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- Euro Trip! Foursquare Invades Europe.
- Favit Has A Good Stab At Organising The Chaos Of Streams
- Google Friend Connect Becomes Friend Connect With Benefits
- Failed Online Navigation Software Maker Sues Google, Yahoo And More Over Patent
- Apple’s 100,000 Point Lead
- Nasty Gmail Bug Erroneously Marks Unread E-mails As Read
- ThoughtWorks Studios Rolls Out New Version Of Mingle, Integrates With Google Wave
- Snack-Sized News Video Site Newsy.com Recruits Traditional Media Vets
- Waveboard Puts Google Wave iPhone Application Up For Sale
- Amazon Turns On The Twitter Pump To Fuel Referral Fees
- Tragedy Of The Social Gaming Commons: A Blueprint For Change
- The Next Step For Twitter Lists — Entire Populations
- Skype Deal Is Turning Into A Bit Of A Cirque Du Freak
- Google’s Music Search Launches Its Artist-Powered Promotion
- Dual-Screen OLPC Design Binned; Get Ready For The OLPC Tablet
- SwingVine Adds Real-Time Functionality To Trend Discovery Platform
- MySpace Says Zero Tolerance For App Scams, Changes Terms Of Use
- Nebul.us: A New Way To Visualize And Share How You’re Spending Your Time Online
- AT&T Tethering Now Unofficially Works Again On iPhone 3G and 3GS – Here’s How To Do It
- Twitter Now Officially En Español
- OneRiot Confirms They’re Building Yahoo’s Real Time Search Engine (Updated)
- MSN Redux. Significantly Less Blue. But With Added Facebook And Twitter!
- Mint’s Aaron Patzer: “We Will End-Of-Life Quicken Online” In Six to Nine Months
- Topsy Surfaces Hottest Real Time Links, Hits Bit.ly And TweetMeme Head On
- What, exactly, is the Twitter Peek? Our first hands-on
| Euro Trip! Foursquare Invades Europe. Posted: 04 Nov 2009 09:00 AM PST
Foursquare is rolling out its service in 15 European cities today. This list (below) includes many large cities on the continent, and also many of the hottest tourist destinations. So this is great not only for our European friends, but also for those of us who decide to take a Euro trip. Now that you can check-in in these 15 cities, there can be a whole new game element to vacations. One city being added is Paris, which is good news for people who will be attending the LeWeb conference in December. Here’s the full list of new cities:
Previously, only Amsterdam and London were available in Europe. These 15 new cities pushes Foursquare’s total city count to 53. Just a few weeks ago, Foursquare added 15 other cities (all in the U.S. and Canada), so they’re clearly moving fast now to roll out widespread coverage. The most popular way to use Foursquare remains its iPhone app, but the service is also quickly expanding its smartphone support. The service raised a $1.35 million seed round in September. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors           |
| Favit Has A Good Stab At Organising The Chaos Of Streams Posted: 04 Nov 2009 07:33 AM PST
But as (perhaps) unlikely as it sounds favit, a new startup from Bulgaria (the service is in English, fear not), thinks it has the answer. At the very least it’s a very nice implementation of a service which enables you to define, filter and organize information streams. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| Google Friend Connect Becomes Friend Connect With Benefits Posted: 04 Nov 2009 07:30 AM PST
There are actually a number of new or tweaked features in Friend Connect, but the overall gist of the changes is that they will allow site owners to offer a more personalized social experience to their visitors, while making it easier for visitors to connect with each other. “Normally we do one feature at a time, but this is a set of features,” Friend Connect product manager Mussie Shore tells us, noting that this is a special launch to his team. The key to the new functionality for site owners is being able to get more information about their visitors. For example, depending on what Friend Connect widgets you install, you can have a questionnaire that comes up the first time a user shows up on your page and signs in with Friend Connect. This may sound like it would be annoying to a visitor, but assuming you don’t install it as a giant overlay when people first hit the site, it could actually be very useful for both parties. Site owners will be able to target content to visitors based on these answers. And visitors will be able to find other like-minded Friend Connect users that also visit that site. Site owners will also be able to use this data to create personalized newsletters. And perhaps most importantly, they can also use it to serve up better ads from AdSense. By knowing some of your interests, Google can obviously go beyond just contextual ad serving. So naturally, this information is also useful for Google as well. But from a social perspective, this is really about using all of this data to build out Google’s social layer. With it, Google can do things like build different social profiles for you on different sites (depending on that site’s content). The goal with that is to encourage users to interact more — you know, like on a social network, like the one that has the rival connect product and 300 million users. But some of Friend Connect’s new interaction methods sound a little clumsy (though we haven’t tried it out since it’s not live yet). Basically, if you see a user who is a member of the site you are currently on, you can click on their face and get an option to message them. Doing so will share your email address with them, and if they choose to respond, they will obviously share their address with you. The idea is to foster communication even outside of Friend Connect, Shore says. Staying true to its goals from Friend Connect, Google has also created APIs for all of its new features, to allow third-party developers to tinker with things. But for the more casual users, which Shore says make up most of their overall community, Friend Connect offers a very simple way to do installations. Google will also package all of the data it gathers from Friend Connect to give it back to the site owners in useful and interesting ways, such as overall stats and graphs. When I asked Shore about the privacy implications of this he replied that they’ve been telling the partners they’ve already started working with on this to “think of it like tweeting.” The idea there is that any information a user puts into Friend Connect is public. So will this shift mindshare away from Facebook Connect and towards Friend Connect as the important social layer for the web? Not if Facebook has its way with the new Open Graph API in the works. Still, Friend Connect is no slouch. In the 10 months since it officially launched, there are now 9 million sites with it implemented in some way. This has led to Google seeing 500 million 30-day active users, with 2 users now joining every second. [photo: flickr/ginnerbot] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Failed Online Navigation Software Maker Sues Google, Yahoo And More Over Patent Posted: 04 Nov 2009 06:45 AM PST
The patent (ID US6772142) is titled “Method and apparatus for collecting and expressing geographically-referenced data” and covers a web-based implemented system in which observers may pinpoint locations on a scalable map in order to fix data by latitude and longitude and to collect data describing that location. Who’s the company suing over this? None other than Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Expedia, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Travelocity, CitySearch, IAC/Interactivecorp, Yellowpages.com, The Washington Post Company, Ticketmaster, Zagat Survey and City Accommodations Network. Wait, all of these? Yes, all of them. The suit claims Google has been aware of the patent-in-suit for "some time" prior to the filing of the lawsuit and is seeking enhanced damages for willful infringement. WebMap is also reserving the right to allege willfulness against any of the other defendants that continue to infringe moving forward. Here’s the funny part: WebMap Technologies doesn’t seem to be in business anymore, and webmap.com – which used to be the address for its corporate website – now features nothing but a GoDaddy placeholder. Judging from this CNET article from February 2001, WebMap was a startup from before the dotcom bubble burst earlier this decade that was backed by at least $13 million in venture capital funding. I’m still trying to pin down what happened to the Boston/Tel Aviv company and if it’s effectively this one that is taking the companies above to court in Tewas, but it’s safe to say the WebMap that was referenced in the CNET article didn’t exactly go anywhere. The company’s former CEO, Michael Iron, went on to found and lead a p2p video platform called StreamSoft, although he doesn’t seem to have made any friends with that venture either (see here and here). Iron is currently listed as director of ILCU, an event-sharing network (but his e-mail address bounces). We’re trying to get in touch with some of the people that used to be affiliated to WebMap Technologies and will update if they get back to us. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Posted: 04 Nov 2009 06:30 AM PST  In this political season, why not talk about the roughest political argument of them all: the real meaning of Apple's announcement of over 100,000 apps in the app store. Are these apps important because, as Steve Ballmer says, the iPhone doesn't handle the Internet well? Are these apps a testament to a strong ecosystem? Or are these apps a testament to Apple's marketing might and the perception that you just might make your millions by selling flashlight app for the Touch. The announcement, which basically says that there are over 100,000 applications available for the iPhone and iPod Touch with some of the true winners - Smule's I Am T-Pain, for example - getting 10,000 or more downloads a day.   |
| Nasty Gmail Bug Erroneously Marks Unread E-mails As Read Posted: 04 Nov 2009 05:50 AM PST
Former TechCrunch writer Ouriel Ohayon was one of the first to signal the bug on Twitter – with many of his followers echoing the phenomenon – and a quick search shows other users are seeing the same thing. Some are evidently fearing that their accounts were hacked or at least accessed by someone else. According to this post, the error stems from a change Google made in how it treats the body of an e-mail through IMAP, although the company has yet to confirm this to us (or publicly). The author of the post also offers a quick fix:
(Gfail image from Tecnoblog) Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| ThoughtWorks Studios Rolls Out New Version Of Mingle, Integrates With Google Wave Posted: 04 Nov 2009 04:00 AM PST  ThoughtWorks Studios, a software development startup, is launching a new version of its project management tool, Mingle, and is rolling out integration with Google Wave. Mingle has been upgraded to feature a communications platform within the application, called "Murmurs." A mix of an IM and Twitter-like microblogging format, Murmurs allows anyone involved in a software project to have online conversations that are associated with a specific Mingle project. Mingle has also added project management capabilities including, increased scalability, the ability to let managers to write customized reporting macros by pulling data from multiple projects and a feature that lets users create links between content across projects for cross-project traceability. Mingle is also launching an integration with Google’s new collaboration platform, Wave, to help improve IT collaboration and software development productivity. Users can view and interact with Mingle from within Google Wave. The partnership is an interesting play for the IT-focused enterprise, when its comes to Wave, which has been received with mixed views. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Snack-Sized News Video Site Newsy.com Recruits Traditional Media Vets Posted: 04 Nov 2009 03:13 AM PST
The company has now recruited Pam Maples as VP of Editorial to help out with ramping up the content side of the equation. Maples is the former managing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one of the largest newspapers in the Midwestern United States, and its website STLtoday.com. Previously, Maples was assistant managing editor of investigations at The Dallas Morning News where she was a member of the reporting team that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting, so her hiring speaks volumes of how seriously Newsy is taking its own mission. Maples, a 2006 Knight Fellow in Journalism at Stanford University and a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, will be reporting to the company’s president Jim Spencer, who also has an impressive background. Spencer is the former VP of Content and Answers at Ask Jeeves (Ask.com) and prior to that served as GM of News and Information Programming at AOL and before that as director of strategic partnerships for MSNBC.com. In addition, Jim Flink, a weekend news anchor and news reporter at KMBC-TV, Kansas City's ABC affiliate, has joined Newsy as an editorial advisor. Keep your eyes on this one – and you can take that literally. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Waveboard Puts Google Wave iPhone Application Up For Sale Posted: 04 Nov 2009 02:06 AM PST
As you can tell from the short demo video below, the app does exactly what you think it does: it displays ‘waves’ and lets you search historical ones, start new ones and manage your contacts. It also opens external links in a custom browser without the need to leave the app. Waveboard also supports push notifications through a workaround (you need both the Prowl iPhone app and the Mac version of Waveboard), although they did say the next iteration will have proper push notifications. While the interface is a bit clunky and there are some bugs left to iron out, the dedicated app sure beats simply using Safari on your iPhone to visit wave.google.com (which works too, just slower). Update: commenters are pointing out that the app functions merely as a viewer for what you can see when visiting the Google Wave service from your iPhone. To an extent, this is definitely true – there is, after all, no Google Wave API yet – but there a couple of features that you won’t get in the web version like the integrated browser window and a ’shake’ function for logging out or reloading waves, with more features underway according to the developer behind the tool. Of course, it’s entirely up to you if you want to shell out a dollar for the app rather than simply installing a Safari bookmark on your iPhone for free instead. (Hat tip to AppsFire) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Amazon Turns On The Twitter Pump To Fuel Referral Fees Posted: 04 Nov 2009 01:15 AM PST
Here’s why this is interesting: As Amazon clearly notes at the end of its email (copied below), you will earn referral money for anyone that clicks on these links and buys a product. Obviously, links that bring in referral fees are nothing new, this has been going on with blogs for a long time. But Twitter users do love to click on links, so this feature could actually mean some real money for popular Twitter users with a massive following. And it’s yet another way that companies — and now even Twitter’s users — are making money off of Twitter, which Twitter won’t see a dime of (presumably, anyway). Something else to think about: A lot of blogs disclose when they’re supplying you with a referral link that they will make money from (though certainly not all of them). But on Twitter, that’s going to be hard for people to do even if they wanted to because of the 140 character limit. Other social sites, like MySpace, for example, do not allow you to post affiliate links. Twitter, it would seem, has no problem with this. In fact, at least one employee tweeted that he was excited for the launch. You can find out more about Amazon’s rules for this type of stuff on its FAQ page. Below, find the text of the email that was sent out to Associates members.
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| Tragedy Of The Social Gaming Commons: A Blueprint For Change Posted: 03 Nov 2009 11:03 PM PST
During our research we spoke to dozens of scam artists, game developers, advertisers and legitimate and illegitimate middlemen. One company was consistently mentioned as being the most above board with their approach to the market – TrialPay. So to end the series, we’ve asked TrialPay CEO Alex Rampell to write a guest post on how he sees the market, and how it can move forward in a healthy way. TrialPay is an 80 person company company in the payment processing and promotions space that works with over 7500 companies like Skype, McAfee, Match.com, Photobucket, Kmart, 1800Flowers, and Playfish. Alex started TrialPay four years ago after pioneering the use of "alternative payments" in consumer software products and games, and previously co-founded a company that became known as SiteAdvisor. Alex believes that the recent coverage about the dangers of advertisements and advertising in the social gaming space is a welcome debate that may help save this industry from what this insider sees as the social gaming equivalent of the "tragedy of the commons," where all constituents – users, advertisers, offer providers, and app developers – could permanently lose. The recent Zynga, RockYou, and MySpace announcements are an encouraging first step, but more needs to happen. Unconstrained Markets Can Create Harmful AdvertisersIn an efficient ad marketplace, the top keyword usually goes to whoever can spend the most money on it, normalized for conversion. Who can afford to spend the most money? Unfortunately, it's not always the company with the best product, service, or price; under pure laissez faire advertising, it can be the company that tricks, lies, and steals more pennies out of each customer than any competitor. This often forces ethical competitors to make a very tough choice: roll over and stagnate (or die), or play a similar game. Playing to win means staying microscopically behind the red line or breaking the rules and not getting caught. Let's keep that as the backdrop as I tell a sordid story about lead generation on the Internet. Offers Can Be Done Well and Benefit EveryoneFirst, "offers" and "incentives" don't have to be dirty words, and when used properly provide consumers better value. Four quick examples:
These real examples work very well for all parties, all of them can be and have been extended to social games, and it would be hard to argue that they are not legitimate. The problem is that they are crowded out by less legitimate alternatives that are proliferating today, a theme which Michael nailed in his last post. Incentive marketing can be a disaster if not done right, though, and the "win-win-win" can turn into "lose-lose-lose." Two Examples of Getting It Right In Social GamingExample Screenshot: Remember Amazon.com's free shipping if you spend over $25? No such thing as shipping in online games, but Restaurant City, one of the leading Playfish games with over 17M monthly active users has offered customers a free movie ticket to anyone who selects the $39.99 option Example Screenshot: PetSociety, Playfish's most popular title with over 21M monthly active users, enables customers to purchase flowers from FTD during Valentine's Day and receive 8,000 coins toward their account. Historically, Offers Have Been Implemented PoorlyConsumers Scamming Advertisers – Cash For Clunkers: Back in the late 90's and even after the bubble burst, a lot of companies offered you "cash" for signing up for offers (like Blockbuster, Vonage, etc). Netflip (aka MetaReward) scaled to nearly $70M in revenue before being shut down by its acquirer, Experian. The reason? The lead quality was bad – no, atrocious. At one point in 2006, Earthlink was paying $200 to acquire a customer for its moribund dialup business. "Cash back" sites would offer consumers $100 to sign up for a $20/month service, which said consumers would summarily cancel, netting the cash back site a $100 profit and Earthlink a $200 loss. Result: Consumers scammed advertisers, and advertisers ran for the hills, but it took years for this to happen and the ecosystem to devolve. Advertisers Scamming Consumers – Free iPods: A few years later, and fueled by cheap media, "Free iPods" (often referred to as "Free iPod Scams" and later encompassing "Free [product X]") grew to over a half billion dollar/year industry. It was a pure breakage model; your iPod would be delivered, but only if you got through dozens of pages of co-registration advertisements and offers. It got scammier and scammier since barriers to entry were low, and whoever scammed customers the most received the most revenue to get more customers. Everyone went along for the ride because every website and ad network benefited in the form of more "free iPod" advertisements. Eventually, the FTC came in. Result: Consumers got scammed, and legitimate advertisers ran for the hills, but this too took years. Social Gaming Today: Offers Still Done Poorly, But With Hope?Now it's 2009 and the age of social networking. Replace "free iPod" with "free virtual currency" and see if you can figure out how this story could end. It's actually worse because every time a consumer signs up for another offer, he or she earns more currency – yet by the 100th offer, the chance of lead quality being high for non-shopping offers (e.g., Gap, BestBuy, Target, etc) is infinitesimal; somebody who immediately signs up for both Netflix and Blockbuster to earn coins will probably be a bad customer for both. Returning to the "tragedy of the commons," the network (or app developer) with a conscience for quality who won't let consumers do 100 untargeted offers will simply be out-monetized by the network/developer who will, and that hurts the long term prosperity of everyone. Many legitimate advertisers have already started to cut their payouts or bail, such that the "scammy" offers yield the highest returns. Many app developers don't want to run scammy offers but don't have a choice if they are to stay competitive in another tragedy of the commons. Where Are the Complaints?There's also a large obfuscation layer between the user and the advertiser. It often looks like this: The offer providers are companies like Offerpal, SuperRewards, DoubleDing, Gambit, Firecue, GratisPay, and to some extent my own TrialPay, and ad networks are companies like Adteractive, CPAStorm, SearchCactus, Gratis Internet, ClickBooth, Affiliate.com, etc. The app developers often rotate different offer providers, and the offer providers often rotate different ad networks, even though the user at the beginning and the advertiser at the end stay constant. This makes it easier for users to scam advertisers, harder for offer providers to correctly track completions (there are more links in the chain to break – many people sign up for offers and are not "credited"), and easier for scammy offers to keep resurfacing such that the game publishers don't always know what's going on. It's the price they pay for higher short term revenue. Moreover, user complaints are often directed at the advertiser since the offer provider and ad network are relatively invisible in this chain, which is why you'll hear many app developers and offer providers claim they get no complaints even though scammy offers collectively yield tens of thousands of complaints to various attorneys general, the FTC, and internet message boards. Despite this clever obfuscation, it's still bad for the game publisher; users have less money to spend directly (since they had a chunk of change "scammed" away), and ill-will is bred towards the game publisher. To Prevent Further Damage, Here's What Needs to HappenIt doesn't have to end this way – there are numerous legitimate forms of incentive marketing (see my initial four examples), but they're not as profitable on a short term basis as allowing users to scam advertisers 100 times, or allowing advertisers to scam users several times (even the most naïve users get the hint after a few interactions). This has been tough for my company because we've felt the only way for us to "win" was not to play the game, and focus on higher quality and sustainability. That's ok because only a small fraction of our revenue comes from social gaming, so we aren't desperate to monetize at any cost, but I'd hate to see the industry implode. So how do we emerge from this sad state of affairs?
Actions Needed TodayThe solution is a mixture of both. Having Facebook crack the whip does nothing to solve the problem of users scamming advertisers, which imperils the whole ecosystem. Indeed, we work with companies like McAfee and Skype, assiduously measure our quality because we work directly with the vast majority of our advertisers, and we have seen the tremendous volume (and often abysmal quality) of incentivized social gaming traffic sour some advertisers to the point of throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. The problem is similar to click fraud in search engine marketing, and the solution is similar: Advertiser Feedback Loops: Offer providers need to establish direct relationships with advertisers and create a quality feedback loop. The vast majority of our advertising deals are direct, and we insist on feedback loops (did the user "quick cancel" a trial?) so we can eliminate bad sources of traffic. It doesn't mean that all of our traffic is perfect, but we spend a tremendous of time eliminating the negative externalities, which provide for better unit economics. App developers who care about quality might even want to consider working directly with advertisers, lest they receive the lowest common denominator of payouts from offer providers who don't focus on quality. Limits on Offers: There should be strict limits on what users can sign up for – not by law but by rational self-interest, since this will yield more long term revenue. The vast majority of our "alternative payment" business revolves around letting users pay for an item like McAfee VirusScan by transacting with one and only one advertiser of the user's choice. This increases the quality, which lets advertisers pay us more, and in turn lets us pay McAfee more. Advertisers will pay more if they recognize that fraud is lower and quality is higher, just like with search engine marketing. Multiple offers can work (e.g., retail shopping at different stores) but it's much more complex in lead generation. Game Publishers Should Insist on Long-Term Partnerships: Game publishers who think about long term quality (and don't swap out providers, where the providers don't swap out networks) will make more long-term money – partially because they won't burn as many customers, but primarily because quality breeds higher payouts from advertisers. Let's hope we can solve the tragedy of the social gaming commons. Virtual currency is a multi-billion dollar industry growing at a massive rate, and reckless short term behavior can threaten an even more prosperous long term future. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| The Next Step For Twitter Lists — Entire Populations Posted: 03 Nov 2009 08:40 PM PST
A couple of hours ago they launched a USA version with a script built to make the listings automatic. The plan is to do is to cover the USA in 72 hours. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Skype Deal Is Turning Into A Bit Of A Cirque Du Freak Posted: 03 Nov 2009 08:31 PM PST
The old Skype founders will now have a stake in Skype according to unnamed sources. That makes sense. It was what eBay was negotiating with Skype long before the current buyout offer, and the team has to get something in exchange for dropping the intellectual property litigation. But Index Ventures, the architect of the deal, is apparently out. For Silverlake Partners and Andreeseen Horowitz to agree to that either means there’s too much money involved for anyone to be worried about business loyalties, or there’s enough of a smoking gun that Index had no choice but to get away from the deal and all that liability. Whatever the truth, everyone is in for a wild ride. Nobody who does business with the Skype founders ever seems to come out of it happy. Maybe Marc Andreessen has the patience to change all that this time around. Just one problem, though. No one has ever described Marc Andreessen as a patient man. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Google’s Music Search Launches Its Artist-Powered Promotion Posted: 03 Nov 2009 08:01 PM PST
One clarification: while these songs are being presented and promoted on Google, they’ll also be available on the site that’s actually streaming the songs — be it MySpace or Lala. In MySpace’s case the songs could also be potentially be surfaced on other search engines, though it sounds like artists will be asking their fans to search for them on Google as part of the promotion. Included among artists giving away free MP3s as part of the promotion are: And the following exclusives are being showcased on Google as well:
Image by thatcrazysteen. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Dual-Screen OLPC Design Binned; Get Ready For The OLPC Tablet Posted: 03 Nov 2009 07:00 PM PST  The One Laptop Per Child project has seen mixed success. With competition from similar, but more familiar-looking items from Intel and others, the OLPC found itself suddenly competing in a market it had no intention of entering. But they're out there, they've had some serious orders, and despite some other speed bumps, has certainly lent a hand in increasing computer literacy in the developing world. You may remember that the sequel to the XO laptop, as the OLPC hardware was actually called, was spied at Davos in January after its initial debut in May of 2008. It was noted at the time that there was some doubt as to whether it would be made, and now those doubts have come to glorious anti-fruition. The XO-2 is dead — but only because Negroponte decided it should be a tablet.   |
| SwingVine Adds Real-Time Functionality To Trend Discovery Platform Posted: 03 Nov 2009 06:40 PM PST  SwingVine, a site that lets you see what content is trending on the web, is adding real-time functionality. SwingVine aggregates data and news from across the web, analyzes the volume of online buzz and the reputation of various sources, evaluates user interactions on the site itself, and other information to surface the the most popular and noteworthy content on the web. It's a hybrid of an aggregator of information on pop culture and news and an analytics site that actually measures what people are looking for on the web. Adding the ability to see trends and buzz on the web in real-time makes complete sense for SwingVine. The startup determines trends based on factors such as volume, recency, and growth rate of web news, sales data, critic reviews, onsite pageviews, clicks, and other data points around topics. Swingvine is also launching a Facebook app to mine and aggregate trends from your existing Facebook friends, incorporating social results into your trends. You can connect SwngVine with Facebook via Facebook Connect. So when users sign in, social trends are added based on the number of friends who engaged with various topics, the type of engagement (like vs comment vs share etc.), and the recency of engagement. Social trends can be separated from web trends. And unsurprisingly, when topics are popular in both a social circle and on the broader web, they are ranked higher. As we’ve written in the past, content on SwingVine spreads over a number of verticals including music, movies, technology, gadgets, fashion and more. ou can also rate and comment on the item, and share your comment on Facebook, Digg or MySpace. The site’s purpose is noble— with so much content emerging on the web, from music to movies to news and tech gadgets, there is a need for a tool to help people know what's worth reading into. SwingVine competes with other small yet well-funded niche social search engines like OneRiot and Blekko, that also offer users a way to see the chatter, and make sense of trends, on the web. And of course, Google Trends and Twitter’s trending topics sites like Topsy (which just launched new features today)TweetMeme also serve a similar purpose as SwingVine. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| MySpace Says Zero Tolerance For App Scams, Changes Terms Of Use Posted: 03 Nov 2009 05:04 PM PST
Today MySpace is making a big move itself. They are instituting a “zero tolerance for app scams” policy, says CEO Owen Van Natta, and are amending their apps developer terms of use to further restrict the types of offers than can be presented to users. The existing terms of use already prohibit many types of scams and require clear and accurate descriptions of offers. But as we’ve shown in previous posts, sometimes a clear and accurate description hidden at the bottom of a page in 8 point type isn’t all that useful. The addition MySpace is adding a requirement to have users opt in to any specific offer or promotion that includes a renewal or subscription.
Rules are great, but without enforcement the scammy offers never go away (this is the Facebook problem). MySpace says they will enforce these rules and will remove applications that don’t modify practices promptly:
The proof is in the pudding, of course. But this is yet another big company stepping up to try to put a stop to social gaming application scams. It’s time for Facebook to make their move. Here’s the full blog post:
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| Nebul.us: A New Way To Visualize And Share How You’re Spending Your Time Online Posted: 03 Nov 2009 04:58 PM PST
Here’s how it works: after installing a browser plugin (the service currently has support for Firefox with IE, Chrome, and Safari on the way), your browser will start monitoring your browsing history and uploading it to the service. Everything is intitally locked down in a private mode — meaning nobody else can see it — unless you visit the site and explicitly decide to share it with your friends. Or, if there are some sites you’d always be comfortable sharing with your friends, you can choose to add it to your ‘Trusted’ list, which means they’ll automatically be shared. The site has a friends system so you can determine who is allowed to following your browser history, or you can choose to share it into a public pool. If there’s a site you never want to have recorded, even in the private mode, you can block it entirely. If you do let something slip by, you can go back and delete it from your history. The site is well done, with a clean UI and some nice graphics. By default, the site will present your recorded browsing history in a donut shape, with each site visited represented by a colored band. The shape and position of these bands is meant to recall a standard clock face — the length and position of a band corresponds to the time you visited a site. Along with your browser history, you can also import your Tweets and songs played on last.fm which are displayed as parallel bands. It’s fun to play around with, but you can also switch into a more standard list view if you’d like. Also worth pointing out: CEO Alex Huf says that everything on the site was built with touch screens in mind, so the site should play nice with whatever tablet devices are on the horizon. Nebul.us seems to have two main uses: it can used as both a social site for sharing content with your friends (and to the public, if you’d like), or as a productivity site for figuring out how you’re spending your time online. In the former case, which pits the site against the likes of Digg and Delicious, Nebul.us users effectively vote on their favorite articles not with sharing buttons, but by voting with their browsers themselves. In the latter case Nebul.us goes against services like RescueTime. It’s nice the Nebul.us has two very different use cases, but I’m concerned it may prove difficult to explain them both to new users who stumble across the site (frankly I was pretty confused at first). Still, Nebul.us is still is fairly early stages so they have plenty of time to figure out how to balance the two. A harder challenge may lie in convincing people to actually share their browser history in the first place: no matter how many security and privacy features Nebul.us offers, putting that data in the cloud is going to be enough to scare off a significant number of potential users. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| AT&T Tethering Now Unofficially Works Again On iPhone 3G and 3GS – Here’s How To Do It Posted: 03 Nov 2009 04:11 PM PST When the iPhone OS 3.1 update rolled through town, it brought with it a handful of new features – but it also killed off one, not-so-official feature: unauthorized data tethering on AT&T. Early this morning, the endlessly ingenious iPhone hacking community released Blacksn0w, a carrier unlock for the iPhone 3G and 3GS. Even if you have no need to plug in a different SIM card than what was originally intended, however, Blacksn0w still has its perks. Namely, it brings the aforementioned unauthorized data tethering right on back. We’ve just walked through the process, and it went off without a hitch. If you’re interested in doing the same but don’t want to do it alone, we’ve thrown together a handy step-by-step guide, just for you. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| Twitter Now Officially En Español Posted: 03 Nov 2009 03:36 PM PST
The Twitter Blog has a post about it right now, but co-founder Biz Stone has cheekily written it entirely in Spanish. We’ll go ahead and translate it for you:
Spanish joins Japanese as the only languages besides English that Twitter currently supports. But more are coming soon, as Twitter previously noted that they’d like to have the “FIGS” languages. The “S” in there is Spanish with the others being French, Italian, and German. Official support for other languages should undoubtedly help Twitter continue to grow after stalling a bit in recent months. And this Spanish support should also kneecap Meme, Yahoo’s Spanish Twitter clone (which is now also in English). Twitter also has a new official Spanish account to follow on the service. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| OneRiot Confirms They’re Building Yahoo’s Real Time Search Engine (Updated) Posted: 03 Nov 2009 03:05 PM PST
In the email, Musk says that OneRiot results will appear in the main Yahoo search results page for certain queries:
Both Microsoft and Google are in the process of launching their own real time search engines via direct data relationships with Twitter and Facebook. Update: From Yahoo:
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| MSN Redux. Significantly Less Blue. But With Added Facebook And Twitter! Posted: 03 Nov 2009 03:00 PM PST More than 1/3 of all Internet users worldwide visit MSN every month. 400 million people. That’s way more than AOL’s 80 million, and not ridiculously out of reach of Yahoo’s nearly 600 million. But still, it’s the most popular Internet portal that no one actually ever goes to. Starting tonight though that’s going to change. Or at least, MSN is changing. We’ll have to wait and see how usage numbers are affected if at all. The most notable change is a new logo and lots less blue (a screen shot of the old MSN is below for posterity). Everything is sleeker and easier to read. Not as many links. More video (hot HD stuff using Silverlight). Lots and lots of Bing bling and Live.com services. And of course, there’s Facebook. And Twitter. Log right in on the bottom right of MSN. Half of their monthly visitors are already Facebook users, says Microsoft. And 15% use Twitter. So having the ability to read and create Facebook and Twitter messages right from the portal page is a good idea. For users with Silverlight, more advanced apps will be available. Microsoft will roll out the new version over time. But if you want in right now, and just absolutely positively can’t wait in line, you can see it immediately by going to http://preview.msn.com. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Mint’s Aaron Patzer: “We Will End-Of-Life Quicken Online” In Six to Nine Months Posted: 03 Nov 2009 02:55 PM PST Yesterday, Intuit closed on its previously announced $170 million acquisition of personal budgeting site Mint, making Mint founder and CEO Aaron Patzer the new vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Personal Finance Group. He is now in charge of not only Mint.com, but also all of Quicken’s online and desktop products. What will his first order of business be? I spoke to him today to find out. “Over the next 6 to 9 months,” he says, “we will end-of-life Quicken Online and their customer’s data will be migrated over to Mint.” Just a few months ago, the Quicken Online team was questioning Mint’s success. Now, Patzer is their new boss. It’s not so much revenge as it is a smart business move. Intuit doesn’t need two different online financial planning sites for consumers, and it bought Mint because it couldn’t beat it. Combining the two is the obvious move. (Both help consumers keep track of their money and spending by monitoring their bank accounts, brokerage accounts, credit cards, and other financial accounts). Quicken Online has roughly 1.5 million registered users, but only about 100,000 are active in any given month. In contrast, Mint has about the same number of registered users (1.7 million), but nearly 700,000 are active every 30 days. “The biggest opportunity for us is to reactivate those users who thought that maybe Quicken Online wasn't for them,” says Patzer. (Read his account of how he built Mint over the past two years after winning TechCrunch40). Other than Quicken Online’s users, is there anything that he’d like to keep? Patzer can only think of one feature Quicken Online has that Mint doesn’t and which he wants: the ability to manually enter cash transactions or record checks which have not yet cleared. The fact that Intuit put him in charge of Quicken’s desktop products as well as its online services says a lot about where it thinks the future of that business is going. The growth is definitely in the online portion of the business. And now Intuit can start cross-selling Mint from its Quicken desktop products, as well as TurboTax. Some consumers, however, will always prefer the perceived security of a desktop app when it comes to their personal finances, which is why Patzer is starting to think about ways to store some information from Mint locally by using something like Google Gears, Adobe Air, or Microsoft Silverlight. Building hooks into TurboTax will present other opportunities beyond simply signing up new members. When a TurboTax user decides to sign up for an IRA to save on taxes or want to know what to do with their tax return, Mint can present the best rates and offers from competing financial institutions and earn a hefty fee for finding one of them a new customer. Patzer has other ideas for connecting Mint and TurboTax as well: “What I want to do is to take your stock transactions and everything you've tagged in Mint as a medical expense or business expense and push that over to see if you should itemize deductions. If we pull in your 1099s and deductions, we have done half your taxes for you. We could reduce the time it takes you to do your taxes to 20 minutes or less.” The next step after that would be to get into financial planning for big life goals such as paying down debt, saving for college, buying a house or car, or saving for a home renovation or a big vacation. He wants Mint to be at the center of every major financial decision a person makes. When he sold to Intuit, he took some flak for not going it alone, but Patzer believes he made the right choice because he can build a bigger business much faster at Intuit. He wants to keep pushing online, as well as mobile, desktop apps, and international (which is hard to do in finance with a 38-person startup). Mint already has a popular iPhone app which has been downloaded more than 350,000 times, and is now working on an Android app. But the biggest reason Patzer sold is because Intuit will help Mint get to scale faster. Mint’s value is in the personal financial data that it tracks, and that data will be much more valuable with 5 million active users than with under one million. Getting to 5 million and 10 million and beyond is the game. And however popular Mint was among younger, Web-savvy consumers, some people were never going to trust it with their financial lives. About 25 million people a year already trust Intuit with their taxes, half of those online. That’s the most sensitive financial data a person has to give. If you already trust Intuit with your taxes, making the jump to Mint becomes a lot easier for those who might have been hesitating before. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Topsy Surfaces Hottest Real Time Links, Hits Bit.ly And TweetMeme Head On Posted: 03 Nov 2009 02:46 PM PST
Topsy is all about the power of the ReTweet on Twitter. When the service first launched publicly in May we noted that ReTweets are the new currency of the web. And it isn’t just the number of retweets that matters (which is subject to large scale spamming efforts). It’s the authority of the people doing the retweeting, too. One way Topsy is distinguishing itself from competitors like OneRiot and TweetMeme is by holding on to data forever. Most real time search engines are focused on right now, which is exactly what people want. But they dump data periodically, and anyone looking for older stuff won’t be able to find it. Here’s a sample search for “skype andreessen” on OneRiot (4 resutls), TweetMeme (0 results) and Topsy (37 pages of results, which can be sorted and filtered by time). So when you want to look up old Tweets around a link, Topsy has the data that no one else is currently showing. Topsy TopLinksToday Topsy is releasing new lists of top links being shared on Twitter at any given time. The product is called Topsy TopLinks. There are lists for the Top 100, Top 1,000 and Top 5,000 links. You can also search within the lists – example. Users can grab RSS feeds for TopLinks, or even feeds for searches within TopLinks. Like Bit.ly Now and TweetMeme, Topsy TopLinks is a great way to see what’s hot on Twitter right now. And by using influence they cut out the spammy stuff. Topsy ReTweet ButtonTopsy is now offering a Wordpress plugin that gives sites a TweetMeme-like retweet button. And it also shows any badges earned for the URL in TopLinks. Here’s how it looks: Advanced Query SyntaxAmong the other changes at Topsy, the site now supports new advanced search queries.
We remain big fans of Topsy. They are amassing a huge long term database of popular links from Twitter, and allowing search and discovery against those links based on advanced search techniques and the idea of influence among Twitter users. The company is based in San Francisco, has 16 employees and has raised $15 million in venture funding. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| What, exactly, is the Twitter Peek? Our first hands-on Posted: 03 Nov 2009 02:33 PM PST  I just got my hands on the the Twitter Peek aka the Tweek and I'm trying to figure out who, specifically, this is for. First, consider this my review: this device is not very good if you're a Twitter "power user" like myself or anyone else with maybe 100+ followers and a few hundred folks you follow. To be clear, this isn't quite Peek's fault as they're clearly not interested in pleasing folks like you and me. They're looking for folks from a different aviary, presumably new Twitter users who haven't quite gotten hooked but are interested in the service enough to stick with it and have $199 burning a hole in their pockets absolutely right now and don't really follow very many people. If you know any of those people, please send them to Amazon to pick this up. For the rest of us, this thing is pretty rough. I follow 2104 people and so this thing was buzzing and Tweeting all afternoon until I finally turned it off. Weird batches of tweets would come in, all from one person, for example, or weird messages like "Oh Hey, you're Tweeting so much! We're going to try to catch up" or something to that effect. It's also really slow. You have to click twice to read a Tweet - once to bring up the menu and once to read the Tweet - and scrolling is really bad. And it makes a buzzing and a tweeting noise when tweets come in - which is all the time. And it's $99 with 6 months free or $199 for life. And it only does Twitter. No email. No texting. I'm really selling this thing, aren't I?   |
One of the biggest problems users face every day is how difficult it has become to follow news streams from many different sources without getting lost in the noise — from mainstream media, to the millions of blogs, YouTube and other social media such as Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter. 
A battle has been brewing for months now: Google and Facebook both 
Bone-headed patent lawsuit number 573482: a company called WebMap Technologies is suing a host of technology companies over an online map patent that was issued over 5 years ago, reports 
I haven’t noticed this myself today, but it appears at least a subset of 
I wasn’t joking when I wrote 
We already knew 
Tonight, Amazon sent an email to members of Amazon Associates letting them know about a new feature: Twitter integration. Basically, when you’re logged into your Associate account, you’ll see a new “Share on Twitter” button on your Site Stripe (a management toolbar along the top of the page). As you’d expect, clicking this button will prepare a tweet complete with a shortened URL to send out of all of your Twitter followers.
Our series of ScamVille posts on social gaming scams are nearly over. There have been some surprises along the way, like Zynga, RockYou and MySpace making quick policy changes to protect consumers. But we want to end this series with a glimmer of hope, and a proposed way for app developers to make a good living over the long run. 
[Ireland] Social media consultants 
In our 
Last night we 
[feat. Gucci Mane & Soulja Boy Tell 'Em] [Logan deGaulle Remix]”
The industry is definitely making big changes to self regulate around social gaming offer scams (
Last month, 
An update to our post in late October about 
Real time search and discovery engine 
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