Technology

'Turkey' searches on Google experience annual surge

Mark Milian — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

Sorry, Istanbul, we're looking for the bird.

Despite there being an entire country named Turkey, it's the yearly American Thanksgiving traditions that leads to a huge boost in Google searches for the term.

Check out the graph at the top illustrating searches for the word "turkey" over the last five years, courtesy of Google Trends.

As you can see, the massive jolt comes around Thanksgiving every year and a smaller one comes around Christmas time.

Google hasn't yet updated its search statistics for today, but we can already see an uptick toward the end of the graph.

Over the last five years, Turkey the country has maintained the top spot where people are searching for "turkey," followed by Britain and the U.S. But during November, it's USA all the way.

"Tryptophan," the amino acid that causes drowsiness after large consumptions of turkey, also sees a stratospheric jump in late-November. We're surprised Web surfers manage to stay awake long enough to type that in -- let alone spell it correctly.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

Music streaming app Spotify comes to the U.S. early next year

Mark Milian — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:26:11 -0800

Perhaps the most-hyped music service coming out of Europe is making its way to American shores early next year.

Spotify's desktop software lets users stream from a massive catalog of music for free.

The ad-supported service is hugely popular in the six European countries it currently operates in. And for good reason.

The program is in many ways more sophisticated than similar services, like Napster and Rhapsody. The interface is simple and lets users arrange playlists that automatically sync between machines. And it's free -- supported by ads.

The premium version, which costs 10 euros per month in Europe (U.S. pricing hasn't been announced yet), lets users stream via mobile apps and store songs in playlists using digital rights management (DRM) on a computer or smart phone for offline listening. The application also sells many songs in its catalog.

We've been testing Spotify for the last few weeks, and it's absolutely blowing us away. Check out our impressions of the service on Pop & Hiss: Spotify plans to rock the U.S. digital music landscape early next year.

-- Mark Milian

Is 'Pulp Fiction' screenwriter Roger Avary tweeting from jail?

Mark Milian — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:40:05 -0800

Roger Avary pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter in September and may be tweeting from jail. Credit: Los Angeles Times

As is often the case with Twitter, screenwriter Roger Avary recently tweeted about what he had for lunch. It was soy, which, an acquaintance told him, contains a dangerous substance intended to shrink their genitals and reduce their sex drives.

Just another day in Ventura County Jail.

Avary, who won an Oscar for writing the "Pulp Fiction" screenplay, appears to be sending updates to Twitter from the big house. He received a jail sentence in September after pleading guilty to vehicular manslaughter following a fatal crash last year.

We can't confirm that the Twitter account, @avary, actually belongs to Avary. But a second account, @rogeravary, points to the companion profile and contains photos of sci-fi author Neil Gaiman and the Dresden Dolls' Amanda Palmer.

Gaiman's Twitter profile and @FoxSearchlight are among @avary's 9,538 followers. Gaiman recently sent a tweet that read, "My friend @AVARY is tweeting from the inside. It's riveting, horrible strange. Jail in 140 character lumps."

The Avary tweets are truly intense. On Saturday, he reported the facility being locked down due to an inmate sneaking in heroin. On Sunday, he said a "sickness" has been spreading throughout the compound, which "#34" (what he has been calling himself since being locked up) is "helpless to avoid."

All of Avary's tweets have come between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Some on Twitter believe he has regular computer access. The majority of his messages were sent via a Web browser, but a couple came through Twitterrific, an application for the Mac and iPhone -- it's unclear which device he's using.

The U.S. Senate has been looking into passing a nationwide ban on cellphones in prison using service jammers.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

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

Mark Milian — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:32:47 -0800

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.

The Brizzly founder has a sharp eye for business. He was at Blogger at the beginning of the decade, helping to sell Twitter Chief Executive Evan Williams' company to Google.

At Google, Shellen steered development of the Atom format, now one of two Web-standard news feed technologies. He also championed the purchases of photo software Picasa, location-based social network Dodgeball (the precursor to Foursquare) and FeedBurner. He also urged Google to acquire Flickr, a photo-sharing site that was snapped up by Yahoo and remains its most-hyped property.

Joining Shellen from Blogger is Wetherell, who built Google Reader, a Web-based news feed app that almost instantly dominated the market. Reader lets you subscribe to your favorite news sites and blogs, aggregate those feeds into folders and sort through it all in a sort of e-mail inbox.

"Google Reader addressed the question, 'How do I keep up with all of it?'" Shellen said during an interview at his San Francisco office. "But now your friends are your filters."

Wetherell joined Thing Labs in June after a few months of leading projects at Twitter and before that, working on Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

Seriously, these guys can't stop betting on the winning horses.

Wetherell, left, and Shellen, right. Credit: Mark Milian / Los Angeles Times

They're hoping that the prize steed in the race to aggregate social networking profiles is a bear -- that is Brizzly's mascot, Phineas T. Brizzly (not joking).

There's a lot of Reader in Brizzly. When a tweet contains a link to a picture or video, the app displays the media inline so that users don't have to go to a separate page to view them.

Part of the reason Reader is so successful is that it's more than just news feeds. It watches users' habits -- how often they click certain news items, what time of the day or week they read certain feeds, which items they e-mail or share with friends, how they scroll down the list. It uses that information to help users find relevant stuff in their mess of data and from news sources they're not subscribed to.

"Twitter has a great opportunity to do this," Wetherell said. And if it doesn't do it quickly, Brizzly will. Usage info could help users rake through the endless stream of tweets and find others with similar interests.

"You find out a lot about somebody, and you can give that back to them as value," Wetherell said.

As was Reader's sort-of mission statement, Shellen says Brizzly is about "information and making more out of it." The app was one of the first to provide a brief explanation in its list of trending topics, the most-talked about keywords across Twitter. Recently, Twitter implemented a similar feature.

The Brizzly team is looking more closely at making sense of network-wide trends going forward. It has an open API that allows any developer to implement its Wiki-style explanatory system. And it may soon offer location- or topic-specific trends.

Shellen has several other experiments brewing in the laboratory. Plinky is one, which asks users to come back every day to answer a simple question.

But Brizzly is the company's main thing right now. And it's something worth watching.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

Techmeme's Gabe Rivera makes news aggregation profitable

Mark Milian — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:29:22 -0800

Gabe Rivera, founder of news aggregator Techmeme. Credit: Mark Milian/Los Angeles Times.

Don't tell News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch, but technology news aggregator Techmeme is raking in profits.

Rather than visiting the front pages of every newspaper or choosing a few out of brand loyalty, as Murdoch hopes consumers will do, aggregators put all of the Web's big headlines of the moment onto one page.

There's no shortage in news aggregation. General news readers might go to Google News, a computer-generated engine that pulls in more than 25,000 newspaper websites and authoritative blogs. Left-leaning political consumers might visit the Huffington Post; right-leaning ones might go to Drudge Report.

For tech news, Techmeme, with its smart computer algorithm for culling interesting links, is at the top. A space once dominated by sites like Slashdot and Digg, Techmeme is now the undisputed top influence for the Bay Area tech elite.

Today Techmeme launched a mobile site that's formatted for smart phones to appease news junkies on the go.

It sounds almost laughable that a 4-year-old property, being such a powerful voice in tech, took this long to build a phone-optimized interface. But Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera is not trying to build a trendy, cutting-edge site with its own comment system and social media share features.

Rivera is, to an extent, mimicking the medium that loudly whines about his breed of aggregation. "It feels like a newspaper," Rivera said over lunch last week in San Francisco. "It feels like something you can rely on."

Techmeme became even more newspaper-like last year when Rivera hired his first editor. Fans groaned at the idea of trusting a human to select news in a fair and balanced way. But the site is doing just fine. Better, Rivera argues.

Now, Techmeme has three full-time editors -- including Los Angeles-based Rich DeMuro, a former Cnet reporter -- with contributions from Rivera and a part-timer. "We have people who mostly cover, at least during the week, all 24 hours," Rivera said.

However, Rivera's algorithm is still the backbone. It's the secret sauce that allows small, no-name blogs to reach the top of the pile every once in a blue moon. It does so based on a formula that takes into account who's linking to a page and how influential those sources are, Rivera vaguely explained.

But rather than code in small tweaks to the system in order to fix mistakes, as he had been doing for years, Rivera went with the human touch. He realized that "the most cost-effective thing would be to hire an editor," he said.

"The algorithmic changes continue," Rivera said. "But then once we started that, we discovered new opportunities for the two to work in tandem."

Rivera has similar projects covering politics, celebrity gossip and baseball. But Techmeme is the flagship.

"Techmeme is the product that is the most valuable, that I'm most proud of, that pays bills," Rivera said. Indeed, it's profitable and has never accepted an outside investor.

But Rivera predicts that Memeorandum, "the unfortunately named political site," as he calls it, could be the next big thing. Watch out, Google News.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

Students can research books on their iPods.... But will they?

Mark Milian — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:31:50 -0800

Questia Library Plus iPhone app. Credit: Questia

We'll spare you the obvious "there's an app for that" joke. But you can get a library's worth of books on your phone.

Questia, an online research portal for students, announced its application today for reading books, articles and periodicals on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

The app costs 99 cents for 5,000 public-domain books and a week of unlimited access. After that, users can buy a two-week subscription for $9.99.

There are so many things wrong with this we don't know where to start.

For one, students don't like to buy things. Especially digital things. Many strapped-for-cash college kids aren't buying songs at a dollar a pop. Why would they buy books they can find free in their university library or on Google Books?

But you get the convenience of reading and browsing on your iPod, right?

C'mon, have you ever tried reading anything substantial on that tiny screen? The Kindle app is great, but we can't get through a chapter without our eyes bursting into flames.

Two universities recently rejected the Kindle DX device as a replacement for textbooks, in part because it lacks features like advanced notation and text-to-speech. (Considering that the alternative is a paper book, their issues are kind of absurd, but that's for a different discussion.)

If they didn't like the Kindle, imagine what they'll think of a device that's about a quarter of the size.

The Questia app is a decent implementation of a very niche idea. If you're planning to actually do research with dozens of sources, you'll be better off with more fully featured alternatives, which includes Google's academic offerings and Questia's own desktop-friendly site.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

On Brightkite, ladies' night never ends

Mark Milian — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:05:11 -0800

Two teens listen to music and send text messages on their cellphones in a coffee shop. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times.

When Jonathon Linner describes his social networking website Brightkite, he sounds more like a savvy nightclub owner than the chief executive of a bleeding-edge Bay Area start-up.

Whereas most new technologies tend to favor the early adopter -- a generally male-skewed, try-everything, fad-friendly crowd -- Linner is focusing on a different audience: hot girls.

"Guys will go where the hot chicks are," Linner said over lunch a few months ago. "The target demographic is a girl in college," he reiterated in a recent phone interview.

How do you get girls in high demand to cozy up to a social network that asks users to pull out their phones and check in multiple times a day? Linner employs what he calls "the ladies' night approach."

"Bars do things to make women come there -- reduced-price drinks or free drinks," he said. "So we do things in our system to make it more inviting to women."

Brightkite's landing page is bubbly and colorful with cute cartoon characters and an emphasis on words like "simplicity."

Compare that to competing location-based network Loopt, with its shiny, sleek buttons and big map overlaid with widgets. Or the smaller but much-hyped website Foursquare, which is quick to highlight that it plays nicely with high-end smart phones.

When adding new features, Linner and his 32 or so employees have to take care not to tick off Brightkite's pioneering female users.

For example . . .

. . . Foursquare has a very popular feature called "mayors." If a user checks in on Foursquare from a place repeatedly, he or she can be crowned "mayor" of that bar or restaurant or store. But when Linner workshopped the idea for Brightkite, girls shrugged at the competitive aspect and worried that if they truly got into the spirit of the game, they would shun friends in order to discourage them from checking in at the same places.

Recurring focus groups are key to these types of insights. "Our focus groups are almost entirely based on having women come in," Linner said. "I'm sitting with underage girls all day."

Brightkite CEO Jonathon Linner. Credit: Brightkite

Of course, Brighkite isn't made up entirely of some small "Mean Girls" clique. The site has more than 5 million users and 2 million active monthly. But about 60% are female, so pleasing the ladies is key.

In the end, "the biggest and heaviest users are women," Linner said. (He means women are the most active, not the fattest.)

DailyBooth, a photo-sharing social network, unintentionally grabbed a majority of female users, which its founder Jon Wheatley says is "working out really well." About 67% are women.

"Apparently females like taking photos of themselves," Wheatley wrote in an e-mail. And "if there's lots of pretty girls to look at, men are more likely to sign up," he wrote.

But when a site isn't targeting the cutting-edge crowd, adding or changing features can be a slow and dangerous process.

When Brightkite was rolling out version 2.0 recently, the team planned to add a relationship dynamic similar to Twitter's, where friendships aren't necessarily mutual. But the company ultimately decided to call them "fans" rather than "followers" -- the latter, it found, has a particularly creepy connotation, especially for a location-focused social network.

Brightkite attracts college students by recruiting on-campus reps (two each at USC and UCLA) and by sponsoring sorority parties with Brightkite-branded ping-pong balls (naturally, for beer pong).

But it has a fine line to walk with privacy. The company simplified its privacy features in the newest version. Facebook is working on a similar revision.

"We let 13- to 17-year-olds use the service," Linner said. "But you can't search for them. You can't really find them."

Since launching in January 2008, Brightkite is still struggling with what it internally calls "Hot Girl Syndrome." Linner has heard numerous complaints from attractive girls whose profiles have attracted some unwanted followers -- er, fans.

But the new, simpler privacy controls hope to give users added power. "It's the bouncer in the bar," Linner said.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

Web ads that learn from you [Updated]

Mark Milian — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:25:53 -0800

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."

Digg's philosophy of allowing users to curate good content by voting on what's worthwhile and "burying" what stinks has converted well to paid spots. Advertisers are encouraged to make good, funny, compelling ads rather than loud ones because users can knock out the lame ads just as easily as they can "digg" them.

Digg's bold twist is that the company charges advertisers more if the users dislike their content and less if it's well-received. This usually results in bad ads getting shown less frequently.

"We actually consult with brands and marketers on how to write those [good] headlines," Maser said. "We have a full-time copywriter."

Intel was one of the first adopters of Digg's new platform. One of the products of that partnership was a rather edgy ad titled "Watch Hot Girl Vlogger Take WiMAX For A Spin" (pictured below). The borderline sexist plug for Rocketboom's Ellie Rountree's video perhaps played to Digg's perceived overwhelmingly male audience.

Maser points out that the gender divide isn't as significant as it once was despite the continued site comments like, "Gasp, a girl on Digg!" Of the site's 40 million unique monthly visitors, 40% are female.

Regardless, Intel spokesman David Dickstein wrote that the company was "satisfied with the results." He added, "We chose compelling content from our consumer blog on Intel.com rather than copy-written ads to facilitate the connection with Intel experts at a more personal level."

Mason Wiley, senior vice president of marketing for online ad network Hydra, isn't surprised by the bold attempts these programs have spurred.

"People tune out ads," Wiley said. "Nowadays, to get attention, you have to be kind of crazy. ... Smart advertisers are trying to make ads that are entertaining."

Social news competitor Reddit has begun slowly rolling out a similar ad platform. In partnership with Adpinions, some of Reddit's 7 million monthly unique visitors are seeing banners with two thumb icons underneath.

While some ad groups are seeing massively increased click-through rates, the major value is all of the feedback they're receiving, said Luke Iannini, chief executive of Adpinions' three-person team.

It lets them cater ads to location, sections and time of day. "That's part of the secret sauce of our algorithm," Iannani said, taking into account "relationships between products."

The system automatically figures out that the video game section likes Nintendo ads and the political session likes Thomas Jefferson statues. A baffling trend is the recurring similarities between people in Boston and Miami.

Adpinions had demonstrated its product to Facebook, Iannini reminisced. A week later, thumb graphics began appearing underneath ads throughout the social networking site. Facebook is often mum on the inner-workings of its platform and the company didn't respond to e-mails seeking comment.

Facebook seems to demonstrate that the concept can indeed scale. It has probably the world's largest ad opinion pool. Leveraging these massive amounts of data could very well have contributed to its projected $500 million in revenue this year.

As the Internet's emerging sites turn on these interactive ad features, we can't help but wonder why Google hasn't integrated them into its dominant AdSense platform. How long until Google gives the thumbs up?

Updated, 5:55 p.m.: Clarified Mason Wiley's title, which is senior vice president of marketing for Hydra. The original version said he was vice president of marketing.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

Top image: Reddit. Bottom image: Digg

Motorola's Droid review: It's the best phone on Verizon

Mark Milian — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:18:37 -0800

We're getting this out of the way now: Motorola's Droid is the best Google phone on the market.

Maybe that's not saying a whole lot. The Droid's only competitors in the U.S. are T-Mobile's 1-year-old G1, its chubby younger brother the MyTouch 3G and HTC's Droid Eris, a $99 Verizon Wireless phone that comes out Friday -- the same day as the Motorola Droid -- with an already-outdated Android operating system.

Here's another one: Droid is the best phone on Verizon.

As we wrote last week, the Droid marks a notable shift for the nation's largest carrier. Verizon -- often renowned for its service, not its selection of phones -- seems to be wisely minimizing its interference with handset makers.

What we get is an attractive and fast smart phone packed to the brim with features for $199 (with a two-year contract).

The Droid hardware is a technical feat. It has a 5-megapixel camera with a flash that doesn't perform exceptionally well but still pretty great for a phone. The speaker is pleasantly loud. The touch-screen screen is gorgeous -- larger than the iPhone's with way more pixels per inch.

Oh, and it has a keyboard.

After spending plenty of time with the iPhone and MyTouch, we realized just how much we don't miss physical keyboards. Granted, the Droid's isn't as nice as most Blackberry keyboards. We spewed just as many typos on the Droid's black-and-white-and-brown keyboard as we did on software keyboards. Only problem is that we're not offered automatic corrections like we get on the touch-screen keyboard.

Impressively, the slide-out keyboard doesn't add much thickness compared with the iPhone -- the Droid is only slightly bigger and noticeably heavier. The keyboard is a nice option (geeks will enjoy the pro shortcuts), but if you're not digging it, you never have to pull it out.

Motorola takes a step back with its navigation buttons. Competing Android phones use a scroll ball -- you know, that little nub that makes the Blackberry so good for e-mail. Instead, the Droid opts for a four-way rocker navigation with a center button, which sits next to the keyboard and provides little utility.

Under the hood, the Droid runs a version of Android 2.0, becoming the first device that has it. That means it packs features and polish you won't see on the other guys -- most notably the free Google Maps Navigation software.

Android has really come a long way in a year. The software keyboard is smarter, the included apps more sophisticated and the subtleties of switching between programs more natural.

But for as far as Google's operating system has come, it remains several steps behind Apple's iPhone in many respects. Even though we ripped on Apple for leaving out the copy-and-paste feature for so long, there's something to be said about how it was finally implemented. It's simple and works incredibly well.

On the flip side, selecting text on the Droid drives us nuts. The option is hidden behind a menu screen; there's no clever magnifying glass to help you grab the right section; and to copy, you have to again find the option somewhere in the menus.

This design choice underlines a prevalent problem that still plagues Android. Some fairly common actions are hidden, including the basic ability to delete apps.

(Here's a tip so you don't look like a stooge at the Verizon store: Press the lock icon and turn to the right to open the phone. The majority of people who played with our review unit couldn't figure out how to get into the phone.)

Button layouts can vary widely from app to app. Transitioning between the many programs that can run simultaneously works well enough, but some can't be closed while others gobble up battery power with no warning.

Android's Marketplace offers more than 10,000 apps -- that's certainly not on par with Apple's library of 100,000, but Android's selection covers most of the main utilities.

As a game system, it's severely lacking. As a media player, it's even worse.

The iPhone can sufficiently replace a standalone iPod. The Droid won't. Getting songs onto the thing is a hassle. No media sync, no smart playlists, no TV shows or movies.

Sure, we love some of the features Motorola built exclusively for this handset -- things that could never be done on the iPhone without Apple engineers building it themselves. For example, the Droid phone book integrates with your Facebook contacts.

But these little perks don't make up for the intuitiveness and maturity of the iPhone's operating system that Android has yet to match.

Yet, as a phone, the Droid is top-notch. It integrates seamlessly with Google Voice and runs on Verizon, a telecom with a superior reputation for reliable call coverage -- unlike AT&T, the exclusive carrier of the iPhone.

For at least the next couple of months, Droid will wear the crowns of best Android device and best Verizon phone.

But Google is constantly making improvements behind the scenes to its mobile system, so who knows how long that will last? With more phone makers on the Google bandwagon, next year could very well mark the Droid renaissance.

-- Mark Milian

Twitter: @markmilian

Video credit: Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times

Is the iPhone romance fizzling out?

Mark Milian — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:04:51 -0800

You can almost hear David Guetta's "Love is Gone" playing on iPods around the world. Have iPhone marriages hit a rough patch?

Apple announced today that the iPhone's App Store broke the 100,000-software mark, and app fever rages on. Heck, there's now an app for driving a car.

But maybe apps aren't enough anymore.

We were taken aback when readers flooded a post about AT&T improving cellphone service in Southern California with comments spitting venom at the telecom and threatening to jump ship to Verizon -- iPhone or not. Funnier still, complaints about AT&T kept rolling in even as T-Mobile was experiencing a full-on outage that affected an estimated 5% of customers.

Could it just be lust for Verizon's Droid, the telecom's first smartphone based on Google's Android operating system?

Either way, it's comforting to know that we here in the States are not alone. CNet UK called the iPhone "the worst phone in the world" on Tuesday, adding that it was a great mobile device but terrible for making calls. CNet lays much of the blame on O2, the exclusive carrier of the iPhone 3G S; other carriers offer the older models.

On top of that, a survey released Tuesday makes iPhone owners look like shallow jerks.

Among the damning statistics, Apple phone users are more attracted to other gadget owners rather than those with a college education, according to the Retrevo survey of 247 iPhone owners nationwide. Oh, and they also end relationships via text messages and e-mails, according to the survey, which is caused by their significant others spending too much time on their phones a quarter of the time.

Of course, there haven't actually been any signs showing that iPhone users are tossing away their beloved devices -- not even of slowed growth. AT&T reportedly added 4.3 million 3G-enabled devices in the third quarter and 3.2 million of those were iPhones.

But the iPhone's public perception is no longer pristine. And Verizon, with its iDon't marketing campaign, wants to keep it that way.

-- Mark Milian

Twitter: @markmilian

Photo: Apple's Steve Jobs with an iPhone. Credit: Peer Grimm / European Pressphoto Agency

AT&T to Verizon: We're improving cell coverage in SoCal [Updated]

Mark Milian — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:07:50 -0700

As Verizon Communications Inc. and Motorola Inc. hype their new Droid phone, AT&T Inc. is firing back with a response -- improving its cell service.

AT&T announced today that it's rolling out six new cell sites in Los Angeles County as well as five new sites in Orange County and one in Ventura County.

The new sites should improve cellphone coverage and 3G Internet connectivity in those areas. AT&T is set to add 200 sites in California before the end of the year and upgrade 320 existing ones to 3G.

AT&T still has Apple Inc.'s iPhone, one of the most desirable wireless devices, exclusively in its arsenal.

But with Verizon releasing the Droid, a worthy iPhone competitor, on Nov. 6, AT&T will have to strike back by making sure its phones can actually make calls and keep them connected.

IPhone owners often complain of dropped calls and unreliable 3G connectivity. Verizon has been capitalizing on the stigma with an ad campaign for its network, saying, "There's a map for that" -- that being reliable national wireless coverage.

Updated, Oct. 30, 9:52 p.m.: Verizon wrote in to tell us that it has added nine local cell sites to its network in October.

-- Mark Milian

Photo credit: Sean Masterson / European Pressphoto Agency

A Twitter bug and two Facebook viruses are spreading

Mark Milian — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:17:48 -0700

How's this for public embarrassment? A bug spreading through Twitter today causes infected users to send direct messages to friends promoting a product that makes them "feel great and look good," as the messages say.

The product? A colon cleanser.

As you can imagine, those attacked by the colon-clearing trick aren't so happy to offer up the free promo. We received messages from former colleagues and business associates discussing their supposed weight loss secret.

Tweets contain links, some through Bit.ly and others through a secondhand redirect that starts with a "q" and ends in ".Info." Once clicked, they redirect to a site promoting a product called Cleanse Pro X, which appears to be a fruity pill that washes your body of human waste.

The Bit.ly link has been clicked more than 4,000 times, but we don't have data on how many people have actually found their way to the site. It's unclear how users were affected.

Meanwhile, Facebook warned of two new viruses today that target its social network. The tricksters send e-mails purporting to contain password information from Facebook, but instead unleash a virus on the user's computer.

-- Mark Milian

Thanks to Google's and Motorola's Droid, Verizon opens up

Mark Milian — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:51:43 -0700

Verizon Wireless opened up to us.

Verizon Communications Inc. and Motorola Inc. proudly and excitedly showed off their new Droid smart phone in a meeting Wednesday afternoon.

First impression: The device is fast, powerful, fully featured and well-designed -- a combination of adjectives we've never used for a Verizon cellphone.

When was the last time a Verizon phone got this much hype? The BlackBerry Storm? Ouch.

Yet, one is coming on Nov. 6, and it has a good chance of living up to the hype. A phone with Google's fast-improving Android operating system, a 5-megapixel camera with a flash and digital zoom, a well-implemented touch screen and a slide-out keyboard.

Despite the Verizon check-mark logo branded on the device, the $200 Droid is all Google inside -- and a little Motorola. The handset manufacturer added some features on top of the Android 2.0 open-source system.

"That's really what open source is all about," said Paul Nicholson, Motorola's global marketing director. "You can layer on top of it."

For years, Verizon had this habit of stripping out good features and software from phones it carried in exchange for a clunky proprietary system. Motorola knows what we're talking about.

We won't miss the hideous red menus, the crippled Bluetooth functionality, or the Get It Now download service or Verizon App Store or whatever they're calling it now. This was a company that just months ago head-butted its way onto Verizon's BlackBerry devices with a separate app store to compete with the one that the phones already had.

Verizon spokesman Ken Muche said the company has no plans to make its own app store for Android -- another platform that already has one, called Market. Good idea.

The Droid's App Store does have a Verizon tab, which contains a Visual Voicemail app.

But all of those little Verizon injections added up to potential revenue in the past.

A lack of Bluetooth transfers on some phones meant you might have to pay a fee to move contacts between devices. Controlling apps meant Verizon could potentially profit from selling software as an intermediary. Keeping GPS software off phones meant a monthly fee could be charged for navigation service.

So much for that.

"If you want total customization, you can go this route," Muche said. Of course, if you'd rather have big red buttons, there's a phone for that.

Granted, Verizon had been loosening up recently with its lineup of dull (but no red menus) smart phones. With this phone, Verizon seems to be sincerely facing facts and stepping back from the software game. And there's another Verizon Droid phone on the way? Has Verizon been taken over by robots?

Wait a minute. Is Google taking over the world?

Muche and Nicholson laughed uncomfortably at the question. After a brief awkward silence, Nicholson chimed in, "You either join or you don't."

We'll have a full review in the coming weeks and a verdict on whether we're joining the rise of the machines.

-- Mark Milian

Photo credit: Associated Press

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

Mark Milian — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:41:41 -0700

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

GeoCities' time has expired, Yahoo closing the site today

Mark Milian — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 06:00:00 -0700

We always imagined how this might end: GeoCities would finally take down all of the animated "under construction" signs, and we'd hear one last Midi file to the tune of horns playing taps.

Instead, GeoCities will probably go down with a whimper today.

Time is up for Yahoo Inc.'s scheduled closing of perhaps the most significant virtual museum in recent history. Years ago a central meeting place for a massive chunk of American Web surfers, GeoCities will lock its doors and take millions of pages offline.

GeoCities allowed anyone to build a custom Web page for free and reserved a small amount of virtual storage to keep pictures and documents. It was perhaps the first mainstream example of an open, participatory and personal Internet.

At the turn of the century, GeoCities was nearly ubiquitous. Fathers created websites about their families; kids created sites about Pokemon; teenage girls created sites about the Backstreet Boys. Practically every facet of culture was documented and thanks to search engines, easily accessible.

All of those documents are about to disappear.

GeoCities stopped accepting new registrations earlier this year. Existing users could continue to update their pages and save sites to a personal hard drive in advance of the impending closure. Yahoo is encouraging the relatively few remaining users to transition their accounts to the company's $5-per-month Web hosting service.

The decision to shut down GeoCities rather than keep it around for historical reference and, say, slap ads all over it is curious. Especially when you consider that the network is still among the top 200 most-trafficked sites on the Internet, according to metrics tracker Alexa.

"Yahoo continuously evaluates and prioritizes our products and services in alignment with business goals and our continued commitment to deliver the best consumer and advertiser experiences," according to a company spokeswoman. GeoCities' closing is "part of our ongoing effort to prioritize our portfolio of products and services in order to deliver the best products to consumers."

The company downsized in a different way on Friday when billionaire financer Carl Icahn announced he was resigning as a director.

Yahoo boasts that it has closed nearly 20 services in less than a year, which includes a sort of competitor to GeoCities called Yahoo 360 as well as My Web, which was similar to Delicious, another Yahoo property.

The collapse of GeoCities, though, is perhaps the most epic failure in Yahoo's portfolio. After going public in 1998 during a period when GeoCities rose to unprecedented prominence as a top-five player on the Web, the following years practically embodied the grander burst of the Internet bubble.

Yahoo paid about $3 billion in 1999 for a company that seemed poised to continue its domination of the user-driven Net. Failing to turn any significant profit from all of those pop-ups and banner ads (in fact, there's questions about whether GeoCities was ever cash-flow positive), the purchase -- or perhaps Yahoo's inaction once GeoCities was acquired -- turned out to be one of the company's most costly mistakes.

But Yahoo's folly spelled unimaginable fortunes for two Los Angeles entrepreneurs.

David Bohnett, a tech-savvy businessman from Beverly Hills, took an interest early on in emerging technologies. In 1994, he decided that everyone should be able to have their own website. He purchased a computer server and connected with John Rezner, a friend of a friend with the know-how to build Web applications.

"He unpacked the very first server out of the box," Bohnett said about his colleague.

From the beginning, Bohnett's idea was focused on bringing the real world to the Web -- be it who people are, what they're doing or what they're interested in.

GeoCities was originally called Beverly Hills Internet (and, for a short while, GeoPages). Its initial feature focused on two cameras situated in different parts of Los Angeles -- one at their headquarters near Rodeo Drive and another at a friend's office at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street -- capturing video 24/7 and broadcasting it to the Web.

Before banner ads, EBay, Google, Friendster, MySpace or Facebook, there was GeoCities and its concept of site neighborhoods.

The neighborhood analogy required users to self-categorize based on what they would write about. Choose Beverly Hills for a site about shopping, Capitol Hill for politics or Hollywood for entertainment.

"People were very selective about where they wanted to live," Rezner said. "They wanted to live next to people with good pages or ones that were similar to theirs."

As the site grew, the neighborhood system had some trouble scaling. They created more addresses, new neighborhoods based on more selective areas of interest and things like sub-neighborhoods. Real estate boomed, and in order to keep residents happy, they began evicting bad neighbors.

Eventually, after Yahoo got a hold of GeoCities, it killed the entire concept and let people pick their own unique names. "It's a shame," Rezner said. "There's nothing like that in the 2D world."

"The Yahoo sale was sort of bittersweet -- obviously, financially, it was great," Rezner said. "Nothing ever happened. GeoCities stagnated from Day One."

"We could have gone into search because we had all of this data. At that time, we had a huge portion of the Web on our servers," Rezner said. "I was screwing around with algorithms, trying to do search, that were remarkably similar to what Google was doing."

Other ideas Rezner was kicking around in 1999 included profiles similar to Facebook's and an open API for developers -- a system that has worked extremely well for Twitter. But by that time, his co-founder and former GeoCities chief executive was gone. And Rezner's involvement within day-to-day operations were beginning to diminish.

"Social networking sites are very fadish," Rezner said. "They constantly have to evolve. I think GeoCities had to do that."

Bohnett echoes those sentiments. "It's not uncommon that a larger company isn't able to focus on doing a lot of different things well," he said. (Both Bohnett and Rezner agreed on one thing: Facebook won't be on top forever.)

Likewise, Jonathan Linner, an outsider working as chief executive on a location-based social network called Brightkite, suggests Yahoo spin off GeoCities to a start-up team or shop it around, rather than pull the plug.

But unlike Skype's co-founders, Bohnett and Rezner don't appear to be interested in reacquiring their baby. They now spend their time and fortunes investing in start-ups.

Bohnett with Baroda Ventures has funded companies that include NetZero and Maps.com. Rezner has invested in numerous companies, none of which have really taken off.

The Bohnett Foundation was founded in 1999 and provides funds to social activism groups in gun safety, voter registration, transportation, language research and support for the gay and lesbian communities. "It is in fact consistent with my personal philosophy of giving people a voice, ensuring that the Internet is accessible to everybody," Bohnett said.

GeoCities was a cornerstone of today's young Internet entrepreneurs. Many say they got started on the Web using GeoCities' site builder.

"I lost my 'HTML virginity' with GeoCities," wrote Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian in an e-mail. "Somewhere in SiliconValley/Grid. ... I wish I could find it."

Some GeoCities pages appear to have been lost over the years. But an independent group called Archiveteam, headed by Jason Scott, has been trying to save everything left before Yahoo closes the building.

The group of dedicated digital historians have been pointing about a hundred computers at the GeoCities domain 24 hours a day for months. First, the machines crawled the neighborhoods, duplicating copies of everything in sight.

"The hard part was going through and trying to find random user names," Scott said about the obstacle Yahoo introduced later in GeoCities' life. "Basically, we're hitting Google and crawling in every direction."

So far, Archiveteam has captured about a terabyte of data, or about a thousand gigabytes, in its mission of mirroring the entire site.

"That's a lot of data," Rezner said when we told him about Scott's project.

You have no idea. Neither do any of Archiveteam's dozens of volunteers. Yahoo won't tell them how big GeoCities really is. The amount of allotted storage fluctuated over the years, making it even harder to estimate, Scott said.

"We're running blind," Scott said.

Scott, an unemployed systems administrator looking to transition into a career as a historian, has found a lot of history in his quest. He's dug up countless family trees, computer software directories and a document on Romania that he believes was compiled over years.

Even the endless "Saved by the Bell" fan sites -- these are history. Scott put together a page populated with a bunch of the "under construction" Gif files that were synonymous with the early Web. The spiritual successor is the "beta" tag, Scott notes.

"I was trying to illustrate quickly the things that could be lost," Scott said. "All of these discussions are happening at the function of having these artifacts laying around."

Scott is also working with Archive.org, the group behind the Wayback Machine, to hit the project from two sides. But only a few grains of sand are left atop the hourglass, and scores of pages are sure to be lost.

The story of GeoCities this decade is one of a skydive from the clouds without a parachute or supervision and a sack of missed opportunities.

"Yahoo never knew the value of GeoCities," Rezner said.

-- Mark Milian

Twitter: @markmilian

Images credit: GeoCities

Nintendo prepping 'New Super Mario Bros. Wii' and 'Zelda: Spirit Tracks' for the holidays

Mark Milian — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:28:54 -0700

Nintendo is loading up the big guns this holiday season with new entries into two of its biggest franchises. Brand X got to spend some time with New Super Mario Bros. Wii and some of the other games a few days ago.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii feels more old than it does new. The game is similar to the New Super Mario Bros. game that launched to rave reviews on the Nintendo DS in 2006.

In addition to some controller-shaking features exclusive to the Wii hardware, the new Mario game multiplies the craziness by four. Scheduled to hit stores Nov. 15, New Super Mario Bros. Wii is the first Mario adventure that lets four players do their thing at the same time. It feels pretty chaotic, but we just couldn't put it down.

Check out the video demo at the top for a sneak peak at the new Mario game, along with The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks for the Nintendo DS and the recently released Wii Fit Plus.

-- Mark Milian and Alexandra Le Tellier

Video credit: Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times

A Twitter hole lets you Google protected tweets

Mark Milian — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:32:45 -0700

[UPDATE, Oct. 20, 1:50 p.m.: The Bill Clinton tweets appear to be a leftover from a Clinton impersonator who now resides at @NotBillClinton. Also, Twitter spokeswoman Jenna Sampson wrote an e-mail today saying, “We have no deal with Google that gives them access to private accounts. … Trust and safety are huge areas of interest for us, and we would never make a deal that damages those ethics.”]

You can find just about anything with a Google search. That includes status updates on many Twitter profiles that were supposed to be private.

Some Twitter users lock their profiles from public view by checking a box on their settings page. People looking to follow protected accounts must then ask permission.

A minority of Twitterers do so to avoid public attention but, as Fleet Foxes indie folk singer Robin Pecknold writes on his protected profile, "keep up to date w/ loved ones and family."

If you try to access a protected account from just about any Web browser, you'll see this message: "This person has protected their tweets."

But Twitter gave at least one company the key to the city: Google.

Google's search crawler, called the Googlebot, appears to be given an unobstructed view into Twitter's more than 5 billion messages, including supposedly protected tweets. It seems Googlebot can crawl through the doggy door and access private profiles without permission.

Many of those protected messages can be found through Google's search engine. The results page shows an index of the tweets it has logged, and for more recent tweets, a cache of the page as it might appear for someone who has been granted access.

Even tweets that appear to have been deleted from a hidden account show up partially.

For example, a search for Bill Clinton's profile spits out the first few words of tweets. The excerpts include: "John Edwards...why did you," "NY Gov got caught with a," "Oh Hillary, 3rd place in," and "I have been too depressed..." Bummer that it cuts off the juiciest parts.

San Diego Chargers cornerback Antonio Cromartie has Twittered about mornings at church and days spent at home watching the Lifetime channel with his wife, whom he calls "poohcat."

Jersey City rapper Joe Budden appears to be ripping on his hip-hop cohorts from the comfort of a perceived private broadcast medium.

Jonathon Linner, chief executive of location-based social network Brightkite, uses his private Twitter account to automatically tell his locations to friends. Little does he know that anyone could just as easily follow him around San Francisco.

Twitter has fixed at least two holes in the past that allowed users to peek into hidden profiles. Twitter's own search engine used to occasionally display tweets from private accounts. You could also trick Twitter into showing you hidden tweets using the site's RSS feeds.

Google was wrapped in a similar controversy recently when its search engine began surfacing voice mail messages for some users of Google Voice. Whoops.

To pull back the Twitter curtain, search the following string, replacing "<user>" with the name of a protected profile: "site:twitter.com/<user>."

We expect this is an unintentional "feature." Twitter Chief Executive Evan Williams wrote on his profile (which is not protected) Saturday, saying, "I think it's not cool to retweet a protected tweet."

We think it's not cool to let Google index a protected tweet.

-- Mark Milian

Follow my unprotected Twitter profile: @markmilian

FCC again looking into Google Voice complaints

Mark Milian — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:19:54 -0700

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski in a meeting with Times editors Thursday. Credit: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times

Google Voice is again under fire from federal regulators.

The Federal Communications Commission is looking into complaints by AT&T that the Google Voice phone service blocks some calls within the United States to avoid a high connection fee.

The FCC sent an inquiry to Google today seeking information about the software's functionality, its number of users and which companies with which it has partnered.

Google Voice gives users one number to ring all of their phones and a website to log call history and text messages. The service also provides free calls within the United States.

But AT&T alleges that Google Voice refuses to connect calls to rural communities where local telephone companies charge higher fees. AT&T did not immediately respond to e-mails seeking comment.

This isn't the first time Google's foray into telephony has drawn the attention of federal regulators. In July, the FCC began probing a dispute between AT&T, Apple and Google after Apple blocked Google Voice software from its iPhone App Store.

Apple says it has reservations about the application's interface and is still considering it for approval. AT&T says it was not involved in that decision.

In an interview on Thursday, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said the commission is still keeping an eye on the iPhone dispute.

"We take Apple at its word," Genachowski said. "We'll continue to monitor the specific issue and to monitor the marketplace."

Does the FCC even have the authority to regulate whether Apple carries Google's program or whether Google has to connect every call?

In a response to the former, Genachowski said, "We'll tackle the authority issues when we get to that point." The mentality is part of, as the new chairman called it, a "proactive FCC."

-- Mark Milian

Crystal Harris, the Playmate behind Playboy Hugh Hefner's Twitter profile

Mark Milian — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:15:57 -0700

Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner is 83 years old. He doesn't own a cellphone or spend any significant amount of time on the computer.

How could someone so disconnected from technology post several tweets a day and garner more than 100,000 Twitter followers?

He has his beautiful blond girlfriend to thank.

Crystal Harris, the costar on the new season of Playboy's E! TV show "The Girls Next Door" and one of Hefner's three new girlfriends, Twitters her lover's musings.

"He writes them down, and Crystal tweets them," said Kristina Shannon, one of Hefner's twin girlfriends, in an interview last week at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.

"Or Amanda in the office," Hefner chimed in, "if someone forgets," he said affectionately.

Celebrities, including Britney Spears and 50 Cent, have gotten flak in the past for having staffers Twitter for them. But if they're actually coming from Hefner, as they assert, via his gorgeous lady friend, we'll let it slide.

Playboy is selectively welcoming technologies into its home. Some new -- for example, the company has a cutting-edge film crew that records every interview Hefner does. Some old -- like the video-game arcade next to the mansion, complete with Playboy-branded pinball machines. Take a tour of the arcade by clicking "continue reading" below.

-- Mark Milian

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

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

Mark Milian — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:50:32 -0700

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