Scott Rafer at Winksite

Yeah, what Nitin Borwankar said:

Data Accessability

Data Visibility

Data Removal

Data Ownership

Eran and Uri, great work!

I was the third musketeer at FotoNation in 1997-1998 for Zing.com bought it. Eran and Uri bought back some of the good parts during the bust, after Zing bought the farm. It was a less in, “don’t sell for other people’s crappy private stock, you already have your own.” This time they sold for cash, and I’m pretty sure they had little if any outside investment.

Under the terms of the agreement, Tessera will pay $29 million in net cash with up to $10 million of additional consideration, contingent upon certain milestones over one year. This transaction is subject to various standard closing conditions, and is expected to close in February 2008.

Based in Burlingame, Calif., FotoNation is a privately-owned, 80-person company that develops innovative embedded solutions to improve image quality and enhance, extend and simplify picture taking for digital still cameras and mobile devices. The company’s extensive portfolio of patented solutions includes advanced hardware and firmware image processing solutions. Principal products encompass technologies for red-eye correction; face tracking; smile and blink detection; as well as other solutions for enhancing digital image quality. FotoNation’s technology is embedded in more than two out of three digital still cameras sold today.

Yes, precisely as Marc says, it’s “Business as Usual.” It’s a good thing too, otherwise Data Portability will never be broadly adopted by social networks. With precious few open-source exceptions, new technologies and standards become mainstream because some startup sees potential profits in making users much happier.

Data Portability will be no different. Top-down imposition of new standards by any means, including yelling loudly, doesn’t work in business. Top-down imposition only works (and unfortunately only sometimes) where people’s lives and wellbeing are concerned. In those areas, I’m with Marc’s way-lefty views. I’m thrilled to support heavy societal overhead in order to protect civil liberties, ensure free speech, uphold personal privacy, stop massive electoral fraud in US presidential elections, achieve universal health care, provide universal daycare, return our educational system to a decent level, etc. “Closed” social networks threaten none of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness in any meaningful way. When they’ve come close to becoming privacy threats, quick action was taken, and openness would not have helped.

Marc is also completely correct that Data Portability is inevitable but completely wrong about how it happens. He can not convince the vendor community that Data Portability is “right” or that the Internet citizenry deserve to be treated a certain way. Instead, someone else will figure out how to turn truly portable social profiles into an economic advantage that raises the standard of competition among social networks. Facebook did something analogous with the F8 application platform, and it’s going to make them (and hopefully us) a ton of money. It’s also made their competition’s life hell for at least the last few months.

I like Marc personally and have great respect for his intellect. I’ve tried hard to take a glass-is-half-full perspective on his counterproductive and self-destructive posturing, but today’s unwarranted personal attack on Dave is just too much. Per Jason’s comment on Marc’s post, Dave is investing his time in helping along as many social software entrepreneurs as he can reach, to a large degree selflessly. The people that Dave freely supports and teaches are exactly the kind of greedy, competitive innovators who will make Data Portability for social networks a reality.

Marc’s repetitious, empty, and in loco parentis misrepresentation of his own opinions as the Common Good is delaying Data Portability rather than accelerating it. He is estranging those of us that agree with him in substance but can no longer bear his form. Dave McClure, Tim O’Reilly, et al, would be Marc’s natural allies on Data Portability if he allowed it. There’s nowhere near 100% alignment of that group’s views, but their vision of an Open Data endgame is more in sync than in opposition.

Delivering new software and services that intensify social networking competition is a productive and high-probability method to achieve Data Portability on a massive scale. At best, all the other noise is weak attempt to take credit for other people’s focus and hard work ahead of their success.

Disclosure: I’m happy and proud to be on a panel at Graphing Social Patterns West and to have Dave as an investor in Mashery. Of course, it would be nicer if I hadn’t lost him money on Feedster.

I’m now hooked on the Travolution blog. Good work, Kevin.

I just let Kevin see my trips on Dopplr. Hopefully, he’ll reciprocate.

Last year’s travel was just about perfect. I made six trips to Europe totaling over sixty days. I made 80%+ of of those plans before Lookery was founded, and this year I’ll be overseas 30 days if I’m lucky. “Perfect” would have been three weeks of my travel time on a trip to Africa, Asia, or South America instead.

I’m a heavy Kayak user, but they don’t do so well intra-Europe (and I suspect intra-Asia), particularly where the dozens of discount airlines are concerned. Beatrice’s Mobissimo is much better at that. However, both those very good travel search engines require that you know your route and interim stops. When I’m at my nomadic happiest, I specifically don’t know those things and have wanderlust for layover serendipity.

Skyscanner just rocked my world with possible solutions to my silly, high-class problems. I’d heard of the site before but came across it again due to their effective SEO. I’ve got a professional(-ish) commitment in Menorca, Spain, in early May and want to telecommute the following week or two from someplace I’ve never been. However, other than the obvious London, Madrid, and Barcelona routes, it’s completely unclear how one flies in and out of Menorca.

Instead of city by city, or sometimes obscure airline by obscure airline, Skyscanner lets me search “Any Country/Any Airport (results pictured)” by time period for direct or connecting flights from any origin. I’m almost precisely two years late to figuring this out, of course:

Also catering for the browsing traveller who wants to be inspired, SkyScanner will display flight prices even if the only thing you know for certain is your departure country.

It’s great undirected travel search, which is almost discovery but not quite. Now if I only had a Skyscanner-Dopplr mashup …

In early ‘07 , I wrote a few posts on CPA, SMO, etc., while trying to figure out what I was doing after MyBlogLog. At MBL, we did a good job of spurring adoption, but Yahoo bought us before we ever had to look at monetization. To build a lasting company (like Lookery we hope), one needs to do both well.

AT MBL, we achieved adoption by solving a real problem for a good-sized group of people who adopt new web technologies quickly. Most importantly, our service addressed both emotional and economic needs. When asked why people were using the service, Eric and I became fond of answering, “For Love or Money.” Online publishers want to know their users better, whether for personal or economic satisfaction. At MBL, knowing users better meant as individual readers; and at Lookery we hope that demographic composition carries some of that same weight.

One reason that I didn’t mind selling MBL so early was that I had no concrete idea how we’d make money. I might now. The lessons I’ve learned at least mean that one post, Inventory for CPA Ad Networks, has completely the wrong premise. The post discusses social profiles as if they will become high-value pages (measured by eCPM) on which to put ads. They aren’t high-value now, and they won’t be in the foreseeable future. They’ll remain below $0.20 eCPM. Beyond just the profiles, the huge majority of pages on social network sites don’t and won’t do any better. The exceptions to that rule are passion-centric communities like Dogster, single-topic social applications like many Lookery publishers, and vertical content aggregations like Fotolog Groups. A few of these exceptions (notably, travel pages) can be worth $2 and higher eCPM but the vast majority are in the $0.20 to $0.50 range.

Premium CPM campaigns aside, high-value web pages are ones where the information they contain is valuable for automatically displaying ads right on that page, i.e. where automated processing of local content (in the software rather than geographic sense) leads directly to high eCPMs. Keyword search ads are the gold standard in this area.

Social profiles have economic value, but as remote targeting data, not as local targeting data. The information they contain is useful for ad targeting but on pages/sites other than the social profiles/networks themselves. In MBL’s case, they know what blogs people read in what combinations. In Lookery’s, we know basic, anonymous demographics (age, gender, and location only). It’s similar to what the behavioral ad networks like Tacoda have been doing for years, but we are depending on concrete user info, rather than mathematical derivation. Their mathematical targeting is impressive, but too expensive for us to attempt.

[Please note that this is the exact opposite of Facebook Beacon from a privacy perspective. I’m talking about taking small amounts of public profile data without identifying the user and using it invisibly on sites where the user is anonymous. Beacon imports behavior from third-party sites that people expect to be secret or anonymous and publishes it in Facebook News Feeds for all the world to see.]

So, social profiles are not inventory for CPA ad networks; they provide targeting data for all sorts of situations.

Adam Green, Communications Director for MoveOn Civic Action, reached out and set up a call due to my upset yesterday. It was great of him to do so, though thus far we’re having to agree to disagree. He’s right in that they got great press coverage for their protest against the Facebook Beacon, but I think it’s completely irrelevant. As I told Adam when we spoke this morning, Silicon Valley high flyers don’t care what the WSJ and NYT write — because few of their core users get their news from those publications. Facebook’s PR agencies can call Z-Man panicking all they like, he’s extremely unlikely to care.

The naive, ham-handedness of MoveOn’s approach is specifically what set me off. If they want Facebook to notice them, they can get a few hundred thousand people to Block the Beacon. I hope the authors of that FireFox plugin create a Facebook-specific one to make blocking the Facebook Beacon easy for the people that care.

End-user revolts are the way power works out here, not PR and policy documents. There are tens of thousands of Silicon Valley denizens who could have told them so. But they didn’t think to check with experts until they had a small user revolt themselves.

Update: I got the walkaway on the LA Times article on the topic. Bottom line — this is the EFF’s job, not MoveOn’s.

“If they wish to go after consumer privacy rights legislation, then fine,” [Rafer] said. “When they are trying to get a bunch of people together to stage a sit-in at a for-profit start-up in Palo Alto, then give me a break, get me off your e-mail list. Even if this does turn out to be the right cause, it’s the wrong organization.”

It’s heartbreaking, but somehow successful liberal activism always jumps the shark and goes in loco parentis. Hubris sucks. Today’s tragedy is MoveOn. They’re great at interfering in traditional social issues, but they’ve now started dabbling in an area they clearly know nothing about — commerce. I’m not a big fan of the Facebook Beacon program, but the Democratic Party mucking around in areas that it doesn’t understand is bad enough.

Here is the mail I received this morning, hopefully my last ever from MoveOn.

Dear MoveOn member,
Join our Facebook group:
Facebook, stop invading my privacy!

Join the Facebook group

When you buy a book or movie online—or make a political contribution—do you want that information automatically shared with the world on Facebook?

Most people would call that a huge invasion of privacy. But this week, Facebook began doing just that. People across the country saw private purchases they made on other sites displayed on their Facebook News Feeds.

And it’s no accident. Facebook encourages companies to get “word-of-mouth promotion for your business” to “millions” by using the new feature that makes this happen.1 But the rights of Facebook users get left behind.

Can you join our Facebook group “Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!” and invite your friends to join? Click here:

[link removed to avoid giving linklove. nofollow was not enough]

A lot of us love Facebook—it’s helping to revolutionize the way we connect with each other. But they need to take privacy seriously. On the above group page, we ask people to sign this petition, which we’ll deliver to Facebook:

“Facebook must respect my privacy. They should not tell my friends what I buy on other sites—or let companies use my name to endorse their products—without my explicit permission.”
Facebook says its users can “opt out” of having their private purchases reported to the world. But the link is easy to miss. And even if you do “opt out” for purchases on one site, it doesn’t apply to purchases on another site—you have to keep opting out over and over again. The obvious solution is to switch to an “opt in” policy, like most other applications on Facebook.

Here’s what a couple MoveOn members who use Facebook have to say about this new policy:

“Last night, I bought a movie ticket on Fandango. Today, I was surprised to see that purchase in my Facebook News Feed. Taking my purchase info from one site and using it without permission on Facebook is an invasion of privacy.”—Ari R.

“It’s easy to picture serious consequences: A college student buying a ticket to Brokeback Mountain and his homophobic football teammates finding out on Facebook. Or a battered woman buying a ticket to see Violence Behind Closed Doors when she told her husband she’s working an extra shift. Or a not-so-friendly employer learning a staffer has bought a ticket to a screening of Living With AIDS.”—Mike R.
If we don’t fight back now, other web sites will follow Facebook’s misguided policy as they attempt to appeal to corporate advertisers. By inviting lots of our friends to join this important group, we can send a strong signal that Internet privacy must be protected.

Thanks for all you do,

–Adam G., Daniel, Marika, Eli, Wes, Karin, and the MoveOn.org Civic Action Team
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

I seem to have missed this news, or did John Furrier just break it in his Facebook status accidentally?

Polar Rose threw its US beta launch at Gnomedex late last week. We did well and learned a lot. As part of the effort, we created a Gnomedex-specific people gallery, which pulled in every face from any image in Flickr tagged “gnomedex07.”

As this stream of nicely composed portraits streamed by, a few people asked me, “Who is cropping the faces out of all those photos?” Answer:: “Polar Rose’s algorithms.”

Out of these interactions came the biggest lesson for me, though my experience at MyBlogLog should have made it clear — faces are far and away the best representation of people on the social web. Polar Rose sifts through social media and puts people first.

Once upon a time, I used to love Flickr’s Photos from your Contacts, but now I have enough contacts where landscape photos and screenshots dilute the social element seeing who is hanging with whom. What I want is Photos of People by your Flickr Contacts, and I think I’m going to have it soon.

I still own LVLT, INAP, and NGI in the sector, but maybe not for long. I think that enough capital has finally flowed back into the sector after the Fiber Bust that price competition is going to hurt financial results substantially. It should have gotten out at 50 a couple weeks ago instead of 35 today, but it’s still a 700%+ profit since early ‘03. I’ll take it happily.

The next few years will be confusing. I now live in a neighborhood that’s “up and coming.” It’s in my narrow, immediate, financial self-interest that the process continues. It’s not clear, however, that it serves anyone’s self-interest in a broader sense. There’s people on these sidewalks everyday whose lives will go from terrible to even worse as the neighborhood improves. Plus, any number of true (as opposed to fake) working class families will get displaced more than a hundred miles east to the desert of California’s Central Valley. It’s going to be much tougher for them to bring up their kids exposed to cultural diversity out there, which is bad for us all.

And then, some people just want to unabashedly glorify gentrification:

Some hot restaurants defy logic. While location seems to be crucial in the success - and failure - of many places, there are exceptions. Sometimes when the place is obscure, the location’s negative becomes a positive.

At least that’s the best way I can explain the runaway success of the tiny Bar Bambino, in the Mission on 16th Street between South Van Ness and Capp.

…

It’s a location that defines the word dicey. Most places on the block have a decade worth’s of soot and grit glazing the facades and windows. Yet in the middle of the block sits a celery green brick building, with a discreetly marked black storefront. Peek inside and it looks like an oasis.

…

Bar Bambino truly is an oasis. Owner Christopher Losa has taken a risk on the location, but has created a sexy, speakeasy vibe. He’s a pioneer - Bar Bambino may have started a rejuvenation of this gritty Mission strip.

And yes, I’m sure we’ll eat there and like it.