MPAA Doesn’t Know How To Link

OK, this is fun. I just stumbled (via Digg) onto MPAA’s webpage where they link all the resources for legal downloading, buying or renting movies.

The fun part is that they managed to mess up all the links on the page. Sure, tech savvy folks will know where they messed up: instead of “a href=”dynamic.abc.go.com”” it should have been “a href=”http://dynamic.abc.go.com”“, but the poor average user will think that the evil MPAA is toying with him, and there aren’t any sites with legal movies for download out there.

And then he’ll go to the Pirate Bay and download the stuff he wants.

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Politics Online Conference 2008: Mashable Readers Save $50

The convergence of politics and new media has been a hot topic this year that will only intensify as we close in on the 2008 elections. The Politics Online Conference, coming on March 4th and 5th to Washington, DC, sits at the intersection of smart politics, good governance, transparent democracy and new media. The conference will spotlight tools, applications, strategies and ideas that affect a range of functions, from writing policy to organizing democratic movements to building dialogue with constituents.

For the full range of topics be sure to check out the conference agenda.

Exclusively for Mashable readers, we are offering a discount of $50 off the registration fee. Simply use the code MINUS50 on the registration form to receive the discount

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Godkut - Social Networking Meets Religion

It’s probably not a coincidence that Godkut was launched a couple of days after Christmas; you can’t get better timing for a faith-based social network.

Unfortunately, and although Godkut calls itself “the world’s most advanced faith based Social Network,” I really can’t report anything out of the ordinary about it. It’s your standard, run of the mill social network with features like blogs, forums, chatrooms, events, classifieds, messaging, groups, and, of course, sharing music and video. One interesting feature is the video recorder, which allows for one-click video recording and saving the result directly to your profile.

The design of the site is lackluster; some elements, like polls, look like there were just slapped on there without any thought given on how it will all look like, and an ugly white banner on top isn’t doing the site any favors. I expect the users to be interested mostly in the content and not in the wrapping, so I’d give Godkut the benefit of a doubt; but all things considered, Godkut will probably be remembered as just another religious social network. Some other examples of faith-based social networks are MyChurch and Youthroots.

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FlickrFan: A Clunky Screensaver for Mac Users

FlickerFan is the latest offering from serial inventor David Winer. FlickrFan is essentially a screen saver program designed for displaying hi-rez images from Flickr accounts as well as RSS feeds that come with media enclosures (or in English, Photobucket, AP’ news wire and Flickr tag streams). The system is designed with the MacMini in mind, and only comes in Macintosh flavor - no cross-platform compatibility here.

The application, at first blush, appears fairly cool, despite the rather dry description an introduction on Winer’s blog. It puts into action something I’ve actually been doing for quite some time now, albeit in an expensive and apparently difficult way.

Keep in mind that I’m not a Mac guy. In fact, I’m about as anti-Mac as a person can be without being an Apple-hater and MS fanboy. Having properly disclaimed myself, I feel no compunctions in informing you that Dave Winer’s “game-changing program” has actually existed for almost two years, and it’s called Yahoo! Go.Since I’m not a Mac guy, and don’t actually have any Macs running here at the house, I had Kristen install the software so she could get some screen shots for me, and perhaps do a cute little PC vs. Mac square vs. hip review of the software. After she installed the software, though, her analysis was the it was “way to much work to install it,” and the process didn’t merit the rewards that the software delivered; it isn’t just me scratching my head wondering why all the wonderment in the blogosphere over this software.

Yahoo Go, at least the version I have running on the Asus MicroITX board that’s hooked up to my living-room big-screen, can display photos as a screen-saver from any RSS stream or from any Flickr stream. What’s more, I can display with a built in Windows screen saver all the photos saved on my own hard drive, and with any number of freely available screen-savers display images from other’s RSS feeds.

There are literally a hundred ways to skin this cat. I went through the laborious process of testing all of them as I decided on a home theatre PC back in early 2006, and Yahoo! Go was the most well-rounded solution for what I wanted at the time. Your mileage may vary.

If you absolutely, positively want new photos to display through your MacMini on your TV screen, Dave Winer’s software is designed specifically for that.

If your needs are separate from that very narrow niche, I’d find a more stable solution.

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MoDazzle: Access Facebook, LinkedIn and Starbucks from Your Mobile Phone

MoDazzle is one way in particular to mobilize your social networks, specifically LinkedIn, Facebook, Salesforce and a couple others. Using email addresses and SMS short codes, there are ways in which you can access a variety of features on these supported social networks.

For instance, you can look up a LinkedIn contact by emailing the search request to MoDazzle, or you can access your unread Facebook messages by sending MoDazzle a request via SMS. Other options for Facebook support include the ability to poke other users, check a friend’s online status, read your wall, or post to a wall. Aside from granting access to your various social networking tools, there are other search tools, like Google Maps, ZoomInfo, Starbucks (in case you really need a shot of espresso), Yelp for restaurant reviews, flight updates, and weather.

While I’m supportive of furthered integration of tools into email and SMS, MoDazzle seems to have taken a somewhat sprawled approach to providing you with mobile access to these various networks and search tools. Each task for each network or resource has its own SMS code and email address. This can make for a rather cumbersome search tactic or access portal, even if each contact is saved in your email client or your mobile phone. Just glancing over the user guide for each tool is daunting, so I can only imagine that trying to remember which contact goes with which task can take some getting used to while scrolling through your contact list.

Even still, MoDazzle wold only be more useful for those lacking mobile browsing. With networks like Facebook already providing a pretty useful mobile extension, along with most of the other tools supported by MoDazzle, it may be far easier to access the optimized networks provided in an independent manner. Likewise, there are several mobile package tools, like Widsets or Mobio, that give you a more comprehensive approach to accessing certain information in a mobile manner.

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Here Comes The Google Mafia

As Googlers get long in the tooth and their stock options fully vest, some are hanging up their employee badges and giving up the free food at the Google cafeteria to try their hand as venture capitalists and angel investors. (That is, if Facebook doesn’t nab them first). Just like the Paypal Mafia before them (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, Jeremy Stoppelman, David O. Sacks, etc), these rich alums are setting out to use their Google money as seed capital for a new round of startups.

But there are some major differences between the two mafias. The Paypal group was tightly knit and forced to direct their entrepreneurial energies elsewhere after the sale of PayPal to eBay. And, with the exception of perhaps Thiel, all are company builders first, and investors second. They did not just invest in other startups, they went on to found them—YouTube, Slide, LinkedIn, Yelp, Geni. PayPal still only had a few hundred employees when it was sold. In contrast, Google now has 16,000 employees. It is quite possible that many in the new class of Google investors never even knew each other while they were at Google. And while there are certainly plenty of ex-Googlers going on to found new startups as well, the emerging group of Google angels and VCs seems to be made up more of pure investors.

So who are these people? The growing Google Mafia includes Chris Sacca, Aydin Senkut, Paul Buchheit, Georges Harik, Satya Patel, Salman Ullah, Sean Dempsey, and Andrea Zurek. Sacca just left his post as head of Google’s bid for wireless spectrum and WiFi initiatives to become a full-time angel investor. Already while at Google, he invested in Twitter and PhotoBucket. Zurek, a former manager for AdWords, is also an angel. Patel, another former Google adverising exec, now works for Battery Ventures. Former deal-makers Ullah and Dempsey are reportedly raising money for their own venture fund.

But the Peter Thiel of the group (or is it the Reid Hoffman?) is former sales manager Senkut. Reports the NYTimes:

Since leaving Google in 2005, Mr. Senkut, 38, may have become the most active angel investor of the bunch, putting $25,000 to $100,000 each in about 35 companies. So far, only two of those were started by ex-Googlers. But Mr. Senkut has invested alongside other former Google employees, including Paul Buchheit, 31, who built the first versions of Gmail, and Georges Harik, 36, who ran many of Google’s new businesses when the company began expanding beyond Internet search.

The three invested in Meraki Networks together. Senkut’s Felices Ventures also has stakes in BrightRoll, Buzz Logic, Cake Financial, Dogster, FreeWebs, Mashery, MesmoTV, Mint, PowerSet, SayNow, and Yapta. Many of these names should be familiar to regular TechCrunch readers. So if there existed a Google Mafia venture fund and a Paypal Mafia venture fund (which would include Facebook, where Thiel sits on the board), which one would you rather invest in?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

CDT Warns Users: Don’t Accidentally Be a Pirate

The Center for Democracy and Technology today released a list of places that you shouldn’t go to if you want to grab some MP3s to fill up your brand new iPod. Most of them appear to be fronts for sites that offer versions of popular file-sharing software that you can grab for free if you know where to look. If the warning was used for the purpose of warding people off of purchasing something they can grab for free, that would be one thing.

Instead, though, they’re using this as an opportunity to warn folks away from “accidentally violating copyright laws” and downloading files illegally.

In case you’ve forgotten who the CDT is, they’re the genius organization who called for the creation of a national “Do-Not-Track” registry, so web surfers could avoid having identifiable information gathered about them by online advertising firms.

Call me crazy, but I’m not to hot for companies that act as advocates for the RIAA, and I’m not particularly interested in having my industry advocated by a group of folks that consistently seem to misunderstand the basic tenants of what the Internet user community is about. CDT, pay attention:

We’re not interested in protecting large corporations and executives and their ability to make a buck, we’re interested in having quality music, and the continued existence of quality entertainers to produce that music.

We’re not interested in having all vestiges of personally identifiable information removed from every advertisers database, we’re interested in what they do with that information, and that it isn’t released into the wilds so that our neighbors can read all about what we surf (or if it is released as such, it is done on our own terms).

We’re not interested in being the smartest kid in the room when compared to you. If you’re going to represent us to the world and to our politicians, learn a bit about technology, or drop technology from you organization’s name and charter.

Aside from my self-appointed representation of the Internet community to the CDT, if users are interested in spending less than $40,000 to fill your iPod - go download LimeWire for free instead of spending $34 on it.

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Geezeo Adds Confessions: What Did You Blow Your Paycheck On?

Geezo is finding more ways to lure you in with social tools for the purpose of getting you to use its service, and love it. Confessions is a new feature for sharing all your spending sins. If you feel the need to get a few purchases off your chest, you can do it here. Thankfully for you there are public and private options for sharing such dark deeds. That means you could also use it for a place to anonymously brag about that severely expensive Christmas gift you bought for yourself, without having to worry about the looks of disdain from your mother.

The Confessions feature is set up very much like a microblogging tool, with updates being posted on a public page within the Geezeo network. And speaking of microblogging, Confessions can also be tied into your Twitter account, so public confessions can be posted on Twitter as well. Anonymous confessions will be posted on the “MoneyConfession” Twitter account. So there are multiple ways in which to keep up with Confessions: via Twitter or via RSS, found on the Confessions page.

The result is a very interesting collection of stories–some rather hilarious (one user confessed to buying a car for a hooker), and others very serious. It all reminds me of the dynamic found on BoredAt, which recently expanded its anonymous posting options from college campuses to corporate offices.

Additionally, Geezeo has added mobile support for Geezeo Targets, so you can more easily check your categorized budgets from your cell phone. That should minimize the amount of time you spend in the Confessions booth.

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Weekly Wrapup, 17-21 December 2007

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.

Highlights this week: Marshall Kirkpatrick tells us how sexy librarians and YouTube will be linked in the future. He also investigates a new leaderboard for Twitter. Josh Catone reviews the most popular Consumer Apps of 2007; and he explores the appeal of Meetup to US presidential candidates. For last100 Steve O’Hear reviews the Internet TV space in 2007; and check the latest action at AltSearchEngines and ReadWriteTalk!

Web News

This week the two main browsers were in the spotlight - with the release of Firefox 3 Beta 2 and the IE8 Acid2 Test. In other news: Apple shut down the blog ThinkSecret, Yahoo! agreed to adhere to 100% of the recommendations for email clients made by the Email Standards Project, Facebook finally rolled out their long awaited friend lists feature, and OpenSocial released an update.

Web Products

Consumer Apps: 2007 Year in Review

“Consumer apps” is a rather broad topic to tackle, so rather than try to recount everything that has happened across the entire cosmos of consumer web applications in the past year, we focused on two areas that have had perhaps the most impact overall in the way we conduct our day-to-day lives: social networking and personal publishing.

Tweeterboard: Who Does That Person on Twitter Think They Are?

Like it or not, there’s a whole lot of conversation going on via microblogging service Twitter these days and it cannot be ignored.

Let’s say you’ve subscribed to a search feed for your company’s name (via Terraminds) and you’ve found someone talking smack about your employer, Perfect Angel Inc. What do you do? Well, one thing you might find useful is the new service Tweeterboard.

Meetup: The Secret Campaign Weapon?

Web metrics firm Compete released their latest “Candidate FaceTime” metric this week, which measures how many hours people are spending across the social networking profiles of US presidential candidates. Not surprisingly, Ron Paul continues to dominate all candidates, while Barack Obama leads the pack among Democrats. The biggest surprise is the rise of Mike Huckabee — who has also been rising in national polls — perhaps due to the Chuck Norris bump (what can’t that guy do?). Compete, however, points to Meetup as the true secret weapon. In this post we explore how Meetup is being used in US politics…

Trends

Sexy Librarians of the Future Will Help You Upload Your Videos to YouTube

A new poll from Harris Interactive was released this week, finding that US respondents are more excited about watching mainstream, commercial content like full length TV shows and movies online than are about watching User Generated Content, news or sports video.

While hardly surprising, we don’t think it has to be this way forever. Who could help improve this landscape by maximizing the impact of the read/write web? Super sexy librarians, that’s who!

Will Web Office Apps Ever See Widespread Adoption?

A new study from market researchers NPD has found that 73% of surveyed PC users have "never heard of and never tried…online, browser-based office productivity applications like Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, gOffice, etc." Roughly 4 percent of respondents said they had heard of these apps and sometimes or often used them.

Blogs around the web are freaking out about how low these adoption numbers are, but we don’t think there’s really cause for alarm.

RWW Network Blogs

last100

On our Digital Lifestyle blog last100, don’t miss editor Steve O’Hear’s in-depth review of Internet TV in 2007. Wrote Steve: "From YouTube’s continued dominance, the television networks’ newfound willingness to experiment online, the rise of the desktop Internet TV application, and a number of new PC-to-TV devices and set-top boxes — it’s been a big year for Internet TV in all shapes and forms. In this post we look back at 2007 through the lens of last100’s coverage, highlighting some of the important stories and trends, and how they point to what we might expect for Internet TV in 2008."

Alt Search Engines

This week on AltSearchEngines, there were two excellent guest posts:
The Economical Path Towards the Future Search Engine by Alex Ginsberg of the NooTag Team and The Long Tail’s Impact on Search Relevance by Melek Pulatkonak, President of Hakia. Both are ‘must reads’ if the future of search is of interest to you.

Also, continuing ASE’s new CEO spotlight series, Natalya has an extensive interview with Michael Hussey from the People Search Engine PeekYou.

ReadWriteTalk

Over on our network podcast ReadWriteTalk host Sean Ammirati got a chance to sit down with Google Developer Advocate, Kevin Marks. Marks is best known, at least within Google, as one of the main evangelists of the OpenSocial project.

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup, 10-14 December 2007

Here is a quick wrapup of the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.

This week on ReadWriteWeb we did our annual review of Web companies and most promising for 2008. Check out these posts for our picks, and see if you agree!

• Best Web BigCo of 2007: Facebook
• Best Web LittleCo of 2007: Twitter
• Most Promising for Web 2008: Open Source Movement

Other highlights this week:

• LinkedIn Announcement: The Good News and The Bad
• Bebo Adopts Facebook Platform; Facebook Opens Up its Platform Architecture
• Mobile MySpace On Sprint: Do Carrier Deals Make Sense?
• Amazon Web Services Family Expands with SimpleDB
• The Evolution of Personal Publishing
• Good Things Take Time: New Tech Doesn’t Go Mainstream Overnight
• Facebook vs. w00t: The Web Defines Word of the Year Competition
• Movable Type Goes Open Source Today
• Online Accounting: The Next Killer App For Google Apps

Apologies for this week’s abbreviated wrapup, normal service will return next week!

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