Jason Calacanis wants to inject what he calls the “Skeeball economy” into Mahalo, his highly tuned site for creating and searching topic pages. (Disclosure: Calacanis is our partner in putting on the TechCrunch50 conference). Since launching Mahalo two years ago, his staff and free workers on the Web (AKA, the Mahalo community) have built about 100,000 topic pages that tend to rank highly in Google search (about two thirds of his traffic comes from search engines). But Mahalo is hitting a ceiling in page creation because the wiki approach is just too slow and complicated. So it is launching a completely new design which makes it much easier to create pages and—here is the Skeeball part—rewards people with “Mahalo Dollars.”
These Mahalo Dollars, which Calacanis first started distributing in his Q&A site Mahalo Answers, can be converted into real money at an exchange rate of 75 cents to the dollar or can be saved up to spend in Mahalo itself in the future. Calacanis saw all the activity that was happening on Mahalo Answers, which he says broke one million users last month, and wanted to bring that over to Mahalo proper. Now anyone can claim a topic and create a search results page around that topic or keyword. There is one editor per page and Mahalo will split the AdSense revenues 50/50 for any page he or she makes and maintains. A typical page could generate $20 to $50 a year. If you make 100 of those, that turns out to be some nice pocket change.
The more pages you make, the more points you get and can climb from being a white belt to a black belt. With each new level, you get more privileges. At some point, members will be able to buy and sell pages they have claimed (for Mahalo Dollars, of course). In order to make page creation easier, Mahalo will now assist editors by turning up appropriate links, images, videos, news stories, questions and answers, and more. All you have to do is put in a search term, pick which elements should appear on the official topic page, and write up a short description. It is all driven by APIs in an attempt to bring the appropriate information to editor’s fingertips. Mahalo needs to go from 100,000 topic pages to millions of them, and fast. It is using these semi-automated approaches to get there.
Whether or not these will produce the best pages on any given topic remains to be seen. One problem I see is that claiming a topic and the associated revenues will be on a first-come, first serve basis. If someone comes along later with better domain expertise on, say, sushi (see screenshot below), he or she is out of luck. So there will be a bit of a land grab. With that, there is certainly a danger that people will shift from making spam pages to Mahalo pages. Calacanis dismisses this possibility. He notes that spammers will always be able to make more money on their own and that there are too many tripwires in Mahalo’s system to make it worth their while. Plus, Mahalo will yank any pages it deems too spammy.
The bigger challenge for him is to get people to come to Mahalo on their own instead of through search engines. People who come from search engines tend to be drive-by traffic. They look at 1.5 pages then leave. People who come directly or through referring sites look at 4 to 5 pages per visit. Calacanis is doing a lot to get more people to come to his site. Now he needs to get them to stay.
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Save the date and let the frenzy begin. Our 4th annual summer meet-up at August Capital will be Friday, July 10 this year.
We can’t thank David Hornik and his partners at August Capital enough for having us back, yet again. Each year the party gets a little more lively, the deck gets a little more crowded, and yet David welcomes us back with unflinching enthusiasm. Thank you. We promise not to trash the place too much.
As our meet-ups have grown in popularity, we’ve expanded the format from simple mixers to timely editorial roundtables. Last year, the topic was the Mobile Web Wars just then brewing. This year, we’re taking on the real-time stream and dedicating a full day to exploring all the rivulets coming together to make it the trending topic on the Web.
What do we mean by the real-time stream? It’s popping up nearly everywhere you care to look. Information on the Web is coming to us increasingly in streams. Twitter kicked off the shift, but everyone from Facebook to FriendFeed to Google to AOL is quickly adopting the information stream as a dominant mechanism for distributing data to people exactly when it is produced. As I’ve written before: “The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.” RSS is dead. Long live the stream.
A whole new set of products is cropping up around these information streams to help consumers filter them and manage their flow, such as Tweetmeme and Seesmic Desktop. It seems as though a new one is launching every day. And the real-time stream is beginning to impact other parts of the Web as well, such as search and corporate reputations.
It is time to figure out where all of this is going, to bring together the smartest people we can find and map out the different paths the stream can take. We’ve just begin to organize this mini-conference, but already the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. We are calling it a CrunchUp because it will be highly participatory and real-time in every sense of the word. TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I will be hosting the event.
Speakers and panelists from Facebook, FriendFeed, Microsoft, Salesforce, Seesmic, and Tweetmeme will be there, and we are just getting started (stay tuned for full lineup). Companies pushing real-time streams to new levels will also be demoing their products, some which haven’t yet launched publicly, such as Andrew Baron’s Magma. (If you have an eye-opening demo or want to launch a product at the CrunchUp, please contact our conference producer, Asad Akbar).
Additional participants will be announced in the coming weeks. If you’ve got some real-time hotness to share, contact us. You will be able to find the speakers, agenda and details as they evolve here.
The CrunchUp will take place on Friday, July 10, between 9:00 am and 4:30 PM at the historic Fox Theatre in Redwood City. Tickets are $295 and are on sale now through Eventbrite. Admission to the August Capital party is automatically included in your CrunchUp ticket (with expedited check-in to August Capital.)
The CrunchUp also gives us a great sponsorship platform for start-ups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities. Additional details here.
We’ll plan to release the first batch of August Capital meet-up tickets the week of June 15, but we’d really love to spend the whole day with you real time. Hope you can join us.
For years, Microsoft has tried to shrug off its reputation as a monopolistic tyrant. Today comes news that seems to undermine those efforts pretty badly.
The Next Web reports that users of Internet Explorer 6 are being forced to use Bing as their default search engine — even if they’ve manually switched their preference to another search provider, like Google. Attempts to switch the browser to something other than Bing result in an error message.
Now, let’s set aside the fact that IE6 is a scourge on the web that opens users up to a wide array of critical security issues and forces developers to implement ugly hacks because the browser doesn’t support many web standards. The fact of the matter is that a sizable number of users are still using IE6 (over 5% of TechCrunch readers still use it, and the global marketshare is closer to 20%). We’re talking millions of users who are potentially affected by this issue.
While the vast majority of users affected probably won’t even notice the change, some are beginnig to complain (you can find threads in Google’s forums here and here). Microsoft has confirmed the issue to Search Engine Roundtable, explaining that it is currently investigating a solution.
Given that Microsoft has long been the target of antitrust cases, there’s no way the company would have done this on purpose. But it’s a hilarious bug nonetheless, and so far there’s no easy way to fix it (expect Microsoft to issue an update in a few days). In the meantime, I suggest any affected users try a modern browser like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or IE8.
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I’m in New York City right now for Internet Week and considering I haven’t been here in eight years, I’m fairly lost most of the time. I’ve gotten by just looking out for big groups of people with iPhones to figure out where I should be going, but when I’m by my lonesome and just looking to get a quick bite to eat, I basically have no idea where to go. So it’s awesome that Google has just launched a new Android app that lists the places around me.
Places Directory is a straight-forward app created by some Googlers as their 20% time project. When you launch it, it looks up your location and gives you a directory of the types of establishments around. If I click on “Bars” for example, I’ll then get a list of the bars around me complete with a thumbnail image, the location’s distance from me and a star rating. Clicking on any of the listings will take you to a page with an overview of the place, including its address and phone number. You can also read reviews of the place by Google local users and see more pictures of the place.
While there are no shortage of apps on the iPhone that do basically the same task, there are less available on Android. And while some of the apps that do exist focus mostly on restaurants, Places Directly can also find things like ATMs or museums. And even the best apps out there that do these place listing suffer from a lack of information in smaller towns. That won’t be an issue in NYC, but could be in my hometown of Pepper Pike, Ohio. But Places Directory has Google’s huge database of information at its disposal, which means that even in remote towns, you’ll likely have some information about local places.
You can find the app here, or in the Android Market. It’s available for free.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
This is funny. At 10:29 am PST this morning all 2,000 members of the Facebook Developers Group got a message that said “Hi” as the subject and “test” in the body. Since then we’ve received multiple “tips” from Facebook developers with variations of the message “I wonder if they plan on sending out some news soon?”
Well, Facebook should be announcing their annual F8 developer conference some time soon. But our guess is this was just what it said it was - a test message that was sent out by accident.
So many companies would be stoked to see conspiracy theories pop up like this around an accidental test message. What I love about this story isn’t the accidental message, it’s the excited response from the developers.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
It feels like just yesterday that Microsoft had blessed the internet with its new search engine, Bing, and as of today we mobile addicts have access to this service on our phones. If you head over to m.bing.com on your handheld, you'll find yourself on a lite version of this Bing's titan service. So does this compete with the Google's mobile service? Not just yet, and it seems that Microsoft has omitted all those fancy features that has made Bing a near-overnight success. I borrowed TechCrunch's unique search results test to throw it through the mobile engine, here are the (disappointing) results:
A friend of the Crunch charbax sent us the first hands-on video of the Pixel Qi e-paper screen, a new kind of LCD technology that uses standard LCD fabrication tools to create an LCD/e-paper/transflective screen that displays full color in direct sunlight and takes very little power. This is not to be confused with the Kindle's e-ink technology. Think of it as a new form of LCD that has e-ink properties - readability, low-power cost, and barely any lag - in full color.
This morning YouTube invited a small group of press to unveil the latest evolution of the site’s viewing experience. It’s called YouTube XL, and it’s going to bring the vast majority of YouTube’s content to your TV or large-screen computer monitor. It’s already live, and you can check it out here.
At its core YouTube XL is basically a redesigned version of the YouTube website. It’s still run in the browser, and you don’t have to download anything to get it working (assuming you have Flash installed). It looks (and according to the demo, feels) like a native application.
One of the first things you’ll notice about the interface is that it’s very clean. This is due in no small part to the fact that it currently doesn’t have any ads (we can probably expect this to change). But YouTube has stripped out many of the suggested videos, comments, and other content that clutters the main site in favor of a much more streamlined interface that is usable from across the room.
One of the most appealing aspects of XL is that it will work on nearly any device that has a browser and can connect to the TV. That means you’ll be able to use it though your PS3 (though it sounds like there are some limitations - for example, the PS3 doesn’t support HD YouTube videos yet). Likewise the Wii will be able to use the new site, but because of its lower hardware capabilities it outputs at at a lower resolution.
Of course, one of the most key elements to offering a TV-like experience is the abiity to control the application remotely. You can use a wireless keyboard, but YouTube has developed found something a bit more practical called Gmote, a remote control app that runs on Android phones. You can scroll around menus, and also input text if you’d like to search. It’s only on Android so far, but because it’s open source you can potentially develop for other devices as well. The input is sent over your Wi-Fi network. Update: Gmote is actually a third party application that works well with YouTube XL, but YouTube didn’t develop it in-house.
With Hulu’s release of Hulu Desktop earlier this week, and today’s release of YouTube XL, it’s clear that the video wars are going to be fought in the living room over the next few years. YouTube XL definitely has potential, especially with its integration with the PS3 and the Wii (Hulu Desktop only works on computers). Now the site just needs to work on bringing more premium content to YouTube - it’s fun to watch silly user-generated videos on my computer, but if I’m going to couch surf through YouTube on my big screen TV, I’d rather watch content that’s a little more polished.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
There have been a bunch of Google eventsrecently, covering a range of products, but the same question seems to rise above all others at each of them: When is Chrome coming for the Mac? Even Sergey Brin is asking it. Google has committed to getting the browser running on OS X sometime this year, but after several months in development, it’s still isn’t ready. Today, we get a nice, bland update from Google: “Google Chrome for the Mac is coming along fine,” says a post on the Google Blog.
The same post points to a more in-depth post on the Chromium Blog which discusses getting sandboxing working on the Mac version. Sandboxing is a security measure Chrome uses to allow to allow it to render sites and run applications without the possibility of harming your overall computing environment in the case of an attack through the web. Apparently, such a technique was tricky to set up for Windows, but it’s much simpler to set up for the Mac and Linux versions of Chrome. Google has posted more information about it here.
So that’s another feature of Chrome that looks good to go on the Mac. I’ve been running the most up to date Chromium builds on my Mac for a while, and it does look like it’s getting close. Certain things though, are still not ready for prime time. While most pages seem to be rendering nicely, and most apps like Gmail not only run, but are very fast, things like Flash implementation isn’t yet a go.
It seems a bit surprising that it’s taken this long for Google to get it working perfectly on the Mac, especially considering that the man behind the excellent Camino browser (a Mac-only browser built by Mozilla) is leading the project for Google. But the keyword is “perfectly” — as Google notes, “It’s important to us that the Mac port of Chromium feels and performs like a native Mac application, and that it provides the kind of high-quality experience Mac users expect.”
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San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced today that San Francisco residents can now send direct messages via Twitter to the city of San Francisco, @SF311, to complain about street cleanings, graffiti, potholes, abandoned vehicles, garbage issues, noise complaints and more. 311 is the primary contact for city services; residents can call 311 to reach a call center to get answers to questions about city services or submit complaints.
Twitter users and San Francisco residents can simply follow @SF311 (which automatically auto follows) to send and receive direct messages about complaints and questions. The useful part of the new service is the ability to send pictures or video of various offenses, such as a pothole, overflowing garbage can or graffiti. Once you submit a DM to @SF311, you will receive a service request number. Apparently, there is a city staff member devoted to handling and responding to @SF311 Tweets.
San Francisco is also using CoTweet, a Twitter business platform that acts like a CRM, to manage and track these conversations. CoTweet’s platform supports both marketing communication and response-driven customer support via Twitter.
We’ll see if submitting complaints via Twitter helps make the city’s response more speedy. Newsom is a big fan of Twitter and even announced his bid for governor of California via Twitter.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Hold the phone! I know all of you were expecting a post about Twitter from Nintendo's E3 press conference, but I'm afraid to report that it's just Facebook today. Sorry.
You'll soon be able to upload wacky images from your DSi to Facebook for all your friends to see. Isn't that exciting? I LOVE FACEBOOK (and Twitter)!!!
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
I just took a tour of the Electro-Harmonix factory in Queens, New York and came away with an interesting bit of information. Their lead web guy, Scott Matthews, has created a number of systems to connect musicians and EHX products in ways that I've never seen on other conventional music supply sites. EHX is famous. They've been making pedals and effects since 1968 and the sounds their pedals produce have been heard in countless recordings in the last few decades. But how is the average Joe supposed to share his experiences with the pedals? Or, more importantly, how does the professional or amateur guitarist supposed to know how to use the pedals and which pedals to buy?
Nothing like a telling graphic to illustrate what most have been expecting, albeit probably not in this order of magnitude. Veteran media exec Alan Mutter discovered some horrid statistics about the state of ad sales for American newspapers on trade organization NAA’s website, and published his view on the Q1 2009 numbers on his blog. They don’t look pretty.
The stats show that total newspaper ad sales dropped by an unprecedented 28.28% in the first quarter of 2009, a deep plunge that represents a loss of more than $2.6 billion in ad revenue compared year-over-year. Compared to 3 years ago - 2006 was a pretty good year for American newspapers - we’re looking at a drop of more than $4.5 billion in ad sales in just three years if you only take into account the first quarter.
The sharp decline is caused by the lousy state of both digital and dead tree ad sales: the stats posted on the Newspaper Association of America website show that print sales fell by 29.7% in the first three months of this year (to $5.9 billion), while online sales dropped a record 13.4% (to $696.3 million).
Classified advertising is clearly still taking major hits. Compared to the first quarter of last year, revenue from all types of classified ads fell 42,32% to less than $1.5 billion. Considering the fact that total classifieds ad sales topped $4 billion back in 2001 and were still at almost $3.4 billion in the first quarter of 2007, that has got to hurt. The biggest losers in classifieds: Recruitment (-67.39%), Real Estate (-45.55%) and Automotive (-43.42%).
Annual ad sales for American newspapers came in at a grand total of nearly $49.5 billion in 2005 and dropped to about $37.8 billion in 2008. If the decline rate keeps accelerating the way these first quarter results suggest, we could be looking at somewhere in between $26 billion and $30 billion in total ad sales revenue for this year.
On average, most businesses currently double the number of digital documents they have every twelve to eighteen months. The impact of this rapid addition of content, argues Google, is that the search functionality of an organization’s databases and Websites need to be scalable in a dynamic environment. Google maintains that scalability is a crucial need of enterprises today, which is why the new version of Google’s Search Appliance (GSA) for enterprise search customers has added a powerful, dynamic scalability feature, allowing businesses to now index billions of documents, in addition to indexing Web pages.
To extend search into the enterprise, Google offers businesses its GSA product, a yellow box (that resembles a slice of Swiss cheese), which is based on a standard Dell server and is powered by Xeon 5500 Series processors from Intel. The GSA can index any enterprise data generated by Oracle databases, SAP systems, Documentum, SharePoint, Salesforce.com, HR systems, intranets, wikis, and more, and presents it to employees in a familiar Google-like interface. The sixth generation GSA will be able to index 30 million documents, compared to 10 million in the last generation. In the sixth generation of the GSA, Google is now adding functionality to let businesses stack GSAs on top of each other, so businesses can search billions of documents across integrated GSAs. The fifth generation GSAs were not able to be interconnected.
The new version of the GSA also allows businesses to separate data by sector of an organization (engineering, marketing, finance) but still be able to provide unified search results of all data contained within each appliance. Each department can also monitor and regulate which documents should be integrated into enterprise-wide search and which should be kept within the department’s search.
In the new version of the GSA, Google has upgraded the customization of the appliance, adding several new features to help businesses tailor the GSA to their search needs. First, Google now allows administrators to specify whether the GSA will implement late binding, which is real time authorization of whether a user has access to a document, or early binding, where the GSA holds a cache of existing policy information about who can access which documents. Second, if a business has multiple GSAs operating search, administrators can give more importance in search results to a particular appliance (engineering documents vs. marketing documents). Developers can also add an extra ranking framework to stack search results.
Google is also revving up search results in the GSA, adding social search features such as suggested search and user-added results, that aggregate knowledge across the organization for more precise search results. Additionally, users can now enable cross-language search, where the GSA will translate their search results in real-time into whichever language they choose.
Google now counts 25,000 enterprise search customers, up from last year’s 20,000 customers. Over half of customers use Google’s search appliance and the rest use its hosted site search and other enterprise products. Last year, Google added results based on personalization and Google Alerts functionality to the GSA. This year’s emphasis on scale and customization reinforces Google’s potentially strong enterprise strategy for both content inside the firewall and in the cloud.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
It’s widely known that China runs a pretty tight ship - to put it mildly - on what its citizens get to see online, especially that content which is served from outside of China. YouTube has been blocked for some time and although Wikipedia was blocked for a while, it’s gradually become more available. However today Chinese authorities have brought the the Great Wall of China on a number of services including Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail, Blogger and a number of other sites. The picture is patchy across the country between ISPs and geography, but my sources - who all agreed to be named in this post - say the ban is blanket ban is closing.
Since many of the sites don’t actually have Chinese versions, it’s hard to know how many people will be affected by this, but for those brave and resourceful business people, entrepreneurs and social commentators with strong links to the world outside China, it’s a crushing blow.
Having traveled to China last year I have a number of contacts there now who have all now confirmed the shutdown. The move is almost certainly related to the date. The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened on June 4, and the lead-up to any date like this is usually a time when the Firewall is tightened. The API to Twitter, used by clients like TweetDeck, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop, has also been affected.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Few users seem to have noticed this, but apparently Twitter is no longer appending the correct application that was used to update user streams at the end of each message. Everything is marked as coming “from web”, even if the message was actually sent out from a desktop client, third-party web or mobile application.
Here’s the kicker: after some digging, I found that the company has learned about this issue a couple of days ago but decided not to fix it in order not to disturb the engineers during the weekend:
“With all the recent increase in Twitter API developers and ease of registering an OAuth application, we’re seeing a large growth in the source parameter database. The logic that appends source parameters to updates caches all of the source names in one large object. This object recently surpassed 1MB which is interesting because it is the largest size of an object that fits in memcached. The lack of ability to cache this object was causing an enormous hit on the database degrading performance.
The quick solution was to disable source parameters so that engineers didn’t need to give up their weekend. This will be fixed as soon as possible, likely early in June 1 workday.”
Guess they’re having a long weekend.
Meanwhile, I’m wondering how this will affect the ranking of ‘most popular Twitter clients’ and the likes.
Yes, the rumors are true: Nokia will start shipping its N97 device (they call it a mobile computer) to no less than 75 countries this month, after starting to accept pre-orders earlier last month. In the second half of 2009, Nokia plans to start rolling out a bunch of new features and functions, but right off the bat it will be the first device to come pre-installed with the recently launched Ovi Store. We hope the experience is better than the actual launch. Nokia hasn't detailed exactly which countries will start seeing N97 shipments roll in, but it's safe to say they will most likely include most of the European markets, as well as North America.
That was fast. Irish programmer and SEO specialist Paul Savage has made this very basic web service, which lists all results for search queries on Google and Bing side by side so you can compare which one produces the best results for the keywords you enter on one single page. We’ve played around with it a bit and found that the tool proves that the user experience for both search engines really is very different:
- searching for ‘Google’
Google will show news results about themselves first, and a link to their homepage later, which makes sense since people are probably already on there. The rest of the results consists of Google products and local versions of the search service. Noteworthy difference is the presence of a button that lets you drop down a widget displaying information about Google’s stock without the need to leave the page.
Bing, on the other hand, provides a list of possible extended search queries on the left sidebar, and a list of useful direct links to Google services below the first result. It also lists ’similar’ searches on the right sidebar (not visible in this screenshot) with alternative services - Bing being the first one they recommend. It also displays a box that you can use to jump to Google search, and it keeps track of your search history right on the page, unless you turn that feature off.
- searching for ‘TechCrunch’
Google only shows internal network links on the first SERP with the exception of our Twitter account, Netvibes profile and Wikipedia entry, while Bing mostly shows links to third-party services (Wikipedia, OnSugar, Flux, Blip.tv, AboutUs.org, Facebook, GitHub, Mahalo, etc.). From the viewpoint of TC the company, the latter situation is not ideal, and to top it off running the query on Bing apparently means potential visitors will see the names of competing blogs in the left sidebar. On the upside, you can open the Wikipedia article on TechCrunch on the same page, which makes for a seamless user experience if information about us was what you were looking for.
- searching for ‘Linux’
Using Google, you get much better results for this query, period. Google lists at least five very relevant links (Kernel.org, Debian.org, RedHat.com, LinuxJournal.com and LI.org) that you will not find in the first 15 search results on Bing. No nifty sidebars, nor any amount of spot-on similar results will help Microsoft here.
- searching for ‘Office Space quotes’
Here, Bing takes the top prize, although with this particular query the results are much more similar, which can be attributed to the fact that it is more detailed (three words instead of one like the other examples). Why do I say that? Because Bing is the only one of both that correctly lists the movie Office Space’s Wikipedia entry in the first few results, while Google doesn’t even list until the fifth page of results (both rank Wikiquote quite high). Also, this is where the extended search options in the left sidebar at Bing really shine: ‘Office Space sound clips’, ‘Office Space WAV files’, ‘Office Space Clips’, etc. - that’s the stuff you’d likely be looking for.
It is far too early and this is far too unscientific a research method to jump to any conclusions - we’d need a Jump to Conclusions mat for that - but using Savage’s tool gives you a nice clean overview of what most people who’ve tried both engines today: Google and Bing at the very least feel very different, and while you can argue about the quality of one engine versus the other back and forth as much as you want, it’s painfully clear both need improvement. Of course, if there continues to be no clear winner on the quality front, then Google has already won the battle before it starts, expensive ad campaigns be damned.
That said, please allow me to reiterate a point Michael made yesterday as well as in the past, that I most definitely agree with: Microsoft is damn right not to give up the search game yet like some are suggesting they should. Please stop calling for a monopoly in search, let these companies compete and fight hard for every user, and I’m sure we’ll see more innovation in this space soon enough.
CrunchGear is on the scene down here in LA, and today was the first big day of the show — even though it doesn’t really even start until tomorrow. Today was actually the day of press conferences by some of the big players, where they drop all their big news and tell you where to check out the latest big franchise games. It’s also a showcase for the latest acquisitions and technology, as well as announcing partnerships and that sort of thing.
Today’s events included Microsoft’s Xbox event this morning, then heavyweight EA’s press conference in the early afternoon, then Ubisoft in the later afternoon (they win the guest presenter contest, with both Pele and James Cameron). They dropped some interesting stuff, though I’d be lying if I told you they didn’t introduce a game where you do fantasy make-up. Ubi had the most interesting non-game talks: they’re working with Hollywood in a pretty ridiculous fashion and are going to be using their in-game engines and assets to help in creating actual films.
If three events in a day sounds like a light schedule, well, it is for a team of like 10 guys, but there’s just two of us right now and we’ve got to liveblog, shoot stills and video, transcode, watermark, upload, and post like five things for each event — all while trying to stay alive in downtown Los Angeles — a full-time job in itself.
One of Twitter’s greatest assets has always been its developer community. But with the countless link, image, and video sharing services available (many of which are very similar to each other), most new services are lost to obscurity. When it comes to determining which services will succeed, the popular Twitter clients hold all the keys. If you’re integrated with one, you’ll be at the fingertips of hundreds of thousands of users who wouldn’t have otherwise known you existed. Getting chosen as an application’s default service can lead to skyrocketing popularity overnight. These Twitter clients are home to some very valuable real estate, and now some of their developers are looking to profit accordingly.
We’ve been hearing from multiple sources that TweetDeck has been toying with charging a fee for services to appear in the popular Twitter client for some time now, so we turned to the company’s founder, Iain Dodsworth, for answers. He says that no services have paid up until this point, but that by the time the next version comes out, that will change. Unsurprisingly, Dodsworth wasn’t willing to go into the details of the arrangements, but we’ve been hearing it will cost services around $50,000 to appear in TweetDeck. We’ve also heard that there might be an extra fee to become a default service, but this information is less concrete.
It also sounds like only some services will be asked to pay to appear in TweetDeck, while others will be included for free, which makes sense. The application would have a hard time omitting a service like TwitPic without raising quite a few eyebrows. But for those link shorteners that are a dime a dozen, particularly the ones that are just getting started, a fee would be much less surprising.
Now, let me be clear: I don’t think there’s anything particularly sinister about this. It’s a natural progression of the Twitter ecosystem. Developers have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise they’re going to be presenting users with an increasingly overwhelming and redundant list of options. So they can either subjectively pick out their favorite services (or perhaps the most popular ones), or they can charge for their spots. In theory they could also allow users to manually specify their own shortener and image sharing services (in the same way you can specify the default search in your web browser), but the number of people who would actually do this would be negligible.
That said, I do have concerns. My biggest issue is that TweetDeck, or any other clients that adopt a similar model, could show favoritism to services that are clearly inferior simply because they have larger pocketbooks. At this point many of these third party services (particularly the URL shorteners) are very similar, so I don’t particularly care if my link goes out through one or the other. But if TweetDeck starts defaulting to a service that isn’t very good, or refuses to integrate an up-and-coming new service that users are clamoring for, then we’re going to have issues.
As for other clients, TweetDeck’s competition has largely avoided the practice of charging for integration. Seesmic Desktop doesn’t do it - in fact, it rotates the default services for each install to maintain neutrality. And Tweetie, the very popular iPhone and native Mac client, doesn’t charge either (though it does generate revenue through premium versions and integrated advertising). But now that the dam is breaking, I suspect we’ll hear about more applications, particularly the free ones, adopting similar pay-to-play models with their integrated third party services.
That TweetDeck is among the first clients to do this isn’t very surprising - it’s the most popular Twitter client, and the company has also raised funding, which means it has to appease investors with some actual revenue. The company has also recently experimented with a branded Blink 182 version of TweetDeck, and Dodsworth says that more revenue streams are on the way.
Update: Dodsworth has sent me the following to clarify his position on adding services, emphasizing the importance of the user experience when it comes to selecting which services qualify:
It is correct that select, commercial, partners are getting integrated into Tweetdeck. TweetDeck is now the leading *client* by a long shot, with around 20% market share and, similar to the browser, we think there might just be a business model in here.
Integration and placement is based on a set of criteria and the experience of our users is always at the foremost of our minds. The user experience of TweetDeck has given us the lead in this market and we are acutely aware that all of the services we integrate need to echo this focus on providing the best possible user experience. Indeed this is why we are looking to integrate additional services as although Twitpic is the current leader their downtime reflects badly on TweetDeck and causes frustration for our users.
We feel its important to provide users with reliable alternatives in all service areas and as a bootstrapped start-up with a small team and limited bandwidth we believe this revenue opportunity can help us to fund our ongoing development and provide our users with the best possible experience.
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Have you ever thought of a quirky but innovative product that might be useful to the masses but didn’t follow through with the idea? Sometimes these flashes of genius get lost in the shuffle. Startup quirky is hoping to be the platform for product ideas that are born on napkin doodles and in other unorthodox ways. The site then tries to use crowdsourcing to develop the product, by engaging participants in collaborating on every aspect of product creation - from ideation, design, naming, manufacturing, marketing, to sales. It’s like a social network for product development.
Founded by serial entrepreneur Ben Kaufman (he created mophie and kluster), quirky lets users submit their product idea for $99. Users can also vote, rate, and influence other people’s product ideas. Every week users can post ideas on quirky to be rated by the quirky community. After a seven day evaluation period, the quirky community chooses one product from the pool of submitted ideas to move forward through the process. quirky’s community engages and contributes to every part of the product’s development, weighing in on everything from naming to logo selection to packaging.
The product is pre-sold at the quirky online store. Once the product hits a pre-sales threshold, credit cards are charged, and the product graduates to production and delivery. $0.30 of every dollar generated from the sale of a quirky product goes back to the creators, and the people who voted, commented, and rated the project idea along the way, giving the community an incentive participate and engage in each product’s development. The creators are given $0.12 of that $0.30.
With the launch of the site, quirky has also revealed its first product, created by friends and family of quirky employees. The Sling Back is a universal wire retractor that holds up three feet of any type of wire ( headphone cords, small power cables, USB cords, firewire cables, or printer cords) up to 1/8″ in diameter. On the development page of the Sling Back, quirky lists the creator (in this case, Ben Kaufman) and the top “influencers,” the people who contributed to the development of the retractor. The site says that so far, two other products are currently being developed. Each product lists the stage of development they are in and how much time is left before a decision will be made. For example, “The Ouch Pouch,” a designable sling that has pictures and decorations needs a logo.
quirky seems like an innovative idea although, I do think that the creators of the product which ends up being developed may get the short end of the stick when it comes to sales, especially given that they are putting up $99 per idea. But, on the flip side, these ideas, which may be otherwise discarded or forgotten, are given the chance of being created. The site is similar to one of Kaufman’s previous ventures, NameThis, and other sites IdeaBlob and Innocentive.
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