Over the past few months Hashable, a startup focused on networking, has become an addiction among many of the power players in New York’s tech scene. It allows users to track who they meet with and who they introduce, creating a dataset that measures in fine detail the social economy of Silicon Alley. “Once I started, I was hooked,” says Charlie O’Donnell of First Round Capital. “Now I’m feeling a bit competitive. I really want to be one of the top connectors.”

Big-name investors like O’Donnell and Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson use the service regularly. But on the site’s leaderboard the top three users, not counting Hashable employees, are a CEO of a small dating site, a relatively unknown investor and an NYU senior and Dogpatch Lab’s intern named Trevor Owens. Which begs the question, how exactly does the site quantify social capital?

Check out the rest of the story over at the NY Observer

Plenty of tech companies are making the leap into the business of mobile telephones, but so far that’s mostly involved partnering with one of the giant carriers like Verizon or At&T. But the news that Facebook and Skype are partnering on communications highlights the possibility of a new future, in which web-only services emerge as a powerful new brand of Telco.

I argued that Facebook should resist the temptation to build its own phone. That’s an expensive and difficult process that would take it far outside its expertise in software. But an integration with Skype is another story. Integrating Skype would allow Facebook to capture a percentage of mobile voice calls without delving into hardware at all.

When I bought my new Android phone it automatically synced with my Gmail and Facebook accounts in order to add people to my contact list. Of my roughly 200 contacts, more than one third are simply Facebook friends for whom I have no cell phone number. There have been numerous occasions when I was frustrated with the realization that I couldn’t call these folks. The integration with Skype could change all that.

Imagine a dense urban center ten years from now where WiFi is a constant in homes, offices and public transportation. Facebook and Skype could potentially power a mobile device with no contract and no carrier, powered only by your social network and voice/video over internet calling.

Read the rest of this story over at BNET

For over a decade now, search has been the dominant paradigm on the Web. To Google (GOOG) became a verb meaning to understand the world, and companies began to live and die by their search result rankings.

Yesterday Facebook introduced a new paradigm, a way of understanding the entire Web that is based around the social, not the search.

Google’s triumph was to design a search engine that used the network of connections between different websites to decide what results were relevant. Facebook’s new Open Graph system does the same thing, but instead of using links between sites to measure relevance, it looks at social networks for the connections between people, places and things.

For a full rundown of how the Open Graph system works, check out my post from yesterday. In brief, this new approach allows users to experience the entire Web through the prism of their Facebook profile. If I like a certain book or movie on an outside partner, I can click a button to share that preference on Facebook. If my Facebook page knows that I like Korean food, an outside partner like Yelp can tailor my experience to reflect that. “It means the Web can become a series of personally and semantically meaningful connections,” says CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“The 10 blue links paradigm, popularized by Google, appears to be reaching its limits,” writes Om Malik in a post on why Google should fear the social web. In an Open Graph world, users will turn to their social connections to figure out where to shop, what to watch and when to travel. All this is already happening of course, and Google has even entered into the social game. But Facebook’s size and the depth of its partnerships give it a huge advantage in this arena. In place of search, says Zuckerberg, “The open graph puts people at the center of the web.”

Image via Flickr user Max-B

Google’s plan to deliver affordable, super high speed internet access to a few lucky American towns sounds like some 21st century version of Willy Wonka’s golden ticket to the Chocolate Factory. If you thought Snozzberries were crazy, how about internet access of a gigabyte per second — roughly 100 times faster than what most Americans experience and 1000 times faster than AT&T’s basic DSL package? Like Wonka, Google’s aim is to show consumers exactly what they’ve been missing.

Full post over at BNET -

Published my first piece for The Atlantic today about the video gamer version of Dante’s Inferno.

What makes this story work is the tension between staying faithful to the original text and pleasing the gaming community. The game’s developers went out of their way to talk about how they kept many elements of the poem intact, while simultaneously reassuring gamers that they had ditched all the sissy stuff.

The gaming community was actually offended by the marketing campaign for this title. I think it would have been a lot braver, and commercially savvy, to create a game that used Dante’s fear and fragility instead of ditching it for an a stock action hero.

Still I applaud the developers for trying something this ambitious and for bringing attention to such a great work of classic literature.

Just wrote my first blog post for CBS on the real issue Google has with China. Google has managed to frame this as a matter of principles and politics, a smart move that helps them win back some of the support they lost for compromising with the Chinese on censorship.

But the truth is that Google’s was willing   to compromise on “being evil” if it meant winning a share of the fastest growing internet market in the world. What they weren’t willing to gamble with was the heart of their global business, customer trust.