My, how quickly things change. It wasn’t much more than a year ago that Apple and Google were happy partners — at least from the public’s perspective — working in tandem to push technology forward at a clipping pace. Google’s search and various apps complemented the iPhone perfectly, and the existing Android phones merely affirmed how much better the iPhone was than everything else on the market. And then everything went to hell.
Late last July, we broke the news that Apple blocked Google’s official Voice application and removed any third-party applications that supported the service, sparking an FCC inquiry into why Google Voice was banned from the iPhone.
Today marks the one year anniversary of Apple’s response to the FCC, in which it gave a remarkably disingenuous explanation as to why Google Voice wasn’t on the iPhone: Apple was still “pondering” the matter. A year later, it apparently still is.
Google Voice is nowhere to be found on the App Store, and while Google has developed an impressive web version for the iPhone, it can’t provide the same performance or ‘native feel’ of a native app and it can’t access the phone’s local contacts directory (at least, not yet). In light of today’s milestone I reached out to both Apple and Google to see if there’s been any progress. Both declined to comment.
Of course, Google Voice itself was never the key issue at play — the service was only available in a private beta when it was blocked from the iPhone. Indeed, most of the outcry stemmed from the fact that Apple was blatantly using its control over the App Store’s walled garden for anti-competitive reasons. Before the Voice fiasco Apple had drawn plenty of heat over its inconsistent App Store approval policies, but most of these removals could be ascribed to the notion that Apple was censoring apps to help maintain the quality and safety of the App Store. That clearly wasn’t the case here: Apple saw Google’s increasing presence on the iPhone as a threat, so it killed it.
Soon after the Google Voice fiasco, I abandoned my iPhone for Android (TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington quit his iPhone too). My rationale had little to do with wanting to use Google Voice more frequently. Rather, it had a lot to do with the knot I got in the pit of my stomach as I imagined just how important Apple’s stranglehold over the iOS platform will become in the next five years and beyond.
The runaway success of the iPhone and the iPad have made it clear that the App Store and iOS are only going to become more ubiquitous. The new Apple TV will soon feature them. In all likelihood Apple will find ways to integrate iOS into form factors that are more competitive with desktop and laptops. Simply put, iOS will be synonymous with computing for a lot of people.
Tim O’Reilly believes that Apple is trying to build a fundamental challenge to the web. A web controlled by a single company. Apple may have intended to use the App Store’s approval system to protect customers and the user experience, but it has the convenient side effect of enabling it to stifle anything that could compete with its own products on the iOS platform. Remember, we are still very early in this game, and the App Store had existed for just one year before Apple gave Google the boot. Is there any doubt it will do the same the next time someone tries to encroach on its turf?
Most of Apple’s ardent defenders will simply tell people like me to go use another, more open platform if they have a problem with the App Store and Apple’s policies. Fair enough. But the time and uncertainty involved in having to switch to a new computer platform are far from trivial, and eventually we may have kids who are raised on iOS — getting them to switch platforms so they can use an innovative new browser or FaceTime competitor or whatever else Apple is quietly blocking from the App Store will be no easy task. It is this inertia, which is only going to become more difficult to overcome as iOS becomes more successful, that troubles me most. Apple will be able to get away with even more egregious behavior, because its users will want to stick with what they know.
Disclosure: Months after the Google Voice/Apple story broke I had my number ported over to the service (just as Michael did). All users will be getting access to this feature soon.
At an event on Wednesday, Facebook unveiled Places, their new location element that allows users to check-in to venues. Obviously, this mimics the core feature of smaller startups like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and dozens of others. The move of the big boys into this space was inevitable, but it is somewhat surprising that it has taken this long. The next question may be: will Twitter follow suit?
It was almost exactly one year ago to the day that Twitter first announced their intentions to enter the location space. At the time, this simply meant that the API would start supporting longitude and latitude coordinates attached to tweets which third-party developers could expose if they chose to. Now, obviously, twitter.com has this element baked in, as does Twitter for iPhone (the app which Twitter purchased that has long had the geotagging feature). But this is still just a layer of meta data, there is no explicit way to “check-in” as it were.
Of course, you could argue that Twitter doesn’t need any kind of check-in functionality because geotagged tweets are essentially that. The problem right now is that on the mobile app side of things, Twitter isn’t doing a good enough job to tie tweets to specific venues rather than just coordinates. They’re working on this — thanks to a deal with Localeze (which Facebook is also using), Twitter has a pretty robust places database that you can see on both twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com. But it’s not where it needs to be yet.
And so many people who are using geolocation on Twitter are stuck simply tagging (or “checking-in to”) a set of coordinates. (Even Buzz gets this right.)
It’s the tie-in with actual places that right now appears to be the real future of monetizing geotagging actions in this space. Foursquare obviously knows that, and you have the presume Facebook does too. Even more so than location-based coupons, customer loyalty programs make a lot of sense for businesses and the place-based check-in is the way (at least for now) to make that happen.
Given the check-in hype, it shouldn’t be surprising that people are working on building check-in layers on top of Twitter. Thanks to their nice geolocation API, Twitter can take in check-in data from services like Foursquare and Gowalla and tie it in. As Facebook ramps up, Twitter is the service that’s the go-to location platform aggregating these check-ins. But again, what about a more direct way to check-in on top of Twitter?
That’s what Firefly is all about. Their tagline says it all: The Twitter Check-in Service. While it soft-launched at our TechCrunch Disrupt event in May, they finally have their iPhone app ready to go and up to speed. With it, you simply sign in with your Twitter account and you can start checking-in to nearby venues.
You can also see where your Twitter friends are based on their Firefly check-ins or based on their latest geotagged tweets. That’s a nice touch. And you can filter location to the city, neighborhood, or “nearest” level.
Obviously, when you check-in through Firefly, the check-in is tweeted out — again, that’s the point of the service: a check-in service on top of Twitter. But what’s nice is that they’ve added a layer to make it more than just about checking-in — it’s also about pictures.
Before you check-in anywhere, Firefly asks if you’d like to attach a picture to the check-in. It seems that the service is well aware that plenty of Twitter users get annoyed when people push their check-ins to Twitter from other services. And since that’s all Firefly was supposed to be, they added this picture element to give users something more interesting. (Though you can still check-in without attaching a picture.)
Overall, it’s a very nice execution of check-ins on top of Twitter. But as I stated above, the big question is: will Twitter get into this game themselves? While up until now they’ve said they don’t intend to, you shouldn’t put it past them — especially given Facebook’s recent moves. But I suspect for now that they’ll keep doing what they’re currently doing while at the same time expanding the functionality of geotagging tweets. For example, I’m sure actual places are going to play a more key role in tweets in the future.
Editor’s note: Jonathan Askin is Associate Professor of Clinical Law at Brooklyn Law School and Founding Director of the Brooklyn Law and Incubator Policy Clinic (BLIP). He previously worked at the FCC and for the Obama campaign on telecommuncation policy.
I can’t help but analogize Google’s role in the Net Neutrality Wars with Anakin’s shift to the Dark Side in Star Wars.
I’m watching the discussion about the policy framework to govern the Internet with the repelled fascination of a guy who, as a child, loved Star Wars Episodes 4-6 and now, as an adult, begrudgingly watches Episodes 1-3.
In the present drama, Verizon plays the Emperor, Google plays Anakin, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plays the Old Republic, and Internet-Company-Not-Yet-Born might play Luke Skywalker—if the FCC is not blinded by the Verizon-Google Jedi mind trick and can formulate a forward-looking Internet policy framework that will foster competition and innovation.
After the Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed, the FCC labored to crack open the Bell Empire to competition. At the time, competitive entry required vigilant oversight by the regulators of the Old Republic to ensure that the Bell companies provided their competitors with fair wholesale access to the Bells’ physical network. Competitive telecommunications prospered briefly, but were not to last, as the Old Republic’s oversight became less effectual and the formerly competitive telephone carriers reconsolidated into a new Empire, with sights set on conquering the nascent Internet.
As the policy battles waged in Washington, D.C., Google, like a young Anakin, emerged with the motto “Don’t Be Evil.” Google—the force strong within it—entered the policy fray, serving as the leading voice for Internet startups. It grew into a formidable counterbalance to the Bell lobbying machine that had, for decades, dictated public policy at the FCC.
Unlike the competitive entrants of the 1990s, Google and other Internet startups did not advocate for physical access to the Bell network. Instead, the rise of the Internet made it possible to provide competitive communications services by simply requiring the Bells and other Internet access providers to guarantee that they would not discriminate.
After years of championing open Internet policies, Google is now professing to have brokered a meaningful deal with Verizon, a leading opponent of net neutrality. The proposed solution, however, could prove devastating to smaller Internet companies and consumers seeking competitive and innovative offerings. The Verizon-Google “compromise” does not apply to mobile services. But like the Jedi master who said, “These are not the Droids you’re looking for,” Verizon and Google conceal that mobile communications is the future.
The “compromise” also allows carriers to diverge from the net neutrality commitment to provide “managed services,” an undefined carve-out that opens the door to discrimination among companies. Google’s “compromise” serves only to ensure that Google is not harmed and does nothing to protect the Internet companies of the future. It is as if Anakin were ambivalent about Luke’s birth and survival.
I am a weary servant of the Old Republic—a former FCC staffer who had tried to inject competition and innovation into telecommunications markets during the Clinton years, and then took another brief stab as Chair of the Internet Governance Working Group of the Tech, Media and Telecom Committee for the Obama campaign. I wonder if Google believes the deal is ultimately in the best interest of the Internet? Maybe Anakin believed that his acceptance of the Dark Side was ultimately in the best interest of the Galaxy.
To be fair, these comments were composed on my Google-enabled Droid X running on Verizon’s mobile network. Apparently, Google was able to slip this Droid into the Empire’s network, and maybe this Droid is not among the “droids they are looking for,” if I may stretch my analogy to its breaking point. But will Luke Skywalker be able to slip his droid into the empire ten years from now? Without a policy framework that fosters innovation and competition from the would-be innovators and entrepreneurs of tomorrow, we might never see Luke with his Droid-of-Tomorrow.
Over several years I took my nephew to see Star Wars Episodes 1-3. When Anakin turned to the Dark Side, my nephew was conflicted, but still loved Anakin. When I asked him who he wanted to win—Anakin or Obi-Wan—he said Anakin without hesitation. He had grown up with Anakin and a belief that Anakin was our champion. I suspect that many of us who grew up with Google still believe that Google will be our champion for an open and innovative Internet. Like my nephew, we want to believe that underneath Vader, Anakin and the greater good will prevail. We want to believe that Google will adhere to its founding principle: “Don’t Be Evil.”
George Orwell’s novel 1984 begins with Winston Smith, the main character, seeing posters saying BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. In 2010, that could be replaced with FACEBOOK IS WATCHING YOU. Or rather, YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK ARE WATCHING YOU. You and your friends can now post where you are and share this information, if you so chose.
Facebookshowed off the power of this new location feature at a launch event this week with a giant projection of a U.S. map showing where people were checking in just moments after Places launched. MG Siegler called it “Facebook’s Awesome Dark Knight-Esque Live Check-In Display.” But it was one of the scariest things I’ve seen.
Facebook only showed people’s first names, but their databases know your last names and so much more about you. To me, it looked exactly what the inside of Orwell’s Ministry of Love would have looked like. That government group was responsible for identifying and monitoring dissidents.
Of course, there are many important differences. Facebook is not the government. Your location information is voluntarily given by you or your friends, not obtained from a vast network of telescreens (more on that later in the post.) And, the information is kept private… well maybe. Your friends can check you in without you knowing it until after the fact.
In a post yesterday, MG said “Places is actually pretty great — potentially”, but he acknowledged “the friend tagging thing is troubling to a lot of people (particularly because of the somewhat confusing three states.)” Agreed. He also wondered how long it would be until the big Facebook location backlash. Sorry, MG, I think it’s started.
I expect we will learn over time how many users allow friends to tag you, turn Places off, or stick to the default limbo land, where most users are now. Sure, some users are bound to be confused and their intentions won’t match their settings, resulting in some unhappy users. How long will it take for all of Facebook’s more than 500 million users to figure it out?
But, I want to focus on users who opt-in to allow tagging. Whether they are using location services to provide the “missing link between social networks and the real world” or because of peer pressure, do they realize or care they have just given up one last piece of their privacy? And that loss was initiated by themselves or their friends, people they trust.
Michael Arrington has argued that “privacy is already really, really dead.” He wrote
Everything we do, everything we buy, everywhere we go is tracked and sitting in a database somewhere. Our location via our phone, or our car GPS. Our credit card transactions. Everything.
Fair point. Sounds very 1984 already. But, in the actions he cited, the loss of privacy is mostly a side effect. It’s our choice to buy something, but the capturing of the credit card data is a side effect we have to endure. Using Places, the point is to lose some of your privacy — the quality or condition of being secluded from the presence or view of others — by voluntarily handing over your location information.
One commenter on Twitter wrote: “If the government were to go all “1984,” it’d be through Facebook. We’re all voluntarily signing away our privacy. Check your settings!”
The telescreen played a big role in Orwell’s 1984:
The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.
We all assumed the telescreen was the television. There was a telescreen in Winston Smith’s living room. But, there were also many telescreens out in public. I think the iPhone or a smartphone could be considered a telescreen too.
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course
no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How
often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual
wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all
the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted
to. You had to live–did live, from habit that became instinct–in the
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
darkness, every movement scrutinized.
That sounds like a smartphone plus Google Maps with Street View. We do turn off our TV’s, but for many, it’s much harder to turn our phones off. Now we are both transmitting and receiving information with these mobile devices. And with Places on, we can be watched (tagged) at any given moment. We are certainly not in a place where they watch everybody all the time, but rather we are all watching each other.
I know many users will love Places and what it can do. They won’t care about the loss of privacy. Some of us, including me, still value the tiny amount of privacy we still have. We don’t want to be a dot appearing on Facebook’s live map. So, we’ll choose to opt-out for now.
Silicon Valley’s vitality depends on a constant influx of bright people who challenge its inhabitants to work harder and think smarter. And, as I noted in my last post, America’s economy depends on startups to create jobs and innovation. Skilled immigrants have provided both. So, given the miserable state of the economy, we should be laying out the welcome mat for the world’s best and brightest. Yet we’re doing the exact opposite. Meanwhile other countries have figured out the secret of the Valley’s success and are laying out their red carpets and welcome mats, not only for the foreign skilled workers we’re turning away but also for our techies.
Fifty-two percent of Silicon Valley’s startups from 1995 to 2005 were founded by foreign-born workers. And in 2006, 26% of America’s global patents—including 40% of those filed by the U.S. government, 72% of Qualcomm’s, 65% of Merck & Co.’s, and 64% of General Electric’s—were invented wholly or partly by foreign nationals residing in the U.S. You would think that we would develop policies to bring in more of these people. Yet, sadly, the only immigration legislation our political leaders have been able to agree on, unanimously, is to hire 1000 more border-patrol agents and to fly drones on the Mexico border—like the ones we use to kill terrorists in Pakistan—to keep the nannies, gardeners, and farm workers out. Ironically, to pay for all this, the new border-security law levies taxes on companies that the bill’s sponsor, Senator Schumer (D-NY), calls “chop shops”—because they bring in tech workers who compete with Americans and supposedly “take their jobs away”. These “chop shops” are Indian companies such as Infosys, Tata Consulting Services, and Wipro—which have the best employee-training and -development programs, and are amongst the best-managed companies, in the world. They compete head to head with American “chop shops” such as IBM Global Services and Accenture, and increasingly with management consultants such as McKinsey & Co and The Boston Consulting Group.
I am opposed to illegal immigration and believe that H1-B visas should be abolished. (If we need skilled workers, bring them in as permanent residents, so that they have the same rights as Americans and can switch jobs if an employer underpays them.) But the political debate has degenerated into nothing but racism and xenophobia. Some politicians are simply pandering to uninformed sectors of their electorates.
Meanwhile, countries such as Russia, Singapore, and Chile are doing what they can to build their own Silicon Valleys. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev visited Silicon Valley last month, to let American techies know that they are welcome to move to his new science park. Singapore has long been offering visas and incentives to any skilled worker who moves there. And Chile has launched the most ambitious program of all.
In addition to the incentives that Chile has been offering established tech companies, it took my advice and announced an ambitious new program for bootstrappers, called Startup Chile. In return for hanging out in one of the most beautiful places on this planet, Chile will provide fledgling entrepreneurs with a grant of $40,000 to help them cover expenses for six months ($40,000 goes a long way in South America, by the way). As well, they’ll provide the entrepreneurs free temporary office space; connect them with mentors, VCs, and angels; and help them settle in. They are also pumping money into local VC funds to ensure that the capital is there for the most promising companies.
A handful of entrepreneurs have already signed up for the program, and Chile’s minister of Economy, Juan Andres Fontaine, is coming to Silicon Valley on Sept 21 to meet two dozen more entrepreneurs who he hopes will return to Chile with him. (Here is the link to apply.) Chile wants to lure hundreds of entrepreneurs, eventually.
Seems too good to be true, doesn’t it? No obligation to stay; no equity ownership in return for the money; no onerous contracts that promise a pound of flesh—as VCs typically demand. Why would Chile do this? Because they’re betting that if they get enough smart, talented people there, three things will happen: first, many of the entrepreneurs going there will fall in love with the country and decide to stay; second, they will enrich the local ecosystem by teaching local entrepreneurs about global markets; and third, their tech community will develop stronger links to the world. Who knows, a couple of startups may also hit home runs. After all, isn’t this how Silicon Valley left tech centers like Boston in the dust and became the world’s tech leader?
Chile’s strategy of attracting skilled immigrants makes a lot of sense when you consider that it costs practically nothing compared with the billions that regions invest in creating industry clusters. The fact is that smart people, when given the education and means to innovate, make the magic happen. And that’s what makes the American immigration policies so troubling: we’re chasing away the highly educated and experienced workers who could be boosting our economy. They are instead turning countries like China and India into major tech centers.
America won’t always be the place to which the world’s best and brightest flock—they will go where they feel the most welcome. And it won’t be long before Senator Schumer or his successor has to sponsor legislation to offer “chop-shops” incentives, like those Chile is offering, to bring skilled workers to the U.S.
Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwaand find his research at www.wadhwa.com.
On Friday’s taping of Gillmor Gang with former TechCrunchIT Editor Steve Gillmor, Kevin Marks and John Taschek, Crowley discussed the opportunity for places, outlined his plan for the next iteration of Foursquare and knocked Google for its social awkwardness. While his disgust with Google’s mismanagement of the ill-fated Dodgeball is well documented, in his explanation you don’t need to read between the lines to understand he’s also talking about Facebook and how he plans to beat Goliath.
“It’s difficult to build services that are supposed to scale to you know 30, 50, 100 million users right off the bat, because they got to be kind of tailored down, by definition they have to be a little bit generic to speak to that large of an audience. And one of the benefits that we get from starting from scratch and starting as a mobile, social, local startup is that we start with zero users and we can put whatever personality and whatever face we want to on the product… Part of what you see on Foursquare, which is the game mechanics and the snarkiness and really more importantly like the fun and the playfulness that we build into the product, because I think that’s the stuff that most people relate to. And you can poo-poo how like those touchy-feely things don’t mean too much to users but I really think that’s the core and kind of the soul of the service and people identify with that.”
Still not convinced that Crowley’s painting the picture of Facebook as a generic-borderline-boring service, versus Foursquare, the hip, edgy, playful alternative? Let’s step back and consider recent evidence. Earlier this week, Crowley blasted a seemingly harmless tweet: “Call from my 86 yr old grandma: ‘Hello. I want to know if this Face-Book is like yours. It sounds like Four-Squared, but without the fun.’”
In a word, that’s what Crowley has brought to this undercover dogfight: fun.
Although it may sound silly, Crowley’s argument is logically sound. The core of “fun” is his most potent weapon to staying relevant.
Facebook is so huge (500 million large versus Foursquare’s 2.8 million) that its check-in service has to be simple and minimal to accommodate such a huge and diverse group— anything too quirky or outlandish runs the risk of alienating factions. While Foursquare cannot dream to compete with Facebook’s installed base, the startup can certainly differentiate itself by offering a creative, more dynamic product that is less utilitarian and more personality-driven.
As Crowley explains on the Gillmor gang show, he does believe that Facebook has a major role to play in the location ecosystem. Facebook can aggregate check-ins from different services and introduce new users (millions upon millions of them) to the world of check-ins. Thus, if Facebook stays in its corner, the relationship could be a very symbiotic one for Foursquare, which saw a record number of sign-ups on Thursday.
In the meantime, Foursquare is certainly not content to just wait and watch this play out. The rapidly expanding team is working hard to push out the new version within the next two weeks. Crowley, who says he’s “embarrassed” by Foursquare’s current game mechanics, says the next iterations of Foursquare will focus on “reworking and rethinking…the way the tips and the to-dos work, because that’s going to be core of the system.”
In other words, when it comes to the basic check-in, Facebook can be the king of the hill, but when it comes to creating the most engaging, valuable location experience, Crowley is ready for a fight.
Below are highlights from the Gillmor Gang show/ or see video above:
On the opportunities with Places
“I think there’s been a lot of folks who’ve tried to do… check-in aggregation services in the past and ultimately I think that’s going to be, that’s probably a good thing for the industry just so it’s not as fragmented…We’ve been looking at their API and playing with it a little bit, there’s a good chance we’re going to push our check-ins into the facebook feed and there’s a good chance we’re going to pull their check-ins out of it. But I think the big win here, just as Twitter and Facebook taught the world how to share things online photos and status updates and social commentary, I think Facebook is going to teach the world what check-ins are all about.”
On the differences between Places/Foursquare
“We don’t ignore the past. I think one of the great things about Foursquare is that we got a critical mass of users that interact with us two or three minutes every day. Like they do three or five check-ins, on a daily basis that’s not a lot of content, not a lot of data that we’re getting…but over the course of weeks and months it ends up being a lot interesting data about the types of places that people go, the types of things they enjoy doing, the types of people they hang out with. You can cut that stuff up and recycle it back to the users in…lots of interesting ways and I think that’s going to be a big opportunity for us.”
On the problem with Foursquare’s game mechanics
“I think the game mechanics, they really need a lot of work. They really need a lot of improvement, there’s a lot of stuff in the product that we’re not happy about, there’s a lot of stuff I’m kind of like embarrassed about, there’s a lot of things that we need to fix. And people love it as it is. Another big push that you’re going to see from us in the next couple of months is redefining and redeveloping a lot of these game mechanics. Just because we’ve gotten much smarter about it. And I think once we start applying a lot of the stuff we’ve learned to the stuff we’ve already built, then we’ll really start to blow people away.”
The next iteration
“The next version of the Foursquare app comes out in probably like two weeks or so and we’re really reworking and rethinking like the way the tips and the to-dos work, because that’s going to be core of the system. …We’ve been thinking for awhile, what’s act two for us? And act two is OK let’s take all this information about what people are doing, what people want to do, and let’s build this back into the app in a way that’s manageable for people and easy to share.”
On Google’s location/social strategy
“I think they’ve just always struggled with social. That could be an entire different, an hour long conversation over what is it with social that they don’t get… My belief has always been that in order for services to take off in the near term, in order for them to develop that passionate user base of people that go out and turn into advocates. The services need to have some kind of personality to them and some kind of identity to them and I think it’s really difficult and I felt like we ran into some of this when we were at Google. It’s difficult to build services that are supposed to scale to you know 30, 50, 100 million users right off the bat, because they got to be kind of tailored down, by definition they have to be a little bit generic to speak to that large of an audience. And one of the benefits that we get from starting from scratch and starting as a mobile, social, local startup is that we start with zero users and we can put whatever personality and whatever face we want to on the product. Part of what you see on Foursquare, which is the game mechanics and the snarkiness and really more importantly like the fun and the playfulness that we build into the product, because I think that’s the stuff that most people relate to. And you can poo-poo how like those touchy-feely things don’t mean too much to users but I really think that’s the core and kind of the soul of the service and people identify with that.”
On why the world needs more than one social graph
Our social graph is more representative of the people that you meet in the real world. I am starting to believe, if you asked me a year ago, Why would you ever need more than one social graph? You need representation of a couple of them. Between the three, Facebook is literally everyone I’ve ever shaken hands with at a conference or kissed on the cheek at Easter. Twitter seems to be everyone I am entertained by or I wish to meet some day. Foursquare seems to be everyone I run into on a regular basis. All three of those social graphs are powerful in their own
Facebook Connect came along and it really made the social graph open to everyone and makes building social apps easier. We think, oh, we are just building our social graphs on top of Facebook . But Facebook could benefit from our social graph, and Facebook could benefit from Twitter’s social graph. You maybe are not just sucking data out of one, and that is the end of it, but maybe sucking data out of one and putting it in another and they are all working to make each other a little more powerful and a little more accurate.
As we noted a couple days ago, the video Facebook made to explain their new Places feature was a bit Apple-esque. But something else they pulled off recently was even more Apple-esque: the secrecy surrounding their location launch.
Sure, we spotted the code for it months ago when an overzealous engineer likely pushed the code (but not the actual feature) to the touch.facebook.com version of the site a bit early. And everyone generally knew that something in the space was coming from them. But what’s odd is that we hadn’t heard from anyone who was actually using it out in the wild in the past several months. The best we got was all the way back in March when someone saw a very early beta of it. As we noted at the time:
One person who has seen it notes that the icon for the location feature has a pushpin on a map. This was apparently a beta version of an app, but the functionality, if Facebook chooses to go with it, would likely be built into the massively popular Facebook iPhone app.
That person also told us the feature was built so that it could bring in check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla. Obviously, all of that ended up being very close to what actually launched — but that was five months ago! Not a peep since.
With a company the size of Facebook, that kind of secrecy is rare — well, outside of that company at One Infinite Loop, of course.
During their event, Facebook revealed that they had been working on Places in earnest for about 8 months. And if you look at the Facebook HQ Places page on Facebook, you’ll see that there have been something around 7,000 check-ins from various employees over those past several months.
For some context, on Foursquare, AT&T Park in San Francisco is a place of massive activity. So how many total check-ins have there been there? 20,000 — and that’s over 18 months. Facebook HQ got 7,000+ check-ins through Places in just a few months. Clearly, a lot of employees were using it.
And yet, we saw no actual leaks in all that time from any of the nearly 1,500 employees. Not about the app, and not even about the Facebook Place pages.
Yes, plenty of us knew what was likely to come (like me, for example), but besides that one source five months ago (well, and that code), it was all from second-hand whispers and straight-up good guesses. I had no knowledge of the product from anyone who was actually using it in these past five months. And I don’t know of anyone who did outside of Facebook. That’s fairly amazing. And it would seem to speak to a company that is in control and has a healthy (or at least fear-inspiring) relationship with their employees.
(As a side note: it looks as if Facebook may be doing some data scrubbing on these previous check-ins as the numbers are hopping around and sometimes check-ins before a few weeks ago don’t show up at all.)
Kentucky senate candidate Rand Paul is being partially bankrolled by the porn industry, apparently. At least that’s the story that the AP’s Bruce Schreiner is pushing today. This is what appears to be the AP’s most recent hit job on Paul. Schreiner in particular has been accused of subtle bias (compare the headline to the text) in his Rand Paul reporting even before this story today.
What’s the evidence for today’s story? Zivity cofounders Cyan Banister and Scott Banister made personal donations to the Rand Paul campaign totalling $4,800. The Paul campaign has raised a total of over $3.5 million. Donors must state where they work, so they wrote down Zivity, says Cyan.
Despite the fact that the donations weren’t from Zivity, and that Zivity would barely fall under the definition of pornography, people are calling for Rand to return the money. Says someone who has no idea what he’s talking about:
“A lot of Kentuckians would have a problem with a candidate accepting money from organizations that are tearing down the culture,” said Martin Cothran, a policy analyst for The Family Foundation of Kentucky. “And we assume that the Paul campaign understands that.”
Schreiner himself seems to have little knowledge of Zivity either. By phone yesterday he asked me if I could tell him more about the site. He had not, apparently, ventured farther than the home page.
The fact is Zivity is nowhere near as graphic as mainstream television. Sexual acts are never shown, and often the models aren’t even undressed. A typical Saturday evening on Showtime or HBO would be far more likely to “tear down our culture,” in the words of whoever that guy is. And I doubt the AP would be trying to make a big deal out of a HBO employee making a donation to a campaign.
Meanwhile, the story has hit TV, although without Zivity being mentioned. Viewers must be imaging some really hot adult action bankrolling the Rand campaign.
This is a textbook example of hidden bias in the mainstream press. If the AP dislikes Rand Paul they should just come out and say it. Getting some crazy idiots in Kentucky to give them uninformed quotes instead is just so lame.
It’s a pity readers don’t want to pay for stories about the death of traditional media, because otherwise journalists and commentators would be riding a big fat cash cow.
This week it’s books (again), and a stark warning from the Wall Street Journal’s Ron Adner and William Vincent to anyone who prefers literature unsullied by full-page ads for SUVs and tobacco.
“With e-reader prices dropping like a stone and major tech players jumping into the book retail business, what room is left for publishers’ profits? The surprising answer: ads. They’re coming soon to a book near you.”
Oh no! Lock up your Little Women! The Mad Men are coming!
The crux of the argument is this: books are the only word-based medium currently free of advertising (unless you count the pages full of ads for other books at the back of most mass market paperbacks). This isn’t – as you might think – because ads kill our enjoyment of literature (many magazines publish fiction surrounded by commercial messages) but rather because until now it’s been difficult to sell ad space in books. The lead times in publishing – and the shelf-life of paperbacks – are simply too long to deliver timely commercial offerings: who hasn’t experienced the amusement of picking up an old paperback and being invited to send off for the previous title in the series for just 25c?
But now, thanks to e-readers, all that is changing. With electronic books, ads can be served dynamically, just like they are online – not only does that remove the problem of out-of-date ads being stuck in old books, but it also allows messages to be tailored to the individual reader. Those reading the Twilight books at the age of 14 can be sold make-up and shoes and all of the other things teenage girls need to attract their very own Edward. Meanwhile, those still reading the books at 35 can be sold cat food. Lots and lots of cat food.
And, so, goes the argument in the WSJ, with publishers desperate to make up the money they’ve lost thanks to the declining cost of ebooks (never mind that distribution and storage costs are dropping at precisely the same rates), we’re soon going to see books chock-full of ads.
It’s a compelling argument, but like so many compelling arguments made about the future of books, it’s also hampered by consisting almost entirely of bullshit. For one thing, publishers are really not geared up to sell ads: they’d have to recruit armies of ad sales people who would be forced to actually sit down and read the novels and historical memoirs and chick-lit-churn-outs that they’d be selling against. Not going to happen.
And even if publishers do hire these crack ad teams, they’d be asking them to perform an almost impossible task: to accurately predict the readership of forthcoming books. Magazines and newspapers are able to tell advertisers weeks or months in advance what their circulation is likely to be, and so how much bang brands can expect to get for their buck. By contrast, even publishers with decades of experience have no idea whether a given title is going to sell one copy or a million. Which advertiser would have bought ads in the niche-niche prospect ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ when the book was published in late 2003? And yet by January 2004 it had become an international bestseller. Traditional ad sales people would be constantly chasing their tails to try to keep up with such an unpredictable industry.
More importantly, though, any direct comparison between books and magazines (or newspapers) is completely misguided. Yes, both formats deliver words to readers’ eyes but where a magazine is designed for light reading – something one skims in a doctor’s waiting room, fully expecting to be interrupted at any moment - a book is a fully immersive experience in which the readers expects to be transported completely to another world.
It’s much more appropriate to draw a parallel between books and film. There’s a reason why movie theatres don’t show commercials in the middle of films: advertising jars you away from the narrative, like a boxing glove on a telescopic arm suddenly punching through the fourth wall. People go to the cinema, or slip in a DVD, to escape from the commercially saturated real world; much the same reason as they crack open a good book. Putting an ad in the middle of a book is a great way to kill a reader’s enjoyment of the product, and ensure they won’t buy another one.
And yet, and yet… advertising is a supremely powerful force. And its operatives are sneaky – managing to come up with ever more cunning ways to infiltrate movies with their sales pitches, much like Leonardo Di Caprio’s character does to his victim’s dreams in ‘Inception‘ (a rare movie, incidentally, during which a boxing glove to the face would have provided blessed relief). The most cunningly effective weapon in their arsenal is product placement: bribing filmmakers to ensure that their heroes and heroines are seen drinking a particular brand of beer or getting married wearing a particular designer’s dress. It’s the perfect crime: barely noticed when executed well, highly profitable and with the alibi of “adding realism” to modern characters.
And for precisely those same reasons, it’s product placement – not straightforward, accountable, cordoned off display advertising – that I can see looming like a shadow on the publishing industry’s future x-rays. Not least because the practice has been with us for at least a decade. Back in 2001, Fay Weldon’s ‘The Bulgari Connection’ caused a stir amongst the literati when the publisher and author received a five figure sum from jewelers Bulgari in exchange for mentioning the company twelve times in the book’s narrative.
Since then the practice has become ever more prevalent, particularly in teen fiction – presumably because it’s easier to slip Pepsi into a book about modern teenagers than it is to wedge Burger King into ‘Oryx and Crake‘. In Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman’s novel ‘Cathy’s Book: If Found Call 650-266-8233‘, a character is described as wearing Cover Girl ‘Lipslicks’ makeup. The mention was part of a cross-promotional deal with Proctor and Gamble, which saw the book promoted across the brand’s teen websites. As the New York Times reveals, an early galley of the book described the same character wearing instead “Clinique #11 ‘Black Violet’ lipstick” – the change being made ahead of publication, after the deal with P&G was signed.
But, cynical as that arrangement was, ‘Cathy’s Book…’ was published in the dark ages of 2006, way before the Kindle and the Nook and other mass-market e-readers opened up the possibility of what can be done with dynamically generate content. Imagine if such a deal were inked today (which it surely is being). Thanks to leaps forward in technology, P&G’s ‘Lipslicks’ placement could be limited to, say, 10,000 reads of the book, after which the character suddenly starts wearing something different – either a newer Cover Girl sub-brand, or perhaps something from a rival manufacturer. Whoever makes the highest bid defines the character for the next batch of readers.
Since Ian Fleming defined James Bond by the Rolex on his wrist, many of our most popular literary heroes have been characterised as much by the products they use as by the lines they say. Once those key traits are perpetually being altered at the whim of the highest bidder – a prospect that technology has made very real indeed – well, that’s when the misty-eyed defenders of old media will really have something to write about.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a hotter term in technology right now than “check-in.” Following Facebook’s entry into the location space with Places, it will soon be a term that hundreds of million of web users know well. But millions already do know it well thanks to Foursquare. While it seems likely that they weren’t the first to use it, they are the ones that made it ubiquitous among the location-based services. As such, they’ve been trying to apply for a trademark on the term.
Foursquare (technically Foursquare Labs, Inc.) filed the trademark application on March 11 of this year. But in June, the USPTO turned down the trademark request stating that “the applied-for mark, as used on the specimen of record, is merely informational matter; it does not function as a service mark to identify and distinguish applicant’s services from those of others and to indicate the source of applicant’s services.“
Further, the USPTO wrote that:
The applied-for mark, as shown on the specimen, is merely informational matter because the word “check-in” appears on the applicant’s website page as merely a part of the informational phrase “check-in find your friends.” Consumers seeing the mark as it is used on the specimens of use would not conclude that the mark functions as a service mark to identify and distinguish the applicant’s services from those of others
But Foursquare was allowed to respond to the ruling and did so nine days later clarifying the wording a bit. But a couple weeks later, some unnamed company apparently sent a letter of protest stating that the term “check in” was generic.
Three days after that, the USPTO once again turned down Foursquare’s request, this time stating that “registration is refused because the applied-for mark merely describes a feature and the purpose of applicant’s goods.” Further, the attorney on the case included several Google searches for “check-in apps” to show that more than just Foursquare was identified with the term.
That said, the USPTO has once again given Foursquare up to six month to respond to the refusal. It appears they haven’t done so yet, but I’ve reached out to the company to see if that is their intention.
Foursquare’s filing for the check-in trademark identifies it as “downloadable software in the nature of a mobile application for displaying and sharing a user’s location and finding, locating, and interacting with other users and places.“
Interestingly enough, Foursquare is also having a difficult time trademarking their name. In June, the USPTO also turned down for a trademark on the name. But in that case it appears to be because Fourquare only sent a screenshot of their site and not the actual application for the USPTO to review. “The specimen is not acceptable as evidence of actual trademark use because it is an advertisement for the applicant’s website. Thus, it fails to show proper use on actual downloadable software,” they noted. Foursquare also has six months to respond to that.
It’s worth noting that a lot of companies are attempting to trademark the term “foursquare” but all seemingly for different reasons.
Foursquare has also tried to trademark the term “Foursquare Check-In” but are having a hard time there because of the “check-in” aspect for the reasons stated above.
One trademark that it appears Foursquare was granted was for the term “4sq.” Notably, this is the .com name that Foursquare uses for its URL shortener.
My, how quickly things change. It wasn’t much more than a year ago that Apple and Google were happy partners — at least from the public’s perspective — working in tandem to push technology forward at a clipping pace. Google’s search and various apps complemented the iPhone perfectly, and the existing Android phones merely affirmed how much better the iPhone was than everything else on the market. And then everything went to hell.
At an event on Wednesday, Facebook unveiled Places, their new location element that allows users to check-in to venues. Obviously, this mimics the core feature of smaller startups like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and dozens of others. The move of the big boys into this space was inevitable, but it is somewhat surprising that it has taken this long. The next question may be: will Twitter follow suit?
Silicon Valley’s vitality depends on a constant influx of bright people who challenge its inhabitants to work harder and think smarter. And, as I noted in 
Kentucky senate candidate Rand Paul is being partially bankrolled by the porn industry, apparently. At least that’s the story that the AP’s Bruce Schreiner is 
It’s a pity readers don’t want to pay for stories about the death of traditional media, because otherwise journalists and commentators would be riding a big fat cash cow.
