I know what animal you're thinking of.

Hey Rizzn-ites,

Have you ever played 20 Questions with a computer or small orb? If so, you know that computers and technology, are very capable of predicting what we'll say and what we're thinking.

How does it do it?

Greg Blonder, who we interviewed on the show about a month ago, posted on Internet Evolution today not asking how it does it, but noting how it doesn't, and posing a work-a-round for poor predictive technology. I've chatted with Greg a few times, and he's a great guy to talk to, but I don't know him well enough to know exactly how much of an AI fan he is.

I am a fan of AI. I'm an AI nut. One of my big fantasies (given enough cash and computing cycles, one that I think is realistic), is to create a truly sentient (at least by Alan Turing's standards) AI.

Greg gives a couple examples of how current predictive technology falls short:

• Search engines, and their contextual ads: "Search engine companies believe that they can target ads more efficiently based on invading my privacy and analyzing my last hundred search queries and emails -- and thus charge a premium for each ad served. But last week, while I was seeking information on car recalls, I was flooded by ads to buy the very same lemon from the same company I was investigating."
• Piracy: "The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) snoops around our computers to see what music files we're posting and trying to guess our intent. Do we own the track we posted, and are we just backing it up to the net?"

It's hard to argue with his examples (and there are others in his list), but I'll try. The bottom line that Greg is getting at is that invading privacy to learn more history is not going to assist a computer in accurately predicting the future. I think that frankly, the opposite is true.

Remember the 20 questions bot I mentioned in the opener? The trick to those AIs is for them first to narrow down the possible responses you could have to a narrow list of nouns, and then, narrow down the possibilities further with a refined tree of questions. Most modern 20 questions AIs can get the answer in less than 17 questions, but rarely more than 26.

What do you need to do when all you have is one question (a search query), and no retries? You need more context. You can either get that by coaching the user to be more specific, or you can use historical context.

Search engines, particularly Google, are going back not just a hundred queries, but years in their history, to determine context and intent. Google is also working to invade our privacy on a number of levels, and I'm not just talking about that silly street view thing they have on the maps system everyone seems to be up in arms about.

Look at Blogger, GMail, Search History, GTalk, Calendaring, and just about every tool that's graduated from Labs into common usage. What's a common thread? Not just organisation and assistance in utilisation of said data - archival! They default to archiving all text chats, give you nigh unlimited space to store email conversations, go back as far as they can in their history of your searches, and give you a free tool to record your thoughts on everything from the mundane to the profound in Blogger. Then they tie it to one nifty little Google Account that has your name and cookie attached to it.

They want to give you a gPhone and a Social Network too, not so that you can do better business with it (although that will be the selling point so that you'll use it) - it's to give better context and idea mapping so that when ads do get served up, it'll know from that bulletin you posted about how much you hate your Honda POS, when you search that term, you aren't necessarily looking to buy a new one.

Read some Kurzweil, if you don't believe me. Even if you do - read some Kurzweil. Age of Spiritual Machines changed the way I think about the future. Kurzweil talks about how for a time, AI's will be almost indistinguishable from unmodified humans in levels of performance and in some cases appearance. And then there will be a period where they excel in every way possible past the unmodified human, especially in matters relating to cognition.

All that having been said, the very things that are driving us toward that solution, that is the ability for Facebook and Google to sell us better, more targeted and predictive ads, are the very same factors that are driving us towards the solution to the problem that Greg proposes.

Greg thinks that we should have a 'transparent internet' - that is an internet where actions have consequences. We are slouching ever towards a social internet - where we log in to an internet based operating system that is focused around our task list and our workgroups. Social networks imply responsibility, as actions are increasingly coming with consequences. It's easier to dig up dirt on a person by looking through their photo albums, but it's also easier to see where information has been forwarded from, as more and more information is moved around by the grease of social tools like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

I don't think we'll ever quite have the transparent internet Greg asks for, with modified SMTP and DNS protocols and security aware browsers. There's just no margin in it for anyone. We will, though, see both more accurate predictions from computers as well as more accountability in our online actions due to social networking. Count on it.

/rizzn

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Google and Facebook

Hey Rizzn-ites,

It seems that every time I gear up to do a blog post, Google or Facebook have to worm their way into my monologue at some point. Today is no exception.

A few days ago, Mike Arrington dropped a bombshell that got a little play in the blogosphere and then evaporated in regards to Google's impending response to the Facebook phenom. We all knew it was coming down the pike, because Orkut just isn't cutting the mustard in terms of the the US market.

I immediately commented on my blog that I simply couldn't see Orkut in any way retooled as a social networking tool, and it having a chance at all to compete with Facebook. In fact, I said that "[m]y advice to Google employees whenever they've brought up the social network issue with me has always been dump Orkut!"

Shortly after the post hit the web, I received a call from a Google employee that agreed with me.

Here's what Mike said we'd see:

On November 5 we’ll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut’s social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more - such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs.

Here's what I'm hearing: instead of leveraging Orkut's social graph information, we're going to see leveraging of GMail's social graph. Does GMail have a social graph? Sure it does. For those of us that aren't bleeding edge early adopters, what's the best measure of who's in our closest circles? Those that email us the most, and those we send out the most emails too. The interconnecting web of six degrees of separation can easily be determined by a little algorithm that pays attention to all the to's and from's. Google excels at both looking at our private data in new ways, as well as algorithms.

By way of significant upgrades to contact management and the enactment of profile pages, essentially, we're going to see a truly business-centric social networking system. It's difficult to find a system that's not got some sort of API or RSS feed within the Google world - it's simply a matter of connecting the dots, and making the Google widget platform interoperable.

Mike, in his original post, touches on very briefly what I was told:

In the long run, Google seems to be planning to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, with Orkut as their initial main source of social graph information and, as I said above, possibly adding third party networks to the back end as well. Social networks would have little choice but to participate to get additional distribution and attention.

Its curious that I'd been talking about this for at least a few months with Googlers along these lines and concurrent to that this has been brewing. I'm thinking of sending a consulting bill out to Mountain View (no, we don't have a big ego or anything. :-)

Or at least demanding an early peek at the gPhone.

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Google to be 100% Open

Mike Arrington says he's talked to four of several folks who attended a super-secret meeting over at the Googleplex that more or less say:

The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Gtalk and other Google services over time.

Here's basically what Mike thinks that means: "On November 5 it is likely we’ll see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning."

My advice to Google employees whenever they've brought up the social network issue with me has always been dump Orkut!

Orkut is only good if you're in South Florida or South America. Other than that, GMail is your ultimate social networking tool. Tool up GMail, tighten up it's integration with iGoogle, and ad the widgetizing feature to both to allow real-time social network via the oldest internet social tools in existence: email and chat.

I can't be the only person who sees this, can I?

/rizzn

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RizWords Weekly Roundup

I'm going to try to highlight a few things from the show this week that I think warrant further discussion. This may or may not become a regular feature. We'll see how you guys like it.

gPhone
Do I really need to say more about this? Check Episode 116 of RizWords (you may need to subscribe to the feed to listen). Also read these two posts. The second one contains links to other interesting coverage. Or just Google gPhone. Everyone's got an opinion now.

Two Unfortunate Investments (originals: here and here).
On Thursday we talked about VC put into startups Veveo.TV and Wis.dm. Both Art and I puzzled over the amount of money flowing into these two losers.

Wis.dm is basically an expanded form of the comments features on every website on the web, but tries to be the newest Web 2.0 to pull wisdom from the crowds. On Wednesday and Friday, I inaccurately referenced from memory the anecdote of Sir Francis Galton, who was from the 19th century, not the 17th, as I said. The anecdote itself was properly related, though, which can be found in his Wikipedia entry:

[T]he crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the butchered or the "slaughtered and dressed" weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts).

The example by which the term is defined dictates that yes or no questions aren't going to be the type of questions that the crowd displays it's wisdom, and I can't think of many other instances where a comment form is worth $9 Million in development time. My question: "Where's the beef?"

Similarly, Veveo is a puzzling investment, weighing in at between $14-28 Million. Veveo promises to index videos, making them searchable. Their big selling point? An autocomplete feature.

As we mentioned on the show, we sincerely hope these aren't signs of the end times (in terms of our current tech boom cycle). I certainly remember similarly stupid investments last time around. Either there are some highly charismatic PR folks at these firms, or there are some highly stupid investors over at the VC firms of Matrix Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, OmniCapital Group. I'm not familiar with the staffs of any of the companies (the startups nor the VC firms), so I really couldn't say. The type of money these firms are doling out though (North Bridge Venture Partners in particular), it's worth coming up with some worthless ideas, getting a Web2.0 design job done, and trying to get a zillion in VC.

I'm game, anyone wanna join me?

Digg's Very Prominent New Media Failure
A front page story over at Digg.com Friday morning was a something we covered on Episode 120: Homophobia Inc: Message of Hate Raises Hundreds of Millions of Dollars.

The type of story we love more than most others at RizWords is a story exposing Old Media screw-ups. What we hate is when a prominent New Media source like Kevin Rose's Digg promotes to the front page a piece of pseudo-journalism full of not only factually incorrect but borderline libelous content.

The piece prints falsehoods that could be discounted by doing only cursory research, alleging that the non-profits Christian Broadcasting Network, Focus on the Family, and Family Research Council devote the entirety of their organisations' energy into anti-gay agenda. Give those sites a cursory glance. Clearly they have other focus than just talking about their moral take on homosexuality (which, by the way, is a far cry from being hate-speech or homophobic).

Art and I both attempted to comment dissenting views on the forms, and within seconds, both our comments were buried.

My point being, the failure isn't the blogosphere. There will always be moronic drivel in the blogosphere. The failure is in Kevin's algorithm. The tripe was promoted to the front page before the Digg count reached 100. For better or for worse, Digg is a major New Media news source. If they want to avoid the fate of Dan Rather and CBS News, they should look at changing the system before more people realized how game-able Digg is.

Facebook: You Can't Look The Other Way Anymore
I did a blog post on the business side of the Facebook API, which has been covered on the show several times. The type of money trading in this space can't be ignored, and neither can the ease of entry. This week, not only was it revealed that Facebook wanted to get serious about good applications, but it was also revealed that Bill Gates is a Facebook user, as well as many other prominent Microsoft executives.

This isn't surprising to those of us who listen to Ken or Scoble, but with news like this coming out, it is getting hard to keep up thinking of reasons to stick around that ol' trailer park... especially in light of the way they like to beat up on the tenants.

That's about all the news that's fit to discuss. Any questions? Comment or email!

/rizzn

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Facebook API Programming: the Business Side

Hey Rizzn-ites,

As I've mentioned several times on the show, I was simply amazed at how easy it is to create Facebook applications using the same tried and true backend web technologies we web programmers all use day-to-day. So, you know it was just a matter of time before I looked at a Facebook programming venture as a business idea. Since I first started writing this article, however, the rules have changed in a significant way, so it is important that if you read this article more than a couple weeks after I've written it, you search for more recent documentation to augment what I'm saying. Facebook is a new New Media promotional avenue, and as such, it's rules are going to be in flux for the forseeable near future.

This isn't going to be a 1-2-3-Profit article, just some salient points and interesting studies I've seen that will help the capitalist programmers out there participate in the Facebook API landgrab.

Valuation of an Application
Shepard Method
There's a fellow that hangs around the Facebook Developer Forums named Tim Shephard who claims to have brokered four Facebook application transactions (that is to say, brokered the sale of four Facebook programs to those interested in owning said apps). He asked each buyer if it would be OK if he published some stats in aggregate. Three of them agreed, while one declined.

Of the three that agreed to include their stats, the sold prices ranged from $0.25 per user to $1.83 per user, with an average of $0.34 per user when averaged by total amount / total users. Total users ranged from around 300 users to around 40,000 users.

It is worth noting that these sales took place before the recent metrics changes Facebook enacted recently.

Shepard also noted that Lee of Altura Ventures is now talking about $1.00 per active user and not per directory user. He defines an active user as a user who visits the canvas page once per week. According to Shepard, this settles in ranges from 20-30% of total users in most applications, with up to 40% tops in high engagement applications.

Kincaid Method
Tom Kincaid, a Facebook app developer, also had theories that were similar in terms of valuating an app for sale. According to Kincaid, all you really need are four numbers to give you a valuation of dollar per user. Impressions per user per month, CPM, growth rate, and required return. Expressed as a valuation equation, it would look like this:

DollarPerUser = ((CPM / 1000) * MonthlyImpressionPerUser * 12) * (1 + AnnualGrowthRate) / (RequiredReturn - AnnualGrowthRate)

It’s the last two that can be tricky. What is the growth measuring? User growth or revenue growth. The first number can be quite spectacular, especially in the early days of an App (100% of 2 is 2) - over 100% a day in some cases. As for the the second number, the required return, who knows?

Required return on an application that one guy made in a weekend and costs $100/month to host is very difficult to gauge.

He gives a for-instance:

Using some ballpark estimates, we can plug in numbers and get a valuation. CPM $0.50 which is a good AdSense return, impressions per user per month 30 or 1 a day, some people use it a lot and some don’t user it at all, growth 15% which is a good business, required return 30% which is quite high, but around credit card rates if someone were to fund their business that way. The result: an app is worth $1.38 per user.

Which Method is Best? What about Sleepy Hollow?
I think both methods are valuable, but who you are determines which method you'll use. A required return is something an in-the-trench programmer isn't going to really think about, but a Slide.com definitely will. If you're on the buying side, you'll definitely want to apply the Kincaid method, as you'll have a clearer picture of what an application needs to make. If you're a developer, the Shepard Method will be more applicable to someone like you.

None of this takes into account ways of valuating an application that doesn't intend to make money off of advertising monetization. Kien Lee makes an excellent point in his "Sleepy Hollow" example:

You have the Sleepy Hollow application, which has 400 users, practically the whole town, ex-cows and one cat. When the headless horseman comes, and someone sees, they log on to Facebook, return a couple of pokes and clicks on that application. The town goes into alert and lockdown. Everyone is safe, except the pussy.

Is your 400 user application worth $1.00 peruser? or $2.00? or 3? No! It's worth much more because you're a monopoly that's effective.

So obviously, the formulas in practice today aren't a one-size-fits-all, but they are a good guage of a one-size-fits-most. This current round of land-grab seems to be for eyeballs, and particularly fingers that click on ads. That isn't to say the next round of applications that are en vogue aren't going to be highly utilitarian in nature, and designed less around the profile page, and more around the usability of Facebook as a Web 2.0 operating system.

Hopefully this boom at Facebook will continue, so we'll have more interesting topics generate off this.

I'm looking to connect up soon with some prominent movers-and-shakers in the Facebook developer community, talk with them, and see if there are other topics that warrant exploration here. So stay tuned for more!

Did I leave something crucial out? Did I totally miss the mark on something? Want more information on some of this? Leave a comment or email me @ guesswho@rizzn.com.

/rizzn

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Badware: 1700 Posts that No One Will Read

According to Google, rizzn.com is a site that "may hurt your computer." Don't you just feel dangerous as heck reading this right now?

I'm not exactly sure why, although I was sent an email from a business associate last week:

When I empty my cache, and visit your site,

my Computer Associates anti-virus reports

the Microsoft Data Access pop-up there,

is infected with the JS/Petch virus.

I ignored it when it first happened Wednesday,

thinking it was just an ant-virus hiccup;

and it didn't re-occur until I cleaned out my

IE cache, and re-visited you today.

I checked the server, and all the domains with a virus scanner on the system, but found nothing. I chalked it up to a random error, until just now, when I discovered that virtually all my Google traffic has disappeared. Below any link from Google to rizzn.com, appears the following warning message: "This site may harm your computer."

This is very disconcerting for me. I went through the Google webmaster tools and requested a 'review.' I'll let you know how things turn out. All recent virus scans of the domain and web pages show no infections. I've got a sneaking suspicion that the infection came from a GoogleAd - I heard on Buzz Out Loud a while back that there were some worms that were launched through GoogleAds. I haven't confirmed this to be the source, but call it a hunch. We have a bunch of virus protection on the server, I've personally verified that. I can't imagine that a virus has penetrated that many layers of protection there.

At any rate, stay tuned for tomorrow or Monday. I've got a piece on Facebook Applications I'm working on that I hope to release here soon.

/rizzn

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RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech - EP51

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech
Episode 51 - download now - subscribe now

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We opened the show with something Mark thought would be good news for conservatives wishing to stay sane in the mornings... of course Art found the dark cloud around the good news rather quickly:

Rosie O'Donnell has fought her last fight at The View.

ABC said on Friday she will not be back on the television talk show following her angry confrontation with co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck on Wednesday.

It ended a colourful eight-month tenure for O'Donnell that lifted the show's ratings but no doubt caused heartburn for show creator Barbara Walters.

O'Donnell feuded with Donald Trump and frequently had tense exchanges with the more conservative Hasselbeck.

O'Donnell said last month she would be leaving because she could not agree to a new contract with ABC executives.

"Rosie contributed to one of our most exciting and successful years at The View," Walters said.

"I am most appreciative. Our close and affectionate relationship will not change."

In a statement, O'Donnell said that "it's been an amazing year and I love all three women."

'US troops terrorists'

No one was feeling the love on Wednesday, when the argument with Hasselbeck began over O'Donnell's statement last week about the war: "655 000 Iraqi civilians have died. Who are the terrorists?"

Talk show critics accused O'Donnell of calling US troops terrorists.

She called Hasselbeck "cowardly" for not saying anything in response to the critics.

"Do not call me a coward, because No 1, I sit here every single day, open my heart and tell people what I believe," Hasselbeck retorted, and their riveting exchange continued despite failed attempts by their co-hosts to cut to a commercial.

According to a New York Post report, O'Donnell's chief writer, Janette Barber, was allegedly led out of the building on Wednesday after she was caught drawing moustaches on photographs of Hasselbeck in The View studios.

ABC executives did not return repeated calls for questions on the incident on Friday.

Scrapbook-like video

On Thursday, O'Donnell had asked for a day off to celebrate her partner's birthday. The View aired a taped show on Friday.

On her website, O'Donnell posted a scrapbook-like video on Friday with pictures and news clippings of her tenure at The View.

Cyndi Lauper's Sisters of Babylon played in the background.

A day earlier, she had posted messages on her website indicating she might not be back.

"When painting there is a point u must step away from the canvas as the work is done," she wrote. "Any more would take away.

The Nose on your Face finds a conspiracy uncovered in all this:

Despite claims that a monster pig shot in Alabama bears a striking resemblance to “The View” host Rosie O’Donnell, both ABC and O’Donnell representatives deny that the enormous swine is the controversial star. ABC’s abrupt announcement on Friday, however, that O’Donnell would be immediately leaving “The View” only lent strength to the rumors that she may indeed have been bagged by 11 year-old Jamison Stone while on a hastily scheduled “foraging retreat” in Alabama.

“Rosie does like foraging as a stress-reliever,” said her spokesperson, Amelda Johnson, “but she stopped going to Alabama several years ago after she discovered it was a favorite foraging haven of Starr Jones.”

In Newsguy Jon news:

Sheen Re-Thinks Loose Change Alliance

May 27, 2007 -- SUPPORT for the loopy 9/11 documentary "Loose Change" - which argues that the World Trade Center terror attack was part of a secret U.S. government conspiracy - is quickly losing steam.

A source tells us Charlie Sheen "is having second thoughts" about being involved in an updated version of the flick, which has a huge following on YouTube. As Page Six reported in March, Sheen had agreed to narrate the ridiculous flick, presumably to give it some needed Hollywood sizzle.

The conspiracy documentary got a further boost earlier this month when Virgin Atlantic announced it would offer the current, narration-free version as an in-flight movie choice. But just days later, it scrapped the idea. "After Virgin announced it, bloggers went nuts and there was so much negative feedback that [the airline] a few days later nixed it," the source said.

After we revealed Sheen's participation, the "Two and a Half Men" star told Extra: "It's a story that needs to be told. It's a story about the truth, and the truth needs to be exposed. It's not just me, not just the Hollywood community [that] is standing up saying what you have given us doesn't make sense. We just want better answers." As for Sheen now pulling his support, the star's flack, Stan Rosenfield, did not return calls over two days.

Another proponent of the "Loose Change" theory is Rosie O'Donnell, who trumpeted her feelings about it on "The View" and her blog, making ABC brass nervous and infuriating some viewers.

O'Donnell reportedly had booked the film's producers, Korey Rowe and Dylan Avery, on Thursday's show. But after getting into a fight with Elisabeth Hasselbeck Wednesday, and after her chief writer was caught defacing Hasselbeck's photos with mustaches, O'Donnell left the show.

"Loose Change" pushes the widely debunked "controlled demolition" theory, which claims the Twin Towers and 7 World Trade Center were blown up from within. It alleges the jet-fuel fires inside the towers weren't hot enough to melt the buildings' steel beams.

Those claims were soundly refuted by Popular Mechanics magazine, which meticulously shot down every single one.

In other Venezualian news, there is major political change afoot... the pictures tell the story better than the links do, but pay close attention to both:

CHAVEZ FORCES CLASH WITH DEMOCRACY PROTESTERS!

Venezuala continues its descent into hell.
** The Jungle Hut is following the clashes from Venezuala.
** Globovision has photos from the crackdown by the regime.
** Venezuela News and Views- Even in San Felipe we are hearing sirens and pot banging!
** Devil's Excrement- "Chavista thugs are attacking another private station!" -Photos
** Xeni Jardin has video links of the regime blasting the protesters with water cannons.
** Citizen Feathers has video of the "pot-banging" against the regime.

(ElPais)

Chavez warned (via BBC): "Venezuelan armed forces are ready. Anyone generating violence will regret it."

He even sent in the tanks for the first time on the opposition.

A supporter of Radio Caracas TV (RCTV) uses the Venezuelan flag to cover herself from tear gas during a protest outside the National Commission of Telecommunications (CONATEL) in Caracas May 27, 2007. (Reuters)

Venezuelan troops earlier today seized the broadcast equipment of the opposition television station.
Reuters reported:

Venezuelan troops have seized an anti-government television channel's broadcast equipment, the station said on Sunday, ahead of a controversial midnight EDT/0400 GMT takeover by President Hugo Chavez that will take the broadcaster off the air.

Supporters of Radio Caracas TV (RCTV) lie on the floor after being hit by tear gas during a protest outside the National Commission of Telecommunications (CONATEL) in Caracas May 27, 2007. RCTV is being forced off the air after President Hugo Chavez's administration refused to renew its broadcasting license which ends on Sunday. (REUTERS/Yuri Ferrioli)

Publius Pundit has several pictures from the protest earlier before the clashes.
Fausta has a podcast posted discussing the closure of the popular opposition news station.
FREERCTV.com has more on the shutdown.
This is very sad.

Actress Cynthia Lander cries during a live broadcast at RCTV station in Caracas May 27, 2007. The government is not renewing RCTV's license after 53 years on the air because of accusations that the broadcaster participated in a bungled 2002 coup against Chavez, incited violent demonstrations and aired immoral programming. (REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins)


Supporters of Radio Caracas TV (RCTV) clash with police during a protest outside the National Commission of Telecommunications (CONATEL) in Caracas May 27, 2007. RCTV is being forced off the air after President Hugo Chavez's administration refused to renew its broadcasting license which ends on Sunday. (REUTERS/Francesco Spotorno)

Previously:
Hugo Chavez Silences the Opposition- Sends Tanks In!

We had a huge discussion on the devolution of democracy in the UK, much to the chagrin of some of our British listeners:

UK: Police to Get Tough New Terror Powers
David Cracknell writes in The Sunday Times:

New anti-terrorism laws are to be pushed through before Tony Blair leaves office giving “wartime” powers to the police to stop and question people.

John Reid, the home secretary, who is also quitting next month, intends to extend Northern Ireland’s draconian police powers to interrogate individuals about who they are, where they have been and where they are going.

Under the new laws, police will not need to suspect that a crime has taken place and can use the power to gain information about “matters relevant” to terror investigations.

If suspects fail to stop or refuse to answer questions, they could be charged with a criminal offence and fined up to £5,000. Police already have the power to stop and search people but they have no right to ask for their identity and movements.

More here.

Turning to tech news, the whole blogosphere is buzzing with the Facebook stuff. Here's our token coverage:

MySpace v. Facebook: “It’s Not A Decision. It’s an IQ Test”

Venture capitalist Josh Kopelman rips into MySpace today as he applauds Facebook’s new developer platform.

Facebook’s timing is perfect. They just released an API that gives third party developers deep access to Facebook functionality and it’s 20 million users. Not only can these third party startups get a widget placed on people’s Facebook profiles, but they can also get viral distribution through users’ news feeds and access core Facebook features. Using the tools that Facebook made available, developers could build new versions of some of Facebook’s own applications, like Facebook Photos. Users can then remove those default applications and add the new ones. Like Microsoft with Windows, Facebook is now competing with application developers on its own platform.

This isn’t all just talk, either. The most popular third party application, iLike, has nearly 400,000 users just a couple of days after launching and 10x what they had just last Friday. That means nearly 5% of Facebook’s users have now included it on their profile.

Kopelman’s post looks at the new reality from the perspective of a startup. MySpace is a minefield - startups want access to their users but suffer from the very real possibility of being banned, either temporarily or permanently.

Facebook is viewing things from exactly the opposite position: they are giving startups access to Facebook’s core feature set, and allowing them to show advertising and conduct transactions with users without even asking for a cut. This is exactly why I called Facebook the Anti-MySpace last week. Kopelman goes on to say:

Think about it. If you ran a venture-backed company and had to decide whether you wanted to focus your effort on: (a) a property that welcomed you in and let you keep 100% of the revenue you generate or (b) a company with a vague policy that doesn’t let you generate any revenue, which would you choose? I don’t think it’s even a decision. It’s an IQ test.

Kopelman estimates that $250 million has been invested in widget companies in the last 18 months. When these startups think about where to spend their resources, they’ll be weighing MySpace’s relative size advantage (MySpace has 100 million users, growing by 300,000 or so per day. Facebook has 20 million users, growing by 100,000 per day) to the open and transparent nature of Facebook’s approach. On balance I agree with Kopelman. Startups can build a very large business on the back of Facebook. The MySpace path is much riskier.

And as a nod to a few of our listeners who have talked a bit about needing this kind of service, we present Gaboogie:

Conference calling is a $2 billion business in North America alone. But it’s not perceived to be a sexy space, and Gaboogie, which brings some next generation smarts to conference calls if making sexier. Gaboogie starts with a beautifully simple “why didn’t I think of that” solution to this problem: the service calls you. No password is needed because if you’re not supposed to be there, you don’t get called. Participants simply press ‘1′ to join, ‘2′ to decline, and ‘3′ for ‘later.’ The service makes the adjustments for time zones, too. And if you get disconnected, the number is on your caller ID to redial. Calls are setup through the website and it’s easy to check the schedule online. Moderators have a dashboard to monitor calls in progress. You can set participation in a call to “lecture” which lets you simply listen. Calls can be recorded and shared as RSS feeds or MP3 files, all with a single click. Attendees can be added on the fly by simply dragging them from the phonebook.

Want to be part of the Rizzn-ite army? Indoctrination instructions here.

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech - EP46

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech
Episode 46 - download now - subscribe now

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We're focusing on immigration today, and the immigration bill being debated in the Senate right now for two reasons... we've neglected the news last week, and two, Art isn't here to provide is violent protest of immigration to America.

This comes from the Patriot Post:

“This administration has a case of the slows on border enforcement. If we have border enforcement, we will be able at that point to start to regulate the internal problem that we’ve got. Because as long as you’ve got a revolving door and you have no border—and this 2,000-mile porous border, incidentally, is our biggest homeland security problem; it’s not just an immigration problem, it’s a homeland security problem—we need to build the border fence. We need to have a Border Patrol which is big enough to get the job done, and we need to be able to ask people when they want to come into America, knock on the front door, because the back door is going to be closed.” —Rep. Duncan Hunter

I spoke at length on my ruminations on border security, immigration, and Ron Paul. I read this quote from the most recent edition of the Patriot Post, a reader's question and the Post's reply:

“It appears The Patriot is following the Leftmedia’s lead and ignoring Ron Paul. He did not even get a mention in Alexander’s essay, ‘The GOP—a party in distress’, last Friday. Why?” —Chesapeake, Virginia

Editor’s Reply: First, you know we always follow the “Leftmedia lead”! Second, we publish Ron Paul’s excellent arguments about domestic policy issues, but we do NOT support Paul as a presidential candidate because his isolationist foreign policy and national security positions are disastrously, appallingly and potentially, catastrophically wrong. Two of the president’s most important constitutional responsibilities pertain to foreign policy and national security, and Paul’s Libertarian views earn him an F- in those departments.

The bottom line is this: Why does Ron Paul get a bum wrap when he's the only candidate with a sure-fire plan to toughen border security and solve our woes in foreign entanglements? No other candidate on either side of the aisle has proposed a legitimate response to that question.

Furthermore, why does Ron Paul rank at the bottom of polls done by newspapers and certain Old Media organisations, when even now in New Media and even certain Old Media polls (like FOX and MSNBC), he's leading the pack? Is it conspiracy, bias, or his rabid base? You're responses are welcome here - guesswho@rizzn.com. They'll be read on the show this week.

Turning to other political news, we revisit the Florida Primary Voting story:

Florida shakes up early presidential voting
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. --Gov. Charlie Crist signed a bill Monday moving Florida's 2008 presidential primary to Jan. 29 and shaking up the race by bypassing a dozen other states set for Feb. 5.

The move puts Florida's primary, which had been scheduled for March, behind only the Iowa and Nevada caucuses and the New Hampshire primary and on the same day as South Carolina's Democratic primary.

Florida has by far the largest population of any of the early voting states set for January and is the most expensive in which to campaign, giving well-funded candidates an even greater advantage and possibly drawing attention away from the smaller states.

"This is going to require the serious candidates to spend very, very large amounts of money and time in Florida," said Merle Black, a politics professor at Emory University in Atlanta. "If you can't compete in Florida, that's going to be a sign that you're not a serious contender."

Crist, a Republican, and other state GOP leaders have argued Florida's diversity and size merit more influence in deciding the nation's leadership. The delegate-rich state decided the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Florida's early election could also have implications in the Feb. 5 primaries scheduled in a dozen other states, including New York and California.

A win in Florida is a big prize because the state is seen as a microcosm of the nation with its diverse population, so it shows how a candidate might do in other states, Black said.

Remember... that's the same state who's Democrats aren't going to regard the votes of the party members, but simply decide on their own who should be the state's Democratic candidate. Does anyone but me see the irony of who the Democratic Presidential candidate is going to be largely decided by non-democratic methods?

In other political news, just a bit more about immigration:

Bush's backing of bipartisan immigration deal splits GOP

The Washington Post and McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — President Bush's embrace of this week's Senate bipartisan immigration deal has split the Republican Party.

Capitol Hill operators were besieged with calls from interest groups Friday, and immigration clearly was Topic A on conservative talk-radio shows. Other key figures, including analysts at the Heritage Foundation and National Review columnists, derided the agreement as a sellout of conservative principles, while most GOP presidential candidates criticized the plan as a form of amnesty — a characterization rejected by the White House.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who last year said similar efforts for a comprehensive immigration bill were "reasonable," called the deal reached this week the "wrong approach" to the problem. "Any legislation that allows illegal immigrants to stay in the country indefinitely, as the new 'Z-Visa' does, is a form of amnesty," he said.

Turning to Tech News, let's be talkin' bout Bebo!:

Is Bebo Worth $1 billion?

See our earlier post on possible acquisition talks between Yahoo and Bebo for $1 billion or so. The original report for the story comes from the UK’s Telegraph, based on a very weak source - “silicon valley gossip.” Still, we though it was worth a look at the most recent data to see if Bebo really could pull off a $1 billion or more sale.

We’ve pulled worldwide Comscore stats for MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. The most recent data (March) shows MySpace with 107 million unique monthly visitors. Facebook had 32 million and Bebo had 13.7 million. Bebo users tend to spend a lot of time on the site - on average they view just over 20 pages per day each, about equal to Facebook and a bit more than MySpace..

According to Comscore, Bebo today is about as big as Facebook was in May 06. Based on fairly aggresive growth estimates, Yahoo valued Facebook for as much as $1.6 billion at that time or a little later. If Bebo sold for $1 billion today, the buyer would be paying around $73/unique visitor, which is certainly in the range of acceptable.

Both Facebook and MySpace are growing faster than Bebo is today. But neither of those properties are available to Yahoo, so perhaps they are dipping down a little deeper into the social networking well.

In other social networking news, I take this opportunity to narrowcast a bit to those in my audience who I know are closely involved in social networking projects. Bottom line: be the platform.

Facebook Going Platform
It's no secret that Facebook has big ambitions and has supposedly turned down huge buyout offers. However, at the same time, there's been a lot of talk about how, despite tons of page views, advertisers weren't entirely thrilled with the returns they got from advertising in Facebook. Still, the site is unquestionably popular, and in many ways more palatable than MySpace, which has built up a tremendously negative reputation in the eyes of many. Over the past year, Facebook has also been aggressive in rolling out a variety of new features to make it start looking like much more than "yet another social network," and the latest is that the company is going to start positioning itself much more as a platform for others to build on. It's already made some effort to allow others to build on its platform via APIs, but this sounds like they're going even further in that direction. There's certainly no guarantee that this will actually catch on, but we've long believed that the strategy to really "own" the next generation of internet users has to be based on being the platform on which apps are built. This is something Google should have done three years ago, but they continue to fall down on the job and certainly have opened up a huge opportunity for others to do it instead. Seeing Facebook as the latest such entrant isn't necessarily a huge surprise, but it again shows that Google's inability to focus on the platform side of things has opened the door for many others.

In obligatory Google news:

Google Cracks Down on Made for AdSense Sites
JenSense reports that a lot of AdSense users who built sites with almost no original content, but full of AdSense ads, had their accounts removed.

Numerous AdSense publishers have been receiving emails from Google the past couple of days stating that their use of their AdSense account is an unsuitable business model and that accounts would be disabled as of June 1st, giving publishers about two weeks notice to prepare for the loss of the AdSense accounts... and since it seems that arbitrage publishers are the ones receiving this account disabled email, to give those publisher enough time to shut down accounts or use an alternative source for their outgoing traffic.

These users usually bought cheap keywords from AdWords and sent the visitors to their sites that also displayed ads, but for more expensive keywords. The sites didn't contain almost anything valuable, most of the time they scraped content from other sites, but they made a lot of money by tricking users.

Related links to this story: viralinstigator.com (not reccomended as a service).

And in the rumor mill this week Feedburner + Google = Feedboogle? GooBurner? heh...:

Should Google Buy FeedBurner?
When I first heard about FeedBurner I wondered what's so great about "burning your feed". Well, you get stats for your feed, you can customize your feed, add dynamic content at the bottom of each feed entry and transform that weird XML file into a nice HTML page that lets people subscribe to the feed.

FeedBurner transformed from a site that offered a way to make your feeds more humane, to the one-stop-shop for bloggers. They now offer stats for your blog, email subscriptions for feeds, ads for feeds and blogs. FeedBurner has dedicated services for companies, so there's no wonder that AOL, Wall Street Journal, Reuters are among their clients. But even if FeedBurner grew so much over the years, they keep adding new features, the customer support is excellent even for non-paying users.

There's a rumor that says Google intends to buy FeedBurner and this seems a very good idea. Not just because FeedBurner is the Google of feeds and has a great team. What could FeedBurner do for Google?

* make Blogger's feeds smarter out of the box

* FeedBurner's services could become totally free (currently you have to pay for more advanced stats)

* offer a lot of interesting information to mine

* integrate the stats for feeds with Measure Map and create the perfect analytics solution for blogs

* FeedBurner has a very big number of feeds: more than 700,000. Google has a lot of advertisers, but the AdSense for feeds program is still in closed beta.

Hackers Declaring Cyberwar on Facebook and Myspace

I've been seeing this headline pop up all over the place the last few days: Hackers Declaring War On MySpace, Facebook? My question is: who are these hackers? Is there a central organisation of hackers that have decided to declare this war? Should Facebook and MySpace fight back? The best defense, after all, is a good offense.

(SC Magazine) “If the hackers know you have a particular interest, this can be used to target you in a phishing attack. They know what you’re into and can exploit this to obtain more information from you such as credit card details,” he said. “People are putting far too much information online and into the hands of identity thieves. Young people in particular, need to be very careful as it may come back to haunt them.”

Those of us with an above average IQ know the vulnerability MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites present to our identity. Still, all this hubub begs the question: where are these hackers?

Furthermore, should I join up? I've been a hacker for years, and there's apparently some money in harvesting this information. Do these hackers have an HR department I can apply to?

It's simply ridiculous to use terms like CyberWar and hackers when it comes to stories like this, but still the media persists.

/rizzn