The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘ashton-kutcher’

Here’s a good virtual parlor game. Pick any two or three Twitter users, and Twiangulate which friends or followers they have in common. Twiangulate is a site that shows the overlap between your social graph and any tow other people on Twitter. It shows the resulting names as a list or an interactive social map.

For instance, if you click on the image at right, you will see an enlarged version of a map I made to see who I follow in common with @fredwilson and @anildash. Fred Wilson follows 463 people, Anil follows 573, and I follow 315. Yet according to Twiangulate, we have 81 common “friends,” which perhaps says something about how insular the world of Web startups and social media can be. In contrast, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and I only have 15 common “friends.”

So who are some of the people Fred, Anil, and I all listen to on Twitter? Some of the common people we follow include Josh Kopelman, Chris Dixon, John Borthwick, Dennis Crowley, Doc Searls, Steve Case, Joshua Schachter, Danny Sullivan, Bradley Horowitz, Michael Arrington, and Jeff Jarvis.

Are we listening to the right people or do we suffer from groupthink? Who do you overlap with the most on Twitter?

We all know that Ashton Kutcher is a fan of Twitter. Last year, Kutcher raced CNN to a million Twitter followers (Kutcher won). Kutcher hosted Saturday Night Live yesterday night, and as a web exclusive, SNL released this bit Kutcher did about Tooter, which Twitter-like network that broadcasts Kutcher’s flatulence emissions, or “gissions.” It’s up to you to decide how funny the sketch is, but it’s certainly an entertaining poke at the celeb’s love for the microblogging network and social media.

Everyone with eyes in their head can see the bright future of multi-touch displays, but the huge variety of technologies out there makes it hard to place a bet. Will capacitive film rule? Or will it be the IR overlay? Or will Microsoft’s foresight in nurturing the Surface project pay off once they reveal their new, flatter display? Well, there’s one more competitor joining the already-crowded field, and they’re coming in heavy with $18 million in funding.

There is some question of whether FlatFrog will be able to create a product that’s truly distinct from the competition, but this money should go a long way toward getting their name out there and their tech up to spec.

Continue reading at CrunchGear…

Here’s a recap of all of the interviews and other videos of technology executives who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week:

1. Brightcove CEO Jeremy Alliare interview
2. Ning CEO Gina Bianchini presentation and interview
3. Benchmark Capital general partner Matt Cohler interview
4. LinkedIn founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman presentation
5. Slide founder and CEO Max Levchin interview
6. Digital Sky Technologies CEO Yuri Milner interview
7. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg interview
8. MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta presentation and interview
9. Twitter CEO Evan Williams presentation
10. Facebook Marketing Director Randi Zuckerberg presentation

I think we can agree that helping charities is a great thing. Browse For A Cause is extending the giving through the web browser. Browse For A Cause is a browser add-on that collects affiliate revenue (usually 3-5%) from sites like Amazon to help charities. For example, if you buy a $20 DVD, the affiliate revenue equates to about $1 which is donated to the charity of your choice. You can support as many charities as you’d like, and revenue will be split between them.

Currently, Browse For A Cause is only a Firefox plugin, with a Chrome extension in the works as well. The group also currently has a white label solution for charities to create a branded add-on, so they can feature a custom version of Browse For A Cause to people on their own site.

For example, college students spend a lot of money on textbooks per year. Browse For A Cause Founder Eric Kerr spent $400 on textbooks last quarter alone – all through Amazon. If Browse For A Cause existed when he was buying those textbooks, he would have generated $20 for charity, just like that. The average student spends $900 per year on textbooks, according to reports, and if they bought these books on Amazon through Browse For A Cause, each student would generate $45 for their favorite charity.

One charity, Malaria No More (Ashton Kutcher promoted this awhile ago) provides bed nets to people in Africa to help end Malaria. Each net costs a mere $10, so each person in the above textbook scenario would generate 4 bed nets.

These are all great examples of how Browse For A Cause can be helpful in the real world, and how you can help as well.

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Early this morning we wrote about what appears to be a blatant rip off of Plurk by Microsoft China. Microsoft’s Juku product looks almost exactly like Plurk, and the code appears to almost identical.

Now, more than twelve hours later, Microsoft still has no real response to the situation. It was the middle of the night in China when the story broke, and Microsoft says that they are just now working with their team there to “track down the information.” In the meantime, Juku is being taken down:

Earlier today, questions arose over a feature developed by a third-party vendor for our MSN China joint venture. We are working with our MSN China joint venture to investigate the situation.

Unfortunately, when these questions first arose, it was the middle of the night in China. Now that the day has begun in China, our teams are working hard to track down the information.

Here’s what we know at this point. Our MSN China joint venture contracted with an independent vendor to create a feature called MSN Juku that allowed MSN users to find friends via microblogging and online games. This MSN Juku feature was made available to MSN China users in November and is still in beta.

Because questions have been raised about the code base comprising the service, MSN China will be suspending access to the Juku beta feature temporarily while we investigate the matter fully.

We will provide additional information as we learn more.

Only two things are really clear right now. First, Microsoft is standing around with their pants around their ankles looking pretty ridiculous right now. And second, this is the best thing to happen to Plurk, ever.

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In this age of instant Internet celebrity, anyone can become famous for 15 seconds (to rework Andy Warhol’s oft-quoted maxim). But what does famous mean exactly when anyone can have a Facebook fan page—those public pages on Facebook set up by brands, media outlets, celebs, and wanna-be celebs. As it turns out, being popular is not as easy as it looks. A full 77 percent of Facebook fan pages have less than 1,000 fans, according to an upcoming report by Sysomos, a social media monitoring and analytics firm.

Once a fan page is set up (here’s ours), anyone on Facebook can become your “fan,” which is like following someone on Twitter in that it doesn’t require a reciprocal friendship. Sysomos analyzed 600,000 fan pages on Facebook and came up with the distribution curve in the chart above.  The vast bulk of fan pages have between 10 and 1,000 fans.  Only 4 percent have more than 10,000 fans, and less than 1/20th of a percent have more than a million fans.  It breaks down as follows:

• 95% of pages have more than 10 fans
• 65% of pages have more than 100 fans
• 23% of pages have more than 1,000 fans
• 4% of pages have more than 10,000 fans
• 0.76% of pages have more than 100,000 fans
• 0.047% of pages have more than one million fans (297 in total).

The Internet has long been defining celebrity down, and now we know by how much (if you accept that Facebook, the world’s fourth most popular Website with more than 300 million members, is as good a proxy as there is for the Web as a whole).  To be Facebook famous, all you need is a moderately popular fan page, with the biggest chunk of those pages (42 percent) having between 100 and 1,000 fans.  Another 30 percent have between 10 and 100 fans.

The categories Facebook fan pages fall into are remarkably evenly distributed.  Celebrities, products, stores, restaurants, bars and clubs, websites, music, organizations, and non profits each make up between 6.9 percent and 7.5 percent of fan pages by category.

So-called celebrities only make up 7 percent of all fan pages.   Of course, there are also some real celebrities (both dead and alive) who attract massive followings to their Facebook fan pages. Okay, there’s only 297 of them.  For instance, Michael Jackson has the biggest fan page with 10.4 million fans, and that’s not counting the probably-overlapping 4.7 million who are fans of R.I.P. Michael Jackson (We Miss You). The action movie star Vin Diesel clocks in at 7 million fans, which is more than Barack Obama (6.9 million) or Megan Fox (5 million). Yes, people on Facebook are idiots (Megan Fox is much hotter than Vin Diesel). In contrast, the most popular person on Twitter, Ashton Kutcher, has 4 million followers, and Obama’s Twitter account only has 2.75 million—although that’s without even trying.

The biggest product page is Facebook’s own page, with 5.8 million fans (hey, is this rigged?), followed by Starbucks with 5.1 million (the page is filled with wall comments such as, “MMMMM Pumpkin Spice Latte!”).  Sysomos drilled down further, looked at the 297 pages with more than one million fans, and properly categorized them—or at least tried.  It turns out many of them (39.2 percent) are uncharacterizable such as “Nights Out With Friends.”  But the rest can be broken down into music (16.7 percent), celebrities 16.0 (percent), products (11.9 percent), TV shows (8.5 percent), films (3.4 percent), and games (1.4 percent).

And that’s just like it is in the real world. If you have more than a million fans, chances are you are either a rock star or an actor.

And unlike on Twitter, where popularity is correlated with how many times you Tweet, Facebook fan pages tend to be updated only once every 16 days.  And that’s really the big difference between Facebook fans and Twitter followers. On Twitter, you follow someone because you want to hear what they have to say. On Facebook, you fan them just to show your support of affinity.  Too often, it’s a throwaway gesture.  But then, fame is fleeting.

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Earlier this summer live video streaming service Ustream scored a big win as it was endorsed by Facebook as its preferred live video service. The app gives celebrities and brands a way to create their own live streams without having to build custom Live Stream Box applications, which also launched in June. Ustream on Facebook is only available to brands and celebrities at this point (you have to apply to the program if you want it), but it’s already seeing some impressive stats — to date, the app has seen nearly 4 million total viewers and more than 6 million hours streamed.

The app’s growing roster of celebrity users includes Miley Cyrus, CBS Mountain Dew, The Jonas Brothers, Ashton Kutcher, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Honors Society, Ashley Tisdale, Reba McEntire, Diddy’s White Party, Hurley Pro and U.S. Open surfing competitions, Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Global Summit, as well as a number of other live concerts and even Duke University’s office hours. Facebook executives have used the app as well, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg streaming from Brazil during a talk and COO Sheryl Sandberg using it for her Advertising Week keynote.

To be clear, Facebook and Ustream don’t have a financial relationship — rather, Facebook has chosen Ustream as its “preferred provider for live streaming video on Facebook”. Facebook was involved in helping develop the application and its initial testing during some massively popular Jonas Brothers events, and has previously recomended it in its blog posts.

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When I walk into a bar, it’s always been a dream of mine that they’ll play a theme song for me. You know, kind of like how when a batter steps up to the plate in a baseball game, he gets his own song. (Okay, really what I’m thinking is more along the lines of X’s version of “Wild Thing” playing when Ricky Vaughn takes the mound in Major League.) The problem with that is, what song do I pick? I think I know now.

Mistah F.A.B.’s “Hit Me On Twitter” is 3 minutes and 56 seconds of awesome.

Here are some choice lyrics:

“I follow you, and you follow me, we can kick it, like one of the homies.”

“What’s your government? I see your screen name. Is this really you, people playing teen games.”

“First it was BlackPlanet, then MySpace, then Facebook took over my place. Whoa, now I’m stuck on Twitter. If I see a girl then I’m gonna go get her.”

F.A.B. goes on to give shout outs in the end to Diddy, Britney (Spears, I assume), MC Hammer, Ashton Kutcher, Barack, Soulja Boy — okay fine, all of those are somewhat normal. But also included: Shout outs to Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams as “the inventors of Twitter.” (Sorry Biz Stone, he leaves you out.)

He concludes, “@MistahFAB, hit @ me.” Looking at his Twitter account, he does actually seem to use Twitter quite regularly, which is more than a lot of entertainers can say.

Of course, this song can’t help but remind me of Andy Milonakis’ “Let Me Twitter Dat” and also this random Twitter rap. Watch both below.

[thanks AlexanderBrown]

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Revision3’s PR firm is urging me to write about the upcoming Diggnation episode being filmed in at the Palms Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas with Kevin Rose and Ashton Kutcher. And I aim to please. But what I can’t figure out is, how do projects with Ashton Kutcher like this and the disastrous 24HoursAtSundance earlier this year help Digg find relevance in today’s world?

Sure, Kevin gets to hang out with the Hollywood crowd and become BFF with Ashton. And yes, I’m somewhat interested in hearing all about “Ashton Kutcher’s Web 2.0 Strategy,” as pitched to me in the email (in the same way that I can’t not look at accidents as I drive by). But none of the story ideas pitched to us (Ashton and Kevin: Why Traditional Hollywood cares about Unconventional Silicon Valley, How mainstream consumer products are merging with new media, Why Ashton thought it was important, in fact, critical to reach Diggnation’s audience), along with “exclusive access” to Kevin and Ashton, really interest me. What I really want to know is this:

Why is Kevin Rose screwing around in Las Vegas with a movie star when a fricking URL redirect service is preparing to eat their lunch?

Digg isn’t the shiny new startup that it once was. Twitter has almost twice the audience that Digg has (45 million v. 24 million worldwide uniques in June according to Comscore). As recently as March Twitter was still smaller than Digg. Now, it’s not even close.

Digg’s product needs serious attention from Kevin. The recent DiggBar changes that enraged users caught Kevin off guard because he was on vacation in China and didn’t know what was happening. He needs to pay attention. Or else relinquish his control of the Digg product to someone else who’ll pay attention.

The next six months are critical for Digg. They are rolling out a new real time product to try to compete with Bit.ly and Twitter. It seems to me that Digg’s investors would be happier if he were working on that, instead of partying in Vegas with the guy from Dude, Where’s My Car?

That being said, I still can’t wait to hear Kutcher’s Web 2.0 strategy and his advice on “merging the worlds of mainstream entertainment and new mediums like Internet Television.”

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