The Latest from TechCrunch

New FriendFeed: Simpler, Faster, Better (Maybe Too Fast)

Posted: 06 Apr 2009 08:00 AM PDT

FriendFeed cofounder Paul Bucheit was recently asked what it was like to be the R&D department for Facebook. His response was appropriately humble, but you can’t help but wonder how long it will be before Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed all start to look pretty much identical as the services simply copy the best features from their competitors.

One thing is for sure, though: FriendFeed moves the fastest. They were the first to add comments to status updates, the first to bring in third party feeds and the first to realize the value of search. They also experimented with real time streams way before the others. So much of what they’ve done first has been copied by others - even Google has dipped into the well.

Now FriendFeed is taking the next step in its evolution with a complete redesign and lots of new features. We were able to see a demo of the new site last week and have been testing it over the weekend. Our opinion: the new FriendFeed, which launches into beta today, is simpler, faster and better than the old FriendFeed. In fact, it may be a little too fast.

The first thing you’ll notice is the new look of the site. The left sidebar is gone, and key information is in separate areas on the right. The main part of the page is now just for messages. It actually looks quite a bit like Twitter.

The most noticeable new feature is real time streaming. The experiments from last year have now been pushed to every part of the site.

FriendFeed’s co-founder Bret Taylor says that by adding this functionality, FriendFeed can be used as a Gmail-like chat interface between one or many friends and is hoping to change the way FriendFeed is being used as a communications tool. Having a real-time feed of your friends’ and contacts’ status updates is really cool but watching the page constantly add updates gets a little annoying.

As real time feeds come into your stream, it pushes what you are reading further down, which also can be a little annoying. FriendFeed has a solution for this: a pause button where your can turn the real-time updates off, and when off, the icon will tell you how many real-time updates are waiting to be added to your stream. The new interface also allows you to send direct messages and photos to your friends and lets you post these messages to Twitter.

Another significant change to the interface is that service icons (the images that appear next to messages), have been changed from the source of the information (Twitter, RSS, Flickr, etc.) to the profile picture of the person who created the message. It makes it much easier to scan messages for interesting stuff.

FriendFeed has added a number of features to promote interactivity between users including sharing features, where you can share a conversation, direct messages, feed, link, etc. to any number of your friends or one friend. The search filters have become more powerful, allowing you to filter searches by keyword or name or restrict searches to certain groups of friends or all of FriendFeed. And the search box will give you suggestions of your friends profiles, helping you to navigate to friend’s feeds easily. FriendFeed has also given you the ability to create a private “chat room” amongst your friends, dubbed “FriendFeed Feedback.” Similar to a group page, the private room feature let’s you create a feed that is restricted to a number of users, can be marked as public or private, and can be used as a communications tool to enable chats in a forum-like environment.

These changes are all part of a new beta version of the service that users can opt into starting today. FriendFeed says they launched the interface in a beta format because they want to make adjustments to the interface as they receive feedback from users and plan to change the interface all together after they receive comments. FriendFeed has changed its interface and added new features previously, adding advanced search features earlier this year and creating a neat live blogging tool during the presidential campaigns last fall.

Here’s a short version of the demo we saw last week. Robert Scoble has a longer version in HD as well.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Revolution Money Raises Another $42 Million For Alternative Payment Service Nobody Is Using

Posted: 06 Apr 2009 07:59 AM PDT

Steve Case’s startup Revolution Money announced a series C funding today of $42 million led by Goldman Sachs. Case and other existing investors (Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, former AOL vice chairman Ted Leonsis, former Charles Schwab CEO David Pottruck, and JP Morgan vie chairman David Golden). That is on top of $50 million the company raised is September, 2007.

The company is using the Internet to lower the cost of credit card charges and payment transfers, charging merchants only a 0.5 percent transaction fee instead of credit card fees which can be four to eight times as high. Revolution Money has done a good job signing up banks and merchants to accept its credit card and online payment service, but it is not so clear how good a job it is doing actually signing up customers. In tandem to its regular credit card, it also operates Revolution MoneyExchange, an online payment processing service that is trying to compete with Paypal. MoneyExchange is basically a loss leader to get people to sign up for the credit card. The problem is that nobody is really using MoneyExhange.

Only 33,000 people in the U.S. even visited the site in February, down from a marketing-fueled high of 742,000 a year before in March, 2008, according to comScore. Hopefully, it’s found another way to sign up customers, and I’m not talking about Washington Capitols hockey fans (Leonsis owns the hockey team and is trying to get fans to pay for tickets with Revolution Money credit cards). The company must be signing up tons of new cardholders through more traditional marketing techniques. Right? I have an e-mail into Revolution Money asking for more details.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Amazon No Longer Allows Associates To Bring In Traffic Via Paid Search

Posted: 06 Apr 2009 07:45 AM PDT

Amazon has decided to make some changes to its Associates program, no longer allowing third parties to bid on keywords that would send visitors straight to Amazon websites where they’d earn a referral fee for each purchase.

The change only applies to the Associates programs in North America, and the company is referring Associates based outside the U.S. and Canada to check their respective terms and conditions agreements.

As of May 1, 2009, Associates will not be paid referral fees for paid search traffic. Also, in connection with this change, as of May 1, 2009, Amazon will no longer make data feeds available to Associates for the purpose of sending users to the Amazon websites in the US or Canada via paid search.

Amazon is not very communicative about the reasoning behind the decision, and the FAQ on its website only cites that it is based on ‘their review of how they invest their advertising resources’.

I concur with blogger Gee that paying out these referral fees is probably costing Amazon a lot of money, which is not necessarily a reason to block Associates from using paid search as a way to bring in traffic during normal times, but likely hurts the bottom line in the economic turmoil we’re in now too much to justify continuing to allow it. If that is true, that would mean that in this case paid search underperforms contextual links when it comes to sales referrals.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Only The Beginning

Posted: 06 Apr 2009 06:54 AM PDT

On Friday the FriendFeed founders Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit debuted a radical redesign of the product for about 15 journalists, technologists, and Robert Scoble. We were asked not to discuss the details until Monday morning. I've been playing with the beta for the last few hours and have already come to several conclusions about what this means for the social media community and by extension enterprise computing. First, the disruption occurring around the realtime universal message bus invented by Twitter has now spread much more widely than commonly anticipated. Twitter's breakout in the mainstream media hints at the speed with which this technology is moving, as does Dave WIner's fascination with harnessing Twitter while at the same time questioning the validity of a single commercial company's dominance of the space. Some analysts have suggested that Twitter has moved past and consumed RSS at the center of the information machine. As newspapers and other print vehicles appear to collapse, the common concerns expressed about the permanent loss and funding of the fourth estate ignore the rise of a superclass of information creation. What some call the fallow ego-driven spew of the Warholian elites is more likely to be seen in the rear view mirror as something more akin to body painting and ultimately jazz. Without directly violating the embargo, what FriendFeed 2.0 suggests is the capture of the sense of the moment. Like a Kennedy press conference or the incredible rhythm trills of Lennon on the roof in Get Back, we're seeing something electric and tangible appearing out of nothing. I dive in and swim in the current, swooping from swirl to eddy, then into direct communication and back to the world I've left behind for a moment. It still takes several moves to accomplish a single task, but the handwriting is on the wall and the time is near when we can pick up where we left off months ago.

IBM Changes Its Tune: “Here doesn’t come the sun”

Posted: 06 Apr 2009 05:56 AM PDT

Oh noes! IBM withdrew its $7 billion bid to buy Sun Microsystems. The company has no other offers outstanding, which may mean that the well-known and well-loved Unix server supplier will have to go it alone in an uncertain economy. One interesting point, from NYT:

The Sun board did not reject the offer outright, but wanted certain guarantees that the I.B.M. side considered "onerous," according to that person.

IBM dropped its price to $9.40 and the requirements included changing the management team and the movement/removal of some senior employees. . Sun's stock dropped to $8.49 last Friday.

Glam Media Lands A $10 Million Round, Its Fifth in 5 Years

Posted: 06 Apr 2009 04:51 AM PDT

Distributed media network Glam Media has raised $10 million more, this time specifically for its Japanese and German operations, reports PaidContent. The fifth round of funding in as many years of existence comes from Japanese VC Mizuho Venture Capital and several local advertising / media companies, but also includes a separate investment round for its German joint-venture from partner Hubert Burda Media. The total amount of capital invested in the company so far now exceeds a whopping $125 million.

Not that Glam isn’t putting their funding to good use. In 2008, the company made a couple of strategic acquisitions and keeps on displaying a clear focus on international growth, while at the same time launching interesting side projects like Tinker.

Late last year, we reported that Glam Media was slowing down payments to its publishers as well as making significant pay cuts although it self-reported its Q4 to have been ’surprisingly strong’. One month later, ComScore data showed Glam Media was one of the fastest growing websites in the US. It was also the ninth largest publisher of display ads, serving up an estimated 2.1 billion ad impressions per month.

It will be interesting to watch how Glam performs the next few quarters.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

PragueCrunch II Is GO!

Posted: 06 Apr 2009 03:15 AM PDT

This Saturday marks our second annual PragueCrunch to be held at the magnificent Hergetova Cihelna (try the veal!) on April 11 at 2pm.

The program will be fairly off-the-cuff this weekend and I encourage those who’d like to speak for about 5 minutes during the event to drop me a line ASAP (john@crunchgear.com). We’ll also have a job hunt portion to the event with colored name tags for networkers, job seekers, and employers. Robin Wauters will dance.

If last year is any indication, you’re going to meet the cream of the Prague tech community at this event so if you’re out of work or looking for a crack COBOL programmer, you’ll be in the right place. Finally, special thanks to our amazing sponsors:

Wirenode
Geewa
Ataxo
Learn10
Kerio
Dial Telecom

We’ll be breaking out a post for them as we get closer to the even. Until then, if you would like to RSVP, drop us a line at john@crunchgear.com with the subject line “RSVP PRAGUE” or just hit up the Facebook Event.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Great Visualization: Web Trends Map 4 (Final Beta)

Posted: 06 Apr 2009 02:10 AM PDT

This is likely going to spread like wildfire, and it isn’t even finished yet: Information Architects has released the final beta for the fourth iteration of its awesome Web Trends Map series. This is a great visualization of current Internet trends, and how companies and individuals fit into it.

The picture that’s embedded above doesn’t do it justice in any way, so be sure to check out the full-sized image hosted on Flickr. Update: better yet, head over to Zoomorama.

The Web Trend Map is a yearly publication by iA Inc. It maps the 333 most influential Web domains and the 111 most influential internet people onto the Tokyo Metro map. Domains are carefully selected by the iA research team through dialogue with map enthusiasts. Each domain is evaluated based on traffic, revenue, age and the company that owns it. The iA design team assigns these selected domains to individual stations on the Tokyo Metro map in ways that complement the characters of each.

Oh, and in case you like it and you want to buy a printed version, they’re only making and selling 1,000 of them, so be quick.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Facebook Completes Rollout Of Haystack To Stem Losses From Massive Photo Uploads

Posted: 06 Apr 2009 01:16 AM PDT

One nugget of information Facebook leaked out to press last week during the Gideon Yu fiasco: the company has been EBITDA profitable for five quarters, but doesn’t expect to generate positive cash flow until 2010. Why the discrepancy? There’s only one answer to that - Facebook is paying out big dollars for something that must be depreciated over time. If they could just write off the expense in full as they paid it they’d be having much bigger losses now that matched cash flow, and they’d hit profitability sooner. But accounting rules let them pay cash now and recognize the expense later on. In early leaked projected financials, there was a $200 million difference in 2008 cash flow and EBITDA profitability (or lack thereof).

What have they been buying? Stuff to serve up all these massive page views, and photos in particular. In our post last October, when Facebook was fishing for dollars in Dubai, we noted some of their expenses, including a massive ongoing outlay for NetApp storage systems that cost $2 million each:

The company is likely spending well over a $1 million per month on electricity alone, say experts we've spoken with. Bandwidth is likely another $500,000 or more per month on top of that. The company has earmarked $100 million to buy 50,000 servers this year and next. And sources say they've been buying one NetApp 3070 storage system per week just to keep up with all this user generated content. At up to $2 million each, that adds up quickly - we've heard estimates that they may have spent as much as $30 million this year alone with the company. And the icing on the cake - earmark another $15 million per year in office and datacenter rent payments.

As we noted in February, Facebook is the largest photo application on the web (forgetting everything else they do). More than 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month, and these things chew up bandwidth and storage like crazy. And it’s even more expensive to serve photos in poorer countries where Facebook is getting all its growth (and little revenue).

Enter Haystack

Haystack is Facebook’s way of substantially lowering the cost of storing and serving photos, and the rollout of the new internal infrastructure was recently completed. See Niall Kennedy for a technical overview of what Haystack is and why it’s so much more efficient than third party solutions they’ve used to date, as well as this 2008 presentation by Jason Sobel.

What isn’t clear is if Haystack will really help Facebook control costs outside of the U.S., particularly in Asia. But it’s a step in the right direction for cost control, and is certainly being factored in Facebook’s estimates of cash flow profitability by next year.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

North Korea Successfully Launches Satellite Into Pacific Ocean

Posted: 06 Apr 2009 12:25 AM PDT

Great success! North Korea has successfully launched a satellite into a near earth orbit and it is now circling the earth at about 1 mile below sea level. That's right: North Korea's Taepodong-2, the much-feared long-range missile that had even the Obama camp worried, broke up over Japan at about 11:37am and then fell into the water at 11:48am on Sunday. The launch is described as a complete success in North Korean reports although American military command believes it to be a failure. Nonetheless, the ability to push a rocket even close to U.S. soil is obviously disconcerting. The NYT writes:

North Korea's public portrayal of the event as a complete success was similar in its celebratory tone to the happy note it struck in 1998 after having failed to loft a satellite into orbit. A general rule of engineering is that failures reveal more than successes. If so, North Korea — which has now test-fired three long-range rockets, each time unsuccessfully — is learning a lot about limitations.

So Now Everything Is Google’s Fault

Posted: 05 Apr 2009 04:54 PM PDT

A year ago British musician Billy Bragg was whining that Bebo should be paying musicians a portion of their $850 million liquidity event, arguing that “the musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise…Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend." We dismantled his emotional rant and suggested that, actually, Bebo should be paid for all the free marketing they gave those musicians. 367 comments later, our readers were still divided between the realists and the “it’s not fair” crowd.

Now he’s back again, this time targeting Google. Thank God the bloggers are here to call bullshit because the journalists, fearing their own looming unemployment, are jumping on board the idiot bandwagon.

Last week Bragg pointed his anger at Google, demanding that the company play music videos on YouTube’s UK site and pay the demanded royalty (Google just took the videos down instead of paying). His argument is ridiculous - that Google should literally be forced to play music videos that it no longer wants to play, and then pay a per play fee.

Really, this begging for handouts is unbecoming:

Sir, We have growing concern over the use of our music on the internet and the unfair way we believe music is treated by Google and YouTube, which it owns. At the heart of the issue is Google's disagreement over the prices it should pay to PRS for Music, the not-for-profit licensing organisation. Music fans in the UK are confused and angry at Google's stance. We, as songwriters and composers of music, share those concerns. It is not in anyone's best interests to block access to music. Fans are denied enjoyment, creators aren't paid and illegal music sites benefit from the resulting displacement of web traffic.

Google says it cannot operate YouTube if it has to pay a royalty — however small — every time a video containing music is played. In 2007 the UK's independent Copyright Tribunal established that a minimum royalty per play was an essential requirement in the licensing of online services. Google fails to recognize this and ascribes little value to music — in spite of a huge increase in music usage on YouTube's UK service. Royalties are a vital income source for all professional creators and must be preserved to ensure a continued vibrant music industry. We trust that Google will reinstate music on YouTube and pay a fair price for it.

David Arnold, Jazzie B, Billy Bragg, Guy Chambers, Robin Gibb, Pete Waterman, Mike Chapman, Wayne Hector, Pam Sheyne, Debbie Wiseman

The audacity of the letter is staggering. But The Guardian’s Henry Porter uses it as a launchpad to attack Google more generally as an “amoral menace”, adding that “Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing…”

Either he refuses to understand, or just ignores, the fact that Google is the one being bullied here. The company is making a simple profit/loss decision and apparently concluded that it can’t make money on the deal being offered. To suggest that Google must accept the deal is to suggest that Google needs to subsidize the music industry simply because it is a profitable company.

It’s ridiculous and only makes sense when Porter moves on his his argument to talk about newspapers, which provide his livelihood (with no discussion of the direct conflict of interest). He then spends paragraphs trying to tie Google’s success with the failure of newspapers. He never really gets there, but does say that Google is “delinquent and sociopathic” near the end, which at least keeps things interesting.

Let’s all be clear here. What Porter and Bragg want is a subsidy from Google. A sort of welfare tax on a profitable company so that they can continue to draw the paychecks they’ve become accustomed to. That isn’t going to happen, and all this hand wringing isn’t helping to move their respective industries toward a successful business model. They either need to adapt or die. And they’re choosing a very noisy and annoying death.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

A Picture Is Worth A Thousands Tweets: Pixim And TweetPhoto Emerge

Posted: 05 Apr 2009 01:56 PM PDT

There’s been a proliferation of photo sharing apps tied to Twitter, including TwitPic, Twitxr (review), and Yfrog (review), giving users a vast amount of choice when it comes to image sharing on the popular micro-blogging service. But TwitPic seems to have emerged as the leader of the pack.

The service took the top spot on our list of the most popular Twitter applications according to Compete and was in the top ten of Twitter clients according to TwitStat. Compete pegs TwitPic to have had close to 1.6 million unique visitors in February, and its traffic doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

TwitStat says TwitPic is now the sixth most popular app used by Twitter clients, rising from being the tenth most popular app when we wrote about TwitStat’s rankings in mid-February. And TwitPic was even used to break news of the plane crash on the Hudson River.

Two more competitors to TwitPic have emerged. TweetPhoto and Pixim are both photo sharing applications attempting to challenge its dominance, so we took a closer look.

Pixim uses OAuth to integrate with Twitter (so you don’t have to give out your username and password) and lets you adjust privacy settings on sharing pictures, tag friends in uploaded pictures, view stats on how many people and who has seen you pictures and see your friend’s pictures on the site. Pixim is similar to TwitPic in many ways but the latter incorporates a geotagging tool and mobile support, which Pixim doesn’t have on its site. While Pixim is planning to release their API soon, TwitPic has the advantage of already being built into most popular Twitter clients, and users who are interested in photo sharing have a familiarity with TwitPic.

TweetPhoto, who plans to launch later this month, also lets you use OAuth to integrate your Twitter account. You are then able to send pics through your mobile phone or upload pics via the site. Like TwitPic, TweetPhoto lets users comment on pictures on-site and tag photos. TweetPhoto will also feature integration with Facebook Connect, which is pretty cool, and something both TwitPic and Pixim lack. Like Pixim, TweetPhoto plans to release its own API, but might confront the same issue with TwitPic’s dominance.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.