Facebook is all about openess, right? And privacy. It’s a balance, or something. Oftentimes it’s a tricky balance, but Facebook has self-instituted standards to live up to. And those standards say that Google’s new Friend Connect is evil (in so many words).

As Friend Connect supposedly shares user data in a way that circumvents total disclosure to all users involved, Facebook has stated that Friend Connect does not comply with its standards for collecting user data and redistributing it across the web. The result? Friend Connect’s access to Facebook has been suspended.

So much for the web platform coming to fruition in an easy, cooperative manner. Google still has Microsoft and Yahoo to compete with on the search level, but when it comes to the development of open standards, MySpace, Facebook and Google have become the battling trio.

Between Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, and MySpace’s Data Availability on top of existing open platforms, the race is on to become the dominant, most widely adopted platform for such open standards. It’s quite dizzying at this point, and not so cooperative after all. Facebook has stated that it’s reached out to Google in order to find a way in which to reach a satisfactory level of compliance, so hopefully that will happen soon. Google does, after all, have a burning desire to own the universe’s data.mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/facebook-blocks-friend-connec/

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This guest post was contributed by Bernard Moon, who authors the blog Silicon Moon.

When the sitcom “30 Rock” began its run, some of my friends weren’t wild about Tina Fey, the show’s star and creator, saying she should “stay in the writer’s room” or that she “looked too mousy.” A few months later, however, those same guys were talking about how hot she was. Fey has since become a mainstream darling. Twitter is Web 2.0’s Tina Fey. Not so attractive initially, Twitter got better the more you looked at it. Case in point: Although I tested Twitter as soon as it launched, I eventually ended up sitting on my account because I wasn’t enamored by early adopters and Silicon Valley geeks listening to each other talk. Today, that situation has changed: While the echo chamber still exists, Twitter seems to be reaching a critical mass that will push it into the mainstream.

An obvious target group for Twitter is the youth and SMS (Short Message Service) markets. The reason for this is that micro-blogging services (such as Twitter, Pownce, and Zannel) provide an easy alternative for blasting messages to multiple contacts, and teens are prolific SMS users. Although wireless carriers in Korea have provided an online platform for broadcasting SMS messages through mobile phones since early 2000—a service favored by night club owners and party planners—I find it highly doubtful that U.S. carriers will be able to do the same (in the process creating a viable competitor to Twitter and others) since they’ve stumbled so many times before in the past (acquisition is a reasonable possibility). Since in addition to their SMS activities, many high school kids are becoming “wall” crazy on Facebook, I assume micro-blogging services could keep more of them glued to their mobile devices.

As Twitter and services like it move into the mainstream, I see a few trends emerging. One is the implementation of increased structure within these platforms. This will be related to better discovery of information ranging from simple things as tags to third-party search engines. Additional infrastructure will also be created to allow people to join larger conversations and to extend the focus of such services beyond today’s echo chamber. Since we’re dealing with a broadcast medium, you could call these broader conversations “channels.” Pownce, for example, allows groups, but I’m thinking about completely open channels for everyone on a platform (or meshed platform, if that ever happens)—for example, national public channels on marketing ideas, baby channels, a Red Sox Nation channel, even a Suze Orman channel. While short-form blogging doesn’t fulfill every need, it can be an excellent venue for brainstorming, generating new ideas, and creating an insightful medium that goes beyond mere ego-tracking.

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In the past 24 hours, two major deals have gone down: Comcast acquired Plaxo for a reported $175 million, while CBS scooped up CNET this morning for $1.8 billion. On the surface, neither pairing makes a whole lot of sense – a big cable company buying an online address book manager, and the home of “CSI: Miami” purchasing the Web’s most popular technology news conglomerate.

Here’s how executives involved in the dealings defended the pairings:

Ben Golub, CEO of Plaxo:

“Together, we will be able to help users connect with all the people they care about, across all of the devices they use, with all the media they love to consume, create, and share. This is also great news for the Internet industry at large, where Plaxo has been – and will continue to be – a strong advocate for opening up the Social Web.”

Leslie Moonves, CEO of CBS:

“Together, CBS and CNET Networks will have significant additional exposure to the fastest- growing advertising sector and can accelerate our growth through a number of new content, promotion and advertising initiatives.”

Do these deals make sense to you, or do you think we are the tail end of another bubble, with old media scrambling to buy the remaining big, independent web properties? More aptly, which of these two deals do you think makes the most sense? Sound off in our poll:

Which deal do you think makes the most sense?
• CBS-CNET
• Comcast-Plaxo
View Results

mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/internet-mergers/

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Copenda, the people search engine that scours social networks and dating sites to help you find your true love, has undergone a number of changes that would pretty much qualify this as a relaunch of the site.

Great Redesign of User Interface

For starters, the user interface has been redesigned. I know this is a typical modification for relaunches, but I must admit that Copenda’s new design makes it far easier to use and much more attractive. One complaint I had about Copenda’s design upon its launch was the fact that the search results resembled a table to be dissected instead of an easily consumed set of matches to consider.

Improved Filter Options

Another new feature that goes hand in hand with this particular design update is the new filter option–something else I wanted to see added to the site. As there is so much data to sift through with Copenda searching across so many networks, filtering through the search results is key for the user experience. It helps rectify one of the major issues I had with Copenda’s initial search tool, which could offer you pages of search results based on gender alone, which doesn’t really narrow down search to a great extent.

More Control for Users

The individual user experience has been improved in a couple of other ways, with more control being extended to users for the display of their Copenda profiles, as well as the option to contact users through the social network with which they’re associated.

Search API

Another important update is the provision of a Search API, which includes mobile support. So other networks and applications can leverage Copenda’s niche people search for various use cases.

In all, Copenda is beginning to look a lot more like your average people search, just targeted towards finding people for dating purposes. I think this is the best route to go for such a search tool, as it allows for a lot of growth in multiple directions, including personalized feed updates, profile agregation, and a unique set of data that could prove useful to advertisers.mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/copenda-relaunc/

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Mosso, RackSpace’s recently launched subsidiary in the cloud computing space, is updating the way they charge customers. Previously, the company’s $100/mo plan was capped at 3 million requests, and charged users $.03 for every thousand requests after that. The big problem with this model was illustrated to me by Travell Perkins, a developer who is currently hosting with Mosso:

“We live in a CPC ad world, at least when a service is starting out. Furthermore Mosso was counting all requests, not page requests. A standard media rich page can make 50 - 100 requests before it loads. Only the page itself is ad supported, so most web applications would not be able to cover the costs through ads. API based web services aren’t even an option. A developer would have to pass the $.03 CPM directly on to consumers of the API to stay out of the red.”

The new pricing structure, outlined in the email to customers that I’ve embedded below, eliminates the request metric and instead charges based on “the compute cycle - a measurement of the processing time your application requires to run on The Hosting Cloud.” Here’s how Perkins explains the significance of this change:

“It basically means you can build standard LAMP/.NET applications with file based caching solutions and compete against the big boys. Amazon EC2 is closer to the metal and not really meant for two man developer teams. You need IT management experience to really make it hum. Mosso in short is really shared hosting taken to the next level, built to scale. Now the pricing structure matches. With creative developers who understand caching you can move CPU utilization to storage utilization and have a really cost effective and scalable solution.”

The cloud computing space has become crowded over the past year, with leader Amazon being joined by Mosso, Nirvanix, and Google App Engine, among others. Will the new pricing structure give Mosso an edge in luring developers? Let us know what you think in the comments.

mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/mosso-cloud-computing/

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Kwiry is a mobile-to-web reminder tool that I think is pretty nifty, and I’ve enjoyed seeing its developments since its December launch. Some new features with today’s release are more options that I was hoping to see, including the ability to send in photos, and more importantly, improved access to kwiry’s from their mobile phone.

The photo-sending option is added onto the existing options for making a voice note, email or text message for reminder submissions to your kwiry account. Now, the mobile access to submitted kwiry’s is very important, because kwiry is already a very mobile tool. In submitting notes and reminders on the go, you also want to have access to these notes on the go.

The realm of personal aggregation tools is growing quickly, with services like Evernote releasing robust tools that somewhat compete with Kwiry, and file storage sites like Putplace that have distribution options for the sharing of personal files.

What’s interesting about the growing space is its increased integration with third party services, for sharing or further personalization. This trend makes such bookmarking tools that much more practical, as it allows for immediate and useful actions to take place with each and every item that’s added to an account. mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/kwiry-photo-mobil/

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There is a reason why web sites ask you for your age, gender, and zip code – the ability to target advertising based on demographic data. Now, YouTube is putting that data in the hands of video producers, allowing you to see on a video-by-video basis the demographic breakdown of your viewers.

For now, you get a bar chart representing the percentage of your audience in different age groups, and a pie chart showing the breakdown of gender. You can then filter that data by country or for a specific time frame. Additionally, YouTube has rolled out aggregate data, so you can see the combined demographics for all of your videos. The data is all anonymous.

Given YouTube’s dominance in online video, the stats they provide are likely to be seen as fairly authoritative, hence giving video producers a better idea of what type of content they should be producing and advertisers a better idea of what they’re buying.

The new stats are available through YouTube Insights, which was first rolled out back in March. To access the features, just go to “My Videos” and click on the “Insight” link for any video where you’d like to see the stats.
mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/youtube-demographic-data/

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As expected, Carl Icahn has sent a letter to Yahoo Chariman Roy Bostock indicating his plans to nominate an alternative board of directors, which, amongst others, includes Mark Cuban, who has been a proponent of a combined Microsoft-Yahoo since the news first broke. Ironically, Cuban made his fortune when he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.6 billion back at the peek of the first dot-com boom. This move paves the way for Yahoo shareholders to elect the alternative board at the company’s annual meeting, which would then set the stage for Microsoft to make a new bid to acquire the company.

In the letter, Icahn discloses that he has acquired 59 million shares of Yahoo. Hence, if he’s able to get his board elected and Microsoft to re-offer $33/share, he stands to make several hundred million dollars. How’s that for motivation?

The letter has some awesomely stern-worded sound bites, including:

“It is irresponsible to hide behind management’s more than overly optimistic financial forecasts.”

“During the past week, a number of shareholders have asked me to lead a proxy fight to attempt to remove the current board and to establish a new board which would attempt to negotiate a successful merger with Microsoft, something that in my opinion the current board has completely botched.”

“It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo’s closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer.”

Here’s the full text of the letter, which also includes Icahn’s full set of board nominees:

mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/yahoo-icahn-board-of-directors/

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CNET Networks, and all of its properties, including CNET, ZDNet, GameSpot.com, TV.com, CNET News, UrbanBaby, BNET, CHOW and Search.com, are being acquired by CBS for a total price of $1.8 billion.

Under the terms of the agreement, CBS will make a cash tender offer for all issued and outstanding shares of CNET Networks for $11.50 per share, representing an equity value of approximately $1.8 billion. This transaction will instantly propel CBS into one of the 10 most popular Internet companies in the US, with 54 million unique monthly users, and approx. 200 million users worldwide.

This doesn’t come as a complete surprise. CNET has had its share of troubles, and investors weren’t happy; in fact, recently a consortium of CNET investors was preparing for a takeover of CNET’s board of directors. CNET’s shares have been in the doldrums for quite some time now, and the shareholders have obviously found a desirable exit in a CBS acquisition.

Leslie Moonves, President and Chief Executive Officer at CBS Corporation, said this about the acquisition:

“There are very few opportunities to acquire a profitable, growing, well-managed Internet company like CNET Networks. CBS stands for premium content and unparalleled reach, and CNET Networks will add a tremendous platform to extend our complementary entertainment, news, sports, music and information content to a whole new global audience.”

Allen Stern has some notes from a conference call the companies held this morning.

mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/breaking-cbs-acquires-cnet-for-18-billion/

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Animoto, web app for creating videos out of photos and music has received funding from Amazon. The amount of money invested was not disclosed.

The service uses Amazon Web Services (S3 in particular) to scale its application which quickly gained tremendous popularity. For instance, the Facebook version of Animoto is one of the most popular applications on Facebook platform, with over 750,000 users. Animoto was doing so well that it became a poster child for AWS, and it has been featured by Amazon as an example of a successful service using S3.

Here’s some marketingese from Jeff Blackburn, Senior Vice President for Business Development at Amazon: “Animoto has a very smart team with an innovative approach to helping people create personalized, high production videos for the web. As a customer of our Amazon Web Services business, Animoto shared with us the success they’ve had recently with their Facebook application, and we think this is just the beginning.” mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/animoto-amazon-fundin/

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