The Social

Classifieds start-up Oodle will be powering Facebook's official "marketplace," the company said Tuesday. Members will be able to use it just like any third-party app on the Facebook platform--the only difference is that this one is official.

"Turning the development and management of Marketplace over to an innovator in online classifieds will give users more advanced ways to create and share listings on Facebook," Ethan Beard, Facebook's director of business development, said in a release. "We're excited by the potential of the Oodle-powered Marketplace application to offer an engaging classifieds experience on Facebook."

Facebook launched its own Marketplace about a year and a half ago, a potential rival to the Craigslist juggernaut. But it didn't really take off, and though it was never formally pulled, Facebook decided to revamp it with Oodle to "further expand the functionality and breadth of the application."

It'll relaunch early next year. Facebook, meanwhile, has been working on developing a PayPal-like payment system for quite some time; it has yet to launch, but presumably could be closely integrated with an official classifieds service.

Oodle also has powered MySpace's classifieds since July.

With all the buzz about Facebook Connect this week, it's worth asking the question: Whatever happened to OpenID?

The universal log-in standard was created in 2005 by Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of LiveJournal, while he was working at blog software company Six Apart. (Fitzpatrick now works at Google; Six Apart has since sold LiveJournal.) It has the support of Yahoo, MySpace (which just helped build an OpenID extension for the Flock browser), and President-elect Barack Obama's Change.gov. Even Google has dipped its proverbial toe in the pool.

But it wasn't until Facebook Connect started making headlines that the concept of data portability--a single log-in across multiple sites--made the jump from the tech press to the mainstream media. OpenID, some speculated, had been left behind in the dust.

Hardly. But Wired's Michael Calore hit the nail on the head on Monday: "Presenting a dialog that asks a user to log in to one Web site using a name and password from another Web site is jarring, but Facebook has managed to keep Facebook Connect simple enough for everyday users to understand. Such ease of use virtually guarantees it will win support quickly."

The truth is, the future of the "social Web" is in expansion. And expansion invariably involves dealing with a crowd beyond the Twittering, FriendFeeding, WordPressing geeks who actually understand the concept behind data portability.

And that's not made any easier by the fact that OpenID calls itself "an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity." Try bringing that up in the boardroom of a non-tech company looking to ride the social-networking wave. Then tell them that the most buzzed-about social network on the planet will power your site's social features. The decision will probably fall in the Facebook camp, unfortunately for the open-standards crowd and its admirable dedication to all things balanced and democratic.

"Nobody should own this. Nobody's planning on making any money from this," Fitzpatrick has said about OpenID. "The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there's no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we're all a part of the community."

But your average company is probably going to care more about profit margins than OpenID's decentralized ideal, and the possibility of having its user activity broadcast across Facebook members' news feeds is tantalizing. Especially during tough financial times, strategy will likely trump idealism.

That said, there are some good signs for OpenID. It has a ton of support in the tech world, and if Facebook Connect's impending expansion goes awry for any reason--think Beacon--it could open up a whole new set of doors for OpenID. What it (and other open Web standards) needs either way is some image repair.

"Facebook is trying to replace all log-ins with their own, and control the creation, distribution, and application of the social graph using their proprietary platform," Chris Saad, whose DataPortability Workgroup has put its support behind OpenID and other open Web standards, wrote in a blog post. "The most scary part of this, is that while Facebook is quietly and methodically building out this vision with massive partners, the standards community is busy squabbling about naming the open alternative."

OpenID and its brethren could use a good, simplified marketing pitch, not to mention some announcements and partnerships that are more prominent than an extension for a niche Web browser. They need to use the resources that the likes of MySpace and Yahoo can provide to get more deals going and start making headlines outside of ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch.

And most importantly, in a recession, "it's good for the Web, so it's good for everyone" just isn't concrete enough. One last tip for OpenID: Start talking business benefits.

There's no more room for smut and naughty bits on build-your-own social network service Ning, according to a post on the company blog. Ning has announced that it will shut down its "Red Light District" of adult content, and on January 1 will formally ban it.

"We are exploring ways for adult networks that will no longer be available on Ning to export their content in addition to their members," the post by CEO Gina Bianchini read. The reasoning, she explained, is that it's costly and problematic--something you just can't deal with in a recession.

Advertisers don't like it, Bianchini said. "Our ad partners aren't big fans of the adult networks and therefore require us to identify adult networks or risk our healthy advertising revenue," she explained. "We don't want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that's where this is heading."

And if legal adult-content networks are allowed, the illegal ones invariably weasel their way in, Bianchini said, and that means more work for a small team. The number of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices is also higher for adult networks: "Compared to our other social networks on the Ning Platform, the additional work created by adult networks alleged to have violated the copyrights of others is enough for us to discontinue adult networks in favor of investing time and energy in growing the Ning Platform from here," Bianchini wrote.

Ning isn't the only site to be cracking the whip on porn. YouTube, owned by Google, said on Tuesday that it's "tightening the standard for what is considered 'sexually suggestive.'"

Bianchini co-founded Ning with Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, and famously raised a $60 million round of funding in anticipation of a "nuclear winter." Guess that was a good move.

Jay Adelson, CEO of social news company Digg, has used a BusinessWeek interview to attempt to quash those long-standing acquisition rumors. From what he said, Digg is not for sale.

"Now I am pressured to keep costs reasonable and focus more on the top-line revenue, which we really haven't done ever," Adelson said to BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante, saying that he now hopes to make the company profitable in one year instead of two.

Not for sale? Riiiiiight.

It's an old (ha) Silicon Valley maxim that any company is for sale, assuming the right buyer comes along and offers the right deal. What's likely is that Digg has come to realize that in this economic climate, it's not going to get the price that Adelson and founder Kevin Rose want.

Digg raised a whopping $28.7 million in Series C funding in September, which Adelson and Rose said would go toward fueling a major site expansion. The company didn't disclose a post-round valuation, but VentureBeat heard that it was only $164 million--significantly less than the $250 to $300 million prices that were oft-whispered about in Valley social circles.

Here's my theory: The longer Digg waits for the perfect bid, the longer it's in danger of having its valuation chipped away. The truth is, it's not very difficult for a site to institute a "social news" feature or other form of Digg-like interaction. Current Media, after Digg spurned an acquisition offer, built Current News and now aggregates user-picked stories into an hourly TV show. Yahoo built Yahoo Buzz, which can propel stories to the front page of its portal. Some Google users occasionally report seeing experimental features in which they can vote on search results. There are smaller ones, too: Reddit, which sold early to Conde Nast, is still alive and kicking. A start-up called Kirtsy puts a girlier spin on the Digg model.

Adelson even remarked to BusinessWeek that buying some of these smaller social news sites could help make Digg stronger, especially now since the recession may make some of them dirt-cheap. "There are Digg clones around the world in every country," he said to Ante. "I could go into those markets and clean up those sites. If I needed more capital to do a deal, I could probably do it."

That, honestly, wouldn't be such a bad idea. Digg's biggest problem isn't user activity--it has one of the most loyal and addicted audiences on the Web--but the fact that its core user base is very niche. It experienced a surge in political traffic as election season rolled on, but its core is geek news; hot topics right now are screenshots from the movie Wolverine and airborne laser weapons.

New York-based blog network Gawker Media continues to trim its staff after a big layoff round in October, MediaBistro reported Tuesday. A few more members of the editorial staff have been let go, and a few others have been downgraded to part-time employees.

"It's all part of the austerity plan we announced a month ago," Gawker Media founder Nick Denton said in an instant-message conversation. He added, "I don't make any apologies: we're going to need as big a cash pile as we can accumulate."

Denton has been particularly bearish on the fate of ad-supported media companies in the face of industrywide cutbacks, suggesting that online ad revenue may drop a full 40 percent and responding with fierce cost-cutting. Company revenue is strong--up 39 percent in November, Denton said--and traffic continues to grow. The company has a history of dealing with underperforming titles by simply selling them or shutting them down rather than letting them bleed cash. It's a strategy that has been called both ruthless and prudent.

In the scandal department (it's Gawker, after all): One of the employees MediaBistro reported was cut, Alex Carnevale, allegedly cribbed part of a blog post from his personal blog last week, if smaller media gossip blog Jossip is to be believed. Denton, however, said that wasn't part of the rationale behind his departure: Carnevale had been a temporary employee, serving one month on sci-fi blog IO9 and one on Gawker.

"He did some good stuff, and I'd like to try him out again," the company founder said.

Of more interest to the tech blogging world, Gawker recently slimmed down its Silicon Valley scandal title, Valleywag, opting to fold the brand into a column on Gawker.com instead.

A correction was made at 9:54 a.m. PT: ThisRecording is considered to be a personal blog that Alex Carnevale writes for with several other contributors, not an employer.

Right now, the most famous classical musician on YouTube is arguably Nora the piano-playing cat. She, sorry to say, probably isn't eligible for "YouTube Symphony Orchestra," a new competition from the Google-owned video-sharing site.

Musicians from around the world (legitimate ones: I'm looking at you, Modded Guitar Hero Controller Guy) are invited to audition by submitting videos of themselves performing "Internet Symphony No. 1," an original piece written specially for YouTube by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon composer Tan Dun, in addition to a "talent video."

Judges come from the London Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, and a number of other high-end orchestras--they'll winnow the selections down to a set of semifinalists by February 14.

Then, YouTube members will vote on their favorite semifinalists, and winners will be announced on March 2. The prize? A trip to New York for three days of a "classical-music summit" with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and a performance at the legendary Carnegie Hall.

YouTube has sponsored competitions before, like the "Democracy Challenge" filmmaking competition, but this is the first one open to anyone from any country, the company said.

I hope that they at least invite Nora to watch. I'm sure she can sit still.

Michael Wolff, whose new, lascivious Rupert Murdoch bio The Man Who Owns The News has taken the New York media industry by storm, stirred up some social-networking class warfare in an interview Monday with BusinessWeek's Jon Fine.

"If you're on MySpace now, you're a (expletive) cretin. And you're not only a (expletive) cretin, but you're poor," said Wolff, whose previous book Burn Rate chronicled dot-com excess in the late '90s and who openly attests to hating the word "blog."

"Nobody who has beyond an eighth grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people," added Wolff, who is also the founder of Newser.

Fine pointed out, "If you are in a band, you are on MySpace. You have to be on MySpace. That's a powerful driver." He's right. "And second of all--if I am to accept your reasoning, even though I don't--as the success of The Sun (a News Corp.-owned British tabloid) will tell you, there are lot of cretins out there and you can make a lot of money off cretins."

Let's get past the language: MySpace did indeed start as a hub for independent music fans. Facebook began as an exclusive directory for Harvard students and expanded to the other Ivies before finally opening to the public. MySpace encourages glitter text; Facebook mandates that members must use their real names. So Wolff is alluding to a legitimate point, but he makes it in the bluntest of terms.

And as Fine notes, there's the money issue. MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe recently expressed concern about the site's revenue growth slowing down amid the recession, but MySpace is still the flagship property of the top destination for display ads on the Web--Fox Interactive Media. Facebook, meanwhile, is still seen as an experimental ad medium.

MySpace, additionally, has trumpeted the buying power of its members with the likes of a high-profile campaign by luxury jewelry brand Cartier earlier this year.

But I'll give Wolff some credit: he sure knows how to drum up controversy.

There's a new OpenID extension for "social browser" Flock, and it was created with the help of password management service Vidoop and News Corp.-owned social network MySpace.

It's now available for download for all Flock users who have upgraded to Flock 2.0. For MySpace, which initially announced its support for OpenID back in July, this is also a push for Data Availability, a universal-login project that the social network announced in May but has since only rolled out with a few partners.

Yahoo, one of MySpace's launch partners for Data Availability, has also thrown its weight behind OpenID.

"As three companies dedicated to empowering users to easily share content and experiences, this was a very rewarding--and relatively fast--collaboration," Max Engel, MySpace's Data Availability product manager, said in a release. "Our goal was to eliminate some of the work involved in jumping between social experiences on the Web so that people can focus on their connections and the incredible content that's out there. This Flock extension will give millions of people an easier way to expand their experiences and expression without boundaries."

The OpenID Flock extension allows for easier credential management within the browser and makes it more apparent when a site will accept an OpenID login. A handful of OpenID extensions already exist for the open-source Flock, but this one's got the seal of approval from some big names.

There are deeper reasons for MySpace being so vocal about OpenID support, though. The standard has seen its toughest rival yet in the form of Facebook Connect, a data-portability project which enjoyed a high-profile New York Times writeup this week and will reportedly be ready for a full debut very soon. (It's already been implemented on a number of sites.)

Flock, unfortunately, isn't an enormous player in the browser space. It has tons of bells and whistles, but is still well behind the likes of Internet Explorer and Firefox in terms of downloads, and has newfound competition from Google's Chrome.

Regardless, MySpace has been paying a lot of lip service to open standards recently, and it's always good to see real developments.

MySpace Chief Executive Chris DeWolfe said that he's "cautiously optimistic" about ad revenue for the News Corp.-owned social network in the face of a recession, Reuters reported Monday.

Speaking at the outlet's Reuters Media Summit, DeWolfe said that MySpace's "revenue and profits are significant and they continue to grow in spite of the poor economy." Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. division that encompasses MySpace, Photobucket, and other digital properties, was declared the top destination for display ads on the Web several months ago.

But display ads will be hit hard as ad budgets are cut, many critics have said--harder than other forms of digital advertising like search ads. Market research firm eMarketer slashed its 2009 projections by over $1 billion this week.

DeWolfe also said, according to Reuters, that MySpace's revenue in the last quarter was up 18 percent from the previous year's. He's expecting that they'll continue to grow--just not as much.

Another one bites the dust? Pownce, a would-be Twitter rival that was heavily hyped due to the involvement of Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, is closing its doors in two weeks.

It's not quite going away, according to a post from Pownce founder Leah Culver on the start-up's official blog. The technology has been sold to blog platform Six Apart, which runs TypePad and Movable Type. And its two full-time employees, Culver and Mike Malone, will be joining Six Apart's team.

"We'll be closing down the main Pownce Web site two weeks from today, December 15," Culver wrote. "Since we'd like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we've added an export function...(you can) import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress."

Pownce, which is like Twitter with additional features like file-sharing, was so buzzworthy at its debut that people were auctioning alpha test invites off on eBay. It also had a business model, with paid accounts available for sale. But the Pownce hype died off, and Twitter gained more and more market share.

Additionally, we heard that the self-funded Pownce was trying to secure a round of venture capital. It looks like that didn't work out. This is, after all, not a great time to be raising money.

Six Apart is encouraging Pownce members to join its blog platform Vox. "We hope the Pownce and Vox communities can come together, just as the teams have, towards a better future," Six Apart's Chris Alden wrote on the company blog.

Pownce's two other co-founders, Rose and Daniel Burka, will become Six Apart "advisers."