At least, that’s what Chris Winfield believes. He’s the cofounder and chief marketing officer of BlueGlass Interactive, a digital marketing agency with Fortune 1000 clients such as Disney, eBay, and the NFL.

I chatted with him today about Facebook, Graph Search, and Google.

VentureBeat: Let’s start generally: What was your first reaction to Graph Search?

Winfield: For me, one of the most interesting things was the way they announced Graph Search. It was understated, there was no livestream, no partnership with CNN, and it wasn’t in a huge venue. They’re really under-promising, saying it’s not a search engine, it’s not Yelp, and we’d love to work with Google if they want to.

To me, that’s a bigger sign that they are in fact looking to compete in search.

But Facebook has a partnership with Microsoft, and you can bet they’ve really looked at how hard its been for anyone to compete with Google. They’ve watched Microsoft pour billions into search and barely make a dent.

VentureBeat: So how would they compete?

Winfield: To start, all they want to do is get people comfortable with making some searches on Facebook … starting to get something they can’t get anywhere else.

The most important thing for Facebook is they just have to get people comformtable with finding a couple of things, and then what we’ll start to see is the evolution of it as they build it out. One goal will be to get more and more businesses to stop caring so much about Google Local.

And then, over time, search and being able to control that experience will become fundamental to Facebook and especially to their advertising platform.

VentureBeat: Let’s talk about Facebook and advertising. How does this help?

Winfield: Everything for Facebook ads right now is based on guesses about what you’re interested in, but search became the most effective advertising engine of all time because people are directly looking for something … you see the intent.

That said, the holy grail is personalization: The more the platform knows about you — what you’re looking for, and what you’re likely to not just click on but also take some kind of action about — the better. Which is why Google has not just focused on being the best search engine but [has] added the personalization that is so important.

Now, from the Facebook point of view, if an advertiser can bid on terms related to your business — and friends have liked that business — that’s the Holy Grail. There’s a long way to go, but if you can put intent and what you like and who you are together, that is very, very powerful.

VentureBeat: Where’s the biggest conflict?

Winfield: Initially, they’re going to position this as if there are no conflicts — we’re completely different, we’re solving the people search problem.

But they’re almost trying to change how people think about search. Googling something is obvious and standard now — Google has it locked up. But when Facebook is talking about natural language search and changing how search is done socially, that’s key.

In my experience, as soon as someone says we’re not really competing with you, that’s when you get really scared. For example, TripAdvisor — you have this partnership and you think you’re safe — but now that’s at risk. Or Bing, frankly. There’s no way that partnership lasts very long. As soon as Facebook thinks they have something that works better, it’s gone.

Facebook doesn’t need to come in and be the dominant search site. They just need to start chipping away.

VentureBeat: Let’s talk about the advertising potential here.

Winfield: That plays back to Facebook’s whole overall messaging: We know we have the audience, we know that advertisers want to spend more with us, and we know they’re not spending as much as they want to because they’re not seeing the same results as elsewhere (like AdWords).

Facebook doesn’t really need to convince advertisers, they just need to create the product and get people using it. And then they’ll have advertisers lining up around the block.

VentureBeat: Is this perhaps the first really serious challenge for Google?

Winfield: Yes, because Facebook has over a billion users. And it’s not just like a Yahoo home page with a billion visitors; these people actually have accounts and are actually logging in.

So Facebook has the opportunity to grab those people’s attention – that’s what makes this different.

VentureBeat: What should Google do?

Winfield: Really, Google should just keep doing what they’re doing.

The big question for Google is: How do you incentivize people more, or give people reasons to spend more time with Google? It’s not about being the next Facebook, it’s about trying to control more and more of people’s experience. Which is why Google is integrating everything.

For Google, it’s about how they convince people that they have the best search engine. If you’re able to find what you’re looking for and are finding what you need, you won’t leave.

photo credit: Tom.Bricker via photopin cc

It’s unclear which a-little-knowledge-is-a-dangerous-thing moron thought this up, but whatever you believe about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, glorifying death — like assassinating a Hamas leader on almost-live YouTube yesterday — and making a game out of war is stupid, wrong, and unspeakably distasteful.

Here are all the badges you can win for participating in this sick game:

I’m going to lay my cards out on the table (stupid, I know) because I don’t want to be mistaken. I support Israel’s right to exist. I support Israel’s right to defend itself. I think that we in the West have absolutely no freaking clue what it’s like to live under threat of terror, rockets, and suicide bombings month after month, year after year.

But it’s not okay to glorify war. It’s not okay to broadcast killings as if they were some sporting match — yay, a goal for our team — or release images of enemy combatants with the word ELIMINATED pasted over top.

You shouldn’t lose your fundamental respect for human life, even in the midst of war, and terror, and death, and destruction.

This is not fun. It is not a game. People are dying. This is not Xbox, this is real life.

War is not a game.

photo credit: mugley via photopin cc; hat tip: ReadWriteWeb

Israel’s army is live-blogging and live-tweeting operation Pillar of Defense, its attacks on Hamas rocket sites in the Gaza strip. The current military campaign is in response, it says, to more than 700 rocket attacks from Gaza this year.

Update Nov. 15: Israel’s army, the IDF has gamified its war blog.

Rocket attack on Israel, and Israel’s retaliation, are nothing new, sadly.

The unprecedented and almost unbelievable part, however, is that the Israeli Defense Forces blog has been updated multiple times today with details on the attacks: intercepts of missiles fired from Gaza, pictures of what IDF says are Hamas rocket-launching sites, and Israeli Navy strikes on what it claims are terror sites in the Gaza Strip.

Reminiscent of Desert Storm, during which images of the daily destruction flashed across our TV screens every night, video of the fight is now available almost in real time via YouTube. The IDF blog highlighted a video of a missile strike that obliterated a vehicle apparently carrying Ahmed Jabari, who it says is the head of Hamas’ military wing in Gaza — and then tweeted his photo with the word “ELIMINATED” superimposed in all-caps.

Palestinian fighters are answering back with fresh attacks on Israel, documented via Twitter. Predictably, they are condemning the attack and threatening more retribution. This tweet, from Al Qassam, is just a sample of 10 or more in the last hour announcing shelling of Israeli air force bases with Katyusha rockets and mortars in response to Jabari’s killing:

Al Qassam hit Isnad Sofa base with 6 mortars in response on assassination of its leader #AhmedJabari #Gaza #Israel #terror

—
Alqassam Brigades (@AlqassamBrigade) November 14, 2012

The IDF says its mobile missile defense system Iron Dome – an Israeli equivalent of the U.S. Army’s Patriot anti-missile defense system — has intercepted at least 17 missiles fired from Gaza.

But why Israel is liveblogging and tweeting the attacks is unclear. Israel has long felt that international media is heavily biased in favor of Palestinian fighters, but tweets like the one announcing Jabari’s death seem more likely to provoke a violent response than to help stop the confrontation:

Ahmed Jabari: Eliminated. http://t.co/sCnQnKkM

—
IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012

We tend to jump all over pro athletes, brands, and celebrities who tweet things that offend our sensibilities, or strike us as cruel, rude, or insensitive. But war is orders of magnitude worse.

And I, of course, am now complicit in this social media war.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Imagine being able to predict when a war will break out. Well, scientists are trying, and they’re getting awfully close.

In 2010, when the WikiLeaks scandal broke, a group of friends gathered together at Bitly Inc in New York to try to bring order to the chaotic mess of data WikiLeaks had unleashed.

They used a simple code to extract dates and locations from about 77,000 unclassified reports from both simple stop-and-search operations and battles. This revealed unexpected hot spots: the Pakistani border, and the country’s main highway, which had experienced a series of violent outbreaks.

Recent advances in big data technologies have shown that we’re close to being able to predict exactly when a battle will break out. However there’s one thing that will stymie advances in this field: the inherent unpredictability of humans.

This year, when big data became a buzzword, the team reunited at Bitly’s offices to give the project another shot. This time, they teamed up with the brightest mathematical minds for a more audacious goal: a war zone prediction model. The researchers found a general pattern to the violence in Afghanistan, using it to determine whether an uprising would take place in each province, and its level of intensity.

The model worked with surprising accuracy and didn’t fail even when President Obama changed the rules of the game by sending in 30,000 additional troops.

The project, the results of which were published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July, is just one small part of a growing movement to anticipate episodes of armed conflict using algorithmic computational techniques. Still, we have a long road ahead of us before this data is turned into actionable intelligence — a matter of life or death on the battlefield.

As Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, head of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Organization, recently stated, “There is no shortage of data. There is a dearth of analysis.”

Iraq: the first ‘big data war’

Bitly’s research wasn’t the first time a group of renegade scientists brought the power of analytics to a war zone. For the better part of the decade, bringing big data to the battlefield has been the job of civilian researchers.

Cast your mind back to the spring of 2003, when four countries participated in the invasion of Iraq and succeeded in toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein in 21 days. At Oxford University, a young scholar had a theory, one that did not sit very well with centuries of political theory. He wondered whether wars share a single, predictable pattern.

Sean Gourley (pictured), a New Zealand-born graduate student, told me that “during one of those classic Oxford dinner conversations where you sit around these high tables, Harry Potter-style”  he butted heads with James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA.

“I had a hunch that there might be some strong, mathematical pattern that might emerge once we’d looked at Iraq,” he said. “No one had really done it before.”

Using a combination of reports from 130 news sources, SMS-based communications between freelance journalists and photographers stationed in Baghdad, plus any information from the frontlines he could get his hands on, he set to work on an algorithm.

“We were writing software to extract when people were dying and how they were dying …”

Gourley told me that he harbored strong reservations about the research. “My God … we were writing software to extract when people were dying and how they were dying,” Gourley said, admitting that he frequently considered throwing in the towel.

To make matters more complicated, reports from various news media often conflicted. As we know now, war reporting is notoriously inaccurate and is even less viable when comparing one armed conflict to another. In Afghanistan, for example, rural environs and a depleted number of reporters on the field led to less coverage than in the Iraq conflict. This remains a problem for researchers today.

Gourley told me they learned that the best approach was for humans and algorithms had to work hand-in-hand. By then, a team of physicists were working with him to see him through this crazy experiment, and they were investigating other conflict areas, including Sierra Leone. According to Gourley, the senior-level military personnel were keeping a watchful eye on their progress.

However, his frequent attempts to convince a contact at the Pentagon to hand over data fell on deaf ears. As a foreign national, he was not able to access official U.S. military reports.

This proved to be a blessing in disguise. At that time, the military’s analysts were typically trained in political science, not computer science, and their reports were spotty at best. “They couldn’t write a python script if you paid them,” Gourley joked. After the WikiLeaks scandal, he discovered that his datasets were superior to the U.S. military’s. “It turns out that we had 80 percent of what they had; they only had 70 percent of what we had,” he explained.

The results, published in Nature in 2009, found that insurgent wars follow an approximate power law, in which the frequency of attacks decreases with increasing attack size to the power of 2.5. That means that for any insurgent war, an attack with 10 casualties is 316 times more likely to occur than one with 100 casualties.

This may seem like a boring set of numbers, but for the first time, it revealed an underlying pattern to war. “It shows that there is something going on in the way these wars are fought that is common to all,” Neil F. Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami who participated in the research, told Nature.

In the course of his research, he and his team collected data on 54,679 “violent events” reported in nine different conflicts, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, Peru, and Colombia.

What’s next for the big data wars?

The Gourley and Bitly research are first steps in bringing objective quantitative analysis to realms that were once subjective. Big data will play a growing role in maintaining global security as the Department of Defense reshuffles budgets and priorities. According to Forbes, the amount of data from drones and other surveillance technology has risen 1,600 percent since 9/11.

To step up the research, the U.S. military recently made a $250 million bet on big data. In May, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta put forward a review of the country’s national defense, spotlighting information processing as a growing priority.

For Gourley, who ultimately left academia to form big data startup Quid, this research will have far-reaching consequences, and not just for the military. If these algorithms work, they may change the very nature of war.

Key Image via Shutterstock 

Multinational game publisher THQ announced today that its upcoming strategy title, Company of Heroes 2, will have special technology to simulate brutal weather conditions in-game, making this the first weather tech of its kind in the genre. Set in World War II, Company of Heroes 2 will help players realize the full role the incredibly cold Soviet winter played in the Eastern Front theater in that war. The weather technology, created with the Essence Engine 3.0′s ColdTech system, includes an “extreme cold” mechanic that accurately recreates the chill of the era, which reached -40˚ F in the winter of 1941.

Players will need to keep their infantry from freezing to death by building fires and enclosed garrisons. Snow will build up and accumulate on buildings and vehicles, becoming a hazard to troops and affecting strategies. Players will need to cover their tracks in fresh snow, or melt it from vehicles to continue the campaign. Ice will also play into various scenarios, affecting troop and vehicle movement, collapsing (or being destroyed) underneath armies, and re-forming as the bitter cold continues.

“Company of Heroes 2 is all about authenticity, and no game based on the Eastern Front would be complete without extreme weather conditions,” said Quinn Duffy, Game Director at Relic Entertainment. “Thanks to the enhanced technology offered by the new Essence Engine, we are able to accurately portray the bitter Soviet winter which crippled the German army.”

The first Company of Heroes was released in 2006 and was highly rated by critics and fans alike. The upcoming sequel is scheduled for release on PC in early 2013.

THQ is based in Los Angeles County, Calif.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Twitter posted earlier today about “delivering a consistent Twitter experience,” which basically meant, as Owen Thomas at Business Insider noted, they were taking their ball and going home. The impact on LinkedIn is that tweets will no longer be displayed within LinkedIn accounts.

But LinkedIn wasted no time firing back. Perhaps you’ve also received this email in your inbox from the professional networking company:

Briefly, what the letter says is that if you want to share status updates on both LinkedIn and Twitter, start on LinkedIn:

Simply start your conversation on LinkedIn. Compose your update, check the box with the Twitter icon, and click “Share.” This will automatically push your update to both your LinkedIn connections and your Twitter followers just as before.

In other words, don’t use Twitter.com (which means that users won’t view any ads or sponsored tweets on Twitter), but spend your time on LinkedIn (which means that users will view ads there) and push your content out to that other network.

This is a very public rift that is somewhat shocking: LinkedIn has been consuming tweets for three years now. And as Thomas noted in his post, Twitter is punishing LinkedIn for exactly what the new Twitter app for Facebook does: cross-posting updates to both social networks.

Here’s the full text from LinkedIn:

LinkedIn and Twitter have worked together since 2009 to enable you to share your professional conversations on both platforms. Twitter recently evolved its strategy and this will result in a change to the way Tweets appear in third-party applications. Starting today Tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn.

We know that sharing updates from LinkedIn to Twitter is a valuable service for our members. Moving forward, you will still be able to share updates with your Twitter audience by posting them on LinkedIn.

How can I continue to share updates on both LinkedIn and Twitter?
Simply start your conversation on LinkedIn. Compose your update, check the box with the Twitter icon, and click “Share.” This will automatically push your update to both your LinkedIn connections and your Twitter followers just as before.

What changes can I expect to see on LinkedIn?
Any conversation you start on Twitter will no longer be automatically shared with your LinkedIn network, even if you synced your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.

If you would like more information about what this means for your synced LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, please visit our related Help Center topics.

Thank you,
The LinkedIn Team

Image credit: ShutterStock