Bill Gates

With little fanfare, Bill Gates joined the ranks of celebrities on Twitter this week. But if 140-character tweets aren’t enough for you, the software-mogul-turned-philanthropist Wednesday started sharing his more complete thoughts on a Web site dubbed “The Gates Notes.”

Mr. Gates’s site, www.thegatesnotes.com, will be a repository for his thoughts on a range of topics from education to energy. He will list books he’s reading and post emails and excerpts from presentations. Areas of the site are broken into categories including “My Travels” and “What I’m Learning.”

The site follows the Microsoft Corp. chairman’s first use of Twitter’s messaging service on Tuesday. His Twitter page bore the blue check-mark icon used to verify the identifies of famous people who use the service.

The Twitter updates and new Web site are part of an effort to increase communication about a broader range of topics that Mr. Gates has focused on since leaving full-time work at Microsoft in 2008.

His first tweet, “Hello World. Hard at work on my foundation letter – publishing on 1/25,” was enough to start pulling in followers, who by Wednesday afternoon numbered more than 230,000. The message referred to an annual letter coming Monday detailing his thoughts on his philanthropy, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Mr. Gates wasn’t just sharing his thoughts, he was also using the service to follow about 40 Twitter users ranging from Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan to actor Ashton Kutcher. “I’d like to welcome @billgates to the twitterverse,” wrote Mr. Kutcher, who has more than four million Twitter followers.

Since leaving the software company he co-founded Mr. Gates has experimented with other non-Microsoft Web tools, including Facebook, which he stopped using after too many people wanted to connect to him on the social-networking site.

Wednesday Mr. Gates used Twitter to announce the Gates Notes site, tweeting that he’s “excited to share more about what I’m learning.”

The first installments include his thoughts on education reform, Haiti and geo-engineering, among other topics. He also gave a thumbs up to the book “Sustainable Energy” by David MacKay and highlighted the work of Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba and author of books on energy, food and population.

Throughout the site, Mr. Gates’s opinions show his overarching belief that more technological innovation, some of it government-led, can cure many of the world’s ills.

Among them is that he believes in “strong government encouragement” to spur innovation in carbon dioxide reduction. He said the world should push for reducing carbon dioxide emissions 80% by 2050.



Facebook slims down

Facebook is testing out a pared-down “Lite” version in an aggressive move to attract more content-sharing. It comes a day after the company launched a real-time search and bought FriendFeed, showing that the company is incredibly focused on moving into the real-time space. The service is in beta testing and invites were sent to specific users. (The photo comes from Twitter and was spotted TechCrunch.)

The Lite version also emulates a bit of Twitter’s spartan look. If Facebook wants to be a social search engine, it can’t let Twitter dominate shared content. It has to be dead-simple for users to share videos, blog posts and comments. Then the company has to collect as much data as possible so that when you do searches, the results highlight timely and relevant activity from your friends and others in the social network.

Here’s Facebook’s comment:

We are currently testing a simplified alternative to Facebook.com that loads a specific set of features quickly and efficiently. Similar to the Facebook experience you get on your mobile phones, Facebook “Lite” is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept Friend requests, write on people’s Walls, and look at photos and Status updates.  We are currently testing Facebook Lite in countries where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience.

This evening, the test was temporarily exposed to a larger set of users by mistake.  We have not opened up access to lite.facebook.com to all users at this time.  People who are not part of the test and are trying to access “Lite” will be directed to Facebook.com as usual.

This is a good move: about a year or two ago, I started using the site less frequently because the privacy controls were overwhelming; sharing photos and links was fairly slow compared to other services I was using. If Facebook Lite works out, it may encourage other users to move sharing activity back to Facebook.

Source: VentureBeat

Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, we’ve learned. We’re gathering details now.

At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but it’s clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few features that FriendFeed popularized, including the ‘Like’ feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates.

Obviously Facebook has already built out some of FriendFeed’s functionality so there is some overlap, but there are still numerous ways FriendFeed beats out Facebook’s News Feed setup. One of these is the way stories are ‘floated’ to the top as new users comment on them. And FriendFeed’s system is truly real-time, unlike Facebook’s feed which users have to manually refresh.

But the biggest win here for Facebook is the FriendFeed team, which includes an all-star cast of ex-Googlers. Perhaps best known of these is Paul Buchheit, who is responsible for creating Gmail, pioneering some of Google’s early (and incredibly lucrative) advertising products, and coining Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto. Other ex-Googler co-founders include Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh.

And so begins the next step in Facebook’s assault on Twitter.

Update: Be sure to check out our interview with Facebook VP Products Chris Cox and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor, where they share their thoughts on the future of FriendFeed and its integration into Facebook.

Update:
FriendFeed has just posted a note to their blog confirming the announcement. FriendFeed’s Bret Taylor writes that the site will continue operating for the time being, but that the company is still “figuring out its longer-term plans for the product”. Likewise, the API will continue to function for the time being.

Update 2 :: Facebook has just issued the following press release:

PALO ALTO, CALIF.—August 10, 2009—Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Source: TechCrunch

Twitter’s new malware filter is a sign the social media site is stepping up efforts to stem attacks, but the measure has its shortcomings, say security experts.

Twitter’s filtering mechanism was highlighted by Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of F-Secure, in a blog post Monday. When a user tries to submit a tweet with a suspect Web link, the following warning appears:

“Oops! Your tweet contained a URL to a known malware site!”

Twitter’s latest security measure was a positive one, especially in light of the current threats directed at the site, Hypponen told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview. The site, he noted, has been “attacked in many ways” including spam, worms such as Mikeyy, and phishing, he noted.

“None of these problems are at epidemic levels yet, but it’s great to see Twitter take real action on this,” he said.

Hacking is another challenge the popular microblogging site faces. In May, Twitter confirmed its network was hacked and some individual account information were leaked.

Dancho Danchev, independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, noted that the site’s latest security move was an indication “Twitter is finally moving from reactive to proactive security practices.” However, he pointed out in a blog post on ZDNet Asia’s sister site ZDNet.com, that the malware filter was “clearly still in development” and showed “disappointing results.”

Danchev pointed to how a MySpace phishing page used in a tweet triggered the security filter, but was eventually accepted by adding a “http://” or removing the “www”.

He noted that the site also allowed tweets containing links to several known malicious sites listed in Stopbadware’s database, which has identified over 380,000 sites identified as unsafe. While it would not prevent the abuse of Twitter in the longer term, the failure to integrate such databases listing known malware was a “missed opportunity”, Danchev said.

Twitter did not respond to e-mail queries from ZDNet Asia at press time.

Source: CNET News

They’re here–sort of. Twitter has launched the early beta phase of its “verified accounts” program, a background-check for celebrities and other prominent users of the service to weed out impersonators and fake accounts. If they pass the test, they get a graphic “badge” much like a PayPal verified account’s.

“We’re starting with well-known accounts that have had problems with impersonation or identity confusion,” an explanation from Twitter read. “We may verify more accounts in the future, but because of the cost and time required, we’re only testing this feature with a small set of folks for the time being. As the test progresses we may be able to expand this test to more accounts over the next several months.”

Twitter’s team is rolling this out a bit prematurely because there are some powerful people breathing down their necks: the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals has filed a lawsuit against the service after someone started using it to impersonate him. There have also been embarrassing snafus involving a fake Dalai Lama account and a prankster who impersonated the Austin, Texas police department. By rolling out even a very bare-bones verification program, Twitter at least looks like it’s doing something about the problem.

Right now, Twitter’s verified accounts are mostly well-known ones (like @mashable), which suggests that the verification process thus far hasn’t been particularly high-maintenance.

Here is the curious part: Twitter is currently only offering this service to individuals, not businesses. That raises the question of whether account verification will eventually be part of a paid “Twitter for business” account service that’s rumored to be in the works. The presence of lawsuits, however, may have derailed plans to charge for account verification.

Either way, I suppose, you could get caught up in the debate over individuals who are businesses (Robert Scoble, anyone?), but that’s a blog post for another day.

Source: CNET News

Facebook and Think Computer have settled a dispute over whether the former actually owns the term “facebook.”

Under the settlement announced late Friday, Think has agreed to abandon its efforts to get the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel the trademark issued to Facebook in 2006.

The story behind the dispute between Think and Facebook is a long, convoluted one. But according to the joint statement, Think founder Aaron Greenspan attended Harvard with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg earlier this decade. In 2003, Think released HouseSystem, a Web-based student portal that included a section called “The Universal Face Book” or “The Face Book.” At launch, the statement said, HouseSystem didn’t include member profiles because of security concerns. Think added profiles after Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004, the statement said.

“Aaron and I studied together at Harvard and I’ve always admired his entrepreneurial spirit and love of building things,” Zuckerberg said in the statement. “I appreciate his hard work and innovation that led to building houseSYSTEM, including the Universal Face Book feature. At school, I was even a member of houseSYSTEM. We are pleased that we’ve been able to amicably resolve our differences.”

Greenspan likewise offered courtesies in the statement. “I am glad that my contributions have been recognized by Facebook. Mark has built a tremendous company at Facebook, and I wish them continued success in the future,” he said.

Greenspan, who wrote a self-published book called “Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era,” had contended that the terms “facebook” and “face book” were generic terms that couldn’t be trademarked. He wasn’t seeking the trademarks himself but wanted them invalidated because of problems advertising his book with Google AdWords. Greenspan has also claimed ownership for the idea behind Facebook.

The amount of the settlement was not released. But last summer, one-time Harvard rival ConnectU settled a dispute with Facebook over whether Zuckerberg stole ConnectU’s code and business plans for a social network. That lawsuit, which was particularly messy, apparently was settled for $65 million in cash and Facebook stock.

Facebook originally was started as a social-networking site solely for Harvard students. It is now one of the most popular social-networking sites in the world.

News of the latest settlement comes on the heels of the announcement that a Facebook tell-all book will hit store shelves in July.

In related news about Facebook’s corporate side, The Wall Street Journal cites unnamed sources who say Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies wants to invest $200 million in the company “at a $10 billion valuation for the company’s preferred stock.”

Source: CNET News

Almost immediately following Twitter coming back from a planned downtime this afternoon, co-founder and current Chairman Jack Dorsey sent out a tweet letting his followers know that he was, “Getting ready to embark on something new and entirely different. Excited!” Dorsey is getting ready to launch his next startup, he’s confirmed to us. As the guy who actually invented Twitter, this is notable.

Though Dorsey declined to comment on what his new startup is right now, we hear from a source knowledgeable about the new company that it’s code-named Squirrel. Here’s what else we know so far: It’s a service that allows anyone with an iPhone to become a merchant. Just like the wireless credit card swipers you see at certain shops and restaurants, you can carry around your iPhone and take payments. Apparently, the idea is that this will allow any individual to take credit card payments on a mobile device, kind of like what PayPal does for the web.

Squirrel is both a physical device add-on to the iPhone as well as an iPhone app. Ingeniously, the device derives enough power from the physical swiping of the credit card to then read the card, so it requires no external power from the iPhone or anywhere else. The physical device apparently looks something like an acorn, thus the code name Squirrel.

But Dorsey is not leaving Twitter. He told me just now, “I’ll never leave Twitter, it’s my life’s work and baby and I’ll always be a major part of the endeavor, strategically and operationally.  But, I do have some other ideas I’m pursuing and yes, we’re going to launch soon.”

Twitter was Dorsey’s idea when he was an engineer at the company Odeo, a podcasting company which current Twitter CEO Evan Williams ran at the time. Odeo ran Twitter as a side project for a while, before realizing that it had more potential than Odeo itself did. Twitter became the company, and Dorsey became the CEO. But there was always some question as to whether or not that role was a good fit for Dorsey, and so a few months ago, Williams and he swapped roles, with Dorsey taking the role of Chairman.

Source: TechCrunch

Facebook stopped a phishing attack on Thursday, its second day in a row of dealing with a worm on the site that lures people to a fake Facebook page and prompts them to log in.

Unsuspecting Facebook users get a message from a friend urging them to “check this out” and including a link to a Web page that appears to be a Facebook log-in page, but it is a fake site that steals their information when they type in their username and password. The worm also sends a copy of the message to the infected Facebook member’s contacts.

In the latest attack, the Web address was “FBStarter.com.” In Wednesday’s attack, the address was “BAction.net.”

The attacks were stopped within a few hours in each case, said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt. He said it was too early to say whether the two phishing attacks are related. “We are investigating,” Schnitt said.

Once Facebook learns of a phishing attack, either by members notifying the company or employees noticing that a URL is being distributed to a lot of people, the company deletes the URL from members’ pages, blocks fresh postings, and removes the redirect to the URL that appears in e-mail messages, Schnitt said.

Facebook also goes in and resets the passwords of member accounts that had been used to distribute the spam, he said.

The company also alerts anti-fraud partner MarkMonitor, which passes the phishing URL on to the major browsers to block it and contacts ISPs to take the site down, according to Schnitt.

To protect against phishing scams, Facebook users should make sure that the URL they are visiting says “www.facebook.com.” If it doesn’t use that domain it’s likely to be spam. Also, members that are already logged in to Facebook will not be asked to log in again.

“People should have a healthy dose of suspicion, and ask themselves ‘why did I get logged out?’” Schnitt said. “If something looks a little strange you should check the address bar.”

Facebook users who think they have been affected by the scam should change their passwords and review their Facebook stream for any unauthorized changes. If they use their Facebook password for other sites, they should change those passwords as well.

And if they are using their Facebook authentication to log in to any other sites, they should check for any unauthorized changes on those sites.

Source: CNN

David Martin, Vice President, Primary Research, Nielsen Online

Oprah embarrassed herself on it with a stuck caps lock. That guy from Punk’d competed with “the most trusted name in news” for audience. A befuddled Jon Stewart shook his fist at it in anger. Let there be no doubt: Twitter has grown exponentially in the past few months with no small thanks to celebrity exposure. People are signing up in droves, and Twitter’s unique audience is up over 100 percent in March. But despite the hockey-stick growth chart, Twitter faces an uphill battle in making sure these flocks of new users are enticed to return to the nest.

Follow Vs. Follow-through

Currently, more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.

To understand why this poses a problem for Twitter, check out the chart below. By plotting the minimum retention rates for different Internet audience sizes, it is clear that a retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure. To be clear, a high retention rate doesn’t guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite. There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.

Maybe we’re jumping the gun. Twitter is still something of a fledgling, and surely some other sites that eventually lived up to Twitter-like hype suffered from poor retention in the early days. Compare it to the two heavily-touted behemoths of social networking when they were just starting out. Doing so below, we found that even when Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today.

Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty. Frankly, if Oprah can’t accomplish that, I’m not sure who can.

Source: nielsen wire

As we speculated this weekend, Facebook has opened up its activity stream through a new API for developers. Now any developer can create new applications incorporating the real-time stream. One of the first apps to take advantage of this new API is Seesmic Desktop, A Twitter client which is now adding your Facebook feed through this API (something Tweetdeck already did in the past through other more restrictive means). Facebook has also created its own desktop notification client to demonstrate what can be built with the API.

I just got off the phone with Ethan Beard, Facebook’s director of platform marketing, who tells me that the entire feed will be available through a single API call. A developer could recreate the entire Facebook home page if he wanted to or take parts of the feed and remix it to make something more interesting. For starters, I’d expect most Twitter clients to add the Facebook stream as an additional option. On Tweetdeck, for instance, you can read your activity stream, but you cannot respond in-line. The new Facebook Stream API is two-way, so it would allow developers to build apps which allow for that two-way communication inside the app.

This is a big deal. It potentially puts Facebook side by side with Twitter in all of these desktop and mobile client applications where a lot of the real-time conversation is happening and lets it compete head-to-head with Twitter. Whichever conversation stream is more interesting will prevail.

But beyond the arms race with Twitter, the stream API will open up teh possibility for many new applications both within Facebook and outside its walls. An obvious one would be better filtering options for your activity stream. It would be simple to create an app that shows you the most liked or most commented on items in your stream, for example. Or now that stream can be plugged into various social search engines to give you socialized results. Hell, if I could just search my own activity stream, I’d consider that a giant leap forward.

Source: TechCrunch