Articles
- Companies that force users to opt-out of new features may create annoyance, project a lack of confidence in the feature’s likelihood of organic adoption, and give users occasion to second-guess other features the company offers while they’re busy trying to turn off the new stuff in their settings panel.
- Conversely, companies that allow users to opt into new features may create goodwill, cause organic word-of-mouth dissemination (much more powerful than the forced version), and help to stagger adoption of resource-intensive features, allowing them to successfully scale.
- Broadcast publicly. By checking “Enable Hangouts On Air,” you can broadcast your live hangout—-from the Google+ stream, your YouTube channel or your website—-|to the entire world.
- See how many viewers you’ve got. During your broadcast, you can look inside the hangout to see how many people are watching live.
- Record and re-share. Once you’re off the air, we’ll upload a public recording to your YouTube channel, and to your original Google+ post. This way it’s easy to share and discuss your broadcast after it’s over.
- Keep your account active
- Keep payment information in Google Wallet accurate and up-to-date
- Don’t cancel or upgrade your current plan
- Because they’ll be largely negative? Maybe. Arrington and Siegler are full of a fire and insight that command pageviews like few other writers in the tech space.
- Because they would have been pointless? Maybe. After all, the deed is done.
- Because they would have been positive as in you-don’t-need-‘em, casting aspersions on Arrington and Siegler, former colleagues and still friends of Lacey’s? Maybe, but that’s the nature of the beast.
- Because Lacey got some advice about minimizing speculation and keeping the focus on the content, not what goes on behind the scenes.
- Because Lacey got some advice about maximizing speculation and keeping the focus on both the content and what goes on behind the scenes.
- Because the Pando’ board didn’t want to allow a potentially mean-spirited conversation about a decision they made on the site about which they made that decision.
Flipboard, Condé Nast, and the Mobile Advertising Problem (Updated)
Howard Mittman, VP and publisher at Condé Nast property Wired Magazine, told Ad Age's Nat Ives:
I’m interested in ways to bring advertisers in front of our community. When Flipboard becomes that, I would love to reengage and reinvigorate our product. Until then, we have to wait and see and not allow intermediaries to build their own platforms without direct monetizable benefit back to us.
This is somewhere between a rock and a hard place. People who consume solely through Flipboard — a group I suspect is growing all the time — might not bother clicking through. The friction meant to induce users to view Wired.com might end up dramatically cutting the number of folks reading Wired’s content. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I don’t think it’s “teaser” sentences.
The ad experience on mobile is already dismal for the user — I only interact with mobile ads by accident. There must be a better way. I know Wired and other content creators need viable revenue streams, and that traditionally the primary stream has been advertising.
But the web, particularly the mobile web, doesn’t even allow for the glossy full-pagers that magazines do. Those full-pagers can be compelling, and what’s more, they can be blended with the magazine itself.
A glossy full-page ad about the newest gaming laptop would be well-received in an issue focusing on gaming hardware, consoles, and next-generation systems. The same connection is much harder to make on mobile, where space is as precious to the publisher selling the ads as it is to the reader teaching himself how to visually avoid them. Flipboard is so popular because it involves us in the content consumption beyond merely staring at a screen. It’s subtle, but that flip is oddly engaging.
If the platform won’t accomodate your advertising, it’s time for your advertising to accomodate the platform. A headline and a single teaser sentence make for bad user experience: either find a way to participate in full, or get out altogether. Half-measures suggest a lack of innovation and a willingness to make user experience secondary to revenue, when user experience is what brings (and keeps) the eyeballs that bring (and keep) the advertising dollars.
Why can’t an advertisement be “Flipboard-ized?” Why not include in Wired's Flipboard stream an article entitled “Ad: Alienware M18x Moves Gaming Laptops into the 21st Century,” accompanied by stunning images of the inner workings and outer design of the machine? This offers the same “unified experience” of which a full-page print magazine ad is capable, but maintains the user experience that makes Flipboard so popular.
Updated 8:30pm: Alexia Tsotsis briefly interviewed Flipboard CEO Mike McCue about the New York Times’ integration into Flipboard. All digital subscribers to the Times can access the newspaper’s full array of online content via Flipboard. More interesting is the fact that the paper’s Flipboard content will also include advertisements described by McCue as “full page, print style advertising.” I respectfully request some credit for at least independently coming up with the model used by the Flipboard/NYT partnership (I somehow missed Tsotsis’ headline while writing this post), but I’m happy to see someone is at least trying it out.
Something like this seems to be working for Facebook on mobile, according a story by Josh Constine at TechCrunch. Facebook’s formidable data farm social network struggled to find a viable advertising solution to massive uptake in mobile use, and they appear to be on to something.
Maybe organic inline advertising isn’t the solution for every mobile advertising problem, but it’s an example of the fact that this problem is solvable. My Flipboard/Wired suggestion probably has weaknesses, but let’s have that conversation. Let’s argue about how the interests of publishers, users, and adverstisers, for all of their apparent conflict, often converge on great value propositions: content and ads that are well-built, well-tailored, and complimentary to one another, rather than shoe-horned next to one another in a way that damages the user experience and decreases all forms of value for everyone.
Pirates of Westeros: the untapped half-billion dollar market for Game of Thrones
Ernesto at TorrentFreak:
It’s clear that HBO (and others) prefer exclusiveness over piracy, which is a dangerous game. They might make decent money in the long run by selling subscriptions. However, this limited availability also breeds pirates, and one has to wonder how easy it is to convert these people to subscriptions once they have experienced BitTorrent.
TorrentFreak is unabashedly pro-torrent and, some might argue, pro-piracy if necessary. And they don’t exactly divulge great detail on their methodology for determining downloads and viewership. But, let’s assume for the sake of a blog post that their numbers are accurate.
Game of Thrones pulled an estimated 4.2 million legitimate (read: cable-subscribed) viewers per episode and 3.9 million illegal torrent downloads per episode during its second season. You could even, as Gizmodo's Casey Chan did, pull legitimate viewership numbers from Wikipedia and use those alongside TorrentFreak’s download numbers to come ot the conclusion that more people pirated the second season than legally watched it. I don’t think you need to massage the numbers, though:
Twitter Digest and the persistence of opt-out
Othman Laraki, Director of Growth and International at Twitter, on the official Twitter Blog:
Like other Twitter email notifications, you can manage your preferences for this new digest in your Notification Settings.
That is true, but Twitter has opted all users into their new weekly email digest. If you don’t want it, you’ll have to opt out of it. The quoted line is a half-assed way of telling us that.
Twitter is (arguably) progressive on patents and protective of privacy, so I won’t spend hundreds of words criticizing them on this particular point, but it’s worth noting.
Companies introducing new features always have two options:
I don’t understand why more companies don’t go with the second option. I find it hard to believe that blind adoption by users too underinformed or lazy to opt-out is somehow more valuable than voluntary adoption.
But the persistence of opt-out feature introductions suggests companies believe exactly that, whether or not it’s accurate.
Google's live 'Hangouts On Air' rolling out to everyone everywhere, and why it matters
I originally posted this to The Verge's Web & Social forum. Read the original forum post here.
Google recently announced that, over the next several weeks, they’re rolling out the ability to livestream and record Hangouts to everyone.
Shameless copy/paste of features:
Now none of this is really new. Sites like Justin.tv and Ustream, among many others, have been doing this stuff for a long time. But those sites built their communities on top of their streaming services. What interests me about Hangouts On Air is that Google is building their streaming service on top of their community.
Previously, one typically had to know about Ustream and similar services in order to seek them out and take advantage of what they offer. Google, on the other hand, is making the same technology available to myriad people who otherwise would never have considered whether or not they want to do a live video meeting/chat/interview/podcast. And if the functionality is baked into the Google+ apps for Android, users of that mobile OS won’t even need to download an additional app.
I think that’s awesome. But I also know it comes with dangers. It’s an opportunity for, at best, loads more noise in Google+ and other social networking feeds as people experiment with this stuff. At worst, for users, it’s a great way to produce and disseminate spam, hate, and other assorted creepiness. At worst, for Google, it won’t get any traction at all outside the Google+ fan club. Maybe it will live and die inside Google+, only coming to the attention of non-Plussers when Google decides to shove the Plus platform in peoples’ faces. But Hangouts is built with YouTube technology, and no one should doubt the potential for anything with that kind of foundation.
In addition, there is an interesting tension here between Google and Hangouts On Air and Microsoft’s Skype. Right now, podcasting heavyweights like the TWiT Network rely heavily on Skype for much of their production. The video-calling software, however, is notoriously prone to dropped calls and “Cyloning”—breakdowns in audio and video quality. If Hangouts On Air can avoid those issues, it may become a viable alternative to Skype for those kinds of use cases.
More broadly, Hangouts On Air puts Google on par with Ustream and others in the world of livestreaming news. Google can now function as a platform not only for the uploading and sharing of live video of political speeches, riots, and dispatches from convention floors, but for the distribution of that video content as it happens.
I’m sure I can’t predict all the implications Hangouts On Air will have down the road. But even if it doesn’t become wildly popular, it signals that Google is not content to make life searchable after the fact. They want to make it watchable, and interactive, as conversations happen.
Remember: 39% of North Carolinians are not fearful and ignorant
The North Carolina amendment alters the constitution to say that “marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized” in the state.
—CNN
I don’t often take a preachy tone, and this story has little to do with how the law and technology intersect, which is my usual topic on this website. However, I think people should be treated the same, and when they’re not, I get angry. When masses of people vote for something so clearly despicable that it can accurately be called evil, I have to get my thoughts about it out of my system.
And my thoughts about North Carolina’s ban on same-sex marriage are the following:
One day, the descendants of the 61% of North Carolinians who voted discrimination into their constitution today will look back on what their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did on Tuesday, May 8, 2012 with disgust, much the same way we do when we read the state’s nonchalant 1875 ban on interracial marriage.
To the 39% of folks in North Carolina who voted with morals, ethics, and plain old common sense:
I implore you, for the sake of your children, to leave your state. Seek refuge from those among your neighbors who would so blight the wonder of democracy.
You are the 39%, who refused to institutionalize hate, to legalize discrimination, to dress up ignorance in the guise of religion, or to use family as a pretext for subjugating a minority. Be proud.
The Pinterest (Er, Tumblr) Problem, Fair Use, and a Suggestion for Change
I wrote the article below for Temple Law’s student newspaper, Prima Facie. While my views on the topic of copyright liability in the modern Internet’s “sharing economy” continue to evolve, I haven’t made any edits to the version that ran in Prima’s April issue. This is a long post, but I would welcome any feedback, including criticism as long as it’s constructive. I also include a postscript at the bottom mentioning a recent development that may affect the relevant legal landscape.
Fair use doctrine is a great thing. Its allows limited use of copyrighted works and consists of four factors. Those factors include the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the work used, the amount used relative to the whole work, and the effect of the use upon the potential market for the work. These considerations, developed at common law and now included in the Copyright Act at 17 USC § 107, can be powerful tools for art, education, and other endeavors. But they are also widely misunderstood. Copyright law and fair use are in many ways more important than ever.
Ours is an increasingly networked world, marked by everyday activities like sharing things on Facebook and posting things to blogs. The rise of social engagement and the sharing economy has been so meteoric as to pull even the enterprise into its gravitational field. The largest companies in the world are now active on Twitter, and even the late Steve Jobs made his Apple, Inc. email address publicly known, sometimes even sending personal replies to complete strangers.
This is an exciting development, and harbors many of the hallmarks of what early pioneers of the public internet might call “success.” And they would be right. But the internet is a tool, and like any tool, it is only as good or as evil as the people who use it. The internet is used to spread child pornography, to pirate movies and music, and to steal massive amounts of credit card and other sensitive private information. However, somewhere between the glorious interconnection that let frustrated Apple users get the low-down from Mr. Jobs himself, and the internet’s criminal underground, there are more pedestrian, though no less important, issues for us to face.
Issues like Pinterest.com. Well, Pinterest isn’t the issue, the issue is still copyright law and the confusion it often causes when it comes to the internet. Legislation like 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act tries to minimize the liability of service providers for the digital wrongs committed by their users. But those laws don’t (and probably shouldn’t) take similar steps to relieve the users themselves of liability for things like copyright infringement. And therein lies the complication for Pinterest.
The invite-only image sharing site had 11.7 million unique visitors in January 2012, according to web metrics firm comScore. Users keep an eye out for interesting or beautiful images while they’re shopping, reading news, or otherwise surfing the web. When they find something worth bookmarking, they “pin” it, building “boards” based on different topics. Earlier this year, attorney and photographer Kirsten Kowalski wrote a blog post about her misgivings: it looked to her like Pinterest users were engaging in copyright infringement on a scale never before seen. Pinterest, the internet seemed to say in unison, has a very big copyright problem.
Now, to be clear, it’s not really Pinterest’s copyright problem. It’s Pinterest’s users copyright problem, since the DMCA and a well-worded indemnification clause in their terms of service probably get Pinterest themselves off the hook. But the problem with Kowalski’s post, and with the press and viral internet attention it got, is that the “Pinterest problem” is absolutely not on a scale never before seen. This is, in fact, how the internet works. The compliance with the DMCA and solid indemnification clauses keep companies out of hot copyright water, but users are infringing at an astounding daily rate.
The popular blogging service Tumblr gets around twelve billion monthly pageviews. Just Google “tumblr star wars” to get a feel for how much user infringement is going on over there. Sections 9 and 10 of Tumblr’s terms of service give them the same indemnity from claims and judgments related to use of the service that Pinterest demands. That’s because Tumblr, Facebook, and others have been around for years, doing exactly what Pinterest does: enabling (and often profiting, directly or indirectly, from) infringement. Publishers often let it go because the traffic and mindshare they derive from this rampant sharing is more valuable to them than the hunt-and-peck game of suing individual infringers. In reality, users agree to assume massive liability in return for the use of myriad blogging services every day, and they have been for a very, very long time.
Pinterest has developed a snippet of website code they refer to as a “nopin” tag that copyright owners can include on their own websites to block Pinterest users from displaying their content via Pinterest. It’s a gesture of goodwill from Pinterest to rights holders, and popular photo sharing site Flickr has made the “nopin” tag an option for its own copyright-holding users. But there’s a better way to empower users to share than mere reliance on the continued laissez-faire legal strategies of publishers and ad hoc website tags.
This brings us back to fair use, the doctrine mentioned at the beginning of this article. Many misconstrue fair use as a right to use someone else’s work regardless of copyright. That’s not what it is at all, though. It is an affirmative defense, only marshaled when a defendant essentially admits to infringing a §106 right. You admit the infringement, but then assert a fair use defense. Under current law, fair use never “excuses” or “permits” infringement ex ante.
But maybe it should.
Maybe copyright law should be modified to make fair use an a priori right of the public to use, with certain limitations and restrictions, the copyrighted works of others. That doesn’t mean that Pinterest users would be off the hook, and commercial companies running their own Pinterest boards will always be more likely to draw negative attention from rights holders in copyright as well as trademark and “use of likeness” issues. Users are required to comply with current law.
But fair use as a right instead of an affirmative defense would reduce the chilling effect overbroad copyright law sometimes has, and would facilitate the growth of the sharing economy that has come to define the modern internet.
Postscript: Porn publisher Perfect 10 has sued Tumblr over the many copies of its copyrighted photos the blogging service allegedly stores on its servers. Note that they’re not suing Pinterest, despite its recent surge in popularity. As I said, what many call the “Pinterest problem” predates Pinterest, and as today’s news suggests, it might be more aptly termed the “Tumblr problem.” Read Jeff John Roberts’ post at paidContent for more information.
No Pressure
Analyst Brian Marshall, to SFGate’s Jun Yang:
As the markets get more saturated, the pressure will be much stronger to add more screen sizes.
"Today, the answer is no," he said. "Down the road, the answer is yes," he said.
No way.
The only source of pressure on Apple to do anything is the company’s own design language and direction. If they ever made iPhones with larger screens, it would be for their own reasons, like maybe the retina display deserves a slightly larger screen on which to show off its awesomeness.
But there’s already the iPad for that.
It won’t ever be to reach “lower-cost segments” like another analyst told Yang, because Apple’s strategy for that is to slice the price of older iPhone models to the bone whenever a new one comes out. There’s your lower-cost segment. They’ve been doing it for some time now, with narry a > 3.5 inch screen in sight.
Hulu will eventually require a cable subscription
Our source noted that Hulu has no interest in being a first mover here and that a requirement for authentication is likely still a few years out. Hulu, however, does want to be a good partner and may have to give in to its partners’ pressure soon or later.
via techcrunch.com
This is a damn shame. It’ll be a blow to the common-sense evolution of television as a business model, and a boon to piracy.
Already paying for extra Docs/Gmail space? You’re payment plan isgrandfathered into Google Drive.
Google storage plans have changed, but you can stay on your current plan as long as you:
This is good news. I can keep paying $5 per year for 20 GB instead of the $2.50 per month ($30 per year) for 25 GB that new Google Drive users will pay.
Marco Arment: Be Skeptical of Twitter's Innovator's Patent Agreement
Twitter’s “Innovator’s Patent Agreement” – Marco.org »
I recently wrote about Twitter’s promise to use patents only for defensive purposes—the “Innovator’s Patent Agreement” (“IPA,” not to be confused with this). The link above leads to a post by Marco Arment, warning us to read the agreement carefully and maintain a healthy skepticism about the potential loopholes in Twitter’s recent patent move. It’s a fair warning, and a good point.
Nilay Patel made brief mention over at The Verge of the “fair amount of flexibility” the agreement leaves for Twitter. But Arment really lays out the manner in which Twitter could, if necessary for business reasons, make an end-run around the whole thing.
I don’t think they would do that. If they wanted the option to sneak through loopholes, they wouldn’t have been so attention-seeking with the IPA announcement in the first place.
"Demand Your Data"
"Tim Berners-Lee: demand your data from Google and Facebook" by Ian Katz at guardian.co.uk
Whatever social site, wherever you put your data, you should make sure that you can get it back and get it back in a standard form. And in fact if I were you I would do that regularly, just like you back up your computer … maybe our grandchildren depending on which website we use may or may not be able to see our photos.
This is exactly what has me seriously considering something even more “liberated” than Wordpress.org for my post-Posterous blog. Right now, I’m looking at Scriptogr.am, and it’s very promising. Write posts in Markdown, save to Dropbox, and Scriptogr.am turns them into HTML. Scriptogr.am even has a bookmarklet, just like Posterous, Wordpress and the rest.
Twitter won't use employee patents offensively
It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.
This is very good news. Twitter has been known in the past for defending the right of its users against dubious subpoenas. Now, it looks like they’re taking the moral high ground on the patent wars.
Secondary market for class notes: copyrighted free speech or lazy cheater's dream?
"Do Students Have Copyright to Their Own Notes?"
This is a decent article by Tina Barseghian of KQED’s Mindshift blog, but unfortunately it isn’t cynical enough for me. It talks about school policies banning the sharing or selling of class notes. It sets up the dichotomy of a professor’s right to be free from unvetted transcriptions of their lecture and a student’s copyright in the original bits of their notes, touching on free speech implications along the way.
Some school policies (and the criticisms attacking them) may confuse these issues. Most, however, appear to ban sharing or selling any part of your notes, whether you transcribed the lecture or only wrote down your own thoughts on the material.
My problem with the article itself is Barseghian doesn’t mention one of the most important caveats to the professors’ reputations/students’ copyrights/students’ free speech conundrum: that not all students sharing and selling notes are innocently “sharing knowledge” or innocently trying to get their First Amendment on.
Some students “borrow” or buy notes because they are lazy or cheating, or both. Sure, somewhere in the middle there are students who do their own work and choose to supplement it with third-party notes. But I’m too cynical to believe the lazy cheaters aren’t in the majority.
Arrington and Siegler out at PandoDaily, don't bother trying to comment about it
As of Monday, April 9 the shareholders of PandoMedia voted to remove Michael Arrington as a director. Given the change in relationship we feel it’s inappropriate for CrunchFund’s partners Michael Arrington and MG Siegler to continue contributing to PandoDaily.
via pandodaily.com
Why?
Arrington has taken the news well, saying:
[…] the company notified me last week that they weren’t happy that I and MG Siegler (my partner at CrunchFund) were going to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt this coming May.
and
Even when I’m being thrown out, I support the entrepreneur. If Sarah feels that they’re better off without our involvement, I support her completely.
both quotes from Arrington’s post about the issue
Apparently, the fact that Arrington and fellow CrunchFund (< irony alert Re: that link…) partner MG Siegler are speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt was a firing offense. Siegler seemed as confused as Arrington, because PandoDaily founder Sarah Lacey knew about Arrington’s contractual obligation to speak at the conference when she took him on as an investor.
What confuses me though is that Lacey disabled comments on her post announcing Arrington’s removal.
Why? Well, it’s stupid to speculate, but I’m feeling stupid at the moment. Maybe comments were disabled…
I like PandoDaily. The writers are great, the focus is great, the content is great. And they have a healthy commenting community.
All parties concerned are too thick-skinned for 1 or 3 to be accurate. 2 has never stopped a popular website from leaving comments enabled before.
4 and 5 are doubtful because Lacey is smart enough to know both are good suggestions, depending on the topic in question and the nature of your publication.
6 would just mean Lacey isn’t truly in control over there, and I find that very hard to believe.
So, my speculation seems to have turned out just as stupidly as I had expected. Turns out I wasn’t the only one engaged in stupid speculation, though.
Incidentally, Business Insider's Matt Rosoff claims the Arrington/Siegler tag team at Disrupt “pissed off PandoDaily CEO Andrew Anker,” implying that Arrington’s post about the issue suggested that. It didn’t, and Rosoff doesn’t mention any other potential source for the Anker line at all. Stupid speculation FTW!
At the end of the day, people are talking about Pando, and that can’t be a bad thing.