Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Sheryl Sandberg is a top Googler no more. Now, Sandberg has the good (she hopes) fortune of being Mark Zuckerberg’s right hand woman. 

While the media world hails how Sandberg can apply her Googley AdWords and AdSense knowledge to build out a ”new kind of advertising network,” a Facebook kind, the real Googley transference to Facebook will be much more powerful, pervasive and, in good Google fashion, scary.

Why does Zuckerberg really want Sandberg close at hand? The still wet around the ears Facebook CEO is emphatic, about his global domination mission:

“Sheryl understands Facebook’s goal of connecting everyone in the world and is passionate about building a business that will enable us to realize this mission.”

So there Google, YOUR global domination mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible” is SO yesterday, for Sheryl Sandberg!

Why the whole world ought to beware, of Facebook AND Google:

The REAL Google (and Facebook) Nightmares: Eternal Data Traps and
Facebook Davos PR Blitz: Beware Scoble Hype, Users Still at BIG Risk and
2008 Social Media Warning: Beware Google AND Facebook

ALSO: Spot Runner Ad Agency: Google Sans $139 billion Search Engine? 

PLUS: SILICON ALLEY TECH PARTY

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

There he goes again?

Michael TechCrunch Arrington is engaging in his signature controversy is good for (his) Web traffic modus operandi, spinning unreliable tales purported to be from inside “sources,” anonymous, of course.

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan attempts to theoretically “dissect” the TechCrunch self-made news of MySpace supposedly seeking to ditch a $900 million (well) done ad deal with Google–while nevertheless assuring, that he, of course, “does not doubt Michael Arrington’s sources.”

I DO doubt Arrington’s “reporting,” however. I have recently spoken directly to MySpace execs about the deal and today asked News Corp., directly, if there is any desire on the part of MySpace to replace Google with a different partner in its $900 million ad deal.

A Fox Interactive Media spokesperson confirmed to me:

There’s no truth to rumors that Fox Interactive Media is interested in getting out of a strategic search deal with Google.

Astute readers will also note that ”truth” is likely missing from the Arrington rumor that:

The vast majority of social network traffic that Google serves ads into is controlled by MySpace - this was a direct complaint about that deal.

Arrington’s assertion? analysis, declaration? brings to mind the double speak he recently took Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures to task for. After all, a MySpace-Google ad deal that concerns serving Google ads on the MySpace platform is, by definiiton, about serving ads into traffic “controlled” by MySpace.

Moreover, Google is tickled to serve ads into any and all traffic, regardless of who is said to “control” it: An Internet powered, universally, by AdSense is, after all, a Google goal.

What is the MySpace goal for its Google deal? To help make the $900 million pact be a win-win:

Peter Chernin:

We we are regularly working with them to continue to improve their performance. We think they are an important partner to us and we want to see them continue to grow their revenue and that has all sorts of things — you know, it’s trying to do a better job monetizing the data, it’s — we’re constantly looking at the placement of the search box on the page, the size of the search box, where we deliver the ads, how to get higher click-thru rates. And I would say that we have a very positive working relationship and to be fair, I think an improving working relationship over the past year with Google.

So we are working together. We’d like to see them improve their results and we expect — but it is important to note that deal, from their own modeling and certainly what they told us, they expected it to reach break-even towards the end of the deal, not right at the beginning.

One MySpace ad sales exec believes it is up to Google to “sell” better.

Read my first-hand, directly sourced, reports: MySpace To Google: Learn How To Sell Advertising, OMMA Report and MySpace To Google (Round 2): Text Clicks Do NOT Rule! VideoEgg Report and MySpace to Facebook: NO ‘Reach, Relevancy, Results’! OMMA Report

ALSO:  Like.com to Entrepreneurs: It’s the Revenues, Stupid! and Why Silicon Alley VCs Should Do Blogging Due Diligence, Too

PLUS: Facebook Meltdown: Is Twitter Next? and Microsoft Steals VideoEgg’s Thunder? Google Ultimate Loser and FriendFeed: Got Google Millions? Who Needs Revenues!

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Will the weekend of February 22, 2008, mark the beginnning of the end of the Twitter (human) love affair?

Why does Facebook make young men swoon? I headlined way back in September 2007, critiquing near universal, unconditional, media and Internet celebrity fawning over an adolescent styled free Web service built for gossipy teens. My lone, grounded voice was in stark contrast to the loud Web chorus of unbridled adulation overflowing for a 23 year-old coder credited for single-handedly changing the world’s communications, although facing accusations of unseemly “inspiration” from the work of others.

Since the very day Mark Zuckerberg graced the world with “F8,” I have been underscoring the unavoidable business model risks of a third-party business based off of Zuckerberg’s platform and have been warning prospective Facebook users that they use the free to consumer service at their own privacy and data security risks. Despite conventional blogosphere wisdom of a supposed inexorable Facebook “killer” strategy, I have also consistenly debunked consistently over rosy projections of a Facebook takeover of the Web and its advertising.

Nevertheless, the Web’s infatuation with the purported Web wunderkid could not be contained, until now.

Beacon was NOT a Facebook surprise and neither is Mark Zuckerberg’s propensity to hold on to his Facebookers’ data for dear life. The Facebook traffic march is not an immutable, pre-ordained parade to inevitable Web domination, despite the exhortations of Facebook and its ardent fans.

Have the real-world challenges of Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual playground finally poked the over-inflated Facebook bubble? After all, Facebook deemed it necessary to defend itself this past weekend against blogosphere cries of “fatigue” over a purportedly soon to be “doomed” Facebook!

A geek love affair is going strong though, for Twitter, the current fashionable object of early adopter adoration. Amidst the Facebook thrashing this weekend, we were reminded of how cool it is to be “hooked on Twitter.”

Twitter infatuation is in full bloom: “Nearly a million users and no spam or trolls,” Russell Beatie gushes:

I don’t have to worry about getting any suggestions that my penis size is too small (I make a point not to follow ex-wives/girlfriends), get any anonymous stock tips, nor anyone telling me that now is the time to refinance my home. Nor do I have to suffer fools or jerks for more than the time it takes me to click the “Remove” button on their home page.

Beattie may not be worried of “exposure” on Twitter, but his commenters are not so sanguine.  

FEEDUS: There are plenty of trolls but not much spam. Trolls in twitter are the people who try to follow like 3000 people. They are also the folks who ‘track’ certain words and then @ with related messages. There’s little spam because you can only send one @ message at a time.

LINKERJPATRICK: I don’t know, I have had people add me to their “friends” list but for all practical purposes they are not people as much as they are “marketing” campaigns. Also I have had to stop following people because some of their posts have been very vulgar or used language I would want someone visiting my Twitter page to see in my list of followers.

GILEST: Twitter spammers only trouble the people who make the decision to follow them. That doesn’t stop the spammers from following as many people as they can, and those people getting the resulting one-off “So-and-so is now folllowing you on Twitter!” email alerts. It’s not annoying (yet), but I fear it will expand very quickly. Both those examples I gave cropped up in my inbox within the last fortnight or so, I think there will be more to come yet.

Fears of man eating plants may also be cropping up, thanks to Twitter! After all, if the geek world is going gaga now for “how to” make plants Twitter their hunger to their “owners,” a “Little Shop Of (Twitter) Horrors” may not be far away!

“Botanicalls” is clear (via Twitter): “THE PLANTS HAVE YOUR NUMBER!”:

Botanicalls opens a new channel of communication between plants and humans, in an effort to promote successful inter-species understanding.

Twitter love really is blooming, for now.

PLUS: Is Union Square Ventures Changing Exit Strategies? and MySpace On Google: Sorry, ‘NO Truth’ To $900 Million Rumors and Microsoft Steals VideoEgg’s Thunder? Google Ultimate Loser

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Thw Wall Street Journal claims the richest man in the world scaling back on his “social graph” usage is ”the most damning indictment of ”social networking technology.” REALLY? Bill Gates is also scaling back on what he does at the company he founded, Microsoft: Any personal computer technology “indictment” there?

There was a Facebook indictment yesterday, it came form MySpace. Arnie Gullov-Singh, VP Product Mangement, Fox Interactive Media, had his competitive “social networking technology” fun at the OMMA Behavioral conference in New York City, at the expense of Facebook, as I present in MySpace to Facebook: NO ‘Reach, Relevancy, Results’! OMMA Report.

I asked Gullov-Sing about the future prospects for MySpace advertising, both in-house prime and the lower grade, out sourced Google variety. My question to panelist Gullov-Singh:

I appreciate your calling Facebook a “competitor”; Mark Zuckerberg refuses to return the favor. 

In any event, do social networks risk becoming too popular for their own good? As user generated content grows like a weed, what will be the impact on ad quality and pricing? Will users be subjected to more “punch the monkey” ads?

Gullov-Sing avoided the seemingly undeniable inventory glut issue, hailing MySpace is popular among advertisers and its CPMS are doing just fine, while offering no hard data to support his contentions.

After the panel, I sought specifics from Gullov-Sing and pointed out that MySpace partner Google itself lamented MySpace ad quality and pricing, in an indirect dig during its Wall Street conference call.

Gullov-Sing told me that there are a lot of reasons for Google not doing well at MySpace. I suggested to Gullov-Sing that perhaps MySpace is not providing necessasry internal MySpace data to Google so it is best able to optimize.

Gullov-Sing indicated to me that Google doesn’t understand the sales process and thinks technology is the answer to everything.

If Google really did learn how to sell advertising like the rest of the media world, though, would its MySpace performance really improve? After all, MySpace has its direct hands on the “good” MySpace ads goods, while Google is an outside ad serving player, playing around with runnerup inventory.

MySpace inventory distribution appears to match the industry standard put forth at the OMMA conference by Peter Horan. The CEO of IAC Media & Advertising said a sites’ advertising is generally about half direct-sale, premium ad inventory and half of lower quality, resold by aggregators.

I have been questioning the quality and “salability” of MySpace’s inventory available to Google since the $900 million deal was announced in 2006 during a joint Fox Interactive Media and Google conference call.

Fox Interactive has continued to retain exclusive rights to directly sell its most desirable, and most lucrative, display advertising to Fortune 500 advertisers. In addition to Google being exclusive search and keyword targeted advertising sales provider, the agreement has provided for Google to have an option on My Space’s unsold, “remnant” display advertising: a “right of first refusal on display advertising sold through third parties on Fox Interactive Media’s network.”

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was well aware of the MySpace monetization challenge when he made a long term, expensive pledge to MySpace, but believed the vaunted Googley technology would prevail. Schmidt in 2006:

“We are not going to cover MySpace with ads,” he said, noting that Google carefully analyzes what sort of ads encourage users to click on what sort of pages to produce the most revenue. “It turns out the right answer is to show fewer, better ads.” (NYT)

It turns out, though, that Schmidt’s Google did NOT, and still does not, have the right MySpace answer, demeuring now that Google is “still in the learning stages of how it monetizes social networking”:

We have had a challenge in Q4 with social networking inventory as a whole and some of the monetization work we were doing there didn’t pan out as well as we had hoped. But we are continuing the efforts and we are still optimistic about future quarters.

MySpace, on the other hand, is optimistic about the present! 

PLUS: MySpace To Google (Round 2): Text Clicks Do NOT Rule! VideoEgg Report

MORE: MOBILE Visions? Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL Open Up: NOT Google! OMMA Report and Henry Blodget Tech Ticker Puts Yahoo Finance at SEC Risk and LinkedIn Preps Spy Network: Is YOUR Company Safe?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Esther Dyson continues her “friending” ode to Mark Zuckerberg, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.

When I heard Dyson declare to Web 2.0 startups in New York City last June (on the heels of Zuckerberg’s unveiling of “Facebook Platform” to the world), “Throw out your development, go use Facebook,” I asked if it would really be prudent for the Web to capitulate to Facebook, as the self-described Internet “court-jester” advised. I warned startups of how Facebook is a wolf in sheeps clothing, citing Zuckerberg’s F8 Platform own Terms of Service.

MY advice to Web entrepreneurs to create their own, proprietary, self-sustainable, independent businesses is proving prescient. SEE: Scrabulous At Risk? Zynga $10 million VC Game: Facebook Roulette   

I also have been warning, since May 2007, of Facebook’s non user-friendly privacy policy and practices. My concerns about Mark Zuckerberg’s non-negotiable data mining machine have also proven on the mark. SEE: The REAL Google (and Facebook) Nightmares: Eternal Data Traps

Nevertheless, Dyson’s admiration for the Harvard drop-out’s “social graph” can not be contained. For Dyson, the Beacon affair is not a privacy quagmire, but a mere Facebook PR faux pas! Dyson applauds how Beacon “familiarized millions of users with the notion that they can control information about themselves online, and determine to whom it is visible.”

REALLY? NOT according to the poor soul who had his Christmas “ruined” due to Mark Zuckerberg allowing Facebook to inform his 100 best friends of his ”surprise” diamond gift for his wife. 

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft? Who cares! Dyson assures “a more profound revolution is taking place on the online social networks,” particularly the one named Facebook.

Who needs MySpace? Zuckerberg prohibits Facebook application partners from even mentioning the name of his biggest nemesis!

MySpace is STILL the space, though, in terms of both traffic and monetization, as Arnie Gullov-Singh, VP Product Mangement, Fox Interactive Media, underscored this morning at the OMMA Behavioral conference in New York City.

Who needs Facebook? “I don’t get it.” Gullov-Singh shared about Facebook’s Beacon and social ads: “How will marketers ever get reach, relevancy and results?”

Moreover, what is really in it for the consumers? “Do any of my friends care that I bought an airplane ticket to come to NYC?” Gullov-Singh pointed out, rhetorically.

Facebook’s latest ad tricks are tools ”thought up by engineers,” Gullov-Singh scoffed.

The ultimate MySpace indictment of Facebook marketing: “LOW RETURN ON ENERGY!”

MORE: LinkedIn Preps Spy Network: Is YOUR Company Safe? and How Web 2.0 Meetups Displaced the New York Software Industry and MOBILE Visions? Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL Open Up: NOT Google! OMMA Report and Henry Blodget Tech Ticker Puts Yahoo Finance at SEC Risk and MySpace To Google: Learn How To Sell Advertising, OMMA Report

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

On the heels of Robert Scoble calling out Facebook for an alleged “erasure,” Danah Boyd shares the sad tale of a “Google horror story,” claiming a third party “disappearance.”

While both Scoble and Boyd do a fine job of tugging at the Web’s heart strings, both cases cloud data security issues in the cloud. Here at Insider Chatter, I have advised of the unavoidable user privacy and data security risks inherent in the use of both Facebook and Google services, and warn non-tech savvy users about using the dangerous services.

In both the Scoble and Boyd’s anonymous “Bob” case, however, both Facebook and Google have appeared to act in the privacy and security interests of their large numbers of non-paying “customers,” attempting to neutralize potentially nefarious affects of dangerous acts (intentional or otherwise) emmanating from the accounts of individual, tech savvy users.

What’s more, in both the Scoble and Boyd’s anonymous “Bob” case, both Facebook and Google restored the free accounts, intact, in a timely manner. Contrary to the sensationalist headlines, Scoble was not “erased” by Facebook and Bob was not “disappeared” by Google.

“Bob” corrects the Boyd story in comments to the post: “I’m the Bob in question. To be fair to Google, it’s unclear if the connections were the reason my account was restored (within 3 days). I filled out the “account hijacked” form several times (advice on the discussion group was to do it every day). And the support email did not come from an individual at Google, but the “team.” So either it was at the guiding hand of one of my friends’ connections and they aren’t taking credit, or I had a really good experience with the standard customer service.”

“Bob” also laments that he ought to have known better, given his technology expertise:

I’m a very experienced internet user, which is part of why I’ve asked not use my name. I’m the -last- person that should be a phishing victim, yet it happened to me. Since it happens to internet professionals far less than, say, the clueless relatives of internet professionals, of course we blame it on the user.

The very expertise of “Bob” and Robert, though, begs the question as to why they are even entrusting free Facebook and Google consumer services with anything!

“Mike” undersocres in the comments: “IMO you should never let a third party (especially electronically) maintain any personal information or data which you wouldn’t want disclosed.”

YES, and one should also not willingly provide such data to such a third party which maintains it in perpetuity with no abillity to correct, modify and or permanently delete the data from all of the third party’s systems, as both the Facebook and Google Privacy Policies and Terms Of Use suggest.

An eternal data trap is the REAL Google and Facebook nightmare and there is only one sure way to avoid it: Don’t use such free, consumer services which do not offer adequate privacy policies and terms of use.

Legislation is not necessary to “protect” users from willy nilly willingly handing over their own personal, proprietary information and data to the greedy “free” servers of for (big) profit corporations, common sense is.

Facebook is NOT a public service, nor is it a necessary one: It can very well be a dangerous service, though. Scoble and “Bob” lessons learned ought to be to STOP using Facebook and Google free login services, not to demand government “protection” from them.

Concerned about Gmail? Get your own domain email account. Concerned about data backup? Use for-fee, professional third party services that guarantee it, in writing. Concerned about not being able to permanently delete data from third party, “free” non-professional servers? Don’t put your information in such places.

Facebook and Google login services are not constitutional rights, they are optional, free, opt-in, corporate services, which adult users of the Internet are free to use, at their own risk.

ALSO: LinkedIn Preps Spy Network: Is YOUR Company Safe?

MORE: Facebook Davos PR Blitz: Beware Scoble Hype, Users Still at BIG Risk and
2008 Social Media Warning: Beware Google AND Facebook and
MySpace to Facebook: Where is Your ‘Reach, Relevancy, Results’? OMMA Report and
Facebook is ‘Sorry’? Savvy Users Will Forget, NOT Forgive, Mark Zuckerberg and
Beacon Privacy Solution: STOP USING FACEBOOK! and
Dear Facebook, Beacon Tracking STILL Evil: Will Zuckerberg Partners Repent? and
Facebook STILL a Danger to Children: Zuckerberg, Attorney General Cuomo in PR Push and
Mark Zuckerberg: Use Facebook at Your Own Risk! and
With Facebook Platform as a Developer Friend, Who Needs Enemies? and
Startups: Why Facebook Platform is a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing 

Google Warning: How GOOG 411 Tricks Consumers and
Google Privacy Trap: Consumers Beware and
Google is WRONG On Consumer Privacy and
Google is NOT Your Friend 

PLUS: How Web 2.0 Meetups Displaced the New York Software Industry and Yahoos Rally: Beware Sticky Peanut Butter Tales

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN