TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Google’s Doing It Again: Jaiku dying on the vine?

Google has an annoying habit of making acquisitions, and then letting those acquisitions die on the vine as (presumably) the talent behind them is employed elsewhere in the Googleplex. The seminal example is DodgeBall,,
who’s founder’s public departure from Google lead many to question Google’s ability to successfully integrate their purchases into their core proposition.

More recently, it looks like Google’s doing the same to Jaiku. “Jaiku users flee to Twitter,” “Jaiku woes plague Google,” and “What is Google’s plan for Jaiku?” are not the kind of headlines one wants to see three months after a purchase.

So what then is Google’s deal? Does anyone there really know how something like Jaiku or DodgeBall should be integrated into the Google-mission to index all information? It would seem not. Google has been roundly criticized for going off in too many directions, and it would seem that purchases like Jaiku are symptomatic of “executive pet projects” - i.e.: purchases made on a whim when a powerful exec mentions that they’d be good to have under their corporate umbrella, but without any real thought behind it.

While a cash-rich company like Google may enjoy the luxury of making poorly planned purchases, they’re not doing themselves, their customers (us), or entrepreneurs any favors. Internally, Google is building teams of disgruntled, neglected staff that have come in the door with acquisitions but found that their new working environment more or less doesn’t care about their aspirations. Further, once dynamic, growing products become static and neglected, to the detriment of that product’s customers (witness the Jaiku flight). Finally, the bright light of an entrepreneur is covered or otherwise extinguished as its subsumed by the Googleplex.

All told, it seems like a sad state of affairs that should be some senior Google’s priority to rectify.

dodgeball, google jaiku

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Predictions for 2008, #3: Semantic apps will continue to suck

Well, “suck” is probably too strong a work. How about “Semantic apps will continue to be completely irrelevant?”

2007 was a year heavy on buzz around so-called next generation, 3.0, semantic apps - things like PowerSet & Hakia (natural language search), Spock (people search), Twine (who knows), and so on.

Well, after a year of anticipation, each is either unlaunched (powerset), unloved (spock is weak), or unheard of (twine).

Consider the value propositions:

1. Spock promised powerful people search, and so far has delivered a (drum roll)… social network scraper. See “idiocy writ large” for reference.
2. Next gen search engines promised better results than google and so far have delivered… junk. See my off the cuff Hakia vs. Google comparo for reference.
3. Apps like Twine promise to automate the discovery of relationships between your disparate bits of information - but if you listen to the video there’s a lot of buzzwords (semantic graph! open! graph! wikis! ontologies!) and little substance (its got smarts!) beyond keyword parsing.

…so my prediction is that Google will continue to kick ass, the so-called next-gen startups will continue to languish or sit or beta-purgatory, and slowly the concept of “semantic” will fade from the public eye as VC’s find something else to latch onto.

(Quick update: Twine has also committed what I consider to be the cardinal sin of marketing plans - attempting to create their own vernacular, i.e.: in scoble’s video above one “twines” a link, and creates a “twine” about something - arggh. Its as bad as the now defunct Teqlo)

2008, google, hakia, powerset, predictions, semantic, spock, twine web3.0

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You say Per-say, I say Persai - let’s call the whole thing off

It hard to separate news aggregator start-up Persai from the personality of one of its notoriously pugilistic co-founders, Ted Dziuba. Before Uncov, however, Ted got a degree in computational math and worked at Google, and co-contributors Kyle and Matt certainly seem to bring deep knowledge to the table: both the Persai blog and Dziuba’s former blog (Epsilon-Delta) at least have enough mathematical jargon to wrap an air of credibility around the enterprise.

So - what is Persai? At a high-level, as I understand it (based on the “evidence” cataloged below), its a news reader/aggregator, similar to in basic appearance to Google Reader. Where Persai differs, apparently, is in the fact that your reader’s content is determined by your interests - not just feeds you’ve subscribed to. Persai, based on your added interests and its own relevance engine, serves up content for you in a Reader-like form - acting as a “recommendation engine.” You can then further refine Persai’s interpretation of your interests by rejecting its selections, creating what I imagine to be a Pandora-like experience. Ultimately, it looks like Persai is closer conceptually to an uber-Memeorandum, Megite, or Tailrank - offering a more customizeable, granular experience integrated into a single personalized stream, compared to other sites canned verticals.

There are three pieces of Persai out there right now: a screenshot at Valleywag (displayed above), and two microsites (eyeonfacebook and appleinsight) apparently built to demonstrate Persai’s ability to generate a topical content stream. There’s also the Persai blog, which is long on technical descriptions and short on use-cases.

So - given that I don’t have access to a beta or whathaveyou, I can’t comment on how well it works, or how accurate my understanding of its functionality is. Assuming that I do have generally the right idea, however, I can comment on the business elements of Persai.

In a nutshell: I think Persai’s user-customizeable recommendation engine is bound to secure a dedicated niche user base, and less likely to ever go “mainstream.” Interest-based recommendations would certainly make an interesting addition to Google reader, especially when combined with your search and Reader clickstream history. As a standalone, however, I’d expect it to float in the same orbit at Megite/Tailrank/etc. - perennially there, but never crossing the threshold that separates those businesses that exist from those that win.

google, megite, memeorandum, persai recommendations

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Watch Google Buy FreshBooks

FreshBooks is a noteable Canadian accounting startup that is widely acknowledged to have elevated online accounting apps to a new plateau in terms of ease of use and effectiveness. They’ve got an API, a rational/cheap/flexible pricing schedule, lots of users (250k!), a blog, and a well-rounded feature set.

So, when Read/Write Web and Jay Eye Sea suggest that Google has the motivation, resources, and market opportunity to get into online accounting, I say they’re going to pull a Feedburner/YouTube and just buy the best-of-breed that’s out there already. In doing so, they’ll get a great product, and great team, and a revenue stream.

What’s stopping them?

accounting, acquisitions, feedburner, freshbooks google

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Hakia vs. Google: the 5 Million Dollar Question

Hakia just loaded up with another $5M to keep working on their semantic search “web 3.0″ product.

Out of interest, I compared search results for what I thought would be a good “semantic” search on both ol’ faithful Google and newfangled Hakia.

The query was: “How to protect my privacy on facebook.” Hakia’s results are here, Google’s here. Screenshots and commentary follow.

I figured it would be a good test of the two because there’s meaning to be extracted from the semantics of the sentence - “how to” implies that I’m seeking a tutorial, “protect” means that I have a specific action in mind, as opposed to just seeking editorial content on “facebook” and “privacy” and so on.

The verdict? Hakia’s second result was a splog trying to get me to sign up for a credit assessment. The rest of the Hakia results were a low quality mish-mash of blog posts and miscellaneous content which by and large were discussions about Facebook - for example, a bunch of HuffPo stuff.

Google on the other hand, started with a PDF from Canada’s Privacy Commissioner on how to adjust privacy settings in your Facebook profile, and continued with several highly relevant tutorials (including Facebook’s own privacy pages), before breaking down into discussion posts.

The bottom line? Google’s result was massively superior. On the other hand, Hakia has built in social networking, offering to introduce me to others who have received similarly dissatisfying results for the same search. Super! Ok, fine. I’m not giving Hakia a fair shake with a sample size of one. But nor will anyone else, and first impressions count. At least Powerset keeps their weak beta results private; Hakia should have done the same, IMHO.

google, hakia search

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TechWatching Blog Search is coming along…

Want to know what the tech blogosphere has said about Windows Vista in the past week? Click here to have a look.

TechWatching now surfaces the indexes that it uses for meme-tracking as a searchable database. Some compartive analysis:

1. Its very vertical. This searches only those blogs that TechWatching indexes - about 225 as of this writing. This number will grow over time of course, but it will never have the breadth of say Google Blog Search. On the upside, results will be spam free and from “trusted” sources vetted by the entire tech blogosphere.
2. Its not deep yet. TechWatching isn’t crawling sites - just following feeds. So the content is very chronologically shallow so far, going back only 7 days (that’s when the current database was rolled out). Of course, it gets deeper second by second, but if you’re looking for older stuff, its back to Google or Technorati.
3. It indexes titles only. I’m trading efficiency for depth here, based on the assumption that if a blogger is writing about something for a feed-reading audience, they’re going to put their important topical keywords in their post titles. Undoubtedly some posts will fall through the cracks because of this - but FWIW, if a blogger is constantly obfuscating their posts with titles that bear at-best tangential relation to their post content, well… that’s annoying for feed scanning people too, not just robots.

I also built in a time-boxer today, so you can see posts from the last few hours, today, etc. Of course, the periods longer that two weeks don’t mean a lot as the index doesn’t go back that far yet….

Anyway - enjoy. I built this engine on top of TechWatching because I find Technorati frustrating and inconsistent, and lord only knows, the world needs an alternative to Google. Also, I believe in the power of focused verticals to deliver superior results.

More to follow - stay tuned.

blog search, google, technorati techwatching

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The Phone Rings for Thee: Google to announce Monday?

The WSJ is reporting that Google is set to announce its GPhone plans Monday (Nov. 5), announcing partnerships with T-Mob and Sprint initially. God willing, that will push bloody Facebook and OpenSocial off of TechMeme for a few days.

So - what does a GPhone mean to me?

Familiar Business Model: I’m assuming that the GPhone will be a mobile OS built by Google, deployed on hardware built by others, serviced by multiple carriers, supported by localized advertising of some kind. That layout seems like a natural fit for Google: its got a familiar business plan, a familiar ethic (open platform!), and forwards the mission of organizing all of the world’s data, an increasing amount of which, in the form of call records, contact data, videos, and photos is tied up in mobile devices. Hell, if you think about it, its an near mirror of the desktop world: Google writes apps and services, deployed on hardware by multiple vendors (every desktop and laptop ever made), supported by ISP’s.

Optimized for the Cloud: IMHO this is where Google will really differentiate. If the OS provides a well-conceived conduit into Google’s cloud, it will be golden. I want to…

1. Access my mobile voicemail through GMail online.
2. See my call history online.
3. Be able to make voice calls online and see that history on my mobile.
4. Have a single online/mobile contact infoset.
5. Save & load pictures and video too and from a GDrive storage cloud automatically.
6. Enjoy true calendar integration - i.e.: if a GCal event is set with an alarm 15 minutes before, I want my phone to ring with a reminder, wherever I am.
7. A full suite of API’s and mobile developer tools to spur development and innovation on the platofrm.
8. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Apple is inching its way there with the iPhone/iTunes marriage - but its synchronization is limited to your desktop, whereas Google’s is global. Of course, Apple’s strategy is tuned to the mass market - its a model that people are familiar with, as reflected in sales. I’m guessing that Google’s geek-centric value propositions are going to see slower initial adoption, buy greater long-term penetration, even if white labeled.

Fundamentally, a single repository for your communications info, accessed through multiple channels (phone, internet) just makes sense. Google, as others have noted, is a natural fit to quarterback this combination of software, hardware, and infrastructure. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Google can pull it off.

apple, google, gphone, iphone, microsoft, sprint, tmobile wsj

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Google Results Suck Hard… so does my SEO

I’ve always tried to stay out of SEO/SEM discussions as I’ve invested very little time into understanding the dynamics of search algorithms and the practicalities of SEO. As a content site owner, however, I’m starting to understand that its not just a traffic booster, but fundamental to the survival of my site (upcomingdiscs.com).

UpcomingDiscs has a great crew of reviewers cranking out quality dvd reviews - that Google can’t find. Here’s an example: take a look at the results for “planet terror dvd review” - seems like a natural enough search, right? UpcomingDiscs has a good review of “Planet Terror” - quality, original content.

1. The #1 result from Google is a Netscape/Propeller page with one vote.
2. The #6 result from Google is a Digg page with two votes.
3. UpcomingDiscs doesn’t appear in the index. Rather, I only looked to page 10 of results, but we weren’t there.
4. The first 10 pages are a mish mash of review indexes, reviews, newspaper stories about the movie, and so on.

So - what conclusions can I draw from this little experiment?

1. Google’s algorithm is damaged. Propeller and Digg in first and sixth place are not right.
2. UpcomingDiscs needs some radical SEO.

The first of these I have little control over; the second, I have lots. I figured that producing an XML sitemap pointing to original content with clean URL’s would suffice; apparently not.

google, search, sem seo

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#2 Deconstructing the TC40: Faroo

#2 in my “deconstructing the TC40″ series (see #1).

Faroo. P2P search.

Summary: DO NOT WANT.

The Proposition: No crawler, no centralized index. Instead, Faroo relies on users (presumably with a browser toolbar); each page a user visits is added to the Faroo distributed index. Visitor metrics gathered across the Faroo network drive rankings in search results.

Value Add: Better search. Advertising revenue shared with users.

Warning Bells: Revenue sharing is commonly a prop to support a core business that doesn’t have the strength to stand on its own. Faroo results will be based on popularity - a poor proxy for either quality or relevance. Similarly, Faroo’s results will be a thin slice of the net. Finally: Faroo’s website talks about Faroo as an alternative to [Google’s] “info monopoly” - mixing “information wants to be free!!1!” politics with business is a warning sign about the company’s readiness to compete on the main stage. Basically no barriers to entry.

Death Knell: Both del.icio.us and StumbleUpon could build out similar “social search” functionality around their indexes very quickly if the concept got any traction.

faroo, google, search, tc20, tc40 techcrunch

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#1 Deconstructing the TC40: Clickable

In this series of articles, I’m going to share my take on as many of the TC40 as I can stand (or find info on), based on the list provided by Paul Boutin.

First Up: Clickable.

Summary: Looks good. Buy rating.

The Proposition: Its an account management aggregator for search engine marketing. i.e.: Clickable lets you manage your campaigns for Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft through a unified interface.

Value Add: Streamlined administration for individual advertisers and agencies. Highly configurable alerts to maximize responsiveness. A single view across all search properties allows for superior evaluation of ad spend effectiveness.

Business Model: Unknown - subscription fees? A percentage of spend?

Prognosis: Seems to me to be a natural evolution; as the volume and complexity of campaigns online increases, the space for “middle-men” grows - Clickable fits in nicely offering advertisers a valuable streamlining management service, reducing the overhead of conducting ad business online. Industry knowledge and workflow integration provide barriers to entry to competitors.

Warning Bells: Clickable I assume is API dependent, meaning its dependent on the continuing benevolence of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Similarly, Clickable’s value proposition is vulnerable to improvements in G/M/Y’s tools, particularly Google’s, given their dominance of this space.

adwords, clickable, google, sem, seo, tc20 tc40

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