Facebook is trying to gain ownership over 21 domain names that include the term ‘facebook’, including KillFacebook.com, FacebookStuff.com and FacebookSafety.com.
The domain names are all currently owned by a company called Domain Asset Holdings, a known domain squatter based in Potomac, Maryland.
Indeed, when you visit those URLs, they are all listed for sale – some even feature the reserve price (FacebookCheats.com is priced $4,000 and AboutFacebook.com even double that).
The domains are all listed on DomainMarket.com, a domain marketplace operated by WashingtonVC (also the owner of Phone.com, SEO.com, Software.com and more).
That is of course the main difference with sites like AllFacebook.com and InsideFacebook.com, both blogs covering all things Facebook. As far as I know, the social networking company doesn’t have an issue with their names.
In the beginning of last year, we reported that both Apple and Microsoft moved to seize a large number of domain names from squatters in one fell swoop. This isn’t uncommon, in other words, but worth noting since Facebook doesn’t often attempt to have squatted domains transfered over to them.
The search wars have officially arrived! That’s right folks, Google’s ongoing quest to make its search results more impervious to spammers has become an infographic, which basically is a badge of honor for any tech bitchmeme.
Closet and not so closet SEO nerds can follow the above flowchart tracing Google’s storied path, from getting rejected by Excite@Home in favor of current Demand Media honcho’s iMail through the chutes and ladders of its algorithmic spam chase to the company’s most recent attempts to quell the rising influence of content farms like um, Demand Media.
“People trade links off topic in large reciprocal link farms.” –> “Google filters out sites that have a high ratio of reciprocal links.” And so on and so forth …
Most ominous part?
“Every change is a new opportunity! Some webmasters are already building business models around the exploiting of opportunities created by the latest algorithm change.”
In a press release issued earlier this morning, Apple has announced that Bertrand Serlet, SVP of Mac Software Engineering, will be leaving the company.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s VP of Mac Software Engineering and Serlet’s long-time protégé, will assume his responsibilities and report directly to chief exec Steve Jobs.
Federighi has been managing the Mac OS software engineering group for the past two years.
Bertrand Serlet originally joined Apple in 1997 and has played an instrumental role in the development of Mac OS X.
Before joining Apple, Serlet spent four years at Xerox PARC, then joined NeXT in 1989.
“I’ve worked with Steve for 22 years and have had an incredible time developing products at both NeXT and Apple, but at this point, I want to focus less on products and more on science,” Serlet said in a statement.
Craig Federighi also worked at NeXT, followed by Apple, and then spent a decade at Ariba. He returned to Apple in 2009 to lead Mac OS X engineering.
“In this day and age, though, you’ve got to know that putting your daughter’s music video on YouTube may result in it going viral.” – sammyshah
The video for Rebecca Black’s “Friday” now has more YouTube views than Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” at around 26 million versus 22 million for Gaga. For those of you that haven’t been playing along with the meme, Rebecca Black is a 13-year-old aspiring singer whose parents paid $2,000 to have a “professional” music video made by a YouTube popstar factory called, appropriately enough, ARK Factory.
The video then went viral after gaining traction for all the wrong reasons on music blogs, tech blogs (yeah we’ll cover anything these days), Reddit and 4Chan, turning its star into both a meme and into fodder for mainstream media outlets like ABC.
So why all the media attention? In part because Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black are two sides of the same Internet fame coin: Black is like the anti-Justin Bieber, her “Friday” video has all the trappings of pop star gloss, with none of the talent.
Bieber on the other hand, had the talent, and enthralled fans with that despite the rawness of his homemade YouTube music videos (nice Simpsons poster Justin), which he posted before putting out a more polished album and becoming the online and mainstream fame tornado that he is today.
Bieber and Black, like the Artic Monkeys and Lilly Allen before them, are a sign of the power of alternative distribution channels in our time. But Black is a tipping point, as her video was engineered to go viral (And it did! If not exactly in the way she intended …).
To give you a micro-example of how much becoming a YouTube celebrity is now considered a viable, respectable way of gaining traction in the music industry, even for those beyond their teen years; Earlier today I had lunch with a musician friend who was lamenting the trouble her band was having booking shows in San Francisco. When I asked her how she planned on getting the word out she said, “Get a publicist, or have a video go viral.” Then she mentioned something about Twitter followers.
“Basically the content doesn’t matter at all. Only the fact that other people are sharing it,” Gawker’s Adrian Chen, who has followed the Rebecca Black story and is pretty much an expert on how people become Internet-famous, explained to me over Skype. “I don’t know if it’s a tipping point. But more like the most extreme example of something that’s already happening in music and entertainment stuff.”
Indeed the focus of Rebecca Black’s ABC/Good Morning Americainterview was the extreme negativity of the comments (“I hope you get an eating disorder so you’ll look pretty. I hope you go cut and die”). In an age of readily available tools for discussion, the value of our pop-stars is now in the extent to which we can use them as topics for social media blathering (Rebecca Black is trending on Twitter, of course) whether or not that blathering is positive.
The most fascinating part of the Black story is that she’s actually famous now, which was exactly the reason her parents gave $2,000 to ARK Music Factory in the first place. From Black herself on her unlikely fame, “I think that’s an accomplishment you know, even a person who doesn’t like it, it’s going to be stuck in their head. So that’s the point of it, it’s a catchy song.” Exactly.
Get used to this kind of stuff. As society advances technologically, culture becomes a parody of itself, and we enjoy the parody, intentional or not, more than anything sincere. But what becomes of the Antoine Dobsons and the Rebecca Blacks, our Internet culture folk heroes?
Says Chen, “From an industry standpoint. I think if you’re an Internet phenomenon you get put in this meme box, which means you can only do certain meme things, like put out merchandise related to your meme, or appear on talk shows joking about your meme. The mainstream industry kind of picks them up gingerly, with slight disgust, and throws them into stuff until they’re sick of them.”
The pop culture ringer hasn’t got sick of Bieber quite yet, and we’ll just have to wait for Black to put out her next song to gage her expiration date. Best case scenario: It’s a duet, with Bieber himself.
Bitly has just rolled out a brand new mobile site, to allow tablet and smartphone users to shorten, share and track links on the go. The HTML5 optimized version of Bitly’s webite is cross-platform so it works on a variety of devices, including the iPad, iPhone and Android devices. As we heard from Bitly CEO John Borthwick recently, Bitly saw a massive 7 billion clicks on its links last month alone.
Similar to Bit.ly’s web site, you can shorten, share and track links. But the mobile site includes a number of mobile-centric features that make the site easier to use. For example, if you shorten a link while your phone isn’t connected to the internet, Bitly will save the link and shorten it when you have internet connectivity.
Actually clicking on a link is different on a mobile phone or tablet from a computers, so Bitly allows you to hold down any link in your history and open it in a new window or simply click to copy the URL and paste it in a browser. In your Bitly history, up to 100 recent links are cached on your phone, so you can access your bitly links even if you aren’t connected to the Internet.
Another useful feature, is the ability to preview the contents of any Bitly link, including videos. In terms of analytics for Bitly links, the startup is using HTML5 to render graphs and charts, and you can also access a QR code for any bitly link.
While some users might not visit Bit.ly on their mobile phones, I can imagine that the mobile site will get more traffic and usage from tablet devices like the iPad, which is built for browsing.
Bitly just raised $9 million in funding and continues to grow despite competition from Facebook and Twitter. And the company leveraging the massive amount of data on its link sharing network to launch new services, including News.me.
