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Daily Wrap: The "Not on Facebook" Movement and More

Robyn Tippins — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:03:37 -0800

Alicia Eler explores the not on facebook movement. This and more in today's Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

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Now is the Time to Quit Facebook

Did you know there is a movement supporting those who have chosen to quit Facebook? Alicia Eler found that the movement is a great place to discover the stories of those who have left the social behemoth, and maybe buy a t-shirt to celebrate your Facebook abstinence as well.

WunderMap Shows Weather From the Past & Future

Jon Mitchell — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:54:00 -0800

Weather Underground's interactive WunderMap now enables users to go back and forth in time. WunderMap overlays a Google map with all kinds of weather information, including temperatures, radar, webcams, ski reports, dedicated services for fires, tornadoes, hurricanes and more.

The map now displays a clock icon that lets users scroll through the past and future to view historical and forecast data. Most data go back to around 2000. It can also display forecasts for several days ahead. It's amazing to go back to historic storms and watch them happen all over again.

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August 29, 2005: Hurricane Katrina

Google has built casual weather tools for its own Maps service, and we worried about WunderMap when it launched. With so many people already using Google Maps, the ability to check the weather there makes it all the more convenient at WunderMap's expense.

Even Google Earth has weather, displaying real-time animations of clouds, rain and snow. But Weather Underground offers so much more information. Even for casual weather-watchers, there's much to learn here.

The layers that include time control features are radar, weather stations, photos, tornadoes, webcams, fire and storm reports. Satellite images can project forecasts but not past data. Check it out at wunderground.com/wundermap.

Lead photo courtesy of Shutterstock

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Here's Another Way Groupon Will Personalize Daily Deals

Alicia Eler — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:00:00 -0800

Groupon really wants to get to know you.

Today the daily deals giant acquired Adku, which describes itself as an "early stage startup working on big data for e-commerce" with the goal of giving users "a more personalized experience." Adku focuses specifically on e-commerce sites.

Ever since its public offering last November, Groupon has been working on personalizing its services. It acquired social shopping start-up Mertado earlier this year. Similar to Adku, Mertado's goal is to create shopping experiences that "build bridges between content, commerce and community." Adku focuses on bigger ecommerce sites; Mertado is more focused on home-related products.

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The ecommerce space is focused on personalization. Last year, eBay bet $80 million on taste-graph recommendation technology Hunch.

Groupon isn't the only daily deals company that is working on personalization. Competitors Google Offers and Amazon Local are also trying to figure out what its users want the most.

San Francisco-based Adku was founded in 2010 by former Google employees.

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Amazon Is Thinking About Real-World Stores

Jon Mitchell — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:28:00 -0800

Good E-Reader reports today that Amazon plans to launch a retail store in its hometown of Seattle "within the next few months." It will be a small boutique emphasizing its Kindle e-readers and physical copies of its Amazon Exclusives book titles. It will also stock accessories for Kindles, such as cases, screen protectors and USB chargers.

It's not a new rumor (it dates as far back as 2009), and it would be a departure from Amazon's strategy thus far. In December, LAUNCH reported the retail store rumor, adding that Amazon plans to sell its own branded merchandise. Amazon is better known for threatening real-world retail than for promoting it. But Amazon's moves in the past few months make the strategy seem more sensible.

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The $199 Kindle Fire is an important service for Amazon's digital content, but it needs to be in physical hands first. That's why Amazon cut deals to put the Kindle family in over 16,000 partner stores over the holidays.

Amazon's key competitor, Barnes & Noble, already has hundreds of its own stores, and they have their own showroom for the Nook readers and tablets, so the boutique model reported by Good E-Reader sounds reasonable.

Did the retail boost work for Amazon? Who knows? As usual, Amazon did not disclose how many Kindles it sold last quarter with any kind of specificity. Amazon typically spins statistics that sound good, but it won't provide hard numbers about devices.

Devices are not Amazon's core business; content is. Kindles are sold at a loss, and Amazon makes the money back on books, movies, apps and other media. The Kindle is a delivery mechanism, and putting the devices in stores would give customers a chance to try out the interface.

Amazon has avoided sales taxes by remaining a purely online retailer, giving its customers the incentive of the lowest price. But lately, sales taxes on online purchases have started to seem inevitable, as Amazon's deal with the state of California shows. Once Amazon resigns itself to sales taxes, that's one fewer reason not to bring its retail might into physical stores.

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Facebook Bans Breast-Feeding Photos

Alicia Eler — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0800

Breasts. They're complicated.

Facebook states that breast-feeding pictures are okie dokie, just as long as there's no "exposed breast" that doesn't feature the child actively nursing. In other words, if there's no suckling, there's no posting. Today breast-feeding activists are using Facebook to coordinate "nurse-ins" outside of of the company's headquarters worldwide, including its homebase Menlo Park headquarters.

When it comes to flagging photos, Facebook asks users to flag photos as inappropriate. Then Facebook employees go through and remove those that violate the State of Rights and Responsibilities. Even though it's pretty clear that breastfeeding photos are fine, often times they will still be flagged and removed from the site.

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Vancouver-based breast-feeding activist Emma Kwasnica is leading the protests. She joined Facebook in 2007; since that time, she has had a total 30 breast-feeding photos removed. Facebook has shut down her account on four separate occasions. One time she was even kicked off Facebook for 30 days. This is unfair treatment, especially since breast-feeding is an activity that users may want to share with one another. Breast-feeding is a routine part of a young mother's day-to-day life, so why wouldn't she include herself doing that activity in a Facebook photo? If anything, Facebook should advocate the sharing of these photos - they could help foster entire online communities of young mothers, a demographic that is in Facebook's best interest to retain. Breast-feeding photos are a natural part of a user's "online scrapbook," which is the entire point of the new Timeline.

"It is obvious to me now that Facebook really has lost control of their network, especially when their written policy clearly states they support the sharing of breastfeeding images, yet they say they cannot control the actions of their employees who keep removing breastfeeding images and who block accounts of the users who post them - usually "in error," Kwasnica told the Huffington Post. "This is exasperating to me."

Facebook needs to stop being total boobs. Or should they stop being total boobs? Either way, it's definitely time for Facebook to get with the breasts.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Analytics From "Most Social Super Bowl" Reveals Chat Wasn't About Football

Scott M. Fulton, III — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:30:00 -0800

Although predictions last week raised expectations about the role that social media would play in reshaping what has historically been one of the most engaging non-holiday events in the U.S. every year, the first analysis of yesterday's public social network data by advertising analysis firm Networked Insights makes a compelling revelation: Almost three-fourths of the chat taking place among Twitter and Facebook users Sunday night had nothing to do with the game itself.

In fact, according to Networked Insights' data, the Super Bowl topic that trended in third place was "Brady," but when you break that topic down, you realize it may actually have been more about Mrs. Tom Brady - supermodel Gisele Bundchen, who appeared on camera perhaps once during the game, whom Tweeters evidently referred to as "Mrs. Brady" or perhaps "Lady Brady" - than about the New England Patriots quarterback.

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Though it may not be entirely surprising that commercials constitute the bulk of online chatter during the event, it's astonishing to see that TV commercials make up some 42% of all Super Bowl-related online chatter. Although New York Giants running back Ahmad Bradshaw scored what Super Bowl history may record as the most awkward game winning touchdown - slowly being seated on the goal line after trying to stop himself short at the 1-yard line - his maneuver only elicited a minor wave compared with Mrs. Brady.

A spokesperson for Networked Insights told RWW this afternoon that part of the reason for the lopsided topic mix may have to do partly with the game. It was a low-scoring game with only one interception, whose outcome was only sealed when the clock reached zero. It may have been such a nail-biter, in other words, that true football fans may have been biting their nails rather than tapping their keys.

"It's not surprising to see viewers' commentary of Super Bowl advertisements surpass those of the game itself," Dan Neely, NI's CEO, tells RWW this afternoon. "Brands can partly attribute this social lift as a by-product of a low-scoring game that allowed viewers to discuss the commercials."

A word about the volume of tweets: Naturally, NI's tracking included tweets that included the hashtag #superbowl. NI estimates tweets to that hashtag alone to have numbered around 1.6 million, though it will have updated, hardened data later in the week. That's as many tweets as are normally archived in a single day, the NI spokesperson tells us.

As an analysis firm for advertisers, NI itself was concerned more with the commercials than the football. Gaining the most overall viewer response among celebrity endorsers was the tattooed, underwear-wearing veteran of what "far'ners" call football, David Beckham. His shorts reached out to 39% of folks talking about just the Super Bowl commercials (as opposed to the game), according to NI's figures. This is what NI means by "share of value." Sentiment among chatting consumers was 23% more positive than negative, suggesting the H&M undies went over well. Coming in second was Clint Eastwood, whose two-minute ad that may have been for Chrysler but may really have been for the city of Detroit, had 21% "share of value," while 9% of the discussion was more positive than negative.

Though NI gives Chrysler kudos for choosing Eastwood, it notes that the resulting chatter was three times more about him than about Chrysler.

By comparison, as much as 28% of folks chatting about Super Bowl topics during halftime were discussing Madonna's halftime show. Their discussion constituted 32% of Super Bowl-related social traffic by volume. Sentiment for Madonna was generally negative (-21%), with tweets about her staying relatively short, with a particularly negative peak towards the end where the lights converged to reveal the message, "WORLD PEACE." By contrast, sentiment for her on-stage co-star MIA - whose little birdie expressed exactly the opposite sentiment - ran generally positive at +6%, commanding 3% of the discussion. The star of the halftime show ended up being Nicki Minaj, whom perhaps more viewers recognized than Clint Eastwood. Minaj commanded a 7% share of value, with 26% of it more positive than negative.

Breaking down just the Madonna comments, MI found that as much as 2% of this subgroup were making comments about her age (53). This group was split down the middle as to whether she looked great for her age, with the negative group making snarky comments about such things as her "veiny" arms. Sentiment turned positive when she began singing "Like a Prayer," which was originally released in 1989, though it tipped downward to -11% after she began her latest single, "Give Me All Your Luvin.'" (NI does not appear to have data regarding consumer sentiment about its spelling.)

"The takeaway for networks, producers, and sports leagues is the need to create multiple engagement points around content that is in sync with the interests of a target audience," states NI's Dan Neely. "Going forward, the winners will be the programs that leverage social technology to drive participation."

What the Twitterers of the world may have missed Sunday night was the terrific sense of community and shared excitement. Just the NFL Experience - the week-long slate of activities in downtown Indianapolis among football fans who love the game and who keep their phones mostly in their pockets except to take pictures - pulled in some 265,000 people over a nine-day period, according to the latest estimates.

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Most Brands Failed To Connect Super Bowl Ads To Social Media

Dave Copeland — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:00:00 -0800

Forget what all those ad executives tweeting on #brandbowl and #whartonfoa told you last night: There were 87 commercials during last night's Super Bowl, but very few of them failed to meaningfully connect their message to their social media platforms.

The ad execs praised the use of Twitter hashtags, even going as far as saying the hashtag was to 2012 what the URL was to 2000, one year after Victoria's Secret became the first ever firm to use a Super Bowl ad to connect viewers to its online media. But posting a hashtag in a commercial and getting viewers to take some sort of action that increases brand affinity are two different things, according to an anlysis released Monday by Resource Interactive.

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Coca-Cola, for example, aggressively encouraged people to watch the game withs its fame polar bears on Facebook and Twitter in the days and weeks leading up to the Super Bowl. But come game time, none of the soft drink makers three television spots included a URL or mention of the social media end of the campaign.

"Consumers don't think in channels (traditional, digital, mobile, social). Coca-Cola failed to make its multi-channel experience simple and seamless," said Lora Schaeffer, Resource Interactive director of social media.

Altimeter was surprised that many brands didn't include some call to action in their commercials. According to the firm's day-after analysis, 32% had no references to Websites or social media sites, And only Best Buy had an "Act Now" promotion, offering people who visited its Web site $50 off a mobile phone purchased in 2012.

"Viewers visiting the BestBuy.com site were immediately presented with the opportunity to sign up for the offer and the brand created a sense of urgency by limiting the offer only to those who sign up by Feb. 12," said Jessica Ried, Resource Interactive director of commerce strategy. "Acknowledging that not everyone is eligible to buy a new phone at this very moment, the offer includes an opt-in notification for new phone eligibility which was a smart move by Best Buy. Many brands with shorter purchase cycles failed to provide any meaningful reason to act."

Other big winners in terms of connecting a television commercial to an online presence were car makers Chevy and Chrysler, although the two firms took decidedly different approaches. Chevy heavily promoted an app before and during the game, and added a contest that included 20 brand new Chevys as prizes to entice viewers to download a mobile app.

"Chevy kept their brand relevant and quite literally at the fingertips of consumers throughout game," Schaeffer said.

Online observers may have missed Chrysler's connection to social media, as its somber, Halftime In America advertisement featuring Clint Eastwood had no social or online branding. But after the game, Chrysler was able to continue the conversation about the campaign on Twitter on #halftimeinamerica, according to Resource Interactive.

"Without tricks or hooks, the brand built upon the energy of last year's spot, and quickly leveraged Twitter to continue the heat-felt campaign," Resource Interactive said.

Only six ads used hashtags in lieu of a Website or social media site, but those ads were notable because they did not ask viewers to like them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. Instead, they asked for viewer interaction.

"This sea change in tactics is an indicator of how brands want to extend the experience beyond the expensive 30 second Ad to an ongoing permanent discussion," Altimeter's Jeremiah Owyang said in a blog post about the firm's analysis of Super Bowl ads.

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Facebook's Next Advertising Move is Mobile

Alicia Eler — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:50:00 -0800

Mark Zuckerberg says he has always been reluctant to make Facebook all about the ads and less about the user experience. This is surprising, however, coming from a freshly minted billionaire who owns more than 25% of his own company and holds more than 50% of the voting power.

"Mark has an evangelical approach to advertising," Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP Plc, the world's largest advertising agency told Reuters. "He sees Facebook as a vehicle to open up communication, not to monetize." Facebook's attitude toward advertising is finally changing. Users have started to notice, too. Today Facebook took that first step, claiming that sponsored stories for mobile will be coming "within weeks."

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In its S-1 filing, Facebook described mobile as one of its biggest risk factors. Yet about half of Facebook's users visit the site through mobile devices. As more people begin accessing Facebook primarily through mobile, Facebook is going to have to make major changes in its mobile advertising platform.

As soon as early March 2012, Facebook will soon start dropping "featured stories" into users' mobile news feeds. Currently Facebook has 425 million mobile users. HTML5 app buttons have started popping up on Facebook's mobile site. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed with Reuters that Facebook will not work with an agency to create paid ads on the mobile platform.

Facebook started integrating sponsored stories into the news ticker and the news feed. It was only a matter of time before Facebook decided to move forward with ads in the mobile space.

When it comes to Facebook ads that are built around a user's data, questions about privacy laws come up. In fact, in its S-1 filing, Facebook noted the "evolving nature" of privacy and data protection laws as two major risk factors - not to mention the fact that Facebook doesn't have a mobile advertising platform. At least, not yet.

How will Facebook's mobile ad strategy evolve? Take the poll on ReadWriteMobile.

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Another Victory For Big Media in Piracy Wars as Torrent Site Shuts Down

John Paul Titlow — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:30:32 -0800

If recent crackdowns against file-sharing were meant as a warning shot to other site owners, it has indeed been heard loud and clear. First, sites like FileSonic and FileServe voluntarily scaled back their functionality, while others vocally defended their own practices in the wake of the Megaupload shutdown.

Today, popular BitTorrent index BTjunkie shut itself down to preempt legal action of the type experienced by the Pirate Bay, Megaupload and others. The seven-year-old site may not have been squashed directly by authorities, but it is nonetheless good news for the RIAA, MPPA and other opponents of online piracy.

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The voluntary shutdown of BTjunkie isn't going to single-handedly change the file-sharing landscape, but it's symbolic of a larger trend in the ongoing war over digital piracy. The copyright lobby has scored several big victories lately, most notably the seizure of Megaupload by federal authorities on January 19. Since that day, the aftershocks have been felt across the Web, BTjunkie's closure being only the latest example.

Separately, the Swedish Supreme Court recently upheld the sentences of three Pirate Bay cofounders who were convicted of copyright infringement in 2009.

Battling Piracy in a Post SOPA-World

Apparently by pure coincidence, the Megaupload shutdown came one day after large-scale online protests against SOPA and PIPA, the proposed anti-piracy legislation. The timing of the crackdown raised a few eyebrows, as well as questions about why SOPA would have been necessary in the first place.

SOPA and PIPA may be shelved for the time being, but the war between the content industry and the parts of the Internet that they perceive to encourage copyright infringement is far from over. The next battle may be legislative, or it may rely on civil or criminal law. In some cases, the aftershocks of previous strikes will be enough to shake other perceived enemies from their positions, as happened in the cases of BTjunkie and FileSonic.

The counterstrikes in these battles have come in occasionally dramatic flavors such as the DDoS attacks from Anonymous that followed the Megaupload shutdown. More subtle - and far more powerful - is the mass migration of users from one service to another as authorities engage in what appears to be one giant game of Internet whack-a-mole.

There have been recent successes, but the very nature and structure of the Internet raises questions about the longterm effectiveness of this approach. As we saw with SOPA, any attempt to tinker with that structure will be met with fierce resistance.

Photo by Mike Baird.

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Google+ Launches Developers Page, So How About That API?

Jon Mitchell — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:56:00 -0800

Google just launched a page for Google+ developers. It will post news updates and info about events, conferences and hackathons. host weekly video hangouts to share updates, tips and tricks about the platform. Office hours are on Wednesdays between 11:30 a.m. and 12:15 p.m. Pacific. Hopefully, this is a sign of upcoming API releases, so Google+ developers can start, you know, developing.

The Google+ Platform Blog has been pretty quiet. Google SVP Vic Gundotra said in October that Google+ doesn't "want to make the same mistakes of others," - referring to Twitter - by opening the API too quickly to developers and then having to clamp down later. He said to look ahead to Google I/0 (since rescheduled for June 27-29) for major platform announcements.

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Vic Gundotra at Google I/O 2011

Google made some of the Google+ API available last year, but the capabilities are still extremely limited. Applications can currently read the main stream as well as search, +1s and comments. This has allowed aggregator apps like news readers to start pulling content from the Google+ stream. There are also basic ways to extend video hangouts with applications.

But because developers don't yet have write access, Google+ is fairly isolated from the Web outside. The +1 button has become commonplace for sharing, but third-party applications that share easily to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and more still can't post to Google+. Once Google opens up more write access to other clients, third-party contributions to the Google+ ecosystem will start to get interesting.

Add Google+ Developers to your circles.

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Now is the Time to Quit Facebook

Alicia Eler — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:30:00 -0800

It's over, Facebook. It's really over.

Last week's overvalued IPO, and the fact that Zuck owns more than a quarter of the world's largest social network and refuses to share the cash has put many users over the edge. But months before the IPO rumor even surfaced, there were plenty of folks who had already left Facebook for Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. They are happy to tell you why they left, and they encourage you to do the same. They have joined together on other social networks - Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ - to discuss why they left Facebook, or why they're thinking about leaving Facebook. On their website, http://www.im-not-on-facebook.com/, they sell mugs and t-shirts (women's available in four colors! Crew neck available in five colors and white!) for as little as $10.99 a piece. These rebels have banded together in a Facebook-centric culture focused on oversharing the mundane details of life.

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I'm Not on Facebook's Twitter stream re-tweets conversations, other tweets and articles about people who have quit Facebook or who are considering the downsides of staying on Facebook. You have probably heard of those people - perhaps you're even one of them. You talk about getting off Facebook all of the time. You love Facebook in those moments it works for you, and hate it when you "accidentally" waste an entire morning reading status updates about the Super Bowl. Or maybe you've done a "stopping Facebook" experiment and realized it's just not for you. Internet users who are re-tweeted on @notonfacebook's Twitter are seriously serious about not being on Facebook. "I sold my iPhone, I quit Facebook.. I will probably sell my soul soon. Takers? lolz," tweets @gwapz.

The site sounds pretty serious in its mission, but it actually started as a joke back in October 2010.

"The site was a birthday gift for my wife because she could not stand Facebook," says graphic designer Tim Woods, who is based in northern Virginia. "She kibitzed with my mother about it, who also hates Facebook. And I thought - there's a t-shirt in this." They decided to go for it after they noticed a couple arguing on Facebook. Initially, Woods sent out t-shirts from Cafe Press to family and friends. They quickly discovered that the anti-Facebook sentiment was part of a global phenomenon.

"We sell products in Poland, Italy, all over Europe, Canada, U.S., Mexico. There's also a big anti-Facebook sentiment in Syria and the Islamic community," Woods says. "We're surprised that even though we have a small customer base, we're pretty diverse."

Despite the strong sentiment, Woods doesn't really want to beat up on Facebook. That's not the goal. Instead, the statements (like the headline of this story), are meant to stir up conversation with others. Think of it as an ice breaker.

One story that @notonfacebook recently retweeted isn't as light-hearted about the whole anti-Facebook sentiment, though."How I Deleted My Facebook Account and Walked Away from 555 Friends by blogger Cindy La Ferle is honest, important and worth a read if you give a crap about real-world friendships.

"Either way, I've always believed that real friendship is reciprocal, not promotional," writes La Ferle. "And certainly more than virtual. Real friends do more than punch the 'like' key on your status updates. Real friends call you directly on the phone, send cards, help you move furniture, meet you for breakfast, babysit your cats, or otherwise make three-dimensional efforts to be there for you."

But the real reason she quit Facebook isn't because she didn't at some level enjoy the "promotional" nature of Facebook friendships. The problems ran deeper than that.

"Of course, you need lots of extra time for real friendship like that," she writes. "My 'networking' on Facebook was devouring some of that time, and I was starting to feel guilty about it...in short, Facebook was becoming a tool to promote myself, with a few family photos thrown in for good measure...I've always tried to avoid one-sided relationships, but good lord, there I was, conducting one of my own."

Not long ago, I made a new friend on Facebook. A few weeks later, we ended up at dinner with a group of other people. I was looking forward to chatting with him in real life - he was so interesting on Facebook, so I figured we'd have lots to talk about offline. But that's not really what happened. We talked tech stuff and got our geek on. Then my Facebook friend mentioned something about the self-referential nature of Facebook. The conversation stopped. Then he grabbed his iPhone and stepped outside for a cigarette.

I turned to a woman sitting next to me, who I am not Facebook friends with, and proceeded to chat with her for at least an hour. After dinner she gave me a ride to my bike, which I had left down the street. I didn't think we'd have so much in common. And I did not go home and friend her on Facebook later. In fact, I am happy not reading her status updates.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Google Begins Building 1-Gigabit Internet Service in Kansas City

Jon Mitchell — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:14:00 -0800

Kansas City won this privilege over 1,100 other cities in March 2011. Since then, Google and the city have been surveying, planning, and eating "way too much barbecue," says Google's manager, Kevin Lo. Today, they start laying cable. A few months behind the Kansas side, neighbors on the other side of the river in Kansas City, Mo. will get the hook-up as well.

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How Fast Is Fiber?

Fiber optic cable contains a bundle of glass fibers about the width of a human hair. The fastest Internet connection on record was established by researchers at the SuperComputing 2011 conference in Seattle. They were testing ways to share the enormous amounts of data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research. That connection reached 186 gigabits per second. Google Fiber is just 1 gigabit.

That's not too shabby, though. Verizon's FiOS network, which is among the fastest commercially available in the U.S., gets only 150 megabits per second. Google Fiber will be almost 7 times faster than that.

How Will Kansas City's Fiber Work?

Kansas City won the Google Fiber competition because it met all of Google's various requirements. "Our goal was to find a location where we could build efficiently, make an impact on the community, and develop working partnerships with the local government, utility and community organizations," its FAQ says. "We believe we've found this in both Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri."

Lo says the network will use "thousands of miles" of cable. The backbone of the network will be built first, and then Google Fiber will be connected to homes around Kansas City. The cable work starts today after months of surveying and measuring, as well as some negotiations around how to use the city's utility poles.

The Kansas City Star reports that Google and the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities had some disagreement over how the network would be hung on the city's utility poles.

The Wyandotte County government wrote the plan with an unusual stipulation that Google would be allowed to hang its cables for free, using part of the poles typically reserved for utility companies to hang their own communication cables, not for third parties. Phone and cable companies typically use a lower part of the pole, and they pay a fee to do so.

The special installation for Google would also have required more specialized crews, so it would be more costly. The Star's source says that Google will opt to pay the regular fees like any third-party provider.

Google says the later stages of this experiment will reach over 500,000 people. Google has promised competitive prices for residential Internet service, but it hasn't been specific yet.

Why Is Google Becoming An ISP?

The cities that applied to receive Google Fiber

Google's not just doing this to collect Internet bills from homes. When the Internet gets faster, Google's whole business benefits. Google wants to test new, bandwidth-intensive "killer apps" to see what kinds of future services it can provide. But even for normal Web services, speed benefits Google. Put bluntly, the faster your Internet, the more Google ads you can see. That's why Google search and the Chrome browser are so dang fast.

Google refers to this Google Fiber project as an "experiment," so don't get too excited about 1-gigabit fiber in your neighborhood just yet (unless you're in Kansas City). But as Google said in its initial announcement, there are big implications for testing this out in the U.S. The country isn't even in the top 10 for average connection speed. Google wants to push U.S. Internet infrastructure forward.

As for Kansas City, with these kinds of speeds, there's sure to be a boom in next-generation Internet start-ups.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

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Microsoft Defines the New Mobile Business Experience on iPad

Scott M. Fulton, III — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:00:00 -0800

Sometimes I have a lot of fun being proven wrong. In the company's first major demonstration in decades that one of its major software products need not be leveraged upon Windows, this morning Microsoft took the wraps off its latest Dynamics CRM for Mobile. And although it promises to provide native apps for Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and Android starting in Q2, there's no escaping the fact that the headline attraction has all the earmarks of iPad. It's the device that CxOs want, and therefore it's the one that any business software platform must target.

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While analysts tend to conclude that Dynamics CRM leads in overall market share for on-premise CRM applications (with about three-fourths of that market), that's like saying Ford is the market share leader among automobiles parked in garages. Where CRM has already headed is to service-based cloud delivery, and Salesforce.com hasn't just led it there, it transplanted it there. Microsoft's transition plan for Dynamics to the cloud began six months ago, and had already been criticized as late to the game.

Microsoft's strategy for besting Salesforce at this late stage of the game is clever, banking on centralized management as a guiding theme. It perceives a need for both CxOs and administrators to adjust and tailor their services, so that they feel less like they've relocated their offices to LinkedIn headquarters, and more like their software is responding to their needs and demands.

The first plays in this strategy involve the distribution of so-called industry solution templates to major market segments, the first four being: life annuity insurance sales, non-profit organizations, health plan sales, and wealth management. The non-profit template, for example, "showcases Microsoft Dynamics CRM's capability to manage constituents and donors, track donations, pledges and volunteer hours," according to a Microsoft white paper released this morning (PDF available here).

The typical difficulty that administrators face with mobile applications is publishing multiple versions for different target devices. In a worst-case scenario, businesses end up with subfolders or even subdomains where, for example, the BlackBerry view is distinguished from the iOS view. Then when a developer publishes to one view first, the other one lags behind and waits its turn.

The revised, browser-based Dynamics CRM portal (above) does not look so much like an iPad app, but Microsoft did make sure to mention that it's been tested and proven to work with Safari, the browser of choice for iOS and Mac users.

This morning, Microsoft emphasized its publishing model for the Q2 update of Dynamics CRM Mobile will enable one view that may be subscribed to by all four classes of supported devices. That way, administrators become free to set up tailored, policy-driven custom views around the roles certain users play in an organization, not whether they use a BlackBerry today and an iPad tomorrow. "Administrators also have the ability to remotely wipe devices of CRM data should a device be lost or stolen or the employee moves to a different organization," the white paper reads.

The distribution model for this latest Dynamics CRM Mobile could give us a preview of what we could see later this year for "Office 15" and Office 365. The anchor for Microsoft's service is the server software, which does leverage Windows and does give businesses the option of on-premise or service-based (cloud) deployment. End users of the Dynamics CRM Mobile will be charged $30 per user per month. Conceivably, the next version of Office (tailored for Windows 8) could present businesses with an even flatter end-user fee (perhaps with per-month or perpetual license options), that's reduced when the business opts to serve Office to its employees on-premise or via cloud.

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The Online Ad Fails at the Super Bowl

David Strom — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:31:00 -0800

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The company monitoring 46 different vendors' websites yesterday and found three big losers:

The Coke Polar Bears Facebook page and main website was unavailable in five languages, as you can see in the screen capture below:
Act of Valor had a very impressive ad, but their website was less so. According to Yottaa's monitoring, it seemed every time the spot ran the site crashed, with more than six outages of five minutes each. The site was also five times slower yesterday during game time.
Acura cars had problems too. "The launch of their new performance car was met with poor performance from their website." Their home page was fine, but the call to action pages were saturated with traffic on Sunday.

Cars.com, TaxACT.com, GoDaddy.com and History.com all fared really well during the Super Bowl, according to Bob Buffone, writing on Yottaa's blog. He emphasizes that live stress testing is critical at this big event-driven moments, and instrumenting what is going on during the event is essential if the sites are going to meet the anticipated demand.

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Is the Digital Music Revolution Really Ruining Sound Quality?

John Paul Titlow — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:15:00 -0800

Last week, rock veteran Neil Young chimed in with his assertion that the digital music files we listen to today are of much lower quality than the original recordings. Speaking at the D: Dive Into Media conference, he said that the technology now exists to deliver much higher-quality audio to music fans, and that he had even talked to Steve Jobs about a possible solution.

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It is certainly true that an MP3 file, by definition, is of lower quality than the original recording. The files that sit on the hard drives of recording studio engineers are massive - several gigabytes apiece - compared to the file consumers eventually download or stream. To get those MP3 file sizes down, the audio has to be compressed substantially. It's inevitable that some of the detail will get lost in the process.

How Serious is the Problem? ... And How to Fix It?

Exactly how bad is this problem? By Young's estimation, what we hear in most files today is "only 5% of the data of the original recording". That may be a slight exaggeration, depending on how the files are encoded. Certainly, lower bit rate files (such as 128kbps MP3s) have a noticeably degraded quality to them, compared to a CD. But most sources have graduated to higher quality files now that broadband speeds allow for it. A standard track on iTunes is a 256kbps AAC file and premium Spotify subscribers can listen to many songs at 320kbps, which is about 22% of a CD track's bit rate.

When it comes to streaming audio on mobile devices, the quality buck pretty much stops at whatever the data connection can handle. On 3G networks, streaming CD-quality audio just isn't feasible. Over a good WiFi connection, things look a little more promising, but there are still limitations if the user experience is to be preserved.

Young: We Need an iPod For Audiophiles

So what does Young propose as a solution? From the sound of it, he'd like to see a sort of mega-iPod with more disk space and internal guts optimized to playback massive files. Such a device wouldn't be designed to include one's entire library, but rather only a selection of audiophile-quality albums. Presumably, it would tend to be used with superior quality earphones or speakers, which is another important factor in the quality of what we hear.

Even if a device akin to what Young describes were produced and sold, how big of a market would there be for it? The quality of the audio found on sources like iTunes, Spotify, MOG, Amazon and Google Music is apparently good enough to convince millions of people to pay for access to it. At the end of the day, most of the content on the pay music services is certainly good enough. Musicians and audiophiles can pick up on the degradations in quality, but for the average listener, it's pretty subtle. The device that Young describes would have to be marketed toward the audiophiles for whom 320kbps simply won't cut it.

Last week wasn't the first time Young has criticized the state of digital music. Some may dismiss his stance as nothing more than a grumpy, old-school perspective, as though he's just an old guy that doesn't get the new-fangled ways of the Web and digital media. This isn't the case. Young may be a veteran of the music industry, but he's well aware of what's changed about it and why. During the same interview in which he slammed MP3's, he said that "piracy is the new radio" and encouraged new artists to forgo record labels in favor of doing it themselves.

There's Nothing Wrong With Analog

As Young pointed out, Steve Jobs may have been a digital music pioneer, but "when he went home, he listened to vinyl." This is true not only of the generation that grew up on LPs, but also of a growing number of younger music fans today. Vinyl sales have been surging for the last few years, with 2011 seeing a 39% increase in sales over the previous year. Digital music sales grew last year too, but by considerably less.

For music fans with the deepest concern for audio quality, it seems analog is increasingly the way to go. That's okay. We can have our digital revolution in music and still fall back on analog formats. Just like with books, the value offered by digital music is primarily about volume, convenience and ease of production and distribution. And just like sitting down with a good, paper-bound book, putting on a vinyl record is more about quality and the overall experience.

Digital and Analog Can Coexist Peacefully

Digital and analog don't need to be at war with one another. What many labels and artists are doing now is sell records on vinyl and include a coupon for a free, high-quality digital download in the record's sleeve. That allows people to enjoy the album as it was intended and also throw it onto their iPod or smartphone for listening on the go.

It's also possible to go the high-quality route in a digital-only format. When The Beatles' catalogue was remastered and reissued in 2009, the material was released on CD and, for the first time, via iTunes. For diehard fans who wanted more than what iTunes could offer, they also sold an apple-shaped (no, not that Apple) thumb drive containing every album in superior quality, lossless FLAC format, as well as as 320kbps MP3s.

However things may evolve, it's evident that digital music has brought us great value, but it's done so at a cost, namely quality. This may not be perceived as a problem by every consumer, but for those who take the craft of creating and recording music most seriously, it's one well worth solving. Whether it's solved through a hybrid of analog and digital music consumption or through some new, high-capacity device for playing back lossless digital audio, the challenge isn't an insurmountable one.

Vinyl sales chart courtesy of Digital Music News.

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Believe It Or Not, There's An Upside To Diminished Online Privacy

Dave Copeland — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:00:00 -0800

All three authors make good points, and they are points worth considering for anyone invested in a digital life. But they also brought to mind Reason magazine's June 2004 cover story - a remarkably poignant preview of the world we now live in. It was also a reminder that a lot of us are okay with the amount of information we choose to share online, and many of us even benefit from giving marketers, friends and co-workers a more complete picture of who we are.

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The 2004 Reason issue was delivered to subscribers in a magazine that had an satellite photo of each subscriber's home on the cover, which Reason was able to obtain through public data and print with then state-of-the-art technology. As Nick Gillespie wrote in that issue's Editor's Note, the issue was dedicated to "describing how many of the popular and convenient transactions we take for granted are the result of readily accessible information that lays you bare to the prying eyes of others.

"Living in a database nation raises innumerable privacy concerns. But it also makes life easier and more prosperous," he said. "We may have kissed privacy goodbye -- and good riddance, too."

Some of the points raised in the Reason article seem dated nearly eight years later. But the basic premise from the Libertarian journal of political and economic thought remains essentially the same, whether we're talking about data collected by supermarket loyalty programs in 2004 or Facebook in 2012: "It's easy to complain about a subjective loss of privacy. It's more difficult to appreciate how information swapping accelerates economic activity. Like many other aspects of modern society, benefits are dispersed, amounting to a penny saved here or a dollar discounted there. But those sums add up quickly," Declan McCullagh wrote in the 2004 cover story.

When Is The Last Time You Actually Read A Privacy Policy?

Businesses gathering information on customers and potential customers, as well as employees and potential employees, is nothing new. Mediterranean merchants relied on a social network in the 11th century to track dishonest merchants selling their goods in foreign ports, and, more recently, in 1766, Adam Smith "stressed the importance of a positive reputation, which necessarily means that others have access to information about your past actions and therefore feel they can predict your future behavior."

What we fear now is not the fact that companies collect the data, but that they collect so much more of it with much greater ease. And we're also rightfully concerned about who has access to all that data. Most of us have made peace with the idea of SafeWay knowing we prefer chocolate chip over pistachio ice cream, and appreciate the coupons we get for our favorite flavor. But what happens when that data is sold to our health insurer, who ups our premium after deciding we're at risk for hypertension because of our ice cream consumption?

This is why it becomes important to read those privacy agreements most of us ignore. Frequent check-ins at your favorite pizza place on a restaurant review site may earn you a badge and a number one rating on the site, but is that virtual prize worth it if the site turns that data over to your health insurer? It doesn't matter if you only go to the pizza place because you like their garden salad (with low-fat dressing on the side), and your insurer won't necessarily know you run 20 miles a week unless you're also checking in at the gym on a regular basis.

Striking A Balance Between Privacy And Innovation

None of the Times' writers outright suggest legislation as a remedy for diminshing privacy, although Somini Sengupta's look at privacy laws in Europe comes close to advocating such a position, noting that every European country, as well as Canada, Australia and many Latin American countries have laws governing the use of online data. At the very least, there's an anti-business and, by extension, anti-innovation, tone in his news analysis.

"Europe has come to the conclusion that none of the companies can be trusted," Simon Davies, the director of the London-based nonprofit Privacy International, told Sengupta. "The European Commission is responding to public demand. There is a growing mood of despondency about the privacy issue."

Sengupta's article does not, however, mention that in the United States the civil court system has dealt with egregious privacy law violations not addressed by existing legislation. Likewise, Andrews's op-ed notes that 93% of us, according to polls, think that Internet companies should always ask for permission before using personal information, without noting that those polls never present the privacy question against the backdrop of more privacy may very well mean higher costs and less innovation.

As a Libertarian journal, Reason predictably took the stance that protecting privacy is largely a matter of personal responsibility. But it's a message that bears repeating now. It's a safe bet that the people most concerned with privacy - the domestic abuse victims and the Syrian dissidents mentioned by privacy advocate Rebecca MacKinnon mentions in Sengupta's article - have taken steps to protect their personal information. And if they haven't, whose fault is it?

"If you have a democratic society, the point is not to say whatever is good for the majority is all we need," MacKinnon said.

But turning her argument around, does that mean whatever is needed for the minority is good for the rest of us?

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

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Since 2009, Mobile Internet Usage Has Doubled Every Year

Dan Rowinski — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:30:00 -0800

StatCounter's analytics only include cellphones, excluding tablets from the mix. The global leader in mobile Web use is Nokia at nearly 40% of usage. The firm believes that Nokia's global dominance is due to high penetration in emerging markets like India. Apple is a strong No. 2 globally, while leading use in the United Kingdom and the United States.

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Since 2009, the rate of mobile Internet use has consistently doubled every year. See the chart on the right. The global numbers reaffirm what we already know: the use of the mobile Web is permeating the everyday existence of people around the world. Developers and business can look at the numbers and be assured that the decision to go "mobile first" will eventually be the right choice. Companies that have built the foundation for success on the mobile Web now will be the future leaders of the space, from advertising to software deployment and every space in between.

While Nokia is the global leader, the strength of Apple is clear. With about 28.76% of use, Apple nearly doubles the next closest competitor, Samsung, by about 14%. If you take all the Android OEMs listed (Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony, Motorola and Sony Ericsson and "Google"), the Android OEMs make up about 24.72% of global mobile Internet usage.

Research In Motion fell about 10% from Jan. 2011 to Jan. 2012 from 18.15% to 8.3%. That is indicative of the global fall of BlackBerry sales and usage. In the U.K., BlackBerry remains the No. 2 device, behind Apple.

In North America, Apple has an astonishing lead in mobile Internet use, with 59.11%. No other OEM comes close, with Samsung holding the No. 2 spot at 11.43% and RIM third at 10.06%.

It is difficult to ascertain Apple's dominance of the mobile Internet access. For most of 2011, Android devices outsold Apple's iPhone globally and in the U.S. The end of the year rise is understandable as both of the U.S.'s largest carriers, AT&T and Verizon, boasted strong iPhone sales in comparison to Android, but after a year of eye-popping numbers, the Android ecosystem has not made a dent in iPhone sales in this metric. It could be attributed to user behavior or device/mobile browser performance or any of several sociological phenomena.

Outside of OEM share, one thing is clear: the mobile Internet is changing the way people access information. If history holds true, then more than one in every six Internet users in the world will be accessing the Web through cellphones by Jan. 2013.

Top photo courtesy of Shutterstock

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