Blyk launches ad-based mobile network

Blyk, the mobile virtual network operator offering free phone call minutes and messaging in return for sending customers advertising, launches in the UK today. Renting airtime from France Télécom’s Orange network and targeting only 16-to 24-year-olds, the network will target the ads based on a detailed profile customers will fill out on their website. It’s ironic timing. MySpace is today announcing an ad-supported mobile version of its site to get on the new mobile advertising bandwagon.

As I wrote earlier this month, the Blyk launch is timed for the start of the new school term in the UK. It’s a smart move but it’s not surprising. Blyk has a very experienced team, headed by backer former Nokia president Pekka Ala-Pietila and Antti Öhrling, a branding veteran.

Blyk is giving itself 3-4 months to make an impact on the highly competitive but mobile-obsessed UK market and will use real-time feedback on what “the kids” are doing to help brands with the targetting process. To make sure the audience is the right one, only 16-to 24-year-olds will be allowed on it, with cross-checks for age in place. Advertisers, including Buena Vista, Coca-Cola, I-play Mobile Gaming, L’Oreal Paris, StepStone and Yell have already confirmed that they will be among the first advertisers.

Blyk isn’t selling handsets, it’s sending out SIM cards, so customers will need an unlocked phone capable of MMS. Every month, Blyk users will get 217 free texts and 43 voice-call minutes as standard, on condition they opt in to receive up to six ads to their phone a day. It’ll cost 99p per megabyte to browse mobile sites.

Meanwhile the MySpace news coming out of Fox Interactive Media is just part of their overall plans to roll out mobile versions and start picking up ad revenues. FoxSports.com, the gaming site IGN, AskMen, Photobucket and its local TV affiliates will all have mobile versions in the coming months. Right now MySpace has subscription-based version of of the service with AT&T and Helio, but the new mobile sites will work on all US carriers.

The new mobile Fox sites will allow users to send and receive messages and friend requests, comment on pictures, post bulletins, update blogs, and find and search for friends. Initially, advertising will taker the form of sponsorships and banner ads, but the company says it plans to move into more targeted advertising based on registration data and local ads based on a user’s location via GPS.

The concept of using mobile advertising to subsidise calls and thus win market share is not new. Virgin Mobile in the US recently reported that 330,000 of its 4.8 million subscribers have agreed to view ads in exchange for free calling minutes. But basing an entire mobile service on this business model is to date untried, and it’s fairly obvious why. Mobile operators generate billions upon billions in voice and text revenues, yet mobile advertising is estimated to only generate $1 billion to $2 billion in revenues worldwide this year.
However, voice revenues are flat or falling (messaging never goes out of fashion, it must be noted) and the mobile ad market is expected to surge from from $5 billion to $11 billion within five years, generating much needed growth, says the IHT.

The UK market, in particular, is poised to get very, very busy in mobile advertising terms. Last week reports began to circulate based on a Guardian story that Google - a dead cert for a mobile ad play - was considering a move into the UK wireless market after the regulator Ofcom said it would auction off older 2G spectrum currently allocated to Vodafone and O2.

Your Truman Show Takes Lifecasting To Widgets

Lifecasting startup Your Truman Show will present a Video Map Widget at DEMO today, bringing their life story focused video product to social networking sites.

VideoMap can be placed and accessed by anyone using Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, YourTrumanShow or other sites. Its selling point is a graphical video relationship map, which, according to YourTrumanShow’s Founder & Chairman Arturo Artom, “Lets you see who links to you and who you link to as well as the video content you have both collected and may wish to share. VideoMap let’s you go from topic to topic and from life to life.”

See our previous coverage here. Aside from the clever name, Your Truman Show is trying to bring the traditional idea of a blog as an online journal to the lifecasting field. The chronological time line via the “V-Link” interface provides something different in an increasingly competitive vertical.

Chat With Mark Zuckerberg At TechCrunch40: The Video

One of the highlights of the TechCrunch40 conference last week was when I had an opportunity to sit down with Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. We talked for 45 minutes about some of the big projects Facebook has launched over the last year - including the launch of the News Feed in 2006, the Facebook Platform, dealing with user abuse by third party developers and much, much more.

Mark also made a surprise announcement about mid way through the talk - the launch of fbFund, a new entity that will make grants to facebook application developers.

The entire video is embedded above.

TechCrunch40 Launch Success: Ponoko

We are being flooded with emails regarding the TechCrunch40 conference - things we did right, things we did wrong (lots, apparently), and suggestions for next year. All are welcome, but what I like to see the most are the emails from presenting companies talking about what’s happened to them since they went up on stage last week.

I’ll be pulling all of the feedback into a wrap up post later this week, but today I received an email from Ponoko, one of the forty launching startups, that really made me feel like the whole thing was worth it. “We reached 1 million website hits within 23 hours 27 mins and 6 secs of launch,” said Derek Elley, the company’s chief strategy officer.

They also wrote a blog post noting some of the coverage the company got immediately after launching - there was a lot of it. So much, in fact, that the site went down for a while.

Ponoko is a cool way for designers to create new physical products and sell them. Users collaborate on design and prototyping all the way through to production. Check it out - the website is back up and humming.

How To Lose All Your Friends Immediately, In Real Time

Don’t even think of using this to contact me. Trumpia is an absurdly stupid new site that, like the efficient crank calling tool we once covered, will likely be used to annoy people far more often than it will be used for any useful purpose.

Here’s how it works: Register for an account and tell it the contact information for your soon-to-be-ex friends. Make sure you enter their instant messaging, cell phone and email contact information for maximum impact. You can then group your friends and message them all at once by texting a message to Trumpia. Your friends receive the message on all of their communication devices at the same (email, SMS, IM), ensuring that there is no way in the world that they can plausibly claim to have missed it. The video below shows how it works.

The idea is that a friend may miss an email or instant message, but they sure as hell won’t miss it if you hammer them at every single point of contact that they have. The act of contacting friends via Trumpia is aptly called “blasting”:

Blast people on their mobile phones, instant messaging and emails at the same time so you can contact everyone in real time no matter where they are, no matter what they are doing…Once you are signed up for Trumpia you can start blasting your friends right away, even if they haven’t signed up.

The only way to make the madness stop is to sign up for the service and tell it not to contact you any more. Remind anyone of Plaxo in the old days?

Contrast this with GrandCentral, which is a much more reasonable way for people so solve the problem of too many points of contact. Grand Central is elegant and useful. Trumpia is just stupid and I pray that PR people never hear about it.

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PlanHQ Still Tiny, But Getting A-List Attenti

Fuser: Manage All Your Email and Social Networking Messages in One Place

Another product that aims to simplify your digital lifestyle is launching today. Give Fuser access to your email and social networking accounts, and the website will organize all of the messages from those accounts in one place so you don’t have to bounce back and forth between multiple interfaces to handle them.

Fuser is still in beta and I ran into a few glitches while testing the site, but it certainly has promise. You can pull in accounts from any IMAP or POP email service and the social networks MySpace and Facebook. Once you have loaded your accounts, messages from all of them appear in one collective inbox. It’s impressive to see posts to my Facebook wall displayed like email messages next to my actual email messages.

Not only can you view messages from all of your accounts together, you can also reply to them as with a normal webmail client. If you want to reply to a Facebook wall post, you can hit reply and either leave a note on your friend’s wall or send them a Facebook message. It’s quite surprising how much of Facebook’s functionality Fuser has been able to extract out of that social network’s website.

Beyond organizing all of your messages in one place, Fuser plays around with the social network data to add a little functionality. You can view a “leaderboard” of your social network friends to see who communicates with you most frequently. Friends are ranked according to how many times they have sent you messages or posted on your wall, and you can view rankings according to certain time periods. Nothing terribly revolutionary, but their attempts demonstrate how it is still possible to mash up Facebook data from outside of the developer platform.

Fuser is free and supported by discreet AdSense advertisements. Check out Orgoo for another message aggregation service. Orgoo, which presented at TechCrunch40 last week, differs from Fuser by integrating instant messages, video conferences, and SMS messages instead of data from social networking accounts.

Demonoid Down, For Now

Our favorite torrent site is no more, at least for today and tomorrow. Demonoid, the previously fully-private torrent catalog and tracker is down, according to reports at TorrentFreak. Trackers have not been responding for over 24 hours, and the site is completely down.

Demonoid was the second largest tracker online, after ThePirateBay, and has seen its fair share of legal threats and takedown notices from copyright holders and associated groups. Demonoid shifted operations from The Netherlands to Canada back in June after their previous ISP balked at legal threats, but it appears that Canada is no safer as the likely cause of the downtime now is the Canadian ISP blocking the website.

Demonoid was our favorite torrent site, because membership and ratio tracking meant that it provided both a large catalog and much better speeds than alternate trackers. Recently they opened up the last 14 days worth of torrent listings to public access, making the site a quasi-private tracker. Demonoid accounts are also amongst the most requested in inviteshare, and its popularity has blossomed recently as it overtook other previously more popular public trackers which were beginning to fill up with fakes and spam.

Copyright groups have had recent successes against tracker sites and catalogs, no less than a few days ago TorrentBox was also taken down. But at the same time, the recent MediaDefender leaks showed that their effort to plant fakes in popular torrent sites had no impact on the most popular torrent sites including Demonoid - a credit to the communities at these sites who would flag fakes.

Takedown efforts seem to be in vain, as even the once much-loved Suprnova has recently made a come-back. The most that a takedown can accomplish is the intermediate interruption of service to that particular community, but as most BitTorrent users access and use more than one site, and the release groups continue unimpeded, the end results of these efforts from copyright groups are very under-whelming. Shutting down Demonoid for a few days will have no impact on the volume of BitTorrent traffic, and Demonoid will be back shortly and with more interest and new users than ever before.

MySpace Blocking Mobile Users In Australia

Mobile internet access is hot at the moment, from the iPhone through to T-Mobile’s New Sidekicks (maybe not so hot, but you can see CrunchGear’s coverage here), so you’d think MySpace would be providing unfettered mobile access to its user base? Wrong.

In Australia, mobile phone users not using the Optus mobile network have been blocked from accessing the new MySpace mobile site, being re-directed instead to the main MySpace page, which is even more unusable on a mobile than it is on a normal computer.

Optus has an exclusive provider contract with MySpace, and they are apparently not alone: the practice is widespread globally with MySpace blocking access from non-provider mobile phones in major markets, including we would presume the United States, although we are unable to confirm that at this time.

As I sit here browsing Facebook via the amazing Facebook iPhone site (oddly enough over the Optus network), I can’t help but ask the question: is MySpace Insane? Are they trying to milk every last cent out of the site before they are defeated by the ever popular Facebook, which I’d note have just passed MySpace by traffic in the United Kingdom. A sane strategy would be to provide easy access to as many people as possible, strengthening and growing your user base in an increasingly mobile world. Revenue would flow as a conseqeunce of having more users, instead of banning potentially the majority of them.

The mobile operators are presuming that users will take up their services to access MySpace which could work, but I can’t see millions of people switching because of it.

Although MySpace users miss out under this model, the biggest loser of all is MySpace. Greed isn’t good when you put profit before users, and denied access to MySpace via their mobile phones users will take their business elsewhere.

Technorati Launches Streaming Updates Service

Technorati has announced the launch of Technorati Topics, a live river of news stream that delivers a moving list of blog posts.

It replaces the just relaunched Technorati home page.

Technorati’s Dorion Carroll said that the changes were due to user feedback on “how [Technorati] should organize the vastness of the blogosphere and help people find the good stuff and help great bloggers be found….In particular, [there were] a lot of blog posts asking us to build what bloggers want.”

It would be easy to be unkind to Technorati, and some may suggest that the move today is a case of shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Technorati has lurched from one crisis to another this year, losing a CEO and downsizing as it attempted to be everything to everybody whilst failing to deliver a killer product any vertical. On the other hand, as a long time Technorati user it’s good to see Technorati going back to its roots as a blogging search engine. There is still some work to do in terms of improving the indexing, but in terms of focus Technorati Topics is at least a step in the right direction.

BlogTV Integrates Streaming Video into Facebook

Israel-based BlogTV will be releasing a Facebook application for sharing amateur video today.

The application, which you can get here, lets users stream shows through a widget on their profile pages. You can also browse your friends’ live streams, posted videos, and upcoming shows. Broadcasts can be viewed on a fuller canvas page with chatting capabilities built right in.

The company also says that users will also have the ability to promote their shows in their friends’ news feeds.

With this integration, BlogTV joins the ranks of uStream and Stickam, who have also created Facebook applications. We recently covered the handful of companies making it easier for people to stream video online.

Some statistics provided about BlogTV by the company itself:

* Average time spent on the BlogTV site is 20 minutes
* 350 live shows are broadcasted every day
* The most popular tag for recorded shows is “music”

Check out some screenshots below for a preview of BlogTV’s new application:

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Propeller Will Be The New Netscape Digg Clone

AOL has announced that Propeller.com will be the new home for the Netscape social media experiment. What was once considered a possible Digg-killer is now relegated to the backwaters of AOL.

In a statement, Tom Drapeau said that AOL was “working hard behind the scenes to ensure a smooth transition before we officially launch at this new destination,” which given the site isn’t live yet is code for we eventually found a spare domain to rid ourselves of our Digg clone.

It might be too early to Deadpool the Netscape Social news experiment yet, but without the type-in traffic and brand recognition of the Netscape name, the whole idea will struggle to survive; after all the Netscape name, and previously Jason Calacanis’ evangelism was really all the site had going for it. I’ve heard some unconfirmed reports that since the initial announcement the site has been bleeding staff and contributors as well; I give it 12 months max, or AOL flogging Propeller off during this time for a fairly low sum.

Wikipedia: 2 Million Article Milestone

Wikipedia had its 2 millionth English language article written on September 10th, the company says.

The two millionth article was on El Horminguero, a Spanish language television show. Wikipedia user Zzxc wrote the article.

Wikipedia, founded in January 2001, is six years old.

Hacks Make Their Way Into Yahoo Products

Yahoo Hack days are a lot of fun, and some pretty interesting stuff comes out of them. But a persistent question is whether or not they are much more than fun - and if any of these hacks ever make their way into actual products.

The answer, apparently, is yes. Tonight Yahoo is announcing two product feature launches that were originally created at Yahoo Hack Days. - Shop By Color and MapMixer.

MapMixer

MapMixer is a tool that lets users “pin up” their own image over Yahoo Maps. The two images are melded to create a hybrid version that can be saved and viewed privately or made public - users can also adjust opacity and perform other tweaks to make it look just right. The ideal use is to add a very detailed map to the existing, less detailed Yahoo map. The melded map can also be embedded in a non-Yahoo website. See images to right and below for examples.

Google Maps allows various types of annotations, but nothing exactly like this.

Shop By Color

Shop by Color is a new Yahoo Shopping feature that lets users search or narrow results by selecting one of 56 different color hues instead of typing the color in manually.

Like.com, which we’ve covered recently, also allows image searching with non-text as the input. What Yahoo is launching is a lot different, but it is exciting to see image search moving beyond purely descriptive text as the input. Images can be queried directly, whereas previously just the metadata around an image could be queried.

Both were developed at Yahoo!’s Q1 2007 internal hack day on March 23rd. Hayro Kolukisaoglu and Sundeep Tirumalareddy created Shop by Color, and Nimit Maru created MapMixer.

Mixx To Take A New Look At Social News

I generally don’t get that excited when I hear about yet another Digg-like social news site coming on the scene, but Virginia-based Mixx may be different. Part of the reason is the founding team, which has deep Internet and news experience.

The company is led by CEO Chris McGill, formerly the General Manager of Yahoo News and more recently the VP Strategy at USA Today. The site describes itself at its core as taking the best features of Digg, LinkedIn and My Yahoo. Look for a private beta launch soon, sign up now on the landing page.

The company is almost certainly funded but won’t yet disclose any details.

We have a few conceptual screen shots, below. It’s hard to understand these without a little bit of context, but my interest is piqued. Top screen shot is the unauthenticated home page. Second is the home page when signed in. Third is “groups” view. More on Mixx soon.

Yahoo Makes Tiny Acquisition: BuzzTracker

Yahoo has acquired news site BuzzTracker, a tiny news aggregation site, for somewhere between $2 - $5 million. Alan Warms, CEO of parent company Participate Media, will join Yahoo as Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo News (a job with a bit of a revolving door, apparently).

The price is lower than the $7 million that Fox paid for NewRoo, a similar service, in 2006.

As lovely as BuzzTracker is, its odd that Yahoo didn’t make a run for TechMeme, the heavyweight in the automated news tracking niche. Until now, BuzzTracker has mostly been known for leaving spammy comments on blog posts that talk about TechMeme or Technorati to get a little extra traffic.

Chris Alden Makes Himself Comfortable At Six Apart

Chris Alden just took over as Chairman and CEO of blogging infrastructure startup Six Apart. Barak Berkowitz, CEO since 2004, steps down. Berkowitz will remain with the company as an advisor.

Alden joined Six Apart a year ago as part of the acquisition of Rojo, a company he founded.

Six Apart was founded in 2002 by husband and wife team Ben Trott and Mena G. Trott. Mena was the original CEO.

A Offline Gmail Client: Sweet

A report from India’s Hindustan Times indicates that Google is prepping an offline version of Gmail.

It’s claimed that a client has already been designed, is in testing, and runs (not surprisingly) on Google Gears. Google has previously offered an offline version of Google Reader using the Gears browser plugin. Other companies embracing the Gears platform include Zoho.

Although the story is unconfirmed by Google at this stage, it would be fair to presume that an offline version of Gmail happening is a given, the only question is when it will be available. Google continues to put together its jigsaw puzzle of office functionality as it builds a serious Microsoft Office competitor.

Dopplr, Social Network for World Travelers, Gets A-List Seed Funding

Dopplr, an invite-only social network for sharing travel plans with friends, has announced early-stage financing of an undisclosed amount from Martin Varsavsky, Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman and The Accelerator Group led by Saul Klein.

The social network bills itself as useful for people who travel at more than five times per year and want to inform friends of where they plan to go. The greatest benefit from sharing travel plans seems to come from discovering when friends will be in the areas of the world you plan to visit. If you decide to take a trip to London, for example, and one of your friends currently lives there, Dopplr will notify you of that fact.

While not yet open to the public, the company claims that Dopplr’s users have already shared 110 million kilometers (70 million miles) of trips to over 2000 cities around the world.

The investors in this round of funding have financed other notable companies such as Last.fm, Joost, FON, LinkedIn, Flickr, Technorati, Wikia, Xing, Stardoll, Six Apart and Netvibes.

Want or have an invitation to Dopplr? Head over to InviteShare.

Thanks for the screenshot David.

Aka Aki: Mobile Social Networking “Auf die straße”

Mobile devices remain social networking’s final frontier. There have been a few mobile applications coming out of the established players (Facebook), but social networking on the mobile phone has largely been an area for new entrants. They’ve included Loopt, Bluepulse, Zyb, MocoSpace, and SK telecom’s own Helio.

Aka Aki is a relatively new German mobile social networking startup running a private beta in Berlin. They aim to take social networking “to the street” (auf die straße), letting you discover and connect with other members as you go about your daily routine.

The service has two components: mobile and web. You can use the site as a standard social network (messaging, friending, etc), but the real differentiator comes from their Java/Bluetooth mobile application.

After you set up a profile with some salient details, Aka Aki uses your phone’s Bluetooth to find similar users who come within 20 meters (~65 ft.) of you. Then you can use the application to page through each of these profiles and connect with them. It’s reminiscent of Proxidate, the mobile dating service that alerts you of singles that enter within your Bluetooth’s range. Naturally, the Aka Aki is ideal for people who frequent crowded social spots such as bars, concerts, and parties.

However, the model comes with some significant drawbacks. Aka Aki’s can leave phones open to attacks over open Bluetooth connections and the users open to unwanted solicitations as they broadcast their profile everywhere they go. Aka Aki’s 20 meter limit makes it useful for random meetings instead of keeping tabs on friends. It also means you have to find yourself in those crowded spaces with other members fairly frequently to find it useful.

MetaCard: The World’s First Virtual World Credit Card

Singapore based FirstMeta has launched MetaCard, a credit card for Second Life that is claimed to be the world’s first virtual world credit card.

The MetaCard works in the same way as a normal first life credit card works. Applicants are provided with a credit limit and present the card when purchasing goods at merchants who accept the card.

MetaCard comes in two flavors: Basic and Gold. The Basic card is subject to a avatar check and provides a credit limit of L$5000 ($18.60) per month. A Gold MetaCard offers a credit limit of L$10,000 ($37.20) per month and can only be obtained by providing real world credentials and a real life credit card for automatic payments. Interest is charged at between 0.13% and 0.15% per day, which would we roughly 54% per annum, but compounding. Payments are 2% of the total amount used plus fees outstanding at the end of the month, and users have 21 days to make their monthly payment. MetaCard holders must also spend L$500 ($1.86) per month or face a monthly maintenance fee of L$300 ($1.12).

FirstMeta also offers MetaCard holders a savings account under the MetaSavings brand, offering interest rates of between 0.06%-0.09% daily.

Although the amount of credit offered by FirstMeta is (in real life terms) rather low, it will be interesting to see how services like these develop in online worlds given that in effect they are financial services that would likely be subject to real life laws. Whilst Second Life companies such as the World Stock Exchange clearly state that they are in effect pretend outfits (ie: games), and therefore are not subject to real world laws, FirstMeta is actually providing credit that is tied to a real world account; in effect by securing their credit services they have crossed the line into the real world.

(in part via SL Insider)

Can Google Do What Amazon Couldn’t? The Search For Steve Fossett In The Nevada Desert

When computer scientist Jim Gray was lost at sea earlier this year, Amazon stepped in to help. They arranged for a satellite sweep of the area and stored the images on their S3 storage service. They then created a task on their Mechanical Turk service to allow volunteers to scan the images to look for the boat. Thousands of people joined the search, but he was never found.

Now Steve Fossett, a 63 year old aviator, sailor and adventurer with a number of world records, has disappeared as well. On September 3, an airplane he was flying in Nevada failed to return. No one has any idea where he is.

His friend Richard Branson now says he will use Google Earth to try and find Fossett. Google may have taken new satellite photos over the last few days which may have information that can help find him.

With Gray, there was a lot of data to review and a boat appears as a very small number of pixels in a given satellite image. Looking for a plane, or even a weather disturbance, in the Nevada desert may not be much easier. Still, if Branson and/or Google call for volunteers to help with the search, I am sure that thousands will join the effort. And once again, Mechanical Turk would be a perfect way to organize the volunteers, even if they are looking at Google data.

Let’s all hope that this has a happier ending than the Jim Gray story.

Google Adds Search To Google Reader

The most popular online RSS reader (depending on what stats you believe) just got better. Google has announced that Google Reader now has search.

The search box is located directly above the reading panel to the right of the Google Reader logo. Users can search all subscribed feeds or search by category/ tag.

Google Readers biggest competitor Bloglines recently released a completely new version that has been getting positive coverage; adding search to Google Reader (a feature Bloglines has had since May 2006) shines the spotlight back in Google’s direction.

It may be completely unrelated, but at the time of writing anyway Google Reader is experiencing difficulties with showing read/ unread items in the reading panel, showing all items as unread since roughly the same time search went live. The sidebar list of tags though is working fine.

reader.jpg

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Google Books: Embed Book Clips Into Websites

Google Books released a useful new tool this morning - the ability to embed parts of public domain books directly into other websites and/or Google Notebook.

The clip from the image above is embedded below. You can choose an image or text embed (both are below). It’s useful for bloggers who want to discuss a certain passage of a book, although taking a screen shot and uploading it does exactly the same thing. The image embed lacks a link back to the original source material for some reason. The text embed has a link but the formatting isn’t so wonderful.

The Adventures of Oliver Twist By Charles Dickens OLIVER TWIST CHAPTER I TREATS OP THE PLACE WHERE OLIVER TWIST WAS BORN AND OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES ATTENDING HIS BIRTH AMOXG other public buildings in a certain town which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning and to which I will assign no fictitious name there is one anciently common to most towns great or small to wit a workhouse and in this workhouse was born on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader in this stage of the business at all events the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter For a long time after it was ushered into this world of sorrow and trouble by the parish surgeon it remained a matter of considerable doubt whether the child would survive to bear name at all in which case it is somewhat more

Breast Isn’t Best On Facebook

A dispute is erupting between breast feeding activists (known as “lactivists”) and Facebook over pictures of breast feeding on Facebook.

Facebook has taken down pictures of users breast feeding, and has even gone as far as banning users completely on the basis that the pictures constitute “obscene content.” Suffice to say the lactivists aren’t the least bit happy.

According to a SMH report, lactivists complained that their images were removed despite the fact they contained no nipple, questioning the logic of the Facebook obscenity accusations: “Where does the feeding stop and the boob begin?? A peek of nipple?” Where indeed.

Facebook spokeswoman Meredith Chin said Facebook does not prevent lactivists from uploading photos of themselves breastfeeding, but went on to say “Photos containing an exposed breast do violate our Terms and are removed”. Now I might be male so I have no recent first hand experience but I’m confused as to how breast feeding cannot include breasts?

The lactivists are calling for supporters to join their Facebook group Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!, which currently has over 7000 members.