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SpeedDate, the online dating site that throws singles in a series of rapid dating sessions, has hijacked over 500,000 users from at least three Facebook applications. Users are logging on to Facebook to find that the applications they’ve had installed for months have been replaced with SpeedDate without being asked to opt-in.

As far as we can tell, all three modified applications were developed by HappyAppy, so it’s likely that SpeedDate either acquired the company with the $6 million it raised last month or the two companies share the same development team. Users are being sent brief messages notifying them that their applications have been renamed and “improved”, but only after the switch has been made without their consent.

The three affected applications are:

• Have You Ever??? (353,217 monthly active users)
• Would You Rather (158,291)
• Romantic Gifts (28,164)

In effect each of these applications has acted as a Trojan Horse, getting install permissions under false pretenses only to pull the bait-and-switch later on. Dozens of users have exhibited outrage over the swap in the review section of each application. It’s likely that such dishonest tactics are against Facebook’s Terms of Service, but after at least ten days of complaints Facebook has yet to act.

There’s also the question of how this change could ever happen in the first place. Does Facebook have no safeguards against replacing an application’s entire codebase, effectively making user bases totally transferable? What good is issuing per-application install permission when developers can replace a “good” application with a spammy one at will? Developer acquisitions are only going to become more common - Facebook should have a system in place to ensure that user privacy is not compromised in the process.

This isn’t the first time SpeedDate has been at odds with Facebook’s Terms of Service. In July it was temporarily banned, and some comments suggest that it was for a similar violation.

Check out Andy Kruger’s blog for more.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/O3J3gngSvxw/

We once asked if Apple’s CoverFlow is a better interface for image search than the typical thumbnail grid approach. But what about for mobile search? SearchMe thinks it is good for both.

The visual search engine that launched last March is working on a natural extension: a visual search app for the iPhone. The app is ready, but the company is still waiting for it to be approved by Apple for the iTunes App Store. Co-Founder John Holland showed me a functioning version of the app earlier this week at TechCrunch50.

I like SearchMe better on the iPhone than I do on my laptop. The idea of flipping through images to find something is already ingrained into some of the most basic features of the iPhone—whether it is flipping through photos or the app menu itself. Maybe I’ve been too well-trained by Google, but when I am searching on my computer, I find it hard to beat the efficiency of skimming down a list of text links. When I do a search on my iPhone, though, I am always squinting and resizing the browser.

SearchMe isn’t a perfect solution. It presents search results as a series of thumbnails showing each Webpage, but you have to flip through them sequentially. SearchMe does let you narrow results by clicking on a topic icon. Still, it lends itself to certain types of searches better than others—when you are grazing for information, rather than looking for something specific.

The CoverFlow-like interface sometimes sometimes gets in the way. But sometimes it lets you find exactly what you want by letting you preview each age before clicking on it. I kind of wish it was an interface option on a regular search engine that I could turn on or off depending on what type of search I am doing. But on mobile devices, search is broken. So I’m more willing to try new things.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Jqn4a5ASDF0/

Former Amazon and Facebook executive Owen Van Natta is said to be a top contender for the CEO job of the new MySpace Music joint venture, multiple sources confirmed to us this morning. There are also a number of other candidates still being interviewed. Last month we posted a shortlist with a handful of them.

MySpace Music, an ambitious joint venture between MySpace and top music labels, is set to launch sometime this month. The project combines the music from three of the four major labels (Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group) with a rumored $120 million in cash from MySpace and its existing music properties.

Music download sales are just one revenue stream for the new venture. In addition to selling DRM-free music (singles, albums, and playlists), MySpace Music will iteratively also offer ring tones, concert tickets, merchandise (tshirts, etc.) and branded advertising campaigns. Amazon is said to be powering the music download part of the service.

Van Natta left Facebook earlier this year and has been said to be looking for a CEO spot at a new company. MySpace Music may be just the position he’s looking for.

Don’t count on a CEO announcement before launch, though. In an interview with MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe earlier this week at TechCrunch50, he made it clear that they’re willing to wait as long as it takes to find the right person for the job, and the search for a CEO certainly won’t delay the launch. In any case, DeWolfe and MySpace COO Amit Kapur themselves remain actively involved in the venture and plan to maintain leadership roles within it even after launch.

Skip to the 7:24 mark in the video below if you want to hear just about MySpace Music:

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/RssaRPoPfb0/

In the last decade, we’ve seen dozens of internet portals, software companies, and startups develop solutions solving the same problem: Everyone wants a webpage, but few people know how to actually make one. In the early days sites like Angelfire offered templates, but users were guaranteed a generic design that was ugly even by 1999’s standards. Since then we’ve made progress - modern WYSIWYG editors can produce high quality webpages within minutes, and affordable web designers are easily found. Yet somehow given these powerful resources, many people still manage to craft eyesores.

The problem, according to SnapPages founder (and sole employee) Steve Testone, is that we’re giving these users too much choice. He says that oftentimes designers will create perfectly suitable webpages, only to have them ruined when their clients start adding clashing colors and irregularly spaced images. Clients inevitably start complaining that their site has somehow become “ugly”, but they can’t figure out where they’ve gone wrong.

SnapPages is a gorgeously designed service that looks to solve this problem by taking some of the choice away from the end user. The site offers a number of customizable templates, allowing users to specify colors and the placement of columns, text boxes, and widgets, but only to a limited degree. For example, users can only choose three colors to be repeated throughout the template, which helps maintain consistency (they’re still free to upload their own logos and choose from a smattering of patterns).

This isn’t to say that the editor isn’t capable of creating rich, multimedia webpages. On the contrary, users are free to drag and drop text boxes, widgets (including Google Maps), and photographs into their sites. SnapPages also includes a full-featured integrated calendar and photo album viewer. All pages are built with standards compliant CSS/HTML, and are SEO friendly.

SnapPages has a lot going for it. The interface is sleek and intuitive, easily passable as something Apple might have designed. It may not be quite as tweakable as other WYSIWYG editors, but it produces professional results quickly, which is all that matter for most people. The full-featured premium service costs $50 a year (there’s a 30-day free trial), and there’s a limited version available for free. Other startups in this crowded space include SynthaSite and Weebly.

For more on SnapPages, check out CenterNetworks and Solution Watch.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/rytIUhQRDAw/

Privacy concerns have dogged the world’s most popular search engine for years, and Google’s responses have been less than the shining example of “Don’t be evil” we expect them to make. They only recently halved the retention period for personal information to nine months, but even then their anonymizing process is simply changing the last digit in the logged IP. Diabolical! Even Microsoft completely eliminates IPs from search tracking data eventually.

Read more…

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/-hHlTTSUH18/

A consortium of digital entertainment companies including movie studios, digital device manufacturers, and electronics retailers are trying to take on Apple by standardizing their DRM practices. Originally dubbed “Open Market,” the official name of the initiative is now the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE). As we first reported a few weeks ago:

Open Market is a set of policy decisions and a software and services framework that will allow interoperability of various formats and DRM schemes that are currently splintering the market. That splintering locks users into a single store and format, and is putting a stranglehold on widespread adoption of movie sales online. Multiple sources have indicated that the studios are putting their weight behind the initiative to avoid the fate of the music industry and as a last ditch effort to stop or slow non-DRM movie sales.

The basic idea is that if you buy digital content for one device, it should play on any device. And instead of having 50 different rules for how many times you can play a digital download movie and on how many different devices, DECE will come up with one industry-wide standard. Content and devices that comply with the DECE standard will sport a new DECE logo.

The consortium includes Alcatel-Lucent, Best Buy, Cisco, Comcast, Fox Entertainment Group, HP, Intel, Lionsgate, Microsoft, NBC Universal, Paramount Pictures, Philips, Sony, Toshiba, VeriSign and Warner Bros. Entertainment.

Notice the glaring absence of Apple and Disney? That’s because Apple already figured this out a long time ago with its Fairplay DRM on iTunes (which also sucks, but at least it is consistent).

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/6eh6NRqLFe0/

After breaking ranks with Democrats and endorsing John McCain for the presidency at the Republic National Convention, it seemed Senator Joseph Lieberman would be out of the news for a while. But now that he has hit the terrorists hard by making sure YouTube won’t host any terrorist training videos, Lieberman is back in the spotlight.

YouTube updated its “Community Guidelines” yesterday with a notation telling terrorist cells that if any training videos are uploaded to the service, they’re at risk of violating the company’s Terms of Service and could face permanent expulsion from the site. That should put the fear of God into them.

In response, Lieberman circulated a press release saying that his four months of pressuring YouTube has finally paid off and because of his hard work, YouTube and US citizens are safer today.

“YouTube was being used by Islamist terrorist organizations to recruit and train followers via the Internet and to incite terrorist attacks around the world, including right here in the United States, and Google should be commended for recognizing that,” Lieberman said in a statement. “I expect these stronger community guidelines to decrease the number of videos on YouTube produced by al-Qaeda and affiliated Islamist terrorist organizations.”

Aside from his self-admiration, Lieberman is still a bit perturbed by Google’s decision to stop at Community Guideline violations. Lieberman is now calling on Google to remove all videos from known terrorist organizations instead of only those which violate the new guidelines. So far, Google has yet to respond to those demands.

Give an inch and they ask for a yard.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/PVKo7HC6ImE/

At one time, it was tough to cover your tracks after visiting some, uh, questionable sites, but now it’s getting easier than ever. According to Mozilla, Firefox is joining Safari, Internet Explorer 8, and Google Chrome in providing its users with a “private mode” that will not collect any of your browsing history or cookies in the upcoming release of Firefox 3.1.

Much like Chrome, users will be able to open a separate window in Firefox 3.1 that will let them browse the Web in any way they see fit without worrying about the wife or kids entering the History menu and seeing why they spent the last hour in the office with the door locked.

But Mozilla’s name for the feature (which was originally planned for Firefox 3 but never made it in) is a bit of a misnomer. Upon entering “private mode,” all your information will still be accessible to the sites you access and your ISP will be able to track you wherever you go. In other words, you’re only hiding where you’ve been from those at home.

Firefox 3.1 is still in Alpha 2, but the company said that a Beta release should be made available in the next few weeks.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/EZEIOnDdpMs/

Microsoft announced that it has improved its Mediaroom IPTV service to bring more show producers and IPTV networks to its platform.

According to Microsoft, its plan for increasing the value of Mediaroom IPTV contains three parts: increase advertising opportunities, make it easier for IPTV networks to port shows to the platform, and make IPTV more interactive.

The improved Mediaroom platform will let service providers using the service offer targeted, interactive advertising spots and have access to better data in order to target ads to specific groups. Microsoft didn’t elaborate on how that would be possible, but claimed more would be coming soon.

To make it easier to switch from another platform, Microsoft started the Mediaroom Migration program, which should give IPTV providers the tools they need to switch. According to Microsoft, before those providers switch, it will provide them with business and technical workshops to review set-top box portability, network compatibility, and audio-visual interoperability.

Microsoft is also trying to make Mediaroom IPTV more interactive, so the company will show how BBC shows can have a news, sports, and weather overlay during viewing so users can do more than just watch shows while using the service. So if you’re watching a show from the BBC and your wife comes in asking what the forecast will be tomorrow, Mediaroom will now let you pause the show and access BBC weather information, which will be displayed over the paused show. And while you’re at it, you can see what’s going on in the world by accessing the News section by clicking on the widget to the left of the weather widget.

Microsoft has been hard at work trying to improve Mediaroom and its newest additions should help a bit. But these improvements smack of desperation as Microsoft tries to increase the service’s presence. And in a hotly-contested market like IPTV, it will take more than some new ad-targeting and migration tools to make that happen. It will take broader adoption of IPTV, which is in the hands of Microsoft’s partners.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ebedBBawoHo/

Google has acquired TNC (Tatter and Company), a Korean blog platform company that compares itself to Automattic, the team behind WordPress. Although Google already owns its own blogging platform, Blogger, it is not particularly popular in Korea. (According to comScore, Blogger had 1.7 million unique Korean visitors in July). The acquisition is clearly a geographic expansion move for Google, but its Textcube blogging platform also has some social networking features which Google might want to export to Blogger or other products.

In his blog post on the acquisition, TNC founder Chang Kim shed some light on the company’s history, and why he thinks it was acquired:

“Despite the danger of sounding too self-important, I would say our company was a fairly good acquisition target for Google. First, we had a killer product: Our previous work, Tistory blog service (now property of Daum as we sold the service to the Korea’s #2 portal), made to the top 10 Korean web destination in less than a year from launch, showing some 30,000% growth over the initial 8 months. While other blog services seem to be exploring the idea of integrating social networks with blogs only lately, our new blog service Textcube (link in Korean) had already implemented the feature much earlier. Secondly, we have great engineering talents. Many of our software engineers hail from the nation’s leading comp sci programs, such as KAIST.”

Chang Kim speculates that this is one of Google’s first acquisitions in Korea (though he admits that not all acquisitions are disclosed by the search giant). He also writes that while the deal is in part related to his product and team, Google is likely trying to establish a stronger presence in the Korean market, where it hasn’t performed well. Kim explains that Koreans tend to prefer web portals - the one-stop-shop online centers like Yahoo - over searching for content.

On the M&A panel at TechCrunch50 earlier this week, Google’s head of corporate development, David Lawee, noted:

We’ve bought companies to boost market share in particularly geographies where we’re not that strong. . . . At Google we don’t really think of size of the deal so much as impact. A lot of the best deals have been smaller companies.

Textcube has some interesting social-networking features, including a built-in RSS reader and a plugin for real-time Web chat. All the major blogging platforms are trying to help blogs turn themselves into mini-social networks. Blogger is already moving in this direction with the recent addition of its “following” feature, but still needs to catch up to the social-networking features available on Typepad and Wordpress.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/VJKM-sjwV1M/