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Facebook's Privacy Move Violates Contract With Users

This morning, we got news that Microsoft had unequivocally ripped off design and code from marginally successful microblogging service Plurk . Now, we're seeing reports - and seeing for ourselves on the Microsoft website - that the knockoff site has been unceremoniously ganked from the tubes. Did a major corporation get caught red-handed stealing intellectual property from a startup? Say it ain't so! More interestingly, is the site's removal an admission of guilt? And are these side-by-side source code screenshots incriminating or what? Sponsor We received an email from a Plurk co-founder Amir Salihefendic this morning calling MSN China's Juku an obvious counterfeit . The proof is in the pudding. And the screenshots. And the source code: Currently, the Microsoft microblog site reads something along the lines of "We regret to inform you that the service is temporarily not available due to system maintenance. Please visit the site again later. We apologize for the inconvenience." Perhaps they ought to be apologizing to Plurk for the inconvenience. "We were absolutely shocked and outraged," wrote Plurk rep Dave Thompson, "when we first saw with our own eyes the cosmetic similarities Microsoft's new offering had with Plurk... "We're still in shock asking why Microsoft would even stoop to this level of wilfully plagiarizing a young and innovative upstart's work rather than reach out to us or innovate on their own terms." Microsoft has issued this press release that passes the buck on to an unnamed third-party contractor. Is it likely that the Microsoft executives in charge of producing the microblog were a) unaware of Plurk's existence and design to the extent that they wouldn't recognize a clone as such and b) that they didn't simply point at Plurk and tell their vendors to "make us one of those"? Having had some experience in both startup development processes and corporate application deployment, I personally know very well that a (literally) criminal amount of IP theft goes on every day in Silicon Valley and around the world. Most of the time, the offending parties are operating under the belief that they won't get caught. And a great deal of the time, they're not caught. We must, however, applaud Microsoft's taking the site down to investigate the matter rather than being defensive or litigious. Still, the software giant should be accepting more accountability for the attempted theft that was conducted in its name and under the auspices of its brand. What do you think? Who is to blame in this situation? Cast your vote below, and tell us what you really think in the comments. How Do You See the MSFT/Plurk Situation? ( polls ) Discuss

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Microsoft Caught With Hand in Plurk's Cookie Jar?

In late November, ReadWriteWeb asked the question, Wasabi beta . As of today the service will go live to the public with CEO Freddy Mini's presentation at the Le Web conference. Sponsor In addition to a number of magazine-style themes, some of the features designed for the real-time web include: Multipurpose Navigation : Users will enjoy the ability to read their feeds and insert widgets directly into the Wasabi home page Smart Reader : In addition to delivering users' RSS feeds, Netvibes Smart Reader lets users check their Twitter, Facebook, widget apps, notifications, podcast subscriptions, photos and notifications. The Real-Time RSS: As promised, Netvibes' feed delivery engine updates with full PubSubHubBub support. Publishing : In addition to being able to create more than 185,000 widgets, users can take advantage of the site's no-code push publishing and notification tools as well as free hosting. The company's premium product also allows users to monitor real-time brand conversations. Drag and Follow Widgets : Facebook, Twitter and MySpace widgets allow users to drag hashtags or usernames out of existing widgets in order to instantly create new specialized ones. To test the product visit netvibes.com . Discuss

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Netvibes Launches Ultimate News and Lifestyle Dashboard

Jack Herrick knows a bit about Demand Media , one of the top 20 web properties in the U.S. and the subject of several ReadWriteWeb articles about sites that are pumping thousands of pieces of content into the Web every day. Herrick sold the business he founded, eHow , to Demand Media in 2006. eHow is one of Demand Media's flagship properties, but Herrick became frustrated with the focus on quantity over quality. So he created another business, wikiHow , which he claims produces higher quality articles. wikiHow has today unveiled a redesign (screenshot below). However we were more interested in the content quality question, so we asked founder Jack Herrick what makes him think wikiHow is any better than Demand Media's content farms? Sponsor The newly re-designed wikiHow How Jack Herrick Went From eHow to wikiHow "When I ran eHow," Herrick told us via email, "we produced content in a manner somewhat similar to the way Demand Studios does today (although at a much, much smaller scale.)" However Herrick ultimately became frustrated with that model when he realized that "it would fill the web with a bunch of mediocre content." "It's like eating a McDonald's burger vs. a wonderful, home cooked meal." At the time Herrick thought that the mediocre content production would hurt eHow's long term brand. Although he now concedes he may've been mistaken on that point, given Demand Media's success over the past couple of years. When Herrick sold eHow in 2006, he began to work on wikiHow - a wiki how-to manual which now competes with eHow. wikiHow currently generates 19 million unique visitors per month, according to the company (it's about to hit 20 million monthly uniques). Demand Media's eHow is still the market leader in how-to content, however wikiHow is a small unfunded company with only 7 employees. Herrick is convinced that the wiki model for producing content attracts "passionate volunteers." He thinks that the wiki way will "ultimately result in a higher quality product," compared to eHow. The other prong of Herrick's argument is that eHow gets what it pays for in terms of content quality. "When you pay $15 for an article, you get a $15 product...and nothing more," he noted archly. Wikis Aren't Perfect Either Jack Herrick admits that "wiki content typically starts out as low quality," but claims that "once it matures and receives enough edits it can be amazing." And that is really the crux of this argument. A quality wiki article, whether it's found on Wikipedia or wikiHow, will generally be one that has received a number of edits from people who know the topic well. wikiHow itself has done research which shows this. Herrick told us that in previous research, wikiHow found that "the more people who edit an article, the more readers it attracted and the higher quality the article became." The problem is, there's no guarantee any given article will attract passionate volunteers to edit it. Wikipedia is a non-profit organization and so it's more likely to be attractive to volunteers - they're contributing to the world's knowledge base and no corporation is profiting from that. wikiHow, on the other hand, is a commercial enterprise. It calls itself a "hybrid organization," meaning a "for-profit company focused on creating a global public good." But it's a company nonetheless. While the content of wikiHow has a Creative Commons license , the company profits directly by it. The company vs. non-profit issue may not be a big influence on many of wikiHow's current volunteers, but it may prevent wikiHow from scaling to Wikipedia's size. Next page: We compare wikiHow to eHow and ask which is better... Comparing wikiHow to eHow Although by no means a perfect approach, I decided to choose a random topic and compare wikiHow and eHow. The topic I chose was: decorating a room using Feng Shui. The wikiHow article had been contributed to by 8 authors and it was a comprehensive, helpful article - complete with diagram and video. A comparable eHow article was helpful too, although much less comprehensive and with no accompanying media. The verdict? In this case the wikiHow article was better. But your mileage may vary per topic and article. Which Approach is Better, Wiki or Paid Content? When done on a large scale, is paid-for content (such as Demand Media's eHow) better than volunteer wiki content? Herrick makes a good case, but in reality it isn't black and white. The most famous example of a wiki, Wikipedia, generally produces quality content - although there have always been instances of contentious content on the site. wikiHow founder Jack Herrick: eHow content "lacks soul." Herrick contends that wiki content is inherently better because "volunteer writers are passionate about their topics and we allow anyone to continuously edit articles." In comparison, he claims that sites like eHow produce "static, low quality" content that "lacks soul." Herrick even used the ol' McDonalds analogy: "it's like eating a McDonald's burger vs. having your friend who happens to be a great chef cooking you a wonderful, home cooked meal." Ultimately I don't completely buy Jack Herrick's argument that wiki-produced content is necessarily better than paid-for content from "content farms." Both types of content could be either good or poor quality, depending on the quality of the people who write and edit it. How-to content needs to be precise and well-researched, which requires time. The best wiki how-to content is likely to be articles which have been edited by multiple people. But equally, well-informed writers can easily produce quality how-to articles in one go. However, the feng shui examples above showed that (in this case) multiple wiki authors produced better results than a single paid contributer. Let us know your thoughts about which is better: wikiHow or eHow? Or neither? Discuss

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wikiHow vs. eHow: Is The Wiki Way Better Than Content Farms?

Apple has just booted a major iPhone developer out of the iTunes App Store along with their catalog of 1,000+ apps, a number so high it represented almost 1% of all the apps in the store. The developer, Molinker Inc., has been accused of attempting to game the ratings system where application users are allowed to review the various programs using a 5-star system. As discovered by an unnamed internet user and a reader of the iPhoneography blog , the ratings scam involved a set of iPhone application reviewers who only rated Molinker apps, giving them each a five-star review. Most of the apps in question ended up with 50 or so of these five-star reviews, representing what was clearly an attempt to boost sales by pumping up ratings through artificial means. Sponsor According to the user who unearthed the scam , the highly ranked reviews were poorly written and the reviewers in question had only rated applications from Molinker. Despite this fact, one of the applications ("ColorMagic"), had made it to the front page of the App Store where it was featured under the App Store "Staff Favorites" section. (On a side note, this makes us wonder whether those "Staff Favorites" are genuine picks from Apple employees or if there's some sort of automated algorithm that simply highlights high-rated applications.) In a detailed letter to Phil Schiller , Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, the accuser noted that the developer was likely using their promo codes (every developer receives 50 per app) on 50 of their own accounts to create the reviews. Shortly after receiving the letter, Schiller confirmed that this was indeed a scam and the developer apps "have been removed from the App Store and their ratings no longer appear either." Cheating Won't Get You Ahead, But What Will? While obviously we don't support unscrupulous developers who attempt to game the system in order to get ahead, we do understand the temptation. At present, the Apple iTunes Store houses over 100,000 applications and development shows no sign of slowing down. Developers who have invested their time, energy and money into building an iPhone application business are becoming desperate for ways to make sure their apps get noticed. The problem has become so bad that an entire ecosystem of "app discovery" services and websites has risen up to fill the void. Although Apple recently launched an " Apps for Everything " section on their website to allow for category-based discovery and extended their "genius" recommendation technology to include the App Store back in September, none of these solutions have really addressed the discoverability problem. For some developers, it has become a case of "desperate times call for desperate measures," apparently. We wouldn't doubt for a second that this ratings scam is the only one of its kind. It probably won't be the last one either - developers will just be more careful to not be as obvious as Molinker was. Unfortunately, the real losers here aren't the cheating developers, but iPhone owners. Without a trustworthy ratings system in place, it's harder than ever to pick out the best app from a handful of similar applications. Can you count on the stars as an indicator? Are the reviews out-of-date? Are the complaints referring to problems fixed ages ago through updates? Is the download count a true indicator of popularity? As more and more applications filled the virtual shelves, users will need a better ranking system than what's currently in place. We hope the geniuses at Apple are working on something like this right now. Discuss

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Apple Kicks Cheating Developer Out of the App Store

Dyyno, which allows its users to stream and record live video from any application on their desktops, is launching a major upgrade of its service today. The company's service will now allow users to stream live and recorded video streams in full 1080p HD resolution. Dyyno has also dropped the price for personal accounts - which can stream HD video - to zero. These personal account support up to 100,000 concurrent viewers. Previously, these accounts started at $10 per month. Sponsor For the time being, Dyyno can only stream videos from Windows PCs. The company does offer a browser plugin for watching these videos on the Mac and Windows. The company's CEO Raj Jaswa told us that a Mac client is on the company's roadmap. We took a closer look at the service's features when the company launched in August. While the desktop client has evolved since then, the basic features remain the same. In our tests, the service worked just as advertised and the image quality of the 1080p streams was very high. It takes a decent broadband connection to work well, however - the HD video streams take up about Broadcast at 3Mbps. Dyyno supports up to 30 frames per second and encodes its videos in H.264. The company does not automatically scale the video streams down for users with slower connections, though for on-demand video, content owners can choose different bitrates for their videos. Running Dyyno's desktop client is very easy. After installing the application, you just have to drag the Dyyno logo from the client to any window on your computer and it will automatically start to stream this video on your personal Dyyno page. In addition to live streaming, users can also create a "WebTV" channels that plays videos at a set time. Requires a Plugin The fact that it takes a browser plugin to run the service could be a roadblock for some potential users, however. On the other hand, no other service that we are aware of offers free 1080p live streaming. Pricing As Dyyno's platform is based on a P2P architecture, it only makes sense for the company to offer the live streams for free. After all, the more users watch the stream, the easier it will be for Dyyno to deliver the video. The company does charge users who want to store more than 1GB of video for on-demand streaming on Dyyno's servers $10 per month. Dyyno does not charge for bandwidth. The P2P architecture doesn't lend itself for on-demand streaming, so Dyyno chose to charge for this aspect of its service. The company also offers business channels for $100 month, which include a total of 10 video channels and up to 100GB of storage. The company's high-end account, the Dyyno Broadcast station costs $1000 per month and allows users to store an archive of up to 1000GB of video and broadcast more than 100 concurrent video streams. Both the business and the broadcast accounts are stripped all Dyyno's branding. Dyyno plans to offer an ad revenue share model to companies that subscribe to these higher end accounts and who want to make use of the Dyyno's on-demand streaming solutions. Discuss

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Dyyno Launches Free 1080p Live Streaming Solution

Would you give a complete stranger your email address and date of birth? How about personal information about your friends? If results of a new study on Facebook user behavior is any indication, around half of us would answer "yes" to those questions, depending on how old we are. The study also shows that Facebook users are becoming more lax with protecting their personal data than they were three years ago. What do these results signify in light of recent concerns about user privacy on the world's largest social network? And now that some user data will be indexed by Google, will users have to adjust what information they share? Sponsor In the summer of 2007, Internet security company Sophos conducted a study showing how much (or little) users understood and protected the data the made available on Facebook. In this study, 200 friend requests were sent from a bogus account featuring a green plastic frog named Freddi Staur . The results were distressing. More than 40 percent of the Facebook users contacted responded to the fake account, and almost all of these users gave "Freddi" access to personal information. 72% of respondents divulged at least one email address 84% of respondents listed their full date of birth 87% of respondents provided details about their education or workplace 78% of respondents listed their current address or location 23% of respondents listed their current phone number 26% of respondents provided their IM screen name Moreover, the folks at Sophos were able to get access to users' photos of family and friends, information about likes/dislikes, hobbies, employer details and other personal facts. A company rep write at the time of the survey, "In addition, many users also disclosed the names of their spouses or partners, several included their complete résumés, while one user even divulged his mother's maiden name - information often requested by websites in order to retrieve account details." So, are users at the end of 2009 any less gullible than their 2007 counterparts? Have we learned to be less vulnerable to phishing schemes? This year, Sophos created two fake accounts - one for a cat and one for a plastic duck - and went after another 200 Facebook users, this time distinguishing between 20-somethings and middle-ages users. Here's a snapshot of the information each group revealed: Eight users friended the cat-themed fake account of their own accord, without having been contacted as part of the study; in so many words, these users pretty much volunteered to have their data phished. As Sophos noted, "Ten years ago, getting access to this sort of detail would probably have taken a con-artist or an identify thief several weeks, and have required the on-the-spot services of a private investigator." Apparently, in the 2.0 era, all you have to do is click to send a friend request, and the desire for online popularity and more "friends" makes a phisher's job easier than giving free candy to kids. Discuss

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User Data Easier Than Ever to Phish on Facebook, New Study Shows