The Social

Was there an unexpected rush of Facebook employees looking to cash out their stock? Yes, says BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy, who said that the $100 million buyback orchestrated by investor Digital Sky Technologies has been oversubscribed. Which means that a fair number of employees have been looking to cash out some stock even though it may be worth far more down the road when (and if) Facebook goes public. It's the sort of thing that would've left pre-IPO Googlers feeling awfully sheepish.

But what's more surprising, Lacy found, is that the high demand for Facebook cash-outs seems to run contrary to Silicon Valley's characteristic idealism.

"What has happened to the start-up work ethic in Silicon Valley?" she asked. "Time was, the region was teeming with believers--be it believers in a company or believers in the sometimes naive, lottery-ticket hope that options would make them billionaires. People who work at the most highly valued startup in Silicon Valley and rush to sell for a smaller valuation--just as an IPO is starting to look likely--aren't believers. They are mercenaries."

Not at all, I would argue.

Imagine, for a moment or two, that you are a character whom we will call Joe Facebook. You are a software engineer, so it's pretty safe to say that you're a dude (apologies to all the women in computer science out there). You're in your mid-20s, and you've been working for Zuckerberg & co. for a few years now, ever since you graduated from Harvard or Stanford or some other big-name institution with a hefty price tag. You grew up in a small town in the Northeast or Midwest, which is why instead of living in Facebook's hometown of Palo Alto, you've opted to get a taste of the cosmopolitan by living in San Francisco and making the commute in this sweet little Prius you bought last year. Your girlfriend, who's been remarkably tolerant of all those late nights of coding, said something recently about how it's a buyer's market and she's getting sick of her roommates. Maybe you'd like to pay off some of those student loans and stop living like a bike messenger.

This, of course, is a stereotype. But employees cashing out some of their stock after working long hours and living in one of the most expensive cities in the country shouldn't be that shocking.

Facebook's salaries, people in the industry tell me, tend to be a little bit lower than those at many of their Valley counterparts. That's understandable: it's one of the hottest companies to work for, and could have a huge IPO down the line, which would mean that a lower salary now would ideally pay off big-time later. But some of those early employees were probably expecting Facebook to have gone public by now. In this kind of economic climate, there's going to be some hand-wringing.

Facebook's revenues are projected to be about $500 million this year with its current, advertising-based model. But it's just barely started to alpha-test its new "credits" payment system, a potential cash cow that was once rumored to be debuting a year ago.

The Web 2.0 bubble didn't pop suddenly like its late-'90s counterpart. Rather, it's still deflating. This week, it was made official that MySpace had acquired iLike, a social music start-up that had $17 million in venture funding pumped into it during the digital media VC heyday. But revenues didn't roll in as promised, and iLike's final sale price was reportedly just $20 million--news that called into question the profitability of an entire (big) niche of Web start-ups, ad-supported streaming music. Facebook is obviously far beyond that stage, but these reality checks can make a massive, Google-style IPO seem even further away.

Then there are services like Sharespost, an exchange for private stock trades. The fact that these sites are drumming up interest is testament to the current uneasiness of many dot-com employees, especially young ones trying to establish some stability, and more particularly those who might not be privy to the big-picture plans getting painted in the executive boardroom. Given the dreary market for M&As and IPOs right now, their supposed personal wealth might as well be in Monopoly money.

And working at a tech start-up, with its casual dress code, oddball hours (think college-style all-nighters fueled by Red Bull and pizza), and young workforce, can seem like a limbo of adolescence--even if the old dot-com stereotypes of Foosball tables and free beer are kept to a minimum. As short-sighted and greedy as it may seem, swapping in some of that Facebook stock now (not anywhere near all of it, mind you) is an upward move for the quarter-life-crisis crowd. It's a down-payment on that cute Victorian in Noe Valley, the last of those student loans, the extra cash to start building up an investment portfolio while stock prices are low. It's growing up, Silicon Valley-style. Even in the bright and happy Candyland of innovation (literally), cash is still king.

Mercenaries? Hardly. More like average 20-somethings.

IAC chair Barry Diller at last week's Founders Club party.

(Credit: Alexander Porter/New York Founders Club)

NEW YORK--From a seventh-floor roof deck at Rockefeller Center, Barry Diller, head of digital-media conglomerate IAC/InterActiveCorp, was addressing the well-dressed crowd at Thursday evening's Founders Club cocktail party.

"There was a time when 'network' was all the buildings on Sixth Avenue," Diller said, gesturing to the west, home to the midtown office buildings that have housed New York's once-unflappable broadcast and print media powerhouses for decades, "and of course now it means something totally different."

The Founders Club, with a watertight guest list, drinks courtesy of Patron tequila, and a decorative pool filled with miniature sailboats bearing the logos of New York's most talked-about start-ups (perhaps a nod to host Diller, an avid yachtsman), was one of the more highbrow events at the second annual Internet Week New York, which culminates Monday night with the Webby Awards gala.

In spite of how rough things have been for the industry over the past year, energy levels were high and there was no shortage of things to do. Internet Week attendees could fill their week up with panels, networking breakfasts, ad industry conferences, start-up expos, and loads of parties. ("It's miraculous that you are all standing up, because all I hear about are these parties!" Diller exclaimed at Founders Club.)

One thing's for sure: New York's tech and digital-media community has been humbled and chastened, and it's ready to get back on its feet. Unfortunately, now there's a whole new problem: what next?

On the bright side, there seemed to be near-universal agreement at Internet Week that changing times present opportunities to explore new territory. A handful of people noted throughout the week that online video-related events had especially high rates of attendance, as traditional media and advertising companies sent marketers and business-development types out to figure out just how they can make a buck or two off it.

There are legitimate reasons for some of this optimism, especially for smaller companies that haven't exactly had the easiest time in New York to begin with. Rents are cheaper now. Prospective employees are willing to work for lower salaries. And once-dominant New York industries have been brought down a few notches, leaving scrappy start-ups in a position that's far from undesirable--especially since big media and finance companies, short on ideas for how to stay afloat, have finally started to listen to them.

"On behalf of the crippled United States economy and the crippled New York City economy, I'd like to thank you for doing what you do," Business Insider founder and former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget said to an audience of entrepreneurs and venture capital types at the blog's "Startup 2009" pitch competition Wednesday. "When you hear people talking about green shoots in this environment, this is what they're talking about."

Even the big companies seem to think the little guys are doing something right, or at least, in difficult times, they can make it seem a little sunnier by putting an entrepreneurial spin on things. New AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, for example, referred to AOL as "the world's largest start-up-slash-turnaround." He's not entirely off base. In New York, anything digital has historically been a bootstrapping industry in and of itself.

"I think the financial meltdown might be the best thing that ever happened to the New York start-up scene," Chris Dixon, co-founder of the fledgling Hunch, told CNET News at the Founders Club event. Dixon, who sold his previous company, SiteAdvisor, to McAfee in 2006, believes that in the Web 2.0 boom, New York's tech scene was even more upstaged by the San Francisco Bay Area's than it had been in the first dot-com gold rush. "(There were) hedge funds sucking up all the talent like they didn't in the '90s," he said.

But the excitement about the potential for innovation is tinged with plenty of confusion that can descend into downright cluelessness, brilliantly parodied in a YouTube-hosted music video called "Mad Avenue Blues" that was making the rounds last week and was the subject of many an Internet Week cocktail party conversation. Set to the tune of Don McLean's "American Pie," the video details the panic that one of New York's biggest industries went through in "the year the media died," and its lyrics full of marketing jargon are uncomfortably spot-on.

All joking aside, Internet Week made it clear that across the industry, nobody seems to be really sure what direction to take, and this can lead to major friction. In his opening address at Digitas' Digital Content NewFronts event on Wednesday, the ad agency's chief creative officer Mark Beeching gave an impassioned speech that included, among other things, the insistence that media companies give up on the fight against digital piracy because it's just not worth it.

"I can name a half dozen media executives who will have something to say about that," somebody remarked to me about Beeching's talk the following day, where even more digital-advertising types had gathered for cocktails and a presentation from ad agency Crispin Porter and Bogusky, which has gained serious geek street cred for edgy campaigns like the Burger King "Whopper Sacrifice" stunt.

At least they can agree on Twitter
Then there was the back-and-forth banter in the highly anticipated I Want Media panel on Wednesday, where it seemed like the only thing the panelists--who came from both print and digital media--could agree on was that the industry's more or less enamored with Twitter. Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal, a firm advocate of media outlets charging for online content, sparred onstage with Nick Denton, founder of entertainment and gossip blog network Gawker Media, who stands staunchly in favor of advertising.

"There's not enough advertising out there to support us," Murray insisted. "The model, digitally, in part because it's so easy to move from place to place, just doesn't work."

Denton retorted, "That is so not true," claiming that "most newspapers, apart from The Wall Street Journal and maybe the Financial Times, they have nothing that people are going to pay for."

But over the past year, as the crisis in the media industry grew worse, Denton didn't sound quite as unflappable. Over the winter, he had been predicting a near total collapse for advertising-based content, and the company spent months trimming away the fat, casting aside unnecessary cargo. Gawker Media consolidated two blogs, sold several others, and laid off a number of writers and editors. It's probably turned into a far more efficient operation.

But things turned out better than he expected, and on Thursday night Gawker partnered with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) for a party on the roof of the blog network's downtown headquarters--the latest in a parade of Gawker roof parties that started popping up as soon as the weather began to warm. There was, of course, an open bar. Waiters brought around trays of appetizers that were certainly several notches up from the fare at Gawker parties of yore, where the catering typically involved ordering pork dumplings en masse from somewhere in nearby Chinatown.

Guests weren't quite sure what was being offered to them. One of the appetizers, they learned upon asking, was pheasant. Another consisted of shot glasses of spicy tomato juice with oysters at the bottom. It was more "Mad Men" than media meltdown.

But ideally, that pheasant was eaten with the knowledge that the industry is still in a grave situation, and it's still not clear how or when it will end.

I thought Twitter hype had reached a fever pitch with the big Oprah appearance. Boy, was I ever wrong.

If it isn't Time magazine's "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live" cover story, it's the widely-circulated Comedy Central clips of co-founder Biz Stone's April appearance on "The Colbert Report," or it's chairman Jack Dorsey, in New York for this week's Internet Week festivities, showing up in society-blog photos from the sidelines of a Diane von Furstenberg fashion show. (OMG!) When I was joking about Twitter's executives reaching pop-idol ubiquity, I didn't think it'd be this soon that they'd start to seem like a slightly older, slightly less puppy-faced set of Jonas Brothers. Twitter and its creators are unavoidable.

But there's something nobody's really saying about Twitter throughout all this: Not everyone is going to use this service. Far from it, in fact. Its mainstream impact could very well have nothing to do with TweetDeck, hashtags, or even the name "Twitter" itself.

The Business Insider did a nice by-the-numbers of exactly what Twitter's explosion amounts to: 60 percent of users quit after a month, ten percent account for 90 percent of all "tweets," et cetera. All these numbers point to one fact: Twitter is high-maintenance. Even if you're only using it to read the latest updates from a few publications and some of your favorite bands, you're still reading about them in short bites that flow in a relatively inefficient manner. Parsing the noise takes effort; participating in it takes even more.

Compare that to Facebook: you can create a static profile, check in every few days, get an e-mail alert when a former high school classmate has added you as a friend, and you're all set. There are loads of apps on the social network if you feel like playing a round of poker or pretending to turn your friends into vampires, but at its most basic level, it doesn't require much effort to stay active on Facebook. Not so with Twitter.

The company's executives seem to acknowledge that in order to reach those who won't get involved otherwise, Twitter has to think outside the 140-character box (er, stream) and get the news industry involved. These people who don't actively participate in Twitter--you know, the 60 percent who drop out after a month--are going to know Twitter as something that enhances the news they already read and watch.

"One thing that's missing from it is the editorial. I think a cohesive narrative around all these reports is missing," said Jack Dorsey at Internet Week's I Want Media panel on Wednesday, just a few hours before he was looking worthy of any gossip magazine's annual eligible bachelors list at that Diane von Furstenberg show. "Bringing journalistic integrity to this mass of messages happening in real time is still very important."

In other words, Twitter's executives realize that the product in and of itself doesn't suffice universally for a legitimate, lasting mainstream reach--namely, an impact on people who aren't going to use Twitter otherwise. There are already dozens of developer applications making it possible to customize and enhance the service. The company is now working actively with media outlets on what it calls the "creative API", integrations of Twitter into content like Current TV's news programming and MTV's forthcoming "It's On With Alexa Chung." That's the beginning of what Dorsey was alluding to on Wednesday.

As more media deals roll in, the question to explore is whether this will, paradoxically, dilute Twitter's reach (and potential for profits) as a company. Once something becomes a standard rather than a brand, it gets tougher for a single company to make money off it. Think about instant messaging: Millions of us use AIM, but AOL isn't getting any ad revenue from those of us who are using it on universal IM clients like Pidgin or Adium.

The Twitter guys have built a great product, and to their credit, I don't think any of them have ever gone on the record saying that they hope to turn all six or seven billion or however many people there are on the planet into active users. It's not that this "Twitter is revolutionary" talk isn't true. Twitter is revolutionary in the sense that it turned the world on to a whole new form of information consumption--real-time, public conversations, aggregated and searchable. But just like blogging or instant messaging, this is going to get bigger than a single brand or company.

Jack Dorsey said in the same event at Internet Week New York that "Twitter's a success for us when people stop talking about it." He's right. But that implies a few things: one, that the hype and wildfire adoption will die down; two, that Twitter will fade into the background as the mainstream starts to recognize it as something they see on TV news broadcasts rather than a nifty, trendy tool for informing the world what you're doing; and three, that as other innovative companies catch on, the "real-time streaming conversations" phenomenon will expand beyond this one microblogging service. Twitter's legacy may very well have the word "Twitter" left out of it.

For the 140-zillionth time, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

This story has been updated. See below for details.

Can you really take everything that's going on with movies, TV shows, music, Internet memes, and social media, and wrangle it all into an hour of live television? MTV believes it can--with some help from Twitter, Facebook, and a quirky British model-turned-TV-host named Alexa Chung.

The pop-culture cable network's new daily talk show, titled "It's On with Alexa Chung," premieres at noon on June 15 and expectations are high. The show is taking over the time slot once held by "Total Request Live," or "TRL," the music video countdown show that more or less defined MTV--and in turn, mainstream youth culture--in the late '90s and early '00s. Chung, 25, is a British import who's already solidified a reputation as a quirky TV host across the pond, but is largely unknown in the U.S.

But it's the dual partnerships that MTV has inked with Facebook and Twitter that are really generating buzz. There will be on-screen "tweets," content sourced from Facebook profiles and fan pages, audience contribution from polls to remixed YouTube videos, and round-the-clock updates from Chung's own Twitter account. If it's all done right, "Alexa Chung" could be both a milestone in the convergence between TV and the Web, and a fresh infusion of innovation for a TV network that many say was shooting itself in the foot for not catching onto the social media craze earlier.

Still largely unknown in the U.S., the star of the upcoming "It's On with Alexa Chung" has already established herself as a quirky TV host in Britain.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

"The hope is that (social media) will just be something that is like the air that the show breathes on," said Dave Sirulnick, executive vice president of news and broadcast at MTV. "I think our audience, they'll expect this from us. They're going to expect us to talk to them the way they talk to each other. It's the way they experience the world, you know--it would be odd for us to mount this project, put this up on the air, and not have that happen, you know, because our audience, I don't think they look at it as something that is all new. This is just what they've grown up with."

A decade ago, if you wanted to get a message on MTV, your best bet was probably to write it on a poster and join the cheering crowds outside the network's New York studio during a "TRL" taping, hoping to make your way into the scope of the cameras sweeping overhead. Or if you were really lucky, you could call in and have your telephoned questions asked to celebrity guests on-air.

"In the old days our connection to the outside world on 'TRL' was one person on a phone," said executive producer Tim Healy. "Now with this new show it's definitely increased the scope."

MTV canceled "TRL" earlier this year--some would say belatedly. The network's reputation as a hub of pop-culture influence had long since started to fade: New music was being discovered on MySpace pages and niche music blogs. Popular clips from last night's TV shows were swapped via YouTube and Hulu links in instant messages and posts on Facebook profiles. Youth culture had grown segmented and fragmented with the mass availability of niche "long-tail" content on the Web, and social media had thrown out everyone's old notions of shelf lives--a 10-year-old music video can become an overnight hit on YouTube if enough people start telling their friends about it, whereas fresh Internet fads can be eclipsed and forgotten faster than ever. It seemed that when it came to encapsulating the cool-kid zeitgeist, a live TV show just couldn't cut it in the digital age.

With "Alexa Chung," MTV is making a totally different show. The iconic "TRL" set has been converted into something that looks like a loft apartment, with the studio audience scattered around like party guests. There will be no countdown--rather, a talk show format inspired in part by late-night programming, with topics ranging from movies and music to the latest YouTube sensations (whom Chung plans to regularly bring onto the set to see if their singing, dancing, or other oddball talents are for real). And there will be no screaming crowds in Times Square. Instead, there will be tweets.

The tweet smell of success?
"I think the genius of Twitter is that it's in the second. Not even the moment, it's right now," Sirulnick said. "Instant feedback from the audience, from what's going on, will be on-screen. Whether it's a persistent on-screen feed is something we're toying with right now. We haven't entirely decided."

This won't be MTV's first experiment with Twitter. Nearly two years ago, the network started a Twitter account for the "moon man," the mascot for its annual Video Music Awards, as a promotion for the ceremony. It went largely unnoticed: In the summer of 2007, Twitter was hardly a household term.

Alexa Chung, as pictured atop her Web site.

(Credit: http://www.alexachung.co.uk/)

But after unofficial celebrity endorsements and an appearance on Oprah hurtled Twitter into the mainstream earlier this year, the situation is very different. A firestorm of gossip ensued last week when a report in Variety implied that the company was developing a reality TV series. The rumors got so out of hand that co-founder Biz Stone posted a clarification on the company's official blog: "We're not making a TV show," he wrote.

"That was very frustrating and unfortunate, and a misrepresentation of all sorts of things," Chloe Sladden, Twitter's director of business development for global broadcast and news media, told CNET News several days later.

As it turns out, the Variety report detailed one of a number of partnerships that Twitter is working on with media and entertainment companies. That's Sladden's specialty: she was hired by Twitter this spring, after she spent several years working at Current, the edgy cable news channel co-founded by former vice president Al Gore. While at Current, Sladden worked with Twitter to help supplement its 2008 election coverage with on-screen tweets. Now at Twitter full-time, she's helping media outlets--including, but not limited to MTV--integrate tweets, Twitter searches, trending topics, and the like into their broadcasts.

There's no financial transaction involved in the "Alexa Chung" deal, Sladden said, and that's the way Twitter intends it to be.

"We're trying to unlock the true potential of Twitter, and a lot of our strategy has been to let other folks build a lot of cool stuff on top of Twitter. So the model here is much like the application developers," she explained. When it comes to Twitter's media partnerships, "think of this as a creative API."

MTV's partnership with Facebook is a little more formal, and a little more out-of-the-ordinary for both the social network and MTV. "Whenever they have a celebrity guest, they're exclusively featuring Facebook's presence for that celebrity," said Randi Zuckerberg, who heads up marketing at Facebook (and, yes, is founder Mark Zuckerberg's sister). "Which is really cool. The majority of celebrities have Facebook fan pages right now, with thousands or millions of fans." There will also, of course, be a "fan page" for the show itself, where viewers can submit questions to celebrity guests, vote on which songs they want bands to play when they appear live, and provide general feedback.

But in addition to celebrity fan pages, viewers' own Facebook profile content might pop up on the show. "People in the studio audience will have the opportunity to temporarily 'friend' some of the producers," Zuckerberg said. "Basically, they'll 'friend' them for about two hours, the duration of the show, and then they're going to encourage people to do mobile uploads during the show, mobile status updates, mobile photos, et cetera." For those who aren't in the studio audience, questions for the celebrity guests can be accompanied by Facebook photos or other content.

It's still a touchy issue, considering that a lot of Facebook profile content still isn't public, and many people wouldn't want their party photos splashed all over MTV without very explicit permission. And it's a sharp turn from Facebook's erstwhile hardline attitude of keeping everything behind a login wall, which is why representatives from both companies say that the use of Facebook content on TV will be given the kid-glove treatment.

"Everything's going to be signed off on by the people who are asking the questions," Sirulnick said, adding that MTV has been working with Facebook to finalize and streamline consent procedures. "We're not going to be exposing anybody who has not explicitly agreed to have their material on television. It's important to us, it's important to the audience, it's fair. It's important to Facebook."

MTV + Facebook = ad potential
Unlike the Twitter partnership, this isn't a money-free deal. MTV and Facebook have assembled a joint advertising sales team to sell sponsorship packages that encompass both TV spots and social-media ads.

"A sponsor can have placement on the show, commercials or in-show integration, and also integration on Facebook," explained Randi Zuckerberg, who previously helped orchestrate a partnership with broadcast network ABC during the presidential debates last year. "So, they can do an event RSVP ad for their participation in episodes they're in. They can be integrated into the Facebook page for Alexa's show. There's a lot of great things that they can target to fans of a certain celebrity. We're really going out together and really involving sponsors on both Facebook and TV."

This is big news for the nascent social-network advertising market. Plenty of companies aren't yet comfortable putting ads on the likes of Facebook, having heard the rampant belief that returns aren't good.

MTV's Sirulnick said he sees the joint ad sales strategy as a way for longstanding MTV advertisers to take the plunge into social media, for example, "if Sponsor X is a sponsor of MTV, and has been looking to get into the social-networking space, and has been looking for a window in." But he said that MTV will keep the profits from ads on its own properties, and Facebook will do the same for its site. "The MTV and the Facebook sales teams are out there jointly putting together packages for sales, but it's not a revenue share."

Not everyone in digital media is sure that this hybrid of broadcast television and user-generated social-network content will work.

"As a device every now and then it's OK. When it's persistent, it's annoying," said Jim Louderback, CEO of Web video production company Revision3, when asked about the idea of bringing Twitter and Facebook to broadcast television. "Mixing two mediums together like that doesn't work. You lose what makes each medium work really well, and that's why television on the Web is different from Web TV. That's why WebTV from Microsoft didn't work."

That said, MTV executives say that they're shaping and tweaking "It's On with Alexa Chung" up to the moment it airs, and will continue doing so even after the June 15 debut. The network is clearly excited at this chance to reinvent its brand--and to keep reinventing it, ideally preventing it from growing stale the way "TRL" did.

"It's going to be something that every day we're trying to come up with new things (for)," Sirulnick said. "The folks at Facebook are very excited about this, the folks at Twitter are very excited about this, and the good news is that they get us, they get the audience, they know what works really well on their site. And so it's much more, We're just talking all the time."

Alexa Chung herself appears to be equally excited.

"First guests confirmed for my new show. SO GREAT," she posted to her Twitter account on Wednesday. "America can you watch me please?? Cos my mum doesn't live here."

Updated at 5:53 a.m. PDT: MTV has now settled on an official name for the show: "It's On with Alexa Chung."

(Credit: Paramount)

Please note: Friendly seas ahead! This is a spoiler-free review.

NEW YORK--When I walked into a theater at Viacom's midtown headquarters for an advance screening of the new J.J. Abrams-directed "Star Trek" prequel on Wednesday night, I felt like that kid who hadn't done her homework--for an entire semester.

And yet that was crucial to my assignment: to see if it was possible for someone completely new to the "Star Trek" universe to understand, process, and more importantly enjoy this new film.

Here's my background. I had never seen any of the prior "Star Trek" films or television series. I knew little more than the fact that it's all about a bunch of people flying a spaceship called the Enterprise, that Leonard Nimoy played an extraterrestrial named Spock who had funny ears and liked to say "Live long and prosper," and that the Klingon language has such a rabid following that the Bible has been translated into it.

Technically, the closest I'd come to seeing anything related to "Star Trek" was the 1998 parody "Galaxy Quest," in which the actors from a washed-up Trek-like TV show are enlisted by benevolent aliens who think they're the real thing (Little-known fact: That was the first movie role for Justin "I'm a Mac" Long). But I'm also a huge fan of Abrams' hit series "Lost," so I suppose I had a leg up there.

So here is my verdict: This movie is awesome.

The new "Star Trek" film is less an homage to a legendary science fiction franchise than to storytelling in general, back through decades of cinema and television and beyond. A deep respect for literature, pop culture, and epic storytelling is something that Abrams has proven time and again to fans, from the litany of film-rooted "Sawyer nicknames" on "Lost" to the tradition of Japanese monster movies that powered last year's "Cloverfield." This is a movie that will probably be well-regarded by anyone with an appreciation for epic adventure and drama, not to mention fast-paced and often witty dialogue.

And that's what the "Star Trek" prequel needed, considering the hand-wringing that surrounded it from even before it was officially greenlit.

Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman was on hand before the screening to greet the audience and explain a bit about the film's origins: that Paramount, the Viacom-owned studio that is releasing the new film, was well aware of the complications and potential pratfalls of adapting "Star Trek, especially in a prequel form, and especially with the goal of reaching out to both "Trekkies" (or "Trekkers," as I hear there is a difference?) and potential new fans. He said that cinema luminaries, including Steven Spielberg, had warned Abrams that undertaking a project with such a history and legacy of loyal fans could be risky.

But the director went ahead, a second Abrams-helmed "Star Trek" picture was greenlit almost immediately, and his contract with Paramount was extended another five years. Obviously, this is a franchise in which the studio has some real faith.

Pretty early on, you can tell that this isn't the "Star Trek" of the '60s, even though I admittedly don't really know what that is. The first 20 minutes contain not only ear-splitting action sequences, but brand-drops of both Nokia and Budweiser (as well as 'Slusho,' a fictional brand from "Cloverfield"), one very Abrams-esque "gotcha" character reveal that will take most newbies like me by surprise, and the oddly effective use of the Beastie Boys' 1994 song "Sabotage."

There is a pivotal bar fight, which I first took as a nod to "Star Wars," but on second thought, the cinematic barroom confrontation really goes back much further than the Mos Eisley Cantina. (I need to brush up on my knowledge of Westerns.) Again, this is a movie deeply rooted in generations of storytelling both onscreen and off.

I can see why some hardcore "Star Trek" fans may have been nervous about the casting decisions: the Internet Movie Database informs me that Chris Pine, the young actor cast as Captain Kirk, was starring opposite Lindsay Lohan in some tepid romantic comedy a few years ago, and Sulu is played by John Cho, best known for playing Harold in the spliffed-up "Harold and Kumar" movies. I must say that Cho wields a retractable sword just as well as he does a joint, and Pine's Kirk keeps the frat-boy attitude to a relative minimum.

But more importantly, "Star Trek" is just plain fun. And I came to appreciate the fact that I was sitting in that theater without prejudice. I was concerned less about whether the cast would live up to the actors who originated their roles, and more about holy whoa, that spaceship just blew up!. There is, however, a flip side to the universality of the new "Star Trek" that Paramount might not love: The fact that it stands so well on its own might mean that it doesn't mint a new generation of Trekkies.

Like me, for one. As much as I enjoyed the prequel, I can't see myself Netflixing all the DVDs of the past "Star Trek" TV series and movies. I've already got "Lost" to deal with, and one fictional universe and canon is enough for me, thank you very much. Seriously--what does lie in the shadow of the statue? Losties, can you help me out here?

Oprah's second-ever tweet. Um, yeah.

(Credit: Twitter)

A correction was made to this post. See below for details.

Oprah's crazy about it. Ashton Kutcher and Anderson Cooper are making fools of themselves trying to show what rabid fans they are. Friday, April 17, 2009, will pretty much go down as the day when the loyally followed indie-rock band known as "Twitter" made its big major-label splash.

If it were the late '90s, this would be its big debut on "Total Request Live" with Carson Daly emceeing and a bunch of screaming girls outside waving posters with crudely drawn fail-whales and "MARRY ME, EVAN WILLIAMS!" scrawled on them. But in keeping with the '90s pop-culture references, it's starting to remind me a little bit too much of "That Thing You Do," the 1996 Tom Hanks flick about a one-hit-wonder pop band that has a smash hit in the wake of the '60s British Invasion and is then never heard from again after mainstream fame makes them more about the image and less about the music.

(Credit: 20th Century Fox)

The issue I have with all this Twitter mega-buzz is that it has the capacity to pack a double punch--in a bad way. First, the media blitz and celebrity endorsements can solidify it as a fad, like the momentarily trendy "pet rock" of Web 2.0. And second, it can tick off the early adopters, the ones who were really at the core of Twitter for its first few years as a geek cult phenomenon. There are already a few who aren't too thrilled about the fact that the Kutcher-CNN million-follower race appears to have been gamed by Twitter itself.

Mainstream success is great for Twitter, which is legitimately shaking up media and communications in ways that I don't think many people thought it would a few years ago. But I certainly hope that all the celebrity frenzy isn't veering it off course on its real, long-term development strategy. You know, like a business model. In "That Thing You Do," the band's descent into gimmickiness is best expressed by the fact that the manager, played by Hanks, suggests that the drummer always wear sunglasses onstage. Let's hope that the Ashton Kutcher-mania doesn't turn out to be the same for Twitter.

On the other hand, back in the '90s Kutcher was best known for playing a teenage stoner on "That '70s Show." I'm pretty sure no one thought he'd ever be heard from again.

Yikes! As a number of you have pointed out in the comments section, I goofed on the movie trivia. In "That Thing You Do," it was indeed the drummer who had to wear the sunglasses. We've fixed that, and thanks all for the catch. (1:22 p.m. PDT)

Guess what isn't super-sized? Digital distribution revenues for filmmakers, apparently.

AUSTIN, Texas--The Internet and the rise of online video have meant a plethora of new options for independent filmmakers. But, as has been well-publicized, the money just isn't there yet. A panel at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Monday highlighted that this is an extremely contentious issue.

"Digital distribution is not some magic bullet," said panelist Gary Hustwit on the success of his documentary "Helvetica," in front of a packed room of audience members that came from both SXSWi and its sister festival, SXSW Film. "It's not that because the film is available digitally it does well. It's because you do the work...because of that exposure, it did well."

In spite of widespread blog speculation that DVDs are dying and that digital downloads and streams will replace the physical medium in due time, filmmakers say that from the creative side, relying on these outlets--iTunes, Amazon, Hulu, Joost, and SnagFilms, represented on the panel by CEO Rick Allen--simply is not profitable yet. In fact, in many cases, sales and revenue numbers are kept on the down-low.

Morgan Spurlock, the documentarian behind "Super Size Me" and "Where In The World Is Osama bin Laden?," put it bluntly. "The reason numbers aren't released (for digital distribution revenues) is because the numbers are pathetic," he said. "The numbers are sadly low in comparison to what we expect from film and television."

"If you're looking to pay your rent, not so much, if you're looking to pay your phone bill, you have a great chance," Spurlock continued. "It's getting to a point where it's down the road from being profitable, but we're just not at that point yet."

The panelists disagreed over whether the best digital distribution strategy is to get a film on as many platforms as possible or to be strategic in the hopes of making more money.

Matt Dentler of digital representation group Cinetic Rights Management argued for the be-everywhere model. "We are a direct aggregator to, I would say, about a dozen portals in the U.S., and we just closed our first couple of deals in Europe." Dentler said that Cinetic's films go to YouTube, Hulu, iTunes, SnagFilms, and quite a few others. "We're probably going to have about five to ten more in Europe over the next few months...what this touches on is there are so many freaking options out there for consumers that you kind of have to provide all of them."

But Steve Savage, president of distributor New Video, disagreed. "It's good to be agnostic, and I think it's a good way to put everything out there and see what sticks but there's also other ways to do it," he asserted, "to be really strategic, to find where the money is."

The panelists seemed to agree that, as so many people have said before, digital revenues are on the way. "The money you're going to make as an independent filmmaker right now," Dentler said, "the fact that we can start cutting checks for people today, it might not be huge checks, but at least they're checks."

"They don't approach TV license fees," SnagFilms' Allen said. "We are at the front end of this. However, they are hundredfold, a thousandfold, the size of the checks that most independent documentarians have received from theatrical release."

Gary Hustwit said that filmmakers need to take responsibility for pushing the digital distribution business forward themselves. "Go directly to the audience instead of relying on, with all due respect to the distributors here, other businesses to do it," he suggested. "Why are we building other people's businesses when we could build our own businesses?"

The Onion's Baratunde Thurston gives his impression of Tony Hsieh's keynote.

(Credit: Twitter)

AUSTIN, Texas--In the dot-com world, Tony Hsieh's story is pretty much canon.

We know he got his entrepreneurial start running a pizza delivery business in college, and eventually went on to co-found LinkExchange and sell it to Microsoft for $265 million.

Then, after founding a venture firm that invested in shoe retail start-up Zappos.com, he took over the helm of the company and has been there ever since. Now nearly 10 years old, Zappos has become renowned among the digerati for its heavy investment in top-notch customer service, quirky company culture, and use of Twitter to promote corporate transparency.

"We put our 1-800 number at the top of every Web page, and we encourage our customers to call us even if it's not to make a sale," the soft-spoken Hsieh said Saturday in his keynote address here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. "The telephone is one of the best branding devices out there. You have the customer's undivided attention for 5 to 10 minutes."

With thousands of people filling up the Austin Convention Center's biggest ballroom and several surrounding simulcast rooms, Hsieh had a chance to really shake up the conversation in the digital-media set. Unfortunately, he didn't do it.

CEO Tony Hsieh--in a photo not from SXSW.

(Credit: Zappos.com)

He explained some of the company's idiosyncrasies: the fact that it will pay new hires $2,000 to leave the company just to make sure they're completely on board with their new jobs, the fact that customer service representatives are instructed to direct customers to better deals at competing retailers if they exist, the "Culture Book" that contains unedited contributions from every Zappos employee. Many of those in the audience probably knew most of this already. Hsieh, after all, has become a conference-circuit regular.

"The thing that ties all of these things together is really that Zappos is about delivering happiness, whether it's to customers or to employees or even to our vendors or other customers that we work with," Hsieh said.

He went through Zappos' 10 "core values," which include "build a positive team and family spirit," "do more with less," and "create fun and a little weirdness." He talked about "frameworks of happiness" and recommended some books like Timothy Ferriss' "The Four Hour Work Week" and Chip Conley's "Peak." It was a talk that would have been perfectly attuned to an audience of old-school marketers that needed to hear something totally new.

"A company's culture and a company's brand are just two sides of the same coin," Hsieh insisted. OK. But that's nothing that anyone who's been involved in the business of the Web hasn't heard before, many times. This is the sort of thing that unfortunately became a hallmark of the dot-com bust when companies invested too heavily in foosball tables and not enough in revenue models. Then, of course, there's Google and all things "Googly."

What Hsieh could have addressed was the fact that while so many of the nodding heads in the audience claim they fully grasp the admirable values that power Zappos, in reality there's a whole lot of hypocrisy out there--not to mention uncertainty. He talked about both the importance of personal branding and his distaste for egomania, two things that some people in the audience might find mutually exclusive. He mentioned "doing more with less" as a core value of Zappos, but not once even made reference to the dire financial climate. How, for example, do we have to try differently to focus on happiness these days?

Hsieh has the enormous respect of an industry. But if he's going to live up to the visionary hype, he's going to have to do more than just talk about what his company's done right and recommending a few business books.

AUSTIN, Texas--I'm in Austin for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, finally. And I'm exhausted. Last night, some friends convinced me that it would be a good idea to watch the Syracuse-University of Connecticut basketball game on TV until the end, and if you read the sports section this morning, you'll know that it went into six overtimes. I was able to get, oh, three hours of sleep.

Apparently, "nerd bird" is SXSWi slang for an Austin-bound plane coming from a city like New York or San Francisco, where there would be plenty of geeks flocking to the conference. It's totally true.

My early-morning JetBlue flight from New York contained folks from Gawker, Mashable, AllThingsD, and CrunchGear. However, unlike a Thursday flight from San Francisco that happened to host Digg founder Kevin Rose, there was no flight attendant encouraging us all to Twitter upon arrival.

So what's the buzz right now? The weather is unseasonably chilly and rainy. The line to pick up conference badges is screamingly long, and I'm about to go deal with that. Friday has only a limited number of panels and discussions.

Beyond that, everyone seems particularly eager to just have some fun. And some cool SXSWi-centric games are popping up. A few days ago, something called SXSW Bingo started making the rounds. It's a sort of Bingo scavenger hunt for which players are tasked with taking mobile photos of targets that range from Robert Scoble to a Snuggie.

I've also heard that Paparazzi, an iPhone game from Socialbomb that attempts to rank players by fame stemming from how many times they show up in mobile photos, may be another time-waster of choice.

I wonder if wacky games, scavenger hunts, and other outside-the-conference shenanigans will have a bigger presence at SXSWi 2009 than they may have in the past. My reasons for thinking so are twofold.

First, given the economic conditions we're all dealing with, a lot of people in the tech and media industries are looking for something to ease the stress. I think that any out-of-work geek would smile at the fact that blogger Ariel Waldman is sporadically twittering the locations where she is giving away free cupcakes.

Second, SXSWi was big last year, and it's bigger this year. The quirky digerati who have traditionally dominated SXSWi's core may be looking for new ways to hang out, now that the conference has grown increasingly corporate.

My CBS Interactive colleague Andrew Mager is also at the conference, and he is currently playing a Twitter-organized game of "Assassins." I'm not quite sure how it works, but he has reported that he was kidnapped by rival players. Eek!