OK, I admit it. I’ve become one of those snooty guys who is telling the rest of us what the future will look like. Case in point: I’m one of the authors of the “Internet Manifesto,” a collection of positions about the future of journalism that was published yesterday. The original manifesto was in German, collectively written by 15 journalists and bloggers more or less known in the German new media landscape, but it has since spread well beyond the krautosphere. Journalist Jeff Jarvis tweeted about it yesterday, an official English version was published earlier today, and users have contributed Finnish and Romanian translations.

The manifesto is a collection of 17 declarations about the future of media production online. At the core of the text is the claim that the Internet is a different medium with a disparate social and cultural impact than traditional mass media, and that publishers need to acknowledge these differences, rather than pretending they don’t exist or trying to make them go away. “Tradition is not a business model,” we wrote, arguing that we need new forms of journalism rather than regulations to protect the old. Fine by me, you might think, but why would anyone need a manifesto for that? Well, let me tell you why.

Newspaper publishers all around the world have been mounting attacks against search engines, aggregators and bloggers in recent months. Germany’s news industry has been no exception. German publishers have been advocating for stronger intellectual property rights, demanding revenue-sharing agreements from Google and even envisioning a world in which anyone would have to pay a licensing fee just for quoting from an article. All of this culminated in the Hamburg Declaration that was initiated by German publishing heavyweights such as Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, but has since been signed by Wall Street Journal publisher Robert Thomson, News Corp.’s James Murdoch, and others. Here’s a short abstract:

“Numerous providers are using the work of authors, publishers and broadcasters without paying for it. Over the long term, this threatens the production of high-quality content and the existence of independent journalism. For this reason, we advocate strongly urgent improvements in the protection of intellectual property on the Internet.”

In other words: Outlaw fair use, make people pay for quotes and give us the right to define who links to us. This is the same kind of mindset that led to the AP’s demands to be paid every time its headlines show up on Google and that causes many publishers to consider putting all of their content behind pay walls and shut out any kind of public discourse.

Compare that to what we wrote in our manifesto:

“Copyright is a cornerstone of information organization on the Internet. Originators’ rights to decide on the type and scope of dissemination of their contents are also valid on the net. At the same time, copyright may not be abused as a lever to safeguard obsolete supply mechanisms and shut out new distribution models or license schemes. Ownership entails obligations.”

I can’t speak for every author of the manifesto. We’re a diverse bunch. Some of us are full-time bloggers, while others, including myself, actually make a fair amount of their living working for traditional mainstream news organizations. We all may hold slightly different beliefs about the future of monetizing professional journalism, and one can certainly have a spirited discussion about charging users for some types of content online. (GigaOM offers up free content on a network of ad-supported blogs, but charges for our subscription-only research and analysis service.)

We are, however, united in the belief that stronger copyrights and regulations against linking, quoting and indexing online content are not only the wrong way to go, but outright dangerous for both the future of online media and society as a whole, and we felt the obligation to stand up against these ideas now.

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Posted by Janko Roettgers on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  24 Comments
Tags: Internet Manifesto, journalism, new media

Updated with comment from KaZaA: KaZaA, whose once-popular file-sharing service was shut down in 2006 as part of a settlement with the music industry, is back in the headlines. Now it’s said to be launching a web-based legal music download service with the support of all four major labels. Sounds like a great story, especially in light of The Pirate Bay’s efforts to go legit. If only it were true.

KaZaA’s purported rise from the ashes has been featured on CNet, Gizmodo, Billboard.com and BBC News, to name just a few. The Sydney Morning Herald was even able to get a few quotes from Brilliant Digital CEO Kevin Bermeister, who was seen as the arch nemesis of the music industry during the KaZaA trial, but now promotes paid downloads as a “quality legal product.”

The paper is dutifully reporting that Bermeister’s company, who is running the service on KaZaA’s behalf, “appears to have the support of the music industry” because KaZaA’s download offering is going to feature some 1 million tracks from all the major labels and a handful of independents. It uses Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM and offers unlimited downloads for around $20 per month — what Gizmodo calls a “2005-style” music service.

It’s no coincidence that the folks at Gizmodo and other publications said they had flashbacks when they read about KaZaA’s comeback — the whole offering is old news, strategically recycled for maximum exposure. Corporate sibling Altnet.com has been offering a DRM-restricted download service for $20 per month since late 2007. The service, dubbed “Altnet Music Club,” has been featured on the Kazaa.com homepage since early 2008. It was completely integrated into KaZaA’s web site site a couple months back and has been heavily promoted with Adsense ads ever since.

What about that cooperation with the music industry? That’s old news as well. Altnet’s and KaZaA’s offerings are basically repackaged subscription services from Medianet, a company that used to be known as Musicnet. Major media players like Yahoo and AOL use to feature the same kind of subscriptions, albeit a lot cheaper. Most of these offerings have been shut down because people just don’t want to pay for DRM-restricted music downloads.

So why is KaZaA in the news this week for an outdated service it’s been offering for years? That’s a story as odd as the music service itself. The company issued a press release two weeks ago that was as strange as they come: The Kazaa.com domain name was misspelled; a well-known hacker who committed suicide last year endorsed the service; and KaZaA’s new offering was linked to Jammie Thomas, who was recently handed a $1.92 million court verdict for using the old, unauthorized KaZaA version to download music. And it featured a number of links labeled “free music” that were pointing to Kazaa.com. Plain-old SEO, aimed at Google’s bots, not journalists.

Regardless, the release was still picked up by a number of web sites, so maybe KaZaA smelled an opportunity to get back into the headlines. Greg Sandoval over at CNet reported this weekend that “sources close to the company” pitched him the story of an upcoming launch, and others are reporting that KaZaA plans to return on Tuesday. To be honest, we don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Maybe KaZaA will relaunch its site to slap a new face on its old service, or maybe it will just issue another bizarre press release.

We’ve left a message with the company seeking more info, but only received an email auto-reply. Turns out the person who published the KaZaA press release two weeks back is out of the office this week, just in time for the supposed comeback. But I guess that’s excusable. After all, he’s only the company’s SEO expert. Update: KaZaA emailed us a short statement, explaining that the company is working on a video player that “will be released (within) a control group,” and adding: “The digital music subscription is still [$]19.98.”

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Posted by Janko Roettgers on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  11 Comments
Tags: Altnet, file-sharing, Kazaa, kazaaa

It’s been a month since browser maker Opera announced Opera Unite to much fanfare, and it’s about time for a reality check: Its users have been struggling to access the browser’s new server functions in recent days, with file-sharing services unavailable and personal web pages returning server errors. At fault is Unite’s proxy architecture, which was supposed to make networking your browser easier, but has been unreliable at best. Add to this the fact that personal Unite pages have been showing up on Google, and you start to wonder what Opera really meant when it claimed to “reinvent the web” with Unite — start from scratch with a shaky architecture and unresolved privacy issues, just like in the early ’90s?

Opera Unite offers users an easy way to share files and host web sites on their own PC through the Opera browser, and the platform can be extended with third-party services. Unite uses proxy servers to make these services available to the world, even if you’re behind a firewall, and the service offers its users permanent URLs that are resolved through Opera’s proxy servers. In other words: Your notebook running Opera with Unite will always be available at an address like http://notebook.youraddress.operaunite.com, even if you drag it from the office to the coffee shop.

Problem is, these proxy servers haven’t been working. Unite users have been complaining about frequent disconnects for at least two weeks, and the situation seems to have gone downhill from there. Not only was I not able to keep a persistent connection to Unite on multiple test machines for more than a few minutes in recent days, I also couldn’t find a single Unite service on other users’ machines up and running. Even the suggested links to other users within Unite resulted in error messages.

Opera finally admitted to these issues in a blog post yesterday, stating that “this has been largely due to our Unite proxy acting funny.” However, the post doesn’t say anything about how long it will take to resolve these problems, and Opera didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Connection problems aren’t the only issues that have come up in the month since Unite’s launch. Transforming your browser into a publicly available server also has huge privacy implications, one of them being that Google indexes these pages just as if they were any other web site. So far, around 1,300 Unite pages show up in Google’s index. Some of them are password-protected, but Google’s robots were able to access password-protected shared media pages in at least a handful of cases. One also has to wonder whether users really understand that making their home PC’s photos available without a password means those snapshots will be part of the Google Images index as well.

A third-party developer has come up with a Unite extension that utilizes a simple robots.txt file to block Google and others from indexing pages. It may be a good idea to make this a default feature of Unite, but Opera may be hesitant to do so because it would hurt the product’s visibility.

To be fair, Opera Unite is still in alpha, and one can’t expect everything to work 100 percent from day one. However, the proxy issues hint at more substantial architectural challenges: Opera is reinventing the web with its own servers as a single point of failure, and the fact that it can’t keep up with a small number of early adopters makes you wonder whether Unite will ever be ready for mass adoption.

Image from the Opera Unite developer’s primer.

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Posted by Janko Roettgers on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  27 Comments
Tags: Browser, Browsers, Opera, Opera Unite

The German parliament is slated to vote on a bill this week aimed at cracking down on child pornography via the establishment of a mandated DNS block list. Representatives of the two parties that compose the country’s coalition government agreed on a final version of the bill late Monday night despite massive opposition from online activists and ISPs. Critics argue that DNS blocking is ineffective and fear the list could be the first step towards massive Internet censorship.

Try to access a web site hosting child pornography from within Germany, and you’ll be met with a red stop sign. Or at least that’s the premise of new legislation that could be approved by the German parliament as early as this Thursday. The bill would authorize the German Federal Police to establish a block list containing the domain names and IP addresses of web sites hosting and linking to child porn. ISPs would be required to block such addresses and redirect all traffic to sites hosting the iconic warning messages.

Germany’s coalition government initially drafted the bill in April. The legislation has been met with intense resistance by German Internet users and civil liberties advocates alike. An official online petition against the bill has attracted more than 128,000 signatures, and the sheer number of citizens trying to sign the petition has brought down the parliament’s web infrastructure on more than one occasion.

ISPs have also criticized portions of the bill, which originally called for them to log each attempted access to a blocked site and share such log files with law enforcement officials. Politicians eventually seemed to understand that labeling someone a suspected pedophile simply because he once clicked on the wrong link wasn’t a very clever idea in the age of URL-shorteners. The new version of the bill doesn’t contain any logging requirements.

Online activists, however, remain steadfast in their opposition to the bill. DNS blocks are ineffective, they argue, because circumventing them is as simple as using a DNS server located outside of Germany. Critics also fear that child porn is only the beginning and that laws mandating the censorship of other types of content will follow.

Such fears are not completely unfounded. Record labels and book publishers have already argued that ISPs should also block access to file-sharing sites like The Pirate Bay and one-click hosters like Rapidshare. Some politicians have even proposed extending the block list to also cover sites offering ultra-violent video games, online casinos and Islamic propaganda. Oliver Süme of the German ISP association eco recently stated  that Internet access providers are “increasingly doubting that this measure will be limited to child pornography” in light of these demands.

Germany is not alone with its filtering ambitions. Six other European countries already have similar block lists to combat child porn. These lists are usually guarded with secrecy, but a few were recently leaked onto the web, prompting German Internet activist Alvar Freude to use them to protest the pending bill by analyzing the listed web addresses with a script that sent out automated takedown requests to the sites’ hosting providers. The results: 250 of 348 providers responded, and 61 sites were taken down within the first 12 hours. Said Freude: “Taking down these sites doesn’t take longer than sending block lists to ISPs.”

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Every family has someone who does all the tech support — you know, the guy who gets a call Friday night at 9 p.m. if Aunt Emma’s LCD picture frame doesn’t work. Chances are, if you read this blog, you are that person. Well, guess what: Your life is about to get even busier. San Francisco-based backup software startup Cucku wants you to safe-keep all of your family’s data.

Cucku has been offering a Skype-based buddy-to-buddy backup solution since late last year. The company is rolling out version 2.0 today, which includes multiperson support, as well as a neat sneakernet component as an answer to those slow upload rates we’ve been complaining about. Cucku is trying to establish itself in a crowded and increasingly brutal backup and storage solutions market, with companies like Crashplan and Zoogmo already offering buddy back-ups. But Cucku may be onto something with the idea of pairing up novices with more experienced users.

I talked to Cucku CEO Robert Ellison last week, and his main pitch was simple but convincing: Online backups are slow and unreliable. “It can be a pretty painful experience,” he said, and many of us would have to agree. Uploading your 80 GB photo and music collection takes weeks — after which your online backup provider may go out of business, or even lose your data.

So how is exchanging those 80 GB of files via Skype any faster, you might ask, and why should your mom’s PC be any safer to host your files? The answer is that Cucku doesn’t just rely on the Net to facilitate your backup needs. The first backup you do is always local, and your first remote backup doesn’t have to choke up your Internet connection, either. Instead, you’re going to export an encrypted copy of your backup on an external HD or flash drive.

Plug it into your mom’s PC the next time you’re over for coffee, and she’s going to be hosting those files for you in no time. Future incremental backups can then be facilitated via Skype. Restoring your system can also be done through an exported image on an external storage medium, or you can just grab your laptop and restore everything with LAN speeds.

Cucku is eyeing the small business market for future versions of its product, which are supposed to include a proprietary network aside from Skype. For now, Cucku is concentrating on the consumer market, where it will continue to offer a free version that allows two users to back up each other. Pro versions that make it possible to host unlimited backups will cost you $49.95, but free and pro versions can interact, meaning that your mom can continue to use the free version even if you go pro and become what Ellison likes to call “the mini Mozy” of your family.

Ellison told me that his company somewhat accidentally stumbled across the geek in the family as the target audience. Users started to ask for ways to back up files of multiple family members, and Ellison now believes this could be a great way to “pull in the people who don’t back up,” as he put it.

I must admit that I was skeptical when I first heard about Cucku. However, I love the idea of an easy way to combine online with sneakernet backups, and I liked what I saw when I played a little with the new Cucku version over the last few days. I would even get my Mom to install Cucku — if she wouldn’t use a Mac, as recommended by the family geek. Cucku is Windows only, and an OS X version is currently not on the company’s road map.

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Tim O’Reilly had a simple message for the tech community earlier this week at the Emerging Technology conference: Support Obama! Wait, isn’t the campaign over? It may be, but the next presidential contest is already around the corner, and O’Reilly believes that there’s only a short window of opportunity to actually innovate in Washington. That’s why he wants to get tech folks involved now. I sat down with him yesterday to hear more about his plans to help the new administration. “We have this wonderful opportunity with this new president who is saying he wants to make government more transparent, more collaborative, more responsive,”O’Reilly told me, adding: “We know how to build systems like that.” One of his favored examples is Carl Malamud, who launched the first free and public EDGAR server for SEC filings without any government help back in 1993, only to donate it to the SEC shortly after. “This idea of public-private partnership is fairly central to my thinking,”O’Reilly told me. “One of the opportunities for people on the outside is to shoulder more of the burden and build services that government has a hard time building itself,” O’Reilly said.

Of course, building such databases is a lot easier when you have a federal administration that committed to publishing government data online. “It is very clear that the Obama administration understands startup culture,” O’Reilly says. However, there are still lots and lots of people within and close to the government that view making data public with suspicion. Said O’Reilly: “Many people in these organizations are threatened by the idea that some young developer could say, ‘I can build for $5,000 or in six weeks something that you are gonna say takes six years and $50 million.’ “

So, how do you convince official agencies to trust that young developer, and how do you get that developer to start toying with government data? First of all, by getting them to talk. O’Reilly Media is holding a Gov 2.0 Summit this September in Washington with the goal to showcase innovation inside and outside of the government. (Wired launched an “Open Up Government Data” wiki earlier this week, as well.)

And then, there’s always money. The new administration loves technology partly because it’s cheaper, O’Reilly speculated. “A lot of it is: How do we get more bang for our buck?,” he said. However, it’s not just about spending less: “Reinventing our sources and distribution systems for energy, reinventing our educational system, reinventing our communications infrastructure are all very powerful stimuluses for new economic activity.”

In other words: Supporting the new administration could turn out to be the Valley’s very own stimulus plan.

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Posted by Janko Roettgers on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  5 Comments
Tags: Gov2.0, Tim O'Reilly

MIT researcher Nathan Eagle regaled the audience at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference yesterday with tales of technical innovation from East Africa. “Kenya has some mobile phone services that are years ahead of what we have right now,” he said. Eagle was at ETech to present his new startup, Txteagle, which aims to be a kind of mobile Mechanical Turk, using countless mobile phone users in Kenya and beyond to solve easy tasks and earn small amounts of money in return. (There’s a good writeup in Wired News today)

It’s definitely an interesting idea. But to me, the real story is how mobile phones have transformed a country like Kenya in recent years, making not only services like Txteagle possible, but also shaking up the region’s entire economic system.

Eagle spent the last few years going back and forth between Kenya and the U.S., and he witnessed this transformation firsthand. I caught up with him after his talk to learn more. According to Eagle, local incumbent Safaricom had started a minute-sharing service for its prepaid cell phone plans a few years back. The idea was to enable users to send minutes to family members in rural areas, who weren’t otherwise able to buy prepaid phone cards. However, Kenyans quickly came up with other uses. “Lots and lots of people were using it as a surrogate for currency,” Eagle said. “[You] could literally pay for taxi cab rides using cell phone credit.”

Safaricom realized a huge opportunity and started a mobile payment service called M-PESA. To call M-PESA a success would be an understatement, according to Eagle. “Within about a year, (Safaricom) became the biggest bank in East Africa.” Today you can use your phone to pay for cab rides and electricity, to get money out of ATMs without owning an ATM card or even having a traditional bank account.

Eagle shared another striking example of the transformative power of mobile payments during his ETech talk. Rural communities used to have to pay a lot of money upfront in order to get a modern well capable of providing clean drinking water. Now, there are companies that install these wells for free, complete with an integrated cell phone payment system. Want some water? Just pay as you go with your M-PESA account.

“It has transformed the country,” says Eagle

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Posted by Janko Roettgers on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  14 Comments
Tags: mobile payments, Safaricom, Txteagle

The Internet is close to a meltdown, according to The Register. The culprit, according to author Richard Bennett, is the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, which introduced a new type of file transfer with its most recent alpha version. BitTorrent clients have long been using the TCP protocol to facilitate file transfers, but now uTorrent is moving to UDP, a protocol that is very popular for streaming media, VoIP and other real-time transfers. This will essentially lead to torrents eating up all of the bandwidth available for VoIP, according to Bennett, who calls uTorrent’s UDP transfers a “net-killing feature.”

Of course, the same argument was made when UDP-based VoIP connections and video streams became popular — and the Internet hasn’t ceased to exist. The truth is that uTorrent’s UDP implementation could actually be a step toward alleviating congestion problems. Bennett, however, decided to ignore this and instead serve up nothing more than a thinly veiled rant against net neutrality.

Bennett’s piece is based on a belief that UDP traffic is “aggressive” and uncontrollable, whereas TCP is the nice and proper protocol that can be easily managed. This notion ignores the basic fact that P2P developers, in order to make the protocol work at all, need to implement TCP-like functionalities on top of UDP, one of which includes congestion control. You simply can’t operate a P2P client that eats up all of its users’ bandwidth, much less build a successful business model on top of it.

BitTorrent Inc. has been working on establishing itself as a CDN solutions provider, offering media companies the ability to tap into its vast user base to deliver video and other huge files. Of course, this only works if end users are actually willing to provide some part of their upload bandwidth, and they are only willing to do so if file transfers don’t stop them from doing other things, like playing online games or making VoIP calls.

BitTorrent has traditionally entrusted its users with figuring out how to balance their network load, meaning that users had to manually limit their client’s maximum upload and download rate in case they encountered choppy Skype connections or similar problems.

uTorrent’s new implementation wants to automate this process by regulating its UDP traffic in relationship to ongoing TCP transfers. The company has tested its congestion control in recent months, and the first results seem encouraging, as a quote from a report (PDF) that the company recently shared with the IETF reveals:

“In one example, (BitTorrent) was used to download and seed game updates while an online multiplayer game was being played. With TCP used for transport the way it is usually used in BitTorrent, ping times shot up to 2000 milliseconds and beyond and stayed there while seeding. With the novel congestion control, ping times were in the 50-100 millisecond range, while the upload rate remained essentially unchanged.”

For now, we do have to take the company’s word for it that this actually works. uTorrent is not open source, and the client’s UDP file transfer protocol hasn’t been publicly specified, either. BitTorrent Inc. V-P Simon Morris has declared in a public response to the Register article that his company is working with the IETF to find “solutions that can be standardized and broadly adopted in due course.” In fact, BitTorrent engineer Stanislav Shalunov is co-chairing an IETF working group for this very purpose.

So why did Bennett chose to ignore all of this? Because a little scaremongering can go a long way to make the case for an ISP-based network management clampdown on P2P traffic. The only way to prevent the coming Internet meltdown, he contends, is to filter out uTorrent’s UDP transfers on the ISP level, and the only way to get this done is do away with net neutrality. Right — because if there’s one thing that we’ve learned from the financial sector, it’s that meltdowns are best prevented by doing away with regulation.

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Posted by Janko Roettgers on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  30 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, P2P, utorrent

Brand Asset Digital launched its P2P advertising platform P2Pwords today, promising to bring pay-per-click advertising to file-sharing networks like Limewire, Gnutella and Emule. The NY-based company received a largely positive review from John Healey over at The LA Times Bitplayer blog, who thinks that “the opportunity presented by P2Pwords is so large, it may be hard for advertisers to resist.”

The combination of file sharing and advertising is definitely an interesting one. File-sharing networks attract millions of users. It’s becoming clearer every day that the entertainment industry’s shock-and-awe lawsuits just don’t work, which is why many look for other ways to monetize P2P. Still, it’s a good idea to approach these early trials with a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, Skyrider, another company that promised to marry search ads with P2P networks just closed its doors last week after burning through $25 million in funding.

Brand Asset Digital compares its P2Pwords platform to Google’s Adwords service. The major search engines attract about 10 billion web searches per month, the company argues, whereas P2P networks supposedly attract 1.5 billion searches per day. P2Pwords wants to leverage that search volume by essentially distributing sponsored and ad-supported content through file-sharing networks. The company’s private beta test included Glaceau, the maker of Vitaminwater; it distributed a sponsored video of Hip-Hop star 50 Cent that offered the ability to click through to a Vitaminwater web site. Brand Asset Digital said some of those early tests saw click-through rates of over 4 percent.

That sounds pretty good, but here are five big caveats:

1. P2Pwords is not Adsense. It’s understandable that the company is comparing itself to Google’s success story, but there are noticeable differences. Google monetizes search by displaying its ads next to, but separate from, its own search results. Brand Asset Digital, on the other hand, doesn’t own a search engine. Instead it injects its ads right into the search results of P2P clients like Limewire, which means it’s operating more like a SEO trying to exploit Google. As a result, it has to walk a fine line, displaying its content only when it is relevant, but also trying to get attention from file sharers that are looking for 50 Cent’s latest album, and not his Vitaminwater commercials.

2. P2P is moving to the web. Brand Asset Digital claims that 70 percent of all upstream bandwidth is consumed by P2P. That sounds about right, but most of those bits are actually caused by BitTorrent transfers. BitTorrent clients, however, don’t offer search networks, and are instead relying on web sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay for search — which, of course, already have advertising in place. P2Pwords only works for P2P clients like Limewire. Those are still significant when it comes to music downloads, but their overall market share is shrinking.

3. The P2P ad market is getting crowded. P2Pwords claims to be the first “pay-per-click search marketing platform,” but it’s not the only one targeting file sharers with ads. The Jun Group, anti-piracy outlet Mediadefender, Hiro and Yume Networks are all offering similar services. Skyrider, also in the same league, just went under last week. Users of file-sharing clients like Limewire are also getting targeted by rogue spammers, porn advertisers, virus writers and other annoyances, which makes it harder and harder to find the content for which they’re actually looking. The P2P community is increasingly responding with IP number-based filters and block lists — and it may just be a question of time before P2Pwords advertisers find themselves blacklisted as well.

4. The market is just not that big. P2P networks only attract a small segment of the whole search market. You just don’t search for a plumber on Limewire. Most people are instead looking for music or video downloads, and most entertainment companies still shy away from P2P networks. The same seems to be true for many big brands, and it’s unclear how valuable P2P will be for them if their attitude ever changes. Advertisers want to sell products, but file sharers want stuff for free, which is why digital retailers especially may find that the Cost Per Acquisition of P2P campaigns is going to be much higher than that of traditional search advertising.

5. There are some significant changes coming. Contextual search ads really only took off when Google launched its own platform. The same may be true for P2P search ads. Limewire is getting ready to launch its own search ad network called Lime Links, which is currently in stealth mode. The company plans to offer self-serve advertising for its own and other P2P clients, as well as for entertainment-related web sites. Limewire’s client is installed on 17 percent of all PCs in the U.S., according to Torrentfreak, and the company is planing to expand its market share with new social networking functionalities. The launch of Lime Links is likely going to be a game changer for companies like Brand Asset Digital — and could even make their business model obsolete over night.

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Posted by Janko Roettgers on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  7 Comments
Tags: AdWords, Brand Asset Digital, Skyrider, Vitaminwater

Fire Eagle lead developer Tom Coates just announced at the ETech conference that Yahoo is launching Fire Eagle for developers today. Fire Eagle is meant to be a location broker that collects location information from a variety of services and devices and makes them available to other platforms. Fire Eagle offers open APIs both for data input and output, which means the service will coexist and possibly even enrich other location platforms. One of the first services plugging into Fire Eagle will be Dopplr.

The beta test is still invite-only, but you can sign up for one on the Fire Eagle web site. Coates said that 10,000 invitations were sent out today, and more will be available soon. Invited users also get a handful of invites to give away. Here are some screenshots:

End users at this time can do little more than update their location through the Fire Eagle web site and play with their privacy settings. Fire Eagle still has some problems recognizing locations that aren’t specified with a exact postal address. For example, it wouldn’t locate me at the “San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina,” which is where ETech is happening this year, unless I entered the complete address. There is also activity stream that would be publicly available to the end user.

The service has some similarities to other locative platforms like Plazes.com, but it’s missing any social component. The reliance on third-party developers to actually make Fire Eagle work does have some important privacy implications: Yahoo doesn’t store any location history, but that doesn’t stop any other platform from starting a complete tracking profile.

It will be interesting to see what Fire Eagle developers inside and outside of the Yahoo Universe come up with. Yahoo is already working on a few basics, like a Facebook app and the ability to automatically update your location through your mobile phone that’s based on cell tower IDs, but the service could obviously also play a big role in future versions of Upcoming, Yahoo Local and other Yahoo services.

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Posted by Janko Roettgers on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  3 Comments

Yahoo’s location based service enabler FireEagle is entering it’s beta testing phase today with an official announcement at ETech. The new web site of the service is still featuring an invite form, just as the alpha version did, so it might still be a limited beta test, or maybe someone still has to flip the switch. We will know more once FireEagle lead developer Tom Coates climbs on the ETech stage for his Fire Eagle keynote, which should be around 9.30am PST.

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Posted by Janko Roettgers on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: fire eagle, LBS, Yahoo, yhoo

Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li, the first keynote speaker of the two-day Graphing Social Patterns West conference that started today in San Diego, said that if she held the keys to the Facebook empire, she would make the social graph open. “Not just the applications,” she told me, “but I would make it Facebook everywhere.”

Her comments were part of a one-on-one conversation following her keynote, during which she laid out what social networks would look like 10 years from now. Subsequent presenters were then forced to explain why their own were still so far off from Li’s vision.

Facebook’s Ben Ling, for example, told the audience that users don’t really want complete data portability. No wonder things are moving along slowly. Li still thinks that we will see some major changes this year, though she cautioned that we won’t see the ubiquitous social network that centers around your email as the constant of your social graph. That, she said, will most likely play out on a large portal site, but not for another five or so.

So how could we speed this whole process up? Well, if she were calling the shots at Facebook, “I would make my social graph open,” Li told me. And not just the applications.

I would preempt all the portals in saying: Instead of using their social map, I’m going to enable you to import your social map into Facebook, and then take it anywhere else you want. If you want to put your social graph in LinkedIn, press a button. You want to upload your Gmail email relationships from a Pop account? And I’m not going to look at the content, I’m just looking at who you are emailing and map those relationships for you that way by email address. They would preempt every single other player from being able to do that. They will keep all those early adopters and pioneers from going some place else to do that aggregation.

Mark, are you listening?

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Posted by Janko Roettgers on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  8 Comments
Tags: facebook