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A group of Facebook engineers - Jack Lindamood, Kevin Der and Dan Weatherford - have created a small project called Palantir at a Facebook Hackathon event. The project is named after The palantír of Orthanc, a crystal ball-like object from The Lord Of The Rings (yep, they’re nerds).

Anyway, it’s a video of the earth showing Facebook activity visually and geographically. One view shows activity as dots of light that flow upward. Another view shows connections between people around the globe as it occurs. The images above show a little of it, but you really have to see the video to appreciate it. You can see it here.

Facebook says they are strongly considering productizing this, but for now it isn’t on the roadmap. If they do go forward with it, presumably you’ll be able to watch friend connections happening all over the world.

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Cheers were heard across the Internet earlier today when Google’s new SearchWiki search interface inexplicably vanished. Perhaps, just maybe, it was gone for good. Or at least when it returned it would have an opt out feature.

Nope. Neither. It’s back and it’s still impossible to get out of it short of logging out of Google entirely. Lovely comments like the one above now scar Google’s once pristine search results page.

Here’s how you can get rid of SearchWiki for good if you were unfortunate enough to accept it in the first place: use a Greasemonkey script created by Austrian developer Franz Enzenhofer and just click a button to turn it off. Instructions are here.

This should hold you over until Google adds an opt-out button.

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Speculation was rampant the last few weeks that Google had to rely on a third party content delivery network to make the YouTube Live live concert stream properly at scale. Despite the fact that Google has it’s own quite impressive CDN, streaming live video (as opposed to progressive downloads, which YouTube has historically relied on) is hard stuff. And expensive - you have to license Adobe’s Flash Media Server, or a competitor like Wowza, and pay at least a couple of cents per gigabyte transferred on top of normal costs.

We’d heard rumors that Google had partnered with one of the big three live streaming services - Mogulus, Ustream or Justin.TV. And in fact Google has met with all of those startups to discuss partnerships or an outright acquisition.

But instead of working with them, or building their own streaming media CDN, they chose to work with Akamai. Google won’t confirm this, but it’s fairly trivial to detect (see screen shot below). Why did they go with Akamai instead of partnering? One key factor may be that Mogulus, Ustream and Justin.tv haven’t streamed live events with much more than 100,000 simultaneous viewers (correction: one person associated with Justin.tv emails to say they’ve hit “well over 400,000″), so tonight’s concert would have been an experiment in scalability for them.

It appears based on public Akamai data that about 700,000 people were watching the YouTube concert at its peak. There’s more information on the Mogulus blog, but basically Akamai was serving about 150,000 live streams across its networks right before the event started, and 863,000 at the peak of the concert.

All this expensive CDN infrastructure really isn’t necessary to handle live video streams effectively. P2P software can handle it effectively and far cheaper since the users are serving most of the video to others. That requires getting software directly onto user’s computers, however, something Joost tried and has mostly abandoned. Eventually this stuff will likely just be built into the browser directly.

One thing tonight proved - Akamai may be expensive, but it sure does work. I wonder if Google will let them issue a press release about it.

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We’re at the YouTube Live event in San Francisco, which is bringing together a number of celebrities, YouTube favorites, and musicians to celebrate the past year in viral videos. The show is being held in front of a live audience of 3000 people, with millions of people tuning in worldwide to watch the first live-streamed event in YouTube’s history. You can watch the event above.

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Users are reporting that the recent changes to Google’s search engine, called SearchWiki, have simply disappeared from the site. It’s certainly gone from my account.

I was (and remain) highly critical of SearchWiki, which was announced two days ago and became the default search interface for anyone who opted into it. The changes allowed users to move search results up or down on a page (or remove them entirely), add public comments, and add entirely new results to the page (there is a good overview of all features here).

User reactions were mixed but weighted heavily towards “this is lame,” and there was no way to turn off the features other than to conduct Google searches without being logged in. Another way to turn it off was to switch search engines.

I’ve emailed Google for a comment.

Update: Google says that this is a bug and is working on restoring SearchWiki now (and by “now” they mean right after the Youtube concert):

“We’re really sorry that people can’t use SearchWiki at the moment - we’re working to fix the problem as quickly as we can. Please bear with us.”

Update 2: It’s back. Here’s how to get rid of it again using a Greasemonkey script.

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This is a guest post by Kathlyn Clore, Associate Editor at the European Journalism Centre who was kind enough to write this report for us after attending the press event.

A cadre of European politicians gathered Thursday at the Museum of the 18th century in Brussels to launch Europeana, a digital museum that allows visitors to explore classic paintings, photos, recordings and texts in the same manner in which it is possible to search, say, Amazon.com.

Trying to access Europeana on the day of its launch, though, was akin to navigating the Vatican Museums in the tourist-thick month of August. It was impossible to see anything, as the project’s three servers were totally overwhelmed.

The Commission said Saturday in a press release that the site received about 10 million hits per hour throughout Thursday - double server capacity. The site was taken down Friday evening and is expected to be back up in mid-December.

Europeana’s three servers are located in the Hague, where the project is headquartered, but programmers plan eventually to put mirror servers around the world.

A pair of Dutchmen programmed Europeana in about 10 weeks, said technical developer Eric Van der Meulen. They added the final two of 21 European languages, Finnish and Hungarian, at 7 p.m. on Wednesday.

Europeana, which is still in beta, was programmed using only open source applications, Van der Meulen said.

“Once we get the thing finished and stabilized, we want to be able to put this down as an open source application so other people can look at it and go, ‘Ok how did you do this?,’ and ‘Wow, maybe we can use this for something.’ The future of computing is open source and not only that but you can get a lot of input from all over the world this way.”

Technical challenges included harvesting and normalizing metadata from more than 1,000 different museums and libraries from around Europe. Half of participating cultural heritage institutions so far are French. The Louvre in Paris, the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (which contributed footage shot on French battlefields in 1914) and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam are three of the biggest participating museums.

Europeana is an outgrowth of The European Library, on which Van der Meulen also worked. But it has in the press been compared to Google’s Library Project. Copyright concerns are abundant in all three projects.

Viviane Reding, European commissioner for media, worked to bring the European Digital Library to fruition prior to realizing Europeana.

Issues of intellectual property will certainly complicate Reding’s goal of adding 10 million more objects over the next two years. The project will receive 2 million Euro over the next two years for that goal, said European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso on Thursday. For now, all objects on Europeana are in the public domain.

Reding said Thursday that she encourages users of the site to ‘remix’ what’s available. Moving forward, she plans to facilitate dialogue among various stakeholders to find a way to legally include contemporary works. Nobody wants a black hole when it comes to artifacts from the 21st century, she stated. In particular, she said she will continue discussions with books publishers in order to arrange for digitization of orphan works.

The difference between Europeana and existing library projects, though, is in the diversity of digital objects available on Europeana. Van der Meulen, for example, is able to search the names of his family members and come to a recording of his uncle’s 1970s rock band, the Makkers, or photos of his father Leendert Van der Muelen, a world-class cyclist.

“It’s for a lot of people that way,” he said. “Its a fun toy. Everybody Googles their name, you know. Only with this you get associations with your own name that you wouldn’t find in Google.”

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Here’s a rumor that won’t go away - Facebook has been quietly searching for a partner to take over their year and a half old classified listings application, and may relaunch as early as the end of December.

According to our sources, Facebook distributed a request-for-proposal to a number of classified sites earlier this year (the same model they are using for Facebook Music).

The obvious partner is Oodle, which began powering Walmart Classifieds earlier this year. We’ve heard thin reports that they in fact have won the contract.

Whoever powers Facebook Classifieds (or Facebook Marketplace, as they call it) has a big hill to climb. Competing with Ebay (and their Kijiji) and Craigslist isn’t trivial. The original thought was that social networks were great for classifieds because you the buyers and sellers know each other. But Facebook’s current classifieds system shows anemic listings. The Silicon Valley network, for example, had a total of ten new listings added yesterday. San Francisco had twenty. New York City - zero. And for those who’ve forgotten, Microsoft launched their own classifieds site based on MSN friends and private networks (like businesses), and it went nowhere.

Part of the problem is the limited functionality of the existing classifieds system, which allows a short listing, a picture and communication via Facebook’s messaging system. Better software may mean more listings (although the bare-bones and massive Craigslist is a clear exception to that rule). Oodle, or whoever wins the contract, may also bring lots of listings from their other networks.

If Facebook gets this right there is a potential for lucrative advertising dollars - people looking to buy stuff are easy targets.

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This guest post is written by Matt Rutherford, Web Strategist and technology producer for Charlie Rose. Matt focuses on the macro themes affecting the internet and the wider world.

In an intimate interview with Charlie Rose on PBS tonight, and available here, Stanford professor Larry Lessig reveals some profound views on copyright, remix culture, and the new hybrid economy that is emerging.

In particular, Lessig speaks out against the abolitionist movement growing against copyright:

My real fear is that the last 10 years have unleashed a kind of revolutionary attitude among the generation that will take over in 10 years. And it will be hard for them to distinguish between sensible copyright legislation and the kind that we’ve got right now. So my real fear is we’re going to lose control of this animal… I just want to reform [copyright] to make it make sense.

A reform of copyright is clearly overdue. We require a new form of regulation that takes into account the ease and speed of digital distribution and appropriation. Every week, books cross my desk clamoring for this change - some of which are certainly worth reading. And as Lessig explains on the show, it’s counterproductive to continue to criminalize kids for file-sharing, remixing and recreating with content. Copyright was established to encourage creativity, not stifle it.

Cultural Roots

Lessig thinks on a macro time scale. For him, the emerging “read-write creativity” seen on YouTube and elsewhere is actually a return to our natural cultural roots. Historically, man has always absorbed and re-created culture – the symbolic retelling of stories and re-interpreting of songs on the front porch. It is only the emergence of mass media in the last century that caused us to accept a passive relationship with culture.

What’s so extraordinary about the last four years is that they’ve demonstrated that the technology of the internet is giving us a chance to go back to the way culture has been from the beginning…Only the 20th century was a deviation from this. But from the beginning of culture, it was a normal thing for people to be able to create and recreate the most important parts of culture that were around them.

As evidence of this, Lessig cites the numerous Charlie Rose remix videos that are floating around the web.

I’ve seen some of these Rose remixes, and they are enormous. They’re fantastic. But I would hope, you know, eventually you could be in a position to say I want to encourage this, please. Please do it.

A lot of these remixes also come across my desk. In the spirit of research, here are a few of the best so far: Beckett, Kung Fu, nuclear weapons. They’re all superb. And yes, we do encourage this. As Lessig says, Please do it.

Hybrid Economy

There remains the fundamental question of how a ‘new’ copyright can maintain revenue. After all, despite the ease of pointing out the flaws in the current system, it’s quite another matter to propose a viable alternative. Lessig sees the solution, in part, coming from a new hybrid economy, one that combines the traditional commercial economy with sharing economies seen in Wikipedia, YouTube and elsewhere:

Businesses have begun to realize that the world is in part divided between commercial economies like buying and selling books, and sharing economies like Wikipedia where enormous value is produced for nothing, people are doing it all for free. The most interesting thing I think we’ve seen though in the last five years is the development of a hybrid economy where commercial entities are trying to leverage value out of these sharing economies or vice versa, sharing economies trying to leverage value out of commercial entities. And this hybrid depends upon the commercial entity showing the proper respect for the creation in the sharing economy, and giving space to it, encouraging it so that the sharing economy can produce enormous value that is beneficial to the people inside, and also to the commercial business.

Lessig’s Big Idea

Lessig concludes the interview with his ‘big idea’. It is an inspiring, and elegant reminder that we are in the midst of an unprecedented social change. Just as the Gutenberg press facilitated the spread of the Protestant Reformation, fundamentally altering the course of Western civilization, so too is the internet beginning to spark tectonic changes, the breadth of which we don’t yet have the historical perspective to grasp. As Lessig explains:

I think the big idea, as every big idea is, is just one amazing step beyond where we are right now. And I think you think about the Obama campaign, something like Wikipedia, something like the stuff that’s going on on the Internet, the kind that I think of as read write culture. What it really is doing is reviving the sense that people can do something. Not the passive couch potato politics or couch potato culture, but that they can do something. We’re close to making it really effective. I think the next cycle, what you’re going to see in the way politics functions, will be unrecognizable, even from today. But when we’re there, it will be a revival of ideals, aspirations about democracy that will surprise us. The cynicism that we had in the 20th century will look very 20th century.

Larry Lessig’s interview on Charlie Rose was first broadcast on Friday 11/21/08 on PBS, and is available in full or in clips: Larry Lessig (full segment), Larry Lessig (clips). Matt Rutherford can be reached at matt@charlierose.com.

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When Apple started running the anti-Vista commercial (above) mocking Microsoft for spending $300 million on Vista’s own ad campaign instead of on fixing its problems, I called it hypocritical:

Apple’s advertising budget is also pretty massive. I mean, I see more Apple commercials on TV than ads for Barack Obama. Apple is on track to spend more than $3.5 billion on SG&A (selling, general, and administrative expenses) for its fiscal year that ended September 30. How much of that was spent on advertising? I don’t know, but 10 percent doesn’t seem unreasonable.

It turns out that I underestimated Apple’s advertising budget. Lindsay Blakely at Bnet (a former Business 2.0 reporter) found the actual numbers in a subsequent SEC filing. In its 2008 fiscal year that just ended last September, Apple spent a whopping $486 million on advertising. (In fiscal year 2007, it spent $467 million, and in fiscal year 2006 it spent $338 million).

Half a billion dollars on marketing. No wonder I think Apple products are so great.

Update: Microsoft spends more on advertising across all of its combined businesses than Apple does, but its Windows business is what competes most directly with Apple. Microsoft’s total advertising budget across all of its businesses, including Windows, Office, Xbox, and all the enterprise stuff, was the following (from the 10K): “Advertising expense was $1.2 billion, $1.3 billion, and $1.2 billion in fiscal years 2008, 2007, and 2006, respectively.”

Microsoft’s fiscal year ends in June, so these numbers do not reflect the $300 million Vista campaign. But that would have eaten up 25 percent of Microsoft’s entire ad budget for any of the previous three years.

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Tomorrow, YouTube will be showcasing its first live stream as it broadcasts its YouTube Live celebration, which will bring together a host of celebrities, musicians, and notable YouTubers for a massive event in San Francisco. The show will be streamed on YouTube beginning at 5 PM PST, and will include performances from Katy Perry, will.i.am, Joe Satriani, Tay Zonday (the Chocolate Rain guy), and a number of other musicians. I’m personally looking forward to a special appearance from the Mythbusters team.

YouTube hasn’t yet made any announcements regarding a livestreaming service for regular users (which would pit it directly against services like Ustream) but it won’t be surprising if we hear from them tomorrow about the company’s upcoming plans. We first heard about possible streaming functionality back in January, and later confirmed that it would be coming some time this year.

YouTube’s Chris Di Cesare says that the event may be the first of a series of annual live-streamed get-togethers celebrating the year in viral videos. We’ll have another post tomorrow with some of the highlights.

Update: There have also been rumors that the event will actually be powered by Ustream or another third party.

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A 17 year old named Eric Calisto is about to learn a valuable lesson in dealing with disappointment. He’s asking Google to use a logo that he created on their site on December 2, his birthday, and he’s urging people to call, email and fax Google with their support.

Not going to happen.

But he may make a few dollars on those ads.

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In partnership with the LeWeb conference, in Paris on December 9th and 10th, we are going to be giving away one ticket to the TechCrunch reader who leaves the best comment about why they want to go (and includes a contact e-mail address). We are also excited that LeWeb’s organizers are offering TechCrunch readers a 20% discount Thank You LeWeb

Without our sponsors TechCrunch would not be possible. Accordingly, we want to thank the following sponsors for their support.

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Every time I scroll through my list of ‘Friends’ on Facebook, I inevitably come to the same (somewhat depressing) conclusion: I have absolutely no idea who many of these people are. This is mostly my fault - my standards have always been pretty low when it comes to accepting inbound requests, and I never kept up with assigning them to appropriate Friends Lists. But there’s also the fact that Facebook doesn’t do much to automatically differentiate between friends and acquaintances (while it does filter your News Feed based on who it thinks you’re interested in, there isn’t a way to automatically generate a list of “good friends” versus everyone else).

Meezoog, an Israeli startup backed by veteran VC Yossi Vardi, is looking to help differentiate between acquaintances and close friends. Today the company has launched its own social network at Meezoog.com that attempts to determine how strong the connections are between users by analyzing their relationships on other sites across the web (it also asks you to manually input your relationship with each friend, but this isn’t required). The site presents a number of “paths” connecting you with each friend in a manner similar to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, that helps users determine the degree of “social trust” they have with each user. At this point it’s too early to tell how well the system works, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Besides its social network, Meezoog also plans to offer Facebook and OpenSocial applications that allow users to estimate the nature of their connections with their friends, even if they aren’t on Meezoog’s network. This cross-network analysis is probably the company’s best shot at success - while Meezoog may be able to establish its standalone social network in some regional areas, it will have a very hard time directly competing with established networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Other companies have tried to do similar social connection strength mapping, including Linking Universe.

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The elections were good to the HuffingtonPost, the political uber-blog. It’s audience in the U.S. rose fivefold in the last year to 5 million monthly uniques in October, according to comScore (see chart below). In what may turn out to be perfect market timing, the Times UK is reporting that the company is close to raising $15 million. In the past, it has raised a total of $12 million from investors including Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners, Bob Pittman, and Ken Lerer.

As with all political sites, it is likely that the HuffPo’s traffic will dip now that the election fever is over. The question for investors, though, is whether its current levels represent a peak or, whether it can take advantage of its new-found audience to establish a solid, new traffic floor from which to keep growing. If you look at the HuffPo’s chart from Google Trends (above), it looks like traffic is at the very least plateauing so far in November, as you would expect.

Where does it go from here?

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If you were intrigued by BitGravity’s Multiview product that allows viewers to choose from six different camera angles as they watch an event, check out episode 177 of Diggnation today at 3 pm PST.

The regular “director’s cut” will be shown at at Diggnation.com. The customized version will be available here on the Revision3 website.

We’ve got a few screenshots of today’s show (actually, we’ve seen the show, but we can’t post it here, you’ll have to watch at 3 PM).

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When most private companies reach 500 shareholders, they trigger an SEC rule which effectively treats them like a public company and requires them to some of the same reporting requirements. Google ran into this issue just before it went public. Now Facebook is quickly reaching that same threshold as it continues to hire and allows employees to sell shares to outside investors.

But in a letter dated October 13, 2008 (embedded below), Facebook’s lawyers argue that rule should not apply to Facebook because most of the shareholders are employees. The SEC granted the exemption.

So Facebook can keep issuing both restricted stock and options to new employees without fear of triggering the (costly) reporting requirements. As long as most of those shares stay inside Facebook, the company should be all right. But if enough employees take advantage of its program allowing them to sell shares to outsiders, and the number of outside investors grows beyond a handful or a few dozen, the SEC might want to revisit this decision.

Facebook Letter to SEC - Get more Legal Forms

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Yahoo has been rumored to be selling Paris-based comparative shopping site Kelkoo for some time now, and it appears that they have found a buyer. Yahoo acquired Kelkoo in 2004 for €475 million.

The company has been sold to a UK-based private equity firm called Jamplant Ltd (update: here is a profile of the fund) for something less than €100 million, according to sources with knowledge of the deal.

Ex-Kelkoo CEO Pierre Chappaz announced the news on his blog (in french), and a copy of the internal email announcing the acquisition is below.

The company has lost much of its momentum since the Yahoo acquisition in the face of significant competition.

The email is below.

Hello Everyone,

It has been since summer since I gave you update email. I have waited because there are so many things nearing launch that I thought it best to wait till they had happened to give the update. Firstly, I would like to end the speculation from the last few months about the future of Kelkoo. Both Toby and I have announced that we were exploring strategic options for the business. One of the options that Laila and I were exploring, in fact pushing for, was to find it a new home for Kelkoo. I am pleased to announce, today, that we have done just that!

The new owners of Kelkoo are a UK based private equity company called Jamplant Ltd funded by several angel investors, and in their own words: “Jamplant Limited is very excited about the price comparison space, and being able to help Kelkoo continue its rapid growth. Philip Smyth, Chairman of Jamplant, believes that with our backing, Kelkoo should be able to accelerate its growth much faster as a standalone company . We are looking forward to working with the highly experienced and established management team at Kelkoo” Laila and I are also very excited about this new phase in the history of Kelkoo, accelerating the growth strategies we have put in place over the last year, and exploring new opportunities for all of us.

So, what does it mean to our daily lives as Kelkoo employees? We will carry on with the great work already in process. This is due to the fact that many people have been working hard behind the scenes to ensure a very smooth transition out of Yahoo! Today at 3pm GMT (4pm CET), we will schedule a video all hands for Kelkoo staff. Please ask any questions that are on your minds to Sasha ( —— ) before the meeting, we will do our best to answer during the broadcast.

I also want to update you on the things we are delivering on our top 3 priorities. Out of the new organization of Kelkoo last October, the Country Managers and the Exec Team have spent time thinking about and stretching our expectations of Kelkoo. That resulted in the following mission statement (slightly altered with the help of our new marketing director, Bernard):

Ø Kelkoo will be integral to the online retail experience by completely satisfying the needs of our users, helping them to find and discover what and where to buy. In doing this, we will ultimately deliver more buyers to retailers than any other site.

To achieve this, we have all been pushing on delivering on the following priorities:

* Fix the Search
o (Convergence) which has seen the launch of Search 5 in France and Netherlands and is currently showing nearly - - - % uplift on revenue per visit
o (Comprehensiveness) we have finalized the agreement with - - -, are working with them to
* Give more noticeable value to users thru creating Kelkoo Club
o - - - launched in all countries in July
o - - - launched in some countries in September
o Cash-Back launched in beta in the UK yesterday, and will launch in FR next week
* Build the Brand
o We have kicked off our own version of project Goldmine , to study and understand our customers and their needs. We have appointed three agencies to help us with the project, which should complete by the end of February. An exciting part of this project will be to interview some employees on “what is Kelkoo”, and feed that back to the business priorities we will establish over the next 6 months.

So you can see, that we are delivering more and faster than ever in our history. Laila and I are proud of the work that has been done so far, and believe that the future of Kelkoo is really bright.

In closing, I feel that it is important to thank Yahoo! for all the investment and work that has gone into Kelkoo and our employees over the past 4 years. To list all of the people we will miss would take an age, but in particular, I would like to thank Toby and Jonathan Wolf for making the new chapter possible.

Regards,
Glen & Laila

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Some apps wander around the wilderness for a while until they can find the perfect home. For Evernote, that home is the iPhone. The note-taking, picture-capturing, voice-recording, handwriting-recognizing universal memory service has been under development for years and launched last February in private beta on the PC. But it wasn’t until May 29 that it debuted on the iTunes store as an iPhone app. That’s when it started to take off.

Now Evernote has 512,000 registered users, who have created 13.8 million notes. In addition to the iPhone app, Evernote offers its service thorugh a PC client, a Mac client, a Website, and other mobile devices. The iPhone app is the most popular, being used 57% of the time. It is followed by the Web (51%), the PC client (32%), the Mac (28%), and other mobile clients bring up the rear (8%). These numbers add up to more than 100 because nearly half of all users access the service via more than one app.

The PC and Mac clients are the most fully-featured, yet it is the iPhone app that gave Evernote its critical mass. Perhaps that’s because the iPhone app lets you take pictures using the camera, append a note and save it to your Evernote page, where it is archived and searchable. It is more difficult to capture memories with a laptop.

Here is Evernote’s Elevator Pitch:

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