Over the past few days I’ve watched this meme about the so-called “geowars” ahead of SXSW gather steam, both in the blogosphere and on Twitter. And it’s giving me a headache. For some odd reason, people believe that SXSW is going to be a full-blown coming-out party for location-based services that will launch at least one of them into the stratosphere.

Ever since Twitter made such a big splash in Austin a few years ago, many startups have come to believe that if they can do the same, they will subsequently become an overnight success — a foolish assumption. It took a lot longer than that for Twitter to go from an early-stage curiosity to a mainstream phenomenon.

Even last year’s debutante, Foursquare, took a whole year to sign up 500,000 users, including myself. Impressive, but not Facebook impressive! Its rival is Gowalla, a liberally funded startup that recently crossed the 100,000 subscriber mark (and released a much-improved and a fantastic upgrade). Others such as Pelago/Whrrl are literally spraying Austin to get the attention of SXSW visitors. Add to this dozens of unknown and/or little known services and you have the “geowars.”

My problem, of course, is not with the technology per se, but with its implementations. With the exception of Foursquare, most LBS startups have not found a way to even briefly engage me. Many of them are going to meet a fate no different that that of a moth flitting around a flame on a dark summer night. So in case you hadn’t noticed, I am a tad skeptical about this notion of geowars.

From GigaOM Pro: Location: The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation in 2010.

Networks — be they telecom, social, transportation or otherwise — are the fabric of modern society. They provide immense value to consumers and businesses alike, enhancing mutual relationships and enabling the distribution of goods, services and information. But does this value grow as the size of the networks grow? And if so, how much?

“Metcalfe’s Law” has long been accepted as characterizing the value — and value growth — of fully connected networks. It states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its nodes, which may take the form of devices — such as computers — or users, in which case a network connection is represented by a “friend” or “follower.” But there are times when the “law,” which has been used to explain network effects and justify mergers and acquisitions, appears to overstate a network’s value. And if that’s the case, what can service providers do about it?

While the number of possible connections in a network is indeed proportional to the square of the number of nodes, value is not necessarily equivalent to number. After all, I may have 10 bills in my wallet, but it matters a lot whether they are $1 or $10,000 denominations.

As I’ve previously observed (at Telecosm and via some math (PDF)), there are several reasons that Metcalfe’s Law can overestimate the value of a network. First, typically only a fraction of the possible connections have value. Second, there are natural limits to consumption of that value. And third, the value of the entire network may decline over time.

Convergent Value Distributions

The number of links in a fully connected network is certainly proportional to the square of the number of nodes. If each connection had the same value as any other, then Metcalfe’s Law would be correct. What would that mean in practice? It would mean that you would spend equal time on the phone with each of the nearly 7 billion people in the world, that they would all friend you or follow you, and you would reciprocate. But humans don’t behave that way.

In 1992, anthropologist Robin Dunbar posited that primates have neurobiologically-based limits to the size of their social networks. For humans, “Dunbar’s Number” is 150. This is exemplified by the fact that the most popular social networking site on the planet now has more than 400 million users, yet the average number of “friends” a person has is only 130 and only a small percentage of those “friends” actually communicate with one another. And although there are a variety of ways to slice the data, the largest microblogging site has close to 100 million users but the average number of followers is roughly 126. Even if we were to assume that tweets have the same “value” as intimate face-to-face interactions and that electronic media might expand Dunbar’s number in some way, there is still an upper bound to the number of relationships, or even weak ties, that can be maintained. If the total value of such social media is related to engagement, and engagement is related to the number of friends, such value would in these cases be linearly proportional to the size of the network, rather than the square of its size.

Intrinsic Limits of Consumption

Suppose you did have equal social interest in the nearly 7 billion people on the planet, or the more than 100 million shared video clips or even the more than 100,000 touchscreen phone apps out there. You then would run into intrinsic limits to your ability to benefit from all those relationships or consume all that content. Perhaps in the early days of TV it would have been possible for a single individual to consume all the content produced. Currently, however, nearly a day’s worth of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Assuming that all those clips did have equal value, even a multitasking insomniac couldn’t keep up. All networks have intrinsic upper limits of consumption, be they bandwidth or dollars or time or attention span.

Holistic Network Value Declines

Even if all nodes were of equal value, and there were no limits to consumption, well, people get jaded. Emotional rewards from novel stimuli are processed by dopamine receptors in the striatum, but the brain is designed to habituate, that is, not get so excited by repeated stimuli. What this means is that an entire social or content network may “grab” you at first, or even for a couple of years, but this infatuation may eventually wear off, and you’ll depart in search of the next new thing. Technological progress can also cause the value of the entire network to decay — consider what the web and email have done to the value of fax networks.

Strategies

There are ways to manage these three effects, however.

If the network node values follow a convergent distribution, ensure that whatever value is present can be extracted by reducing or eliminating core bottlenecks and enhancing the process of discovery. Specific approaches such as scalable non-blocking network infrastructure, content delivery networks, tagging, recommendation and search engines can help.

To extract maximum value when there are intrinsic limits of consumption, not only is removing access bottlenecks effective, but so are personalization, richness, context sensitivity and multitasking facilitation.

And to keep a given network exciting and the dopamine system revved up, new features, content or applications can help. Even if the core “network”— whether social site or app store — remains the same, using a platform for new content or apps can continue to trigger the pleasure receptors associated with novelty, maximizing value and engagement.

Overall, the behavior of real-world networks isn’t always as simple as what’s represented by Metcalfe’s Law. However, understanding their underlying characteristics can help users and service providers maximize their value as well as create new business opportunities.

There are countless ways to track your brand on social media. Simple methods include using Twitter search and Google Alerts; more elaborate tools include Radian6’s newly announced Engagement Console, which will scour numerous social platforms for any mention of your brand.

So here’s a roundup of some of the more popular tracking tools.

Monitoring Dashboards

Twazzup 2.0 beta (which Dawn wrote about last year) is a dashboard that gathers all the mentions of your brand on Twitter and presents them in an appealing and useful way.

Trackur is another powerful social media monitoring tool. It used to be premium-only, but a free basic plan was recently announced that allows you to monitor one keyword, which is sufficient for most small organizations and personal brands. One of the things I like is the way that you can export any search result to an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.

SocialMention (which Dawn also wrote about last year) is similar to Trackur in that it will search all over the web for any mention of your keyword/brand. I like how you can set up alerts that will be emailed to you with results summaries. It also lets you break down search results according to where your brand is mentioned: blog posts, images, videos, news items and more. You can even see every time someone has saved a link from your web site/blog to Delicious or shared it on StumbleUpon.

Addictomatic presents all mentions of your keyword or brand on one nicely designed page. You’ll see images from Flickr, videos from YouTube, posts shared on Digg and much more.

Twitter Clients

Some people find it sufficient to keep track of their brand or other keywords of interest via their day-to-day Twitter client, such as TweetDeck, Seesmic or HootSuite. They accomplish this by simply creating a new column in the client that displays any tweets mentioning that keyword. The nice thing about this method is that you can reply and respond to people mentioning your brand or product, which makes it a good customer service tool.

Larger organizations that need more than one person to monitor Twitter can use a Twitter clients geared for teams, such as CoTweet, which lets multiple people respond to tweets at the same time. The other useful thing about CoTweet is the way it lets you turn tweets into tasks or action items that can be assigned to different team members, much like helpdesk tickets.

There are also tools that do nothing but track multiple hashtags/keywords on Twitter, such as Twitterfall, TweetGrid and my personal favorite of this type, Monitter. While Monitter doesn’t provide nearly as many columns or choices as TweetGrid, it does sport a slick user interface and feels faster. I do like the fact that TweetGrid lets you share a URL with all of the search terms you’ve assembled.

What tools do you use for social media monitoring?

Photo by: VivaLibre574

Two years ago, we launched Structure, our conference devoted to Internet infrastructure and cloud computing. At the time, it was clear as a sunny California day that the Internet was entering a brand-new phase of growth that would see everything from pipes to routers to web services scale up, all thanks to digitization. The emergence of cloud-based services such as Amazon’s EC2 and S3 was the first sign of this big shift.

Greg Papadopoulos (Sun) and Werner Vogels (Amazon) on stage at Structure 2009

Since then a lot has changed — and Structure has become a premier event for those of us who are deeply interested in Internet infrastructure and its business implications. And while it’s easy to get fixated on cloud computing, one cannot deny the far-reaching impact of on-demand and utility computing. However, to view cloud computing in isolation is a mistake. We need to think of infrastructure in a more holistic fashion.

Take big data, for example. One of the biggest changes we’re seeing is that companies are starting to look deeply into the data they’ve spent years collecting in order to figure out ways to leverage it. I have often talked about the coming data deluge and how it influences the demand for pretty much everything.

Attendees in the audience at Structure 2009 in San Francisco California.

From the emergence of private and hybrid clouds to the rise of novel server architectures to the importance of security in the cloud — these will be just some of the topics of discussion at our event. We’re also going to be exploring the impact of big data and real-time computing on infrastructure. What, for example, are the needs of the new, web-connected, on-demand enterprise?

Essentially, the 2010 edition of Structure is going to be about the progress the industry has made so far and how things are expected to evolve in the years to come. The event will be held on June 23 and 24th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco.

Many of our old friends, such as Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, and Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels will be returning for the event. Other experts will join us for the first time — folks such as IBM’s Erich Clementi, who is spearheading Big Blue’s cloud computing efforts. We will be announcing more additions to the line-up of speakers in coming weeks.

The event is being expanded to two days so we can explore more topics and address one of our community’s biggest demands: more time to network. I hope you will come and be part of our ongoing conversation. Tickets are on sale now — at a discount. For more details, visit the Structure 2010 web site. See you in June!

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking at a conference in Abu Dhabi this week, confirmed that the Chrome OS operating system is on track for delivery in the second half of this year. While we already know that it’s headed for netbooks, there are new reasons to believe that its brightest future may be as an adjunct OS on netbooks and tablets.

Google is taking several big gambles with its upcoming OS, not the least of which is that it will require users to work with all data in the cloud. That will rule out countless applications and utilities that are, in some cases, beloved to users, and there is a good chance that Google’s cloud-only gamble could backfire.

But what if Google adopts an “if you can’t beat them, join them” strategy with its Linux-based operating system, and oversees its shipment on netbooks and tablet devices alongside other OSes? If the idea sounds far-fetched, check out the video below from Mobile World Congress, in which Freescale shows a $199 tablet computer concept that runs Chromium OS (the open-source core of Chrome OS), Linux and Android.

If you think about it, a tablet or netbook running the cloud-focused Chrome OS alongside one that caters to local applications could offer a lot of flexibility. And Freescale’s demo shows that very low price points could be achievable for these types of devices.

Linux-based operating systems are already used on many devices in conjunction with OSes such as Microsoft Windows, sometimes through virtualization, and sometimes via lightweight Linux-based platforms such as Splashtop. There are also brand-new operating systems that are designed from the ground up to run alongside other ones, such as Jolicloud.

Google has already witnessed its Android mobile OS being forked into numerous new incarnations, and seen it running as a secondary operating system on some devices. The company has undoubtedly envisioned scenarios in which Chrome OS accompanies other platforms. Remember that in the operating system business, you don’t have to be the top dog to succeed — just ask Apple.

In the end, it won’t even matter whether Google delivers or encourages dual-OS devices based on its new platform. Let’s not forget that Chrome OS is open source and malleable, and is already showing up out in the wild alongside other operating systems–even before it’s launched.

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There’s a big geeky holiday coming this weekend — and no, I don’t mean SXSW. It’s Pi Day on Sunday, aka March 14, aka 3/14. But in the leadup to this year’s day most resembling the constant ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, many self-proclaimed nerds are ramping up for the longest extended Pi Day of our time, on 3/14/15. As a rapidly growing Facebook event, “The Only Pi Day of Our Lives,” explains,

Yes, the time is upon us. Everyone knows pi day is March 14th, but any true nerd realizes pi is not 3.14, but rather an irrational constant which continues infinitely in decimal expansion. Starting at 9:26:53 (.589… sec) AM, the longest extended Pi Day of our lives will come into action. The date, at the AM and PM hours, will be ” 3/14/15 at 9:26:53.589. Days like this only come once in a lifetime!

Sure, it might be a bit of an exaggeration to say “the time is upon us” for an event five years out, but honestly, what’s more charmingly nerdy than prepping for Pi Day? The Facebook event, which has 131,871 registered participants and encourages attendees to invite all the nerds they know, does note that 1592 was a better year for Pi Day, and that there are many way to interpret pi’s existence in all sorts of dates. Pi Day, by the way, is totally legit; it was officially recognized by the U.S. House of Representatives last year.

Image from piday.org. Video of a 6-year-old reciting 380 digits of pi in Japanese from YouTube.

Like many others, I waited for Apple’s online store to open this morning. It’s iPad pre-order day, in case you missed it, and I purchased two. The 32 GB model is for my own use and review purposes, while my wife and stepdaughter will share a 16 GB version. Both devices are Wi-Fi models: We have Wi-Fi here at home and I pay for a Boingo Wi-Fi account, plus a 3G MiFi device to use on the road. With the MiFi, I can share 3G with multiple iPads, netbooks and notebooks over Wi-Fi.

While many folks are ordering, some are indecisive on the connectivity options because they’re unsure of how the 3G service is going to work. Typically a 3G plan requires a long-term commitment, but not so with the iPad. Now that Apple has laid out the details of the 3G service, they’re worth closer inspection. From what I can see, this is mobile broadband done right.

Right off the bat, you won’t need to sign up for a 2-year contract to use 3G on the iPad. That’s a huge selling point right there — in fact, I expect many to splurge the extra $130 for the 3G option. Why not plan ahead and pay for the ability to use 3G on an as-needed basis? Again, I’m totally covered with my other plans and devices, but if I weren’t, I would have gone with the 3G option. Contract-free is generally more favorable than a lock-in. Mobile technology is changing far too fast for the standard 2-year contracts. It’s for this reason that I paid full price for my Google Nexus One handset: I have the freedom to change phones — and service providers — whenever I want to.

Monthly pricing

The iPad’s 3G monthly plan pricing is another draw. Through AT&T, you can opt for a 250 MB plan at $14.99 or unlimited data usage for $29.99. While it’s not a true apples-to-apples comparison, these same plans for a laptop 3G data connection are currently $35 for 200 MB and $60 for 5 GB  through AT&T. The unlimited smartphone data plan — like the one used for Apple’s iPhone — is the same $29.99 as for the iPad.

But some may only need 250 MB per month, so saving $10 $15 is a nice option and one that’s not available with today’s smartphones. On a related note, we’re running a poll on how much 3G throughput folks are using with their smartphones. As of this writing, 26 percent of the respondents use 200 MB or less, so it’s possible that 250 MB could be enough. On the other hand, smartphone data usage is typically less than on other devices due to the smaller display and “bite-sized chunks” of web usage. With its larger display, the iPad could be used more than a smartphone, with a usage pattern more akin to a data-hungry notebook. And here’s where Apple is doing mobile broadband smartly.

Turn it on or off with metered mobile broadband

The 3G service can be activated or canceled right on the device. No need to find an AT&T store, hit an Apple retail location or make any phone calls — you simply make the transaction on the device. Not only that, but Apple includes a metering system so you know how much data you’ve used during the service month. That’s handy for those trying to stay under that 250 MB limit. And there’s no need to keep checking how much data you’ve used on the iPad — the device will alert you when you approach 20 percent, 10 percent or zero of the 250 MB plan. Each alert allows you to bump up to the unlimited plan or kick off another month of 250 MB service. That could get dicey if you play the 250 MB game  – eating through that data in two weeks, for example and grabbing another 250 MB essentially cuts your first month short in terms of time, i.e.: you would have been better off with the unlimited plan at the same price. Regardless, the approach provides options and looks easy to manage right on the device.

No service change fees?

It’s still unclear if AT&T will charge any fees to change or cancel the plan. Apple doesn’t mention this on the iPad product page, but it’s standard for AT&T to charge a fee around $36 to activate a 3G device. I don’t think it’s going to apply here, though. For starters, I’d like to think that Apple would outline that in the details and there’s no mention of it. And that type of fee would add a usage barrier that I wouldn’t want to see if I were Apple. We’ll know for sure next month when the first iPad 3G models hit, but I don’t expect to see any type of charge for 3G service changes. It would defeat the entire “breakthrough deal with AT&T” that Apple negotiated for the iPad and mar this mobile-broadband-done-right approach.

Images courtesy of Apple

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Smartphone owners are more interested in receiving coupons on their handsets than getting other kinds of mobile come-ons, according to figures released today by Compete.com. It’s just the latest evidence that while mobile advertising as a whole is slowly gaining traction, mobile coupons may be about to take off in a big way.

Compete found that grocery coupons were the most attractive of 10 types of mobile marketing ploys, with 36 percent of U.S. smartphone owners saying there were interested in receiving the discount offers on their handsets. Twenty-nine percent said they wanted to scan barcodes with their phones, while only 15 percent were interested in receiving text message ads.

Interestingly, Compete’s findings come just days after the launch of what may be the nation’s biggest mobile-coupon campaign: Target this week began delivering mobile coupons that can be scanned at the retail counter. Consumers can visit the retailer’s mobile web site or text the word COUPONS to the short code 827438 (TARGET) to opt in and receive a link to a mobile web page containing multiple offers accessible through a single barcode.

Mobile coupons have been around for the better part of a decade but have failed to really take off thanks to a lack of widespread retail support and a user experience that is often intolerable. The market is positioned to pick up some serious momentum in the next few years, though, according to a recent report from Juniper Research, which expects it to exceed 300 million people worldwide by 2014. That forecast might look modest if Target’s campaign gets legs and other nationwide retailers follow suit.

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Image courtesy Flickr user Joe Pemberton.

Despite doubts about Clearwire’s ability to compete against the coming rival 4G network of Verizon and AT&T, its users are apparently pleased with the service. Mike Sievert, chief commercial officer at Clearwire, said the company’s mobile users (those on laptops and dongles outside the home) consume more than an average of 7GB per month of data. That’s a shocking amount of mobile data consumption, especially when all we’re hearing is how scarce spectrum is and how operators can’t keep up with the mobile demand.

But slaking that thirst for mobile data, and doing it cheaply, underlies Clearwire’s overall strategy. For now, that’s why it’s bet on WiMAX, but WiMAX plays only a small role in Clearwire’s cost benefits, which means that it’s not beholden to the technology after 2011, when an agreement with Intel that kept Clearwire and WiMAX together will expire. Sievert was coy when asked directly about the Long Term Evolution standard that the two largest U.S. carriers are experimenting with, but rather than obsess about the radio access technology, let’s look closer at the real disruption Clearwire offers.

Sievert said it cost Clearwire “somewhere in the mid-$20 range” per person to build out its WiMAX network, an estimate that relies on several things, from the cost of the spectrum to the number of the towers Clearwire needs to deploy. In contrast, analyst Chris King at investment bank Stifel Nicholas, has put the per-person cost near $20 for Verizon’s rival LTE network build.

But it’s once the network gets humming when Sievert believes Clearwire starts looking good, both because it will be cheaper to send bits across and enable the company to provide more capacity to data-hungry users, something that may play a larger role as rivals introduce tiered pricing plans, as both Verizon and AT&T have talked about doing.

Sievert credits the all-IP architecture of the Clearwire network for its ability to deliver bits cheaply, pointing out that Verizon and AT&T both will have more expensive legacy networks to run that include equipment for dealing with circuit-switched voice. In the short term this is an advantage for the LTE crew, because they can offer data across their 4G networks and keep voice on 3G — ensuring a consistent level of quality.

But long term, Sievert thinks the advantage is Clearwire’s, especially after it introduces handsets in 2011 that will use Sprint’s 3G network for voice (see video) and will then transition to VoIP. Sievert did not give a time frame for the all-4G phone. Eventually, however the LTE providers will also move to VoIP but aren’t likely to abandon their older networks for decades.

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But the biggest advantage is Clearwire’s deep spectrum resources. If nothing else, the last few months has focused the tech world’s attention on the scarcity of available mobile spectrum. Well, Clearwire has a lot of it — about 150 MHz in many markets, while the other major carriers claim just two-thirds or less of that amount.

It also has 30 MHz chunks of spectrum that it can use for WiMAX, while Verizon, for example, has 20 MHz for LTE. Spectrum can be used to increase both speed and capacity, so while Clearwire’s current speeds of 3-6 Mbps down aren’t going to compare to Verizon’s 5-12 Mbps for LTE, Sievert says Clearwire could allocate another 10 MHz to match speeds and still have another 10 to spare to boost capacity.

So Sievert is content that he can profitably meet the needs of mobile broadband customers with his existing resources without having to resort to pricing gimmicks that may anger customers. And since, as I’ve argued, the average consumer isn’t too worried if their mobile wireless is LTE or WiMAX, Clearwire does have a chance. Add to that a relationship with the cable providers and Sprint, and Sievert claims he has access to 100 million customer relationships through his partners. In other words, if consumers decide they want unlimited wireless broadband from their existing cable provider, rather than a constrained offering from their wireless provider, Clearwire may succeed.

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Vodafone has shuttered Wayfinder — just 16 months after spending $30 million to acquire the Swedish navigational software firm. The move underscores just how drastically the mobile navigation market has changed in the last year thanks to the emergence of free services from third-party developers. It’s also a sign that U.S. operators won’t be able to continue charging customers extra for navigation for much longer.

Navigation has been a lucrative space for carriers such as Verizon Wireless and Sprint, both of whom continue to offer GPS-based services for $3 a day or $10 a month. Vodafone had acquired Wayfinder in an effort to create a suite of new location-based services and keep pace with third-party developers such as Google and Nokia.

But both Google and Nokia have made their offerings free in the last few months, giving consumers turn-by-turn directions and other goodies for no charge beyond the cost of mobile data. So Vodafone will ditch its effort to develop its own products and look to partner with third parties for location services that it can offer for free. And that’s a clear indication that U.S. carriers looking to monetize their branded navigation services will have to find a way to do it without dinging their customers for additional monthly charges.

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Image courtesy Flickr user KhE 龙.

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Nearly 4.1 million new subscribers signed up for broadband from the 19 largest cable and telephone providers in the U.S. in 2009, according to Durham, N.H.-based Leichtman Research Group. These 19 service providers account for about 93 percent (about 71.8 million subscribers) of the total U.S. market. Annual net broadband additions in 2009 were 75 percent of the 2008 total, when these same carriers added about 5.4 million subscribers.

Here are excerpts from the report:

• The top cable companies netted 57 percent of the broadband additions in 2009 and added 2.3 million broadband subscribers.
• The top telephone providers added over 1.7 million broadband subscribers.
• In the fourth quarter of 2009, cable and telephone providers added 890,000 broadband subscribers -– with cable companies adding about 580,000 subscribers and phone companies adding about 310,000 subscribers.

Maybe Thomson Reuters was feeling nostalgic about the flurry of negative attention that both the New York Times and the Washington Post got last year when they came out with policies on the use of social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook. For whatever reason, the wire service recently issued new guidelines for its staff, and they suffer from many of the same problems that both the NYT and WaPo policies did. All of these flaws boil down to one thing: A desire to control something that fundamentally can’t be controlled, and a fear of what happens when that control is lost. Without even bothering to enumerate the positive aspects of social media use, the policy starts in with the warnings right away:

We want to encourage you to use social media approaches in your journalism but we also need to make sure that you are fully aware of the risks — especially those that threaten our hard-earned reputation for independence and freedom from bias or our brand.

The risks, of course, are everywhere — someone might say something embarrassing, or post a tweet that others could twist to disparage Reuters:

The advent of social media does not change your relationship with the company that employs you — do not use social media to embarrass or disparage Thomson Reuters. Our company’s brands are important; so, too, is your personal brand. Think carefully about how what you do reflects upon you as a professional and upon us as an employer of professionals.

The overwhelming message is that, while social media is great and useful for many things (although none of those things are ever mentioned), it is a minefield of potential dangers and even a potential threat to the company’s traditional media business:

We’re in a competitive business and while the spirit of social media is collaborative we need to take care not to undermine the commercial basis of our company.

The policy says that “where practical, you should ask someone to check content of Twitter posts,” even as it admits that this is frequently impossible, and warns that supervisors will be monitoring those tweets to see if they cross any lines. It even says that “when using Twitter or social media in a professional capacity, you should aim to be personable but not to include irrelevant material about your personal life.” Why not? No reason is given, but the obvious implication is that it’s “unprofessional” or might “damage the brand.”

I happen to think the opposite is true (within reason, of course). I enjoy it when journalists I know — like Reuters reporter @bobbymacreports, for example — post things that indicate they are human beings. And I don’t think any less of a media brand when one of its employees posts something that turns out not to be true, because I know that they are doing their best, and will correct what needs to be corrected.

Right at the end of the new policy, Reuters says something that cuts to the heart of all the difficulties with social media guidelines. The policy baldly states: “Don’t scoop the wire.” So I mentioned on Twitter that Reuters’ own editor-in-chief, David Schlesinger, did exactly that when he was tweeting from Davos last year and posting about a number of newsworthy events. Schlesinger then responded that “some stuff belongs on the wire first. some stuff belongs on tweets. some stuff you can’t always tell immediately.”

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That phrase could just as easily be applied to all of the other potential negative outcomes that Reuters is trying to avoid with its policy. Some things are bad to say on Twitter, and some things are not — and some stuff you can’t always tell immediately. Obviously, you probably shouldn’t chew out a source publicly on Twitter using abusive language. But that’s a little like putting a warning sign on a chainsaw saying “Do not stop chain with hand.” If your employees need to be told that kind of thing, they are probably too stupid to be on your payroll and should be sent to work for your competitors instead.

If you trust your writers and editors, whom you presumably hired and continue to employ because they are smart and capable, then let them use social media for what it was meant for: engaging with readers in as many ways as possible. Don’t get consumed with fear about a loss of control over them — embrace it.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user LunaDiRimmel.

Microsoft launched a site dubbed the MSN Video Player in the U.K. Thursday that aims to be something of a U.K. version of Hulu, featuring TV shows like Peep Show, League of Gentlemen and Doctor Who. It’s pretty standard fare, as far as British online TV content is concerned. In fact, the recently-launched Seesaw platform offers an almost identical catalog. However, there’s one feature worth noting: MSN Video Player uses Microsoft Silverlight to stream video if possible, but it defaults to a Flash-based player for users without Silverlight.

That’s an important departure from Microsoft’s earlier habit of forcing users to download Silverlight to access any content at all, and it acknowledges that Silverlight is still far from being as omnipresent as Adobe’s Flash.

MSN Video Player isn’t the only site that has adopted such a dual strategy for Silverlight and Flash, and Adobe has been making inroads with content providers previously signed up with Move Networks as well. YouTube and some other sites have recently been experimenting with HTML5, and Apple’s decision to ship the iPad without Flash has gotten some people to wonder whether a big switch to HTML5 and H.264 is on the horizon. But for the time being, it looks like Adobe is stronger than ever.

Visit the MSN Video Player site without Silverlight installed on your machine, and you’d barely notice a difference to other Flash-based platforms. Videos start in Flash without any hiccup, or warning message for that matter, and playback in full-screen mode isn’t an issue either.  Granted, the site does feature a small button labeled “MSN Video Player works best with Silverlight” somewhere in its upper left corner, but honestly, it’s barely noticeable, and there’s no explanation as to how installing it will improve the experience.

The MSN Video Player site isn’t alone with offering Flash as a substitute for Silverlight. March Madness On Demand, a CBS-affiliated site that is expected to serve tons of live streams as the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament goes underway starting this Sunday, also offers a Flash stream, albeit with a lower bit rate than their Silverlight player is going to offer. One reason for CBS’s reluctance to go all out with Silverlight could be that NBC has been taking a beating for forcing users to install Silverlight ever since the 2008 Olympics.

Biut what about HTML5? Google rolled out a test of the standards-based way of playing video straight in your browser without any plug-in in January, and Wikipedia is gearing up for a major HTML5 video roll-out across its site as well. However, differences about the codec used in various implementations have delayed the adoption of HTML5, and advertisers haven’t signed on to the format yet either, making it unlikely that it will be chosen as a default solution by any of the big commercial platforms any time soon.

Flash, meanwhile, continues to make inroads. This week, ESPN announced that it is dumping Move Networks for MLB Advanced Media, a switch that includes transitioning from Move’s video plug-in to Flash. ESPN isn’t alone in abandoning Move for Flash — Fox.com left the erstwhile high-flying start-up in January for Flash delivered by Brightcove, and ABC.com is reportedly working on a similar transition.

The fact Move lost all these high-profile customers may have a lot to do with issues related to pricing and the overall direction of the company; the fact however that those customers went right back to Flash, and not to Silverlight, should give HTML5 supporters pause. It was easy for the FSF to get headlines when it recently suggested killing Flash. Following through with that goal could prove to be much harder.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Cameron  Russell.

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Rupert Murdoch, the legendary founder of News Corp., has always had a love-hate relationship with the digital world. Sometimes (read: during the bubbles) he loves it. Sometimes (read: during advertising recessions) he hates it. His recent moves – whether it be getting rid of some of News Corp’s digital holdings or shuffling the chairs at MySpace — are a continuation of that love-hate relationship. (Watch the video below the fold.)

And as we all know (and have read), he is not so enamored with Google, the so-called content stealer. (Never mind that he was OK taking Google’s $900 million when the search giant wanted to run ads on MySpace.) In an interview with Fox Business Network in Abu Dhabi, Murdoch said:

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“Well Fox is now paid for. People when they pay their cable bills some of it comes to Fox. Cable television is paid television. But search on the Internet whether it be Bing or Google, whatever, it’s free and they simply take all our expensive and we think very good content such as Wall Street Journal or whatever and what they call they scrape it and they use it for search, it gives them their raw material for nothing and then they have this very clever business model of charging for searching it, we don’t get any of that. And they are technologically brilliant, they are a long way ahead but they do not have the right to do it if we want to stop them.”

In contrast to Google, it seems he loves Apple’s iPad and what it can do for the publisher.

Now that Apple is coming out with the Ipad that will be a very interesting way, more media is going to go into the Ipad…And they’ll get better and better and you’ll be able to do more tricks with it…And particularly with advertising and you see an advisement and you touch it and it becomes a 30 second commercial it’ll be these sort of things will happen not this year perhaps.”

Ohai has grand ambitions of jumpstarting an industry for social massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. Think World of Warcraft crossed with FarmVille — engaging and rich, but also easy to use and social. The San Francisco-based company has a great ambassador in CEO Susan Wu, a former venture capitalist who became fascinated by the emerging market for virtual goods, then teamed up with MMO tech wizard Don Neufeld, formerly of Sony Online Entertainment, and raised $6 million from August Capital and Rustic Canyon Partners. But it still has a long way to go.

Ohai’s first game, the vampire-themed City of Eternals, came out in November and has 40,000 players across Facebook and the web, and its second game, Project Unicorn Parade (“an evocative, interactive world environment” with animals, says Wu), is coming soon. Ohai needs to be prolific, efficient and innovative to take on gaming heavyweights like EA and new juggernauts like Zynga, while growing its user base and revenue per user. So the company has tried to make itself nimble, building a platform for Flash-based games that can be tweaked and expanded on the fly and transformed completely to build a separate game (Ohai aims to release eight games per year). “I don’t view us as being in the content business,” said Wu. “I view as as being in web services, where we look at things like data and conversion rates.”

We offered Ohai the chance to come in and show us what they’ve got, so they offered the one-two punch of Wu talking about the company and what it represents, combined with a Ohai content designer coming along to build, in pseudo real time, a virtual representation of the GigaOM office beset by “PR zombies” as a mission for City of Eternals. It’s a little hokey, to be sure, but it got me playing the game! If you’d like to help Om and I fight the PR zombies yourself, click here. The video of our chat with Wu is embedded above.

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One of the more solid and genuinely useful Internet startups out there, travel fare aggregator Kayak, was dissected in a report released today by NeXt Up Research for SharesPost. NeXt Up thinks that with a heavy advertising spend, Kayak should have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18 percent from 2009 to 2012. Based on estimated revenue and comparison to competitors, the report estimates Kayak’s market cap at between $705 and $771 million.

Is Kayak a promising IPO candidate? You decide. Here are some of the relevant assessments:

• Meta search engines like Kayak accounted for less than 8 percent of online travel booked in 2009, due mostly to low awareness.

• Kayak is spending heavily to make itself better known — NeXt Up estimates an advertising budget of $50 million a year, but Kayak has said itself it plans to spend $100 million on marketing.

• The travel industry should recover from the recession and see a CAGR of 4 percent from 2009 to 2013, with online travel agents growing with a 7 percent CAGR.

• Promising Kayak initiatives include its iPhone apps (see our story) and Travelpost, its TripAdvisor competitor.

• Kayak is projected to have revenue of $180 million in 2010, growing to $305 million in 2014 with EBITDA margins of 30-35 percent.

• Kayak has raised about $224 million in venture funding and debt from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Oak Investment Partners, Tenaya Capital, Trident Capital, Gold Hill Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and AOL.

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Not too long ago, Toyota reigned as the seemingly untouchable hybrid leader. That dominance — in terms of both market share (50 percent of hybrids sold in the U.S.) and mindshare (no alt-fuel vehicle on the market is better known or more widely recognized than the Toyota Prius) — means that as the Prius image takes a beating, other models across the spectrum of green cars will also get bruised.

Mike Omotoso, senior manager for J.D. Power and Associates’ global powertrain unit, told me the firm plans to lower its hybrid and electric vehicle forecast for 2010, although it has yet to determine how big the hit will be. For the first two months of this year, the hybrid share of light vehicle sales hovered at around just 2.3 percent, compared to 2.8 percent for all of 2009 and 2.4 percent in 2008, according to Omotoso. That’s due to a number of factors — including high unemployment, a weak economy and the biggie: gas prices. But the Prius and its technical troubles loom too large to ignore.

Prior to 2009, the Prius’ share of U.S. hybrid sales had slipped below 50 percent only once since 2005 — in 2006, when it dropped to 42 percent. But even that offers a sign of Toyota’s dominance in the hybrid space. Omotoso explained that 2006 marked “the first year for the Camry hybrid and the first full year for the Highlander hybrid. So other Toyota models cannibalized Prius sales.”

Regulators are only beginning to look into the most recent incidents. But initial reports suggest the problems may not have been linked to a floor mat that pinned down the gas pedal in other Priuses and prompted Toyota to issue a recall last year for 2004-2009 models of the hybrid. Last month, when problems surfaced with the regenerative braking system of some 2010 Prius models, Toyota attributed them to a software glitch.

Regardless of what investigators and Toyota may turn up if they check out the cars involved in this week’s incidents more closely, however, one thing’s already clear: Videos that zipped around the web and TV news shows this week of a visibly shaken driver, and quotes from the 911 call he made during the 23 minutes that his 2008 Prius hurdled at high speeds down a Southern California highway before a highway patrol officer helped him stop, aren’t helping to repair the reputation of either Toyota or advanced vehicles.

Given the Prius’ status as the poster child for hybrids, Omotoso explained, “consumers might think that if the Prius has a problem then all hybrids might be dangerous.” That concern creates one more obstacle for new vehicle technologies to penetrate the mainstream, as some car buyers may forgo experimenting with the next generation of green cars — among them plug-in hybrids and all-electric vehicles from General Motors’ Chevy Volt and Nissan’s LEAF to BYD Auto’s e6, Coda Automotive’s Coda Sedan and Fisker Automotive’s Nina — rolling out over the next few years.

That perception problem is a hurdle that many car makers can’t really afford in this nascent market. Plug-in vehicle developers are competing for a niche that’s likely to remain quite small for years to come. Nearly a decade after the Prius debut, hybrids still hold a single-digit sliver of the pie. And despite optimistic projections from investors like Warren Buffett, who has said he expects all cars will run on electricity by 2030, other forecasts suggest significantly slower adoption, mainly due to high price tags.

Lux Research forecasts that even if oil costs $200 a barrel in 2020, just 4 percent of vehicles sold globally will be all-electric or plug-in hybrid because of the high costs of the battery technology. According to Lux, plug-in hybrids could sell 3 million units per year by 2020 if the price of oil reaches those heights, while hybrids can be expected to sell that many by 2020 regardless of oil prices.

In addition to presenting a challenge to companies vying to win over consumers to advanced vehicles, Toyota’s ongoing troubles also highlight a need for the government, the auto industry and even drivers to collect and manage (or in the case of drivers, to file), vehicle safety data and complaints in a more open and timely manner. Noting in prepared testimony that regulators and Toyota had received complaints of unintended acceleration in Toyota models seven years ago, Consumers Union is issuing that challenge – to increase transparency of vehicle safety data – in a hearing this morning on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s oversight operations. As much as technology may be part of the problem with Toyota’s vehicles, it could also be part of the solution — helping identify problems before too many drivers are put in the situation of having to call 911 from behind the wheel of an out-of-control car.

Foursquare, the New York-based location services startup, has more than 500,000 users and 1.4 million venues, it announced today, one year after it launched at SXSW. The company says it had its biggest day ever last Friday, with 275,000 check-ins from users declaring they were located at a certain venue. It also now has 16 employees and 1,200 venues offering specials (which is one revenue model the company is working on, alongside a coming small business analytics tool).

While we’re at the stats game, Foursquare also says it’s had 15.5 million check-ins and 1,000,000 badges awarded to encourage users to participate (in a bid to inspire further loyalty, it is offering temporary tattoo badges at this year’s SXSW). Foursquare raised $1.35 million in September and continues to be actively pursued by VCs.

The company is most definitely hyped disproportionately to its adoption, but at least it has more users than media mentions. The word “foursquare” has been used 4,140 times in articles indexed in Google News since 2009 and 89,311 times in Google Blog Search — but surely many more times on Twitter, which doesn’t offer a long-term index.

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The iPhone has a number of advantages over its smartphone competitors, but one thing it hasn’t had that users have been clamoring for is true multitasking. Push notifications were intended as a workaround designed to give users the ability to stay up-to-date with multiple apps without having to actually run them at the same time.

It’s still only a partial solution, though, and one many iPhone users aren’t satisfied with. True multitasking is still high on the want list of many iPhone users, and really remains the only thing not addressed by the many major feature additions iPhone 3.0 brought. Luckily, true app backgrounding capabilities are said to be on the way in iPhone 4.0.

That’s according to sources AppleInsider describes as having a “proven track record in predicting Apple’s technological advances.” According to those same sources, though, Apple still has a ways to go before it can introduce these features to iPhone users. But the problem doesn’t lie with the iPhone’s ability to run multiple applications at once.

In fact, the iPhone is quite good at multitasking in its current incarnation. Nike+ runs great while you do other things like take calls and/or check your email. But it’s the only non-Apple app that’s allowed that privilege. And Apple developed it for Nike, so it doesn’t really count. What’s new in iPhone 4.0 is that third-party developers will finally be able to run their apps in the background, too.

Apple hasn’t enabled true multitasking for all apps not because it’s been technically prevented from doing so, but because doing so represents a security risk in terms of opening the door to apps being able to run in the background without the user’s knowledge, which is how viruses and other malware works.

There’s also the issue of increased performance requirements, and increased battery usage. Apple is said to be addressing both of those with the new framework, though the source provided no specifics about how exactly that would be managed. I predict that mutitasking will only work on newer hardware, most likely the 3GS and above. A next-gen iPhone will probably be built from the ground up with multitasking in mind, and should offer battery and processor improvements scaled to compensate.

Another challenge Apple faces in bringing background multitasking to the iPhone is redesigning the user interface. As of now, users can access any currently running Apple programs that use backgrounding by tapping a thin colored bar at the top of the screen. While that works quite well for just one app, if you have a number running at once, it could quickly become way too cluttered and obscure the app you’re actually using at the moment.

According to AppleInsider’s source, the solution in the works at Apple leverages some existing tech from OS X to accomplish this. Personally, I’m betting on some kind of Exposé-type interface, possibly accessed through a special gesture or in a way similar to the one used now to bring up the iPhone’s Spotlight search screen. It might also take a page out of mobile Safari’s book, and use an interface similar to the one the browser has for displaying multiple pages.

The iPhone’s interface in general could probably use a makeover at the point. It’s been unchanged since its launch, and while many would call that a testament to its strength and intuitiveness, there’s no denying that as the iPhone gains new abilities, Apple might want to consider some more drastic changes to the ways in which users access and make use of those functions.

I’m sure Apple can handle the UI challenges, but I’m much more wary about how it addresses the potential security risks that come with opening up backgrounding. Luckily, it still has absolute control over the App Store, but it still might be possible for industrious hackers to bypass the safeguards in place and get some malicious software onto people’s devices.

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