AllThingsD » connect

Roku to Launch Cordless Streaming Stick for TVs

Lauren Goode — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:59:16 +0000

Roku, maker of competitively priced set-top boxes that stream Web video on TVs, is introducing a new device it thinks will offer a simpler option for Internet connectivity than some “smart” TVs.

Today, the company is unveiling plans for its Roku Streaming Stick, a flash-drive-sized dongle that plugs into the back of television sets to enable the same streaming capabilities as a Roku box.

The Streaming Stick will deliver HD streaming video and feature Wi-Fi capabilities, a processor and upgradable software. The Stick won’t require any cables or a separate remote. It will, however, work only on TV sets with HDMI ports that are enabled for Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL).

Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood said the company plans to continue making Roku set-top players. But as the television industry shifts more toward smart TVs that connect to the Internet without use of an additional device, Roku wants to be the solution that TV manufacturers look to in the interim.

The connected TV category is forecast to grow at a 30 percent compound annual rate between now and 2014 — up to more than 123 million shipments, according to a report from DisplaySearch earlier this year. The report also predicts continued complexity in the market, with a variety of streaming video services available to consumers, and tech giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft — in addition to smaller companies like Roku and Boxee — offering boxes for streaming Internet media.

Wood points out that despite the growing number of smart-TV shipments, Roku believes the actual connectivity rate on those TVs is still relatively low. Consumers, he said, are still looking for devices that can be easily upgraded when it comes to getting the Internet on their television sets.

Roku hasn’t yet determined the price of its Streaming Stick, but Wood said it would likely cost between $50 and $100, and will ship in the second half of 2012. While Roku hopes to partner with television manufacturers to bundle the dongle with TV purchases, the Streaming Stick will at first be sold individually, as well as alongside Insignia brand TVs from Best Buy.

California-based Roku launched in 2008 with the introduction of the first Netflix streaming player. Its lineup of devices now includes the Roku LT, the Roku 2 HD, the Roku 2 XD and the Roku 2 XS, which have around 400 channels and apps, including Netflix, Pandora, HBO GO, Vimeo, Hulu Plus, and Amazon’s streaming video service. The Roku 2 XS also offers Angry Birds, which can be played using a Roku XS remote.

Wood said sales of Roku players are up 300 percent over last year, with around 2.5 million Roku devices sold. He added that the company has been focused recently on casual games, with the introduction of Pac-Man and Jeopardy game apps on Roku, in addition to Angry Birds. Roku is also broadening its retail presence to more than 13,000 storefronts across the U.S.

Roku isn’t the only small set-top box maker shifting its strategy to adapt to the growing market for smart TVs. Boxee, maker of the Boxee Box, recently said it would offer a Live TV dongle for watching TV programming through the Box. Shortly afterward, the start-up also said it would be releasing its last software update for its PC-based application, as it focuses more on TV-compatible devices.

Internet Access in Hotel Rooms

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 02:00:15 +0000

I have a 3GS iPhone. Is there a way to connect it to the Internet cable found in hotel and motel rooms?

Not that I know of. But you can do this indirectly by creating your own Wi-Fi network from the wired connection in the room. There are two ways to do this.

One possibility is to carry a small portable router. These are small devices that plug into the wired connection and propagate a Wi-Fi signal in the hotel room that the iPhone (or other devices, like laptops and tablets) can use. A second option is to plug a laptop into the physical connection and use it as a Wi-Fi base station by setting up what’s called an “ad hoc” or computer-to-computer Wi-Fi connection. Steps for doing this, which can be a bit techie, differ depending on whether you use a PC or Mac.

I have been struggling with a hard drive space shortage for at least a year. I have deleted duplicate emails. I have deleted videos and word files and put them on a stand alone hard drive. Do you have any other suggestions?

If you don’t want to, or can’t, replace your laptop, and don’t want to be tethered to your external hard disk, you might look into buying a new, larger, internal hard disk.

Many stores and consultants can sell and install larger hard disks, and even transfer the data from your old one.

I have thousands of photos on my computer and external hard drives. I’m in the process of trying to organize them on one hard drive and noticed that there are many duplicates between the different devices. Is there one program that you recommend that reliably detects and allows the removal of duplicate files?

You might try using Google’s Picasa to sweep the drives, locate the photos, and display them.

The program has a feature that can avoid importing duplicates. Once imported, if there are still duplicates, Picasa offers methods to hide or actually delete them from your disk. Information on this is at http://bit.ly/8YKTzy.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the new All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo on Platforms, Reliability and Independence at D@CES

Peter Kafka — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 23:49:28 +0000

Twitter has crossed the threshold from Web novelty into something substantial. Now Dick Costolo’s job is to turn it into a business–one big enough to justify the sky-high valuation investors have given the messaging company.

He’ll talk to Kara Swisher about the company’s efforts to sell advertising on the service, and if we’re lucky, he’ll give us a glimpse of his improv comedy roots, too. Don’t be shy, Dick!

Dick starts off by insulting Kara’s vest. “Matador casual,” he calls it. Good one! Kara responds by asking him why he’s hanging out at CES.

[ See post to watch video ]

The same reason everyone else is, Dick says: To talk to industry people. For example, he’d like to get device makers to preload some features like “Fast Follow.”

Kara wants to know if Dick would like a “Twitter button” installed on phones. No, says Dick. But he’d like Twitter to work the same way on different platforms.

So how do you make that happen?

Dick: We’re assigning a product team to make sure that this happens.

Kara: And you’re talking to TV people, too? What’s that about?

Dick: Yep. Because mainstream TV viewing, more and more, they have a device in their hand when they’re watching TV. Like on “Glee.” The characters tweet while the show is on. [This baffles Kara.] When “Glee” starts, tweets per second for “Glee” shoot up, and stay up 100 times that level until the show ends, and then they drop.

That has interesting implications. Like, it takes the DVR out of the mix, because you have to watch in real time to make it worthwhile.

But we don’t know if all of this means Twitter while you watch TV, or Twitter actually on your TV screen.

Kara: Is it important for you to be on the screen?

Dick: We’re already on the screen. But we don’t know if that will be the mainstream experience.

Kara: We had Steve Levitan from “Modern Family” talking about how the Web doesn’t help him, but that he and his team like Twitter.

Dick: Sure! “I was having a conversation with Conan O’Brien, as one does” and he was talking about the importance of Twitter to him, and how the 140 character limit is the right length for a joke. It’s definitely the case that network TV people like Twitter, because it gives them feedback, like they’re in the theater, watching how the shows play out.

Kara: Keep talking about celebrities! I love celebrities.

Dick: Sure! The folks that we’ve hired to work with talent and agencies, etc., we think of those people has high-value publishers. They have a huge following. A lot of people are on Twitter just to hear what those folks have to say.

The interesting thing about the top 200 to 300 tweeters–a lot of them are musicians, actors, etc. LeBron James, etc. I think Lady Gaga is number one. But! They’re not all celebrities. There’s CNN Breaking News. And the New York Times. And other brands like Gary Vaynerchuk, who aren’t really that known outside that world.

And Twitter is disaggregating some of those businesses. Like a third of all the players in the NFL playoffs are using Twitter actively. And many players have more followers than their teams. [Here Dick explains football to Kara.] That’s fascinating.

Kara: Let’s go back to phones. Whats the most important device? Tablet? PC? Phone?

Dick: Mobile is a more and more and more common use of Twitter–40 percent of all tweets created on mobile devices. That might seem low, but it was 25 percent a year ago. 50 percent of active users are also active on mobile.

But Twitter ought to work platform to platform. We want to be agnostic.

Kara: What about what’s coming out from Palm? Working with them?

Dick: Not yet.

Kara: What about games? Talking to those guys?

Dick: Yep. Like with Microsoft on their Xbox, you can see integrating tweets into people who have discussions on Xbox.

Dick: You lost interest in the answer to your question. [True!]

Kara: You’re so annoying.

[Some laughter. Not a lot, though!]

Dick: Anyway, the important thing for us is consistency across device to device to device.

Kara: Speaking of working consistently, how’s that going for Twitter?

Dick: Right. So, we raised a bunch of money. We’re hiring “tons of engineers and operations engineers” in the last year. We hired 100 people in Q4, out of about 350 total. And we’re working very hard on erasing our “technical debt.”

Kara: “That’s a great word for fuck-ups”

Dick: Anyway, we’ve got a guy assigned to this pretty much exclusively. And there used to be a tolerance for this, and now there isn’t. If someone fires a pistol next to your ear every hour, after a while you stop flinching when you hear it. It’s crucial that we do this, both for our users and our engineers, who shouldn’t have to get up at 3 am all the time.

Kara: Time for a vision question, which stumps Yahoo. What is Twitter? What is your vision?

Dick: “We want to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them.”

See, that’s a good statement. We’re not just a social network that’s connecting people. It’s connecting for a purpose.

So some people meet girlfriends on Twitter. And other people get tickets to shows they like on Twitter. Etc.

And you don’t have to tweet to get a lot of value out of it.

Kara: What’s the percentage of people who just read Twitter, and don’t tweet themselves?

Dick: Rising. And we have to make that easier to do. “We’re going to spend a lot of time making that consumption experience much better.”

Kara: What’s your business plan?

Dick: To continue to raise money!

[hohoho]

Dick: I’m going to steal Jeff Weiner’s line. We’re a technology company that’s in the media business. Our business model is an advertising model [cough, cough, that's familiar! You're welcome!] So we’re selling ads, and we’re letting people promote their accounts, etc. And we really don’t have to do anything else. Our engagement rates on these ads are ridiculously high. When we saw our stats this last spring when we launched, the numbers were so big we thought we were measuring it incorrectly.

Kara: Is that a big enough business to be a standalone company and/or IPO?

Dick: It’s enough to be a standalone company.

Kara: Sell or IPO?

Dick: We want to be a standalone company. It’s my sincere hope. We’ve accomplished 1 percent of what we want to do.

Kara: You like to sell companies, though.

Dick. Yes, I had two companies that I sold. But that doesn’t mean we’ll sell this one. I’ve had two kids too. But I shouldn’t get a reputation for having kids.

Kara: What’s up with people buying and selling secondary shares of Twitter. It’s an issue for Facebook. What about you?

Dick: We keep an eye on it, and talk to employees about it. But I just think that there are other people that are focusing on it and paying attention, and I’ll let them talk about it. But I just don’t think about that stuff on a day-to-day basis.

Questions and Answers

Q: [sorry missed it].

But answer seems to be about whether Twitter is a platform company or not. Dick quotes Ev Williams by saying they’re not a platform company–they’ve had an API. They want people to be able build off Twitter and build into Twitter. Which requires a more robust API.

Kara has more questions. How do you look at yourself as a leader?

Dick: As a very bald leader.

Kara: But you’re very different than Evan.

Dick: Right. Two components. Three founders at company: Ev, Jack, Biz. They all come at it from a different angle. Jack thinks about simplicity and elegance and the mobile experience. Ev thinks about the user. Biz is “the protector of the brand and the guardian of the culture.”

Kara: He’e the guy who goes on Colbert.

Dick: And he’s great at it. Anyway, those guys are great. My focus is on operational greatness. I try to emulate operators like Ben Horowitz (Opsware) and Susan Wojcicki (Google).

Q: What’s up with that internal page rank for each user? asks Ben Parr from Mashable.

Dick: Your’re not exactly right. We play around with stuff like that. But there’s nothing robust that we would think of productizing anytime soon, and we don’t use it for things like resonance, which we use in ads.

Q: [Sorry, couldnt quite understand.]

Dick is talking about WikiLeaks in general, says there was something specific about WikiLeaks today that he can’t talk about. In general, he hates government mandates to keep things quiet. And he hates that a woman in China was punished for retweeting something. He reiterates Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information. “We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can.” The proof is that we’re banned in China. “We’re not going to sacrifice what we’re trying to do to, you know, get into this country over here.”

Q: How will you work with brands in the future, vs. advertising?

Dick: Our promoted suite of stuff doesn’t simply let advertisers use a giant bullhorn. This stuff has to be organic. “It almost is like a quality-assurance program.”

[Some context for what Dick wouldn't talk about: Feds Subpoena Twitter Seeking Information on Ex-WikiLeaks Volunteer].

Dick is now talking about Twitter and international growth and language. Twitter is growing fast in the U.K. but not in Germany. Why is that? Because German has really, really long words. “There’s a bunch of stuff we want to do, and have to do” just to make things usable in those languages.

Last question, from Kara: What’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen at CES?

Dick won’t give a one-word answer. CES is a “quantum conference.” Some years are transformational, some are incremental. “This seems like it was an incremental year.”

And we’re done! Thanks all for your patience. We’ll have video up over the next few days, which should help fill in the gaps left by my lousy note-taking.

Second-Edition iPad–Worth the Wait?

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 22:36:42 +0000

I am considering buying an iPad, but am wondering if I should wait for the second edition which is rumored to be coming soon. What do you advise?

I regard the current, original iPad as an excellent product, and can’t say you’d go wrong with it. But while Apple is famously secretive, I’d be surprised if there isn’t a new model announced in the next few months that will have added or improved features. There’s wide speculation, for instance, it will gain a camera or two. The company has a long history of improving its products, and, in the case of the iPad, must keep making it better to deal with a host of coming tablet rivals. So, if you can wait a few months, I’d do so.

I see that many of the newer wireless routers with attractive features do not support printer sharing. Does that mean you cannot connect a printer via Ethernet cable to the router and be able to access that printer through the wireless network? Why do so many of the newer routers not support printer sharing?

In the context you seem to be using it, the term “printer sharing” referred to plugging in an otherwise non-networkable printer via USB to a router, which would then make the printer usable over the network. I presume that this feature has declined in popularity as more home printers now have wired or wireless networking built in, and the latest Windows and Mac operating systems make it much easier to share even a printer without its own network features through the computer’s connection to the network. If the printer has wired networking built in, you should be able to plug it into one of the Ethernet jacks on most wireless routers and make it usable on your wireless network.

I have an almost two-year-old MacBook Pro. The hard drive is nearly full, and I wondered if you knew of any tricks to free up some space. I’m particularly interested in cost-effective fixes.

One useful free utility for freeing up space on a Mac is called Monolingual, and is available at http://bit.ly/dqTCSC. This little utility allows you to remove all the obscure files on a Mac that allow the computer to operate in languages you can’t read or don’t use. For instance, if you only speak and read English, you can erase the files that enable the computer to run in, say, Albanian and Portuguese. Its maker says this can free up hundreds of megabytes of space. I have tried it and it works. Of course, whether you have a Windows PC or a Mac, you can free up space in many other ways, such as by deleting files and programs you don’t use, archiving or deleting old email, and removing temporary browser files.

Email mossberg@wsj.com.

For Ask.com, Foray Into Social Search Points to Mobile

Liz Gannes — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 20:56:29 +0000

Ask.com is in the process of reformulating itself, having dropped its algorithmic search offering and laid off 150 employees in November. The company is billing the changes, which came after a community Q&A launch in July, as a return to its “Ask Jeeves” question-answering roots.

I recently had a chance to sit down with Ask.com President Doug Leeds, who was particularly high on the company’s efforts in mobile: A new iPhone app that includes the Q&A feature has been downloaded 250,000 times since being released in November.

(It might be premature to say mobile is the future of Ask, considering it has yet to launch apps on other mobile platforms.)

Refocusing Ask around Q&A on both the Web and mobile has already had an impact, even if it’s not fully rolled out. Leeds said 60 percent of Ask queries are in the form of a question now, up from 28 percent last year.

Questions are more monetizable than queries, he attested, because users stay on an Ask.com page rather than clicking to zoom off elsewhere on the Web. Ask has found that users who have their questions answered are 50 percent more likely to click on an ad.

Social search offers Ask.com a way to differentiate itself from the competition. Leeds said the company’s brand has long been a second-choice search engine: A huge percentage of Ask users go to Ask after Google fails to answer their query. That may not sound like something to brag about, but it’s made the company profitable, with consistent traffic as the sixth-largest U.S. site, at 90 million monthly visitors.

Ask doesn’t seem to get a lot of love within the halls of its owner, IAC, so it’s especially important for the company to grow its revenue, if not its traffic. Ask is hiring back 30 of the 150 positions it cut, for a total of 270 employees, said Leeds, who described the layoffs as a removal of satellite offices in order to consolidate operations at its Oakland, Calif., headquarters.

Leeds said that Ask has found social search works especially well on mobile, where, for instance, users can ask a question verbally using the free Ask.com iPhone app with speech recognition, put the phone back in their pocket and wait for a notification saying that a real person has answered the question.

The median answer time for questions posed to the Ask community is approaching five minutes. That’s eons in search time, but the fact that the answer is created within those five minutes matters, said Leeds.

According to a Harris Interactive survey of mobile users sponsored by Ask, 66 percent of respondents said timeliness matters more when they’re not in front of their computer, and 40 percent of smartphone users said they’re more influenced by users’ opinions given within the last 24 hours than those from a month ago.

To be clear, Ask has not completely converted to social. Only 20 percent of visits are currently exposed to community Q&A, and only after users say they want to ask a question or a search has failed to produce results. That’s because Ask doesn’t want to overtax its human question answerers, said Leeds. The majority of Ask user questions are answered through a machine process of extracting information from multiple Web pages (similar to the word definitions, flight status information and real-time weather you’ll get at the top of the search results page if you look for such things on Google or Bing).

To recruit and retain question answerers, Ask has a promotion going where it donates 10 cents per answer to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. “Altruism is the best incentive,” said Leeds. “We don’t want it to be a game; we want it to be useful.” Today, 65 percent of questions asked through community Q&A get accurately routed to an answerer.

Next for Ask is a “nearby” feature of its iPhone app that will launch early next year. The ideal question, said Leeds, would be “Why is there a crowd over there?” Or users could ask about the current state of traffic on roads, crowding in a particular restaurant or whether they should be worried about that smoke they’re smelling in the air. Of course, for this to work well, Ask will need much deeper penetration than 250,000 iPhone users.

As it tries to get social, another limitation for Ask is it doesn’t have much of an existing membership system. Unlike, say, Yahoo, where users are virtually always logged in, Ask has never had a portfolio of products, just search. The company introduced a revamped log-in system in July, but it will have to get many more users to sign in before it can make use of personalization, social connections and network effects to get questions answered. (Hmm…isn’t this what Facebook Connect does?)

Trying Out a Revamped Myspace

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 23:02:26 +0000

Thanks to the popularity of Facebook, it’s easy to assume that all social networks are designed primarily to connect friends with one another. But many of these networks—think Twitter, Yelp and LinkedIn—aren’t focused on that. Instead, they provide information from strangers, business contacts and group postings on a variety of topics. Myspace is now also shifting in this direction after Facebook decisively overtook it as the most popular social network.

Last month, the company rolled out a revamped version of Myspace, which is owned by News Corp., publisher of the Wall Street Journal. I’ve been testing it to see what has changed and if it’s worth using. Its interface is cleaner than the old version of Myspace and I found it easy to navigate. It’s also inviting for non-members or people who’ve long-since given up on Myspace. But I can’t definitely say I like it enough to add it to my large list of social networks.

[ See post to watch video ]

Step one of this site’s rehab was a new focus. Myspace (myspace.com) was redesigned to serve as a source of information about entertainment. People who use it can follow five categories—TV, music, movies, celebrities and comedy—that include more than 100,000 topics. News about these topics comes from sites all over the Web and is arranged on users’ home pages to show loads of information at a glance. A Discovery tab at the top of the page shows content related to trends on Myspace makes suggestions based on a user’s preferences and taste. A spokesman said the Myspace topics can be expanded, but for now, if you’re fonder of, say, books, theater or hard news, Myspace won’t be a good fit.

Step two for Myspace included making nice with its old competitor. It now works with Facebook Connect to pull in people’s Facebook “likes” and interests, which automatically generate customized Myspace pages for new users.

The final step of the Myspace redesign was its emphasis on music. The site still contains one of the largest Web music catalogs that plays full versions of songs for anyone who visits Myspace. New versions of band profile pages look more organized. And all artists with band profiles will have ReverbNation’s FanReach email product integrated into their profile to help them create targeted email campaigns for fans.

Was Myspace’s rehabilitation worth the effort? I’ve been using it for a week and it has taught me a lot more than I knew about things I care about. I had no idea that one of my favorite TV shows, TNT’s “The Closer,” recently said that 2011 would be its last season. Nor did I know that Anthony Bourdain blogs about his role as a judge on “Top Chef Masters.” These items and others appeared on my Home page after I performed the process that the Myspace site refers to as a Facebook Mashup.

The Facebook Mashup does a few things automatically for you, in addition to generating a Myspace page filled with topic-related news. A playlist is created in the Music section of your page that contains artists whom you “like” on Facebook (or whom you indicated while setting up an account). And the Videos section of the Myspace page will reflect your tastes in a list of Followed Channels related to your Facebook preferences.

The Home page can be seen in one of three views—List, Grid or Play—and icons at the top of the screen let users toggle among these views. My favorite was Grid View in the Full Grid View format, visible by clicking a small box at the top of the page.

Some of the content displayed on my Home page was mixed up. For example, a tile representing the story about Mr. Bourdain’s blog (originally posted on Celebrifi.com) displayed with it a photo of actor Tom Cruise, who wasn’t mentioned in that post. Another Tom, Tom Colicchio, chef and a “Top Chef Masters” judge, was mentioned in the post, but that doesn’t explain the mix-up.

Anything that falls into the 100,000 plus topics of Myspace’s realm can be found via a search box in the top right corner of the page, but this box is confusingly labeled, “Search People.” Though Myspace still allows users to search for and friend one another, the label on this search box is puzzling, given the greater reach of the site.

You can watch video content from Hulu.com (of which News Corp. is part owner) without jumping to a new page. And videos also come from other sources like TMZ and the NFL.

Users can earn recognition badges—icons that show up on their page—for their involvement on Myspace, and can become curators of topics, awarded on the basis of users’ involvement and how much other people respond to their activity.

This week, a Myspace mobile app was launched in Apple’s App Store, and an Android app is due out next year.

Myspace successfully reinvented itself in a way that could very well get people using it again, but Facebook’s more personalized social network may be more valuable than a rich library of entertainment content.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Looks Like Facebook Connect Is Coming to Myspace Tomorrow

Liz Gannes — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 06:26:32 +0000

Myspace and Facebook have just invited the press to a joint GoToMeeting webinar (how very not social media!) tomorrow at noon PT. The announcement comes on the heels of a report from the Telegraph on Wednesday that Myspace plans to integrate Facebook Connect “imminently.” Plus, Myspace recently (and perhaps accidentally) introduced a “login with Facebook” option on its sign-up page that was non-functional, as Inside Facebook noticed.

Facebook VP Dan Rose

Presenting at the webinar will be Myspace CEO Mike Jones–who has been pitching Myspace as “a social entertainment destination” rather than a social network–and Dan Rose, VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing for Facebook.

Myspace adding Facebook Connect has been rumored for so long you’d think it had already happened, so hopefully there will be more to the deal than that.

If things go as heralded, this will be the first Facebook announcement in a long time where CEO Mark Zuckerberg has not spoken for the company. Dan Rose is a former Amazon guy who joined Facebook in 2006. He has recently spoken on Facebook’s behalf about a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing to give it social data to improve search, and EA’s five-year exclusive Facebook Credits deal. Rose was previously Facebook’s VP of business development and monetization, and according to Kara Swisher was the main negotiator in Facebook’s failed effort to buy Twitter a couple of years ago.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Path: The Social App That's Not Viral (By Design)

Liz Gannes — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 05:00:26 +0000

Silicon Valley is in the midst of a mini photo-sharing app boomlet. We have Instagram (which started adding 100,000 users per week as soon as it launched last month), Picplz (which beat out Instagram to get a Series A round with their shared investor, Andreessen Horowitz) and as of tonight Path, from former Facebook exec Dave Morin.

Dave Morin

All three companies make mobile apps (primarily on the iPhone) that allow users to take and immediately share images with friends. It seems kind of simple and mundane, but all these smart people seem to think photo-sharing is the future.

Morin and Path are the most convincing about there being a larger idea behind what they’re doing. San Francisco-based Path is stubbornly focused on close personal connections–a.k.a. real friends.

Unlike every other social site, where there’s an implicit pressure to collect as many friends and followers as you can (and at the same time increase the site’s user numbers), Path is only for the people you really know and trust.

In order to force and foster that kind of sharing, Morin’s team has left out many of the social Web features we’re used to. Users can do only two things on Path: Share photos and view them.

There are no reciprocal friend relationships, no likes or comments, no fun photo-editing filters, no publishing photos to services like Facebook and Flickr, no editing something after you post and no global user search (you have to know the email or phone number for anyone you want to add).

And there are additional restrictions. Users can only ever share with a maximum of 50 people (though they can follow more than 50 people, if invited). Every single post has its own privacy settings–you can share with either only the people tagged in it, or only your share list. If you get sick of someone who’s sharing with you, you can “pause” that person until further notice. Users who don’t have iPhones can view photos on the Web.

The most interesting feature for me is that users see which of their contacts have viewed any one photo. So on Path, you can’t lurk in peace. People know when you’ve seen their posts. This might be a little creepy, but it also could cut down on those annoying awkward conversations that sometimes happen when you’ve seen someone post about something online and then they start telling you about it in person.

Photos are tagged with the location where they’re taken automatically, and users can add people and tags. If someone else takes a picture at that same location, tags that have been previously used near that place recently will be at the top of the list.

The idea is those tags will be used to help users relive their memories stored on the service. So, for instance, someone Morin shares with could retrace his “path” of wine tasting in Napa by zooming in on a map of the pictures he posted from California wine country.

But the thing is, if you want to go try Path (which you’ll be able to do in the U.S. and Canada as of 9 pm PT tonight by going to Apple’s App Store, and in the rest of the world within a few hours), it’s going to seem rather empty at first. You’ll have to seek out friends to share with from scratch–but even worse, nobody will be sharing with you until they decide to add you.

Unlike just about every other social service, Path is not really viral. At all. So even though it’s interesting, its numbers are highly unlikely to correspond favorably to those of competitors like Instagram. And after all, how many mobile photo-sharing apps are you really going to use?

“We really prioritize slow organic growth over hyper-viral growth and going after influencers to build this really steep graph,” said Morin, who formerly helped lead Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect before leaving the company in January. “We are building Path to be a 30-year brand.”

He added, “Many of the photo-sharing apps are photo-blogging apps and popularity contests. On Path, you should always feel comfortable being yourself.”

This antiviral stuff almost seems like overkill, but Morin grounds Path’s feature decisions in the theories of the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar (known for the oft-cited “Dunbar’s Number” of 150 acquaintances, he also proposes that 40-60 people is the outer bound of our personal networks) and Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman (who talked about the difference between experience and memory in a well-received TED Talk on happiness).

If this hyper-personal stuff works, I think Path could potentially create a third major category of social network, distinct from the kind of relationships found on the two current giants, Facebook and Twitter. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves–and c’mon Dave, you should really let people comment on and like their friends’ photos.

Path was co-founded by Morin, Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau, both formerly of Napster. The staff also includes Mallory Paine, who helped engineer the iPhone photo and camera apps for Apple, and Matt Van Horn, who formerly did business development at Digg. Fanning is chairman and landlord of the company but is working on his own other projects day-to-day.

Path has already raised a jumbo seed round with Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Founders Fund and Betaworks. The company also provided us with an extensive list of individual angel investors: Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, Keith Rabois, Dustin Moskovitz, Marc Benioff, Gary Vaynerchuk, Steve Anderson, Tim Draper, Joi Ito, Fadi Ghandour, Matt Cohler, Sam Lessin, Bill Randuchel, Karl Jacob, Paul Buchheit, Ruchi Sanghvi, John Couch, Michael Parekh, Claudio Chiuchiarelli, Maurice Werdegar, Don Dodge, and Chris Kelly.

Welcome to NetworkEffect!

Liz Gannes — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 08:06:03 +0000

Hi there, I’m Liz Gannes.

You may know me from my writings at GigaOM, where I covered topics like the social Web and online video for the last four years. If this is your first time reading me, I hope you’ll find my writing, reporting and analysis worth sticking around for.

My beat at All Things Digital is All Things Social, and you’ll be able to find my stories under the heading NetworkEffect, named after the idea that a community of users makes a service valuable for everyone who joins.

On the social Web, network effects help us improve the lives of our friends, family and neighbors, when we sign up for the same Web services and share our lives and experiences; they also factor in the power of critical mass to create new businesses from scratch. In the six years I’ve been a tech reporter, companies I’ve watched being born–such as Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube–have come to be major parts of people’s lives around the world. And I think that’s pretty awesome.

Of course, not everyone agrees. Example du jour: In this month’s New York Review of Books, the author Zadie Smith (whose novels I like very much) applied her considerable forces of perception to Facebook and the implications of its creation myth. Smith’s credentials to analyze Facebook are: She was a fellow at Harvard University when it was founded, she spent only two months trying the service before leaving it, she’s a full nine years older than Mark Zuckerberg (ancient!), and she calls herself a “private person.”

In her piece, Smith charged that Facebook encourages highly superficial, low-effort communication that threatens to replace actual relationships and experiences. She cited Jaron Lanier to assert that computers cannot represent actual human relationships, and, further, that the limitations of a tool can shape what its users think is possible.

So, basically, Facebook is devaluing the way we relate to each other.

Smith thinks her problems with Facebook come back to the site being created by Zuckerberg as an immature college sophomore who desperately wanted to be liked. “If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out,” she wrote. “[T]o Zuckerberg sharing your choices with everybody (and doing what they do) is being somebody.”

If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.

Smith noted in the piece that she doesn’t actively use Facebook herself, but she looked up some of Zuckerberg’s recent public comments and keenly observes that the Facebook CEO “uses the word ‘connect’ as believers use the word ‘Jesus,’ as if it were sacred in and of itself.”

Personally, I see my relationships extended and improved on Facebook, whether it’s knowing what my extended family is up to on a daily basis, or the great conversations I’ve had in the past few days about Death Valley, after I posted an album of pictures from my between-jobs road trip to the desert last week.

Still, I don’t often find visiting Facebook to be deeply satisfying either. But, whereas Smith sees reasons to run away screaming, I see an opportunity to better address some of the parts she finds lacking.

The real story here?

It’s about the capability of the social Web to improve so it better serves and extends our real-world relationships. It’s about the fact that these sites and apps are created by people whose versions of the world are expressed in them. It’s about the potential to communicate with people you don’t know, to cultivate and reward passionate fans and to learn the dark art of self-promotion. It’s about the wide-open opportunity to improve on and compete with Facebook, which is still really far away from delivering on its potential to improve the lives of the half-billion people who already use it regularly and the many more who don’t. Simply put, there’s a lot more to be done.

And that’s what I want to write about.

(P.S. As detailed in my ethics statement, which I will keep updated, my husband is a part-time employee at Facebook. His work is not a part of my reporting, and I obviously find the company fascinating and will not shy away from writing about it–both the good parts and the bad ones. )

Steve Jobs on Why Facebook Is Not Part of Apple's New Ping Music Social Network: "Onerous Terms"

Kara Swisher — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:05:03 +0000

Yesterday, at the Apple music event in San Francisco, I had a short chat with Apple CEO Steve Jobs as he strolled through the demo room for the media, just after he had announced various updates for the iPod, Apple TV and iTunes onstage.

One of the those was the introduction of a new social network for music called Ping that Apple (AAPL) has integrated within iTunes 10 and which looks an awful lot like the experience you get on Facebook.

Essentially, it is a vertical version–in this case for music–of the powerful social networking site.

Facebook has noodled for years about creating its own social music offering, including doing a partnership with Lala, which was bought by Apple last year and shuttered in June.

But its efforts have largely gone nowhere.

And Facebook is nowhere on Ping, either. Currently, there is no linking, sharing or participation of any kind with Facebook–or Twitter or MySpace–on Ping, which will work only on the iTunes software on computers, iPhones and iPods.

When I asked Jobs about that, he said Apple had indeed held talks with Facebook about a variety of unspecified partnerships related to Ping, but the discussions went nowhere.

The reason, according to Jobs: Facebook wanted “onerous terms that we could not agree to,” related to connecting with Facebook friends on Ping.

For those who are struck by the word, the definition of onerous, according to an online dictionary: “Involving an amount of effort and difficulty that is oppressively burdensome; Involving heavy obligations.”

Jobs did not elaborate on those troublesome terms and also would not say if Ping would incorporate connecting with Facebook or even using Facebook Connect–which would make it much easier to find friends to share music with.

“We could, I guess,” he shrugged.

And when I asked how to find friends, Jobs offered, noting iTunes had 160 million users across the globe: “You can type their names into search or send them emails inviting them to join.”

Okay, although being more open would work too!

As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka noted:

“Maybe Apple plans on joining the rest of the Web, via an open API that will let Facebook, Twitter et al–maybe even the to-be-launched Google (GOOG) music service–play nicely with Ping. We’ll see.”

Facebook–including some execs who are definitely irked about how closely Ping resembles Facebook, right down to the blue color scheme–hopes so.

Consider the statement issued by Facebook to me–after attempts to get it verbally failed, due ironically to several dropped connections on the iPhone of the exec I spoke to:

“Facebook believes in connecting people with their interests and we’ve partnered with innovative developers around the world who share this vision. Facebook and Apple have cooperated successfully in the past to offer people great social experiences and we look forward to doing so in the future.”

In other words: Zing, Ping.

UPDATE: Oddly enough, a Facebook connection feature appeared to be in Ping when some signed up–not for me–as noted by Cult of Mac. And Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer even spotted the wording in Jobs’s stage presentation. I have an email into Apple PR asking for a comment on the change.

In any case, at the Apple event, Jobs told me he had great hopes for the social music service, adding that Ping could be the most significant thing to come out of yesterday’s announcements.

But soon enough he moved right on to the new iPods, declaring enthusiastically: “Isn’t the nano amazing?”

Inside Ford's App-Happy Fiesta–But No Manilow (and BoomTown is a Fanilow)!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:51:41 +0000

Last week, outside the Facebook f8 developers conference, BoomTown checked out the new 2011 Fiesta model, which will be the first vehicle in which smartphone apps can be voice-controlled via its in-car synching software.

While getting a test, I interviewed the Ford dude–Julius Marchwiki–who has been in all the YouTube videos of late touting its digital prowess.

Ford has been trying to fast-forward its automobiles in the digital space to try to differentiate itself from other car makers, using SYNC AppLink, as well as other innovative Web-friendly features.

In December, Ford (F) said it would make the next generation of its SYNC-enabled vehicles into Wi-Fi hotspots, allowing drivers and passengers to connect to the Internet everywhere much more seamlessly in a moving car.

Presumably, the ultimate in mobile.

One speed bump: SYNC AppLink will work only with Google (GOOG) Android and Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry devices for now, although Ford promises an Apple (AAPL) iPhone solution soon.

Pandora Internet radio, online talk radio aggregator Stitcher and mobile Twitter client OpenBeak are the first SYNC-enabled mobile applications.

Here’s my interview with Marchwiki, as well as Scott Monty, Ford’s social media guru:

[ See post to watch video ]

Yahoo's "Project Rushmore" Begins With Massive Facebook Connect Deployment Across Internet Giant

Kara Swisher — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:30:25 +0000

A few weeks ago, several sources at Yahoo begin telling BoomTown about a mysterious “Project Rushmore,” which was described as a massive integration of major social networking sites across the giant Internet portal.

Now, the first unveiling of Project Rushmore comes with this morning’s announcement that Yahoo (YHOO) will be integrating Facebook Connect with its many properties–from its powerful media sites to its Flickr photo service to its email.

Once deployed–in the first half of next year, said Yahoo–Yahoo users can monitor their full Facebook feed on the site and Facebook users will have their Yahoo activity displayed on their news feed, if they choose to.

The companies said no money will be exchanged in the five-year deal; nor will there be any other financial or advertising element.

This is a major step for Yahoo, which has long touted its openness, and a significant upgrade to the company’s relationship with Facebook.

It’s also more than ironic, as Yahoo had been very close to acquiring Facebook for just over $1 billion several years ago, in a should-have deal that went south.

Currently, Facebook users can update their status and access their stream via an app on the Yahoo homepage. They can also share to Facebook using buttons on Yahoo, and Facebook can access contacts on Yahoo.

But the relationship between the pair–which have some of the largest audiences on the Web between them–has been relatively thin until now.

This has been a glaring problem for Yahoo, which has also promised a lot of socialization throughout the service, but has not really provided it for users. The company hopes this tight link with the fast-growing Facebook will send users back to Yahoo.

Facebook–via Facebook Connect, which allows users to log on to participating sites with their identity on the service–is perhaps the bigger winner here.

The huge amount of data from the activities from one of the most trafficked sites on the Web–with upward of 500 million users–will further solidify its growing role as a central hub of a user’s Web life.

Another irony: This was the role Yahoo held for many years and has been losing to, yes, Facebook.

Yahoo is still aiming to be the central hub for a lot of people too, said Jim Stoneham, Yahoo’s VP of Communities, who noted that slightly more than half of Yahoo users also have Facebook accounts.

“That’s highly relevant that a lot of people use both,” said Stoneham. “So, there should be a strong bond across both sites.”

Added Stoneham: “This will be a done on a deep level into Yahoo.”

Stoneheam declined to comment on whether and when the service would be striking similar deals with other networking sites.

But sources told me that Twitter and LinkedIn are likely candidates, as well as MySpace.

That would, of course, account for the four presidential stone faces on Mount Rushmore–George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.

Other big Internet companies are getting into the social act. Separately, both Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) recently struck a data-mining deal with Twitter and Microsoft also did so with Facebook.

So, such an overall move by Yahoo is an important and necessary one–and also very late in coming–since it completely missed the social networking train and needs to figure out how to be part of it in a way that is useful to users and open.

“This relationship pushes us really far forward [toward openness],” said Cody Simms, senior director of product management for Yahoo’s open strategy. “And it helps our users be more social, which they want to be wherever they are.”

And presumably, Yahoo hopes these moves will keep users on Yahoo a little longer while doing that.

Here is the full blog post from Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal by Stoneham:

Update once to share with many on Yahoo! and Facebook

Posted December 2nd, 2009 at 6:29 am by Lucas Mast, Blog Editor

We have good news to share with everyone who uses Yahoo! and Facebook–in the first half of 2010 we will open the door between two of the Internet’s largest online communities. You will be able to see your Facebook friends’ activities on Yahoo! and share Yahoo! content–ratings, photos, article comments, and more–directly on your Facebook stream. We’re doing this by deeply integrating a service called Facebook Connect across Yahoo! properties worldwide, which we announced today.

As the place where over 500 million people visit every month, Yahoo!’s goal is to bring together social experiences from across the web, and provide one place for people to access information and stay in touch with the people they care about most.

Yahoo!’s integration of Facebook Connect will provide you with richer experiences across the Yahoo! products you use every day, such as Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Sports. In the future, you’ll be able to choose where you want to update your status message–from destinations across Yahoo!–or directly on Facebook.

We are doing this as part of our commitment to deliver more personally relevant Internet experiences, so watch for more details in the New Year!

Jim Stoneham, VP of Communities for Yahoo!

And, if you are a glutton for punishment, here’s the full press release from Yahoo:

Yahoo! Extends Facebook Integration to Bring Together Social Experiences From Across the Web

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Dec. 2, 2009–Continuing its commitment to be the center of people’s online lives, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) today announced further integration with Facebook that unites social experiences from across the Web to provide a place for consumers to enjoy meaningful content and stay in touch with the people they care about most.

“With this integration, we are opening the door for two of the Internet’s largest online communities to make it easier for people to stay connected,” said Jim Stoneham, vice president of Communities for Yahoo!. “It also enables us to further the Yahoo! Open Strategy, which is aimed at making experiences dramatically more open, social and personally relevant for the more than 500 million people that visit Yahoo! each month.”

Yahoo!’s Facebook Connect integration will give consumers richer experiences on Yahoo!, including in Yahoo! Mail and on properties like Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, and Yahoo! Finance. It will enable them to connect with Facebook friends on Yahoo!, view a feed of their friends’ related activity on Yahoo!, and share content–such as photos from Flickr or comments on news stories–with all of their friends on Facebook. The content that consumers share with Facebook friends will then create a loop that drives visitors back to Yahoo!.

This partnership extends the current Facebook integration on Yahoo! which enables Facebook users to access their stream and update their status from the Yahoo! homepage, provides “Share on Facebook” options across the Yahoo! network, and allows Facebook to access Yahoo! Contacts. People using both Yahoo! and Facebook will soon be able to share updates across both networks, creating a richer and more relevant social experience by connecting the broad range of Yahoo! content and services with their friends on Facebook.

“As one of the largest sites on the Web, Yahoo! is an ideal partner to integrate with Facebook Connect, enabling users to share meaningful content with their friends on Facebook from Yahoo’s wide range of category-leading properties,” said Ethan Beard, director of Facebook Developer Network.

The integration is expected to begin in the first half of 2010.

[Photo credit: Dean Franklin under the Creative Commons attribution license.

Nice Comment.

Kara Swisher — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 07:25:05 +0000

BoomTown gets guff about a lot of stuff, but no one is more passionate than those who wanted us to make our comment system better.

And they were right.

So while we never move fast enough, even for ourselves, tonight we have launched a new comments tool to improve the user experience on AllThingsD.com.

It lets you do cool things, such as log in using Facebook Connect, comment easily from a mobile phone and comment via email.

The tool we chose is called Disqus, and it’s used pretty widely on the Web (see Fred Wilson’s site, A VC, for a good example).

In fact, you might already have a Disqus profile that you use on other sites.

But, because we know how annoying change can be, we were able to port over all of the old comments from our site to the new system, although there might be a glitch or two (which we will fix!).

In addition, those who have already signed up as commenters on ATD can continue to comment as they always have always without further sign-ups.

We hope the change makes it more fun (and interesting) for you to comment and interact with us and with one other.

Please let us know if you have any problems at all and we will get to them asap!

Let the feedback begin!

A Twitter Spinoff Launches for Moms

Elizabeth Holmes — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 22:45:58 +0000

Can mommy bloggers become mommy tweeters?

A new microblogging site targeting moms and modeled after Twitter launched Friday. Rachael Herrscher, a 31-year-old mother of three, has added the abbreviated commenting feature to her site Today’s Mama.

Ms. Herrscher is not the first to rip off the idea of Twitter. The more popular the site becomes–it is adding millions of users by the month–the more knockoffs pop up. There are Twitter clones for different countries and a handful by subject or topic.

Dubbed “Connect” on Today’s Mama, Ms. Herrscher’s version has several Twitter traits. Posts are constrained to 140 characters or less, comments directed at someone begin with the “@” symbol and topics are marked by the “#” symbol.

Unlike Twitter, however, Today’s Mama has a group function. Ms. Herrscher has created groups by region, such as Bay Area Mamas, and topics, such as parents of teens or the book “Twilight.” After a user joins a group, she can send a message to it by adding an exclamation point and the group name.

Read the rest of this post

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Vista Service Pack 1

John Paczkowski — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:00:34 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Sony CONNECT Disaster Impressively Well Realized

John Paczkowski — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 12:04:24 +0000

Sony ATRAC is at long last joining Betamax, MiniDisc, Sony Dynamic Digital Sound, HiFD, (pause for breath) Multi-Media Compact Disc, Memory Stick and Super Audio CD in the company’s Museum of Failed Formats.

After an overlong and unsuccessful campaign to spread adoption of ATRAC, Sony is scrapping the proprietary audio format. This morning the company said it would close its CONNECT digital music store and forthcoming Walkman digital media players will support formats that consumers actually use like Windows Media Audio, along with MP3 and AAC (or advanced audio coding). “Customers don’t want to be locked into one service, consumers are demanding choice in music,” said Jeffrey Van Ede, Sony Europe audio marketing VP. “There has been a fundamental shift in legal downloading, and that is toward DRM-free music.”

And what of those few Sony customers who actually own ATRAC music? For them the company’s offering an MP3 Conversion Tool and some advice that CONNECT users have been likely following for some time now: “For your purchased music from CONNECT, you can burn it to audio CD and rerip it into MP3 format to continue enjoying it for personal use.”