The grounding of flights in and out of European as a result of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull has been a powerful reminder of how much of our global economy relies on air transportation. As we wrote yesterday, the volcanic ash not only impacted the airline industry, but the tech world as well, disrupting business and conference travel alongside product deliveries.

European startups, particularly reliant on quick transportation from country-to-country, may be feeling the consequences of restrictions on air travel even more so. Mike Butcher argues in a Techcrunch Europe article, “It seems that Europe’s startup economy has been running partly on the spread low-cost airlines for the past 5 years, and without airlines the startups, along with the whole of the general business sector, are going to be badly affected.”

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It’s unclear how much the volcanic eruption will further challenge business development, or if it will spur innovation and opportunities, particularly around virtual conferencing and alternative transportation planners.

Jame Andrews, co-founder of Loco2, a site promoting sustainable travel, remarks, “Thanks Iceland volcano for helping us to prove the market for alternatives to flying!”

Jacek Kelski, founder and director of f3fundit, a blog and business portal aimed at helping support European entrepreneurs, argues that the major hindrance in Europe remains “investor readiness.” According to Kelski “there are definitely a lot of good ambitious companies out there. There is a lot of activity all over the continent.” But while there seems to be a lot of startup activity, Kelski is less optimistic about investor activity. “We’re seeing very little if any VC activity in Europe at the moment, and the majority of funding is coming from angels and larger corporates.” To help, f3fundit are holding a “Next Top Startup” competition. Ten finalists will take part in a boot camp June 16 and 17 in Barcelona, Spain, where they will work closely with a team of 25 mentors. One of the companies will be crowned the “Next Top Startup” and win a €25,000 prize.

Kelsi hopes f3fundit.com’s competition can help provide both the cash and the support for some of the startup community. Hopefully, European volcanic activity will cooperate.

Discuss

Imagine visiting a website and finding that it already knows who you are, where you live, how old you are and who your Facebook friends are, without your ever having given it permission to access that information. If you’re logged in to Facebook and visit some as yet unnamed “pre-approved” sites around the web, those sites may soon have default access to data about your Facebook account and friends, the company announced today.

Barry Schnitt, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook, told us in an email that “the right way to think about this is not like a new experience but as making the [Facebook] Connect experience even better and more seamless.” There will be new user controls made available, but this is a new experience: this makes Facebook Connect opt-out instead of opt-in.

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The proposed change was first written about by Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch, who called it Facebook’s Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For.

Here’s the language Facebook used to describe the draft policy:

Pre-Approved Third-Party Websites and Applications. In order to provide you with useful social experiences off of Facebook, we occasionally need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit them (if you are still logged in to Facebook). Similarly, when one of your friends visits a pre-approved website or application, it will receive General Information about you so you and your friend can be connected on that website as well (if you also have an account with that website). In these cases we require these websites and applications to go through an approval process, and to enter into separate agreements designed to protect your privacy.

That sounds downright creepy. It’s nice to have one-click access to your Facebook info if you decide to share it with other sites – that’s what Facebook Connect does – but the prospect of having that information automatically shared when you show up on another website seems like an idea that won’t be well received by users. There’s a big difference between opt-in and opt-out “data portability.”

Schnitt says: “People love personalized and social experiences and that’s why Facebook and Facebook Connect have been so successful. We think there are some instances where people would benefit from this experience as soon as they arrive on a small number of trusted websites that we pre-approve.”

Shnitt is the man who told us in a previous interview about Facebook’s fundamental shift away from being private by default (Why Facebook Changed Its Privacy Strategy) that users generally go along with the company’s default privacy settings because they agree with the company’s recommendations and because the world is changing to be less private. He cited the growth of Twitter, blogging and reality TV as evidence that the world was changing this way and that people are less interested in privacy.

In that interview, Schnitt also acknowledged that business reasons, like pageviews and advertising, were part of why Facebook was transforming away from privacy as well. We asked if this new opt-out Facebook Connect was the first step in a Facebook Ad Network, where your profile on Facebook is used to target ads that Facebook sells on sites all over the web. Schnitt told us, “this has absolutely nothing to do with advertising.”

Do you buy all that?

Do you trust Facebook to select trustworthy websites to automatically share your data with when you browse around the web? If you don’t trust Facebook’s judgement, you will be able to opt-out of exposing that data. But by default you’ll be sharing it.

By default, you’re sharing more and more these days, with more and more people. Perhaps that’s because of your love for Twitter and reality TV, but perhaps its because of Facebook’s cultural and commercial agenda.

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The AFP is reporting that the person who leaked internal business documents from Twitter Inc. to the blog TechCrunch last July is also the same person who compromised the Twitter accounts of Barack Obama and other celebrities last year. A 25-year-old who went by the name “Hacker Croll” has been tracked down and arrested in France by French authorities, with the assistance of the FBI. It’s not clear from the report what charges are to be filed.

Reportedly, the FBI alerted France to the man’s presence in that country almost a year ago, in the same month the internal documents were leaked. Update: Hours after the report of the man’s arrest, the AFP now says he has been released after questioning. Apparently the man explained that he merely guessed peoples’ passwords and the police were unimpressed. “He’s not a genius,” a source explained.

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The media report doesn’t make mention of the leaked documents, only the illicit takeover of Obama’s account. “Hacker Croll” was identified as the source of the controversial files, though. It seems possible that these two incidents are being improperly connected, but the report filed indicates they were carried out by the same person.

We’ve reached out to both Twitter and TechCrunch for comment.

When the documents were sent to TechCrunch, that blog deliberated publicly at length about whether it had a journalistic obligation to publish or suppress them. Founder Michael Arrington in the end decided to work with Twitter executives to identify the most sensitive documents but published other, less sensitive information days later. The resulting blog posts provided a very interesting look into the thinking of one of the most important companies on the Internet, but proved severely damaging to TechCrunch’s reputation with people in the industry who considered the decision to publish them an unacceptable betrayal.

TechCrunch argued that it was within its legal rights to publish the information, and the law breaking had been done by the person who sent them the files. Now that person is apparently headed to trial.

The ethical and perhaps legal implications of TechCrunch’s decision will no doubt be discussed again due to this turn of events.

The one clear lesson from all this that no one can argue with, though: Don’t mess with Twitter or the FBI will hunt you down where ever you may be around the world.

Discuss

Would you broadcast information about your credit card transactions publicly on the Internet? That might sound frighteningly irresponsible, but serial entrepreneur Phil Kaplan says his new social network Blippy does that and represents the way of the future. I thought he was crazy – until I sat down and talked with him today at SXSW. In just a few minutes Kaplan melted my skepticism and got me excited about what Blippy is doing.

You may have read about Blippy on sites like TechCrunch, Venturebeat and CNN. Kaplan shared a few things with us today that haven’t been published anywhere else though, and the story of Blippy is generally interesting. Here are seven things you probably don’t know about Blippy, a very far-out social network.

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1. Users can manually review each item before it’s published or set up certain substreams that do different things – like automatically publish my iTunes transactions but ask me before publishing my Amazon purchases. Kaplan has two credit cards, one with a Blippy sticker on it to remind him that purchases made with that card are posted immediately to the web.

2. It’s not about the money. Kaplan says he wants Blippy to be a way for offline activity to publish online conversation. The things you buy are often convenient signals for activities that are important to you. The conversations that go on around the items are quite interesting… at least on Kaplan’s profile. He can buy a movie on iTunes and find a conversation about it swarming around his automatic Blippy post before the opening previews are over. Other users often don’t see any comments on their activity at all. Jason Calacanis sees some good conversation.

3. Blippy now sees $2 million worth of user transactions streaming through the site per week, Kaplan says, and has seen close to $15 million in transactions total since it launched publicly January 15.

4. Kaplan doesn’t think sharing credit card data is that big a deal. He cites LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman’s argument that people will share anything if there’s enough of a benefit to sharing it. Friendster was the first site where people used their real names on the Internet, and people weren’t comfortable with that at first, either.

5. Data portability: Kaplan is working on a Blippy App Programming Interface and “it’s going to have everything.” Data caching policy is something “we have to think about still.” Imagine a website that recommends recipes based on the food it knows you have in your refridgerator. That’s one example of the kind of service that could be built on top of Blippy.

6. Aggregate data analysis isn’t something Kaplan is personally interested in, he says. It’s hard to believe but he says he’ll leave that kind of thing up to third parties using the Blippy API if they want to. The company will focus all its energy on making Blippy a good experiene for users. Really, that’s what he said.

7. Location data is something Blippy sees but doesn’t expose right now. Kaplan says it’s coming, though. He thinks the current location-based social networks need to deliver more value to users, and says that’s something Blippy can do.

People these days produce all kinds of data streams, Kaplan says – from Facebook to Twitter to Smart Grid utility use and electronic medical data. Some of those streams you wouldn’t want to be public about at all, but some of them you can benefit from partially exposing. He thinks that at least some of your credit card transactions are better shared than kept private. Time will tell whether or not other people agree with him.

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Seth Goldstein comes up with a lot of ideas. Some of them work and some of them don’t. He was one of the original backers of Del.icio.us (bought by Yahoo), Etherpad (bought by Google) and Bit.ly (huge via Twitter). He was also President of the short-lived Attention Trust and built a browser plug-in that allowed people to track, manage and sell on the Chicago Board of Trade futures in their browsing history and other online attention data. That didn’t work out so well, though it was a very interesting idea. Two years ago he raised $10m, built an advertising network called SocialMedia.com and then sold it off in November.

Goldstein’s latest idea may be one of his most interesting yet. He’s leading a company called Stickybits. It’s a service that uses vinyl barcode stickers and a mobile scanning app to layer social media content on top of physical objects.

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You scan a Stickybits barcode that you place or find on some thing or some place (perhaps on someone) and you can see all the multimedia that’s been associated with that barcode before and add your own.

Erick Schonfeld covered Stickybits this morning on TechCrunch and called it a way to unlock “the secret lives of objects.” Commenters on that post brought up far more questions than Stickybits has answered so far.

Someone is going to nail this, though. I’ve long fantasized about being able to use my mobile phone while around town to find out the news, demographic and property ownership history of various locations. Stickybits isn’t doing anything that ambitious yet; it’s mostly just tweets, photos and audio messages. It’s hard to know if a temporary sticker from one particular company will be the way forward into a world of places and objects with social histories made easy to unlock.

Stickybits is selling packs of 20 attractive vinyl stickers for $10, a steep price if you ask me, but perhaps calculated to maximize the significance of each one and minimize the annoyance of property owners about to get annotated. How that price point and the need to download a free mobile app will impact the spread of the program remains to be seen. Whether the messages attached to the stickers end up looking more like Foursquare, Gowalla, Wikipedia or ChatRoulette is another one of the many questions that come to mind.

In a location-aware world, the primary role of the barcode stickers may simply be in letting people know that there is data associated with a particular location, something that other services that let you “tag your world” have struggled with. There will likely be other user experience subtleties, sublime and profane, that users start to notice after a few Stickybits scanning experiences.

Expect to find these things stuck around various places in Austin this weekend. Perhaps on cats, dogs, planes, trains, automobiles and street light poles all around the country soon. Will it work? We’d love to hear your thoughts in comments below.

Discuss

For months, we’ve been fielding rumors (and filtering out the facts) about MySpace’s proposed redesign and rebranding.

Tonight’s report on TechCrunch outlines a few minor details of the overall plan to stop the site’s hemorrhaging users and stem its financial decline. As we’ve known (and as we predicted last year), the site will shift its emphasis from pure social networking to content discovery and recommendation. The site’s tagline is expected to change to “Discover and Be Discovered.”

But is that really enough to bring users back? What would it take for you to start regularly using MySpace again?

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Disclosure: The writer of this post has been privy to a great deal of internal information about the redesign due to personal connections in the L.A. and S.F. offices. Because of confidentiality issues and NDAs, much of that information cannot currently be published here. We will do our best to let you know official MySpace news as it breaks.

With the abrupt firing of CEO Owen Van Natta two weeks ago, we are reminded of his initial duties when he was hired less than a year ago. In addition to dealing with internal politics and negotiating the end of MySpace’s ad deal with Google, Van Natta was expected to give MySpace much-needed boost in the areas of technology, branding and features.

While it’s unknown exactly how much of the forthcoming “new” MySpace will represent Van Natta’s vision, we do wonder if anything is enough to save that sinking ship. Of course, the site still has a large userbase, particularly in the international market. But what do techies want to see before they start using the site again?

The outlook isn’t good, to say the least. We conducted an informal poll on Twitter, asking what folks would need to call themselves MySpace users. While a slew of respondents said bribes – from money to puppies to MacBooks – would do the trick, the noble @EricBurgess replied “They couldn’t even pay me.” @_Tycho_ wrote that the site would have to “be easier to use than Facebook, and then convince my friends to all go back on.” A tall order, indeed, and one echoed by several others.

But usability and attrition/retention aside, many users gave a common ultimatum: MySpace would have to do anything they try – from social networking to content and beyond – better than Pandora, Facebook or Twitter do the same things.

Granted, in terms of content discovery, Facebook’s not particularly kind on musicians or filmmakers; as evidence, you can check out some of the remaining MySpace users. If you’ve visited the site lately, your list of active friends might look like a wasteland of struggling bands. But is a new content recommendation engine packed with multimedia goodies and intuitive discovery tools enough to regain the public’s love and trust?

What do you think – is a site redesign enough to make you want to use MySpace again? Can the site succeed as a content platform rather than a social network? Or is MySpace doomed to sink like the Titanic, regardless of the products or features they roll out?

Let us know your opinions in the comments.

Discuss

This is the first in a five-part series of video interviews on how startups can benefit from participating in conferences and competitions at any stage of their growth.

YourVersion CEO Dan Olsen has been bootstrapping his startup for two and a half years but has recently been hitting the startup circuit hard. Since his launch at TechCrunch 50, he and his team have been hard at work competing and promoting their work.

So far his team has been mostly concentrating on being very visible in the San Francisco area, but they’re starting to branch out. At Twiistup in Los Angeles, he took some time to tell us about the costs and the returns of participating in shows and conferences, from user and traffic spikes to press mentions to VC interest.

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Discuss

Innovative real-time document collaboration software company AppJet, makers of Etherpad, has been acquired by Google. TechCrunch broke the news and AppJet promptly confirmed it. AppJet was started by ex-Googlers, got a YCombinator investment (you know, that firm that invests in anonymous college kids from around the country) and will now close down its own product to work on Google Wave.

What a cynical bore. Here’s the new formula, meant only to tease users with innovation and ultimately enrich a select few Valley darlings:

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• Be a smart computer scientist
• Get a job at Google
• Leave Google, create startup
• Use your Google resume to get high profile Silicon Valley backing
• Build something cool, win some fans
• Sell to Google
• Tell Silicon Valley insider press about sale
• Kill product, break a few hearts, get absorbed again by Google but with millions of dollars in your pocket
• Work on less interesting Google product…
• Repeat, if you can get away with it.

Some people don’t go right back to Google, they go to Facebook or Twitter. You thought FeedBurner had a lot of potential? It’s an ad network now, its founders have nice houses and work on other things or in other places. FriendFeed was cool, founded by ex-Googlers who are now at Facebook and say that FriendFeed is actually too sophisticated for the users of their new Sugar Daddy’s software.

Check out the Etherpad company blog post about the deal. They didn’t even pretend to be sorry about closing the service. They didn’t thank any community of users for help along the way. They just said the deal is done, here’s what’s happening to the money you paid, now get out.

Maybe Google Wave will change the world, maybe it won’t. It’s hard for a person who loves startups and innovation not to feel a little toyed with by this kind of drama though.

Discuss

Everybody has been waiting to see a glimpse of Google’s upcoming Chrome OS – that is Google’s new operating system. Those who attended an event at the company’s headquarters today had a chance to view a demo in person, and many more details than previously available are now out on the OS.

Google has now opened up the code for Chrome OS, so developers can get in there and see what it’s really all about. For all of the non-developer types, Google has provided the following short video, which sums up what Chrome OS is as a concept.

Google says Chrome OS is focused on three main things: speed, simplicity, and security. The main philosophy behind Chrome OS is that most people use their computers mostly to access the web, so Chrome OS cuts out the middle man, which is your operating system. With Chrome OS, your browser is the operating system. The programs you would use on Chrome OS are all web apps. They’re all in the cloud. Nothing is saved on your computer. This mean that if your machine dies on you, or you lose it, or if it gets broken, you can just get another one and all of your data will be readily available, because it’s all in the cloud.

Google says that it takes about seven seconds to go to the log-in screen, and three more to log on to an application. That’s much less time that it probably takes you to boot up and get onto Facebook on your current machine.

The look of Chrome OS is very similar to the Chrome browser, but it has application tabs and an app menu. You may have seen the screenshots at TechCrunch recently. Google did note, however, that the user interface could change to some extent by the time it actually launches.

When you use apps in Chrome OS, they can take up the entire screen, so that it doesn’t even look like you’re using a browser or an OS. You can also drag and drop tabs. If you hook up additional hardware to the machine, it will bring up windows for that. For example, at the demo, they pointed out that if you hook a camera up, it will bring up a window with the picture files, and you can pull a picture up and open it in a new browser Window.

Fore more technical details about Chrome OS, and how it handles security issues, read this live blog. Here is another account from Danny Sullivan.

From the sounds of it, Google Chrome OS will not be replacing established operating systems for users who use a lot of programs that aren’t web-based. However, it has the potential to cut significantly into the market share of Windows, Mac, etc. among users who do mainly use their machines to connect to the web. I can see this catching on in a big way, particularly with the Netbook crowd, which Chrome OS is essentially aimed at.

Google Chrome OS is currently scheduled to launch sometime before the holiday season next year. Do you think Chrome OS will be a hit? Tell us what you think.

Related Articles:

> Will Google Chrome OS Challenge Windows?

> Intel Apparently A Google Chrome OS Partner, Too

> Steve Ballmer Skeptical Of Chrome OS

Seems like Twitter is experiencing firsthand the pitfalls of cloud storage.

“Hacker Croll” apparently gained access to Twitter documents by hacking into an employee’s personal account and then downloading papers that had been stored in Google Docs. Hacker Croll then sent 310 formerly confidential documents to TechCrunch, which is now publishing some of them.

TechCrunch’s decision to publish is proving controversial, but the move isn’t surprising. It also appears to be lawful. News organizations have a well-established right to publish any information that they come upon lawfully, regardless of whether the person who gave them the information was entitled to do so. In other words, if someone steals documents and then decides on his own to hand them to a publisher, that publisher is free to print or post them.

That’s why news organizations were free to publish former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s emails last year, after a hacker got into her account and distributed the messages.

Journalists and others can debate whether distributing this type of material is ethical, but there’s no question that many reputable news outlets routinely publish material that company executives didn’t intend for outsiders to see.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone blogs that the documents don’t contain anything all that juicy. “We have a culture of sharing and communication within Twitter and these stolen documents represent a fraction of what we produce on a regular basis,” he writes. “Obviously, these docs are not polished or ready for prime time and they’re certainly not revealing some big, secret plan for taking over the world.
Meanwhile, TechCrunch has already posted one document — a pitch to Twitter from “Through the Eyes Production” for a new reality TV show, “Final Tweet.”

It’s not clear whether Twitter liked this pitch, but TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington would have passed: “Frankly, it looks like a big loser. I hope and assume Twitter turned this down, and fast,” he writes.

Wendy Davis – MediaPost

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Twitter’s Private Docs Become Public

I’ve been trying to coin phrases since I started this gig in 2005—fraugs (fraud blogs), googlings (Google nuts), spitter (Twitter spammer) etc.—and not a one has stuck except “hamsterbating,” which I didn’t actually create but was credited for in an online dictionary.

I only bring it up now because if Danny Sullivan gets credit for “Associated Blogs” then I’m gonna blow my top, kick some dirt, and whine a whole lot about it. In 2006, I wrote “Seeds of an Associated Blogosphere” and have mentioned it every chance I got since then, including last month in “The AP’s Battle for Relevance in a Decentralized Universe.”

Associated Blogosphere is mine. I want it. Replace hamsterbating with it, please, whoever actually runs the Internet neologisms department.

Since Danny brought up my concept, and in the spirit of great minds thinking alike (because I assume he missed those articles), let’s take a look at Danny’s post, entitled “Dammit, I’m a Journalist, Not a Blogger: Time for Online Journalists to Unite?”

In a nutshell, Danny bemoans all the special treatment the traditional mainstream press gets while bloggers get “bupkes.”

“I wanted to float the idea that perhaps it’s time for an Associated Blogs to take on the Associated Press,” he writes.

That should read: I wanted to float the idea that it’s time, like WebProNews’ Jason Lee Miller has repeatedly suggested, for an Associated Blog[osphere] to take on the Associated Press.

After that, we’re cool, and ready to cheer on some classic Sullivan-esque ranting:

“we’ve got a newspaper industry increasingly portraying us as part of an evil axis that’s killing them. Blogs steal their attention, and Google steals their visitors.”

Yeah! That sucks!

“I don’t recall Google calling me in, or TechCrunch, or ReadWriteWeb, or VentureBeat [or WebProNews] or any number of other online media outlets and asking about our financial health and ways they could help us. I don’t recall any groups proposing special laws to help our financial health. But I do get sick and tired of seeing the journalism we do not getting near enough credit from mainstream media sources that depend on us, plus us being dismissed as mere bloggers."

Preach it!

“I’m a journalist, not a blogger. I use a blog platform to publish, but that doesn’t make me a second class citizen in the journalism world.”

Rock on, Danny, you tell’em. and I’m all about promoting “your” idea of an Associated Blogosphere, or Online Journalism Association or United Bloggers, I guess, whichever you prefer, so long as, if everybody goes the Associated Blog[osphere] route, I get mentioned in the Wikipedia article about it. ;-D Cheers.      

Has Google’s model of spidering and indexing web pages in an ordered list become obsolete? Is the old static model of search about to be replaced? Does a real-time online conversation (a la Twitter) make for a more relevant and compelling search experience? These are the questions that I recently posed to a group of search and Internet experts. To say that these guys know their stuff would be a complete understatement. It’s more like these are the professionals that have defined the modern science of search and search marketing. You’ll see what I mean when you read the quotes below.

My premise started when I read a UK Techcrunch story about a Google / Twitter mashup. This was in February and there was a major snow event blanketing the UK. But if you were to try to get a satellite image of the snowfall in real time, you couldn’t. That’s because the cloud cover prevents the satellite from seeing the ground. So this genius named Ben Marsh comes up with the mashup. In brief, the idea was to get the general UK Twitter population to report on the snowfall at their location in the UK. Respondents reported their postcode and then selected a number from 1-10 to rate the snowfall amount. Ben’s mashup then graphically displayed the results on a UK Google map. Then it hit me – this Twitter data is yielding superior search results for the amount of snowfall in the UK than any other source. So will this type of real-time data stream become a rival to Google in search?

Daniel Foster is the co-founder of 34SP.com – the website hosting service that kept Ben Marsh’s mashup online during peak bandwidth usage during the February snowstorm. I asked Mr. Foster if he thought that Twitter could overtake Google in search, based on his experience with the Ben Marsh mashup site. Mr. Foster replied, "While this use of Twitter was certainly unique at the time and created a superior data set for UK snowfall for that time period, it is still a long way from a true search product. Google clearly has a corporate mission that drives search-related activities. Twitter just asks "What are you doing?". I don’t see Twitter search overtaking Google unless the business directives change."

Here is what a few of the other Internet and search experts I contacted had to say in answer to the question: "Will Twitter Replace Google in Search?".

Rand Fishkin is a legend in search marketing. As the founder and CEO of SEOmoz.com, Mr. Fishkin was recently included in Newsweek’s list of Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2009. His involvement in search marketing began in high school, and he is now generally regarded as one of the world’s authorities in search. Mr. Fishkin commented, "No. Twitter is not a search engine and cannot answer the vast majority of queries sent to an engine like Google, Yahoo! or Live. Twitter searches a single stream of user created data in 140 character slices. While searching this database of information can be fascinating and even relevant (particularly for those who are interested in what Twitter users are saying about a particular topic or person), it is not even an attempt to replicate the functionality or application Google provides. Google answers an inherent need that has existed since the web’s inception: users must navigate to web sites and pages that contain desired information. Twitter cannot achieve this function and therefore cannot be a replacement for Google in search."

Michael Gray is President of Atlas Web Service, a full service website and Internet marketing company. Michael has worked in website development and marketing for over 10 years, and shares his thoughts regularly on Graywolf’s SEO Blog. Mr. Gray opined, "Twitter is never going to replace Google for searches there simply isn’t the breadth of information available there. For example say you need to know: "Who was the 3rd Vice President of the United States?". Unless you happen to have a history buff in your stream – very few people are going to know it’s Aaron Burr off the top of their heads. It’s simple and easier for you and everyone else to type the question into Google and have it spit back the answer. However, if I have a tech related search like: "How do I backup my Firefox profile?" chances are I’ll get a few answers from my users. One way that Twitter is better than Google is if I know my followers and trust them. I might not trust Yelp or CitySearch when they tell me what a good seafood restaurant in San Francisco, but if someone who follows me gives me a recomendation, if I know who they are, I’m much more likely to trust their response. The one caveat is the trusted relationship of the person giving the response. 20 people I don’t know telling me someplace is good is never going to outweigh the 1 person I really trust telling me it’s bad."

Danny Sullivan is often regarded as a true pioneer in search. His seminal 1995 work published as "A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines" laid the groundwork for his career as an often cited expert in search. Mr. Sullivan he has been quoted in all the major media outlets such as The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, The New Yorker, Newsweek and ABC’s Nightline. Here are Mr. Sullivan’s comments, "No, Twitter won’t replace Google search because it simply doesn’t cover enough of the topics out there. It can be used for question answering, but that’s largely limited to the number and quality of your followers. I do think it’s an excellent additional search tool, however, http://searchengineland.com/how-we-search-with-twitter-16920 has much more on this."

Andy Beal is an online reputation management consultant, award-winning blogger, and professional speaker. Mr. Beal shares his expertise via his blog at www.andybeal.com, and he is also the founder and editor of Marketing Pilgrim, an award winning news publication that covers internet marketing news and trends. Mr. Beal added, "Twitter’s real time data certainly compliments Google’s search results, but I don’t see it ever replacing it. Twitter’s data stream should be looked at in the same way as Google News or Google Blog Search. There’s tremendous value in tapping into a fresh, up to the minute content, but people still rely on the structured, ranked data that Google’s web index provides."

Neil Patel’s email identifies him as a ‘professional web surfer’. I know him as an incredibly charismatic, smart and friendly Internet, social marketing and search expert. He has also been named a top 100 blogger by Technorati, and was also one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Journal. His current company is KISSmetrics, and Mr. Patel shares his insights in his blog – QuickSprout. Mr. Patel offered these thoughts on Twitter overtaking Google in search, "Twitter will not replace Google in search. You can use Twitter to find up to date information, but I doubt you will ever use Twitter to find products to buy or figure out how to fix a technical problem. Just the other day I had to search Google on how to program my router. I don’t think I will ever be able to do that on Twitter."

Todd Malicoat is a Marketing Consultant and on the SEO Faculty at MarketMotive.com. Mr. Malicoat is an Internet entrepreneur who has spent "near obsessive amounts of time on Webmasterworld.com, and Threadwatch.org. Here is Mr. Malicoat’s response, "I think Twitter definitely has an opportunity to swipe a bit of market share from Google on certain TYPES of terms. Anything very time sensitive, Twitter gives very good results for. I think Google will likely be a suitor, but they likely don’t want another youtube over-valuation debacle. Twitter has definitely raised some eyebrows, and what it does do is fill the need for ‘guided search’ that several companies including trexy.com, mahalo, and even yahoo answers (to an extent), and many others have been trying to do for years. Twitter has done this with a different model of getting the guides first with the critical mass of people, and the organization will come later. Most search results, however, don’t NEED a search guide or expert, so for now, Google is perfectly safe, but has the potential to lose out on some niche expert traffic to the new kid on the block."

By way of fairness, I did contact the PR department at Google requesting a comment for this piece. As of the writing of this article, they have not responded.

So there you have it. Practically no one thinks that Twitter will overtake Google in search. At best, in very time sensitive events – perhaps Twitter can be a good companion reference to Google. Of course things can change quickly – and if they do, I’m sure we can all check in with Twitter to learn about them. My thanks to all the experts who participated in this article.

Last week, it was announced that MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe was leaving the company, and that former Facebook Chief Operating Officer and Chief Revenue Officer Owen Van Natta would be taking his place.

His second in command has now been confirmed as former AOL executive Michael Jones, who will be taking on the role of Chief Operating Officer at MySpace.

Jones is the founder of Userplane, a video chat service that was aquired by AOL several years ago, PBJ Digital, and Investing.com. Last year, he started content publisher Tsavo Media, which is described as a site that delivers "highly relevant experiences to today’s digital consumers."

He has held the CEO title at Tsavo, but as he steps up to the COO position at MySpace, he will assume the role of advisor with Tsavo according to Mike Arrington at TechCrunch. "Jones won’t have the same authority in the No. 2 position at the company, but if Van Natta is smart enough to give him room to run it will be a good sign for the company," he says.

It is no secret that while MySpace continues to have a lot of users, Facebook is growing at a much more rapid pace. I bet even you know somebody that has abandoned their MySpace profile and started concentrating more on Facebook and/or Twitter. I know a few.

Perhaps new leadership in Van Natta and Jones will provide the spark MySpace needs to keep its users around. It will be interesting to see the changes that come about as a result of that leadership.

Conflicting reports, none confirmed, are circulating today about Facebook’s latest attempts at raising funding. TechCrunch says that Facebook has been shopping itself around at a $4 billion valuation somewhat unsuccessfully, while VentureBeat says they just decided not to accept funding at that level.

In October 2007, Facebook announced a major deal with Microsoft—1.6% of the company for $240 million, placing the overall valuation at $15 billion. However, in the intervening eighteen months, the company’s speculated value has fallen off, being projected as low as $5 billion last June. By October 2008, many sources thought Facebook was headed for financial ruin.

TechCrunch’s story is that Facebook is having trouble coming up with new funding:

the company has been pitching hard for new cash at a much reduced valuation, hoping for at least $4 billion. And some investors are biting, but perhaps not at that price. A source with knowledge of the possible transaction tells us that General Atlantic may have submitted a term sheet at “around a $2 billion” valuation.

Also troubling is the potential costs of taking such funding and accepting such a low valuation: “In addition to the direct dilution to stockholders from the new money, old investors at the $15 billion valuation may need to be made whole.”

VentureBeat, on the other hand, reports that the company’s financial future may be very bright. In addition to allegedly rejecting a $4b deal, they have $200 million in the bank,

So there’s a good chance costs aren’t outpacing revenue. Facebook made under $300 million last year, was a little shy of breaking even, and at first expected to make towards $400 million in revenue this year. But the company said in late March — incidentally at the time that chief financial officer Gideon Yu left the company — that it was beating projections by 70 percent. I’ve confirmed that this run rate has the company possibly breaking half a billion in revenue by the end of the year.

VB also reports that FB may be revealing more information about its infrastructure soon, possibly to allay reports that their operating costs for their 200 million active members outpace their revenue.

What do you think? Is Facebook barely keeping its head above water, or is it smooth sailing for the most popular social network on the Internet today?

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