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Designing What’s Right for Consumers – New York Times

Designing What’s Right for Consumers – New York Times:
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FROM THE DESK OF DAVID POGUE
Designing What’s Right for Consumers
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By DAVID POGUE
Published: February 7, 2008
You might think that digital picture frames would not be especially hard to review. After all, what’s so difficult? You plug it in, you turn it on. (And that’s if it has an on/off switch at all, which most of them don’t.)

The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly email newsletter.
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But creating my roundup in The Times today was brutal, truly brutal. For one thing, there were seven frame

Kevin Kelly — The Technium

Kevin Kelly — The Technium:

The Technium Home
Archive
Better Than Free
Lumpers and Splitters
Believing the Impossible
One Trick At a Time
Four Stages in the Internet of Things
Loving Technology
A Cloudbook for the Cloud
Technology Wants To Be Free
Dimensions of the One Machine
How Much Power Does the Internet Consume?
The Value of Search, 2
How much does one search cost?
Holy Technology
Invariant Ratio of Lifespan
Harry Plotters and the Prophesies of the Hive Mind
The Gift of Stuff
The Maes-Garreau Point
Every Organism Is a Hack
Bootstrapping the Industrial Age
Ownership Is Use
Dealing With Rogue Technologies
Major Stages of the Technium
Everything That Doesn’t Work Yet
Lifelogging, An Inevitability
Being Is All Maintenance
Expected and Unexpected Inventions
Humans Are the Sex Organs of Technology
A Taxonomy of Minds
The Paradox of Up-Creation
Surprising Continuity of Ancient Technologies
The Evolutionary Mind of God
The Evidence of Progress
Technology, The Movie
Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humani

MySpace Answers Facebook’s fbFund With Slingshot Labs

MySpace Answers Facebook’s fbFund With Slingshot Labs:
Four months after Facebook announced the formation of the $10 million fbFund to provide seed capital for startups building Facebook apps, MySpace is responding with its own incubator to be called Slingshot Labs. According to the NYT, the incubator will be financed by News Corp. but will be separate from Fox Interactive Media’s incubator. As we get more details on Slingshot Labs, we will keep you informed.
An incubator is more of a hands-on approach than a seed-capital fund, but will still allow MySpace to focus on its main business while fostering interesting new ideas. As it gets ready to launch its MySpace Developer Platform, the company will want a way to help create viable businesses around its social network. Although one source tells us that the startups will be focussed on more than just MySpace.
It is also our understanding that Josh Berman, currently MySpace COO, and Colin Digiaro, senior vice president of International Corporate Development, are going to go head up this incubator. Both were part of the founding team. But Tom DeWolfe and Chris Anderson got the big $7 million-a-year contracts. This could be a way to give them their own fiefdom with some nice upside if they make the right bets. Amit Kapur, the current VP of business development and a pretty young guy, is slated to step in as COO of MySpace. We have not confirmed these personnel moves with MySpace yet.
Corporate incubators have had a mixed history of success in the past. Sometimes giving startups too much shelter prevents them from adapting quickly enough to the harsh realities of the market. Of course, corporate venture capital funds have their own problems, especially when investments are based on corporate priorities rather than on pure economic ones. Which do you think is the better route?

How to impress girls…

What Does MySpace’s Child-Protection Deal Mean for Facebook, Bebo, and Google?

What Does MySpace’s Child-Protection Deal Mean for Facebook, Bebo, and Google?:
Today’s agreement between MySpace and nearly all the states attorneys general to bulk up protections against sexual predators will no doubt have spillover effects on other social networks as well. No social network can afford to look like it is lagging in this area and will do whatever it can to be at par with emerging industry norms in this area.
In fact, not long after I originally posted about the MySpace deal earlier today, I received the following statement from Facebook:

Facebook has always created an inhospitable environment for predators by limiting access to users’ personal information based on real-world social connections. We have led the way in our partnership with the New York Attorney General and continue our involvement with the Attorneys General of all states and other law enforcement agencies to keep children safe from those who would do them harm. We are happy to work further with the states to develop and deploy strategies to protect kids online.

I am pretty sure that not only Facebook, but also Bebo and Google, will do whatever is necessary to fight sexual predators. With that in mind, here specifically is where Facebook, Bebo and Orkut (i.e., Google) are now lagging MySpace in protections for younger users, and where they may have to spend money to catch up:
1. IMAGE AND VIDEO REVIEW
MySpace proactively reviews videos and images for pornographic and sexually inappropriate content. Humans look at every image and banned images are digitally fingerprinted to prevent them from being uploaded again.
Facebook and Bebo only ban inappropriate images and video that are reported by users. Orkut doesn’t even do that.
2. GROUPS REVIEW
MySpace monitors group discussions for predatory content.
Facebook and Bebo regulate only reported incidents. Orkut does not review group discussions.
3. SEX OFFENDER DATABASE
MySpace helped develop and fund a database of registered sex offenders and deletes the accounts of members who are registered sex ofenders.
Facebook, Bebo, and Orkut do not have a policy of automatically removing registered sex offenders.
4. AGE LIMIT ENFORCEMENT
MySpace algorithmically searches for underage members and deletes their accounts.
Facebook and Bebo are more reactive in their underage account deletion policies. Orkut does not enforce any age limits.
5. “FRIEND” PROTECTION FOR YOUNGER USERS
On MySpace, older users cannot contact underage users without first knowing their e-mail and full name.
On Facebook, Bebo, And Orkut, anyone can “friend” anyone else.

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

hi5 Adds Status Updates. Can You Keep Up?

hi5 Adds Status Updates. Can You Keep Up?:Hi5 is rolling out a healthy list of updates, that all appear to take the network further in the direction of Facebook. That’s the thing to do these days: mimic Zuckerberg and you too could be on 60 Minutes one day. Just as MySpace and LinkedIn and countless other networks have done in recent months, hi5 has added features to keep you in the know, at all times. That means status updates and friend updates.The “Scrapbook” topics have actually been merged with the new status feature, which means that your friends can actually reply to your status and let you know what they think about your being sleepy, or hungry at lunch time. There doesn’t appear to be any mobile integration for the friend updates, which is Facebook’s primary differentiating factor, but I’m still waiting for a centralized way to update my status across all networks. Make it a one-stop shop, and I’ll be a happy gal (doesn’t that speak to the commerce of Twitter?).Moving along, hi5 also lets you know which of your friends are currently online. Blocked users can no longer see your profile, and private messages from non-friends will now go to the new bulk inbox. What we’ve got here is a slew of updates to streamline the process of managing your hi5 account, which is always a good thing, and should make regular hi5 users happy for the time being.Another interesting feature that hi5 is adding is photo ordering. This was a highly requested feature from users, and it too helps you better manage the photo albums aspect of your hi5 account. You can set your album cover, re-order and delete photos using a simple drag’n’drop interface. While photo-sharing has always been a popular aspect of social networking, these social networks and photo-sharing sites have recently taken additional measures to make it easier for you to edit, share, print and commoditize your photos. Facebook has a photoshop option, Flickr has a photo-editing tool powered by Picnik, and American Greetings as well as Shutterfly have taken things to the next level with photo products.

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MySpace agrees to social-networking safety plan

MySpace agrees to social-networking safety plan:
NEW YORK–A coalition of law enforcement authorities and representatives from social-networking site MySpace.com gathered Monday morning to unveil an extensive new plan for ensuring the safety of minors on the Internet.

Under the agreement, MySpace has pledged to work with the attorneys general on a set of principles to combat harmful material on social-networking sites (pornography, harassment, cyberbullying, and identity theft, among other issues), better educate parents and schools about online threats, cooperate with law enforcement officials around the country, as well as develop new technology for age and identity verification on social-networking sites.

“Today’s announcement is a landmark step forward in providing new protections for teenage members of social-networking sites such as MySpace,” Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace’s chief security officer, said at the press conference here.

The new Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking, led by attorneys general Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, consists of Nigam as well as the attorneys general of 49 total U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The group has released a “Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking,” which it hopes will achieve industrywide approval from other social-networking sites and Internet providers.

The lone state missing from the task force is Texas. North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, speaking on behalf of the coalition’s executive committee–Cooper, Blumenthal, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, and Marc Dann of Ohio–would not comment on the reason why. The members of the executive committee were joined by Anne Milgram, attorney general of New Jersey, as well as Steve Cohen, a representative for New York attorney general Andrew M. Cuomo.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said later on Monday that his office declined to participate because he didn’t consider the proposed safety measures to be strong enough.

In the press conference, the attorneys general acknowledged that existing standards of law enforcement simply don’t suffice in the rapidly changing climate of the Internet. “You’re in an area where what you are looking at today will not be what you’re looking at in six months,” Cohen said. “There is an exponential change that goes on with each passing week and month, and you really do need to bring together the best minds and the best ideas.”

The task force aims for cooperation from other social-networking sites, namely Facebook, which reached its own agreement with Cuomo’s office over sex offender data on the site in October. “We are calling on Facebook and other social-networking sites today to adopt these principles, to put these safety practices in effect, and to join the task force,” Cooper said. “We think it’s critical that this be industrywide.

When a member of the audience asked why reaching an agreement with MySpace had taken this long–the site was founded in 2004–Cooper said that it had been an ongoing process. “We recognized pretty soon that this was going to be a problem and we began pushing legislation, we began exploring litigation, (and) we’ve been in discussion with MySpace for about two years,” Cooper said. “We talked to other social-networking sites. It has taken us this long to culminate in this agreement.” He added that the negotiations significantly improved when MySpace was acquired by the News Corp. division Fox Interactive Media in 2005.

Indeed, MySpace’s dealings with law enforcement officials have been ongoing. Last spring, a group of eight states’ attorneys general wrote an open letter to the site expressing concern about the numbers of registered sex offenders with profiles on the site. After initially asserting that federal and state laws prevented it from meeting the attorneys’ requests, MySpace eventually unveiled a preliminary plan for compliance.

The attorneys general confirmed in Monday’s press conference that they wanted to avoid legal action against MySpace and social-networking sites in general. “Litigation is costly, time-consuming, (and) uncertain in its result,” Blumenthal said. They also acknowledged that law enforcement officials still don’t see eye-to-eye with social-networking sites on a variety of issues, namely the feasibility of identity and age verification. The attorneys general believe it’s technologically possible; Nigam and the rest of MySpace say it needs more development.

“We are not papering over or concealing our continued differences,” Blumenthal said. “This process of discussion has been difficult, daunting, but also extraordinarily educational.”

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