Everybody Forgets The Readers When They Bash News...
I remember way back before the Internet when I got most of my daily news via the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN. If it wasn’t reported by either of those outlets, there was a good chance I wouldn’t hear that news at all.
Those days are over.
The problem is that most of the people running legacy news sites today are way older than I am, and still can’t get their arms around the fact that the world has fundamentally and irreversibly changed. Today I get my non tech news via scores of sources. I’m led there via social sites like Twitter and Facebook, and from aggregators like Google News and Memeorandum. Most of my tech news comes, of course, via my phone and email inbox.
It’s ok that the legacy guys don’t understand that, because when they erect paywalls it just stokes TechCrunch, which isn’t behind a paywall. Live and let live, I say. Far be it from me to talk them off the ledge. Paywalls kill social links and aggregators unless they are specially designed to allow them via a set number of free views. But even then there’s enough friction that most people won’t bother.
But when Mark Cuban starts saying aggregators are bad, that’s something new. He’s one of the guys that gets it. He’s not supposed to be on the losing team:
Outspoken billionaire cum provocateur Mark Cuban charged Google and other content aggregators Tuesday of being freeloaders — or worse. “The word that comes to mind is vampires,” he said. “When you think about vampires, they just suck on your blood.”
Telling the world that you don’t want them to do you the favor of visiting your site is just ridiculous.
Let me repeat that. When someone visits your site they are doing you a favor. Not the other way around.
And when an aggregator puts up a link to your site, they are doing you a favor by sending you traffic. Not the other way around.
As I’ve written before, “We throw a party when someone “steals” our content and links back to us. High fives all around the office. At least there’s some small nod in our direction.”
The real problem out there today for news sites are the guys that just take stories and rewrite them on the cheap without any links or attribution at all. When you erect a paywall, you’re just encouraging this behavior. It’s less anyone will notice.
What About The Users?
But forget all that navel gazing for a minute while I jump back up to my first paragraph. Aggregators are popular because they help users find the news they’re interested in. They serve a very real purpose and add value to the system. Without aggregators and social links users would be forced to choose which news sites they want to pay for, and trust that they’ll get everything they need from those sites.
I don’t want to jump back to 1993. I want to live in the present where each piece of news lives and dies by its own merit as it spreads virally around the Internet. That means I spend less time finding better content.
Mark Cuban knows all this, and he agrees. Which is why I don’t understand his lash out against aggregators. If news sites block aggregators, as Cuban urges, they lose and the users lose. No one wins. Except the sites that remain free. And those sites are here to stay.
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3Crowd Comes Out Of Stealth, Reveals Its Plan To Disrupt...
3Crowd, the new startup from BitGravity co-founder Barrett Lyon, is ready for its close-up. Until now little was known about the company, other than that its backers include Jay Adelson, Kevin Rose, Storm Ventures, and Greenwich Technology Associates. Now the company is talking: 3Crowd is looking to change the way people use content delivery networks, with a goal of making it both cheaper and easier to use these CDNs by making them part of a unified ‘cloud’. At least, that’s the first thing 3Crowd is hoping to do — the company’s future goals are even more ambitious.
3Crowd’s first product is setting out to help users manage their content across multiple CDNs at the same time, using rule sets to determine which CDNs should be tapped depending on variables like the user’s location and which content they’re accessing. The product also looks to make it easy to actually deploy your content to these CDNs — you have to create the account with the CDN, but 3Crowd can then walk you through a wizard to get things going. Lyon says that this changes the process from one that would typically require a programmer to one that’s managed through a clickable wizard.
So what’s the benefit from being able to easily spread your content across multiple CDNs? For one, you aren’t dealing with a single point of failure. But the rules-based platform also gives you more flexibility as to how you’d like to distribute your content. If you found a CDN based in the United States that was cheaper than the alternatives, you could use that while still maintaining your content on a premium CDN serving users abroad. You could also set up the system to have a secondary CDN kick in if your traffic hit a certain threshold. The system also makes it easy to jump between CDNs — find a better deal on one, and you can jump to it with fewer headaches than you would have had otherwise.
As the co-founder of the CDN BitGravity, Lyon obviously has experience in this area. He says that one of the issues with content delivery networks is that they can become prohibitively expensive for successful sites. He explains that as your site grows, CDNs may be able to help you quickly serve your content to all of your new fans, but there’s a good chance your income isn’t scaling as quickly as your CDN costs are. 3Crowd ultimately hopes to make it much cheaper to achieve massive distribution.
There are still plenty of unknowns, though. 3Crowd is still in private beta and will remain so for the next few weeks, and Lyon didn’t want to get into the service’s pricing (he says it will be “very affordable”). Lyon also promises that there’s much more to 3Crowd’s vision, though he wouldn’t get into the details yet.
My hunch is that the company will eventually look to make switching between CDNs a near real-time affair — imagine being able to dynamically swap between CDNs based on which one is cheapest at a given moment (this would be especially powerful if you could target CDNs during traffic drop-offs, when bandwidth might be cheaper, though that assumes the CDNs will cooperate).
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Live From Facebook’s HipHop Technology Tasting
I’m here at the Facebook Technology Tasting, where the social network is showcasing their newly open sourced PHP technology, HipHop. The new technology effectively transforms PHP into C++, resulting in a significant savings of CPU cycles on web servers. Facebook is streaming the event live, and we’ve embedded the live stream below.
Facebook Senior Open Programs Manager David Recordon kicked off the event by walking the audience through some of the challenges Facebook faces, particularly with the dynamic pages it has to generate. He spoke about some of the benefits of various programming languages, and also the CPU costs of each. As it scaled, Facebook encountered problems with PHP, including high CPU and memory costs and difficulty developers faced to build extensions. But Facebook has a slew of talented PHP developers, and it didn’t make sense to rewrite the site.
The solution Facebook came up with is HipHop for PHP, which started as a hackathon project from a single developer named Haiping Zhao (though he had some team members as the project progressed). The technology transforms PHP into C++, using g++ to compile it.
Facebook has found that the technology uses 50% less CPU with equal traffic on its web tier, and 30% less CPU usage with doubled traffic on its API tier.
Facebook started deploying HipHop six months ago (initially it was only on internal servers). It’s now been ramped up to 90% of Facebook’s production servers.
Zhao took the stage to give a highly technical walkthrough of the benefits of the technology (watch the video below for the details).
Facebook Open Source Developer Advocate Scott MacVicar presented a roadmap for the future of the open source project. Among Facebook’s goals:
-Catch up with PHP 5.3
-Support Apache as a web server option
-Evolve based on usage outside of FB.
Video chat rooms at Ustream
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How to SEO Your Pictures
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Facebook Status Update: Becoming a Technological Lock-in
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Hidden Backdoors On Torrent Sites Led To The Latest Twitter...
Early this morning, Twitter began alerting certain users to reset their passwords because of a possible phishing attack. They later elaborated on it a bit but it still wasn’t clear exactly what was going on. Now they’ve felt the need to fully go into exactly what went down — and it’s fairly interesting.
On their Twitter Status blog (interesting that it’s not the main Twitter blog), Del Harvey, Twitter’s Director of “Trust and Safety” has a post detailing the attack. Apparently, Twitter figured out that some torrent sites have been being created for a number of years by some individual who then sells them to others looking to get into the business. The problem is that this person seems to have included a backdoor into these sites so that they could access them later when the site became popular. And because people often use the same login and password across the web, a bunch of Twitter accounts were then comprimised with this data.
To make matters worse, it seems that there were also other exploits on these sites that allowed other hackers to gain access to data. Harvey doesn’t name any of the torrent sites involved (and says they likely won’t even be able to figure out all of them), but notes that if you’re a torrent site user, you should probably change your Twitter password immediately.
Harvey titles his post, “reason 4,132 for changing your password” — but really it should be, “reason 4,132 for not using the same login/password on all sites.” Here’s the main nugget:
The takeaway from this is that people are continuing to use the same email address and password (or a variant) on multiple sites. Through our discussions with affected users, we’ve discovered a high correlation between folks who have used third party forums and download sites and folks who were on our list of possibly affected accounts.
[photo: flickr/Daquella manera]
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Video: Android’s New Pinch-To-Zoom Multi-Touch In Action
As we noted earlier, Google announced an update today to its Android OS for Nexus One phones that would enable the pinch-to-zoom multi-touch feature for the first time in a few Google apps: Maps, Gallery, and the Web Browser. We’ve just received the update, which is technically firmware 2.1-update1, and have taken a video of the new functionality in action.
While some third-party apps have taken advantage of mutli-touch for some time on Android, Google has resisted the feature for its own apps — likely due to an agreement with Apple. But now, all bets appear to be off.
Google notes that most users shouldn’t receive the update until the end of the week as they gradually roll it out, so we were apparently lucky. Watch it in action below, and note how it compares to the iPhone’s multi-touch.
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Did Google Just Multi-Punch Apple In The Face?
As great as Android phones are getting, there has been one major feature lacking that users have complained about: multi-touch. Yes, some third-party apps have been free to use it on certain devices, but the best Android apps, those made by Google, have all lacked it.
With the Android update announced for Nexus One phones today, Google has enabled multi-touch for its Browser, Gallery, and Maps applications. Specifically, they’ve enabled the popular pinch-to-zoom functionality that iPhone users are fond of.
So why did Google wait all this time to implement this obvious feature when its devices have been capable of it since the G1? Well, a report last year (written by me for another publication), cited a source within Google who noted that Apple and Google had a gentleman’s agreement that Android wouldn’t encroach on what Apple believed to be its property, certain multi-touch gestures, like pinch-to-zoom. With Apple and Google now fighting, all bets are apparently off.
Android chief Andy Rubin has said that there was no conspiracy about multi-touch, and suggested the Google apps haven’t implemented it simply because he didn’t like the functionality too much. But given that just about every Android user disagrees with him, that statement seems suspicious, at best. And why the change of heart now? And why does it happen to coincide with a time that Apple and Google are clearly at odds with one another?
While the two used to be just about as close as two companies can be, sharing two board members, one of whom was Google CEO Eric Schmidt, things have turned sour as the two are increasingly competing in various fields. This led to Schmidt resigning from Apple’s board last year, and since then things have gotten more sour. While the whole Google Voice not being allowed onto the iPhone situation was one thing, Steve Jobs reportedly made recent remarks that Google’s Android team was out to destroy the iPhone (as well as other disparaging remarks about Google).
And the battle continues on — those new Chrome OS tablet mock-ups are clearly envisioning multi-touch usage, just like Apple’s new iPad.
Apple and Google also apparently used to have a gentleman’s agreement not to poach each others workers, we reported in August. But again, with the situation between the two deteriorating, that is apparently off now as well.
And Google may have another reason to be okay with implementing multi-touch now: the Palm Pre. Since its launch last year, webOS (the OS that runs on the Pre and other new Palm devices) has allowed for native multi-touch, including pinch-to-zoom. While Apple has made some thinly veiled threatening comments about protecting their IP, they have so far not sought any legal action against Palm for this. Microsoft’s new Zune device uses similar multi-touch functionality too. Maybe Google now believes that Apple is not going pursue legal action against the use of this, despite their many multi-touch patents.
[image: warner brothers pictures]
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News Corp Earnings Are In: Digital Media Contribution...
News Corporation just announced financial results for the second quarter ended December 31.
Zooming in on the ‘Other’ segment, which houses News Corp’s Digital Media group, things are not looking too bright.
The business unit, which manages MySpace, IGN Entertainment, as well as the Hulu joint venture with NBC Universal, took a bit of a hit (again).
The company says earnings contributions from the Digital Media Group decreased by $32 million from a year ago, principally due to lower search and advertising revenue. Unfortunately, those numbers aren’t broken out in more detail.
Other than that, News Corp actually performed remarkably well, solidly beating Wall Street’s expectations.
News Corp reported net income of $254 million ($0.10 per share) for the last 3 months of 2009, compared to a net loss of $6.4 billion ($2.45 per share) in the second quarter a year ago.
In the quarter, total revenue increased by 10% to $8.7 billion as a result of double-digit percentage growth at the majority of business segments (Filmed Entertainment, Television, Cable Network Programming, Newspapers and Information Services and Book Publishing) as compared to the same period a year ago, said News Corp.
News Corp chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch said he was overall pleased with the results:
Our strong top-line revenue growth demonstrates that News Corporation is emerging from this recession with renewed vigor and strength.
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The Nexus One Just Got Multi-Touch
Google has just started to deploy an update to the Nexus One that brings a long-desired feature to Android: Multi-touch. In a blog post announcing the news, Google says that the new update will bring “Pinch-to-zoom functionality” to the Nexus One, which will allow users to pinch-to-zoom in the Android browser, Gallery, and Maps applications.
So does this mean that Multi-touch will be coming to all Android phones? Not quite yet. A Google spokesperson says that multi-touch support is part of the Android 2.0 framework and that its integrated support on the Browser, gallery, and Maps applications will be part of the next Android update. However, it will be up to carriers and device manufactures to roll the updated software to these devices.
The post also says that Nexus Ones will be receiving some other updated apps. The new version of Google Maps Navigation will include a ‘night mode’ that automatically changes the screen for optimized night time driving. And Google Goggles, which lets you search with pictures, will now be included in the default set of applications on the phone. Finally, 3G connectivity has been improved.
You may have to wait a little longer to get your update though — while the over-the-air update will start going out today, Google’s post says some users may not get it until the end of the week.
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