SF Tech Sessions is back! This month's event will feature 4-6 companies that may change the way you view search, communities, and online social interaction. All products are from small startup companies who have launched within the last 2 months. Details Wednesday, March 29 7:00-9:00 p.m. Westin St. Francis hotel Alexandra room, 32nd floor Union Square, San Francisco Full details for the event are available on the SF Tech Sessions blog. Add to iCal I learned a few things from the first SF Tech Sessions events: shorter presentations and more time for socializing and Q&A. Our meeting room features rows…
I am in west Los Angeles today and dropped by theOffice, a community workspace serving the professional writing community of Santa Monica and surrounding areas. They have put a lot of thought and effort into creating an ideal creative work environment combining elements of a cafe, library, and Feng Shui garden into a place creative professionals feel inspired and focused. Background information The workspace was founded by writer and director Aleks Horvat in 2004 with charter members such as J.J. Abrams, Jim Uhls, and Mara Brock Akil. A wall-of-fame tracks successful works written in the space. Aleks was working…
In this week's episode of Om and Niall PodSessions Om and I talk about Google Finance, the latest piece of the search company's portal play. According to Hitwise, 10% of Google UK's visitors clicked out to Business and Finance sites last week. Yahoo! Finance received .02% of those clicks. Is Google in denial about its move towards a portal service? I liked the new Google Finance, especially the chart overlays and integration with other Google products. Om found the new product lacking a few of his favorite features from Yahoo! Finance such as institutional holdings and insider trading. A search…
Google Reader users can now share tagged feed items with anyone on the web via Gmail, an Atom feed, JSON, or a view within Google Reader. All you have to do is authorize one or more tags as shared and publish the appropriate URL or JavaScript. The new feature was announced tonight on the Google Reader blog. You can utilize special tags to enable new feature for yourself or your site. Adding a tag of "blogsidebar" to an item for example could add that item to a link list in your blog's sidebar. A tag of "mom" would queue up…
Google just unveiled Google Finance aimed at private investors. The new service correlates stock quotes, trading volume, executive bios and information, top news, blog posts, and Google-hosted moderated message boards. Check out the information page for GOOG for example. The site uses Flash technology to create interactive graphs. You can hover over any data point on the graph for more information and adjust a date-range slider beyond the default 3-day view. Blog data from Google Blog Search appears above message board content for selected blog. Given the frequent posts about a given company it makes sense to filter the…
Six Apart is partnering with blog hosting company Bokee to localize and distribute Movable Type in China. Bokee (formerly known as BlogChina) means "great, open minded person" in Chinese. Leading Chinese search company Baidu estimates there are 36.82 million blogs in China authored by 16 million unique bloggers as of November 2005. The same study found 658 blog service providers in China and 330 providers with over 1000 registered users. MSN Spaces currently leads the market. Bokee has been vocally opposed to the spread of MSN Spaces in China and what one Bokee employee calls a "Microsoft monopoly" of blogs…
Last night I attended a talk at the Computer History Museum about the early history of portable computing highlighting GRiD Computing as one of the pioneers in the space. Some interesting facts: GRiD was one of Silicon Valley's first stealth companies (back in 1981). Most employees did not know what they were working on until after they were hired. Co-founder Dave Paulsen told a story about sourcing parts from all over the world to try and find already manufactured components that could work in a small form-factor PC. They found their electro-luminescent displays while flipping through a Japanese electronics…
In this week's PodSession Om and I discuss voice and mobile technologies currently available for platform integration. When does it make sense for a web application to add voice or mobile capabilities? What are the costs and benefits? Are so called "web 2.0" companies just shinier versions of existing applications? Is anyone actually pushing the envelope and inventing entirely new industries? IP-based voice applications have already changed the way we think about communicating online. Mobile phones are now common tools of daily communication with relatively fast data connections with always-on access to the Web and focused data. Why are we…
FeedBurner just announced the hiring of Don Loeb and its expansion to a San Francisco office. Don also posted an announcement on his blog. Don was previously led business at Yahoo!'s personalized media division including My Yahoo!, Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Groups, etc. FeedBurner's San Francisco office is most likely a rented desk at Adaptive Path, a San Francisco user experience design firm. Adaptive Path rents desks on the second floor of its building to small companies for about $250 a month. Tags: feedburner…
The NewsGator API allows synchronization of feed and item-level data across multiple locations. NewsGator has a few unique features not available in other APIs such as Google Reader, so I will dive right into the unique features. SOAP now, REST later The NewsGator API is currently offered as a SOAP interface only but Brent Simmons mentioned future plans for REST support during his presentation at last week's Emerging Technology conference. Authentication An application acts on behalf of a user with a NewsGator account. The account also allows access to NewsGator Online, a web-based aggregator that can be used anywhere. Locations…
Google built a feed platform that is freely available for any user with a Google account. The first implementation of the Google feed platform is the Google Reader lens, already used by thousands of Google users. The Google feed platform is web-based and therefore works with any operating system. It can be used as a pass-through for one feed at a time for small implementations or a full aggregator backend. It's running on the Google's expansive (and expensive) back-end hardware and network, creating fast response times and high reliability. Atom 1.0 output The Google Reader platform outputs all data in…
The Windows RSS platform is included in Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista, both due out later this year. The platform exposes feed and list data to all Windows applications via a common API, manages enclosure downloads, and applies common security settings to feed data and downloads. Common Feed List Windows XP and Windows Vista users will soon be using Internet Explorer 7 as their default browser. They may notice a glowing orange button on their toolbar, click it, and start subscribing to feeds exposed on the page. A subscribed feed is added to the Common Feed List, a centralized…
Feed aggregator developers currently struggle with multiple data formats, unclean sources, HTTP status handling, and many other complex problems that take time away from actually developing their application. New feed platforms are emerging that will allow developers to leverage the existing work of larger teams that already sweat the small stuff every day, allowing new aggregator developers to focus on creating new experiences on top of feed data to thrill users and deliver requested features quicker and easier than ever before. Microsoft, Google, and NewsGator are three examples of established companies exposing their feed architecture to the outside world to…
In the beginning, there was text. Early feed applications such as Netscape's In-Box Direct, PointCast, and Microsoft Active Desktop transformed existing data formats such as a newspaper and its articles, summaries, and full-text and applied traditional publishing thoughts to a new transport medium. Almost 10 years after then introduction of early web feed formats we are just starting to tap into the full potential of feeds as a descriptive data format with rich payloads and more easily discoverable content. Desktop aggregation The desktop has been the traditional home of feed experiences. Our desktop aggregators are full of text-heavy content (preferably…
Microsoft introduced a new front-end for MSN Search data last night on Live.com, the new default homepage for Internet Explorer users. The new features improve the search experience for novice users with a more familiar interaction and customization. Scrollbars, no next button Microsoft found about 60% of their users request more than one page of results for services such as image search. They redesigned the experience, replacing the "next" and "previous" buttons common on other search sites with a with a draggable scroll up or scroll down slider that requests new result sets in the background. Choose your thumbnail…
I'm at the Emerging Technology conference in San Diego with some cool new applications and services being announced on stage and in the hallways. The problem is, no one is able to blog about what's happening in real-time due to an almost non-existant network connection (even for presenters wanting to live demo). A thought for conference organizers: wireless connectivity is part of your marketing budget. It allows the audience to research products and sponsors, connect to other attendees to arrange meetings and get-togethers, and enables more people to attend knowing they will be able to simply connect back to the…
As previously mentioned, I will lead a session on Feeds as a Platform at the Emerging Technology conference tomorrow at 1:45 p.m. I will talk about the feed ecosystem, peer into the future a bit, and introduce attendees to three real-world examples of feed platforms. Windows RSS platform. Jane Kim of Microsoft will present Microsoft's new technologies exposing feeds at the operating system level. You will see feed handling in action on the latest builds of Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7 and learn why they matter to both users and developers. Google Reader API. I will introduce the Google…
AOL Instant Messenger is now officially available to external developers for custom presence, add-ons, and full integration of AIM into existing applications. I signed up for a developer key and I've implemented my AIM presence to my contact page as a first step. The new AIM developer features open up new methods of integration for everyone from the independent publisher all the way up to big corporations. AIM Presence You can now integrate your AIM status into web pages and other applications to let people know when you are online. You can also communicate your idle status, away message,…
I will be at O'Reilly's sold-out Emerging Technology conference next week learning about the latest developments in the online technology world and talking to a lot of smart people. If you are at the conference you should come to my Feeds as a Platform presentation on Wednesday, March 8, at 1:45 p.m. I will talk about new trends in the syndication space and the technologies that make it all possible. What will the syndication space look like at the end of 2006? What are the underutilized applications of the technology primed for the most growth? What new products and services…
TailRank launched a bunch of new features today focused on improving the meme tracker's ability to recommend new sources and hot posts. Users can now have their favorite weblogs automatically recognized without the need for relatively confusing terms such as OPML, RSS, or blogrolls. Favorite sites are imported using a user's browser history. I think this technology will be common across many sites in the next 6 months, and here's how you do it. The user clicks on an "Auto Configure" button that initiates the magic. Clicking the button loads a list of links that are potentially sites visited by…
Sony Ericsson announced a new lineup of mobile phones today with Google integrated as a blogging and search platform. Sony Ericsson's new K800 and K790 phone models include a 3.2 megapixel camera with a xenon flash and the ability to upload photos and text to Google's Blogger service. Google will become the default search engine on all Internet-enabled phones from Sony Ericsson. A Google search bar will appear as a part of the default browser but hopefully won't take up much space on the small 2″ screen. Tags: sonyericsson…
FeedBurner unveiled a new look for their statistics package today and a few new features for premium members. It's the second major update in FeedBurner's two years as a company and affects all of FeedBurner's 140,000 publishers. Paid members can now track more information about individual entries such as popularity of a post by day and active readers vs. feed downloads (reach). Members utilizing the free service will notice better graphical data plotted over time, JavaScript tricks that allow you to easily dig deeper into a specific user-agent, and a separate display for user-agents not in the FeedBurner database as…
Search company Ask is dropping the Teoma brand name in a further move to roll all of its brands into one. Jeeves, longtime mascot and search butler, was dropped from the site earlier this month. The Teoma team has been a part of Ask Search Technology since Teoma's September 2001 acquisition. Paul Gardi, formerly VP of search for Ask Jeeves and Teoma, is now leading IAC's Advertising Solutions business. Teoma has powered Ask's backend search since 2001 but the Teoma.com front-end always provided more advanced features than Ask. Teoma features have now been rolled into the Ask engine. I'm…
In this week's episode of Om and Niall PodSessions we talk about newly popularized methods of interaction within web applications. JavaScript, Ajax, and Flash have all seen a huge surge in demand and mindshare over the past year. What is the current state of the technology and is there enough talent to step up and fill the demand? JavaScript developers need to account for a variety of different implementations and parsers across browser platforms. You need to apply special tricks and hacks to the interaction experience consistent and dependable. I'd prefer to develop for the latest version of Firefox only…
I am enjoying the blog of Harvard Assistant Professor Noam Wasserman and if you are a founder, entrepreneur, or venture capitalist you may appreciate his research into founder frustrations. He covers economic concepts of stewardship theory and agency theory from a startup's point of view. Past topics: Founder-CEO succession Co-founder issues Hiring and scaling challenges Communicating with investors Building a board of directors Entrepreneurial compensation Case studies Graphs, charts, hard data, and real stories. Enjoy! Tags: startups…
