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Posts Tagged ‘parties’

Later this week, thousands of ironic t-shirts will be arriving in Austin for the 16th annual South By Southwest Interactive festival.

At about this time, it’s traditional for tech publications to publish handy guides to “surviving SXSWi” – packed with useful advice that’s basically interchangeable with that for any other festival since the beginning of time.

“Drink plenty of water!” “Prepare for some late nights!” “Plan ahead to make sure you don’t miss anything!” “Pack sturdy shoes!” “Always use a condom!”. Useful advice for SXSWi, certainly, but also applicable for Oktoberfest, Glastonbury, Woodstock and the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia (although for the latter, replace ’shoes’ with ’sandals’ and ‘condom’ with ’sprig of silphium’).

This year, though, I decided to use my experience of past SXSWi’s to produce something more useful. A very specific and completely foolproof guide on surviving this year’s event. And here it is…

Tip One: Don’t go to South by Southwest Interactive.

I’m serious. It sucked last year, and it’s going to suck again this year. You’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise. The idea that SXSWi is a conference – or even a festival – for people doing interesting and useful things in technology is a fallacy. In reality, it’s just a non-stop orgy of bullshit fanboyism – a chance for people with stickers on their laptops to go and add more stickers to their laptops; an opportunity for sweaty dorks in Diggnation t-shirts to line up for two hours in the hope of getting Alex Albrecht to – I dunno – sign their laptop, I suppose, or maybe give them another freaking sticker. Even the parties – which are basically the only reason to go – are horrible: the free bars runs out too soon, and they’re always rammed with the kind of people who you could be forgiven for assuming have never been inside licenced premises before.

“But Pure Volume at 2am is pretty awesome!”

No it isn’t. You were just drunk. You’d lined up for three months to get in with your stupid plastic entry tag and you had to convince yourself that the experience was worthwhile because the only alternative was to kill yourself. Free vodka Red Bulls are not worth the hassle. Take your lead from the pros: buy a couple of bottles of vodka and a case of Red Bull and host your own party in your hotel room. Except you can’t, can you? Because you’re sharing with your friend Dan and he has to be up early for the “Google Hackathon”.

“But we’re launching a new app, and it’s going to be awesome.”

No it isn’t. But I completely understand why you think it will be. With all those fanboys in one place, where better than ‘South by’ to launch your awesome new location-based app?

Two years ago, Twitter was the undisputed hit of the festival. Everyone was using it – to find parties, to silently heckle panels, to do all the things that one can do with Twitter. Last year those same people were so desperate to find the new Twitter that they mistakenly handed that crown to Foursquare on the basis that a relatively small number of Web 2.0 scenesters used it to find out where their friends were partying. And yet, despite that auspicious start, and a shit-ton of publicity since, Foursquare has failed to capture the imagination of even most early adopters, particularly those outside of San Francisco and New York. Foursquare was resolutely not last year’s Twitter. Last year’s Twitter was Twitter.

That won’t, however, stop a billion start-ups blowing their entire launch budget on flying their whole team – armed with sacks of flyers and amusing stick-on bugs and branded candy and more fucking stickers – to Texas, confident in the knowledge that their app (with its stupid cutesy name) will be the hit of the festival. It won’t be. It will just be yet another location-based app sloshing about in a sea of location-based apps that may be temporarily useful while a thousand early adopters are crammed into an area of less than one square mile. The moment the festival is over, you’ll be dead.

Instead, this year’s hot location-based app will be… Twitter. You’re welcome. Call me Nostradamus.

Last year, while in Austin, I wrote a column for the Guardian talking about the awfulness of the event, saying..

“None of this is surprising, of course, as it all fits neatly into what social media has taught us – that the moment a service or community gets too big, too mainstream or too commercialised, the early adopters declare it “over” and move on to the next cool, niche thing. And it’s why I really hope that next year one or two of those early adopters will organise – and I mean that in the loosest sense – a user-generated unofficial fringe conference to sit alongside the main event. Ideally it will be a bit nerdier and more businessy, and a lot more fun, than SXSW and will have plenty of space for unofficial “core conversations” and a great product launch or two.”

Sadly, unless it’s a very well kept secret, there’s no such rival event and this year’s SXSWi will be more of the same bullshit. And for that reason, I’m totally serious when I say that you shouldn’t go. Instead – while your rivals are distracted in Texas, pissing their money up the wall and ejaculating over their laptop stickers during yet another Evan Williams keynote – you should use the time instead to stay at home and work on building your start-up.

Your liver will thank you, your investors will thank you, and most importantly so will millions of real-world users who really want you to create something new and innovative rather than being sucked into the hype and churning our just a better, prettier Twitter-meets-Gowalla clone for the approbation of your peers.

Yeah?

Yeah.

I’m moderating the “Unsexy & Profitable: Making $$ Without Hype” panel on Saturday at 3:30pm in Hilton A/B.

See you in Austin.

(Photo of Gary Vaynerchuk and Kathy Sierra by Randy Stewart)

Twitter has just announced that it is launching a new anti-phishing feature that allows Twitter’s Trust and Safety team to monitor all links submitted through the service for potentially malicious attacks. Part of the new feature will involve the use of Twitter’s link shortener twt.tl, which may now start popping up in some of your emails and direct messages.

At this point, it’s not really clear which links are being converted to Twitter’s twt.tl shortened links. We just ran a test at the TC office with two different links: one for an article on GigaOm, and another for a bit.ly link that pointed to a page on Google Buzz. The links I received on my Twitter client were both unchanged, but both were converted to twt.tl links in our Email notifications (obviously neither of them had malicious content).

From the Twitter blog:

Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.

Since these attacks occur primarily on Direct Messages and email notifications about Direct Messages, this is where we have focused our initial efforts. For the most part, you will not notice this feature because it works behind the scenes but you may notice links shortened to twt.tl in Direct Messages and email notifications.

Image via ToastyKen

Amazon’s Kindle device sparked quite some controversy last year over its text-to-speech capabilities. The Authors Guild was up in arms over the feature, identifying it as a threat to audio book sales, and the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and the American Council of the Blind (ACB) had some things to say about the Kindle, too.

In June 2009, NFB and ACB jointly filed a discrimination lawsuit against Arizona State University (ASU) to prevent the university from deploying Amazon’s Kindle DX as a means of distributing electronic textbooks to its students because the device cannot be used by blind students. Sounds arbitrary, I know, but more on that later.

ASU was one of six institutions of higher education to deploy the Kindle DX as part of a pilot project to assess the role of electronic textbooks and reading devices in the classroom.

The main contentions in the lawsuit filed by NFB and ACB – which also targeted the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) – was that while the Kindle DX has a text-to-speech feature, the menus to select a book or purchase a book are not blind-friendly, making it impossible to select textbooks for download.

The blindness organizations alleged that this was in violation of federal law. ABOR and ASU denied and continue to deny any violations of the law. Either way, the parties this morning announced that they have reached a settlement agreement.

The agreement was reached in light of several factors, according to the press release: ASU’s commitment to providing access to all programs and facilities for students with disabilities, the fact that the pilot program will end in the Spring of 2010 and the university’s agreement that should ASU deploy e-book readers in future classes over the next two years, it will strive to use devices that are accessible to the blind.

Interestingly, the settlement agreement also stipulates that Amazon “and others” are making improvements to and progress in the accessibility of e-book readers. It’s unclear which what these improvements are and when they will be into effect.

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A judge in the Northern California District Court has thrown out the countersuit Power.com levied against Facebook over the summer. Power.com filed its countersuit in July, alledging that, among other things, Facebook is unlawfully withholding the data that users own (as stated in Facebook’s own ToS) and is stifling competition by refusing to allow third party services.

Power.com is a service that allows users to aggregate all of their social network activity into a central hub, and has done so through methods that Facebook says violate its terms of use. Facebook filed suit against the company at the beginning of this year for scraping data and storing user credentials. A week later there were reports that the two parties were near a settlement, but that clearly didn’t happen.

The judge attributes the dismissal to a lack of concrete complaints and factual allegations in Power.com’s countersuit. We’ve embedded the full document below.

Update:
Power.com has given us the following statement, saying that they will continue the case after fine tuning their arguments:

Earlier in the case Judge Fogel granted Power’s motion to require Facebook to provide a more detailed pleading of its claims. Yesterday’s order essentially does the same thing with respect to Power’s counterclaims and affirmative defenses. The Court determined that Power’s pleading did not provide enough detail with respect to the fair use defense and other affirmative defenses, and also with respect to the counterclaims under the unfair competition laws. The Court gave Power 30 days, until November 21, 2009, to re-plead their defenses and counterclaims with more detail. Power intends to do so.

This is a routine type of order that often occurs in the early stages of litigation, where the parties dispute the sufficiency of the pleadings in terms of the level of factual detail that is provided. Power is confident that it will be able to amend its pleading within 30 days to satisfy the Court’s concerns.

Power’s Answer and Counter-Complaint contains a seven and a half page “Introduction and Background” narrative untethered to any specific claim. The claims themselves each consist of a conclusory recitation of the applicable legal standard and a general “reference [to] all allegations of all prior paragraphs as though fully set forth herein.” Facebook argues persuasively that this form of pleading does not enable the Court to surmise which facts in the introductory narrative support which claims, if in fact they do. Moreover, antitrust claims require a “higher degree of particularity in the pleadings.”

Power.com_Dismissal –

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A class action lawsuit brought in 2006 by several Yahoo! pay-per-click search advertising customers has been settled, one of the parties involved who received an e-mail about the settlement informs us. In the e-mail, administrator Rust Consulting lets the concerned parties (”all persons that purchased, directly or indirectly, Yahoo! pay-per-click advertising in the U.S. marketplace”) know that the court has granted preliminary approval of the Settlement and has provisionally certified the Settlement Class.

The lawsuit (PDF) alleges that customers contracted for targeted ad placements through two products, “Sponsored Search” and “Content Match” (and predecessor products provided by Overture and GoTo.com) and that Yahoo! breached its contract with its customers by allowing Yahoo! ads to be displayed in spyware, domain name parking sites (bulk registration sites), pop-ups, pop-unders and typosquatting sites. According to the message, which is reproduced on a dedicated website about the case, plaintiffs brought claims for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, misrepresentation, civil conspiracy, and unfair business practices.

Interesting tidbits about the lawsuit:

During the course of the Action, Yahoo! has produced over 1.5 million pages of documents and hundreds of gigabytes of data. Yahoo! employees testified at deposition. The plaintiffs or class representatives did much of the same. Yahoo! has apparently entered into the proposed settlement to avoid further expense, inconvenience and the burden of drawn-out litigation.

In addition, the Sunnyvale company has agreed to launch a new filtering option for ads, and to make some other modifications to the way it handles disclosures and click fraud investigations:

Yahoo! has agreed to develop and offer a new ad placement option that will enable Yahoo! Ad customers to control where their Yahoo! Ads appear. The Ad Placement Option will allow Yahoo! Ad customers to specify that their Sponsored Search ads should be displayed only on websites and other Internet properties owned or operated by Yahoo!, and the websites of certain “Premium” distribution partners. According to the docs, Yahoo! has agreed to make best efforts to launch the Ad Placement Option as early as the first quarter of 2010, but in no event later than September 30, 2010. Yahoo! will maintain the Ad Placement Option for at least two years from the date of its launch.

Yahoo! will post enhanced disclosures on the “Traffic Quality” portion of its website about where Yahoo! Ads may appear on the Internet. These disclosures will provide information about the Ad Placement Option, including a link to a Yahoo! webpage with instructions for using the Ad Placement Option. The company will also modify its click investigation request tool to allow advertisers to ask questions or request investigations regarding certain Yahoo! advertising partners. Yahoo! will also add language to the Traffic Quality section of Yahoo!’s website notifying advertisers that they can request investigations of partners.

As part of the settlement, Yahoo! has also agreed to pay pay a $20 refund to eligible Class members who are out of business (I’m sure they’ll be relieved). Claims forms must be submitted to the administrator by March 22, 2010.

One thing is for sure: the lawyers have won this case.

Yahoo! will pay the costs of notice and claims administration, as well as the plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees and costs, and service awards to the Class Representatives. The attorneys’ fees amount up to $4,170,000, plus reimbursement of expenses of approximately $100,000, and for service awards to the three Class Representatives of $10,000 each. I’m convinced the lawyers are yodeling all the way to the bank.

For your reference: Google settled a similar case back in March 2006 for $90 million.

You can access the court documents here.

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Do you like sounding like an idiot? Does the thought of doing so in front of millions of people appeal to you? Then Yahoo has just the thing for you (or, rather, Y!ou).

Yahoo has just launched Yodel Studio, a site for you to yes, record yourself yodeling. The idea is for Yahoo users to remix the service’s signature sound for a chance at recognition, most notably, on Yahoo’s homepage which is visited by tens of millions of people each month. Yahoo is also pledging up to $130,000 for local and global charities on behalf of each yodel submitted.

So how do you do it? Well if you happen to be in New York City, London, or Mumbai, there are live events happening later today (NYC and London) and tomorrow (Mumbai). Professional recording booths will be set up and celebrities will be on hand to help you with your yodeling. People like Randy Jackson (from American Idol) and LeAnn Rimes will be in New York, along with Jewel, who apparently is one hell of a yodeler herself (watch the video below).

If you aren’t going to be in any of those cities, you have until November 8 to submit your yodel through this site. The recording is all done through the web browser and includes video. It also includes background tracks if you want to yodel along with generic rock or hip-hop beats.

The videos are already rolling in on the site. Wow. Feel free to post links to your yodeling in the comments, if you dare.

Obviously, this is a quirky part of Yahoo’s new It’s Y!ou marketing campaign. Will this bring Jerry back? That seems unlikely; if I heard all these people yodeling, I would run the other way as quickly as possible..

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If this were a column about religious affairs, I would undoubtedly focus this week on the shocking news that Beelzebub himself has joined a coalition opposing child abuse in the Catholic church.

I’d remark upon the sheer chutzpah of El Diablo, and his glaring hypocrisy in funding a law school to investigate his sworn enemy’s practices. An investigation which, thanks to his involvement, now reeks of self-interest. Self-interest and sulphur.

But this isn’t a column about religious affairs, so I’m not going to discuss that. Instead, as this is a column (broadly) about technology, I’ll confine myself to the entirely unrelated news that Microsoft is joining a coalition to oppose Google’s settlement with the US publishing industry over Book Search. I’ll also touch on the totally unanalogous fact that they’re funding a New York Law School investigation into their biggest rival’s anti-competitive behaviour.

Avid TechCrunch readers would be forgiven for having missed this latest development in the Google Book Search saga. After all, in recent weeks this once-fiercely bipartisan publication has thrust itself headlong into an orgy of Google adulation - a veritable golden shower of fanboyism - apparently triggered by Arrington’s discovery that his Android phone is a bit better than the iPhone.

Nary a day goes by without the Dear Leader splurging more praise over his precious new handset and the undeniably paradigm-shifting fact that it allows him to use Google Voice. In that context, writing a negative story about anything happening in Mountain View might be considered at best inadvisable, at worst sacrilegious.

But as usual I’m not afraid to be the voice in the wilderness. To risk ostracism by asking the questions that need asking: namely, doesn’t Microsoft actually have a point? I mean, where the hell does Google get off criticising Apple for anti-competitive practices when they’re about to be investigated by the Department of Justice for the exact same thing?

Some background, if you need it. Back in 2005, the US book industry - as represented mainly by The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers - launched a class-action suit against Google over the Search God’s plans to scan the world’s books and make them searchable through Google Books.

Late last year, after millions of dollars in lawyers fees had changed hands, a settlement was agreed between the parties. Much of it was uncontroversial - a win-win, even: Google would pay a token $60 scanning fee to authors of in-copyright (US) works in return for being allowed to display short extracts of the books as part of their search results. For out-of-print books, users could also pay to download digital copies of the entire work, with a reasonably decent commission being paid to the publisher or author for each download. For in-print books, users would be referred to online retailers or libraries to buy or rent. So far, so fair.

But one aspect of the settlement wasn’t so uncontroversial, and that was the issue of so-called ‘orphan works’ - books which are still in copyright but where the identity of the copyright owner is, for one reason or another, unclear. As part of the settlement, the book industry agreed that, with certain restrictions, Google could scan orphan works without being held liable for breach of copyright claims if the rights owner subsequently came forward. In return Google agreed to create an independent (and open to all) rights registry letting authors of orphaned stake their copyright claim.

At first glance, the deal over orphaned works seems as reasonable as the rest of the settlement - these are books for which no-one is being paid and which otherwise would be hidden away in libraries and second hand bookstores. But still Google’s competitors are crying foul.

The Internet Archive is particularly annoyed, arguing that they too are scanning millions of books for the public good, but without any blanket copyright protection for orphaned works. And so, through a group they call Open Content Alliance, they hope to pressure the Department of Justice to extend the terms of the settlement to everyone, not just Google.

For the other companies joining the Alliance - including Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon - there are more obvious and nakedly commercial reasons to oppose the settlement. But that doesn’t make their objections less valid. Back in April, Erick Schonfeld wrote a passionate - and compelling - argument for the immunity to apply to everyone so that Google wouldn’t have a monopoly position where they could effectively charge whatever they like for downloading digital copies of orphaned works.

So, yeah, Google love-in be damned - let’s ask the tough quesions. If Google really does care about making the world’s information free, surely bringing rivals into the orphaned works party is the very least they can do? Whatever happened to ‘don’t be evil’?

Yeah.

No.

Erick may be dead right in demanding the orphans be freed, but the Open Content Alliance is dead wrong in both their method and motives for making that happen. Let’s take a quick look at some of the loudest Alliance members, shall we?

First there’s Microsoft - the kings of the anti-trust violation, the monarchs of monopoly. This is a company that gave the Internet Archive ten million dollars to scan books, only to pull the plug when they realised that they couldn’t make any money from their own book search service. The truth is, Microsoft couldn’t give a damn about making information free - remember Encarta? -but they’ll stop at nothing to prevent Google from succeeding where they failed. If Google Genocide launched tomorrow, you can be sure there’d be a lawyer from Redmond whining to a judge that they should be allowed a piece of the action.

At least Amazon wears its biases on its sleeve - in March, Google signed a deal with Sony to put 500,000 public domain titles, scanned by the former, on to the latter’s e-reader device. At a stroke, Sony’s library of ebooks overtook Amazon’s (then) 250,000-strong database. And unlike Sony, which uses the open ePub standard for its titles, Amazon still insists on using its own ridiculous proprietary format. If they really were serious about making books more widely available, they could start by fixing the crappy PDF support for the Kindle.

And then there’s Yahoo. Poor old bandwagon-jumping Yahoo. Nothing to see here; let’s move on.

And yet if you look past the most vocal members of the Alliance, there are countless member organisations with bags of credibility, including thousands of libraries and universities. And there’s the Internet Archive itself, and their legal expert, Gary Reback. Both boast solid credentials - the Internet Archive has worked tirelessly, and non-commercially, to digitise out-of-copyright books, while Reback is probably the valley’s most high-profile anti-monopoly activist.

(If Reback’s name sounds familiar it’s because in the 90s he was instrumental in persuading the DoJ to investigate Microsoft for anti-trust violations - and also because in a recent interview with Michael Arrington he said that, he doesn’t think Microsoft should have been split in two because the investigation itself was enough to make the company change its ways. Apparently in Reback welcoming Microsoft into the Alliance, the enemy of his enemy is now his friend.)

All of which leads me to the real question that needs to be asked this week: what on earth are the Internet Archive and Gary Reback and the libraries, universities and other legitimate members of the Open Content Alliance thinking?

The stated aims of the Alliance - to ‘build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material’ - are solid, and their position that Google’s legal immunity over orphaned works should be extended to all is laudable. But by palling around with anti-trust terrorists, self-interested champions of DRM and conflict-funded law schools, they’re undermining all of that by making themselves look like corporate shills.

If I were the Alliance’s legal advisor, I’d recommend that they leave the anti-trust nonsense to Google’s conflicted rivals and instead focus their efforts on lobbying for a change to the US Copyright Act. Google has already said that they would support a change in the law to shore up the status of their searchable rights registry and to protect all users of unregistered orphan works from breach of copyright claims.

The Alliance should be working with Google to make that change happen - and that includes Amazon who really has no business siding with a bunch of sour-grapes-fuelled anti-trust cheerleaders.

Beyond that, if I were advising the Alliance, I’d tell them to shut up about extending the settlement to all comers. Google has spent millions of dollars being forced into the deal they now have with publishers and it’s frankly ludicrous to expect them to share those hard-fought spoils with their biggest competitors.

Google Books may be a commercial enterprise, and it may be establishing a position where it can dictate terms to authors and publishers. But it also happens to be the best book search product the world has ever seen. Really, it’s incredible. And if the likes of Amazon and the Internet Archive started working with it rather than against it, it could also be the answer to rewarding book authors in a digital age, tidying up the mess of orphaned works, making books accessible to a new generation of readers and - hell - shifting a few million more e-books and e-book readers. And with a change in the law to allow everyone to exploit orphaned works, many of the anti-trust issues that Reback hates so much would vanish too. That really would be a win-win.

But of course I’m not anyone’s legal advisor; I’m just a guy who writes a technology column for money. And, as I may have mentioned before, an author. And a former co-founder of a publishing company. I mean, really this isn’t my field. I’m just glad that once again Google is in the right, and their rivals are in the wrong. The TechCrunch/Google circle jerk can continue for another week.

Awesome. Someone pass me the Gool-aid.

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Following Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed, a lot of users in that community were up in arms. Basically, everyone was quick to jump to the conclusion that FriendFeed, as we knew it, was dead. And with the comments immediately following the deal, the parties on both sides did little to change that line of thinking, basically saying things along the lines of “we’ll see.” Many users were threatening to leave the service immediately, turning them into yes, FFugees.

Well, now that the FriendFeed team is successfully in their new Facebook office and working to get up to speed on their new site, Steve Gillmor got a chance to catch up with FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, and to ask him some of the questions that Mike didn’t touch on too much during his interview with Buchheit last week. Warning, the video below is quite long (over 50 minutes) and free-flowing at points, so I’ll summarize some of the key things said first.

Of note:

• FriendFeed was in between large new internal projects when the Facebook deal came along, so the timing was good for it. That said, they were working on a new feature to allow you to pipe FriendFeed feeds into FriendFeed Groups. While you could import pretty much any feed previously, you couldn’t import an entire FriendFeed feed into another feed. The service was working on that and still plans to launch it, but Buchheit says he wasn’t running point on it, so doesn’t know the timing details.
• Buchheit has a lot of trouble pronouncing PubSubHubbub. He also talks a bit more about their SUP implementation to speed up the gathering of information.
• Buchheit is not aware of a conspiracy on Twitter’s behalf to slow down their feed coming into FriendFeed post-Facebook deal.
• While FriendFeed had switched from Twitter’s XMPP feed to the newer HTTP-based feed a few months ago, Twitter recently requested that they update again to a newer HTTP feed called “Birddog”. Birddog is the name of one of the restricted feeds of Twitter data, you can read more about it here.
• With regard to the old FriendFeed team’s focus right now, Buchheit notes that for the time-being it’s dedicated to the issues Facebook is facing, and learning now Facebook actually works.
• That said, while new FriendFeed development may stop during this transition period, maintenance that needs to get done to FriendFeed will get done still indefinitely.
• Buchheit notes that the FriendFeed team is still using FriendFeed to talk internally about their new projects at Facebook.
• Buchheit notes that Facebook had shown interest in FriendFeed basically since they launched the company in 2007. But FriendFeed was never interested in an offer from them until they actually started talking to people on the Facebook team recently and saw their vision for where they want to take the product.
• He jokes that the whole “has Facebook been copying some of your [FriendFeed's] features” thing helped the FriendFeed team actually see that they were at least interested in the same goals in some regard. (Something which, ahem, I pointed out in my first TechCrunch post.) Buchheit notes that a couple years ago Facebook was just profiles and games, now it’s much more.
• Buchheit likes the idea of FriendFeed clones popping up. Their new API allows you to do a lot of things, and offers much of the functionality of actual FriendFeed, and he hopes people keep building cool services on top of it. The APIs will live on.
• He still believes that long term, all of these status and information streams should be more federated in some way, much like how email is. Of course, Facebook is known now for its lack of openness in that regard, but Buchheit cites Facebook’s unique security issues as being a reason to take it slow. Still, he sees a future where Facebook is much more than just a website, where it’s more of a platform for the web, and he believes that is what Facebook wants to be as well.
• Buchheit notes that the Facebook inbox is not his favorite feature, but that it was born out of the long history of email where people have expectations like subject lines and signatures. (Buchheit was instrumental in creating Gmail for Google.) He notes that direct messages, like the kind used on Twitter and FriendFeed, are much more efficient for messaging now.
• There won’t be a literal dropping in of FriendFeed code to Facebook because that wouldn’t work well.
• On the topic of the fears some FriendFeed users have about still using the service because their data may just disappear if FriendFeed does, Buchheit notes that if anything, the Facebook acquisition has lowered the chances of that happening. He says that in the big picture, it’s so little data, and takes very little to support. And Facebook is a huge, secure company now. (He is, of course, alluding to the fact that FriendFeed was in a much less stable position in the market.)
• Buchheit reiterates again that he is not worried about FriendFeed vanishing. And he believes that some features may start to appear in other forms on Facebook that users will like. And there may be some experimentation with that relatively soon.

Those are many of the key points, but again, if you’d like to watch a nearly hour-long video on this fine Saturday, please be our guest below. Hopefully much of this will further put to ease the minds of would-be FFugees.

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Earlier today, we reported on Bit.ly offering Tr.im parent Nambu Network, a couple of ways to ensure all its links don’t die when the service stop supporting them at the end of the year. Nambu rejected those, as it is instead looking to sell. Now we know the price it’s asking for: As of right now, they’re seeking something between $80,000 and $100,000, three separate sources have told us.

Not surprisingly, all three are balking at that price. After all, the main reason Nambu is giving for folding Tr.im is that it can’t compete against Bit.ly when Twitter is actively promoting and using it as its default link shortener. Still, several other parties have reached out to us to say that they are interested in purchasing the service (though they did not appear to know the price tag).

We’re also hearing that Nambu Network is also considering shutting down its Nambu Twitter client, again citing Twitter’s preferential treatment of others. Currently, Nambu has a desktop and iPhone client.

Again, Tr.im URLs are going to be supported through the end of the year, so there is still plenty of time for a buyer to step in and scoop up the service. But with so much negativity surrounding it now, and not great numbers to begin with, will anyone?

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Anyone who has ever used Google’s automated translation service knows that it’s not exactly perfect — generally you’ll wind up with words that are close approximations of what you started with, but Google inevitably decides to change the meaning of at least a few sentences, just for kicks. Today, there’s a new site that taps into Google Translate’s under-appreciated creativity and magnifies it to the point of greatness : Translation Party!.

The site is incredibly simple: you enter any English phrase you can think of, and it uses Google’s automated translator to convert it into Japanese. And then it translates it back into English. And back into Japanese. At each step along the way, the words you began with gradually take shape to form something entirely different and (hopefully) awesome. The retranslations continue until you reach what the site calls ‘equilibrium’, when the English and Japanese words translate back and forth into exactly the same thing. Fortunately, it usually takes at least a few steps for your words to reach equilibrium, and the resulting sentences are often hilarious.

There really isn’t much else to do on the site, but it’s definitely a great way to kill some time. Movie quotes and song lyrics seems to work best. You can also check out a list of some of the results other people are generating by clicking the “crash other parties” at the bottom of the page.

Enjoy it. And October 5 power, to please.

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