Facebook wants users to share it all

At Facebook, they call it "Zuck's law" after founder Mark Zuckerberg: Every year people share twice as much online.

Now Facebook is pushing its 800 million users to share far more about themselves than ever before by making these acts of show and tell automatic.

The plan: When users sign up for one of these new social apps –- say Spotify or Hulu –- they will be asked to give permission to update their friends in real time every time they listen to Kanye West or watch the latest episode of "Breaking Bad." That way their friends can click on that same song or TV show and alert their friends and so on and so on.

Photos: The many faces of Facebook

While onstage Thursday at the company's annual developers conference in San Francisco, Zuckerberg underscored how much better he thinks the Facebook experience will be for everyone when users stop getting those pesky pop-up boxes to give consent for these updates and just share everything by default.

That already has some users complaining of too much information. (Slate's Farhad Manjoo also makes a compelling argument for people not sharing absolutely everything, not because of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad privacy concerns but because he thinks it will amount to people sharing a whole lot of drivel).

Even though Facebook says users will have the ability to set privacy controls when they sign up for these social apps, the company could face another privacy backlash from people worried that they are baring far too much on Facebook.

But that's really the point. Zuckerberg spoke again and again Thursday about "the open graph," which is basically all the connections people have to each other and –- increasingly -- to everything: the books and articles they read, the music they listen to and the movies and shows they watch.

As Altimeter Group analyst Brian Solis put it succinctly: As Facebook moves beyond the verb "like" to "read," "listen," "watch," it will not only own those verbs, it will own the actions themselves.

Every time I "run" through Golden Gate Park or "cook" rainbow chard, I will automatically share those acts with all of my Facebook friends. If Facebook has its way, I will not do much of anything anymore without telling my friends (and marketers) all about it.

Zuckerberg calls it "frictionless sharing." But analysts say Facebook seems to be removing as much "friction" for Facebook as it does for Facebook's users.

The more Facebook knows and understands about people's lives -- their relationships, their interests, their whereabouts –- the better it can profit from that information by targeting advertising to eager marketers, just the kind of turboboost it needs with its highly anticipated initial public offering coming next year.

For the cynical, the latest features that Facebook rolled out on Thursday are just another big step in the company's unstoppable march toward World Wide Web domination (or the creation of a parallel Internet). 

What do you think about sharing on Facebook? Let us know in the comments.

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Photo: Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg at the company's F8 developers conference in San Francisco. Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg 

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SoundCloud wants to be the YouTube of audio

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from the L.A. TimesSoundCloud wants to be the YouTube of audioSeptember 23, 2011 |  3:48pm

SoundCloud is one of the handful of popular destinations for musicians on the Web looking to upload their songs, so listeners can download or stream their work.

But while musicians have largely powered SoundCloud's growth to a user base of more than 7 million since it's start in 2008, the site is now looking to reach not just bands and fans, but also everyone else who currently captures a moment in a photo or a video, versus audio, with their smartphone.

"We had a realization last year where we started seeing people using SoundCloud for other things than just music," said Alex Ljung, SoundCloud's co-founder and chief executive. "And it became obvious for us, that when we look at the Web we think of photos, we think of text, we think of videos, so why don't we think about sound in a broader sense? So, music is obviously a key part for us, but there's a lot of other things happening on the platform as well."

The Berlin-based start-up recently opened a San Francisco office to aid its efforts to reach more and more users, musician and non-musician alike. And while SoundCloud has more than a few competitors out there -- such as BandCamp and SoundClick -- as a preferred platform for musicians to host their tunes, the company might be aided in its goal by the fact that its sound-streaming rivals are focused on music.

The company also has its own free audio recording apps available for Apple's iPhone, Google's Android mobile OS, as well as more than 200 other apps from third parties that can record and sync with a user's SoundCloud account by way of developer tools it has made available.

"Ultimately we want people to be able to connect through sounds, and we think that, you know, we are providing a certain kind of experience around that, but we want that experience to be like the Web is," Ljung said. "We want it to be distributed. So it doesn't matter if you're on your phone, or your desktop, or you know, on a different website -- we want people to be able to have a SoundCloud experience there. So that's why we built it as a platform and allow other apps to basically integrate SoundCloud into what they're doing. So you don't have to soundcloud.com to get the experience. You should be able to get that wherever you are."

By opening up its own platform, as well as being integrated with the likes of other social sharing networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, SoundCloud aims to be what YouTube has been for video, what Twitter has become for quick comments written out in 140 characters or less and what Facebook has grown into for photos.

"I think for us it's important, just this idea of you know sound can be a lot of different things," Ljung said. "It can be the Foo Fighters putting something up. It can be 50 Cent using it. But it can also be Russell Brand reading stuff from his new book, it could be ABC News putting up memories from -- or people's memories from 9/11."

What do you think? Do you want to record and share audio -- or are photos, video and text good enough? Is there anything you'd like to hear on the Web, on SoundCloud or anywhere else?

To listen to my interview with Ljung, recorded in downtown Los Angeles earlier this week, check out the recording I posted to SoundCloud below.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Image: A screenshot of ABC News Radio on SoundCloud.

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Carol Bartz calls Yahoo board 'doofuses,' investor wants new board [Updated]

Yahoo's ex-CEO Carol Bartz and its third-largest outside shareholder, the investment firm Third Point, lashed out at the company's board of directors Thursday in entirely different ways.

Bartz, in an interview, called the board "doofuses," while Third Point filed a letter with the SEC calling on board members to resign. Officials at Yahoo were unavailable to comment Thursday.

In her interview with Fortune Magazine, Bartz confirmed that she was fired by phone and said that when Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock called her Tuesday to let her go, he read from a prepared statement drummed up by lawyers.

"I said, 'Roy, I think that's a script,'" Bartz told Fortune. "'Why don't you have the balls to tell me yourself?'"

According to Bartz, Bostock continued reading the statement, and when he was done, Bartz told the chairman, "I thought you were classier."

Bartz told Fortune that her firing had less to do with her performance as chief executive and more to do with the board not wanting to look like "the worst board in the country" after fumbling a bid by Microsoft to take over Yahoo in 2008, which led to the ouster of Bartz's predecessor, company co-founder Jerry Yang.

"They want revenue growth ... even though they were told that we would not have revenue growth until 2012," Bartz told Fortune about the board. "Now they're trying to show that they're not the doofuses that they are."

Third Point, based in New York, said in its letter addressed to Yahoo's leadership that it manages a 5.1% stake in the company and called on Chairman Roy Bostok, and other directors, to step down and allow new board members to step in.

Although Bartz and Third Point seem to agree that the board is a problem for Yahoo, the investment firm didn't express any approval of Bartz's tenure as CEO.

"It is now widely accepted that the board made a serious misjudgment in approving the hiring of Carol Bartz as Yahoo's chief executive officer, given her inexperience in the consumer-oriented internet space," said the letter, written by Third Point's CEO Daniel Loeb. "Although we are pleased that the board has terminated Ms. Bartz's employment, we fail to understand why this decision was so long in coming given her abysmal performance over the last two and a half years."

In the letter, Loeb also criticizes Yahoo's board for ignoring problems in the company under Bartz's leadership:

While the decision to hire her alone is grounds for questioning the Board's competence, its willingness to turn a blind eye to these serious problems and inexplicably remain supportive of Ms. Bartz notwithstanding the negative impact she was having on the company is even more troubling. As recently as June 23, 2011, at the company's annual meeting, Chairman Bostock reportedly stated that the board remained "very supportive of Carol and this management team" and that they were "confident that Yahoo [was] headed in the right direction." These comments demonstrate that this board lacks the courage to urgently make the difficult decisions required by the situation today.

Bartz, although never overwhelmingly popular as Yahoo's CEO, did have success in her previous job, which she held for 14 years, as chief executive of the design software firm Autodesk. Under Bartz's leadership, Autodesk grew in revenue from $300 million to more than $1.5 billion, which Yahoo cited in 2009 as a reason to hire her.

Like Bartz, Loeb mentions the Microsoft deal that never was as another point of criticism against Yahoo's board:

"It is also now widely recognized that the board made a gross error in turning down the $31 per share Microsoft bid in 2008, which would have generated significant returns for Yahoo's shareholders," Loeb's letter said. "This mistake is all the more frustrating given Yahoo's current depressed stock price of $13.61 per share -- far below the company's intrinsic value."

Yahoo has appointed its chief financial officer, Timothy Morse, as interm CEO until it can find a permanent replacement for Bartz. Loeb said in the letter that he didn't like that either:

Mr. Morse's elevation to interim CEO makes him Yahoo's fourth CEO in four years and further demonstrates the poor corporate governance Yahoo investors have been saddled with for too long.... Against this background, it is evident that merely replacing the company's CEO -- yet again –- will not be enough to alter the direction of the company. Instead, a reconstituted board with new directors who will bring fresh eyes, relevant industry expertise and increased investor alignment to the table is immediately necessary.

[Updated 5:04 p.m.: A Yahoo spokeswoman emailed along this response from the company's board of directors in response to the criticism levied by both Bartz and Third Point's Loeb:

The Yahoo! Board recognizes the critical challenges facing the company and appreciates constructive input from all shareholders. Accordingly, the Yahoo! Board welcomes a dialog about the concerns that have been raised by the Third Point filing. The Board is committed to acting in the best interests of shareholders.]

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

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Photo: Yahoo's then-CEO Carol Bartz speaks at the American Assn. of Advertising Agencies' annual Media and Leadership Conference in San Francisco on March 1, 2010. Credit: Robert Galbraith / Reuters

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