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Twitter Suffers Brief Link Service Outage

Mike Isaac — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:12:23 +0000

Twitter looked to be experiencing technical problems on Thursday morning, as users complained of not being able to access URLs and links tweeted through the microblogging service.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the company’s status blog had not been updated as of 7:04 am PT. Multiple reports of the outage circulated widely, however — via Twitter.

Twitter seems to have temporarily remedied the outage by swapping out its own link-shortening service — which looks to be the problem here — with bit.ly, another link-shortening service. Links accessed through the bit.ly shortener via Twitter were indeed accessible.

It’s obviously a pain for users wanting to access links via the service, which remains one of the most popular ways to discover news and websites through viral circulation and distribution. But it’s likely more of a pain for publishers and news media outlets (like ours, for example) looking to push out stories using the service.

It’s also an unfortunate reminder of the “fail whale” days of yore, when Twitter’s service was far less reliable and experienced downtime often.

The good news: No more fail whale. Now we’ve got a robot monkey instead.

Update 7:34 am PT: And we’re back! Twitter issued a statement via its engineering status blog, saying the issue has been resolved. Carry on.

Twitter's New Expanded Tweets Tease More In-Stream Content

Mike Isaac — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 20:54:14 +0000

As AllThingsD noted it would earlier this week, Twitter rolled out an update to individual tweets on Wednesday, allowing users to preview content like article text from embedded links, watch video and view pictures from within their streams. The update will apply to users of Twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com, and will soon come to iOS and Android.

Twitter Starts to Claim Credit for Sending Other People Traffic

Liz Gannes — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 23:30:42 +0000

In the last week, Twitter has dramatically ramped up its efforts to receive credit for helping send traffic to other people’s Web pages.

As part of the rollout of its t.co shortener for all links included in tweets that are at least 20 characters long, Twitter is now redirecting 40 percent of links tweeted by its users so that t.co will show up as the referring address in Web analytics tools.

That’s according to Awe.sm, which helps publishers analyze the effectiveness of social media.

Awe.sm found through a global analysis of its customers’ data that, as of today, 38 percent of links shared through Twitter are using the new t.co redirect, up from 10 percent on August 13, and less than one percent as recently as July.

This was expected; Twitter had said that it would turn up link-wrapping in mid-August, and that it eventually plans to use t.co for all links. Some publishers say they are already noticing a significant uptake in their Twitter referrals.

As I wrote in July, Awe.sm and its investor Mark Suster have pointed out that Twitter was particularly affected by the problem of “last mile social media attribution.” That is, links shared on Twitter are often passed along through various desktop and mobile clients or widgets on other Web sites, which results in distorted traffic stats.

Because Twitter didn’t previously get involved in shortening and/or redirecting many links, it may have been driving four times as much traffic as Web sites could track, according to Awe.sm.

Twitter was well aware of this problem, because it masked one of the company’s biggest strengths: That people use Twitter to find interesting stuff to look at and read. If publishers know better that Twitter is responsible for their visitors, they’ll be more grateful.

Twitter also says it plans to use data from t.co to help “surface quality, interesting tweets.” And last but not least, t.co serves as an intermediary that allows Twitter to intercede and block access to spammy or otherwise bad links.

Google Penalizes Overstock for Search Tactics

Amir Efrati — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:00:41 +0000

Google Inc. has penalized Overstock.com Inc. in its search results after the retailer ran afoul of Google policies that prohibit companies from artificially boosting their ranking in the Internet giant’s search engine.

Overstock’s pages had recently ranked near the top of results for dozens of common searches, including “vacuum cleaners” and “laptop computers.” But links to Overstock on Tuesday dropped to the fifth or sixth pages of Google results for many of those categories, greatly reducing the chances that a user would click on its links.

The incident, according to Overstock, stemmed in part from its practice of encouraging students and faculty to post links on college and university websites associated with an Overstock discount program.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

HTC's One-Button Facebook Phones Headed to ATT

Ina Fried — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:08:40 +0000

AT&T said on Tuesday it will have HTC phones later this year that include the Facebook button the Taiwanese cellphone maker showed off here in Barcelona.

The phones may not be the exact Cha Cha and Salsa models that were unveiled at HTC’s press conference, but the devices will have similar abilities, including a context-aware Facebook button that allows photos and links to automatically be shared and lights up when such an option is available.

“In the U.S., AT&T and HTC are exclusively bringing this unique user experience to the market later this year,” an AT&T representative told Mobilized. However, the carrier said that full device plans have not been finalized.

AT&T has said it plans to offer at least a dozen Android devices this year as part of a major push to feature devices with Google’s operating system. Products announced so far include phones from Samsung and HTC, Motorola’s Xoom tablet and its Atrix smartphone, which can act as a laptop when plugged into a custom dock.

“It goes without saying this is part of our commitment to have the industry’s best Android portfolio this year,” the AT&T spokesman said.

HTC and AT&T aren’t the only ones at Mobile World Congress looking to harness the power of Facebook. INQ Mobile is showing off its cloud line of Android phones, which feature heavy Facebook integration, while Gemalto has a SIM card that features built-in Facebook support.

Cisco Security Survey Finds Windows Vulnerabilities And Spam Decreasing

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 14:40:09 +0000

Cyber criminals have fewer ways to attack Microsoft Windows, and sent less spam in 2010 than in 2009–a first-ever decline of spam from year to year. Those are among the findings in an annual report on the state of Internet security released today by networking giant Cisco Systems.

All the security attention paid in recent years to securing the Windows desktop and the applications running on it have paid off a little, Cisco found, making it harder for computer scammers to successfully carry off their intended crimes on that platform. The trouble is they’re now starting to focus more attention on mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone and iPad, and devices running Google’s Android operating system, Cisco said.

Meanwhile, the overall global volume of spam, which often contains troublemaking links that are used to deliver attacks, decreased for the first time ever in 2010. Even so, spam still increased in some developed countries where broadband connections are multiplying. In the United Kingdom, spam volume nearly doubled, while the volume in France went up 115 percent. The U.S. saw a slight decline–11.1 trillion messages down from 11.3 trillion in 2009. Spam in Brazil, China and Turkey also declined. Some of the decline can be attributed to last year’s arrest by FBI agents in Milwaukee of a Russian accused of being the “king of spam,” and to the shutdown of a few botnets used by scammers to send spam.

One thing about Cisco’s report that’s likely to draw some attention is its finding that the raw number of vulnerabilities on Apple products appear to be growing. Apple users are usually pretty sensitive about this topic, and any comparison of the Mac to Windows on the security front tends to make them grind their teeth and pound out annoyed comments on tech blogs. I know because I’ve done the same teeth-grinding and have in the past criticized other reports for similar findings.

Here Cisco is addressing vulnerabilities that Apple has itself documented and patched in software updates. One thing that’s not clear to me–though it sure looks like it–is whether Cisco is combining vulnerabilities found on both iOS (iPhone and iPad) and OS X (the Mac). The data it’s using is from its IntelliShield service, which tracks vulnerabilities and security incidents, and shows that over five years Apple’s vulnerabilities rose, from less than 200 in 2006 to more than 350 in 2010. That rate was higher than Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard and Cisco itself, the report found, though it goes on to say that Apple has worked harder than most other vendors to protect its users. Security is one of the reasons Apple imposes such strict rules on what’s available in the App store, though people still jailbreak their phones.

Another trend Cisco found is something called “money muling.” Tom Gillis, VP and general manager of Cisco’s Security business unit, describes money muling as using unsuspecting people who are attracted by “work at home” spam messages and Web ads to participate in money laundering by moving small amounts of money into bank accounts, just a few thousand dollars at a time. He says the operations around this are becoming increasingly elaborate, and criminals will devote a lot of effort to developing it this year.

I talked with Gillis about the report and other security trends that Cisco found. Here are a few highlights from our conversation:

NewEnterprise: So you’re seeing fewer attacks on Windows and more on mobile devices. Is that simply because there are more of them?

Tom Gillis: It’s the simple fact that there’s this new class of mobile device coming into the enterprise that used to be a phone and now it’s a computer, and it can access enterprise information. So what we’re seeing is that the raw number, but not the severity, is down on Windows. Part of this is that Windows 7 was a very good release on Microsoft’s part from a security standpoint. And we’ve got these new devices coming into the enterprise, and so we’re seeing a shift in focus of attacks on these mobile devices. They’re vulnerable to attack and they’re relevant in the enterprise. Two years ago this would have been too small a population to be meaningful.

What kind of attacks are you seeing?

It varies. In some cases there’s a little “phone home” code in a free gaming app. Pretty gentle stuff so far. But as people start using smartphones to access sensitive information we need to start thinking about security considerations on these devices. There’s a larger theme here that the whole nature of attacks is changing dramatically. The fact that spam volumes dropped at all is a big tell. For 10 years this has only gone up. We’re not forecasting a steady decline in spam, but the fact that it slowed down at all is an indicator of the shift in the way that attackers are using email. The attacks are more targeted and personal, for one thing.

Can’t some of this decrease be attributed to some of the arrests that happened last year?

It can. There’s been a handful of arrests. And they went after not only the botnet operators but other parts of the spam value chain. There are firms and entities that build botnets of compromised machines that relay the spam, and then there are other firms and entities that rent time on those botnets that do the merchandising. The biggest category is selling fake pharmaceuticals. Some of these fake pharma operations were shut down and the people associated with them arrested. It’s not an easy thing to do, because they’re global, they move around, and so to make an arrest in this space is a huge accomplishment.

So what is the thinking now about securing the mobile device?

We think there are two ways to make mobile devices work in the enterprise. The flood of devices into the enterprise is huge, and everyone wants to use them to check their email and access corporate directories and other fundamental things. There needs to be some kind of software on the end point–the phone or device. It will have to be light. You can’t have some kind of antivirus suite running on the phone. It would be a little piece of software that’s on all the time that knows when you’re behind the corporate firewall and when you’re not, and manages your connection accordingly. We bought a company called ScanSafe that has 40 data centers around the world. When you’re outside the firewall it connects to you the nearest data center and enforces your corporate policies, but all you as the user know is that it just works. This notion of being on or off the corporate network goes away. And we can do all kinds of scanning for security, independent of the device that’s being used.

This year we also saw the Stuxnet attacks, which we now know for certain were carried out against the Iranian nuclear program. Clearly this is a new kind of attack that can be mounted against industrial control systems via computer networks. Is Cisco researching this?

Massively. Often these types of attacks are targeted against Cisco’s biggest enterprise customers. Who buys Cisco’s infrastructure? The biggest banks in the world, the defense contractors. If the goal of an attacker is to disrupt an economy, their targets will be our customers, and they’re demanding a response from us. I like to call it global threat correlation, but it comes down to taking huge samples of network traffic and picking out good traffic from the bad. Cisco has a good advantage here because our equipment is so widely deployed around the world. As we start measuring traffic we can develop reputation data on every publicly routable IP address on the Internet. As we start putting telemetry info into that equipment–and the customer can choose to enable it or not, and it’s turned off by default. But people turn it on because it helps them against the unknown kind of attacks that are popping up. If a Web server says its a Web server, but you just saw it sending spam three minutes ago, there’s a pretty good chance it’s part of a botnet. Once you know that you know that, you can start to mount a pretty good defense. We’re putting a lot of energy into developing that, and it’s proven to be pretty robust.

How to Steal Any Movie You Want on the Web: Wall Street Gets a How-To Guide

Peter Kafka — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 16:21:41 +0000

It’s easier than ever to download any movie or TV show you want on the Web, for free. Just ask Rich Greenfield. Or better yet, let the Wall Street analyst show you, via a helpful four-minute video embedded at the bottom of this post.

And if you don’t want to invest that much time, here’s the super-short version: Head to a pirate review site like Scenesource, look for any movie you want and then look in the comments for links to cloud-based storage lockers where you can grab a copy of the movie, for free.

You may have to try a couple of links, because they eventually get shut down, but it should still be very easy–and more comfortable for mainstream users than dealing with BitTorrent software, which has been the preferred piracy method for some time.

Greenfield’s larger point (registration required) is that the rise of Internet-connected TVs–look around this year’s Consumer Electronics Show and you’ll realize that the next set you buy will almost certainly have a Web connection, whether you want it or not–and cheap bandwidth is going to create a giant headache for big media.

Big media and technology companies can try to fight it with legal and mechanical tactics, or half-steps like UltraViolet, the “everybody but Apple” coalition. But the best long-term answer is to make media consumption incredibly cheap, and incredibly easy, so that it’s more convenient for mainstream users to get it legally than to go through the pirate sites.

That’s an incredibly hard thing to do, because it involves trading big, existing revenue streams for smaller ones down the line. But not doing it can be even more costly: Ask the music labels.

Delicious Red Sea Parted, Users Wander to Other Bookmarking Services

Voices — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 04:35:13 +0000

Since Yahoo’s plans to “sunset” popular bookmarking service Delicious leaked last month, it is natural to assume that users would be looking elsewhere to store their link libraries.

What we didn’t know, until now, is how greatly other link services would benefit from news of the closure.

Late last week, Delicious competitor Pinboard tweeted a link to a screenshot of its traffic graph from the couple of days following the Yahoo leak, overlaid on more-typical traffic from previous days.

The sea-foam green area is Pinboard traffic after the leak, in number of server requests per minute (not unique or new visitors, which would undoubtedly be far lower).

The tiny blue and purple areas beneath represent typical request rates.

You can click on the graph to see it in full size, though the sense of scale speaks for itself.

Wi-Fi Hotspot Safety and Mac Viruses

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 22:50:38 +0000

I have had a little disagreement with my IT guy. He says that when taking my laptop out in public, I should never type anything with passwords or confidential information. He says that someone can pick up my information. I say that I can’t believe that everyone in public is totally exposed. There must be some way to protect yourself while on a public network. Who is right?

There’s no single correct answer. It’s true that thieves in public places can and do steal passwords and other sensitive information transferred over public Wi-Fi hotspots. But it’s also true that methods like Virtual Private Networks can mitigate this problem, and that most public hotspots are, just by the odds, unlikely to harbor these thieves at any one time. However, my advice is to avoid doing any sensitive tasks, like banking or stock trading, while using public hotspots. And, if you’re doing anything confidential on your company or home network remotely, use a VPN, which is like a secure tunnel through the internet.

I recently purchased a new iMac and am considering installing anti-virus/spyware/malware programs on it. Reader forums in MacWorld magazine say it’s not needed. A local newspaper computer columnist says he’s had Macs since the early ’80s and has never run an AV program and has had no problems. Other online computer advisers say Macs are always vulnerable and advise to run AV programs. Any recommendations here?

No computer is inherently invulnerable to malicious software, and that includes the Macintosh. However, nearly every malicious program known is meant to run on Windows and simply won’t operate on the Mac operating system. The handful of Mac viruses and other malware that have been discovered are either proofs of concept, or have spread to very few users and done little or no damage. Most Mac users I’ve known don’t run third-party security software and haven’t had malware problems. So I don’t routinely recommend Mac security software.

There are two caveats, however. If you are running Windows on your Mac, you should install Windows security software, to run while Windows is in use. Also, Mac users are just as vulnerable as Windows users are to online scams, or to insecure public networks. So, even though you may never get a virus, you still have to be careful about doing sensitive Internet tasks via public hotspots or careless behavior like clicking on links sent you by unknown email senders.

My car has an audio jack that integrates any input into the sound system. I know that Kindle has a text-to-speech feature. Would I be able to use that feature via the audio jack in the car?

Without having tested your car’s input jack, I assume the answer is yes. The Kindle has a standard headphone jack.

However, note that the text-to-speech feature works only on certain books, not all of them. Publishers have the right to allow or disallow it for any book.

Also, even if it’s enabled, it isn’t the same as an audio book, which is usually read by a trained narrator or by the author. Instead, it’s a computer doing the reading.

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

What to Do With Photos Piling Up in a Phone

Roger Cheng — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 02:20:42 +0000

I can be quick on the draw when it comes to pulling out my smartphone to snap a few photographs. Like a lot of people, I’ll let those pictures lay idle on my handset for months.

[ See post to watch video ]

A lot of my reluctance has to with the hassle of transferring the pictures to my PC before uploading them to a photo-sharing website or Facebook. Sure, I can use my phone to directly post them online, but I like to use photo-editing software on my computer to touch up the images. As a result, photos from a May birthday party won’t end up on my Facebook page until November.

With sophisticated cameras going into smartphones—including the 5-megapixel, high-dynamic range shooter found in Apple Inc.’s iPhone 4 and the professional-grade, 12-megapixel Carl Zeiss lens in Nokia Corp.’s N8—more people are leaning on their handsets for all sorts of photo opportunities.

Application developers haven’t ignored the trend. A large number of mobile programs recently have cropped up allowing you to tweak photos, add eye-popping filters, tag them with information about subject and location, and then post them on social-networking sites.

Camera Fun Pro turned this Penn Station corridor into an artistic sketch

Instagram put a retro photo border around a shot of a Penn Station waiting room.

I recently attended a holiday dinner with friends, giving me an opportunity to test some of these mobile photo-editing and photo-sharing apps: picplz, Instagram, Hipstamatic, Path and Camera Fun Pro. All five are either free or relatively inexpensive.

Instagram, a free app launched by Burbn Inc. in October for the iPhone, is among the most straightforward. After taking a photo, you are given a choice of a dozen filters that give the picture a retro twinge. Some of the photos shot while sitting in an Italian wine bar looked like something from a movie set.

After choosing your filter, you have the choice of adding a caption. You can add the location as well, although it requires the phone to have a working GPS or network connection, so you can’t get the information while on a subway or in a dead zone.

The program gives you an option to upload the photo to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Foursquare or any combination of the social-networking sites.

I also liked the feed Instagram creates to show you all the photos you’ve taken, giving you a nice timeline of your shots. There is also a section devoted to the most popular photos taken from all Instagram users, giving me some new ideas.

Picplz, another free app, available on iPhones and smartphones using Google Inc.’s Android software, gives you the same capabilities, but only half the number of filters. As a result, I found myself using Instagram more frequently.

A popular app is Hipstamatic ($1.99) from Synthetic Corp., which allows your iPhone to mimic an old-fashioned camera, complete with a virtual old-fashioned case with swappable lenses and flash bulbs on the front, and a small viewfinder on the back. There are several options for types of film, allowing for a large number of different combinations.

Hipstamatic gives this smartphone shot of New York’s Penn Station a ‘real-life’ photo look.

While I appreciated the options, I also was a little overwhelmed. The app isn’t ideal for spontaneous moments, because you have to choose the film, lens and type of flash bulb (or whether to have flash at all) before taking your shot. The costs for the app could add up if you add virtual accessories: types of film, lenses, flashbulbs and camera case. Each feature retails for an additional 99 cents.

Hipstamtic has been around for nearly a year, but in September, Synthetic added the capability to order print versions of photos. The packs of photos range between $4.99 and $9.99, depending on the print size. I didn’t get a chance to test out the service, but the company says it has won over many repeat customers.

A more recent app is personal-photo network program Path, which launched in November for the iPhone. The aim for Path is slightly different from the normal sharing program. Rather than post the picture to Facebook and your entire network, the program will share the photo with 50 friends, which Path Chief Executive Dave Morin says is the maximum number of relationships a human can maintain at any given time.

Hipstamatic transforms an iPhone into an old-fashioned camera, complete with swappable lenses and flash bulb.

The initial version of Path, however, required my friends to have the application. My friends ended up receiving an email asking them to sign up for Path, which most promptly ignored. As a result, I wasn’t sharing my photos with anyone. Mr. Morin says the company will release an update that opens up the program, sending email links to the photos that don’t require downloading the program.

The app that got the most attention around the dinner table, however, was Camera Fun Pro from SpiceLoop. While it has been available for the iPhone since January, it arrived on Android devices in September. The app, which costs 99 cents, applies a live filter over the camera, allowing you to see what you get before taking the photo. The 19 filters’ effects on photos aren’t subtle: They implant a bulge, stretch, give a 3-D effect, or tint subjects Avatar-blue. If those aren’t enough distortion for you, you can go back and layer effects on a photo.

Testing the app out on Samsung Electronic Co. Ltd.’s Epic 4G, my friends and I especially enjoyed the sketch filter, which makes everything look like it was hand drawn with a pencil. The photos were reminiscent of A-Ha’s famous music video, which used a similar sketch effect, and had us humming the ’80s pop tune “Take On Me” during the meal.

Write to Roger.Cheng@dowjones.com. Walt Mossberg is on vacation and will return Dec. 16.

Pulse News App for iPad Gets Social

Liz Gannes — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:00:15 +0000

Pulse, the visually engaging mobile news reader, is adding a social element today. To date, Pulse (for iPad, iPhone and Android) gave users an easily scannable and image-driven view of their favorite RSS feeds. Now, users will also be able to add their Facebook accounts and flip through material posted by their friends.

The social version of Pulse will be available only for iPad for now, and is to be released this afternoon at 3 pm PT.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Alphonso Labs, which makes Pulse, recently stopped charging for its apps and raised $800,000 in venture funding. CEO Akshay Kothari came up to San Francisco today and showed me the new iPad app.

The new Pulse for iPad gives users three feeds of Facebook information: Friends’ status updates, friends’ shared links and a historial look at the user’s own Facebook wall. In keeping with Pulse’s design, items are image driven and easily swipe-able, and expand into a second panel when users tap on them (see screenshots). Users can add comments or “Like” statuses and shared links as they would on Facebook, but this is more of an alternate way to consume content than a full-featured Facebook client.

As with other content feeds, Pulse caches the 25 most recent Facebook updates in each category, so a user who goes somewhere without Internet access could continue to read the content there.

As Alphonso grows from being some young folks with an interesting design approach into a real company, it is exploring closer relationships with publishers like the Huffington Post. “We don’t want to be a company that makes a news reader,” said Kothari. “We want to help people discover awesome content.”

Kothari added that with the influx of new users since Pulse went free two weeks ago, Alphonso is looking to improve content discovery by mining user data to show a “most-emailed” story list across all feeds.

He said his aim is to get away from the hierarchical structure of Web sites–where one must return to the homepage before moving on–and help people scan quickly through potential reading material. Ultimately, Kothari said, recommendations will be done through a balanced combination of machine and social factors.

Further reading: Earlier this year, Pulse was mentioned as an example app by Steve Jobs, then yanked from the App Store due to complaints about content usage by the New York Times. The app was quickly reinstated and Alphonso has an open dialogue with the Times about how best to send it new readers and subscribers, according to Kothari.

Richard Branson's iPad App: $2.99, Instructions Included. You'll Need Them.

Peter Kafka — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:29:26 +0000

Richard Branson will hold a press conference in New York this morning to show off “Project,” his new iPad magazine app. But since it’s already live in Apple’s iTunes store, there’s really no need to wait. Pay $3, and you can see for yourself.

Should you? Depends: If you’re into iPad magazine apps, you’ll want to, because it’s a pretty good iPad magazine app, with some interesting deployment of art, video and live Web links. On the other hand, it’s pretty similar to most of the other iPad magazine apps you’ve seen so far.

Except more confusing–the navigation on all of these things changes from app to app, but this one seems even more random. Hence this one-page instruction manual (note to the guy who was confused – yes, this is an actual screenshot):

That said, if you do monkey around with this thing, you’ll find some cool stuff. My favorite so far is an ohmygodlookitathat photo of some nutjob kayaking off a waterfall. This image:

Expands into this image:

And then a link gets you to this astonishing Vimeo clip:

tyler bradt world record–Palouse Fall, Washington State tyler bradt world record–Palouse Fall, Washington State from Vagueo on Vimeo.

Skyfire Launches "Facebook Edition" for Android

Liz Gannes — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 17:01:14 +0000

Skyfire, the innovative mobile browser maker that’s known for its dexterity with Flash video, is launching an upgrade to its Android app today focused on social sharing. Set to become available at 9 am PT in the Android Market, the company calls its 3.0 version “Skyfire Facebook edition.”

Making browsers social is a hot project these days. The Facebook-framed RockMelt browser, made by and backed by some of the people responsible for Netscape, launched to much fanfare earlier this month. However, it seems to me completely crazy that someone could launch a “social browser” in this day and age without a mobile component.

Skyfire helps fill that mobile-social gap with some nifty uses of the Facebook API. There are two notable new buttons in the browser, which are prominently displayed despite the small size of a mobile screen.

First, users can click from any Web page to see global popular Facebook Likes for that domain. So in the example portrayed in this demo video, you can see all the recent articles on the New York Times ranked by how much they are being shared by people on Facebook. This is similar to what many companies are doing around analyzing links shared on Twitter (for instance, I wrote about Gravity last week), but it’s rarer to see global analysis of Facebook. A spokesperson for Skyfire said this is based on public Facebook APIs, not a deeper partnership like what Bing has for its social search.

The other new Skyfire button is called “Fireplace,” and it’s a custom newsfeed for any user with only status updates from friends who included shared links. This is somewhat similar to what folks like Flipboard are doing, but without the fancy design. Fireplace breaks out a simple list of what your friends are reading and sharing so you can quickly flip through what they think is interesting.

The Skyfire Facebook edition also includes integration with Twitter and Amazon.

A Web Video Truce: Free Hulu Goes Away From Boxee, Replaced by Hulu Plus

Peter Kafka — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:45:06 +0000

The Hulu-Boxee war is over! The terms of the truce: Boxee, which makes software that makes it easy to get Web video on TV, will remove links to Hulu’s free service–but will give users the ability to use the Hulu Plus paid service.

Boxee CEO Avner Ronen is scheduled to make the announcement tonight at an event celebrating the release of the Boxee Box, his company’s first move into the consumer electronics business.

The arrangement with Hulu, which is primarily owned by News Corp.’s Fox, Disney’s ABC and GE’s NBC Universal, marks the end of a conflict that dates back to February 2009. That’s when Hulu insisted that Boxee take down links to its service, then tried severing the connections itself.

Hulu said it made the move at the insistence of its network partners (an argument that outgoing NBC U boss Jeff Zucker said was not true). But recently it has stopped complaining publicly about Boxee.

And as I noted earlier this week, the big networks have warmed to Boxee in the last year or so. And with the appearance of Google TV, which offers something similar to Boxee, they appear to be more amenable to working with Ronen and company.

Boxee will also have other content partnerships to announce tonight, I’m told, including a deeper relationship with Netflix. More details on that, as well as timing of the Hulu move, as I hear about it.

UPDATE: Alas, no details from Boxee on either–just confirmation that Netflix will come to Boxee by the end of the year, and that Hulu Plus will come “soon.”

Facebook Looking for Japanese Friends

Yoree Koh — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 18:00:03 +0000

Sharing is caring, and by linking up with one of Japan’s biggest social networking sites, Japanese users are likely to be finally drawn to Facebook.

In contrast to its success elsewhere, Facebook has so far failed to establish itself as Japan’s most popular social-networking site. The company, with headquarters in Palo Alto, California, has thus decided to launch a cross-platform feature that will allow users of Facebook and Mixi, a popular Japanese social-networking site, to link to each other’s profiles. This also allows users to share links, videos and photos.

“We built this application using Mixi’s standard APIs available for all developers. Through this application, we hope to simplify connecting and sharing with friends across different social platforms,” said Facebook spokeswoman Kumiko Hidaka, adding that Facebook has similar applications in place with other internet services, including Twitter.

This is not an official partnership between the two companies. Instead Facebook has taken advantage of a new platform developed by Mixi last month that would allow its users to share information with other internet services. However, this new feature could raise Facebook’s profile in Japan where it has struggled to win over users from local rivals like Mixi and Gree. There are currently about 21 million registered users on Mixi while Facebook boasts over 500 million members world-wide. Facebook, which launched its Japan version in 2008, declined to disclose user statistics by country.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Yahoo to Offer Media Links

Amir Efrati — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 12:57:10 +0000

Yahoo Inc. plans to mimic a strategy used by rival Facebook Inc. to help drive traffic to its site, people familiar with the matter said.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., company soon will roll out a feature called Y Connect to allow media publishers, web developers and other websites to integrate elements of their services with Yahoo–an approach Facebook has used in allowing sites to forge links to the popular social network, these people said.

Such efforts can help Internet companies track the activities of users around the Web and better tailor advertising offerings to them. Representatives of Yahoo declined to comment.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Apple's Ping Wants Rock 'n' Roll, but No Sex and Drugs

Peter Kafka — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Ping may never move beyond the “interesting idea, executed poorly” stage. But it might! And in any case, it’s Apple, so if you’re a music act you ignore it at your own risk.

Which means those acts need to create a “profile” for Steve Jobs’s social network. An Apple (AAPL) document making the rounds (Apple has confirmed its authenticity to me) explains how. You can read the whole thing at the bottom of this post.

Most of it concerns technical specs about things you don’t care about, like video formats. Here’s one part you might be interested in–some of Apple’s edicts regarding the content of artists’ profiles:

Videos, photos, and text posts should not contain pornography, hate speech, racism, nudity, or any references to or depictions of drug use.
Posts should not include advertisements or links to sites outside of iTunes.
Posts should not contain links to other content providers.

The first item is sort of obvious, but still worth noting. Because theoretically, if the Beatles ever do make it to iTunes, they’re going to have a hard time promoting some of their songs. Like this one.

But that rule seems like the kind of thing that Apple can change or ignore at will–just like its “no porn except sometimes” ban in the iTunes app store. And anyway, artists have always found ways to put up with, or ignore, these kinds of restraints.

The rules about not posting to links outside of iTunes are more worrisome. Because it’s telling music acts to ignore the digital assets they’ve painstakingly built up on MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and anywhere else on the Web.

Makes sense for Apple, but not for anyone else.

artist_bestpractices_1.0-1

Anyone Want to Offer Free SEO Advice to a Former Businessweek Editor?

Peter Kafka — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 13:22:13 +0000

Former Businessweek editor John Byrne has a new site up, and he’s understandably proud: PoetsandQuants has an impressive-looking survey of the top MBA programs and a slew of related stories. (Not a coincidence: Business school rankings are a big asset for Businessweek too.)

The problem, as Byrne explains in a blog post, is that Google (GOOG) doesn’t seem to care. Or at least not in the way he’d like it to: Search for “poetsandquants” and you’ll find many references to the site, including the site’s Twitter and YouTube accounts, but no direct links to the site itself.

And, frustratingly, many of the links that Google does show searchers are simply scraping/Google gaming sites with no connection to Byrne’s site at all. Byrne:

As you go through the first five pages of Google results, there are all kinds of websites that have essentially highjacked Google, rendering its search product less useful and helpful to users. There’s a so-called weblog that is little more than a place to advertise Viagra and Cialis. There’s links to TweetMeme, Interceder, tweetcepts, twapperkeeper, rallyclips, and whotechpunditstweet, among many others. Most of them are search traps that have gamed Google. There’s even a link to one fool who has no idea who I am yet calls me a “douchebag” on page three of Google’s results for PoetsandQuants. (See the screenshot below to get a real glimpse of how bad Google’s results are.) Get through the first ten pages of results and there is still not a direct link to the site.

Two thoughts:

Join the club, John. You’re now one of many publishers who have a gripe with Google.
The fact that you’re one of many doesn’t make your gripe less worthy. And this sort of thing really should be worrisome for Google. It’s not that the search engine is ignoring your site–it’s that it is sending searchers to the wrong place. This happens much too often, and it’s a huge hole for a competitor to exploit.

I assume that Byrne, and Google, will sort this out fairly quickly–Bryne doesn’t tell us whether he’s been able to get ahold of a human in Mountain View to hash this out. And perhaps a link from this site will help!

But I also assume that Byrne, as a bootstrapping publisher, has less advanced SEO help than he had at his last gig, which means he’s always going to have some version of this problem.

So. Any generous SEO experts want to offer some advice about ways to solve his problem? You’ve got an open forum in the comments section below.

Pakistan Takes on Facebook, YouTube and the Internet

Peter Kafka — Thu, 20 May 2010 12:11:23 +0000

A good reminder that the definition of the “World Wide Web” can change, depending on the country you’re living in: The Pakistani government is trying to block some of the planet’s most popular Web sites, including Facebook, Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, Yahoo’s (YHOO) Flickr, and Wikipedia. Twitter is still okay–for now, apparently.

Associated Press:

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority didn’t point to specific material on YouTube that prompted it to block the site, only citing “growing sacrilegious contents.” The government took action against both Facebook and YouTube after it failed to persuade the sites to remove the “derogatory material,” the regulatory body said in a statement….

The regulatory body said it has blocked more than 450 Internet links containing offensive material, but it is unclear how many of the links were blocked in the past two days. Access to the online encyclopedia site Wikipedia and the photo sharing site Flickr also was restricted Thursday.

YouTube’s comment, via email: “We have received reports that the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority has ordered Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Pakistan to block access to YouTube. We are looking into the matter and are working to ensure that the service is restored as soon as possible.”

The moves are a reaction to “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” which is a reaction to Muslim protests about an episode of “South Park” last month.

As the AP notes, Pakistan has temporarily blocked access to YouTube before. So have other countries, including Turkey and Thailand. And China has a permanent ban on the site, as well as on Facebook. This doesn’t mean people who live there can’t actually get to the sites–that’s what proxy servers are for–but it does mean it’s harder to do so.

Top Three Ways to Get Facebookers to Read Your Story: Post It on the Weekend, Use a Number and Don't Talk About Twitter

Peter Kafka — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 11:00:23 +0000

Facebook may or may not be bigger than Google (GOOG). Actually, it probably isn’t. But it’s certainly big enough, and generates enough traffic, that Web publishers are desperately trying to figure out how to harness it.

Enter Dan Zarrella, a self-described “social media marketing & viral marketing scientist,” who has been doing some interesting research about the way Facebook users share Web links. Some of his findings, in ascending order of usefulness:

Facebook users aren’t interested in sharing stories about Twitter.
They are interested in sharing stories that have numbers in the titles.
They’re most interested in sharing stories when they read them on the weekend.

It’s not surprising that people who use Facebook aren’t terribly interested in stories about Twitter–unlike Twitter-obsessed Twitter users. And there’s not much a publisher can do with that info. The fact that people like numbers and lists is behind a magazine trick the Web has already embraced wholeheartedly.

Zarrella’s research about weekend posts, though, is worth chewing on for a second. He suggests that Facebook users are more likely to share stuff on weekends because they lack time to get on the site during the work week.

But if that were the case, you’d figure Facebook would have a well-documented usage drop from Monday through Friday. And if someone’s reported on that, I haven’t seen it.

Here’s a guess I can’t back up with numbers: Maybe people are more apt to share stuff on the weekends because they’ve got more time to read.

In any event, Zarrella’s advice to post items on the weekend is sensible, but limited–there aren’t a lot of Web publishers who can take a pass on five days each week.

Apple's New Job: Marketing Apps Through Google

Peter Kafka — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:57:33 +0000

Google and Apple may be fighting each other on multiple fronts, but they’re deeply linked, too. Another example: Apple is flooding Google search results with the contents of its iTunes store.

That’s the result of a small but consequential move Apple (AAPL) made last fall when it began showing Web searchers full-fledged previews of the stuff it sells at its online stores instead of directing them immediately to the store itself.

The biggest impact appears to be on the 140,000 apps Apple sells, which seem to be getting increased visibility from Apple’s links. So says Weldon Dodd, who has put together an interesting study of apps and search results over at The Apple Blog.

For most of Apple’s best-selling apps, Dodd found, Apple’s preview links are likely to turn up on the first page of Google (GOOG) results, and usually much higher up than the developers’ own pages.

So Apple, in effect, is performing search engine optimization on behalf of its developers. That’s the good news. The bad news is that developers don’t have control over or insight into the process. Which means it’s that much harder for them to direct traffic in a retail environment that’s already tightly policed by Apple.

[Image credit: Stig Nygaard]

Twitter's New Security Strategy: Rewriting Some Users' Links

Peter Kafka — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:04:53 +0000

Beset by phishing attacks and other scammy behavior, Twitter is taking a step I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else before: The social messaging service says it may change the text of its users’ messages in order to protect them.

Specifically, Twitter is going to rename links that users send to one another via direct messages, which allows the company to track them and shut them down if they turn out to be malicious. You’ll be able to identify the renamed links, because they’ll be shortened using a “twt.tl” prefix.

In typical Twitter fashion, the company has a blog post that explains the change, but in somewhat vague and hazy terms. As best I can tell, what Twitter is really doing is rewrapping some links that users send with its own code.

This doesn’t appear to change the core characteristics of the link–publishers and marketers who use the bit.ly link shortening service, for instance, will still be able to track the data generated by their links. But it does give Twitter the ability to track bad behavior.

If you want to view the move in a positive light, you can think of it as the tag an airline slaps on your luggage when you check it–the only changes to your message are superficial. Or, if you’re so inclined, you could shiver just a bit at the thought of a messaging service changing any part of your message, no matter how trivial.

Twitter only announced the change this evening, but the company appears to have been testing it for some time: Searching Twitter for “twt.tl” turns up shortened links going back several days. As best I can tell, this one–what appears to be the retweet of a direct message from a marketer–is the first one to show up in public:

There’s a good chance many or most Twitter users won’t see the shortened links–if you’re not sending or receiving direct messages, you may never see one, period. But Twitter seems to leave the door open to expanding the program to regular tweets as well: Its blog post says the company has “focused [its] initial efforts” on direct messages and email.

Just to be clear, I checked with Twitter spokesman Sean Garrett via email. Here’s our exchange:

Q: But to be clear: Do you reserve the right to change links in regular tweets?

A: This is our focus right now.

Game On: Time Inc. Shows Off a Tabletized Sports Illustrated

Peter Kafka — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:24:55 +0000

Last month, Condé Nast played show-and-tell with its concept of a digitized magazine. Today it’s Time Inc.’s turn: The publisher is demoing a concept version of Sports Illustrated it says will be able to run on whatever tablet Apple (AAPL) or any else has up their sleeves. Eventually, the publisher imagines that it will port all its titles into the new format, which it says will be ready for primetime by the middle of next year or sooner.

The show part will work better than the tell, and the Time Warner (TWX) unit will be releasing some photos and videos that I can embed later in the day. But for what it’s worth, the demo looks as nifty as, and quite similar to, what Condé showed off. Except that in this case, I actually got to play with it for a couple minutes, and it was quite a bit of fun.

UPDATE Here it is:

Both publishers are thinking along the same lines. They imagine that their digital magazines will replicate the print version, including advertising, and will include add-ons like multimedia and links to the Web.

But they’re supposed to be distinct–and more valuable–than simple Web versions of magazines, and both publishers expect consumers to pay for them.

“Nobody reads the magazine on the Website,” says Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonell. “That’s a firehose. This is the opposite of a firehose.”

One distinction between the publishers is that Condé has aligned itself with Adobe (ADBE), which is working on software to create e-editions and reader software to consume them. Time Inc.’s take is more conceptual: It worked with design shop The Wonder Factory to build a prototype, but isn’t committed to any particular platform.

This may mean Time Inc. will need more time to get the magazine ready for consumption next year or it may mean the publisher has more flexibility than Condé and Adobe. Given that magazine-friendly e-readers don’t exist yet, this is all sort of vaporware for now.

On a related note, the “Hulu for Magazines” joint venture I’ve been telling you about for a couple of months may finally be ready to step out in public next week. Though as I’ve noted, I’ve been hearing that for many weeks.

Still, the broad strokes seem set: Time Inc., Condé Nast, Meredith and Hearst–and perhaps News Corp. (NWS)–are creating a separate company designed to let them sell and distribute their digital editions, regardless of platform.

A New Search Engine Specializing in Fun

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:54:04 +0000

If you’re like me, you like to make the most out of what little free time you have. One way of finding ideas for activities without wasting precious minutes is by searching online. But sometimes the process of browsing the Web can suck you in and waste more time than it saves.

This week, I tested a tool called Goby (pronounced go-be), www.goby.com, which works as an activity search engine to help you find things to do. It tries to be simple enough so that you can get some ideas and start doing the things you want to do rather than wasting hours in front of the computer.

[ See post to watch video ]

Goby uses three boxes—What, Where and When—with drop-down menus to find results for your query. It crawls the Web searching what it considers high quality information from 500 sources and employs a part-human, part-machine review process to ensure first-rate results. Goby searches through over 200 categories, including live music, art exhibits, outdoor festivals, spas, bed-and-breakfasts and restaurants.

Using Goby was an emotional roller coaster. With very little effort I found things in Washington, D.C., that I’ve never heard of in the seven-plus years I’ve lived here, including tea with Martha Washington and a stuffed Civil War hero horse on display at the Smithsonian. But I also found inaccurate Goby results like an activity in Washington state rather than Washington, D.C., or photos that were supposed to represent a tennis center but instead showed a celebrity’s child with the same name. And sometimes the same results were listed four times in a row.

Goby’s results took a serious nose dive when I looked outside the city in my hometown of Allentown, Pa. I searched for all performing arts and theater near Allentown, an area that I know first-hand has plenty to offer in the way of music, theater and dance. Goby returned two results—one for the Nutcracker in December and another for a Shakespeare play that was put on last July. A quick check of my hometown newspaper’s Web site showed hundreds of performances to attend in the coming months.

The Goby home page

Goby.com has been available to the public for only a few weeks and it is still working out some kinks. The more people use it, the more accurate its results will become—or at least that’s what its founders hope will happen. When Goby’s search results are accurate, they include the kinds of thing locals would want to see or do in their own hometown, and that’s no small feat. But people won’t have a lot of patience for some of the erroneous results that now show up in Goby. Also, this activity search engine currently lacks features like the ability to build and save itineraries, make one-click ticket purchases or book reservations.

Though Goby’s query boxes ask users to enter What, Where and When, the When is always an optional specification, and people can enter either What or Where if they only know one of these factors. General suggestions of categories also are made in Goby’s drop-down menus. The What box opens five categories: things to do, food and drink, events, places to stay and, right now, fall fun; many of these open several, more-specified subcategories. For example, I started a search and followed a four-part trail: things to do, outdoor recreation, horseback riding and horseback riding trails—all within the same drop-down menu.

If you know what you want to do but not where you want to do it, the drop-down arrow in the Where box opens an interactive map of the U.S. Users can pan around the entire country, zooming in on specific areas or small towns. I even zoomed in on Minot, N.D. (population 35,000) and found out about an event taking place at the Northwest Arts Center on Nov. 2.

This map comes in handy if you know the general geographic area where you would like to spend time, but don’t know the area’s name.

Lists of query results are deliberately designed to show more than just Web links, like what Google (GOOG) often displays. Suggested activities are displayed in a numbered list on the left side of the screen, and a map with corresponding numbers is displayed on the right, moving along with your cursor as you scroll on the page. A blue flashlight tool on the map can be dragged anywhere to pinpoint exactly where you want to find activities, and after you drop the flashlight on a spot, the left-hand list dynamically changes to correspond with that map view.

A “More Info” tab shows vital information for each query result like a description, time, address and Web site for the activity. If you are looking at lodging, you can adjust a price scale to limit or expand results for rooms that cost a certain amount per night. Lists of results can be sorted according to category: Art events can be sorted by relevance, distance, date or name; bed-and-breakfasts also can be sorted by price.

Photos representing these activities are pulled in from source sites like bedandbreakfast.com as well as from Google and Flickr. While these images can provide a quick glimpse of something while saving users from navigating to another Web page, some of the results weren’t accurate. For example, when I searched for tennis in Washington, D.C., a tennis program that I didn’t know about called “Tennis at Shiloh” was listed in results. But four out of six photos showed images of Shiloh, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s child of the same name. I called the organization to confirm that it is indeed a real program, but without calling, I would have seen the photos, doubted the quality of the place and looked for another spot to play tennis.

A “What’s Nearby” function is designed to help people expand their activity searches. It takes the address of a selected activity and suggests other things nearby like places to go for dinner or where to listen to live music.

Unfortunately, Goby doesn’t let you build an itinerary. So if you find a few possible activities for a weekend trip to Williamsburg, Va., and then use “What’s Nearby” to find a pub for lunch, a restaurant for dinner and a bed-and-breakfast for the night, you can’t save all of these findings using Goby. The company says it plans to incorporate these features in the near future.

Goby would be incredibly helpful if it had a mobile app. This Sunday when I was across town from my house and had an unexpected block of free time, I could have used Goby to find a nearby art exhibit or a spot for apple picking. Goby says it is working on an iPhone app, which it expects to release later this year.

If you get lucky with Goby, you’ll find activities that let you do as its name says: Go, be and enjoy your surrounding area. But the site’s results need to be much more accurate for me to start relying on it full time.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Condé Nast Tries Turning the App Store Into a Newsstand: Will You Buy GQ for Your iPhone?

Peter Kafka — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:26:56 +0000

I’ve all but declared a moratorium on “Company X has an iPhone app” stories–memo to PR folk: There are now 85,000 apps–but this one is actually interesting: Condé Nast is turning the app into a digital magazine.

The publisher plans to start selling digital copies of its print titles via a yet-to-be-approved app. Condé will start with the December issue of GQ, which it will sell for $2.99 (versus a newsstand price of $4.99), but the idea is that the publisher can use the same technology to sell other issues of other magazines down the road.

Condé says the GQ digital issue will replicate the print one on a page-by-page basis, including the ads. Digital bonuses include related videos, as well as links to sites for products (clothing, music, etc.) featured in the issue.

I wasn’t able to attend Condé’s presentation this morning, so I can’t tell you how its attempt to transfer a rich glossy magazine onto a phone (or iPod touch) actually works. But for now, I’ll take the company’s word for it and assume that it’s a nice alternative to carrying around some dead trees.

The interesting question is the business model, which I think has some real potential. This doesn’t solve Condé’s core problem–its costs are too high to support its shrinking ad revenue–but it does have several things going for it.

For one, this approach reaches its potential readers where they are: I don’t want to read a magazine at my desk, and I’m far from sold on the idea of buying a specialized reader to consume it digitally. Getting it to me on my phone, which goes wherever I do, is the way to go.

It also generates some (potential) additional revenue for Condé Nast right off the bat without creating a channel conflict with its analog product line: Condé will be able to count any magazines sold via its app platform toward its audited circulation numbers, a trick that no publisher has been able to pull off with Web products so far. Meanwhile advertisers in the print publication who want to add digital links to the iPhone version will pay a premium, Condé says. And the publisher has been able to extract additional dollars from Grey Goose and Gillette, which will be “premium sponsors” of the GQ issue.

Bonus upside: Condé says the technology it has assembled for this effort should work well for future Apple (AAPL) products, like, say, its mythical tablet. “We think that the minute Apple is ready, if they ever are, to announce that they’re going forward with a tablet, that we’ll be ahead of everybody,” says Sarah Chubb, president of Condé Nast Digital.

This doesn’t solve the distribution issue that Condé and other publishers have with Apple, Amazon (AMZN) and other potential digital delivery outfits: Apple, not Condé, will control the billing relationship for the app. But then again, Condé doesn’t get to interact with you when you buy a magazine at a newsstand either, so at least it’s not getting disintermediated.

The question, as always, is whether customers are willing to pay anything at all for content they’ve been getting free on the Web. I still think we’re going to end up with a small segment of people willing to pay up for specialized stuff and a very large group that are going to end up with free things of dubious value. It would be great to be proved wrong, though.