SiliconBeat

Google Buzz is here. And the big question is this: Can Google finally get in the social game? After playing around with Google Buzz for a bit today, I’ll say the jury is out for me. But I have a few thoughts, and will have more after I’ve played with it for a few weeks.

The first impulse I have is to fight is the despair over creating and learning a new social networking tool. Facebook and Twitter work well for me, despite some imperfections. I won’t say there isn’t room for improvement. But any new service has to clear a pretty high barrier to become part of my daily routine.

After digging in and following a few friends on Google Buzz, the next thing that strikes me as interesting about Google Buzz is how much it mirrors the approach to social that Yahoo is taking. And there’s something I wouldn’t expect to be writing: How Google is following Yahoo. Read the rest of this entry »

In my column yesterday about the Google and China mess, I explored how this rift could affect Silicon Valley’s relationship with China. But within the column, I also included this thought:

“The conventional wisdom that has been shattered was based on a kind of digital utopianism prevalent throughout Silicon Valley. This line of thinking holds that the Internet, and Web-based services like Google, Twitter and Facebook, are liberating forces. Maybe it would take five years, maybe a couple of decades, but over time as more Chinese gained access and technology, there would be the inevitable dismantling of cultural, economic and political barriers.”

That spurred some discussions on Twitter and got me thinking more about that idea. By coincidence, I was catching up this morning on my backlog of TED videos, when a talk by Evgeny Morozov came up called: “How the ‘Net aids dictatorships.” The talk is summarized as:

“TED Fellow and journalist Evgeny Morozov punctures what he calls “iPod liberalism” — the assumption that tech innovation always promotes freedom, democracy — with chilling examples of ways the Internet helps oppressive regimes stifle dissent.”

Morozov’s talk got me thinking more about this subject.

Read the rest of this entry »

I spent last Friday night at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco watching the Crunchies. The third annual version of the tech award show was co-hosted by three leading high-tech blogs: GigaOm, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch. According to the official Cruchies description, the show aims to “recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.” You can read a nice overview of the event and after-party by Jessica Guynn of the Los Angeles Times.

It was an entertaining, if low budget, affair. In fact, the casual nature of the show in such a fancy space was quite charming. There were corporate jugglers providing entertainment and the reliably funny Richter Scales served up a nice glee-club style spoof (see video above).

You can check out the award winners here. But the mix of nominees and winners left a muddy impression of the event. What, exactly, is the point of the Crunchies? Read the rest of this entry »

Palm Pixi

After covering Apple’s music event this morning, I met with Palm and got a hands-on look at the company’s new Pixi smartphone, which Palm announced early today

I was a bit underwhelmed by the actual phone, which will be the second to run Palm’s WebOS software. But the Pixi, which Palm plans to launch before the holidays, will have at least one new features that will be very cool.

I found a lot to like about Palm’s Pre, the Pixi’s WebOS predecessor. One of the features that I liked most was something Palm calls Synergy. The feature collects and combines address book information from a variety of sources and displays them all together.

Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook just announced it has acquired FriendFeed of Mountain View, a social media aggregator built around a news feed similar to its new owner’s.

I think Yahoo missed a big opportunity here. I had written a couple times that Yahoo should buy FriendFeed and make it the centerpiece of its new homepage. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a piece by technology editor Damon Darlin under the headline, “Serendipity, Lost in the Digital Deluge.”

As the headline suggests, Darlin laments that the digital age is robbing us of those wonderful moments of serendipity. I couldn’t disagree more strongly. In fact, I’ve found myself discovering more through serendipity than ever, in large part thanks to the rise of social media.

Read the rest of this entry »

I attended an intriguing dinner in Woodside last night.

The dinner was ostensibly to promote a new wireless router being launched by FON, a Spanish company. The router — dubbed the Fonera 2.0 — is somewhat interesting, adding some neat features that most comparable devices don’t have, such as the ability to upload files to the Internet while your computer is turned off and the ability to offer — and make money off of — a public hot spot without granting the hoi polloi access to files on you home network.

But the dinner was much more interesting for who attended than the product that inspired it. The guest list was a notable cross section of the digerati and tech blogosphere. Among those present: Tech Crunch founder Michael Arrington; Scobleizer’s Robert Scoble; Ryan Block, a former editor at Engadget and more recently the founder of Gdgt, a new tech “community” site; Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and a marketing manager at the social networking company; Dave Morin, Facebook’s senior platform manager; and Jeff Clavier, founder and managing partner of SoftTech VC.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m just catching up on some discussions I missed while traveling this week. One of the more interesting was the chatter around Facebooks announcement that it was finally going to do something about search on the social networking site.

I was just discussing this with a few folks this week. As things stand now, Facebook search is somewhere between horrible and useless. Facebook is great for seeing what I did the last couple of days. But if I want to find something I did two months ago, forget it. I have to manually click back through dozens of pages on my news feed.

Also, Facebook doesnt help me build a larger narrative about my life and online activity. So I hope this new search will help mine and understand my behavior to help create a better profile of me and my interests over time.

Anyway, here are a few posts I thought help the stage for this discussion. Here’s the Facebook blog post announcing the search plans: Read the rest of this entry »

There I sat, Friday night, at 9 p.m. My laptop open. Browser set to facebook.com/username. Just waiting. But it didn’t help. 

I didn’t get my Facebook vanity URL. Perhaphs the odds were stacked against me. Having a name like Chris O’Brien was just a bit too common. There were five other guys named Chris on my freshman hall at college. Put that together with O’Brien, and well, there are just too many of me. 

Still, I tried to be optimistic. But as soon as I tried to grab facebook.com/chrisobrien, it was gone. Instead, I was offered lame-o substitutes like chrisobrien1, or some such thing. And now there was a whole new round of pressure: Read the rest of this entry »

From The Mary Tyler Moore show to The Daily Show, Hollywood has long seen the entertainment possibilities in news reporting. Not so journalists who tended to take themselves and their profession very seriously. They proudly drew the line between “real journalism” and infotainment. But the collapse of traditional business models and the rise of online platforms like blogs, Facebook and Twitter is changing that.

When the news itself fails to provide personalities, tension, drama and conflict, journalists are stepping up to the plate.

Take last week: Report of a rumor that Twitter was in talks with Google quickly devolved into a highly entertaining smack session between All Things Digital (also known as AllThingsD), which is owned by the Wall Street Journal, and TechCrunch, a leading technology blog.

TechCrunch set things off with a story that Google and Twitter were in advanced talks. AllThingsD, whose co-founder, Kara Swisher reported that TechCrunch’s report “isn’t accurate in any way.”

Erick Schonfeld, a co-editor of TechCrunch who was formerly an editor-at-large at Time Warner’s now defunct Business 2.0 magazine, woke up, read Kara Swisher’s post and got angry. The following is the transcript of their Twitter conversation.

7:12 a.m. Erick to everyone. “According to @karaswisher, a rumor is not true until she reports it and nobody is allowed to mention it without checking with her first.

7:13 a.m. Kara to Erick: “@erickschonfeld pls. get some thicker skin, erick. your report is inaccurate.”

7:16 a.m. Kara has an additional thought: “@erickschonfeld besides, I do not publish rumors. We report stuff that is accurate. and you obviously don’t check with me first.”

7:19 a.m. Kara adds: “@erickschonfeld But make it about me and not the accuracy of the reporting, by all means! That could work.”

7:20 a.m. Erick to Kara: “Is it inaccurate, or are you just going negative about the headline? We’ll see.”

7:24 a.m. Kara, who has the advantage of being a speedier typist (and a quicker wit) responds to Erick: “@erickschonfeld You wrote an attention-grabbing post that my sources say is inaccurate. You keep changing that report.”

7:25 a.m. Kara adds: “@erickschonfeld Your piece was designed for maximum look-at-me impact and it calls out for further reporting obviously.”

7:26 a.m. Kara continues: “@erickschonfeld We will see. But Google and Twitter are not engaged in ‘late-stage’ acquisition talks as you asserted, say my sources.”

7:25 Erick to Kara, defensively: “@karaswisher next time you should check with our sources.”

7:26 a.m. Kara: “@erickschonfeld I think I will stick with my sources.”

7:30 a.m. Kara tries to make up: “@erickschonfeld If TC ends up being right, I obviously would say so. but I am sticking with my reporting esp since yours keeps changing.”

7:32 a.m. Erick makes a joke: “@karaswisher I actually love what you’ve done with your hair.”

7:35 a.m. Kara: “@erickschonfeld now, that was accurate! (and funny). When you come to D, you can give me fashion tips.”

7:38 Erick makes the mistake of reopening the subject: “@karaswisher Well, yes, it does call out for more reporting. At this point it is a ‘heck of a rumor,’ like we say in the 1st sentence.”

7:47 a.m. Erick can’t help himself: “@karaswisher you really should read beyond the headline. That’s where all good bits are.”

7:49 Kara: “@erickschonfeld oh, the heck of a rumor cavaet! I guess it was that loud declaratory hedline that threw me.”

7:52 Kara continues: “@erickschonfeld I read beyond the hedline. Those were the good bits? Also, so many hedges, I felt like I was in an English garden.”

7:52 Kara: “@erickschonfeld The worst part of all this growling is that I think I still need to take you to lunch.”

7:54 Erick can’t let go: “@karaswisher as we say in our update, the talks may indeed be early stage. You are getting hung up on that.”

7:55 Erick tries and fails to get the the last word. “@karaswisher that is true because I was right about Bebo getting acquired :)”

7:57 Kara, who has been reporting while tweeting to Erick and multiple others, has some additional information. “@erickschonfeld it is marissa mayer working on a biz product deal.”

7:58 Kara adds: “@erickschonfeld you had wrong price, wrong acquirer as I recall and I noted that in piece. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…”

7:59 Kara contines: “@erickschonfeld didn’t we have THAT argument a year ago? I will still take you to lunch, as Rupe would want it that way.”

8:00 a.m. Kara tries for the last word. “@erickschonfeld seriously, I am going to sleep. It’ll muss my hair, so come over with the blow dryer around 11 am.”

8:06 a.m. Erick, still defending his Bebo reporting: “@karaswisher it was a well-sourced rumor that Bebo got bought. We didn’t know who. Then we found out and did another post unfolding story.”

8:06 a.m. Erick reads Kara’s last note: “@karaswisher yes please go to sleep so I can actually get some work done.”