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Google Turning Search Into the World's Biggest Wiki

2008-11-21T02:30:46+00:00

Google put on a full court media push tonight for a major change the company is making to its search experience. According to the Official Google Blog and a very unusual email the company sent out to press, a new feature called Google Search Wiki will launch soon. We're not seeing it yet, but this is what it will do.

The feature will allow logged-in users to change the order of search results and mark up search results pages with notes. Only their own results will be changed - unless they click a link to view all Search Wiki notes on a search's page. Very few details are out yet, nothing regarding vandalism, libel, history, messiness, collaboration or other wiki matters. Those are pretty important concerns given that this could become the biggest and most important wiki in the world.

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This isn't Google Labs, this isn't a little project off to the side, apparently there's a Google Search Wiki team and they have access to the primary search results page. We expect this to be a very big deal.

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Is this really a wiki, though, and what does it mean for Google, the masters of the algorithm, to put a wiki type thing at the center of their core product? "It is wiki-like," said Mark Dilley, co-creator of the wiki directory WikiIndex.org. "When Google previously launched a wiki service, called Google Sites or formerly called Jotspot, they refused to call it wiki. That they have called this "Search Wiki" says they now find wiki important enough to use the word. They could turn this into a full wiki at some point but already it's pretty amazing."

We think so too.

Discuss

Genwi Further Blurs The Line Between A Feed Reader And A Friend Reader

2008-11-21T00:53:47+00:00

When we first wrote about Genwi a year ago, it was asocial feed reader with content feeds that could be organized by different categories (blogs, news, videos, music, podcasts) and shared with your friends. Today, it is relaunching with a completely new design that takes into account what your friends are doing across the Web as well.

You can think of Genwi as a combination of Google Reader and FriendFeed with sophisticated search, auto-categorization, and filtering features. As before, Genwi is a super RSS feed reader. It suggests feeds by category, or you can add your own (via search or by importing an OPML file from another reader). You can also invite your friends by giving Genwi permission to match its members to your contacts in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn, AOL, Outlook and elsewhere (although it does not have Facebook integration yet).

Once you do that, you can track your the social activity of your friends across the Web, just like on FriendFeed. Anytime a contact does something on Twitter, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, or other social media sites, it appears on Genwi. (The other supported services are Vimeo, Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, Pownce, Yelp, Upcoming, Last.fm, iLike, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Jaiku,Webshots, Picasa, Smugmug, Zoomr, Furl, Reddit, Mixx, and Diigo).

So far, so what. But Genwi has some interesting features that could push the ball forward in the Web filtering/lifestreaming game. Genwi treats the Web as a collection of information objects. An object can be a blog post, a video, a streaming song, a photo, a Tweet, a Digg. Genwi lets you grab the objects you care about either directly through RSS feeds or indirectly by paying attention to what your friends do and presents them all in a manageable, personalized, searchable feed. Explains Genwi co-founder Killian P. McKiernan:

At first a web page was a published document. It has evolved to a collection of objects—wading through all of these objects by searching and loading pages may not be the most efficient way to consume them. It might be better to bring in all the objects that matter to you and create a context enabling you to filter and directly consume what is most interesting.

Once all the objects are ingested into Genwi, it starts to do some interesting things with them. Each post/video/song/object can be filtered by type and category, as well as by most popular, highest rated, and most recent. They can be rated, shared, or added as a favorite. All of your friends favorites show up in your wire (which is what Genwi calls your personal super feed). The most popular items are available in a public wire, which can also be sorted in various ways. When you search for things, favorite items across the network come up top, adding an element of social rank to the searches.

There are other features that noteworthy as well. You can follow other people’s wires without having to “friend” them. If you wan to send a “quick post” to all your friends, it will appear Twitter-like in all of their feeds (FriendFeed has something similar called “messages”). It handles all sorts of media quite adeptly. And it does a better job of showing what’s popular on the service in a very granular fashion.

On the downside, the site takes longer to load than FriendFeed and is not quite as responsive. But it has a few tricks worth checking out.

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I Want My MTV? Not Anymore, Music Promotion Moves to Web

2008-11-21T00:54:49+00:00

It's clear now that the Web has once and for all replaced TV's role in the music business. Yesterday Guns n' Roses released their very long awaited album Chinese Democracy via a colorful MySpace page. Then today NPR announced that they will offer an "Exclusive First Listen" to the new albums of two music legends - Neil Young and Paul McCartney. In late September NPR had a similar arrangement for Bob Dylan's latest album. Younger musicians are flocking to Web platforms such as Imeem and last.fm to promote their music. For bands still under the radar, all the afore-mentioned sites cater to them - but also small sites like Muxtape (a notice on its homepage currently reads: "relaunching soon, in the service of bands").

All of this is further proof that Web technology has gone mainstream in the music business.

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In an age when MTV seemingly doesn't play any music anymore - instead preferring to bore anyone over 15 years old with insipid 'reality tv' shows - it represents a big shift away from TV to the Web, when promoting new music.

The Guns n Roses MySpace page is impressive. It offers the full album online, a couple of days before the official release in stores. True GNR fans, including this author, will still buy the album when it is released. But by promoting the album online a couple of days before release, it encourages new fans and gives Guns n Roses a lot of free publicity and viral uptake on the Internet. This will almost certainly increase overall sales.

While Guns n Roses hasn't gone as far as Radiohead did with their latest album In Rainbows - which was released as a 'pay what you want' download before it was even an actual CD product - Guns n Roses and MySpace is an appropriate partnership for both parties. For Guns n Roses, it allows them to reach a young, hip, massive audience. And for MySpace, it gives them a lot of page views and we presume a very healthy profit from the record label and retailers such as Best Buy (which has a banner ad right at the top of the page). We should also point out that Guns n Roses has employed some heavy handed tactics to stop illegal file-sharing of the album, so they haven't been entirely savvy about the Web. Still, the MySpace promotion is inspired.

We've been impressed by many of the online music services this year - last.fm has continued to evolve its web services, Imeem has been a revelation for many music fans, Pandora's traffic continues to grow despite ongoing legal issues, sites like The Hype Machine (our coverage) and Muxtape (when it was available) offer something new and different, and so on.

But we're also noticing some of the more traditional radio stations vastly improving their Web sites - and NPR is a great example of that. NPR Music is currently marking its one year anniversary. It features content from NPR and 12 of its public radio stations, but what's impressed us has been the "original-to-NPR Music features" such as live performances, studio sessions, first listens to forthcoming albums, and interviews. This author is a subscriber to NPR's All Songs Considered podcast, which has recently featured a full Radiohead concert and a Guest DJ appearance by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke.

I want my MTV? Not anymore. I can get everything I want in my Web browser! Although to be fair, even MTV has moved its music to the Web.

Discuss

Yahoo Continues To Embrace This Openness Thing. Ebay Widget On Yahoo Home Page

2008-11-21T00:53:47+00:00

Yahoo appears to be quite serious about openness and promoting third party content and applications on their massively visited home page. Today they’re announcing the addition of an eBay widget to the new Yahoo home page, which is still being tested with just a subset of Yahoo users. The widget will be added to the My Applications dashboard area on the left.

eBay users can use the widget to monitor buys and sells, check recent bids and get reminders about auctions that are about to close. They can also search listings without leaving Yahoo.

Yahoo, like AOL, has made a subtle but important shift in their home page strategy. In the old days the home page linked out to other Yahoo pages, or advertisers. Now they’re willing to provide content that users want on the home page, no matter the source. The fact that users can access this eBay widget, presumably without eBay paying a sponsorship fee of any kind, shows Yahoo is willing to put users above revenue (in the hope that happy users will mean more revenue down the road).

By the way, Yahoo sure does love Southwest Airlines. Every screen grab they supply the press with has a big fat Southwest ad in it.

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TechCrunch Feed Reader Breakdown

2008-11-20T23:26:03+00:00

Every once in a while we show some of the stats about the feed readers people are using to access TechCrunch content. Since we recently passed a million daily RSS readers, now is a good time for a new update.

In June 2006 Firefox, Bloglines and Newsgator were the three largest readers, in that order. Feedburner did an analysis later in 2006 with similar results. Long ago Google reader eclipsed all of those readers. And recently, Outlook has surged as the feed reader of choice.

Of our roughly 1.4 million RSS readers, 520,000, or about 38%, come from Outlook. 390,000, or about 28%, come from Google Reader. Newsgator and BlogRovR are next with about 10% each, followed by Netvibes, Bloglines, AOL, Flock, Yahoo and the Windows Media Center.

The complete breakdown is below.

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Twilio: Powerful API For Phone Services That Can Recreate GrandCentral In 15 Lines Of Code

2008-11-20T23:26:03+00:00

Every once in a while we come across a company that seems to have a giant bullseye on it for acquisition, with a great product, viable business model, and a talented team. Twilio, a company that has created an intuitive API for a variety of telephony services, is that kind of company (it also managed to Rick Roll my boss). The startup has developed a simple API with pay-as-you-go pricing that allows developers to quickly implement phone services into their applications, opening the door to a number of services that were previously only accessible to the small sliver of engineers trained in the dark magic of phone calls. Twilio is launching today in private beta, and TechCrunch readers can grab an invite here.

CEO Jeff Lawson says that while other web telephony services exist (like Asterisk, an open source project), these technologies tend to be very complex and difficult to use, even for experienced developers. Lawson says that Twilio is looking to commoditize these phone services by making them much more accessible to developers, by introducing a set of very intuitive commands. The API primarily consists of 5 commonly used phone actions (Say, Play, Record, Dial, and Gather a phone number), each of which behaves exactly as you’d expect it to. That Rick Roll app we heard a few days ago? Here’s the code (for you non-programmers, this is pretty basic stuff):

Lawson showed me a number of other impressive examples, including a project that he said managed to replicate most of GrandCentral’s features in only around 15 lines of code. A number of organizations have already started using the API to build their own applications, including a non-profit that has now automated hundreds of calls that used to take staff hours to make.

Twilio is adopting the cloud-service model, with no contract required and flat fees for calls depending on the number of minutes used and the number of phone numbers needed (developers can also scale their needs based on demand, so they don’t have to worry about their servers crashing). And while the Rick Roll app was created with the service, Lawson says it was just a pre-launch joke, and that safeguards are in place to prevent any future applications from making annoying phone calls.

Twilio isn’t perfect - it doesn’t yet support voice recognition, which is a key component in many telephony services (though this feature will be released in a future version). But it is very cool, and will probably be very popular among developers. Don’t be surprised if this one gets snatched up soon by a cloud service provider like Rackspace or Amazon (my money’s on Amazon - CEO Jeff Lawson was a Product Manager for AWS).

There are a few of other startups trying to make phone services more accessible to developers, including Skydeck, which we covered here.

Twilio Web Service API for building Voice Applications

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: voice applications)

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Don’t like Google’s search results? Change them using the SearchWiki!

2008-11-20T23:37:44+00:00

Today (well, it is yesterday at the time you read this) Google will rollup a new feature to its well-known search engine: custom search results.
That is, you can now edit the search results…more power to the masses.
The feature’s name is Google SearchWiki and it was in an experimental phase since several months ago (only some users had access to it).

“This is a search feature that gets a user more control over their search results,” said Cedric Dupont, Google’s SearchWiki product manager.
That means you have to be signed into your Google account in order to have the possibility to use SearchWiki (the changes you have made will be saved into your account so next time you come to Google you will see your previous work).

You can see the SearchWiki feature to the right of each search result title: an up arrow lets you move a result higher on the page and an X will remove the result. After moving the result higher a down arrow shows up (of course) so you can move it back down the page. After editing the result the icons will turn green and that’s a reminder for you that you edited that result. There’s another icon, a bubble, which lets you leave comments for others to see.

Of course, if you can move and delete results you can also add your input. There’s an “Add a result” link at the bottom of the search results page which lets you do just that.
Now, if you removed a result how would you bring it back? No worries, there’s an Undo kinda feature at the bottom of the page.

People can share their SearchWiki notes with others by clicking a “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link at the bottom of each search results page.

Will this feature help Google become even better at sorting out the search results? I wouldn’t be surprised if they would use the data collected to improve their search engine and other services Google has.

By tomorrow (today, the at time you read this) all the users should be able to user this feature and you can tell us your experience with it.
At the time of writing this article I didn’t yet have access to this feature…

Mossberg Says Innovation is the Key to Success During the Econaclypse

2008-11-20T23:27:20+00:00

Walter Mossberg, who has been reviewing technology since 1991 for the Wall Street Journal in his weekly "Personal Technology" column, is convinced the companies that succeed in this type of econaclypse, as AllThingsD has dubbed the economy, will be those that focus on innovation. "It has been my observation that while things do slow down in bad times, they don't stop," Mossberg said.

Speaking to a packed room this week at the Dow Jones VentureWire Technology Showcase in Redwood City CA, Mossberg, the "Most Influential Computer Journalist" according to Time Magazine, described the trends that excite him right now as happening both in computer hardware and computer software: outside the browser Web applications, service in the cloud, and hand held computers.

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Much like during the mid to late eighties, when we saw advances in the personal computer, Mossberg explained we are once again witnessing advances in hardware innovation. This time however, we are not getting excited about the Commodore, Radio Shack and Apple II devices; instead, a new model of computer is energizing the world of consumer technology. The super smart phones or hand held computers as Mossberg prefers to call them: the iPhone, the G1, and the soon to be released BlackBerry Storm.

In much the same way, this time also reminds Mossberg of the mid to late nineties as we are once again observing a swell of Internet innovation; this one happening on the software front with widgets/Web apps and service in the cloud.

With so much information available on the Internet, and the instant gratification demanded by consumers today, the melding of these products is inevitable. Mossberg, who believes widgets will flourish on hand held computers, suggested that while the new class of mobile devices offer better browsing than their predecessors, it is in the apps that he sees competition, innovation and ideas fermenting. "We don't necessarily need to go through a browser," he said.

The problem of course is replicating data across devices in a smooth, cohesive manner to ensure that data available on the Internet is available on the handheld. And that's where service in the cloud comes in. While corporate America has enjoyed technologies such as BlackBerry Enterprise Server, Microsoft Exchange, and Lotus Notes that have enabled data to be replicated between devices [servers, desktops, laptops and handhelds], according to Mossberg, nobody has yet been "wildly successful" in bringing this technology to the wider consumer world via the cloud.

And so the race begins. While Mossberg has always claimed he is not responsible for business coverage of tech companies, the fact remains that for the past 17 years, the star of the Wall Street Journal has accurately assessed innovation within the consumer tech market. Given his insights this week, the only questions that remain are: who will bring cloud services to the masses, and will it happen during the econaclypse?

Read the transcript of Mossberg's keynote below.

Walter Mossberg: Dow Jones VentureWire Technology Showcase 2008

Effects of the economy

I think it's obvious to everybody that we're in for a serious recession. The question is only how serious. Barack Obama probably had thirty seconds of feeling happy and now has a whole lot to worry about.

At AllthingsD.com, our website, we have coined a term for the economy; we're calling it the 'econaclypse' and I think we are in kind of an econaclypse.

My observation, and I have been writing about tech for 17 years, I don't fund anything, but I do get pitched like VCs do.

I see all kinds of new companies, sometimes many months, sometimes over a year before their product ships. And it has been my observation that while things do slow down in bad times, they don't stop.

There is a digital tidal wave in the world, all kinds of digital products, whether they are hardware products, software products, services, web 2.0, whatever the hypesters are going to call the next phase of the Web. That stuff doesn't stop. It slows down a little, but doesn't stop.

And the companies obviously that can hold together and continue to work on their innovation, whether it's business model innovation, but especially if it's product innovation, those are the companies that come out of these things strongest.

Obviously this is not a typical company and I realize the model is different when you have 25 billion dollars in cash in the bank and no debt - which is what this person has - but Steve Jobs said, it was about a month ago or three weeks ago, Steve Jobs jumped on their earning call - he rarely deigns to be on their earnings call as many of you know - and he jumped on their earning call and said: in the last recession, that's when we opened our Apple stores, that's when we did... and he mentioned a couple of different innovative and expensive projects they'd taken on during the downturn, and he says we're going to try and keep innovating our way out of it.

Obviously on a smaller scale and without the 25 billion in cash, and maybe with a little debt that he doesn't have, still I think it's the right thing to do. And even if you don't manage to do that, somebody else will.

Just because the market is in the eight thousands instead of the eleven thousands or unemployment - which is actually the more serious number in my opinion for gauging the length of the recession - is 8.5 percent, which it might get to rather than 4 percent, it doesn't mean people stop working on new ideas, particularly in tech and particularly in consumer tech.

Mossberg's take on consumer technology today

Let me talk about what I think is going on, kind of the big picture of where we are and then we'll do some Q&A; if you want.

This period we're in right now if we put the econaclypse off to the side for a minute, this period we're in right now, to me reminds me a lot of the mid to late eighties and the mid to late nineties at the same time. And here's what I mean. It reminds me a little bit of the mid to late 90's because we have another wave of Internet innovation going on.

There is obviously a million different things going on in the Internet but there are two categories I look at - and you've got to remember I don't write about, and I don't pay any attention to corporate technology, or niche technology. I also don't ever use the word enterprise, because the least enterprising and least entrepreneurial part of the entire economy are these giant bloated corporations to whom that term is often applied. I don't see anything enterprising about Ford Motor Company I just call them big corporations or big government agencies or whatever they are. Fine with me that they buy technology - it's great that they buy technology, and sure there is wonderful technology being produced for those folks, but it's not my job to write about them. So everything I say is in the context of consumer

So what do I mean when I talk about things going on on the Web that are to me as exciting and there is as much fervor and ferment and intellectual energy as there was when the Web was getting going in the mid to late nineties?

There are two buckets.

One is outside the browser - it's these widgets, web apps, whatever you want to call them, that did start on the PC and Mac. Actually in a funny way, some of them were tried in Windows 95 with what was called Active Desktop. Unfortunately the way that Microsoft presented it to the world was as sort of selling your personal computer desktop to Disney and Warner brothers, which allowed me to write a couple of great fulminating columns, and not just me.

But it was kind of this idea. And then the next instantiation of any importance, of any sort of economic clout was when Apple put this dashboard aspect into the Mac OS and then Microsoft followed with the sidebar in Vista. But really the place where I think it flourishes is on handhelds. Hand held computers, the iPhone class of computers of which there are now about to be three, and I'm going to get to that in a minute.

So, that's the first bucket, and I think there is colossal developer energy, intellectual energy, going into this question of "okay we have the Web out there, the Internet out there, it's just full of all kinds of information; commerce engines, and search opportunities, and entertainment opportunities, but we don't necessarily need to go through a browser - we can go through an app that takes advantage of the processing power and the graphics engine and all that on the computer that is narrowly focused on whatever it is.

How many people here have an iPhone or an iPod Touch? I'm talking about everything from the simple stock widget on there, to the now over 7000 apps for that phone - for that hand held computer. That's since 11th July. Two million downloads and 7000 apps for that phone, for that hand held computer. So that's one big area of excitement.

The other one, of course, is trying to take what has been true in corporate America for a long time, which is a sort of service in the cloud - whether it's the Blackberry Enterprise Server, or Microsoft Exchange or Lotus products that replicate data across devices and, push e-mail and other data out and bring that to the wider consumer world.

You see Google making some effort, you see Microsoft making some effort, you see Apple with Mobile Me making some efforts - that so far hasn't been successful. Nobody has really been wildly successful. Even RIM - much of the RIM effort has been focused - and when I talk about the consumer space most of the RIM, distributed computing through the cloud, is still out of the enterprise - although that is changing with their customer profile.

So those are the two big exciting areas that I see. I'm not talking about business models for those things. I understand that there has been some debate in some of the sessions about the viability of the advertising model versus other kinds of models, and I share some skepticism about relying solely on advertising.

But without regard to business model for a minute, I think those are two huge pools of excitement.

And then, complementing that and this is what makes me think of the mid to late eighties as opposed to mid to late nineties. What was happening in the mid to late eighties?

Remember the personal computer; the mass market personal computer appeared in 1977.

You had three of them; one of the most important of the three was the Apple II, but you also had a Radio Shack and Commodore. And those were the first machines where somebody without an engineering degree could actually take it out of the box and do something with it. And on the Apple II in particular, that's where business began to adopt personal computers because Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston wrote a program called VisiCalc. It was a spreadsheet, it ran on the Apple II and you were off to the races in terms of businesses using personal computers.

But it was in the eighties that you began to see this tremendous competition and intellectual activity and design activity and engineering activity around "what is a personal computer?"

So you had Apple doing its stuff, you had Commodore, you had Radio Shack, you had, you know, a million companies.

When I started writing my Personal Technology column in 1991, PC Magazine, and first of all, PC Magazine was the size of Vogue, and when they did their ratings of computers, there were 75 or 80 PC makers, and they were not all making the same sort of thing.

Well I think we're kind of back there because I think there are new form factors and models of computers. Some of them are these netbooks, everybody's heard that term, it's actually a misnomer. The original idea was it would be a very thin client, with very little memory and processing power and would mostly be used to access things on the Net, these widgety kinds of things. And there is still some of that, but within eight months, they've all gotten hard disks, they've all gotten Windows XP so they've all kind of become very small laptops, but nevertheless, it's an interesting category.

The much bigger category of new kinds of computers is what I call hand held computers or another term might be super smart phones. I mean this smart phone term has been out there and has meant very little. At one point Microsoft actually was using it as a brand for something that by today's standards would look very primitive.

You know, Treos were smart phones, Blackberry is a kind of smart phone, obviously these Windows mobile phones that have been out there but there is something new, another whole level of game changing power, and application development that was kicked off with the iPhone and there are now two devices in my opinion that are in that category; one is the iPhone, and one is the G1, the first Android phone, and there will be many other Android phones.

And this week we're about to see a third, which is this, the BlackBerry Storm, which is their effort to compete with the iPhone head on. It's a touch screen phone which will have an app store, and I'm not referring to the - there have obviously been third party apps for the Blackberry, but this is going to have, it has a new SDK, and it will have a major app store like Apple has like Google has for the G1.

These things are computers that happen to make phone calls.

Some of you who have tried some of these 7K apps on the iPhone know that here is pretty much a staggering variety of what you can do on there. And I at least can say in my travels and daily life, I'm as glued as the rest of you probably are to this stuff. I'm pulling out my laptop less and less often during stopovers at airports, and it's not just like when you use to have your Blackberry or Treo and you could look at your e-mail.

I'm doing Web surfing in the browser - which is a good browser in the iPhone - and all of these, the marks of these is they have a much more real browsers than the old phones used to have, but I'm also using a lot of these apps. These are kind of big broad areas where I think it is quite fun and exciting to see competition, ideas ferment; and innovation.

Now are these things immune to the economy? Of course they're not - of course RIM would rather be launching and Verizon would rather be launching Blackberry Storm in last years economy than in this years economy, and it may be that what it would have done in last years economy is not going to happen in this years economy. But luckily for me, I don't have to cover the business side of RIM or Verizon, I don't have to predict sales, I just have try to review and try to understand these products and where they are heading.

Just as a lot of the design and engineering energy left things like CD-ROMs and rushed into the Web when it was clear that it was a big deal, I observed, and I don't know about all of you, but I'm observing a tremendous migration of design and engineering activity into these super smart phones or hand held computers, iPhone class devices. And into these both cloud services and these kind of widgety outside the browser Web apps.

So that's what I think are the big kind of trends that going on right now, at least in consumer technology - of course mixed with other things. People are still making laptops, we have a new version of Windows coming, which I actually think has a chance of being quite good, and quite good is not a phrase you would have seen in any of my columns next to the word Vista, but I think the track they're on with Windows 7 is quite promising. So I'd like to open up to Q&A; and we can talk about these topics or any other topic you might think I might be quite competent.

Thank you.

Discuss

GotGame Releases Integrated Web Browser For Games; Watch Hulu As You Get 1337

2008-11-20T21:50:26+00:00

For all their mesmerizing graphics and adrenaline fueled gameplay, it might come as a surprise to non-gamers that many of today’s most popular computer games are bogged down by downtime (I should know - I spent the better part of 1999 mining virtual ore in Ultima Online to become a master blacksmith, and enjoyed about 10 minutes of it). MMOs like World of Warcraft see epic battles punctuated by hours of wandering mostly empty wilderness, while FPS games often punish gamers for dying by making them sit out and watch their comrades go at it until the beginning of the next round.

Today GotGame is giving these gamers something to do during these bouts of boredom. The company has released Rogue, a web browser based on WebKit and Adobe’s AIR platform that integrates directly into most of today’s popular gamers, allowing users to swap between their game and the web with a single hotkey. Gamers will be able to check their Email, listen to Pandora, watch Hulu videos, or casually browse the web at their leisure, jumping back into the game within seconds whenever they need to (the browser supports opacity, so it’s easy to tell when you need to swap your attention).

It’s possible to accomplish similar multitasking by placing games in ‘Windowed’ mode (which doesn’t make them take up the full screen), but this makes games prone to crashing and poor performance. Conversely GotGame says that Rogue should run perfectly fine with most games, and should only slightly affect performance (though the effect will increase significantly if you watch Flash-based movies like Hulu).

While it may seem counterintuitive to non-gamers, GotGame Rogue is a great idea - I would have loved to have had it during my gaming years (instead I was forced to sit a TV next to my computer monitor). Provided the app is as stable as GotGame claims, it will probably do very well. Other players in this space include Xfire, which offers an in-game application for socializing with other gamers.

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Crowd Science Giveaway: 50 Free Accounts to RWW Readers

2008-11-20T21:51:28+00:00

Crowd Science is a new tool that allows web publishers to gather demographic data. We're using Crowd Science currently on ReadWriteWeb - you may have already come across a pop-up invite and filled out the survey. If you haven't, that's because it's done randomly. So if you do get the Crowd Science pop-up, we'd love it if you filled in the demographic survey. The data from this survey lets us know more about our readers, which helps guide us in our topic selection and so on. Plus of course it enables us to get sponsors and ads that are highly relevant.

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Crowd Science has given us 50 free Personal accounts to give away to our readers. To get a free account click here and enter the promo code "RWW". Crowd Science will choose 50 people, randomly, to get an upgrade to a Personal account - which you will get free for a period of 1 year.

Discuss

Leapfish Launches Another Meta Search Engine No One Will Ever Use

2008-11-20T20:02:53+00:00

Last I heard about Leapfish (this was a couple of years ago), they ran a useless but fun tool that provided you with a free appraisal for your domain name based on a variety of ratings and criteria. Now they’re back with an equally useless tool, this time without the fun part.

The company just revamped itself under the ownership of California-based DotNext, morphing into what they refer to as a “multi-dimensional information aggregator,” which is actually nothing more than yet another meta search engine. You know the kind: sites that pull together search results from real engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo and attempt to differentiate themselves by adding tabs for meta-searching images, videos, Q&A, blogs, and so on. Leapfish also displays a number of static, non-customizable widgets on their homepage for the latest news, weather reports, and a stock market summary, which is a kind of step backwards from all the start page personalization efforts we’ve seen over the years.

The company is actively contacting potential advertisers to buy keywords for top positions in their search result listings for a flat fee—typical registration fees are reportedly around $1000 and there’s a yearly renewal fee of 5% of the amount spent —which would give them a “lifetime” guarantee for a top slot for that keyword, but they also get the opportunity to resell it later to another advertiser. Of course, this is only beneficial if Leapfish becomes big, and the chances for that are slim.

The premise of meta search engines is that the aggregation process digs up the most relevant results across different sites and technology platforms, all on a single page. What I want to know: if these meta search engines (and boy, are there many) deliver significantly better results or a greater experience than a Google’s or Yahoo’s core search technology can on its own, then why doesn’t everyone flock to them instead?

The answer: people don’t want to get as many search results as possible and they don’t care about how large the unindexed part of the internet is, let alone what they might find on this so-called “invisible deep web.” All they want is a quick, convenient way of obtaining decent information from a source they know and trust. Or do you honestly visit Search.com, Dogpile, Zuula, Fazzle, Clusty or Mamma.com to get what you need? (I can go on with this list forever, but ask Mark Cuban about how much that last one is worth).

Don’t get me wrong: I see the value of startups trying to improve search and driving innovation both on a technology and a business level, and I’m sure some will be able to compete and carve out their piece of the market. In fact, I hope some of them will. Because no matter what your opinion is on human-powered search, semantic search, vertical search, or social search engines, you have to admit several companies in that space are trying to push the envelope, often drawing attention from the big guys or keeping them honest at least (see yesterday’s announcement about Yahoo Glue, for example).

For me, though, wanna-be search engines like Leapfish don’t clear that hurdle.

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Live Current Media In Trouble, Raising Cash

2008-11-20T20:02:53+00:00

Live Current Media, a Canadian company which is in the business of developing, operating and monetizing premium domain names, has raised a little over $1 million through a private placement. The money comes from Live Current’s own management team and a couple of outside investors, and is expected to be the first part of a private funding which could total up to $2 million in the next 15 days.

Live Current, which changed its name from Communicate.com earlier this year, is a publicly traded company (OTCbb:LIVC). The investors paid 65 cents per unit, a premium of 38% to yesterday’s closing price of 40 cents.

The company acquired YCombinator startup Auctomatic in March 2008. A month after, it was time for a far bigger deal: it signed a $50 million deal to obtain the exclusive online rights to official content from the Indian Premier Cricket League. (Live Current owns Cricket.com and operates IPLT20.com, the official site for the league). When we reported on the deal, we wrote:

It is a pretty big commitment for Live Current Media, a domain-name company with revenues of $9 million last year and a net loss of $2 million. The Canadian company is basically betting its entire $51 million over-the-counter market cap on this deal.

And that was before the economic meltdown. Now, Live Current is being forced to sell up to six of its premium domain names, including Communicate.com, Brazil.com, Vietnam.com, Indonesia.com, Malaysia.com, Canadian.com and GreatBritain.com, hoping to fetch a combined total of $6 million to $10 million. It could turn into a fire sale or worse, deadpool tag for the company, unless they can convince some outside investors that they’re able to turn the ship around.

Most of Live Current’s revenue, which was nearly $2 million for the quarter ended September 30, comes from its Perfume.com operation. But with a gross profit of $352,435 and expenses of $2,343,285, those numbers aren’t going to do the trick.

Live Current CEO and Chairman, Geoffrey Hampson, said in a statement:

“This financing, in addition to the expected proceeds of the previously announced sale of up to six non-core domain names, is consistent with management’s strategy to ensure that sufficient cash resources are available to meet our obligations through the end of 2009 while minimizing dilution for existing investors.”

Only time will tell if the cash resources are sufficient enough to keep the company afloat.

(Hat tip to DomainNameWire)

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YouTube Tests HD Videos

2008-11-20T20:04:09+00:00

According to a report by Wired's Meghan Keane, YouTube is testing stereo sound as a default option for videos and is also offering very high quality HD versions of a small selection of clips. We weren't able to find a lot of videos that were encoded in the 720p HD format, but it is important to note that this is different from the 'watch in high quality' option YouTube already offers, which only features a resolution of 480x360 and which doesn't look half as good as the 720p option.

It would not surprise us if Google was adding these options to give professional content producers and TV networks more of an incentive to upload their content to YouTube instead of using Google's competitors.

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Competing for High Quality Content

As HD cameras are pretty much already becoming standard in the consumer electronics space, it would make sense for Google to start supporting this format. Also, a lot of YouTube's competitors like Vimeo already offer HD playback with a resolution of up to 1280x720.

We also know that Google is trying to get more professionally produced TV shows and movies onto its service. In this space, YouTube is competing with Hulu, which already offers some shows in HD, as well as the offerings of individual TV networks like ABC, which streams a large selection of its primetime shows in HD.

To see these HD videos, you have to add "&fmt=22" to the YouTube URL, but we haven't been very lucky in finding a lot of videos where this option was enabled yet. If you find any, let us know in the comments.

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Obama Pimping the White House with High Tech Gadgets?

2008-11-20T20:15:38+00:00

So Obama is likely to be the first American president to have a laptop on his desk in the Oval office as well as the first to use the web for his weekly address to the nation. This little interesting nugget has sparked a flurry of discussion amongst designers over how the White House should be changed to accommodate the more tech savvy Obama and his love for tech.

He’s already had to relinquish his blackberry but that hasn’t stopped the associated press asking a number of interior designers to suggest Obama-style changes for the White House.

Lisa LaPorta, designer of HGTV’s “Designed to Sell”, has a wonderful vision for the White House library:

I see the library as more of an Internet cafe-lounge with state-of-the-art computer, television and surround-sound capabilities as well as a place for books. … I would like to take down whatever art hangs above the fireplace and replace it with a flat screen television-computer monitor.

I would love to hear of Obama’s changes in the near future and hopefully raising the standard for leaders homes worldwide, both on a technological front and on design. Naturally there are more important areas to attend to but a little gadgetry never hurt anyone, did it?

via geeksugar

Casual Internet Use Is Good for Kids, 3 Year Study Concludes

2008-11-20T20:04:09+00:00

The ways young people use the internet everyday are transforming learning in ways that adults often fail to understand but represent major new opportunities that need to be taken advantage of by supportive educators. That's the conclusion of a major new study by 28 researchers over three years released today by the University of California at Berkley and the MacArthur Foundation.

Titled "Living and Learning With New Media," the study articulates the value of social networking, text messaging and other forms of new media use better than anything we've seen yet. It's a major contribution to our understanding of the new web and the way it impacts the world at large.

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Funded by the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Series, the research is summarized in one two page document a 30 page white paper and a 12 part online book titled Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media. MIT Press will be offering a print version of the book soon.

Leading education blogger Will Richardson pulls out some of his favorite parts of the study on his blog, some of which we excerpt below as well.

Self Directed Exploration Uniquely Motivating

New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in classroom setting. Youth respect one another's authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented toward set, predefined goals.

That makes sense, of course, but is it effective?

New Forms of Learning Essential to Participation in Contemporary Society

Social and recreational new media use as a site of learning. Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technological skills they need to fully participate in contemporary society. Erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning. Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access "serious" online information and culture. Youth could benefit from educators being more open to forms of experimentation and social exploration that are generally not characteristic of educational institutions.

What kinds of rolls can adults play in this?

Adults Should Help This Process

Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults, and notions of expertise and authority have been turned on their heads. Such learning differs fundamentally from traditional instruction and is often framed negatively by adults as a means of "peer pressure." Yet adults can still have tremendous influence in setting "learning goals," particularly on the interest-driven side, where adult hobbyists function as role models and more experienced peers.

It's a new world for those privileged enough to have access to the web. The consequences of these changes will unfold in years to come. Do schools need to adapt to these new forms of learning in order to keep functioning well? Perhaps. But perhaps for some learning subjects in particular traditional schools have never worked as well as they could in the future if they support these new collaborative styles of learning.

This report is the end result of work done by 28 researchers over 3 years, based on interviews with 800 young people and 5000 hours of online observation. Check it out in full for yourself and let us know what you think.

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