- A Little Perspective (Digg, Twitter, Facebook)
It wasn’t all that long ago that Digg captured our collective imagination. In fact, even last year Google thought it was important enough to seriously consider buying Digg, only to back out at the last minute. Digg was the future of news. It was crowdsourced, democratic editorial. The masses decided what was news, not some 50 year old guy in a skyscraper in New York, who secretly hated the Internet.
a lot of the shine has come off Digg. And while it still drives a tremendous amount of traffic, it’s amazing to see just how completely it has been eclipsed by Twitter, which in turn is still just a drop in the Facebook bucket.
Comscore worldwide data says Digg, Twitter and Facebook have 32 million, 58 million and 411 million unique monthly visitors (September 2009), respectively. Google Trends says much the same thing, but the growth over time is fascinating visually. We started with Digg, then added Twitter, and then added Facebook. In the end, Digg and Twitter are just footnote blips in the chart.
About a third of all Internet users worldwide visited Facebook in September 2009, says Comscore. A year ago it was 17%. And what about Digg? They grew from 15 million worldwide unique visitors a year ago to 32 million today. And they tripled page views to 171 million. So it’s not really about Digg doing anything wrong. They just pale in comparison to the guys currently in the spotlight – Twitter and Facebook.
If you could only use one service, which one would you choose? I’d be unhappy about the forced decision, but I’d go with Twitter, even with all its flaws.
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- Say Goodbye to Voicemail, Hello To Ribbit Mobile (500 Invites)
First, there was Google Voice. And all was good, and not so good. But it showed that there is a better way to manage voicemails than to listen to 15 in a row just to get to the one you care about.
Now, there is an alternative to Google Voice called Ribbit Mobile. And it too is very good. Ribbit Mobile is in private beta, but the first 500 people to sign up with the invite code “techcrunch” will jump to the front of the line.
Ribbit Mobile starts out by taking over your cell phone’s voicemail. You give it permission to do this by entering some codes it presents to you during the sign-up process. So Ribbit Mobile lets you use your existing number, something Google Voice also recently added as an option. Once you set up your voicemail, and record a new greeting message, you can get started.
All voicemails will now get routed to Ribbit Mobile and stored there. Every time you get a voicemail, it appears in your Ribbit inbox, where it can be played on your computer. It is also transcribed (using Phonetag/Simulscribe’s speech-to-text engine). And it is pretty accurate. It was even able to understand and transcribe a message left by my three-year-old son. Every transcribed voicemail also gets sent to you as an email.
So there is really no need to listen to a voicemail again. But you can retrieve them the normal way, by calling an assigned number you can save to your phone. The one drawback I found is that I no longer see the notification on my phone showing how many voicemails I have.
Ribbit also lets you route calls to any number, including Skype and Ribbit’s own Java phone which rings in your browser so you can take calls on your computer. It does not yet, however, let you assign different actions to different callers (put my wife through to my cell, put anyone not in my contacts through to voicemail).
When you are online, you can also sign into various social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr) and see recent Tweets, status messages, and photos from the person who is calling. It’s very Xobni-like in that way.
Soon there will be an iPhone app, and the ability to send “shouts” to Ribbit Mobile members. A shout is a voicemail that doesn’t actually ring the person’s phone, it just goes straight to voicemail, where it is then transcribed and sent along as a regular text message. Why talk, when you can shout?
Ribbit Mobile will launch with a free basic package, and then start charging between $10 and $30 a month for more services, such as human transcription. Ribbit was acquired by British Telecom last year for $105 million, so it’s not going anywhere.
One day, we’ll get a service like Ribbit Mobile or Google Voice that actually is built into our phones.
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- Search Til You Drop: Google Launches Hosted Commerce Search For Retailers
Searching retail sites can be frustrating at times. While many retailers try to present product search in a visually appealing way, search can often be slow or difficult to refine. Tonight, Google is making a huge play in retail space with the launch of Commerce Search, a hosted enterprise search product to power online retail stores and e-commerce websites.
Google offers a general hosted search product that is used by organizations that want to add customized Google search functionality to their websites. Google is now entering the vertical space, by the first tailor-made enterprise product, with retail optimized space. There are four key components to thew new search offering for retailers:
Speed: Google promises “ultra-fast speed and accuracy” by leveraging Google’s search technology to provide sub-second response time to customer searches on retail sites. Commerce Search also uses a proprietary ranking technology to analyze the products in each data feed and serve the most relevant match. Google says that faster search speed will help increase conversions to buy products, as customers can quickly find specific products without having to navigate complex search interfaces.
E-commerce-Specific Search: Google Commerce offers a variety of features that are optimized for retail and product search, such as parametric search, sorting of results, spell checker, stemming, and synonym suggestion, which in some way or another let users to refine and target their searches. I’m told hosted search uses several proprietary signals to determine the ranking of search result. Commerce also offers a compelling product promotions features, that lets retailers fine-tune search results to push promoted products to the top of results. The search interface allows for retailers to specifically label products as promoted.
One of my bones to pick with Google Commerce was that it’s interface may be to simple for retail sites like Saks, Bloomingdales or others who tend to display products in a more visually appealing way. Presentation, whether it be real-store or online, matters. But Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager for Google Enterprise Search, told me that the Google Commerce Search API allows retailers to fully customize the search experience on their website and add all the bells and whistles they need to make the interface match the rest of their site. And, retailers using Commerce don’t need to show the Google logo on the search site.
Scalability: Because Commerce Search is hosted by Google and based in the cloud, Google says it’s easily scalable to absorb additional traction on the site. For example, says Mangtani, during the holiday season, retailers will most probably experience high traffic on search. Google will ensure that retailers can manage the boost in traffic and scale the search application. And Mangtani adds that once all product data is incorporated, search can be deployed on any e-commerce site fairly quickly.
Leveraging Other Google Products: Google promises integration with other Google products like Google Analytics and Google Product Search. Using Commerce, retailers can measure clicks, conversion rates, number of transactions, average order value and other data via Google Analytics. And e-commerce vendors can provide a single feed of products and catelogue items that will power Commerce and indexing of their products on Google Product Search. Product Search (formerly Froogle) was blends shopping results with Google search.
Google didn’t release too many details on its pricing mode for Commerce Search, but a spokeswoman told me that the product will start at $50,000 per year. Beyond that, pricing will be based on the number of products (SKUs) in the customer’s database and the number of search queries entered on their site each year. This pricing isn’t cheap so obviously this appeals to bigger retailers and e-commerce shops. Google has already partnered with Birkenstock USA to power search, which looks mediocre. It was a little simple for my taste and it lacked a visible search bar but I’m really interested to see what can be done with Commerce for more embellished e-commerce sites. Google Commerce will now compete with the likes of Omniture, Endeca, and others.
Google is playing into “conversion rates” when advertising the product for retailers, saying that while the average online retailer conversion rate is just three percent, it could be five to ten times higher with a powerful search technology. With Commerce, Google is making an aggressive move in the retail space. Google Product hasn’t really taken off, but Commerce could and could effect the use of Google Product as well (and maybe Google Checkout?). Google’s other enterprise search offerings have steadily gaining users, so it should be interesting to see if the search giant can make inroads with big-name retailers.
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- Bodega: A Cross-Platform Marketplace That Lets Gamers Swap Virtual Currencies For Cash
As more games on the web begin to embrace virtual currency, users often run into the same problem: they’ve racked up mountains of whatever currency they’ve been playing with, but then don’t have a way to actually do anything with it outside of that game. Sure, they can always buy the latest tractor or weapon to arrive in their game, but at some point that gets old and they’re ready to cash out and move on to something new. Enter Bodega, a new platform that’s looking to help users swap virtual goods and currencies across different games, and even across different social networks.
Bodega lets users sell their virtual goods at auction in return for for Bodega’s own currency, the Bodega Bill. When you go to sell your virtual goods, you can either put it up as a ‘buy it now’ style purchase or an auction, with a minimum reserve if you want. Users looking to purchase virtual goods can obtain Bodega Bills by completing offers, buying them with their credit cards, or by selling their own virtual goods in the marketplace. You can also earn Bodega Bills by completing actions on the site, like adding another user as a friend or listing an item for sale.
Of course, actually executing these transactions is difficult, because none of these games have any of this functionality built in. To work around this, Bodega holds the buyer’s Bodega Bills in escrow until there is confirmation from both users involved with the transaction that the virtual good has actually been received. This system does have the upside of allowing the platform to work across multiple social networks and platforms (Bodega is currently available on Facebook with plans to launch on MySpace, Bebo, and the iPhone soon), but it’s not the ideal situation. CEO Mark Sendo says that the company is currently in discussions with a number of big games in this space, in the hopes of integrating an API into the games themselves that would negate much of the hassle associated with the transactions, but it sounds like it may be a while before any big deals come to fruition.
Once you’ve earned some Bodega Bills, you can use them to purchase other virtual goods (so you could potentially buy points on another game or social network), or you can trade them in for cash — something that sounds like it could be especially appealing to gamers who are looking to turn their online wealth into something a bit more tangible. Sendo says that the amount of money paid out will be established by the market (the actual conversion rate will likely play a big role in how quickly Bodega catches on).
Virtual currency marketplaces have always been a tricky area, rife with scammers, so-called ‘gold farmers’, and fraud (there’s a reason eBay has largely banned them). But that doesn’t negate the fact that there are lots of people who’d like to sell their virtual goods. Bodega is going to be fighting a long uphill battle here, but if it can pull off a unified, safe platform, there’s plenty of money to be made.
Bodega rose from the ashes of urTurn, a startup we covered last year that looked to reward users for their actions on Facebook. It’s worth pointing out that Sendo was convicted of wire fraud a decade ago and was later forced to wrangle with the SEC over violations involved with InternetMoney.com (Sendo settled by agreeing never to deal with penny stocks).
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- At The Top Of Its Game, And The App Charts, Ngmoco Bets Its Future On In-App Purchases
On Monday, ngmoco released worldwide its latest game for the iPhone and iPod Touch: Eliminate Pro. It’s been downloaded 500,000 times so far at a rate of about 25,000 an hour, currently making it the top free app in iTunes. The top paid app, Skeeball, also happens to be affiliated with ngmoco through its Plus+ social game network. ngmoco has had it’s own top paid apps as well, like Rolando, but CEO Neil Young says that Eliminate Pro is more “representive of where we have been moving our business—free applications, that we monetize with in-app purchases.”
Ever since Apple opened up in-app purchases for free apps two weeks ago, it’s been catching on. In general, free apps are downloaded 10 to 20 times as much as comparable paid apps. Now, says Young, the payments can be “built into the compulsion loop of the game.” In other words, developers will get consumers to try their apps and then ask them to pay only once they are hooked.
This model works particularly well for games. Eliminate Pro easily could have been a paid app for which ngmoco could have charged $7.99 or $9.99. It is the first multiplayer first-person-shooter for the iphone. You play against other people on their iPhones around the world, and can connect to the server-based game via WiFi or the 3G cellular data network.
In order to advance or level up, your battle suit needs to be powered, and you need to buy power cells to charge up your suit. Power cells are the currency of the game. The game comes with 30 free power cells, and then you can buy them in increments going from $0.99 to $39.99. You can still play the game without buying power cells, and your suit gets trickle-charged, but some people are really impatient and they’d rather pay to play.
It only takes a small percentage of hardcore gamers who opt to pay for their power-ups to exceed the revenues ngmoco could have made with an all-paid app being bought by fewer people. Ngmoco has three more games it is planning to release before Christmas, and they will all follow the same freemium model. “We think at the end of the day this is the best way to build a big business on the iPhone,” says Young.
Both Eliminate and Skeeball are also part of ngmoco’s Plus+ social gaming network, which allows players to send out game challenges to their friends via push notifications on the iPhone 9the most effective method), as well as Facebook and Twitter. Add the multiplayer aspect to Eliminate, and what we’ve got here is a realtime game on the iPhone. No wonder it’s so popular.
Ngmoco is part of Kleiner Perkins’ iFund portfolio of iPhone startups. The company also announced today that back in July it acquired another iPhone game developer, Miraphonic, creator of the Epic Pet Wars game.
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- Twitter Testing Out New Tweet Notifications To Keep Users Engaged
Twitter has a problem: A number of users tweet, then lose interest. It needs a way to reengage them in the site. And tonight it’s starting to test one way: Notifications.
The test is currently only rolled out to a “limited” number of users right now, according to this update. But those who have it should notice an indicator similar to what Twitter does to let you know there are new search results on a query (see a capture above and below). There’s another service that does these types of notifications for new messages also: Facebook. Yes, Twitter for once is taking a playbook from its rival rather than the other way around.
When Twitter was still a young service, it used to auto-update with new tweets as they came in, in realtime. That was one of the first features killed off as the service began to explode in size and was having trouble scaling. FriendFeed implemented a similar live-updating stream before the Facebook acquisition, and that seemed to help boost engagement. Twitter currently offers live updating stream with its widgets.
There has always been some debate as to whether a constantly updating stream is better than notifications. Twitter is clearly now choosing the latter. When FriendFeed first launched it, plenty of users complained that the live updating was moving too fast. Seeing as Twitter is much larger than FriendFeed ever was, that could be an issue. The notification method is probably easier on server load than the constantly moving stream, as well.
As you can see in the screenshot below, these notifications shows up in the titlebar as well (just like with Twitter Search).
[photo via stephromanski]
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- Offerpal Tries Out A New CEO. Shukla, Queen Of Scams, Is Out.
Offerpal Media, the central character in the Scamville drama, is changing CEOs. Anu Shukla is no longer the CEO of the company she cofounded. Veteran executive George Garrick, most recently the CEO of Mochi Media, is now the CEO of the company.
From the press release quietly announcing the change:
Offerpal Media, the leader in virtual currency monetization for online games, virtual worlds and social networks, announced today that George Garrick has been named chief executive officer.
Garrick brings more than 25 years of experience in technology, advertising and consumer businesses to Offerpal Media. His track record of accelerating revenue growth and brokering strategic relationships with customers and partners will be critical assets in leading Offerpal Media.
I had an…interesting public exchange with Shukla last week at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco (see video at end of this post). I’ve also embedded it below.
She vehemently denied that her company’s offers ever scammed users. Despite her defense of the industry, MySpace, Zynga, RockYou and others have since made significant policy changes to protect consumers from the types of offers Offerpal peddles.
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- Kiersten Hollars Never Actually Joined Digg. She Was Just On Loan From Brad Garlinghouse
Brad Garlinghouse, a former SVP at Yahoo, joined AOL as President of Internet and Mobile Communications two months ago. And he’s clearly doing a little housekeeping, and forming his own exec team. His first major hire? Kiersten Hollars, a Digg PR exec.
Hollars is part of Garlinghouse’s old team at Yahoo, and left the company shortly after Garlinghouse did to take over PR and communications at Digg. She joins AOL later this month.
“This is more about working with Brad again, and nothing about Digg,” she told us in a phone interview this morning, adding that she’s excited about the turnaround opportunity at AOL. She joins AOL as senior director of corporate communications, reporting to both Garlinghouse and EVP Corporate Communications Tricia Primrose.
Digg’s looking for Hollars’ replacement immediately. So if you want be the person to handle all corporate communications and Kevin Rose babysitting duties at Digg, let them know.
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- All The News That’s Fit To Print — And Vanity-Driven, Ego-Dripping Good Stuff
Google News has just launched a pretty cool new feature: Create your own news section. As you can probably guess, this allows you to create a new area of your Google News personalized page (you have to be signed-in) for anything you want. You simply fill-out a section title, put in any search terms you want it to look for, select a country, and you’re set.
Previously, you could make customized sections for Google News, but it was limited to single queries about topics. With multiple queries, this is much more comprehensive. And the pages look a lot nicer with images automatically pulled in. You can also now filter by source locations, restricting items to a single country or even state.
Also nice and new is that you can publish these section you make to a public directory. If you do that, anyone can then subscribe to (and rate) the section you’ve created. There are quite a few good ones that have already been created in this directory, like Mobile Technology.
Here’s what else this is great for: Vanity searches. As with most search products, the real key thing everyone wants but no one likes to talk about, is to be able to find information about themselves. This new Google News section creator is rather brilliant for that if you say, work for a tech blog that appears quite often in Google News.
“MG News” is probably the new pinnacle of Google News.
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- Apple’s New Remote Is A Riddle, Wrapped In A Mystery, Inside An Enigma
I hold in my hand the new Apple Remote. In case you missed it, Apple quietly launched it alongside the new iMacs, Mac minis, Magic Mice, and MacBooks a couple weeks ago. Simply put: I don’t get it.
That’s not to say it’s not a nice looking product — it is, but there have been some changes that make me confused as to what Apple exactly is trying to do with this thing. From a design perspective, it makes sense. The new remote now has the brushed aluminum and black button exterior that graces both Apple’s MacBook Pro line and the iMac line these days. The original Apple Remote was all white plastic (aside from the top sensor), that matched the older iMacs that it originally launched with.
Back in those days, the remote made more sense. First of all, it came with most new Macs. This, alongside Apple’s Front Row software, made it seem obvious that Apple was going to start taking media (beyond just music) very seriously across the Mac line (for a while the remove even came with Mac laptops). But today, the remote doesn’t come standard with any Apple product aside from the Apple TV (for obvious reasons). Instead, it’s a $19.00 add-on, even for the new huge 27-inch screen top-of-the-line iMacs (which seem like a natural fit to watch media on).
Also odd: while the original white remote had a magnetic back to allow it to easily stick to the side of the iMac, the new remote does not. That means this remote is yet another piece of clutter sitting on your desk if you opt to buy one. It would seem that Apple doesn’t really care about you using this remote anymore, even though without it, Front Row is basically useless. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to use it over simply using iTunes if you have to sit at your computer to do it anyway.
But the oddest thing about the new remote has to be that Apple has for some reason decided to move the Play/Pause button from the center of the navigational circle to the lower right side of the device, shifting the Menu button left to make room. That might make some sense as just a straight-up ergonomic design change, but the weirdest thing is that the center of the navigational circle is still a button, that does the same thing as the Play/Pause button.
Yes, Apple has added a new useless button. Again, Apple. The company that hates buttons.
Apple’s documentation for the new remote provides little insight, but they do label this new center button as “Select” rather than Play/Pause. But again, it does the exact same thing. Could there be some new funtionality for Front Row in the future that takes advantage of the Select button? Maybe. But even launching something like the new iTunes Extras content now being packaged with movies doesn’t seem like it would need its own button.
Here’s something else: Apple doesn’t even bother mentioning it on the main Remote page on its site, but this new remote does work with the Apple TV. Again, from a design perspective, this makes sense as the new remote looks much more like the Apple TV than the white one that currently comes with it. But again, the remote’s phantom button does nothing different from the Play/Pause button aside from the fact that holding down Play/Pause brings up movie chapters, while holding the phantom button does not seem to. Odd.
There is one definite advantage of the new remote: It’s much easier to change the battery. I have friends who have stacks of old dead white remotes simply because they didn’t even realize you could previously change the battery. So that’s nice, but does it really warrant the $19 price for a larger, heavier remote that no longer sticks to the iMac? Probably not.
If you want a good remote for iTunes and the Apple TV, just use your iPhone or iPod touch. Apple’s own Remote app makes it much, much more useful than either of the physical remotes. You can, for example, do a search by typing on the device’s keyboard rather than being forced to do a ridiculous amount of clicks to manually enter each letter on the Apple TV’s onscreen keyboard. It’s also much better for scrolling through a bunch of titles. Really, it’s better in every way imaginable. The only downside is that you have to own an iPhone or iPod touch. But if you own an Apple TV, chances are you probably own one of those as well.
I really don’t understand Apple’s thinking with these remotes. It would seem that they’re clearly inching towards products with less buttons and more touch elements, but this new remote is the opposite of that. There’s been a touch screen remote rumored for some time now, but this is what we got instead? What gives, Apple?
Update: A few things from some insightful commenters:
1) It’s also a bit odd that the new remote does not feature an Apple logo anywhere on it. The old one did on the back.
2) It’s true that aluminum is not a magnetic metal, but neither is plastic, which the old remote was.
3) I had forgotten about this, but the old Apple Remote is very similar to the original iPod Shuffle. It’s certainly possible that Apple was using the same manufacturing for both, and with that Shuffle long retired, it was easy to move to a new type of remote.
4) Apparently, the Play/Pause separate button also allows you to stop/start content when you’re not specifically in that section. That could very well be why Apple did this, but that is also not very intuitive since the buttons do the same things the rest of the time.
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