I think critics should start boycotting the yearly Christmas Family Comedy. It's amazing: these movies are never good. I can't think of another distinct subgenre with such a poor track record over the last decade. And of course, I went and saw Four Christmases, of my own free will. I'm an idiot.

In any event, it was silly of me to imply that Four Christmases didn't have the muscle to win the weekend; high-profile Christmas movies almost always do well. The $31.7 million three-day is one of the best openings ever for a movie of this kind; last year's Fred Claus, also starring Vince Vaughn, only managed $18.5 million in early November. Four Christmases even squeaked out Elf. Its five-day gross was an impressive $46.7 million.

Australia, on the other hand: oh boy. Baz Luhrmann's ultra-expensive, ultra-long epic made $20 million over the five days, which is less than inspiring -- especially considering it has now basically exited the Oscar race. Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! only ended up with around $57 million at the end of its domestic run -- but it didn't cost $130 million, either.

Transporter 3 -- the weekend's best new offering, for my money -- did okay with $12.3 million over three days and $18.5 over five. The three-day is a slight decline from what Transporter 2 did three years ago, but overall I'd put them even. This franchise continues to be profitable.

Twilight fell considerably, which isn't too surprising given the rabid-fan phenomenon that packs theaters opening weekend. Around $160 million is looking like the endgame. Meanwhile, Bolt, facing no new kid-centric competition over the weekend, held up almost miraculously well, actually gaining slightly over the three-day weekend. The folks at Disney have surely turned last weekend's frown upside down.

Slots 10 and 11 on the weekend's chart are occupied by limited releases: Milk and Slumdog Millionaire, on 36 and 49 screens, respectively. Their success bodes well for their Oscar chances.

The full five-day estimates after the jump.

Filed under: New Releases, Box Office

Continue reading Weekend Box Office: Christmas Takes Thanksgiving

Permalink | Email this | Comments

pimg class="float_right" src="/~~/f?id=487f6ccb796c7a3500dc8dc2maxX=237maxY=320" border="0" alt="opera-mobile.png" title="opera-mobile.png" width="237" height="320" /Norway-based browser-maker Opera Software (OPERA.OL) stock jumped 11% today after the company beat estimates for Q3 earnings./p pOpera only commands 0.7% of the desktop a href="http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0"browser market/a -- already trailing the much-newer Google (GOOG) Chrome -- which has 0.8%. But that's not where the revenue comes from: Opera is reporting strong growth in license revenues for its Opera Mini a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/opera-s-new-mobile-web-browser-now-available-good-news-for-carriers"emmobile/em browser/a./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601204sid=auvNZOwV0dSgrefer=technology"Bloomberg/a: Shares climbed as much as 1.9 kroner, or 11 percent, to 18.5 kroner, and were at 18.2 kroner as of 9:31 a.m. local time, the highest intraday level since Sept. 12, valuing the company at 2.2 billion kroner ($310 million)./p p style="padding-left: 30px;"Net income for the three months ended Sept. 31 rose to 33.3 million kroner [$4.7 million] from 4.65 million kroner a year earlier, Opera reported to the Oslo stock exchange. Analysts on average had estimated profit at 15.5 million kroner./p pstrongSee Also: /strongbr /a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/opera-s-new-mobile-web-browser-now-available-good-news-for-carriers"Opera's New Mobile Web Browser Now Available: Good News For Carriers/abr /a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/why_firefox_is_shrinking_its_browser_mobile_market_to_explode"Why Firefox Is Thinking Small: Mobile Browser Market To Explode/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/q3FjxRZpuh7HHxUQ4YxxVvi-dLI/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/q3FjxRZpuh7HHxUQ4YxxVvi-dLI/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=Qkw9LU1A"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=Qkw9LU1A" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=kIPVWzrW"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=70ErfnYV"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=5PZoFE8H"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=5PZoFE8H" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=KlQEv9rY"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=zEutEtfs"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=GB4Gu99B"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=fqByCXA1"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/ohe4Et-5FgQ" height="1" width="1"/

pAfter weeks of denials and a href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-huffpo-raises-15-million-expansion-in-face-of-high-cash-burn" title=""no comments,"""no comments,"/a political blog a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/" title="The Huffington Post"The Huffington Post/a has closed a $25 million third round funding from Oak Investment Partners, the company said in an e-mailed press release this morning. We a href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-huffpo-raises-15-million-expansion-in-face-of-high-cash-burn" title="reported earlier"reported earlier/a about a $20 million and above round with post-money valuation in the $110 million range. This probably puts it right at $115 million. /p p The company said it planned to use the proceeds to support general growth efforts and for "focused acquisitions." HuffPo also wants to build up its in-house ad sales team, as even the internet is succumbing to the wider economic turmoil. The three-year-old HuffPo had previously raised roughly $12 million from Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners, co-founder Ken Lerer and Bob Pittman. /p p On the content side, the $25 million will go towards the jump-starting of a new investigative journalism initiative, expanding its video offerings and ba rollout of local versions of the HuffPo aimed at an unspecified number of cities/b. It already has a a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chicago/" title="Chicago-centric site"Chicago-centric site/a. The funding comes as HuffPo says farewell to what appears to have been a successful and long campaign season. With interest in politics expected to wane compared to the height of its election coverage, HuffPo hopes to become known for more than its left-leaning politics coverage, by building on its other sections, which include media, living, style and green. While broadening its content should attract more advertisers, this is a tough time on the local ad front, as Borrell Associates and other analysts have a href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-the-local-online-ad-locomotive-slows-little-or-no-growth-in-08-borrell" title="pointed out"pointed out/a that the growth in that area had and will continue to slow down considerably. /p p In conjunction with the funding, Oak Investment's Fred Harman is joining HuffPo's board. Harman said in a statement: "Much of the news media business needs to be reassembled online around an ad-supported model and the timetable for this has been accelerated, not slowed, by this economic down cycle." /p pstrongRelated/strong/p ul class="related" lia href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-huffpo-raises-15-million-expansion-in-face-of-high-cash-burn" title="Update: HuffPo Finishing On $20M Round, Oak and Others; $110 Million Valuation Ballpark"Update: HuffPo Finishing On $20M Round, Oak and Others; $110 Million Valuation Ballpark/a/li lia href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-huffingtonpost-raises-another-5-million-same-investors-including-pittma" title="HuffingtonPost Raises Another $5 Million; Same Investors Including Pittman"HuffingtonPost Raises Another $5 Million; Same Investors Including Pittman/a/li lia href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/huffingtonpostcom-does-close-5-million-funding-led-by-softbank" title="HuffingtonPost.com Does Close $5 Million Funding; Led By Softbank"HuffingtonPost.com Does Close $5 Million Funding; Led By Softbank/a/li /ul p!-- iMark Logic Digital Publishing Summit, Thursday November 6, Westin Times Square. Insight and perspective from Outsell, Gilbane, Simon Schuster, BusinessWeek.com, more. Evening cocktail reception. Cost is complimentary. a href="http://content.adbureau.net/accipiter/adclick/CID=000010cb0000000000000000/SITE=PC_US/AAMSZ=PREMB_NEWS/relocate=http://marklogicdps.eventbrite.com/"Register now!/a/i --/p pa href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?a=sw9xir"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?i=sw9xir" border="0"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=ZmAMO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=ZmAMO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=2uEKO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=2uEKO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=9olCo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=9olCo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=53EvO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=53EvO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=SXJeO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=SXJeO" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pcorg/~4/471328664" height="1" width="1"/

Federal tax returns and other reports confirm that she’s accepted at least $5 million for her self-named South African girls' school from perhaps Barack Obama's single greatest political enemy.

pJOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA--Nearly four years after political pressure shut down two trials that would have tested whether a once-a-day pill could prevent high-risk HIV-negative people from catching the AIDS-causing virus, therersquo;s a surge of renewed interest in the concept, known as Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, or PrEP./ppWestern doctors and organizations that funded the halted trials of the anti-HIV drug tenofovir in Cameroon and Cambodia say theyve learned their lesson from the debacle in 2004 and 2005, when activist groups questioned the quality of medical care impoverished study participants would receive if they suffered side effects or the became infected by HIV. Today, with at least seven U.S.-funded PrEP trials underway at a cost of $39.5 million, researchers are working with local advocates, who have traditionally been distrustful of Big Pharma, to push the studies forward./p a href=http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=daily-hiv-prevention-pill[More]/a

We already knew The Huffington Post was looking for capital, but it turns out to be a little more than the projected $15 million. Kara Swisher says the political uber-blog has raised $25 million from Oak Investment Partners and will announce the news this morning.

When The HuffPo raised $5 million in September last year, we wondered how much it was worth. Kara’s source indicates the valuation is ‘just south of $100 million’.

The new capital will serve for the expansion of The Huffington Post’s offerings and recruitment. In an interview with BoomTown, Oak’s Fred Harman said:

There is an inevitable shift from offline to online with people increasingly getting their news media online, and this election proved how powerful the Huffington Post could be. And I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Another milestone maybe?

-------------------

AdMob October 2008 Metrics Report: iPhone Now the No. 1 Device Worldwide
405 words
28 November 2008
Wireless News
English
(c) Copyright 2008 M2 Communications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved
The iPhone is now the No. 1 device worldwide, displacing the Motorola RAZR, and in a regional feature focus highlighted traffic from Latin America and the Caribbean has more than doubled in the last year in the October 2008 AdMob Mobile Metrics Report, according to AdMob, a mobile advertising marketplace.

The iPhone experienced strong traffic worldwide to become the No. 1 device, with 37 percent of requests coming from outside of the US.

The iPhone experienced particularly explosive growth across AdMob's network after the company launched its unique ad units for iPhone sites and applications in July 2008. There are currently more than 400 applications and sites in the AdMob's iPhone Network. In October 2008, AdMob reached more than 4.5 million iPhones, 1 out of every 3 on the market.*

Other highlights from the October 2008 report:

- 17 percent of iPhone requests came from Western Europe and 8 percent from Asia. Top markets worldwide include the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, and Switzerland.

- In the US the iPhone is the No. 2 device behind the Motorola RAZR and in the UK it is the No. 3 device, behind the Nokia N95 and Sony Ericsson K800i.

- Traffic from Latin America and the Caribbean doubled in the past 12 months to 109 million requests in October 2008. The fastest growing countries in the region include Puerto Rico, Guyana, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Mexico.

- Motorola, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson all have more than 20 percent market share in Latin America and are leaders in different markets. The Motorola RAZR is the top device in the market, followed by the iPhone.

- Worldwide requests grew 13.8 percent month over month to 5.8 billion. US requests grew 7.9 percent to 2.2 billion and UK requests grew 16.0 percent.

- Sony Ericsson passed Motorola to become the No. 2 handset manufacturer worldwide. Apple jumped ahead of LG and RIM to become the No. 5 handset manufacturer worldwide.

- The top 10 devices worldwide, in order, are the Apple iPhone, Motorola RAZR V3, Nokia N70, Motorola KRZR K1c, Motorola W385, Nokia 6300, Nokia 3110c, Nokia N73, Motorola Z6m, and RIM BlackBerry 8300.

The full October report online: http://www.admob.com/metrics.

Comments on this story may be sent to newsdesk@closeupmedia.com

Distributed via M2 Communications Ltd - http://www.m2.com

Document WLNW000020081128e4bs00008

div class="rxbodyfield"p page="1" class="ArticleBody"Acer, the world#39;s third largest PC vendor, is planning to launch a netbook next year with a 10.2-inch screen, the largest netbook screen from Acer so far, a company representative confirmed./pp align="right"a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" target="_blank" /img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" width="336" height="280" border="0" alt="" align="right"//a/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The Taiwanese company#39;s Aspire One netbook has been a hit this year. Launched at mid-year, the device now has Asustek Computer#39;s popular Eee PC in its sights. Acer has forecast shipments of 6 million Aspire One#39;s this year, against estimates of 5 million from Asustek for its Eee PCs./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"b[ For more on products in the hot mini-notebook category, check out our hands-on looks at a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/07/03/Hands_on_with_Asuss_Eee_PC_901_and_1000_1.html?source=fssr"Asus#39; Eee PC 901 and 1000/a and the a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/11/14/Hands_on_with_the_Asustek_N10_netbook_1.html"N10 netbook/a, the a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/07/02/Hands_on_with_the_Cloudbook_Max_netbook_1.html?source=fssr"Cloudbook Max netbook/a, a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/30/Hands_on_with_Elitegroups_G10IL_minilaptop_1.html?source=fssr"Elitegroup#39;s G10IL mini-laptop/a, a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/19/Hands_on_with_MSIs_Wind_lowcost_laptop_1.html?source=fssr"MSI#39;s Wind low-cost laptop/a, a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/07/09/Hands_on_with_Gigabytes_M912X_minilaptop-IDGNS_1.html?source=fssr"Giga-byte#39;s M912X mini-laptop/a, a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/08/07/Hands_on_with_HPs_MiniNote_netbook_1.html?source=fssr"HP#39;s Mini-Note netbook/a and a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/07/14/Hands_on_with_Acers_Aspire_one_netbook_1.html?source=fssr"Acer#39;s Aspire one/a. ]/b/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The Aspire One out now has an 8.9-inch screen, but most companies are putting out netbooks with 10.2-inch screens now. The slightly larger screen sizes are more popular with people who like to view Web pages without scrolling left and right to see the entire page./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Asustek, which has offered a 7-inch screen on its Eee PCs, has said it does not plan to offer the small screen size in the future because people don#39;t seem to like it as much./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Netbooks are mini-laptop PCs designed for mobility, typically sporting 7-inch to 10-inch screens and weighing less than 2 kilograms. Most netbook components, including the microprocessor, are less powerful than those of full-fledged laptops so batteries last longer. Netbooks are designed for dealing with e-mail, browsing the Internet and working on word processor or spreadsheet documents, not for heavy-duty gaming, video editing or other multimedia work./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Reports also indicate that Acer plans to launch a rival to#160;a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/11/19/Asustek_to_launch_iMac_rival_1.html"Asustek#39;s Eee Top/a#160;, which is a low-cost competitor to Apple#39;s iMac , a display with computing functions built-in./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"#160;/p/divbr style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=camp;i=fdea70971a04e4a854731d5eedbcc089amp;p=1img style=border:0; src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=vamp;i=fdea70971a04e4a854731d5eedbcc089amp;p=1 border=0 //a

BARACK OBAMA: His Thanksgiving YouTube address. Also transcribed, AFTER THE JUMP...

RACHEL MADDOW: What she's thankful for.

MACY'S PARADE RICK-ROLLED: Rick Astley appears at the parade's best moment.

ROSIE LIVE: Clay Aiken arrives for a lame gay joke on what was perhaps the worst television special I've ever witnessed. Others agreed.

Remarks of President-elect Barack Obama
Thursday, November 27th, 2008

Good morning.

Nearly 150 years ago, in one of the darkest years of our nation's history, President Abraham Lincoln set aside the last Thursday in November as a day of Thanksgiving. America was split by Civil War. But Lincoln said in his first Thanksgiving decree that difficult times made it even more appropriate for our blessings to be -- and I quote -- "gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people."

This week, the American people came together with family and friends to carry on this distinctly American tradition. We gave thanks for loved ones and for our lasting pride in our communities and our country. We took comfort in good memories while looking forward to the promise of change.

But this Thanksgiving also takes place at a time of great trial for our people.

Across the country, there were empty seats at the table, as brave Americans continue to serve in harm's way from the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts of Iraq. We honor and give thanks for their sacrifice, and stand by the families who endure their absence with such dignity and resolve.

At home, we face an economic crisis of historic proportions. More and more Americans are worried about losing a job or making their mortgage payment. Workers are wondering if next month's paycheck will pay next month's bills. Retirees are watching their savings disappear, and students are struggling with the cost of tuition.

It's going to take bold and immediate action to confront this crisis. That's why I'm committed to forging a new beginning from the moment I take office as President of the United States. Earlier this week, I announced my economic team. This talented and dedicated group is already hard at work crafting an Economic Recovery Plan that will create or save 2.5 million new jobs, while making the investments we need to fuel long-term economic growth and stability.

But this Thanksgiving, we are reminded that the renewal of our economy won't come from policies and plans alone -- it will take the hard work, innovation, service, and strength of the American people.

I have seen this strength firsthand over many months -- in workers who are ready to power new industries, and farmers and scientists who can tap new sources of energy; in teachers who stay late after school, and parents who put in that extra hour reading to their kids; in young Americans enlisting in a time of war, seniors who volunteer their time, and service programs that bring hope to the hopeless.

It is a testament to our national character that so many Americans took time out this Thanksgiving to help feed the hungry and care for the needy. On Wednesday, I visited a food bank at Saint Columbanus Parish in Chicago. There -- as in so many communities across America -- folks pitched in time and resources to give a lift to their neighbors in need. It is this spirit that binds us together as one American family -- the belief that we rise and fall as one people; that we want that American Dream not just for ourselves, but for each other.

That's the spirit we must summon as we make a new beginning for our nation. Times are tough. There are difficult months ahead. But we can renew our nation the same way that we have in the many years since Lincoln's first Thanksgiving: by coming together to overcome adversity; by reaching for -- and working for -- new horizons of opportunity for all Americans.

So this weekend -- with one heart, and one voice, the American people can give thanks that a new and brighter day is yet to come.

Inventor and tech-philosopher Dave Winer Twittered tonight that federation is the hot thing, pointing to a New York Times article about Facebook Connect. And just like that he touched upon the third rail of our increasingly social web. The big question facing the social web depends on the direction it needs to take. A sharp increase in the number of web services and social networks has many of us yearning for a single sign-on, which has lead to the idea of “federation.” On the flip side, we also want one place to manage our diverse web services in one place — aggregate. These two diametrically opposed views of how we are going to come to grips with our social web are going to face an intense debate until consumers vote with their clicks.

United Federation of The Social Web

Federation, as explained on Wikipedia, “describes the technologies, standards and use-cases which serve to enable the portability of identity information across otherwise autonomous security domains. The ultimate goal of identity federation is to enable users of one domain to securely access data or systems of another domain seamlessly, and without the need for completely redundant user administration.”

Facebook Connect, which was announced in May 2008 and is being rolled out this week, allows you to use your Facebook login to access Facebook’s partner web sites, then broadcast what you are doing on those sites to everyone on Facebook. It’s like Facebook Beacon — minus the marketing sleaziness. Partners include the Discovery Channel, the (irrelevant) genealogy network Geni, and (hot) video site Hulu.

“Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer told The New York Times. “They can build their own social capabilities, but what will be more useful for them is building on top of a social system that people are already wedded to.” Of course, as I pointed out earlier, this is desperately important for the company to figure out how to make money. As a competitive matrix, here are some of other projects Facebook Connect is teeing off against: Google-sponsored Friend Connect, Open ID and MySpace’s Data Availability initiative.

HyperAggregate

On the flip side of federation is aggregation. There’s a small army of startups, such as FriendFeed and Ping.fm, that want to act as a dashboard for your entire social-web infrastructure. The latest startup to join the ranks is Power.com, a Rio de Janiero, Brazil-based startup that has until now operated in stealth and has raised $8 million in venture funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Esther Dyson. The company was started by Steve Vachani.

Vachani’s big idea is that you can come to the Power.com web site, log into and interact with all your social networks, as well as other web services. It is not the first startup of its kind. Several others — MyLifeBrand, Spokeo, Loopster and ProfileLinker — have walked down this road. What Power.com has done is use virality and focus on Orkut to get a big enough user base. Steve describes his service as “Facebook Connect for everything — an ultimate mashup platform” that connects to data from any service and allows Power.com users to interact with that information.

It works like this: You register all your web services and social networks on Power.com. Once you log on, you are automatically logged on everywhere that matters and you can easily go from Power.com to any one of your social networks with a single click. Your start page on Power.com (a stripped-down cross between Facebook’s start page and Netvibes) will show you all of your friends, messages and content — from all their social networks, soon from instant messengers and email accounts — in one place. All your friends, messages, updates, birthdays and photos from diverse social networks will be aggregated nicely together.

A Power “communicator” will allow you to send information to all your friends across networks with the ease of sending an email. “This is just like Meebo,” Steve insisted, where they log in to and constantly interact with the service. It doesn’t use any APIs, and all the magic happens using this technology developed by the company. Steve called it “intelligent proxy.” I have asked for more details to understand how exactly it works.

Power.com claims that all your information is going to be arranged by people not by discrete web destinations. Soon you will be able to use its dashboard to do everything on the web — or so it boldly hints in the press materials. The company claims it has 5 million registered users in Latin America and India and says it will hit 30 million by 2009. How it is claiming all these numbers and growth is a tad fuzzy.

Theoretically (and only theoretically) the idea of aggregating your web content and activites makes a lot of sense. Back in March 2007, in a column for Business 2.0, I wrote: “This is one of the hot opportunities in new new media: hyperaggregation. If aggregation is what we’ve seen so far on YouTube and Flickr, hyperaggregation is aggregating the aggregators…It’s impossible to keep up with dozens of social networks, millions of videos and thousands of blogs. Hyperaggregation is simply a way to do in the new-media world what old media has done for centuries: neatly package information.”

The demo of the service was quite impressive, but there was something about the service that makes me uneasy. Don’t get me wrong — I think they have built an interesting service, but many questions remain before it wins me over.

A Privacy Problem?

First of all, how is this going to turn into a big business? My guess is that our profiles would be used for some kind of marketing. In its terms of service, Power.com says:

You agree that Power may use your image for advertisement purposes. These advertisements will only be displayed to the same user whose image is being used.

Given my distaste for Facebook’s Beacon and other ad-supported efforts, this line makes me pretty queasy. Down in its TOS, Power.com notes that by saying yes to its service agreement, you are authorizing “Power.com to add the URL WEBSITE to my profile, linked to the site My.Power - Power profile of the user.” In other words, they can become your presence on the web, and the company can build a global social directory.

All these issues I would still be able to put aside, but I am not sure I want to aggregate and trust all my private information, including my personal communications (IM messages, emails and what not), to a tiny startup. What assurance is there when it comes to fidelity of my data? I am waiting for Vachani to outline how his company will be able to do that.

Instead, I very much like Loic Le Meur’s concept of “centralized me. “I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service,” he wrote. I couldn’t agree more.

Image courtesy of Luic Le Meur

A study published today in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology concludes that Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy is as effective as anti-depressants in controlling long-term depression. I've had personal experience with MBCT. About ten years ago, my personal life hit a very low point that left me more than sad -- I was paralyzed, weepy, unable to see the bright side of anything, listless, always tired. I recognized the symptoms of depression and spoke to a psychiatrist I knew. He recommended MBCT in the form of David D Burns's The Feeling Good Handbook. Despite its cheesy title, the book was just what I needed: a series of simple exercises that used empiricism (writing down what happened around you and how it made you feel, and what alternative explanations you could think of for others' behavior) to help change the habits of thought that led to the downward spiral. It wasn't long before the depression lifted, never to return (so far -- and if it does, I know what I'll do). I've never spoken in public about this before, but I have quietly passed on the book to many of my friends when it seemed needed, always with good results. So I'm not surprised to hear that this research ("led by Professor Willem Kuyken at the Mood Disorders Centre, University of Exeter, in collaboration with colleagues at the Centre for Economics of Mental Health (CEMH) at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, Peninsula Medical School, Devon Primary Care Trust and the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit") shows that MBCT works in cases of chronic, long-term depression. This is especially good news, since chronic depression (which runs in my family) is especially hard on the person experiencing it as well as those around her or him. The holidays are prime-time for difficult emotions. If you or someone you know is experiencing depression, know that it's not a sign of weakness or personal inadequacy. Help is simple, widely available and effective. Professor Willem Kuyken of the University of Exeter said: "Anti-depressants are widely used by people who suffer from depression and that's because they tend to work. But, while they're very effective in helping reduce the symptoms of depression, when people come off them they are particularly vulnerable to relapse. MBCT takes a different approach – it teaches people skills for life. What we have shown is that when people work at it, these skills for life help keep people well." Professor Kuyken continues: "Our results suggest MBCT may be a viable alternative for some of the 3.5 million people in the UK known to be suffering from this debilitating condition. People who suffer depression have long asked for psychological approaches to help them recover in the long-term and MBCT is a very promising approach. I think we have the basis for offering patients and GPs an alternative to long-term anti-depressant medication. We are planning to conduct a larger trial to put these results to the test and to examine how MBCT works." Depression Treatment: Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy As Effective As Anti-depressant Medication, Study Suggests...br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=ce0c26b54d8fa8e8d979291f9e053643p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=ce0c26b54d8fa8e8d979291f9e053643p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=ce0c26b54d8fa8e8d979291f9e053643" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

pimg alt="power_logo.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/power_logo.jpg" width="133" height="80" /The race to find a single sign-on and synchronization service has been on since social networking sites hit global acceptance several years ago. Today, after working under the radar for the past year, and with a member base of 5 million users, a href="http://power.com"Power.com/a announced its global launch with a mighty claim: "Our platform will break down the boundaries between social sites and allow users to synchronize their logins, content, messages and friends."/p pCalling it a 'social inter-networking' service, CEO Steve Vachani today explained: "Social is about people, not about place; we're making 'where' irrelevant."/p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.openx.org/ck.php?n=12757amp;cb=12757' target='_blank'img src='http://d.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=861amp;cb=12757amp;n=12757' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pHere at ReadWriteWeb, we have written extensively about the various efforts taking place to transform the Internet from the predominantly closed system it is today, to a more open and social experience; one where authentication is once only and data can be ported across sites. While we are certainly interested in any company that claims to have the answer, like everything else, time will tell./p h2What is Power?/h2 pPower is an interoperable platform that allows social network users to synchronize their profiles, content, messages and friends across various social sites. Right now, it works with a href="http://facebook.com/"Facebook/a, a href="http://hi5.com/"Hi5/a, a href="http://www.msn.com/"MSN/a,a href="http://www.myspace.com/" MySpace/a and a href="http://orkut.com"Orkut/a. LinkedIn is scheduled to appear before the end of the year, and Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Skype as well as others should be part of Power's grid within the first few months of 2009./p pAccording to Vachani, what Power is not trying to do is create one place online for people to send and receive updates, "we want people to continue using the sites they are currently using," said Vachani./p pAdditionally, Vachani explains that Power doesn't need the big websites to get together and agree to any commitment as the platform does not depend on their participation: "This independence contrasts with all previous efforts to bring social networks together, including Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, Microsoft Passport, OpenID and OpenSocial," Vachani said./p h2How does Power work?/h2 pOnce you register your social networks, Power shows you all the content from your registered sites; friends, IMs, e-mails, photos, data. Your home page will have three Power modules; your profile, your messages and your friends list. The technology is dynamic, so once you're logged in everything is served to you in real time./p pimg alt="power1_nov_08_1.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/power1_nov_08_1.jpg" width="526" height="307" //p pIf you want to reply to any of your messages, you can do it from within Power, in what Vachani calls 'Power Communicator' and send it to Facebook, MSN, SMS, MySpace, Gmail - all of them if you wish, or you can do it via your 'Power Friends' list:/p pimg alt="power_2_nov_08.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/power_2_nov_08.jpg" width="515" height="313" //p p"Profile Syncing" allows you to change your profile within Power, and gives you the option of updating it across all of the social networks Power supports./p pimg alt="power_3.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/power_3.jpg" width="514" height="324" //p h2How Power got 5 million registered users so quickly/h2 pAccording to Power, messaging is a prime driver of its user base. Users communicate with their friends across sites, via email and IM using Power Messaging to send millions of inter-networked messages every day and each message has a link back to Power./p pAdditionally, Power users have added Power widgets, links, and watermarks to their social network profile pages, so when friends visit, they click to learn more./p pHeadquartered in Rio de Janeiro Brazil, Power.com is a privately held company with 70 people. This month, Power.com is opening new offices in San Francisco, California and Hyderabad, India. The company received an $8 million Series A investment led by a href="http://www.dfj.com/"Draper Fisher Jurvetson/a, and investors including a href="http://www.edventure.com/"Esther Dyson/a. The company expects to have over 30 million registered users by the end of 2009.br / /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_inter-networking_with_p.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/y_-yxKe31ZfDxUhBth-jWebgsJQ/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/y_-yxKe31ZfDxUhBth-jWebgsJQ/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=v4xRj0nI"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1035" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=UGYJMJu6"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=1pL2OCsw"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=1pL2OCsw" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=Puf8KtfQ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=Puf8KtfQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=oBkuwgPG"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=oBkuwgPG" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=NCQiC11G"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=mhIZ7dNt"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1034" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/pUukzMhNpjE" height="1" width="1"/

There aren’t many sites with 5 million users that we haven’t heard of, but Power.com is just that, and it’s a name you might be hearing a lot more of after it launches in the US today.

Previously available in Brazil and India, the site bills itself as a “Meebo for social networking” of sorts, allowing you to simultaneously login to accounts on both social networking services like Facebook and MySpace and instant messaging networks like MSN.

From there, you can view new activities from friends on those services, see who’s online across all of them via a buddy list, and use the “Power Communicator” to simultaneously send a message to your friends on any site you have synced with Power.com. In other words, if your friends are spread across many social networks, you can see an aggregate view of their activities and message them on their native network, all from inside the Power.com interface.

Isn’t this just like Friendfeed?

Not exactly. For one, the instant messaging aspect is something Friendfeed doesn’t have - if you’ve synced your Facebook, MySpace, and MSN accounts with Power.com, you’ll get a buddy list that shows all of your friends who are signed on to those services, even if they don’t use Power.com. Additionally, Power.com is far more of a two-way communicator. In addition to aggregating activities from your friends across multiple services, it lets you respond to them and send messages to their native app.

So It’s Like Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, etc?

Still a bit off. While those services will let you access your friend’s list on third-party websites, Power.com isn’t looking to be your universal profile or social graph. And, it doesn’t matter at all if your friends use it – you’ll still be able to communicate with them using Power.com so long as you’ve synced your account.

How does it have 5 million users already?

Initially, the only social networking service supported by Power.com was Orkut, which, is big in Brazil and India. These are where most of Power.com’s users are currently – Alexa shows that the site is in the top 1,000 in both markets. Additionally, the service has built in virality. For example, when you send a message to friends on other networks, it includes a “Sent by Power.com” message. Power.com also has a communicator app that is added to social networking profiles, allowing friends to contact you through it (similar to MeeboMe widgets).

Will it Take Off in the US?

At launch, Power.com supports Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, MSN Messenger, Orkut, and YouTube. While there is certainly some overlap between those services, Power.com will become much more valuable when it adds LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, and Skype, all expected to be added soon.

Ultimately, you end up with a combination of an aggregation service like FriendFeed, a multi-protocol IM tool like Meebo, and an all-in-one email application. Like Meebo, getting started is as easy as logging in with one of your existing accounts on one of the supported services, making user acquisition a breeze. The viral features mentioned above should presumably have the same big impact in the US, further fueling growth.

Despite flying under the radar in the US, Rio-based Power.com has already raised $6 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, in addition to well-known angel Esther Dyson. The company has 70 employees.

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Major San Francisco Power Outage Takes Down Web 2.0 Sites
30Boxes Brings Us Power Twitter
Ironic Press Release Heaven
Pixsy Powers iStockphoto Search
Pixsy to Power SuperStock Search
Veoh Search Now Powered by Pixsy
Google-Friendster Partnership Revealed

Chances are you use at least two major social networks - 49 million people, for example, visited both MySpace and Facebook in October 2008 (Comscore, worldwide). Nearly 7 million people in the UK use both Bebo and Facebook. A lot of people maintain very different friend lists on LinkedIn than MySpace or Facebook. Etc. And when you add in niche social sites like YouTube, Flickr, etc., there’s even more overlap among users.

There has never been an effective way of aggregating and merging all the data and activity on these sites into a single user interface. A new venture backed Brazilian-based started called Power.com launches today, though, that aims to do just that. They’re calling what they do “social inter-networking” because it allows users to view and interact with all of their social networks at once. Data is aggregated, and the sites themselves, if accessed via the Power.com site, are marked up with added features in a way that Greasemonkey users are familiar with.

The service is unknown in the U.S. today, although it’s been live since August and boasts 5 million users already. Until today it supported just a few social networks, notably Orkut. Now, though, the service supports users from Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5 and a number of niche networks like YouTube.

Here’s how it works.

Log into one or more social networks on the Power.com site. Friends, messages, updates, photos and other information are either scraped from the site or obtained via the API (it varies by site), and aggregated on the Power dashboard. Users can respond/comment on this content directly from Power. And if they like, they can send messages and updates to all of their social networks at once. Or send a message to just one friend, but have it sent to all of their different social networks (and if they are a Power user, to their email, SMS, instant message, etc., per their settings).

If you visit one of the social networks through the Power site, the pages are marked up with additional functionality. Click a button to start chatting with the user over MSN chat, if they are a Power.com user.

Lastly, users can create a Power.com profile based on whatever social network they choose. Here’s mine, based on Facebook (which, by the way, effectively makes my private Facebook profile public).

It’s all a bit confusing, but it’s fairly simple to try out. Just log in and go.

There are real benefits to the service. Users can keep track of friends on social networks they belong to but don’t visit very often. Status messages can be added to all networks simultaneously. Photos and videos can be uploaded on multiple sites at once. And messaging people across multiple services is dead simple.

There are limitations to the service. You have to access the sites via Power.com. And the company is scraping content off the sites, something that may violate the terms and conditions of some or all of these services (Meebo did the same with instant messaging platforms, and was eventually embraced - but they could have just been shut down).

As I said above, the company has gathered 5 million users since August, mostly on Orkut. Power.com users who leave content on sites can choose to add a link to Power.com, making the service spread virally very quickly. Now that they’ve launched publicly and on the big sites, expect the service to grow even more quickly.

The company has raised $5 million in venture financing from Silicon Valley-based Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

It’s also worth noting that we’ve covered a bunch of services that attempt to do some of the things Power.com is doing. See our posts on MyLifeBrand, Spokeo, Loopster and ProfileLinker. None of those sites were able to tap into the viral growth features that Power.com has, though. Power’s decision to add a link when content is posted through their service was brilliant.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0