It appears as if the new feature is currently being tested only with a very small subset of users; we haven’t seen it at the bottom of any Facebook notification e-mails yet and there are only about 4 tweets from the past couple of days mentioning the new feature.

We asked the company about the apparent bucket test, and they’ve acknowledged that they’ve started roling out the feature again for a small percentage of users after running similar brief tests a couple of weeks ago and making some improvements.

Facebook hasn’t provided more information (e.g. how they plan to prevent autoresponder messages from being posted to Walls all the time) but said it was hoping to release the new feature to all of its users in the coming weeks.

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The Facebook iPhone app is broken [updates below, it appears to be an API problem], and has been for a while now. Every single user profile page contains zero updates or posts. Instead, each loads a stream that reads “USER has no recent posts.” Judging from Twitter searches, tips coming in, and a Facebook thread, this has been the case since at least yesterday, and possibly before that.

To be clear, Facebook’s main News Feed is still being populated with updated items, but if you want to see elements from any individual user, you’re out of luck. And that’s bad when one key feature of the iPhone app is the ability to pin friends’ profiles to your main screen in order to more easily access such information. And it’s really bad when, again, this is one of the most popular apps that there is.

After Hewitt’s decision to stop iPhone development, Facebook’s VP of Communications Elliot Schrage left us a comment reaffirming Facebook’s commitment to Apple and, in particular, their iPhone app. He wrote that Facebook “has a great team of engineers taking over iPhone related development.”

So a full team has replaced Hewitt, but they can’t seem to keep the app from breaking. And I’m not sure they even realize it is broken. But plenty of users do.

Update: In an email, a member of Facebook’s communication team confirmed the issue and says they’ve alerted the engineering team. But I’m still wondering how Facebook’s new iPhone “team” could have either missed this issue or have let it go unresolved for a day or so now?

How many Facebook developers does it take to fix an app? We’ll find out, I guess. The answer should be one: Hewitt. But sadly, that’s not the case anymore.

Update 2: Facebook has responded again that “this is the result of a backend Platform API issue, not the iPhone app. We are pushing a fix shortly.” So it’s a API problem that only affected the iPhone app. That sounds like an iPhone app problem to me — especially considering that Facebook controls both.

Update 3: Joe Hewitt has written to say that, “The FB API has glitches from time to time which break not just the iPhone app, but every app that builds on it, from Blackberry to Seesmic.” So I’ll guess we’ll just chalk up all the iPhone-only complaints to the fact that it’s so popular.

[thanks Andy]

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Editor’s note: Today, being a news junkie requires not just the ability to keep up with hundreds of breaking stories a day, but the ability to redistribute those stories to your followers and news sites. To get some insight into the modern news junkie, we asked Mrinal Desai to share with us how he screens the news in the guest post below. Desai is the co-founder of CrossLoop, but some of you may recognize him more from Twitter or Techmeme, where he tips stories every day—580 of those tips have appeared as headlines since the beginning of this year. You can read his last guest post here.

Like many out there, I have been, am and always will be a news addict. For many news junkies, it is the fleeting, current fix of information about a breaking topic that interests them, only to be replaced by the next headline. They jump from headline to headline, forgetting the one they just read as they move on to the next one.

For me personally, news is not only timely information on the current state of affairs but also a way to take a deep dive, to connect analysis and information together and learn through application.  I am looking for insight.  It could be patterns, it could be knowledge about an industry or it could be an opportunity to become introspective and ask questions.

Keeping this in mind, here is a snapshot of my consumption and distribution of news both offline and online.  I’ll divide the way I screen the news by the screens on which it comes to me.

No Screen:

• I don’t start a day without reading The Wall Street Journal in print
• Currently, I get 4 magazines and I go through them on the weekend: The Economist, The Atlantic, Wired and Fortune. Before they stopped, I used to also get Business 2.0 and MIT’s Technology Review.

Screen 1 – MacBook Pro:

Apps: Twitter, Google Reader, Techmeme and a little bit of Facebook

Twitter: I’ve been a user since January 2007.  Its always on for me. I invest a significant amount of time in figuring out who/what to follow based on my interests.  Today this ‘list’ stands at 489. Building this list is a continuous process and it typically consists of people who can teach or inform me of something, news sources and people I respect and with whom I want to build a long term relationship with independent of business. Of this, I have a column/list/group called “Pigeons” (birdie, early days of communication—you get it, right?).  I read each and every tweet of this group. I have about 75 in this group. 15 of my personal favorites, apart from @techcrunch and all those who write for it @techcrunch/team, are:

@bxchen – Technology Reporter, Wired
@148apps – iPhone App Reviews
@msuster – General Partner, GRP Partners
@jennydeluxe – Technology Reporter, The New York Times
@scobleizer – everything social media
@Learmonth – Reporter at Adage
@jasonhiner – Executive Editor at TechRepublic (CBS Interactive)
@leplaporte – Technology Journalist and Broadcaster
@appadvice – Editor, Webware (CBS Interactive)
@taylorbuley – Technology Reporter, Forbes
@sarahintampa – Writer, ReadWriteWeb
@reckless – Nilay Patel, Engadget
@gizmodo – Everything gadgets blog
@dmac1 – Technology reporter, Business Week
@joshk – General Partner, First Round Capital

You can follow them all in one click on the Twitter List I created called “Fifteen”

Screen 2 – iPhone: I have played with a few iPhone news apps, both paid and free.  These include the mobile apps from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times , Byline, Fluent News, News Fuse, BBCReader, NPR News, ReadItLater, ZenNews, and News Pro. I also visit mobile news sites. Being a little glued to Techmeme, I was very excited to see its new mobile version for smartphones—the icon took a spot right away on my home screen:

After experimenting and trying them all out, though, my current favorite native iPhone app is Newsstand (iTunes Link) which stays on my dock. Its a $4.99 app but it does the following extremely well for me:

1. Synchs beautifully with Google Reader and is fast.  It allows me to organize my folders, move them up and down and importantly very easily “Mark all as Read”

Below is a snapshot of my Feeds and a folder creatively named ‘Top News” that I keep a close watch on every day.

2) Newsstand has a lot of social goodness to share through Twitter, Delicious, ReadItLater and Instapaper

What’s Missing:
—bit.ly so that I can track data on the links I share as I do on Tweetie 2 with my API key.
—Sharing on Facebook
—Ability to RT or @respond to my twitter stream that I subscribe to as an RSS feed from within Google Reader.

Before social media, I always shared news via email to specific people. Now I have replaced email with these easy tools:
—Twitthat bookmarklet. One click.
—Twitterbar a Firefox Add-on customized with a prefix. One click.

—Google Reader’s Share is connected to my Twitter account. One click.
—Facebook Share bookmarklet or if I want it all on one place, I recommend Shareaholic.

Screen 3 – TV. I do not get my news here since I watch very little TV.

Screen 4 – eReader
I have a Kindle that I use to read books and have not switched from print to this one yet for news. As you can imagine, I get enough news on my other screens all day and like some time away from it.

Below is a visual of how I personally share news and the tools I use. Everything goes through Twitterfeed as my central hub for news going in and out.  Note that lately I stand undecided between Seesmic and Tweetdeck. (Image courtesy: Zurb, click to enlarge).

I spend a significant amount of money on news—4 print magazines, 2 newspapers with one online and iPhone apps.

The only screen I care about:

• well written analysis
• Unique and timely content/information
• Thought provoking story telling
• “Connection” with the writer—literally or figuratively from a style perspective
• Delivery channel. Find me—the “paperboy route” has changed

How do you screen the news?

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Today, at our RealTime CrunchUp event in San Francisco, Buchheit and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman sat down for a chat with our own Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld. The topic was: Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus.

So can we kill email?

Well if Buchheit’s quote didn’t tip you off, the consensus was “no.” Though there are some interesting things coming out that are helping to expand our communication, we’re just not at the point now where we can live without email. And in fact, for many of these services like Twitter and Facebook, you still need email to be notified about new followers or new messages.

Threadsy (which launched at TechCrunch50 this year) is trying to help the transition away from email by integrating it with other services like Twitter, but even Goldman acknowledges that the email notification problem remains an issue because people keep relying on it. At one point, a question from the audience asked about Google Wave, another would be “email-killer,” and Schonfeld noted that he was having a hard time getting into it because he wasn’t getting notified via email when there is a new Wave message. So you can see the problem.

Speaking of Wave, when asked about his thoughts on it, Buchheit noted that he hadn’t actually tried it yet, while laughing. “The invite is sitting in my inbox.” This is significant because Buchheit was instrumental in creating Gmail for Google. But Buchheit doesn’t consider Google Wave as a replacement of email or even Twitter or Facebook. Both him and Goldman agreed that it seemed more of a collaboration tool. And both felt that despite some great technology it was still a few years away from having a polished experience.

When asked if there would be a mashup of social and private streams, such as email and Facebook with Twitter, Buchheit said that he felt rather than one thing killing off another that we would just keep layering on new things. Goldman noted that the next step for Threadsy is to provide better context about the messages you’re getting and who you are talking to. He also noted that being able to search across all your messages is key.

So, no. Email isn’t dead yet, but it may be changing.

[photo: (cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.thelettertwo.com]

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Taylor said that Le Meur’s request seemed “reasonable” and continued “we should do that.” “We’re not working on that. But we should be,” he continued. So there you go, done deal. Great. It would seem that soon, third parties should have access to the list filters that Facebook uses.

Here’s why this matters. With services like Seesmic (Desktop) and Brizzly importing data from both Twitter and Facebook, the social graph for those services is starting to get messy. If there were a way to merge Twitter Lists and Facebook Friend Lists, third-party services could provide a valuable new service: Easy-to-make Facebook and Twitter social graph mashups.

Granted, it seems unlikely at this point that either Twitter or Facebook will ever sync these lists with one another on their respective services. But as long as they’re willing to provide that data to third-parties, other companies should be able to do interesting things with it.

The Lists, it seems, are starting to merge.

[Photos: (cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.thelettertwo.com]

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For those who have not had the opportunity to try Brizzly yet, it’s a web app that serves as a way to interact with both Twitter and now Facebook. It has advantages over Twitter’s regular website because it shows pictures and videos inline, and they actually did lists (which they called Groups) before Twitter. Now that Twitter has rolled out that functionality, Brizzly has integrated it. Perhaps more importantly, Brizzly also offers as one-click way to do the old-school way of retweeting. You know, the “RT” way.

But the opening of its service is not all Brizzly is announcing today: They’ve also made a new hire. Ben Darnell joins the team from Facebook, where he worked for just a few short months since he came over after the FriendFeed acquisition. But Darnell’s ties run close to Brizzly as he’s a former Googler like Thing Labs’ Jason Shellen, Chris Wetherell, Dolapo Falola. At Google, Darnell was one of the original Google Reader team members.

With Brizzly, Darnell will work on “larger framework for communication and content discovery,” Shellen tells us. This means he’ll be working on their infrastructure and APIs.

And Brizzly has one more new trick up its sleeve today: On-the-fly translation of tweets. While Twitter is busy rolling out its service into other languages, Brizzly is translating it to anyone who wants it thanks to Google Translate. Translating a tweet is as simple as clicking a button.

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Assuming the new site does well, we can likely expect Zynga to port its other games to their own standalone portals down the line.

Zynga has recently been in the headlines lately over our reporting on its use of scammy offers to help monetize its games (other social gaming companies are guilty of the same practice). Zynga removed those scams promptly, but then they reappeared. Finally Zynga announced they were gone for good, but that isn’t the end of the story: now there’s a class action lawsuit against Zynga and many other companies who allegedly engaged in these scams.

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Though they’d never admit to such a thing, the reasoning should be obvious: The longer you’re at your computer, the more time you’re spending on their sites. The more time your spending on their sites, the more ads you’re being served. The more ads being served, the more money they are earning. No matter why these sites originally started, or what features they add, that is, quite literally, the bottom line. They’d have us strapped to a chair with our eyes taped open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, if they could. The only difference is that we’d have a contraption on our arms to allow us to click on the ads being shown every so often.

Thankfully, we don’t quite live in that world yet. And there are a couple factors pushing us the opposite way from that. Mobile devices are the biggest one. But even that is still just a screen. You may not be chained to a desk using it, but as plenty of people with an iPhone will tell you, you may end staring at this screen even more than you do a desktop or laptop monitor throughout a day. But there’s another up and coming factor working against our screen slavery: Location.

Social networking has been perhaps the most popular trend on the Internet over the past several years. At first the term was ironic. “Social networking” was anything but social in the traditional sense. But over time, we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that you can do social activities such as play games, collaborate on work, and talk, online. And in fact, many times it’s even more convenient than doing it in person. It’s social, but it’s a different kind of social.

Ever since the term was born, countless people have debated the implications of taking social interactions virtual. At one point or another I’m sure that it has been said that it would be both the downfall of mankind, and the thing that would bring the planet together. The truth is that social networking, while great in many respects, does not fulfill a fundamental human desire: To be in the actual presence of other people.

If you’ll allow me to be embarrassingly obvious for a second: Sitting in a chat room all day, even if all of your friends are in it as well, is not the same as being in the same physical room with them. Even if you all are having great discussions in the chat room, and not saying a word when you’re hanging out with one another, there is just something that’s different. Something that social networking will never be able to replace.

That’s where location comes in. It has the power to be the bridge between social networking and actual social interaction. We’re already seeing the very early signs of this with services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, and Google Latitude, to varying degrees.

To the masses, most of these services still either don’t make sense, or are way too creepy. Social networks used to be thought of in the same way. This will change.

The people who do use these services likely have at least one story about a situation where a friend saw where they were, or where they planned to be, and showed up to meet up. Some have many of these stories. And for some of us in cities where these services are popular, this happens just about everyday. And it’s really quite amazing.

Is it annoying if a friend shows up if you want to be alone or don’t want to see them? Of course. But that’s why it’s important that you’re in control of what location information you are sending out. Is it creepy if a stranger shows up to meet you somewhere? Of course, but that’s why privacy settings are so important.

Make no mistake, there are hurdles to location-based services gaining widespread acceptance. But the upside of it far outweighs the downside. And with that the case, these types of services are ripe to take off.

At the core level, using a social network to facilitate actual social interaction just seems to make sense. Though I poked fun at them in the intro of this post, don’t think that Facebook doesn’t recognize this. In some ways they already do this through their popular events offering. But anything they do with location — which it should be no surprise, they are working on — will go far beyond this. When you have a social graph with over 300 million users and you add a realtime location component into the mix, it’s going to change things.

I remember the first time I used sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster (back in the day) to find people that I went to high school with who I hadn’t talked to in years. It was a little weird, but also in some ways exciting. Imagine that transfered into the real world. Maybe you’re in a city with a person you went to high school with, but hadn’t talked to in years. It’s unlikely that the two of you were ever run into each other randomly, but maybe you can get pinged by Facebook location when they’re nearby. Maybe neither of you want to meet, and that’s fine. But maybe you do.

The word we keep hearing over and over again for such situations is “serendipity,” but really it’s not. None of this needs to be left up to chance. It’s simply an extension of social networking into the real world.

Another social network, Twitter, is already in hot pursuit of such functionality. Any day now, the service will turn on its geolocation service which will both allow you to send tweets with your location tacked on, and allow you to pass in location information from other services, like Foursquare. As a service with tens of millions of users, Twitter will be the first massive test of location as an extension of social networking.

It may be a while before users start truly taking advantage of it since it is an opt-in feature. But eventually, I believe we’ll see more and more users opt-in to be able to use third-party clients like Birdfeed which let them choose which tweets to attach their location to and let people know where they are.

And beyond individual user data, this location data will be very interesting as an aggregate. Undoubtedly people will use things like Twitter’s geolocation APIs to make services that can show where people are flocking to in realtime. This is the next step for what services like SocialGreat are doing with location data, showing hot spots in towns. And we already know that Twitter is planning to use the data to tailor its trending topics to show the hot things being tweeted about in specific places.

Social networking up until this point has been great. But it’s also really a bit odd. The core concept is still to gather your friends in a virtual construct, while the companies behind these constructs convince you to hang out in them as much as possible. Instead, they should be using the interesting social data they have to help you connect in other places as well. That’s what makes Facebook Connect is so powerful. But that doesn’t extend to the real world yet. But with location, it could. And that’s exciting.

We’ll be discussing this and other topics at our Realtime CrunchUp this Friday in San Francisco.

[images: MGM and Warner Brothers]

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Here are some of the features listed on the press release Sony just issued about the update:

Showcase Trophies: Instantly share trophies you earn in PS3 games in your Facebook stream. Simply sync your PS3 system and easily show off your accomplishments to friends and family.

PlayStation Store Purchase Log Publishing: Let friends and family on Facebook instantly know which PlayStation 3 games you’ve purchased. The PlayStation Store, available to PS3 and PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) system owners through PlayStation Network, features over 200 downloadable games, many of which are exclusive to PS3 or PSP system owners, in addition to over 4,000 pieces of add-on game content.

Game Event: With a few quick clicks of the controller sharing select game events, progress and statistics is now easier than ever with the Facebook integration.

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Ustream says that Shakira video wasn’t its most popular of all time — the streams for Michael Jackson’s memorial service and President Obama’s Inauguration saw much more traffic, with 4.6MM and 3.8MM total streams respectivly. But those streams were both hours long, while Shakira’s stream lasted a mere ten minutes. It’s also important to note that these viewers were likely more engaged than they would be if they were just staring at the tube. By integrating Ustream into Facebook, Shakira was likely able to gain quite a few new Fans on her Facebook account, which means she’s established a long term way to reach out to them.

It’s worth pointing out that Shakira was’t the first artist to stream her video — that title appears to be held by Chamillionaire who debuted his video for Good Morning a few days prior. Given Shakira’s success don’t be surprised if more artists start following suit.

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Sound familiar? For years, many people who have recently lost their phones have turned to Facebook to reunite with their friends. But rather than use the site’s integrated phone directory (which is probably more comprehensive than you think) they take a different approach: a new Facebook group declaring that their address book is gone for good. These groups often wind up with over a dozen phone numbers from friends who leave their numbers on the group’s wall. Turns out, that’s often a bad idea — in some cases it’s incredibly easy for spammers to harvest these phone numbers from Facebook. All it takes is a little Google trickery.

Earlier today we received a tip showing just how easy this ‘hack’ was to execute, yielding many thousands (perhaps even millions) of phone numbers. I quickly alerted Facebook to the issue, hoping that they might do something to somehow fix it before I wrote anything. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen — Facebook’s view is that users shouldn’t be using these groups (at least not public ones) to share their phone numbers. And Google has cached many of these numbers, so it’s unlikely they could do much anyway. From a Facebook spokesman:

We certainly agree that people should be careful when posting their phone number to any public forum (and if they do decide to do it, they should probably delete the number once it’s been used for the intended purpose).

The trick itself is very simple, yielding hundreds of thousands of Facebook groups, many of which have multiple phone numbers listed that are tied to each user’s real name. We’re not going to actually include the directions (giving spammers a slightly more difficult hurdle), but here’s what a page of results on Google looks like:

It’s also possible to do a query with similar results on Facebook itself, so this isn’t solely a problem with search engines. And this isn’t tied to spammers alone either — it’s easy to tweak the ‘hack’ to look for an individual’s phone number.

The issue here is that people are sharing private data in groups that have been marked public, rather than private groups that can only be viewed by group members. Facebook has obviously noticed that this is a trend, because if you try to create a group and include certain keywords (like “phone number”) the site will actually recommend that you use the Facebook phone number directory instead. But there are plenty of people who still do it anyway.

Thing is, the problem doesn’t just lie with user error — Facebook deserves some of the blame. When you create a group, you are presented with three options: ‘Open’, ‘Closed’, and ‘Secret’. People generally choose the first setting for these phone groups, because it means they don’t have to manually invite or approve every friend they have. Here’s how Facebook describes the ‘Open’ setting:

In this case it isn’t clear what exactly anyone really means. Are groups only exposed to other Facebook users? Or do search engines have access to the data too? Obviously, it’s the latter. Perhaps more important: the language doesn’t do anything to convey that sharing this information with the world might be a dumb idea. Thankfully, Facebook is planning to make this more clear:

While there are some differences between this information being available through a Facebook search by any of our 300 million users and a search on Google, the more important issue here is that users are choosing to create open groups for this purpose…. We’re working on language changes that will hopefully make it even more clear how large an audience this is. In the meantime, we fully support you educating your readers on this point.

This all ties back to my concerns over the looming Facebook Privacy Fiasco that will strike once Facebook eventually flips the switch on its privacy overhaul and begins encouraging users to share their information with the world (don’t remember that? It was announced way back in July and is apparently still in the works). The fact of the matter is that Facebook has established trust with millions of users who believe it has at least some degree of privacy. Any time Facebook invites users to share information with the world, it needs to make it abundantly (perhaps even annoyingly) clear what implications that could have.

Thanks to Eric Fulton for the tip

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Did Facebook finally unfriend iLike? It certainly looks that way. Facebook is restricting iLike from showing people’s music data in their profiles (the songs and artists they like) or alerting them to upcoming concerts through Facebook notifications. The ban on notifications appears to be part of Facebook’s recent moves to fight app spam. It is not clear what music data specifically will be pulled from profiles, but that could cover all the data iLike collects about users—their music preferences and recommendations.

Even though iLike is the top music app on Facebook, with 12 million active monthly users, the two companies have been on the outs ever since iLike was picked up for a song by arch-rival MySpace. The recent deal with Google Music to show iLike/MySpace Music results added insult to injury.

This morning some people with the iLike app installed on Facebook received the following notification:

Due to upcoming Facebook changes, your Music data on Facebook won’t show on your profile and you’ll stop getting concert alerts. Take this step to save your music data

To get around these restrictions, iLike is now asking for users’ emails so they can send them concert alerts (which can be a very lucrative source of affiliate revenues) outside of Facebook. But routing these types of alerts through email is not ideal. People don’t want app spam in their inbox.

The app inside Facebook is currently “taking a short time-out for maintenance.” I have asked iLike, MySpace, and Facebook for clarification on the changes, and will update this post when I hear back from them. A few weeks ago, Facebook’s Ethan Beard hinted: “We are making some changes to the profile. We think it should be a great place for users to accurately represent their identity.” Perhaps this is related.

Update: This notification is indeed in response to changes in Facebook’s developer roadmap, which will eliminate two of iLike’s top features: adding music to a profile and personalized concert alerts. So iLike trying to get users to switch to email notifications (outside of Facebook’s control) and new profile tabs. The policy changes are not targeted at iLike specifically.

A Facebook spokesperson clarifies: “We didn’t do anything specific to iLike as the headline implies, and alerts are not going away, they’re simply shifting away from their current channel to ones we think will be more effective for both users and developers.”

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This guest post was written by Steve Poland, a former TechCrunch writer working on his soon-to-launch start-up InSeconds that allows sites to easily customize each visitor’s experience, resulting in optimized revenue for each visit.

Affiliate marketing is 15 years old this month—CyberErotica is said to have launched the first program in 1994. The adult industry has always been ahead of the curve, but I digress. Despite 15 years of existence, which is essentially an eternity in “online years”, the performance based marketing method is still in its infancy. Sure, there are lots of affiliate programs that exist for many online etailers (and other sites that seek sales, leads and visitors) and $2.1b was paid out last year from affiliate programs, but affiliate marketing is still not as easy as it should be for website/blog Publishers to implement and get compensated for their referrals.

For those that don’t know, affiliate marketing works like this—a company with a product or service for sale pays a referral fee to Publishers (marketing companies) that can drive sales, leads, or visitors to them. The Publisher is taking on the risk here—they might be outlaying their own cash on advertising to promote the product/service, or they are linking to that company’s product/service in the content of their site’s own webpages (when they could be linking to another company instead). The Publisher signs up for an account with the affiliate program and is then given “trackable links” to use in their content, which track referrals back to them. Most etailers have an affiliate marketing program in place—for example, Amazon.com’s Associates program will pay 4%-15% referral fees to you when a visitor of your website clicks a link on your site and makes a purchase at Amazon.com.

Twitter & Facebook Turn Everyone Into An Affiliate Marketer

Most recently, it’s not just websites/blogs that are referring sales, but rather individuals themselves, who are using realtime sites like Twitter and Facebook to influence their friends and followers by recommending products to buy, music to listen to, and movies to watch. These realtime discussions are becoming important sources of referral sales and leads for websites—if someone is asking on Twitter what digital camera they should buy, you bet your ass that Amazon.com wants anyone on the Internet responding to that user’s question to be linking to a camera for sale on Amazon.com (and not Walmart.com or BestBuy.com). Amazon.com wants to make sure that those influencers are compensated for referring people to buy from their website, which thus positively reinforces them to continue linking to Amazon.com product pages in the future.

Everyone with access to the Internet today is a Publisher. They are a voice. This has always been the case, but not the way it is now with Microblogging. Individuals were Publishers on a smaller scale via email forwards, email replies, IM, or most recently blog posts. Blogging broadened individual’s view points (influence) up to a global scale—no longer would they only influence just a few friends in a closed-circuit email, but they could influence the masses online. But blogging wasn’t realtime discussions. Instant messaging and chat rooms were always realtime discussions—but primarily on a one-on-one or small-group basis. Twitter and Facebook status updates, aka microblogging, has mashed the realtime nature of instant messaging with the global scale and voice of blogging.

Amazon.com Pioneers Affiliate Marketing, Again

As an early pioneer of affiliate marketing for site/blog Publishers (holding the patent on all the components of an online affiliate marketing program), it only makes sense that Amazon.com would now become an early pioneer of affiliate marketing for individual publishers—those who simply tweet and comment on their friend’s Facebook updates. Last week, Amazon.com announced they would start compensating individuals with referral fees for using Amazon.com links in their Twitter messages and in their Facebook status updates/comments. Although it will likely lead to more noise (and spam), I think we’re going to see many companies follow Amazon.com’s lead. I also think this has the potential of being a game changer, if some other pieces fall into place—more on this in a bit.

What has shocked me over the years is the number of links in webpages that aren’t trackable links. Most links in content are just regular links out to other webpages, which means that they don’t contain a tracking code that corresponds to them as the referring website—which means that when a sale is referred and occurs on a site that has an affiliate program in place, that affiliate program site doesn’t know who to pay the referral fee to (even though they honestly would like to, because it encourages future linking to them by that referring Publisher). In a perfect world, all the links on all the webpages on the Internet that link to Amazon.com product pages would be trackable links which would earn those websites referral fees for whenever their visitors click over and purchase products from Amazon.com. Ditto for all the links that have affiliate programs in place.

Affiliate Marketing for Publishers Still Not Quick and Easy, Yet

I would go out on a limb and estimate that 99.99% of all links on the web are not trackable links. Why? Because it’s been a bit of a pain in the ass, quite frankly. If you’re a publisher and you’re writing a content piece, you would need to go away from your writing, login to the affiliate program for the website you want to link to (i.e. Amazon.com Associates), and then generate the trackable link for the webpage you want to link to—ensuring that when your visitors click that link, that you’ll earn referral fees from Amazon.com when purchases occur. Not to mention that you have to signup for all of these affiliate programs; some of these programs are handled by third-party companies and become discontinued (making your links dead). And then there’s the money—if you don’t get very many visitors each month to your site, you may only earn a few dollars a month from affiliate programs, which then discourages you from putting forth the time to place trackable links into your content in the first place.

The lack of ease that sites/blogs have had to endure to use affiliate marketing over the years is the same for Individuals now. Amazon.com has said they endorse trackable links by users in social media, but it’s still not easy enough. Sure, you can go over to Amazon.com, login to your Associates account, and a button appears at the top of every product page saying “Share on Twitter”, which then creates a tweet with your trackable link in it, but that’s still one too many steps. People are lazy. More than half of Twitter users are using a Twitter application to do their tweeting. Until the affiliate programs are integrated into the social networking platforms (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, forums) or the applications used on these platforms (Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Tweetie, bit.ly), this affiliate marketing by individuals won’t take off.

It’s in the interest of the platform (Twitter) to make this easier because it will ultimately allow their users to earn money. It’s in the interest of the users, because it earns them money and reinforces their usage of the platform (Twitter). It’s in the interest of the affiliate program (Amazon.com), because it positively reinforces users to share links to their site. (On the flip side, Twitter might not want to encourage this for fear of making teh spam problem even worse than it is).

“Facebook Credits” could become de facto Virtual Currency with a Facebook integration of Amazon.com

But if you really think about it, Facebook should really be integrating these affiliate program partners into its platform first. Facebook has the most to gain by integrating. You may have heard of the virtual currency system that Facebook has been working on—Facebook Credits. It will allow users to purchase Facebook Credits with cash and then use them in third-party Facebook applications, such as leveling up your character in a game or buying a virtual rose for a friend. To get people using this system, Facebook will likely give away some initial credits to every user, to get them to see how simple they are to use, then get the user to pull out their credit card and refill.

What about a constant refill of Facebook Credits every month to help spur more in-app activity/purchases? That could happen. Even if users were merely earning $0.44 or $1.32 monthly from their link sharing habits, if these referral fees were automatically turned into Facebook Credits, Facebook could really jump-start this in-app currency of theirs (and if they operate anything like Apple, they’ll nab 30% of all in-app money spent). This will work for Amazon.com and other affiliate program participants, as long as the user knows that the 1000 Facebook Credits they earned this month were from their sharing of Amazon.com links. Facebook would love it because these affiliate links would be an income generator for their users, encouraging their users to spend more time on Facebook, and of course there is revenue associated with users spending their credits. Finally, Facebook application developers would love it because they’ll be seeing a steady stream of revenue as well. Meanwhile, app developers and Facebook can steer clear of Scamville-type offers. With affiliate links, you only get paid if someone actually clicks through and buys something. Good referrals get rewarded,while bad referrals get nothing.

Plus, imagine the publicity for a Facebook or Twitter. I can see the headlines now, “Facebook now ‘employs’ 300 million people” or “Facebook lets 300 million people to start earning money just by sharing links”.

This is Now, Get Ready for the Effects

One effect of affiliate programs becoming integrated easily into these realtime platforms (and/or client apps) is that referral fees will go down. Amazon.com currently pays out 4%-15% on referral sales, but that’s because they know only a small percentage of their sales occur now from referrals (because of the lack of ease—and because of the laziness of sites linking to Amazon.com). But with a vast usage of trackable links, then for example, if sales remained flat and 5% of all purchases were referrals previously and now that number becomes 25%, then Amazon.com can’t be paying out 8% referral commissions (unless sales went up 5x too), so Amazon.com would reduce that to 1.6% referral commissions (8%/5).

Yes, this movement is going to turn up the volume of spam noise to us all via our use and searches on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. Those people who you follow may get spammy, but their influence over you will go down (just like those people that send you too many nonsense email forwards). Everyone has a personal brand and if you spam your audience with tons of links, they won’t be listening to you as much.

But what I’m talking about isn’t the future—it’s here now, with Amazon.com leading the way. Those companies that don’t embrace affiliate marketing for Individual Publishers, will lose. If someone is tweeting about the new iPod, that someone is going to link to the webpages that will earn them money.

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Yahoo hasn’t exactly seemed like the ideal place to work over the past couple of years. Besides just the Microsoft acquisition offer distraction (and subsequent search deal), and the CEO shuffle, the company has lost much of its sterling polish that it once had during the dot-com era. But what’s even more odd is that Raffel has worked at Yahoo before. It’s where he made a name for himself by helping to create Yahoo Pipes, the popular content mashup tool. But a few years ago, Raffel took off to work at Pioneers of the Inevitable, where he helped make Songbird, the open source desktop music player.

So why’d he come back to Yahoo at a time when others were pursuing him? It’s hard to say for sure, but one source believes Yahoo paid a significant amount of money to lure him back. Another source believes he was promised more resources and an easier time rising up the ladder than if he went to Google. Still, Yahoo over Google is not a choice that a lot of people seem to make these days. And one source is sure that Bradley Horowitz, a former Yahoo exec that is now at Google, would have obviously wanted to bring Raffel on board, and was likely pushing for it.

There’s another reason he may have went with Yahoo. Since returning in late August, Raffel has been serving as a senior product manager under Cody Simms, the senior director of product management for Yahoo Open Source (Y!OS), we hear. He’s apparently working on mainly off-network projects such as making the Yahoo authentication platform more seamless. That might not sound sexy, but the bigger picture may be involve Yahoo building out its own platform product to better connect Yahoo with the rest of the web. Yes, think Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and the like. The chance to get into this hot space and play a critical role in building a “Yahoo Connect,” may have also enticed Raffel to come back, but that’s pure speculation at this point.

“He’s one of those rare product guys who is technical and can actually build stuff,” says one our sources. We’ll be watching what he’s building for Yahoo the second time around.

We’ve reached out to Raffel for comment, but have yet to hear back. We’ll update if we do.

[photo: flickr/sektordua]

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At the beginning of 2009, during a now-famous strategy meeting, Twitter’s executives asked themselves, “Are we building a new Internet?” At the crux of that question was the realization that Twitter “introduced a new form of communication to the world.” Public micro-messages are now everywhere—on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Bing, Yahoo, AIM. They are infiltrating every part of the Web, particularly as the backbone of realtime search.

Yes, status updates (which are a form of micro-message) existed before Twitter, but it is the growing public nature of these messages which makes them exciting. For one thing, they need to be public in order to be visible to search engines. But when Twitter and other companies talk about building a new Internet, they don’t mean that 140-character messages are going to replace web pages. Rather it is that these realtime streams are becoming the center of people’s attention on the Web, and sending them off in all different sorts of directions.

These streams are the new Internet not so much because of the micro-content which they contain, but because they are a more efficient means of communication. Remember, the Internet at its core is a communications system. The battle going on now between Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others is to control this new realtime layer of communications on the Internet. Each one wants to be driving the micro-message bus.

In computer terms, a message bus carries data between different parts of a computer or between different computers. Realtime streams can be thought of as a micro-message bus which carries information instantaneously between people. The power of a micro-message is its ability to carry data, usually in the form of a link. It is a vehicle for passing links and other information. The value of a Tweet or status update or a Yammer or a Wave is not only in what it conveys about the sender, but where it leads to.

Other kinds of data can take a ride on this micro-message bus as well. Geolocation data, photos and videos are among the most popular. Whoever is in the driver’s seat of this micro-message bus will be in an enviable position, which is why everyone is trying to clamor aboard in hopes of taking over the wheel.

Next week, at our Realtime Crunchup (tickets are still available), we’ll be examining how this new communications layer on the Internet is being built and who will be driving the bus. We hope you can join us.

Photo credit: Flickr/Jan Krutisch.

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The live video/Facebook combo is quickly gaining steam for artists looking to connect with their fans — we’ve recently seen the Foo Fighters stream a live concert using LiveStream, and earlier this week Jason Mraz held a couple live chat session with fans as well. Other sites that have also recently streamed live concerts include MySpace, YouTube, and Hulu.

Update: Looks like Sony was wrong. As our commenters point out, Chamillionaire was the first to use Ustream for the debut of his music video, Good Morning (which you can watch here). As we saw at TechCrunch50 he’s definitely ahead of the curve with regard to web services, so it’s no surprise that he was first.

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But CuffLinks.com appears to be going for a new crowd with its latest design. The “Facebook Me” cufflinks are $50 and feature yes, the Facebook logo on them. They are approximately 3/4″ by 3/4,” are “Rhodium plated,” and feature a “Bullet back closure.” One cufflink features the Facebook “f,” the other reads “me.” Classy.

Facebook has well over 300 million users now, but I’m just not sure how much overlap there is with the cufflink crowd. Much of that crowd seem to prefer monogrammed cufflinks, so perhaps it would have been a better idea to engrave Facebook vanity names or profiles pictures in these bad boys.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg also famously doesn’t like to dress up. But he has traded his North Face/flip flop uniform for a tie with jeans. He could well be on his way to cufflink status.

Again, let me just clearly point out again that these cufflinks very clearly spell out “f me.” If the presence of Facebook cufflinks wasn’t going to ruin your chances of meeting that someone special this weekend, this likely will.

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In July of last year, I wrote about The New Apple Walled Garden. The post was about the irony of developers and advocates who were otherwise open standards and open source champions being absolutely pro-iPhone, a platform that is closed and proprietary in every sense. Since that post, the horror that was foreshadowed by some has been realized – rejected apps, rejected apps, rejected apps. We documented the troubles here at Techcrunch and the overall response was nothing more than long comment threads, complaints, and a few wise people changing their minds. The complaints to date are from some bloggers and a small number of application developers, incidents that Apple are able to write-off as being minor, as they have a dedicated fan base and growing market share to fall back on. That was, until yesterday.

Yesterday, a high-profile iPhone developer became fed up with the nature of the platform and decided it was time to call it quits. Joe Hewitt of Facebook not only pronounced that it was time for him to move onto ‘other projects’, but had the courage to state that his reason was because of the closed nature of the iPhone platform and his frustration with the approval process. Joe is not just the guy who wrote the Facebook application, within 12 hours of the first iPhone launching he released a library for app developers to create iPhone-like applications. This was back in the first generation, when iPhone ‘applications’ were nothing more than websites. Without any documentation from Apple, and with sheer enthusiasm for the new-born platform, Joe created a library for other developers that would help them build applications that would mimic native iPhone applications built by Apple.

As somebody who downloaded the very early releases of Joe’s library, I could immediately see that most, if not all, of the first iPhone applications were built on, or at least inspired by, the iUI library he released. The credibility that Joe has and the work that he did not only inspired developers, but it gave them an easy path to developing the first generation of software for the iPhone. With the statements that Joe made yesterday, Apple has not only lost another developer that it can write-off, but has lost somebody who was an early adopter of their platform and an impetus for others.

Most iPhone and Apple fans would retort that “Apple make great products, and it is winning in a market where the consumer has free choice”. I agree that they make great products, I am writing this post on a Macbook. I was beside myself with excitement when I found out about Rhapsody, about OS X, about the new Mach kernel, about FreeBSD code being used for userland (my code is in there, somewhere). I was so enthusiastic about the second coming of Jobs that I had an email exchange with him about incorporating OpenSSL, amongst other things, when the early dev previews were out. I was totally sold, because an operating system was being built and released that combined the best of UNIX with the best of great interfaces. Finally, the open source on desktops conundrum had been solved, I cheered. The biggest non-Microsoft company had adopted what we knew was good, as a way to compete against the standard. It validated my belief in the BSD license, and I was completely spellbound and a fan (although not in the more recent fanboi sense).

It was not until the iPhone was released that I felt let down. I felt betrayed. I wanted to hack, and I wanted to do so standing on the shoulder of a giant who was gaining market, a giant who was my old friend. I hold a very strong belief in the open market, a concept which at a theoretical level is difficult to argue against. The iPhone took advantage of a market where the competition was completely clueless. It took an intelligent and smart outsider to recognize that. What has shaken my belief in the open market is that an otherwise good company can enter a market, show them how it is done – but do it in a bad way for the overall ecosystem, and at the same time win the support of people who would otherwise philosophically disagree with them, completely on the basis of that company being not-Microsoft and, well, being sexy.

I never believed that Microsoft were evil, first because as a user and developer I had a choice. Second, Microsoft gave me free tools to learn how to code. And last, despite the position Microsoft were in on the desktop they never asked me to send them my code so that they could test it against their black-box of what is ‘compliant’. Microsoft never sent me a letter to say that speech bubbles can not be used in my application. Microsoft platforms let me run whatever-the-hell voice provider I wanted. Microsoft, as far as I can recall, also never told me that I could not have a sense of humor (the ironic 1984 reference has already been done, thanks Jon). Developers today also have a choice with mobile applications, and the sooner more developers raise their blinkers and realize that the popularity of the iPhone is built on the applications they are building, the sooner we can either get rid of this mess and see Apple change, or see a new more open alternative thrive.

Hewitt’s statements, as a model iPhone developer from a large company, can be the tipping point. The only thing holding this back right now are Facebook themselves, who seem keen on preserving a business relationship and casting Hewitt off as a rogue. Facebook came out today, and in a more official capacity (ie. somebody with ‘communications’ in their title, as opposed to ‘developer’), said that “Facebook’s relationship with Apple and our commitment to the iPhone platform remain strong”, and that “There’s been a fair amount of confusion and speculation about Joe’s comments” (chuckle, chuckle) and that “Facebook has a great team of engineers taking over iPhone related development”. Joe is probably taking some heat from his employer right now, and he probably knew he would before he made any comment. Facebook could have simply shifted Joe to another project (Android, I hope), and many wouldn’t have noticed – but he stood up for what he believes in, and what many have been thinking, and he deserves the full support and credit from everybody who believes in transparency and free opinion, regardless of which side of the iPhone debate your opinions may reside.

If it comes down to Facebook vs iPhone, Facebook wins. If Apple hold to their position on being the gatekeeper for everything on their platform, we only win if the developers say no. An iPhone platform with applications only from Apple and no third-parties is no longer a viable platform, and no longer a device that consumers will purchase — because they are making decisions based on applications and access, not on the brand or suburb engraved on the back of it (I hope).

Facebook should recognize this and back Joe all the way. If they do, it will show that that interest of what they want to do takes precedence over what a handset manufacturer wants to do. Apple can squash small developers, but if a big developer were to set aside short-term business interest for a moment, they will win in the longer term. If only we could all do that and not be blinded, perhaps, well, the free market could work again.

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How right he is.

Facebook’s VP of Communications Elliot Schrage has just left us a comment on our post from yesterday explaining that while Hewitt may be moving on, Facebook “has a great team of engineers taking over iPhone related development.” May an entire team blossom, apparently.

Schrage left the comment because there has been much brouhaha over developer Joe Hewitt’s decision to stop working on the Facebook iPhone app because he’s fed up with Apple’s App Store policies. Schrage obviously wants to make it clear that Hewitt’s stance does not in any way signify how Facebook as a company feels towards Apple. We don’t really think our story yesterday implied that, but okay, noted.

Here’s the full comment that Schrage left on the post from yesterday:

This is Elliot Schrage, VP of Communications at Facebook. There’s been a fair amount of confusion and speculation about Joe’s comments and whether they reflect the official position of Facebook. They don’t. Facebook’s relationship with Apple and our commitment to the iPhone platform remain strong. IIn fact, though Joe himself will be moving to new projects, Facebook has a great team of engineers taking over iPhone related development. More generally, our work bringing Facebook Connect to the iPhone and with iTunes, iPhoto and other great products over the past year should illustrate our commitment to expanding our relationship with Apple and finding new ways to offer new services and features to the people who use both our products.

A beautifully crafted (minus the typo, of course) piece of PR work there. Are you reading this, Apple? Facebook is asking nicely not to be put in the penalty box.

Seriously though, while Facebook may not be on the same page as Hewitt with regard to the App Store policies, we are. As much as I think Apple generally makes great products, the App Store continues to be rife with hypocrisy and heartache. And it’s only going to get worse as it continues to grow. It’s good to see a developer of Hewitt’s caliber take the stance.

[photo: flickr/appsara]

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It’s ScamVille, the lawsuit. And we’ve spoken to one other law firm considering a class action claim against these companies.

Will users be vindicated and get their money back? Maybe part of it. A recent class action settlement against WebLoyalty for post transaction marketing scams led to a $10 million settlement, just a tiny fraction of the total revenue pulled in by these offers. The law firms are the ones who get a payday.

Gawker, which broke the story, makes a good point though. That video of Pincus looks bad enough on a blog. Imagine what a jury will think of it. And services like Offerpal have now admitted that what they did was questionable. This will likely settle quickly.

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It also pulls your name, and other details from your Facebook profile such as your career. For example, at one point, it flashes the following message to me, “you are squandering your potential as a writer.” Interesting.

I took a video grab below of it in action, but unfortunately, it doesn’t capture the sound. You need to watch this for yourself to get the full effect. Do it now. You are not your f*cking khakis.

Update: And in one of those awesome little moments of coincidence, commenter Ron reminds us that it is none other than David Fincher who is currently filming The Social Network, the new movie about Facebook, which presumably, the company isn’t too happy about.

[images: Fox]

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I don’t know about you, but I don’t know anyone other than my grandparents who use use print calendars any more. Launching today, Personera, hopes to bring print calendars into the Web Age by combining the old with the new. The company is offering the world’s first print calendar that is personalized with the birthdays of your Facebook friends, upcoming events, and photos.

Personera’s service allows people to use their Facebook accounts to log in through Facebook Connect, and make all of their social network content instantly available for product personalization. Users are able to choose a theme, automatically add their friends birthdays and events each day, and drag and drop their favorite photos into the monthly layouts.

A high quality 12-month, 32-page printed calendar then is delivered to their mailbox. The service itself costs $24.95, but that includes shipping to anywhere in the world.

Also, Personera is giving TechCrunch readers a 30% discount coupon off any products that they purchase from Personera. On the checkout page, enter the code “TCREADER” in the voucher box to claim your discount. The offer is valid for a week.

Personera has received $125K in funding from Vinny Lingham, Michael Leeman and Tomas Van den Berckt.

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