Social Networking Web Design

The saga surrounding URL shortener Tr.im just keeps getting stranger. First Tr.im shut down in dramatic fashion. Then Bit.ly tried to save Tr.im with a collaborative, independent project called 301works. Then, Tr.im suddenly reopened.

Now, there’s yet another new twist, as Tr.im has announced that it is going open source and that its parent company, Nambu Network, is completely renouncing all ownership of Tr.im. It will be “community-owned” by September 15th. Oh, and the company took every chance it could to bash Bit.ly and Twitter.

Tr.im’s Announcement

Before Nambu got into its detailed plan to turn Tr.im into an open-source software, it went right into harsh criticism of Bit.ly and Twitter. Specifically, they revealed that Bit.ly made a $10,000 offer for Tr.im, which they rejected. They also called the 301works initiative a “Bit.ly public relations stunt.”

“We would like to set the record straight. Last Monday, August 10, 2009, bit.ly offered $10,000 for the tr.im domain name and everything associated with it. They used this “offer” to inject themselves into the conversation, and generate attention for their shallow initiative to address link-rot. It was transparent, and so I rejected it.

That initiative, 301works.org, is little more than a bit.ly public relations stunt, which is why we have not joined it. It has little substance, claiming to address link-rot while it does nothing of the kind. If a URL shortener decides to close, only the donation of the domain name and the data can address the existing links. For any high-volume URL shortener, like tr.im, it is unlikely a commercial entity would do that given the offers we have seen come in this past week to immediately hijack all tr.im URLs.”

Nambu then went into detail over what would be happening to Tr.im in the next few weeks. Here are the key points:

1. Nambu will renounce its ownership of the Tr.im domain.

2. The source code will be released to everyone, under the MIT open-source license

3. The link-map data of Tr.im URLs will be available to anyone in real-time, including click data and the number of URLs created for any specific URL. It’s also going to publish statistics related to usage.

4. Nambu’s Eric Woodward will personally guarantee any shortfall in Tr.im’s operation budget.

5. Tr.im will now accept donations

There’s more, but the point is that Tr.im has decided not to sell, but to give its entire code structure to the masses. That is a positive step for innovation – that code could build some really powerful URL shorteners in the near future – but Nambu’s motivation for opening up is less than thrilling. Woodward’s entire argument is that Bit.ly and Twitter have monopolized the market and are the ones creating the URL shortening crisis. It’s a very negative motivation, and that can lead to bad decisions.

Will the new Tr.im work as intended? Can it survive in a community-owned structure? And are Bit.ly and Twitter really destroying innovation in the URL shortener market? We leave those questions for you to ponder in the comments.

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: bit.ly, Tr.im, twitter

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When you are well known and have some cash in the bank, you’re probably going to get sued at least once in your life. When you are Facebook and you have 250+ million users, increase the amount of lawsuits by a factor of 10 or so. Yes, Facebook has been sued once again, this time for allegedly misleading members on the use of their personal information and for violating California privacy laws.

The Orange County lawsuit was filed on behalf of five Facebook users, according to the AP– a photographer, an actress, two children under 13 (despite needing to be 13 or older to legally use Facebook) and a “user of the original Facebook.” It seeks monetary damages, attorney’s fees, and a trial by jury.

As you’d expect, Facebook believes that there is “no merit to this suit” and intends to fight it. We could go on and on about past Facebook lawsuits, many of them similar to this one. There was the lawsuit seeking $70.50 in damages, the text messaging lawsuit, the iKimbo patent, a class-action lawsuit for Facebook Beacon, the famous ConnectU debacle, and most recently, Power.com suing Facebook over data ownership. We’re pretty sure this list is nowhere near comprehensive.

Look: Facebook faces these types of suits all the time, and most of the time they are either dismissed or settled. Yes, Facebook’s had some thorny affairs with privacy, but recently they’ve been moving in the right direction with Facebook Democracy. Allowing users to vote on their own Terms of Service and letting them vote on changes is more than most sites offer. Besides, this lawsuit complains about common practices being illegal, such as changing the Terms of Service. It essentially rails against Facebook for 40 pages on practically every one of its featurse.

From the parts that we’ve read, we suspect that this California lawsuit doesn’t worry Facebook very much at all.

Reviews: Facebook

Tags: facebook, lawsuit

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For higher education students who spend an average of $702 per year on course materials, mostly textbooks, the prospect of going digital is an appealing one. Among the theoretical benefits of digital textbooks is the possibility of significant cost savings due to lower overhead costs — bits are cheaper than printed pages, after all. Unfortunately, students shouldn’t chuck their backpacks any time soon; there still exist some major hurdles that digital textbooks must overcome before they widely replace traditional, printed textbooks on college (and high school) campuses.

The benefits of digital textbooks are numerous: they’re potentially cheaper, they’re better for the environment (at least so long as you don’t continually need to upgrade your electronic book reader), they weigh less, they can be updated more easily, and they’re more easily searched. But for all that, a number of hurdles still exist.

1. Cost Savings Must be Greater

In theory, digital textbooks should cost a lot less than their printed counterparts. Textbook publishers will always have overhead costs (they must still compensate authors, editors, typesetters/designers, proofreaders, indexers, etc.), but the costs associated with physically printing, binding, warehousing, and shipping the book are eliminated when going digital. Further, many textbook publishers already publish electronic editions of their books. McGraw-Hill, for example, which is one of the largest textbook publishers in the United States, publishes nearly 95% of its books electronically.

In practice, though, the cost savings for electronic textbooks are miniscule. “Human Biology,” a textbook published by Pearson imprint Benjamin Cummings, for example, costs about $50 used, and about $80 new in its printed/hard copy form (according to BigWords.com). Via electronic textbook publisher CourseSmart, the digital version costs just over $70, a savings of about 12.5% over the printed version. However, the printed version can be kept forever or sold back at the end of the semester to mitigate costs, while the electronic version is automatically deleted after 180 days, and requires additional equipment, such as an ebook reader or a laptop computer. As a student, which of these options makes more sense?

“At the moment, there’s not a lot of [cost savings],” Tom Rosenthal, the senior manager of electronic product sales at textbook publisher Academic Press, told the Wall Street Journal. Those cost savings will have to become more significant for students to start opting for electronic texts over printed ones.

2. A Standard Format is Needed

When Amazon announced the larger format Kindle DX in May, and along with it a pilot digital textbook program at several major US universities to be launched this fall — including Princeton, UVA, Case Western, Arizona State, and Reed College — we called it “a game changer.” But it also raises a very important question about formats and ebook compatibility issues.

There are many different competing ebook formats and a huge number of textbook publishers that don’t all use the same format. If I buy a book on the Kindle, it may not necessarily be available on my Sony reader (and I certainly won’t be able to transfer that specific purchase from one reader to the other), and if I buy a book through CourseSmart, I need to use their proprietary software to download it. What that means for students in a practical sense is that vendor lock-in might prohibit them from going print-free even if they wanted to, because not all of their required course materials may be available for the reader or software they invested in. Because buying an ebook reader is a significant initial cost outlay, it’s hard to expect students to make that investment without assurances that all, or at least nearly all, of their required books will be available in that format.

With ebook readers expected in the next year from Plastic Logic, Hearst, and News Corp., and the much-rumored “Apple Tablet” on the horizon, things may only get more muddled.

3. Questions of Ownership

One of the most important stumbling points for the adoption of digital texts is the question of who actually owns the books. CourseSmart’s books, for example, generally only last for 180 days before being automatically deleted, which means that students are essentially renting them for a set period of time. That’s not a consideration students need to make when purchasing a hard copy book from a bookstore, where the answer to question of ownership is very clear.

Further, the recent Orwellian (literally) case of Amazon remotely deleting books from Kindle readers, has rightly raised a number of eyebrows. One high school student even filed a lawsuit against the ecommerce giant when, as he claims, the notes he had made on the book for school were “rendered useless because they no longer referenced the relevant parts of the book,” as a result of the remote deletion.

“Amazon.com had no more right to hack into people’s Kindles than its customers have the right to hack into Amazon’s bank account to recover a mistaken overpayment,” said Jay Edelson, the lawyer who filed the case.

If students feel that they don’t actually own the textbooks they purchase, or that their books might be taken away before they are done with them (or that their notes might be damaged), they’re unlikely to embrace electronic textbooks.

Conclusion

Digital textbooks are indeed a potential game changer, and they are likely going to be a major part of the future of academia. A year from now, the National Associated of College Stores estimates that digital textbooks could account for 15% of all textbook sales. However, for that to happen, textbook publishers, ebook reader manufacturers, and schools must first address some of the major hurdles that are making students wary of electronic books.

Further, in addition to the problems that exist with the digital books themselves, electronic textbook publishers also need to overcome deeply ingrained student behavior. For many students, the idea of reading words on a screen is not as appealing as on a printed page. That may change as more so-called digital natives progress into higher education and as ebook reader technology gets better, but for now, 60% of students would rather pay for a low-cost printed book than use a free digital version.

“We may have actually made enough progress for this to be a landmark device, but the caveat that humans have proven is that they are resistant to change,” said Andrew Dillon, Dean of the University of Texas School of Information about the Kindle DX device. “Fighting 700 years of human familiarity with paper is a huge challenge.”

Would you use electronic textbooks if available? Let us know in the comments.

See also: In the Future, the Cost of Education Will Be Zero

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, gibsonff

Reviews: iStockphoto

Tags: amazon kindle, ebook reader, ebooks, electronic textbook, kindle dx, textbooks

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