Updated: Users of social networks choose where to spend their time based on factors entirely outside of those such as uptime and reliability, according to report issued Tuesday (PDF link) by Pingdom, a service that tracks web site uptime and optimization for companies. Not that such things aren’t important — after all, a social network isn’t going to be of much use if people can’t log in or use the features. But the Pingdom report shows that when it comes right down to it, those things don’t matter nearly as much as one might think.

Take a look at the chart below, which sorts social networks according to their total downtime in 2008.

Notice who’s up there near the top? A bunch of networks you likely never use (or at least not very much), including Xanga.com and Classmates.com, as well as Imeem and MySpace (although Pingdom admits that its data for Imeem was incomplete). And right down there at the bottom in terms of reliability is…yes, you guessed it: Twitter. The social network that is currently growing like a weed on steroids — the one that everyone is talking about — had the worst uptime record by a landslide: Its downtime in 2008 stands at more than 84 per cent hours, or almost twice its nearest competitor, LinkedIn.

Here’s another eye-opener. This chart shows Twitter’s downtime per quarter:

Update: That’s right — nearly 50 percent of Twitter’s downtime took place in the second quarter of last year. Twitter was down almost 50 per cent of the time. That is a pathetic and dismal record by almost any measure. There are apps and services that are still in the private alpha stage with uptime records that would put Twitter to shame. But what is the social network that everyone wants to use? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not Xanga (no offense to you Xanga-ites). And one of the big reasons for Twitter’s downtime, of course, was the simple fact that it was trying to scale quickly enough to keep up with its growth (that, and it arguably had the wrong kind of infrastructure to start with — but that’s a different story).

When I wrote about Twitter and its downtime last year, I got a fascinating comment from someone who ran a small technology startup — not a Twitter knockoff, but similar in many ways. They spent a lot of time and money building a great infrastructure, robust and scalable, with all kinds of features. And what did it get them? A great service, with very few users. This person said that he would much rather have had Twitter’s problems: lots of downtime and scalability issues, but also lots of devoted users. Uptime isn’t much good if there isn’t anyone around who cares whether you are up or not.

When Twitter first hit my radar screen sometime back in 2007, I (like many others) immediately dismissed it as a gimmicky little time-waster with no real value. I mean, a message limit of 140 characters? Lame. And what was it for? Nothing, apparently. It was like the Facebook status message, but all by itself, with no other services or features around it. What could possibly be the point?

In particular, I wondered why the Twitter team didn’t include more features, and left it up to external services to do things like search (which they eventually brought in-house by buying Summize). But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the lack of features is actually a positive, not a negative. What Twitter did was strip away all the clutter found on so many social networks and pare things down to their essence. A tweet is like the smallest possible unit of online interaction — the atom of social media (an idea I wish I could claim, but one that appears to have occurred to others as well).

By using those atoms as building blocks, other services have built larger structures. While many Twitter users might be happy to just post random “tweets” (a term that users came up with themselves, according to Twitter co-founder Evan Williams), eventually some of them are probably going to want to track some of their followers in groups using a “dashboard” type of app such as Tweetdeck, or export their messages using Tweetake, or track the most popular tweets through something like Tweetmeme or Retweet. They might want to filter messages using “hashtags” or keywords, using something like Tweetgrid. And then there’s the universe of URL-shortening services like Bit.ly (which has some interesting tracking features) and TinyURL, which got a huge boost from Twitter.

The number of Twitter-based services has continued to explode. There’s Stocktwits, from Howard Lindzon and Soren Macbeth, which lets you track stocks and trading; Mr. Tweet, which recommends Twitter users based on an analysis of the people you are already following; TweetLater, which lets you schedule future messages; TwitPic, which turns Twitter into a kind of Flickr-like photo-sharing service (and was used most famously to post that photo of Flight 1549 landing in the Hudson River); and some rather unique ones such as Follow Cost, which lets you check a particular user’s activity to see whether it will be time-consuming to follow them. There’s a list of some great services and tools here (in fact, the “15 Great Twitter Apps” type of post has become a staple of the blogosphere).

Of course, these aren’t really services at all — they’re features. In the normal kind of software or web-service environment they would have been part of the offering from the start, or the company would add or acquire them. Not so with Twitter (other than Summize). Instead an ecosystem of sorts has sprung up around it, with features disguised as stand-alone services all competing for attention in a kind of Darwinian process of evolution. So now that Williams and co-founder Biz Stone have raised $35 million that they didn’t really need, will they go on an acquisition spree? Possibly — although it’s not clear whether that would make the core service more appealing, or disrupt the ecosystem the company has created.

From a “business ecology” point of view, it’s also worth wondering whether an ecosystem that grows up around a single company or service — even one as great as Twitter — is sustainable over the long term. One way or another, it’s a fascinating process to watch.

There’s been a lot of chatter about the newspaper industry in recent weeks — about whether newspaper companies should find something like iTunes, or use micropayments as a way to charge people for the news, or sue Google, or all of the above — and how journalism is at risk because newspapers are dying. But there’s been very little discussion about something that has the potential to fundamentally change the way that newspapers function (or at least one newspaper in particular), and that is the release of the New York Times’ open API for news stories. The Times has talked about this project since last year sometime, and it has finally happened; as developer Derek Gottfrid describes on the Open blog, programmers and developers can now easily access 2.8 million news articles going back to 1981 (although they are only free back to 1987) and sort them based on 28 different tags, keywords and fields.

It’s possible that this kind of thing escapes the notice of traditional journalists because it involves programming, and terms like API (which stands for “application programming interface”), and is therefore not really journalism-related or even media-related, and can be understood only by nerds and geeks. But if there’s one thing that people like Adrian Holovaty (lead developer of Django and founder of Everyblock) have shown us, it is that broadly speaking, content — including the news — is just data, and if it is properly parsed and indexed it can become something quite incredible: a kind of proto-journalism, that can be formed and shaped in dozens or even hundreds of different ways.

Doing this with all of the various elements of the news — names, places, events, details — on a large enough basis can reveal hidden patterns or connections that might not only improve an existing story but lead to new and completely unexpected ones. At the moment, only the research departments of newspapers have the tools to do this, but opening up an API the way the New York Times has can put those tools into anyone’s hands, allowing them to pursue projects and avenues that newspaper reporters and researchers might never think of. And from the point of view of the Times as a media outlet and business, it turns the paper into a kind of platform for other services and features. That makes the paper and its content more valuable, and could lead to all kinds of commercial licensing possibilities and partnerships — not to mention being good marketing.

This kind of thinking is at the core of Jeff Jarvis’s book “What Would Google Do?” His main point is that virtually any business can benefit from thinking about making its data more open, allowing others to remix and manipulate it to see what comes out, and then taking advantage of what can be learned from those experiments. All the New York Times is doing is using its article database in the same way that Google uses its map database, or the Google Earth satellite-imagery database — as a foundation upon which other things can be built. The Times deserves kudos for pursuing such a open model rather than locking its articles up and trying to charge people for every view. I have no doubt that they will benefit far more from such an approach in the long run than would ever be possible with a pay-per-view strategy.

Variations on the “Google should pay me for X” theme have been around for some time now, and the precipitous decline of content-related industries — among them book publishing, newspaper printing and music distribution, to name just a few — has only accelerated the number and frequency of these complaints. Everyone from the World Association of Newspapers to the American Authors Association seems convinced that the Internet owes them a living, and that Google (being synonymous with the Internet the way it is for so many) is the best one to settle the bill, especially since it has billions of dollars just lying around, like Scrooge McDuck. Let’s call this the “Google as sugar daddy” argument.

But why should Google pay? The main reason seems to be: Because it can. Any additional rationale comes off as an afterthought, and one that in most cases, doesn’t hold water.

The latest addition to this sad pantheon is an opinion piece by Peter Osnos, a former journalist turned book publisher who writes for an outfit called the Century Foundation. He has posted on The Daily Beast a shorter version of a piece he wrote for the Century Foundation. The most recent one is called “Will Google Save The News?” but the earlier piece is much more blunt, entitled simply “Make Google Pay.” Osnos’s argument seems to be: Google paid book publishers for the right to scan their books, therefore Google should pay newspapers as well, since their content is used without their permission in Google News. Presto! Industry rescued. As he puts it:

“The major point is that Google has now conceded, with a very large payment, that information is not free. This leads to an obvious, critical question: Why aren’t newspapers and news magazines demanding payment for use of their stories on Google and other search engines? Why are they not getting a significant slice of the advertising revenues generated by use of their stories via Google?”

This argument is so full of holes that it’s difficult to know where to begin.

Let’s take one of the most obvious points: Google News doesn’t carry advertising, so there are no “advertising revenues generated by use of their stories” for the news industry to get “a significant slice” of (there is referral revenue, but that’s a step removed, and requires a different argument). Obvious point #2: Books are not newspapers. Google was (and is) scanning hard copies of books and adding them into its index of data, which publishers say amounts to copyright infringement. The only way this would be comparable to what Google is doing with newspapers is if Google was buying copies of every newspaper and scanning all the stories manually. Stories show up in Google News because newspapers make their content freely available — if they did not, then it wouldn’t be indexed. Don’t want Google to have it? Don’t publish it online, or use simple tools (like robots.txt) to block the Google bot from indexing it.

Obvious point #3 (although this could easily be a candidate for obvious point #1): Google is indexing entire books, but only small fragments of news stories appear in Google News. Why should Google pay newspapers for the use of a headline and a few sentences from their stories? Even if you assume that newspapers aren’t getting a flood of traffic from Google (which they are), and even if you ignore the fact that this kind of use is a prime candidate for exclusion under the “fair use” clause in U.S. copyright law (which it almost certainly is), asking for payment makes no sense whatsoever. If you follow the logic of Osnos and his fellow Google-hounds, then I should be able to sue Google and be compensated for having my blog indexed in its search results.

This is absurd, of course — as is Peter Osnos’s argument (former journalist Mark Potts makes some good points on his blog as well, calling Osnos’s theory “sheer idiocy”). The real reason that Osnos thinks Google should pay is simple: Newspapers are desperate for funds, and Google has boatloads of money. But that doesn’t mean his thesis has any actual merit. The reality is that newspapers should be thinking of ways (and many are) to profit from the traffic that Google and other web sites and social networks send them, not obsessing over how to get the search giant to cough up some of its cash.

As everyone waits to find out how new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz plans to resuscitate the struggling Internet giant, in the meantime, the stress of watching Yahoo bungle one thing after another — such as coming within inches of a merger with Microsoft, only to blow the deal at the 11th hour — seems to have taken its toll on some otherwise perceptive stock analysts. Take Gene Munster from Piper Jaffray, for example. As described by Barron’s blogger Eric Savitz, Munster recently wrote yet another “open letter” to Bartz (man, she must be getting sick of those) in which he suggested that Yahoo buy the New York Times. And maybe Gawker Media as well. Oh yes, and Twitter too. And maybe FriendFeed.

Is this a strategy, or a laundry list? With all due respect to Munster, rattling off a bunch of names as possible acquisitions doesn’t amount to a realistic strategy for the company at this point. I get the idea — Yahoo needs quality content, and the NYT has that in spades; Yahoo needs to get bloggy, and Gawker owns that territory in numerous key market niches; and Yahoo needs to get more social, hence Twitter and FriendFeed. But isn’t this just going to spread Yahoo’s peanut butter even thinner? It’s already gotten so thin that even peanut-butter manifesto writer Brad Garlinghouse is gone. More importantly, gobbling up Twitter or the New York Times doesn’t actually make a whole heck of a lot of sense.

Take the New York Times. Yahoo already gets to aggregate content from the Times and other publications through Yahoo News, and is free to strike deals with the newspaper or any other web site to provide special content, etc. What possible benefit could buying the Times provide? It’s not as though the newspaper is spinning off boatloads of cash, or producing content that Yahoo can’t get by other means. And buying the Times could actually make it harder for Yahoo to strike deals with other content providers, which would actually put the company further behind. An acquisition makes no sense whatsoever. Sorry, Gene.

And what about Twitter and FriendFeed? Getting more social would be an excellent idea, but hasn’t Yahoo tried that already with Flickr and Delicious? Yes, indeed. And what has the company gotten out of it so far? Very little in the way of synergies, as far as I can tell, and there’s no reason to expect that Twitter and FriendFeed would add any more value. What’s Yahoo going to do — hope that it can somehow convince people to Twitter links to Yahoo content? Good luck with that. About the only thing Yahoo would be likely to do with either service is gum it all up with spammy content and lace it with ads, which would kill either one dead. Nice try, though.

I understand the desire to find some kind of magic bullet (or bullets) that could rescue Yahoo from its predicament — or even make things a little more exciting than they have been for the last couple of years, as the company has stumbled and bumbled from one pothole to another. But the reality is that there is no magic cure. Yahoo has to find a way to do what it does better, that’s all, and neither the New York Times nor Twitter would help.

Apple’s announcements at Macworld may have lacked some of the flair and sizzle that CEO Steve Jobs usually brought to his keynote, but there was one announcement that, arguably, will wind up changing the playing field considerably. That announcement is the news of DRM-free sales from all of the major music labels through iTunes, and the addition of variable pricing. As rumored during the run up to Macworld, the world’s largest online music store will soon start selling songs for 69 cents, 99 cents or $1.29 each.

The only question now, as Peter Kafka notes in a post at MediaMemo, is whether anyone will care or not — and whether it will help to fix any of the music industry’s systemic problems.

Amazon (among others) has had DRM-free songs from the four major record labels available in its online store for almost a year now, and it sells many of them at a lower price than Apple does. But so far that hasn’t helped Jeff Bezos and his team loosen the stranglehold that Steve Jobs has on the portable music market. The reality is that while DRM may be a big hobbyhorse for geeks, it isn’t really a big concern for most iTunes shoppers. The vast majority of buyers are happy to buy songs from Apple regardless of what format they come in — provided they can play them on an iPod. Anyone looking for DRM-free music can already find it pretty easily.

The more important part of this news, at least from a music industry point of view, is the introduction of variable pricing — or at least a three-tiered approach, which is as close to variable pricing as the record labels are likely to get (for now). Jobs has resisted the pleas of the industry for several years now, and Apple appears to have done a straight swap of DRM-free music in return for the tiered offerings. But as veteran music-industry observer and gadfly Bob Lefsetz describes in his latest letter, those concessions could wind up doing the record labels more harm than good — at least if the industry sees them as a solution to their larger problems. Lefsetz calls it “fiddling while Rome burns.”

The labels may be hoping they can sell the bulk of their hits for $1.29, but the reality could be very different. As Adrian Kingsley-Hughes points out in his column at ZDNet, they could easily wind up conditioning the market to expect even lower prices for most of the music they buy, apart from the mega-hits. That will make the labels even more desperate to pump up mega-brands like Britney, but the result could be an even thinner revenue stream from the bulk of their catalogues. Don’t be surprised if you see a lot of record executives thumbing through the Cliff’s Notes version of “The Long Tail,” with a fevered look in their eyes, while staring down a spreadsheet with some big holes in it.

The Recording Industry Association of America, which has spent the past five years suing tens of thousands of individual file-sharers for copyright infringement, has apparently decided to change tactics, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal (hopefully this one is a little more reliable than the recent story about Google’s views on net neutrality). The good news is that they are going to stop suing 13-year-olds and retired war veterans and single mothers for downloading music. The bad news is that their new plan involves cutting sneaky backroom deals with Internet service providers to take a so-called “three strikes” approach: They let the ISP know when they think you’ve been sharing copyrighted material, and the provider agrees to send you an email warning; the second time, you get a letter; do it again and your Internet access gets cut off.

This is not a new idea. The French government has proposed legislation that would require Internet providers to cut off subscribers for up to a year if they repeatedly engage in copyright infringement, and the British recording industry association managed to convince several major ISPs to agree to warn their users, although they have stopped short of cutting off their access altogether. While the European Parliament approved a resolution in November saying “three strikes” legislation was an unreasonable breach of the rights and freedoms of Internet users, the EU’s Council of Ministers rejected the resolution and it appears that the French law will go ahead.

Even if the RIAA or the ISPs could identify file-sharers or copyright infringers with 100 percent accuracy, the three-strikes approach would still be disturbing, since it effectively turns ISPs into an extra-judicial copyright police squad, with the power to cut off a service without any appeal. But it’s even worse than that. If there’s one thing that all the lawsuits launched by the RIAA have shown, it’s that the record industry has a pretty poor track record when it comes to actually identifying who is sharing what kinds of files and whether they are infringing or not. So now instead of lawsuits against the wrong people for the wrong reasons, Internet users will have their access summarily shut off for something they may or may not have done.

As Peter Kafka notes in a post at MediaMemo, this approach clearly serves the interests of ISPs, which are concerned about the amount of bandwidth file-sharing services consume. And it definitely serves the interests of the RIAA, since it allows them to strike out at the perceived menace of copyright infringement without having to even go to court. But it should be disturbing to anyone who thinks that individual rights and freedoms, including the right to be presumed innocent — not to mention the idea that the punishment should be proportional to the alleged crime — are worth more than the record industry’s desperate desire to cling to an antiquated business model.

Traditional media outlets like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have begun to use some of the tools of social media — blogs, Facebook pages, even Twitter accounts. But they seem a lot less eager to adopt some of social media’s core principles, including a commitment to the two-way nature of the medium and all that it represents. This means a lot more than just talking about “the conversation” and how great it is to get links or comments. It’s about taking those comments seriously, responding to them regardless of whether they are positive or negative, and incorporating that approach into the way you do your job. It’s about looking at “journalism,” broadly-speaking, as a process rather than an artifact.

This is something that most of the blogosphere, or at least the part of it that cares about accuracy and integrity, does pretty well. Sites like GigaOM and others update their posts when information is added or corrected, and in many cases link to critical or differing opinions (and if they don’t, they should). In that sense, truth — to use a loaded word — is not absolute, nor is it something that a single entity has a monopoly on, particularly around a developing or complicated issue. The most we can hope for is that an outlet of any kind, whether it’s a blog or a traditional newspaper’s web site, does its best to represent an issue fairly and completely, and that requires additions, updates, links and discussion.

The WSJ arguably failed that test on Monday, with its story on Google and how its position on “net neutrality” had allegedly softened.

There has been, and will no doubt continue to be, debate about whether the Journal’s perception of Google’s behavior is correct. Some believe that Google is actually giving itself a benefit that others can’t match (except, of course, other large web companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, etc.). Others see it as a natural move by a large Internet company, and no threat to net neutrality at all. Whether you agree depends on what you think net neutrality is supposed to mean, and what Google’s role in it is. If you want to understand more about the issue and the way the Journal described it, read some of the links in David Weinberger’s post.

What isn’t in dispute, however, is that Google completely disagreed with the implications in the article, as company representatives made clear in a blog post written not long after the story went up on the Journal site. It’s understandable that Google might take issue with the story, of course, since it paints the company’s behavior in a negative light. But that’s not really the point.

What is important is how the Journal responded to these criticisms, both from Google and Lawrence Lessig (who was also quoted in the Journal story and noted, in his own blog post, that the description of his views was simply not accurate), and from other sources. Was the story itself updated? No. Were any links to the blog posts in question included, even as supplementary material? No. There was a blog post on the Journal site that mentioned how the story had “gotten a rise” out of the blogosphere, which included a couple of links, and then on Tuesday there was as second one, also with links to additional posts at Wired and elsewhere, as well as a description of what “edge caching” is.

No response to Lessig’s factual assertions about his views and the way they were described was provided. There is no acknowledgment of it apart from the Journal’s second blog post (which someone reading the original story might or might not even find). To any self-respecting blogger, this seems like a failure. Why not put all of that information, whether they be links to critical blog posts, updates on factual errors, or something else that is relevant, inside the original story? Why not allow those responses to help expand the way people look at the story? They’re going to do so anyway, once they come across them on their own. Is the Journal simply hoping that they won’t, and the story will remain pure and unsullied by criticism?

That’s an old-media approach. It’s a way of saying, either directly or by implication, “The truth is whatever we say it is.” Any critical responses, even from two of the major players in the story, are relegated to a blog post that gloats about the reaction the story got, but does little to treat it as valid or worthy of inclusion. As Scott Rosenberg of Salon points out, online media provides the tools for a real conversation, one that changes the way people look at an issue, and for a real “journalism as a process” approach to the news. It’s a pity the Journal couldn’t spot — or take advantage of — such an opportunity when it presented itself.

Earlier this week, I wrote about the launch of Google’s Native Client, and how the company hoped that the new software would help web-based apps run faster and more securely. After the post appeared, I got an email from Google, asking me if I wanted to find out a bit more about Native Client, and suggesting that they could help “clarify some misunderstandings” in the piece I wrote. Since I hate to think that there’s something I might have missed or described poorly in a post, I agreed.

What resulted was a phone call with three Google engineers: Linus Upson, an engineering director; Brad Chen, the engineering manager for Native Client (who wrote this post on the Google blog); and Henry Bridge, a product manager for Native Client. (Note: It was difficult for me to tell who was speaking during the call, and I only got their names after the conversation was over, so I can’t attribute comments to any specific individual; if any of them want to email me and identify who said what, I would be happy to include that).

One thing that the Google team wanted to clarify was that Native Client isn’t a “scripting language,” which is the way I described it in my original post. So how should it be described? Well, it’s kind of a platform — but at the same time it’s not really a platform. One of the Google engineers said it’s “a platform for creating modules” that can be written in a variety of different languages, but at the same time “it’s not a platform in itself.” Another said that Native Client “isn’t a place where an entire app would live; it’s a way for an app to access the machine code and make it easier to run it faster.” (one Slashdot commenter described it on Slashdot as “a little operating system”).

Another thing the Google staffers wanted to clarify was that Native Client isn’t really a competitor for Javascript or ActiveX or Flash (although some definitely see it as a competitor for Java). “You could use it in conjunction with ActiveX or Flash,” said one. “Or with Javascript, or whatever you want to use.” What Native Client does, he said, is to enable any web-based app — regardless of which technology was used to create it — to access the machine code of a user’s computer (provided it uses Intel’s x86 series of processors) and thereby run apps a lot faster. ActiveX and Flash can run machine code, one of the Google team said, “[B]ut you take a security risk by doing that. Native Client means you can run native machine code without sacrificing security.”

No one had any issue with the bottom line in my original post, which was that Native Client is yet another move by Google to turn the web into an actual operating system, or at least to blur the line between desktop and “the cloud.” One of the team members said that the company sees it as a way to “close the gap between what you can do in a web app and what you can do with a desktop app.”

As for having a grand vision of creating a web operating system, one of the engineers, who was working at Netscape during that period (or as he put it, “When Microsoft was ripping us limb from limb”), said that, “No one was really thinking along those lines — we were just trying to get the browser working so we could stay in business.” So while it may not have been top of mind while Netscape was struggling for survival, there’s no question that Google is coming close to realizing the overall vision of a web OS — and Native Client is one of the factors that could help make it a reality.

With the release on Monday of a software platform known as Native Client, Google has moved even closer to fulfilling the early promise of a “web operating system” — a vision originally offered by browser-software pioneer Netscape Communications.

Over a decade ago, Netscape was the technology name that made users smile and competitors tremble. And one of the things that kept Microsoft awake at night was the fear that Marc Andreessen’s company might be able to turn the browser into a kind of web OS. Using a new software scripting language known as Java, the theory went, Netscape would be able to offer services and features through the web browser that would compete head on with software installed on PCs.

That fear was a big part of the impetus for Bill Gates’s famous “Internet tidal wave” memo in 1995, and it was also a big reason why Microsoft started pushing its own scripting language for the browser, known as ActiveX. As it turned out, Netscape was never able to follow through on the early promise of a browser OS. Not only was Java too clunky, insecure and ill-suited to the purpose, but Netscape never really took advantage of it, and the browser wars that Microsoft triggered with the release of Internet Explorer soon turned in the software giant’s favor, as Netscape became bloated and unfocused.

Now, Google is offering its own scripting language known as Native Client, which the company no doubt hopes will be seen by developers as a friendlier version of ActiveX. What it will allow browsers to do is run code in the language understood by a user’s PC, rather than having to translate everything on the fly. In a nutshell, that means browser-based software and services will run faster and be able to offer more functionality than they can now. Browser-based services that could replicate all of the features of a desktop application would become a reality.

As several observers have noted, the combination of Google’s new Chrome browser, its Gears software — which allows web apps to store data for offline use and synchronize it later — and the Native Client language makes for something that is awfully close to being a web OS. Applications and services could run on any computer, storing data whenever an Internet connection wasn’t available and effectively erasing the boundaries between desktop and web. And all it requires, of course, is that everyone adopt and adhere to Google’s new language and standard (both Microsoft and Adobe have been trying something similar with Silverlight and Flash/AIR).

Is the world ready for a Google-ized version of ActiveX? Perhaps not. But if the company does manage to get enough support for Native Client, the web OS could become a reality — and the knife that Google is already holding to Microsoft’s neck with its web apps could cut a little deeper.

Well, well, well — maybe there’s a place for human beings in the new media landscape after all. Who would have guessed? The revelation comes courtesy of Gabe Rivera, the creator and programming genius behind a series of news aggregation sites including Memeorandum, Ballbug and Techmeme. He has just admitted that the algorithms he uses to find the latest hot news haven’t been working all that well, and that as a result, he has added the services of a (gasp!) human being to the mix to try and improve things. That would be Megan McCarthy, a former writer for Wired.com and the gossip site Valleywag.

Rivera posted a job ad on Craigslist recently, looking for what he variously described as a “news technician,” “news analyst” or “configuring editor.” As the young Techmeme founder noted in the ad, the type of job he had in mind — the one Megan McCarthy has apparently been hired to do — had never really existed before, but “will become increasingly important in the years ahead.” Anyone who has tried to follow the news coming from hundreds or even thousands of different sources, using a combination of overstuffed RSS readers and other tools, knows that Rivera is right — there is a fire hose of data gushing 24 hours a day, and filtering through it all is becoming harder and harder.

Not that long ago, it was assumed by many that algorithms would be the answer. Aggregators like Yahoo News and Google News, along with more specialized (and in some cases short-lived) RSS “meme trackers” such as Techmeme and Tailrank, were seen as the killer app for information overload — automated news readers that would be able to sort through the headlines and figure out what was important. And some of them, including Memeorandum and Techmeme, manage to do that pretty well. But they are still missing, as Rivera describes in his frank and honest assessment of the flaws in his methods, an important ingredient: the ability to tell when a story or headline just doesn’t belong.

The hiring of a human being to tweak the selection of headlines at Techmeme and possibly some of Rivera’s other sites is just another sign that algorithms aren’t the final solution to the information overload problem, and that it’s going to take software and human beings working together to make sense of the information coming out of the fire hose. Even Google, the king of the algorithm — a company whose automated PageRank methods have helped to create more than $100 billion worth of stock market value in just a few years — has started allowing people to influence its search results directly, through its recently-launched Search Wiki features. Although the choices people make only directly affect the results they see, the search giant has suggested that in the future those choices could affect a site’s overall PageRank.

Looks like there might still be a few jobs left for us human beings after the robots take over.

The closure of Pownce, which was announced Monday via posts by co-founder Leah Culver and her new employer, blog software company Six Apart, didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who’s followed Pownce since its launch last year. Despite help from co-founders like Kevin Rose of Digg and usability guru Daniel Burka, the service never really found an audience, or at least not one big enough to make a go of it. In the end, Pownce was just too much like Twitter (and Jaiku and Plurk, for that matter); the added features it had — including the ability to transfer files — weren’t enough to set it apart in people’s minds, much less turn it into a must-have utility.

So why did Six Apart, the blogging software provider founded by husband-and-wife team Ben and Mena Trott, decide to buy the company? It’s possible that they just saw Culver and her fellow Powncer Mike Malone as valuable hires in the programming department, and decided to acqu-hire them, as Google has done with so many startup founders over the years. But while the Pownce service is being shut down, could its features live on inside Six Apart and its Vox blogging service? I think that’s a very real possibility. Culver, for example, notes in her blog post that she hopes to “come back with something much better in 2009.”

Twitter and its ilk are often referred to as platforms for “micro-blogging,” because (in the right hands at least) a 140-character message posted to the service can be almost as good as a blog post. More than one blogger has said that the frequency of their blog posts has decreased since they began Twittering, and some have given up full-blown blogging altogether. Others, however (myself included), use Twitter as a kind of feeder system for their blogs. Not only do they use it to find ideas, links and conversation that spark longer blog posts, but they use it in reverse — to alert potential readers to their posts. And in many cases the conversation extends from the blog to the chat service and vice-versa. There’s an almost symbiotic relationship between the two services, with each feeding off and benefiting from the other.

Six Apart has made a number of acquisitions that indicate the company is thinking about how to extend its services, including social media application maker Apperceptive. Much like its blog software competitor Automattic, the home of WordPress (see disclosure below), the company seems to be looking for tools that can be incorporated into its platforms to make them more robust as media publishing services. Could a Twitter-style tool be part of that vision for Six Apart? It would make a lot of sense, just as WordPress buying Buddypress (a startup that added social networking functionality to the platform) and launching a Twitter-style chat theme called Prologue made sense.

There are already a variety of plugins and tools that allow WordPress and Movable Type bloggers to incorporate Twitter into their blogs, either by posting their messages automatically in a sidebar, or in some cases, by allowing them to post to Twitter from their blog dashboard. But having someone who understands how such services operate could help Six Apart integrate these kinds of features more fully into their platforms, as well as making it easier to develop new ones that could merge micro-blogging and “real” blogging. At the end of the day, Six Apart and Automattic aren’t just blogging services but content-management and content-publishing companies, and Twitter messages are just another form of content that needs to be managed and published.

Auttomatic is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Update: Few online events have ended as horrifically as the Lori Drew case. Befriended by a boy on MySpace who later began bullying her, a teenager named Megan Meier hung herself, and her online friend later turned out to be the mother of a school classmate, who created the persona specifically to torment the young girl. Lori Drew was found not guilty of conspiracy on Tuesday, but guilty of a lesser misdemeanor charge as a result of setting up the fake persona, which the court decided was a case of “unauthorized access” to the social networking site (under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act), because it was in breach of MySpace’s terms of service.

It’s easy to sympathize with the urge to punish Lori Drew (Megan’s mother has said she wants Drew to get the maximum penalty). After all, her actions helped lead to the death of a young woman whose life was full of promise and potential, and that is something almost anyone would find unforgivably repugnant. But finding her guilty of a federal offense because she created a fake MySpace account leaves the entire online world on a very slippery legal slope. Yes, doing so is technically a breach of the terms of service for sites like MySpace and Facebook, but those rules (which few people read anyway) are routinely overlooked. There are hundreds, possibly even thousands, of phony accounts on both networks — people who have created personas based on countries, religious figures, even inanimate objects.

Are all those people now guilty of a federal offense? If the Drew ruling stands, then legally they will be, as the New York Times points out. In effect, they will be seen by the courts as criminal hackers. No doubt supporters of the decision will argue that such a case is only likely to emerge if the fake account is used in the commission of a crime, such as theft or murder — at which point it could provide an easy way of nabbing a wrong-doer, in the same way that tax evasion managed to hook Chicago crime boss Al Capone. But how do we know that it would only be used in such cases? We don’t. It could just as easily be used to prosecute users who created fake accounts for some other purpose, such as poking fun at a prominent public figure, or to protect their identity in some way.

That’s getting awfully close to impinging on freedom of speech, and yet it would be more than possible if the Drew case stands. Anyone who altered their name, their age, or their gender for virtually any purpose — benign as well as harmful — would be liable to federal prosecution. And is any of that going to make social networks safer for people like Megan Meier? Not really. What happened to her was definitely a tragedy, but it was not a crime. The Drew case should be overturned.

Update: It’s obvious from the number of comments here — and the passionate feelings expressed in many of them — that my post has struck a nerve with a lot of people. Some believe that finding Lori Drew guilty of virtually any crime is worth it, because of the heinous nature of her actions, but I think laws should be used when they are justified by the facts, not just because we are desperate to find a way of punishing someone. And the fact is that the “unauthorized access” law was designed to apply to criminal hackers, not people who create fake personas on social-networking sites — regardless of what that persona allegedly made someone do. If we are going to prosecute everyone who doesn’t abide by the terms of service for a website, then the courts are going to be filled to the rafters.

I think @Jeema put it well in a comment that said: “Anyone could now be prosecuted for violating a terms of service agreement if this precedent stands, regardless of whether or not they ever intended to cause harm or not. If we want to make a law against cyber-bullying, fine, but we should not abuse existing laws and throw away freedom of speech in the name of mob justice.” The reality is that the charges against Lori Drew were designed to take what she did and twist it until it fit into a specific law, so that she could be punished for something — anything — as a result of her behaviour, as noted by Diogo. That’s not justice, it’s revenge.

A number of commenters have said that they don’t think this case has anything to do with freedom of speech, since companies such as MySpace are allowed to do whatever they like. In fact this isn’t the case, as others have pointed out. It may not fit most of our definitions of speech, but I think it could quite easily be argued that creating a persona of your choosing for an online social network — provided you aren’t trying to hijack the identity of a real person — should fall under the protection of the First Amendment. Online researcher danah boyd has some thoughts on the decision here.

If there’s one thing people love to speculate about, it’s what a future business model might look like for Twitter, the belle of the Web 2.0 ball. Founder and CEO Ev Williams has said the company will come out with more details in the new year, which has only increased the frenzy of speculation. That frenzy got another boost on Monday, when Twitter announced that it had acquired Values of n, a company founded by well-known programmer Rael Dornfest, the former chief technology officer at O’Reilly Media and one of the developers responsible for creating the RSS standard.

In separate blog posts, both Dornfest and Williams said that Values of n would be shutting down the two services it offers — a smart sticky-note application called Stikkit and a personal assistant application called I Want Sandy. However, both also hinted fairly broadly that aspects of these services might find their way into Twitter. “[T]he technology behind the scenes will live on and potentially re-emerge as part of Twitter’s systems, services, user experience, or open source libraries,” wrote Williams, while Dornfest said Twitter “has no immediate plans to incorporate Sandy or Stikkit’s feature sets into its core product [but] those who know our apps well may notice familiar-feeling bits and bobs appearing in your Twitter experience.”

Stikkit and I Want Sandy are similar, in that they are both personal productivity-related apps. The former makes it easy to collect bits of personal data about friends and co-workers — phone numbers, birthdays, reminders, and so on — as though you were writing them all down on a sticky note, which is then integrated with other applications and services such as email, etc. I Want Sandy, meanwhile, is a kind of virtual assistant; you send “her” emails with specific instructions or keywords, such as birthdays to remember or appointments you need to keep, and she emails you or text-messages you at a time of your choosing to help you remember.

The fit between both of these services and Twitter seems fairly obvious. In the same way that Twitter “bots” can be set up to send specific messages at certain times or when users type certain keywords (try sending a message that contains the word “pony” in order to see the Wheee! Pony bot in action), it’s easy to see how a user might set up something like I Want Sandy and Stikkit combined — so that he or she could direct message the bot with details about a meeting or appointment, and then receive a message later with all of the relevant info. I Want Sandy, in fact, is already connected to Twitter so that you can send your virtual assistant direct messages.

Who knows — for the ultra-connected and time-starved business traveler, that might someday evolve into something worth paying for.

Google has finally pulled back the curtain on a new feature that until now has been in restricted beta: the addition of wiki-style functions in standard search results. Once logged into a Google account, this allows you to click a small up or down arrow to move a specific result, click and delete it from your search entirely, or click on a small comment bubble and leave your comments on that result. Google will remember those settings the next time you search for the same keywords, and has said it may even work for similar or related searches. In many ways, Google is taking the same principles that power a site like Digg and applying them to search.

Adding these kinds of features isn’t a universally popular move. When Wikia Search — Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s attempt to do the same thing to search, with editing of results and comments (or “annotations”) encouraged — launched earlier this year, there was plenty of criticism aimed not just at the execution and the lack of usable results, but at the very concept of wiki-style search. Many said that opening search results up in such a way would leave the system vulnerable to the inevitable SEO gaming and trick-playing that hampers many other “crowd-sourced” services such as Digg.

This is a little like complaining that the furnace heating your house is too hot, and that you’re afraid it might burn someone. In many ways, wiki-style search is just an extension of the way that Google has always worked: that is, by aggregating the choices of millions of users and then using the PageRank algorithm to produce something approaching the best result. Voting and commenting features simply give Google more pieces of data they can use to arrive at the best result). They will also provide a fairly rich trove of activity-based information that the search engine could use to improve its regular results — that is, the ones that users who aren’t logged in will see — or to tweak its overall search algorithms based on the behaviour of wiki-search users. Why did so many people move that result up? Why did they move another down? Why did some delete that result and not others?

Will these new wiki-style functions be subject to rampant gaming and manipulation? Of course they will — just like everything else that the search giant touches. When you wield as much power online as Google does, gaming and manipulation follow in your wake like pilot fish following a shark. Presumably, the company has taken that into account, and will use their resources to reduce gaming as much as possible. And meanwhile, they will use the results of all that clicking to teach their engine a thing or two about human search behavior.

Now that Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang has finally stepped aside, removing what many saw as one of the main barriers to bringing the two companies together, Microsoft should re-ignite acquisition talks with the company. But that’s not the only reason. There are plenty of other good ones why it should do so — and why Yahoo should accept. (full story below)

After his last effort to strike some kind of a deal with Yahoo ended in failure, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said categorically that the software behemoth had no interest in making another acquisition bid for the troubled web company. Was he just bluffing? That should become obvious relatively soon, now that co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang has finally stepped aside, removing what many (including Ballmer himself) saw as one of the main barriers to bringing the two companies together. But that’s not the only reason Microsoft should re-ignite acquisition talks with the company. There are plenty of other good ones why it should do so — and why Yahoo should accept.

One of the biggest reasons Microsoft should take another kick at the Yahoo can is obvious: Relatively speaking, it would cost them far less. Even if Microsoft offers a hefty premium (last time the original offering price of $31 a share was a 62-percent premium, and the software maker later boosted that to $33 a share), it should be able to acquire Yahoo for somewhere in the $18-$20 range. That’s a savings of more than 35 percent. If Yahoo was worth $45 billion in February, surely it’s worth $25 billion to Microsoft now. That’s barely more than a year’s worth of cash flow for the company.

The second major reason Microsoft should reconsider a deal is that the Redmond giant is still a distant third in the search game, and the longer it spends trying to solve that problem on its own, the worse it gets. Yahoo’s revamped search and advertising platform has its flaws, but it’s light years ahead of anything Microsoft has, or will have anytime soon. That’s worth paying for. The same rationale applies to Microsoft’s web content strategy, such as it is. Yahoo has tons of content and services, and plenty of paying customers, two things Microsoft badly needs.

And why should Yahoo accept such a bid? At this point, it really has no choice. In fact, not accepting a reasonable bid if one were to emerge would arguably be a dereliction of duty on the part of the company’s board of directors, and they are already skating on thin ice. What other options does Yahoo have right now? A merger of some kind with AOL? That would be a massive waste of shareholders’ money and time. Roping together two struggling companies is no way to create a winner. And while hooking up with Microsoft isn’t a sure bet either, such a move would offer a far better chance at success than a Yahoo-AOL tie-up. At this point, anything would be better than Yahoo on its own. The company has lost the confidence of both investors and a growing number of users, and it needs to do something — fast.