The Social

The Spore Creature Creator.

(Credit: Spore/Electronic Arts)

With all this hysteria about the pig sniffles, you'd think that an announcement about 100 million strange little organisms would be cause for alarm. That's not the case, however, when we're talking about the oddball life forms that players grow and control as part of video game Spore. The game created by industry legend Will Wright announced Monday that 100 million creatures have been created, far outrunning the number of species on Earth.

The game publisher, Electronic Arts, started counting last June. That's when it first released its Spore Creature Creator, several months ahead of the full Spore game itself.

There's more Spore on the way. Electronic Arts' Maxis studio is releasing the Spore Galactic Adventures expansion pack for PC and Mac players, Spore Hero for the Wii, and Spore Hero Arena for the Nintendo DS. The player who created the 100 millionth Spore creature now has a chance to win a copy of Spore Galactic Adventures as well as a souped-up PC graphics card.

Last month, Will Wright announced his departure from Electronic Arts. Wright, who soared to the heights of video game fame with Sim City and The Sims, has said that his new project is an "electronic think tank" that goes by the interesting name of Stupid Fun Club.

There aren't many new companies launching at this year's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, which runs Tuesday through Friday. One of the few that are is Lunch.com, which strives to get a little more juice out of user-generated publishing.

Here's the premise of Lunch: You can review anything you want, from a TV show to a restaurant to a food product to a household appliance. I guess it aims to be, sort of, a Wikipedia for opinions. Founder J.R. Johnson, who started building the site after he sold previous creations VirtualTourist.com and OneTime.com to Expedia, said that Lunch started filling up its private beta by reaching out to frequent Amazon reviewers and received a very positive response.

You're also encouraged to network with other members and filter reviews through its "Similarity Network" function, an algorithm for finding like-minded users and matching them to one another. To ramp up Lunch's assessment of your preferences, you can play "speed-rating" games called Exhilarate, which are structured much like Netflix's recommendation feature.

Quite honestly, I have a hard time seeing people turn to a general reviews site when there are already well-established sites for reviews of businesses, books, movies, and the lot--not to mention a plethora of "social shopping" sites for consumer products. I feel like Lunch could've gained a lot more traction if it had made its debut two or three years ago, when user-generated content was a lot more noteworthy. But maybe that's just me.

Auditude, a video advertising company best known for technology that can identify clients' video content and run ads against it, has raised a $10.5 million Series B funding round from Redpoint Ventures and existing investor Greylock Partners. This brings the company's total funding to $23 million.

Last time we checked in with Auditude, the company had inked a deal with News Corp.'s MySpace and Viacom's MTV Networks to detect both official and user-uploaded MTV content on the social network's MySpaceTV platform. It was seen by many as a savvy antipiracy measure. Since then, Auditude has started powering a broader variety of video ads on MySpace and its MySpace Music product, as well as partnered with Warner Bros. Entertainment. More content deals are on the way, CEO Adam Cahan told CNET News.

"From our perspective, we are looking to work with everybody," Cahan said. "We are trying to tackle what I think is one of the biggest opportunities and challenges on the Internet right now, which is (that) tons of people are watching video, 80 percent of folks out there, and yet very few people are really making a business of this yet."

Redpoint partner Chris Moore will join Auditude's board of directors, which also includes former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta. A member of the short list for the top post at MySpace Music, Van Natta instead took the CEO role at rival streaming service Project Playlist.

A guy I know created an Elf Yourself video of his friends. Um, I'm on the bottom right.

(Credit: OfficeMax/JibJab, user-gen work by Peter Feld)

Because we need to ensure that silly do-it-yourself comedy will stay alive during these harrowing financial times, the magic venture capital fairies have infused JibJab.com with a $7.5 million Series C round. And by "magic venture capital fairies" I actually mean Overbrook Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and existing investor Polaris Venture Partners.

Founded in 1999 by brothers Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, JibJab started as a hub for funny political song-and-dance videos that the two created, but in 2007 the company began an e-card service called "Starring You!" in which visitors to the site could insert photos of themselves (or their bosses!) into geeky cartoon videos. For the '08 holiday season, JibJab partnered with office supply store OfficeMax for the third annual installment of those "Elf Yourself" greeting cards that I'm sure more than a few of you were sent. (See image for embarrassing example.)

JibJab says a whopping 35 million of its holiday greeting cards were sent across the Web this winter. That's a lot of elves.

JibJab forged a deal with CNN Politics around that time last year when everyone was either thinking about Halloween or the presidential election, launching a zombie politician video creator.

The site has a business model beyond advertising and sponsorship, thank goodness: some of its content is subscription-based, and JibJab also sells additional video. To keep an "Elf Yourself" video past the holidays, for example, you can pay to download it.

"We sensed that customers would pay for access to unique, high-quality entertainment that they could use to express themselves online," co-founder and CEO Gregg Spiridellis said in a release. "With this thesis well proven, and the capital from this financing now in place, we plan to aggressively innovate the online greetings category in the months and years ahead."

Hey, guys, I have a suggestion: recession-themed dance video greeting cards!

This post was updated on Friday at 7:26 a.m. PT to note OfficeMax's creation of "Elf Yourself," which is now presented by JibJab.

Anyone who's ever edited or created a Wikipedia entry can attest to the fact that it's not that self-explanatory. They're in luck--the nonprofit anyone-can-edit encyclopedia has received $890,000 from the Stanton Foundation in order to make it easier to use.

More specifically, the grant was given to the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that encompasses Wikipedia. It'll fund the hire of three new software developers in the foundation's San Francisco office. Then, per a press release, the team will "commission research to identify the most common barriers to entry for first-time writers, and then work to systematically reduce or eliminate them...hiding complex elements of the user interface from people who don't need them."

Wikipedia will make all new code open-source.

"Wikipedia attracts writers who have a moderate-to-high level of technical understanding, but it excludes lots of smart, knowledgeable people who are less tech-centric," Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner said in the release. "One of our key priorities is to attract those people and persuade them to help write and edit the encyclopedia. I am thrilled that the Stanton Foundation recognizes the importance of that work, and will be helping us with it."

Also a plus for a more user-friendly Wikipedia: Ideally, its millions of articles will have a broader depth of coverage. My colleague Declan McCullagh did an assessment last year of the skew toward geeky pop-culture content: the article for the mythological figure Vulcan, for example, is about one tenth as long as the article for the Vulcans of Star Trek fame.

The Stanton Foundation was founded by broadcast executive Frank Stanton, who served as president of CBS (which publishes CNET News) from 1946 to 1971.

Amazon has enlisted a half dozen of its most dedicated (addicted?) reviewers to act as holiday gift experts this season. They'll be responsible for providing gift picks, tips, and other advice regarding their favorite products available on the mega-retail site.

Putting a "real people" face on holiday shopping is key for Amazon in a season full of thin wallets and nervous spenders: research firm eMarketer just lowered its projections for online holiday shopping. Many of the tips provided by Amazon's reviewers, for obvious reasons, deal with cost-cutting recession strategies.

Amazon has offered customer reviews since 1995, and says that over 5 million people have submitted reviews so far. Its "Holiday Customer Review Team" members have between 367 and 1,483 reviews under their belt apiece.

The six chosen ones, in case you happen to live next door to any of them or anything, are: Mark Espinosa of Jersey City, N.J.; Debbie Lee Wesselmann of Allentown, Penn.; Marty Hogan of San Francisco; Zack Davisson of Seattle; Joseph Boone of Irvine, Calif.; and Ed Uyeshima of San Francisco.

Wow, way to ignore the "Real America," Amazon! What would Sarah Palin think?

Imagine seeing an ad on Facebook for a retailer like American Apparel or Target, and clicking a button to pass a 15-percent-off discount code to someone on your friends list. For advertisers looking to tap into the power of social networks, it sounds tantalizing.

That's the thinking behind "Engagement Ads," the new "experimental" advertising technology that social network Facebook unveiled last week. With the new program, members of Facebook can leave comments on participating ads, add the brands to their list of "fan pages," and use them to send friends virtual gifts. For the social network it's a small but important trial as it continues to combat the common wisdom that sites of its ilk can't survive on ad revenue.

But it's more vital for advertisers, who are eager to tap into the tech-savvy youth demographic that thrives on sites like YouTube and Facebook. "It's critical for (brands) to reach this market. They realize that," said Jeremiah Owyang, the Forrester Research analyst who announced Engagement Ads to the world on his blog last week.

But what Facebook calls "engagement ads" won't be the magical cure, because it simply won't work for most advertisers. Rather, it's a niche option that will probably lead to very successful campaigns for some brands--and high-profile blunders for others.

The reason why Engagement Ads aren't a universal solution is partially because it's tough to start with a little-known company and hope that Facebook users will be spurred to start playing with the ads. For a new movie, for example, the ad could play the trailer. But with other brands it's not so easy. "This is something new that kind of already requires awareness, because a lot of this is driven through peoples' perception of the product," said Dave Gentzel, co-founder of ad start-up SocialMedia, which praised the concept of Engagement Ads early on. In other words, it's tough to get the conversation started when no one's primed to talk about it.

"When you're sharing an affinity for something, it's kind of hard to grasp exactly what new products encompass without knowing what they already are," Gentzel said.

A new company or a brand that's not a household name will have a tough time jumping into the mix, but so will established companies that don't necessarily have public opinion on their side. Owyang suggested that those who fare best will be "brands that have heavy lifestyle affinities," or in non-industry speak, cult followings. That goes for luxury brands, automakers, and clothing lines; it wouldn't apply to brands for which conversations tend to consist of complaints, like cell phone carriers and airlines. (Unless that airline is, say, Southwest Airlines and manages to have eked out a cult following in spite of industry trends.)

Before signing on to something like Engagement Ads, companies need to have a grip on what the public--more specifically, the largely young and Web-savvy people using Facebook regularly--thinks about their products. The reasoning behind this caveat is that when a social advertising campaign falls, it falls hard and loud.

"Brands can't approach this as a one-off," Owyang said. "So thinking that they're going to do Engagement Ads, and that it's going to be success alone, isn't going to be sufficient." A social-media ad campaign can likewise help public perception, but that won't help much if there's already a vocal contingent that's willing to make the conversation take a turn for the worse.

A screenshot from one of the Chevy Tahoe user-generated ads that sparked a social-media disaster.

(Credit: General Motors)

The quintessential example of this is a 2006 promotion by General Motors in which the automaker encouraged fans to "mix" their own video ads for its Chevy Tahoe SUV. Environmentalists, many spurred by activist group ExxposeExxon, caught wind of the gimmick and promptly used it to create anti-global warming ads. Consequently, videos that read "Global warming isn't a pretty SUV ad. It's a frightening reality" were featured right there on the GM-created Web site.

Imagine a similar promotion inadvertently used to further conversations about sub-par restaurant service or dropped calls on a cell carrier, and you've got a bigger problem. But in GM's case, the ads stayed online. And Owyang said that GM's response of leaving the anti-SUV propaganda intact is one to be emulated. "The brands should roll with the negative feedback, and listen, and incorporate some of that feedback in their upcoming products," he explained. "The last thing they should do is shut the ads down."

SocialMedia's Gentzel said that this is a situation that most advertisers aren't familiar with and that debacles like the Tahoe ad campaign could make them more reluctant to dive in. "There's a large amount of social responsibility that comes into play here," he said. "When you're sharing people's opinions and associating them with certain things, it takes a personal attachment that hasn't been used in advertising before." In Engagement Ads, companies can't hand-pick the portfolio of satisfied customers to appear in its commercials; it's handing that duty over to Facebook's hyped "social graph," and there's no clear word on how positive the feedback will be.

Facebook could help on this front, Jeremiah Owyang said. "What they need to do is develop resources for the marketers that will help them be more confident," he explained. "Maybe (the company could) develop a marketing conference for marketers on Facebook. Their developer conference in San Francisco was huge. Why aren't they doing this for the brands?"

The take-home point, really, is that Facebook still considers Engagement Ads to be an "experiment," that the new marketing tool is a small part of an offering that is by no means fully developed, and that interested advertisers should know this. The company's last foray into cutting-edge ads, the "Beacon" program, was a disaster fueled by bad PR. A high-profile Engagement Ads flop--think Tahoe mishap--could be bad news for everyone.

"Facebook is throwing all kinds of pasta at the wall when it comes to marketing and to see what sticks," Owyang said. "They haven't figured it out, and unfortunately, they're using brands as the guinea pigs and their customers. They really have to make it clear to their community what works and what doesn't, and develop best practices sooner or later."

In the meantime, I'm happy to tell my Facebook friends to wait until The House Bunny comes out on DVD.

CNN is close to expanding its "iReport" user-generated reporting initiative into a separate Web site, MediaWeek wrote Monday.

The new site, to be hosted at iReport.com, will be a repository for user-submitted news content--video, audio, and photos. Visitors can navigate through categories of news (like sports, weather, and politics), rate content, and embed it elsewhere on the Web. Contributors will be able to create profiles, and regulars can build up individual followings. As for filtering, the new site will be moderated once content has already been posted to the site; this is a change from CNN's current strategy with iReport, in which only select contributions are posted to CNN's Web site. This obviously means that the news runs the risk of inaccuracies and pranksters, but one could assume that moderation as well as community interaction could keep the fake-news factor to a minimum.

Right now, hubs for "citizen journalism" on the Web include well-backed companies like Current Media, which recently filed for an IPO, as well as start-ups of varying size like NowPublic and GroundReport.

CNN first launched the iReport project in August 2006, and since then has received over 100,000 photo and video submissions, according to MediaWeek. In October, the Time Warner-owned news brand established a presence for the initiative in virtual world Second Life.