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Microsoft has entered the Group Buying market by launching a joint venture in Australia with 2 of the country's largest print and digital media companies.

The startup, named Cudo, launched last week and sees Microsoft, publishing giant PBL and NineMSN (itself a joint venture between Microsoft and PBL) join forces to try and dominate a local market that has seen a raft of new, but relatively small, group buying startups this year.

Cudo is being run by former Microsoft Australia Director of Business Development, Billy Tucker who, oddly enough, blogged a month before the launch of Cudo about how the Australian group buying market had gone mad.

In that same blog post he also hypothesised that a number of poorly funded group buying pretenders would come and go over the coming monthsmaybe a hint that Cudo might have some interest in buying market share or, more likely, Tucker soliloquizing about the fate of smaller group buying start-ups after Cudo entered the market.

In a recent interview with Smart Company, Tucker explained more about Cudo's strategy.

In relation to his target audience he said he wasn't interested in going for the regular tech savvy crowd but instead was interested in mainstream consumers:

If you walk down the street, talk to a group of people about group buying, they'll have never heard of it. That's the audience we're talking about and that's who we want

He also highlighted that Cudo wanted to quickly get to the number one position in Australia:

We need to take the lead in a short order. The vision for us is to go hard on advertising through the PBL network including ACP magazines and Ninemsn.

In addition to that there's also a national television campaign that has already launched and a $10 referral voucher to spend on Cudo purchases (perhaps an extension of lessons learned from the Bing cashback campaign that helped Microsoft boost market share in the search space).

While all the above may seem excessive for the relatively nascent group buying space, it's necessary if Cudo is to reach their very lofty target of 10 Million customers in the first month - a huge target, even if speaking about repeat purchases, when you consider that Australia only has a population of 21 Million.

If they can even come close to that number I wouldn't be surprised to see digital media companies around the world with their own group buying startups trying wrestle the market away from current runaway leaders like Groupon.

With switching costs a non-issue in terms of customer acquisition, and an ability to gather the attention of both sellers and buyers alike, the market seems primed for digital media giants, with their massive salesforces and huge audiences, to make a serious run at the space.

Original title and link for this post: Microsoft launches Group Buying startup Cudo

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I will be joining the AndroidGuys.com podcast this week, talking about my6sense's entry on the platform. 7 p.m Thursday Pacific time.

Tonight, starting at 9:00 PM CST, the Android Guys Thursday Night Droid-cast will take center stage to bring you some of the best Android entertainment out there! We will talking MANY different things Android this week, including:

• Louis Gray from my6sense will be joining us to talk about the launch of the Android version of the popular social media app.
• Ashley Esqueda from This Week in Mobile will be live with us to plug her show, and to talk about herself lol! (not really but she hates it when we say that)
• We are talking Big Android BBQ tonight, with some awesome news!
• AndroidSWAG has got some brand new SWAG they are dropping on the AGTN audience, make sure to be there to win some!
• Ray and Kyle will be talking about APPNATION, and how they are going to be LIVE in San Fran!

And of course, much more. To listen in, go to http://www.blogtalkradio.com/androidguys, see you tonight at 9:00 CST!

Join us tonight for AGTN! originally appeared on AndroidGuys.

Bachus has a long history in the entertainment and gaming space. He was with Windows software and game developer Mindscape before joining Microsoft in 1997 as a product manager for DirectX. However, he made his name as one of the four men that came up with original concept for the Xbox console, as well as Xbox's first director of third-party relations. Since then, he's worked in the entertainment and gaming industry through various firms he's led or founded.

Bebo, on the other hand, has a long history of decline and turmoil. AOL acquired Bebo back in 2008 for an astonishing $850 million. The acquisition never panned out though, and in June the company sold the site for around $10 million. Only a collapsing U.S. bank could lose $840 million faster than Bebo did.

Bachus will be responsible for spearheading product development. His experience seems ideally suited to bringing entertainment and gaming to the social network, which claims 117 million users (half which have logged in within the last year) and 6.5 billion monthly pageviews (1.5 billion of them mobile). Bachus told me that he sees Bebo as a dream opportunity to try a lot of different ideas quickly against a large user base.

Criterion Capital Partners seem serious about turning things around for the social network, though. In addition to adding Bachus as CPO, the social network has also hired hi5 co-founder Akash Garg and former Danger/Oodle executive Aren Sandersen to help grow Bebo. The company is focusing on video content, mobile access and gaming as the three central components of its rebirth strategy.

Bebo?!

We'll admit; we were a bit surprised to hear someone of Bachus' pedigree and reputation would be joining Bebo. While the social network still has an international presence and a dedicated userbase, it's become an afterthought in the face of competitors like Facebook and Twitter.

When we asked Bachus why he was joining Bebo, his answer was simple: Why not? More specifically, he believes that Bebo has two interesting things going for it: a large, dedicated user base and an opportunity to grow in interesting directions. When we questioned further, Bachus said that he thought the social networking market was maturing and that you will be seeing more specialization in the market, meaning that there's room for more than one player.

For its part, Bebo and its new CEO Adam Levin (also the managing director of Criterion Capital Partners) have cut costs and expect to churn a profit in the next month. More importantly, Criterion seems to be in this for the long haul it wants to revive Bebo's fortunes.

While we see Bachus' point of view and understand why he joined Bebo, it's still a tough sell for us. Beyond its declining prominence, 40% of its users are from the U.K., meaning it will have to have to look to other locations to fuel growth. More gaming and multimedia content will help, but that's long been part of MySpace's turnaround strategy, so far to no avail.

Bebo promises that a lot more features are coming like universal chat and more video and gaming content. We're going to be keeping a close eye to see whether it'll be enough to turn the social network's fortunes around.

More About: aol, bebo, Kevin Bachus, microsoft

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One of the early concerns about Flipboard -- the beautiful reading app for Apple's iPad -- was that it pulled lengthy excerpts of content from web publishers, without paying them or pulling in their ads.

It turns out most publishers don't really care, at least not enough to complain. Instead, the vast majority of publishers that Flipboard has been in touch with since launching in July want to work with the company, cofounder and CEO Mike McCue told us today during a brief visit to Flipboard's Palo Alto, Calif. headquarters.

McCue says only a tiny handful of publishers have complained about the length of excerpts on Flipboard, and as a result, Flipboard tweaked the settings on its back-end to take shorter excerpts from those publishers, "while we brainstorm ways to standardize excerpting for social media purposes." Meanwhile, McCue says most publishers have been supportive of the way Flipboard excerpts. In theory, the excerpts drive up incremental traffic and revenue to those sites.

Indeed, large numbers of publishers have reached out to Flipboard to figure out how they can work together. When SAI's Nicholas Carlson talked to McCue in late July, already 130 or so publishers had said hello. We imagine those partnerships could eventually include deeper integration into the Flipboard app; content-, ad-, and revenue-sharing deals; or potentially even co-branded editions of Flipboard's app.

What's next for Flipboard? A minor update of the app should roll out in the next few weeks with some small tweaks, and a bigger revision is planned for later, but McCue wouldn't get into many details. (One of the things we complained about -- too much repetitive or duplicate content -- should be addressed, though.)

Later, Flipboard will also have to start developing an advertising product, built around the iPad's large, beautiful display -- merging the emotion and quality of print advertising with the social, measurability, and targeting capabilities of the Internet.

But that's still in the future. McCue -- the CEO -- is still the company's only ad sales rep, he joked.

Related: The Inside Story: Flipboard's Crazy Launch And Its Plan To Save Media

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See Also:

• New iPad Ad Gives Flipboard A Huge Shout Out
• The Inside Story: Flipboard's Crazy Launch And Its Plan To Save Media
• Is Hot New iPad App Flipboard Illegal?

TUAWTUAW TV Live: An Apple TV in pieces and a machine that goes Ping originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 08 Sep 2010 16:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google just effectively offed one of it's oldest, quirkiest features the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

The good news is that in the process, Google added at least another hundred million dollars in revenue.

It used to be that you could go to Google.com, type a search query into the search box and then, by clicking "I'm feeling lucky," go directly to the page that would have been listed as the top search result.

But then today happened, and Google announced "Google Instant." Now, when you go to Google.com and start typing a search into the search bar, Google instantly begins showing search results. Users no longer have a chance to click the "I'm Feeling Lucky Button" before they begin seeing search results. Essentially, the feature is dead.

So, how does killing the "I'm feeling lucky" button gain Google more than $100 million?

In 2007, Google search boss Marissa Mayer estimated that 1% of all Google searches go through the I'm Feeling Lucky button skipping Google's search results pages entirely.

That meant that Google showed ZERO ads (and therefore got ZERO ad clicks) on 1% of all Google search queries. Back in 2007, an analyst suggested the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button probably cost Google as much as $110 million per year.

At the time, Marissa Mayer said that Google hadn't ditched the button because "It's possible to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money."

She said, "I think what's delightful about 'I'm Feeling Lucky' is that it reminds you there are real people here."

Today, Marissa gets to eat her (cup)cake and have it too. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button is still there on Google.com perhaps reminding users there are real people at Google but it's been rendered entirely irrelevent.

Join the conversation about this story

See Also:

• Facebook Wins Patent For Social Search Results, Could Use It To Threaten Google
• Google Launches New Realtime Search Results Page
• SEC STALKER: AOL Is Hiding Information From You About Its Google Deal Until December 19

Google just offed one of it's oldest, quirkiest features the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. The good news is that in the process, Google added about another hundred million dollars in revenue.

It used to be that you could go to Google.com, type a search query into the search box and then, by clicking "I'm feeling lucky," go directly to the page that would have been listed as the top search result.

But then today happened, and Google announced "Google Instant." Now, when you go to Google.com and start typing a search into the search bar, Google instantly begins showing search results. Users no longer have a chance to click the "I'm Feeling Lucky Button" before they begin seeing search results. Essentially, the feature is dead.

So, how does killing the "I'm feeling lucky" button gain Google more than $100 million?

In 2007, Google search boss Marissa Mayer estimated that 1% of all Google searches go through the I'm Feeling Lucky button skipping Google's search results pages entirely.

That meant that Google showed ZERO ads (and therefore got ZERO ad clicks) on 1% of all Google search queries. Back in 2007, an analyst suggested the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button probably cost Google as much as $110 million per year.

At the time, Marissa Mayer said that Google hadn't ditched the button because "It's possible to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money."

She said, "I think what's delightful about 'I'm Feeling Lucky' is that it reminds you there are real people here,"

Today, Marissa gets to eat her (cup)cake and have it to. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button is still there on Google.com perhaps reminding users there are real people at Google but it's been rendered entirely irrelent.

Join the conversation about this story

See Also:

• Facebook Wins Patent For Social Search Results, Could Use It To Threaten Google
• Google Launches New Realtime Search Results Page
• SEC STALKER: AOL Is Hiding Information From You About Its Google Deal Until December 19

It started with netbooks--those cheap little compact laptops that were once the greatest thing since sliced bread: In the months leading up to the iPad's launch, the growth of sales of netbooks hit a wall (see chart at right).

And now, says UBS analyst Maynard Um [great name], iPads have become such a force of nature that they're cannibalizing the whole PC industry:

Sales of traditional notebooks appear to be feeling pressure from the iPad, causing a scramble by vendors to launch iPad-like tablets... We believe that a majority of this impact is occurring on the lower end of PC sales as the iPad is priced close enough to this range that it becomes attractive to consumers looking to make purchases within this segment. We are not sold that the iPad is purely cannibalizing PC sales, as the functionality of the iPad can not yet fully match the functionality of notebook PC's. However, consumers who purchase iPads may be more willing to delay purchases and upgrades of existing PC's.

Who is this bad news for?

Mainly, Microsoft and the PC hardware vendors.

Many netbooks run Linux and/or stripped-down versions of Microsoft Windows, so a slowdown in their growth did not wallop Microsoft. Regular PCs run full-fledged versions of Windows, though, so every lost sale of a PC as the result of an iPad sale is a license fee that moves directly from Apple to Microsoft.

Dell and HP can't be happy about this, either. And the farther ahead iPad gets in the tablet market, the harder it will be for Google's Android to catch up (though Android has done a fine job of catching up in the smartphone market).

It's great news for Apple, though.

via: John Paczkowski, All Things D

See Also: WOW: The iPad Is Killing The Netbook Business

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See Also:

• Apple's iPad Is Going To Destroy The Netbook Market, Says Goldman (Sorry, Microsoft)
• WOW: The iPad Is Destroying The Netbook Business
• CHART OF THE DAY: iPad Browser Share Already Beating Android, BlackBerry

Kevin Mincio quit his job at Goldman Sachs to join the army after September 11 and he says he'd never go back.

Mincio, who told his story to ABCNews, says he was in a meeting with his managing director at Goldman when the first plane hit. They were discussing integrating the Investment Banking Technology team within Goldman's larger, firm-wide technology division on a conference call.

In the aftermath, when Mincio was assigned to save Goldman's computers, he made his decision to go on unpaid military leave. He told himself he had to save more than computers.

His heartwarming story is at ABCNews >>

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The following is a guest post from one of my favorite young bloggers Onibalusi Bamidele (he's 16!) who has previously written a great analysis on the top 5 blogs and now is taking his evaluation to Twitter.

Twitter is one of the largest social networking sites, featuring users from various walks of lives. Twitter has a wide range of benefits from communicating with friends and families to building a brand for your business.

What I discovered among most Twitter users nowadays trying to be a top (or power) Twitter user is that they seem to automate everything. On Twitter, it's not hard to find a lot of accounts now with thousands of followers and tens of thousands of tweets, only to discover that their profile has no value because they have the same following to follower ratio, they have lots of spam messages in their tweets, and their tweets hardly get any retweets. It is very clear that you can't automate social media.

This post will analyze the top ten users on Twitter, what they all have in common, and what we can learn from them in order to build a better and valuable Twitter profile.

The top ten Twitter users referenced in this post were taken from Twitterholic.

1. Lady Gaga
2. Britney Spears
3. Ashton Kutcher
4. Barack Obama
5. Ellen DeGeneres
6. Justin Bieber (who has his own dedicated servers at Twitter)
7. Kim Kardashian
8. Oprah Winfrey
9. Taylor Swift
10. Katy Perry

If we take a look at all of the above Twitter users, we will observe the following.

Your Status Matters

Twitter is not just any kind of social networking site. It has an algorithm that favors your status. If you take a look at the ten people listed above, you will notice that all of them are celebrities. They have a name outside Twitter and it is that name that helped them build such a powerful Twitter profile.

Even though it is good to have a Twitter profile even if you don't have a website or name, having an audience before having your Twitter profile really helps and makes things easier. Of course, there are also Twitter users who started out solely online, but even those users had a status that mattered.

Following to Follower Ratio

Many people think becoming popular or having a strong Twitter profile is all about following a lot of people on Twitter. No! It is not about that. You will notice that almost all the top Twitter users listed above hardly follow many people. They only follow a few.

If you go about following people in order to build your profile, the end result might be inactive people or bots or those who will add no value to your profile following you back. It is not all about the numbers, it is about the results. There is no result in having thousands of Twitter followers if they would not pay any attention to you.

Number of Tweets

One thing I notice about a lot of so called Twitter experts is that they go about tweeting everything. Having a gazillion tweets is no guarantee of being a top Twitter user. You will notice from the above that all the Twitter users have a low number of tweets and they don't just tweet about everything under the sun. They only tweet useful, helpful, and valuable information.

Promotion on Twitter is not Bad If Done Right!

Many people are under the impression that it is not good to promote on Twitter and that Twitter should only be used for personal things. No! This is not true. If we take a look at the profile of Justin Bieber, we will notice he also promotes his product on Twitter but does not spam. Here is what I found in his bio www.BieberFever.com Request my single SOMEBODY TO LOVE featuring USHER!! and thank you for making a dream come true. MY WORLD 2.0 Get that!!. You will notice he promote things but not in the spammy way most people do today.

You don't need to tweet your product hundred times a day before it is seen. That is what the bio is made for.

As a note, I am not saying being a top Twitter user means you should not promote your products via tweets, but I am just saying it has to be minimal.

Personality is Important

By taking a look at the recent tweets on the above Twitter accounts, you will notice that they all have a personal relationship with followers and they answer questions from their followers. For example, here is a recent tweet taken from Ashton Kutcher's twitter profile: @problogger bummer I'll be there 1 week too early.

You will notice that many Twitter users don't even care if about their Twitter profile, and all they do is automate everything.

Your followers wants to see a personal side of you and not just the automated part.

Branding is Important

Sometimes, little things make a huge difference. Many people who want to be power Twitter users don't even have a branded Twitter account. You will notice that all the top Twitter users listed above have their image branded on their Twitter profile, and they also have a branded background.

Branding your Twitter profile makes it unique and also makes it easy for people to relate with you. Having a branded Twitter profile also bring about your presence to anybody who follows or wants to build a relationship with you.

Joined Date

Does this really matter? Yeah! As I said above, sometimes, the little things make a huge difference. At the time of writing this post, out of all the top Ten twitter users, the individual who joined last joined 18 months ago (1 years 4 months) while the individual who joined first has been there for 43 months (3 years 9 months). What this means is that success doesn't come overnight, so don't expect to join Twitter today and go popular tomorrow. Everything has a time-frame and you have to build your profile over time.

One of the best ways to achieve success is by learning from those who have been there, and the above tips are 7 great things we can learn from the top 10 Twitter users.

Onibalusi Bamidele is a young entrepreneur living the internet lifestyle, subscribe to his blog for more great posts. Also, get his free traffic eBook called the ultimate traffic formula.

Photos by Shutterstock.

[ Analysis of The Top 10 Twitter Users and What We Can Learn From Them is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

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Tristan Louis, an internet technology veteran and tech reporter, has an interesting series of posts over at his blog, TNL.net. He divides the entire tech industry into four different kinds of companies based on the models established by Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple.

He writes:

The big 4 in the tech world have different profile and every other company seems to be following one of those models. Whether it's Twitter, Foursquare, or Tumblr, all of them follow some great attributes set by each of those leader.

Can you guess which one follows which? I've divided the four companies into 4 entries:

• The Attacher
• The Pusher
• The Tinkerer
• The Refiner
  

Can you guess which one Google is? Microsoft? Apple? Facebook?

Check out the answers on his site >

Join the conversation about this story

See Also:

• 5 Lessons Entrepreneurs Should Learn From How Kids Think
• Apple Is The New China
• 8 Management Lessons I Learned Working At Apple

I belong to a weird little group of people that think differently from most of you. It's not just the ADD (although I suspect there's more there than people realize). We go by many names: Early Adopters, Futurists, Trend Watchers, Disruptors, Change Agents, That Crazy Guy. The World is full of us. Social media and tech are crawling with us.

You probably have a few of us at your company right now. We fascinate most people because we have the ability to see things in a way. If I had to summarize what we do I'd say we're really good at non-linear pattern recognition. We're also very easily distracted, passionate and highly intelligent (if I do say so myself).

There's a down side though.

We can tell you that something is going to be incredibly important but we usually can't fully articulate why. We sometimes see patterns that we don't understand but we know they're important. Sometimes even when we can articulate why it doesn't seem like that big of a deal to regular people.

We're not always right. We see things so far out that sometimes things change. Sometimes we don't know all the pieces of the patterns we see. And sometimes we're just wrong.

We can be very distracting. Because we see non-linear patterns we sometimes talk and write in a non-linear fashion. (Want a good example of this read this Robert Scoble post. Is it about his son being diagnosed with Autism, his many visits with startups, the changes in mobile technology, his 10th year of blogging or what?) We are usually more interested in what needs to change than sticking around to help with the change. Even when we're right and can articulate the coming changes there is often more opportunity than there are resources to address the opportunities.

So how do you get the most out of us?

Bring us in at the right stage: Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame wrote a follow up book a few years back called Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution . In it he calls out 4 quadrants and that each company and product progresses through during its life cycle. Early adopters are best at the first quadrant but need to learn to transition products into the second quadrant. From there find a new project for them to work on or you'll quickly lose them.

Triangulate your input: You don't need a lot of early adopters but you need more than one. You may even only employ one but you should have a few whose blogs you read or friends you can call to pick their brains. You need to be able to weed out the crazy ideas from the great ones.

Know your strategy: And of course I will tell you that this is the most important. There's a lot of opportunity out there and you can't chase it all. Make sure you know what you will do and what you won't do. Make sure your early adopters know what your strategy is too. This helps them focus their efforts and helps them know what kind of feedback they need to bring to you and what they shouldn't distract you with.

And to my early adopter friends I'd simply tell you:

• Be passionate but be patient. You're early so there's usually time.
• Learn to articulate your thoughts. Great ideas don't mean crap if no one understands them.
• There's more than one chance to get things right. If it doesn't catch the first time, try and try again.

Photo credit by Venn Diagram

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I was thumbing through Twitter messages on my Blackberry on Monday (I use Twitter as a mobile first, web second product) when I saw the following Tweet (see graphic).

I resisted the temptation to jump in with a response because I knew it was too complicated of a topic to discuss on Twitter. But I thought I should do a quick post on the topic.

1. Options are gravy - I lived through the first dot com era where we used stock options as a recruiting tool. I freely admit this (along with nearly everything between 1999-2000) was a mistake. We set our sites on our IPO price and then worked back to our current valuation and showed potential employees what we thought they could earn (with all legal caveats) if the company was successful.

The stupid thing is we sort of believed it ourselves. If Ventro was worth $8 billion on $2 million of sales surely a paltry $1 billion would suffice. Goldman Sachs was an investor and the assured us an IPO would happen and riches would be had by all. I think they believed it, too.

We obviously attracted the wrong people for the wrong reasons and this led to a lot of disappointment. We had a lot of re-setting of expectations to do.

Options are obviously a very important economic motivator for your first 3-5 employees and your most senior management team. But unless you become Facebook or Zynga they likely aren't going to pay off big for everybody else.

So I developed this standard line that I used for all employees. I've said versions of it on this blog before so I hope it's not too repetitive. But it's critical to get this right:

Join our company if you think you'll learn from being here. I think you will.

Join if you think your career will progress because you'll be given more responsibilities than elsewhere and if you're good at what you do you can move up quickly. We're a meritocracy.

Join because you know you'll be earning less than you could elsewhere at some meaningless job cranking out non-core code, producing Powerpoint slides or shuffling paper. You can always earn more. But join here if you want to grow.

Join because you like the culture. You think you'll have fun. You'll consider your colleagues close friends.

Join because in three year's time when you look at this job and this company on your CV you'll feel proud and it will be part of how you got where you were going.

Join because as we grow our ability to reward you will grow and your income will grow with our success that you contributed to.

We give out stock options. I hope they're worth money to you some day. But let them be icing on the cake. If they pay off handsomely that's great. But don't count on it. Don't let it be your motivator or your driving decision.

Not because we don't want them to be valuable, but because we don't want to create an options culture around here. Option cultures are corrosive, create the wrong incentives and attract the wrong sort of people.

I've said similar hundreds of times. And I believe it. If you find out one day that company you went to work for was Facebook then consider it the lottery. And that would be nice.

But if you're the CEO who is spinning up a story about how the options for non-founders, non-VPs is going to be worth a lot some day then you're probably doing some young entrepreneur a disservice at your expense.** And when they figure it out some day they're not likely to be very loyal moving forward. Do the harder work and convince them to join anyways without the stock option bravado.

** Unless you really are Mark Pincus, Mark Zuckerberg, Ev Williams or similar. Then go ahead

2. The best policy is transparency The stream on Twitter, as best as I can tell, started with Chris Dixon sending the following Tweet (see graphic)

My interpretation of this Tweet was harmless enough. I thought Chris basically meant that investors know what most deals (not just their own) get done at so they have a pretty good sense how to price seed, A, B, etc. rounds and still be competitive. This is mostly true. I don't know whether I fully agree that they keep them secret for informational advantage but maybe.

I tend to keep valuations secret because I'm usually told by a trusted source and feel it isn't my place to reveal confidential information. I wouldn't be a VC for very long if I did. I see people's private information for a living.

Anyhow, on the above Tweet Andrew Weissman (a VC) disagreed with the premise I'll assume Andrew read it how I did followed by Nate Westheimer who wrote the Tweet that Henry Blodget retweeted (opening image) about companies wanting to keep their valuations from stock-holding employees.

Quickly dissecting

• I think Nate's response slightly veered off topic. There's a difference between companies wanting to hide valuations and investors doing so.
• I think Chris's initial comment was about investors
• Investors generally are not the people to reveal valuations to anybody it is the business of the company and the CEO should manage this information.

Whatever the intent of the dialog let me encourage all management teams to be transparent with their employees. My personal preference is to tell people the amount of stock options they are receiving (total number), the value of those stock options (say $100,000), the value of the company (e.g. $10 million post money) and therefore if we sold for $100 million dollars one day your gain would be approximately $1 million).

If you perform extremely well in this role there is always a possibility of further allocations although that is clearly not guaranteed or promised.

3. That said, don't complicate the topic If you're the founder of a company you likely know a lot about things like Liquidation Preferences and how they affect value allocations when the company is sold. You also understand that there are future financing rounds and in tough times this can change the value equation of stocks.

Some founders err on the side of telling employees absolutely everything. I prefer not to. It's not that I don't want transparency it's just that some issues are technical complications that aren't material to the employees understanding of the issue. I know some people will take issue with this approach and that's fine. But here's my rationale:

I see way too many employees trying to understand all of the complexities and spending way too much time trying to calculate how much their options are worth through each fund raising round. This really conflicts with my view that options are to be put in the top drawer of your study at home and treated like upside gravy.

The most complexity the more angst the more options end up working against your intent if you think about them the way I do.

Obviously I'm not talking about your most senior 3-5 employees who hopefully own meaningful stakes, are making salary sacrifices and have the experience in understanding stock option nuances. Much experience tells me that most people don't.

It kind of reminds me of sales employee bonus plans. If you make them easy people spend their time selling. If you make them complex to maximize every possible way to incentivize behavior sales people end up spending 10% of their sales time calculating how much their bonus would be if they structured their deal this way or that way. Ah, the law of unintended consequences.

4. Valuation or percentages it's up to you. I think either strategy is OK. I prefer percentages (e.g. you're getting 1.5%) for the top employees (in addition to the method I described above) and staying away from percentages for everybody else.

If you're transparent about the value of the number of their stock options, the value of their stock options and the market cap of the company then they can do the calculation themselves (98% won't know how, but they have all the information they need).

Why do I feel this way? It's really meaningless to say to somebody that you own 0.18% of the company. It doesn't make somebody feel better. And by telling them the value they have all they need to assess whether or not it was a good deal. Sometimes a percentage can be equally meaningless.

But I can buy both arguments. I choose my way. Either way, make sure not to over sell. And I would opt for transparency. There is nothing worse than an employee who wakes up one day feeling duped or a sense of mismatched expectations. Then everybody loses.

Oracle named former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Mark Hurd as its new co-president today. That puts Hurd in a position to do some serious damage to HP, which is now his competitor.

The appointment isn't unexpected, since Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle, came to Hurd's defense last month after Hurd resigned from HP under pressure, after an investigation by the board into a sexual harassment matter turned up inaccurate expense reports. Ellison thought that was a poor excuse for forcing Hurd to resign, and he said so in an email to the New York Times at the time. He called it the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.

During the five years Hurd served as CEO, HP became the biggest technology company, surpassing IBM and growing revenues from $80 billion to $115 billion last year. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Hurd was in talks to join Oracle, confirming a prediction by VentureBeat's Owen Thomas.

Mark did a brilliant job at HP, and I expect he'll do even better at Oracle, Ellison said in the statement. There is no executive in the information technology world with more relevant experience than Mark.

Oracle had to make room for Hurd. Charles Phillips, who serves as co-president alongside Safra Catz, has chosen to resign from Oracle. Of course, that gives HP a chance to strike back at Ellison. Phillips had some huge responsibilities at Oracle and might very well now be a candidate for HP's vacant CEO job. Then again, Phillips had his own sex scandal last year. He admitted to having an affair after the woman in question put up a billboard in New York's Times Square about their relationship.

HP and Oracle are close partners in business computing. But Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems last year upset that relationship, putting them in direct competition as vendors of both hardware and software. Hurd will bring his experience running HP to the task of whipping Sun Microsystems into fighting form. Before he joined HP five years ago, Hurd was CEO of NCR.

Hurd's downfall at HP came after Jodie Fisher, a former HP marketing contractor, complained of sexual harassment. HP's board couldn't substantiate the allegations and Hurd settled the matter out of court. But during the investigation, the board found that Hurd had violated HP's code of conduct by failing to disclose the close personal relationship with Fisher and for filing expense reports that appeared to conceal the relationship. Hurd denied improprieties, and Fisher said they did not have a sexual relationship. But the whole matter created mistrust between Hurd and the board.

Catz will continue to oversee Oracle's finance, legal and merger and acquisition operations, while Hurd will manage sales, marketing and software support. Ellison will be in charge of engineering.

Tags: HP board scandal

Companies: Hewlett Packard, Oracle

People: Charles Phillips, Jodie Fisher, Larry Ellison, Mark Hurd, Safra Catz, Steve Jobs

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison publicly defended Hurd after he resigned under pressure from HP's board last month. The board cited inaccurate expense reports related to a personal relationship.

Ellison called the board's actions the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.

Tonight Oracle confirmed that Hurd would join Oracle as Co-President, reports the New York Times.

More About: business, HP, management, mark hurd, oracle

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Oracle named former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Mark Hurd as its new co-president today. That puts Hurd in a position where he can use his managerial skills to do some serious damage to HP, which is now his competitor.

The appointment isn't unexpected since Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle, came to Hurd's defense last month after Hurd resigned from HP under pressure, after an investigation by the board into a sexual harassment matter turned up inaccurate expense reports. Ellison thought that was a poor excuse for forcing Hurd to resign and he said so in an email to the New York Times at the time, saying it was the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago. Under Hurd's five years as CEO, HP became the biggest technology company, surpassing IBM and growing revenues from $80 billion to $115 billion last year. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Hurd was in talks to join Oracle, confirming a prediction by VentureBeat's Owen Thomas.

Mark did a brilliant job at H.P., and I expect he'll do even better at Oracle, Mr. Ellison said in the statement. There is no executive in the information technology world with more relevant experience than Mark.

Oracle had to make room for Hurd. Charles Phillips, who serves as co-president alongside Safra Catz, has chosen to resign from Oracle. Of course, that gives HP a chance to strike back at Ellison. Phillips had some huge responsibilities at Oracle and he might very well be a candidate for HP's vacant CEO job. Then again, Phillips had his own sex scandal last year, admitting to having an affair with a woman who put up billboards about their extramarital relationship.

HP and Oracle are close partners in business computing. But Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems last year upset that relationship, putting them in direct competition as vendors of both hardware and software. Hurd will bring his experience running HP to the task of whipping Sun Microsystems into fighting form. Before he joined HP five years ago, Hurd was the CEO of NCR.

Hurd's downfall at HP came after Jodie Fisher, a former HP marketing contractor, complained of sexual harassment. The board couldn't substantiate the allegations and Hurd settled the matter out of court. But during the investigation, the board found that Hurd violated HP's code of conduct by failing to disclose the close personal relationship with Fisher and for filing expense reports that appeared to conceal the relationship. Hurd denied improprieties and Fisher said they did not have a sexual relationship. But the whole matter created mistrust between Hurd and the board.

Catz will continue to oversee Oracle's finance, legal and merger and acquisition operations, while Hurd will manage sales, marketing and software support. Ellison will be in charge of engineering.

Tags: HP board scandal

Companies: Hewlett Packard, Oracle

People: Larry Ellison, Mark Hurd, Steve Jobs

I realise this might sound like politician calling for a new taskforce, or a businessman calling for a new tax break, but: we need a new social network.

By this, I don't mean that we need a new standalone service for sharing a kind of media, be it short messages, photos, videos, sound, shopping lists or anything else. Rather, what's needed is a framework to pull all the existing Web 2.0 services together in a way that's fluid, attractive and easy to use.

Social networking versus social publishing

In the beginning of the internet, much time and energy was spent discussing its potential to enable people to reach outside the boundaries of their everyday lives and connect in communities of shared interest. The internet enabled us to explore areas of interest our real' lives didn't allow us to investigate: people who lived in small towns with no galleries could learn about art; fans of obscure bands or niche cuisines or unusual hobbies could connect all around the world.

Equally importantly, the web allowed us to adopt a second identity. People could embrace interests that might not be socially acceptable from kinky sex to stamp-collecting to simple silliness without risking their real-world reputations.

With the advent of Web 2.0' and the development of ever more methods for people to create and share content online from Flickr for photos to YouTube and Vimeo for vidoes to Blogger, WordPress and Twitter for written thoughts this potential of the web was enhanced. Secret identities are no longer the preserve of superheroes: now each of us can have a second persona under which we publish all manner of content and connect with strangers all over the world.

But just as these services were developing, a funny thing happened: real life started to intrude. Facebook, launched in 2004, grew like topsy to become the website many people spend most time on, and the most vital to people's lives outside email. In the process, it became the default method of sharing photos, videos and writing for millions of people.

Facebook's success stems largely from one thing: its grounding in real life. You join under your real name, with a real photo, and connect with your real-life friends. From its origins as a tool to grease the wheels of the stratified social scene at Harvard University, it's become the online complement to people's real lives, used to share holiday snaps and plan birthday parties with existing friends far more than it is to meet new people. It's a true social network' the only true social networking site because it exists almost exclusively as an extension of, and facilitator of, people's real-life social lives.

There's nothing wrong with this. Facebook demonstrates that many people probably the majority are happy interacting online under their real names, and have no great desire to adopt a second persona or make contact with strangers who share their interests.

But at the same time, the continued success of self-publishing services like Flickr and Twitter shows that there remains a substantial demand for services which let you broadcast to the whole world, rather than just your own social contacts, and which let you adopt a second identity to enable you to say things you daren't with your first. The success of Twitter, in particular, shows the power of this freedom many people I know joined Twitter with a username based on their real name, before adopting a name that's less identifying to free them to be silly or profane.

Millions of people have a non-identifying username which unites their online publishing activity on a host of services: Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, as well as endless comment forums. Each of these sites has its own flourishing communities.

But here's the thing. Facebook is so popular because it enables you to see what your friends are up to, across all different media, in one place. That's why Facebook, while technically inferior to Flickr as a photo-sharing site, is now the biggest photo-sharing site in the world it's convenient to share photos with the network you've already built.

But in the wider world of Web 2.0 services, there's no united network. My Flickr contacts can see my photos, but not my tweets; my blog subscribers can't see my YouTube uploads. Each service provides tools for finding your connections on other services, but it's laborious and you still have to visit each separate site to see what your contacts are up to. I check Facebook every morning, and frequently again later in the day. It takes a few minutes.

If I checked Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr and Vimeo every morning to see what all those I follow were up to, it'd take an hour or more.

What's needed is a portal which lets us conveniently and easily see what all those we follow are up to across the different web publishing services: to add social networking to social publishing. And it's needed for more than just convenience. As Facebook's power grows, there's an increasing danger that the convenience if offers will lead people to abandon other services and simply share through Facebook. Already I find myself clicking the Like' button where before I would have Dugg' a web page, or shared it on Twitter, because it's so damn easy. If young people joining the internet get in the habit of doing everything through Facebook, the whole idea of distributed Web 2.0 services and of the freedom to adopt a second persona online could wither on the vine.

More than the stream

The most successful attempt at this so far has been Friendfeed. The site, launched in 2007, does a pretty good job of aggregation' pulling in your contacts' activity on various web services into a single stream. Friendfeed was bought by you guessed it Facebook in 2009, and development of the site has basically ceased while its former owners are put to work on its parent's site. But even if it hadn't been effectively abandoned, Friendfeed has serious limitations. To follow a contact, they need to have signed up for the service themselves, rendering it useless for those whose contacts aren't signed up yet. It's ugly, better suited to sharing text-based items like tweets than photos and videos, and it displays links rather than whole entries for blog posts.

Moreover, Friendfeed offers you your contacts' content in a single stream, with photos and blog posts jumbled up with tweets and bookmarks. To be easily useable, a new aggregation service needs to be smarter, automatically separating material of long-term interest like blog posts and new batches of Flickr photographs from short-term material like tweets and TwitPic photographs, and showing them differently.

What's more, Friendfeed offers only aggregation. It does have rudimentary social networking features like messaging and groups, but they're secondary the focus is on, as the name implies, the feed.'

Let me sketch out what's needed from this new social network.

1. Users should be able to sign up using any of the services they wish to include, if those services offer a system for signing up to other websites (like Twitter, for example).
2. When a user adds a service to the site, they should see the entries of all the people they follow on that site in their unified feed, whether or not those they follow have joined the site. (This will depend on the service in question's API, but should generally be possible). For example, I should see all my Twitter contacts regardless of whether they've joined the site themselves.
3. Where the same person is a contact on two services, but they're not a member of the site, the site should suggest joining them together into a single virtual contact' based on username (so for example, my friend Joethedough's Tumblr and Twitter, which share a username, would be suggested as a virtual contact for me to approve). If that user then joined the site and connected the different services themselves, the virtual contact would be upgraded' to a real one.
4. The service should smartly separate long-form content and display it in a different, less-frequently-changing area to the main feed. For example, if a contact uploaded a single Flickr photo, it'd go in the feed, but if they uploaded a set of 50, it'd go in the long-term section.
5. Users should be able to filter the feed in advanced ways, limiting it to a single service, type of service (photos/videos/blogs/etc), or by groups of contacts. Service-based contact groups like Twitter lists would be imported and you could add to them on the site. For example, I have a Twitter list of tech journalists; on our new social network, this would show me not just their tweets but their Flickr accounts and blog posts.
6. As well as sucking in information from various services, users should be able to write information to those services from the service. If you want to add a short message to your profile, for example, you'll be able to post to Twitter from the service, adding the message both to your Twitter profile and to your aggregated service profile. Not using a particular service yet? You can sign up, with one click, without leaving the social network site, with an account based on your existing username and password there.
7. Users should have a profile' showing their own feed, and long-term content area, for all the services they've added. They should have considerable control over the colours, fonts etc of the profile (but they should not be able to dump in random HTML, MySpace-style).
8. A user's profile should be able to function as their OpenID provider, giving people a common, effective hub' to use as their online identity across the web (and acting as a counterweight to the growth of Facebook login).
9. Users should be able to message each other, form groups, organise events, and do all the additional things which social networks enable. Ideally these too would be based on external services, with users able to (for example) email each other at their registered email addresses through the site, or organise events through a sevice such as EventBrite.

Ideally, this service wouldn't need to store or produce any information whatsoever on its own systems, besides the basic network of users and their connected services. Everything else would be done through external services that users had connected.

None of this, to the best of my limited technical knowledge, is beyond the current potential of services' APIs the systems by which they let different web services talk to each other (for example, Twitter apps like TweetDeck use Twitter's API to read and write information). But put it all together, and you have a recipe for a fast-growing, super-useful site that could provide the natural balance to Facebook. Each morning, you'd look at Facebook to see what your real-life friends are up to, and our new site to see what your virtual friends are up to. Just as your Facebook profile is becoming a hub for your real-name online activity, your profile on this site this would become a hub for your online identity, perfect for putting in email signatures or on address cards.

You'll notice I haven't said anything about privacy. Facebook's complex and often-changing privacy features have put privacy issues at the heart of the debate about social networking. But for this project, I don't see it as a top priority. Users should probably have the ability to show parts of their profile to only certain people, and information imported from external services should be subject to any privacy controls the user has applied on that external service.

But when you look at the services this network would be designed to aggregate, you find their privacy features are basic and rarely used. Only a very small proportion of Twitter users protect their tweets, and only a small proportion of Flickr users post private photographs. These services are really about publishing in the literal sense of making things public, submitting them to be found and enjoyed by the world. It's normal to follow strangers, and be followed by strangers, on Twitter. That's why it's so vital this new service allows people to mask their real identities frankly, that ought to be privacy protection enough, at least at the start.

Why existing services won't do

There are a range of sites currently vying to be people's online hub. But none of them will do:

1. Facebook.

Facebook actually does aggregation very well; its Platform API makes it easy for services to create applications to suck your tweets, photos and blog posts into your News Feed. Indeed, Facebook's attractive previews of links in messages, and embedding of videos and photos, makes it a better displayer of someone's tweets than Twitter itself. And, with its recent moves to encourage users to share more information publicly, it's making a wholesale bid to be the centre of people's online lives as it is the online centre of the offline lives.

But Facebook's networks are, and will always be, based around real-life connections. Most people with some notable exceptions don't want accumulate hundreds of random strangers as Facebook friends' the way they do Twitter followers. And there remains the problem of Facebook requiring people to use their real names.

The recent introduction of Facebook Pages, which are automatically public and well suited to aggregating information, provides a partial answer. But while actors, musicians and politicians and even some journalists might find it appropriate to complement their personal profile with a public Page, most people find the idea nonsensical. And Facebook has recently increased its restrictions on the names users can give to Pages, making them no more psuedonym-friendly than personal profiles.

What's more, part of the purpose of a new social network would precisely be to counterbalance Facebook, which is acquiring a degree of dominance many find disquieting.

2. Google.

Google's Buzz' was generally tagged as a Twitter rival when it was launched earlier this year, but it's fair to say it's also intended as an aggregator it can automatically import Blogger blog posts, YouTube videos, and Twitter posts. But its appearance is heavily text-based, and it doesn't feel like it's committed to aggregation there's no reason to believe that Google would want to enable users to import content from the video site Vimeo, for example, as it's a direct competitor to YouTube, and the same applies for WordPress in relation to Blogger. It doesn't even import RSS feeds, which is pretty much the baseline feature for a decent aggregator.

Google is gearing up to incorporate Buzz into a new, expanded social network, a full-on Facebook competitor, later this year. But the signs are that rather than complementing Facebook's focus on real-life relationships, Google will seek to beat them at their own game. A recent presentation by Google employee Paul Adams, who's believed to be working on Google's putative social network, focused on how online networking can be made to more closely mirror our offline day-to-day activity. It's well worth a look at, and it suggests Google Me' might be really useful. But it's not an answer to this problem, which is not about interacting with your offline social network, but precisely about building new communities and connecting new ones online.

3. MySpace.

Once upon a time, MySpace fulfilled just this function people's public-facing home on the web, a place where bands, celebrities, microcelebrities and regular folk mingled and connected. Had MySpace seized on its potential as people's public-facing alternative to their Facebook profile, and quickly wired in advanced, attractive aggregation, it might have had a chance. (Imagine for a minute if MySpace, not Facebook, had bought Friendfeed, and launched a radically overhauled service with aggregation at its core. Wouldn't that have been something?)

But services with 250 million users don't tend to carry out radical overhauls, especially when they're owned by irascible conservative media tycoons. And MySpace has now fallen so far, in user visits and above all in prestige, it's simply impossible how they could experience any sort of renaissance. Besides, the latest plan for reviving the site is pretty much the opposite of what I'm describing, focused not on social media but on centralised traditional media like TV shows and record-company-approved music.

4. Twitter.

By rights, Twitter should be considered one of the many services to be aggregated by a new social network, a self-publishing platform like Flickr or WordPress. But there are signs that Twitter is becoming, almost by default, the leading aggregator of people's content most services offer tools to automatically update Twitter when there's a new photo upload/blog post/video, and it's common to look at a friend's Twitter feed and see their actual messages outnumbered by auto-generated announcements of new content on other services.

The problem is that as an aggregator, Twitter is really, really bad. An entirely text-based service, it's useless at showing links, photos or videos. A whole industry link-shortening services has sprung up to deal with its inability to handle long links. And it's also not much of a social network: there's no capacity for groups, event management or messaging of more than 140 characters.

5. Diaspora.

The young developers behind a new social network project called Disapora got a lot of attention earlier this year, becoming the focus of attention of the growing mass of people seeking an alternative to Facebook and its (supposedly) cavalier attitude to privacy. The four young men are smart and idealistic, and Diaspora sounds like a great idea. But I strongly suspect it's doomed to fail.

Diaspora's founding principle is that no central hub should be required for people to communicate with each other. They're proposing that users have their own node,' installed on their own server, which can channel information from different web services to their contacts. It's a good idea. But it's impossible to think that a service that requires users to install software on their own server will ever reach beyond a narrow tech audience.

Of course, a central site could offer hosted nodes,' much as WordPress.com offers the experience of a self-hosted WordPress installation on a central site. But nothing I've heard from Diaspora so far suggests this service will allow for the kind of richly multimedia and easy-to-set-up profiles and feeds this service will need to take off.

To provide a really good experience, I think this has to be a centralised, hosted service from the off. That does make it reliant on one company, but because the information being shared isn't stored on the service just on whichever external service the user adds it to there's minimal risk of data being lost if the service disappeared overnight.

It's also not clear how focused Diaspora are on easy aggregation from other web services. Right now their focus seems to be on building an internal structure for sharing messages, links etc. And, Diaspora's system appears to be based on symmetrical' relationships that is, user A and user B have to agree to friend' each other to see each other's content. This new service should be based around asymmetrical' relationships, as used by Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and most Web 2.0 services, where following' someone's content doesn't require them to follow' you back.

So far, Diaspora seems to be intended as an alternative to Facebook, a tool for messaging and content sharing, for the tech-savvy not unlike a decentralised Pownce. Good luck to them, but it's not what most users are looking for.

6. VIRB.

Possibly the most worrying precedent for this new social network would be VIRB. The little-known social network was launched in 2007, aimed at attracting web-savvy creative types the same types who were fleeing MySpace in droves, but weren't attracted to Facebook. It offered aggregation of external services, messaging, groups, attractive profiles with design tools, and many of the things this new social network all to have.

And it failed. Earlier this year, VIRB announced a total change of strategy, shifting from a social-network model to one of simple website provider. Users were invited to convert their profiles to standalone sites, and pay a monthly fee for them. The direction Virb was headed, just wasn't working for anyone especially our users, explained founder Brad Smith in a blog post. It was time we made an epic course correction, allowing our product to regain pertinence. Virb is not an answer to those seeking a Facebook alternative or a better-looking MySpace.

Pretty depressing stuff. But though VIRB got a lot right the importance of allowing users to style their profiles without letting them make them hideously ugly, for example it just didn't offer a rich enough experience to grow. Setting up a profile was pretty laborious, with profile information needing to be entered and decisions required about layout and theme. Aggregation was basic, with only a FriendFeed-style text-based list of aggregated material and no photo or video previews. And while you could aggregate all your services to your profile page, only certain services Flickr, blogs and Twitter, if I recall correctly could be properly integrated with the site so your contacts were aware when you'd imported new material.

Above all, what all these services have in common is that they require users to rebuild their contact lists on the site. The most crucial aspect of this new service should be that you don't have to do that each time you import a service, you import your contacts from that service, and the service helps with connecting the various profiles of a contact into a single presence in my network, even if that person hasn't signed up for the site themselves yet. This means people could begin using the site every day as their social media hub even before their contacts join, preventing the user-inertia problem that's killed so many aspiring social networks at birth.

If you build it, they will come

Tech is a business, and services aren't built simply because some blogger sees the need for them. But I'm convinced that a service such as this could be a viable concern. If getting started was easy enough, it could quickly become the chief place users go to check their contact's online activity outside Facebook giving decent potential for advertising without extravagant costs for servers, R&D, staff, etc.

Who'll build it? Well, in the industry of a thousand startups, it could be anyone. But here's an idea. Every major, independently-owned social publishing platform Twitter, Tumblr, Vimeo, FourSquare is threatened by the growing domination of Facebook and by the trend towards sharing with real-life contacts replacing social publishing. So why not work together? Each are small companies, but each could spare a little engineering time. Smaller companies still, who could stand to gain most from being plugged in to a service with built-in users, could contribute smaller amounts of time. These businesses could help the new startup get funding (and, of course, benefit from the ultimate advertising revenue). Users, eager to have a central home for their online identities and just one site to check in the morning after email and Facebook could make donations to help get things started, much as they did earlier this year for Diaspora.

Am I crazy? Probably. But you only need to look at the flurry of press surrounding the threat Facebook's new Places feature poses to Foursquare to see that the community of independent social services need to do something to combat the ever-growing Zuckerberg empire. By banding together maintaining their separate communities but adding a service that lets their users meet each other and subscribe to each other's additional services they can carve out a strong second network of social activity on the web to rival Facebook's. A user who thinks they need to check their Flickr, Twitter and Tumblr contacts' activity is likely to give up, not bother and just check Facebook.

Above all, users need this. What Facebook has done in helping people use the web to enhance their offline lives is admirable and valuable. But, if the social web is to fulfil its true potential as a place for people to connect and grow, to share interests and experiences, and to be creative, there must be a strong network of places where users can publish and network without using their real names.

Eric Schmidt of Google made headlines earlier this week when he predicted that, in the future, it would be routine for young adults to change their names to disassociate themselves from all the embarrassing youthful indiscretions recorded online in photos, videos and status updates. But you don't have these problems if people are free to use a pseudonym. And as well as reducing privacy problems, you get more interesting content put online. There's ample evidence that when forced to use their real name online, people are far more circumspect about how they interact and what they publish.

The web helps us do many important, everyday things shopping, organising events, sharing memories. These are great, and important. But much of the most exciting potential of the web lies in exploring interests and communities and building identities outside the boundaries of our real' lives. For that area of the web to survive and thrive, we need a new, public social network where people aren't restricted. I don't know what the name should be, but I can think of a slogan Be yourself.