AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Red Herring
Facebook on Monday announced a new friend: Marc Andreessen, who has joined the company’s board.
“Marc is an industry leader, and we’re fortunate to have him join our board,” Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.
The Ning chairman and co-founder was added to tap his experience with social sites and in growing [...]

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The Long Tail
I’ve argued before that social networking should be a feature, not a destination, and that the one-size-fits-all model of Facebook and MySpace will eventually give way to a multitude of narrowly focused sites with social networking built in, such as the 220,000 niche networks hosted on the Ning platform.
It turns out that it’s [...]

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The Wall Street Journal
Firms to Compete With Social Sites That Host Them
The start-up companies that create games and other popular applications for big social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are trying to break into a new business: ad selling.
Backed by venture-capital money, these companies, including start-ups such as RockYou and iLike, are under pressure to [...]

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TechCrunch
As we wrote last week, Facebook is turning parts of its application platform open source, the company announced today. It’s available here for download.
This comes a little more than a year after Facebook Platform first launched to allow third party developers a way to get their applications directly onto Facebook. The company says more than [...]

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NewTeeVee
Josh Catone over at ReadWriteWeb has an interesting suggestion for Warner Bros. to get folks interested in the upcoming superhero feature, Watchmen: Take a page from Trent Reznor’s book. The Nine Inch Nails front man has been experimenting with innovative distribution and marketing schemes ever since his band said farewell to Universal Music, giving away [...]

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Tech Crunch
More details on Steven Spielberg’s upcoming ghost and UFO based social network, which we first wrote about in early March and followed up with additional details a week later. The site will reportedly be called “Rising” or “The Rising” (our understanding is that they have acquired both .com domain names), and the logo above [...]

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The Wall Street Journal
Sports Illustrated Group has reached an agreement with Citizen Sports Inc. to develop and promote sports-related Web content, including a fantasy-football game that will be played on the Facebook Inc. Web site.
The move is, in part, an admission by the iconic sports brand, owned by the Time Inc. division of Time Warner [...]

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NewTeeVee
For a company whose product sported a beautiful interface, TiVo’s web site was alway pretty ugly. But that’s all changed, as the DVR company has given its web presence a dramatic makeover to match its signature style. It’s even incorporated the playful pop and bell sounds TiVo makes.
The site is a dramatic improvement over the [...]

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BusinessWeek
FriendFeed is tearing down the walls between Web haunts such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.
Attention, attention: The latest tech darling has arrived, and it goes by the name of FriendFeed. Silicon Valley is buzzing about the seven-month-old startup, which offers a promising if somewhat messy new Internet service. Part of the interest comes from the [...]

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Crystal Ball 2.0 - Advertising Age
Power 150 Bloggers: Pay Attention to Web Video, Twitter, Facebook This Year
We asked the bloggers on the Power 150 blog-ranking index to tell us what technology marketers should be paying most attention to in 2008. Here’s what they said.
Tom Martin
Positive Disruption
With the cost of production and distribution of digital content [...]

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