While the spotlight is only now really focusing sharply on this badly-written law, SOPA first attracted criticism months ago. Back in November, a letter [PDF] was sent to four high-seated U.S. politicians in the Senate and House of Representatives. It was signed by nine Internet behemoths: AOL, Google, Facebook, Ebay, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Zynga. In said letter, the companies said they “were concerned that [measures proposed by SOPA] pose a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job creation.” They wanted SOPA to be pulled down. They saw it as ham-fisted and harmful, and they were prepared to speak out about it.

Many of us found the united stance of these companies heartening. The Internet’s meanest gunslingers had rode into town to help the little guys. So why, as we enter SOPA Blackout Day, have so many of those outspoken tech firms delivered such limp-wristed protests?

Check the sites of those who signed that November 2011 letter, and anti-SOPA sentiment is all but invisible. AOL, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Zynga, Ebay: at the time of writing, none of these have a single syllable about SOPA anywhere on their front pages. Twitter also skirts the issue, with CEO Dick Costolo even calling the shutting down of sites “foolish.” Mozilla does mention SOPA in a blog post linked on its front page, though it’s well below the fold. Next to all of these, Google’s response – an anti-SOPA Google Doodle and a link to a petition addressed to Congress – looks positively revolutionary.

Tellingly, Wikipedia (which didn’t sign the aforementioned letter, and hey – doesn’t answer to shareholders) is the only online giant to stage an effective protest, blacking itself out for 24 hours. It’s a powerful move from a site that remains the fifth most popular in the world, and it will have an effect. It is joined by Reddit, and then a further clump of middle-sized sites and companies, such as BoingBoing and the Cheezburger network. The gesture is appreciated by opponents of SOPA, but there’s a nagging feeling that the big boys, the heroes who signed that November letter, have let the side down.

There’s another reason the relative inaction of bigger sites is disappointing. Sites such as Reddit and BoingBoing are far more likely to be visited by educated readers, people who already know about the sinister SOPA. Temporarily closing a site like Reddit or BoingBoing is a ballsy move, and will justifiably win admirers, but it feels like these few bold sites are preaching to the choir.

I am convinced more courageous action from the Internet’s big players could have shut SOPA down for good. Imagine if Facebook had closed its doors: 800 million users shut out in an instant. Imagine if sites like Yahoo!, AOL, and Twitter had yanked the shutters up. More intriguingly, imagine the complete storm if Google had shut up shop for just a few hours. The coverage would be immense, surely a billion more people would be educated, and the signatures would weigh in the tens of millions. SOPA (and its ugly sister PIPA) would be dead in the water. All in return for a few hours of downtime.

As it is, the pusillanimous reaction of these big sites means SOPA will now be able to retreat to the shadows and bide its time. It will be tweaked, refined, and will likely return in the future, insufficiently diluted. SOPA Blackout Day was an opportunity for the web to truly stand as one and deliver the killing blow to an unreasonable, poorly conceived law. SOPA will be back. Next time, let’s hope a few more giants deliver actions as well as words.

[Op-Ed] Why the Internet Giants Have Let SOPA Protestors Down is a post from: The Inquisitr

As a person who basically routes their entire life through the internet- professional, personal, lifestyle- one of the things that gets me agitated about the whole SOPA brouhaha is how little the average web user is concerned with the ostensible end of the internet as we know it.

The few outside communities like Reddit who are aware of even the existence of SOPA don’t really seem to comprehend how seriously it could impact even basic web use, and many worryingly seem to believe that the delayed passage does not mean- in the words of a Daily Kos writer- that the bill is “favored to pass.” (Which, you guys, it still is.)

The continued failure of the bulk of web users to realize the threat SOPA poses means that the few who understand the impact need to do everything in their power to wake the web up to its imminent potential destruction. And it seems that some of the biggest entities are considering a “nuclear option” to get users active, to spur political action and maybe- just maybe- convince lawmakers to ignore special interests and ditch SOPA.

AOL, eBay, Facebook, foursquare, Google, IAC, Linkedin, Mozilla, OpenDNS, PayPal, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo! and the Zynga Game Network are all members of an organization called the NetCoalition, and there is said to be chatter about shutting off the sites for a time to drive home the message that a future with SOPA sucks for everyone. Daily Kos quotes:

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you’ll know they’re finally serious…

“There have been some serious discussions about that,” says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. “It has never happened before.”

Scarily, not even the action proposed is guaranteed to stop SOPA or the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), but it would be a hell of a newfangled protest and could be a political game-changer.

Are you concerned about SOPA?

SOPA-Opposing Web Giants Consider ‘Nuclear Option’ to Thwart Law is a post from: The Inquisitr

Bain Capital was an earlier investor in social business network LinkedIn and now the private equity firm is preparing to sell off their 3.7 million shares, an amount equal to $275 million at today’s stock price.

That investment is equal to approximately 4.3% of LinkedIn’s outstanding stock. Bain began investing in LinkedIn during a 2008 funding round that brought the company $53 million.

Bain Capital isn’t the only investor pulling the plug in LinkedIN, three other investors have also announced plans to pull out including German software giant SAP, LinkedIn co-founder Allen Blue and LinkedIn head of international business Arvind Rajan who will sell a combined total of 2.5 million shares, equal to $225 million.

The move to sell stock comes after the company’s 180 day “lock-up” which ends on November 20. LinkedIn launched their IPO on May 19.

While 6.2 million shares will be sold the social network will also place 1.3 million new shares on the market, shares valued at a combined total of $100 million. LinkedIn will use the money they raise to help develop new products, sell services and acquire new company’s for technology advancement purposes.

The 6.2 million shares being offered are all “Class B” shares which offer 10 votes per share compared to Class A stock which offers 1 vote per share, however once resold the stock will be reclassified as “Class A.”

The sell off comes at a time when LinkedIn shares have more than doubled in value since their initial offering despite only a small increase in company profits in 2010.

Do you think LinkedIn is still a good investment?

LinkedIn Investor Selling Off $275 Million Early Investment, Others Following Suit is a post from: The Inquisitr

The new professional networking site Unvarnished was a pretty big topic of discussion yesterday after people balked at its strange marriage of concepts- kind of like LinkedIn meets /b/ on 4chan.

When the site comes out of beta, you or anyone who’s ever met or heard of you can set up a profile for you on Unvarnished, and then the anonymous “feedback” cycle begins. With jobs scarce in this economic climate, the idea of workplace (or general) grudges being aired unedited and in a place where you’re powerless to remove inaccurate and harmful information has people predictably pissed. The site got a pretty much internet-wide panning over the past week or so, but they don’t appear to be taking it lying down.

I don’t know that it counts as irony per se, but the the site that’s trying to sell itself on the value of honest feedback engaging in not exactly honest feedback to drive their point home is somewhat amusing. One blogger who posted his not so positive feelings on Unvarnished spotted an interesting pattern in comments first on his own post, and then on similar posts about Unvarnished:

Unvarnished’s co-founder, Peter Kazanjy, left a comment on my post, which was shortly thereafter followed by an interesting comment from a fellow going by the name of “Mike.”

The comment looked a little bit suspicious to me… A little digging online appeared to confirm that Peter had a relative named Mike, so I figured one plus one probably equals two.

My suspicions were confirmed after Mike Kazanjy, Peter’s brother, responded to me, apologizing for his “use of anonymous response earlier” but chastising me for spreading “inflammatory and baseless criticisms”. It’s worth pointing out that Mike did not use our anonymous response functionality, which is available to registered users; he simply didn’t provide his last name.

It would appear that Mike was a busy boy that morning, commenting all over the web about how he’d love a service like Unvarnished to help with recruiting:

On TECH.BLORGE.COM, a “Mike“ chimes in to set the record straight about Unvarnished. He claims to be “a participant in the private beta.” There are defensive comments from a “Mike” on Marketing Pilgrim and TechStartups.com too, and a quick survey of the comments left on TechCrunch’s Unvarnished post reveals that people named “Mike” seem far more likely to support what Unvarnished is doing than those who don’t go by “Mike“.

…When faced with the evidence, Mike Kazanjy has confirmed that at least some of these comments were indeed written by him. The excuse: he failed to reveal his last name and relationship to the company because he wanted to avoid “personal attacks and threats“. An especially revealing excuse given that Unvarnished — the service Mike so staunchly defends — doesn’t provide individuals any ability to protect their profiles from the same sort of abuse.

The bolding is Patricio’s, but it raises an excellent point. Most tech blogs that reviewed the idea didn’t feel that a service like Unvarnished would be particularly useful and seems like it would be more harmful than helpful. Based on the commenting habits of those linked to (and trying to sell) Unvarnished, it would appear that they are pretty much in agreement. Or, as Patricio helpfully summarizes:

Unvarnished talks a good game, but at the end of the day, the people behind it are willing to engage in precisely the type of behavior they say Unvarnished’s users won’t.

Unvarnished astroturfs blog comments after pretty much everyone hates on it is a post from: The Inquisitr

You’ve probably heard some of the steadily increasing buzz about the new professional networking site Unvarnished, a site Gawker says aims to “cross the anonymous pompous idiocy of Yelp with the overserious ‘professional’ism of LinkedIn.”

People are freaking out about it, understandably, though the site is still in closed beta. The alarm comes essentially from the fact that- well, have you never crossed a person or had a co-worker that just hated you for no real reason? Have you never escaped a round of firings with some very displeased colleagues getting the ax instead? While the people behind Unvarnished describe it rather innocuously, the idea has some rather unpleasant attributes you can’t ignore.

For instance, you don’t create your own profile- anybody can do it. That boss who really didn’t take it well when you jumped at another job offer? They can start up your profile for you, and it probably won’t be flattering. Ditto for that chick that was passed over so you could get a promotion. Or that guy in accounting who asked you for a date you weren’t interested in. Essentially, any manner of in or out of workplace grievances can be aired in a few nebulously damning sentences on Unvarnished.

When the unfair and inevitable undeserved bad reviews do appear, you can’t get rid of them either. They’re anonymous, and all you can do is respond to what’s been said about you. You can also encourage a friend or favorable co-worker to get in and defend you, which doesn’t seem like it would help very much once the bad stuff is out there. Although Gawker hopes that if we all ignore it, it will go away, that’s cold comfort when you know a buzzed about site is hosting a claim that you never refill the coffee pot, have poor attention to detail or tend to continually run five minutes late. (Even if you make that up by always staying an extra thirty.) (Edit: CNet has some interesting commentary after speaking to one of the founders, Peter Kazanjy.)

Do you plan to “claim” your Unvarnished profile if it appears? Is this going to take off and help the hiring process, or is it career ruination and lawsuit potential in a neat Web 2.0 package?

Unvarnished: bad networking idea or the worst networking idea ever? is a post from: The Inquisitr

My first thought when I read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post at ReadWriteWeb about Twitter and LinkedIn forming a partnership was – huh?

The purveyor of 140 character dribble is partnering up with a social network meant to let the whole world know how important you are and if you are up for a new job.

For what reason?

After all it’s not like prospective headhunters and human resources people who are trolling for new employees are really gonna give a shit about some retweet of a retweet of a message that is more hashtags than content. Not to mention the fact are you really gonna care if your blathering on about how drunk you got at some cool social media conference ends up in your LinkedIn profile – in fact you might want to really rethink that idea.

This is a deal in my opinion that only serves the purpose of keeping both company names in the news starved tech blogosphere; and really in this case it only reminds people that LinkedIn still exists. It’s not like Twitter needs to remind anyone since it is already the most popular non-business business on the web right now.

There is no real advantage to any kind of partnership between the two companies mainly because they have totally different synergies. LinkedIn serves as a great place to have yourself up for sale to the highest bidder and Twitter is the best place for expounding non-sequiturs and other pointless messages to show that your live really isn’t as boring as it seems.

In the case of either company there is nothing that is of benefit to the other by forming some sort of so-called partnership.  Well other than giving us all another non-story to talk about for the next few hours.

Twitter and LinkedIn get all warm and cozy … and the point is? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Twitter and business focused social network LinkedIn have signed a new deal that will allow users of both services to cross post status messages.

Users of LinkedIn will be able to link Twitter accounts to their profile, and select which messages are cross posted via a small Twitter option below the LinkedIn status entry field. Twitter users will be able to link their LinkedIn accounts, and (and this is perhaps the interesting part) use the hastags #li or #in to indicate that they want that Tweet to be posted to LinkedIn.

A spokesman for Twitter said that the wildly popular microblogging company wanted to take advantage of the strong identity in LinkedIn to make professional tweeters more successful…what ever that means.

The use of hashtags to indicate cross posting is a first for Twitter itself, although it has been used in third party tools before.

Twitter and LinkedIn Now Status Share. In Related News, LinkedIn Has Status Updates is a post from: The Inquisitr

Dipchand “Deep” Nishar will become LinkedIn’s vice president of product strategy, the Wall Street Journal discovered. His role will reportedly focus on building new products and services — and, given the seemingly high amount of success he had doing that at Google, you have to wonder what sorts of things could be on the horizon now for LinkedIn. (The guy who had the gig before will shift to “broader strategy issues,” the WSJ notes.)

Nishar is among the elite Google employees honored with the company’s Google Founders Award, considered the highest award within the company. It recognizes “extraordinary entrepreneurial achievement” and comes with a nice stock grant instead of just a trophy.

Nishar had been with Google for five-and-a-half years.

Google Exec Leaves For LinkedIn is a post from: The Inquisitr

Of the various social media sites, the one I’ve seen used the most for non-marketing business uses is LinkedIn. While there are many people who see little to no value to the site, I’ve witnessed companies using the site for recruiting, locating service providers, and seeking business advice. I was hired at The Industry Standard based on working LinkedIn, and yet it’s the one social media site that always seems to be ignored or dismissed. It has the highest CPM rate for advertising of any social media site, and probably will be one left standing in the end.

Facebook and Twitter are probably on par in terms of usefulness for companies. Both can be used to build brand awareness, as well as pitch journalists, announce news in a less formal manner, and reach out to a different audience. Some people have had success with leveraging their contacts on the sites for jobs and partnerships, but the majority of the users seem to use the sites for their intent: socializing.

FriendFeed is the current darling of the tech set, and Duncan himself has been converted to a believer. The problem, however, is that there doesn’t seem to be a justifiable business case for using it, at least in its current incarnation. Those trying to woo the tech A-listers know it’s a necessity to keep up with the in-crowd gossip, but overall, the site has the feel of an upside-down high school cafeteria, with the nerds at the popular kid table and the cheerleaders left to their own devices over on MySpace and Facebook. The few companies or blogs who have set up rooms seem to use them only as one more way to publish a news feed, and even the site’s “recommended” users are, for the most part, empty profiles with newsfeeds but little participation.

Unfortunately, the sites with the most practical uses seem to be overlooked while those that prop up the flip-flopped social structure of tech geek supremacy seem to get the most appearances on the tech blogs. For any single post on the usefulness of LinkedIn, there are 100 about a new design at FriendFeed or an outage on Twitter. When it comes to being a viable site that can be used as a tool (and earn money to boot), odds are the sites that pump up your ego won’t be the ones that survive.

Is Social Media Useful or just Ego-Boost? is a post from: The Inquisitr

A lot has happened in the microblogging space in the last twelve months, but Blogs Media, the company behind YouAre has maintained a steady as she goes, get it right development approach. The private beta is planned to last anywhere between “several weeks to several months” until such time the Blogs Media time thinks the site is right to launch.

So what does YouAre offer over the growing sea of competitors?

YouAre combines Twitter, Tumblr, Linkedin, Del.icio.us and the sites “secret ingredient” (their definition). At the basic level YouAre offers 140 character limited short messaging, complete with user profiles, support for @replies and DMs, and the ability to follow friends. The next layer of YouAre (and that’s the best word I can use to describe the feature sets) is Pownce and Tumblr like. Users can share video or pictures, although notably the site doesn’t offer hosting of either at this stage.

The next layer goes off into an unexpected tangent: LinkedIn style professional bios, including support for schools attended and work experience. Layer four takes us into what they describe as De.licio.us territory, but it’s part FriendFeed; yes, users can import external feeds into YouAre, although at this stage the choices are limited to De.licio.us, Flickr and YouTube.

But wait, there’s more! because YouAre also supports manual geolocation, so you can connect with others within your same area, based on the location based in your profile, or if you were visiting somewhere it’s as hard as placing /country/city after YouAre.com.

So what is it? Well it’s not a cake, or even an onion, despite the many layers. My very first impression is that unlike some of the other services I’ve reviewed lately, YouAre wins on name and aesthetics. It’s a great name, and Blogs Media has really thought about the looks of the site. It’s not OMG this is amazingly gorgeous great, but it’s pleasing to work in.

If I’m forced to label it as something, I (with some hesitation) would perhaps label it Twitter 2.0, or even a more professionally focused version of Twitter. It builds on the key concepts of Twitter, and adds to them in a way that isn’t overly complicated, or in a way that has a polarizing effect in an effort to be different (eg Plurk). Any user of Twitter will be able to sign up to YouAre and feel right at home. Although the various layers of the service sound complicated, in practice it feels like a safe, natural progression in this space.

As mentioned above, I don’t have a date as yet for when YouAre will open up nor do I have any invites yet(see below). There’s work to be done, but despite entering late into the space, here’s what I like about YouAre already: these guys are determined on launching this as a fully fledged, working platform:

Right now, our priorities are: launching a desktop widget for Windows and MAC, freeing the API, and optimizing the mobile interface, now that the site works on cell phones and smartphones without javascript support.

Yes, they won’t be launching until all the various parts of the service jigsaw puzzle are in place. In an age of half arsed product launches, isn’t it refreshing to see a company focused on launching a complete package.

Screenshots and YouAre’s spreadsheet below, and I’ll be following YouAre closely as it continues to be developed.

Update: we now have 25 invitations for Inquisitr readers. The first 25 people to email use@youare.com with this Subject: “The Inquisitr Invitations” get in. Also I forgot to add that coming in the next couple of days will be the ability to import contacts from external services, including Gmail and Twitter.

First look at new microblogging service YouAre: Twitter 2.0? is a post from: The Inquisitr