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There’s been no shortage of stories lately alleging that Wikipedia moderators have fascist tendencies, but a new case goes one step further. A German politician has filed charges against Wikipedia alleging that the worlds most famous UGC site promotes Nazism.

Katina Schubert, a deputy leader of the Left Party (Die Linke) told reporters that she had filed the charge on the grounds that Wikipedia’s German site contained too much Nazi symbolism with a particular fetish towards the Hitler Youth movement.

Schubert told Reuters (via SMH) that “The extent and frequency of the symbols on it goes beyond what is needed for documentation and political education…This isn’t about restricting freedom of opinion, it’s about examining what the limits are.”

Schubert went on to claim that there may be a Nazi plot afoot on Wikipedia itself: “There are signs neo-Nazis are trying to take advantage of such structures, and this needs to be stopped.”

Wikipedia Germany denied the allegations, saying that the imagery used was used for educational purposes. Use of Nazi symbols except for educational purposes is illegal in Germany.

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SmugMug has released a set of new features that further cements itself as a first-rate photo sharing website.

The first of these constitutes just a user interface upgrade, but a very attractive one at that. SmugMug realizes that users often change the size of their browser windows - and switch between devices with differently sized screens - so it has implemented dynamic resizing of photos, a feature it’s calling “SmugMungous”.

Change the size of your browser window and the photo that you are viewing will automatically get bigger or smaller while preserving its quality and resolution. The rest of the page’s interface will accommodate the new size as well, with thumbnails appearing or disappearing dynamically to fill the additional or remaining space. SmugMug’s not only about photos, though; videos hosted by the service will now also resize automatically in response to changes in the browser’s window size.

There are a few other new features related to video in particular. High definition video encoded in H.264 and with a maximum size of 1280×720 can now be uploaded to and played through SmugMug using Quicktime (and, soon, Flash). When you upload high resolution video, it will automatically be encoded in a variety of sizes (”Web”, “iPod/DVD”, and “HiDef”) so you can play it back in a variety of settings.

Video collections that you share publicly can now be exported to iTunes as podcasts so that family members and friends can watch up-to-date videos on their computers and play them on their Apple handhelds. And finally, SmugMug’s iPhone interface now supports video so you can browse and play videos through Quicktime on your phone.

SmugMug, a family-run business that will celebrate its fifth year anniversary this Friday, says it has over 45,000 paying customers and makes over $10M in revenue per year. There are no free accounts on SmugMug; users must pay a minimum of $40 per year, but they have access to unlimited storage and bandwidth. The company has yet to take any outside money, and seeing how well things are going, probably won’t.

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Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/196463080/

Stealth startup Hyphen-8 has been beta testing their new mobile social network called Lime Juice in San Francisco since October.

Using your phone to create or enhance real world interactions is a killer application, but no one has cracked the nut yet. The reason is that the network is useless until it achieves a critical mass of users who are online and using the application via their mobile phone. If no one else is online, there’s little point in you being online, either. And presence detection is another (technical) problem. Even if people have joined the network, how do you know when they are near you?

But once it does happen, look out. You could be in a bar and see who’s single, who thinks you’re cute, who wants to talk to you, etc. (if they choose to share that information). Forget meeting via an online dating site and then organizing an awkward in person meeting that usually falls flat. Instead, you can do the online an real world thing simultaneously.

We’ve kept an eye on the new startups launching in this space. Check out Mig33, ZYB, Mocospace, Aka-Aki, Nokia Sensor, Dodgeball, Mobiluck, MeetMoi and Imity, just to get warmed up. But none of them yet have critical mass (Mig33, however, is turning into a very large cheap VOIP provider on the side).

LimeJuice now joins the group with a unique product. Users can actually join on the fly, via SMS. And the company is sponsoring party after party at bars and clubs in San Francisco to get users to try out the product with lots of others at the same time. The test results are encouraging - people are using it. A lot.

How It Works

The goal is to allow people in a bar or other social gathering to learn a little about the people around them, and flirt via the mobile network as a way to break the ice. The details are what makes LimeJuice interesting. It’s dead simple to join and use.

First, users can register for the service via SMS. That means if just one person in a bar is a member or even knows about the service, they can tell others and quickly get a core group to join. When you create an account, you tell it something distinctive about yourself (tall blonde, red dress!) so that people searching will be able to quickly know who you are. When you go to another event later on, you simple update the description for the evening).

Second, all of the key interaction (for now) happens via SMS. So every phone is ready to go. No need to download a java app or even go to a web page. Just send a text message to the service along with the identifier of the person you want to talk to (which you can get via search), and the message is sent to them.

Third, even though people are using the service to send text messages back and forth, phone numbers are not exchanged. LimeJuice sits in the middle, and you can block someone easily.

Beta Events

LimeJuice has seen a good level of participation at the handful of events they’ve sponsored. An average of 40-50 people participate per event. They spend about 1.5 hours each using the service over the course of the evening and average ten text messages sent per person (some people send as many as 180 text messages). At one event, over 2,500 messages were sent to the service from participants.

For now the company will continue to sponsor events in San Francisco, hopefully building up a core user base that will begin to spread out and get others to join. If/when they get a lot of people in San Francisco to use the service, they’ll then expand to other cities.

The company, founded by Tobin Van Pelt and John Garrett, is based in San Francisco and has four employees. They’ve self funded to date with $100,000 and are currently pitching for a Series A round of funding.

Hyphen 8

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“A professional community of top global brands dedicated to promoting best practices in corporate blogging” have formed The Blog Council, a “forum for executives to meet one another in a private, vendor-free environment and share tactics, offer advice based on past experience, and develop standards-based best practices as a model for other corporate blogs.”

Initial members include AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, and Wells Fargo.

The crux of the idea is that big businesses can get together and talk blogging, from the challenges corporate blogging presents from a governance perspective, through to management and policy development .

The reaction to the formation of the Blog Council has been mixed; some such as Lionel Menchaca, Digital Media Manager at Dell and Rick Calvert at BlogWorldExpo think its a great idea, where as others including Dave Taylor thinking its a poor idea, with Taylor writing

My translation: “we’re all clueless, but don’t want anyone to realize just how unplugged our organizations have become from the world of “marketing 2.0″, so we created a club so our ignorance can be shielded from public eyes.”

I’m not so sure. My natural reaction against the Council is based on its name; “The Blog Council” sounds like it owns blogging or has some sort of superior position over the medium, where as it is nothing of the sort. Something such as the Corporate Blogging Association or similar would have suited the purpose far more better than what they’ve picked. In terms of big companies getting together under a formal structure to discuss blogging they’re entitled to do so but you’d have to ask why? Are they, as Dave Taylor suggests, soo clueless that they need to set up a separate body to understand new media marketing?

The Blog Council’s website is here; ultimately you can be the judge.

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While Facebook’s Beacon program has been drawing the ire of many people because of the privacy issues surrounding it, advertisers might be equally concerned about whether Beacon is inflating Facebook’s overall visitor and traffic numbers. Yesterday, Compete reported that Facebook’s unique visitors went up 20 percent in the month of November, after a controversial dip in September and practically zero growth in October. Could the increase have had anything to do with the launch of Beacon in early November?

In a word, yes. Every time someone visits a Facebook Beacon partner (there were 40 of them at the time of the announcement) and performs a pre-defined action like writing a review or rating a hotel, a little Beacon toast pops up alerting you that your action is being sent to Facebook. That pop-up is actually coming from Facebook, and in some cases may be counted as a Facebook page even though the person seeing it does not normally click through to Facebook. It is triggered by a tag on the partner’s page known as an iFrame, which then tells your browser to load a page from Facebook within the site you happen to be visiting. This occurs even when a non-Facebook member visits that page and performs the same action. In that case, it creates a ghost iFrame, though, because the viewer does not see anything. But data is still sent to Facebook.

I called up Jay Meattle at Compete, who wrote the post, and he confirmed that of the 29.2 million unique visitors Compete counted for Facebook in November, those could also include visitors to Facebook iFrame “pages,” which are really nothing more than a pop-up on a partner site. So, for instance, if you write a review on Yelp, a Beacon partner, a JavaScript is executed for all users writing a review (http://www.facebook.com/beacon/beacon.js.php) and an iFrame is launched (http://www.facebook.com/beacon/auth_iframe.php). That review on Yelp can now count as a unique visitor on Facebook.

So how many Beacon iFrames “visits” did Compete mix up in its numbers? Meattle says that 2.3 million people triggered a Beacon iFrame in November. But he wasn’t able to tell me what the overlap is because a portion of those 2.3 million people could have already been counted as Facebook visitors when they visited Facebook previously, and thus would not be counted again. The Beacon pop-up would be treated in that case like any other Facebook page. (That is, after the first one, it would count towards page views, but not towards unique visitors). But remember, these iFrames are triggered by non-Facebook members as well who never go to Facebook proper. That would explain why Facebook had such a huge jump in visitors in November. If all 2.3 million of those iFrame visitors were counted improperly as part of Facebook’s total, that would account for nearly half of the 4.9 million jump in unique visitors measured by Compete.

Another strange thing about the Compete numbers is that they show unique visitors going up by 20 percent but page views only going up 2.58 percent. That could be due to lots of things, like Facebook users doing more stuff with apps on a single page, clicking off to Websites controlled by application providers, or Facebook just becoming more efficient in not making you click around as much to do the same things. But I wonder if that is partly Beacon-related as well.

Will wel see the same inflation in comScore’s November numbers when they come out next week, or in other measuring services such as Quantcast, HitWise, or Alexa. The folks at comScore assure me that they filter out any traffic or pages not requested by users such as pop-ups, so it might not be an issue for them. I don’t know how the other measuring services treat iFrames. But in an age when Websites are interchanging so much data and so many actual applications, where one begins and the other one ends is becoming blurred. Do page views even matter anymore? Do uniques? Maybe it is time for some new metrics.

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So I thought it was interesting and humorous when we discovered that Facebook, which will more than double the number of employees to 700 next year, was grabbing Google employees at an alarming rate - at least ten high profile hires so far, and 2-4 more each month.

But what isn’t so funny is that they are poaching from other startups and companies much closer to my heart. Namely, us. Today I found out that they’ve hired our product manager for Crunchbase, Ben Meyer. Ben was one of our star interns over the summer, and we kept him on in a full time role when the internship ended. We don’t have many people here at TechCrunch, and everyone is key. Losing Ben is very, very hard.

But apparently the gravitational pull of Facebook and their stock options was enough to lure him away from TechCrunch. Congratulations to Ben, who will be missed but will do well in his new job (and, I hope, give us internal access to Facebook’s admin system ).

But I am not happy at all with Facebook about this. Stay the hell away from our employees, Facebook, and fill your employment quotas elsewhere. Anyone else, and I declare war.

On a completely unrelated note, if anyone has a lead on a highly negative Facebook story, send it our way. Jerks.

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Social network for night owls MingleNow appears to have been a victim of Yahoo’s recent acquisition of BlueLithium. According to a post on the service’s blog, MingleNow will officially close on January 7th. No official explanation has been made for the closure. We assume that Yahoo simply isn’t interested in maintaining another social network, especially since its purchase of BlueLithium was for its ad network, not its other holdings. See our early coverage of MingleNow here. The product is now in the deadpool.

Via RWW

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It’s only been about a month since Google launched OpenSocial, its development platform for social networking applications. But already developers are frustrated with how half-baked the whole thing is. Russ Whitman, the founder of MediaPops, a startup that launched at TechCrunch 40, reports to us in an e-mail:

While we were initially very excited, we have learned the hard way just how limited the release truly is. My dev group has been discussing the issues in the Google forum trying to figure out how to build our service through OpenSocial. From our experience its not even a beta platform. The concept of “write once, distribute broadly” is not accurate and core functionality components are missing.

Its clear we are pre-Beta at this point, with Google telling developers they are hoping to launch 1.0 early next year. Any company hoping to leverage Open Social as a means to grow its user base similarly to the Facebook growth model will need to wait at least until February to get started, if its ready then. In the end my hope is that Open Social becomes more than just hype to compete with Facebook.

In our opinion the fundamental problem lies in the core value of Open Social - it’s a unique partnership between Google, Containers/Hosts, and Developers. Getting all on the same page is going to be a ton of work. The opportunity is clear, but the path to get there will be difficult for sure. We remain excited about the vision, but are disappointed with the current state of the union. It’s clear that they announced too soon, and clearly Open Social is NOT Open for Business. (sigh)

Whitman is not alone in this assessment. Even as Google was preparing to launch OpenSocial, back when it was codenamed Maka-Maka, developers were telling me that Google needed “more time” and that the launch was “a challenge for them.” More recently, here is a developer thread on Google Groups about the problems with the “write once, run anywhere” part of OpenSocial. And just last Friday, Google quietly acknowledged how much work it still has to do to get OpenSocial up and running in a meaningful way when a Google employee posted this lengthy to-do list on Google Groups titled “What’s up with OpenSocial?”

The post is an attempt to address developer concerns. But it is clear from the laundry list that Google has a long way to go before OpenSocial can be taken seriously. The post addresses issues with security, navigation, privacy, basic user-interface features, standardizing profiles across all apps, timing of the more-baked 1.0 launch, versioning, API specifications, and the lack of an application directory. Google has yet to determine such basic things as “what features a container supports” (container is Googlespeak for a site that hosts OpenSocial applications), standards for passing data between profile and canvas pages, or even how to reserve a name and URL for an OpenSocial app.

Given all the uproar around Facebook’s Beacon project and how it sends data about members willy-nilly across the Web, Google should make sure it doesn’t fall into the same trap as well. Might as well add it to the list.

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This post at The Onion’s A.V. Club blog rails against “Everything Sucksism.”

Another reason I’m pursuing this project is to refute what I like to call the “Everything Sucksism” afflicting popular culture, a cheap adolescent nihilism that delights in taking down celebrities and pop-culture entities that are already walking punchlines. “Everything Sucksism” reigns on E! and VH-1, where seemingly half the shows (especially those with “Awesomely Bad” in the title) consist of anonymous C-listers making agonizingly banal, snidely delivered comments about tacky celebrities and failed projects. Boy, that K-Fed isn’t a very good rapper! That Britney Spears sure is unencumbered by excesses of dignity and intelligence! Isn’t Paris Hilton worthless!? Wasn’t hair-metal lame?! Milli Vanilli sure was cheesy! And what’s up with The Macarena? What were we thinking?

Everything sucksism is ugly, it’s cheap, it contributes nothing of value to popular culture and worst of all, it’s not funny. Everything sucksism reduces all of human endeavor to a cheap punchline.

Good stuff. But am I the only one who thinks this is a bit pot-kettle-black coming from The Onion? You know, the publication that runs a column called “The Hater” which each week features “The Tolerability Index” (“A Guide To What We’re Barely Putting Up With This Week”).

Because, you know, that’s the spectrum of opinions: tolerable to unbearable. God forbid you actually like something. Thank goodness The Onion’s staying away from “anonymous C-listers making agonizingly banal, snidely delivered comments about tacky celebrities and failed projects.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/732-everything-sucksism-and-the-onion

Freewebs is taking a step back from its personal website network and expanding into a social media portfolio company under the name Webs.com. The domain will serve as a hub for its new web properties, including recently launched social publishing site Pagii and Freewebs. The site will also include a new property, the “Social Gaming Network” (SGN).

SGN is a game developer that builds applications for social networks. Currently, they’re making games just for Facebook, although Open Social integration seems a no-brainer. Their games include Warbook, Super Snake, and Blocky, as well as two recently purchased games with over a million installs, Street Race and Fight Club (for an undisclosed sum). You can add each of the games to your profile like any other app, which turns out to be a bit of a pain. I’ve started glossing over the Facebook permissions checklist. Each of the games is a decent way to waste away your work day on Facebook, but Blocky took up the most of my time.

The new network makes a lot of sense. In essence, Webs is doing what other casual gaming services like Kongregate and King.com are already doing off the site, but using an existing social network instead of building one. The games leverage the network in varying degrees. Warbook is a feudal RPG that lets you make allies or fight your friends kingdoms. Snake is understandably more solitary. But all the games encourage users to play more games by earning points for virtual goods, or bragging rights by pw0ning their friends on the leaderboard.

Freewebs

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