Sunday, July 12, 2009

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Dazzboard, An Open iTunes For Just About Any Portable Media File (500 Invites)

Posted: 12 Jul 2009 05:47 AM PDT

Finnish startup Linkotec is close to debuting the public beta version of dazzboard, a browser-based media manager that it says has all the goodness of iTunes but without the disadvantages of Apple’s closed environment.

Granted, we hear that a lot, but I’ve been invited to take an early peek at what they’ve been cooking and came away fairly impressed.

Dazzboard is currently invitation-only but is shooting for a Wednesday release of the public beta version. TechCrunch readers with limited patience (yes, you there) can already sign up to take it for a spin before that: 500 of you can register for an account right here. Note that the web application currently requires Windows - a Mac-compatible version is in the works - and works best when you’re using the latest Internet Explorer or Firefox browser.

With dazzboard, you can plug a wide range of mobile devices into your computer and easily transfer multimedia content like photos, videos and music to the web-based management interface, after which you can organize all your files and seamlessly share them through a variety of social networking services. It goes both ways: with the use of the ‘Dazz me’ bookmarklet you can download content from the Web to the media manager and distribute it to your favorite social network or your mobile device once it’s transferred to your account.

Dazzboard supports any portable device that can be used in mass storage or media transfer mode. The company divides the range of portable media players and mobile phones it supports into two groups: full supported devices (supported and maintained by the Dazzboard database, meaning no specific user action is required) and so-called generic devices (not fully supported by Dazzboard so handled as a generic media hub). In the latter case, it’s possible not all functionality of the media manager will work without any glitches.

All in all, dazzboard worked as advertised with the few portable devices I used to test it, and it does a great job syncing media content from and to social networks like YouTube, Flickr, etc. Of course, supporting ‘thousands of devices’ means that the company risks getting flooded with just as many device-specific support questions on a daily basis if it takes off. There’s a reason why closed platforms sometimes win.

Give it a whirl yourself and tell us what you think.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.


Thanks Everyone: The Real Time CrunchUp + The August Capital Summer Party.

Posted: 12 Jul 2009 03:01 AM PDT

Thank you to all of you who came out to support the 2009 Summer CrunchUp! We broke 600 attendees to the Real Time Stream CrunchUp, double our initial expectations, and we hosted lots more of you at the August Capital outing.

In typical TechCrunch style, it was a work-hard, play-hard day. Thank you to all our CrunchUp speakers for investing your time with us to talk about new trends, boundaries and your passions. Plus we fit in 22 new product highlights from start-ups and big internet companies alike.

If you missed the CrunchUp, the video is on the CrunchUp site, courtesy of Ustream. Both they and FutureWorks did an amazing job to help us stream and record Real Time for future use. We live blogged as much of the conference as possible. In case you missed yesterday:

The Real-Time Opportunity, including Ron Conway’s Top Ten List of Monetization Opportunities
The Real-Time Moment
Real-Time Search
Real-Time Mobs (and Syphilis)
Real-Time Business
Real-Time Roundtable
Demos and announcements. including:
Tweetdeck Funding
Microsoft Silverlight
PeopleBrowsr
Brizzly, from Thing Labs
Seesmic Browser Client
Bantam Live
Camtweet, from Justin.tv
Qik Push API
ECHO, from JK-Kit
12seconds.tv
Mag.ma

Additional archives are on the CrunchUp site. We incorporated real-time widgets and services, from CrunchUp sponsors Tinker, cc:Betty and Tokbox. Thanks again to Charles River Ventures and Microsoft BizSpark for helping to underwrite the CrunchUp.

August Capital was unbridled start-up networking and fun. As usual, we are indebted to David Hornik and the partners at August Capital for allowing we hooligans onto their beautiful back deck under the premise of business socializing.

We did manage to get a bit classy this year. Grey Goose Vodka hosted an amazing martini bar for us, complete with ice sculpture. (We were told the last time Grey Goose did an ice-sculpture, it was for Tiger Woods, so we’re super proud of our TechCrunch in ice.) cc:Betty’s founder Michael Cerda shared his latin jazz band, El Desayuno with us. Between sets, Pandora rocked the house with music. Silver Moon Desserts shared mini, gourmet ice-cream cones. Stormhoek provided wine and Groovy provided the beer and other refreshments. Friendster hosted an amazing caricature mural of attendees with artists who recorded hundreds of attendees. Gaping Void’s Hugh Macleod shared his Dream Big lithographs with attendees (a large-format serigraph a Dream Big was auctioned off during the CrunchUp, and picked up by Bantam Live founder John Rourke in honor of his company’s launch. Benefits to the EFF.) Lots of other start-up demos ran the length of the deck.

Eye.fi took pictures on behalf of Microsoft BizSpark’s photo wall. Catch them on flickr. Please tag your photos of the conference and social with crunchup (also techcrunch, august capital, 2009.)

Share your photos and posts about your CrunchUp experience, and we’ll add links to them here.

Thanks again for sharing your own ideas and energy at the CrunchUp. Events like this keep our adrenaline up at TechCrunch. We’ll do another one soon.

Lots more photos below.

Thank You To Our CrunchUp Sponsors Who Made It All Possible

Product Sponsors: Glam Media Lab’s Tinker live conversation moderation, Tokbox live video chat, Ustream live video streaming, Bantam Live, Charles River Ventures, Microsoft BizSpark and mailspace cc:Betty.

Demonstration Sponsors: Seesmic, OneRiot, PeopleBrowsr, Mashery, IDrive, Sun Start-Up Essentials, Meraki, SocialFeet, Tapulous, Loopt, Grey Goose Vodka, Future Works, Gaping Void, Stormhoek Wines, Silver Moon Desserts, Friendster, LifeIO, Groovy and ODesk.

Event Sponsors: Eventbrite for ticketing and MediaTemple for hosting, Topix, Orange, AIM/AOL, ReTargeter, NewTek, Coveroo, Pandora.

More photos:

Michael Arrington sweeps Randi Zuckerberg off her feet:

Michael Arrington (left), Ron Conway, John Borthwick:

Twitter creator Jack Dorsey on stage:

CrunchUp Crowd:

Grey Goose ice sculpture:

No idea, but I love it:

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.


Twitter Expanding Executive Team: Hires General Counsel From Google, Looking For CFO

Posted: 12 Jul 2009 02:40 AM PDT

Twitter has hired Alexander Macgillivray, Google’s associate general counsel for Product and IP, as their new General Counsel, we’ve confirmed. Macgillivray is still an employee of Google, and his start date at Twitter has not yet been determined.

We’ve been sitting on the story all day and were trying to talk with Macgillivray because our understanding is that he may not have told Google that he was going to Twitter and we didn’t want to be the one’s to break the news. But the story broke on the NY Times, so I’m guessing they know all about it now.

We’ve also confirmed that Twitter is aggressively hiring across the board, including top executive spots. A number of candidates have been interviewed for the CFO job in particular.

Macgillivray, a former Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati attorney, has been a key figure in Google’s legal battles over their book scanning efforts. The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the matter.

Macgillivray is leaving Google at a crucial time. The books settlement is a key antitrust issue that needs to be handled delicately, and he was leading the charge (or, perhaps, retreat). Google will be scrambling to fill his role.

One problem Twitter has had in attracting key executives, multiple sources have told us, is the impression that they may sell the company sooner rather than later. They have told candidates that they intend to stay in it for the long haul, and don’t plan to sell any time soon.

We’ll see.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.


Get Ready For Animoto Video…And Animoto 3D

Posted: 12 Jul 2009 01:33 AM PDT

Animoto is turning into a cult favorite web app - upload a few pictures to the service, pick some music, add some text and get a really cool video slide show back. They made my annual “can’t live without” list last year based on their obsessive desire to perfect a single product. Many, many users agree.

Last month they announced a new round of financing and turned cash flow positive. Users are flocking to their iPhone application that lets you create slide shows from events even before you get back to your computer. And soon, CEO Brad Jefferson tells me, they will let users upload video clips as well as photos to make their slide shows.

They actually showed the feature last month in a promotional video for the Webbies, which shows photos as well as short video clips.

The feature is near-ready to launch to users, Jefferson told me last week. I was on a Southwest flight with him and Wired editor Fred Vogelstein (see his recent Facebook article and a 2007 article on TechCrunch) on the way back from an event in Seattle. Jefferson showed me some of the Animoto clips with video, and even showed off a 3D product they are working on. I took the video above when we landed at Oakland airport, much to the amusement of a few late night passengers hanging out near us. Make sure you watch to the end - Vogelstein is hilarious with the 3D glasses on.

Here’s what’s great about Animoto - these clips take just a few seconds to create. Animoto does all the hard work for you. And the demo videos show clips with mixed images and short video clips put together into a seamless product. You will actually be able to create these right from an iPhone using the app, the camera and the new video functionality, and then share them with your friends and family.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0


Real-Time Conversations Hasten Social CRM

Posted: 11 Jul 2009 11:36 PM PDT

Social Media has evolved beyond a series of platforms that enable content publishing, sharing, and discovery into a genuine, peer-to-peer looking glass into the real world conversations that affect the perception, engagement, and overall direction of the brands we represent.

Socialized media didn't invent "conversations," it simply organized and amplified them and established an opportunity for learning and collaboration.

Twitter and Twitter Search have ushered in a new genre of not only communications and associated search technology, but also dedicated ecosystems that transform and support how we as consumers share and discover relevant information in real-time.

Online discussions, rants, and observations are either alarming (and motivating) brand managers or fooling them into unforeseen enthrallment. But the reality is that real-time dialogue is fueling connections and perceptions in the statusphere, blogopsphere, online communities, and the social web in general. It's this swelling tsunami of chatter that will only intensify and heighten as it forces a new genre of Social Customer Relationship Management (sCRM). Social CRM is no longer an option. It necessitates brand involvement to proactively share answers, solve problems, establish authority, and build relationships and loyalty, one tweet, blog post, update, and "like," at a time.

In the world of business, social media, led by Twitter, is forcing companies to augment the offshoring of reactive customer service with the nearshoring of proactive customer engagement. The conversations that power social media are sparking a sense of urgency to identify influential voices and talk to customers in a place and time of their choosing (generally, in public and online).

For example, on Friday at during a panel at the CrunchUp on Real Time Business, Porter Gale, vice president of marketing for Virgin America, made it clear that Virgin America understands the promise, prospect, and value of listening and responding to the social stream.

Erick Schonfeld, who was moderating, asked Porter how her team mines Twitter for the perception of the brand and also for determining how they contact customers.

Porter revealed that the Virgin America team is small and applies roughly the equivalent of 1.5 people to monitoring and engaging on Twitter and other social networks. To her and the team, social media is representative of not only a listening system, but also a complete engagement channel. The word "marketing" doesn't even enter the mix.

With more than 20,000 followers on Twitter, Virgin America is galvanizing a vibrant and active community of people who will respond in "Twitter time," thus alleviating the modest team from having to engage in every discussion, whether it's positive or negative.

The most common example Porter shared was a response to the question, "Should I fly Virgin?"

"The community closes the sale," exclaimed Porter.

She also shared a story of how Virgin America invests in the good will of customers, simply by publicly acknowledging and supporting them in the same channels where they're communicating.

During one flight, a woman who just graduated medical school to become a doctor, had tweeted her excitement about graduating and also flying @virginamerica. Instead of simply responding with a congratulatory Tweet, Porter and her team retweeted and asked someone on the flight to buy her a drink (the benefits of offering inflight wifi).

To her surprise, Porter triggered an immediate response, "Row 11 is going to buy her a drink." And, to her further astonishment, the person who sent that Tweet was live in the audience at the Real-Time stream event.

Alexia Tsotsis, tech writer at the LA Weekly, shouted from the first row, "That was me!"

Everyone in the audience was a witness to a vivid demonstration of how interaction online extends into real world experiences.

More impressive is Virgin America's use of the social Web for real-time customer service. They're actively monitoring issues, frustrations, and recommendations to solve challenges as they arise. In several such instances, Virgin America has used Twitter as a real-time guest service recovery system in flight to address concerns and problems by contacting service staff in the air to alert them to issues – again, the perils and associated benefits of offering inflight WiFi.

Earlier in the day, Peoplebrowsr (disclosure: I am an advisor) showed a demo in which airlines were ranked by the sentiment expressed about each brand on Twitter, and Virgin America was on top. Peoplebrowsr highlighted the ability to analyze conversational sentiment by industry through the alignment of positive, neutral, and negative conversations and perception by brand.

Ross Mayfield, CEO and founder of Socialtext, discussed the nature of the social dialogue enterprises are being pulled into and how conversations require more than one person or department to engage. SocialText offers a dashboard for enterprises that wish to collaborate internally with coworkers and externally with customers and stakeholders.

Ross referenced the engagement iceberg, where he observes only a small portion of customer conversations and engagement as truly visible, with most occurring beneath the water line and thus, out of view.

He' s right. In my research and experience, we've identified that every online conversation worthy of response directly matched specific divisions within an organization and usually rank in this order:

1. Support
2. PR
3. Marketing
4. Sales

It highlights the reality that every department eventually needs to socialize.

Ross then asked his fellow panel members as well as the audience, "Who's going to own Social Media and the process of responding?"

My answer: No one.

Social Media is, for the time being, tuning-in new channels of influence to incorporate into the brand and marketing mix.  While it takes a station manager time to receive the signals and in turn, coordinate outward broadcasts, it is the divisions within each organization that will need to shift from an introspective support mode to an extrospective group of proactive collaborators.

But as Ross cautioned businesses and eager social media teams, "Before they collaborate with the community, they have to collaborate with themselves."

If responsibilities and workflow isn't established and most importantly, if guidelines aren't drafted and disseminated company-wide, the intention of helping influential customers and advocates can quickly transcend into social, and very public, chaos.

We need rules of engagement.

As Erick pointed out in the discussion, "It used to be unhappy customers who would call into customer service lines to express frustration. Now if businesses don't immediately respond with a resolution and nip these issues in the bud, they have the potential of spreading and getting out of control. At the same time, companies need to identify and amplify praise as it happens."

Virgin America's Porter Gale is trying to rally her team as well as the other departments that are affected by real-time conversations and the issues they raise. She hosts brownbag lunches, where PR, customer service, and other teammates discuss what's happening with Twitter and other social networks. They also share and review strategies and tactics to teach and learn from each other based on their experiences.

There are social networks, and there are tools with which to identify conversations and facilitate interaction, but everyone agreed, that in the world of new service and marketing, we need to improve the literacy and education among the teams who occupy the front lines.

The "now" web is powerful. It's building new bridges, networks, and channels. It's absolutely changing the way people communicate, research, and ultimately make decisions.

Yes, the real-time Web is powered by conversations. But, what's important to remember, is that conversations are personal and therefore sacred.
Broadcasting messages, or even worse, sponsored messages as a form of resolution or participation is foolhardy.

Companies such as Pizza Hut that relegate Twitter interaction to a summer "Twintern" will indubitably get what they pay for. We've already witnessed the public backlash when a twintern abuses Twitter on behalf of an unsuspecting brand. #habitat

The point is that it’s not whether or not an intern or junior staffer on the marketing and communications team is competent or incompetent. The reality is that businesses should view the role of engaging with customers, prospects and influencers as a strategic competitive advantage as well as an earned privilege.

As panelist Maynard Webb of LiveOps pointed out, "A brand can get damaged faster than ever nowadays."

The true shift represented by the social and real-time Web is not simply the ability to surface relevant conversations as they happen, it represents the opportunity to learn from public sentiment and create a more aware and adaptive organization that leads communities through action.

Monitoring the conversation is not enough.  Brands need to jump in, but in a professional way.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0


RentHop: Easier Apartment Hunting, Without The Broker Fee

Posted: 11 Jul 2009 06:09 PM PDT

Anyone who has tried to use the immensely popular ‘housing’ section of Craigslist to do some apartment hunting is well aware of its limitations: aside from breaking listings into basic neighborhoods, for the most part they lack any structure, which can make them a pain to browse through, especially when you’re trying to compare more than one apartment.
Y Combinator startup RentHop is looking to offer an alternative, featuring thousands of structured housing listings that are much easier to search though and compare. Of course, there are plenty of other sites that offer comprehensive housing listings, so RentHop is also looking to differentiate itself by eliminating housing broker fees.

For the time being RentHop is only available in New York City, largely because of the way apartment hunting is set up there. For those who aren’t familiar with the situation, most of the time when you’re looking to find an apartment in New York City, you’re forced to work through a broker who will charge a fee of 15% of your first year of rent (which works out to around $3,000 based on NYC’s average rent).

So why not just skip the brokers and go straight through Craigslist, which offers a broker-free ‘no fee’ section? RentHop co-founder Lee Lin says that oftentimes brokers will spam this section with fake listings, hoping to seduce viewers into calling them at which point they can say “Oh, that one is taken, but we’ve still got this one available…” and so on. Because NYC apartment listings rarely include an actual address, these are very easy to fake.

RentHop solves this problem by going to major landlords, some of which own many buildings in New York City, and getting the listings straight from them. Each listing on RentHop has a valid address, which means that they’re harder to fake, and the site can also plot them on a map to give you an idea of where the apartment actually is. Lin says that landlords have an incentive to offer apartments through the site, because their inventory will move more quickly when potential tenants don’t have to pay a large broker fee.

While the site originally launched back in Febraury, Lin says that most of the features have been added since then, and the site has changed its business model. RentHop now looks to generate revenue by offering a set of ‘Pro’ features to large major landlords, who can have hundreds (or more) of apartments to manage at once.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors


23andMe Zeppelin Hanging Out Above My House, Creeping Me Out

Posted: 11 Jul 2009 05:30 PM PDT

I’m a fan of DNA startup 23andMe. In fact, I was one of the first people to lay down $1,000 and take the test. And I like what they are doing to help disease research.

But this blimp (or rather a zeppelin) they’re flying around Silicon Valley is a menace. First of all, I go outside to get away from work, not to look up in the sky and see a big startup logo hovering over my house. And our attempts to take a video of it almost resulted in a car crash (video below) (Yeah, probably more my fault than theirs, but still, it’s there, I need to video it. From a moving car). Go away, Blimp. Or Zeppelin.

Apparently this thing has been around for a while. An excruciatingly detailed overview of the zeppelin and why it is flying around with a 23andMe logo on it is here.


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How Much Does Google Like Twitter?

Posted: 11 Jul 2009 05:25 PM PDT

This much.

picture-110

That’s 44 accounts by my count. Where are all those Jaiku accounts?

Still think they have no interest in the micro-messaging service? Of course they do. It just may cost them more than a billion dollars to satisfy their fixation. And Microsoft is starting to get a fixation too. Remember when the two had a bidding war over a stake in Facebook?

Update: Interesting. As Habib points out in the comments, it looks like Google may have missed one of its own accounts in the region list: Google Arabia. That makes 45.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors


Google Stealing Apple’s Ideas And Other Tales Of Accidental Corporate Espionage

Posted: 11 Jul 2009 01:15 PM PDT

This morning I woke up and saw an interesting headline on Techmeme from Forbes writer Brian Caulfield: Why Google Is Stealing Apple’s Ideas. Wow, a story involving two of the world’s largest technology companies and scandal? This was going to be good.

And then I read the story, which turned out to be a strange hit job on Google for no apparent reason, trying to imply that Google has somehow bypassed Apple’s “renowned secrecy” and used its ideas to foster the development of its new Chrome OS. And somehow, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is behind it.

Caulfield claims that Apple may have “missed a spot” by letting Schmidt stay on Apple’s board. First off, why does everyone seem to assume that Apple isn’t well aware of the fact that Eric Schmidt is the CEO of Google?  To paraphrase John Gruber, does anyone actually think Steve Jobs is too shy to confront Schmidt? Of course, Caulfield immediately goes on to say that Schmidt isn’t actually a spy, but rather that somewhere along the line Apple and Google have become “accidental competitiors” who have simply yet to realize it. Right.

But the Schmidt point can be forgiven. It’s possible, however improbable, that Eric Schmidt has somehow been accidentally abusing his position at Apple to gain insider knowledge that he then leveraged to empower Google, all under Jobs’ nose, and without realizing that he was competing with Apple. After all, he is a very smart man.

So on to the points where Google has apparently copied Apple, which range from the silly to utterly ridiculous.

Caulfield points out that Chrome OS runs on x86 and ARM processors and is based on Unix. But look: Apple’s OS X also runs on both x86 and ARM processors, is based on a Unix variant, and NeXT Step (which laid the ground work for OS X) was used to build the web. Frankly I have no idea what that last point is even relevant to (maybe that Chrome is optimized for browsing the web?). Moving on, OS X is built to run on a wide range of devices, including the iPhone, servers, and Mac PCs. Clearly, Chrome’s planned support for both netbooks and eventually desktops is entirely derivative of Apple’s idea to allow an operating system to perform on multiple products.

Caulfield fails to point out the major obvious differences between the two operating systems. For one, Chrome OS will probably be entirely browser driven — many of the details are still speculative, but it’s likely that Chrome PCs will boot directly into the browser, with a boot time ranging in the single digit seconds. Applications will all be reliant on ‘the cloud’, rather than storing data locally. In contrast, Apple’s OS X is totally different. It’s not cloud based. It’s a full fledged OS that doesn’t boot into the browser. It seems that Caulfield honed in on just about every other obvious similarity while ignoring the mountains of differences.

Caulfield then gets into the similarities between the iPhone and Android. This is well-trodden territory, and Apple and Google are definitely competitors here. But trying to say Google stole the idea of a smartphone OS from Apple is strange — Apple and Google are taking very different approaches to their software (Google is free and used on devices from multiple vendors, Apple’s isn’t). And Apple wasn’t exactly the first company on the mobile block, though they did revolutionize the touchscreen. So, okay, we can see where Caulfield is going with this.

Then :

Apple launched a Web browser for the Windows operating system Safari in June of 2007. Google launched the Chrome Web browser for Windows in September 2008. Apple offers a full suite of office productivity software for the Mac. Google offers its own Web-based alternative, Google Docs. Apple has an e-mail service. So does Google.

Let’s just go through these one by one. Eric Schmidt was just quoted by the Financial Times as saying “[Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin] wanted to do this project since founding the company”. In other words, Google has been thinking about doing this for over a decade. But Google didn’t actually wind up releasing Chrome until well over a year after Safari hit Windows. Point Caulfield, I guess. Of course, by this logic, Apple was “stealing” that whole Windows browser thing from Microsoft to begin with.

Next up, Apple’s office productivity suite iWork vs. Google Docs. I don’t think anyone who has ever actually tried using both iWork and Google Docs would put them anywhere near the same ballpark. Google Docs is a cloud-based service that allows for easy collaboration. But it isn’t where you’re going to be doing any heavy document lifting — I can’t imagine writing anything longer than a few pages in it, not to mention create a media-heavy presentation. Yes, you can edit documents in both of them, but calling this a “stolen” idea is pretty ridiculous.

Finally, Apple’s Email service vs Gmail. This one is just laughable. When Gmail was released back in 2004, it revolutionized webmail, offering a full gigabyte of storage space to users (not to mention a great interface). Mail services at the time that had previously been restricted to a tiny fraction of that — in fact, Apple’s premium .Mac, which cost $100 a year, was only giving out a measly 15 megabytes of storage.

Even if all these points held water, Caulfield could have used nearly exactly the same argument trying to accuse Google of “stealing” from Microsoft. Microsoft has a browser too, as well as a tiny productivity suite called Office, and an Email service called Hotmail. You may have heard of them. Google isn’t stealing, it’s competing. It’s releasing new products in an effort to beat out its rival. Likewise, Apple is out to beat Microsoft as well, so the two sometimes wind up releasing similar products. If anything, this is a case of convergent evolution, not cloak and dagger espionage.

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The Hype Machine’s New Twitter Music Chart Is Too Easy To RickRoll

Posted: 11 Jul 2009 12:22 PM PDT

The folks at the Hype Machine, the popular music tracking site, think that all of the Twitter music charts out there are “lame,” so they decided to make their own Twitter Music Chart. It encourages people to Tweet out links to their favorite songs on the Hype Machine, where you can listen to the full audio stream. They came up with a formula which gives people with more followers on Twitter more points for every song they Tweet. The songs with the most points, move up the chart.

It seems straight-forward enough, but it is way too easy for people with a large number of Twitter followers to game. I just RickRolled the chart by Tweeting a link to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” from the TechCrunch Twitter account. The TechCrunch account has 916,735 followers, which gives each Hype Machine Tweet 2,997 points. A single Tweet was enough to put the song at the top of the chart, above Michael Jackson’s and Telepopmusik’s “Remember The Time” (1,972 points). Okay, so maybe it wasn’t fair to use the TechCrunch account, but what else am I gonna do on a Saturday morning plane ride back to New York (gotta love Virgin America’s WiFi in the sky).

Even before I Tweeted the link with the TechCrunch account, I Tweeted it first through my personal @erickschonfeld account, which only has 7,224 followers, and was able to get the song to debut on the list at No. 24. Every time I Tweet out a song link, it counts for 266 points, noyt enough to get a song to the top spot with one Tweet, but enough to move “Superteen” by The Care Bears On Fire from the No. 12 spot to the No. 5 spot.

The Hype Machine’s formula is flawed. No single person should be able to affect the rankings so easily. To be fair, it just launched, and as more people start voting, the system should self-correct. But the bigger problem with ranking songs based on someone’s popularity on Twitter is that just because someone has a lot of followers doesn’t man they have good taste in music (TechCrunch and myself excluded, of course). Ranking music based on roughly on how many Twitter followers someone has is just as lame as any of the other methods the Hype Machinists are trying to replace. (I like WeAreHunted). If there was a way to figure out who are the music experts or influencers on Twitter and give their Tweets more weight, that would create a more interesting list.

Otherwise, the Hype Machine’s chart is just going to keep on getting RickRolled.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0


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