The Latest from TechCrunch

Twiangulate Who You Share In Common With Other People On Twitter
Rant: Google Translate Toolbar In Chrome 5 Needs An ‘Off’ Button
TED Organizer Trashes Speaker, Fails Social IQ Test
Google Buzz Abandons Auto-Following Amid Privacy Concerns
Google Buzz Privacy Update Has Users Seeing Stars (Instead Of Your Friend’s Private Email Address)

Twiangulate Who You Share In Common With Other People On Twitter

Posted: 14 Feb 2010 08:41 AM PST

Here’s a good virtual parlor game. Pick any two or three Twitter users, and Twiangulate which friends or followers they have in common. Twiangulate is a site that shows the overlap between your social graph and any tow other people on Twitter. It shows the resulting names as a list or an interactive social map.

For instance, if you click on the image at right, you will see an enlarged version of a map I made to see who I follow in common with @fredwilson and @anildash. Fred Wilson follows 463 people, Anil follows 573, and I follow 315. Yet according to Twiangulate, we have 81 common “friends,” which perhaps says something about how insular the world of Web startups and social media can be. In contrast, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and I only have 15 common “friends.”

So who are some of the people Fred, Anil, and I all listen to on Twitter? Some of the common people we follow include Josh Kopelman, Chris Dixon, John Borthwick, Dennis Crowley, Doc Searls, Steve Case, Joshua Schachter, Danny Sullivan, Bradley Horowitz, Michael Arrington, and Jeff Jarvis.

Are we listening to the right people or do we suffer from groupthink? Who do you overlap with the most on Twitter?

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Rant: Google Translate Toolbar In Chrome 5 Needs An ‘Off’ Button

Posted: 14 Feb 2010 06:43 AM PST

Ever since I upgraded my beloved Chrome browser to version 5 on my (Windows) computer, I’ve been wanting to get something off my chest about a new feature that was baked into it, one that annoys me to no end.

With the update to the most recent version of the program came an integration with Google Translate, a feature that makes a custom toolbar appear under the bookmarks bar whenever I visit a Web page that contains text in a language other than English. Basically, Google Chrome supposes that I don’t understand any other languages besides English by default and enables me to translate Web pages in say, Spanish or Dutch, with one click.

Thanks for the help, Google, but how about you let me turn that damn toolbar off?

You see, unlike, the Google Translate extension for Chrome, this particular feature found its way to my most-used browser without asking for permission and no desire to leave any time soon. And while I’m sure a lot of people will think it’s a useful add-on, I just want to get rid of this intrusive little bugger as quickly as possible.

Right now, the toolbar asks me to confirm or decline if I would like to translate Web pages. When I click ‘Nope’, the toolbar disappears, only to reappear every time I jump to another Web page on the same website. Ah, but let’s see, there’s an Options button on the right hand side of the toolbar (which you can see on the larger image that you can view when you click through on the image embedded above).

There are the options:

- Never translate Spanish
- Never translate this site
- About Google Translate

The third option leads to a Chrome Help page with nothing on it, and the actual settings presented are insufficient: I don’t want to have to indicate for every language on the planet that I never want to see the toolbar pop up again, and I sure as hell ain’t gonna do it for all the non-English Web pages on the Internet I visit from this point forward.

What’s missing is an option to disable the toolbar completely, and I can only hope the next stable release of Chrome provides users like myself with a choice. Chrome’s a great, fast, free browser, but it’s those little things that can drive me insane. And I do realize this is a developer version, so consider this constructive feedback from an otherwise very happy user.

End rant.

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TED Organizer Trashes Speaker, Fails Social IQ Test

Posted: 14 Feb 2010 12:15 AM PST

TED Organizer Chris Anderson isn’t a man to be trifled with. If you criticize his event you don’t get invited back (which is why we see a bunch of nonsense articles about the event that don’t mean anything at all, but praise heavily). But it’s always fine for Anderson to trash his own speakers.

“I know I shouldn’t say this about one of my own speakers,” he said on Twitter, “but I thought Sarah Silverman was god-awful…”

Silverman’s crime? She made people uncomfortable by saying, over and over, that she wanted to adopt a retarded child. Like other comedians lately, she was using the word to remove its power to hurt people, and as a jab at Governor Palin’s recent jihad against the word.

Apparently the TED crowd didn’t get the joke.

Here’s a first hand version of what happened from a TED attendee who asked not to be named, since he or she would certainly never be invited back to the event:

What’s not funny is when people try to give certain words too much power over you and I think people could forgive the farts, doodies, penises and vaginas (I mean they did in the other talks), but what they couldn’t forgive was Sarah Silverman saying with absolute seriousness (I’m recalling from memory):

“I want to adopt a special needs child (to which one person applauded), because adopting a special needs child, who would do that? Only an awesome person, right?” I looked around the room and I knew exactly what was coming next. She was going to say retarded and not only was she going to say it, she was going to drop it like 10 times. I knew it wouldn’t be ok, but I was excited about it.

Words are powerful. They are mightier than the sword and all of that, but if you let them have too much power, you can create what I feel is evil. You create a society of people who are so concerned about what they say and what is PC and you destroy creative expression.

Sarah was following suit behind Megan McCain and Stephen Colbert in making fun of Sarah Palin. She didn’t say this, but I knew this. Why did I know this? Because this is a trend with comedians right now and I know why they are doing it. They are doing it for a cause. They don’t want that word turned into the “r word”. Saying the word “retarded” can only have extreme negative power if you let it and Sarah Silverman is brave, because she got on stage in front of some global minds and dropped it over and over and over.

She went on to say:

“The only problem with adopting a retarded child is that the retarded child, when you are 80 is well, still retarded and that she wouldn’t enjoy the freedoms of setting them free at age 18, so she was only going to adopt a retarded child with a terminal illness so it has an expiration date, because who would adopt a retarded child with a terminal illness? Well, someone who was awesome like her”.

The room went silent and she went on with her show and sang a song about how all of the penises in the world couldn’t fill your heart holes.

So, the theme of TED was “What the world needs now” and I think the world needs more Sarah. The world needs to take many things seriously and many things less seriously. The world needs to get its sense of humor back. It needs to allow people to express themselves without feeling the overwhelming pressures of society bearing down and being a social pariah. Sarah is a super hero in my opinion.

When she went off the stage, about half the room applauded and probably half of those only did so out of an automatic response. Then, one brave “soul” as TED would call us shouted out among the silence that followed: ENCORE! ENCORE! ENCORE! and those of us who felt the same way stood up cheering. Collectively, we were loud enough to let the stage manager know we wanted her back and we wanted to hear her say something more, be asked a question or better yet keep performing. They called out to her and for a while it seemed she had already left the building, but she came back on stage and looked confused. They told her, “They wanted you to come back to thank you and we’d do an encore but there’s no time, etc. etc.”

I’m of the opinion that if your crowd wants an encore, you fucking give it to them. Even if it means your schedule runs over. I mean, after all, we are adults. All but maybe 3 members of the audience are adults and anyone who brought kids or kids who attended are well aware they are listening to some grown up ideas. So, you can’t use that excuse.

No, they were uncomfortable and embarrassed. They had invited Sarah Silverman to TED and she made everyone feel uncomfortable. They should be embarrassed because they didn’t bother to watch her work before she came to get a full understanding of who she is and what she does. She’s a modern day Joan Rivers! She’s going to say cunt, fuck, shit, poop and guess what. Retard.

The whole thing, as TechCrunch would say, was an intelligence test and it had EVERYTHING to do with play. Playing with words and playing with different types of reactions to words and she’s a master and for that I applaud her again.

And a follow up email:

I thought about this even more.

I can understand why people don’t want a condition used as an insult. If you look up idiot, imbacile, dumb, etc.. they are all derogatory terms for someone with mental retardation, so this condition has been plagued with the condition used as derogatory term for quite some time. I have sympathy for it, but I still think that isn’t a reason to stop using the word.

I started thinking about the word Nigga and the word gay. Southpark has a great episode on the word gay and how it has morphed from referring to an actual homosexual to meaning something entirely different. So, people were upset about that, but some may argue that the tension between the two sides created more good for gay rights and bringing gays to light than ever before. I know the word nigga has. It pisses me off to no end that I can’t use that word out of fear for my own life. Blacks took it away, made it their own and even better made it *COOL* and now I feel jealous about it. I want to walk up to my pals and say “what’s up nigga”, but I can’t, but maybe if someone is brave at TED next year or somewhere else and decides to shock a few people I’ll be able to.

Now, Chris Anderson might have an issue with the whole talk, the retarded child stuff, the jew stuff, the penis stuff, the poop and whatever else and maybe his specific issue wasn’t that, but that’s what everyone talked about afterward. In a conference where so much effort is put on the children, Sarah crossed the comfort bar. It took us out of kumbaya for 18 minutes and made us squirm and laugh.

Perhaps TEDsters should just stick to the simple stuff. Slavery sucks, for example. Glad we finally got that controversial topic on the table for discussion.

Google Buzz Abandons Auto-Following Amid Privacy Concerns

Posted: 13 Feb 2010 05:44 PM PST

As we noted this morning, Google isn’t wasting any time in responding to user criticism about Buzz. Now they’ve rolled out another set of changes to further address Buzz’s privacy issues. The biggest change involves the automatic follow system: it’s now being switched to a suggestion model, where Google will present you with a list of friends it thinks you’d like to follow, but gives you a chance to deselect them before you start using the service.

That’s a pretty big change — when Buzz launched four days ago, one of its selling points was that it took no work on the user’s part to get started, because Buzz would automatically follow the people you interact with most on Gmail. Of course, that isn’t always a good thing — there are plenty of cases when you wouldn’t want people to know who you’d been communicating with. After an initial backlash Google made it easier to hide which users you were following, but now they’re ditching the auto-follow model entirely. Fortunately it only takes a minute to go through the suggestions, so it’s not much of a hurdle.

New users will see a screen like the one above, and Google’s post says that existing Buzz users will be shown a version of this friend selection screen in the next few weeks to confirm that they’re comfortable with everyone they’re following. The service is also going to stop automatically connecting Google Reader and Picasa albums to Buzz accounts, though those options will still be available.

Finally, Google is adding a Buzz section to Gmail’s Settings. Why this wasn’t there from the start is beyond me — before now, if you wanted to adjust your Buzz settings you had to go to your Google account page, which made very little sense because most people use Buzz from Gmail.

Earlier today, Google made yet another change to Buzz’s privacy settings by fixing a bug that could cause users to inadvertently expose their friends’ private settings.

All of these are good changes for Buzz, and I’m optimistic about its future, but I can’t help but wonder how they all made it through months of internal testing.

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Google Buzz Privacy Update Has Users Seeing Stars (Instead Of Your Friend’s Private Email Address)

Posted: 13 Feb 2010 11:43 AM PST

Google Buzz launched with more than its fair share of privacy issues, leading to a significant backlash from some users. Fortunately the Buzz team is fixing these issues at a brisk pace. Today, they’ve rolled out a fix to a bug that would let users inadvertently expose their friends’ private email addresses using Buzz’s @reply system. Now, instead of sharing these private email addresses with the public, Buzz will simply show everyone a series of asterisks.

The bug stemmed from the way Buzz handles @replies. To send a message to someone you do it using their Email address, and Buzz makes this easy by showing an autocomplete box as you start typing their name. Unfortunately if you happened to pick an Email address that wasn’t associated with a Google Profile (which is quite easy to do given how many people use multiple accounts), Buzz would expose that Email address to the world.

Earlier this week Google helped allay privacy concerns with some other changes to Buzz, including a more prominent option to hide your follower lists (which could be used to figure out who you frequently exchange emails with).

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