Uncrunched

Facebook announced a new way for people to log in to apps “anonymously” today. You still log into the (third party) app using your Facebook credentials, but Facebook sends absolutely no information about you at all to the app.

Read all the coverage about it on TechMeme. The tech press is impressed, even to to point of wondering if there’s a catch.

I don’t know the details, such as if this is something all apps have to implement if they want Facebook login, or if developers can opt not to offer it while still using the “normal” FB login.

But it doesn’t really matter. Facebook is addressing a strong desire for privacy by its users.

Distill that even further and it comes down to this – Facebook is treating its users, at least in this case, like its customers.

Then there’s Google. Today I read that they’re going to stop scanning student Gmail accounts (because of a lawsuit). Of course the rest of us who haven’t sued Google get the same old treatment.

I’m also still simmering over Google+ logins. I’ve diligently avoided getting a Google+ account for years now. The times that they’ve auto-created one for me because I clicked the wrong button I’ve deleted it. I’m still able to use Gmail without it, but Google Voice is rumored to be shutting down soon, and the only way I may be able to continue using my Google Voice phone number is if I finally relent and get a Google+ account.

I’m not going to go into the very many reasons why getting a Google+ account may be a bad idea – you can Bing that if you don’t already know. But even though no one wants to use Google+, Google is pushing, whining and pleading with you constantly to sign up – because it’s the only way they can continue to push higher numbers of “active users.”

No one uses Google+, but the whole Internet has an account there.

We’re not Google’s customers. Never were. We’re just a bundle of data to be sold to advertisers, and they don’t give a damn what we think about that.

Facebook may not be all that different, really. But at least today they treated us like human beings. And for that I’m grateful.

Don’t Be Evil™

The valuations of messaging apps like WhatsApp, Snapchat and others are, obviously, stunning.

Twitter is our de facto identifier now (think of all the times you see Twitter handles on TV news and other media). Not Facebook, and certainly not Google.

Allowing proper private communication among users is an obvious easy win. And yet Twitter has never really cared about private messaging. Direct messaging is a long neglected product, and Twitter doesn’t seem to care much about it.

I wonder if Twitter execs regret not paying more attention to private messaging, and if they occasionally fantasize about the extra tens of billions of dollars they might have added to their market cap if they had done so.

It’s not too late.

In the early days of TechCrunch I realized we could really use a data repository to help keep track of all the financing, M&A and people news around startups.

We’d cover all of these things as they happened but it was a huge pain to go back and research historical information. I thought about creating a basic wiki for startups but the lack of structured data was an issue. If I created a profile for a person I wanted there to be links to the companies that person worked for automatically created. Adding them in by hand wasn’t going to work, and anyway the links would quickly become stale.

So we built CrunchBase in 2007, a wiki with structured data, and started dumping data into it. We quickly abandoned the first iteration and by late 2007 we had a pretty good application that served the community well for years.

When AOL acquired TechCrunch in 2010 I kept telling them that CrunchBase was probably the most valuable thing they were buying. It took a while but they finally got it and started putting real resources towards improving it.

Today there are an astounding 23 people working on CrunchBase, led by Matt Kaufman. I’ve known and sometimes worked with Matt for some 15 years now, and he’s a very good product guy. It’s in the right hands.

Yesterday CrunchBase relaunched and has some really nice new design and data organization features. You can read all about it on TechCrunch.

I really like where CrunchBase is heading. I do urge them to keep the data open to all, something we built in from the beginning. This is community data, edited by people in the community, and it’s important that the community continues to feel free to use and repurpose the data.

Some rules around the API are needed, and there have been some bad actors that have taken advantage of the openness of CrunchBase in the past. But the benefit to everyone in having this data available and open far outweighs the damage done by those very few bad actors.

Congratulations to the team on a great relaunch. I continue to use CrunchBase daily and am so proud to see it continue to grow.

OkCupid played a major role in the successful effort to bring down Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich.

On March 31 the company showed a message to all visitors using Mozilla’s Firefox browser. The message stated: “Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.”

As we all know, Eich’s opposition to equal rights for gay couples stemmed from his $1,000 donation to support Proposition 8 in 2008. There are no other allegations that he ever showed any other discrimination against gays or anyone else.

Most people will argue (including me) that OkCupid is permitted to express opinions and take actions like this under its first amendment rights as a corporation.

But what was OKCupid’s motivation? And how does OkCupid’s co-founder Sam Yagan fit into this?

I believe that it was a PR stunt by OKCupid, that the company isn’t really committed to gay rights at all, and that OkCupid co-founder Sam Yagan was particularly hypocritical in this.

To go further, I think that a person and/or a company who deliberately destroy a man’s reputation and career under false pretenses just to get a PR bump is being explicitly evil.

Here’s my support of that.

1. Many people (here’s just one example, but a quick search pulls up far more) have pointed out that OkCupid’s actions appeared to be little more than a PR stunt to get attention. Regardless of motivation, there’s no argument that OkCupid benefited hugely from the saturated media coverage of their boycott.

This was a PR stunt, and as I show below, nothing but a PR stunt.

2. Sam Yagan is the co-founder of OkCupid and CEO of Match.com, OkCupid’s parent company. He certainly approved OkCupid’s actions, and his twitter stream shows numerous statements confirming his approval and, later, support of Eich’s forced resignation.

3. And yet Sam Yagan made a $500 donation to U.S. Congressman Chris Cannon in 2004.

4. Cannon has a special kind of hate for gays.

The Human Rights Campaign gave him a 0% rating on supporting gay rights. He voted no on prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation. He voted for a ban on gay adoptions. And he supported a constitutional amendment defining marriage as man/woman only.

He also voted to make the Patriot Act permanent, and supports (literally) any limitation on abortion that anyone can possible think up.

He’s the kind of politician that led me to vow to never vote for a republican again.

5. Is it absurd to judge Yagan as a person based on a single donation, years ago, to a politician well known for waging war on gays? Yup. But that is precisely what Yagan and OkCupid did to Eich.

In this new reality, supported by Yagan, it is both acceptable and a moral imperative to judge people based on their prior political donations, even those made years and years ago.

6. How can a man orchestrate and support a boycott of Mozilla over Eich and yet donate to a hateful politician like Chris Cannon? How do you square that?

You don’t. A man who feels strongly enough to boycott Mozilla over Eich’s actions is not a man who would donate to Chris Cannon.

OkCupid received a clear benefit, media attention, for trashing Eich. But their co-founder and ultimate CEO has shown strong anti-gay tendencies in the past. That’s hypocrisy, and worse.

I have not seen any issue that has divided Silicon Valley so deeply since first moving there in 1992 as this Mozilla thing has.

I’m not talking about the blogs, even this one. I’m talking about very emotional disagreements breaking out on Twitter and Facebook between people I respect and who until recently thought that they saw these issues of equality, tolerance and freedom the same way.

The worst of what I’m seeing is this – people who have steadfastly supported gay rights (and minority rights in general) but don’t like seeing how Eich is being treated are being called bigots and worse by their colleagues.

At some point soon everyone is just going to exhaust themselves, and an uneasy truce will emerge.

But the long term fallout seems to me to be that a lot of people simply won’t say what they think any more out of fear of retribution. That’s what will cost us the most.

Note: Mozilla says that they are getting “alarmed” phone calls and this post is causing people to become worried that there has been some kind of shooting incident at the company. So just to be clear, this is satire.

This morning, a number of gun-owning and gun-sympathizing Mozilla employees took to Twitter with a united, nearly simultaneous message to new Mozilla Corporation CEO Brendan Eich, who favors gun control: “Step down.”

The internal response began this morning with two tweets from Mozilla Open Badges project lead Chris McAvoy. “I love @mozilla but I’m disappointed this week,” McAvoy said, referring to the controversial decision to appoint Eich as CEO after it was revealed he had donated $1,000 six years ago to the Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence.

“@mozilla stands for openness and tolerance for all, but is acting in the opposite way.” He then made a more pronounced declaration: “I strongly believe in the second amendment and as an employee of @mozilla and I’m asking @brendaneich to step down as CEO.”

Within minutes, many other Mozilla employees followed suit, using similar language or copying each other’s statements outright. Those included Mozilla Festival curator Chloe Vareldi, partnerships lead John Bevan, designer Jessica Klein, and engagement team member Sydney Moyer.

McAvoy added that he feels fortunate to work at a company like Mozilla, “where now, at least, I feel safe speaking out about my gun rights and bringing my concealed gun to work so that I can protect myself.”

Other employees demanded Eich apologize for his support of gun control: “Pressuring him until he finally apologizes properly, which I hope is the end of this, is reasonable. He deserves every bit of condemnation he is receiving. He hurt people. Why shouldn’t he be held accountable?”

““I was wrong to support gun control, and I no longer oppose the NRA.” Until an apology includes that sentence or words to that effect, it’s not an apology for his actual offense.”

He added “It wasn’t evil when we shamed the racists out of the public square. It isn’t evil to treat the anti-gun bigots the same way.”

Neither McAvoy nor the other quoted employees mentioned Eich’s statement this week expressing sorrow for those he’s hurt. All of them expressed surprise to learn that the definition of “tolerance” includes “the willingness to tolerate something, particularly opinions or behavior that one does not agree with.”

Last week was the semi-annual gathering of large parts of Silicon Valley at Y Combinator Demo day. We met and invested in a lot of great startups. But I also picked something else up (I think) at Demo Day – A godawful nasty case of the flu.

This wasn’t just a normal flu. This is the kind of flu where you become a drugstore cowboy, taking any and every pill that can possibly mitigate your suffering. The kind of flu that brings your face into intimate contact with your toilet seat.

Parts of Saturday night I was tripping balls, although I don’t know if it was from the half bottle of NyQuil I downed or from the raging fever slow roasting my brain. I was easily sicker than any time I can remember since I was seven years old.

Two days after I started my girlfriend got it (I’m sorry). We took another swing through CVS today to stock up on more drugs. Most of my symptoms have receded, although I now have a thriving cough and brutal sore throat that I’m pretty sure is planning on sticking around for as long as possible. I also have a very grumpy girlfriend on my hands.

Anyway, I’m blaming Demo Day, particularly after reading about YC head Sam Altman’s own flu woes just now on Facebook. A bunch of other people who were there seem to have gotten sick as well, based on the comments to his post.

How do we fix this? We end the goddamned barbaric practice of handshaking, that’s how.

I first wrote about this in 2009, noting that we continue this repulsively stupid activity only because so many people find it so odd and insulting, not to shake hands.

I wrote again and again about the evils of handshaking, but I eventually gave up and simply started carrying hand sanitizer with me at all times.

I forgot to bring hand sanitizer to Demo Day.

I sincerely hope that Y Combinator bans handshaking at future Demo Days. I also call on TechCrunch and other conference organizers to institute no-handshake policies at events, starting with TechCrunch Disrupt in NY next month.

We know people don’t stay home when they’re sick, and we know that most people rarely wash their hands, even after using the bathroom. The only solution I see to this is for events, where the germs really run wild, to strongly suggest to attendees that they keep their damned hands to themselves.

Watching all of these Mozilla employees demand the removal of Brendan Eich as CEO makes me extremely uneasy.

What did Eich do? He donated a thousand dollars in support of California’s Prop 8 back in 2008.

I was against Prop 8 and am pretty clear on my feelings about gay rights in general. In short, I disagree with Eich’s positions in 2008.

But Eich has changed his mind and has apologized, just like millions of others, including our current president who was against same sex marriage when he first ran for president in 2008.

One Mozilla employee, Chris McAvoy, says he feels fortunate to work for Mozilla where he can speak out against Eich “without fear of retribution.”

McAvoy clearly appreciates his ability to speak his mind without fear of retribution. But he also demands the termination of employment of a person that he disagrees with.

That sounds like hypocrisy, and intolerance, to me.

America continues to shift dramatically towards less intolerance towards gays. Those that are happy this is happening, like I am, should not aim to destroy those citizens who just took a little longer than we did to come around to our way of thinking.

I’m reading about how Microsoft read a blogger’s Hotmail (or other Microsoft hosted email) to determine who leaked Microsoft information to that blogger. Microsoft’s response is pathetic, stating that “the privacy of our customers is incredibly important to us” in the same post that explains that they’ll keep doing it.

While I think that doing this is both evil and shortsighted (they lose trust and users), the only thing that surprised me was that they admitted it.

As the Guardian points out, other email providers also reserve the right to do this in their terms of service.

I have first hand knowledge of this. A few years ago, I’m nearly certain that Google accessed my Gmail account after I broke a major story about Google.

A couple of weeks after the story broke my source, a Google employee, approached me at a party in person in a very inebriated state and said that they (I’m being gender neutral here) had been asked by Google if they were the source. The source denied it, but was then shown an email that proved that they were the source.

The source had corresponded with me from a non Google email account, so the only way Google saw it was by accessing my Gmail account.

A little while after that my source was no longer employed by Google.

I certainly freaked out when this happened, but I never said anything about it because I didn’t want people to be afraid to share information with TechCrunch. But I became much more careful to make sure that communications with sources never occurred over services owned by the companies involved in the story.

So, yeah, the Guardian story is accurate.

Update: Google says this never happened (also in a comment below that I just approved). Some of the wording is (just slightly) odd (“opened” denial v. “accessed” accusation) but I assume that was inadvertent and they’re flatly denying this whole story.

Two 2009 tweets by WhatsApp (acquired for $16+ billion today) cofounder Brian Acton that show that even the most successful entrepreneurs need to face a little failure here and there:

Via