When Facebook launched its latest redesign, it became evident that the company was putting a lot of emphasis on real-time information--inspired, undoubtedly, by the runaway success of Twitter. Now the company's rolled out two small but crucial new features that put instant updates even more front and center.
First, Facebook is aiming to use the "publisher" tool--formerly known as the status update box--as members' gateway to the Web at large. Starting Wednesday and rolling out gradually, according to a post on the company blog, a beta version of the new content-sharing box will allow members to select exactly how public or private to make each piece of content that they share. The post by Facebook engineer Ola Okelola explained that something shared on a profile can be visible by friends, friends of friends, friends and networks (school, region, or company), user-created custom friends groups--or everyone on the Web.
Facebook's probably hoping that this will spur people to share more content: if members know that sharing a video, a photo, or even a status message won't by default go out to everyone who can see their profile, they might be more likely to share things along the lines of party photos and videos of their kids.
But, wait. There's more.
In addition, a post on the Facebook developer blog Wednesday explained that developers can now take advantage of live-streaming status update boxes much like the one that CNN used during President Obama's inauguration this January. "With the Live Stream Box on your website, users log in using Facebook Connect and share updates that appear both within the Live Stream Box and on their Facebook profiles and in their friends' home page Streams," the post by Tom Whitnah explained. "Each post includes a link back to the Live Stream Box on your site so users can discover the live event and immediately join based on their friends' recommendations."
It's intended so that people watching an event simultaneously can comment in sync on Facebook. And it's also supposed to be a no-brainer to create your own, meaning that Facebook is hoping a lot of developers and site owners will jump on this bandwagon.
"The Live Stream Box is easy to install and takes just a minute to set up," the post added. "To get the Live Stream Box on your website, get a Facebook API key, upload a small file to your website, and then embed a few lines of code into your Web page."
This is a move clearly aiming in the direction of Twitter, where real-time updates and discussions around events have become so commonplace that members regularly agree on a "hashtag" to flag related posts in advance of the event. (For the inauguration, for example, it was #inaug09.) The question is whether Twitter use has already become the standard for chronicling and commenting on events in real time--will enough people be willing to use Facebook widgets rather than apps built on Twitter?
Not a particularly surprising move: LinkedIn president Jeff Weiner has taken over as CEO of the company, according to an announcement Wednesday from the business networking site.
Weiner, a former executive vice president at Yahoo, joined the company in January after then-CEO Dan Nye stepped down in December and founder Reid Hoffman took over as interim CEO. Hoffman will remain executive chairman of the company.
"LinkedIn was founded to harness the power of the Internet to create a tool that would help individuals become more effective and successful professionals," Hoffman said in a release. "Over the past six months, Jeff has done an exceptional job leading the company and I look forward to continuing the work that we have begun together."
LinkedIn now has over 42 million members, the company said, and hopes to be profitable this year for the second year in a row; it makes money not only from ads, but from premium subscriptions and "corporate solutions."
The company was aiming for a billion-dollar valuation just around a year ago when it raised a $53 million Series D funding round. Hoffman has gone on the record saying that he hopes LinkedIn will eventually go public.
(Credit: Doubleday)David Fincher is in "advanced talks" to direct the Columbia Pictures movie about the origins of Facebook, according to Variety.
The movie, based on Ben Mezrich's upcoming "The Accidental Billionaires," was written by "The West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin. It's being produced, Variety reported Tuesday, by Scott Rudin and Michael De Luca along with Dana Brunetti and actor Kevin Spacey. Variety said the movie is called "The Social Network." We hear this is a very preliminary working title. (It, obviously, could also be called "Accidental Billionaires.")
Fincher's past directorial work includes "Fight Club," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," and "Panic Room."
An entertainment industry source tells CNET News that early casting searches are under way and that the list of young actors being eyeballed to play Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg includes both Michael Cera ("Superbad," "Arrested Development") and Shia LaBeouf ("Transformers"). They aren't the only ones, and it's not clear whether either of those two in-demand actors would want to take a turn away from comedies (Cera) or action movies (LaBeouf) to play Zuckerberg.
Cera is, according to the source, a top choice because audiences find him particularly likable. Rumors about the plot of the book "Accidental Billionaires" hint that Zuckerberg is going to be portrayed rather unfavorably--basically, as an obnoxious nerd--and obnoxious nerds are not the world's biggest box-office sell. Cera could make the part a little bit more sympathetic.
But in LaBeouf's favor, I saw "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" last night, and the guy really does sound a lot like Zuckerberg.
Meanwhile, Facebook itself reportedly isn't thrilled. The social network consistently hasn't commented publicly about "Accidental Billionaires" and is said to have warned employees not to talk to anyone affiliated with the movie.
Memo to Twitter: If you're really going to be making money with sponsored direct messages, as a New York Times article hints, please make sure it doesn't get annoying.
Twitter investor Todd Chaffee of Institutional Venture Partners told the Times that "e-commerce, including links to products and turnkey payment mechanisms, is a likely revenue stream for Twitter." That's not too surprising. Some companies have touted real success with Twitter-only deals: electronics manufacturer Dell, for example, says it's racked up a few million in sales. Airlines JetBlue and Southwest sometimes advertise special fares on Twitter. It's pretty logical that Twitter would want a slice of this; the catch for the company's team would be how to charge for this sort of thing without taking away features that are already offered for free.
The bigger challenge, however, is not making it annoying. The other day I posted to Twitter about difficulties with my iPhone. I appreciated getting responses from people who were able to inform me that all I had to do to keep my iPhone from skipping songs was to turn off the "shake to shuffle" feature that's new in the iPhone 3.0 software, but I'm not sure if I would want quasi-unsolicited offers from tech support outlets or the like popping up as direct messages in my Twitter feed. Twitter would have to tread very carefully if it plans to be this intrusive--many people receive direct messages as SMS, for example.
Now, there's reason to take the whole thing with a grain of salt, because "sponsored messages" are just the latest potential Twitter business model we've heard about from people affiliated with the service. Last we heard, Twitter was going to be offering some kind of analytics or customer relations management suite for businesses that want to use it more effectively. There have been whispers about search ads, too.
So maybe, when it comes to business plans, Twitter is pretty much throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. Especially since Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams left a comment on a Business Insider post about Chaffee's remarks that make the whole thing seem much less likely.
"To be clear: Todd is a Twitter investor and a very smart and helpful guy," Williams wrote. "However, he is not actually on Twitter's board and, in this article, he's brainstorming on his own. These are not in the least bit concrete plans of the company."
But if we want to turn to the "juicy gossip" side of things, consider this: Twitter's executives have been very laissez-faire about allowing the users to shape the service before determining the best way to make money off it. Seems like its investors might not be in the same camp.
Well, here's an innovative way to get some buzz: FBHive, a new blog devoted to the discussion of all things Facebook, has debuted with the revelation that its creators have discovered a hack that can expose some crucial profile data.
No, it won't expose your personal photos or wall posts. But, FBHive says, it can bring up all the "basic information" that you have entered into your profile, even if you've elected to keep that information private. This is the section that includes location, gender, relationship status, relationships (significant other, parents, siblings), political views, religious views, birthday, and hometown. That's enough to be a problem in the identity theft department, as it could easily expose frequent password hints like dates of birth and mothers' maiden names.
Security holes are nothing new to social networks: last year, Facebook plugged a leak that exposed members' protected photos via the Facebook mobile site, and another hole was discovered about a year ago that exposed members' birth dates.
Admirably, FBHive has not shared the details of the newly discovered hack; more disconcertingly, it said Facebook has done nothing since it alerted the social network to the issue earlier this month.
"We are not malicious hackers, by any means, and our skills are far from advanced," the post read. "We here at FBHive are fans of Facebook, but when a security hole as big as this is discovered and brought to (Facebook's) attention, it shouldn't take 15 days to fix."
A Facebook representative said the company is currently "looking into" the matter and will have more information soon.
UPDATE at 11:14 a.m. PT: "We have identified this bug and closed the loophole," an e-mailed statement from Facebook read. "We don't have any evidence to suggest that it was ever exploited for malicious purposes."
The Federal Trade Commission is planning to crack down on bloggers who review or promote products while earning freebies or payments, the Associated Press reported Sunday.
This would, for the first time, bring bloggers under FTC guidelines that ban deceptive or unfair business practices.
"New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers--as well as the companies that compensate them--for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest," the article explained.
The rules could be quite strict, even extending to the practice of affiliate links--for example, a music blogger who links to a song on Amazon MP3 or iTunes that earns an affiliate commission in the process.
The practice of free products for bloggers, most of whom are not bound by ethical guidelines that journalists have historically followed, has been making headlines for some time now. Microsoft, for example, created a wave of bad press a few years ago when it gave free Acer laptops preloaded with Windows Vista to several dozen bloggers.
Some companies have sprung up around the whole notion of blogger compensation and giveaways. The AP article mentions some of the marketing companies that have made a business out of offering bloggers incentives--free trips, products, gift certificates, or outright payments--for coverage. One of them, Izea, has been generating controversy in the tech press since it started PayPerPost.
Izea says that it requires bloggers to disclose what they've gotten paid for or what they've received for free. But with the proposed FTC guidelines, if a blogger fails to disclose a freebie or payment, both Izea and the blogger could be held responsible. The FTC could also take issue with the fact that for at least one promotion, Izea has said it avoided including bloggers who would be likely to give the company negative press.
Izea CEO Ted Murphy wrote in a blog post Monday that the company supports stricter FTC regulations for bloggers.
"The companies that should be worried about these changes are those that have no standards and no way to enforce disclosure," Murphy wrote. "We have invested millions of dollars creating systems that allow us to automate transactions and verify standardized disclosure."
But some bloggers, the AP article mentioned, are concerned that the FTC's efforts could go too far, possibly generating probes into posts that were written without any compensation, and possibly leading bloggers to post with more restraint. And some believe it would be better if bloggers created their own standards based on niche and industry.
Then there's this: does the FTC realize just how many small-time bloggers are out there? Championing business ethics is a worthy goal, but, um, good luck getting much done when there are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there and new ones popping up more or less daily. Ever heard of the expression "herding cats?"
This post was updated at 11:37 a.m. PT with comment from Izea.
The tweet that shall live in infamy.
(Credit: Twitter)You can't make this stuff up: Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Republican from Michigan, set off a political-blog firestorm when he posted to his Twitter account on Wednesday that "Iranian twitter activity (is) similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House."
Presumably he was talking about rallying in the face of adversity. But, um, really? The U.S. congressional elections might be rife with mildly nefarious characters on both sides of the party line, but the current upheaval in Iran deals with a totalitarian regime, media blackouts, and mass protests with casualties. Talk about a gaffe. Rep. Hoekstra has said he will not seek re-election and is reportedly considering a run for governor; I'm sure his potential opponents are taking note here.
Anyway, somebody brilliant (I learned this is, unsurprisingly, Ben Huh of I Can Has Cheezburger fame) seized the opportunity and created a hilarious blog called "Pete Hoekstra is a Meme," devoted to photo captions much like the perennial "lolcats" craze. "To Hoekstra is to whine using grandiose exaggerations and comparisons," the site explains. Each "Hoekstra is a Meme" caption illustrates a similar, though generally more offensive claim.
(Credit: hoekstraisameme.com)It gets better. This is the same Rep. Peter Hoekstra who, you might recall, Twittered his secret trip to Iraq back in February. This guy is just comedy gold. I'm sure he's a fine public servant to the good people of Michigan (Is he? Michiganders, please weigh in!), but when it comes to Twitter, you'd almost think he had been planted by the writers for The Daily Show.
And while some might say Rep. Hoekstra's staffers ought to gently prevent him from Twittering, in the future, I say keep 'em coming. It's been a while: Politicians have been getting awfully digital-savvy for the past few years. Back in 2006, we were guaranteed loads of hilarity whenever Ted Stevens tried to explain the Internet, Robert Wexler wasn't aware that his Colbert Report joke about being a cocaine fiend would be mixed and remixed all over the Web, or George Allen mouthed off in the presence of YouTube-ready cameras.
These days, however, we're stuck with far too many Beltway types who are woefully adept at Twittering, like former Bush strategist Karl Rove.
And honestly, that's just no fun.
This post was updated at 11:33 p.m. PT.
The new Facebook inbox.
(Credit: Facebook)Well, according to a post on the official Facebook blog, the social network's messaging feature is getting a much-needed revamp from its cruddy, bare-bones state. Select users have the new in-box now; it'll be rolling out to everyone else over the next few weeks.
The catch is that there aren't actually very many new features, just a better presentation of existing ones for the most part. You'll now be able to accomplish such technological marvels as filter your in-box for unread messages (wow!) and flag unwanted messages as spam.
There's also a more clearly delineated division between messages from friends on your friends list and updates from brands' "fan pages" that previously all went into the same in-box.
Some more updates are on the way. "Over time, we plan to migrate messages from Groups and Events to Updates as well, so you have more control over the communication you receive," the post by Facebook's Scott Marlette read. That means the message from the guy who just reconnected with you on Facebook after not speaking to you since the fourth-grade spider-in-the-lunchbox incident will have a different destination than the message to all guests of next week's Bocce ball tournament.
So, no, Facebook probably won't be replacing your e-mail client yet. But more importantly--it's prettier. Oh, and you can flag spam now--that's important.
For Twitter, the past year has been a series of coming-out parties as it jumped further and further into the public eye. But it wasn't until this month's post-election upheaval in Iran that it became really clear: Twitter, you're not in Silicon Valley anymore.
"They have a responsibility that goes way beyond what they originally imagined," said Patrick Meier, director of research at DigiActive, an organization dedicated to helping activists better utilize new-media communication and networking tools. "This is a tool that can help communication in politically volatile situations."
Up to this point, much of the hype about Twitter's use in crises and disasters (as well as political events like elections) has been how quickly it can spread raw eyewitness reports, sort of the ultimate center for participatory "citizen journalism." There was the U.S. Airways incident in January, in which a photograph posted with Twitter app TwitPic was one of the first close-up looks at the emergency landing of a passenger jet in the Hudson River. When a wave of terror attacks sent the Indian city of Mumbai into chaos, many turned to Twitter for the most immediate information available.
In the aftermath of the contested Iranian elections, however, it's been Twitter's potential as a communications medium, rather than simply a source of up-to-the-minute news, that has been front and center. It's usurped Facebook as the social-media tool in the spotlight. The U.S. Department of State even requested that the company reschedule a planned outage so that it would be less likely to disrupt the flow of information coming from Iran.
"It's humbling to think that our 2-year old company could be playing such a globally meaningful role that state officials find their way toward highlighting our significance," a post on the Twitter blog by co-founder Biz Stone read.
Therein lies the uneasy truth: In a major international crisis, one of the prime channels of communication and news for individuals, media outlets, and governments alike is a 2-year-old start-up in San Francisco with 50 employees, no discernible business model, a history of technical instability, and a misinformation-related lawsuit on the table. This is a problem.
"It's just a start-up, and here they are playing geopolitics in some of the most crucial events we've seen recently, and that's kind of worrying," Meier said.
"There's definitely a risk...There are always going to be, I think, dangers in relying on all different kinds of technologies for many different reasons," Meier continued. "A related question to ask is, well, what's the alternative? The cell phones (in Iran) were blocked intermittently, Internet sites were blocked, (but) a few people were able to use Twitter. That was one of the last things that people were able to use, and when you're in that kind of an environment, when things are coming to a showdown, you use what you can and you try and do so as securely and as safely as possible."
The question now is to what extent Twitter, which has declined to comment beyond posts on its official blog, is obliged to step up its game. This is not always an easy question to answer.
It's ambiguous, for example, as to how much responsibility Twitter should take for the content spread over its network. As a communication platform, Twitter needn't be held accountable for the accuracy of everything that its millions of members "tweet." But it already has misinformation problems: Twitter has been sued by St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa over a Twittering impersonator, something that led the company to start rolling out a "verified" accounts program.
"Part of the way that I look at Twitter is much the same way that I look at citizen journalism, and chiefly the sort of early-breaking, unvetted citizen journalism," said Rachel Sterne, founder of user-contributed news site GroundReport. "You take it as an early warning system, you take it as a litmus test where something is happening somewhere in the world, and then the next step for responsible news gatherers is to check your sources."
But if La Russa's lawsuit is any indication, Twitter can't take a completely laissez-faire approach when it comes to accuracy. It's not Wikipedia, with an army of volunteer fact-checkers that manage to self-correct errors and hoaxes most of the time. When something is "tweeted," it's out there, it's public, and it's searchable.
In addition to the content on Twitter, there's the service itself, and it's a service that was once known for embarrassing unreliability. The days when a Steve Jobs keynote could turn Twitter into the famed "fail-whale" error message are over, thankfully, but vulnerabilities remain--the fact that Twitter required maintenance serious enough to disable its service for several hours, for example.
Unstable servers and fail-whales are just the surface, though. It's even less clear as to how effectively Twitter could handle large-scale denial-of-service attacks, phishing, hacking, or more serious forms of sabotage or cyberterrorism.
These are things that Twitter needs to be ready to handle internally, Meier said. He brought up the incident early last year in which a network in Pakistan knocked out the entire YouTube service for several hours. "A government didn't react, the U.S. didn't react, (and) there was no public relations or diplomatic reaction," Meier said. "All that happened was that YouTube found out about it, got their tech people in a room for a few hours, got YouTube back online and did it, and yet it was an international incident at the same time."
But the Twitter situation is very different, and not only because governments have started to take note in this situation. YouTube is a hosting platform that relies chiefly on other communications channels to spread the word about content hosted there: if it goes down for one reason or another, people can upload videos elsewhere. With Twitter, the technology itself isn't the only piece of the equation. What's equally important is the constantly updating, searchable mass of short public messages being broadcast and received around the world. This cannot easily be uprooted and replicated elsewhere.
Both the possibilities of mass misinformation and technical problems lead to another issue for Twitter: revenue. Pundits' calls for Twitter to get cranking on its yet-to-be-unveiled business model have turned into little more than a broken record, but the prominence of Twitter as a communications channel in the Iranian crisis raises the question of whether a pre-revenue company--no matter how cushy its venture backing--is up to task.
If Twitter is going to continue to have this kind of role in international affairs, it's going to need infrastructure so rock-solid that it drives the "fail whale" into extinction. It will need to hire employees with expertise in public policy and communications and a legal team capable of handling issues much more serious than a ticked-off baseball team manager. Those things take money, and this is a company whose co-founder once hinted that hiring an advertising sales staff would be too labor-intensive and costly.
Sterne, however, thinks that might be asking too much of Twitter. "I think the most important thing for Twitter is to focus on their technology and make sure their platform is up," she said. "They're not in the diplomatic game, and they're not a news outlet, so it's not up to us to hold them responsible for the content that goes across their network, it's up to us as consumers to be responsible consumers."
But, as Meier pointed out, turning things up a few notches could be in Twitter's own self-interest. If it doesn't make some moves to be ready for the international stage, it could be a major missed opportunity for the company.
"The activist will adapt if the environment changes," he said. "If Twitter goes down, they'll find something else."
Facebook's targeted advertising program is "materially different from behavioral targeting as it is usually discussed," Chris Kelly, the social network's chief privacy officer, said in remarks prepared for a Thursday morning hearing before two House subcommittees.
"In offering its free service to users, Facebook is dedicated to developing advertising that is relevant and personal without invading users' privacy, and to giving users more control over how their personal information is used in the online advertising environment," read the remarks for two subcommittees of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce.
The hearing, titled "Behavioral Advertising: Industry Practices And Consumers' Expectations," was also slated to include testimonies from Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy; Scott Cleland, president of Precursor; Charles Curran, executive director of the Network Advertising Initiative; Edward Felten, director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University; Anne Toth, vice president of policy and head of privacy at Yahoo; and Nicole Wong, deputy general counsel at Google.
Chris Kelly
(Credit: Kelly2010.com)Kelly, a White House staffer under President Clinton, has announced an exploratory bid to run for attorney general in California.
Social-media sites like Facebook, where members fill out extensive personal profiles that can detail everything from their music tastes to travel plans to political leanings, are at the forefront of new developments in behavioral ad targeting. The Facebook Ads program lets advertisers fine-tune their campaigns to reach specific demographics and audiences. Kelly insisted that this does not constitute an invasion of user privacy, an Internet-wide concern that the Federal Trade Commission has been exploring at the request of privacy advocates.
"The FTC's behavioral advertising principles recognize the important distinctions made by Facebook in its ad targeting between the use of aggregate, non-personally identifiable information that is not shared or sold to third parties," Kelly's remarks read, "versus other sites' and companies surreptitious harvesting, sharing and sale of personally identifiable information to third party companies."
Privacy concerns are nothing new to Facebook. The social network went through a user backlash over the introduction of its News Feed in 2006, and a bigger one over the controversial Beacon advertising program. More recently, a revision to Facebook's terms of use prompted consumer advocacy blog The Consumerist to highlight language that it said meant that Facebook claimed ownership of user profile data and photos.
"In February of this year, we looked to revise our Terms of Use, simplifying them to cut out as much legalese as possible and explain them in plain language," Kelly's remarks explained. "When we released a first version of our new terms, a blog misinterpreted our simplification of our copyright license, claiming that it meant we were seeking to own user content. The user reaction was predictably swift and severe, and we needed to choose among weathering the storm, revising the language, and introducing an entirely new process that would directly involve users in the governance of the site."
Facebook ultimately underwent a "notice and comment period modeled in part on the federal government's rulemaking procedure...(with) a user vote at the end of the process."
The points he tried to drive home the most: that Facebook members have extensive control over their personal information and that Facebook does not allow advertisers access to "personally identifiable" data in the Facebook Ads program.
Kelly also included a general mea culpa of sorts: "Perhaps because our site has developed so quickly, Facebook may have sometimes been inartful in communicating with our users and the general public about our advertising products," he stated. "We learned many lessons about the importance of user education and extensive control from the imperfect introduction of our Beacon product in 2007. As a result, Facebook continues to be dedicated to empowering consumers to control their information in both the noncommercial and the commercial context because we believe that should be the future of advertising."
A few other interesting tidbits from Kelly's remarks: out of Facebook's 200-million-plus active users, about 65 million are in the U.S.; more than 10,000 sites are using the Facebook Connect universal log-in product; and Facebook plans to continue the discussion-and-feedback-period strategy on any future changes to its "critical site documents."
