Monday, November 15, 2010

Does Path Stand A Chance?

Path is a new social network - much talked about - that has some of the early, key Facebook people on board. Facebook limits you to 5,000 friends. Path limits you to 50 friends. Facebook does photos plus. Path does photos only.

My first reaction is I agree with Robert Scoble.

Rockmelt felt more like a Chrome plug in than a smashing new browser. Path feels like a feature Facebook probably already has.

But it would be nice to be proven wrong. It would be nice if they took off.

Wasn't Twitter a trimmed down blog? Isn't FourSquare a trimmed down Twitter? Perhaps Path is seeking to be a trimmed down Facebook. The problem is Facebook does not like FourSquare, it is not going to get too excited about Path.

Let some water flow down the Hudson.

In The News

TechCrunch: The Underlying Technology of Messages The current Messages infrastructure handles over 350 million users sending over 15 billion person-to-person messages per month. Our chat service supports over 300 million users who send over 120 billion messages per month. ...... In 2008 we open-sourced Cassandra, an eventual-consistency key-value store that was already in production serving traffic for Inbox Search. ...... clusters of MySQL, Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, and a couple of other systems. We ultimately chose HBase. ..... HBase comes with very good scalability and performance ....... the most feature rich in terms of our requirements (auto load balancing and failover, compression support, multiple shards per server, etc.). HDFS, the underlying filesystem used by HBase, provides several nice features such as replication, end-to-end checksums, and automatic rebalancing. ...... The open source release of HBase is what we’re running today. ...... we store attachments in Haystack, wrote a user discovery service on top of Apache ZooKeeper, and talk to other infrastructure services for email account verification, friend relationships, privacy decisions, and delivery decisions

TechCrunch: Facebook: 350M People Using Messaging; More Than 4B Messages Sent Daily
BusinessWeek: Facebook Passes EBay in Value, Becoming No. 3 U.S. Web Company some customers are spending $20,000 a day on the social-networking site
Minister Raja Quits Amid Multibillion-Dollar India Telecom Probe

How Baidu Won China the search engine that kicked Google's butt out of China, with an assist from the Communist Party. ... a 73 percent share of the world's largest Internet market by users.. the fifth-largest market capitalization ($38.3 billion) among the world's pure-play Internet companies, trailing Google (GOOG), Amazon.com (AMZN), Tencent (an instant messaging and gaming company based in Shenzhen), and only narrowly, eBay (EBAY). ... 57 percent bigger than Yahoo! (YHOO)—and with significantly brighter prospects.... "It's hugely profitable, with massive growth ahead in the population of Chinese Internet users, and the government backing it up. Essentially it's a state-sponsored monopoly." .... its popular MP3 service allows users to download just about any song ever recorded for free. ..... got a master's in computer science from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1994. .... the future: expanding into games, e-commerce, and online payments, establishing a Hulu-like video site called Qiyi, and exporting the Baidu brand abroad. ..... engineers are translating the site into a dozen languages. "I hope in ten years, Baidu will become a household name in 50 percent of the world. Sooner or later you will see a China-based company that really has a global impact and I think Baidu has a chance to become one of those companies. ....... Once a Silicon Valley cubicle jockey earning around $45,000 a year at Infoseek, a forgotten portal from the Web's past, Li is now the second-richest man in China, with a fortune valued at $7.2 billion ..... his U.S. investors. ..... an introverted search engineer ...... invested $1.5 million in Baidu in 2000— a stake worth $170 million at Baidu's IPO in 2005. "We were worried about his marketing skills. He was so quiet." ....... In 1996 he received a patent related to what he called link analysis, a way to rank search listings by the number of incoming links to sites. Stanford doctoral students Larry Page and Sergey Brin would separately come up with the similar PageRank algorithm. Inspired by Yang and pushed by Melissa, Xu and Li decided to use Li's research to build a search engine for the slumbering Chinese Internet market. ....... "We became Baidu.com because we were forced into it" ..... Google contributed $5 million to Baidu's $15 million third round of financing ..... In late 2004, Brin and Page visited Baidu's offices during a visit to China. Xu says the Baidu team scheduled the meeting during a national holiday when the office would be empty, so the Google executives couldn't see how many engineers Baidu employed. Brin and Page declined to eat the Subway sandwiches Baidu served for lunch. ...... made Li China's first billionaire Web prodigy. ...... domain name system poisoning; users typed in Google.cn and found themselves at Baidu instead. ..... Baidu really was better able to parse sentences in Chinese. Baidu also put more sales people on the ground to talk to advertisers, and demonstrated a better grasp of Chinese tastes. ..... In its IPO prospectus, Baidu said its music service accounted for about 40 percent of its traffic. ..... Only in 2009 did Google introduce a free, ad-supported music service in China, in conjunction with music labels. ..... Baidu was the fun option for the masses, while Google was viewed as the search engine for the coastal intelligentsia ..... there are millions of Chinese websites only because there is a search engine to help people find them ..... With Baidu assured of nothing from the government, and Google fading from view, Baidu is now fighting Alibaba and Tencent in a three-way skirmish to be China's preeminent Internet company.

AllThingsD: Exclusive: Ex-Yahoos–Plus Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang–in New Morado Ventures Fund (That’s Spanish for Purple, Natch)

All Facebook: 11% Have Had Sex with Someone They Met on Facebook until January 2008, Facebook’s “looking for” field also contained the options “random play” and “whatever I can get”

The Next Web: Google’s Schmidt: Android Gingerbread to have near-field-communication support
An inside look at Steve Jobs’ home office
6 Social Media Marketing Myths Debunked
Facebook Messaging: Reinventing the power of meh What Facebook did today could easily be done in Gmail with 3 Gmail Labs plugins.... people are already talking about turning down job applications that include a Facebook.com email address.

BGR: Motorola MOTOPAD to usher in Android 3.0

Robert Scoble: Path: the social system that will piss social mavens off I can use it with my son, for instance, and let him see a photo of something I’m doing and he can send one back. I see if he’s seen the photo. We can see where the photo was taken. But there isn’t any text we can write back and forth yet. .... “Something about Path bugs me: if these friends are so close, why not just use facebook with a closed list?” .... my closest friends and family, like my brother Alex, don’t have an iPhone. So can’t use Path with them ..... Facebook Groups do pretty much what Path does ..... just get Instagram and use Facebook’s groups with your close friends and family.

New York Times: Start-Up Plans a More Personal Social Network

New York Times: Attacker That Sharpened Facebook’s Defenses A friend on Facebook suggests that you watch an amazing or funny or sexy video. The link may seem innocuous enough. But with a few simple clicks, you could end up infecting your PC with the Koobface worm..... the Koobface criminal enterprise, saying its operators live in St. Petersburg, Russia .... To halt Koobface, Facebook uses algorithms that can detect suspicious posts and hijacked accounts, looking for unusual behavior like log-ins from odd places and a surge in messages sent. Facebook also keeps a blacklist of malicious Web links to prevent them from being shared on the site. When Koobface posts find a way through, members of the operations team remove them .... researchers recently identified more than 20,000 fake accounts, which they reported to Facebook as part of the takedown effort.

AllThingsD: Let a Zillion Users Blab: Yahoo Debuts “Contributor Network” “Associated Content has been known for maintaining the industry’s largest contributor base, and with the launch of the Yahoo! Contributor Network, we’ve added scale and reach that sets us apart from any other crowdsourced media platform.” http://contributor.yahoo.com

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