Lil Wayne To Release New Album Online At Midnight After MTV's VMAs
By Nekesa Mumbi Moody, AP
NEW YORK (AP) -- Lil Wayne is hoping his performance on the MTV Video Music Awards will be so good, fans will rush out and get his new album: The rapper is making it digitally available at midnight after Sunday's show.
"Tha Carter IV" will be available on iTunes, Amazon.com and other digital outlets. The physical album will hit stores Aug. 29.
"Tha Carter IV" features collaborations with Drake, Cory Gunz, Rick Ross, Busta Rhymes and others.
Lil Wayne says he's making history.
Google Buzz Was An $8.5-Million Disaster. Why Can’t Google Do Social?
Image via CrunchBase
Google Buzz was Google’s attempt to combine Twitter and Facebook’s news feed. Knowing that people would be opposed to getting involved in yet another social sharing site, Google tried to make it easy to adopt by automatically populating people’s list of Buzz friends, using its knowledge of who they emailed most often in Gmail. People weren’t too happy about that, given that Buzz activity was public.
Google was quickly beset with privacy complaints, and fixed the problem, but the damage was done. Within 10 days, a complaint had been filed with the FTC and a class action lawsuit had been filed in California. The FTC investigation is still pending, but the class action suit was resolved yesterday. Google emailed all of its Gmail users about the $8.5-million settlement:
The settlement acknowledges that we quickly changed the service to address users’ concerns. In addition, Google has committed $8.5 million to an independent fund, most of which will support organizations promoting privacy education and policy on the web. We will also do more to educate people about privacy controls specific to Buzz. The more people know about privacy online, the better their online experience will be.Google follows in Facebook’s steps in creating an educational fund after a privacy disaster, but it hasn’t been able to follow in Facebook’s steps as well in creating a social product that captures the public’s imagination…
The Register noted Google’s “unusual step” in contacting all of its users by Gmail about the settlement. It was a practical move, though. Not only did they get to plug Buzz one more time — they helpfully included a link to the Buzz website, along with a link to the Buzz settlement site — they got to quickly and cheaply notify all class action members (all of us Gmail/Buzz users) about the settlement and their right to opt out of it, as required by law, in case anyone feels unsatisfied and wants to pursue their own suit.
It seems like the hot trend right now for tech companies that make privacy mistakes is to settle with a big payment to set up an educational fund. Facebook similarly paid out $9.5 million in 2009 to set up an online privacy foundation to settle a class action lawsuit over Beacon. That Beacon suit dragged out over two years (meaning bigger legal bills). Kudos to Google for settling theirs in under a year.
Google is the master of search, but has struggled in the world of social:- Social networking site Orkut has fizzled in the U.S., with no hope of getting a foothold in Facebook’s community. It thrived in India and Brazil initially, but now Facebook has overtaken Orkut in India, according to the WSJ, and is growing fast in Brazil, according to RWW.
- Earlier this year, the company killed Wave, a program for work sharing, since no one was using it.
- Google Latitude, a location-sharing service which came out of the purchase of Dennis Crowley’s Dodgeball, has been surpassed in popularity by Dennis Crowley’s Foursquare.
- And Buzz just doesn’t really have much buzz at all.
Why can’t Google build social applications? Ifindkarma speculated in a fascinated post that it’s because Google is too good at doing what it does well:
Google apps are for working and getting things done; social apps are for interacting and having fun.Social apps are like molasses designed to suck us in and keep us hanging out there. Google is too good at making efficient apps that keep us coming back over and over again to use them, but don’t keep us hanging around.
Another issue is that Google knows so much about us already through our use of its other products; its attempt to use that knowledge to leverage a social network makes some users uncomfortable. Will Buzz be an $8.5 million reminder that Google should stick to what it does best?
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