Wild prospect Justin Fontaine suspended for using gay slur on Twitter about …

Minnesota Wild prospect Justin Fontaine has fit in nicely with the team’s AHL affiliate Houston Aeros in his rookie season, posting 34 points in 49 games, good for second in team scoring. He’s also fit in well off the ice — three weeks ago, he joined a large contingent of Wild prospects that are currently on Twitter, interacting with fans.

He’s taken to Twitter quite well by all accounts, too — except for an unfortunate incident this last weekend when he used a gay slur.

Hockey Wilderness

Sunday night, Fontaine’s roommate David MacIntyre tweeted about the Foo Fighters’ Grammy performance. Fontaine responded, attempting to sarcastically disparage Dave Grohl’s critically acclaimed grunge rock band. But he chose his words poorly.

Fontaine deleted the tweet, but not before a number of Wild fans had seen and reacted to it, and Houston Aeros captain John DiSalvatore had retweeted it for some reason.

Wild management didn’t take too kindly to this and it responded immediately, suspending Fontaine for his next two games.

From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

The Wild has suspended Houston Aeros forward Justin Fontaine for the next two games after he used a gay slur during a Twitter exchange about the Grammys with a teammate on Sunday night.

Fontaine soon removed the tweet and apologized, saying, “My apologies to everyone, it was wrong. Twitter rookie and it came out totally wrong. It was a roommate battle, nothing more. #sorry.”

Additionally, the Wild issued a statement regarding their disciplinary actions and publicly apologizing for the slur. Guess this is what happens after someone like political commentator Roland Martin of CNN gets suspended for homophobic jokes during the Super Bowl. The lesson: No more gay comedy during massive television events on social media (celebs only).

The team’s response in this instance was swift, appropriate, and frankly, a little unexpected. Even Hockey Wildnerness’ Bryan Reynolds, who instantly decried the tweet when he saw it, felt its response would likely be more understated:

What the fallout will be will play out throughout the day. More than likely, it will be done behind the scenes. If I had to guess, the level of usage of Twitter by Wild players and prospects is about to undergo a serious cutback. It’s disappointing, because the level of interaction with these players was priceless.

The problem is, when you are a pro athlete, you are no longer representing only yourself. As frustrating as that may be, it is the truth. This type of language gives the entire Wild organization a black eye, especially if there is no recourse. If Fontaine had called an opponent that word, he would be suspended.

Reynolds is correct: This did reflect poorly on the Wild organization, and it would have continued to reflect poorly on the Wild if they had simply dealt with this privately or recommended the Wild prospects cut back on their Twitter usage. While those responses aren’t endorsements of Fontaine’s choice of word, neither are they rebukes, and that’s what this calls for.

As Reynolds said, this would have necessitated a suspension had it been said on the ice. Truth is, Fontaine represents the Wild organization on and off the ice, and the word remains damaging regardless of where it’s said, so kudos to the Wild for making it clear that the use of gay slurs anywhere will necessitate the same response.

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Article source: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-puck-daddy/wild-prospect-justin-fontaine-suspended-team-using-gay-124914397.html

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Northwestern Twitter flap sparks backlash

This might shock some of you, but head football coaches don’t always do their own tweeting.

Northwestern’s Pat Fitzgerald usually controls the content on his Twitter account, but his director of football operations, Cody Cejda, also posts from time to time. Cejda also has his personal Twitter account.

The tangled Web of social media landed Fitzgerald and Northwestern in some hot water during the weekend. After New York Knicks sensation Jeremy Lin led his team to a win against the Los Angeles Lakers on Friday night, a tweet appeared on Fitzgerald’s page stating: “Officially on the Jeremy Lin bandwagon. There’s finally an NBA player who plays hard and says the right things off the court.”

Some saw the complimentary tweet toward Lin as a shot at the rest of the NBA. A few thought it was racist. The fact it came from a coach who works about 15 miles North of where Derrick Rose works his magic with the Chicago Bulls looked especially bad. Isn’t Northwestern supposed to “Chicago’s Big Ten team?”

Although Michigan State athletic director Mark Hollis appeared to concur with the tweet, the Pat-Fitzgerald-Hates-Derrick-Rose buzz began to build.

Turns out, the tweet came from Cejda, not Fitzgerald. According to Northwestern, Cejda meant to post the tweet on his personal account but hit the button for Fitzgerald’s page. The tweet was quickly removed, but in this day and age, it’s too late.

“The tweet was meant as a compliment to Lin and not in disrespect to anyone,” associate director of athletic communications Doug Meffley told the Chicago Sun-Times. “Fitz is a huge Derrick Rose fan.”

Fitzgerald has voiced his praise for Chicago teams before on Twitter, especially his beloved Chicago White Sox. But for the most part, he keeps the tweets Northwestern-specific.

Probably should keep it that way going forward.

Article source: http://espn.go.com/blog/bigten/post/_/id/45555/northwestern-twitter-flap-sparks-backlash

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Oprah Twitter Scandal! Winfrey Apologizes After Soliciting Nielsen Viewers to …

Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images

Let’s get one thing straight: Oprah Winfrey doesn’t beg.

She sends a polite albeit wholly policy-violating solicitation, removes it, than apologizes all while not quite getting what the fuss was about.

But she doesn’t beg. We know this because in the wake of the fallout from her Nielsen viewer-seeking tweet over the weekend, the OWN honcho has seen fit to tell her followers that. Repeatedly.

MORE: Are Barbara Walters and Oprah battling it out to score Pippa Middleton’s first sitdown?

It all began on Sunday night, when Oprah, whose OWN network has been in a bit of a ratings freefall since its relaunch last year, tweeted out a seemingly harmless plea to her followers.

“Every 1 who can please turn to OWN especially if u have a Neilsen box,” she wrote in a tweet that has since been deleted from her feed (but not before getting RT’d ad nauseum).

In addition to a steady stream of backlash and criticism from fellow tweeters that the request was “desperate” and that she was obviously “begging for viewers” for her cable network, her request also caught the eye of the ratings company itself.

Turns out, networks (and that includes network heads with their names in the network title) aren’t allowed to specifically target Nielsen subscribers with any attempts to change their viewing habits.

MORE: Oprah’s bodyguards brawl with Indian media

Cue an aha moment, and not the good kind.

“In accordance with our policies and procedures, Nielsen is reviewing this incident with our clients and we may withhold, breakout and/or make a note in the ratings,” read a statement from the company. “We take any violation of our policy seriously and will work with clients to resolve the situation.”

Oprah herself was quick to remove the offending post, but nevertheless persevered with defending why she wrote it in the first place.

“‘Desperate’ not ever a part of my vocab,” she tweeted. “Just making a request, since I can’t watch myself. Choice is yours.”

MORE: Is Oprah really Blue Ivy’s godmother?!

“The word ‘please’ is used as courtesy not a beg,” she replied to another online critic. To another, harsher reply, she wrote, “Huh? Corrupt? Me? You really believe that?

“Unethical a little harsh don’t u think? Seemed like it made sense to me. Sorry if u’re offended.”

She seemingly came around eventually, and instead of allowing herself to be goaded into an online fight by fellow tweeters, she harnessed her inner Oprah and instead tried another tact.

“You really are more than a number,” she wrote.

Ah, much better. Let the healing begin.

PHOTOS: Oprah’s Memorable Moments

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Article source: http://www.eonline.com/news/oprah_twitter_scandal_winfrey/294280

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Whitney Houston scams flood Facebook and Twitter

As the rest of the world mourns the loss of Whitney Houston, online crooks have wasted no time capitalizing on her tragic death in the hopes of making a quick buck.

Shortly after news of Houston’s death hit the Web on Saturday (Feb. 11), Twitter and Facebook became inundated with people reacting to the event. As a result “RIP Whitney Houston” quickly became a trending topic on Twitter, creating a perfect environment — millions of interested social networkers hungry for any information — for cybercriminals to strike.

The security firm TrendMicro found one such Twitter scam disguising itself under the supposedly homage-paying trending topic. Clicking on the link in the rigged Twitter post takes people to a blog dedicated to Houston’s career, but the blog automatically redirects them to a Web page offering different Whitney Houston wallpapers.

Downloading a wallpaper triggers yet another offer to download Whitney Houston ringtones, and, no matter what you do, the sneaky Web page eventually takes you to a survey site that asks for your cellphone number.

Of course, no scam would reach even a fraction of its true potential unless it spread like wildfire through Facebook, and this one certainly has. Trend Micro spotted a wall post with the subject, “I cried watching this video. RIP Whitney Houston,” followed by, of course, a link to what promises to be a YouTube video.

“However, clicking this link only leads to several redirections until users are lead to the usual survey site,” Trend Micro’s Christopher Talampas wrote in a company blog.

Trend Micro found 101 such survey scams registered on the same IP address where the original fake video was hosted.

It’s par for the cybercriminal course that, within hours of a tragic event, scammers emerge from the woodwork to prey on the public’s fascination and desire to know the “true” story of what happened. Similar scams popped up following the deaths of Amy Winehouse, Osama bin Laden and Moammar Gadhafi, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and countless other huge world happenings that drew people in droves to the Web.

To protect yourself from Whitney Houston hoaxes and other ones that are sure to come in the future, never download anything that looks suspicious, even if it comes from a friend on Facebook or Twitter. And make sure your anti-virus software is updated; besides basic common sense, it will be your strongest line of defense in combating rigged websites and dangerous software.

• 6 Steps to Staying Safe on Social Networks
• Why You Should Quit Facebook Now
• Top 10 Identity Theft Protection Services

Copyright 2012 SecurityNewsDaily, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Article source: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/14/whitney-houston-scams-flood-facebook-and-twitter/

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Hands On: Angry Birds Migrate to Facebook

New power-ups in Angry Birds on Facebook include steroid-like seeds that instantly bulk up your birds.
Image courtesy Rovio

As of November, Angry Birds has been downloaded for various gaming platforms over 500 million times. But just in case you haven’t already gotten your fill of the tremendously popular physics puzzle game on your mobile device of choice, Rovio launched Angry Birds for Facebook on Tuesday.

Angry Birds on Facebook is not just another port of the mobile app. While it doesn’t exactly reinvent the series, this version is a bit deeper than you might expect.

The new browser-based version of Angry Birds comes loaded with a slew of new features including exclusive levels, social gaming integration (allowing you to do things like keep track of, and compete against, your Facebook friends’ high scores) and several all-new power-ups. Some of the more interesting new powers allow you to trigger “birdquakes” to take out your pig nemeses or “super seeds” that instantly bulk up your birds.

Rovio has also implemented some social gaming features to keep you thoroughly immersed in the experience, such as daily rewards for continuing to play. And you can of course bombard your Facebook friends with those annoying virtual gift notifications to lure them into playing the game, too.

One of the more impressive things about the game is how sharp and vibrant the picture quality is compared to the iOS versions, especially if you have it running on a decent monitor. It takes advantage of Adobe Flash Player 11, perfect for the series’ colorful visual style.

Angry Birds is still in beta, so you may encounter some technical issues. For instance, at the moment the game doesn’t run as smoothly when you have it up and running in Internet Explorer 8.

Rovio has said that it is committed to introducing more features and improvements to the Facebook game as time goes on, calling the launch “just the beginning” in a statement Tuesday.

Article source: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/02/angry-birds-facebook/

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Facebook’s $100 Billion Valuation Pretty Much Depends On This One Guy

Facebook has a huge valuation relative to the size of its revenues and how fast (or actually, slow) those revenues are growing.

When its shares start trading in late May, Facebook is expected to have a valuation between $75 billion and $100 billion.  It’s already above $100 billion on private markets.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s revenues are actually decelerating, reaching $3.7 billion in 2011.

Google and Apple trade at 3X and 4X revenues. LinkedIn trades at 16X revenues.

A Facebook valuation that is 15 times the size of its 2011 revenues would be something around $50 billion. A valuation 15 times the size of Facebook’s projected 2012 revenues would value the company between $55-$80 billion.

There is a big gap between $50 billion and $100 billion.

The explanation for that gap is this: People who are optimistic about Facebook’s future business are betting not that Facebook’s current ad business will grow to justify that $100 billion valuation, but that Facebook has so many users (almost a billion!) that it will be relatively simple for it to invent a new business to make money.

So whose job is it to close that $50 billion gap?

Meet Gokul Rajaram, the product director of ads at Facebook.  He is, in the words of an industry source, Facebook’s “main man for ads strategy.”

Rajaram joined Facebook in 2010 when it acquired the startup he was running with his brother, called Chi Labs.

Facebook bought Chi Labs for one reason: to hire Rajaram.

He has an impressive resume.

Before Chi, Rajaram spent 5 years at Google.

His last job was Product Management Director, AdSense.

Rajaram is also an active startup investor, having put money in successful companies like Adku, Associated Content, and Coupons.com.

Google AdSense is the product that puts all those text ads “by Google” all over the Internet. They scan the page, and try to match the right ad for it based on keywords.

One ex-Googler we talked to told us Rajaram “is a legend” and that he is “beloved times ten” by those who have worked with him.

“[Rajaram] sees the forest for the trees,” says this source.

Former Googler and Associated Content CEO Patrick Keane says “Gokul is a brilliant technologist and a skilled executive.  He can deftly bridge the most sophisticated technical and business challenges.”

“I worked with him closely at Google on the launch of AdSense and he was a key tech and recruiting asset on the board of Associated Content.”

The most important ad product that Rajaram’s team has come up with so far is something called Sponsored Stories.

Basically, Sponsored Stories give businesses the chance to turn natural conversations Facebook users are having about their products into ads.

An example: Ticketmaster.com has a feature where, when customers buy their tickets, they can share the news and a link to Ticketmaster with their friends on Facebook. Ticketmaster tells us that when those friends click on that link, it’s worth $6 to $8 for Ticketmaster revenues. The only problem is, those links tend to get lost on Facebook.com when users visit.  They go into News Feeds and get pushed to the bottom pretty quickly.

This is where sponsored stories come in. Instead of spending money on billboards or radio commercials, concert promoters can put that link from Ticketmaster in an ad on the right hand side of Facebook.com and then pay Facebook every time it gets clicked on. 

There is a lot of promise in this ad unit, but so far it hasn’t quite taken off like you’d expect. They were first introduced at the beginning of 2011, a year in which Facebook’s revenue deceleration steepened.

One reason may be that advertisers used to spending their budgets on things they’ve heard of and are used to, like billboards and 30-second radio commercials, haven’t quite figured out what good something new like Sponsored Stories can do.

Still, Rajaram is adjusting.

The ads used to get stuck on the right side of the page. Now they’re going to go right in the middle at the top of the News Feed, where users are used to looking for pictures of their friends. Already some users are screaming about it, and a few even sued.

Rajaram will have to adjust again. He’ll have to. There’s $50 billion or so riding on it.

Related: Facebook’s most important people

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See Also:

• How To Get Business Insider Stories In Your Facebook News Feed
• T-Pain Just Tattooed A Facebook ‘Like’ Button On His Forearm
• Another One: Australian Teenager In A Coma After “Planking” On A Fast Moving Car

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/02/14/businessinsiderfacebooks-100-billio.DTL

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Twitter slaps limits on sales of its pricey stock

A policy barring Twitter shareholders from selling more than 20% of their stock is causing tension in Twitter’s employee ranks.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — While Facebook prepares to go public, Silicon Valley’s other buzzy social startup, Twitter, is doing everything in its power to stay private. In pursing that goal, it has slapped its shareholders with an unusual restriction: No one who holds stock can sell more than 20% of their shares.

The rule — which has been in place for more than a year, according to e-mails obtained by CNNMoney, but is being reported here for the first time — has caused dissent in Twitter’s ranks.

It directly led to the departure of Twitter’s senior technical engineer, Evan Weaver, who resigned in August. In an e-mail that went to all Twitter employees, Weaver said he quit over “policy disagreements” with the company.

The policy at issue was Twitter’s 20% stock sale restriction, according to several people with knowledge of the discussions. Weaver, who is currently working on his own startup, declined to comment on the matter.

Weaver’s missive prompted a quick response from CEO Dick Costolo, who sent out his own all-staff e-mail later that day laying out Twitter’s reasons for imposing the limit.

The main one: Keeping under the “500 shareholder rule” to avoid going public.

When companies have more than 500 shareholders owning one class of equity shares, the SEC requires the business to begin disclosing its financial results. Companies aren’t required to go public at that point, but most choose to. The rule was a catalyst in Facebook’s recent IPO filing: Facebook moved past the 500 shareholder mark last year.

Twitter is going to great lengths to stay under the threshold.

“We don’t want to be public until we have very predictable quarterly earnings growth,” Costolo wrote in his August e-mail. “We’re not ready to be a public company for a couple years.”

That means that Twitter has to “artificially limit the supply of stock being sold,” Costolo wrote. “There is one reasonable way to do this: Let everybody with vested common stock sell only some fraction of their shares.”

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment on the issue.

Many private companies set limits on stock sales by current employees, and some impose annual caps on how much stock any shareholder can sell off, according to sources familiar with private trading patterns. But a blanket restriction like Twitter’s, preventing shareholders from selling off more than 20% of their shares for the foreseeable future, is unusual.

Why do Twitter shareholders want to sell? The company’s soaring valuation is a big motivator. Twitter’s last major fundraising round put its value at around $8 billion — a huge number for a company that is still firming up its business model. Industry research firm eMarketer recently estimated Twitter’s 2011 advertising revenue at just shy of $140 million.

While Twitter’s shares aren’t publicly traded, they have generated heavy interest from private buyers eager to bet on the company’s rapid user growth and cultural cache. But at Twitter’s current valuation, it’s a very expensive investment. As Costolo put it in his e-mail: “It takes a lot of investors now to buy a lot of stock at these prices.”

To avoid having too many shareholders, Twitter has had to play matchmaker and seek out a handful of buyers who can afford to spend several hundred million dollars each buying up large batches of Twitter stock. The company has an extra condition. It only wants buyers who “don’t want a significant say in how the company is run (board seats, special rights, etc),” Costolo wrote in his e-mail.

Twitter found one such buyer recently: Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who announced in December that he had acquired a $300 million stake in Twitter. The deal was done entirely through private share purchases from existing stockholders, Fortune reported.

All of Twitter’s employees — it currently has around 900 — have equity in the company, but only Twitter’s investors and its earliest employees hold actual stock.

Last year, Twitter changed its approach and began granting new employees “restricted stock units” that will only be converted to common-stock shares after a “liquidity event” such as an IPO or corporate takeover. Those RSUs, which can’t be sold to investors, don’t count toward the 500-shareholder limit. Facebook used a similar tactic to delay its IPO filing.

But for early Twitter employees — who do hold actual, vested stock — the 20% rule is a frustrating form of golden handcuffs. Some people who would like to leave Twitter feel stuck, according to several current and former employees. Without selling more shares, they don’t have the cash to walk away.

Some like Weaver have left anyway, because of their philosophical objections to the policy. Even those who leave, voluntarily or not, remain bound by the 20% restriction, which applies to all Twitter shareholders.

The issue came up in a recent staff survey Twitter conducted.

“Folks continue to be worried about the company losing its best talent,” Janet Van Huysse, Twitter’s vice president of human resources, wrote last month in a e-mail to employees summarizing survey’s results. CNNMoney obtained a copy of the internal e-mail.

“In most cases, the comments name specific employees — most of who left over the stock policy,” Van Huysse wrote. “You’ll note that there are not necessarily solutions here — more so just anxiety that we lost so many ‘senior’ people.”

Twitter experienced major employee turnover last year as the company worked to transform itself from a successful but haphazardly run startup to a more mature business. Two of Twitter’s founders left while its third co-founder, Jack Dorsey, returned to take charge of its product vision. More than a dozen early company leaders departed, while hundreds of new employees joined Twitter’s flock.

Insiders say those changes have generally been for the best. There’s widespread agreement that Twitter — once famous for the “fail whale” icon that marked its frequent crashes — needed to sharpen its focus and improve its execution. Twitter’s internal overhaul is starting to pay off: The company unveiled a widely praised redesign in December and has rapidly expanded its client roster of paying advertisers. EMarketer predicts that Twitter’s ad revenue will almost double this year.

But for Twitter shareholders eager to cash out, the wait looks likely to be a long one.

“We’re trying to build a decades-long, lasting business. We don’t care about what the market window is for going public,” Costolo said in an interview at a media conference two weeks ago. “I don’t pay any attention to that, and I try to get everyone else in the company to not pay any attention to that.” 

Article source: http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/14/technology/twitter_stock_sales/

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White House renews #40dollars Twitter campaign on payroll tax cut

Call it tweets for tax cuts.

On Tuesday, President Obama will renew his Twitter campaign to pressure Congress to approve a year-long extension of the payroll tax holiday.

The president wants supporters to use the hash tag #40dollars while explaining what losing that much in each paycheck would mean to them. That’s the amount an average American worker would give up every two weeks if the tax holiday expires as scheduled at month’s end, according to the Obama administration.

In December, the same strategy helped the White House foment populist sentiment as Obama routed House Republicans and won a two-month extension of the payroll tax cut. More than 30,000 people had responded to #40dollars campaign on Twitter and the White House Web site, administration officials said.

Now, Obama wants to try it again — even though Republican lawmakers signaled Monday that they are willing to compromise this time by not requiring that the administration offer spending cuts on other programs to pay for the tax cut.

In a YouTube video posted on the White House account, Obama thanked supporters for helping convince Congress last time and called on them to join the cause again.

Obama said those who responded to the #40dollars campaign “made all the difference. Your voices changed the debate and reminded Washington what was at stake. Well, once again I need you; we all need you — to speak out. Because if Congress fails to act soon, then taxes on the middle class will go up.”

Though Republicans say they will compromise on the payroll tax cut, Obama also is demanding that they extend long-term unemployment insurance.

On Tuesday afternoon, Obama will appear with some of the people who responded to the Twitter campaign and share their stories publicly — something he also did last December at the White House.

Article source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/44/post/white-house-renews-40dollars-twitter-campaign-on-payroll-tax-cut/2012/02/13/gIQANZaYCR_blog.html

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Nielsen Chastises Oprah Over a Twitter Plea

But on Sunday night, when she used that powerful online megaphone to make what seemed to be a simple plea, Ms. Winfrey broke a rule that the Nielsen ratings company rarely has to enforce. “Every 1 who can please turn to OWN especially if u have a Neilsen box,” she wrote on Twitter just as a new episode of her interview show, “Oprah’s Next Chapter,” began.

What seemed to most Twitter users to be a simple, if misspelled and desperate-sounding, call to watch a struggling channel was seen by Nielsen as a potentially serious violation of its policy. Nielsen measures the television viewership of a sample of roughly 25,000 households across the United States, and it works hard to ensure that the sample is not coerced to watch specific shows or channels.

After officials at OWN and Nielsen corresponded on Monday morning, Ms. Winfrey removed the Twitter post at the ratings company’s request. “I intended no harm and apologize for the reference,” she said in a statement.

In Nielsen’s ratings system, an asterisk will be attached to OWN’s ratings at the time of day Ms. Winfrey’s message was sent, noting a “possible biasing effect,” a Nielsen spokesman said.

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“It is Nielsen’s policy to note attempts to single out panel members to either change their viewing habits or otherwise influence or affect their reporting,” the spokesman, Matt Anchin, said later in an e-mail.

Such attempts are rare, but are taken seriously by Nielsen, since its ratings are used to set advertising rates and determine the success or failure of shows.

Television hosts, executives and channel owners — for OWN, Ms. Winfrey is all three — may privately doubt the veracity of the daily ratings, but the TV industry collectively agrees to let them be the currency for buying and selling. So any hint of tampering with the Nielsen household sample sets off alarms.

In 1999, when a sports anchor in Baltimore told viewers, “We need you tonight, especially our special viewers, and you know who you are, with that little box on the back of your set,” referring to Nielsen’s measurement box, Nielsen admonished the station. “Not too proud to beg,” The Baltimore Sun said of the case.

Last November, the NBC late-night comedian Jimmy Fallon declared that he wanted to “Occupy Nielsen.” He told viewers, “This Friday, I want everyone who knows someone who’s in a Nielsen family to call ’em up” and tell them to turn on his show.

“You don’t even have to watch the show, you just have to put it on,” he said.

That Friday, Nielsen excluded Mr. Fallon’s show from its averages altogether, a much more severe punishment than the one presented to OWN on Monday. That’s because Mr. Fallon’s request was more specific than Ms. Winfrey’s.

On Sunday, Ms. Winfrey’s unusually blunt request and the misspelling of the Nielsen name caused some Twitter users to doubt that Ms. Winfrey was the one actually doing the typing. But she was, according to her executive producer, Sheri Salata, who was in the same room at the time.

They were together at a hotel in suburban Atlanta that did not carry OWN. The fact that it is difficult for some viewers to find highlights one of the channel’s problems. The two were watching the Grammys like tens of millions of others.

Five minutes after the post about Nielsen, when the Grammy Awards ran a commercial, Ms. Winfrey wrote, “Grammy people..u can turn to OWN.”

Some replied to Ms. Winfrey to thank her for the reminder, but others criticized the tone of her two please-tune-in messages. Ms. Winfrey replied to one of the people who labeled her message “desperate” by saying, “ ‘desperate’ not ever a part of my vocab.”

The last year has been a hard slog for Ms. Winfrey, who created her cable channel in a joint venture with Discovery Communications by converting the Discovery Health Channel into OWN in January 2011. Although she cautioned from the start that OWN would need years of nurturing, its early ratings have been disappointing to people involved in the venture.

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Nearly a dozen advertisers made big multiyear commitments in advance of the channel’s debut, and to them — as to investors and reporters — Discovery and Ms. Winfrey have emphasized patience. At an investment conference in December, David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery, said of advertisers, “They’re excited about the mission.” Discovery will report its quarterly earnings on Thursday.

Lately, Ms. Winfrey has increased her presence on the channel, and there is a belief inside OWN that “Oprah’s Next Chapter” is becoming a centerpiece — which explains why she would seek to steer her Twitter followers to it on Sunday night.

Since the interview show began in early January, it has drawn almost 900,000 viewers on average, significantly more than most other prime-time shows on the channel. The viewership figures for Sunday’s episode, the one that will come with an asterisk, were not available as of Monday evening.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/business/media/nielsen-chastises-oprah-over-a-twitter-plea.html

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Facebook ‘saving’ MySpace

MySpace has been bedevilled in recent years by confusion over its strategy
and, according to analysts, failed to innovate at the pace required. Its
user numbers peaked at 73.6 million in October 2008 and has since shrunk to
sub 30 million.

Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, bought
MySpace for $580m in 2005, a year before Facebook launched and blew it out
of the water.

Last month he tweeted
about how his company “screwed up MySpace in every way possible”.

“Many questions and jokes about My Space.simple answer – we screwed up in
every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons,” he wrote.

It is the first time Murdoch has tweeted about the social network and his
experience of owning MySpace for six difficult years, since joining the
microblogging platform.

Murdoch has spoken out before about how difficult owning MySpace was, after finally
selling it off to advertising company Specific Media and Justin Timberlake
last year, for approximately $35m (£22m) – just six per cent of
what News Corporation paid for the business. Murdoch’s business is
understood to have retained a small undisclosed stake in the social network,
but is not involved in the day to day running of it.

In October 2011, during an annual shareholder meeting he admitted: “I made a
huge mistake…We bought it [MySpace] for $600 million. We could have sold it
for $6 billion a month later.”

Instead, Murdoch’s company continued to try and battle against Facebook for
users and advertising dollars for six more difficult years, relaunching
several times and going through three chief executives.

Article source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/myspace/9081492/Facebook-saving-MySpace.html

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