There have been rumors of a TV network led joint venture to compete with YouTube for months - the first time we heard it was just a couple of days after the first rumor of Google’s acquisition of the company. Since then, we’ve heard that discussions stalled as one partner or another pulled out of the group.
The rumors are now back with a vengeance. The L.A. Times is now reporting that a deal may be announced soon, and this was confirmed to us directly as well by a source close to the deal. An announcement could come as early as Thursday.
It seems clear that News Corp. and NBC are involved, with Viacom and Sony as possible players as well. This won’t be a direct YouTube competitor in that the focus will be on distribution of content to third party sites: deals may already be in place with Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and News Corp.’s MySpace. There may or may not be a dedicated website for this content as well.
So, to sum up, here’s what we know so far: This is happening and a press release is planned for as early as Thursday. We don’t know who beyond News Corp. and NBC is involved. The actual launch of the service would be summer 2007 or later.
I think this will get a crazy amount of attention, then probably launch very late. Joint ventures are notoriously difficult to manage, and adding third party distribution partners to the mix will add complexity. And of course the technology needs to work, and these companies are not now for building web based applications. Google doesn’t seem to be particularly worried, either: execs are reportedly referring to the project as “Clown Co.”
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Zoho just launched a private beta for Zoho Meeting, their new online meeting application that will overlap with the important features of WebEx (recently acquired by Cisco) - desktop sharing. They’ll be bleeding new users in - sign up on the home page to request access, or watch the embedded video at the end of this post to see a demo.
Zoho Meeting lets each member view (zoom in/out) and remotely control the host’s desktop, chat, add participants, email the host, and view meeting details. Sessions can also be recorded and downloaded by users (AVI format, Flash coming soon). Chat is handled with Zoho chat, which will soon have VOIP capability as well. Basically, if you want to demo something remotely, Zoho Meeting is going to be a very compelling choice.
To create a meeting, you create a meeting in your Zoho account, set a date, description, and invite participants by email. However, to broadcast your desktop, you also have to install an ActiveX controller (732 Kb), which makes hosting Windows only.
They’ve gone to great lengths to make the viewer work everywhere by making three different flavors: ActiveX (Windows only), Java, and Flash. This means Zoho meeting can work across Mac, Windows, and Linux machines. The Flash client came with some latency, bobbing between 1.5 and 1.8 seconds, with the Java and ActiveX clients performing better.
But Zoho didn’t include a Flash viewer for just for kicks. The Flash viewer will let users embed meetings anywhere flash is accepted, such as a website. This embed will also work for Zoho Show, which will allow hosts to remotely demo to a large crowd of observing their show from within a slide containing the embed code. Meeting integration will spill over into other Zoho apps as well, through integration with Zoho Chat. Zoho users will soon be able to call a meeting with any Zoho user by clicking a link in their chat box, making it possible to not only say, but show what you mean.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Yahoo is launching the 4.0 version of their desktop widget platform this morning. It is substantially less burdensome on system resources (a common Yahoo Widgets complaint is that it slows down computers) and also adds Vista-like features like a widgets dock on the desktop. A video tour of the new version is here.
The new platform it a lot lighter than the current version 3.1 - they’ve cut the basic installation with bundled widgets from 11.3 MB to 6MB and reduced widget virtual memory usage by as much as 40%. This version will also lasso your widget family into a tidy collapsible dock that runs up and down the side of your desktop - an organized tile view of all widgets that’s kept on the side of the desktop. The image to the left shows what this dock looks like. There’s no limit to the number of widgets you can add to the dock. Overflow is just adds more pages to the scrolling dock.
Yahoo has both PC and Mac versions. The Mac version of Yahoo Widgets is superior to the OSX Dashboard Widgets product that comes with every Mac simply because it runs on the desktop right along with other applications (Dashboard does not). And while Yahoo Widgets isn’t particularly better than the platform offered by Microsoft on Vista, XP users will find it to be a good choice before upgrading to the new Windows operating system.
Widget developers will be happy to hear the new version also comes with canvas object support, SQLite, DOM/Vvew system improvements, and new online documentation.
Yahoo still doesn’t allow Desktop Widgets to be included on My Yahoo pages - something both Microsoft and Google already allow. Compatibility between these two Yahoo products is important if they want to keep Vista users from switching away from Yahoo Widgets over time. These widgets will also make the My Yahoo site much more compelling.
Yahoo Widgets, previously called Konfabulator, was acquired by Yahoo in July 2005.
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We covered Kongregate when they were in private beta, but they’re officially public with a new wad of cash from some big names to back them up. They’ve created a gaming community around Flash games developed by other users, and are announcing a “nearly” $1 million angel round, including funds from Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Joe Kraus (Excite/JotSpot), Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC) and Richard Wolpert (Disney Online), among others.
Kongregate is about user generated games and the competitive gaming community around them, setting them up to be a really sticky site. CEO Jim Greer compares it to XBox Live for Flash games. Players can chat with each other during game play, create profiles, earn points, and get special achievement bonuses as they progress up the ranks. You don’t have to be registered to play the games, but you do if you want to chat and gain levels. My favorite game on the site so far is Warbears, where you play some bad ass teddies on a mission to save hostages by incapacitating baddies.
Currently players get points for uploading games (big points), completing game challenges, rating games, leaving quality feedback, and referring Kongregate to other players. You get achievement icons by accomplishing challenges, like finding all the hidden items in their top game, The Fancy Pants Adventures. In the future, players will get some rewards for each level-up, which may include new options for personalizing their profile, unlocking the ‘labs’ category on the site, or special offers from Kongregate and its advertisers. The achievements you get from points and challenges will also unlock cards for a special online card game (set to release in May) they are developing in-house.
Developers who upload their own games get more than points. Kongregate will also share 25%-50% of advertising revenue generated from the games with developers.
There are many competing Flash game sites. The giants are Pogo and Miniclip, which support multiplayer games along with a host of downloadable versions that users unlock for a fee after a trial period. Another very large site Newgrounds (500K uniques/day) and Cafe.com come closer. Newgrounds runs on user generated games and has a point ranking system, but doesn’t have Kongregate’s revenue share or chatting. Cafe.com has all downloaded games, with power-ups and avatar attire you can buy. Another startup Bunchball, used to allow embedding of the flash games on other websites up until last week.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
So after 1 year of fund-raising, planning and development, your shiny new
beta web app is finally ready... and now you think it's marketing time. You want to reach thousands
of users as quickly as possible. Aha, you think, the cheapest and shortest path is
viral marketing - via blogs and social news sites. So you turn to your favorite
sites like digg, del.icio.us, TechCrunch and (of course) Read/WriteWeb. Somehow
your email to Michael Arrington or Richard MacManus gets noticed above the
hundreds of others, so your site gets featured and then other blog coverage
follows! Yippee, this is the fame you were waiting for! But a few days later....absolute silence. No one
is talking about you anymore, the activity on your site diminishes to nearly zero, and the new
'poster child' web 2.0 app is something else.
Like a nightmare, isn't it? But unfortunately, this horrible peak-then-slump scenario is very common in the web 2.0 era. The Alexa graph below illustrates this with a well known
example, in this case following a
TechCrunch write-up:
The reasons for this very common pattern are simple to guess. The web 2.0 savvy audience is overloaded with all these
fancy new sites that come up everyday; and this audience will try a lot of apps,
but not necessarily become a permanent user. That's why you are very vulnerable to get
quickly forgotten, if you don't offer them something very useful and
enduring.
The upshot is that timing your app/site promotion is very important. Even though
popular blogs and news sites are a great way to attract community and VC attention, you should know
when to show yourself. Below is a categorization that we suggest all upcomers
consider before any marketing push...
The WAIT List
The Wait list consists of sites that should be more patient to market themselves. This is certainly the largest category, with these 2
broad types of web 2.0 sites:
Social / User Generated Content Sites
Verticals
Social sites need existing user activity before getting promoted. For instance, a social networking site with no members won't be
interesting at all. So if you get dugg, sure you'll get thousands of people
arriving to check out your social network - and maybe even sign up. But more
likely they will be disappointed that not much activity is happening, so they
will leave your site with bad memories and may not come back.
In the case of verticals, the problem is more about competition.
Rather than immediately publicizing your site, it may be better to focus on
differentiating yourself from others and gradually building up a user base.
Also, most of the sites that fall under one (or both) of the above 2 categories require you to sign up
first. But generally users will be reluctant to join ghost sites.
The best way of marketing for sites in the WAIT list is to focus on their niches, spend very little
and attract targeted masses over time. One example comes from the March 2007 issue of Business 2.0
Magazine. A company called Betty, which sells dye for "the hair down there", spent just $2000 for space in a Las Vegas
beauty tradeshow brochure and created enough buzz from that to get featured on
the Jay Leno Show. The company expects $1 million in sales this year! Other successful examples are Dogster and Maya's Mom - they are both vertical and
user-generated sites and they attracted most of their initial user base from pet and mothers magazines.
The bottom line is that WAIT list sites should find their niche, enlarge their
user base there, then come to the web 2.0 savvy audience to show off their force and attract VC attention.
Spotplex, the site shown in the diagram above, is a very good example of a
site that should have WAITED.
The WALK List
The walk list includes sites that should start promoting their site on web 2.0 blogs from the beginning. Most of the WALK candidates
come from Web Utilities. For example:
search engines (unless they're vertical);
Instant Messaging mash-ups;
Webtops;
File hosting agents;
Translators;
Browser add-ons.
The reason why WALK list members are so different than the previous WAIT list members, is that
these sites don't need prior popularity. The site's attractiveness depends solely on the
quality of their service. So there's no critical mass of user base
required before promoting themselves.
The RUN List
This is the smallest category, with perhaps just tens of sites. The success of these sites depends on web 2.0 media, so they should solely focus on getting themselves featured there. Actually most of them are no different than
the WAIT list, except that their niche is web 2.0 itself! Two great examples are BuzzShout and Go2Web2. Obviously, the web 2.0 audience is open to such
services, so there's no better place for these sites to get exposure. Blog widgets
is another category can be added to the RUN list.
Conclusion
There are three main strategies then, to market your new web app or site:
1) WAIT list sites should find their niche, enlarge their user base there, then come to
the web 2.0 savvy audience to show off their force and attract VC attention;
2) WALK list sites, such as search engines and browser add-ons, can go after
that elusive digg frontpage or Read/WriteWeb feature now [Ed: preferably
both!];
3) RUN list sites should do everything in their power to get attention from
web 2.0 sites!
What are your thoughts on this - agree, or do you suggest other strategies?
Am I breaking the law with my embed above of this copyright-violating music video on YouTube? Or am I providing a valuable marketing service to Silversun Pickups and their current tour? The answer is: both.
The Wall Street Journal notes that CD music sales are down 20% from the same week a year ago. The seven year decline in CD sales doesn’t look to be turning around anytime soon.
And while legal music download sales are increasing by 50% or so a year, overall industry revenue is still down 25% from a year ago by some estimates.
The faster music labels realize their massively profitable days are over, the better it will be for them, as well as the bands they represent and us, their customers. Digital music sales are not going to make up for lost revenue. Suing their customer base is not going to make up for lost revenue. In fact, absolutely nothing is going to make up that lost revenue. The industry, revenue-wise, is going to continue to shrink.
The problem is that their main product, recorded music, has a zero marginal cost to produce. It’s so cheap to make that consumers can actually make it themselves. And they do. A billion songs a month are downloaded, mostly illegally, from P2P networks.
As the marginal price of recorded music continues to fall towards zero, its natural price, bands will need to make money elsewhere. Live concerts will become more and more popular, and will be the largest source of revenue for many artists. Recorded music will be used to promote those live events. Popular artists will still make a very, very good living. Others will have to decide if love of their art is enough to keep going.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Classified search engine Oodle got a pile of cash today, $11 million from new investor JAFCO Ventures and the leaders of their previous $5 million round, Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures. Like LiveDeal, Edgeio, and Vast, Oodle repackages and aggregates classified listings from around the web to make them easily searched by category, attributes, and location. Google Base also dipped its feet into this territory. Oodle’s model is taking on nearly every established vertical search by hosting listings for cars, real estate, rentals, jobs, personals, merchandise, tickets, pets, and services.
Oodle has expanded its listings through direct postings and a series of local listings partners, which it syndicates on sites like Yell.com, Local.com. include Engage.com, Local.com, ticket sellers, real estate brokers, colleges, and newspapers. However, Last year they lost their Craigslist feed. Edgeio and Vast are also growing through crawling the web. They are branching out by grabbing data from more obscure RSS feeds from across the web (Edgeio) or the deep web that lies behind login and search forms (Vast).
Oodle reports 20 million active listings from more than 75,000 sources in the US and the UK, when compared to Edgeio’s over 100 million international listings and Vast’s 25 million classified listings across 70,000 sites. Oodle, however, has some more advanced search features than these others, adding price tracking and maps where it makes sense. Their price tracking is a more basic version of what Mpire is offering in the shopping vertical.
Disclosure: Michael Arrington is a founder and director of Edgeio.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
After
the tremendous build-up and response
to Adobe's Apollo platform, which aims to integrate desktop apps with the Web,
we must also remember there are other products trying for the same thing. Dekoh
is one such competitor and, like Adobe's Apollo, it is in the business of
bringing the browser to the desktop.
Launched in private beta at the end of February, Dekoh is a cross-platform
development framework for deploying Java, Flash, and Ajax applications. Dekoh
itself was built using Java. The public alpha launch of Dekoh is April 15th at
the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
While Apollo has the benefit of huge financial backing and pre-existing
developer support, Dekoh is aiming to attract developers by providing more
features. Which actually makes it hard to describe what Dekoh is in a sentence.
When Ryan Stewart covered the private beta release of
Dekoh, he implied it was like the WebOS
products that we've profiled before on R/WW. Anyway here's a table showing
the main differences between Dekoh and Apollo (courtesy of the
Dekoh blog):
A full (and very technical) explanation of the differences, at least
according to Dekoh, is on
their blog.
Dekoh: Open Source and has Social Networking features
Possibly the main point of difference is that Dekoh offers an open source
license - unlike the proprietary license of Apollo. This is because Dekoh aims
to create a community around their platform and, because they don't have the
resources or developer mind share of Adobe, Dekoh has to approach this
differently. What they've done is offer social networking aspects to its
developer community. As a Dekoh user you can invite other developers in, create
profile pages and share photos. There are also "web 2.0 features" like
sharing, tagging and commenting. This may hint at a new trend, of deploying an
open source development community around a social networking platform. If
properly executed, this could be enticing and empowering for the developer
community.
An example of a Dekoh app, a music app
Google Calendar Integration
In
speaking with the co-founder of Dekoh, Vijay Pullur, he informed me that for the
alpha they will show at Web 2.0 Expo in April, will include a Google Calendar
offline integration. This product will allow users to synch events from the
desktop with Google calendar. Therefore, you can add events on the go and have
them automatically synched when you are online. It will be part of Dekoh's range
of applications that can be, with
one click, installed on the desktop portal.
Another interesting feature of this app is the ability to record a personal
alert that will play from the system tray icon, by showing a bubble with the
event description. This is extremely interesting because of the ability to use
devices and the online/offline possibilities we are likely to see in the near
future.
Conclusion
Overall, the main challenge that both Adobe and Dekoh face is to create a
value proposition for the developer community, in order to attract developers
onto their platform - and build a wide array of applications for end-users.
We're interested in the thoughts of R/WW's more technical readers, on Dekoh -
how does it compare to Apollo in your eyes?
Forrester Research has just released two reports concerning 'web 2.0' in the
enterprise. Forrester recently surveyed
119 CIOs on the topic and their answers illustrate what IT honchos want – and
don't want – from social software technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts,
RSS, social networking, and content tagging.
According to the report entitled 'CIOs Want Suites For Web 2.0', the
enterprise Web 2.0 market "is beginning to consolidate". Apparently
CIOs have a strong desire to purchase web 2.0 products "as a suite, as well
as an equally strong desire to purchase these technologies from large, incumbent
software vendors." 61% of respondents indicated that they would prefer both
a suite solution and a large, incumbent vendor. According to the report,
"integration issues, longevity concerns, and the occasional lack of
polish" are counting against small vendors.
Source: Forrester
This is a worrying thing, to my mind, as there is so much innovation
happening with enterprise web apps by startups. At least the likes of Zoho and
ThinkFree are suites, but what about all the focused startups doing 'best of
breed' apps? But it demonstrates once again the
value of partnerships amongst web 2.0 companies, or just being outright
acquired by a bigco (as e.g. JotSpot was by Google last year). Forrester
actually notes the latter trend, saying that consolidation in the Web 2.0 market
has been happening over the past 18 months - e.g. Google acquired Writely and
JotSpot; Cisco acquired Five Across and Tribe.net; Yahoo! acquired del.icio.us;
and Six Apart acquired Rojo Networks.
Forrester recommends that small players "partner to create a tightly
integrated ecosystem to go head-to-head with the suites". Recent examples
of this, noted by Forrester: SuiteTwo, WordPress and KnowNow have a joint
offering, and Attensa is coupling
with The Real Time Matrix. Indeed Read/WriteWeb has been covering this trend -
see our reports on recent partnerships by Zoho
and Omnidrive, and Central
Desktop and EditGrid.
Forrester also recommends that bigcos, like Microsoft and Google, "go on
a shopping spree for best-of-breed technologies." Again, this is a trend
that Read/WriteWeb has been covering over the past year or so. Google has been
the most active in this regard, snapping up Writely and JotSpot - two leading
Web Office apps at the time they were acquired.
Another Forrester report, entitled 'Efficiency Gains And Competitive
Pressures Drive Enterprise Web 2.0 Adoption', concludes that firms using Web 2.0
technologies "are driven by gains in worker efficiency and a fear of
competitive pressures." Meanwhile non-adopters cite "a perceived lack
of business value" in web 2.0 apps. It was also noted that wikis and RSS are the two Web 2.0 technologies most likely to be adopted, while enterprises are largely not interested in social networking and blogs - at least, they were the technologies most likely to be viewed as unnecessary.
Earlier
this week we gave away a free ticket to Office 2.0 and today we have a a
free ticket to next week's ETech
to offer as a prize. ETech is O'Reilly's Emerging
Technology conference and it'll be held next week, March 26-29, in San
Diego. An important note about the prize - the Etech pass is good for sessions
only at ETech (Tuesday-Thursday). The workshops and the Executive Briefing
on Monday are not included. Also of course you need to make your own way
to San Diego and cover your accommodation. But still, the value
of the ticket is $1390.00 - so it's a great prize and thanks O'Reilly Media for
offering it to Read/WriteWeb.
I was hoping to be at ETech, but unfortunately I now can't make it. However
Read/WriteWeb's Alex Iskold
will be there, so if you're going to ETech and would like to meet up with Alex,
send him an email at alex [dot] iskold [at] gmail [dot] com.
We picked on Google in the previous caption contest, so it's only fair we
turn our attention to Microsoft this time ;-) Here is a
photo from the recent Windows Vista launch in New York. I'm sure you can
come up with some imaginative captions to this! Put your entries in the comments below. The winner will be picked by
Friday morning PST time.
Lately
I have been discussing the vertical segments that old media companies are losing to new media,
with a focus on Personal Finance as an important category.
Previously on Read/WriteWeb I covered Yahoo
Personal Finance and in this post I will take a look at Microsoft’s
offering, using my framework.
Context: A+
MSN Money is the Personal Finance and Investing site of Microsoft. The site is an excellent resource for news and information and provides consumers with a number of financial services tools. The site is powered by Microsoft Money
2007 and it gets content from CNBC, a leading financial news channel. The main sub-categories of MSN Money are:
For both context and content, there is little to separate MSN
Money and Yahoo Personal Finance - both score A+ in these
areas.
Commerce: A-
The site offers “Microsoft Money”, a personal finance application that allows users to manage household financial accounts and track a budget. Cnet rates it among the best personal finance applications. MSN Money also provides Bill Payment services, for a monthly fee of $2.95 for the basic plan and $5.95 for the premium plan.
Similarly, the other sections of the site deal with different personal finance issues like Investing, Retirement, Tax, Insurance, etc in detail
- and has good contextual information and advice to help a lay person to understand, decide and manage finances.
MSN Money is much stronger than Yahoo in the 'commerce' area, because Yahoo
doesn't have the transactional elements that MSN Money has, which integrate with
banks and brokerage accounts.
Once again, I scored MSN Money higher in community than Yahoo
(which got a B-).
Personalization: B
MSN Money Investment Toolbox is a free service that allows users to track, screen, and manage one’s portfolio of investments (stocks, bonds, options). The software allows a very high level of customization to the users, and is a successful Software-As-A-Service implementation of Microsoft’s personal finance desktop application. Over time, however, they could go much further in this area.
Vertical Search: B
MSN Money offers vertical search option through its popular MSN Money Investment Toolbox, which allows users to screen stocks from more than 500 criteria. Stocks can be screened on the basis of Market Capitalization, ROE, EPS Growth, etc. It is a powerful tool that allows investors to focus their search and save
or export it to one’s portfolio, or mail the result to a friend.
Other kinds of Vertical Search could easily be added to extend the offering, and make it deeper and more compelling.
For both personalization and vertical search, Microsoft and Yahoo are similar
- a slightly disappointing B for each.
Overall, my rating is as follows: Context : A+, Content : A+, Commerce : A-, Community : A-, Personalization : B, Vertical Search : B.
MSN Money is a stronger offering than Yahoo Personal Finance
in a couple of areas: commerce and community. For the other
areas, neither site stands out from the other. But MSN Money is
clearly the better site overall, with A- being my overall
rating.
Google announced the testing of a new pay-per-action, or PPA, advertising product today. It’s important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Google controls so much of the online advertising market that just about anything they do in advertising has real consequences around the Internet.
Background
Until now, Google has primarily sold cost-per-click, or CPC ads. Advertisers pay a fee when someone on Google or a Google partner site clicks on the ad and is delivered to a web page designated by the advertiser. Advertisers like this because they only pay when a potential customer is in their hands. They don’t like it because of click fraud - publishers and advertiser competitors have an incentive to click those ads and generate revenue (or just cost to the advertiser). Since Google has a short term financial incentive to actually promote click fraud, there’s been a lot of debate around the subject over the years.
PPA advertising is meant to mitigate the risks of click fraud. Now the advertiser pays only if a customer has been delivered to a website and takes a further action, such as buying a product or filling out a web form.
Like CPC ads, PPA advertising wasn’t invented by Google. Search engine Snap has been selling ads this way for some time, for example. Another startup, Turn, is also in this business. As are others.
PPA requires an additional level of complexity in the ad network as well. Previously, Google delivered a user to a website, and sent a bill for the click. Now, Google needs to verify that an “action” has occurred by receiving confirmation back from the advertiser.
The advertiser will of course have an incentive not to confirm the action, but Google will be able to easily adjust for this. Like CPC ads, PPA ads will be ranked by profitability to Google. Google need only calculate the average value of a click to a PPA advertiser, and those ads can then be ranked by profitability. CPC and PPA ads could even be mixed, although Google isn’t doing that yet.
Consequences
This won’t affect big advertisers much, because they already track ROI on CPC advertising very closely. For smaller advertisers though, click fraud can wreak havoc. The ability to largely filter out click fraud will help them track ROI much more closely that they previously could. This will be a big help for them.
Affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare are screwed. These networks also operate on a cost-per-action basis, mostly with online retailers. Even though some of them have scale, they will not have the ability to compete with Google on sheer size of network. Advertisers flock to volume, which drives average pricing up. When prices increase, publishers flock to the new platform because they’ll earn more. Look for serious publisher leakage from the big affiliate networks over time as this new product scales up. If you want to argue this point, note what happened to the stock price of Commission Junction’s parent company, ValueClick, today. And that’s even though the market has largely adjusted for this news already - this move to add PPA ads has been rumored for some time.
This should be good for Google’s overall market share and long term revenue growth. Anything that drives fraud out of the network will get advertisers to actually spend more money, not less, as their ROIs increase.
And Yahoo is now in the unenviable position of playing follow the leader again, even as they catch their breath from the massive Panama release earlier this year.
Oh Yeah, Google Also Released…
Google also announced a new “text link format” ad unit today. This was mentioned in the fourth paragraph of the blog post (not exactly highlighted), and is also discussed in the PPA product FAQs:
What is the text link format for pay-per-action ads?
Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.
For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher’s recommendatory text: “Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to Buy a high-quality widget today.” (Mousing over the link will display “Ads by Google” to identify these as pay-per-action ads).
Though the maximum length of a text link is 90 characters, we’ve found that shorter links perform better because they allow the publisher use the link in more places on her/his site and in different context. The maximum length is 90 characters but less than 5 words is best. Even better, just use your brand name to offer maximum flexibility to the publisher.
No longer will Google ads need to be confined to their own space on the site - publishers can subtly embed ads right into hyperlinks within the main content of the site itself (see second paragraph of quote above). Other companies already do this, but Google has never tread into the “advertorial” space before.
They’ve crossed a hazy ethical line here. If this product was announced on its own, it would be heavily debated by the blogs and press. But by burying it in other, bigger news, they’ve mostly avoided the critical analysis that this actually deserves.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
It looks like there’s a good chance today’s SpaceX launch will be successful - Founder Elon Musk just wrote that they made it into space. The maiden launch attempt one year ago didn’t go so well, and today’s launch was almost aborted.
Congratulations to the SpaceX team. This is an awesome private sector accomplishment. There’s much more about this story on CruchGear.
Update 6:56 PM: They lost contact with the rocket before it reached the intended orbit. “The rolling motion caused the second stage engine to shut down early” and it may have re-entered the atmosphere. Still, they made it into Space.
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New York based call recording company 2ReCall just recently launched their initial call recording product last week. The new service lets you record any US domestic outgoing call by first dialing into an 800 number and then number you want to call. The old fashioned way of recording calls consisted of Spy-vs-Spy type tape recorders and suction mics. VOIP changed that a bit, making it dead simple to grab the conversation as it passes through your phone client, although it leaves you chained to the desk. 2ReCall’s 800 number means you can record an outgoing call on any phone. Over the coming year the service will be able to record inbound calls as well, with the ultimate goal being a completely seamless solution that records all calls on the number.
When calls are recorded, they are stored on your online 2ReCall account in .wav or .mp3 format where you can download, review, and annotate them. Although the service works by 800 number, you must first buy a 500MB storage account for $4.95/month and pay 20 cents a minute or a 1GB account for $9.95/month and pay 15 cents a minute to use it.
Currently call recording is a rats nest of legal issues, with 38 states only needing one party’s permission and the other twelve needing both parties’ consent before recording a call. It gets complicated when calling between states. They cover the legal issues deeper in their FAQ.
While the service is geared to anyone needing to frequently record their calls (journalists, professionals, conference calls), the founders have already used the service to catch one stonewalling architect. The architect, who was reviewing plans for one of the founder’s developments, said he wouldn’t let him build a house on their property regardless of whether they met the development guidelines or not. Armed with the tape of their conversation, the reviewing architect backed down and settled the matter out of court.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
37Signals has added an online contact manager to their online productivity suite. The new product, Highrise, to keep track of all the contacts you’ve inevitably made while drumming up clients for your Basecamp projects. The customer resource management (CRM) space is packed with a lot of big players, Salesforce and NetSuite being two of the largest.
37Signals is taking a more streamlined approach from the big guys, opting for a laser focus on only online contact management, serving as a good companion to Outlook. Contacts can be added manually or imported from Basecamp and vCards. Each of the contacts you add to Highrise gets a bio complete with photo and can be assigned task to-do lists and labeled with notes (including images and files). Each of these contacts can be locked down through user permissions, and dropped into project groups that keep your contacts, notes and files all together. If logging on is too much, you can also CC email notes to Highrise, which it will attach to the right contact.
Their basic business accounts start at $24/month for 6 users and 5,000 contacts, and work their way up to $149/month for unlimited users and 50,000 contacts.
Zoho has a similar CRM application that’s free with all features for 3 users and $12/month for each additional user. However, Zoho CRM is better suited for the sales pipeline, tracking leads from potentials to completed sales and forecasts. Zoho CRM also integrates with your web forms so leads can go right from your site to the form your database, and back out again as a .csv export.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
There’s a post on the Facebook blog today announcing a new group called “Facebook Sneak Preview” where they will show upcoming feature additions and changes before they are made live.
My bet is that this is their response to the user backlash and protests last year after after Facebook made some fairly dramatic changes to the site. With the new group, Facebook can ease users into the new stuff, and also get their feedback before it goes live. It’s an easy way to build consensus and dissolve criticism before it gains any steam.
The first batch of upcoming changes suggest Facebook is regrouping a bit, and redesigning things to help organize all of the new features they’ve added over the last year.
A simplified design. For those of the Facebook old guard, you’ve watched the number of features on the site grow. The new design will bring the focus back to the core elements, so the links you use the most often are easiest to find, while the others have new sensible homes. This will also help beginners understand how to get started. The Profile page will be a little sleeker, with your status rearranged, quick links under the profile picture and a mini-er Mini-Feed.
We’ve added a screenshot of how the new profile pages may look below. They are also simplifying message inboxes and networks.
Facebook’s drive to keep things neat and clean on the site is in stark contrast to MySpace’s chaos ridden widget hell. MySpace obviously does ok regardless. But I keep thinking that Facebook’s focus on order is very much in line with Google’s thinking on the matter. It may be time to start some new rumors about those two getting together, since Yahoo is obviously not going to pull the trigger on an acquisition. If Facebook does get acquired, it will be a larger deal than YouTube’s $1.65 billion.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Now, normal phones are perfectly capable of calling normal phones already. What Jaxtr and others do is allow the call to be initiated from a website. Also, both parties are called from Jaxtr, so there are no call tolls. And phone numbers are not communicated to either party.
Jaxtr users place a widget on their website (ours is above). Others can then call the user by entering their own phone number. The caller’s phone rings, and then the other party’s phone rings. Then you have a phone conversation. Jaxtr also allows people to send the publisher a text message or just send them a voicemail directly (text messages and voicemails are administered on the Jaxtr site, not on your phone). Jaxtr never discloses the call recipient’s phone number so you can install a widget without ever exposing personal information. Users can also block callers or specify on a per-caller basis which callers can reach them live and which get routed to voice mail.
Jaxtr is a free service but has some limitations. Currently, users can receive 100 minutes of calls per month. After the limit is reached, calls are routed to the voicemail service instead.
After a first call is successfully initiated, Jaxtr provides the caller with a unique, permanent number, which they can use to call the same person in the future. Local toll rates apply, of course.
This isn’t a useful way for larger sites to communicate with users (I place the widget above with some trepidation), but it is a fantastic way for MySpace users with a small group of friends to stay in touch, and have phone conversations without giving out any personal information. It’s also a brilliant way for small businesses with a website to let their customers contact them.
Go crazy with the widget above.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
CBS announced the acquisition of MaxPreps, the largest high school sports site, earlier today.
The acquisition price was not disclosed, but we’re digging. We’re hearing that the company was asking for $20+ million.
Comscore says MaxPreps has about 674,000 unique monthly visitors and 14 million month page views. Traffic is way down from a year ago - March 2006 showed 26 million page views.
MaxPreps raised $8.5 million in capital from DFJ Frontier, BEV Capital and Dolphin Equity. The Company is located near Sacramento, California.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
NOTE: Please see important update about this week's R/WW Poll below, on
the topic of Personalized Homepages. We had to re-set it and so are asking for
you to re-submit your vote.
Today Google launched
6 new themes for its Google Personalized
Homepage. The themes to choose from include: a beach, a city,
a sweet dreams theme, a teahouse, a winter hills theme, and a bus stop. It seems
like an attempt to re-create the PC desktop background theme experience, but for
personalized homepages. Plus the 6 new themes by Google are all interactive,
similar to Microsoft Vista's new desktop backgrounds. Each Google theme changes
dynamically, based either on the user’s time of day or local weather
conditions.
For example I chose the "sweet dreams" theme for my Goog homepage,
which currently shows the middle of the day (which it is in NZ, as I write
this). Later tonight, my time, it will change into a night scene. The intention
with this cute functionality is to make your Goog homepage feel more like
"home". Google also says it used a new CSS framework "to optimize
our ability to scale images and easily add new themes."
The new themes is one of several new features that have been released
recently for Google Personalized Homepage. Last week, Google launched a Google
Talk gadget and a "Magic Tabs" feature - which auto-generates a tab
based on a category the user selects (e.g. sports, news, movies).
Poll (note: was re-set last night)
So now to our poll. Unfortunately we had to re-set it 12 hours after we
published it on Monday, due to suspicious voting behavior. So if you previously
voted in this poll on Monday, please cast your vote again below. Sorry for the
inconvenience, but we've strengthened the voting process now to avoid dodgy
activity.
We had an awesome response to our
caption contest on Monday - over 80 comments! The Under The Radar folks and
myself had a tough choice deciding... but the winner of the free ticket
to the Under
The Radar Office 2.0 conference, to be held this Friday March 23 at the
Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, is... (drum roll)
Congratulations Ali! We'll be in contact by email shortly. For those of you who missed out, don't forget there is a discount code to the conference for R/WW readers.
There were of
course many excellent caption suggestions. Others that made the shortlist of
myself and the Under The Radar crew were:
"Those dang spammers get younger everyday..."
by baron
"I guess I shouldn't have brought my Ask Jeeves action figure" [Ed:
this was my personal favorite!]
by Julie C.
"Cookies? What cookies?"
by Ian Kennedy
"Yes Larry, your new shrinking machine is definitely making you look
younger"
by Charles Dalton-Moore
"The cavity searches he could take, but Billy had to draw the line at
the Googleizer."
by Brett Trout
Allth.at
was one of the
100 top alternative search engines in Charles Knight's February list. It's a
search agent that allows you to define a search topic, then refine it with the
use of filters, and finally subscribe to it via email or RSS. It's similar in
many respects to PubSub, the now defunct 'future search' engine that I was a fan
of. I got the chance to catch up with Allth.at
founder Morgan Snyder recently, to find out more.
How Allth.at works
When you go to Allth.at, it at
first looks like a normal search engine. This is a good thing, as it means the
UI is simple and intuitive (something PubSub never achieved). First you input
your desired search - say "web 3.0" ;-) Then you filter, either by
using the search sources tabs (made up of common search sources like Google,
Yahoo, eBay) or by applying graphical boolean filters, i.e. the drop-down boxes
on the left. You can add content sources by clicking the 'Add' tab - for example you
can add readwriteweb.com
as a source (as I did for the example below). And with the drop-down boxes, you can filter words in or out -
including clicking on the 'specify' link to add your own terms.
After you're done filtering, you can save your search and choose an alert if
required (note: you need to register for an account first). While you can simply
come back to the website every now and then and check the latest results of your
"saved searches", it's easiest to subscribe to an alert. This of
course automates the delivery of new search results, using two methods -
subscribe to email notifications, or RSS feeds.
You can also filter your saved searches at any time - and this automatically
updates the alerts (email, feed). Morgan told me that Allth.at
can also filter out the duplicates.
Web 3.0 Goodness
Morgan pointed out to me that Allth.at is a good example of what Alex Iskold
wrote about in his recent popular post Web
3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services. That post was about what kind of applications
will be born once many APIs are opened up (it wasn't about defining 'web 3.0',
as some commenters claimed). Morgan says that Allth.at is a good example of what
Alex was driving at:
"Allth.at’s goal is to integrate every searchable
API in existence. Obviously every website does not have an API. So instead of
scraping, we have taken a hierarchical approach that uses a combination of APIs,
RSS and “indexed” results (equivalent of a site: search on google or yahoo).
When a user selects a source to search, we check to see if that site has an API.
If so, chances are we have integrated it and will use it. If not, we’ll check
to see if that site has a searchable RSS feed. If so, we’ll use that. If
not, then we’ll deliver results off of the index of one of the big engines."
Competition
Allth.at is not alone in the market segment which Charles Knight has called
"Continuous Search Engines". In our February Alt Search Engine list,
we noted Swamii, which continually search
newspapers, TV, the web (and more) to let
you know when new, relevant and cool stuff arrives. There is also Searchbots.net,
which gives you your own personal search robot - to continuously search the Internet, trying to find all the best websites it can, on your behalf.
You could also consider Google Alerts in this category,
since they can be set to "continuous" alerts also.
I asked Morgan what is the difference between Allth.at
and the competition. He told me that usability and ease-of-use is what differentiates
allth.at and noted
that even Google CSE and Rollyo don't deliver custom search results 'on the
fly'. Morgan told me that another key differentiator from other "custom engine
providers" is that Allth.at's results "are more real time". He
said:
"For example, Google’s CSE
delivers results off of their index. Rollyo I believe is powered by Yahoo.
Because we use APIs, RSS and then index, Allth.at returns the most current
results first."
Morgan explained how this works, using my example of searching for the term
"web 3.0". If you use Googles CSE and
select readwriteweb.com as a source, it would be the equivalent of doing a 'site:
search' on Google. If you use Rollyo, and select readwriteweb.com as a source, it’s
the equivalent of doing a 'site: search' on Yahoo. Depending on when Google or
Yahoo
last updated their index, they may or may not pick up the latest results (e.g.
Alex's article). With Allth.at, it first searches the RSS feed for readwriteweb.com
(because this site doesn’t have an API), which would therefore pick up Alex's
web 3.0 article. Allth.at delivers indexed results on top of that too. Here is
an illustration of this exact scenario:
Conclusion
Overall, Allth.at is a very
easy to use search agent and outputs some nice 'topic feeds' for users to
subscribe to in their RSS Readers. An easy-to-use, yet sophisticated and
reliable, 'topic search' service is
something I've been looking for a long time - and Allth.at
looks very promising in that regard.
Today Allth.at takes the covers
off their relatively stealth company (well it was stealth until Charles
discovered it!). It's a bootstrapped little startup, with just 3 people. They
took the splash page down just under a month ago and today is the launch of Allth.at's
"live beta". Color me impressed, but check it out for yourself and let
us know what you think.
Note: thanks Charles
Knight for his help in writing this article.
How to build a $50M online company is a topic that Dan
Mitchell at the NYT explored recently, taking his cue from Jeremy Liew of
Lightspeed. A few weeks ago Jeremy wrote
about the scale a business has to achieve to get to $50M in revenue. I have
summarized the scenarios from Jeremy's post in the table below:
RPM = Revenue per thousand impressions (including CPM, CPC, and CPA
models)
Scott
Karp of Publishing 2.0 had an interesting take on Jeremy's piece, saying
that it "exposes a deep flaw in the way online media is currently valued
and sold to advertisers". Scott's view is that the real issue is who
is viewing your site. Or as Scott put it: "10 million uniques is great, but
not so much if you don’t know who these people are". Because of the this,
Scott believes that advertisers are getting too good a deal for their
advertising dollars.
I think Scott is onto something here. Take Google AdSense, which shows ads on
different sites based on keywords. These keywords provide valuable context for
targeting ads. But still, without understanding the users the ad-targeting
can go completely off. As an example, say we have two users: one interested in
football and another in politics. If each is shown a targeted ad based on the
keywords "defense strategy", they will be shown similar AdSense ads.
Whereas what the users were really interested in is not the same.
Now imagine a system that somehow understands the users a little bit better.
In our example, such a system would be able to understand that the user is
looking for football strategies in the first case and advice on
warfare/geopolitical maneuvering in the second case. This system could then
present each of the two users the appropriate ads, thereby dramatically
increasing the effectiveness of those ads. Such an ad placement system, given
reliable user information, could make a website financially viable with a lot
less traffic - thereby empowering alternative voices and making the Internet
a richer and more vibrant environment.
Technology landscape
Based on the potential for financial upside, it seems like this area should
be rife with innovation. But the problem is not as easy as it sounds... If the
system mentioned above were to work, it would need to effectively deal with
issues of privacy and user control of their data. To address this
problem, one approach that is gaining some currency is the idea of user-controlled
Attention data (see R/WW's
analysis on this and also my
take). The way user-controlled attention data works is that it provides
tools to users to collect and manage data about their preferences and browsing
behavior etc. Users can then allow businesses they trust to access this data.
This preference data will improve the richness and quality of interaction
between the user and the business, while addressing all the privacy and user
control issues. In the example above related to the "defense strategy"
keywords, a user's attention data will help web sites understand a user's
interests in politics or football and thereby show the right ads. While this
solution sounds pretty good, it hasn't yet gotten enough traction - because it
relies on the users being sophisticated enough to create and manage their
attention data.
Another approach being explored by some big players is the old idea of Personalization.
The way this works is that large businesses collect enough information on users
to understand their preferences. These businesses then use this understanding of
their users to better target ads. As one would expect, Google is leading the
charge here - you can read more about Google's personalization technology from Read/WriteWeb's
interview with Matt Cutts of Google. So Google collects information about
the users via all their interactions with Google properties - like Gmail, maps,
blog, calendar etc. - and uses this information to improve Google search results
and ad targeting. To revisit the example of "defense strategy" we
talked about above, Google will look at the totality of all user interactions
and infer a user's interest in politics or football. With this inferred data,
Google will be able to show the right ads to the right person. While this
approach is likely to work well for big companies that have tons of user data,
what should small businesses do?
Most businesses should really work on modeling their user data for targeting
as soon in the product development cycle as they can. They have to realize that
understanding the users is really key to competing with the big guys and being
viable.
Conclusion
While some of the traffic numbers required for a business to hit $50M in
revenue look scary, startups should not lose hope. They should focus on really
understanding their users and then utilizing this understanding to improve their
RPM rates. This will help businesses get viable with a lot less traffic
and ensure that they get proper value for their traffic.
What other technologies do you think can help small business become viable,
without achieving massive scale?
Joe Greenstein, Flixster’s CEO, told me by email that they now have ten million registered users and up to two million movie ratings completed daily (380+ million movie ratings to date). That’s a lot of (very valuable) user generated data. Comscore continues to show a sharp rise in page view and unique monthly visitors as well. Compare the charts below (U.S. user data only), which show data through February 2007, to the December stats we published in February.
There have been some complaints about Flixster’s aggressiveness in getting users to invite friends to the service as well. Like all services, they have to be careful about where they draw the line.
Flixster’s revenues will start to increase as large and highly relevant movie marketing budgets start to really focus on this targeted audience. Fandango now claims to generate only half its revenue from ticket sales, the rest coming from advertising and other sources. Comscore says Flixster is already bigger than Fandango, and moving in the right direction v. IMDB (see last table below).
Web design and programming firm WeBreakStuff just released a new project planning suite, GoPlan, similar to Basecamp and ActiveCollab. You use this stuff when you want to get a team organized around accomplishing project milestones - a lightweight Microsoft Project with collaboration built right in.
The products have a lot of similarities. They’re all web based applications for managing your team projects. Both GoPlan and BaseCamp are hosted pay services made by staunch Ruby evangelists, while the more basic ActiveCollab is an open source PHP installation. GoPlan and BaseCamp prices range from free plans up to beefier pay plans (BaseCamp’s unlimited maxes out at $150/month, while GoPlan tops off at $100/month). Derek over at 5ThirtyOne has a detailed feature comparison of the three.
GoPlan’s project management tool offers modules for note-taking, calendaring (with iCal export), task management, issue tracking, file management and online real-time chat (optional SSL). BaseCamp has a lot of the same features, minus bug tracking and a public project blog. GoPlan has also approached project tracking with a different design methodology. GoPlan not only lets you choose features based on plan levels, but also turn them on and off as needed to keep navigation free of feature clutter.
GoPlan has also shot for a lower price point than BaseCamp (basic $20/$24; premium $100/$150), but with less file storage (GoPlan tops out at 8GB). Their free account gets you everything except calendaring and chat. However, for the paid accounts, GoPlan unlocks features faster. $10/month gives you all of GoPlan’s features for 12 projects of 8 people each. For an extra $20/month you get unlimited users, and 30 projects (twice BaseCamp).
For readers interested in real-time project collaboration, check out our comparison coverage of ConceptShare and Thinkature.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
One
of the more innovative web apps around has just gotten another
big injection of funds, and a new CEO to boot. Zopa
describes itself as a "marketplace for Social Lending", where people
lend and borrow money with each other - sidestepping the middleman, i.e. banks.
They recently advertised
for jobs in their new America operation (in San Francisco) and celebrated
their second birthday.
Zopa's new CEO is the former CEO of San Francisco-based Chela Education
Financing, Douglas H. Dolton. He is understandably bullish on Zopa's prospects:
"Zopa is the most innovative concept I've seen in my 13 years of being
involved in loan businesses [...] I expect it to be the fastest-growing
company I've ever led, because of its outstanding consumer proposition:
amazing rates on financial products, and a strong, safe person-to-person
connection that promises to change the way U.S. consumers think about
money."
Well he would say that.... but there's something about Zopa as a web company
that is very attractive. It is very web-native, definitely innovative, and it
routes around institutions that have enjoyed too much power over ordinary people
for too long - banks! Phillip Riese, Chairman of Zopa, says about the US
expansion:
"Our UK peer-to-peer business is now well-established and growing
rapidly and we are poised to launch in the US, an even larger opportunity for
the company."
R/WW normally doesn't cover VC news, but the fact that Zopa is heading into
the US market with an innovative financial web app - is something that caught
our interest. It already has over 135,000 members in the UK (whose average age
is 37 apparently), so it looks poised to make a splash in the US.
Thanks Emre for the pointer. Any of our UK readers used Zopa? If so, we'd
love to hear your opinions of the service.
Disclosure: Userplane is a sponsor of Read/WriteWeb
Userplane,
the provider of community web apps that was acquired by AOL in August last year, is today
releasing Userplane Userlist - a Flash-based instant messaging app that you can integrate
into web sites. Basically Userlist enables users on a site to view other users' online
status and initiate IM conversations. It's aimed at online communities and corporate
websites, but I can also see a use for this type of functionality in social networks and
perhaps blogs (more on that in a minute). Userlist is implemented by inserting a script
into a web site, which gets the app up and running. While currently it only allows single
user chat, future developments include multi-user chat integration, multi-user games, and
saved buddies. Also coming soon is an advertising revenue-sharing program.
There are other products on
the market implementing IM/chat into websites too. However it should be noted that most
of the initial entrants into this market, like Gabbly
and 3bubbles, did not pan out. Library Clips profiled
a number of them last year - and to my knowledge none have been successful. It's
fair to say then that real-time chat in web sites has probably not reached its potential
yet. Another company in this space to watch is Tangler - which is building a tool for enabling
real-time discussions anywhere on the web. Tangler is currently in private beta and
they're looking for more beta testers
if you're interested.
Conclusion
Despite the lack of success so far, I think real-time chat in websites is a trend
we'll see more of during 2007 and beyond. While IM services like AIM and Yahoo Messenger
dominate the chat market, there is room for turn-key chat solutions like Userplane or
Tangler for web sites and online communities. They will get good take-up from sites where
real-time communication is important (an online call center for example) or where the
community is passionate enough about its core topic that members want to chat about it in
real time.
What other products do you recommend for implementing IM into web sites? And do you
think it's something more and more sites will look to do?
On Tuesday Yahoo will significantly expand the reach of their new mobile search
product, Yahoo! oneSearch, by making it
the default mobile Yahoo homepage at http://m.yahoo.com
for US users. In effect this brings oneSearch, which Yahoo launched in January
2007, to the Mobile Web
masses. The US masses anyway - it will be rolled out to other countries and languages in
the coming months. To clarify, oneSearch was initially only available in the Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 package, but as of Tuesday it
will become available on more than 85 percent of US mobile phones through the Mobile Web.
Another way of putting it - Yahoo is replacing the old '1.0' m.yahoo.com site with its
upgraded '2.0' oneSearch product.
In this post we examine the new features that US mobile Web users can expect from
Yahoo. Also check out this
screencast for a full video explanation, which is an exclusive to
Read/WriteWeb.
Here is a simple illustration of the changeover from the old y.mobile.com page
(designed for mobile phones) to the new:
The most obvious change is that it has become a purely search-centric homepage
for mobile phones, whereas the old site had both search and a kind of mini-portal.
There is more than meets the eye though. When you actually do a search, there is a lot of
added functionality in oneSearch - that wasn't there before. oneSearch tries to provide
context when searching for something on your mobile phone, recognizing that on a
phone you need different types of info than on a PC.
Yahoo #2 in Mobile Search, behind Google
A little background to the Mobile Web market. According to the December 2006 stats from M:Metrics, Yahoo! Search is currently the #2 search
service on mobile phones for the US market:
Google 4,889,881
Yahoo! 3,523,725
MSN Mobile/MSNBC 530,831
Current mobile network 4,315,345
So oneSearch is obviously aimed to challenging Google for that top spot.
Yahoo and the Mobile Web
Before we look at some examples of oneSearch and its feature set, a few words about
how Yahoo is managing its Mobile Web products...
Yes there will be advertising in oneSearch, including sponsored search results
and display advertisements. So monetization has been built into oneSearch from the
get-go.
Distribution and partnerships is key in the mobile world. Yahoo's Director of
Mobile Web Lee Ott told me over the phone that Yahoo has partnerships with over 80
handset manufacturers (LG, Samsung, Nokia, etc) and carriers.
Another thing worth noting... Lee Ott told me that in the mobile world, there are
thousands of different devices, with many different browsers and rendering.
Whereas of course the PC world has just a couple of main browsers (and several smaller
ones, which are not dissimilar in rendering to IE and Firefox). So oneSearch won't
actually look the same on every phone. But Yahoo has created a mobile platform, which it
says understands how phones render content and so gets around that 'thousands of devices'
problem.
Mmmmm, Pizzaaaaa
OK let's get down to the nitty gritty - how does oneSearch work? An example given in
the screencast is searching for a pizza. oneSearch will return you details of local pizza
places, including phone numbers and address details. There are added niceties, like being
able to click the "call" link to actually call that number, or you can also easily change
your location if you want a pizza place elsewhere.
oneSearch also gives you extended details, relevant to mobile phone users, which are
generally just one click away. In the pizza example, clicking on one of the results
brings up a mobile page like this:
You'll notice the community ratings and reviews, which is by now a common feature on
Yahoo properties (and most other 'web 2.0' sites too). Extending this to mobile is a nice
value add. The ratings and reviews come from various Yahoo properties, like Y! Local, Y!
Search and Y! oneSearch.
Compare this to the old m.yahoo.com, which when you search for "pizza", gives you a
fairly basic PC-centric list of results:
So already it's clear that oneSearch gives users much more helpful results than the
old service.
oneSearch for research or movie info
Yahoo is also promoting oneSearch as a research tool for your mobile phone. The
example in the screencast is a search for "apple", which displays this:
The top results are stock quotes, news articles, stores that are near you, product
information. All of these results are supposed to be more useful to you while you're
mobile, than they would be if you're on a PC.
Movies is another example given, where you get movie details in your location, user
reviews, theatre locations, news about the movie, etc.
Conclusion
There's a lot more functionality in oneSearch, which the
screencast does a good job of covering. There are two main takeaways here though:
1) Yahoo is making Mobile Web search much more of a mobile-native product, than
something that has been simply ported from the PC to the mobile phone. You could argue
the 1.0 version of m.yahoo.com was just a stripped down bunch of links to Yahoo
properties. The new Yahoo oneSearch seems to do a much better job of giving 'on the go'
users information that is useful to them in a mobile context.
2) The second takeaway is that Yahoo is launching oneSearch, on Tuesday, to basically
the entire Mobile Web in the US. The main mechanism for accessing it is WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) - which
is a technology with a bad reputation, due to early unsuccessful efforts at mobile Web in
the dot com era. But forget the bad connotations of WAP, the reality is it's still the
primary method of accessing the mobile Internet. So this launch of oneSearch to the
Mobile Web is a big step forward for Yahoo. It'll be interesting to see if Google
responds by ramping up its own mobile search service.
Just thought I'd pass on this deal for those of you that are running small businesses on a budget. BTW The links to amazon are affiliate links to support my site Spendfish.
Today's Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden
from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in
esoteric ways that are difficult for machines to process. The so called Web 3.0, which is
likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What
we mean by 'Web 3.0' is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web
services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.
The transformation will happen in one of two ways. Some web sites will follow the
example of Amazon, del.icio.us and Flickr and will offer their information via a REST
API. Others will try to keep their information proprietary, but it will be opened via
mashups created using services like Dapper, Teqlo and Yahoo! Pipes.
The net effect will be that unstructured information will give way to structured
information - paving the road to more intelligent computing. In this post we will
look at how this important transformation is taking place already and how it is likely to
evolve.
The Amazon E-Commerce API - open access to Amazon's catalog
We have written here before
about Amazon's visionary WebOS strategy. The Seattle web giant is reinventing itself by
exposing its own infrastructure via a set of elegant APIs. One of the first web services
opened up by Amazon was the
E-Commerce service. This service opens access to the majority of items in Amazon's
product catalog. The API is quite rich, allowing manipulation of users, wish lists and
shopping carts. However its essence is the ability to lookup Amazon's products.
Why has Amazon offered this service completely free? Because most applications built
on top of this service drive traffic back to Amazon (each item returned by the service
contains the Amazon URL). In other words, with the E-Commerce service Amazon enabled
others to build ways to access Amazon's inventory. As a result many companies have come
up with creative ways of leveraging Amazon's information - you can read about these
successes in one of our previous posts.
The rise of the API culture
The web 2.0 poster child, del.icio.us, is also famous as one
of the first companies to open a subset of its web site functionality via an API. Many services followed, giving rise to a
true API culture. John Musser over at programmableweb has been tirelessly cataloging
APIs and Mashups that use them. This page shows almost 400 APIs
organized by category, which is an impressive number. However, only a fraction of those
APIs are opening up information - most focus on manipulating the service itself.
This is an important distinction to understand in the context of this article.
The del.icio.us API offering today is different from Amazon's one, because it does
not open the del.icio.us database to the world. What it does do is allow
authorized mashups to manipulate the user information stored in del.icio.us. For example,
an application may add a post, or update a tag, programmatically. However, there is no
way to ask del.icio.us, via API, what URLs have been posted to it or what has been tagged
with the tag web 2.0 across the entire del.icio.us database. These questions are
easy to answer via the web site, but not via current API.
Standardized URLs - the API without an API
Despite the fact that there is no direct API (into the database), many companies have
managed to leverage the information stored in del.icio.us. Here are some
examples...
Delexa is an interesting and useful mashup that
uses del.icio.us to categorize Alexa sites. For example, here are the popular sites tagged with the word
book:
So how do these services get around the fact that there is no API? The answer is that
they leverage standardized URLs and a technique called Web scraping. Let's understand how
this works. In del.icio.us, for example, all URLs that have the tag book can be
found under the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/book; all URLs tagged with
the tag movie are at http://del.icio.us/tag/movie; and so on. The
structure of this URL is always the same: http://del.icio.us/tag[TAG].
So given any tag, a computer program can fetch the page that contains the list of sites
tagged with it. Once the page is fetched, the program can now perform the scraping - the
extraction of the necessary information from the page.
How Web Scraping Works
Web Scraping is essentially reverse engineering of HTML pages. It can also be thought
of as parsing out chunks of information from a page. Web pages are coded in HTML, which
uses a tree-like structure to represent the information. The actual data is mingled with
layout and rendering information and is not readily available to a computer. Scrapers are
the programs that "know" how to get the data back from a given HTML page. They work by
learning the details of the particular markup and figuring out where the actual data is.
For example, in the illustration below the scraper extracts URLs from the del.icio.us
page. By applying such a scraper, it is possible to discover what URLs are tagged with
any given tag.
Dapper, Teqlo, Yahoo! Pipes - the upcoming scraping technologies
We recently covered Yahoo!
Pipes, a new app from Yahoo! focused on remixing RSS feeds. Another similar
technology, Teqlo, has recently launched. It focuses
on letting people create mashups and widgets from web services and rss. Before both of
these, Dapper launched a generic scraping service
for any web site. Dapper is an interesting technology that facilitates the scraping of
the web pages, using a visual interface.
It works by letting the developer define a few sample pages and then helping her
denote similar information using a marker. This looks simple, but behind the scenes
Dapper uses a non-trivial tree-matching algorithm to accomplish this task. Once the user
defines similar pieces of information on the page, Dapper allows the user to make it into
a field. By repeating the process with other information on the page, the developer is
able to effectively define a query that turns an unstructured page into a set of
structured records.
The net effect - Web Sites become Web Services
Here is an illustration of the net effect of apps like Dapper and Teqlo:
So bringing together Open APIs (like the Amazon E-Commerce service) and
scraping/mashup technologies, gives us a way to treat any web site as a web service
that exposes its information. The information, or to be more exact the
data, becomes open. In turn, this enables software to take advantage of
this information collectively. With that, the Web truly becomes a database that can be
queried and remixed.
This sounds great, but is this legal?
Scraping technologies are actually fairly questionable. In a way, they can be
perceived as stealing the information owned by a web site. The whole issue is complicated
because it is unclear where copy/paste ends and scraping begins. It is okay for people to
copy and save the information from web pages, but it might not be legal to have software
do this automatically. But scraping of the page and then offering a service that
leverages the information without crediting the original source, is unlikely to be
legal.
But it does not seem that scraping is going to stop. Just like legal issues with
Napster did not stop people from writing peer-to-peer sharing software, or the more
recent YouTube
lawsuit is not likely to stop people from posting copyrighted videos. Information
that seems to be free is perceived as being free.
The opportunities that will come after the web has been turned into a database are
just too exciting to pass up. So if conversion is going to take place anyway, would it
not be better to rethink how to do this in a consistent way?
Why Web Sites should offer Web Services
There are several good reasons why Web Sites (online retailers in particular), should
think about offering an API. The most important reason is control. Having an API will
make scrapers unnecessary, but it will also allow tracking of who is using the data - as
well as how and why. Like Amazon, sites can do this in a way that fosters affiliates and
drives the traffic back to their sites.
The old perception is that closed data is a competitive advantage. The new reality is
that open data is a competitive advantage. The likely solution then is to stop
worrying about protecting information and instead start charging for it, by offering an
API. Having a small fee per API call (think Amazon Web Services) is likely to be
acceptable, since the cost for any given subscriber of the service is not going to be
high. But there is a big opportunity to make money on volume. This is what Amazon is
betting on with their Web
Services strategy and it is probably a good bet.
Conclusion
As more and more of the Web is becoming remixable, the entire system is turning into
both a platform and the database. Yet, such transformations are never smooth. For one,
scalability is a big issue. And of course legal aspects are never simple.
But it is not a question of if web sites become web services, but when
and how. APIs are a more controlled, cleaner and altogether preferred way of
becoming a web service. However, when APIs are not avaliable or sufficient, scraping is
bound to continue and expand. As always, time will be best judge; but in the meanwhile we
turn to you for feedback and stories about how your businesses are preparing for
'web 3.0'.
Update: Unfortunately we have had to re-set the poll, 12 hours after it went live, due to some suspicious voting behavior. We have now blocking repeat voters by Cookie and IP address (previously it was only cookie). We apologize for the inconvenience, but please cast your vote again.
With the release of Netvibes' latest version, now is a good time to poll R/WW readers on which personalized homepage, if any, you use. Let us know in the poll and comments below:
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the market implementing IM/chat into websites too. However it should be noted that most
of the initial entrants into this market, like 
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Today's Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden
from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in
esoteric ways that are difficult for machines to process. The so called Web 3.0, which is
likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What
we mean by 'Web 3.0' is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web
services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.
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The web 2.0 poster child, del.icio.us, is also famous as one
of the first companies to open a subset of its web site functionality via an 
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