Rafe's Blog

Music and Apartments

What does the music sharing service Mercora have in common with a classified advertising aggregator Oodle?  Quite a lot, I think: They both enable a kind of laser-focused, person-to-person commerce that is not possible without the Net.  They are like PubSub, Feedster, and Technorati, which keep blog readers current with precisely the content they are looking for, as soon as it is published, no matter how obscure the blog is that publishes it.

I'm working up this idea for an upcoming Rafe's Radar column.

Longhorn: Beyond search

I just got a demo of Build 5063 of Windows Longhorn, from Microsoft group product manager Greg Sullivan. There are interesting changes from previous versions we've covered at CNET.com, including the removal of some of the whizzy user interface flourishes like the side bar. On the other hand, this OS finally does a very good job of combining very different file organization schemes into one UI, including the standard folders-based file organization, searching, and tagging (which MS calls keywords).  I'll put a Works for Me column together on this quick as I can. For latest Longhorn news, click here.

Home networking software needs something more

I covered both Pure Networks' Network Magic and SingleClick Solutions' HomeNet Manager in my latest Rafe's Radar column, Bringing the Network Home (free registration required).

I like these products (especially Network Magic), and readers of this blog do too, judging from the comment posts. However, I'm not sure I see this software category making a whole ton of money, unless the vendors manage to tie these products into services that can create recurring revenue.

New Google products

Finally, after a day of totally elementary Google 101, we have some actual new products. 

Fusion
Most important is "Fusion," a personalized home page.  It's the My Yahoo killer. Finally.

In this early stage, it incorporates Gmail, news, weather, stocks, driving directions, and movie data. Also it pulls in Web content from the BBC, NY Times, Slashdot, Wired, Quote of the Day, and Word of the Day.  To come in the future: Any other RSS feed.

It's live now on labs.google.com

Usability looks good - nice edit-in-place for the page, and drag-and-drop modules.

We'll do a review of this product vs. My Yahoo as soon as we can on CNET.

Two other new products:

AdSense for Feeds
Basically, lets you insert ads in RSS feeds.  Looks like it's been done right, but I haven't tried it yet.  Supports Blogger, Movable Type, TypePad. And serves ads via GIFs, so it won't bust the "updated" flag and cause duplicate entries in RSS readers.

Google Earth
An update of the standalone Keyhole product, which is already incredibly cool. This new version will integrate with Google's search engine and the driving directions function, and will even let you "play" a driving route as a movie.  Also has much higher-resolution satellite data than the current version and than the satellite images shown on maps.google.com.

Google on new opportunities

Jonathan Rosenberg, VP Product Management:
My favorite Google philosophy, as stated by Rosenberg: "We build first and monetize later."  Indeed, when I met a few months ago with Lars Perkins, who built Picassa, he told me that he kept going to his new bosses at Google (which acquired Picasa) and tried to engage them in discussions about making money, and they just told him, "Don't worry about it."

Wouldn’t you love to build products that way?

Regarding all the new, incredibly cool sites being built on top of Google Maps, Google says they are trying to figure out a way to make it work for everyone. They don't want to shut anybody down. I have a hunch they'll figure a way to embed ads in the mapstream…

Jeff Huber, VP Engineering on innovation in advertising technology:
Ads=Content.  When a user has commercial intent, an ad can be the best result.

My take: Granted, Google serves very well-targeted ads, but if Google really believes this, why is Froogle so bad? See my column on Dulance: Better than Google.

Question from Harry McCracken, editor-in-chief of PC World: Did you learn any lessons from the Web Accelerator brouhaha?

Rosenberg: “There were some misrepresentation of the dangers…”   But yes, he said, there was a lesson about the aggressiveness of testing needed.  They’re back in testing again.

Google's advertising products

Advertising session.

Salar Kamangar, AdWords Product Manager
Salar gave an overview of the Google ad models that we know about. And one that's new to me: Google recently launched Site Targeting. Which is really banner serving. Looks like competition to existing ad networks like Fastclick and Advertising.com.  More at this News.com story: Google readies banner offerings.

Susan Wojcicki, AdSense Product Manager
This is the engine that can find and serve ads based on page content, and (new) RSS feeds. It's also the engine that serves ads on GMail.

New formats coming: graphical and animated ads.

Should I add advertising to this blog?

Tim Armstrong, VP Advertising Sales
U.S. advertising biz in 2005: $280B, projected.  Internet ads growing 25% this year. TV shrinking.

Bonus of Web advertising:  A business can target each of its products to a site, page, or user. Instead of just making giant campaigns that hit the broad middle.

 

How Google search works

Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products… talked for a bit about the core of Google: the team that runs the search engine, which is the 70% of Google that people take for granted.  Google has 8 billion pages indexed. 

Marissa introduced Peter Norvig, Director of Search Quality. His talk: Crawling, Indexing, and Serving 101.

1. Crawling. Google spiders the Web to put pages in the Google servers.

2. PageRank. Pages importance is calculated based on number and quality of links to the page.

3. Indexing. Every single word on the Web is indexed. "We have several hundred machines with just the word 'the'."

Finally, doc servers, which store all the Web (see step 1), are used to create the text that shows up around your search results to give you context.

Not a ton of new info yet.  We're all looking forward to learning things we don't know.

Google "Factory Tour"

A rare event: Google is having a press day.  Eric Schmidt is introing the event. Says the company is sending its employees to Star Wars today. Which goes to the argument that George Lucas is responsible for a huge short-term hit to  U.S. productivity.

On the other hand, this company also encourages employees to spend a part of their time working on extracurricular projects, which argues that letting employees go off on tangents is actually a benefit to productivity.

We'll see what good insight comes out of this…

Under the Radar… it lives!

In 2003, I worked with IBDNetwork to launch an event series called Under the Radar. The idea was this: We picked a startup theme (event #1 was Wi-Fi startups), lined up a few good early-stage companies, and got them to present to a panel of venture capitalist judges, who then voted on the companies' prospects, American Idol-style.  We also polled the audience at each event to see which companies they liked -- their results were often different. I moderated a bunch of these evening events, and found them a lot of fun, and very informative. I guess the format worked, since the audience size grew from event to event.

When I went to work for CNET full-time, about a year ago, I reduced my involvement with IBDN, but the Under the Radar series has continued to grow and flourish, and recently the IBDN team launched a series of full-day Under the Radar events. I'm participating as a moderator in one of these events, on May 31, at the Microsoft conference center (map) in Mountain View, CA. I'm handling two sessions:

Social Software Tools @ 1:00 pm
Presenting companies: 

• imeem
• Multiply
• Peerflix
• Userplane

Blog/RSS Tools @ 2:45 pm
Presenting companies:

• Audioblog
• Five Across
• PubSub
• Rojo

I'm looking forward to learning about these companies (and getting some good blog and column material).  If you are interested in attending, tickets are available on Acteva.  More information about the event is on the IBDN site.  They also have a blog about the event, and I'm told there are blogger passes available (if you are interested, contact Valerie Cunningham).

If you come to the event, come find me after the RSS session and tell me which companies you liked…

The Dell of Wine?

A pal pointed out to me today an odd startup that allows you to design and make your own custom wine: CrushPad. Too weird. I learned a little about the wine business when I wrote a column on Vinfolio, which allows wine collectors to outsource their cellaring. I'm going to look into CrushPad and may cover it shortly.

Disclosure: I have a tin palette. I can tell the difference between a Chardonnay and a Cabernet, but that's about as much as I know about wine qua wine. My wife is the wino in the family.