The rich clients of Goldman Sachs, who are poised to grab a $1.5 billion piece of the company?

The venture investors, as well as Microsoft, who funded the social networking site when it was not the behemoth it has become?

Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who owns 25 percent of Facebook?

Of course they all do. But in the midst of this investor frenzy around Facebook, it is critical to keep in mind that the most important “owners” of Facebook are its 600 million users.

Not many of them have been invited to invest in the Goldman deal, but without their active support, uploading of all kinds of personal information and their friend networks, Facebook would be worthless.

Those users–whether or not they are being acknowledged by the company and the markets–are the real shareholders in Facebook.

And if they left, Facebook would become irrelevant. Such a thing has happened before (see: AOL). It’s Facebook’s contract with and service for those users that gives it that massive $50 billion valuation.

This particular deal might not be eyebrow-raising enough to get a ton of people up in arms, but it was specifically structured to consider Goldman investors a single entity, which some think is being done to circumvent shareholder limits that Facebook has historically avoided (although it does not have to any longer, as long as it goes public by the end of April of 2012).

But given the events of the last few years, the public and the government have developed an emphatic mistrust of tricky Wall Street accounting. It’s kind of a sore topic.

And potentially sorer still for Facebook and its consumer image. As the social network has no real competition in most regions and demographics, many users have developed a deep relationship with the service.

Facebook has tried to make its offerings be (and feel) egalitarian, but working hand in glove with Wall Street bankers to freeze out average investors is definitely not that.

Thus, it might be time for the company to think about who its most important constituents are.

Because the only thing that really matters in the long term is if users stick with Facebook or leave it behind.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Think of it as the equivalent of iTunes for Android.

Developers will be able to upload apps–including games and other digital content–to Amazon, which in turn will promote and distribute them on Amazon.com and also on mobile phones. (I can hear the promotions now: “If you liked that app…what about this one?”)

In a blog post aimed at developers, Amazon writes that it’s trying hard to get developers recognized among the hundreds of thousands of apps out there: “Amazon’s innovative marketing and merchandising features are designed to help customers find and discover relevant products from our vast selection, and we’re excited to apply those capabilities to the apps market segment.”

For the past few months, Amazon employees have been reaching out to developers to find out pain points and drum up support for this day.

So far, it looks like Amazon has listened to concerns. The developer portal looks insanely easy to use–anyone with a regular Amazon username and password can access it. Right now, the annual fee of $99 has been waived, and once you agree to a seven-page app-store distribution agreement, you can start uploading applications to the network, and eventually see metrics on how well they are performing.

Much of it sounds like iTunes.

Amazon will share 70 percent of revenues with developers, and the distribution agreement hints it will go worldwide. For now, it will be limited to the U.S. Amazon will handle all the bill processing, which is complex, especially on a global basis. Google learned this the hard way, and continues to support only paid apps in some countries. Amazon will also have some sort of approval process, but it’s unclear how rigorous that will be.

Launching an app store is not a stretch for Amazon. It’s been selling MP3s on phones for some time and has a large digital catalog, spanning books and videos. It also has a built-in payment system and access to tens of millions of Amazon customers, many of whom have their credit card information on file, as with iTunes or PayPal.

The one question is whether the business will provide enough scale for an e-commerce company of its size. After all, most applications today are free, or really cheap. And at least for now, Amazon is limited to the Android operating system.

True, Android is quickly gaining on Apple, especially in the U.S. According to Nielsen’s latest figures, the iPhone’s market share is 28.6 percent vs. RIM’s BlackBerry and Google’s Android platforms, which are essentially tied in second place with 26.1 percent and 25.8 percent, respectively.

There are two potential scenarios that will help pencil this out: The app store could help drive more sales of other content or products on the phone for Amazon. A more farfetched scenario is that Amazon does such a good job that other platforms or handset makers, like BlackBerry, Windows Phone, HTC or Samsung, will choose to outsource or adopt Amazon’s platform for a cut of the revenues.

Eye-Fi, the company best known for adding Wi-Fi to cameras via the memory card slot, thinks it has a way to pair the two devices and offer consumers the best of both worlds.

The company is announcing today that it plans to create a new “direct mode” that will allow cameras with its cards to share photos with a nearby smartphone. Photos transferred would show up on the camera as if they had been taken from that device, allowing for easy editing and sharing.

Eye-Fi’s cards already allow photos to be uploaded from a digital camera, but until now have required either a home Wi-Fi network or a supported public hot spot.

In an interview, Eye-Fi CEO Jeff Holove said he rejects the notion that the cellphone will kill off the digital camera for most consumers.

“We absolutely expect people to use both,” Holove told Mobilized. Typically, Holove said, consumers use their camera on days they know they want to take pictures, relying on the cellphone to capture unexpected moments.

Eye-Fi, which is announcing direct mode at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, said it plans to add the feature later this year as a free update to its X2 series of cards. The company isn’t saying exactly when the feature will be enabled or which smartphones will initially be supported.

The company has been expanding its products beyond just its signature cards, which allow cameras to wirelessly upload photos over a home or public Wi-Fi connection as well as tag photos with the location where a shot was taken. Last year, the company announced a service that allows its customers to back up their photos to cloud-based storage.

Now we have a full text of the actual rules, weighing in at a voluminous 194 heavily footnoted pages, which just became public on the FCC’s Web site. As with some of the other documents relating to this, I’ve uploaded this one to Scribd and embedded it below. This is the document that corporate lawyers, lawmakers and other policy wonks at think tanks and trade associations will be combing through in the coming weeks and months in hopes of either watering down or strengthening the rules, depending on your point of view. Others will be looking through this text for provisions they can challenge in court. And congressional Republicans have already promised to hold hearings next year and will probably try to find a way to legislate these rules out of existence.

FCC-10-201A1

Let’s get this out of the way right now–WakeMate co-founder Arun Gupta said the start-up is finally shipping all pre-orders of the long-awaited sleep tracking gadget.

Gupta said, “Our goal is to fill all pre-orders by Christmas.”

And I can even verify that the unit exists, since I have been using one for a week now.

So why all the skepticism?

Because WakeMate–which began as an idea for a smart alarm clock back in 2006 and graduated out of the Y Combinator incubator in summer of 2009–has had more than a few delays in delivering product.

To be fair, the tiny company might have bit off a fair amount to chew. WakeMate chose a solution to the sleep-tracking problem that required it to build original hardware, a main Web application, as well as apps for Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry.

Thus, Gupta describes the first version of its product as “really, a public beta.”

And, WakeMate is indeed a little rough around the edges.

For example, the unit itself–with its semi-exposed electronics and shrink-tube wrapper–looks a little more like something hacked together on top of one of the mini DIY Arduino boards than it does a finished consumer electronics device.

But if you have any experience programming microcontrollers, you might appreciate the sort of sophistication that goes into coordinating this sleepy symphony of data gathering.

(Pardon us for a minute, while I get a little über-geeky and explain how the WakeMate wristband works. If this doesn’t concern you, feel free to fast-forward a few paragraphs to get to Gupta’s predictions for WakeMate’s future.)

When you flick the small switch on the WakeMate wristband, just prior to going to sleep, the device connects via Bluetooth to your iOS, Android or BlackBerry device.

You then open the WakeMate app and enter a 20-minute window during which you’d like to be woken.

The app talks to the wristband and transmits that time information. Then, both app and device enter a sort of low-power state. At this stage, the WakeMate becomes little more than a data logger.

There is a fairly standard, solid-state, three-axis accelerometer on board, much like the one that allows you to “shake to shuffle” your iPhone.

WakeMate then spits out three fields of data–X,Y and Z axis readings–40 times per second, which are stored in its flash memory all night.

That means an eight-hour sleep cycle will produce about 3.5 million unique data points, not including metadata.

The onboard clock–for the computer, not for human time-telling–waits until your pre-selected 20-minute window and then figures out, based on frequency and severity of wrist movement, when you are closest to being awake on your own.

When that moment comes, it wakes the Bluetooth connection, connects to the phone, sounds the alarm and starts uploading the data it collected all night directly to the phone and immediately sends the information to WakeMate’s servers.

And, not to worry, if the WakeMate dies mid-sleep, the phone knows to sound the alarm anyway.

It is quite a concert that needs to be played flawlessly for connectivity and battery life to remain intact.

Impressive data tricks aside, the world in which WakeMate was conceived looked a little different from the one into which it has been born, and that means a different set of competitive realities.

When WakeMate left Y Combinator, the world of iOS device-connected movement sensors was limited to the Nike Fit, which links running performance via a shoe-attached device.

It was also a world without Fitbit, another popular activity and health tracker.

And, unlike now, there were no sleep apps claiming to do what WakeMate does.

But now, even with all the new rivals, Gupta believes WakeMate still has the edge.

He explained: “In the early days of sleep-tracking studies, doctors decided to monitor non-dominant wrist movement as part of the data collected to determine sleep state. That continues today, so there is a ton of research that has been collected over the years on correlating wrist movement with sleep cycle.”

He added that WakeMate has built an algorithm that fits the data collected by its wristband to these medically relevant sleep-cycle models and spits out graphs mapping your sleep states, your waking moments and even times when you were in deepest sleep.

“All the competing tools out there aren’t at all based on any kind of accepted research–no one is studying pillow movement or waistband movement or anything,” Gupta said. “But we know how you are sleeping when you move your wrist.”

The major questions facing WakeMate as a company revolve around what one might expect from a start-up with such a complex beta product.

Gupta said it will focus on innovating and revising its wristband, as well as doing more interesting things with the data it will collect.

“On the macro level, we’re really doing the biggest sleep study that has ever been done,” he said. “We’ll be able to tell you how people are sleeping in San Francisco versus New York, based on seasons and all kinds of things.”

Gupta added that while he doesn’t know what the next step is, WakeMate is prototyping ideas where it could correlate sleep data with other metrics about health, occupation and stress to provide a more complete tool set.

But as more companies work on the problem of digitizing the analog data of human life, the harder questions to answer are really in front of the consumer.

Gupta said he doesn’t know what a world would look like if a health insurance company could access your sleep data, or when information about your apparent insomnia is grabbed by some hacker.

What WakeMate hopes for, he said, is a world where more people have access to the kind of medical data collection that has previously only been collectable by trained technicians in controlled settings.

But more data is better, as far as WakeMate is concerned–it is hoping that its vision puts its products at the center of an all-day biometric data collection future.

In the No. 1 spot was the California District Court ruling on gay-marriage voter initiative Proposition 8. Uploaded by GoodAsYou.org shortly after the ruling came out in August, the document was Scribd’s most viral ever. The start-up provided a timeline showing how it was spread (image embedded; click to enlarge).

We should note that Scribd did not provide a list of docs ranked by number of views. CEO Trip Adler said such a list would be dominated by random items that have good search engine optimization, like a scan of an Indian phone book that has long been one of Scribd’s most-viewed documents of all time. Scribd, which now has 60 million monthly uniques, attributes much of its growth to its improvement of social sharing features.

The No. 2 most-shared doc on Scribd in 2010 was the surprising claim of proof of the computer science problem P ? NP from earlier this year. Uploaded by Vinay Deolalikar of HP Research Labs in August, the paper seemed to show that a class of computationally intensive problems could not be solved using simple algorithms.

In the third spot was the Republican political platform “GOP Pledge to America,” uploaded in September by CBS News. The draft lays out policy principles on the economy, healthcare and national security.

I find it interesting that Scribd’s most social documents are more often notable for newsworthiness than timelessness. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments earlier this month appealing the Prop 8 decision that was posted on Scribd. And as for P ? NP, while many computer scientists believe the claim in the paper on Scribd is correct, the proof itself is not seen as conclusive.

The rest of Scribd’s 2010 social docs list is a similar mix of newsworthy documents and research, as well as a little levity, including a list of 25 macaroni-and-cheese recipes.

1. California Prop 8 Ruling (Good As You)
2. PNP 12 pt (Angelica Lim)
3. GOP Pledge to America (CBS News)
4. Scribd in HTML5 (Scribd)
5. A Statement to the Viewers of Countdown (Brian Stelter)
6. Marijuana Is Safer (Chelsea Green)
7. Cognitive Biases–A Visual Study Guide (Efern211)
8. Using Facebook to Move Your Business Forward (Facebook)
9. 25 Mac & Cheese Recipes (Gooseberry Patch)
10. Influence and Passivity in Social Media (Hewlett-Packard)

25 Mac & Cheese Recipes by Gooseberry Patch

But I’ll be very surprised if it is music related–like a new music subscription service, or even one that lets you stream music you already own to multiple devices.

(UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal says that Apple has finally signed the Beatles to an iTunes deal to be announced “soon”. Which makes tomorrow’s announcement a much easier guess.)

It’s easy to understand why Apple might head in that direction: Generally, because it seems inevitable and because Google has been talking about doing something similar. And specifically, because Apple has that shiny new North Carolina data center to play with.

But the music industry sources I’ve talked to so far today don’t know of any new deals between Apple and the big music labels. So that would rule out a new subscription service, which would definitely require a new rights deal.

And that also makes it very unlikely that Apple does the next best thing: Letting users upload their iTunes catalog to the cloud, and letting them access it anywhere they want.

Does Apple have to get a special deal with the labels in order to do that? Not necessarily. Some start-ups are offering similar services, without a deal (though one of them, MP3tunes, is getting sued).

And you can make a common-sense argument that simply storing someone’s data, then letting them access it again, shouldn’t require a deal. But the labels argue that it does.

So unless Apple wants to make them go ballistic–and freak out the movie and TV studios, the folks that Steve Jobs really wants to court–it’s hard to see Apple announcing a service without signed paperwork.

Okay. So what are they announcing? Again–got me. Hoping to find out before tomorrow, but if not I’ll be watching at 10 am Eastern like the rest of you.

The company says it will comply with a court injunction to turn off “the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality” of its software, which remains one of the most popular methods of finding free–and illegal–music on the Web.

That means the company will stop offering downloads of its software, which you could still get on its site as of late Tuesday afternoon. And it also means that the company will disable the software that’s already been downloaded, according to people familiar with LimeWire’s plans.

I don’t know if LimeWire intends to cripple its client via a “kill switch” or some other method, but as of 20 minutes ago it hadn’t gone into effect–I was able to locate and download a version of the Clash’s “I Fought the Law” within a minute of booting up LimeWire’s software. (UPDATE for the technically minded, via a person familiar with the company’s plans: “They’ve taken down the relay severs on the Gnutella network which the Limewire client uses to figure out which other p2p clients have what info on them.” This should render existing clients effectively useless as anything other than a media player within the next nine hours, I’m told.)

LimeWire‘s client has been downloaded “hundreds of millions” of times, and is still responsible for the “vast majority” of usage on the Gnutella trading network, says Eric Garland, who runs the BigChampagne media tracking service. The company’s moves won’t affect other open source clients that run on the same Gnutella network, like FrostWire.

Meanwhile, LimeWire’s parent company, Lime Group, is prepping a new music service that it says will be legal, and should be due out in a month.

But the utility of that service depends on the participation of the big music labels, and at least for now the labels are still trying to extract a big piece of Lime Group’s hide. Court hearings in the damages phase of Lime Group’s hire are scheduled to resume in January. And this statement by industry trade group RIAA makes it clear that the labels aren’t feeling conciliatory:

“For the better part of the last decade, Limewire and Gorton have violated the law. The court has now signed an injunction that will start to unwind the massive piracy machine that Limewire and Gorton used to enrich themselves immensely. In January, the court will conduct a trial to determine the appropriate level of damages necessary to compensate the record companies for the billions and billions of illegal downloads that occurred through the Limewire system.”

Today’s announcement comes after Lime and the labels spent weeks trying to negotiate an out-of-court settlement; Federal District Court judge Kimba Wood actually handed down the injunction in August.

Here’s LimeWire CEO George Searle’s description of events, via  blog post:

As of today, we are required to stop distribution and support of LimeWire’s P2P file-sharing service as a result of a court-ordered injunction.

Naturally, we’re disappointed with this turn of events. We are extremely proud of our pioneering history and have, for years, worked hard to bridge the gap between technology and content rights holders. However, at this time, we have no option but to cease further distribution and support of our software.

It’s a sad occasion for our team, and for you–the hundreds of millions of people who have used LimeWire to discover new things.

While we have enabled open sharing and discovery for the past decade, LimeWire is mostly the product of the people who used it. You made LimeWire. Thank you for letting us being part of that. Your support and enthusiasm has fueled everything that we do.

During this challenging time, we are excited about the future. The injunction applies only to the LimeWire product. Our company remains open for business.

We remain deeply committed to working with the music industry and making the act of loving music more fulfilling for everyone – including artists, songwriters, publishers, labels, and of course music fans.Our team of technologists and music enthusiasts are creating a completely new music service that puts you back at the center of your digital music experience.

We’ll be sharing more details about our new service and look forward to bringing it to you in the future.

And here’s a LimeWire PR rep’s description of what’s going on:

As a result of a court ordered injunction, we are required to disable “the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality” of LimeWire’s P2P file-sharing software.

Please note LimeWire’s official statement on this legal development is as follows:

“While this is not our ideal path, we hope to work with the music industry in moving forward.  We look forward to embracing necessary changes and collaborating with the entire music industry in the future.”  – LimeWire Spokesperson.

An important point of clarification, LimeWire is not “shutting down”, in specific regarding our software, we are compelled to use our best efforts cease support and distribution of the file-sharing software, along with increased filtering.  And, that is what we are doing.

Sources tell me that Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures are leading a “significant” new round for the Berlin-based company. I don’t have a dollar amount, but I’m told that VCs were competing fiercely to get into the three-year-old company, which raised a $3.3 million round from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures in 2009. The round hasn’t closed yet.

Online music has been a black hole for investors for a very long time. So what’s the attraction here?

In large part, it’s because SoundCloud isn’t dependent on deals with the major music labels. It’s designed to let professional and amateur musicians share their own music with each other and the public, via cloud-based files that the company hosts.

Once the tunes are on SoundCloud’s servers, the service makes it easy to move the stuff around the Web, via its own widget and an API that’s showing up on lots of interesting sites, apps, services and devices, including Facebook and Apple’s iPad. You can load SoundCloud files into Spotify, the streaming music company that Index has also invested in.

The service uses the freemium model, offering most of its capabilities for free, and charging up to $700 a year for more storage and extra features.

You can also use SoundCloud to share music you didn’t create and don’t own–and a “private sharing” option makes it easy to do so discretely. That could leave the service open, theoretically, to copyright claims, a la YouTube.

But so far the company has signed up a million users without attracting the ire of the big labels. And recent court decisions in the Veoh/Universal Music and Google/Viacom cases seem to give user-uploaded services like SoundCloud a lot of legal leeway, at least in the U.S.

I’m told that the company also plans on using Audible Magic’s “fingerprinting” technology, which will make it easier for copyright owners to pull content off the service.

SoundCloud, Index and Union Square all declined to comment.

Here’s an example of SoundCloud at work–a 43-minute (!) mix that Beck has posted to his Web site, which we can also embed here:

Melted Lemons by planned_obsolescence

SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

Here’s the company’s statement on the issue:

AT&T and Alcatel-Lucent jointly identified a software defect–triggered under certain conditions–that impacted uplink performance for Laptop Connect and smartphone customers using 3G HSUPA-capable
wireless devices in markets with Alcatel-Lucent equipment. This impacts less than two percent of our wireless customer base. While Alcatel-Lucent develops the appropriate software fix, we are providing normal 3G uplink speeds and consistent performance for affected customers with HSUPA-capable devices.

That’s the upshot of a federal judge’s ruling ordering both sides in the slow-moving copyright fight to unseal many of the documents in the case.

I’ve embedded the document below so you can parse it yourself. But the important part is that U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton has told both sides to work together over the next few days and weeks to figure out which of the files the public can see. A good chunk of them should be available within the next 10 days.

This won’t be the entire paper pile the three-year old case has thrown off–the ruling only affects documents both sides have filed in their requests for summary judgment. But it should be most of the interesting stuff, since both sides are trying to marshal as much evidence as they can to persuade Stanton.

The two arguments in a nutshell: Viacom (VIA) is arguing that Google (GOOG) and YouTube violated its copyright when they allowed users to upload and play the cable company’s stuff on the video site. And Google is arguing that federal law protects it from copyright-violation claims.

There is presumably stuff in the file embarrassing to both sides. Google has intimated that Viacom executives knowingly uploaded their own stuff to YouTube, for instance, while the Viacom folks hint that YouTube management knowingly uploaded its stuff onto the site.

But as CNET’s Greg Sandoval explained yesterday, Google’s attorneys asked the court to keep the documents sealed for another three months, while Viacom’s team wants them unsealed in two weeks.

So that makes Stanton’s ruling is a small victory for Viacom. But only a small one: The status of the documents won’t have any bearing on the case itself.

show_temp-3

In China, the search giant is battling hackers and the government, who may be one and the same. In Europe, the company is being hauled in front of an antitrust review. And Italy? Total disaster.

Yesterday, an Italian court convicted three Google (GOOG) executives of privacy violations in a case that stems from a clip uploaded to Google Video in 2006. The executives, who include former CFO George Reyes, have been sentenced to six-month prison sentences.

And that verdict follows a December ruling whereby an Italian court found the company guilty of copyright violations on YouTube, the video site it bought in 2006. Mediaset, the broadcaster that brought the suit–and which is controlled by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi–is looking for more than $730 million in damages.

Google has responded to the video convictions with an outraged blog post. Note that the language is more forceful than the company used to describe its China problem. But also note that the company isn’t threatening to pull out of Italy altogether. Maybe it should.

Serious threat to the web in Italy
2/24/2010 01:57:00 AM
In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police. We also worked with the local police to help identify the person responsible for uploading it and she was subsequently sentenced to 10 months community service by a court in Turin, as were several other classmates who were also involved. In these rare but unpleasant cases, that’s where our involvement would normally end.

But in this instance, a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees–David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left the company in 2008). The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video’s existence until after it was removed.

Nevertheless, a judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants–David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes–for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. All 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation. In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.

But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them–every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video–then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

These are important points of principle, which is why we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision.

Posted by Matt Sucherman, VP and Deputy General Counsel–Europe, Middle East and Africa

“This is not the ‘GDrive,’” a Google (GOOG) spokesperson explained. “We’ve been continuing to expand on the types of files that can be uploaded to Docs. We started with documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Later we enabled upload, view and share of PDFs. This launch builds on internal work that we’ve been doing for some time.”

And indeed it does. Until yesterday, Google Docs was limited to office-type documents. Today, those limits are gone and you can upload any file you like as long as it’s not over 250 megabytes. The service will provide up to one gigabyte of free storage, with additional space costing 25 cents per gigabyte per year.

How this is different from the following description of GDrive culled from a 2006 Google presentation for analysts escapes me.

With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc). We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today. For example: Firefox team is working on server side stored state but they want to store only URLs rather than complete web pages for storage reasons. This theme will help us make the client less important (thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and is also of great value.

You could see this one coming a mile out: After telling users they could not upload new videos late last year, Yahoo is finally shutting down Jumpcut.

“This was a difficult decision to make, but it’s part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo!,” said Jumpcut in a note to users today.

That’s code for the stylings of new CEO Carol Bartz, who is hard at work axing many of Yahoo’s similarly lagging services.

She has reportedly been readying plans to sell off Yahoo’s lackluster HotJobs employment listing service, for example. And there will surely be more to come, from the many companies Yahoo has gobbled up in the last few years and has done nothing much with.

Such as the sassy video editing service, which was bought by Yahoo in 2006 amid high hopes of the Internet giant becoming a big player in the hot online video market.

That honor, as it turned out, went to YouTube, which was more cats-on-skateboards-oriented than tools-oriented.

Yahoo (YHOO), ironically, was poised to buy YouTube in the month after it grabbed Jumpcut, until it was snatched away in a last-minute acquisition grab by Google (GOOG).

Now, Jumpcut is a wrap.

Curiously, Yahoo is making users download the videos to their computers, and then suggests they upload them to another Yahoo property, Flickr, which now allows video.

Why the company doesn’t just let people migrate the videos is probably due to the silos of tech at Yahoo, which are infamous and which the company is trying to fix.

But not today.

Thus, Jumpcut sent this note to its customers:

Dear Jumpcut user,

After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009. This was a difficult decision to make, but it’s part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo!

Very soon, we’ll be releasing a software utility that will allow you to download the movies you created on Jumpcut to your computer. We’ll send instructions to this email address when the download utility is available.

Once you download your movies, you may choose to upload them to another site such as Flickr, which now allows video uploads. You can find out more here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/video/

Thanks for your understanding and thanks for being a part of Jumpcut.

The Jumpcut Team

And, for a trip down memory lane to happier times, here is the memo Yahoo wrote when it bought the San Francisco start-up:

SEPTEMBER 27, 2006

Jumpcut Joins the Yahoo! Video Family

Yes it’s true!

Jumpcut just announced they’ve agreed to join us, which will make Yahoo! Video an even better place for people to create, share, and discover great video online. If you haven’t heard of Jumpcut, it’s a San Francisco-based startup that has a passionate community of users and a great suite of online video editing capabilities.

Ever since Yahoo! Research Berkeley launched the International Remixer, our interest in this space has been pretty clear–we couldn’t stop talking about how cool it is to mashup multimedia of all kinds.

So needless to say, we are very happy to have Jumpcut join the Social Media group here. They’ll be bunk-mates with Flickr, and just around the virtual corner from Delicious, and Upcoming.

Please head over to Jumpcut’s blog for the official word.

Jason Zajac
VP Social Media

To avoid a South Korean law that would require users who upload or comment on videos to first register with their real names, YouTube last week disabled those two features on its local Korean site, according to the company. The move garnered new attention Monday, after it was reported by a Korean publication, Hankyoreh.

Scott Rubin, a spokesman for YouTube parent Google (GOOG), said it devised the compromise because it believes in users’ rights to be anonymous online. He notes that users in Korea can upload and comment on videos by changing their country settings to another geographic zone. And users of the Korean site can still watch videos anonymously.

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“Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call,” Hurley wrote in an, ahem, “visionary” post to Google’s blog celebrating the company’s tenth anniversary. “This new video content will be available on any screen–in your your living room, or on your device in your pocket. … In 10 years, we believe that online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication. The tools for video recording will continue to become smaller and more affordable. Personal media devices will be universal and interconnected. Even more people will have the opportunity to record and share even more video with a small group of friends or everyone around the world.”

And YouTube will have even more video content to fail to monetize!

Well, presumably Google (GOOG) will have figured out a way to turn YouTube into a profitable business by 2018. Hurley best hope so, because YouTube’s rumored $1 million-a-day bandwidth bills are a bit steep, even for Google.

“Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call,” Hurley wrote in an, ahem, “visionary” post to Google’s blog celebrating the company’s tenth anniversary. “This new video content will be available on any screen–in your your living room, or on your device in your pocket. … In 10 years, we believe that online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication. The tools for video recording will continue to become smaller and more affordable. Personal media devices will be universal and interconnected. Even more people will have the opportunity to record and share even more video with a small group of friends or everyone around the world.”

And YouTube will have even more video content to fail to monetize!

Well, presumably Google (GOOG) will have figured out a way to turn YouTube into a profitable business by 2018. Hurley best hope so, because YouTube’s rumored $1 million-a-day bandwidth bills are a bit steep, even for Google.

Beginning this summer, as soon as next month, wireless Internet access will arrive in the passenger cabins of some commercial U.S. airliners.

On these Internet-equipped planes, any passenger with a Wi-Fi enabled laptop — or a cellphone with Wi-Fi — will be able to do almost everything he or she could do online at home or at the office. That includes surfing the Web, using email, having instant-messenger text chats, downloading and uploading files, and streaming video and audio.

In fact, I did all these things a few days ago on a test flight using the new system, called Gogo. During the flight from San Francisco to Denver, on a small test jet, I could operate online as if I were sitting at my desk, or in a Starbucks. I used Dell (DELL) and Apple (AAPL) laptops, a BlackBerry (RIMM), a Windows Mobile phone and an iPhone to perform all the most common online tasks, while soaring over majestic mountains and glorious national parks.

I sent and received emails on Microsoft (MSFT) Outlook and Apple Mail, including messages with hefty attachments. I conducted IM chats on AOL (TWX) Instant Messenger and Google (GOOG) Talk. Using all the major Web browsers, I called up dozens of Web sites, and watched video clips on Hulu and YouTube. I downloaded photos, songs, PDF files and Microsoft Office documents. I used all the Internet functions on the iPhone, and on the Wi-Fi-equipped BlackBerry and Windows Mobile phone.

One important caveat: Gogo is a data-only system. It doesn’t allow phone calls and will block all services that allow voice conversations to be made over the Internet.

Gogo will launch on three American Airlines (AMR) routes, likely in July. The first planes to use it will be American’s 15 Boeing 767s flying between New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami. Later in the year, Gogo will be available on all of Virgin America’s small number of routes, and possibly additional American routes, if the first deployment works well. It’s supplied to the airlines by a Denver-based company called Aircell, which says it is in negotiations to offer the Gogo service on several other major U.S. airlines by next year.

The Gogo service will cost a flat fee of $12.95 for flights of three hours or longer, and $9.95 for shorter trips. You log into Gogo as you would any commercial Internet service, registering on a special Web page. Aircell plans to allow advance sign-up, so you’d only have to enter an ID and password on the plane. No add-on software, hardware or cables are required.

A few Web functions will be offered free from Gogo, including access to the American Airlines Web site, to Frommer’s online travel guides and to a limited selection of articles from The Wall Street Journal.

Gogo isn’t the first in-plane Internet service. A few years ago, Lufthansa (LHA.MU) offered a satellite-based service from Boeing (BA), mainly on over-ocean flights, but it was canceled.

The service operates at respectable, if not blazing, speeds — similar to what you’d get on a cellular broadband service or a slow home DSL line. On my test flight, download speeds varied from 266 kilobits per second to about 1.4 megabits per second, with the most typical speeds hovering between 500 and 600 kbps. Upload speeds were between 250 and 300 kbps. I found that most of the tasks I tested, except for streaming video, felt smooth and normal.

Speeds could degrade on a large plane with scores of people online simultaneously. But Aircell claims it has the technology to make my experience representative for anyone doing common tasks, such as Web surfing and email. During my test flight, eight laptops and six Wi-Fi-enabled smart phones were using the system simultaneously. All registered decent speeds, except for a couple of minutes when the plane was crossing between the zones controlled by the company’s ground-based towers.

Aircell gets Internet access to the planes through a network of 92 towers scattered across North America. These essentially are cellphone towers, carrying a high-speed cellphone data signal, except that the Aircell antennas point up, into the sky. A receiver on the underside of the aircraft picks up the signal, which is then distributed through the plane via Wi-Fi.

The companies say Gogo is safe and won’t interfere with the plane’s operation. It is government-approved, and pilots can shut the system off should they deem it necessary.

Gogo has some limitations. The service plans to allocate its capacity so that low-bandwidth activities like Web surfing and email take priority over high-bandwidth ones like streaming video. That means you may find video to be slow and halting.

And Gogo is a North American, land-based service only. It won’t work over the oceans and, for now, it won’t work on other continents.

But for U.S. travelers who want to stay connected in the air, Gogo does the job.

• Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

The once-frustrating process of sharing digital photos and videos has noticeably improved over the past year, thanks to seamless Web-based programs that work like desktop applications. But many of these sites give all the power to whoever created the album, leaving invited guests to simply look at photos or add comments.

Shwup by muvee Technologies gives friends a common album in which to share digital photos and videos.

This week I tested shwup (www.shwup.com), a free Web-based application that’s available starting Wednesday from muvee Technologies and works as described above with only a few pitfalls. The concept is simple: Anyone who signs up for a shwup account can create an album filled with digital photos and videos, and this album can be shared with anyone else via email whether they have a shwup account or not. Recipients of these email invitations can click on an embedded link to view and add content to the album. Or users can completely skip visiting the site and instantly upload content by replying to the email invitation with attached photos and videos.

Muvee Technologies is best known for selling software that automatically creates short movies, or muvees, by blending digital videos and photos with music and transitions. Muvee’s namesake technology is a part of the free shwup site; a few muvees are automatically generated in each of the albums and everyone who is invited to the album can create muvees using its content. But shwup’s main focus is making sharing easier for everyone. It differs from most of the company’s software programs in that it’s free and completely Web-based.

A shwup album takes just a few minutes to set up and even less time to share. It works on Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 browsers but won’t work on Apple’s (AAPL) Safari until the fall. Shwup is available Wednesday but is still technically in its beta, or testing, phase, and I ran into a few kinks. I had trouble getting its useful reply-to-email uploading capability to work when two friends and I tried to upload content to my album using attachments in email replies. My friends had to visit the site to upload content. Muvee couldn’t figure out what went wrong when I asked the company about it.

I did, however, add content to someone else’s album using the reply-to-email method, uploading a digital photo in seconds. And in another instance I received a shwup email invitation on my BlackBerry and replied to it with an attached photo, which — in seconds — sent that photo from my BlackBerry to the specified shwup album.

Shwup automatically makes muvees, or short movies with music and transitions, using album content.

A glaring omission from shwup is the ability to view photos in full-screen view, a feature that most photo-sharing programs offer in slideshow mode. A friend of mine said he would use shwup over other photo-sharing Web sites that require user names and passwords if only it had full-screen photos. Muvee recognizes this as one of shwup’s biggest issues and says it will add this feature in August.

I uploaded over 60 high-resolution digital photos into my first shwup album, noting that the only limitation on files is that no individual file can be larger than 100 megabytes. These images can come from your computer, Flickr, Facebook or any Web site. Out of curiosity, I plugged www.cnn.com into the Web site entry box and shwup automatically grabbed images from the site that were available for me to use. I checked two of the images and they were added to my album in seconds.

Shwup automatically made and added three muvees to my album, using my photos put to music it chooses with dramatically timed transitions. These short clips looked really well-done, and were labeled as “sample muvees” so as not to be confused with my content. I followed a few simple steps to create a muvee of my own for the album by dragging photos into a tray, choosing from seven different layout styles and a handful of stock music licensed by shwup.

An option lets you upload your own music to play with your muvee, which I did. Seconds later, my homemade muvee played with transitions that were perfectly timed to the beats of a Fountains of Wayne song. After filling an album with digital photos, videos and muvees that I made, I invited friends to my album using emails generated from shwup.com. Within each album, a clear list of whoever was invited to the album can be seen on the top right side of the page. If someone hasn’t shared content yet, he or she can be “poked” by anyone invited to the album, sending them yet another email invitation.

Everyone invited to an album receives notifications from shwup whenever someone contributed content to the album and everyone can change the layout of the album to one of three settings: Grid, Simple or Mosaic. Moving my cursor over an album’s images showed data about each file including who contributed the photo or video, when it was captured and how many comments it had received in the album. (Comments are readable after clicking on an image to see a bigger version of it.)

Digital videos are labeled with small Play icons to distinguish them from digital still images. But a friend who uploaded a video to my album pointed out that the still image representing his video was a gray square rather than a still of the first scene as it did with the other videos — perhaps because this is where the camera was focused at the start of the video. Without an image to illustrate what the video was, it wasn’t as appealing as the other videos and images. Muvee explained that the ability to select a still image to represent a video was available in its pay software, but not yet in shwup, though the company plans to add this to shwup in the future.

Another hitch: If you invite someone to your album and then add something to the album you’d rather they not see, you can’t un-invite the person. Muvee says it plans to add the ability to un-invite members in July. Individual contributors have the ability to delete or “unshare” the content that they added to an album, while album creators can unshare and delete all pictures or entire albums. Album creators also are given the authority to merge albums.

Along with shwup, muvee also announces a new version of its downloadable pay software Wednesday: muvee Reveal. This $100 software has much more detailed features that specifically tweak your videos to become extra personalized.

When it works, shwup serves as a neat, artistic way to share photos quickly. Friends and family will be relieved that it doesn’t require any forgettable usernames and passwords, and the email-uploading tool will make anyone who knows how to attach something to an email feel like he or she can contribute to a photo-sharing Web site without a second thought. After shwup adds its full-screen photo-viewing option and clears up the glitches of its email-uploading feature, I’ll be using shwup for many group events to come.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Last week, when you wrote about the ChaCha cellphone search service, you didn’t say how they make money. Are they collecting phone numbers from customers so they can send spam text messages, or sell the numbers to others who will do so?

ChaCha allows you to ask any Web-searchable question, by speaking it or texting it over a mobile phone, and then it sends you the answer via text message. The company charges consumers nothing, but says it is hoping to make money by striking deals with cellphone carriers to incorporate the ChaCha service into their current 411 phone-number look-up services. Also, it hopes to eventually include ads in the text message answers it provides.

In addition to the message that includes the answer, ChaCha sends you a message saying it is working on your request and restating your question, so you can see if it understood you correctly. It also sends an introductory text message to first-time users and occasional tips on how to use the service. Scott Jones, ChaCha’s chief executive, asserts that “we do not spam” and “we never make phone numbers and/or email addresses available to others.” He said the company is updating its privacy policy to make that clearer.

We have DSL service. I use several Web-based applications, one of which is online backup, and my husband is concerned that they degrade his use of the Web, which includes creating Web sites. I contend that that is like saying turning on one light bulb is using too much electricity, that two people on one DSL line aren’t using up too much bandwidth. Who is right?

Every situation differs, depending on exactly which programs you are each using, how you have them set, whether you are using them simultaneously, and how fast your DSL connection is. However, in general, your husband is correct that it is possible for heavy Internet usage on one computer in a home to slow down Internet speeds on another.

This is especially true with something like online backup, because it relies on your DSL account’s upload speed, which is typically far slower than the download speed. If your online backup program is trying to push a bunch of files over a slow upload connection, while he is in another room trying to upload new versions of a Web site over the same narrow upload pipe, it could affect the speeds he gets. You might try coordinating or staggering those online activities that involve heavy uploading. Normal Web surfing or emailing shouldn’t require any such coordination.

I am thinking about purchasing a Dell (DELL) XPS One all-in-one desktop, but I have one question. Does the Dell’s built-in TV tuner require any extra attachments to watch TV right out of the box?

You can watch over-the-air stations and analog basic cable stations right out of the box, without added equipment. However, you may want to connect a small desktop antenna to improve reception, which is what I did when I tested this machine. To use the XPS One with digital or premium cable or satellite stations, you would have to connect it to a cable or satellite receiver, just as most people do with their TV sets. This requires the use of an adapter that comes with the machine.

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

So, last month, the photo giant introduced Photoshop Express, its free Web-based service for storing, sharing and editing photos, in an effort to compete with established online photo services such as Yahoo’s (YHOO) Flickr, Google’s (GOOG) Picasa Web Albums, or the photo-laden Facebook social-networking service.

Photoshop Express has many of the same features as Flickr and its ilk. It gives you two free gigabytes of photo storage. But Adobe is hoping to make its mark with editing.

Most online photo services offer little or no editing, assuming you’ll do that using software on your computer before you upload your pictures. But Photoshop Express, borrowing from Adobe’s deep knowledge of photo editing, offers the nicest set of Web-based editing tools I have seen. They are sophisticated for a consumer application, yet easy to use. They edge out those in Picnik, a pioneering Web-based photo editor I hailed last year.

These slick editing tools are not only available for use with photos you’ve uploaded from your hard disk. You can also use them to edit pictures stored in your accounts at Facebook, Picasa Web Albums and another big photo-storage service, Photobucket — all without leaving Photoshop Express. You can even move pictures between Photoshop Express and these three services just by dragging and dropping.

Adobe’s new service is available in the U.S. only, at www.photoshop.com/express.

I’ve been testing Photoshop Express and its service overall is pretty good, even though it’s still labeled “beta.” It’s a nice example of the Web 2.0 trend, where programs accessed via a browser can look and feel like applications that live on your computer.

But Photoshop Express is rough around the edges. It can be slow at times, and it’s missing some obvious features, like the ability to easily download publicly shared pictures from other members or to print photos. Adobe says it is working on these things.

Photoshop Express isn’t meant to replicate all the features and power of Photoshop. It’s more like a Web-based version of Photoshop Elements, Adobe’s consumer software package.

I tested Photoshop Express on multiple computers: PCs running Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows XP and Windows Vista, and Macs running Apple’s (AAPL) Leopard operating system. I used it in all three major Web browsers: Internet Explorer for Windows, Firefox on both Windows and Mac, and Safari, also on both platforms. It worked fine in all of these operating systems and browsers, though it does require Adobe’s free Flash software.

For my tests, I uploaded from my computers dozens of photos, from very large images captured with good digital cameras to smaller shots from cellphones. All were handled perfectly by Photoshop Express. I also opened and edited pictures in Photoshop Express from my accounts on Picasa Web Albums and Facebook. All of this worked well, though uploads of large images can be slow if your Web connection is pokey.

Photoshop Express is a handsome product, presenting your photos on a gray background with controls and features arrayed at the top and bottom, and down the sides, in a logical, clear manner. Your own photos are presented in a section called “My Photos,” and can be organized into albums. Photos that other Photoshop Express users have chosen to publicly share are organized into collections called “Galleries,” which can include multiple albums. You access these community photos by simply clicking on “Browse” or performing a search.

For each album you create, you can choose to share it publicly or to keep it private. Whichever option you choose, you can email friends either a link for viewing the album or a single photo. Your own photos can be downloaded at a variety of resolutions, including original size.

When you view shared galleries or albums, they appear as slide shows. You can select a number of slick effects by which the slides appear, allowing them to zoom and glide into place from various directions.

The editing features really stand out. In addition to standard tools such as auto-correction and red-eye elimination, Photoshop Express lets you touch up areas; adjust exposure, saturation, and lighting; and even make certain colors pop — so grass is greener, for instance. And, in most cases, it shows you small example images illustrating the changes, then previews those changes in the larger main image just by moving your mouse over the example. You can revert to your original at any time.

Unfortunately, there are a number of problems. Photos, especially large ones, can take awhile to appear in the editing module and to snap into focus. Captions sometimes get lost or mixed up when you move photos to other services. You can view shared albums only as slide shows, not as individual photos.

Still, Adobe has made a good start with Photoshop Express, and it’s worth a try if you want better online editing for your pictures.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

This week I tested SeeToo, a free service that lets you share videos in the same time that it takes to open and watch them on your own computer. Even better, you get to watch the video along with the people with whom you’re sharing it and type comments to each other in real time.

SeeToo works when one user selects a video to share with other people, who get an emailed hyperlink to SeeToo’s Web site, seetoo.com. After opening the link, these people join a SeeToo session during which everyone can watch the same video at the same time.

With SeeToo, you and your “buddy” can watch and chat about a video at the same time.

While the video is playing for the group, each viewer can pause, rewind and fast-forward the video. A space below the playback screen allows friends to send instant messages to one another during the session. There aren’t any limits to the size or type of video file that is shared, and other types of media — including music and photos — can also be shared on SeeToo without size restrictions.

SeeToo sounds too good to be true, and in many of my tests, it was. The service became available to the public in January in its beta, or test, stage. But I’ve used many other products in beta that were in better shape than SeeToo. And there is one major catch: Once a video-sharing session is over, the participants, other than the person sharing, can no longer access the video.

People who are invited to watch videos on the service can do so using any popular Web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari) on Windows (MSFT) computers and Macs (AAPL). But the person actually supplying the video and initiating the sharing session can use only a Windows PC. The initiator also must download a browser plug-in, which seems old-fashioned in the world of Web-based applications. And sharing sessions time out after 15 minutes of inactivity on the initiator’s side, after which point the email link doesn’t work.

I was able to successfully initiate a SeeToo session using Firefox and Internet Explorer on an older Windows XP computer but had trouble with two computers running Windows Vista: Neither worked with SeeToo using Internet Explorer and only one worked using Firefox. SeeToo says this is due in part to Microsoft’s new Service Pack 1 for Vista, and the company claims it will have this problem fixed by today. I also had trouble with the sound.

The concept behind SeeToo is also somewhat limiting. Some people may not be able to watch a video exactly when someone else wants to watch it. Some might rather watch videos alone than with others. And typing out back-and-forth chats while videos are playing could be somewhat of a distraction from watching the video.

I tested SeeToo by sharing video with family and friends and watching video they shared. My sister and I got a kick out of watching video footage from a wedding I attended in October. I shot the video using an inexpensive, low-resolution Flip Video camera and the footage looked pretty good. But SeeToo’s site shares video on a rather small screen, and we both wished it were larger.

We sent instant messages to one another in a small space below the screen, making comments about the guests’ dance moves and the DJ’s choice of music. I used on-screen tools to pause the video when the camera passed by a friend whom I wanted my sister to see. To take a second look, she selected her screen’s Take Control button and rewound the footage to see my friend.

For the first two seconds of a video, users can see a small image in the top right corner of their screen that displays what the other people are seeing. SeeToo explained that this is a way of confirming one person is indeed seeing the same screen as another person.

I originally invited three people to watch the video with me. One friend I invited was at work, where his computer restricts him from watching videos. When he got home that night, the email hyperlink didn’t work — nor did it explain that the session had expired. Instead, it crashed his Firefox browser. I also invited my boss to watch the video with me, but he only saw my invitation two hours later when the session was over.

I didn’t even try to invite my parents to see the video because neither of them sit in front of a computer all day long and they wouldn’t have received my invitation in time to see the video.

In some ways, it was probably better that the other people I invited to watch the video weren’t able to see it, because the instant-message chat screen currently labels everyone as “buddy,” without distinguishing one person from another. SeeToo hopes to change this in future versions of the service by offering users a chance to register, thus receiving a specific nickname for chatting purposes. As of now, no one who uses SeeToo needs to enter any personal information such as a name or email address, which is a plus. SeeToo is also ad-free as of now, but the company plans to monetize parts of the service sometime this summer.

I also shared music and photos with friends using SeeToo, but this feature isn’t obvious; the site is primarily focused on sharing videos. Music playlists can’t currently be shared with friends, nor can photo slideshows be shared. Instead, individual songs or photos must be selected and shared within a session, one at a time.

SeeToo has high hopes of adding many features in the future, probably by June. Those features include a full-size, higher-resolution viewing screen for sharing and watching videos; a fully Web-based, download-free version of SeeToo; photo slideshows; using names to distinguish viewers; and sharing sessions that don’t time out. In addition, it hopes to let Mac users initiate sharing sessions. The site aims to be out of its testing stage by September.

Right now, SeeToo can come in handy if you know someone else is at a computer and ready to watch a video. The invited guest never downloads anything and neither party needs to register to use SeeToo. But its screen is a bit on the small side, and the service needs to become more versatile before it can be seen as a reliable sharing site.

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

“The layout is the same, the tabs at the top of the screen are the same, the right-side sidebar listing participants and file uploads is the same,” writes Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. “It even copies Campfire’s trick of formatting a message as ‘code’ if it contains literal newline characters.”

UPDATE: Google has taken Huddle Chat offline. Google Product Manager Pete Koomen offered the following explanation for the move:

As one of the App Engine product managers, I wanted to give an update — we’ve now taken HuddleChat down from the App Engine app gallery. The App Engine team was looking for some sample apps to help kick the tires on their new system, so we invited Googlers to build some as side projects. A couple of our colleagues here built HuddleChat in their spare time because they wanted to share work within their team more easily and thought persistent Web chat would do the trick. We’ve heard some complaints from the developer community, though, so rather than divert attention from Google App Engine itself, we thought it better to just take HuddleChat down.

Something like X times Y, to the power of Z–where X is the lack of a sustainable business model, Y is an aggravated response to a nonexistent threat, and Z is the inability to differentiate between customers and thieves.”

–Toronto Globe and Mail writer Mathew Ingram explains the formula used to calculate damages in Virgin Records America et al. v. Thomas.

We’re never going to hear the end of it now …

The recording industry won its first ever file-sharing suit to go to trial yesterday, when a federal jury found 30-year-old Jammie Thomas liable for copyright infringement. The jury awarded the six record labels involved in the case a total of $220,000, or $9,250 for each of the 24 songs they claimed Thomas uploaded.

Seems it was far easier for the labels to sell the jury on their investigative methods than you might think–especially after the presiding judge ruled that no proof was needed that anyone actually downloaded the songs at issue in the case–simply making them available constituted distribution.

Emboldened by the ruling, the Recording Industry Association of America took a break from sending prelitigation settlement letters to college students to issue this gloating statement: “The law here is clear, as are the consequences for breaking it. When the evidence is clear, we will continue to bring legal actions against those individuals who have broken the law. This program is important to securing a level playing field for legal online music services.”

Reading that you’d never think it’s been eight years since Napster, would you? Eight years. Anyway …

Attorney Ray Beckerman, writing in the Recording Industry Vs. the People blog, called the verdict “one of the most irrational things” he’s ever seen in law. “A verdict of $222,000, for infringement of 24 song files worth a total of $23.76?” he asked. “In a case where there was zero evidence of the defendant having transferred any of those files? It is an outrage, and I hope it is a wakeup call to the world that we all need to start supporting the defendants in these cases, and the attorneys who are sacrificing so much to represent them. And the support cannot be with words, it must be with checkbooks. And it cannot be next year, it must be now.

“All the businesspeople who make a living from the vibrancy, democracy and freedom of expression which is the Internet need to get behind the RIAA’s victims; if they do not, the world in which they hope to thrive and prosper will disappear rapidly.

“The RIAA ghouls smelled blood in Duluth, and I guess they were right.”