Liz Gannes, Editor, NewTeeVee. Prior to founding NewTeeVee in December 2006, Liz covered the web beat for GigaOM.com. In addition to writing and editing for NewTeeVee, she programmed the NewTeeVee Pier Screenings as well as NewTeeVee Live. Prior to GigaOM, she wrote for Red Herring.
Valleywag today published a letter from an anonymous Facebook platform developer complaining about the abusive limits Facebook is imposing on viral growth.
“Facebook just recently unceremoniously undercut the very thing that was driving the virality of most the initial applications, which is the ability of people to invite all their friends to an application,” the developer complains.
Yahoo will announce tomorrow it has bought collegiate sports site Rivals.com. The news is available due to what seems to be a publishing timing error on an Associated Press story by an Austrian web publication.
Yahoo is describing the deal as Jerry Yang’s first as CEO, though recently ousted CEO Terry Semel’s regime had initiated discussions. Financial terms are not being disclosed. It’s clear Yahoo is trying to move forward with normal activities, but this is not going to displace scrutiny of its rearranged management and reported complicated partial sales talks with News Corp.
Big companies buy hot web startups for their audiences and their cool factor. Increasingly, along with the transaction is the up-and-down pinkie-swear promise to have little-to-know impact on the acquired company. No name change, no office location change, little-to-no leadership change.
Acquirers, despite their enormous and asymmetrical audience, money, and power compared to their purchases, seem like awkward first-time parents afraid of hurting a baby. They are more than conscious of their status as old farts swooping in and quickly turning cool to lame. It’s not just media companies; Google is doing exactly the same thing with YouTube, which captured global attention like its internally built competitor, Google Video, could not.
Me.dium, a company making a browser add-on that relates the webpages you are browsing to those being viewed by other people concurrently using the tool, today announced it had raised $15 million in a second round of funding, bringing its total amount of capital to $20 million from Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Spark Capital, Appian Ventures, Brad Feld, and Elon Musk.
Really? $15 million? I didn’t realize it had taken off to a level to attract that kind of bet. Me.dium is something I tried out for an early review and ended up uninstalling a week or so later during a plug-in purge.
Lala, an enabler of CD swapping and provider of Internet radio, is announcing tonight it will soon be offering a large catalog of music for streaming directly from its website, including the catalog of Warner Music Group.
This is a big move, improving on existing Internet radio and subscription music services, because users will have unlimited and free access to complete albums. In other scenarios, listeners are constricted by radio restrictions or monthly charges.
Google is looking to help web applications get offline, releasing a new Gears open source project. At a demonstration, today it is releasing a version of Google Reader that works offline via a manual sync.
Google Gears is a developer release with new JavaScript APIs for data storage, application caching, and multi-threading features, the company says. In a demo today at headquarters in Mountain View team members said it should work for everything from spotty Internet access to total offline status. They said Google applications like Gmail would be a natural extension, whereas applications like search would not make sense.
Mark Zuckerberg is channeling Steve Jobs here at Facebook’s big launch day. A giggle just went through crowd at his presentation of the three key elements of his announcement, complete with choreographed hand gestures and reiteration: “deep integration, mass distribution, and new opportunity.”
Facebook’s platform strategy will be announced today in San Francisco. In discussions with multiple sources involved with the launch, we’ve come to see the platform as a highly ambitious idea, approaching the idea of Facebook being an operating system with other web apps riding on top of it.
Access to Facebook’s highly organized site and highly engaged 20-plus million user base is something at least 40 companies having been madly prepping for, and many more will rush to build widgets of their own in the days after the platform becomes open to the public.
Launch partner companies have been struggling to deal with uncertainty and last-minute changes to the tools and services made available by Facebook, multiple sources have told GigaOM.
Real estate search engine Trulia has raised a $10 million Series C round of funding from Sequoia Capital and previous backers Accel Partners and Fayez Sarofim & Co, bringing it to a total of $17.7 million raised.
Trulia’s information-rich site recently came out of beta. We haven’t heard anything about the company approaching profitability, though. Its site currently has 1.5 million monthly visitors and 60 million homes.
Why the investment? Trulia’s Heather Mirjahangir Fernandez theorizes over email that her company has been able to “navigat[e] the minefields” of bringing new web tools to the real estate business., “Given all the drama in the Web 2.0 space (Redfin getting fined, Zillow getting sued [correction: complained about and ordered to cease and desist]), there is a lot of attention on us.” For once playing nice pays off.
I moderated a panel today of Silicon Valley high schoolers, talking about their impressions of technology and entrepreneurship. They were a highly articulate and tech-savvy bunch — very doubtfully an accurate statistical sampling — but very fun to talk to. Some tidbits:
One girl told the audience, “I would be lost, helpless, and alone without the Internet. I don’t know how you people survived without it!”
