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Posts Tagged ‘Firehose’

Facebook Firehose May Be Released at Developer Conference F8

Facebook plans to announce the availability of a firehose of user data at its F8 developers conference in April, we believe based on research. Such an offering could be similar to the firehose that Twitter has shared with large partners and select small developers building the famous Twitter ecosystem of 3rd party applications around the web. A Facebook representative did not offer a denial, saying only that the company would not comment on speculation.

The huge social network was once private by default, then made controversial changes in December that pushed hundreds of millions of users toward publishing their information in public and now appears aimed to complete the about-face at its F8 developer conference by offering up public user data in a huge river that outside parties can consume, analyze and build on top of.

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The first F8 conference saw the unveiling of the Facebook Platform, a way for app developers to build games and utilities inside of Facebook. This announcement would represent Facebook as a platform and enable far more to be built outside and on top of the social network. Privacy concerns? For sure. Genuinely world-changing potential? There’s a lot of that too.

It’s not clear exactly what would be included in this firehose, it could be a stream of low-value Fan Page promotional content, for example. The most likely thing content to be included though is user activity data published under public privacy settings. There’s far, far more of that today than there was just a few months ago.

If you’ve participated in a supermarket loyalty program, you’re familiar with the concept of opting-in to sharing data about your activities with outside parties in exchange for benefits. In that common practice, though, consumers gain shopping discounts but get nothing from the analysis of the data they emit.

In the case of the Twitter Firehose, the much sought-after full feed of public user data from across the site, users gain access to all kinds of interesting applications and insights based on analysis of their use of Twitter.

A Facebook firehose would be much bigger. We’re hearing that there will be no launch partners in the announcement, but the imagination runs wild thinking about all the mashup possibilities. We learned last week that user location data is coming to Facebook at F8, now picture all this rich data roaring like a river into the data digesting machines of a wide range of developers all over the world.

A firehose of public Facebook user activity data could function like a living, breathing global census. Cross reference that data with any other data set and we may find an ocean of insights into the human condition, around the world, for slices of people, second by second or over time.

This is something we’ve been calling on Facebook to do for some time. I’ve sat with founder Mark Zuckerberg and discussed the importance and potential of releasing aggregate user data at length.

That, though, was before last December when the privacy policy changed.

Privacy Concerns

Just because something is posted publicly on the web, Microsoft researcher danah boyd said in her opening keynote at SXSW yesterday, doesn’t mean people want it to be broadcast more generally. Making something public is not permission to publicize it.

Is the inclusion of public activity into a firehose programatically available to outside developers a case of broadcast that violates user control and thus privacy?

I don’t think it’s clear either way. In a discussion about aggregate Twitter data analysis late last year, a representative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told me that Twitter users had no reasonable expectation that their data wouldn’t be redistributed and analyzed in bulk because Twitter was a public forum.

Facebook used to be different. It was private by default, our actions were shared only with friends and family that we gave permission to see our status messages and photos.

Then in December the company made a dramatic shift, prompting users to re-evaluate their privacy settings and making “share with everyone all over the internet” the new default for most options. Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was only changing to reflect the way the world was changing, but we argued that was a disingenous rationalization of Facebook’s culture-changing actions driven in part by its own profit motive. We also argued that by pushing users toward being more public the company was reducing user control over data and spreading distrust about making data available online at all. That put at risk the idea of sharing your data in a way that could be analyzed.

Is there a reasonable expectation that online social networking activity set to “public” will not be redistributed in bulk to outside parties? How can a company like Facebook respect user privacy as much as possible while still achieving the incredible things that can be achieved by making aggregate user data available for analysis?

Let’s begin to discuss it.

See also: The personal blog of Cameron Marlow, Facebook’s in-house sociologist and big data guy.
Related analysis: Twitter 2.0: API Rate Change Could Lead to a World of New Apps & Features
Chewing on the Issues: Twitter Data Dump: InfoChimps Puts 1B Connections Up for Sale

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Twitter To Add “Nifty” Site Features That May Make You Forget Third-Party Clients

Twitter appears to be on the verge of some big changes to its website if the tweet that Twitter developer Alex Payne sent today is any indication. In fact, the new features may be so good that they may make some people re-examine their use of desktop clients, apparently. As Payne writes:

If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)

Not surprisingly, that tweet had a few third-party Twitter developers worried.

“@al3x as a developer, i’m not sure how to take that looming tweet….,” wrote developer Chad Etzel (who actually used to work part-time at Twitter). Payne immediately repsonded, “@jazzychad I don’t mean that developers won’t be able to compete with the site. We still release most everything API-first, of course.“

While I dabble with both Brizzly and Seesmic Desktop, I still mainly use Twitter.com day to day, so the prospect of these new, more powerful features excites me. The reason I never got into one of the desktop clients is the same reason I only dabble with Brizzly and Seesmic: The lag in the API (and the rate-limit) annoys me. But that should hopefully change soon with the new Twitter firehose of data.

Last year, Twitter added two huge new features to Twitter.com: Lists and Retweets.

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Cognitive Match Secures Another $2.5m For Realtime Matching

Everyone knows “realtime” has been a hot tech category for the last year or so but as we all know the ‘realtime problem’ is getting some kind of intelligence out of that firehose, and, crucially, eventually working out if or how it can be monetised. Search found its way with keyword targeting, but what will happen around realtime?

The Cognitive Match startup is applying artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content (product, offers, or editorial) to realtime content. It’s doing this in part by relying on an academic panel of professors in artificial intelligence from Universities across the UK and Europe who specialise in machine learning and psychology. The idea is to ensure maximum response from individuals, thereby increasing conversion, revenue and ultimately profit.

Last year it raised a Series A investment from Dawn Capital, rumoured to be in the $1m+ ballpark. Today Dawn has stepped in again with a follow-on Series B investment of $2.5m which the company will use to accelerate its growth. That takes it’s war-chest to around $3.5m

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A Twitter App for Power Users: SocialVisor

Seemic’s announcement of Look, their brave new Twitter client, had the tubes positively humming yesterday.

Although it might be a great interface for newbies, this app isn’t recommended for power users. But we just found one that is – for desktop use, anyway. It’s an agile bit of hotness that’s as responsive and unobtrusive as you’d ever want, and it can also provide you with a stock-ticker-esque UI that will satiate all your info-social needs. Meet SocialVisor – the Twitter app.

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It runs primarily as a scrolling ticker on the top of your screen:

Here’s the skinny:

• You can run your social streams as a retractable bar above your desktop screen.
• You can login to Twitter and Facebook and choose to see either or both streams.
• You can group your buddies any way you want, regardless of which site they use.
• You can access DMs, retweets, replies and mentions.
• You can see threaded conversations from Twitter.
• You can share and view links, updates and pictures on either or both networks.

And more other common features for third-party apps, such as retweeting, following or unfollowing, replying, liking/favorite-ing, commenting and more. And when you want to update, links are automatically shortened with bit.ly and character counts are tracked as you type, all from a simple bar above your other windows.

If a user clicks his “exclamation” icon, there’s a slim popout for Facebook notifications. If you need to focus on other tasks, no problem – you can “pause” the entire firehose and resume any time you like.

When you don’t need it, it retreats conveniently into the background. There are no annoying popups flooding your screen when your stream gets a little noisy

The app has been live for about a month, and it’s just what the doctor ordered. It’s an OS-agnostic AIR application, so it’ll play nicely with Linux, Windows or Macs. We can see ourselves running this on the daily. One issue we had is that, while the visor does optionally dock at the top of the screen, when it’s locked on top, we were unable to access our menu bars for maximized windows. It’s still in beta, and a bit buggy, but what kind of early adopters would we be if we didn’t admit this app has huge potential, bugs and all?

Give it a shot, and let us know what you think in the comments.

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ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup

With the first week of 2010 in the books, we thought we would take a look at the most popular posts of the new year in this week’s weekly wrapup. In this edition we’ve got tips for funding advice, keeping organized and building loyal communities, but be sure to check out the newest post in our new series “Never Mind the Valley,” highlighting thriving startup communities outside of Silicon Valley.

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5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized

In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed.

While there is no shortage of online solutions, it can be hard to know which one is the right tool for the job, so here’s a list of five web applications to help kick-start your company and keep it organized without breaking the bank.

5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice

The best advice we can give you is to know your audience. You don’t try to sell booze to pregnant women, you don’t make God-jokes in Utah and you don’t get a term sheet without tailoring your pitch. Investors are already blogging about what they want from potential portfolio companies, so if you’re looking for funding you should be reading their blogs. While we know there are plenty of useful investment-related blogs, here’s a list of five to get you started.

Community First: How Wufoo Created a Captive Audience

So you’ve got a fabulous idea for a startup? That’s great, but before you get wide-eyed and start thinking about wireframes, venture capital and moving to San Francisco, get your feet wet first by beginning to build your community.

Having a strong and loyal community behind you is an important step in the startup process. After all, it will be much easier to convince a potential investor of the viability of your product if there is a thriving community eager to get their hands on it.

Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Los Angeles

Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn’t the first place you’d think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like Demand Media and Docstoc call Southern California home, it’s not surprising that the community is emerging as one of the country’s hottest startup hubs. ReadWriteWeb caught up with some defining characters of the LA Tech scene to find out why they’ve made their homes away from the traditional tech haunts of Silicon Valley.

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5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized

In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed.

While there is no shortage of online solutions, it can be hard to know which one is the right tool for the job, so here’s a list of five web applications to help kick-start your company and keep it organized without breaking the bank.

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Google Apps – Google’s collection of web apps includes solutions for corporate email accounts, calendars or contacts, but its best use for a new startup is with document sharing. Using Google Docs to collaborate on text documents, spreadsheets or even presentations is far more efficient than sending a file in an email attachment.

In recent years, Zoho has become an increasingly competitive enterprise alternative to Google, even adding integration with Google Apps. Zoho has also introduced more features that help it stand out against Google Apps, including their own CRM solution that aims to compete with Salesforce.com.

Basecamp – We here at ReadWriteWeb use Basecamp on a daily basis for managing ongoing projects and reviewing edits of our stories. Developed by 37signals, Basecamp offers a great interface with an easily read dashboard of the latest activity, as well as to-do lists, milestones and email alerts.

For the on-the-go entrepreneur, there are a handful of mobile Basecamp apps ranging in features and price. Personally, I recommend using Insight for iPhone, which was rebranded from Encamp and recently recommended by 37signals.

Dropbox – Whether it’s large financial spreadsheets, or Photoshop mockups of your website-to-be, you are going to need somewhere to store all your files. Dropbox makes all of these easy and relatively inexpensive, offering up to 100 GB for $20 a month. But it’s not just storage.

Dropbox can automatically sync with folders on your desktop, creating an offsite backup of your vital startup files in the cloud, which any member of your staff can access. An alternative solution would be to use Box.net, however their pricing plans are higher than Dropbox’s and are aimed at larger corporations.

Dimdim – The next time you find yourself struggling to explain an intricate concept to your coworkers through a text document or presentation, check out Dimdim and use the power of screen-sharing to make your point crystal clear. One of Dimdim’s best features is that their product works entirely from within your web browser without the need to download or install any extra software.

Screen-sharing services like Dimdim can save a young company hundreds if not thousands of dollars in travel expenses by providing a much more efficient way to meet and share information. Also a notable service in this space is Citrix’s GoToMeeting. However, like Box.net to Dropbox, its pricing is much higher than Dimdim’s.

MindMeister – Between the last two semesters of graduate school, I worked on a collaborative ten-week reporting project, and used online mind-mapping app MindMeister extensively to stay organized. The application is a great way to keep those more abstract ideas organized in an easy-to-understand way.

Countless startups have mapped out their product ideas and business plans on giant whiteboards, and now the whiteboard has gone digital. MindMeister makes it easy to create and share mind maps and flow charts, and best of all, its free to get started.

Photo by Flickr user simax.

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Top Ten Digital M&A Deals For 2010

Editor’s note: As the capital markets heat up and the economy continues to rebound, the deal flow is starting to open up again. We’ve already given you our top ten IPO candidates for 2010. In this guest post, Kelly Porter, an M&A expert at Woodside Capital Partners, proposes ten digital media deals he’d like to see. None of the companies mentioned in this editorial are clients of Woodside Capital Partners.

Digital media M&A activity is expected to pick up in 2010—big acquirers have significant cash on their balance sheets, share prices are up, and many good acquisition candidates are on the landscape. With this in mind, I’ve put together the following list of 10 interesting Digital Media M&A deals for 2010. Some are longshots, some are slam dunks; all would create compelling new opportunities and possibilities. It’s a list that was compiled in recent weeks over coffee with some of the brightest and most connected folks in the valley. Without further ado, here are the deals we envisioned:

1. Google acquires Roku

YouTube arguably holds the highest potential of Google’s major growth initiatives, capturing about 38% of video viewing on the web and serving more than 1 billion streams daily. However, the average YouTube user watches about five hours of TV daily versus only 15 minutes of YouTube. Moreover, consumers face a firehose of difficult-to-find viewing options on the YouTube site, with some 20 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute. Most important, Google is having trouble monetizing all that video content and YouTube is bleeding significant red ink. Roku would address all these issues plus extend the YouTube brand – via Roku’s set-top box. The Roku box currently streams content from sites like Netflix and Amazon VOD to a consumer’s television. Google could rebrand and supercharge the box with lots of cool new search features, interactivity, gaming, PVR functionality, a tier of Google-branded channels featuring popular YouTube content, plus add several tiers of channels from major studios, broadcast networks and cable networks. A freemium model could be deployed, with subscribers getting most content for free, and paying extra for premium tiers. Google could grow a potentially huge new revenue stream, plus the service would be a formidable competitor to the rumored Apple broadband TV service (Apple is reportedly talking to Disney and CBS about supplying content for the service). Some might say that Microsoft already tried this with WebTV; however WebTV never had the massive cross-promotion engines of YouTube and Google behind it.

2. Cisco acquires LinkedIn

Cisco’s pursuit of enterprise communications is important, and LinkedIn would be a natural and powerful extension of this strategy. LinkedIn is growing like wildfire, having nearly doubled its user base in the past two years and launched hot partnerships with companies like Microsoft, RIM and Twitter. Cisco’s acquisitions of WebEx, Tandberg, Jabber and PostPath would be augmented by LinkedIn’s 53 million members globally, and some very cool and unique new applications could be created using the combined capabilities of LinkedIn and Cisco’s various divisions. LinkedIn’s estimated 2010 revenues are just over $200M and the company’s last fundraising came in 2008, with a valuation of approximately $1 billion. For Cisco, with a $138 billion market cap and $35 billion in cash and short-term equivalents, acquiring LinkedIn for a big premium to the company’s most recent valuation (which is what it would take to acquire LinkedIn) would use a relatively small amount of that cash and would create a meaningful strategic extension for Cisco in the social networking domain.

3. Fox Interactive Media / MySpace acquires Pandora

As many music services struggle, Pandora has reportedly skyrocketed to 40 million registered users and is adding 600,000 new users per week. Pandora has become a bona fide internet behemoth, accounting for a reported 44% of internet radio listening, with half of that listening coming on mobile devices. One of MySpace’s great strengths is the social network’s music presence. In recent months, FIM/MySpace acquired imeem and iLike, but those acquisitions pale in comparison to a potential Pandora acquisition. A MySpace-Pandora combination would create formidable scale which would span multiple segments of the music industry—from coffee shop singer/songwriters to arena rock bands—and provide benefits to music consumers that are not available elsewhere. Pandora would also breathe new life into the MySpace brand, which has been lagging in the wake of Facebook.

4. Twitter acquires Twithawk, TweetMeme, bizz.ly, Skout and TwitJump

Some believe Twitter should sell to a larger company, but they are missing the greater opportunity.  Twitter enjoys massive potential as a standalone company. It is reminiscent of Yahoo! in 1995—a single compelling product, lots of traffic, growth potential and buzz, and poised to dominate several markets—in this case, the markets surrounding all things realtime. These five acquisitions—although all young companies themselves—would extend Twitter in significant ways: business marketing (Twithawk); realtime news discovery and sharing (TweetMeme); realtime promotion, publishing and sharing (bizz.ly); realtime dating/connecting (Skout); and Twitter management tools (TwitJump). Twitter could organically grow these new capabilities from within, but acquiring them through M&A would be faster and would also bring new talent into the company. Most important, these markets would bring new revenues to Twitter, extend its network effects, and broaden its footprint—ultimately positioning the company more favorably for a public offering.

5. Netflix acquires Flixster

Flixster—the movie-info sharing site with about 50 million unique users and a robust social networking core—is a near-perfect strategic fit for Netflix, providing both a marketing benefit as well as a critical social networking component. Netflix, with about 12 million subscribers (up about 28% from a year ago) is spending an attention-getting $27 per subscriber in acquisition costs. Flixster would help bring these subscriber acquisition costs down through its web presence, connection to Facebook and MySpace, and strength on the iPhone, where Flixster is the #1 movie app. Netflix’s future growth lies in adding new subscribers as well as increasing revenue from existing subscribers, and the company’s 17,000-title instant streaming service is a critical strategic component for its future; Flixster would be a core component in growing all of Netflix’s revenue streams. Rumors are recently afloat that Fox Interactive Media / MySpace is eyeing an acquisition of Flixster, but that deal is apparently not imminent. While there is indeed good strategic fit between Fox and Flixster, a Netflix-Flixster deal feels like an even better one.

6. Ticketmaster acquires Eventbrite

Eventbrite would be an excellent addition to the Ticketmaster portfolio, providing Ticketmaster with a new consumer market and Eventbrite with a deep-pocketed corporate parent that offers unparalleled distribution and marketing opportunities. Eventbrite enables an online presence for marketing and ticket sales for fairs, festivals, fundraisers and other events, rocketing from fledgling start-up in 2006 to projected 2009 sales of over $100 million, 3 million monthly uniques and 10,000 new monthly events. Ticketmaster’s savvy CEO Irving Azoff has shown great adeptness in growing revenues from $1.0 billion to nearly $1.5 billion in just the past four years, along with building substantial increases in the company’s free cash flow. Azoff would bring world-class managerial knowhow to Eventbrite’s high-volume, low-margin business. Ticketmaster has had its hands full seeking approval of the Live Nation merger; assuming that merger succeeds in early 2010, Eventbrite would be a solid next step in the company’s strategic growth.

7. DirecTV acquires Blip.tv

Comcast’s TV Everywhere online initiative—which features about 12,000 titles from about 30 major content providers—was a shot across DirecTV’s bow and pointed to the need for DirecTV to launch a successful online distribution initiative. Blip.tv offers DirecTV an immediate and valuable distribution channel for online broadcast, plus access to thousands of other programming assets from independent producers (which possibly could be used to program one or more unique channels on the DirecTV satellite TV service). Blip.tv currently manages 50,000+ shows and 3 million+ episodes. Views of Blip.tv programming have reportedly more than doubled in the past year, exceeding 85 million views during December 2009. The company has also attracted an impressive roster of advertisers including AT&T, Best Buy, Nikon, Chevy, Scion, Canon and Samsung. Blip.tv’s offering would need to be modified to distribute programming from major TV networks on DirecTV’s behalf (in order to limit distribution of those programs to DirecTV viewers), but that would likely not be a difficult modification to undertake. This would extend the audience reach for both companies.

8. Bing/Microsoft acquires Bit.ly

Bit.ly’s utility as a URL-shortener is far eclipsed by the strategic value the company brings to search: in November bit.ly shortened some 2 billion URL’s on Twitter, Facebook, email, instant messages and blogs, which means that the company has one of the best windows into realtime search across the internet. Twitter is often mentioned as the most likely acquirer of bit.ly, but an acquisition by Bing is even more compelling given the importance of realtime search to big search engines. Bing has gained impressive market share in the overall search market, but lags in realtime search. Bit.ly has grown out of nowhere in just the past two years to be one of the dominant companies in the social web. Given the growing importance of bit.ly, it would not be surprising to see a heated bidding war between Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft. A key mitigating factor is that Google and Facebook have recently rolled-out URL shorteners of their own.

9. Bing/Microsoft Acquires Foursquare

Called “Next Year’s Twitter”, Foursquare is a fantastically addictive and cool mobile startup that enables a person to share his location with a group of friends. Each time the person checks in from a particular location he or she earns a badge, and the person that checks in most from a particular location becomes the location’s “Mayor.”  It’s this addictive game quality that has Foursquare growing exponentially, a la Twitter. This is a natural add-on to Bing Maps, and would further extend Microsoft into the social web with a mobile extension carrying significant ad sales and promotional opportunities. Given that Foursquare is one of the most exciting private companies on the digital mediascape, the company would command a big premium. Google is another natural acquirer of Foursquare, but a Google-Foursquare tie-up is less likely because of events surrounding the acquisition of Dodgeball, and the team subsequently fleeing Google to create Foursquare.  Twitter could also acquire Foursquare.

10. LinkedIn acquires Yammer

Yammer is Twitter for the enterprise and has grown rapidly since its September 2008 launch, attracting 50,000 enterprise members so far. Yammer would be an ideal extension of LinkedIn’s reach into the enterprise and would provide new revenue to LinkedIn via its freemium model (companies pay $3 to $5 a head when they upgrade to a premium account). Given Yammer’s market traction and compelling model, it is likely that other enterprise-related suitors like Salesforce.com and Oracle would also step-up in a bidding process for Yammer.

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Facebook Will Be Google-able (If Your Profile is Set to Public)

At Google’s event today, the company announced not just a number of fantastic new features, including real-time search, but a new partnership as well: real-time search of public Facebook status updates.

A Google/Twitter partnership was announced months ago but we assumed that Facebook wouldn’t allow Google to index many details of its site because the two are fast becoming big rivals. Thus today’s announcement is a very big surprise.

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The integration of Facebook updates into Google search isn’t live yet; Google just said “soon” at its event today. The company also declined to comment on whether they were paying for access to this information. It has been presumed that Twitter is being paid by partners including Google, Bing and Yahoo for access to its firehose of updates.

SearchEngineLand’s Danny Sullivan pointed out at the Google event today that there was some real irony in the fact that these real-time sources may be receiving millions from the search engines, while newspapers have demanded payment from Google for inclusion in search, but have been rebuffed.

Want your Facebook updates to stay out of Google? If that’s a concern, you needn’t worry. Only people who have changed their privacy settings to Public will have their content show up in Google. Facebook would like you to change that setting, but you don’t need to worry about your private content being sold to Google without your opting-in by changing your settings.

If Facebook is able to prod more users into sharing more content publicly, then it could rival Twitter in importance among real-time sources. Facebook has approximately 10 times as many users as Twitter today, but the fact that its default privacy setting is private means far less content is available for indexing. In addition to a potential for greater quantity, Facebook also holds far more personal information about its users, meaning that search tactics like personalization and localization would have more data points to process.

Ultimately, the real-time web remains larger than both of these sources and the newly-included MySpace partnership (also announced today). There is so much implicit real-time data online that few real-time search startups use only explicit data, like shared links, from social networks. For example, user click-streams are being indexed by real-time startups like OneRiot and Wowd, and user presence data is a valuable piece of real-time data being leveraged by startups like Aardvark. Google could try to revise its contract with users to allow indexing of click-streams, though, and TechCrunch reported last night that the company is trying to acquire Aardvark as we speak.

This real-time search stuff is just beginning.

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