The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Social Networking: The Future
- Twitter Goes After Twittersearch.com
- Why Is The WikiLeaks Twitter Account Only Following TweetBackup?
- More Details On Skype’s Big Move To The Web
- Yesterday and Today
- In The Future All Music Videos Will Be About Facebook
- The Wikileak China-Google Cables
- Here Comes The Wetware
- Gillmor Gang 12.4.10 (TCTV)
- Friendly, The Hugely Successful Unofficial Facebook iPad App, Goes Free
- TRON: Legacy movie review (TCTV)
- Our Favorite Reviews of 2010
- Google’s Possible “+1″ iPhone App, Facebook Similarities, And Social “Loop” Groups
| Posted: 05 Dec 2010 06:46 AM PST Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part guest post by venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners on “Social Networking: The Past, Present, And Future.” Read Part I and Part II first. This series is an adaptaion of a recent talk Suster gave at the Caltech / MIT Enterprise Forum on “the future of social networking.” You can watch the video here , or you can scroll quickly through the Powerpoint slides embedded at the bottom of the post or here on DocStoc. Follow him on Twitter @msuster. In my first post I talked about the history of social networking from 1985-2002 dominated by CompuServe, AOL & Yahoo! In the second post I explored the current era which covers Web 2.0 (blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook), Realtime (Twitter), and mobile (FourSquare). Is the game over? Have Facebook & Twitter won or is their another act? No prizes for guessing … there’s always a second (and third, and fourth, and fifth) act in technology. So where is social networking headed next? I make eight predictions below. 1. The Social Graph Will Become Portable Right now our social graph (whom we are connected to and their key information like email addresses) is mostly held captive by Facebook. There is growing pressure on Facebook to make this portable and they have made some progress on this front. Ultimately I don’t believe users or society as a whole will accept a single company “locking in” our vital information. Facebook will succumb to pressure and over time make this available to us to allow us more choice in being part of several social networks without having to spam all of our friends again. I know in 2010 this doesn’t seem obvious to everybody but it’s my judgment. Either they make our social graph portable or we’ll find other networks to join. I predict this will come before the end of 2012. 2. We Will Form Around “True” Social Networks: Quora, HackerNews, Namesake, StockTwits Since 2006 I have been lamenting what I see as “the Facebook problem” – they are trying to lump me into one big social network. Nobody exists in one social network. I have the one with my friends where I want to talk about how wasted we were at the party last weekend that I don’t want to share with my family network where I share pictures of the kids with my parents and siblings. I don’t want either of these mixed with the business social network in which I want to maintain the appearance that I’m “all business” and certainly don’t want to see college pictures of me in Mexico floating around. I don’t want to mix my “public network” with my “private networks.” Facebook has jumbled these all together and then tried to bandage it by making groups available. I don’t think this really solves the problem. And young people aren’t stupid – they certainly aren’t as digitally naïve as their elders like to think. To get around all of this jumbling of social graphs they simply create multiple Facebook accounts under pseudonyms or “nom du guerre” for their real discussions and more pristine Facebook accounts for their real names. I wonder how many of Facebook’s 500 million users are created for this purpose? I’ve confirmed this trend with several young people. I believe that people already form topical social networks as evidenced in places like HackerNews or Quora. We are also seeing the growth of social networks around topics of interest like StockTwits for people interested in investing in the stock market. There are new networks forming to try and address the needs of specific social networks such as Namesake that is in its experimental stage but sees a world in which people want to network outside of Facebook. 3. Privacy Issues Will Continue to Cause Problems: Diaspora Facebook made a deal with us that our social network was private. When they jealously watched the rise of Twitter they decided that it should be made more public, but that wasn’t the bargain we made when we signed up in the first place. If I were Facebook I would have simply created two places where you could network, Facebook “private” and Facebook “open.” The latter product could have competed directly with Twitter and could have had an asymmetric follow model. Sure, we would have had to choose which followers to have in that separate timeline and they wouldn’t have gotten all the synergies that they have by just lumping them together. But if they would have done it this way they never would have crossed the ethical lines that they did and we could all just love Facebook in stead of our love-hate relationships. I’m still there daily to see pictures of my nieces & nephews – but I never connect more broadly with anybody in the business community. So 95% of my social networking time goes to Twitter. I know most people aren’t troubled by the loosening of their information – but I believe that’s because most people don’t understand it. What I realized in working with so many startup technology firms is that even if you don’t give permission to third-party apps to access your information much of it is available anyways as long as somebody you’re connected to is more promiscuous with third-party apps. Also, all of those “Facebook Connect” buttons on websites are awesome for quickly logging in, but each gives those websites unprecedented access to your personal information. I believe that privacy leaks will cause a longer-term backlash against misusing our information but in the short-term not enough people understand the consequences to be alarmed. Diaspora was created in direct response to the growing concerns about Facebook privacy and lock-in. Whether or not Diaspora will take off is anybody’s guess. But a lot of people would love to see them or similar players emerge. 4. Social Networking Will Become Pervasive: Facebook Connect meets Pandora, NYTimes As our social graph becomes more portable I believe that social networking will become a feature in everything we do. You can already see it slipping into services like Pandora where my social graph instantly appears and my friends’ musical tastes are displayed without my knowing this would happen. On NY Times I’m getting recommended articles by friends and I didn’t explicitly turn this feature on. This trend of social pervasiveness will continue. 5. Third-Party Tools Will Embed Social Features in Websites: Meebo One thing that is obvious to me is that while many websites want to have Facebook Connect log-ins to know more about you, they don’t really know what to do with you once they have that information. They’re mostly now thinking about serving demographically targeted ads to you, but that’s not very interesting. Third-party software companies will start to offer features to websites to actually drive social features. This will take a few years but players such as Meebo are already innovating in this category though their toolbar. 6. Social Networking (like the web) Will Split Into Layers: SimpleGeo, PlaceIQ One of the most interesting trends in the last few years has been watching the Internet split into layers. At the bottom end of the stack is storage (S3) and processing (EC2). At the top end is the business logic created by startups and established technology companies. I’m going to write a whole post on BothSid.es in the next few weeks on the layering of the Internet and the most important layer that will emerge in the next few years. We know that the layering of the PC era led to huge innovation at each layer in the stack and I expect the same to continue to emerge on the Internet. But for now suffice it to say that we’re already seeing this happen in social networks. One interesting layer is the “mapping layer” that is emerging in mobile social networks. If every startup had to figure out the locations of every business, what type of business they were and where they were located on a map we’d have very few startups. SimpleGeo is designed with the idea that startups can create new mobile products without having to each build their own mapping functionality. This is an awesome trend and will further lower the cost of startup development. I predict that SimpleGeo will do well in the mapping layer but I see more innovative companies emerging at the data layer. And there are other companies racing to create horizontal platforms. One I saw recently was PlaceIQ. Their goal is to create a horizontal platform that allows marketers or developers to know a lot more about the geo-locations and not just the specific businesses / points-of-interest. They’re capturing information about the demographics of map tiles, levels of LBS activity, what certain zones are known for (i.e. romantic spot, financial district) and want to make this available to others. 7. Social Chaos Will Create New Business Opportunities: Klout, Sprout Social, CoTweet, awe.sm, (next gen) Buzzd The explosion of data is creating opportunities just in the management of the data in and of itself. Once we’re uber-connected and getting information online from people we’ve only met online we need to know more about the “authority” of the people we’re following. Enter Klout, a service that tracks the influence of individuals in social networks. It can be imported into other products (e.g. StockTwits) where you really want to know more about the person giving you advice. We know that Twitter is leading to customer service opportunities for businesses but the opposite is also true. If you don’t manage what is said about you in social networks it could be detrimental. Products such as Sprout Social and CoTweet are emerging to help businesses better track and communicate with their customers and leads. Products like awe.sm (I’m an investor) will help you manage the efficacy of your social media marketing campaigns. And one of the cooler new products that will emerge in 2011 is being created by Nihal Mehta, who has pivoted from his previous company Buzzd, but I’m sworn to secrecy on what he’s up to until he releases it publicly. I saw the product recently in New York and loved it. It will address the world of what happens when businesses and consumers are increasingly mobile & social. 8. Facebook Will Not be the Only Dominant Player I know that in 2010 it seems ridiculous to say anything other than “Facebook has won—the war is over” and I know that it feels that way right now. Facebook is so dominant it is astounding. In a complete return to where we all began with AOL—the world is “closed” again as Facebook has become this generation’s walled garden. When you’re on Facebook you’re not on the Internet—you’re on the InterNOT. It is an amazing service and I use it regularly myself (although much less than I use Twitter). But it makes me laugh to now see so many brands advertising their “fan pages” as they did their AOL Keywords back in the day. Plus ça change … Well, here’s a quick history primer that may change your mind:
Social Networks: Past, Present & Future        
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| Twitter Goes After Twittersearch.com Posted: 05 Dec 2010 05:06 AM PST Twitter late last week filed a UDRP complaint, notably its first ever since the company was founded, in an effort to obtain ownership over the (currently parked) domain name twittersearch.com – as you can see here. Obviously, Twitter is right to do this, since the domain is likely to cause some confusion, although we should note Twitter hasn’t managed to secure a trademark for the term ‘twitter’ in the United States so far, despite multiple attempts. Update: my bad, they haven’t had any success in getting a trademark on the word ‘tweet’, but they do own the ‘twitter’ trademark. Twitter of course has a popular search product that bears the obvious name Twitter Search, so I’d do the exact same thing if I were them. That said, they took their sweet time to make the move – twittersearch.com was first registered back in March 2007. A quick WHOIS search reveals that the owner of the contested domain name has opted to hide his or her identity, and the domain name is currently inactive, leading to a placeholder page riddled with ads. Next up, twitter-search.com?        
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| Why Is The WikiLeaks Twitter Account Only Following TweetBackup? Posted: 05 Dec 2010 01:31 AM PST
Perhaps WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is wondering the same thing. Which would explain why only account @WikiLeaks is following at the moment is @TweetBackup, a service that allows you to back up your tweets daily. Tweetbackup, run by Backupify, requires that you follow it in order to use it, which means that Assange has no other choice but to follow if he wants Tweetbackup to preserve his tweets in case of a takedown. It’s interesting to note that by some kind of default Assange, who has all eyes on him at the moment, is basically advertising one service and coincidentally one that protects your Twitter data in cases of deletion. I’ve contacted Twitter as to whether they would take down the @WikiLeaks account under any circumstances and have yet to hear back. In the meantime TweetBackup representative Charlie Ungashick tells TechCrunch that they haven’t tried to DM Assange, despite being the only people in the world who have the power to do so. I’m amazed at their powers of resistance and/or indifference.        
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| More Details On Skype’s Big Move To The Web Posted: 04 Dec 2010 07:50 PM PST
Now we’ve heard more details from one source about what this new service may entail. We’re still working to firm up the specifics, but here’s what we’ve gathered so far: According to our source, Skype is hoping to launch its web-based service in the first quarter of next year. The launch will likely include integrations on multiple partner sites — Skype is gunning for some big partners, and we hear that LinkedIn has been in discussions about a possible integration (LinkedIn declined to comment). As for the web service itself, we hear it will actually be based on browser plugins — this isn’t a full HTML5 solution (note that Google took a similar approach with its own web implementation of Google Voice earlier this year). Skype will promote the plugins to users of its existing native apps. To monetize, we hear that Skype will be offering a number of premium features, which may include SMS functionality and advanced telephony options. Partner sites that integrate Skype will get a revenue split for the users that they drive toward these premium features. It is possible that these premium features may not be slated for the initial release and will roll out later. Finally, in addition to the hiring boost we reported earlier today, Skype is also planning to bolster its growth in these areas by acquiring smaller companies. Obviously VoIP service is going to play an increasingly important role in the coming years, and it sounds like if Skype has its way, it will become a standard feature on many of the web’s most popular sites. We’ll keep digging for more.        
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| Posted: 04 Dec 2010 04:52 PM PST
When the show is published to the Ooyala Backlot software, a number of different versions are rendered. The show works on the Web, works on the iPhone, but on the iPad plays the TechCrunch logo bumper and an ad, then goes black. Now, I'm sure that the engineers will shortly fix this, and if they don't you can go to the YouTube version which works just fine. But my larger, or simpler point is that not supporting the iPad as the base case in today's environment is ludicrous. I blame the content cartel, Comcast, the FCC, Barnes & Noble, Adobe, and anybody else who is attempting to derail the overturning of the traditional media channels. The content cartel is really on our side, believe it or not. Mostly because they tremble in fear of being RecordBiz 2.0. They know full well the iPad is their friend, because once NetFlix trains us that there is no window long enough to protect Hollywood from today's shows being compared to last year's releases, the jig is up. It's Microsoft's problem with Windows and Office updates: they're competing with themselves, and the only reason we buy the next one is because it comes preloaded on a new machine. That's why the Beatles own the Top 50 on iTunes. The Beatles play on my iPad. Comcast doesn't care about the iPad but that's because they are acquiring NBC which is paid by Microsoft to not care. They released an iPad app that lets me control my DVRs but doesn't let me watch them. I can get NBC shows on my iPad by renting them from iTunes, so I don't blame NBC, just Comcast. The FCC is toothless, Barnes & Noble gives me no reason whatsoever to leave them even a pity tip as I go to the Kindle and iBooks stores to download iPad product, and Adobe…. Ooyala will fix the problem, but Adobe is the problem. As the guy said in the old movie, what we have here is a failure to communicate. What part of yes fails to penetrate the minds of those who see video as the next bubble? Yes, we want video, we want it streamed, we want access to it even if we never stream it because then we can delete it off of our iTunes server to free up enough OS space to upgrade to the next version of the infrastructure. The Chicken Littles announcing that this streaming thing is gonna use up all the Cloud's free space have always and continue to be wrong. OK, well, then we're gonna have to charge you. Fine. What part of how much do you not get? 3 or 400 for Google TV, no thanks. A hundred for Apple TV, sure. Now that I've been able to AirPlay into my bedroom, I'll buy another one for my new stereo home entertainment system in the living room and even buy the new Hendrix box set on iTunes while I'm standing on line in Starbucks. Comes with interactive liner notes so I don't mind saving the money for the analog box set that I can't buy anywhere. Apple TV shows us we will save up enough money from opting out of clueless suppliers and spend it on what this streaming architecture will cost. I am diverting my acquisition of DVR-constrained TV shows to rental and preferably streaming of socially filtered results. I am moving to iTunes from CDs and BlueRay, to Bluetooth content streaming from radio, to the networks that speak iPad as well as all the rest. Just look at the ABC app; fully one third of the shows my family and I watch (All My Children, The View, Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice, you get the idea) and all the arguments about saving them on the living room screen are gone. The kids got iPads from the grandparents for the holidays, and now I can blast Hendrix and Neil Young and Dylan outtakes guilt free. When this sooner than later adds up to real money, the other networks will ante up. Android and Chrome will help, but people will be in those markets as a way of competing with iOS product, not instead of. Comcast will still be useful just because of the economics of that cable coming into the home. But if they keep the iPad at arms length they will provide competitors with an on-ramp to their customers. It's not so much cable-cutting that is the threat; it's winnowing the valuable product down via social clouds to the point where the accumulated revenue makes it viable to justify the investment in iOS UI and the supposed wrath of the cartel. It's 3:19 now and still no Gang joy on the iPad. But I can tell you that when John Biggs asks whether it's going to go all streaming, there's no part of yes to misunderstand. Every time a hard drive crashes, a little bit of us dies. Pictures, stolen moments, the soundtrack of our lives. Facebook thrives because we trust the Cloud, not the company. Gmail we trust because without redundancy they have no product. NetFlix we trust because we know we're not missing much no matter how long Comcast lengthens the window. It's not clear how NetFlix/Level 3 will fare against the studios' fear of being Appled, but then again the failure of the GroupOn deal suggests we're seeing a negotiation not a war. The Google strategy appears to be about acquiring the GroupOn salesforce as a way of staffing its +1 social product. Absorb the new social advertising model, they figure. The studios, afraid of iTunes, may realize it's better to absorb the NetFlix streaming model with variable pricing just like the Beatles waited for $1.29 and the holiday selling season to jump. After years of embargoed Beatles recordings in the media, those Apple Beatle ads look and sound fresh and alive. Yesterday suddenly doesn't seem so far away.        
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| In The Future All Music Videos Will Be About Facebook Posted: 04 Dec 2010 04:30 PM PST
Actually the increased prevalence of the social network in cultural artifacts comes as no surprise, as people now spend more time on Facebook then anywhere else online, clocking in a whopping a 41.1 billion minutes spent last quarter. I’m just wondering when this Facebook music video thing, like the popularity of cellphones, will eventually hit the US. Extremely silly “Facebook Love” lyrics below.
h/t Europopped        
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| The Wikileak China-Google Cables Posted: 04 Dec 2010 03:33 PM PST A week ago when the first Wikileak cables started coming out, the New York Times reported that some of them shed some more light on the Chinese hacking attacks on Google which led to its withdrawal from operating in China proper. But the actual cables were not released until today. The NYT describes the cables at length in another article today. But the underlying cables are hard to find, so I’ve reproduced the four main ones below. I found three of them on Wikileaks, and the other on on the New York Times’ own Wikileaks documents page. It appears from the cables that Google’s troubles in China were going on for years, but it got into particular trouble in 2009 when its Chinese site, Google.cn, wasn’t blocking pornographic sites to the level the Chinese government required. At that time, Google also had a link to its main Google.com site on Google.cn, which the Chinese government didn’t like either. In particular, one Politburo member, identified by the New York Times as Li Changchun, “discovered that Google's worldwide site is uncensored, and is capable of Chinese language searches and search results. XXXXXXXXXXXX allegedly entered his own name and found results critical of him. He also noticed the link from google.cn's homepage to google.com, which XXXXXXXXXXXX reportedly believes is an ‘illegal site.’” The Chinese government then told China’s three main telecom companies to stop doing business with Google. The cables also describe denial of service attacks on Google’s sites in China, and concerns dating back to 2006 about Google Earth images of sensitive government facilities. Cable 09BEIJING1336, Google China Paying Price For Resisting Censorship, May 18, 2009
Cable 09BEIJING1957, GOOGLE CLAIMS HARRASSMENT BY CHINESE GOVERNMENT, July 12, 2009
Cable 06BEIJING23571, PRC CLAIMS HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGERY ON GOOGLE EARTH, November 7, 2006
And this one from the NYT (with redactions): Chinese Government Singles Out Google
       
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| Posted: 04 Dec 2010 12:46 PM PST Throw out your touchscreens, kibosh your Kinects: thought-controlled computing is the new new thing. Brain-computer interface technology has been simmering for years, and seems finally ready to bubble out of research labs and into the real world. Earlier this year, friends of mine at the Toronto art space Site3 built a thought-controlled flamethrower, for fun. (Don’t you hate how it’s always the friends you least want to have the power to project torrents of flame with a flick of their mind who always get it?) Toronto has long been a hub for brain computing, in part because legendary cyborg Steve Mann is a University of Toronto engineering professor. Mann also cofounded the thought-controlled computing consultancy InteraXon, which built the neural installation at this year’s Olympics. Both InteraXon and my pyromaniacal friends use brainwave-reading headsets made by Neurosky (whose promise was noted by TechCrunch five years ago) and Emotiv. Today’s sets handle much more than mere alpha/beta wave measurement: Emotiv’s, in particular, can track eye motion, facial expressions, emotional state, and even directional thoughts. The potential applications go way beyond flambés. Ariel Garten, InteraXon’s CEO, ticks off a laundry list that includes advance warning of epileptic seizures, headset-controlled airline entertainment systems, and a company that approached her hoping to build a thought-controlled welding system. Meanwhile, Columbia University’s Paul Sajda has scored $4.6 million from the Department of Defence for his EEG cap and machine-learning algorithms used to improve image recognition and classification. Gaming is also a big market (making the Kinect seem so five minutes ago) but the ability to connect neural headsets and mobile devices is even more interesting. Garten—who will be speaking at Le Web next week, and at CES in January—sketches a compelling vision of stylish headsets growing more common than Bluetooth earpieces today, and their users interacting with phones, kiosks, and other devices without so much as twitching a lip or finger. InteraXon, which is self-funded and profitable, already connects neural headsets to iOS devices over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Both Neurosky and Emotiv have made SDKs available for developers, and have app stores up and running. Their futures look ripe with potential—until and unless someone like Apple decides to play in this space. iMind, anyone? We’re still a long way from real wetware (direct brain-computer connections) . . . but last week an NYU professor had a digital camera implanted in his head. It’ll be many years (if ever) before that goes mainstream, but the line between the mind and its tech is growing finer. "It can be a transformational experience," Garten says, of the moment users first don a headset. "For the first time, you’re consciously interacting with your own brain."        
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| Posted: 04 Dec 2010 12:00 PM PST The Gillmor Gang went skinnydipping in the politics and technology of the Streaming Era. Kevin Marks took on the technical discussion, suggesting there is really no difference between downloading and streaming. Of course, he’s absolutely correct. What there is a difference is between the content cartel getting a fivespot per view and a buck a view or a penny a view if you’re one of those guys who are streaming NetFlix endlessly at 8 bucks a month. That would be me, if in fact there was any interesting product on NetFlix after Comcast gets through suing them into oblivion. I got your Net Neutrality right here, pal. Andrew Keen objects to my constant use of the term “cartel”, accusing me of being old as do a stream of Tweets in the chat room. Of course I’m old, enough to know better; why would I still be using FriendFeed? CrunchGear editor John Biggs makes his Gang debut from his Brooklyn lair, hoping that everything will soon come into his broadband connection so he can avoid risking his life going to the movies. And Robert Scoble couldn’t be happier driving around the Bay Area listening to streamcasts of his favorite startups. As he says, we’re just waiting for Hollywood to name its price so we can get it when and where we want it. If Neil Young can have an iPad app, then anything is possible.        
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| Friendly, The Hugely Successful Unofficial Facebook iPad App, Goes Free Posted: 04 Dec 2010 11:12 AM PST
To be clear, there will still be a $0.99 version of Friendly, but the only difference from the new free version is that it won’t have ads. Undoubtedly, most users won’t care about that and will opt for the free version. And the app will rack up even more downloads because 1) again, Facebook doesn’t have an official app and 2) Friendly is a very solid way to use Facebook on the device. “We’re making Friendly for Facebook free, because we want to expand our user base and put Friendly for Facebook in as many people's hands as possible,” Moutran says. The service essentially takes the touch-optimized version of Facebook’s site and wraps it in their own native app wrapper. But this allows them to add more functionality, such as the ability to change fonts and colors. Plus you can browse the web within it and quickly share back to Facebook. You can also easily manage multiple Facebook accounts from the app. The app also brings a native app look, feel, and performance to Facebook. That may not sound like much, but given the usage numbers, it definitely can’t be overlooked. But while Friendly is very good, let’s be honest: if Facebook had their own app, most people would likely use that. People currently searching for “Facebook” on the iPad only have the third-party options — and this has tricked some people. And considering that many of these apps are paid apps, that has cost people money — something which Facebook can’t like too much. So did Facebook pressure Friendly to go free? It doesn’t seem that way. Moutran says that Facebook has been very supportive of what they’ve been doing. “The Facebook Platform team in particular deserves kudos for their around the clock dedication at providing help and guidance to developers on iOS SDK,” he says. Maybe we should take Friendly going free as a sign that an official app is coming? That also doesn’t seem all that likely given Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent words about the possibility. While Moutran declined to talk about their revenue numbers, if you simply take the 500,000 user number and multiply it by the one dollar the app had sold for, you get $500,000 (before Apple takes their 30 percent cut). Of course, Moutran did say the 500,000 is active users, so it’s possible the app has been downloaded quite a bit more, bringing Oecoway even more money. Now they’ll likely have to replace a lot of that money with ad revenue. Will it add up? Who knows, but this move will undoubtedly bring them a lot more users. “We're really excited because Friendly for Facebook has been an extremely successful paid application. It's held the top overall spot for paid applications for more than 40 days, and it's been the top paid social media iPad app since we launched version 1.0. But we want as many people as possible to be able to experience Friendly for Facebook so that's why we are making it free,” Moutran reiterates. That’s great news for Facebook users and iPad lovers alike. You can find the free version of Friendly here. And the paid version here.        
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| TRON: Legacy movie review (TCTV) Posted: 04 Dec 2010 10:30 AM PST
If you do not like movie spoilers, do not click to read more and do not read on, because I’m going to tell you what I think about the movie and I’m going to include some information about it that you might not want to know. I’m not going to give away major plots, because I hate that, but I’m going to go into some of my thoughts on the movie. If you are curious about seeing TRON and don’t mind a tidbit of information, read on. When I saw TRON the first time as a child it opened up my mind to amazing possibilities. The story around Kevin Flynn was ok, but the ideas around being transported to a virtual world where programs were personified by human representations are what really stuck with me. I liked to believe that one day this would be possible. I could have an avatar and I could meet people on the “grid”. In some ways we can do this now through MMORPGs etc., but we’re still aware of our real world surroundings. We can’t truly get lost yet. We can’t feel, smell and taste virtual things. Maybe someday. TRON held a different place in my heart during different periods of my life. As a child, it was just a simple and beautiful thing, but as an adult, I dove deeper into the technology that made it all possible. What TRON achieved in 1982 was ground breaking. From what I understand, it was the first movie to incorporate live action with CGI and hand drawn animation. The results were breath taking. I know you look back at it now and maybe you don’t see it, but you have to somehow use a mental wayback machine to put yourself in the early 80s and imagine it. The animations were rendered on the only PDP-10 in the area using 2MB of RAM. As a young adult, I played TRON at parties with the volume off. We’d watch it in the background and revel at its beauty. When the volume was on, we laughed at the witty and inaccurate technical jokes, but they were endearing. My favorite character was “bit” who only spoke in binary. Yes and No. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes… NO NO NO NO NO! Yes. When IMDB launched, I immediately looked up TRON and saw – “In production TRON 2.0, release date TBD”. I waited and waited. I heard the production was canceled, restarted, canceled, restarted, etc. As technology accelerated and movies like the Matrix & Avatar appeared, it made me hopeful for what they could create with a new TRON. I also love the original Star Wars. When I found out they were making Episode 1, I had extremely mixed feelings. Unlike TRON, I’m not sure Star Wars gets better with improved technology. Part of what made Star Wars so special were the models and limitations of the time. I camped out all night with a friend and we played chess while we waited to see the new Star Wars. I was so disappointed. Jar Jar ruined quite a bit of it for me, but really, if I had to be honest, it wasn’t special anymore. Something was lost. I was too young to realize it then, but those movies were not intended for me. They were intended for a whole new audience and a whole new generation of Star Wars fans that had just recently been born. I wasn’t going to relive my childhood through that movie and I had to move on. So, really, the Matrix is the sequel to TRON in my mind. That’s where you’d take a concept like TRON to a whole new level for adults. The key word being adult. The new TRON, like Star Wars, is for a whole new generation. It is a stand alone movie that needs to be judged on its own. It is a Frankenstein story, where the artist creates a world that is meant to be perfect, but everything goes wrong. The cost is the real and tangible relationship with the outside world. It is also a story about the ethics around artificial intelligence. If the original TRON inspired me the way it did, I wonder what our children will take away from this. Maybe they’ll get the message. So, if the Matrix, Snowcrash, Diamond Age and Avatar are for adults. TRON is the movie for children. It is the introduction to the complex idea of existing in a virtual world by transporting your brain and identity into an electronic form. Think of it as a Madeleine L’ engle book. If you read a Wrinkle In Time as a child, it was an introduction to quantum physics. This is what TRON is. It is a primer for more complex thoughts that require more literature and other movies. The new TRON is absolutely beautiful. The Cirque Du Soliel of movies. You don’t go for the plot at Cirque, you go to see some amazing stuff. You go to see how far we can push the human body and you are astonished by the skill. That’s TRON, old and new. It is a wonder of the human imagination. A virtual wonderland. Even the movie Hackers (another favorite) was like this. If you tried to take that movie seriously and compare it to what was really possible, you’d be disappointed, but if you saw it from the creator’s eyes and how computer people “sound” to people who don’t understand what we’re saying, it made perfect sense. That movie was the re-creation of hearing people talking about a kill -9 on a process. If you asked any hacker what his dream girl might be like, maybe she did ride a motorcycle and skate around on rollerblades. She certainly had the fastest computer which was better than yours and could hack you under the table. That movie was also a work of art. As a bonus for the Unix geeks, there’s some actual *real* Unix stuff in this movie when Sam goes through his father’s history and executes some previous commands. I thought that was pretty cool. Usually movies get this all wrong. I mean, in the Matrix, Trinity took down some power grid using nmap, which is a port scanner. It sure looked cool, but it really didn’t make any sense. “This is Unix. I know this.” – Jurrasic Park One of the members of the TRON team said not to over analyze it and get lost in the world, and that’s my advice as well. Try to become a child again and imagine being a 5-10 year old and being blown away by the light cycle races. Imagine what’s ticking in their mind and what seeds are being planted. The original TRON is responsible for a lot of things that we enjoy today. Daft Punk draws their inspiration from the movie, many people got into technology because of it, movies were inspired by it and so on. After watching the movie, I was left wanting more, which is always a good sign. I felt like they could have given us one hour more of this beautiful world. I didn’t want it to end. That’s what Avatar was for me. The story was basically Pocahontas in space, which really didn’t interest me, but the idea around real living things being driven by a remote host was what really piqued my interest. The creation of a whole new world that I could get lost in, was just amazing. I watched it three times just to see that world and I blocked out what everyone was saying. The new TRON is sexy, the soundtrack is amazing, the world is beautiful, the characters are awesome and the 3D is amazing. I don’t normally recommend that you see anything in 3D, but I wouldn’t see this movie any other way. As a matter of fact, see it on IMAX if you can. Just remember, it is a Disney film. Put your child hat on and let go of being an adult for a while. I think you’ll really enjoy it. If nothing else, you’ll be pining for your very own TRON suit and End Of Line club with your very own Daft Punk to play songs for you. You can view a short TRON: Legacy Featurette below. Plus, watch our interviews with cast and crew Part 1 and 2 (with the original Tron director and more about the fashion) here, and Part 3 and 4 (with Jeff Bridges and Olivia Wilde) here. You can also pledge your allegiance for TRON vs Avatar here. I watched Avatar 3 times, and I’ve pledged to watch TRON at least 4.        
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| Posted: 04 Dec 2010 10:15 AM PST
       
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| Google’s Possible “+1″ iPhone App, Facebook Similarities, And Social “Loop” Groups Posted: 04 Dec 2010 10:09 AM PST
The first is that Google may be testing an iPhone app for +1, which would presumably launch alongside the web variation of the service. One source reports seeing a Google employee’s iPhone with an app called “Loop” on it. This was apparently Google’s social project in native app form. The source says that it looked similar to Facebook and had large portions that were still in development. This is particularly interesting because we have heard that early iterations of Google +1 itself were much more similar to Facebook. But that version was supposedly scrapped in favor of a more all-web-encompassing toolbar approach (at least as it currently stands). So it’s possible that the app is a bit old, or that Google is thinking a bit differently about the social product on mobile devices. The “Loop” name is also interesting because we’ve heard that a big part of +1 is groups, and those groups are apparently called “loops”. The idea is that as you add or remove people from these loops, they’re either “in the loop” or “out of the loop”. Get it? In fact, loops are considered to be such an integral part of the service, that it’s possible that Loop is/was another name Google’s been toying around with for it. That would certainly make the name of the iPhone app make sense. Or perhaps the app is just a certain subset of +1 features that would work better in native app form, rather than on the mobile web. Either way, the location-based app Loopt can’t be happy about the possible name. It’s also believed that Facebook found out that groups (loops) were going to be a key part of Google’s social service, so they went into “lockdown” over the summer to get their new Groups feature out the door — which they did a couple months ago. Undoubtedly, if such a Google +1 app does actually exist, the company has an Android version as well. But as we’ve seen with apps like Google Voice, the search giant isn’t opposed to developing for a rival platform. It’s all about reach. And Google would need something for the iPhone if they want +1 to be successful in the mobile space.        
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Even though Amazon and Paypal have 
Earlier today we broke the news that Skype was ramping up in preparation for new 
As we’re all well aware, Facebook doesn’t offer an iPad app. Well, maybe we’re not all so aware of that. Because Friendly, an unofficial app made by 
Part of the TRON press event included an advance screening of TRON: Legacy. We’ve been under embargo not to review the movie, but someone broke the embargo, so we are no longer going to keep it secret.
Since we broke the news a couple days ago that Google’s secret social project, formerly known as “| You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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