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social networks
microsoft
Facebook's search engine second fastest-growing on the Web
What did Microsoft get when it signed a deal in August to serve ads against search results on Facebook? The right to make money off the second-fastest growing search engine on the Internet, according to a ComScore study. Facebook served 173 million search queries in July 2008, up 10 percent from 157 million in July 2007. Facebook doesn't allow its users to search the rest of Web from its site. Even then, its search engine reached a sixth the size of Microsoft's own. More »
your privacy is an illusion
France's "electronic Bastille" sounds a lot like Facebook
The French government plans to create a database called Edvige that will log information about anyone in the country over the age of 13, including whether or not they are "likely to breach public order." The idea is to help crack down on crime, an issue President Nicholas Sarkozy successfully campaigned on. Other information that would be included? More »
quotable
Valleywag mangles Marc Andreessen, and we think he likes it
PALO ALTO — Thursday night in a Crowne Plaza hotel, with an Elks Club banquet roaring next door, Netscape cofounder, Ning king, and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen sat down with Portfolio writer Kevin Maney for a Churchill Club interview. This wasn't exactly what Andreessen had planned. Back in May, he wrote on his blog that he planned to stop speaking in public: "Used to be, if you wanted to get a message out into the market, you would give a talk at a conference, a reporter would write down some of what you said and mangle the rest, and you'd call it a day.... Mid-year resolution #1: No more public speaking. Mid-year resolution #2: More blogging." Two weeks later, he stopped blogging. Here follows a thoroughly mangled version of his comments. Marc, you have no one to blame but yourself. More »
stats
58 percent of Internet users haven't even heard of social networks
Sheryl Sandberg's right! We've teased Facebook's overserious COO for talking up Facebook's need to sign up more users before figuring out how it's going to make billions of dollars off of them. But analytics firm eMarketer says only 42 percent of the Internet-using world knows about social networks. Translation: A lucky 58 percent are not burdened with worrying about whether they've made anybody's top friends list. Heck, while we're at it: Less than a quarter of the world's 6.6 billion people have access to the Internet. That means 5.97 billion people have no reason to have ever heard of Sandberg, let alone blame her for global warming, violence in the Middle East, and cat allergies. Not yet, anyway.
great moments in journalism
Users booted for Facebook spam cry to the Washington Post about it
Elizabeth Coe sent 100 friends a link to her company's website. This feat got her booted from Facebook — and got her featured in the opening of a Washington Post story about Facebook's spam-fighting effort. Facebook is now banning users who ask too many people to be friends all at once, send too many messages, join too many groups, or "poke" too many people. "All I was doing is using it to communicate more efficiently, which is what I thought it was for," Coe told the Post, which goes on to explore the ins and outs of Facebook's unpublished rules. More »
Terms of Disservice
Nobody reads terms of service agreements, those legal documents new users have to click a box to say they've read. And the truth is, they hardly matter to anybody but the cyber-rights-now crowd who get worked up by articles on Boing Boing, and the paranoid lawyers at large Web companies who want to avoid money-fishing lawsuits. But sometimes they go far beyond protecting corporate interests into la-la land. Did you know that when you download Google's new Chrome browser, you agree that any "content" you "submit, post or display" using the service — whether you own its copyright or not — gives Google a "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute" it? Google's ambitions for Chrome are even larger than we thought; by the letter of this license, Google will own all information that flows through its browser. But Chrome's terms of service are just the latest in a long line of ludicrous legalese.
More »
The 5 most laughable terms of service on the Net
Nobody reads terms of service agreements, those legal documents new users have to click a box to say they've read. And the truth is, they hardly matter to anybody but the cyber-rights-now crowd who get worked up by articles on Boing Boing, and the paranoid lawyers at large Web companies who want to avoid money-fishing lawsuits. But sometimes they go far beyond protecting corporate interests into la-la land. Did you know that when you download Google's new Chrome browser, you agree that any "content" you "submit, post or display" using the service — whether you own its copyright or not — gives Google a "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute" it? Google's ambitions for Chrome are even larger than we thought; by the letter of this license, Google will own all information that flows through its browser. But Chrome's terms of service are just the latest in a long line of ludicrous legalese.
More »
11:20 AM on Wed Sep 3 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
34,730 views,
27 comments
Latest by Nicholas Carlson: @Barce: Great idea! Email me with an obvious clauses that should be on the list? more »
online advertising
Facebook's ads still target your instincts and insecurities
Google regularly contends that well-targeted advertising is valuable to the end user. Facebook promises that its advertising technology will allow levels of refined targetting that even Google has yet to muster, thanks to all the information people willingly give the company about themselves. While computer graphics and animation specialists may have moved past the uncanny valley, advertising targetting lags behind. Washington Post reporter Rachel Beckman had to put up with ads promising to trim down any love handles. After complaining, those ads were removed and the site changed its policy towards aggravating fatties. But now that's she's changed her relationship status from engaged to married, did Facebook greet her with mazel tovs? More »
virtual worlds
There.com hopes Second Life hasn't ruined virtual worlds for everybody
With support for Mac users, a new Facebook widget and an instant messaging application, There.com is hoping to breathe some life into its 3D virtual world which has gone largely unnoticed for years since its launch in 2003. If publicity could support a business model, Second Life might not be the largely empty libertarian paradise it is today. Google's new entry Lively, on the other hand, has also struggled with adopting users — possibly because it refuses to cater to any interests that aren't G-rated. The question remains as to whether any 3D simulacrum that isn't explicitly for gaming has much attraction to all but introverted shut-ins and avant kinksters. With family-friendly rules to keep the virtual pimps and hustlers off the polygonal streets, There.com might just succeed in finally reaching a broadening demographic: Parents so scared, they'd rather keep their teens cooped up at home and nervously trying to interact with crushes online when not reading the Twilight series of chaste teen romance novels featuring abstinent vampires or getting dragged to dad's Promise Keepers meetings.
social networks
Facebook makes as much as $42 million off pointless "Gifts"
After too much math, Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners estimates that Facebook earns between $28 million and $42 million allowing its users to buy icons as gifts for each other. Lightspeed came up with the revenue numbers by watching how much users spent on the icons for a week and then multiplying that number by 73.3. Uh, why not 52? Because Facebook Gift sales go up during the holidays, just like real useless merchandise. We'll let Liew explain the rest of his math, below. Bring your coffee: More »
facebook
Mark Zuckerberg pokes Ev Williams by copying Twitter
Imitation is the soul of flattery, and the engine of Silicon Valley. Whatever can be copied, will be — especially when the copiers are pals. After a redesign, Facebook has made its status-update feature more prominent. It now asks users, "What are you doing right now? A sharp-eyed reader notes that those words are eerily similar to Twitter's "What are you doing?" We wonder if this will pose any problems for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's newfound friendship with Twitter founder Ev Williams. More »
bad ideas
The soon-to-be-shuttered Yahoo Mash is not Yahoo's first failed social network. It's also not its second, third, or fourth. It took one whole hand for us to count Big Purple's failed attempts to get social, either through mergers or in-house development, below.
More »
5 social networks Yahoo couldn't befriend
The soon-to-be-shuttered Yahoo Mash is not Yahoo's first failed social network. It's also not its second, third, or fourth. It took one whole hand for us to count Big Purple's failed attempts to get social, either through mergers or in-house development, below.
More »
yahoo mash
Yahoo kills its Facebook wannabe
Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton sent out the following message to members of the company's experimental social network Yahoo Mash: "Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it. Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available." It's an embarrassing end for Yahoo Mash, which only launched last October. But it's not as embarrassing as its beginning, when Yahoo felt it had to promote the site via Facebook message.
hollywood
Facebook movie to be based on Ben Mezrich's controversial tell-all
Aaron Sorkin is indeed working on a Facebook movie — which Valleywag readers think should star Superbad's Michael Cera — but not with Facebook's permission, says a company flack. "We are routinely approached by writers and filmmakers interested in telling the Facebook story. We are certainly flattered by the attention and interest, but at this point, have not agreed to cooperate with any film project." Probably the main reason Facebook wants no part of Sorkin's movie is because he's basing his screenplay on author Ben Mezrich's forthcoming book, which according to published excerpts, seems to be about as sympathetic to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as Thunderball was to Adolpho Celi. (Photo by Getty Images) More »
confirmed
Aaron Sorkin admits he's working on "The Facebook Movie"
Why would anyone not think Aaron Sorkin is working on a movie about Facebook? "You can't handle the truth!" That's the line Sorkin penned for Jack Nicholson in 1992's A Few Good Men. Nicholson might well have been speaking to some of our readers, who reacted poorly to the news that the West Wing writer was working on a movie about Mark Zuckerberg's creation. One begged us to uncover the fraud: "The BBC, the Guardian and New York Magazine are all over the totally fake-seeming Aaron Sorkin movie about Facebook. Please get to the bottom of this horrible joke." Sorry, you'll have to handle this: Sorkin himself confirmed that he is indeed planning a movie about how Zuckerberg and his Harvard classmates created Facebook. More »
We Read Facebook So Sheryl Sandberg Doesn't Have To
Facebook security a laughing matter for cofounder
Officially, Facebook is treating the onslaught of viruses piggybacking on the social network's popularity as a very, very serious matter. We're talking Sheryl Sandberg serious. Facebook's press statement reads: "We are investigating every report, removing false content, blocking bogus links and addressing the concerns of our users. These efforts have limited the affected users to a small percentage of those on Facebook.” The unofficial response from cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, posted on CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook profile, is much more fun: More »
online advertising
What MySpace gets about advertising that Facebook doesn't
Both top social networks Facebook and MySpace redesigned their sites this summer, but while we prefer the look and feel of Facebook — isn't that nice? — so far only MySpace's redesign has actually earned its company more cash. ComScore reports MySpace served the most ad views on the Web last month. Analyst Rich Greenfield of Pali Research says MySpace was able to charge major brands like Sprint, Verizon and Wendy's more than it used to for many of them. More »
online advertising
