June 12, 2008

Will FriendFeed Change the Face of Search?

Earlier this year, I wrote about FriendFeed's new search feature and how it was a powerful tool for finding conversations about your brand. I've used the site a little more, and I know it's a great way to find user-generated content as well. Now, Steve Rubel is weighing in on the discussion over the power of FriendFeed's search, saying it could disrupt traditional search methods.

Rubel suggests that the real power lies in searching among a network of trusted friends. He says there will be a whole advertising strategy built around it, which he dubs social contextual search advertising. Rubel thinks this is where Facebook and Google are headed as well.

Really, all FriendFeed needs to do is sell contextual ads for this to happen. But FriendFeed is a long way off from disrupting search or changing search ad models. And is that the true mission of the social aggregator?

One of the best things about FriendFeed and all social sites is discovery of new things. It's difficult to search for things you're not aware of, making discovery more powerful than search, in my opinion.

Even so, FriendFeed needs to figure out ways to help its users manage all the noise. When you're tracking a bunch of people who are all sending their blogs, social bookmarking votes, Tweets, etc. to FriendFeed, it gets a bit overwhelming. The new "rooms" that have been created are helpful and so is the hide feature, but tagging friends would be even better.

Plus, FriendFeed needs to watch the mobile space carefully. The attention economy will be streamlined even further and all the noise will be a distraction.

Finally, sites like FriendFeed and Twitter are all primarily used by internet marketers, bloggers, web developers, and other tech power users. Search appeals to the masses for obvious reasons, but social media sites have yet to prove staying power (Friendster, anyone?).

What do you think the future of search and social media are? Will social media overtake search or is Google here to stay? Let it fly in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

June 9, 2008

New 3G iPhone 2.0 Gets Loopt

Social Search may be the killer app for the new 3G iPhone 2.0 release.

Loopt launched its native iPhone social search app onstage at WWDC, Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. The free application will connect users with their friends by using location technology built in to the iPhone, Like Google Maps, Loopt will drop pins onto a map showing users where their friends are.

CNET reports that Loopt also offers other social-networking features, such as calling, texting, and sending invitations to meet up. The example used was seeing if any friends are in your area for lunch. Once you have located friends, you can send them an invitation for lunch, and if they agree, you will be one touch away from directions to their location. As Sam Altman from Loopt put it, "You will never have to eat alone, or at a bad restaurant again."

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

June 2, 2008

Add Value to Twitter Tweets

There's some value to Twitter “tweets” after all. If you carefully assemble sources, then more useful and search-friendly content is bound to emerge.

Newstex has already started to bundle tweets this way. It's a natural progression for the company, which distributes real-time news feeds, commentary and blogs to corporate and financial users.

During the past few years, Newstex identified and signed up 4,000+ blogs and redistributed them to publishers such as Lexis-Nexis. With the twittering explosion, Newstex President Larry Schwartz wanted to deliver the added information coming from live tweets too.

I had a chance to catch up with Schwartz, to see if there’s demand for their Newstwits. Among the bloggers they represent, the response has been very positive: “We first approached our existing blog network and asked if they would be interested in participating, and several hundred immediately signed up to part of the feed."

"Since the announcement, we have strong interest and several of our existing blog clients are adding the Newstwits product. We quickly learned syndicating individual ‘tweets’ was less valuable to our clients than packing 30 minutes of ‘tweets’ into one news story/blog post.”

All these bundled tweets can be made searchable by their clients, who are all online publishers. Newstex delivers them every half-hour, and publishers integrate them like any other real-time feed. When the bundles appear on web pages, there's more silo-content available for site search or web search.

There's a lesson or two here, as Twitter continues to grow. With some elbow grease, good content can be mined from tweets from the right or relevant sources. Perhaps bundling will become another way to build content that attracts traffic. It's interesting to consider how these mini-posts can be added to publisher arsenals.

Today Schwartz remains realistic about acceptance rates, among his corporate and financial users. “When we mention Twitter, they look at us like we contracted some strange disease -- and one Wall Street person asked if Twitter was a speech problem. We have a long way to go, but it only took us three years for blogs to go mainstream. Hopefully, Twitter will be quicker.”

Posted by Deborah Richman at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 22, 2008

Google Xooglers Launch Social Search Engine Mechanical Zoo

Everyone knows that the Google search engine no longer wants to be a social donut.

But the first true social search engine may have already escaped the innovation machine at the Googleplex.

CNET reporter Stefanie Olsen scooped the industry on the launch of Mechanical Zoo, a stealth search engine currently in alpha with several hundred users.

Led by Nathan Stoll, former product lead of Google News, Mechanical Zoo may launch in beta as early as May, 2008. Search Engine Watch readers may remember Stoll's Google News presentation at SES San Jose in 2005.

San Francisco-based Mech Zoo was co-founded by Max Ventilla, a former Google business development manager; and computer scientist Damon Horowitz, former lead engineer of Perspecta, a search software firm. Former Google Firefox app-security engineer Fritz Schneider, is on staff.

Ex-Yahoos joined the team, too: Winton Davies, (Yahoo Research Labs), and Bob Zoller (Yahoo 360).

Sep Kamvar, founder of search technology company Kaltix (sold to Google) is an adviser.

Mechanical Zoo is building products that enable "social search" by accessing the knowledge of people in your network. It's not too far from the old Bebo space.

Their plan is to develop several experimental offshoots built around their core technology.

The 12-man team is looking for a few good people. So what skills would you need? AJAXy web development; rapid prototyping and development with rails; new paradigms of data availability and access (OpenSocial); distributed systems and large datasets; statistics; algorithms; NLP and machine learning; recommendation systems; usability research; online community building; and data-driven marketing.

Sounds like there's more than a one-trick pony search engine at the Mechanical Zoo.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 12:03 PM | Permalink

April 10, 2008

Digging deeper into the social press release

First of all, a tip of the cap to Drew Kerr over at Four Corners Communications for emailing me about a new post by Mark Glaser on the MediaShift weblog at PBS, which is entitled, "The Social Press Release: Multimedia, Two-Way, Direct to the Public."

Mark interviews Laura Sturaitis, senior vice president of media services & product strategy for Business Wire, Andy Beal, a marketing consultant who writes the Marketing Pilgrim blog, and others about the evolution of press releases.

Mark also includes links to a number of articles on the topic, including: Is the Social Media Press Release a Meatball Sundae? and The 100th Birthday of the Press Release at Search Engine Watch at Search Engine Watch.

Mark's post is a fair portrait of the social press release -- warts and all.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 12:28 PM | Permalink

March 20, 2008

SEW Experts: Social Search: Welcome to the World of Socialommerce™

Social media combined with search holds great potential for e-commerce. In today's Building Brand Equity column, "Social Search: Welcome to the World of Socialommerce," Erik Qualman explains that companies and marketers would be better off spending more time listening to their customers and potential customers, and less time spending hours upon hours figuring out their next award-winning – but "no-customer-getting" – 30-second spot.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:01 AM | Permalink

March 19, 2008

Mahalo Adds New Social Search Tools

Today at Search Engine Strategies New York, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis unveiled the latest set of features at the social search engine: My Mahalo.

My Mahalo is a service, currently in beta, that allows users to import their ratings and reviews from other social media sites, and share them with contacts on Mahalo Social. That service, which launched December, is similar to Yahoo's delicious service. It lets users recommend and share links, or see recommendations from friends and top Mahalo users.

With My Mahalo, the social features are becoming more prominent. Mahalo pages will now show pictures of friends that have expressed an interest in that topic on Mahalo, or have imported their reviews from other social media sites, such as Facebook, MySpace or niche sites like GoodReads.com.

"We're taking the information that's available on the social graph, and putting it where you need it," Calacanis told SEW.

Instead of having to visit several social media sites to find the various comments, ratings, reviews and other content your friends have created, Mahalo users can see all of that info in one place, if their friends have imported their data into Mahalo. So a search for the movie Bladerunner will show you how many of your friends have seen the movie, how many want to see it, how many reviewed it, etc.

February 21, 2007

Sproose to show 'subject expert' information in search results

Bob Pack, CEO for Sproose, a personalized social networking search engine with user-ranked results, spent some time with me in an interview, detailing his company's plans for a 'Wiki-style subject expert social networking system' to be included in Sproose's search results pages.

"The subject expert will be able to have a Wiki-style page of information based on the topic or keyword." explains Bob. "That person will become a subject expert for that keyword or topic. Others will be able to join, write and edit about that keyword or topic. That information will be tied into web keyword search."

"For example, when you do a keyword search for ‘mustang cars’ – you not only get a web index of search results; you’ll get the subject expert’s information, where the users in the Sproose community can contribute self-published information… That is something in the next phase of our social networking aspect more than just search, but it does allow users to contribute to the search.”

Pack plans for the new system to be rolled out over the next 90 days.

Posted by Grant Crowell at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 19, 2007

MSN Reporter – A Digg Competitor from MSN

The LiveSide Reporter notes that MSN Reporter, in beta since October 2006, has launched in three markets -- Netherlands, Belgium and Norway. The new service is similar to digg.com and redit which allow users to vote on the news stories. The new service has reportedly attracted 500,000 and 800,000 users during its 1st and 2nd months in beta. Some articles are reported to have received up to 10,000 votes and 1,000 comments. The site is not immune from the spam problems that plague these user voting news sites, and an increasing volume of spam is reportedly now appearing on the site. Since the top four headlines from MSN Reporter will now appear on the MSN.nl homepage, more users can get involved which will make it increasingly difficult to game the system.

Posted by Amanda Watlington at 5:40 PM | Permalink

February 8, 2007

Lycos Jumps Into the Social Mix

With the launch of Lycos MIX (http://mix.lycos.com), a new bookmarking tool, Lycos users can pull video clips from a variety of different sources across the web (YouTube, MySpace,Yahoo Video, and others) into one playlist, creating a community around shared interests and topics.

Within the MIX interface, users can add new videos, rate and comment on all the videos within a given playlist. Playlists can be made private or kept public, and the owner of a content mix can approve or discard video additions.

Lycos Mix works for both PC and MAC users, and browsers including IE, Windows, Safari and Firefox support Lycos MIX.

More notes from the release:

“Lycos MIX continues the evolution of community and video with a true Web 2.0 collaborative, contributory and interactive social viewing experience,” said Brian Kalinowski, chief operating officer for Lycos, Inc. “Unlike social networking sites, each MIX is a collection of video clips where users socialize around content, not individual people or profiles, creating combinations of lasting content to share with others. With Lycos MIX, users can create an amalgamation of video content where others participate by viewing, commenting and adding more clips.”

Other unique functionality includes a “MIX It” bookmarklet feature, allowing users to quickly and easily add videos from other sites to their MIXES without cutting or pasting URL’s. Robust permanent comment and rating system features also allow users to rate MIXES, as opposed to individual pieces of video content.

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 12:38 PM | Permalink

January 25, 2007

Wikio, a European social bookmarking site, receives funding

E-consultancy reports that Wikio, a European social bookmarking site, has received almost £2.7 million in a Series A round of funding. Wikio originally launched in France and Italy in June 2006, and has reached almost a million unique visitors per month since then. The company has since launched its site in Germany, Spain and the US, with a UK version planned for sometime this year.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 9:39 AM | Permalink

January 23, 2007

Searchles releases social media’s first push-me/pull-me widget

Searchles today released a fully integrated widget that keeps web traffic where it should be – on your site. It is the first social widget that doesn’t take the user off the source page to bookmark, tag, share or comment on content. It automatically pushes and pulls tags and comments back to the source page, and recommends related content from the source site and elsewhere.

The Searchles’ widget is targeted at blogs, online media, social networking, audio and video websites that want to tap into the viral power of social media while building closer connections between their audience and content. Among its key features: * With the widget installed, users never leave the source website to bookmark, tag, share, group or comment on content. This requires user registration at Searchles. * Tags and comments on the source website are automatically “pushed” into Searchles just as tags and comments at Searchles itself are automatically “pulled” back to the source site – viewable instantly in both places. * Users can receive notifications to automatically know when another user has replied to their comments and are prompted to return. * By using your mouse to scroll over tags within the widget, Searchles will automatically recommend related content biased to the source site and then elsewhere on the web. No registration is required for this feature. * The Searchles’ widget doesn’t hog valuable site real estate – it integrates very unobtrusively at the bottom of source content, collapsing and expanding within the source site as the user interacts. * It is easy to install with just one line of code – and easy and intuitive to use.

You can see how the Searchles widget works at http://blog.searchles.com, or you get one for your website at: http://www.searchles.com/misc/widget.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 2:47 PM | Permalink

January 16, 2007

Jimmy Wales Discusses Search Wikia on MarketWatch

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales went face to face with Bambi Francisco on today's MarketWatch, and shared more about the concept of Search Wikia, a new social search engine designed to combine algorithmic results with user voting and contribution features. Francisco questioned whether or not this social search technology had the power to dethrone Google.

During the TV interview, Wales declined to put a specific number on the "substantial investment" for building out the new search engine, although he said the service should be in open beta within 2-3 months.

Wales fully admitted that the early days of Search Wikia may not produce quality results, just as the initial stages of Wikipedia had its challenges. However, Wales was clear that the ultimate goal is complete transparency and high quality search results.

Danny Sullivan wrote earlier this week on the poor quality of the new Wikiseek tool, though the purpose and functionality is worlds apart from the new engine in the works. Sullivan had previously discussed the driving forces of Search Wikia in another interview with Jimmy Wales.

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 8:34 PM | Permalink

January 9, 2007

New Social Search Engine Targets Boomers

Eons, a social network for the over-50 crowd launched last year by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor, has launched a new Web search engine that will apply user behavior from its network to sort search results.

Cranky.com is built on a base of Ask.com's index, with editorial oversight from Eons' team, and an initial behavioral "lens" created using data from market research firm Compete's panel. Compete has been tracking the user activity in its panel for more than a year, and will extract the top 5,000 sites visited by users in the over-50 demographic to use their behavior as a relevance filter for Cranky.com's search.

"Popular search engines are easy to use, but it can be difficult to understand the results, " said Jeff Taylor, founder and CEO of Eons. "For the one-third of Web users over 50, relevance and getting overwhelmed by information can be big issues."

The SERPs for Cranky have been simplified to show only the top four results on the first page. Subsequent pages will show 10 results each. Users are also invited to submit ratings or reviews of each site in the results, and that input is used in the next iteration of the ranking algorithm.

"We've talked a lot to users in this age group, and we've found that they're more interested in getting fewer results that are very good than millions of results," Taylor said. "For this group, a search engine with a narrower user interface, focusing on the top-ranked sites, can be more useful."

Cranky will also display Ask Sponsored Listings' text ads on the SERPs, as well as display ads that Eons sells throughout its network. There are no paid inclusion programs to get a site on the first page, just the ratings and behavior of users.

"Eons knows that the 50-plus market has a distinctly different set of needs and behaviors than the general population -- specifically, they use search engines as navigational devices to find key sites on targeted topics such as health and travel," said Rob Rubin, SVP of engineering at Eons. "To make these searches better, Cranky is aimed specifically at the Boomer generation, as opposed to a category."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 2:59 PM | Permalink

December 28, 2006

Branding Buys in the Social Whirl

Maybe it's time to consider brand-oriented SEM buys.

We know that Gen Yers embrace brands within social environments like MySpace and Facebook. According to MediaBuyerPlanner, advertisers don't have to come up with breakthrough experiences anymore. They can sell products laden with celebrity contests, just like other media.

It wasn't long ago that advertisers were nervous about appearing next to content they could not control, and that's changing now. Reaching a mass audience is more important in the new social whirl.

What does this mean for SEM buys? Consider making more broad-based, message buys to dominate specific domains or communities. Right alongside those banners and social site profiles.

Posted by Deborah Richman at 3:00 PM | Permalink

December 27, 2006

Clipblast! Releases List of Top Video Searches in 2006

Clipblast.com, which can be classified as a meta search engine that searches for online videos in 'real-time', announced today their Top 10 most popular searches for Internet video clips in 2006. The engine has indexed millions of video clips from across the Web. The company's patent-pending technology crawls the Web in search of video, then categorizes video files, Web pages and feeds so that the most relevant clips can be served up in real-time, on demand.

Not surprisingly, celebrities behaving badly top the list, but also some of the biggest US news stories, as well as World Cup soccer action made the cut. The year's most popular video searches according to Clipblast.com, searching on any of the topics below will return an array of videos from different sources:

1. Steve Irwin – the crocodile hunter was celebrated, memorialized and mourned after his untimely death.

2. Borat – Kazakhstan's sixth most famous man became a bona fide cultural phenomenon.

3. World Cup – four weeks of nonstop soccer action, 32 national teams and one infamous head-butt scored big with sports fans.

4. Al Zarqawi – the June death of Iraq's Al-Qaeda leader in a U.S military strike was big news on the Web.

5. Britney Spears – between the new baby, the messy divorce and the no-panties partying, Britney was an online-video favorite.

6. Michael Richards – a bad stand-up comedy set laced with the liberal use of a very bad word made Kramer from Seinfeld a hit once again with Web surfers.

7. JonBenet Ramsey – nearly 10 years after her unsolved murder, the nation's fascination with the tiny-tot beauty queen was rekindled by a "confession" that proved to be yet another dead end.

8. George W. Bush – the President's popularity may have taken a beating in the opinion polls, but he came out a winner in the video-search bar.

9. Cory Lidle – the death of the New York Yankees pitcher became headline news – not just sports news – when his plane slammed into a Manhattan apartment building. . 10. Mel Gibson – the actor and director got a prolonged and not-too-flattering close-up after his July arrest and anti-Semitic tirade.

Borat and Michael Richards, along with YouTube and the late James Kim (cNET editor), are also featured in ClipBlast!'s "A Life in Video." A Life in Video, which highlights the Web's best video clips on a particular subject, will officially debut in 2007.

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 5:54 PM | Permalink

December 21, 2006

'Tis the Season for Top Ten Lists

UK-based local search engine 192.com has released a list of its top local searches for the holiday season. Some search term top ten lists, which always pour in at this time of year, can be a good indication of consumer buying activity (some, it must be noted, are heavily filtered as Danny Sullivan points out over at Search Engine Land).

“Royal Mail” tops the list, as the pragmatic requirements of the season occupy a significant portion of people’s time and mindshare. But the more fun elements of the holiday season are also represented further down the list with “Restaurants” and “Toy Shop”. Golf clubs and jewelry also seem to be the most popular gifts in the UK this year (assuming people are visiting, rather than buying and gifting, beauty salons and hotels).

Here is the entire list:

1. Royal Mail

2. Garden centers and florists

3. Beauty salons

4. Restaurants

5. Hotels

6. Golf

7. Taxis

8. Toy shop

9. Jewelers

10. Churches

Other interesting lists that have come out in the past week include Google’s and Yahoo!’s top search terms for the year explored earlier in the week by Greg Jarboe. AdAge listed its top 10 Internet acquisitions of 2006; The Seeking Alpha Blog has a top 10 list of tech storylines that defined '06 (social media and video are not surprisingly at the top); while Sebastien Provencher’s new social/local media blog, Praized.com, looks forward to the top trends that will shape ’07.

If Provencher is right, online video and social networking will continue to shape the direction of the media world and particularly local search. Local advertising’s marriage with social networking was seen this year and it could grow considerably in ’07, as more small businesses see the value in viral marketing on a local level.

We could see this and other intersecting trends in ’07 and as innovation continues throughout the media world, and adoption levels for many developing forms of media (online video, mobile local search, social search, etc.) approach mainstream status.

Posted by Mike Boland at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 20, 2006

Visits by college students to MySpace power its lead in page views

comScore Networks has released a study that analyzes the impact of visits from university locations to the top two Web properties, Fox Interactive Media (which includes MySpace) and Yahoo!

College students account for 8% of all Web content consumed by U.S. Internet users, as measured in page views. At MySpace, the top Internet property in November on the basis of page views, 12% of content is viewed at university locations, while only 6% of page views at Yahoo! occurs at university locations.

If college student usage is omitted, the data tells a very different story: Yahoo!, with 35.6 billion page views for November, would rank higher than MySpace with 34.9 billion.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 10:20 AM | Permalink

December 19, 2006

Digg extends its reach beyond news

Oliver Luft of journalism.co.uk reports that Digg has "spread its reach beyond news stories to begin rating and aggregating podcasts."

Digg, which gets 10 million unique users a month, has also introduced a Top 10 Stories feature which allows users to see the most popular stories at any given time, including stories that are no longer on the home page but are still receiving votes and are topics of discussion.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 11:30 AM | Permalink