Media Outlaw

500 million and rising also makes it clear to anyone not paying attention that Facebook is no fad and that it is a cultural force shaping our collective culture. Even if you have no desire to ever set up a profile, you can’t ignore it and you are now oddly defined in the negative and left out of the zeitgeist.

A service of that size won’t disappear anytime soon, even if Facebook has hit its plateau in the U.S. But net users are fickle and the web’s short history includes dozens of sites that were once high-flying that have either since died (Geocities), lost their luster (Yahoo) or faded into irrelevance (Friendster).

So how could Facebook lose its place at the center of the web?

Tags: Facebook

If you search for flights on Google today, all you get is links to results from the big online travel sites. Bing, on the other hand, offers a much richer Travel experience, complete with comparison prices for the same flight from the different travel engines, as well as predictive charts and graphs from Farecast which was acquired by Microsoft for $115 million in 2008. Bing also gets a lot of its flight and fare data from ITA.

via Google Pays $700 Million In Cash For Flight Info Provider ITA.

Tags: bing, flightinfo, Google, Microsoft

Google — May 18, 2010 — TV meets web. Web meets TV. Learn more at www.google.com/tv. Produced by Epipheo Studios.

via YouTube – Introducing Google TV.

Tags: Google, googletv, webtv

Development on the product is most definitely full steam ahead. Is your TV screen the next battleground in the platform wars? Survey says: hell yes.

via The next Apple TV revealed: cloud storage and iPhone OS on tap… and a $99 price tag — Engadget.

Tags: Apple, appletv, TV

CBS Evening News.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the good, old-fashioned copy machine. But, as Armen Keteyian reports, advanced technology has opened a dangerous hole in data security.

Tags: copymachine, harddrive, security

Fast Company has a great excerpt of an interview with the “Woz” on the future of computing. so I guess Dancing with the Stars didn’t completely cloud his window to the future.

Tags: Apple, computing, dancingwithstars, future, human, Steve, Woz, Wozniak

A great post from Electricpig’s Mic Wright. Does Facebook know a whole lot more that we think? Read on.

Facebook had a master password that allowed employees to access any account and still records far more information about how you use the site than you’d assume, according to a new interview with a Facebook insider.

American blog, The Rumpus, has published an interview with someone it claims is a current Facebook employee. The biggest revelations: there was once a master password that would access any profile and Facebook records which profiles you visit most (essentially a stalking count) amongst many other bits of data.

The alleged employee says a master password once allowed Facebook employees to access any account. The password was apparently a variation on ‘Chuck Norris’ and was used for engineering purposes but other employees were aware of it. Most interestingly, the interviewee claims that misuse of the password led to two Facebook employees being fired.

Though the master password is apparently no longer in use, the interviewee claims that employees can simply query Facebook’s back-end database to look at private information. They also claim that there is a specilaised tool to access specific profiles but that Facebook requires a reason to use it and employees can be sacked for misusing it.

The interview also claims the social network records every element of your activity on the site. That goes beyond messages you write and receive to how many times you click on a particular profile, which photos you view, who has tagged you most in photos and notes. The information is apparently behind a recent change that now shows your best friends first in a search rather than simply an alphabetical list.

Facebook gave a statement to Techcrunch pouring scorn on the interview: “This piece contains the kind of inaccuracies and misinterpretations you would expect from something sourced ‘anonymously’ and we’ll leave it at that.”

However, it’s clear that Facebook is able to access profile information when it needs to, for instance to help police with their investigations, so the existence of a master password or tool for accessing private information is not so far fetched.

Does this interview suggest that one employee has simply misinterpreted Mark Zuckerberg’s call for a less private, more open world? We suspect he didn’t mean spilling all of Facebook’s secrets, whatever he’s done with his own profile.

Out now | £free | Facebook (via The Rumpus/Techcrunch)

Tags: Facebook, MasterPassword, Mole, Rumpus, Zuckerberg

Posted on Alltop by Annie Colbert.

What the heck is Google Wave? You and about 64.7 percent of the Twittersphere are all wondering (scientific calculation based on random checks of trending topics.) EpipheoStudios.com created a handy animated video to help explain the Wave hype with an underlying motive of scoring an elusive invite to the fancy new Google product. Does anyone else feel like this whole invite situation is reminiscent of elementary school birthday party invites? Still not a cool kid, I suppose.

Tags: EpipheoStudios, Google, Twitter, Twittersphere, Wave

Below are extended versions of technology reporter James Temple’s interviews with two executives at the company on these topics.
Read more: San Francisco Chronicle

Hunter Walk, director of product management at YouTube:

Q: How does YouTube see the online video world shaping up and what does it want its role within it to be?

The future of online video is that there is no such thing as online video, there’s just video. Consumers are going to be accessing the content that interests them through a number of devices and what’s really going to be at the center of that equation is that user, not any particular channel or device. It’s the “channel of you.”

We think the content you care about is really three types of content: mass/popular media, the stuff that everyone wants to watch, that everyone wants to talk about … and more niche media that might relate to topics you care about, places you’ve been, people you know. But then there’s also very personal media, the content created by you and your friends, the documenting of you and their lives.

Before that has never been brought to one platform together. Consumers have stapled that together, they’ve created the channel of you through multiple devices and multiple subscription packages, spending their time on lots of different information gathering. YouTube is the first place that really brings that all together.

Q: But is YouTube still coming up short on the mass market media, when you can’t get full episodes of current TV shows like 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live, whereas you can on Hulu.com or by simply turning on your television?

A: No one channel has the totality of all the content that’s ever been created, but I think what you see is, content is quickly rushing to these platforms that offer consumers choice.

I look at where we were (just after Google acquired the company), versus two and a half years later and the tremendous amount of that mass media that’s been filled in. In January 2007 you were still talking primarily about music, which is still a place where we have an incredible corpus. But since then, having added some long form television in the sense of classic TV or syndication TV, short form content from partners like CBS, ESPN, yesterday’s sports highlights, NBA, BBC.

I think it continues to accelerate and my big bet is this content will continue to migrate to YouTube. But because the channel of you is so powerful that consumer will increasingly make consumption decisions based upon the content that is easily accessible to them and consumable by them on their terms.

Q: Could the rapid rise in popularity of Hulu make it harder to get full episodes and other professional content onto YouTube, and the ads that come with them?

A: I think the existence and growth of a site like Hulu has helped companies to decide to commit to online strategies and very often these strategies include YouTube and that is very productive for us.

Hulu is focused on one very particular niche of official content, and it’s broadcast television that happens to be on air right now and it’s largely content provided by its three majority owners. There’s an incredible amount of content that goes beyond that definition and when you look at where that content is aggregating, YouTube is the place.

We’re not a media company, but what I do think is we’re a media catalyst. We use our platform, we use our technology, we use our monetization tools to accelerate the creation of media and the distribution of media. That’s a vision and a mission that’s very much in line with Google’s broader strategy, which is about information and access to information.

Q: One analyst I spoke to made the point that, while it’s all well and good that YouTube may be getting closer to profitability, it’s still been three years after a nearly $2 billion acquisition and who knows how much additional money since. By this point they should be contributing a lot more on the revenue side to Google. What’s your take on that concern?

A: From just about any objective metric if you look at YouTube’s business, you’d be happy. The revenue growth over the last few years; the growth to the second largest search engine … the impact that YouTube’s been able to have on news and politics in the world.

We increasingly have generations of consumers who are looking at YouTube as the new TV, this is what’s bringing them a visual on the world around them. Time spent on YouTube is incredibly high, I think it’s almost 150 minutes per user a month and only growing.

I don’t think there’s a way to look at YouTube and be anything but bullish, whether you’re looking at our business, whether you’re looking at the general trends of how people are interacting with video online and via technology, and then when you look at the actual performance metrics of the site.

Tom Pickett, director of online sales and operations, began the conversation by talking about efforts to make money at YouTube:

A: We are on a great positive trajectory with respect to revenue growth and we’ve done a lot of work to streamline our operations on the cost side. We’ve seen tremendous success with selling (ads on) the home page, particularly in the U.S. market and we’re starting to get traction with that internationally as well, which represents a big opportunity. More recently (we launched) in-stream advertising (that plays before, during or after the video) on what we call our watch pages. That, I think, is going to be a big opportunity ahead of us as we monetize more and more of the video content that we have on YouTube.

We focused on a lot in the past on big brand advertisers and we’re trying to move much more into a broader offering across the whole long tail of advertisers as well.

The way we think about content on YouTube is we want to be the place for all kinds of content, from premium content you might find on TV, to mid-sized content producers who are producing content directly for the web to users who have been able to generate an audience over time on YouTube. All of that content is very attractive to users and we also think very attractive to advertisers. It’s going to be a very effective way for advertisers to reach their audience in the future.

Q: What are the broader goals and long-term opportunities of YouTube?

A: The more our partners make, the more we make. And the more content we have on YouTube creates more users coming to YouTube … In the end, we’re really about expanding the pie and we want to share that with our partners.

The home page has gotten us to a great start in getting traction with advertisers and now we’re expanding on that, really going much deeper, with using the video content we have as an advertising mechanism.

We do have a viable business here. There have been a lot of doubts about that in the press and what we’re saying is that we see ourselves on a really nice trajectory.

Our goal is not just to be a profitable company. Our goal is to be a huge economic force for our partners and for our advertisers — and in the end, that will benefit our users.

Tags: channel of you, profitability, YouTube

Here is a test by Brian Krebs of the Washington Post of the new Microsoft FREE anti-virus software, “Morro”.
Microsoft on Tuesday released a beta version of its new free anti-virus offering, Microsoft Security Essentials (a.k.a “Morro”). My review, in short: the program is a fast, easy to use and unobtrusive new addition to the stable of free anti-virus options available today.

MSE is basically the next generation of Microsoft’s Windows Live Onecare anti-virus and anti-spyware service, but without all of the extras, such as a firewall, data backup solution and restore or PC performance tuning (Microsoft announced in Nov. 2008 that it would stop selling Onecare through its retail channels at the end of June 2009).

The toughest part was getting the program installed. MSE can run on Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions), but the program failed to install on an XP Pro system I tried to use as my initial test machine — leaving me with nothing more than a failure message and cryptic error code that didn’t turn up anything in an online search.

Fortunately, it installed without issue on my Windows 7 Beta system. Interested users should note that installing MSE requires that the would-be user’s system passes Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy tool, which checks to make sure it is being installed on a licensed version of Windows. Would-be users also will need to register for or already have a free Windows Live (or Hotmail) account in order to download the program.

After installation, MSE spends a couple of minutes downloading additional files, and then prompts the user to perform a “Quick Scan.” True to its name, that scan took less than 10 minutes on my test system. A full scan, however, took about 45 minutes on a relatively new install of Windows 7.

Anti-virus products are notorious for sucking up system resources, but you’d be forgiven for forgetting this program is even running. It barely used more than 4 MB of system memory for the entire time I tested it, including during scans.

By default, MSE scans archived files (.zip, e.g.), and creates a system restore point before deleting any files that set off alarms. The one scanning option not checked by default is to scan removable drives — such as USB drives — for viruses. But users can enable this option.

The program is not just an on-demand scanner: It includes real-time protection, which Microsoft says “alerts you when viruses, spyware and other potentially unwanted software attempts to install itself or run on your computer.”

In addition, MSE monitors file and program activity on your computer, and automatically scans all downloaded files and attachments. If it finds something, it will ask you what to do with the suspect file, and if the user takes no action after 10 minutes, Microsoft will decide what to do with the file(s) according to its default actions. Out of the box, it schedules a scan every Sunday at 2:00 a.m., but only if the PC is idle at that time.

A great deal has been written so far about the potential for MSE to unseat established giants in the anti-virus industry. It’s too soon to say whether that will happen, or how Microsoft’s new offering will measure up in tests against real-life malicious software, tests that are beyond the scope of this review.

Personally, I doubt whether MSE will have much of an impact on the anti-virus market as a whole. If anti-virus industry players fall by the wayside in the coming years, it will be because they either get gobbled up by their (non-Microsoft) competitors, or they fail to adapt to the latest threats.

Each time the issue of Microsoft throwing its weight around in the security space arises, it invariably raises the same issues of trust, privacy and efficacy. Allow me to address a few of the common themes, in the context of MSE:

Microsoft made the operating system, so it’s probably best equipped to produce software capable of defending its weaknesses: The truth is, Microsoft is continually defending the weaknesses in Windows. Every month, it ships new patches to fix security and stability problems in its software that it didn’t know about until bad guys or researchers unearthed them and proved they were exploitable. What’s more, Microsoft is in no more advantageous a position vis-a-vis other anti-virus makers to tell which tricks the bad guys will pull out of their hats next.

Microsoft is responsible for the same buggy software that lets the bad guys break in, so why would you trust them to also do a good job defending your PC against malware?: This is a fair question, but the folks asking this very question probably will never install this software anyway.

And, while I don’t believe Microsoft has the time or the inclination to go rooting through users’ systems for personal information, the disclaimer for the default “Basic membership” in Microsoft SpyNet that ships with MSE also isn’t likely to reassure those who doubt the company’s intentions. It reads:

“Send basic information to Microsoft about software that Microsoft Security Essentials detects, including where the software came from, the actions that you apply or that Microsoft Security Essentials applies automatically, and whether the actions were successful. In some instances, personal information might unintentionally be sent to Microsoft. However, Microsoft will not use this information to identify you or to contact you.”

Microsoft is only offering this product so that it can gain a foothold in the security software market, after which time it will start charging people to protect their computers whilst strong-arming its competition: Microsoft has said it plans to continue offering MSE for free. And for all of the reasons stated above, I don’t believe Microsoft’s offering of a free anti-virus product is going to steal too many paying customers away from other products. After all, there are plenty of other free anti-virus products available, including AVAST! Home Edition, Avira’s AntiVir, AVG Free, ClamWin, PCTools, and Panda’s new Cloud Antivirus offering, to name but a few.

I suspect Microsoft is offering this software for reasons part public relations and part self-preservation: Redmond knows that anything it can do to ensure that there are fewer malware-infested PCs out there is a good thing. And let’s face it, for whatever reason — even with the impressive number of free anti-virus offerings out there already — a dangerous number of Windows users continue to use the operating system without any kind of anti-virus software installed. At least with its brand recognition, Microsoft has a good chance of changing that reality to some degree.

One final note, if you’re interested in trying out this software, you probably want to move pretty quickly. According to ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft intends to make this beta available only to the first 75,000 downloaders in the United States, Brazil or Israel.

By Brian Krebs | June 24, 2009; 7:00 AM ET

Tags: anti-virus, Microsoft, Morro, Security Essentials