The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘word’

This is the last time we write about this, promise.

But it turns out that a week before the super-liberal TED crowd was shocked by comedian Sarah Silverman’s repeated use of the word “retarded” on stage (so much so that TED organizer Chris Anderson tweeted how “god-awful” she was), she had agreed to donate her time to a fundraiser for children with Down syndrome.

She was ridiculing Sarah Palin’s whole argument that the word “retard” can’t be used.

The crowd, mostly bay area wine and cheese liberals, should have been cheering her on. But it went over their head, and TED stepped in it.

So just to recap, TED invites Sarah Silverman, a shock and insult comedian, to the event to give a talk. She turns up and shocks and insults, but for a good reason. The crowd doesn’t get it even though it plays right into their politics, and the event organizer trashes her publicly. Silverman hits back on Twitter, and there’s a quick cameo by Steve Case in the whole drama. Then it turns out Silverman is already donating her time to help fight the very issue she brought up in the talk.

In honor of the whole episode, TechCrunch is purchasing 10 tickets to Twenty Wonder on March 6 in Los Angeles on behalf of TED and Chris Anderson. If you’d like one of the tickets, let us know below and the first ten get them (say if you want two to bring a friend). Or buy your own. It’ll go to a much better cause than the $6,000 TED attendees spend to feel good about themselves for a couple of days.

As you might have heard earlier today, Google made another acquisition — the email search startup reMail. While its topical description may make it seem like an obvious buy, there’s another layer that makes this really interesting. reMail isn’t just any email search startup, it’s a startup working to perfect email search on the iPhone. Or rather, it was.

Here’s the key part of reMail founder Gabor Cselle’s post about the acquisition today: “Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail’s iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store.” Yep, it looks like this may be another battle in the Apple-Google mobile war.

While you might assume this was a pure talent acquisition, there’s something odd: Cselle has already worked for Google in the past. On Gmail. While I’m sure Google is happy to have him back, I’m betting they’re just as happy to kill off what is hands down one of the best email applications on the iPhone — much better than the iPhone’s native email app.

As an advisor for this year’s Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator startup competition at SXSW this year, I had a chance to take a good look at reMail recently. Not surprisingly, it was chosen as one of the finalists (though I’m sure that will change now). It’s sad that other iPhone users won’t get a chance to check out this app now that Google is killing it. But all’s fair in love and war, I suppose.

And make no mistake, this is war.

[image: Dreamsworks]

TED Organizer Chris Anderson isn’t a man to be trifled with. If you criticize his event you don’t get invited back (which is why we see a bunch of nonsense articles about the event that don’t mean anything at all, but praise heavily). But it’s always fine for Anderson to trash his own speakers.

“I know I shouldn’t say this about one of my own speakers,” he said on Twitter, “but I thought Sarah Silverman was god-awful…”

Silverman’s crime? She made people uncomfortable by saying, over and over, that she wanted to adopt a retarded child. Like other comedians lately, she was using the word to remove its power to hurt people, and as a jab at Governor Palin’s recent jihad against the word.

Apparently the TED crowd didn’t get the joke.

Here’s a first hand version of what happened from a TED attendee who asked not to be named, since he or she would certainly never be invited back to the event:

What’s not funny is when people try to give certain words too much power over you and I think people could forgive the farts, doodies, penises and vaginas (I mean they did in the other talks), but what they couldn’t forgive was Sarah Silverman saying with absolute seriousness (I’m recalling from memory):

“I want to adopt a special needs child (to which one person applauded), because adopting a special needs child, who would do that? Only an awesome person, right?” I looked around the room and I knew exactly what was coming next. She was going to say retarded and not only was she going to say it, she was going to drop it like 10 times. I knew it wouldn’t be ok, but I was excited about it.

Words are powerful. They are mightier than the sword and all of that, but if you let them have too much power, you can create what I feel is evil. You create a society of people who are so concerned about what they say and what is PC and you destroy creative expression.

Sarah was following suit behind Megan McCain and Stephen Colbert in making fun of Sarah Palin. She didn’t say this, but I knew this. Why did I know this? Because this is a trend with comedians right now and I know why they are doing it. They are doing it for a cause. They don’t want that word turned into the “r word”. Saying the word “retarded” can only have extreme negative power if you let it and Sarah Silverman is brave, because she got on stage in front of some global minds and dropped it over and over and over.

She went on to say:

“The only problem with adopting a retarded child is that the retarded child, when you are 80 is well, still retarded and that she wouldn’t enjoy the freedoms of setting them free at age 18, so she was only going to adopt a retarded child with a terminal illness so it has an expiration date, because who would adopt a retarded child with a terminal illness? Well, someone who was awesome like her”.

The room went silent and she went on with her show and sang a song about how all of the penises in the world couldn’t fill your heart holes.

So, the theme of TED was “What the world needs now” and I think the world needs more Sarah. The world needs to take many things seriously and many things less seriously. The world needs to get its sense of humor back. It needs to allow people to express themselves without feeling the overwhelming pressures of society bearing down and being a social pariah. Sarah is a super hero in my opinion.

When she went off the stage, about half the room applauded and probably half of those only did so out of an automatic response. Then, one brave “soul” as TED would call us shouted out among the silence that followed: ENCORE! ENCORE! ENCORE! and those of us who felt the same way stood up cheering. Collectively, we were loud enough to let the stage manager know we wanted her back and we wanted to hear her say something more, be asked a question or better yet keep performing. They called out to her and for a while it seemed she had already left the building, but she came back on stage and looked confused. They told her, “They wanted you to come back to thank you and we’d do an encore but there’s no time, etc. etc.”

I’m of the opinion that if your crowd wants an encore, you fucking give it to them. Even if it means your schedule runs over. I mean, after all, we are adults. All but maybe 3 members of the audience are adults and anyone who brought kids or kids who attended are well aware they are listening to some grown up ideas. So, you can’t use that excuse.

No, they were uncomfortable and embarrassed. They had invited Sarah Silverman to TED and she made everyone feel uncomfortable. They should be embarrassed because they didn’t bother to watch her work before she came to get a full understanding of who she is and what she does. She’s a modern day Joan Rivers! She’s going to say cunt, fuck, shit, poop and guess what. Retard.

The whole thing, as TechCrunch would say, was an intelligence test and it had EVERYTHING to do with play. Playing with words and playing with different types of reactions to words and she’s a master and for that I applaud her again.

And a follow up email:

I thought about this even more.

I can understand why people don’t want a condition used as an insult. If you look up idiot, imbacile, dumb, etc.. they are all derogatory terms for someone with mental retardation, so this condition has been plagued with the condition used as derogatory term for quite some time. I have sympathy for it, but I still think that isn’t a reason to stop using the word.

I started thinking about the word Nigga and the word gay. Southpark has a great episode on the word gay and how it has morphed from referring to an actual homosexual to meaning something entirely different. So, people were upset about that, but some may argue that the tension between the two sides created more good for gay rights and bringing gays to light than ever before. I know the word nigga has. It pisses me off to no end that I can’t use that word out of fear for my own life. Blacks took it away, made it their own and even better made it *COOL* and now I feel jealous about it. I want to walk up to my pals and say “what’s up nigga”, but I can’t, but maybe if someone is brave at TED next year or somewhere else and decides to shock a few people I’ll be able to.

Now, Chris Anderson might have an issue with the whole talk, the retarded child stuff, the jew stuff, the penis stuff, the poop and whatever else and maybe his specific issue wasn’t that, but that’s what everyone talked about afterward. In a conference where so much effort is put on the children, Sarah crossed the comfort bar. It took us out of kumbaya for 18 minutes and made us squirm and laugh.

Perhaps TEDsters should just stick to the simple stuff. Slavery sucks, for example. Glad we finally got that controversial topic on the table for discussion.

Back in July 2009, Twitter made a big stink about developers using the term “Tweet” in their Twitter apps. For instance, at the time, the Twitter API team contacted a third-party developer—TweetKnot—informing him that it had “grown uncomfortable” about the use of the word “tweet” in the app’s name. Well, that was , before the company effectively secured the trademark with the USPTO (which, notably, it still hasn’t).

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone promptly clarified the situation in a blog post, stating that it has “no intention of ‘going after’ the wonderful applications and services that use the word [tweet] in their name when associated with Twitter.”

However, contrary to that statement, it appears that Twitter is trying to take actions against TweetKnot’s use of the term on, of all places, Facebook. TweetKnot received a message yesterday from Facebook’s User Operations team in response to an infringement notice from Twitter which shows that it is still very much uncomfortable with developers using the term, or at least this particular developer.

This is the e-mail that was sent to developer of the TweetKnot application by the Facebook employee in question:

Hi Mallikarjun,

We have recently received the following email regarding your “TweetKnot” application. As you know, the Facebook Statement of Rights & Responsibilities (“Statement”) prohibits applications that infringe the intellectual property rights of a third party. If your application does contain infringing content, you must remove it immediately.

As you are solely responsible for the operation of your application, we request that you resolve this issue directly with the complaining party [REDACTED]@twitter.com within 48 hours. We reserve all rights in regard to this matter, including all of our rights under the Statement.

Thanks,

[REDACTED]
User Operations
Facebook

The e-mail that was referenced came in the form of an email attachment, and contained the following text:

Name: Brian Sutorius
Company: Twitter, Inc.
Mailing address: 795 Folsom St. Suite 600, San Francisco CA 94103
Phone number: [REDACTED]
Email address: [REDACTED]
Web address (URL) of the application: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=87531617948
Description of where the infringing content is located: The application’s name contains “tweet”
Description of developer contact:
I have sent a notice via the “Contact Developer” link on the application’s profile to no response.
Explain which rights are being infringed by each piece of reported content:
The application uses the Twitter marks without permission, causing confusion

The wording leaves little to the imagination: Twitter clearly still considers the term ‘tweet’ in app names an infringement of its trademark, even though that hasn’t been assigned to the company yet, according to USPTO filings.

We’re not sure what to make of this—we’ve contacted the company to see if there has effectively been a change in policy that could affect more third-party developers (TweetDeck, Tweetmeme, Tweetie and others spring to mind) down the line, or if there’s another explanation for this.

Photo Credit/Flickr/TPorter2006

Anyone who has been on Twitter for more than a few days knows that it’s rife with bots — accounts that are run by a computer, rather than a human. But while bots may be pretty easy to come by, it isn’t often that you get the chance to read through the code that makes one tick. Tonight, you’ve got your chance. The bot’s name? Jason Thorton. He’s been humming along for months now, sending out over 1250 tweets to some 174 followers. His tweets, while not particularly creative, manage to be both believable and timely. And he’s powered by a single word: Love.

Thorton is the creation of developer Ryan Merket, who built him as a side project in around three hours. Merket has just posted the code that powers him, and has also divulged how he made Thorton seem somewhat realistic: the bot looks for tweets with the word “love” in them and tweets them as its own. From Merket’s blog:

Jason tweets A LOT about the word “love” – that’s because Jason actually steals tweets from the public timeline that contain the word “love” and posts them as his own.

Jason also @ replies to people who use the word “love” in their tweets, and asks them random questions or says something arbitrary.

Merket then goes on to detail why the ease with which he could build the bot should be cause for concern:

It took me about 3 hours to code Jason, imagine what a real engineer could do with real AI algorithms? Now realize that it’s already a reality. Sites like Twitter are full of side projects, company initiatives, spam bots, and AI robots. When the free flow of information becomes open, the amount of disinformation increases. There’s a real need for someone to come in and vet the people we ‘meet’ on social sites — it will be interesting to see how this market grows in the next year.

Can social networks really vet every single user that joins? That would likely be incredibly difficult to scale, but there’s certainly room for the algorithms to improve. In any case, here are some of Jason’s most recent tweets:

And here are some of the people who fell for them:

Facebook has just released its list of top status updates for the year, and they’re pretty interesting. This is a new feature that Facebook plans to release yearly called “Memology,” the study of how memes are spreading on Facebook. Specifically, the Facebook Data Team looked at status updates in the U.S. for this year’s list.

For this list, Facebook grouped together similar items to make it a more comprehensive one. As such, the first item on the list should be a surprise to no one: “Facebook Applications.” The specific words that Facebook grouped together here include Farmville, Farm Town, and Social Living, they note. The fact that Farmville has 72 million month active users who update their statuses with info from the game was probably enough to give Faceboook Applications the top spot.

But below that, things start to get interesting. For example, “FML” is the number two term. As you likely know, this stands for “fuck my life” (or as Facebook puts it, “We’ll leave the “F” open to your interpretation”) and is a popular Internet meme in general for talking about why your life sucks. As you can see in the graph they included, FML usage rose out of nowhere to peak in May, then dipped, then came back in September. Facebook also notes that usage of the term was strong during Mondays and Tuesdays.

“Swine Flu” and “Celebrity Deaths” came in third and fourth place respectively, which isn’t surprising given how much news both created this year. Then things get pretty boring until number 10: “Twitter.”

Technically, Facebook included both the word “Twitter” and “RT” in this trend. There are a few interesting things about this. One, the two are obviously rivals as Facebook has seemingly been taking a lot of product cues from Twitter, and Twitter turned down an acquisition offer from them. Two, “Facebook” did not appear on Twitter’s year-end list, which we found suspicious and still think it may have been filtered out. Three, Facebook still manages to take a swipe as its much smaller rival:

Talk about Twitter took off at the beginning of the year. April showed a peak of activity and momentum, though mentions of the word “Twitter” decreased over the past few months.

There’s been a lot of talk about Twitter’s lack of growth recently, and Facebook is clearly playing that up here.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

For a long time, Meebo has been a widely liked company with lots of funding but a fairly small amount of revenue. This year, that started to change. The company’s Meebo Bar (AKA Community IM) has now been deployed to over a hundred major sites and has helped Meebo reach nearly 100 million unique visitors monthly. And today, it’s launching a feature that will see that number take a huge jump: a self-serve tool for implementing the Meebo Bar yourself. Last week I spoke with CEO Seth Sternberg about Meebo’s recent growth, the impact of the new self-serve tool, and how he sees Meebo’s outlook over the next year.

Sternberg says that Meebo started 2009 with around 30 million uniques, almost all of which came from the site’s chat portal at Meebo.com. The Meebo Bar has added nearly 70 million more visitors in one year. The product was originally announced back in July 2008, and launched late that year on Flixster. Since then, it’s been deployed to 130 partner sites, with 150 more contracted partners ready to deploy it in the near future.

Unfortunately for small-time bloggers, the Meebo Bar had to be installed with some help from Meebo, as there was no way to integrate it yourself. Sternberg says that the site initially decided to focus on the “torso sites” of the web — sites with over 1 million unique visitors, but under 20 million. That encompasses quite a few popular sites, but it excludes the countless longtail content sites and blogs that could also benefit from the Meebo Bar. Sternberg says that Meebo receives 75 Emails a day from smaller sites requesting the bar. Today, they’re getting their wish.

For sites that integrate the Meebo Bar, Sternberg reports increased engagement and sharing across the board. He says that on sites like MyYearBook and Justin.tv, 35% of all users wind up chatting with their friends using the integrated bar. Perhaps more important to site owners is his followup stat: users tend to share twice as much content using the bar’s integrated Twitter/Facebook/Yahoo/Email sharing tool than they do using more traditional share buttons. He attributes this largely to the fact that users can simply drag and drop an item to share it with a friend, which most people are comfortable with.

But the Meebo bar isn’t perfect. Sternberg acknowledges that on some content sites (he singled out tech sites) sharing hasn’t seen such a big increase. And he says the flow to get people using the chat bar, which involves setting up a Meebo account and inputting your credentials for various chat services, could use some work.

The conversation then shifted to Meebo’s future. Sternberg calls 2010 Meebo’s “pivot year”: it’s the year that Meebo is going to start earning some serious money. Sternberg is optimistic about the site doubling up on its unique users, with hopes to reach 200 million monthly uniques. And he thinks Meebo can turn those users into added revenue: the company has been getting strong traction with major brands, who are ordering much larger ad campaigns than they were when the Meebo Bar was first launched.

The company itself is growing too. Meebo started 2009 with 35 people and has since doubled its headcount, with plans to boost that number significantly over the next year.

From the looks of things, the Meebo Bar is shaping up to be a major hit. Now the question is just how much of a hit it will be with advertisers over the long term. Meebo has nearly $40 million in funding, so investors are going to want to see that revenue stream turn into a full-blown torrent.

Graph via Quantcast.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

This guest post is by Adam L. Penenberg, author of Viral Loop.

Four months before my latest book hit store shelves, my publisher wanted to change the title. Viral Loop might be catchy, and reflect what the book is about—and isn’t that what a title is supposed to do?—but Hyperion worried that some readers would be put off by the word “viral.” Would they shrink away for fear it was about “swine flu”?

The book looks at entrepreneurs who built multimillion- and in some case billion-dollar businesses from scratch by incorporating virality into their products and businesses. Many iconic companies of our time, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, eBay, PayPal, Flickr and rising stars like Twitter are prime examples of a “viral loop”—to use the product, you have a strong incentive to spread it. At some point, as the number of users doubles, then triples, the company achieves what’s known as a “viral loop,” when the product spreads even if the company does nothing to promote it. The trick is that they all created something people really want, so much so that their customers happily spread the word about their product for them. The result: Never before has there been the potential to create wealth this fast, on this scale, and starting with so little.

Fears of swine flu as a reason to change a book’s title may sound inane to TechCrunch’s audience, but from Hyperion’s perspective you are anything but representative of a mass audience (sorry). Every publisher wants to maximize its chances of sparking a bestseller. The challenge is to create a title that would not only appeal to those in the know but also induce a regular human being (read: non-geek) browsing the stacks in Barnes & Noble to pick up a copy, sample text and carry it to the checkout aisle. (Insider’s tip: That’s why editors place such great emphasis on the first 50 pages of a book.)

Hyperion suggested we call the book “Share,” because that’s what Web-based viral dissemination is, when you get down to it: Users sharing links, memes, observations and ideas with one another. Since I would be following Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson’s Free in its publishing lineup—and his first book, The Long Tail, was a bestseller—Hyperion believed a title like Share would be more likely to succeed. I refused since I had invested tens of thousands of dollars into a social marketing campaign with Viral Loop as its centerpiece. More to the point, I believed Viral Loop perfectly encapsulates what the book is about. (I didn’t invent the term; I first heard it from Marc Andreessen, who I interviewed for a Fast Company cover story.)

Now that Viral Loop is out, and I’m in full book pimping mode, doing radio and TV interviews with interviewers who don’t have a clue what social media is, I wonder if Hyperion might have been right. On ABC News Now, the anchor referred to Digg as “Dij”—apparently he’d never heard of it. A septuagenarian radio host cracked a string of borscht belt jokes about diseases and the flu after introducing my book. (Him: What’s that word that means you’re doing a lot of things at the same time? Me: Multitask? Him: Multicask?) While I want to talk about viral coefficients, viral business plans and success stories, and the entrepreneurs who founded these businesses, mainstream interviewers want to know how to sign up for Twitter. Clearly there are the social media “haves” and the social media “have nots.” How do you reach the latter without alienating the former?

The problem, I think, is the word “viral,” which comes from biology and was retrofitted to cover the phenomenon of word-of-mouth—or on the Web, so-called “word-of-mouse”—dissemination of ideas. I propose we kill it and replace it with something better. (Where’s Don Draper when you need him?) If I had my druthers I’d also change the word “blog,” which sounds like the noise someone makes after scarfing down a plate of nachos after tipping back a few too many tequila shots. But one thing at a time.

With that in mind I’ve created a Change the Term Viral contest. If you have a better term for “viral” a.) post your suggestion to the comments thread of this post, and b.) email it to viralloopbook@gmail.com.

The winner will get props for his or her genius in the forward of the next edition of the book and win $250. The runner up gets $100. Third prize is $50.

Each participant must post to the comments thread because that way the community can weigh in. The reason for the email is so I can contact the winners and arrange payment. Winners will be announced on viralloop.com next week.

Learn more about Viral Loop on Amazon.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Someone call LATFH . This is “ Sonic Fabric ,” and it’s made out of old cassette tape, um, tape. It’s 100 percent ridiculous, yes.

Original post: 
And while you’re at it, why not turn that old cassette tape into clothing? I mean, really.

That blasted Apple event is on Wednesday, and in the interest of having fresh-but-not-really posts on this holiday weekend, here’s some interesting predictions I’ve stumbled upon. The highlight: say goodbye to the iPod classic. Note that the following predictions were predicted by one of the Tumblr guys; I’m sure he’s a nice fellow

Here is the original: 
Some random Apple event predictions for you: Bye bye iPod classic?