This week’s episode of Speaking Of… is the CEO and founder of deviantART.

One of the greatest things about TechCrunch is that they celebrate and reward each writer’s own voice rather than forcing every writer to sing from the same hymn-sheet. They encourage differences of opinion. While deviantART isn’t Erick Schonfeld’s cup of tea, I’m definitely a huge fan. I have five pictures up on my wall that I’ve purchased from the site, and they’re absolutely beautiful.

Deviant recently passed the milestone of their 100 millionth submission or “Deviation” as they’re called. I think that’s pretty cool, but what I think is even cooler, is that they just celebrated their 10th year of being in business. I don’t know how old Angelo is, but I imagine that’s about 1/3rd of his life. For a startup entrepreneur, that’s a very long time.

DeviantArt was bootstrapped with 15k in cash, was profitable immediately and the company ran without any additional investment for 7 years. That too is pretty damn cool.  Today on Alexa it has a US traffic rank of 104, making it one of the country’s highest trafficked sites. And yet what’s interesting is that people think of them as being small. Maybe that’s the charm and what’s so special about their site for artists – it doesn’t feel large.

During my interview with Sotira, we traveled back to the site’s roots. DevaintART was originally formed during an era where there was no such thing as a social network. Their artist profile pages, ability to add friendships and commenting system was new and filled an amazing market need for people to connect, share and sell their works. Sotira’s inspiration came from the early days of creating a site for Winamp skins. Their artists made other forms of art such as paintings and were looking for a digital home. Ten years later, you have one of the largest and most vibrant community-driven art sites online.

What advice does Sotira have for new entrepreneurs? For one thing, don’t be weak. He feels that the new crop of entrepreneurs has it a lot easier than he did and needs to do more with very little. He also feels that his generation built platforms while the new generation will be all about marketing, creating the most powerful generation of marketers the world has ever seen.

The title of the episode is Speaking Of… Flying, because of Angelo’s love for flying RC helicopters and the fact that our interview takes place in a cockpit of a plane. How cool is that?

Skype is one of the most important work and social tools I use. It’s nearly perfect. Except that you people are using it to drive me crazy.

It’s made my list of “can’t live without” products for the last five years, and more recently the screen sharing feature has made Skype even more important as a productivity tool.

What I like about Skype is that you can use it for chat, or audio, or video. It’s an extremely versatile tool and most people in the startup world use it as their primary instant messenger application. It’s nowhere near as popular as Windows Live Messenger with 303 million worldwide monthly users, or Yahoo with 79 million. But it’s in a solid fourth place with 18 million users per month, according to Comscore (just the IM feature). The real number is probably far higher than that.

A lot of people know I like to use Skype for communicating, and I get a lot of inbound messages. And I’m starting to go a little crazy from the way people are using it. So it’s time for a friendly primer on appropriate Skype etiquette. Most of these helpful hints will also be useful for people using different IM applications.

It’s not a conversation until both sides are engaged. Just because I haven’t blocked you on Skype doesn’t mean that you have an open door into my brain. The best way to start a Skype conversation is to message something like “are you free?” If I respond then we’re all set. If not, don’t take it personally. And don’t start firing off whatever you want to say anyway. Too many of my Skype interactions look like this:

You: Hey Mike
You: Mike!
You: Are you
You: there?
You: Ok well I really want to talk to you about
You: [long message follows]
You: Hey! r u there?
You: hellooooooooo
You: yo!
You: Whatever. Thanks for ignoring me. Jerk.
Me (an hour later): Um, ok.

Instand messaging is both synchronous and asynchronous. Sometimes a conversation is both. I don’t take offense if someone bails out of a conversation on IM without warning only to reengage an hour or a day later. Neither should you.

Just start a conversation politely, and wait for the other person to say something before jumping in. If they don’t respond, say something like “Looks like you’re not online, I’ll send an email.” And then send an email.

Don’t abuse the Enter button. I know – your message is extremely time sensitive. So instead of typing full sentences you just
hit return in the middle of a sent
ence. Or a word.
That way the reader can know what you’re saying in the beginning of a sentence before you’re even done typing the end!

The default Skype settings are lots of notification messages all the time. Every time you hit enter it beeps my computer. That’s really annoying. Get whole sentences, paragraphs even, down in the box before you hit enter. People will appreciate it.

This is the number one thing that drives me crazy on Skype, as shown in the video above. Full screen it to watch the fun.

Don’t just jump right into a phone call. It’s polite to send a chat message first saying “online? time for a quick Skype call?” It’s annoying when the Skype phone starts ringing randomly. Sometimes in a rush to hit don’t accept I accidentally accept and then there’s some person talking full volume at me, most likely with their video going and demanding that I turn on video too. And all I wanted was a little bit of quiet.

Video calls are not a God given right. Just because you want to do video right now doesn’t mean I want to. I may be in my underwear, for example, which is when I do my best blogging. Feel free to hit video if you want. And if I want to I’ll hit video. If I don’t, why bring it up?

If you do turn on video, note that you have just become part of my informal psychology test. The default is for you to see yourself in the bottom left of the Skype app. Most people constantly check themselves and then change position slightly or whatever. I won’t mention it, but I do find it funny to see what percentage of the call you spend looking at yourself.

Don’t assume confidentiality. The worst thing I ever did was Skype message someone, in a rush, to confirm a story. And it turns out that poor person was using his laptop to give a presentation to a group of co-workers. And my skype message popped up on the screen for everyone to see. Bad stuff followed. Since then I always start off with something benign and wait for them to engage before jumping into anything sensitive. Other people are often looking at my computer screen, too. So be careful with throwing confidential information around until you know who’s reading it.

For more tips on human communication with touchy bloggers, read my post Greetings! And interesting side note, my favorite secret Skype emoticon is (mooning).

My, how quickly things change. It wasn’t much more than a year ago that Apple and Google were happy partners — at least from the public’s perspective — working in tandem to push technology forward at a clipping pace. Google’s search and various apps complemented the iPhone perfectly, and the existing Android phones merely affirmed how much better the iPhone was than everything else on the market. And then everything went to hell.

Late last July, we broke the news that Apple blocked Google’s official Voice application and removed any third-party applications that supported the service, sparking an FCC inquiry into why Google Voice was banned from the iPhone.

Today marks the one year anniversary of Apple’s response to the FCC, in which it gave a remarkably disingenuous explanation as to why Google Voice wasn’t on the iPhone: Apple was still “pondering” the matter. A year later, it apparently still is.

Google Voice is nowhere to be found on the App Store, and while Google has developed an impressive web version for the iPhone, it can’t provide the same performance or ‘native feel’ of a native app and it can’t access the phone’s local contacts directory (at least, not yet). In light of today’s milestone I reached out to both Apple and Google to see if there’s been any progress. Both declined to comment.

Of course, Google Voice itself was never the key issue at play — the service was only available in a private beta when it was blocked from the iPhone. Indeed, most of the outcry stemmed from the fact that Apple was blatantly using its control over the App Store’s walled garden for anti-competitive reasons. Before the Voice fiasco Apple had drawn plenty of heat over its inconsistent App Store approval policies, but most of these removals could be ascribed to the notion that Apple was censoring apps to help maintain the quality and safety of the App Store. That clearly wasn’t the case here: Apple saw Google’s increasing presence on the iPhone as a threat, so it killed it.

Soon after the Google Voice fiasco, I abandoned my iPhone for Android (TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington quit his iPhone too). My rationale had little to do with wanting to use Google Voice more frequently. Rather, it had a lot to do with the knot I got in the pit of my stomach as I imagined just how important Apple’s stranglehold over the iOS platform will become in the next five years and beyond.

The runaway success of the iPhone and the iPad have made it clear that the App Store and iOS are only going to become more ubiquitous. The new Apple TV will soon feature them. In all likelihood Apple will find ways to integrate iOS into form factors that are more competitive with desktop and laptops. Simply put, iOS will be synonymous with computing for a lot of people.

Tim O’Reilly believes that Apple is trying to build a fundamental challenge to the web. A web controlled by a single company. Apple may have intended to use the App Store’s approval system to protect customers and the user experience, but it has the convenient side effect of enabling it to stifle anything that could compete with its own products on the iOS platform. Remember, we are still very early in this game, and the App Store had existed for just one year before Apple gave Google the boot. Is there any doubt it will do the same the next time someone tries to encroach on its turf?

Most of Apple’s ardent defenders will simply tell people like me to go use another, more open platform if they have a problem with the App Store and Apple’s policies. Fair enough. But the time and uncertainty involved in having to switch to a new computer platform are far from trivial, and eventually we may have kids who are raised on iOS — getting them to switch platforms so they can use an innovative new browser or FaceTime competitor or whatever else Apple is quietly blocking from the App Store will be no easy task.  It is this inertia, which is only going to become more difficult to overcome as iOS becomes more successful, that troubles me most. Apple will be able to get away with even more egregious behavior, because its users will want to stick with what they know.

Disclosure: Months after the Google Voice/Apple story broke I had my number ported over to the service (just as Michael did). All users will be getting access to this feature soon.

Image by Brian Hillegas

This article was written by Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower and Leila Janah, CEO of Samasource.

On Thursday July 8, 2010, residents of Oakland took to the streets after a jury convicted police officer Johannes Mehserle of involuntary manslaughter of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old unarmed black youth. Race-related riots are not new to California. But this time, the first people to learn about violent incidents tied to the protests weren't riot cops — they were the Oakland residents behind OscarGrantProtests.com, a website that allowed people near the action to map incidents of violence and view reports from others. Established in a few days, OscarGrantProtests employs crisis mapping technology from a group of open-source developers called Ushahidi, who built the software to report violence in the aftermath of the 2008 disputed Kenyan presidential election.

Ushahidi has radically altered the way we respond to disasters by placing reporting power in the hands of people who might otherwise be victims. Virtually every disaster affecting large groups of people presents the same problem: in the absence of real-time data, emergency responders don't know where to go and when. Technology can solve this problem quickly and cheaply, but governments and relief agencies don't often use it.

Telecommunications infrastructure is now ubiquitous — even in sub-Saharan Africa, eight out of 10 adults have access to a mobile phone. The four billion cell phones in use around the world create massive amounts of data and demand for crowdsourcing technology to aggregate, categorize, and otherwise make sense of it.

Mission 4636 provides a good example of how we can use data from mobile phones to make relief efforts more effective. In the aftermath of the January earthquake that shook the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, millions of Haitians lacked food, water and shelter. Aid workers flooded the capital, but lacked information about who needed help, and where. Voila and Digicel, Haiti's two major telecommunications carriers, had their cell towers up and running immediately following the quake, but huge call volumes exceeded their capacity and resulted in service outages. Text messages offered a solution — texts take up less bandwidth than calls, and are much less affected by network delays.

A group of companies, including Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, CrowdFlower and Samasource, collaborated to set up a text message hotline – "Mission 4636" – supported by the U.S. Department of State. The Haitian government collaborated with radio stations to advertise the hotline, and a few days after the disaster, anyone in Port-au-Prince could send an SMS to a toll-free number, 4636, to request help. The messages were routed to relief crews at the U.S. Coast Guard and the International Red Cross on the ground.

In the first month, Haitians sent more than 40,000 texts to 4636. But Mission 4636 ran into a problem: the messages were in Haitian Creole, but the aid workers designated to respond spoke English. Worse still, many of the texts contained location information that only Haitians familiar with the geography of Port-au-Prince could comprehend, such as references to neighborhoods or popular landmarks. Without a translation service that could operate in real-time, Mission 4636 provided little value to victims of the earthquake.

Traditionally, governments solve problems like these by hiring contractors — after major disasters, it's not uncommon for relief agencies to spend millions of dollars building temporary call centers to handle the flood of new calls. Outsourced translation firms abound, but charge large premiums to deliver translation on a 24/7 basis. In Haiti, crowdsourcing provided an answer: we customized Ushahidi and CrowdFlower's technology to allow hundreds of thousands of Haitians living outside the country to translate texts from Port-au-Prince in real time, and for free, via a public website. News of the site spread quickly through the Haitian Diaspora living abroad, who heard of our efforts through a grassroots media campaign The results were immediate. In the first day, Mission 4636 got a message from an overcrowded hospital that was running out of fuel. Within minutes the message was translated and desperately needed fuel was deployed.

Mass collaboration accomplished more than Creole-English translations — armchair disaster relief agents around the world also collaboratively edited maps and information about Haiti to assist aid workers. A few days after the disaster, Openstreetmap.com, a Wikipedia-like site for amateur map makers, had more accurate maps of Haiti than the U.S. Department of Defense.

Perhaps most critically, crowdsourcing provided hundreds of thousands of data points on what Haitians most needed after the earthquake. Surprisingly, after immediate needs were met, text messages sent to 4636expressed unprompted demand for something other food, water or shelter — people started asking for travay, or work. It became clear that short-form translation could create needed jobs in parts of Haiti flooded with refugees from the disaster. Samasource trained 50 people in Mirebalais, a small rural community in Haiti's Central Plateau, to translate the 4636 messages on the web after Ushahidi volunteers categorized them by priority level. Using netbooks (small, cheap laptops) powered by a generator and a satellite Internet connection, these workers translated tens of thousands of messages, forming a kind of "virtual assembly line" with the Ushahidi volunteers.

The rapid proliferation of broadband, wireless and cell phones, coupled with new crowdsourcing technology, is completely changing the face of disaster relief. Everyone with a computer can provide crucial assistance, sifting through satellite photos, translating messages or updating maps, and most people are happy to do this free of charge — contributing to life-saving relief efforts is a powerful motivator. Mission 4636 cost less than $500,000 to design, build and deploy. At a fraction of the cost of most relief budgets, crowdsourcing can solve coordination problems on the ground. Governments and aid agencies should make it a central part of future disaster response efforts.

In round #856 of the Print vs. Web saga, Newsweek has come up with the above infographic/artifact. At least they didn’t call it “Old Books Vs. New Books.”

While Nicholas Negroponte earlier this month claimed that the physical book would be dead in five years, the more generous folks at Newsweek still think that the book has some fight left.

Putting forth such vague statements such as “quality hardcover books (in direct light) are still easiest on the eye,” and the frightening because it’s true “$249.2 million vs. $29.3 million in publishers sales totals,” the infographic seems really unsure about the future.

Let me help you out here Newsweek. No matter what the numbers say right now, in 2010, I can pretty much guarantee that in 2020 the advantage will lean heavy towards the E-book side of the graph.

Well maybe not the Jane Austen part.

Image: Newsweek

Much ink has been spilled, and many a pixel lit, on objects to which people feel an unreasonable loyalty. Blood, too, depending on whether you’re willing to classify the likes of Crusaders and soccer hooligans as fanboys. And why not? These rivalries, from the biblical to the forum-bound, all have a certain distinctive unreason to them. Yet there is nothing more reasonable than sticking by your choices, your judgments, your perceptions — your brands.

So how do things get so venomous? It seems like pitchforks are issued with every browser these days. Let’s see if we can make sense of why so many of us end up escalating to such absurd heights something so clearly trivial.

Continue reading…

Netlog, the company that sagely changed its name from Facebox in 2007, is taking this gaming thing pretty seriously. While the bread and butter of the Belgium-based operation is still social— with 69 million members on its youth-centric social network— gaming is now nearly 20% of revenues and climbing, according to Netlog founder, Lorenz Bogaert.

Twenty percent is fairly significant when you consider that its gaming operation, Gatcha!, launched just 8 months ago. At its core, Gatcha! is a gaming distribution platform. The service creates its own in-house games but the bulk of its business is helping other developers add social layers to their games and achieve distribution across the major social networks such as Facebook and Netlog. Gatcha! gets a cut of the developer’s advertising deals and those highly lucrative micro-transactions, the developers get Gatcha!’s support and easy entry into Europe’s market— Bogaert says they can get a developer in front of a large European audience within 24 hours.

Gatcha! has been working with several European-based game developers like Sakari Games and Electronic Arts’ Playfish and now, Bogaert says, they’re ready to put more muscle in the US market. He has no desire to tackle America’s social network market with Netlog, but he sees real opportunity for gaming partnerships. Last week, Bogaert flew to San Francisco to meet with a few key players in the industry and to look into opening a new office dedicated to Gatcha! and gaming (this will be Netlog’s first US office). He hasn’t signed a lease yet, but he says don’t be surprised if you hear of an announcement soon.

That’s not to say that Netlog is giving up on Netlog, its social website. The company is planning 40-50 new hires this year, half will go to Gatcha! and the other half will be dedicated to expanding the social network (a sort of Euro-heavy Myspace, geared towards the 14-24 demographic). Bogaert understands he’s in a challenging field— lots of big players (like Facebook) are gaining traction abroad and by targeting a younger audience, his typical user is only engaged for a certain amount of time before s/he graduates to a different social network. He’s not ready to broaden the appeal of Netlog just yet (although he’s looking at options), but Bogaert is planning to aggressively hit his key European markets and double-up efforts in the Middle East.

Since 60% of Netlog’s traffic comes from less than a dozen countries— most significantly from France, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg— the company plans to change  its strategy this year by shifting resources to the most important markets. That means new offices in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, France and Milan (which is already in the opening phase).

However, the question I find really interesting here is: what Netlog will be able to do in the Middle East? The network is getting a lot of new users from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, with the number of monthly uniques from the Middle East growing 5 to 10% per month. That translates to roughly 2 million uniques per month. Yes, it’s still a small fraction of Netlog’s total uniques (roughly 30 million per month). but 5-10% is an exciting pace, compared to Europe/s more languid 1-2%. Bogaert seems to think so, Netlog has plans to open a Dubai office very soon.

Our video interviews with Bogaert below:

At an event on Wednesday, Facebook unveiled Places, their new location element that allows users to check-in to venues. Obviously, this mimics the core feature of smaller startups like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and dozens of others. The move of the big boys into this space was inevitable, but it is somewhat surprising that it has taken this long. The next question may be: will Twitter follow suit?

It was almost exactly one year ago to the day that Twitter first announced their intentions to enter the location space. At the time, this simply meant that the API would start supporting longitude and latitude coordinates attached to tweets which third-party developers could expose if they chose to. Now, obviously, twitter.com has this element baked in, as does Twitter for iPhone (the app which Twitter purchased that has long had the geotagging feature). But this is still just a layer of meta data, there is no explicit way to “check-in” as it were.

Of course, you could argue that Twitter doesn’t need any kind of check-in functionality because geotagged tweets are essentially that. The problem right now is that on the mobile app side of things, Twitter isn’t doing a good enough job to tie tweets to specific venues rather than just coordinates. They’re working on this — thanks to a deal with Localeze (which Facebook is also using), Twitter has a pretty robust places database that you can see on both twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com. But it’s not where it needs to be yet.

And so many people who are using geolocation on Twitter are stuck simply tagging (or “checking-in to”) a set of coordinates. (Even Buzz gets this right.)

It’s the tie-in with actual places that right now appears to be the real future of monetizing geotagging actions in this space. Foursquare obviously knows that, and you have the presume Facebook does too. Even more so than location-based coupons, customer loyalty programs make a lot of sense for businesses and the place-based check-in is the way (at least for now) to make that happen.

Given the check-in hype, it shouldn’t be surprising that people are working on building check-in layers on top of Twitter. Thanks to their nice geolocation API, Twitter can take in check-in data from services like Foursquare and Gowalla and tie it in. As Facebook ramps up, Twitter is the service that’s the go-to location platform aggregating these check-ins. But again, what about a more direct way to check-in on top of Twitter?

That’s what Firefly is all about. Their tagline says it all: The Twitter Check-in Service. While it soft-launched at our TechCrunch Disrupt event in May, they finally have their iPhone app ready to go and up to speed. With it, you simply sign in with your Twitter account and you can start checking-in to nearby venues.

You can also see where your Twitter friends are based on their Firefly check-ins or based on their latest geotagged tweets. That’s a nice touch. And you can filter location to the city, neighborhood, or “nearest” level.

Obviously, when you check-in through Firefly, the check-in is tweeted out — again, that’s the point of the service: a check-in service on top of Twitter. But what’s nice is that they’ve added a layer to make it more than just about checking-in — it’s also about pictures.

Before you check-in anywhere, Firefly asks if you’d like to attach a picture to the check-in. It seems that the service is well aware that plenty of Twitter users get annoyed when people push their check-ins to Twitter from other services. And since that’s all Firefly was supposed to be, they added this picture element to give users something more interesting. (Though you can still check-in without attaching a picture.)

Overall, it’s a very nice execution of check-ins on top of Twitter. But as I stated above, the big question is: will Twitter get into this game themselves? While up until now they’ve said they don’t intend to, you shouldn’t put it past them — especially given Facebook’s recent moves. But I suspect for now that they’ll keep doing what they’re currently doing while at the same time expanding the functionality of geotagging tweets. For example, I’m sure actual places are going to play a more key role in tweets in the future.

You can check out Firefly here in the App Store. It’s a free download.

Editor’s note: Jonathan Askin is Associate Professor of Clinical Law at Brooklyn Law School and Founding Director of the Brooklyn Law and Incubator Policy Clinic (BLIP). He previously worked at the FCC and for the Obama campaign on telecommuncation policy.

I can't help but analogize Google's role in the Net Neutrality Wars with Anakin's shift to the Dark Side in Star Wars.

I'm watching the discussion about the policy framework to govern the Internet with the repelled fascination of a guy who, as a child, loved Star Wars Episodes 4-6 and now, as an adult, begrudgingly watches Episodes 1-3.

In the present drama, Verizon plays the Emperor, Google plays Anakin, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plays the Old Republic, and Internet-Company-Not-Yet-Born might play Luke Skywalker—if the FCC is not blinded by the Verizon-Google Jedi mind trick and can formulate a forward-looking Internet policy framework that will foster competition and innovation.

After the Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed, the FCC labored to crack open the Bell Empire to competition. At the time, competitive entry required vigilant oversight by the regulators of the Old Republic to ensure that the Bell companies provided their competitors with fair wholesale access to the Bells' physical network. Competitive telecommunications prospered briefly, but were not to last, as the Old Republic's oversight became less effectual and the formerly competitive telephone carriers reconsolidated into a new Empire, with sights set on conquering the nascent Internet.

As the policy battles waged in Washington, D.C., Google, like a young Anakin, emerged with the motto "Don't Be Evil." Google—the force strong within it—entered the policy fray, serving as the leading voice for Internet startups. It grew into a formidable counterbalance to the Bell lobbying machine that had, for decades, dictated public policy at the FCC.

Unlike the competitive entrants of the 1990s, Google and other Internet startups did not advocate for physical access to the Bell network. Instead, the rise of the Internet made it possible to provide competitive communications services by simply requiring the Bells and other Internet access providers to guarantee that they would not discriminate.

After years of championing open Internet policies, Google is now professing to have brokered a meaningful deal with Verizon, a leading opponent of net neutrality. The proposed solution, however, could prove devastating to smaller Internet companies and consumers seeking competitive and innovative offerings. The Verizon-Google "compromise" does not apply to mobile services. But like the Jedi master who said, "These are not the Droids you're looking for," Verizon and Google conceal that mobile communications is the future.

The "compromise" also allows carriers to diverge from the net neutrality commitment to provide "managed services," an undefined carve-out that opens the door to discrimination among companies. Google's "compromise" serves only to ensure that Google is not harmed and does nothing to protect the Internet companies of the future. It is as if Anakin were ambivalent about Luke's birth and survival.

I am a weary servant of the Old Republic—a former FCC staffer who had tried to inject competition and innovation into telecommunications markets during the Clinton years, and then took another brief stab as Chair of the Internet Governance Working Group of the Tech, Media and Telecom Committee for the Obama campaign. I wonder if Google believes the deal is ultimately in the best interest of the Internet? Maybe Anakin believed that his acceptance of the Dark Side was ultimately in the best interest of the Galaxy.

To be fair, these comments were composed on my Google-enabled Droid X running on Verizon's mobile network. Apparently, Google was able to slip this Droid into the Empire's network, and maybe this Droid is not among the "droids they are looking for," if I may stretch my analogy to its breaking point. But will Luke Skywalker be able to slip his droid into the empire ten years from now? Without a policy framework that fosters innovation and competition from the would-be innovators and entrepreneurs of tomorrow, we might never see Luke with his Droid-of-Tomorrow.

Over several years I took my nephew to see Star Wars Episodes 1-3. When Anakin turned to the Dark Side, my nephew was conflicted, but still loved Anakin. When I asked him who he wanted to win—Anakin or Obi-Wan—he said Anakin without hesitation. He had grown up with Anakin and a belief that Anakin was our champion. I suspect that many of us who grew up with Google still believe that Google will be our champion for an open and innovative Internet. Like my nephew, we want to believe that underneath Vader, Anakin and the greater good will prevail. We want to believe that Google will adhere to its founding principle: "Don't Be Evil."

SEO consultant Rob Ousbey has noticed an interesting thing happening to his search results, live updates of results as he types in every letter.

Google has confirmed to TechCrunch that the above video is in fact real. Is this capability imminent? Sources familiar with Google product developments could not say whether imminent productization in the cards.

So basically this guy ran into a pretty significant Google experiment in the wild. Seeing as though only Ousbey has made noise about this so far, it’s safe to assume that it’s being rolled out to only a tiny fraction of users.

From Gabriel Stricker, Google spokesperson:

“At any given time we are running between 50-200 search experiments. You can learn more on our blog.”

It seems very possible limited bandwidth or CPU could slow live search updating interactions and as to what this means for products like Google Ad Words who knows? Perhaps this is why Google is running these tests?

George Orwell’s novel 1984 begins with Winston Smith, the main character, seeing posters saying BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.  In 2010, that could be replaced with FACEBOOK IS WATCHING YOU.  Or rather, YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK ARE WATCHING YOU.  You and your friends can now post where you are and share this information, if you so chose.

Facebook showed off the power of this new location feature at a launch event this week with a giant projection of a U.S. map showing where people were checking in just moments after Places launched.  MG Siegler called it “Facebook’s Awesome Dark Knight-Esque Live Check-In Display.”  But it was one of the scariest things I’ve seen.

Facebook only showed people’s first names, but their databases know your last names and so much more about you.  To me, it looked exactly what the inside of Orwell’s Ministry of Love would have looked like. That government group was responsible for identifying and monitoring dissidents.

Of course, there are many important differences. Facebook is not the government.  Your location information is voluntarily given by you or your friends, not obtained from a vast network of telescreens (more on that later in the post.)  And, the information is kept private… well maybe.  Your friends can check you in without you knowing it until after the fact.

In a post yesterday, MG said “Places is actually pretty great — potentially”, but he acknowledged “the friend tagging thing is troubling to a lot of people (particularly because of the somewhat confusing three states.)” Agreed. He also wondered how long it would be until the big Facebook location backlash. Sorry, MG, I think it’s started.

I expect we will learn over time how many users allow friends to tag you, turn Places off, or stick to the default limbo land, where most users are now. Sure, some users are bound to be confused and their intentions won’t match their settings, resulting in some unhappy users. How long will it take for all of Facebook’s more than 500 million users to figure it out?

But, I want to focus on users who opt-in to allow tagging. Whether they are using location services to provide the “missing link between social networks and the real world” or because of peer pressure, do they realize or care they have just given up one last piece of their privacy? And that loss was initiated by themselves or their friends, people they trust.

Michael Arrington has argued that “privacy is already really, really dead.” He wrote

Everything we do, everything we buy, everywhere we go is tracked and sitting in a database somewhere. Our location via our phone, or our car GPS. Our credit card transactions. Everything.

Fair point. Sounds very 1984 already. But, in the actions he cited, the loss of privacy is mostly a side effect. It’s our choice to buy something, but the capturing of the credit card data is a side effect we have to endure. Using Places, the point is to lose some of your privacy — the quality or condition of being secluded from the presence or view of others — by voluntarily handing over your location information.

One commenter on Twitter wrote: “If the government were to go all “1984,” it’d be through Facebook. We’re all voluntarily signing away our privacy. Check your settings!”

The telescreen played a big role in Orwell’s 1984:

The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.

We all assumed the telescreen was the television. There was a telescreen in Winston Smith’s living room. But, there were also many telescreens out in public. I think the iPhone or a smartphone could be considered a telescreen too.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course
no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How
often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual
wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all
the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted
to. You had to live–did live, from habit that became instinct–in the
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
darkness, every movement scrutinized.

That sounds like a smartphone plus Google Maps with Street View.  We do turn off our TV’s, but for many, it’s much harder to turn our phones off. Now we are both transmitting and receiving information with these mobile devices. And with Places on, we can be watched (tagged) at any given moment. We are certainly not in a place where they watch everybody all the time, but rather we are all watching each other.

I know many users will love Places and what it can do. They won’t care about the loss of privacy. Some of us, including me, still value the tiny amount of privacy we still have. We don’t want to be a dot appearing on Facebook’s live map. So, we’ll choose to opt-out for now.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post penned by Michael Cole, Managing Director of RightSite.asia, China’s largest online marketplace for commercial and industrial real estate. Cole has also successfully launched, grown and profitably exited from media ventures in China.

After a modest amount of time observing China’s economy it becomes clear that the government likes to arrange organized competition in industries it considers strategic. Thus the country gets three major airlines—China Eastern, China Southern and Air China—as well as three major mobile phone networks in China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom.

Now, with the recent announcement of two major new search engine companies, it appears that search is joining transportation, phone networks and Internet service providers as a strategic industry to be managed more directly by the government. And maybe China will soon have three search giants to match up with its telephone and airline triplets.

The first search engine deal announced two weeks ago was an alliance between ecommerce giant Alibaba and online portal Sohu to upgrade Sohu’s existing search product, Sogou.com. In a statement on Monday, August 9th, Sohu announced that Alibaba and Yunfeng, an investment fund cofounded by Alibaba’s chairman, Jack Ma, would be buying 16 percent of Sogou.

Another 16 percent of the company would be invested by a fund affiliated with Sohu chaiman Charles Zhang. And Sogou could use the help. In a search market dominated by Baidu with a 70% share, and Google with 24.2%, Sogou currently ranks third, but has only 0.8% market share according to recent market research by third party analysts.

The second, and more surprising deal was a link-up announced two Fridays ago between Xinhua and China Mobile to start yet another search engine. Xinhua, a news agency belonging to the central government which also acts as a propaganda organ and sometimes intelligence gathering body, and China’s largest cellular carrier seem like unusual partners for an Internet venture, and the exact terms of the transaction have yet to be announced.

The New York Times described the deal as follows:

In an apparent bid to extend its control over the Internet and cash in on the rapid growth of mobile devices, China plans to create a government-controlled search engine.

While these two new search engine ventures being announced in a single week, particularly so closely following the recent Google controversy, could be a coincidence, very few major transactions in an economy that is still largely government-controlled happen in such a random way.

Although Baidu, Sohu and Alibaba are all private companies, and thus very different creatures from state-owned enterprises such as China Mobile or the airlines, in practice China’s government requires any large media enterprise to be closely aligned with the bureaucracy and these major firms often serve as unofficial market champions for the nation, particularly once they have gone public and become internationally recognizable symbols of the country’s media markets.

At the same time, the government is careful not to have any market dominated too much by a single company and it actively works to encourage (and organize) some competition among industry heavyweights. Thus the airline industry was split into three companies from a single parent, and part of the 3G market was set aside for the lesser cell phone players, China Unicom and China Telecom.

Now a similar scenario seems to be appearing in search and it most likely means that the government is taking search engines seriously as a strategic national interest. (Bad news if you are Google). In a story that Xinhua published regarding its new joint venture with China Mobile, the news agency portrayed its search engine enterprise in a directly political manner.

According to the report, the new search engine is intended to “better serve the work of the Party and the nation and to practically protect national interests … and to expand the reach and the ability in and outside China of the country's mainstream media to guide public opinion."

While that mission statement would seem to doom the new search product with consumers, the massive market penetration of China Mobile could give the new project a significant advantage with mobile users.

While it is too early to tell what will happen in China’s search market, if the moves last week were officially sanctioned measures to "harmonize" the market, there could be some moves in the pipeline to curb Baidu’s dominance and provide a boost to the new players. This could take the form of reserving parts of newly developing markets for the newcomers or through other measures designed to keep a perceived competitive balance in the market.

The other side of this equation is that if this recognition of search as a strategic industry is happening as speculated here, then opportunities for Google or other international companies to achieve gains in the market are likely to all but disappear.

While China welcomes foreign investment in most industries, it is still ambivalent about international involvement in the media sector, particularly with regard to consumer-facing products. Anything which smacks of mass media is likely to be all but closed off to foreign involvement, and search, with its ability to lead users to new information may be seen as too strategic to be left to the open market.