Brad’s Sketchpad

You’ve probably seen the salacious ads, plastered across sites like MySpace and Friendster. Dating site True.com has rediscovered the age-old notion that sex sells. However, like a Texas politician, it is also combining those sex drenched ads with a bit of piety, asking state governments to pass laws requiring that dating sites conduct background checks on their members or disclose that they fail to do so.

In today’s paper, I look at True.com, its eccentric founder Herb Vest, and why True and some of its less than honorable business tactics seems to making many of its rivals a little hot under the collar.

Today Cisco announced it is buying the technology behind eclipsed social network Tribe.net, which I first reported on the paper’s web site on Friday. It’s an odd deal, but puts the Silicon Valley equipment giant on track to help its customers, like telcos and media companies, set up their own social networks. Today, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube seem unique. But clearly a multitude of clones is on the way.

For the last five years, we’ve competed in San Francisco’s Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt, a four-hour-long scamper through the floats, crowds and firecrackers of the annual Chinese New Year parade.

In yesterday’s competition, our Year of the Pig team (”Boar to be Wild”) took second place — out of thousands of entrants. The accomplishment was particularly sweet because in previous years we have finished quickly but made minor mistakes that ruined our chances. We won a cake, champagne and a certificate.

From last week:

On Monday, Miguel Helft and I profiled the digital fingerprinting companies helping Web 2.0 sites filter user submissions for copyrighted content. Google’s YouTube was seemingly dragging their feet on implementing the technology, but a few days later Google announced they would begin filtering YouTube.

In Wednesday’s paper, I profiled eBay’s marketplaces president John Donahoe.

And today, onetime pirate pariah BitTorrent joined the flood of companies offering Hollywood movies and TV shows for sale over the Internet.

This week, the FTC settled a dispute with parasitic adware firm Direct Revenue, whose software, surreptitiously installed, bedeviled so many computers a few years ago. The agreement requires the company to pay a $1.5 million fine and get explicit permission before downloading software onto someone’s PC, something it blatantly failed to do in its first few years of existence.

Commissioner John Leibowitz filed a dissent and makes a persuasive argument that the fine is not heavy enough, given the pain and frustration the company caused millions of Internet users.

A few years ago — before the class action lawsuit, the legal assault by Eliot Spitzer, and the action by the FTC — I investigated the secretive Direct Revenue for a piece that ran on Newsweek’s Web site. Somewhere in my files, I have CEO Joshua Abrams’ angry letter disputing the story. If I find it I’ll post it. In light of recent conclusions about the company’s nefarious behavior, I’m sure the letter now appears hilariously disingenuous.