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Along with its nifty new iPhone application, Facebook on Monday night unveiled a new home page. No, not the moderately infamous "redesign" of its member pages--this is a new look for the page that you see when you navigate to Facebook.com without being logged in. It's what you'll see if you're not yet a member.

There's a pretty new blue gradient background, sure, and it makes the whole page look a little bit less stuffy. But more importantly, there's a map of the world with little Facebook "head" icons … Read more

Maybe it's just because it's Monday morning and I've had only one cup of coffee, but I'm not quite comprehending DigitalCity.com, the latest in a parade of bloggy new sites from AOL.

A press release describes Digital City, which gets its name from a very vintage AOL brand, as "a new approach to geo-blogging by showcasing original content with a local slant, but global appeal." In other words, it's stuff about nightclubs in Vegas, concerts in Portland, and New York vs. Boston rivalries that are written so that you don't have … Read more

NEW YORK--The crowds at the Web 2.0 Expo seem to have one clear consensus on what they think of this week's Wall Street meltdown: things are bad, but it's no time to panic.

Of course, they're all pretty relieved that the tech industry can't be blamed for this economic meltdown.

"This is a very good time to start up a company," investor David Rose of the New York Angels firm said in a panel called Starting Up in Silicon Alley. "Despite the calamities that are going on outside, the world is not coming to an end."

The current financial crisis is less than a week old, after all, so the outcome is less than certain. Most of the conference crowd chose to be cautiously optimistic.

The Jacob Javits Convention Center is only a few blocks from Wall Street. Yet at the Web 2.0 Expo, it was mostly business as usual: marketing, monetization, branding, social advertising, and a Microsoft-sponsored party on Wednesday night where the centerpiece was an ice sculpture that dispensed vodka shots.

Standing at his company's booth on Thursday afternoon, one representative of a Web-based nonprofit organization shook his head with disapproval. "Not enough people are talking about it," he said. We all know what "it" is.

In fairness, it's a stretch to say everyone was twittering while Wall Street burned. The underlying attitude at the Web 2.0 Expo was one of sober acceptance, realizing that conducting business in 2008 is more difficult than it was in 2006.

I'm very worried," said Majid Abai, CEO of the community software start-up Pringo. "When the economy is down, investment in technology is down."

There's reason to be concerned: financial-services companies are often cutting-edge technology buyers, and the mess on Wall Street makes it unlikely that big brokerage houses (at least the ones still standing) will be spending on anything nonessential anytime soon.… Read more

NEW YORK--"We are not an alley."

So said venture capitalist Fred Wilson of at the Web 2.0 Expo here in his keynote entitled "New York's Web Industry From 1995 to 2008: From Nascent to Ascendent." A longtime leader in Gotham's culture of digital innovation, Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, gave a short "history lesson" to the hordes of conference attendees, many of whom had come from hundreds of miles away.

And the term "Silicon Alley," he said, is one that the city should shake off. "We are one of the largest cities in the world," Wilson said. "We are one of the largest Internet development communities in the world. Let's bury the name Silicon Alley."

New York's technology community is still considered an afterthought in comparison to the Bay Area, and Wilson, though he has invested in companies like Delicious and Twitter over the years and runs one of the Web's most influential venture capital blogs, isn't yet in the league of true Valley legends like John Doerr.

But the numbers, Wilson said, show a very different trend. In 1995, 230 early-stage companies in the Bay Area received venture backing, and only 30 did in New York. By the end of the year, 2008's numbers should be 360 in the Bay Area and nearly 120 in New York. "We have grown here in New York by four times in 14 to 15 years, and Silicon Valley has grown by 1.5 times," Wilson said. "We've gone from being one-eighth of the activity of Silicon Valley to one-third. In my mind that's very significant."

The keynote took the audience back, in fact, to 1979, when New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program was first formed. "It started in an art school, the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU," Wilson said. "I think that still to this day defines a distinguishing characteristic of the New York Internet community."

The timeline went on: the rise of interactive ad agencies in 1995, along with the debut of The New York Times Web site, which first launched in conjunction with the visit of Pope John Paul II to New York; the debut in the mid-1990s of digital businesses like iVillage, The Knot, and Star Media; the sale of Total New York to AOL, and the IPO of DoubleClick in 1997--New York's first tech company to go public.… Read more

NEW YORK--Blogger and new-media publicist Brian Solis struck down one of the biggest marketing buzz terms of the past few years in a panel on Wednesday morning at the Web 2.0 Expo here.

"There is no 'viral marketing' per se," Solis said, referring to the marketing trend of creating a catchy online gimmick and hoping it will spread like the latest cat-does-something-funny video on YouTube. Rather, Solis explained, it's the people who make it viral. Getting a grip on online marketing is an ongoing strategy, he said. "This isn't a campaign. This is something … Read more

NEW YORK--In the press room at the Web 2.0 Expo at the Jacob Javits Convention Center here, there are a ton of fliers, stickers, and press kits lying around for us reporters and bloggers to peruse.

It's kind of hard for any one of them to stand out. Unless you're like collaboration software start-up Octopz, which we reviewed last year.

The company's strategy: Leave out some bright turquoise-and-green stuffed octopi, free for the taking. No corny company logos, no attached pitch, just a cute stuffed sea creature with a flash drive press kit tied around its … Read more

Let's hope Yahoo has finally learned that the maxim "If you build it, they will come" simply does not apply to a social network.

The Silicon Valley mainstay and onetime Microsoft shopping-spree target is quietly shutting down Yahoo Mash, its latest foray into creating a general-interest social network like a Facebook or MySpace.

It's the latest social-networking failure for Yahoo, which was unable to get its earlier "Yahoo 360" network off the ground, and once attempted to purchase Facebook, only to have its billion-dollar offer turned down.

Mash was cute, with a slick interface, … Read more

Imagine seeing an ad on Facebook for a retailer like American Apparel or Target, and clicking a button to pass a 15-percent-off discount code to someone on your friends list. For advertisers looking to tap into the power of social networks, it sounds tantalizing.

That's the thinking behind "Engagement Ads," the new "experimental" advertising technology that social network Facebook unveiled last week. With the new program, members of Facebook can leave comments on participating ads, add the brands to their list of "fan pages," and use them to send friends virtual gifts. For … Read more

InterActiveCorp, the sprawling conglomerate of brands helmed by media titan Barry Diller, is formally splitting into five separate companies Thursday. And it hopes to do so quietly.

The story is familiar by now: Diller, determined to solidify himself as capable of mastering both old and new media, has long insisted that a lack of confidence on Wall Street has suppressed IAC's stock price. So last November, Diller made the big announcement that IAC would be slimming down to a core of ad- and subscription-supported Internet media brands such as Ask.com, Match.com, Bloglines, Citysearch, Vimeo, and Evite.

The … Read more