Like its parent company, Facebook, Instagram plans to roll out an added layer of identity to its 100-million-strong photo-sharing service with the introduction of a new section and feature called “Photos of You.”

It’s two things, primarily: One, it’s pretty much the introduction of photo tagging to Instagram. Take a picture of yourself and some friends, and you’re able to stick their name inside your photo via their Instagram handle. Sorta like the way you stick an @mention in the caption, only this @mention lives inside the picture itself.

(It’s worth noting here that you’re only adding Instagram users to photos, not Facebook users — despite the nature of the relationship between the two services.)

Then comes the second part: Any photos tagged with your name will be added to the new tab inside your Instagram profile, aptly named “Photos of You.” Again, like Facebook photo tagging, it’s a way of crowdsourcing your online presence in photos, collecting all of the shots you’ve been tagged in and sticking them in your Photos of You tab. You can curate it as you please, approving and nixing which pics show up in the tab. And the privacy level depends on whether your IG profile itself is public or private. (It’s either publicly viewable or it isn’t. No in-between like Facebook.)

Tons of privacy arguments to be made here, I’m sure, which I will let my other colleagues in the Fourth Estate handle. What’s most interesting to me, for the moment, are the potential implications for brands and businesses who use Instagram.

Say I’m Nike, one of the brands with a large presence on Instagram. Normally, I’m curating my Instagram stream to show off the best products I sell. You follow my Instagram account and see the cool stuff I have for sale. Hurrah.

A tagged business photo, courtesy of a user

Fascinating! Although it’s admittedly contingent on whether Instagram users actually take the time to tag brands in the photos they produce. But potentially a boon for brands who want to bulk up their stream of content with minimal work — all they need to do is feature the best user-generated shots.

Interesting, too, considering Instagram’s dust-up last year concerning placing ads against user photos in the future. Last year, when Instagram first tweaked some of its terms-of-service language concerning advertising, everyone freaked out at the thought of, say, having a Geico ad slapped atop their precious baby’s face. So Instagram walked it back a bit to appease the angry mob of users.

But Instagram never killed the idea entirely. It basically said, “Sorry for making y’all mad. We’ll come back with a better explanation when it’s time to monetize.” This could be another step in the direction of monetization. Is a user’s tagging their own photo with a brand’s name a sort of implicit agreement to place ads against it? I don’t know — maybe, maybe not.

Another possibility: Maybe ads never come near the Photos of You tab, and perhaps brands ask users if they can share their tagged photos on Facebook, where there are already ad products. Get the permission to incorporate real user-generated Instagram content into an existing Facebook ad product, and you don’t need to worry about slotting ads into the Instagram stream itself. Big idea, that.

Whatever the case, now I believe Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s line about Instagram from yesterday’s first-quarter earnings call: “They’re really doing well and growing quickly, and that is the right focus for them,” he said. “They have the opportunity to … build community.”

In other words, this is a move toward growth, discoverability and community first and foremost. But if it actually works, imagine this as a big step toward a future where Instagram could actually be a moneymaker.

ForgeRock, a San Francisco startup led by a bunch of former Sun Microsystems execs, announced today that it has secured a $15 million Series B round of venture capital funding. Accel Partners, which led its $7 million Series A last year, also participated. Warren Weiss, a general partner at Foundation, will join the board of advisers.

I say “another player” because identity and access management is sort of a hot area these days. For one thing, companies are adding all sorts of cloud services to the mix of their IT operations, so there’s a significant need to make managing all the account credentials easier.

The one that comes most readily to mind is Okta, led by Todd McKinnon, a former Salesforce.com executive. It, too, has been raising a lot of money. And even Salesforce.com is making noise about getting into the identity game.

ForgeRock’s approach is based on open source software to provide a single sign-in across pretty much any kind of cloud environment, including public, private and hybrid. It also works with lots of software-as-a-service applications and mobile apps.

So far it has about 200 customers, including Thomson Reuters, Vodafone, McKesson and AOL.

The team is led by Mike Ellis, a former SAP exec who has also spent time at Oracle and Apple. CTO Lasse Andresen was also CTO for Sun’s European divisions. Jamie Nelson, VP of Engineer, was Sun’s director of engineering.

Several of the senior execs hail from Sun and worked on its identity products, including Sun Director EE and OpenSSO. After Oracle closed its acquisition of Sun in 2010, Sun’s identity products took a back seat to existing Oracle products. Several members of the ForgeRock team bolted Oracle to start their own identity outfit based on open source approaches.

As it turns out, Oracle is ending support for certain Sun identity products, so ForgeRock is going after their customers, specifically marketing a “Sun Replacement” — essentially an upgrade from Open SSO to its own OpenIDM. So now their old employer is a competitor.

Late last year, it landed a significant round of venture capital funding, a $25 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital. Prior investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and Floodgate all participated, too. The round nudged Okta’s total capital raised to north of $52 million.

The funding announcement was accompanied by a larger vision statement about what Okta aims to achieve. In that statement, CEO Todd McKinnon argued that “identity is central to how work gets done in a business,” meaning that Okta aims to be a lot more than the company that makes it easy to manage account credentials.

I recently had a chance to catch up with McKinnon in New York to talk about what he meant by that, and to flesh out what he sees happening at Okta in the coming year.

AllThingsD: You’ve just landed a big C round investment, but it coincided with the publication of a big vision statement. What is the vision statement all about?

McKinnon: I think people misunderstand a lot of things about our company. The first thing they think is that we’re just for cloud stuff. And CIOs and other people thinking about building the next generation of their IT environment don’t want two identity systems. They don’t want the old that barely worked, and the new one that doesn’t talk to the old one. They want one. And we’re positioned to build that. We’re trying to be more aggressive at communicating that.

Initially, everyone understood the identity layer to be a simple manner of managing all the credentials for using cloud services. Now you’re reaching into more on-premise products. How much of a pivot is that for you?

The vision has always been about a single identity layer for everything. The reality is that we started as a little cloud company; the most receptive buyers were companies doing a lot of cloud stuff. So that was how we communicated about ourselves to the marketplace. And now the product has matured to a point where we can really communicate about the vision, about a unified way of managing identity.

Give me some sense of momentum. Funding is certainly an indirect indicator, but what else is going on?

We have, in the last year, added 140 enterprise customers, which brings us to more than 200. We’ve added 300,000 end users. Those are paid enterprise-user seats, which means there’s real money behind them, and that has brought our total user footprint to 500,000.

The obvious thing that people start wondering about a company like yours is when you might be ripe for acquisition, or if you’re going to go the distance. I can think of a handful of cloud and software companies, like Salesforce.com or Oracle or IBM, that could be logical buyers. What are your thoughts about this?

We’re building the identity layer for the next generation of corporate IT. Everyone is going to want to do something like this. You saw Saleforce’s announcement that they want to do this, too. This is clearly something strategic. The value of our product comes from it being in the hands of a neutral party. Our customers want Switzerland; they don’t want someone like, say, a Salesforce.com or a Google, because it would be beholden to their own apps.

I’m reminded that David Sacks, the CEO at Yammer, used to say something similar about being Switzerland when asked about being acquired. Look what happened there: Yammer is now part of Microsoft. Couldn’t the same thing happen to you? And what would it mean if it did?

It’s different for us. If you never connected Yammer to anything, it could be valuable. If any one of our integration partners, say, Jive or Box, or any one of those companies cuts us off, the value of the product goes down. So it’s different in that regard. The Yammer platform is still valuable with no integrations. Our platform is not. So I think that’s a big difference. It gets back to the funding. We’re venture-backed. At the end of the day, I have a responsibility to my shareholders, and we have to build enough momentum in the company to have the outcome of not being acquired, to be superior in the minds of my shareholders than the outcome of being acquired. Clearly at Yammer, they couldn’t do that.

Now you jumped ahead to my next question. Salesforce’s Marc Benioff announced a plan to create a competitor to Okta, and we talked about it at the time. How far, to the extent that you’re aware, has that effort come along? Are you worried about it?

Anytime a big company announces they want to compete with you, you should be worried. They said they’re going to build a product, and that’s definitely going to be a competitive threat. The reality is that Salesforce is doing a lot of things, and they’re spread very thinly. I don’t think they’re going to make the kind of investment necessary.

What will you do with the money?

The big thing is to build out the product. Right now, it’s robust, scalable, used by tons of customers live. But there’s a lot of work to do on it. We have 2,000 connectors to different applications and services, but there’s more than 2,000 of those. We need 20,000 connectors and then we need 50,000. We need to really expand that number and connect to everything. Every device, every application, every platform. So we’re going to use the money to build the product in that way. If a customer has an application that’s built by some regional provider, with maybe 50 customers in some niche business, to a customer in a certain vertical, that application is very important. They don’t want to have some kind of one-off situation where they can sign in to everything they use, but not this one thing. And it’s not economical for us to go out and build the connector ourselves. So we need to have a platform where someone can go and build the connector themselves and share it with anyone who might need it. The thing about our platform, because it’s based in the cloud, is that it can be maintained and supported over time. There’s also some exciting things we can do with helping companies collaborate with each other. So if two companies are using Okta, they can connect their systems across firewalls more easily. That’s the identity network we’ve been talking about.

But Mine, a new start-up focused on exactly this sort of thing, operates on a different premise: Embarrassing or no, we are what we buy.

In other words, it’s another stab at mapping our online identities. But instead of relying on our ever-expanding web of social connections — such as Facebook — or the myriad topics of interest that catch our fancies on a moment-by-moment basis — like Twitter — Mine goes after our e-paper trail, piecing together a picture of a user from a history of their e-commerce activities.

“Over the next few years, purchase history is going to become perhaps the biggest component of your online identity,” co-founder Pierre Legrain said in an interview. “Right now, it’s spread out all over the place. Mine should be the repository that you control — it’s the master copy of your purchases.”

The idea is fairly simple. Log into Mine with Twitter or Facebook and grant the app access to your Gmail or Yahoo email account. From there, Mine combs through your purchase history of receipts from Amazon, Etsy, iTunes and Zappos, retrieving a master list of your purchases. After that, you’re able to choose which purchases you want showing up in your Mine identity (thank god), and publish them to your account.

From here, it’s much like other social platforms — you’re headed into the stream. Based on a follow/follower model like Twitter (a company Legrain once worked for), you’re able to scroll through the stream to see your friends’ recent purchases, complete with annotated comments sections and the ability to “heart” things. There are links tacked on to each purchase entry, so if you like something one of your friends bought, you can click through and get one yourself.

So, a question: Is this little more than a collection of items you’d otherwise be “liking” on your Facebook page? Or, say, a Pinterest board of items you own or want to own? It seems like the territory is already rife with potential competition.

Legrain refutes this (obviously). He believes the verbs themselves — “like” for Facebook, “pin” or want for Pinterest, and “own” for Mine — are on separate trajectories. “Liking and wanting things creates tons of volume, but in terms of ownership, it is a completely different bucket in people’s minds,” Legrain said.

In other words, there’s room for his start-up not to get big-footed upon by a giant competitor (hopefully).

That may be true, but the more difficult part is making room for another social networking app in consumers’ minds. Keeping people engaged and in the feed is an uphill battle. And with existing competition from players like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter (to say little of Path and Pinterest), Mine has its work cut out for it, no matter how active our spending habits.

Mine is available in the App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch, as well as on the Web.

Good taste not included.

His note went to the dealership—but it also went, without his knowledge, to a company that tracks car shoppers online. In a flash, an analysis of the auto websites Mr. Morar had anonymously visited could be paired with his real name and studied by his local car dealer.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Seeking to resolve that pesky problem, Google is integrating its Google+ social platform to the Play store, now requiring users to log in to a Google+ account in order to leave feedback on Android apps.

It solves Google’s identity problem, much like how Facebook made its “Comments” plugin available to outside Web sites that were tired of seeing their comments sections polluted with vitriolic posts. The thesis: Internet trolls flourish behind pseudonyms and anonymity, slinging mud and off-topic content from a place of impunity. Connect a form of social ID verification to these accounts and, ideally, the comment areas in question will improve.

Along with your name, your Google+ profile picture will be stuck next to every review word you’ve typed on Play. It’s Social Contract Theory in action, and it has seemed to stymie trollish actions when enacted — or for Facebook, at least.

Moreover, it’s yet another small step by Google to connect its disparate sites via one single thread. Or a “social spine,” as CEO Larry Page described Google+ on a conference call earlier this year. Other steps in that vein include the slow spreading of “Hangouts” over to Gmail, as well as the social bar flanking the top of the screen on all of Google’s Web properties.

The big question: Will Google eventually mandate that YouTube commenters — arguably one of the most troll-ridden corners of the Internet, outside of 4chan — use their Google+ profiles on the video site? Currently, users have the option to do so, but it’s not a necessity. It could clean up the wasteland that is YouTube’s comment section — and lord knows, YouTube needs it (though I’ll admit some of those comments make for unintentional hilarity).

As far as solving the troll problem goes, I doubt we’ll see a complete and utter end to it with the new Google+ system. Apple and Android enthusiasts are some of the most vehemently opinionated (and oft rather unpleasant) commenters on the Web, polarized like modern branches of the Democratic and Republican parties. While the identity layer may take out some of the bite on Play comments, I’d still expect some level of incivility.

There are identity thieves, stalkers and people generally trying to take advantage of you.

At least that was one of the things that I took away from a privacy conference last week in Seattle, where the word “creepy” slipped into the conversation as a description of everything from location-based services to more cutting edge Internet businesses.

But advocates argued that the cure for creepy was to make services relevant and useful — not spammy and invasive. In other words, consumers are willing to share their information — age, gender, location — if there’s a benefit to them.

I moderated a panel titled “Building Trust in the Sharing Economy,” which addressed identity issues as people become more comfortable using the Internet to find babysitters, rent out their apartments or lend their car to strangers.

In those cases, honest people typically don’t mind sharing information about themselves in order to be considered a trustworthy consumer or provider. It’s a red flag if they don’t.

Sonny Singh, the VP of sales and business development at Jumio, said it’s not creepy when you show your driver’s license to Hertz when you’re renting a car or to a hotel when you’re checking in. That’s why it shouldn’t be viewed as strange when you use sharing services like Airbnb or RelayRides.

But he said, instead, “they are assuming from your Facebook profile that you are who you say you are.”

Jumio is developing technology that allows users to verify their identity by entering their credit card and driver’s license information using a webcam or camera phone.

Participants in the panel (from left to right in the picture) are: Tricia Duryee, AllThingsD; Drummond Reed, founder, Connect.me; Sam Rosen, co-founder, Scaffold; Xin Chung, CEO and founder, Trustcloud; and Singh.

Here’s a video of the whole discussion, but you can skip to around the 26-minute mark to hear the whole discussion on “creepy.”

A month ago, I posted an initial list of speakers for the 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

After a decade, the event — which is held in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., just south of Los Angeles, at the end of May — has attracted another amazing group of speakers, including: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with the social business site’s CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

Now, here’s another group of stellar speakers we’ve added to the programming lineup (and there are still even more big names to come in the weeks ahead): Oracle CEO Larry Ellison; former tech analyst superstar and now VC Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins; Intellectual Ventures’ Nathan Myhrvold; Pixar co-founder and Disney animation head Dr. Ed Catmull; and Visa President John Partridge.

Larry Ellison, CEO and founder of the enterprise giant Oracle, needs little introduction, as one of tech’s highest profile figures and a true Silicon Valley icon. Frankly, I think the short bio that’s on Oracle’s Web site says it all: “Larry Ellison has been CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977. He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.” There will be a lot to talk about with the voluble and always entertaining exec — who appeared at the D conference once before many years ago — from the current state of the tech industry to insights to where it’s all going. (In addition, Ellison has agreed to appear on a panel we are doing as a tribute to his close friend, Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs.)

Another well-known tech figure is Meeker, who is now a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, having joined the storied venture capital firm in early 2011. She focuses there on investments in its digital practice and via KP’s Digital Growth Fund, working with companies such as Spotify, Jawbone and One King’s Lane. But Meeker is perhaps best known for her long stint — 1991 to 2010 — as a star Internet research analyst at Morgan Stanley, where she brought many of the Internet’s great companies to the attention of Wall Street and beyond. She also wrote a series of groundbreaking reports on the landscape. That includes her annual “State of the Internet,” which Meeker will debut this year at the conference in an extended demo of her always riveting Internet trends presentation.

Nathan Myhrvold is also a tech legend, having worked for 14 years as chief strategist and CTO of Microsoft. But, instead of retiring, the avid inventor decided to focus on patents, founding and leading a controversial company called Intellectual Ventures, which buys them up and licenses them out (or sues if it doesn’t sell). With all the mishegas around patents right now, it’s a good time to have Myhrvold back to explain it all and perhaps to take some of the blame for the explosion in intellectual property lawsuits. (Myhrvold also co-authored a cookbook, “Modernist Cuisine,” so we hope we will also get some sort of futuristic cooking demo. Perhaps, Patently Delicious Flan?)

Speaking of tasty, the animation from Pixar over the years has been just that and it’s been one of Disney’s greatest acquisitions. Given how much Pixar has contributed to animation technology, we are glad to finally get Dr. Ed Catmull onstage. As co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, he will discuss where entertainment and technology are intersecting and where they are not. Catmull is a geek’s geek in the industry — having also founded the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology, the computer division of Lucasfilm, as well as Pixar, which he did with chief creative officer John Lasseter. Get ready to talk about image compositing, motion blur, subdivision surfaces, cloth simulation and rendering techniques, texture mapping and the z-buffer. Also, Catmull’s five Academy Awards.

Lastly, it is perfect timing for bringing on John Partridge, president of Visa. With swirling issues around online identity theft, digital privacy, the future of money and the rise of upstart competitors such as Square, Partridge has his hands full at the credit card giant. One of the most neglected arenas in tech, the way we manage payments is perhaps the biggest story of the next era, especially as it relates to mobile and the rise of smartphones as all-purpose devices.

In a forceful Gizmodo essay called “The Case Against Google,” Mat Honan argues that Google has become evil, because the company’s leadership now realizes that, in a world divided into apps and social networks, playing on the open Web won’t cut it anymore.

Google is in the process of tying all its products together so our usage of each one can inform the others, but it hasn’t really told users what’s going on and what it means. And as its set of products becomes more interwoven, Google is cross-promoting them ahead of the competition.

As Honan accurately describes the situation, in order to answer complex and subjective queries, Google needs to know a lot about the person asking the question. And that requires entrusting Google with lots of our private data and control.

But I want to live in a world where I can use the best tools and they work together. I don’t necessarily need Google to be the one to connect everything, but I’m not opposed to Google making it happen with some combination of its own products and other people’s.

Here’s a scenario that sticks in my mind. I want my phone to buzz me to say, “Hey, you should really leave now, because with the extra traffic today, your next meeting is 35 minutes away.”

And then the phone should tell me what I need to know about who I’m meeting with, and show me our recent correspondence and his or her latest tweets, and what friends and interests and experiences we have in common. It should tell me exactly where the meeting is and what’s a good place to park, and then it should start speaking turn-by-turn directions. If traffic gets worse, it should help compose a text to the person’s cell number that says I’ll be a few minutes late, and help me send it without distracting me from driving.

If you think about it, the who, what, where and when of a meeting are often split into four different apps: Our contacts, email, maps and calendar. That’s redundant, annoying and totally ridiculous on a phone, where I need to glance down and see what I need to know, now, before I walk into a pole.

I really like a lot of Google products. I don’t imagine I’ll ever voluntarily leave Gmail. Google Voice and its voicemail transcriptions make my life so much easier. As a voracious news consumer, I live in Google Reader. The Chrome browser is excellent. I’m generally quite happy when these products work together; for instance, when Gmail recognizes an event invitation in an email and helps put it on my calendar.

But when I’m looking for local stuff, I generally prefer Yelp and Foursquare to Google’s local products. If I want the latest news and commentary, I need my Twitter. Facebook is where the people are, and the good stuff is on Path and Instagram. I chat on Skype and AIM all the time. We run AllThingsD’s editorial team on WordPress and Socialcast. On my phone, I’ve recently gotten lots of value out of Highlight (dossiers on who’s nearby), Orchestra (to-dos), and Quora and Pinterest (for high-quality text and photos).

In many cases, Google has a competing product. I don’t want to be forced to use Google’s product, and I don’t want my favorite apps to have to live as subjects on a Google-owned platform (or, for that matter, a Facebook-owned platform). What I’d like is for these services to work together and share data respectfully.

If Google wants to push its unification agenda, it should do a better job of explaining why that’s a good thing for me. We billion users, many of whom have been on Google for five years or more, should be given a fair chance to decide whether we want to opt in.

But again, I don’t think unification is a bad thing, if it can be done right. In app form, the closest thing I’ve used to have my online identity unified for my own sake is Greplin. Being a fairly trusting person, I’ve given this start-up access to search across my personal data on my multiple Google email accounts, calendars and docs, plus my Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Each time I open Greplin, it guesses that I probably want to search for information about the people in my calendar for that day, so it preformats them into suggested searches. When I click through on each name, I can see my historical correspondence with that person on every place we’re connected online (email, Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Greplin also scans through the correspondence to make a best guess at the person’s phone number, which has more than once been a total lifesaver.

But Greplin is just one app, and it’s only available on the iPhone. Imagine if these kind of connections could be made by the mobile operating system itself. Unlike iOS, Android at least lets apps communicate a bit between each other by signaling users’ intent when they switch between applications.

In fact, I would be okay with Google being the smart glue between services — understanding who I am, where I am, and what I prefer — and securely and respectfully moving that information around. That’s the kind of unified identity I’d want.

(Images courtesy of Flickr users Quinn Ryan Mattingly and Joi Ito)

This morning, Yahoo said it had hired PayPal President Scott Thompson as its newest victim, oops, CEO.

(You can read my interview with him too, here.)

AllThingsD.com had reported the pending development last night — which is how we roll here.

Now we will roll into the conference call on the matter, and are hoping that the head of the lucrative eBay payments unit will make an appearance, given that he does not start until next week.

One piece of advice I will extend Thompson: I would refrain from cursing, as previous Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz did on her first outing. (She was fired in September, although not precisely for the cussing she so enjoyed partaking in.)

Here we go!

7:02 am: It’s on, with Thompson present.

Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock begins, and he is “very excited, very excited.”

I’d be very excited if Thompson talked and not Roy, who has been to this particular Yahoo CEO rodeo a few too many times before.

Bostock is making promises that this time it’s going to be different. Really!

He also notes that the company will continue its “strategic review” — but who knows what that means now.

And he thanks Tim Morse, the interim CEO who is moving back to the CFO job. (Agreed — nice work, Tim!)

7:06 am: Scott Thompson is on and is “just thrilled” to be the new Yahoo CEO.

I like his accent, which seems like he might be from Boston. He does look and sound like Cliff Clavin, the mailman guy at the Beantown bar from the television classic “Cheers.”

Except, given he has been the darkest of dark horses in this CEO race, nobody knew Thompson’s name.

Thompson is saying all the right stuff, about wanting to increase shareholder value and such.

He sounds so hopeful! Urgency! Thoughtfulness! A bright new morning at Yahoo!

I have been to this rodeo before too, but I am still hoping this time it’ll work.

Scott, if you let me down, I might cry, because you sound so nice.

7:09 am Q&A time already.

Congrats from the Wall Street analyst peanut gallery.

Then, it’s right into a question for Bostock, about the progress of the Asian assets deal.

Also, is Thompson too much of a technologist and not a media dude?

Bostock wants to talk about only Scott, but notes that there will be “no slowdown and no delay” in the Asian process. And Thompson will be all onboard when he comes on board, folks.

Bostock sounds tired, but starts to talk about how a “great customer experience” is the key to the advertising business. He notes that Thompson knows how to do this, hence he’ll be fantastic.

“I have every expectation he’ll be out there calling on advertisers,” says Bostock. I would hope so, given that is where Yahoo makes most of its lettuce.

Bostock is saying Yahoo has been “treading water” and now needs to swim fast. Treading water? I wonder who the top honcho at Yahoo has been while the company has been listlessly dangling its legs in the drink?

Roy — that’s who!

7:15 am: Another analyst asks about margins.

Thompson is not having any of it! He is polite when asking for time to get on the job to make proper statements.

But he does focus on the need to build “great, innovative” products. True, but Yahoo has been incredibly unable to do this of late.

Thompson gives no specifics, though. My big idea: I would steal the self-driving car from Google.

7:17 am: A question about what the core of Yahoo is, and about what lessons Thompson is bringing from his experience at PayPal.

Well, he has not met the team — literally. Yahoo’s board consulted almost no one in the top ranks of execs on this appointment.

But Thompson “suspects” there is talent there. Given the recent attrition, he’ll need a big Inspector Clouseau magnifying glass to find it!

From eBay’s PayPal, he says that the key was balancing the customer experience with network effect and, well, blah, blah, blah Internet-speak.

I am still thinking shoplifting the self-driving car is the bestest idea.

7:20 am: A question about Yahoo’s display business versus Google.

Thompson notes it is too early for him to say — though he had better say soon! — but notes that data is key. He is a well-known by-the-numbers guy, and that is clearly where we are going at Yahoo, now that he is the big dog.

Thus:

“The data these Internet businesses create, the ability to use analytical technology to build a better businesses for your customers … I feel certain that wealth of data is going to be exploitable for next generation products, next generation experiences … My instinct says down in that data we’re going to be able to find ways to compete and innovate that the world hasn’t seen yet.”

I am really liking this accent, which is almost lulling. And so polite! Sources tell me that being “collaborative” was a big goal in this hiring.

7:22 am: A question about the identity of Yahoo, and whether it should be public or private.

Thompson harps on the need for innovation, and hopes it will be the future.

“I would not be here if I didn’t think it was possible,” says Thompson.

Bostock takes the public/private question. Yahoo will be public, he declares! Mostly, because it would be too pricey to take private.

“It’s a moot point,” he says.

7:25 am: More questions about what Yahoo is.

Thompson declines to run off the rails on this dicey one, but he says he believes that Yahoo has great assets.

It does. It’s just that it has been crashed many times — by the people who just hired him — right into a wall.

Just sayin’ — a self-driving car would have done a better job.

7:27 am: A brain-drain question, and more on Asia and on mobile.

Bostock butts in again. He said that Thompson will not be distracted by that, and will concentrate on the core business. Hush up, Roy.

Thompson says that he looks forward to meeting the peeps of Yahoo. (’Cuz he has not, as yet!)

He also loves mobile — which Yahoo has largely borked.

7:32 am: A content strategy question. Early days, so Thompson is still keeping his yap shut.

In this, he’s like the anti-Bartz. Is this good? It’s certainly different.

He says again that, “I can’t wait to meet” everyone at Yahoo. Vice versa, because this dude came from left field.

Thompson promises that he will be a “sponge.”

He closes by noting that he is “genuinely excited,” and says he believes in Yahoo.

Indeed, when it comes to Yahoo, you definitely gotta have faith.

“We all have multiple identities. It’s not abnormal; it’s just part of being human,” Poole said, in probably the most interesting session so far at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

“I cherish having options,” Poole said, joking that he can find more choices in the toothbrush aisle than ways to express himself online. “What’s really at stake now is the ability to be expressive on the Internet.”

Justifications for multiple identities include youthful indiscretions, personal and professional distinctions, exploring random communities and interests, and the more general drive to be able to choose how you present yourself to the world, Poole said.

Somewhat ironically, Poole’s new start-up Canvas does use Facebook authentication, Poole said — because it’s an easy way to filter out trolls and spammers. But after that Canvas users can then express themselves however they want.

Poole argued that it’s this diversity of options that must be preserved. Instead of using filtering techniques Google Circles and Facebook Smart Lists, he said, “It’s not who you share with, it’s who you share as.”

He concluded, “Facebook and Google do identity wrong, Twitter does it better, and I want to think about what the world would be if we did it right.”

Image credit Sage Ross.

The heavily backed San Francisco start-up came under fire a couple of weeks ago after one customer’s horror story spread rapidly across the Internet.

Ever since then, it’s been apologizing and working round the clock to roll out new security features.

Brian Chesky, the CEO and co-founder, tells me that so far he’s gotten 3,000 emails since posting his email address (brian.chesky@airbnb.com) on the site for any customers to contact him, and that engineers have been working past midnight and spending the night in the office to get new features completed quickly.

Most of the improvements are a direct response to the outcry, while only a few of them were already in the company’s pipeline.

“We realized that as we were entering the mainstream, there were a few opportunities to tighten up the platform,” Chesky said.

Today, it concluded work on a couple of major features, such as the $50,000 Host Guarantee, which means hosts will be reimbursed for property damage or theft and vandalism. Last week, the company also started providing 24-hour customer support using 100-plus agents in 18 countries working in multiple time zones.

It also launched Airbnb VoiceConnect, which allows people to make phone calls to one another without ever disclosing their real phone number. Privacy continues to be one of the company’s mantras, but that’s bending as users press to see a person’s real identity before conducting a transaction of this kind.

The need to make better security decisions in the future is also at the core of two hires. Airbnb has brought aboard Command Consulting Group, which will be reviewing the company’s practices and making recommendations, and hired Monroe Labouisse, who will be director of customer support after spending a decade at eBay and PayPal.

All of today’s improvements were outlined in a blog post today.

The guarantee will be retroactive and will definitely apply to EJ, the woman who chronicled her devastating story in a blog about how her San Francisco apartment was ransacked after she rented it to people via Airbnb.

The Airbnb Guarantee will allow hosts who believe their property was damaged or stolen during a stay to request funds from the company. Hosts can submit a request online, which will be examined by the customer service team. Airbnb will also have third parties that can go to the property to conduct an inspection if possible, and then a decision will be made.

The coverage will run alongside that of other insurance companies, meaning that if a person is refunded for his or her losses by another company, then the Airbnb Guarantee will not be necessary. The company still is recommending that hosts have insurance, and stresses that its guarantee does not replace it.

Chesky and Labouisse, who officially started at the company today, said that a number of previous customers have already reached out to inquire about the guarantee, but declined to disclose a specific number.

At $50,000, the guarantee is high enough that it signals to customers that Airbnb is serious about security and now has an incentive to make sure it is secure for all parties involved. Likewise, by making it retroactive, it means that it’s not just confident about its future, but also about most of the stays it has helped to mediate in the past.

Janrain, a Web identity management provider, has survived six years in the space and today is announcing $15.5 million in new funding led by Emergence Capital Partners and including Anthem Venture Partners, DFJ Frontier and RPM Ventures.

Janrain says it’s now used on 350,000 websites, including those made with Ning, KickApps and Get Satisfaction. You can see an example of how Janrain works on the Nasdaq community site below — basically, visitors are given the option to authenticate themselves with an existing account on another social service.

Web sites — that pay Janrain for its services — benefit because they can piggyback on the login and profile information users provide to other sites.

See also: Clearspring, which offers social sharing tools with an advertising business model, recently raised $20 million.

The deal, which occurred as far back as August, is being reported by Ben Kolada, an analyst at the boutique research firm the 451 Group. Kolada is characterizing it as a relatively small deal and remarks that the company’s only valuable asset is a patent awarded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark office. Google confirmed the acquisition to eMoney, but wouldn’t provide any more details.

The patent could potentially tie in nicely to Google’s near field communications (NFC) technology, which was announced last week as part of the release of the new Nexus S smartphone. Google’s Andy Rubin demonstrated the NFC technology live last week onstage at our event D: Dive into Mobile.

The patent encompasses technologies around mobile banking, advertising, identity management, and credit card and mobile coupon transaction processing. The company also occasionally goes by the name Walleto.

According to LinkedIn, the CEO and Founder of ZetaWire/Walleto is Alex Hertel, who started the company with his brother Philipp in March 2007.

Google publicly shamed Facebook this week for not giving its users the option to export the email contacts of their Facebook friends and import them to Gmail. The rapid-fire kerfuffle between the two companies came after private talks about sharing such data had broken down, and is apparently working, with tech industry opinion seeming to side with Google, even though few if any users seem to actually care about the issue. Sooner or later, if users start demanding to own their email lists and complaining about Facebook being evil, it will happen.

But the actual battle isn’t about reciprocity. If it’s on purely moral grounds, everyone’s hypocritical here. Facebook has arrangements to share user email addresses with Microsoft and Yahoo, and Google has in the past impeded Orkut users from exporting emails to Facebook. The reason this is playing out this way is because of the contentious relationship between Facebook and Google, and Google’s planned competitor to Facebook, a.k.a. Google Me.

As a larger question, what captivates me is how much value people are putting on user email addresses. Are our email addresses really the best proxy for who we are?

If you peel back the back-and-forth, the substance of Facebook’s argument is that Facebook users are on the service because it’s a social network, not an email application. When you use Facebook, your friends are identified by their (usually real) names, and you hardly ever see their email addresses. From Facebook platform tech lead Mike Vernal’s comment on TechCrunch:

Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.

But to Google’s point, if people want to deactivate their Facebook accounts and/or try another service, they shouldn’t lose what they’ve created. When you join a new service, the best way it becomes useful and interesting is to quickly find and invite your existing friends (see: network effects)–and the best way to do that is to import a list of your email contacts.

The problem is you don’t own your friends’ email addresses; they do. Email is the only successful example of a decentralized social network.

Facebook has a privacy setting that lets you decide who specifically can view your email address. But that’s just within the centralized system of Facebook; you don’t (yet) get to choose where your email address can be shared. Plus, as we all know, Facebook’s privacy settings can get rather complicated, and both we users and the company change them over time.

Say I have a business contact I don’t want to share my personal email with, and she goes and exports her Facebook email contacts so she can fill out her Yahoo Mail contact list. Those settings need to carry over. And even if they do, spam and invasions of privacy are pretty much inevitable.

But am I my email address? As someone who’s very recently changed jobs, I know firsthand that link can be broken. I registered for so many of the sites I use with my old work email, and my whole address book was locked up there too. Now I have to reconstruct those relationships with a new identity. But I can do it. I’m still myself, after all.

Probably all of you reading this have more than one email address, and often multiple people use the same email address or the same computer. There’s not a one-to-one link between self and email, and the overlaps are often confusing and annoying.

Besides email, other options for an identity token might be your phone number, your social security number, your Facebook user name or your fingerprint.

But email seems to be the agreed-upon best proxy for Web services. Companies like RapLeaf run their businesses on connecting and aggregating information about people based on identifying their valid email addresses (and incur concerns about the implications of getting all that data in one place and selling it).

The stakes in this battle are increasingly high. Both Facebook and Google want to be our identity on the Web. I stay logged in to Gmail and Facebook all day from my laptop, and reap the benefits of those services being integrated with other ones, whether it’s a related service like Google Calendar or a new doodad that I can use Facebook Connect to register for.

Both Facebook and Google are striving to do two things:

• Represent us best by collecting our connections and experiences
• Be our token to bring that identity the rest of the Web

So think about where this is going. Facebook last week introduced a single-sign-on feature for phones (first on select Android apps and soon iOS). The way this will work is when you open a participating app, you have the option to connect to Facebook and bring your identity and friends with you. So the first time you use the app, it knows you and your context. You can imagine if this were to extend to Facebook’s Instant Personalization product, and you were to get a phone that out-of-the-box got your Facebook account and then automatically set up your contacts, preferences, apps and anything else you want or need. It’s powerful stuff.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Adam D’Angelo (pictured here) is too shy to subject himself to a BoomTown video–or perhaps too savvy–but he did agree to a sit-down for a short interview recently in a nondescript room in the Palo Alto, Calif., office building that houses Quora, the hot social answers start-up.

D’Angelo was, of course, the CTO and VP of Engineering at Facebook, as well as a prep school friend of the massive social networking site’s co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

But D’Angelo left the company in mid-2008 and with former Facebooker Charlie Cheever launched the question-and-answer site in January, after much venture capitalist shoving to get on board.

With more than $10 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and a whole lot more hype to contend with, D’Angelo and his small team have been trying to move the site well beyond its Silicon Valley-tech-dudes forum to one in which a plethora of topics and memes thrive.

As was the initial goal, D’Angelo said the aim remains to become the best place to find pertinent information about just about anything.

“The Web is a great place for finding information, but a lot of information that is really important is actually in people’s heads,” said D’Angelo. “If I had to pick one, I would say Wikipedia is a good comparison [to Quora], but there is room for more.”

Not such an easy task, which is why D’Angelo believes most Q&A sites still come up short for users.

“Quora is a simple interface, but it is very complicated underneath,” he said. “Q&A sites in the past had good systems, but they did not add in identity, reputation and quality.”

The hope is that by adding those elements, as it develops, Quora can more correctly answer the questions people are looking for.

“We are really interested in info that changes quickly and in unstructured info,” said D’Angelo, which he noted was at the heart of a lot of searches and well beyond data that search engines such as Google (GOOG) provides.

And for answerers, D’Angelo believes, it also gives them a place to feature their expertise in a much easier way than if they used their own Web site.

“We think people have found that Quora is different from a blog, in that people now have to think up what they think people might want to know,” said D’Angelo. “Here, they are given the topics and the questions, which means they are hitting areas they already know their audience is interested in.”

Interestingly, D’Angelo said he has wanted to turn down the spotlight on the site in recent months, as he hopes to get Quora on as solid footing as possible.

“We want to make a product that markets itself and not because we are big in Silicon Valley,” he said. “So, we want to tone down anything that does not have to do with improving Quora itself.”

Perhaps one of the reasons is the competing effort by his old pal and employer at Facebook, which launched its own Answers product soon after D’Angelo did.

D’Angelo declined to answer any questions related to the obvious and decidedly odd competition, although it is clear the move irks him, since it was a longtime interest Facebook was never interested in until he was and Quora attracted a giant amount of attention.

“There were a lot of different things I could have done [when I left Facebook]. But I felt this was an area that was completely neglected compared to other stuff,” is all D’Angelo will say.

Luckily for Quora, so far the Facebook Answers product has not garnered a whole lot of buzz, although D’Angelo discounted that as being a sign of Quora’s success.

“This thing is up to us, whether we succeed or fail is something that only we can determine,” he said.

Last night, BoomTown got to grill some “Catfish”–as in the three young hipsters responsible for the new documentary about a twisted online romance on Facebook.

That was for a Q&A after a screening in San Francisco, where I got to talk to Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost and the film’s subject, Nev Schulman, about how they decided to make it.

“Catfish” is being released by Universal Pictures, which picked it up after it got a lot of attention at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

Before the social networking site’s CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg gets his knickers in a knot, “Catfish” is actually not the Facebook-bashing one.

Instead of a semi-fictional film–that would be “The Social Network” from Sony (SNE)–this one is a rumination on identity in the digital age.

As I previously wrote, I won’t give away the particulars, except to say it shows the range of human emotions that social networking engenders, from desperation and loneliness to serendipity and hope for love.

We talk about all that and more in the video of the interview I did before our discussion with the audience at the screening:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100903/the-catfish-aka-the-other-facebook-movie-dudes-speak/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100611/att-responds-to-boomtown-privacy-breach-via-email-oh-the-irony/ http://allthingsd.com/20100611/att-responds-to-boomtown-privacy-breach-via-email-oh-the-irony/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 14:53:59 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=29397

Earlier today, I wrote a piece about how I was one of the 114,000 AT&T customers whose email and device identity numbers had been easily exposed earlier this week via a flaw in the way the company registered the Apple (AAPL) iPad 3G for cellular access.

In my post, I complained that I had yet to hear from the telecom giant about the security snafu and release of my personal email address, which AT&T (T) had yet to acknowledge to those impacted.

Well, the company does read tech blogs, so this morning, this communication from a PR honcho was sent to my work email, which is available on this site publicly.

Regrets? AT&T has a few:

Hi Kara:

I am writing to apologize that your personal e-mail address was made public. As you know, we fixed the flaw that caused this almost as soon as we heard about it from one of our business customers. But that doesn’t change the fact that your personal information was exposed without your permission. That is something we truly regret.

Nothing is more important to us than protecting the privacy of customer information. You should know that in this case, the only thing compromised was your email address and not, for example, the contents of your email or any other personal information. And as you also know, the problem only affected iPad 3G customers. No other mobile devices or customers were involved.

Thanks very much for your patience. Please let me know if there is anything we can do for you or if you have any questions.

Mark Siegel
Executive Director-Media Relations
AT&T
[Address redacted]
[Work phone number redacted]
[Mobile phone number}
[Email address redacted]

As you can see, I used my crack security system–DELETE!–to save Siegel any incursions into his privacy.

And while I do appreciate the reaching out, I still want to hear–as do others affected–officially from AT&T about exactly what’s what.

Siegel told me in a follow-up email: “We are finalizing our plans for communicating with customers.”

(Suggestion to make us happy: A free iPhone 4 might be a sweet gesture. Only kidding!! Sort of.)

In addition, I am not sure, as he wrote in the initial email, whether it is comforting or not that it was only my email and only my iPad 3G that were violated.

That’s sort of like telling me that only one room of my digital house was broken into, although nothing good was taken, so not to worry.

Actually, if that happened in real life, I would still call the police. That is, if the call on my iPhone didn’t drop.

Again, I kid! Sort of.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100611/att-responds-to-boomtown-privacy-breach-via-email-oh-the-irony/feed/ 17 http://allthingsd.com/20100611/online-privacy-follies-hit-home-boomtown-was-one-of-those-exposed-in-the-att-ipad-snafu/ http://allthingsd.com/20100611/online-privacy-follies-hit-home-boomtown-was-one-of-those-exposed-in-the-att-ipad-snafu/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 07:15:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=29352 Yesterday, it was revealed that AT&T–which usually and deservedly catches flak for its appalling dropping of voice calls–got caught up in a thorny security debacle related to the Apple iPad.

According to a report initially posted on Gawker Media’s Valleywag site, the telecom giant had a flaw that allowed a group of computer experts to expose the email addresses and identity numbers of 114,000 owners of the popular tablet device.

Including mine.

That would be my personal one from Comcast (CMCSA), which you can see here in an obscured list of others–including some prominent officials in government.

AT&T (T) had my email because it was used to sign up for mobile service for the Apple (AAPL) iPad’s 3G version, automatically appearing during registration.

Now the Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the AT&T breach, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal, in what seems to be an early probe.

Oooh, the Feds are involved now.

I wish I could say it will make a difference. Because it won’t.

In fact, coming on the heels of privacy controversies at Facebook and Google (GOOG), it’s just another log on the digital fire that has been burning up privacy for a very long time now.

And now more than ever, it is part of a massive confluence of trends, including:

Consumers more interested than ever in sharing information about themselves in order to make ever better social networking connections online; a plethora of innovative devices–mostly mobile–and Internet tools available to seamlessly and easily allow those consumers to do so; and, perhaps most of all, Internet companies intent on hoovering up as much information as possible, in order to garner more consumers and sell it to advertisers.

In large part, this is all well and good, creating a range of valuable and entertaining services at little or no cost and making the computing experience more personal and relevant.

Because of that, I have to admit I was less tweaked than I thought I would be, although I wish I were not.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose email was also compromised, expressed the feeling best.

“It shouldn’t be pretty hard to figure out my email address,” he was quoted saying in the Journal article. “To me, it wasn’t that big a deal.”

That’s because all of us are thinking less that such information is private or will remain that way for long.

See this handy illustration, below, from the Journal, about how the iPads were hacked so easily and you get the picture quickly.

And, indeed, I am one of those who puts a great deal of information about myself out there for many to see, from my email on Facebook to my locations on Foursquare to my thoughts on Twitter to photos and videos everywhere.

That said, like others, I have also begun to rethink some of this, recently removing my phone number and other personal information from Facebook and other places where I had stashed them in plain sight, making them harder to find.

Of course, I also know that retrieving much of my personal information is now a lost cause, like trying to unmix cream poured into coffee.

Still, companies, especially those entrusted with this information, should not be quite so sanguine as consumers have become.

I still haven’t heard from AT&T, for example, which is somewhat irksome since the company has known about the issue for days now.

And as each of these incidents occurs, you get the feeling of execs either too obtuse or thoughtless or, yes, cynical to make this a priority.

They should, since the avalanche of information being made available will only increase, with possibly dire circumstances if not handled well.

Hollywood actress Joan Crawford had it right in a famous quote: “Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.”

Substitute “Digital living” for love and it’s the very same message.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100611/online-privacy-follies-hit-home-boomtown-was-one-of-those-exposed-in-the-att-ipad-snafu/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100517/your-web-browser-just-told-everyone-you-visited-a-porn-site/ http://allthingsd.com/20100517/your-web-browser-just-told-everyone-you-visited-a-porn-site/#comments Mon, 17 May 2010 18:47:23 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=19584 Your identity as a dog may still be safe on the Internet. Everything else about you, though, is looking increasingly like an open book.

Latest data point: No matter what you do to stay anonymous, there’s a good chance your Web browser is betraying your identity, by leaving a unique fingerprint every time you visit a site.

A study conducted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that 84 percent of browsers leave a unique marker, via different combinations of settings and configurations. That percentage moves up to 94 percent if your browser uses plug-ins for Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash and Oracle’s (ORCL) Java.

What to do about it? There’s not a lot an individual user can do, the EFF says. But it says these kinds of broswers tend to be less identifiable than others:

• Those with JavaScript disabled (possibly using a tool like NoScript)
• Those that use TorButton, which successfully anticipated and defended against many fingerprinting measurements
• Mobile devices like Google’s (GOOG) Android and Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone (the study was conducted in January and February, before the iPad hit the market)
• Corporate desktop machines that are precise clones of one another

So if you’re the kind of person who only browses the Web via your smartphone, perhaps you’ll be okay. Otherwise, “the best solution for web users may be to insist that new privacy protections be built into the browsers themselves,” the EFF suggests.

Or, failing that, accept that absolute privacy–the kind where no one has any ability whatsoever to track your actions–may be unattainable on the Web. The real solution may not be a technical one, but a social one, whereby we come to a rough agreement about what we’re okay sharing and what we really, really need to keep to ourselves. That could take a while.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100517/your-web-browser-just-told-everyone-you-visited-a-porn-site/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100426/facebook-scribe-david-kirkpatrick-talks-about-zuckerbergs-world-which-we-all-just-live-in/ http://allthingsd.com/20100426/facebook-scribe-david-kirkpatrick-talks-about-zuckerbergs-world-which-we-all-just-live-in/#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:34:55 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=27651

While at the press conference at Facebook’s f8 developers confab last week, BoomTown checked in with David Kirkpatrick, author of the soon-to-be-released book, “The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World.”

Pretty good timing for the former Fortune magazine writer, since the social networking site seems to be barreling through on its goal of being at the center of the digital universe, now reaching 500 million users worldwide with a $25 billion private-market valuation.

An IPO is expected sooner rather than later, although the innovative company seems more intent on colonizing the Web with “Like” buttons and its insidious Facebook Connect.

As Kirkpatrick wrote on the book’s Facebook fan page after the conference last week:

“Yesterday’s f8 represents a sea change for Facebook because for the first time the world finally sees its true ambition–to become the world’s Internet identity infrastructure. The implications are manifold, as I explain in my book.”

Well, as an aged member of the tech media who has seen true ambitions come and seen them go, often very quickly–Netscape Communications, AOL (AOL), Yahoo (YHOO)–I will reserve judgment on digital world domination for five years hence.

Nonetheless, it looks like “The Facebook Effect” will be well worth reading, given Kirkpatrick had cooperation from its execs, including CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg.

And I know how much the was-that-a-question tech wunderkind of Silicon Valley likes to answer queries, so kudos to Kirkpatrick for getting him to sing. Also, expect a lot of big players in the Web drama from Yahoo to Google (GOOG) to Microsoft (MSFT) to Twitter and more.

Here’s the video of my interview with Kirkpatrick about the book, which comes out in June (I did forget to ask him why Tintin’s silhouette posed for the cover):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100426/facebook-scribe-david-kirkpatrick-talks-about-zuckerbergs-world-which-we-all-just-live-in/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100309/on-tap-for-facebook-new-technology-for-linking-to-web-sites/ http://allthingsd.com/20100309/on-tap-for-facebook-new-technology-for-linking-to-web-sites/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:02:55 +0000 Jessica E. Vascellaro http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=22386 Facebook Inc. is holding a major developer conference in San Francisco next month. The packed agenda includes technology to better bridge the Web site with the rest of the Internet, people familiar with the matter say.

The software is called the Open Graph API, which Facebook said late last year it planned to release during the second quarter of this year. Using the technology, Web sites can adopt elements of the pages business build on Facebook, like a box that allows people to become a “fan” of your site.

But Facebook’s plan is far broader than helping people build Web sites. By getting sites to adopt the technology, Facebook hopes to make it even easier for users to share information from the Web on Facebook and to have that information associated with their Facebook identity.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100309/on-tap-for-facebook-new-technology-for-linking-to-web-sites/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091203/so-much-for-openid-google-embraces-twitter-yahoo-embraces-facebook/ http://allthingsd.com/20091203/so-much-for-openid-google-embraces-twitter-yahoo-embraces-facebook/#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:01:17 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=30157 Ever use Google Friend Connect? No? Every heard of it? No? Well, you may soon.

If you use Twitter.

This morning, Google (GOOG) said it is integrating the microblogging service with Friend Connect, a federated identity platform that allows credentials from social networks to be used on nonsocial sites. So beginning today, you’ll be able log in to any site that supports Google Friend Connect with your Twitter identity, and once you’ve done so, share content from those sites via Twitter (see video below).

An interesting move–more so for timing, than strategy. News of the alliance comes not 24 hours after Yahoo (YHOO) announced the integration of Facebook’s competing identity platform, Facebook Connect, across key properties Mail, News and Finance. Seems Google has no intention of allowing Friend Connect to become for the social Web what Yahoo is to search. Although as Om Malik notes, Google may not have much say in the matter.

“If more and more sites use Facebook Connect, that is use Facebook ID, the closer company gets to becoming the ultimate identity broker of the Web, which in terms helps them achieve their ultimate goal–organize world’s relationships,” Malik writes.

“Since the Yahoo deal will yield more relevant user behavior data,” Malik continues, “Facebook can continue to get better at surfacing information using the social graph. The more Facebook does that, the less important it is for people to continue searching. If the Facebook brain brings you the stuff you’re likely to want (thanks to inputs from your friends), the more Facebook will keep you inside its system. Google is nowhere close to delivering that experience.”

One last point: The announcement of the Google-Twitter and Yahoo-Facebook alliances does not bode well for OpenID, a nonproprietary identity standard that has a lot of industry buy-in but hasn’t yet bee able to move into the mainstream on the Web.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091203/so-much-for-openid-google-embraces-twitter-yahoo-embraces-facebook/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091202/yahoos-project-rushmore-begins-with-massive-facebook-connect-deployment-across-internet-giant/ http://allthingsd.com/20091202/yahoos-project-rushmore-begins-with-massive-facebook-connect-deployment-across-internet-giant/#comments Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:30:25 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=21220

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.

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