Facebook's old Palo Alto headquarters during Hackathon 28

Initial public offering filings typically include a letter to potential investors from the company’s CEO. These missives are generally used to discuss basics like the company’s growth so far and its bright future ahead. In Facebook’s IPO document filed Wednesday, however, Mark Zuckerberg dedicated a significant portion of his letter to something a bit out of the ordinary: Teaching potential investors about “the Hacker Way.”

For one thing, it’s a sign of Zuckerberg’s commitment to maintaining a rigorous engineering culture at Facebook, even as it becomes an increasingly powerful media entity. It’s a statement that at Facebook, technology — and the programmers who push it forward — will always come first. The company’s “hackathons” (one of which GigaOM recently attended) are a key example of this. Hacker Way is also what Facebook named the road inside its new Menlo Park, California headquarters.

But it’s also a powerful statement on a larger scale. Digging into the SEC’s online database of company filings, it looks like the word “hacker” has been used just 6400 times in the past four years. That may seem like a lot, but out of the millions of words that have been filed to the SEC in that amount of time, it’s a pittance. And from the looks of it, practically every time the word “hacker” has been used in regulatory filings, the connotation has been negative: “Data security breaches as the result of hackers,” “The acts of a hacker causing damage or destruction to data” and so on.

For Zuckerberg to use this platform to embrace the word hacker and actively change its definition into something positive comes at an excellent time: Right now, the tech industry is waking up to how important it is to help the government and regulatory bodies understand what it is that they do. Facebook’s IPO could serve as a call for hackers everywhere to get more respect, which would be a great thing for the tech industry as a whole.

Below I’ve excerpted some key parts of Zuckerberg’s treatise on hacking from the IPO filing:

“The word ‘hacker’ has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.”

“The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.”

“Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: ‘Code wins arguments.’”

“Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.”

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Screenshot of Volkswagen's enhanced Twitter page (click to enlarge)

On Wednesday, Twitter switched on enhanced brand pages for accounts owned by National Public Radio, NBC News, Volkswagen, the Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, and Anobii, among others. This is the first batch of premium Twitter pages from companies other than the handful of launch partners (including Coca-Cola, the American Red Cross, and American Express) who unveiled enhanced brand pages in December.

A quick refresher: As part of the head-to-toe redesign Twitter first announced back on December 8, Twitter said it would give companies, brands, media organizations and celebrities the ability to have “enhanced” profile pages with extra design options and content feed controls. While the general redesign started rolling out to the majority of Twitter users nearly two months ago, the company took a bit more time in pushing the makeover for its first class users.

A Twitter spokesperson tells me the enhanced brand pages “will continue to roll out to advertising partners, as well as other select partners, charities, media organizations, and individuals” over the coming weeks and months. As Twitter gets more serious about generating revenue, it makes sense that it would want to create a more welcoming environment to big-name brands — the types of users who may want to buy more ads on the site after they see how nice their spruced up pages are.

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Shareaholic's survey (click to enlarge)

Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn — combined. That’s according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 referral traffic report, which is based on aggregated data from more than 200,000 publishers that reach more than 260 million unique monthly visitors each month.

In January Pinterest was responsible for 3.6 percent of referrals tracked by Shareaholic, up from 2.5 percent during the previous month. That means the site is quickly gaining ground on Twitter, which drove 3.61 percent of referral traffic in January, down from 3.62 percent in December. Pinterest’s ascent has been especially rapid when viewed through a longer lens: The site owned just .17 percent of the traffic in Shareaholic’s July survey.

Not surprisingly, Facebook is holding steady at the top of Shareaholic’s survey, as it was responsible for more than a quarter of all referral traffic in January. Next in line was StumbleUpon, with 5.07 percent. It bears mention that while the Shareaholic survey is global, in the United States market alone StumbleUpon has in the past unseated Facebook as a top driver of referral traffic.

It’s exciting to see a relative newcomer growing so quickly in the web space. While the web’s more established companies are quite powerful these days, the fact that a startup like Pinterest has successfully established its own foothold shows that the competitive landscape is still alive and mainstream users are open to trying things from new players.

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Screenshot of SocialFolders' web app (click to enlarge)

With all the time we’re spending on social media sites, it makes sense that people are starting to get more serious about being able to preserve their activity there in a way that’s easier to look back on for posterity. An app called SocialFolders is aiming to help with that.

SocialFolders, a freemium application that launched last month to let you store and manage any file created on the social web on your own computer, rolled out an integration with Evernote on Tuesday that lets users drag and drop content such as tweets, Facebook updates and Instagram photos into their Evernote accounts.

SocialFolders is calling the Evernote integration a “social memory service” to help you remember all the little social media interactions that have become an increasingly big part of our day-to-day lives. Evernote is a very popular app for helping people keep track of their schedules and thoughts, so this third-party app is a nice added feature to its core service.

Even though social media is thought of as a fun pastime, it has almost completely supplanted physical, more easily archived communication methods such as letters and diaries — our activity on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram really is reflective of what’s going on in our minds every day. It’s nice to see services such as Facebook Timeline, Path 2, and now SocialFolders that recognize how important those things are and help us own and remember them for the longer term.

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The DMARC standard attempts to authenticate email by requiring both parties to implement DMARC-standard policies at either end. The idea is that an organization such as PayPal “signs” its outgoing email for all messages associated with its domains. Then when a recipient gets such a message in his email account (if his provider is participating in the program) the mail host checks for the authentication and lets the message through. If a message says it is from PayPal but does not have PayPal’s DMARC credentials, it gets refused.

A report of which messages were received and refused are eventually sent back to the email sender. This allows legitimate senders to see if one of their domains isn’t currently credentialed, but it also lets them know how many attempts are being made to spoof their address.

The result is consumers will no longer see spoofed email messages from phishers. However, consumers and employees will still have to keep their eyes open for emails from hackers that might implement DMARC on their own domains, such as emails from paypa1.com. DMARC only stops “bad actors” from appropriating legitimate domains in a sender line, not from trying to send emails from similar domains.

Some readers will be wondering why this is necessary, given that tech-savvy people can usually check to see whom an email is actually from to uncover the spoofing. But this is for everyone else on the web, who may not know exactly how to protect themselves. With this standard, which the working group intends to submit to the IETF, tech companies are trying to plug some of the security holes in the web.

The web wasn’t a planned system but an amalgamation of technologies that has ended up growing into a network connecting billions of people and things. Efforts such as DMARC join others, including the new IPv6 addressing effort or more-efficient routing systems, to improve an existing ecosystem without costing players too much or shutting things down.

The underpinnings of the DMARC standard are two common email security best practices that are already implemented at about half of the domains on the web and in about 80 percent of legit email. As for consumers, most will have protection on their webmail accounts such as Gmail or Hotmail. The biggest hole for the time being will likely be at midsize companies that still run their own email servers and that will have to wait for their email software provider to support the DMARC standard before they can implement it.

The following additional companies are participating in the effort so far, but others can join now that it is launched: AOL, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, American Greetings, LinkedIn, Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path and the Trusted Domain Project.

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I'm the lady in the orange dress.

Thanks to Google trumpeting its new privacy policy and inviting users to explore their profiles with the search giant, there have been a few giggles over at GigaOM, and elsewhere on Twitter as my female friends and colleagues check their Google ad preference manager to discover that Google thinks they are male. For example, I’m in the 35-44-year-old male demographic based on my interest in Internet and Telecom as well as “Real Estate – Property Management.” I am assuredly female.

Two of our editors also fall into the male demographic based on their clicking habits associated with reading our sites and finding stories, while in their personal accounts they are both female. An impromptu Twitter quiz reveals many fellow ladies in tech are in the same position. I’m not going to dig too deeply into this, but at best it shows how far off we are from truly personalized and scary ad targeting, and at worst it gives a pretty sad indication of how technology is still clearly defined as a “male” activity.

This wouldn’t be so problematic if it weren’t an entire industry that employs both men and women and is a giant source of innovation and wealth creation. I wonder what my female friends in finance, medical or the legal professions see? It would be disheartening if Google classified those surfing categories as male.

So ladies, get out there and spout off about tech. Let’s show those demographic wunderkinds at Google that there are a few of us (in the 25-33 age range, thank you!) that think packets, semiconductors and programming are an equal-opportunity category. To see what Google thinks you are click here.

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Uberpaper founder Dmitry Shapiro

“In a world full of algorithms, we can get a skewed sense of the world when it comes to news,” Shapiro, the tech executive known for founding Veoh and most recently for serving as the CTO of MySpace Music, said in a phone conversation Thursday. “News is an extremely important part of how we experience the world around us. If news has been overly processed by personalization algorithms that essentially pander to us, we can start to believe that the world is a certain way, when it really isn’t that way at all.”

News that’s purposefully impersonal

That problem is exactly what Shapiro’s latest project Uberpaper was built to combat. Uberpaper, which launched to the public this week, pulls all the news from Yahoo News’ API and presents it in a way that manages to be both clean and image-rich: Imagine Flipboard meets Pinterest, but all in a liquid user interface design that works in any web browser. The only social elements to the site come in the form of a simple “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down” button that users are meant to use to show how well-reported or relevant a story was, as well as the ability to comment.

Users can choose to view Uberpaper in 10 different languages, and sort the news according to topics such as World, US, Business, Technology, Sports, Politics, and so on — just like an old fashioned newspaper. In fact, the experience of finding out what’s happening in the world by reading a traditional physical paper is a big thing Uberpaper is trying to replicate. Shapiro put it this way:

“With technology, I think we threw the baby out with bathwater when it came to newspapers. Online news sites today show their content very much like search does — it’s kind of database-y, and formatted in a very linear way. We wanted to bring back the aesthetic of a newspaper, and the serendipity that comes with scanning the news that way.”

Uberpaper screenshot (click to enlarge)

Keeping social in its place

However, Shapiro is quick to point out that he is personally a big fan of social media sites, telling me, “I love Facebook and Twitter, and I’m on those sites all day long. They’re wonderful places to share news, and I don’t think Uberpaper is competitive in any way to them.” Rather, he says, Uberpaper is meant to be a place where people can find fresh news to ultimately go back and share with their friends on Facebook and Twitter — to bring something new to the table, rather than re-sharing stuff that’s already been discovered.

For now, Uberpaper only pulls in news through Yahoo News’ API, which was chosen because it has a very broad base of news sources and topics. More news sources will be folded into Uberpaper in the future, but the expansion process will be very well-considered, Shapiro said. “We’re going to be really cautious as we add additionally sources. We very much want to make sure that we’re not slanting the news in partisan ways, or toward any kind of topic, really — it should be broad and generic.”

Uberpaper was built by the same team led by Shapiro that built Anybeat, the social network that encourages people to use pseudonyms that launched this past autumn. Anybeat, which has $1 million in funding, is still in operation, but right now it and Uberpaper are being run as separate products. Uberpaper doesn’t make any revenue right now, but down the line advertising could be brought in to run alongside the news.

A long shot that’s worth taking

In all, I think Uberpaper is great: Simple, straightforward, and clean, while perpetually brimming with new content. It’s certainly coming out in a tough space — many people already feel like they have more than enough sources of news — but I could see Uberpaper becoming a much-frequented bookmark for news junkies. And in my opinion, any service that’s aiming to put an end to the echo chamber is fighting the good fight.

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Screenshot of ShoeBox uploads in Timeline (click to enlarge)

Within the next few weeks, every Facebook profile will be converted to the new Timeline user interface, which shows each user’s life over an expandable Timeline that dates all the way back to his or her birth. That’s exciting and all, but it also means that a lot of profiles out there will suddenly have big, vacant gaps with no content between the time a user was born and when they joined Facebook. Don’t panic, people: A San Francisco startup called 1000memories is here to help.

ShoeBox, an iPhone app made by 1000memories that helps you quickly scan and share your old printed photos, has debuted a new integration with Facebook Timeline. The updated app now lets you scan physical photos directly into your Facebook Timeline. Also, now all photos that have already been added to 1000memories by existing app users can now push selected photos to their Facebook Timelines.

Photo scanning made easy

Now of course, people have been scanning old photos and adding them to Facebook for a while now. But the ShoeBox app makes the process super easy. The app automatically detects where a photo’s edges are and crops it accordingly; users then add details such as dates, names and locations onto the photo, and automatically tag Facebook friends before sharing it to Timeline. The whole thing makes so much sense that Mark Zuckerberg himself reached out to the 1000memories team when the ShoeBox app debuted in October, 1000memories co-founder Rudy Adler told me in an interview this week:

“On the day we launched ShoeBox, we got an email from Mark Zuckerberg saying that he really liked it and wanted people to use it to fill their back stories on Timeline. The whole thing was serendipitous. We were probably halfway through building the app when Facebook first announced Timeline at the f8 conference, and we automatically thought it’d be a great integration then. Anyone who activates Timeline has this big gap between their birthdate and when they joined Facebook.”

ShoeBox uploads in Facebook Timeline (click to enlarge)

1000memories launched out of the summer 2010 class of Y Combinator with a primary focus on being a website where people could remember friends and family members who had died. But in 2011, after landing $2.5 million in funding from Greylock Ventures, the company expanded its focus to helping everyone organize and archive their photographs and memories online.

Keeping a standalone service

Even with the new Timeline integration, 1000memories still expects to grow as a standalone service apart from Facebook, since not every old photo is appropriate for social sharing. “Everyone has these really cherished photos sitting in their closets. They’re things you would save in a fire, but we want to breathe new life into them,” Adler said. “A lot of our current users use 1000memories as a place to put all those photos, and you don’t really want to share everything on Facebook.”

1000memories is a free service at the moment; down the line, the company could start charging for premium features and services, Adler said. In the meantime, 1000memories is working to improve its existing offerings, and a ShoeBox for Android app should make its debut in the next couple of months. To make people feel more safe about using 1000memories as a place to back up their treasured photos, all public content on the site is preserved through a partnership 1000memories has with the Internet Archive.

In all, I think the new version of ShoeBox seems like a very complementary fit with Facebook’s current push of Timeline to all users. It’ll be fun to see how people take to the app in the weeks and months ahead.

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It is difficult to say exactly how much data the combined company will have, but with a combined social and interest graph of 1.25 billion users — or three-fourths of the online world, more than Facebook’s estimated 800 million users — it is certainly one of the more impressive data-centric operations on the web.

33Across, a marketing platform that lets companies target potential customers based on those companies’ social graphs, came into the acquisition with 200 million of those users and already had a major big data operation under way. As CEO Eric Wheeler explained to me over the summer, “We constantly re-score the brand graph to understand who are the best targets for that ad right now. We use social connections of that brand to know whom we should next target.” In order to do this, 33Across maintains a “massive Hadoop implementation” complemented by machine learning and predictive-analytics algorithms that it has developed in-house.

According to Wheeler, 33Across is processing 40,000 transactions per second.

Source: Tynt

Wheeler said the data implications of the combined 33Across-Tynt graph will be enormous. It is looking at billions of data points every hour in order to drive maximum value, he added. Tynt has an ecosystem of 500,000 publishers for whom it tracks the copying, pasting and sharing of links, and the company has said that people still copy and paste 50 links for every 1 they share via buttons such as those from ShareThis. As of April, Tynt said it was collecting and analyzing 1 terabyte of data per day on its Hadoop platform, although Wheeler isn’t certain of the total size of the companies’ combined data stores.

Going forward, the task will be integrating the existing 33Across and Tynt environments so the latter’s publishing can benefit more organically from 33Across’ Brand Graph. Wheeler said it will let it act even faster and more intelligently based on what its readers are doing, which will help it chip away at the disproportionate amount of online advertising revenue that currently goes to Google, Yahoo, AOL and other platform providers. Those companies are able to sell lots of ad space because they have so many users and can target ads by determining users’ interests from activity across their expansive platforms.

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Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson

Yahoo’s newly appointed CEO Scott Thompson may have only been on the job for three weeks, but he has already made one thing very clear: The discussion over whether Yahoo is a media or tech company must come to an end.

In a call with analysts and investors to discuss Yahoo’s latest earnings results, Thompson held back from making definitive statements on many issues — but in regards to the media vs. tech discussion, he minced no words:

“Our media leadership is imperative, and we have and will continue to develop best-in-class products, engineering, and technology. We must end the debate about which is more important: We are a media company and a tech company. We must do both. End of the discussion… There’s a longstanding debate within the company, but we better be darn good at both. In fact, we need to be great at both when it’s all said and done. We are going to stop this debate.”

Thompson’s stance is interesting, especially in a world where many successful tech companies are claiming to focus on specialization, not diversification — with Facebook and Twitter being two of the most high-profile examples. It’s also a bit puzzling, as Thompson also stated that he would be “very aggressive” in evaluating which parts of the business Yahoo should let go in the weeks and months ahead, saying:

“We will get speed back into the equation and move aggressively. To me that is how we get to playing offense from playing defense.”

Can Yahoo really focus on both technology and media while making the cuts necessary to regain its edge as a leader in either field? Only time will tell, of course. But from the looks of it, with co-founder Jerry Yang’s recent departure and Yahoo’s stock lagging in the middle of its 52-week range at $15.60 per share, many people aren’t exactly optimistic.

Image of Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson courtesy of Flickr user YodelAnecdotal.

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