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He said: “I have now had a chance to play around with Facebook Places and it’s not that great or interesting. It’s a pretty boring service, with barely any incentives for users to keep coming back and telling their friends where they are.

“The only interesting thing about Places is that it has a potential audience of over 500 million people around the world… but that can only be a good thing for location-based services, like Foursquare, as Facebook will educate the masses about check-ins.” Read more at www.telegraph.co.uk

As they announced last week, Twitter is in the process of testing their new Streaming API with a feature called User Streams. Basically, this is a realtime data push for desktop applications. This means almost all tweets flow to apps in realtime: friend tweets, reply tweets, DMs, search queries — you name it. There is no more refresh needed. I’ve been testing User Streams out this past weekend with the latest beta build of TweetDeck (one of two desktop apps the feature is being tested with — Echofon is the other). It’s amazing.

The User Streams feature reminds me a bit of FriendFeed right before the acquisition by Facebook. It was my go-to app mainly because it pulled in tweets in realtime — and you could do searches in realtime too. At first, a number of users felt the realtime updating was too fast — and made the service unusable. But FriendFeed had a way to pause the stream and also filter it nicely. A lot of third-party apps are going to pop up around Twitter User Streams that do that as well.

If you follow thousands of people, the realtime friend stream may be overwhelming. But I follow about 750 people, and I find it pretty manageable, even at peak times. Read more at techcrunch.com

Using sites like Craigslist, Twitter and YouTube, the researchers were able to cross-reference information contained within publicly available online content to determine the exact home addresses of potential victims, even those who had posted the content anonymously. The experiments didn’t take weeks, days or even hours of research either - the addresses were pinpointed with GPS-level accuracy within minutes.

To demonstrate the ease involved in determining a stranger’s precise location, Friedland and Sommer first “cybercased” Craigslist, a classified ads website often used to post items for sale. Here they found geo-tagged photos which they compared with Google Street View, allowing them to determine the postal addresses belonging to the item’s sellers. Even more helpful (if the researchers were, in fact, thieves), was that several ads included a “best time to call” - implying the hours the sellers were not at home.

In further tests, the researchers cybercased Twitter, which allows mobile users to geo-tag their updates. Third-party applications - like TwitPic, for example, used for posting images to Twitter - also include locational data. Using a Firefox Web browser plugin called Exif Viewer, it was only a matter of right-clicking on an image to reveal location of the Twitter post, plotted on a map.

A third experiment, and perhaps the most devious yet, showed the ease with which this form of cyberstalking could be automated. While the above examples revealed users’ location within minutes, manual effort was still involved. For YouTube, however, the researchers wrote a simple script that automatically recognized when videos were recorded a certain distance away from a primary location, that being the potential victims’ home addresses. When the “vacation distance,” as it was called, was set to 100 KM, the script returned 106 hits revealing who was out-of-town in the test location of Berkeley, CA. After briefly perusing the results, the researchers came across a video from someone who was clearly on a Caribbean vacation and would have made an ideal victim. Read more at www.readwriteweb.com

After Apple’s iPhone 4 press conference last week, Szymon Weglarski and Jon Dorfman, two designers from Brooklyn, decided they would have a little fun with the iPhone 4’s antenna problem.

They designed tiny bandages that fit perfectly around the edge of the iPhone, opened a store on the marketplace site Etsy, and named their new product Antenn-aid. Now the two partners are rushing to keep up with orders.

The two designers are clearly having a little fun with the product. The Antenn-aid Web site says the stickers “work like magical,” poking fun at Apple’s description of the iPad as a “magical and revolutionary product.”

“It’s a lot of satire, it’s kind of a gag product, it’s poking fun at the whole idea of how overblown the whole antenna solution has been,” Mr. Weglarski said. Read more at bits.blogs.nytimes.com

The Bad: Relying Too Heavily On Perfection

Not everyone agrees, however, that A/B testing is a wise practice. Just this morning, Jeff Atwood, author of the blog Coding Horror, expressed his idea that this kind of testing is a lot like the movie Groundhog Day. In the movie, Bill Murray - stuck in an infinite loop reliving the same day over and over again - attempts to win the love of a woman, Rita, by learning as much as he can about her each day and pretending to share all of her interests.

Atwood says that this is exactly what startups and designers are doing by relying too heavily on A/B testing. While romantic relationships are certainly different than business relationships, the parallels are interesting. Even though Murray’s character says presumably “all the rights things,” Rita can still tell there is something odd about it. Startups should be wary of testing too many of their decisions and should instead focus on just a few key elements at a time.

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz warned a few weeks ago against falling into the “trap of A/B testing minutiae.” He says many are “tantalized” by the idea that a small change can go a long way, when in reality this is far from the norm.

“In all of these, some simple change accounted for big increases in click-through or conversion rate, leading to widespread praise and sharing,” says Fishkin. “The problem is - they’re the exception, not the rule. In fact, that’s precisely why they’re newsworthy and get so many mentions.”

Fishkin also says for the small changes A/B testing often produces, the time and energy is too high. He suggests that startups focus more on testing larger changes - like a sight redesign - rather than smaller ones - like button colors. Read more at www.readwriteweb.com

When outsourcing, you can’t manage through the contract, you have to manage through the people. Delegating to a vendor is no different, on a day-by-day basis, than delegating internally. You have to stay close in the beginning to ensure that objectives and success measurements are well understood, the approach makes sense, accountabilities and roles are clarified and the team jells. Then you have to stay close enough throughout the project to see what others aren’t seeing, catalyze the right conversations, and ensure that the right mid-course corrections occur.

In the project above, internal leadership believed that their work was done when the vendor walked in the door. They assumed that the vendor knew what they didn’t know — about how the business and IT operated, the legacy systems, the packaged software, and the new technology platforms. And they were completely dumbfounded when the users revolted against the software.

When internal leaders outsourced the work, they made the mistake of outsourcing the leadership of the work as well.

This is a common outsourcing fallacy, but a crucial one to recognize, because it has led many to believe that there’s little need for senior leadership expertise within IT. That is, since IT is outsourced, leadership can be, too. While it’s true that IT organizations that operate with an extensive network of outsourcing relationships have fewer employees, those that remain have to be much more sophisticated in their ability to exert indirect — versus direct — influence. Read more at blogs.hbr.org

Risk is perhaps the biggest issue. The specification has not been finalized and could remain a draft for many years to come. No one knows what could happen — that article or header tag you love using could be scrapped. At least HTML4 and XHTML1.0 have been stable for more than a decade.

Browser support is another problem. All vendors have jumped on the HTML5 bandwagon, but they have their own interpretations and are yet to implement a consistent set of technologies. Microsoft may have announced comprehensive HTML5 support in IE9, but the browser is unlikely to appear until next year and won’t be available on Windows XP. Developers will need to support IE8 and, to a lesser extent, IE7 and IE6 for some time.

Finally, I suspect many developers are reluctant to spend time migrating to a new, largely unproven, and potentially problematic markup language. Read more at www.sitepoint.com

The Android ecosystem as a whole is in no danger. There are a host of phones available running on that platform. By one measure, Android is even outpacing iOS. But the Nexus One was the Google phone, as opposed to simply an Android phone. Perhaps Google has found manufacturing and marketing hardware is outside their comfort zone. Read more at www.readwriteweb.com

I, too, was surprised. Google has been, after all, the most successful company in recent history (in terms of churning out growth and profits), led by Eric Schmidt, a well-respected CEO. And, we’ve seen book after book about why everyone should be more like Google. I admire Google, its people, and what they have been able to accomplish enormously. It’s astonishing. But the opinions in that room were not based on the company’s past performance. They were based on insights about Google’s future. Below are the reasons people cited for shorting the company (which, interestingly, were fairly diverse):

Google has experienced a severe talent drain over the past several years, losing some of its most entrepreneurial and innovative people. Although Google’s has high retention rates, Google’s talent challenge is not in terms of numbers, it’s the type of people who are leaving and why they are leaving. The talent drain from Google has been well documented. Venture capitalists in the room (without a vested interest in the companies) argued that Facebook and Zynga are currently considered hot places to work in Silicon Valley. Google has, for example, seen a stream of people leave for Facebook including, more recently, the likes of Erick Tseng, the senior product manager of Android, Google’s critically important mobile initiative. People close go Google say upward management is slowly replacing the company’s early culture of innovation. Entrepreneurial types and thought leaders who feel confined or unmotivated are moving. People will even say that it reminds them of Yahoo back in 2004-2005, not the meritocracy they once joined.

The company has run out of easy growth opportunities and must now find big chunks of new revenue. With the core search business maturing, Google increasingly seems to increasingly feel the need to make some “big bets.” That is a problem that maturing companies face that CEOs call “the tyranny of large numbers.” Even mobile search, which is seeing impressive growth numbers of a small base, is still too small to make a material difference for the company. The company is obviously trying like crazy to find growth pockets, knowing that mobile is a ways off. The recent $700 million ITA acquisition is a great case in point of how it is going to spread out some medium-sized to big-bets to see what sticks. That is, companies must find bigger and bigger chunks of revenue to maintain growth rates. This problem is documented well by innovation researchers Professor Clayton Christensen in The Innovators Solution, and Jim Collins in How the Mighty Fall.

The company lacks a coherent strategy, especially in mobile. As Schmidt and other Google execs have stated, mobile is core to future growth. A number of people around the table that night had unique insight into Google’s mobile efforts. They argued that growing nascent mobile revenues will take significant time, especially since there aren’t many sizable acquisition targets available in mobile after Google’s purchase of AdMob. Instead, the recent purchase of ITA Software was an indicator of how the company might make some medium to big bets to see what sticks.

It’s about people, people, people. Google’s engineering-dominated culture isn’t news to anyone. But As Peter Drucker opined in his landmark book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, “Successful innovators…look at figures, and they look at people.” The company has long recruited people who fit a very specific profile. Read more at techcrunch.com