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I’m going to take some criticism for this, but I think it’s something that needs to be said: We need a Fake Follow on Twitter and a related Fake Subscribe on FriendFeed.

FriendFeed and Twitter are different than normal social networks because they don’t require two people to mutually agree to become friends. Instead, you simply choose to follow someone and see the content they produce. That person is notified that you are following them, and can choose to reciprocate or not.

So far, so good. The idea is that you shouldn’t be pressured into following/subscribing to another person just so that they can read your content. The entire point is to reduce the stress to reciprocate friendship unless you actually want to.

And for the most part it works. But there are a lot of people who for some reason are greatly offended when you don’t reciprocate a follow/subscribe on Twitter or FriendFeed. When this happens (and it happens a lot), you have a choice - deal with the fallout (”that guy is such a jerk”) or just friend the person and avoid the pain.

Here’s the problem, though. When you follow too many people the service just becomes unusable. On Twitter I follow just 466 people that I find interesting, but the content stream is far too much to consume. On Friendfeed the problem is even worse because it aggregates so much other content (Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, blogs, etc.).

On Twitter I generally only monitor messages specifically directed at me (@techcrunch must be in the message), and I sort of peruse Friendfeed a few times a day to find interesting stuff. But what I really want to do is have a core group of friends that I watch.

That means Twitter and FriendFeed need to let me group friends somehow and let me watch just some of them if I like. Or a simpler approach: give me a Fake Follow.

The Fake Follow looks like a normal follow to the other person, but to me it’s like I didn’t follow them at all. This solves the ego stroking issue (and related problems) that so many people have, and it keeps the content stream clean and usable.

Eventually we’ll evolve online culture to the point where people adapt to these new systems (just like today people aren’t usually offended when an instant message isn’t returned, well, instantly). But until then we need to find a way to keep things under control, and anger at a minimum. And since Twitter and FriendFeed will become far more usable with it, it’s in their best interests to adopt it.

I asked Evan Williams at Twitter about this a few weeks ago and he said they may adopt different friend types to deal with the problem. FriendFeed cofounder Paul Bucheit says they are releasing new features in the coming weeks that will “make it easier to separate the people who you really want to follow from the rest.” They may not call it a Fake Follow, but we’ll all nod and wink when the features roll out. Thanks in advance, Paul.

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Time Warner is moving forward with its plans to sell off AOL in pieces, and is finally ready to formally separate the AOL portal and advertising business from its legacy dial-up access business. But how much can it hope to get for these parts? When Google invested $1 billion in AOL a few years ago for a 5 percent stake, that valued AOL at $20 billion (which some people thought was an inflated figure even back then). Today, even after breaking it up, Time Warner will be lucky to get more than $7 billion for the whole lot.

Although it wants $10 billion for just the advertising and content business, there are only two serious potential buyers: Yahoo and Microsoft. And Time Warner is not making any friends at Yahoo by interfering with the selection of one of its new board members. If Microsoft turns out to be the only bidder, it would have no reason to offer much more than the $4 billion that the market is valuing the business at today. And, of course, all bets are off if Microsoft ends up buying Yahoo instead. (The dial-up business also only has one serious buyer: Earthlink).

According the WSJ (subscription required):

The Yahoo discussions have valued AOL at around $10 billion, excluding the dial-up business. In contrast, Time Warner’s current stock price — around $14 — suggests a value of no more than $3 billion to $4 billion for the ad-sales and content businesses, some analysts say.

Analysts value the [dial-up] business at only $2 billion to $3 billion, but Time Warner is expected to seek more than that in any sale discussion, according to people familiar with the situation. Despite having been in decline for several years, the business is still profitable and generates a predictable stream of cash. It serves 8.7 million subscribers, while EarthLink, the second-biggest dial-up service, serves 3.3 million, including broadband and Web-hosting subscribers

If Time Warner can convince Yahoo it still needs AOL, it might get closer to that $10 billion valuation for the online ad and content business. (Except that transaction would likely be structured so that Time Warner gives Yahoo cash in return for a large minority stake in the new combined AOL-Yahoo). According to comScore, AOL’s Platform-A is the largest online advertising network in the U.S. in terms of its reach, with 170 million individuals seeing its ads in June. Although Yahoo is probably bigger if you add together the reach of its advertising network with that of its own sites, depending on how much overlap there is. And many of those Platform-A ads, especially those from Advertising.com, are remnant ads sold at less than $1 CPMs (so volume is key).

(Disclosure: I own Time Warner shares).

How Much Is All Of AOL Worth?
( polls)

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AOL is getting into the lifestreaming business. Like Friendfeed or Facebook’s News feeds, it recently launched AIM BuddyUpdates, which lets AIM users keep up with what their instant-messaging buddies are doing on social services such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Digg. To beef up its lifestreaming capabilities, we have been able to confirm that it has also bought Socialthing!, a FriendFeed competitor that is still in private beta.

We don’t know the price, but it was likely a small purchase. Socialthing! came out of Colorado-based incubator TechStars. Once you sign up to track friends activities on Socialthing!, it keeps automatically adding new friends for the services you choose to monitor. (See our review).

Despite all the turmoil and uncertainty about its future, AOL is trying to keep up with the times. It is embracing feeds, lifestreaming and even playing nice with other IM services such as Meebo and eBuddy. Maybe it is finally realizing that there is a bigger world out there than AOL.

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NBC has launched its online video hub for the 2008 Olympics, which features free on-demand video for over 20 sports. In order to maximize quality, the videos are available as downloads (you can start watching before the download finishes) and will be in “up to HD” quality. Unfortunately, the video downloads will only be available on Windows machines running Windows Media Center - once again Mac users are left in the cold, likely because of DRM issues (and the fact that Lenovo and Microsoft are sponsors).

While the Olympic ceremonies don’t kick off until August 8, NBC has already posted footage of Olympic trials. Once the games begin, NBC expects to have the footage available around 12 hours after each competition (which shouldn’t be too annoying given the time difference).

Microsoft is participating in the partnership, so access to the videos will be integrated into Media Center’s main panel. Users can also visit this TVTonic page, and the content will be available directly from NBCOlympics.com beginning next week. You can read more about the service at the TVTonic blog post here.

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One month after launching its new recommendation system, Digg is already reporting positive results. Digg recommends stories based on other members with similar voting patterns and interests. Chief scientist Anton Kast writes on the Digg Blog:

- Digging activity is up significantly: the total number of Diggs increased 40% after launch.

- The Recommendation Engine is running strong: at any given point in time, the system is generating over 54 Million Recommendations, with the average Digger having nearly 200 Recommendations from an average of 34 “Diggers like you”.

- Friend activity/friends added is up 24%.

- Commenting is up 11% since launch.

Digg’s recommendation engine takes a Last.fm approach to finding people’s whose tastes overlap with yours and then suggesting stories they’ve Dugg up but that you’ve missed. It is collaborative filtering for news.

As Digg becomes more mainstream, it needs technologies such as this to bring it back to its glory days when everybody was interested in the same niche categories. Social recommendations work best when they are extracted from niche communities who are obsessive about one or two topics. Digg started out as a haven for hardcore techies, but has branched out.

The recommendation system is designed to, in effect, help Diggers carve out their own niche communities again. If you happen to like tech industry news, you will see stories from other like-minded Diggers. If you prefer politics or sports, you’ll get those stories. And if you like a combination, the system will grab recommendations from each appropriate bucket.

At least, that is how it is supposed to work in theory. The recommendations seem decent. But I personally haven’t noticed anything that really strikes home. Over time, it should get better.

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Caterina Fake, who co-founded Flickr along with her husband Stewart Butterfield in 2004, has announced her plans to join a fledgling new startup called Hunch. Flickr is one of the web’s most popular photo-sharing sites, and was acquired by Yahoo in 2005 for $35 million. Since then, Flickr has been one of Yahoo’s most successful properties, but Fake left the company in June as part of the executive exodus from the struggling search giant.

In her blog post on the matter, Fake says that she will be joining Hunch as Chief Product Officer. Details about the New York-based startup are very slim at this point, and Fake’s description doesn’t shed much light on the matter:

“What is Hunch? Well, as you might assume, it is a consumer internet application, it will have a lot of user participation, and it is more than a little fun. Beyond that, we’re still making it up.”

Beyond that nebulous description, Fake offers few details beyond stating that Butterfield won’t be involved with the project.

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MySpace COO Amit Kapur apparently meant it when he told me earlier today that MySpace is continuing to hire despite letting 5% or so of staff go in the coming days. He introduced five new senior executives this evening via an email out to all staff, the text of which was forwarded to me and is copied below.

The new execs are Manu Thapar, SVP of Engineering (formerly Yahoo VP Engineering), Angela Courtin, SVP of Marketing, Tish Whitcraft, SVP of Customer Care, Jason Oberfest, VP of Business Development and Abe Thomas, VP of Online Marketing

All of the new execs seems to be eating the MySpace dog food by at least having a presence on MySpace. Except former Yahoo’er Thapar, that is. He’s MySpace-free for now. I wonder how long that will last.

Email is after the break:

Hey everybody,

MySpace has been on a hyper-growth track since our launch in January 2004. We’ve evolved into a stable, profitable business with amazing talent driving one of the most trafficked websites in history. Four years ago we started at a small office in Santa Monica with a few employees, and now we operate offices in 19 countries across the globe and support 29 localized communities across the web.

Today we’re pleased to announce several new senior team members joining MySpace:

· Manu Thapar, SVP of Engineering
· Angela Courtin, SVP of Marketing
· Tish Whitcraft, SVP of Customer Care
· Jason Oberfest, VP of Business Development
· Abe Thomas, VP of Online Marketing

Looking back, this has been an incredible year of innovation and expansion—in the last few months, we have successfully developed and launched a number of major company initiatives strengthening our leadership position in the future of the social web. All of you have played a big role in keeping MySpace in the driver’s seat of innovation.

Here are some of the initiatives we’ve rolled this year:

· MySpace Developer Platform
· Site Redesign
· Data Availability
· Formation of the MySpace Music Joint Venture
· MySpace Support for OpenID
· OpenSocial launch with Google, Yahoo and others
· Implementation of Google Gears for Mail Messaging and Sort

Looking ahead, there’s a lot more to come—this is going to be a big year!

Thanks!
Amit

Meet Our New Team Members:

Manu Thapar, SVP of Engineering

Manu Thapar serves as the SVP of Engineering for MySpace, the world’s premier social network. In this role Manu is responsible for overseeing the company’s infrastructure, security and high priority projects, as well creating an offshore development team for MySpace.

Prior to joining MySpace, Manu served as Vice President of Engineering for Yahoo!, Inc. where he was Responsible for software infrastructure engineering, operations, test, product and program management teams of more than 250 engineers. Manu also served as Sr. Director of Engineering for Cisco Systems where he oversaw all aspects of delivering large scale network products used by high end customers for the development of sophisticated enterprise web sites.

Manu earned his PhD from Stanford University’s esteemed school of engineering in 1992.

###

Angela Courtin, SVP Marketing (www.myspace.com/acourtin )

Angela Courtin serves as SVP of Marketing for MySpace, the world’s premiere social network. In this newly created role, Angela is responsible for leading the marketing, branding, promotions, events, content and entertainment teams for MySpace with the objective of increasing growth and public awareness and driving revenue through marketing programs for the company.

Prior to Joining MySpace Angela served as Vice President, Integrated Marketing, for MTV Networks, responsible for overseeing the West Coast department. In this role she served as the liaison with production and series development as well as the West Coast client base.

An accomplished, creative, and vision-oriented marketing executive, Angela has developed key relationships with clients and production to create rich product integrations, branded entertainment and game-changing marketing executions. Her background in development and production have been key in understanding the creative dynamic in achieving authentic integration experiences for the audience, the client and the narrative.

Angela also served as Associate Producer on HBO’s Big Love and also worked for Knollwood Productions in Development. Her MTV trajectory would intersect in 2004 when she served as Vice President of Rock the Vote, where she partnered with MTV’s Choose or Lose campaign and corporate America to bring civic participation and voter empowerment to young people across the country. Her work in politics spans the beltway, from the Human Rights Campaign to the Democratic National Committee.

Her work was recognized in 2004 in Out Magazine’s OUT 100, the annual list of the year’s most interesting, influential, and newsworthy LGBT people. Angela earned a B.S in Civil Engineering and an MBA from Oklahoma State University.

###

Tish Whitcraft, SVP of Customer Care (www.myspace.com/tishwhitcraft)

Tish Whitcraft recently joined MySpace as SVP of Customer Care responsible for delivering a world-class user experience to the 250 million + MySpace users. In her new role, she will be responsible for building scalable global customer support, user experience and satisfaction and driving the user feedback loop back to the business. In addition, Tish will focus on building and implementing a new online self-help strategy which will allow MySpace users to get answers and help by delivering more accurate and relevant information right when users need it and want it.

Most recently, Tish served as Vice President of Global Customer Experience and Operations at ooma, a consumer voip start-up, where she had overall P&L responsibilities including day-to-day business operations, business development, marketing and sales and product development. The primary focus was to ensure the highest quality customer experience from product to post-sales. Prior to joining ooma, Tish served as the leader and operational executive responsible for Global Customer Operations and Customer Experience at online giant Yahoo! Inc., leading customer care and experience for Yahoo!’s 850 million users in 48 markets across 68 different product categories.

With extensive experience in the communications and outsourcing sectors, prior to ooma and Yahoo!, Tish has held executive management positions with inServ e-Customer Solutions, Aegis Communications, Lexi International, and Communique Telecommunications. At Aegis, Tish served as COO and Senior Vice President of Operations, overseeing the P&L for this $250M outsourcing firm, servicing communication, technology, software and financial service industries with clients such as ATT, Macromedia, SBC, Nextel, Directv and the Dish Network, IBM, Toshiba and American Express.

###

Jason Oberfest, VP of Business Development (www.myspace.com/joberfest)

Jason Oberfest serves as Vice President of Business Development for MySpace, the world’s premier social network. In this role, Jason is responsible for structuring and negotiating deals to drive revenue and support the launch of innovative new products. Alongside the company’s business development team, Jason oversees the commercial aspects of the MySpace Developer Platform and MySpace’s Data Availability APIs.

Prior to MySpace Jason served as Managing Director of Business Development and Product Management for Los Angeles Times Interactive. In this role Jason launched a redesign of latimes.com and structured deals with leading startups including Netvibes, Aggregate Knowledge, Eventful and Mixx.com.

From 1999-2005 Jason served as Vice President of Strategic Planning at Blast Radius, an interactive agency. In this role Jason founded the strategic planning division of the company and led the design and development of media and commerce websites for Sony, Nintendo, Viacom, Warner Music Group, A&E Television Networks and others. Jason worked with AOL from 2002-2005 developing AOL Shopping, AOL Search, AOL.com, and other products. Blast Radius was acquired by the WPP Group in 2007.

###

Abe Thomas, VP of Online Marketing (www.myspace.com/abethomas08)

Abe Thomas serves as Vice President of Online Marketing for MySpace, the world’s premier social network. In this role Abe is responsible for developing the overall strategy for acquiring new customers through online advertising, affiliates and search marketing. Working closely with the company’s creative group, database engineers and product marketing teams Abe spearheads companywide initiatives geared towards driving loyalty from existing customers through email, direct mail and on the website, using effective segmentation and promotional strategies and tactics.

In 2006, Abe spent a year in Mumbai, India leading eBay India’s Internet Marketing team. With Google still in its infancy in India, successful optimization of eBay’s Search program resulted in a high representation of eBay pages in Google’s Paid Search program and Google’s Natural Search results.

In Jan 2007, Abe moved to PayPal Merchant Services where he was focused on marketing PayPal to our largest merchants.

Prior to joining eBay, Abe held multiple business development, product marketing and consulting positions at AltaVista, Palm, IBM Consulting and Motorola.

Abe received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, a MSEE from USC and then an MBA from the University of Chicago. He lives in San Jose with his wife and two girls aged 3 and 6. He loves playing Basketball, Cricket, cooking and spending time with his kids.

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Christian Cantrell, an Adobe employee and editor of WatchReport just sent me a link to his latest project. It’s called Apprise Reader and it’s basically a feed reader with two very compelling features: direct forwarding of stories to Twitter or AIM.

On the surface, Apprise Reader hits all the right buttons: Adobe Air, Twitter, AIM, RSS. It is, at its core, a feed reader with a dead simple interface. It accepts standard OPML files to import feeds and runs natively on Windows and OS X - Linux support is coming soon.

Read more…

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After two weeks of all the iPhone apps I care to download, I can say this: most of them are useless. I use a few of them daily (Facebook, MySpace, Loopt, Phonesaber) and a few others occasionally (BoxOffice, Pandora, Twitterific). Most, though, sit unused after testing and are far from being “must-have applications.”

DataCase, though, looks to be different. It will turn your iPhone into a wireless drive for file storage, and includes a viewer for most popular file formats (Office, PDF, etc.). The application has been highly anticipated but is yet to launch - the creator says by email that they want it to be perfect before releasing it.

For now we have to settle for the demo video that they just put up on YouTube and is embedded below. DataCase will cost $7 when it does launch, and I expect a lot of people will buy it immediately. This is exactly the kind of utility application that I need. The ability to email out any file on the phone would be a nice feature add, too.

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In a blog post today Google says they’ve identified 1 trillion unique URLs on the web. It’s actually more, they say, but some web pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other.

What they note way down in the fourth paragraph, however, is that they don’t actually index all of those pages, so you can’t find them on Google. Estimates on the true size of the Google index are a mere 40 billion pages or so.

Why don’t they index all the pages they’ve found? Some of them are spam. But it’s also very expensive to index sites. And the fact that Google indexes many news sites, blogs and other rapidly changing web sites every 15 minutes makes all that indexing even more expensive. So they make value judgment on what to actually index and what not to. And most of the web is left out.

Google also says “But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine.”

That may be true today, but it probably won’t be true next week (check back here then). Google knows that as well as we do, and that’s why they posted this today.

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