Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Facebook to get a facelift
Social networking site to give users more tools to customize what information they see.
NEW YORK Facebook is revamping its home page and plans other changes so its millions of users can more easily choose the types of information they see.
Facebook said Wednesday it will let users follow public figures like President Obama and swimmer Michael Phelps and bands like U2, and even institutions like The New York Times.
Facebook's fan pages currently work as static destination sites for anything from bacon to Coca-Cola to Jane Austen. The social-networking site will eventually make them work more like profiles, which individuals can now continuously update by posting photos, links and other tidbits.
Beginning next Wednesday, Facebook will also launch a redesigned home page that lets users receive continuous updates from their friends instead of every 10 or 15 minutes.
It is also adding filters so people can choose which of their friends to keep up with and which to silence, limiting news from tiresome or annoying acquaintances you don't necessarily want to “de-friend.” Currently, people can choose to receive less information about certain friends but can't silence them completely.
Facebook will also tweak its central feature, the status update, which now invites people to broadcast to their friends a response to “What are you doing right now?” Responses can now range from mundane to poetic to uncomfortably personal.
Facebook's new question, “What's on your mind?,” may encourage people to dig deeper into their subconscious and post more entertaining updates than “Kevin is updating Facebook.”
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
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Friday, February 27, 2009
Facebook Changes TOS Back after uproar.
by Sarah Lacy on February 21, 2009
In case you didn’t read him quoted in some 1,700 newspapers last week, NBC’s Press:Here has an interview with Chris Kelly, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer this week. The show, which focuses on technology, airs in the Bay Area on Sunday mornings after Meet the Press, and the young show has already been beating Meet the Press in the ratings. You can also watch a clip on the jump or the entire episode online here
right now. (I was one of the guest reporters on the show this week.)
Kelly said in no uncertain terms that Facebook does not own your data and content, never did and never will. What’s more: Any reproduction of your data has to be subject to the privacy settings you choose as a Facebook user. You can sense his frustration amid a scandal that was essentially cooked up by Consumerist on the Sunday night of a holiday weekend without even calling Facebook to check if their assumptions on the Terms of Use changes were right.
But this isn’t the first or last time users will be in an uproar over Facebook, despite all of Facebook’s best efforts. Why? There’s never been a Web site—or media property for that matter—that people trusted with so much personal, emotional and intimate information, whether it’s your cell phone number or a video of your child taking his first steps. And with Facebook’s business model still uncertain, that trust makes us legitimately nervous. You think all the search data Google has been collecting on us for all these years is scary? Things you do and upload to Facebook are far, far more personal. For the conspiracy theorists out there, Facebook is going to be the gift that keeps on giving.
I asked Kelly—on this, the third major user uproar the company has faced on privacy that caught it completely by surprise—if the issue was a blind spot for the company or if Facebook was doing something so new in organizing the data of human relationships that it was bound to take all the arrows as these issues of privacy continually emerge. Kelly essentially said its the latter; I think it’s a mixture of both, although Facebook’s privacy sensitivities have clearly come a long way since the News Feed and Beacon debacle days. Give them credit: Each time they learn how to handle the crisis better, and this time they sprung into action quickly and decisively.
Either way, this is not the first or last time a user revolt will spark up around privacy and the site. And that’s one reason Facebook is inviting users to help them craft the language this time around. You can’t blame yourself for violating your rights, right? But as Elizabeth Corcoran of Forbes pointed out on the show, can you really organize a committee of 175 million people?
The clip featuring both of these conversations is below, or go here for the entire episode.
Toys.com sold for $5.1 million Today
Toys.com sold for $5.1 million in a heated domain auction today.
The lucky buyer is Toys 'R' Us. Competing bidder National A-1 was
giving the toys store chain a run for their money with a top bid
of $5 million. Domain guru Frank Schilling had dropped out at $2.9
million.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
A Look at "Facebook's Disturbing NEW "Terms Of Service"
Facebook Say: We Can Do Whatever We Want With Your Content. Forever...!Facebook's terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.
Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.
That language is the same as in the old TOS, but there was an important couple of lines at the end of that section that have been removed:
You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.
Furthermore, the "Termination" section near the end of the TOS states:
The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.
Make sure you never upload anything you don't feel comfortable giving away forever, because it's Facebook's now.
Oh, you also agree to arbitration, naturally. Good Luck with that, counselor.
New TOS (from 4 Feb 2009) [Facebook]
old TOS
Friday, February 13, 2009
Whizz kid 9, creates popular app for iPhone.
Most children his age may draw pictures on paper with crayons, but nine-year-old Lim Ding Wen has a very different canvas.
The primary school pupil from Singapore writes applications for Apple's iPhone.
His latest project, a painting programme called Doodle Kids, has been downloaded over 4,000 times from Apple's iTunes store in just two weeks.
The primary school pupil has written a painting program for the iPhone called Doodle Kids
iPhone users can draw with their fingers by simply touching the iPhone's touchscreen. They can create squares, circles, lines, triangles and stars of different sizes and colours. Pressing the space key animates the picture and pressing delete or shaking the phone clears it.
'I wrote the program for my younger sisters, who like to draw,' Lim said. His sisters are aged three and five.
Lim, who is fluent in six programming languages including ActionScript and JavaScript, is thought to be the world's youngest Apple IIGS programmer.
He first used a computer at just two years old and began learning programming by the time he was seven.
He has since completed about 20 programming projects. One of his games called Paddle is modeled on the famous arcade game Pong.
His father, Lim Thye Chean, a chief technology officer at a local technology firm, also writes iPhone applications.
'Every evening we check the statistics emailed to us (by iTunes) to see who has more downloads,' the older Lim said.
The boy, who enjoys reading books on programming, is in the process of writing another iPhone application - a space race game called 'Invader Wars'.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Travelzoo Buys Fly.com Domain For A Lofty $1.8 Million
Jason Kincaid
Friday, January 30, 2009; 12:06 PM
Travelzoo, a publicly traded travel site launched in 1998, has announced that it purchased the domain "Fly.com" for $1.8 million. According to Travelzoo's announcement, Fly.com will be the home of "a new information web site to be launched in Feburary". A visit to the site itself offers a slightly less vague description:
"Fly.com will launch a new travel search engine within the next few weeks that will help you find the best travel options. Please visit us again soon."
The $1.8 million price tag might sound like a lot (and it is), but pricey domains are nothing new, even in the down economy: Vibrators.com sold for $1 million a few months ago and A&T's YellowPages.com paid a whopping $3.85 million for YP.com in December. Of course, good domain names are no guarantee for success - let's hope Fly.com has more behind it than yet another generic travel search engine.
Monday, January 12, 2009
CBS Pumps Up TV.com to Create a Destination
When the CBS Corporation bought CNet for $1.8 billion last year, it acquired TV.com, a Web site that had little to brag about except a valuable domain name. Now CBS is transforming it into a video destination.
One month ago, CBS has redesigned the previously clunky site to showcase the thousands of new and old television episodes that it offers, from “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” to “Charlie’s Angels.” And on Monday, the company is expected to announce distribution deals with PBS, Sony, MGM and Endemol that will expand its free advertising-supported online library.
Many Web users are already familiar with Hulu, Fancast and other Web sites that bring the television experience to the Internet. In the land grab for the online TV audience, CBS hopes to define itself by adding a community layer to the videos and by encouraging user interaction.
CBS, the most-watched TV network so far this season, already puts the most recent episodes of its shows on CBS.com. Those shows will be available on TV.com as well, but Anthony Soohoo, who oversees the entertainment and lifestyle categories for CBS Interactive, said he did not intend for the site to be “tied to the success of our shows.”
TV.com has taken various forms over the years. In the mid-1990s, it was the name of CNet’s syndicated television show about the Internet. More recently, the company turned it into a guide to TV, with listings, forums and fan information. The site recorded more than 16 million unique visitors in November, according to the measurement firm comScore.
“In the past, it’s been a place to get information,” Mr. Soohoo said. “If we add more video content to the site, we believe it can drive more community.”
To date, much of the site’s episodic content has come from the popular video site Hulu, the joint venture between NBC Universal and the News Corporation. With this week’s announcements about its new partners, TV.com will be able to add classic shows like “Bewitched” and “The Addams Family” to the site. Showtime, the premium cable channel owned by CBS, will provide episodes of “Dexter” and “Californication.”
None of the partnerships are exclusive. Because it cannot be the only source for episodes, CBS executives want TV.com to be the most comprehensive one. Users already rate episodes, write reviews and view cast and crew information on the site.
CBS expects comparisons to Hulu, which has become one of the top video-viewing sites in the country in the last year. By placing an emphasis on the user interactions on the site, it will seek to, as the Web site PaidContent.org put it last month, “move beyond Hulu.”
Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of the CBS Corporation, called TV.com “extremely exciting” at an investors’ conference last month and said he thought the site would become “one of the leading destinations” for online TV viewing.
Shelly Palmer, the author of “Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV,” said people tended not to use YouTube, Hulu and other video aggregation sites for social interaction.
“On the other hand, I’m sure the team at CBS thinks that well-executed social media components might differentiate TV.com from other video sites,” he said. “Consumers will be the ultimate judge.”
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