Facebook Doesn’t Need Your Money
According to Om Malik, Facebook needs $300 to $500 million in order to make its site safe for children to use:
The New York attorney general has started investigating the safety measures Facebook has put in place, and based on his preliminary investigations, he is not happy. His staff has found sexual predators and a wide variety of pornographic material, including images and videos, prompting him to issue a subpoena.
Unfortunately, I think the premise is ridiculous. Facebook provides a large number of privacy controls that would allow children to:
- Prevent people finding them in searches
- Prevent strangers from viewing their profile
- Prevent their profile from showing up in Google and other engines
I see Facebook as a piece of infrastructure, like a telephone address book and cellphone, that you find and communicate with people. Generally that lets friends talk to each other, or lonely people find other lonely people nearby; sometimes it lets perverted old men call up kids. The problem isn’t technological; it’s social, and perhaps medical.
Facebook and MySpace are just the tubes; what goes through them isn’t, and shouldn’t be, their concern.
Interesting Google Finance Streaming Quotes Bug
I was looking at AAPL today and saw this:
Google doesn’t update the color when it receives new streaming quotes, so if AAPL is positive and goes negative, the price stays green. This is easy enough to fix.
Amazon’s iTunes-Compatible DRM-Free Music Store
The new Amazon Mp3 store gives you 256 Kb/s MP3 files without any DRM, for generally $8.99 an album. They are already ripping iTunes up on quality, price, and digital rights management. Expect them to continue to improve their selection (Amazon is famous for long tail) and interface, at which point no one will buy Steve Jobs’ crippled music.
Even better, Amazon’s system integrates cleanly with iTunes. You can one-click buy an album from Amazon, and their downloader will pick up the .amz file, grab your tracks, and automatically add them to your iTunes library. I’m also a big fan of the cover-flow like Album pickers they float on some of the mp3 pages:
Paul has it right when he says “Amazon MP3 is kicking ass and taking names.” You can also check out the official blog post or Techcrunch, who notes they are carrying 2,000,000 songs.
