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Chevrolet has announced that during Super Bowl XLVI, they will be running a “Play to Win” game on their interactive Chevy App.  The app itself ties in with a special Chevrolet Twitter account and allows participants to interact live with other SBXLVI fans as well as participate in trivia and game-based polls to try to win one of 20 cars being given away as prizes.

The Chevy Game Time App is available free in the Android and iTunes markets as of yesterday (Jan. 22).

Other prizes will include tires and accessories from Bridgestone, Motorola phones, National Football League (NFL) gear, Papa John’s pizza, and Sirius XM.  This is the first time Chevrolet has tried to implement a large-scale app for smart phones with this kind of interaction.

“This is the first time any company has attempted such a large-scale app,” says Joel Ewanick, global chief marketing officer for General Motors.

The games begin as soon as the app is loaded, though most of the big prizes will be given immediately before, during, and after the big game.  The first thing the app does is give the user a unique license plate.  If that plate appears in any GM commercial (both during broadcast and online) during the Super Bowl, then you’ve won a car.

Trivia questions revolve around players, teams, commercials aired during the game, the game itself, etc.  Correct answers get you entered into drawings to win prizes.

This is very cool and a first of its kind, so it will be interesting to see how well it plays out and how popular it is.

Saturday night, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who’s new to Twitter and may not fully understand how permanent tweets can be and how broadly they can be distributed (which may, ultimately, be part of his problem – more on that in a minute) posted a barrage of accusations in 140 or less against President Obama and Google.

The gist of those tweets?  Murdoch is a huge supporter of the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) and accused the president of selling out to Silicon Valley money.  He then accused Google of being the world’s largest pirate enabler and of profiting from advertising sold alongside pirated content.  You can see Murdoch’s full list of tweets at this link.

Google, of course, responded by denying the accusations made against them and pointed out the millions of dollars they’ve spent and the man hours given by their company to stop piracy.  Without government legislation, it should be added.

The president, given he dignity of the office, probably won’t bother responding to these lame 140-or-less tirades from Murdoch.  If Obama does, I think it should be via a simple blog post that is then syndicated via Twitter.  Just to show Mr. Murdoch how it should be done.

Murdoch, for his part, has shown that he has a poor grasp of how social media works.  Sitting with your iPad and typing a barrage of tweets is.. well, not the right way to do it.  Twitter is meant for a quick exchange of ideas.  Those ideas, however, need to be expressed in one tweet – two at the very most.  Each tweet should stand alone and not require the tweets before it to be involved in the understanding of the micro-blog’s content.

In other words, Murdoch is doing it wrong.  His SOPA-endorsing tweets should have been compiled into a blog post and then the gist of that post plus a link tweeted instead.

In short, Murdoch has proven that the reason people like him support SOPA is that they are ignorant of how technology works.  I realize that piracy affects the bottom line of everyone in media – including myself, in fact – but it’s not something that can be dealt with with sweeping legislation that is poorly worded and which will dramatically change the Internet for the worse by stifling people’s use of it.

I would submit that if more media moguls like Murdoch were to embrace the Internet rather than try to fight it, they would be able to capture more revenue from it than they stood to lose from piracy.

If you know anything at all about Twitter, you will know that many celebrities from Hollywood and beyond have opened up accounts so they can tweet to their followers.

However, the number of celebrities using the site has dropped by one this week.  Alec Baldwin, star of “30 Rock” among other programmes and films, has deactivated his account after getting involved in a row with American Airlines.  According to reports that hit the internet a few days previously, Baldwin was asked to leave the plane because he was still using his mobile phone.

He tweeted about the event on his Twitter account and even though he calmed down after a short period of time, he went on to ask all his followers to “unfollow” him.  This is the term used when you want to stop following someone on Twitter.  He asked people to do it at a specific time, after which his account was deactivated.  It cannot now be accessed if you search for it on Twitter, although some of his older tweets can be found via the Google cache.  Ironically, the airline responded to his comments by using Facebook rather than Twitter.

It remains to be seen whether Mr Baldwin will open up another Twitter account once he has calmed down.  Nevertheless, for now it stands as an example of what can happen when celebrities build up a huge Twitter following.  Sometimes those tweets can go one tweet too far.

Pandora has two major drawbacks: a small music catalog and it’s only available in the U.S.  A catalog of 900,000 songs to choose from is nothing to balk at, but in today’s connected world of on-demand content, it’s a tiny drop in the bucket.  Add to that the inter-connected world we live in now and you see limitations to Pandora that make it.. well, less desirable.

Other music services like Spotify have been gaining ground quickly, but there is a large market segment that it doesn’t appeal to: music listeners who aren’t interested in surfing.  Many popular music platforms require you to actively choose music, surf your friend’s playlists, and otherwise use the service itself.

Many listeners are more interested in a radio-like experience of hands-off listening where you choose a “channel” and just listen.  Pandora has survived in today’s breakneck world of music streaming almost entirely because it’s one of the few services offering this.  Choose “rock” and that’s what you get, for as long as you want to listen.

Senzari does the same thing, offering what CEO Bill Hajjar calls a “lean back” experience.  You choose a genre of music or load in your own music catalog and Senzari finds similar music – and that of your friends, if they’re connected – to create on-the-fly playlists that you listen to without doing anything but listen.

The music app just drew in $2 million in angel funding and has already shown it can beat Pandora at the content and distribution game.  Senzari is licensed as an Internet radio station in three countries (U.S., Brazil, Spain) and has a strategic partnership with RED Viacom.

Plus it’s got a music catalog of over 10 million songs.  More than ten times what Pandora can offer.

Senzari is currently in closed beta in the U.S. and will open in Spain sometime this month.  Brazil will see it early next year.

CNN Money is reporting that, according to sources, Facebook has purchased location sharing service Gowalla.  The deal is officially unconfirmed, but seems likely given the sources.

Further information says that Gowalla will uproot from its Texas offices and move into Facebook’s space in Palo Alto, California.  Gowalla will become integrated with Facebook’s “Timeline” feature, which is gradually rolling out to FB users now.

Gowalla recently re-built iself as a “travel guide” after failing to attract enough users to really compete with Foursquare, current Mayor of Location-Based Apps.  It’s unknown whether Facebook will keep this new direction or push Gowalla back into Timeline – which seems more likely.

In fact, given Facebook’s history with buyouts, it’s questionable whether Gowalla will remain at all.  With Drop.io, Hot Potato, and others, FB killed them off and moved their talent pool into other projects.  It seems likely that they’ll do the same here, putting Gowalla’s talent into Timeline instead.

There will probably be an official announcement on the take over today and more information may be forthcoming from that.

Update 12/5/11, PM: As expected, the announcement was made today and Gowalla and Facebook both say that the Gowalla service itself will cease in January and the entire Gowalla development team will be put on the Facebook Timeline squad.

Major porn companies have banded together to sue ICANN over the new adult top level domain (TLD) .XXX.  The suit is an anti-monopoly claim against the non-profit that oversees most of the well-known TLDs (com, net, org, etc).

The major companies behind the suit are Luxemburg-based Manwin and Digital Playground, which together own many of the Web’s most well-known porn hubs.  They contend that ICANN is price gouging on the .XXX domain and want an injunction to stop the TLD and require its re-opening with competition and “reasonable price constraints.”

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of California on November 16 and accuses ICANN and its registry company ICM Registry of engaging in “monopolistic conduct, price gouging, and anti-competitive and unfair practices.”

This might seem frivolous, except that it’s very serious and could have long-lasting implications on the domain system as we know it.  The crux of the suit alleges that ICM (a for profit contracted by ICANN) used coercive tactics and promises of millions of dollars in fees if it were made the sole registrar of .XXX.

If Manwin and Digital Playground were to win this suit, it would fundamentally change a lot of how we use and interact with domain registrations and use.  Currently, there are a handful of TLD registrars in the world, each more or less operating regionally.  They pay ICANN a small fee for every domain registered through them and ICANN acts as the world’s “central hub” for domain registries.

When ICANN approved the dot XXX TLD earlier this year, a lot of buzz around its implementation was heard.  Early registrations were opened with companies paying many thousands of dollars in fees to secure their brands on the domain.  Including many who traditionally would not be associated with porn: like colleges and universities.

At $300 per registration, that’s not insignificant, considering that most have many names and variants to protect.  CraigAgranoff.xxx is one thing, but Craig-Agranoff.xxx, CraigAg.xxx, AgranoffCraig.xxx, Agranoff-Craig.xxx, and then several each for all of my owned properties (brands) could potentially ad up to tens of thousands in fees.  A university, for instance, might have their own name (and 3-4 variants), thier football team, their basketball team, their volleyball teams, their sports teams collectively, their various departments, and even famous backers or names of buildings on campus.

Securing these means securing your brand.  Not doing so could mean costly lawsuits later (either to fight misuse of it or to fight potential litigation for your not protecting someone from it).  Most businesses and apparently universities have opted to pay now instead of later.

But for the adult industry, that was not as clear cut.  ICM did not allow some of the domains to be sold in this relatively open pre-market, instead reserving them to auction to the highest bidder.  Despite the fact that the .com/net/etc equivalents may be clear brands owned by others.

These auctions are quite lucrative.  “Gay.XXX” auctioned for $500,000 and many others are going for $200,000 and up.

Another blow to ICM is their requirement that legal rights and claims against them be waived as a condition of registering with them.  This doesn’t look good for them in court.

ICANN should take this lawsuit seriously.  Not only does it have potential to change how domain registrations are made, but it could have long term ramifications for how new TLDs are introduced and the way that they’re handled.