It seems to me that the larger issue in this ongoing real names debate is not who you say you are, but the usefulness of a unified Web identity. The more we condense our online selves into a single person, the more reliable, accountable and monetizable our Web experiences can be.

Facebook and Google are fighting a war over which company will be the preferred personalization experience across their own and other people’s Web sites and apps. Both companies offer Web identity systems that they want us to stay logged into all day long, whether we’re reading the news, listening to music or looking at photos.

Having a unified identity isn’t necessarily a bad thing for users, because it can make the Web more customized and convenient. It can also be super creepy.

When I log into my Google Dashboard, I can learn that the last thing I bought with Google Checkout was a pair of shoes in June ’09, that I last synced my mail on my iPhone at 1:27 am last night, and that I’ve had 1,518 Google Voice calls. That is a seriously quantified self.

Facebook and Google+ may say that they require “real names,” but I’m not convinced that they’re terribly serious about it. Neither site requires users to send in their passports to create an account (though they do sometimes ask for legal verification in disputed cases). Like danah boyd, I know many Facebook users who use pseudonyms, often for obviously justifiable reasons or simply because they like more privacy.

For that matter, I’ve also become friends with a few pet dogs as well as dummy accounts created by developers, which Facebook didn’t officially support until last month.

Facebook does do some policing of its terms of use but it obviously turns a blind eye to pseudonyms much of the time. It seems to rely more on a culture of real names than strict enforcement. Users who choose to go by their commonly used names are probably more likely to have a full Facebook experience, simply because more people they know will find them and interact with them.

Google+, meanwhile, has tweaked its “real name” requirement after offending users by deleting their accounts on the presumption that they broke the rules. It still doesn’t have a clear policy in place but there’s time for the month-old invite-only “field trial” product to evolve. For now, the service is allowing users to submit their nicknames and display them to certain circles of friends, though that’s not the same thing as allowing multiple accounts.

Even if I’m giving Google+ a pass for now, I will say Google is currently utterly terrible at understanding its users’ multiple identities. I have a Google Apps account for work and a Gmail account for personal email and am constantly bumping into access problems despite having supposedly set up a multiple account feature.

For a while I contributed to a (silly, harmless) blog under a pseudonym, and now every time I go to make a comment on a Blogger site, it’s under that name because I linked it to my Gmail address. And do I really want every video I ever watch on YouTube tied to my Google account? Not really, but if I log out of YouTube I log out of everything.

None of this inconvenience has to do with whether or not I used my genuine certified real name — it’s about Google or Facebook trying to get me to use a single account for all my activities.

Facebook’s Mark and more recently Randi Zuckerberg have famously called for the end of anonymity and denigrated inconsistent online identities. But Randi was on her way out the door and Mark later tried to recant his comments, saying he didn’t mean to make value judgments about people’s lives. Their stated positions are too uncompromising to be defensible.

As Caterina Fake writes, pseudonyms have different purposes — among them, stage names and noms de plume, false names used for protection and haters and trolls. Requiring “real names” on online services is a clumsy though often effective attempt to fend off trolls. Sites like Google+ and Facebook don’t actually need real names to do their business.

What Facebook and Google really seem to be after is condensing our accounts into one. That in itself is a scary and awkward prospect as well — but it’s not as simple as requiring a “real name.”

Passport image credit: FreeFoto.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

She’s raising what looks like a $2 million round, according to an SEC filing, from a list of investors that she said includes True Ventures, Founder Collective (where she is an investor), SV Angel, Keith Rabois, James Joaquin and Shoshana Berger.

The filing says more precisely that $1.54 million of a $2 million round had been collected as of June 15.

Further Google-stalking shows that the company, which appears to be code-named 2bkco, also involves Marc Hedlund of Daylife and Wesabe as well as Eric Allen of Sauce Labs.

Fake had left Hunch, which makes recommendation technology, after it pivoted from being a consumer destination site to a tool used by other sites. She said on her blog today:
“Entrepreneurs gonna entrepreneur. I have a new startup! We are building something consumer-facing, something social — all the things I love best — for optimal founder-market fit!. It’s crazy times in the Valley and while I prefer doing startups when the going’s tough, money is scarce, and engineers are unemployed — the best time to start a company is always two years ago, and the next best time is now. So now it is.”

The one thing it doesn’t have are stories about investors clamoring to throw money its way. And the three-year-old company has never disclosed a funding round. Is it possible it has never taken in any money?

Nope. It’s not. I hear that Kickstarter, which helps artists and entrepreneurs raise money for their projects via crowd-sourced donation, has itself raised around $10 million in venture backing so far.

Its investors are high-profile, too: Union Square Ventures is the company’s best-known backer, but Kickstarter has also received money from the Betaworks incubator/seed investment fund, along with contributions from well-known entrepreneuer/angels like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Vimeo co-founder Zach Klein and Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake.

Kickstarter’s public profile has been shooting up, up, up–most recently, as the company that helped fund watches made out of Apple’s iPod nanos — and its backers are a bit of an open secret in tech circles. But for whatever reason the company hasn’t wanted its investors chatting about it.

Union Square, for instance, doesn’t include the company in its public portfolio. [UPDATE: Now they do. "Recently the company has been getting a lot of attention and it has become clear to all of us that the quiet period is over," USV partner Fred Wilson writes in a blog post this morning. "So now we get to add the Kickstarter logo to our investments page and we can talk about the company publicly as much as we talk about it privately.]

That quiet period is over now, though, courtesy of a profile in the new issue of Wired magazine. The story is primarily about the company’s origins and ambitions, but casually mentions Union Square’s backing, and identifies Fake, Klein, Dorsey, Meetup founder Scott Heiferman and comedian David Cross (!) as other investors.

I asked CEO Perry Chen for more details about the company’s funding, but didn’t expect much. And via a pr agency, I ended up with a list of other angels, but nothing else. Here it is, for the record: Josh Stylman; Peter Hershberg; Joi Ito; Chris Sacca; Joshua Schacter; Matt Haughey; Josh & Jared Kushner; Chris Kaskie; “some other friends.”

The Wired issue with the Kickstarter profile is just landing in subscribers’ mailboxes now, and should be on newsstands and iPads next week. If you’re waiting for a free peek, though, you’ll have to be patient–the magazine usually waits a bit before it puts a new issue up on the Web. Meantime, here’s a look at the cover, via the magazine’s Twitter account:

[Kickstarter image credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]

The money was actually raised last fall in two rounds after the company completed the Y Combinator program, but for whatever reason it’s been kept under wraps. NetworkEffect took the opportunity to talk with co-founder Rudy Adler about his year-old start-up this week.

“The Internet was missing a past tense,” is Adler’s quip to explain the motivation for 1000Memories. The site offers a central place for mourners to contribute pictures, stories and the like, with the promise of becoming a permanent collaborative obituary and eulogy.

Sites like Facebook don’t have a great way of dealing with people who pass away, because they are designed for living participants, Adler said. Creating accounts for dead people can be awkward, but perhaps less so on a dedicated, nicely designed site.

Future premium products for 1000Memories may include custom domains, physical memory books, personalized designs and additional storage, Adler said. The company currently helps its users do things like rip and post DVDs, in part because they are often much older and less tech savvy than the average social media user.

1000Memories recently launched a groups feature that was used to memorialize those killed in the Egyptian protests. It went viral, with more than 400,000 page views, Adler said.

In addition to Greylock, participants in the $2.5 million Series A round included Caterina Fake, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Mike Maples, Paul Buchheit and Chris Sacca. It came through just a couple of months after 1000Memories had raised an angel round worth $500,000.

Of course, he won.

Dominating tech’s mindshare and press coverage in 2010, Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs also handily took the No. 1 slot of a reader poll conducted by BoomTown in the last days of year.

Jobs–who introduced a range of innovative products, such as the iPad, over the course of the 2010–garnered just over 30 percent of the votes for the question that asked: “Who are the 10 Most Interesting People in Tech in 2010.”

Among the reasons he was selected, from comments posted by those who took the survey:

“With the iPad, he’s re-inventing the personal computer. Again.”

“Because he never stops.”

And my favorite: “Because if he had to be dictator of the world, he’d actually take doing a good job of it seriously.”

And, despite not acing him out for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” WikiLeaks head Julian Assange got 16.3 percent for the No. 2 spot, followed by Facebook’s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at 10.1 percent.

Said one voluble commenter: “Whether one agrees or not with the how, governments and the individuals in power tend to do things that, we as a public, need to know, given that their actions, ultimately, impact how we must live our lives. Assange, is merely bringing to light things that many would rather not have brought into the light of day. One could argue that we do not need to know, for security or other reasons. However, negotiations, diplomacy and conflict, are all simply ways or resolving issues. Since, as a public, we allow these people into power, should we not know they are acting on ‘our behalf’?”

Arguing for Zuckerberg and his increasingly powerful social networking site, one person said: “Changed the way we looked at the Web and added another layer of connection between user and the Web, as well as sites connecting to each other.”

A wide range of people, not included by name on the list I compiled, got the No. 4 slot with 7.3 percent. They included Google Android head Andy Rubin, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, Demand Media co-founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Arianna Huffington and, um, me!

Longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen was No. 5 at 6.3 percent.

“Visionary as a grad student, very successful as an entrepreneur, now doing some really interesting things as a VC,” said one person.

The red-hot attention around social buying start-up Groupon–and its gutsy choice not to take Google’s offer of billions of dollars–got co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason the No. 6 slot with 5.7 percent.

Pure curiousness about the future outcome spurred one choice: “Is he really lucky or really good? I’m guessing 2011 is a fairly decisive year. I’d like to know more about him…”

The mishegas around Yahoo and its voluable CEO Carol Bartz put her in the No. 7 position.

Said one commenter: “She’s taken the impossible job and will succeed. However, rewiring is taking more times than expected…”

Innovation put social magazine iPad app Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue at No. 8 with 2.3 percent.

No. 9 was Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at the same percentage, with the inevitable Betty White clocking in at No. 10 with 2.1 percent.

The reason for picking the longtime Hollywood movie and television star, after lobbying by rabid Facebook fans got her a gig on “Saturday Night Live”?

Simply put: “She rocks.”

And, indeed, she does.

Here’s my lovely bar chart showing the winners, which, perhaps most fascinating of all, did not include anyone from search topper Google or software giant Microsoft or microblogging leader Twitter (click on the image to make it larger):

Former Google international exec Adam Freed (pictured here) has taken a job as COO of Etsy, the crafts e-commerce site, which just raised another $20 million in venture funding.

Index Ventures is part of the new round, which also includes previous investor Accel Partners.

Union Square Partners and Hubert Burda Media are also investors, as well as Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake.

Etsy has raised almost $52 million overall since its 2005 founding, which gives it a valuation of more than $300 million.

Etsy’s CEO is founder Rob Kalin, who took over again as CEO at the start-up last year.

But Freed brings more solid management with a global flavor to Etsy, having been a director of international product management at Google (GOOG). He left the company two years ago.

In that job, he focused on the localization and development of the search giant’s international products and had also worked in international online sales and operations, including setting up Google’s online advertising operations in London, Paris, Hamburg, Tokyo and Sydney.

He also established Google’s multilingual online operations center in Dublin.

Oh, yes, Freed speaks nine languages, which will come in handy at Etsy, since it helps craftspeople globally sell handmade items online.

Sources tell me that Khosla Ventures is leading a new round that will add another $10 million to $12 million to the start-up’s bank account. General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Ron Conway, who put $2 million into the company a year ago, are reinvesting.

I’m told that Gideon Yu, the former CFO of both Facebook and YouTube, is steering the investment for Khosla.

Hunch was co-founded by Caterina Fake, who founded Flickr and sold it to Yahoo (YHOO) in 2005, and Chris Dixon, who built SiteAdvisor and sold it to McAfee (MFE) in 2006.

Hunch is still a modest-sized site–its internal numbers put it at 1.2 million unique visitors–but Fake and Dixon are well-regarded entrepreneurs. And while they don’t like to be compared with Aardvark, which has a vaguely similar concept, the linkage does have some upside: Last month, Google (GOOG) bought that site for $50 million.

I asked Fake, Dixon and Yu for comment. Until I hear from them, you can read up on Hunch in Kara Swisher’s story from last month. Or you can watch this interview.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100312/hunch-gets-it-right-adds-a-10-million-b-round-led-by-khosla-ventures/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100218/hunchs-fake-and-dixon-speak-and-theyve-got-a-hunch-you-might-not-get-exactly-what-it-is-yet/ http://allthingsd.com/20100218/hunchs-fake-and-dixon-speak-and-theyve-got-a-hunch-you-might-not-get-exactly-what-it-is-yet/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:42:18 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=24560

When Aardvark was sold to Google (GOOG) for $50 million last week, a lot of folks wondered about the fate of Hunch, another hot start-up in the space.

Except, as correctly noted by two of its four co-founders, Caterina Fake and Chris Dixon, in a chat BoomTown had yesterday, Hunch is quite different–more of an algorithmically hopped up recommendation service that makes use of a mass of data from user-generated questions and answers than a simpler social search site.

That doesn’t make Hunch into either a Yahoo Answers or a Wikipedia with more charm or allow for annoyingly querying your friends on Facebook or the masses on Twitter.

Personally, Hunch reminds me of a crowd-sourced decision-making mosh pit without the sharp elbows, making all kinds of cool, if odd, connections.

This mass of varied data is what Dixon and Fake think is key to making better decisions.

Got it?

The New York-based Hunch launched about last June to a lot of hype–somewhat due to Fake’s success with her last start-up, Flickr, the popular photo-sharing site Yahoo (YHOO) bought in 2005.

And so far, Hunch has been growing decently, with 1.2 million unique monthly visitors now and tens of millions of questions asked and answered.

(Its other founders are Tom Pinckney and Matt Gattis.)

With $6 million in funding, where Hunch goes from here will be interesting to watch, as it adds perhaps more profiling features, both fun and helpful.

The business goal said Fake: Basic lead generation, for which Hunch will presumably be paid by all kinds of vendors.

Listen in on all this and more in my video interview with Fake, who works on product design at Hunch, and CEO Dixon, who has had his own serial entrepreneurial success selling security start-up SiteAdvisor to McAfee (MFE) in 2006:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100218/hunchs-fake-and-dixon-speak-and-theyve-got-a-hunch-you-might-not-get-exactly-what-it-is-yet/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090430/flickr-co-founder-butterfield-and-chief-architect-henderson-working-on-stealth-start-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20090430/flickr-co-founder-butterfield-and-chief-architect-henderson-working-on-stealth-start-up/#comments Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:48:49 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=13035

Yesterday, several Flickr engineers posted news of their layoffs from the Yahoo photo-sharing unit on Twitter, which caused GigaOm’s Om Malik to notice that Flickr architect Cal Henderson (pictured here) was also no longer on its About page.

According to several sources I spoke to, Henderson was actually not laid off at Yahoo (YHOO), but is leaving to start a new company–in the social-gaming arena, I am told–with Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

He and several other of the original core development team for Flickr transitioned out or have been transitioning out for quite some time, sources said.

Henderson’s Web site, called iamcal.com, still says he is the head of engineering at Flickr.

Butterfield (pictured here), as well as another co-founder, Caterina Fake, left Yahoo last year. Yahoo had paid $35 million to acquire Flickr in 2005.

Fake joined another start-up, called Hunch, last summer as chief product officer. Hunch is an answers site and is now in beta testing.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090430/flickr-co-founder-butterfield-and-chief-architect-henderson-working-on-stealth-start-up/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20080715/iphone-mania-3/ http://allthingsd.com/20080715/iphone-mania-3/#comments Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:00:54 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=2780

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080715/iphone-mania-3/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080619/whos-next-to-go-at-yahoo-as-reorg-looms/ http://allthingsd.com/20080619/whos-next-to-go-at-yahoo-as-reorg-looms/#comments Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:52:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=2176

My special BoomTown Yahoo (YHOO) tip inbox is filling up fast this week from Yahoo employees–who, by the way, seem to like to use Gmail as their secret one–all buzzing about the next shoe to drop.

That clodhopper would be, of course, which major exec will leave the troubled Internet company, all due to a major reorg that is about the hit the company within the next weeks.

After the recent departure of Network division EVP Jeff Weiner and Chief Data Officer Usama Fayyad–along with the flashier exit of Flickr’s Co-Founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake (who, it should be said, have been easing quietly out the door for a while now)–several sources tell BoomTown that Search and Advertising Technology group EVP Qi Lu is the next on his way out.

Dr. Lu (pictured here), holder of 20 patents, leads development efforts around Yahoo’s Web search and monetization platforms.

But Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker should be worried about just about everyone at this point, from Connected Life EVP Marco Boerries to Platforms and Infrastructure division EVP Ash Patel to the quartet of execs under Weiner.

Any insecurity in that group—Front Door and Network Services’ Tapan Bhat, Brad Garlinghouse, who heads Yahoo’s communications and communities arenas, Media Group head Scott Moore and Yahoo Search’s Vish Makhijani–and other SVPs on that level really, are especially worrisome, as the voids above and below them become larger and offers from the outside more enticing.

So, combined with the levels of tension rising at the company dramatically with the continued external turmoil, the looming reorg has got to have them plenty worried.

Worse, Yahoos are bracing for a big one this time–sources all talk about a much more deep and profound managerial shift–rather than the deck-chair-arranging that has been typical of most Yahoo reorgs.

For those just checking into this drama, reorganizations are to Yahoo as floods are to Venice–inevitable, annoying and very unpleasant.

Still, CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker–who appears to be the main architect of the changes–do have to try to give the company’s management structure a new shape for the challenges ahead and before the Aug. 1 annual meeting.

This is critical, given everyone and anyone will want to see a clear and well-articulated strategy for Yahoo’s future from the pair by then.

(See them trying to do that at our D: All Things Digital conference last month, in a pair of videos below, when pressed on the subject by Walt Mossberg and me.)

More importantly, it has to be a plan for making the company as valuable as the $33-a-share offer from Microsoft (MSFT) that went poof after the software giant walked away from its takeover attempt in early May.

While Wall Street and major shareholders have been insisting (and hoping fervently) that Microsoft will return to buy all of Yahoo again, BoomTown is here to tell them it’s kind of like waiting for Godot.

Which has made them very frustrated. Very, very. A lot. Tons. Much.

“Jerry and Sue have no more chances to get this right,” said one major shareholder. “This is it.”

Translation: As tired as they must be by now, Yang and Decker have to pull the biggest rabbit ever out of the hat in this reorg and resetting at Yahoo.

Sources say the reorg will focus on creating more of a global product organization, because too much development of common products (like email) is being done all over the company worldwide.

In addition, many have suggested creating a more integrated relationship between products and their revenue sources.

Not having those responsible for selling ads in close sync with, for example, new content or software initiatives has produced a level of frustration within executive ranks at Yahoo.

Right now, for example, Global Partners Solutions EVP Hilary Schneider (pictured here) is in charge of all ad sales, although many other parts of Weiner’s former group rely on her efforts without reporting to her.

Many sources expect that Schneider is likely to amass more power in the new structure–she is close to Decker, who must dramatically rejigger Yahoo’s top echelons to better focus the company on its stated objectives of becoming the premier ad network and a consumer “starting point.”

Smack dab in the middle of a storm where it’s raining shoes, shoes and more shoes, of course.

Here are the two videos of Yang and Decker at D6:

Part 1

Part 2

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080619/whos-next-to-go-at-yahoo-as-reorg-looms/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20070504/yahoo-flickrized/ http://allthingsd.com/20070504/yahoo-flickrized/#comments Fri, 04 May 2007 21:02:45 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070504/yahoo-flickrized/

We want to do everything and be everything to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. … I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. I hate peanut butter.”

– Yahoo Senior VP Brad Garlinghouse, The Peanut Butter Manifesto

I guess Yahoo really does hate peanut butter. The company has begun to consolidate its redundant services, as Garlinghouse suggested it should. The first to get the ax? Yahoo Photos. The company has finally announced plans to shutter its long-running photo service in favor of Flickr, a rival it acquired in 2005. Not a big surprise, really. Yahoo Photos lost 60% of its audience in the past year, according to measurement service Hitwise. Meanwhile, Flickr’s audience grew 22%. If you didn’t see this one coming, you’re probably still using a Polaroid Land Camera. Or you’re a Flickr founder. (Just kidding.)

“No. Yahoo Photos will get a lot of Flickr features, and there are a lot of other areas around Yahoo that will also be Flickrized where Flickrization would be good,” Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake wrote when the site was acquired by Yahoo. “Yahoo Photos and Flickr have different kinds of users with different needs, and will remain separate for the foreseeable future. Flickr would also suffer from a sudden deluge of LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! omg! so we’re going to grow it carefully.”

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