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- Google Maps Will Now Show You Traffic Conditions On The Back Roads
- Sony Launches Words Move Me, A Literary Twitter Clone
- Short And Tweet: TweetMeme Introduces An URL Shortener Of Its Own
- Live at the Sony Daily Edition eReader Announcement
- Opera 10 Slated For September 1 Launch. Will Anyone Take Notice?
- Apigee’s Ambition Is To Be The Google Analytics For APIs
- Facebook Conversations Used As Evidence In Exam Cheating Case
- Blogger Buzz Blog Is Trying To Communicate With Us
- Opera Mini Storms Mobile Apps, But Safari Is On Its Tail
- Confirmed: Yahoo Acquires Arab Internet Portal Maktoob
- Mark Zuckerberg: “Spotify Is So Good”
- Yahoo May Have Acquired Arab Portal Maktoob (Updated)
- Facebook App Developer To Apple: Tear Down This App Store Wall
- Brazen Careerist: A Professional Network That Realizes You’re More Than Just A Resume
- StyleRays Lets You Share Your Personal Style With The Masses
- David Recordon Leaves Six Apart To Join Facebook
- Welcome To The Stream. Yahoo Adds “Status-casting” To Mail And Messenger
- Bing Doesn’t Have Much Zing Yet Outside The U.S. (comScore)
- Wondering How Seriously Apple Is Taking The FCC Inquiry? Check Out Their Home Page
- The Top Query At Today’s Yahoo Event? Bing.
- Facebook Still Pondering Whether To Let Users Syndicate Status Updates To Twitter
- Facebook Events Now Creates Automatic Guest Lists From Your Most Recent Parties
- What Matters Most To Yahoo Is “Taking Away” People Search From Google
- The Old Fail Whale Was So Much Cuter
- SocialToo Launches App That Allows You To Publish From Facebook To Twitter
| Google Maps Will Now Show You Traffic Conditions On The Back Roads Posted: 25 Aug 2009 08:51 AM PDT  Any one who commutes in major cities knows the value of back roads when it comes to avoiding traffic on the highways during peak rush hour times. Google Maps just added a nifty feature that will show you live traffic conditions on arterial roads (non-highway roads) in selected cities. Google Maps will also show traffic patterns on main highways as well, helping you see what the least-trafficked route is for your commute. When you zoom-in on the city you’re interested in and click the “Traffic” button in the upper-right corner of the map, you’ll see the traffic conditions of both arterial roads and highways. The colors correspond to the speed of traffic green is little to no traffic, yellow is medium congestion, red is heavy congestion, and red/black is stop-and-go traffic. Google says that this feature can also be accessed on Google Maps for Mobile, which is particularly useful when trying to figure out the best route on the go. Google also shed a little bit of light as to how they crowdsource traffic info via Google Maps on mobile phones. When you enable Google Maps with My Location, the phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When Google combines your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, they can get an idea of traffic live conditions. They continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. Google assures users that they only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when the user has opted to enable location services on his or her phone. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Sony Launches Words Move Me, A Literary Twitter Clone Posted: 25 Aug 2009 08:32 AM PDT
In conjunction with today’s announcement of a new wireless Sony Reader, the electronics giant also launched a literary clone of Twitter called Words Move Me. The site falls into the category of viral social marketing—there are links to the Sony Reader website and eBook store plastered on every page—and was pobviously rushed out before it was ready, but it shows some promise as a niche micro-messaging network centered around sharing quotes from books. The idea is very basic. You paste in passages up to 255 characters long, add the book title and author, and post it to your stream. You can also add tags. You can follow other people, or they can follow you. When you click on an author, a book title, or another user, you see more passages from that source that have been shared on Words Move Me. So far, so good. The problem is that right now it is a self-contained site. Facebook and Twitter integration are coming “in phase 2,” I’m told. If you can’t share your favorite book passages with your existing network, this isn’t going to go far. But it’s coming. Also, the site does not auto-populate book titles or authors, which it should be able to do at least for books in the Sony eBook store or in Google Book Search (which is a Sony partner). Avid readers love to share quotes, but that is not the only things they like to share. Quotes and passages are all good things to share, and can serve as hooks for people to come back and explore further (and mabe even buy a book). The concept reminds me of iWise, which is a way follow famous people through their quotations. It’s Twitter for dead people. And iWise lets you Tweet out your favorite quotes, or get random ones right in your Twitter feed. There is an opportunity for several more focused micro-messaging sites, but they cannot exist in a vacuum.
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| Short And Tweet: TweetMeme Introduces An URL Shortener Of Its Own Posted: 25 Aug 2009 07:43 AM PDT
It shrinks longer links in order to make them more tweetable (and retweetable), it gives you some options to share links from its main website, throws in some analytics so you can see just how few people actually click those links you’re spreading and comes with an API. The only slight advantage it could have over competitors like TinyURL and bit.ly is a tight integration with the TweetMeme service / button, but they won’t be exploiting that connection and keep on supporting the URL shortening services as they were before (which is obviously the right thing to do). TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead asks the appropriate question in the e-mail announcing ReTwt.me: why did they build this? The answer:
I have my doubts about ReTwt.me being more serious about uptime and scalability than some of the other services, like bit.ly (a venture-capital funded startup to which URL shortening and analytics is core business) and Digg (which I’m sure has a lot more load on its servers than TweetMeme currently has), but having a fall-back option I guess makes sense. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine why any end user would want to switch to ReTwt.me for URL shortening purposes. Halstead bets on the simpleness of the service, but I don’t know how anyone could make the existing URL shortening services more basic than they already are. But please do judge for yourself (and don’t forget to retwt this story).
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Live at the Sony Daily Edition eReader Announcement Posted: 25 Aug 2009 07:13 AM PDT
Erick Schonfeld is on the scene live and we’ll be reporting once the doors open at 10:30am EDT. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Opera 10 Slated For September 1 Launch. Will Anyone Take Notice? Posted: 25 Aug 2009 04:59 AM PDT
Opera 10, formerly codenamed Peregrine, will feature an improved user interface, increased web standards support, bug fixes, performance improvements, and new tools for web developers. Opera 10 Final will also include Opera Turbo, the new bandwidth-booster for slow Internet connections, and a revamped Opera Mail, its built-in e-mail client. Also worth testing when it comes out: Opera claims the next version of its desktop browser will be significantly faster on resource intensive pages such as Gmail and Facebook, deeming it more than 40% faster overall than Opera 9.6. The question is: how many people will actually experience any of that? The Opera desktop browser, contrary to its mobile sister, hasn’t exactly been adopted like crazy since its initial release back in 1996, even if it has been known to innovate the browser field with several useful new features over the years that nearly always end up in competing web browsers shortly after introduction. As of July 2009, usage data on English-language sites show Opera’s share of the browser market as being 1.97%. For comparison, according to Net Applications the July data shows Internet Explorer still leading with a 67.68% share of the browser market, followed by Firefox (22.47%), Safari (4.07%) and Google Chrome (2.59%). Also, I’m not really sure what to make of this:
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Apigee’s Ambition Is To Be The Google Analytics For APIs Posted: 25 Aug 2009 04:15 AM PDT
The Web has come a long way from a collection of Web pages to repositories of programmable data freely flowing from one site to another through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). But it is difficult to keep track of all of the thousands of APIs out there. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Google Analytics for APIs? Today, Sonoa Systems is taking the first step towards building just that with the public beta launch of Apigee. (Developers can sign up for it here). Sonoa built the service around its massively scalable API router. Apigee offers Web developers and publishers a dashboard for managing both the APIs they provide to others and the ones they consume for themselves. Easy to understand charts and graphs can tell a Web developer which one of five APIs is messing up his mashup or a bigger Website when an overzealous developer is making too many calls to its API and threatening to bring the whole thing down. “The way we see APIs is like the dark matter of the Internet,” says Brian Mulloy, the general manager of Apigee. “We know they are out there, but we are not directly observing their behavior.” For a developer whose Website is a mashup of five APIs, Apigee would monitor each one for response time, error rates, and number of requests being put through (to make sure the developer is not hitting the limit). In the illustrative screenshot below, the example is for a fake app called “PhotoTwitty” which is a mashup of APIs from Twitter, Twitter Search, Flickr, Google, and 4PayPrints. All five have to work in order for PhotoTwitty to be up and running. Big sites with popular APIs have a different problem. They set limits so their servers don’t crash, but sometimes all it takes is one or two heavy users to cause a meltdown. Just because an API providers set limits doesn’t mean they enforce them. Apigee lets sites throttle API limits with simple sliders and once the limits are hit, any individual API user cannot exceed them. The reason Apigee can do this is because it is in fact creating a proxy for each API. “We want every API going through us,” says Mulloy. It uses Sonoa’s API routers to create its proxies and from then on all the API calls are routed through Apigee. The proxy works both ways. Either the API provider or consumer can set one up. Since you can’t drop a Javascript beacon in an API like you can on a Website, this is the only way to measure the broad usage of APIs. If enough APIs start going through Apigee’s proxies and its users allow the data to be shared anonymously in an aggrgegate fashion, then Apigee could eventually create an Alexa-like service as well with public data for API usage and uptimes. The downside to using Apigee is that it introduces a latency into the whole system. Mulloy estimate sthat this latency is only 200 to 300 milliseconds, which is is acceptable for most apps, but starts to become noticeable for real-time apps like Twitter. For URL Shorteners, for example, 300 milliseconds can mean the difference between an acceptable and unacceptable lag. But that’s the price you pay for visibility into your APIs. You may also be paying Apigee, which wants to charge up to $100 a month for anyone monitoring more than 10,000 API calls a month. Below that, the service is free.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Facebook Conversations Used As Evidence In Exam Cheating Case Posted: 25 Aug 2009 04:09 AM PDT
Supervisors had noticed the two young men talking to each other during the exams and constantly eying them to stay on top of their location in the room, but had apparently failed to find any hard evidence of cheating. Additionally, fellow students had reported the cheating by the two students anonymously and by e-mail, but this was still insufficient for the exam council to nail them for fraud. But then a couple of threads on Facebook held prior to and after the exams surfaced, proving that the cheating had been going on for quite a while and showing that the students were pretty proud of the fact they hadn’t been caught to date. The council ultimately determined the conversations on the social network could be used as evidence, resulting in the flunking after the students confessed to cheating (which they later withdrew claiming that the conversations were completely unrelated - yeah right). Noteworthy: there were complaints (presumably from the students themselves and/or their parents) that Facebook could not be used as evidence arguing it is a personal medium, but the council president wiped those claims off the table saying Facebook is ’semi-public’ and users have full control over what is shown and what is not. What do you think: was it right for the council to decide Facebook conversations could be used as evidence in this case or not? (Via T-zine, Getty image found on Telegraph.co.uk ) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Blogger Buzz Blog Is Trying To Communicate With Us Posted: 25 Aug 2009 02:10 AM PDT
Unless it wasn’t actually the blogging equivalent of junk mail but just some overanxious Googler who was so thrilled with some new feature they’re adding to the free blogging service that he/she resorted to gobbledygook speak out of sheer excitement. Or maybe this person was still a bit tipsy from the 10-year anniversary get-together. We’ll never know, and the post has since been removed. But someone (or something) was definitely trying to make contact there. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Opera Mini Storms Mobile Apps, But Safari Is On Its Tail Posted: 25 Aug 2009 01:54 AM PDT
Opera Mini is also making Firefox eat dust in the mobile world. Firefox has been promising a full-blown mobile browser for a year, but Mozilla users are still waiting, although Mozilla has released Fennec 3, a beta version of its open-source touch mobile browser. Meanwhile, Opera Mini users are enjoying a pretty advanced browser which also runs Flash. Its popularity shows that mobile users are clearly not satisfied with the standard browser they tend to get thrown in with their cellphone. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Confirmed: Yahoo Acquires Arab Internet Portal Maktoob Posted: 25 Aug 2009 12:46 AM PDT
The MaktoobBusiness Twitter acccount notes that the deal will unite “Yahoo’s 20 million users from the Arab world with Maktoob’s 16 million”, with Vice President Ahmed Nassef stating that it will bring “a sea change in the industry.” Up until now, Yahoo has held a weak presence in the Arab region, with no dedicated portal to speak of (though it still managed to attract millions of Arab users to its sites). The deal effectively gives Yahoo an instant foothold in the market. According to MaktoobBusiness, products will be cobranded with Yahoo and Maktoob, with the deal completing in the fourth quarter and new products rolling out next year. Maktoob launched in the late 90’s as the first free Arabic Email service provider. Since then it has grown to encompass a variety of services, including payments, gaming, search, and auctions. According to comScore, Maktoob has seen very impressive growth over the last year, growing from 6 million unique visitors in June 2008 to 21.8 million a year later. Likewise, its page views have grown from 406 million to 1.1 billion over the same time frame. Update: Yahoo has now confirmed to acquisition on its blog:
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Mark Zuckerberg: “Spotify Is So Good” Posted: 25 Aug 2009 12:26 AM PDT
We’ve heard that Facebook has been talking with the European startup about a partnership for well over a year (about the time the Facebook music rumors heated up), but that the talks have intensified dramatically in the last week. And just as we were digging into that rumor, up pops a Facebook status message from Mark Zuckerberg: “Spotify is so good.” Wondering about the timing? Don’t. Facebook investor Li Ka-Shing is now a big stockholder in Spotify, too. And it was clear that as soon as iLike turned down Facebook and accepted MySpace’s offer, Facebook would have to make some new decisions on music strategy. iLike has always been the de facto music application on Facebook. A year ago Facebook named them one of only two “Great Apps” that would get preferential treatment on the platform. But all that has changed. The Great Apps program was shuttered, and there’s no way Facebook is going to continue to shower the love on iLike. So out with the old, in with the new. See ya, iLike. Helloooo, Spotify. So when are you launching in the U.S.? Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Yahoo May Have Acquired Arab Portal Maktoob (Updated) Posted: 25 Aug 2009 12:14 AM PDT Update: This is now confirmed.
We’re still working to confirm the news, but there are indications that the acquisition will be officially announced within minutes. A Twitter account called MaktoobBusiness, which we believe to be affiliated with the company, is currently tweeting about a Yahoo press conference, where founders and the GM of Maktoob are attending alongside Yahoo’s emerging market team. Rumors of a deal between Yahoo and Maktoob have been swirling for many months, but details have remained scant. Arabcrunch reports that the acquisition price exceeds $100 million — we are working to confirm these details.  Maktoob launched in the late 90’s as the first free Arabic Email service provider. Since then it has grown to encompass a variety of services, including payments, gaming, search, and auctions. According to comScore, Maktoob has seen very impressive growth over the last year, growing from 6 million unique visitors in June 2008 to 21.8 million a year later. Likewise, its page views have grown from 406 million to 1.1 billion over the same time frame. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Facebook App Developer To Apple: Tear Down This App Store Wall Posted: 24 Aug 2009 11:26 PM PDT
It’s hard to remember an app in recent memory that has been anticipated more than Facebook’s new 3.0 version of its iPhone app. How do I know? You should see my Facebook inbox from people who have hunted me down knowing that I have it since I reviewed it. Unfortunately, I can’t give it to anyone because it’s a version tied specifically to my iPhone (so stop emailing!). It’s been a week and a half since Facebook engineer Joe Hewitt submitted the app to the App Store, and the wait time frustration is not only getting to the users, but to Hewitt himself, as he made clear in a blog post tonight. Simply put, Hewitt’s post is a must-read because he makes a range of excellent points in a fairly condensed space. We’ll simply highlight some of the larger ones. Now, to be clear, Apple considers a typical wait time for approval to be 14 days, so Facebook 3.0 isn’t there yet. And Hewitt notes that he wouldn’t mind waiting for that, were it not for the reasoning behind the wait time, which he describes as “guilty until proven innocent.” And while there is definitely something to be said for Apple wanting to control the experience of using the iPhone, it rings true that the App Store and its 40 or so full-time reviewers (a number we learned from the FCC docs) simply cannot give most apps a meaningful review. Instead, it’s the developers who should, and in most cases, do, make these meaningful reviews before submission. What app reviewers are really looking for most of the time are violations of the SDK terms of service, as Hewitt notes. But Hewitt goes much deeper. He calls for Apple to remove the app approval process entirely. While Apple’s argument against this would undoubtedly be that because apps can access core functions of the phone, they need to protect consumers. But Hewitt, who built the original excellent web version of the Facebook app for the iPhone back before there were native third party apps, and has done extensive work on both the Netscape and Firefox web browsers (and built the excellent Firebug debugging utility for Firefox, among other things), knows his stuff. And so when he says something like:
Apple may do well to listen. The reality is that while native app development on the iPhone is a relatively new system, it’s not all that different in theory from some of the robust web app development going on out there. And things like HTML 5, which can do things like access certain system elements for running tasks, will only further blur this line. Apple has started making Google create web apps for many of its apps (since they have stopped approving the native ones), and we are sure to soon see just how far they can go. Just imagine an App Store with no gates (just a registration process). Sure, there would be spammers, but why not let Apple catch the guilty ones and ban them? That seems like a much more reasonable way for app reviewers to spend their time. Users would send it reports of suspicious activity, and reviewers would look into it. Remember also that for anyone to use these apps, they still have to install them. And so if someone is tricking users into installing a bad one, ban that developer. Think that won’t work? Look at the Android Market. There is no pre-approval process for apps, yet Google has only had to ban 1% of apps coming in. Sure, it’s not nearly as popular as the Apple App Store, but again, users have control over what they install. And they’re proving to be reliable app reviewers themselves by flagging bad apps. The point of all of this is that an app approval process is simply not scalable. Apple may have bolstered it recently, but if it continues to grow at its crazy rate, we’re going to see the same issues pop up again and again. Apple would have to keep hiring more and more people to review these apps. It’s not a tenable system. Instead, wouldn’t it just be easier to let everything in and then go after the bad ones? I expect the calls for this to continue to get louder. [photo: White House Photo, Public domain] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Brazen Careerist: A Professional Network That Realizes You’re More Than Just A Resume Posted: 24 Aug 2009 09:46 PM PDT
Brazen Careerist launched over a year ago as a blog network, and has since grown to include over 1000 bloggers. Now, the site is also launching its own social network that’s centered around Generation Y — adults who were born from the late 70’s through the mid 90’s. Unlike LinkedIn, Brazen Careerist is trying to focus on the human side of these potential employees, offering an environment where users can share their thoughts and activities alongside their resumes. CEO Penelope Trunk says that neither LinkedIn nor Facebook are doing a particularly good job catering to Gen Y, at least in a professional network sense, and that while there are some other sites that have tried to tackle the problem, they’ve done so by trying to cater to employers first and using them to attract a community. In contrast, Trunk says that Brazen Careerist is focusing on building a community of young workers first, and that the employers will come to them. The site feels like a mix between Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. When you log in, you’re shown your ‘Fan Feed’ — a list of updates from the members on the site that you follow (the site uses a one-way follow system similar to Twitter, so the people you are following aren’t necessarily following you back). Updates consist of status updates, as well as comments you’ve left on blogs in the Brazen Careerist network and any blogs you write yourself. Your profile, which is what potential employers are likely most interested in, consists of two parts: “Ideas” and “Resume”. The Ideas section is essentially a feed of all of your status updates, comments, and other actions on the site, which gives employers a three dimensional view of your potential and personality that they can’t get from a resume alone. For example, employers might check out some blog posts you’ve written to get a taste for your writing style and the way you think. Or they might check out the movie review you left for Inglourious Basterds, or the on-site Group you’re involved with that discusses marketing. The Resume section, as you might expect, includes a brief personal note along with your past career highlights.
At this point, there are a few issues I see with the site. For one, users may have a hard time walking the line between writing updates that are personal enough to be humanizing to prospective employers, but not too unprofessional. I’m also concerned that these updates could devolve into endless streams of self promotion, which we’ve already gotten a taste of on Twitter. My other issue with the site is that HR reps don’t have particularly effective ways to browse through the applicant pool. At this point they can do basic keyword searches (e.g. “Marketing” or “Engineer”), and they can also look through the various job-oriented groups, but compared to the options seen on sites like LinkedIn, they’re pretty limited. Likewise, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of recommending peers or establishing connections, which obviously play a key role in identifing promising candidates. That said, I think Trunk is right when she says that there is an under-served market for Generation Y job seekers. Brazen Careerist will likely need to continue evolving to find the right mix of professional and personal content, but it’s headed in the right direction. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| StyleRays Lets You Share Your Personal Style With The Masses Posted: 24 Aug 2009 09:10 PM PDT  Fashion has long had a place in the Web 2.0 arena. There are online sample sale clubs, social networks around fashion and even fashion microblogging networks. StyleRays is jumping on the bandwagon by launching a microblogging site focused less on the actual fashion and more on style. What’s the difference you ask? According to StyleRays, the site is focused on how you put clothes together and integrate brands into certain “looks.” Instead of answering Twitter’s question of “what are you doing?”, StyleRays looks to answer the question “what are you wearing now?” On the site, users can upload photos of what they are wearing, then tag the photos with the brands of clothes that they have on and publish their photos. Similar to Twitter, you can follow other users and their photos will appear in your stream. You can also comment on users’ photos and Tweet photos to Twitter and publish links to Facebook as well. The site is pretty basic and currently doesn’t offer more features than microblogging your style photos. The startup plans to add daily style updates from the users you follow, conduct contests on style and implement a rewards system. The concept is fairly similar to TryMyFashion, a startup that lets users post short messages (just like Twitter—140 characters or less) and photos, videos, etc. about their daily fashion. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| David Recordon Leaves Six Apart To Join Facebook Posted: 24 Aug 2009 06:36 PM PDT
Besides Six Apart, Recordon has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of key social media technologies such as OpenID. In 2005, Recordon collaborated with Brad Fitzpatrick in the original development of OpenID, which has since become the most popular decentralized single-sign-on protocol on the web. According to Recordon, Facebook has always been built on open source software, has released powerful open source infrastructure technologies such as Thrift, and this year become an active member of the Activity Streams and OpenID communities from a standards side. So Recordon will continue to focus on open source and standards at Facebook. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Welcome To The Stream. Yahoo Adds “Status-casting” To Mail And Messenger Posted: 24 Aug 2009 05:30 PM PDT
When you are late to the game, trying to rename it doesn’t win you any points. Today, Yahoo announced that it is finally adding basic status updates to its Mail and Messenger products, which it is calling “status-casting.” In both Yahoo Mail and Messenger 10, you can update your status and all of your contacts who also use either of those two products can see your updates. You can also choose to see your friends’ updates from a variety of social media sites across the Web—such as Yelp, YouTube, and Twitter— right in your Mail homepage or IM stream. Yahoo is making its communications products more social by combining private and public message streams in much the same way that AOL added lifestreaming to AIM last month. (That’s right, AOL beat Yahoo to this feature set by more than a month). On the one hand, Yahoo wants to use the popularity of Yahoo Mail (which is the No. 1 Web mail service with 300 million people using it worldwide) to get into the micro-messaging game. Just like it did with Yahoo profiles at the beginning of the year, you can now add 140-character updates via Yahoo Mail to other people on Yahoo. It also lets you and keep track of what your contacts are doing across other social sites. These appear under a new updates section on the Yahoo Mail landing page. Yahoo Messenger lets you do the same things—create updates across your Yahoo network and see updates from your IM buddies happening elsewhere. But it doesn’t appear to be a two-way connection. You can read your friends’ updates on Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, and elsewhere, but you can’t always reply from within Yahoo Messenger or Mail so that your reply appears back in the original service. If you want to respond to a friend’s Tweet, you can IM them back with a copy of their Tweet attached, but you can’t simply generate a new Tweet in response like any Twitter client could. It’s not really status-casting, or whatever you want to call it, unless you can broadcast your status back across non-Yahoo services. (Photo credit: Flickr/Andrew Sea)
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Bing Doesn’t Have Much Zing Yet Outside The U.S. (comScore) Posted: 24 Aug 2009 05:28 PM PDT In the two months since Microsoft launched Bing, its new search engine has taken nearly a full point in market share in the U.S. But overseas, the Bing effect is not really being felt yet. The latest global search market share numbers (as opposed to U.S.) from comScore show Microsoft’s share of search queries actually declining by 0.1 percent in between June and July to 2.9 percent. (See chart below). Maybe this is because most of Bing’s $100 million marketing budget is being spent in the U.S., and that is driving much of the initial market share movement we are seeing here. Microsoft’s global market share is also so much smaller than its 8.9 percent share in the U.S., so making serious inroads overseas will take much longer. Meanwhile, Google gained 0.4 percent to end July with 67.5 percent global share, compared to Yahoo’s 7.8 percent (which was also down 0.1 percent month over month). Yahoo and Microsoft combined have 10.7 percent share of searches worldwide. (Table courtesy of Christa Quarles at Thomas Weisel Partners)
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Wondering How Seriously Apple Is Taking The FCC Inquiry? Check Out Their Home Page Posted: 24 Aug 2009 05:05 PM PDT
Wondering just how seriously Apple is taking this FCC inquiry about their rejection of the Google Voice application for the iPhone? Just check out their home page, which is promoting the response they sent to the FCC last Friday. Apple’s website draws 94 million unique visitors a month (Comscore worldwide, June 2009), and the home page is generally reserved for selling stuff. Today for example, they’re pushing the upcoming operating system release of Snow Leopard, as well as Final Cut, Macbooks and a promotion to give an iPod Touch to students who buy Macs. The area reserved for “Apple answers the FCC’s questions” just seems out of place, and gives us a hint about how seriously they’re taking this whole situation. This is a PR war they’re engaged in, and they are using everything they have to spread their side of the story. Last week I tore that response letter apart and showed how it was full of half truths, outright lies and lots of misleading statements. Apple is running for cover right now. And unless they want the FCC to blow this investigation wide open, they are going to need to retreat. And by retreat, I mean this - look for Apple to accept the Google Voice app in the near future. They’ll say changes were made that satisfy them, but in reality our guess if no changes at all will be made to the app. Google, who’ll be happy with their tactical win, won’t stir the pot. And this will all be forgotten as the next crisis hits the news. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| The Top Query At Today’s Yahoo Event? Bing. Posted: 24 Aug 2009 04:30 PM PDT
But there’s an important distinction between Yahoo’s plans for its own search product going forward, and Microsoft’s plans for it. The easiest way to think about it is that Yahoo will be in charge of the frontend side of things for Yahoo Search, while Microsoft will be in charge of the backend — though not all of it. And Yahoo didn’t shy away from questions today as to whether that means that essentially, Yahoo is still competing with Microsoft in search? From a frontend perspective, which is all most users will ever see, it is, says Yahoo. Yeah, it’s confusing. Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo’s Senior VP of Labs and Search Strategy, tried to answer the questions as best he could. But the vibe seemed to be that he felt confined in giving the answers that Yahoo is making all of its execs give. And even though at least half of the questions during the Q&A session were about Yahoo’s deal with Microsoft, it was clear that plenty of the journalists and bloggers in the audience still weren’t entirely clear what the plan is. Or that Yahoo really knows what the plan is. "We are not a version of Bing. We are the Yahoo search experience,” Raghavan said at one point. And he continued on that it was a complex deal, and not as easy to explain or execute as a straight-up acquisition would be. I’ll say. While Yahoo is full of PR-ready answers that seem to confuse even them, here’s how I interpreted what Yahoo was basically saying today: “We are Yahoo Search, powered by Bing, but we don’t want you to know we’re powered by Bing.” Elisa Steele, Chief Marketing Officer of Yahoo, wanted to make it clear that the Yahoo branding would remain intact on all Yahoo Search pages. Okay, and that’s fine, as I said, most users will have no idea what is actually powering their search results. But it’s a little odd that Yahoo Search now sounds more like a search layer of sorts over Bing (though, again, they would never put it that way). And it’s too bad. After the last event which focused on their search innovation (before the Microsoft deal), I was harsh in my criticism of Yahoo, saying that they weren’t doing enough on the frontend to ever take users away from Google. At today’s event, a new frontend is exactly what they showed off, and some of it looks very good. The people-search aspect in particular strikes me as something I would use, as soon as it gets a way to filter things like tweets by most recent updates — which it’s getting, I’m told. The left-side filters work well as an obvious visual way to scour various popular services that Yahoo has included. We currently use Yahoo BOSS to power TechCrunch search, it was impressive that when I did a search for my name, one of the options was to see all the TechCrunch articles by me. Certainly it’s in Yahoo’s interest to get people using Yahoo more, but it is too bad that the main benefactor of all the work Yahoo has been doing to make the frontend of its search more compelling may be Microsoft. I wonder if in a year’s time we won’t just consider Yahoo Search to be the prettier version of Bing. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Facebook Still Pondering Whether To Let Users Syndicate Status Updates To Twitter Posted: 24 Aug 2009 03:17 PM PDT
From what we’ve been hearing, Facebook is still internally debating if and when they’d release the feature, and they’re going to take their time in making the decision. The reasons for the slow progress are obvious: Facebook only recently began offering the ‘everyone‘ sharing option to users, and it still hasn’t released the privacy overhaul that will promote it. This isn’t good news for anyone hoping for a release in the immediate future, but it also dispels any notion that Facebook has a long-term roadmap that rules out data export entirely. In short, this is something that Facebok has avoided doing until now, and it’s going to dip its toe into these new waters as cautiously as possible. As I wrote in our last post on the subject, there are a number of reasons why Facebook might consider enabling syndication to Twitter, and why it might hesitate to do so. On the plus side, allowing users to update their Twitter profiles using Facebook would likely turn the latter into the largest Twitter client overnight. And because users would be tweeting many items that are housed on Facebook — including photos, videos, and updates from applications — it could actually lead to a significant boost in traffic. On the other hand, one of Facebook’s big advantages over Twitter is its huge user base and established community. Making it easier for those users to make the jump over to Twitter probably isn’t an appealing prospect to Facebook. And if Facebook begins handing these updates to Twitter, it could also hurt them in the real-time search race, where Twitter already has a huge lead.  Fortunately, if you’re in a hurry to start broadcasting your Facebook updates to Twitter, you’ve got some options. Today just saw the launch of SocialToo’s new Facebook App which enables this functionality, and you can also use RSS feeds to import your updates. As an aside, it’s quite interesting that a summer intern at Facebook was responsible for building the Pages->Twitter feature. Not only is Facebook giving its interns some time in the public spotlight, but they’re putting them in charge of functionality that could have major implications for the social network down the line. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Facebook Events Now Creates Automatic Guest Lists From Your Most Recent Parties Posted: 24 Aug 2009 02:48 PM PDT  Facebook just added the ability to invite friends to an event based on who was invited to past events that you’ve been to. The new feature basically lets you filter your friends by recent events when creating an invitee list. So when you create an event on Facebook, you will now see a “Filter Friends” tab in the upper-left corner. The drop-down menu will display the five most recent events you either created or attended in the past month. If you click on one of these events, you can see the invitee list for this event. Of course, only your friends will appear in this list; you will not be able to see or invite anyone who you aren’t friends with from past lists. One drawback is that you can only access the lists from recent events and can’t see the lists from older events. You can either invite people individually or select all. The new feature is definitely an easier way to both create an invitee list for an event. Facebook’s event application is massively popular, with the site seeing "2.5 million events created each month". While Facebook’s event app is growing rapidly, rival social network MySpace has also been steadily boosting its events application and recently overtook Evite, another popular event planning site in number of invitations sent per day. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| What Matters Most To Yahoo Is “Taking Away” People Search From Google Posted: 24 Aug 2009 01:05 PM PDT
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz may be under the impression that Yahoo has “never been a search company,” but at its “What Matters Most” product update today, search was definitely front and center. One of the demos showed a new, upcoming search homepage. The new design will focus on making search more personalized, and specifically going after Google in people search . “We’re taking that away from them,” vows Yahoo’s VP of Search Products and Design Larry Cornett. When you type in a person’s name in Yahoo, it will do a better job of bringing up links to their profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and FriendFeed—something Google already does exceedingly well. But Cornett throws down a challenge for Google: “When we launch this, you're going to come to Yahoo to search for people." Any niche that Yahoo can carve out for itself strengthens its position as it awaits the long approval process surrounding its proposed search deal with Microsoft. After that, Bing will take over its core search results, but it will still focus on the user interface front-end on Yahoo search itself. Already, that is moving in a more Bing-like direction. Another new feature previewed today was dividing the search page into three columns, with the left-hand column being devoted to filters and different ways to sort and refine your search. Bing, of course, does this already with its related searches in the left hand column. But Yahoo combines this with people search so that along the side are tab-like filters which bring up recent Tweets, Facebook results, Friendfeed comments, Pandora profile information, and more of the person you are trying to find out about. But people search was a big area Cornett stressed as one where Yahoo thinks it can give Google a run for its money. The problem is that people search is only one type of search. Even if Yahoo does a better job there, it will have to do much more to break consumers of their Google habit.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| The Old Fail Whale Was So Much Cuter Posted: 24 Aug 2009 01:00 PM PDT
503 error? Are we serious, Twitter? Yes, the service with an illustrious history of going down, is down again. But rather than returning the cute, cuddly Fail Whale that we’ve all come to know and love, everyone is getting a boring old 503 error. For those not versed in server speak, 503 means:
Could we at least get re-routed to another server with a 503 Whale? As always, here’s our list of suggestions on what to do when Twitter is down.
Update: Here’s an update from Twitter with absolutely no information besides the obvious (we’re down). Update 2: And we’re back. No word on what the issue was yet. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| SocialToo Launches App That Allows You To Publish From Facebook To Twitter Posted: 24 Aug 2009 12:16 PM PDT  SocialToo, a startup that lets you manage your personal connections on Twitter and Facebook, has launched a new Facebook application that lets you post updates to your Facebook wall, to Twitter, and any Facebook Fan Page you manage. This feature is particularly interesting after Facebook just released a feature that will allow Facebook Page owners to syndicate their updates from Facebook to Twitter — something that users have been asking for for ages. At the moment, it’s unclear whether Facebook will be extending this feature to Facebook Profiles. Here’s how it works: after installing the application on your Facebook profile, you will be given a prompt in the Publisher’s drop down menu to publish via SocialToo Status. After authorizing your (via oAuth) Twitter accounts, you will be able to select a publish to Twitter option each time you post an update on your Facebook feed via the SocialToo Status option. You can also publish to various Facebook pages (if you are the administrator). When you publish via SocialToo Status, your updates will appear in your personal stream, along with a link to each destination, i.e. Twitter and Facebook Pages. There will also be a little green SocialToo quote icon with each post, differentiating the posts from a regular status update. There a couple of other roundabout ways to publish updates from Facebook to Twitter that have emerged. An app called FB2Twitter lets you Tweet from Facebook’s Publisher to Twitter. But when trying the app out, I wasn’t able to publish to my Facebook feed. Another way to update Twitter from Facebook by pulling in the Facebook RSS feed into TwitterFeed but the whole process sounds confusing. SocialToo’s app seems like one of the easiest ways to post from Facebook to Twitter at the moment. That is, until Facebook allows the ability to do this from your profiles and news feed. But its unclear if and when this will happen.  Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
As if we needed yet another URL shortening service, 
You’ve been waiting for it. You’ve been talking about it. You’ve sent long, rambling letters to Jodie Foster about it. You’ve been calling your local Congresswoman about it: It’s the Sony Daily Edition e-reader with built-in wireless.
That other browser maker, 
Two Belgian college students have been flunked for cheating on their written exams, getting zero points for two courses because they had reportedly been caught exchanging responses during the tests. Notably, the determining evidence used in the case came straight from 
Google’s 
Mobile browser 
Yahoo has just officially acquired Maktoob, a very popular Arabic web portal that offers services including search, payments, social network, and auctions. Rumors of an aquisition have been building for months, and in the last hour they reached a head as news of an impending press conference 
The ink isn’t even dry on the 
Breaking news from the other side of the world: Yahoo may well have acquired 
Apple has been working overtime recently to 
The Q&A session following Yahoo’s “
Last week Facebook 
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