Actors Jesse Eisenberg (left) and Joseph Mazzello, playing Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz in the upcoming film 'The Social Network.'
(Credit: Columbia Tristar Marketing)NEW YORK--They're everywhere here: on the sides of buses and along the walls of subway stations, posters for the upcoming film "The Social Network" bearing little else than the three words "PUNK, BILLIONAIRE, GENIUS" and a partial headshot of lead actor Jesse Eisenberg. Likewise, buzz about the David Fincher-directed film about the contested origins of Facebook, based on Ben Mezrich's book "The Accidental Billionaires," has been growing now that its hyped premiere at the New York Film Festival is less than a month away. Its wide theatrical release is on October 1.
This week, at least in the mainstream press, the narrative has taken a turn for the speculative: Will the film actually be both a box-office hit and an awards contender? Will Facebook's chilliness toward the movie, which it did not sanction and has characterized as "fiction," affect its performance--or will a strong performance at the box office affect the public's perception of Facebook?
Igniting all these questions is the fact that "The Social Network" is apparently not just good, but excellent. The sole long-form review of the film comes from Film Comment, a publication operated by NYFF parent Film Society of Lincoln Center. Critic Scott Foundas characterized "The Social Network" as a "portrait of a self-made outsider marking his territory in the WASP jungle" akin to F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic "The Great Gatsby," and speculated that it may come to be considered a microcosm of the Digital Age in the same way that "Gatsby" encapsulates the Jazz Age.
"'The Social Network' offers a despairing snapshot of society at the dawn of the 21st century, so advanced, so 'connected,' yet so closed and constrained by all the centuries-old prejudices and preconceptions about how our heroes and villains are supposed to look, sound, and act," Foundas wrote. "For Mark Zuckerberg has arrived, and yet still seems unsettled and out of place."
A few others have seen it, too. In a tweet, Rolling Stone magazine critic Peter Travers gave the movie four stars and called it "the movie of the year that also brilliantly defines the decade."
Whether it actually is as good as a handful of early reviewers say it is, "The Social Network" could really be the first major, zeitgeisty film that portrays the "digital generation," or Generation Y, or whatever you choose to call it, as adults--the film that will be evoked for decades as emblematic of the climate that caused whatever generational neuroses that the "millennials" experience down the road. That's something that the film's excellent theatrical trailer, scored with a haunting choral cover of Radiohead's "Creep," starts to drum up with its emphasis on social status, the enormous amount of deeply intimate information shared online through social networks like Facebook, and a snippet set in a nightclub in which Justin Timberlake, portraying former Facebook executive Sean Parker, declares confidently, "This is our time."
The cast alone may be sufficient to draw crowds. Eisenberg, cast as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is shaping up to look like a more astute choice than some of the better-known actors who were said to be up for the part--a young A-lister like Shia LaBeouf or Michael Cera could come across as too played-out by now, or overshadow the rest of the film.
The supporting cast may be a big draw, too, in part because of the roles that some of the relatively unknown young actors have lined up for next year. Andrew Garfield, portraying spurned Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, will be the next Spider-Man; Rooney Mara, playing a fictionalized version of a girl Zuckerberg had been dating around the time that he founded Facebook, will be the eponymous "Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" in the film adaptation of Stieg Larsson's bestselling novel (also directed by Fincher). Some speculators had wondered whether Timberlake, a pop singer who was gracing the cover of teen magazines with the rest of boy band 'N Sync at the time when his character Parker was an executive at Napster, would be the film's weak link. Perhaps not: Foundas said that the quality of Timberlake's performance is "surprising."
So what of the concerns about accuracy? "Inside Facebook, they think the movie will not be good for Mark's image, and that worries them," journalist David Kirkpatrick, who wrote the Facebook-authorized "The Facebook Effect," said in an interview with USA Today. The article explained that Kirkpatrick had spoken to the producers of "The Social Network" about signing on to a consultant role for the film, but that he "objected to the story" and Facebook "said it would not cooperate on his book" if he took the gig.
In the same interview, Kirkpatrick said that "The Social Network" will "fundamentally misrepresent Facebook's origins" but that its only real impact will probably be to "make Mark (Zuckerberg) a celebrity."
Entertainment blog HollywoodNews brought up the fact that while some believe that straying from history cost the 1999 Denzel Washington film "The Hurricane" the Best Picture accolade at the Oscars, fictionalizing some detail didn't derail 2001's "A Beautiful Mind" from winning the same award.
A story in The New York Times about Facebook management's grappling with the potential success of "The Social Network"--including attempts on behalf of the company to lobby for modifications to the script--mentions that a "mostly made up" scene "that depicted Sean Parker...delivering his dialogue while a pair of teenage girls offer partygoers lines of cocaine from bared breasts" was in cutting-room limbo.
But while this allegedly contested scene in "The Social Network" sounds sleazy enough to make the film seem a little bit more lowbrow than your average Oscar contender, it certainly has been pulling in more buzz. When it started to look like the scene was staying in the picture, it instantly became headline-worthy.
"Justin Timberlake's naughty party scene uncut in 'Social Network'," a HollywoodNews headline read. JoBlo.com was a little bit blunter: "Boobs and cocaine won't get cut from 'Social Network' after all."
Does social news site Digg need to be rescued by a celebrity white knight like Ashton Kutcher?
(Credit: CBS Early Show)It's still too early to tell whether the redesigned and revamped Digg, which went live on Wednesday following a limited private alpha test, will be enough to resuscitate the once-hot social news site. The usual suspects of the blogger punditocracy seem to agree: it's all dependent on how the community reacts, and Diggers are unpredictable.
The "new Digg," which puts a focus on a customized news lineup based on content chosen from social-network friends as well as celebrities and brands that the user opts to follow, is a big change from its predecessor, in which Digg power users had built up so much clout that the site became too insidery for its own good. Traffic growth slowed, as did the parade of rumors that companies like Google and News Corp. wanted to buy Digg for hundreds of millions of dollars. The company had to do something.
"The redesign may be too much of a shift for Digg's core users, who traditionally have driven much of the activity on the site, even after the 'Top Digger' list was removed," Mashable writer Vadim Lavrusik wrote. On the flip side: "Digg may attract a whole new audience looking for a place to discover news through curated sources."
TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid: "At this point I'm skeptical, but it won't be clear for some time. In order for this to lead to the resurgence Digg needs, user behavior will need to change, especially among casual users."
My CNET colleague Josh Lowensohn's early hands-on of the new Digg, internally referred to as Digg v4, agreed that the relaunch was a big improvement but echoed fellow tech bloggers' concern that it might be too little, too late.
With the redesign, though, Digg may be able to count on more than the community. Celebrity and brand usage of Twitter and Facebook has helped propel growth (especially for Twitter, where actor Ashton Kutcher's endorsement led to some early mainstream momentum) and Digg has aggressively reached out to media companies to start using the new version. It's unclear, though, whether Digg will be able to find a celebrity who takes interest in the new version with a geek-chic firepower that matches Kutcher's, and even if it does, whether he or she will experience the kind of traction that Kutcher (and eventually the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Kanye West, and Lady Gaga) did on Twitter.
Digg founder Kevin Rose, who took over the role as the company's CEO after predecessor Jay Adelson stepped down in April, and who has said recently that a replacement CEO is imminent, filled that role himself to an extent on the "old Digg." Rose became an influential fanboy hero, something which then carried over into his massive Twitter following and the "Diggnation" podcast produced by Revision3, another company that he founded.
But Rose isn't nearly on the caliber of a recognizable celebrity outside of the tech industry, which may hamper his clout on the new Digg. Will a celebrity in need of a self-promotion outlet find its way to Digg and help revive the social news site in the process? Time will tell--but on the Internet, obsolescence comes on fast. Just ask the old Digg.
There was something very much in the vein of Utopian science-fiction fantasies to Facebook's announcement of "Places," its location-based "check-in" product that it launched on Wednesday night. (CNET was the first to report its impending debut last week.) In short, Facebook not only wants to be the digital sovereignty toward which all other geolocation apps direct their figurative roads, it also wants to be the Web's own omniscient historian.
"Too many of our human stories are still collecting dust on the shelves of our collections at home," Facebook vice president of product Christopher Cox said as he explained the sociological rationale behind Facebook Places, a "check-in" service that more or less replicates the basic functionality of existing location-sharing start-ups like Foursquare and Gowalla, as well as lets those services tap into Facebook's new Places API to integrate with it. Facebook Places will not just collect location check-ins, it'll allow for messages and comments and pictures to be aggregated around them, creating a sort of "collective memory" that places a layer of Facebook-published narrative atop the physical world.
"Those stories are going to be placed," Cox said. "Those stories are going to be pinned to a physical location so that maybe one day in 20 years our children will go to Ocean Beach in San Francisco, and their little magical thing will start to vibrate and say, 'This is where your parents first kissed.'"
Now, let's toss aside the awkward usage of the phrase "little magical thing will start to vibrate" and any invariable knee-jerk reactions implementing the "Wayne's World"-Steve Carell tagline "that's what she said." What Cox meant is important.
Facebook Places' debut marks a shift in the rhetoric of the location-based services market because of the company's vocal connection of geolocation to permanence and memory, rather than the language of exciting immediacy (see what your friends are doing right now! In real time!) touted by the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla. Whereas Foursquare handled check-ins as a digital embodiment of the frenetic pulse of the city around you--fittingly, it was developed in the madcap, bar-saturated grid of downtown New York, where there is always somewhere more exciting you could be--Facebook looks at it as a three-dimensional chronicle.
Many had said that technology, Cox related, was threatening the phenomenon of the "third place," a term coined by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg to refer to a spot of social gathering and interaction that was differentiated from the workplace and home. Digital advancement, technophobes claimed, would force us to be "sitting there in these little bubbles," Cox explained. "It's like (dystopian animated film) 'Wall-E' with the fat people rolling around in their bubbles."
Right. So, of course, Facebook will make everything better?
"The entire goal of this product, and in general what we're trying to develop here, is that the 'third place' is alive and well and that technology can actually be the thing that pulls us away from the TV and out to the nightclub or out to the concert or out to the theater or out to the bar," Cox said. "Technology does not need to estrange us from one another."
Is this brilliant, or creepy, or both? Is Facebook Places a benevolent archivist, the Web's new equivalent of Orwell's Big Brother, or Tolkien's Eye of Sauron? Whatever your point of view, one thing's clear: start-ups like Foursquare have been using that "technology can bring us together" pitch for well over a year now.
For rivals, too close for comfort?
Indeed, some of the immediate reactions from many in the digerati voiced discouragement (though not outright surprise) that Facebook had seemingly "ripped off" the likes of Foursquare without developing anything particularly innovative on its own, something that seems like Microsoft's old practice of effectively snuffing out start-ups with its sheer muscle--and, do recall, the House That Gates Built invested $240 million in Facebook in late 2007. Others (also unsurprisingly) started highlighting privacy concerns, specifically the fact that Facebook will allow people to check their friends in for them. Granted, Places product manager Michael Sharon explained that there's an extensive armor of privacy controls preventing this from causing a ruckus, but it's not going to quell the concerns of the usual suspects.
"Facebook immediately opened up location data to applications and Connect sites," a blog post on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, a frequent Facebook critic, explained. "This means that your friends' apps may be able to access information about your most recent check-in by default as soon as you start using Places. Even if you've already gone through your settings to limit the info that apps can access, you should do it again--you may find that you've been defaulted into sharing your location info with apps."
But Facebook may need to force-feed this feature in order to prompt ubiquity. The massive social network, with 500 million members around the world, is offering its own breed of check-ins in addition to corralling those from third parties--who, at launch, include Foursquare, Gowalla, business reviews site Yelp, and location-based gaming site Booyah. With a basic check-in functionality now available on Facebook, a service like a Foursquare or Gowalla will now be forced to develop additional features and branding to draw users to their own offerings (for Foursquare, local tips and "game mechanics"; for Gowalla, travel-oriented "passport stamps") rather than just letting users "check in." In other words, they are now applications operating on top of Facebook.
And Facebook's ties to its new start-up rivals in the geolocation space run deep. Sharon, a soft-spoken native of South Africa, joined Facebook in 2008 after having co-founded a New York-based start-up called Socialight. A mapping start-up that implemented a rudimentary form of geotagging long before most phones were equipped with GPS, the tiny Socialight also employed developer Naveen Selvadurai, who last year left Socialight to work full time at the new company he'd just co-founded--Foursquare. Despite their prior professional ties, CNET has heard that Sharon didn't give Selvadurai and his team many hints as to what Facebook was working on.
Sources close to the situation told CNET that Foursquare had wavered on whether it even wanted to be part of the announcement after having been kept in the dark for so long--and after the start-up had been snubbed by Facebook during acquisition talks. Facebook, sources said, had offered $120 million to purchase Foursquare. Foursquare wanted about $150 million; Facebook then walked away. The decision for Foursquare mobile business development lead Holger Luedorf to appear at the Facebook Places launch event, and for Foursquare to hence appear alongside Gowalla and Yelp, literally happened at the eleventh hour.
Notably absent from the whole affair was Twitter, which also launched a geolocation feature earlier this year and which, like Foursquare, was the target of a botched acquisition attempt on Facebook's behalf. And there was no mention of Hot Potato, the small "check-in" service which has either just been acquired by Facebook or is extremely close to it, depending on who you ask.
There are many questions that remain about Facebook Places; about its impact on services like Foursquare, about its eventual mainstream reception, about the kinds of data that Facebook plans to keep alive and weave into whatever "memory" it envisions. But its general aim is clear. Facebook has made one attempt after another to seize the Web's complex map of social connections; in the manner of a Gilded Age railroad monopoly, to not necessarily own the destinations but to control the routes of passage and communication. Here, it has made an audacious attempt at extending that dominance into the physical world--and, in a gesture that some might characterize as imperial hubris, into history.
Not too long ago, the golden rules for high school and college students turning to the Web as a research tool were simple: treat digital content that's never been in print with suspicion. Be careful what you Google. And thou shalt not touch Wikipedia.
But the Web has grown up a bit in the past few years, and the presence of digital research journals, fact-finding social media tools, textbook exchanges, and e-readers have made it a much more complicated landscape for anyone who encounters the education world's slow march beyond the traditional textbook. When things have shaken out, it may be a world where free-for-all online information hubs are accepted--or, if proponents of "collaborative knowledge" have their way, even embraced.
"We have 16 million articles," said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia. "It's impossible to say that they're all going to be great and you're not going to find any vandalism. So a healthy dose of media literacy helps any student looking at that information."
In a 2005 study, scientific journal Nature found, based on a survey of articles pertaining to various disciplines, that Wikipedia was on a par with Encyclopedia Britannica when it came to the accuracy of information within. It was a win for supporters of the idealistic concept of collaborative knowledge. And some academics say that it's now sufficiently stable and commonplace that they're all right with students using it for basic knowledge--just not citing it.
"With more and more people using (Wikipedia), it has done a better job of being able to self-correct than in the Wild West days of when it first started up and you had no idea who was vouching for any of this stuff," said Chad O'Connor, a consultant and adjunct professor of communications at Emerson College. But he, too, argued that students should be aware of what they're getting into. "It's an encyclopedia, and just as I would with anyone who would use the old-school system of an Encyclopedia Britannica, it's a great starting point to get a big, 50-foot view of the topic and the subject matter."
"Wikipedia should not be used as a primary source," Walsh said. "We completely support that. We would not encourage people to cite Wikipedia in their papers. That's not what it's for." He added that the Wikimedia Foundation has started an experimental outreach with some U.S. universities to bring faculty and students into the corps of Wikipedia contributors, specifically with regard to articles about public policy--one of the site's more contentious areas.
But just as the academic community has started to accept the inevitability of sites like Wikipedia, the Web is also about to foist what may be the biggest complexity it has encountered since the advent of the free-for-all encyclopedia. As the school year starts, the recent proliferation of question-and-answer sites--like the brainy Quora and the soon-to-be-everywhere Facebook Questions--may prove to be students' next last-ditch time-saver and teachers' next digital bogeyman.
When Facebook Questions leaves a limited beta test, high school and college students who have been spending massive chunks of time on the social network will be able to seek answers for their confusing homework questions with a potential audience of 500 million more or less alongside their photo albums and FarmVille games. It's unlikely that students will be attempting to cite Facebook Questions answers in research papers, but calculus problem sets and English lit response pieces are another story. After enough Facebook queries of, "What does the red hunting hat stand for, anyway?" teachers may be nostalgically recalling the days when Cliffs Notes were their biggest fast-knowledge-fix problem.
"Teachers hate it because it's not authoritative; they don't know who's written the content," said Nature Publishing Director Vikram Savkar, who has been spearheading the company's new online science resource tool, Scitable. The ambitious quasi-start-up aims to cobble together the factors that make Wikipedia and Q&A services so appealing--fast, free access to knowledge, channels of communication outside the classroom--but with the backing of a respected journal publisher and the approval of teachers. "I think that most faculty know that the migration of students into Google is not going to stop," Savkar said. "There's no point in trying to prevent students from searching on the Web for resources. What they're looking for are authoritative resources on the Web that they can point their students to."
Obviously, something needed to change. The potential benefits of bringing education into the social-media age just can't be ignored, from lectures turned into podcasts on iTunes to teachers in underfunded school districts turning to sites like DonorsChoose to seek micro-benefactors. But the bureaucracy and institutionalization has been tough to shake, and the textbook market continues to be criticized for making negligible changes to books in the name of profiting off a new edition while being too slow to pick up on sudden and major changes--like four years ago, when the International Astronomical Union kicked Pluto off the roster of "classical planets" just in time for a new school year to start with freshly outdated science textbooks.
Publishers as well as academic institutions have been poking their way into the e-reader market, launching titles for Amazon's Kindle or Apple's iPad and a Netflix-like textbook rental service called Chegg has been further complicating the market. The days of a $200 biology textbook that only gets used for a semester may be limited.
Textbook publishing conglomerate Pearson recently launched a partnership with build-a-social-network site Ning, sponsoring K-12 classrooms that want to create the most basic level of Ning network free of charge (per a recent change in Ning's business model, operating a social network is no longer free).
"Far and away the largest group of paying customers has been education (focused) Ning networks," Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal told CNET in an interview last week. "We're on the cusp of what I think is going to be a revolution in the whole way the Internet and technology is used in learning."
Early on in Ning's somewhat tumultuous history, co-founder and Silicon Valley veteran Marc Andreessen was already highlighting its potential use as an educational tool.
But when it comes to adding some order to the chaos, comprehensive online research and learning hubs are tougher to get off the ground than one might think: assembling relevant and reputable information, infusing it all with social-media tools and accessible experts to use them alongside curious students, and now the added challenge of putting together the requisite mobile and iPad-optimized editions. "The main thing that we're working on is releasing a lot more new content," Vikram Savkar said of Scitable, which initially launched in 2009. "Last year we launched courseware in genetics, pretty comprehensive, and we're just shortly about to launch materials in cell biology and in ecology as well. So we're making great progress in covering the whole of the life sciences which is our goal for next year."
To use a bad pun, they've realized they have their homework cut out for them.
"On average, we update every article once every other month," Savkar said. "It's not so much that there's new research in that particular field but that somebody has made a point about something that he or she thinks we should mention."
When rumor broke that Twitter would be launching official "tweet" buttons for third-party sites, the first question for many was: How will they deal with TweetMeme, the third-party company that already operated Twitter sharing buttons and a Digg-like aggregation page?
To be sure, official Twitter "tweet this" buttons just had to be on the way--Facebook's "like" button continues to proliferate--in order for Twitter to avoid being completely eclipsed as the hub of choice for social-media sharing. But the lack of a formal Twitter tweet button had led to TweetMeme's filling of that void and impressive proliferation. So, in this case, Twitter needed to get diplomatic.
Ever since Twitter held its inaugural Chirp developer conference in April and rolled out a series of announcements that signaled that it was going to be far more proactive in how it managed and surveyed the microblogging masses it had enabled in the first place, developers began to voice concern over just how many third-party apps Twitter stood a chance of snuffing out. There were loads of Twitter clients that were forced to rethink their business models after Twitter selected Tweetie as its iPhone app of choice (though, to be fair, most of them are still around months later), and quite a few URL shorteners that may have been threatened by the advent of Twitter's own shortening tool.
The case of TweetMeme was a little different. If a blog or media publisher wanted to count and share retweets, there wasn't a real mess of options for them to choose from. TweetMeme was the obvious way to go, and the start-up had plenty of relationships in place with some very major digital publishers that Twitter would have needed to win over in order to spread the new tweet button across the Web. The start-up had been pegged by some tech pundits as a potential acquisition target for Twitter as a result of this domination; that didn't happen.
Nor are the companies commenting on what financial terms may have been in place in the deal that ultimately was birthed, or what back-and-forth that went on to form Twitter and TweetMeme's close new data analytics relationship.
"We're not really disclosing the specifics of the deal," Twitter representative Carolyn Penner told CNET via e-mail.
So what resulted? Well, from Twitter's blog: "(TweetMeme has) already made it easier to share links on Twitter and have helped a tremendous number of publishers get their content into Twitter. We're pleased to be working closely with the good folks at TweetMeme and, from here on out, they will be pointing to the Twitter Tweet Button."
And from TweetMeme's: "Twitter is launching its own Tweet Button and we are very pleased to be partnering with them to continue to grow the overall Twitter ecosystem...We will be assisting Twitter with the technical challenges involved with the button and secondly we will be working even more closely in the future on delivering real-time curation of the Twitter Firehose. This will manifest itself in the launch of a number of new products." The first, TweetMeme explains, is called DataSift.
In spite of what appears to be a very careful and calculated partnership, some critics still think Twitter is effectively screwing over TweetMeme. But it could actually have been a boon for TweetMeme's balance sheet: TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead hinted in an interview with TechCrunch that the TweetMeme buttons may not have actually made very much money for the start-up. Preferential access to Twitter "firehose" data may yet prove more profitable.
Launching official tweet buttons, complete with ensuing suggested links for accounts to follow based on the subject matter of the link being shared and a pre-shortened URL that's been run though Twitter's own t.co shortener, is another sign that Twitter is working actively to rein in an "ecosystem" that had grown dominated by third-party applications to the extent that Twitter itself was more or less just powering the basic function of pushing out 140-character messages. That, as the company seems to have finally realized, was not particularly conducive to a business model.
In the midst of speculation about Google and Facebook going after one another on the virtual commerce and social gaming fronts, Twitter had fallen off the radar a bit when it came to placing bets on who might take the biggest share of the social Web. But on the most basic level, Thursday's unveiling of the tweet button and the partnership with TweetMeme is a reminder that Twitter is nevertheless powerful enough to force a major shift in the business model of one of its most popular third-party apps.
Disclosure: CBS Interactive, parent company of CNET, had used TweetMeme buttons and was one of Twitter's launch partners for the tweet button.
(Credit:
JetBlue)
Once upon a time, a weird news story was just a weird news story. Now, thanks to the Web, it's an international sensation and everyone can be a part of it: a reality-show-hungry couple claiming their kid flew away in a balloon; a strange, dead animal washing ashore; an oddball clan of Alaskans getting improbably close to the White House.
This week, it was the ridiculous story of Steven Slater, a JetBlue flight attendant who cursed out an uncooperative passenger over the intercom, activated the plane's emergency slide, and escaped with a beer in hand. Not only is it tailor-made for a Zach Galifianakis character with anger management problems, but it's the perfect wacky, speculative, and yet somehow socially provocative news story that will get the Internet fired up.
For JetBlue, which has crafted itself as an airline with a sense of humor and a savviness with regard to new-media "conversation," it wasn't going to be able to get away with a simple "no comment" on this one.
The Steven Slater saga is, almost without a doubt, the nuttiest airline-industry online PR snafu since film director Kevin Smith made sure that every single one of his million-plus Twitter followers knew that Southwest Airlines had informed him he was too overweight to fly. And as it had with Smith, the public opinion steered in Slater's favor, with his I'm-mad-as-hell tirade making him a sort of working-class hero. In addition to about a zillion Twitter quips and Facebook status messages about him (many evoking actor Samuel L. Jackson's profanity-filled tirade in the 2006 film "Snakes on a Plane"), Slater inspired blog posts with headlines like "As A Flight Attendant Who Longed to Jump From a Plane, I Get Steven Slater" and late-night TV comedy routines that more or less wrote themselves.
"JetBlue really does have the best in-flight entertainment!" exclaimed Comedy Central pundit Stephen Colbert in his crowning of Slater as "Alpha Dog of the Week." NBC's "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" even enlisted over-the-top blogger Perez Hilton to perform a reenactment of what happened on board, with Hilton screaming into a fake intercom about experiencing a "full-on double rainbow of rage." (That's an allusion to yet another Internet meme.)
JetBlue, which was one of the first big companies to embrace the use of Twitter as a communications and branding tool, couldn't really have gotten away without saying anything, or even just releasing the standard "no comment" statement of yore. It's chugged plenty of "conversational marketing" Kool-Aid, and couldn't easily retreat from that strategy in this situation. And indeed, a delay for a few days was making some critics impatient. An AdAge article Tuesday pointed out that "if JetBlue is observed to be taking the matter lightly on Twitter or in discussions with the media, it could be used against the company by Mr. Slater or the Federal Aviation Authority."
On its corporate blog, JetBlue broke the silence Wednesday--undoubtedly after extensive consultations with its legal counsel. "While we can't discuss the details of what is an ongoing investigation, plenty of others have already formed opinions on the matter," a company representative wrote in a post. "Like, the entire Internet." The blog post explained that out of respect for the privacy of the individual, it wasn't saying any more. But it attempted to end on a positive note: "While this episode may feed your inner 'Office Space,' we just want to take this space to recognize our 2,100 fantastic, awesome, and professional in-flight crew members for delivering the JetBlue Experience you've come to expect of us."
The incident in itself probably wasn't going to reflect too badly on JetBlue, as Tuesday's AdAge article pointed out. Unlike the Southwest-Kevin Smith incident, this wasn't an an exercise of controversial airline policy or a customer-service mess--it was, very obviously, the act of a rogue individual. And Slater, as has been well-publicized, quit his job as part of the noisy tirade, meaning that the airline wasn't going to have to deal with publicly or not-so-publicly firing him. Where JetBlue was really at risk, image-wise, was in how it crafted its response.
There is, also, still a vulnerable spot: As JetBlue emphasized, there is a pending investigation into the incident. The "Save Steven Slater" campaigns are already brewing; JetBlue may want to brace for the barrage of an epic wacky fan stunt if it looks like he'll face significant legal or disciplinary action--and even still, that's pretty tame.
There's a requisite chaos to the "hacker culture" that has been central to the rise of both Google and Facebook: cobble something together, fueled by Red Bull and pizza, until it works; keep changing it and improving it, lest a competitor jump in and create something better; and if for some reason it doesn't work, just do away with it altogether. From both the inside and the outside, it can look quite messy.
Take, for example, the fact that Google has been known to tweak its search algorithm hundreds of times per year, or that the Facebook home page goes through major facelifts on a regular basis. This week, Google killed an experimental social-collaboration project called Wave that had been heavily hyped at launch; last month, Facebook's "Gift Shop" feature got the ax. That slash-and-burn, change-the-system mentality that a Valley superstar like Google or Facebook projects to the outside world applies internally, too.
Increasingly, these relatively small shifts in product and strategy are spelling out something much bigger: the two companies are, after months of speculation and prediction, really starting to go after each other.
You could put it this way: Facebook dominates the social Web, and Google dominates everything else. Google wants to wrest a bit of control of social media from Facebook; Facebook plans to use the vast network of connections and communication channels it's built to more or less conquer the rest of the world. It's the case of a giant with a glaring Achilles heel versus a smaller, more nimble player with a finely-honed skill that can attack its competitor right where it hurts.
Google, as has been well-documented, has been attempting to get into the social-networking game for years now and keeps flopping: Wave, which was touted at its debut as a potential revolution in communication, was only the latest embarrassment. Google Buzz, which some speculated could render Twitter obsolete, was beset almost immediately by privacy concerns that were easy to fix technically but may have permanently damaged its image. Google Friend Connect and the OpenSocial app platform product came across as second-tier imitations of Facebook's own developer initiatives. They were reactionary, not revolutionary.
The verdict is uncertain for Google's alleged upcoming endeavor in Facebook-poking, called "Google.Me." There's the off-chance that it won't work, and that Google will just keep botching social media, and some pundits speculate the losing streak may continue. In that case, it looks like Google has put together a bit of a backup plan: weaken some of Facebook's ties with the companies that have made it big.
For example, Google has invested as much as $100 million in Zynga, the biggest company to have risen to success on the Facebook developer platform with its arsenal of wildly popular social games. Zynga is a driver of heavy Facebook traffic and a top buyer of Facebook ad space, but it also has a history of icy rapports with Facebook that culminated in the signing of a five-year armistice, er, "strategic relationship." Additionally, this week Google reportedly outright acquired Slide, an early success on the Facebook Platform that used a ranch's worth of virtual sheep in its SuperPoke application to prove just how strong the connections of the "social graph" really were.
Facebook's offensive
But Facebook, too, is adopting a strategy of hitting Google where it hurts.
Last month, Facebook formally launched Facebook Questions, a question-and-answer product to enable users to ask questions about literally anything, soliciting answers in turn. (It should be noted that Google killed its own Q&A product, a paid service called Google Answers, way back in 2006.) Facebook Questions is audacious for a number of reasons: one, it's completely public, with no way to make questions or answers restricted to one's friends list or otherwise; two, it's designed so that search engines cannot index its content. Some speculated that this may be temporary because Facebook Questions is still in a limited beta, but Facebook says it's planning to keep it the way it is.
"We may consider it for the future, but currently have no plans to make questions or answers available to search engines," Facebook representative Meredith Chin told CNET via e-mail.
It was a big deal when Facebook users were first given the option to have their profiles show up in search engine listings, undermining a whole segment of "people search" sites that had recently arisen in Valley start-up circles. At the time Facebook, like many other Web start-ups and publishing properties, needed to get its content ranked high in search engine queries to boost traffic. If they weren't at the top of the front page of a Google search query, someone else would be. And all this activity, of course, fuels Google's own search ads.
Among other things, Facebook's decision to keep otherwise public Questions to itself is a sort of posturing: It's telling search engines (e.g. Google) that with 500 million people using Facebook regularly, it doesn't need to rely on them for traffic referrals anymore. The Google training wheels are off. And Facebook Questions could be the feature that first makes the social-networking site a search-query destination in itself.
A ways back, it became clear that Google and Apple were on a collision course in the mobile world, and Google was able to position itself as the "open guy" thanks to the open-source basis of its Android software in contrast to Apple's history of corporate secrecy and proprietary technologies. It won't be that easy in Google vs. Facebook: Not only do both companies have a history of social-media privacy misfires, making it difficult to pin either as the more altruistic competitor, but the prize in this madcap game of high-stakes Capture The Flag is advertising revenue--and its advertising business, like its search algorithm, is something that Google keeps under lock and key. The gospel of openness won't work here.
Or will it? This week, news broke that Facebook had purchased 18 social-networking patents that had previously belonged to erstwhile competitor Friendster. If Facebook chooses to enforce these, it could strengthen the company's control not just over the world of social-networking, but on the extent to which potential competitors--including, theoretically, Google--can implement similar ideas in products.
The last time Facebook made the news for patents it owned, these ones pertaining to its "news feed" technology, some industry thinkers decried the move as ant-competitive because they believed the technology in question should remain the property of the Web at large. Google's championing of open technologies in the Android operating system in contrast to Apple's iPhone empire appears to be showing some success. The same argument could be rehashed if Facebook starts to look like it's trying to patent and brand the entire idea of social networking.
But that's a battle tactic that didn't work when Google took aim at the Facebook Platform with OpenSocial, and reviving it may be similarly unsuccessful.
Start placing your bets--that is, if you haven't already.
(Credit:
Michael E. Gruen)
There's a silly but enduring bit of apocrypha about the alleged rural pastime of "cow tipping"--in which, supposedly, there are so few ways for mischievous young people in the boondocks to amuse themselves that they resort to knocking over cows standing in slumber. (Actually, cows don't sleep upright. Should you try to "tip" a standing cow, be forewarned: it isn't asleep.)
Fittingly, a recently launched Facebook-based game designed to make a statement about the supposed inanity of other Facebook games--like the now-antiquated "sheep throwing" of Slide's SuperPoke and the stampeding success of Zynga's FarmVille--takes the form of what's more or less virtual cow tipping. It's called "Cow Clicker."
Install Cow Clicker on your Facebook profile, and the app will display a fairly generic cartoon cow. You are allowed to click on that cow once every six hours, and clicking will earn you more clicks. If you are sufficiently enthralled with Cow Clicker to spend real-world money (or "mooney" as the game calls it) you can buy fancier "premium" cows like the "Bacon Cow" or pay to be able to click your cow more frequently than once every six hours. Stories about your Cow Clicker activity, naturally, show up in your Facebook news feed so that your friends can get in on the action. It seems, on the surface, tailor-made to do nothing but dispel boredom, much like the cow tipping of legend.
"Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence," wrote Cow Clicker developer Ian Bogost, a video game theorist and Georgia Tech professor in a blog post explaining why he built the seemingly silly game. "Most will consider Cow Clicker to be satire, and that's true in part at least. But satire these days risks becoming mere conceptual art. The idea of the 'cow clicker' arose almost involuntarily, as a playfully deprecatory name that seemed plausible enough that it might be real."
The name "cow clicker," Bogost explained, was originally just a snappy slang term that was formulated over the course of conversations at the Game Developers Conference earlier this year. A nearly unavoidable topic of conversation there was the mushrooming of social games on the Facebook platform, games like FarmVille and Pet Society and Mafia Wars--with simple, uniform and easily replicable sets of rules, and as Bogost put it, "challenge-free," social games were drawing disapproval and even outright anger from traditional game developers.
But the game Cow Clicker is designed to draw attention to the enduring appeal of games like FarmVille, not just to their shortcomings--and it's developed a bit of a cult following. Since launching on July 21, Cow Clicker has drawn nearly 15,000 active users, including "a good number of players who are playing intensely," Bogost told CNET. Some, he says, are actually exchanging real-world currency for "mooney," and others are buying merchandise like a T-shirt that says "I Clicked A Cow And I Liked It." The Cow Clicker app refers to it as "haute cowture."
Most of those fans seem to be people who are well attuned to the satirical undertones of Cow Clicker and, perhaps frustrated themselves at the FarmVille activities that pop up endlessly on their friends' Facebook profiles, are eager to feign obsession. "A game of godly proportions," one reviewer extolled. "I sit around thinking about what I'm going to do until I can click my cow again. Things such as, sleeping, nothing, and reviewing the game." Another said, "It is like I have stared into the very meaning of life itself, when I click upon my cow." Still another: "Probably the best thing since 'Twilight.'"
Likewise, Bogost's blog post explaining the rationale behind Cow Clicker pulled in dozens of comments, including cheers from supporters, deep thoughts from fellow academics, and some very harsh critics who said that Bogost was more or less just jealous of the success of companies like FarmVille manufacturer Zynga in corralling mainstream attention. "It's hard to swallow that, instead of your little proteges and named successors, it was a for-profit commercial enterprise that became instantly successful because it saw what you didn't see: it's about the players," one particularly opinionated commenter wrote. "It's about what they want, not what you want to tell them."
And when game-industry intellectuals like Bogost do what some see as criticizing the pedestrian nature of FarmVille and its ilk, they may indeed look like they're harvesting a crop of sour grapes. Social games are simply enormous. Playfish sold to Electronic Arts for about $300 million. Another, Playdom, is rumored to be in acquisition talks with Disney. FarmVille parent company Zynga, the biggest of them all, is the subject of about a thousand rumors of an initial public offering that may turn out to bear fruit--it's raised more than $400 million in financing, after all--or may ultimately be as fictitious as cow tipping.
Zynga, around the time of the industry dissatisfaction that became evident during the Game Developers Conference, asserted that it has "the utmost respect for independent developers and their talents." And to be fair, as far as the sophistication of barnyard-themed games go, FarmVille is a few notches above merely throwing a sheep--with social-network gaming platforms mostly fewer than four years old, there are still many opportunities for increased complexity and new ways to tempt and tug at Facebook's social patchwork of more than 500 million users. That hasn't dissuaded independent game developers who believe that it's using tactics that are at best uncreative and tacky, at worst sleazy and thuggish in the name of sheer profit, like a step backward in the evolution of the games industry. With the advent of Cow Clicker, FarmVille now has its own "Animal Farm."
But the satirical commentary is meant to still be light and probably doesn't need to be pried on the level of an advanced-placement high school English class' analysis of an Orwell novel. When informed that "Mooney" is, in addition to the name of Cow Clicker's silly currency, also the surname of the FarmVille general manager at Zynga, Bogost said it was a "startling coincidence."
Contrary to popular prediction, the Kindle isn't ready to be kindling just yet.
(Credit: CC: Flickr user Mynameisharsha)The second-quarter earnings that Amazon.com announced Thursday weren't quite up to par with what Wall Street had been hoping. But Wall Street had been hoping for good things, and the results were still pretty decent. One of the areas of growth worth highlighting the most for Amazon was all things Kindle--the e-reader device, and the huge marketplace of digital books available for it as well as for apps on third-party devices like Apple's iPhone and iPad and the Android mobile operating system.
In the earnings announcement Thursday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos characterized the Kindle system as an area of the company defined by "rapid growth."
Pardon the corny "Fahrenheit 451" nod, but right around when the iPad became a huge sensation a lot of people were expecting that the Kindle would soon be, well, kindling. The pricier iPad is far more functional, is stocked with an App Store of beautifully designed games, news readers, and other bits of developer magic, and it's even got a Kindle bookstore rival in the Apple iBooks app. And, perhaps most importantly, it's an Apple device. It's powered by Steve Jobs and his magical marketing machine; no offense to Jeff Bezos, but he can't hold a candle.
And the iPad has been a seriously huge success, and a surprise in itself because a whole lot of people had scoffed at the device's initial debut with "it's just a big iPod Touch." A total of 300,000 were sold in the first day when the iPad hit stores this spring, and in that same time 100 million apps and--more relevant to Amazon's success--250,000 e-books were downloaded.
But the Kindle numbers have proven truly impressive too. A few days before its earnings release went out, Amazon announced that more Kindle titles are sold than hardcover books now: in the past three months, 143 Kindle books were sold for every 100 hardcover books, and in the past month individually, it was 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books. Amazon says that free Kindle books, including the 1.8 million public-domain titles that are no longer copyrighted, were not included in those figures.
So what has Amazon done to save itself? Well, the array of third-party apps that Amazon has released mean that Kindle titles can be read on the iPhone and iPad, Android-compatible phones, BlackBerry handsets, and desktop computers, and once a customer has bought a title once, it can be read on any of the devices. (It still can't be shared with friends, though, something that e-reader pessimists point out.) In effect, it's freed the Kindle brand from the Kindle device, making the purchase of its e-books more flexible and more open-ended. Kindle titles are also generally a few dollars cheaper than those in Apple's iBooks store, and the selection is broader to begin with.
Amazon also dropped the price of the Kindle this summer to $189 from $259 (granted, Barnes and Noble had just dropped the price of its Nook e-reader to $199). With the iPad priced at $499-plus, the Kindle is now firmly in a completely different price bracket.
This could change, of course. Consumer thirst for all things iPad could continue to escalate, especially if there are price drops, hardware upgrades, or new improvements to the iBooks store. So Amazon shouldn't get complacent--especially since these second-quarter results weren't what Wall Street had hoped they'd be.
But still. Kindle books, it seems, are not yet worth burning.
Let's be honest: none of us was expecting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's landmark ABC World News interview with Diane Sawyer on Wednesday night--coincided with the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social-networking giant's announcement of 500 million active users around the world--to drop any serious bombs.
Not only is Zuckerberg notoriously, even proudly noncolorful, he's also proven remarkably astute in his ability to stay quite stoic in the face of press interrogation. He's not one of those over-the-top CEOs who likes to throw wild claims around and talk big about himself publicly. When he was grilled onstage at the D conference this spring, the news wasn't what he said, it was the fact that he got really nervous and started sweating.
Oh, and that he wore a funny sweatshirt.
ABC's PR team sent out a press blast in the minutes before "World News" aired, containing some of Zuckerberg's most newsworthy quotations from the piece. Indeed, it was the first time that anybody got him on the record remarking about the recent lawsuit on behalf of a New York man who says that he's entitled to 84 percent of Facebook and the fact that a Facebook lawyer said that the company was "unsure" whether Zuckerberg had ever signed a contract with the man in question.
"If we said that we were unsure, I think that was likely taken out of context, because I think we were quite sure that we did not sign a contract that says that they have any right to ownership over Facebook," the 26-year-old Zuckerberg said to Sawyer.
The poster for Columbia Pictures' 'The Social Network,' which stars actor Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Beyond that, there wouldn't have been much that was surprising to, say, anyone who picked up David Kirkpatrick's "The Facebook Effect," which contains an astonishing amount of detail about Facebook's formation as told by Zuckerberg. More than anything, this was a primer for people who may know Facebook only as the place where they share their backyard barbecue photos and tend to their virtual aquariums, and don't know much about the people behind it.
In her introductory remarks to ABC World News Sawyer called Zuckerberg "elusive" and "the force behind a revolution" and its 500 million member milestone "something historic," all of which is true. ABC correspondent Bill Weir spoke beforehand about how Facebook now amasses eight new users per second, and that its cultural power is rivaling Google despite that it has one-twentieth the size of its staff. And Sawyer explained its current challenges, like the University of Michigan survey that said Facebook earned "the kind of sour marks usually given to airlines or the IRS."
So, Zuckerberg's juicy commentary, or lack thereof? I'll pass over the general Facebook companyspeak of "there's this incredible movement on the Internet toward people being empowered to share what they want" and "when you give everyone a voice and give people power the system usually ends up in a really good place." Because that's just not all that notable.
Well, Sawyer asked him what it's like to be a billionaire. Zuckerberg said, "I'm not. The company is a private company, so I don't really have access to any money like that." Sawyer then asked him about a previous comment he'd allegedly said about wanting to own a jet. "I don't think I ever said that," was Zuckerberg's response. He declined to talk about just how much he earns and what kind of a stake he has in Facebook. "That's the advantage of being a private company," he said with an uncomfortable chuckle.
He's awfully good at understatement.
Did he screw things up? Would he have done things differently a second time around? "I started this site when I was 19. I didn't know much about business," Zuckerberg said. "The things that you learn along the way are what makes you who you are...I would have done a lot of things differently. I hope that instead of making the mistakes that I made, I would have made different mistakes." And he said that "we've made mistakes for sure" with regard to user privacy, one of the company's ongoing hot-button issues.
Sawyer asked him, "Do you hate interviews?" Zuckerberg laughed, and said, "I like that you just said that with a completely straight face."
"ABC World News" then switched over to a couple of quick hits about the breaching whale that smacked into a sailboat in South Africa and then the bride-to-be who's "freaking out" because she's getting married in the same town on the same day as Chelsea Clinton and is concerned that all the security will mean her guests won't be able to get there. I wonder what her Facebook status has been saying.
And then it was back to Facebook's corporate culture, its cafeteria of free food, Guitar Hero lounges, and laundry service. Zuckerberg, it turns out, lives right down the street! "It's pretty simple," he said of his living arrangements. "It's a pretty small house. The most important thing for me is to be within walking distance of the office."
Wait! But in the very last line there was a shocking bit of news! Sawyer was asking Zuckerberg about the impending (and unauthorized) Facebook biopic "The Social Network"--whether he'd seen the trailer ("Someone showed me part of it") and whether he'd see the movie itself, which doesn't portray him particularly kindly ("I don't think so"), and then she asked him what he thought of Jesse Eisenberg, the actor who plays him i the movie.
"I've never met him, but he seems like a nice guy," Zuckerberg said of Eisenberg. "Actually, his cousin works here. His cousin is a designer here and we have meetings all the time...It's a small world." Whoa. Awkward.
And then "ABC World News" cut to the next show in the TV lineup, game show "Jeopardy." Which, come to think about it, is a TV show on which I would rather have seen Zuckerberg make an appearance.
