In what appears to be a test among some users, Twitter is adding “Top News” and “Top People” results at the top of its realtime search results. When you search for a hot story like “gmail” (which came out with a buggy iPhone app today) or even “Humanoid” (a new startup I just wrote about), you will see a highlighted boxed result with a link to a top news story along with a thumbnail image from that article or blog post. Similarly, a search for anyone who is Twitter-famous will turn up a “Top People” result with their Twitter profile picture and a link to their stream.
I first noticed this earlier today, and I thought it was a paid search ad. But it is actually a way to help users discover the most popular content and people. Presumably, the Top News items are based on retweets and some sort of whitelist Twitter keeps for news sources. Although it seems like the Top News story sometimes rotates to another source if you repeat your search. → Read More
TV is just not the same without Twitter and Facebook chatter. Tonight’s prequel movie Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe comes with social chatter about the show on your laptop courtesy of Echo, the realtime commenting system. The USA Network launched this companion site, which pulls in comments, Tweets, Facebook status updates and Fan Page comments, as well as YouTube video and Twitpic photos about the show.
Echo gathers it all into alive chat feed, which is then curated, and the best comments appear on TV. Prior to the show, actor Bruce Campbell answered questions online about the show. In the first two hours, 18,000 fans were commenting in the stream, hoping their comment would be plucked into the curated channel which was shown on TV. → Read More
Push notifications are the new prime time, water-front property, Boardwalk and Park Place of phase 2 realtime. The domino effect of this alert mechanism will transform the iPad and therefore the downlevel iPhone and Web clients in turn. Soon we will be able to write filters directly to that middle layer buffer where state is stored, with business rules that let some things through to compliant apps and push data from weaker clients to second class citizenship. This in turn will provide powerful incentives to clean up wayward apps, as iPad economics propel such power features for an additional price or more targeted information about user interests. → Read More
Week One of the Age of iPad was barely weekended when Keith Olbermann was removed from his position at NBC/Comcast. I missed his final show, mostly because I stopped watching it and all the cable news channels once the election was over. But then I remembered we are now in the Age of iPad, and guess what I found when I turned on Apple TV. There it was right in the podcasts section, ready to stream.
Parsing the language I heard the same thing we heard earlier when Steve Ballmer fired Bob Muglia, when Eric Schmidt was kicked “upstairs,” when I was asked to leave along with my wife and a friend from the Crunchies because the room was too full. In the last case, I refused to move, waiting until the venue manager moved on to people more her size. I wonder what would have happened if Muglia just said, no, Steve. I’m not going anywhere.
We’ll get back to Eric and the boys in a minute, but in the Age of iPad, all is not as it seems. Take Olbermann for instance: firing him seems like exactly what NBC doesn’t want. It dredges up the recent Leno fiasco in a visceral way, suggesting that even if Conan’s new show might as well be emanating from Siberia, at least he suffered no bad will for telling NBC where they should get off. By contrast, I wouldn’t touch NBC at 11:30 with someone else’s hard disk. → Read More
The news on Monday appears to be that Facebook will reinvent email. TechCrunch says it’s the long awaited Gmail killer. Others say it’s Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit’s project since he came to Facebook in the FriendFeed acquisition. Paul says he hasn’t been working on that, but rather the Big Freaking Zip File app where we can download all our Facebook bits. And anyway, he’s gone — off to Y Combinator to continue his angel investing. And I’m gone — from email. Have been for a while now.
I still use email all the time. Or rather, it uses me. I watch colleagues at work (Salesforce.com) bounce back and forth from Outlook and Gmail, selecting, reading, skimming, and oh yes, deleting, deleting, deleting. You have to do that in Outlook, to stay ahead of the Mailbox is Full message. Gmail, not really, but it’s hard to break the old habit. And recently I had to start paying for that privilege, when Google stopped raising the limit and converted me to a cloud customer. → Read More
Realtime search has come a long way from just a year ago when the only option really was Twitter’s own search engine. Now Google, Bing, and a gaggle of realtime search startups all have products up and running (even Facebook is expanding its own realtime search to include everybody’s public stream). Today, one of those realtime search startups, CrowdEye, released a bunch of new features that point the way to a better realtime search experience. In particular, it lets you filter your search by location and sentiment (expect Google and Bing to copy some of these soon).
CrowdEye is part of an early group of startups who recently got access to Twitter’s full firehose of Tweets. Today, it turned on that firehose and is indexing a full 14 days of everything on Twitter. CrowdEye returns both links and Tweets as results, and lets you sort by relevance or time. It uses its own CrowdRank algorithm to come up with the most relevant Tweets. → Read More
An interesting firefight broke out over the weekend as Google engineer DeWitt Clinton defended Google data policies in Buzz and related “open” standards. Those who remember the politics of RSS and the games companies played around its buildout would recognize a number of the names and tactics of the current positioning. Closed comment threads, insinuations, calls to action — only the names of the bigcos are shifting, and not all that much either. The latest wrinkle is to describe developer acceptance as the key measurement of open standards. As Clinton and fellow Google evangelists fan out across the realtime stream’s version of the Sunday talk shows, they’re having to argue the borginess of Facebook versus Google. C’mon guys, get serious. Google has the gorilla crown going away. Think of the breadth and depth of Google’s strategy: own every product category and decorate each with their own metadata. Gmail, done. Apps, done enough. Chrome. OS, Android, Nexus. Now Buzz. What folks who argue against the Google tax don’t understand is that this isn’t going to happen if…. It’s done, banked, in the books, check cashed, burger eaten. Every time a Buzz gets distributed, the addition of key voices from this and previous eras solidifies the new metadata type as the social graph ripples spread. It doesn’t matter how immature Buzz is compared to other systems; in fact, it just makes the resultant Buzzes on the subject all the more canonical. No matter how long it takes for these systems to converge, each object will have its own metadata stamp. From here on out, Buzz stamps are getting licked and posted in increasingly significant numbers. The big companies behind these moves have learned a lot from the pioneers of RSS and open source, as well as the bigco strategies of Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle/Sun. But Google has taken all the previous strategies and combined them into one relentless juggernaut: create the data and let the process fall into place around it. It would be cynical to suggest that Google was somehow behind the open standards players who started the ball rolling, but clearly the two groups scratched each other’s backs along the way. Perhaps the key melting pot for this buildout was the Internet Identity Workshop, where key players from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook first got together openly. Facebook seems to have the most to gain by adoption of the various open → Read More
Lady Gaga blared from the speakers as my 16 year old daughter drove away from the house. I didn’t want to like Lady Gaga, but her duet with Elton John at the Grammys changed everything. She seemed to draw strength with every traded verse, turning his phrasing to her advantage, his blues to her power. This was not a generational shift, but a reach across the eras. Now there was my little girl moving out of sight with her precious cargo, our youngest daughter, on the way to school and beyond. For a second we glanced at each other with a nervous giggle, then drank in a day with new eyes. A day where the world prepares for the coming of the iPad. A day where health care reform was debated and both Democrats and Republicans were coaxed out of hiding. Whatever you think of the merits of the positions, the debate in Washington was good for both parties. Republicans came prepared, with a clever mixture of partisan politics and pragmatic courage to avoid crossing the line from talking points to personal insults and worse. For their part, the Democrats let Obama carry the ball, getting away with it because of his skill and command of the details but finally showing the passion that fuels their cause if it is to prevail. The media was less impressive, with Fox Business News the only cable feed that stayed with most of the live coverage. MSNBC and CNN seem to have switched roles in the year-long debate, moving away to talking heads on the former to blather on repetitively before bailing altogether for the Olympics, while capturing more of the underlying dynamics on the latter. I finally gave up switching to stay with the event and watched the rest on the MacBook Air via CSPAN. Next stop, the iPad. The tech agenda seems similarly polarized, what with Buzz this and Facebook patents that. But I get the strong feeling that no one has yet succeeded in smoking out the real work that needs to be done in the few short weeks before the iPad arrives. There’s a lot of phony outrage about Apple and Google soaking Techmeme, as though big companies with aggressive agendas is something new and more fearsome because of the scale at which net giants operate. But I keep coming back to my daughter driving off to greet the → Read More
Rumors of the death of Flash are greatly exaggerated, says Jeremy Allaire in a TechCrunch guest post. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch touts the ability to update the millions of Flash-powered devices over the network. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz resigns in realtime over Twitter. Nexus One updates the Android OS in realtime when I switch it on this morning. The iPad arrives in March. Here’s another couple: Netflix streaming is now available on PlayStation, Wii, and Xbox, over Silverlight on Macs and PCs, and via 48% of its customers in the fourth quarter. The company expects 66% will stream by mid-2011, and added a record 1 million new subscribers Q4 for a total of 12 million. And this: Microsoft has released a Silverlight 4 beta client for Facebook on Windows and OS/X, with background notification, a grid UI for status updates, photo and video uploading and device access, and netbook/tablet support. Each datapoint by itself suggests valid reasons why Flash will endure for many years on a majority of machines. Huge support among gaming developers, 75% penetration on the Web, and soon a foothold on every major phone but the iPhone/iPad. But taken together, Flash faces forces beyond its ability to cope. Whether it’s Silverlight choking off Flex/Air in the enterprise or Apple and Google scraping the cream of the developer community off the top, Adobe is being squeezed into a corner from which it can only escape by losing control of its platform. Using HTML 5 as a rallying cry serves Google’s marketing and developer evangelism strategies, but its impact on Flash is minimal until the iPad ships. For iPhone users, it took two upgrades for the marketplace to provide a work-around with H.264, but once that was in place with YouTube it brought Ustream and other players in. At about the same time, FriendFeed enabled realtime streaming chat. Suddenly, integrated realtime streaming experiences could be leveraged to target valuable communities. Whether it’s a Facebooked version of these technologies over Silverlight or a native iPhone/iPad version via decompiling and H.264 streaming, by March we will have multiple versions of essentially the same content running on PCs, Macs, i*’s, and Nexus One. Coupled with Netflix device expansion, holdout services such as Hulu will have to move quickly to avoid a stream of hemorrhaging customers away from what is no longer a unique offering. Watching how fast book publishers like Macmillan and → Read More
We’ve only got a few days to go before Steve Jobs tells us what we’re spending our money on this year. From all the leaks and positioning announcements, it appears we’re being pushed into the Pay Zone. The NY Times, the top four or five TV shows, the embargo-free bestseller. The bet is we’ll pay for same-day-as access to discretionary consumption of media. I think he’s right. But is that as big a bang as the iPhone? In and of itself, the tApplet does not change the world or even our corner of the world. But just as with the disruption triggered by the iPhone, this new disruption will move beyond the carriers and into the center of the creative core of the netertainment and information industries. In turn, this new wave of video, music, and text will quickly overturn some of the major stakeholders and rewrite how we spend our time at work and play. It’s hard to think far enough back to remember how we used to use our computer time before realtime stole onto the stage. Back before my MacBook Air, which turned every other computer in the place into an appliance: the MacBook Pro for rendering video, the iMac for Web site design, the PC for nothing. Back when software was something I paid for, music something I shopped for, television something I set a timer for. The MacBook Air’s disruption was the strategic removal of an internal CD/DVD drive. It declared independence from physical media, and bootstrapped existing devices to serve as feed machines for the rare need to rip a CD or backup a file for sneakernet. USB drives quickly eliminated even that requirement, and the move to cloud services sealed the deal. Streaming media rushed quickly into the vacuum of tangible media. Once the location of the actual bits was made irrelevant by look-ahead caching, we quickly learned to validate those services which allowed us to share pointers to the material rather than the downloadable enclosures. Identity online became the control point for micropayments, and the incentive for providing behavior and social signals in return for discounts and sponsored bundling. WiFi became the razor, and the streams the blades. In effect, we are now selling our gestures into the stream hoping to build up enough credit to buy these new devices as they reach the intersection of battery life, broadband, and social filtering. → Read More
The dominoes are falling fast in the wake of NBC Universal’s decision to ax its experiment with late night in prime time. What seemed a simple revolt by local affiliate stations may spell the beginning of a complete reworking of mainstream media around the emerging realtime architecture of Twitter. RSS and its podcasting offspring triggered a process of democratization that offered users a way of aggregating news and entertainment under their own control. Most media outlets constrained such access to their programming, but YouTube gave users a way to flout the law and Google a way to look the other way while shows like The Daily Show and copyrighted musical performances were made available over the net. As with Napster, free as in media morphed over time to iTunes, the Kindle, and soon the iTablet. The disconnect between broadcasting audiences and the economic underpinnings of prime and post-prime time has reached the boiling point. Now that Twitter and its gesture-based Follow architecture has reached a critical mass, audiences can set alerts to notify them of breaking news, analysis, and commentary. If available, these nuggets of information can be played off in realtime and shared with targeted micro-communities while the information is at its most valuable. Unfortunately for local broadcast stations, this destroys a substantial portion of their revenue, much as craigslist eats newspaper classifieds’ lunch. Follow the money and it’s streaming away from a scheduled architecture to a DVRed and eventually on-demand personalized portal. On the desktop Silverlight is leveraged by Netflix to move that disruptor (see boarded-up Hollywood Video stores) from FedEx to Instant access over the Net. On the iPhone/Nexus platform, Ustream streams realtime events over the cracked-open 3G network. How can the local news compete with an interactive identity wand that lets you download an app in seconds moments after you are told about it via your aggregator filter router? Once the affiliates said No, the house of cards collapsed. NBC faces the same stupid choice they made when they opted for the middle-of-the-road Leno over the real Carson heir Letterman. By reinstalling Leno after the news, they roll the clock back 7 months (really 6 years) and create a monster called Conan that will destroy what’s left of the Tonight Show heritage. A Fox show will spawn a Late Night Fox show, and suddenly we go from 4 shows to 6. Talk show glut favors a → Read More
In the age of Twitter, no one can keep a secret. That’s clear from the announcements about the Gphone, the iSlate, and the likely fact that nothing will happen at CES. Comdex has been dead for years, Oracle conferences feature endless rehashes by Scott McNealy about the Sun merger, and in general most trade shows have been denuded of any real news. That leaves product announcements by the vendors themselves, timed to fit around the old event schedule but in fact disrupt the news flow that normally used to be captured in large multi-vendor settings. But these announcements have begun to focus around hardware devices (phones) that require a supply chain, lead time, and partners. Apple used to be mostly successful at keeping the lid on the hardware part of the equation, choosing its suppliers based as much on security as the commodity parts that help maintain a firewall by need-to-know silos. But where the process has really broken down from an IP perspective is with the partners. And particularly the media, which has a stake in its survival on top of these devices. So we see a clearly endorsed leak that Apple will ship a tablet in March, as a result of meetings with media folks about supporting the platform. Of course they want to support the platform; the Kindle has already iTuned up the book business and YouTube the video pipeline. It’s equally important for all concerned that Google succeed with Android and Nexus One; today’s rollout confirms how cleverly this is being played with the media. Not the pixel-stained wretches who seemed oddly more impressed than their content will let on. They are of course secretly very happy that a real competition is engaged. Apple the gatekeeper stories have been milked to death, and no one really cares what Motorola or Nokia has up their sleeve. No, the story is Apple v. Google with a twist. The twist is that it’s actually not a competition but a mutual tag teaming of our social services. The key demo today was the voice control of tweets enabled across server side resolution engines. Every single input field on the Nexus One is voice-enabled. Sure, the voice enabled search linked up to the voice-prompted GPS service finances the new device, assuming it can be integrated into bluetooth for hands-free driving. That used to cost $99 for TomTom. But hands-free tweeting over → Read More
Over the holidays I had the great pleasure of watching the Seinfeld reunion story arc on the seventh season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It’s about to disappear from Comcast OnDemand, presumably to traipse off to the increasingly less-profitable domains of the DVD. But not only did the perfect reanimation of Seinfeldian celebration of nothing get around the impossible task of going home again, it made Curb glow in a way I never quite got before.
Jerry Seinfeld’s role inside the HBO show hewed to Curb’s central premise: that the “actors” improvise rather than read scripted lines. The situations are prepared, but not the actual interplay. In so doing, the onus shifts from the writer to the performer. For Larry David, whose persona and comic style is to set up some premise and then toy with his victims the way our cats play with a mole in the bathtub, this produces an expected effect of comic competence but not brilliance.
Comic actors fare reasonably well in this laboratory, especially well when they are playing themselves as do the Seinfeld cast. Comic actors as they are, they find their attitude as “themselves” then riff off of their characters to inform the elements of their essence. Kramer once again rockets through Jerry’s door as if suspended in mid-air, while the others lock in as though ten minutes, not years, have passed. At this point, the experiment is already successful. Now the question: what to do with it?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1cAb0CUFRA&hl=en_US&fs=1&] → Read More
FriendFeed’s return of its realtime Twitter feed is a great end to a turbulent year. Watching the river flow is a maddening exercise in gauging the value of the stream, but having the option again is invigorating as much as it underlines the futility of keeping up. That’s where the Kindle comes in. Kindle is a vacation from the stream; it’s checking into the Millstream motel and communing with old friends and old-is-new ideas.
2009 has been a challenging year, particularly on a human level. Personally, I’ve seen friendships turn to dust as the economic crisis grinds the once-carefree impulses of the realtime Web into marketing and posturing. As someone who writes columns and produces the Gillmor Gang, certainly we all are guilty of these crimes. What I saw as a declaration of the obvious (RSS is dead) continues to roil the conversation, but the damage to a longstanding friendship with Dave Winer seems substantial. Perhaps the friendship that founders on disagreement is not the loss it once might have been.
On the plus side, the massive success of social media and its drivers has rendered moot the criticism that these issues and personalities are not worthy of the enterprise or indeed any serious pursuit of one’s time. As a product of the Sixties, if anything the connection between industry and my passion for technology, the arts, and comedy has become so pervasive that I would be virtually unrecognizable to myself from that era. I have become my father, mother, cop, and judge even as I struggle to make the mortgage and ease my kids into the unknowable future. Tech feels to me like the sessions for some potentially great record, or the noodlings of some robotic drum machine.
I haven’t seen the Lizard movie yet, but from afar it seems more on the side of science fantasy than fiction. I’m sure I’m wrong, but for now I’ll preserve that standoffish pose I took with Twitter and Facebook and the Kindle — knowing full well I’d soon join the stumbling herd but glad to pass the time today pushing more familiar buttons. As the stream floats by, the usual persists: open v. closed, tablet rumors, is realtime real, and so on. OK, I’ll bite:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7velKsXtiQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&] → Read More
The following guest post was written by Edo Segal (@edosegal).
It was 1993 and I had just decided to drop out of college. I was a graphic design major in a great art school but decided I want to start my second company. Knowing this would mark the conclusion of my studies there I set out to create my final project. I would write a short story, design and produce it in print. I put out an edition of 300 and gave it to my friends and people who inspired me like author William Gibson.
Cut to November, 2009, when I returned from sitting on a panel at the second Realtime CrunchUp. I had urged the audience and participants that when thinking about the realtime web we should not consider the challenge through the lens of how consumers behave today. → Read More
The RSS-is-not-dead-it’s just-Twitter Lobby is finally getting the point. As Dave Winer, Anil Dash, Stowe Boyd, Fred Wilson, and whoever else thinks the time for the Bum’s Rush is upon us are proclaiming, the Open Twitter API can save the world from onecompanyitis. In five words: Bearhug Twitter and feed them PB&J until they explode. I know that’s 9 words, but in this upside down argument, it’s really 5 invented in 2001 with just 4 small one-time-only updates. Only one small problem: Twitter killed RSS, not the other way around. Twitter didn’t do RSS some big favor by extracting the vast majority of citations away from Google Reader and its victims in the RSS aggregator wars. Twitter rolled through downtown URLville and right over every social media platform including Facebook with one simple premise. Hi, how you doin’? You are what you tweet. The next big thing since Gmail. Please put down your lunchbox and take a number. Today URLs flow through Twitter. Ideas ship on Twitter. Software is built on Twitter. Fine: the Open RSS API means we can now write to a standard interface that lets Twitter clients become carriers for blogs, conversations, comments, podcasts, and all sorts of unaffiliated competitors. Except that’s hogwash. The time for bearhugging Twitter to the ground vanished when Facebook realized it had to clone Twitter or lose control of the social graph. Once FriendFeed created a realtime conversational data type, the race was under way to codify Twitter and extend it before Twitter absorbed the capability. Neither has happened yet, but once either company reaches that goal, there is no need for a social revolution. This is not the IM Wars all over again. This is not Do No Evil 2.0. Twitter has produced a great service that transcends the politics of the moment, just as Gmail eviscerated email as we knew it. What part of Yum, Good do we fail to understand is bad for us? It’s a simple and inviolate contract: you do something useful and I’ll give you my data. How do they make money with that? Don’t care, they’ll think of something. If everybody likes it, you got yourself a lock on the market. This is why the Gphone materializing is just as good for Apple as Google, and therefore all of us. Competition drives innovation, and it also drives duopolies, as Jason correctly noted on this week’s → Read More
If Google Analytics just isn’t fast enough for you, there’s Chartbeat, a betaworks company which provides realtime analytics to Website owners. It gives Website publishers a second-by-second view of the number of visitors on their site, which pages are spiking in popularity, referring sites, as well as alerts on slow load times and server crashes. It is particularly useful for blogs.
Today, Six Apart’s blog hosting service, TypePad, is starting to promote chartbeat by making it available from its stats page. Website hosting service DreamHost is offering a deeper integration, showing a hover-over summary of current visitors and top referring sites on its dashboard page. Chartbeat also has an iPhone app which sends you push notifications every time your traffic spikes or your site is down. → Read More
Earlier this week, Google made a massive push into realtime search, taking advantage of its newly gained access to Twitter’s firehose of data, as well as realtime feeds from Facebook, MySpace and others. You can see these realtime results for every search you do by selecting the Updates option, Bing is also in the realtime race.
So what’s Yahoo’s less-than-realtime response three days later? A limp-wristed addition of selective Twitter results to its main search engine. Already, Yahoo shows Twitter results in its News search for breaking news and trending topics. Today, it is adding Twitter results to its main search page, but only for trending search terms. So will not always see it, if ever. → Read More
Today, at its Search Event in Mountain View, Google Fellow Amit Singhal (who recently participated in our Realtime Crunchup) took the stage to announce a big new feature for the search giant: Realtime. “It’s Google’s relevance technology meeting the realtime web,” is how Singhal described it.
As we’ve learned over the past several months with Twitter Search, relevancy is perhaps the key to making realtime search a pillar of the web. Google seems to believe it has cracked the code for this, and has been internally testing it for a while now. But starting today it’s going live for everyone. → Read More
Earlier this summer I traveled to Redmond to talk realtime and the cloud with senior Microsoft executives. In this conversation with Robbie Bach, President of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, I tried to delve into what “we inelegantly call Three Screens and A Cloud” from Bach’s vantage point atop Xbox, Zune, Windows Mobile, Media Server, and related hardware. The subtext: Microsoft’s nextgen realtime strategy at the cusp of consumer and enterprise.
ROBBIE BACH: For us, the cloud does a number of things. First of all, it enables us to create community. Right? I mean, the biggest thing — people ask why is Xbox Live successful. Why do we have 20 million members on Xbox Live? And a good percentage of those people who pay us real money for a subscription every year. And some of it is about multi-player gaming, I will grant you. But a significant portion of it is about those people saying, “Hey, this is where I meet my friends. This is where we do things together.”
And if you don’t have a cloud set of services behind that, that gets actually quite hard. How do we do the types of things we’re doing now where you and your friends will be able to watch a movie together and not be in the same room? That requires a set of cloud-based services behind it to enable that to happen in a rich and effective way. And, oh, by the way, talk and see each other at the same time. That’s a pretty interesting experience and a pretty interesting trick. And that all happens through the work that we’re able to do on Xbox Live.
So to me, the biggest thing that the cloud does in the immediate term is it gives us a social environment. It gives us the ability for people to do things together.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu289G4bqCA&hl=en_US&fs=1&] → Read More
San Francisco, CA
