California Attorney General Kamala Harris recently announced an agreement with three of the largest online dating sites: eHarmony, Match.com and Spark Networks (parent company of JDate and ChristianMingle, among others). In much the same way Facebook reached an agreement regarding child safety with AG’s nationwide in 2008, it appears the dating sites agreed to some voluntary…
What sort of business operators can we predict will be disproportionately drawn to using a funding mechanism that is designed from the ground up to leverage a large number of middle-class individual investors with minimal bargaining power under circumstances involving minimal disclosure, toothless corporate governance and little-to-no liability to shareholders?
This week, industry leaders, pundits, journalists and assorted hangers-on are gathering in San Francisco for the annual Web 2.0 Summit, one of the online industry’s most influential events. John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly moderate conversations with a long list of Web luminaries, including Eric Schmidt, Carol Bartz, Marc Benioff, Reed Hastings, Peter Chernin, Tony Hsieh, Evan Williams, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Pincus, Ron Conway, John Doerr, and Fred Wilson.
As a completely made-up statistic, assume that 0.01% of users are sociopaths or predators who cause serious damage to the community and its other members. With 10,000 users, that’s one guy. With a million, it’s a hundred people. With 100 million registered users — the scale at MySpace when I left — it’s ten thousand. That kind of math illustrates why every major consumer Internet company has an abuse team that serves as the first line of defense against all kinds of ugliness.
My particular interest in Angelgate relates to the role of anonymity in social media, its facilitation of information flow in a way never seen before, and the fragility — under some circumstances — of that anonymity. Allowing users to log in via Facebook Connect, Twitter OAuth or Google Apps makes it easier than ever to unmask anonymous posters when a site owner is required to comply with a subpoena or search warrant.
As part of Social Media Week, I visited the Autodesk Gallery for a panel discussion entitled “The Next Challenge For The Crowd: Quickly Build Real, Hard, Complex Shit That Matters (Like Cars).” With a title like that, I was not about to miss it. The Rally Fighter parked out front (around the corner from a Tesla roadster, natch) foreshadowed the fascinating discussion inside. Many of the ideas which had been swirling around in my head for the past week coalesced in this 90-minute conversation with Jay Rogers, CEO and co-founder of Local Motors; Marten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL; and Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired, moderated by Matt Johnston.
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