IT News

These days, thanks to its growing ubiquity in the media, nearly everyone knows what Twitter is. But back in 2006, when it was known as Twttr, a side project of the podcasting service Odeo, no one knew what it was. So co-founder Biz Stone made a video.

As you can watch below in “Twttr 101,” dug up by Say OMG, Stone dresses up as some sort of crazy scientist with Harry Potter glasses and sports an even crazier accent. Also worth noting is that at the time, Twitter was described as a “social texting service based on the contents of you mind.” Most users today don’t realize it, but in the early days, Twitter was almost entirely based around SMS.

For those wanting to know more about Twitter’s past, you should also check out Stone’s blog post from July 2006, announcing the launch of Twttr. In it, he writes, “Jack Dorsey is one of Odeo’s brightest stars so when he told us about this idea that has been haunting him for six years we had to listen. It’s not even remotely related to audio but it’s an awesome idea so we told him to go for it.” This foresight in switching from audio idea of Odeo and going with Twitter proved to be a very smart move.

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MySpace has just announced that CEO Owen Van Natta has left the company. Taking his place will be co-Presidents Mike Jones And Jason Hirschhorn, who had been serving as the company’s Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer, respectively. The news comes less than two weeks after we interviewed Van Natta about his first eight months running MySpace, when he gave no indication that he was intending to leave the company. Van Natta joined MySpace last April alongside Jones and Hirschhorn as part of a major executive shakeup.

We’d previously reported that Chief Product Officer Hirschhorn would soon be leaving the company. Obviously that isn’t the case. Our sources tell us that there has been a long standing conflict between News Corp digital chief Jon Miller and Van Natta, and that part of Van Natta’s decision to leave was his inability to terminate Hirschhorn.

Before MySpace, Van Natta had a short-lived stint as CEO of Project Playlist, where he stayed for around five months.

We’ve included the release below:

News Corporation today announced that Owen Van Natta will step down from his position as MySpace CEO, effective immediately. Mr. Van Natta will be replaced by newly-elevated co-Presidents Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, who will each report to Jon Miller, Chairman and CEO of Digital Media for News Corporation. All three executives joined MySpace in April 2009, with Mr. Jones and Mr. Hirschhorn previously serving as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer, respectively.

“Owen took on an incredible challenge in working to refocus and revitalize MySpace, and the business has shown very positive signs recently as a result of his dedicated work,” said Jon Miller, News Corporation’s Chairman and CEO of Digital Media. “However, in talking to Owen about his priorities both personally and professionally going forward, we both agreed that it was best for him to step down at this time. I want to thank Owen for all of his efforts.”

Mr. Miller continued, “Mike and Jason have demonstrated true leadership in their operational and product guidance, respectively, and I have the utmost confidence in both of them to lead MySpace into its next chapter.”

In a joint statement, Mr. Jones and Mr. Hirschhorn noted:
“We joined MySpace last April with very a specific set of goals in mind, and are anxious to continue working together to make those goals a reality. This business is now pointed in the right direction, and we have a great team of employees that will continue to push MySpace closer to its potential as the place where people go to be discovered and to discover great content.”

Mr. Van Natta commented:
“MySpace is an incredibly unique place and we’ve made real gains in terms of product focus and user experience. I’m proud of the work we’ve all accomplished together and look forward to watching its continued growth.”

Prior to his role as MySpace COO, Mr. Jones founded and operated several online businesses, including Userplane, a leading provider of tools for online communities such as MySpace. Userplane was acquired in 2006 by AOL, where Jones subsequently served as a senior vice president and focused on social media monetization and also pioneered the distribution of widgets and other technology to Web publishers. He also was founder and CEO of Tsavo Media, an online content and search network developing next-generation publishing platforms and technology services.

Since joining MySpace, Mr. Hirschhorn oversaw all aspects of product development, and previously has led both start-up and established online businesses. He was president of Sling Media, Inc’s Entertainment Group, which created consumer-driven applications and services for the Slingbox device, and was chief digital officer at MTV Networks, where he oversaw the company’s digital media businesses, products and strategies. Hirschhorn joined MTV Networks following the acquisition of his company, Mischief New Media, which provided interactive services to the entertainment industry.

CrunchBase InformationMySpaceOwen Van NattaJason HirschhornMike JonesInformation provided by CrunchBase

Love it or hate it, everyone is talking about Google Buzz right now. And, judging from my account, a ton of people are actually using it too. The main use envisioned for Buzz was sharing, but the problem is that for content, you still need to copy a URL and then head over to Buzz to share it. Not anymore.

We’re all used to tweet buttons (like the one built by Tweetmeme), Facebook buttons, Digg buttons, and even Yahoo Buzz buttons on many posts around the web. These make it easy to share without having to leave the content. So we made a Google Buzz button.

When I say “we,” I actually mean one of our developers, Andy Brett, who hacked this together with amazing speed. He could do that because it’s actually a simple piece of code derived from a button you would use to share an item on Google Reader. And that’s an important thing to note: for this to work, your Google Reader shared account has to be hooked up to your Google Buzz account. The good news is that assuming you use Google Reader, Google did this link-up automatically for you.

So there you go, Buzz away.

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I just returned from the Microsoft campus, where some students from Carnegie Mellon University are showing off their awesome project, a version of D&D that runs on the Surface. Now, before you start rolling your eyes, just recognize that this isn’t just a holy grail for tabletop gaming nerds. I mean, it’s that too, but really it’s a proof of concept that shows how fun and intuitive something like this can be, and how accessible a team can make it. I honestly think that if they had these things scattered around like Golden Tee cabinets, they’d get a huge following.

The build we played with was last semester’s (it’s a student project, not a professional development), and since then there’s been a lot of bug-squashing and feature-adding, but the newest build isn’t playable. So they’ve got a short little scenario where we went from a zoomable map screen to a town where we… spotted some orcs! Roll for initiative!

Read the rest of this story at CrunchGear…

Leading up to its January event, rumors were swirling that Apple was talking to the TV networks about offering possible subscriptions to their shows through iTunes. Of course, that never happened. While reports had CBS and ABC interested in such a deal, the other networks apparently were less enthusiastic about it — perhaps out of fear of repercussions from the cable companies. But that doesn’t mean that Apple is giving up.

A new report today in the Financial Times indicates that Apple will begin testing the sale of $1 U.S. TV shows this year. Specifically, the new pricing could launch around the time that the iPad does, which will be March/April, FT notes citing people familiar with the discussions. Apple currently sells its shows for $1.99 (standard definition) or $2.99 (high definition) through iTunes. These $1 would be the standard definition variety, apparently, as they will play on the iPad.

Obviously, by cutting the prices of the shows in half, Apple and the networks in the test are trying to see if it spurs sales. It undoubtedly will, but this remains a temporary solution. Apple still wants to do some sort of subscription service for the shows it offers through iTunes. And I would be all about that because it would strike a blow to the major cable operators that control the industry with an iron fist and make us all pay insane rates so they can pad their profits.

Also, a subscription version of television shows would mean you wouldn’t have to store all of them, all the time. It’s simply not practical to buy all the shows you want through iTunes right now. Even if you could afford it, the amount of space they take up would quickly overwhelm your hard drive. This is exactly why iTunes is inevitably going to move to the cloud.

Apple has been testing discounts on its TV shows even before this announcement. For example, if you bought the latest season of ABC’s show Lost early, you could get the season pass for $39.99 instead of the regular $49.99. It’s not clear how the new $1 pricing would change season passes, but presumably, they would be much cheaper as well.

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Macworld 2010 will be the first San Francisco show in which Apple hasn't participated, but that doesn't mean the show won't have plenty to offer attendees.

Epocrates surveyed 350 clinicians a few days after Apple announced the iPad and found that 22 percent plan to purchase the tablet within a year.

When it came to Facebook and Twitter, it took brands a while to figure out how to take advantage of the social networks. With Foursquare, they have been much faster. But now with Google Buzz, they’re beating plenty of early adopters to it.

Samsung has already set up a Google Buzz account this morning and is already cranking out buzzes. Not only that, but they’re apparently trying to start their own trends on the service, as they have today tagged a bunch of their “favorite buzzers” and tagged the buzz with “#BUZZwednesday.” Of course, the problem here is that Google Buzz doesn’t support the “#” symbol the same way Twitter does (at least not yet). Still, you can search Buzz (right from within Gmail) for the term “#BUZZwednesday” and Samsung’s buzz will appear.

Of course, what’s annoying about the Buzz tagging mechanism is that it automatically sends these message to your Gmail inbox if you’re mentioned in one.

Hope everyone is ready for an onslaught of brands on the service! Need I remind you that Google Buzz just launched yesterday?

Update: And Samsung responds:

For the record, I think it’s smart for brands to hop on these services early — it’s just Samsung doing it’s job. But I think we can all see how this will get annoying quickly.

Update 2: And Samsung adds: “We agree that messages going to Inbox is not ideal. We need an @reply and DM section. Maybe even a comments, likes, and favorite sections.” A good idea, I think.

CrunchBase InformationGoogle BuzzInformation provided by CrunchBase

This app takes a visual approach to shuffling your music, displaying up to 12 album covers for randomly selected songs in the music library stored on your iPhone or iPod touch. It's a nice upgrade over the shuffle feature, but it's limited by the app's inability to run in the background.

Online advertising revenues among the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL) ramped up 10.2 percent in the fourth quarter to $9 billion.  This marks the second quarter of positive growth following last year’s advertising recession, and growth accelerated from 1.2 percent in the third quarter.

Unlike in the third quarter, Google didn’t account for all the growth. All four companies showed decent sequential increases, indicating that display advertising is beginning to regain its health, and not just search advertising. But search is still driving the gains. Google had another blowout quarter, for instance. And Microsoft showed some strength compared to the previous quarter, perhaps due to Bing search advertising revenues starting to kick in. On a sequential basis, Microsoft’s advertising revenues grew the fastest at 18.6 percent. But the other three weren’t exactly slouching, with growth rates between 11.5 percent and 13.7 percent each

I keep track of these numbers every quarter for these four companies, which turns out to be a good proxy for overall online advertising revenues since they represent a majority of the industry’s revenues. The numbers represent global advertising revenues, and include network revenues paid to affiliates through AdSense and Yahoo’s ad network. Google’s licensing revenues for Google Enterprise Apps have been stripped out. For Microsoft and AOL, I include only the advertising portions of their online revenues as reported in their quarterly earnings statements.

Below is a table with all the numbers:

Online Advertising Revenues (in millions)

4Q08 1Q09 2Q09 3Q09 4Q09 Google $5,504 $5,331 $5,336 $5,757 $6,465 Yahoo $1,594 $1,383 $1,378 $1,377 $1,535 Microsoft $610 $520 $540 $490 $581 AOL $507 $443 $419 $415 $472 Total $8,215 $7,677 $7,673 $8,039 9,053 Sequential Growth Q/Q 3.44% -6.55% -0.05% 4.77% 12.60% Annual Growth Y/Y 4.94% -4.63% -5.76% 1.22% 10.20% CrunchBase InformationGoogleMicrosoftYahoo!AOLInformation provided by CrunchBase

If you’ve ever tried to use Twitter Search, you know that it’s got some pretty serious problems. First, the site only lets you search back through a couple weeks of tweets. Even worse, the service doesn’t seem to employ any relevancy algorithm to speak of — you just see the most recent tweets that contain your query’s keywords, regardless of who said them (which oftentimes yields junk and spam). Today Topsy, the startup that views tweets as the currency of the web, is launching a handful of new features that improve on the official Twitter search in almost every way.

Up until now, Topsy has been based entirely around links. When you visited the site, it would prompt you to enter a search query, and then would display a list of links most relevant to whatever you searched for. The links are ranked by the number of times they’ve been retweeted, and also by the influence of the people who have tweeted them;  the site actually keeps track of the number of retweets each user typically gets to establish their overall reputation. Now, Topsy is taking this reputation system and extending it beyond just links, allowing you to search for both photos and tweets that don’t contain links at all.

So what does that mean? Before now, if you ran a search for “Google Buzz”, the site would return links to articles and videos about the new service. Now, it will also surface tweets from influential Twitter users, even if they don’t include a link. That’s important for breaking news when a story may not have already been covered by a publication, or when there’s a tweet that’s important in and of itself (say, Bill Gates’ first tweet). You can view just these tweets using the navigation menu at the top of the screen, and important tweets will also be included in the site’s flagship web search, alongside links and photos (more on that later). You can filter these results by time, sorting by Hour, Day, Week, Month, and All Time (which represents 18 months of data).

This new search functionality for linkless tweets comes with one big caveat — it will only count retweets that use the native Twitter retweet functionality, which has been pretty controversial. Native retweets don’t allow users to append their own comments to a retweet, and they’re still only used around 10% as often as the “old school” retweet functionality. That said, the Topsy team says they will eventually be tracking all retweets, though it may take a while.

The other big addition to the site today is support for photo search. This searches the text of any tweet that contains a link to a photo, and then presents all matching photos in a thumbnail view similar to Google Images (as with links and tweets, these are all ranked according to Topsy’s reputation system). Because these are pulled in in realtime, the results can be more useful and timely than what you’d find on other image search engines. That said, they can also be pretty quirky. For example, I ran a query for “airplane” and got results of a guy hiding his head in a sweatshirt (on an airplane), a photo of an airplane safety manual, and a photo of a guy wearing a banana suit (again, on an airplane). Queries appear to work better if they’re related to a current event. But even if the results aren’t always perfectly on point, you can definitely have a lot of fun with them.

Finally, you can see the top trending items for all three search categories — web, photos, and tweets — in the “Trending” section, which sort of serves as a Digg for Twitter. And, for those who were asking for it, Topsy now supports RSS feeds.

This is a big improvement for Topsy, and I’ll definitely be using it as an alternative to Twitter’s official search. My concern, though, is that Twitter will probably be launching something similar in the future — its own search engine really hasn’t changed in years, and is ripe for an overhaul (especially since it’s now featured on the Twitter homepage). That said, Topsy has its search indexing over 18 months of tweets (search.twitter.com only has around two weeks of content), so that may help differentiate it from whatever Twitter releases.

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The Iranian government has officially banned the use of Gmail in the country, reports The Wall Street Journal. In place of Google’s email platform, Iran will allow citizens to use a State-sponsored national email service.

The ban coincides with the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Republic, which is expected to draw mass protests and riots from citizens who are both for and against the regime. Last summer, during the controversy surrounding the Iranian elections, Iran banned social network FriendFeed. Facebook was also banned around election time. As many other communications outlets were blocked around this time period, Iranian citizens took to Twitter as the main tool of choice to spread information about what is going on.

Already it appears that the government is beginning to crack down on text messaging. It should be interesting to see if Iran starts handing out bans on social networks like Facebook and Twitter if citizens begin to spread information about demonstrations and protests on the networks. Earlier this year, the country banned Badoo, a popular social network in emerging markets.

Photo credit/Flickr/dougcurran

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Web analytics company comScore just announced that it has acquired advertising research agency ARSGroup. The acquisition was all-cash and is expected to close in March.

ComScore also reported earnings today, with revenues for the fourth quarter of 2009 coming in at $33.8 million, an increase of 7% over the fourth quarter of 2008.

The company says it has added 57 net customers during the quarter, which is the highest number of client adds since the second quarter of 2008 according to comScore President & CEO Dr. Magid Abraham.

For the entire (fiscal) year 2009, comScore reported revenues of $127.7 million, up from $117.4 million the year before, an 8.8% increase.

As for the acquisition of 42-year old ARSgroup: the company essentially helps advertisers measure, optimize and predict the effectiveness of their advertising messages. ARSgroup’s products help evaluate and quantify the impact of campaigns across various media, including television, print, radio, outdoor and digital.

With the purchase, comScore demonstrates that it is looking beyond online audience measurement for future business.

ComScore also recently acquired Certifica, a similar web measurement company based in Latin America. In 2008, the company bought up M:Mobile to broaden measurement offerings.

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Panasonic announced two new high-definition camcorders, each equipped with three low-light-optimized Live MOS sensors and the ability to record 1080p video.

If you’re a fan of Facebook Chat but haven’t been able to use it in your favorite chat client, good news: Facebook has just launched support for Jabber/XMPP, an open protocol that makes it very easy for any chat client or web service to integrate Facebook Chat (it’s also the same protocol used by Google Talk).

Facebook first announced that it was working on implementing Jabber/XMPP support way back in May 2008, and rumors that XMPP support was on its way began anew in November.

There’s a chance that this will lead to a surge in Facebook Chat usage, since it can now be easily integrated into just about every chat client out there, including iChat and AIM. That said, Facebook Chat has already been available though some major clients like Adium, Meebo, and Pidgin, though integration required some extra effort from those applications’ developers. In other words, if you really wanted to connect to Facebook Chat outside of the social network, you already could. But even with these applications, Facebook says that the authentication experience through XMPP should be more seamless than it was before, and that the company is also launching Facebook Connect support for these third party chat clients.

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iPhone developer Sourcebits has created a new division to focus on creating "super apps" for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

Opera announced it has developed a version of its Opera Mini web browser for Apple's iPhone. The Norwegian company said it will demonstrate the new browser at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Jon von Tetzchner, cofounder of Opera Software, said he is "thrilled" to offer the preview and added that the software provides a "fast, feature-rich" experience for iPhone users. Opera on the iPhone brings the company "one step closer" to its mission of "bringing the web to the world," he said.

Will Apple Approve?

The big question, however, is whether Apple will approve Opera as an iPhone application on its App Store. Apple currently only accepts browsers that run on the WebKit engine -- the same engine that powers Apple's Safari browser.

But Apple has gotten into hot water with the Federal Trade Commission over its initial refusal to certify Voice over Internet Protocol applications, Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, noted. This time around, Apple will be hard-pressed to exclude competitors.

"Given Apple is under FTC review for their application approval process, I don't think they can refuse this application -- but they could break it or limit its capability," Enderle said. "For instance, both the ARM processor and the Opera browser support Flash on other platforms, but Apple will likely make sure Flash doesn't work on Opera any better than it does on Safari on the iPhone."

"Changing defaults will likely be difficult as well," Enderle added, "so that it is the Safari browser that opens when you click on a link. If Opera gets on the phone, it is likely that [Google's] Chrome will soon follow, and Apple will do whatever it can to make sure that never happens."

Advanced Features

Opera Mini 5, currently in beta, boasts quite a few advanced features over Safari, including tabbed browsing so users...

During Disney's conference call with investors this week, CEO Bob Iger said Apple's newly unveiled iPad could be "a game-changer in terms of enabling us to create new forms of content."

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad last month, one notable potential partner absent from the stage was Hulu, now the second-largest video site on the Web. The launch event focussed more on the iPad as an eBook reader to rival the Kindle, but watching videos on it will be just as important. The TV shows on Hulu would be perfect on the iPad. There is just one hitch: the iPad doesn’t support Flash, and all of Hulu’s videos currently run inside a Flash player.

But that could change by the time the iPad launches in March. One rumor I’ve heard from an industry insider is that Hulu is working on an iPad-friendly version of its site that should be ready by the time the iPad hits the market. Hulu itself is still vague about its plans. When asked directly by Om Malik whether Hulu has any plans for the iPad, CEO Jason Kilar recently hemmed and hawed about how he is a big believer in mobile, but wouldn’t confirm or deny anything.

Putting Hulu on the iPad boils down to a business decision, not a technical one. Getting Hulu to work on the iPad would not take as much work as some might expect. The biggest challenge to getting a large video library to play on the iPad (or iPhone) is to convert the underlying video files to the H.264 standard. Fortunately for Hulu, its videos are already encoded in H.264 and have been since the summer of 2008. So it doesn’t have to go back and re-encode all of its videos. But on the front-end, it would have to create a non-Flash player (Flash plays videos encoded in H.264 as does the Quicktime player on the iPad and iPhone).

Getting Hulu’s videos to play on the iPad is not that big a deal. They could just do what YouTube does and pop open the Quicktime player when a viewer tries to click on a video in their browser. But making people switch applications every time they want to watch a video isn’t the best experience. Hulu could rectify that in two ways: build a custom iPad/iPhone app with its own player, or rewrite its site in Javascript for the iPad/iPhone browser.

Here’s where things get a little tricky. Hulu’s familiar look and feel is all built into its custom Flash player. It would have to try to reproduce that as much as it can using HTML5, and it might not look as good (for more on HTML5 Vs. Flash and the future of mobile apps, read this post). More importantly, all the ads that run on Hulu are designed for Flash, especially interactive ads like overlays. The ad code, business logic, and underlying analytics would all have to be rewritten for a Javascript player. Frankly, this is the biggest hurdle.

So porting Hulu to the iPad is not completely trivial, but Hulu has a large engineering group (including a group in China) more than capable of doing the work. The question is, with more than a billion streams a month and growing via the good ol’ Web and Flash, is it worth it to put engineering resources just for the iPad. At this point, the iPad needs Hulu more than Hulu needs the iPad.

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Fujitsu has released the ScanSnap S1300, a device aimed at people who need to scan on the go.