It is also a rebuke to the Internet’s amateur investigators — and to media outlets who encouraged them by passing along their speculation to the wider world.

The Post story spends quite a bit of time relaying this message from law enforcement officials: It’s great that you want to pitch in, but you’re probably going to do more harm than good. When we want your help, we’ll ask for it.

If you’re a true believer in Reddit Exceptionalism, and/or that crowds are always wiser than the pros, or that you simply can’t stop people from talking about things on the Internet, so best to talk about them yourself, you can probably find something to feel good about in today’s story. Likely along the lines of “Hey! We had an effect on the investigation!”

But the law enforcement sources the Post talked to sure don’t seem too feel great about that effect. The biggest impact seems to be that FBI officials released images of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev before they might have wanted to, because they were afraid someone else would, first — or that people would keep misidentifying innocent people as suspects.

From the Post:

● Investigators didn’t want to risk having news outlets put out the Tsarnaevs’ images first, which might have made them the object of a wave of popular sympathy for wrongly suspected people, as had happened with two high school runners from the Boston area whose photos were published on the front page of the New York Post under the headline “Bag Men.” At the news conference, FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard DesLauriers sternly asked the public to view only its pictures or risk creating “undue work for vital law enforcement resources.”

● Investigators were concerned that if they didn’t assert control over the release of the Tsarnaevs’ photos, their manhunt would become a chaotic free-for-all, with news media cars and helicopters, as well as online vigilante detectives, competing with police in the chase to find the suspects. By stressing that all information had to flow to 911 and official investigators, the FBI hoped to cut off that freelance sleuthing and attend to public safety even as they searched for the brothers.

Want to couch this in some to-be-sures? Okay.

* Maybe it’s possible that someone, somewhere, on the Internet did have more impact on the case than the Post’s sources are letting on. After all, this is still a very early draft of history, cobbled together just hours after the event. Things get more nuanced over time, and sometimes they play out much differently.

* Similarly, it’s easy to assume that there’s some institutional bias in the Post’s story. If amateurs did have a more significant role in the case, the pros might not be excited to talk about it — for the same reason lots of professional reporters aren’t excited to acknowledge their diminished authority in the Web age.

And, in any case, I assume that none of this will prevent some Redditors or other would-be Sherlocks from trying the same thing the next time around. But maybe it will make the rest of us just a little bit less likely to share their efforts with our friends or readers.

(Image courtesy of spirit of america/Shutterstock.com)

The problem is calling them newspapers …

– Barry Diller, in an interview with Katherine Weymouth, CEO of the Washington Post, at the Newspaper Association of America’s mediaXchange on Tuesday

The latest victim of digital miscreants is the U.S. Department of Energy, in an attack, the New York Times says, that resulted in the compromising of personal data on “several hundred employees.” It is, of course, hard to know whether this incident is connected to the high-profile attacks upon that newspaper’s computers along with those of The Wall Street Journal (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.), the Washington Post and Bloomberg News.

The apparent targets were journalists who cover China. One can easily imagine a scenario where attackers acting in the pay of Chinese political leaders were tasked with learning as much as possible about “sources and methods,” which — in the intelligence business as well as in journalism — are the twin crown jewels of the trade: Who provides information that shows up in stories, and how that information is shared.

The source of another attack, this one on Twitter, is as yet unknown, and may not be connected to the China-sourced attacks on the media organizations. When one rash of attacks comes to public light, it sort of behooves other companies to disclose attacks that may be wholly unconnected in order to soften the blow to a corporate reputation. When computer security disclosures take place in groups, it’s easy to conflate them and make them all seem like one big story, even if each disclosed incident may be unconnected.

And these are only the companies that have admitted to being targeted in the latest round of incidents. It’s easy to imagine that there are probably more that decided it was not in their best interest to go public with the information, or that haven’t done so yet. In prior incidents, companies like Intel and Google have conceded that they, too, have been attacked by parties working in China.

Disclosure may soon become the rule rather than the exception. According to new rules expected to be proposed Thursday before the European Union parliament, search engines, banks and utilities will be required to disclose attacks against them.

The timing of the disclosures comes as the Obama administration is said to be working on a classified set of guidelines on the conduct and use of cyber weapons. While Twitter or news media organizations aren’t exactly considered critical infrastructure that if attacked would trigger a retaliation, the sheer volume and effectiveness of attacks suggest a time is coming when attacks against systems crucial to the flow of daily life, like power utilities and the banking system, will become more routine.

Last month, government sources disclosed that Iran was thought to be behind a series of denial-of-service attacks against several U.S. banks. Those attacks might have been retaliation against the U.S. for its role, never officially acknowledged, in the Stuxnet attacks against the Iranian nuclear research program.

Effective as the Stuxnet attacks may have been — they are said to have caused some Iranian nuclear centrifuges to explode — they showed the world what is possible, and in time that learning will stick. The ease of Stuxnet-like attacks against industrial systems in particular has already been demonstrated by security researchers, and has long been on a list of things Western policymakers have to worry about when it comes to cyber security.

Consider this just a hunch, but there’s going to be a lot more news like this throughout the year.

While details are being finished, people familiar with the matter said that a metered paywall — meaning a Web site that allows casual readers to read a certain number of stories free before charging a subscription fee — is likely to be rolled out in 2013, along with increases to the print newspaper’s newsstand price. One person familiar with the matter said the paywall will be introduced no earlier than next summer.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

What was your favorite TV show as a kid?
We didn’t have TV, so naturally I thought that all TV was fabulous.

What qualities do you like in a person?
A capacity for forgiveness.

Name one thing you will regret never having done (if you never do it).
Going to Japan.

What’s the single most important issue in the world today?
That would be a long list to choose from, but I think the most interesting thing right now is probably the spread of freedom.

Do you still buy CDs or rent DVDs?
No. I’ve had a Netflix DVD sitting on my table at home for probably six months.

What would you be doing if you were not in your current job?
Real estate development. I’m fascinated by the way spaces get made — I wouldn’t build office buildings, though.

What is your greatest achievement to date?
Being a good friend and a good son. I hope to be a good father.

iPhone, Android or BlackBerry?
BlackBerry. I can’t give up the keyboard.

If you could meet any historical or fictional person, who would it be?
Marie Curie. She lived in a time when not only did no one think that she had a brain, no one thought her entire gender had a brain. But she accomplished extraordinary things nonetheless, and she won two Nobel prizes.

What site/app do you check first when you wake up?
Marginal Revolution. And Grantland.

What was the last thing you fixed?
I fixed a friend’s writing for publication on the Web. Does editing count as fixing? (Editor’s note: Yes, it does.)

What was your first computer?
When I worked at the Washington Post, they gave everyone a Trash-80 (Radio Shack TRS-80) with a telephone interface for filing stories. It was an amazing computer, for its time.

What was your biggest mistake?
Not going to college somewhere really different, interesting and far away, or taking advantage of more possibilities in general when I was younger.

Do you have a dog or cat or other pet?
No. But I wish I had both!

What’s your favorite mode of transportation?
Bicycling. And running.

What was the last book you read?
Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise.”

If you could have any superpower, what would you choose?
The ability to transport myself anywhere instantly, like on “Star Trek” — teleportation.

Name your favorite guilty pleasure.
Spy novels. It’s gotten so I have to look for books from the ’50s and ’60s, because I’ve read everything else.

What was your biggest most recent purchase?
A Volkswagen Golf R. They only make 5,000 a year. It’s totally stealth. It looks exactly like a regular Golf, but it has a sports car engine dropped in — the only thing that distinguishes it from the standard model is a tiny “R” on the grille.

Whom do you idolize?
Tyler Cowen, who publishes Marginal Revolution. I am a huge Tyler Cowen fan.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I would be taller and younger — of course!

In this light, the Washington Post is launching “The Fold,” a nightly newscast created specifically with Google TV and Android devices in mind.

It’s essentially a 15-minute recap of that day’s events, with an airtime of roughly 6 pm ET every evening, to capture the segment of the market that wants a curated summary of their news when they come home in the evening. Each show will be made up of features, hard news and analysis produced by a mix of new and existing WaPo staffers.

“While laptops and desktops are under siege because of today’s mobile-first attitude, the lean-back, six-foot experience of the TV isn’t going anywhere,” Vijay Ravindran, chief digital officer of the Washington Post Company, told me in an interview. This is why, he said, the company is first targeting the Google TV set-top device market. As an added bonus, since Google TV is powered by the Android platform, WaPo’s “Post TV” app is able to run on Android tablets, as well.

So yes, it’s like a Webcast for nightly news — only for Android. The pitch, however, is that wrapping the experience into an app allows for some nimbleness not otherwise seen in a regular Web video production. For one, each segment within the app can be split off from the entire show and shared via Facebook or Twitter, bite-sized portions made more digestible for the frenetic flow of news and status updates that fly through our streams on a daily basis.

Cracking this space is, in part, some of the mission behind WaPo Labs, the company’s experimental digital initiative, home to such products as Trove and Washington Post Social Reader, which are applications that rely on social and personalization features to deliver content tailored to users’ personal tastes or, in the case of Social Reader, the top circulating content among friends.

The problem with Social Reader is that WaPo and others producing similar apps are left at the mercy of Facebook’s News Feed for distribution. It’s an app, and, as such, that app is modulated by the tweaks in Facebook’s algorithms that determine how often you’ll see the app activity amongst your friends. Many companies live and die by the feed, and recent news that Facebook is pulling away from this “passive sharing” app model may hurt Social Reader’s distribution and activity.

“Everything is affected by the changes that Facebook makes,” Ravindran said.

So “The Fold” and Post TV are something of a hedge between multiple platforms. Break your program up into chunks that detail segments like the campaign trail and a 59-second digest of the entire day’s news, and it’s more amenable to tweeting or a status update via social streams. Push out the app on Android to reach a widely distributed platform with a rapidly growing mobile market share. Add all of this content onto WaPo’s own site to cross pollinate with the existing Web audience. And finally, attack the segment that still goes for the lean-back experience, by launching the Google TV application.

One issue, though: The Google TV audience just isn’t there yet. Data made public in February suggests that there could be fewer than one million Google TV set-top boxes in living rooms across the country. Even across the industry, connected TV devices aren’t fully taking off — while Apple has moved a few million Apple TV devices, it’s far from a best-selling product for the company.

Ravindran and WaPo director of video Andy Pergam are hopeful, saying the market is still getting its legs.

“We feel that Google TV is on the upswing,” Ravindran said. Price points are a challenge, he notes, but new products are arriving that could address this. Vizio’s $100 set-top box is available on the cheap, while LG and Sony are attacking the high end with options that integrate Google’s service directly into the TV set.

Ultimately, Ravindran and Pergam say it’s a long-term bet for the company, as are the rest of WaPo’s Labs initiatives.

“The Fold” will kick off it’s first night with a bang, featuring an exclusive interview with Dr. Henry Kissinger, and will go up on the Post TV app at 6 pm ET.

On Friday, I began a series about the various and sundry things new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was up to at the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

First up was a look at how she is zeroing in on improving its troubled search efforts and advertising platforms, two business arenas that will get more focus this week when Mayer unveils her plans to the employees of Yahoo at an all-hands meeting.

According to an internal memo Mayer sent out Friday, the confab is scheduled for Tuesday. It comes after two days of meetings with Yahoo’s board of directors last week, in which Mayer outlined the plans for she has come up with to turnaround the company.

[Special note to readers: I would, as usual, embed the entire memo below, but Yahoo's top execs -- most especially, newly installed general counsel Ron "Leaks Are 'Uncool'" Bell -- have worked themselves into quite a lather over the issue of late. Apparently, according to numerous sources, the company is using all kinds of leak-catching tech tools -- free smartphones aren't as free as you might think, if you catch my drift, Yahoos, and I would also advise turning up the music loud when whispering in the Sunnyvale HQ offices -- so I will only quote internal emails only in part going forward to thwart such silliness.]

Pressing on!

In the memo, titled “Board slides, strategy and goals,” Mayer talked about the meetings. There will be two this Tuesday, one in the morning and one later in the day, in order to accommodate Yahoo staffers internationally.

“In an act of radical transparency that will be a tradition moving forward,” Mayer promised that she will go over the slides — which are usually not shared widely — of her “strategy and vision” that she presented at the board meeting on Friday.

“We want to offer you transparency into what happens at the board level as well as guidance as to where the company is going,” Mayer noted.

Kudos to that! (And send all that transparency my way, please!)

Mayer also said in the memo that she will have another all-hands meeting on October 1, where she will begin “rolling out a new system and process for goals for the company,” including annual goals that will be tracked and graded — first on a company level, then to departments, teams and, finally, individuals.

That’s a good idea, of course, because tracking such things has not been a focus of Yahoo for a while now. Not surprisingly, it is very much a practice at Google, from whence Mayer came and where she has been liberally borrowing a wide variety of management concepts.

But she has a few of her own tricks up her sleeve too, according to many sources, in terms of the strategy.

As I previously wrote, Mayer is planning on doubling down on search, as well as advertising platforms. Expect more money spent in both places, as well as a redo of Yahoo’s long-rocky search partnership with Microsoft.

Also up for a refresh is both email and also the critically important Yahoo home page. Both are being redesigned substantially to focus on consumer experience. People who have seen the mock-ups describe them both as more social and as more of a dashboard approach for users than the traditional catch-all portal.

It’s all based around learning technology that Yahoo has been working on called CORE, or Content Optimization and Relevance Engine. There will be lots of linking out and an attempt to make Yahoo more of a platform for others to develop on top of.

It’s a little Facebook-like, said several sources, but more focused on content and other products that differentiate Yahoo. Mayer has decided to back 10 key arenas, such as its powerful Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports sites, as well as its Flickr photo offering.

Still, no redesign is set in stone yet, so we’ll see what Mayer has decided on.

It’s also not clear what the e-commerce focus will be, but it is also an area that Mayer has a lot of experience in. Also a big question: What the heck is Yahoo’s non-existent mobile strategy going to be?

In addition, Mayer has already ordered the removal of some ads from both Yahoo’s email service and also its home page, cutting them back to improve the consumer experience. That’s a dicey move since Yahoo makes a big chunk of change from those ads, especially on the home page.

No matter. “Everything she is doing is about the consumer experience,” said a source. “Nothing else matters to her, even if it might matter to the bottom line.”

So far, Wall Street has been wary of Mayer until they see a strategy — the stock has been sitting in the $15 range since she arrived. That said, the high-profile exec does have more leeway from investors, and — perhaps most importantly — from the board.

In fact, at her now weekly Friday meeting for employees, a big group of the directors appeared onstage in a show of support.

A purple show, apparently — all were wearing lavender Yahoo t-shirts with “BoD” stamped on them.

Awwwwww! It’s like a mostly all-boy band! One, by the way, that might get more members soon. Sources told me that director Dan Loeb has been on the hunt to add at least one more person to the group, focusing on landing a Silicon Valley star.

When he was waging his proxy battle on Yahoo he tried to recruit both SurveyMonkey and former Yahoo David Goldberg and also well-known entrepreneur Max Levchin of PayPal and Slide.

While Goldberg joining the Yahoo board is not happening — he just joined the board of the Washington Post — getting Levchin to sign on seems more likely, especially with the focus on attracting innovative talent to the company.

Levchin is definitely that, as are many others Loeb has apparently been trying to buttonhole of late.

More on talent in our next episode.

The app — which allows users to capture and upload video to share with friends across social networks — will be on the iPhones of official WaPo reporters on-site, who will use Socialcam to record spot interviews and live footage of on-the-ground events. Further, WaPo also extends that invite to the average Olympic Games attendee; users who shoot video using the app may see their footage appear on “London Eyes,” the Post’s official site created for the event. (Editors, of course, will have carte blanche as to what footage is suitable to show up on the site.)

This isn’t the first time WaPo has tried going social. At last year’s Facebook F8 conference, the company launched Washington Post Social Reader, a Facebook application that allows for reading WaPo articles from inside of Facebook, while the reading activity shows up across the site in others’ News Feeds. The app, and others like it, was initially widely used due to its heavy News Feed distribution, though it has tamped down in recent months.

But the boost in readership has most likely proved encouraging to the ailing publication. Aside from massive newsroom cuts, Social Reader has been the Washington Post Company’s boldest attempt to clamp the flow of cash hemorrhaging from its coffers over the past few years. Monetization is still foggy — the app lets readers view WaPo articles from inside of Facebook, not requiring a redirection and link out to the Post’s own, ad-serving site — but an increased readership for WaPo-branded content could, at the very least, raise brand awareness enough to direct users to the Post’s site.

So a partnership with an app like Socialcam — which has exploded in popularity over a relatively short period of time — makes some sense, especially as the traffic tide for Social Reader begins to subside. The Post can stick more branded content in the faces of Socialcam watchers, while surfing the high-riding wave of sharing across Facebook that Socialcam currently enjoys.

Expect “London Eyes” to launch in mid-July, and to run throughout the remainder of the summer.

Two quick snapshots, via Cristina Cordova, using stats from AppData. Here’s the usage data for the Washington Post’s Social Reader. Note the second steep drop, in the middle of this month:

And the Guardian’s, which has the same pattern and the same mid-May drop:

Note that Cordova runs biz dev for Pulse, the iOS/Android news reader app, so she’s presumably not unhappy about this trend.

But I don’t have a dog in the fight, and I’m delighted with it myself. I’ve always thought the “social reader” apps were bad ideas, executed poorly: I don’t need to automatically know what my friends are reading — I only want to know about the articles they want me to read, and they’re pretty good about telling me that. And I don’t want to have to use an app to read them — the Web works just fine.

The new digerati consensus is that the drops don’t indicate a sudden revulsion by Facebook users, but that they’re the result of Facebook engineers twisting the dials, and ensuring that Facebook users don’t see the apps in their feeds anymore.

There’s an important lesson there for any Facebook partner or would-be partner (hello, Socialcam!). But as a Facebook user, I don’t really care — I’m just glad I don’t have to see these things anymore.

There’s a popular maxim in Silicon Valley: Find your user base and the revenues will come later.

For a while, it seemed to be the easiest way for a founder to explain his or her way out of a proper business model. But with Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of the entirely revenue-free Instagram, that adage now carries more weight than ever.

Enter Viddy and Socialcam, two of the hottest start-up apps, both of which have the buzz of being the “Instagram for video.” The pair have exploded in popularity over the past few months, with each garnering user bases in the tens of millions seemingly overnight.

But the growth of one of these apps is not like the other.

Using a combination of fortunate timing, Facebook’s Open Graph influence and a new way of playing the system, Socialcam has effectively gamed Facebook, YouTube and the App Store to keep a strong grip on that ever-so-valuable user base. In the short term, at least, the three-man Socialcam start-up team has discovered a method to beat the 20-plus person outfit that is Viddy.

The method is so effective that Socialcam skyrocketed from around 1.4 million monthly active Facebook users to a whopping 40 million in a span of little more than two weeks. Socialcam surpassed Viddy in the Facebook app rankings last week, and currently sits fat atop Apple’s powerful App Store as one of the most downloaded free applications.

Some have started picking up on Socialcam’s tactics. Threads arose on Quora and Hacker News questioning the validity of the app’s growth, and TheNextWeb picked some of this apart on Thursday.

But there’s far more to it.

History

The concept of social video has been simmering for some time. Viddy was founded in December of 2010, while competitors like Mobli, Klip and Socialcam came along at various points during 2011.

But it was only over the past few months that the mobile social video concept began to boil. Socialcam hit the three million user mark in December. The Instagram acquisition announcement hit the web on April 9th. Two days later, Viddy hit 4 million users.

At some point on April 24, social video apps exploded, and it suddenly became clearer that Viddy and Socialcam were leaving all of their competitors behind.

Web view traffic to Socialcam through Facebook skyrocketed from around 10 million monthly active users to an astounding 40 million MAUs over a period of two weeks. Viddy jumped from around eight million MAUs to upwards of 36 million over that same period.

It was as if someone had flipped on the awesome traffic switch.

What Happened That Fateful Day in April?

What isn’t clear is just who or what flipped that switch. But I’m hearing many different theories.

Theory No. 1: Socialcam received its Facebook Open Graph integration around this time, thus increasing the app’s visibility in users’ Timelines. But Viddy’s Open Graph integration had already occurred on March 12, more than a month previously, at South by Southwest, and both apps received immense boosts in traffic during that same time period.

It’s possible that Socialcam’s Open Graph jumpstart fueled Viddy’s growth by mere virtue of being another social video app. Or perhaps it was the announcement that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Shakira and Jay-Z would back Viddy financially, the news of which occurred two days before Socialcam’s Open Graph integration.

Theory No. 2: A more conspiracy-like theory in which Facebook itself made changes to its News Feed in favor of the “Watch” action for social videos on the whole.

Consider this: When the once-popular Facebook social reading apps like the Guardian and Washington Post Social Reader recently started tanking in their monthly active user ratings, Ryan Kellett, a Washington Post employee, confirmed to TechCrunch that it was indeed changes in Facebook’s News Feed that led to Social Reader’s decline. It’s feasible, then, to think that Facebook could tweak things in the other direction, in order to favor video apps.

And, indeed, SocialCam, Klip, YouTube, Viddy and DailyMotion all saw spikes in Facebook traffic on April 24 — some more than others — with Mobli’s traffic following suit shortly thereafter.

Facebook declined to comment to AllThingsD on the near instantaneous rise on April 24, although it did shrug off the date in question to the New York Times: “The popularity of videos and other user-generated content on Facebook is not new, so it’s no surprise that social video apps are growing as friends share with each other and as more developers experiment with this type of content on Facebook.”

In a tweet on Saturday, TechCrunch writer Josh Constine noted that the sudden burst of growth on April 24 was due to a reporting error from Facebook to third-party app tracking site AppData. That also seems reasonable, although doesn’t fully explain the sudden traffic explosion that occurred over that two- to three-week period.

Whatever actually happened, Socialcam saw the chance to seize its moment.

Gaming Facebook

After receiving the boost, Socialcam’s founders discovered the perfect way of keeping that veritable fire hose of Facebook Web traffic pouring in.

According to multiple sources, it was around this time Socialcam began scraping video content from Vevo and YouTube to add to its own network of users, which essentially amounts to ripping content directly from other services.

As you might imagine, it’s not a welcome practice.

Then, sources said, Socialcam uploaded that video content to its own servers, where it began distributing it via different dummy accounts on the Socialcam network. There’s a slew of “YouTube Popular” accounts doing much of the distribution, along with others.

So, in effect, when a Socialcam user on a mobile device clicked on what he thought was a Socialcam video, he was taken into SocialCam’s Custom player, where the ripped YouTube video was played from Socialcam’s servers.

Herein lies the cleverness of the plan: Scraping and ripping stripped each video of its YouTube wrapping, or in the case of Vevo, its pre-roll advertising. So initially, users weren’t even aware they were watching YouTube videos. Socialcam systematically targeted a number of the most viral videos uploaded YouTube in the past four to five years, said sources, aiming to harness that viral success and bolster Socialcam’s network.

Why go to this trouble, especially since it’s against the terms of service to rip off the YouTube APIs? That risks sullying a relationship with a large and powerful online content powerhouse. Embedding the YouTube code within a Socialcam video instead of ripping YouTube’s content would comply with YouTube’s ToS. It’s also potential fodder to get its app booted from Facebook’s platform.

When asked if Socialcam was ripping YouTube videos, YouTube was cagey, only telling me this:

“While we don’t comment on individual cases, however, we take any violation of our open API’s Terms of Service seriously and take action against known abusers,” a spokesperson for YouTube told me.

A Facebook spokesperson concurred: “If it comes to our attention that an app is violating our policies, we will take action. We have no further details to share at this time.”

Vevo declined my request for comment.

Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel responded: “Socialcam has weekly and often daily interaction with the developer relations teams at both Facebook and Youtube. To the best of our knowledge, we are not violating the terms of service of either company.”

But what apparently happened, said sources, was that Socialcam got caught scraping and was told to knock it off. So to continue with its plan but stay compliant with Facebook and YouTube Terms of Service policies, Socialcam then began embedding the YouTube videos into Socialcam posts, effectively doing the same thing as before, only with the YouTube branding in place.

As of last week, nearly every top trending video on Socialcam’s site was a YouTube video.

Combine the viral nature of those YouTube videos with Facebook’s traffic-driving Open Graph, and you’ve got a recipe for success. If an app is integrated into Open Graph like Socialcam and Viddy are, using those apps publishes activity to three sections of Facebook: Timeline, Ticker and the News Feed. With every click, each user would broadcast the videos they had just watched, and that traffic fed on itself.

Despite the fact that social video on the whole received early initial traffic boosts by some yet-to-be-pinpointed variable, Socialcam was able to retain that traffic through proliferating YouTube videos throughout Facebook.

In a way, the guys behind Socialcam are brilliant, cracking a method of using YouTube and Facebook together to extend the app’s reach in a matter of weeks.

And it worked: The app still sits atop the App Store, using its Facebook viral success to boost download numbers immensely. It has soared beyond Viddy and other similar apps, most of which have been around much longer than Socialcam has.

Is All Fair in Apps and War?

And here’s the thing: Aside from the alleged initial screen-scraping, doing what Socialcam is currently doing isn’t breaking any rules.

Sure, its largest competitor, Viddy, is definitely not a fan of the practice. The company spent the past 18 months building its subscriber base out with user-generated content, not to mention raising tens of millions of dollars in venture funding in order to do so.

And Viddy CEO and co-founder Brett O’Brien is making no bones about his discontent.

“Viddy is built on 100 percent community-generated original content, which we feel is the only way to build a true social community as Facebook, Instagram and others have done,” O’Brien told me in an interview, a thinly veiled slight at Socialcam’s YouTube video poaching. “Our active community of over 27 million Viddyographers is passionate about Viddy and is actively growing the community through sharing. Viddy is clearly filling a consumer need to easily create, beautify and share original video content.”

The problem for Viddy is, others are catching on. Of the top 10 fastest growing Facebook apps from the past week, half of them are social video apps. Most recently, Chill gained more than eight million users in as little as two weeks. All but Viddy use a mix of content, both user-generated and user-curated — although Socialcam still remains the most adept at working the larger ecosystem.

It seems, however, that in light of the recent negative press Socialcam has received, the company decided to tweak its app on Tuesday afternoon, incorporating a handful of subtle changes. YouTube videos are now labeled much more explicitly. A bug which kept users auto-sharing their videos to their feeds — whether they turned the option on or off — has been fixed. And now Socialcam’s “Trending Bar” — the one replete with YouTube videos — is gone from the site.

Still, as the social apps using these methods proliferate, it’ll only get harder for non-viral videos to rise to the top. According to one source, Facebook’s News Feed only allows for a certain percentage of its inventory devoted to video. The algorithm that determines which videos make it into that inventory is based on click-through rate, as well as the number of comments, likes and shares it received. Still, click-through rate weighs heavy on that scale.

In that case, it’s obvious that when Socialcam — and apps like it — seed Facebook with the most viral YouTube apps of all time, click-through rates and shares will skyrocket, and those apps will take a much larger portion of the video News Feed pie.

The question, then, becomes a philosophical one: Is it fair? Since Socialcam essentially cracked the video sharing code, does it not deserve its seat at the top of the charts?

That point remains contentious. As Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel told me, the company’s “simple goal is to allow users to create amazing videos and watch videos shared by their friends.” And as Seibel explained on Bloomberg West last week, “people want to see the videos that their friends are watching.”

But, if all that is being watched are the most viral videos Socialcam has seeded, are users not just watching what Socialcam directs them to?

The war isn’t over. Perhaps Facebook will tweak its algorithm to compensate for the types of videos. Or perhaps Socialcam and others like it will ride to the top on YouTube videos, then see an influx of user-generated content after reaching a critical mass of subscribers.

And again, like that old Valley adage goes — it’s all about the user base, right?

The Washington Post reported this morning that its online ad revenue dropped 7 percent in the first three months of 2012. That follows a New York Times earnings release which saw that publisher’s Web ad business drop 2 percent.

(We should get some color on the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, when parent company News Corp. reports its earnings next week; News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

The Times said that digital sales were “under pressure” in the first quarter of the year, while the Post didn’t bother to add any color to its results. But it did note that online display ads were down 11 percent, while classifieds were down 1 percent.

Unlike the Times, the Post is essentially a regional newspaper, so it is harder to argue that its travails reflect a larger trend. And it’s also worth noting that the Post faces fierce competition for its core political coverage from Politico, an online/offline competitor that basically sprouted overnight.

But for the record: The rest of the Web publishing business — including not only Google but laggards like Yahoo — has been posting Q1 revenue increases.  [An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that AOL's ad revenues were up for Q1; the company won't post its numbers until next week.]

But it’s looking pretty close. The Washington Post is in the process of buying/hiring the news aggregator’s technology team, but isn’t purchasing the business itself, according to multiple people familiar with the negotiations. The Post plans to put the new hires to work alongside the people who built the publisher’s Social Reader Facebook app.

The Next Web initially reported on rumors that the publisher was buying Digg, and TechCrunch later reported that the deal was an “acqhire.” Both the Post and Digg declined to comment.

Once the deal closes, Digg won’t shut down, at least not immediately. The site’s remaining management will try to figure out how to take advantage of its brand name and traffic, according to people familiar with the company.

But given the fact that Digg has been looking for a buyer for months, it’s hard to see how they’ll be able to find another home for the remainder of the company.

Then again, it’s been hard to see how Digg would work for some time. The site was once one of Silicon Valley’s hottest Web 2.0 start-ups, and there was a period when lots of Web publishers spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to court Digg’s hordes of users. But that time is long gone (if you’re looking for a social/traffic kingmaker, head to Reddit, which used to be dismissed as a Digg wannabe).

Its current management team — the old guys are long gone, too — has been gamely trying to broaden the site’s appeal by courting mainstream users. But that always seemed like a tough sell.

Given Digg’s track record — which includes a deal to sell to Google that got pretty far down the road before the search giant walked away — you don’t want to write anything about the company with any certainty. But it doesn’t look good.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Rob Byron)

While it’s tempting to see the Huffington Post’s Pulitzer as a “big win for new media,” or something like that, the real story is that these organizations — the Huffington Post, the New York Times, the Washington Post — are becoming more like each other. Old media and new media are increasingly antiquated terms.

– Journalism professor Jay Rosen to HuffPo media writer Michael Calderone (via GigaOM)

This has got to be the mother of all political ads — directed by Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim, narrated by Tom Hanks, and lasting 17 minutes — all part of the campaign of President Barack Obama.

Plus, “The Road We’ve Traveled” video was posted right to YouTube upon its release.

It will be interesting to see how it will be received, and if it will work. The Washington Post is calling it a “docu-ganda,” noting that it cost $345,000.

What do you think?

And in 2012 — which also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the confab of tech and media titans — it’s already shaping up to be another fantastic event in terms of programming, with a lineup of onstage appearances that is sure to make some news.

There are many more very big names to come, but Walt Mossberg and I are pleased to introduce the first group of interviewees, which will give you a glimpse into the firepower we expect at D10 in late May. It is again being held in Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles.

The initial speakers we have confirmed so far include: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

It’s hard to imagine someone we have wanted to have onstage more than Michael Bloomberg, a man of many talents and interests. He’s known worldwide as the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. First elected in November 2001 (and again in 2005 and 2009), he is also one of the most compelling politicians in the U.S. today.

But Bloomberg is also a pioneer in terms of the business of digital news and information technology, having built a huge and groundbreaking media company and information service. Bloomberg (the company) has 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service, and more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

There will be a lot to talk about with him, from the upcoming presidential election to the state of our government to the future of innovation, news and technology.

Also sure to be voluble is Sean Parker, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of innumerable important digital trends of the recent decade. In 1999, Parker co-founded Napster, the controversial and industry-changing music service, at the age of 19.

He followed up with early contact information service Plaxo, and then shifted over to his critical involvement as founding president of Facebook in its early days as a start-up, an experience which was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” Parker continued to found and also invest in companies, from Causes to Spotify to his most recent, Airtime, a social video company that he is doing with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Parker will be appearing onstage with Daniel Ek, another serial entrepreneur and technologist, who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. The Swedish native later co-founded online music phenom Spotify in 2006, with Martin Lorentzon.

The former CTO of Stardoll and founder of Advertigo leads a company that is changing the way music is delivered and consumed by fans, against a backdrop of intense change in the industry, succeeding even as a plethora of other services have stumbled.

Also a groundbreaker is Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus, yet another serial entrepreneur, whose latest effort in the online gaming arena has finally resulted in his biggest success. It recently went public, and now has a nearly $10 billion market cap.

Before founding Zynga in 2007, Pincus had already started three other companies: Push start-up Freeloader in 1995; automated tech-support company Support.com after that; and early social networking site Tribe.net in 2003.

(I met Pincus when he was at Freeloader in Washington, D.C., while writing a profile of him for the Washington Post, so I have enjoyed tracking his progress since then.)

Pincus is also an avid angel investor, with early stakes in Napster, Brightmail, Twitter and Facebook.

Reid Hoffman was another early investor in Facebook, along with many of Web 2.0’s most successful ventures. Well-known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and VC, and recently dubbed the “start-up whisperer” by the New York Times (although I am not sure exactly what that means), he’s also chairman of LinkedIn, the business-networking service that also recently went public (at a $10 billion valuation, too).

He’ll appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who started out life in Hollywood, but soon made his way to Silicon Valley as a top exec at Yahoo. After running its media division, Weiner spent a short time at venture firms before going operational again at LinkedIn.

What it takes to build and maintain momentum as tech companies move into more mature stages, as well as how the social networking space evolves, are among the many topics on tap for the pair.

The evolution of a start-up phenom — in this case, Internet telephony service Skype — will be among the topics covered by Tony Bates, who is now a president at Microsoft, which bought it last year.

As such, he is responsible, says the software giant in its description of his job, “for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications service that will eventually reach billions of users.”

That’s a tall order for Bates, who came to Skype from a top job at Cisco. Bates has deep roots (or maybe, routing?) in the guts of the Internet, having done backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI. The U.K. native also holds nine patents.

Lastly, given all the activity we expect will happen between government regulatory agencies and tech companies over the next few years, we felt it was key to bring in FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. He has been at the FTC as a commissioner since 2004, but was given the top job by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Among his priorities, according to his bio, is “promoting competition and innovation in the technology sector through law enforcement and policy initiatives; and protecting consumers’ privacy — especially while they are using the Internet.”

Uh-oh!

Leibowitz knows from regulation, having served as the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters, as well as a similar stint at the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology before that.

There will be a lot more speakers to come, of course. But, so far, we think D10 is off and running fast.

Last week at Facebook’s f8 developers confab, I ran right into my old boss, Washington Post Chairman Don Graham.

While I could go on about what a privilege it was to spend my formative journalism years at the legendary newspaper and how critical its steadfast owners were to exemplifying all that is quality about the media, all Don wanted to talk about was now and the future.

And that would be how to make sure his media company was going to successfully make the transition to social. Thus, he was at f8 not only because he is a longtime board member of Facebook, but because he was eagerly showing off the Washington Post’s nifty new app for the social networking giant called Social Reader.

With the motto, “News. Better With Friends,” it’s an elegantly done version of what other publishers are trying, allowing users to instantly share the stories they have read with friends and also seeing what those friends are reading.

Here’s Don talking about Social Reader and showing it off on his Apple iPad, as well as some choice words about the future of news in general.

Listen, because he’d know:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110929/the-washington-posts-and-facebook-director-don-graham-talks-about-social-reader-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110609/fab-com-launches-as-deal-site-for-designed-not-designer-goods/ http://allthingsd.com/20110609/fab-com-launches-as-deal-site-for-designed-not-designer-goods/#comments Thu, 09 Jun 2011 18:59:13 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=84963 No longer just another pretty domain name, Fab.com launches today as a new deal site for designed goods.

Led by CEO Jason Goldberg, the site’s opening offers are on the sorts of things one might find at a design museum gift shop — fancy plastic chairs, fancy energy-saving light bulbs and fancy signed posters.

With future deals appearing to include personal electronics and apparel, Fab.com is entering a space currently dominated by Gilt Groupe, which offers deals on luxury goods in several categories through its Web site and apps.

In an email, Goldberg said the launch was made possible by a new round of seed funding that included the likes of Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade fund, SoftTechVC and First Round Capital, the Washington Post Company, and Baroda Ventures.

While the amount of the round was not disclosed, Goldberg added that Kutcher will advise the company.

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