Webware

Finalists for Google's 10th Anniversary 10^100 contest will not be announced on Tuesday as originally planned. According to a post on Google's Official Blog, it's taking a little longer than expected to sort through the 150,000 submissions. The 100 finalists will instead be announced March 17th, which is a month and a half from now.

Despite the delay, Google has made no mention of whether this affects the April end date, when the five finalists who get to share in the $10 million funding pot will be revealed. The delayed user voting will bring the 100 finalists down to 25 from which the final five are chosen.

The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is one of those exclusive, highbrow affairs with a guest list tighter than your belt after a pie-eating contest. But social network MySpace is leveling out the playing field by partnering with the Wall Street Journal for a competition called "MySpace Journal," in which an aspiring "citizen journalist" will be awarded the chance to attend the summit later this month.

MySpace is now accepting video submissions in which entrants explain their reasons for wanting to attend and be a member of the Davos press corps. One winner, chosen by a panel of industry figureheads that includes pundit and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, will receive an all-expenses paid trip, a coveted press pass, and a blog on MySpace that will also be syndicated to The Wall Street Journal's Web site.

They probably don't attract the same demographic, but MySpace and the Journal have something big in common: Both are owned by the Rupert Murdoch-helmed media conglomerate News Corp.

MySpace might be better known for music promotion than international affairs, but the social network showed off its civic colors quite a bit during last fall's presidential campaign. A similar "citizen journalism" competition was conducted in partnership with NBC, and a series of candidate dialogues were broadcast in conjunction with MTV.

To mark the United Nations' first-ever International Day of Democracy, the U.S. State Department launched a YouTube-based video contest on Monday.

Called the Democracy Video Challenge, the contest encourages the submission of three-minute videos that define the concept of democracy.

"The Democracy Video Challenge asks budding filmmakers, democracy advocates, and the general public to create video shorts that complete the phrase, 'Democracy is...'," the contest's official Web site explains. While they don't require entrants to be professional filmmakers, it's pretty clear that they're looking for something more high-end than sitting in front of your Webcam and waxing philosophical about Barack Obama.

Submissions will be accepted through January 31, and a jury will select semifinalists and then finalists. Seven winners, each one from a different global region, will be chosen by a public vote sometime in June. The winners will receive trips to New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles for screenings and meetings with film industry representatives and "democracy advocates."

There are very few rules: entrants must be 18 or older; the videos must be under three minutes long, "suitable for a general audience," comply with YouTube's terms of use, and either be in English or subtitled in English.

Partners in the contest include NBC Universal, the film schools at New York University and the University of Southern California, and the Directors Guild of America.

Facebook is moving to the next step of its $10 million FBFund developer grant program, the company announced Friday in a blog post by employee Catherine Lee. The first round, announced early in August, is now closed, and 25 winning proposals will be announced on September 22; 5 final winners will be chosen out of all first-round winners who apply for the second round, and winners will wind up with grant money between $25,000 and $250,000.

"Our team has been busy reviewing each submission and we're amazed and excited by what we've seen," Lee wrote. "We're blown away by the remarkable amount of creativity, dedication, and hard work put into each application. The competition is intense!"

FBFund was first devised by Facebook last year, with cash provided by company investors Accel Partners and the Founders Fund, as a way to encourage developers to create high-quality applications for its platform. It hit an early snag, however, when Facebook abruptly voided existing applicants and asked that they re-apply while agreeing to a new set of fine print. FBFund's initial round gave away 10 developer grants, which were announced at the company's F8 conference in July. But those applications--which include wedding planner ConnectedWeddings, game creator HotBerry, and carpool organizer Zimride--were not selected in a contest process.

Several applicants for this year's round of FBFund have made their pitches available on the Web: e-commerce gifting service Real Gifts, contacts management system Socialfly, and greeting card creator GroupCard.

There's going to be an Elvis karaoke contest on MySpace. That is not a joke. I can't seem to figure out whether it's trying to market Elvis to a younger generation or MySpace to an older one--or if it's just for kicks.

The News Corp.-owned social network, best known for attracting a demographic for whom the King has always been dead, announced Monday that it will be hosting an official Elvis karaoke competition for "Elvis Week 2008," which runs from August 9 to 17. It's in partnership with Elvis Presley Enterprises, and members can enter through August 4 by submitting videos of Elvis song performances to MySpace's karaoke site. Elvis Presley Enterprises, for that matter, has launched an official MySpace page as well.

The winner gets to perform live onstage at Elvis' historic Graceland home, backed by entertainers who actually performed with Elvis himself. Ten second-place winners get a DVD of Viva Las Vegas as well as some variety of MP3 player loaded with Elvis songs. Third-place prizes, of which there are 20, are one-year memberships to an "Official Elvis Insiders" club.

The contest is a singing one, not an impersonation one, but I'm presuming there will be plenty of video entrants decked out in sunglasses and gold-studded leather jackets. Let's hope they welcome contest entrants in Elvis regalia a little more warmly than they do with the media.

When I was a kid, youth-voting organization Rock the Vote teamed up with MTV when it wanted to reach young audiences. But in the 21st century, it's MySpace: the News Corp.-owned social network has announced a contest called 'DemROCKracy,' in which bands that use the site as a promotional tool are invited to encourage their fans to register to vote.

Here's how it works: from now through August 14, bands with profiles on MySpace can install a tool on their pages that lets their fans register to vote. The first 25 bands to have 150 people register to vote through the tool will have their music featured in custom playlists on TouchTunes digital jukeboxes--you know, the kind you see in bars--and then the grand prize winner will get to be the opening act at Rock the Vote's "Ballot Bash" concert at the Democratic National Convention in Denver on August 25. They'll also get some new guitars courtesy of Gibson.

Despite the fact that the show is at the Democratic convention, both Rock the Vote and MySpace's political arm say they are nonpartisan.

MySpace is hoping the contest will spark the interest of some of the many small-time bands that have a presence on the site and have used it to build up loyal fan bases. "Not only will the competition link MySpace's thriving music division with an active and successful field effort but it will also offer small bands, a core constituency of MySpace, the chance to open up for top talent," Lee Brenner, executive producer of political programming and director of the "Impact" political channel on MySpace, said in a release Tuesday. "This competition with Rock the Vote is furthering the democratization of music and the ability of bands to engage their fans through MySpace."

Registering to vote and actually showing up at the polls are two very different things. But since last year, MySpace has been stepping up the effort on youth voting and political awareness as the 2008 election draws closer: the most recent projects have been a reporting contest gearing up for the conventions, in conjunction with MSNBC; an election site powered by NBC; and regular member polls pertaining to politics.

I have had it with this Twitter situation. I know it's a free service, and I know that a lot of you are frankly sick of hearing about it, but I cannot keep pretending that Twitter is the savior of the modern Internet, the message-bearing standard of Web 2.0, and the most important thing to happen to online communication since Gopher, when the site itself is only slightly more reliable than a late-model Saab. And I'm sorry, but being down all the time is not excused by the fact that people who think they're cool think Twitter is cool. Therefore, I would like to hereby officially announce the Totally Unofficial Build a Better Twitter Contest.

The premise: What other tool do you use in your life that's unusable almost as often as it's usable? And how is that acceptable? For months now, Twitter users have been asking what's going on with the service, and why it's down so often. Andrew Baron created an art gallery about it. By February, the headlines read Twitter Down; Sky is Blue. In more scientific reporting, Pingdom ranked Twitter dead last in social networking uptime from January through April. How bad was it? Twitter was down more than 37 hours in four months. And that's compared to social networks with many multiples more users than Twitter. The biggest of them all, MySpace, was down just one hour and five minutes in the same period. Now we've even got Is Twitter Down, that will let you know if you should even bother. Currently, no surprise, it's:

Is Twitter down?

That's embarrassing. And Twitter can't seem to fix the problem or even communicate why it's a problem at all. I don't want to bash Twitter, and I have enjoyed my time there when I wasn't beating my head against the wall with rage at its internal server errors. I know we all have a lot of community goodwill toward Biz and Ev, and I'm not trying to be nasty. It's just that I don't see a lot of clear signs from Twitter that it's taking the problem seriously or working on some real solutions. In a product based on communication, they're just not doing a great job of communicating. Hence, the contest. Someone, please, build a better Twitter.

Now, before I went shooting my mouth off about this, I consulted some actual software engineers (who wish to remain anonymous) about whether this could be done. One said, of course, "you can architect a better system." One acknowledged that, "knowing what I do about how it's set up, I think it'd be damn hard to keep that m******r up." However, he agreed that scaling Twitter in its current form is "non-trivial," because Ruby on Rails, as Twitter developer Alex Payne himself noted, is easy to develop with, but hasn't ever proven particularly scaleable. So, OK, Twitter underestimated scaleability. It wouldn't be the first time, right? But yet another of my experts noted that you can build a better Twitter. He said, "It requires memcached, or some other open source cache...it would take hours to do. Hours!"

So, I'm thinking someone out there has some hours to devote to this, and I am hoping you will do just that. As motivation, I pledge the following, totally unofficial and un-endorsed by CNET (or CBS) not-really-prizes prizes:

I will go there, for a test period of not more than 30 days, and I will beg all of my followers to join me for this test period (as of this writing, a nice round 6,700). My colleague, Tom Merritt, says he'll go there, too, and hopefully bring his followers along for the scalability test. I'll ask everyone else I know on Twitter to come along (I'm talking to you, Leo Laporte), and we'll see if it's really as hard as all that to build a Twitter that can stand up to the awesome pressure of being Twitter.

I will also throw in a motley collection of MP3-player accessories, a CNET windbreaker, some CNET stickers, and an autographed photo of the CNET personality of your choice, all not to exceed whatever value it is that triggers The Lawyers. Plus, if it works, you'll probably make bajillions of dollars. Or, at least, you would if there were any discernible business model for Twitter. You should probably try to think of that, too. Get to coding!

Something about this just makes me uneasy.

Bragster, a London-based site "for dares and social bets," announced Wednesday that it has secured $3.5 million in Series A venture cash. The funding round was led by none other than Intel Capital, the investment branch of the famed chipmaker.

The premise of the Digg-meets-Jackass-esque site is that members dare one another (or place open dares) to perform ridiculous feats, then insist on video evidence that they were completed. Bragster, co-founded by a former Morgan Stanley employee and an Amazon.com alum, provides prizes to some of the most over-the-top stunts and also sponsors contests like the "Undies at Uni Challenge," which appears to encourage college students to take their clothes off.

So what are some of the top bets and challenges on Bragster? One member has dared another to "slap someone around the face with a fish in a supermarket." O.K., I'd like to see that, however inappropriate it may be. Same thing with "dress like a Spartan and run around in the street shouting lines from the movie 300." Others, like "pour 2 mugs of boiling hot coffee on my laptop," start to make me uneasy. Call me old-fashioned, but somebody could get hurt. At least Johnny Knoxville occasionally informed his viewers that they shouldn't imitate him at home.

Then there's "I bet I can do 15 shots of tequila in 60 minutes." Um, that's called "really dangerous." I hope Bragster has good lawyers.

Hook 'em while they're young and impressionable.

Such is the general idea behind a contest Google announced Wednesday designed to get students who haven't yet begun college or university interested in open-source programming. Contest tasks will focus not just on programming, but also on documentation, research, outreach, quality assurance, training, translation, and user interface work, Google said.

Various open-source organizations, including the Apache Software Foundation, GNOME, Joomla, and Mono, are providing the tasks. "We hope that students who participate will be long-term contributors to these and other open source projects in the future," Google said in a statement.

I don't see any contests around to introduce budding programmers to the concept of proprietary software, but courting coders is nothing new for the industry overall. Microsoft built a powerful business out of its Windows operating system in part by working hard to keep programmers engaged.

The contest awards cash, T-shirts, and a trip to Google, according to a posting on the Google Code Blog announcing the contest. Students must be at least 13 years old.

Google also has been trying to involve college students through its Summer of Code program, which began three years ago.