Technology

After a month of hype, Bing's share of the search market barely inches up

David Sarno — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:13:35 -0700

Despite an onslaught of hype this month, Bing's performance is ringing hollow.

The new Microsoft search engine increased its share of the search market by just four-tenths of a percentage point, according to an unreleased survey by Web ratings firm ComScore Inc., rising to 8.4% from 8.0% in May. Any expectation that the service was siphoning traffic from leader Google (65% of market share, unchanged from May), would appear to be unfounded. If anything, Bing sliced off a fraction of the traffic from second-place Yahoo, whose share dropped half a percentage point to 19.6%.

The lack of any major uptick by Bing has been cited by other Web analytics companies. In its numbers, Compete.com found that Bing helped Microsoft increase its market share by three-tenths of a percentage point, pegging it at 6.5% (still less than the 7.2% Microsoft had in June of 2008). And HitWise observed a slight drop in Microsoft's market share in June.

Analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. sprinkled a few more raindrops over Bing's parade, noting in a preview of Google's second-quarter earnings that, "we estimate that Google lost up to 120bps [1.2%] of US search query share to Bing, but expect these losses to be temporary."

-- David Sarno

Analyst sees dimming future for AT&T wireless if Verizon gets iPhone

David Sarno — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:00:00 -0700

A bottom up view of a cell tower. Credit: Locomotive8/ Flickr.

If Pali Research were to pick its favorite wireless carrier, it wouldn't be AT&T.

The market research firm believes that despite the huge success of Apple Inc's iPhone, for which AT&T is still the exclusive carrier, its monopoly on the iPhone won't last forever, and as soon as it expires, the beleaguered telco should prepare for slowed growth and even defections.

Customers will head to faster, more reliable networks, said Pali head researcher Walter Piecyk in a blog post, and that means Verizon.

"A basic premise of our recently initiated buy rating on Verizon and sell rating on AT&T is our belief that as the iPhone exclusivity period rolls off between AT&T Wireless and Apple, a material number of AT&T customers will flock to Verizon’s superior network."

"We expect AT&T Wireless net subscriber additions to fall to less than 1 million in 2010 from more than 4 million in 2008," he noted.

Piecyk cited a recent reader survey by Wired, in which the magazine asked users to register their locations along with the speed of their 3G service. Though unscientific, the survey did generate 12,000 responses from customers across the spectrum of major wireless providers. Verizon won handily with an average download speed of 1,940 kilobits per second, while AT&T took fourth behind T-Mobile and Sprint, with an average speed of only 900 kbps.

A recent story in The Times raised the possibility that AT&T's 3G networking infrastructure may be lacking, and that a sparse 3G network could be contributing to substantial battery drain among many iPhone 3G and 3GS users. When towers are farther away, the phone requires more power to communicate with them.

AT&T acknowledged that the density of the network was a factor in the power drain on 3G phones, and is in the process of building thousands of new cell sites around the country to buttress its network.

Updated, 12:01 p.m.: The expiration date of the exclusive iPhone deal between Apple and AT&T has not been officially released, but in April the Wall Street Journal cited anonymous sources saying AT&T is hoping to extend the deal into 2011.

-- David Sarno

Netflix stock nears 10-week high on Amazon buyout rumor

David Sarno — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:37:11 -0700

Netflix Inc. shares closed at a near 10-week high today as rumors swirled that online commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. was looking to buy the 12-year-old online movie rental company.

Netflix rose $2.12 to $42.19 with a trading volume of 4.2 million, one of the highest in months.

A Bloomberg report quoted an analyst attributing the trading activity to "renewed takeover talk" surrounding Netflix, with Amazon at the center of the conversation.

But other analysts were skeptical.

"Adding another business that would essentially cannibalize from the moves they’re already trying to make just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense," said Steve Weinstein of Pacific Crest Securities.

"Amazon is ramping up digital distribution very quickly," he said. "They’ve obviously done a good job with e-books, and they’re making some progress with music. So I don’t think anyone’s that much farther down the road than they are."

Neither Amazon nor Netflix would comment, saying that they don't respond to rumors and speculation.

Today's buyout rumor resembled whispers from June 2007 that spiked Netflix's stock price by 5% with one analyst predicting Netflix could fetch $1.5 billion if acquired by Amazon.

Both companies are big players in the online streaming business, where consumers can watch movies through special set-top boxes like those made by TiVo and Roku. Amazon, which charges for each viewing, tends to have newer, more popular films available for download, while Netflix streams a more limited selection of older films to its subscribers.

Netflix has a catalog of over 100,000 movies and television shows available by mail -- its primary delivery mechanism -- but streams only about 12,000 of those shows via its set-top software. Amazon has made at least 40,000 movies available for streaming.

-- David Sarno

Will Twitter trademark 'tweet' before it’s genericized?

David Sarno — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:13:47 -0700

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.

-- David Sarno

Swine flu conversation mutates to new level of absurdity

David Sarno — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:10:57 -0700

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
- Global Hamdemic
- 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.

-- David Sarno

1976 swine flu PSAs attempt to scare citizens into getting shots

David Sarno — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:46:29 -0700

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.

-- David Sarno

Illinois attorney general demands shutdown of Craigslist's erotic services section

David Sarno — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:05:41 -0700

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 Newmark has 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.

-- David Sarno

Don't get confused: Facebook's open stream approach isn't like Twitter's

David Sarno — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:11:31 -0700

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 ...

to what appears in a user's stream. A detailed explanation of the new API tools tells developers that "reading the stream gives you all the content of a user's stream, including posts from the user and the user's friends, regardless of privacy settings of the posts."

A potentially confusing sentence in the same paragraph reads, "You can then display the stream's contents in your application or on your site."

People used to the way Twitter works might have to think for an extra minute about why it's OK that Facebook is allowing third parties to take their data and move them to other sites. The critical qualifier, which Facebook buries in the middle of its announcement, is that developers "can access the stream on behalf of a user and then filter, remix and display the stream back to that user however you choose." (Bold added for emphasis.)

Translation: The new applications will be able to publish data across the Web -- but the audience for that remixed data will be the original Facebook user, not the public.

That distinction is important because Facebook's move to allow off-site developers to mine user information has been seen as an attempt to replicate the way Twitter's messaging system developed. Twitter, an outward-facing platform in which all user information is public by default, has nourished a wide ecosystem of third-party applications that take advantage of the high volume of public data Twitter users generate. Twitter applications can track a variety of trends embedded in the collective data, including things such as the most popular articles and the most frequently tweeted words.

But while open Facebook applications may be able to capture users' data to create similar types of analysis and trend tracking, the data itself will remain private.

In that way, Facebook's new system is both open and closed.

"We’re all about giving the user the control to share information with the people that they want to," Morin assured.

-- David Sarno [follow]

Google's Similar Images: Teaching computers to see

David Sarno — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 13:05:56 -0700

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 ...

... you wouldn't want a list of photos of the exact same ring.

The search would seem to come in handy for shopping, especially if you don't mind ordering from online jewelry retailers you've probably never heard of.

Update: Apparently there are already ventures out there that elegantly employ computer vision to help buyers find what they're looking for. Modista.com helps you do it with shoes.

You can also use Similar Images for tracking memes, like all the variants on the Shepard Fairey image of Barack Obama, or keeping tabs on all the UFO images popping up online.

Similar Images itself may not be the most obviously useful tool around, but as Google developer Radhika Malpani points out, it's just one piece of a larger puzzle of image search.

"In general, search is such a hard problem," she said. "We’ve been working for a while to move beyond just textual signals."

Since the beginning of Google's image search, the search engine classified images according to the words associated with them on a Web page. But that's not enough, Malpani, said. Instead of looking at the context, "we’ve been focusing on analyzing the content of an image, and saying, let’s try and understand what’s in an image and see how we can use this to help our users find what they’re looking for."

In order to do that, Google's software has to be able to process hundreds of millions of images, and in each case, try to decide what it's looking at. Which might not sound all that amazing until you remember that computers don't have eyes.

-- David Sarno

Facebook governance vote is a homework assignment no one did

David Sarno — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:55:12 -0700

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.

Why did Facebook so grossly overestimate interest in its experiment with online government?

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?

-- David Sarno

Interviews: CNN acquires own Twitter account, @cnnbrk, from James Cox

David Sarno — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 07:44:21 -0700

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 ...

... giving social-media seminars to CNN staff. However, a CNN insider noted that because of the ongoing relationship between Cox and CNN, the deal was not a lump-sum type of transaction in which CNN would pay Cox "what someone could just buy a full account with close to a million users off the street for."

For his part, Cox said, "It’s not them paying me for the account. It’s CNN and I figuring out the relationship and taking it from there. ... Everyone's happy."

Both Estenson and Cox said that Twitter Inc. had been aware and supportive of the unofficial partnership since the beginning. Indeed, Twitter had put CNN in touch with Cox after the company requested his contact information.

"I think there was a certainly a sense of attachment and understanding and mutual respect that happened between Twitter and me and CNN," said Cox. "There’s was really an open dialog between the three of us."

Recently, however, the three agreed that it was time for Cox to pass the reins.

"We’ve been working with directly Twitter," Estenson added, noting that he'd recently met with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. "As part of that, it’s just a matter of them wanting to make sure that owners of these streams are officially the people who have them."

Cox said that before Twitter, he'd been wanting to find a way to take CNN's breaking news e-mail alerts and send them to his mobile phone, but that trying to set up a system that would send SMS messages was too expensive. Twitter, a free service, solved the cost problem with flying colors and had the additional benefit of allowing his friends to subscribe.

Cox said it took "a couple of hours of hacking" to write a script that would automatically digest CNN's news alert e-mails and post them to the Twitter account. After that, he mostly sat back and watched the account as it snowballed.

"We grew to about 100,000 by ourselves," Cox said. "After that we had help from the Twitter suggested users list and onscreen exposure,” meaning television promotion by CNN. Several anchors on the news channel also have Twitter accounts.

Estenson said Web traffic from the account "is a nice addition to the site but not a meaningful traffic driver when you’re doing a million uniques and a billion page views a month. But this an important part of our audience -- the part of our audience that’s the most active and engaged."

"We hope that we’re helping Twitter as much as they’re helping us," said Estenson, before observing that one major player was missing from the race to 1 million followers. "I’d love to see Britney Spears get into the mix as well."

-- David Sarno [follow]

Facebook: 200 million users, but 275 million visitors?

David Sarno — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:48:19 -0700

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.

-- David Sarno

Newsplastic: Electronic ink + flexible screens + wireless

David Sarno — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:25:00 -0700

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's News 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.

Remember, too, that e-ink is a relatively new technology, so the future's portable news readers are bound to look a lot spiffier than the Stone Age Kindle and Sony units. Amazon is reportedly developing a larger-screen version of the Kindle, and Plastic Logic is already showing off its next-generation touch-sensitive reader.

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:

A few weeks ago, Fujitsu released the first color e-reader too.

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.

-- David Sarno [follow]

Amazon begins to re-rank affected 'adult' books; theories swirl [UPDATED]

David Sarno — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:10:38 -0700

UPDATED, 3:03 p.m. Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener sent us the following statement, blaming the entire situation on a "cataloging error":

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

-----

The unexplained de-ranking of books on Amazon.com this weekend kindled an inferno of Internet outrage, the likes of which is seen only a couple of times a year. Meanwhile Twitter has shown that if you're looking to start a righteous conflagration, there's no better way to quickly add ten thousand twigs to the fire.

Amazon now appears to be undoing the damage -- as of this writing the so-called "adult" books that were at the center of this controversy are now ranked again -- Mark Probst's "The Filly", Leslea Newman's "Heather has Two Mommies," and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" by D.H. Lawrence. (Bloggers have speculated that when a book loses its sales ranking, it becomes harder to find on the site.) Ranks have also been given back to a bunch of the other books on this list kept by the bloggers at Jezebel.

But for most of the day, cries of censorship, boycotts plans and petitions were flying around like dollar bills in a money tornado, characterized -- as in most mob frenzies -- by a striking absence of facts.

Blame Amazon for that. After more than a day of exceptionally bad PR, the online sales giant -- whose stated goal is to "be Earth's most customer-centric company" has said nothing except that their system had experienced a "glitch." "Glitch," of course, has entered the public relations lexicon as a synonym for "a bungle you'd like to sugarcoat by blaming it on computers." In this Twitterized world, Amazon's tortoise-like slowness is even more stark -- would it kill them to tweet one small update?

Meanwhile, the thousands of participants in the AmazonFail conversation are moving the mystery forward themselves. Earlier today, a LiveJournal blogger took credit for the situation, saying he'd used some simple programming to systematically catalog all gay and lesbian books in the Amazon database, then used that information to mount a feedback attack on the books in question: the idea being that if a book gets enough negative user feedback, it is automatically de-ranked.

Another LiveJournal blogger named Bryant Durrell took the first guy's programming code and showed that it didn't work. But both he and Bart Leib, a third LiveJournal blogger (I haven't seen this much LiveJournal since the other mass-deletion controversy) speculated that even if the phony bad guy didn't do it, the scandal still has the pungent aroma of online pranksterism. If there was indeed a way for determined saboteurs to flag books as inappropriate, it might have made sense for Amazon to remove the entries while it considered the merits of the complaints.

The problem is, there's no button to complain about a given book or product. Instead, users are offered the chance to leave text-based feedback for a product, a mechanism that would be much harder to manipulate with any real speed.

Well, anyway, we'll probably have our answer soon. We've just heard that Amazon is planning to release more information about the glitch.

-- David Sarno

FCC asks nation for suggestions on big broadband plan

David Sarno — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 11:21:44 -0700

Credit: Nicholas Smale via Flickr

The Federal Communications Commission opened proceedings today to discuss the creation of a national broadband Internet system that will reach every American. The plan is due in Congress by Feb. 17, 2010.

The FCC is looking for input on ways to keeps costs manageable, effectively monitor the deployment of new infrastructure and, more expansively, "use broadband to advance consumer welfare, civic participation, public safety" and a slew of other national issues.

"If we do our job well," acting FCC Chairman Michael J. Copps said in a statement, "this will be the most formative -- indeed transformative -- proceeding ever in the Commission's history."

Congress mandated the FCC to come up with the broadband plan as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Also known as the stimulus package, the act allocated $4.7 billion to the Broadband Technology and Opportunities Program, a wide-ranging program of grants, planning and oversight of which the FCC's broadband initiative is a part.

The FCC hasn't yet said how it will gather comments and suggestions. No website or mailing address was given on its announcement.

Update, 2:47 p.m. The FCC released the full text [pdf] of its 59-page Notice of Inquiry (NOI) on this subect. The document points potential contributors to the FCC's electronic comment filing sytem. Given that the inquiry centers on the future of the Internet, you might think they'd use a transparent, next-generation commenting system like President Obama did for his town hall last month. But it's still early in the game.

-- David Sarno

FriendFeed's new look: A little Twitter, a little Facebook

David Sarno — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:25:00 -0700

A series of similar streams: FriendFeed 2.0, TweetDeck, and Facebook.

FriendFeed launched a new beta interface this morning, and, even though you've never seen it before, you've seen it before.

FriendFeed, which is a sort of real-time discussion feed, is now a lot more real-time. The new interface paints the screen with your friends' latest musings while you watch, blasting another high-caliber round into the now bullet-riddled concept of "refreshing" a Web page.

In other words, it just became more like Twitter. Desktop clients such as Twhirl and TweetDeck have for some time employed constant refreshing to keep users' incoming message stream forever scrolling, pumping the present into the past to make way for the future.

Facebook, too, has become a believer in the Big Stream. Its controversial revamp got rid of a slower but less noisy news feed in favor of a roaring "river of everything" approach. Which is also what FriendFeed does. FriendFeed and Facebook also depart from Twitter's unadorned look and draconian character limit, allowing longer, bulkier messages, embedded multimedia content and strings of comments from followers.

There are other differences between the three services. Facebook and Friendfeed are still private by default -- that is, access to users' profiles is governed by an explicit approval process. Twitter profiles are visible to anyone, unless the owner decides otherwise. And Twitter and FriendFeed make more sense for sharing content with professional colleagues and people you've never met, while Facebook, even though it's trying to be more public-facing, is still the best service for sharing with personal friends (as distinct, I guess, from impersonal friends).

Still, it's clear that Twitter's huge success has influenced the growth strategies of the other two services. What's tougher to decide, though, is whether the ape-Twitter approach is smart or short-sighted. It may be early enough in the history of micro-blogging for the pretenders to steal a piece of Twitter's micro-pie, especially if the young company makes any serious missteps. But Facebook and FriendFeed are not, fundamentally, micro-blogging sites -- and mama always said you're better off being yourself.

-- David Sarno

Google and Twitter, sitting in a tree, T-A-L-K-I-N-G [UPDATED]

David Sarno — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:40:01 -0700

Google's buying Twitter? Dang! I'd make a "Stop the presses" joke if the presses weren't already stopping of their own accord.

On his mega-megaphone TechCrunch blog, Michael Arrington reported Thursday night that "Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter," citing two people close to the negotiations. If it were true, this news would be the biggest tech bombshell of the year, with the Web's richest behemoth snapping up its biggest darling. But later, Arrington exploded his own ordnance by citing a third unnamed source who contradicted the first two by saying the talks were "still fairly early stage."

AllThingsD's Kara Swisher kicked around the shrapnel too, quoting more anonymous sources who said the rumor was bunko: “Seriously, no negotiations, no deal, nada,” the person told her, although there apparently was a discussion about "real-time search and about product stuff."

Add to that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone's straight-faced performance on the "Colbert Report" Thursday night, during which he said his company would become "strong, profitable and independent," a statement he might not make on the teetering verge of a buyout.

TechCrunch has a less than spotless record with anonymously sourced buyout rumors, including last July's dead-ender about Google almost buying Digg and last March's similar rumor that Google and Microsoft were bidding on Digg ("a sale looks like it might happen, and soon"), the latter of which made Digg Chief Executive Jay Adelson an unhappy camper. Swisher also recalls TechCrunch floating a Google-to-buy-Bebo rumor that didn't get much past the embryo stage.

Of course, this is the blogosphere, and everyone loves scuttlebutt. Plus, this one probably has truth to it, warped as it may have become. As Arrington himself says, one of Twitter's greatest assets is its searchable, 1.5 billion-tweet database, a platinum mine for marketers and info-entrepreneurs of many stripes. Adding a Google-strength search infrastructure on top of all that data would unleash the value that Twitter's limited, keyhole search engine just can't. And, seriously, Google and Twitter's business development people would be bobbing for pink slips if they weren't at least discussing some kind of tie-up.

Moreover, if the Twitter rebels are right, the natural course for the micro-messaging space is to move away from a monopoly model and splinter into a thousand networked mini-Twitters, the way e-mail became an open standard in the 1990s. If that's true, Google would be better off going with its DNA and establishing itself as the leading search provider for mini messages, crawling the Web of twitters like it does the Web of Web pages.

And I've already thought of the name for Google's real-time search engine: Glitter.

(Printing out trademark application now).

Update, 11:16 a.m.: Twitter's Stone responds to the rumors, saying what we're saying, which is that "it should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects."

-- David Sarno

'Revenge of the Nerds,' the wacky classic, hits Hulu

David Sarno — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:34:04 -0700

Nerds!!!

Gilbert, Louis, Booger, Ogre, Lamar and Dean Ulich (heh) have climbed their way back out of cinematic semi-obscurity with the help of Hulu.com. The 1984 cult classic "Revenge of the Nerds" joins "The Jewel of the Nile" and the mini-masterpiece "Sexy Beast" as the latest full-length, uncensored movies to go up on the premium video site. Hulu's collection of freely available online movies has swollen to include more than 200 films from all eras, including a surprising number that you might actually want to watch.

But rescuing "Nerds" from the video store shelf is an inspired act of product promotion. This film has a timelessly juvenile quality that should still tickle college types today, is perfect for watching on a laptop while you're doing something else and may well have outsize appeal to the community of what you might call technology-inclined cinephiles.

The film, shot at the University of Arizona, stars recognizable actors such as Anthony Edwards, John Goodman and Timothy Busfield, as well as the character actors this film made famous, Curtis Armstrong (Dudley "Booger" Dawson) and Donald Gibb ("Fred "The Ogre" Palowakski"). And if nothing else, it's worth watching just for the belching contest (as pictured above).

The playback includes a series of commercial interruptions -- seven of them during 90 minutes, which is about what you'd get on TV. But each interruption is only 30 seconds, and this R-rated movie is not bleeped, dubbed or censored like it would be on the public airwaves. The only catch is that in order to watch, you've got to sign up for a free Hulu account. A sweet deal if you love the Tri-lambs.

-- David Sarno

April Fools' Day is dead: If everyone's fooling, nobody's a fool

David Sarno — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:01:25 -0700

In order for April Fools' Day to work, a lot of people have to forget it's April Fools' Day -- at least for the first few hours. But nowadays, you can forget forgetting. The moment you fire up a Web browser in the morning, you're barraged by a dozen silly pranks from every node; it's like a roomful of comedians all competing for a laugh. Google loves its guffaws: If it's not the purported invention of the first artificial intelligence, it's that same AI helping you automatically answer e-mails from boring people or YouTube scandalously turning all your videos upside down.

(We had to chuckle at the endangered Encarta's example of an April Fools' Day stunt: "Someone may give a friend the telephone number of the zoo, telling her to return a call from 'Mr. Fox.' ")

Twitter is awash with reports that President Obama has been sending out messages advising people that they appear to be members of his extended family. If any fingers are to be pointed, one might want to start with Facebook's "We're Related" application, the source of the messages.

Said one cheery Tweeter to a family member, "We're related to Barack Obama. So I guess I'm going to college after all."

The makers of the Opera browser also announced the launch of "Opera Face Gestures," a new technology that allows users to surf the Web using only the neck, jaw and face muscles. Here's the video:

The Pirate Bay, notorious stronghold of copyright violators, made fake headlines by announcing it had sold itself to Warner Bros. (the record label, no great friend of the online music space, is actually Warner Music, one tip-off that the outlaw Swedes are trying to pull some wool).

Even Tribune Co., the Chapter 11-protected owner of the Los Angeles Times, decided to whistle through its own ever-expanding graveyard by issuing a press release about the new Accelerator product, an "Alternative info-super highway," which "May Render Internet Obsolete By 2010." Indeed, sirs, indeed!

Along the same careful-what-you-wish-for lines, the Guardian declared it would jettison 188 years of reliance on the printing press in favor of an all-Twitter operation.

The surfeit of trickery has obliterated the day's crucial element of surprise and turned April Fools' into a many-way game of one-upmanship. There are so many Web pranks today that you need a whole website just to keep track of them all. All the distractions have drowned out the real news: hardly anyone has noticed as reports of damage from the Conficker virus roll in, including an attack on a U.S. nuclear weapons installation. Who's laughing now?

-- David Sarno

April 1 damage from Conficker worm not likely to catch up to hype

David Sarno — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:23:44 -0700

The Worms in Mud dessert. Credit: PaysImagniaire/ Flickr

Today we unsuspecting L.A. Times tech bloggers were besieged by e-mails from publicists regarding "the Conficker C threat pending for April 1," offering "insight on any scenario that happens tomorrow," and alerting us that companies have been preparing ahead of time "in an effort to prevent the Conficker worm from spreading further and potentially causing substantial damage."

Just like the Y2K hysteria and other bugs du jour, the Conficker worm has been a prime vehicle for the language of terror and fear. And just like those other instances, the warnings make for better conversation than the reality.

"As you are probably aware," read one e-mail from a PR firm called GlobalFluency, "tomorrow, April 1 is the day that the Conficker worm, possibly the most widespread ever, is predicted to inflict its damage through the hundreds of thousands of computers that it has infected. Nobody knows what Conficker will unleash."

GlobalFluency went on to offer an interview with an expert from a computer security firm that markets anti-virus software.

Conficker, a digital worm that has reportedly infected millions of Windows computers, has been widely covered in the media, including in the New York Times, which wondered if Wednesday would bring "An April Fools Joke or an Unthinkable Disaster," and on "60 Minutes," which noted that "so far, the bad guys who created it haven't triggered Conficker. It's just sitting out there like a sleeper cell."

Twitter, a useful heat map for online conversations, lit up today with thousands of worried messagesabout Conficker. "I'm terrified of that conficker virus thing," wrote Sarah Rutherford of New York. "Not getting back on here at all for the rest of the week!!"

But as more sober commentators have noted, Conficker is not a ticking time bomb set to ...

... blow up the Internet at midnight. On a blog at SecureWorks, Joe Stewart noted,

The truth is, there will be no April 1st outbreak, despite what some of the press stories have said so far. The only thing that will happen with Conficker on April 1st is that already-infected systems will begin to use a new algorithm to locate potential update servers. There, that’s not so scary, is it?

Rather than being a call for the worm to begin a major attack, the change happening tomorrow is more like an evolutionary step that makes Conficker more slippery and more difficult for security experts to track down and exterminate.

Alex Eckelbery of Sunbelt Software reminds usersthat a fix for Conficker has been around for nearly six months. The worm "takes advantage of a vulnerability in Windows that Microsoft fixed in October of last year," he wrote. "If a machine is patched with this update from Microsoft, then that system cannot get infected."

Conficker's true potential for damage and destruction is simply not known, and won't be until its mastermind puts his creation to work -- whether that's as part of another huge cloud of zombie spam computers, an identity theft ring or something more innocuous.

"We don’t know yet if there’s anything explosive in it," said Chris Schwartzbauerof Shavlik Technologies, a security firm. "Really what we've learned about this one is that the unique way it’s architected makes it particularly wily."

That is, more is known about its infectiousness than about its potential for harm.

Experts agree that Microsoft Windows users can still protect themselves against Conficker and other potential security threats by making sure their systems have current anti-virus software and the most recent patches from Microsoft. See prevention instructions here.

-- David Sarno