The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- VisualDNA beta: Tailored Ecommerce Based On The Pictures You Choose
- Mochi Media Network Attracts Nearly 100 Million Online Gamers A Month (comScore)
- So Much For Twitter’s Trending Topics To Indicate Breaking News
- Digg Nabs Federated Media’s Chief Revenue Officer, Chas Edwards
- Spymaster: The Twitter Game That Will Assassinate Your Time
- What Just Happened? Thursday Was Supposed To Be Bing Day.
- The Bing Definition Microsoft Probably Doesn’t Want You To Get In Your Fortune Cookie
- Google Wave: The Full Video From Google IO
- Video: Plastic Logic Prototype E-Reader
- Ads For New Microsoft Bing Search Engine…On Google
- SourceForge Acquires Open Source Data Community Ohloh
- Sergey Brin: Google Wave Will Set A New Benchmark For Interactivity
- Take A 3D Tour Of Your Favorite Baseball Stadium With Google Earth
- Palm Pre To Come With Twitter Search And iTunes Sync
- Facebook Names First Class Of fbFund REV, Its New Incubator
- Playdom Grows Up: Switches To Studio Model, Lands Top Talent
- Fortune Columnist Stanley Bing Reminds Microsoft That He Was Here First
- Arianna Huffington: Subscriptions Are For Porn
- Hulu Labs Now Live: Recommendations, Time-Based Browsing, And More
- Live With The Google Wave Creators
- Hulu Desktop Lets You Rot Your Brain From The Comfort Of Your Couch
- Exclusive: Video Interview With The Google Wave Founders
- Why Bing? Sift Would Have Been Better.
- Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.
| VisualDNA beta: Tailored Ecommerce Based On The Pictures You Choose Posted: 29 May 2009 08:30 AM PDT
It does this using the company’s VisualDNA concept; working out people’s personality types based on the pictures they choose. Imagini draws the data from its consumer facing personality test site, Youniverse, which has profiled more than 15 million people since 2006. VisualDNA Shop presents visitors with a few visual questions, and delivers real-time product recommendations from Amazon.com based on their responses. Imagini secured $13.5m in funding in February this year, a chunk of which no doubt went on getting actor Stephen Fry to explain the VisualDNA concept in the video after the jump. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Mochi Media Network Attracts Nearly 100 Million Online Gamers A Month (comScore) Posted: 29 May 2009 05:58 AM PDT
Sometime next week, the company is going to announce that in its first month of inclusion in comScore’s measurement system, it has taken the lead over one-stop shop gaming destinations in traffic by a margin. Combined with the company’s claim that the so-called ‘extended network’ is growing its delivered impressions by 5 to 10% month-over-month, Mochi Media should be attracting over 100 million visitors on a monthly basis right about now. Looking at worldwide traffic, comScore pegs the Mochi Media network to have received a little over 91 million unique visitors last April, or roughly 8.2 per cent of the total traffic measured in the ‘Online Gaming’ category for that month. These are impressive numbers: the second ranked online gaming destination is Spil Games, and the total amount of traffic that network receives on a global scale per month is close to that of Mochi Media Action, a subset of Mochi’s network made up of only one genre (adventure games). Familiar brands you’d expect to rank higher, such as Yahoo! Games, MSN Games, EA Online and Nickelodeon, all obtain less than half Mochi Media’s reach worldwide.
It’s worth noting, however, that most of this traffic is coming from countries outside the U.S.: from those 91+ million visitors per month worldwide, only about 16 million visitors or roughly 17% originates from the Unites States. The company tells me a lot of visitors come from other English speaking nations like Canada and the U.K. but also from China and a good number of European countries. I also got some numbers regarding its current network size: Mochi Media currently includes more than 14,000 games played across 30,000 websites, which the company claims translates to 1 billion game plays a month worldwide. A company representative declined to share any details about its revenue - the company provides technology for game developers to integrate advertising units powered and distributed by Mochi Media - but did say sales of pre-roll video advertising units are going particularly well, with CPM rates “in the low to mid-teens” for the U.S. and the UK. Mochi Media is backed by $14 million in venture capital from Accel Partners and Shasta Ventures. Its most recent financing round was a $10 million Series B round from both investors back in June 2008. Meanwhile, the startup has convinced both a former MySpace (Carol Werner) as a Yahoo exec (Eric Boyd) to join its ranks and spurred small startups like the recently seed-funded HeyZap to do similar things. Keep your eyes on this one, folks. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| So Much For Twitter’s Trending Topics To Indicate Breaking News Posted: 29 May 2009 02:13 AM PDT
We already know Twitter can be quite the source for breaking news, but critics have in the past correctly pointed out that one should be aware of the fact that the mob isn’t always right, and unverified claims on the micro-sharing service - often from a single user or even a single message - can quickly lead to false or incomplete stories circulating rapidly and viciously until the dust settles and the truth surfaces. And even then, it’s often too late as most people will have probably moved on unless it was a topic they have a continued interest in. Case in point: the Prop8 debacle. Up until recently, Twitter’s trending topics - which are prominently displayed on their Search homepage and now also in the sidebar when you’re using the Twitter website - were an awesome way to get a feel of what was buzzing on the Web, in a way that virtually no other web service was able to do. And even if you couldn’t quite make sense of why a certain word, term or hashtag was trending, wiki-based services like WhatTheTrend were able to lay it out for you (most of the time, anyway). It was simply a great way to stay on top of news that was breaking online. Which brings me to my rant. Today, when you look at Twitter’s trending topics, you’ll notice that the large majority of trends are memes started by a single user or a group of users, with the main goal offering entertainment rather than spreading information. That’s all fine and dandy - no harm in having fun - and I realize well that Twitter’s trending topics are not necessarily required to be giving you and me an overview of stuff that really matters, but I can’t help but think it’s a pity that that list is starting to turn into the top 10 of chain letters people used to circulate through e-mail messages in the late nineties. Fine with me if people want to share what they consider to be lies that boys tell, or which 3 words should follow after sex, or what their moms used to tell them when they were little, but as I said before I think it’s a shame considering how powerful that trending feature and how valuable that list could be instead. Maybe Twitter needs to add a feature that allows for people to customize that list by enabling them to remove topics out of their attention stream at the very least. We’ll make sure to add it to our list of 300 things we think Twitter should do before a TV show.
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| Digg Nabs Federated Media’s Chief Revenue Officer, Chas Edwards Posted: 29 May 2009 12:04 AM PDT
Mike Maser, currently Digg’s Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer, will change his title to Chief Strategy Officer. He controls Digg’s marketing, business development, corporate development and community management groups. This is a big blow for Federated Media. Founder and CEO John Battelle recently announced that he’ll be looking for a replacement to run the company, although he’ll remain active with the business. And Edwards, I know from personal experience, is the kind of guy who can sell ice to eskimos and get a sincere “thanks” as he takes their money. Federated Media raised a big round of financing last year that valued the company at $200 million. Oak Investment Partners, which led the round, must be wondering what exactly they invested in. Many of Federated Media’s partners have left the network. Digg left in 2007, followed by GigaOm last year. TechCrunch parted ways with Federated Media earlier this month. Edwards will have responsibility for all revenue streams at Digg, which include some revenue from Microsoft (although that deal is largely over) as well as direct sales. The company is making a push towards profitability, they’ve said in past months. That will likely require about twice the reported $8.5 million in revenue that Digg generated in 2008. Edwards will certainly help them get there. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Spymaster: The Twitter Game That Will Assassinate Your Time Posted: 28 May 2009 10:54 PM PDT
For doing all of these various tasks, you get in-game fake money, and/or points to level-up to become a better spymaster. But if you try to do too much, too often, it will wear on your body and you will lose energy points. Plus, if you fail in assassination or other tasks, you can get injured and lose money. But the genius of this game is its tie-in to Twitter. You sign-up for the game with your Twitter name using OAuth, and your fellow spies are other Twitter users. So when you attempt to assassinate one of them, it will tweet that out to all of your followers including both of your names — and to the followers of the person you tried to assassinate, if they turn the setting on. These Twitter notifications are the real key to the game. There are a bunch of activities within Spymaster that you can set up to automatically tweet out when you do them. These include securing a new safe house, buying something on the black market, and even failing in an attempt to assassinate someone, among other things. The more of these you elect to tweet out, the more money you will earn for doing stuff. But it’s a delicate balance, because if you tweet out too much of your activities, you run the very real risk of annoying your other Twitter followers.
Co-founder Eston Bond is clearly aware of this, saying that with just a very small group of users, some are already finding the tweet updates “a bit noisy.” But it’s easy to toggle them on and off on the game’s site. And after playing around with a few different settings, I find that “Assassinating a user,” But it’s really quite ingenious. Because the game relies on these tweets, each of which is hashtagged and sent with a URL for the game, word about the game is spreading like crazy with just a select few beta users. The game is being opened up more tomorrow for public testing tomorrow, Bond tells me. And when it is opened up, it should spread even more quickly because a large component is “Converting Spies,” which is taking your Twitter followers (regular “spies”) and sending them direct messages to join your spy network, converting them to “spymasters.” The bigger your spy network, the better your spymaster will be in the game at things like assassinations.
Definitely part of the draw of Spymaster is the whole spy thing — it’s hilarious. Spies who do sign up to become spymasters opt-in to one of the various spy agencies — either the CIA, the British SIS or the Russian FSB. Which group you sign up for helps determine your spy network as well. And depending on which network you’re in, you can wire money to spymasters in other networks, but you will have different (fake) currencies. But the money is all converted with the real-time exchange rates, Bond tells me. Brilliant. Spymaster is a side project of iList, a classified listing site for your friends. Aside from Bond, it was created by Chris Abad (iList’s CEO), and Albert Choi and Ben Myles. I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot of spymaster hashtags tomorrow on Twitter — hopefully users figure out how to limit their noise. But if they don’t, feel free to assassinate them. That aspect is another brilliant part of the game — just when I think I’m done playing, I get a message that someone tried to kill me, so naturally I hop back on and try to kill them. It’s beautiful, really. Or, as my fellow spymaster Drew Olanoff puts it, “Just when I try to leave. They pull me back in.” That’s the theme of just about every spy movie ever made.
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| What Just Happened? Thursday Was Supposed To Be Bing Day. Posted: 28 May 2009 10:12 PM PDT
Everyone knew today was the day that Microsoft was going to launch their new search engine. Everyone’s been talking about it for months, and the press and marketing efforts were carefully tailored to maximize the impact. Thursday, May 28, 2009 was supposed to be Microsoft Bing Day. A little after 8 am this morning Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer himself took the stage at the exclusive All Things Digital conference near San Diego, California and announced to a few hundred elite executives that Microsoft would soon be releasing its new search engine, and that it would be called Bing. One problem right off the bat: the Bing.com site wasn’t live. And since press didn’t know the name until Ballmer said it, it took a while for the news to spread. Another problem: A team of Google engineers based in Sydney was simultaneously announcing a stealth project 4+ years in the making called Wave. And it wasn’t being announced to a select few top business executives. Instead, the team that created it was showing it to 4,000 developers at the Google IO conference in San Francisco, California.
That’s basically what happened today. The eyes of the world, and the press, swung from San Diego to San Francisco as they realized what was happening. And what was happening was this: Google stole Microsoft’s thunder with one of the most ambitious and exciting products the tech world has seen in a long while. At the end of the Google Wave presentation, 4,000 developers stood up and cheered like nothing we’ve seen outside of a Steve Jobs keynote. That picture above isn’t the crowd of gray haired execs cheering Bing. It’s a mass of engineers going wild over a new open source communications platform from Google. And yes, that guy on the right was literally waving his laptop in the air in excitement. The fact that everyone in attendance was still glowing from a free Android G2 phone that was handed out the day before didn’t hurt, either. So what happened? Well, the company that will do no evil will certainly engage in a little stealth black ops mission when its required. Google knew full well exactly when Bing was going to launch. And they carefully planned the Wave launch to occur just minutes afterwards. They knew the crowd was ready for something cool. Not only did they have that free phone, but the day before Google VP Engineering Vic Gundotra told the crowd that there would be a big announcement the next day. People were ready and willing to be wowed. And while Wave certainly deserves every bit of positive attention it got today, the fact that it’s an open source project didn’t hurt, either. San Francisco engineers love open source like east coast liberals love Obama. Microsoft never stood a chance. As far as the San Francisco developer crowd is concerned, Bing stands for “But It’s Not Google.” Photo credit: I have no idea. If you know, please tell me in the comments so I can ask forgiveness for using it without permission and give proper credit. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| The Bing Definition Microsoft Probably Doesn’t Want You To Get In Your Fortune Cookie Posted: 28 May 2009 09:45 PM PDT
While you might associate “bing” with the Chinese flatbread, or a number of other things that Wired broke down. We were sent perhaps the ultimate translation in the form of a fortune cookie that just happened to pop up after someone’s dinner tonight. One translation for “bing” is apparently “disease.” Some more digging on the web indicates this as well. So while that is slightly less subtle than Microsoft’s former search property, live, spelling “evil” backwards, it’s another interesting name choice by Microsoft. I’d hope they didn’t plant the bing definition in that fortune cookie as part of its elaborate $100 million marketing campaign — though, come to think of it, that might not be a bad play. [Thanks Stephen] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Google Wave: The Full Video From Google IO Posted: 28 May 2009 08:08 PM PDT Here’s the full video of the Google Wave demo from this morning at Google’s IO conference in San Francisco. Our full review of Google Wave is here. Exclusive interview with the founders is here, and our video and notes from the press conference is here. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Video: Plastic Logic Prototype E-Reader Posted: 28 May 2009 06:48 PM PDT Plastic Logic is showing off a prototype of its thin-film electronic reader at the D7 conference. The main difference between what Plastic Logic is trying to build and the Kindle is that its screen technology is much thinner, lighter and can be incorporated into more flexible form- factors. I shot the video above showing a demo of what it can do. We certainly need thinner, sleeker e-reader devices. But unless Amazon adopts the technology for future Kindles or opens up the Kindle Store t other e-readers, any Plastic Logic device will have limited appeal. The company is pitching it as ideal for viewing business documents, something you can easily do with the Kindle as well. It converts everything to a PDF and lets you jump around to different pages or even different documents (represented by different tabs). The Plastic Logic prototype uses E-Ink technology, like the Kindle, it i just not on glass. So it suffers from the same slow load times for each new page. It also does not display Web pages (something the Kindle does in rudimentary form). Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Ads For New Microsoft Bing Search Engine…On Google Posted: 28 May 2009 04:27 PM PDT
Maybe it works, but seeing ads on Google for Microsoft’s new Bing search engine just doesn’t seem to send quite the right message. Plus, the ads link to a nearly blank landing page, since Bing hasn’t launched yet. Microsoft is rumored to be spending up to $100 million to advertise the Bing launch. I wonder how much of that Google will end up getting… There are also ads pointing to a Ning site called BingHub. I can’t imagine why whoever created it is spending cold hard cash to promote that, either. Thanks for the tip, Gur. Update: Bing ads on Yahoo, too:
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| SourceForge Acquires Open Source Data Community Ohloh Posted: 28 May 2009 03:55 PM PDT
SourceForge, a tech news and e-commerce network has acquired Ohloh, a social network for developers and directory of open source projects, for an undisclosed amount. SourceForge owns and operates a number of tech media websites, including SourceForge.net, a centralized location for software developers to manage open source software development; Slashdot, a tech news site; ThinkGeek, a marketplace for tech goods. Founded in 2004, Ohloh crawls 3,500 open source forges and gathers statistics and data on more than 300,000 open source projects and 300,000 open source developers. It’s not clear of Ohloh will be absorbed into SourceForge.net. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Sergey Brin: Google Wave Will Set A New Benchmark For Interactivity Posted: 28 May 2009 03:00 PM PDT
Google unveiled its new communication tool, Wave, this morning with a bang at Google I/O. The blogosphere is a buzz with talk of the new product, which blends email, instant messaging, collaboration and real time functionality into one platform. And Wave will open up its API soon to developers and will eventually be an open source product, letting the developer community take an active part in shaping the platform. We spoke to Wave’s creators yesterday, brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon. One question that’s is on everyone’s minds is whether Gmail and Google Apps become obsolete with the emergence of such powerful platform? TechCrunch IT Editor Steve Gillmor caught up with Google co-founder Sergey Brin (who he also talked to about Chrome yesterday) after a Q&A session with Wave’s creators, and asked him about the future of Google Apps and more. Brin says that Google has been using Wave internally for a couple of months and remained mum about how and when Gmail and Google Apps will be integrated. Brin points out, however; that developers of Chrome have been collaborating with Wave developers to make the platform extra speedy on the browser. Wave has also been working with the Google Web Toolkit, says Brin. It’s apparent from the video that Brin is enthusiastic about Wave and its potential. Brin, who only works on a handful of Google’s products, handpicked Wave as a compelling project on which to focus his efforts. Brin also says in the video that he didn’t know that Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, launched today but he did say that he has played around with Wolfram Alpha and is interested in exploring that search engine a little bit more (fun fact: Brin spent a summer interning for Stephen Wolfram). Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Take A 3D Tour Of Your Favorite Baseball Stadium With Google Earth Posted: 28 May 2009 02:37 PM PDT  This has been quite a week for Google, especially with the announcement of Google Wave at the Google I/O Conference. Not to be ignored, Google Earth has been quietly rolling out some nifty features, including business listings. Today, Google Earth has added 3D tours of buildings, bridges, baseball stadiums and more. The tours are self-running views into buildings, bridges, museums, skyscrapers, stadiums and castles from around the world, most of which were built Google SketchUp users who model buildings for Google Earth. To play a tour, you need to activate the “3d Buildings” layer in Google Earth. Then you can click the “Start tour here” link in the “Places” panel in Google Earth (make sure you have download the latest version of Google Earth). Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Palm Pre To Come With Twitter Search And iTunes Sync Posted: 28 May 2009 01:07 PM PDT
The Palm Pre will be Twitter friendly. In a demo of the Palm Pre at the D7 conference a few minutes ago, Twitter search was showcased as one of its universal search options (along with Google and other search engines). Other features shown in the demo included the ability to sync the Pre to iTunes, download music over the air from the Amazon MP3 store, run multiple apps at the same time, and integrate third-party apps with other apps on the device such as the calendar. For instance, if you buy a movie ticket through a Fandango app, it can make an entry on your calendar. In an interview on-stage, Palm’s largest investor Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners noted that Palm represented 45 percent of the capital invested by Elevation so far. McNamee compared Elevation to the early days of Kleiner Perkins, where the partners are fully engaged in the businesses they invest in and they invest in very few companies (Elevation has six portfolio companies and five partners). Palm is its biggest bet by far. “This will be the thing that defines us,” says McNamee. He is confident that there is room in the transition from feature phones to Web-enabled smartphones to carve out a decent business for Palm. First, he’s got to make sure the Pre does not flop. Asked whether Apple would mind that Palm built iTunes sync into the Pre, McNamee shot back: “They are practically a monopolist. Consumers want their content.” The Pre can only sync non-DRMed content from iTunes. And there are other ways to get that content, but this is the first non-Apple device that syncs directly with iTunes without the use of third-party software. ” They can’t tell people what to do with music that they own,” says McNamee. “We are confirming their dominant market share. They are not stupid.” Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Facebook Names First Class Of fbFund REV, Its New Incubator Posted: 28 May 2009 12:59 PM PDT
The incubator program is being called fbFund REV, and will operate in a similar fashion (at least in some senses) to programs like Y Combinator and TechStars. Twenty companies, which include two nonprofits, will take part in a program headed by Founders Fund’s Dave McClure, and will have the chance to work with Facebook engineers and a range of Silicon Valley veterans. Facebook intends to keep us posted on the startups’ progress throughout the session, and will be holding a demo day at the end of the summer to help expose the companies to investors and press. McClure is drawing inspiration from his experience teaching a Facebook course at Stanford, where he helped guide 25 teams of developers. He says that while the program has more participants than other incubators have had over the last few years, this can actually help the startups, as they feed off each others’ knowledge and experience. McClure adds that the program will be somewhat more structured than YC and other incubators and that it will emphasize getting the companies to release and iterate their products quickly, rather than spending a long time on the development cycle. As for the funding being given to each startup, McClure says that the average amount of investment is $25,000, with over $500,000 being distributed in total (the non-profits are excluded from receiving funding, but are invited to the program for free). Investments are being made as a convertible note, with a discount for future priced rounds. fbFund is taking roughly a 1-5% stake in each company (around 2% for most of them), which is in line with what other incubators have been doing. Here is the full list of winners, along with some brief introductions provided by Facebook:
Non-profits*
Congratulations to TechCrunch alum Mark Hendrickson, whose company Worldly Developments will be part of the program! Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Playdom Grows Up: Switches To Studio Model, Lands Top Talent Posted: 28 May 2009 12:15 PM PDT
Playdom, a popular social gaming developer on MySpace, is moving to a studio model, similar to the model of competitor Zynga. Playdom has largely flown under our radar until now, but they’ve built up some very popular social networking apps on MySpace, and are also moving to Facebook as well. Adopting the studio model means that Playdom will have multiple independent teams working on different games. To head up the two studios, Playdom has brought in substantial talent from successful gaming companies. Former Director of Game Design at Zynga, Dave Rohrl, will oversee a studio focused on new intellectual property and former Studio Director at Pogoa/Electronic Arts, Sean Clark will head a studio focused on role-playing games or RPGs. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company first made a name for itself on MySpace, creating the most popular game on the social network, Mobsters. The startup has 9 of the top 25 games on MySpace. Playdom also made waves on Facebook’s gaming community, creating the popular game Poker Palace. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Fortune Columnist Stanley Bing Reminds Microsoft That He Was Here First Posted: 28 May 2009 12:04 PM PDT
One of the funniest takes on this we’ve seen today comes from Fortune columnist and author Stanley Bing, who is ‘moderately outraged’ over the new name but is not considering legal action at this point. Sure, Bing’s doing his best to get some free publicity out of the carefully planned preview of the new search engine, but his sense of humor is spot on, so enjoy the read. Here’s an excerpt:
Read the whole thing here, and make sure you don’t miss the end:
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| Arianna Huffington: Subscriptions Are For Porn Posted: 28 May 2009 11:40 AM PDT
At D7 today, Kara Swisher sat down with Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington and Washington Post’s Digital Chief Katharine Weymouth to discuss a topic that has been beaten to death: old vs. new media. Much of the interview was spent massaging each other’s egos, with each praising the other for the quality of their respective publication’s journalism. But Huffington spiced things up when Swisher broached the issue of monetization. Huffington denied that HuffPo would ever consider subscriptions, saying “We absolutely never imagine subscriptions. Unless you're selling porn, and especially "very weird porn", you shouldn't sell subscriptions.” Swisher cited a Penn Schoen & Berland survey that found that 5% of people would pay for blogs and 92% of people don’t pay for online content today. Subscriptions for news are a controversial subject to say the least. Rupert Murdoch said recently that News Corp. would start charging for access to many of its newspaper’s websites, citing the success of News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal’s subscription model. News Corp. owns and operates over 110 newspapers worldwide. Today, GigaOm announced GigaOm Pro, a subscription service for research and analysis created by analysts. Content includes briefings, notes, long views written by editorial team, quarterly wrap-ups, weekly updates on news, and curated links. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Hulu Labs Now Live: Recommendations, Time-Based Browsing, And More Posted: 28 May 2009 11:38 AM PDT
First, there’s Time-Based Browsing, which is the feature I’m going to be using most (aside from Hulu desktop). This allows you to see all new Hulu videos sorted by the day they appeared. Before now you could always sort individual shows in order, but if you missed a night of prime time it was up to you to figure out which shows you’d missed. Now you can just jump to that date under Time-Based Browsing and Hulu will do all the work for you.
Labs also includes a new Recommendation feature that presents users with videos they might like based on their past actions (videos viewed and rated) on the site. Next to each recommendation, the site includes a note explaining why it thought you might like a certain show. It seems to work fairly well, though I don’t really understand how Fever Pitch was recommended because I’d previously watched Family Guy.
Finally, the Video Panel Designer will allow site owners to make a custom Hulu embed featuring multiple videos at once (they display a handful of video thumbnails side by side). Using the Designer you can specify exactly which shows you’d like to have appear in the panel, and you can also customize the color scheme, size, and layout. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Live With The Google Wave Creators Posted: 28 May 2009 10:56 AM PDT
We spoke with the creators of the service, brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon yesterday, but it should be interesting to see and hear from them following the initial reception. Find our live notes below and the live Qik stream below that. The creators are here along with Vic Gundotra, Google’s VP of Engineering. Live Notes (paraphrased): Vic: Google wants to move the web forward. Greater of the usage leads to more Google Search ultimately. Google Wave is exciting for open source and it’s running in the browser. This could be a turning point on the web. —–Q&A—- Q: This does Gmail and Google Docs one better. Will Wave be the evolution of both or a replacement? Vic: This is an early developer release of our Wave, but we’ll see this over several products/services/sites. Q: Limitations of the mobile site of Wave? Lars: This is just the developer preview again, mobile isn’t finished yet. But because we built it in the web browser, it can be on many of the smart phones that use the rich mobile web browsers. If we did native code, we’d have to write it multiple times, but with the web we write it once. The web by far is the best choice for us. Eventually access to the camera and other advanced features will be available through the browser. Q: This seems like this will replace email –but can it really replace all we love about email? Lars: We think of email as an incredibly successful protocol. Google Wave is our suggestion for how this could work better. You can certainly store your own copy by way of the APIs and with the extensions. The model for ownership — it’s a shared object, so how do you delete the object? Even though it’s a shared object, no one can take it away from you without your consent. There will eventually be reversion to sync up with the cloud or you own servers. We’re not planning on having spam in wave (laughs). Early on in email, spam wasn’t really taken into account, so we benefit from that learning experience. We’re planning on a feature so that you can’t add me to your Wave without being on a white list. Q: Is this something that forces identity on people? Will there be anonymous usage? Lars: I don’t think Wave will answer that question way or another. With our APIs people can make the choice of how they use it. If a person embeds a Wave in their own website, it’s up to the website who can interact with that Wave. You can use anonymous comments, or a number of different identities. Q: You haven’t talked about advertising. Ideas for that? Lars: We haven’t talked about it because we haven’t thought about it — yet. That’s a benefit of working at Google, we have time to think about how to make money from this. It’s the same way we worked with Google Maps, the ads eventually came. Q: No immediate need for this replace email — so how can this be all in one? Lars: Integration with Twitter is an example of what you can easily build with the APIs. You can do that for email too if it’s open on their end. Imagine if someone has an email extension that will turn all your emails into a Wave — and replies come back via email. It’s not simple, but it could work. Q: How do you integrate with Gmail or other Google services? Lars: Again, it’s very early for us. When you sign up for Google Wave, it’s your Google account, you’ll have your Google Contacts, etc. Q: Is this Google’s attempt to organize the world’s communication? Who is or will be your competitor? Lars: Acme Wave (the fake demo they used) is the competitor (laughs). Look, I don’t know. It’s not something we really thought about — it was all about making communication and collaboration better. There’s a lot of overlap with web services that makes it hard to figure out which service to use at which time. Stephanie: It’s important to know that we’re going to let people build their own Wave services. It’s not about us controlling this. Here’s Sergey Brin, Google co-founder.
Q: Lots of ways to market this. How do you do it? Vic: Really haven’t thought about that too much. Q: Top 3 priorities for developers, that you’re doing core work in? Lars: Doing our absolute best to make the developers happy. We’re looking for the 3,000 early adopter developers who are adventurous. Sergey: And you’ll be working on scalability right? Lars: Yes. Stephanie: And we’re excited to learn from users. Q: Who would this be the most useful for? Vic: The way a lot of social sites work today is that you get sent a link via email when someone updates something. With Wave it can all be done in the system. That’s just one example. Any social company can use it too. Q: How interoperable will it be — how open source? Lars: The developers can choose completely. We’re using the most liberal license to open source our code. Q: To Sergey - Lars came to you with this idea in 2007, why go with it? Sergey: It did sound kind of crazy - we’re just going to reinvent communication (laughs). It was not a very compelling proposal, but Lars and Jens had reinvented what mapping was like on the web. So if it was someone else this might be different, but they have the body of work to give them the benefit of the doubt. It was also an interesting experiment, it was one of the most independent groups that we’ve had at Google. Q: Google has reinvented how I do school work — where could this go for education? Lars: It could be a great tool for researchers, and students too. Vic: We very much care about your (student) demographic. Q: Why do this now? You’re trying to replace email, why will it work? Is this a SharePoint competitor? Vic: SharePoint is easy — this has far greater breadth. And it’s open and has a federation model. The previous day we talked about the five capabilities of HTML 5, so that’s why now. The main browsers are starting to support it. Sergey: Google Maps was on the edge of browser capability when we launched. Today, Wave is that edge. You’ll see a form of interaction with this you wouldn’t have before.
Q: A lot made of real-time search and a lot of talk about Twitter — does Google put these real-time capabilities in perspective. Real time search? Lars: The liveness in Wave came about because we became obsessed with how fast you could see a message on someone else’s screen. With IM you’ve been waiting for someone typing, so we removed that (others have before). When it’s not live, you lose your attention on a conversation, but when you see it live, you’re engaged. From that a whole new set of use-cases came up. The live search aspect is fun. Q: Were there platforms that influenced you on this? After Maps and Wave, what’s next? Lars: Before we joined Google we (him and Jens) had the discussion about what would be next. Basically we realized email was like snail mail on the web, computers were evolving. We needed something faster. And IM and email shouldn’t really be two separate tools. We took inspiration from everything that we could see in communication and collaboration. Stephanie: We want to work on this for a while. Q: What did you show Sergey to sell him on it? Sergey: Nothing (laughs). It really wasn’t much besides the pitch. Demos came after we were already well brought in. We can’t have everyone at Google do these crazy ideas, but with a handful of past successes, that sold me. Lars: My vision is to have the one communication tool. I want all the use cases to be covered. We made up ideas of what Wave could be used for — negotiating contracts, writing articles. Lots of things. Stephanie: Each person you show it to seems to pick out other things they would use it for. Going back to email now, I miss the liveness. Q: How important of a roll is mobile going to play? And will Google ever release an official app for any mobile platform? Lars: Mobile is hugely important. If you’re out walking and and take a picture to put in a Wave, that’s perfect for mobile. We have no plans to make native apps for any mobile platform. The rate of progress on mobile is astounding — we hope soon access to the camera will appear. Maybe we’ll make a lightweight app just to get access to those if they don’t come quickly. Vic: You might have missed the Android and the iPhone working in the demo, but it worked great using the same code. It’s an economic issues as well. Think of those teams who have to write native code for all these platforms, but this is just one browser-based version. Q: Will this work right now on mobile? Vic: We’re not sure it’s ready yet, but we’ll let you know. We’re working on it. Some of it is just the layout. Q: Are you going to rely on grassroots adoption? Or will you work with the other big players to get them to adopt? Lars: This is just the first step today, but my colleagues are reaching out to friends to gauge interest. Q: Looking at the notification speed — is it too distracting? Stephanie: We’re still trying to figure out how best to handle the speed at which we can communicate. For example, the real liveness of real-time search could be distracting. We’re thinking about it. Q: Can you elaborate on the offline capabilities? Lars: Offline is very important, we don’t have support yet, but the protocols are designed for that. If you lose an Internet connection, you should be able to keep working. Full offline support will come later, but it’s coming. That wraps it up. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Hulu Desktop Lets You Rot Your Brain From The Comfort Of Your Couch Posted: 28 May 2009 10:33 AM PDT
One of my only long standing gripes with Hulu was that it could never really replace the TV watching experience simply because you had to sit in front of your computer to control it. Boxee was the perfect solution to this, as it allowed you to control Hulu via remote through a very snazzy media center interface. But Hulu has repeatedly killed that functionality, largely at the behest of its major network investors. Now Hulu is releasing its own desktop application, allowing you to browse through the site’s content using your computer’s remote control (both the Windows Media Center remote and the Apple Remote are compatible). Both applications are native too, so you won’t have to deal with any quirkiness from Adobe AIR. Hulu has posted an intro video for the Desktop application, which you can watch below. The app itself doesn’t seem to be live yet (oddly enough, the URL for the application that’s shown in the video is located on the company’s QA server, which requires a password). Of course, most people aren’t going to ditch cable in favor of Hulu, simply because they don’t have their computers hooked up to their TVs. They’ll just use it to make their Hulu experience at their computer even better. But for those of us who have been toying with Boxee and similar solutions to replace our cable boxes entirely, this is a very welcome addition. Update: Looking back on the Boxee fiasco, the news is a bit strange. I (and a number of others) believed that content owners were against giving users this ‘lean-back’ experience entirely, but now Hulu has done just that. Given the change of heart, Boxee is reaching out to Hulu once more to give things another shot. It won’t be surprising if they get turned down though - Hulu may well want to keep all of its content contained in its own application. Hulu is also planning to launch a new Labs section today, Thanks to eagle-eyed TechCrunch alum Nick Gonzalez for the tip. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Exclusive: Video Interview With The Google Wave Founders Posted: 28 May 2009 10:20 AM PDT Everyone’s still digesting the Google Wave news from this morning. The demo video that we’re seeing at Google IO isn’t yet up, so for now you’ll have to digest the our overview and screen shots. But the product is important - not only does it do fantastic new things in a browser care of HTML 5, but it also proposes a new communication paradigm. The founding team behind wave like to say that this is what email would be if it were invented today. Yesterday we had a chance to sit down with that founding team - brothers Lars Rasmussen and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon - to talk about the initial idea behind Wave, and Google’s philosophy in rolling it out. VP Engineering Vic Gundotra also makes a cameo appearance at the end. Yens and Lars are brothers, originally from Denmark, who founded mapping startup Where2 in 2003. The company was acquired by Google in 2004 and is now Google Maps. Stephanie is a Google Product Manager who was previously on the Google Maps team. The core idea for Wave, says Lars, was first thought of by Jens as a way to fix email (yes yes yes). Email is asynchronous conversation. Instant messaging, by contrast, is synchronous. Wave is both. Yahoo has tried to tackle this problem by bringing instant messaging directly into the web mail interface. Google also integrates Google Chat directly into Gmail. But in both cases the products are simply bolted together. Google Wave is something new. The team also talks about making both the underlying protocols as well as the source code for the application open source. They seem to define success as the point when lots of third parties are building their own Wave systems, fully interoperable with Google Wave. Unlike Twitter, Google Wave is an open system right from the start. If it’s successful there is no need to host data on Google servers. And third parties are free to fork the direction of Wave for their own use. This is very, very innovative stuff. We’ll be hearing a lot more about this over time. The full transcript of the interview is below.
Michael Arrington (TechCrunch): This is Mike Arrington. I'm here with the Google Wave founding team. We've got Lars Rasmussen, Stephanie Hannon, and Jens Rasmussen. You guys are brothers? Lars: Yes. MA: At this point now, everyone has seen the Google Wave demo. Developers here at the Google I/O conference now have access to it, so they can start playing with it. What I want to do here in this video, is talk to you guys about the core vision, when you first came up with the idea, why, what you wanted to build, and do you think you've done that, where do you see it going? SH: We just wanted to say we hope everyone liked the demo. MA: I think it's safe to say that people were pretty stunned by the demo, in a good way. LR: I get to answer the question because it was his (points to Jens) idea. I don't have to be as modest as he would have to be. JR: It works better that way. LR: So actually it's been a while since we (by we I mean Jens) had the idea. It was back in 2004, and we were just about to join Google. That had bought a little startup that we had. We had a mapping prototype that turned into Google Maps. And Jens and I started discussing what we might do after Maps. And Jens had the idea that we should work on this thing that became Google Wave. He argued that email, even though it is the most popular way to communicate still, was invented quite a while ago, in fact before the Internet (if we look it up on Wikipedia). And he argued that was designed essentially to mimic snail mail, and what we should do instead is look at how computers work today and networks work today, and they have obviously improved dramatically in four decades, and see what the best way to communicate would be. He proposed this thing called "hosted conversations" (this is what we call waves now). He listed them in a big series of benefits over existing systems. The thing that caught me was with these hosted conversations, you could do both email type conversations and instant messaging type conversations, in the same tool. You can see this in the very early parts of the demo. MA: Synchronous and asynchronous communication in one stream. LR: Exactly. Synchronous and asynchronous in the same conversation. And you can switch back and forth, depending who is online at any one time. That's what sold me. We didn't talk about the project for another couple years. We had a great time building Google Maps with some of the best engineers in the world. And then in the beginning of 2007, we picked it back up. We started prototyping with the a team of four or five engineers in Sydney, Australia. And little by little, we came up with what became Google Wave. [Points to Jens] All based on his original ideas. MA: [to Jens] Do you agree? JR: Yes. [laughter] MA: So you really started coding hard in 2007 with four or five people. How big is the team now? LR: It's about 50 now. MA: 50 engineers? LR: 50 engineers. Pretty much all of them are in Sydney. SH: We are in Sydney too. Everyone can come visit. MA: One of the cool things about this is you aren't just launching a new web service — obviously the service itself is pretty impressive based on the demo (can't wait to try it out myself) — but you are also open-sourcing this. Parts of it. In particular, right from the beginning, the protocols. And so, if you were inventing a new way of communicating here, and if you were inventing email for the first time and you kept it proprietary, it would obviously limit the usefulness of it. Can you talk a little bit about your goals with publishing the protocols and not trying to keep intellectual property rights attached to those? LR: I'll give it a shot. This has been our thinking from the beginning. We want to build, like you said, a new way of communicating. But we want to make sure it's open, just like email. We want to make sure that you can choose your own Wave provider and no matter which provider you get your account from, you can talk to anyone else that has a Wave account. And were publishing the protocol, or rather a draft of the protocol (I should say that this is very much a work in progress), and we intend later to open source the lion share of our code. The primary reason we want to open source our code is actually adoption of the protocol. It's not a simple thing to build a Wave system — we've spent two and a half years on the first one — and so we think adoption will go a lot faster if you can grab our code, look at it, and start out with that. And so we're envisioning this bright future of Wave, where it's a new accepted way we all communicate. There are lots of different Wave providers. Some of them will be cloud-based like ours, where you go and get an account from a Google or a competing company. But also, we envision that enterprises or techies will run their own Wave servers, in their own server closets. MA: So within the enterprise, behind the walls, for those reasons. LR: Exactly. It's a very important feature of the protocol that if a set of colleagues within an enterprise runs a Wave server, that will stay just between them — that data will never leave their network. And in fact, if remember in the demo, we have this feature called the private reply, where within a larger Wave with a large number of people, you can do a sub-thread with a sub-set of the people in that Wave. If you guys are colleagues in an enterprise running your own Wave server, you start a private reply within a larger Wave, that private reply will never leave your corporate network. SH: So we think exciting things will happen, the more people that have Wave. And we think more people will have Wave, if they have choice in providers and choice in where there servers sit. MA: Jens you guys have talked about how you guys have been using this internally for a couple months now, and you have a couple thousand Googlers using it. How sticky is it? How many people sticking with it after they try it out? You guys must be looking at those numbers. JR: They are very good. MA: Very, very good? SH: Yes, very good. JR: You can quote me on that. LR: I would moderate given how early days it is, it's quite good. And we have just started. We actually asked them, when we offered our colleagues accounts to help us test it, how pain tolerant they were — whether they were the types that swim with sharks and walk on fire, or people that like less adventurous things. I think about the 3000 or so users we have now are the people that offered to walk on fire. MA: Willing to try anything? LR: Exactly. MA: But may not be willing to make a commitment to anything? LR: Well, what we are looking for now is for people to test it, try it out. We want to measure how well it scales. We want to figure out what happens when lots of people use it. In the first several months, there were about 50 Wave users, and everything was all very controlled, calm, and quiet and all the Waves were super important to us. All of sudden there were 2000 users, all of them colleagues, all of them wanting to talk to us. And we learned — in a very exciting way — what it means to get lots of waves all of a sudden. And so we are learning lots from it. SH: A core part of the product is the “liveness.” And you can see what people are doing all the time. Waves become active and unread and pop-up in your search panel all the time, and you need to learn when that's useful for people and when it's not, and how to present information to them in a way that's useful and so they know what's important and what to deal with. Googlers are amazingly vocal, and we have learned so much in the last few months about how people are using it. It has helped change our feature set, improve our usability, and just decide what to do with our engineering resources. LR: Amazingly vocal, that's true. SH: Crazy vocal. MA: And you were saying earlier that you definitely think this is a Twitter-killer? [laughter] LR: I don't remember saying… MA: Oh, was that off record? SH: I don't think that was ever said… MA: Oh maybe that wasn't you guys, that might have been someone else. LR: I remember saying quite the opposite. So you saw the video that we did two months ago? One of the things that's missing is actually integration between Twitter and Wave. Another of the sample applications that we are trying to sell developers on building for real — where you can install as an extension into your Wave client that let's you get all of your tweets from all of your followers into a Wave, and if you reply to one of the tweets inside a Wave, the extension will tweet back into the Twittersphere. And we would estimate that would actually improve adoption of Twitter. SH: We like to compliment Twitter for being open and having APIs from the beginning. MA: You want to compliment them before you kill them. [laughter] Uh oh, the press people are not happy. Vic Gundotra: Michael, Michael, Michael… MA: Can we talk about Chrome? VG: We can talk about anything you like. MA: I think we are done. I really appreciate your time. Congratulations guys and thank you very much. The demo at Google I/O has just ended to huge standing ovation. If today is any indication, this is going to be big. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Why Bing? Sift Would Have Been Better. Posted: 28 May 2009 09:15 AM PDT
Microsoft just announced it’s new search engine Bing, and it is going to spend a reported $80 million to $100 million on an advertising campaign to familiarize consumers with the brand. But was it the best name it could have picked? Asked about the name onstage at the D7 conference, CEO Steve Ballmer admits: “I am not what you would call the creative side of life. Short matters. Being able to verb up can be helpful.” But he also says, “We wanted something that unambiguously says search.” Does it? To me, Bing says nothing. I think a better name from the ones Microsoft was supposedly considering would have been Sift. Other candidates were Kumo, which is project’s codename, or Hook. Which would you have gone with?
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| Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web. Posted: 28 May 2009 08:59 AM PDT
Everyone uses email and instant messaging on the web now, but imagine if you could tie those two forms of communication together and add a load of functionality on top of it. At its most fundamental form, that’s essentially what Wave is. Developed by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon out of Google’s Sydney, Australia offices, Wave was born out of the idea that email and instant messaging, as successful as they still are, were both created a very long time ago. We now have a much more robust web full of content and brimming with a desire to share stuff. Or as Lars Rasumussen put it, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.” Having seen a lengthy demonstration, as ridiculous as it may sound, I have to agree. Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale. The much better comparison is coincidentally the company started by another group of (former) Googlers, FriendFeed. But Wave is a different product for a number of reasons, and seemingly has loftier goals — all of which I’ll touch on below.
Features During our demonstration, the Wave team kept reiterating that the product is still basically in its infancy. While it was born out of an idea Jens Rasmussen had in 2004, it was placed on the back-burner (while he and brother Lars got busy building what would eventually become Google Maps), only to be resurrected in 2007, and finally set free for internal testing only a few months ago. The reason Google kept reiterating this is because the feature set as it exists right now is just a sliver of what they intend it to be eventually. That said, there’s already plenty to do. Wave features a left-hand sidebar “Navigation” and a list of your contacts, from Google Contacts, below that. But the main part of the screen is your Wave inbox. This looks similar to what your Gmail inbox looks like except it feature the faces of your friends who are involved in each thread. There are also number indicators signifying if there is new content in that thread. This is an important distinction from Gmail — it isn’t just about new messages, there can be any kind of new content in these waves. Clicking on any of the wave threads will open another pane to the right of the inbox that shows that wave in its entirety. Let’s say one wave is a message from a friend and you want to reply to it. If they’re not currently online, you can do it below their message just as you may in Gmail. Except there’s no bulky new message creator to pop open, you simply start typing below your friend’s message. But perhaps you want to respond to a particular part of their message — well you can do that too simply by starting to type below the part you’re replying to. Maybe you want to add another friend to the wave. You can do that by going over to your contact box and dragging their picture into the wave. This is where things really start to get interesting. If that friend wants to get caught up on what everyone else in the wave has already been talking about, they can do so by using the “Playback” feature. This is sort of like rewinding the wave to see what has happened in the past and you can watch it progress through its changes.
But if two of the people involved in the wave are online at the same time, you can talk to each other in real time, all in the same wave. Simply start typing, and your friend will see words as you enter them, and vice versa. This is the element that’s like instant messaging obviously, but the key is that it’s just a small part of what potentially makes up a wave conversation. And if you don’t like the idea of real-time communication where the other person can see what you are typing as you type, you can enter a “Draft” mode to hide your words until you’re ready to send them. And say there is one person in a multi-person thread that you want to message privately. You can easily break-off a private conversation in the wave. Obviously, only you and the other recipient would be able to see this message, but for the both of you it would remain in the flow of the wave itself, keeping it in context. But Wave is hardly just about traditional styles of messaging and replying that we’ve become accustomed to with email and IM. You can also edit things wiki-style with concurrent group collaboration. As anyone who has ever tried to group-edit a document on something like Google Docs knows, this can get tricky fast. But Wave offers a nice UI and real-time edit updates to ensure that even a few people editing something in a wave don’t step all over each other. When someone is editing something, you see their name outlined by a brightly colored box next to the edits they are making in real-time. If you get confused, you can just use the Playback feature I described above to jump around and see the edits. And from here we go much deeper. Say you want to share some recent photos on Wave, if you have a browser with Gears installed, all you have to do is drag and drop the pictures right into the Wave window. It’s worth noting that this is the one Achilles heel keeping Wave from being fully functional with the “modern” web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera) without any additional add-ons. (”Modern” is Google’s passive aggressive way of calling out Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.) Google says it would like to see such functionality added to the HTML 5 standards because it really simplifies this type of sharing.
And it’s pretty damn cool. If you share pictures in a wave thread with several other people, from the moment after you drag the photos into the wave on your end, your friends can see the thumbnails of them on their screen. Everyone in the wave can collaborate to change the titles of the pictures, and you can view things like a slideshow of the images. But pictures are just the beginning. Other example of things you can share in Wave include Google Maps (that you can edit), games, event invitations, and more. And those are just the examples the Wave team itself has thought of. Which brings us to the next point of Wave. Wave As Web Communication Google isn’t just thinking of Wave as another web app that it creates and you use on one site — it wants you to be able to use it across all sites on the web. Say, for example, you have a blog. As a post, you could share a wave with the public and allow others to see what you and the other people in your wave are doing. And these visitors to your blog could even join in as well right from your blog, and all the information would be placed right into the original wave. This could work a few ways. Either you could enable anonymous collaboration on the wave on your site, offer users the ability to sign-in with a certain method you already have on your site, like a comment user name, or they could sign in and interact with their Wave/Google name. We asked about using something like Facebook Connect as a method by which you could edit a wave, and though Lars Rasmussen said they hadn’t yet worked on anything specifically for such functionality, they are very much thinking about it — though you can be sure that Google would prefer Friend Connect. Waves can also be published as their own entities on the web. This would make them and their content indexable by Google’s bots. But the Wave team is careful to note that if something is published to the public on the web, there’s a big indicator of that within the wave that you may see in your main Wave pane.
And it’s not just blogs that Google wants Wave on, it’s pretty much any type of site you can imagine. And for a lot of different uses. For example, plenty of companies user some type of management system for communication beyond email or IM. We use Yammer, and when I was with VentureBeat, we used a FriendFeed private room. Yammer is good but it is just basically Twitter on your own system. The FriendFeed room is much more dynamic, but FriendFeed hosts that. Wave could offer the best of both worlds, and they’re all for companies or even individuals hosting Waves on their own servers. That’s one of the keys to this entire idea. Google doesn’t want Wave to be another one of its apps, it wants Wave to be a communication platform that it may have started, but flourishes all over the web in a bunch of different places. Which brings up the next point. Developers, Developers, Developers Gundotra, who used to work for Microsoft, cited Bill Gates’ early insistence on having a robust developer community as one of the keys to the success of Windows. (And we all know what current CEO Steve Ballmer thinks about developers.) That same emphasis on developers is helping newer platforms like Android and the iPhone grow. And if Wave is to be successful, the entire team knows it will once again be because of developers. While the Rasmussen brothers and Hannon, along with some 50 developers now working on the project at Google have built a very intriguing framework, it is just a taste of the potential of Wave if the development community embraces it. On Friday, Google will open Wave’s APIs to developers to let them have at it. The hope is that in short order, there will be a ton of gadgets, extensions, mash-ups and interesting sites all built around the Wave concept.
The idea is to make the system as open for adoption as possible. The team wants to see Waves created by someone communicating with Waves created by someone else. “We want it to be an open system like email. We want other services to build Wave services even in competition with Google,” Lars Rasmussen told us. And with that in mind, Google plans to open source Wave. This will be the third phase of Google Wave. The first is Google Wave, the product, which Google creates, works on and eventually releases to the public as a web app. The second is Google Wave, the platform, which we outlined above as a system in place for developers to get involved in and create things for. But the third aspect is Google Wave, the protocol, which is its existence as a web communication platform. Find out more at the Waveprotocol.org site. Because it will be open sourced (as Google gets it ready for a public release), it won’t be just Google that is in charge of what it becomes. As it has been doing with Android, it will largely be the development community that dictates where it goes. Or, at least, that’s the hope. A New Web So, if you’ve read this far, you’re probably thinking that Wave either sounds great or you’re confused as to what it exactly is. It really is one of those products that you have to see in action to understand. Unfortunately, unless you’re a developer, you’re not going to be able to see it right away. As we noted at the beginning, Wave is still in its early stages, but Google sees enough promise in it that it wants to get the developer community involved as early as possible — and that’s why we’re seeing it launch at Google I/O. It’s also important to note that Wave is very much centered around the key fundamentals Google is focusing on with HTML 5: The canvas element, the video element, geolocation, App Cache and Database and Web Workers. You can read more about those on O’Reilly Radar or in our live coverage from yesterday, but one of the keys for Wave will be the Web Workers. This capability allows you to run background processes outside of the browser so it doesn’t slow to a crawl which running very rich apps — which Wave is. Web Workers helps turns the browser into a more full-fledged launch pad for the next generation of web apps. That was the main point of yesterday’s keynote and today’s provides the best example thus far of one of these new-style apps in Wave. It’s a really interesting concept, one that you really do need to see in action. It’s ambitious as hell — which we love — but that also leaves it open to the possibility of it falling on its face. But that’s how great products are born. And the potential reward is huge if Google has its way as the ringleader of the complete transition to our digital lives on the web.
Update: We’re sitting in the day 2 Google I/O keynote where the team is showing off Google Wave. There are a number of impressive features that we didn’t even go into (yes, there’s that much to this). One of my favorites is that not only is search real-time in Wave, but it’s really live. For example, if you remove an ‘e’ from “Here” it will disappear from the results for that word. Likewise, if you add the “e” back on, it will pop up again — instantaneously. Another great feature is the advanced spell checker that not only looks through a dictionary for spelling, but looks for context in your sentence. It’s crazy to think that this could work, but it does as they’re showing it off. And yes, Wave will work with Twitter. The team itself created a gadget for it that they call “Twave” that brings in tweets from your stream, complete with your contacts’ Twitter icons. You can respond to these tweets from within Wave and they will go back to your Twitter stream. But the best feature is Twave’s search feature which scans Twitter in real time and updates live when new results come in. You can use this to track anything you want in real-time. Now the team is showing off a wave that can translate to other languages in real-time. Again, impressive. The demo at Google I/O has just ended to huge standing ovation. If today is any indication, this is going to be big. Update 2: And here’s an interview we recorded with the creators of Google Wave. Hear them explain the product in their own words. Update 3: And here’s our coverage of the post-keynote press Q&A session. Update 4: And finally, here’s a video of the full demo from I/O today. You’ll want to watch this if you’re interested in Wave. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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