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.

* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts

Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
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.