Who Will Be the Next Steve Jobs?

Source: FoxNews.com
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/10/07/next-steve-jobs

1. Mark Pincus
Have you played Farmville? Then you already know the work of Mark Pincus, the CEO and co-founder of a San Francisco start-up called Zynga that has made a killing with Facebook apps. According to an SEC filing, about 232 million people play Zynga games routinely. This past summer, the Wall Street Journal valued the five-year-old company at a hefty $15 billion to $20 billion. Pincus is a social marketing genius with a broad smile, bright ideas and plenty of charisma.

2. Caterina Fake
Fake has a long history of innovation -- her entrepreneurial record in Silicon Valley is legendary. She helped launch the site Flickr.com in 2004, which paved the wave for other Web 2.0 services that allow user contributions, tagging (to make images easier to find) and discussion over content. (The site was sold to Yahoo! in 2005. Her latest project, called Hunch.com, goes a step further, allowing users to share their preferences and create an on-going recommendation system for books, movies, or just about anything you can find on the Web.

3. Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg has the same golden aura and visionary outlook of Jobs. The CEO and co-founder of Facebook said during a recent Facebook tech conference that his company stands at “the intersection of technology and social issues,” so he’s prone to make grand statements. His main contribution is building what's become a second Internet of sorts, a safe and mostly secure haven for storing your digital life: photos, conversations, news and more. The company is steadily closing in on 1 billion users on the network -- all of this, and the guy is only 27.

4. Jon Rubenstein
Born a year after Steve Jobs, in 1956, Jon Rubenstein worked at Apple up until 2006. According to Rob Enderle, a consumer analyst, Rubenstein was being groomed to replace Steve Jobs. He even has the same knack for creating a “reality distortion field” at product launches. Rubenstein helped create the original iPod but eventually left Apple for Palm. His efforts to create a new smartphone interface called WebOS fell flat: the company was eventually sold to HP. Still, there’s signs he will rise to prominence from within HP as a tech executive.

5. Marissa Meyer
Named one of the 50 most powerful woman by Fortune Magazine, Marissa Meyer has a bright tech future. A vice president at Google, this well-liked visionary is also the “face” of the company: She's said to have created the basic building blocks for the Google.com and Gmail interfaces. Meyer is well-spoken, chats easily with press and has a upbeat personality.

6. Dean Kamen
The inventor of the Segway, Kamen has the bright spark of the entrepreneur about him. And he's clearly got "that vision thing": When he invents something, it takes a while for people to realize how innovative it is. The Segway is still an uncommon sight on sidewalks, but lately he has worked with science foundations for kids, invented alternative engines and founded a research institute.

7. Larry Page and Sergey Brin
The co-founders of Google have a youthful exuberance about technology and a penchant for inventing products everyone uses. Even the mission statement at Google is far-reaching: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Charles King, an IT analyst at PUND-IT, says the two founders did more than just create a search engine -- they invented (or at least popularized) the idea of using the Web for data processing and storage.

8. Tony Hseih
Here’s a name you might not know, unless you've read his best-selling book about entrepreneurship, "Delivering Happiness." In the book, the founder of Zappos.com -- a shoe retailer now owned by Amazon -- makes a case for pleasing customers by making a company all about customer service. Hseih’s greatest gift is in communicating ideas, something that served Steve Jobs well throughout his career.

9. Michael Dell
A wild card pick, Michael Dell is a successful entrepreneur and visionary who started Dell in 1984. He’s older than Zuckerberg, who was born in 1984, and his contributions in tech have more to do with enterprise computing (the servers that run in a company), IT services (helping a business run efficiently) and direct marketing to consumers. His time may finally come now that HP has pulled out of the PC business.

7 Formerly Popular Sites that Are Dying

Indications are that Slashdot, Blogger, Digg and other sites are on their way out.
John Brandon, FoxNews.com
Thu Aug 25, 2011
http://news.discovery.com/tech/seven-popular-website-dying-110825.html

Today's hot new website is tomorrow's old news.

Sunny days sometimes turn dark and dismal. A shirt that looked good on the rack at Target now sits in the bargain bin at Goodwill. And, that new car with the Hemi engine and the third-row backseat? It now drives like a crusty tank.

The same is true of websites. What seemed so fresh when you first registered now seems like a ghost town. What happened? According to Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg, site visitors routinely check the door to see if anyone else is leaving for better services. Like lemmings, they can pull up stakes and leave in a heartbeat. (Facebook, are you listening?) All you can hear are the crickets.

1. Gawker.com

This popular gossip site's traffic has dropped 75 percent this year, according to Compete, and has wallowed in its own bad press over the years: cuts in freelancer budgets, a stalker map that showed the location of celebs, and several site changes. At the same time, tech sister-site Gizmodo has risen in the ranks, growing views by 10 percent this year.

2. Chatroulette.com

Sometimes, it’s hard to say whether a Web site is actually dying. Chatroulette.com is a site that lets you chat with a stranger; sometimes, the stranger is naked. Visitor counts are on the rise again, hovering around 1 million after a 25 percent drop this year, per Compete.com. The site went live in late 2009, and Wired wrote about it early last year. Andrey Ternovskiy from Russia created the site when he was 17. What has died out is the press coverage: the tech media is not touching the site anymore. Most critically: the site offers nothing extra beyond what you can do on Skype. “Chatroulette was a fad, an interesting one for a while, but was invaded by male exhibitionists, and most people aren't into that sort of voyeurism,” says Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies (http://www.ndpta.com/).

3. Digg.com

Statistics don’t lie -- they just help explain the mystery. Digg.com started out in 2004 as the brainchild of San Francisco whiz-kid Kevin Rose and allowed visitors to “digg” a link so that everyone could see what was popular. In the past year, the site has been bleeding users by the boatload. There were 8 million visitors in January; this month, there were only about 3 million, per Compete.com. That’s a 60 percent drop. Competitor Reddit, which has maintained an interest level, is not so ad-centric. But the real killer is Twitter, which has become a link aggregator and social medium. Kay agrees: many people find their Web links on Facebook these days.

4. MySpace.com

You would think MySpace would have gotten the message by now: we don’t like ugly banner ads that fill the page, and a consistent user interface is more appealing to most than one that allows crazy customizations. MySpace had 30 million visitors in July, per Compete.com, but Facebook squashed them like a bug with 150 million. The real story: MySpace had 64 million visitors in last year in July. That’s a 54 percent drop. Gartenberg says the drop is almost inexplicable: users just gave up on visiting. Kay argues that the brand was somehow tarnished and uses antiquated technology.

5. Bebo.com

Going from 2M users to just 600,000 in one year might seem like a crushing blow. But consider this: AOL bought the upstart social network in 2008 for $850 million. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, AOL sold it for just $10 million last year. So what happened? This one is a mystery. Kay says that there is no real explanation, because the site offers similar services to Facebook and even Tumblr.com.

6. Salon.com

One of the oldest and most-beloved online magazines, Salon.com has sunk like a rock lately, losing about one million regular visitors over the past year, per Compete.com, a 37 percent decline. Once again, there is no reasonable explanation for the sharp decline, but there are a few clues. The user-hemorrhaging started almost immediately last November when the main editor, Joan Walsh, took a back-seat to write a new book. Many online magazines have struggled to balance free content with paid services, and Salon tends to be a little ad heavy at times. Kay says Salon has had a hard time competing with classier mags like The New Yorker.

7. Blogger/Typepad

Blogging is dead – or at least it has shifted to another medium. Now, instead of typing several pages worth of material, most Web users just tap in a 140-character sentiment on Twitter. “Long-form” blogging is not as popular, and we all know the jokes about the blogger in his parent’s basement. Sites like Blogger.com and TypePad.com have declined considerably of late, dropping about 25 to 30 percent in user visits per Compete.com. Granted, some have discovered the streamlined blogging tool WordPress.com, which has enjoyed steady growth the past few years.

8. Slashdot.org

Sadly, one of the best tech sites on the Web has seen declining user involvement. Started as a home project focused mostly on computer tech, the site grew to almost one million users back in 2008. Quantcast.com shows a bar graph that looks like a ski slope: user counts dipped down to just over 100,000 in April, although the latest counts are in the 500,000 range.

What the Rise of Google+ Says About Facebook

Google's new social network is a hit, but its sudden popularity may have more to do with the missteps of its predecessor. Peter Pachal
August 13, 2011
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2391038,00.asp

When Google debuted its social network, this time for real, this time for really real, about six weeks ago, it was big news. Once Google+ arrived, many wondered whether or not a true Facebook rival was finally here. People focused on features, apps, APIs, and Google's potential to scale to measure whether this thing would ever be a real Facebook rival, or another dud, like Google Buzz.

While all those things are all important, there's another factor at work in the rise of Google+, which, by most measures, has been incredible. And that's Facebook. More specifically, the things about Facebook that annoy and frustrate its users. When PCMag put the question to readers, "Will you ditch Facebook for Google+," a whopping 50 percent said they would. Even if most of those who answered yes don't actually end up quitting Facebook, that statistic illustrates a general frustration with the service that's probably familiar to anyone who's on it.

Facebook has been annoying its users probably since its inception. Now, every piece of software has its problems. Some users of iPhoto might be annoyed that it doesn't have built-in integration with Snapfish. Twitter users may not like that a direct message looks almost identical to an @reply (Anthony Weiner certainly doesn't). That's normal. Facebook's issues go deeper, though. Facebook's integration into our lives is so personal, so far-reaching, that when it does something users don't like, irritation can quickly become outrage.

There have been numerous cases of Facebook making some kind of of change to its features, users responding with an uproar, and then Facebook proceeds to make the change anyway. A good example is friend lists, which were recently replaced with Groups. Facebook gave its users lists, noted that (after a while) only 5 percent of users actually used them, and then took them away.

"I know that they say only 5 percent of users really cared about that feature, but they cared about that feature a lot," says Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com, Facebook app developer, and an self-described unofficial Google+ statistician. "In the end, everyone had to comply and go along with all the Facebook changes, some of them pretty radical, because they had no choice."

Unitl now, of course. There have been other social networks since Facebook came on the scene, sure, but Google+ is the only one that has the features, the scale, and—possibly most important—the buzz to be a real Facebook competitor. Until now, quitting Facebook was a difficult prospect. Not necessarily physically difficult (though Facebook does bury how to leave the service on its site), but socially difficult. I personally know at least a half-dozen people who left the network at one time or another only to inevitably return. The reason? Some variation of "All my friends are on it, and I don't want to miss out."

In other words, there was really nowhere to go that offered the same experience, so they returned. But now that there's another place for people to get social online, things could be different the next time someone walks away. Google+ isn't quite the Facebook alternative Google wishes it was, however, since the new service doesn't actually have all your friends on it—yet. While the growth has been extremely rapid, it's still 25 million to Facebook's 750 million.

"Google has a big chicken and egg problem," says social media analyst Lou Kerner. "Nobody's going to use it until people are on it. But that's a problem that all social networks have. But to the degree that anyone can solve it, it's Google."

Even though Google+'s member base is a drop in Facebook's bucket, it's actually a pretty notable drop. Google was selective about whom it let into its private playground when it debuted its social network, making sure the initial users were, in a word, smart. What Kerner sees as a weakness of Google+—that it's been limited more or less to the digital "cognoscenti"—Allen sees as a strength. Google+ is already the cool new thing, and a dynamic population of first-generation users (see the slideshow above) multiplies that perception.

"The geek crowd has fallen in love with Google+," says Allen. "Those first 10 or 20 million people who first jumped into Google+, it's like the cream of the crop in technical and professional circles. I have never seen this kind of online discourse and communication."

In the end, the cool factor could be the one that ultimately matters the most. A couple of months ago, when it looked like Facebook's popularity in the U.S. was starting to wane, I entertained the theory (one of many) that Facebook's time might have come. I dismissed it right away—rightly, since user engagement on the site is still rising—but all endings have a beginning. Facebook, for all its impressive features and vast statistics, not to mention a looming IPO said to be potentially worth $100 billion, just isn't cool anymore. Even Allen says the people he talks to about Facebook say "It feels so much like MySpace."

Cool, almost by definition, isn't quantifiable. But there's virtually no question that Google+ currently has loads of it, and Facebook is running dry. Mark Zuckerberg probably isn't losing any sleep over Google+ just yet, and maybe he's shouldn't given Facebook's collosal size and influence. But he should definitely think twice before pulling the trigger on the next Facebook feature with questionable privacy implications. As soon as Google+ opens its doors fully (it's still invitation-only and limited to users 18 or older), every single Facebook user will have the chance to try something new. And they may decide they like it better.

For more from Peter, follow him on Twitter @petepachal.

Facebook's Phonebook Fiasco

Want to find the phone numbers of all your friends and some strangers, too? Just look inside your Facebook contacts page.
Dan Tynan, ITworld
Aug 11, 2011
http://www.pcworld.com/article/237940/facebooks_phonebook_fiasco.html

Who are all these people, and what are their phone numbers doing on my Facebook contacts page? That’s the question I am now asking.

I have 987 Facebook friends, some of whom I actually know. A handful of them are on my Android phone. Most, if not all, of the contacts inside my mobile phone are now listed in Facebook – as well as numbers for things like the pizza joint down the street, which doesn’t have a Facebook page.

You know how it goes on Facebook – somebody you don’t know asks to be your friend, you look over their friends list, decide they probably aren’t an axe murderer or a Tea Party member, and you say Yes, because Facebook is a fairly low risk, low maintenance connection. And if they prove to be truly annoying you can always block or defriend them later.

The vast majority of these people did not voluntarily give me their phone numbers. Some probably would if I asked, others might decline. But Facebook just gave me all their numbers – no questions asked. Apparently it’s because they elected to share their contact information with the world, so Facebook took the next step and added their info to my list.

Want to see for yourself? Launch Facebook, click Account and then Edit Friends, then select Contacts from the menu on the left. You should see a long list of profile pictures with phone numbers attached.

My Facebook phonebook: Who are all these people?

It gets weirder. There are also people whom I do not know, who are not in my Android phone’s contact list, with whom I share no connection whatsoever and have no friends in common, who are in my Facebook phone book. Now Facebook is asking if I want to friend them. I have no idea why.

And some of them are minors.

Wait, it gets weirder still. As regular readers of TY4NS may remember, I have a few Facebook alias accounts that I use for testing. None of these have their own cell phones or contact lists, so I never imported any contacts to them. Yet these accounts also display the phone numbers of everyone in their respective friends’ lists. So despite what Facebook’s contacts page says, this has nothing to do with using Facebook’s mobile app.

As Swiss developer Kurt Von Moos points out, Facebook has been syncing mobile contacts this way for some time. I’d just never clicked the contacts page before.

He writes: ... with neither your knowledge or consent, [Facebook will] import ALL the names and phone numbers FROM your phone’s address book and upload them to your Facebook Phonebook app ... on Facebook.com, thus storing your private contact numbers on Facebook‘s servers. Once your phone is synced , Facebook will attempt to match the newly uploaded phone numbers to users that have listed the same phone number on their Facebook profile, whether you are friends with them or not.

Why exactly is Facebook storing all of those numbers on its servers? That’s a good question.

The problem: Many people give everyone on Facebook access to their contact information and may not even be aware of it. Freelance coder Tom Scott has created a Web app (called “Evil”) that randomly displays phone numbers unsuspecting Facebook users have made public, along with their profile picture. He blocks out the last three digits of each one, but they are visible on Facebook itself.

My advice: Stop sharing your phone number on Facebook. You can go to Facebook’s Remove Imported Contacts Page to delete the numbers of your friends (though when I tried to do that with one of my dummy accounts, it didn’t do a damned thing). You can go into your Account/Privacy settings, click Customize settings, and change access to your Contact Information so only select people can see your number. Or you can just delete your digits from Facebook and be done with it.

Would you just hand your phone number to a random stranger in a bar or on the street? Probably not. So why are you doing that on Facebook?

TY4NS blogger Dan Tynan’s Facebook phone number is literally a Facebook phone number; don’t dial it unless you enjoy getting an earful of fax noise.

Facebook: We’re Not Giving Out Your Number

Sarah Kessler
8-11-11
http://mashable.com/2011/08/11/facebook-phone-numbers

Facebook has publicly responded to rumors that it is harvesting numbers from mobile phones and then making them public.

The source of the rumors is a misinterpretation of a feature called “Contacts.” When you download Facebook’s mobile app, this feature syncs your phone’s address book with your profile. From then on you can access all of the numbers in your phone from your Facebook profile.

What has made some users uneasy is this: Contacts uses your mobile phone contacts to match your friends’ Facebook profiles with their numbers. If a friend hasn’t included her number on her Facebook profile, it looks as though Facebook has just given you her number when in reality it came from your own phone.

The feature also uses the numbers in your phone’s contact list to search for potential friends on Facebook. If it finds somebody who has posted a number on Facebook that matches one in your phone book, it will suggest that you add them as a friend.

To see the feature in action on your own profile, go to the Accounts tab at the upper right-hand corner, select “edit friends,” and then choose “contacts” from the menu on the left.

A viral Facebook post warned users that Facebook also posts the numbers it finds on your phone to other users’ Contacts tabs. This is not the case, the company said in a post on its wall late Wednesday.

“Our Contacts list, formerly called Phonebook, has existed for a long time,” the statement says. “The phone numbers listed there were either added by your friends themselves and made visible to you, or you have previously synced your phone contacts with Facebook. Just like on your phone, only you can see these numbers.”

While Facebook says it is not sharing phone numbers collected from mobile phones, its ability to populate them in this way is still disturbing to some users, who left a total of about 9,000 comments on the message.

“You should have to opt INTO this feature, rather than have it happen automatically and have to uninstall it,” wrote user Heather Hollowell.

Facebook: Korporate Phone Hackers

If you need another reason to hate FB, here's a little note from Konformist Korrespondent AF on their latest (and probably greatest) outrage, which amounts to a criminal invasion of privacy (of both users and their friends who may want to keep their phone numbers private):
THIS IS NOT COOL!!!

ALL THE PHONE NUMBERS IN YOUR PHONE are now on Facebook. No joke - go to the top right of the screen, click on Account, then click on Edit Friends, go left on the screen and click on Contacts. All phone numbers from your phone (FB friends or not) are published. Please repost this on your Status, so your friends can remove their numbers and thus prevent abuse if they do not want them published.