50+ Goes Social Media
Pew: Social media use among internet users ages 50+ nearly doubled, from 22% to 42% within one year; http://j.mp/duy1in
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Icons of the Web
A sea of favicons, presented proportional to the sum of reach of sites using it; http://j.mp/Webicons (via @VizWorld)
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Gerrit Eicker
Net Neutrality: Facebook vs. Google
Facebook breaks with Google: continues to support net neutrality for landline and wireless networks; http://j.mp/a4Yvzb
Gerrit Eicker
WSJ vs. Media Business
Jarvis: I do not understand how the WSJ could be so naive about the basics of modern media business; http://j.mp/bBRzYt
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: The New Internet?
Facebook: the new Internet? The Open Graph and the meaning of open; http://j.mp/c0mGdr Details: http://j.mp/f8OpenGraph
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Gerrit Eicker
pC: “A question for you. When was the last time you surfed the net? Can you remember when you just clicked around looking to discover new sites or a site to occupy your time? Now ask yourself when was the last time you sat on your couch or laid in bed clicking the remote looking for something to watch on TV. Finally, how long do you regularly spend on Facebook? How much time do you spend checking out your Wall, your friends’ Wall and hopping from profile to profile checking people out? … Everything that the net was 5 or more years ago, Facebook is today. … Facebook is putting out trojan horse after trojan horse and no one seems to care. The only thing FB has not done is create a mobile operating system ala Android/iPhone as a platform for applications. … There is no doubt that this is NOT the direction that Facebook wants to go. They want to remain independent. But just as Apple and Google quickly turned from friend to foes, Facebook will soon be the object that both of those companies see in the rearview mirror. I don’t see either Apple or Google as being suitors to buy Facebook. That isnt their style. On the other hand, its straight out of the Microsoft playbook. If you cant beat them or outlast them, buy them.”
TC: “The fact of the matter is that Facebook is one of the most powerful forces on the web and they’re now using that position to introduce a new platform that will yes, help them. Shocking, really. A company that wants to do something that will benefit itself. But I do believe that Facebook, at least in part, believes this will also make the larger web better too. But that’s not going to be good enough for some, because it’s not fully open. Nevermind that plenty of these fully open solutions always being advocated never make it off the ground for one reason or another. … Of course, then publishers don’t have to use Facebook’s Like button. But they will — I can think of nearly 500 million reasons why. Love it or hate it, that’s the way it is. It’s not good versus evil. It’s not black versus white. It’s a million shades of gray, as always.”
VB: “Concerns are already rising among users around overly sharing of personal information. ComputerWorld’s IT Blogwatch bloggers spotlight several concerjs, including the automatic opt-in to share your information when visiting websites through Facebooks new open graph feature.”
TNW: “There has been a lot of chatter, since Facebook’s F8 announcements, about how the company will be the downfall of Google. Or, in some cases, the chatter is about how it will push Google to do what it does in a different manner. … Face it, you wouldn’t dream of doing investigation for a research project using Facebook search. That is of course, unless that research were more appropriate to what Facebook does. … The question that arises, though (especially given the power behind the social graph API), is how long this situation will remain as it is. Will Google eventually have to step up its game directly to combat Facebook? It’s possible. Not likely, but possible.”
RWW: “Facebook Open Graph: The Definitive Guide For Publishers, Users and Competitors. … The bits of this platform bring together the visions of a social, personalized and semantic Web that have been discussed since del.icio.us pioneered Web 2.0 back in 2004. Facebook’s vision is both minimalistic and encompassing – but its ambition is to kill off its competition and use 500 million users to take over entire Web. – Whether we like it (pun intended) or not, we have to understand what this move means. … With this release, Facebook asks users if they are willing to trade off privacy for personalization. To be clear, no personalization is ever possible without users telling a system about their tastes. What Facebook is asking for is necessary in order to then create personalized Web experience. Whether users want this sort of thing is a different question, but assuming that you want to know more about your friends you will. … So any site that already has social networking built in has to decide to abandon that before jumping into the Facebook Open Graph. The even worse problem is the ownership of ratings and comments. Are publishers really ready to give that up? … This is aggressive and brilliant move by Facebook – and Twitter, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, eBay, Amazon and others, except for Microsoft, should be really worried. … Technically speaking, what Facebook has done is elegant and correct. From markup, to plugins, to API, all of it is modern and awesome. The missing bit is that Facebook appears to be the only repository of data in this equation – and that makes the whole offering seriously closed. … One of the most exciting parts of the Facebook announcement to me personally is the possible breakthrough in semanticizing the Web. … Facebook made a major chess move. It might have checkmated its competitors, or perhaps it might have to lose another piece like it lost Beacon. Whichever is the case, right now there are deep implications for Facebook and its competitors, publishers, users and the Web at large. What Facebook has announced cannot be ignored and can not be undone. Everyone needs to figure out the next steps and understand what to do.“
Gerrit Eicker
eBay: Online Auction Patent
11 years after filing the patent application, eBay owns its online auction process model exclusively; http://j.mp/dsHXLi
Gerrit Eicker
Truste Ranks Companies in Privacy
RWW: Is This a Joke? eBay and Verizon Win [Truste/Ponemon Institute] Privacy Award; http://j.mp/47qKOs
Gerrit Eicker
eBay to Sell Skype Finally?
NYT: eBay plans to announce a deal to sell its Skype division to a group of private investors; http://bit.ly/AQoyV – Update: Silverman confirmed the deal.
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Gerrit Eicker
Silverman/Skype: “Today, Skype begins a new chapter. We’re spinning off from eBay to become an independent company once again. This is very exciting news for all of us here at Skype, and I want to give all of you a brief overview of what’s happening. – A small group of venture capital funds have agreed with eBay to acquire a majority stake in Skype. The group is led by Silver Lake Partners, joined by Index and Andreessen Horowitz Ventures. You may recognize some names – for example Danny Rimer and Mike Volpi (both at Index Ventures) who were some of the earliest Board members and supporters of Skype. – The new investors will buy approximately 65% of Skype, with eBay continuing to own 35%, in a deal valuing Skype at $2.75 billion US. It means we’re back to being a fully independent company again, but with a new group of owners who believe passionately in our mission and in the ability of our team to deliver on it. I can’t wait.”
Gerrit Eicker
eBay: Quo Vadis?
Nielsen: eBay loses reach deeply. Page views in May 2009 dropped 32% compared to May 2008; http://tr.im/rQJo
Gerrit Eicker
Skype Mobile
Skype finally offers its own iPhone app and truly brings spectacular quality to VoIP-calls; http://tr.im/i1HP
NMAP: “A large-scale scan of the top million web sites (per Alexa traffic data) was performed in early 2010 using the Nmap Security Scanner and its scripting engine. As seen in the New York Times, Slashdot, Gizmodo, Engadget, and Telegraph.co.uk … – We retrieved each site’s icon by first parsing the HTML for a link tag and then falling back to /favicon.ico if that failed. 328,427 unique icons were collected, of which 288,945 were proper images. The remaining 39,482 were error strings and other non-image files. Our original goal was just to improve our http-favicon.nse script, but we had enough fun browsing so many icons that we used them to create the visualization below. – The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its “www.” counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons – those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach – are scaled to 16×16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440 (1.4 gigapixels).“