Facebook isn’t doing many public appearances these days in the lead-up to its IPO. But that’s not stopping the company from teasing a new Facebook feature on live television.

Slated to air Tuesday evening, ABC News has snagged interviews with Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, in which the two will debut a mystery tool “which has the power to save lives,” according to the company.

I doubt it’s a Facebook-branded Life Alert bracelet — “I’ve been poked and I can’t get up!” — and Facebook is keeping mum on details until the interviews air.

My best guess? It’s most likely another project involving Facebook’s efforts to fight cyberbullying, that online scourge that has kids harassing one another across social networks.

It’s a logical move, especially after increased attention following the spate of suicides spurred by cyberbullying over the past few years. Not to mention the 20 million users under the age of 18 that regularly use Facebook. There’s also increased attention of late related to the documentary “Bully.”

Thus there is increasing pressure from governmental bodies due to the issue. Nearly every state is either working on or has already enacted legislation to combat cyberbullying, cyberharrassment or cyberstalking, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

To boot, this isn’t Facebook’s first anti-cyberbullying rodeo. Nearly a year ago today, Facebook introduced a suite of tools to combat cyberbullying on its site. And the company has moved toward strengthening those measures consistently over the past three years.

Facebook isn’t responding to my request for comment.

(Image courtesy of J_O_I_D/Flickr)

Yahoo is on a bit of a hiring spree, picking up longtime Internet exec Robertson Barrett (pictured here), to run its critical and powerful Yahoo News and Finance sites.

Barrett has held top positions at Tribune Interactive, Time Inc., ABC News, Primedia’s Channel One Interactive and The Feedroom.

Barrett worked most recently as chief strategy officer of Perfect Market, a Comcast-backed start-up.

Last week, Yahoo announced that Jai Singh will join the company as editor in chief. Before that Ken Fuchs was tapped as VP of Sports, Games and Entertainment.

For the huge Yahoo News job, Barrett replaces Mark Walker, who left for Disney a month ago. Steve Schultz left the top Yahoo Finance job last fall.

Here is Yahoo’s official press release, which confirms it and the particulars:

Yahoo! Names Robertson Barrett Vice President of News and Finance

Media Industry Vet to Oversee Company’s Category-Leading Properties

Yahoo! today announced that Robertson Barrett will join the company as Vice President of News and Finance. Based in Santa Monica, Calif., Barrett starts May 16, and will report to Mickie Rosen, senior vice president of the Yahoo! Media Network.

A media industry veteran, Barrett brings more than 20 years experience leading online ventures and as a reporter, including senior positions at Tribune Interactive, Time Inc., ABC News, Primedia’s Channel One Interactive, and The Feedroom. His appointment is the latest addition to the Yahoo! Media Network leadership team, which recently announced that Jai Singh will join the company as Editor-in-Chief, and Ken Fuchs as Vice President of Sports, Games and Entertainment.

Barrett will oversee Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Finance in the U.S., two of the company’s most renowned properties. In the U.S., the Yahoo! News Network is No. 1 in the general news category, attracting 86.6 million unique users in March 2011 and Yahoo! Finance has been the top finance destination for 39 straight months, attracting 42.6 million users in March 2011–more than twice as many unique visitors as the No. 2 destination Dow Jones & Company (comScore).

“Rob’s addition to our leadership team comes at a pivotal time for Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Finance, especially in light of the global and economic events driving massive consumer interest and engagement,’ said Rosen. “We have ambitious plans for these properties, and Rob will play a critical role in leading these businesses and deepening Yahoo!’s position as the premier digital media company.”

Barrett’s appointment comes on the heels of the largest traffic week in the history of Yahoo! News. Following the death of Osama bin Laden, Yahoo! News has experienced its heaviest-trafficked week, including 3 of its top 10 most visited days ever. Since the news broke, Yahoo! News has served more than 865 million pageviews, attracting more than 20.4 million unique users on Monday, May 2 and 17.6 million unique users on Tuesday, May 3 in the U.S. Yahoo! reaches more than 680 million users globally each month.

Barrett most recently served as Chief Strategy Officer of Perfect Market, a Comcast-backed venture, where he was responsible for building relationships with major news brands for the organization. Previously, he was EVP of Tribune Interactive, where he managed the operations and strategic development of online properties in 40 U.S. markets, including latimes.com, chicagotribute.com, baltimoresun.com, and all Tribune news, entertainment and TV sites. He also was previously VP and GM of The FeedRoom Inc., an Internet news venture backed by NBC, where he oversaw the development of video-on-demand for NBC, Tribune Company, CBS and local station groups. He was also co-founder and operating lead at online ventures for Time Inc., ABC News and Primedia’s Channel One Interactive. He holds a BA from Duke University and a Masters from Harvard University.

There might have been tweets right from the Pakistani city of Abbottabad at the time of the attack, but this disturbing ABC News video from inside the house where the U.S. raid on al Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden took place depicts it in ways 140 characters simply cannot.

Warning: It’s a bloody scene in what appears to be a bedroom.

Here’s the video:

I am surprised, though, at what happens when I click on #royalwedding, Twitter’s official hashtag for the event: I end up on the day’s Promoted Trend, purchased on behalf of something called “Magnum Ice Cream,” and which directs Twitter users to Magnum’s Facebook page.

Turns out this is indeed a real product, from Unilever, and I guess they’re getting their money’s worth, because you’re reading about it now. More important is that near the height of the ceremony Twitter was seeing 13,000 #royalwedding tweets per minute.

I do wonder, though, how the media companies Twitter has been encouraging to use #royalwedding today feel about helping the social network promote the “stylish and luxurious lifestyle inspired by the world’s most pleasurable ice cream.”

Related: In advance of the event, Twitter and ABC News told me they were working closely together on live coverage and plans, with hashtag polls and onscreen meters showing the velocity and total number of wedding tweets, etc.  But this turned out to be pretty restrained: In an hour of viewing this morning, I only saw a single reference to Twitter cross my screen (an ABC rep tells me there have been more).

Also worth noting: If you wanted to, you could watch the wedding itself on Twitter.com, via a livestream that NBC News provided. Pretty sure we’ll see more of this.

Now Flipboard, a social news-reading app based around Twitter and Facebook, is adding publisher feeds.

One thing’s clear: There’s a lot of excitement and energy going into how the iPad can re-create content consumption.

Flipboard is launching a beta test with eight publishers, including, full disclosure, All Things Digital.

The other publishers are ABC News, Bon Appétit, Lonely Planet, SB Nation, SFGate, Uncrate and the Washington Post Magazine.

Participating advertisers, through a partnership with OMD, include Pepsi, Gatorade, Infiniti, the CW Television Network, Showtime, Levi’s, Dockers, Hilton Worldwide, GE, Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, Project (RED), Standup2cancer.org and Charity: Water.

They are contributing full-page ads that are inserted into longer-form articles.

During the beta period, no money will change hands between any of these parties, including our site, according to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue.

Later, McCue said he expects to add many more publishers to the Flipboard app, and perhaps help publishers create their own “iPadified” content experiences to distribute themselves.

Instead of prompting users to go to the iPad’s Safari browser to read full versions of articles, as it has done to date, Flipboard will now import partner publisher content and lay it out automatically. For these stories, Flipboard formats images, divides them into pages and offers different layouts for portrait and landscape modes.

McCue said Flipboard users’ No. 1 most requested feature is the ability to add content through RSS feeds.

But he’s not giving them that with this update. Users can still only subscribe to publishers through Twitter accounts and lists. The reason, according to McCue, is Flipboard is dedicated to the social aspect and beautiful design of content, and RSS contains neither of these things.

McCue speaks of scrolling through Web pages with advertising units and side bars as a relic of the early Web and crappy Internet connections, saying Flipboard represents a return to the pagination and image emphasis of print.

Unlike print, though, Flipboard doesn’t work offline; that’s a future feature, said McCue. He also said his team is still singularly devoted to developing for iPad, and will divert focus to Android tablets only after they have an established user base.

By the way–more full disclosure–seeing ATD content get iPadified in McCue’s demo wasn’t as fun and glossy as you might imagine, especially given our small images.

And in what might be a problem for other content publishers like us, the quick blog posts we often write are not as easily transferable to this layout, given Flipboard does not yet differentiate between short stories and longer articles.

Lu also confirmed a similar deal with Facebook.

bing is bringing twitter search to you

October 21, 2009, 10:24 AM by Bing | 0 Comments
One of the most interesting things going on today on the Internet is the notion of the real time web. The idea of accessing data in real time has been an elusive goal in the world of search. Web indexes in search engines update at pretty amazing rates, given what it takes to crawl the entire web and index it for searching, but getting that to “real time” has been challenging.

The explosive popularity of Twitter is the best example of this opportunity. Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous. Innovative services like Twitter give us access to public opinion and thoughts in a way that has not before been possible. From important social and political issues to keeping friends up to date on the minute-by-minute of our daily lives, the web is getting more and more real time.

Search needs to keep up. Shortly after we launched Bing, we did an experiment with the team at Twitter, where we took a fairly small number of “celebrities” from Twitter and provided access to their tweets as part of the search result. Here is a great example.

But what if we take that to the next level? What if we indexed basically the whole public Twitter stream and made it available to customers?

We’re glad you asked that. Because today at Web 2.0 we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now). Try it out. The Bing and Twitter teams want to know what you think.

How does this all work?

Were you as fascinated by the 6-year-old boy floating away in a balloon as we were? Was it a hoax? We know that people are going to twitter more and more for information surrounding all the latest chatter.

You can now search for what people are saying all over the web about breaking news topics, your favorite celebrity, hometown sports team, and anything else you use Twitter to stay on top of today.

If you want to keep an eye on this topic, you can just watch the Tweets roll in. Or, click on “See more Tweets about…” to go to a page full of Tweets. On that page, you can change the ordering to “Best Match.” Here we arrange Tweets differently. If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower. For example, I saw a Tweet from ABC News ranked pretty high in the Best Match mode during the “boy in the balloon” fiasco. By the way, you won’t see any of your tweets if you protected or deleted them, and tweets don’t last more than 7 days in our index.

Are you a Taylor Swift fan? Just think of all the links that are shared on twitter that have to do with Taylor. To help you find these links we sift through and find the most interesting and hot trending links that other search engines usually don’t pick up on. Below you can see a couple of interesting links shared by Twitter users–some news and some gossip.

Instead of the usual captions that are used for links, we decided to give you a “social caption” and show you what people are saying about these links.

Our team has been using this product internally, below are some situations where it came in handy:

Sean Suchter (my boss) and I avoided a closed freeway on a rainy Seattle day and made our flight home.
Eric Scheel (principle program manager on the team) a photo-gear junkie, keeps up on early product reviews and owners’ tweets, which helped him decide on his next purchase.

My wife thinks I am almost cool because I know stuff about Taylor Swift.

We’d love to hear some stories from you about how this may have helped you. Of course, we also want to hear your ideas about how to keep improving this product.

Paul Yiu and the Bing Social Search Team

A Twitter interview must have sounded great to all involved at first blush — Everyone’s talking bout this Twitter! We gotta get in on this! — but if they’d given it any thought, they’d would realize it’s pointless: Twitter is a great broadcast system, but a lousy tool for one-to-one communication.

So conducting an interview using Twitter is like eating soup with a fork. You can do it if you really want. but there’s no reason to do so.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the transcript, which you’re supposed to read from the bottom up. But if you read it from the top down, it’s just as valuable.

SenJohnMcCain@GStephanopoulos Thanks a lot george, let’s do it again soon. now i look forward to reading our followers comments and insults.2 minutes ago from web in reply to GStephanopoulos

GStephanopoulos@SenJohnMcCain Thanks for your time Senator.You’re a good sport I know I’m not getting anymore on Coulter and Ingraham Happy St Pat’s again4 minutes ago from web

SenJohnMcCain@GStephanopoulos like any family we agree on some things and disagree on others.5 minutes ago from web in reply to GStephanopoulos

SenJohnMcCain@GStephanopoulos I’m proud of my daughter and she has a right to her opinions.9 minutes ago from web in reply to GStephanopoulos

GStephanopoulos@SenJohnMcCain Lots of twitterers want to know: what do you think of Meghans’s feud with Coulter and Ingraham?10 minutes ago from web

SenJohnMcCain@GStephanopoulos too early to draw that conclusion.13 minutes ago from web in reply to GStephanopoulos

GStephanopoulos@SenJohMcCain Cheney said on CNN that Obama putting US at risk of new terror attack Agree?16 minutes ago from web

SenJohnMcCain@GStephanopoulos both. the challenges are different but both significant.17 minutes ago from web in reply to GStephanopoulos

GStephanopoulos@SenJohnMcCain What worries you more: Pakistan or Iran?18 minutes ago from web

SenJohnMcCain@GStephanopoulos I’m working with others on alternatives – cong paul ryan has some great ideas.19 minutes ago from web in reply to GStephanopoulos

GStephanopoulos@SenJohnMcCain Take point on 1st AIG bailout How about budget? Will you offer alternative?19 minutes ago from web

SenJohnMcCain@GStephanopoulos to follow up – first AIG bailout was pre-tarp.21 minutes ago from web in reply to GStephanopoulos

GStephanopoulos@SenJohnMcCain Obama says GOP can’t “just say no” on budget Will you offer a full alternative to Obama budget?22 minutes ago from web

SenJohnMcCaini voted for first tarp but that doesn’t mean i voted to bail out AIG.24 minutes ago from web

GStephanopoulos@SenJohnMcCain RIght, but didn’t you vote for first TARP, which went to AIG?26 minutes ago from web

SenJohnMcCain@GStephanopoulos i haven’t seen it but i would explore every option. i repeat, we wouldn’t have this problem if we hadn’t bailed them out35 minutes ago from web in reply to GStephanopoulos

GStephanopoulos@SenJohnMcCain ok, but today: should bonus contracts be broken? Dodd wants a targeted tax on bonuses OK with that?

SenJohnMcCain@GStephanopoulos i would have never bailed out AIG, the real scandal is billions to foreign banks.38 minutes ago from web in reply to GStephanopoulos

GStephanopoulos@SenJohnMcCain AIG: Would a President McCain break bonus contracts? Obama teams says that would cause more harm than good

SenJohnMcCain@GStephanopoulos Happy St. Patrick’s day – slow, sometimes pc somtimes bb41 minutes ago from web in reply to GStephanopoulos

SenJohnMcCainHappy St. Patricks day43 minutes ago from web

SenJohnMcCainboth, usually pc sometimes bb.43 minutes ago from web

SenJohnMcCainhi george im a little slowabout 1 hour ago from web

GStephanopoulos@SenJohnMcCain Happy St Patrick’s Day! First things first: How do u tweet — dictate or type? Blackberry or pc?about 1 hour ago from web

GStephanopoulosFinal call for McCain questions. Interview at noon. You can follow on abcnews.com Go to This Week pageabout 1 hour ago from web

[Image credit: soggydan]

Because they can, of course. And because the presidency-to-be has already provided a short-term boost for media companies who’ve been able to feed the public’s appetite for all things Obama. The New York Times, for example, says it generated $2.3 million in much-needed extra revenue via the sale of its commemorative election day edition and other paraphernalia.

So it will be nearly impossible to boot up your browser on Tuesday and not end up watching a live stream of the pomp and circumstance; the actual swearing-in ceremony is scheduled for noon Eastern Standard Time.

But just in case your online venue of choice gets the hiccups, here’s a list of sites that promise to provide coverage; I’ve also embedded a stream from Hulu (which is using the Fox broadcast’s feed) at the bottom of this post if you’d prefer to stay right here.

I’m sure I’ve probably missed several dozen options: If you’ve got a site you want to add to the list, do so in comments below or contact me at peter@allthingsd.com or via the blind tip box here.

Presidential Inauguration Committee (Microsoft-haters beware: This stream will require the company’s Silverlight player)

Joint Congressional Committee

New York Times

Washington Post

ABC News

CNN (features obligatory Facebook tie-in)

C-SPAN

CBS News

MSNBC

Fox News

Joost (Joost would like to point out that unlike some of the options listed here, its feed will be available for  international audiences).

Current TV (features obligatory Twitter tie-in)

Livestation (requires download; player allows viewers to flip between coverage from Al Jazeera, C-Span, BBC, euronews, France 24, Russia Today).

One major video outlet that apparently won’t be streaming the event live: The biggest–Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. But YouTube’s Inauguration Channel is serving up plenty of video during the run-up.

And if you couldn’t score tickets to the Huffington Post’s pre-inaugural ball Monday night with the likes of Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and, um, Ashton Kutcher, don’t fret: The news aggregator promises to provide both live video and live blogging of the event.

To keep you abreast of tech news while he’s away, we’re compiling a daily digest of 10 must-read tech stories. Our Tech 10 appears below.

1. Coming to a PDF Near You: Adobe announced today that it is teaming with Yahoo to put text-based ads in PDF files, reports The Wall Street Journal, noting that publishers will be paid for running ads from Yahoo Inc. next to the PDFs.
2. But Will It Be Able to Leap Tall Buildings in a Single Bound? The new and improved version of Apple’s iPhone will be able to download from the Internet at a faster rate, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson announced last night, Bloomberg reports. Speaking to the Churchill Club in Santa Clara, Calif., Stephenson also divulged that the new iteration of the device will debut next year and will operate on third-generation wireless networks. (AT&T is the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the U.S.)
3. Nothing’s Set in Concrete, After All: Responding to criticism from MoveOn, Facebook execs are looking into changes to the recently launched Beacon advertising tool, according to BusinessWeek, adding that adjustments to the system could come as early as today.
4. Democracy Comes to Search Results: Google is experimenting with a system that enables users to change the rankings of or delete sites in personalized searches, according to Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal, explaining that the new system will allow users to manipulate search results by simply hitting dedicated buttons.
5. Reining In Comcast: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin is proposing a rule to keep cable colossus Comcast from growing larger, the New York Times is reporting, adding that the new rule comes as Martin attempts to regain the upper hand after his earlier proposal to broadly control the cable industry was shot down.
6. The Faster the Better: Verizon Wireless will upgrade its network in 2008, according to Reuters, using long-term evolution technology to achieve higher speeds. The new system could end up challenging Qualcomm, which developed the CDMA technology Verizon’s current network is based on, as well as supporters of WiMax.
7. Strike This Strike? ABC and the Writers Guild of America, East, announced today that they had come to a tentative agreement for about 250 ABC News writers, editors, graphic artists and desk assistants in New York and Washington, D.C., according to the Hollywood Reporter. The union, which has worked without a contract since Jan. 31, 2005, will vote on the new agreement Dec. 13.



8. Cartman, Kyle and Kenny–Free: Following the online popularity of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” MTV Networks will make all episodes of the animated comedy “South Park” available for free in 2008 according to Reuters, noting that the move is part of Viacom’s strategy to boost TV viewership.
9. Just When You Thought Things Couldn’t Get Any Worse: Along comes Warner Music Group’s gloomy forecast for 2008. In today’s fourth-quarter earnings call, CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. predicts a continuing decline in physical music sales as retailers cut back on shelf space, while the digital-music and mobile sales growth will be slower than expected, reports Peter Kafka of Silicon Alley Insider.
10. No Wii? Waaaaa! The popularity of Nintendo’s gaming console coupled with “a maxed-out supply chain that can’t be ramped up to meet holiday demands” means it could be next to impossible to purchase a Wii before Christmas at retail stores, explains Chris Kohler at Wired.

–posted by Associate Editor John Sullivan

To keep you abreast of tech news while he’s away, we’re compiling a daily digest of 10 must-read tech stories. Our Tech 10 appears below.

1. Slick Deal for Sony? A Dubai investment firm owned by the emirate’s ruler has acquired a “substantial” stake in Sony. The Wall Street Journal reports that the deal typifies the growing appetite of Middle Eastern oil producers awash in petrodollars for diversifying their investments.
2. Facebook, Political Animal: The social-networking site is jumping on the campaign bandwagon in a partnership with ABC News, the TV network announced today. Facebook members can now digitally track ABC reporters, watch videos and take part in polls, debates and even influence how the news is covered.
3. TGICM (Thank God It’s Cyber Monday): Black Friday may one day take a back seat to Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving when online retailers entice bargain-hunters with discounts similar to those offered by offline marketers on the day after Thanksgiving, the New York Times reports.
4. But No Blues for Online Retailers on Black Friday, Either: Online spending on the day after Thanksgiving zoomed 22% compared to last year, according to comScore. That boosts the total of online purchases to more than $9 billion for the season to date, up 17% over the same period in 2006.
5. Zune Is No. 2, in a Good Way: Microsoft’s Zune posted strong Black Friday online sales, playing second fiddle only to sales of Nintendo’s Wii, according to preliminary figures released by Electronista.
6. News Corp. Aims to Serve: Online ads, that is. The media giant’s Internet division will debut an online network to sell ads across Rupert Murdoch’s many holdings (which include this site) as well as other media companies, possibly by the first half of 2008, Reuters reports.
7. Take That, Sacré Downloader! Cracking down on online piracy, the French government is proposing to pull the broadband connections of those who illegally download movies or music online, according to dBTechno News, which notes that President Nicolas Sarkozy has floated a “three strikes” policy to fight Internet pirates.
8. Hollywood Sues ‘Pirates’ Pirate: Maintaining that film piracy in China costs the U.S. movie industry hundreds of millions annually, the Motion Picture Association is suing Chinese Web site Jeboo.com for providing bootlegged copies of such movies as “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” to an Internet cafe in Shanghai. The Times Online says the MPA is seeking about $432 million in damages on behalf of five studios.



9. Look! Up in the Sky! Original Content–From China. Signaling its entry into space exploration, China today released its first picture of the moon from its Chang’e lunar probe. The photo’s “symbolic importance perhaps rivals its scientific value,” Wired reports.
10. Data Deep-Freeze? Microsoft plans to build a data facility in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, according to a report in Data Center Knowledge. The center is expected to host 10,000 servers in a region attractive to Microsoft not for its rough winters but its stable electricity supply.

–posted by Associate Editor John Sullivan