If the rumor about what the Google executives previously dubbed NBC and News Corp.’s idea for Hulu is true, I see them as being completely hypocritical. Around March 2007, rumors were afloat that News Corp. and NBC were parterning to develop a YouTube competitor and Google executives were supposedly not worried about it because they were reportedly nicknaming the company that didn’t exist at the time as ClownCo. Today that company is named Hulu and they have impressed the hell out of several media bloggers including Pulse 2.0, TechCrunch, and GigaOM. Mashable seemed to have a more undecided opinion about how Hulu will perform in the market.

The reason why Google would give such a nickname to the company is because of the number of players involved. Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo!, MySpace, FOX, NBC, and News Corp. were all involved somehow as partners of the company in some shape or form. But the reason why I am calling Google hypocritical is that they seem to be pulling the same trick: partnering with a large number of companies to try and one-up a company that they cannot stand to see score a good deal for themselves. Microsoft’s investment in Facebook is what I’m referring to specifically.

I am making a bold statement by calling Google execs a hypocrite, but I have to admit that I was partially influenced by the article title on today’s New York Times: Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook. And when hearing Google and Friends Ganging Up on Facebook, I think of a $220 billion search monopoly picking on a 23 year old with a good idea. Shame on you: Schmidt, Brin, and Page. You guys should just take some money out of the bank and take a bath in it or buy more Boeings.

Who is Google allying with? Other social networks of course. These social networks include:
1.) LinkedIn
2.) hi5
3.) Friendster
4.) Plaxo
5.) Ning

Other companies involved in Google OpenSocial include Oracle and Salesforce.com. Just for the record, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch also mentioned that the only image associated with OpenSocial is a horny Elmer’s glue thing. As funny as that comment was, I agree that there is something highly wrong with this image.

All opinions aside, do I expect OpenSocial to really take off? I think developers will explore the prospects of OpenSocial, but won’t be as receptive to developing applications for Google’s partners. This is because Facebook’s core users are college students and young, urban professionals that are still receptive to adding applications that make networking more “fun.” And the social networks that Google has partnered with are losing their edge. As a recently graduated college student myself, I have personally left Friendster years ago and never looked back.

I think Google is an amazing service and will not sway from using their search engine unless something amazing comes along, but I think OpenSocial seems too much like a product created out of a grudge. And that doesn’t go along with their “Don’t be Evil” philosophy. When Facebook Applications were released, they were promoted as a way for developers to explore the creative senses while leveraging Facebook’s user base.

PicksPal is a website where users predict the winners of sporting events and win free prizes by doing so.  Essentially it is a fantasy football, baseball, basketball, and other sports website.  Except in this case, users have an incentive to participate here rather than other websites.

The company is based in Mountain View, Calif.  PicksPal was founded by Tom Jessiman, a former CBS SportsLine.com, Sports.com, and Ziff-Davis senior executive.  Since the company started in September 2005, they have raised $9 million.  The first round of investment at $2 million was provided by Canaan Partners.  The second round was $4 million and was provided by Canaan Partners and Bay Partners.  And the most recent funding at $3 million was provided by Canaan Partners and Bay Partners once again.

As this is the generation where the post World War II baby boomers are passing habits on to Generation X and Generation Y, more people are tuning into sports and want to compete with their peers.  There is a lot of room to grow in this market and with this new round of funding, PicksPal should redesign their web site as a first step to cater to the Web 2.0 enthusiasts.

Curbed is a New York, NY-based real estate network blog that focuses on local events and architecture.  The blog network raised $1.5 million recently from a plethora of investors including Nick Denton (founder of Gawker Media), Zach Nelson (CEO of NetSuite), Joanne Wilson (wife of Fred Wilson, author of A VC blog), and Brad Inman (founder/publisher of Inman News). 

Curbed was founded by Lockart Steele and he is a former managing editor of Gawker Media.  Steele founded Curbed before working for Gawker, but went back to working for Curbed after leaving Gawker.

“We’re not just about real estate,” stated Steele.  ”People come to the site to talk about their neighborhoods and about life in the city.”  Some of Curbed’s advertisers include American Express and Volkswagen.

The New York Times’ Dan Mitchell broke the news of the funding.

“With the growing popularity of video, fueled in part by social networking sites, we’ve actually seen an increase in customer demand for alternative video sharing solutions. Many customers, particularly families with children, don’t want their personal memories available for anyone to see in the public domain nor do they want to share them in a cluttered environment that includes advertising,”
-Kevin Winneroski, VP of Best Buy

Richfield, Minn.-based specialty retailer company, Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY) has made a minor equity investment in Mydeo recently.  Mydeo plans on using the funding for its video-sharing services.  The Best Buy-Mydeo partnership web site is already online at: mydeo.com.  Users are encouraged to upload personal videos for storage and then share them on blogs and web sites. 

This investment complements Best Buy’s market-share dominance in selling digital camera and video camera within the U.S.  The more that customers buy digital cameras from Best Buy, the more likely they are to use Mydeo to share video.  Mydeo is based in the U.K.

The base plans for 100 minutes of video hosting with lengths up to 30 minutes each starts at $6.97 per month.  Additional storage can also be purchased.  A premium user plan includes uploading videos that are 90 minutes in length and can store up to 250 minutes of video for $10.47 per month.  Videos can be made private and can be shared with family and friends.

Mydeo was started in 2005 by Cary Marsh and Iain Miller.  Mydeo partnered with Microsoft to become the software company’s first European Movie Maker Hosting Partner.

Information Source:
[1] Mydeo press release: Best Buy Launches Online Video Sharing Service

“Amplify your world. For Free.”
-Champion Sound motto

I just got an email saying that Champion Sound is launching in Limited Beta Launch and that the Public Launch is coming soon.  Champion Sound is a tool for music artists to keep manage their gigs easier.  For example, one feature is called Activity Overview: this is where artists can monitor their gigs and the documentation involved around them.  Below is a screen shot:

Another feature of Champion Sound is to maintain e-mail subscribers more seamlessly.  E-mail addresses can be either manually added or imported from a .CSV file:

And one of the last features of Champion Sound is the ability to generate a new campaign.  This can be done so by creating a Flyer, Announcement, or Newsletter.  Then the template can be added into e-mails:

Champion Sound was created by Digital Telepathy, a San Diego, Calif.-based Web 2.0 consulting company that created works on Hard Rock Hotel, MojoPages, Tierra Natal, and Razoo.  Digital Telepathy also built a Facebook sponsored page to promote Mozilla Firefox 2.0. 

The San Diego fires was a minor bottleneck for Digital Telepathy.  The company had to evacuate their office for a ocuple days.  Digital Telepathy’s blog is available at: http://blog.dtelepathy.com/

“Google reaps about 60 percent of its outsize revenues and more than 80 percent of its profits from ads on that page, according to analysts’ estimates. That means the company’s success continues to hinge on the dominance of its simple search. There are no guarantees that its dominance will last.”
-David H. Freeman, Newsweek

Tui Stark, a photography stylist recently attempted to search for “snorkeling beaches blue water,” but searching for those keywords on Google turned out to be futile.  Results that Google found included web sites about real-estate companies, rafting apparel, and listings for scuba diving, slightly irrelevant from the searches keywords. [Source: NewsWeek]. 

In my opinion, is Google overvalued?  For the amount that their stock is trading today and how much their company is appealing competition to enter the market, they’re not too far away from becoming the next Yahoo! by becoming overshadowed by the next big thing.  And one of the most valiant efforts made by a company to take on Google today is Quintura. 

Quintura has stayed consistent in pushing their tag searching technology and have never strayed from it.  Quintura has a kid-friendly search engine that filters out inappropriate content and most recently added a Halloween themed search homepage:

I challenge Pulse 2.0 readers to test out Quintura and leave any feedback for the company.  I believe that users will find that the only problem that they have is that Quintura is not like Google.  Keep an open-mind because I’m sure Quintura is here to stay.  The company is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners.

“Consumers are clearly interested in easily accessing a broad spectrum of programming,”
-Peter Chernin, President and COO of News Corp.

NBC Universal and News Corporation, parent company of FOX, have proved the nay-sayers wrong with their new venture, Hulu.  Bloggers, news publications, and YouTube fans all had a lot of doubt about whether an NBC/News Corp. partnership would be able to take on video user-generated content web sites.  Since NBC and FOX wasn’t happy with sponsored groups on YouTube, it comes to no surprise that full episodes of NBC- and FOX- owned shows are placed on Hulu.  I think it was also a smart move that FOX shows were not placed on MySpace, News Corp.’s own social network.

Even though Hulu is still in Beta testing, some of their clips are available on MSN and on AOL.  The videos that are available by Hulu on AOL and MSN are of high quality so that should be a reason for future Hulu users to be optimistic about the future of video content.  How will NBC and News Corp. make money from Hulu?  Advertising most likely.

What are the pros and cons of Hulu?  The pros are that more time will be spent on Hulu because the quality of the content is much higher than YouTube.  The cons is that YouTube was made for people that wanted that quick snapshot of entertainment.  Let’s say that I wanted to show a buddy of mine a 15 second clip of Family Guy, Hulu would not be the ideal place to do so.  There are a lot of funny one-liners on FOX and NBC shows.  But Hulu does not offer that convenience.  And that will be Hulu’s one weakness.

Yahoo! acquired MyBlogLog around January 2007 for about $10 million. MyBlogLog is a web tool that is used by bloggers and another publishers to showcase what web sites they are visiting or who is visiting their blog. The official announcement was made by Robyn Tippins, Community Manager at Yahoo!’s MyBlogLog.

The e-mail signature can be set-up when clicking on “Edit Profile” and then “Email Signature”:

If you look at the above screen shot, you will notice that there is a MyBlogLogo icon logo under myname. Other icons a user can add is icon links to their YouTube profile, Pownce profile, MySpace profile, Blogger account, LinkedIn profile, Digg profile, Twitter page, del.icio.us profile, Facebook profile, etc. After the signature is fully customized, MyBlogLog generates the code.

Then users simply take their code and embed it into Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird.

I could see this as being a very useful tool for Web 2.0 addicts like myself, but I don’t foresee a lot of people to use the signature generator. Great tool though.

“They [Joe Greenstein and Saran Chari, founders of Flixster] have built an amazing user generated content site around movies, including ratings, reviews, actor pages, trivia quizes, movie compatability tests and tons of other stuff.”
-Jeremy Liew, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners

San Francisco, Calif.-based movie and social network database, Flixster.com, has seen exponential growth since its January 2006 start. Flixster currently has 30 million-plus user homepages, has 870 million+ movie ratings, and 1.5 million+ quiz questions in user-generated content. The database currently also hosts over 30,000 movie profiles, 60,000 actor profiles, 1.1 million pictures, and 310,000 videos. Flixster’s Facebook Application is part of the reason why Flixster has seen enormouse growth as well.

Today TechCrunch reported that we may see a Flixster acquisition happen soon. TechCrunch sources have cited that a letter of intent was sent to Flixster from InterActivCorp (NASDAQ:IACI), parent company of Ask.com, LendingTree, Ticketmaster, HSN, and Match.com. The rumored valuation is worth $150 million.

Flixster is monitored by several administrators and the company has about 8 employees. Besides the Facebook Application, another reason for Flixster’s accelerated growth is because users are asked to provide GMail or Yahoo! Mail passwords and then the user is asked to invite friends and family from their contact lists.

Flixster is powered with $2 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners. Keep checking Pulse 2.0 to see whether the acquisition takes place.

I read a rather fussy article by Nick Douglas on ValleyWag today entitled, Facebook employees know what profiles you look at.  The story received 1500+ Diggs and I have to agree with the with the response made by the first commenter of the article, walkngonawire:  “In other shocking news, librarians can see which books you’ve checked out at the library, and bank tellers can see where you’ve spent money recently!”

When you sign up for a social network, send emails from your place of employment, or even sign up for a free e-mail account with Hotmail, Yahoo!, or Windows Live Mail, then you should expect that you’re being monitored in some form.  Let’s say that some terrorists had a GMail account and a Facebook account and used both web communication forms to conspire with other terrorist friends, I could only hope that Google and Facebook reacts somehow.  If not, I would say that it would be negligence on their part if they just sat there.

Scenario: let’s say that Johnny Appleplum was a stalker of a Jenny Orangebanana.  Johnny and Jenny have never never met before and Johnny is known to be not right in the head because he sends threatening messages to a Jenny saying how much he needs Jenny.  If I was Jenny, I would only hope that Facebook was tracking any further suspicious activity from Johnny because you never know what Internet creeps are capable of. 

However, one of the comments that Douglas made in his blog post to clarify what Facebook employees are capable of is:

The only ones who have full access to profile information is security staff and higher ups.  Seems like a fair check-and-balance.

“It is actually interesting. Microsoft and Facebook, one thing that they have in common, is they both recruit using Jobster,”
-Jobster CEO, Jason Goldberg.

Jobster Inc., the Seattle, Wash. based company focused on the recruiter-candidate relationship has some high hopes for their partnership with Facebook and Microsoft.  Microsoft and Facebook both recruit candidates with Jobster. 

As a matter of fact, in February 2007, Jobster announced that they will have an official deal with Facebook [Source: GigaOM].  Since the partnership between Jobster and Facebook happened 5 months ago, I have not heard of any major milestones for Jobster. 

According to CrunchBase, Jobster has raised $8 million Series A from Ignition and Trinity, $19.5 million Series B from Ignition/Mayfield/Trinity, and $18 million Series C from Ignition/Mayfield/Trinity and Reed Elsevier.  This brings Jobster’s total investment at $45 million. 

Jobster’s Silicon Valley competitor, Simply Hired has about one-third in funding.  Simply Hired has about $16.5 million in funding.

Goldberg showed his optimism for Jobster on the FOX Business Network.  [Note: the video is down for now, if I get a fixed link, I'll update this post].

The National Basketball Association (NBA), professional men’s baskeball league, represents 30 teams.   The league was founded in NYC in June 1945 and has made millionaires of so many of its participants.  And now the NBA has started a social network for the Phoenix Suns. 

One of the NBA’s most notable players of this past generation is Michael Jordan.  Given all the franchising opportunities and endorsements made for Michael Jordan during his involvement with the NBA gave him the $398 million net worth that he has today.  Fortune magazine estimated that Michael Jordan’s global economic impact was $10 billion.

There are also a large number of athletes that are continuously being highlighted around the league as a great opportunity to be branded by various marketing companies.  You have LeBron “King James” James, the Cleveland Cavalier that was recruited right out of high school who scored a $90 million contract from Nike.  You also have Ron Artest, the ass of the NBA, who gained a lot of publicity when assaulting Detroit Pistons fans after he was hit with a cup of beer for technically fouling Ben Wallace.  Kobe Bryant also gained publicity for being accused for sexual assault a year after him and Shaquille O’Neal lead the Los Angeles Lakes to three consecutive NBA championships.

Looking at Artest and Bryant as examples, clearly the NBA has its fair share of negative press, but the NBA realizes this.  This is why NBA is pushing for a way to influence children and networking professionals to show that they care about their brand.  This is why several teams have started their own social networks.

The most recent team to start their own social network is the Phoenix Suns.  The social network will feature a message board, user blogs, multimedia sharing, and other features according to BrightSideOfTheSun.com.  The social network will have a look & feel similar to MySpace.com.  Other features include a scavenger hunt with featured prizes and profile pages.  The social network is available at PlanetOrange.net.

The Phoenix Suns is owned by Robert Sarver, who bought the team for $401 million in 2004.  Former Phoenix Sun, Steve Nash won the NBA MVP award in the 2004-2005 season.

I’m currently at the Snap Summit. It’s all about Facebook apps and the future and development of platforms. I’ll be trying to update from here, giving you guys the skinny on what’s going on. Keep Refreshing this Page to get the latest!

10:03AM: The first panel has Susan Wu as moderator, Keith Schacht (cofounder of 42friends), Dave McClure, Jia Shen
(CTO of rock you), and Chris Smoak (of Kickflip which made TattooYou). They came out wearing funny hats and beards. The audience didn’t really laugh at all. I heard like 2 chuckles.

10:31AM: Jia Shen says you should launch on the app platform because it’s the same as making your own site because you have your own canvas pages and you can make money a month later. “You can grow stuff, you can build a company, and become a standalone business”

10:33AM: Dave McClure thinks most people are missing out on the features of feed. Mini feed is probably the best way to get your facebook application to spread.

10:35AM: Jia Shen gave advice to someone about targeting the invites to someone’s family rather then just blasting them to everyone for a Family Fan application and that got someone to spread to 300k users.

10:36AM: Jia Shen thinks that although the toy apps are shown prominently on most pages such as the wall, the poke. But people from the marketing aspect should focus on apps with 1 million or 2 million or less users have huge page views. And they can really be used for marketing.

10:38AM: Chris Smoak talked to someone from Photoflex, a Photoshop application that is having trouble spreading. And by using games attached to apps, people encouraged to play really helps growth.

10:39AM: Keith says always track everything, if you don’t see growth right from the beginning, you’ll have trouble knowing where you need to improve to see growth. The first 10-20 clicks as soon as someone adds your app are the most important.

10:40AM: Jia “Knowing your stats for your app on the fly is gold”

10:43AM: Susan Wu – “Building on the Facebook platform right now is like investing in the Chinese stock market”

10:45AM: Dave McClure – Interactions of a group of people in the mini feed has better spreading ability because it might have a higher priority to show up in feed.

10:47AM: Jia Shen – Specific targeting invites have 3 times the likelihood to get a person that has a relationship to the individual to add the app. Show targeted users on the invite page.

Oh snap… my laptop has 64% Battery left. Eff this… I only got 2 hours of battery. Dah well I’ll update as much as I can for as long as I can. I’m a flipping champion for you guys!
-Mo

10:49AM: Keith -”Facebook has raised the bar to how passionate you have to be to spam your friends.”

10:51AM: Dave -Pages are looking more and more like MySpace and that can be detrimental if they don’t give something to clean up apps from your page.

Me: I agree my Facebook page is full of stupid app invites.

10:54AM: Chris -We have like a million users but we also have a lot of smaller apps, we’re just focused on growth.

10:55AM: Dave – Metrics are over-emphasized by being daily. Look at monthly or weekly over daily.

10:57AM: Jia – The numbers are just bragging rights. In the end there is no connect to that and marketing dollars

10:58AM: Susan – There is a danger to the numbers because they don’t relate to real worth metrics

11:00AM: Jia – We look at Uninstall rates compared to the install rate from the day before

11:00AM: Keith – Uninstall is a trailing metric. If you see a lot of people uninstalling you should have seen that coming way before.

11:00AM: Chris – Make profiles very engaging. That converts to a lot of adds.

11:00AM: Dave McClure – Invites for the sake of invite sake should be related to interaction. Kiss me compared to DodgeBall- one says You kiss someone or you Hit someone… the notification is for the person on the receiving end of the action. Focus on that to keep away from spaminess rating.

11:02AM: Jia- There are only three clicks and then you get blocked so you need to be careful to not get a high spaminess rating. It’s dangerous to not listen to your users and get it set.

11:03AM: Jia – Notifications sit there forever so if you get blocked (your app) and then you go and unblock you’ll get blocked right away because your notications are still out there.

11:04AM: Jia – “Outside of the US on Facebook means UK and Canada… no seriously”

11:05AM: Susan Wu – “If you want to develop internationally wait until Hi5 releases their app platform”

11:06AM: Jia – Google is good for page views, for analytics, tracking and logging stuff on your database

11:07AM: Dave – With Google, you can log events via Javascript, but Facebook doesn’t allow for that.

11:09AM: Jia – “We’re going to focus like a laser we go full blast” I have no clue what this is in reference to… he just said it.

11:10AM: Jia -5 Biggest Channels for spreading- Name of your App, Mini Feed, Profile Action, Default Profile Action… Name should be entirely descriptive, don’t put your company name in it.

11:12AM: Chris – Initially we named our app Hot Girl because we thought it would get guys to add it

11:12AM: Susan Wu – what’s the size of your dev team and size?

Chris - we have 5 guys and 4 million users on Facebook

Jia: -5 or 6 people development

Dave – 25 teams of 3

Keith -2 full time, 3 part time… 3 million users.

11:15AM: Chris – 1 person devoted to an app is the way to go

Susan – That’s it for the panel!

Ami Vora senior platform manager is on stage talking about Facebook… big surprise. Here’s the basics of her presentation:

- We’ve got 49 million active users with rapid growth
- New growth is from 25+ and international users
- International growth: over half are out of college
- UK and Canada battle for 2nd place after US
- #6 most trafficked website

This seems like mostly Facebook propaganda… SOCIAL GRAPH!

Social Graph -is the most accurate digital mapping of real life interaction. Sounds like they’re big Star Trek fans…. “WE ARE CLONING THE WORLD IN A COMPUTAR!!!”. She’s showing tagging photos and how it changes pictures into social information and social interaction.

Tagging lets more and more people can see that photo. Only the people interested can see that photo. Value of social graph to events. Facebook has events way higher then Evite 30m to 11m… Oooo punch in the face to Evite. Way to go Facebook.

11:40AM: She’s going through the same spiel that Zuckerberg did at F8. Same pictures and everything. Either she has the exact same vision and understanding of Facebook as Zuckerberg… or he made her presentation.

If you’re reading this live… leave a comment. Otherwise I’m starting up Snes9x and gonna play some mario.

Monetizations

-relation with ad networks
-fb fund
(her list was longer than that)

FBFund-Lower Barrier to entry, small no-equity grants, right of first refusal

I’m just going to take pictures of her presentation from this point on… she’s basically just saying what’s on the slide… not exactly. I mean she’s a good presenter but I don’t think I’m adding anything by reporting live.

My Laptop Battery is out. I’ll update tonight after the conference.

Andrew W. Meyer, an undergraduate Journalism student at the University of Florida asked some very hard questions to former presidential candidate, John Kerry during one his speeches at the University. Some of them included why John Kerry did not insist on having President Bush impeached. Meyer also asked what it meant that John Kerry and George Bush were both Bonesmen, members of secret organization, Skull and Bones. The microphone was then cut off from Meyer and then the police officers moved in. Meyer resisted arrest and was eventually dragged near the exit and was “tased” with a stun gun while Meyer screamed, “don’t tase me, bro!”

The video of the entire incident became extremely viral on the Internet within the matter of a couple days. “The Meyer arrest video has received 2.6 million views and almost 40,000 new comments since Monday [within 2 days],” stated Wired. People have even created mash-ups for the video. The most creative I have seen so far is a mash-up of the incident with M.C. Hammer’s Can’t Touch This:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzkd_m4ivmc[/youtube]

This parody got over 600,000 views in about a month and one week.

What makes a video like the one above so viral? When watching the above video, you can easily find yourself laughing, but at the same time think, “Oh my God, that really happened, I cannot believe the police actually tased him. That’s police brutality right there.” As optimistic human beings, we don’t want to be constantly thinking about negative things that happen in the media… Fortunately for us, the Internet is clever. It helps us make light out of serious situations. And the expression uttered from young Andrew’s mouth, “Don’t tase me, bro” provided the perfect comic material to accentuate that cleverness.

The role that the Internet played has made Meyer happy though. “While Meyer was incarcerated, state investigators say the jail recorded two phone calls in which Meyer ‘appears to sound elated that the arrest has occurred and at one point states that he is happy this has happened.’ They spent a lot of time talking about all the “media exposure the incident has generated,’ the investigators say.” And the police that were involved in the incident were all reinstated. Meyer even told the police officers that what they were doing wasn’t wrong when being driven to jail.

I place Meyer in the YouTube Hall of Shame along with LonelyGirl15 and Chris Crocker.

“I feel like I’m taking crazy pills! I invented the piano key necktie, I invented it!” yelled Mugatu at the audience of his Derelicte campaign centered around professional male model, Derek Zoolander. For some reason, reading about Eric Schmidt’s reaction on whether there is a Google phone reminded me of the aforementioned scene from Zoolander. When questioned about the phone, Schmidt said “As you know I’m on the board of Apple. I’m using the iPhone.” Overbidding for tech companies apparently upsets Schmidt too, but suave Sergey Brin calms him down [Source: Forbes]. If the Governator heard one of the highest paid CEOs in California talks like this, I have no doubt in my mind that Schmidt would be called a girlie man for such a comment and the Governator would then proceed to pump him up.

The purpose of my blog post however isn’t to stigamatize Eric Schmidt though. It is to question the purpose of these exclusive advertisement deals. When I think of the word exclusive, I believe that it means “not shared” or “not divided” with others. This is why Google paid $900 million for exclusive MySpace advertising rights and $1 billion for powering AOL search. Google also has an exclusive advertising partnership with CNN and Friendster as well. A lot of Google’s money is also going towards the Mozilla Foundation to power browsers such as FireFox. That is a lot of partnerships Google has and a lot of money has been paid to attain such partnerships.

Therefore Microsoft needed this Facebook deal and needs the deal that it has with Digg… “We’ve signed on Microsoft as our new partner to sell and serve the ads on Digg. It’s a deal similar to the one Facebook signed with Microsoft last year,” wrote Kevin Rose on the Digg Blog in July 2007.

I saw Google Ads on Digg today though. And this makes me question the word exclusive. Is Digg being neglected by Microsoft and this is why Google Ads were not removed yet? Is it a simple mistake on Digg developer’s part? Did the Microsoft-Digg deal actually happen? And what is with all these damn Digg shouts I’m getting?! Why is it that I’m getting poked, shouted at, and superpoked by all the web companies in Silicon Valley for crying out loud?

Information Source:
[1] Barron’s Tech Trade Daily: Google Analyst Day: CEO Eric Schmidt