'Don't Be Evil' tool alters new Google search results

When Google changed the rankings of its search results this month, items from its Google+ social network -- such as photos, videos, comments and links -- got a boost at the expense of other social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter wasn't happy about the changes, which Google called Search Plus Your World, and made its dissatisfaction known. Privacy groups called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the changes.

But merely complaining about the new search results wasn't enough for a few engineers from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace. On Monday, the backlash against Search Plus Your World hit another level with the release of their Don't Be Evil bookmarklet, available on the new website Focus on the User.

The bookmarklet, which is a browser plug-in of code that alters Google search results to make them more like they were before Search Plus Your World, was built over the weekend by a small team that included Facebook's director of product, Blake Ross, and Facebook software engineers Tom Occhino and Marshall Roch.

The bookmarklet's Don't Be Evil name is a nod to Google's company mantra.

A statement posted on Focus on the User says:

When you search for "cooking" today, Google decides that renowned chef Jamie Oliver is a relevant social result. That makes sense," reads a statement on Focus on the User. "But rather than linking to Jamie's Twitter profile, which is updated daily, Google links to his Google+ profile, which was last updated nearly two months ago. Is Google's relevance algorithm simply misguided?

No. If you search Google for Jamie Oliver directly, his Twitter profile is the first social result that appears. His abandoned Google+ profile doesn't even appear on the first page of results. When Google's engineers are allowed to focus purely on relevancy, they get it right.

So that's what our "bookmarklet" does. It looks at the three places where Google only shows Google+ results and then automatically googles Google to see if Google finds a result more relevant than Google+.

Google officials were unavailable for comment on the bookmarklet Monday afternoon.

Facebook's Ross, who is also one of the three co-founders of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser and was spreading the word about the bookmarklet on his Twitter and Facebook accounts, has had a run-in with Google+ before: In August, Ross' Google+ profile page was temporarily suspended. Google never commented on why that happened, but Ross has said it was because Google didn't think the page really belonged to him.

Along with the launch of the bookmarklet and the Focus on the User site, a video (which can be seen below) explaining how the bookmarklet works, narrated by Ross, was posted to YouTube.

The bookmarklet isn't an official product of Facebook, Twitter or Myspace, but nobody seems to be shying away from the connection to those companies.

Where will this beef go from here? That's up to the involved engineers and anyone else around the Web who wants to dig in and write some code.

"This proof of concept was built by some engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, in consultation with several other social networking companies," Focus on the User says. "We are open-sourcing the code so that anyone may use it or make it even better."

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+

Twitter.com/nateog

Image: A screen shot of FocusOnTheUser.org.

Google, Facebook, YouTube are most visited websites in 2011

Google, Facebook and YouTube racked up the most unique visitors among U.S. websites in 2011, according to new data from the research group Nielsen.

Not necessarily the most surprising news is it? What may be a bit more interesting is that, despite its rapid growth, Google+ was on average visited by fewer users than Myspace this year, according to Nielsen. Google+ was released in beta in July and opened to the public in September.

The Nielsen data also doesn't cover the entire year, only January to October.

According to Nielsen, the top 10 U.S. social networks and blogs, by page views, in 2011 were:

1. Facebook -- 137.6 million average page views per month

2. Blogger -- 45.5 million average page views per month

3. Twitter.com -- 23.6 million average page views per month

4. WordPress.com -- 20.4 million average page views per month

5. Myspace.com -- 17.9 million average page views per month

6. LinkedIn -- 17 million average page views per month

7. Tumblr -- 10.9 million average page views per month

8. Google+ -- 8.2 million average page views per month

9. Yahoo! Pulse -- 8 million average page views per month

10. Six Apart/TypePad -- 7 million average page views per month

Nielsen also reported that the 10 most visited overall U.S. Web brands in 2011 were:

1. Google -- 153.4 million average page views per month

2. Facebook -- 137.6 million average page views per month

3. Yahoo! -- 130.1 million average page views per month

4. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing -- 115.9 million average page views per month

5. YouTube -- 106.7 million average page views per month

6. Microsoft -- 83.8 million average page views per month

7. AOL Media Network -- 74.6 million average page views per month

8. Wikipedia -- 62 million average page views per month

9. Apple -- 61.6 million average page views per month

10. Ask Search Network -- 60.5 million average page views per month

 And finally, the top 10 U.S. Web brands for video, according to Nielsen's data:

1. YouTube -- 111.1 million average page views per month

2. Vevo -- 34.6 million average page views per month

3. Facebook -- 29.8 million average page views per month

4. Yahoo! -- 25.3 million average page views per month

5. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing -- 16.6 million average page views per month

6. AOL Media Network -- 13.3 million average page views per month

7. Hulu -- 13.1 million average page views per month

8. The CollegeHumor Network -- 12.5 million average page views per month

9. CNN Digital Network -- 8.3 million average page views per month

10. Netflix -- 7.4 million average page views per month

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Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+

Twitter.com/nateog

Image: A screen shot of plus.google.com. Credit: Google

MySpace's Tom Anderson weighs in on censored pics on Google+

Call it the tempest in Google+.

Former TechCrunch writer and current blogger/venture capitalist MG Siegler stirred things up this week by complaining that Google's politically correct overlords had censored his profile picture because in it -- not sure how to put this delicately -- he was giving the world the finger.

SearchEngineLand's Danny Sullivan explained Google's rationale (in a post on Google+): "Why's Google care so much if +MG Siegler wants a middle finger in his Google+ profile picture? Because in turn, that has him giving the finger in Google's search results. And that mess is kind of Google's own doing on how it has linked author pictures so much to Google+ profiles."

Now in a blast from the past, Tom Anderson has taken to Google+ to pounce on the debate. As the co-founder of Myspace, the guy who was everyone's automatic friend on the service, he has a lot to say including this: MySpace became a "cesspool" because people put up all kinds of potentially offensive content.

"All Google+ has done here is execute on its stated plan: removing offensive photos. This is Facebook’s plan, Twitter's plan and Myspace's before it. When you’re processing hundreds of thousands of photos a day (and in Facebook’s case, millions a day), it’s not easy to spot such material (even with algorithms). It’s not that Google+ has decided to do things differently, it’s just that they’re ahead of the game and doing things better," Anderson wrote.

Further, Anderson says users of Google+ (and presumably Google) "don't need to see you flipping us off, nor do we need to see you naked, or displaying something else generally considered offensive. When a social network lets that stuff slide, it turns into a cesspool that no one wants to visit … sorta like Myspace was."

In a Twitter post, Siegler responds: "As much as I enjoy #fingergate I do have this other job I'm attempting to do..."

The real beneficiary may be Google+ itself which, if you believe predictions from the armchair statisticians out there, is starting to get some real traction.

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Photo: Surfboards decorate the main lobby at one of Google's offices in Santa Monica in 2007. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

BeachMint's ShoeMint is a 'sell out' over Black Friday, Cyber Monday

This post has been corrected. Please see note below for details.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday delivered for major retailers, as expected. But the holiday shopping weekend generated unexpectedly high sales for Santa Monica start-up BeachMint too.

BeachMint, which operates e-commerce websites with products designed by celebrities, launched its fourth site -- ShoeMint.com -- on Friday. By Monday evening, the site had sold its entire inventory of women's shoes.

"We sold thousands of shoes, and honestly, we underestimated the demand a bit," said Josh Berman, BeachMint's chief executive. "The one mistake we made is we didn't order enough shoes, and it'll take about a week to get more shoes made and delivered to us, but it's a good problem to have."

ShoeMint sells women's shoes, for an average of about $80 a pair, that were designed by actress Rachel Bilson and Hollywood stylist Nicole Chavez, and manufactured by Steve Madden, whose eponymous brand has been a major shoe seller for more than a decade.

"We sold through just about everything we had by Cyber Monday, and we had to go into our warehouse and find a few pairs that weren't even in our inventory system to meet demand," said Diego Berdakin, BeachMint's president. "We're still trying to piece it all together. The traffic was incredible."

The pairing of a brand with celebrity designers and stylists is a model used in each of BeachMint's sites so far: JewelMint.com, which sells jewelry designed by actress Kate Bosworth and her stylist, Cher Coulter; StyleMint.com, which sells T-shirts designed by actresses Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen; and BeautyMint.com, which sells skin-care products designed by Jessica Simpson and skin-care guru Nerida Joy.

"Our model, and you can see it with everybody that we've picked, is to find the authentic experts in that category and to work with them," Berman said. "These aren't just endorsement deals. We're relying on Kate Bosworth, Rachel Bilson, Nicole Chavez, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Jessica Simpson to identify quality products that we can sell using our technology. Diego and I aren't experts on women's shoes, but we see the opportunity and demand there, so we find the people who are experts and we work with them to deliver the right products."

So far, ShoeMint is BeachMint's fastest-growing site, Berman said, noting that it passed BeautyMint's company record of 500,000 visitors in the first 24 hours of operation.

More than 10,000 people are on waiting lists to buy shoes, and about 80,000 consumers registered to buy goods over a four-day period before the site's official launch, Berdakin said.

Berman and Berdakin declined to say how many shoes ShoeMint has sold so far, but they did say that they had originally planned for their inventory to last them through the end of the year.

Berdakin also said that more than half of the site's pre-launch registrations came from referrals made on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. And the bulk of those referrals were made by people who had purchased items from BeachMint sites.

The company produces shoes in limited numbers, so the next shoes that will arrive will be designs originally planned for January.

"We're already looking at expanding the size of the shoe line in April, May, June because of the demand we're seeing" Berdakin said. "But we have the benefit of working with someone like Steve Madden, who has made hundreds of millions of shoes in their life, and he's definitely ready to ramp up production with us. And Steve, Rachel and Nicole are making sure what we come out with each month will be what's on trend, what's fashionable."

While ShoeMint's success is just a few days old, Berman said the company is confident that it has a hit on its hands. The firm, which has about 85 employees and was founded in July 2010 by Berdakin and Berman (who is a MySpace co-founder) has raised more than $43 million in funding to date and is looking to continue to expand.

"This year our tongues are wagging, we're pretty tired," Berman said. "But we are planning some new Mints for next year, and we're going to keep expanding the model. We're focused on expanding the right way and with the right partners, and we're seeing a lot of pent-up demand outside of the U.S., so we may launch internationally next year as well. But, at this point, we're just looking to get the word out about the Mints we have running, and we need to get more shoes in."

[For the record, 8:17 p.m. Nov. 30: An earlier version of this post said BeachMint had raised about $23 million in funding to date, that about 20,000 people pre-registered on ShoeMint before its official launch and that Steve Madden was among ShoeMint's designers. The company has actually raised more than $43 million in capital so far, more than 80,000 people pre-registered for ShoeMint, and Madden is manufacturing, not designing, ShoeMint's shoes, Berdakin said.]

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Image: A screen shot of ShoeMint.com. Credit: BeachMint

Former Myspace CEO Mike Jones launches tech studio in Santa Monica

Former Myspace Chief Executive Mike Jones on Wednesday launched Science Inc., a Santa Monica tech studio that aims to develop, provide guidance for and fund start-up companies.

In an interview, Jones said he thought there was "an efficiency to be gained" in how emerging tech companies are created and built, and noted that Los Angeles has a less mature and established angel market, which can often hamper companies with fresh ideas.

"Access to early capital and mentorship and advice and strategic development is very much limited in L.A. compared to Silicon Valley," he said. "We felt we saw really interesting talent in L.A. that was having a hard time getting through the formative stages in the business."

Science will take an approach practiced by movie studios, conceiving and building its own companies in-house as well as helping already-established companies. It plans to shepherd entrepreneurs through product design, business strategy, marketing and business development. Jones added that unlike other tech studios, Science would work with the companies "for the entire life cycle of the business."

"We look at this as a long-term portfolio, not a term-based business," he said.

Science is backed by investors including Rustic Canyon, White Star Capital, the Social+Capital Partnership and Tomorrow Ventures.

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Photo: Mike Jones, former chief executive of social network Myspace, is the founder of Science. Credit: Science

Bebo founder Michael Birch on Myspace sale to Specific Media, Justin Timberlake

Justin Timberlake, who played former Facebook President Sean Parker in "The Social Network," has a minority stake in Myspace through a deal Specific Media struck to buy the ailing website from News Corp. for $35 million.

And that could be the kind of game-changing move that could rescue Myspace, Bebo founder Michael Birch said in an interview Wednesday.

"They clearly need to do something quite radical," Birch said. "Clearly the new owners have to reinvent it. It can't go head to head with Facebook. They have to create something different."

As a part owner, Timberlake will play a major role in the creative direction of Myspace. The new buyers envision MySpace as a Web destination for original shows as well as videos and music.

"There's a need for a place where fans can go to interact with their favorite entertainers, listen to music, watch videos, share and discover cool stuff and just connect. MySpace has the potential to be that place," Timberlake said in a statement.

Tim Vanderhook, co-founder and CEO of Specific Media, said he pursued Timberlake because he has the star power to reinvigorate Myspace. Timberlake will have an office at Myspace and a staff of six reporting to him.

"Justin is a tremendously bright guy who is really passionate about the opportunity for artists to build a community with fans," Vanderhook said.

Birch, the entrepreneur who competed against Facebook and Myspace, said he thinks Myspace has a "strong but tarnished brand" that could regain its shine.

"Myspace was always a bit edgy. People identified it with edginess and music. It may be able to play to that characteristic. But they have got to do it and execute quite well," he said.

Myspace was never all it could be, Birch said. That's what convinced husband-and-wife team Michael and Xochi Birch to launch a rival social networking service, Bebo. They sold Bebo to AOL in March 2008 for an eye-popping $850 million.

Bebo, which launched in 2005 and gained millions of users, mostly in Europe, was supposed to be a game-changer for AOL, driving traffic to its other Web properties and fueling advertising sales. It didn't work out that way. A new executive team at AOL decided to scrap it instead. In June 2010, AOL sold Bebo to a private equity firm in Los Angeles for less than $10 million.

"The problem with Myspace was always that it was never as strong a product as it needed to be. It left itself vulnerable to competition. It was only a matter of time before someone created something better," Birch said. "Because we didn't think Myspace was as good as it could be is the reason we launched Bebo in the first place. We were self confident that we could create a better social network, a better user experience and a better product than Myspace. We set out to do that. We achieved it, but not to the extent we needed to achieve it."

Who did? Facebook, of course.

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Photo: Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, right, and Justin Timberlake as Napster co-founder Sean Parker in "The Social Network." Photo credit: Merrick Morton / Columbia TriStar

Justin Timberlake to play 'major role' in Myspace reboot

Justin Timberlake is looking once again to a social network for a career hit, and this time it's Myspace.

Last year, the pop singer won critical acclaim for his portrayal of Sean Parker, one of Facebook's early leaders and a co-founder of the former file-sharing service Napster.

As noted on our sister blog Company Town on Wednesday, Irvine-based Specific Media announced that it had bought Myspace from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $35 million in cash and equity -- a far cry from the $580 million that News Corp. paid for it just six years ago, when Facebook wasn't seen as much of a threat.

Facebook has since dethroned MySpace as the most popular social-networking site in the world, and Timberlake -- known more for pop songs than tech investing -- is taking on an ownership stake in Myspace as a member of Specific Media, which specializes in online advertising.

He will also drive the creative strategy at Myspace, said Specific Media co-founder Tim Vanderhook.

"Regardless of the current perception of the Myspace brand, it's one of the small group of brands that has international prominence and a global traffic base of almost 100 million people going to it every month," Vanderhook said. "We are very focused on reinvigorating the brand. Our vision is to bring it back to what it was supposed to be originally."

Timberlake declined an interview request through his publicist. But the company and the crooner left no doubt that media are where they are shifting Myspace's focus.

"There's a need for a place where fans can go to interact with their favorite entertainers, listen to music, watch videos, share and discover cool stuff and just connect," Timberlake said in a statement. "Myspace has the potential to be that place. ... [A]rt is inspired by people and vice versa, so there's a natural social component to entertainment. I'm excited to help revitalize Myspace by using its social media platform to bring artists and fans together in one community."

As a part of Specific Media's takeover deal, News Corp. will take a minority stake in the Irvine firm, the company said.

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Photo: Justin Timberlake at the premiere of the movie "Bad Teacher," which he stars in, in New York on June 20, 2011. Credit: Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

Pew report: Facebook users have a higher degree of social well-being

In just seven years, Facebook has connected one-eleventh of the world on a single website whose population is now nearly twice as large as the United States.

By way of explanation, Mark Zuckerberg says people just naturally become more engaged when their friends are involved.

So it probably comes as no surprise to the folks at Facebook that a new survey has found that the number of people on social networking sites has more than doubled since 2008 and that people with Facebook accounts have a higher degree of social well-being than those without.

Among the findings of a phone survey of 2,255 American adults conducted by Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project last fall:  Facebook users are more trusting of other people, they have larger numbers of close friends, they exhibit a higher level of civic engagement and they get more social support from their friends.

The survey's findings challenge the common perception that social networking sites isolate people or undercut their real-world friendships and interactions, said University of Pennsylvania professor Keith Hampton, the lead author of the report.

"We've found the exact opposite," he said.

In fact, Facebook has become so integral to the social fabric of American life that:

-- Someone who logs into Facebook multiple times a day is 43% more likely than other Internet users and more than three times as likely as someone who does not use the Internet to feel that most people can be trusted.

-- Someone who uses Facebook several times per day averages 9% more close, core ties in their overall social network compared with other Internet users.

-- Someone who visits the site multiple times a day was two and a half times more likely to attend a political rally or meeting, 57% more likely to persuade someone to vote for a candidate and 43% more likely to have said they would vote.

Facebook dominates social networking sites in the Pew survey: 92% of users are on Facebook, 29% use MySpace, 18% use LinkedIn and 13% use Twitter.

On an average day, 15% of Facebook users update their own status; 22% comment on a friend's post or status, 20% comment on a friend's photos, 26% "like" a friend's content, and 10% send another friend a private message.

One disturbing finding: The social fallout from the digital divide. People who are not online have the smallest social networks, are more socially isolated, get the least amount of social support and are least likely to vote, Hampton said.

"The real digital divide today is a social network divide," he said.

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 Photo credit: Saeed Khan AFP / Getty Images 

Twitter ad revenue could hit $150 million this year, research group says

Twitter may triple its advertising revenue to $150 million in 2011 as more companies turn to the growing social media website to market their products, according to a report from EMarketer Inc.

And by the end of 2012, Twitter ad sales could hit $250 million, EMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson said in the report.

Twitter introduced its advertising program last April and has pulled in major ad campaigns from major companies such as Mercedes-Benz, Pepsi, Starbucks and Disney.

Last year, the San Francisco micro-blogging site brought in about $45 million in advertising revenue, the report said.

By comparison, Facebook brought in more about $1.8 billion in ad sales, EMarketer said. The research firm expects Facebook's ad numbers to grow hugely as well: It projects about $4 billion in ad revenue in 2011 and about $5 billion in 2012.

Twitter has more than 175 million users worldwide and will have to increase its user base substantially before being able to compete with Internet advertising heavyweights Google and Facebook, which is also the leading social networking website. Facebook says it has amassed 600 million users.

Williamson noted that a December report from the Pew Research Center said only about 8% of Internet consumers in the U.S. use Twitter, which is relatively low compared with Facebook's and Google's numbers.

"If Twitter can grow its user base and convince marketers of its value as a go-to secondary player to Facebook, it will succeed in gaining revenue," she said. "In 2011 it must work overtime to give its early advertisers a positive experience."

Twitter's monetization efforts will go into "full gear" this year on the popularity of its current Promoted tweets and trends and on the upcoming launch of a platform similar to Facebook's that will let companies target their ads at specific user groups, she wrote.

The micro-blogging site won't pass Facebook in terms of revenue anytime soon, but it should pass MySpace by 2012, the report said. MySpace pulled in about $288 million in ad revenue last year, EMarketer said.

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Photo: A Malaysian girl logs in to her Twitter account in Kuala Lumpur in October. Credit: Saeed Khan / AFP/Getty Images

MySpace to lay off about half of its staff [Updated]

MySpace, the onetime leader in social-networking websites, is set to lay off about half of its employees on Tuesday, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Both MySpace and the Journal are owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

Citing a "person familiar with the situation," the Journal reported that about 500 people at MySpace, based in Beverly Hills, will lose their jobs. MySpace officials could not be reached Tuesday morning for comment.

The job cuts are the result of the website's major business overhaul in an attempt to free it from "dismal financial performance," the report said.

News Corp. bought MySpace in 2005 for about $580 million. At the time, MySpace was hugely popular and the leading website in online social media. Since then, large numbers of users have left MySpace for Facebook and other websites.

MySpace has recently been trying to gain its audience back with a redesigned layout and rebranding as a social entertainment website focused on sharing and promoting music and video among its users.

News Corp. also owns picture-sharing site Photobucket, the video-game news website IGN.com, AskMen.com and the Fox TV networks and movie studios.

[Updated 10:01 a.m.: Times reporter Dawn Chmielewski has confirmed the MySpace layoffs for our sister-blog Company Town. The layoffs made up about 47% of MySpace's staff. From Company Town:

MySpace Chief Executive Mike Jones said the job cuts were necessary to streamline operations and put the site on a path toward profitability, following its relaunch last fall as an entertainment destination for Gen Y.

"These changes were purely driven by issues related to our legacy business, and in no way reflect the performance of the new product," Jones said in a statement. "The new organizational structure will enable us to move more nimbly, develop products more quickly, and attain more flexibility on the financial side."

Also, a previous version of this post incorrectly said News Corp. currently owned RottenTomatoes.com. News Corp. sold Rotten Tomatoes to Flixster in January 2010.]

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Photo: A screen shot of MySpace's revamped layout. Credit: Nathan Olivarez-Giles / Los Angeles Times