Michael Arrington argues, over at TechCrunch, that the startup community should ignore the current administration's entreaties for feedback on tech policy, and instead shoo policy makers away and hope for this best. This advice is naive, misguided and short-sighted and if followed, will yield less opportunity and potential for startups in the future. If the tech industry's innovators ignore government policy, it will instead be decided entirely by those who are uninformed about policy, in cahoots with the monied forces of legacy technology and media companies. Insulting government and dismissing it won't make it go away, and ignores the potential it provides for supporting new opportunities.
Adobe ignored the fact that Apple could regulate the app store market, and ended up wasting tons of time creating a new release of Flash that would generate iOS apps that Apple would never approve. TweetUp ignored the fact that Twitter could regulate the Twitter application market, and ended up potentially wasting tons of time creating a service that might not be able to build an advertising product that Twitter would approve.
And today, Michael Arrington suggested that startups ignore the fact that the U.S. Government can regulate the entire technology market, putting them at risk of wasting tons of time creating products or services that might be unintentionally or intentionally impacted by policy changes. Worse, he's shortsightedly advocating that there not be a dialogue between startups and policy makers, which might lead to startups missing the potential for building billlion-dollar businesses on open government platforms. Startups from Garmin to Foursquare rely on government GPS data, the Weather Channel turned government weather data into a billion dollar business, and I'm pretty sure health data is next. But not if everybody in Silicon Valley puts their fingers in their ears and says "la la la la la I can't hear you!"
Look, I get it. Tech geeks in San Francisco always want to play more-libertarian-than-thou, and it leads to silly things like saying "the government" as if it's a monolithic entity. That's the same as talking about "the technology industry" as if somebody stringing ethernet cables in Tulsa is the same as Steve Jobs. Michael's lead example of why the current administration shouldn't engage with the tech community? Chris Dodd's cluelessness about venture capital. You'd have be unaware of the distinction between the legislative and executive branch, convinced of the not-quite-proven concept that venture capital is an unmitigatedly positive force for innovation, and ignore the fact that the tech industry is successfully fighting against the legislation in order to make even the most tenuous case that this example has anything to do with the President's agenda.
People in D.C. don't look at the crappiness of the web browser on their Blackberries and make broad declarations that "the tech industry is clueless", they say "This one product has a flaw. Let's find a better one." People in San Francisco need to be at least that thoughtful when looking eastward.
What's my agenda? Well, obviously, I'm the director of Expert Labs, which has as its mission the goal of helping policy makers make better decisions by tapping in to the expertise of citizens, especially experts like the people who start new technology companies. But we are not part of the government — we're an independent, non-profit, non-partisan organization specifically because we think that if we can get people engaged in improving policy without having to have people work for government. Surely even the most diehard libertarian must want to support the idea that as citizens, we don't have to work for government or be a lobbyist in order to positively influence policy.
Now, I don't know Victoria Espinel, the intellectual property enforcer that Michael had such issue with. But I do know folks like Todd Park, who is part of this administration, as CTO of Health & Human Services, and the startup he built is making hundreds of millions of dollars more revenue than, say, the last half-dozen web startups that TechCrunch has covered.
But, most importantly, not liking government doesn't mean it will go away. It just means that only big, slow, customer-hostile tech companies will be the ones influencing policy. In the 90s, Microsoft ignored the entire realm of policy, thinking their hyper-competitive market couldn't possibly be of interest to regulators. Facebook's making that same mistake about privacy right now, not realizing that their continuous missteps and shoddy communications are going to doom not just Facebook, but the entire social media industry, to onerous regulations if they don't get their act together quick enough. And our ostensible voices of leadership are advocating "close your eyes and hope they go away" as a plan of action? It's clearly time for leaders who are in tune with reality when it comes to regulation.
Inevitably, people will point to failures of government as "proof" that government can't do anything right. These same people never point to corporate abuses as proof that corporations can't do anything right. And they'll use the fact that over 90 percent of venture-backed startups fail as a credential. I think all these systems and economies run the way that they do for a reason, and while I won't claim to be the best educated person in the world about all of these topics, I am someone who's worked at a venture-backed startup, started a few businesses, been involved in public policy discussions, and helped lead an effort to involve thousands of people from all walks of life in substantive policy discussions with policy makers in the White House. Talking about policy makers from a position of authority when you've failed to engage with them is even more egregious than simply judging a book by its cover; It's judging all books by one shoddy book's cover.
If you care about startups, get involved. Do you think the AT&Ts and Verizons, let alone the Halliburtons and BPs of the world, are going to just let the government leave startups alone? If you have a cool new music startup, and the RIAA sends 100 lobbyists to DC to crush you, and the current administration asks "What can we do to help you innovate?" and your answer is "STOP PISSING ON OUR FLOWERS YOU SOCIALISTS!", how do you think it's gonna play out?
Here's a hint: It doesn't end up with you sitting happily in a rose garden. AT&T is, (as detailed in the video below) funneling millions of dollars into fighting network neutrality, and the inventors and founders who could articulate why that's a bad thing are in danger of forfeiting the game instead of even showing up and trying to play. Stop listening to the people who've already got millions of dollars in their pockets, who already have control over tons of startups, when they tell you not to talk to your government. And stop believing the myth that the innovation and opportunity of Silicon Valley happened because "government didn't intervene". Instead, what you had was a relatively smart set of regulations that formed a framework where some small number of people could get very rich. There's no reason that system can't be expanded and improved, unless the startup community decides that there's no room left for any innovations in policy in the future.
Still not convinced? Please watch Susan Crawford articulate the challenge we all face:
Yahoo Adds Facebook, Begins New Role as Social Network Aggregator http://bit.ly/9TF6Ai
Yahoo has announced a series of changes set to roll out this week that integrate Facebook's social networking service into various Yahoo properties, including Yahoo Mail and its homepage. Also included in the announcement is news of a refresh for Yahoo Profiles. Originally launched in 2008, the new profiles will be accessible at pulse.yahoo.com (whenever Yahoo gets around to making that URL live, that is.)
With all these changes, we wonder: Did Yahoo finally pick a new direction? And is it "social network aggregation?"
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According to the company press release, Yahoo's senior director of Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network, Cody Simms, is quoted as saying Yahoo is "uniquely positioned to provide people with all of the mainstream methods of content discovery - social, search, communications, and editorial," which sounds like more of a mission statement than we've heard from the company in years.
One-time Web darlings from a bygone era of homepage portals, Yahoo has floundered over the years, lacking direction and a clear course. Even when directly asked by tech blogger Michael Arrington at the recent TechCrunch Disrupt conference, "what is Yahoo?", the stated answer from CEO Carol Bartz was rather wishy-washy: "Yahoo is a great company," she said. "Very strong in content for its users."
Right, so what is it again?
But with the new Facebook integration, it looks like Yahoo might now be starting to figure that out. It's an aggregator of not just news, but social networks too.
The Yahoo homepage already functions as a somewhat decent RSS reader for those mainstream users who don't know what RSS is - you "add favorite websites" to customize the homepage's sidebar, from a list of choices that includes Yahoo properties, mainstream news publications like NPR and WSJ, top blogs like Huffington Post and Boing Boing and a couple social networks too.
Facebook now joins Yahoo's own "Buzz" network (a Digg clone for voting up news stories), Twitter and Flickr, the latter a Yahoo-owned property, in the list of social sites that can be added as "favorites" to the homepage.
With Facebook added, you can actually read your News Feed from Yahoo.com via the "Facebook Quickview" feature. Once you give the site permission (similar to how Facebook applications work), Facebook launches as a mini-window on Yahoo's homepage...just like all the other news and social sources already do today.
But Yahoo's Facebook integration doesn't stop there - it's spread out across the network's sites, including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Flickr, and Yahoo's entertainment sites like omg!, Yahoo! TV, and Yahoo! Movies. And the company promises there's more to come. From any of these sources, those creating and sharing content can link those activities to their Facebook profiles, allowing those actions to post to their Facebook Wall and News Feed.
Because the social aggregation is so extensive, Yahoo users are actually being given a centralized dashboard to manage their external social networks from: Yahoo! Pulse. Available (soon, we hope) at pulse.yahoo.com, the site will replace Yahoo! Profiles as a place to link, manage and update social accounts and their privacy settings.
As far as picking a direction, going "all in" on Facebook isn't that bad of a choice for the flailing company, which was recently described by the New York Times as "a dog," referring to its poor stock market showing.
Creating a social and news dashboard application out of Yahoo.com is a decent choice for the company - after all, that's what Google is doing with Buzz and let's not forget that social aggregator FriendFeed did OK before being bought up by Facebook.
That said, one has to wonder: is a Facebook-heavy Yahoo enough to save the company?
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Yahoo Adds Facebook, Begins New Role as Social Network Aggregator
- Rob DianaYahoo Adds Facebook, Begins New Role as Social Network Aggregator
- Robin DindayalYahoo Adds Facebook, Begins New Role as Social Network Aggregator
- (jeff)isageek
In an interesting nugget of Friday afternoon news, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has posted an article featuring a preview of the upcoming fourth version of the social news site Digg. Founder Kevin Rose has published a glorious 1080p video to YouTube aimed at explaining the new features to publishers. Among the most interesting features is the inclusion of social network contacts into the Digg ecosystem, as well as the ability for publishers to auto-publish stories to Digg via an RSS feed.
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Just like when joining most Web services these days, users will be asked to search their Facebook and Twitter accounts (among others) to follow friends and contacts via Digg. The Digg homepage will then default to a page consisting entirely of stories dugg by the users they choose to follow. When browsing articles either on the social "My News" section, or on the more traditional "Top News" tab, users will be able to see which stories their friends have dugg, as well as view their friends' comments directly in-line with the story.
Rose says these new features play into the hands of publishers because the viral aspect of sharing stories with friends will help stories achieve higher digg counts. If one person diggs a story, it shows up on the homepages of their followers, and if they digg it, the process continues. To make the process of getting articles online even simpler, publishers can now claim their RSS feeds and automatically publish their content on Digg without having to visit the site.
These changes and additions may be just what the doctor ordered for Digg which has had to continually delay these updates. Personally the preview looks pretty slick, and may actually bring me back to using Digg on a more regular basis. Check our Rose's video below and let us know what you think in the comments.
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Facebook will be rolling out its promised “simplified” privacy controls to its users starting Wednesday, Facebook vice president Chris Cox announced Tuesday.
Cox made the announcement from the stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in NYC.
The venue is hardly surprising and in keeping with Facebook’s recent reliance on sympathetic media outlets to combat the backlash against its overweening ambitions and abysmal privacy practices. TechCrunch’s founder and head Michael Arrington recently came to the company’s defense, chastising the media for being too hard on Mark Zuckerberg.
On Monday, the Washington Post gave the company free space on its Op-Ed page to write a nearly content-free post on how it was listening to users. In fact, the company is promising little to its users and seems set to continue its new practice of turning over user data to third parties without getting prior permission.
Coincidentally, Washington Post publisher Donald Graham is on Facebook’s board and is a mentor to Zuckerberg. As Ryan Tate at Valleywag puts it: “An opinion piece in one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers carries more moral authority than a blog post on Facebook.com,” and that Graham has been a sort of “press consigliere for the startup founder.”
The closest the company has come to apologizing came the day before in a Sunday e-mail from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to the corporate-blogger-for-hire Robert Scoble. In it, Zuckerberg admitted to “making many mistakes.” Scoble is notorious for trying to gain as many followers as he can on any social network — and his main complaint about Facebook is that he thinks it should have no privacy at all.
In fact, after getting the e-mail, Scoble put a hand-wringing post entitled When Do You Throw a CEO’s Privacy Under the Bus,” worrying that publishing the e-mail from his “friend” would ruin his future relationship with Zuckerberg.
Meanwhile, over the weekend, NPR ran two different segments on Facebook’s woes (On the Media and All Things Considered) — both of which this reporter participated in — and the company declined to participate. Perhaps that’s because when Facebook officials get put on the spot — as the company’s public policy head Tim Sparapani was on a radio show last week, the company’s arrogance shines through.
For instance, Sparapani called the company’s new initiatives an “extraordinary gift to the public,” a statement that tech blogger Danny Sullivan called an “extraordinary rewriting of history.”
Wired.com asked Facebook to comment on its choice of outlets by e-mail, but the company did not respond.
Facebook, it seems, knows the value of sharing only with close friends, even if it keeps pushing you abandon that setting in your own profile.
Photo: Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg Credit: Andrew Feinberg
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Frank Quattrone, the Godfather of tech investment banking, sat down in a fireside chat with Michael Arrington today at Disrupt. Quattrone is back in tech boutique M&A with his new investment advisory firm, Qatalyst Partners. Recently, he advised Palm on its $1.2 billion acquisition by HP and two years ago he worked for Google when it tried to cut a search deal with Yahoo.
The conversation ranged from Quattrone’s remembrance of a 25-year-old Steve Jobs coming in to talk to his Stanford business school class before Apple’s IPO to his early days at Morgan Stanley and his thoughts on the prospects for the tech IPO market ever opening up again. On the IPO market, he notes that the market is waiting for “category-defining, earthshaking companies” to file to go public, but hasn’t seen them yet. Investors are waiting for Facebook, Twitter, or Zynga to go public. And just how much could Facebook be worth? Quips Quattrone: “$18 Gazillion dollars.”
Below are my rough notes of the Q&A:
Arrington: You were involved with Apple’s acquisition of Next that brought Steve Jobs back Your advice was to do that deal or not do the deal?
Quattrone: Apple had lost their recipe for doing an operating system, which is like Coke losing their recipe for soft drinks
Arrington: Tell me about the early days.
Quattrone: I joined Morgan Stanley in 1977, when it was less than 1,000 employees, and was in one business, advising companies. When I was in my second year at Stanford Business School, a professor brought in Steve Jobs before they had an IPO. I thought I was a hotshot. But here he was the same age as me, 25, about to IPO for a few hundred million dollars. I basically scratched my head and asked how did he do that?
Steve Jobs did tell us how PCs were going to change the world. He had to sell his Volkswagon van for $800 to get Apple started, so it was very inspirational.
Arrington: You formed Qatalyst Partners in 2008 to counsel companies and the very first thing you did was advise Google. There was a Microsoft -Yahoo takeover bid.
Quattrone: Yahoo had proposed a very complex deal to Microsoft. We explained to Google how much leverage they had in that situation, and that they could just do a search deal.
Arrington: Are there any other deals you have worked on last few years?
Quattrone. There was a bidding war for Data Domain that ended in an attractive sale of $2.4 billion by EMC.
Arrington: Do you ever forget how much money you are dealing with. You are tossing around $2.4 billion. What is that world like?
Quattrone: I did not start that way. At Morgan Stanley I was known as the guy who did small deals for small companies. The head of investment banking asked me why do you keep doing all of these small deals. What does Cisco do That was in 1990. For the first ten years it was a tough climb up a steep hill.
Arrington: How is the venture capital industry doing?
Quattrone: It Is not a pretty place to be unless you are one of the top ten firms with demand pull. It’s been a perfect storm. The last vintage of funds that have made any money for investors was 1998. That is not an asset class. Part of the problem is that it has become tougher and tougher to get companies public.
Arrington: Going public now takes ten years.
Quattrone: The bar has been set higher to go public.
For the VC market to produce above average returns you need there to be an IPO market. In the 1990s the venture community would get 50/50 liquidity from IPO and M&A. The IPO deals have the long tail, if you hold onto the stock they have a ride. If you lose those longtail returns you lose a lot of the returns.
Arringtone: John Doerr sees the third wave of disruption. The PC was the first, The internet was the second, and right now we are in the start. of third wave. He talks about mobile, social, and changes in commerce. Do you agree?
Quattrone: We do ride phases in this sector. A lot is happening at the convergence of mobile, social, and realtime. I first got Twitter when my daughter was in New Zealand and they had an earthquake. I entered the town and there were twelve posts. Twitter and people dealing with this realtime world have a huge advantage over the status quo.
Arrington: What is your Twitter account?
Quattrone: @Frankquattrone.
Arrington: What needs to happen for that to change, to get more IPOs?
Quattrone: I think the IPO market has been savaged by two different downturns. IPOs are more risky than average investments so when stocks are down, IPOs are down more. In my heydey at Morgan Stanley, when we were the leader, 80% of the deals were Robertson Stephens and other boutiques. The companies need to trust the boutiques.
The other thing is that mutual funds have grown by 200X over the last 30 or 40 years. A $1B mutual fund that is now managing a trillion dollars doesn’t care about an IPO.
There are probably 40 to 45 IPOs on file. They are not the category-defining, earthshaking companies the market wants to see. The market wants to see Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, LinkedIn, Skype. They want to see the companies that are changing the way we live.
Arrington: Twitter and Facebook and Zynga are changing the culture of the world. Does one of them have to go public first? Who is the standard bearer this time?
Quattrone: It could be any of them.
Arrington: Facebook could be, LInkedIn could be, Zynga could be?
Quattrone: Sure, Zynga is a whole new way to do social gaming.
Arrington: Yuri Milner said Facebook is an accelerator on top of the Internet. Have you ever played a Zynga game
Quattrone: I personally am not much of a gamer.
Arrington: What is the most secret thing you know?
Q: I hear Yahoo is preparing a hostile takeover for TechCrunch
A: The personal chemistry between me and the CEO is what sealed the deal. How is Carol doing?
Quattrone: I think she has done a great job. I harken back to when IBM lost its way and Lou Gerstner came in. Everyone bugged him about his strategy. Unless you got the fundamentals right . . .
Arrington: . . . plugging the holes in the dam
Q: yes, she knows
Do you think Facebook is a competitive threat to Google over the next ten years
Quattrone: Potentially, yeah. Look at how much time people are spending on Facebook. I think it was important that Zynga recently renewed that deal. Because developers are asking where can I make money?
Arrington: If Facebook were public, how big would it’s market cap be?
Quattrone: 18 Gazillion dollars. I have no idea, I don’t know what their revenues are.
Arrington: I bet you do know.
At Techcrunch Disrupt, in a panel moderated by Michael Arrington, Facebook’s VP Chris Cox mentioned that Facebook will turn on new – and supposedly simpler privacy controls tomorrow at some point. He said that the changes will be announced clearly “you’ll know about it”. He did not give any more details on when or what would be released.
Here is some of our earlier coverage on this topic:
Facebook takes its time, but responds to the advertising privacy issues.
Facebook CEO: “we’ve made a bunch of mistakes.” Changes coming this week.
Facebook Confirms Simpler Privacy Settings Coming Soon
We’ll just have to wait until tomorrow to see exactly what these changes are going to be.
I start each day by working out, but today, I made an exception –- I woke up and tuned into the live feed of TechCrunch Disrupt. I was hoping to see what one of my favorite Silicon Valley people had to say — John Doerr, who somehow has a way of encapsulating an era, a trend or a combination of technologies with just a few succinct words.
I mean this is the guy who uttered the memorable (and very true, in hindsight) lines such as “the largest legal creation of wealth on the planet“ or “The old economy was about monopolies; the new economy is about competition.” And who can forget: “I have never paid so much for so little,” following his investment in Google.
This is also the man who invested in market-making startups such as Sun Microsystems, Intuit, Genentech, Symantec, Amazon.com, Netscape, Google and more recently, Bloom Energy. He was due to talk about the third wave, Michael Arrington had hinted in a post — and in light of the fact that he was the driving force behind @Home, the company that jump-started the broadband revolution — I was more than a little excited to hear what he had to say.
So I made myself a nice cup of peach-flavored white tea and sat down to watch the conversation Doerr was having with Charlie Rose, another one of my favorite people. Watching two people I admire that much talk about the future was so exciting that I forgot to call my parents, who were leaving to make their way over to the U.S. Oops!
What I got was a commercial for social gaming startup, Zynga, which Doerr described by saying: “We invested in Zynga 20 months ago, and it’s the fastest-growing venture we’ve ever had.” Then came his thesis about the third wave:
I think we’re on the verge of a third great wave of innovation. The first was the microchip and the PC in the early 80s. The second wave was 1995: the Internet. Marc Andresseen brought Netscape Navigator to the world. Then Amazon came. Then in 1999 we saw the 15th search engine called “Google.” This third wave is social, mobile, new commerce. We don’t have a name for it yet. We could be on the verge of reinventing the web. It’s people, it’s places, it’s relationships. It’s exciting. These smartphones change everything. They’re always connected, always on. It’s a powerful new platform. 85 million iPhones and iPod touches – we’re there. And now we have the iPad. It took just 28 days to sell a million of them. It’s not a big iPod. It’s a new paradigm. Imagine 10 years forward.
That was the extent of what he had to offer; even in a subsequent follow-up interview with TechCrunch TV he had little to add. But Social, Mobile and New Commerce — that doesn’t add up to the third wave of anything. That’s just the natural evolution of the Internet. It was obvious in 2002 that due to a growing number of broadband connections, more edge touch points (mobiles, laptops, connected televisions) and more people on the web, the Internet revolution, which began in 1995 — with Doerr providing the fertilizer — would continue to gain scale.
It was also obvious that more people and more always-on connections at higher speeds would mean more opportunities. Social — thanks to a determined kid named Mark Zuckerberg — is now part of the Internet fabric. More than 500 million have already signed on to be part a part of his social networking site, even despite the company’s privacy-related shenanigans.
Mobile? We’ve been a mobile society for the past few years — the iPhone only added fuel to the fire lit by the rollout of 3G networks in the middle of this decade. And new commerce? That’s an idea the South Koreans and the Japanese have been mucking around with since the 90′s and lately the Chinese. Zynga might be the darling today, but virtual currencies and gifts have been around an awful lot longer than that.
So if Social, Mobile and New Commerce are the third wave, we are way past the prediction stage. We’re already riding it. What comes next? That’s what I want to know. Especially from the one man whom I’ve have always counted on as being able to see the future better than everyone else.
P.S.: If you have thoughts about the next evolution of the web, leave a comment or feel free to drop me an email with your thoughts.
From GigaOM Pro: As Zynga Profits From Personal Data, Other Opportunities Abound and Is an iPhone- and Android-Only World the Best We Can Do?
Bartz Curses Arrington at TechCrunch Disrupt is a post from Chris Pirillo
Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz participated in a cozy little chat with TechCrunch CEO Michael Arrington earlier today during TechCrunch Disrupt. True to himself, Michael opened the chat by asking Carol “So how the fuck are you?” Niceties aside, Arrington got down to the nitty gritty.
There have been a couple of major changes over at Yahoo! in recent weeks. Personals are no longer a part of the site. Instead, Yahoo! and Match.com have teamed up to take dating to a new level. Additionally, the company just recently announced a deal with Nokia. Both of these moves show that the company is struggling to catch up and try to become the powerhouse they once were.
Michael asked some tough questions of Carol, such as: “How important is social to Yahoo?” Carol seemed to fumble through her answers at times, as though she wasn’t quite sure what to say. In response to that particular query, she quipped: “Back when social had a broad definition, you could almost say that Yahoo Finance chat was the first social product. We have a million comments a day now. We had 85,000 comments on day one at Yahoo News. And we’re merging in some of the big products like Twitter, etc. We’re doing some new cool things with Mail next month too. It’s about finding out the new things about people.”
I hate to tell you, Carol, but you guys are just a tad late to the party. If you want to consider the Yahoo Finance chat to have been the first social product, we’ll go ahead and give that to you. However, while other companies such as Twitter and Facebook have been dominating the field, Yahoo! has remained stagnant and forgettable. The claims of being “on 37 million of the 82 million mobile devices in the US. We have half the US market. People don’t think that’s true, but it is. And we’re huge in the emerging world.” honestly don’t ring very true. Take a glance around the Internet – ask people how often they use and of the Yahoo! site or services. I have a feeling you’ll be pretty shocked at the reply.
Arrington was ruthless in his questions to Carol regarding Google. He attempted to call her on a few things she has said in the past, when she claimed that Google “needs to grow a Yahoo every year — just go into a lot of businesses. They have to be a 20% grower.” What, exactly, are they supposed to be growing? Google has already carved out their niche, and they continue to expand on it nearly every day. Have we forgotten Google TV already, Ms. Bartz?
What bothers me most about this interview is Carol’s lack of professionalism. I don’t honestly care how much Arrington grills you… you don’t tell him to “fuck off” at the end of the interview. I know that she (and the audience) laughed it off, but it was a serious gaffe. She was frazzled by all appearances, and knew that Michael had gotten the best of her. Just moments earlier, she had stated that she is only “one of many” people who could do her job, and that that was “the beauty of it.”
Here’s a piece of advice: NEVER tell the world that others could do your job as well as you can, and then tell the CEO of a “very tiny” business such as TechCrunch to fuck off in front of a live audience. The point isn’t that she said it to Arrington. The point is that she said it at all. Sure, I curse on occasion. However, I don’t go around telling people to f*ck off when they have made me uncomfortable. You’re supposed to smile and nod your head. Give back as good as you get. Above all else… remain calm.
You get more flies with honey than you do with the F word. I’m willing to bet that the “many people” who could do her job wouldn’t have caused such an uproar.
What are your thoughts? Do you think that Carol’s send-off was appropriate, or something she should have likely kept to herself?
RT @dannysullivan: more on bartz & the f-bomb. she's genius in dropping it as way to keep attention off big issues yahoo faces http://tcrn.ch/aMtGsD
- Robert ScobleHe can’t help himself. Michael Arrington has Ochlophobia. http://bit.ly/cgi4vt
[Direct Link]Dear Mr Mob, I heartily enjoyed this post.
- WorldofHigletThat is incisive writing, Eric. Truly EXCELLENT.
- MicahI liked it after the first two sentences
- MiniMage loves youThanks.
- Eric @ CSTechcast.comWell done, sir.
- Steven Perez, FF BunnehThe Seattle Social Community is Growing is a post from Chris Pirillo
Ever since I moved here to Seattle, I’ve talked to all of you about how much I love it here. I love the people, the weather and the city itself. There are so many amazing people and companies within a short distance of where I live, and being able to network with them face-to-face is invaluable to me. It’s been exciting this week to read the news of two big names agreeing with me and making a home here in the Pacific Northwest.
On Monday, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington announced that he had moved his home to Seattle. He listed many reasons for this change, including pointing at the many awesome startups who have staked a claim here. Michael says that he has always felt that the Silicon Valley was the place to be if you had anything to do with startups and the people behind them. However, he now states that “But that doesn’t mean Seattle isn’t a hotbed of entrepreneurism. There are scores and scores of startups here that are doing innovative and disruptive things, and I want to get right in the middle of things. Be an insider instead of just an occasional visitor.” I couldn’t agree more.
Today, I read that Facebook is moving in, as well. They are scouting locations for a new engineering office, and plan to have about 30 people employed there by next year. All of us who are locals already should be quite proud of what the official announcement said: “Seattle has a strong history of innovation and is home to thousands of talented technical people who we want to help us solve the challenges of designing and building the next generation of Facebook.”
Welcome Facebook and Mike Arrington! I have a feeling our paths will cross often as we all work together to continue to bring Seattle to the front of the social media and technology worlds.
Salesforce.com has just announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Jigsaw, which provides crowd-sourced data services in the cloud, for approximately $142 million in cash, plus a performance-based earn out of up to 10% of the purchase price.
The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of fiscal year 2011, subject to customary closing conditions.
The enterprise cloud computing company in a statement touts Jigsaw’s Wikipedia-style crowd-sourcing model, which it says delivers the world’s most complete, accurate and up-to-date business contact data. When the company launched back in 2006, Michael Arrington deemed it a really, really bad idea.
Jigsaw has changed its model since then: people can now see if their personal information has been uploaded, and there is a process to have it removed, at least temporarily. And users are no longer paid cash to upload contacts. Instead they receive points that can be used to download contact other people’s contact information. Revenue is rumored to be around $30 million/ year.
As for Arrington, he went from calling the company evil to simply amoral.
Going back to the acquisition: Salesforce says the deal will allow the company to combine its suite of CRM applications and enterprise cloud platform with Jigsaw’s model for the automation of acquiring, completing and cleansing business contact data. Jigsaw’s data cloud platform, it adds, also creates an enormous opportunity for developers and independent software vendors to deliver new applications that leverage the business contact data found in Jigsaw.
Looking ahead, Salesforce seeks the creation of new partnerships with information services companies like D&B, Hoover’s and LexisNexis.
Jigsaw’s community is said to consist of more than 1.2 million members. Over the last six years, community members have built and maintained a contact database of more than 21 million professionals at nearly 4 million companies, according to the press release. Jigsaw currently has 800 corporate customers.
Jigsaw had raised $18 million in venture capital to date.
Salesforce Buys Business Directory Jigsaw For $142 Million In Cash Plus Earn-Out
- Tac Anderson
Social media is expanding the power of word of mouth marketing. But as always, WOM is hard to measure. Forrester is attempting to rectify that with their latest measure, Peer Influence Analysis.
In keeping with traditional WOMM thought, Forrester says that Mass Influencers, who make up just 16 percent of all online Americans, are responsible for 80 percent of the brand impressions in online social settings.
But the big winner is Facebook:
Of all the social influence impressions, Forrester found that 256B were on social networks, and another 1.64B were on other forms of social media (including blogs).
Forrester divides the Mass Influencers into two groups: Mass Connectors and Mass Mavens (3.7% of the online population falls into both categories). Mass Connectors have a lot of online friends—537 total across all networks, Forrester reports. Mass Mavens are people with a high level of expertise in their field. While Mass Mavens are driven to collect and share facts and opinions, Mass Connectors are driven to know others. Naturally, both frequently post about products and services.
As always, Influencers are the Holy Grail of WOMM. Unfortunately, Forrester doesn’t offer a whole lot of advice on finding those influencers. However, once you find them, Forrester says, don’t just use the same campaigns you’d use with the rest of your social media efforts, or with your “social broadcasters”:
Social Broadcasters are the “famous” individuals in your market, like Robert Scoble or Michael Arrington for consumer electronics. While they can achieve a great number of impressions, they cannot equal the power of unleashing thousands and millions of Mass Influencers. You need separate programs for Social Broadcasters and Mass Influencers.
What do you think? How do you find influencers? Are they still as influential as this study indicates?
You guys are WRONG Twitter will keep getting huge and growing WITH its developers.
It’s been a really stressful few days for the Twitter developers from the announcements of Friday to this decisive day of Chirp. Chirp started really with a fresh room this morning, ask Ryan Sarver when he said his goal was developer happiness and asked us “are you happy” and a minority answered, obviously still under shock from Twitter competing more with its developers. There were in fact some more bad news for the developers today: Evan Williams confirmed an Android app and hinted that bit.ly would be removed as url shortener as well as the high probability that they will integrate media (photo services come to mind).
I have had an interesting week myself, it started with Michael Arrington explaining that I was in denial with an awesome picture to defin e the situation, then emails from friends, partners sorry to hear that we are going to be in huge difficulties competing with Twitter and some employees literally wondering if they would have a job (think about my mobile developers who were told by Fred Wilson that they should stop filling holes). My morning has been mostly populated by meetings with friends and press looking totally sorry as if someone had died in my family.
I am focusing myself on the good news from Twitter itself
-strong commitment to keep the APIs open and not use internal APIs only for themselves
-make Twitter.com use the same public APIs as everyone else such as m.twitter.com is doing (great that means we will have the same tools to play with)
-streaming live feed for desktop clients and Twitter does not seem to be investing much in desktop clients (Tweetie desktop will ship but I don’t expect much action there)
Trust is back and investments will keep going big time in the space
-Evan, Biz, Dick, Ryan and the entire Twitter team restored trust, it was my biggest concern, that we (and therefore the investors community) would be so uncertain about the next Twitter moves that the space would get frozen by lack of investments from VCs and scared developers. They did a great job answering all the questions in an open and straight conversation.
-I felt the room was reassured and warm in the afternoon, lots of private conversations confirming that people were less worried
-Realtime investor star Ron Conway has set the tone and said that he will invest even more in the space, and Ron is a trend setter. No doubt it will happen. I bet Twitter will come with its own fund like Facebook did.
Developers still have to adapt to this new deal
-Guy Kawasaki has a great post and very funny videos too. Basically developers who are angry should shut up (they already did) and keep rockin’
-Twitter launching its own mobile clients is a great challenge for many, including my own company and here is how we adapt. Expect all Seesmic products to be GREAT for Twitter but also support more and more networks as we already started.
-the new Twitter moves actually has reinforced us. We are launching today our Seesmic Desktop Platform and there is a huge attention from developers and partners around it
-most Twitter app with “tweet” something in their names will change their names very quickly
-many developers will integrated other services like we do to decrease their risk, but I don’t think this will affect the Twitter growth and it’s a good safe move for them
The net is Twitter rocks. As Evan said, the more users on Twitter the more opportunities for us developers and I agree I am very impressed by its management and what happened last week is mostly due to a poor communication which they have already started correcting. There will be plenty of holes to fill in the future that won’t get destroyed by Twitter. Let’s keep it up and change the way people consume the news for ever as well as stay in touch with their friends.
It’s only a beginning, the real time web phenomenon is on its way for real and for years.
F*CK you naysayers. Twitter did NOT f*ck us and just rocks.
- Louis GrayLoic seems ticked. Potty mouth.
- Louis GrayI'm not sure how he feels about it. Seemed a bit ambivalent o_O
- WorldofHigletF*CK you naysayers. Twitter did NOT f*ck us and just rocks.
- AJ BatacHeadlines like that are why English speakers say "Pardon my French". ;-)
- Spidra Webster
Engadget has reviewed the Fusion Garage JooJoo tablet, and for a device that once had some good buzz, it sounds…devastatingly disappointing. The user interface is gnarly; it doesn’t run Flash (supposedly a big selling point) well; the battery conks out after 2.5 hours. Couple that with the fundamental limitations imposed by by the fact that it’s browser-only device that only works when Wi-Fi is available–it can’t run apps–and it’s unclear why any tablet fancier would spend $499 on this rather than on an iPad.
Given the shipping delays the JooJoo already suffered, it’s also unclear why Fusion Garage decided to ship it more or less simultaneously with the iPad rather than postpone the launch a bit longer so it could whip the software into more respectable shape.
We’ll never know for sure what this gizmo would have been like if the strange soap opera that led to it shipping as the JooJoo rather than the CrunchPad hadn’t transpired. But you gotta wonder: Maybe Michael Arrington is lucky that he was unwillingly disassociated from it months before it shipped…
TechCrunch Loses Steve Gillmor to Salesforce is a post from Chris Pirillo
Michael Arrington received news a short while ago that he had hoped to never hear: long-time friend and mentor Steve Gillmor is leaving TechCrunch. Steve is the founding editor of TechCrunchIT, and has been writing about technology for more than thirty years.
Beginning Monday, Gillmor will be on the senior team at Salesforce. The founder of the company, Marc Benioff, reportedly recruited Steve himself. This explains Arrington’s harsh sentiment of “You bastard.” Michael acknowledges that the move will be an excellent opportunity for Steve, but that doesn’t mean he has to be happy about it. Michael – like many of us – listened to Steve on the Gillmor Gang long before TechCrunch itself came into existence.
I’m happy to see that Steve will continue writing for TechCrunch on a weekly basis. I’ve always enjoyed reading whatever he came up with – considering he’s usually on the mark (and ahead of the game). Steve is not only one helluva nice guy… he is also smarter than many people have ever realized. Michael definitely hit the nail on the head when he stated that he’s “not exaggerating when I say that Steve has forgotten more things than I’ll ever learn.” That holds true for me, as well.
I’m not sure if this change is good or bad – it just is. I certainly know Steve should bring his usual dry wit and controversial nature to the table. It’s going to be interesting to see what develops with this addition to the Salesforce team.
TechCrunch Loses Steve Gillmor to Salesforce - http://lgno.me/bTYowG
- Chris Pirillo
Unvarnished is a new website where you can post and read anonymous reviews of people and their professional performance. That sounds a little frightening, doesn't it?
TechCrunch has been writing about it for days and the company just started rolling out invites. See Michael Arrington's thought provoking, if extreme, post Reputation Is Dead: It's Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions and Evelyn Rusli's review Unvarnished: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place For Defamation. I told Unvarnished founder Pete Kazanjy that I thought he was doing more harm than good, I heard his response and now I've tried his site. It turns out that reality is a lot more complex than the hype. Unvarnished is both more intellectually interesting and less freakishly prurient than you might think.
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Unvarnished could be positioned as a place you can anonymously slam your former bosses on or a place you've just got to visit in order to see what's been written about you. It could just as accurately be described as LinkedIn with teeth: minus the sappy reviews people post to each others' profiles on that site. LinkedIn with teeth makes it seem more mundane, and that is the truth of the matter. Browse around a little and you'll calm down pretty quickly. Come back later when you're considering working with someone and you may find it useful.
Could the service be abused? It could, but first let's look at how it works.
Unvarnished operates on top of Facebook, which is both good and bad. You have to get a request to be reviewed sent by a Facebook friend in order to create an Unvarnished account, you have to use FacebookConnect to log-in to the service and you have to have demonstrated a certain amount of activity on Facebook in order to prove that you aren't setting up a fake account just to post critical reviews of people on Unvarnished. At many points in navigating the site you're encouraged to post reviews of your Facebook friends.
The reviews you post are tied to your profile, but readers and the people you review cannot trace back from your reviews to see who posted them. They can only see your aggregate activity history on the site and how highly rated your other reviews have been. In other words, if you've reviewed a lot of people and many other users have approved of your reviews, then your next review is going to carry extra weight in the minds of readers. Chronically judgmental but on balance positive? You'll love Unvarnished!
The downside of the close Facebook integration is that one more time Facebook is centralizing our identity while we navigate around the larger web. Expect to see many more sites do this, though, as it makes authentication really easy and means that every new user automatically arrives with demographic, social and taste data. Sorry OpenID and distributed data portability, 400 million people voted for Facebook.
You can't delete things that get said about you on Unvarnished. It's like Yelp but for individuals, and many businesses already hate Yelp. What's to stop people from saying untrue, unkind, unfair and unattributed things about you? Not much.
"A lot of people say 'I don't want people to make reputation claims about me'," site founder Kazanjy says, "but they also say 'I certainly would like to consume repuation claims about other people'."
People on the site have the opportunity to say bad things about you and your supporters have the opportunity to respond. You might be a bully with a posse of bullies who have your back. Your critics might be marginalized people who make no use of Unvarnished other than to shed much-needed light on your abuses of power, or they might be people with an axe to grind who jump onto the site to post terrible, untrue things about you.
Kazanjy's contention is that a low reputation on the site and a group of vocal supporters can overcome any unfair criticism of you. That's not very convincing.
When he says that both the offline world and the web at large work in the same way (anyone can post anything about anybody) but that Unvarnished is merely centralizing this discourse, then things start to get interesting.
Few people have the knowledge, the broadcast platform or the search engine pull to really post a free-flying slam against a person online in a place it could be easily found. The relatively few people who could do that have an unspoken agreement not to do so. It would be uncouth and open them up to other powerful people doing the same thing to them.
Unvarnished aims to create one centralized, democratized place to learn about a person's reputation. Suddenly even people who are not powerful public figures will have a single, prominent place to post their criticisms of others - and they'll have very little disincentive to doing so.
Is that evil? Perhaps it is, a little. Is it a little bit genius as well? Time will tell. Unvarnished invites have begun filtering through Facebook today. If you see one, take a few minutes to check it out.
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Unvarnished is no "burn book."
After 15 years of covering Web startups, it’s not often that one strikes a chord in this jaded journalist’s heart. But one new Silicon Valley company strikes me as not just timely, but necessary. It’s called Unvarnished, and it aims to collect reviews about people.
This has caused predictable alarm among people who have reason to worry about their reputations. Michael Arrington hinted at the existence of the startup Sunday, calling it a “Yelp for people.” He argued that “reputation is dead” and that anything anyone might have to say about anyone else amounted to nothing more than youthful indiscretions or the gripings of disgruntled employees.
That’s nonsense, of course. Long experience has taught me that where there’s smoke, there’s fire — and that people have a way of falling back into old patterns.
The startup in question is almost certainly Unvarnished: A source in the recruiting business alerted me to Unvarnished’s existence a few weeks ago, and Pete Kazanjy, a former VMware product manager, who now lists himself as a “founder at Unvarnished,” advertised the startup as one that would “outperform LinkedIn and Yelp” in November. Kazanjy did not respond to a voicemail left for him on Sunday asking for comment.
From what VentureBeat has learned about Unvarnished, it’s far from an online version of the “burn book” in Mean Girls. Nor is it some kind of crowdsourced gossip sheet about Silicon Valley. (That already exists.)
Instead, Unvarnished aims to gather fair and honest reviews about people who wouldn’t normally hit the limelight — mid-level product managers, senior engineers, and the like. Recruiters and hiring managers struggle to learn forthright information about these types. It’s not worth the time to do the kind of exhaustive background check one might do for an executive hire. But LinkedIn’s fluffily friendly recommendations don’t give a full picture of the kind of foibles and personality quirks which might make for a costly failed hire.
The question Unvarnished is asking: Can Silicon Valley handle the truth? I think it can. The Valley runs on data. And yet we seem to think that the engineering culture of honesty and openness somehow doesn’t apply to people. Yes, there’s always a place for tact. But the best managers — and the best employees — are the ones who let you know exactly where things stand.
TheFunded raised a similar ruckus when it started letting entrepreneurs rate venture capitalists. But the better investors along Sand Hill Road eventually got over it and learned to take the feedback seriously.
LinkedIn’s you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours atmosphere is a direct outgrowth of the Panglossian optimism of its founder, Reid Hoffman. I think the tech world is ready for LinkedIn’s evil twin. Or rather, its honest one.
Tags: reputation
Companies: linkedin, Unvarnished
People: Pete Kazanjy
Why Silicon Valley needs the Unvarnished truth
- Rob Diana
Where 2.0 is starting today. We have a full program with keynotes from Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Bing), John Hanke & Michael Jones (Google), Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp), Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land), Michael Arrington (Techcrunch), Dennis Crowley (Foursquare), Keith Lee (MyTown) and Josh Williams (Gowalla).
Here are some of the topics that will come up over the next three days.
Local Data
Any local startup has to make the decision to either build or buy their data. Either is a costly venture. Yelp, Yahoo! Local and Google's PlacePages usefulness depend on the accuracy of their data. Attaining and maintaining that accuracy is very challenging. There are tens of thousands of local businesses with everchanging information - many of which are not online. Yelp has invested in this space and uses a combination of getting users (the Yelp Elite) to fill-in information and alert them of errors, algorithms to detect spammers and errors, and Mechanical Turk to do more tedious fact-checking.
Local Search
With concepts like PlaceRank proliferating it is becoming more and more important for businesses to think about Search for your local market. Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan is going to be leading a panel on this topic. Let Danny know if you have any question for the big players. His panelists are John Hanke (Google), Blaise Agüera y Arcas (Microsoft), Tom Wailes (Yahoo) and Dylan Swift (Yelp).
Augmented Reality
Years ago satellite imagery came onto the web with a big splash. Now geodata has a new view: Augmented Reality. Though certainly not the only use, it is becoming a regular tool in mobile apps arsenal. Yelp uses it to display reviews and ratings. Someday I hope Foursquare will use it to show me where my friends are. In the months and years to come these overlays will become a normal part of the mobile experience.
Location Sharing
One of the most contested areas on the web right is location-sharing. There are two main models: active (the check-in ala Foursquare and Gowalla) and passive (always in the background ala original Loopt and Google's Buzz). Though there are many players we know that not all of the hands have been shown. How will Twitter's burgeoning location strategy play out? Who will buy Skyhook? Will Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl and MyTown (just to name a few, there's actually more companies than I can list) all be able to survive?
MobileCloud
The mobile boom has brought about a number of web services that are specifically for mobile developers. Services like SimpleGeo, Bump, UrbanAirship and GeoAPI make it possible for mobile app developer to focus solely on the mobile client and leave the webservers to someone else. Will companies be willing to outsource fundamental parts of their application? Where will they draw that line?
Game Mechanics
Many mobile apps are quite famously using game mechanics to keep their users engaged. Foursquare, MyTown and Gowalla all take different approaches (and their CEOs will be here to discuss them). How will other types of apps take advantage of these new techniques?
Web Vs. Native Apps
This year's Where 2.0 is more focused on mobile than ever before. One of the issues facing companies is whether to build their mobile app for the browser (ala Google Buzz) or for the (various) App Stores (ala Tweetie2). There are arguments for and against both approaches. App stores provide amazing distribution and access to phone functions, but the competition is fierce and supporting multiple clients is resource intensive. HTML5 (including location support and offline caching) allows web apps to *almost* reach parity with the richness of a native app, but you're still in the browser.
Where 2.0 is in San Jose from 3/30-4/1. There are still seats available, but they are filling up.
Are Online Reputations Really Dead? is a post from Chris Pirillo
Michael Arrington recently posted an article on TechCrunch discussing online reputations. Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions seems to be Arrington’s way of laying it on the proverbial line, and giving up the ghosts of his past. He feels strongly that in the very near future, we won’t care so much about our online reputations anymore.
This post has been debated to death already amongst people in the blogosphere. Both sides of the coin are passionate about their viewpoint (naturally). Lockergnome blogger, Ron Schenone wrote an excellent rebuttal, where he contends that reputation does, indeed, matter greatly.
I threw Ron’s post onto Google Buzz to see what type of reactions our community would have. There have been a couple of excellent points made, and I wanted to share them here.
This is kinda like the teacher that posted pics of her going out at a club and the student’s parents complained. But the public spoke up for the teacher and felt the parents were wrong. We are slowly embracing the good, bad, and ugly of humanity thanks to the internet. We could be naturally desensitizing a bit. There are anonymous feedback services like betterme.com and the honesty box app is somewhat popular, so he may have a point.
I’m observing the culture of “hidden” behind an avatar in MMO’s like Secondlife decreasing at some point. More people will begin to associate their real life photos with their avatars, augmented reality, and other future technologies. That’s a good measurement to look at the progress of our transparency.
Online reputation is not dead despite what arrington says. We do however need to kill anonymous comments. If someone wants to make positive or negative comments about people then at least they should have to put their name to the comment. Building and or protecting your relationship online is paramount in the future. People stupidly believe anything people write online whether true or not.
TechCrunch and all other mainstream blogs should start by disabling anon comments. They won’t because they care more about pageviews than real comment value.
Philena Rush came back with:
I dunno Sam, I post on TC with my FB account all the time. With the openID movement, I think less and less will be anonymous.
Sam Sethi returned:
I agree you can choose to comment with your FB ID but not everyone does. It is simple wordpress setting to disable anon comments if they wanted too.
What are your reactions to this particular TechCrunch article? I can understand where Michael is coming from, but I cannot say I agree completely. Your reputation is important, whether it’s a “real-life” one – or an online one. I have to side with Ron when he stated that no one person can (or should) decide what is “right” and “wrong.” This alone makes the case for the importance of reputations, and indiscretions.
What is more important than your reputation? For most individuals and
businesses, the answer to that is simple: "not much."
Our increasingly networked world has only boosted the importance of reputation. On the internet, the investment often seen today in PR, social media and reputation management solutions highlights this.
But is reputation dead? According to TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, it is. In a blog post this weekend, he writes:
Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. And much like the fight by big labels against the illegal sharing of music, it will soon become pointless to even try. It’s time we all just give up on the small fights and become more accepting of the indiscretions of our fellow humans.
He goes on to argue, essentially, that the only thing that would really matter in the future is "hard proof of being a bad person" -- stuff like criminal records or photos of an individual caught red-handed committing a horrific crime. And Arrington even argues that "the kind of accusations that can kill a career today will likely be seen as a badge of honor, and a sign of an ambitious individual..." I'm sure that will be music to the ears of future wannabe Bernie Madoffs.
Unfortunately, it's easy for bloggers to dismiss 'reputation' in the abstract. But in the real world, reputation does matter. If you own a small, local business, what customers in the community you serve say about you can make or break your business. If you're a web developer, being known as someone who writes solid code and finishes projects on time will likely make you a hot commodity. If you're a business executive, a track record of delivering results will likely be rewarded. If you're a job-seeker, the right reference from a former employer can result in employment. And so on and so forth.
There are numerous flaws with Arrington's argument. Two worth noting:
In short, a good reputation is something that most conscientious individuals work hard to earn, and for good reason. A good reputation leads to trust, and trust greases the wheels of long-term success. Everybody, of course, makes mistakes. And the internet often makes it easier for others to learn of these mistakes. But that doesn't mean that reputation is going away. For one, not everybody is making the same mistakes. It may come as a shocker to Arrington, but you won't, for instance, find "ridiculous drunk college pictures" of every single person who attended college because (surprise?) not everyone who attends college has a habit of getting drunk and doing dumb things in public.
This said, the things that factor into reputation can change in terms of how they're weighed. Thanks to the internet, we are learning more intimate details about businesses and individuals -- details that might have remained unknown pre-internet. That's why both individuals and businesses should be aware of two components of reputation that are increasingly important today:
At the end of the day, managing your reputation online may not be easy, but I don't think it's as difficult (or impossible) as Arrington makes it out to be. So long as you do right by others (especially your employers, clients and customers), act with honesty and integrity, use good judgment and make a good faith effort to rectify your mistakes, you'll be fine. That has always been the case, and it still is today. Fortunately, decent, hard-working people already do these things, and because of that, there are far fewer people and businesses with a closet full of skeletons than Arrington seems to believe.
On that note, it's worth pointing out that Arrington himself recently terminated a TechCrunch intern after determining that the intern had accepted compensation for a blog post. In doing so, Arrington apologized to TechCrunch's readers and explained that all of the intern's posts had been removed to ensure that TechCrunch's content wasn't "tainted". Arrington didn't brush off this intern's indiscretion, and he didn't expect his readers to either.
More than anything else, his termination of the intern and apology to his readers were clearly designed to defend TechCrunch's reputation. This proves one thing: while it's easy to dismiss the importance of reputation in the abstract, most of us understand instinctively just how important it is in real life. That's one thing the internet is never going to change.
Photo credit: Shiny Things via Flickr.
Twitter Hacker, Document Leaker, Arrested in France http://bit.ly/9dl9Ez
The AFP is reporting that the person who leaked internal business documents from Twitter Inc. to the blog TechCrunch last July is also the same person who compromised the Twitter accounts of Barack Obama and other celebrities last year. A 25 year old who went by the name "Hacker Croll" has been tracked down and arrested in France by French authorities, with the assistance of the FBI.
Reportedly, the FBI alerted France to the man's presence in that country almost a year ago, in the same month the internal documents were leaked.
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The media report doesn't make mention of the leaked documents, only the illicit takeover of Obama's account. "Hacker Croll" was identified as the source of the controversial files, though. It seems possible that these two incidents are being improperly connected, but the report filed indicates they were carried out by the same person.
When the documents were sent to TechCrunch, that blog deliberated publicly at length about whether it had a journalistic obligation to publish or suppress them. Founder Michael Arrington in the end decided to work with Twitter executives to identify the most sensitive documents but published other, less sensitive information days later. The resulting blog posts provided a very interesting look into the thinking of one of the most important companies on the internet but proved severely damaging to TechCrunch's reputation with people in the industry who considered the decision to publish them an unacceptable betrayal.
TechCrunch argued that it was within its legal rights to publish the information and the law breaking had been done by the person who sent them the files. Now that person is apparently headed to trial.
The ethical and perhaps legal implications of TechCrunch's decision will no doubt be discussed again due to this turn of events.
The one clear lesson from all this that no one can argue with though: don't mess with Twitter or the FBI will hunt you down where ever you may be around the world.
Discuss
Twitter Hacker, TechCrunch Document Leaker, Arrested in France
- Sarah PerezTwitter Hacker, TechCrunch Document Leaker, Arrested in France (UPDATED)
- LouCypherTwitter Hacker, TechCrunch Document Leaker, Arrested in France (UPDATED)
- Louis Gray
Ignoring It Won't Make It Go Away
- Louis Gray