SO THERE

Things aren't going so great over at the Silk Road. Where are nerds going to order their Molly now?! [Telegraph]

Now any old rando can shell out for promoted tweets. Please, please let's not start using this to promote resumes. [Ad Week]

Craigslist can no longer spook startups like Padmapper with threats of prosecution for copyright infringement: A judge has ruled the company has no such ownership of its users' listings. [Forbes]

"When he woke up, he found that Path had gone on a rogue mission early in the morning, texting and robocalling an unknown number of his contacts, including his grandparents." [The Verge]

Apparently authors still bother getting pissed at bloggers. [Daily Dot]

What's wrong with that? (Photo: Wikimedia)

The Chat-rooming Classes Today, seemingly every tech reporter in the business tuned into Jason Calacanis's "This Week in Startups," presumably in the hopes that Mr. Calacanis would tell all re: the allegations of abuse against Michael Arrington. But as familiar names chattered away in the chat room, Mr. Calacanis had little to say beyond comparing himself to Obi Wan. That would make Mr. Arrington Anakin Skywalker, of course; Mr. Calacanis said he taught him how to be powerful in media, and "I regret that."

As for the allegations themselves, Mr. Calacanis was quick to say he wouldn't be commenting on whether they were true, citing his lack of direct knowledge. (He did, however, openly discuss the time that Mr. Arrington called a PR honcho "the c-word," thereby outing someone who'd never mentioned the incident publicly!) [Correction: Mr. Calacanis first mentioned the incident and the PR exec (Brooke Hammerling) by name in the comments of his Facebook post, prompting Ms. Hammerling to confirm the story, also in a Facebook comment.] All in all, it sounds like he (kinda sorta) regrets getting involved. He apparently thought writing a Facebook note wouldn't go very far. "I thought that that would be a place where it just lived there," he said. (Paging Randi Zuckerberg!) "I got a little P.T. Barnum in me and I feel like me commenting on all this stuff actually detracts from it," he added.

The Biggest Failure Silicon Alley fameballer and Vimeo cofounder Jakob Lodwick took to PandoDaily this week to lament his decision to sell his company Connected Ventures, which included CollegeHumor and Vimeo, to media conglomerate IAC in 2006. In the post, called “An acquisition is always a failure,” Mr. Lodwick wrote that selling the company to IAC was “the worst business decision of his life” because although it fattened his bank account, it stifled his ability to work creatively. Getting acquire is like giving up, he argued, which we’re sure delighted his fellow NYC entrepreneurs who are desperately groping for the exit sign.

We suppose you can’t have your cake and eat it too, even if the cake is made of millions of dollars.

Kenny Lerer's Got Ringtones In the midst of a recent phone call with Ken Lerer about Lure Fish Bar, his favorite power lunch spot, our conversation was interrupted by the dulcet sounds of Jim Morrison from his cellphone. Was that “People Are Strange,” we asked? Yes, Mr. Lerer confirmed, revealing that he spends “way too much time” picking out the right ringtones for the important people in his life. That Doors song was for Brian Bedol, Mr. Lerer’s business partner in the media and entertainment company Bedrocket. "If you knew Brian," he said, "'People Are Strange' is the perfect ring tone for him."

Did he have a ringtone for his son Ben, the cofounder of Thrillist? “Oh this is embarrassing,” he replied, admitting that it was Rod Stewart’s “Some Guys Get All the Luck.” “Not bad, huh?” quipped Mr. Lerer the elder.

Brit’s Got Jokes On Monday, Brit + Co. founder Brit Morin announced on her Facebook page that she was expecting a baby with her husband, Path cofounder Dave Morin. Of course, the update was quickly debunked as an April Fool’s Day prank, despite the fact that she posted it towards the end of the day. “For all of you who wished me congratulations on being pregnant, thank you for being a total sucker!” she wrote.

Apparently, along with making Christmas trees out of cheese and turning Mac extension cords into jump ropes, such personal pranks are part of Ms. Morin’s repertoire.

“The trick is to wait until the evening of April Fools when people think all the jokes are over,” she wrote. “I pull this one every single year and still, so many fall for it ;)” Guess she lost all of next year’s suckers by giving away her secret.

PR darling Brooke Hammerling had a subtweet for the ladies pretending to be with child for April Fool’s Day:

https://twitter.com/brooke/status/319229167046623233

Jack Did it All for the Nookie We knew about Jack Dorsey's nose ring, but we had no idea he used to be in Limp Bizkit. Business Insider uncovered an old photo of the Square cofounder that shows him looking quite different than he does when sporting his current hand-sewn jeans look. The black and white portrait has Mr. Dorsey with full-on 90s rave kid hair. Pass the glowstick, bro.

(Photo: Twitter)

Bloggers! They're Just Like Us! Business Insider editor Steve Kovach gets hearts aflutter, apparently. As overheard by fellow editor (so many over there!) Alyson Shontell, a starry eyed PR person compared their meeting with Mr. Kovach to that of a Hollywood star. It's understandable, we constantly confuse Mr. Kovach with Jake Gyllenhaal every time we see him out with the normals.

http://twitter.com/shontelaylay/status/319838156486758400

Do You Startup, Bro? Silicon Valley's fraternity president and Digg founder Kevin Rose was the subject of an ABC News profile this week which reminded us he's still around! The Google Ventures partner revealed what new apps he's circling to potentially fund, including a personal training app called FitStar. He also revealed that the Instagram filter Toaster is named after his adorable dog and detailed what his typical day is like: "Invest in start-ups. Find the next big thing. Meet with entrepreneurs. Drink coffee. Hang out." Sounds like a Bravo show in the making.

Internet Weak On Thursday, the New York collective of the Web’s  hive mind met up for a low key gathering at the Watch What Happens Live prop closet Design Within Reach showroom in SoHo to celebrate the quickly approaching Internet Week. The festival's new director Caroline Waxler welcomed the sharply dressed but older-skewing crowd. iPads were shuffled around to get attendees to sign up and vote  for the 200+ panels that are in contention for just 13 slots to be showcased at the yearly event. (Holding a drink from the open bar and registering on the iPad was difficult, but we managed.)

Anyway, the annoyingly arranged support columns, a seating arrangement dependent on the furniture layout, and the tri-level setup made it hard to pay attention to Vice editors Kelly Bourdet and Brian A. Anderson. After talking for a half hour about all the cool things Vice does (and plentiful mentions of the burgeoning media empire's massive presence at SXSW), they showed off a drone for people to play with. But that wasn’t enough to amuse the partygoers as throngs of them slinked off shortly after the panel ended. Perhaps that was enough Internet for one day.

(Photo: Flickr/RobertScoble)

Morin needs a Mophie Path founder Dave Morin, he of popped collar fame, did a Q&A with Vanity Fair about his mobile habits. Among the gems revealed is the fact that Mr. Morin boasts a "custom-designed, one-of-a-kind bespoke app" that he built to communicate with his assistant. Guess gChat is too gauche?

But our favorite moment came when the Facebook mafioso revealed that he also has a newfound solution for the fact that his iPhone is always running out of battery. Instead of buying a battery pack or carrying around a charger like everyone else, Mr. Morin has opted to shlep around a second iPhone. "I have two iPhones, one for day and one for the night," he told VF. "When the day phone runs out, the night phone takes over. I never have to worry."

Cool. Cool cool.

NSFWCorp Big week for ex-TechCrunch writer and rabblerouser Paul Carr! He relaunched NSFWCorp and mailed 5,000 copies of a print edition of the site. He also scaled new heights in his commitment to transparency. Witness: Conflict NSFWCorp, a gallery of all of NSFWCorp's backers. Interested parties can buy a "room" in the House of Carr. Prices start at $3 and reach as steep as $1,400, with the top slot already filled by a generous $600,000 in funding from Vegas Tech Fund, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh's investment firm.

In a poetic twist on transparency in journalism, the first room at the top contains an illustration of the firm CrunchFund, including a rather svelte-looking Michael Arrington, a man famous for his conflicts of interest.

Gosling Parker Economically conscious walking Internet meme Ryan Gosling was recently spotted looking dashing in his Warby Parker frames. The company humble-bragged about the royal sighting on its Facebook page earlier this week noting that the frame is the "Preston." We share their exuberance. This is one piece of clothing we don't mind seeing him in.

Reboot that Ho? One hit wonder (#realtalk) Soulja Boy earned that coveted @Windows follow on Twitter. He tweeted "oh hey windows look at my be cool pic," along with a screenshot of the golden moment. What's next? A commercial with Soulja waxing poetically about his swaggy Windows-powered phone?

https://twitter.com/souljaboy/status/317682776788856833/

Living on the Edge On his Tumblr today, LivingSocial cofounder and CTO Aaron Batalion announced that he’s leaving the company.

"After much soul searching, I have decided to leave LivingSocial to pursue some new ideas. No new adventure to announce yet, just a urge to go create… that there is more to do."

That’s probably a hard pill to swallow for investors who ploughed $100 million into the company last month. Guess that makes tomorrow Schadenfreude Saturday for the roughly 400 staffers the company laid off last November.

While Facebook claims it's an effort to stop spam and promote apps that add value to the network, "Developers say the crackdown is an attempt to stifle applications that compete with Facebook-owned services," or pay for ads on Facebook, the Wall Street Journal reported last night.  

This past Friday, MessageMe joined the ranks of apps like Vine, Voxer, and Yandex's social discovery app Wonder, in getting blocked from Facebook's platform.

But it would be hard to make the case that MessageMe--a rich, incredibly easy-to-use app that lets users send doodles, locations, photos, Google images, videos, iTunes songs, and even Snapchat-like drawings on photos--doesn't add value considering Facebook reportedly tried to acquire the app.

Rather, cofounder Arjun Sethi told Betabeat, he was informed Friday that MessageMe was not compliant with platform policy guidelines related to duplicating Facebook's core services (i.e. Facebook Messenger) and that "they’d be shutting off access to our users to get to their friends list."

Mr. Sethi said his team "worked over the weekend and basically removed the feature. So if you looked at the app now it’s not there anymore." When we downloaded the app last night, the option to find friends on Facebook still showed up, which would have been a welcome option considering only seven early adopters from our contact list were already on the service, but MessageMe is that supremely rare app we actually wouldn't mind bugging our normal friends to join.

That explains why, in a blog post today revealing seed funding from True Ventures, First Round Capital, Google Ventures, SVAngel, Resolut.vc, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Social+Capital Partnership raised last year, MessageMe also announced that it picked up more than 1 million users since launching (with the Facebook connection) on March 7th.

The company said it's sending more than 500 notifications per second worldwide and that in the U.S. alone, users have shared more than 10 million doodles and more than 4 million songs on iTunes.

Facebook's social graph may be in the midst of midlife crisis, but MessageMe's features are perfectly suited to the current state of discourse, which seems to be frozen in adolescence.

Mr. Sethi said his team's background is in social gaming and they plan on introducing in-app monetization when the time is right, rather than advertising or selling data to third-parties. (The "stickers" and "money" buttons next "video" and "doodle" are currently turned off.) The same cofounders previously collaborated on a company called Lolapps, which was acquired by a Korean company.

When it came time to build MessageMe, they took their inspiration from the more personal social network Path and its so-called "stickers," as well as the Chinese messaging app QQ and the older BBM-style messaging on Blackberries. "When you look at our product, you can see there’s a PIN system so we focus a lot of our attention on that as well, rather than like some sort of public broadcast of usernames," he explained.

(An earlier version of MessageMe's blog post noted typically "Asian" messaging behaviors becoming more mainstream.)

And like Path, MessageMe sets its sights smaller. "We’re not focused on the replication of your Facebook graph," he explained. "We’re focused on having you communicate with people that you want to communicate with the most and people that you feel you can be yourself with." The average customer, he said, will have a network of 20 to 25 people they spend their time chatting with, rather than hundreds of Facebook friends.

That may be more than just a defensive posture. As John Herrman recently wrote on Buzzfeed, app developers at SXSW were "actively planning for the graph-rot contingency" by "leveraging to build separate graphs of their own." Besides at this point, getting booted off of Facebook offers its own little media boost.

Mr. Sethi acknowledged that tensions between Facebook and developers were rising. "I do feel like some developers are feeling the pain depending on the type of applications they’re making. It’s just part of like a natural cycle of any platform or ecosystem, depending on what is core to them."

However, that hasn't been the case between MessageMe and Apple. "Our product is competitive with iMessage and they’re not revoking access for us. So I think it just depends on the way each company thinks about the platform and product."

In the meantime, DM us if you want our MessageMe pin? We really want to spend the morning sending doodles and most of the people on our contact list are venture capitalists. :(

First there's Todd, who is studying Japanese, taking flying lessons and searching for the perfect smiley sticker to fit his mood. Todd meets up with Sasha, who wants to "discuss his scifi novel about space root," at Jack Dorsey's favorite coffee shop Sightglass--just to round out the arc of insufferability.

The rest of the cast of characters includes Gerard (Gerard. Really?), who is drunk at the office and spamming everyone with "BURP" stickers. They bleep-bloop along at a vintage video game pace, doing things you'd never want to do and telling you all about it. With stickers.

Path is aware that ads are designed to get people to sign up for the app and not smite all smartphones with the fire of a thousand angry suns, right?

Path "Bringing People Closer Together" from Path on Vimeo.

(h/t @heif)

(Photo: Tipster)

Your Name Here A Silicon Valley source had the pleasure of dining near Path cofounder Dave Morin and his wife, Brit.co founder Brit Morin recently. Mr. Morin spoke about the future of Path while Ms. Morin, a DIY enthusiast, used crayons provide by the restaurant to doodle on the paper table cloth, said the source. There were rainbows, flowers and balloons, but our favorite was a drawing of the Brit.co logo, with "Morin" written underneath and an arrow pointed towards Ms. Morin (just in case the restaurant staff didn't recognize her). That's one way to disrupt advertising, we suppose. Our tipster was kind enough to snap a pic on their way out.

Happy Internet, Mr. President Twice this week in conversation with tech types, Betabeat was asked when Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian was running for office already. The 29-year-old credited with helping to defeat SOPA/PIPA already toured the country (in a bus once leased for John McCain's  “Straight Talk Express") running for president of the Internet. But with Sheryl Sandberg hot on his heels, isn't it time to start campaigning for the real thing?

Last we heard, Mr. Ohanian was rumored to be launching his own startup reality show on MTV. However, he was recently spotted handing out awards on behalf of Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, who likes to call himself "the House GOP's chief watchdog."

We've reached out to Mr. Ohanian comment, but perhaps this lulzy tweet is response enough:

Lol RT @michaelpryor: I just realized why Alexis Ohanian's senate race hasn't yet begun. You have to be 30 years old to be a senator!

— Alexis Ohanian (@alexisohanian) March 1, 2013

(Photo: Instagram/Neil Blumenthal)

Here's Looking At You, Kid Warby Parker celebrated its third birthday last night. And what better way to mark a $41.5 million funding round and potential Google Glass partnership than champagne at Grand Central Terminal. Ain't startup life grand?

Duly Noted We're starting to wonder how the geniuses at Rap Genius get any work done. The beef-starting startup promptly uploaded Andrew Mason's farewell letter and started annotating. A sampling of the notes: "Seems like Andrew has too much swag for a public company, they need to find more of a “boring loser” type…" Can't imagine why this team would be so ready to defend "swag."

VC Ben Horowitz also chimed in with a more sedate contribution, saying, "Andrew does the stand up thing and claims accountability. Make no mistake though—although he’s the only one accountable, he’s certainly not the only one responsible for all the things that went wrong." Wait, was that a dig at Eric Lefkofsky?

No Micky D's Please Worth noting: Gross slideshows about how McDonald's terrible blunders of yore perform far better, numbers-wise, than flattering slideshows about a company-funded visit to HQ.

But since McDonald's paid for airfare + hotel, not such a big deal. Also, 4 kinds of mcnugget shapes! h/t @bupbin businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-four…

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) February 28, 2013

Star Power Hey, what'd you do for the Oscars? Presumably you went over to a friend's house and had a couple of beers and fell in love with Jennifer Lawrence, like most of America. Well, AllThingsD grand dame and Vanity Fair contributor Kara Swisher was there. Like, Hollywood there. NBD! She tweeted Sunday, "Weird Oscars, now onto the party," complete with Insta. On another snap, she added, "Observation on first and only Hollywood party: Celebs are just like us (except prettier and more insecure)."

Snacks You know what's a really great diet, according to former Google employee Mike Dudas? Quitting Google to work somewhere else without that cafeteria. We've always heard free suckling pig goes straight to the hips.

(Photo: Instagram, @pinkla16)

Thanksgiving beat out Hurricane Sandy as the most-Instagrammed event ever, solidifying the photo platform as more of a Path-type social network than the future of citizen journalism. [PandoDaily]

The Wiki Weapon Project could be testing its 3D printed guns by end of year. [The Guardian]

Courts continue to wrangle over the legality of collecting texts and data from cell phones to use as evidence. [The New York Times]

Facebook has finally admitted it will soon share the data it collects from your profile with external websites and ad networks. [GigaOm]

Can the Wii U save Nintendo? [The New York Times]

But you didn't expect an app that once limited your social sphere to just 50 people would be short on exclusivity, did you?

Betabeat just caught word of a "small dinner" the company is hosting at 8pm tonight at Mas Farmhouse, a French farmhouse by way of West Village. "We are bringing together an intimate group of founders, CEOs, and friends across a variety of industries," says the invite. We take that to mean to the usual suspects, i.e. high-profile 32-year-old founders and investors, minus walking stand up act Ben Lerer, since he's apparently dining with Barack Obama tonight. (Unless, of course, IT'S THE SAME PARTY.)

We were trying to figure out if Path cofounder and Facebook mafioso Dave Morin was in town to assess the voltage of tonight's guests, but he hasn't friended us on Path. Guess he's taking that "high-quality network" stuff seriously.

(Photo: Microsoft)

Why do Nigerian scammers say they're from Nigeria? A Microsoft researcher investigates. [Hacker News]

Now you can read through a user's Twitter stream without all those annoying @ replies to randos clogging it up. [Twitter Blog]

Oops. Microsoft forgot to tell its PC partners about that little thing called the Surface tablet. [Reuters]

Facebook's head of mobile told the audience at Le Web that the company is trying to copy Path. Cool story, bro. [TechCrunch]

The Daily Dot rounds up some of the more embarrassing moments in Reddit's history. [Daily Dot]

LinkedIn is being sued for that unfortunate password hacking scandal. [VentureBeat]

A few of the featured apps.

There's clearly quite a lot of creative talent being devoted to the creation of iOS apps. Even hipsters are flocking to the craft. But does something like Path really rise to the level of art? Yesterday, Betabeat ventured downtown to the Internet Week-pegged gallery opening for “The Art of Apps,” to hear the argument out.

By the time Betabeat arrived at the Soho Gallery for Digital Art (the name stencilled sternly in white against a revolutionary red background), the party was winding down. We stepped inside to find a dimly lit gallery studded with high-definition flat-screen televisions, each offering up some element of iOS user design, attempting to recontextualize it as art, not just app.

The first screen offered a note from gadget blogger and host Peter Rojas, which explained a bit about the curatorial philosophy at work: 

Great apps often feel complete and polished in a way that websites often don't, sometime which obscures the process of experimentation, iteration, and (sometimes) failure that goes into making them. Creating an amazing user experience for an app--one where the device itself almost melts away--requires a thoughtfulness and cleverness that can be hard to find.

It concluded by laying out the exhibition's mission: "We wanted to showcase examples of some of the smartest, best-designed apps we could find, as well as give a peek into how they get created in the first place."

Some apps benefitted more from this treatment than others.

Up close and magnified to the size of a dorm-room poster, Path looks lovely. You can see the subtle textures of its red welcome screen; the moon-filled sleep screen looks gorgeous rather than oversharey. Meanwhile, Tweetbot’s interface serves basically the same function--serving up the content created by moment-to-moment status updates. But place them side-by-side, and it’s like comparing Anthropologie and Old Navy. Whatever the latter’s virtues, the aesthetics are underwhelming.

Further back were the creativity-facilitating apps. You know, the ones that are almost painfully calibrated to the Platonic ideal of the Apple user: Young, hip, design-savvy. Here the presentation was scattershot. Some displays, like social collage social collage iPad app Mixel, privileged art produced on their platform. Social video-making app Cameo (currently in beta, as per its website) injected a little whimsy, explaining the process with arrows stuck to the wall space between its two allotted screens, labeled "this" and "make." Repping for creativity suite Paper was a borderline motion-sickness-inducing POV video of the app in use.

After browsing the screens, struggling with whether to view what we were seeing as artwork or giant advertisement, we decided to investigate a sign pointing downstairs, which promised a Mixel. Given the app's display had some of the most eye-catching images upstairs, we bit. The display that greeted visitors at the foot of the stairs definitely landed on the commercial end of the spectrum: A table on which sat a great big washtub full of the hangover cure Berocca. Beyond that was the bar, stocked by a sponsor pushing a fluorescently lit liquor. (It looked like the type of thing that would require a hangover cure.)

In between was an enormous floor-to-ceiling screen, clearly connected to the demonstration. We finally found it nestled under the stairs, in prime opposite-the-bar real estate, we found the Mixel demonstration. A rep was explaining the concept to the lone holdout, demonstrating on an iPad connected to the aforementioned enormous screen. When the fleet of bartenders began breaking down the room, we felt it best to take our leave.

Upon arriving home, this reporter explained the concept of Internet Week using the event as an example to her boyfriend, who responded: “Oh, so it’s like Fashion Week, but for the Internet?” Pretty much.