The Social

Following modifications to its "First Click Free" policy that gives Google News users access to some content that would otherwise be behind a pay wall, Google has released an additional tweak that lets publishers decide whether they want their sites to show up in Google News, Google Web search, both, or neither.

Previously, if a publisher wanted to request inclusion in one or the other, but not both, sending a request to Google was required. This now automates the process.

These updates to Google's news indexing come at a time when media outlets are once again pointing fingers at the search giant as a revenue suck--and in response, Google insists it's good for publishers because it drives traffic. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has made concrete threats that he will pull his publications' content from Google and is reported to be in talks with Microsoft to strike an exclusive deal on its Bing search engine.

By offering more flexible options for choosing where exactly news outlets want their content to appear, Google comes across as friendlier and less authoritative--at least on the surface.

Can't anybody tell that the fail whale is hungry?

(Credit: Flickr user Victoria Belanger)

Something has been rocking the boat over at Twitter, where stability issues on Monday afternoon caused the company to temporarily take down Twitter Lists, a popular and relatively new feature that lets members group Twitter accounts into categories.

"We began experiencing a very high rate of errors and we are working on the underlying problem," a post on the Twitter status blog read. It was later updated saying, "We are now recovering from this unexpected downtime. The Lists feature is temporarily unavailable as we diagnose the cause of the outage."

Many members had reported sightings of the "fail whale," Twitter's error message featuring a cartoon whale, earlier on Monday. It may have been more noticeable than usual because of the day's status as "Cyber Monday," a big day for holiday e-commerce deals--which in this day and age means plenty of people hunting on retailers' Twitter accounts for fire-sale promotions.

Obviously, amid all the seasonal shopaholism, somebody forgot to feed the whale.

If you stepped in late, it sounds awfully dull.

An announcement Tuesday tells us all that "certain assets" of a "white-label" online video service called Joost have been acquired by Adconion Media, which calls itself "the largest independent global audience and content network." The acquisition "will be able to provide advertisers, content owners, and Web site publishers with an end-to-end global video platform and cross-channel video and display ad-serving solution," according to a statement from Adconion CEO Tyler Moebius. Financial terms were not disclosed. Yawn.

But really, it's an exceptionally anticlimactic ending for Joost, a company so secretive and hyped that it was once known, James Bond-like, as "The Venice Project," and which was supposed to kill YouTube and that dastardly Cold War villain known as your cable company. It was a scrappy start-up with roots in lawlessness--founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom had built onetime file-sharing hub Kazaa--but major street cred, too, as they'd also founded Skype and sold it to eBay. There were impressive backers, too, including CBS (which owns CNET).

What went wrong?

Well, there was a big issue with Joost's downloadable peer-to-peer app. By the time it was released, Web-based video was advanced enough so that a required download was a barrier to entry, not a technical leg up. Some of the big-name content partners seemed to be putting in a halfhearted effort with Joost, offering up reruns and esoteric programs instead of the new programming that people actually wanted to watch.

But perhaps what really doomed Joost was something that was itself supposed to be a flop: When NBC Universal and News Corp. announced their plans to create an online video hub that would rival YouTube and address the rampant issue of piracy, it was referred to disparagingly as "Clown Co." We all know how that one turned out. The finished product, Hulu, was extremely well-received and continues to expand its video library.

There was, briefly, a time when it looked like there was a slight chance that things might turn up for Joost. It did, after all, beat most of its competitors to the release of an iPhone app, and a focus on niche content like Japanese anime seemed like a viable business choice as Hulu increasingly placed an emphasis on the mainstreamiest of the mainstream. Unfortunately, that didn't work either.

There was "a major retrenchment" as Joost reined in its lofty plans. Then it switched business models altogether to the far less glamorous "white-label video solutions" modus operandi.

And then the management debacles became evident. CEO Mike Volpi resigned and then was ousted by shareholders from his role as chairman. Oh, and then the company sued him. Nasty.

Sometimes hype plays out well. Sometimes it just doesn't, and Joost was one of those cases. In spite of the founders' prior successes, truckloads of venture capital dollars, and a few early and impressive content deals, it flopped. The end. Now, per Tuesday's release, it'll be "(adding) many dimensions to Adconion's existing video services and further will solidify its position in the online video and content syndication market."

That's a pretty nice way to put it.

The Winklevoss twins will probably be scary, too. This is a 'Jurassic Park' promo shot of actor Joseph Mazzello, who was recently cast as Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. NB: He's nearly two decades older now.

(Credit: Amblin Entertainment/filmdope.com)

This isn't particularly Earth-shattering news, but it's sort of hilarious.

Dustin Moskovitz, one of Facebook's co-founders and its head of engineering until he left last year, will be played by the little boy from "Jurassic Park" in the tell-all flick "The Social Network."

According to details in the Internet Movie Database, the role of Moskovitz has been filled by Joseph Mazzello, the actor best known for playing Timmy, the skinny 8-year-old who fell out of trees, nearly got electrocuted, and narrowly escaped getting eaten by all kinds of meany dinosaurs in the 1993 blockbuster. In other words, he already has experience as a member of the supporting cast of over-the-top movies about high-tech innovations.

Mazzello is now 26, which should make you feel very old.

Moskovitz was instrumental in Facebook's origins, but in "The Social Network" (helmed by "Fight Club" director David Fincher with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin) he has a relatively minor role. The film is not supported or authorized by Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO and co-founder. And the book that the movie is based on--Ben Mezrich's "The Accidental Billionaires"--relies on sourcing, much of it anonymous, from other figures early in Facebook's history. We can confirm that Moskovitz, who has been loyal to the company even after leaving, was not one of them. Putting too much of him in there could lead to legal problems.

The young cast of the movie has proven to be an amusing blend, with "Adventureland" star Jesse Eisenberg starring as Mark Zuckerberg (likely a very good fit), pop star Justin Timberlake playing Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sean Parker (really?), and "Gossip Girl" actor Armie Hammer playing both Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the identical twins who claimed Zuckerberg's founding of Facebook amounted to a theft of their own idea.

Some looks at the new AOL branding.

(Credit: AOL)

It's the media equivalent of moving out of your parents' house, heading to the nearest tattoo and piercing parlor, and yelling FREEEEEEDOM!: AOL has unveiled the "new brand identity" for its post-Time Warner era, slated to begin December 10 when it begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company. And there's nary a blue triangle in sight. Instead, there's a plain new text logo presented with various backdrops, from cartoon scribbles to a rock-star hand symbol to a totally adorable goldfish.

The company is currently offering just a preview, and says in a release that a full unveil will come on the spin-off date. Yay, secrets! I love secrets! But we, of course, have many hints: like the fact that CEO Tim Armstrong, who joined the company in March after a long stint as a high-profile Google sales executive, keeps talking up AOL's future as a powerhouse in digital content and publishing. The company's array of niche blogs, which were hatched when AOL purchased Weblogs way back in 2005, are now its centerpiece.

So the new mood? "It's one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal," the release explained. Ooh, sexy!

The release also included a soundbite from Karl Heiselman, CEO of Wolff Olins, which AOL enlisted to help with the transformation: "AOL is a 21st century media company, with an ambitious vision for the future and new focus on creativity and expression, this required the new brand identity to be open and generous, to invite conversation and collaboration, and to feel credible, but also aspirational."

Of course, it's not all sunny: The company is on the verge of significant layoffs, as well as the possible chucking of non-"content" properties like ICQ and MapQuest, as the spinoff date grows closer.

Whatever. Isn't that goldfish cute?

An example of Brizzly's new tweet translation.

(Credit: Brizzly)

Web-based Twitter client Brizzly made a dual announcement Friday: first, it's opened up into a full public beta mode (previously, an invite code was required); and second, it can now translate tweets into your default language on the site.

To translate a tweet in Brizzly--which already expands links, videos, and photos posted to Twitter, creating a more visual experience--you can click on a question mark for an instant translation. This is interesting, as Twitter has made its first moves recently in launching translated versions of the service (starting with Spanish), meaning that there will potentially be many more non-English tweets flowing through the system. It uses Google Translate, so needless to say, it's not totally perfect.

Brizzly added Facebook Connect support last month.

Offerpal Media, one of the companies at the center of a bitter dispute over misleading advertisements on social networks, on Thursday launched a revised policy designed to "forbid any offers that are misleading, deceptive or otherwise objectionable."

Companies like Offerpal are enlisted by many of the big gaming companies built on social networks like Facebook; they help those companies make money by letting game players earn points and virtual goods by completing offers and surveys rather than paying real money.

They make a lot of money doing so. So do the game companies, like Zynga and Playfish (recently acquired by Electronic Arts), which in turn advertise heavily on the likes of Facebook to recruit new players.

But then the negative press started to emerge: many of these "free" offers and surveys actually had hidden costs attached to them that weren't adequately disclosed. Some companies like Zynga started backtracking and going so far as to ban offers altogether. Facebook and MySpace, the two biggest social-network platforms, made very public revisions to their policies. But the controversy continued, and both Facebook and Zynga were named as defendants in a federal class-action lawsuit.

Offerpal, which replaced its CEO amid the controversy, has now come out and said that while it's setting a basic standard for advertisement quality, game makers and publishers enlisting Offerpal's services can opt to be even more stringent. "Offerpal will rate all offers by quality and allow its partners to select a quality level of compliance ranging from 'Level 1' for minimal restrictions to 'Level 5' for highly conservative restrictions," a release explained.

Will the new restrictions keep angry bloggers and consumers--not to mention lawmakers--at bay? More importantly, are they going to amount to anything more than smoke and mirrors? We'll see.

The simple concept of having virtual-good payments in games sent directly to your cell phone bill has gotten a lot of buzz--and stirred up a lot of rivalry. One of the start-ups looking to pull this off, Boku, announced Monday that it has signed on a dozen new gaming partners, both a few based on the Facebook platform and some others that are either Web-based or desktop downloads.

The partner companies are Waves, Cie Studios, Cyberstep, GameDuell, IGG, King.com, NHN USA, Ntreev, Outspark, PerfectWorld, Snap Interactive, and Zoosk. Most of them aren't household names: they're game manufacturers, not the games themselves, and some of them are most prominent outside the U.S.

There are a handful of companies trying to grab market share in this space, but the two who have been most vocal about making inroads have been Boku and rival Zong, which last month announced that it would allow members to sync credit cards with their phone numbers, allowing for larger payments and putting the company closer to direct competition with the likes of PayPal.

Boku says it's sticking to the mobile-number-only strategy, choosing instead to ink more deals and emphasize its global reach: with the current round of partnerships, the company says it will have 200 million registered users added to its ranks (no word on how active they all are, or how much redundancy there is across games).

Additionally, Boku has made some infrastructure upgrades that it says will improve the user experience, including the ability to detect whether a phone number that has been entered is landline or mobile--and if mobile, what carrier it's coming from.

In the wake of acquiring smaller digital music services iLike--and now, it looks like, Imeem--MySpace continues to attempt to align itself as the foremost player in the digital music industry. On Wednesday, the News Corp. division rolled out a music charts page to track the most popular music getting listened to on the social site.

It's fairly self-explanatory. There's a prominent "movers" section featuring artists that have seen an uptick in activity recently, and music can be filtered by genre, country, and label category (indie, unsigned, or major). Then there are links to "friend" an artist, buy songs, and watch music videos on MySpace's recently launched music video portal.

(Credit: MySpace)

The design, regrettably, isn't very user-friendly and requires quite a bit of scrolling. And in a world of finely tuned "music discovery" and personalized recommendations, charts can seem a little bit static. A blog post from MySpace Music head Courtney Holt assures that it's "just the beginning of a product and platform evolution that reinforces the key messaging, vision and direction of the new MySpace Music."

MySpace launched its music service last year as a joint venture with major and independent record labels, and has received a mixed response as the industry continues to grapple with the fact that no non-iTunes digital music service has proven to be a huge moneymaker yet.