The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- WikLeaks Reports It Is Under A Denial Of Service Attack
- From The MAD TechVentures Conference 2010 In Kuala Lumpur: 22 Pitches From Malaysian Startups
- From The Video Vault: Barbie Video Girl
- Sites With Government Seized Domains Are Moving On, On Twitter
- Gmail Lite: If You Build It Google, We Will Come
- NSFW: 404 Alcohol Not Found (Or, Social Media is Overrated, but it’s Helped me Stay Sober)
- Those Two LeWeb Tickets Now Include Lodging Thanks To Airbnb. Tell Us Why You Need To Go
- The Myth Of Serendipity
- The Good Old Days
- The Best Of Google Demo Slam
| WikLeaks Reports It Is Under A Denial Of Service Attack Posted: 28 Nov 2010 09:03 AM PST  @wikileaksWikiLeaks We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack. 48 minutes ago via webRetweet A lot of people, including many governments, have problems with WikiLeaks, the site dedicated to publishing sensitive and often classified documents. (Read more background on the controversial organization). The site is currently under a distributed denial of service attack, according to a Tweet from the WikiLeaks account. The site seems to be withstanding the attack so far. It is up right now. The DDOS attack comes just as WikiLeaks is preparing to release another set of U.S. government documents—this time diplomatic cables which may prove so embarrassing that the State Department decided to warn foreign governments ahead of their release. But WikiLeaks reports via Twitter that even if the site goes down, newspapers around the world will publish excerpts from the cables: @wikileaksWikiLeaks El Pais, Le Monde, Speigel, Guardian & NYT will publish many US embassy cables tonight, even if WikiLeaks goes down 30 minutes ago via webRetweet So who is behind the DDOS attack? It is obviously a conspiracy.        
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| From The MAD TechVentures Conference 2010 In Kuala Lumpur: 22 Pitches From Malaysian Startups Posted: 28 Nov 2010 08:54 AM PST
TechVentures is essentially a platform for Malaysia’s startups to demo their services on stage to an audience and a panel of judges, both of whom selected a handful of companies (out of 22) as winners. The nine lucky companies received advertising and marketing prizes valued at a total of 1.5 million Ringgit (US$500,000).
Here are thumbnail sketches of all 22 companies that presented during the MAD TechVentures Conference 2010: MAD TechVentures Conference 2010: Winner of the Grand Prize
MAD TechVentures Conference 2010: Panel-selected winners
Xilnex (the winner of the Grand Prize) also won the MAD TechVentures prize in the Cloud Computing, SaaS and Web Applications category – as judged by the panel. MAD TechVentures Conference 2010: Audience-selected winners
JustSAMit by ISA Innovation The three panel-selected winners Math Quest, Techsailor Community Connect and ooView also won the audience awards in their respective categories. Here are the 13 other startups that made it to the MAD TechVentures finals but didn’t quite make the cut:
MAD Incubator and co-organizer MSC Malaysia already expect to have another TechVentures Conference in Kuala Lumpur next year. To keep up-to-date about Malaysia's web scene, head over to the Entrepreneurs.my blog or follow the Twitter account of Kuala Lumpur-based mover and shaker Daniel Cerventus. For more South East Asia-related information, have a look at the e27 and SGEntrepreneurs blogs or download the This Week In Asia tech podcasts.        
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| From The Video Vault: Barbie Video Girl Posted: 28 Nov 2010 08:12 AM PST
With holiday shopping season now in full swing, it is time to revisit one of the strangest toys to come out this year. Yes, I am talking about the Barbie Video Girl. Or, as I like to call it, Surveillance Barbie. It is a Barbie doll with a video camera embedded into her chest, a USB port in her back, and batteries in her legs. When Mattel released this $50 Barbie last July, it sparked all sorts of spirited commentary and some entertaining videos. Here are two videos that tell you all you need to know about Barbie Video Girl. The first one, above, shot by Brandon Bloch, compares it feature-by-feature with a Canon 7D camera. It was widely viewed at the time, but worth another look. The second one, below, is a viewer favorite from the TCTV vault. In it, our own Paul Carr and John Biggs discuss whether or not it is a good idea to give one of these surveillance Barbies to a six-year-old. Biggs tries to treat it like any other gadget until Carr shames him into admitting it should be buried in cement. Watch both videos for some Sunday morning entertainment, but don’t show your kids (Fair Warning: Carr drops a few F-bombs).        
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| Sites With Government Seized Domains Are Moving On, On Twitter Posted: 27 Nov 2010 10:27 PM PST Last week while everyone was waiting for the COICA bill to move through Congress, the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency one upped the Attorney General and seized domain names from a group of over 70 copyright infringing websites. A visit to the blacklisted domains now results in the ominous looking message from Homeland Security below.
While the graphic is pretty scary, Market Ticker’s Karl Denninger points out the websites themselves and the servers they run on have not actually been seized, just the domains.
Domains under US jurisdiction currently include anything controlled by Verisign which puts .com site owners in a legal relationship with the United States. According to Denninger, all afflicted site owners need to do is move to a non-US controlled top level domain in order to dodge further ICE seizures. Some have already started to migrate to other domains, though it’s likely choices like .net won’t be any safer. Torrent-Finder owner Waleed Gad El Kareem said he switched his site over to Torrent-Finder.info the moment he saw the ICE message on Torrent-Finder.com, posting the new site’s address on Twitter.  @gadelkareemWaleed GadElKareem Torrent Finder is now http://www.torrent-finder.info Hip hop site RapGodfathers has aggressively followed suit with its own .info address, using Twitter to get the word out about the move and asking people to retweet as well as @replying fans with its new domain.  @RapGodFathersRapGodFathers.info Everyone please retweet our new link, lots of people still don't know about it. http://www.RapGodFathers.info #RGF about 17 hours ago via webRetweet Onsmash seems to have not made the move over, but is soliciting emails from fans on Twitter who oppose the domain name seizure as well as tweeting out stuff like “THEY CAN NEVER STOP US!!!” I’ve emailed them and sister site dajaz1.com about possible plans to move to a different domain and am waiting to hear back.  @HofOnSMASHHof // OnSMASH ARTISTS: If you oppose the seizure of @OnSMASH pls send an email to gmail.com”>freeonsmash@gmail.com & express why. Your participation is appreciated! about 17 hours ago via webRetweet Even the counterfeit sites have caught on, an email I sent to www.2009Jerseys.com was met with the following auto response, “Notice: The original Domain Name has been suspended, please visit the new domain name www.2009Jerseys.net, We apologize for the inconvenience. If there is new information, we will first time inform you.” The people behind Dvdcollects.com have decided to focus all their energy on the yet unfettered Bestcollects.com according to their Facebook page. If it really is that easy to pick up and move on its hard to believe that the other 70 or so sites won’t find friendlier domains on which to land, rendering ICE’s efforts ultimately futile. If anything, the seizures serve as lesson to all possibly infringing sites — Steer clear of the .com top level domain.        
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| Gmail Lite: If You Build It Google, We Will Come Posted: 27 Nov 2010 07:10 PM PST
At first, I was underwhelmed by the new Facebook Messages. But that’s just because I really hadn’t been using Facebook Messages before. I would get a message every now and then, but mostly I would ignore the area. But in the past couple of weeks, probably as the feature gets turned on for more users, I’ve started to get more messages coming to me this way. And as that has happened, I’m seeing the absolute beauty of the system. Namely, I’m seeing the beauty in its speed. I’m not even talking about loading times or anything necessarily related to the technology behind Facebook Messages. What I’m talking about is the feature that allows you to respond to a message simply by typing in the tiny box below it and hitting return to send. Some people hate this idea because they want the return button to insert a carriage return like the old days — and that’s fine, that’s still an option right next to the box you’re typing in — but I love this quick-send ability. Love. Love. Love it. The famous cliche is that every second counts. But it’s a cliche because it’s true. Every second does count. At first, you might think it’s ridiculous that I’m jumping for joy because Facebook Messages is saving me one or two seconds by not having to use the send button. But those seconds really do add up. I wonder how many times over the years I’ve hit that send button? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? 100,000 seconds is almost 28 hours. In other words, I’ve probably wasted a day of my life hitting that stupid button. And yes, I know there are keyboard shortcuts. But the percentage of people who use those is likely pretty small. Plus, on Gmail, the keyboard shortcut to send something involves hitting two keys: tab then enter. If you could cut out the tab part, you’d still be saving about a half second. Again, per message. It adds up. But that’s just one part of it. Let’s talk more specifically about Gmail. The product I’m envisioning would be an opt-in version of the service which would replace the standard Gmail that we all know and love (when it’s not unbearably slow these days) with a modified version. This new version would work much like Facebook Messages in that when you load a message thread, you’d have a small box under it: the reply area. To reply, you’d simply type a message and hit return, and off it would go.
There would be no options to change the fonts of the email. No subject line. No CC field, no BCC field. No left-align, right-align, quotes, bullet lists, etc. None of the crap that you don’t use 99 percent of the time. It would just be a tiny input box that you could type a message into, or paste a URL into. Ideally, you’d be able to drag a photo or document in this box too, to attach it to the message (like you now can with regular Gmail). And then you send it. Again, just like Facebook Messages. If for some reason you needed to add any of the above mentioned clutter to your message, there would be a button to make that stuff appear. But by default, it would all be off. It would just be a small input box. But the real key to this Gmail Lite that I envision would be a restriction. Message length. Currently, a huge amount of time with email is wasted trying to fit it into some lame formal style.
If you want to be formal with someone, send them a letter. 99 percent of messages online should be brief.
That’s it. If anyone wonders why SMS has been exploding in usage over the past decade (in spite of rip-off costs), this is it. There’s no reason email shouldn’t work like that as well. And while email may be getting less formal with time, I would bet that the length of the emails actually isn’t going down. That’s why we need a new restriction in place in this Gmail Lite to enforce that. Back in September, my colleague Jon wrote about the awesome movement to send three sentence emails. It’s a wonderful idea, but it’s just not catching on in the way that it needs to in order to fix the problem. We need a built-in solution. Gmail Lite should borrow the character restriction from Twitter and enforce it. 140 characters. But maybe bump it up to 160 characters, the actual SMS limit, as usernames wouldn’t be needed with this system. This way, messages could also be sent via SMS (again, like Facebook Messages). More importantly, messages would have to be brief. Even more brief than three sentences. It would be so beautiful.
Part of the problem with email coming in is that when one comes in, you know in the back of your mind that you’ll have to type a bunch of words and hit send to respond to it. It will take time. So you put it off. If there was just this input box that forced you to be as brief as possible, I bet that a lot of people would respond more immediately. And the response rate in general would be higher. How do I know? I see it in my new Facebook Messages inbox and my Twitter Direct Message area. Obviously, this idea will have some people screaming bloddy murder. But remember, Gmail Lite would just be an opt-in option for users. And if you needed to send a long email, you could hop back into regular Gmail Classic with the click of a button. But I would bet that a huge percentage of Gmail users would opt-in to using Gmail Lite as their primary email solution. And it would come with some sort of built-in notifier in the mail itself (either at the bottom or in the metadata) to let people know that you were responding with Gmail Lite, and that’s why your response was so shot (like what three.sentenc.es does). It might be weird at first, but eventually, everyone would get used to it. So what’s stopping a startup from doing this? Why does it have to be Facebook or Google? Because, sadly, this is probably only going to work with a messaging system that has hundreds of millions of people already using it. (And of those, Gmail is in my mind still definitely the best.) Twitter has come the closest to doing this from the outside, but that service is used differently — it’s public messaging versus private messaging. And private Direct Messages are severely limited by the follow factor (someone has to be following you for you to DM them). Gmail’s Priority Inbox is great. But it really just dances around the true inbox problem. It helps you determine what email to ignore. It doesn’t solve the fundamental issue that we’re all seeing more and more as inboxes grow: the lame legacy formalities of the system. And the outdated ideas such as the subject line and even the send button. We need to kill all that stuff off. And we need a current email system to help do it, so it will actually catch on. Facebook Message may well be the future of this type of online communication for the younger generations, but Gmail has a chance to mimic the idea and get the rest of us involved right now. Gmail Lite. If you build it Google, we will come.
[image: Universal Pictures]        
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| NSFW: 404 Alcohol Not Found (Or, Social Media is Overrated, but it’s Helped me Stay Sober) Posted: 27 Nov 2010 06:42 PM PST
Specifically, he was emailing to congratulate me. According to the site in question - ispauldrinkingagain.com – it has been 404 days since I last drank alcohol. And, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, I owe a large amount of credit for that to the power of social media. Making that admission is slightly awkward, given that on Tuesday you'll be able to watch me take part in a CNNMoney / Webbies debate with Gary Vaynerchuk where I argue in favour of the motion that “social media is overrated”. And yet my reason for supporting the motion is simple: despite how much I owe it, social media is overrated. It's overrated when it comes to politics: the fanciful claim that it can win elections (any more than can offering immobile voters a ride to a polling station or any other kind of grass-roots initiative) is completely unproven. It's overrated when it comes to foreign policy: despite a million green avatars and an appeal to Twitter by the state department to postpone scheduled maintenance, Ahmadinejad remains in power – as powerful and bat-shit insane as ever. Most harmfully of all, I'd argue, it's overrated when it comes to charity: for every idea like Twestival – where Twitter was used successfully to encourage donations from people who previously might not have given – there are a thousand Facebook groups and "please RT" campaigns perpetuating the lie that clicking a button and thus "raising awareness" of an issue is the same as volunteering or donating money or – you know – doing anything even slightly meaningful. It's hard to tire of Malcolm Gladwell's stat (in the New Yorker) that, from the millions of people who joined the "Save Darfur" Facebook group, the average donation was nine cents. "That's better than nothing!" cry the social media fans – an argument that assumes none of those people had a charitable bone in their body before Facebook came along. Far more likely is that many of those people wanted to do something charitable and where previously that would have required them to write a check – for far more than nine cents - they can now satisfy their conscience with a simple click. To those people, Pete Cashmore's trite maxim that "attention is the new currency" is as smugly satisfying as the old miserly idiom “charity begins at home”. Sadly, as any economist will affirm, the new currency is currency. And yet, and yet… there is one area where I concede that social media is – as the kids might say – a "game changer" where it can, as those same kids might say, "do us all a solid". And that's in situations where a single person needs a small amount of – usually selfish – help from a relatively large number of people. Some people (say, those who want to sell books) might call it "crowd sourcing"; to my mind it's closer to group therapy. Gladwell concedes this point too – referring to Clay Shirky's story of a New York man who used social media to track down – and shame – the kid who stole his cellphone. Good for him! Gladwell also points to the slightly more heartwarming case of Sameer Bhatia who used Facebook to encourage people to join a bone-marrow registry in order that he might find a donor to aid his treatment for myelogenous leukemia. A little over 400 days ago, the selfish assistance I needed from a large number of people was in helping me give up drinking. And, as with most effective social media campaigns, what I needed those people to do was virtually nothing. Anyone who has read my previous book – or most other things I wrote before October of 2009 – will know the reasons why I had to quit drinking. Anyone else probably won't care. All you need to know is that there came a point where I decided I absolutely, definitely had to stop. The problem was I’d found myself trapped in a ridiculous cycle where my livelihood – and more importantly, my ego – was built on a reputation for drinking to excess and then writing about the resulting adventures, for fun and profit. In order to end the cycle, I realised I would have to use that same ego to the opposite effect. And so I decided to announce – on my blog, on Twitter and on a variety of other social networks – that henceforth I would never be seen with another drink in my hand. Once I'd made that declaration, sheer force of ego demanded that I stick to it. I had no way of knowing who had read about my decision, but based on my (then) Twitter follower count, the number of retweets and the traffic stats to the relevant post on my site, I knew that within the first couple of months they numbered just shy of a quarter of a million. No matter where I was in the world, if one of those people spotted me with a drink in my hand, they would know I'd failed; something my ego simply wouldn’t allow. (When I decided to quit social media, I registered ispauldrinkingagain.com to keep the pressure on, but also to cut down the number of emails I receive asking me if I’m back on the sauce.) Of course, I'm lucky to have other platforms that I could have used to similar effect – this TechCrunch column, for example. But there's something about the immediacy, faux-intimacy and reciprocity offered by social media that makes it by far the most effective way to solicit help from strangers, and to be accountable to those strangers afterwards. As I've never been someone who drinks alone, the watchful eyes of those thousands of strangers – along with a decent amount of willpower and the support of some amazing friends – have kept me sober for 404 days. For that reason – in spite of my cynicism, and my continued insistence that it’s massively overrated – I owe social media a debt of gratitude.        
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| Those Two LeWeb Tickets Now Include Lodging Thanks To Airbnb. Tell Us Why You Need To Go Posted: 27 Nov 2010 02:35 PM PST
Airbnb has graciously offered to cover the lodging in Paris for each winner of our ticket giveaway. Each winner would receive a $500 gift card from Airbnb which they could use to find a place to stay in or around Paris during the conference. Airbnb offers some great deals around the city, so you should be able to find something very nice with that money. And that means that if you win, you would only have to pay for your own travel to the conference. Yes, it’s a killer deal. The same rules to win the tickets apply: just leave us a comment as to why you absolutely need to go to this conference. You can leave the comment either on this post or on the original one. We’ll be going through them all on Monday and will select a winner.        
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| Posted: 27 Nov 2010 11:55 AM PST
Editor’s note: Henry "Hank" Nothhaft, Jr. is the co-founder and CMO of Trapit, a virtual personal assistant for Web content still in private beta that was incubated out of SRI and the CALO project (as was Siri, the conversational search engine bought by Apple). One of the most interesting concepts to emerge in media and tech lately is that of "serendipity"—showing people what they want even if they didn’t ask for it. Despite its seemingly ubiquitous invocation, however, the concept of serendipity remains ill-defined and put forth as some vague panacea for a slew of emerging innovations hoping to attract new users in droves. What is needed is a closer look at what we actually mean when we talk about serendipity. From Search to Discovery Eric Schmidt's recent remarks about Google as a "Serendipity Engine" (and Facebook's quick reply), emphasize an important shift in our daily interaction with the Web and how we use it. Google-driven search provided us with an expectation of finding what we are looking for with increased precision. But the rise of Facebook's social relevance algorithms brought about more personalized content discovery based on the human graph—who we know and what they are reading, watching, or passing along. In fact, I'd argue that we're seeing the dominant portion of our interaction with Web content shift from search to discovery. Jeff Jarvis has perhaps most succinctly defined the concept of serendipity, arguing that serendipity is simply "unexpected relevance." His explanation opens an entirely new can of worms, however, in the recognition that relevance is relative. In seeking to achieve serendipity, the individual reader becomes both the target of content delivery mechanisms and the genesis of what that content may be. This is why serendipity is so closely associated with personalization—it requires a high-resolution understanding of the user. Serendipity and personalization are in fact two sides to the same coin. Personalization merely acknowledges intimacy, whereas serendipity pretends to have happened on it as if by accident. Of course serendipity is not, in fact, at all random. In reality, it's quite scientific. Good serendipity is a slight of hand—it requires deep and granular knowledge, and the fact of its seeming to happen by accident is an artifact of naivety, if anything. Serendipity is really just an informed calculation based upon any number of our individually unique interests, habits, location, the time and date, and prior knowledge. This level of relevance is, of course, what the emerging personalized Web hopes to achieve for each user, whether for recommendations (GetGlue; Hunch), marketing and ads (Rapleaf; Facebook advertising), or news and content (my company, TrapIt). Below I run through four different kinds of serendipity—each has its pros and cons. I end by talking about them all taken together, and "the myth of the sweet spot". Editorial Serendipity Editorial Serendipity is the first and oldest form, the process of combining articles that we know we want to read (the day's headlines) with unexpected stories (features, profiles, restaurant reviews). Yet the editorial voice and direction of a paper or aggregator is hardly serendipitous; it is a calculation of demographics and readership, whether you're the New York Times, the Drudge Report, or TechCrunch. On the plus side here, the human element of editorial serendipity (someone making decisions on what content to deliver) provides an effective flexibility of interest. The downside is that editorial serendipity is delivered by another's interests, or at best their perception of their audience's interests. Though the content's relevance is targeted to a certain demographic of readers, it is a necessarily broad sweep of potential readers, and the level of interest is based on the editors' perception of what is most in tune with those readers or what she thinks they should be interested in based on her own judgement. Examples: Newspapers/Magazines, Curated Aggregators Social Serendipity Much of our content discovery now comes from the virtual watercooler of what our social circle is sharing directly online. The social aspect of staying informed with what our friends are discussing is valuable, not only for keeping "in the loop," but also simply for the notion that what our friends like is parallel to our own interests. The benefit of social serendipity is that our social groups have always been a primary indicator of how we choose to define ourselves and our interests. If something is important or relevant to our friends, there is a high likelihood that it is also relevant to ourselves, as well. The con is that social serendipity is therefore largely public by necessity, and thus a projection of ourselves we would present to others or like to be seen. The propensity to amplify the echo-chamber of like-mindedness is also exaggerated, whereas the goal of serendipity largely lies in the surprise and delight of unexpected content. Examples: Facebook, Twitter Crowdsourced Serendipity Bridging the gap between editorial and social serendipity, the notion of crowdsourced relevance really only delivers a broad, lowest-common-denominator level of content discovery. While not without its usefulness to the degree that we want to be aware of what is most popular and most talked about, the trade-off is the lack of personalization. The pro here is the viral component, which makes up a great deal of our online content-discovery routines. Crowdsourced serendipity provides a tier of distribution in touch with a larger zeitgeist, from trivial cat videos to important broad-based news. The downside is that the lowest common denominator lacks any precision and therefore has limited utility. Examples: StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg Algorithmic Serendipity Opposite editorial serendipity, the notion of algorithmic serendipity is the hardest to do well, but the most promising for future innovation. (Bias alert: this is the approach we are trying at TrapIt) Based-upon any given set of data points, content is personalized to provide both the relevant, need-to-know information of news and content correlating to our interests, with varying degrees of flexibility through both active and passive inputs. The best aspect of algorithmic serendipity is that it places the user back at the center of defining relevance. Content delivery emanates from the user, whether consciously or in the background based on habit. It also provides for a level of adjustability and fine-tuning based on individualized input and how narrowly or broadly a user may want the information delivered to him. The con with algorithmic serendipity is that we need to be careful not to completely lose the human element of engagement, no matter how accurate the algorithm is. Of course, the biggest hindrance is that unlike the other forms of serendipity, a finely-tuned algorithmic Serendipity Engine has yet to be effectively realized. Still, it needs to only be the starting point rather than end point of achieving personalized serendipity. Examples: Genieo, My6Sense, TrapIt The Myth of the Sweet Spot The challenge for any conception of serendipity, regardless of type, is the prevailing notion of a mythical "sweet spot" for users. In all of the forms of content delivery outlined above, there is a notion that we can hone in on a user's interests and find the right balance of relevance. Presenting any such balance as stable or definitive is pure folly. We humans have no "sweet spot"—our interests are evolving and fluid in realtime. To some extent, this recognition is obvious. Our interests change and evolve over time. Yet for the kind of precision that seeks to provide consistent serendipity in the ways we have been discussing, the indicators need to be equally sensitive. The content that I want, and better yet, the content that I don't even know that I want, is an ever-changing proposition based on any number of factors. To achieve that level of sophisticated customization requires a sensitive understanding of context for any proposed "serendipity engine", both a context of the content and the user. In the end, relevance is a goal based on context. The impossibility of fully understanding every intricacy of context at any given moment makes achieving the mythical, consistent sweet spot of serendipity impossible. Recognizing that serendipity is a constantly moving target of context, the best we can hope to achieve are fleeting moments relevance. Photo credit: Flickr/Jennifer Konig        
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| Posted: 27 Nov 2010 10:31 AM PST
Navigating Apple TV and its various peeks into the presumed future has been a valuable waste of time. For $100 plus an HDMI cable I get to sample various media dead ends including NetFlix, iTunes rental, buy, and streaming options, YouTube, and other stuff I can't remember right now. In the past, I would have spent more time testing the work arounds for adding podcasts and ripped music to broaden the choices, but something about the device suggests we're in such a rapid shakeout it might be easier to wait. But for what? Google TV seems caught in little brother mode behind the next loser tablet wave. What ultimate value is there in trading Apple's dead ends for another set of second rate dead ends? The idea that we can replace the aggregate value of the Hollywood studio system with some loose coalition of rag tag revolutionary product ignores the tendency for the avant-garde to go mainstream. At some point, having everything work from one device is the best way of killing any possible interest in what's available. We're getting to the same place in the social software sweepstakes too, and I have Rackmouth to thank for it. In a recent update, Facebook messages are now randomly popping up with messages (I think) from everyone who I've "friended" since the dawn of time. Sometimes these chicklets or toasters or requestors as they used to be called or badges as they might now be called come 30 at a time, staying onscreen just long enough for me to miss any one of them as I scan. It's like a dream where I keep trying to figure something out and keep getting distracted by another thing I never quite figure out before…. The new Twitter clients perpetuate this feeling of never quite catching up, of clicking from one random comment to a full stream of comments by some random person. The metadata and inferences surrounding each identity are becoming the way we know each other. If you want to know who this person is like, follow these people and see what they are interested in. Good luck ever finding your way back to the original comment or person, however. It's probably better to wait until they pop up again randomly. Switching media helps a little. While watching conventional TV last night, I saw an ad for Kindle books that pointed out you could continue reading a purchase you bought on the iPhone over on an Android phone or a Blackberry or whatever. When we have twenty loser tablets to also choose from, we'll be that much happier. In other words, they're selling against the pain of Apple TV, Roku, Google TV, etc., promising you the respite of universal access to a good old book. This is where the mainstream is going, selling escape from the business of hunting down content across overlapping silos. And it's going to work too. Like the enterprise players understand, it's the maintenance contract that will provide the most durable relationship. It's almost as though these guys are in league together, making it so difficult to own anything that you'll be grateful for a smaller menu of choices that are streamed at you no matter what device you're on. This is the new shelf space, the guaranteed mediocrity of the new common denominator. Eventually, after waiting a while to hear from that interesting new friend who had something ephemerally clever to say, after surviving the NetFlix window or the network boycott of whichever device I have already collected, I will go back to my various bookshelves or @mentions or aging bookmarks and find something interesting to do. Even though I know the stream is littered with the as yet undiscovered time waster of tomorrow, I'm confident a careful sort of yesterday's rejects will turn up something. It's only in retrospect we realize these are the good old days.        
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| Posted: 27 Nov 2010 10:19 AM PST
Back in October, we came across a mysterious site called Google Demo Slam a couple days before it actually launched. It turned out to be a fun site featuring demos of different Google products where you can watch two demos side by side and vote for the best one. Some of the demos are by Google engineers, but anyone can submit their own and vie to become a Google Demo Slam champ. Below are a few of the best demos on the site so far. The first one is four guys pretending to be Mount Rushmore and doing such a good job that they fool Google Goggles into identifying them as the real thing. The second shows two women using Google Translate to get their computer to order Indian food in Hindi. The third one demonstrates how to give yourself a haircut using Google Chat and two computers. And the fourth one recreates a road trip on Route 66 with Google Street View, a couple couches, and a projector. Some of these videos have already been viewed more than 100,000 times. It’s amazing what a little game mechanics can do to get people to watch and create product demos for your company. Mount Rushmore (Google Goggles)
Extra Spicy (Google Translate)
Haircut (Google Video Chat)
Road Trip (Google Street View)
       
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I’ve seen the future of messaging — it looks a lot like Facebook Messages. More specifically, it looks like the 
Earlier today, my friend 
Yesterday, I noted that 
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