On stage at Disrupt NY 2013 today, serial investor Ron Conway and filmmaker/actor Alex Winter took the stage with CrunchFund’s MG Siegler to talk about the documentary Downloaded about the rise and fall of Napster. Ron Conway described being an early investor (his Angel Investors fund put around $500,000 into Napster, he said) and how the process of taking them through the ordeal went. One of the biggest issues, he said, is that the sharing economy problem Napster identified never got solved.

Napster made it very clear that there was a strong desire among people to share and collaborate in order to make the most out of resources among a community, but there was just too much of a reaction against that from people who were already established in the industry. And that’s something that never got worked out, which Conway said was one of the most disappointing parts of the whole affair.

“Technically speaking it never got solved,” Conway said. “Today we have all the sharing economy companies, like ride sharing and AirbnB, and all the local authorities are acting like the record labels. You can’t stop innovation, and it amazes me that people still don’t know that.”

Conway’s referring to problems that companies like Uber have run into, including its closure of taxi services in New York City back in October of last year, and a new policy that will help it do more ride sharing, as a way to side-step regulation and licensing requirements around taxi and livery services in place in most major cities throughout the U.S.

Referring back to the Napster issue and how it ran into major roadblocks around the music industry, record labels and artists, Conway lamented that no one found a way to work through the issues that were causing both sides to be essentially at each other’s throats.

“If people just left their ego at the door, I believe the problems would’ve been solved [long ago],” Conway said. “But everyone immediately went into macho mode.”

Sharing economics drive a lot of startups these days and it’s true they often seem to run into regulatory problems, resistance from incumbent players and more. It’s probably to be expected when you’re taking markets that once made a lot of money separately from individuals, and combining them into one that makes less spread across a much larger group, but people clearly want these to work, and as Conway notes, ignoring that won’t help anyone solve the problem any faster.

For more of Alex Winter’s thoughts on why Napster was a real community, and his predictions about 3D printing template piracy, check out his follow-up interview with our writer Josh Constine.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple made a small but important change to the way its mobile apps appear in the iTunes App Store, which will help parents better determine which applications and games are appropriate for their children. The company has relocated the age rating (e.g. 9+, 12+, etc.) by moving it up from its previous position at the bottom of the app’s detail page, so that it now appears directly beneath the app title and publisher.

Apple-watching blog Appleinsider spotted this problem today, remarking that the change comes after a couple of high-profile cases this year which had Apple pulling apps from its store due to inappropriate content. For instance, Twitter’s recently launched video-recording app accidentally began featuring a pornographic video as an “Editor’s Pick,” forcing Apple to pull the app from the App Store until the problem was resolved. Apple had also earlier faced a similar situation with the popular photo-sharing application 500px, which was also pulled while content issues were addressed.

That’s not to say that either of these apps were aimed at children, however, but headlines referring to “porn in the App Store,” could have caught parents off guard. Apple has long since taken a stance that apps are reviewed and curated before approval, which is why problems like those mentioned above become sensational stories when that process breaks down. But it’s difficult for Apple or anyone to police applications in the social space, where content comes from users, not the app’s creator. Social services are known for their “adult” leanings, in fact.

Still, Apple making a slight tweak like this is an effort to address parents’ needs, which is a step in the right direction given how many children today are now using Apple devices of their own.

The company already offers some parental controls, but these are often ham-fisted, “on and off” buttons that turn off Apple’s default apps altogether, or prevent a younger child from using (12+ rated) Netflix, for example. It’s all or nothing, when it comes to these current parental controls – apps can’t be approved on a case-by-case basis via whitelisting or managed in any special “kid mode” type of interface.

So in reality, many parents forgo Apple’s imperfect controls and deal with app downloads on a one-off basis upon a child’s request. They glance at the app, read the description, look at the pictures and then either enter their password or refuse to do so. Having the ratings boosted higher here will help these parents make better decisions on the fly. But at the end of the day, it’s a bandage (or just a baby step forward, depending on your bias) for the larger problem that comes with putting Internet-enabled, app-running machines into children’s hands.

This problem has become an opportunity for startups to address in recent months. Companies have emerged to help parents find better apps to keep kids entertained (and learning), including KinderTown and YogiPlay, for example, while a new startup called AppCertain offers a “post-download” analysis of an app’s content, emailed to parents’ inboxes. There are also special browsers designed for restricting Internet access throughout Apple’s App Store. But today it’s still far easier to lock down smartphones and tablets running Android, using things like Kytephone, Play Safe, Kid Mode, and others because of an Android app’s ability to deeply integrate with the Android operating system. The Kindle Fire also has a special kid mode, which is one of its bigger selling points outside of price.

People like to point fingers at parents, telling them it’s their problem to watch what their kids are doing and downloading on their devices, and that if a kid ends up viewing adult content, violence or anything else inappropriate, it’s their fault. That’s true of course, I suppose, but at least Apple understands the reality of everyday life – it’s messy, difficult, and exhausting to parent. People aren’t ever perfect, and everyone needs a little help. Especially mom and dad.

Image credit: AppleInsider

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When my friends found out that I was going to interview Irrational Games‘ Ken Levine, who led the development of the acclaimed video game BioShock, as well as its just-released sequel BioShock Infinite, everyone said I had to ask him about the Seasteading Institute, a group that has been jokingly referred to as “BioShock for real.”

The institute was co-founded and funded by famed entrepreneur investor, and libertarian Peter Thiel, and it’s looking to build communities at sea that are independent of any government. To gamers of a certain mindset, that seems pretty reminiscent of Rapture, the libertarian undersea community featured in BioShock. So I asked Levine what he thinks of the idea, and he said:

What I was trying to do with BioShock was to say, ‘Okay, well, [in Atlas Shrugged] that’s a utopia where Ayn Rand, who made the philosophy, made all the rules, and all the characters were under her control. What if things weren’t under everybody’s control?’ And I think that’s the problem with utopias — we bring ourselves to it, you know? We think we’re leaving our problems behind but – I don’t mean this in a cynical way – we are the problem. Like whatever social problems that occur come out of us. It’s not like they fall out of the sky. I think people think they’re going to go to a utopian society, and I think it’s not really possible.

(To be fair to the Seasteading Institute, the organization says it’s not just for libertarians, and it even published a blog post about how the idea is different from Rapture.)

We also talked about the setting of BioShock Infinite, which takes place at the turn of the 20th century. Levine said he was attracted to the period because it was a time of enormous technological change, with the introduction of electricity, cars, airplanes, radios, phonographs, and more, all within a few decades: “We’ve really only had one piece of technology in our lifetime which has been that substantial, which is the Internet. They had 10 Internets, effectively, in terms of things that just changed their world completely.”

Not that the new game takes place in a realistic historical setting. Instead, it’s set in a floating city of the sort that people imagined they would live in, and one that’s dominated by religious fundamentalism, nationalism, and racism. Those can be pretty sensitive topics, even today, and while Levine said he’s mostly trying to tell a good story, he also has to follow that story wherever it leads:

If you start getting scared of what story you’re telling, it’s going to show. You have to be kind of stupidly fearless, I think, to do this stuff, because otherwise you’re goign to try to please people. And that’s not what we’re in the business of doing. Which is weird, because we’re in the video game business — we want to please people so that they’re going to have an entertaining experience, but we’re not trying to make people super-comfortable with everything. We want to challenge people, and we want to challenge ourselves, too.

Lastly, I asked Levine about whether he’s interested in making the move from consoles to mobile or tablet gaming. He said he certainly plays those games, and he’s open to the idea, but he hasn’t figured out his next project yet.

“I think that whatever I wanted to do, I would make sure it’s something that embraces the platform that it’s on, rather than fights the platform it’s on,” he said. In other words, he doesn’t want to take a console game and try to squeeze it onto an iPad.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Remember that nasty little iOS 6 lockscreen bug that let hackers access apps on any iPhone with a few smooth moves? Well, fresh on the heels of yesterday’s iOS update that squashed the problem, another security researcher has found a similar issue on Samsung’s Android smartphones.

Terence Eden claims to have found a flaw that lets hackers access a phone’s apps, dialer and widgets even if it’s been locked with a password, PIN, or other security measure.

Just like the iOS flaw, the Samsung security hole seems to involve the emergency dialer. For a brief moment after the emergency dialer is closed, there is a window of opportunity for a hacker to launch apps or place calls. Eden says that he discovered the flaw and contacted Samsung about it in February, but the company declined his offer to hold off publication until they had a fix.

He also discovered an earlier flaw that also involved the Emergency Dialer, in which the user presses a few various parts of the screen at the same time to gain access to the home screen. Both flaws are very similar, but Samsung is aware of both and currently working on a fix for this problem.

The latest security flaw is not present in other Android builds, but seems to only occur on Samsung’s modified version of Android 4.1.2. The flaw has been spotted on both the Galaxy Note II and Galaxy S III, but could also extend to other devices. We’ve asked Samsung about which devices specifically are affected, but haven’t heard back yet.

For those interested in checking out the hack, Eden posts instructions on how to access a home screen on a locked Android Samsung phone here. He also explains that the only fix is to load a different ROM onto the phone, which can be tricky.

Considering that the Galaxy line is one of Samsung’s top-selling lines, including both the S series and Note series, this security hole is quite possibly in your pocket at this very second, so be safe out there.

[via SlashGear]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Wealthfront is one of my favorite startups out there today — because it has actually made me money. I’m not alone. The automated investments company has been growing its user base by 20% every month because it cuts out traditional mutual funds and investment advisors, charging its users a very low fee for returns that have been beating the Street.

Now it’s aiming at the sluggish and shady finance industry with a $20 million second round of venture funding led by Mike Volpi of Index Ventures, Chamath Palihapitiya of The Social+Capital Partnership and Reid Hoffman of Greylock Partners — plus a large group of angel investors including Matt Mullenweg, Andy Dunn, Adam D’Angelo, Michael Schroepfer, Hunter Walk, Cipora Herman and Satya Patel.

My personal story is pretty typical of why the company has been doing so well.

After Inside Network got acquired in May of 2011 — and after I’d paid off all the taxes and a scary credit card debt from my previous, failed startup — I was stuck trying to figure out what to do the money I had left. I talked to some financial advisors who recommended various packages that promised uninteresting returns, along with fees that looked to zero out any of those gains. I sat on the problem for months, unsure of what to do.

I’d seen Wealthfront launch at the end of 2011 and was curious (it was promising to solve my exact problem) but only I got around to trying it last November after it added an online wire transfer option that didn’t require me to spend hours filling out transfer papers at my bank. Well, and also, once I became confident enough in the direction of the US and world economies that I thought investing would be worth it.

I went through its onboarding flow by directing its software to follow a conservative investment strategy fitting to my situation. Wealthfront picked mostly exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for US, foreign and emerging market stocks, along with bonds, real estate and natural resources.

I began making money from it immediately, no doubt benefiting from the particularly positive mood that many markets have been in since late last year.

By February I was like, hey this is pretty great, so I invested a smaller amount and directed Wealthfront to max out the risk on that account.

Today, nearly four months after starting to use the service, my conservative investment is up 4.4% and my risky one 5.2%. This might not look as good as the crazy numbers you see on benchmarks like the S&P 500, but as the company discusses here, it’s basically impossible to benchmark diversified portfolios like what Wealthfront offers.

https://blog.wealthfront.com/benchmark-investments-portfolio-performance/

Founder Andy Rachleff tells me that about a quarter of its users added additional money last month. And these people aren’t just 20- and 30-somethings like me who are fortunate enough to have the problem of investing hard-earned results from their time at successful startups.

Wealthfront has been growing through word-of-mouth, he says, as well as a rewards-type program for users who get their friends on board. About a third come through the latter mechanism. If you get somebody in, you get $5,000 of your money managed for free and they get $10,000 managed free. Note that Adam Nash, a top Silicon Valley product manager who joined after a great run at LinkedIn, is going to be focused on growth going forward.

In general, the company’s fees are set up to undermine the models of incumbent investment services like Fidelity, Schwab, and any other mutual fund investor or financial advisor. It charges a monthly rate based on an annual 0.25% fee, which compares quite favorably to the quotes like I had gotten from professionals — along the lines of 2.5% for a massive minimum required investment.

The low fees are the start of what Wealthfront does. Another feature is automated tax-loss harvesting for any account worth at least $100,000, which it added last year — if you make a profit on parts of that account’s portfolio, it’ll reinvest it to and avoid taxes on the gains by doing so.

The company also sometimes makes larger changes to how it handles your money.

Earlier this month it adjusted all user portfolios to include a much broader range of bonds, as well as the addition of retirement accounts (allowing long-term investors to avoid yearly taxes). The expected gains from these changes, which were masterminded by the company’s legendary Chief Investment Officer Burt Markiel, come out to about 0.5% per year.

Where to, now? Rachleff thinks he can carve out a solid chunk of the approximately $12.5 trillion individual investor industry in the US, A founding partner at top venture firm Benchmark beginning in 1995 and a Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer since 2004, he’s also a student of the real disruption going on here. He’s really aiming for anyone who can’t afford the high requirements of most professional investors.

He says the company will be using the additional $20 million to invest in more improvements to the core product, as well as a major push for more growth.

The company previously raised a total of $10.5 million from a big group of angels as well as DAG Ventures, beginning in 2008 when it began life as kaChing, which Rachleff described in an essay for us as a not-so-disruptive social investing service. Check out the full story here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Cobook, a Mac contact management app that made its way over to the iPhone back in December, is today launching version 2.0 of its service which introduces a new feature called “Livecards.” This feature does what everyone wants address books to do these days – automatically update their contacts with the most current information.

It’s bizarre that in this day and age, we’re still struggling with a feature that should be so simple. An automatically updating address book is something that our email providers should have implemented for us ages ago. Google is doing this in its own way now, but via Google+, which is not for everyone.

And as innovation in the address book space has stagnated among the big players, that’s left room for startups to come in and try to fix the problem. For example, late last year a company called Addappt launched a similar app to Cobook, also with a heavy focus on the auto-updating functionality.

However, the problem with many of today’s solutions is that they work best when everyone uses the same platform. In that regard, Cobook is not much different.

For what it’s worth, at least the solution Cobook has implemented to fix the problem is relatively simple. After updating Cobook on iPhone (or upon first install for new users), it will prompt you to “Connect Livecards” when you launch the app. You’ll tap a button, fill out the info you want included on your own Livecard (name, company, email and phone), select the friends you want to share with, and then send them a message which they can either confirm or ignore.

Of course, this sharing process also serves as a nice viral way for Cobook to gain some traction through users’ friend networks, too.

Currently, this messaging and friend-finding functionality only works via Facebook, but Cobook’s founder and CEO Kaspars Dancis says that email registration will arrive shortly. He also confirms that the startup does not upload your address book data to its centralized servers.

“The only thing that needs to be synced through our servers is your Livecard,” he explains. The sharing is explicit, he adds, and you control your own Livecard containing the information you want to publicize. That’s a bit different from Addappt, which shared my “Me” card, without first letting me select the fields which I wanted to keep private. Instead, I had to make a duplicate, simplified contact card for myself, and set that one as “Me.” Cobook’s system is more straightforward.

The Livecard feature is also optional, so if you would prefer to only use the app for address book management and not for sharing, you can. (Also, you’re crazy).

If you haven’t used Cobook yet, and you’re a Mac and/0r iPhone user, it’s worth taking a look at this one. Although the startup has competitors in the social address book space - Brewster and Xobni’s Smartr, for example – Cobook’s app is pretty powerful in that it not only works with your iCloud contacts as a replacement address book, it also syncs your iCloud and Google Contacts, and pulls in data from social networks including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, as well. Most importantly, its sync process is conflict-free, unlike the much more painful experience using Apple’s native Mac address book.

If you’re a current Cobook user who had previously done a lot of customizations and categorizations of your contact list, including favoriting people, manually updating their info, merging their social profiles, tagging them, etc., those changes are saved upon updating to version 2.0, but it might take a couple of minutes for everything to sync, depending on the size of your address book.

The updated iOS app is here in iTunes.

Cobook, still a bootstrapped company out of Lativa, has half a million users today. Dancis says that an Android version is now the company’s next priority.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I had a little bit of time to play with the Chromebook Pixel today and I’m a regular user of the Acer C7, a $199 machine that is wildly underpowered but good enough on a bad day. I really like the concept and I really like ChromeOS – it’s a solid way to get a little browsing done, say, in a cyber cafe or hotel bar. It isn’t, however, an OS.

As Linus Torvalds notes, the Pixel is an amazing piece of hardware and it makes you wonder just what other laptop manufacturers are thinking. It’s pricey, sure, but the touchscreen works well, the display is striking, and the styling is on par with the MacBook. Even MG (the G stands for Grumpy) liked it, and he doesn’t like anything.

But then there’s the problem of apps. Torvalds writes:

The creator of Linux, the paragon of pure computing, wants to install a “real distro.”

Ouch.

What the Chomebooks can’t yet do is run real applications. I’m currently dual-booting my C7 so I can install Skype on Ubuntu and you get this sense, once you’re in a real environment, that ChromeOS is like one of those “pre-OSes” that they used to stick on laptops so you could browse the web and watch movies without booting into Windows. It’s not all there.

That’s fairly easy to fix: allow vendors to create real apps for the platform. After all, Google is the “open” company, right? There should be a way for me to jackhammer Skype and Audacity into the ChromeOS environment. After all, a beautiful big screen is useless when all you open on it is Gmail.

Apps matter. As much as everyone clamors that Windows Phone and BB10 will thrive, they can’t do it without lots and lots and lots of apps. They can’t win without a dedicated developer base and groups of users who go out of their way to learn programming just to program for their favorite platform. While web-based apps are fun, in theory, we’re just not there yet in terms of real value. In the uncanny valley of application programming, HTML5 and attendant technologies are too stiff and jerky, like the humans in the first Toy Story movie. We need a few more years to bake them into real usability.

Until then, we’re stuck turning silk purses into sow’s ears (or, depending on your opinion of Linux, silk purses into penguins). I can’t, for example, recommend that my Mom pick up a Chromebook because she’ll immediately hit a brick wall when she wants to, say, Skype my in-laws. We can regress the argument down to “Well, they can use Google Hangouts” but that doesn’t solve the problem. In human-computer interaction, there should be more than one way to do something. That way, I’m sad to say, is through the introduction of a full SDK.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“No, don’t hit that button.” “Hit the red X.” “Don’t tap on the ones with the stars.” “No, go back with the arrow.” “Not that one.” “No, here.”

These are the kinds of things I’m constantly having to say to my three-year-old as she explores the world of iPad applications on her first computer, my hand-me-down iPad 1. At her age, she’s too young to understand the nuances of how in-app purchases work – or even read for that matter – but that hasn’t stopped app developers whose apps are targeted at her age range from including confusing mechanisms to direct their youngest fans to in-app purchases, upgrades, and new app installs.

Just a few days ago, Apple made headlines when it had to refund customers in the U.K. when their five-year-old boy accidentally spent $2,500 in in-app purchases in just 15 minutes. It’s odd to me that much of the response has blamed the parents, tut-tutting about their failure to enable the appropriate restrictions and parental controls on their iPad before handing it over to the child. Maybe they should have RTFM (ahem, read the manual, as the expression goes), it’s true. But at the end of the day, while this is an extreme example of what can go wrong (and here’s another), it’s at the far end of the spectrum of a completely broken model in terms of how Apple’s youngest fans are interacting with its technology and mobile applications.

It’s a downright poor experience today.

From a parent’s standpoint, when it comes to selecting applications that are appropriate for children, the App Store offers an overwhelming selection. The top charts help to some extent, but it’s hard to qualify the educational value these apps offer. Some startups like KinderTown and YogiPlay are trying to change that, but they’re still struggling to get picked up by mainstream users in large numbers. So parents generally hunt and peck, read descriptions, look at pictures, then download. Only after the apps are in the kids’ hands do they realize that wow, that app may not have been the best choice after all. But now it’s the kid’s favorite new thing and deleting it would not go unnoticed.

So the apps remain.

And the kids tap the wrong buttons, accidentally buy things or, in the case where parents do have controls enabled, cry because they can’t. And whine. Wonderful.

It’s enough to make even the most tech-savvy parent want to rip the iPad from the child’s hands and yell, go play outside! 

Of course, I can’t fault the app developers for installing revenue-generating mechanisms into their applications. Companies need to make money, and development is expensive. But the freemium model makes much more sense in the world of apps for grown-ups, where the users themselves are the decision-makers holding the purse strings. Kids will just blindly click and tap and buy if there are no restrictions.

Parents choose free apps for kids over paid ones for a number of reasons. For starters, there’s no “try before you buy” mechanism in the iTunes App Store, so developers tend to either launch a “lite” version or a single app that includes an upgrade path through an in-app purchase. The model makes some sense, as it’s hard to say if junior will appreciate that $4.99 investment in his new digital toy. But it also means that iPad becomes littered with apps that aren’t fully functional and that continually ask the child to buy, buy, buy.

Not only is this an annoyance for parents, it puts up barriers between the technology and the child. Kids are learning quickly that in so many of their apps, there are sections that break the experience, redirecting them to the App Store, taking them to screens unrelated to gameplay and other odd behavior.

I can see first-hand the impact this has on my own child even at the age of three. In new apps, we’ll sit side-by-side, and I see her hesitate to tap obvious buttons like the big green “GO” button, or the little house-shaped “Home,” for example. “This?” she will ask me. After being on the iPad long before her first birthday, my daughter is now used to me telling her “no, not that one.” I have to guide her through the new freemium apps, so she can learn the nuances of which things you should tap or not tap in a particular one.

Parents also choose free/freemium apps because kids tire of some applications relatively fast. Like bigger people, kids want a little variety, too. But more importantly, they also outgrow educational apps quickly – there’s a big developmental leap between age three and four, for example, when it comes to what the child is learning at that time.

It’s Not Just Apps That Are Broken  

The way parents find, install and purchase apps for their kids’ iPads isn’t the only thing that’s inexplicably broken on these mini computers. So are those ham-fisted parental controls in iOS. Today, they’re “all or nothing” switches that either turn on or off default iPad apps entirely. Parents must decide between web browser or no web browser. Should the child never be able to install or delete apps? Ever? Use the camera? Browse the iBookstore?

Why not a little nuance and assistance here? Let the kids surf a web of white-listed websites, like Disney or Nickelodeon’s homepages, perhaps. Or surf in safe mode. Let them install the free apps, but not the paid ones. Let them browse a kid-friendly section of the bookstore. Oh, and those app ratings? A mess. Turn on ratings for younger kids only, and watch Netflix disappear from the homescreen – arguably the most-used app of dozens on any kid’s iPad. (I should also point out that Netflix’s “kid mode” doesn’t work on iPad 1, which is likely the hand-me-down iPad that’s in the hands of most kids today. Genius.)

Just Fix It

There’s a lot of room for improvement here and a million ways it could be done. The iPad could offer a “kid sign in” that lets kids use the device in a safe mode of sorts. The Android ecosystem is full of solutions for this problem, including things like KIDO’Z, Kytephone, Play Safe and others. And Android developers can more deeply integrate with and take control of various operating system features. But developers can’t solve this problem on Apple’s platform – only Apple can. And where are they on this? Getting beat by Windows Phone 8′s OS, for god’s sake. Even it has a built-in kid mode.

Stopping short of setting up kid accounts, sign-ins or special modes, Apple could do more to enforce the naughtiness prevalent in the kids’ app ecosystem, which encourages the errant purchases. Apple could offer a subscription service plan where parents can download a select number of apps per month, or one where usage is monitored and developers get their cut based on actual app activity.

Bypassing Apple, there’s also a little wiggle room for developers to take charge. Many kids’ apps come from larger studios with big portfolios, so at the very least, these app makers could test such similar subscriptions ahead of any official moves by Apple.

These Are Kids’ Computers

According to some reports, over 80 percent of the “educational” apps are aimed at children (and growing). Nickelodeon’s research into the market found that 27 percent of U.S. households with kids aged three to five had an iPad as of October 2012, up from 22 percent in April. Forty percent of those preschoolers used educational apps on the iPad, up from 27 percent. In addition, Apple device owners were willing to pay 15 to 23 percent more for apps in that category.

At this point, I’m beyond wanting to argue for one solution over another – I just want Apple to pick one solution – ANY SOLUTION – and implement it. We’re on the fourth generation of iPad now, after all. There’s even a kid-sized iPad mini.

It’s not just humorous that some toddler thinks magazines should work like tablets, it’s simply a reflection of reality: Our babies are now computer users. But kids need guidelines and boundaries. Apple is long overdue in addressing the needs of parents and children with the way it has structured its app ecosystem, the rules for those targeting kids and parental-control mechanisms. Apple needs to start looking out for the kids, or risk losing parents’ trust.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google+ experienced an outage this morning, and almost no one noticed. Gizmodo poked fun. Engadget wrote a few sentences. Someone posted it to Hacker News. Where it gained zero comments.

Google+, reportedly the fastest-growing social network in history (or fastest-growing “thingy” ever), and reportedly the second-biggest social network worldwide, experiences an outage, and nothing hits Techmeme. Google+, where the President of the United States just hungout, goes down, but Twitter users (and TechCrunch reporters) only have jokes, not frantic questions and concerns.

This is the problem with the perception surrounding Google+ in a nutshell; it’s two things: a website on the Internet which is perceived as an “anti-Facebook” no one cares about and also a deeply integrated piece to Google’s overall platform.

Google has rightly moved to implement a social layer across all its properties in its efforts to stave off on the increasing competition from Facebook. It’s taking on Facebook in social, as Facebook takes it on in search. To do so, Google needs social-data signals to feed into its massive digital brain. But while the site can boast metrics like “more than 500 million people upgraded!”, it’s disingenuous in terms of how many visit Google+ the way they would a destination site like Facebook.

And that’s the problem. Google+ is not even really a destination site. That’s a part of it, yes, but that’s the part of most questionable merit. It’s FriendFeed redux, with some extra clever features, like multi-person video chats and “Circles.” It mostly seems to be popular among those who like to aggressively post comments in its defense if you dare to question its lasting value.

But the real Google+ is everywhere. It can’t be avoided, remember? And some of its better parts aren’t some website on the Internet. After all, “hanging out in Gmail” feels like using Gmail, not heading over to a specific place and posting things you want to share with friends. Seeing friends’ faces appear in Google search results feels like an upgraded version of Google.com, not a Facebook alternative.

And yet, because this plus.google.com “alt Facebook” exists, Google opens itself up to ridicule and skepticism.

And Google makes it worse because it will never tell you how many visitors Google+, just the homepage, has. I mean, even when you specifically ask Google communications questions like a) define how you determine if a user is “active” or say, b) how many active users visit the Google+ website itself (that is, just the URL plus.google.com)?. The lines suddenly go quiet.

That’s why it doesn’t feel like the world is ending when Google+ goes down. Sure, today’s outage was temporary. It’s Friday, too. But the lack of chest-clutching horror that Facebook sees after five minutes in the dust, explains what position Google’s destination network holds in Internet users’ lives.

h/t: Yes, @TaylorLorenz, I totally stole that for my headline

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google Reader, the RSS feed-reading service Google has long since benignly abandoned, has gone completely mad, and Google has yet to acknowledge the problem even as it heads into its second day of unusability. Users are reporting inaccurate read and unread counts, the reappearance of thousands of old, unread items as new, and, in some cases, the return of feeds users had previously unsubscribed to.

According to mentions on Twitter, the problem started at some point yesterday, but many users are just now noticing it this morning, as they return to work and their usual Monday morning routines. The issues, documented to some extent here, effectively make it impossible to use Google Reader, as you can no longer tell which items are new and which are old – even timestamps seem to be affected. This is unfortunate because Google Reader remains one of the best pure, feed-reading services on the market, and it also powers the backend of many other news reading apps, like Reeder or Feedly, for instance, as well as others like Flipboard, which allows for more casual ways of reading RSS feeds.

It’s fair to say that Google Reader is no longer a priority at Google, given the company’s focus on developing Google+ in the midst of an overall shift to consuming news via social feeds, not the “geekier” RSS technology. RSS, as a consumer-facing tool on the front end never caught on with mainstream users. Most still have no idea what RSS means, or why there are little orange “feed” icons on their favorite websites.

That being said, Google Reader continues to have a core, highly engaged audience of more tech-savvy folks. These people, self included, may be holdouts from a previous era of the web – a time when there weren’t Twitters and Flipboards and Google+’s, even, for social news reading and sharing.

Yet while these users are members of a small community (and dwindling), they tend active users and influencers. According to some of our previous posts on Google Reader, there are at least a few hundred of these people left who cared enough to comment about Google Reader’s changes – that is, its forced transition to a part of the Google+ infrastructure back in fall 2011.

The beloved network, eventually steamrolled by Google+, was also the focus of a BuzzFeed profile on “Google’s Lost Social Network” just a couple of months ago, demonstrating that there continues to be an ongoing interest in the service, even if Google no longer cares much about its existence…or apparently, its continuing functionality.

 We’ve reached out to Google for comment earlier this morning, and are in the process of waiting a response. A message from a Googler on the Google Reader forum states: “The Google Reader team has been notified and someone will be looking into this.” (Incidentally, that message was posted five minutes after I received a response from Google following an earlier email requesting details about the issues, and the ETA to resolution.)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch