Facebook Opens Up Virtual Currency Platform to Devs

Facebook said today that application developers can now apply to test out its virtual currency platform, an aggressive move that places pressure on virtual currency companies such as Offerpal and Zong.Third-party virtual currency companies have made millions of dollars over the years through the sale of virtual goods on Facebook social gaming applications.

The social network also said it’s rolling out a new feature that makes it easier for application developers to advertise to new users based on what applications they’ve used in the past. The same feature also lets developers advertise to current users as a way to encourage repeat visits to their applications. Read more…

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The Debate Over Publishing Stolen Twitter Documents

The Web has been buzzing over confidential Twitter documents that a hacker stole and sent to some blogs after breaking into Twitter’s corporate network.

The incident has raised age-old questions about the ethics of publishing confidential material, questions that have taken new twists in the age of blogs.
TechCrunch, one of the blogs that received the confidential material, is working closely with Twitter as it determines which pieces of information to publish, said Michael Arrington, TechCrunch’s founder.

“It is within our ethical obligation to help Twitter” in this situation, Mr. Arrington said in interview. He is protecting the identity of his source, the hacker, but is assisting Twitter in other ways “to help them mitigate the damages” that could come as a result of sharing personal documents, he said.

He has sent Twitter all the documents he received and is trying to put Twitter in direct contact with the hacker, he said.

The hacker, who calls himself “Hacker Croll,” sent TechCrunch a zip file Tuesday with 310 private files from inside Twitter. They include business-related documents like financial projections and discussions of competitive threats and potential acquisitions. They also include personal information, like meal preferences and phone call logs of Twitter employees.

In an interview Wednesday, Mr. Arrington said he has been involved in two separate debates. The first is legal. He said that he has lawyers analyzing laws that cover trade secrets and the receipt of stolen goods, but that he did not want to discuss the legal issues any further.

The other debate, he said, is ethical. He decided not to publish embarrassing personal information, including call logs and a record of people who interviewed for jobs at Twitter. Read more…

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BingTweets: Microsoft Launches a Twitter Search Engine

Microsoft, in cooperation with Federated Media and Twitter, launched its own full-blown Twitter search engine today. BingTweets mashes up real-time Twitter search with results from Bing, Microsoft’s new and increasingly popular search engine. The result is an interesting hybrid product that puts Bing’s search results at the center of the experience, while the real-time Twitter feed appears in a sidebar on the left. The top of the page features a list of trending topics, which are quite interesting, as BingTweets separates them out by popular terms, as well as by popular people, places, and products.
Disclosure: Federated Media is a ReadWriteWeb advertising partner.

Microsoft started to integrate some Twitter search results in the main Bing search engine a few weeks ago, but these were only from very popular Twitter users. Interestingly, BingTweets will run on its own Bingtweets.com domain, and, as far as we can see, isn’t linked to from the main Bing site. For now, it’s a completely separate entity, but chances are the Microsoft is already experimenting with other ways to incorporate more Twitter search results into Bing.

This is Federated Media’s second Twitter project together with Microsoft. The first was the launch of ExecTweets, a site that allowed users to find, follow, and engage business executives on Twitter. Read more…

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Facebook’s Growing Influence on the World: Could 250 Million Users Be Too Big?

Facebook announced today that it now has 250 million users, having added 50 million new users in just the past three months. If Facebook was a country it would now be the 4th most populous place on earth. If it maintains this kind of growth there will be more Facebookers than people living in the United States by early November. The man who ostensibly rules this kingdom is 25 years old.
Could Facebook be too big? It has centralized an incredible amount of power over a huge number of peoples’ lives; the texture of Facebook now shapes the pattern of a substantial portion of human communication around the world. Is Facebook too big? That seems like an important question.

Subtle Influences

Let’s look at an analogy. Every week about 30 million Americans watch American Idol on television. What are the lessons re-enforced by this program? Perhaps it’s that anyone can achieve great things, that harsh public judgment can be funny and appropriate, that the story of our culture is one of rising from obscurity through hard work to wealth and heroism. There may be more subtle messages communicated. It’s widely understood that American Idol is an important cultural influence at this point in history.

Facebook is almost 10 times as big and its users spend far more time on the site than people spend watching American Idol. They use it to communicate with some of their closest friends and family. Surely there can be no doubt that the culture of Facebook has an impact on the larger culture of the human experience. The old cliche “the medium is the message” still rings true and Facebook is a very big medium. Read more…

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Twitter Hack Raises Flags on Security

SAN FRANCISCO — You might think your password protects the confidential information stored on Web sites. But as Twitter executives discovered, that is a dangerous assumption.

The Web was abuzz Wednesday after it was revealed that a hacker had exposed corporate information about Twitter after breaking into an employee’s e-mail account. The breach raised red flags for individuals as well as businesses about the passwords used to secure information they store on the Web.

On Web sites containing personal information like e-mail, financial data or documents, there is usually just a user name and password for protection. More individuals are storing information on Web servers, where it is accessible from any online computer through services offered by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, social networks like Facebook or back-up services like Mozy.

But password-protected sites are growing more vulnerable because to keep up with the growing number of passwords, people use the same simple ones on numerous sites across the Web. In a study last year, Sophos, a security firm, found that 40 percent of Internet users use the same password for every Web site they access.

The attack on Twitter highlights the problem. For its internal documents, the company uses the business version of Google Apps, a service that Google offers to individuals free. Google Apps provides e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and calendars over the Web.

The content is stored on Google’s servers, which can save time and money and enable employees to work together on documents at the same time. But it also means that the security is only as good as the password. A hacker who breaks into one person’s account can access information shared by friends, family members or colleagues, which is what happened at Twitter. Read more…

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Everything You Need to Know About Microsoft Azure

Microsoft today unveiled pricing details for its Azure services platform — possibly because customers were reluctant to build an application on the beta platform without knowing what it may one day cost them. The platform is Microsoft’s leap into the clouds, and it’s an impressive first step, at least on paper, complete with competitive pricing and lots of concessions designed to get enterprise customers to shift over their IT operations. It also has the potential to become a platform as a service, which would enable far greater levels of control than current platforms, such as those offered by Google; or those tied to applications like Force.com, which allow programmers to build more apps that connect with Salesforce.com; or Quickbase, which does the same for users of Intuit’s software.

What It Is:

* Windows Azure is a cloud operating system on which developers can build using .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, Python and other languages. Doug Hauger, Windows Azure GM, said that in the future Microsoft will offer an admin model that will allow developers access to the virtual machine, although they will not have to manually allocate hardware resources as they might with a traditional infrastructure-as-a-service offering such as Amazon’s EC2.
* SQL Azure is Microsoft’s relational database in the cloud.
* .NET Services is Microsoft’s platform as a service built on the Azure OS.

What It Costs:

* There are three pricing models: consumption-based, whereby a customer pays for what they use; subscription-based, with discounts for those committing to six months of use; and as of next July, volume licensing for enterprise customers that want to take existing Microsoft licenses into the cloud.
* Azure compute is 12 cents per service hour (half a cent less than Amazon’s Windows-based cloud).
* Azure’s storage service costs 15 cents per GB of data per month, with an additional penny for every 10,000 transactions, which are the movements of data within the stored material.
* .NET Services platform costs 15 cents for every 100,000 times the applications built on .Net Services accesses a tool or chunk of code.
* Moving data costs 10 cents per GB of inbound data and 15 cents per GB of outbound data.
* SQL Azure is $9.99 for up to a 1 GB relational database, and $99.99 for up to a 10 GB relational database.

What the web is saying:
The Register: Microsoft has announced pricing for Azure that marginally undercuts Amazon on raw computing for Windows-based clouds but remains more expensive than the mega book warehouse’s Linux option.
The Wall Street Journal: …Microsoft had priced its Azure service “aggressively,” suggesting the company is serious about establishing itself as a cloud computing provider, despite qualms about the impact the move could have on its own business model which is overwhelmingly reliant on traditional packaged software sales.
ZDNet: Do you think Microsoft is just rebranding its existing datacenter software as “private-cloud”-capable? Or does Microsoft’s private-cloud tools and software give it a leg up over Amazon and Google?
Ars Technica: Microsoft may have a tough time convincing developers that Azure is worth their time, and while pricing is important, it all comes down to trust.
The NYTimes: Critics have charged that Microsoft took a long time to prepare a cloud computing offering, giving rivals – even a bookseller like Amazon – a chance to grab the early attention in this market. Such tardiness has cost Microsoft dearly in the past, especially in search, where Google’s brand remains dominant. Read more…

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Bing, the Imitator, Often Goes Google One Better

For the last 15 years, Microsoft’s master business plan seems to have been, “Wait until somebody else has a hit. Then copy it.”

I know that sounds mean, but come on — the list of commercial hits/Microsoft knockoffs is as long as your arm. PalmPilot/PocketPC. Netscape Navigator/Internet Explorer. Mac OS X/Windows Vista. Apple iPod/Microsoft Zune.

You’d think Microsoft would feel a little sheepish after a while.

And now we have yet another me-too effort. It’s something called Bing, and it’s the latest iteration of Microsoft’s multiyear attempt to imitate Google.

The name, presumably, is supposed to evoke the sound of a winning game-show bell. The cynics online, however, joke that Bing is an acronym for “But It’s Not Google.”

Here’s the shocker, though: in many ways, Bing is better.

That’s quite a statement, of course — almost heresy. But check it out yourself. It’s easy to compare the two, thanks to sites like bing-vs-google.com. Here, you’re shown search results from both Bing and Google, side by side, on a split screen. Read more…

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Google Voice Goes Mobile

Google Voice, the universal voice mailbox and call-routing service that Google rolled out in March, has always been accessible from mobile phones. Users dialed their Google Voice number and could access their voice mail or hit a button and be prompted to make a call.

But it was clunky, especially for placing calls. For example, users had to type in numbers they wanted to call, rather than accessing them directly from their address books.

Now Google is unveiling a mobile application that will address these kinds of problems. The app, which is only available for BlackBerrys and Android phones, will allow users to make calls directly from their phones. Those receiving the call at the other end will see the user’s Google Voice number, rather than their mobile phone number. Text messages will also appear to have been sent from a user’s Google Voice number.

These features have the potential to make Google Voice’s Internet calling service, a potential rival to Skype, far more useful. Read more…

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Extend LinkedIn Into an Online Document Collaboration Platform

While we have covered the social media aspects of LinkedIn in the past, the service is now being extended with third-party applications. Right now, Box.net Files and Huddle WorkSpaces enable you to use LinkedIn as an online document collaboration platform. These free tools are light versions of more full-featured products, but should serve you just fine for one-off collaboration needs.

The potential of LinkedIn for document collaboration may sound hinky to some, but there are some real benefits, including:

* Secure access via the LinkedIn social network of contacts.
* No infrastructure or administrative costs.
* Access documents anywhere via the web, as long as you are a LinkedIn member.

However, there is a flip side, in that that there are basically two types of LinkedIn users — those who log in faithfully on a regular basis, and those who log in just often enough to respond to network invites, and otherwise spend little time on the site. Online document collaboration via LinkedIn is going to work best for organizations where LinkedIn is already part of the corporate culture. In other words, frequent LinkedIn users are going to be the best adopters of these applications.

Both of these applications are accessible from your LinkedIn profile, via the “Featured Applications” section. Read more…

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Bing Starts Strong and Keeps Climbing

Bing, the new Microsoft search engine, captured slightly more United States searches than Yahoo in the first eight days of June, according to StatCounter Global Stats, a firm that tracks Web use. That is a milestone for Bing, whose share of the search pie has been slowly rising since it was unveiled on June 3.

During June, Bing increased Microsoft’s share of the search market by 1 percentage point, according to StatCounter, which tracks the number of times users click on search results, rather than the number of searches run. Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter’s chief executive, said it was common for search engines to briefly surge after being introduced, as did the search engine Cuil in July 2008, but it was less common for them to stay hot for this long. Read more…

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