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the sum of all human knowledge
your privacy is an illusion
Facebook making sure there's nowhere on the Web to hide
Facebook's formal announcement of Facebook Connect is at once a transparently timed response to MySpace's announcement of partnerships with eBay and Twitter yesterday and the culmination of things the social network has been working on for ages. Facebook Connect, at its simplest, lets websites like Digg and Twitter integrate their users' activity into Facebook users' News Feeds. Those two companies, as well as Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa, have been using Facebook Connect well before it was unveiled under that name. It cements Facebook's role as a central place to keep up with one's friends. Yet I'm not sure how I feel about it. More »
scoop
Scandal-ridden Brit Rachel Whetstone to run Google PR
We hear that Rachel Whetstone, Google's European communications director, will replace Elliot Schrage as the company's top flack after Schrage left for Facebook. Her background may make her a perfect fit, in more ways than Google would like you to know. Unlike Schrage, Whetstone has some experience with rough-and-tumble politics, having served as chief of staff to British Conservative party leader Michael Howard. She also may be better suited to dealing with CEO Eric Schmidt's periodic outings with mistresses: She herself had an affair with Viscount Astor, a top Tory official, which scuppered her political career and led to her joining Google.
deals
Google moves to quash Wall Street's hopes for Microsoft-Yahoo deal -- and with it, Yahoo's stock price
Yahoo shares are hovering around $25 because investors hope major Yahoo shareholders can still force a deal with Microsoft at $33 per share or more. But at Google's annual shareholder meeting yesterday, cofounder Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt tried their best to destroy those hopes, amping up talk of a deal that would outsource Yahoo's search advertising to Google and make Yahoo unattractive to Microsoft. Brin said the deal is designed to keep Microsoft at bay. "[Yahoo was] under a hostile attack and we wanted to make sure they had as many options as possible," Brin said. More »
third prize is you're fired
Should Facebook and MySpace can their salesmen? Only if they're not into this thing called "revenue"
Everyone wants to sell ads like Amazon.com sells books — one click and it's done. Social networks Facebook and MySpace as well as ad networks AdBrite, AdReady and AdItAll have all followed Google to offer advertisers do-it-yourself buying options. The trend has led both the Wall Street Journal and PaidContent to wonder if online ad sales teams will go the way of the dodo, or at least the travel agent. The answer — especially for social networks MySpace and Facebook — is no. More »
9:00 AM on Fri May 9 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
1,367 views,
4 comments
Latest by raincoaster: Fuck, now I'm hungry. Want to make money? Tell me how to download ribs. more »
cubicle culture
We've toured the top 10 workspaces in tech. Now, we've gone back to Office Snapshots to find the 10 worst. What makes them so bad? Some offend with exposed fluorescent lights, gray cubicles and a dystopian corporate sheen. But others, with their pseudo-hip graffiti, kindergarten toys and plastic decorations — all in a desperate attempt to seem "Internet-y" — come off even worse. We'll start with Yahoo's New York digs.
More »
The 10 worst workspaces in tech
We've toured the top 10 workspaces in tech. Now, we've gone back to Office Snapshots to find the 10 worst. What makes them so bad? Some offend with exposed fluorescent lights, gray cubicles and a dystopian corporate sheen. But others, with their pseudo-hip graffiti, kindergarten toys and plastic decorations — all in a desperate attempt to seem "Internet-y" — come off even worse. We'll start with Yahoo's New York digs.
More »
toogle many googlers
Why Google's drowning in talent
Looking at the departure of top Google flack Elliot Schrage for Facebook and concluding that the search engine is suffering a "brain drain" is the laziest journalism on the subject I could imagine. The BBC's take on the subject is predictable, citing the same names — Ben Ling, Ethan Beard, even chef Josef Desimone — everyone else does. The most telling thing is actually a Google spokesbot's programmed response: "We have a deep management pool at Google." The problem at Google is not that its brains are going out the drain. It's that the drain is plugged up, and not nearly enough are leaving. More »
5:00 PM on Thu May 8 2008
By Owen Thomas
4,111 views,
1 comment
Latest by ThatKid: All that water imagery has me feeling seasick. more »
erik moeller
Wikipedia's porn-loving No. 2 and his abiding concern for the children
A firestorm is now brewing over pornography on Wikipedia and its accessibility to children. The FBI is investigating the matter, right-wing news site WorldNetDaily reports. Jay Walsh, the spokesman for Wikipedia's nonprofit parent, the Wikimedia Foundation, has disclaimed all official responsibility for the contents of the world's greatest compendium of fictional balls. But who oversees the contents of Wikipedia for the foundation? Why, Erik Möller, its deputy director. And Möller is deeply, deeply concerned about the children. More »
9:20 AM on Thu May 8 2008
By Owen Thomas
8,629 views,
21 comments
Latest by WilliamMarkFelt: @XedMac [www.fbi.gov] I'm certain the FBI will be very interested in the long precedent of providing internet safe-haven to sexual deviants by Wales on Wikipedia, and Wikia too for that matter. more »
breakdowns
Yahoo's real leadership problem: David Filo
Everyone's piling on Jerry Yang, saying Yahoo's founder-CEO needs to go. Why? The weak stock that provoked Microsoft's unsolicited bid may have been the result of his absentee ownership over the years. But Yahoo's deeper problem is the rot in its technical prowess. And that has everything to do with the quieter cofounder, David Filo. Filo has stayed behind the scenes, but wields considerable power over Yahoo's infrastructure. Requests for more hardware go through him, for example. When Yahoo executive Jeff Weiner joked in an internal all-hands movie about not going through IT because it was "too much paperwork," the audience surely laughed because they knew exactly what he meant. More »
5:00 PM on Wed May 7 2008
By Owen Thomas
6,035 views,
33 comments
Latest by X-Y: @BaldDog Bingo. The absolute correct source of "leadership problems" in Engineering, at Filo's expense apparently. more »
eric jackson
Yahoo shareholder plots July 3 revolt
Yahoo will hold its annual shareholders' meeting on July 3. Investors angry over how Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang the Yahoo board handled merger negotiations with Microsoft — paging Gordon Crawford and Bill Miller — have until next Thursday to do so by submitting an alternate slate of directors to replace the current board. Wall Street analysts don't expect it to happen, reports the Financial Times. Activist shareholder Eric Jackson, the president of Ironfire Capital, isn't listening to them, however. More »
jerry yang
Yahoo can find its way, but only if it stops searching
Jerry Yang's spin campaign about why the Microsoft bid fell through is transparent. He's not trying to cajole Steve Ballmer back to the negotiating table; he's trying to cover his rear and appease indignant shareholders. The only reason he's so open about accepting a new bid from Microsoft, I think, is that he's not expecting another one to come. Ballmer has more or less said he thinks that Yahoo is worth less and less every day; last Saturday, when Yang flew up with cofounder David Filo to meet with Ballmer one last time, was as close as the two will ever get to agreeing on Yahoo's worth. The thing is, unless Yang makes some dramatic shifts, Ballmer may well be right. More »
1:40 PM on Tue May 6 2008
By Owen Thomas
2,038 views,
7 comments
Latest by FungibleMind: @feeldumb "Google would have much more well targeted information from their search data than Yahoo! will ever have." Wrong. Yahoo! has as good or better data than Google in both depth (length of time) and breadth (services, media, platforms), more »
rumormonger
New iPhone will hit stores June 12, feature improved speakers and camera
A source tells us that "someone who designed part of the iPhone UI, who generally has access to new hardware locked down in a room to play with, " told him that the new iPhone will run on faster 3G networks, as expected; feature new, improved speakers on the bottom; and an improved camera. It will hit stores June 12. Our source warns us: "The person has mixed details before." Our guy puts his friend's trustworthiness at an 8 out of 10. More »
deathwatch
The Omnidrive story you won't read on TechCrunch
Until a recent article from ReadWriteWeb declaring online file-storage and sharing service Omnidrive dead, founder and CEO Nik Cubrilovic was missing in action. The support forums for customers went unattended even as the site went down. An investor, Clay Cook, who sunk six figures into the company couldn't get a reply to his email. Also nowhere to be found? Any reporting from TechCrunch. More »
online advertising
Why Google TV ads are doomed to failure
Google's top executives desperately want to convince Wall Street that it's on the verge of cracking the $70 billion television-advertising business — automating it, rationalizing it, and ruling it, as it has done with the considerably smaller search-advertising market. They've even hired an NBC executive, Michael Steib, to sell broadcasters on the idea. The only problem: It will never work, as Google's own documentation shows. Google's triumph in search is a product of its skillful use of data. By analyzing what Web searchers click on and what advertisers say they'll pay, it's able to continuously refine the ads it displays to yield the most clicks for advertisers and the most profits for itself. More »
exits
Elliot Schrage, Google's top flack, interviewing at Facebook
Are Elliot Schrage and Sheryl Sandberg about to stage a policy-wonk reunion in Palo Alto? When she worked at Google, Sandberg, now Facebook's COO, helped recruit Schrage from the Council on Foreign Relations. Having taken charge of Facebook PR, Sandberg is looking to hire a VP of communications with experience in public policy. Since most Valley flacks are weak in knowing the ways of D.C., that job description is tailor-made for Schrage. Sources tell us he has already interviewed at Facebook. And we hear he's more than ready to leave Google, chiefly because of its philanderrific CEO, Eric Schmidt. More »
friendfeed
Why Silicon Valley just won't shut up about FriendFeed
"Cathy Brooks is a typically unapologetic Silicon Valley Web addict," writes Brad Stone in the New York Times. "Last week alone, she produced more than 40 pithy updates on the text messaging service Twitter, uploaded two dozen videos to various video sharing sites, posted seven photographs on the Yahoo image service Flickr and one item to the online community calendar Upcoming." Usually, when one identifies a friend as an addict, an intervention is in order. But Stone, who seems to have spent so much time in San Francisco's tech circles that he's gone native, suggests more technology instead: Specifically, FriendFeed, which gathers all of this online activity in one place, making it marginally easier for Brooks's benighted friends to keep up with her online logorrhea. More »
9:20 AM on Mon May 5 2008
By Owen Thomas
2,450 views,
11 comments
Latest by Figaro: Friendfeed is for people on ADD/ADHD. Even if you have few friends, the amount of useless data that it gives you is enormous! Stay clear of that tool! It's just an RSS reader with a "social" feel to it. more »
nerdfight
Ballmer to Yang: How stupid are you?
Even when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tries to sound polite, he manages to be rude. His thank-you-very-much letter to Yahoo's Jerry Yang declining to make an offer for Yahoo is no exception. In particular, Ballmer rails against Yang for considering outsourcing search advertising to Google, saying it will cause Yahoo's engineers to flee and raise prices for advertisers. "By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table," Ballmer concludes. If I were Yang, I would read this and wonder why I ever even contemplated getting into business with this guy. The full letter: More »
antitrust
