AllThingsD » The Guardian

Hey Facebook, Where's That Timeline and Open Graph You Promised?

Liz Gannes — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:00:10 +0000

Two and a half months after Facebook promised that a huge revision of its self-expression and sharing tools were coming soon, users and developers are still waiting.

Way back in September, Facebook told the world it was launching two major changes to its service: A revision of user profiles, called Timeline, that would make them more substantive and beautiful records of people’s lives; and “Open Graph” tools for developers to automatically share activity by logged-in Facebook users to their Timelines and friends.

Facebook didn’t give a firm date for the new launches, though it indicated they would be ready soon. “We’re going to roll [Timeline] out widely over the next few weeks as we polish all the edges,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told developers and press attendees in his keynote at f8 on Sept. 22.

But we’re already in December, and those tools have yet to arrive. Why the delay?

“We wanted to let developers build on the platform and to give users more time to get used to the idea of change coming,” a Facebook spokeswoman told AllThingsD, noting that Facebook has been criticized in the past for rolling out products in a hurry. Would she offer a launch date, or even an estimate? Nope.

Developers told AllThingsD that they are eager and ready to launch their Open Graph tools, but that Facebook keeps pushing its dates back. In recent developer communications, Facebook’s promises to launch “before the end of the year” have segued to January, the developers said.

Developers also said they’re worried that Facebook has told them it will likely run a staged rollout, where all users might not receive access at the same time, and where users would have seven days to review their Timeline before publishing it.

Those various states of deployment could be a chafe for app makers to support simultaneously, and could potentially confuse users.

At f8 in September, Zuckerberg had promised that Facebook would soon be filled with a cornucopia of verbs — like “watch,” “listen,” “read,” “cook,” “run,” “throw sheep,” etc. — building on the more static “people,” “places,” “things” and other nouns the site had supported in the past.

He said users could look forward to automatically sharing and collecting records of their culinary and athletic adventures through social cooking and social running apps, for example. Facebook also named a list of developers who had already agreed to create Open Graph applications, including Blockbuster, Flipboard and Mashable.

But only a chosen few — including Spotify, Rdio, the Guardian, the Washington Post and Netflix (though the social version of Netflix is not available in the U.S. yet) — got to launch in September; to my knowledge, no other partners or any other developers have since been allowed to release their “frictionless sharing” apps to the masses.

Meanwhile, more than a million Facebook users are already trying Timeline through a preview version for developers.

Months later, it seems rather odd that some users have an entirely different Facebook aesthetic. Personally, as a user with many connections in the tech industry who have activated their Timelines, when I happen on an older-style profile, with no glossy cover photo, the layout feels dated.

Here are some of the reasons Facebook, developers and conspiracy theorists gave for the delays:

From the Facebook camp, we hear of efforts to rewrite Timeline to make it faster, to sync up mobile versions, and to fully ensure the product is ready. There’s also some chatter of internal conflict over the Timeline concept.
Based on my own observations, early response to beta versions of the new features has been mixed. The new real-time Ticker, built to show Open Graph activity and every other action taken on Facebook as a sidebar on the site’s main page, was initially unpopular with many users. Anecdotally, I’ve seen very few Timeline beta users scan in their baby photos to tell the backstory of their lives. And new automated sharing features — like Spotify and especially the social news reader apps — can be annoying.
There are also some external factors. A small company called Timelines, with trademarks on its brand, sued Facebook right after f8. A judge denied Timelines a temporary restraining order against Facebook, but said he would reconsider if Facebook opens Timeline to a larger audience. As of Oct. 8, 1.3 million people were using the Timeline beta, and tens of thousands were signing up per day, according to court documents. Also, Facebook recently agreed to settle with the FTC over privacy complaints. While the settlement specifically prohibits Facebook from retroactively changing any user privacy settings, it’s not as explicit about how Facebook must introduce privacy features for new products. Given that Facebook is likely to go public soon, people at the company are probably especially interested in surviving a major launch with as little privacy backlash as possible.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

NewsCred Raises $4 Million for Its Web-Based Newswire

Peter Kafka — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:00:11 +0000

Problem: You own a Web site and would like to fill it up with some nice-looking newsy content, but you don’t want to pay people like me to make it. NewsCred wants to provide the answer: It syndicates news stories from outlets like the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times and Forbes, and places them on sites around the world.

The New York-based start-up has been at this in various incarnations since 2009, but CEO Shafqat Islam says he’s getting some traction, and is able to charge Web publishers $3,000 to $5,000 a month per “vertical” for access to his (borrowed) content. He says he’ll do $1 million in revenue this year; last month, Islam raised a $4 million Series A round led by First Mark, along with Lerer Ventures, AOL Ventures and Shari Redstone’s Advancit Capital.

Content syndicators aren’t a new idea, by any means, and NewsCred’s basic pitch sounds quite similar to Mochilla, which has raised a pile of money. Several folks are trying versions of this in video, including AOL’s 5min and U.K.-based Perform Group’s ePlayer. And Demand Media has tried putting its super-low-cost freelancers to work for publishers including USA Today.

NewsCred’s basic pitch seems to be that it has a better selection of blue-chip content makers, all of which are getting guaranteed payments for their stuff. Islam pitches his product as a disruptor out to take on the likes of the Associated Press, but he also syndicates content from Reuters and Bloomberg, also giant newswires. So presumably they don’t feel threatened quite yet.

Here’s an interview I conducted with Islam earlier this week, featuring a cameo from Pat the Contractor (NewsCred is in the process of moving into its own place, after graduating from start-up launcher General Assembly).

[ See post to watch video ]

(Side note: To get a sense of how difficult it is to hammer out some of these content deals, or just get a foot in the door, see this email exchange between Islam and an executive at Dow Jones, which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.)

Why Is the Washington Post at the Top of My Facebook Feed Yet Again?

Liz Gannes — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:00:17 +0000

It seems every time I’ve visited Facebook in recent weeks, I’m greeted front and center with a box of stories that my friends have read on the Washington Post. Occasionally, they’re articles I’m interested in, but often they’re things I’ve already seen — or just the latest Kardashian development.

I know my friends are sharing more interesting things about their own lives on Facebook, but these dang stories are almost always at the very top.

After uninstalling and hiding the app failed to stop this from happening, I asked Facebook and the Washington Post what was going on, and how I could make it stop.

Washington Post remains glued to the top of my news feed. Marking it as spam doesn’t seem help; no app settings. This is crazy.

November 11, 2011 7:58 am via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@bpm140

Eric Marcoullier

They said the box I’m seeing is an aggregated list of activity from news apps, with the new “frictionless” Open Graph that shows every single story my participating friends read.

Because Facebook has rolled out to only a few news apps, and the Washington Post Social Reader seems to be by far the most popular with my friends, Facebook’s algorithm keeps determining that it’s very relevant to me.

The Facebook newsfeed allows users to hide all updates from a single app, but at least for now there’s no way to hide all updates from the aggregated news list.

You can see this in the screenshots a Facebook spokeswoman sent me, embedded here. The news box above is missing the “hide all” option offered for Spotify, below. (Her news box happened to include the reading activity of Washington Post CEO Don Graham, who is on the Facebook board of directors.)

The Washington Post automatically shares every story read on its site by anyone who has installed its Social Reader App. (And that’s a lot of people — the app has 1.9 million monthly active users, according to Facebook, including about a quarter of my Facebook friends.) The publication aggressively promotes its app to those users’ friends, by asking them to install it when they click from Facebook on a link to a Washington Post story.

For his part, Washington Post Chief Digital Officer Vijay Ravindran said the integration with Facebook is a work in progress.

“We’re excited to be part of a small set of apps that are learning as Facebook is learning about the power of the Open Graph,” Ravindran said. “We’re encouraged by how things are going to date but we also know that we could do a better job having a more engaging app and there’s a lot of evolution to build upon what they’ve done.”

A Facebook spokeswoman said the best way for a user to downvote the aggregated news story box is to right-click and select the “unmark as top news” option.

“This is something we’re testing, and we’re continuing to gather feedback based on people’s actions with these stories and others related to the Open Graph,” she said.

My experience is, of course, biased by my news-junkie habits and the preferences of my particular set of friends. According to AppData, the Washington Post Social reader has 210,000 daily users, while the Guardian’s Facebook app has 420,000. A spokeswoman for Yahoo said 400,000 people are opting in per day to share their news-reading activity on Facebook.

Anyway, there are lots of things to complain about in the world and on Facebook, but I thought I’d let you know that I tried to get to the bottom of this one.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

New from Google Labs: Google April Fools Overkill

John Paczkowski — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:59:58 +0000

If 2008 (or 2007, 06, 05, 04…) was the year April Fools on the Web jumped the shark, then 2009 was the year it was eaten by it. The Web is so overburdened with pranks this year, it may be that the best April Fools announcement of all proves to be Palm’s–a company promising to deliver real news and not some over-thought hoax. Google alone has posted no fewer than 12 pranks–and none of them match Pigeon Rank in wit.

First the company gave us CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity), an “artificial intelligence” tasked-array system with the personality of a 12-year-old girl and accompanied by its own homepage, YouTube channel, blog, monograph and versions of Google Earth and Google Maps. And to these, Google has added Google LOLCODE, Google Brain Search, Google Chrome with 3-D and a new Gmail auto-reply feature. The search giant also announced a new upside-down viewing option for YouTube and an automatic red-eye function for Picasa.

Overkill? Maybe, just a little. Google (GOOG), of course, wasn’t alone in pumping the Web full of pranks. Seems people with Web sites everywhere fancy themselves Don Rickles today. Hotels.com began taking reservations for rooms on the Moon. And Expedia (EXPE) began offering flights to Mars. Microsoft (MSFT) renamed its Kumo search product Omuk and unveiled Alpine Legend for Xbox 360. Some angry librarians staged a Kindle burning in a Los Angeles park. Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst Media appointed Gary Busey as Director of Human Resources. Torrent index The Pirate Bay partnered with the hopelessly litigious Warner Bros. The Guardian adopted an all-Twitter publishing model. Gizmodo was taken over by spam overlords. Amazon (AMZN) launched a brand new cloud-computing dirigible called Floating Amazon Cloud Environment, or FACE. Yahoo (YHOO) debuted an Ideological Search. And, finally, Qualcomm (QCOM) took convergence a bit too literally.

There are plenty of others, of course, far too many to mention here, and most of them unworthy of that mention in the first place. As Good Morning Silicon Valley aptly notes, “The sad fact is that pranks are like fireworks–once amateurs get to fiddling around with them, somebody’s going to end up lame.”

RIM: Orange to Pull BlackBerry Bold? Guardian Alleges Software Glitches.

Tiernan Ray — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:17:47 +0000

U.K. paper The Guardian this morning reports that Orange, the mobile phone operator owned by France Telecom, is considering yanking Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry Bold from its handset lineup–presumably in the U.K. market–because of what the paper calls persistent software errors.

The curious fact of the article is that it cites no one–it is “understood,” in the passive voice, that the device will be discontinued by Orange. And the article is actually more about the BlackBerry Storm than the Bold.

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