Copious revamps social commerce service with a new twist
Pinterest has yet to provide many details about how it intends to make money from its fast-growing image-sharing social service.
But that’s not stopping others from trying to capitalize on the online service’s rich catalog of product images.
Copious, a social commerce start-up, launched a new version of its website on Monday that lets consumers buy many of the bags, shoes and other fashion accessories that get shared by Pinterest’s millions of users every day.
Pinterest is just one of several online social media services, including Twitter and Facebook, that the Copious site connects to, allowing consumers to create a personalized online storefront that changes as frequently as your Facebook newsfeed.
The idea is to create a shopping experience based around people you follow and their actions, rather than around static categories of merchandise. Instead of browsing pre-set selections of shoes or sweaters, a visitor to Copious sees an ever-changing mix of items, based upon whatever the friends and bloggers they follow are sharing or commenting on at that moment.
The result is a shopping experience that’s constantly morphing, supposedly giving consumers a reason to come keep coming back.
“Conversation is always ongoing. That’s why people go back to Facebook on a daily basis, but don’t necessarily go back to Amazon.com on a daily basis,” said Jim Rose, the co-founder and CEO of Copious.
from Paul Smalera:
All your Tumblr are belong to Them
Forget Instagram’s billion-dollar payday. Forget IPOs, past and future, from Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn and the like. And ignore, please, the online ramblings of attention-hungry venture capitalists and narcissistic Silicon Valley journalists with the off-putting habit of making their inside-baseball sound like the World Series. Their stories, to paraphrase Shakespeare, are tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, but signifying very little about the impact of technology on most of our lives. (Sure, some of their tales are about great fortunes, but those are only for a select few; to summon the Oracle of Omaha rather than the Bard of Avon, only a fool ever equated price with value.) Their one-in-a-million windfalls are just flashes in the pan. Or, actually, they are solitary data points, meaningless when devoid of context.
That context is here. It’s come, in part, because of the cunningly simple social and curatorial tools that media companies like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Pinterest give away to their users. But making sense of our social world is only possible with the the tools and technology behind what we call Big Data. The massive information collections spawned by our digital world are too big to address directly, so smart scientists have used fast computers to carve the data into real knowledge. This is how Big Data is already changing the way the world works.
But Big Data is young; though there are hundreds of accessible data sets already, there are still many more chaotic stores of information its tools can tame. Take, for example, social media: Yesterday, social media API company Gnip announced that it is providing customers with all of Tumblr’s data, what in techspeak is called the firehose. What Gnip and competitors like DataSift are providing to customers are Social Big Data firehoses that can be perfectly filtered into gently babbling brooks lined with digital gold nuggets. When the tech media wonder out loud how social companies will ever make a buck – sifting the gold out of their user-generated content is a huge piece of the puzzle.
At Gnip, Tumblr joins Twitter, WordPress, Disqus and the Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo as the latest tree in a forest of Social Big Data accessible via API. A well-written API can transform a jumble of numbers into a perfectly organized multiplication table – on the order of millions or even billions of complex data pieces. (See this recent Economist visualization of the data record of a single tweet for more context.)
The data pieces are valuable, but not solely because they help advertisers sell more widgets: In an email, Gnip Chief Operating Officer Chris Moody explained one of the coolest uses of data his company has enabled may have actually helped firefighters do their job better: “During the 4 Mile Canyon Fire in Boulder in 2010, [Gnip customer] VisionLink was able to provide fire crews and managers a realtime view into what was happening on the ground by layering geo-tagged Tweets and Flickr images onto a Google map of the area.”
It’s not just maps, photos and geo locations that number crunchers crave. Tumblr, after all, is a blog network full of cat photos, animated GIFs and other tomfoolery. Yet last year its already booming traffic grew an additional 300 percent. As the Web comic XKCD noted a day before Gnip’s announcement, the proper noun “Tumblr” is perhaps six months away from surpassing “blogging” in online searches, much the way “Google” became synonymous with the verb “search” a decade earlier. Tumblr users know that the site’s tools are heavily oriented toward sharing and signaling, as opposed to pure content creation. On Tumblr, users can of course write posts and upload photos, but they can also follow other users, “heart” each others’ posts and reblog posts they want to share with their own followers – and each action takes little more than one click. All these actions are trackable, all of them indicate some sort of sentiment or preference and all of them are discrete chunks of data in Tumblr’s massive data store – now joining the 90 billion pieces of social data Gnip is already delivering on a monthly basis.
If all of this sounds like a grand plot to aggregate, sift and derive insight into social behavior from all sorts of data that unsuspecting users unwittingly upload – well, it is. But those are the trade-offs that users agree to when they sign up with social-media websites, right when they check that box agreeing to the terms of service.
“But that’s not necessarily bad, if all the power of social media belongs to all of us.”
Yeah, well, all that power doesn’t belong to all of us, it belongs to a very small group of collectors and sellers. And that is necessarily bad.
Unmetric gets funding to help brands gauge their social media clout
What would you get if social media ego measurement tool Klout had a baby with comScore, the Web traffic measurement firm? It would probably be Unmetric, a new “social media benchmark” tool that helps brands measure their social media engagement.
If you’re a big brand-owner all those Facebook Likes and Twitter Retweets by your customers and ‘fans’ are fine but what do they really mean in terms of engagement and customer sentiment? More importantly, how do they stack up against your rivals? These are some of the questions Unmetric hopes to help answer after raising $3.2 million in Series A financing led by Nexus Venture Partners.
Chicago-based Unmetric will debut its Unmetric Score, tailored for Fortune 500 companies, based on weighted data from at least 24 qualitative and quantitative metrics measuring online brand performance versus competitors. The Unmetric Score will be somewhat similar to the Klout Score but Lux Narayan, Unmetric’s Chief Executive, hopes its own score will have, er…more clout (sorry).
As far as marketers and advertisers are concerned these are still very much the early days of social media as they try to engage with their customers in more tw0-way conversations in a range of these fledgling platforms. Even Narayan admits it’s too early to declare what the value of a “like” on Facebook really means in itself. But he believes a “like” for example offers a very important tool for brands in the new world.
“A Like is a right for the brand to engage in a conversation with their customer,” said Narayan.
Unmetric’s customers include Citibank and Nestle and measures data on more than 3,000 brands already.
Tech’s forbidden touch
“You can look, but you can’t touch” – great advice in most museums, and every strip club. But it makes no sense when it comes to our computers. We are getting very touchy-feely with our smartphones and tablets, and this is how it should be. Even BlackBerry and Amazon’s Kindle, which launched with hardware keyboards to differentiate it from the competition, have abandoned them.
It’s no accident. We touch instinctively. We are born touching everything, and only learn where the boundaries are later in life. Our handheld devices are reconnecting us with the primary technique we used to learn about the world we had just entered. The metaphor extends. Now it’s the mobile computers that we use to learn about the world around us, and we control them with our fingers, by touching a screen. How do you place a price on that?
Many are trying, thanks to software patents. Patents have become a bane to the very essence of innovation. They are arsenals, ostensibly meant to defend but more often used to offend. Yahoo’s lawsuit against Facebook over 10 patents further proves that weaponizing software patents is the last gasp of a dying business.
Which brings me to the news that Twitter is trying to patent one of the most instinctive gestures on the iPhone, what they call User Interface Mechanics. Anyone who has used a Twitter client on their phone knows to refresh the page: You “pull” it down and release. Others use this as well, like Google’s Gmail mobile site.
But as Techcrunch noticed, this functionality isn’t built into every core app on the iPhone (like the Mail app), and the reason is probably because it’s potential lawsuit bait.
It’s not a sure thing that Twitter’s application will be approved, or that Twitter would enforce it. The most important computer interface device – the mouse – was patented by visionary Douglas Engelbart in 1970, and everything worked out all right.
Why can’t Facebook and Twitter say the A-word?
What’s the most uncool word in social media?
Just look at the pains the top social networking companies take to avoid uttering the dreaded term.
Twitter started the trend when it rolled out its advertising products in 2010, which it dubbed “promoted Tweets.” Chief Executive Dick Costolo (who was COO at the time) insisted that the marketing pitches coming to Twitter were not ads at all – they were simply standard Twitter messages that companies could pay to promote.
Now Facebook, which derived 85 percent of its revenue from advertising last year, has developed a similar aversion to the A word.
At a splashy marketing event in New York on Wednesday, the company introduced a new ad format that will allow big brand marketers to push information directly into users’ newsfeeds and onto other prominent on-screen real-estate. The word “advertising” was conspicuously absent from the somewhat vague name of the new ad format: “Premium on Facebook.”
Facebook executive Mike Hoefflinger (pictured, right) even delivered a whole on-stage spiel about why Facebook’s new ads were in fact not ads, but “stories.”
Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, that refuse to claim advertisement where it exists, aren’t fooling anyone. Advertising by any other name, is still advertising. The fear of backlash for advertisements on these sites is what leads them to use terms such as “promoted tweets” or “stories.” These sites are supported by advertisements, which is what allows users to access them for free. These sites should practice transparency with their business and advertising instead of beating around the bush.
Tello tries to make customer service gripes more effective
From firing off angry tweets to writing nasty Yelp reviews, there are many ways to vent about bad customer service in the age of social media.
But while it feels good to blow off steam, it doesn’t always produce results for companies or customers.
Tello, a year-old mobile app that lets consumers rate the employees who served them at restaurants, shops and other businesses, is looking to make all that online griping more productive for both consumers and businesses.
On Wednesday, Tello debuted a customer feedback service with an online tool that lets businesses respond directly to the customers who rated their employees. A manager at a restaurant can then reach out to a disgruntled customer to ask for another chance. But it’s not all bad–a retailer can inform a customer that the pair of shoes they wanted are now in stock and a business can also write back to thank a customer who gave an employee a stellar review.
The service also lets businesses track the ratings that their various employees are getting on Tello.
While Tello’s app remains free for customers, the company will charge bigger businesses $99 per month per location to use its service. A basic version of the service is free for businesses with up to three locations.
Tello has raised $2.7 million in a Series A round of venture funding from True Ventures and Bullpen Capital.
from Paul Smalera:
What real Internet censorship looks like
Lately Internet users in the U.S. have been worried about censorship, copyright legalities and data privacy. Between Twitter’s new censorship policy, the global protests over SOPA/PIPA and ACTA and the outrage over Apple’s iOS allowing apps like Path to access the address book without prior approval, these fears have certainly seemed warranted. But we should also remember that Internet users around the world face far more insidious limitations and intrusions on their Internet usage -- practices, in fact, that would horrify the average American.
Sadly, most of the rest of the world has come to accept censorship as a necessary evil. Although I recently argued that Twitter’s censorship policy at least had the benefit of transparency, it’s still an unfortunate cost of doing global business for a company born and bred with the freedoms of the United States, and founded by tech pioneers whose opportunities and creativity stem directly from our Constitution. Yet by the standards of dictatorial regimes, Internet users in countries like China, Syria and Iran should consider themselves lucky if Twitter’s relatively modest censorship program actually keeps those countries’ governments from shutting down the service. As we are seeing around the world, chances are, unfortunately, it won’t.
Consider the freedoms -- or lack thereof -- Internet users have in Iran. Since this past week, some 30 million Iranian users have been without Internet service thanks to that country’s blocking of the SSL protocol, right at the time of its parliamentary elections. SSL is what turns “http” -- the basic way we access the Web -- into “https”, which Gmail, your bank, your credit card company and thousands of other services use to secure data. SSL provides data encryption so that only each end point -- your browser and the Web server you’re logging into -- can decrypt and access the data contained therein.
By blocking SSL, Iran has crippled Tor, a program that enables Internet users to anonymize not just their content but their physical location as well. Tor is a very common workaround for users in totalitarian regimes to access Twitter, Gmail, Facebook and other services. It’s hard to come up with an apt analogy for Iran’s unprecedented blockage -- it’s not just that the letters you send are read by the Post Office and photocopied for their records, it’s that the Post Roads themselves have been closed off, so you can’t even send a letter in the first place. That’s the net effect of blocking SSL in Iran.
The hacking group Anonymous has brought down all kinds of websites in protest, mostly over copyright, in the U.S. and Europe. I don’t advocate their targeting any country’s servers for retribution, but where is the outrage or public demonstration or media attention over the denials of Iranians’ basic freedoms to communicate, via the Internet?
Unfortunately, it’s still too easy for Internet companies and even the Internet’s founding fathers to dismiss the importance of the tools they created in fostering free and open public dialogue, especially in places like Iran. Recently, legendary engineer and Google Vice-President Vint Cerf published a New York Times op-ed entitled “Internet Access is Not a Human Right,” where he wrote: “Internet access is always just a tool for obtaining something else more important.” How wrong he is. Cerf’s line of thinking eviscerates the Internet -- the wonder of the modern world he helped build. Cerf argues that humans have the right to “lead healthy, meaningful lives,” including having “freedom from torture or freedom of conscience.” Yet, we live in the 21st century: It’s hard to see how, among people whose economies are developed enough to afford them communication devices, Cerf would excuse governments that curtail their citizens’ freedom and right to use the ultimate communications tool -- the global network of the Internet. In fact, in underdeveloped parts of the world, the cost to have a cell phone that connects to the Web can be quite affordable.
I’m not arguing semantics here -- if our society excludes the Internet from the fundamental rights of human communication, we also excuse totalitarian regimes like Iran’s from any repercussions when it comes to blocking that avenue of human contact. It’s a dangerous compromise to make in a world that only gets more digital with each passing day. And it also conveniently excuses the free world from having to do much of anything about it. We wouldn’t forgive Iran if it threw 30 million citizens into solitary confinement -- so why would we ignore it when the Iranian government effectively cuts the entire population off from the outside world, to stifle their voices during a critical electoral cycle?
The example of Iran is well taken in this article, but I would like to add one: I lived and taught in Zhuhai, China, from August 2007 to July 2009. As an expatriate, I didn’t seem to have my computer monitored and censored very much, but my students at United International College surely did.
We take our freedoms for granted. I don’t any more. I know what it is like to live in a country where “freedom of expression” is a sham. We shouldn’t let that happen here, which doesn’t mean condoning criminal activities on the net, but it does mean a conscious guarding of freedom of speech.
Microsoft’s msnNOW targets hot news, gossip
Microsoft’s MSN portal, like Yahoo’s, is finding it tough to compete with Facebook and Twitter as people’s first port of call on the Internet.
The software giant is looking to grab back some buzz and appeal to younger users with a new service that delivers a snapshot at any minute of the day on news stories, people and topics that are most popular on the web.
The product, branded ‘msnNOW’, launches on Thursday at now.msn.com, and will be integrated into items on Microsft’s main MSN site.
It takes data from Microsoft’s own Bing search engine to find out what people are searching for, and mixes in results from Facebook (which Microsoft owns a small part of) and Twitter to get a hold on what links are being exchanged.
Editors at MSN will then sort out the results — filtering out the fake death rumors that spread so quickly on Twitter — to give a ranking of news stories and hot topics and point out resources to find out more on a particular subject.
The service is aimed primarily at younger users, who are accustomed to fast-moving data flows, said Bob Visse, MSN’s general manager. But it may also serve as a useful tool for news junkies and media professionals who want to keep track of hot news, he added.
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.
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.
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.
