Forget People. You want the 50 most beautiful people on the Internet? We'll give you 73. Start with, um, a guy (girl?) named Starspirit. Gorgeous. You too, Bunty. (Don't think we're forgetting you either, Spocko). Where'd we find them?
I blame Twitter. It's not enough to be a website anymore. Oh no. You must be a platform. Have an API. Court developers. Build an "ecosystem." Whatever. You know what an application programming interface really is? An admission that you're too poor, cheap, or uncreative to build all the features your website needs. Pownce is the latest to 'fess up to its shortcomings. The file-sharing and messaging site has released its own API. Incomplete, naturally. Maybe they can release an API for their API and have someone else finish it for them.
While other startup founders have to stay home and, you know, work, these guys have the time and the spare $3,000 to spend hanging out at a zero-agenda conference in Hawaii. (For the record, we're jealous.) Spotted in Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz's Flickr stream: Benchmark entrepreneur-in-waiting Nirav Tolia; "stepped-up" LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman; FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo, who's rolling in Googlebucks; Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale; Evan Williams from Twitter; Mashery's Oren Michels; and
Kevin Rose (and his new haircut) from Digg with Joshua Schachter from the Yahoo-owned Del.icio.us. One question: Is this really Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg? I don't recognize him looking so unnerdly. (Photo by: bradley23)
Valleywag has a secret informant on the Big Island of Hawaii, where venture capitalist David Hornik is throwing his no-agenda, all-schmoozing conference The Lobby. Our spy, whom we've dubbed "The Lobbyist," reports that the hotel where it's being held is also hosting a meeting of the California State Athletic Association. That means, of course, that Hornik's hand-chosen geek squad is looking even more pasty and out of shape next to the hot, young sporty set. (One wonders if Digg founder Kevin Rose's new haircut is getting him some play with the female athletes, or if he's staying faithful to longtime love Sarah Lane, who's with him in Hawaii.) Today, attendees are on a scavenger hunt. The contestants, inexplicably, are wearing long pants, despite the 90-degree weather. But we're sure that the site of their legs would be blinding. Central Station Alarm Association, which makes this whole item far less funny. (Photo by bradley23)
You know those sequences of distorted letters and numbers you have to type in at websites? Known as captchas, they were popularized by PayPal cofounder Max Levchin. And they're used on sites like Digg to prevent computer-generated spam. Annoying but smart. Sometimes too smart. This captcha, supposedly randomly generated, clearly shows that Digg's servers know exactly what's on users' minds.
Everyone's heard of Kevin Rose, the genial, constantly drinking founder of Digg and host of the Diggnation webcast. And everyone's used to his sleepy-eyed, mopheaded good looks. Well, forget the mophead. From this Valleywag spy photo pic we spotted on Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz's Flickr stream, Rose got a buzz cut before flying to Hawaii for VC David Hornik's exclusive Lobby conference. Does this have something to do with that Captain America comic? How will his online-video fans react? Will his Diggnation numbers plummet? And will women continue to ask him to sign their breasts? (Photo by bradley23)
Study your trivia and get your answer buzzer ready, as there's a contest this evening at the Web 2.0 Summit. Nerdboys and geek girls, your life's in jeopardy, Web 2.0-style.
Oh god, Evite. It starts with an email about a party with no information about that party, and then it gets worse. But in many cases there's no reason you have to use the most popular site. Here's what to use instead of Evite, YouTube, Blogger, Twitter, Digg, and MapQuest.
If you haven't kept up with the latest Captain America comic plot lines, you may be in for a shock to learn that the virile symbol of American patriotism is dying and he has to choose a successor from among a band of merry marines and office trollops. But who lurks over his left shoulder? Is that ... drowsy-eyed, hunky Digg founder Kevin Rose sporting a Diggnation T-shirt? We'll have to wait until January 2008 to learn if Rose and his Digg army can save America from Al-Qaeda — and if Marvel, publisher of the comic, has mastered the fine art of Diggbait.
How overrated is blog-post-ranking site Techmeme, so much in this week's news? Scoring the top slot on the site's front door is good for bragging rights if you're a tech blogger. But if you value pageviews more than props, here's the hard truth: Techmeme's prize position will only send around 1,000 direct clickthroughs to your post, according to bloggers I pinged. As for the "influencing the influencers" theory so popular with second-tier PR firms, topping Techmeme means at most 5,000 extra pageviews total from around the Web, say sources who've been there several times.
Did Boing Boing, Digg and Engadget bloggers get paid to appear in Virgin America's ads? Who cares! Bloggers don't believe in the complicated conflict-of-interest rules of traditional news reporters, any more than rappers care about classic rock's stance against "selling out." Virgin, Microsoft and other household names don't need to pay famous-for-the-Internet people to appear in their marketing campaigns. Bloggers do it for the far more valuable quid pro quo of being associated with a bigger brand. Be honest: You would, too.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — Coming to a browser near you: "People who liked this article also liked these articles." That's right — according to founder Kevin Rose, Digg is getting ready to do to news what Amazon.com did to shopping. At a panel at Technology Review's EmTech conference, Rose said that Digg would be launching a "suggestion service" in a few months. It's a natural move, after Digg introduced social-networking features that let you better track the headlines your friends find interesting; mining that data to find patterns and present users with similar articles just makes sense. Still, it could spell a radical shift in news consumption — a move that brings us closer to the vision of the "Daily Me," a techie vision of a completely personalized news outlet. (Photo by Lane Hartwell for Valleywag)
Ah, we remember a day when relations between the creators of Pownce, the online message board backed by Digg founder Kevin Rose, were, well, kinder. But now Pownce coder Leah Culver, pictured here, has started a spat with Rose, using his own Digg site to accuse Digg of copying Pownce. Digg has added more social features, it's true — and considering that Digg and Pownce share employees, is it really surprising that they'd look similar? Perhaps Culver has reconsidered the charge, having deleted the Flickr screenshot she used to illustrate it. Considering that one of the double-time workers, Daniel Burka, is Culver's ex, we suspect that there may be more to this drama than mere user-interface issues.
The biggest problem with becoming an extremely popular website with extremely vocal and loyal users, like the social news site Digg, is ... being extremely popular and having extremely vocal and loyal users. Your audience can never be pleased: Some want new features, others want old features refined, and others want no changes at all. While the newly introduced social-network features seem unobtrusive, and in keeping with Digg's headline-rating focus, most Diggers simply want commenting improved and a promised images section added. And they're enraged that the new features were revealed in an old-media BusinessWeek exclusive prior to appearing on Digg's own blog.
AOL's Digg clone, formerly branded as Netscape and already pronounced dead, will be rebranded as Propeller. The announcement came from Tom Drapeau, the head of AOL's Netscape division since Jason Calacanis's brief tenure. Muhammed Saleem, a Propeller editor né Netscape Scout, thinks technology sites should be eating their hats for the grave predictions. Maybe the site would have had a chance at life and competed with Digg, the social news site, if it had launched with original branding instead of misusing the name of the already-dead Netscape. But AOL angered and turned off a loyal community when, under Calacanis, it killed the original Netscape and, after Calacanis's jealous pursuit of Kevin Rose, its own Digg clone — even if the sites ignominiously remain on life support and AOL refuses to accept that its time to pull the plug.
I would do plenty of things for you. I'd drive you to the airport. I'd be the gunner while you drive the Warthog on Halo. I'd pretend you really can play the guitar. But I won't vote for your lame story on Digg.
Social news filter Digg has spawned imitators, including Reddit and Slashdot's Firehose. Oh, and the late, unlamented Netscape. "Ripping off" is practically a core tenet of Web 2.0, though we suppose it sounds nicer if you call it "iteratively evolving industrywide best practices." One creative Web designer and Xbox fanboy, though, decided the Internet needed a Digg dedicated to Microsoft's Xbox consoles, so he created Diggxbox. As you might imagine, it uses its own version of Digg's user-driven filtering to sort the day's Xbox-related news. It's even adopted cute videogame touches like the Xbox's "red ring of death" as the "bury" button (as Digg's mechanism for voting "no" on a story is known). Cloning Digg is easy, but attracting a fanatical userbase like Digg's is another thing altogether.
