Klout, a startup that measures influence on Twitter, has secured $1.5 million in Series A funding from a number of investors, including Allen Morgan of Mayfield Fund, Nova Spivack of Lucid Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, Paige Craig, Tom McInerney, Michael Yavonditte of Quigo Technologies, and Ofer Ronan.

Klout, which recently released a new API, evaluates Twitter users’ behavior with complex ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of content to measure the influence of individuals and topics around the web. Since the company’s launch in 2008, Klout has registered over 250,000 users and over 300 API partners, including CoTweet, HootSuite, and the newly-launched Tweetup, and is handling millions of API calls a day.

The new funding will be used to scale product development and to launch a new web app that is more consumer-focused. With the large number of API partners, it’s clear that the Twitter influence startup is gaining traction, especially in third party Twitter clients. There’s always the risk that Twitter will develop its own measure of authority that can be used, but for now Klout seems to be leading the pack in terms of measuring influence on Twitter.

It’s Apple’s fault. The Parents Television Council (also known as Parents Against Adults) believe that Apple isn’t doing enough to prevent underage children from downloading apps even though each app download requires a password to be tapped in and parental controls can prevent certain apps from appearing on the phone. After all, it’s Apple’s responsibility to ensure that kids don’t see boobs, not yours.

Online media company Internet Brands (aka INET) today announced the acquisition of ExpertHub, a network of websites that connects consumers with attorneys and other professionals. The network will get folded into the company’s Money and Business vertical.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it is perfectly in line with Internet Brands’ growth-through-acquisition strategy. The INET CrunchBase profile lists 10 small purchases in the last 3 years alone, and its portfolio of brands is currently 100+ strong.

Its latest buy, startup ExpertHub, operates a network that includes dozens of websites, such as CriminalDefenseLawyer.com, BankruptcyLawFirms.com, and LawFirms.com.

Internet Brands also announced the acquisition of two websites in its Shopping vertical: DoDTracker.com – which aggregates deals from major retailers – and PursePage.com, a designer handbag review site.

Late last month, a number of sites noted that a very early build of Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, was available to download for Android phones. However, that build was unofficial as it was put together by an individual and optimized for the Droid device. Today, Mozilla has itself put out a pre-Alpha build of Fennec that should work at the very least on Droid and the Nexus One.

Mozilla is quick to note that this is a pre-Alpha build of the browser, and is only for testing purposes. But that isn’t stopping Mozilla’s Vladimir Vukićević from announcing it on his blog. “There also aren’t yet any automated nightly developer builds or automated updates to this build; it’s even more of a pre-nightly build (even earlier than pre-alpha).  But, it’s usable enough that we wanted to get some feedback on it as we continue to develop,” he notes.

To get this build, you can visit this link on your Android device. Or you can point your phone’s browser to: bit.ly/fennec-android. And yes, there’s a QR code on Vukićević’s blog post if you want to scan it, and download it that way. Whichever way you do it, you’ll need to make sure your settings allow you to install non-Market apps (go to Settings, Applications, and check “Unknown Sources”).

Some other warnings and notes to consider about the build from Vukićević:

• We’ve only really tested this on the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One.
• It will likely not eat your phone, but bugs might cause your phone to stop responding, requiring a reboot.
• Memory usage of this build isn’t great — in many ways it’s a debug build, and we haven’t really done a lot of optimization yet.  This could cause some problems with large pages, especially on low memory devices like the Droid.
• You’ll see the app exit and relaunch on first start, as well as on add-on installs; this is a quirk of our install process, and we’re working to get rid of it.
• You can’t open links from other apps using Fennec; we should have this for the next build.

Last week, Facebook launched some major new products, including social plugins, its Like button for the web, and its Open Graph API. It also launched a product that has some serious privacy issues: ”Instant Personalization”, which automatically hands over some of your data to certain third-party sites as soon as you visit them, without any action required on your part. I’ve previously discussed at length why I think this could lead to a major backlash. And now four Democratic US Senators — Charles Schumer, Michael Bennet, Mark Begich and Al Franken — are calling on Facebook to change its policies.

This morning the Senators sent a letter addressed to Mark Zuckerberg that details these issues (they’ve also separately reached out to the FTC, urging it to establish more rules around social networks). Here are the Senators’ three main concerns, along with my own commentary:

1. Publicly available data. Facebook’s expansion of publicly available data to include a user’s current city, hometown, education, work, likes, interests, and friends has raised concerns for users who would like to have an opt-in option to share this profile information. Through the expanded use of “connections,” Facebook now obligates users to make publicly available certain parts of their profile that were previously private. If the user does not want to connect to a page with other users from their current town or university, the user will have that information deleted altogether from their profile. We appreciate that Facebook allows users to type this information into the “Bio” section of their profiles, and privatize it, but we believe that users should have more control over these very personal and very common data points. These personal details should remain private unless a user decides that he/she would like to make a connection and share this information with a community.

The Senators are spot on: Facebook has been systematically stripping away users’ privacy one item at a time and adding it to the bucket of information it considers publicly accessible. It’s debatable whether or not a user’s list of friends, or Interests and Activities (which recently could be made private but are now all public Fan Pages) really constitute sensitive information. But the fact of the matter is that people built their profiles under the impression that they were private, and users don’t stand to benefit by having their control over this data reduced.

2. Third party data storage. Previously, Facebook allowed third-party advertisers to store profile data for 24 hours. We are concerned that recent changes allow that data to be stored indefinitely. We believe that Facebook should reverse this policy, or at a minimum require users to opt in to allowing third parties to store data for more than 24 hours.

I’ve heard from multiple sources that Facebook had almost no way to enforce the 24 hour third-party data storage policy, and that many developers routinely ignored it and kept data for longer than 24 hours. The big guys — Zynga and the like — have to keep everything above board, so this change is probably primarily directed at them. Comforting? Not at all. But regardless of Facebook’s policy it will have a hard time enforcing this.

3. Instant personalization. We appreciate that Facebook is attempting to integrate the functionality of several popular websites, and that Facebook has carefully selected its initial partners for its new “instant personalization” feature. We are concerned, however, that this feature will now allow certain third party partners to have access not only to a user’s publicly available profile information, but also to the user’s friend list and the publicly available information about those friends. As a result of the other changes noted above, this class of information now includes significant and personal data points that should be kept private unless the user chooses to share them. Although we are pleased that Facebook allows users to opt-out of sharing private data, many users are unaware of this option and, moreover, find it complicated and confusing to navigate. Facebook should offer users the ability to opt-in to sharing such information, instead of opting out, and should make the process for doing so more clear and coherent.

Again, spot on. The thought of a future where the Web is more social and customized to your interests is really cool. The fact that Facebook decided to enroll all of its users into this new futuristic web without asking them to opt-in is ridiculous. And while Facebook is restricting this program to only three services for now — Pandora, Yelp, and Docs.com — it obviously hopes to expand it.

Elliot Schrage, Facebook VP of Global Communications, responded to the Senators with his own letter (embedded below). One key passage (emphasis mine):

Specifically, these new products and features are designed to enhance personalization and promote social activity across the Internet while continuing to give users unprecedented control over what information they share, when they want to share it, and with whom. All of Facebook’s partner sites interact with a user’s consent.

The problem here is that Facebook definitely did not get users’ consent to do this. Yes, there’s an option to turn off Instant Personalization in Facebook’s privacy settings. And yes, whenever you visit one of these Instantly Personalized sites there’s a bar at the top of the screen that you can also use to turn it off. Unfortunately, most people have no idea what any of this means.

Let’s get one thing straight: Facebook does offer quite a few privacy controls, and it offers a wealth of information describing them. In fact, it offers so much control and information that it is utterly overwhelming to most users, who simply don’t bother with it. Facebook knows that people don’t necessarily know what’s going on, but that hasn’t stopped it from racing forward at a clip pace. The social network may not like it, but it’s probably a good thing that these Senators are looking to put a few speed bumps on the way.

Schrage letter via CNN.
Top photo by Steve Maller Photography

We always keep the list of launching startups and products at our big events strictly confidential until the day of launch. But we’re finalizing the list of launching companies at TechCrunch Disrupt this week, and we usually give out a single teaser prior to the event. We’re excited that Comcast will be launching a new product called Tunerfish on May 24 in New York at Disrupt.

What’s Tunerfish? We’re not saying, but we think you will be suitably impressed. The Plaxo team (Comcast acquired Plaxo in 2008) is behind the new product, led by former Plaxo VP of Marketing John McCrea (John’s blog is here). Tunerfish may or may not have something to do with Comcast’s ambitious Fancast plans.

We’ve got lots more to announce around TechCrunch Disrupt, including even more incredible speakers and other surprises. See you in New York on May 24.

The N8 looks like the Motorola Devour and has a 3.5-inch OLED, capacative touch screen, and all of the fun things you expect like compass and accelerometer. On paper, it seems great. It also uses Symbian^3 which, again, according to early reports, its just like Symbian^1 and Symbian^2. In other words, the more things change at Nokia, the more they stay the same.

Mobile Ad Network AdMob has released its monthly mobile metrics report for March, which takes a close look at Android OS traffic. In March 2010, there were 34 Android devices from 12 manufacturers available to consumers. In AdMob’s network in March 2010, 11 devices accounted for 96 percent of Android traffic, up from two devices in September 2009. The three primary versions of the Android OS all drove significant traffic in March 2010 – Android 1.5 (38 percent), Android 2.0/2.1 (35 percent) and Android 1.6 (26 percent). Motorola and HTC were the leading Android device manufacturers with 44 percent and 43 percent of respective traffic.

According to AdMob, Motorola Droid was the leading Android handset in March 2010 generating 32 percent of Android traffic, while the Google Nexus One drove only two percent of Android traffic. It’s surprising that Google’s Nexus one generates so little traffic, considering Google’s claims of profitability and success from the device.

At least 54 percent of Android traffic came from devices with a QWERTY keyboard, says the report. Of course, only three devices – the iPhone 3GS (39 percent), second generation iPod touch (25 percent) and iPhone 3G (20 percent) – generated 84 percent of total iPhone OS traffic. iPhone 3GS traffic share has increased from 30 percent in September 2009 to 39 percent in March 2010. The 1st Generation iPhone only generated 2 percent of iPhone OS requests in March 2010. Total worldwide traffic in AdMob’s network increased 18 percent month-over-month.

The report of course highlights that diversity of devices in the Android ecosystem, with manufactures each creating and launching devices with diffferent form factors, capabilities, and OS versions over the past seven months. In contrast, the iPhone OS runs on devices from a single manufacturer, a single form factor (until the launch of the iPad in April), and all devices have the ability to upgrade OS versions.

The Android ecosystem is steadily growing, with the App market now counting 38,000 plus apps, up 8000 apps from a month ago. Of course this pales in comparison to Apple’s booming App Store.

The small share of traffic from Google Nexus One phones isn’t surprising, when you take into account this report from Flurry, which reported low Nexus One sales. In fact, there’s been a lot of talk about how the Nexus One’s initial roll-out has been a flop. But only weeks ago, Google claimed profitability for the device and painted a rosy picture for the Nexus One’s growth and future.

AdMob and Google may be in a bit of a pickle. The FTC is reportedly gearing up to challenge the Google-AdMob deal, due to anti-trust regulations The search giant acquired the popular mobile advertising network for $750 million last Fall. Reports emerged a few weeks ago that the FTC’s lawyers will recommend that the Commission block the deal. We’re not surprised, considering that we heard that Google was taking the unprecedented step of reaching out to AdMob competitors to rally their support around their acquisition of the company, in response to rumors that the FTC could block the deal. Consumer groups have also lobbied to block the deal.

The biggest story in tech today is the Gizmodo stolen iPhone debacle (note that I use the word “stolen” only to keep the description brief, not in any legal way). An Apple employee with a iPhone prototype left it in a bar. Someone found it and sold it to Gizmodo for $5,000. Gizmodo got a huge scoop, but they are now facing criminal and possibly civil liability issues. John Gruber has a good summary of the first part of the story. How this all plays out is still being decided, but the police have now raided a Gizmodo editor’s home and have seized property.

A number of sites have compared this to the Twitter document scandal that we were in the middle of last year. And we’ve received a number of inquiries about whether or not we would have handled this iPhone situation the same way as Gizmodo did.

I’m not going to go into the legal issues around this because I’m just not qualified. I will say that having the police raid my house would very likely be a net positive event – it would place us firmly in the middle of the story, and all eyes would be on us. So don’t think Gawker is trembling in their boots just yet. I would hope that any legal pressure would be on me though, not one of our writers.

But putting that aside, how would I have handled the story?

The Twitter documents were emailed to us without us requesting them in any way. We contacted Twitter and their lawyers immediately, before publishing any documents. There were lots of behind the scenes discussions, but Twitter made it very clear from the first conversation that they would not take legal action against us for publishing the documents. They just wanted to make sure that they weren’t all published.

Twitter certainly tried to stop us from publishing any of the documents, but they put moral and ethical pressure on us, not legal pressure. And we never came to full agreement on what the ethically correct thing to do was – I wrote my thoughts on that here.

In some ways the Twitter story was more of a problem than the iPhone story. The Twitter documents were clearly stolen from Twitter by a hacker who broke into their email accounts. Here’s a full description of how that happened. Ultimately we decided that it was reasonable for us to publish the documents because the value of the news was substantial. And the hacker also made it clear that he intended for the documents to be published. We spent a great deal of time convincing him not to do that, because most of the documents were simply too personally sensitive and embarrassing.

In the Gizmodo/iPhone case things are less clear. The phone was left behind by an engineer and was found by another individual. Should that individual have returned it to Apple? You can argue that, but you can’t argue that Apple wasn’t negligent in letting it be found in the first place.

Where Gizmodo made a mistake in my opinion is when they purchased the phone. This is something we would never do. We’ve been asked if we wanted to purchase information in the past that would have made for some great stories and we have always declined. Our policy is to never pay for information. That isn’t common, and even the big media outlets will occasionally pay for a story. But it just isn’t something we’re comfortable with.

Does the legal case against Gizmodo rely on the fact that they purchased the iPhone? I don’t know, but it sure does make them look bad.

Apple’s complaint will be that information about the phone leaked early, giving competitors a head start on copying the features. That’s a reasonable complaint, but it seems to me they can make the same case against Engadget, which also posted leaked photos of the device. The same damage was done there, and they posted before Gizmodo.

The bottom line is this. If someone walked the new iPhone into our offices and offered to let us take pictures of it, we’d do that in a second. If Apple or the police came after us, we’d lawyer up and make it as big of a circus as possible. The only thing we wouldn’t do is pay for the device. At the end of the day that may be the thing that they can get Gizmodo on.

First Apple goes after Taiwanese cell phone maker HTC over infringement of no less than 20 of its patents, and now the man who invented the PDA (personal digital assistant) is targeting the company.

Entrepreneur and inventor Judah Klausner, or rather his company Klausner Technologies, has filed suit against HTC for patent infringement under its U.S. Visual Voicemail patents.

The lawsuit is based on the unveiling by HTC of its MyTouch 3G mobile phones, which Klausner Technologies claims alleges uses its patented Visual Voicemail technology. The company adds that various other HTC models with the Visual Voicemail feature are already covered under Klausner Technologies Visual Voicemail patent licenses granted to certain mobile operators for their Visual Voicemail services.

Klausner Technologies says it currently has 27 Visual Voicemail patent licensees under its U.S., European and Asian patents, including major U.S. and European mobile operators, international cell phone manufacturers, cable/VOIP providers as well as other providers of Visual Voicemail services.

Just last week, BT Group subsidiary Ribbit entered into a patent license agreement with Klausner Technologies, settling their outstanding litigation.

Perhaps HTC can take some comfort in the fact that it isn’t exactly the first company to get taken to court: Klausner Technologies had earlier sued Verizon Wireless, Google, Apple, Skype, Comcast, AT&T, LG and others claiming that their visual voicemail feature infringes on Klausner’s patents, as well as Motorola and Research In Motion more recently.

ItsTrending is a new website that shows popular shared items on Facebook. This isn’t anything magical – Matt Schlicht, a product manager at Ustream, put it together in an evening – “This is a good example of how easy the Facebook plugins are to implement – I’m a product guy not a developer,” says Matt.

But it is a new view into popular links some people may find fascinating, and I’m a sucker for simple mashups. It shows the most shared links on Facebook for a variety of third party sites – news, video, pictures, etc.. It uses the Recommendations social plugin provided by Facebook (like I said, no coding magic is going on here). But the data is great, and like Digg, TweetMeme and other services, it helps people find interesting and relevant content. And given that AllTop and PopUrls still survive, why not ItsTrending, too.

Mostly though what ItsTrending shows is the power of all this data that Facebook is collecting, and how it can be used in very productive ways as it’s released to third parties.

Robert Scoble represented the happy user, listening to friend-seeded recommendations on Pandora. Andrew Keen represented his own peculiar subset of clueless netizens, entertaining us with a stylized version of Facebook’s onboarding interrogation: Who are you? What’s your favorite cereal? What constitutes an invasion of privacy? Taylor batted the gambit away, only to have Sullivan loop around to it later and give Keen’s schtick more credibility than I thought possible.

I sat down with Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman and investor/board member James Slavet to talk about the continued success of the Seattle-based company. Warning in advance – the interview was done at the end of the day and we were drinking beer from our new kegerator, and we rambled at times. Perfect for a Sunday afternoon viewing, in my opinion.

Kelman announced in the video that Redfin is now on a $30 million revenue run rate, up from $15 million last summer (and at that point they were profitable.

The company cuts real estate fees dramatically, by about half, for both buyers and sellers. Kelman called real estate “by far the most screwed up industry in America” on 60 Minutes a couple of years ago, But Kelman has cooled somewhat since then, and some of the death threats and hostility by realtors has now calmed down, he says.

We also brought up the age-old Seattle v. Silicon Valley debate again – something we’ve been arguing about since 2008. And we touched on his recent guest post about the need for founders to share the love with employees when it comes to distributing equity.

Side note: Slavet was also in our studio recently to talk about his investment in TellApart.

Index Ventures, a European based venture fund that has also invested heavily in U.S. startups, will launch a new seed fund on Monday to focus on early stage deals. Partners Neil Rimer, Danny Rimer, Saul Klein and Mike Volpi will manage Index Seed. The fund is partnering with existing seed fund The Accelerator Group, and TAG founder Robin Klein is joining Index as a venture partner.

The firm plans to make twenty early stage investments over the next 24 months, Klein told me. Investments will range from $50,000 – $1 million in size. And unlike many seed funds that have been carved out of larger venture funds, the partners will take board seats or otherwise be heavily engaged with their startups. With larger venture funds, the partners have time to make the investments but can’t spend a lot of time on them simply because they are managing so much other money. Index Seed is being carved out of Index’s existing $400 million fund.

The decision making process is streamlined, says Klein. “We are optimizing our process for due diligence and legals. We can make decisions quickly, don’t need a board seat, expect rights that are the same as other seed investors and can invest as little as $50k or as much as $1m in a seed round.”

Index already does seed deals occasionally, and Index Seed is a way to structure and organize those efforts. Saul Klein has been actively engaged in promoting young startups through SeedCamp, a startup competition and incubator, and OpenCoffee Club, a entrepreneur networking event that has spread around the world. And the partnership with TAG brings in additional expertise around early stage deals.

Index has done 40 seed stage deals since 1995, says Klein, and 30 of those were in the last 5 years. Those deals include MySQL, Skype, Playfish and RightScale.

TAG is a seed fund run by father and son team Robin Klein and Saul Klein. The fund, which won the Europa award for top European investor, is a co-investor with Index with 14 companies, including Moo, My Heritage, Glasses Direct, OpenX, Stardoll, Moshi Monsters and LoveFilm. Saul Klein works at both funds, and so there is already a lot of overlap. TAG’s exits include Agent Provocateur (3i), Sit Up TV (Virgin Media), Lastminute.com (IPO), Last.fm (CBS) and Dopplr (Nokia). They currently have 44 active investments. TAG will continue to make its own investments – Robin Klein will spend two days a week at Index.

Saul Klein says that Index wants to continue to invest with top angels in Europe and the U.S., and says that those relationships are crucial to bringing in deal flow. He talks about the notion of “fellow travlers” – investors who share Index’s philosophy of active engagement with seed stage teams. “In the nearly 100 or more seed deals, we have collectively done, we have seen time and again how important it is for founders to have not just relevant investors at the seed stage but investors who are accessible, honest and engaged,” says Klein.

Two years ago I was on the Charlie Rose show and we talked about, among other startups and trends, Facebook. It wasn’t clear then that Facebook had what it took to become one of the great technology companies. They had conquered the college market and were destroying the hopes and dreams of MySpace. But they were also reeling from the Beacon debacle and hadn’t proven that they could turn those massive reach and page view numbers into sustainable revenue streams.

You can watch the whole discussion about Facebook, which begins at about the 22:00 mark. But the key question I asked then was, “Will Facebook Have their Google moment?” I was referring to Google’s ability to pair awesome search in the late nineties with, later, an amazing business model – a bidding system for text ads. In 2008 it was clear that Facebook had taken the first step and changed our culture, possibly permanently. But it wasn’t at all clear that they would create the massive revenue streams to allow them to effectively dominate tech culture.

Fast forward to today. Those questions have been answered. Facebook is profitable and probably is running at a billion dollar plus revenue run rate today. They have 400 million users and 500 million people visit the site each month. Only Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have more monthly visitors than Facebook. And only Google has more page views. And they aren’t done growing yet. In a year they will likely be second on the list of unique visitors. In two years, they’ll probably be first.

In a talk a few days ago investor Ron Conway spoke about the explosive growth of Facebook. “They are the universe,” he said. I asked him if we are in the Age of Facebook. His answer was yes. Ron has been investing in startups for thirty years and he has seen the rise and fall of many companies. This wasn’t just idle chatter.

Microsoft dominated the technology world in the 90s on the back of their Windows and Office products. Google was the champion for the last decade after perfecting the business model around search. Both are still huge companies.

But all the momentum is behind Facebook and how they are changing the Web, and our culture.

Last week Facebook unveiled a variety of new developer tools, and new consumer applications are set to be launched in the near future. What’s most interesting about these changes aren’t the debates about whether what Facebook is doing is good for the Internet or not, or how open or not open their solutions are.

Those debates are important but they don’t affect the Facebook revolution any more than debates about Adsense a decade ago affected the decade of glory that Google just experienced. The fact is that Facebook is permeating the Web. Publishers, us included, are clamoring to organize our websites in ways that please Facebook.

Their vision of an open graph of people and things (with Facebook at the center) is becoming reality, and debates by technologists won’t changes that. Facebook is taking over our identity and we are going along with that happily. It will take a new technology paradigm to disrupt what Facebook is doing.

Microsoft’s Windows platform wasn’t threatened by user complaints, lawsuits or even government actions to weaken it. It took the evolution of the browser as an operating system, and new applications like Google Docs, to give users the comfort to move beyond Windows. And while the Windows franchise is still going strong, the writing is on the wall. Eventually, it will fall.

Someday, maybe a decade from now, some new technology will rise and allow other companies to threaten Facebook. But until then there is little to stop them. Their march to dominance has just begun.

As I wrote about back in February, ManageTwitter is easily one of the most useful third-party Twitter services out there. While there are plenty of services that help you find new people to follow, there simply aren’t enough that help you prune those that you already follow. For those of us who have been using the service for years now, and have accumulated a lot of people we follow over that time, this is a problem. ManageTwitter solves it brilliantly. And now Twitter is going to kill them.

As the service posted on its Posterous blog yesterday, Twitter has sent the service an email letting them know that they’re breaking one of their rules. Specifically, this is what Twitter wrote:

We’re writing to let you know that your application, ManageTwitter, breaks our Automation Rules and Best Practices (http://help.twitter.com/entries/76915). Specifically, it facilitates bulk automated user unfollowing, which is not allowed. It’s best for both our users and your users if your application follows the rules, so please make the necessary changes, such as removing the “Select All” option (and requiring users to decide on each user individually) to bring your application into compliance.

The problem is that ManageTwitter’s service isn’t automated at all. It simply offers up suggestions for who you should unfollow. As ManageTwitter writes:

Yes our application does facilitate bulk unfollowing BUT ManageTwitter does not facilitate any *automated* bulk unfollowing, the user has to filter based on criteria. The user is still required to do significant processing to unfollow groups of people. Furthermore the system only allows unfollowing of up to only 100 at a time.

They go on to note that they understand Twitter’s rule, but again, do not believe they are breaking it. It’s possible that the portion Twitter doesn’t like is that the checkboxes next to usernames are automatically selected for deletion (I don’t particularly like this either because most users — even many of the ones they suggest — I don’t want to unfollow) — and if so, that’s an easy fix. I have an email into Twitter asking them if that would be good enough and will update when I hear back.

I can certainly see Twitter not approving of the name for trademark reasons — but they’re apparently not disputing that at the moment, just the bulk unfollow bit.

Or maybe Twitter just doesn’t like the fact that ManageTwitter has managed to help 35,000 users unfollow nearly 6 million people on the service. I can’t imagine any social network would like a third-party service changing the social graph in such a way. But again, this service is very useful to many users, and I believe makes Twitter better — even if it is slightly less connected.

ManageTwitter is asking that you retweet this tweet in support of them.

[Thanks Courtenay]

As AOL pours $50 million into its hyperlocal news site Patch.com to expand its sites around the country, smaller competitors are maintaining confidence that their platforms can survive AOL’s aggressive content strategy. Outside.In CEO Mark Josephson told GigaOm recently that he welcomes Patch into the space, because the site provides more content for his hyperlocal news aggregator to source. But what about the future of existing, local news sites in cities, such as the Tribune’s ChicagoNow, which has a similar model to Patch? While Patch hasn’t reached Chicago yet, we hear that it will be arriving soon.

So is there room for a few hyperlocal news sites in one city? Digital VP for the Chicago Tribune Bill Adee says yes. In fact, ChicagoNow has seen considerable success since its launch last August. ChicagoNow, the brainchild of Adee and Editorial DirectorTracy Schmidt, is a network of 350 blogs from individuals all around greater Chicago that report on local happenings trends, events and community news. Bloggers are incentivized to write by earning $5 per 1000 local page views.

While the site has a number of editors, the content is purely generated by the bloggers. And editors don’t proofread any of the content; bloggers have the power to post whatever they’d like. That being said, ChicagoNow requires that writers sign an agreement taking full legal responsibility for any content written in their posts.

On the content side, blogs range from ArtTalkChicago to Chicago Baseball Stories to Chicago Political Commentary. While bloggers provide the content, editors help with SEO, socializing content, SEO, and interlinking of content. ChicagoNow even holds educational blogging seminars for its contributors. Besides traditional display advertising, ChicagoNow also offers advertisers the ability to post “adverblogs,” which is sponsored content from local advertisers.

One of my criticisms of the site is that it seems difficult to navigate, and content is not streamlined. But ChicagoNow is completely redesigning its site with a more powerful search technology, courtesy of Loud3r. Not only is the site’s search is getting an overhaul, but the entire site has been redesigned with a sleeker, more user-friendly interface.

In March, ChicagoNow saw 1.5 million unique visitors and 15.5 million page views according to Omniture. Adee says the company has grown every month in terms on unique visits. That’s not too shabby, considering that site is still fairly young and experimenting with a new model. So is ChicagoNow’s model the magic formula to hyperlocal news? Schmidt says that there’s more than one model that will work in terms of serving relevant content to local audiences. But she does highlight the fact that the site allows both bloggers and visitors to discover localized content that is interest-focused on niche topics within a community, such as public schools, neighborhood crime, jazz in Chicago, healthcare in the area, public transportation and more.

It’s important to note that the Chicago Tribune and the Tribune Company are investing money and resources into developing a homegrown hyperlocal news initiative as opposed to acquiring a local or national site or model that is doing the same thing. AOL acquired Patch for $7 million last year and MSNBC acquired hyperlocal news aggregator EveryBlock.

It should be interesting to see how ChicagoNow fares when Patch does arrive, with its war chest of funding. ChicagoNow also faces competition from the Chicago News Cooperative, which provides local news and coverage of the Chicagoland area for The New York Times.

This guest post was written by Alex Ahlund, the CEO of AppVee and AndroidApps, which was recently acquired by mobile app directory Appolicious. He is currently an advisor to Appolicious.

Apple is hailing the iPad as a “magical” and “revolutionary” device. Perhaps, but the feature set accompanying the first version leaves many of us skeptical of that claim. We’ve all seen tablets before and we’re already seeing similar ones coming out soon with better specs. What we need to consider more than the device itself are the effects its release will have on the market.

The iPad could potentially usher in a new set of casual users who may not already be iPhone or iPod Touch owners. This is good for business across the board, but the area that may be impacted the greatest is the iPhone gaming industry.

The current iPhone and iPod touch gaming landscape consists of pick-up-and-play micro games, watered down console ports, and some in-between titles. It’s hard to consider the iPhone a true gaming platform. The lack of physical buttons, coupled with the scarcity of deep, quality titles, may prevent the iPhone from ever becoming a true competitor to the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. Unfortunately, there are even more issues that further intensify this problem.

The first is price point. Given the average game is sold for $.99 and the most expensive are $9.99, App Store prices differ wildly from other game markets. Even the downloadable casual games industry spans $10 – $20 on average. Think about this. Many of these are the same games that get ported to the iPhone. Not only are the games the same, but the target demographics as well. So how did this happen? The fault lies with developers and consumers alike.

Price is extremely psychological and both sides equally contribute to setting that standard. Prior to being involved in the iPhone industry, I worked for years in the casual games space. I saw the evolution of downloadable gaming go from the traditional core download.com-style shareware model to a full-blown casual gaming industry that catered primarily to 40-something women. To say the least, it was a stark contrast. Now, the most interesting component was seeing how price was affected when it moved from the underground to the mainstream. In the old shareware days, pricing was not uniform. It was the Wild West. But when the big guys (AOL, Yahoo, EA, PopCap, Big Fish, etc.) started to catapult the casual space, pricing had to be regulated for the psychological comfort of mainstream audiences. At the time, the sweet spot was $19.99. Some of those portals would sometimes try to undercut one another, but in the consumer’s mind, it felt suspect to pay significantly less. Alternatively, these portals went another route – subscription services, which offered deeply discounted pricing models.

I bring this up to provide a better understanding of pricing psychology. It first starts with what the industry as a whole unofficially agrees the average price of a similar product should be. This is determined with some guesswork and tweaking, while waiting to see what the market will bear. As time goes by, competitors start to undercut each other and the industry either follows suit or holds steady to that original average. Unfortunately, the iPhone game industry chose the former. I say ‘unfortunately’ because it is severely crippling the gaming space.

When the 3G was first launched, $9.99 was the average price of a decent, quality game. At the time, it was a fantastic price when we considered what DS games, downloadable titles and even those budget CDs at Walmart cost. This was not a lasting trend, though. As more developers flooded the market, prices continued to be pushed lower and lower. What drove this price drop was mainly gimmick apps and cheap games. The problem was that even though these products were clearly of lesser value and depth, the damage had already been done. In the minds of the consumers, paying $10 for an iPhone app, let alone more, had become a huge stretch. Instead of buying a new title at $9.99, most consumers simply waited for “the drop” – the inevitable price slash that developers enacted shortly after a game’s release. It was no longer a value proposition; it was a somewhat illogical psychological standard that had been created.

Most developers had to learn to flow with this changing market, embracing the fact that shear volume could often make up for their development costs. Typically though, these development efforts were focused on low-priced impulse apps. This is where the damage to the industry comes in. Since expected pricing is so low, it discourages quality game contenders from entering the space. The cost investment is still high to produce a quality product, especially considering the average sale prices are so low. To address this problem, one rumor we heard a number of months ago was the possibility of Apple opening a premium game space on the App Store. The intention would be to feature higher priced, higher quality games. So far, nothing has come of this.

In effect, this is keeping the iPhone gaming industry as still just typical mobile fare, with the occasional big game. As much as Apple wants this to be a serious competitor to the DS/PSP, it will never make it unless there is a shift. Indirectly, this is where the iPad comes in.

The iPad is not a pocket product

One of the biggest reasons that gimmicky apps and quick pick-up-and-play games have done so well is because the iPhone and iPod Touch are products that fit in your pocket. Typically, you take them everywhere and they are always within reach. This allows for the majority of use to occur within short periods of time (i.e. waiting in line, on the bus, during a boring meeting, etc.). To fill the needs of those sorts of time constraints, short-use applications fit the bill. This limits the desire for a deep experience or time consuming game.

The iPad changes this. As a device that works as an in-between for your mobile device and your desktop, the time use allowance goes up dramatically. In most situations, you won’t pull out your iPad while waiting in line at the post office. It won’t be carried everywhere you go. While some will treat it as a netbook substitute, I anticipate a lot of its use will occur casually at home.

Since the iPad is not a pocket-sized device like the iPhone and iPod Touch, time constraints become less of an issue. This means that bite-sized games or gimmicks will feel less at home here. Something like Doodle Jump will most likely not do so well on this platform. This is likely to cause the market to desire more fulfilling experiences, especially in the games space. In effect, developers will respond accordingly to meet this new market need. This acts as one phase of the changing landscape.

Price sensitivity will go down

There is an additional psychological component that hasn’t yet been addressed in regards to pricing: size does matter. Whether it makes sense or not in terms of value proposition, the actual size of a product can have some bearing on how we perceive its value. The small screen size of the iPhone and iPod touch causes us to perceive, whether consciously or unconsciously, that the applications are worth less than something you can interact with on a big monitor. Diner Dash on the iPhone is identical to Diner Dash on the PC. Yet, the price points are dramatically different. One aspect is market-determined pricing averages and the other is perceived value. Many consumers perceive a higher value from their larger screened PC experiences.

The additional screen real estate of the iPad makes apps feel more like “real” applications. Visual interaction with the iPad screen feels closer to that of a monitor or TV. It removes the notion of the “pocket-sized time waster” and seems to provide a more substantial experience. Take a game like Civilization Revolution. Which experience feels more enriching: playing it on the small screened iPhone or playing it on a full sized device with many times the screen real estate? Despite being the same game, more breathing room provides for a deeper and more enjoyable experience.

This will start a new cycle for the App Store. Reduced price sensitivity will create opportunities for deeper games and apps, which will then help set a new pricing standard. $.99 gimmicks will always exist, but now alongside a new wave of higher quality products.

Shallow apps will decrease across the board

The goal of developers is to increase revenue at every possible avenue. This means creating a product that can span multiple platforms. Unless highly specialized, apps work just as well on the iPod Touch as they do on the iPhone. The same should hold true for the iPad. By reducing focus on one of the platforms, you start losing a whole market segment – and additional revenue source.

However, simply upscaling current applications is a very short-sighted solution. It is a way for Apple to capitalize on the 150k+ apps out there for their new device, but this isn’t going to work for the longterm. Using an application unoptimized for a larger device, and not tailored for the iPad’s greater screen real estate, will feel like a tacked on experience. Because of this, more users will want to download iPad-specific applications to take advantage of their shiny new device. For some products, such as 3D games like N.O.V.A, upscaling may not be an issue. These games can scale with ease, with only slight modification to interface images. But for the rest of the app work, doubling the pixels is going to be a complete mess.

Now what effect does this have on gimmicky apps and games? It forces these developers to rethink their model. As we discussed, when you develop an app, you want to capitalize on all revenue streams possible. If you produce a product that only makes sense on the iPhone, you will miss out on new opportunities provided by the iPad. Short lived gimmicks and micro-gaming experiences are unlikely to fare well on the iPad. The effect of this realization may likely cause a decline in small sized, $.99 apps as a whole. There will always be a place for these, but to really maximize profit potential, focusing on them solely is a short-sighted plan.

The iPad is a device that may be misunderstood for a while. It’s certainly not revolutionary in the typical sense, but its subtle influences may eventually justify that characterization. We can surely expect to see even more casual users jumping on the band wagon and certainly a spike in casual game development for the device. As the product evolves, becoming more powerful feature-rich, it may become even more ubiquitous than we expect. This will be an extremely interesting space to watch within the coming months and years.

Yesterday at the Startup Lessons Learned conference in San Francisco, Brett Durrett, James Birchler and Timothy Fitz from avatar-based social network and 3D virtual world IMVU took the stage and talked about scaling startups (worth your time).

IMVU CEO Cary Rosenzweig didn’t come speak at the event, but was featured in a video preview on the event website (third video on that page).

In this video – I’m not sure how long it has been online already – Rosenzweig boasts about the company’s profitability and cites its annual revenue run rate, which he says is now at $40 million.

This means that if you multiplied the company’s current monthly revenue times 12, you’d get $40 million. Notably, that’s up from a $25 million annual revenue run rate back in October 2009. That’s a lot of growth in income in roughly half a year.

So how did revenue increase? Simple: more users buying and earning credits in the 3D world and buying virtual goods, such as clothing for their avatars to furniture for their virtual rooms.

On a sidenote: in charge of revenue generation at IMVU is Lee Clancy, formerly Senior Director for Community Products at Yahoo.

IMVU was founded in 2004 and is backed by $29 million in venture capital, raised over 4 rounds. The company employs 60 people in Palo Alto, California, according to its website.

In October, the company claimed more than 40 million registered users and 6 million unique visitors per month (numbers they also use on their about page), but I’ve been unable to retrieve more recent numbers.

(Thanks to Kyle Mulka for the heads up)

There are two sides to every story, but this email exchange between Mahalo founder and CEO Jason Calacanis and one of his (now former) employees is a lesson in how not to handle a resignation.

Jason says this was a private exchange and that he was just being honest with Evan. Evan says Jason can’t control his emotions.

If you’re going to trash your employee, do it verbally so that there isn’t a record of it on the Internet later. Or, don’t trash them at all and organize drinks with the team to see them off so that the rest of your employees know you care. Read from the bottom up.

April 20, 2010

Resignation

Jason Calacanis at his finest.

I should note, that instead of responding, he instead removed my email account. Real pro of him. Good thing I forwarded it to myself first :P

Begin forwarded message:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Evan Culver
Date: Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 10:53 PM
Subject: Re: Resignation
To: jason@calacanis.com

Really?

What is your deal? I will ultimately *have* to come back to Mahalo to pick up my things. Why so rash, what is your rationale? This seems really unprofessional and when other developers and employees see this, it just makes them want to leave ASAP. Is it really that big of a deal that people find better things for them than Mahalo?

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 10:19 PM, wrote:

Evan,

Don’t come back to the office, do not email the team list.

Elliot will send you paperwork tomorrow. Today was your last day.

Good luck being employee 4,367 at a dying company.

Horribly disappointed in you.

J

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

From: Evan Culver
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:48:37 -0700
To: Jason Calacanis; Jacob Burch; Jeff Ammons
Subject: Resignation

Hey guys,

This isn’t an easy email to write, but as the subject suggests, this email is to inform you of my resignation from Mahalo effective in 2 weeks. An amazing opportunity came out of nowhere that I just couldn’t say no to. I’ll be writing code as a UI engineer at and contributing to the open-source project on a full-time basis.

I’ve never worked with such a great team and learned so much in such a short period of time. I owe all of it to the opportunity you’ve given me, Jason and I thank you immensely for that. Jeff and Jacob, you guys are amazingly brave for tackling such a great undertaking. I’m impressed you do it with seemingly such ease. Many people would fail quickly in your shoes and I applaud you for your leadership in such a fast-paced environment and against such great odds.

I certainly won’t be going far (), so I hope to continue a lasting relationship and hope that we all can work together sometime in the future.

Thanks again,

During the Q&A session of their earnings call this week, Apple COO Tim Cook fielded a question that he gets seemingly every earnings call: what’s the deal with Apple TV?

The question is a good one. While Apple is spending plenty of time and money on new products such as the iPad, which at least in part aims to change the way we consume media, Apple has largely neglected the Apple TV (a device, which it seems, would have a similar role). This time, Cook gave a little more insight as to why that is.

“It’s still a hobby,” Cook said, repeating the line him and CEO Steve Jobs have used time and time again to describe the device. But he continued on with a bit more. He said that if you look at the markets Apple is in, computers are a 300 million unit a year business (industry-wide), cell phones are a 1.2 billion unit per year business, and even MP3 players are a 100 million unit per year business. “These are enormous markets,” Cook noted. “The market for Apple TV is not, in our view, nearly that large yet. That’s why we classify it as a hobby,” Cook went on.

In other words, Apple isn’t taking it too seriously because they haven’t yet figured out a way to make a lot of money off of the device. And as we all should know by now, Apple loves to make money. It doesn’t make products just to make them. That’s why the Apple TV’s position remains a weird one. For now.

Cook also said that the “hobby” wording was mainly because Apple didn’t want to trick people (presumably investors and analysts), into thinking they were taking the product seriously at this time. You might think that’s just a way to deflect criticism that it hasn’t been a hit product (on the scale of say, the iPhone), but Cook also noted that sales of the device are up 34% year over year.

Further, he went on to say that, “a number of us love the product, and use the product. We continue to think there’s something interesting there.” That can be read as, “we’re not giving up on the product, we’re just waiting for the market to mature.”

Perhaps Cook took this opportunity to expand his thoughts a bit about the Apple TV because he hears this questions over and over again. There are also no shortage of blog posts from Apple TV owners out there (like me) who enjoy the device, but wish Apple would take it more seriously. But what Cook says is undoubtedly true. Just look at Apple’s other businesses. They make billions on the iPhone, billions on Macs, and billions off of iPods. With both Macs and iPods, they make that money off of high margins on the hardware. With the iPhone, it’s largely from the huge subsidy AT&T pays Apple for each device sold.

The Apple TV, at $229, likely has a pretty good margin for Apple, but the problem is that thing is entirely dependent on video content, which Apple simply doesn’t have enough of at a compelling enough price. This is, of course, Hollywood’s fault. When Apple unveiled the Apple TV in 2007, the company probably thought Hollywood would fall inline with its video distribution plans (for both television shows and movies) the same way the music industry had. But Hollywood wasn’t in nearly the position of weakness that the music industry was in (but with those plummeting DVD sales, could be soon), and as such, has been playing hardball with Apple.

For example, it took Apple a while to get the rights to be able to rent movies over iTunes (and the Apple TV) rather than making users buy them outright. Then it took more time to get HD content (which there still isn’t a ton of). And the latest rumors have Hollywood balking at Apple’s attempts to offer television subscription services, rather than making users buy each show. And they’re probably not too keen on the idea of Apple storing content in the cloud and streaming it to users either (at least, not without the ridiculous windowing deals like they have with Netflix).

Just as with music in iTunes, Apple doesn’t care about making money off of the content, but it needs to content to sell the hardware, where it does make the money. (Though, the subscription idea may be different, and may make Apple a nice chunk of change, that’s not clear.) With Hollywood holding back the content, or restricting it to the point where it’s less desirable to the consumer, it’s holding Apple’s plan for living room domination, captive.

But you can bet that Apple is thinking about ways around this. For example, while there isn’t much indication that it will happen yet beyond some vague patents, I would bet (as I have for a while) that Apple will eventually release an App Store for the Apple TV, just as they have for the iPhone and now iPad. It just makes sense. People love playing games on the iPhone and iPad, and they’ll love playing them on their big screen TVs too. The resolution issue (televisions have many different sizes and ratios) may be a bit of an problem to work around, but I still bet it will happen sooner or later.

And when it does, you can probaly expect a Netflix app, an ABC streaming app, and maybe even a Hulu app — three things that will make Apple TV much more attractive to a number of buyers. Those pipelines of content, on top of YouTube (which is already on Apple TV), and iTunes will make people take the Apple TV seriously. And hundreds of thousands of apps that you can use on your TV (perhaps interacting with them from an iPhone or iPad) could very well make the Apple TV a must-own device. You know, the type of device that makes billions of dollars in profit for Apple. In other words, no longer a “hobby.”

Gilt, the well-funded company that sells high-end luxury goods online at steep discounts in short-term “flash sales”, has its eyes set on a new target: Groupon. At least, it’s launching a new service that has a very similar model. In the last two days, Gilt has been sending some members invitations to ‘Gilt City‘, where they can get “exclusive local deals and offers up to 70% off.” The service is only available in New York City for now, but it’s clear that Gilt intends to expand it elsewhere. As with Gilt’s normal flash-sales, you’ll have to request an account to take part (it looks like existing accounts already work).

Like Groupon, Gilt City offers deals from local businesses (restaurants, beauty salons, etc.) and events. Deals are available in limited quantities and for a limited time. But the site differs in a few ways from Groupon: there doesn’t seem to be a minimum number of participants needed for a deal to become “activated”, and some stores are offering multiple deals. And unlike Groupon’s one-deal-per-day, Gilt only updates once a week for now.

Gilt is only the latest in a long, long string of Groupon-like sites to launch recently, but it’s in a better position than most. Gilt already has a strong brand presence, and it’s raised $48 million. But it’s typically focused on luxury goods whereas Groupon has a broader focus, so there’s likely room for the two to coexist.

Among the deals currently being offered are specials at a local salon, a trendy restaurant, and a show, all of which are high-end. However, there’s also a deal for the 16 Handles yogurt chain, which has a pretty broad appeal.

Thanks to Josh Goldman for the heads up.

Turns out, the people of the Internets aren’t the only ones interested — the Santa Clara County police are curious, as well.

Location based apps and services are all the rage now, with Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and Twitter leading the space. Startup ChoiceVendor has launched a location based iPhone app and service called MoPho.to that has a different twist. Instead of an emphasis on check-ins, MoPhoto is designed around the idea of capturing a photo. It’s “social photography” with geotagged photos enriched with metadata, comments, and likes. You can download the free app here.

Similar to Foursquare, Gowalla and others, MoPhoto is built around a free app and website. And the service currently allows you to tap into your social graph on Facebook. Here’s how it works. The app is essentially built around the camera, requiring you to first take a photo at an event or place (bar, restaurant, business, work etc). Once you take a photo, you can add a caption and you must pin the photo to a geographic place or event. Places are sources from GeoAPI (which was acquired by Twitter last year) and events are sourced from your Facebook events (although the app will eventually pull events from Last.fm and possibly Plancast). When you take a picture, you’ll be given a list of possible place or events near you according to your geolocation.

Once you publish your photo, the image, along with your location according to place or event, will be pushed to your friends who are also using the app, to Mophoto’s site and your Facebook friends, via Facebook Connect. Mophoto will soon add the ability to push to Twitter as well. On the app and site, you’re notified when your friend posts a photo and can easily see photos your friends are posting from places and events around you, giving you an opportunity to follow them in pictures. You can also comment on and “favorite” their photos.

While Gowalla allows you to publish photos with your location, Mophoto aims to differentiate itself by emphasizing the photo first, with the check-in as an afterthought. ChoiceVendor founder, Yan-David Erlich adds that eventually on the site, you’ll be able to search for a particular venue, business, or event, and see all the photos taken by Mophoto users at that events space.

The eventual aim is to create a visual timeline of events and local establishments. There are not current aims to monetize, but Erlich says that there is the possibility of monetizing data about venues.

The app essentially blends Foursquare with Facebook with TwitPic, creating a photo based social network of sorts. Of course, we still don’t know Facebook’s detailed plans for location, so that could become a competitor in addition to Twitter, Gowalla, Foursquare, Loopt and a plethora of others. Erlich, who is an entrepreneur-in-residence at Battery Ventures, and his co-founder are also soon launching ChoiceVendor’s other project, which is essentially a Yelp for the the B2B space.

Last January, news broke that YouTube had signed its first international sports streaming deal, gaining multi-year rights to broadcast the Indian Premiere League’s 45-day cricket tournament worldwide. We’re now closing in on the conclusion of the tournament — the finals begin on Sunday morning — and YouTube has shared some initial stats.

Right now, YouTube’s IPL channel has over 49.5 million views. That far exceeds the company’s internal expectations: we’re told that their stretch goal was to get 10 million views over the course of the tournament. Viewers from 200 countries have watched the streams. Unsurprisingly, India has the most views overall, but coming in second is the United States — YouTube had expected that spot to go to the UK or Australia, where cricket gets far more attention.

When the IPL deal was first signed it granted YouTube live streaming rights for every country except for the United States, where matches have been posted fifteen minutes after they ended. However, YouTube is streaming both the semi-finals and finals live (we’re told YouTube’s biz dev people worked “around the clock” to make that happen). All of which means the final view tally is going to be way more than 10 million.

Palm has seen better days. Following the departure of senior vice president of software, Michael Abbott (who landed at Twitter), the company has been offering packages to try and keep other executives around. That may not be working so well. Caitlin Spaan, Palm’s vice president of carrier marketing will be leaving the company shortly as well, we’ve learned.

This was likely not an easy decision to make for Spaan, she’s been with the company for 14 years. In fact, she may have been the last of the old school team in place before Jeff Hawkins (Palm founder), Donna Dubinsky (former Palm CEO), and Ed Colligan (also former Palm CEO) left to form Handspring (which merged with Palm in 2003).

Following a very bad earnings report in March, word started circulating that Palm was looking for a buyer. Yesterday, Financial Times reported that CEO Jon Rubenstein is committed to Palm surviving as an independent company but admitted that they’re open to other ideas. Ideas, including, letting other manufacturers make phones with Palm’s webOS software, and yes, looking at takeover bids.

Earlier today, Reuters reported that Lenovo is now the leading candidate to take over Palm. But the bad news continues, the same report had HTC dropping out of the acquisition race after reviewing Palm’s numbers.

Update: And as we’ve just heard, the latest rumors have Rubenstein possibly being out as well.

Grab the popcorn. There is a serious nerd fight brewing.

Following Facebook’s big Open Graph announcements at f8 a couple days ago, many of the leaders of the so-called “open web” are taking exception to Facebook’s use of the term “open” for its grandiose plans. While the Open Graph may be a lot of things, it is not open, is the feeling many of them have, as Erick laid out earlier.

Specifically, most of them are targeting the new Like button that is appearing everywhere on the web (including on TechCrunch). It’s an obvious target as it’s the most visible part (at least so far) of the Open Graph protocol. Investor/Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon is leading the effort for a new OpenLike button (though he wants someone else to be in charge). And Google’s Open Web Advocate, Chris Messina, has already ripped apart Facebook’s Like button in a blog post.

Anyone could have predicted these reactions immediately after Facebook’s announcements — in fact, I did (last paragraph). The fact of the matter is that Facebook is one of the most powerful forces on the web and they’re now using that position to introduce a new platform that will yes, help them. Shocking, really. A company that wants to do something that will benefit itself. But I do believe that Facebook, at least in part, believes this will also make the larger web better too. But that’s not going to be good enough for some, because it’s not fully open. Nevermind that plenty of these fully open solutions always being advocated never make it off the ground for one reason or another.

But what may be most interesting to me in all of this is that Facebook actually has one of these open web guys working there. In August of last year, Facebook hired Dave Recordon as a “Senior Open Programs Manager.” Recordon has long been a central figure in the open web discussion. For example, back in 2005 he helped create OpenID. So I asked Recordon what he thought about this latest melee, and specifically, Messina’s post.

In response, Recordon pointed me to this Google Group thread. Here, Recordon has a long response directly to a question Messina asked. I’ll paste both below.

Two days ago, Messina wrote:

In all seriousness — not trying to snark — just trying to understand what’s intended by “open” in the open graph protocol?  Thanks! Congrats on the launch.

Chris

Yesterday, Recordon answered:

I think open means a few things in this context:

First of all it is designed to increase openness between people based
on being able to connect with things all around the web. Within
Facebook this means that people can like any web page anywhere, not
just those on facebook.com.

Second, the Open Graph protocol increases the amount of semantic data
on the web in a manner that isn’t specific to Facebook or any single
social network. While we can all disagree about where the quotes and
angle-brackets should go, at the end of the day I think we all can
agree that this sort of metadata is good for the web.

Third, it was created and implemented by more than one company. We’re
now broadening that group of people (right here) and are interested in
evolving the spec in a meritocratic fashion.

Finally, it’s licensed from day one under the Open Web Foundation
Agreement (http://bit.ly/6zaAYh). As Jesse Stay wrote (http://bit.ly/
c0ROCw), this means that it, “is under a completely open license
agreement that other platform creators can adopt, use, and freely
distribute.”

That help?

–David

To that, Messina responded:

What other companies were involved in the creation of the OGP?

Where is the signed agreement? While I think it’s awesome that you’re using
the OWF agreement here, it seems like there actually needs to be a signed
agreement stored someone online by ALL the parties that affected by the
terms of the agreement.

Thanks. Eager to see the signed agreement!

At this point, Recordon noted that they should probably move the discussion to the Open Web Foundation mailing list. I assume anyone can sign up for that (wouldn’t be very “open,” if not), so look there for more juicy open web in-fighting.

Recordon has some good points there, but the one he doesn’t make (of course), is that Facebook has the right to do things beneficial for Facebook. The best argument you can make against this is that what’s beneficial to Facebook may not be most beneficial to us all. In a thorough breakdown of Open Graph at ReadWriteWeb, Alex Iskold (who is also active in the OpenLike community) makes a good case for this:

Technically speaking, what Facebook has done is elegant and correct. From markup, to plugins, to API, all of it is modern and awesome. The missing bit is that Facebook appears to be the only repository of data in this equation – and that makes the whole offering seriously closed. Publishers and users don’t have a choice as to where to store the data. It is going to Facebook and Facebook alone. Perhaps there is a way to rework the system in a way that fixes that.

Of course, then publishers don’t have to use Facebook’s Like button. But they will — I can think of nearly 500 million reasons why. Love it or hate it, that’s the way it is. It’s not good versus evil. It’s not black versus white. It’s a million shades of gray, as always.

One SEC accountant tried to access porn 1,800 times in two weeks, another tried 16,000 times in one month. In another case, an SEC attorney spent eight hours a day looking at and downloading porn— as reported by the Associated Press and ABC News— when his disk drive was full he resorted to CDs and DVDs. Gross.
Over the last five years, the SEC has launched “33 probes of employees looking at explicit images,” according to an SEC memo obtained by the Associated Press. The bulk of those cases occurred in the last three years (with 16! in 2008—Bernie Madoff was arrested in Dec. 08), as the financial industry teetered on the brink of collapse. More than half, seventeen of the cases, included senior employees. The memo has led to a gaggle of giggle-worthy headlines like: “Did Porn Cause the Financial Crisis?,” “SEC Staffers Watched Porn, Not Wall Street,” “SEC Was Wanking Off While The Economy Crumbled,” etc.— conjuring images of rows upon rows of SEC computers tuned into porn while homeowners received foreclosure notices and Madoff victims wept. It’s certainly disturbing to hear of senior SEC officials perusing porn websites when they had a crisis on their hands, but lets be honest here, are we really that surprised? 70% of all porn access occurs during the 9am to 5pm work day (according to a Messagelabs report), and I’m not just talking about the SEC. The numbers are ugly.

Another statistic cited by Michael Leahy the author of “Porn @ Work” is a 2006 report from Comscore Media Matrix: one out of every five unique visitors to porn websites in March 2006 were logging on from a work computer. If the SEC was watching porn while the financial crisis engulfed the country, so was the rest of America, or at least a good portion of it. In fact, when you put it in perspective, 33 over the course of 5 years is strangely a small amount for a workplace with 4,000 workers. Don’t get me wrong, I’m disgusted, but I’m not raising an eyebrow. To the SEC’s credit, it is cracking down on their employees, the SEC uses Blue Coat Systems to automatically patrol their employees internet usage and spokesperson John Nestor said the spike between 2007 and 2008 (2 cases versus 16) could have more to do with the inspector general’s more aggressive posture than a rise in impropriety. Several of the offenders have been suspended or dismissed. Here is the regulatory agency’s official statement:

“As we said when this story was first reported in the media in February, every instance of inappropriate use of the Internet investigated by the Inspector General was detected by the SEC’s own surveillance and referred to the Inspector General for investigation. Each of the offending employees has been disciplined or is in the process of being disciplined. Some have already been suspended or dismissed. While any misuse of government resources is always a concern, since February we have further increased penalties. We will not tolerate the transgressions of the very few who bring discredit to their thousands of hardworking colleagues.”

(Image Source: Random Pixels And Loose Talk)

I love our planet as much as the next person, but I despise efforts by companies and people to get credit for caring about the earth with empty gestures.

Like Pepsi’s ridiculous Aquafina press stunt. Or all this black screen Earth Day nonsense. Or bringing in goats to eat your lawn. Or banning black cars.

But I can’t find anything wrong with Frito Lay’s creation of a 100% biodegradable bag for SunChips. It will completely compost in 14 weeks under ideal conditions. I can imagine a day when most of our trash goes into our own back yard, simply to melt away into the ground.

Sure, it uses a corn based product, and there are all kinds of environmental issues with our corn production. But when you see the huge amount of trash accumulating around the world, including in our oceans, it’s hard to argue that this is a very, very good thing.

Watch the video of a bag biodegrading here. More detailed information on the process here.