Gen Y and Boomers Diverge on Facebook Movie, Poll Finds

When Facebook debuted to the public in 2006, youth flocked to it to create an online persona and keep track of their friends, while many adults thought the social networking site was just another fad and that sharing their lives online was weird, perhaps even dangerous.

That divide has closed quite a bit in four years, but now that Aaron Sorkin has turned Facebook’s seedy origins into the box-office smash The Social Network, there’s a similar divide in the reaction to the movie: 18- to 34-year-olds like Facebook even more, while the site’s reputation fell among adults over 50.

That’s according to survey data from YouGov BrandIndex, which interviews 5,000 people every weekday, asking them to gauge what they think of various companies and brands. Scores range from 100 to -100, figured by subtracting negative feedback from positive, with a zero score reflecting equal numbers of positive and negative feedback.

The upswing among 18- to 34-year-olds is dramatic — rising from a general impression of 23.5 (on YouGov’s proprietary scale of brand approval) on Sept. 22 to 46.4 on opening day (Oct. 1) then up to 51.5 on Oct. 6 (the day Facebook released its new groups feature).

(YouGov says its BrandIndex scores “range from 100 to minus 100 and are compiled by subtracting negative feedback from positive. A zero score means equal positive and negative feedback.”)

That’s despite the fact that the movie features no redeeming characters — depicting Facebook’s founding as a combination of backstabbing idea-borrowing, a way to get revenge on an ex-girlfriend and an attempt to vault Mark Zuckerberg into the upper echelon of Harvard society. Meanwhile Sean Parker, the founder of Napster and one-time Facebook president, is portrayed as a paranoid playboy with a taste for coke and underage girls.

But perhaps the 18- to 34-year-old generation sees the movie as Wired’s Fred Vogelstein did:

I don’t know if Zuckerberg stole the idea behind Facebook from the Winklevosses. I don’t know if he cheated Eduardo Saverin. What I do know is that it doesn’t matter. They didn’t build the company, Zuckerberg did, and in Silicon Valley, at least, that’s all that matters.

Perhaps the movie works because Facebook has defined a generation and fought its way to the center of the web. And now that the site has a creation myth, and ugly or not, it’s a gripping tale full of driven youngsters building one of the world’s most valuable companies with late-night coding binges and drinking games, making that myth good enough for Hollywood and the Facebook generation.

Graphic: Courtesy of YouGov BrandIndex

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Futurist Nick Bilton Sees Media’s Destiny: Storytelling

With smartphones, computers and tablets bombarding us with more data than we could ever ask for, it’s difficult to get a clear vision of what the future portends. But maybe we’re already living there.

That’s what writer Nick Bilton argues in his new book I Live in the Future and Here’s How It Works. A seasoned technologist and lead writer at The New York Times, Bilton underscores all the major web-based media — from digital books to porn, and from social networking to videogames — that are trickling into our everyday lives so seamlessly that they’re blending together into a rich storytelling experience.

“As we move to this world where we consume things on screen and the lines blur between television and radio and the printed word and every medium, everything is going to be catered to storytelling,” Bilton told Wired.com.

This media-rich phenomenon poses interesting implications for business and society, as well as our personal lives, Bilton says in his book. Wired.com invited Bilton to join us for a one-on-one interview to tell us his story, and here’s how it went.

WIRED: So you’re from the future. Are there jetpacks and flying iPhones and stuff? Tell us a bit about it.

Nick Bilton: (Laughs.) I actually came to the WIRED offices in a time machine from the future. I’m under NDA from the future police.

The title of the book is ironic and funny, but there were two reasons for it. I used to work in the research labs at the time, where it was basically my job to look forward two to five years in the future. And I’ve essentially grown up in a way that a lot of kids are growing up today with technology as the commonplace in their lives.

WIRED: Your first chapter is all about porn. What’s up with that?

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That New Super WiFi? What’s in It For You?

Wifi! By Florian Boyd/flickr. Used with gratitude via a Creative Commons license.

In late September, the FCC announced it would be freeing up spectrum from television broadcasters and opening it to public use to create “super Wi-Fi.”

Tech industry groups and public interests groups hailed the new “white-space spectrum” as a way to expand upon the success of the open frequencies that allow anyone to set up a Wi-Fi radio hot spot in their house or coffee shop, without needing to buy spectrum or get a license.

But what will this super-Wi-Fi look like in practice? Will it replace the 3G service we pay for for our smartphones? How fast will it be? Will we need new equipment or can our current laptops and cellphones just be upgraded?

Wired.com asked the experts at smart Wi-Fi equipment maker Ruckus Wireless in Sunnyvale, California, to find out.

The short answer is that the new spectrum could be really great news for rural areas, won’t be nearly as useful in dense urban areas, though the characteristics of the new spectrum could make for some very smart uses.

That’s according to Bill Kish, the CTO and co-founder of Ruckus Wireless, which is known for its innovative Wi-Fi antennas.

“There is an interesting amount of hype around the new spectrum,” Kish said. “But people don’t know the best way to use this new spectrum at this point and it’s going to be sometime before we figure it out.”

Currently, Wi-Fi uses unlicensed spectrum in the 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz ranges (Wireless-N uses the latter in combination with the former). These ranges are available across the country and largely standardized across the world.

The new whitespaces are much lower — in the 700-MHz spectrum — and like the TV signals that use adjacent channels, the waves are very good at penetrating walls and obstacles. Wi-Fi is more easily absorbed by obstacles, including humans.

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Ars Technica: ‘Banned’ In Iran

Ars Technica has had no traffic from Iran since about Sept. 27.

Ars Technica is reporting that cannot be accessed in Iran. The sister publication of Wired.com — we both are owned by Condé Nast — says a reader told them last week of the block, which displays a “403 Forbidden.”

Ars says its logs (see illustration above) supports the allegation, though it has no real idea why the block is in force — there are several shades of  “403 Forbidden” but given that this is Iran, well, one is forgiven for assuming the worst: it seems to have begun after a Sept. 27 story about the Stuxnet malware that allegedly targeted an Iranian power plant.

“The point of the ban isn’t clear, but it definitely highlights how easy it is for governments to start cracking down on whatever sites they like once they have the proper tools in place and have centralized all Internet links leaving/entering the country,” Ars reports. “And, as the traffic logs show, it can be surprisingly effective at discouraging casual users from viewing unwanted content.”

We’d welcome any first-hand reports about whether Ars is blocked in Iran, and for that matter what else can’t be accessed. Leave a comment or, for extra points, e-mail us some prima facie evidence at nynews[at]wired.com.

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It’s Not Just You: 71 Percent of Tweets Are Ignored

71 percent of tweets are ignored

About 160 million people use Twitter, which may explain the signal-to-noise ratio.

Ever feel like you’re talking to a brick wall on Twitter? That might be because 71 percent of tweets get absolutely no response from the world.

Toronto-based social media analytics company Sysomos scanned 1.2 billion messages that were sent in August and September 2009 to try and get some idea of the kind of conversations that are going on. They discovered that more than seven in every 10 tweets sink without any kind of reaction from the world.

Of the remainder, just 6 percent get retweeted, and 92 percent of those retweets occur within the first hour. Multiplying those probabilities together means that fewer than one in 200 messages get retweeted after an hour’s gone by. Essentially, once that hour’s up, your message is ancient history.

That leaves 23 percent of messages that get an @reply. Drilling down, Sysomos found that 85 percent of replied-to messages get just one reply, 10.7 percent get two, and just 1.53 percent get three replies. Similarly to retweets, 96.9 percent of @replies are posted within an hour of the original tweet.

It’s not clear how the company treated messages that were both replied-to and retweeted.

The company also commissioned an animated visualization of the data. In the video embedded below, the spiral represents time, with the size of the blue dot representing the number of retweets and replies to that tweet. Following one dot over time, you should see it slowly grow as it gets replied-to and retweeted.

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Xmarks to Continue Syncing Bookmarks, Thanks to Loyal Fans

XmarksXmarks has a new lease on life thanks to the support of its most vocal users.

The free bookmark syncing service had previously announced it was shutting down, but vocal customers signed an online pledge last week promising to pay for a premium version of the service. This made the company take a second look at its options.

Now, according to a new post on the Xmarks blog, it looks like the service itself will continue, even though the company behind Xmarks may still be doomed.

In a new blog post thanking users for their outspoken support, Xmarks CEO James Joaquin, says “Xmarks now has multiple offers from companies ready and willing to take over the service and keep making browser sync better.”

Although Joaquin cautions that no deal has yet been signed, he seems confident that one will emerge in the near future: “With multiple offers on the table we’re pretty confident that Xmarks will continue on with no service interruption,” he says.

That’s good news for the some two million users who rely on Xmarks to sync bookmarks and open tabs between web browsers like Google Chrome, IE, Safari, Firefox, as well as mobile devices.

Many of the users have already but their money where their mouth is — or at least pledged to put their money where their mouth is — using Xmarks’ PledgeBank page to promise their support for a premium version of the service. That’s no doubt had a positive effect on Xmarks perceived value and convinced at least a few companies that service might be worth buying.

This article originally appeared on Webmonkey.com, Wired’s site for all things web development, browsers, and web apps. Follow Webmonkey on Twitter.

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Microsoft Buying Adobe Would Solve ‘The Apple Problem’ For Both

The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has recently been at a secret meeting with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen to discuss topics including the two companies’ mutual competitor, Apple.

The Times says that the companies were investigating ways to partner in order to do battle with Apple. One option was for Microsoft to acquire Adobe, a claim that has seen Adobe’s stock price surge by more than 10 percent.

Microsoft is thought to have investigated buying Adobe some years ago, but abandoned the idea with the expectation of running into new antitrust problems. With Apple and Google now such strong competitors, such a purchase may now be a viable option. Regardless of the legal difficulties, a partnership—and, indeed, a Microsoft purchase—makes sense.

The common enemy

Apple’s increasing importance in the mobile space with its trio of iOS devices, the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, is a growing threat to both companies. Adobe and Apple butt heads in a number of markets. The two companies have competing software (Adobe’s Lightroom and Premiere go up against Apple’s Aperture and Final Cut Studio, for example), and more significantly, Apple is attacking a key Adobe product: Flash.

IOS devices have no Flash support in their browsers, so can’t run Flash ads or any other Flash content on webpages. Apple has been advocating the use of HTML5, with its video and interactivity capabilities, as an alternative. Given the dominance of Flash in advertising, this is a big blow to Adobe. Apple then stepped up the pressure on Adobe with the launch earlier this year of iAds—rich, Flash-like ads built using HTML5.

Microsoft’s difficulties in the mobile space—both phones and tablets—are well-known. The tablet problem is probably more serious; though Microsoft would like to have a piece of the smartphone market, it’s tablets that threaten PC sales, and hence Windows. There is already some suggestion that iPad sales are denting netbook sales, and this is a trend that Microsoft could be badly hurt by. At the very least, it would substantially diminish home PC sales; ultimately, it could threaten corporate computer purchases too.

Apple’s anti-Flash stance also indirectly threatens Microsoft. Redmond’s relationship with HTML5 is a difficult one. On the one hand, the Internet Explorer team is making a considerable effort to make Internet Explorer 9 a modern browser with good support for new web technology. That team, at least, is serious about HTML5.

On the other hand, Microsoft is also investing in its own Flash competitor, Silverlight, which it introduced in 2007 with great fanfare. Like Flash, Silverlight is a browser plugin that allows the creation of rich, interactive web applications, and like Flash, it includes a range of media features not available to HTML5, such as DRM-protection of video streams. HTML5 threatens Silverlight in much the same way as it threatens Flash.

HTML5 also raises Microsoft’s long-standing fear about the web: that it would become a platform in its own right and displace the Windows PC. It is this fear that led to the development of Internet Explorer and the first browser war; Microsoft doesn’t want the web to be a platform, but if it must be one, it should be a Microsoft-powered web accessed through a Microsoft browser on a Microsoft operating system.

Microsoft and Adobe do compete on a number of fronts. Silverlight and Flash, and ASP.NET and ColdFusion, are the two main areas of opposition. However, in practice, even in these competitive areas, the companies’ respective products have carved out their own niches, and neither is threatening to completely demolish the other. Apple’s stance towards Flash—get rid of it, use HTML5—is far more dangerous to Flash, and far more vigorously pursued, than Microsoft’s stance—use this other browser plugin instead.

Having a common enemy isn’t enough to justify working together, of course. There needs to be some practical benefit to cooperation: something that strengthens both Microsoft and Adobe against the Apple threat.

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Why Mark Zuckerberg Should Like The Social Network

Josh Eisenberg (L) as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 'The Social Network.' The real Mark Zuckerberg (R).

It’s hard to go anywhere and not see, hear and read about Mark Zuckerberg right now. Last week and the week before, the Facebook founder and CEO was getting attention for giving away $100 million. This week he’s talking about two long-awaited Facebook features — a way to easily get your data out of Facebook and a better way to parse friends into subgroups. On Tuesday night, satirist Andy Borowitz wondered on the radio — only half in jest — if he should win a Nobel Prize in economics.

The Social Network is more than just a movie about Facebook. It’s the first movie about Silicon Valley.

Sandwiched between all that, of course, is the reason for all this publicity: Hollywood has made an uncomfortably excellent movie about the company, and Facebook’s image makers want to ensure that partially fictional account doesn’t become the real way the world sees Facebook and its precocious leader.

They’re doing their job well. But having finally seen the movie myself — no free screening for me — I can tell you that they should stop worrying. I don’t know if Zuckerberg stole the idea behind Facebook from the Winklevosses. I don’t know if he cheated Eduardo Saverin. What I do know is that it doesn’t matter. They didn’t build the company, Zuckerberg did, and in Silicon Valley, at least, that’s all that matters.

Remember three years ago when Yahoo tried to buy Facebook for $1 billion and Zuckerberg said “No”? Remember four years ago when he launched “newsfeed” and again said, “No” when outraged users and a few employees told him to shut it down? Gutsy decisions like that are why Facebook and Zuckerberg are where they are today, not because of who had what idea first.

Most have forgotten, for example, that the Google guys were accused of having stolen the idea for Adwords — the targeted advertising model behind much of the company’s success. Yahoo ended up owning well north of 5 percent of Google because of that and other legal settlements. Has it changed Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s place as technology visionaries? Not a bit. The list of ideas Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have allegedly appropriated have filled chapters in books.

I’m sure Zuckerberg doesn’t like the way he is portrayed in the movie — as a friendless, overly ambitious geek — because it isn’t accurate. But so what? Zuckerberg long ago lost control over what the world thought of him. If you start the most important company of the new millennium and are worth $7 billion at 26, no one is going to believe how down-to-earth you are, even if it’s true.

To me, what’s important about The Social Network isn’t how it well it hews to the truth about Facebook or Zuckerberg. What’s important is that such a good movie about Silicon Valley got made at all. Silicon Valley has been changing the world for more than a generation. But Hollywood’s stance has been “Who wants to see a movie about geeks and nerds making things few can understand?” Directors and screenwriters love movies about Wall Street and the media. But movies like The Social Network that have the main character doing riffs about Apache servers, Linux boxes, and computer code? Not a chance.

This makes The Social Network more than just a movie about Facebook, it makes it the first movie about Silicon Valley. It means Facebook — not Google, Apple or Microsoft —  gets credit for making Silicon Valley truly mainstream. Sure there was Pirates of Silicon Valley, the made-for-TV movie about Gates and Jobs a decade ago. But to me that doesn’t count. The financial risk associated with showing a movie on TV pales next to the risk of putting it in theaters and relying on people to shell out $11 to go see it.

Why Facebook? Why Now? The Social Network is a great story about the American Dream, but that’s been true for every super successful Silicon Valley startup. Is it because what people do on Facebook — talk to their friends, instead of to their machines — is something that has universal and visceral appeal? Is it because Facebook is just the newest incarnation of what Google and Apple are doing just as well — creating 21st-century television networks and turning Silicon Valley into a new media epicenter? Just last week I heard Google CEO Eric Schmidt ask, “Why watch TV when you can watch the internet?”

I don’t know the answer yet. What I do know is that it took more than 20 years before anyone in Hollywood remotely cared about how Microsoft and Apple were changing the world. Google is 12 and there is no movie about it yet. Facebook is not yet seven and a movie about it and Zuckerberg is likely to be one of the blockbusters of the year. Mark my words: It will do so much good for the company and Zuckerberg that a year from now they’ll be wondering about a sequel.

Fred Vogelstein is writing a book about the intersection of media and tech in Silicon Valley. Follow him on Twitter @fvogelstein.

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Leaked Report: Worker Abuse, Violence Continues at Foxconn

Foxconn workers dress T-shirts with an "I Love Foxconn" slogan during a rally to raise morale at the heavily regimented factories inside the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, south China, Guangdong province, Wednesday August 18, 2010. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Electronic gadget manufacturer Foxconn is under fire—yes, again—for alleged worker abuse. The Chinese state-run Global Times claims to have information from an as-yet-unreleased report by Foxconn itself on the results of its worker investigation, which details safety issues, “violent training,” and low wages.

The survey was conducted on Foxconn’s behalf by researchers from several universities located in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. They surveyed 1,736 workers, and 14 researchers were reportedly allowed first-hand access to Foxconn’s facilities to check it out for themselves.

Despite widespread reports that Foxconn had given employees a 30 percent raise earlier this year, the newspaper claims that workers got a maximum of 9.1 percent while losing many of their other benefits and bonuses. Student interns sometimes made up as much as half of the staff in Foxconn’s Shenzhen, Kunshan, Taiyuan, Wuhan, and Shanghai plants, and they were supposedly forced to work overtime and night shifts against local law.

(It’s unclear whether the interns get paid from working at Foxconn, but Global Times claims that Foxconn doesn’t sign contracts with them so that the company doesn’t have to pay their social welfare or medical costs.)

Additionally, 38.1 percent of those surveyed said their privacy had been invaded by management, and 16.4 percent reported being subject to “corporal violence.” And finally, although the company is supposed to provide workers exposed to hazardous materials with regular health checks, at least one unnamed employee said that he only received two medical checks in his 16 years at Foxconn.

Some critics of the report argue that the Global Times is acting as a puppet for the Chinese government, which allegedly has unnamed “issues” with Foxconn. However, Foxconn has long had a controversial history when it comes to wages, safety, and worker treatment. The company has been subject to repeat investigations in recent years, though most of the companies that use Foxconn for manufacturing have yet to find sufficient reason to take their business elsewhere.

Which companies are those, anyway? Apple is the most common name that gets attached to Foxconn news, but other big names like Nintendo, Sony, Nokia, Dell, and HP have all contracted with Foxconn for various products. Foxconn has been on a big PR push since news spread about worker suicides earlier this year, but has yet to respond to the claims made in the latest report.

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Silicon Valley Lacks Vision? Facebook Begs to Differ

Facebook Vice President Chris Cox

Facebook Vice President of Product Chris Cox. Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Facebook VP and early employee Christopher Cox believes and he’s got some words for those who think Facebook and social networking are a waste of time and overvalued.

“This stuff matters,” Cox says.

Cox — who graduated Stanford in 2004 and joined Facebook the following year — is one of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s closest confidantes. He’s prone to impassioned McLuhanesque speeches that put Facebook pretty close to the forefront of human evolution.

‘Technology does not need to estrange us from one another. The physical reality comes alive with the human stories we have told there.’

When he spoke in August at the unveiling of Facebook’s check-in service Places, Cox seemed on the verge of tears as he described how Facebook would let children visit the place where their parents shared their first kiss.

“Technology does not need to estrange us from one another,” Cox said. “The physical reality comes alive with the human stories we have told there.”

While Cox clearly believes, not everyone feels the same about the online service — including many of its 500 million users. It’s easy and common to dismiss Facebook as a narcissistic waste of time and to scoff at its $35 billion valuation.

In fact, Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons used just that argument to troll the tech journalism world last week, lamenting that Silicon Valley isn’t solving hard engineering problems anymore and the country is falling behind in important technology.

“[T]he Valley has become a casino, a place where smart kids arrive hoping to make an easy fortune building companies that seem, if not pointless, at least not as serious as, say, old-guard companies like HP, Intel, Cisco and Apple,” Lyons wrote. “Facebook lets you keep in touch with your friends; for this profound service to mankind it will generate about $1.5 billion in revenue this year by bombarding its 500 million members with ads.”

In an interview with Wired.com after Facebook’s announcement Wednesday of new ways to talk with groups of friends, Cox immediately and passionately attacked Lyon’s thesis when asked about it (noting that he hadn’t actually read the piece).

“The most important innovations in the history of technology have been mediums that accelerate the velocity or make cheaper or make faster the ability for one human being to share something with another human being, starting with language and going all the way up to e-mail, the internet and mobile phones,” Cox said.

Yes, he speaks that way off the cuff.

“Think about how people make decisions, big decisions, like who should I vote for, what do I think of the health care bill, what’s going on in Afghanistan, what should I think of all this news about Thailand, and small decisions like what shoes should I wear or what album should I listen to, should I take this job, and where should I eat tonight?” he asked. “We make those decisions by talking to people we trust.”

“I think Facebook has changed in a noncontinuous way the ability for one person in the world to say, ‘I exist. Here is my story.’ That’s why people are now finding their birth mothers, guys in Columbia are organizing millions of people to march together that have no money, no access to media, no anything.

“This stuff matters,” Cox said. “It’s as simple as letting people share more easily. That may not sound like building the next 10-Ghz processor, but in the grand scheme of things, communicating with each other changes everything.”

Sitting in a small conference room with Facebook product manager Carl Sjogreen and Wired.com, Cox paused after his monologue, and turned to look out the window looking out onto the green campus, perhaps bored with the topic.

Sjogreen, formerly of Google and his own startup called Nextstop, adds that while he’s new to the company, he thinks that the seeds of Facebook’s vision are “profound” and the company is just at the “beginning of being able to deliver that.”

As Sjogreen finishes, Cox turns back from the window, and we discover he hasn’t not been distracted, but was just marshaling his argument:

“Here’s what I would write: When the mobile phone came out, we made fun of it. The movie Clueless is a gigantic joke about the mobile phone. Why would anyone need a mobile phone? It’s Alicia Silverstone gossiping on a big black box in her car. Now all we write about are these frickin’ things [picking up his iPhone]. And it only takes 15 years from where we are all laughing at something to ‘This is the foundation of how technology works.’

“We get this wrong every time. We laughed at FM radio. We laughed at every new technology because we are grounded in the perspective of the media we use today.

“But somebody’s got to be thinking about tomorrow.” Cox concludes.

He doesn’t name the somebody, but it’s not hard to guess who he’s thinking about.

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