Neighborhood news aggregator Outside.in has been acquired by AOL, according to multiple reports this morning. Apparently it's being bought for less than the big pile of money that high-profile investors put into it, back when hopes were high. It's sad, really: the ambitious hyper-local news technology services of the last few years don't seem to be working out very well.
Outside.in, EveryBlock and Fwix are the three sites best known for building out automated collection and analysis of news about particular neighborhoods of cities around the United States. There is huge, exciting potential there - but it takes resources to develop technology and media sites like this. Maybe a shortage of resources is why none of these sites are the thriving hub of activity that many people hoped they would be. There are many different theories why, but all three of the leading startups in this space feel like a disappointment so far.
This morning TwapperKeeper, the Twitter-based service that allowed users to create and export archives of Tweets around certain words or hashtags, announced that it would be shutting down a number of key features of the service to remain in compliance with Twitter's Terms of Service.
According to the company's blog post, the archiving and API features will be shut down by March 20. While TwapperKeeper may be just one service among many to be forced into compliance, is its fate indicative of a larger movement in the Twitter ecosystem?
With the South By Southwest Interactive festival just a couple weeks out, everyone is asking "What will be the big app this year at 'South By?'" One genre we've all been looking at this year is group communication. Apps like Beluga, GroupMe and Fast Society are getting a good bit of pre-conference clamor for their utility when trying to coordinate with multiple people.
Another app, called Yobongo, is getting some attention too, but not because it will make communication with folks you know easier, but because it will help you with communicating with folks you don't know who are nearby. All of it, however, hinges on one key, yet-to-be introduced ingredient - Yobongo's special sauce of location and "ambient real-time communication."
Facebook now publishes its millions of user generated event listings according to the standardized microformats hCalendar and hCard, according to an announcement today by microformats community leader Tantek Çelik. That means that the venues where all these events are being held are now described in a universally standardized way.
If Facebook were to take one more step and allow websites other than the big 3 search engines to index its events listings, then that could tip the scales and move everyone in the industry to understand places around the world in the same simple terms. Joe's Diner in Denver could be understood to be the same place across Facebook, Foursquare and a world of other location-aware applications if only one giant player in location listings had high-quality Place database marked up in the hCard microformat and publicly accessible. Is Facebook going to do that? Probably not.
The Web is becoming social, and companies are jumping to capture the investment dollars. With business models and advertising effectiveness in question, it's hard to valuate such ventures. Social media economics does just that: it's the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of content amongst online social outlets.
It means treating social networks as if they are countries in the world economy. Each post is equivalent to a good or service, sharing is equivalent to trade or distribution, and clicks/views are the equivalent of someone purchasing or consuming the post.
Taking this logic, you can then apply the modern economic growth function: Y(f) = L, K, HC, T. Within that equation, Y is GDP or total economic output, L is labor, K is capital, HC is human capital, and T is technology. Together, these factors determine the worth of an economy.
There is no Facebook phone, the world's largest social network told everyone firmly last year. Instead, the company said this afternoon, there are "dozens" of phones that will include a deep software integration with Facebook features and some with Facebook branding on the hardware. (Above, the INQ Cloud Touch.) Make no mistake, Facebook is taking clear steps to use software and brand licensing to change the way we relate to our phones. Might this new level of socialization of the phone be of comparable historic impact to telephone network interoperability or the rise of the mobile phone?
Sarah Perez covered these phones from a technical perspective this morning from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. What does a phone like this mean, though, in terms of user experience and cultural implications?
Last night, Twitter made official what many members of the developer community had long suspected - there would be no more whitelisting for data-hungry apps. For some developers, this either means that they have to come up with creative work-arounds or, for others, that their projects are dead in the water.
So why did Twitter kill the exception to the rule and what does it mean for the future of Twitter apps and the developers who create them?
The Wall St. Journal reported today that both Facebook and Google have had low-level talks with Twitter about acquiring the fast growing social network. Nothing has come of it and the Journal focuses on the large sums of money being discussed: between $8 billion and $10 billion.
More interesting to me is the thought of one of these companies owning Twitter. That sounds terrible to me and to almost everyone who responded to an inquiry about it on Twitter. Why? Because the cultures of the two services are remarkably different.
One of the world's most revered cultures and religious histories has been threatened with death and extinction in Tibet for decades at the hands of the authoritarian Chinese government; Groupon's Super Bowl advertisement about Tibet (below) was based on a joke drastically reducing the seriousness of that suffering. Not all hope is lost, the ad says, because at least there are still refugees that will cook discounted food for White people! Many people on Twitter reacted very negatively to the ad. This is my best explanation why it was offensive. Not everyone agrees - we've got a debate going in comments below which we invite you to participate in.
The joke was intended to be absurd, but the absurdity presumed a lack of seriousness in the whole matter. It was an attempt at post-serious humor - but most people with common sense agree that the struggles of Tibet still deserve respect and seriousness. The joke is on anyone who really cares. It came across as the kind of out-of-touch humor that overprivileged, spiritually mean, advertising industry creatives (specifically, the kind that kids refer to as "douchebags") would come up with. That's one explanation why the commercial was offensive, but view it below and offer your own if you like. Another perspective: As Rabbi Eliyahu Fink said on Twitter tonight, "Amazing. More people are offended by Groupon's ads than the coarse objectification of women in EVERY SINGLE OTHER AD!"
When protests erupted in Egypt nearly two weeks ago, the government's response was swift and all-encompassing - shut off all forms of communication. One media outlet rose from the ashes to provide consistent live coverage of the events in Egypt - Al-Jazeera. The only problem, however, is that the Qatar-based media outlet isn't available on most cable networks in the U.S. and the company wants to fix that.
Like other movements of its kind, and despite the Egyptian government's best efforts, the protests in Egypt gained traction on Twitter with hashtags like #jan25, #cairo, #mubarak and #egypt. Now, Al Jazeera has tried to leverage its visibility on Twitter with Promoted Tweets and a Promoted Trending Topic - #DemandAlJazeera - to get into one place that's harder to access than Egypt - U.S. TV markets.
