Microsoft May Invest in Facebook At $10 Billion Valuation

Microsoft May Invest in Facebook At $10 Billion Valuation

Salesforce Enters Custom Application Market With Force.com

Salesforce will enter the custom software market next week with the launch of Force (site will go live Monday morning), a new platform that will allow developers to create database driven applications and deploy them as services. So if Salesforce doesn’t offer what you are looking for, and no one has built it for you on Salesforce’s AppExchange, you can simply build it yourself using the Apex framework.

At its core Force competes as a development platform with .NET, Java, etc. But there are also a slew of startups that have focused on allowing people to easily create and deploy database driven applications - DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks, among others. All will take a hit from Force. In fact, this may be sort of game ending for them. Salesforce has its eyes on much bigger fish than those startups.

Any internal process or function that requires custom software may be a candidate for Force. Disney, which has been testing the platform, is using it to manage character (Mickey Mouse, etc.) appearances. EA has built a recruiting application. Bronx School is using Force to manage attendance, performance, etc. Salesforce says they can actually manage the entire school on Force.

Salesforce is also announcing VisualSource, a set of tools that allow developers to build applications for multiple devices (tablets, iphone, etc.) and add HTML, AJAX and Flex to Force applications (making for much nicer looking and more user friendly applications). See the screen shot below for an example user interface.

Pricing is a flat $25/month/user.

Salesforce has always said its about software as a service. Next week, they say they’re deploying the platform as a service with Force. I imagine they’ll find a receptive customer base.

Googlers Get Kinky On Wikipedia

Warning: presume all links in this post are NSFW.

Users of Google registered IP addresses contributed to Wikipedia entries including “Amateur Pornography“, the “List of male performers in gay porn films” and “Mutual Masturbation” according to data pulled from Wikiscanner. Other sexually related edits include the pages for sex show and the talk:#$%^ sex; a particular person is using a computer with a Google IP address to share the details of his sex life with the world.

Another user decided to clean up one Wikipedia entry by correcting the definition to read “”Motherf&$@er means to f&$@ your mother also known as incest,” which of course made the entry that much more clearer.

User’s of IP addresses registered to Google’s Corporate IT Department edited a page pertaining to something called “Breast expansion fetishism” and these two which I won’t name lest I haven’t upset enough people with the language in the post already.

Overall though, people using Google IP addresses are a fairly tame bunch, with no evidence that they have been editing the pages of Google competitors, the story I had initially looked to research. However, there were two edits by people using Google IP addresses to pages relating to Google; the first removes the term Googly from the Google (Verb) Entry, the second bizarrely deletes mention of Google having an office in Ireland.

Justice Department Says ISPs Are Like The Post Office

The U.S. Justice Department has taken a step toward you getting more charges from your ISP. In comments to the FCC today, the Department said imposing Net neutrality regulations could “could deter broadband Internet providers from upgrading and expanding their networks to reach more Americans.”

Chief amongst their examples was that the one of the oldest data delivery systems, the U.S. Postal Service, charges customers differently based on guarantees and speeds of delivery, ranging from bulk mail to overnight. Similarly, the Department believes ISPs who deliver data packages, should be able to offer different levels of service to spread the costs of improving networks.

Net Neutrality proponents counter with a different analogy, pointing out telephone networks have always been neutral to the data transmitted across their wires.

This is good news for telecoms, like by AT&T Inc., Verizon and Comcast, who argue that high-volume uploaders should pay for part of the cost of upgrading internet infrastructure to handle the new load. It’s bad news for the internet companies (Google, eBay, Yahoo ,Microsoft) ISPs have seen get rich off their networks.

However, Telcos caution that they don’t want to charge for access to public sites, but want to offer private Internet-based services with faster speeds for uses such as downloading movies.

Facebook Opens Email Up A Little; I Want More

Facebook opened up their very closed email platform today by allowing users to add normal email addresses in a message. Previously you could only send messages to Facebook friends. Now you can add in others, too.

This is great news for people who use Facebook for most or all of their emailing. But for those of us that use normal email for our day to day business, getting Facebook messages is more of a problem than a feature. That’s because Facebook makes you log on to the site to read messages/emails from your friends. They’ll send a note to your normal email address when a new message comes in, but they make you log on to Facebook to actually read it.

I rarely do that, and have missed some important messages from people trying to contact me. As a next step, I think Facebook should offer to forward the actual messages to an outside email address (and/or provide a password protected RSS feed). Eventually Facebook should offer full POP or IMAP support for their email. They can still restrict it so that you can only receive messages from friends, but at least you could access it from your desktop or web based mail application.

Google Will Be Beaten By Facebook, Mahalo: Scoble

Above is part 3 of a 3 part Robert Scoble video blog series on “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years.” To see the other parts scroll on the player; Part 2 at around the 6 minute mark gets to the main points*.

Essentially Scoble argues that Google is in trouble because they are unable to adapt their algorithms and business model in the face of social search sites such as Mahalo and even Facebook; Techmeme is thrown in for good measure as well. Scoble argues that the search results from sites such as Mahalo will appeal to more people due to their ability to be socially constructed as opposed to Google’s computer generated results.

As much as I think that Jason Calacanis is doing a good job with Mahalo, and that he is creating decent content for those frustrated by current search technologies, I’m not even sure Calacanis would be so bold as to argue that his company is going to kick Google’s butt in four years time.

Scoble though does open the more interesting question: what is the future of search?

I won’t even start linking to the many, many search startups that are trying to answer that question.

Scoble seemingly forgets though that even if Google’s current model doesn’t incorporate social search, there is absolutely nothing stopping Google going out and acquiring one of these companies then incorporating their model within the Google product family. I’m also not convinced that we are yet to see the David to Google’s Goliath, but I could be wrong.

* for what ever reason Kyte insists on showing only the latest video in the embed so I was unable to include Part 2 straight up.

Amazon Fresh Shopping Bag Spotted In The Wild

Finally, pictures are starting to come in of Amazon Fresh, the new Webvan-like grocery delivery service that launched in Seattle last month. What I’d really like to see is a review of the service by someone who lives in Seattle. And a picture of the delivery van everyone keeps spotting. Or even better, just video the whole delivery experience. I have very fond memories of Webvan and I can’t wait until this thing hits silicon valley. I’ll never have to leave my computer again.

Update: Here’s the truck - photo credit to Jeff Sandquist:

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Movable Type’s Version 4.0 Final Release

Movable Type is releasing the final version of their 4.0 platform tonight. We covered the beta, their turn towards open source, and new feature set previously. The new release, no doubt, comes under pressure from the success Wordpress has had as an open source platform. Unfortunately, we’ll still have to wait until later in the year for Movable Types’ open sourced version.

The finalized version includes 50 new features, a component based architecture, a new plugin directory, and some new launch partners. It looks like a solid release that comes with a lot of the functionality Wordpress MU is aiming for. Notably, Boing Boing will be upgrading soon.

We covered the upgraded features in depth before. They included a new installation and upgrade wizard, easier and more powerful template management tools that speed site development, all new default templates and themes, and a completely redesigned user interface focused on streamlining common tasks. You can see a full list here.

However, the release also includes a shift to a component based architecture running on top of a single MT 4 code base. Components will be paid extensions of the platform meant to provide greater functionality out of the box. The first example component will be their enterprise version. Instead running as a separate installation, the enterprise version of the software will run on top of the basic MT 4 code base. It will feature the original enterprise feature set, including LDAP and Oracle support.

They have also released a new community component that beefs up the basic community features. The component adds a ratings system and deeper user profiles. The ratings system consists of post specific user ratings and a buzz feature that tracks the highest rated content. The new profile pages consist of a blog, their latest comments, and recommendations on your site. The infrastructure for these enhancements exist in the basic version, but buying the community component provides them out of the box and comes with support. They plan on releasing more components in the future.

Accompanying the release, Movable Type is launching a new plugin directory. They’ll also have some partners throwing their own plugins into the mix. Partners developing supporting applications and tools for MT4 include HP, Amazon, Sphere, Technorati, Snap, Feedblitz, NewsGator, SimplyHired, SocialText, Fliqz, Box.net, Mpire, Vizu, SodaHead, and Oodle.

MediaWhiz Latest Ad Network For Sale?

, a holding company for a number of advertising networks, may be shopping itself to private equity firms. We are hearing that they are looking for $400- $450 million, which is 2.5 - 3 times estimated 2007 revenues.

MediaWhiz owns a number of ad networks, including two that are long time sponsors of this site (Text Link Ads and Auction Ads). Both were recently acquired by MediaWhiz.

I have an email in to the company for comment.

Ad networks are the hot commodity this year, with AOL, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all making big acquisitions. The size of those deals combined is nearly $10 billion.

Facebook Source Code Leaked

We just received a tip that the source code for the Facebook main index page has been leaked and published on a blog called Facebook Secrets. There are at least two possible ways that the source code got out - the first is that a Facebook developer has sent it out, or the more likely option that a security hole or other method has been used on either one of the Facebook servers or in their source code repository to reveal the code. The blog that published the code only has a single post on it, so it was created exclusively to publish this code - meaning that whoever is behind this both isn’t taking credit for the hole and doesn’t want to be associated with it. While there is no certain way to verify if the code is actually from Facebook, by taking a quick look through the code and by double-checking some paths that have been referenced, we can say with some certainty that this seems to be both real and also a recent version of the main Facebook page.

There are a number of clear ramifications here. The first is that the code can be used by outsiders to better understand how the Facebook application works, for the purposes of finding further security holes or bugs that could be exploited. Since Facebook is a closed source application, without access to the code security holes are usually found through a process of black-box testing, whereby an external party will probe the application in an attempt to work out how the application behaves and to try and find potential race conditions. In closed source applications it is common that developers rely on the closed nature of the application to obfuscate poor design elements and the structure of the application. An attacker getting access to the source code more often than not leads to further security holes being discovered. It is for these reasons that it is often claimed that open source software is more secure than closed source software, since there are many more eyes auditing the code and obfuscation can’t be used as a security measure.

The second implication with this leak is that the source code reveals a lot about the structure of the application, and the practices that Facebook developers follow. From just this single page of source code a lot can be said and extrapolated about the rest of the Facebook application and platform. For instance, the structure doesn’t follow any object oriented development practices, and it seems that the application is one large PHP file with a large number of custom functions living in the same namespace (they also seem to be using the Smarty templating engine).

This leak is not good news for Facebook, as it raises the question of how secure a Facebook users private data really is. If the main source code for a site can be leaked, then it can be said that almost anything is possible. Facebook has become such a success and has such a high profile that it has become a magnet for attacks against its systems. Most large scale applications suffer a breach at some point or another, since the odds are always stacked in favor of attackers, but companies can respond in a number of ways and the hope here is that Facebook will handle this situation gracefully. I don’t doubt that Facebook will pursuit this case with a lot of energy to both find the cause of why the code has leaked as well as to find who was responsible. They will also need to take some very quick short term measures to mitigate the risk to users since you can bet that right this minute there are hundreds of potential attackers pouring through the leaked code and probing their systems. At a quick glance, I know that I can see some obvious things in the code that both reveal certain hidden aspects of the platform and give a potential attacker a good head start.

Update: Facebook have sent us an official response (and Brandee Barker from Facebook has left a comment below): “A small fraction of the code that displays Facebook web pages was exposed to a small number of users due to a single misconfigured web server that was fixed immediately. It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way. Because the code that was released only powers the Facebook user interface, it offers no useful insight into the inner workings of Facebook. The reprinting of this code violates several laws and we ask that people not distribute it further.” It seems that the cause was apache and mod_php sending back un-interpreted source code as opposed to output, due to either a server misconfiguration or high load (this is a known issue). It is also apparent that other pages have been revealed, and that this problem has occured before, but only now has somebody actually posted the code online.

Leveraging Facebook To Compete With eBay Won’t Work

Buy.com made a splash tonight with their announcement of a new Facebook application called Garage Sale.

Facebook users can use the application to sell thing directly to others via their Facebook profile. Buy.com charges a flat 5% commission on completed sales (the seller will also have to pay Paypal or other payment fees. The application says “thanks to Garage Sale, Facebook users don’t have to leave their profile page to advertise and sell personal goods.”

There are other Facebook applications doing nearly the exact same thing. Mosoma, for example, is one that I tested a couple of weeks ago. It also allows users to sell items on their Facebook profile.

There is an argument that a closed network is a better way to sell items because the people who view the listing know you and, presumably, trust you. That gets you over a big hurdle - eBay’s feedback system provides information on the buyer and seller which helps them get comfortable transacting. Without that feedback system to encourage sales, it’s important that something else takes its place. In the case of Garage Sale and Mosoma, user familiarity is the key.

But in practice this doesn’t work so well. Sellers are looking for a big base of buyers to sell into to leverage the network effect. eBay obviously does an excellent job of this. Otherwise there is no reason they would command a long term leadership position with their high fees. Buyers and sellers put up with the fees because it is the place to go to conduct p2p transactions. The network effect perpetuates their success and newcomers have a very difficult time gaining market share.

With Garage Sale and Mosoma, sellers can’t access this large pool of buyers because only their friends will see the listings. And sellers who are looking for a specific item are still likely to hop on over to eBay and do a quick search. They’ll only buy from friends if they serendipitously happen to catch site of an item in a friend’s news feed that they were already looking for.

Microsoft experimented in this area in late 2005/early 2006 with their Live Expo product. Originally Expo was a way to buy and sell items to your MSN IM buddies, or coworkers at a company, which is very similar to the Facebook experiments now being conducted. But over time they seem to have expanded Expo to become a more generic listing service. People want deep listings when they are looking for something.

Closed networks work for some things, but they don’t seem to work for trading physical goods. My bet is that Garage Sale and Mosoma fall short of expectations, and that eBay is looking on with, at best, bemused interest.