Banking giant Goldman Sachs has invested $500 million in Facebook, buying shares at a price that puts the value of the entire company at $50 billion. If all shares in the company were priced equally (they are not) then we could assume that Goldman, and co-investor Russian giant DST, bought 1% of Facebook. What's most important isn't the amount of literal control over the company that the banks bought, rather it's the valuation this gives the company and the relationship the investment fosters between Goldman and Facebook.
ReadWriteWeb readers, probably more concerned with technology and innovation implications than the business end of this deal, may benefit from a summary of the flurry of news coverage that began last night with the scoop by Andrew Ross Sorkin and Evelyn M. Rusli at The New York Times.
Facebook's data team proved once again today that when you analyze a large set of anonymous user data from the world's biggest social network, you can learn some very interesting things about the state of humanity.
In a blog post titled What's on your mind?, the company disclosed the results of its text analysis of 1 million anonymized messages. Among the findings: Young people swear more than older people and older people talk about other people more than just themselves. Popular people are more likely to talk about other people, TV and movies, to swear and use religious words. Less popular people are more likely to talk about work, sleeping, eating and thinking. These are but a few of the many observations made by the in-house data team. The biggest question about the data remains unanswered, though: what could a world of independent researchers discover in this data?
I'd like to ask for a moment of silence to mark the passing of a Web application that had eyes bigger than its stomach. An ambitious little startup called Nsyght gave up the ghost this weekend and with it went some very, very cool features. In the end, this little Twitter and Facebook message-parsing service just couldn't do what it set out to do, and so it has closed up shop.
By some standards, Twitter publishes a whole lot of data, about 1,000 messages per second. Nsyght allowed you to do remarkable things with that river of data: search inside Twitter lists, retrieve your own long-lost messages or filter messages from your friends by media type. Below are three of the ways I used Nsyght every day in my news gathering routine. Maybe someday, someone, somewhere will be able to bite off this many Tweets and return these kinds of dream-features to the world.
The guys at About.me say they considered a number of different URLs for their company. That they chose the name About.me seemed to pay off today when it was announced that the four-month old company, lead by some of Silicon Valley's best known startup people, has become AOL's latest acquisition.
With the startup acquisitions piling up in just the past couple of years, including About.me, 5Min, ThingLabs, SocialThing and TechCrunch, it looks like AOL is trying to take a shot at what Yahoo! is now admitting it failed at: amassing hot little startups and the brains behind them to try to form a cohesive whole. But what did AOL get in its acquisition of About.me?
Technologists have spent nearly 20 years now predicting the future of the Web. And while the Web is not dead yet, how we use it and our expectations of it are surely changing. We want what we want exactly when and where we want it. And when we don't get it, we don't hesitate taking our business - or eyeballs - elsewhere.
This has led more technologists including myself to start thinking about how the Web needs to evolve to keep up with user expectations. People hold companies to impossibly high expectations to deliver extremely personalized experiences as they browse, shop, learn and play on the Web.
Yahoo! is going to shutter its social bookmarking service Delicious, the web learned today, and with it will sink an incredibly valuable source of collectively curated knowledge. You can easily export your own bookmarks (no verdict yet where we should all meet up to import them to) but what if you want to export other peoples'? That's at least half the value of the service, socially curated discovery.
Tonight I thought I'd go loot a little from a burning building owned by a company not interested in putting out the fire. Specifically, I went to extract the top 50 links to pages that had been tagged by users with both the words "Twitter" and "International". Where else are you going to find a reading list of the best collected written works and other multimedia about almost any given topic? Unfortunately, automated extraction is blocked by the site and the rickety, antiquated API appears focused on returning you little more than your own bookmarks. If there's a clear way to accomplish export of not just my bookmarks, but all bookmarks with one or more tags, from all users - I haven't been able to find it yet.
Update: 24 hours later, Yahoo! has issued a statement saying they would like to sell, not close, Delicious.
Social bookmarking service Delicious announced five years ago last Thursday that it had been acquired by Yahoo The first comment posted on the blog entry announcing the deal was from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, saying "Congratulations! Yahoo sure does get tagging I see." When I heard the news, I felt very differently. I was deeply saddened that it wasn't US Library of Congress to acquire Delicious. Five years later, Yahoo announced internally today that it is closing down Delicious. No date has been given for its closure.
It's a loss not just for the many people who used Delicious to archive links of interest to them around the web, it's a loss for the future - for what could have been. Five years later, people are just beginning to appreciate the value of passively published user activity data made available for analysis, personalization and more. That could have been you, Delicious.
Update: 24 hours later, Yahoo! has issued a statement saying they would like to sell, not close, Delicious.
Time magazine's editors have named Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg their Person of the Year, despite WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange crushing the popular vote. Zuckerberg received the 10th highest number of votes from readers. We wrote early this week about the possibility that Time's editors might choose someone other than the person their readers chose.
So what does Zuckerberg have to say about the man who peeled back the curtain from the internal discussions among diplomats for history's most formidable empire? Not much. Time's press release included a rambling pseudo-statement from Zuckerberg on WikiLeaks. Read it below and ask yourself: shouldn't he have put a little more thought into such an important matter than this? Wasn't there anyone available to edit these statements for coherence?
The smash-hit puzzle game Angry Birds made big headlines today with its parent company's announcement of its own sales system that will route around the Android Market and let consumers run up charges directly on the monthly bill sent to them by their telephone carrier. Called the Bad Piggy Bank, the in-app payment system will also be offered to other developers as a service.
This is not just a story about Android struggling to keep developers happy, though. Mobile developers can program on top of device hardware capabilities, Operating System or software capabilities - or on top of the telephone networks themselves. The story of the Bad Piggy Bank is a page out of the larger story of a fight between device-level companies and network-level companies for the attention of developers. Traditionally, we think of post-iPhone mobile apps as being almost entirely based on the phone and its OS - but it doesn't have to be that way. Carrier level payment joins a list of other capabilities being advanced on the carrier level, including location tracking, presence status, push notifications and more.
Nonviolent direct action is a staple in the American diet. Our everyday freedoms depend on the work of activists who have put their bodies on the line to fight for the rights we enjoy. Despite that, many forms of protest are reviled in the present, as people are often more willing to condemn the actions of a few committed individuals as violent or unnecessary, than to judge the system, be it violent or unjust. But history reveals much that is hidden, and we will see how history will judge WikiLeaks and Operation Payback. In this post, I will analyze Operation Avenge Assange in light of nonviolent direct action as it has been traditionally considered.
