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Dear Facebook, Please Return Our Social Networking Space
Dec 20, 3:31AM
The following is a guest post by David Dalka. Dalka is a digital business strategist and keynote speaker who was a member of BlackRock (BLK) during its hyper-growth phase of 80 to 800 people. He is a top ten contributor to CrunchBase, strategist to senior executives on how digital marketing tactics are transforming business strategy and revenue generation, blogger and is currently working on a nonfiction business book proposal. According to TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington, Dalka currently lives in a location of "horrendous weather eight months out of the year". (Editor's note: Maybe you can entice him to move somewhere else? Seriously, we really do pity him.) Photo courtesy of 2010 Internet Hungary conference. About a month ago there was a loud outcry when Facebook inexplicably introduced a smaller font size to its News Feed. The lack of communication from Facebook while making a significant change is sadly nothing new. You could tell that the angry and highly upset Facebook users that day knew instinctively that this event was not in their best interest.
Flirting Social Network Likealittle Hits 20M Pageviews In 6 Weeks
Dec 20, 2:29AM
If you were paying attention to Hacker News this weekend, you may have seen both the following post advertising "YC W11 Startup Social Network, 20M Pageviews in 6 Wks, Hiring Hackers/Designers" and the subsequent thread trying to determine which startup it was both go popular within hours of each other. 
Why Sunsetting Delicious Matters
Dec 19, 11:26PM
Yahoo, which earned $1.6 billion in revenue last quarter, is "sunsetting" Delicious because the unprofitable acquisition "is not a strategic fit". The tech and blogger community, along with Delicious fans, are crying 'no.' Michael Arrington says Yahoo is in "absolute disarray". Even though Yahoo's Delicious home page says it's "the biggest collection of bookmarks in the universe", 
Pizza Superiority Determined In Massive Geek Eating Binge
Dec 19, 10:04PM
Lots of people argue about which place has the best pizza. But only a geek's geek would get so obsessed that they spend a whole weekend determining as scientifically as possible exactly who's right and who's wrong. Enter David Shamma, a research scientist and Chicago style pizza snob. He argued with former Yahoo product guru Daniel Raffel about which Chicago joint had the best pizza. They failed to find common ground. So (of course) they asked a scientist and cognitive psychologist specializing in human-computer interaction to create and conduct an experiment to settle things. 
Thanks In Part To Free Shipping Offers, Online Holiday Spending Up 12 Percent To $27.5B
Dec 19, 7:14PM
We know that online holiday spending is reaching highs this year, as consumers are looking to the web for deals this season. To date, comScore is reporting that $27.46 billion has been spent online, which is a 12 percent increase versus the same period of time last year. This past week ending December 17, reached $5.15 billion in spending, which is an increase of 14 percent. In fact, four individual days this past week surpassing $900 million, led by Green Monday (Monday, December 13) with $954 million and Free Shipping Day (Friday, December 17) with $942 million. 
NSFW: Hey, Assange's Celeb Supporters, What Time's Your Protest Outside Quantico? Oh.
Dec 19, 6:39PM
I think we can all agree that the one thing the world needs right now is another column about Julian Assange. I'm sitting in a hotel bar about an hour north of London, and spread out on the table in front of me are all of today's British newspapers - from the Mail on Sunday to the Observer. Every single one of them contains - within the first few pages - a news story or opinion about the antipodean face of Wikileaks. Online, it's a similar state of affairs. You can't move your mouse pointer today without rolling over an Assange fanboy blogger, either propounding conspiracy theories on the real reason for his imprisonment, or demanding to know why Time cruelly overlooked their man for "Person of the Year". (My theory: Time is wisely sticking to its policy of waiting for controversial people's stories to play out a bit before putting them on the cover. The whole Hitler thing back in '38 rather bit them on the ass.)
Neutrality Or Bust
Dec 19, 3:01PM
Editor's note: Guest author John Borthwick is the CEO and founder of betaworks and in a previous life was a senior strategist for Time Warner and a witness in the Microsoft antitrust case. Access to fast, affordable and open broadband, for users and developers alike is, I believe, the single most important driver of innovation in our business. The FCC will likely vote next week on a framework for net neutrality—we got aspects of this wrong ten years ago, we can't afford to be wrong again. For the reasons I outline below, we are at an important juncture in the evolution of how we connect to the Internet and how services are delivered on top of the platform. The lack of basic "rules of the road" for what network providers and others can and can't do is starting to hamper innovation and growth. The proposals aren't perfect but now is the time for the FCC to act. Brad Burnham stopped by our office earlier this week to talk about his proposal for the future of net neutrality. The FCC has circulated a draft of a set of rules about neutrality that the Commission will likely vote on this week. Though the rules are not public, Chairman Genachowski outlined their substance last week. Through a combination of the Chairman's talk, the Waxman Proposal, and the Google/Verizon proposal, one can derive the substance of the issue and understand its opportunities and risks. I strongly support much of what the Chairman has proposed and I support the clarifications that Burnham outlines. But before further discussing this point, I have to ask, why does this matter now? Over the past few years there has been a lot of discussion, a lot of promises, and some proposals with regard to net neutrality. Here are three reasons why this matters now:
Isle Of Tune Lets You Compose Music By Um, City Planning
Dec 19, 4:03AM
Need something to do while waiting for your copy of Farmville for Dummies to arrive? Isle of Tune is the latest in viral web distraction, built on the side by London-based interactive director Jim Hall. Isle of Tune lets you create whole songs by building a little town using objects like streetlamps, houses and trees to make sounds. 
Instagram Gains Suggested Users, 7 New Languages, And Yes, 2 New Filters
Dec 19, 3:53AM
An update to Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app for the iPhone, has just hit the App Store. And while the version numbering (1.0.6) may not make it seem like a big update, there are a few notable things about the latest version. First of all, in an effort to drive more social connections for new users, they've added a suggested users list. Second, they've added seven new languages (Japanese, German, Russian, French, Chinese, Italian, and Spanish). Third, they've fixed a number of bugs and increased performance. And finally, for the first time, they've also added two new filters into the mix.
Google Quietly Kills Their Creepy Latitude Location Alerts Feature
Dec 19, 3:28AM
Back in February, we noted a sort of creepy feature of Google Latitude that was annoying some users: Location Alerts. The beta feature actually launched alongside the Location History feature the previous November, but it didn't get a lot of attention at the time. Then people started getting emails notifying them where their friends were — without asking for such emails. Yeah, a little creepy. So it shouldn't be too surprising to hear that Google has quietly killed the feature. The only place Google noted this is on this page on their support site. As they write:
Former Yahoo Engineers Shed Light On Why Delicious And Other Acquisitions Failed
Dec 19, 1:53AM
As we've written a number of times over the past few days, Yahoo appears to be in complete disarray. Following layoffs at the company this week, a leaked memo revealed that Yahoo is "sunsetting" a number of products includes Delicious (bought by Yahoo in 2005), MyBlogLog (bought by Yahoo in 2007), Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Picks. Other products are planning to be "merged" such as Upcoming (bought by Yahoo in 2005), Fire Eagle, and others. A day later, Yahoo announced that it would be finding a new home for Delicious, passively aggressively blaming the press for the way that users found out about the news. There have been many more fumbles, which you can read here. So how did it get to this point? A Quora thread with posts by a number of former Yahoo engineers and employees sheds some light on why the acquisitions of web services startups like Delicious and Upcoming failed at the company. 
The @Mention Cloud
Dec 18, 9:40PM
Many social aggregators have mined citations to produce digests of trending stories and multimedia. Google Reader support in the new Flipboard and Delicious' apparent folding are two sides of the same coin, a last ditch effort to ignore the impact of the social stream on the InBox. Where RSS used to capture so much of the flow of information, now social signals determine not only whether but when items reach the InBox. @mentions win the race to the InBox. You might think just focusing on @mentions would produce a fatuously egocentric view of the stream. But in fact that's exactly what we all do. Techmeme, for all its technology and human editorial, is still Gabe Rivera's view of who's talking about him, his issues, his view of what constitutes interesting material. And judging by his continuing success, if it's all about Gabe, it's all about us too. Us is remarkably stable in its basic parameters of interest. So-called tech news is really about the architecture and evolution of the technology that @mentions us.
Online Video In 2011: Connected TVs, Social Recommendations, And Standards Wars
Dec 18, 8:00PM
Editor's note: Online video is going through many changes as people begin to connect their TVs to the Internet and social sharing over Facebook and Twitter influence what people watch as much as search. In this guest post, Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of online video platform Brightcove, gives his view of where online video is going next year. Allaire's last guest post for us was on the standards war in mobile video formats. Web video is just getting started, and 2011 promises to be yet another year of transformation in the online video landscape. The stage is set for mainstream connected TVs, Over-the-top adoption, and even more videos watched directly streamed from website. Here are the five biggest trends in online video that will play out in significant ways for end-users and publishers alike. 1. Connected TV Platform Wars The past year saw the definitive emergence of platform wars in the handheld computing landscape. This year will see those wars expand into new territory, the Connected TV platform market. Input 1 on the TV is the new homepage or start screen. We should expect that the battles will look incredibly similar to the market that emerged for smartphones over the past several years, but with some other entrenched players. Google vs. Apple vs. the dominant TV brands. In fact, these platforms will largely be based on a similar architecture, offering app and content publishers a common model for creating device-oriented applications and Web experiences. Apple will ship an iOS-based Apple TV display and will open up Apple TV to third-party apps beyond Netflix. Developers will have a common model for building apps across the phone, tablet and TV, as well as a suite of new APIs for phone and tablet apps to interact with TV apps (think remote control type activities, gestures for games, etc.). Its platform will also support HTML5 with a set of design standards for TV Web 10-foot experiences.
Gillmor Gang 12.18.10 (TCTV)
Dec 18, 8:00PM
The Gillmor Gang took advantage of the presence of multiple Android lovers to provide a visceral demonstration of the anti-Jobs reality distortion field. Namely, that no matter how many new Android phones hit the market at 2 week intervals, none is actually better than the iPhone. Michael Arrington went a step further, declaring that Android tablets were destined for instant has-been status once the next iPad ships in February or so. Robert Scoble succeeded in proving Flipboard may be Steve Jobs' favorite iPad app but still remains useless until they open up. Danny Sullivan wondered how you get into their Tech media section, but why he would care with his iPad sitting unused most of the time. Gillmor's theory is that the death of Delicious at the hands of the drowning Yahoo represents capitulation to Twitter's domination of what once was called bookmarking and now social citation. Kevin Marks saw a lineage between Delicious, Facebook, and Twitter, but Arrington was more interested in details on a story his team was writing about an alleged Salesforce investment in Seesmic. Scoble stepped in with a demo of a new app that pulled historical data from these and other social apps into a timeline. Thanks to those who showed up and especially those who didn't.
Startup Sherpa: Serving Two Masters And Changing Consumer Behavior (Part II)
Dec 18, 6:30PM
Yesterday, we debuted Part I of Startup Sherpa, a new show with angel investor (Founder Collective) and Hunch founder Chris Dixon talking to Stickybits CEO Billy Chasen about when is the right time for a startup to pivot. Today, in Part II above, Dixon and Chasen discuss how startups can serve two different masters (in Stickybits' case, consumers and advertisers). With consumer mobile apps there is always a tension between pleasing advertisers and driving away users. It is a delicate balance.
Google eBooks: Is That All There Is?
Dec 18, 5:28PM
Two weeks ago the Google eBookstore finally launched, and the world was briefly amazed. Google Editions, as it was known until launch, was the book world's Duke Nukem Forever: vaporware for seven years, depending on how you count. Its actual emergence was like the birth of a unicorn. A mewling, misshapen, half-baked unicorn. Some background: "In 2004 Google digitized the entire contents of several major US libraries, and made a lot of material available on-line, mostly in snippet form as part of its Google Book Search program. It did this without the consent of rightsholders," to quote an April 2009 email from my agents. (I'm the author of half-a-dozen books, mostly technothrillers.) The resulting legal jihad remains unresolved, and Google's dream of scanning, indexing, linking, and selling the contents of every library in the world has fragmented into a hodgepodge that includes their Book Search, Library Project, Books Partner Program, and now eBookstore, all of them semi-intermingled. Confused yet?
This Weekend: CrunchGear's Stocking Stuffer Giveaway
Dec 18, 4:00PM
If you haven't noticed, we've been away great stuff for the past few days and this weekend is no exception. Today and tomorrow we're giving away a whole slew of exciting prizes including, but not limited to, lasers, iPad gear, and assorted sundries. You will love what we have on offer this weekend. Without further ado: Check CrunchGear's Stocking Stuffer Giveaways and keep checking Saturday and Sunday.
Chile's Grand Innovation Experiment
Dec 18, 3:00PM
Regions all over the world have spent millions—sometimes billions—of dollars trying to create their own Silicon Valley. They drank the same Kool-Aid and used the same recipe: start with a research university; build a fancy tech park next it; give tax breaks to chosen companies to locate in the park; attract venture capital by offering matching investments; and watch the magic happen. Unfortunately, the magic never happened, anywhere. All government-sponsored (top-down) tech-cluster efforts—everywhere in the world—either have failed or are on life support (though some pretend they are not). That's because they all used the wrong ingredients. It isn't real estate, universities, or VCs that make innovation happen; it is entrepreneurs. To create a tech center like Silicon Valley, you need to first attract smart entrepreneurs from all over the world. Then you have to create entrepreneurial networks; instill a spirit of risk-taking and openness; and build mentoring systems. You also need to provide seed financing to startups. The money is easy; everything else requires a change in culture that usually takes decades.
(The) Greatest Thing Facebook Ever Did Was Drop The "The"
Dec 18, 3:55AM
Or so argues this music video about ex-Facebook president Sean Parker's mythical contribution to humanity. Behold as a goofily dressed and bewigged Parker sings about the apocryphal moment (as seen in The Social Network) where he convinced founder Mark Zuckerberg to drop the "the" in TheFacebook and just go with Facebook. 
Yahoo's Head Of Engineering For Communication Products, An 11 Year Vet, Latest To Sign Off
Dec 18, 3:31AM
At the risk of sounding like we're kicking a dead horse — then lighting it on fire — we've been able to confirm another significant departure from Yahoo this evening. Raj Vemulapalli, Yahoo's Head of Engineering for Real Time Communications, is leaving, the company has confirmed to us. Vemulapalli, amazingly, has been with Yahoo for over 11 years. Over that span he has worked his way up the engineering ranks, culminating in his position leading some of the few products that have been bright spots for Yahoo in recent years. That includes the massively-used Yahoo Messenger product, and all of the other messaging integration across the various Yahoo products.
Another Key Feature Of Google +1: Massive-Scale Social Video Conferencing
Dec 18, 2:58AM
Over the past few weeks, we've been able to dig up a bunch of details about Google's secret forthcoming social service. The service, previously codenamed "Emerald Sea" but currently being called "+1", essentially seems to be a toolbar that exists along the top of Google's various properties to allow for easy sharing. We even were able to snag a picture of it. But there's also quite a bit more to it, based on what we've been hearing. For one thing, we've been hearing a bit of talk about specific mobile applications, which may or may not be called "Loop" — after one of the key features of +1 (think: groups). But another feature of +1 is apparently large-scale video conferencing.
Don't: Parade In Front Of TechCrunch HQ Wearing A Chicken Costume
Dec 18, 2:13AM
Late last week, a handful of TechCrunch staff noticed something strange going on in front of our headquarters in San Francisco: there was giant, creepy-looking chicken pacing back and forth in the street, holding a sign over its head that said "TechCrunch Dont Be Chicken, Check Out DoDont". Laura bravely went outside to scope out the situation — she returned to say that the guy had already been out there for hours, and that this was actually the second day he'd been walking around TCHQ (nobody noticed him the first day). So, I did what any other fearless reporter would do: I grabbed my Flip camera and started talking to the giant chicken. As you'll learn in the video above, the chicken in question happens to be one of the founders of DoDont, a site that invites users to voice their recommendations on a binary scale: "Do" something, or "Don't".
Ask a VC: Kairouz on Canada, Splurging on Wine and the Surging NYC Scene (TCTV)
Dec 18, 2:03AM
Habib Kairouz of Rho Ventures was my guest on Ask a VC this week, and as I mentioned earlier this week, he's had a range of Web exits in the last ten years. He's also seen tremendous changes in his home tech market of New York. It's gone from silly Silicon Alley days to tumbleweeds and now to a thriving hub that's stolen Boston's East Coast venture thunder, at least when it comes to consumer Internet companies. In this episode we talk about what New York finally got right, why Rho has offices in Canada, the value of an incubator versus bootstrapping and why Kairouz doesn't think there's as much opportunity in online beer as there is in wine. (Note: Apologies on my audio. We had some issues, but Kairouz is the one answering the questions and his is just fine.)
Yahoo Just Killed… Consumer Confidence In Them
Dec 18, 1:41AM
It has been fairly amazing to watch this Yahoo "sunsetting" news over the past 48 hours. It seemed to go from a bad leak, to huge backlash, to PR disaster, to confusion, to worse PR disaster. Now Yahoo, by way of Delicious (the most prominent service being "sunset"), has responded by lashing out at all the press for the coverage of the fiasco. Danny Sullivan just did a great job of ripping them a new one for this nonsense misdirection. But the issue actually goes much deeper. Yahoo may not be killing Delicious, but they have killed something else: consumer confidence in them.
Zappos Expands To A San Francisco Office, Is Hiring
Dec 18, 12:32AM
Online shoes and accessories retailer Zappos announced an expansion and a move to San Francisco on its employee blog this morning, in a post called "Zappos IP, Inc. Is Looking For 'A Few Good Developers'" "We are very excited to be opening up a small San Francisco office. We're jazzed to go back to the Zappos Family's Bay Area roots and surround ourselves by the many amazing people and companies who make the world a happier place through technology, arts and culture.The San Francisco office in some ways will be a mini-start-up within the Zappos Family."
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