The big news in the startup world is that Israeli startup Shaker won the big prize at the Techcrunch conference this week. Many, including AOL employees, wonder what it is that Shaker is “disrupting” while others are talking about the conflicts regarding the finalists and AOL/CrunchFund’s funding of 2 of the top 3 and an upcoming investment in the winner. Of course questions are nothing new with Techcrunch (now aol) conferences – heck, I wrote about MC Hammer investment questions with regards to DanceJam at the first TC40.

When I saw Shaker, the first thing that popped into my head was, “oh it’s the new version of that game!” But I couldn’t remember the name of the game until Dean Collins replied to my message on the NYTM messageboard noting that Shaker is Leisure Suit Larry! And yep that’s exactly what it looks like.

TC writer Leena Rao describes Shaker as, “…a mixture of Second Life, The Sims, and Turntable.fm all mixed together using your Facebook data and connections. Your Facebook profile becomes a walking avatar, your pictures are placed on an virtual wall, you can choose what music is playing in the room for everyone to hear and you can even buy people drinks.”

Shaker looks like a fun game but what frustrated me in the Shaker demos is that the founders kept suggesting that this virtual world was, ” just like real life”. It is absolutely nothing like real life.

Rackspace startup blogger Robert Scoble seems to love Shaker – I just don’t see it here. I mean seriously – maybe I am missing something – but it’s a virtual world where you walk around and chat – AOL 1996 called. Sure you can click on a person and get their info but otherwise what, you dance on a bar? And just wait – the minute a woman “walks in” to the virtual chatroom, you will watch all the males run over. Something tells me these “bars” will be all male. Maybe it will work for the concert concept but even that will be a stretch.

As I watched the two demos of Shaker, I could only think of one thing (which applies to more than just Shaker)…

HOW ABOUT CALLING UP A COUPLE OF YOUR REAL FUCKING FRIENDS AND GOING OUT TO A REAL FUCKING BAR AND HAVING A DRINK OR DINNER AND SOME FUCKING CONVERSATION INSTEAD OF SITTING IN SOME FUCKING VIRTUAL WORLD.

And if you don’t have local friends or are new to your town, go to Meetup.com or Plancast, find a freaking meetup and get the gosh damn fuck out of your house. Walk up to a person, shake a hand, exchange a business card (heh), and smile. Learn something in your conversation.

I know it’s not easy to go outside and it’s way easier to stay home/office and chat on a social network or, now, play some 2.0 version of Leisure Suit Larry. But trust me, the more we sit at home and live online, the less we will be able to live offline.

Ok I am done. Now get out there and do something.

Find more stories about: AOL, Conferences, Meetup, Shaker, TechCrunch

AOL’s Going.com has announced it will be closing on May 1, 2011. Below is the email that AOL (NYSE:AOL) sent to Going.com community members earlier today. Kara Swisher reported on AOL’s acquisition of Going back in 2009 at a value of $10 million. Interestingly, if you visit going.com, they offer you the option of browsing in a brand new beta version of Going.

Here’s how AOL CEO Tim Armstrong referred to Going upon the acquisition, “Going has developed a local events platform to discover and share information about things to do in a number of leading cities across the country. Under the leadership of CEO Evan Schumacher, Going has launched sites in 30 cities–including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami–and provides users with RSVP tools and advertisers with self-service event advertising.”

Dear (redacted),

First off, we’d like to thank you and the Going community for your support and your feedback over the years. With your contributions we built a very special site that has helped make the city a place to live in to the fullest and has gotten the word out about thousands of great local happenings, artists, and places. We can’t thank you enough!

As part of AOL’s refocusing, Going will be going away as of Sunday, May 1st, 2011.

We wanted to give you as much notice as possible so that you can grab anything you’ve contributed ahead of that date. Please save out any of your messages, events, photos, profile information and other personal content you’d like before May 1st.

After that date, Going.com will have a new home in Moviefone and Patch which have movie and event listings at a national level. Hopefully that will ease the transition and help you continue to discover great things to do around town!

Please note that the Going mobile site and iPhone and Facebook applications will be discontinued as well. Feel free to reply to this email if you have any questions, and thanks again.

Sincerely,
Roy Rodenstein, Going co-Founder, and the Going Team

I wonder if AOL will keep the strong domain name or if they will try to sell it.

Find more stories about: AOL

Earlier this month AOL (NYSE:AOL) acquired the Huffington Post blog for $315 million. I posted on Twitter that I wondered if online video hosting service Viddler would be next for the “new” AOL. I still think the acquisition makes sense for both companies.

AOL has a large number of brands (and will be even larger once the above acquisition is complete) and I have to imagine that video will be a large piece of AOL’s pageview generating strategy going forward. Today AOL has a video site and they also own the Truveo video search engine.

Viddler currently works with AOL’s Engadget tech blog for their gadget videos. AOL’s Techcrunch blog uses Ooyala for their video hosting and this hosting could easily move to Viddler if there was an acquisition. It appears that the videos on AOL’s video site are self-hosted.

I am not 100% sure but I think Viddler has only raised some angel funding (which is quite impressive considering they are in the video hosting business). Viddler also received $50,000 from Ben Franklin Technology Partners last April. Viddler lists a team of 16 people based outside Philly and in Poland.

My guess is that AOL could acquire Viddler for a very reasonable price and bring a strong base of video hosting, video analytics and monetization inside the company. If there was an acquisition, Viddler would become the corporate hosting platform. This central repository would help AOL cross-promote videos across all of their channels. There is tremendous opportunity in cross-promotion that AOL is losing everyday by hosting with so many different video partners. For example, when you are finished watching the latest iPad 3 unboxing video on Engadget, you could jump over to Techcrunch to watch the latest TechCribs video.

AOL would also gain the ability to use their internal ad sales team to sell and integrate video ads across all of their properties.

The only question I am left with regarding a potential acquisition is whether Viddler would remain open to other companies to use — they currently host video content from a variety of companies including Gawker and the Cheezburger Network.

Find more stories about: acquisition, acquisitions, AOL, online video, Viddler

Last night sure was interesting — everyone on Twitter was bitching about the Groupon ads, cheering for the Chrysler ad, and there was very little actual football chatter from what I could tell. Then at 9:01 Pacific time, the conversation on Twitter changed in the tech sector. Kara Swisher and the NYT posted that the Huffington Post was acquired by AOL. Congrats to everyone involved – looks like this was a very large acquisition for the content network that recently acquired a number of blogs and technology providers.

What I immediately thought was, “wow, this fits perfectly with the AOL Way where they want to generate massive pageviews with little work”. Last week I put a URL into my bookmarks for later usage on a story about content scraping. The URL was from a post on HuffPo about some topless photos of actress Olivia Wilde. Apparently Wilde did a shoot (she was covered) in FHM magazine. The reason the link was interesting to me is that FHM magazine goes after any outlet that posts their images online. So could the HuffingtonPost really have posted these images? NOPE! What do you get when you land on the page titled, “Olivia Wilde Goes TOPLESS In FHM France (PHOTOS)”? You get one tiny paragraph of content and a link to another website. But you also get thousands of pixels in other non-related “stuff”.

When you put something in parens (Photos, Video, etc.) in a story title, you expect that the thing is actually located within the post.

So what did AOL pay for when they acquired HuffingtonPost for $315 million? Did they get one of the biggest SEO plays out there? Today on the investor call, Ariana Huffington said something about how they create quality content at cost-effective prices. I am not a regular reader of the HuffingtonPost – mainly because every link I follow ends up being a scrape or a let down in quality or quantity of content.

I am certain that most of the content on HuffPo is probably of good length and quality — but is it these types of articles that drive the pageviews to let them create the other quality content?

But let’s take a look at one example — last night Christina “Genie in a Bottle” Aguilera performed the national anthem at the Super Bowl. She messed up and missed some of the words. I wanted to see what the press was saying about her fumble so I headed over to Google and typed in her name (actually only part of her name, the rest was courtesy Google Instant).

On the first page of results is a blog entry from Huffington Post titled, “Christina Aguilera Nude Pictures Leak (PHOTOS)”. So I clicked it, not because I want to see Xtina naked, but because I just knew that it would be a dupe of the Wilde story above. And sure enough, I was unfortunately correct! Below is a graphic I made showing the page about Christina and as you can see – the blue box is content and the red is everything else. Oh and…the blue content is a scrape from another site! There is not one photo of Christina naked but there are about 100 “tags” – I wonder how long it took someone to enter all of the tags displayed below?

Wasn’t Google supposed to fix this issue?

I sure hope that this isn’t the type of content we will see coming soon from Engadget.

Here’s the Christina “nude pics” page (click to view the larger version):

Find more stories about: acquisitions, AOL, blog, Blogging, blogs, Huffington Post

Evelyn Rusli, anchor for Techcrunch TV has announced that she has resigned from the AOL-owned Techcrunch blog and will be moving to NYC and will begin working for the New York Times. Rusli left Forbes in mid-March to join Techcrunch and just six months later she is off to the land of Yankees, Giants, knishes and the best subway system.

Techcrunch founder Michael Arrington noted on Evelyn’s hire, “(she) will be our main anchor for breaking news content as well as planned shows”. So what happens to TechcrunchTV now that the main anchor has left? My guess is not much as most of the content on TechcrunchTV are interviews and weekly series rather than only breaking news.

Good luck to Evelyn in my home city – I am sure she will love it there!

Update: Some new questions have come up in chats I’ve had since this post went live. The questions all revolve around whether the NY Times will be looking to get more into video with the hiring of Rusli. Based on her messages, it does appear she will have a larger content scope than at Techcrunch.

Find more stories about: AOL, TechCrunch

Last month AOL made three large acquisitions: video service 5min, tech blog network Techcrunch and Thing Labs (makers of the Twitter client Brizzly).

Louis Gray reported that the Thing Labs acquisition price was $18 million with a total including earnouts of $30 million. Peter Kafka reported that the 5min acquisition was an all-cash deal valued at somewhere between $50-65 million. Most have suggested the Techcrunch sale price at between $25-40 million. (Om Malik originally broke the news of the Techcrunch acquisition.)

Assuming all three acquisition reports are correct, that would mean a total acquisition price of ($18 + 50-65 + 25-40) between $93-123 million. So assuming the lower numbers are correct, that would fall in line with today’s announcement.

Update: the AOL 10-Q notes the 5min sale at $64.7 million (that’s what Kafka initially reported) which leaves $32.4 million for Techcrunch and Thing Labs. If Gray is correct that Thing Labs was acquired for $18 million, that would leave $14.4 million for Techcrunch, a much lower number than the $25-40 million reported by some outlets. But the only confirmed number at this point is the 5min acquisition price so the other two are still a mystery. These amounts don’t include the earnouts – much of which I assume goes to TC because it’s critical that some of their staff stay on board.

AOL has released their Q3 earnings today and the announcement includes a short brief regarding the acquisitions. Total price for all three: $97.1 million plus $23.1 million in earnouts over the next three years. They were able to lump all three acquisitions together which means we may never know exactly what each acquisition price was.

Here’s the bit regarding the acquisitions, “In late September 2010, we completed the acquisitions of 5Min Media, Thing Labs and TechCrunch for $97.1 million in the aggregate, net of cash acquired. In addition, we have agreed to pay an aggregate of $23.1 million in total to certain employees of the acquired companies over the next three years contingent on their future service to AOL.”

Find more stories about: 5min, acquisitions, AOL, Brizzly, TechCrunch

I’ve been suggesting for a long time that inch by inch, day by day, Facebook moves closer and closer to becoming AOL 2.0. I am not talking about the new AOL that’s a collection of blogs, I am talking about the 14.4 dial up, 3.5″ floppies, look at photos of Cindy Crawford and email “You’ve Got Mail” AOL.

It’s easy to see how hooked people are to Facebook when the service is down as it has been a couple of times the past month. It’s the same crack that had me and lots of my friends hooked to AOL back in the 90s and pushed my first bill over $600.

In February I took a long look at the components of Facebook and compared them to the old AOL. Facebook had a press conference today to discuss a variety of updates at the social networking service. Next Web has a recap of all of the changes. The Facebook Groups update was the most interesting to me. It was fun to watch how quickly everyone ran for a group and how many updates were posted on my Facebook page about x person joining y group. It was interesting to note that groups can have email addresses @facebook.com which is one of the items I noted back in February would be coming. I still believe we will see full username@facebook.com email addresses coming soon. Email was the core functionality of AOL so it’s easy to see why I think it will be coming to Facebook.

Email is really the only function left that keeps Facebook from being its own complete island. Almost all of the other services a normal Internet user uses on a regular basis are provided by Facebook. From photos to videos, groups, IM, chat, apps, games, what else is there where a person would need to go outside the walls of the Facebook?

While many compare Facebook and Google, I would actually suggest Facebook’s next battle will be with Apple.

I’ve been watching how my sister has been using Facebook as of late and it is EXACTLY the same way she used AOL.

So you say, “Allen but I need to use a web browser when I want to visit my favorite brands”. Not so! The PR machine has helped brands to understand that all they need is a Facebook page where they can easily communicate with their “fans”. Social Media Experts are pushing companies to create campaigns on Facebook — both page and ad campaigns.

I can’t wait until I receive my Facebook modem – I kind of miss that lovely noise that told me “you will soon be connected to others around the world”.

I am by no means suggesting that the slow move towards a full, standalone network is a bad thing. Now if I could only get back the full head of hair I had when AOL was big. Perhaps that’s coming next from Facebook.

Find more stories about: AIM, AOL, chat, Facebook, Social Networking

AOL has collected final bids to purchase instant messaging (IM) service ICQ. The bids came from Russia’s Mail.ru-major owner Digital Sky Technologies (DST) and Rambler’s owner ProfMedia as well as from Chinese IM service QQ-owner Tencent, reported newspaper Vedomosti.

ICQ has 42 million active users, of which 18.5 million or 44% are in Russia.

The Russian entertainment media group ProfMedia offered $120 million for ICQ, the newspaper said. The Rambler-branded IM client software Rambler ICQ has 5 million active accounts. Rambler Media first partnered with AOL’s ICQ in 2005. The company should have earned revenues of $6 million from advertising in Rambler ICQ in 2009.

Mail.ru has 12 million registered users of its own instant messaging client software Agent@Mail.ru. It’s #2 popular IM software client in Russia, behind ICQ. Russian internet investment group DST, which owns majority of Mail.ru, offered more than $120 million for ICQ, reported Vedomosti.

Yakov Sadchikov is the President & CEO of visual search engine Quintura.

Find more stories about: AOL, Yakov Sadchikov

While at SXSW this week, I met with Shawn, the AOL product manager over the new AOL Lifestream product. AOL Lifestream brings together a variety of social services including Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, etc. The service is available on the iPhone, Android and on the desktop.

Interestingly, AOL now allows you to post status updates to AOL along with the other services you select. AOL Lifestream also allows you to follow places and find updates related to a place. So if you are interested in a certain hotel, bar, etc. you can subscribe to that location and any updates will hit your stream. To make these location pages very valuable, AOL will need to aggregate additional services including Yelp and even Google results (blog, web, news, etc.).

Similar to Google launching Buzz inside of Gmail to gain an instant audience, AOL Lifestream has the same instant audience as the new version of AIM includes the Lifestream product.

I asked Shawn about the comparisons to FriendFeed, his response is worth listening to.

Check out the video demo below.

Find more stories about: AOL, social media, sxsw, SXSW 2010, Video, videos

Earlier this week, I took a look at the social news service Propeller and wondered if the service was coming in for a landing. Since that post, one of Propeller’s users submitted the CN story to Propeller and I thought it might be interesting to see what we got from the submission.

The story was posted on Propeller 27 hours ago as of the time of this blog post. The story (as seen below) has received:

• 45 props (these are the up votes)
• 2 drops (I guess these are like down votes)
• 60 views listed on Propeller (not sure if this is how many people visited the page on Propeller or something else?)
• 247 comments!

I count 16 total pageviews in my analytics software using the propeller.com referral domain. This means that nearly none of the people who commented on the story actually read the story. This is an issue for most social news sites – and I think will be an issue for Buzz as well. Outbound traffic is the only real measure for a social news site – the more traffic that the service sends out, the more people want to invest in it.

Interestingly the story became the top listing for best of day and now is listed in the first position for “most popular stories this week” as seen below.

Member “nottooneedy” noted that Tom Drapeau is no longer in charge of Propeller (I haven’t confirmed this). The member also noted, “This place has become nothing more than a cess pool, your bloggy article verifys that fact.. Not much is based on fact here anymore and just as well to read about acid reflux as to read fresh conservatives or liberal heretics racist rants.”

User TimALoftis notes, “Clearly one of the biggest blows to the site was the loss of its Editor, James Marcus who was reassigned by AOL to its AOL News team last Summer. A replacement for Mr. James was not made leaving many to look upon the change as merely a cost cutting move to help compensate for drop in Propellers traffic. Last Fall, the Director for Propeller, Tom Drapeau was also reassigned to other duties within AOL leaving Propeller without leader. No formal announcement was ever made, only a brief reference to it on Tom’s profile page.”

As I noted in my post, the majority of stories I see on Propeller are political (not including the spam). Perhaps Propeller should drop all other content categories and only focus on political content? I can’t picture AOL turning off the service – as long as it generates ad-driven pageviews, and it’s no longer linked from the main AOL properties, it can stay around and just keep generating income.

Find more stories about: AOL, Netscape, Propeller, social media, Social News

Let’s start this journey by taking a ride back in time. Some of you are too young to remember the Internet of the early 90s. Back then one of the most popular ways to get “online” was to use AOL. This was the popular online service that came via disks you received in the mail. Prodigy and Compuserve were on their way out and this new service AOL was the darling of the time. I went to college in a small town in upstate New York which had no local number for AOL. I had to call to Albany to access AOL. And boy did I access AOL. One of my first months I received a phone bill for over $500 in long-distance charges (where was Vonage back then?!?) and that didn’t even include the AOL access fees. I still use the same username on AOL today that I originally registered way back then.

AOL was exciting – you could read news, send and receive email, play games, IM chat with friends, go into chat rooms based around topics, search for content, listen to music, send eCards, customize the home page to suit your preferences and a variety of other online tasks. In later versions of the AOL desktop, a Web browser was included and other “partners” were added to allow for additional content and, what I will call, applications.

It sure does seem that the more we try to move the Internet forward, the more things seem to copy the old. So with that said, allow me to introduce you to the next version of AOL… AOL 2.0… otherwise known as Facebook.

Read the above paragraph that begins with “AOL was exciting” and replace AOL with Facebook. Seem similar? Seem to be identical?

Facebook has news, buddies, chat/IM, games, video, photos and when you include their developer network you get pretty dang close to what AOL offered. I’m not going to run down every single feature in both services but if you were to create a matrix, the checkmarks would overlap pretty closely. One difference is the aggregated “feed” that Facebook offers which allows you to see what your friends (or marketing contacts) are up to.

Update: Doc Searls said the same thing about Facebook and AOL last month. You should read his post and comments as he discusses trying to keep up with all the content that is pushed his way.

Sure Facebook allows us to connect at higher speeds than an overclocked 28.8 baud modem, but if you look closely, I can see the little yellow running man inside the Facebook logo. I’d argue that if AOL had the connection speeds and coverage that Facebook benefits from today, AOL would have been much larger.

I’ve wondered if Facebook will eventually launch a branded phone similar to Google’s launch of the Nexus One smartphone. And there is a lot of chatter about the potential of Facebook to create a web browser. AOL had a web browser as well.

Facebook likes to say that they are open but I guess by their definition AOL was just as open in the mid-90s. One difference between the companies is in the way they generated revenue. AOL charged a service fee and Facebook is using ads and Facebook also told me tonight that Heinz Ketchup wants me to share my Ketchup stories (I never use Ketchup) and that two of my Facebook friends are “Fans” of Heinz Ketchup.

Let’s look at some recent posts from around the Web – just replace Facebook as you read the posts with AOL and replace any mentions of Obama with Clinton.

• Steve Rubel says that Facebook will centralize the social web. Isn’t that exactly what AOL did in the early-to-mid 90s?
• Facebook is the largest newsreader says Hitwise. Wasn’t AOL the largest online newsreader?
• Facebook is working on an internal email service says Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington. Along with many others, I said this would be coming. And lookie here, AOL had an email service as well. So now people will tell you to email blueriver149@facebook instead of blueriver149@aol.

So is Facebook really just a refurbished version of the old AOL?

Find more stories about: AIM, AOL, chat, Facebook, IM, social media, Social Networking

eBay company StubHub has announced a new partnership with AOL Music today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Basically StubHub will be integrated all over AOL Music so people can buy and sell tickets (and pay comissions to StubHub) from practically anywhere on the site. From the release, “this includes AOL’s Artist & Video pages, as well as AOL Music’s concert touring website, TourTracker. For the first time, users can also see up-to-the minute concert ticket price ranges on StubHub’s marketplace without ever leaving AOL Music. ”

“Allowing our consumers to purchase tickets to sold-out shows through StubHub will significantly enhance our user experience,” said Bill Crandall, vice president of AOL Music.

Find more stories about: AOL, music

AOL announced today that their online coupon application shortcuts.com is now supporting Safeway (a supermarket chain). Safeway has 1,554 stores in 22 states and the District of Columbia. Shortcuts.com allows you to pick coupons online and they automatically get deducted at checkout – no more coupon clipping.

I’ve spent a number of years working with retailers and their frequent shopper cards. I have a variety of frequent shopper cards including CVS, Kroger, Cosi, etc. I also have a few bank cards that I use at ATM machines that are owned by the bank.

Why can’t any of these systems get smarter with regards to receipts. Apple allows you to provide an email address and have a receipt emailed to you. The few times I’ve purchased items at the Apple Store, it’s worked perfectly – the emails will usually hit my mobile before I even leave the store.

CVS knows my email address – can’t they just email me the receipt each time I shop? It would help me manage my books, it would help CVS save money on the receipt printing and would save a number of trees (how many I have no idea but certainly a good number).

Banks are even worse with regards to receipts. Let’s not even talk about the fact that my bank knows I speak English – why they prompt me for 7 other languages is beyond me (and could be a security risk). With so many banks offering online banking, can’t they too email me a receipt when I complete a transaction? If they removed the language question and the receipt question, they could easily shave 10-15 seconds off the total transaction time. I can’t imagine it would be hard – the bank already knows my email address and they could offer a button that allows me to enter my pin and get a hardcopy receipt or enter my pin and get a receipt via email. Sure this won’t work when I use a foreign ATM, but I bet the majority of transactions are made at one of your own bank’s ATM.

So many of the things we do on a daily basis could be made smarter and save us time and natural resources. Ok, I’m done ranting…leave your thoughts on how machines like ATMs and cash registers can become smarter.

Find more stories about: AOL, mobile, money, Online Coupons

After the major launch of “Where It’s At” yesterday, today AOL has announced the launch of the AOL portal to the UK market. Last month we wondered why AOL pushed their big acquisition of Bebo aside to pimp Facebook and Twitter. The good news is that it seems Bebo is one of the top four being pushed in the UK version of the portal service.

It appears in the UK users prefer different types of content than we do here in the U.S. Here are some of the differences between the UK and US AOL portal sites:

UK version of My Stuff – shows Horoscopes over AOL Radio – all other items are the same

UK version of My Networks – here we see the UK version pushing Bebo over AIM and also pushes Twitter to slot 4 while the US version pimps Twitter first (which is a huge mistake) and doesn’t even list Bebo in the top 4.

The content and stories on the UK version appear to be UK-based which is a good thing.

Find more stories about: AOL, Bebo, London, Twitter

AOL’s publishing unit MediaGlow has announced the launch of their newest website today called “Where It’s At”. It’s a site that they describe as, “serving as a guided tour of iconic pop culture landmarks from music, film and television, complete with photos and background stories on why the landmarks are famous.”

Bill Crandall, vice president, AOL Music said regarding the Where It’s At launch, “Where It’s At is the ultimate pop culture treasure map that we get to build together with our audience”. The map shows the entire world yet the locations seem to be limited to the U.S. There are about 200 spots listed in a variety of categories and locations. You can naturally interact with the team on Twitter and via RSS.

Adena at the All Points Blog has some suggestions for the Where It’s At team including not linking to Google Maps and some confusion as to what the site actually offers (i.e. nightlife or location-based trip planning). This seems to be the weakest of all of the sites that AOL has launched over the past year. This almost looks like they put it together as a quickie site for VISA. I hope the other 29 sites that AOL MediaGlow plans to launch this year are stronger than this one.

Here’s an example of the location spots on the MapQuest-powered map, this time it’s Britney Spears’ Quickie Wedding Chapel – the place she married Jason Alexander back in 2004.

Find more stories about: AOL, online advertising