Valleywag
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bad ideas
3 reasons why Google's bookstore will be a disaster
The lovingly jumbled piles of books at Shakespeare & Co., the famous Paris bookstore, must madden Googlers. All that information, unorganized! In the wake of its $125 million settlement of a lawsuit filed by book publishers, Google is now thinking about turning its money-burning Book Search product into an online store. This will end badly. More » -
bad ideas
Esther Dyson fails to factcheck her startups
The Valley's pundits believe that partisan bias is damage, and that the Internet can route around it. That's the conclusion I arrived at after hearing about Ameritocracy.com, a new startup aiming to have Internet users factcheck soundbites for free. Esther Dyson, the writer and startup investor, has joined it as an advisor, just in time for the vice-presidential debate Thursday night. "It bothers me to see people's random statements spread around the world with no quality control — and I like Ameritocracy's decentralized approach to providing that quality control," Dyson says in a press release. So that's what's plaguing politics — a lack of quality control! Dyson, who also invested in Flickr, is deluded to think crowdsourcing will work with opinions as well as it does with photographs. Anyone who's spent time on Wikipedia knows that a decentralized approach doesn't lead to the elimination of bias — it just guarantees that whoever has the most time to waste wins. -
bad ideas
Twittad lets you sell Twitter pages no one looks at
There is now an online ad network for Twitter backgrounds. Launched last week, ad startup Twittad allows Twitter users to sell their background image as ad space and charge advertisers based on how many followers they have. Back in June, Ian Schafer, the CEO of interactive agency Deep Focus, sold his Twitter background as advertising space for $1,082.01. Ridiculous, we thought — since the background only appears when Twitter users visit the company's website to look at another user's profile, or read a specific message on the website. Twitter's website accounts for about 5 percent of the service's usage, and users mostly read pages with streams of all their friends' messages, on which individual backgrounds don't appear. More » -
bad ideas
5 social networks Yahoo couldn't befriend
The soon-to-be-shuttered Yahoo Mash is not Yahoo's first failed social network. It's also not its second, third, or fourth. It took one whole hand for us to count Big Purple's failed attempts to get social, either through mergers or in-house development, below.
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bad ideas
Google nixes Steve Chen's YouTube live video plan
In a moment of what now seems like irrational exuberance, YouTube cofounder Steve Chen declared that the popular online video site would add live video streaming this year. Not so fast, says Google. YouTube is already struggling with the concept of profitability, and according to an anonymous source cited by Silicon Alley Insider's Michael Learmonth, Chen's idea is a financial black hole: More » -
bad ideas
The bubble in personal-finance websites
AOL has launched Walletpop, a personal-finance site; IAC and Dow Jones have FiLife; and TheStreet.com has MainStreet.com. All hope to attract a younger audience to personal-finance news than the conventional stock talk and online portfolios offered by the staid likes of Yahoo Finance and CNNMoney. The bets are wrong both in their timing and their premise. Stockbrokers and mortgage lenders, reliable advertisers during good times, are both ducking for cover and pulling back their budgets. Froth might have sustained these sites a couple of years ago, but not now. No matter when they launched, though, their proponents should have remembered this maxim: Financial advice, like youth itself, is wasted on the young. More » -
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bad ideas
Why LinkedIn's getting into the insider-trading business
You'd think LinkedIn management, which has made no secret of its plans to take its automated schmoozefest public, would be trying to avoid trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not so. They're aggressively marketing the company's latest moneymaking scheme, LinkedIn Research, to hedge fund managers. The premise: Traders can use LinkedIn to find "experts" with "unique input" on public companies in their portfolio. What LinkedIn marketers delicately phrase as "input," SEC investigators might well call "inside information." And the only thing actionable about the whole affair might be the insider-trading charges that result. More » -
bad ideas
TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld to unleash world's worst startup pitches on the rest of us
When we worked together at Business 2.0, I always thought my then-colleague Erick Schonfeld was a bit of an evil genius. Now an editor at TechCrunch, Schonfeld hasn't proven me wrong. He's taking all of the boring startup spiels — "elevator pitches" — he gets from wantrepreneurs trooping through his office and turning them into content. All he has to do is sit back and hit "Record"; he doesn't actually have to do the critical thinking required to evaluate whether the ideas hold any promise, or even make sense. How boring is this idea? Look at David Carr from the New York Times, sitting two seats over from Schonfeld, who's fallen asleep just from listening to the idea. But I have no doubt this is the crowdsourced, video-enabled future of innovation journalism, folks. -
bad ideas
Robotic voices to express HP's disgust with customers
Its pretexting heyday may be over, but HP is apparently still not adverse to a little telephone trickery, as its pending patent for Text-to-Speech Conversion with Associated Mood Tag shows. In it, HP touts the use of VoiceXML to have a fake 18-year-old salesgirl register her disgust with customers who don't respond to offers. -
bad ideas
Facebook app spreads social disease to your friends
Beware MorphMonkey's invitations to morph you and a friend into love children on Facebook. The American Social Health Association has infected the MorphMonkey app with chlamydia, transmitted each time you make spawn with it. ASHA's video tutorial doesn't explain why Facebook condoms can't protect you from Facebook VD, or how the kids used to deal with virtual infections back in the days of AOL chatrooms and fingering each other's Unix .plan files, but it is sort of sexy in an afterschool special way: More »
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San Francisco, 6:43 AM
Sun Nov 23
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