In Your Face

How Facebook could crush MySpace, Yahoo!, and Google.

By Christopher Beam
Posted Friday, June 22, 2007, at 5:50 PM ET

There comes a time in every young person's life—soon after teething, usually—when she must make a momentous decision: MySpace or Facebook? One's preference is a matter of taste. MySpace, if you ask me, is a spam-infested state of nature. The average user page comes with a crapload of embedded music and video players, some seizure-inducing wallpaper, and a bunch of friend requests from "models" who want to "get to know you." (It also happens to be nearly three times the size of Facebook.) Facebook, on the other hand, is much less customizable but also a lot more reassuring. The interface is comfy, sturdy, and attractive without being showy—the kind of social network you'd bring home to Mom. Think of it as the Volvo of social networking.

But a few weeks ago, Facebook pulled a MySpace-like maneuver. The site tore down its walls and opened its pages to outside developers. A new tool kit called Facebook Platform allows any programmer—a bored student or a multimillion-dollar corporation—to peel back the site's breastplate, poke around, and rearrange the innards. None of the nearly 900 (and counting) programs released so far are particularly life-changing—among the most popular add-ons are a "Graffiti" program (downloaded by more than 3.3 million people as of this writing) that lets you doodle other people's profiles and an "Honesty Box" that lets your friends say, anonymously, what they really think of you. Collectively, though, these programs are hugely significant. If the site figures out a smart way to deploy these mini applications, it will be more than just a social network. Facebook will turn into a do-everything site with the potential to devour the whole Internet.

For all the hype about Second Life, Facebook and MySpace are already the closest things we have to "virtual worlds." Sure, Facebook doesn't have large-breasted 3D avatars and a sky and buildings and its own currency. But the whole point of the Internet is that you don't need all that stuff. If I want to buy something, I go to Amazon, not some virtual store. Even before Facebook allowed outside applications, it had millions of users who basically lived inside their profile pages. The typical Facebooker spends hours each day sending messages, posting "notes" or blog entries, and uploading photos, along with trolling for freshmen girls who love the Decemberists. Facebook Platform simply expands this world. (According to the Wall Street Journal, the site's user base has jumped from 24 million to 27 million since Platform launched.) Now you can check the local weather, feed and nurture a virtual pet rabbit, and see what music your friends are listening to. With just a few more additions—e-mail, an instant-messaging program, RSS feeds—Facebook obsessives will become total shut-ins. Users wouldn't have to venture out into the Internet; the Internet would come to them.

If Facebook does decide to become an all-encompassing portal, it would be a bit late to the party. Customizable homepages like My Yahoo! and iGoogle already let you cram your favorite Web stuff onto a single page; there's also the trendy start-up NetVibes, which Slate's Reihan Salam called "the ultimate mashup." But a Facebook homepage would have a huge intrinsic advantage: The social network is already built in. Sure, the other portals incorporate Gmail and BBC headlines and YouTube searches and podcast directories. By adding a social context to all of this content, however, Facebook would immediately trump its main competition. With Facebook's News Feed, it's elementary to see when your friends sign up for a new product or service. That means the best add-ons become viral instantly—Platform's biggest success story so far, a music sharing app called iLike, started growing at the rate of 200,000 users a day.

It's a certainty, too, that outside developers will fall over themselves to deliver great content to Facebook users. The site's growing audience, sterling reputation, and clean look are catnip for corporations.

What kind of stuff will companies offer to Facebook users? Every major corporation, it seems, is trying to add social networking to their core services. Netflix, for example, allows you to keep tabs on what your "friends" are watching. But it makes much more sense to peddle your services on a huge, prebuilt network—no wonder Netflix users can now check their buddies' queues on Facebook. And we're not only talking about businesses: Just look at Barack Obama's campaign. Thousands of users have downloaded the Obama Facebook application since late May, and hundreds of thousands more have joined Obama-themed groups. Compare that to the relatively paltry 70,000 registered users on the candidate's custom-made social network, My.BarackObama.com. Using the Facebook network as a delivery system, it seems, is easier and more productive than creating the system yourself.

For me, an influx of outside content seems like the obvious path to a bigger, better Facebook. But the recent deluge of applications has created a big backlash. I count 15 groups started in the past month, all variations on a theme: "Enough with the @$#%! Facebook Applications Already!" Even my friends have started complaining. When I added a 12^th application to my lineup—I think it was "Pets"—one wall-poster labeled me an "applications slut." Some of this sentiment, dubbed by one developer as "app fatigue," is just a product of the site's growing pains. But it also reflects a real frustration with Facebook Platform, a sense that it hasn't reached its potential. Most of what we've seen so far looks like refuse from an airport gift shop—cutesy Tamagotchi imitations and fortune cookies and virtual presents.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I can doodle multicolored genitalia on my friends' Graffiti walls. But come on, Facebook, where's all the useful stuff? It's reassuring to hear that Facebook plans to add a "wallet" feature for processing online payments. But for the site to really take off, it needs to have an instant messaging system as easy to use as Google's, as well as an embeddable inbox that connects to Hotmail, Yahoo!, and the like. The fact that Facebook hasn't introduced some sort of RSS feed for news—real news, not News Feed news—also borders on inexcusable. It's not clear to me why Facebook hasn't incorporated these seemingly essential elements, and neither their press office nor CEO Mark Zuckerberg (or the guy he probably pays to handle his profile) responded to my inquiries. But I'd be confused and disappointed if these projects aren't in the pipeline, especially considering the rumors that Yahoo! wants to buy MySpace. A merger of that size would dwarf Facebook at the outset. But in the long run, if there's going to be a supernetwork, I'd much rather have it be clean and navigable like Facebook than spam-filled and occasionally creepy like MySpace. If Facebook adds e-mail, IM, and RSS, it's one step closer to becoming as comprehensive as Yahoo! and as popular as MySpace. The rest of the Internet might as well surrender.

How Liberal Activists Outfoxed Fox

Submitted by Rick Perlstein on June 19, 2007 - 5:52pm.

A really illuminating panel showed how a major right-wing organization was set back on its heels -- and how it can be done again and again and again.

When the Nevada Democratic Party announced that it was cosponsoring a presidential candidate debate with "Fox News," Robert Greenwald, the maker of the outstanding documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, started hearing from friends. "Can we convince them that this is a serious mistake?" they asked. And said: "We need to make it crystal clear to people that Fox is not a news organization."

He ended up circulating a video about Fox's war on Democrats that eventually got the debate canceled. And, even better, managed to do something Democrats have never been able to do, and never even tried: get people questioning Fox News's very legitimacy.

Greenwald told the story about what happened in between, at the panel, in a riveting way: via video. Yes, a video about a video. A simple video, to be sure, featuring short talking head interviews with the major activists who made it happen: Greenwald himself; Matt Stoller of MyDD.com; Adam Green of MoveOn.org. There was even a soundtrack behind them. (I recall synthesizers, and strumming guitars.)

By starting the panel that way, Greenwald made a crucial point: outfits like Fox can be fought on their own terms - via images - with surprising ease, and in incredibly compelling fashion. It was kind of, if you know what I mean, Brechtian. (If you don't know what I mean, no matter.)

Then Greenwald, in the flesh, took the podium, and fleshed out the rest of the story: how a new model of "mutually reinforcing activism" saved the day. Greenwald produced a video of the most damning clips of Fox savaging Democrats. The video included an address for an online petition at the end. Within 24 hours the petition had received thousands of signatures. They got angry local Nevada Democrats to bug Nevada Democratic leaders. They got local Nevada bloggers - people with but a thousand or two thousand readers a day - on the case. These blogs were read by local politicians, party officers, local media. The elites started taking notice. They managed to get national coverage of a local story. That made it bigger locally.

As the controversy started burbling, Fox made a clever play. They approached Air America and invited them to contribute a liberal to the debate panel. Tokenism: a powerful hustle. Especially since it would help them slap the "fair and balanced" imprimateur on a TV show designed, like all "Fox News" programs are designed, as a platform to humiliate Democrats.

Not so fast. Mark Green, Air America's co-owner, told the panel audience about the spanner he threw in Fox's works: not only did he turn them down, he sent letters to every Republican state chair, pointing out that Fox News and Air America have similar-size audiences, proposing that Air America sponsor a Republican candidate debate. The brilliant PR gambit amplified the entire message of the movement: Everyone knows agrees Air America is a liberal activist organization. Presto! He had just framed Fox as an equally activist organization of the right. (Green, Rudy Giuliani's longtime rival in New York municipal politics, repeated the quip he publicly made to Ailes: he could be at least as "fair and balanced" to Giuliani as Fox would be to the Democratic candidates.

On March 9 the debate was cancelled. Left wing activists had managed to do what conservatives had done for years: make a small story into a big one and seize terms of discussion. The movement's "most important role," Greenwald pointed out, was not getting the debate cancelled. "It was to de-brand Fox for the long haul. Once we agreed on that, then the decisions along the way all could fall into that pattern." Soon presidential candidates - this was the best part - started repeating the message.

Greenwald's lesson: "With no money spent on traditional publicity you can reach millions of people." And this: "Victory could not have happened...without various groups, sometimes with different agendas, coming together to fight the one fight."

It wasn't easy. They were, he said, "creating this model on the go." There were "struggles along the way." But once people started figuring out it helped everyone to stop saying, "Oh, but it's not my issue, we only to this - well, everone ended up benefiting. Said Adam from MoveOn - in the flesh: "This is what movement activism really is." It's a lesson too easy to forget. It's a lesson we'll have reason to revisit. "Because there are going to be more fights ahead."

Indeed, the same people are in one now.

Fox was pissed. Republicans don't take kindly to losing -- especially Republicans like Roger Ailes, the Fox chief who got his start in politics as Richard Nixon's media advisor. They came up with a brilliant idea: sponsoring a new Democratic debate, with the Congressional Black Institute as co-sponsor.

What good liberal movement, after all, would go after black congressmen?

The answer was: this liberal movement, which refused to be outfoxed. A stalwart African American progressive organization, Color of Change, stepped up as the voice of this next battle: telling the story that "Fox News Attacks African Americans." They circulated two more Greenwald videos: on Fox's serial abuse of the black community, and their denigration of Barack Obama. Color of Change was able to speak to the black community, with the message that the Congressional Black Institute was not speaking for the black community. Noted Greewald: "I want to make something very clear. Had we begun with a white organiation... Fox would have grabbed onto that and created fault lines."

That, indeed, was the Nixonian way. That was why Nixon promoted affirmative action in the building trades: to create fault lines between two traditional Democratic communities, labor and blacks.

It didn't work this time. We outfoxed them. Democratic candidates have started discovering sudden "scheduling conflicts." If this latest attempt at a a "Fox News" debate comes off, it will be a failure.

Says Adam Green, with this story, "You just kind of see the gradual evolution of our political leaders in response to a movement."

And isn't that what Take Back America is ultimately all about?

Paris Hilton to go on Larry King show — unpaid

The heiress, nearing the end of a 23-day jail term, agreed to a one-hour live interview on CNN after the three broadcast networks spurned her request for a lucrative deal.

By Matea Gold
Times Staff Writer

June 24, 2007

NEW YORK — After being spurned by the three broadcast networks, Paris Hilton is turning to CNN's Larry King to spill the details of her 23-day incarceration in Los Angeles County jails.

The celebutante has agreed to do a one-hour live interview with the cable news host after she is released from a Lynwood facility next week, CNN announced today. The sit-down is set for 6 p.m. June 27.

Both CNN and a spokesman for Hilton said she was not being compensated for the interview.

King landed the exclusive after Hilton's efforts to extract a lucrative deal from the broadcast networks through compensation for the use of personal videos and photos backfired.

In a chaotic series of negotiations this week, ABC executives said they were told by Hilton's family that "Today's" Meredith Vieira had won the interview because NBC had offered to pay close to $1 million to license the footage, a story that NBC rejected as untrue.

The heiress and her parents — now insisting that she was not seeking to be paid — then renewed discussions Friday with ABC's Barbara Walters, who ultimately turned down the interview. Hours later, NBC officials informed the Hiltons they were no longer interested, either. CBS officials also said they did not want the story.

In turning to King, whose nightly interview program is a staple of the publicity circuit, Hilton will get a conversational forum in which to recount her jail-time experience, one she has said has dramatically changed her.

In a statement released through a spokesman this afternoon, Hilton said: "I am thrilled that Larry King has asked me to appear on his program to discuss my experience in jail, what I have learned, how I have grown and anything else he wants to talk about.

"Larry King is not only a world-renowned journalist, but a true American icon. It will be an honor to do his show."

BlogAds For Perez Rescue?

Perezhilton.com shut for several hours

Perez Hilton is seen outside the Village at the Lift during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, in this file photo from Jan. 20, 2007

By GARY GENTILE, AP Business WriterThu Jun 21, 8:33 PM ET

Popular Internet gossip columnist Perez Hilton had his Web site shut down for several hours after the company hosting it received a flurry of complaints about copyrighted photos being posted on PerezHilton.com.

The Web site was down for several hours Tuesday, and by Wednesday was back up but being hosted by a different Internet service provider.

The gossip columnist, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, is the target of several lawsuits by paparazzi and others who claim he posts their photos and video content on his site without permission.

Celebrity photographers make hundreds of thousands of dollars selling exclusive images to magazines and Web sites each year. The agencies that have sued Lavandeira say he has refused to pay fees to license the photos, claiming he has a right as a journalist to use the images for free.

The Web site routinely posts tabloid photos of celebrities and adds scribbled commentary and rudimentary doodles. Lavandeira defends his actions, saying his commentary constitutes "fair use" and is protected by copyright law.

Los Angeles photo agency X17 Inc. sued Lavandeira in federal court last year, asking for $7.6 million in damages. The suit claimed Hilton used 51 photographs without permission, payment or credit, including images of a pregnant Katie Holmes, Kevin Federline pumping gas and Britney Spears.

A federal judge denied the company's motion for an injunction against the site, although the lawsuit continues, as does another filed on behalf of several other photo agencies. A lawsuit filed by Universal Studios claiming the site posted a stolen photo of Jennifer Aniston from the film "The Break-Up" is also pending.

X17 co-owner Brandy Navarre said the company has sent more than a dozen notices to the Australian Web hosting company Crucial Paradigm in the past two weeks, demanding that copies of copyrighted photos on the Perezhilton.com site be removed.

"They quickly realized it wasn't worth taking on this liability just to host this one client who was a repeat infringer," Navarre said Thursday.

Tuesday, Crucial Paradigm sent a strongly worded letter to the company that represents Lavandeira, saying it had received numerous complaints of copyright violations and warning that one more complaint would result in the site being taken offline.

"Please note that with any other provider this would have been done a long time ago, and moving your site to another provider will not solve this issue," the letter read. "Continued abuse is leaving us more liable each day, which we can't afford."

Crucial Paradigm did not respond to a request for comment. The site's new host also did not immediately return a call for comment. Lavandeira, reached by cell phone, referred all comment to his attorney.

"Having lost its attempt in court to stop perezhilton.com when the judge denied their injunction attempt, X17 now seems to brazenly admit to resorting to threats and intimidation in an attempt to shut down the Web site," Bryan J. Freedman, Lavandeira's lawyer, said Thursday.

The site is now hosted by a company called Blogads, which places ads on various Web blogs, including Perezhilton.com.

BlogAds For Perez Rescue?

After all the drama between Perez Hilton and X17, his web host dropped him the other day. For a few hours his site was not hosted anywhere. And then, BlogAds came to his rescue. I didn't even know that they provide a web hosting service, but since he is probably one of their biggest clients (with weekly ads in the amount of $31,000 out of which 30% goes to BlogAds) I bet that even if they don't provide web hosting, it was worth it to them to make sure his site is not down. His current site doesn't include his archives or allow for comments. Also some pictures are not viewable. Another interesting fact is that all his ads but one are gone. Could it be that some advertisers dropped him? Perhaps at least until this mess is resolved?

And on a related note, if any of our fellow bloggers have BlogAds invites and would be kind enough to spare one for us, we would be your bitches forever. Oops, I mean, we would be grateful forever.

CIA to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry
Assassination Attempts Among Abuses Detailed

By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 22, 2007; A01

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.

"Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history," Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests.

In anticipation of the CIA's release, the National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government discussions of the abuses. Those documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called "skeletons" in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts.

A New York Times article by reporter Seymour Hersh about the CIA's infiltration of antiwar groups, published in December 1974, was "just the tip of the iceberg," then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned Ford, according to a Jan. 3 memorandum of their conversation.

Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, "blood will flow," saying, "For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of [Cuban President Fidel] Castro." Kennedy was the attorney general from 1961 to 1964.

Worried that the disclosures could lead to criminal prosecutions, Kissinger added that "when the FBI has a hunting license into the CIA, this could end up worse for the country than Watergate," the scandal that led to the fall of the Nixon administration the previous year.

In a meeting at which Colby detailed the worst abuses -- after telling the president "we have a 25-year old institution which has done some things it shouldn't have" -- Ford said he would appoint a presidential commission to look into the matter. "We don't want to destroy but to preserve the CIA. But we want to make sure that illegal operations and those outside the [CIA] charter don't happen," Ford said.

Most of the major incidents and operations in the reports to be released next week were revealed in varying detail during congressional investigations that led to widespread intelligence reforms and increased oversight. But the treasure-trove of CIA documents, generated as the Vietnam War wound down and agency involvement in Nixon's "dirty tricks" political campaign began to be revealed, is expected to provide far more comprehensive accounts, written by the agency itself.

The reports, known collectively by historians and CIA officials as the "family jewels," were initially produced in response to a 1973 request by then-CIA Director James R. Schlesinger. Alarmed by press accounts of CIA involvement in Watergate under his predecessor, Schlesinger asked the agency's employees to inform him of all operations that were "outside" the agency's legal charter.

This process was unprecedented at the agency, where only a few officials had previously been privy to the scope of its illegal activities. Schlesinger collected the reports, some of which dated to the 1950s, in a folder that was inherited by his successor, Colby, in September of that year.

But it was not until Hersh's article that Colby took the file to the White House. The National Security Archive release included a six-page summary of a conversation on Jan. 3, 1975, in which Colby briefed the Justice Department for the first time on the extent of the "skeletons."

Operations listed in the report began in 1953, when the CIA's counterintelligence staff started a 20-year program to screen and in some cases open mail between the United States and the Soviet Union passing through a New York airport. A similar program in San Francisco intercepted mail to and from China from 1969 to 1972. Under its charter, the CIA is prohibited from domestic operations.

Colby told Ford that the program had collected four letters to actress and antiwar activist Jane Fonda and said the entire effort was "illegal, and we stopped it in 1973."

Among several new details, the summary document reveals a 1969 program about CIA efforts against "the international activities of radicals and black militants." Undercover CIA agents were placed inside U.S. peace groups and sent abroad as credentialed members to identify any foreign contacts. This came at a time when the Soviet Union was suspected of financing and influencing U.S. domestic organizations.

The program included "information on the domestic activities" of the organizations and led to the accumulation of 10,000 American names, which Colby told Silberman were retained "as a result of the tendency of bureaucrats to retain paper whether they needed it or acted on it or not," according to the summary memo.

CIA surveillance of Michael Getler, then The Washington Post's national security reporter, was conducted between October 1971 and April 1972 under direct authorization by then-Director Richard Helms, the memo said. Getler had written a story published on Oct. 18, 1971, sparked by what Colby called "an obvious intelligence leak," headlined "Soviet Subs Are Reported Cuba-Bound."

Getler, who is now the ombudsman for the Public Broadcasting Service, said yesterday that he learned of the surveillance in 1975, when The Post published an article based on a secret report by congressional investigators. The story said that the CIA used physical surveillance against "five Americans" and listed Getler, the late columnist Jack Anderson and Victor Marchetti, a former CIA employee who had just written a book critical of the agency.

"I never knew about it at the time, although it was a full 24 hours a day with teams of people following me, looking for my sources," Getler said. He said he went to see Colby afterward, with Washington lawyer Joseph Califano. Getler recalled, "Colby said it happened under Helms and apologized and said it wouldn't happen again."

Personal surveillance was conducted on Anderson and three of his staff members, including Brit Hume, now with Fox News, for two months in 1972 after Anderson wrote of the administration's "tilt toward Pakistan." The 1972 surveillance of Marchetti was carried out "to determine contacts with CIA employees," the summary said.

CIA monitoring and infiltration of antiwar dissident groups took place between 1967 and 1971 at a time when the public was turning against the Vietnam War. Agency officials "covertly monitored" groups in the Washington area "who were considered to pose a threat to CIA installations." Some of the information "might have been distributed to the FBI," the summary said. Other "skeletons" listed in the summary included:

· The confinement by the CIA of a Russian defector, suspected by the CIA as a possible "fake," in Maryland and Virginia safe houses for two years, beginning in 1964. Colby speculated that this might be "a violation of the kidnapping laws."

· The "very productive" 1963 wiretapping of two columnists -- Robert Allen and Paul Scott -- whose conversations included talks with 12 senators and six congressmen.

· Break-ins by the CIA's office of security at the homes of one current and one former CIA official suspected of retaining classified documents.

· CIA-funded testing of American citizens, "including reactions to certain drugs."

The CIA documents scheduled for release next week, Hayden said yesterday, "provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency."

Barred by secrecy restrictions from correcting "misinformation," he said, the CIA is at the mercy of the press. "Unfortunately, there seems to be an instinct among some in the media today to take a few pieces of information, which may or may not be accurate, and run with them to the darkest corner of the room," Hayden said.

Hayden's speech and some questions that followed evoked more recent criticism of the intelligence community, which has been accused of illegal wiretapping, infiltration of antiwar groups, and kidnapping and torturing of terrorism suspects.

"It's surely part of [Hayden's] program now to draw a bright line with the past," said National Security Archive Director Thomas S. Blanton. "But it's uncanny how the government keeps dipping into the black bag." Newly revealed details of ancient CIA operations, Blanton said, "are pretty resonant today."