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Sandwiched neatly between the RealTime is God and RealTime Who Needs It crowds is a new group that embraces both positions while moving forward rapidly. These folks include Brett Slatkin of the PubSubHubub effort and Dave Winer of rssCloud.org. Slatkin and fellow conspirator Brad Fitzpatrick demoed the PSHBB architecture at the RealTime Stream Crunchup, and Winer quickly jumped in with his own implementation.

While Winer attacked PSHBB as a Google (and TechCrunch) conspiracy, the rhetoric seemed mostly in service of his own plans for a decentralized open platform not controlled by bigcos. The charges don’t make sense — PSHBB is not a Google effort but rather one started by Fitzpatrick and Slatkin on their own — and like Winer’s, proposed and delivered as an open architecture that can be spacross multiple players. In other words, they’re saying the same thing.

Digging deeper, it could be that Winer’s concern is that adoption by Google or other platform players will create a bandwagon effect that could lock out smaller independent developers. There’s certainly some truth to that dynamic, as PSHBB is already running in a number of cooperating platform implementations including FeedBurner, WordPress, and even FriendFeed, where Slatkin is active in tracking user issues. But ironically, by offering a competing framework, Winer takes away the argument of unfairness. If developers and publishers want to adopt one platform over another because it’s got more mainstream adoption, they’re free to do so. In the past, Winer has been the beneficiary of just such choices, with RSS 2.0 proliferating in no small part due to support from Microsoft on the platform side and the New York Times on the publishing side.

Those little green reweet buttons you see across the web on sites like this one have helped TweetMeme rise in popularity. The buttons are now so ubiquitous that the service has seemingly become the de-facto retweeting mechanism for content on the web. But it looks like it’s about to get a challenger, with a killer name, Retweet.com.
Retweet.com currently only has a a landing page saying that it’s “coming soon,” so it’s hard to know exactly what it is from that. But there are plenty of clues around the web pointing to it being a TweetMeme competitor. The main hint comes from a design contest taking place at 99designs. The prize is over $1,000 to design the site, and all of the mockups look very similar to TweetMeme (which, to be fair, takes a lot of its look from sites like Digg).
And there’s more. The group behind Retweet.com, Mesiab Labs (which seems to have a poor reputation among the Twitter community for products like Hummingbird, that some have accussed of spamming others), has a few sites related to Retweet.com that are already live. One is the URL shortener RT.nu, which will clearly be used to send out the retweets from Retweet.com. Another site, Checkretweet, scours Twitter for retweets for any user. Each of these play into the bigger strategy of the site, according to this blog post. And here’s the key nugget from that post, “Together, these systems allow us to detect and deliver breaking news faster than any other media outlet at present.”
So it looks like they’re setting up Retweet to take on not only TweetMeme, but also Digg, Google News, Techmeme and the new service that Bit.ly is working on. They key to all of this is obviously the links that are getting tweeted out and then retweeted. And because the latter word is entering the lexicon of the web, Retweet.com has a pretty awesome domain for trying to come along with a new service in this field.
That little trademark sign in the upper right hand corner of the logo is also interesting. It may just be for the logo, because it seems like they might have a hard time trademarking the word “retweet.” Though, that would be a potentially very scary situation for TweetMeme and all those little green buttons.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though, Retweet.com still has to execute — and launch. But this is probably something to watch.

[thanks Orli]

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Sifting through public status updates posted on Twitter and Facebook can be quite useful for instantly tapping into people’s thoughts on any given topic and links to more information about it.
But sometimes it’s even more useful to search only the status updates published by your friends and family, like when you’re looking for something specific to your social circle or only want to get an overview of thoughts or recommendations from those people you know and trust. Enter Status Search, which aims to fill that particular void in real-time search.
Once registered for this service, brought to you by Elad Meidar and Lior Levin, you can authorize it to gain access to what your circle of connections on both Twitter and Facebook is saying without the need to enter your credentials for said social networks. Basically, it’s what you can accomplish by searching FriendFeed updates from your friends but without the need for them to actually register for that service. Firefox users can enable a quick-search plugin for Status Search inside the browser, which takes away the hassle of having to remember to visit their website to search.
I tested a couple of search queries and the results were satisfactory, although I’m not sure exactly how far the index goes back. What I particularly liked was the fact that the trending topics that are displayed in the sidebar are generated from the stream of messages originating from the people you know and not the herd. In the past, I’ve called out for this type of implementation because Twitter’s trending topics have simply lost their appeal from the early days now that the service has gone mainstream.
Also nice: an alerts system that enables you to track specific words or phrases that you would like to get notified about. You can choose to receive an unlimited amount of e-mails on these terms, delivered either immediately or on a daily basis. From what I can gather from the Status Search website, the alerts are currently free of charge but there are apparently plans to start charging as much as $10/ month per word at some point (which is ridiculously expensive if you ask me).
Simple and useful, just the way I like my web apps. Now if we could get this functionality as a feature in TweetDeck, Seesmic and the likes …
(Hat tip to Eyal Sela)

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In light of the FTC’s recent scrutiny of Social Media practices and the activity that connects brands to influencers and ultimately consumers, we will soon see guidelines and corresponding penalties to serve as governance for future engagement.
In the realm of sponsored posts or tweets, the FTC simply cannot delineate the differences between earned and paid postings and therefore assumes that most consumers are equally oblivious.
With Izea’s impending announcement of a new pay-per-tweet network, combined with existing ad networks and services such as TweetROI, Twittad, and Magpie, the FTC will be forced to pay attention to the paid endorsements in one of Social Media’s most promising and also elusive networks.
As you could possibly imagine, the reality of mass-sponsored tweets will raise a Tweetstorm that will immediately trigger a blogstorm, which will ultimately escalate into a full-blown Category 5 media hurricane. But the reality is, whether you agree with them or not, sponsored conversations and paid tweets are already here.  The question is how to use them correctly and responsibly.
Their appeal to marketers is obvious.  They increase awareness, expand networks, drive sales, build communities, promote causes, raise money and awareness, and push traffic.
So, before the chaos and confusion ensues, I wanted to take a proactive role in steering a productive conversation to explore and introduce solutions, ethics, standards, and also reduce the possibility for consumer confusion and potential backlash.
I hosted a virtual summit on the topic via Facebook and invited pundits and industry leaders to discuss:

The issues and options for meeting FTC guidelines
The responsibility of brands and participants to provide consumers with information, context and intent
The inevitable need for guidelines and standardization in disclosure practices
The impact on the image of the sponsoring brand as well as the brands of the influential voices who lease their stature and social graph and how it ultimately affects the dynamic, trust, and vibrancy of their community

Disclosure certainly is a first step, but it can also steer perception, which is why this discussion is so critical to the evolution of sponsored conversations. The debate however, centralizes on the mechanisms and terminology for disclosure and whether or not they are effective when either explicit or implicit in nature.
To kick things off, I introduced options for consideration such as including a symbol or term in each Tweet that conveyed sponsorship or endorsement such “$,” “spon,” “paid,” “endorsement,” “sponsored” or possibly including an is.gd or bit.ly link to a landing page that could more effectively communicate the nature of the endorsement, ad, promotion, and the intention of the relationship.
As the conversation deepened, the rationale for one standard or solution unlocked a series of challenges that necessitated further exploration and discussion. As I noted in the forum, the use of “paid” for example, precipitates psychological connotations that will evoke a completely different emotional response as compared to endorsement or sponsorship.
Anders Abrahamsson shared an interesting perspective, “Paid is coming close to that you sold out your integrity - some might call it prostitution.” Stowe Boyd, the champion for Microsyntax.org, offered a general resolution that resonated with many participants, “My recommendation would be to concoct a new indicator, perhaps ‘AD’, to place at the start of any sponsored Tweet. This has several benefits since anyone would immediately know, at the outset of reading the tweet, that it is sponsored. It stands apart from the tags, which usually appear in a cluster at the end. Also, this would make it easy for tools to build filters to block ADs or to easily find them, depending on your leanings.”
I believe there’s a difference however, between sponsored and paid tweets, one defined by purpose and objective. For example, I enjoy the tweets published by Gary Vaynerchuk and I observe that he has a tremendous following of developing wine (and marketing) enthusiasts.  A company may choose to either sponsor his Twitter wallpaper and/or his tweet stream. In this case, they don’t necessarily influence his tweets, they simply sponsor them. This introduces another alternative through the disclosure of relationships directly on Twitter backgrounds.
However, if I pay for tweets specifically, then I expect to dictate the content related to each paid tweet.  Brian Carter of TweetROI shared his perspective on sponsored conversations versus ads, “SP and AD make sense. Surprisingly, even some quality Twitterers, don’t want to change the advertiser’s text…Everyone interprets payment/ sponsorship differently….”
At this point, SP and AD become potential preambles for sponsored and paid tweets respectively.
But, Jeremiah Owyang, social analyst with Forrester Research, believes that they are not enough, “People won’t understand that ‘AD’ and ‘SP’ imply that those tweets are paid for. We need to be explicit, even if it occupies more characters in the tweet. The only solution is to specifically state, ‘sponsored’ in each…”
Again, I suggested that an included (shortened) URL that directs to a pre-defined page that explains the sponsorship and further clarifies the intentions and benefits of the program is another option to consider. While it’s implicit in nature, it communicates disclosure in a mutually beneficial way that serves the Twitterer, the brand, and the reader.
In the leaked Twitter documents, also know as Twittergate,, there is mention that Twitter is already thinking about this as a form of revenue generation.
It appears as though Twitter is considering the implementation of color coding or introduction of different fonts for sponsored and paid tweets. James Eliason of Twittad believes that Twitter should release an API to support color-coding as not only a form of disclosure, but also as a measure of preventing spam.
Eliason took the case to Twitter co-founder Evan Williams where he recommended that Twitter begin the process of selecting specific ad partner providers to prevent dilution from spam marketers and ensure that the advertising comes from the source through the API. His idea is to assign the API calls from each ad partner through Twitter.com and also third party apps such as TweetDeck, Seesmic, and PeopleBrowsr. He also believes this will introduce a new subscription model for users to pay a small fee for a non-ad model across all platforms.
Our challenge isn’t only to unite the industry of sponsored conversation providers around common standards and ethics, we must also encourage marketers to put them into practice.
Whether it’s on Twitter, in blog posts, or in television commercials, paid tweets are technically no different than the array of commercials and advertisements that are available to marketers already – except that everyday people become the spokespeople and thus become difficult for followers to discern real experiences versus influenced perspectives.
While everyone agrees on the need for standards, and it’s clear that competitors will actually collaborate to help define them, there’s merit and promise in top-down regulation from the FTC and/or Twitter itself. In the meantime, I still believe that including “sponsored” as Jeremiah suggests, providing disclosure on individual wallpaper, or including a link to a page that offers context and clarity, represent credible alternatives in the interim.

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This is a guest post by Israeli blogger Orli Yakuel, who has apparently spent a significant amount of time testing every single way of accessing Twitter. In this post she shares her experiences with nine of her favorite web interfaces for the Twitter service (we have one more that we like, too - tunein, that just launched a week ago). The tenth, of course, is Twitter.com - but the cool kids always want to be a little different. You can more from Orli on her blog, go2web20.
Believe it or not, almost 50% of Twitter users, prefer to tweet directly from Twitter.com. This isn’t surprising, but most heavy Twitter users agree that Twitter.com is actually the poorest user experience among the plethora of alternative web applications to access the service. But there’s one thing Twitter.com has going for it (besides being the default way all new users access Twitter) - it’s simple and easy to use.
But after few months of using Twitter you begin to look for the retweet button, the auto-refresh updates, or a way to create groups, and moreover, you are looking for a better way to navigate through your endless list of friends and/or content. You won’t find these features on Twitter (although the Power Twitter Add-on gets you most of the way there), but here’s a list of alternative web applications that will let you monitor your Twitter account from your browser in a much richer way than the Twitter site itself.

With Web Seesmic (Disclosure: Arrington still has a small investment in Seesmic), you can monitor all of your tweet activities in one place and in real-time. Easily navigate through your list of friends, choose your favorite layout, and more - all from a very clean and clear interface. So far, I’ve found Web Seesmic to have the most potential in terms of becoming your next Twitterstream service. There is still room for improvement, of course. When it comes to usability, the design is just too minimalistic. The retweet/direct messages should be visual and accessible via one click only. The “list view” navigation is better than the column, but the font is way too small (that needs to be changed ASAP). In addition, it lacks two significant features: The trend list, which becomes very important if you want to be up-to-date with timely news and current events, as well as a twitpic/yfrog integration. Surprised, I have to ask: Where is the main thing that Seesmic does so well? Video-based would leverage this app at least ten times more. Have they given up on video completely?

Meanwhile PeopleBrowsr has it all. See all of your tweetstream, your mentions, DMs, search-based keywords, create groups, manage multi accounts from one dashboard, use a to-do list with quick tags, integrate with all your social networks, RSS import, map view, and tons of other features. The problem is - that it’s just too overwhelming! Even the most skilled power user on Twitter won’t need all of these advanced features. Luckily though, PeopleBrowsr has a light version that is more reasonable to use. Still, I did feel a bit lost in both the advanced and light versions.
PeopleBrowsr provides so many other services that are related to any and all of your social activities on the web. The service actually reminds me of Zoho, which turned out to be the largest office suite on the net. Maybe this is the direction PeopleBrowsr is heading towards? - Your one-stop-shop for all real time activities.

TwitHive is a multi-channel web dashboard for Twitter. The service lets you create channels based on your query. You can customize each channel whichever way you please. It might sound great overall, but during actual testing the service failed to impress me. The service is somewhat annoying to use - search and also new updates opens in a different layer, and column creation takes time, while other services do that for you automatically. One thing that I did enjoy and found unique was the integration of Google News and Blog Search alongside any search you perform.

If you have several Twitter accounts that you need to monitor (personal plus brand(s)), you may consider using Splitweet. Splitweet allows you to compose a list of accounts and distribute tweets to more than just one account. You can also follow your contacts’ tweets from all of your managed accounts. OK, so here’s my problem with this service: Each account gets its own color, and Splitweet places this color coded box next to each tweet in the stream. Personally I think it’s a bit weird to have refer to various Twitter accounts by color. I rather see the username of the account, or a small icon, than to remember what color symbolizes that particular account.

TweetTabs, a Tweetmeme project, is the easiest way to track trends on Twitter. It’s so easy, you don’t really need to do anything. Just enter the site and enjoy the stream of each trend presented on Twitter right now. Additionally, you can run a keyword search and it will automatically add it as a new column. There’s no registration whatsoever, and if you want to reply or retweet someone else’s tweet, you’ll be redirect to your own Twitter profile (which I found to be very useful always). Although on TweetTabs, you can’t see your friends’ streams or manage anything else beyond what I’ve mentioned above.

Similar to TweetTabs, Monitter allows you to track what most matters to you on Twitter without the need to sign up or in. Just type three words into the three search boxes (you are free to add more boxes if needed), and within seconds you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live. The one thing that Monitter gives above all the others listed here is the ability to grab a real-time twitter stream widget for your site, with the option to customise the CSS to make it look the way you want.

Kudos to Tweenky, for being the first service that enables real time tweets from the web. Unfortunately, it didn’t evolve any further. Their first version had this nifty Gmail look & feel, but for some reason, today, it just looks pretty plain and boring. Having said that, you may want to use it because of its simplicity. Tweenky is designed to be very obvious to the user. The list of activities and trends are accessible always, and the main stream is easy to adjust to. I found the larger font in the update box to be conveniently useful.

Remember all the buzz around Tweetree? I tried it again today and was surprised to see that nothing has changed (usually you get to see more useful features over time, no?). Anyway, it still a good service, if you want to see a bigger picture of your stream. Tweetree embeds external content so you get to see pictures, videos and even the text from submitted links right in your twitterstream. To be honest, I didn’t like how the service overtook the Twitter layout. If you already use Twitter in the background, go easy with your logos. In Tweetree’s case, they placed two extremely large logos on top of the twitter page, and it is just a distraction. It would have been less annoying to get all of the features without all of the noisy design around it.

TwitZap is not half bad for a layer that sits on top of Twitter site, and frankly it has great tools that the others don’t have. First of all it lets you organize your favorite channels, then it shows you how many updates you missed when you’re not on the channel, which relates to a RSS reader experience. But furthermore, it shows you who are the people that are viewing the same channel right now, and this is by far the best way to find people based on a shared activity. The page refreshes in real time (you can even choose its speed), and on its browser tab you get to see how many of new tweets you’ve missed. The bottom line, if I have to choose the best service among these 9, I think TwitZap is the winner (they should change their registration to a single sign-in though).

Frankly, I’m not completely satisfied with all of these services. I think that Twitter web clients are weak compared to the desktop ones. I wonder who will step up and take the entire experience forward. Who will integrate twitpic, blip.fm, emoticons, videos, and all that fun stuff that we found on other Twitter applications into one? One thing we know - it most likely will not be Twitter. Therefore it’s up to someone else to gather everything into a single, easy-to-use page. I’m still in searching for that one service…
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A couple of weeks ago IAC Chairman and CEO Barry Diller was telling the elite crowd at the Allen & Co. Sun Valley conference that he was “pessimistic about Twitter’s prospects for making money.” A couple of weeks later and he’s singing the same tune, this time to the elite crowd at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Pasadena.
In an interview with Andy Serwer, Diller admitted that he didn’t really understand the service and doesn’t use it himself. He said it was for people who want emote real time information like “I’m going to the doctor now,” “I’ve left the doctor now,” and “I have a cavity,” and that it doesn’t seem like a natural advertising platform. “It’s not exactly for me” he said, “I don’t go to the dentist.”
He does admit that it is a “very strong” real time communication device. But he just can’t get much more excited than that. Maybe he’ll take another look if Twitter ever hits those massive revenue projections.
Full video is below. Sorry for the low quality, Fortune will likely have a clean high definition version soon and I’ll swap it out.

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TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington recently was interviewed by Charlie Rose for a chat about the latest news and events in technology. Michael gave his take on the Google vs. Microsoft rivalry, saying that each tech giant is going after the other’s core businesses. Michael also touched upon the latest news around the CrunchPad and Apple’s much hyped and potentially similar product, the large form iPod Touch, which is reported to hit the market in early 2010.
Of course, Rose unsurprisingly delved into the whole Twittergate controversy, which Michael gave a lot more insight into, including the discussions with Twitter and the ethical decisions he faced in his decision and why he published the documents. Michael also weighed in on mobile social mapping startup Loopt, the iPhone, the Palm Pre (which he says is a “great phone”) Facebook’s viability as a money-making enterprise and more. below for the full transcript of the interview. You can see Arrington’s other Charlie Rose appearances on Crunchbase.
Full Transcript:
Michael Arrington is here. He’s the founder and editor of TechCrunch,
one of the most widely blogs in Silicon Valley. TechCrunch was
founded in 2005, and now has separate sites covering specific countries and
technologies. Arrington has also formed a company to develop a tablet
computer primarily to use the Web. It is called the Crunchpad. I’m
pleased to have him back on this program. Welcome, sir.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Hello, Charlie.
CHARLIE ROSE: Google versus Microsoft. We now have Bing, their
search engine at Microsoft, and Chrome, which is going to be an operating
system, a browser and an operating system.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Yes, it’s fascinating, because you think of Google
as a search engine company, which most of the revenue is derived from
search marketing, and Microsoft as a sort of software company. Windows and
Office, that’s where they get a lot of their revenue. And yet these two
companies are competing head on, viciously, because Microsoft wants search
share. There’s so much money in it. So they’ve got Bing and they’re
trying to do things with Yahoo! And Google, I don’t know if they want —
if they want sort of revenue from Office and the operating system, but they
certainly want to take that revenue from Microsoft. So you have them with
Chrome OS and Google Docs competing directly with Windows and Office. And
they’re going at each other’s core businesses, and it’s fascinating to
watch.
CHARLIE ROSE: But do they really look to have great success in that?
Do they expect to take away a lot of Microsoft’s operating system?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: If you listen to Eric Schmidt at Google, he seems
pretty serious, that they want — they want to do innovative things in the
operating systems space.
I don’t know what their projections are around that, but…
CHARLIE ROSE: There was a story that Eric was the one resisting going
ahead with Chrome as an operating system.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Oh, I don’t know if he resisted or not, but he’s
certainly behind it now that it’s public. And they also have Android, of
course, the mobile phone operating system that is also based on Linux.
CHARLIE ROSE: There’s also Bing. So, Bing got very good notices.
People in the business, the Walt Mossbergs of the world.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Yes. Bing is a great search engine. They
launched it, what, two months ago now. And it’s a little too early to tell
what kind of market share gains they’ll have, if any, but it’s definitely a
great search engine.
One of the problems with search — and all the guys who do search
testing will tell you this– it doesn’t matter what the results look like
if you have a testing group sort of blind sampling. If you put the Google
logo on top and ask them what they think of the search results, they like
it more than they like it otherwise. And so Google just has the brand in
search, and it’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of money.
CHARLIE ROSE: And a lot of people have to say Bing was better.
Someone said to me this interesting point, that what Google sometimes
worries about if somehow Microsoft computers, PCs, wouldn’t take Google.
Does that make sense to you?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: I think that Microsoft in the past has made
changes to Internet Explorer that stopped the gathering of information by
the browser — by Web sites. The browser sort of puts up not a firewall,
but you can imagine something like that. I think that’s part of the reason
why Google decided to back Firefox so heavily and also to create their own
browser, to stop that from happening. But I think with Google…
CHARLIE ROSE: So, it wouldn’t be Explorer?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Yes. Right. And Explorer’s market share is
dropping.
But I think Google wants to get Microsoft out of the PC entirely. And
they’re offering alternatives across the board to Microsoft software, which
makes that battle so fascinating.
CHARLIE ROSE: Speak to me about mobile phones and mobile technology
and where are we?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: We’re in an awesome place. I mean, think back. I
know you talk about the iPhone quite a bit. The iPhone changed —
absolutely changed the mobile landscape. And people said, you know, some
people said that Apple couldn’t do this, they won’t do it.
CHARLIE ROSE: Because they began to see it as a computer in itself?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Well, yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: That’s what…
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Although not just that.
CHARLIE ROSE: And it looked good and everybody wanted to have one
because they thought it was so cool.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: They also figured out Web surfing on a phone with
a small screen that’s a touch screen, but it’s small, but they figured out
the gestures to zoom in and out, and it’s actually an adequate Web surfing
experience that they figured out. No one else had done that before.
CHARLIE ROSE: And what about the Palm Pre?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: It’s a great phone.
CHARLIE ROSE: It’s a great phone. Why is it a great phone?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: The operating system I think is as good or in some
cases better than the iPhone. The operating system is quick, you can have
lots of apps open, it’s a great operating system.
The hardware on the phone I think was a little rushed and feels a
little cheap, so for me I’m sticking with the iPhone, but I came close to
choosing the Palm Pre, partially because of the physical keyboard. I think
it’s really nice, and also because I feel like I’m getting a little bit too
tied to Apple.
CHARLIE ROSE: OK. Tell me what Crunchpad is.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: About a year ago — and I really like where the
industry is going with this — about a year ago, I realized I just want a
big iPhone. I want a computer that I can sit on the couch and surf the Web
without having a weird keyboard stuck to it that doesn’t really work when
you’re not sitting at a desk. And so we started this project on TechCrunch
just talking about it, saying we want to build this and we want help from
the community, and great things happened over the course of a year. We’ve
hired a team. We’ve had lots of people, partners come on board and
contribute their time, their resources, suggest partnerships.
CHARLIE ROSE: Did you go get venture money?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Well, you know, I’m not going to answer that
question.
CHARLIE ROSE: Why not?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Because I haven’t — I don’t want to answer the
question.
(LAUGHTER)
CHARLIE ROSE: We have our ways, sir.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: But I’ll say this. I think that Apple — so
there’s rumors — forgetting the Crunchpad and the fact that I want to
build that — Apple is talking about coming out with a tablet computer,
which is going to be a large-screen iPod, or iPhone or iPod Touch. I think
that’s a good thing. I think they’ll sell a lot of them.
Google’s new operating system, Chrome OS, is a Linux-based operating
system with a browser on top, and the idea is you never see the operating
system. You never go to the desktop on the computer. It goes right to the
browser, which is what we’ve been talking about for a year. They’ve been
working on it for a long time. I’m not suggesting we had the idea first.
I have no idea. But the point is, it’s coming to market as a free
operating system. I think that’s really good, and we’re going to see
netbooks without keyboards. We’re going to see computers with other input
mechanisms besides keyboards, or alternative input mechanisms that I think
are going to — really exciting stuff.
CHARLIE ROSE: Facebook versus Google. Is that a big competition?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: You know, last time we talked, it was Facebook
versus MySpace. And the funny thing is, that’s not the question anyone
asks anymore.
CHARLIE ROSE: It’s what is Facebook becoming?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Right. And what is Google becoming. I think it’s
almost like everybody is chasing Twitter right now, and Facebook clearly
is. But when it comes down to it, the social aspect of Facebook, where
your friends are recommending things to you, which could be products or
news items, and it’s the constant sort of logging into the site 25 times a
day is something that Google needs to address. And right now they…
CHARLIE ROSE: So that’s Zuckerberg’s argument. Look, I mean, who
better to go for a search than your friends? If you know and trust.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Exactly. Exactly. Yes. Why not?
CHARLIE ROSE: Because they will know who you are and what you like.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Some of the startups that buy traffic on Google
search are talking about the conversion rates from those — conversion
rates meaning a purchase or a signup that they get from that purchase
traffic from Google is good, but not nearly as good as the conversion rates
they are seeing from Facebook and Twitter. So if I just send out a link
saying, wow, I just saw this movie and it sure is good, and you click on
that, you’re more likely to go see the movie than you are if you do a
search for it and click on a paid ad from Google.
Google is very aware of that. The free stuff on Twitter and Facebook
is better than the paid ads on Google. And that has to be freaking them
out a little bit.
CHARLIE ROSE: So, what did you do? You published some internal
financial documents from Twitter?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: There’s this hacker…
CHARLIE ROSE: I know that.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: This French guy that got these documents from
Twitter because of these guest books (ph)…
CHARLIE ROSE: Right, and so what did you do?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: I’ll get to it. He — so what he did was, he
wanted to warn Twitter that, you know, your security is awful. And also he
wanted to get credit for doing this as hackers and crackers do. So, he
went to the French media, and a French journalist — he was told about it,
this French journalist went to Twitter and said what happened, Twitter
wouldn’t respond. So he dropped it, came to us and said…
CHARLIE ROSE: Who came to you?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: This hacker, anonymously, and said, here are all
the documents and sent us all these documents. Started this fascinating
discussion about…
CHARLIE ROSE: What was in the documents?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: It was hundreds of documents taken from Twitter’s
employees’ attachments to e-mail accounts. And it included interview
schedules, people they interviewed in Silicon Valley, prominent people that
work in other companies that didn’t end up at Twitter. So very
embarrassing stuff. Credit card information for many of the employees. E-
mails, inbox screen shots, executive meeting notes, financial projections,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Just the whole sort of thing. And we
looked at that and said, we’re going to post some of this. Some of it
we’re not. But we said…
CHARLIE ROSE: Like credit card numbers, you’re not going to post
that.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: We’re not going to post the credit card numbers or
things that would embarrass people, but some of this was — we thought was
pretty darn newsworthy, particularly the financial projections and the
executive meeting notes from the last few months. And so we engaged in a
dialogue with our readers, where we said, look, we have got these
documents. We haven’t decided yet what we’re going to post, we think a
couple of documents. We talked to Twitter, sent them all documents, so
they knew what was going on. Talked to our lawyer…
CHARLIE ROSE: So, what did they say, go ahead and post them?
(LAUGHTER)
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: They said…
CHARLIE ROSE: We have no problem with this?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: The ultimate answer was, we know you’re going to
post a couple of these, and that’s OK, but for most of these, we’d really
rather you not, and so that’s not a problem, we absolutely won’t. And we
worked with Twitter on the back end to make sure they closed up some of the
security holes that they had. But the interesting thing to me wasn’t the -
- the documents were fascinating. The interesting thing to me was the
discussion that was generated around whether we should publish them or not.
And there are people that have come out, major journalists who have
come out said it was unethical for us to do this. And there were
journalists who had come out and said it was absolutely fine and ethical
for them to do this. In fact, their readers deserve that kind of access.
And obviously I have an opinion because I’m in the middle of the
story, but just taking myself out of it, I think it’s a fascinating
discussion, because I know in the old days, when “The New York Times” or
“The Wall Street Journal” got documents like this, they weren’t — they
didn’t have that discussion with the readers.
CHARLIE ROSE: It’s interesting how you did it, you know, engaging
your community.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: I engaged them, and I would say that 80 percent of
my readers disagreed with me. And let me know about it.
CHARLIE ROSE: So, why did you do it?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Because I think — well, you know, it’s funny.
When I make decisions with TechCrunch on whether to publish or what
position to take, often I’ll look back after everything is played out and
say, would I do things differently with the benefit of hindsight? And
there are a couple of instances in the past where I would have probably
done things differently. In this case, I think I absolutely did the right
thing, and I wouldn’t do things any differently. So.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do you know the site called Loopt? It’s amazing.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: It’s this mobile social networking. And it’s all
about location.
CHARLIE ROSE: Wherever you are, you know everybody in your block.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Yes. I can turn mine on — I mean, I don’t have
my phone with me, but I can turn it on when I get out of here and see
everyone around me who’s a friend. Actually, mine is set up a little
differently, so I’ll see everyone who wants me to see them. And it’s a
different way of networking socially.
I love it. In fact, I’ve written about this, where you can imagine a
time where you walk into a bar and you pull out your phone and you see —
for everyone that wants you to see it, you see — and you laugh and it’s
funny, but it’s also big business. Everyone’s picture who’s the opposite
sex or whatever your sexual preferences are, who is single and maybe wants
to — you can see all of them. And that way you know, you know, you can go
and flirt with them on the phone and it sort of helps you meet people in a
bar.
Or you go into a business cocktail setting, and you see people on your
phone that you’ve met before and maybe it helps you with their first name
or to remember things. I think that’s the kind of thing that Looped (ph)
and others are doing that is going to change social networking.
CHARLIE ROSE: So, tell me how you see the future of social
networking? I mean, is it…
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: I don’t know what it is. I mean, it’s hard to
define. It’s — if you look at Facebook, it’s really the plumbing behind
the interactions online between people and helping them map to the real
world. It’s clear that people love interacting with each other on Web
sites. And it’s clear that Facebook has been able to get third parties to
build applications on their platform that leverage you having your friends
sort of seeing what you’re doing. And it’s clear also that they can then
take that — if you saw what they did with CNN around the elections, and
then you can comment and your friends can see you comment, you know, what’s
going on during the election.
That’s all — it’s sort of really fascinating. What’s unclear is
whether it can really become profitable over the long run. Because
Facebook has these massive expenses, and the revenues are growing rapidly,
but it’s unclear if in the long run, they can make that vastly profitable
like Google has.
CHARLIE ROSE: What about the Kindle space?
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: The ebook reader space is very interesting, and I
wouldn’t expect Apple to stay out of it for much longer, to be honest, but
Amazon has been successful in selling the Kindles. I think they — the
estimates are they might sell a million or so this year. They sell lots of
books on top of it and subscriptions, so it’s a great revenue stream for
them.
I’ve argued that Amazon should not be building a hardware device
specifically. They should be building the software or the device and let
anyone build a Kindle if they want. These are forcing Sony and Barnes &
Noble and Apple and others to come up with their competing sort of closed-
off ebook systems. And so I think that Amazon should really say, look,
we’re going to do the books, we’re going to do the software for the Kindle,
but other people build the hardware.
CHARLIE ROSE: You take care of the hardware. Yes. TechCrunch, thank
you.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Thanks very much.
CHARLIE ROSE: Michael Arrington.
Thank you for joining us. See you next time.
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