I Want This In Photoshop Immediately

http://www.techcrunch.com/page/4/



This image resizing and manipulation demonstration is sort of jaw dropping, particularly as the video goes on. The related paper, written by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan is available here.

YouTube In The Spotlight For Hosting Racist Material

YouTube is in a spot of bother in Germany for hosting Nazi related material uploaded by users.

Clips include scenes from the 1940 Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Suess and music videos from German far-right rock band Landser.

A German parliamentarian was quoted as saying that YouTube hosting these films “amounts to aiding and abetting incitement of these people.” The display of Nazi imagery or logos, or supporting Nazi ideals is illegal in Germany and punishable by jail time as well as severe fines.

According to a ZDNet report Germany’s Central Council of Jews Vice President Salomon Korn was considering pressing charges against Google Germany over the matter.

Facebook Takes Further Steps To Curb User Abuse; Change In How Applications Are Measured

Last week Facebook updated their developer platform to restrict some of the more egregious abuses of users by application developers - bait and switch profile advertisements and friend spamming.

Today they announced additional changes. And Facebook also announced that they are changing the way applications are measured to show user engagement instead of just how many users have added an application.

Defending Users Against Abuse

Today they’ve updated the platform again to further restrict questionable behavior. In a blog post on the Facebook developers site, Dave Morin outlines the new rules and says “With the upcoming changes, we hope to shift the balance more in favor of good apps.”

It is now impossible for applications to hide things from profile owners. Previously, applications were showing ads to friends without the owner seeing the ad when looking at his/her own profile.

Facebook has also taken steps to limit invitations sent to friends, and have stopped applications from sending emails to users who’ve added it.

Application Metrics

Morin also says Facebook is going to start giving users more information on which applications are actually being used, as opposed to simply added and forgotten:

This week you’ll see us shift our application directory metrics to a focus on user engagement. This will help inform users as they make decisions on which applications to add as well as shift developer focus to engagement rather than total users. More specifics will be available as we roll out these changes this coming week.

This is a good change. Newer applications with fewer users will now have a way to move up on the charts if users are really engaged with the application. We’ll have to wait and see exactly how they plan on measuring engagement, but overall this is good news for the lesser known but “good” applications that are currently hard to find.

The Quickly Evolving Platform

Facebook is still a young platform, and it’s good that they are taking steps to reduce abuse of the user base. But they don’t seem to be taking any remedial action against past abusers, meaning those applications get to keep the millions of users they’ve racked up using questionable practices.

Since application developers aren’t penalized for finding the weaknesses in the Facebook platform, expect them (and their venture dollars) to continue to focus on finding the next hole to exploit. If Facebook were to slap a few of the worst offenders on the wrist, perhaps others would lose the incentive to engage in bad behavior.

Also, the changes are very cumbersome for even the non-abusers. For example, applications will now need to find another way to contact users since email is out. That creates uncertainty, and reduces the incentive for the good guys to innovate since they don’t know if functionality will disappear.

At the end of the day, it may take more to police this ecosystem than occasional band aids to the platform to stop abuse as it appears. A more subjective reward and punishment system may eventually evolve where Facebook takes an active role in policing the behavior of application developers. It may or may not be a good thing, but it is almost certainly inevitable.

Lots and Lots of Google Phone Rumors: HTC, Android, and even Yahoo in the mix

The pace of rumors and leaks around the fabled Google Phone is picking up, suggesting that Google is making a real push to launch something early next year and is no longer trying to keep everyone quiet.

Yesterday CrunchGear got confirmation from a senior (and anonymous) HTC exec that they’ve created some twenty devices for Google to test and are shooting for a Q1 2008 launch.

Today Engadget is focused on the operating system side of things. They note that Google quietly acquired Android, a creator of mobile phone operating systems, in 2005. And that the Android team, led by founder Andy Rubin (former cofounder of Danger) is leading the effort to write the Google Phone operating system.

The two rumors fit together nicely. Engadget says Google is likely shopping its OS to handset makers. HTC would certainly be one of the manufacturers that they would be talking to. And the huge success of the iPhone may have spurred Google to kick things into high gear. That would involve adding a lot of new people to the team, and the leaks we’re starting to see are the predictable result.

Google’s effort is different than the iPhone. They look to be focused mostly on the OS and layering Google applications like Maps and Gmail on top of that, while simultaneously talking to device manufacturers about a number of devices. Apple, instead, took a much more holistic approach in creating the iPhone. Google’s product likely won’t appeal to the mainstream audience that the iPhone attracts…but it probably won’t have a $500 price tag, either.

And just to throw another tidbit out there - the HTC exec that was mentioned on CrunchGear yesterday said Yahoo is on a parallel track as Google, and has actually been working on custom phones for longer than Google. We may be seeing a Yahoo phone next year, too.

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join Digg

Video sharing site MetaCafe launched a new area of their site today - it uses the Digg API to show the most popular MetaCafe videos.

Viewers can sort by most dugg, highest rated, most discussed, most viewed, etc. Only Metacafe videos are shown.

Digg’s video channel and Metacafe overlap somewhat, particularly for people who just want to quickly find and browse interesting videos. That makes this pairing somewhat unlikely - I would have expected Metacafe to simply build their own Digg-like voting system or use Pligg’s open source software (see VideoSift’s similar functionality, which was recently in the news). The fact that they are working with Digg shows that they are willing to hitch their brand to that shooting star, damn the competitive angle.

Metacafe released a press release this afternoon on the new functionality. Notably absent from the release was Digg, who did not jointly release it, or provide a quote. (Update - see comment #2 below).

Ladies Rejoice, TheFind.com Acquires Glimpse

Shopping search engine startup TheFind has acquired the high-fashion shopping site Glimpse.com for an undisclosed amount. It’s an early deal for Glimpse, which just launched earlier this year.

TheFind is a comparison shopping search engine that crawls many shopping sites across the internet (190 million products at over 500,000 stores). Other shopping sites often charge for the privilege of getting listed in engines like Shopping.com. This keeps the results page clean of nonsensical results while generating some extra revenue.

The impetus for the deal was to increase their offering targeted to the female market. TheFind will be powering the shopping search for Glimpse.com, enabling the site to cover more online boutiques, specialty fashion retailers, and brand stores.

TheFind was founded in 2003 and launched their main search site last year after running a of their technology on FatLens.com. They are funded by two rounds of financing totaling $23 million from Bain Capital, Redpoint, and Lightspeed Ventures.

TechCrunch Reader Polls

A little while ago, Fred Wilson over at A VC posted a reader poll in which he asked his readers to identify themselves by their occupation. We thought this was a cool idea so we’ve decided to run our own polls below.

We have provided an occupation poll that is a near facsimile of Wilson’s. Further down, we have placed a couple of polls that address other topics.

Thanks for taking a few seconds to fill these out - the results should be interesting!
Which of the following labels best describes your occupation?

* Startup founder
* Established company staff
* Student
* Other
* Startup staff
* Established company founder
* Educator or academic
* Journalist (Traditional or Citizen)
* Research scientist
* Venture capital firm staff
* Venture capital firm partner
* Angel investor
* Hedge fund staff
* Hedge fund partner
* Buyout fund staff
* Buyout fund partner

View Results
How often do you read TechCrunch?

* Daily
* A few times per week
* Hourly
* Once per week
* Every other day
* A few times per season or less
* Every other week
* Once per month

View Results
Do you smile or grumble when TechCrunch covers Facebook news?

* Grumble
* Smile

View Results

MyProgress Lets You Track Your Progress

Vancouver based MyProgress offers a service that provides progress monitoring features (generally used in computer role playing games) for life tracking.

MyProgress allows users to track their personal finances, skills, “knowledges”, wealth and health dynamics.

The site tracks every piece of information users enter, from a new purchase, capital gains, an hour of photographic or driving experience, or a rental price change, and provides a detailed overview on how fast they are progressing in comparison with the others across multiple categories, such as age, occupation, and location. The service provides analytics about user’s life and build forecasts based on past data.

MyProgress is billed as the world’s first online application “designed to helping an individual [not a corporate] manage their progress and read their life log as an RSS feed.”

GrandCentral’s “One Number For Life” Not Really

So much for GrandCentral’s “one number for life” promise. The company is turning off customer phone numbers and giving them new ones following their acquisition by Google last month.

Troy Schneider received such a notice, advising him that in 8 days his GrandCentral number would be canceled and that he would be required to immediately start using a new number allocated to him. Judi Sohn received the same message: with no prior warning she had 8 days left on her existing phone number then it would cease to operate. Sohn was fortunate to some extent: Google has offered to pay for the reprinting of her business cards, but that would appear to be a one off, and a token gesture at that.

The inconvenience of losing a telephone number, particularly for a business, is more than just stationery. Paper telephone listings must be changed (some people still use them), sign writing must be fixed, and every single listing of the old number has to be found and changed. Most land line telephone providers would offer a redirection service for the old number, however with Google it’s simply a matter of 8 days then no more phone number. Every customer that tries calling the old number post cancellation and cannot connect to the business is potentially a lost sale.

There was no comment at the time of writing from Google or GrandCentral. Ironically the last post on the GrandCentral blog talks about the wonders of being able to keep a GrandCentral Number for life.

Update: Founder Craig Walker comments below and notes that this affected on 434 users:

Everybody, thanks for your comments and I want to quickly reply to try to clear the air regarding this issue. I’ll post a full blog about this on the GrandCentral site in just a bit, but first I want to assure everybody that we are NOT disconnecting anyone’s service. Unfortunately we received word recently that one of our partners was stopping their service in part of the country and since that time we’ve been working to port those phone numbers to other partners. We’ve done this successfully for the vast majority of those users but unfortunately there were approximately 400 users whose numbers could not be ported (434 to be exact). As soon as we found out these users could not be ported to other partners, we contacted those users, set up an alternative GrandCentral number in the same area code for them, and gave them a reply email to request additional GrandCentral number choices. Vincent (our COO and Co-Founder) and I have been personally replying to these emails to help make this transition easier. This would have been these case whether or not we were acquired. We completely sympathize with any pain or disruption this might cause these users and will continue to work directly with them to help find a solution. I will post more on our blog shortly, but wanted to give you all a quick heads up.

Facebook Opens Email Up A Little; I Want More

Facebook opened up their very closed email platform today by allowing users to add normal email addresses in a message. Previously you could only send messages to Facebook friends. Now you can add in others, too.

This is great news for people who use Facebook for most or all of their emailing. But for those of us that use normal email for our day to day business, getting Facebook messages is more of a problem than a feature. That’s because Facebook makes you log on to the site to read messages/emails from your friends. They’ll send a note to your normal email address when a new message comes in, but they make you log on to Facebook to actually read it.

I rarely do that, and have missed some important messages from people trying to contact me. As a next step, I think Facebook should offer to forward the actual messages to an outside email address (and/or provide a password protected RSS feed). Eventually Facebook should offer full POP or IMAP support for their email. They can still restrict it so that you can only receive messages from friends, but at least you could access it from your desktop or web based mail application.

Vlingo: Voice Enable Any Mobile Application

People really hate cell phone keypads for data entry.

Anyone who’s called customer service knows voice guided phone applications aren’t new, but they’re a good way to navigate menus and enter text. And applications like Spinvox which incorporated speech recognition to turn verbal voicemails into written text messages, and TellMe, which uses voice recognition to power local search, are useful and popular.

Cambridge-based Vlingo wants to make voice enabling applications easier, by using their own speech-to-text J2ME/Brew application API (Windows/Symbian later this year). With the API, developers will be able translate a user’s voice to text, and use it in their application as if typed directly into the program. One of their first examples was for local search and shopping. Vlingo voice-enabled a text box on the program you could fill out by holding down the talk button and saying a phrase, like “Pizza in San Francisco”. The system then fills in the form with what you said, letting you modify the text normally if it gets it wrong.

In our trials the system generally worked with my Californian accent. However, an Australian accent had very little luck, highlighting the difficulties of internationalizing speech recognition. Often speech recognition companies make their jobs easier by limiting the vocabulary or training the system on a comprehensive lexicon of words and accents. But due to the breadth of their effort, Vlingo had to take a more general approach, using machine learning through statistical analysis so the system could work in a wider array of uses. There’s a demo below.

Their system starts with a basic statistical language model to make the best guess about what you say. It then improves upon that by taking into account context, and positive and negative user feedback down to the individual. Context helps the system by narrowing the number of possible words you said. For instance, if the context is an address, the number of possible street names is limited to the ones in the city. User feedback correcting the system’s output or leaving it be helps the system learn how you speak (e.g correcting Austin to Boston).

It’s a very ambitious project, but the team behind it comes with some significant experience in the speech recognition space. The two co-founders (Mike Phillips and John Nguyen) worked for SpeechWorks, which was acquired by ScanSoft, which then renamed itself Nuance. Nuance most recently paid $293 million for VoiceSignal, a company using speech recognition for mobile search in 21 languages.

Vlingo plans on monetizing the service by charging developers on a cost per month or per user basis. They’re a team of 13 with $6.5 million from CRV and Sigma Ventures.

eBuddy Adds MySpace Instant Messaging

European web chat startup eBuddy, which is in a fight-to-the-death struggle with Silicon Valley based Meebo, just added support for MySpace instant messaging tor their product.

eBuddy now supports MySpace IM, AOL, ICQ, GoogleTalk, MSN and Yahoo. Log in to some of all of these services from the eBuddy home page.

MySpace says they now have over 18.5 million users of the service, which soft launched in September 2006. By comparison, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM have 224 million, 93 million, 30 million and 30 million users, respectively (Comscore worldwide - July 2007). GTalk trails the rest, with just 4.8 million users.

Rumor is that Trillian, a downloadable piece of software that also accesses all major IM networks except Skype, will be adding MySpace support soon, too.

Esther Dyson, Guy Kawasaki and Yossi Vardi Join TechCrunch20 Expert Panel

The TechCrunch20 Panel of Experts is now nearly complete. Today we add Esther Dyson, Guy Kawasaki and Yossi Vardi to the impressive list of individuals who will judge the startups launching at the conference and determine who will ultimately win the $50,000 top prize.

The final companies for TechCrunch20 have been selected, and more announcements are coming soon. Register for the event, which is being held in San Francisco on September 17-18, here.

Esther Dyson and her company EDventure specialize in analyzing the impact of emerging technologies and markets on economies and societies. She is the author of Release 2.0, a book which discussed how the Internet has affected our lives. Esther has been a board member or early investor in numerous startups, including Flickr, PowerSet, ZEDO, Medscape, and Medstory. In addition to her active roles in a number of not-for-profit and advisory organizations, Esther enjoys private aviation and commercial space startups and hosts an annual Flight School conference in Aspen.

Guy Kawasaki is CEO of early-stage venture capital firm Garage Technology Ventures and an active blogger. Guy was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, CEO of ACIUS and founder of Fog City Software. Guy has written eight books, including The Art of the Start. He sits on the board of BitPass, FilmLoop and SimplyHired. His most recent venture is launching Truemors, a site dedicated to democraticizing information by encouraging everday people to post news.

Yossi Vardi is one if Israel’s hi-tech veterans, having helped build some 40 hi-tech companies in Internet, software, telecommunications, electro-optics, energy, environment and other areas. Several companies Dr. Vardi co-founded became successful public companies, among them Alon, Advanced Technologies, and Granite Hacarmel. Internet companies backed by Dr. Vardi include Mirabilis Ltd, ICQ (acquired by AOL), Gteko (acquired by Microsoft), Scopus and Answers.com. He is a member of the World Economic Forum, on the board of Amdocs, and the advisory board of 3i. He has served as an advisor to the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program.

MyHeritage Expands Its Family Tree

Genealogy site MyHeritage is merging with Pearl Street Software. Through the team-up MyHeritage will pick up Pearl Street’s VP of Technology and gain control of the #2 family tree software in worldwide sales (Family Tree Legends), the #2 family tree submission site (GenCircles) with more than 160 million ancestors, and more than 400 million public records in the Family Tree Legends Records Collection.

The addition of the team and products put the company in a better position to deal with upstart Geni, which announced over 5 million profiles in 5 months in July. They’ve also been getting a great deal of the press. However, Geni still has a long way to go when taking on the established ancestry industry. MyHeritage has a large lead on the site with over 10 million registered users of their site. Ancestry.com, the leading genealogy site, has added 5.6 million people to their family trees this week.

As a sign of the competition, MyHeritage will now be making all the Pearl Street Software free.

Playboy Launches Social Network: “High schoolers, old dudes and your Mom can’t join”

Update: Playboy U is built on the Ning platform

The recent launch of Silicon Valley funded adult/porn site Zivity raised a few eyebrows. Now one of the old sovereigns of sexy is getting into the game, too. CrunchGear reports that Playboy is launching their own sexy social networking site just for college students, Playboy U.

Playboy U requires all users to have a .edu email addresses, mimicking Facebook’s early policy of only allowing college students to join. They say, “Sorry, but high schoolers, old dudes and your Mom can’t join”. However, The site won’t be as lascivious as the periodical. In what may be a bummer for some, the site will be “an exclusive college-only non-nude social network”. Furthermore, it will be a place to “show your school pride, connect with other students and celebrate the social side of college”. But I’m sure they’re not going to police the whole network for porn.

Student profiles will consist of the usual social network features including, bios, photos, videos, Blogs, and Forums. Schools will have customized pages, parties and on-campus events, and a national radio show with student callers.

Other magazines have been trying to get with the times and fight floundering readership by launching their own social networks too. Rolling Stone recently announced plans for their own network as well. But Playboy may have some better luck with readership already skewing toward the college following.

Lots of college students lament the loss of their exclusive Facebook social network to the older crowd. They may be receptive to a newer, cooler alternative. Something tells me that Playboy may not be the brand to steal their hearts, though.

SpiralFrog: Free Music Alive And Hopping

Remember SpiralFrog that free music download service that announced itself nearly a year ago? Well, after slowly releasing invites to Canadians, we received a private beta invitation.

SpiralFrog originally made a splash when they sealed a deal with Universal BMG to give away free downloads of some of their songs in exchange for a share of on-site ad revenue. Later they closed a deal with EMI and have since added a bunch of smaller labels totaling over 700,000 songs. However, now we know a little more about how their free system works.

Songs on SpiralFrog are not ad-supported through interstitial advertising or free in the sense that you can bring them anywhere. Instead, you get DRMed songs (WMA) leased to you for a free 30 day membership (or you can buy on Amazon). You can renew your membership, and the lease to play your songs, by answering survey questions (# concerts per year, how you discover music, etc). All that data helps SpiralFrog know what kind of ads to serve on the site.

To keep the whole system secure, they’ve locked down the download process end to end DRM controls. First you have to get a download manager, and then ensure you have Windows Media Player 9.0 or up. The system is kind of annoying and only works on Windows machines since it uses Microsoft DRM. Although, Microsoft DRM has already been cracked. The DRM requirement also means the songs only play through Windows Media Player, making them unportable. Unlike other DRM setups, though, there doesn’t appear to be a limit to the number of computers you can download to as long as you set SpiralFrog up on them.

Once the system is in place, you can search for artists and download their songs/videos individually. The songs are queued in a download manager and stored locally by artist and album in your SpiralFrog folder. The system seems to have intentionally been crippled so you view more advertising, with downloads happening one at a time and only while on the site. Using the site, I was able to download a bunch of songs and play them with no problem, but other early beta user have had trouble.

I don’t know if SpiralFrog will be able to sustain their business off of on-site advertising and affiliate music sales. A lot of other services are simply going DRM free, not download free. Blogmusik also recently went legit in France, but the US courts and music industry are a lot harder to sway. However, limiting the lease time on the songs means they can continuously tweak what hoops their users need to hop through to keep playing the music they download. For now it may be a simple option if you want a (legal) source of free tunes.

Why Darwin Beats Danny Carlton

Danny Carlton writes a little known personal blog under the pseudonym “Jack Lewis” at jacklewis.net/weblog. But don’t try to visit it if you use Firefox, because he’s banned users of the popular browser from visiting his site. Firefox users are now redirected here.

Why? Because he objects to the fact that some of those Firefox readers are using an ad-blocking extension to block ads showing on the site. To counter the problem, he’s thrown the baby out with the bathwater and kicked 13% or so of the Internet off his site.

While Carlton is certainly enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame, in my opinion this is not a good strategy to build a blog. Users are solid gold. Even the ones that block ads. They sometimes write comments, which is free content. They link to you from their own blog. And they tell friends about your site. All that leads to more readers and, ultimately, more revenue. If a user wants to skip the ads and is willing to go to the trouble of installing ad blocking software, so be it. I still love ‘em. And I gladly hand them my content for free.

Carlton doesn’t agree, apparently. Although I wonder why he continues to provide a full content feed, sans ads, at jacklewis.net/weblog/atom.xml (and it has been reposted here). Those users are “stealing” his content, too. What about them? Perhaps he’ll now turn his attention to the evils of RSS.

The Internet will certainly be a less colorful place without Carlton’s passionate editorial. A perusal of his blog posts (via Safari) tells me he thinks Barack Obama is a communist and that “fourth graders can be lied to and told the Theory of Evolution is a fact.” The problem is, Darwin was right. Only the fittest survive. And Carlton just made his blog an endangered species.

Is Orkut A Social Networking Heavyweight? Comscore Says Yes.

The upcoming Orkut redesign prompted us to check out Orkut’s page view numbers according to Comscore.

U.S. Comscore data shows, as expected, barely a blip from Orkut (Facebook shown for comparison). Orkut has 425 million monthly page views compared to 15 billion for Facebook:

But, wow, take a look at the worldwide Comscore numbers - Facebook doubles to 31 billion monthly page views, but Orkut jumps all the way up to 38 billion (we’ve also included some of the other big social networks for comparison in this chart):

Not that it adds much to the conversation, but Alexa agrees Orkut is bigger than Facebook in terms of page views.

Is this accurate? I don’t know. Compete barely shows Orkut as existing, let alone anywhere near Facebook’s traffic. But Orkut is famously popular in Brazil and other Non-U.S. countries. Perhaps, somehow, it is actually a social networking heavyweight.

Now That The iPhone Can Be Unlocked, Will Apple Try To Block The Hack?

For those who might have missed it: Engadget has the scoop on a new software solution that unlocks Apple’s iPhone, allowing it to be used on any mobile carrier worldwide (presuming of course they run a 2G GSM network).

The creators of the iPhone hack (iPhoneSimFree.com) claim that the hack is “restore and upgrade resistant”; essentially reseting the phone and/ or loading the latest software updates doesn’t affect the hack. The big question is whether it will be resistant to future updates.

So will Apple try to block the hack, or will the Apple engineers in Cupertino be secretly cheering that their gift to mobile users can now be used worldwide and just simply leave the hack alone?

It is unlikely that the decision will be Apple’s alone. AT&T will be very unimpressed at the notion that users could buy an iPhone and bypass their network. The iPhone has already proved itself as being a massive confidence boost for what is considered by some to be America’s worst mobile carrier. The tangible benefits of a AT&T exclusive iPhone are also strong: roughly 1 million users are locked in to AT&T plans averaging somewhere between approx. $50-$100 per month per user, a benefit in the hundred of millions of dollars over the life of the contract. AT&T would be hoping for millions of additional users in the future as well.

On the other hand, someone, somewhere in Apple must be at least a little bit excited by the notion that more people than ever will now consider buying the iPhone. As much as Apple receives some financial benefit from AT&T in terms of a signup or ongoing payment, the real money for Apple is in the hardware and the Apple services such as iTunes, services iPhone users do and will use.

Either way, as long as the iPhone hack works America’s balance of payments should see a very small improvement in the coming months, as first adopters, and tech fiends world wide take iPhones home with them from their next trips to the United States.

Is The Internet Dead And Boring?

Mark Cuban wrote Friday that he believes the internet to be “dead and boring.”

Cuban argues that:

“Some of you may not want to admit it, but that’s exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago….Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet has stopped evolving and stabilized as a platform. Its very very difficult to develop applications on a platform that is ever changing. Things stop working in that environment. Internet 1.0 wasn’t the most stable development environment. Todays Internet is stable specifically because its now boring.(easy to avoid browser and script differences excluded)”

He goes on to state that “The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead. They are dead until bandwidth throughput to the home reaches far higher numbers than the vast majority of broadband users get today.”

On a weekend where a Wall Street Journal article explaining the LOLcats phenomena is a leading story on Techmeme, there could certainly be some argument in favor of the notion that all that is old is new again, and that the web has become at least a little boring. Ultimately you can judge. Read Mark Cubans full post here, and let us know what you think in the poll below.

Is The Internet Dead and Boring?

• No: you're kidding, right?
• Yes: there is nothing new
• Only on Weekends

View Results

Google Will Be Beaten By Facebook, Mahalo: Scoble

Above is part 3 of a 3 part Robert Scoble video blog series on “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years.” To see the other parts scroll on the player; Part 2 at around the 6 minute mark gets to the main points*.

Essentially Scoble argues that Google is in trouble because they are unable to adapt their algorithms and business model in the face of social search sites such as Mahalo and even Facebook; Techmeme is thrown in for good measure as well. Scoble argues that the search results from sites such as Mahalo will appeal to more people due to their ability to be socially constructed as opposed to Google’s computer generated results.

As much as I think that Jason Calacanis is doing a good job with Mahalo, and that he is creating decent content for those frustrated by current search technologies, I’m not even sure Calacanis would be so bold as to argue that his company is going to kick Google’s butt in four years time.

Scoble though does open the more interesting question: what is the future of search?

I won’t even start linking to the many, many search startups that are trying to answer that question.

Scoble seemingly forgets though that even if Google’s current model doesn’t incorporate social search, there is absolutely nothing stopping Google going out and acquiring one of these companies then incorporating their model within the Google product family. I’m also not convinced that we are yet to see the David to Google’s Goliath, but I could be wrong.

* for what ever reason Kyte insists on showing only the latest video in the embed so I was unable to include Part 2 straight up.