This is a story I had heard about two years ago from a Harvard grad I am friends with (who also mentioned Mark Zuckerberg was one of the biggest pricks on campus (WAS one, not HAS one).
Apparently, Zuckerberg was hired to develop some coding for the similar college start up, ConnectU.com. Shortly after his term of employment with ConnectU, Zuckerberg had thousands of fellow Harvard students signed up for his very own website, TheFaceBook.com. The choppy story I heard two years ago was that two brothers were the main investors/creators of ConnectU, both of whom are heirs to quite a large family fortune, so basically they were dragging the lawsuit out as long as possible, in hopes that Facebook would gain national notoriety. Well, it has, and now Zuckerberg is going to have to pay.
I would think there would be some type of settlement in the near future, but if anyone were to refute such an attempt, it would Zuckerberg. The timing of everything is too sketchy for this not to work in the favor of ConnectU. However, I can’t help but call ConnectU out as a bunch of morons for not taking advantage of the publicity they are getting. Their Alexa ranking has jumped this week since the news of the settlement, yet when I go to the University of Miami’s page on the website (where I happen to be studying Law), it brings up a database error. Talk about a wasted opportunity!
Xuqa, known for virtual worlds, forums, and other various social networks, has decided to change its name and focus more on quizzes and other third party content that will appear on more popular social networks.
The only question that remains is "could they have made their logo look any more like a penis?"
Back in May, MySpace estimated that there were 7,000 sex offenders on their website. However, reports this week show that the number is actually over 4 times that, at 29,000. MySpace was quick to remove all these profiles to avoid any future criticism.
What is this world coming to? First Craigslist goes down and now MySpace is removing profiles… Where is a sex predator supposed to find their next prey now?!
If you were one of the hundreds of thousands of people logging into CraigsList this morning to find that 1997 $500 scooter or an Oriental massage with a happy ending, today just wasn’t your day. For quite some time, Craigslist, NetFlix, Technorati, Vox, Typepad, and Livejournal were all offline today. Our guess is it was due to the major power outages experienced within San Francisco.
What does this all mean? Welp, I guess it just means thousands of men had to deliver a self medicated happy ending. :-\
Sorry to Amp’d Mobile clients. After blowing $360 million in VC Funding and dropping from 200,000 members in April to about 100,000 currently, Amp’d Mobile will be closing shop tonight just after midnight. And if you are an Amp’d Mobile subscriber, what is your recourse? Absolutely nothing! When Amp’d closes down tonight, it will seem as if it never existed. Instead of helping its clients switch to new provider, Amp’d is turning a blind eye and basically saying “F-ck you all.” Not exactly the most ethical problem, but I’m assuming the top dogs at Amp’d are more willing to pocket the rest of the investment funds from the company than to pay employees to assist outraged clients.
This may be the first time I am happy to be with Sprint…
Answers.com has just purchased Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com from Lexico for $100 million. This sounds like a steal to me. Although the network of sites reportedly earned only $2.8 million of income last year, Answers.com has just bought into a network of website that receives three times the page views as its own.
What excites me about this deal is that its a blockbuster deal involving a company being purchased that has a bright future and is actually making money!
With no economic knowledge of the Lexico network, I would’ve thought this deal would be much higher, somewhere in the realm of $500 million. I use Dictionary.com on weekly basis, but now with the spell check in text fields on Firefox and TheFreeDictionary.com apparently having a sick SEO department (considering they top google for many single common nouns), this could be great timing for Lexico to get out.
When it comes down to it, this seems like a great deal for Answers.com. Thumbs up.
Pardon my bluntness, but the real reason that Second Life will fail (I use the term loosely and should probably replace it with ‘will not be a tremendous success’) is really quite simple; real vagina is better than cyber vagina. Sure, there is a niche of introverted hermits sitting inside their homes attempting to make connections with other similar people, but this is hardly enough of a demographic to establish the numbers huge corporations are looking for to expand their businesses.
I made this prediction the very first time I learned of SecondLife a little over one year ago (but unfortunately had not started this blog yet). And unpromising numbers have recently come out for SecondLife. The LA Times reported that the maximum number of users on SecondLife at any given time is 40,000. The most popular corporate destinations on SecondLife peak at 10,000 visitors per week. With the cost of owning and maintaining real estate of SecondLife, what this boils down to is that essentially SecondLife is not economically efficient whatsoever.
SecondLife will not be a failure. However, don’t expect it to be the economic powerhouse experts once believed it would be. It’s just too weird for mainstream success.