Platform: Internet | Author: Sam Matthews | Source: nma.co.uk | Published: 07.02.08

Sony BMG is promoting the 25th anniversary of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album with a YouTube viral of professionals dancing on the tube.

London commuters were treated to an impromptu show on London Underground’s District Line by dancers from the Thriller Live stage show performing the famous zombie thriller dance.

The show, set up by Sony BMG – the label behind Jackson, was filmed and seeded onYou Tube and has so far received 380,000 views in under a week

The video has also been picked up by the press with TV coverage on GMTV, BBC News 24, ITV London Tonight and London Today.

The Facebook for Mobile Operators platform is designed to make Facebook’s social networking app work better on portable devices

By Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service

February 07, 2008

Facebook took a new step into the mobile realm on Thursday, launching a platform for operators designed to make its social networking application work better on portable devices.

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Vodafone is the first operator to use the Facebook for Mobile Operators platform and has started services in the United Kingdom and Germany, said Jed Stremel, Facebook’s director of mobile division. Vodafone will soon expand the program to Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal.

The platform involves giving operators a set of technical specifications intended to resolve some frustrating hang-ups when using Facebook on a mobile phone rather than a PC, such as smoothing out login problems and opening up other features, Stremel said.

The move by Facebook, which ranks next to MySpace as one of the most popular social networking sites, is intended to grow its user base, which the company estimates at 64 million users. So far, the company says it has 6 million users of Facebook Mobile, an unsupported mobile version of the Web site that will now get full support, Stremel said.

At the moment, the mobile site does not have any advertising. Stremel would not reveal the financial details of Facebook’s deal with Vodafone, although he said operators will be able to generate revenue from data services as their subscribers access Facebook.

The long-term hope for social networking sites is rich online advertising revenue. Facebook, which has an exclusive deal with Microsoft to place ads on the site, also did not say when it would put advertising on the mobile site.

The company is hoping to lure more operators by the simplicity with which they can enable Facebook, Stremel said.

Facebook has created special Web pages with instructions on how operators can set up their systems, he said. The instructions, for example, let operators add system settings that will let their subscribers send MMS with photos or video to their Facebook profiles, Stremel said.

The platform also includes other specifications designed to stop abuse of Facebook, such as spamming, Stremel said. When someone sends their first MMS with a photo to their profile, the user is sent back a confirmation message with a code or a link. That confirmation then links that person’s phone with their Facebook account, Stremel said.

Annoyed with the ad deluge on social networks, many users are spending less time on the sites

by Spencer E. Ante and Catherine Holahan

If you want to socialize with Chris Heritage, you won’t find him on Facebook. The 27-year-old Port St. Lucie (Fla.) business analyst joined the social network last year after his buddies bugged him to get an account. But he soon became fed up with the avalanche of ads, especially those detailing what his friends were buying, and he quit the site in November. Now, Heritage expresses himself through a blog, happy to pay $6 a month to publish on a promo-free Web site. “It’s worth it to not have to look at the ads,” he says.

Uh-oh. Social networking was supposed to be the Next Big Thing on the Internet. MySpace, Facebook, and other sites have been attracting millions of new users, building sprawling sites that companies are banking on to trigger an online advertising boom. Trouble is, the boom isn’t booming anymore. Like Heritage, many people are spending less time on social networking sites or signing off altogether.

The MySpace generation may be getting annoyed with ads and a bit bored with profile pages. The average amount of time each user spends on social networking sites has fallen by 14% over the last four months, according to market researcher ComScore. MySpace, the largest social network, has slipped from a peak of 72 million users in October to 68.9 million in December, ComScore says. The total number of people on such sites is still increasing at an 11.5% rate, but that’s down sharply from past growth rates. “What you have with social networks is the most overhyped scenario in online advertising,” says Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Specific Media, which places ads for customers on a variety of Web sites.

WISHFUL THINKING?

Advertising on social networking sites is growing fast. Last year global ad spending on these sites shot up 155%, to $1.2 billion, says researcher eMarketer. This year, eMarketer expects it to jump 75%, to $2.1 billion. During its Nov. 4 earnings call, News Corp. (NWS) gave an upbeat forecast for Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace.

But the forecasts for torrid growth may prove unrealistic. Besides the slowing user growth and declining time spent on these sites, users appear to be growing less responsive to ads, according to several advertisers and online placement firms. If advertisers can’t figure out how to reverse these trends, social networking could end up as a niche market in the online ad world, smashing hopes and valuations across Silicon Valley.

The current strength in advertising on social networks may be exaggerated by guaranteed ad deals and hopeful experimentation. Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT), in hot competition with each other, promised a number of sites a minimum amount of advertising revenue in exchange for the exclusive right to place ads on those sites.

But the early results from those deals are mixed. On Jan. 31, Google said it didn’t generate as much revenue from social networking ads as expected. Google, which has a $900 million guaranteed deal with MySpace for placing ads alongside search results, says existing ad approaches aren’t working well on social networks so far. “I don’t think we have the killer, best way to advertise and monetize social networks yet,” said Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

When News Corp. reported its earnings, it said revenues for Fox Interactive Media surged 87%, to $233 million. But $62 million of that came from Google’s guaranteed deal with MySpace. It’s unclear whether Google, which ad experts believe is losing money on the deal, will sign similar agreements in the future.

Another big slug of ad revenue is coming from companies experimenting with social networks because they are such a popular new medium. But for some, the results have not been encouraging. Many of the people who hang out on MySpace, Facebook, and other sites pay little to no attention to the ads because they’re more interested in kibitzing with their friends.

Social networks have some of the lowest response rates on the Web, advertisers and ad placement firms say. Marketers say as few as 4 in 10,000 people who see their ads on social networking sites click on them, compared with 20 in 10,000 across the Web. Mark Seremet, president of video game publisher Green Screen, stopped advertising on MySpace last spring because of a 13-in-10,000 response rate. “It’s really hard to make money on that anemic click-through rate,” says Seremet.

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Let the rumors begin…

TechCrunch speculates that there’s a 51% chance that Google might buy Bebo—or maybe MySpace will snap up the smaller social networking company.

Last year, it was Yahoo that was supposed to be making a $1B offer on Bebo. This year’s guesses are similar—$1B to $1.5B.

TechCrunch explains that the move would almost double Google’s social networking audience, with Orkut’s millions of members worldwide plus Bebo’s non-US English-speaking market. Erick Schonfeld also notes that MySpace could assure its worldwide dominance by buying the #1 social network in several English-speaking countries.

Bebo has an exclusive partnership with Yahoo for display and video advertising. They initially signed on to Google’s OpenSocial, but soon also accepted Facebook’s platform as well.

Tells conspiracy theorists to cool their jets

At the end of January, Egyptian midfielder Mohamed Aboutrika was the talk of the soccer world. Scoring the winning goal to defeat Sudan’s team, Aboutrika raised his shirt to reveal a message of Palestinian sympathy.

It read: Sympathize with Gaza.

When images of the statement did not appear on Google’s image index, the conspiracy theories began. When the image didn’t appear a few days after the match, Google was flooded with enough accusations that the company censored the image at the request of the Israeli government that the Google Images team was compelled to respond.

Matt Cutts lent the blogp-space on his blog to clear things up.

The Google EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) Team said all images could take a few days to appear in the index:

“[W]e definitely didn’t do this,” they wrote. “The reason for the delay in the image showing up on Google Images was that it can take a few days between when an image appears and when its crawled by the Googlebot…. No-one [sic] from any government has contacted us about this image, and we have no reason to remove it.”

They further point out that the image is available now when searching for [Aboutrika] or [Aboutrika Gaza].

Cutts reminds readers in that blog post that indexing images takes time, and that Google has made significant progress over the years since it once took months instead of days to index images.

You guessed it: they’re still censoring things

On the (sort of) bright side, few people were probably deprived of the information – it’s not as if Google and Yahoo are all that popular in China.  The downside is that both companies seem to have suppressed something yet again.  Also, they will soon be sued for doing so.

In this instance, the thing to get removed from search results is Guo Quan.  Jane Macartney describes him as “[a] former Chinese university professor who was dismissed after he founded a democratic opposition party.”

Yet in what is both a nice and surprising turn of events, Guo Quan is alive, not in prison, and will be filing the lawsuit himself in a U.S. court.  Not everyone who’s had this sort of contact with search engines and the Chinese government has been so lucky.

Now, what’s difficult to say is what will come of the lawsuit; “we feel bad”-style statements have been made in the past, and American politicians have even dealt out some harsh words.  But, as the existence of the new lawsuit should prove, nothing really changed, and we hope this won’t be a waste of the former professor’s time and resources.

He has shown some restraint and wisdom; the former professor told Macartney, “[H]e could understand why search the engine Baidu.com, a Chinese company and the locally controlled arm of portal Yahoo!, could have been coerced by the Government to block his name . . .”

Also, regardless of what happens in the future, Guo Quan has already succeeded in redirecting international attention to censorship in China, which may be most of his goal.  Our only regret, aside from concerns for his safety, is that Guo Quan doesn’t seem like much of an animal fan.  He wrote, “To make money, Google has become a servile Pekinese dog wagging its tail at the heels of the Chinese communists.”

A look at Google Earth images
A look at Google Earth images

Images on Google Earth are highly detailed but do not show imagery in real-time.

Many people according to Frank Taylor at his Google Earth Blog believe the images are in real time. He believes that is because of weather satellite photos that are a few hours old or because of live weather radar. He goes into detail how Google collects its images for Google Earth.

Taylor writes, “High resolution satellites (like those operated by DigitalGlobe) operate just a few hundred kilometers above the Earth. This means they only see a small part of the Earth with their camera as they orbit over.”

“They typically go around the Earth every 90 minutes, but only cover about 1% of the Earth on each pass (you can see strips of imagery if you look at the imagery in Google Earth) – most of that is water.”

One reason why the images are not in real time is that they must be processed by a commercial provider like DigitalGlobe before being passed on to Google. Goggle then compares the imagery to the current imagery to see if the new imagery is better than the current.

Taylor writes,” Once an image is selected, it has to be processed into the format and coordinate system of Google Earth’s databases. Then it has to go through a quality control process and fed into a processing system before it gets distributed to the live Google Earth database servers.”

Another reason there is not newer imagery according to Taylor is that it is expensive to purchase quality aerial imagery. Taylor points out that recent imagery is worth more than older imagery and companies do not want to have their newest imagery available for free on Google Earth. He says you cannot sell or use the imagery from Google Earth for business purposes without permission.

There is near real- time imagery of Earth available on Google Earth. Taylor writes,” first there’s the new Clouds layer. Found under the new Weather layer folder. The clouds are actually taken from weather satellites and are a global picture of the clouds as recent as 3 hours old.”

He also points to NASA. “NASA has a layer they call DailyPlanet which shows the entire Earth at a medium resolution (about 500 meter resolution per pixel). You can view DailyPlanet in Google Earth.”

“Right now, this layer from NASA is the most recent, highest resolution imagery of the Earth continuously updating available to the general public.”

A combined Microsoft and Yahoo! would create a dominant player in the display ads market, with control of a huge proportion of the UK market, if the hostile bid made by the software giant goes ahead. A merger in the wake of Microsoft’s proposed $44.6bn (£22.7bn) takeover, could create a dominant display provider to match Google’s dominance of the search market, according to media industry experts. The deal, revealed on 1 February, saw Microsoft offer $31 a share – a 61% premium…

MySpace MD Travis Katz has predicted that over half of the site’s traffic will be from mobile within five years, as rival Facebook reports a boom year on the medium. The two social networks rolled out mobile sites for the first time last year and have already seen a surge of interest from users. Katz is backing mobile following impressive growth after a launch with Vodafone in February 2007 followed by wider deployment. “Mobile is one of the most important strategic initiatives…

Peter’s on holiday this week. We sent him to an isolated cottage in south-west France with his family. He has no internet access and we confiscated his mobile phone.

So in his absence I thought I’d write a few thoughts this week. I’m probably way behind the internet curve, but I only recently discovered the joys of YouTube…

Here at the BBC we’re obliged to take copyright issues extremely seriously. Producers are constantly in fear of broadcasting uncleared pictures, or discovering, as we did the other day, that five seconds of archive was to cost us over £1000 (you can imagine how that went down with Peter when he found out). Well, on Wednesday morning I came in to find an email from the agent of rock photographer Mick Rock – he’d spotted an uncleared picture we’d used in Robin Denselow’s obituary of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett.

Mick was extremely gracious and only charged us a small fee. However it got me thinking – how does YouTube get away with it? Newsnight’s Syd Barrett film is on YouTube for anyone to find – and for anyone to judge whether Mick’s photo was worth paying for (I’d argue it was). So, who put our film up there? Has Mick seen it and if so, who has paid him his small fee for the use of his picture? So far 1,125 people have viewed the film via YouTube, admittedly a small number, but none the less, surely copyright is copyright?

On Tuesday the producer of the item, Rebecca, had great difficulty in finding clearable pictures of Syd that she could use. In fact the film came close to not being broadcast – at 11pm they were still looking for shots of the rock recluse. But had Rebecca looked on YouTube and searched for Syd she would have founds reams of footage – everything from homemade tributes to a stalker movie someone made discreetly following Syd around Cambridge.

Now how much of this material is infringing copyright? And what would have happened if we’d just taken it and reused it on Newsnight? I guess I would have received a load of emails asking for money. So why is there one rule for us and another for YouTube? Perhaps someone could explain.

In fact if you search for Newsnight on YouTube you’ll find a whole range of our films and discussions. Currently, over 20,000 people have watched Kirsty’s interview with Pete Doherty – a smaller number (71) have watched Peter Marshall’s expose of British corruption in Saudi contracts – or as described on YouTube: “An exclusive and gutsy report from the beebs flagship news programme.” As more and more people get their TV over the web, these questions are bound to become more important.

Mick’s agent is about to get very busy.