from Paul Smalera:
The piracy of online privacy
Online privacy doesn’t exist. It was lost years ago. And not only was it taken, we’ve all already gotten used to it. Loss of privacy is a fundamental tradeoff at the very core of social networking. Our privacy has been taken in service of the social tools we so crave and suddenly cannot live without. If not for the piracy of privacy, Facebook wouldn’t exist. Nor would Twitter. Nor even would Gmail, Foursquare, Groupon, Zynga, etc.
And yet people keep fretting about losing what’s already gone. This week, like most others of the past decade, has brought fresh new outrages for privacy advocates. Google, which a few weeks ago changed its privacy policy to allow the company to share your personal data across as many as 60 of its products, was again castigated this week for the changes. Except this time, the shouts came in the form of a lawsuit. The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the FTC to compel it to block Google’s changes, saying they violated a privacy agreement Google signed less than a year ago.
Elsewhere, social photography app Path was caught storing users’ entire iPhone address books on their servers and have issued a red-faced apology. (The lesser-known app Hipster committed the same sin and also offered a mea culpa.) And Facebook’s IPO has brought fresh concerns that Mark Zuckerberg will find creative new ways to leverage user data into ever more desirable revenue-generating products.
This is the way we’re private now. It’s ludicrous for anyone who loves the Internet to expect otherwise. How else are these services supposed to exist -- let alone make any money? Theft or misuse of private user data is a crime, certainly. But no social web app -- not one -- can work without intense analytics performed on the huge data sets that users provide to them voluntarily (you did read the terms of service agreement...right?).
And the issue compounds when people connect one site to another. By linking their Twitter to their Facebook to their Google+ to their Foursquare to their Zynga to their Instagram to their iOS, users are consolidating their lives, and in the process making them more attractive to marketers. While Facebook, Twitter and other services have made attempts to warn users about hitting the “connect” button, many of us hit that button with reckless abandon, without a thought of who’s slavering on the other side.
The reason social media and digital information companies want that data is because of what we refuse to give them: money. No one wants to pay for the privilege of chatting with their friends or using a coupon, and to this day, no one has to: Go ahead, ring their doorbell or pick up the free coupon book from your front stoop. But if you want to chat using Facebook or Gmail, or you want to buy a groupon for an 80 percent-off Botox service, you will have to tell those companies who you are. And those companies will use that information to tailor their offerings to you, increasing your value as a user and a customer. They will slice their data sets into a million different pieces and show those pieces to people -- advertisers -- who will pay them money for the privilege of using their service. They’ll use it to get to you.
This is an update on an old media model. Magazines and newspapers for decades could only guess at the readership of their product and the demographic of their customers. But now social and new media demand to -- and can -- know exactly who you are before they agree to let you use their free services. Even email newsletter services like the increasingly hot Thrillist -- which might innocuously start you on their service by asking only for your simple email address -- deploy click trackers, pixel trackers and other online data-gathering techniques to start to put together a picture of you as a user, both individually and in aggregate. A deceased magazine like Spy could only dream of that kind of intel.
Trolling for a tech showdown
The scene: A federal courtroom in Tyler, Texas.
The drama: A lawsuit by a patent troll who said he owned the rights to the “interactive web.” The troll says he’s owed some back rent for owning the Web we all use every day.
Dramatis persona: Tim Berners-Lee. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. He invented the World Wide Web.
Oh, to have been in Tyler. It was the stage for a showdown in one of the most bizarre patent troll cases ever, pitting (metaphorically if not in fact) expert witness Berners-Lee against some punk who wanted to make his name by taking out a very, very big gun in a shootout. The plaintiff, Eolas, claimed it owned patents that entitled it to royalties from anyone whose website used “interactive” features, like pictures that the visitor can manipulate, or streaming video. The claim, by Eolas’s owner, Chicago biologist Michael Doyle, was that his was the first computer program enabling an “interactive web.”
If Texas was still the Wild West this might have been settled at High Noon at some dusty, just O.K. Corral, with single-action Colt .45 revolvers. There was no gunplay, but for geekdom the calm morning testimony in an air-conditioned courtroom was just as exciting.
On Wednesday, Jennifer Doan, a Texarkana lawyer representing defendants Yahoo and Amazon, examined Berners-Lee for the plaintiffs, which include Google, Amazon and Yahoo. An excerpt from Wired‘s report:
When Berners-Lee invented the web, did he apply for a patent on it, Doan asked.
“No,” said Berners-Lee.
“Why not?” asked Doan.
“The internet was already around. I was taking hypertext, and it was around a long time too. I was taking stuff we knew how to do…. All I was doing was putting together bits that had been around for years in a particular combination to meet the needs that I have.”
Doan: “And who owns the web?”
Berners-Lee: “We do.”
Doan: “The web we all own, is it ‘interactive’?”
“It is pretty interactive, yeah,” said Berners-Lee, smiling.
@danbri Quite right! That last reference was a bad boo boo.
All about the Benjamins, or How Mark Zuckerberg cemented control of Facebook $100 at a time
One hundred dollars doesn’t go very far these days.
But for Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, a C-Note was the key to cementing his control over the social networking phenomenon.
As we learned last week when Facebook filed its prospectus for a $5 billion initial public offering, Zuckerberg has the voting rights to shares owned by some of Facebook’s biggest stakeholders, including venture capital firm Accel Partners, Digital Sky Technologies and former Facebook President Sean Parker.
In an amended filing on Wednesday, Facebook provided a little more color about the agreements that contributed to Zuck’s controversial control of 57 percent of the company’s voting shares.
Most intriguing was the price that Zuckerberg paid each of the various shareholders in exchange for handing him their voting rights: $100 in cash.
That’s not a typo.
One hundred bucks may seem like a pittance for such an important right. But it’s possible that the $100 payment was merely a formality, and that forfeiting voting rights to Zuckerberg was the real price of admission for (the raging horde of) investors seeking to buy into Facebook.
Curt Schilling’s video game finally gets on base
Curt Schilling, the former pitcher and two-time World Series champ is more nervous about his new video game than he ever was about baseball.
He told a New York crowd at an event put on by Electronic Arts on Tuesday that he slept like a baby before World Series games in 2007 — but didn’t catch a wink on Monday night ahead of the release of his company’s first video game.
Schilling’s personal fortune is on the line with “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning,” a fantasy-action game that hit stores Tuesday. Schilling told Reuters last July he had invested between $30 million to $35 million of his own money into the 400-person company he founded that made the game.
“‘This is opening day of career 2.0,” he told the crowd . And it’s an opening day that’s seven years in the making–Schilling founded the company called 38 Studios (after his jersey number) in 2006.
Schilling has been a video fanboy for years. Peter Moore, EA’s chief operating officer said he first spoke with him in 2005. Schilling called Moore, who then worked at Microsoft, to see if he could get his hands on an advance copy of the Xbox 360.
Moore, who said he turned down phone calls from Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson that same day, took Schilling’s because he was a big Red Sox fan.
“We spoke one hour about massive multiplayer games. I tried to talk him out of it,” Moore said, of Schilling’s idea to bankroll a video game.
Fast Cash: Accel invests $ 30 million in Capital Access Network
Shelling out cash to small businesses that need it fast– or just don’t qualify for bank loans– has become a $600 million annual business for New York-based Capital Access Network. Now, Accel Partners is betting $30 million that the combination of risk-averse banks and cash-starved businesses will help CAN grow even bigger.
CAN offers small and medium businesses cash advances and loans based on its proprietary scoring system, where factors like how fast a business is growing count a lot more than collateral or the business owner’s credit score.
“The banks never were very good lending money to this segment,” said Kevin Efrusy, the partner at Accel who arranged the deal and who is taking a seat on CAN’s board. “Especially after 2008, it’s completely dried up.” A typical CAN transaction is in the $30,000-$1.5 million range.
The funds will help CAN aggressively target online-based businesses as well as expand its business overseas through working with partner organizations, said chief executive Glenn Goldman. It expects to provide businesses with $600 million in capital this year, compared to $450 million last year. The company’s write-off rate– or the percentage of outstanding capital that doesn’t get paid back– is about 5 percent, Goldman said.
The bulk of CAN’s business comes from advances rather than loans, and businesses pay a pretty penny for them. A typical advance of $30,000 might take a year to pay back and would likely cost the business around $6,000 in fees.
CAN says it is worth it because it makes decisions within 48 hours, compared to perhaps a few weeks or more for banks, allowing businesses to move fast on fleeting opportunities such as the opportunity to buy inventory at a cut price. By April, CAN will launch a new website that will offer same-day decisions, said Goldman.
The business pays back the cash via automatic dockings of its credit-card or PayPal receipts from customers. Instead of paying back a set amount each month, the business forks over a percentage of revenue as it comes in.
How ‘don’t be evil’ became ‘let’s all be evil’
It’s been nearly a decade since the tagline “don’t be evil” was attached to Google in a Wired magazine profile. Google, a little more than four years old, adopted the phrase as a code of conduct as it navigated through a growing list of hard questions, and as it increasingly shaped the Web itself. Since then, the term has been hurled back at its founders again and again — every time a saucy blogger or disgruntled user had a bone to pick with the company.
Google’s executives have long since stopped saying “don’t be evil” in public, and the company has been more willing to make bold moves that court controversy (as long as they lead to changes that will promote further growth). Case in point: Last month, Google altered its search results to favor pages from its Google+ social service over other social sites.
Facebook responded by designing a browser extension called “don’t be evil” that played up results from non-Google+ social sites, like Facebook and Twitter. It was an amusing potshot at Google — but for the wrong reasons. Facebook’s track record at focusing on its users’ needs and preferences is even worse than Google’s. Beyond the privacy snafus that flare up regularly, Facebook has designed its site not to make it easier for us to share content with our friends, but to weave corporate brands and ad campaigns into those friendships.
But Facebook’s exercise in highhanded hypocrisy was revealing for another reason. At some point, tech companies bled “don’t be evil” dry of any true meaning. It’s a dead motto, and its sole remaining function is as a ruler to slap the Google brand. In 2012, evil must be a part of your stock and trade. How else will you make billions in profits in the Web industry? Google and Facebook can snipe at each other all they want. But they both follow the same credo now: Let’s all be evil.
But what exactly do we mean by evil? The word can be traced back to the Bronze Age as a disparagement, but evil as we talk about it today can mean anything from an annoyance to extreme moral wickedness. And most of the evil things tech companies do don’t quite rise to the level of evil — it’s just bad. Tweaking your search results to promote your social networks is bad. So is confusing your members when they try to protect their privacy. You take a step toward moral wickedness when you let countries decide how they want to censor tweets. And you’re pretty much on your way there when you poison your workers with neurotoxins in the name of manufacturing efficiency.
In the still-nascent world of social networks, though, things could be worse. The problem is we’re already on our way down. The most powerful companies are designing their sites not to improve the user experience, but to try and get the better of each other.
Facebook and Twitter have declined to let Google incorporate their data feeds into its search engine (those companies say the data is available on the Web; Google says their terms of service don’t allow this). So Google responds by favoring Google+ in its search engine, and downplaying Facebook and Twitter. Very well, point made. But how does this help the rest of us?
What does evil mean? How about the fraud at the heart of Google being a pay to play engine rather than a search engine? The fraud of representing your “search algorithm’s” “technology” being something other than a fraud. Google’s algorithm was always a front for the fraud. I’d call that evil.
‘Chronicle’ wins tight box office race
Teen boys with superpowers helped lift the movie box office to unexpected heights over Super Bowl weekend as thriller “Chronicle” edged “Harry Potter” star Daniel Radcliffe’s haunted house movie “The Woman in Black.”
“Chronicle” brought in an estimated $22.0 million from U.S. and Canadian theaters, studio estimates released on Sunday showed. The movie with largely unknown actors finished just ahead of Radcliffe’s “Woman in Black,” which took in an estimated $21.0 million.
Both performances surpassed projections from studio executives, who had expected weaker sales against competition from Sunday’s Super Bowl football championship. The tallies include actual ticket receipts for Friday and Saturday plus estimates for Sunday at North American (U.S. and Canadian) theaters.
“Chronicle” added $13 million from 33 international markets, for a global weekend total of $35 million.
The appearance of young moviegoers, who had shunned some recent films targeted to them, boosted the top two films.
“The teen audience seems to be coming back to movies again. There was serious worry they were fading,” said John Davis, who produced “Chronicle.”
The movie tells the story of three teenage boys who develop superpowers and find they have a dark side. People under age 25 made up 61 percent of the movie’s audience, distributor 20th Century Fox said. Fifty-five percent were males.
Nearly every Super Bowl commercial, in one post
We are compiling all the Super Bowl commercials here so you don’t have to. Once we’ve got most of them, we’ll ask you to vote which one you think was the best. In the meantime, post what you think about the ones we have here in the comments below.
Aliens star in an ad for the Chevrolet Volt electric car
Matthew Broderick returns to his Ferris Buehler roots in this Honda commercial
Jerry Seinfeld shows up in a number of Acura ads.
Regis Philbin appears in a commercial where a Coke salesman wins free Pepsi.
Kraft will debut a new breakfast food called “belVita”
A car shopper’s conscience unleashes his inner-Disco for Cars.com
Where is the Southwest commercial that ran in So Cal?
Why Facebook won’t kill the class reunion
From the minute they allowed us grown-ups to join Facebook in 2007 right up to the IPO filing, the same question has been posited again and again, first on technology blogs, then later in the mainstream press: Will Facebook kill the class reunion?
Alumni are interviewed, both for and against. Statistics are cited, showing a decline in reunion attendance over the past five years, often without noting that many of us, due to economic realities during this same time period, have sometimes been forced to choose between shaking our sagging booties on a faraway campus and eating. High school and college reunions get lumped together, presupposing a similar pull toward both, which rings false for those of us who saw high school as an unfortunate trial to be endured and college as the moment when, freed from nuclear families and provincial roots, we grew into ourselves in no small part through interactions with new friends.
The real fallacy of this line of questioning, however — that it’s either Facebook or the reunion — lies in its presumption of causality: Why take it as a given that knowing more about our fellow alumni would cause us to be less likely to want to see them in person? If anything, speaking purely subjectively, scrolling down an endless stream of status updates, family photos and videos of my college friends’ toddlers walking around with hampers on their heads (I’m talking to you, Nick Spooner) makes me want to see them in person more, not less.
Remember the aerogram? For those of you born into the digital age, they were my generation’s Twitter: a prescribed, limited, rectangular box into which we squeezed all of our random thoughts, activities and ephemera. I both wrote and received my fair share of these Precambrian tweets when I lived and worked abroad, and the two details I recall most vividly about the act of slipping one’s finger under the edges of its fragile, blue seams — aside from how difficult this was to do gracefully — was that the anticipation of reading an aerogram was nearly always more thrilling than the fact of having read it; and that, once digested, those blue missives never once sated my desire to chat with their authors in person. Rather, they made me long, more achingly, for their presence.
Decades before the advent of social media, student and alumni offices on college campuses across the country instinctively understood the value of providing pre-game tidbits of information about one’s fellow classmates as a means of piquing — not quashing — desire for face-to-face contact. Such desire leads in the short run to fostering a sense of community on campus and, in the long run, to bolstering endowments, which is the real reason, by the way, they throw those parties for us every five years.
Like many colleges, my alma mater, Harvard, the now infamous birthplace of Facebook, provided every freshman with Facebook’s progenitor, a yearbook-style hardback book filled with black-and-white head shots of our classmates, under which their names, hometowns and high schools were listed. We studied those books, those faces, the way Talmudic scholars study the Torah, parsing every name, city and school for meaning. When we finally met the people behind those faces in real life, we were already well versed enough in the whole who-what-where-when of their lives that we could skip over the formalities and head straight into the meatier why.
Post-college, alumni magazines have always kept us up-to-date with the Facebook-like information of those willing to share: marriages, births, new jobs, and the impossible-to-fathom early deaths. My alma mater takes this a step further, asking the members of every reunion class to describe their past five years in short essays, which are then collated and published in crimson-colored class reports called red books; these are such intriguing documents of the triumphs, failures, loves, losses, self-deceptions and truths of any life, let alone the 1,600 therein, that there is a thriving market for them on eBay. When the books arrive, with a weighty thud, they offer a narrative cheat sheet which, far from dissuading their recipients from attending the reunion, provide — at least to those of us already predisposed to go — further impetus: to hear more about his crazy divorce; to hug the woman who lost her child; to gaze into the eyes of the former lover; to appreciate, communally, our good fortune at still — incredibly! — being alive.
from Paul Smalera:
Facebook.coop
Facebook shouldn't pay its users. Its users should pay to own Facebook.
“Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his letter to investors announcing the IPO of his already hugely successful and profitable company. “It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”
Facebook has succeeded wildly, despite internal admonitions that its “journey” is only 1 percent finished. Journalists have latched onto Zuckerberg’s statement that Facebook wants to “rewire” the way the world works. In a world of thousands of self-anointed “social media experts,” only Zuckerberg can claim to have basically invented what the world thinks of as social media. He has etched himself into the timeline of human innovation.
Pity then, that Zuckerberg hasn’t turned his talents or attention toward Facebook’s financial underpinnings. After all, an IPO? How ho-hum can he get? If Mark really wants to accomplish his social mission with Facebook, he should share the company’s ownership with the people who helped him create it. Not just his Harvard contemporaries. Not just the programmers. Not even just the venture capitalists.
I’m talking about us. All of us. The users. Facebook should be a user-owned, user-managed company, run for the benefit of users. For the Facebook, by the Facebook. The company should be a cooperative.
Before I explain further, let me lay out the case in four simple points:
For what it’s worth, the largest co-operative in the world, The Co-operative Group, had £11.9 billion in revenue last year and has 6 million members.
It is utter rubbish to claim that we cannot have a better internet than the one we have right now. Most users simply do not really understand what and how much they have given up. And what has been given up unknowingly can be reclaimed. That is what laws are for.
Europe has a much better system, and much more privacy. And we can improve on that, without wrecking the essentials of the internet.