Twitter has applied with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for dibs on the word "tweet."
The San Francisco micro-messaging pioneer's action raises the perennially tricky question of whether a company can own the rights to a word that has so penetrated the English lexicon that, some argue, trying to own it is like trying to own the ocean or the atmosphere.
That's what happens when a trademark is "genericized." Think Xerox, Kleenex, Jacuzzi, Q-Tip and, of course, Google. All are silly words that became synonymous with their products, often to the chagrin of the owner, whose legal claim to the much-beloved mark becomes increasingly slippery as the word burrows into the vernacular. CollegeHumor.com offered a funny-because-it's-true take on the issue last week with a video called "Googling with Bing."
Twitter's pending trademark application is accessible by searching "tweet" through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The request (a portion of which as it appears on the U.S.P.T.O website is displayed above) was filed in April and, like most applications, will have to wait four to six months before a trademark examiner in the patent office evaluates it. A search reveals that the application is one of many across the decades for the word "tweet," including everything from sheets and pillowcases to a record company to a hydraulic system.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone explained the move this morning in a blog post, saying no harm was meant to the many applications that have grown up alongside the core service. Many of the services -- Tweetdeck, Tweetmeme and Tweetie, to name a few -- use "tweet" in their names.
"We have applied to trademark Tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective," Stone wrote. "But we have no intention of 'going after' the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter."
Still, in six month's time, Twitter may find that a lot of the tweet-birds have taken flight before there's a legal basis for protecting the mark.
Ignore for a moment the question of whether swine flu is a fearsome plague or a mild annoyance, and let's move on to a more pressing matter: What should it be called? Scientists are carrying on a heated discussion about whether it's correct to name the H1N1 virus after pigs, given that it also has genetic material from bird and human viruses too. Accuracy first.
Meanwhile, thanks to the reported suggestion of a World Health Organization spokeswoman -- who encouraged the public to come up with a better name for the sickness, Twitter users are trying to solve the problem in their own way. Led by actor Rainn Wilson, the online peanut gallery is engaged in a boisterous game of "Name that Flu" (#namethatflu). The object is not to find the most precise name, but the most ridiculous.
Here are a few examples:
- Hamthrax - Aporkalypse - Hypefluenza - Sowmonella - GlobalHamdemic - Epigdemic - "I was thinking Jonothan [sic], or maybe Greg. If it's a girl, then Erin or Amelia." - Hamageddon - Baconsumption (obs.) - Wilburculosis - Smallporx Mass hysteria has become ... hysterical.
Corrected: Thanks to readers for pointing out that virus's genetic material is made of RNA rather than DNA, and that National Public Radio originated the name game.
An enterprising conspiracy theorist on Monday posted a pair of U.S. government PSAs from 1976, urging citizens to quickly get a swine flu vaccine or risk becoming "very sick"-- although that pandemic never materialized.
The two sensational videos attempt to show that anyone and everyone can get the bug and pass it to children, teachers, postal workers, veterinarians and acquaintances. ("Betty's mother gave it to her best friend Dottie, but Dottie had a heart condition and she died.")
The spots were released by the U.S. Public Health Service, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services partially dedicated to minimizing the spread of infectious diseases.
The agency, evidently, had a taste for scaremongering. As it turned out, its recommendation was unfounded. Not only did the 1976 swine flu scare result in only 200 cases and a single fatality, but the $135-million vaccination effort did more harm than good: The Centers for Disease Control halted the effort after several days after worrying that the vaccine was causing a rare neurological condition that resulted in the deaths of 25 people.
With that background in mind, these PSAs become shrouded in a grim irony.
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan sent a letter to Craigslist today regarding what she called "the rampant prostitution and exploitation of women" on the site's erotic services section. Madigan became the latest state law enforcement chief to request that the section be taken down after the killing of a woman who had posted a massage advertisement there two weeks ago. Craigslist founder Craig Newmarkhas defended that area of the site.
Madigan alleges that Craigslist has not fully met the terms of a November 2008 agreement it signed with the attorneys general of 43 states [PDF here], in which the classifieds website agreed, among other things, to the development of what the letter calls "an electronic screening system to prevent posting of certain advertisements," language and images that violate Craigslist's terms of use.
The system, Madigan's letter says, has not been effective.
"While there has been an approximately 40% decrease in daily postings, more than 400 ads are posted daily in Chicago alone," the letter stated, "and the vast majority of ads blatantly violate even the most basic terms of use."
Craigslist did not immediately return a request for comment.
In January, the letter says, Madigan's office coordinated an effort in which Chicago advocates and law enforcement personnel used the flagging mechanism that Craigslist offers to complain about "hundreds of ads" in the erotic services section of the local version of the website. "In response to the flags, no ad was removed or subject to 'speedy removal' as represented by craigslist," the letter says.
Madigan demanded that the erotic services section be removed from the site immediately, and requested a variety of information about the functionality of Craigslist's flagging system, and the degree to which it has been used to enforce the site's terms of service.
Finally, Madigan asks for an affidavit from Craigslist's public accounting firm of the fees raised from erotic services postings. The November agreement stipulated that 100% of those fees would be donated to charity.
Asked for an example of an ad that it believed violated the terms of service, Madigan's office sent the text of a current posting in which a woman offers "Discreet outcalls to your private residence," before specifying an hourly rate. The title and text of the advertisement contain explicit sexual language, and it's accompanied by a graphic image of a woman in a sexual position.
Facebook announced the launch today of its Open Stream API, a new set of tools that will allow application developers to access users' "streams" -- the never-ending set of updates, photos and shared links that constitute what Facebook calls "the core" of its product.
"We've spent a bunch of time thinking about how to open up the Facebook experience to outside developers for innovation," said Dave Morin, a platform designer at Facebook, who said that there were more than 660,000 developers building applications for the social network. "But this is the first time we've opened up the core user experience for consumption outside of the Facebook.com website."
Developers of new open applications will be able to siphon stream data from the site and use it to fuel Facebook-based applications elsewhere on the Web. That creates the potential to harness a great deal of valuable user-generated data, which could be used to track consumer trends among the site's more than 200 million global users.
Users will maintain control of their data privacy, Morin noted, and applications will be able to access streams only with individual users' permission -- largely the way Facebook's current on-site application system works. The data harvested by new applications will be subject to the same privacy strictures as any other data on Facebook: Even if it's on other websites, it will still be visible only by your friends, not the public at large.
Still, once developers are granted permission, they'll have broad access ...
This week, Google unveiled an odd but interesting new feature of its image search capabilities. Similar Images lets the user look for images that are visually close to a target image without being exactly the same. Playing around with the tool lets you see just how far the science of "computer vision" has come. Fundamentally, digital images are nothing more than patterns of lines and colors -- but Google has somehow taught its search engine to look at those patterns and decide which images a human would consider similar.
Try typing in "ferrari." The engine will return a page of listings, many of which have a "similar images" link below them. If you find one you like, you can click it, and be returned a page of images that are startlingly similar without being identical:
This is neat for Ferrari 360 fans who like to surf through pages and pages of car photos. But, in general, there aren't many reasons why you'd want to have a few hundred pictures of the same thing.
That's why it's better to think of the similar image search as a way to find similar things, rather than similar pictures of the same thing. If you're shopping for diamond rings, for example ...
Facebook governance results a few minutes before the voting closed. Credit: Facebook.com
Updated, 8:44 a.m.: Facebook says it will ignore the 30% threshold this time and consider the results valid.
By the time voting closed today at noon Pacific time, only 0.32% of Facebook's users had weighed in on the question of whether the site's lengthy new policy documents were better than the lengthy old ones.
About 75% of that 0.32% chose the newer policy, while the rest chose the old. But the election won't count anyway: Facebook said that for the results to be valid, 30% of its roughly 200 million users would have to weigh in. That's about 100 times more than the 0.32% of people who actually did.
Start with the subject of the vote itself: New terms of service vs. old terms of service. Global warming, civil rights or nuclear disarmament this is not. The issue can't even rightly be said to be black and white. It doesn't help that the new terms -- though written in more concise and readable language -- substantially overlap with the old ones. Both new and old documents describe licensing terms, rules of user conduct, account termination and several other minor technical matters.
The documents are so similar that in order to figure out the differences, you've got to read both documents side to side, and/or refer to a confusing third document that tries to explicate some of the changes. Suffice it to say that even figuring out what you're voting on -- if anything -- takes an hour of eye-strain. Most of Facebook's high school and college-age users already have enough government homework to do, and its grown-up users are either trying to find jobs or keep their current ones, so voting on the future of a website's small print may not have been a priority.
There have been signs recently that Facbook has allowed its sense of self-importance to grow rather inflated. In a recent video, CEO Mark Zuckergberg grandiosely compared the site to a real nation, noting that, population-wise, it "would be the fifth-largest country in the world" and that it therefore merited "a more transparent and democratic approach to governing."
In its own eyes, Facebook has become more than merely a recreational website where users share photos and wish each other a happy birthday -- it is now a global body of citizens that should be united and protected under a popularly ratified constitution.
But it's hard to have a democracy, a constitution or a government if nobody shows up to participate. Which means, presumably, that the pretense of democracy will be now abandoned and things will go back to normal. Facebook will make its own decisions about how it wants to run its business, and when users disagree, they'll scream bloody murder. It's the natural order of the Internet; why mess with it?
The race to 1 million Twitter followers has turned into a particularly 21st century kind of media circus. Ashton Kutcher, who has been steadily elevating his challenge to CNN, has come within about 17,000 followers of the cable news giant. Both Kutcher and CNN have promised to donate 10,000 mosquito nets to malaria prevention programs if they win, and now Electronic Arts has pledged a mountain of video games and a cameo in its next Sims game to whomever becomes Kutcher's millionth follower.
With all the hype, a strange element of the story has been overshadowed. The news broke that CNN had in fact never owned its league-leading @cnnbrk Twitter account, and that only Wednesday had it acquired ownership of the account from 25-year-old London Web developer James Cox, who'd been running it since January 2007.
In interviews with both Cox and KC Estenson, the head of CNN's online operation, it came out that Cox had owned and maintained the account with the permission and oversight of CNN since mid-2007.
"We’ve been managing the feed through him," said Estenson, noting the huge increase in the number of Twitter followers since the November election. "As Twitter took off and became more prominent, we decided it was time to take our engagement and make it a marriage."
Neither Cox nor CNN would specify the terms of the exchange, noting only that Cox had for some time been contracted by the network as a Web consultant -- he was in Atlanta this week ...
Facebook is going gangbusters in Europe. According to a news release from ComScore today, the social network's usage in European countries grew by 314% to 100 million visitors in February from 24 million the same month a year earlier.
Facebook's worldwide growth rate was 175% year over year, leaving the site with 275 million unique visitors in February.
That number is almost 30% higher than than the 200 million active users Facebook cited in a blog post last week. Why such a big discrepancy?
For one thing, ComScore reminded me, active users and unique visitors are not the same thing. You can visit various public Facebook pages and images without being a registered user, but you'd still notch Facebook a unique visitor. ComScore said it had looked into that difference and found that a substantial part of the extra 75 million visitors were not registered Facebookers -- but the firm didn't want to say exactly how substantial.
Satisfied?
If not, you can apply for conspiracy-theorist credentials to the crowd that thinks Facebook likes to underreport its membership numbers. My application is already in the mail.
Thanks to Amazon.com's Kindle, the e-book reader has gone from a niche curiosity to a mainstream, oft-cited technology in a little more than a year. But now buzz is snapping and crackling about a second wave of electronic readers coming down the pike to give Amazon a run for its undisclosed monies.
A post by Ars Technica pointed to the array of media interests rumored or reported to be entering the e-reader field -- from telecom heavies such as Verizon, AT&T and Sprint, to Barnes & Noble, to news companies such Rupert Murdoch'sNews Corp, Hearst, and the owners of the Detroit Free Press, the last two of which have faced crippling challenges to their print products. Upshot: More than a few big shots are betting that even if electronic readers can't print money, they can still make some.
But the possibilities really start to hit home when you watch these YouTube videos of laboratory-stage e-reader technology. Note that the following video of Plastic Logic's flexible screen is almost 3 years old.
This video of a Sony plastic color TV screen is 2 years old:
Also from 2007 is the following demo of a cellular device that contains an actual folding screen:
Put the pieces together and you have enough technology to build portable, flexible, touch-screen color reading devices -- just the sort of gadget that the publishing world needs. Both the Kindle and the iPod have suggested that it takes a new hardware platform to get people to pay for electronic content. You're not just buying the song or the book, it turns out, but the ability to consume it anywhere -- a value proposition that much bulkier computers still can't satisfy.
You've got interest from the distribution companies, and you've got a technology that's starting to become viable. A digital newspaper is now visible at the end of the tunnel. The problem is, there's also a train coming.
Depending on the model, your device features either a hard drive or flash drive that allows you to read and write files to it just like an external drive.
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