Technology

GoDaddy website-building product GoCentral is getting an upgrade today — and along with new features, therea new name: Websites+Marketing.

As you can probably guess, Websites+Marketing isn&t just a website builder. After all, as Senior Director of Product Management Heidi Gibson put it, a small business website is now part of a &a whole ecosystem that comprises your online presence.&

These are issues that Gibson said sheexperienced directly, as the chef/owner/&Commander in Cheese& at The American Grilled Cheese Kitchen in San Francisco.

&Our typical customer, our target customer is not just a small business — they&ve got one to five employees …they don&t know what they&re supposed to do, they don&t know whateffective,& she added. Complicating matters is the fact that &where you need to be will not be the same answer for every kind of business.&

So GoDaddy Websites+Marketing — which Gibson described as &an evolution of GoCentral& —includes tools to manage email marketing and search engine optimization, and it syncs up with Facebook, Yelp, Instagram and Google My Business, so that iteasy to read the latest reviews and comments, respond and post other updates directly from your Websites+Marketing dashboard.

It also includes a new feature called GoDaddy Insight, which relies on anonymized data — aggregated from all the businesses using GoDaddy and GoCentral — to provide entrepreneurs with a score on how their online presence and marketing compares to similar businesses, as well as an action plan recommending the next steps for improvement.

The website-builder looks pretty slick, too. Gibson acknowledged that some of the features will look pretty similar to anyone whoused a competing product, but she said even here, GoDaddy has taken steps to make things easier.

For example, the Site Makeover feature allows businesses to get a quick view of how their content might look laid out on each of the 20-plus website templates, rather than making them click through each one. And thanks to GoDaddyrecent acquisition of Sellbrite, businesses also can manage their product listings across online marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart and eBay.

GoDaddy Websites+Marketingis available infour pricing tiers, ranging from $10 to $25 per month.

A real check to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbergcontrol is finally coming in the form of an 11 to 40-member Oversight Board that will review appeals to its policy decisions, like content takedowns, and make recommendations for changes. Today Facebook released the charter establishing the theoretically independent Oversight Board, with Zuckerberg explaining that when it takes a stance, &The boarddecision will be binding, even if I or anyone at Facebook disagrees with it.&

Slated to be staffed with members this year, who will be paid by a Facebook-established trust (the biggest update to its January draft charter), the Oversight Board will begin judging cases in the first half of 2020. Given Zuckerbergoverwhelming voting control of the company, and the fact that its board of directors contains many loyalists, like COO Sheryl Sandberg and investor Peter Thiel whom hemade very rich, the Oversight Board could ensure the CEO doesn&t always have the final say in how Facebook works.

But in some ways, the committee could serve to shield Zuckerberg and Facebook from scrutiny and regulation, much to their advantage. The Oversight Board could remove total culpability for policy blunders around censorship or political bias from Facebookexecutives. It also might serve as a talking point toward the FTC and other regulators investigating it for potential antitrust violations and other malpractice, as the company could claim the Oversight Board means itnot completely free to pursue profit over whatfair for society.

Finally, there remain serious concerns about how the Oversight Board is selected and the wiggle room the charter provides Facebook. Most glaringly, Facebook itself will choose the initial members and then work with them to select the rest of the board, and thereby could avoid adding overly incendiary figures. And it maintains that &Facebook will support the board to the extent that requests are technically and operationally feasible and consistent with a reasonable allocation of Facebookresources,& giving it the right to decide if it should apply the precedent of Oversight Board verdicts to similar cases or broadly implement its policy guidance.

How the Oversight Board works

When a user disagrees with how Facebook enforces its policies, and with the result of an appeal to Facebookinternal moderation team, they can request an appeal to the Oversight Board. Examples of potential cases include someone disagreeing with Facebookrefusal to deem a piece of content as unacceptable hate speech or bullying, its choice to designate a Page as promoting terrorism and remove it or the companydecision to leave up problematic content, such as nudity, because itnewsworthy. Facebook also can directly ask the Oversight Board to review policy decisions or specific cases, especially urgent ones with real-world consequences.

After Zuckerberg initially laid out a blueprint for the Oversight Board a year ago, Facebook assigned a 100-person team to build out the plan for the board. It held six workshops and 22 round-tables, plus case-review simulations with 650 people from 88 countries.

The board will include a minimum of 11 members, but Facebook is aiming for 40. They&ll serve three-year terms and a maximum of three terms each as a part-time job, with appointments staggered so there isn&t a full change-over at any time. Facebook is looking for members with a broad range of knowledge, competencies and expertise who lack conflicts of interest. They&re meant to be &experienced at deliberating thoughtfully and collegially,& &skilled at making and explaining decisions based on a set of policies,& &well-versed on matters relating to digital content and governance& and &independent and impartial.&

Facebook will appoint a set of trustees that will work with it to select initial co-chairs for the board, who will then assist with sourcing, vetting, interviewing and orienting new members. The goal is &broad diversity of geographic, gender, political, social and religious representation.& The trust, funded by Facebook with an as yet undecided amount of capital, will set members& compensation rate in the near future and oversee term renewals.

Inevitable calls of biased board members

My biggest worry here is how Facebook will handle the fact that ittrying to represent an extraordinarily vast set of global policy perspectives…broader than any one countrylaws. Whattaboo or even illegal in one nation may be common or lauded in another. Facebook may see endless challenges from different segments of the public regarding the previous public statements by board members.

What Facebookown staff in California might see as an uncontroversial viewpoint could trigger calls for removal from the board elsewhere. We&ve seen how common &cancelled& culture has become when the public digs up problematic content from celebrities or politicians, and thatjust based on what flies in the United States.

For example, Republican senators just bullied Facebook into removing a fact-check that found the statement &abortion is never medically necessary& to be false, allowing that viewpoint to spread uninhibited on the social network. I personally wouldn&t want someone with that viewpoint on the Oversight Board, but others might feel the opposite. And what happens when politicians start demanding more conservative representation on the Oversight Board the same way they&ve badgered Facebook for supposedly censoring them despite evidence to the contrary?

BARCELONA, SPAIN & FEBRUARY 21: Founder and CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg gives his speech during the presentation of the new Samsung Galaxy S7 and Samsung Galaxy S7 edge on February 21, 2016 in Barcelona, Spain. (Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images)

Which cases get reviewed?

The board will choose which cases to review based on their significance and difficulty. They&re looking for issues that are severe, large-scale and important for public discourse, while raising difficult questions about Facebookpolicy or enforcement that is disputed, uncertain or represents tension or trade-offs between Facebookrecently codified values of authenticity, safety, privacy and dignity. The board will then create a sub-panel of five members to review a specific case.

The board will be able to question the request that Facebook provide information necessary to rule on the case with a mind to not violating user privacy. They&ll interpret FacebookCommunity Standards and policies and then decide whether Facebook should remove or restore a piece of content and whether it should change how that content was designated. Verdicts are meant to have consensus, but will be approved by majority when necessary.

How decisions get made

Once a panel makes a draft decision, itcirculated to the full board, which can recommend a new panel review if a majority take issue with the verdict. Once they&ve gone through a privacy review to protect the identities of those involved with the case, the decisions will be made public within two weeks and affected users will be notified. Those decisions will be archived in a database, and are meant to act as precedent for future decisions. The idea is that the decisions of the board will be binding and implemented by Facebook as long as they don&t require it to violate the law.

But will Facebook really implement them?

The biggest concern with the charter is that it still provides Facebook some leeway about how to implement the boarddecisions. Critically, it only has to apply the decision to the specific case reviewed, and itat the companydiscretion to turn that into blanket policy:

In instances where Facebook identifies that identical content with parallel context — which the board has already decided upon — remains on Facebook, it will take action by analyzing whether it is technically and operationally feasible to apply the boarddecision to that content as well. When a decision includes policy guidance or a policy advisory opinion, Facebook will take further action by analyzing the operational procedures required to implement the guidance, considering it in the formal policy development process of Facebook . . . Facebook will support the board to the extent that requests are technically and operationally feasible and consistent with a reasonable allocation of Facebookresources.

Because of these sections I&ve bolded, Facebook has the ability to decide it would be operationally infeasible to do what the board decided in every situation, merely take the guidance into account for future policy-making and choose whether implementation is a reasonable allocation of capital and staff. This provides a sizable gray area.

If Facebook chooses that the boarddecision could materially reduce sharing even if it protected users, it might consider that operationally infeasible. If it would cost too much to moderate content in the way the board recommends, it could deem that unreasonable resource allocation. And if the policy guidance doesn&t mesh with its other objectives, it only has to &consider& the boardwishes.

This section is where advocates and critics should focus. These exemptions to implementation need to be made less vague if the structure is truly going to hold Facebook accountable. If Facebook just declines to broadly change its policy to fit the boardrecommendation, all the board can do is make binding decisions on specific cases.

Facebook director of governance Brent Harris explained on a call with reporters that &If the board doesn&t feel like we&ve handled it right, they&ll keep taking cases and overturn us.& But again the boardpower is focused on a case-by-case basis. Facebook still controls the wide-reaching changes to policy.

If you want to learn more about solutions to Facebookconcentration of power, check out my talk at SXSW 2020 with Facebookco-founder Chris Hughes, who has called for the company to be broken up.

Amazon-owned Twitch has made a small but strategic acquisition designed to improve its search capabilities and better direct viewers to exactly the right content. The company is acquiring IGDB, the Internet Games Database (no relation to AmazonIMDb), a website dedicated to combining all the relevant information about games into a comprehensive resource for gamers everywhere. As a result of the acquisition, IGDBdatabase will now feed into Twitchsearch and discovery feature set. However, the IGDB website itself will not be shut down.

Founded in 2015 by Christian Frithiof and a small team based in Gothenburg, Sweden, IGDB sources its gaming content both through community contributions and automation.

The site includes useful information for every game, like the genre, platforms supported, description, member and critic ratings and reviews, storyline, game modes, publisher, release dates, characters and more. You could also find less-common details, like how long it would take to play the game in question, or the player perspectives the game offered, among other things.

And similar to IMDbmission of organizing everything associated with the entertainment industry, IGDB allowed voice talent to claim their profile on its site, in addition to listing the full credits associated with a given title.

To generate revenue, IGDB provided a developer API thatbeen free to use for smaller shops or $99 per month for up to 50K requests. Interested partners, (e.g. ASUS), could reach out to request special pricing. To date, IGDB was working with several thousand API users, we understand.

Twitch confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch in a statement.

&Millions of people come to Twitch every day to find and connect with their favorite streamers and communities, and we want to make it easier for people to find what they&re looking for,& a spokesperson said. &IGDB has developed a comprehensive gaming database, and we&re excited to bring them on to help us more quickly improve and scale search and discovery on Twitch.&

Deal terms were not disclosed, but it was likely a small deal, from a financial standpoint. IGDB is only a 10-person team and had raised just $1.5 million to date, according to data from Crunchbase.

From a strategic standpoint, however, the acquisition is much more impactful.

Twitch CEO Emmett Shear has spoken publicly about the issues surrounding Twitchsearch functionality and how it needs to improve on that front.

&We want every place on Twitch to help you get discovered. Today, nearly one in three people who come to Twitch use Search to find what they&re looking for. Now, I&ll be the first to admit that our search function hasn&t always been the best experience,& Shear had said earlier this year, speaking at TwitchCon Berlin. &One wrong letter and your search results may come back empty, or direct you to a very different streamer than the one you were looking for. So we&re going to fix search so it actually works,& he promised.

In recent weeks, there were hints that something was going on at IGDB.

In a blog post dated August 19, 2019, IGDB announced it was starting a &large scale migration of our backend, database, and hosting& and said that the service was &about to undergo some changes, some temporary and others more permanent.& As a part of its changes, it shut off the ability for users to sign-up or update their profiles, and it shut down its pulse news, feed and recommendations features.

Now a part of Twitch, IGDB will merge its free and premium APIs into one free tier, will clean up other features and migrate infrastructure. Its IGDB website will continue to remain online.

&Our mission has always been to build the most comprehensive gaming database in the world. Such a monumental undertaking can be quite challenging when you are a small startup team,& reads an IGDB blog post. &By joining Twitch, we will be able to tap into their experience, resources, and skills, which will enable us to accelerate our progress and deliver the version of IGDB we all always dreamed about. Not only that, our companies share the same culture, core values, and passion for gaming & making this the perfect fit,& the post said.

It was common industry knowledge Twitch previously used competing data provider Giant Bomb. As is often the case, the company may have been in discussions with IGDB about making a switch, which led to the acquisition. (The company declined to say how it came about.) What had made IGDB different from other API providers, like MobyGames, is that it allowed its API to be used commercially, including by competing projects, and it allowed caching and storing data on local databases.

The entire 10-person team from IGDB will remain based in Sweden, but will report into Twitch through its Viewer Experience organization.