Web2.0 Updates

Facebook will announce later today that it is adding a “Features” tab to the “Insights” area of the application management page.

The new tab will give developers a greater range of statistics on application usage, including the number of canvas page views, clicks on profile boxes, confirmations of feed forms, and additions and removals of bookmarks (which have replaced application installations). Developers will be able to graph changes to these statistics over time and compare how daily counts fluctuate within particular time periods.

The Palo Alto-based social network claims to be adding this new tab in response to developers’ requests for more insight into how users are actually using their applications.

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According to the Brazilian news magazine Exame, Google has made Brazil the center of its Latin American operations, placing former country director Alexandre Hohagen at the helm.

Google is understood to have chosen Brazil for its superior regional performance. While the Mountain View, California-based search giant doesn’t comment on regional numbers, the article claims that Brazil is Google’s fastest growing market (hard to verify, but it’s certainly one of the fastest growing), generating an estimated $500 million per year in revenues. This is all the more impressive considering the Brazilian office was opened just three years ago and has only 200 employees.

The decision to run Latin American operations from Brazil comes soon after another decision to move all development and management of Orkut to that country, with most of the engineering in the city of Belo Horizonte. Orkut is Google’s social network, which enjoys most of its popularity in Brazil and India.

Brazil is also said to have the second largest number of Gmail accounts, perhaps because of the popularity of Orkut. Google’s biggest white labeled Gmail customer may also be in Brazil: iG, a portal with over 9 million accounts.

Google is still in the process of replacing Hohagen with a new country director for Brazil.

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Twitterfone launched in May to let Twitter users post new messages by calling in to a phone number and speaking out what they want to say. The service then converts the message to text and posts it to your Twitter account along with a link to the audio file. Here’s a test message I created at the launch. The service is a great way to leave a quick Twitter message when you’re away from your computer and only have access to a phone - the service offers local number in 19 countries and is expanding regularly. The company says 20,000 people have signed up for the service since launch.

Today Twitterfone will start converting your Twitter messages to audio, too, giving users a full audio interface to the service. As of today, when you call Twitterfone the service offers to let you record a new message, listen to messages from your friends, and reply to messages publicly or privately. Users can listen to the first ten messages.

For now, only English is supported, but Japanese is next up. The service is free and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

If you are a Twitterer, you’re gonna love this. Below is a quick demo video I did via Qik that shows the functionality.

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Glam Media loves to tout its comScore numbers, and uses them to claim it is the largest collection of women’s sites in the world. And that’s true when you count all of the affiliate sites Glam does not own or operate that it sells advertising for. That’s Glam’s entire business model: sign up sites that appeal to women, and sell ads across the entire network. In June, that network reached 76.9 million people worldwide, which was flat with May (77.4 million), but much bigger than rival iVillage’s women’s network (27.6 million).

But apparently, reaching 77 million people a month is not enough. Glam is now trying to strong-arm its affiliates into placing the Glam logo on every page of their site, because that is how comScore counts traffic and visitor stats for the Glam Network. In its August newsletter to affiliates, Glam is claiming that affiliates agreed to place the Glam logo on their sites as part of contract they clicked on when they signed up. This is news to at least one affiliate, who forwarded the newsletter to us. It presents this claim almost innocuously as a “Question of the Month.” Here’s an excerpt (I’ve bolded parts for emphasis):

QUESTION OF THE MONTH

If you have any questions about your logo or your account in general, please contact your account manager.

Yet, if you look at the language of Glam’s “Affiliate Linkage and Advertising Agreement” (which can be found here and embedded in its entirety below), the only stipulations that are seemingly related are the following (again I’ve bolded for emphasis):

b. Affiliate agrees to:

vii. Obtain Glam’s final approval of the placements and targeting of the Advertising and all references to Glam in the Affiliate Websites; and

That bit about placing Glam Network Branding on the site might cover the logo, but it clearly states that any such placement will be mutually determined by both the affiliate and Glam (presumably at a future date, so it can’t be part of the existing contract)

Oh, and there is also this nice clause in the agreement, which is unrelated, but still surprising. If you sign up to allow Glam to serve ads on your site, you are also giving them the first right of refusal in case you ever decide to sell your site. Per the agreement:

10. Right of First Refusal

b. Right of First Refusal. Glam shall have an option for a period of 15 days from receipt of the Notice to elect to purchase Affiliate’s interest in such website(s) at the same price and subject to the same material terms and conditions as described in the Notice. Glam may exercise such purchase option by notifying Affiliate in writing before expiration of the 15-day period. In this event, Affiliate agrees to enter into an agreement on terms substantially similar to the terms set forth in the Notice.

Best Friends Forever, indeed.

Glam Affiliate Advertising Agreement - Upload a Document to Scribd Read this document on Scribd: Glam Affiliate Advertising Agreement

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Yahoo’s Search Blog has posted a list of some of the most promising new web apps being built using its BOSS search platform. BOSS is a radically open API that launched last month that allows developers to utilize much of Yahoo’s core search data without the restrictions seen on most other search APIs.

4HourSearch - A week ago Yahoo VP of Platform Sam Pullara released Yuil, a search engine that looked nearly exactly like recently launched (and overhyped) Cuil, but powered by Yahoo’s BOSS. The search engine actually managed to produce better results than Cuil by many accounts, but it was not to be - lawyers stepped in and Yuil was taken down only hours after it first went up. Pullara ripped the guts out of of Yuil and redid the layout to be less tempting to DMCA-hungry lawyers, leaving us with 4HourSearch (which was apparently created in 4 hours).

NewsLine - Dipity has combined BOSS with the Daylife news API to create NewsLine, an interactive timeline that places news events in chronilogical order. The result works surprisingly well, especially for current events. Earlier this year Dipity released TimeTube, a similar mashup that displays YouTube videos across a timeline. We covered TimeTube here.

You can find more mashups and details at the original blog post here

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The dog days of August lend themselves to kicking back and letting the world slide by. Since the advent of the Web 2.0 ecosystem, they’ve also been the province of a tech company version of the summer shows the networks play off - failed pilots, reality programming being tried out for the Big Show or another writer’s strike, and ratings stinkers that can be buried outside of Sweeps months.

But the DVR has changed everything, in the process eliminating the notion of special sweeps periods and the upfronts where the new season is hawked. Instead, every day is Premiere Month, with the quality of the audience becoming a function of its trackability. The more that you can see the gestures of the audience in real time, the less you need to attract their attention and the more you can market it to the advertisers. In that context, a show played back is no longer a second class citizen; instead the metadata about when you played it back and what was going on at that time form a more powerful indicator of intent, and the common signature of like-minded users a highly valued target.

In fact, television and music content have become more like software than they are different, and the release of the iPhone App Store is a significant new platform for the intersection of what formerly were seen as two different products.

What kinds of programming will emerge? Perhaps a kind of reality show with mobile devices, where contestants roam the real world and use their phones as transaction wands to indicate their interest (or lack of it) in products, events, personalities, and so on. Team behavior is aggregated and mined by matching demographic profiles with reactions to produce “answers” to questions about news of the day, topic swarms on Twitter or other social networks, the race for the White House.

In effect, a new hyper reality show becomes possible, where the App Store is the gateway for an Adsense-like version of Big Brother that leaves the house and breaks out into the virtual community. The device and bandwidth is subsidized by the show, so that Apple can turn on the video aspects of the phone to produce footage, and the community could even be encouraged to provide production support for cataloging and editing the show together via the app and the phone.

Read the full rant on TechCrunchIT

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As part of the ongoing integration of its DoubleClick acquisition (yesterday it sold off Performics), Google will be placing an additional DoubleClick cookie on the browsers of everyone who visits a site that is part of Google’s current AdSense network. This will allow Google to serve up display ads across that network of sites. It will also allow it to introduce some basic improvements such as frequency capping (letting advertisers limit how many times the same person sees the same ad), and better reporting and conversion data.

All of that is great for advertisers and great for Google, which will be able to leverage its vast, existing Adsense network to push display ads as well. This is what scares the hell out of Microsoft and Yahoo, and was the prime impetus for Microsoft seriously getting into the online ad business in the first place with its acquisition of aQuantive last year and its attempts to buy Yahoo this year.

For consumers, it means even more cookies on their browsers and more attempts to target ads to them. From the Google Blog:

We are enabling this functionality by implementing a DoubleClick ad-serving cookie across the Google content network. Using the DoubleClick cookie means that DoubleClick advertisers and publishers don’t have to make any changes on their websites as we continue our integration efforts and offer additional enhancements.

On the bright side, for those who of you who have enough cookies on your browser, Google is letting you opt out of cookies for both AdSense and DoubleClick ads with one click.

(Flickr photo by scubadive67).

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Regator, the blog aggregator that acts like a mix between a standard RSS reader and Digg, has launched in public beta.

We initially covered Regator in July when the site launched in a limited private beta. At the time my biggest concern was the inability to add your own RSS feeds to the site, which restricted you to the approximately 3,000 blogs handpicked by Regator. CEO Scott Lockhart says that the site has been updated to allow users to upload their own feeds, but these won’t be visible to other users until they have been approved by Regator’s editors.

The site has also expanded on its sharing functionality to include Twitter and Facebook, with plans to introduce further integration with social networking sites in the future. There are a number of similar sites that combine news aggregation with social voting, including Socialmedian, which we covered last week.

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Here are a few audio snippets from a Q and A session with the president of Google’s Enterprise division, Dave Girouard. The session took place on August 5th at the Pacific Crest Technology Leadership Forum in Vail, Colorado.

Girouard talks about Cloud Computing, Google’s new App Engine, the Google Apps productivity suite, competition versus partnerships, and how Google faces the challenges of protecting its users’ privacy and security.

Read more…

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I’m seeing a trend as I continue to download and test many of the 1,500+ and growing iPhone applications currently available on iTunes: Few of them are really taking advantage of the network effect to build any kind of competitive barrier to entry.

Some apps are safe because they are simply iPhone versions of their normal web service. Google and Yelp are two examples out of hundreds of applications that are simply marking their territory for now.

But most applications are unaffiliated with an established website, which means they need to be able to build a sustainable business on the iPhone alone unless they’re just there for fun. Already we’re seeing applications that are effectively identical to others. There are two chess games for example (Chess Classics and Caissa Chess), both priced at $9.99. There are at least three movie theater apps (Movies.app, OneTap Movies and Box Office). Etc.

There are few feature differences between the applications, which can be quickly updated to match what competitors offer. Those that are trying to charge for their applications are at an extreme disadvantage when they have comparable free alternatives. There’s a march towards free with these apps, and it’s unclear they’ll be able to make money via advertising or other channels.

Take Advantage Of The Network Effect

Without a compelling existing brand or a really innovative product with protectable intellectual property (some of the games fall into this category), the only chance these apps have for long term success is to start thinking about ways to have users interact with each other in order to build network value.

I’ve long argued that social networking on the iPhone is a huge opportunity, and the fact that the big guys are ignoring it for now leaves the door open for a newcomer to get long term market share.

But there are endless other opportunities as well. Take those chess applications as an example. Neither support multiplayer games on different devices. I can play against a friend if he’s here with me, but I can’t have my dad download the application to his phone and play a game of chess with me asynchronously from two states away. The functionality is available to developers, they simply didn’t build it. If they did, there would be a big incentive for chess lovers to flock to that particular application, and it would then be hard for the others to compete. The same thing goes for other games like Scrabble, etc.

My guess is the first breakout hit on the iPhone will be a multiplayer game that is played real time or asynchronously, with each user installing the app on their own phone. I’ve played too many games of Halo on Xbox Live against people who live God Knows Where to not understand the power of distributed game playing to drive software, hardware and subscription sales.

If you are building this kind of application, we want to hear all about it. Someone is going to do this right, and then a flood of copycats will enter the market. Don’t be second to market. And stop treating the iPhone like it isn’t connected to every other iPhone and iPhone user out there in the world.

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See our review of the YouNoodle startup valuation predictor from a couple of days ago (as well as our skeptical post from earlier this year). The company says they will be launching later this morning sometime. Look for a tab in the top right corner of the site called “startup predictor”, or just click on younoodle.com/predictor to see if it’s live.

The company, which is funded by The Founders Fund, Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, uses detailed data about startups and a proprietary algorithm to make a guess on the likelihood of success of a startup. They even go so far as to estimate the value of the company three years out.

The key factors in determining likelihood of success are the team, financial factors, the concept and advisors. Details on the education, entrepreneurial experience and other information founder and key employee. The tool wants to know everything. For the founders, their age, education, previous startups (and how they did), and their long term relationship to the other founders. For the concept, YouNoodle gathers information on the business idea (probably extracting keywords for analysis), where it’s located, and lots of other data.

See our previous post for valuation predictions for a few high profile startups like Slide, RockYou, Twitter, FriendFeed, Cuill and Mahalo. Then cast your aspersions appropriately. The most interesting and insightful (or just plain funny) commenters get a TechCrunch tshirt in the size of their choice.

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Jajah, a popular VoIP service provider, has released a new English/Chinese translation service called JAJAH.Babel just in time for the Olympic Games. The service, which was developed in conjunction with IBM, allows users to call a free number to get a near-instant translation of spoken sentences. The service isn’t meant for voice calls abroad - instead, it’s a handheld translator. After speaking your message into the phone, you hand it to the person you’re speaking with, and the phone spits out the translated message.

Using the service is fairly simple, and should work from any phone line:

How does JAJAH.Babel work? From English to Chinese or in reverse:
Dial JAJAH.Babel from any phone. U.S. local access number: +1.718.513.2969
Choose which language you want your message translated into (either English to Chinese or Chinese to English)
Say your message and press #
You will be able to confirm that your message was properly understood by the system.
The message will automatically be played back in Chinese. If you wish, simply hand your phone to the other person or put the phone on loudspeaker so they hear the message.
The other person can then record a message in Chinese, following the steps above, and you will hear their message in English.

To help test the service I recruited TechCrunch intern Matthew Schulz, who is fluent in Chinese. His conclusion was that it worked surprisingly well. The translation from English to Chinese sounded a little bit awkward, but the meaning was obvious. As for speech detection, the service had some trouble when he spoke Chinese in his normal tone, but when he enunciated a bit more than usual the results were almost perfect.

For now, the service is limited to translations between English and Chinese Mandarin, but the companies plan to release new languages in the near future. You can get more information about the service along with more local access numbers here.

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TokBox, the Sequoia backed video chat startup, has closed a $10 million Series B round led by Bain Capital Ventures, with Sequoia also contributing. The round brings TokBox’s total funding to around $14 million. As part of the deal, Bain’s Scott Friend will join the company’s board.

TokBox offers a Flash-based video chat service that requires no extra plugins. The service has gotten rave reviews from a number of our readers for its ease of use. While the service offers basic social network functionality, there’s no account required to participate in a chat - users need only browse to the URL that gets assigned to each chat room.

Last month TokBox positioned itself to more directly take on traditional web chat and IM clients like AIM and Skype by releasing a new AIR desktop client.

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The web is full of hipsters scouring the indie music scene for the next big thing. And while there is no shortage of communities where these trendsetters can share their picks, they’ve never stood to gain anything from being ahead of the crowd (aside from a slight sense of superiority). Popcuts, a Y Combinator-funded music store that launches today in public beta, is looking to reward these early adopters by paying store credit to the first people who buy a song that later goes on to become popular.

When an artist signs on to the store, they allocate a certain portion of the revenue generated by their songs to go back to their fans. This money is then distributed according to how early each user purchased a song (the earlier you buy, the more you make). For example, the band My First Earthquake has decided to pay out 30% of its revenues to its fans. The earliest adopters (say, the first dozen people to buy the song) will break even after the song has been purchased by around 25 other people. Fans buying the song later on will still earn credit, but it will be earned at a much slower rate (the site will tell you how quickly you’ll be earning credit before you buy a song).

For the time being Popcuts is only selling music from unsigned indie artists, but CEO Kevin Lim says that the company will pursue deals with record labels once it has perfected the new payment model.

Popcuts has a compelling idea, but its success may well lie in the generosity of the artists it signs. The store’s default split gives 60% of revenues to bands, which is competitive with other online stores. But the default 30% allocated to fans may not be enough of an incentive to drive many more purchases, and bands may find they have to give up more of their proceeds to drive sales. In any case, it’s an experiment that the music industry will probably be following closely.

There are a number of other music stores experimenting with new pricing models for music. Most notable is Amie Street, which initially sells a song at 1 cent and increases the price as it rises in popularity (like Popcuts, this rewards early adopters, but it does so in a different manner).

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Another Y Combinator startup, ididwork, announced its launch yesterday. In short, the web-based service lets employees keep record of work they have completed. Employees can then submit a weekly or monthly report to their manager in the form of a chart, graph, or simple summary, and receive feedback through the system. The service is designed to drive performance reviews, eliminating the need for status meetings, and allowing employees to be evaluated based on concrete information rather than a manager’s impressions.

What differentiates the service from the many performance monitoring platforms out there is that the managers don’t have to participate. It is designed to be useful solely from the employee’s perspective, letting them track their own progress and analyze trends over time. The service does not have to serve the enterprise, but rather can spread amongst individual users. Employees can decide to forward performance breakdowns to managers, who then have the option of joining the network. There is clearly a viral aspect to the service that could make it work, but it is dependent on how necessary employees find it to record their own progress, and how informative it can really be.

The idea seems simple but it tackles a big problem: it is difficult to judge productivity in big companies. In employee reviews managers often have very little idea of what an employee has done, which leads them to make judgments based on behavior that seems productive; like staying late everyday, or sending out company wide emails at three in morning. It also gives employees an idea of what their associates are working on with a news feed, eliminating the need for status meetings.

As far as competition goes, there are many similar services but not many that follow the same model. There are work logging services, but they focus on billable hours, and there are many performance review platforms, but these target HR departments rather than individual employees. 37 Signals‘ BackPack has some similarities, but it is more suited for coordinating operations within a group rather than tracking individual performance.

The founders plan on eventually charging employers after the service takes off, allowing early adopters to continue using it free of charge. To expand, the service plans on integrating desktop widgets and customizing performance breakdown charts in the distant future.

The founders of ididwork previously started Expensr, which was bought by MyStrands. Prior to that, they worked in large consulting companies where they derived the idea for their newest project.

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Mozilla Labs announced a new project today called Snowl. It is an add-on for Firefox that aims to bring all of your messages together in one place, whether it is from email, SMS, Twitter, or RSS/Atom feeds. The project right now is an early, buggy prototype that only supports RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter. So that is nothing special.

But once email and SMS is folded into the mix, it could become a very powerful messaging center, built right into the browser. It will allow you to search through all of your messages and feeds, both public and private, no matter where they originate.

The current version of Snowl shows messages in one of two ways: in a three-paned window much like a traditional e-mail client, and in a river-of-news view. This is a separate project from Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail client, although it does overlap somewhat. The point of Snowl is specifically to “help you follow and participate in online discussions.”

You can download Snowl here (for those brave enough to try it—Mozilla warns that it is ” primitive implementation with many bugs, and subsequent versions will include changes that break functionality and delete all your messages, making you start over from scratch.”)

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In a post to the official Digg blog, Kevin Rose has announced a new Digg extension for Firefox 3 that incorporates a toolbar and notification system into the popular browser that should appeal to heavy and casual Digg users alike.

In a video introducing the extension, Kevin Rose says that its main purpose is to get a feel for what features users would like to see incorporated into future releases. The extension was developed for Firefox 3, but users can download a Firefox 2 compatible extension here.

Small notification messages now appear in the bottom right of the browser window, displaying updates on topics you’re covering along with your friends’ recent activity (you can specify what events you’d like to receive notifications for). The collapsible toolbar includes a counter that indicates how many Diggs and comment the current page you’re browsing has received, and includes a “Digg It” button that allows you to submit and Digg stories without having to visit the site.

Digg Firefox 3 Extension from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

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Wikia Search, the human edited search engine which we trashed at launch, continues to make incremental improvements (and thankfully they’ve turned down the “This is a Google-killer” hype machine).

Today they did something really smart - they released a Firefox Add-on that lets users add search data without going back to the Wikia Search site itself. That lets casual users who want to contribute to the project to do so with less effort, meaning they may contribute far more data.

The toolbar also alters search results pages from Google and Yahoo (sorry, Microsoft, you didn’t make the cut) and adds a rating widget and an Add button next to each result. Again, this makes it super easy for Wikia Search users to improve the project’s data without actually visiting the site.

Overall Wikia Search is starting to look like a real search engine, with decent results for a lot of queries. They’ve made a lot of progress in the last few months.

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The Pew Internet Project has released a report detailing the search habits of Americans, and they confirm what many of us already know: Internet search has become a part of daily life for many people, to the point that it is challenging the dominance of Email, the web’s longstanding killer app.

According to the study, nearly 50% of internet users use search engines like Google or Yahoo on a daily basis - substantially more than the number of people who check news (39%) or the weather (30%). While search still falls behind Email use, which holds steady at 60%, it is showing significantly more growth. In the six year span between January 2002 and May 2008, search use increased by 69%, while Email use grew only 15% during the same period.

It’s important to note that this data pertains only to usage on a “typical day”. 90% of web users use a search engine at some point over the course of a month - a figure that has held relatively constant over the years. But as search engine accuracy has improved, more people are turning to them for their day to day information instead of traditional tools like bookmarks and homepages.

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Ever since Google closed the DoubleClick acquisition, it’s been trying to sell off Performics, a unit of DoubleClick that does search-engine marketing and optimization. The business presented a conflict of interest for Google because its services are aimed at getting better placement on Google’ search results for its clients. Google announced today that it sold the business to France’s Publicis Groupe.

The French advertising giant will absorb the 200 “search marketing specialists” currently working for Performics. It will fold the business into its VivaKi Nerve Center (sounds scary). The purchase price was not disclosed.

Now Google can leave the SEO and SEM to others. It can spare the crumbs.

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