's will be on December 11 in Washington, D.C.

AOL's People Networks division, formed when the company acquired Bebo, has picked up a new friend: Socialthing, a Boulder, Colo.-based start-up that aggregates social feeds from sites like Digg, Twitter, and Flickr.

The acquisition has not yet been completed, but is close to it.

No financial details have yet been released regarding the acquisition of Socialthing, which falls into the same niche as FriendFeed and is still in private beta. The company is a new one; it emerged out of Boulder's TechStars incubator and had its official launch party at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March--where the company instantly gained word-of-mouth buzz when the soiree was still raging past 3 a.m. The buy was first reported early this month by TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld, who speculated that it was "likely a small purchase."

The People Networks division at AOL is headed by Joanna Shields, who was CEO of Bebo when it was acquired. Also encompassed in the group are AOL's two instant-messaging services, AIM and ICQ, and acquisitions Goowy and Yedda.

Getting bought was probably a good move for Socialthing. In recent months, Facebook has started to institute feed activity from other sites in its members' news feeds, creating a potential threat to standalone aggregator services.

Benjamin Ling, the former Googler who was hired by Facebook last year and sparked a barrage of blog speculation about Google employees moving on to the next cool company, may be going back to Mountain View. Earlier this week, Facebook confirmed that he was indeed leaving the company.

Valleywag reported on Thursday that Ling had been spotted at the Googleplex, and the Gossip Girl-ish nature of that post was backed up by a report from Kara Swisher that she'd heard he'd be returning to Google to work on YouTube. More specifically, he was re-hired to help monetize the notoriously tough-to-produce-cash video site.

In his previous stint at Google, Ling had been instrumental in developing the Google Checkout payment service. He was hired at Facebook last October to market its developer platform, and confirmed in June that there was a payment system under way at the social network as well. That has yet to launch, leading some to speculate that it's been shelved or is behind schedule.

One of the earlier Google employees to jump ship to Facebook, Ling was later joined by execs Sheryl Sandberg, now serving as Facebook's chief operating officer, and Elliot Schrage, now the company's vice president of global communications and public policy.

Media6Degrees, a firm that provides data on social-network activity to marketers and advertisers, announced Thursday that it has raised $9 million in venture funding in a Series A round led by U.S. Venture Partners.

The New York-headquartered company had already received seed funding from Contour Venture Partners, Coriolis Ventures, and a number of angel investors.

According to its Web site, Media6Degrees uses "patent pending algorithms and methods (to) connect a brand's existing customers with user segments composed entirely of consumers who are interwoven via the social graph." The company is helmed by Joe Doran, former general manager of Microsoft's Ad Center.

"Media6Degrees is revolutionary," Tim Connors, general partner at U.S. Venture Partners, said of the investment. He'll be joining the company's board along with fellow venture partner Ted Maidenberg. "It is the first company we have seen to tap the potential of social data for advertisers."

Revolutionary or not, it isn't the only player in its field: a few other social-media analytics companies have emerged in the past year or so, all promising to make some sense of the messy blog-and-Twitter show.

A class action lawsuit filed earlier this week targets Facebook and eight of the participants in Beacon, its ill-fated advertising product that shared information about third-party site activity with the social network. The set of 20 plaintiffs, mostly residents of Texas, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday. Named as defendants are Facebook, as well as current or former Beacon participants Blockbuster, Fandango (owned by Comcast), Overstock.com, STA Travel, Zappos, Hotwire (owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp), and GameFly.

A Facebook representative told CNET News on Thursday that the company had not yet actually been served with the lawsuit, and that its legal team consequently did not have a formal statement at the time. STA Travel, Gamefly, and Overstock all declined to comment; none of the other defendants could be immediately reached.

"Until we're served, we're not being sued, so we don't have any comment," Overstock general counsel Mark Griffin told CNET News.

Beacon gained almost immediate notoriety when Facebook unveiled it as part of its Facebook Ads announcement last fall. Privacy advocates, most notably liberal activist group MoveOn.org, lambasted the program for not allowing users to disable it easily. Facebook has since modified the program and the controversy has wound down. But in the lawsuit, the plaintiffs point to the window of time before Facebook instituted the new controls--between November 7 and December 5 of last year--and claims that the social network still has access to a large amount of user data that was gathered in that period.

"If the user was not a member (of Facebook), Facebook still obtained the notification from the Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliate," the filing for Lane et al v. Facebook, Inc. read. "Information regarding user activities was sent in real time to a third party Web site--one which was not open or active in the user's browser, and one which, in many cases, the user may never even have visited or heard of."

There's one odd law that may make the plaintiffs' case stronger: the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988. The law was passed amid the fracas surrounding Robert Bork's controversial nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, when a journalist obtained Bork's movie rental record from a local video store and published it.

That's why there's already been a suit involving Beacon that specifically targeted Blockbuster for participating in such a program: a Texas woman filed suit against Blockbuster in April, claiming that the VPPA bars it from Beacon. Facebook was not named as a defendant in that suit, and though the plaintiff sought class action status for her case, she does not appear to have any involvement in this week's suit.

The defendants named in the suit don't encompass all of Facebook's original Beacon partners, but several of them could tie into VPPA protections: GameFly rents video games, Fandango sells movie tickets, Hotwire and STA deal with travel bookings, and Zappos and Overstock are both online retailers with a large scope (Overstock sells DVDs, for example). The suit also names the California Computer Crime Law and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act as grounds for the suit.

One of the plaintiffs, Sean Lane of Waltham, Mass., was immortalized in a Washington Post story about Beacon: He's the guy who bought his wife a diamond ring on Overstock.com, only to have her spot the purchase in a Facebook news feed, spoiling the surprise.

Guess he's still irritated.

A couple of hunters in northern Georgia (the state, not the country) claim to have found a carcass of the legendary creature known as Bigfoot (or Sasquatch, if you prefer).

The two hunters teamed up with a fellow named Tom Biscardi, head of a group called Searching for Bigfoot; they plan to hold a press conference on Friday in Palo Alto, Calif., to show off DNA evidence and photos--but not the body itself. That's apparently being kept under wraps. (Yeah, right.)

He's reeeeeeeeeeeeal! (Or is he?)

(Credit: Amblin Entertainment)

Biscardi's Web site, searchingforbigfoot.com, proceeded to crash under bandwidth pressures.

According to a press release, the creature:

• Stands 7-feet-7-inches tall.
• Weighs more than 500 pounds.
• Looks part human and part ape-like.
• Is male.
• Has reddish hair and blackish-gray eyes.
• Has two arms and two legs, and five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot.
• Has flat feet that are similar to human feet.
• Has a footprint that is 16.75 inches long and 5.75 inches wide at the heel.
• Has hands that are 11.75 inches long from the palm to the tip of the middle finger and are 6.25 inches wide.
• Walks upright. (Several of them apparently were seen on the day the body was found.)
• Has teeth that are more human-like than ape-like.
• Has been undergoing DNA testing.

This summer has filled quite the appetite for strange creatures in the news, fueled by photos of the "Montauk Monster," a strange carcass that washed ashore in eastern Long Island, New York. That creature, which earned plenty of headlines on Gawker and other New York-centric blogs, has been shakily confirmed as a viral marketing stunt. Earlier this week, a Texas man claimed to have videotaped a legendary creature called the Chupacabra, but the video really just looks like a weird dog.

The two amateur Bigfoot hunters who claim to have found the body in Georgia, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, are a cop and a former corrections officer, respectively. Biscardi, according to LiveScience, has been responsible for at least one Bigfoot hoax before, leading many to take this with an even bigger grain of salt than they normally would.

But here's the real kicker: Every geek and X-phile knows Bigfoot prefers the thick forests of the Pacific Northwest. What the heck was this one doing in Georgia? Searching for decent barbecue?

ServiceNation, a relatively new nonprofit that hopes to engage more Americans in volunteer and service work, has earned the seal of approval from Facebook.

The social network will provide the organization with advertising deals, technical help, and support for ServiceNation campaigns on Facebook. In return, ServiceNation has selected Facebook as a primary tool for online organization and communication.

The nonprofit was kick-started earlier this year by four existing organizations: City Year, Be the Change, Civic Enterprises, and Points Of Light. Its inaugural "summit" is set for September 11 and 12 in New York with a keynote by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"Facebook is already a place where people are acting on their interests and ideals, connecting with each other, and sharing information that can lead to meaningful change," Elliot Schrage, Facebook's vice president of global communications and public policy, said in a joint release. "Through this partnership with ServiceNation, we can be part of an historic effort to inspire Americans to act together to get more directly involved in and connected to their real-life communities."

Given Facebook's global reach, influential status among young people, and reputation as an effective tool for group communication and organization--as well as founder Mark Zuckerberg's more-than-occasional comparisons with a young Bill Gates--the company has been increasingly asked about philanthropy and the general concept of "doing good." In both speeches and private conversations, the company's executives frequently talk about changing the world.

But Zuckerberg said at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March that the company was not yet mature enough to undertake its own philanthropic projects. That would take up financial resources that the young company simply doesn't have yet.

"I think at this point, because we're not incredibly profitable, we're not at that stage of the company--hopefully we get there--that's not really something that we can do a lot of," the CEO, then just 23 years old, told CNET News at the time. "But I'd like to think that just what the company is trying to do in general, just helping people communicate, is actually making the world better."

European users of Twitter can no longer receive text message updates on their cell phones, in a temporary move designed to keep the start-up's telecom bills down.

Twitterers can still use its U.K. number, +44 762 480 1423, to send updates to the site. But that number will no longer deliver text-message updates back to users, and recommends that they use the Twitter mobile site or a third-party client like TwitterBerry, Twitterrific, TwitterMail, or Cellity.

"When you send one message to Twitter and we send it to ten followers, you aren't charged ten times--that's because we've been footing the bill," a post on Twitter's blog explained. "When we launched our free SMS service to the world, we set the clock ticking. As the service grew in popularity, so too would the price."

The company has managed to find "sustainable" text-message billing agreements in the U.S., Canada, and India--the other three countries in which Twitter has enabled SMS updates--so those countries will not be affected by the change. The blog post explained that Twitter is continuing to negotiate with mobile operators to make it possible for SMS numbers to exist around the world, but hasn't gotten there yet.

"Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the U.S.," the post explained. "It makes more sense for us to establish fair billing arrangements with mobile operators than it does to pass these high fees on to our users."

There's been another victory on the water for ConnectU founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss--even as their court case against Facebook continues to peter out unfavorably.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss racing in Beijing.

(Credit: Row2k.com)

The identical twins, representing the United States in the men's pair (M2-) event of the Olympic rowing races in Beijing, placed second in their Wednesday semifinal to advance to the grand final.

At the 500-meter mark, a quarter of the way through the race, the Winklevosses were in fifth place out of the six boats. But they powered through crews from Germany, Serbia, and Italy to cross the finish line just less than 2.5 seconds behind the winning Australian crew of Drew Ginn and Duncan Free. The U.S. pair's final time was 6:36.65.

The Winklevosses are best known in the tech world for having founded ConnectU, a social network for college students that once employed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a programmer. ConnectU's founders--the twins, along with Harvard classmate Divya Narendra--began seeking legal action against Zuckerberg and Facebook in 2004, long before its Silicon Valley deification.

They alleged that Zuckerberg, a Harvard colleague, had swiped ConnectU's business plan and development code in order to kick-start Facebook; courts, however, have been skeptical because of the casual, dorm room nature of the company's early days. No formal contracts were signed, weakening ConnectU argument, and even though the case has been settled, the plaintiffs have continued to fight due to a dispute over Facebook's valuation.

Things have thus far fared much better for the Winklevosses in Beijing, where rowing insiders say the twins were not expected to win a spot in the grand final. In the race on Saturday, they will be up against the German and Australian crews, as well as the top three finishers from the event's other semifinal: Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa.

If they place first, second, or third in that race, they'll have some medals to take home.

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