Want to Google Me? Go Ahead!

We’re all guilt of it: vanity searching. Maybe you just want to make sure prospective employers can’t find out about your college antics or maybe you’re hoping an ex-partner will stumble across news of your promotion and deem you The One That Got Away.  Either way, now you can have more control over what people searching for you discover when they Google your name. That’s right–Google search engine results pages (SERPs) will now include Google Profiles. The profiles, Google’s stab at social networking across its services, include such information as a short biography, links to blogs and social media profiles, photos, location, contact information, and more.  The very ambitious–or just those with very popular names–can even register vanity URLs for their profiles.

But not everyone who creates a profile will earn one of the four SERP links to profiles for a given name. Anectodal evidence suggests that comprehensiveness of the profile could help its chances, but Google has not disclosed specific criteria yet. If you’re interested in creating a profile, also be aware that you must opt into the service and the links in your profile will not affect PageRank or boost a site’s reputation. But it could boost your reputation with your long-lost high school nemesis who’s been trolling the web dying to find out if he’s still getting better-looking dates than you.

How Popular Is Social Media–Really?

How popular is social media? Perhaps less popular than we think, according to Harris Interactive, who reports that 51% of Americans do not have Twitter, MySpace, or Facebook accounts. (Gasp!) And just five percent of Americans use Twitter, Harris says, despite the ultra-mega-huge gains in traffic that the site has been posting every month. Of course, now that Oprah has started tweeting, that could very well change…

Of the 48% of Americans who are social network users, Harris found that Facebook and MySpace accounts are more popular with the 18-to-34 crowd than the 55+ crowd (no surprise), while people with college education/college degrees tend to engage in social networking more than people with high school education/degrees.  Hmmm, interesting. Wonder what the implications of that might be…

Other findings include that women tend to engage in social networking more than men and that Twitter has broader appeal across a larger age range than social networks, although social networks continue to be more popular–for now–than Twitter.

So even though it might feel like everyone you know is jumping on the Interweb for networking and microblogging purposes, there are probably less people tweeting and Facebooking than it seems.

Jeeves’ Triumphant Return to the UK

When Ask.com retired him in 2006, Jeeves, the Internet’s favorite butler-cum-savant, began traveling the world in a “quest for knowledge.” Now he has made a triumphant return in the UK to uk.ask.com and transitioned flawlessly back into the role he played for 10 years. The new Jeeves, complete with his own Twitter and Facebook accounts, appears in 3D form and plays a more visible role in Ask.com’s search services, suggesting additional queries and interacting with users. In the future, he may also be a part of enhanced Ask.com advertising services focused on delivering contextually targeted ads based on user behavior. For now, Jeeves has not been restored to the U.S. version of Ask.com, but many have speculated that he might reappear in the future. (He also continues to contribute to www.askjeeves.com.)

Here’s hoping that the well-loved Jeeves will give Ask.com a boost in search market share. In the UK and US, Ask.com’s share hovers between 3% and 4%, well behind Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Twitter Writhes with Worms, Google Puts News Articles in a Timeline

Over the Easter weekend, Twitter was hit by two worms created by a 17-year-old from Brooklyn. The “StalkDaily” and “Mikeyy” worms proved to be more of a nuisance for the Twitter team than a serious security breach, but Michael Mooney (who claimed he unleashed the wigglers partly out of ennui and partly to exploit a vulnerability in the Twitter code) still managed to foul up hundreds of accounts and send some 10,000 spam Tweets before the damage could be fixed and the accounts secured.

Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone hinted, before Mooney came forward, that the company would take legal against against the perpetrator. Mooney’s reaction to the potential legal repercussions of viral actions was that of a typical teenager–incongruous with a dash of blasé. “I feel pretty bad about it, but it’s not me that left the vulnerability out in the open,” he said. “I’m not worried, though. I know that it could land me in jail.”

Next time Mr. Mooney is feeling bored, he might take a walk or read a book instead. Or just realize that monotony is a part of life.  That flat, listless, empty feeling? Not worth jail, kid.

In other news, Google has created a timeline feature for its news articles to show which sources break stories and how the stories develop over time. News aggregators’ inability (or just unwillingness) to “point users to the latest and most authoritative sources of breaking news” was one of the AP’s chief complaints when it announced last week a new initiative to track AP content online. Although Google CEO Eric Schmidt denied that the AP’s allegations of “misappropriation” included the search engine,  Google could be trying to cover its bases, nonetheless.

YouTube and Universal Music Group Partner to Form Music Video Site

After announcing partnerships with ESPN and Disney-ABC Television Group and expanding its Click-to-Buy program last week, YouTube has taken another step towards better monetizing its services by partnering with Universal Music Group (UMG) to create VEVO, a new music video site. VEVO will feature premium video content from UMG—and potentially other major labels in the future—and will be owned by both YouTube’s parent company Google and UMG. The companies will share ad revenue from the site.

On the YouTube blog, Partnerships Director Chris Maxcy explains, “This service will blend UMG’s broad catalog of artists and content production capabilities [UMG is the world’s largest recording company] with our video technology and user community—in other words, we’ll provide the technology infrastructure that will power VEVO and host UMG’s extensive library of professionally-created music videos on the new site. This content will be exclusively available through VEVO.com and a new VEVO channel on YouTube through a special VEVO branded embedded player. It launches later this year.” Per the agreement, users will also be able to create and watch videos containing UMG sound recordings.

According to The New York Times, YouTube is hoping VEVO will reproduce the kind of success that Hulu, an online video site from NBC and Fox, has had in the past few months. Although Hulu is less than a year-and-a-half old and attracts a smaller audience, it has been able to pull in strong advertisers. Moreover, Hulu viewership is growing steadily, increasing 55% between January 2009 and February 2009 to reach 7.8 million visitors.

The UMG partnership should also help YouTube circumvent some of the legal troubles that it has faced in the past over the use of copyrighted music. Google is currently embroiled in an ongoing $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom. Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the Times that the agreement with UMG could become the model for resolving future conflicts between media companies.

Is Web 2.0 the New Industrial Revolution?

Consider this excerpt from Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 classic Winesburg, Ohio:

In the last fifty years a vast change has taken place in the lives of our people. A revolution has in fact taken place. The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new voices that have come among us from overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth of cities, the building of the interurban car lines that weave in and out of towns and past farmhouses, and now in these later days the coming of the automobiles has worked a tremendous change in the lives and in the habits of thought of our people of Mid-America. Books, badly imagined and written though they may be in the hurry of our times, are in every household, magazines circulate by the millions of copies, newspapers are everywhere. In our day a farmer standing by the stove in the store in his village has his mind filled to overflowing with the words of other men. The newspapers and the magazines have pumped him full. Much of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also a kind of beautiful childlike innocence is gone forever. The farmer by the stove is brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will find him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us all.

Reading those lines, it’s hard not to think about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, news aggregators, blogs, and the like. In this age of info-dumping, have we traded our “beautiful childlike innocence” for immediacy? And, more importantly, in this new Age of Reason, what becomes of individual minds “filled to overflowing with the words of other men”?

From the Annals of MySpace: Hometown Rant Ruled Not Private

For anyone who’s fled his or her stomping grounds for sunnier skies, the feeling of one’s hometown as a provincial backwoods is not unique and often engenders a considerable amount of derision from those who have manged to “escape.” But for one such expatriate–Cynthia Moreno of Coalinga, CA–angry hometown feelings caused a number of negative and even dangerous consequences.

According to WebProNews, the problem started when Moreno, now a student at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote a post on her MySpace page entitled “An Ode to Coalinga” that included a litany of Coalinga and its denizens’ faults. Moreno erased the post after a week, but not before the prinicpal of Coalinga High School, Roger Campbell, saw the post and forwarded it to the local newspaper, the Coalinga Record.  The paper printed the rant as a letter to the editor, complete with Moreno’s name.

As you can imagine, the town of 19,000 didn’t receive Moreno’s critique warmly. Her family was targeted with death threats, and someone even shot at the family home. Moreno’s father eventually closed his business, and the family moved out of town. Later, the Morenos sued Campbell, the Coalinga school district, and the newspaper’s publisher for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.  However, the court ruled against the family, saying that by posting on MySpace, Moreno made her rant public and available to anyone with a computer–thus, any claim to privacy was moot.

The jury’s still out on the emotional distress claim, however, and is trying to decide if Campbell’s actions were “extreme and dangerous.” While I’m inclined to agree, on principle, that MySpace information is public, I do think Campbell was out of line. And it’s also strange that he visits MySpace and looks at former students’ pages.  Was he hoping to find something just like this? At any rate, the case speaks clearly about need for discretion when posting information online.

Google’s Schmidt Says Newspapers Must Innovate

On the heels of yesterday’s brouhaha over online misappropriation of AP content, Google CEO Eric Schmidt delivered the closing speech at the Newspaper Association of America’s annual meeting yesterday. Schmidt praised the industry’s importance and efforts at innovation during the early days of the Internet but criticized its subsequent staidness, saying, “It’s obvious to me that the majority of the circulation of a newspaper should be online, rather than printed. There should be five times, 10 times more circulation because there’s no distribution cost.” He added, “I would encourage everybody: think in terms of what your reader wants,” he said. “These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.”

Of the recent AP initiative to track and take legal and legislative action against those sites and services which the AP feels mishandle its content, Schmidt was largely reticent, saying only, “I was a little confused by all the excitement. We at Google have a multimillion-dollar deal with the Associated Press not only to distribute their content but also to host it on our servers.”

It’s hard to believe that the attitude at Google headquarters is really that cavalier. Earlier this week, Wall Street Journal Editor Robert Thomson called Google an “Internet parasite,”  sucking the blood (read: money) out of content without absorbing any of the costs. And the Google name has been mentioned by numerous sources as the biggest possible target of the AP’s wrath, “multimillion-dollar deal” notwithstanding. But, then again, public legal battles are nothing new for Google, so perhaps they’ve adopted a steely aegis against the haters. And with 72% search market share in February, according to Hitwise, Google’s naysayers don’t seem to have made any dent in the search engine’s popularity at all.

Caveat Linker: Let the Linker Beware

The AP recently unleashed an initiative that could take legal and legislative action against search engines, news aggregators, and websites that it feels misappropriate AP content. The AP, which represents thousands of news organizations, is trying to suss out where and how its content is being used and, in the case of others profiting from that content, snag a cut of its own. “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,” said AP Chairman Dean Singleton. Misguided meaning the “fair use” doctrine that is generally employed so that sites like Google News can aggregate headlines and snippets of articles with accompanying links.

The AP said it will develop an online tracking system to help it hunt down offenders. The issue, however, is not just profit. When news sites provide links to news stories, they don’t always point to the most authoritative, breaking sources but rather to sites that have paraphrased the news. To address this problem, the AP has said that it will create new search pages that help users find the right sources for the news they seek.

If the AP gets its way, it could also make attribution in the form of naming the original source or the widespread practice of linking to the original source in rewritten content illegal without a license agreement from the copyright holder. Obviously, this has the potential to create tremendous shifts in the fundamental ways in which content is created and distributed online. We’ll be following this story very closely as it develops…

YouTube, Sony Pictures Discuss Partnership

Tired of pirating movies from the rough seas of the Internet? If a rumored deal between YouTube and Sony Pictures comes to fruition, you may be able to snag some movies for free on the online video site, though perhaps not enough to hang up your tri-cornered hat just yet. CNET reports that the two companies are in talks to offer full-length movies on YouTube via Sony’s video property Crackle; however, CNET speculates that the number probably won’t exceed 15 and no word on possible titles yet. At present, there are about 60 Sony films available on Crackle, including such titles as “Groundhog Day,” “Wild Things,” “El Mariachi,” “Ghostbusters,” “Idle Hands,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” “Rudy,” “The Karate Kid” (all three installments), and more. Sony could choose to make a portion of these public on YouTube, provided that YouTube uses the Crackle video player, which would allow Sony to retain control of the advertising. But the videos would have limited usage, as the studio does not allow its partners to syndicate its content. That means YouTube users wouldn’t be allowed to post their favorite videos into their blogs, Facebook pages, etc.

Still, YouTube needs to develop ways to monetize its services further to avoid losing money, even though online video sites are growing faster than ever. According to global financial services firm Credit Suisse, the company could lose as much as $470 million in 2009 due to inflated bandwidth and content licensing expenses. Recently, YouTube has struck deals with ESPN and Disney-ABC Television Group to try to drive advertiser demand. We’ll see if a Sony Pictures partnership could also help YouTube avoid landing in the red this year.

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