Betting that Brizzly will be huge, ex-Googlers are working on things

Thing Labs in their San Francisco office. Chris Wetherell, middle left, and Jason Shellen, middle right. Credit: Mark Milian / Los Angeles Times

The mad scientists at Thing Labs have a very impressive track record.

On the sixth floor of a trendy building in San Francisco's recently renovated Mint Plaza, four former Google employees -- scratch that: five former Googlers, with today's addition of FriendFeed's (now Facebook's) Ben Darnell -- and a few others are working on things. Some very interesting things.

Founder Jason Shellen is purposely fuzzy with his description of ongoing projects. Whereas Google famously has "20% time," a policy that lets engineers spend one-fifth of their day working on anything they want, Shellen says his workers get "100% time."

For the last five months, the majority of that time has been spent building Brizzly, a Web application that combines your Twitter and Facebook profiles into a single interface.

After gaining some viral interest through its invitation-only sign-up system -- a strategy that has worked exceedingly well for Gmail and now Google Wave -- Brizzly is unlocking its doors today. Anyone can sign up and plug in their social network credentials.

But Brizzly remains in beta despite having tens of thousands of users. The product is ahead of most desktop apps in its stability and interface but is not yet a replacement for Facebook because you can't fully browse friends' profiles, view events or upload pictures. And the app currently lacks some newer Twitter features like geolocation, which is available in only a few programs anyway, and standardized retweet, a project originally spearheaded by Thing Labs' vice president of technology, Chris Wetherell.

So why should you care? There's plenty of websites and apps for accessing Twitter. TweetDeck and Seesmic, like Brizzly, can pull in Facebook as well. And while Brizzly is stuffed with potential even now in such an early stage, Shellen's track record hints that there's much more to come.

Web ads that learn from you [Updated]

This might surprise you, but the holy grail for many online advertisers is to make an ad that people actually like. Based on the current state of the banner ad economy, that might not seem like the case.

Thanks to the simple addition of thumbs up and thumbs down buttons on many websites, advertisers are finally getting a sense of how enjoyable (or annoying) their ads are.

The Internet has long provided a measurement of how effective an ad is -- that is how many times it was clicked versus how often it was shown, a metric called click-through rate. But that's based simply on how loud and flashy a banner can be in order to attract a reader's attention.

A click doesn't necessarily convert to a purchase, or "conversion" as they call it, nor are visitors guaranteed to associate the product positively. If an ad mimics a virus alert, it might get clicked out of fear or urgency but won't elicit a pleasant reaction once users realize they were duped.

Many social networking sites, including Facebook, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, are beginning to shift toward a subjective ad model. Initial results from allowing users to rate ads have been mostly positive. The success may be inspiring a trend, as advertisers throughout the Web seem to be toning down on annoying ads.

One of the boldest implementations is Digg Ads, which publicly launched in August and has tested exceptionally well, according to Mike Maser, Digg's chief strategy officer.

The new sponsored posts appear in the main content space and look almost identical (save for a thin gray line and small "sponsored by" text) to user-submitted news stories. Whereas an isolated graphic ad on Digg gets about eight clicks out of every 10,000 impressions, Digg Ads are pulling click-through rates of 2% to 3%.

"The results were astounding to us," Maser said. The advertisers are "writing copy and headlines in a way that's almost as if you'd want to share it with someone."

Google starts testing Social Search. 'Creepy,' naysayers mutter. [Updated]

Just about any social-networking-focused product that Google rolls out brings a group of naysayers pointing fingers and calling it creepy.

Right on cue, those folks are welcoming Google's new real-time search feature with less than open arms: "Google Social Search is creepy.... Just perfect for child preditors [sic] to use," wrote Greg House on Twitter.

OK, let's turn it down a notch.

Google Social Search is available for testing in Google Labs, a section of experimental search features. Social Search stems from a deal Google recently struck with Twitter.

[Updated at 6:28 p.m.: An earlier version of this post incorrectly said Google had announced a deal with Facebook.]

Microsoft announced a similar deal and promptly rolled out BingTweets along with news of a partnership with Facebook. No one has yet disclosed financial terms.

Google’s Social Search works much like its standard search, but instead of sifting through the Web at large, it culls links from friends’ pages on the user’s social networks. 

In order to know who your friends are, Google asks you to fill out a profile that includes links to your pages on networks like Twitter and FriendFeed -- which is now owned by Facebook. A deal with Facebook could be on the horizon -- at which time, Facebook's notoriously change-averse users would no doubt bemoan the feature.

Are today's reactions any worse than the ones to Google Web History, which shows you a list of past searches? Or to Google Latitude, which shows you where on a map you and your friends are? Or to Gmail's targeted ads, which, for example, promote concert tickets if you receive an e-mail about U2? Or to Google Voice, which logs your phone usage, voice mails and text messages?

Maybe not, but what happens if Google rolls out Facebook search?

-- Mark Milian

Twitter: @markmilian

The Internet: a place to pay for music?

The Internet has been a decidedly mixed blessing for the music industry, encouraging people to listen to more songs and discover more bands but also to buy fewer recordings. One reason is that there's been a disconnect between where people go online to find and hear music, and where they can pay for it.

Two pieces of news today suggested that the industry may soon turn more of that burgeoning consumption into revenue, although neither one is a sure thing. TechCrunch, among others, reported that Google -- the site that millions of music lovers use to find bands and songs online -- is poised to launch a music service. The venture, which is set to be unveiled next week, reportedly will combine Google's search capabilities with streaming and purchasing functions from Lala.com and MySpace's iLike. Meanwhile, Facebook -- the planet's most popular social network -- has chosen Lala to power a new music-gifting service. Starting Thursday, users will be able to send their pals MP3s or Lala "websongs" (streamable songs from an online locker) in addition to the usual array of virtual gifts.

By putting the ability to hear and buy music where the masses spend time online, Google and Facebook could help convert more of the Internet's free music consumption into revenue. In both cases, users won't have to pull out their wallets to generate royalties for labels and artists -- Google would presumably share revenue from the ads it sells around its music service, and Facebook would automatically ding its users' credit cards for the music gifts they send. According to Lala CEO Bill Nguyen, Facebook users already spend $50 million or more annually on such gifts as virtual plants and pictures of birthday cakes, which sell for about $1 apiece. So it's reasonable to assume that they'll spend 10 cents to a $1 sending people songs. (Note to the Beatles: Now's the time to license "Birthday" and "Yesterday" to Lala.) Nguyen is so bullish on Facebook's music gifts that he said it could bring in "an order of magnitude" more revenue for the company. He added, "This may be the most significant thing since the ringtone." (He declined to comment on the Google reports.)

That's hyperbolic, but Facebook certainly is taking a lot of the friction out of buying music for a pal. Not only does it tell users about their friends' birthdays and other significant events, it also makes it easy to search through Lala's catalog of 8 million songs for just the right sentiment. And the 10-cent charge for streamable tracks is practically painless, especially when it's added to the user's tab automatically, Google's advantage, meanwhile, is that it's extremely well positioned to serve music fans and the advertisers who want to reach them.

Still, it remains to be seen whether Google pursues a pure advertiser-supported model, à la MySpace Music and the much-hyped Spotify, or if it is more focused on driving sales through social-based discovery and low prices, à la Lala. As NPD analyst Russ Crupnick pointed out recently, free advertiser-supported services are cannibalizing digital music sales. That's true in part because advertisers won't pay much for banner or display ads on a music service that people use as background music. So if Google goes the unlimited-free-music route, it's an open question whether it would be able to generate enough revenue from advertisers to make its service a net plus for copyright holders.

My guess is that it won't. At a panel discussion today about new music formats at Digital Hollywood in Santa Monica, iLike CEO Ali Partovi spoke highly of Lala's model of one free listen. But he also said it was important to go beyond mere 30-second samples, which has been one of iLike's limitations. Said Partovi, "If you let them listen to the full song, they're more likely to buy."

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Facebook digs through user data and graphs U.S. happiness

Facebook released a graphical breakdown showing the collective happiness of the site's millions of active U.S. users.

The company combed its database of short user-updates and looked for words indicating a theme of happiness or sadness correlating to the day it was posted. The breakdown was released Monday.

What we learned from the analysis of our nation's Web chatter: Holidays make people happy, celebrity deaths make people sad.

As Facebook notes, Thanksgiving and Christmas are some of the happiest days, while the deaths of Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson were among the lowest.

Indeed, the findings are completely obvious, but could become more interesting with years of data collection -- especially when aligned with economic indicators.

But, hey, do we really want Facebook to keep peering into updates meant just for friends and family? The research serves as a good reminder about cybersecurity -- after all, it is National Cybersecurity Month.

If you put something on Facebook, no matter how tight your privacy settings are, Facebook Inc. can still hang onto it, analyze it, remix it and repackage it.

Despite its silly name, the Gross National Happiness indicator is creepy. We're in there.

Mint, a personal finance website similar to (and now owned by) Quicken, also does this sort of data analysis. The company combs through millions of bank and credit card accounts that its users inputted for the purpose of personal finance tracking -- key word being "personal" -- in order to determine "America's most frugal cities" or "global wealth distribution."

We're going to send a link to this post on our Facebook pages along with the words "mad" and "unhappy." Maybe Facebook will notice the graph dip the next time it digs through my profile.

-- Mark Milian

Follow my commentary on technology and social media on Twitter @markmilian.

Image courtesy of Facebook

Timberlake signs on to co-star in Facebook movie, "The Social Network"

Justin Timberlake. Credit: Chris Pizzello / AP

Did Facebook just get somewhat cooler?   

Variety is reporting that the latest addition to "The Social Network," the early-stage Hollywood movie project that will tell Facebook's origin story, has signed Justin Timberlake to play a principal character.

The actor-singer-Emmy winner is slated to play Sean Parker, a co-founder of Napster (not to be confused with Sean Fanning, the music site's creator) and Facebook's first president. Timberlake will play alongside Jesse Eisenberg ("Adventureland", "The Squid and the Whale"), who will portray Facebook's founding father Mark Zuckerberg, who was 19 when he famously created "The Facebook" in his Harvard dorm room.

The film will apparently concentrate on the vicissitudes of fame and fortune encountered by the young founders, whose meteoric ascent into wealth and pop culture was not always without its hitches. 

The script was written by Aaron Sorkin, a specialist in spinning drama out of often prosaic reality. Facebook's origin story comes with its share of Hollywood's classic elements involved -- money, power, and even betrayal -- but Sorkin and director David Fincher may have to take some liberties with the sex.

-- David Sarno

Facebook retires once-embarrassing Beacon advertising system

Facebook is closing the book on Beacon, an early advertising experiment that got the upstart social network in big trouble with users in 2007. 

Back then, Facebook quietly launched the service, which recorded user activities on non-Facebook sites and then reported them to users' friends. 

In the most famous instance, a Facebook user complained that he had ordered a diamond ring for his wife from Overstock.com and that Facebook had ruined the surprise by reporting the purchase to all his friends -- and his wife, too.

The endeavor quickly turned into what "60 Minutes" called "a full-blown PR disaster ... including petitions and bloggers writing obituaries" for the company. 

In that same "60 Minutes" segment from early 2008, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Beacon and the company's advertising plans "might take some work for us to get this exactly right" and that "this is something we think is going to be a really good thing."

But the company is no longer maintaining that position. Beacon, it says, will be shut down as part of a class-action settlement. The suit was filed against Blockbuster and Facebook last year, accusing the video rental company of violating user privacy by disseminating customer rental information to users' Facebook friends -- via Beacon.

In addition to decommissioning Beacon, Facebook will also donate $9.5 million to establish a foundation that will focus on online privacy and safety concerns.

-- David Sarno

Facebook hits 300 million users, says it's cash-flow positive

Photo: Palo Alto., Calif.-based Facebook is the nation's and the world's No. 1 social networking website. Credit: Tony Avelar / Bloomberg.

It took Facebook five years to get to 150 million active users, a lightning-fast growth rate by any measure. But like track phenom Usain Bolt, the world's No. 1 social networking website atomized its own speed record this year by going from 150 million users to 300 million users in a little over nine months. 

CEO Mark Zuckerberg also said today that the company had become cash-flow positive ahead of schedule (he had originally guessed "sometime in 2010") and called the milestone important "because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term."

Facebook makes its money from sponsored advertising as well as from an auction system in which marketers and small businesses pay to target their ads to users of a certain age or geographic region. The private Palo Alto, Calif., company does not disclose its revenues.

Facebook has had a tumultuous childhood, frequently getting in hot water over the way it shares, stores and uses the private information of its large user base. Last month, the company said it was starting a year-long project to clarify and tighten its privacy controls after a Canadian government agency complained about the site's policies.

But Facebook's growth is perhaps the best evidence of its utility and its general appeal to users worldwide. The company says its fastest-growing demographic is now people 35 and older, and in the U.S., the site's nearly 90 million visitors made it the fourth most-trafficked Web property in July. Facebook had 70 million U.S. visitors when it surpassed rival MySpace in May to become the nation's most popular social network.

The company was valued at $10 billion in a transaction earlier this year in which the Russian venture firm Digital Sky Technologies bought $200 million worth of stock in the company. Facebook, which now has close to 1,000 employees, has taken about $600 million in financing.

-- David Sarno

TechCrunch50: MySpace looks for friends

It's the sad fact of life for MySpace, a sponsor of this week's TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco: Silicon Valley loves Facebook and Twitter. MySpace? Not so much.

Yet that doesn't stop Rupert Murdoch's favorite social network from trying. Chad Russell, who runs MySpace's OpenSocial team, is at the conference, trying to persuade developers to create apps for the one-time social networking leader. MySpace, he points out, still has 170 million users -- dwarfed by Facebook's 250 million, but still a significant population.

"It's almost like we're back to square one," Russell said. "We're pitching again, like we were a few years ago."

"This is a Facebook crowd," he said, noting that Facebook and Twitter get a lot of positive coverage on the TechCrunch website, which covers Silicon Valley and is hosting the conference. "They take their leanings from on high."

OpenSocial, which Russell works on, is an effort launched by Google two years ago to get developers to build applications that can run across a number of social networks, including MySpace, LinkedIn and Google's Orkut. Facebook has its own system and has not signed on to OpenSocial. "They're anti-open standards," Russell said. "All of Facebook has closed protocols."

As for MySpace's newfound role as underdog and Web 2.0 whipping boy, Russell said, "Some of it we deserve. Some of it we don't."

-- Dan Fost

Facebook, take note: Twitter changes terms for the better

Twitter Inc. changed its terms of service today to clarify that advertising on your Twitter page is OK and that users, not the company, own their tweets.

For months, ad services have flourished in certain circles of the social network. Twitter's legal provisions reinforce those companies' legitimacy.

Twitter also inserted sections to the user agreement addressing standards for third-party developers and intolerance for spammers, wrote co-founder Biz Stone on the company blog.

When Twitter announced the changes earlier today, I was having lunch in Hollywood with Ben Huh, chief executive of Pet Holdings Inc., the parent company of Fail Blog and popular kitty site I Can Has Cheezburger. Quite aptly, we were eating cheeseburgers at In-N-Out.

Huh and I joked about how Facebook had gone out of its way in February to say it owned all of the content you upload to your profile -- and had to backtrack -- compared with Twitter going out of its way to assert the opposite.

For the record, Huh prefers Twitter to Facebook but acknowledges that they both have their place -- the latter being good for interactions with real-world friends. Oh, and actress Alyssa Milano agrees.

Facebook can simplify its interface and photocopy Twitter all it wants (cough, Facebook Lite). But it won't convince the world to entrust Facebook with every bit of its personal content as long as the company keeps making blunders like the terms change, followed by the joke of a democratic legal page and the infamous Beacon.

-- Mark Milian

Follow my commentary on technology and social media on Twitter @markmilian.

Original photo by ChrisL_AK via Flickr