Mark Zuckerberg on Privacy, Google and More [LIVE]

Why is Facebook on a product launch frenzy? What does Facebook’s founder think of Google? What is Facebook going to do next?

Mark Zuckerberg, the high-profile CEO of Facebook, has placed his company in the limelight recently with a huge wave of product launches.Facebook Places, Facebook Messages and Facebook Groups all launched within the last three months. It also doesn’t hurt that his company is growing like wildfire and is now worth more than eBay.

Mark Zuckerberg is about to be interviewed by Tim O’Reilly and Federated Media’s John Battelle about Facebook, its new products, the CEO’s view on Facebook’s competition with Google, his vision for social media, and much more. Here are our live notes from their conversation:

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Live Notes: Mark Zuckerberg

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All times are in Pacific Standard Time

5:07 PM: Zuckerberg takes the stage. Battelle brings up Facebook’s new Messages product and wants Zuckerberg to explain what it is. Zuckerberg says, “We didn’t want to build an e-mail product,” (something he has said many times). He then goes into the anecdote about what a high school student told him about e-mail: It’s too slow and formal. He calls Facebook Messages “seamless.”

5:11: E-mail filters have become very good at winnowing out the real junk, but we still get random e-mails from services and utilities. The real way to solve spam is to use your social graph, Zuckerberg says.

5:13: Zuckerberg says photo tagging works much better than facial recognition. With regard to Groups, he says, “Groups is one of our fastest-growing products ever.”

5:15: There’s a discussion about Facebook’s privacy practices. Battelle asks whether it’s his approach to step on toes until people scream then apologize. Zuckerberg talks high-level and doesn’t really address the question.

5:16: The controversy surrounding Gmail and Facebook contact sync is brought up. Zuckerberg says it’s different, Battelle and O’Reilly say it isn’t, and nobody agrees.

5:22: Battelle brings up competition. He says he thinks Facebook looks like it’s at the point for bringing his business model off-site, à la AdSense. Basically, Battelle asks, will Facebook will launch its own version of AdSense? Zuckerberg: “I think we have a lot left to do. Same on the credit side.”

5:24: Zuckerberg: “I think over the next five years, most industries are going to get redesigned around social and people.”

5:25: More than 50% of people use Facebook every day — that’s more than 250 million people.

5:28: Games are the first vertical to be “tipped” to be social.

5:29: Facebook focuses on helping people share. It won’t start businesses in areas of expertise like media, content, or games.

5:33: Battelle: “Do you believe there is just one social graph? … Do you feel that pressure of power?” Zuckerberg started with discussing how the best apps on Facebook went all-in with social on Facebook. Then he says instant personalization wouldn’t have worked a few years ago because it didn’t have critical mass. Zuckerberg says that there can never be “just one” graph. His view is that Facebook makes all of these graphs more interoperable.

5:38: What about the social graphs that would be detrimental to Facebook as a company? Zuckerberg says it’s fine; he doesn’t seem too concerned.

5:41: Zuckerberg is asked about Steve Jobs and Ping. The Facebook CEO responds on social: “Get on the bus.” Either you’re going to have an incumbent that gets social (Zuck says they’re in on it with Ping) or an entrepreneur will take you down.

5:45: Zuckerberg thinks Facebook is in a good place by having a high user-to-engineer ratio.

5:46: An audience member asks what it’s like to be popular and incredibly important/ahead of other entrepreneurs and how that impacts his life. Zuck responds that he’s made a lot of mistakes but it didn’t deter him. You have 100 problems to deal with, but only one or two really matter, he was told by a VC.

5:50: Is education an opportunity for Facebook? Zuckerberg responds that if someone builds a great application, there’s a huge opportunity.

Source: Mark Zuckerberg on Privacy, Google and More [LIVE]

Test if your ISP is shaping your traffic

The goal of the Glasnost project is to make ISPs' traffic shaping policies transparent to their customers. To this end, we designed Glasnost tests that enable you to check whether traffic from your applications is being rate-limited (i.e., throttled) or blocked.

Glasnost tests work by measuring and comparing the performance of different application flows between your host and our measurement servers. The tests can detect traffic shaping in both upstream and downstream directions separately. The tests can also detect whether application flows are shaped based on their port numbers or their packets' payload. For more details on how Glasnost tests work, pleaseread our NSDI 2010 paper.

We configured our tests to be conservative when declaring the presence of shaping, i.e., passing our tests does not necessarily mean that there is no throttling occurring on your link.

Select a Glasnost test to run

P2P apps		Standard apps		Video-on-Demand
BitTorrent  eMule  Gnutella		Email (POP)  Email (IMAP4)  HTTP transfer  SSH transfer  Usenet (NNTP) NEW!		Flash video (e.g., YouTube)

• Each Glasnost test takes approximately 8 minutes
• Note to all users: To allow accurate measurements you should stop any large downloads that might run in the background.

5 Sites to compose and edit your music online

I seem to be enjoying this music syndrome which I am going through these past few days. Keeping up with the theme of few of my past posts, here is what I’ve managed to lay my hands on this time. If you feel the need to try composing music but lack the time to learn the art, here is a simpler way out. These free online applications will soothe those itchy nerves down and make the club popping with your tracks.

(Image Credit: Mashable)

So all set to be “DJ You” ? Hang on guys, there is a list!

#1. iNudge

Create music with random clicks across your screen? That seems to be the concept behind this application. Its extremely simple to use, but that wasn’t it for me. What really clicked for me, is somehow it didn’t matter how random the clicks were, it seemed to sound good. It has got a user-friendly interface which is good. You can toggle between 8 sound types as well as mess around with basics like tempo, audio panning, volume settings.

#2. Tone Matrix

It is a simpler version of inudge. It should amuse you for a while when you are overworked. It is not really for serious music editing.

#3. Audiotool

Created by the makers of Tone Matrix, Audiotool is an high-end music mixing software. It’s a virtual DJ console, right to the part of plugging in the wires of additional devices you pull out. If you aren’t familiar with mixing, don’t be worried as there are some fun tutorials as well.

#4. Looplabs

You will get three choices when you will click on the link – Music Studio, Dubstep Studio,  and Electro House Blender. Each of them is just as good and easy to use. There is also Charles Ives Music Lab which is made by the same creators. While you are there, don’t forget to check out the playlist of the most popular tracks created on these applications. Addictive!

#5. Jamstudio

One of the most popular of all these is Jamstudio and for all the right reasons. It has managed to retain the most important features necessary for music editing – instruments, sound effects and notes. It has over 300,000 users, which is probably a good audience for your grand debut.

So that I guess is a good range for all of you to try. Don’t panic if it seems too complicated because there are tutorials or guidelines given which make it easy to deal with.

I love these innovations like these because you can choose to learn the tricks of a new job everyday.

Know of better alternatives? Let me know through your comments.

-- This Post 5 Sites to compose and edit your music online is Published on Devils Workshop .

Facebook mail Will it really kill Gmail?

Facebook has been working on ‘Gmail Killer’ and Tech Crunch recently reported Facebook is going to announce this on Monday. It is human tendency to not accept monopoly and Facebook is feeding to those thoughts!

One big advantage Facebook has is, it has millions of users across the world already to use it’s new product. I remember reading somewhere that Facebook might enable email to all the current users by default and make them use it. Well, there’s already enough hype which will make every current user to at least try once!

But, when we look at Gmail, it’s been around from years and is a very matured platform now. Gmail is feature rich & almost has no flaws in it. Gmail has seamless integration with Android which is taking over the mobile OS market share. And more importantly we all have our years old emails already with Gmail. I’m damn sure Facebook would come up with tools to migrate all your emails. But, question is, can Facebook really take on Gmail in just one shot?

Tit-Bit:

Out of curiosity I hit the URL http://mail.facebook.com and I was presented with Microsoft Outlook Web-access!! That means Facebook is using Microsoft exchange server for internal emails!!

Introducing bit.ly Bundles

We are thrilled to announce the launch of bit.ly bundles, a new way of sharing multiple links with a single bit.ly short URL.

You can start bundling links right away!  Just head over to bit.ly, shorten some links and then hit the “Bundle” button.

Every link you add to a bundle will include a rich media preview (courtesy of our friends at embed.ly) and a bit.ly click count, and can be customized with a title and description. Try it out with your favorite video, photo, and any other links you’d like to curate and share!

If you’re looking for some inspiration, check out a travel guide to Washington, D.C. from our friends at Jauntsetter, a collection of videos soundtracked by the Free Music Archive, and a bundle of fun from Superchunk drummer/comedian Jon Wurster.

So, click on over to bit.ly and get your mace out… let’s get ready to bundle!

Twitter Trends Come to Even More Cities Around the World

Twitter’s locally focused Trends, the list of hot topics that allows Twitter users to keep their twitchy little fingers on the pulse of their communities, is now available in a total of 18 countries and 24 cities around the world.

In an announcement today, a Twitter product manager stated that Twitter’s trending topics, a what’s what of popular and talked-about keywords, will be gaining a more local flavor for 13 new countries and 6 new cities starting today.

Twitter’s been paying a lot of attention to trend-related features lately. Trends became locally oriented for some users in major markets at the beginning of 2010. The company worked on its trending topics algorithm in the spring; with trends becoming ever more relevant and interesting, Twitter was ready to roll out trend-based ads in the summer.

In other globally focused Twitter news, the company will now be displaying tweets from other languages in the user’s native tongue.

According to the company blog, “We we are now using Google Translate to to display Tweet translations in the details pane to give people more access to what people are talking about around the world.”

This is hardly surprising; Twitter has been focusing on multi-language support since last year. Only a handful of users have this feature now; it’ll be rolling out site-wide in the weeks to come.

Source: Twitter Trends Come to Even More Cities Around the World

RockMelt Browser

Book your invitation for RockMelt Browser!: "

RockMelt browser promises to be the next exciting new browser with a clear view of being useful from a social media perspective. It is based on Chromium. It promises to revolutionize social media usage by bringing in some intrinsic built-in features to the browser itself. As it is based on Chromium it supports almost all extensions which work with your Chrome browser.

Some expected features of RockMelt

• The browser is basically specific for Social Media usage. Facebook friends with their display images can be seen on the browser itself.
• Along with this you can see multiple features to use Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.
• This seems to try to mash together the concepts of social media apps like Tweet Deck with a browser like Chrome.

I do not have an invitation to sign-up and use the browser so I will post a full-fledged review of it in sometime in the future. 

Sign up for RockMelt

Meanwhile you can sign-up for RockMelt with your Facebook account. It will send you an invitation soon so you can use RockMelt browser. This has actually helped create a lot of buzz about RockMelt because invites are available to people who get invited to RockMelt. I guess a viral campaign is a nice way to build up publicity for a browser.

There are many browsers out there but RockMelt seems to be focusing more on social media as its calling card. Will this work for it? Do drop in your comments and views.

Link: RockMelt Browser

-- This Post Book your invitation for RockMelt Browser! is Published on Devils Workshop .

Book your invitation for RockMelt Browser

RockMelt browser promises to be the next exciting new browser with a clear view of being useful from a social media perspective. It is based on Chromium. It promises to revolutionize social media usage by bringing in some intrinsic built-in features to the browser itself. As it is based on Chromium it supports almost all extensions which work with your Chrome browser.

Some expected features of RockMelt

• The browser is basically specific for Social Media usage. Facebook friends with their display images can be seen on the browser itself.
• Along with this you can see multiple features to use Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.
• This seems to try to mash together the concepts of social media apps like Tweet Deck with a browser like Chrome.

I do not have an invitation to sign-up and use the browser so I will post a full-fledged review of it in sometime in the future. 

Sign up for RockMelt

Meanwhile you can sign-up for RockMelt with your Facebook account. It will send you an invitation soon so you can use RockMelt browser. This has actually helped create a lot of buzz about RockMelt because invites are available to people who get invited to RockMelt. I guess a viral campaign is a nice way to build up publicity for a browser.
There are many browsers out there but RockMelt seems to be focusing more on social media as its calling card. Will this work for it? Do drop in your comments and views.
Link: RockMelt Browser


-- This Post Book your invitation for RockMelt Browser! is Published on Devils Workshop .

Top 5 Online Radio Applications

Previously I wrote about the top 5 applications to create music playlists online. Today, the mood lingers on but with a bit of nostalgia. I’m talking about online radio.

I get disappointed with annoying messages like ‘This application is not supported in your country’. After a bit of searching, I was thrilled with the options available which are supported in my country! Not only can you listen to the usual hip hop, R&B, jazz category, you can also hear Tamil and Punjabi music.

Here is a list of my top 5 picks for keeping you “tuned” with the hippest radio stations around the globe:

#1. Live365.com

With its own Wikipedia page, Nanocosm Inc.’s Live365 is one of the most popular online radio networks. It has more than 7000 broadcasters from over 150 countries. I am definitely impressed because it’s neatly classified with genres and has great sound quality. Must try – That 70′s Channel.

#2. SHOUTcast.com:

Every genre of music has sub-genres. The radio opens up in a separate window which makes it easy to browse through other options. While you’re there, don’t forget to try the Indian music streamers – it has Bollywood, Hindi and Tamil music! It also displays the last song played by any radio station.

#3. Radiolicious.com

Radiolicious has great variety, and is not as cluttered as the others. You have to simply browse through the pages and choose what you like. You can also download a version compatible with your iPhones/iPads.

#4. Last.fm

Though you have to create an account here, it doesn’t take much time. My favorite is the Red Hot Chilli Peppers Radio. You can change the skins as well but red or black are the only choices.

#5. HypeMachine.com

It’s not exactly an online radio, but I really want you guys to know about it.  Hype Machine tracks various music related blogs and uploads the most popular and interesting works of new artists. I think it is offbeat and a pleasant break if you have an ear for new artists.

The radio was invented somewhere through the 19th century but strangely hasn’t gone out of vogue as yet. To think of it, radio paved way for our iPods and Zunes, personally its my fashion statement as well (I wear a chain with an antique transistor engraving!). Hopefully, these applications will keep the ‘radio gaga‘ still going on amongst us.

Do let me know which one is your favorite through your comments.

-- This Post Top 5 Online Radio Applications is Published on Devils Workshop .

5 Ways To Transfer music from your iPod to your PC

I have found iTunes extremely frustrating at times when after formatting my computer, I lose all the music on my iPod as it isn’t synced with the new iTunes version. Now what if I told you there was a way you could transfer music from your iPod to your PC/Mac? How about this, I gave you more than one way to do this – and you can transfer music, movies, pictures?

#1. iDump

One of the most popular software used to transfer music from your iPods to PC. It was released around 2007 but has been updated many times since. It should work with the iPod, iPhone, iTouch and iPad.

#2. Sharepod

Think of this place if you want a one stop shop for your iPod, iPhone and iTouch related transfer and backup related work.  The unique feature of this application is that once you upload your music from your iPod to your PC, it automatically imports the music into iTunes. You can also move your album artwork,

#3. doubleTwist

This one is should be compatible with iPod, Blackberry, Android and PSP Pre. It supports music, video and photo transfer and syncing. While you are there don’t forget to check out the demo video. It’s a great watch.

#4. EphPod

One more option for you guys. It is a far more basic version compared to the multi tasking doubleTwist. However if you use Microsoft Outlook, Winamp on a Windows OS then this one is great way to merge them all into your iPod.

#5. MediaMonkey

My last listing gives you an alternative to replace all the functions of iTunes (including syncing the iPod, iPhone, iTouch) apart from taking a back up of your music on your PC. You can also burn CDs, manage your music library and leave it on auto-DJ mode and leave all worried behind.

The days of losing your mind over your music have finally come to an end because of these amazing applications. Hope you find these applications just as helpful as I did. Let me know through your comments.

-- This Post 5 Ways To Transfer music from your iPod to your PC is Published on Devils Workshop .