Saddest sentence ever. (Photo: Hashgram)

Welp, guess we’ve been using Snapchat all wrong. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel spoke this morning at AllThingsD's Dive Into Mobile conference, where he that argued his creation “isn’t a great a tool for sexting” and stated that the future of apps should be ephemeral.

Mr. Spiegel said more than 150 million pictures are uploaded every day to Snapchat by people aged 13 to 25. Although he noted that "some" of its users are probably naked, usage dips after 11 p.m., when he assumes when sexts are sent. (We hope by that time people already have sealed the deal).

Snapchat recently locked down $14 million in funding last February and is currently embroiled in a lawsuit that reeks of plot from The Social Network. It's also recently been the target of photo spam, which speaks to its popularity. Mr. Spiegel posted to the Snapchat blog this morning apologizing for the issue, which had users receiving unwanted pictures from users they hadn't friended.

Of course the app's success is rooted in the dissolving of embarrassing images, which lends it a decidedly anti-Instagram quality. (Nobody needs to permanently save that drunk photo you took last night.) Mr. Spiegel is such a fan of the ephemeral nature of your n00dz and funny faces that he believes it should be the future. According to Mashable:

The notion, said Siegel, of online versus offline is changing. “What we’ve seen change is now that it’s always online," said Siegel, adding "We believe the default should be ephemerality. In this world, deletion is the default.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Spiegel hinted that he's working on a way to monetize all those blurry photos of your cleavage. ”I like ads,” he told conference attendees. "We’ve been playing around with some prototypes.”

Hear that? It's the sound of Virgin Mobile's marketing team feverishly scrambling to develop ideas for Snapchat native advertising.

OpenWireless.org

The waters from Hurricane Sandy have rendered some telecommunications networks about as useful as the rudder on the Titanic. As city-dwellers have begun to seek an internet connection, finding a wifi hotspot has sometimes become almost as important as securing non-perishables and batteries for flashlights.

AllThingsD has collected a good deal of information on where to find wifi in areas where even strong cellphone signals may be in short supply:

In New York City, free Wi-Fi is usually available in city parks in partnership with AT&T, but since the parks are closed, and just getting close to one isn’t exactly a good idea right now what with the falling trees and all, that’s not much of an option.

There is a network of free and documented open Wi-Fi hotspots all over the city at NYCwireless.net, but the map appears not to be working. Instead I found a link to a PDF document that claims to be updated as of today, showing known hotspots around the city. Know this: Your mileage may vary.

Relevant to civic wireless needs, AllThingsD points out that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has just announced the Open Wireless Movement.

The website for the Open Wireless Movement is openwireless.org. The Open Wireless Movement wants to see a world where we can find the following in "any urban environment":

• Dozens of open networks are available at your fingertips.
• Tablets, watches, and other new devices can automatically join these networks to do nifty things.
• The societal expectation is one of sharing, and, as a result, wireless Internet is more efficient.
• The false notion that an IP address could be used as a sole identifier is finally a thing of the past, creating a privacy-enhancing norm of shared networks.

AllThingsD also noted that Boingo Wireless has a “Free AOL Wifi” deal in conjunction with–obviously–AOL, which will last all day Wednesday.

Cheryl Mills (Photo: Wikipedia.org)

A lot of startups are letting their employees work from home for the next few days because of hurricane Sandy. That's all swell news, but those members of New York's tech scene who were supposed to go out and party or sit through conferences are screwed. Tech events are getting cancelled left and right, though some scene luminaries don't seem to mind.

AllThingsD's "D: Dive Into Mobile" conference has been postponed until a later date that will be announced as soon as possible. The event had originally been set for tomorrow and Tuesday in New York City. If you booked a room at the Ritz Carlton (looking at you, VC's), the hotel is apparently giving full refunds and waiving cancellation fees. Speakers like Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy and Hillary Clinton's Chief of Staff, Cheryl Mills, will just have to wait until another day to make their speeches.

The Big Apple Smackdown Tourney, a ping pong tournament held at Susan Sarandon's SPIN and co-sponsored by this very blog, was postponed until further notice. Gilt's Kevin Ryan will have to wait to face off in a heady match of pong against David Tisch and AllThingsD's Kara Swisher. Ping Pong'ing with the Tech Stars sounds like a Bravo reality show just waiting to happen. Maybe the rain delay will give Andy Cohen some time to hash out that concept. The event will be postponed "until a later date."

Facebook, however, is the company shedding the most tears about Sandy. They've had to cancel two of their New York events set for this week. The first is a Tuesday engineering open house that was planned for the social networking site’s New York HQ in midtown. And, more importantly, Facebook's Gifts event--set for Thursday at FAO Schwartz--has been nixed too. According to AllThingsD, Facebook was set to use the occasion to announce partnerships for its new platform that allows users to send gifts to each other in real life.

Monday's Google event in New York has also been shut down ahead of schedule. They were expected to present the Nexus 10 tablet and an updated version of Android OS. Guess you'll just have to use your old gear through the storm and dream of the bigger and better things that will come after the skies clear.

Our new desktop background? (lolfed.com)

The New York Tech Meetup is producing a video series called #startupstories. "Failure" is apparently Fred Wilson's fav. [NYTM]

Sergey Brin lets California lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom try on Google Glasses. [The Verge]

There's a new digital divide in town. [New York Times]

A roundup of Tim Cook's chat at the AllThingsD conference. [Wall Street Journal]

Kim Dotcom is winning legal battles left and right. [Bloomberg]

No one on Facebook actually cared about the Facebook IPO. [Buzzfeed]

Thompson. (Source: Yodel Anecdotal/Yahoo! Inc. via Wikipedia)

Rebel Yahoo shareholder Daniel Loeb's campaign to upend the leadership at Silicon Valley's most troubled old-school Internet company has succeeded. In an exclusive, Kara Swisher reports for AllThingsD that Scott Thompson is gone. Mr. Thompson's fudged resume was a keystone in the crisis that began unfolding in Yahoo's upper echelons a week ago; it appears to have been his undoing. An investigation by Yahoo into the phony computer science credential Mr. Thompson listed in public biographies revealed that the now-outgoing C.E.O. also put the degree on his resume:

[Although] Thompson made a convoluted attempt to explain it all in two awkward employee meetings at the end of last week, in which he blamed a headhunting firm for introducing the mistake when he was being hired for a job at eBay in the mid-2000 timeframe.

That company, Heidrick and Struggles, slapped back with an internal memo noting that Thompson’s claim was not “verifiably not true.” Sources said that Heidrick told Yahoo’s board that it was in possession of a resume submitted by Thompson that he had apparently submitted showing the inaccurate CS degree on it.

Yahoo is probably doubly embarrassed at this point by the way it initially tried to shrug off its head man's nebulous credentials as an "inadvertent error."

AllThingsD reports Mr. Thompson will likely be replaced by  the company's head of global media, Ross Levinsohn.

(http://saulhansell.blogspot.com/)

Betaworks just got an entrepreneur-in-residence with some old and new media cred: Saul Hansell, former Timesman and the founding editor of the Grey Lady's Bits blog just announced he's coming aboard. Mr. Hansell headed up AOL's freelance network, Seed.com (now "in the process of reformatting" and not giving out any new assignments, hm) before AOL bought the Huffington Post. "Seed is in fact thriving and will continue stronger than ever as part of AOL’s Advertising.com group, which is devoted to providing the best tools to online publishers and marketers," Mr. Hansell wrote at the time. 

He continued:

I am very proud of what we achieved at Seed over the last year. And I’m just as proud of what we didn’t do. Despite our reputation as “hellish scheme” dedicated to “slapdash, disposable content churned out en masse,” we didn’t pollute the Web with millions of articles that would be embarrassing even in a high school newspaper.  Rather, we worked on ways to respect our creators and our audience by creating formats that delivered lively, useful and reliable information that writers can produce efficiently. You can see the results in articles like these: What Is Christine O'Donnell's Religion?, Giardia in Dogs: What You Need to Know as a Dog Owner, and Jack Daniel's Drinks: 4 Drink Ideas From a Bartender.

Right! So: Seed was a big flop seems to be what he's saying there, no? Either way, Mr. Hansell became Big News editor for HuffPo in May. That lasted a little under six months. Now, Mr. Hansell joins his old buddy John Borthwick at what is obviously a better job, EIR at Betaworks, a company that is not crushing the creative spirits of its employees.

But wait! It's not that, Mr. Hansell insists: "I know my friends in the technology press well enough to suspect some of them will see my move as part of a broader trend at AOL. I’m not sure the easy take is the right one. Based on my experience, I am more bullish on Tim Armstrong’s clear vision of a company built from the ground up for online journalism and the potential of AOL’s many assets to achieve that vision."

Indeed. HuffPo, while ruthless and depraved, has given AOL a breath of new life—Arianna Huffington's newsroom is fast-paced, agile, inventive and we're told, has been given a lot of control over its better halves in the rest of the AOL empire.

At any rate, with Mr. Hansell's wide range of experience going from NYT to AOL, he should fit right in at the incubator/innovation lab that has produced publisher tools such as Chartbeat and SocialFlow as well as consumption tools such as Findings and News.me.

[via AllThingsD]

Nobody wants to go on the record saying negative things about TechCrunch, arguably the most powerful news blog in tech, for obvious reasons.

Entrepreneurs and investors in the startup scene tend to be very cagey when making public statements about anyone else in the same scene, with the rare exceptions of bomb-throwers and those who have succeeded past the point of caring. It's also never smart to trash-talk the hose that feeds you users.

Sources even refused to go on record with New York Times media bulldog David Carr for fear of "editorial retribution."

First, everyone's shaking in their bootstraps in fear of Mr. Arrington; now that he may have been fired, according to Fortune, hands are wringing over what will happen to the blog.

But come on, we thought. People read TechCrunch, but it's not that influential. Is it?

But TechCrunch, as the de facto trade publication in Silicon Valley, commands a special reverence. Sure, Mr. Arrington has a temper. He's notorious for taking things personally and holding a grudge--a scary prospect for young entrepreneurs who consider the blog crucial to getting exposure to the right users and validation from the right people. But the devotion stems from the fact that insiders feel that TechCrunch is important. TechCrunch gets it. TechCrunch has prestige.

Mashable, for example, writes about similar topics and has more traffic--but a Mashable hit isn't as coveted as a TechCrunch hit. Investors don't read Mashable. Your friends don't read Mashable. Same goes for the stodgy New York Times, which still refers to tweets as "Twitter messages" and "live Twitter posts."

For startups, the blog's meat and potatoes, TechCrunch is "grade AAA," said one local hacker and entrepreneur who also picks up work getting web traffic for high-end clients. "TechCrunch has always been the standard," he said. "Me and my partner would always joke around, if you ain't on TechCrunch you ain't shiiiiit. Like they say it on The Wire. You ain't on TechCrunch but you claim to be a baller in the Valley? Shiiiiiiieeeeeeeetttttt."

The fear and awe of TechCrunch is strongest for entrepreneurs who are just starting out. When hackathon baby WhoWorks.at was featured in TechCrunch, hacker John Britton got over 20,000 user signups. "TechCrunch is a force to be reckoned with," he said. BillGuard, which got to the final round at TechCrunch Disrupt, got 10,000 sign-ups in a matter of hours; another finalist, Sonar.me, got a few thousand.

Other entrepreneurs said it's about quality, not quantity. One local founder said a prominent TechCrunch post got him 2,000 users--the same as a post in TheNextWeb, and twice as many users as a post from a prominent Silicon Valley tech blogger. But it wasn't until the TechCrunch post that anyone seemed to have heard of his startup. "TechCrunch is not all-powerful in driving traffic / user acquisition," he wrote in an email. "In fact I heard Mashable is way better for user acquisition, like 3,000 top 4,000 ... [but] TechCrunch is the king for awareness."

In the early days of TechCrunch, one Silicon Valley vet told Betabeat, the comments were combed over: "People put so much import into the comments on TechCrunch ... now it's more scanning the headlines."

The blog has respect among more experienced entrepreneurs and investors as well. Top VCs read the blog or at a minimum, skim the headlines. TechCrunch is the number one source for stories that end up on TechMeme, by a wide margin: 10.57 percent of the stories on TechMeme in the last 3o days came from TechCrunch, versus 4.82 percent for runner-up AllThingsD.

Not to mention that influences gather at TechCrunch events, where luminaries meet each other and deals are made and startups are born, and a booth in Startup Alley will cost you around $10,000.

Besides being one of the best outlets for launch, TechCrunch (usually Mr. Arrington) has occasionally dipped a rake into the muck, as when he wrote a series of posts titled "Scamville," about what he felt were manipulative practices by social gaming companies like Zynga, which earn revenue from advertisers through shady lead generation. "A typical scam: users are offered in game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey," Mr. Arrington wrote. "Four simple questions are asked. The answers are irrelevant. When the user gets to the last question they are told their results will be text messaged to them. They are asked to enter in their mobile phone number, and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they’ve done that, they’ve just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription." The stories prompted at least one user to bring a class-action lawsuit against Zynga. (She lost.)

"They've kept people honest as well and kept it real," said Shervin Pishevar, a managing director at Menlo Ventures. "TechCrunch has been an important part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Arrington and TechCrunch, they've changed lives in a very positive way. It'd be a shame to lose any of that."

But Mr. Arrington may be his own greatest threat to maintaining TechCrunch's credibility with stories like Angelgate, in which Mr. Arrington made allegations of investor collusion and pumped with controversy immediately before TechCrunch Disrupt. The piece fizzled into irrelevance after the conference. (Some skeptics have pointed out that the current Aol controversy is also hitting immediately before the conference.) A vindictive post about Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake earned him mostly disgust and bafflement. Several sources we spoke to related stories of Mr. Arrington's vendettas--making calls to try to prevent his perceived enemies from getting businesses--but also of his ability to "get over it" if it means getting a good story.

And the ongoing pay-to-play game in which entrepreneurs promise TechCrunch "exclusives" in exchange for good karma undermines Mr. Arrington's real reporting, when he gets on the phone and asks hard questions and plays inside baseball with the pros. When you regularly refer to getting the first press release for a star entrepreneur's new startup as a "scoop," the word starts to lose its impact.

Assessments of TechCrunch's pull range from "all-powerful" to "shouldn't be ignored." But most everyone agrees: any influence TechCrunch has comes from Mr. Arrington. He may have gotten the blog to the point where it can continue to exist without him, but it wouldn't be a must-read.

The dispute over Mr. Arrington's $20 million CrunchFund threatens to change the blog's coverage permanently with the institution of new rules and leadership. (Fun fact: Mr. Arrington's entry in Time's 100 Most Influential People list was written by Arianna Huffington.) The Times story alleging journalistic malfeasance led victims and beneficiaries of Mr. Arrington's influence to vocal defenses. "Everyone is getting tired of these battles between blogs, I think it's really tiresome," the Silicon Valley vet said. "I don't want to see Kara and Arrington and Henry Blodget and all these people duking it out over who got what first and it's really a bore."

Mr. Arrington is good, the defenders said. Nothing else matters.

Sounds like startup logic.

But as to whether someone like Yuri Milner reads TechCrunch daily? Sources were skeptical.

It's less important the more successful you become, other sources said. One bi-coastal entrepreneur and investor went so far as to say, "it's more influential the further outside of the industry you go."

"TechCrunch's traffic impact has decreased over the years, both from what I've observed and from what I've heard other people," said Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-VC Elias Bizannes, who has chronicled Mr. Arrington's rise to success and pontificated on the tech blogosphere on Quora. "Part of the reason for this is simply it's a more competitive landscape and TechCrunch doesn't have the monopoly on talented writers and relationships ... the reason it's been so dominant is because its bloggers are firmly entrenched in Silicon Valley, with special relationships among multiple groups that have enabled TechCrunch (and especially Mike Arrington) to break news.

"I think something more important isn't so much TechCrunch, but the aggregators like TechMeme and Hacker News. It's those curation services that drive awareness of posts, and what is construed as TechCrunch traffic actually originates from those two aggregators."

But even entrepreneurs who have "made it" can't help but care what TechCrunch writes, as when Mr. Arrington seriously irked, we heard, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey after insinuating his new startup was facilitating illegal transactions. "Founder Jack Dorsey has told me that exactly zero drug or prostitution transactions have been completed through Square. I believe he believes that, but I wonder how he really knows for sure," Mr. Arrington wrote in a thinly-sourced post last year.

It's tough to ignore when an infamous blogger tells a readership of your peers that your startup serves hookers.

We started this post wondering if TechCrunch's power is really due to the perception of TechCrunch as powerful--and whether there's effectively any difference. TechCrunch doesn't "make or break" startups, contrary to what some starry-eyed young founders believe. But despite the unfortunate names of competitors, Mr. Arrington made sure TechCrunch was the most insider-y tech news blog of them all.