Viral Loop

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Viral Loop Page 28

by ADAM L PENENBERG


  scanned the brains of fiction readers: “Readers Build Vivid Mental Simulations of Narrative Situations, Brain Scans Suggest,” by Gerry Everding, Physorg.com, January 26th, 2009.

  “are scarcely able to lead”: Improvement of the understanding: Ethics and Correspondence of Benedict de Spinoza, by Benedictus de Spinoza (ed.) Robert Harvey Monro Elwes, Universal Classics Library, 1901.

  helps us live longer; get fewer colds and flu: “Friends ‘help people live longer,’” BBC News, June 15 2005.

  A research project by Paul J. Zak; “The stronger the signal of trust;” Trust works as an ‘economic lubricant’”: Interview with Paul Zaks by Corante, December 23, 2004. http://brainwaves.corante.com/archives/ neuroeconomics/

  It’s actually closer to 6.6: “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon? Microsoft finds 6.6 in massive data bank,” by Matt Asay, CNET, August 4, 2008.

  Mary Hodder material: Interviews with Mary Hodder. Published in part in “Her So-Called Digital Life,” by Adam L. Penenberg, Wired News, December 2, 2004.

  Al Gore keynote speech at We Media conference in NY: October 6, 2005.

  Intel Atom design and production: Interviews with Pankaj Kedia, Intel’s ecosystems manager, Mooly Eden, general manager of Intel’s mobile platforms group, and Martin Reynolds, vice president at Gartner Inc., who covers semiconductors. Published in part in “Intel Atom: Intel Makes Its Smallest Chip Ever,” by Adam L. Penenberg, Fast Company, October 2008.

  “These things are powerful”: Interview with Charlie Miller.

  Crushlink material: Interviews with Crushlink founders Greg Tseng and Johann Schleir-Smith.

  Federal Trade Commission fined the viral duo $900,000: “Ad Firm Pays $900,000 for CAN-SPAM Violation,” by Donna Higgins, Andrews Publications, March 29, 2006.

  CHAPTER 4

  Events and descriptions: Interviews with Sabeer Bhatia, Jack Smith, Tim Draper, and Steve Jurvetson. “What Is Viral Marketing,” white paper by Steve Jurvetson, May 1, 2000; “Hotmail Case Study,” by Steve Jurvetson and Sabeer Bhatia, created for an MBA class at Stanford Business School; transcription of interview with Sabeer Bhatia, published in Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days, by Jessica Livingston (ed.), Apress, 2007; “HotMale,” by Po Bronson, Wired, December 1998.

  Hotmail growth figures provided by Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

  CHAPTER 5

  Events and descriptions: Interviews with Arin Crumley, Susan Buice, Chris Kentis, and Ethan Marten. Some articles that helped form the basis of this chapter include “Revenge of the Nerds,” by Adam L. Penenberg, Fast Company, July 2006; “Cue the Computers: How Star Circle Pictures Is Remaking “Moviemaking,” by Adam L. Penenberg, Fast Company, September 2006; “Boom, Bust & Beyond,” by Adam L. Penenberg, Fast Company, March 2006; “Song Pirates,” by Adam L. Penenberg, Forbes.com, July 11, 1997.

  “Just imagine trying to shoot,” etc: Interview with James Longley.

  “The typewriter didn’t make better writers”: Interview with Ronald Steinman.

  Open Water material: Interview with Chris Kentis.

  Star Circle Pictures material: Interviews with Ethan Marten and Kimball Carr.

  “fascinating,” and “deliberately smudges the line between fiction and nonfiction”: Review by Robert Koehler, Variety, February 22, 2005.

  “spry,” etc: “Barbecue, bummers, and Boston: Our man at South by Southwest,” by Gerald Peary, Boston Phoenix, March 25, 2005.

  between 1825 and 1826 and 40 percent of American railway bonds, 45,000 miles of track, etc.: Engines That Move Markets, by Alasdair Nairn, John Wiley & Sons, 2002.

  our exuberance, irrational or otherwise: “Irreplaceable Exuberance,” by Henry Blodget, Op-Ed in New York Times, August 30, 2005.

  Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has likened the impact of the Internet to the Cambrian era: Q & A with Jeff Bezos, published in Businessweek, September 16, 1999, among many others.

  U.S population grew by 15 percent between 1910 and 1920, but the number of personal servants fell 25 percent: Electrifying America, by David Nye, MIT Press, 1990.

  “as the beginning of neural pathways”: Interview with Wes Craven: “Electroshocker!” by Adam L. Penenberg, Forbes.com, November 29, 1999.

  “The Lair” material: Interview with “The Lair,” an underground music pirate. “Song Pirates,” by Adam L. Penenberg, Forbes.com, July 11, 1997.

  It would cost about $3 billion to convert, “You have a $9 billion domestic box office,” and cost to offer digitally: Interview with Bud Mayo.

  “The studios are afraid,” etc.: Interview with Ira Deutchman.

  “If a theater pulls,” etc.: Interview with David Zelon.

  Research shows that in 1910, there were 2,600 daily newspapers…by 1990, there were 1,600: The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting, by Thomas C. Leonard, Oxford University Press, 1986.

  CHAPTER 6

  Events and descriptions: Interviews with Pete Healey, Michael Donnelly, Fritz Grobe, Stephen Voltz, Greg Spiridellis, and Steve Spangler.

  “It’s all about the combination”: Interview with Adam Lavelle.

  “The more in control we are”: A. G. Lafley speech at the Association of National Advertisers, December 4, 2006.

  “If you ever care to see”: Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreackage of Wall Street, by Michael Lewis, Penguin, 1990.

  tracked it to a nearby school: “The NASA Joke Cycle,” by Elizabeth Radin Simons, Western Folklore, October 1986.

  subservient chicken: http://www.subservientchicken.com

  CHAPTER 7

  Events and descriptions: Interviews with Maynard Webb and Jim Griffith. “Running the World’s Hottest Company Is a Lot Harder Than It Looks,” by Patricia Sellers, Fortune, October 18, 2004; “What Makes eBay Invincible,” by Brad Hill, E-Commerce Times, March 4, 2003; “Webb Master,” Julie Pitta, Forbes, December 13, 1999; “The People’s Company,” by Robert D. Hof, Businessweek, December 3, 2001; “Exit Interview (with Meg Whitman),” by Amy Wallace, Portfolio, May 2008; “Behind the Scenes at eBay,” by Kathleen Melymuka, Computerworld, January 13, 2000; “eBay Knocked Out by More Tech Problems,” by Troy Wolverton, CNET News.com, November 2, 1999; “Sun’s Bid to Rule the Web,” by Peter Burrows, Businessweek, July 24, 2000; “Webb Puts a Spin on EBay’s Woes (Q&A with Maynard Webb),” The Age (via Salon), September 28, 1999; “New-Media Companies Come Calling—Dot-Coms Are on the Prowl For IT Talent, and That’s Changing the Career Landscape,” by Teri Robinson, Information Week (reprinted from ITWeek), November 1, 1999. Offer Letter from Meg Whitman to Maynard Webb (Source: eBay), July 17, 1999.

  I relied extensively on The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, by Adam Cohen, Back Bay, 2003, for material on eBay’s early years. For anyone interested in learning more about eBay’s history, this is a must-read text.

  If your viral coefficient is one and explanation of scaling: Interview with Jeremy Liew.

  MagicFX hack of eBay: “Going, going, going…hacked!” by Adam L. Penenberg, Forbes.com, March 19, 1999.

  152 Friendster material: “How to Kill a Great Idea,” by Max Chafkin, Inc., June 2007; “Friendster, Love and Money,” by Gary Rivlin, New York Times, January 24, 2005; “Wallflower at the Web Party,” by Gary Rivlin, New York Times, October 15, 2006; “Friendster Moves to Asia,” by Ling Woo Liu, Time, January 29, 2008; “Social Networking Is Not a Business,” by Bryant Urstadt, Technology Review, July 1, 2008; Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?” by Danah Boyd, danahboyd.com, March 21, 2006; “Friendster Gets $10 Million Infusion for Revival Bid,” by Vauhini Vara and Rebecca Buckman, Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2008.

  “All they had to do”: Interview with Matt Cohler.

  “We were taken by surprise”: Interview with Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter.

  “They’re playing catch-up now”: Interview with Fred Wilson.

  Gmail scaling: Founders at Work (interview with Paul Buchheit, Gmail creator), by Jessica Livingston (ed.), Apress, 2007.

 
“It humbled the company”: “10 Years Ago, eBay Changed the World, Sort of by Accident: Auctioneer Grew by Trial and Error into a Phenomenon,” by Kevin Maney, USA Today, March 22, 2005.

  CHAPTER 8

  Events and descriptions: Interviews with Max Levchin, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman. Once Your Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, by Sarah Lacy, Gotham, 2008. “Meet the PayPal Mafia,” by Jeffrey M. O’Brien, Fortune, November, 26, 2007; “The Paypal Exodus,” by Rachel Rosmarin, Forbes, July 12, 2006; “Technology Is at the Center,” by Ronald Bailey, Reason Online, May 2008; “New software will allow users to beam money to each other,” by Martha Mendoza, Associated Press, July 23, 1999.

  For additional behind-the scenes action at PayPal (outside the scope of my interviews with PayPal’s founders and early employee Reid Hoffman) I relied extensively on The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth, by Eric M. Jackson, World Ahead Publishing, Inc., 2004. For anyone interested in PayPal, it’s an excellent resource.

  “Google wanted PhDs,” “great hire,” “was an idiot,” etc: “Meet the PayPal Mafia,” by Jeffrey M. O’Brien, Fortune, November, 26, 2007.

  “Peter, Max, and I are not directly aligned philosophically”: ibid.

  “If it’s war you want, it’s war you’ll get.” Recounted by Reid Hoffman.

  CHAPTER 9

  Events and descriptions: Interviews with Caterina Fake, Chris Dewolfe, and Aber Whitcomb. Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America, by Julia Angwin, Random House, 2009; “Smiles, Everyone; Online hookup site MySpace is beginning to look a lot less like Facebook and a lot more like MTV,” by Erika Brown, Forbes, December 10, 2007; “The Battle for Your Social Circle,” by Josh Quittner and Jesse Hempel, Fortune, November 26, 2007; “MySpace Strikes Back,” by David Kirkpatrick, Fortune, October 1, 2007. “The MySpace Generation; How a project to feed burritos to the hungry in L.A. spread all the way to Damascus,” by Chris DeWolfe, Forbes, May 7, 2007; “MySpace Cowboys,” by Patricia Sellers, Fortune, September 4, 2006; “Look Who’s Online Now: It took a while, but Rupert Murdoch has a case of Internet fever. A real-time portrait of a legendary mogul remaking his media colossus,” by Adam Lashinsky, Fortune, October 31, 2005.

  “Journalists are trained not to be emotional,” etc.: Interview with Michael K. Powell and published in “Technorati: A Public Utility,” by Adam L. Penenberg, Wired News, July 14, 2005.

  Flickr material: Interview with Flickr cofounder, Caterina Fake.

  MySpace material: Interviews with Chris DeWolfe, Aber Whitcomb, who headed MySpace’s IT, and Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America, by Julia Angwin, Random House, 2009, which offers delicious detail on MySpace and key information on Photobucket and YouTube.

  notorious teen hacker who, under the nom de hack, Lord Flathead: “Chase Computer Raided by Youths, Officials,” by David Sanger, New York Times, October 19, 1985.

  “the least lonely girl on the Internet”: “Tila Tequila,” by Lev Grossman, Time, December 16, 2006.

  Photobucket…sold to MySpace in 2007 for $250 million: “MySpace owner to buy Photobucket,” by Kenneth Li, Reuters, May 30, 2007.

  Google walked away with the year-old site for $1.65 billion in October 2006: “Google to Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion in Stock,” Google Press Release, October 9, 2006.

  CHAPTER 10

  Events and descriptions: Interview with Michael Birch. “Making a mint as the laidback king and queen of gossip central: Profile Michael and Xochi Birch,” Sunday Times, March 16, 2008; “On the Face of It,” by Emily Bell, The Guardian, March 17, 2008; “AOL to “supercharge’ Bebo revenues,” by Andrew Edge-cliffe-Johnson, Financial Times, March 13, 2008.

  “She’s such a stupid”: “Social networking websites such as Bebo were set up for entirely innocent purposes. But the scourge of teen bullying has now found a new playground in cyberspace,” published in Independent.ie, April 26, 2006.

  Dublin school suspended: ibid.

  death threats: Death Threats Posted on Net, by Jilly Beattie, Mirror, May 11, 2006.

  To disseminate porn: “Bebo evil or innocent?” Irish Times, May 20, 2006.

  Irish Times report: ibid.

  CHAPTER 11

  Events and descriptions: Interviews with Mark Zuckerberg, Matt Cohler, Jia Shen, Lance Tokuda, Sandi Sayama, Mark Pincus, Max Levchin, James Hong, and Jim Young. Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era, by John Cassidy, Harper Perennial, 2003; Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, by Sarah Lacy, Gotham, 2008; Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America, by Julia Angwin, Random House, 2009. “Me Media; How Hanging Out on the Internet Became Big Business,” by John Cassidy, The New Yorker, May 15, 2006; “Facebook Goes off Campus,” by Brad Stone, New York Times, May 25, 2007; “Facebook’s Plan to Hook Up the World,” by David Kirkpatrick, Fortune, May 29, 2007; “Facebook Grows Up,” by Steven Levy, Newsweek, August 20, 2007; “How to Kill a Great Idea,” by Max Chafkin, Inc., June 2007; “Facebook Ignites Entrepreneurial Spirit at Harvard,” by Vauhini Vara, Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2008; “The Battle For Facebook,” by Clarie Hoffman, Rolling Stone, June 26, 2008; “How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign,” by Ellen McGirt, Fast Company, April 2009.

  noticed that traffic shot up: “How to Kill a Great Idea,” by Max Chafkin, Inc., June 2007.

  a typical approach is to create thousands of web pages: Interview with Dave Dittrich.

  cybercriminals have been borrowing black-hat SEO techniques: “Google Bombing and the IRS,” by Adam L. Penenberg, fastcompany.com, March 30, 2009; “Search Google, Click to Massive Malware Attacks?” by Gregg Keizer, Computerworld, November 27, 2007.

  A 2009 report: “Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network,” Information Warfare Monitoring, March 2009.

  the six degrees patent, “probably the pioneer patent out there”: “Idea for Online Networking Brings Two Entrepreneurs Together,” by Teresa Riordan, New York Times, December 1, 2003.

  RockYou material: Interviews with Lance Tokuda, Jia Shen, and Sandi Sayama.

  Metrics for Viral Loop: Presentation by Lance Tokuda, RockYou, on using social networking platforms and applications for viral marketing distribution, at Startonomics workshop, San Francisco, 2008.

  Slide material: Interview with Max Levchin; Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, by Sarah Lacy, Gotham, 2008; Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America, by Julia Angwin, Random House, 2009; Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days, by Jessica Livingston (ed.), Apress, 2007.

  Click-through rate on banner ads on social networks is barely 0.02 percent: Interview with Seth Goldstein, founder of Social Media, an ad firm.

  CHAPTER 12

  “electric toy” and “utterly out of the question”: Engines That Move Markets, by Alasdair Nairn, John Wiley & Sons, 2002.

  At a conference in December 1996, “off their rocker,” and “Bill has an extraordinary ability…”: “Cable told to make ‘digital money,’” by Harry A. Jessell, Broadcasting & Cable, December 16, 1996.

  Battle between marketers and consumers: Some of these issues were explored in “The Speed Squeeze,” by Adam L. Penenberg, Media, September 22, 2006.

  “Long-tail marketing effect”: Email exchange with Mark Cuban.

  “How many times have you gone home from a commute”: Interview with David Schwartz.

  “Anything that causes the audience”: Interview with Colby Atwood.

  “the right to be left alone”: “The Right to Be Left Alone,” by Mark Skousen, Ideas on Liberty, May 2002.

  The Privacy Shibboleth explored in previously published pieces: “Surveillance Nation,” by Adam L. Penenberg, Wired, December 2001, and “Nowhere
to Run,” by Adam L. Penenberg, Media, April 1, 2008.

  more than five hundred surveillance cameras: The Surveillance Camera Players, http://www.notbored.org/nyu.html.

  “Moore’s Law of cameras”: Interview with David Brin.

  “privacy is the power to selectively reveal”: “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto,” by Eric Hughes, http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/cypherpunk.manifesto.

  “You have no privacy”: “On the Record: Scott McNeally,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 14, 2003.

  CVS’s ExtraCare program, which has signed up tens of millions: CVS CareMark History: http://info.cvscaremark.com/our-company/ history.

  “no longer can mean anonymity”: “Top Intelligence Official: Public Needs to Change Their Definition of Privacy,” by Pamela Hess, Associated Press, November 11, 2007.

  127 million sensitive electronic and paper records were lost or pierced by hackers: “The Anonymity Experiment,” Catherine Price, Popular Science, February 8, 2008.

  can’t keep secret his home address: “Google Balances Privacy, Reach,” by Elinor Mills, CNET news.com, July 14, 2005.

  Time, Not Clicks: The New Ad Unit material: Interview with Andy Monfried, CEO, Lotame.

  users should receive a commission: “Facebook’s Beacon Coming Back? Sort Of*,” by Vasanth Sridharan, Business Insider (Silicon Alley Insider), August 20, 2008.

  Find the Viral Loop widget at viralloop.com.

  EPILOGUE

  Population growth rate figures: “Year-by-Year World Population Estimates: 10,000 B.C. to 2007 A.D.,” by Scott Manning, http://www.digitalsurvivors.com/archives/worldpopulation.php, January 12, 2008; Worldometers: http://www.worldometers.info/population; U.S. Census International Database, World Population Information, http:// www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.html.

  Searchable Terms

  Note: Entries in this index, carried over verbatim from the print edition of this title, are unlikely to correspond to the pagination of any given e-book reader. However, entries in this index, and other terms, may be easily located by using the search feature of your e-book reader.

 

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