Category: Tech news

The Newtown school shooting tragedy turned social media channels into another disastrous rumor mill. Ryan Lanza and his friends suffered a flood of hate messages after vigilante facebookers attacked him following false reports by CNN (the shooter was Adam Lanza, Ryan’s brother). Actor Morgan Freeman had to deny a viral violence-in-media rant widely attributed to him (although, this may not be as bad as when rumors of his death were circulated). To combat vicious falsehoods, social media updates need a credibility rating. A new lie detecting algorithm that correctly identified truthful tweets 86% of the time could mark a giant leap forward toward that goal.

Following up on a 2010 Yahoo! study, the updated paper to be published in next month’s Internet Research finds that users themselves are the best sources of credibility. Specifically, it builds upon known characteristics [PDF] of credible tweets:

1. longer updates
2. include URLs
3. be tweeted by users with more follower counts
4. tweets have a more negative tone
5. contain swear words
6. 6. contain more frowny emoticons

Interestingly enough, users themselves tend to question potential rumors, making their aggregate skepticism a key indicator of credibility. Authors Carlos Castillo, Marcelo Mendoza, and Barbara Poblete explain,

These results show that the propagation of tweets that correspond to rumors differs from tweets that spread news because rumors tend to be questioned more than news by the Twitter community. Notice that this fact suggests that the Twitter community works like a collaborative filter of information. This result suggests also a very promising research line: it could posible [sic] to detect rumors by using aggregate analysis on tweets.

In the updated study, as reported by Slate, when presented with a random false or truthful tweet, the algorithm correctly identified the truthful ones 86% of the time.

As these predictors become more reliable over time, web apps, such as Tweetdeck, or even Twitter itself, could rank tweets by their credibility, hopefully sparing the public from more vicious rumors. Long ago, Wikipedia recognized this with its famous “[citation needed]” tag. For all our sakes, its about time Twitter and Facebook developed their own version.

[Image Credit: XKCD]

Cubby, the new cloud storage player from LogMeIn which aggressively, if belatedly, entered the market this year to compete alongside Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, SkyDrive and others, is today revealing its pricing and Pro plans. The service first debuted in April, previously offering users up to 5 GB of online storage for free, with an additional 1 GB for each referral – double that of Dropbox.

The service was entirely free to use during its beta period. Today, the company is introducing its pricing structure for the first time, but the service will remain in beta mode until early 2013. Currently, the free version of the service, now called “Cubby Basic,” will continue to offer users most of what they had access to during the free beta period –  that is, 5 GB of free cloud storage, and access to their files from PC, Mac, mobile or tablet by way of Cubby client software.

The paid option, “Cubby Pro,” meanwhile, will start at $6.99/month ($83.88/year) for 100 GB of cloud storage. To lock in that rate, subscriptions have to be prepaid annually. Month-to-month pricing will be $9.99/month. However, early adopters who sign up before the service exits beta sometime next year can get a better rate – 100 GB for $3.99/month (or $47.88/year billed annually).

Both tiers, free and paid, offer online storage, public and private sharing, unlimited versioning and file size uploads, client-side file encryption (AES 256-bit), and access to files from Mac, Windows, Android or iOS. Pro users will additionally have access to one of Cubby’s better features, DirectSync, in addition to increased support and user-held encryption keys dubbed “Cubby Locks.” These Locks let you set passwords on files which have to be entered in order to use and share the files. For sensitive documents, this could help protect files on devices that could more easily become lost or stolen – like phones, laptops or tablets, for instance.

The other Pro feature mentioned above, DirectSync, allows users to sync an unlimited amount of data across their devices, without counting towards their cloud storage limits. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Microsoft’s now-shuttered Live Mesh service (yes, it still existed!), in the sense that it too offers hard limits as to how many files can be stored online, while more data can simply be synced between computers. That feature puts Cubby more in direct competition these days with SugarSync, now that Mesh is no more.

In terms of the bottom line, special beta pricing aside, Cubby remains competitive now that’s it’s a paid service. For comparison’s sake:

• SugarSync is $4.99/month or $49.99/year for 30 GB and goes up from there. Its 100 GB plan is $14.99/month or $149.99/year.
• Google Drive gives you 5 GB for synced and uploaded files for free, and doesn’t count those created or converted to Google Docs format. You can buy more storage here. It also offers 25 GB for $2.49/month, 100 GB for $4.99/month and then goes up to 200 GB for $9.99/month or 400 GB for $19.99/month. (Storage is shared between Google Drive and Google+ Photos.)
• Box (Personal) account holders can host between 5 and 50 GB of files with 5 GB available for free. 25 GB is $9.99/month and 50 GB for $19.99/month.
• Dropbox starts with 2 GB for free but users can climb to 18 GB by maximizing referrals. Paid upgrade plans start at $9.99/month for 100 GB.
• SkyDrive offers 7 GB for free, then you can add an additional 20 GB for $10/year, 50 GB for $25/year, and 100 GB for $50/year.

Of course, bottom-line pricing is not users’ only concern here. Many are drawn to Dropbox because they can game the system’s referral process to increase their free storage. Others are more tied into an ecosystem (as with Google), so they want to increase their storage there instead. The overall feature set and user experience of each service is also important when making a final decision, and this includes how well the apps look and behave on the devices you use the most. Some of this comes down to personal preference, too.

None of this is a necessarily a zero-sum game, however. For example, I pay for extra Google storage, but also use Dropbox.

Cubby’s pricing and early beta discounts are live now here on the homepage.

Foursquare has long been working to move beyond location check-ins and into the realm of local discovery, helping its users find new places to check out, based on ratings, comments, and tips from its users. But it’s not the only one: Facebook today announced its local business discovery engine nearby as part of its latest app update. Well with Facebook now invading its turf, Foursquare just launched a new update to its iPhone app which has added even more discovery features.

The latest Foursquare iPhone update provides more information around local businesses — such as location, hours, and ratings — front and center, as well as offers swipeable photos. All of that is designed to give users a good idea about whether or not they’d like to go to a place.

But that’s just the start. Once a user has checked in, Foursquare will provide more details about a specific place, including who else is there, as well as tips from friends and other users. Users will also get notices about their own usage — such as the number of weeks in a row they’ve been to a place, or how far they’ve leveled up in a certain category — with every check-in.

The new features are designed to further the company’s positioning as a discovery engine for local businesses, leveraging info they’ve gained over the last several years to help power that decision-making. While it’s likely just a happy coincidence that the latest Foursquare update comes on the same day that Facebook rolled out its nearby feature, the fact that they were released on the same day shows how more companies are looking to provide relevant information to users in search of new places nearby.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) reigns supreme as the developer platform of choice while Windows Azure is showing impressive growth, according to a survey conducted by Forrester Research.

The third-quarter survey compares how cloud developers are using the cloud. The report looks at the potential growth of the different services; the state of the platform as a service (PaaS) market; how developers are using cloud services; their expectations for future usage; types of apps deployed and what to expect going forward.

AWS, the dominant cloud player, is an overwhelming favorite among developers, but it’s good to see Windows Azure showing momentum. Of interest is the lacking presence of OpenStack deployments, with Rackspace as the exception. It is still early days for services that use OpenStack and Cloudstack, the Citrix-led open cloud effort operating as an Apache Software Foundation project.

Respondents said they expect usage to increase on AWS and Azure. Developers have mixed expectations of Force.com, Google App Engine and Rackspace.

According to Forrester, the PaaS market is still emerging. Developers don’t delineate as much between PaaS and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings. The survey notes AWS’s addition of abstracted development services such as AWS Beanstalk, Elastic MapReduce, and DynamoDB.

Expect AWS to continue adding services that complement its core infrastructure. Redshift is its most recent addition. The service is an alternative to traditional data warehouse offerings. Forrester cites AWS, Rackspace, and Microsoft as creating ecosystems of PaaS and SaaS in their walled gardens. These are services that exemplify how developers are blurring the lines between PaaS and IaaS. They use them all in AWS instead of using other services for different aspects of their work.

Microsoft, Salesforce.com and Google offer integrated IaaS/PaaS platforms. Forrester also recognizes ActiveState and CloudBees pioneering on-premises PaaS services. Apprenda, AppFog and Dell also offer private PaaS.

Speed of delivery is the top reason that developers cite for why they use the cloud.

Internal business apps were the top app deployed on cloud services. That will change in the next year as more developers say they will deploy more social and collaborative apps and services. Developers will use platforms that offer tools that better support their more sophisticated needs. This will drive deeper use of platform services. Capabilities that will be in demand include mobile back-end as a service (MBaaS), message and app-level caching.

In the next few years, developers will put more code in the cloud, with JavaScript being the programming language of choice.

The Forrester study reinforces that developers will go to the services that offer what they need. The use cases are relatively simple now. Most developers are deploying internal apps, and as the apps become more sophisticated, developers will look for platforms that offer both infrastructure and platform capabilities. That points to an opportunity for AWS, Azure and the platforms that integrate with infrastructure environments.

Kik announced a fairly significant change in direction at the end of November, with the introduction of Kik Cards. Essentially, Cards are lightweight HTML5 applets that Kik users can employ to share content and play games with one another, directly within their Kik message stream. Today, the company revealed to TechCrunch that over 2 million of its 30 million total users had already used Cards within one week of the feature’s launch, and introduced an update to its apps which brings a mobile-optimized Reddit browsing experience to the messaging service.

Kik’s Reddit card is actually a remarkable achievement in a number of ways: first, it manages to be a much more enjoyable way to browse Reddit on iOS or Android smartphones than Reddit’s own website, and second, it was built essentially over the course of a week by a single one of Kik’s native app developers working on his own. It stands as proof that what Cards offers is a way for developers and brands to reach a broad audience quickly and with minimal effort, according to Kik founder and CEO Ted Livingston.

“One of our native developers comes to me and says “I made this,” and it’s Reddit,” Livingston said. “It was crazy, he was just like ‘I built this in a weekend,’ and we said take a week and make it perfect and we’ll put it in the app.” The feat is more impressive, Livingston says, since he wasn’t even a web developer, but a native dev working on a simple side project.

Using the Reddit Card feels a lot like using an iOS native app, and you don’t actually even have to have Kik installed to see what I mean. Like all of Kik’s Cards, the Reddit one is essentially a mobile website, but one that uses the development platform they’ve created to come as close to a native-feeling app as possible, meaning you can visit it by going to http://reddit.kik.com in your device’s mobile browser. As you can see, by default Kik includes a number of subreddits, but you can also add your own manually.

Kik’s big picture move here is starting to come into focus – this isn’t a feature add, it’s a platform play, and one that could help Kik reinvent itself as a mobile-first social networking app long before services that started on the desktop are able to complete the turn. It’s still early to call Kik’s move into Cards a success, but we’ll be watching to see how adoption continues to chart over longer periods.

With Mobile World Congress already on the horizon, it’s hardly a shock to see a new batch of smartphone leaks and rumors starting to make the rounds. HTC never fares well when it comes to keeping their new devices a secret, and today may be no different — the ever-listening Evleaks seems to have come through with new details on HTC’s forthcoming flagship, the Jelly Bean-powered M7.

Contrary to an earlier report from HTC Source, the M7 could sport a smaller 4.7-inch “SoLux” display instead of the 5-inch Super LCD2 panel that debuted on the J Butterfly and its U.S. cousin the Droid DNA. HTC doesn’t seem to be shying away from full HD though — the M7’s screen is still said to run at 1080p, which makes for an astonishing pixel density of 468ppi (the iPhone 5’s display comes in at 326ppi, while the Droid DNA’s 440ppi screen slips to second place).

Of course, pixel density isn’t all that goes into making a truly great display — the DNA had a mostly wonderful screen, but it sadly fell short when it came to overall brightness. Thankfully, Evleaks also notes that the so-called M7’s SoLux display also bolsters “viewing angles, outdoor visibility, and color accuracy,” which could go a long way in making the M7 the Android phone to own (for a while, at least). Meanwhile, a 1.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm chipset is said to be running the show, along with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage — there’s no word on expandable memory yet, though I’ve got my fingers crossed that carriers won’t step in and make any questionable decisions.

Speaking of carriers, the juiciest new tidbit is also the most curious. Evleaks notes that the M7 will eventually find its way onto Verizon and Sprint’s store shelves after its international release (said to take place in Q1, remember?), and alludes to the possibility that the handset will be the first HTC device to be offered by each of the Big 4 U.S. wireless carriers in a long time. That may well be the case (I certainly hope it is), but some of these carriers tend to impose more dramatic changes of design than others, and the end result could be a device that falls short of the standard set by the international model and its all its inevitable variants.

Daniel Burka, who co-founded mobile incubator Milk, has joined Google Ventures as a design partner.

In a tweet earlier this morning, Burka noted that this is another chance for him to work with his Milk co-founder Kevin Rose. Before Milk, Burka was a designer at Digg and a co-founder at Pownce (Rose co-founded both).

Google acquired the Milk team in March, and a few months later Rose joined Google Ventures as an investment partner. According to Burka’s new bio on the Google Ventures site, after the acquisition he led the mobile experience team for Google+.

Design partners are part of the Google Ventures design studio, which works with portfolio companies on product design and user research. A Google Ventures spokesperson told me that the firm has held more than 50 design sessions with its companies this year. The firm also announced a designer in residence program in October, where it enlists designers to work with its startups for a few months.

I’m scheduled to talk to Rose in a few minutes, so I’ll be updating this post with his comments.

Update: When I asked about what brought Burka over to Google Ventures, Rose said it made sense, especially given the pair’s history together, and Burka’s experience co-founding Silverorange, a web agency that “does nothing but work with various different startups.”

Rose added that Google Ventures has realized — “just as everyone has realized” — that design plays a big role in a startup’s success. At the same time, different startups have different design needs, and so the firm’s design partners have different strengths. Burka is “a really amazing product designer” and visual designer, he said, while other partners are good at research and running focus groups.

I also asked if anyone has taken over Burka’s role at Google+. Rose said he doesn’t know, but added, “Obviously, it wasn’t just Daniel — they’ve got a whole team of designers over there.”

Here is an interesting move by Google, which has clearly stepped up its mobile game in recent months: You can now download a dedicated YouTube camera app – YouTube Capture – for iPhone and iPod touch. The app lets you record a video clip and right after you are done filming, you can write a caption, select which networks you want to share to, and publish.

One nice feature of the app, Google writes, is that it will continue to upload your video in the background even after you minimize the app. You can also control who sees your video by setting it to the usual YouTube privacy settings (private, unlisted, and public). The app, of course, also makes use of the usual YouTube enhancements like color correction and stabilization, and it lets you “trim the length and add free background music from YouTube.”

All of these features, says Google, are also available for your existing videos on your device and you can always undo them (but only by going to YouTube.com).

What’s interesting here, by the way, is that the app doesn’t just let you upload your videos to YouTube – it also supports simultaneous uploads to Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.

Facebook this afternoon released a new feature called “Nearby” that lets users search and review businesses such as restaurants, hotels and bars — and it looks like Wall Street received the memo quite quickly.

The stock price of reigning online search and review site Yelp started going down precipitously almost immediately after news of Nearby emerged at around 11am Pacific Time, 2pm Eastern. Within 20 minutes after Nearby launched, Yelp’s stock had taken a swift drop of more than 3.65 percent to as low as $18.50 a share. The next couple of hours brought ups and downs and a bit of a recovery, but the stock still closed for the day down 2.72 percent at $18.93 a share.

Of course, the nature of the stock market is like a horse race, so we shouldn’t read too much into this just yet. But the initial response from the investor community seems to be that Yelp may well have a formidable new competitor on its hands. And, to be fair, it is by no means the only company in this position — it’s just one that we can monitor on the public stock market, thanks to its (very successful) March 2012 IPO.

As my colleague Josh Constine wrote in his hands-on review of Facebook Nearby: “Should Yelp, Foursquare, and other local discovery startups be worried? Yes. …[Facebook Nearby] might not have the long-tail of reviews or advanced spam protection of Yelp, but it knows where your real friends go.” Facebook also has a leg up on many of other players in the space when it comes to monetizing its content. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but for now there is certainly at least one tangible impact.

After signing deals with Twitter and Flickr to power photo filtering and editing, Aviary is bringing on a new CEO. Former OneRiot CEO and Walmart exec Tobias Peggs will be joining the startup as CEO. Former CEO and co-founder Avi Muchnick will assume the Chief Product Officer role.

Most recently, Peggs was CEO at OneRiot, managing that company’s transition from consumer to B2B, and leading the startup to an acquisition by Walmart. Muchnick says that his experience in growing the business through the distribution of SDKs to developers will help Aviary do the same.

“Our network has been growing massively, and we are so excited for the next chapter of Aviary,” said Muchnick. “Tobias has extensive experience with managing accelerated growth and he completely understands our business — working with developers to meet their needs, as well as the emotional aspect of creative expression that the end-user experiences. We couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come.”

Aviary started out with a direct-to-consumer product that allowed people to beautify and share their photos, and the company decided to switch gears and provide its tools to other apps and sites.

Currently there are 25 million monthly active users of Aviary’s products, across a distribution network of 2,500 partners. Partners include Flickr, Box, Walgreens, and Twitter. And Aviary just passed 2 billion edits. Peggs will be overseeing and leading the company’s future growth as a business. You can read more about the transition and Aviary’s future here.

Ron Conway, Silicon Valley’s best known angel investor, got quite a gift this evening. Laurene Jobs, the wife of the late Steve Jobs, dropped by the Conway annual holiday party this evening and unveiled what I can only describe as an epic painting of the man. It was hung on the wall and just about everyone in attendance took a picture.

The painting is based on a photo taken of Ron and his dog Coco for a Fortune article earlier this year.

I tried to steal it because I thought the painting really should be up at the CrunchFund offices (as a conversation piece). Security suggested that was a bad idea.

The party was significantly less festive than previous years because of the horrendous shootings in Connecticut earlier today. Conway’s toast was mostly about the families affected. Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was at the party – Conway rightfully called her an American hero.

Editor’s note: Heather Meeker is a shareholder and chair of the IP/IT Licensing and Transactions Group in the international law firm Greenberg Traurig LLP, and a leading authority on open-source software licensing.  

Startups stand on the shoulders of giants, developing proprietary applications on top of a software landscape that heavily leverages open source components. But as the saying goes, free software is not free, and using open source software requires that organizations understand the legal framework of open source.

Failure to follow the licensing conditions for open source software can result in lawsuits, bad public relations, and more. To reduce risk, companies large and small need to have a basic understanding of open source license conditions and have in place an actionable list of best practices that includes seeking legal guidance when necessary.

Open source software users must follow the licensing conditions for each package they are using, including subcomponents. This can be perplexing, as there are hundreds of different open source licenses, each with its own, sometimes unique conditions. The good news is that a majority of open source software is covered by a handful of licenses, and there are just two major license categories: “copyleft” requires developers to make the source code and documentation available; and “permissive” applies minimal conditions, such as author attribution.

Organizations must have a license and compliance strategy in place that fits both categories. This begins with keeping a record of the licensing terms that apply to the open source software you’re using — including subcomponents and dependencies. Once you know what you are using and the licenses that apply to it, you need a strategy for compliance. Some open source software licenses have simple requirements, and some have requirements that are more complex, such as source code delivery. Your strategy needs to handle such requirements in a streamlined process.

For example, all open source software licenses have notice requirements. If you distribute a product that includes open source software, the notice requirements may instruct you to deliver a simple copyright notice – or even the entire text of the license that governs the software – with your product. While notice requirements are usually not difficult to understand, complying with them can be time-consuming – and challenging when you’re on a product release deadline. Copyleft licenses go further and limit the way developers can integrate the open source software with proprietary software. They also require an offer of source code and build documentation every time you deliver a binary.

Many companies have come to realize that managing the use of open source without automation diverts business, technical and legal resources, which is part of the true cost of free software. The last decade has seen an evolution of automated tools to help identify, track, and manage the use of open source software.  The best tools can help manage use of software in an integrated way, not focusing on open source or proprietary software to the exclusion of the other.

One such approach is Component Lifecycle Management (CLM). CLM is the process of providing developers with collaborative tools, intelligence, and control at every phase of the application lifecycle that addresses the management of licensing risk for component-based development. CLM products, such as Insight from Sonatype, provide a set of software management tools designed to help organizations incorporate CLM practices easily into their development processes. For instance, such tools enable organizations to select appropriate licensed components during design and development; identify and manage component licensing during the build phase to address issues quickly and avoid costly rework; and scan existing applications to identify licenses and dependencies, so you can assess these against corporate policy.

Open source licensing can be complex and confusing if you are accustomed to living in the world of proprietary licensing. So when it comes to evaluating the legal conditions for use of open source software components, don’t hesitate to ask for help. Look to legal experts to help you understand how to combine open source software under different licenses and properly prepare for a product launch or acquisition/exit transactions.

Sports is in the process of becoming the next big market to be transformed by the digital revolution, as fans are increasingly turning to mobile devices and second, third and fourth screens to consume sports content. In August, Turner bought sports blogging and content platform Bleacher Report for an estimated $200. More recently, Yahoo and NBC forged a digital sports partnership in the hopes of becoming the largest sports web property in the U.S., and permanently stealing that spot from ESPN.

Naturally, ESPN and Yahoo! perennially rank as the top sports websites in the U.S., and the same is true for digital video — although it’s more true of ESPN. As more and more fans turn to digital video to watch games live or get highlights after the games, the household names tend to pick up a lot of that digital traffic. Over the last year, for example, ESPN has ranked at the top of the list in terms of digital sports video viewership. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for newcomers. In fact, today, it seems there’s a new leader in the digital sports video world, and it’s not ESPN, Yahoo, NFL or CBS.

You may not have heard of Perform Sports, but the sports media company supplanted ESPN in digital video viewership in November — even if just barely — according to comScore’s November rankings. Perform saw 24.5 million unique viewers in November, just outpacing ESPN at 24 million. Yahoo Sports ranked a distant third with 9.9 million.

This represents the first time that Perform Sports has claimed the top position among digital video providers in the U.S., so it’s a big milestone for the company, which, compared to ESPN and Yahoo is a veritable newcomer to the sports world.

Not only is the company a youngster compared to the 40+ year-old ESPN and the 15-year-old Yahoo Sports — it was founded in 2007 — it’s based in the U.K. That’s right. Nonetheless, the $1 billion, London-based company has grown quickly over the last five years, and now has over 1,000 employees in 12 countries and is listed on the London Stock Exchange.

How has Perform captured the top ranking? The company owns one of the largest portfolios of digital rights in the world. In the U.S., the company provides over 350 publishers, like the L.A. Times, the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald, USA Today and The New York Times with professional and college sports video highlights and original programming via its syndicated video player, ePlayer — just as ESPN now does with Ooyala.

Unlike the big, branded sports destinations, Perform and the other lesser-know but fast-growing CineSport (which ranked fourth in November) are able to license content from leagues and other content providers, distributing video content particularly to a litany of third party sites. As you can see above, for Perform especially, those partners are primarily publications who are looking to beef up their digital properties.

Perform streams game highlights from the MLB, NBA, PGA, MLS, WTA, Nascar and Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, ACC, Pac-12 under their Total College Sports brand. The content is often geo-targeted (and includes national clips and coverage for big games), placing that content alongside editorial coverage in the sports sections of publisher sites, for example.

The company has also been expanding its focus of late to include original content in its lineup, through Total College Sports, for example, which offers a mix of original programming with an in-studio team. The site is currently producing a new original show that will air Saturday nights on Hulu.

Above, you can see a comparison of Yahoo Sports, ESPN and Perform beginning in November 2011, running through October 2012. ESPN led the rankings over that time, with Perform seeing some modest gains on the leader. But from October to December, Perform saw a huge boost (of nearly eight million unique viewers), which seems almost unbelievable, but the company tells us can be attributed to a new distribution deal it signed with the NFL in October.

Perform (and CineSport) have also been able to make gains on the household names by becoming video distributors that enable content to be disseminated broadly, across platforms and devices. Like the bigs, Perform can serve content to viewers wherever they happen to be, but unlike other big brands, it doesn’t require them to navigate to their own branded sites or platforms in order to view that content.

Third-party sites are ravenous for quality video content thanks to escalating demand both from fans and advertisers, and Perform has been able to take advantage of that, while making the deal more appetizing to publishers by offering a revenue share of the ad dollars generated by Perform’s video on their platforms.

The economic dynamics around sports video content are changing, and the demand from third-party sites for sports video content is only going to increase. This could mean that there’s a good chance this won’t be the last time that Perform, or CineSport, find themselves atop the sports video rankings.

[Note: This is a weekly series. If your company is doing something amazing to help a charitable cause or doing some good in your community, please reach out.]

Before we start with this week’s edition of “The Weekly Good”, I want to let everyone know that our thoughts are with those who are affected by the horrific events in Connecticut today. We are all human, and doing damage like this to one another must stop.

There are good things going on in the world, and it’s important to highlight those things. When tech companies deploy their efforts and resources for good, it hits me, for reasons. Twitter is doing something really awesome, called #Tweet4Good. For every tweet using the #Tweet4Good hashtag, Twitter will give $1 to in ads on the platform to the Red Cross. Up to $20,000. You have until 12/31 to get your tweets in.

Twitter will donate $1 in Twitter Ads for Good to @RedCross with each #Tweet4Good before 12/31, up to $20K. Please RT: tweet.twitter.com/Tweet4Good

—
Twitter Advertising (@TwitterAds) December 13, 2012

We spoke to Claire Diaz-Ortiz, who leads social innovation at Twitter, and she told us all about the initiative:

———

TechCrunch: How did you come up with the idea for #tweet4good?

Claire Diaz-Ortiz: The #Tweet4Good initiative was the brainchild of our Sales Marketing Team as a way to bring our advertisers and users together to engage around a critical non-profit and to support them with a donation in Twitter Ads for Good, our pro-bono ad program.

In Dec 2011 we renamed our pro-bono advertising program as Twitter Ads for Good. To help promote the program, we ran a holiday campaign for our advertisers that invited them to choose from five different charities for a donation in Twitter Ads for Good that Twitter would make on their behalf. This year we wanted to evolve that idea and bring it to Twitter to invite our advertisers to participate and engage with the program on our platform. The goal is to involve people in the campaign to help us reach our $20,000 goal as way to generate more awareness for the @RedCross by Tweeting with the hashtag #Tweet4Good.

TechCrunch: How do you usually work with nonprofits for good using ad units?

Claire Diaz-Ortiz: The Twitter for Nonprofits program gives benefits to any non-profit who applies. The Twitter Ads for Good program, which has been in existence since the day we first launched our very first ad product back in April of 2010, now gives nearly a million dollars in pro-bono ads to non-profit organizations each year.

TechCrunch: How else do you work with nonprofits as a company?

Claire Diaz-Ortiz: Although we do engage in some one-off philanthropic work, including our collobration with Girls Who Code, we focus on the programmatic ways we can reach large numbers of non-profits. The Twitter for Nonprofits program and the Twitter Ads for Good program do well to reach this aim.

TechCrunch:</b What are some stories about nonprofits that have used twitter for good, with or without your help?

Claire Diaz-Ortiz: See some great case studies of non-profits at http://www.Hope140.org. Another great example of Twitter use this year by a social good campaign would be the #halfthesky campaign — the book, documentary, and now movement of @nickkristof to help support women and girls the world over.

TechCrunch:</b What are your days like at Twitter?

Claire Diaz-Ortiz: I (Claire) work with non-profits, faith organizations, and their leaders to help make Twitter a place for them to do their good works. Whether in helping to highlight the work of excellent charities, or in working to bring leaders like the Pope onto Twitter, the goal is always the same: to help users better do what they are already good at.

———

There’s a website that features all of the people who have tweeted with the hashtag, along with a real-time indication of how close we are to hitting the maximum goal. It’s pretty awesome:

Participate, tweet, and if you’re a company, think of something that you can do year-round to help out some less-fortunate folks with the tools that you have at your disposal. You never know, you might just change the world. Twitter did it with a hashtag.

In case you’ve missed our previous Weekly Good pieces, have a look here, here and here.

YouTube first launched its Data API back in 2007, and it has since become the video giant’s most popular API in terms of request volume. Today, YouTube announced that it has officially opened version 3.0 of its API to all developers.

The new APIs bring a number of important changes to bear on its current feature set, including client library support, improved tooling, reference documentation and integration with Google’s API infrastructure. It’s also now officially using JSON instead of XML encoding for, as YouTube says, “greater efficiency” and in pursuit of actually returning what you ask for.”

On top of that, the new API introduces Freebase integration via topics and universal search and, for those developing social media management apps, YouTube now offers channel bulletin and subscriber list management. The former especially could help solve a real pain point for YouTube’s user experience, considering that many of us are likely familiar with the less-than-satisfying results that are produced in search results.

With its new Topics API, developers can specify Freebase topic IDS rather than using search keywords. In its blog post this afternoon, YouTube gives the example of the topic ID, “/m/02vx4,” which would come in handy for tagging content related to soccer content, rather than having to come up with the right keywords. On top of that, because the API offers a universal search feature, developers can quickly match their topic of choice to channels, playlists and videos in one request (example here), which removes a good deal of friction from the whole process.

With v3.0, YouTube also aims to help developers lower their apps’ bandwidth requirement (by only returning what you ask for with its new “part” parameter) — along with the improved efficiency that comes from its new default JSON encoding. To that point, YouTube says that version 3.0 supports Google API tools like its API console and its reference documentation now allows developers to “scroll down to the bottom of any reference page to try the new API.” Pretty cool.

All in all, YouTube calls this its “biggest overhaul to date,” and as YouTube product manager Hunter Walk said via tweet, this is a clear sign that YouTube is getting serious about providing deeper support to its developer ecosystem. There are already a number of recognizable apps and startups taking advantage of YouTube’s API and, with v3 today, the company may very well see a renewed interest from developers.

No mixed messages to developers from @YouTube — we <3 you. here's an even more powerful API v3 apiblog.youtube.com/2012/12/the-si…

—
Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) December 15, 2012

A handful of startups have implemented the new API, which YouTube is leveraging to showcase its new capabilities. Showyou, for example, has integrated the Topics API to allow its users to discover related videos by clicking on topics associated with the Showyou feed, while YouTube audience development startup Tubular Labs has begun using v3.0′s subscriber list to let content creators and publishers get a more nuanced view of their audiences. [More examples here.]

There’s a lot to play around with in YouTube’s new data API, and it’s still in the experimental phase, so there are likely more changes to come. But, as of now, it seems that the changes open the door to new pockets of growth within its developer ecosystem. By adding the ability for clients to post bulletins to subscribers through third-party apps, for example, this could jump start the YouTube marketing developer industry — much the way Facebook did when it offered its publishing APIs for pages.

For more on the announcement, find it here or introductory playlist here.