Tech

Boingo Wireless, a nationwide WiFi provider, has just issued a release stating that it is pricing its IPO tomorrow morning at $13.50 per share, which falls into the expected range. The shares will begin trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol “WIFI.”

Boingo is looking to raise $75 million in its public offering. Boingo claims that it is one of the largest commercial Wi-Fi networks in the world, with 211,000 Wi-Fi locations in over 100 countries. The company installs, manages and operates wireless networks in locations like airports and restaurant chains, which Boing says had more than 800 million visitors in 2009.

Boingo is offering 3,846,800 shares and selling stockholders are offering 1,923,200 shares. In addition, Boingo has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 865,500 shares, on the same terms and conditions. Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank Securities, Pacific Crest Securities and William Blair & Company are underwriting the offering.

According to the initial S-1 filing, Boingo had 1.3 million consumers who have purchased its mobile Internet services in the past year. The company’s primary source of revenue is from consumers who purchase month-to-month subscription plans or hotspot specific, single-use access to its network. Boingo also receives money from business partners that pay to allow their consumers to access the network. Other revenue channels include telecom operators and advertisers.

CrunchBase InformationBoingo WirelessInformation provided by CrunchBase

TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki launched its iPad app in the App Store a less than a week ago and after 11 days has hit the quarter of a million downloads milestone. This is notable for an iPad app, especially when compared to other highly publicized iOS app milestones; It took iPhone app Instagram six days to hit 100K, SoundTracking two weeks to hit 250K and FourSquare a whopping seven months to get to 60K users.

Qwiki PR rep CeCe Cheng tells me that Qwiki.com has “millions of users” but that the Qwiki app, which lets users see notable Qwikis around them in map format, has already eclipsed pageview traffic on the Qwiki site by 5x. She estimates that by the end of the day tomorrow that the app will hit 300K users after only two weeks. Individual user sessions on the app are averaging 24 minutes.

Says founder Doug Imbruce, “The Qwiki experience was made for the iPad – an intimate, entertaining, (sexy!) new media format. It’s amazing to see the popularity of the app reinforce our original vision of Qwiki as a multi-platform experience.” The app has 2,170 total ratings, with an average of 4.5 stars per rating. The current build has an average 5 star rating at 688 ratings.

Qwiki sees the future of its visual Wikipedia search product as resting on the mobile platform, and is currently focusing on releasing Qwiki for the Android and the iPhone. It also plans on eventually letting users create their own Qwikis about themselves and their businesses.

CrunchBase InformationQwikiInformation provided by CrunchBase

On April 21st, Facebook celebrated the 1st birthday of its now ubiquitous “Like” button, and promptly shared the news that 10,000 sites are, like, using the plugin every day. The social networking behemoth then continued its parade of social widgets last week, giving the Like button a new partner in crime with the “Send” button, which allows users to directly share content with their Facebook Groups, Facebook friends, or any standard email address. And gives site designers yet another widget to integrate into their code. Huzzah!

With the “Send” button, Facebook seems to be continuing its quest to eventually replace email with some sort of Facebook-related social service. The button is already available on over 50 sites including The Washington Post, last.fm, 1-800 Flowers, Gilt Groupe, The Huffington Post and Orbitz. With more to come, I’m sure.

So, to commemorate Facebook becoming the Big Brother of social widgets, JESS3, a creative interactive agency specializing in UX and data visualization, has created a nifty retrospective — timeline of Facebook’s social widgets, beginning with the launch of Facebook Connect back in 2008.

Warning: Infographics ahead. Oh, and by the way, you should totally “Like” us on Facebook. Sorry, I had to.

CrunchBase InformationFacebookJESS3Information provided by CrunchBase

NBC News compiled an interesting infographic detailing how people watched the Royal Wedding last week, including data about live video streams, tweets and Tumblr notes. Check it out:

For a closer look at the world-wide online video traffic and the protocols used to stream all that content, also check out our posts Royal Wedding Breaks Records, Not the Internet and Flash & Mobile Are Big Winners of the Royal Wedding.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast
• Report: The Live-Stream Video Market
• Connected Consumer Tuned In to TVs in Q4

Beginning with one inspiring video, Dan Savage used the web to create the It Gets Better projecta movement that has generated thousands of uplifting videos that give hope to teens. Go to Article

A few weeks ago, a video entered wide circulation in the tech press for two reasons: 1) it featured lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Apple employees talking about their difficulties growing up. And 2) it was very, very well made. But the truth is that the It Gets Better Project has been around since last September, when columnist and author Dan Savage kicked things off with his own YouTube video with his partner to talk about their experiences. The Apple video simply reinvigorated the project in our circles, helping to keep the message going.

And now Google is doing their part to continue the message as well. Yesterday the Chrome team uploaded a new, great It Gets Better video. Watch it above.

Google has actually participated in this project before. In October, several Google employees were featured in a video. This was immediately followed by President Obama creating a video as well. There are now thousands of these videos. Great, great stuff.

CrunchBase InformationGoogle ChromeInformation provided by CrunchBase

One upon a time, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer interrupted a speech at a developer’s conference with a chant that would set the Internet ablaze. “Developers, developers, developers, developers” was quickly put on the web and just as quickly mixed, remixed, and placed on the mantle of pure Internet gold. But to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever crafted an actual song around it.

Until now.

Mobile developer Cory Smith shot us an email today pointing us to a song he wrote and recorded. “I’m contrasting developing music and developing software in a hardcore rap kinda way, pretty entertaining,” he notes in his post. “The Steve Ballmer sample is the icing on the cake,” he notes in his message to us. Indeed.

Listen to the song below. It’s awesome. And below that, find Smith’s lyrics.

If Microsoft is smart, they’ll use this to kick of Ballmer’s next speech much like Apple used an awesome song we posted to kick off the Antennagate presser. After all, the talk is that Microsoft is putting a heavy focus back on developers. The song is perfect.

Smixx - Developers (feat. Steve Ballmer) by Smixx

I’m a developer
in many senses of the word
cause I make these applications
but I also use these verbs
to make this music
I construct it line by line
just like when I’m coding
another software design
in both cases
its about design patterns
anyone can get the job done
its the execution that matters
I have many interests
sometimes they conflict
my creativity can usually be a benefit
but sometimes it keeps me
far too busy
but I can’t complain
because my life is hardly gritty
so I think i’ll sit back
and pen myself another ditty
why is it that Linus Torvalds
the only one that Gits me
did you get that reference I was using
or is the thought of source source control too confusing
may just lay myself down a Team Foundation
so I can test the objects of my creation

Chorus (Steve Ballmer)
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers

not a fan of jewelry
except for Ruby on Rails
I can use my skills
to increase my online sales
capitalize on the popularity of Facebook
or grill up some beats
so they declare me a great cook
never really been a big fan of insects
so I track down bugs
remove them when in test
make sure they never get pushed to production
but sometimes deadlines decide they get rushed in
I’m the same way
when it comes to my songs
perfection is the goal whenever the mic is on
I don’t want a bad verse to slip in the mix
cause it could look really bad
for Cory or smixx
only a fan of your behaviour
if its driven development
theres no sense of
adding features for the hell of it
complexity is irrelevant
whether its with music or software
your users have stories so you should be telling them

Chorus (Steve Ballmer)
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers

seeing my creations
on others devices
after years of concentration
is nothing but priceless
whether its with software
or a song just like this
I put myself out there
so go on and hype this
Running 3 external monitors
off of my macbook
currently reviewer on a Windows Phone Pact book
now I got Steve Ballmer
and he’s bombing on this tracks hook
of course my QA’s on me
cause this app just crashed look
when I write my raps
never use a marker
constantly refactor
like I’m using Resharper
doing ad hoc deploys
and I’m always deliverin’
and I made that choice
regardless of dividends
creating all this noise
in some form
until the bitter end
stating with with my voice
theres no norm
that I can fit within
haven’t been sleeping
but using lots of REST
pass the mic back to who rocked it best

CrunchBase InformationMicrosoftSteve BallmerInformation provided by CrunchBase

Turns out it was OK for me to be unwell last week. It gave me enough time to ponder some of the major stories of the moment without being compelled to write about them. Whether it was Amazon’s outage, Sony’s network breach or the drama around Apple’s location data collection policies (or lack thereof) — the hue and cry was quite astonishing. I mean, even South Park and Stephen Colbert had to weigh in on Apple’s location problems!

Not that it is the first time privacy, security and reliability have been the subject of hot debate. Skype outages, Gmail failures, Facebook going on the blink, and the brouhaha around Facebook’s dreaded Beacon project are some of the media explosions that crossed over from the realm of inward looking tech-media to mainstream media outlets. And I am pretty sure we will keep encountering more of these issues.

Stepping back, when you look at all these instances, you see that in all of them, the common thread was “we the people.” Our fears, our desires and our needs were behind the huge outcry around these problems that seemed to impact millions of us. This mainstreaming of technology has opened up new opportunities, but it has and will pose a brand new kind of challenge to companies in Silicon Valley.

If the hue and cry over Apple’s location data collection methodologies is any indication, then are we the people becoming the limiting factor in the evolution of technology and its adoption? Will the idea of what computing can do and what it will be in the future be limited by our collective ability to grok these changes? I mean, things aren’t exactly getting less complicated. Apple CEO Steve Jobs put it well when he said:

…as new technology comes into the society there is a period of adjustment and education. We haven’t as an industry done a very good job educating people, I think, as to some of the more subtle things going on here. As such, (people) jumped to a lot of wrong conclusions in the last week. I think the right time to educate people is when there is no problem. I think we will probably ask ourselves how we can do some of that, as an industry.

Jobs’ comments, in fact encapsulate the bigger issues at play.

The Tech Side Story

For the longest time, the future of technology has been determined by the building blocks that go into devices. The processors, memory and storage defined how software was written during the PC era. Of course, since big buyers of PCs were large companies, the average consumer didn’t have much say in the matter, though ironically the productivity-driven PC revolution was labeled the personal computer revolution.

The early days of the commercial Internet carried this grand tradition — ignoring the actual user of a product in favor of the commercial desires of a service provider. You, mom and I had little or no say in how the technologies were used to build a service. However, as the networks spread, the early years of the new century saw a massive consumerization of technology.

Corporations stopped buying, but consumers didn’t. Broadband connections grew. Sales of iPods and computers shot up and we all wanted digital cameras, video cameras and TiVos. As a result, the balance of power shifted away from companies and technology started to become more personal. However, the first five years of the 21st century were all about objects and how to make them simpler.

With the arrival of the social web, companies like Flickr, Plaxo and LinkedIn showed that it was time to think differently about how technologies (web applications) were built, used and, more importantly, adopted. The emergence of Facebook and Twitter has only amplified that effect.

The social web is about connecting people. On some networks it is real people (Facebook) and on some networks the web connects assumed identities (Twitter). If CPU, memory and storage defined the capabilities in the PC era, then in the Internet era, we saw software being defined by processors, memory, storage and bandwidth.

The Internet era eased the way to the social web. In the social web, the software and with it the frontiers of technology being defined by the marriage of network connectivity, PC-era staples and social identity.

There isn’t really social software, social media or even social networks. What social represents is a new way of thinking about what is as old as us –humans — relationships. Think of this way — the social web mimics the way we are in the real world.

Friends, families, tribes and teams that communicate, collaborate, consume and create together. There is no client, no server, just us. The CPU, memory, storage and the network are mere enablers. In this new kind of social web, the defining characteristic is us.

So when Facebook goes down, we cry bloody murder. If Facebook launches Beacon or tweaks how stuff shows up in our news streams or if we suddenly become shills to our friends — we all stomp our collective feet on the ground, till it starts to shake. In other words, it is not what Facebook can build or how it can use the technology resources. Instead the limiting factor for Facebook is how its 600 million (and growing) people adapt to the changes.

My Mobile, My Way

Over past four years, in parallel to this social web arranged around people and their networks, we have seen the emergence of a new kind of mobile Internet. Smartphones mean that technology that once was the domain of the office is now a constant accompaniment. Mobile phones of today might have innards of a PC, but they are not really computers. They are able to sense things, they react to touch and sound and location. Mobile phones are not computers, but they are an extension of us.

With this revolution, it has become easier to share our moments and other details of our life that have so far been less exposed. The sharing of location data becomes a cause of concern because it is the unknown. The situation is only going to get more complicated — we are after all entering a brave new world of sensor driven mobile experiences, as I wrote in an earlier newsletter. No, this is not science fiction stuff.

Today, I read about State Farm, the insurance company launching a new app that uses iPhone’s built in accelerometer technology in tandem with GPS-based location data to measure your ability to do three major tasks when driving — accelerate, brake and corner. You get a score at the end of the journey.

Of course, for now the results are private to the driver, but what if an insurance company started to keep records of your driving and decided your insurance rates based on your performance. It is great news if you are a good driver, not so good news if you are a horrible one. In other words, the perceived scariness is going to define how we adopt and adapt to this and more such technologies.

While Jobs’ idea of offering better explanations of complex technologies is a good step forward, companies also have to start thinking about the human aspect of their core products. In addition to the core building blocks, a product of tomorrow needs to know its human limits or its human capabilities.

Photo courtesy of Apple via its new iPad 2 clip. 

var host = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://secure." : "http://"); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + host + "wufoo.com/scripts/embed/form.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); var wuwu = new WufooForm(); wuwu.initialize({'userName':'gigaom', 'formHash':'z7m8z1', 'autoResize':1, 'defaultValues':'', 'height':'0', 'ssl':1}); wuwu.display();

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Shopping Matters When it Comes to Location-Based Apps
• Connected Consumer Q1: The Over-the-Top vs. Pay TV Battle Heats Up

The Phase One IQ180 boasts an 80-megapixel sensor, the highest-resolution sensor the company has ever offered. And the camera costs almost $50,000.

It might not make sense that you can make money by giving away services and concentrating on keeping users happy, but that's how Evernote is making millions, the CEO tells would-be entrepreneurs.

If you have even the slightest hint of a creative streak, you may be interested in COLOURlovers, a startup whose products let you easily express yourself using shapes and colors, even if you aren’t particularly good at it. The Y Combinator-backed company has built up a community around creating color palettes, a matching iPhone app, and even a tool for sprucing up your Twitter profile. And now the company has closed its first seed round.

COLOURlovers has raised $1 million from investors including Atlas Venture, Morado Ventures, Founder Collective, Charles River Ventures, 500 Startups, Seraph Group & Zelkova Ventures, Matt Mullenweg, Alexis Ohanian, Don Hutchison, Dharmesh Shah, Jared Friedman, and Shawn Bercuson (the startup says it got in touch with many of them via Angel List).

Founder Darius A Monsef IV (aka Bubs) didn’t want to talk too much about the company’s future plans, but he did say that it would soon be releasing a more robust version of its vector shapes editor, Seamless. Seamless has been available as a web app until now, but the company will be selling what he describes as an advanced desktop version within the next few weeks. As for the company’s long term goals, he says they’re working “towards a much bigger vision that builds upon all of the great creative content our community has been generating.”

The company’s team now consists of three founders and two recently-hired full-time employees, with plans to hire an additional seven in the near future (if you’re interested they’re targeting hires in Portland — Monsef describes the hiring market in San Francisco as “pretty nutty”. The company was actually already profitable prior to the seed round, and on track to do over $500k in revenue this year.

Monsef says that Seamless has been used to create 65,000 patterns thus far, and that 1.5 million color variations have been created as well (users can re-color existing patterns to suit their taste). The Twitter profile designer, which is called Themeleon, is used to design 600,000 profiles per month — and that number will grow once the company launches its upcoming WordPress version and a Themeleon API.

CrunchBase InformationCOLOURloversInformation provided by CrunchBase

Peer-to-peer education startup Skillshare, which just launched in April, raised a $550,000 angel round, according to an SEC filing. Investors in the New York City startup include Founder Collective, SV Angel, Collaborative Fund, David Tisch, and Scott Heiferman.

Skillshare is a community where people can offer classes to other members. People sign up online, and meet in person for real classes for everything from how to bake cupcakes to how to get startup funding. People can charge for the classes and Skillshare takes a 15 percent cut. Co-founder Michael Karnjanaprakorn used to be head of product at Hot Potato (since acquired by Facebook), and co-founder Malcolm Ong was the product manager at OMGPOP.

The site is focussing on classes about tech startups, food and drink, and arts & crafts to start out.
Our business model is similar to Eventbrite. For instance, Chris Dixon of Founder Collective is going to teach a class on How To Raise Your First Round for $15 (with proceeds going to charity).

The founders are curating the classes to start out in order to attract the right kind of people and define the culture of the site. They are getting some advice from fellow New York startups. “The guys at Kickstarter have given a lot of advice on how to build our community, especially in the early days of the startup,” says Karnjanaprakorn. “Right now, we don’t allow private one-on-one classes, tutoring sessions, or test preparation services. While we think these classes are great, they don’t really fit into our community as we’re going after the ‘creative, unique, interesting and skill-based’ classes.”

The goal of Skillshare is to make education relevant and more current to what people need to learn. “While it’s great to learn multi-variable calculus or the economics of China during school,,” says Karnjanaprakorn. “What about the other 99% of skills that will never see the light of day? By the time a college starts teaching “Mastery in Online Community Management”, it will become so outdated and irrelevant. Traditional education will never catch up to the skills needed in the market today.”

CrunchBase InformationSkillshareFounder CollectiveSV AngelInformation provided by CrunchBase

May 3 is Press Freedom Day and to mark the occasion, New York-based campaign group the Committee to Protect Journalists is outlining some of the ways that free speech is restricted online. The results make important — and sobering — reading.

In a report published on the CPJ site, coordinator Danny O’Brien outlines “the 10 tools of online oppressors”.

Some of the techniques you probably know about: Iran’s predilection for blocking Web sites and services and Egypt’s decision to flip the Internet kill switch in the days when Hosni Mubarak’s rule was verging on collapse. And, of course, a number of different countries regularly imprison journalists, bloggers and others who dare to challenge political regimes.

But there are a few examples of less obvious restrictions that the report also points out. Take Cuba, which manages to keep a lid on online dissent by the simple method of not having Internet connectivity in the first place. It’s a similar situation in countries like North Korea and Burma, where only a tiny elite — who are totally invested in the status quo — are granted Internet access.

Even when infrastructure is in place, it can be manipulated in important ways. Ethiopia rarely makes headlines these days, but the government has gone to great lengths to expand the network as it tries to shake off a national history of extreme poverty. But in attempting to become a hypermodern nation, it has also discovered that there are new avenues of control: as the CPJ report explains, the government is exercising an astonishing amount of control over that connectivity. Political news is heavily filtered, and foreign information sources are shut down where possible.

As O’Brien states:

Many of the oppressors’ tactics show an increasing sophistication, from the state-supported email in China designed to take over journalists’ personal computers, to the carefully timed cyber-attacks on news websites in Belarus. Still other tools in the oppressor’s kit are as old as the press itself, including imprisonment of online writers in Syria, and the use of violence against bloggers in Russia.

And if none of that concerns you, then remember that these techniques may already apply to your own life in some way — a report issued by American NGO Freedom House last month suggests that “even in more democratic countries — such as Brazil India, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey, and the United Kingdom — internet freedom is increasingly undermined by legal harassment, opaque censorship procedures, or expanding surveillance”. Curtailing freedom of speech isn’t something that just happens to other people– it could happen to you too.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Connected Consumer Q1: The Over-the-Top vs. Pay TV Battle Heats Up
• Smart Grid Apps: Six Trends That Will Shape Grid Evolution
• Green IT Q1: Cleantech Breaking Out — and Bracing for Hard Times

This week, tech insiders and observers joined in on a new round of the industry’s current favorite parlor game: bandying around estimates of how much Facebook is really worth.

What set off the latest buzz was a Sunday morning Wall Street Journal report that Facebook could hold its initial public offering at a valuation of $100 billion. The number came from unnamed company insiders, who arrived at it based on the $2 billion in annual earnings before interest, taxes, debt and amortization (EBITDA) they say Facebook is set to make in 2011.

There’s a lot being said about this, but to me, two particularly salient points stand out from the chatter:

• Consider the (potential) source.

Skeptics have noted that the WSJ report’s sources could well have some skin in the game. After all, the WSJ article comes just days after an April 27 Reuters report that a group of Facebook shareholders are attempting to sell $1 billion worth of company shares in a secondary market at a price that values the entire company at $70 billion. Those same shareholders had previously tried in vain to offload their Facebook holdings at a price that valued the company at $90 billion, according to the Reuters report, which cited five unnamed sources claiming direct knowledge of the situation.

Could it be that people who are reportedly shopping around their Facebook stock are the same ones talking up Facebook’s valuation to the press?

• That’s one ambitious valuation!

Even if the $2 billion EBITDA figure is completely accurate, does it make sense to extrapolate a $100 billion valuation from that?  As USA Today‘s Tim Mullaney points out, while a few firms like Salesforce and OpenTable are currently trading at around 50 times EBITDA, most tech industry players are traded at much lower EBITDA multiples. Google is currently valued at 9 times EBITDA, and Apple is valued at 10 times EBITDA. Part of the beauty of the stock market is the mystery of market capitalizations, but valuing Facebook at 50 times EBITDA would place it at the far end of the Bell curve.

From a revenue, talent, and a customer traction perspective, there is no doubt that Facebook is in the big leagues. But until the company pulls the trigger on an IPO or sale, whether it will all translate into a $100 billion valuation is up for debate.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• A Media Tablet Forecast, 2011 – 2015
• Finding the Value in Social Media Data
• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011

Social media tools like Twitter and Facebook have been around for several years now, but some media organizations are still just getting around to figuring out how to handle them — and in many cases, as we’ve written before, they spend a lot of time talking about what journalists should not do, and very little about what they should do. Bloomberg is the latest to come out with this kind of social-media policy, which spends most of its time telling staff all the things they should avoid doing.

The Bloomberg policy, which was sent to the Emedia Vitals blog by a source, starts off well enough, by saying that social networks and social-media platforms are “a powerful way to reach millions of new readers and expand the impact of our reporting,” and that social media “is a useful complement to our work so long as principles of fairness, accuracy and transparency are upheld.” So far, so good.

Then, however, the policy goes on to list all the things that reporters and editors with Bloomberg shouldn’t do. Staff “should not use social networks to express political opinions or to advocate on behalf of a particular issue or agenda,” and posts on any network or platform “should never express bias based on race, sex, religion, or nationality.” Reporters and editors “cannot use social media to express opinions related in any way to their professional assignment or beat.” Staff are also forbidden to join any groups or social networks that are dedicated to a particular political opinion or cause, are not allowed to “engage in arguments with those critical of our work,” and are not allowed to mention any internal discussions or meetings.

All of these restrictions and bans are very similar to the ones that the Toronto Star newspaper laid out in its new social-media policy, which I wrote about recently: never discuss stories in development, do not talk about newsroom issues, don’t express any opinions about the topics you cover, and don’t respond to readers.

These kinds of policies have a number of flaws — including the fact that much of what they are prohibiting is either common sense or impossible to police (or both). During a discussion of policies on Twitter on Tuesday, journalism professor Jeff Jarvis echoed a motto tweeted by Katie Rosman of the Wall Street Journal, who said that deputy managing editor Alan Murray told her the best policy was “Don’t be stupid.” And John Paton, CEO of the Journal-Register Co. newspaper chain and architect of its digital-first strategy, posted his own social-media policy recently, which told employees to consider three points — all of which were blank (the implication being that there are no explicit rules).

One of the biggest flaws of most policies is that they spend so much time talking about how bad social media is for the profession, and so little time talking about what makes it useful, or how to approach it as a positive tool for journalism. About the only positive thing that both the Bloomberg policy and the Toronto Star policy are willing to admit to is that social media such as Twitter and Facebook are really good for promoting your content (although Bloomberg does mention that it’s “good etiquette” to occasionally link to interesting work created by others, which is more than many policies do).

But social tools are good for so much more than just promoting content — not to mention that if all a journalist does is promote his or her content, people will quickly determine that their account is just self-promotional spam, and pay little attention. So what would a positive social-media policy recommend? Here are a few suggestions that I’ve come up with — feel free to add your own in the comments:

• Talk to people: this has nothing to do with promoting your own content. It means engaging in conversation about issues, and responding to and/or asking questions of others. It’s called a conversational medium for a reason. Unfortunately, most media outlets explicitly forbid this.
• Reply when you are spoken to: if you don’t respond when someone asks you a direct question or makes a point in reference to you, it’s like ignoring someone who is standing right beside you and talking to you. That doesn’t mean responding to every troll or flame.
• Re-tweet others: social media gets very boring if all you do is post links to your own things, or post your own thoughts. Lots of other people have interesting things to say — find some and re-tweet them. Maybe they will return the favor.
• Link to others: the same goes for links — social media is a tremendous tool for finding interesting content, and you should share it when you find it, not just keep it to yourself. If you do this, others are more likely to share your links when you post them.
• Admit when you are wrong: this is difficult for many journalists, since we like to pretend that we never get anything wrong — which everyone knows is untrue. So be transparent, as much as it pains you, and admit when you got something wrong. It builds trust.
• Be human, but not too human: it’s okay to show emotion — in fact, it’s good, because it shows that you are human, and people relate to other people. It’s called social media for a reason. But be the best version of yourself — and don’t ever tweet drunk :-)

Those are just some of the principles that make social media what it is, but I have yet to see a social-media policy — apart from possibly the blogging and commenting guidelines at The Guardian — that focuses on this kind of behavior, instead of spending all its time talking about what could go wrong, or telling reporters and editors things they shouldn’t do.

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Finding the Value in Social Media Data
• A Media Tablet Forecast, 2011 – 2015
• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011

Andrew Keller, CEO of advertising company CP+B, off-handedly challenged even the premise of an early question at the Wired Business Conference: "I don’t know if we do edgy." But the product campaigns speak for themselves.

Google has seven major product groups. Advertising, Commerce & Local, Mobile (Android), Social, Chrome, YouTube and Search. Search is, of course, Google’s first and most important product. But that group actually no longer exists internally. As of April, when Larry Page took over as CEO of the company, the search group was renamed the “knowledge group” internally.

Google confirms the change. And, they point out, it was actually publicly announced in an SEC filing made on April 11. Nobody seems to have noticed that someone was named the SVP of a Google product group that previously hadn’t existed.

Why the change? That’s a longer story.

Leadership of Google search, like most other Google products, was previously split between Marissa Mayer as product lead and Udi Manber as engineering lead. Late last year Mayer moved over to run Local. Alan Eustace now runs the group, and Manber reports to him. There’s a single leader of the group, and he reports to Page.

Page, say our sources, has for a long while been thinking of search as much more than Google’s original mission to “organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” His goal is about more than organizing that information, though. It’s also about enhancing people’s understanding and facilitating the creation of knowledge.

The problem is, “search” still means “search.” And as Google has expanded that product over the years, first bringing in results from Google’s vertical search engines via Universal Search in 2007, and later via Google Squared, which structures information on the Internet.

And there have been other experiments as well. Google Base, for example, as well as Google Knol.

In fact, look back at this 2007 Google blog post about Knol, where Manber says “The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.”

These product efforts have generally been led by Manber in the past. And they remain in the search/knowledge group today.

Here’s how Google currently views the group. Remember that previously they split it up between Mayer (product) and Manber (engineering). But today Eustace is the overall lead. Manber reports to Eustace and focuses on finding ways to improve the knowledge out there and to encourage more high quality content creation, whether it’s on Google’s servers (Knol) or not.

Amit Singhal, Manber’s peer, focuses on the more traditional goals of search, such as the recent algorithm changes called Panda targeting content farms.

One way of thinking of this, says a source with knowledge of the group, is this. Singhal does the weeding (removing and pushing down low quality content in search), and Manber is focused on the seeding (encouraging “good stuff” to grow).

This isn’t supposed to be information that helps outsiders understand how Google operates, which is probably why Google made the SEC statement in as few words as possible and didn’t publicize it at all. Instead, it’s to make sure that the team inside Google understands that they aren’t just working on search. It’s not just about organization, it’s about enhancement of knowledge.

Other than confirming the creation of the Knowledge group to supplant the Search group, Google won’t comment on the personnel changes or the subtle shifts in strategy. For now, says one source, all Google wants to do is align everyone internally. When, and if, Google talks about this more publicly is a mystery.

CrunchBase InformationGoogleInformation provided by CrunchBase

We heard yesterday that Sunday night’s announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death drew the highest sustained rate of tweets ever according to Twitter and Google has revealed an impressive stat showing the impact of the event on Google search.

Google says that between 7:30 and 8:30 pm PST (which was right around the time the news broke over Twitter), Google saw an one million percent increase in searches for the term ‘bin laden.’

For basis of comparison, you can see a chart below comparing searches for the Royal Wedding on Google Trends. The Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton also drew massive amounts of web traffic from around the world, but clearly the search volume for news and information around Bin Laden’s death came in at a much higher scale.

Netflix is blowing the doors off its business, with $3 billion in annualized revenue and a $12 billion market cap driven by the transition to streaming online video. In terms of hours watched, streaming surpassed DVDs for Netflix in the fourth quarter, but CEO Reed Hastings has been preparing for this moment for more than decade. The name Netflix itself always held the promise of movies delivered over the Internet. The problem, says Hastings in an interview today at the Wired business conference, was that back then they couldn’t stream movies over 56K modems.

But there was Moore’s Law and improvements in bandwidth which could be plotted, and that is exactly what Hastings did. “We took out our spreadsheets and we figured we’d get 14 megabits/sec to the home by 2012, which turns out is about what we will get.” So what does his spreadsheet tell him about the next ten years? “If you drag it out to 2021, we will all have a gigabit to the home.”

One advantage consumers will see with streaming over cable settop boxes or DVD players is that upgrades to the quality can happen much faster because they are not dependent on switching out boxes in everyone’s home. While streaming is just now catching up with high-definition streams, that progress should keep advancing and even leapfrog hardware solutions that really only change every ten years or so. Streaming Netflix movies to multiple high-def screens is only a matter of time.

As it turned out, however, the DVD business was not just a way to bide time while the network caught up. It laid the economic groundwork for the streaming business to become established because of the need to license content, which it doesn’t have to do with DVD rentals. “If we had tried to launch streaming in the beginning,” says Hastings, “I’m sure it wouldn’t have worked because we couldn’t have written big checks. Now we can write a $50 million or $100 million check which gets the content flowing. As we get more subscribers, we can write bigger checks.”

Asked whether Netflix threatened the cable companies, Hastings was careful to say that he doesn’t want to replace cable. That is why Netflix continus to focus on older movies rather than new releases, sports, or news. “We have consistently said that would not be profitable for us,” he says. “It would start an Armageddon battle, and we would not emerge alive from that battle. So we are concentrating on our niche.” And yet, Netflix is experimenting with licensing better programming and even original series. You can bet those experiments will continue.

CrunchBase InformationReed HastingsNetflixInformation provided by CrunchBase

For the first time since the tablet's release, RIM showed a live demo of the three biggest features that have been MIA since the tablet's launch: native e-mail, calendar and contacts applications.