Ashton Kutcher at the Brainstorm conference earlier this year
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News)Everybody panic!
Seemingly unable to let any hot social media start-up escape his hunky clutches, it appears that actor and prolific Twitter oversharer Ashton Kutcher is now using where-you-at, ping-your-friends city guide app Foursquare. A tipster pointed me to a Foursquare account for user "aplusk," the same handle that Kutcher uses on Twitter for his 3 million-plus followers.
Is it real? Well, his friends include Digg founder (and occasional bromancer) Kevin Rose, videoblogging personality Justine Ezarik, and "mrskutcher," which is the Twitter username for his wife, actress Demi Moore. Since Foursquare requires mutual approval of friend connections, this would indicate that the likes of Rose and Moore believe the account to be legit. And since Kutcher's Twitter account is linked to the Foursquare profile, which requires using the Twitter log-in credentials, it's either legit or Kutcher's Twitter account has been hacked. (And there have been no indications as to the latter.)
So why is this important? Well, it could be pretty momentous for Foursquare if Ashton Kutcher sticks around.
All joking aside, the 31-year-old Kutcher has been a prominent, and admittedly important figure when it comes to bringing social-media tools into the mainstream. His race to beat CNN to 1 million Twitter followers (he won) was one of the publicity blitzes that put the name of the microblogging service on the pop-culture map. Foursquare, a tiny New York-based start-up that launched only six months ago out of the ashes of the ill-fated Dodgeball and still hasn't wrapped up a round of venture funding (though I hear they're working on it) could really get a boost from this--assuming their servers are ready for it.
But it also raises an important security question. Unless they're using Foursquare to broadcast their locations for promotional purposes (as some party photographers and DJs in NYC are already doing, and it'd be certainly interesting if Kutcher did something like this), celebrities using any kind of GPS-based or geolocation app could be making themselves vulnerable to varying degrees of annoyance ranging from pesky fans with cameras to full-on stalking. It could also make Foursquare an appealing target for hackers.
But I assume Kutcher, who seems like a pretty smart guy, will be careful with who he lets onto his friends list. Now for the real question: how long before he unlocks a "Crunked" badge?
UPDATE (1:06 p.m. PT): Just to clarify, a few people were under the impression Kutcher had already deleted his Foursquare account. That was actually due to a broken link in this blog post; Kutcher is, for the time being, still on Foursquare. (My bad.)
On a completely different note, I recommend reading this follow-up post on branding consultant Matt Spangler's blog about what Ashton Kutcher means for Foursquare.
Memo to Twitter: If you're really going to be making money with sponsored direct messages, as a New York Times article hints, please make sure it doesn't get annoying.
Twitter investor Todd Chaffee of Institutional Venture Partners told the Times that "e-commerce, including links to products and turnkey payment mechanisms, is a likely revenue stream for Twitter." That's not too surprising. Some companies have touted real success with Twitter-only deals: electronics manufacturer Dell, for example, says it's racked up a few million in sales. Airlines JetBlue and Southwest sometimes advertise special fares on Twitter. It's pretty logical that Twitter would want a slice of this; the catch for the company's team would be how to charge for this sort of thing without taking away features that are already offered for free.
The bigger challenge, however, is not making it annoying. The other day I posted to Twitter about difficulties with my iPhone. I appreciated getting responses from people who were able to inform me that all I had to do to keep my iPhone from skipping songs was to turn off the "shake to shuffle" feature that's new in the iPhone 3.0 software, but I'm not sure if I would want quasi-unsolicited offers from tech support outlets or the like popping up as direct messages in my Twitter feed. Twitter would have to tread very carefully if it plans to be this intrusive--many people receive direct messages as SMS, for example.
Now, there's reason to take the whole thing with a grain of salt, because "sponsored messages" are just the latest potential Twitter business model we've heard about from people affiliated with the service. Last we heard, Twitter was going to be offering some kind of analytics or customer relations management suite for businesses that want to use it more effectively. There have been whispers about search ads, too.
So maybe, when it comes to business plans, Twitter is pretty much throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. Especially since Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams left a comment on a Business Insider post about Chaffee's remarks that make the whole thing seem much less likely.
"To be clear: Todd is a Twitter investor and a very smart and helpful guy," Williams wrote. "However, he is not actually on Twitter's board and, in this article, he's brainstorming on his own. These are not in the least bit concrete plans of the company."
But if we want to turn to the "juicy gossip" side of things, consider this: Twitter's executives have been very laissez-faire about allowing the users to shape the service before determining the best way to make money off it. Seems like its investors might not be in the same camp.
John Mayer's deep thoughts on Twitter.
(Credit: Twitter)So I once went on a movie date with a guy who thought it was sort of weird that I posted to Twitter about the movie in mid-date. In retrospect, it probably was weird, and a bit rude, and I wouldn't do it again (and no, there was no second date). But get a load of this one.
Sources quoted in Star magazine and rehashed by the U.K.'s Telegraph (we can tell this anonymous source is just rock solid) claim that the highly publicized relationship between pop singer John Mayer and actress Jennifer Aniston fizzled because of the evil forces of...Twitter!
"People claiming to be friends of (Aniston) have told Star magazine that she finished the affair after discovering Mayer, 31, spent hours on the networking website, despite telling her he was too busy to get in touch with her," the Telegraph report alleged.
Mayer has become an extremely avid user of the microblogging service (username is @johncmayer), along with fellow celebrities like basketball player Shaquille O'Neal, comedians Jimmy Fallon and John Hodgman, and actor Ashton Kutcher (who famously got his wife, actress Demi Moore, to join Twitter as well).
But now it looks like the celebrity Twitterers may be getting a glimpse of what many of us in the tech industry know already: Chronicling your life in constant 140-character updates doesn't leave much wiggle room once you've gotten used to always telling the world what you're doing. I'm sure more than a few people have gotten in trouble because they Twittered about watching sports at a bar when they'd informed their bosses that they were holed up in bed with the flu.
A concluding note to John Mayer: Look on the bright side. At least this time the tabloids aren't blaming a breakup on infidelity, drug addiction, or the failure to disclose a venereal disease. I know plenty of nice, smart girls who wouldn't mind a Twitter-addicted beau.
Most folks don't want to admit it, so I'll lead the charge: I can't get enough of celebrity gossip sites.
Each day, I'll surf to my favorites and find out everything I wanted to know about Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and other celebs. It's my guilty pleasure. And by the looks of things, especially if we are to believe a post written by Perez Hilton's founder, which claims his site had 13.9 million page views Monday, I'm not alone.
So let's take a look at some of the prominent celebrity gossip sites across the Web and find out why they're so intriguing.
Defamer
Although Defamer was originally a separate entity under the Gawker Media umbrella, the company's founder and CEO, Nick Denton, announced recently that the site would become a section on Gawker.com to streamline business operations. And although it's not the most popular of the celebrity gossip sites, it's still worth visiting.
The content on Defamer is interesting, but I've found that it tends to be a little late in its reporting, and it's not nearly as compelling as sites like TMZ or Perez Hilton. In fact, despite its name, Defamer is decidedly "nicer" than the competition, and its tries to be more news-oriented than some sites that simply post pictures and comment on the way a particular celebrity looks.
I don't mind that Defamer has chosen to go that way, but as a major Perez Hilton fan, I enjoy the occasional snark.
Perez Hilton
If you haven't been to Perez Hilton to find out all the juicy details on A-list celebs like Angelina Jolie or D-list celebs like LC (Lauren Conrad) from "The Hills," you probably haven't spent enough time on the Web. Believe it or not, this site is, in its own strange way, a Web institution.
Rather than posting videos, a la TMZ, Perez Hilton boasts some of the funniest and most eye-popping stories on celebrities anywhere on the Web. The site is filled with pictures Perez finds of celebrities living their daily lives, which are then edited to include mean-spirited or (at times) nice comments. That said, many of the edits made to the pictures by Perez are adult in nature, so it's best if you read this blog when the kids are asleep.
Perez Hilton has been around for years, and the site's founder, Mario Lavandeira Jr., is one of the most hated people in Hollywood. He doesn't mince any words, and his blog posts, while short, are biting and shoot straight from the hip.
Unlike sites like Defamer, Perez often breaks big stories and has shots of celebrities hours before other gossip sites. Because Perez Hilton is the biggest site in the space, Lavandeira has been cited in a slew of lawsuits, and some celebrities criticize him, saying he goes easy on some and unnecessarily hard on others. He claims that he's tough on everyone.
Regardless, Perez Hilton is a must-see for celebrity watchers. The blog posts are sometimes serious, often funny, and always entertaining.
... Read moreSAN FRANCISCO--John Battelle, CEO of Federated Media, decided to have a little bit of speculative fun onstage Thursday with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 Summit. It's the sort of "speculative fun" that could give tech bloggers a gossip-overload headache for weeks to come: Battelle decided to throw some fuel on the "Facebook might buy Twitter" fire. Which, as far as I can tell, is a relatively new addition to the rumor-roasting pit.
"Is Twitter just a feature of Facebook?" Battelle prodded. Facebook, after all, has its own "status" feature that arguably competes with micro-blogging services like Twitter and FriendFeed.
Zuckerberg answered cryptically. "Oh, that's tough."
Battelle then asked if Facebook's chief financial officer, Gideon Yu (yes, the one who's reportedly hunting for venture capital dollars in Dubai right now, depending on who you ask) has a "build-or-buy spreadsheet" on the wall of his office, jokingly implying that the company could be weighing the option of acquiring Twitter to boost its own "update" service. There wouldn't be a particularly logical way for the two to integrate, but what the heck? It's juicy, unfounded gossip ripe for the mongering! And once these things start, they can get deliciously out of hand.
The young CEO laughed it off, and said he's "really impressed by what they've done" at Twitter, and that it's "a very elegant model." He added that Twitter has signed on to the Facebook Connect data portability initiative.
Zuckerberg himself, unlike contemporaries like Digg's Kevin Rose and WordPress' Matt Mullenweg, does not use Twitter publicly. A handful of blogs have reported that he has a friends-only account with a tightly monitored friends list. But that, like so much else in this industry, appears to still be a rumor.
Spleak widgets can be customized and embedded into other social network profiles.
Spleak Media Network, the San Francisco-based start-up focused on creating "interactive content communities," announced Tuesday morning that it would be moving into three new content categories: fashion, television, and games.
Spleak's concept is a bit unusual: users read, rate, and create content entirely via instant messaging platforms (AIM, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk), though there's also an opportunity to embed a Spleak widget into your MySpace or Facebook page. The content--in 250 characters or less--comes from readers and from Spleak's official content partners, such as CosmoGirl and Fox Sports. Users can vote each element up or down, with the most popular tidbits floating to the top.
Today's launch includes StyleSpleak, which focuses on fashion trends and tips as well as designer news; TVSpleak, where fans can read about TV shows and characters; and GameSpleak, where users can share game news, strategies, and cheats. The new sites join existing communities centered around sports, politics, and celebrity gossip (which we covered late last year).
More content areas are forthcoming, as is a plan to make money off the content with ads, interactive games, and quizzes.
Buzznet, the social network whose CEO told CNET News.com in April that he'd like to build "the next Viacom," has launched a sister site: Celebuzz, a community for enthusiasts of celebrity news and gossip. It's been in private beta for some time now.
Already dominated by the likes of Perez Hilton, Popsugar, and the AOL-owned TMZ.com, celebrity gossip is a niche of the Web that some might say doesn't need another outlet. But Celebuzz general manager Karina Kogan told CNET News.com that it doesn't matter. Research showed that celebrity gossip fans are more than happy to use "more than one source to get the same exact story. They're interested in different points of view, and frankly, they're happy to look at the same photo ten times, just in different settings."
She also asserted that Celebuzz offers something new. "There is no community dedicated to celebrity out there," Kogan said. "There are news aggregators, there are blogs, but there is no community for the celebrity fans."
(Credit:
Celebuzz)
Celebuzz features a full-out social network with user-created content in addition to editorial content coming from in-house reporters, partner bloggers, paparazzi photo agencies, celebrities themselves, and "expert panelists" like celebrities' personal trainers and plastic surgeons. At launch, Kogan said, it's already the "fourth-largest celebrity site on the Internet, period," following People.com, TMZ, and Yahoo's OMG.
Buzznet itself focuses on music, but had already inked "deep partnerships" (read: borderline acquisitions) with celebrity gossip blogs Just Jared and A Socialite's Life. The two social networks are not yet interoperable, but Kogan said that's on the way.
Still, she said, they're meant to be kept separate. "We definitely don't want to shove celebrity media down the throats of music fans," Kogan explained.
Sex. Money. Incriminating instant messages. From the news that's been pouring in recently, you'd think Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales were the tech industry's own Client No. 9.
In a series of embarrassing peccadilloes that were originally relegated to gossip blogs like Valleywag, Wales' failed relationship with former Fox News commentator Rachel Marsden took center stage when Marsden "leaked" some of their online chats to the Web and made quite the public display of auctioning some of his clothes on eBay. The usual blog storm followed: photos of other women with whom Wales had reportedly been involved, hints that he may have acted inappropriately in editing Wikipedia entries to scrub details of the scandal, and what have you.
But with all eyes on the Wikipedia founder, other allegations have come into play, and they don't have anything to do with sex. First, there were reports that Wales misused foundation funds; now his ties with a high-profile Silicon Valley venture capitalist are calling into question Wikipedia's nonprofit aims. The New York Times notes a $500,000 donation to the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's parent organization, on behalf of Elevation Partners' Roger McNamee, with another $500,000 in the works. (Elevation Partners is the venture firm that counts U2 front man Bono as one of its founding partners.)
Considering McNamee's status in the Valley, it's easy to speculate that these massive donations could constitute an investment rather than a donation. That's bound to raise more prominent eyebrows than a trashy sex scandal. McNamee told the Times, "I am a Wikipedia volunteer--I help with strategy, fundraising and business development--it has nothing to do with Elevation Partners. And no one should be confused about that."
A representative from the Wikimedia Foundation told CNET News.com that it has not released an official statement addressing the speculation about McNamee's involvement. But Wikimedia Foundation chair Florence Nibart-Devouard said to the Times that she was "not comfortable with the concept" of the nonprofit accepting massive funds from donors best-known as capital investors, and the article went on to say that the foundation's board has passed a measure requiring approval for all donations that total over 2 percent of Wikimedia's revenues.
But despite the shift of "Jimbogate" concerns from personal to professional indiscretions, the musky tinge of sex-scandal still hangs over it. The latest, per Valleywag, involves a tipster who implied that Wales had a tryst in Amsterdam with Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner, who has remained one of his staunchest supporters throughout the controversy. It appears to be thoroughly unsubstantiated at this point, but the Valleywag blogger hinted that camera phone photos existed.
Even juicier, the tipster just had to bring Amsterdam, home to what's arguably the world's most famous red-light district as well as notoriously lax regulations on some substances that are frowned upon in the U.S., into the equation. It's all starting to read like the script of a made-for-TNT movie.
Eliot Spitzer, this Silicon Valley dirt might be one-upping you.
On Friday, a rumor surfaced that Facebook would be launching an internal instant-messaging service . Then, on Saturday, gossip blog Valleywag suggested that launching the IM service would involve acquiring Social.IM, a Facebook application that enables instant message chat between services like AIM, Yahoo, and Windows Live Messenger. A Social.IM exec coyly told Valleywag, "If we're being bought, I haven't gotten the call yet."
Social.IM's coy tease at getting acquired by Facebook.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)Social.IM is supported by venture backing from Valley icon Peter Thiel, who also has invested in Facebook.
One thing Valleywag didn't note is that in response to the rumor on Friday, Social.IM representatives had posted to their blog a fake IM conversation between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and a Social.IM representative. The dialogue consisted solely of that famous exchange between Star Wars' Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in which Vader (Zuckerberg) attempts to coerce Skywalker (Social.IM) to join the Dark Side.
On Saturday afternoon, the blog post was pulled from Social.IM. Perhaps that's because the undertones of the faux-conversation indeed hint at an acquisition, or at least joke about the possibility of one.
"You have only begun to discover your power," the Vader-Zuckerberg character reads. "Join me, and I will complete your training. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy."
(Poor, misunderstood Darth Vader. Sounds like all he ever really wanted was to help the world communicate more efficiently.)
MySpace has unveiled a new MySpace Celebrity site devoted to entertainment culture, which is slated to launch in full on the News Corp.-owned social network on Thursday. The portal will feature news (including gossip aggregated from People magazine's Web site), blogs, and multimedia content pertaining to already-big and fast-rising names in acting, music, comedy, sports, and Page Six notoriety.
MySpace already operates several other 'channels' of aggregated content, including the Impact political channel and an upcoming casual gaming page.
Content on MySpace Celebrity goes beyond gossip, encompassing news about celebrities' charitable endeavors and behind-the-scenes antics on the job. Perhaps most useful, MySpace Celebrity has an index of official celebrity MySpace profiles--more than 300 at launch. As many avid MySpace users know, fake and unofficial celebrity profile pages are a dime a dozen on the social network, and this ideally can create a way to weed those out.
"MySpace Celebrity is Hollywood's new home page," MySpace President and co-founder Tom Anderson said in a statement from the company. "Celebrities have been using MySpace since the site's launch and it's a natural extension for us to now offer them an aggregated channel where they can be in control of their own image...We want MySpace users to connect with celebrities in the same way that they do with musicians."
That's a lofty goal. Long before the News Corp. buyout, MySpace gained heavy buzz as a hub for discovering independent music, and it still continues that role today. There's not quite a perfect analogy to be drawn between an independent band eager to showcase its talent and an outlet for Jessica Alba to promote her latest movie.
Besides, the entertainment news niche is already fully saturated online with the likes of Perez Hilton, Popsugar, the online outlets of magazines like Entertainment Weekly, and the AOL-owned TMZ.com--which grew so big on the Web that it turned to network television.
On the other hand, MySpace has shown that it knows entertainment. As the social-networking leader still struggles to catch up to smaller rival Facebook in terms of technology and networking tools, branding itself as a central point for Web-based pop culture has helped differentiate it. And so far, that's proven at least relatively successful.
