Ajax Girl

The landmark search advertising deal between Google and News Corp. is set to expire on June 30, 2010, just a little more than a year from now. The $900 million deal, announced in August 2006, has little chance of being renegotiated on similar terms, say sources close to the company. That means MySpace, which accounts for most of the revenue generated from the deal has just a year left figure out its go forward revenue strategy.

Until now the details of the contract have been kept confidential. But we’ve recently reviewed a copy of both the original agreement (a binding term sheet) as well as the amendment signed in 2007 - in fact I’m reading it right now. The guaranteed payment clauses, which lay out the dates and sizes of the payments due to News Corp., call for $300 million to be paid by Google over the final year of the agreement. Here are the revenue guarantees:

January 1, 2007 through June 30, 2007: $50 million, paid quarterly pro rata
July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2008: $250 million, paid quarterly pro rata
July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2009: $300 million, paid quarterly pro rata
July 1, 2009 through June 30, 2010: $300 million, paid quarterly pro rata

All MySpace has to do to get the guaranteed payments is make certain search page view requirements. They’ve made those page view requirements easily, says our source, mostly by destroying the user experience. Any search on MySpace by default returns Google web results, which is rarely what the user wants to see. But MySpace has a history of monetizing their site to death, damn the user experience. That may explain part of the rise of Facebook at their expense.

For their part, Google is said to be unhappy with the results. Perhaps it’s because MySpace is tricking users into doing Web queries, but click through on ads is rumored to be abysmal, and conversion on those click throughs is even worse. In other words, Google, Google advertisers and users are unhappy, but MySpace is just fine, thank you.

One part of the deal which is reportedly doing well is display advertising, which is separate from the guaranteed revenue payments. Google is able to offer display advertisers deep reach into MySpace’s tens of millions of users, our source says. But it’s not clear MySpace, which has its own sales team and self service ad product, is all that interested in Google display ads going forward.

At this point Google probably feels like it’s paying off a mortgage on a house worth half of what it paid for originally. They may be glad to just be able to walk away from it all as soon as possible.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/aCLylUcQ6P0/

While Twitter is busy removing features, or half removing them, or whatever — FriendFeed continues its relentless pace at adding new ones. The latest one today is small, but potentially very, very useful. Basically, you can now get emails/IMs/pop-up notifications from any group or individual user on FriendFeed.

While it may not be so obvious at first, this is useful because you can custom tailor FriendFeed to use even when you’re not on the site. The way I’ve been using it for several months now is to create groups for people/things I’m particularly interested in. But that would still require that I go to FriendFeed to check those groups. Now I can just get pinged over IM every time something I’m looking for comes up.

My colleague Steve Gillmor should love this, because this allows you to basically track something without being actively engaged in the service. It doesn’t yet work for saved searches on FriendFeed — which would allow you to track any keyword, but you can imagine that will come soon as well. Track is a feature that Twitter used to have to ping people when a keyword was said. It had to discontinue the service when Twitter kept crashing last year as it grew it size. It’s still supposedly coming back one day, but it would seem FriendFeed, once again, may beat them to it.

And while tracking keywords is interesting, I’m actually more interested in people track — which is what this is. And since FriendFeed of course imports Twitter messages, this basically is a track of people on Twitter too. And if you really want to get fancy, you can just track when a user likes something on FriendFeed and have it ping you, or a number of other options.

And this doesn’t have to just be over IM. You can get these notifications over email or using FriendFeed’s AIR-based popup notifier. Slick.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/QKVbH1rcjKM/

A couple of years ago a lot of buzz started in the Ruby community about Erlang, a functional programming language developed by Ericsson originally for use in telecommunications systems. I was intrigued by the talk of fault tolerance and concurrency, two of the cornerstones that Erlang was built on, so I ordered the Programming Erlang book written by Joe Armstrong and published by the Pragmatic Programmers and spent a couple of weeks working through it.

A year later, Kevin Smith began producing his excellent Erlang in Practice screencast series in partnership with the Pragmatic Programmers. It’s amazing how much difference it made for me to be able to watch someone develop Erlang applications while talking through his thought process along the way.

As I was learning Erlang, I kept threatening to rewrite the poller service that handles updating Campfire chat rooms when someone speaks in room. At some point my threats motivated Jamis, who was also playing with Erlang in his free time, to port our C based polling service to Erlang. Jamis invited me to look at the code and I couldn’t help myself from refactoring it within an inch of it’s life.

The code that Jamis wrote worked fine, but it was not very idiomatic Erlang. While I didn’t have much more experience developing Erlang code than Jamis, I had definitely seen more real Erlang code. I tried to pattern our work after what I had been exposed to, making improvements along the way. We ended up with 283 lines of pretty decent Erlang code.

parameter(Parameter, Parameters) ->
  case lists:keysearch(Parameter, 1, Parameters) of
    {value, {Parameter, Key}} -> Key;
    false -> undefined
  end.

For the curious, here’s a very simple example function from the real Campfire poller service. This function takes two arguments, the name of a parameter to search for, and the list of parameters. If it finds a matching parameter it returns the associated value, otherwise it returns the atom undefined. Atoms are like symbols if you’re a Ruby programmer.

Last Friday we rolled out the Erlang based poller service into production. There are three virtual instances running a total of three Erlang processes. Since Friday, those 3 processes have returned more than 240 million HTTP responses to Campfire users, averaging 1200-1500 requests per second at peak times. The average response time is hovering at around 2.8ms from the time the request gets to the Erlang process to the time we’ve performed the necessary MySQL queries and returned a response to our proxy servers. We don’t have any numbers to compare this with the C program that it replaced, but It’s safe to say the Erlang poller is pretty fast. It’s also much easier to manage 3 Erlang processes than it was the 240 processes that our C poller required.

Erlang definitely isn’t a replacement for Rails, but it is a fantastic addition to our collective toolbox for problems that Rails wasn’t designed to address. It’s always easier to work with the grain than against it, and adding more tools makes that more likely.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1728-nuts-bolts-campfire-loves-erlang

Since launching back in 2004, Gmail has set the gold standard for webmail clients, offering a large amount of storage and a highly usable interface, free of charge. But for many people it has remained out of reach - no matter how appealing Gmail might be, they’ve racked up thousands of messages on other services that they simply can’t give up. Today, that changes. Gmail just released a new feature that allows users to import their Email archives and contacts into their Gmail accounts effortlessly.

The new feature, which is being powered by TrueSwitch, supports importing from all of the usual suspects, including AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and dozens of others (you can find a whole list here). To start with it is only enabled on new accounts, with support for existing accounts being added over time (Google warns that this roll-out will be considerably slower than normal). You can also optionally choose to import messages sent to your old account for up to thirty days.

Now, there have been ways to import your mail archive into Gmail through other routes, but for the average computer user these were both too confusing and time consuming to be considered viable options. Now things are as easy as entering your other mail service’s password and letting Gmail go to work over the next 24-48 hours, importing all of your Email and contacts. It’s making a once frustrating process nearly painless, and it’s going to attract new users in droves.

Of course, users will still be switching to a new Email address. This shouldn’t be a problem for users with providers that support POP3 or mail forwarding (which would allow you to have Emails sent to your old mailbox forwarded to your new Gmail inbox), but not all webmail providers support these features.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ZKJViMC0FoU/

The web is increasingly filling up with ads. Many sites, including this one, have a bunch of them all around with the hopes that you’ll find one relevant to you, and click on it. Of course, most of you don’t. And if you do, it may be by accident. As you can tell, I’m not exactly bullish on the model. But the problem is that there are few alternatives. Contenture is trying to offer one.

The service has been getting some buzz over the past few months, but mostly because no one seemed to know what the hell it was all about. An email today finally revealed their model. Contenture wants to be the “anti-ad network.” What it means by that is that it wants sites to adopt their monthly-fee based network to offer visitors the option to do things like turn off ads. Yes, this would basically turn your site to the subscription-based model.

But there’s a somewhat interesting twist. Contenture wants to sign up a bunch of sites to this model and have users pay one flat monthly fee to have access to all of these sites. That money would then be distributed to all of these sites. These sites could determine what Contenture subscribers get as a part of their subscription. Some may lose the ads, some may have special commenting ability, etc.

A similar model has been tried by the likes of TipJoy and others, but grouping sites together and offering users a place to pay one-fee for multiple sites is interesting if nothing else. Plus the site has a comic homepage that features a drunk Twitter Fail Whale and makes fun of its competitors. That’s pretty cool in our book.

The service is still in private beta testing, but apparently it’s getting ready to launch on May 21.

Disclosure: This morning for four hours Contenture sponsored our CrunchCam.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/9v6Aq6en7nM/

CBSNews.com is undergoing a major overhaul and redesign of its sites to make them easier to navigate, more visually compelling, faster and more focused on driving users to content.

The new home page features a rotating list of top stories on the left, next to the list of the latest and most important headlines. CBS News programs, as well as the latest videos, photo galleries and blogs, are all highlighted on the page. CBS News also plugs its program sites, including Evening News, Face the Nation, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, and Sunday Morning, on its homepage. CBS says that the company applied technology from its sister site, CNET.com, to deliver pages from its servers to users’ screens more rapidly. Dan Farber, CNET’s editor-in-chief, oversaw the redesign.

Here’s what CBSNews.com used to look circa 2000 (left) and currently (right):

As you can see from the screenshot of the new design at the top of the post, this is a big improvement. The additional of images definitely make the site more aesthetically pleasing and easier to scroll through. But it seems that the new site is now a little too cluttered with pictures. Farber says the news site has undergone two major redesigns over the past ten years. A small percentage of random visitors to CBSNews.com will see the new look for pages on the site. CBS Says the site is still a work in progress and is undergoing changes and upgrades frequently.

This new redesign may be part of an effort to catch up to ABCnews.com and MSNBC.com (NBC’s news site). CBSNews.com only drew 3.2 million unique visitors in U.S. in April compared to 4.4 million for ABCnews.com and 30.7 million for MSNBC.com, according to ComScore.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/15aZpPXgRTA/

Short version: We’ve loved the MiFi mobile router since we first laid eyes on it back at CES. After a few days of playing with the Verizon MiFi 2200, we still love it just as much - but with one hangup: the nasty monthly bill. After a trivial hiccup with the activation, we had 4 computers up and running in minutes. Speeds in our area are about average for the local EVDO Rev-A network, and we’ve had absolutely no connectivity drops in our 2 days of testing.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/4J2ciQ0yl0Q/

One of the neat little sub-features of Amazon’s Kindle is being able to subscribe to blogs on it. You have to pay for the privilege, but for heavy Kindle users, it makes sense as you can get the content delivered to you wirelessly for your favorite blogs. You know, like TechCrunch.

But the biggest limiting factor of this so far is that only the big blogs have been included in the blog directory. Starting today, anyone can make their blogs available via the new Kindle Publishing for Blogs Beta program.

All you have to do is make your blog’s feed available to the Kindle Store, and Amazon will do the rest, formatting your content for the device. According to the email from Amazon, after a few easy steps, your blog should be up and ready to go in the Kindle Store after about 12 to 48 hours of processing. Not bad.

As with blogs currently in the program, these new blogs will get 30% of the monthly blog subscription price for every subscriber Amazon signs up. In a world where mobile app developers traditionally keep 70% or more of the revenues, 30% seems awfully low.

And exactly how much Amazon will charge for each blog isn’t totally clear, other than Amazon says it will “define the price based on what we deem is a fair value for customers.” Most blogs currently go for $1.99 a month. Unfortunately, even if you want to, you can’t give your blog away for free on the device. Amazon has that WhisperNet to maintain, after all.

As a Kindle owner, I currently subscribe to a few of my favorite blogs, but for most of the rest I use Instapaper to bookmark articles and sync them over email to my device (which does cost a ridiculous $0.15 an email unfortunately — but Instapaper sends only one digest a day). The bottom line is that with 30% of the subscription price going to publishers, this isn’t likely to be a big source of income for most sites. There are simply too many blogs and the Kindle market is simply not that big. And the people who will pay for blogs on it is even less.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ULEwdI51N6s/

Remember Twitter, that super simple service for sending messages? Well, last night they instituted a change that should have made it more streamlined, but users revolted because it’s never a good idea to take away features. So today, Twitter relented and gave users the feature back. Only they did so in a way that is hilariously convoluted.

Previously, if you wanted to see another user’s @replies even if they were talking to someone you weren’t following, you had to select that option in the settings. Some people had, and enjoyed it. But the default setting for that was off, so Twitter simply removed the option to turn it on. But some users loved it so Twitter is now turning it back on — kind of. Apparently, soon you will be able to see these @replies again but only when a person is using them when not clicking the “reply” button.

So basically, you can see when someone is replying to someone else but only when they’re not really replying to them. Yeah, this is going to confuse the hell out of people. Remember “Keep It Simple, Stupid“? Yeah, this is the opposite.

I consider myself a pretty savvy Twitter user and I had to read it twice to understand just what the hell Twitter meant. I also just had a hilarious conversation with fellow writer Jason Kincaid, where we debated just what exactly Twitter meant. The fact that we had to have that conversation is not a good sign.

Twitter also claims to have second fix in mind, that will involve giving users more control over what exactly they see from which users. This is getting really complicated, quick. It sounds like the convoluted settings mess Facebook has become.

This whole situation has turned into an absolute disaster. Twitter claimed it was just removing a feature that relatively few people used, but if it really believed that, it should have stuck with it. Instead, it admitted that the move was done to help with scaling issues.

“We learned a lot,” is the title of Twitter’s post. That’s really code for, “a lot of people bitched, and so we’re half going back to the old way.” Don’t go half. Either do it or don’t do it. You may have been taught a lesson by your users, but you’re not heeding the lessons of other services in the past that have over-complicated things.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/3ofa9HmjyN4/

A year and a half after launching at our first TechCrunch40 conference, document-sharing service is Docstoc is taking off its “beta” label with a homepage redesign, open APIs, and a new revenue-sharing model called DocCash. The service is growing at a healthy clip, with 3 million documents uploaded and 1.6 million unique visitors a month in the U.S., according to comScore. (The company’s internal Google Analytics shows 4.8 million unique visitors worldwide).

DocStoc is still much smaller than its rival Scribd, but hopes to catch up with some of its changes (as does Issuu, another document-sharing service that keeps adding features). In order to encourage more activity and higher-quality document uploads, DocStoc is introducing DocCash. The company will be splitting AdSense revenues 50/50 with anyone who uploads documents and wants to opt into the service. Right now the ads only appear on Docstoc pages, but will eventually include Flash ads in DocStoc’s embedded Flash player as well. (See video tutorial below).

DocStoc is also unveiling a new homepage with a much more blog-like feel. Featured documents a will be selected by an editorial team, more images will be highlighted, and different document categories are highlighted on the left (including business, technology, legal, and current events). Former TechCrunch writer and Website designer Mark Hendrickson worked on the new homepage.

Finally, it is opening up its APIs so that other sites can integrate DocStoc functionality into their own sites

Barack Obama 2008 Tax Return -

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