Two former Yale University law students have settled their suit brought against some 30-plus anonymous commenters who posted derogatory remarks about them on an internet forum called AutoAdmit. The comments, which ranged from standard insults to those of a more sexually explicit nature, were so vile they prompted the women to sue in order to out the identities of those doing the commenting. According to the plaintiffs, the suit was necessary because the discussion board, a site designed for law school graduates, was often monitored by firms looking to hire. Because the comments were associated with their names, the women claimed that it would hurt their chances of being offered a job.

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The Case

This case had been in litigation for years, having been originally filed back in 2007. The problem stemmed from the fact that internet sites such as AutoAdmit are essentially able to operate under different rules than those that apply to TV and newspapers when it comes to libel. This is due to a law called “Section 230,” which immunizes internet publishers from legal harm. At the time of its establishment in the 90’s, however, those “publishers” were the ISPs themselves – the AOLs and CompuServes that delivered Internet access to consumers. The idea of bloggers, social media publishers, and anonymous blog and forum commenters didn’t really exist yet and therefore wasn’t taken into consideration. That meant the women weren’t able to sue the operators of the discussion board website itself, but had to go after the anonymous posters instead. That, of course, was quite the challenge.

In the end, the women’s attorneys were able to identify some eight or nine of the anonymous posters, according to the Hartford Courant and they settled with some of them.

Because the terms of the settlement were confidential, the lawyers representing the former students, Heide Iravani and Brittan Heller, would not discuss them. However, San Francisco attorney Ashok Ramani, whose firm, Keker & Van Nest took the case pro-bono said that their clients were “very pleased with how the case went.” The women had sued for monetary damages so a settlement means they were likely awarded at least some of the amount they had hoped for.

Was the Settlement a Win or a Loss? Depends on Who You Ask

Marc Randazza, the attorney for one of the defendants scoffed that if the women’s intention were to have the negative comments removed, their interests were very poorly served. “Now there’s even an Encyclopedia Dramatica page for them,” he told the Yale Daily News.

However, David Rosen, one of the women’s attorneys and a Yale Law professor, countered that unmasking some of these anonymous posters who were hiding behind pseudonyms and then holding them accountable for what they said had accomplished “the fundamental goals of the case.” He thinks the suit may even have some internet commenters thinking twice before posting. The possibility of a lawsuit “may make some people pause before posting comments that are malicious and completely indefensible,” Rosen was quoted as saying.

Will This Really Change Things?

While obviously a major case, this suit isn’t the first time a defamation case like this has been brought to court. In fact, only months ago, an anonymous blogger using Google’s Blogger.com service was sued for rants she made about a fellow model, one Liskula Cohen, on her site “Skanks in NYC.” The victim sued to reveal the identity of the malicious blogger. Thanks to a judge’s ruling that Google must hand over to Cohen any identifying information they had on the site’s creator, the blogger in question was revealed to be Rosemary Port. (She’s now suing Google for not protecting her).

Although a slightly different case, the womens’ suit involving the forum commenters also succeeded – at least in part – in revealing the identities of those posting the defamatory messages. Combined with the prior example, it will be interesting to see what impact these cases have on the online world. Will this lead to more lawsuits where alleged victims seek to out the identities of their internet foes? Will it lead to more self-policing among the commenting community? Will internet trolls actually think before they type?

It’s too soon to say, but it’s possible that a kinder, gentler – and possibly more boring – internet may be in our future.

Image credit: Troll – flickr user tandemracer;

Discuss

Here’s our collection of photos from the Web 2.0 Summit, which ran from Tuesday through Thursday in San Francisco. It’s also our 30-second summary of what you may have missed at the big digerati event. We’ll start with the last man who spoke at the conference, Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web. He never made any attempt to own his creation and gave it to the world for free, he said, because “that was the only way it would have worked.” He said he was concerned about attempts by companies or countries to control the Internet.

Who would have thought the chief executive of General Electric would show up at a tech conference? But Jeff Immelt came to show off a new gadget that lets doctors monitor patients with a portable ultrasound. He also touted GE’s efforts to move into the green technology space.
Carly Fiorina had a close-shorn look because she is recovering from breast cancer. But she was frank in a Q&A where she talked about her ambition to run for Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat. She actually supported Obama’s policies on a more holistic effort to win the war in Afghanistan and using technology to make government more transparent. Yet she said she was a Republican because she feels government shouldn’t make choices that people should make themselves.
Mark Pincus couldn’t make his slide clicker work. But the chief executive of Zynga says a new era of social apps is coming that will create a vast virtual economy. He touted the integration of charitable donations into the actions gamers can take inside the company’s FarmVille game, which has 56 million monthly active users.

Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker said that leading indicators show we’re climbing out of the recession, but lagging indicators such as the 10 percent unemployment rate show there is still a lot of pain in the economy. She predicts that mobile technology will lead to a huge new wave in computing. And she went through a huge slide deck in 17 minutes.

Justice Department antitrust honcho Carl Shapiro said, “I’m from the government, and I’m your friend.” He explained that Justice hasn’t intervened in all that many antitrust cases, but will act when there are attempts to illegally monopolize markets, eliminate competition through mergers, or fix prices through collusion.
Brian Roberts, chief executive of Comcast, dodged questions about whether he was going to buy NBC Universal from General Electric. But he said that he likes to invest in content because it gives him multiple revenue streams. He politely listened as several speakers complained about Comcast’s high-speed Internet service.

Jonathan Miller, chief digital officer at News Corp., was glad he wasn’t at AOL anymore. But he has his own set of challenges as News Corp. makes sense of all of its different digital properties and tries to restore growth at MySpace, which has lost its market leadership to Facebook.
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, was a surprise guest. He showed off his comfy shoes and admitted he was embarrassed about the lateness of Google’s Chrome browser on the Mac platform. But he said that Google wasn’t to blame for all of the old media’s business problems.
Sean Parker, managing director at Founders Fund, founded or was an early executive at Napster, Plaxo and Facebook. He got booted out of all three companies, but he advanced an interesting theory about network effects and why it was inevitable that Facebook would overtake Google in importance.
Tim Armstrong, chief executive of AOL, said that the company’s spinoff from Time Warner is going as planned. He believes that content investments will be key to AOL’s future, and he noted that real-time communication (think some kind of mashup of instant messages and Twitter) is going to be a big part of AOL’s future.
The teens had the next-to-the-last word. They loved Apple and Facebook, but just didn’t grok the value of Twitter. One of them seemed to think that Apple had defeated Microsoft already, saying, “They won when they came up with the PC vs. Mac ads.”

Sean Parker, a managing partner at Founder’s Fund, gave an interesting talk today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The key to it is simple: Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and eBay will dominate the web going forward. One company of note that won’t? Google.

Why? Parker believes we’re shifting from the first phase of the Internet, which was dominated by what he calls “information services” These are companies like Google and Yahoo. But next up to dominate the web will be the “network services” like Facebook and Twitter, he believes.

To be clear, he thinks Google will stay huge and relevant, but it’s dominance will go down because collecting data is less valuable than connecting people, he said.

He went on to talk a bit about the social networking space, which is significant because he helped found Facebook.

Parker noted that data portability is a red herring. Data portability is easily solved by converters and adapters, he said. Facebook has of course been criticized for being much more closed with regards to its data than many of the other social networks. In Parker’s view, it would seem that not only is this not a bad thing, but it will help them dominate, because it will force other users to join them. That’s something that I would bet a lot of people believe, but it’s interesting to hear someone like Parket be ballsy enough to say that.

He went on to say that Friendster was not a fad, it failed because of the failure to scale, not because of poor product execution. So how did MySpace fall? It was a “systematic product failure,” said Parker. And Facebook was smart to launch with the college campus networks. “College students didn’t have MySpace accounts, so we went for them,” Parker said. It was all about tightly spun networks at colleges, and that helped Facebook spread naturally and virally.

Parker also talked a bit about why it’s not always the best products that win. Craigslist, MySpace, AIM and eBay all were poorly designed or executed, yet they did well. This was because of their networks were strong enough to overcome their bad products, Parker said.

Also of note was that one of Parker’s slides talked about the few networks Google does own, like Orkut. That slide seemed to imply that Foursquare is owned by Google, which of course is not true. Google did buy Foursquare co-founder’s Dennis Crowley’s former location company, Dodgeball, but they have since killed it. So in Parker’s view, Google is actually weaker than he thinks.

Update: Parker has written to let us know that he did, in fact, mean Dodgeball rather than Foursquare.

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At the Web 2.0 Summit today in San Francisco AOL’s chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong took the stage for a discussion with Federated Media’s John Battelle. Armstrong, who was previously in charge of the Google ad group in America, took the AOL job in March as the company prepares the split from its parent, Time Warner.

The Armstrong talk can be summarized pretty easily: Content, content, content. Armstrong made it very clear that not only is AOL in the process of spinning off into its own public company, but that they are now going to be a content company. In fact, they’ve gone from 500 journalists to over 3,000 since he took over, he said. And that will keep growing.

The idea is to grow AOL’s unique visitors and then figure out the best way to monetize it. But again, growth, will be the key. He’s not sure if 2010 will see that significant growth, but after that, he expects they’ll be going in the right way.

Notably, Armstrong also hinted at some new technology that AOL has been working on for the past 3 months now. When pressed, he would not say what it is, but said that they will be talking about it at a later date. Mysterious.

Armstrong says he took the AOL job partially because it was a risk. And he noted that if you’re not working in the Internet industry to take risks, you shouldn’t be in it. “If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough,” he said.

Below find the full Q&A (paraphrased):

JB: You and Sergey dress a bit differently.

TA: This is his tie (laughs).

JB: Why take the AOL CEO job? You had other options, like a sandy beach.

TA: I wasn’t thinking about leaving (Google) but the AOL thing came up. I’m a big believer that this is just the beginning for the Internet. AOL has a lot of things that people don’t realize. It’s undervalued. Google was a great experience, but I wanted to learn again. I have on this job in the first 6 months already. And the company was ready to change.

JB: Would you have taken the job if you knew you couldn’t spin it out from Time Warner?

TA: That’s not true. But it does make sense to spin it out.

JB: It hasn’t happened but it will right?

TA: Yeah that’s the intention.

JB: How does one do that? Take it public, private?

TA: If you own Time Warner stock, you will get a share of whatever AOL is. It’s like the Time Warner cable offering. So you can buy a share of AOL too soon.

JB: Is the company ready for that?

TA: Everyone has worked really hard. Still more work to do. We need to prepare to go public, so we have to do investor relations and taxes, etc. We’re in a good position, working towards it.

JB: How profitability and rev growth?

TA: Well that’s the tricky part. (laughs) The company is very profitable. Most of it is paid services, very small is from dial-up. We’re very focused in growing a large platform around content now. That’s the hard work to get down. The rev 2010 for us will see the content coming up.

JB: Lot of AOL brands now, TMZ, women’s brands, etc. Will this be more of that?

TA: We have some secret sauce that I can’t announce. But we’ve been working on something for 3 months that’s a big tech shift. I can talk about it later.

JB: Wait, tell me more. What tech?

TA: It’s a broader platform with more information about content, and around content. I can’t give you a better answer. We’ve gone from 500 journalists to over 3,000. We’re going to keep growing. Our content is 80% our own, we’re going to keep going. It’s all about taking content management serious. There’s an opportunity there.

JB: Will AOL start acquiring again?

TA: Yeah the AOL/Yahoo deal that almost happened really set us back. Now we’ve flipped it, we’re not living in fear. We will acquire other companies again. I’m not sure who yet. Our money is going to the product right now, period.

JB: Talk to me about Twitter, all we’ve heard the past few days. Do you want to integrate Twitter?

TA: Yeah we’re interested in bringing in stuff like that. We have lifestreaming now, we do see that as a part of our future. Brad Garlinghouse’s mandate is ‘how do we take messaging to the next level?’ I’m a bit fan of Twitter, they’ve made it impactful. We’d be happy to use it in some way.

JB: What about Bing?

TA: I think they did a good job with Bing. They’re getting worthy attention. I was surprised.

JB: Can content-bases strategies scale? Content businesses don’t seem to get all the love that tech companies do.

TA: I don’t know what our valuation will be but people in the media business look at Silicon Valley companies with envy. We have the opposite view. Let’s take some tech and be serious about it, around our content.

JB: But how do you scale?

TA: I can’t tell you that! (Yet) I’ll use the television example. When you see the TV channels, look at the depth of content with 300 channels. It could be better. The distribution has massively changed with the Internet.

JB: The deal with Google, let’s talk about that. Is Google going to get a new search deal with you?

TA: AOL is not in the search business. We’re not in a rush to get a new deal done. We’re patiently working to get something done. Google has been a great partner. Google has a leg up on the relationship side, but in my AOL hat I need to make sure we get the right deal.

JB: What about Yahoo not being a search company anymore, like what AOL did a while ago? Did you agree with Sergey that Yahoo should have stayed going it alone?

TA: No, but I wasn’t as concerned as he was about it. Yahoo had to do what it had to do. It’s a tough market. Did I think we’d be major search partners with Yahoo? No. Now they’re getting out.

JB: What are the metrics how you judge where you are now and down the road?

TA: When I got there, pageviews were the main metric. I still am looking at that, more uniques, etc. We need to get to new areas of innovation too. Looking at user interest, etc. It may be tough in 2010, but post 2010, how do we get shareholder value? I think it comes from consumer value. I want to see large growth. Then we’ll figure out how to monetize those.

JB: What are they now?

TA: 270 million globally, 100 million in the U.S. but we’re changing things (unique visitors). 2010 should start showing things, but we may drop a bit at first, then we should see growth after that.

Audience Q&A

Q: What’s the vision for Patch? And what about Yellowpage revenue?

TA: Patch is in about 10 towns, it’s being tested. We’re trying to digitize towns. But all that town’s information online. The vision is that this is a business, but this could be good for the world. This is a core area we can innovate in. We’re excited about that area.

I think in the future the Yellowpage business will be much, much better than it is today. A lot of companies out there are working on it. And Patch will help.

Q: Talk about email and ICQ.

TA: We’ve have: content, ads, and communications. What you’re talking about is the last bucket. People ask why isn’t AIM a billion dollar business? For us, that’s about the community.

Q: 500 to 3,000 journalists? Holy cow, how’d you do that?

TA: Mainly it’s been hiring and getting free-lance people on payroll. We have come up with a content strategy that fragmentation is our friend. We started to quickly add content when we see successful ideas. We’re doing over 3,000 pieces of content a day online, and much more than that soon. We’re also now doing 3-4 times the amount of video we were doing a few months ago. This is a way for us to build a community. We’ve been hiring big names from ESPN and WSJ. For journalism, you’re not just hiring the person, you’re hiring their community too.

Q: What about using new devices?

TA: There’s some interesting stuff from a device perspective. But we’re just thinking about the users now, no matter what they use. Mobile will be even more important in the future. I’m agnostic towards the devices though.

Q: So will mobile be it’s own interface?

TA: I don’t know.

JB: What about Google going into content?

TA: I know Google gets criticized a lot for going into new areas, but they keep ahead of the curves. They’re very good at that. It makes sense to test things, even if they don’t work out. It’s more than just sitting around the room and thinking about it. “If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough.” AOL used to take no risks, now we’re changing that.

Bebo is a great product, we’ve pulled it back out and are trying to do it as its own product again. Shame on us for trying to integrate it to all this other stuff. I came to AOL because it’s a risk. If you’re not ready for that, the Internet isn’t for you.

That’s a wrap.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Here’s our collection of photos from the Web 2.0 Summit, which ran from Tuesday through Thursday in San Francisco. It’s also our 30-second summary of what you may have missed at the big digerati event. We’ll start with the last man who spoke at the conference, Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web. He never made any attempt to own his creation and gave it to the world for free, he said, because “that was the only way it would have worked.” He said he was concerned about attempts by companies or countries to control the Internet.

Who would have thought the chief executive of General Electric would show up at a tech conference? But Jeff Immelt came to show off a new gadget that lets doctors monitor patients with a portable ultrasound. He also touted GE’s efforts to move into the green technology space.
Carly Fiorina had a close-shorn look because she is recovering from breast cancer. But she was frank in a Q&A where she talked about her ambition to run for Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat. She actually supported Obama’s policies on a more holistic effort to win the war in Afghanistan and using technology to make government more transparent. Yet she said she was a Republican because she feels government shouldn’t make choices that people should make themselves.
Mark Pincus couldn’t make his slide clicker work. But the chief executive of Zynga says a new era of social apps is coming that will create a vast virtual economy. He touted the integration of charitable donations into the actions gamers can take inside the company’s FarmVille game, which has 56 million monthly active users.

Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker said that leading indicators show we’re climbing out of the recession, but lagging indicators such as the 10 percent unemployment rate show there is still a lot of pain in the economy. She predicts that mobile technology will lead to a huge new wave in computing. And she went through a huge slide deck in 17 minutes.

Justice Department antitrust honcho Carl Shapiro said, “I’m from the government, and I’m your friend.” He explained that Justice hasn’t intervened in all that many antitrust cases, but will act when there are attempts to illegally monopolize markets, eliminate competition through mergers, or fix prices through collusion.
Brian Roberts, chief executive of Comcast, dodged questions about whether he was going to buy NBC Universal from General Electric. But he said that he likes to invest in content because it gives him multiple revenue streams. He politely listened as several speakers complained about Comcast’s high-speed Internet service.

Jonathan Miller, chief digital officer at News Corp., was glad he wasn’t at AOL anymore. But he has his own set of challenges as News Corp. makes sense of all of its different digital properties and tries to restore growth at MySpace, which has lost its market leadership to Facebook.
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, was a surprise guest. He showed off his comfy shoes and admitted he was embarrassed about the lateness of Google’s Chrome browser on the Mac platform. But he said that Google wasn’t to blame for all of the old media’s business problems.
Sean Parker, managing director at Founders Fund, founded or was an early executive at Napster, Plaxo and Facebook. He got booted out of all three companies, but he advanced an interesting theory about network effects and why it was inevitable that Facebook would overtake Google in importance.
Tim Armstrong, chief executive of AOL, said that the company’s spinoff from Time Warner is going as planned. He believes that content investments will be key to AOL’s future, and he noted that real-time communication (think some kind of mashup of instant messages and Twitter) is going to be a big part of AOL’s future.
The teens had the next-to-the-last word. They loved Apple and Facebook, but just didn’t grok the value of Twitter. One of them seemed to think that Apple had defeated Microsoft already, saying, “They won when they came up with the PC vs. Mac ads.”

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller sat down to talk with Federated Media’s John Battelle. Miller oversees a lot of projects for News Corp., most notably MySpace.

Below find my live notes from the Q&A (paraphrased):

JB: What do you make of this whole rodeo around Twitter?

JM: I think it’s great. Search had been out of the socialization of the web thing, now it’s in it. It’s also clear that we have a lot of competition. It’s great. It’s not a one-horse race. Microsoft is hanging in there (in search).

JB: What’s it like to work with Rupert Murdoch?

JM: It’s fascinating. He’s so curious. He wants to know everything about everything. No matter what it is. He retains his ambition. He’s as ambitious as anyone I’ve ever met.

JB: What’s your job? What does it involve?

JM: I’m Chairman and CEO of the Digital Media group. I do two things really: One, I’m the executive in charge of a lot of businesses like MySpace. The other role is to provide strategy and guidance for the entire corporation.

JB: How do you split your time between those two? Thoughts on all this media stuff?

JM: Rupert feels there needs to be a paid content model – that doesn’t mean there won’t be free as well, but that’s our stance. There will be free and paid, but there will be paid. I spend half my time in that world trying to figure it out.

JB: It is just a pay wall?

JM: That’s a hard way to do it. You have to offer value to the users. It has to be different from the free area. It’s not just throwing a pay wall. Wall Street Journal is working with that model. You can walk and chew gum at the same time.

JB: So that works for the WSJ, but they have a fat wallet audience.

JM: Well I think they offer value.

JB: Why leave what you were doing?

JM: I was having a good time and we were investing in a few key areas. One big one was online video. That was fun and focused. But I was given the opportunity to work on a larger scale with more difficulty. I’m a glutten for punishment.

JB: The idea was that you were going to have to “fix MySpace,” right? Owen was here yesterday laying out the plan. How is it going? How do you know it’s working?

JM: Fix isn’t the right word. Nothing was broken that we’re putting it back. You have to think ahead. I don’t want to be in the catch up game. We need to get the essence of what MySpace is. It’s about making contacts, we’re getting back to that. The social part. Look at the big picture, then focus it down. Music announcements are core.

There was some stuff that needed to be fixed. You need to stablize loss of traffic. It’s been a combination of organic loss of traffic and cleaning up the service. We’re stablizing it, but it’s not the fix game. We need to do new and different.

JB: Rupert got a lot of credt for making that investment at the time. Is he upset for how it has gone?

JM: You know you have to keep moving forward. But MySpace didn’t keep going. There have been competitiors in the general space, Facebook and Twitter that came along. We’re upset that we didn’t keep going. It’s hard to regain momentum.

JB: Is Twitter overhyped?

JM: It’s fascinating. I didn’t think it would have been what it is now. But the question is: Where does it go? They’re smart to be an open platform. The money question is easier, I think. Their new deals are interesting, but it doesn’t take you to a billion valuation. Are you your own thing or are you a sub-category of what Facebook is doing? That’s the question.

JB: Is News Corp. a buyer in this space right now?

JM: We did just buy iLike. It’s strategic. We’re not just trying to go after cool businesses, it has to be about our strategy. That’s a music focus with iLike. We’re not just investing.

JB: What are the key strategies?

JM: Generally I’m obsessed with realtime. I have been for a long time, even when I was with AOL. I didn’t know it back then, but now you can really see it. Twitter is one level, but it’s beyond that.

Another interest is global. I just returned from Asia – it was really eye-opening. As we heard from Mary Meeker, the mobile world over there is amazing. They have things over there that compete with the iPhone. The mobile Internet is huge over there. We’re actually behind over here. It’s a huge transformation.

For MySpace music and games. It needs to start with an “M” a “G” or an “E”. We need to open our platform more with MySpace, like Twitter is doing.

JB: Talk about FAN (Fox Audience Network).

JM: Most people in the audience would know the biggest ad networks, but not the #5 one, which is us. We’re moving up. We want to be #4. A deal with Omnicom helps us big time. It’s a real-time bidding network, advertisers can buy directly in to this huge network. They can buy a huge audience. It’s giving that power over to the buy side. It’s the beginning of a coming out part for FAN. Display advertising is coming.

JB: In display publishers feel threatened right? You can reach through the brand and grab an audience. Is that a problem?

JM: Yep. I think it’s a real change. There will be a premium world that will command high CPMs. Hulu can do that. It’s a true premium buy and a great expereience. Then there is the cheap inventory that can go to a broad audience. I think FAN can help with that. But the middle will get squeezed. You have to be premium or bulk. It’s hard in the middle.

JB: FAN is an exchange network right?

JM: Yeah directionally exchange.

JB: How’s it different from what’s out there.

JM: Along with a move to display, it’s a move to exchange. FAN uses the social networking environment. People tell you stuff freely through these networks. We’re not doing profiles, but it’s audience, to be clear.

JB: So if I declare what I’m interested in on MySpace, but then I go to another FAN network, and I see an ad for what I’m interested in.

JM: You can spread that across the web.

JB: Let’s go back in time a bit. As the former CEO of AOL, the new CEO TIm Armstrong – what should I ask him?

JM: That’s a good one. I’m thrilled he’s there. They need to get their freedom. I know they’re on track, but are they really. The freedom from Time Warner. That’s #1. It’s mutually felt, both want it. Is it on track.

Number two is how does the new content focus scale? Can you make enough of it in the model they have. The portal-based model.

The third, what’s happening in ad sales? Revenue is kind of important and AOL has a declining revenue and subscription base. So you need accelerating ads. It’s so key to that company.

Audience Q&A

Q: Is there a big opportunity for brands to do new things with all these social networking communities and sites?

JM: Absolutely. That’s what AOL has been doing with TMZ, leveraging the AOL platform. We need to start new brands, not just extend networks.

Q: Is authentication big?

JM: Yes, it’s a big thing.

Q: (From Mike) Did you sell Photobucket?

JM: (Laughs). I’m confident that is Mike Arrington. No I can’t make that announcement here. But look, we’re going over all our assets, is it a stand-alone or does it fit? Photobucket is right in the middle of that. It will be resolved shortly, but not today.

Q: Talk about MySpace versus Facebook and Twitter.

JM: Twitter is about the assymettic relationship. Facebook is symmetric. MySpace is in between. We’ve had both in our history. We need to declare a major. Facebook is trying to be everything it seems. We’re more about interests of our users going forward, more than just the friend thing. I think we’re closer to Twitter. But we can be richer, I think. I don’t know if Twitter with change, but that’s how it is today.

Q: Talk about copyrights.

JM: We need to have copyrights that are expected. Even in China they realize that. They have a budding content industry too. They’re very interested in copyright and piracy. I think we’ll have an Internet that respects copyright.

That’s a wrap.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Meez has built a virtual playground for 13 million teens in the past couple of years. Now that playground is going to get a lot bigger and more crowded as Meez integrates its Meez Nation virtual world into MySpace.

Meez users will be able to log into their virtual world directly from within the MySpace social network, almost as if the virtual world is a widget on a MySpace page that lets you dive into another world. The partnership promises to help MySpace with user engagement, one of the closely watched metrics for how well a site hangs on to its users. Meez says it ranks No. 5 in engagement for online destination sites in the U.S. In June, Meez managed to hit No. 1 in engagement, at 36.4 minutes per user, according to market researcher MediaMetrix.

With Meez, users can create cartoon-like avatars, or virtual characters, and chat with their friends. They can express themselves by decorating rooms and buying virtual clothes. They can also wander around in the Meez Nation virtual world, which launched 14 months ago. That world has a variety of neighborhoods, public hangouts, and personal “Roomz.” The most popular thing that users do is dance to music in these rooms, said John Cahill, chief executive of the San Francisco-based company, in an interview. Business is good because of the growing popularity of virtual goods, Cahill said.

Since MySpace is loaded with web-savvy teens who love to share videos and music, the social network is likely to be a good match for Meez in co-marketing efforts, said Cahill. Meez users are watching a million videos per day, and they’re playing over 100,000 games. Each time they log in, they spend about an hour on the site. About 90 percent of users are in the U.S.

Traffic has hit three million unique visitors a month. The company makes money through ads, virtual goods, and paid subscriptions. One of the most popular things to do is send branded virtual gifts to friends. Advertisers include Nike, RocaWear, Clone Wars, NBA, NHL, and others.

Cahill said MySpace is the first of a number of sites that will integrate the Meez Nation virtual world into a branded site. Meez has been profitable since the second quarter on an operations basis, and it turned cash flow positive in July. The company made its Meez avatars available on mobile phones on the KDDI and Verizon Wireless networks.

Meez is backed by Anthem Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, Draper & Associates and Transcosmos. The company has 30 employees and has raised $10.75 million in three rounds. Rivals include Gaia Online and IMVU. Cahill said the company isn’t raising money.

Scoreloop is announcing today that it will make it easier than ever for iPhone game makers to put social networking features in their games.

This so-called CoreSocial technology, described as a white label social gaming platform, lets developers insert features into their games such as score leaderboards, achievement medals, cross promotions and virtual currency. Those features get gamers to brag to their friends and stay connected with each other. That makes them stick with the games longer.

San Francisco-based Scoreloop has made this platform available to game developers for a while. But now it is adding the ability to take its features and completely integrate them within a game. So now a gamer can use Scoreloop’s social features within the game’s user interface itself, rather than leaving the game to go to a Scoreloop app. To gamers, the Scoreloop features will seem like they’re built into the game. On top of that, if the developers desire, Scoreloop’s own programmers will do the integration work themselves.

Scoreloop gets paid through the purchase of virtual currency. For instance, if gamers want to challenge each other to a match, they have to purchase Scoreloop Coins. Then they can engage in a multiplayer match. Marc Gumpinger, chief executive of Scoreloop, said in an interview that launch partners for this new service include the publishers of the Parachute Panic and Astro Boy (top) games that are already available on iTunes, and the yet-to-be-released Pee Monkey Jungle Fire game (right).

Gumpinger said the platform is good for developers who don’t want to reinvent social gaming features and instead want to concentrate on making a game fun. Big brands will probably like this kind of platform because it gives them an easy way to get into the iPhone game market.

The company competes with the Plus+ service of Ngmoco and Aurora Feint’s Open Feint platform. But Gumpinger says his company can be viewed as a more neutral party by developers because Scoreloop doesn’t make games itself.

Scoreloop has 20 employees and has raised $3 million in funding from Target and Earlybird.

“If everybody is special, then one is.”

Such is the problem companies face when crowdsourced criticism tends to be — er — not so critical.

Yelp, a community recommendations site, is the first that comes to mind facing this problem. The average rating for its more than 7 million reviews is 3.8 stars (out of five). Co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman says that’s a little better than other user-generated sites like YouTube, whose users say its videos are worth an average 4.3 stars.

Still, it means that any user looking for a place to have dinner inevitably comes to a list of all four-star restaurants (like the one to the left). There are so many reviews that it’s virtually impossible to have a perfect record, yet people are reluctant to hand out one- or two-star ratings. And when you’re looking for a fast solution on where to eat, a list full of four-star restaurants makes for an overwhelming “paradox of choice” situation. (Ironically, the site feels less useful to me now than it did two years ago when there were enough reviews that I could discover great finds, but not be daunted by all the four-star choices.)

So how does Yelp deal with this? The company says it’s not straying from the five-star rating system anytime soon, not even for some sort of percentile system where you can see how restaurants compare to each other. Instead, the company says its ranking system already factors in the number of reviews, whether they come from experienced Yelpers or first-time reviewers, and whether those reviews were voted helpful.

Virtually identical ratings mean people have to dive into reviews to understand what’s different, said Vince Sollitto, who heads communications for the San Francisco-based company. (Yes, it takes more time, but I bet it’s better off for Yelp’s advertisers.) The company’s also pushing more social features, nudging users to find and follow like-minded reviewers. Rather than relying on a generic one- to five-star system, Yelp says connecting people with similar tastes may be the best way of discovering the next gem.

Editor’s note: This post is sponsored by Virtual Goods Summit.

The 3rd annual Virtual Goods Summit will take place in San Francisco, CA on October 29-30, 2009. The event will bring together thought leaders in this space to talk about what’s changed, what’s working, and the key challenges facing the industry. This year’s lineup features executives from the leading companies in the virtual goods ecosystem, including Tencent, Playfish, DeNa Global, Nexon, Zynga, Playdom, Bigpoint, IMVU, Outspark, Zong, PayPal, Perfect World, MyYearbook, InComm, NHN, Ning, TrialPay, Super Rewards, Viximo, Offerpal Media, Serious Business, Slide, Giant Interactive, and many others. Our assembled panel of experts will share their thoughts on key issues such as trends in monetization in the United States and Asia, key learnings on how to best drive revenue from social games via virtual goods, market sizing estimates for the US and global virtual goods opportunities, and similarities and differences between user behavior in the United States and Asia

In addition to the exciting lineup at this year’s edition of the annual must-attend event in the virtual goods space, the Virtual Goods Summit is expanding in 2009 with the creation of “Virtual Goods Summit University” or VGSU. VGSU will offer attendees the opportunity to go in-depth on the fundamental business practices and capabilities required for success with a virtual goods business model. The Virtual Goods Summit University will cover some of the most important issues facing publishers today, including how to get started with virtual currencies, how to manage a virtual economy, key decisions when rolling out a payments infrastructure, and how to manage multiple virtual currencies.

VentureBeat readers can save 15% on tickets by using the code VENTUREBEAT at checkout when registering at http://vgsummit2009-venturebeat.eventbrite.com.