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Profile: BoingBoing

Michael Arrington

January 21. 2000 (as a weblog) If you haven’t heard of BoingBoing, you are seriously behind in contemporary Internet culture. It is the number one most linked to blog according to Technorati ( ), by a huge margin. It is a must-read every day here at Techcrunch. It is a self-described “directory of wonderful things”, and that it is. Topics fluctuate wildly, but common themes include technology/science fiction/intellectual property. Site content is written by four people, all of whom are or were at one time writers for Wired magazine as well: In 2004 became involved and the site incorporated as Happy Mutants LLC. Revenue is generated via ads. (January 2000-January 2005)

Web 2.0 This Week (July 17 – 23)

Michael Arrington

It’s been a helluva week. Myspace got bought for over half a billion dollars. Podcasting died (but not really), and an important development in beer tapping technology was announced. Oh yeah, we spent the week at and learned a lot about social networking in the real world. :-) For a wrapup of AlwaysOn, see our profiles and links . Marc Canter’s new thing, , was announced at the conference and we will profile it separately sometime in the next couple of days. From : As I outlined earlier, unlike Friendster and its clones, MySpace took a unique approach to the Social Networking space and concentrated heavily on building a community first (centered around music and bands), and a social network second. The strategy worked and by the beginning of 2005 MySpace was the clear #1 player in the social networking space.” See Also: , , , , , , , Frank Barnako writes a controversial essay last week titled “ ” in which he states : . Steve Gillmor writes back in an : In related developments, Microsoft Corporation cancelled its rollout of RSS technology in Longhorn, citing Mark Cuban’s assessment that “indies will survive only as a labor of love.” Fired evangelist Robert Scoble, under attack from CNET’s David Berlind and former CNET reporter and analyst/infomercial producer Joe Wilcox, refused to comment pending a review of his current fact-checking procedures, which entail IMing with each of his 7,000 RSS feed publishers for their sign-off on his presumtively erroneous and intensely damaging “facts.” Meanwhile, CNET blogger Steve Gilmor called the death “a seriously lucky thing” given his reluctance to release the last edition of his Gillmore Gang podcast. Gillmour called the final show a “poorly-recorded obscenity-filled miserable ramble” that showed how prescient Ziff Davis columnists John Dvorak and David Coursey have always been in protecting readers and listeners from the dangers of unauthorized and ambiguous sources of dangerous information. “I always knew John and David were right, but I didn’t know why until now,” Gilmorr said. “Normally I would have waited for Lee Gomes to pronounce the body, but Barnako is the Man. Thanks, Frank.” iTunes’ podcasting support will be phased out in the next version, replaced by pay versions of Harry Shearer’s Le Show and NBC’s Meet the Press. NPR officials will return to complaining about loss of federal subsidies, and Jason Calaconis will join the Bush Cabinet as Secretary of Page Views. Karl Rove will continue as Assistant Prevaricator to the President.” See also and on this. . Referencing , David writes: See also “ ” Jeremy Zawodny writes “ ” and says: : Second, what is a blog? I know this is a long tiresome question, but it matters. The distinction between blog sites that have ads and those that don’t is probably a bigger distinction than between magazines that have ads and blogs that have ads. A blog without ads is itself an ad, interesting to a small number of people. Blogs with ads, like their print counterparts, strive to be as broad as possible, to reach as many people, and in doing so, lose their value as an ad for the author.” See also: , , SJ’s Longest Now . But Web 2.0 adds on the wonders of the latter: feeds (RSS, Atom, FeedBurner, et al); lists (OPML, etc.); conversations (blog posts, Technorati links, PubSub feeds, comments); swarming points (tags on Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Dinnerbuzz); heat sensors (Blogpulse et al); aggregations (e.g., Command-Post.org); communities (Craig’s List, et al); alerts (Craig’s List feeds); decentralized distribution (bittorrent, etc.); and on and on.” See on this post as well. Nathan Torkington creates a contentious about seven words you can’t say in Kindergarten. After you watch it you’ll understand why . Fred at WeBreakStuff.com writes a great comparison essay on RSS and Atom. Susannah Gardner took the time to review all major blogging platforms, wrote an excellent on the subject and created a . This is excellent research and a very useful tool. (via ) see also: , , Om Malik wrote a post called “ ” and discussed 24 hour laundry, saying absolutely nothing (I hate this – either be stealthy and therefore be quiet or tell us what the heck you are building). He also made a few comments about Netscape, saying: Marc Canter, never a person without an opinion, his thoughts on the subject of Netscape and Marc Andreesen: So please – do your revisionist thinking piece – pump up 24 Hour Party People Laundry and hope that Marc’s string of bad luck doesn’t continue. Cause he sure as hell hasn’t done shit since – what 1995?” I was one of Netscape’s corporate attorneys in the late nineties, and worked on many of their large acquisitions, as well as their eventual sale to AOL. While everything Om says is true, Netscape was a huge failure, in the sense of not meeting expectations. It would feel very, very similar if suddenly someone came out with a Google killer and over the course of two years Google use steadily dropped to a fraction of its current use. It seems unthinkable, but that is exactly what happened to Netscape. I’m looking forward to , whatever it ends up being. SatireWire p with Jeeves, of Ask Jeeves. (Via ) I had a very good friend in high school named Brent who’s favorite line at a party was, “the one thing you need to do right now is stop talking and drink more beer, faster.” It always made me laugh, and reminded me of those days.

Profile – AttentionTrust

Michael Arrington

Today (I believe) Attention Trust is a project led by Steve Gillmor and others that is the next evolution of his idea. It is a From a post by Steve Gillmor on March 28, 2005: So what is AttentionTrust? It’s light on content for now, but it proposes a basic set of user rights to their attention data: The idea of attention is hugely debated and polarized. It’s useful and needed, but will it work in the real world? The debate will continue as Steve pushes this idea forward. We’ve joined AttentionTrust, and look forward to developments. , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Update: Always On (Day Three)

Michael Arrington

, , Day Three at Always On for us was a busy mishmash of hallway meetings, quick (and not so quick) trips over to Sand Hill Road, and jumping in and out of the final panels. Schedule link is . : : On Bill Joy’s fear of the power an individual has to use technology to harm us and counter-points by George Gilder: Dan Farber also wrote an excellent day two essay on Skype: “ ” See also: , , , , , , , , , , , .

Update – Feedburner (BuzzBoost)

Michael Arrington

Chicago , FeedBurner has been launching a ton of lately, and , is worth noting. In their own words, * Feed Title * Item publication date * Individual item headlines, headlines and plain text, or headlines and original HTML * Plain text item excerpt length * Link to download podcast enclosures (if available) We know that publishers who are familiar with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) would also want to precisely control the styling of whatever BuzzBoost generates. Therefore, BuzzBoost has the right hooks in the generated HTML to make sure you can style each of BuzzBoost’s elements, which we have documented (see the links at the bottom of this post.)” at Qumana posted about this a few days ago and saw the power of it immediately – you can cross promote blogs, and use any RSS feed in new ways. For instance, Tris is thinking about taking RSS feeds of prospective search queries and promoting them through buzzboost – very creative! This isn’t new technology, it’s just a very easy and cool implementation. Feedburner will create an html script for you based on your parameters, or you can take the source html and entirely customize it. To use it, if you already have burned feeds at Feedburner, click on “publicize” from the control panel area, and choose “buzzboost”. You can then select certain parameters, and choose a standard snippet or take the html and edit it directly: Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: Powered by FeedBurner

Profile – Wikipedia

Michael Arrington

January 15, 2001 Wikipedia has been around for over 5 years, is the (by far) and serves over 400 million page views per month (to compare, USA Today has about 300 million). Wikipedia is a free, online, user-written encyclopedia in wiki format that was created in 2001 by and . It has grown at an astonishing rate and now includes 1.6 million articles. More than 600,000 of these are in English, more than 250,000 in German, and more than 100,000 each in Japanese and French (wikipedia has editions in 205 languages, 92 of which are active). Many people don’t realize how easy it is for anyone to add content to wikipedia (I’ve done it several times). Each month, thousands of individuals add content to the project. We are writing about it today because it became the most comprehensive and most reliable center of knowledge as information became available about the on July 7. We posted about the attacks , and noted in last weeks that while the BBC and other news sites couldn’t keep up, wikipedia marched along without a hiccup and kept the world informed. Clay Shirky spoke about it, and Jim Phelps picked it up : See also David Weinberger’s post on this . For many of us, we started to fully understand the tremendous power of wikipedia as a cultural/knowledge aggregator on July 7, 2005. A Wiki is a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. The first wiki was the , created on March 25, 1995 by Ward Cunningham. A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Wikis generally practice the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them. The name is based on the Hawaiian term wiki wiki, meaning “quick” or “informal”. It is used commonly in Hawaii as part of the Hawaiian Pidgin language. An encyclopedia is a written compendium of knowledge. An excellent summary can be found , at wikipedia: “Traditional encyclopedias are written by a number of employed text writers, usually people with an academic degree.” Today, most encyclopedias offer content online and charge a subscription fee for content ranging up to about $100 per year. Wikipedia combines wikis, which are aggregations of content created by users, and the idea of an encyclopedia. To summarize it further would be foolish – we cannot compete with tens of thousands of editors at wikipedia. See their entry for wikipedia . At its core, wikipedia offers conent on a vast array of subjects (like ), and offers additional features such as a for each item, to add content, and a page showing to the text. Samuel Klein writes a beautiful post summarizing our thoughts exactly on what Wikipedia is, was and will become . There are certainly problems with wikipedia, but these problems are inherent in the structure of wikis (when everyone can write, some people write crap). But it is tremendously resilient and self-healing, and an extremely important asset to the Internet culture. (left the project in 2002) – interview with Jimmy Wales (full interview ) (on the London bombings) (scientist discovered wikipedia, wants to expand on his area of exprtise) See Nivi – “ ”

Profile – Judy's Book

Michael Arrington

July 2005 Seattle, WA Judy’s Book is a site that allows people to write reviews of local businesses. It also has social networking features (adding friends, groups, etc.) to share reviews with a trust network. The idea is that people trust what their friends think more than advertising. The reviews are easy to write, with lots of structure (rating, cost, pros/cons) and free text areas that will make searching easier (no tags though – they’ll add that soon enough). It is somewhat like , without the tagging and with more social networking. They don’t discuss in on the site, but they clearly use the or some other datebase for business search. In their own words, Here is a visual of a review: To get the content rolling, Judy’s book is offering bribes. :-) Five reviews gets you $5 at Starbucks, and 50 reviews + 10 friend invites gets you an iPod shuffle. Good idea. Great site. But its another social networking tool to keep updated…and therefore will have some traction issues. The site does not provide RSS feeds for searches or tagging…They’ll realize the usefullness of that soon enough and add it. (Andy and Chris, if you read this, check out Dinnerbuzz and see the things they are doing correctly – it will be easy for you to add this functionality) :-) Andy Sack Chris DeVore ,

Pluck Features the TechCrunch Feed

Michael Arrington

made TechCrunch a “featured feed” today ( ). For new subscribers (and there have been a bunch – thanks Pluck), we apologize for the slow review day today. We are still recovering from the AlwaysOn conference. Tomorrow’s weekly wrapup will be a great one, though, and we have a ton of great reviews coming up! For those of you looking for the best RSS aggregator on the market, check out Pluck’s new (our ). And (our ), their brand new bookmarking service with the awesome shadow pages functionality was definitely the buzz at AlwaysOn. Thanks Pluck!

Profile – Gataga (its gone)

Michael Arrington

and Just as background, Gataga was a wonderful tool for searching multiple tagging services in one go. enter a tag on the command line, and see results from delicious, furl, flickr, etc… See our profiles above more more information. We just received an email from Vic at Gataga: Just to let you know that we’ve had to take Gataga down for various reasons which I can’t get into now. Thanks for all the help, comments and write ups. We really appreciate it. Vic There’s no additional explanation on their blog. They went right from to Since sites are generally not taken down unless there is legal pressure to do so, our assumption is that Gataga got into some sort of trouble for its service. We do note, however, that Technorati and others have very similar tag searches that show results from other sites. What happened to Gataga?

Profile – Browster

Michael Arrington

Beta in February 2005, Version 1.0 launched today, Browster is a tool, (damn, I just lost half of my readers right there) that pre-fetches content from links on a web page, and makes that content available by mousing-over the link. Too see it visually click . So we dusted off IE (used only for FTP these days), downloaded 334k of stuff and had at it. Browster allows you to browse search results more quickly and with fewer clicks. Browster will also pre-fetch content from non-search sites if you tell it to (there are a couple of easy ways to do this). There is a nice feature to basically scroll through search results quickly by clicking on an arrow. It’s hard to explain but works very well. Browster has CPC advertisements on the top of its window. I don’t mind the ads, but the copyright holders of the content they are showing may. I also wish they would have focused on Firefox before IE…Even though IE still has a very large market share, it seems like most of the cutting edge users are on firefox, or macs. Not having support for those browsers is a serious mistake because your most important customers (bloggers, for instance) won’t use it. Tom Foremski a few hours ago and pointed out a number of very serious flaws (we agree with some, disagree with others). At the end of the day, our only real concerns are those mentioned above (browser support and copyright infringement issues). From a business model perspective, there’s very little that’s viral or sticky about the product. That means ultimately their liquidity event valuation may be based on their technology rather than their network. It’s a great tool and as soon as they support firefox I’ll use it regularly. Scott Milener, CEO and co-Founder Jim Kelly, Vice President, Engineering Steven Lurie, Vice President, Business Development Wendell Brown, Chairman and co-Founder John Zeisler,Member, Board of Directors First Round Capital Wendell Brown, co-Founder and Member, Board of Directors John Zeisler, Venture Partner, Gabriel Ventures Ken Sawyer, Managing Director, Saints Ventures Rick Magnuson, former General Partner, Menlo Ventures Robert Simon, General Partner, Alta Partners

Iconize Me – Online Caricatures for $15

Michael Arrington

will create a hand-drawn caricature of a picture that you supply to them, for $15. . Iconize Me is the creation of and and is based in New York. The service was launched two years ago, but was re-launched recently. They use Adobe Illustrator to draw and color, Adobe Photoshop so make JPEGs and GIFs, and IconFactory IconBuilder Pro to make the icons. In their they state that they’ve created over 1,200 icons. No real technology here, but the design is very, very good. The results are fun to view and the price is right. In fact, the price might be too low. The service seems to be in a perpetual backlog – every time I’ve they are not taking any additional orders. The concept behind Iconize Me! is pretty simple: After sending DV Graphics an order and a photo of yourself, we start off on creating a custom caricature of you (or friend, or relative) based on the photo. The end result is then sent off to you as an icon file (for use on the computer), a GIF file (for use on the internet) and you also have the option of ordering fantastic, high-quality JPEG and PDF files. Using a fairly basic hand drawing and coloring technique that we call Digital Ink, we are able to provide you with an amazingly high-quality portrait. Every inch of every icon is hand drawn and hand colored in vector format. It’s as if you were sitting in front of us and we created your portrait on the spot using natural tools. Unlike our old system, we don’t use the paint bucket tool to simply fill in vast areas of color, using tints and shades. Each color now is mixed and created for each individual spot. We do the best we can to replicate real-life drawing. You can pay an additional fee for high res jpeg and vector pdf files of the caricature. There is a sister service called that costs a little more – $35 – and creates a full “portrait” based on the picture you supply them. Portraits are delivered as vector files, which are endlessly enlargeable without pixelization and can therefore be blown up to any desired size. JD Lasica about Iconize Me way back in 2003. Dan Costa more recently.

Profile – MSN Virtual Earth

Michael Arrington

July 23, 2005 MSN Virtual Earth is an excellent mapping/satellite imagery application. Much like ( ), it is fascinating to look at, and very useful as well. There is no download required (whereas Google Earth has a 10 meg download). In addition to excellent search features, you can autolocate via your IP address (although I am in San Francisco today and it says I am in Seattle based on IP) or via a small download, which works very well. There is also a scratch pad to keep notes (there needs to be a print function added to this though). Mandatory first searches, of course, were of my home in Manhatan Beach and my parents home in Anacortes. The picture quality in MSN Virtual Earth was better than Google Earth, and the picture quality of my parents home in Anacortes was decent, whereas Google had nothing to show for them. Overall, MSN wins in this very limited test: Jeremy Wright posted an excellent review of the service and comparison to Google maps: “At the same time, Virtual Earth is much easier to use from an “exploring�? point of view. Hop off a plane, hit “Locate Me”, look for rental cars, then look for hotels, then look for somewhere to eat and then look for somewhere to catch a show. Boom, your whole day is planned and in your Scratch Pad.�? Check out , on MSN “nuking” Apple’s headquarters. :-) , , , , , , , ( ),

Findory is your Personalized Newspaper

Michael Arrington

I’ve recently become interested in companies that exploit the actions and of users to provide personalized content recommendations. We wrote about efforts in this area earlier this week. is also taking a very creative crack at solving the problem (update on them soon). , which is almost two years old, is a pioneer in this area and has a unique solution. Findory is a personalized newspaper that evolves, quickly, as you click and read. I’ve been trading emails , Findory’s co-founder and CEO, for a few weeks and we finally had a chance to talk at length a couple of days ago. Greg and his co-founder Alex Edelman, spent years at Amazon prior to creating Findory, and gathered extensive experience in recommending new products to Amazon users. Findory works. There is no nead to register, it will know who you are via a cookie. If you do register there are additional benefits to the service. I’ve been using it for a while now and it presents exactly what I want to read (technology) on the home page. They have three silos of information, all personalized – news, blogs and search. Findory looks at your historical clickstream and presents only related information. It evolves real-time as you search, browse, click and read stuff that interests you. Want to add specific feeds that you know you like? Check out their and add them. They also use their personalization algorithm (patent-pending) to present super-relevant google ads on some pages. It’s a simple idea with powerful technology behind it, and can be classified under “it just works”. Read what others have to say . Check it out. Findory just may become my new home page. And in true web 2.0 fashion, all of this was created by – Greg Linden and Alex Edelman

Web 2.0 This Week (Aug 28 – Sept 3)

Michael Arrington

What a week. Yes, I wrote about new companies (and there are some very interesting ones), but every day brought more heartbreaking news about . By late Thursday night, I was reading on and hearing just the opposite from our federal and state leaders. Like others, I just couldn’t focus on writing about new companies, and I took from blogging entirely. The weekend has brought better news – record donations from US citizens, aid is flooding in from most of the world, and more people are being rescued. But there is still a very long way to go before things are back to “normal”. And now the political shit-throwing will start in earnest. If you can, consider or other charity of your choice, and for the bloggers out there, see the where you can put up an image and link for those wishing to donate. I spent the week in Palo Alto. I am moving to the area this month and finding a house to rent took a long time. I did find one, though, in Atherton, and I’ll be moving in on September 12. We’ll be having an open TechCrunch party there sometime in October, and all are welcome (a wiki for the party will come soon and I’ll announce it on the site). I also had some great meetings this week. Keith Teare and I met with at a wonderful she recommended in Palo Alto. I’ll be back there often. We also met with , the creator of . During our talk, walked by and hung out with us for a bit as well. And possibly the most interesting meeting of the week was with Sam Schillace, one of the founders of , an ajax powered online word processor that is getting a ton of buzz. I really think the “Ajax Office” concept is here to stay, and Writely is one of the best early solutions out there. Here’s this week’s summary: (update), , , , , , (update) (I’m surprised this functionality hasn’t gotten more buzz), , , , (update), , , , Chris Sherman at SEW writes a : Many people mistakenly refer to RSS search as “blog search.” While it’s true that many blogs offer RSS feeds (automatic feed creation is a feature of most blogging software), not all blogs have feeds. Furthermore, RSS can literally be used with just about any kind of web-based content. RSS fundamentally is a relatively simple specification that uses XML to organize and format web-based content in a standard way. Fred Wilson about where his readers come from, and reveals some very interesting data on the relative popularity of Email v. RSS feeds. The bottom line is that only about a third of his readers access his content via RSS. The rest come directly to the site, or read his daily emails. Web Page Views in August: ~90,000 Web Visits in August: ~60,000 Web Unique Visitors in August: No Idea, but I’d guess around 10,000 Email Subscribers: 1055 RSS Subscribers: ~5500 And later: The fact is that of the approximately 17,000 people who make up my audience, only a third of them use RSS. And my readers are probably more technical than the average reader (only half use Internet Explorer for example and almost 40% use Firefox). Ajax and other online office type applications are springing up all over the place. Richard MacManus goes to the trouble of finding many of them and writes about them . To be honest, there aren’t any good full-suite solutions yet. is just a web page with a stated intention. has an excellent ajax word processor, but needs to build the rest. How long before the big guys jump in here? The Rails Wiki provides an created with the Ruby on Rails scripting language. Lots of good stuff here. I’m considering it a to-do list. :-) new functionality. I have a source that tells me its coming, and soon. (did I mention I love his blog?) takes a post (and the comments) by (another terrific blog) and comes up with a comprehensive list of mobile RSS readers. Good stuff. I also think the mobile product will be a winner once it’s released since it’s run on the same engine as their other readers…resulting in wonderful post syncronization at last. You can now purchase a built in. How cool is that? Pretty cool.

PocketMod – Type Stuff and Print It

Michael Arrington

I wasn’t going to write about , and I know people are going to give me crap about it, but I keep seeing posts on it and so I finally tried it out. Other than the fact that folding the paper correctly (see screen shot below) is harder than tying a bow tie, there are one or two things I like about it. But I get ahead of myself. For those of you who don’t know, PocketMod is a flash program that allows you to print modules on a piece of paper, so that you can refer to it and take notes on it later. There are calendars, to do lists, tic-tac-toe, etc. You can up up to eight modules on a page and it folds into a nice little book. I do a lot of actual writing during the day to keep organized. At any given time I have 3-4 pieces of paper in my pocket with notes on product ideas, new companies to profile, etc. So I guess I may start to use this. Especially now that I’ve invested so much time in learning how to fold it properly. There isn’t a whole lot else to say about PocketMod. I’ve put the folding instructions below just because I think it’s hilarious that you have to cut and fold the damn thing. This is supposed to be a blog about web 2.0. :-) , , , , ,

Organize Your Stuff With Listal

Michael Arrington

is a very early beta product that allows you to catalog, tag and share your physical media. At this point it is free. While functionality is currently limited (heck, it’s only a few days old), the site clearly anticipates upcoming features and it looks like it can become quite useful. Since there are limited solutions for organizing physical media using your computer, I like where this is going. Once you’ve registered, you can tell it the books, music, movies and games (physical media) you own. There is also a nice ajax interface to tag items and rate them. Your listal stuff is public – ours is at . For now, there is no way to make any part of the list private. Features include: I also want to mention a wonderful and similar product called (Mac-only and not browser-based, you have to download software). In addition to an award winning design, DM also allows users to simply point a digital video camera at any bar code and capture the media information without typing a single thing in. Delicious Monster launched in November 2004 and racked up sales of $250k in its first month (the product is $40). It is also (or was) . If Listal can become as good as Delicious Monster, they’ll have something. , , , (note: works fine on firefox for me), , ,

We're not Blogging Today

Michael Arrington

The Katrina situation is just too horrible. I can’t get passionate about tech when a million people’s homes have been destroyed, there are dead bodies in the streets of New Orleans, our military is pointing their guns at people who just want water, and entire cities have been wiped out. Forget TechCrunch. Read and and, if you can, and donate to the .

Del.icio.us Toolbar Coming

Michael Arrington

This is definitely filed under the rumor category, but two people have separately pointed out to me a (user’s links are posted under the URL del.icio.us/[username]). Fred links to a del.icio.us toolbar Firefox Extension called (see below). In the notes section, he writes “what do we think of this one? i might try it out ” (emphasis added). Fred’s fund, , is an . The link suggests, therefore, that del.icio.us will be coming out with their own toolbar. Now Since Fred knows that many people monitor his delicious links, it makes you wonder if he’s just messing around, and/or is using this as a way to let the market know that the product is coming. Either way, it’ll be a toolbar worth having and I can’t wait until releases it. Lots of other rumors of new delicious features coming soon. I’m under super double secret NDA on those.

Google Wifi to Launch

Michael Arrington

Google will in the near future. Details are slim, but the buzz is growing. It looks like the basic concept is a secure VPN – you sacrifice having Google see everything you do to ensure that other people on whatever wifi network you are on cannot (wifi sniffing is easy and widespread, and many passwords are transmitted without hashing). , and write about this. Google has not publicly commented, but there are a number of links referring to the service on the Google website: Is this web 2.0? Nope. But it’s interesting. And with all of Google’s recent product launches, the idea of becomes, if possible, even funnier. , , , , ,

Web 2.0 This Week (September 11-17)

Michael Arrington

What a week! Skype gets acquired, Google launches RSS search and del.icio.us turns two. Lots of good web 2.0 stuff below. TechCrunch has moved from our offices in Los Angeles to Atherton, right in the heart of silicon valley. We had a and will have another one this Thursday, September 22, from 5 pm to about 10 pm (although last week I had to kick people out at 2 am). It’s an open event with lots of entrepreneurs and VCs attending. Invitation post and wiki will be up no later than Tuesday. But keep you calendars open. , , , (update), (update), (update), , , , (update), , , , , , , , (update), , (update), (update), (update), (update), last week (including earn outs). The eBay analyst call discussing the transaction has been recorded and is available , and the associated power point is . Google launched a to mixed reviews. . turned last week. Congratulations! Yahoo a beta version of last week, which uses ajax to instantly show relevant results based on your search query. Our Profile is . responding to Steve Ballmer’s statements in a article that Microsoft will “win the web”. We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web. Molly writes that Mr. Ballmer’s attitude is “deplorable” and says: The Web belongs to everyone. The Web’s core vision and value is to be platform independent. Microsoft has no right to think it can win a tool that is for the people, of the people, and ultimately – by the people. The comments to her post are great as well. Richard MacManus, who writes the excellent blog, recently started a ZDNet blog called . It’s a must read. His . This has been all over the blogospere this week, but I the first to post it was (borrowing it from the New Yorker). To me, this is a handy reminder not to take ourselves too seriously as bloggers. Woof!

Memeorandum Is Exceptional

Michael Arrington

I’ve been using for about a month (since in August). Gabe Rivera, the creator, gave me a private demo and set up a demo site for me (no longer active). Like , I was hooked immediately. This is a HUGE thing to me. If you are a busy executive and only have five minutes a day to see what the blogs are saying, this is THE PLACE to come to every day. Memeorandum is the result of with tracking blogger conversations about a given topic. Search engine weren’t producing intelligent results, and links from blogs didn’t tell the full story. So like any good entrepreneur, he set out to tackle the problem. And boy did he come up with a compelling solution. It’s one of those sites you just keep coming back to, every day. Memeorandum is a way to track blog conversations relating to or issues (Gabe can and probably will add additional verticals in the future) in a highly effective manner. When you go to the site you see what is being talked about the most in the blogsphere at that moment. The most highly linked articles appear at the top and in bigger font sizes. Less popular items are below. Super-popular items eventually are pushed down as newer popular stuff goes up. Here’s how it works: A post is written. People start to link to it. If enough people link and it becomes very popular, it goes up in the “New Item Finder” area in the top right. If more people link, it will go up in the main area. If a link includes and (substantial text in addition to the link), the linking blog is noted underneath the popular post. All of this is automated, which is the really beautiful part of the service. Memeorandum is very low noise, too. It tracks about 2,000 blogs today – only content from those blogs comes up on the site. Yes, it’s a limitation, but it results in very relevant and high quality results. Gabe will add more quality blogs over time. It sounds complicated, but it is a very useful way to monitor conversations about popular things going on in the blogosphere. Things went crazy last week, for instance, when Google launched its blog search engine. Memeorandum sorted it all out, in near real time (it updates every 5 minutes), and presented the information in a logical way. , , , , ,

JotSpot Live – The Perfect Wiki?

Michael Arrington

, a company, launched today. They’ve created an awesome wiki tool that solves at least two common wiki problems – the specialized markup language and multiple simultaneous users. I love wikis. . They are perfect for group collaboration. But wiki code is different from everything else and while it isn’t difficult, it’s silly to have to use it (note , however, which is a nice wysiwyg editor for wikis). And only one person can edit text at any one time. Jotspot Live solves both of these problems. It also doesn’t require any server software. With a few feature additions (like link and image support) it will be good enough for most people to use. It’s built with Ruby on Rails and uses Ajax to allow dragging and dropping of text around the screen. Add users by adding their email address. The wiki has presence functionality, meaning it shows you who is live on the page at any time. Multiple users can edit text simultaneously. , who is one of the people who built JotSpot Live, writes this about it: I’ve been working on a project at JotSpot that is so incredibly cool, I get excited every time I think about it. It’s called JotSpot Live. JotSpot Live is a real-time wiki interface that allows multiple users to edit the same page at the same time. Calling it “SubEthaEdit for the web” is an oversimplification, but that’s probably the quickest way to wrap your head around the concept. Unlike SubEthaEdit, JotSpot Live doesn’t require any special client software: it’s a web application that runs in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, using nothing but HTML, script, and CSS. It’s not perfect. (who also writes about ) and I are editing a page right now and he’s found a bug that occurs when two users simultaneously edit text. We also noticed that if one person logs off and then back on, two separate versions of the wiki page seem to run and each person only sees themself as “present”. Other problems: Slow load time, no image support, it doesn’t tell you who written or edited text, there is no page delete function and you can’t uninvite people once they are added. However, all of these bugs/feature adds are easily fixed. Fred Oliveira (TechCrunch editor) about problems with wikis and collaborative software in general in July 2005. He identified many of the problems that JotSpot Live addresses. Free for up to five wiki pages per month. Includes advertising. $5/month for up to 15 pages per month. No ads. $20/month for unlimited pages. No ads. There are no restrictions on functionality or number of users. Joe Kraus, co-founder and CEO Graham Spencer, co-founder and CTO Ben Lutch, Vice President, Operations Ken Norton, Vice President, Products , , ,

OPML – An Awesome Experiment

Michael Arrington

We’ve been following the evolution of Dave Winer’s for most of this year ( ). We’ve experimented with it, but never fully understood all of the incredible potential that it has to organize and distribute information.. . We’ve created a directory, in OPML format, of every TechCrunch company profile. Dave has put the TechCrunch directory up on . The directory updates on Scripting News automatically as we update the OPML file. All of our content is therefore available on the Scripting News site. Dave wrote about this last night: There are so many stories that connect together in this one development, I’m going to have to do a podcast to explain (and I will, tomorrow), but in the meantime I wanted to show a rough top-level of the project, and give a brief idea of where it goes. If you look in the right margin, you’ll see a box that lists the top level of an OPML directory being edited by Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch. Each of the items in the directory is an article on TechCrunch. I wanted to include his content in mine because I would point to every review he writes, they’re all on-topic for Scripting News readers. When he makes a change to that directory, the recalcs. When it appears on tomorrow, it will recalc every time I update Scripting News (that page is statically rendered). If you want you can include Mike’s directory in your site, or in your directory through inclusion. It’s a normal OPML file, edited with the OPML Editor. This is, in so many ways, the kind of collaboration I envisioned when I released the OPML Editor. Mike, a lawyer who loves technology, is exactly the kind of person I want to empower with OPML. This is just a start. We’re working on the taxonomy and interface. But this is an interesting experiment in using OPML to solve real-Web problems. If you’d like assistance in working with OPML, please email us and/or check out .

Pluck Expands Product Line

Michael Arrington

( ) is quietly building a very nice suite of web 2.0 products (see as well). They on September 12 – InSite RSS and InSite Blogging. Both products are aimed at online content publishers, particularly online newspapers. Both can generate significant revenue for Pluck, as they charge for these services. Pluck also announced their first customer for these products. I spoke with Dave Panos, the CEO of Pluck, via email about these products and their first customer deal. InSite RSS is a tool to allow sites to integrate RSS feed content directly into their websites, adding significant stickiness to their users. Allows publishers to provide their readers with personalized news services that leverage millions of available RSS feeds. With InSite RSS, portals can deliver a “My News” style offering, giving users control over feed discovery, subscription and consumption. InSite RSS keeps sites on par with major web portals and ensures that all feed source providers are referenced and linked to appropriately. InSite RSS leverages Pluck’s award-winning consumer RSS technology and Pluck’s FeedFinder service for RSS feed discovery. With InSite Blogging, site users/readers can create their own blogs. For sites with a local focus, like online newspapers, this can be a very effective tool for adding stickiness, as well as increasing content creation on local issues. While editorial control can be an issue (as the LA Times found out quite painfully), this can be a way for newspapers with an online presence to stop the customer bleeding they’ve had to suffer over the years. A hosted, managed solution that enables publishers to offer community blogging as part of their web sites. The service allows publishers and web portals to offer readers a fully-featured citizen journalism program complete with photos, community tools, tagging, categorization, management and reporting. Once embedded into a web site, the service opens new sources of content and contextual advertising space while building reader loyalty and page views. InSite Blogging is built on technology Pluck acquired earlier in 2005 from EasyJournal, a third-generation community of hundreds of thousands of active bloggers. Pluck also announced their first customer for Insite Blogging – The Austin American-Statesman, a Cox newspaper and Central Texas’ leading daily newspaper (it basically owns Austin). The blogging sites can be seen and . An example blog (lots have sprung up after only a few days) can be seen (see screen shot also). and also blogs about Pluck’s new products. Congratulations to Pluck. If they can get traction in this space, there is a real revenue opportunity for these products.

TechCrunch MeetUp Tonight

Michael Arrington

We had a TechCrunch BBQ tonight in Atherton, California. It started off as an informal get together but ended up with quite a few web 2.0 entrepreneurs and bloggers. Entertainment included Costco hamburgers and many bottles of good California wine. Attendees included , , , Michael Duran, , , Daniel Gould & Brian Norgard (cool new startup to come soon), Tim Kay, , and others. Discussion ranged from Marx v. Reality to what’s new in Web 2.0. We’re looking forward to doing this every week and inviting more entrepreneurs. Thanks everyone for attending.

Major Overhaul at Loomia

Michael Arrington

David Marks, the CEO of ( ) emailed me last night to tell me about new functionality and a new look and feel at the site. Loomia is an excellent podcasting and videocasting resource. You can subscribe to podcasts, and listen to them via the site or download them to your computer or device. The key value-add is their recommendation engine – you rate media and get recommendations based on your ratings v. ratings by other community members (it works in the same way that Netflix recommends new movies to you). In addition to substantial visual improvements, Loomia has added tagging of media, creating a great new way to find podcasts and videocasts of relevant content. Check out – it’s free and it’s the best resource we know about for finding new podcasting and videocasting content.

FilmLoop Demo Video

Michael Arrington

( ) has a 6 minute video of the founders demo’ing their product on the . It looks pretty slick. And a lot like .

(Just a bit) More on Measure Map

Michael Arrington

We’ve been beta testing , ‘s new blog analytics tool, for a couple of weeks now. We previously wrote about and Heather Green also wrote about it . Measure Map is an extremely useful tool for bloggers. It uses ajax and flash intelligently. Integration is very simple (adding a javascript snippet into the blog template). It provides detailed analytics on every aspect of your blog – how readers get to your site, what they read, whether they comment and what links they use to leave. We can’t post screen shots or feature comparisons yet, but I will say this: tools like Measure Map, , and that track blog analytics are extremely useful. They take a much needed step past existing server log analyzers. Not only are the statistics much more readily available (and real time), but they also provide very granular data on exactly the areas bloggers care about – things like comments, trackbacks, links in and out, etc. The aspect of blogs. Anyway, Measure Map is evolving and stats are erratic this weekend. I realized just how much I’ve grown to rely on it when it wasn’t fully available to me. Kevin Hale has a list of additional analytics services .

Happy Birthday Del.icio.us!

Michael Arrington

Del.icio.us on September 15, 2005. Happy Birthday, and Congratulations Joshua!

Rollyo Search Launches Today

Michael Arrington

, which launched today, allows you to create and publish your own search engines, based on websites you decide to include. and wrote about Rollyo earlier today as well. The basic idea? Create customized searches (built on Yahoo search) that include only those sites you want to include. Search those sites for information that you know you can trust. And, see what other’s have created, and leverage those searches as well. To set up (or “roll”) a search, you are asked to name up to 20 websites, pick a category and tag the search. A search can be public or private – public searches are ranked by popularity and listed on the site. You can also share searches with others directly. Once you search, you can also expand the search out to all websites to get additional results. In their section, Rollyo says: Are you tired of wading though thousands of irrelevant search results to get to the information you want? Ever wish you could narrow your search to sites you already know and trust? With Rollyo, you can easily create your own custom search engines, and explore and save those created by others. Rollyo puts the power of Yahoo! Search in your hands, by giving you the tools to create your own personal search engines – with no programming required. All you have to do is pick the sites you want to search, and we’ll create a custom search engine for you. , Founder + Roll Player Angus Durocher, Engineering + Roll Model , Designer + CSS Jedi , Zen Master User Experience Architect

Flock Evolves, Announces Public Launch

Michael Arrington

If you haven’t heard about yet, check out this and our from August 26, 2005. It is still in private beta, although you can request a beta invitation on their . Not sure of . sent out an email to Flock beta testers yesterday announcing that they are moving from beta 0.2 to 0.5 and making some product changes. Social Bookmarks (they call it “Breadcrumbs”) are being phased out after a lukewarm response from testers, and they will be adding new functionality. They’ve also announced that Flock will be publicly available sometime in October: We’re going to be phasing out our online breadcrumb service and replacing it with a couple more… established options. Oh, and don’t worry, we’ll make sure you can take your existing breadcrumbs with you. So in the meantime, keep posting to our service, but know that we’ll be shutting its doors come November 1. Questions? Just let us know. So back to the next release. Let me first say that we’re all very excited about the ideas we’re baking into Flock 0.5. Second, we’re set to launch something public in October! So between this Friday and then, we’re going to need lots of intrepid testers to pound on our stuff and let us know what works, what’s broken, what you like and what you can’t stand. I must say I’m even more impressed with Flock – it is a very bold move to simply drop functionality that must have hundreds of developer hours behind it. They are obviously serious about listening to beta feedback and building an exceptional product. Chris also pointed to taken by Flocker Lloyd Budd.

Ajax Dictionary – ObjectGraph

Michael Arrington

has a basic dictionary web app with ajax that’s worth mentioning. Type in a term and the results appear as you type each letter. It works much like . There are a number of dictionary options, and a thesaurus. From . Personally, I find this much more useful – but ObjectGraph’s ajax implementation gets them extra points. ObjectGraphs’s and a description of how it works is .

TechCrunch Meetup This Thursday

Michael Arrington

After the success of our in Atherton last Thursday, we’re . About 25 people showed up last week, and we expect quite a few more this week. If you are in the bay area, please join us. The event is being held at our house/office in Atherton. . If you are coming, please add your name to the bottom of the wiki. If you don’t know how to edit a wiki, you can’t come. :-) We’ll be bbq’ing from 5-6:30, and will have plenty of wine, beer and soft drinks throughout the evening. Computers for demo’ing products are avaiable in the living room and in a back office. Fire pit is outside to keep things going late into the evening. If you’re looking to meet other entrepreneurs and VCs, or want to get the buzz started on your startup, this is the place to be (if you aren’t at DEMO, that is).

FilmLoop!

Michael Arrington

is a winner. You can quote me on that. There are obvious similarities with , but FilmLoop is different. (he told me yesterday something cool was launching today), FilmLoop took another step clser to launching, replacing a nondescript “sign up here” page with a full description and demo of their product. Full details can be seen in their . Introducing FilmLoop, a visual communications network that uses client-server architecture to provide direct, real-time, and bi-directional updates to the user’s PC desktop. Strings of images called “loops” move across the desktop screen to tell stories, showcase products, communicate ideas, and build brands. For businesses, FilmLoop is a direct real-time connection to consumers’ desktops. For individuals, it’s a new way to instantly express oneself and share images with friends, family, and colleagues, as well as continually monitor activities such as online auctions and dating postings. Creating and viewing loops requires a client download. Creation looks to be simple – drag and drop pictures and images into your “loop” (I’m assuming they’ll have an API for this as well). You can send your loop to people (I’m thinking it’s an excellent way to share photos among family members). Public loops can also be searched for and subscribed to from the site. And multiple people can add pictures to a loop. And “With a simple click, frames can open to a zoom view, link to video, audio, flash, or directly to “click to buy” or “bid” page on any website. Open to a zoom view, link to video, audio, flash, or directly to “click to buy” or “bid” page on any website.” Obviously there is a business angle here as well. FilmLoop will launch for windows only, with a mac version to be released this year. Kyle Mashima Prescott Lee

70% of TechCrunch Readers use Firefox

Michael Arrington

One of the great features of (profiled and ) is that it gives you real time stats on almost every aspect of your blog. One of the features I like to check out every once in a while is “Browsers your visitors used today”. Today I noticed that 69% of TechCrunch visitors use Firefox, whereas only 16% used Internet Explorer and 14% used Safari. These numbers vary a bit from day to day, but Firefox always has a commanding lead. Measure Map is still in closed beta but has given me permission to post the image below, grabbed earlier today.

Skype Adding Video & Other Features

Michael Arrington

Skype released parts of their product roadmap at VON in Boston last week, and screen shots are up at . Hai, Mark Blue Chinese Brah! Upcoming version 1.5, schedule to be released in October, is to add video and client-side web presence features. Version 1.6, in November, streamlines the client and adds social networking, among other features. Later releases include blog/webmaster tools, PTT, user rewards program, offline IM, shared groups and video mail.

PubSub's List of Most Influential Blogs

Michael Arrington

( ) has been experimenting with blog stats recently (see their page). reported earlier today that PubSub has released it’s newest stats tool – a list of the . The PubSub LinkRanks 1000 is a list of the most consistently influential sites that publish feeds, based on their average LinkRank scores over the past 30 days. To create this list, we’ve averaged the daily LinkRanks of over 16 million sources. We’ve also included a 15-day average as well as each site’s current LinkRank as additional points of comparison. PubSub also says “LinkRanks is PubSub’s method of measuring the strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in over 16 million sources that PubSub monitors.” Robert Scoble says “ ” The lists includes 15 and 30 day trailing data for each blog, current rank and percentile and a link to site stats ( – techcrunch).

Web 2.0 This Week (September 18-24)

Michael Arrington

We had a terrific turnout for our on Thursday and look forward to hosting future events regularly (at least monthly). It is wonderful to have so many smart, obsessive people in one house for an evening – the demos were absolutely fantastic and lots of cross-pollination occured throughout the evening. Thank you again to everyone who and posted . Too much to fit in the summary this week. Stuff that nearly got in: And last week marked a new of course, the first in…well . , , , , , (stats), , , (update), , , , (update), (update). FeedBurner on their blog on September 20, . They are now managing 100,000 feeds and over 4 million people subscribe to those feeds. Our . We congratulate Feedburner on their growth and note that the trend is likely to reflect similar exponential growth in RSS usage across the web. So, congrats to all of us! Tim O’Reilly on Flickr. Result of a “What is Web 2.0?” brainstorming session at FOO Camp 2005. Meme maps adapted from business model maps developed by Beam Inc. As we all struggle with defining Web 2.0, visual cues always help. I’m not as excited about this as others, though. Simple is better. We’re not at simple yet. See , and others on the Meme Map. Venture Capitalist Dan Grossman, who’s young blog is now on my must-read list, describing in detail some of the shortcomings of Ajax. Microsoft announced a last Tuesday. See our detailed discussing why this is important for Web 2.0 (written by TechCrunch editor Keith Teare). finishes a survey of bloggers and publishes the results in two parts: Some of the data is surprising – 34% of respondents read 30 or less feeds, and the average blogging time per week hovers around 3-5 hours. Both of these stats are far less than I would expect. Lots of additional stuff there worth noting. . :-) This site may save more relationships than all of the online dating sites combined manage to start.

Zvents Launches Next Week

Michael Arrington

I had a chance to see a demo of the upcoming Zvents service this evening at the office on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. Mark this one down as an ajax showcase. Zvents is a complete events ecosystem, with search, event creation, calendaring, sharing and blogging/webmaster tools (lots of ajax here) for promotion of events and calendars. It looks similar in many respects to (now ), although the search functionality is clearly a generation further along and it certainly is a very good looking site. zvents opens up next week and will be launching at the Web 2.0 Conference. Peter Caputa , including eventful and zvents, on PC4Media. Tyler Kovacs Tom Hill Ethan Stock Matt Melmon Paul Martino Allie Williams Tim Harrah Chris Serrano Chris Law Diane Barrera

TailRank – A Tool for the Long Tail

Michael Arrington

just released an alpha product for their new analytics service. My understanding is that it is a personalized search/recommendation/ranking engine for the long tail of blog content. Kevin Burton (co-founder of ), is TailRank’s founder and writes about the launch on his (subscribe to this blog if you haven’t). TailRank is a next-generation weblog ranking system which takes into consideration a lot of lessons learned from other Web 2.0 products and services. Needless to say I’m really excited! I love my job and there’s a lot of innovation in this space right now. We’re still in early alpha development mode and still building out a team. Things are going well and everyone I’ve pitched seems really excited. I hope to have a public release in a few weeks but feel free to register for a beta account and we’ll send you out something as soon as possible. I’ll obviously be talking about TailRank a lot on my blog in the coming weeks so feel free to subscribe. Kevin will be demo’ing the product at the tomorrow.

VideoEgg Launches

Michael Arrington

, founded by three Yale graduates, launched at in Huntington Beach, CA on Monday. Given the light content on their website, my bet is that the folks at VideoEgg have been working quite hard over the last few weeks to get the product ready for release. VideoEgg is a web-based publishing service that allows users to capture video content from virtually any device and format and publish it to the web. Click for an example featuring . At first glance, VideoEgg has some really excellent features. A is available on their site, and allows you to drag a video into the viewer to get a taste for how easy it is to use. allows the viewing of videos with enhanced quality. From their : Today, VideoEgg, Inc. unveiled the VideoEgg Publisher, a new Web-based video publishing technology that makes it easy for everyday Internet users to capture, encode, upload, and watch online video for the first time. A ‘universal adapter’ that captures directly from hundreds of devices and reads dozens of formats, the VideoEgg Publisher allows users to painlessly publish video that anyone can watch without worrying about player compatibilities, encoding settings, or extra software. VideoEgg announced the Publisher at the DEMOfall 2005 Conference, the invitation only, leading industry showcase for launching innovative technology products. Currently, posting video online is complicated for users, requiring a highly technical understanding of formats, encoders, players and servers. The VideoEgg Publisher simplifies the difficult video encoding and posting process, allowing users to capture video directly into a Website from camcorders, Web cams, and mobile phones. It also accepts video files via a simple drag-and-drop interface. Before movies are encoded and posted, users can perform basic edits with the Publisher’s simple editing tools. Using this system, videos are immediately available for viewing online through the Flash-based VideoEgg Player, a “playerless” solution that does not require external players like Windows Media and QuickTime. Lots of interesting information about the service above…and the last paragraph is really interesting. Publishers can easily integrate content directly on their website by simply adding a html snippet. This is something I really like about VideoEgg – it appears that they are really focused on making their product as easy as possible to use. I’ve downloaded their software (which seems to be off the site now) and am digging through a box for my video camera. I’m hoping to get some good content up and indexed on . , (interview with the founders), ,

More SearchFox Beta Invitations Available

Michael Arrington

( ) just the availablility of additional invitations to their beta. If you’d like an invitation to try it out, email “support at searchfox dot com” with your preferred username, and reference code xb17. As you may have read in our , we believe they have created a potentially disruptive product in the RSS Aggregator/Reader space. It’s worth testing out if you are interested in how the attention idea can help push relevant content to you.

Update: TechCrunch Meetup Tomorrow

Michael Arrington

for the this Thursday, September 22, are starting to roll in. If you are coming, please remember to sign in at the . If you’d like to give a private or public demo, please note that as well on the wiki. See you tomorrow!

Truveo – Video Search

Michael Arrington

is a video search engine that beta-launched a few days ago. Jeff Clavier, an investor, . If you are looking for video content, this is the place to go. Founded two years ago by a seriously of search experts, Truveo is tackling the very difficult problem of creating metadata from video out of whole cloth – unlike text-based content, it is very difficult to determine context of video and audio content without a human to actually view it (which is error prone and doesn’t scale). Truveo takes an innvoative two step approach to indexing new content. The first step is a straight web crawl to find the videos. The second, more important step, is to create metadata about the content, beyond what is available in transcripts and feeds (most video content has neither). They’ve created a “ ” that looks at surrounding content to determine context. Finding all the video files on the web is only part of the challenge. For video to be searchable, it is also necessary to collect meaningful text metadata to associate with each video file. Of course, we rely on standard techniques, such as mining closed-caption transcripts and importing RSS feeds. The vast majority of video on the web, however, does not have any closed-caption or RSS metadata available. Fortunately, our visual crawlers come to the rescue. Whenever our visual crawlers find a new video on the web, they can also “visually” examine the context of the surrounding web application. In most cases, this examination reveals a bounty of rich and detailed metadata related to every video. With our unique approach to crawling, not only can we find the videos that the other crawlers miss, but we can also collect rich and relevant metadata for each video. As a result, when you search for video with Truveo, you can always find high-quality, relevant search results. The next time you are looking for a web video to watch, we invite you to try our search engine and see for yourself. The best thing is, this stuff actually works. Try searches for and . There are options and that will assist users in finding relevant content. Sadly, the “adult filter” is turned on by default. :-) You can also filter out paid content. The only thing I’d like to see added is RSS feeds for search. Dr. Timothy Tuttle – CEO & Founder Dr. Adam Beguelin – CTO & Founder Dr. Pete Kocks – Senior Architect

85% of College Students use FaceBook

Michael Arrington

February 4, 2004 Funded by and 32 in Palo Alto, 4 in Boston Palo Alto I’ve long been intrigued by , the fantastically popular social network site for college and university students. FaceBook raised about $500,000 from Peter Thiel in an angel round, and $12.2 million from Accel Partners in April 2005 (at a rumored valuation of around $100 million). I’ve read that describe a vibrant and growing social network, but lamented that I simply could not get in to it! To get past the login page you need a valid .edu college/university email address, and I am not a college student. More news came out last Friday, September 2. FaceBook high school students to join the network, significantly increasing their target market. I emailed FaceBook over the weekend and requested an interview. Chris Hughes wrote back and said he’d be delighted. We spoke today. And Chris, great guy that he is, gave me access to the site via a demo account. I was finally able to see what FaceBook was all about. By the way, the screen shot above is the demo account profile. The Kramer picture is a nice touch, I think. This will be a longer than normal post since most of us can’t simply try the service out for ourselves. I’ve organized my notes under the subjects of “membership,” “functionality,” and “business model”. To become a college member of facebook you must have a .edu college/university email address. Most colleges issue these to students. Facebook supports 882 colleges today – there are about 2,000 in the U.S. if you count community colleges. Their goal is to support all of these over time. The penetration rate is staggering – about 85% of students in supported colleges have a profile up on FaceBook. . Chris tells me that 60% log in . About 85% log in at least once a week, and 93% log in at least once a month. With the addition of high schools – there are approximately 22,000 in the U.S., Facebook’s target market increases substantially. Chris tells me “tens of thousands” of high school students have joined since the functionality was launched last friday. Becoming a member as a high school student is a bit easier. High schools generally do not issue email addresses, and so there is no requirement for an active .edu email account. Current high school members can invite others. Once you start college, you have the opportunity to change the account over to whatever school you attend. Also, Chris tells me that recent alums (who can remain members) are maintaining the same log in rates as current members. The demo account profile can be . In addition to basic personal information, users are encouraged to add additional descriptive information about themselves to build out their identity. Users can add favorite music, books, movies, quotes, etc. Every entry is linked to search results where users can see others who share the same interests. Users can also form and/or join groups. Examples are political and social groups. However, about 80% are “fun” related, such as “I love NY”. Additional functionality includes events (party notices, etc.) and messages (email). Users can interact in a number of ways. You can add friends (must be mutually accepted), and you can also “poke” another member, which is a way of saying “hello”. The biggest use of the site appears to be dating…as you can see from this very funny independent that I found on FaceBook. It’s long, but I highly recommend it if you are trying to get a feel for the service. FaceBook has three methods of producing revenue. Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, CEO Sean Parker – President Dustin Moskovitz Andrew McCollum Chris Hughes

Feedburner Releases Important Stats

Michael Arrington

released on their service yesterday. If you are unfamiliar with Feedburner, check out our original . The graphs show total feeds managed by feedburner and total subscribers to those feeds. Both show hockey-stick like growth that looks similar to data released by Technorati (see item no. 2 in a past ). I believe that these stats are very relevant to the blogospere in general. We are in a steadily increasing tide, that is increasing at an increasing rate. All boats are rising. Feedburner now manages about 100,000 feeds and about 4.3 million people subscribe to those feeds. The growth rates are obvious: notes that the number of feed subscribers is doubling approximately every 60 days. What I’d like to know is what percentage pay the $5 per month for the Pro product. If it’s around 5% (that’s my guess), then FeedBurner revenues (not including advertising) would be about $300,000 or so annualized. The only thing left to ask is, do you have ? I do. We’ve previously written about Feedburner on , , and .

Feedster loses CEO, gains Investor

Michael Arrington

Big news at . Mitsui & Co., Ltd. made an (size undisclosed) in Feedster today. “We are pleased to have Mitsui as an investor,” says Chris Redlitz, Feedster’s Vice President, Sales and Marketing. “Feedster is already a market leader in blog search and content syndication. With this investment we continue to distance ourselves from the field and prepare for global expansion.” The Feedster PR quote was from Chris Redlitz, VP Sales & Marketing, not Scott Rafer, the CEO. That should have given everyone a clue as to the next piece of news, which followed a couple of hours later. Scott is and the Feedster board is searching for his replacement. Scott is not wasting any time in starting something new – he became chairman of startup today. Scott, you created one of the founding pillars of web 2.0 and we salute you. Good luck with your travels and your new venture. No news on the from yesterday.

FeedBurner's New Design

Michael Arrington

Last week, announced a of their site. I didn’t post on it right away because the basic stats functionality remains the same. People are with the change. And I have to say FeedBurner is one of my favorite tools – without it I would have a very difficult time understanding how much of our traffic was coming through our RSS feed. Overall, however, though I don’t think the redesign was a success. I am finding that I am clicking (and waiting) much more often than I was previously to find the stats I care about (24 hour recap and item readership stats). Too much information is available only through secondary pages. A better information architecture would make that information more readily available. I also think the site is a full generation behind the state of the art – adding ajax would speed things up somewhat and significantly reduce necessary clicks and refreshes. Some of the applications I am beta testing quite frankly make FeedBurner look very bad in comparison. has additional thoughts as well. I am a big fan of FeedBurner, so take this criticism very lightly. 99% of what they do, they do extremely well, and frankly that is (mostly) all that matters. We’ve written previously about FeedBurner on , and .

CustomScoop Offers Advanced Prospective Search

Michael Arrington

What I like best about ‘s new prospective search/press clippings product is that it is dead simple to use. I spoke to , CustomScoop’s Chief Innovation Officer and founder, tonight about his new service. Steve Rubel has been testing CustomScoop and . CustomScoop has had a for five years. ranges from $300 – $1,500 per month and includes lots of bells and whistles. The CustomScoop Personal product strips out many of those features and enters the market with a free version (allowing one search per account), with a paid version coming soon that allows more searches – the fee will be “substantially less” than the prices charged for their core high end offerings. CustomScoop is more more, and less, than existing prospective search engines like . More because they monitor sites not covered by existing prospective search engines (including pages without feeds) and because they offer much more tailored searches (language and country filters, more keyword inclusion/exclusion functionality, etc. Less because they search only 25,000 blogs, whereas blog search engines generally hit the entire blogosphere (tens of millions of blogs). However, CustomScoop, like ( ), carefully chooses what they consider to be the most important blogs that will supply their customers with pertinent information. In addition to the 25,000 blogs, CustomScoop also monitors U.S. Online News (5,000 sources), International Online News (2,000 sources), US & EU Government Web Sites (7,000 sources) and Policy Web Sites (1,200 sources). Search results, as they come in, can be viewed via RSS, twice daily emails or on the CustomScoop website. They’ve snuck in some nice ajax to speed up the review of large result sets.

Top Ten Things You Can Do To Get Blogged

Michael Arrington

Our primary goal here at TechCrunch is to profile new web 2.0 companies. Finding and experiencing what new companies have to offer is exciting for us. It what gets us up in the morning. We are honestly deeply passionate about this stuff. Usually, the passion, drive and intelligence of the creators is reflected in the company or product they create. And even if a product is very young and/or doesn’t necessarily have a high chance for commercial success, there are usually features that carry our mutual thinking on web 2.0 further along. We try very hard to dig for those forward-thinking features and highlight them on this site. Doing one thing in a spectacular and inspiring fashion and nine things stupidly is far, far better than doing ten things “well”. “Well” is boring. We find new companies primarily in three ways. First, we scour hundreds of blog and news feeds daily to see what’s new. Second, we get a number of tips (often anonymously) about new stuff – usually these are the most interesting new products. The third way is a direct request from the company itself. We receive on average 5-10 email requests a day to be profiled. Usually we’ll write about one of these, meaning if a company sends in an email request to be profiled, they have a 10-20% chance of getting up on the site. This is not a hard rule but more of an observation. I believe that if more companies approached us differently, a much higher percentage would be blogged. I’ve decided to humbly submit my advice on how to approach us in requesting a profile – I think this advice will work well with other bloggers as well. You can also use your blog to promote bloggers who write about you. Other bloggers will see this and want to write about you too. In this new world, links are currency. Links grant authority. Links build branding. Links equal value. If you don’t have a blog, you don’t even have a wallet, let alone currency. Having a blog gives you a tangible way to say thank you” to bloggers who write about you. Encourage your employees to blog too. Go easy on the blogging policy in the early days. If someone just won’t write about you, move on to another blogger. Don’t heckle them. If someone does write about you and you don’t like what they say, deal with it by sending an email or leaving a clarifying comment. Don’t attack. Other bloggers will see it and avoid you like the plague. It’s hard to determine tone in a written blurb. Bloggers easily take offense. Think twice before you post something that can be taken the wrong way, and be very quick to apologize if you screw up. Don’t try to explain yourself – just apologize. If you are going to say something nasty or controversial, do it via email, not in a public comment. One example of this came up today. 9rules network has been adding blogs to their network and people have been writing about them. doesn’t like the fact that people sometimes refer to 9rules as 9Rules (capital R), and Mike Rundle an arguably condescending post about it today on the 9rules blog that said: Since our company/service/network is getting links from everywhere nowadays, I wanted to quickly clear up some confusion regarding the name of what it is we’re doing. The company is “9rules, Inc.” and the network is “The 9rules Network” or just “9rules.” These capital R’s dropped everywhere are making our CEO cry in public, and believe me, that’s not pretty. Lowercase r’s are where its at. Uppercase is for suckers :) The post was picked up by and and 9rules has been roundly trashed in comments. Bad idea. Don’t do stuff like this. Once you have done it, apologize immediately and sincerely. I won’t even bring up the thing. Perfect example of how poor/hasty communication can hurt a company. Like I said, bloggers are touchy and I’m a blogger. The company handled this the right way and in the end everything was fine. Please comment and tell me what I’ve missed.

Goowy adds Calendar and Other Features

Michael Arrington

is a browser based desktop tool built on Flash. See our for additional information. Until recently, Goowy’s main draw (other than it is extremely fast) was a very nice email application. Goowy also allows access of your regular email account in the Goowy UI via pop. Goowy has launched new applications on their flash platform. The two key new beta products are a calendar and a basic RSS reader. The calendar application is tightly connected to email, and the feature base is as good as most ajax calendars we’ve reviewed. With these additions the suite of products is now becoming much more useful. In the near future Goowy will also be creating a virtual file storage product and allowing email pop into and out of Goowy. Virtual file storage will have an optional desktop application allowing for simple drag and drop access of files into Goowy. They’ve also made the strategic decision to open their API to developers for the creation of new desktop widgets. Pop email access (in and out), email and file storage beyond 100 mb to the 2 gb range and other Goowy premium products will be priced at around $20 per year. The core products will remain free

The Ugly (but necessary?) side of Wikipedia

Michael Arrington

As before, I like a lot. I link to it often. And it’s getting : : “The Wikipedia, which has surged this year to become the most popular reference site on the Web, is fast overtaking several major news sites as the place where people swarm for context on breaking events.” (Steve Rubel on a Reuters article) But the free and open editing system can be ugly at times, and tonight I saw something ugly. I saw the movie today and really enjoyed learning more about Ray Charles’ life. After the movie I sat down at my laptop and looked him up on Wikipedia (and fired up the iPod to listen to more of his music). The Wikipedia entry is quite good, informative and interesting. But as I read further, I saw the following: Note the last word in the image above – possibly the most vile and hateful word in our language. Since anyone, ANYONE, can edit wikipedia (I’ve written entries myself), there are no real-time controls on this kind of abuse. It’s the beauty of Wikipedia, and its most often heard criticism. My first question is, how can someone smart enough to use a computer and edit a wiki be so ignorant as to write something so horrible? My second question is, what, if anything, can Wikipedia do to stop these kinds of things from happening and yet retain the complete editorial openness that they have today? Wikipedia that they will be experimenting with new editorial rules to stop things like this. Maybe this will help. I think one thing they should consider is a simple dictionary filter of questionable words…and freeze those edits until someone can review them. Character recognition technology is advanced enough now that this will work for words in images too. Some good news – the entry was amended and the word removed in the time it took me to write this post (I just checked). Good. Maybe I just came accross it during the few minutes (I hope) that it was up on the site.

Free Wiki Solutions

Michael Arrington

I’ve come accross a couple of free Wiki solutions lately and thought I’d post them here. Check out and if you’re looking for a bare bones and free Wiki solution. PBwiki also has very nice privacy features, so you can make a wiki public or private, and turn on or off editing credentials for individuals.

WSFinder – A Wiki for open APIs

Michael Arrington

is a wiki that provides information on existing open APIs and web services. It launched and badly needs a logo. :-) Chris Law, one of the early employees of and creator of WSFinder, : I’ve been scouring the web for some time trying to compile an initial list of APIs that people could use to create applications with and now that we’re up to over 80. I think it’s pretty cool. It’s our hope that you find this resource useful and that it inspires you to create some cool applications using these Web Services. Please let us know once you do create them and we’ll add them to the examples pages. Or just add to the wiki yourself! We also hope that this effort will encourage more companies and developers will open up their APIs and let other people have access to them. We’ve seen many examples of great new things that have been created using open APIs that no one would have anticipated before. A burst of cool new services is emerging and we want to help accelerate that process. This blog is going to be used to talk about what is going with the WSFinder Wiki as well as interesting thoughts we have on Web 2.0 and Web Services in general. Drop us a line and let us know what you think! I’m at chrislaw(at)gmail(dot)com You can get back to the WSFinder Wiki here at http://www.wsfinder.com Chris I love Wikis and the things people do with them. Examples are everywhere, and (this one for ICANN) are popping up constantly. WSFinder will be particularly interesting for those of us who are building new companies and want a single resource for APIs to assist with mashups.

Technorati Releases Major New Feature

Michael Arrington

Dave Sifry the this evening. Derek Powazek at Technorati also posts on Blog Finder . What is it? It’s a ranked list of blogs. By Tag. David Powazek calls it “a mini Top 100 for any topic you can imagine”. Here’s . Here’s . Here’s . How good is it? I think it has some problems. Tags are publisher created and so publishers will add a lot of them, and will have an incentive to push the envelope on what is considered an appropriate tag for their blog. I believe, for instance, that I could make TechCrunch a very popular cooking site simply by adding the tag “cooking” to the TechCrunch blog. There are three ways tags are added. Technorati has already tagged “over 2 million blogs” according to Sifry, and that appears to be accurate. The other two way tags are added are via publisher tools (note the text below is tailored to add a “web2.0” tag): Get in here! To add your blog to this page, and add “web2.0” to your blog tags, or put on your site. Technorati did do a pretty good job of selecting tags that describe Techcrunch, however. There are definitely some changes I’d make, but it’s a good start. The Blog Finder is available as the third tab on . At first glance, I actually think I prefer the Rojo approach in this case. Rojo’s lists use tags that readers have used to describe individual posts that a blog has published. See our profile update here for . I do, however, believe that lists, if they are useful, must be subject based. This is an interesting experiment in solving this problem. Previous Technorati Posts by TechCrunch: , , and

Kiko – a Screenshot

Michael Arrington

Kiko (see our ), an ajax calendar application, is working now and we were able to grab a screenshot. First impression: Kiko is a usable calendaring application with nice sharing features. Try it.

Kiko – Ajax + Calendar

Michael Arrington

Online calendar solutions are launching quite regularly now – see and for examples. But while Trumba is charging $40 a year, and Hula is an open source project, not an application that we can just use, seems to be free, simple to use, and ajax based. At least, I can’t find anything on the site referring to a fee. I haven’t been able to test the product because when I try to create a user account a I get an error, and the demo link on the home page doesn’t seem to work. Since they launched only yesterday, perhaps they are getting a bit more traffic than they expected. When it’s working and/or I’ve had a chance to talk to the , I’ll write a full review. For now, Kiko promises to work like a “native application” – click, drag, drop, etc., and to put everything you need on a single page dashboard. They also promise future functionality that includes import/export functionality to iCal and Outlook, and mobile versions. also wrote about Kiko. Thanks for Ivan Pope at for emailing me about this.

Feedster to Release new Feature?

Michael Arrington

Somebody pointed out to me today that Tony Guntharp, a senior software engineer at Feedster (previous ), this on his blog today: So I’ve been busting my ass the past few weeks getting ready for a new feature launch for work. I’ll post more updates more frequently after the 6th including screenshots and thoughts from World of Warcraft. Could be nothing, could be something. Email to Tony went unanswered, although it’s only been a few hours. This could also be about World of Warcraft – the post isn’t totally clear. Nothing on as of 9 pm PST on 9/6/05.

Fooky Tests AI Search

Michael Arrington

Ed Dunn has been developing since 1999. While it’s currently in private beta, I’ve had the opportunity to swap emails with Ed and check out the service in its current form. There is definitely something interesting about the service, and it will be worth checking out once it goes live. For now, you can view low quality screen shots on the home page and view a that includes additional information. The uniqueness of Fooky lies in its approach to artificial intelligence and natural language commands, as well as a clean interface: Fooky.com uses a single textbox interface as its primary input source. Users can input phrases, commands or conversation to process information. Fooky do not prefer Boolean text searches, opting to search keywords separated by comma to get actually what is requested. Users can also enter direct commands such as “get stock quote for S” or “get traffic for Chicago” to go directly to rich content, not hyperlinks. Also users can enjoy conversation with Fooky.com by simply typing in “hello” or “how are you” in the textbox interface. As more users have conversation with Fooky.com, it will get smarter and able to launch the secret “Artificial Friend” service once a threshold is met. Fooky.com uses multiple spiders and in-house processors to locate and filter web sites for quality and relevance. Fooky.com is one of the few destination sites that consider the quality of the web sites indexed seriously. Our spiders are able to read web code and determine if the site is using tactics designed to hijack the browser settings or download code without user knowledge. Fooky.com use a scoring system based on various factors including the presentation of the site home page, the web site operator credibility as a business or organization and use of code or techniques such as pop-up or pop-under pages. Web site operators will find Fooky.com use of their web site Meta tags more practical, cost efficient and beneficial to their business than bidding for generic keywords. By embracing Meta tag usage, web site operators are empowered to control their Meta information and search criteria on their terms. Fooky.com is able to embrace Meta tags by its quality inclusion policy that believes quality web sites provide quality Meta information that can be trusted. Ed is also thinking ahead to the mobile market and the need for simple text and voice input mechanisms: I believe people will appreciate how easier and practical it is to query and retrieve content. Fooky.com is also designed to move beyond the desktop with ease. Our phrase-based model makes it easier for mobile devices. On a mobile phone for example, it is easier to key in a command “get showtimes for 60618″ than click down levels of theatre related hyperlinks. When the automotive industry get wired, Fooky.com can seamlessly allow voice recognition to process phrase-based commands such as “get traffic for Chicago” It’s too early to point the thumb up or down for Fooky, but we look forward to seeing the live service. In the meantime, I highly recommend running the in 4-5 browser windows simultaneously. The music is cool, and you can get an awesome beat going when it overlaps with itself. :-)

Remote Control Mail is a Great Idea

Michael Arrington

: Closing Angel Round Portland, OR (development also in Russia) will provide you with a permanent (snail) mail address, gather all of your incoming mail, scan (the outside), notify you of its existence (with the outside scan), scan the inside if you like (for a fee), and then either forward it to you or shred it, on your command. You can sign up now for RCM. The service will begin working in a couple of weeks. Who would want this? Anyone who moves a lot or maintains multiple residences. Businesses that need a physical mailing presence in another city. People who are concernced about identity theft (everyone should be). Or people who just want more cyber-control over their real world mail. I spoke with the founder and CEO, Ron Wiener, today about RemoteControlMail’s launch a few days ago and got a better understanding of the service. Dealing with real, actual (snail) mail isn’t very much fun. An endless and prodigious trail of junk mail comes through our mailbox (and incidentally, only of it is ultimately recycled). As a country we get over 200 billion pieces of mail a year. is the first company to try to solve this problem for us by virtualizing our real-world mail box. Once you register, Remote Control Mail assigns you a permanent mailing address and you can then redirect all or some of your incoming mail to that address. Upon receiving a piece of mail, RCM will scan the outside of the package or envelope and notify you of its existence via email or through the RCM website. You can choose to have the inside of the package scanned, and then either have the item forwarded to you (singly or grouped with other mail), or shredded and recycled. An example of your RCM mailbox: John Smith RCM# 1234 14525 SW Millikan Way Beaverton, OR 97005 Basic pricing is $2.50 per month + $.10 per mail piece and $0.95 per package. RCM charges extra fees for forwarding, scanning ($10.-$.20 per page), shredding ($0.1 per ounce) and archiving. Ron Wiener, Founder, Chairman and CEO Michael Miles, P.E., Director of Automation Technology Brett Prochaska, Director of Software Development Len A. Bayles, Chief Utility Player – Engineering David L. Richardson, Director of Operations Jeff Evans, Director of Marketing

Successful Meetup Last Night

Michael Arrington

Thank you to our meetup/bbq last night in Atherton. We are definitely going to do this at least monthly, and we had a number of offers for corporate sponsorships last night to cover food, drinks, etc. in the future. If you have any pictures from last night, please upload them to the (or place a link to buzznet or flickr or wherever you’ve posted them). Also, I see posts by , , , , , , , and on the meetup. Thanks for writing! Tara is also tagging her flickr pictures of the event with the tag “techcrunchbbq”. Good idea. I’ll do the same. Pictures: .

SoloSub takes a step towards fixing RSS

Michael Arrington

allows sites with RSS to point to a single URL and allow the reader to then decide which RSS reader they want to use. Example is . RSS feeds today are a pain – you either need to include tons of subscription buttons to make it easier on people who don’t fully understand what the “XML” button means, or rely on autodiscovery of feeds, which seems to break as often as it works. I spend a lot of time with aggregators requesting that they re-cache the feeds on TechCrunch, and it is still an ongoing project. SoloSub is a step in the right direction. It adds a step to the process of subscribing to a feed (users click on the solosub icon and then choose their reader), but the extra step is worth it. SoloSub currently supports Bloglines, My Yahoo, NewsGator and Rojo. Lots of good readers need to be added. RSS Compendium Blog also about SoloSub.

Yahoo Releases Instant Search

Michael Arrington

Yahoo last night (more info on this ). Like and , Yahoo has added ajax functionality to search. It’s different, though. Google Suggest and Snap use ajax to suggest search queries based on what you’ve typed in so far, whereas Yahoo has integrated basic search results into the interface. This means you can get answers to simple and popular searches (like weather) without a page refresh. . Yahoo suggests queries such as “Boston Weather” and “Wikipedia”. This type of search gives good results. And Yahoo takes a small swipe at Google by saying ““Why feel lucky when you can be right”, a reference to Google’s button. says “Meeeeyowww, the claws are out….” :-) , , , ,

Zimbra – Web/Ajax Based Outlook

Michael Arrington

We saw that really well done Ajax web applications like can to the future of the computing and the place that web 2.0 has in that future. When you first view the demo you may have a similar experience. Zimbra is, basically, a web based outlook/iCal/Thunderbird application in the same way that Writely is a web based version of Word. At Zimbra, our goal is to make e-mail, calendar, contacts and other communications technologies the best they can be. We believe that by opening the technology to the community we will insure that we can maximize innovation, scale and the ability to co-exist with existing messaging systems. There are some core differences between how Zimbra and Writely approach their respective markets, however. Writely is a proprietary, hosted application (although they import and export in Word and other formats). Zimbra is an open source project, and is presented only in demo form at this point – if you want to run it you have to do so on your own servers. So while Zimbra is not something you can immediately start using, you can view a hosted demo and a flash demo . The source code is available on the download page . Zimbra also integrates tagging of messages. It’s very impressive and quite beautiful. (thank for the tip, Brian), , , , , ,

Skype sells to eBay for $4.1 Billion

Michael Arrington

eBay the acquisition of ( ) for $4.1 billion today. $2.6 billion is being paid up front – half cash and half eBay shares. Another $1.5 billion will be paid in 2008 or later based on performance goals. Skype has 50 million registered users and about $7 million in revenue last year. This year’s revenue is projected to be $60 million. Jeff Clavier has an of the deal.

People Need to be fired at Juicy Fruit

Michael Arrington

If you take everything good about blogging and web 2.0 and chuck it out the window, and then add back in everything that is wrong with traditional marketing, you’d end up with the . I agree with – it’s a train wreck. I am posting about it here because companies need to be ridiculed for creating crap like this. Juicy Fruit’s entire marketing department should be taken outside and beaten for spending shareholder money in this way.

SearchFox – Personalized RSS Reader

Michael Arrington

is in private beta testing of a potentially disruptive RSS reader. It’s the first product I’ve seen that does a good job of prioritizing new content from feeds based on your historical reading behavior, as well as data gathered from the SearchFox community as a whole. This is a very big problem that I’ve written about many times. RSS readers are great for sorting through content, up to a point – after a couple of hundred feeds there is simply too much information to go through quickly. Companies are now trying to tackle the problems faced by the power users – those reading hundreds of feeds daily, in the hope that in solving their problems they will create a product that addresses the needs of the masses as well. Since they are in private beta, you’ll need to request an invitation to try the product out now. Esteban Kozak at Search Fox tells me they still have a few left, but they have almost invited the quota. There are a number of preset feeds when you log in for the first time, which I promptly deleted. Adding new feeds was fairly simple – no problems with adding feeds one at a time. Although there is functionality to import an opml file (the standard file format for RSS feeds), I was not able to successfully import my file. I’ll be trying again and it may be an issue on my end. I’ve only been using it for a couple of days, but I am already seeing how the prioritization works and I’m fairly happy with the decisions it is making. Estaban tells me via email that after a couple of weeks of use the results will be even better: Our RSS reader learns by watching what individuals and the entire community find interesting, taking into account various inputs such as source, author, and topic of the an RSS entry. Existing RSS readers only show information chronologically, which quickly leads to information overload. Our goal is to that you see what’s interesting to you on the first page, rather than on the 20th page. Initial studies show that our personalization engine surfaces 50% of the interesting posts to the first page after a week of use, and reaches the 90% level after two weeks of use. Search Fox also has a nice interface – inlcuding easy links to save, mark as read, email link, and delete. One of my favorite features is the ability to expand or contract a post without a page refresh. Robert Scoble about Search Fox last week, and mentioned them briefly as well. You should also check out TechBlog, which does an of a number of web based readers, including Search Fox. The Search Fox blog is . and others are talking about releasing products in this space. Search Fox may be ahead of them.

Meebo – Instant Messaging with Ajax

Michael Arrington

Meebo, an ajax-rich web-based instant messenger application, launched today. It’s elegant and useful. There are a number of problems with instant messaging. First, most of us have too many client applications to run at one time (skype, msn, AOL, Yahoo, Google Talk, Meetro, etc…) (solutions like Trillian attempt to solve this). Second, if you are away from your base computer, you may not be able to access the software needed to run IM. Meebo solves this by allowing you to log into AOL, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo instant messaging services from their web page. Since Meebo uses ajax, you can drag and drop the message boxes around the screen. And the core functionality (making IM more useful and easy to use) is quite nice. There are things that they can improve on – support for emoticons is the first to come to mind. One problem that they can’t overcome, but which users should be aware of, is that Meebo is taking (and can store) your IM usernames and password. Any Meebo employee (and hacker) with database access could obtain these credentials and use or change them. Something to be aware of. Also, Meebo should be supporting Jabber even in this public alpha product. Jabber is an open protocol and should therefore be the easiest service to implement. By supporting Jabber, Meebo would allow you to access Google Talk ( ) as well. This was pointed out in a comment by on an post on Meebo earlier today. For additional information, see the Meebo page and . Elaine Wherry – the Ajax guru Sandy Jen – Server side programming Seth Sternberg – jack of everything else , , ,

Attensa Adds Tagging

Michael Arrington

, which we , has of its feed reader for Outlook. The main new feature in the release is support for tagging of feeds, blogs and posts: We’ve integrated an incredibly easy way to tag articles and feeds using the Attensa Toolbar for Internet Explorer. Tags are simply keywords you add to add context to RSS feeds, articles, Web pages, blog posts, photos, even music you discover online. The new tagging feature can be used in Attensa to keep feeds and articles organized but it also works with Del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a great way to keep track of anything that captures your attention on the Web and to share those things with people with similar interests. When you set up your bookmark page on Del.icio.us, not only can you see the pages you’ve you tagged, you can also see related articles from other people who tagged the same pages or used the same tags as you have. Since every Del.icio.us page has an RSS feed, you can also subscribe to feeds based on a given subject, user, URL, or tag. It’s a pure attention stream that you can explore. You can add tags to articles and access them using a pull down list using the Attensa Toolbar for Internet Explorer. When you tag articles with Attensa your bookmark list on Del.icio.us is updated and synchronized automatically. With the addition of tagging, Attensa gives you a set of tools for organizing your feeds and articles. Categories let you create a hierarchal structure using folders to keep feeds organized. Tags give you a more free form tool for keeping articles organized and they connect you with the del.icio.us social network. Attensa is aggresively adding features to compete with other readers and has an excellent product suite. However, some (including ) have stopped using Attensa’s Outlook product because of reported difficulties in making these third party applications work with Outlook properly. Attensa also has a . I liked the better. :-)

Findory Adds Self-Evolving Feed Reader

Michael Arrington

has a first-class personalization engine for blog and other news (see our on September 3, 2005). Findory has built up a loyal following in the nearly two years since its launch. However, many users requested the ability to include RSS feeds of their choice directly into their blog and news channels. just , making Findory nearly perfect as a news source and reader. Findory users now have the ability to add feeds directly into Findory – one at a time, via an OPML cut-and-paste or simply by directly importing your feeds from Bloglines, if that is your current reader. You can also import other users’ public Bloglines feeds. Once you’ve imported these feeds, the powerful Findory personalization engine takes over and presents posts to you in a personalized way, based on what you (and community members like you) tend to find interesting. Click on TechCrunch posts a lot, and you’ll start to see lots of new posts from TechCrunch and other blogs on new web 2.0 companies. Findory is squarely attacking the current efforts by , , and others to present your feed information in a more intelligent and useful way. The standard readers quite simply don’t work for power users with 100+ feeds any more – and companies are trying very hard to find ways of sorting through this information for you before you start to read. And unlike Attensa (who hasn’t launched their personalization product yet) and SearchFox (in private beta, although you can fairly easily), Findory is live and open to everyone. Findory does not support folders, so if you tend to group your feeds that way Findory will not work well for you. If you methodically check your feeds and like knowing what order they are in, you may want to stick to your current reader. But it is very fast, and does group informaiton well according to interests. , , , , ,

Google Blog Search – First Impressions

Michael Arrington

last night and hit the blogospere by storm. We’ve had a chance to bang on it for most of the night and morning and have a few things to report. Overall, Google Blog Search is a very worthy addition to the ranks of blog search engines. The search is completely separate from normal Google search. It can be accessed in three ways, although the back end service is the same regardless of how you access it: Advanced search options can be viewed . Blogs that use a ping server such as ( ) have been indexed since June 2005, so older posts are not included in the index. The engine generally points to posts only, although if there is a good match to your query for an entire blog, Google points to the blog above normal search results (see screen shot below). You can used the advanced search features to restrict search to certain languages (35 supported languages). Additional information can be found in the . The interface is clean. The engine is unquestionably fast. About as fast as normal Google searches. However, since their indes only goes back to June, it is unfair to compare it to existing blog search engines. Google is indexing posts by . This allows for significantly more structured data (date, author, categorites, etc.). However, if the XML feed only includes a summary of the post (as very many do), the full text of the post will not be indexed (and therefore cannot be searched). Relevant information will not be found. Speed is a crucial issue and if they can maintain current search speeds over time, it will be a very large competitive advantage. Search results can be sorted by date or “relevance”. Sorting by relevance is the default. A few people are noting deficiencies in the current product. says: But… is it just me, or is Google Blog Search pretty tame/lame? I don’t think Technorati should give up its day job just yet, despite being hammered in the blogosphere lately. David Sifry (CEO of Technorati) , saying: I’m sure that they’ll continue to improve over the coming months, perhaps including tags, recent images and links, zeitgeists, blogger tools, and other types of semistructured data. I’m sure that they’ll also start indexing the full-text of blog posts, not just the partial text found in most blog feeds. Overall, significant room for improvement exists. Google Blog Search is fast and the ability to sort by relevance or date is an important features. However, Google search is not a category killer like the original Google search was. Competitors took a much expected hit today, but they are still standing.

Send Voice Messages with Slawesome

Michael Arrington

, which demo’d at the TechCrunch last Thursday, is a neat tool for recording and sending voice messages via email. Unlike , slawesome does not require a download. And unlike , Slawesome is free. Once you’ve registered, you can record a message of up to 2 minutes and send it to any number of email addresses. A link to the file is included in the email. At this time there is no functionality for downloading the sound file. Messages are archived and can be set to private or public status. This is a young, raw service, but worth trying. Disclaimer, , one of the TechCrunch editors (and site designer), worked on Slawesome.

Profile – MSN Start.com

Michael Arrington

Start.com, an RSS aggregator and search service, is one of Microsoft’s “ ” projects ( is another one). It is an application. Start.com is comparable to . The primary features include a drag and drop interface, easy addition of RSS feeds (although auto-discovery doesn’t seem to work very well, it hung multiple times on me), and integration with MSN Search. Feeds and other content are listed in a drop down menu on the left, and content can be “pinned” anywhere on the page. The Start.com blog is . The only thing I can’t figure out how to do is delete the “popular” feeds that are pre-populated from the drop down menu. Like Google’s RSS aggregator, this is a great service for RSS newbies or people who only read a limited number of feeds. , the architect for start’s framework , lead developer Jose Saura, lead developer , program manager , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Update – Browster (for Firefox)

Michael Arrington

Browster announced . See our for more information on what Browster does. From their : Browster pre-fetches Web pages listed in search results and includes the first instant page rendering capability. Users can then view this page, or the entire web site in the Browster window. As users browse their search links, Browster’s patent-pending LookAhead® technology displays the preview window as users roll their mouse over a link. Browster for Firefox is a revolutionary, secure, lightening fast way to preview web pages.” We are very glad to see this release. Browster will now be permanently installed and used. Great application.

Profile – Best Page in the Universe

Michael Arrington

This website is very, very funny. I’m not allowed to make normal postings today because and he’s demanded that (i) I start using Photoshop for images, and (ii) I write only “standards based postings”. :-) So in the meantime I though I’d profile “The Best Page in the Universe”, a very funny site. My favorite page is his . It’s funny, and I have to admit being guilty of many of the things he points out. Then God forbid a blogger gets mentioned on CNN. If you thought it was impossible for a certain blogger to get more pious than he was, wait until you see the shit storm of self-righteous save-the-world bullshit after a network plug. Suddenly the boring, mild-mannered blogger you once knew will turn into Mother Theresa, and will single handedly take it upon himself to end world hunger with his stupid links to band websites and other smug blogger dipshits.”

TechCrunch News

Michael Arrington

has hit a milestone, and is celebrating with a makeover. We grew to over 500 daily RSS readers yesterday (about six weeks after our initial launch). People seem to like our content and until now have overlooked our fairly pathetic design skills. Well, today that changes! We hired all-star developer and web designer to redesign TechCrunch from the ground up. All of the bells and whistles should be finished in a day or two, but the general look and feel is now complete. Love it? Hate it? Let us know. Fred will also be posting occasionally at TechCrunch. He’s opinionated, smart and has an awesome writing style. See his blog at . Welcome Fred!

Profile – Indeed

Michael Arrington

Indeed is not a newly launched site, but the job space seems to be and so we are going to profile a number of web 2.0 jobs-related sites and services in the coming week. Upcoming profiles include , , and others. At its core, is a vertical search engine for jobs. It has a huge data set – Indeed gathers jobs from nearly every job website (including Monster.com, CareerBuilder, Hotjobs, craigslist and others), makes the jobs searchable via title, company, keyword and/or location, and presents results to the user. Search results can be further narrowed via suggested keywords. Importantly, once you find the job results you are looking for, you can have future job postings that meet those search criteria delivered to you via email alerts or RSS. This “prospective search” functionality is a key web 2.0 feature. All services are free for users. The site includes advertisements to generate revenue, and also partners with other sites. Indeed has some other interesting features and tools as well. For instance, click on their link and see a map of the United States showing total number of job postings visually. You can easily zoom into any specific area. This page also shows major metropolitan areas, ranked by total number of job postings per 1,000 people. Today (August 4, 2005), San Jose is #1, with 73 job postings per 1,000 people. Oklahoma City is last, with just 12 job postings per 1,000 people. Indeed also has a area, where you can get code to display a or Indeed on your blog. You can also access Indeed’s to integrate Indeed’s job listings in a more customized way on your website. Indeed’s corporate blog is . Paul Forster Rony Kahan , , ,

Profile – Simply Hired

Michael Arrington

Yes, we have been infatuated with jobs sites these couple of days. Trust me, there’s more to come. This space is moving and we fully intend to jump on the train. Or in front of it. Hope to have a profiel of up later today as well. is a vertical search engine for jobs and can be compared to , its primary competitor. Yesterday, Simply Hired that it raised $3 million in new captial from Rajeev Motwani, Ron Conway, Kanwal Rekhi and Garage Technology Ventures. The company had previously raised $1.2 million from its founders. Guy Kawasaki also joined their board of directors. Much like Indeed, Simply Hired gathers job postings from a huge set of sites, including Monster, the Wall Street Journal, CareerBuilder, Hotjobs, craigslist and others. Simply Hired then structures the data in the postings and allows its users to search for specific keywords, titles, companies, locations, etc. Searches can be further refined, including by freshness of the posting and by lists like “fortune 500”. Once a user has the final search result set that they want, future job postings meeting the search criteria can be delivered to the user via RSS and/or email alerts. One interesting feature is the ability to rate a posting, with 1-5 stars. Their idea is to generate enough user rating content to be able to recommend job postings to you, based on how you’ve rated other postings (and how other users have rated those postings). See our profile on – they are doing something similar in the podcasting space. To round things out, Simply hired has promotional snippets for your website , and a corporate blog (sans comments). I actually can’t say if I can pick between Indeed and Simply Hired. Both changed the jobs game permanently (as witnessed by Hotjobs changing their model to incorporate other listings). is a site to Simply Hired that is centered around , the 22 year old who was fired from Google for being incredibly stupid. The idea with Simply Fired is that you write the story of how you were fired, and win prizes if it’s considered one of the best. I tried to find a good story to link to but they are all pretty obvious – sleeping with bosses daughter, ran over bosses foot, etc. Some of them may even be true. I have deep respect for this as a nice viral marketing tool (sort of), but is a much better read. But back to Simply Hired, it is a beautiful site with meaningful results, and definitely a cool web 2.0 business. Gautam Godhwani, Founder/CEO Peter Weck, Founder/CTO Anil Godhwani, Founder/VP People Jerry Crowley, Chairman of the Board Dion Lim, VP Business Development Dave McClure, Director of Marketing Julie Craft,Director of Channel Partnerships , (podcast interview with CEO), , , , , , , , , , ,

Profile – Collaborative Rank (Del.icio.us)

Michael Arrington

is an experiment created by The University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It is a search engine front end for bookmarks. The search engine is heavily influenced by what they describe as the . This doesn’t just look at who bookmarks the most pages, but who bookmarks things quickly, and in ways that other people subsequently copy (affirming that you are tagging in a way that others think is appropriate). In their own words, I’m proud to say that I made the list of 500 – #499 to be exact (oh great, another thing to compete over). :-) This is a great relevancy tool for searching del.icio.us content. Collaborative Rank has a discussion forum . (via ), , (please, please, please kill these frames, more people will link to you),

Update – IceRocket (Link Tracker)

Michael Arrington

released their tool for website owners. There are a couple of fairly simple integration options. This tool will insert a link at the bottom of each of your posts. The link will be to an IceRocket page that shows all posts and websites linking to your post’s URI. Along with comments, trackbacks and pingbacks, this is a nice way for blogs to keep a conversation going. Very nifty. , , , , , , ,

Profile – Protopage

Michael Arrington

Virtual desktops are in vogue this week. Unlike Goowy ( ), which is flash based, is all Ajax, baby. Visually is is both functional and beautiful. Drag, drop, add, and delete. Totally cool. Applications are somewhat limited for now: sticky notes, to-dolists, favorite links and quick searches. Also, the initial start page is a bit crowded, although it took only a few minutes to customize it. I imagine they’ll have RSS, email and other cool widgets added soon – more are definitely needed. What’s the business model? No idea. It’s totally free and sans-ads, at least for now. No registration at all is required to use it, although to name the page you need to go through an email verification. Check it out. , , , , , , ,

Profile – Skylook (for Skype)

Michael Arrington

Outlook is cool. Skype is cool. Get a couple of Australians to bang them together and what do you get? . It skypefies Outlook and it’s awesome. Skype does already have a product for Outlook, which we . Skylook is much more advanced and easy to use (although, unlike Skype’s Outlook Toolbar, it is not free). The download is about 2.2 mb. You can try it out for free with a 14 day trial. $29.95 after that to purchase. After installation, there are three main feature areas that I like. The first feature I like is auto-recording of all skype calls and IM chats. After recording, Skylook places the file in a special folder and they can be forwarded via email, searched, etc. The second feature I like is that you have presence information for skype contacts directly within Outlook, and you can start IMs and voice calls directly from Outlook. The third feature I like is the ability to “one click” call contacts via either skype or skype out, directly from their vcard. Skylook’s CEO, Jeremy Hague, wrote to me and included the following information: Skylook is much more than an Outlook toolbar for Skype. Skylook does for Voice and IM what Outlook does for email. Skylook allows you to store and later retrieve all of your Skype communications, in exactly the same way you store and retrieve emails today. Outlook is a great tool for managing email. It lets you store, organize, sort and search in many different ways. Wouldn’t it be great if you could use all those great Outlook features not just on email, but on all of your communications? Skylook lets you do just that. Skylook records all voice calls as items in a special Outlook folder. Each item includes details such as who you called, the duration of the call etc., but best of all the actual conversation is recorded as a high quality MP3 file and included as an attachment to the item. Because this is saved as a standard Outlook item, just like an email, you can file it for later reference in exactly the same way as you do with email. Skylook also records all text chats as items in Outlook. Each item includes details such as who took part in the chat etc. Because this is saved as a standard Outlook item, you can file it for later reference. Later on, you can search on it, sort it, archive it or use any of those great Outlook features that normally only work with email. To remove the need for you to constantly switch back and forth between Outlook and Skype, Skylook has a presence button in the Outlook toolbar for each Skype contact who is currently on-line. This button shows the status of the contact (e.g. on-line, away etc.) with a handy icon, and also allows easy access to contact details and recent emails and Skype conversation recordings. In addition to the above, Skylook provides all the features you would expect from a Skype toolbar for Outlook. You can call an Outlook contact using Skype, start a text chat with an Outlook contact, select an email and immediately start a voice or text chat with one of the recipients, select an appointment and immediately start a voice or text chat with one of the recipients, and more. Skylook is a keeper for us. And not just because Jeremy gave me a free activation key. :-) I’d pay for this. Jeremy Hague Paul Andrews (interview with Jeremy Hague), , , , , Skylook has offered 20 free licenses to TechCrunch readers. See Jeremy’s comment below.

Dig into the Music Long Tail – Pandora

Michael Arrington

(formerly Savage Beast Technologies) (private alpha) Within two weeks 50 (including 30 musicians) Oakland, CA Do you love music? Are you the kind of person who’s pissed off because your iPod only holds 60 gigs? If you are, stop reading this, click over to and request an invitation to their private alpha . Then come back and read the rest of this post. If you don’t agree that this is the coolest application you’ve seen in a long while, re-read this post over and over until you agree, because you are wrong. I am in love with Pandora. It’s like the Internet was invented so that Pandora could be. I met with , Pandora’s CTO, today at and he gave me a private demonstration. He’s presenting to the group today at 5 pm as well. What is it? It is a music recommendation engine and player and it is the future of discovering the long tail of music. Pandora is a technology based solution. They spend about 20 minutes analyzing the identity of a song (“everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony”) – and they’ve analyzed 300,000 of them (10,000 artists) over the last five years. See Pandora’s – a five year project involved scores of musicians to analyze music: On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever. Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like. Over the past 5 years, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world. And…it works! Once you’ve registered, you simply create a “channel” by typing in an artist or song name. It may ask for clarification if it has multiple matches, then it will start streaming the song (or one of the artist’s songs if you’ve chosen an artist) at 128k (great quality). Here’s the good part. Click on a button and you can find similar music by other artists. I created a Nirvana category. Soon Pandora was playing “The Man Who Sold the World” (a great song”). By clicking forward, Pandora then played “Wings of the Throne” by Guided by Places, “How’s it Going to Be” by Third Eye Blind, and then “Nutshell” by Alice in Chains. Perfect. Click on any song and buy it on iTunes or Amazon. Correction. If you would like an invitation to Pandora, please email me at editor@beta.techcrunch.com and I will send one to you. I have none left (where were these people when I was looking for a little love on :-) ). I can’t deal with the volume. I’m done with invites. You’re on your own. One last tidbit that Tom shared with me – Apparently, sometimes people like certain kinds of music that they think is pretty darn fringe/indie/hard core. And sometimes, when they look at related music after Pandora has put it through an objective technical analysis, they see stuff by britney spears/hilary duff/[insertcraphere]. Pandora isn’t broken. The listener is. :-) I am going to be posting a ton more on this over time. 10 hours free for every new user $3 per month after that : Tom sent me an email explaining what it does: “Pandora is a “music discovery service” designed to help you find and enjoy music that you’ll love. It works like this: you give us the name of an artist or song and we instantly create a “station” that plays songs that share musical characteristics with the artist/song you entered. From there you can fine-tune the station to your tastes by giving us feedback on the individual tracks we play. You can make up to 100 unique stations that play all kinds of music – Pop, Rock, Jazz, Electronica, Hip Hop, old, new, big names, and small acts — over 300,000 songs from more than 10,000 artists. Pandora is entirely web-based; you won’t need to install any software to start listening.”

Weblogs Work – These Guys Build Cool Stuff

Michael Arrington

, based in Dallas, Texas, is a web 2.0 consultancy, incubator and overall cool group of people. I’m finding that I spend more and more time talking with these guys about new ideas, and we are linking to eachother so often that people are starting to talk. :-) Weblogs Work designs, builds and promotes new applications, and will also assist third parties in application building if there is a fit. Existing and future applications include things like (our ), , Frankenfeed, EgorRSS, and EgorOPML. Many or all of these will be profiled on TechCrunch in the near future. Brian Oberkirch (who has a really excellent personal blog called ) is the CEO. He is a former literature professor, college baseball player, and marketing executive, turned entrepreneur. The company is 50% marketing/PR guys like Brian and 50% tech/coder guys like Scott Ryan (26 total employees/contractors). (I like going to this site just to listen to the cool background music) funds and guides Weblogs Work. Alexander Muse is the main guy at M Ventures, and keeps his (another must-read).

Profile – Blogtronix

Michael Arrington

Corporations, even , are starting to blog and otherwise interact directly with their customers. New startups are rushing to fill the blogging needs of these corporations. is the newest entrant in this space. , Blogtronix is headquartered in Oakland, CA, and has additional offices in Colorado and Bulgaria. Blogtronix is a novel corporate blogging and business networking company, enabling businesses, universities, web portals and government agencies with secure on-demand services built on the Microsoft’s .NET platform. Blogtronix Corporate is the only corporate blogging system on the market to incorporate product blogging and rating for optimal marketing reach and customer feedback. The service is young and the site is not fully functional yet, but there appears to be a real service here. Blogtronix : We’ll watch this one as it develops. We note, however, that criticism is already being throw their way. laments Blogtronix’s choice of the .NET platform over open source solutions: Pure FUD. Perhaps Vassil doesn’t realize that 1000s of companies are happily using LAMP and other open source solutions for their blogging and business networking needs without fearing the integration bogeyman. In 1999, companies were wary of using open source, in 2005 it’s a no brainer. I see Roland’s point, although a lot of companies out there love .NET and may embrace this solution simply because it will (hopefully) integrate seemlessly with their current IT platform. A boring, but secure, solution may be just what they want. Vassil Mladjov, co-founder and ceo George Athannassov, co-founder and business development Bojidar Zashev, vp development Hristo Serafimov, CTO Dim Draganov, Software Architecture Nik Dimitrov, Tech Project Manager Ivan Popgruev, vp products development Boyan Stanoev, legal counsellor

Update – Technorati (being Acquired?)

Michael Arrington

A by B.L. Ochman ignited rumors that may be acquired in the near future: Here’s a tip I was given this morning from a venture capitalist who is “heavily invested” in the blogosphere: Technorati is about to be sold to a large search engine company. The deal should go down in about a week. My bet is on Yahoo! Where’s yours? True? Wild speculation? We have no idea. Sure are a lot of this week though. Is (“Murdoch is Set to Buy a Search Company”) related? It looks like we’re seeing . Jeff Jarvis says “ .” , , ,

Update – Pluck (new product releases)

Michael Arrington

Pluck three product updates on August 9, 2005 – Pluck 2.0 for Internet Explorer, Firefox and their Web product (web product image on left). A key new feature is that all of these products syncronize feeds (and will hopefully syncronized read/unread posts in the next version). Pluck also does an excellent job of explaining what RSS is, and how to subscribe to feeds for new RSS/Atom users. See, for instance, the Pluck tour and “What is RSS” . An excerpt of the follows: Pluck Version 2.0 Delivers Cross-Platform Suite of RSS Readers for Firefox, Internet Explorer and the Web AUSTIN, Texas (August 9, 2005) Pluck Corp. unveiled Version 2.0 of the industry’s #1 browser-based RSS reader for Internet Explorer and extended the product line with RSS readers for Firefox and the web. The product suite is the first in the RSS space to allow users to synchronize important web information, such as RSS web feeds and bookmarks, between different computers, web browsers and operating systems. Pluck is available for free at www.pluck.com. The product suite released today includes a major upgrade to the Pluck Internet Explorer Edition and the Pluck Web Edition, and also introduces a new product called Pluck Firefox Edition for use in the popular and fast growing Firefox web browser. Pluck Firefox Edition offers advanced RSS aggregation and management within the Firefox browser, enabling Firefox users to easily organize, view, store and share RSS Web feeds, Internet search results, web pages and other information in easy-to-view folders. Like all Pluck RSS readers, Pluck Firefox Edition includes the ability to search on topics of interest for relevant web feeds, and imports existing collections of bookmarks and Web feed subscriptions. The new Pluck 2.0 upgrade to all three products in the suite provides active Internet users with a rich set of features and capabilities that enhances the way they find, access and manage web information. Features available with this release include: * Synchronization: Enables users to automatically access and synchronize their bookmarks and RSS web feeds between multiple computers (PC, Macs, etc.), different web browsers (Firefox, IE and more) and Internet enabled devices so RSS content is always available at work or at home. * Significant UI improvements: Improved user experience in all aspects of RSS reading, bookmark organization and subscription management. This new experience is designed to ease the RSS learning curve and increase adoption rates for RSS. * FeedFinder: This new feed discovery engine from Pluck dramatically improves the relevancy of feed searches and opens new ways for users to discover web feeds. With FeedFinder, users can find feeds of interest by browsing a feed taxonomy, reviewing featured RSS web feeds and submitting keyword searches across Pluck’s large cache of feeds gathered from around the Internet. * Power Search Tools: Allows users to send search queries to multiple search engines via one click and in one view, saving time and improving the quality of results. All Pluck products are free of charge.

Group Search with Raw Sugar

Michael Arrington

is somewhat similar to , which we profiled yesterday. Raw Sugar basically combines del.icio.us type social bookmarking, with search (of your and other’s bookmarks, along with google results). You can save a URI found in Raw Sugar Search results, or use a bookmarklet to save any browsed page (support at this time for firefox and explorer only). You can also add a description and tags. Your tags are saved on your user page with a unique URI. This page is also customizable with images, pictures, etc. For instance, taking someone at random, here is , who is apparently just about to complete a world class bellyflop and likes, among other things, kung fu (if his tags are indicative of his interests). He also likes the Ramones, which is one of my favorite bands (reminds me that I need to create a Ramones station on ). Raw Sugar offers a nice search service that leverages tagged pages and presents them in search results (keyword and tagged based results look to be mixed, which seems right). They also have a “refine” option after your first search, which further narrows the results set (something really needs to add). Given that , Raw Sugar may have a long hill to climb. Overall, it’s a useful service that could use a little jazzing (and ajaxing) up of its user interface. The Raw Sugar blog . Ofer Ben-Shachar, CEO and Co-Founder Frank Smadja, VP Engineering Monica Laurence, VP Marketing (regarding RSS feed functionality, I looked but can’t find it), , , ,

Update – Qumana (new feature)

Michael Arrington

(TechCrunch ) is a blog editor that works with virtually all blogging software. See our previous profile for more information, but you can drag and drop images, have the text look exactly like you want it to without html or formatting tags, and write and edit posts even when you are offline. In our opinion it is the best software out there to do this (note: ), and unlike most of their competitors, it’s free. Yesterday Qumana a new feature: the ability to change previously published posts. Note that this new feature works with both Qumana and non-Qumana posts, so you can start using their software now and revise old posts that you wrote using your existing blog software. , , , ,

Update – Browster (Firefox surging ahead)

Michael Arrington

Scott Milener, the CEO of Browster, just left a on our last Browster posting. After supporting Firefox for only a couple of weeks (actually, about a week), it accounts for 1/3 of total downloads: thanks for posting and for the kind words about Browster. We’re really happy to be supporting Firefox. We’re now getting requests for Browstr on all platforms and all browsers – lots to do! interestingly our Firefox install numbers are already 1/3 of our installs (thousands per day). it’s that kind of acceptance that helps drive the Firefox community and companies like ours to support the platform. please drop me a line with any thoughts about improvements or any other ideas. thx Scott Milener CEO Browster

Feed Aggregator Market Share

Michael Arrington

TechCrunch is two months old today. To celebrate, I thought we’d reveal our RSS Aggregator market share breakdown. Our numbers are much different than those published by and . The main difference is Pluck has surged way, way ahead – are others seeing this trend as well? (July 2005) (removing 10 most popular feeds): : Consistent with other RSS aggregator market share reports on the Internet, Pheedo is seeing Bloglines atop our feed reader statistics, followed by Firefox, Thunderbird, NewsGator and Sharpreader. In aggregate, these readers are used by almost 70 percent of people subscribing to Pheedo managed RSS content. Compare this to TechCrunch readership (about 1,000 feed readers over last 24 hours): TechCrunch’s Top 6: Pluck is clearly the no. 1 aggregator for TechCrunch readers. Are other bloggers seeing this surge by Pluck?

Profile – Bitty Browser

Michael Arrington

is a mini-browser that can be embedded into a web page. It is the creation of Scott Matthews. I spoke with Scott earlier today. He’s taking customer feedback and will be releasing new features soon. Scott calls his project “picture-in-picture” for the web. He also points out that it is a perfect way to bridge the gap between mobile and normal content – Bitty Browser is a good way to pull mobile content into a website. Bitty Browser is built on javascript, works with virtually all web browsers and has some nice shortcuts to view feeds, delicious tags, etc. For more information, see their . We created a browser showing the TechCrunch RSS feed in a couple of minutes (I haven’t embedded it into the post because feed readers seem to often break html). For addtional information, see and .

Attensa – The Smart RSS Reader

Michael Arrington

is a world class RSS reader that is attacking the multi-platform syncronization problem (I’ll explain that) and is also looking very seriously at the issue from a unique perspective (a good thing). Attensa launched their first product at Gnomedex in June – an Outlook based reader that is lightning fast and has been getting (Jeff Nolan). It’s also free, for now. supports enclosures, and so will automatically download things like podcasts and videocasts. Since it syncs with outlook, all content will be available for you to read when you are offline. This is a key feature for people who travel and aren’t online constantly, but want to be able to catch up on their feeds. Attensa for Outlook is just the beginning, however. I spoke with Scott Niesen, Attensa’s Marketing Director, this evening and heard about their future product plans. In a “couple of weeks” Attensa will be launching a private beta of their web-based RSS reader. It will fully syncronize your feeds with their outlook product. , meaning if you’ve read a post on one product, it will not show up as unread in the other product. This is a key product feature and possible because Attensa’s engine runs at the server level for both products. Duplicate posts are a huge problem for power RSS users, and Attensa is making a serious attempt to solve this. I’ll be included in the beta testing and Scott tells me that I can blog freely on the product, including screen shots. More on this when the product is soft-launched. Later this year Attensa will roll out a mobile reader as well, rounding out the product set nicely. For now, all products are free. Attensa has been to create an appropriate long-term pricing plan. Their current plan is to keep the web product free, and eventually charge a one time fee of $20 for the Outlook client. If a user want to use both products and syncronize feeds, Attensa will charge a yearly subscription fee of about $20 (but you won’t be charged for the Outlook client). $20 a year for this kind of high end product seems pretty reasonable to me. No word from Attensa yet on their pricing plans for the mobile product, but I assume it would be rolled in with the subscription plan. Attensa is looking at the issue very carefully. About half of my call with Scott was spent discussing their plans in this area. They have a unique perspective on the opportunity. For a full discussion, see co-founder Eric Hayes . Basically, Attensa will (with your opt-in permission) aggregate information about your reading habits to make your feed reading more efficient ( to make it possible to mow through hundreds and hundreds of feeds every day) . Their idea? Watch what you read, what you click on, how long you spend reading something, what you ignore (just as important), and prioritze feeds and posts according to what they think you’ll want to read first. They’ll also suggest new feeds based on what you seem to be liking. I, for one, am more than happy to give up a little privacy if I get efficiency and good recommendations in return. Craig Barnes: Co-Founder, CEO Eric Hayes: Co-Founder, Vice President of Research and Development Tim Brown: Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer Guy Field – CFO Scott Niesen, Director of Marketing , , , ,

Rate Your Date on Gahbunga

Michael Arrington

launched . It was created by the guys at ( ) and is at least as interesting as , another Texas dating startup (I think these two companies should work together). The idea? It’s “hot or not” for your cell phone. You take a picture of someone (hopefully with their permission). It’s sent to your friends and, if you desire, to the entire Gahabunga community (talk about pressure). They rate the person’s physical hotness. You get the opinions of your friends and the Gahbunga community in moments. Your level of insecurity determines your next move, I guess. See the site: For example, you are on a blind date and you are on the fence about the guy: First, take a quick phone-photo of your date and send it to Gahbunga. Gahbunga will then send the photo to your friends and if you choose, to other members of the Gahbunga community. Gahbunga will then ask your friends and community members to ‘rate’ your date. The results will be sent to your phone within an hour. The rest is up to you! Yes, people will be offended. But this is an interesting experiment. Right? I dunno. It’s late and I’m going to bed. Can’t wait to see the comments on this one.

BAR Camp & OPML Roadshow

Michael Arrington

What a great weekend to be in the bay area: For those of us not invited to this year, there is an alternative which looks to be equally (or more) exciting: . No invitation required. It’s not anti-Foo Camp, it’s just different. I’m looking forward to attending (and blogging) about the event. As Ross Mayfield , “The important thing is that when good people get together, great things happen.” Socialtext is donating the use of it’s office and wifi. Ross Mayfield: From Dave Winer on : OPML Roadshow in California, August 20, 7PM! Mark your calendars, the OPML Roadshow comes to California on August 20, in Berkeley, at the . 7PM. This is the largest venue so far, it can hold over 200 people. It seems we’ll likely fill a good portion of the seats. And if the OPML Editor isn’t publicly available by then, I’ll do something memorable and just a little embarassing. Thanks to Sylvia Paull and Jeff Ubois for helping put this event together. This is an open event, anyone can attend. We’ll be at both.

Profile – Kahuna (Hotmail beta)

Michael Arrington

Kahuna (the new hotmail with Ajax) hasn’t launched yet, but the Start.com team ( ) has been working on it seriously since May 2005 and it is now in ( ). From posts by the Kahuna team (see below) and various ( watching the space), it looks like it as as signifcant an enhancement to Hotmail as is to the old MSN portal. It appears that they will be launching the service under the URL mail.start.com. Key features include liberal use of ajax to eliminate screen refreshes, an “outlook�? approach to allow reading of emails without leaving the inbox, and a generally faster and cleaner user interface. Details of the recent history of Kahuna can be found . From , Kahuna team member: Mail beta is a brand new web mail experience focused on being faster, simpler and safer than existing web mail services (read more). The team focused on the basics of reading and sending mail. Mail beta is a work-in-progress and a large number of beta users are driving what it becomes (we can barely keep up with all their ideas…) Here’s the first of some of my favorite things about reading mails in mail beta: 1. Fast, faster and faster still Mail beta is significantly faster, I mean by an order of magnitude: a) The UI responds instantly to many actions and quickly to others b) Very few context switches (where the whole page changes and your eyes have to rescan) c) You need fewer clicks to do the everyday tasks d) Cleaner look (including more “white space�?) so your eyes can relax and find stuff faster 2. Read mail without leaving your inbox using the Reading pane The Reading pane allows you to read your mail without leaving your inbox. If you like the reading pane in Outlook now you have it in web mail. Other web mail services forces you to open each message and close it before reading the next message. If you have 10 messages to read, they will require 20 clicks, Kahuna: 10. (How’s that for your carpal tunnel?) Want to see a wide email? Just double click the message and voila! We’re looking forward to testing this out ourselves.

Profile – Vemail

Michael Arrington

Vemail is a cool little (234k download) voice-2-email application for windows machines. There aren’t many features, but it does what it does well. Once you install and launch the application, you simply type in an email address (no support for multiple emails), hold the F6 button and talk. If you have a microphone, it will record what you say, and once you let F6 go, it will email the file as a sound file to the selected email address. I did a quick test email and sent it to myself. A 14 second message was only a 23k wave file, emailed to me with the subject line “Vemail Voice Message� (note that you cannot change the subject line of the email). The quality was great, the file size was manageable and overall it worked as promised. It is also free, which we approve of greatly. Try it out, and drop us a voice message at editor@beta.techcrunch.com. Compare this service to , which we profiled on . Note that Springdoo is located in New Zealand, and Vemail is Australian. We like the rivalry. :-) We also hear whispers that may be coming out with something somewhat similar, but much more interesting, in the near future. ,

TechCrunch blew a hard drive today

Michael Arrington

We’ve had a in traffic these last few days and apparently our server had something to say about it. We’ve lost everything since yesterday (last backup) but will get the recent posts up again later tonight. Apologies.

Pandora is Launching, Right Now

Michael Arrington

just stopped playing music. I went to their site and saw this message: After a successful preview period, Pandora will be open to the public starting very soon. We’re updating our systems to support the full public version. Please check back tomorrow… and enjoy the music! By the time I wake up tomorrow I expect Pandora will be fully live. We posted a profile of Pandora , and wrote about their upcoming launch . Glad to see them finally go live, sad to have to start paying. Robert Scoble Pandora too. They passed his “seven-day” test and he’s still using it. Steve Gillmor, you are going to lose that bet with Robert and me. :-)

Collaborative Writing – Unblokt

Michael Arrington

Sometimes blog (and any other) writing day after day is hard. The creative juices stop flowing. You have something interesting to talk about, but the words just don’t . reads (real books) to blog better. Others take the weekend off (I don’t remember where I read this). I just sit in front of my computer and listen to until I start rocking again (no, I don’t work for Pandora but I in love with them). :-) Today I read a post by (a favorite blog of mine) saw something that may also also help – . It’s also just really, really fun. Unblokt is a collaborative writing experiment created by Sean O’Hagan that anyone can participate it. The page says this: -a collaborative experiment in novel-writing -a random sentence and its successor are displayed -write a new sentence which fits in between -at the beginning, don’t worry too much about connectedness -near the middle, start trying to bring sentences together -at the end, try hard to weave everything tightly -here’s a place to praise, complain, and wonder: I’ve been writing on unblokt all morning. I’m determined to make it as weird as possible.