A month or so ago, the crew that makes the Bloomberg Game Changers documentaries about entrepreneurs who have transformed our lives stopped by the Wired offices to ask me a bit about Twitter.
The 25-minute show is now online and being show on Bloomberg TV. Check out the trailer below, and you can watch the full episode online. Also featured are Om Malik, Tim O’Reilly, Jack Dorsey and Mike Maples. Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I wrote a story for Wired.com about how two performance artists had scraped 1 million Facebook profiles to create a fake dating site — the story took off quickly, as did the cease-and-desist letters from Facebook’s lawyers.
The site — Lovely-Faces.com — is shut down now, but the duo explains their view of their success (.pdf). You can also see me speaking with Fox News 11 about the project (note the great backdrop from the Wired.com conference room).
NPR’s Talk of the Nation kindly invited me on last week to explain what the net neutrality debate is all about, and what it means for regular net users.
I’m afraid I got a bit too technical, having been used to writing for Wired.com’s tech savvy audience. I learned one thing — which is never mention peer-to-peer on the radio, and I failed to make clear two key points.
1. The openness of the internet has led to astounding innovation, ranging from Yahoo to Google to Facebook to YouTube to Pandora to Craigslist to Skype to the explosion in online publishing. That’s purely a function of the internet being open to all comers and not having a pay any special fees, beyond renting a server and paying for bandwidth.
2. There’s a very complicated debate about what internet service providers (ISPs are the cable or telephone company you pay to connect to the internet) can and cannot do, and choosing wrongly might stifle continued innovation on the net.
3. ISPs have a vested interest in trying to extract as much money as they can and changing the net’s architecture to bring them more profits. They would rather do that than add more infrastructure to handle the growing traffic.
4. Internet traffic is cheap. Time Warner cable spends half the revenue it gets from cable video subscriptions to pay for programming. Time Warner’s internet service pays about 3% of the revenue it gets from subscriptions to pay for delivering your emails and the videos you watch. And the price of that keeps falling.
5. Net neutrality has some simple principles, though they get very thorny when you get into the details. Basically, the idea is that users should be able to use the computers, software and online services of their choice and ISPs should not interfere with that, especially when it offers a service (video cable) that competes with a service you want to use (YouTube).
Anyhow, for those who want to listen, here’s my interview with Tony Cox on NPR.
American Public Media’s Marketplace Tech Report looked into Facebook groups and the controversy over letting your friends auto-add you to a group, without you having to confirm it, in this October 13, 2010 report.
Despite the high-profile gaffe of someone adding Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to the NAMBLA group, I explain why Facebook isn’t likely to move to requiring confirmations and why Groups is a very smart decision for the company.
Marketplace Tech Report from October 13, 2010 mp3.
Photo: Mark Zuckerberg speaking at Startup School in 2009. Credit: Mathieu Thouvenin/Flickr Creative Commons licensed.