Alexis C. Madrigal

Look, Google, we've got a plan to help you win on social. There's only one catch: You have to give up on the notion that animates Google Plus.

Out in the Mojave Desert, there's a place called California City that's fascinated me ever since Geoff Manaugh brought its story to the Internet's attention. The city is one of the largest in the state by land area, but its population sits at a mere 14,718. The facts together indicate the grandeur of the planned community's conception and its failure.

As pitched by the town's founder Nat Mendelson, California City would be the home of the American dream, a wonderland for sun and job seekers to go after Los Angeles' population burst across that city's eastern mountains. In 1957, land was purchased; roads were roughly paved; street signs were hammered into place. All Mendelson and his investors needed were the people ...

Who did not arrive as expected.

Those people did stop going to Los Angeles. But they didn't head to the enormous planned community taking shape in the Mojave. Instead, they headed to places like Phoenix. In 1955, the town had 350,000 people. By 1990, it had broken 2 million. California City languished, its grid still cut into the ground and viewable on Google Earth (see below). Instead of a megalopolis, California City became a set of half-built infrastructure. Growth went where people were already gathering naturally. They did not want to move out to the middle of nowhere, no matter how great the golf courses looked in the brochures.

Google/Alexis Madrigal

Last year, Google, which had dabbled in official social-networking applications, released Google Plus. The site has all the things you've come to expect in a social network. There is a rich profile builder, a place for your photos, a nice videochat feature, a conversation feed, and, of course, "Circles," which allow users to sort the people they know into different buckets. Word at the time was that Google's full weight was behind this social push. The journalists who knew the company's insiders best declared that Facebook was CEO Larry Page's obsession.

I was bullish about Google Plus, even if it did feel like a Facebook clone. Google had built out a ton of infrastructure and was pushing Plus out through its major products. This had to be big!

But by most accounts and third-party research, the service is growing its number of users but not their engagement. People are "on" Google Plus, but they are not really ON Google Plus. The infrastructure is there. The street signs are there. People own plots of land. But there's nobody actually visiting town. To make it obvious: Google Plus is the California City to Facebook's Los Angeles.

Google, of course, vehemently disputes that the social network is anemic. They say not to trust the methodology of the people who measure public posts. They tell you that more private sharing occurs than public sharing. They say that the service is growing by every metric that matters to Google.

For example, here's what a Google spokesperson told me about one third-party report:

"By only tracking engagement on public posts, this study is flawed and not an accurate representation of all the sharing and activity taking place on Google+. As we've said before, more sharing occurs privately to circles and individuals than publicly on Google+. The beauty of Google+ is that it allows you to share privately - you don't have to publicly share your thoughts, photos or videos with the world."

But it is simply impossible to ignore that few people actually *use* Google Plus in any way that we've come to define usage of a social network. ComScore says people spent about 3 minutes a month at the site. Google contends that doesn't include mobile traffic or the dropdown menu that appears when you click the red "notification" icon in Gmail and other Google services. But neither of those places seems likely to change the overall pattern here. Deep engagement is not lurking in that dropdown. Let's say actual G+ usage is 10x what the numbers say, so 30 minutes. Facebook's at 405. Pinterest's at 89. Tumblr is at 89, too.

Another small piece of evidence: I added up all the links from plus.url.google.com to The Atlantic. In total, we received 16,000 visitor referrals from the site. That ranks it in the low 30s for us and that sum is orders of magnitudes smaller than we get from some of Google Plus' competitors. BuzzFeed assembled some similar evidence on +1s from around the web along with a devastating excoriation of the site experience.

"Logging into Google+ feels like logging into a seminar, or stumbling into the wrong conference room at an airport Marriott," John Herrman wrote. "It looks like a cubicle farm and smells like a hospital."

Ouch. So what gives? How could Google have invested so much money and credibility in building a service that, by all accounts except Google's own, doesn't work?

One hypothesis, advanced by TechCrunch's Josh Constine, is that we in the media completely misread Google Plus. The service was not an attempt to compete with Facebook. It was not a declaration of social war. No, it was a classic Google approach to social: develop a method to extract and organize information, but this time about the humans. So, they gave us something that looked like Facebook with familiar text boxes to fill in. They tricked us into inputting ourselves into their database with the promise of a great service. On this theory, it doesn't matter to Google if we use G+ because we already gave them our names, locations, interests, and webs of social connections.

And if they get some users clicking on +1 buttons for advertisements, that increases their engagement rate substantially for those users' friends.

"We are seeing 5 to 10 percent click-through-rate uplift on any ad that has a social annotation on our own Web sites," Vic Gundotra, Google's VP of engineering, told the New York Times. "We have been in this business for a long time, and there are very few things that give you a 5 to 10 percent increase on ad engagement."

And so what if the trade we made for our valuable demographic info resulted in us getting 36 minutes a year of entertainment from Google Plus? Jokes on us, I guess.

But I am not (quite) that cynical. Google did not go through all that effort just to build something that people never use. Perhaps they did not dream of the massive destination site. Perhaps we dreamed that up ourselves because we wanted a real competitor for Facebook. But every sign from inside the company is that Google cares deeply about social and they are willing to risk their best product (Search) in order to integrate themselves into your social life. They want to win in social.

And you know, I think they can, but only by ditching the very idea that animates Google Plus.

Reuters

Essentially, Google built a social "spine" for their services without building a service that developed into a compelling social offering. There is no meat on the social bone because Google thought of building a social network not as a means for you to connect with friends but as a means for you to connect with Google.

In an earnings call with investors, CEO Larry Page laid out Google's approach to its social effort. "Google+ is about much more than the individual features themselves. It's also about building a meaningful relationship with users so that we can dramatically improve the services we offer," Page said. "Understanding who people are, what they care about, and the other people that matter to them is crucial if we are to give users what they need, when they need it."

Not that mission statements are the be all and end all, but notice how different Facebook's theory of the case is: "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."

Facebook is about you sharing with the world. Google Plus is about Google understanding you. See the difference? This is why people sometimes say that Google doesn't get social. People don't join Facebook so Facebook can understand them better! In fact, the better Facebook understands them, the more wary of the service they get.

Here's the charitable way of looking at things: Google Plus was the first step. Now that they've got the spine in place, they can use their knowledge of the social web to build cool integrations with their existing products. For example, I think the Circles integration with Gmail is awesome. Try it yourself: stick your family members into a Circle. Then, open up Gmail, and click on the Family circle. Voila: every email a family member has sent you is right there. This is awesome. And you can see how Google Plus could form a social dashboard for the email experience. I'd expect to see a lot more of that kind of thing across Google's services. 

But.

That's not the kind of thing that's going to get people to spend more time with Google's social offerings. You create the circle, move the people, and you're gone. It's a nice utility but it's not what has made any social network work so far. Let's assume Google wants people to post to and spend time on G+. How can they go to the next level? How can they make it easier for people to connect to and share with people they care about?

I think Google needs to stop looking across town at Facebook and look within itself. Google is riddled with invisible social networks surrounding a wide range of products. Even better, Google's homegrown social networks tend to be built around Google's core strength: organized (and organizing) information.

Reuters

I've been drawing out a city building metaphor here, so let's keep it going. If Google Plus is California City (or Brasilia), Google needs to find areas where people are already congregating excitedly. They shouldn't build a new city, but revitalize the neighborhoods they already have.

Note that this community building task is different from providing better search service with social knowledge! This is about generating more social connections, not drawing on them to power a separate product. The former is nice, but it's not how you build an engaged community.

So, where are the neighborhoods where humans are already hanging out? Google has a variety of products that while not explicitly "social networks" could easily be thought of as places that help people "share," a la Facebook's mantra. Just think about them all:  Reader. Picasa. Scholar. Earth. Books. Blogger. Hell, even Zagat.

It's these already bustling communities that should form the core of Google's next-level social offering. Take Scholar, which allows users to access research papers. A smallish group numbering in the millions visit the site to find research papers because it works better than academic search engines. It's pretty clear that Google's corporate honchos think the site is kind of a drag and they have no revenue model for it. Little has been done to update the service, even simple things like allowing people to sort by the number of citations.

But think about Scholar as a latent social network. Each paper contains its own social network that Google already crawls. Every bibliography is filled with other social networks. And people searching Google Scholar are likely to be as interested in connecting with the researchers who created those papers as they are with the papers themselves. Why isn't Google making it easy to connect the searchers with the searched? And sure, build a whole other set of social tools on top of that, which make it easy to share with networks of researchers. You want every college kid in America to start engaging deeply with your social network? Make it easy for them to get their papers written.

Or take Google Books, which has been languishing thanks to a similar level of inattention. Every book is also a latent social community. Why can't I lay down markers on my favorite books so that when someone stumbles on some old and forgotten energy book, they see my face there and can connect with me as someone who cares about this obscure thing that they care about? Boom: Instant, fairly strong tie social connection.

I'm just spitballing here. There are so many other things that Google could do with its existing products by working with the communities who already engage around them.

Instead, Google has tended to ignore or piss off its passionate social fans. (That's not to mention the many small, revenueless products -- Wave, Buzz, Knol, etc -- that had their own small but dedicated communities.) So, Google squashed Reader's biggest fans when they decided to integrate that service into Google Plus. The nuts and bolts of the change ruined Reader as a social network for sophisticated sharers of information. Were tons of people using it? No, but they loved it with the kind of passion that few have for Google Plus. Facebook would have tested to see if the changes hurt how often people used the site; I'm not so sure that Google did.

I can see why this is not the most obvious strategy for a company of Google's size: "Build social tools specific to our dozens of products? Bah! Why don't we just come up with a single set and push them out?"

It doesn't seem like Google groks how to create the smaller, self-organized networks of people who become the main driving force behind the larger thing. How many thousands of Twitter users power the whole service? How many thousands of Reddit users drive the whole news system? It I'm sure Google's executives understand the 90-9-1 rule intellectually, which says that 1 percent of users tend to contribute the most to social networks. But they don't get how to identify those key users.

Most companies have to create those kinds of users, but Google just has them sitting around in droves. It's those people rooting around in Scholar and Books and Earth. It's those people uploading ridiculous amounts of photos to Picasa. It's those people who built large networks of Google Reader friends. They are the ones who make a social network awesome and therefore worth visiting.

So, yes, use Google Plus as the social spine. Satisfy the corporate imperative to "understand" me and my web of connections. But now Google should concentrate on fostering the nascent but largely invisible communities it already has. Build them the tools they what they want to help them share. Don't mess up the networks they put in place. Watch what they're doing and double down on helping other people find it.

Does that sound harder than just building one set of social tools that span the Google universe and waiting for the people to show up? Yes, yes it does. But it's an illusion that it's easy to build any social network. Discovering a hive of people spending time together online is an amazing and precious thing. You can't just put a street sign at a road in the middle of nowhere and expect a party to erupt.

So, Google, look inside your already sprawling Google City. Find your explicit and implicit social power users, then empower them to build your social network.

A rousing success for the world's smallest artificial heart.

A Roman doctor holds the pump (Reuters).

Italian doctors successfully implanted the world's smallest artificial heart into a 16-month-old boy, keeping him alive for 13 days with a titanium pump until a heart transplant donor was found.

At 0.4 ounces, the astoundingly small piece of equipment weighed about 80 times less than a standard artificial heart for an adult human, Reuters reported. It can pump a little over 3 pints of blood a minute. 

The little boy had a condition known as dilated myocardiopathy and spent almost his entire first year of life at Rome's Bambino Gesu hospital, where the artificial heart was also implanted. 

The device was invented by Robert Jarvik, esteemed creator of the first permanent total artifical heart, but had only been tested in animals.

It is no accident that we surfed channels before we surfed the web.

Television began as a box. It sat on the floor and it had honest-to-goodness knobs. If you needed to change something on the television, like the frequency to which it was tuned, you had to turn the knobs. You pulled a different one to bring it to life and pushed it back in to silence it. It made a physical noise that did not play from a speaker. The act of watching TV required you to physically touch the box surrounding the tube. Changing the channel while simultaneously watching the television was not physically easy.

The television was that box. But television was also a sociotechnical system of producing, distributing, and consuming a certain kind of media. There were three channels that were scheduled in blocks of time (30 minutes, 60 minutes). There were local affiliates that broadcast national news. The specificities of the system were many. And the actual technological objects -- the boxes -- both influenced the larger system and were influenced by it. (Just like now: what your phone can do changes the network; what the network can do eventually changes your phone.)

Fast forward to today. The distribution of moving pictures to human beings in their homes has changed along almost every vector. People pick and choose. They DVR. They have hundreds of cable channels. They watch video on YouTube and Vimeo. They make their own videos. CNN picks up video from some guy's phone and some other guy's phone plays that video routed through the global brand that is CNN.

The obvious route from that old television set to our current world of video entertainment and news runs through cable. Cable, the story goes, gave consumers more choices. It broke the hegemony of the big three networks with the help of satellite television, VCRs, and Fox. Meanwhile, the Internet was built, creating a vast, peer-to-peer distribution network.

But that narrative --  like this version found at the Museum of Broadcast Communications -- leaves out a lowly but important change agent: the remote control. The remote control diffused more rapidly than television itself and more widely than cable or even the VCR or its descendants. While we say "everyone has an iPhone," the truth was that everyone really did have a remote control. This was an immensely useful technology.

We look back at the remote control's role in changing the nature of television today because a co-creator of the wireless remote, Eugene Polley, died Sunday at the age of 96. His work at Zenith, in part, laid the groundwork for a new kind of television and maybe for new ways of thinking about what home entertainment should be.


The best treatment of the role of the remote control comes to us from two communications professors, James R. Walker of Saint Xavier University and Robert Bellamy of Duquesne in their 2006 book, Television and the Remote Control: Grazing on a Vast Wasteland. They explicitly connect the development of the remote control with the rise in what we've come to call interactivity.

"The remote control is a subversive technology," they write. "By allowing the user to move rapidly between program offerings and avoid unpleasant or uninteresting material, the [remote control] works in opposition to the historic structure and operational parameters of the U.S. television industry."

That is to say, the remote control wasn't just a means of changing channels on the box, it was a means of changing structures within the industry. The new device meant people could change channels quickly and easily from the comfort of their sectionals, and that affordance meant that television stations could not continue to sell advertising or deliver programming the way that they had before when it was more difficult to change the channel. I do not think it is an accident that we started channel surfing (1986) before we started surfing the web.

Walker and Bellamy continue:

No longer can the viewer be conceptualized solely as passive recipient of the messages of advertisers. Rather, she or he now has the means to construct an individual media mix that may, or increasingly may not, contain advertising. In essence, the [remote control] allows the viewer to control some of the programming functions previously reserved for television and advertising executives.

Any of this sound familiar? The remote control was one of the first devices that users could use to craft their own experience of the medium of television. While we think of channel surfers as mindless at times, they were, at least, making active and frequent choices about what programming to watch. Within the constraints of the available content, they were programming their televisions, not solely being programmed.

Of course, this control only went so far. It is not as if television and advertising executives saw this potentially subversive device and did nothing. Rather, they changed the way they advertised. The industry consolidated with one driver being that the networks, dealing with a newly empowered audience, had to get into cable television. The idea that by changing channels, you could actually change the world sounds ridiculous, but it turns out to have a basis in reality. The only problem is that the entrenched forces in the world have their own levers that they are not shy about pulling.

Thus, Walker and Bellamy conclude, "A large number of distribution systems does not ensure a diversity of content." 

That, if you have watched television recently, still holds true. Certain types of programming continue to dominate. Certain types of advertising -- out of all the things you could possibly imagine -- remain prevalent. But sometimes a small change diffused widely can be as significant as a big change diffused narrowly. At one end of the spectrum, you have tiny numbers of early BBS, USENET, and Internet users, while at the other, you have everyone using a remote.

Even if television *looks* a lot like it once did, the audience has changed. Big chunks of it are gone. These people have moved on to the Internet and even when they watch television programming, they do it on Hulu or Netflix or through a DVR. And what are those services if not the offspring of a nation of channel surfers and a network of nerds?

So, thanks Mr. Polley for, in some way, helping make it easy to watch every episode of Friday Night Lights, years after the show ended and whenever I feel like it. The Zenith Flash-Matic may have been the product you worked on, but your contribution was more important than the device.

The iPhone comes with this great little app called "Find My Phone." Launch it from a computer and the software will use your phone's built-in communication tools to locate the device on a map. This is great if you've simply misplaced your phone. But what if it's actually been stolen?

Our own Jared Keller discovered the perils of tracking down your phone. He knew roughly where it was -- an apartment building in northeast Washington, DC -- but had no idea how to get it back. The Washington police were not interested in going door to door in a big apartment building looking for some kid's phone, and besides nine other cell phones had been stolen on the same night.


The problem isn't specific to Keller, though. It's general. If someone or someones are holding a piece of your stolen property, how are you actually going to retrieve it? The situation holds the potential for confrontation, violent or otherwise, and the resolution of the phone tracking isn't so precise that you can be 100% for sure where the device is.

This is true even if you happen to be the police chief of a mid-size American city like Berkeley, California. The Oakland Tribune reports that Berkeley's police chief sent 10 police officers to track down his son's iPhone, after the kid had it jacked from his gym locker at Berkeley High. Civic discussions aside, the real kicker in the story is that even with all those cops swarming around San Pablo and 55th (a couple miles from where I'm sitting), they were not able to locate the phone! So, they had an active tracking signal and 10 cops and still came up empty handed.

The boy alerted his father and Meehan pulled out his own cell phone and showed a property crimes detective sergeant the real time movement of the stolen phone.

Given the active signal of the stolen phone, the detective sergeant took his team to try to locate it. As the signal was moving into the city of Oakland, the detective sergeant called the drug task force to ask for some additional assistance and members of that team offered to help, said Sgt. Mary Kusmiss, department spokeswoman..

The four sergeants followed the signal to the area of 55th and San Pablo avenues in North Oakland, where they contacted residents at several homes looking for the phone. It was never located.

If 10 cops who know a neighborhood can't find an iPhone that's broadcasting its location, that shouldn't give you a lot of confidence in your own vigilante recovery of a stolen iProduct. Just saying. Consider this a PSA: just buy a new phone.

1. Data visualization
2. TED
3. Magazine tablet apps
4. Flickr
5. NATO
6. Judd Apatow comedies
7. Balsamic vinegar
8. Bachelor's degrees
9. Listicles

There are some people who love machines the way some people love food. They fix things. They build things. They repair things. If you want your children to be this type of person, you may want to check out the wonderful new project that Lucas Ainsworth and Alyssa Hamel have up on Kickstarter.

Kinetic Creatures is a set of three cardboard animals that you assemble yourself. They don't just stand there, though: they walk! You can use human power or a little motor to send them on their way. 

They are simple but also complex. They are crafty but also manufactured. They are real, but will only become available if enough people pool their money to bring them into being. These are creatures of our time.

Via Joe Moon

After a weird IPO, no one knows exactly what's going to happen with the social media's shares on its first full day of trading.

Just when you thought absolutely nothing interesting could happen on Friday, when Facebook debuted on NASDAQ, something did: the company's bankers really did set the price of the offering as high as the market would bear. That is to say, when the shares made it out to the open market, they didn't immediately spike as has happened with so many other tech IPOs like LinkedIn's last year. Some have argued that's a good thing, others that it wasn't.

Regardless, as Friday's trading drew to a close, Facebook's underwriters (namely, Morgan Stanley and the consortium of banks the company put together) propped up Facebook's share price at $38. They just would not let the company's share price fall below where they priced it. If you want to see a detailed blow-by-blow of how it worked, check out this rather stunning video recap. Meanwhile, other social media companies' shares tanked for reasons that are not quite clear.

In any case, no one expects those underwriters to keep up that kind of buying. So, Facebook will have to stand on its own. The big surprise, it seems, was that Regular Joe investors seemed unimpressed with the company's offering. Most industry watchers expected the stock to pop because they figured retail investors would herd into the shares. For whatever reason, those regular people didn't on Friday. Now everyone is waiting for the opening bell to find out if they will be more interested now that the hype of the IPO is over. I know better than to offer a prediction.

Many tech twitterers thought the company's first day on the market would go a lot better than it did.

With the market closing up shop and Facebook sitting at $38 thanks to the deep pockets of the IPO's underwriters, so it's worth revisiting what people were saying about this IPO yesterday. Luckily, developer James Proud created a little app -- facebookipodayclosingprice.com -- at venture capitalist Chris Sacca's request to track predictions about the company's first day of trading. This got tweeted out to the Twitter tech elite and about 2,261 people entered their predictions. Mashable wrote it up like this: "Facebook IPO: Did Twitter just give us closing price?"

In short: NO.

What did they think Facebook would close at? $54.
What did Facebook close at? Exactly $38.

And I note that $38 should have an asterisk.

Only 26 of the 2,261 predictors offered $38 as the company's shares closing price. And as you can see in the chart above, the distribution of predictions were concentrated around $50 with a substantial number of people predicting a very high closing price. Put it this way: almost as many people predicted a close of $80 (21) as predicted a close of $38.

The big news of the day (the week? the month?) is that everyday investors can now buy shares of Facebook. Quiet. Please sit down, everyone. Ladies and gentlemen, quiet please. Please! I am holding the conch shell. I am holding the conch shell.



Everyone wants to have their say about Facebook today, even if there isn't too much more to say than there was yesterday. We know this is a company with an astounding number of very engaged users. We know that some people love it and other people find it annoying. We know their ads have a lower than average clickthrough rate, but that it seems like they have the potential to build the world's most formidable advertising business. We know they make some money but not nearly as much as companies that have much smaller market values.

That's the state of play. We do have a little new data: the stock didn't go wild. It priced at $38, debuted at $42, and is hanging around $41 as I write. That's technically what is supposed to happen, but practically never what happens, so people are a bit confused as to what that all means. I'm trying not to draw any huge conclusions from a few hours of trading.

More broadly, though, there are some interesting cultural, corporate, and catty things to speculate on, now that Facebook is public.

• Will people keep "sharing" as much as they do now?
  
The most basic assumption of the social media game is that people will keep sharing ever more and ever more. If only because it is so deeply ingrained, I think it's worth examining that idea. What if it doesn't turn out to be true? What if sharing peaks in 2013 or 2014 simply because people run out of time or because of some newfound sense of privacy or because some subtle cultural shift occurs? None of these things are impossible, though they would be running against the current trends.

One thing to note: people tend to think about privacy as a function of the amount of information that people share. So, if people are sharing a lot on Facebook, the idea is that they are OK with the privacy tradeoff or that they are fine with whatever information is available about them. But NYU philosopher Helen Nissenbaum sees things differently: she sees privacy as that information ending up in places you did not expect. So, as time goes on, all the information you've put on Facebook could still end up in a place you did not expect it to. That means that the aggregate amount of stuff that could lead to a Nissenbaum privacy violation continues to grow, particularly as people change contexts from college to work, say, or single to married.


• What are the Facebook natives going to think about online life?
  
There are hundreds of millions of people who are coming to Facebook at about the same time that they are coming to the Internet. They've always had a social web. They don't remember AOL. Most don't live in the United States. I'm not sure that those of us who have been on the Internet since 1993 are going to be able to accurately predict their online behavior or what they'll think about online life. Every day of their lives is going to be cataloged partially on Facebook, so what happens when they get older? Do they reject the service they grew up on or does it become a permanent social layer in their brains? I don't know.


• What are the mobile natives going to do with their time?
For just about everyone reading this post, your experience of the Internet began on a computer. For hundreds of millions in the developing world, this is not the case. Their primary or sole means of access to the Interweb is through a mobile device. I have a long running debate with Paul Kedrosky about what these people are going to do as the incomes of their countries rise fall and computer prices continue to decline. I think they'll switch to the old mouse-and-keyboard style as soon as they can afford them. Paul and many others think that they'll remain mobile device lovers. Why's that matter for Facebook? They're much stronger on the web than on mobile, most (but not all) people think

• If and when will Facebook's unusually centralized corporate structure be tested?
  Not all corporate structures are alike and as Matt Yglesias explained a while back, Facebook's power is concentrated in one person: Mark Zuckerberg. Is this going to become an issue for investors or are they all too happy having Zuck running the show?

• What are the thousands of new rich people going to spend their money on?
  If you live around the Bay Area, this is a big question. It won't play out immediately, but everything from the businesses they fund to the restaurants they frequent to the apartments they buy will be transformed by today's big event. New companies, new neighborhoods, new ideas about how cities should be run: we'll get all that and more as these people make their way further from Palo Alto's HQ, the money rippling reality before them.
  
  
• What will happen to other social media stocks?
  As Facebook debuted, shares of GroupOn and Zynga took a nosedive. Perhaps that's because investors who wanted exposure to social media now can get in on the main course instead of messing around with the side dishes. It'll be interesting to watch what happens as time goes on.
  
  
• How will being a public company change Facebook's culture?
  Some people think: not much. In fact, one of the first articles out of the gates today was about how after Mark Zuckerberg rang the NASDAQ opening bell from Palo Alto, everyone whooped it up for 10 minutes and then went back to work. But this is a long game here, and you never know how the company's new orientation might impact who is interested in working for them or how they have to shape their products to meet investor expectations. (Then again, see the point above, re: company control.)
  
  
• How will the Google and Facebook competition evolve?
  Last year, Google was the company stepping all over Facebook's turf with the launch of Google Plus and the social layer it represented. Will Facebook start to push into Google's information organization and discovery territory in 2012 or 2013? And for what it's worth, Google's actually up 7 percent since the Facebook's IPO.
  

I do not think that I can add anything to this video, but I would like to thank its creators, who have brought so much joy to me on this day. "Most of the people in this video have never met face to face," the video maintains. "We are a global family of people committed to inspiring and empowering each other via Facebook."

Don't miss the song's Facebook page, either.

OK, I do have one thing to say about this video. This is a celebrity singalong from our universe in which everyone sort of behaves like a celebrity. It's "We Are the World" multiplied by The Cult of the Amateur and raised to the power of Facebook's opening-day share price.

Via @normative

Your Google search experience is about to change.

No, don't worry, it's not another social integration. The latest update has nothing to do with Facebook and everything to do with Google's core strengths of organizing information so that you can find it faster.

Now, when you search certain things, say, Tom Cruise, a box will pop up in the right column of your search with structured data about the topic. Google can identify 500 million people, places, and things and can serve up a custom selection of data based on the nature of the noun.

Google knows that you are very likely to want to know certain things about Tom Cruise (e.g. his height) and other things about Bill Gates (his net worth) and other things about astronaut Don Pettit (which Shuttle missions he flew).

How good is Google at both guessing what you want to know and having that information in its databases? In some cases, the company is really good. "Based on the other things that people are looking for when they are looking for Tom Cruise, our knowledge graph is going to show you 39 percent of the answers to the next thing you might be looking for," said Johanna Wright, director of product management for The Google Knowledge Graph, which is what the company is calling this new feature.

In the online world, there is this relentless obsession with relevance. Everything has to be relevant, relevant, relevant. The way the word is normally translated in common speech is that something is relevant when you're interested in it at a particular time and place. Facebook's news feed is all about showing you things that are relevant to you from your friends. Google wants to show you the most relevant pages for a given search. And, to my mind, they actually do a pretty good job doing these things.

As businesses, though, what they really want to do is serve up the most relevant advertisements. That is to say, they want to serve up the ads that you're most likely to click on. So they refine and refine and refine the algorithms they've got with more and more and more data in the quest to find ads that people want to click on.

It's fair to ask, I think, how are they doing? One indication comes courtesy of this infographic that these marketers created showing the differences between Facebook and Google's ad networks. It contains three remarkable stats about clickthrough rate (CTR), which is the percentage of the time a user clicks on an online advertisement. The average, these marketers say, is about 0.1 percent. Facebook's CTR is below average at 0.051 percent and Google's is above average 0.4 percent.

While these differences are meaningful and say something powerful about Google and Facebook, let's do the math on those percentages to see how relevant the ads you're seeing really are. For Google, people are clicking on about 1 of every 250 ads they see while searching. For the average, it's 1 out of every 1,000 ads. And for Facebook, people are only clicking once every 1,961 ads they see.

That's the reality of relevance in the online world -- and, not so incidentally, while companies are so eager to scoop up any data they can to increase the likelihood that you'll click.

A preview of what the next wave of anti-corporate activism might look like. Call it Big Dada: speaking noise to power.

Through the 1990s, a practice called "culture jamming" grew in popularity and sophistication. It aimed to disrupt consumer culture by transforming corporate advertising with subversive messages. So, as in the example above, a Coca Cola sign has been defaced to note the company's other imperative aside from love. Another canonical example was current BuzzFeed chief Jonah Peretti's 2001 attempt to order a pair of Nike's through the company's website emblazoned with the word, "sweatshop." Culture jammers would use the power of brands against themselves. Their most famous organ remains the magazine AdBusters, which is widely credited with helping jumpstart Occupy Wall Street last year.

Culture jammers capitalized on the general feeling of many on the American (and global) left that corporations had (and have) too much power and that one very powerful expression of that power was advertising. Advertisements seemed to have mythic influence that could get people to do all kinds of things from buying Hummers and McMansions to starving themselves to attain fashion-model thinness.

Active culture jamming was always a niche activity, but failing active engagement with brand transformations, ignorance was considered the next best policy. Better to skip past commercials with Tivo or stick to NPR than watch or listen to the ads on these broadcast media. Being ignorant of advertising has been considered a moral good; it meant that one was not in sway to the corporate paradigm, etc, etc. The underlying idea is that the activist position is to transform or ignore corporate assets and advertising.

Fast forward to our world in which an increasing amount of advertising runs online. The old logic of culture jamming would say that anticorporate activists should run ad blockers or perhaps something like the (now outdated) Firefox extension, Add-Art, which replaced corporate callouts with curated art.

But the system of advertising has changed in the online world. First, because of the private nature of the browsing experience, there is no way to transform ads for others' political consumption.

Second, Google and Facebook ads are measured on what's called a cost-per-click basis. Advertisers are charged not by how many people see their ads, but by how many people click on them. That means that the old method of passive resistance to corporate power -- ignoring ads -- costs the advertisers nothing. In fact, it makes the delivery of those ads more efficient. Advertisers' dollars get spent on those who find their ads "relevant" and are open to their marketing methods. And because of the private nature of the browsing experience, there's no real way to deface or transform an ad as a political statement to others. Whatever personal pleasure one might find in Add-Art, it's not doing anything in the societal realm. (There are anti-corporate memes, sure, but those would not be a direct response to the ads that Bank of America runs when you search for mortgages.)

I foresee that activists might find the best way to disrupt corporate power on the Internet is to be begin interacting with the ads they're being shown and muddying the data that's being collected.

The counterintuitive logic of online advertising is that any time someone clicks on an ad, it costs the advertiser money. So, clicking on any, say, mortgage-related Google ad, would cost the company that placed it more than $1, according to current pricing. Other banking-related keywords are more expensive, too. "Jumbo mortgage" has an average cost-per-click of $2.42 (and you'll find Citi, Union, and Fremont banks advertising on the search). "Mortgage calculator" goes for $5 (presumably because those searches are more serious). One person's clicks, of course, don't mean much. But a million people's clicks would. Tens of millions of clicks would. And this is a kind of online activism that's closer in nature to Anonymous' famed distributed denial-of-service attacks than to protesting in the streets. It's something people could participate in without leaving their computers and it would not be hard to write tools that would help activists coordinate their actions.

In the commercial world, already something like 10 percent of all clicks on Google ads are perpetrated by various bad actors, usually bots or spyware that are trying to make a tiny bit of money for delivering clicks to Google. The company has to actually refund that money to advertisers, which means it's probably a vast sum when you consider Google's $37 billion of 2011 revenue. (Consider that the Move Your Money project claims they got about $50 million moved out of big banks to credit unions.)

This form of activism, however, wouldn't be click fraud if it weren't perpetrated by machines. It's hard to see how it could be against the law or even against Google's terms of service. It's "window browsing" as activism, sucking up corporate resources as a political act.

But beyond the immediate financial impact this kind of action could have on marketing budgets, if the collective action became large enough, it could begin to impact the quality of the data that Google and other data intermediaries are collecting about each and every Internet user. If enough people started to seem interested in home mortgages who were not actually interested in home mortgages, it might start to disrupt their ability to efficiently target users with behavioral advertising. This would be statistical noisemaking as a form of protest. 

After the attention that Occupy Wall Street garnered last year, the attempts to revive the movement in May have not caught fire. As they always have, activists will keep trying new things. How long before they realize that many businesses are valuable more for their data than their storefronts? Banks are troves of data being mined for profitable strategies. How long before activists see that making their data harder to analyze could be a political tool?

Call it Big Dada: speaking noise to power.  

The unlikely story of a company that built a business selling the recent torrent of digital photos.

The stock photo company Shutterstock has grown tremendously as companies of all sorts realize that they're in the media business. And if you're in the media business, you need visuals. The incumbents in the stock photo space, like Corbis and Getty Images, get expensive if you need to illustrate hundreds of pages on a website.

So, Shutterstock came along with an all-you-can-eat subscription model and said, "Here, use tons of photos from this library of 19 million images." Some of the images are cheesy, but they serve the role that clipart used to: filling a space that you know needs an image with something vaguely topical (see above).

Now, after doubling revenue growth over the last two years, the company is preparing for an IPO.

It's an interesting game that Shutterstock is playing. Individual customers pay an average of about $3 per image. That's dirt cheap, but they make up for it on volume, bringing in $120 million of revenue in 2011. On the producer side, my read of their SEC filing is that they paid out $39.3 million in royalties to 35,000 contributors. So the mean contributor is making something like $1,100 a year by posting their work on the site. (I don't know exactly what the distribution looks like; we only know that no entity received more than 10 percent of the royalties paid out.)

This is clearly a buyer's market. In fact, it's amazing that some entity, i.e. Shutterstock, has been able to build a nine-figure business on the flood of digital imagery emanating from DSLRs across the world given that buyers aren't paying much and sellers aren't making much. They've come up with a cost structure that's low enough to enable them to turn a decent profit. The company's had net income of around $20 million a year since 2008.

From an investment perspective, the most obvious red flag, though, is that their revenues have more than doubled in the last several years, but their net income has been stagnant. They're having to spend a lot more money on sales and marketing than they did back in 2008. If that trend continues, something will have to change on the revenue side.

Even the most cherished skills for manipulating our machines eventually lose their utility.

At some point in the not-too-distant past, the key technological moment in a teenager's life might have been when she learned how to depress the clutch with her left foot, change her car's gear with her right hand, while giving the engine gas with her right foot. As the driver improved, the action became automatic and if you were a particular kind of dumb, rural teenager (like myself), you may have tried to see how fast you could get your car going in a given direction. The keys to this (I may have discovered) are when and how you shift the gears. I felt much mildly unsafe joy in getting from 0 to 60 as quickly as possible in my little Ford Escort.

Nowadays, though, more than 90 percent of American cars come with automatic transmissions. And the deskilling of teen drivers, I'm sure, has begun. One more skill, like efficient rotary phone dialing, will go missing and more more system will become a little easier to use and more opaque.

So it was with great nostalgia that I watched this incredible video of the hundreds of gear shifting clips from all five Fast and Furious movies. I've never actually seen these films and luckily, now that we have this YouTube video, I'll never have to. Imagine what this will look like to the kids of the future, almost all of whom will not know how to "drive stick."

While climate change may be complex and difficult terrain, rediscovering our industrial infrastructure is compelling.

A coal mine in Utah (Reuters).

The Rio+20 UN summit is just around the corner, the latest in a decades-long string of international meetings that attempt to address one of the world's greatest and most global environmental problems.

What's that? Your eyes have already glazed over? Well, you're not alone. I just spent the last couple of days in Seoul for the Global Green Growth Institute Summit, where I spoke during a session on green journalism. A common refrain from both the speakers and the audience was that that people were tired of hearing the same jeremiads about greenhouse gas concentrations, sea level rise, and government panels. Even people who care deeply about the environment are fatigued. This is a particularly acute problem on the Internet where the distribution of a story largely depends on readers to share the narrative with their friends through social media. The standard climate change narratives are not shareable.

But to me the most interesting stories to tell about climate change have never been attempts to elucidate the worst-case scenarios. As an organizing narrative, what climate change offered me was a reason to rediscover and reimagine the world's basic infrastructure. Want to radically improve the efficiency of the transportation system? Well, first you have to understand how and why Americans built the system that we have. You have to ask: What problems were our forebears trying to solve?

For people who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, this is a fascinating topic because we came into a world that had effectively covered its tracks. By the logic of the system, making the industrial processes that power the world opaque was good, so we don't see them in our daily lives. As an early 21^st century American, it is easy to be completely ignorant of the basic systems -- food, water, energy -- that make modern life possible. You just don't have to know.

I think there's a perception that people don't want to read stories about the innards of industrial life, but I've never had a hard time getting people to look at and share these narratives. Take a look at Reddit's Today I Learned section. Among the miscellany, you often find factlets about how the 20^th century's big technological systems work.  Which makes sense because there is just so much to know about the complex networks that deliver what we need. When you really think about everything that needs to happen for a piece of coal in Wyoming to become the electricity that flows into your phone, it's stunning. It doesn't make me mad or depressed, even though burning the coal emits carbon. Rather, I'm filled with awe about the achievements of previous generations, and maybe with some hope that our generation can accomplish something equally ambitious.

Readers aren't stupid. They know when your product is cheap.

For a time, people measured site 'traffic' by the number of page views on that site. So, any time someone opened a page on that publication, it counted as one. Shortly thereafter, people started juicing the pageview stats by throwing up a bunch of pictures and asking people to click through them. It was a lot easier to generate 20 pageviews with 20 photos than it was to bring 20 people to the site by other means.

Of course, the fact that these pageviews are not all worth the same is obvious to everyone: readers, writers, editors, advertisers, advertising agencies, etc. So, many forward-looking media companies like Gawker went away from pageview metrics back in early 2010. The company's head Nick Denton wanted to focus on unique visitors to his site. Many of us have followed suit.

And yet still, today, nearly halfway through 2012, we find this story on The Atlantic Wire. The president of the Washington Post, Steve Hills, told his team that "awards 'don't matter' [and] urged more traffic-driving slideshows."

Now, I've got nothing against slideshows. At their best, I see them as a kind of horizontal storytelling. They are a tool you can deploy to tell certain stories. In fact, as storytelling widgets, I think they're actually underexploited. You can embed them as a sidebar to convey some complicated set of ideas without interrupting the main flow of a narrative. And I've got nothing against a well-curated set of images a la our own In Focus or BuzzFeed's random weirdness.

But that's not what the WaPo's slideshows are all about. Instead, they are seen as a cheap and fast way to produce "traffic." The problem is that they are not producing "traffic" -- which in any other context would mean the number of people in a space -- they are producing page views. This is not a simply academic distinction. The company's president is calling on his workers to juke the stats, effectively. These companies want you to think that more pageviews equal a larger, more engaged audience, but that's a quantitatively and qualitatively shaky proposition.

Quantitatively, sites vary widely in their page views to visitor ratios, and I can tell you from experience that it is much, much easier to drive up the former than the latter. So, when companies are in trouble, what do you think they try to do?

If you're trying to juice page views, your staff will ineluctably be forced to make galleries. Where else can they get a 10x or 20x multiplier on their work? I can guarantee you that will not help you break the kinds of stories or do the kinds of analysis that will keep people coming back. Not only that, but it's demoralizing to your best people, the ones who want to be out there producing their best work.

Worse, readers may click through your slideshow, but they'll hate you a liiitttle bit more than they did when they got to the site. And I bet they'll feel the same way about whatever advertiser was unlucky enough to get stuck on the page with some stupid thing that a reporter did with a little bit of hate in his heart and fingertips.

That won't be visible to you in your analytics, but what reader of the Internet has not felt that pang: "This site doesn't really value me or my time." You can get a page view spike that's actually a negative for your brand. And the more the slideshow spreads because of a clever headline or just because the topic is hot, the farther that brand damage spreads. Congratulations! You juiced the stats with an invisible poison!

I'm sympathetic to the business concerns of the media industry. I really am. But this myth that slideshows are the path to salvation has got to be put into a rocket and sent hurtling into the sun. People know when your product is cheap; there is no "trick" of the web. The sad truth is that to win on the Internet you have to do good reporting and analysis, write great headlines, empower individual staffers to embed themselves in communities that can serve up scoops and distribute finished stories, and understand the social ecosystems that bring visitors to your site.

Just one more pebble of evidence on a growing pile that Silicon Valley has been too focused on small ideas in the social space.

In a blog post today, an early investor in the warehouse robot company, Kiva, detailed what he learned from the venture.

If you haven't been watching the logistics space, Kiva makes squat little robots that work in vast teams in e-commerce fulfillment centers. Instead of humans wandering into vast stacks of merchandise, robots bring that merchandise to the workers. The robots carry out the work according to constantly evolving algorithms that maximize the efficiency of the operation.

They are a very big idea in logistics -- and one that founder Mick Mountz built a company around that Amazon purchased for $775 million in a deal that closed this week.

In today's blog post, Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures noted that Mountz was unable to find funding in Silicon Valley, despite the idea's now-fulfilled promise.

There have been several blog posts, most notably by Peter Thiel and Founders Fund, discussing the venture community's lack of desire to fund transformational companies -those with disruptive technologies taking on big problems.  Mick saw this firsthand. When Mick first started Kiva shortly after the bubble burst, he was unable to raise funding on Sand Hill Road.  This ultimately caused him to move to Boston, where he raised his angel round and eventually his round from Bain Capital Ventures...

The truth is, Kiva simply wasn't a company that could be cranked out in weeks with some seed money, and the technical obstacles inherent in building a solution like this forced Kiva to invest years working on the solution pre GA. However, once they built a working and viable solution, they had the advantage of significant IP and few direct competitors.

There are echoes in Agarwal's post of the no-idea-too-small attitude that I discussed in my recent essay, "The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future."