Category: Tech news

TripIt, the site that creates customized travel itineraries from travel confirmation emails, is upgrading its premium version today to be even more useful. Now TripIt Pro will track any pro member’s flight itinerary so they are notified of a price drop that could trigger a potential airline refund.

TripIt Pro members will now be alerted by email and text message when they may be eligible for an airline credit or voucher. Any eligible flight within TripIt Pro is automatically monitored for post-purchase price drops. Consumers simply contact the airline via phone to obtain their credit, armed with the information TripIt Pro provides in its alerts.

The startup has activated the feature for a select number of beta testers and users have been receiving credits or vouchers ranging in value from $20-$600. It’s a no-brainer; and travelers have nothing to lose.

TripIt Pro now also features new benefits from partners; enrolled members will received a complimentary membership to Hertz #1 Club Gold and Regus Businessworld Gold (which is a $660 value). And the yearly fee for TripIt Pro has dropped from $69 to $49 (coincidentally this is about the same amount has you would pay to check-in two bags on most airlines).

TripIt Pro’s existing features include a notification via text or email when there is a flight delay, cancellation or gate change. If there is a need to reschedule, TripIt Pro finds alternate flights, including flight status and open seats. The service also tracks frequent traveler points all in one place and allows travelers to designate an inner circle of people with whom to share all their trips. And the premium service works on the startup’s mobile apps.

It’s been nearly two weeks since Google Instant launched, and aside from conjecture and personal opinions about the new UX (everyone seems to either hate it or love it), we’re finally starting to see some real data about how the new Google search experience is affecting organic traffic levels and other facets of SEO. Despite assertions to the contrary, SEO hasn’t been killed by Instant, but nor have the changes been inconsequential. Google Instant is slowly changing how search engine optimization professionals work, what they focus on, and the bottom line results seen by their clients.

When Google Instant first launched, we predicted three major SEO trends we expected to see. Since then, we’ve been collecting data from users of our SEO platform, Drive. Here’s how our guesses matched up with the results we’ve seen.

The Prediction

Real Estate is at a real premium in the age of Google Instant. A SERP that once showed seven or eight results above the fold now only has room for four or five results below the Google Instant suggestion dropdown. Based on this, we expected traffic to decrease dramatically for those results that Instant shoved below the fold. As a corollary, we expected traffic from above-the-fold keywords to rise, especially due to the general nature of Instant to present the searcher with more and more options to click those results, as they appeared automatically above the fold as he or she typed.

The Data
To test this theory, we focused on keywords that consistently ranked between position six and eight both before after the introduction of Google Instant, comparing how those keywords fared with counterparts ranking #1 through #5, and those in positions nine and ten. Focusing on such specific criteria gave us our smallest sample, but it was still large enough to be representative—and surprising. We actually found that once a user stopped typing, Google Instant was more likely to make the user scroll down the page: keywords in lowest positions showed the largest growth. Google Instant, however, seems to make searchers less likely to click to Page 2 of the results; keyword ranking past position #10 showed a significant decrease in traffic. Keywords that remained above the fold showed some growth, while keywords that had just dropped below the fold—where we expected to see the largest change—showed a barely-discernible decrease in traffic.

What To Do About It
Google Instant has changed how the SERP looks and how many results show, but—overwhelmingly—the behavior of most searchers to click on the top results hasn’t changed. Only now those top results are shown more often and are driving more traffic, so obtaining a top position is more important than ever. On the flip side, keywords ranking at the bottom of Page 1 are starting to get more attention, while keywords on subsequent results pages are tanking. Time to do that extra work to push your keywords from the top of Page 2 to the bottom of Page 1.

Long-Tail Keyword Compression
The Prediction

Our first prediction when Google Instant launched was that we would see less keywords driving approximately the same amount of traffic to sites—at least to well-optimized sites with a well-round keyword strategy. Because Google Instant focuses the user’s attention on more popular search phrases, by suggesting them and showing their results as the user types, fewer users will use longer tail, less popular phrases. Searchers typing a longer, more obscure variation of a keyword are unlikely to complete it before they see the results—automatically loaded onto the SERP—they were looking for.

A company selling iPod Car Adapters, but ranking for a lesser-used phrase, like “iPod Car Cables,” is unlikely to get much traffic from that phrase, as a searcher using Instant would almost never get to that search before seeing relevant results. For a site counting on unpopular, “forgotten” long-tail phrases like that, their traffic will dwindle. For sites ranking for a variety of relevant head and tail keywords, search volume will stay constant, even as query variety dwindles.

The Data
So far, this one is coming true in a major way. While organic traffic levels have risen about 5% for all Drive users since Instant was introduced, keyword variety has fallen more than 15%! Thousands of phrases are no longer driving any traffic, but most sites aren’t suffering for it.

What To Do About It
Firstly, take a deep look at your analytics. Find out which tail keyword phrases have stopped generating traffic, despite ranking well, and stop optimizing those phrases, shifting to your attention to the more popular variations of those phrases that are still generating traffic—and likely generating much more of it. Follow up with some keyword research—using Instant—to discover other popular varieties of those keywords that are showing up In Instant suggestions.

The Google Prude Paradox
The Prediction

One of the most interesting aspects of Google Instant is how much it put the search engine’s “prudishness” on display. Even with SafeSearch turned off, Google Instant will not show suggestions for adult terms or keyword phrases. We’d expect sites banking on adult terms, especially long-tail terms, to see little difference in organic traffic, since Google Instant basically doesn’t apply to them. Complementary to this, we’d expect sites that rank for “mature” but not necessarily “adult” terms—like “sexy videos” or “sexy girls”—to see slightly more traffic. As a searcher types a keyword phrase that starts out mature and gradually gets adult, the searcher might be enticed enough by a site showing up in the progressive results that has mature, but not adult, content.

The Data
We expected a slight increase in traffic. What we saw was huge: a more than 20% increase in traffic from “mature” keywords. A 25% increase in traffic from keywords containing the word “sex.” Google Instant is really changing user behavior here, waylaying a searcher intending to type an adult query with what is usually PG-13 content.
What To Do About It
This applies to a small group of sites, but if you have content that falls into that narrow band between Safe For Work and not shown with SafeSearch on, optimize that content as much as possible.

Conclusion
All this data comes with a large caveat emptor: it’s only been two weeks—long enough to see some data, but the data we’ll see in another month will definitely better illustrate the changes wrought by Google Instant. Full adoption of Google Instant—when it launches on mobile and in the browser address bar; when it is supported by more browsers and by those accessing Google through https on not via the home page (iGoogle, for instance)—will also further clear up these results. Some of the above may be disproven; other trends may continue. What’s certainly clear is that Google Instant has changed things, and SEOs need to react.
Data for this article was compiled by looking at the top 10 accounts in Drive and the approximately 10,000 tracked keyword driving traffic to their sites, along with the more than 60 million organic hits these sites received in the 13 days preceding and post the launch of Google Instant.

Eli Feldblum is the CTO & Co-Founder of RankAbove, the leading provider of scalable SEO solutions, intended for SEO professionals working at or on large web properties. Feldblum is an eight-year veteran of the SEO world, and has spoken and published throughout the industry. More predictions and data that either backs them or knocks them down is available here, and even more data will be available during a joint webinar between RankAbove and ComScore taking place on October 14th.

At this point, my head is spinning. Earlier tonight, I wrote about how Verizon is still full-steam ahead on destroying the fabric of Android. Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, we have AT&T playing up the fact that they got a “D-” on a coverage test instead of an “F”. I seriously just can’t decide which carrier is worse.

Earlier today, a study by Credit Suisse was released stating that 23 percent of iPhone users currently on AT&T would switch to Verizon if that carrier offered the phone. That number is slightly off from the 34 percent that was previously reported, but is still pretty massive. In total, that represents about 1.4 million customers that would jump ship from AT&T to Verizon without hesitation. But speaking today at the Goldman Sachs media and technology conference, Communacopia (yes, awful name), AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson had something interesting to say about possible defections.

Stephenson noted that 80 percent of AT&T’s iPhone base is either in family plans or business relationships with the carrier and that these type of customers tend to be “very sticky.” So essentially what he’s saying is that those 80 percent of iPhone users probably won’t leave even if they want to. Wow, that’s a fresh approach.

The correct answer there would have been to say that AT&T will be doing all it can to improve its network and its customer service to ensure these people stay. And that they’re confident that they will. Or really, anything would have been better than an answer that basically amounts to “we have them trapped.”

Of course, this seems to be the company line these days. The same 80 percent figure was touted in a recent SEC filing.

But this may be my favorite part of Stephenson’s talk, from CNBC’s report:

Stephenson emphasized the “extended array” of smartphones Apple subscribers can pick from, which reads as AT&T saying it’s not too reliant on Apple.

Does he really believe that iPhone users are going to switch to some other phone that AT&T offers instead of switching to the iPhone on another network? I mean, seriously?

This is basically like saying, “well, we offer you crappy service on one of the most popular devices out there, so why don’t you try this less popular device and stick with us?”

That’s what we call a lose-lose situation. Brilliant.

About a week ago, we noted that Verizon was gearing up to launch its own app store for Android phones. This app store, called V CAST Apps, would be completely separate from Android’s existing Market for apps. In other words, it’s Verizon kicking their partner Google in the man region.

Of course, we all knew neither side would spin it that way. And sure enough, today we have Verizon’s take. During their Verizon Developer Community Conference earlier this afternoon, the company took the time to respond to the charges that they were taking over control of Android devices with maneuvers such as this. Jkontherun has a good overview of what was said, but Verizon itself was tweeting key parts. Here’s my favorite:

V CAST Apps is NOT out to take over the phone. It’s about choice, and about simplicy [sic] – carrier-billing — and quality — great apps.

Oh Jesus. Here we go again. It’s not about control or money — no, of course not. It’s about “choice”. Excuse me while I vomit in my mouth.

Does anyone really believe that Verizon really cares about choice here? What they care about is not  ”becoming a commodity connectivity provider,” as James Kendrick puts it. And that’s fair enough, there’s nothing wrong with a company wanting to be successful and maintain their success. But I’m sick of this spin that all of this is for the betterment of all. Verizon cares about making money just like every other company and that’s why they’re doing this.

But there are two main reasons I have a problem with all of this. First, Verizon has proven itself to be incapable of making a decent consumer experience. I’ll refer back to my experience with the Motorola RAZR which was delayed for many months so Verizon could load it up with their crap UI and V CAST junk. And now we’re seeing it with the Droid Verizon phones. They’re packed to the gills with garbage compliments of Verizon. There is no question that Google needs to improve the Android Market experience, but as the creators of Android, I have much more faith in them doing that than with Verizon circumventing it.

Second, here’s what really annoys me: believe it or not, I really like the idea of Android. I love the idea of an OS ecosystem that works across a range of carriers. In the U.S., Apple isn’t doing this, Android is. I like anything that gives the carriers less power. The problem is that Verizon is now using Android’s openness to ruin that approach.

Verizon is essentially making Verizon Android phones different from all other Android phones.  Say I buy an app through the V CAST app store then a year down the line I buy another Android device on Sprint. Guess what? It won’t work on the new device. This was supposed to be an open ecosystem — instead, it’s turning out to be very, very fragmented. We’re seeing now that a Verizon Android phone and a Sprint Android phone will soon only share a bit of branding in common. The harmonious ecosystem is being razed.

And all of this doesn’t seem to bode well for the prospects of a Verizon iPhone. Does anyone believe for a second that Apple is going to let Verizon open their own app store on the iPhone? Not a chance. They’ll be lucky if they get a V Cast content app pre-loaded on there — you can bet Apple doesn’t even want that. So why would Verizon want to have anything to do with a device that will turn them into the “commodity connectivity provider” when Google is giving them the keys to the castle?

And so, despite the best efforts of Apple and Google over the past few years, the carriers are now striking back. And it’s us, the consumers, who will lose as a result. How’s that for “choice”?

[image: Warner Bros.]

Online marketing network for small business owners MerchantCircle has acquired meeting scheduler TimeBridge, we’ve learned. We’ve confirmed the acquisition with MerchantCircle. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 2005, TimeBridge provides a web app and an iPhone app that allows users to coordinate and schedule meetings easily. The company, which has over 500,000 users, also offers a number of features that allow users to conduct meetings, including web, phone and video conferencing. The app will send attendees email and SMS reminders and allow users to upload documents and capture notes.

Ben Smith, co-founder of MerchantCircle, says that the startup plans to use to TimeBridge to allow merhcnats on its network to schedule appointments with consumers. Merchant Circle, which has been steadily growing, provides a business directory for merchants in smaller towns and currently lists 1.3 million small businesses. MerchantCircle has long targeted merchants in small locales versus catering towards the consumers, as sites like Yelp and CitySearch do. MerchantCircle has local business members in 95% of the 24,600 U.S. cities and towns with populations over 200.

While the company will continue to operate TimeBridge’s scheduling platform, TimeBridge’s technology will also eventually be integrated into small businesses’ profiles to allow consumers to schedule appointments and calls with merchants (see picture below). Smith said that the acquisition was also a talent acquisition; and says TimeBridge’s Yori Nelken will bring both his technical skills and business acumen to MerchantCircle.

Another asset of TimeBridge that was attractive to MerchantCircle was the patent portfolio that TimeBridge has in the online scheduling space. TimeBridge has raised $14 million in funding to date. MerchantCircle has been steadily adding new features, expanding to international markets, and increasing traffic to its site, perhaps in preparation for a possible IPO in the coming year.

Online forums pervade the web, but often these forums leave much to be desired in terms of design and layout. Huddler has launched its white-label solution to allow publishers to migrate online forums into sleek, feature-rich web-based communities.

Forum and website publishers can partner with Huddler to modernize their sites. Huddler’s technology adds product reviews, image hosting, wiki functionality, user image galleries, specialized search functionality and aesthetic improvements to any forums.

Founder Dan Gill says that forums are still massive in terms of members and traffic, but features and the interface of many forums has lagged behind. Huddler is claiming that its model will increase search traffic and be able to make money for publishers. In addition to adding features for forums, the startup also aims to monetize thee sites through display advertising and affiliate marketing.

Over the past year, Huddler has been in private beta, with 24 publishers using the startup’s technology including, EpicSki, ChefTalk, DenimBlog, and Head-Fi. To date Huddler has raised $5 million in funding from NEA.

As you can see from the before and after pictures of Huddler’s makeover of EpicSki, Huddler’s technology seems to help spruce these forums up a bit.

With the news this week that the recession officially ended in June 2009, there’s a ton of commentary about how it still feels like we’re in recession. But from where I sit, it never felt much like a recession at all. Revenues tightened up and people didn’t get raises, but I don’t know any friends who lost apartments, few who lost jobs and few companies that went under, just because of the crash.

Compare that to the post-2000 crash, when I’d estimate that half of my friends in the Bay Area were laid off and out of work for months or in some cases, years. I may sound like those old grandmas who insists on rinsing and reusing paper towels because they never got over the Great Depression, but honestly, that was a recession. This thing we just went through? From the Valley standpoint it was an excuse to trim fat and put some decisions off.

This should seem obvious– after all we’d been built up to a crazy level in the late 1990s, propped up by IPOs that weren’t sustainable. But somehow I keep finding myself in this debate– including in China at the World Economic Forum last week– and the broader business press keeps projecting that this was “the big one” when for a lot of us out here, it just wasn’t.

Well, I’m tired of having the debate, so I spent the afternoon digging up some stats to back up my anecdotal sense of things. Spoiler alert: I was right. We–meaning Silicon Valley– got off pretty easy this time around. When I say “Silicon Valley” I mean that as the universe of American tech startups not the geographical area, although there’s clearly a lot of overlap.

I looked at six indicators for startup “health”: The number of funding rounds, the amount raised, the number of M&A transactions, how much those transactions netted, the number of IPOs and how much those IPOs netted. I compared the percentage of drop, between peak and trough quarters over the last two downturns. (Dow Jones VentureSource actually did the looking up; thanks to them for the quick turn around on data.)

Here are the results: There was a downturn in all six metrics in this last recession but it only lasted from the third quarter of 2008 through the first quarter of 2009, compared with an 18 month retrenchment from the first quarter of 2000 through the middle of 2001. (In general, that is. Some measures bounced back quicker.) And don’t forget– that was the period when Sequoia Capital sent out its death-and-destruction-are-coming memo instructing people to cut the fat and cut spending. That pull back is called catching your breath and being prudent, not a true correction because a market was overheated. In the middle of the recession I wrote that things weren’t so bad in the Valley because we weren’t the cause of the downturn this time, we were just an innocent bystander. But as it turned out, we were more of a bystander that got splashed with water than a bystander that sustained any real collateral damage.

Let’s look at funding deals first: In the 2000-era downturn the number of deals getting done fell 53% and the amount of money going into those deals fell 64%. In the more recent downturn the number of deals getting done fell only 20% but the amount going into those companies fell 47%. So for sure there was less money for startups to play with but there wasn’t an even comparable free-fall in the number of companies that could raise money before and after each crash.

Now let’s look at money from liquidity. That matters, because that’s the big money that sloshes around an economic area that makes people feel rich– paying for dinners, buying houses and having a lot of ripple effects on other parts of the economy. The number of acquisitions dropped a similar amount– 15% in the recent recession and 18% in the post-2000 crash. But the proceeds from acquisitions took a bigger hit in the post-2000 era, at 66%, than it did in the 2008 crash at just 26%. Translation: The going rate for companies fell this time around, but wasn’t decimated. In the post-2000 crash, acquisitions bounced back quicker than other stats — not hugely surprising as VCs were likely incentivized to move some properties that suddenly couldn’t go public.

That brings us to IPOs, where we see the biggest difference. In the post-2000 crash IPOs fell a whopping 93% in one year’s time and the amount raised from IPOs fell 94%. The startup universe went from a peak of nearly 70 deals in the first quarter of 2000 raising a combined $7.3 billion to just five deals raising $467 million. That can make a whole company, a whole industry and a whole major economic area feel destitute in a flash. Comparatively, the startup universe went from six IPOs in the first quarter of 2008 to four over the next five quarters, raising about the same amount. Simply put– there was little room for IPOs to fall during this last downturn.

And that last stat is the one that drives all the others. Valuations and the number of deals did soar in the Web 2.0 era but it had nothing to do with exits or the broader market, so the broader market didn’t tank them. What did drive the increase? Some was legitimate new value being created online– or rather displaced from traditional media. But a lot of it was our own economic cycle of an overheated venture capital universe that lags the market-based economy by years, because venture capital funds invest and exit over ten year periods– meaning a correction isn’t immediate and the broader market was buoyed up when asset managers went to reinvest a few years back, putting off a shakeout even further. So there are loose correlations but little direct cause-and-effect.

What about jobs, you might ask? After all, numbers came out a few days ago showing that the Bay Area– while slightly better than the State as a whole– has unemployment of around 9%, almost double what it was pre-downturn and comparable to the national numbers, which are causing plenty of pain. That’s where we get to the difference between “Silicon Valley” the geographical place and “Silicon Valley” the lazy shorthand for venture-backed tech startups. Dig a little deeper into the numbers and you’ll see that in terms of local job losses construction was the hardest hit, with sectors like retail and personal financial professionals, in part being replaced by technology tools, also hit.

My point: Stop whining. If you couldn’t raise money your company probably wasn’t working, which doesn’t mean it was bad, it just means you were a startup trying to do something risky that didn’t work. If no startups go under–in good times and bad times–entrepreneurs and investors likely aren’t taking enough risk. If you lost your job–and you work in tech– you likely either worked for a public company that had more systemic problems (cc: Yahoo, eBay) or the recession was an excuse to get rid of you. Either way, you likely have been rehired somewhere since. The verdict is in: It wasn’t just like 1999. It wasn’t bubble 2.0 and it certainly wasn’t dot-com crash 2.0.

At a Gaming Event in Palo Alto today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that games are one of the primary reasons some people visit Facebook, confirming that 40% of its userbase is using the site for social gaming. The top ten games on Facebook have more than 12 million users each.

But Zuckerberg says it’s complicated, “While they’re in the top five things that people like, they’re also in the top five things that people hate.”

Read more in Jason Kindcaid’s liveblog from the event.

Facebook product manager Jared Morgenstern is on stage at the Facebook Gaming event in Palo Alto and after describing the internal codename “Super Mario Party” as “Doing things with your close friends is better than doing things with strangers,” (yes, random) he finally got into what newsfeed changes Facebook will be making with regards to games in order to make the Facebook gaming experience less annoying for both the people who are playing and the people who want nothing to do with games.

This is big with regards to exposing users to games, as Facebook is making a concession to gamers still reeling from limitations on game updates. From the Facebook blog …

“People who do not play games will only see stories when a particular game is added by a group of friends, instead of ongoing News Feed stories. These dedicated stories will show which friends are playing a game, making it easy to join them. Over the coming months, we plan to launch additional features that provide improved and personalized social games and News Feed experiences. Happy gaming!”

Here is an outline of the games-related interface changes below:

Fix Navigation In Order To Make It More Useful

1. Smarter Bookmarks — The left hand panel of bookmarks that just sat there before, will now actually take user behavior into account, using a relevance algorithm i.e # of days in the last 30 days that you’ve used an application.

2. Stronger Reengagement Channel — Facebook will replacing the grey text of gaming notifications with the more stand out blue bubbles. In addition to the functionality of retracting games requests, Facebook will be moving requests to the left sidebar.

Simplifying And Strengthening Behaviors

3. Requests to the Dashboards — Gaming related requests will now be moved  to the games dashboard.

Understand Our Shared Audience

4. Targeted Stream Posts plus Personalizing Stories — People who don’t play games will only see when a game is added, instead of ongoing “Marissa is building a barn in FarmVille!” type updates.

Make Viral Loops More Frictionless

5. Simplified policy changes — In the coming months Facebook will be adding more changes and features in order to streamline the social gaming experience.

VP of Business Development Dan Rose closed off the announcement by saying that, “We recognize that some of the things that we’ve done in the past.. sent a signal that maybe we don’t care about games or thought that they should be less prominent” and reaffirmed Facebook’s desire to be the best place in the world to play social games. With about 200 million people playing games monthly, it is definitely are the largest in terms of population.

I’m at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, where the social network is having a special press event to talk about the current social gaming landscape. We expect there to be some important announcements this evening — the event is being led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and there are myriad game developers in attendance. My live notes and a video stream are below.

Facebook’s Dan Rose has taken the stage.
Talking today about changes to FB platform, user experience around games.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stage.

• Today, talking about two themes: quality and apps/games. Every day almost 300 million people come to FB.com.
• Hundreds of millions of people love games on Facebook. Hundreds of millions hate them.
• Let’s talk about quality. We have a team called the Site Integrity/Graph Integrity team. Try to make it so that each experience people have on the site is a positive one.
• In last two months, ‘friend spam’ — friend requests that aren’t accepted — are down 40%
• One of biggest drivers of negative experiences has been games. But poll Facebook users, and games are in the top five. There have been at least four large companies building games. On the other hand, games are one of the biggest complaints we get. Often right up there on list of top five people wish weren’t there. How do we manage that?
• When we turn weight of game stories in News Feed up — we get complaints. Turn it down, get complaints. We want to build and enable anything that hundreds of millions of people want to use.
• Solutions are pretty simple: if someone is playing a game, and they want context about that game… then don’t limit stories about that game. On the other hand, if you’ve never played a certain game, then you probably don’t want to see context from a lot of friends who are playing that game.
• Talking about how if you play a game, it should be easy to access. If you stop playing it, it should fade out of your experience.

Jared Morgenstern, PM for Facebook’s games team, has taken the stage.

• We now have a dedicated gaming team.
• Talking about how much he likes games. Zelda, Nintendo Power… video game colleges.
• Top 10 games on FB have more than 12 million active users each
• Championed building a team dedicated to games at FB. Various teams are building ‘war rooms’. Surround office with people on the project. Had idea at a hackathon to make a loft in a conference room… a gaming focus loft. Designed so you can see the faces of the people you’re playing against.
• Doubling down on infrastructure

• Starting with a vision…doing things with your close friends is better than doing things with strangers

The actual changes…:

• Smarter bookmarks. Sorting bookmarks by actual usage. Relevance = number of days in the last 30 days that you’ve used an application. Will always be core set of services at the top (FB services) and then personalized set of features based on what the user often users.
• Stronger reengagement channel Using blue bubbles as notifications instead of just grey text. Will make it more apparent to users.
• Moving game requests from bottom right area of requests module, to be part of the same left sidebar.
• Ability to retract requests.
• Will start targeting shared stories to only users playing the same game (this is big) — no more spam about cows that you don’t care about. For users that aren’t playing a game, Facebook will show ‘Discovery Stories’. “Everett and Joey are playing Social Chess”, but you won’t see their every move.
• Making viral loops more frictionless with policy changes.

Dan Rose is back on stage. “We recognize that some of the things that we’ve done in the past.. sent a signal that maybe we don’t care about games or thought that they should be less prominent”. We’re dedicating more resources to games. Have big team working on Credits.

Tried to do collapsing of stories earlier, but devs didn’t like it. And gamers didn’t like it either — because they only saw some of the stories they wanted to see. And people who don’t like games didn’t like it either, because they were still seeing these stories, only fewer of them.

Q&A:

Did you just say that a user playing a game can’t share a story with a user who isn’t playing that game?
A: Requests and discovery stories will be only new user channels.

Q: I have some friends that play games a lot, I know I can sort News Feed based on friends, not content. Is there thought to sort News Feed by not user, but content?
A: Jared: Games dashboard kinda sucks right now. There will be a wave of innovation around dashboard. One thing we did test is an embedded stream in games dashboard that filters content based on games you’re playing.
A: Zuckerberg:One thing we’re trying to emphasize is that this is a set of infrastructure changes that gives a base from which to build on. Someone asked can you now not publish a News Feed story to all of your friends? What we found is that most people were trying to share it with other people who were having relevant exp. in content. We may add more features to broadcast more broadly in the future. We did a lot of testing of this to make sure this balanced out to around where we were before. So if some of these seem like big swings… They are big swings in that people who play games will see a lot about games and people who don’t wont… But in testing it’s neutral in terms of ecosystem. Good base to build things from.
A: Rose: If I know two of my friends are playing a game, that’s more relevant to me than any information they might post from that game if I haven’t started playing it yet.
Q: Talk about discovery stories.
A: First set will be based on someone installing your app and playing it on an amount of time that shows engagement. Will also be controlled by privacy setting.

Are you making a Credits dashboard?
A: Yes, we’re building things that will make it easier to see what’s going on with your business.

Strategy for free credits?
A: One of goals is to increase number of people on FB who are buying virtual goods in games. One of ways we’re attempting to do that is to give free credits to users.

Last 6-8 months cost of user acquisition has gone up. How do you see credits being rolled out? Will it be a requirement?
Rose: Credits are important for users to make sure that when you buy them on FB you can use them in any game that you play. That only works in a world where all of the games accept credits. 170 games accept credits. Want to get all games accepting credits.
Zuckerberg: A lot of changes balance out two curves. One is cost/ease of getting new people on your app. Second is cost/ease getting someone continually engaged in game. Our view is that early on it was all virality. Trying to boost engagement now.

Q: Can you still target feed posts to specific users?
A: Current algo is that you can change feed form showing friend lists, won’t show up if a player isn’t playing the game. Request removal: Open Graph API call to remove all requests. Can’t do it individually.

In two days, Zynga has hit the $500k mark in a charity campaign that launched late Sunday on FarmVille for the “L’Ecole de Choix,” a K-12 school the gaming giant is building in Mirebalais, Haiti.

Farmville players can donate money directly by purchasing Sweet Seeds for a special beet that won’t wither. In addition, Zynga is making a corporate donation if players reach a community goal. Every FarmVille player was given a Haiti Backpack, and players can exchange School Supplies (free gifts) to fill the backpack.

If players exchange 400 million gifts, Zynga will donate $100K to the charity, in addition to the funds donated for the Sweet Seeds. So far, the initiative has resulted in 200 million gifts exchanged. Zynga is donating 100 percent of the proceeds for this campaign to the school, and Facebook has also agreed to donate their Facebook Credits fees as well.

It’s an impressive amount of money to raise (not to mention interactions) in such a short time. Zynga says that this is one of the most popular campaigns the company has ever run, second only to its Earthquake Relief Campaign, which raised over $1 million in five days on Farmville. Zynga’s fundraising goal is is to generate enough donations to complete building the school and provide 1 year of operating funds. The campaign for the next 10-14 days depending on how much money players are able to raise.

It’s no secret that one of the biggest issues Android has faced is fragmentation — there are many devices running older versions of the OS, and carriers are generally painfully slow about upgrading older phones (only around 30% of handsets are currently running the current version, Froyo). One way that Google has been working to mitigate this problem has been to decouple key Android applications from the core operating system, allowing it to update its apps more frequently, without having to worry about carriers getting around to distributing OS updates. And today, it’s put one of Android’s most essential applications on this fast track: Gmail.

You can now download a standalone version of Gmail from Android Market (use the QR code below if you don’t want to have to go looking for it). The app includes some nifty new features, including a menu with options like ‘Reply’ that follows you down the screen as you read a message.

It also includes what Google is calling “limited support” for Priority Inbox, which basically means you can browse the ‘Important’ label (“limited” is definitely an appropriate choice of words here).  Fortunately the fact that this is now a standalone app means we can probably expect more frequent updates in the future

This isn’t the first key Google application to get the standalone release treatment: Google Maps, Voice Search, and the main Google Search application have all been released separately as well.

FourSquare has been historically underpowered. You can check in, but then what? You add a tip? Who wants that? ChatSquare, soon to be found at ChatSQ.com and on iPhones near you, is an app that lets you chat with other people in the same FourSquare location. You’re in the club? Chat with the bouncer. The girl by the bar. The man being kept in the meat locker. At a conference? Make fun of others around you to your friends or even comment on the speaker.

The app isn’t quite ready yet – we’ll update you when it’s out – but it’s a great idea and a cool implementation. It uses the FourSquare API to place you at different locations and opens a chat room at each of those locations. All you have to do is talk. You can block people, ignore them, and, provided you’re desperate enough, stalk them around town.

You can think of this as being in a symbiotic relationship with FourSquare – it’s not part of the system proper but it fills a need. Check out the video for more details but generally it’s a very cool app.

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As an Internet behemoth with properties that get visited a zillion times a day, life battling spammers must be pretty tough for Google. Sure, they invent new technologies to try and stop these jokers. But like parasites, they quickly adapt and come up with new methods to manipulate the system. And when it gets bad enough, it’s now clear that Google is willing to throw technology out the window and simply sue the bastards.

As they’ve announced on the Google Blog today, the search giant is taking a group of rogue pharmacies to court in order to stop them from continually bombarding Google’s ad ecosystem with their spam. As Google notes, in this case, it’s not just that the spammers are annoying users, they’re potentially tricking people and offering products that “can be dangerous without the right prescription.” So Google felt as if they had to act.

Google also notes that late last year they were forced to take other spammers to court — the so-called “Google Money” scammers. On June 1 of this year, a court granted Google a permanent injunction barring those scammers from using the Google logo or name. So while time-consuming, the court-route can work.

Says Google: “Litigation of this kind should act as a serious deterrent to anyone thinking about circumventing our policies to advertise illegally on Google. As we identify additional bad actors, we will add them to the lawsuit.“

After an analyst reported that Yahoo, Inc stock was worth “less than nothing” today, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz made an apparently unsuccessful case for her company’s value to Wall Street during a Q&A at the Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia Conference in New York.

Paid Content’s Joseph Tartakoff outlined some of the highlights, including Bartz on hiring, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to my assistant and said, ‘Do you know who this person is,’ and they’re about six layers down.”

Bartz on product engagement, “She blamed consumers who are increasingly sending short messages via Facebook instead of via e-mail and also a “pretty old” product.”

And Bartz on China …

“Bartz dismissed some of the recent coverage of the two companies’  [Yahoo, Inc & AliBaba] relationships as “commotion.” But she did acknowledge that the value of the company’s Asian assets “tower over the value of Yahoo Inc,” Tartakoff here referring to the fact  that while Yahoo’s stakes in China and Japan are the bulk of its value, Bartz has done the company no favors in terms of fortifying its Chinese relationships.

Which lead PaidContent founder Rafat Ali to call for her head on Twitter (weirdly through a retweet of a Business Insider story and not Paidcontent’s), which was retweeted by the prolific Techmeme tipper Atul Arora with a “+1,” which was then retweeted by Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon with a “X10.”

Bartz has not won any popularity contests during her two year stint as Yahoo, I c CEO. Is this Twitter open call for her firing by industry influencers a sign that she is on the way out?