Silicon Valley and Technology

StumbleUpon is preparing to launch a shortURL service (a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs, like TinyURL or Bit.ly) in the next couple of weeks called su.pr.

Founder Garret Camp announced the new service on Twitter without any description of what it might be on March 3. In an email exchange he says it will be a shortURL service to share StumbleUpon links on sites like Twitter and Facebook and that it will be launched in a week or two. The site currently redirects to StumbleUpon.

Digg is planning its own similar service, which we covered late last month.

Digg’s service will show additional information, like total traffic to the link, in a Digg “toolbar” wrapper, and users can easily create links by simply adding digg.com/ before any URL (the short URL will then be created and shown. I don’t have any information on exactly what StumbleUpon is planning, but it’s a safe guess it’ll have similar features, and it may actually launch before Digg.

The benefit to StumbleUpon and Digg to these services is traffic when people click on the short URLs. People add a lot on links on Twitter posts but space constraints (140 characters per post) require short URLs.

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Google reached out this evening to Web publishers using its advertising, warning them to review their privacy policies now that Google is about to track their users more closely.

The notification comes a day after Google announced it is starting to track users’ Web surfing preferences in order to target them with advertising that closely matches their tastes. Google reaches about 74 percent of U.S. Web users, according to Comscore, and so is collecting an immense amount of information when those users visit different sites.

To conduct its targeting, Google is dropping “cookies” on your browser each time you visit a Web page owned by a publisher that users Google advertising. Those cookies track you as you surf from page to page. If you tend to visit lots of sports pages, for example, Google classifies you as a “sports enthusiast” and chooses to serve up advertisement related to sports.

Google is essentially giving publishers a heads-up that they should tell their users about this new targeting by revising their privacy policies. (In separate but related, the NYT’s Saul Hansell has an excellent review of how Google’s practices compare to those of other companies, including privacy policies Though it’s too bad he doesn’t mention AOL’s Advertising.com, which reaches 91 percent of U.S. Web users, according to Comscore, and so has a greater reach than Google.). Here’s the message Google just sent to publishers:

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site’s privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we’re unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html.

Making an online social game a hit is about more than owning the intellectual property for the concept, as game-makers Hasbro and Mattel have been finding out over the last year or so. They shut down a popular Facebook application called Scrabulous last summer, because it too closely resembled Scrabble, the word-forming board game they shared the worldwide rights to. But the Scrabulous creators — two brothers in India — came back with a new version of the game late last year that dodges Scrabulous’ legal issues by using a slightly more different interface and name. Called Lexulous, the new version has been catching up with the offical Scrabble apps that Hasbro and Mattel had previously launched.

Here are some numbers. Hasbro owns the rights to Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada, and partnered with video game giant EA to build an app for these users called Scrabble Beta. It now has 595,934 monthly active users. Mattel pursued a similar strategy, developing a version inelegantly called SCRABBLE® Worldwide (excluding U.S. and Canada) — that now has 370,203 monthly active users. We covered the relatively poor performance of these apps back in early January. And to be sure, they’ve grown some since then. But the real story is Lexulous: As of today it has 566,815 monthly active users. And, while the Hasbro and Mattel versions have received overwhelmingly poor reviews from users, Lexulous is almost universally loved.

For those unfamiliar with the Scrabble concept, players receive a random bunch of letters and compete to form dictionary-defined words. The more words a player can create, the more points they win (details here). Scrabulous has been a hit on Facebook because it paired the well-known game with communication channels on the site, encouraging friends to invite more friends and play more often — it’s not just a game, it’s a way to stay connected to people you care about.

Which points to some issues for Hasbro and Mattel. By dividing up the license geographically, they have prohibited Scrabble fans in the U.S. and Canada from playing with the rest of the world. Lexulous, meanwhile, can be played by friends everywhere. Users of both the Hasbro/EA app and the Mattel app have complained about bugs and usability issues, as reviews from Facebook users indicate. Some users have also complained to us about spammy notifications from the EA app (Facebook says EA hasn’t violated Facebook’s developer terms of service, that it is aware of).

Meanwhile, Lexulous has focused on building an application that people want to use — and it’s been busy taking advantage of new communication channels on Facebook. Last week, for example, it became one of the first applications to integrate Facebook’s new chat invite feature, a way for a user playing a gaming application to send invites to friends on Facebook who are logged into its chat service. Hasbro and Mattel have yet to make a move on that front.

The two game-makers reportedly looked into buying Scrabulous before they got courts to shut it down. Given all the effort they’ve put into building their own not-so-popular versions — and the ongoing success of the Scrabulous/Lexulous team — perhaps they should have worked out a deal. Scrabulous was getting more than half a million daily active users before the schism, and was beginning to make money. A business deal between its creators and the gaming companies could have paid off for everyone.

[Image via Gear Diary]

MySpace’s Events page hasn’t really seen a major upgrade for years - the site looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2005, and now lags behind Evite and the current leader Facebook by a wide margin. Today, it looks like that’s about to change. The site’s Events tab now redirects to a MySpace application called Social Plan, which was apparently built by Slingshot Labs, MySpace’s stealth incubator that was created last January. As far as we can tell MySpace hasn’t made any announcements about the new feature, but it seems to be accessible to everyone.

The new Events section is a major upgrade from the previous version, both in appearance and functionality. The biggest addition to the new application is the ability to get relevant event suggestions based on what your friends are up to. While Facebook has been doing this for years, MySpace has largely failed to tap into its greatest asset - its social graph. Users can also scope out upcoming events in their region, and can make ‘Quick Events’, which take only a few seconds to put together. The workflow of making a normal event is also much improved.

The new product from Slingshot is being billed as a standard application built on MySpace’s app platform (it includes the typical “This app was not developed by MySpace” message), and visitors can still access the original Events page at events.MySpace.com. But users that click on ‘Events’ from MySpace’s navigation bar are brought to the application, so it’s clear that this is part of the site’s core functionality (I suspect they’ll get rid of the old version entirely once they’ve made sure the new one doesn’t have any kinks). This is also notable for being the first time a Slingshot app has been deployed on MySpace itself, and indicates that the social network is pleased with the results from its unorthodox venture.

All in all, it looks like Slingshot has come up with a winner, though it will still have a tough time catching up with Evite and Facebook (MySpace probably should have rolled out something like this a long time ago). This isn’t the first time the experimental incubator paid off for MySpace: Slingshot also created DailyFill, a gossip site that has shot off to 3.9 million uniques a month since its launch less than four months ago.

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Electronic Arts showed off its latest sports games today, with a heavy emphasis on new kinds of games that could reach wider audiences.

Among the big titles coming soon is EA Sports Active, a fitness title for the Nintendo Wii that resembles the Nintendo Wii Fit title that topped ten million unit sales last year. But EA Sports Active isn’t just a knock-off of Wii Fit, which comes with a Wii Balance Board.

The game has a deep fitness program for people who are serious about losing weight or keeping fit. They can use the advice and tools to track their activities and exercise and then design workouts that let them have fun while they’re exercising with the game. You can do things like simulate rollerblading jumps by tying the Wii controller to your thigh and then jumping up and down. You can use a stretch band to exercise your arms and see how precisely you’re following the instructions by looking at your on-screen avatar. The game isn’t as cutesy as Wii Fit and so it may appeal to people who thought the Nintendo game was a little silly.

Jen Riley, an EA spokeswoman pictured at bottom, showed how you can use the Wii controller with the game to shoot baskets, do bicep curls or flex your legs or box. You can design the workout so that it gets harder every day that you do it. You can design the workout to focus on cardio, upper body, lower body, or sports activities. And the game keeps track of your progress and gives you trophies for achievements. It also lets you enter physical activities that you’ve done outside of the game. The game launches on the Wii on May 19.

EA Sports generates billions of dollars in revenues for Redwood City, Calif.-based EA each year, with hardcore console games such as Madden NFL generating the meet of the business. But it’s innovative titles like EA Sports Active that can help EA reach new audiences and grab better market share on Nintendo’s fast-growing Wii console.

“This is about transforming the business and innovating,” said Peter Moore, head of EA Sports.

EA needs transforming because it’s losing money, despite the EA Sports cash cow. The company has been trying to come up with original hits, but some have flopped and EA’s game development costs have been rising faster than revenues. As a result, EA has been cutting back on staff and canceling games.

Moore pointed out that EA’s traditional console sports games are now garnering big online audiences. The FIFA soccer and Madden football games generate as many as two million game sessions per day online. In one day, the equivalent of 150 full NFL seasons are played on Madden. EA is adding a lot of digital-only content that can be downloaded to game systems. One example is the NCAA Basketball 09 March Madness title, which can be downloaded to an Xbox 360 for the equivalent of $15. That game will be updated with some of the latest developments in the ongoing tournament.

But the sports world is changing. Free-to-play, short session games are being offered (or launched soon) by rival start-ups such as Cybersports, GamesCampus, Six Degrees and Quick Hit. The web, iPhone, the Wii and other new platforms are becoming increasingly appealing. EA has experiment with these new platforms as it tries to hang on to its fans and attract new ones, Moore told me.

EA’s mobile game division showed off a version of its Tiger Woods PGA Tour game for the iPhone. That game debuts in the coming months with seven 18-hole golf courses, five pro golfers, and customizable players as well (so you can make the player look like you). You play the game by flicking your finger across the touch screen to swing at a golf ball. Over the next nine months, EA plans to roll out a bunch of iPhone games.

“We’re taking the iPhone extremely seriously,” said Josh Milton, producer at EA Mobile.

Please check out our GamesBeat 09 game conference on March 24.

Me and my fellow VentureBeatnik Eric Eldon are here on the ground in Austin, Texas for this year’s SXSW conference. Right now, nothing too exciting is going on, as we’re sitting alone in a cafe writing, but tomorrow the conference starts. For those not at the conference, there’s an interesting, visual way to follow along.

Pepsi has teamed up with the teams behind two great Twitter apps, Twistori and Twennis, to bring us PepsiCoZeitgeist, a new Twitter visualization tool that showcases tweets about SXSW. For those familiar with Twistori, it looks similar, but rather than focus on the words “love,” “hate,” “think,” “believe,” “feel,” and “wish,” it focuses on more SXSW-appropriate terms: “arriving,” “registering,” “eating,” “connecting,” and perhaps most importantly, “partying” and “drinking.” But those evolve as the conference goes on, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone notes in a post about the feature today.

And you can change the visualizations too. The default is a stream like Twistori, but you can also use “Popular” view, which is sort of like a tag cloud, “Swarm” view, which shows tweets on a map, “Party Watch,” which will focus on parties on any given night and “Overheard” view, which will seperate out all the tweets that start with “OH:”

For those of you here at SXSW, Pepsi will be displaying these visualizations on displays throughout the Austin Convention Center. Those who were here two years ago may recall that is similar to what Twitter itself did back then. That move was perhaps the big catalyst that made the service a staple in the tech community, and allowed it to grow into what it has become today.

Of course, while this will be a nice tool for some of you who couldn’t make SXSW, I know a lot of you would prefer a way to filter out all SXSW-related tweets. Sorry, can’t help you there.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeatniks Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Camille Ricketts, Dan Kaplan and Matt Marshall. We have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

Kara Swisher grabbed the man of the hour, Tim Armstrong, after Time Warner announced that he would become AOL's new CEO.  Tim will start his new job on April 7.

Tim made the obligatory noises about AOL still having lots of good assets (it does). Then he handicapped its likely future:

AOL owner Time Warner (TWX) has given [Armstrong] a lot of options for its future, from keeping it inside the larger media conglomerate (unlikely) to partnering with another company (less unlikely) to spinning it out (likely!).

“One of the things we discussed was making sure we were able to have the best outcome for AOL,” said Armstrong. “That could take the form of a lot of different paths.”

(Translation: As soon as the economy brightens, I am going to become a public company CEO, just like my soon-to-be-ex-boss Eric Schmidt!)

Read the whole thing >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• "Rondy" Gets The Boot
• Tim Armstrong Named AOL CEO (TWX)
• War At AOL: Randy Falco Or Ron Grant (Or Both) May Go (TWX)

Google co-founder backs major Parkinson’s study –  Sergey Brin says he plans to contribute money and DNA to a study run by his wife Anne Wojcicki’s startup 23andMe.

Dockers introduces shakable iPhone ad — Users will need to shake their iPhones to spur urban street dancer Dufon to perform his moves. The ad was created by mobile ad company Medialets.

Twofish launches analytics platform for social games — The company’s Elements platform will help social game and virtual world developers understand and make more money from their virtual economies. Inside Social Games says the tools are “very powerful.”

Mayfield Fund has appoints Kendall Cooper as chief financial officer — Cooper joins Mayfield from Dominion Ventures, where he held the same title.

Oprah to interview Zuckerberg tomorrow — The talk show host will probably ask Zuckerberg to demo the show’s new Facebook page, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Jason Calacanis offers $250,000 for a prominent spot on Twitter — The Mahalo founder predicts that having a profile that’s promoted through Twitter’s “suggested users” feature will be worth “$1 million — Super Bowl commercial level” in five years.

Microsoft exec appointed to protect nation’s computers — Philip Reitinger, who currently has the unwieldy title of Chief Trustworthy Infrastructure Strategist at Microsoft, has been given a spot in the Department of Homeland Security, where it will be his responsibility to protect federal computing systems.

The switch to daylight savings time costs the US $480M — At least according to RescueTime, which extrapolated from data collected by its time tracking software.

Adify updates its platform for building and managing ad networks — The company says Adify 4.0 offers allows advertisers to track the success of up to four conversion points after a user has clicked on an ad.

imeem CEO on monetizing social networks — In the video, Dalton Caldwell talks to hypebot about the music-focused social network service, and outlines (vaguely) some of the targeted advertising projects coming later this year.

Plaxo adds comments in activity feeds – The social networking site also announced integration with travel site TripIt.

Dave Winer, the old guy who takes credit for blogging, podcasting, and other tech trends, is mad at Twitter CEO Ev Williams. Why? Because Williams is making people — people who are not Dave Winer — famous.

Poor Williams! He's just the latest target of Winer's wrath. The irascible Internet fussbudget has gotten mad at Jason Calacanis for being self-promotional, mad at Internet commenters who do not acknowledge his contributions to the Internet, mad at Twitter for not doing what he says, and mad at Hillary Clinton for being alive. (We've also long suspected that he is secretly mad at the New York Times because they will not hire him as a columnist and run his verbal spew unedited.)

But Winer's latest rant is hilariously hypocritical.

Williams's sin, according to Winer, is playing favorites with Twitter's "Suggested Users" page, a feature meant to help bewildered new Twitter users navigate the messaging service's real-time, 140-character spasms of pointless puffery. He writes:
I pour a lot of effort into Twitter, and while I wasn't in the top tier of users, I was solidly in the second tier. I wasn't doing the things you have to do to get the most followers, or I didn't have a powerful media presence like Leo or Shaq to get me up there. ... It's now approaching 20,000, which I am proud of, but it's not very much compared to the numbers of some people who did nothing other than be friends of Evan Williams to get hundreds of thousands of followers. ...

Think about it this way — do you know who wrote Apache or PHP? Do any of them have the power to deliver so much flow to an installation of their software? Imho, that's exactly the relationship Twitter should have with its users. Or the phone company and users of phones — they shouldn't jump into a conversation and say (for example) "We know someone really cool you would probably like to talk to. We're connecting you to them now.

Makes sense! Who would want the phone company to do that? Except Winer did the exact same thing himself with his own blog-software company, Userland Software, in 2003, writes former employee Rogers Cadenhead. Moreover, unlike Twitter's Williams, he actually took money to promote a blogger — former MTV veejay Adam Curry. In 2003, Curry wrote:
Time to come clean on an investment I made a year and a half ago. At the time, UserLand software had released a Mac OSX version of Radio and I was totally digging the built in news aggregator. I came up with a cunning plan: I asked Userland if I could purchase a pre-installed feed on their aggregator, which supports RSS xml feeds. I paid $10,000 for a one year license. To date I've been delighted with my purchase and although I haven't checked recently, I'm pretty sure Userland still has me in the defaults. ...

The $10k didn't 'just' give me an automatic base within the userland community, it got pasted on web pages all over the world and I've built up an audience that consists of 50% aggergator users.

Williams hasn't said anything about charging for placement on the Suggested page, but it can generated tens of thousands of new followers a day for featured Twitter accounts. Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis — yes, the one Winer feuded with — has offered to pay $250,000 to get featured on it. Which makes us think: Winer isn't mad at Williams because he's playing favorites. Winer is jealous because Williams is far more effective at playing favorites than Winer will ever be.

Much is being written today about the value of a large following on Twitter. Jason Calacanis wants to pay $125,000 a year to have Twitter recommend him to other users, for example. He thinks that over time accounts with massive followings will somehow be able to pull in $1 million a year or more in incremental revenue, assuming they then have millions of followers.

We have unique data to share because our TechCrunch Twitter account was made one of the suggested accounts on Twitter earlier this year. On February 11 we had 65,573 hard earned followers. By March 1 that had jumped to 158,708 followers. Today it stands at 217,187.

So in just over a month the number of Twitter followers to the TechCrunch account has nearly quadrupled. What I want to know is what kind of traffic that’s sending to TechCrunch, and what value that might have.

Our recent referral traffic from Twitter is shown in the chart below. This only includes traffic from Twitter directly, it doesn’t include third party clients or Twitter Search.

My suspicion is that most of the new followers aren’t hard core TechCrunch fanatics and wouldn’t be as valuable as the follower that we “earned” prior to being added to the suggested list. So far the data is confirming this.

Traffic from Twitter spiked in January, before we were added to the list, growing from 67,000 page views to 130,000 in that month. In February, when follow number spiked upwards, traffic actually dipped to 111,000 page views. The first 11 days in March have brought in 53,000 page views from Twitter, suggesting the month will end up around 150,000.

If the March data holds, that tells us that 65,573 hard core users brought us 130,000 January page views. Nearly quadrupling that number of followers will only bring in an extra 20,000 page views in March.

We love these new users, but they aren’t nearly as valuable to us as the ones that we fought for in the early days of Twitter. We’ll update this post later with more data as we collect it.

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There are hearings this week in Congress on whether non-satellite radio stations should pay a performance royalty for the music they play.  They have not had to do so, unlike the radio industries in other parts of the world, for historical reasons. The music industry has been lobbying to right this decades-long wrong, and its arguments seem to have sympathetic ears in Congress — notwithstanding the political capital of the National Association of Broadcasters.  I’m not always sympathetic to the arguments of the labels, but in this case, I am.
Quite simply, I don’t think U.S. terrestrial radio has a leg to stand on. They claim that they serve a promotional role for the music they play and that they should therefore be exempt (while Internet and satellite radio isn’t). As Billy Corgan testified, there is no doubt that radio is a heavy promoter of music, but so what? Stations are still using a copyright, and the owner of the copyright ought to get paid for it — especially if their IP can be used without an individually negotiated license. The NAB’s argument is absurd: Radio stations will pay Rush Limbaugh for his content and go after people that try to re-broadcast it, but they won’t do the same for the music they play?

It is time for this to be changed, and I hope it happens.  It may well hasten the departure of music from FM radio, but that would be a market decision. In fact, some enterprising labels may calculate that they do indeed derive a greater promotional benefit and offer to waive the royalties for stations playing their repertoire.  But that should be the prerogative of the copyright holder.

In an interview with Variety magazine, Lionsgate president Curt Marvis let slip that the Wii presents a major opportunity for Hollywood studios to distribute movies and television shows — and that this might be a reality before the year is out. While it isn’t written in stone, someone of Marvis’ stature probably isn’t just blowing smoke.

There are other indications that this might be in the works: Nintendo has already started developing a video-on-demand service to deliver original content via the Wii in Japan. The next logical step would be to partner with U.S. studios and agencies to add American films and shows to its roster. If it does, the Wii would instantly come toe-to-toe with Microsoft’s XBox Live, which already offers this feature through a partnership with Netflix, and Sony PlayStation Network, which has just joined forces with NBC Universal — not to mention the pack of set-top boxes that also serve internet video straight to living room televisions like Roku, Boxee, ZillionTV and Apple TV.

It seems a likely move for Nintendo, which has always been very TV-set-centric. It has a ripe chance to dominate the market in one fell swoop. There are 16.2 million Wiis in the U.S. right now, as opposed to 12.8 million XBox 360s and 6.3 million PlayStation 3s. Not only would it double the market for this kind of online video service (making it a Hollywood darling overnight), but it would beat the early adopters at their own game. And as a family-oriented entertainment system, the Wii is arguably a better fit for the business as well. Can’t you just see Disney rocking the Wii’s bubbly interface?

The only forseeable drawbacks are that the current Wii model wouldn’t be capable of high definition playback and lacks a hard drive for long-term storage. That being said, it’s more likely Nintendo would set up a quality streaming service through the device, and wait for another hardware roll-out to add in requirements for ehanced viewing and video storage.

Financially, it’s been a tough year for almost everyone, even the absurdly rich. Some of the tech world’s richest men are billionaires no more, according to Forbes’ new list of the world’s billionaires. Among the most notable dropoffs (for VentureBeat readers) are Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz, and venture capital pioneer Arthur Rock.

Last year, Zuckerberg (then 23) was estimated to be worth $1.5 billion, making him the world’s youngest billionaire. Now he’s lost at least $600 million and is “simply a youthful multi-millionaire,” Forbes says. The Wall Street Journal’s DealBook blog, meanwhile, notes that Moritz and Rock have dropped off the list — and that’s despite Moritz hanging on to the number two spot on Forbes’ Midas List of the world’s top venture capitalists (based largely on his investment in Google ). Moritz was previously ranked 897 with a worth of $1.3 billion, while Rock ranked 1,014 and was worth $1.1 billion. Rock is famous for backing companies like Intel and Apple, but he also invested his money with fraudulent financier Bernard Madoff.

That doesn’t mean tech or venture capital have completely left from the billionaire’s club, of course. For one thing, Microsoft founder Bill Gates may have lost $18 billion, but he’s still worth $40 billion, putting him back at the top. Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are tied for 26th with $12.0 billion each. Moritz’s fellow Google investors John Doerr (of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers) and Ram Shiram tied for number 601, and are estimated to be worth of $1.2 billion each.

Other tidbits: The total number of billionaires has dropped from 1,125 to 793. The world’s richest bachelor is Michael Bloomberg. And New York City has the highest concentration of the world’s billionaires, with its 55 billionaires far outnumbering San Francisco’s 10. Man, my New York friends will never let me hear the end of this.

Who's the most popular guy in the midst of the worst economic crisis in decades? Why, none other than Nouriel Roubini, New York University's own Dr. Doom. He just got back from a world tour.

Roubini, a doomsaying economist who's as well-known for his Tribeca loft parties as his increasingly grandiose predictions of worldwide economic collapse, took a break from wooing young women on Facebook to post a few photos of a copter ride in Brazil. (He simply had to spring for a helicopter "as Sao Paulo car traffic is THE worst in the world.) Check out who he hung out with: New York Times loan shark Carlos Slim Helù, disaster-exploiting hedge fund manager John Paulson, and demise-of-empire chronicler Niall Ferguson. They know all about meltdowns, too!

Are all the Twitterers headed to the SXSW festival, like Digg's Kevin Rose? Actually, no! Here's where Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin, Salon.com edi-bore Joan Walsh, and Politico's Patrick Gavin recorded their time-wasting thoughts:

Politico's Patrick Gavin ogled the oglers.

Salon.com editor-in-chief Joan Walsh confirmed people's general opinion of her.

Geek overlord and Digg founder Kevin Rose prepared to rule Austin at SXSW, the geek spring-break festival.

Former AOL employee and Engadget alumnus Ryan Block gloated over the firing of incompetent AOL CEO Randy Falco.

Boing Boing blogger and intergalactic space princess Xeni Jardin reported in from Africa.

See something worth noting on Twitter? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

AOL announced today that it has hired away Tim Armstrong, the head of Google’s sales organization, to become the company’s next chairman and chief executive. Armstrong, whose official title is senior vice president of sales in North America and Latin America, has been credited by many with building the search giant’s goliath online advertising business — and will now try to work the same magic at its faltering peer.

Armstrong will replace chief executive Randy Falco and president Ron Grant after a short transition period. The change is clearly motivated by AOL’s poor performance in recent months and years. Industry insiders and tech pundits alike have been calling for its leaders’ dismissal for a while. Not only does it continue to hemorrhage dial-up subscribers, but it has failed to gain traction in any other major sector of the internet as consumer preferences evolve. Its revenue fell 20 percent in 2008 to $4.2 billion, led by a 31 percent drop in its subscriber business, which has now dipped below $1 billion.

Few people realize that AOL — which saw the bulk of its success in the 1990s as an online access service — has its own fledgling internet search engine. Google (and Armstrong, for that matter) is no stranger to this division of the AOL organization. In 2005, it invested $1 billion in the company in exchange for a 5 percent stake and profit-sharing to help it serve search advertising. AOL’s addition of Armstrong will no doubt magnify focus on this segment of its business. His primary charge, as Reuters notes, will be to prepare AOL to spin out of parent company Time Warner, either to stand on its own or merge with a partner like Yahoo. A smarter advertising strategy will obviously be vital in both scenarios.

Incidientally, it was speculated that Yahoo would be the one to tap Armstrong to replace departed chief executive Jerry Yang. But it was not to be. Armstrong’s tenure at Google stretches back to 2000. Before that, he held executive sales posts at Snowball.com, Starwave and ABC/ESPN Internet Ventures.

Tim O’Reilly had a simple message for the tech community earlier this week at the Emerging Technology conference: Support Obama! Wait, isn’t the campaign over? It may be, but the next presidential contest is already around the corner, and O’Reilly believes that there’s only a short window of opportunity to actually innovate in Washington. That’s why he wants to get tech folks involved now. I sat down with him yesterday to hear more about his plans to help the new administration.

“We have this wonderful opportunity with this new president who is saying he wants to make government more transparent, more collaborative, more responsive,”O’Reilly told me, adding: “We know how to build systems like that.” One of his favored examples is Carl Malamud, who launched the first free and public EDGAR server for SEC filings without any government help back in 1993, only to donate it to the SEC shortly after. “This idea of public-private partnership is fairly central to my thinking,”O’Reilly told me. “One of the opportunities for people on the outside is to shoulder more of the burden and build services that government has a hard time building itself,” O’Reilly said.

Of course, building such databases is a lot easier when you have a federal administration that committed to publishing government data online. “It is very clear that the Obama administration understands startup culture,” O’Reilly says. However, there are still lots and lots of people within and close to the government that view making data public with suspicion. Said O’Reilly: “Many people in these organizations are threatened by the idea that some young developer could say, ‘I can build for $5,000 or in six weeks something that you are gonna say takes six years and $50 million.’ “

So, how do you convince official agencies to trust that young developer, and how do you get that developer to start toying with government data? First of all, by getting them to talk. O’Reilly Media is holding a Gov 2.0 Summit this September in Washington with the goal to showcase innovation inside and outside of the government. (Wired launched an “Open Up Government Data” wiki earlier this week, as well.)

And then, there’s always money. The new administration loves technology partly because it’s cheaper, O’Reilly speculated. “A lot of it is: How do we get more bang for our buck?,” he said. However, it’s not just about spending less: “Reinventing our sources and distribution systems for energy, reinventing our educational system, reinventing our communications infrastructure are all very powerful stimuluses for new economic activity.”

In other words: Supporting the new administration could turn out to be the Valley’s very own stimulus plan.

At last, AOL has done something right: The Time Warner Internet unit has hired Google's Tim Armstrong as its new CEO, booting the laughably incompetent duo of CEO Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant.

Falco and Grant were almost instantly hated when they arrived at AOL's Dulles campus — partly because Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes badly mishandled the exit of former CEO Jonathan Miller. (Miller is now a venture capitalist, and both his name and Armstrong's came up as candidates in Yahoo's CEO search.)

Armstrong, head of Google's North American ad sales, seems like the best possible man for the job — and with Google's shares hovering around $323, down more than 50 percent from their peak, and AOL at the nadir of its tumultuous existence, it seems like a good time for him to prove what he can do.

He benefits from an easy comparison: Falco's reign at AOL, where the company's notional value sank from $20 billion to a fraction of that, will go down in history as one of the worst reigns as CEO at any company, anywhere.

But what is Armstrong going to do? He'd never have left his cozy perch at Google to oversee AOL's further decline. Let's assume that's not in the cards.

The best indicator of Armstrong's preferred strategy is not the one he pursued at Google. Based primarily in New York, Armstrong oversaw an agenda set by the geeks in Mountain View. To keep him on board, Google's top managers allowed Armstrong use his Google-IPO wealth to make several startup investments on the side, even when they posed a conflict of interest.

One company, Associated Content, run by Armstrong's college roommate Luke Beatty, lets amateur publishers post content on the Web and get paid a share of the advertising revenues. Another, Patch, is building local news sites with real journalists behind them, in competition with the New York Times.

It's not clear if Time Warner, which is stricter about this kind of thing, will let Armstrong stay involved with his side gigs. But what they spell out is a guy who's itching to be a media kingpin, not the boss of an army of programmers.

What that likely means: The future of AOL will rest in its blog-heavy MediaGlow division, while Armstrong works his Madison Avenue connections to rebuild AOL's slouching ad sales. If he makes it work, it will be a triumph over his old bosses at Google — the ones who believe in the alchemy of algorithms over the hard work of creating content that attracts an audience.