Category Archives: Internet

Facebook should not be afraid of Google Wave…yet

Posted by joel on May 28, 2009 1 comment

Google today announced the impending release of their new…product, Google Wave. I hesitate when describing it, because it’s actually pretty tough to categorize. Techcrunch has a thorough writeup of the functionality and Mashable has a brief of their own, but neither does much analysis, so let me try to summarize.

Google Wave is:

Like email, but won’t work (navtively) with existing email
Like IM, but it isn’t an application
Like Facebook messaging, but without Facebook
Like Facebook’s application platform, but without Facebook
Like Twitter, but without a public-facing feed
Like IRC, but less temporal

Does that help? Maybe not.

Let me try to sum it up in a positioning statement that I’m making up based on the proposed featureset:

Google Wave is a web-based messaging system that helps people communicate, share, and collaborate with friends, family, and business contacts both in real-time and asynchronously.

If we look at it in these terms, Google Wave is not only extremely ambitious but is also set squarely against Facebook.

You may consider this comparison invalid because Google Wave has so many features that Facebook doesn’t and Facebook has a ton of features that Wave doesn’t, but users don’t look at features, they look at problems the product solves for them. Is it filling a need that isn’t met right now, or is it filling the need better than existing services? It’s unlikely that people would give up Facebook for Wave, so the question for Google comes down to: will they use both? You can ask the same question about Wave vs. email, IM, and Twitter.

In order to think Wave will be successful, you have to think the problems it solves are important. Here are some of the problems it purports to address:

It’s hard to communicate and collaborate with friends over email / IM / other web services
There are too many ways to communicate with people online – I want a single method
Email, IM, and online messaging don’t allow collaboration, and allow limited use of multimedia
Email is not a dynamic communication mechanism
It’s hard to share my email conversations with people who aren’t in the conversation
“When (messaging is) not live, you lose your attention on a conversation, but when you see it live, you’re engaged.” (I remember the days of using “talk” when you could see the other person typing and correcting themselves as they type – it actually kind of sucks.)
“IM and email shouldn’t really be two separate tools”
I want to allow “anonymous comments, or a number of different identities” in my conversations

This is just a start of what they want it to do. One of the creators, Lars, said of Wave,

“My vision is to have the one communication tool. I want all the use cases to be covered. We made up ideas of what Wave could be used for — negotiating contracts, writing articles. Lots of things.”

Is it trying to do too much? Very likely.

I fear that Wave breaks one of Google’s own product development tenets: fail often, fail early (or maybe fail early, fail often, I don’t remember, but I know there was a lot of failing involved.) This project has been in development since 2007 and has 50 developers working on it, and it already has a plethora of what we product managers call “would-be-nice” features. I encourage Google to make sure the core features work and release this thing as soon as possible to see if people like it at all. If they like it, THEN add the silly extras like real-time wiki-style collaborative editing that lets you see what other people type as they type it.

I do like the concept behind Wave in how it aims to unify communication, but I want to see that happen in a way that simplifies my life. Read through the comments on the TechCrunch article, and you’ll see that most people think it looks too complicated. As a contrast, no one who saw the iPod or iPhone unveilings thought either device would complicate their lives – they are both beautiful in their simplicity, and that’s why they sell by the boatloads. Google will have an uphill battle marketing this product until they can show an average user how it will simplify their lives. If they clear this hurdle, Facebook needs to watch out.

Kindle 3 – Now THIS I would buy

Posted by joel on May 26, 2009 No comments

CollegeHumor.

Breaking: Wolfram Alpha now useful

Posted by joel on May 20, 2009 No comments

If you didn’t think Wolfram Alpha was useful before, here’s your proof that it can answer everday queries that everyone cares about:

Snicker.

Have you found any other amusing queries?

Real-time Twitter search: cool, but no Google threat

Posted by joel on May 14, 2009 1 comment

In a recent blog post by industry veteran Dave Winer, he opines that Google is falling behind by not paying attention to the search opportunities opened up by Twitter and other microblogging services. His point boils down to:

Once Twitter is delivering the news search that Google can’t, it will be way too late. This is probably what the Google management doesn’t understand because they aren’t using Twitter themselves.

C’mon, Dave. Someone’s been drinking the Twitter Kool-Aid for too long now. Twitter is not the answer to everything. Let’s get off the more-plugged-in-than-thou soapbox and look at real value propositions.

First of all, “news search” is not something Google is focused on because that’s not how they make their money. If someone else were to come along and make a much better product than Google News (and one might argue several companies already do), Google’s management and shareholders wouldn’t notice a thing.

Second, I’m doubtful (as is Valleywag) that Twitter could ever provide a usable news service. When major events happen, there may be witnesses who are Twittering what they see, but how can Twitter parse the useful, factual tweets out of the millions of related tweets? It’s an impossible task. The best Twitter can do is say “a plane crashed”, but they’d be hard pressed to say which tweets are authoritative. (Google Trends tracks memes like this already.)

To complicate Twitter’s job, spammers are already exploiting Twitter hashtags, so as soon as that #planecrash meme gets momentum and people start watching live Twitter search results for details, I guarantee a good number of those posts will look like “#planecrash Buy viagra here! http://supersmallurl.com/blah.”

Lastly, news searches probably account for less than 5% of searches across the web, and “real-time” news search surely represents far less than 1%. Google can afford to ignore this segment because they rock at the other 99% of searches, typically for more mundane topics like “cheap digital camera” or “paris hilton nude pics.” And those digital camera searches will monetize much more effectively than news about the latest plane crash.

Twitter is a great trend- or meme-tracking tool, but it will never be a real news source, and even if it is, Google won’t care, nor should they.

Zumbox: When good ideas go bad

Posted by joel on May 14, 2009 1 comment

Have you ever wanted to let someone send you an email, but didn’t want to give out your email address? Thanks to Zumbox, now you can keep your email address safe and sound by simply giving out your physical address instead. Awesome! Maybe when I don’t want to give out my phone number, I’ll give out my social security number instead. Brilliant guys.

I know where they are trying to go with this idea – they’re trying to replace the ridiculous volume of bills, credit card offers, and junk mail that we all receive, and that is certainly a noble cause, but it just won’t fly unless the senders of this mail buy in first. If Zumbox could promise me that all my junk mail would come in electronic form (and ideally get filtered out by Google so I’d never see it), then I’d sign up in a heartbeat.

What’s more likely to happen is that direct marketers will continue to send mail to my physical address and they’ll also send their spam to my Zumbox email address because ITS THE SAME ADDRESS. The spammers no longer have to trick me into giving up my email address because they can just send their junk email to my Zumbox, and now they can send me even more spam because it’s cheap - Zumbox charges marketers 5 cents per email and the rates are even lower for high volume marketers, so that’s a bargain compared to physical mail. With rates like these, it’s worth multi-channel spamming someone on their Zumbox and their physical address to get a better response rate. Wonderful.

So guys, go back to the drawing board, get the USPS and the Direct Marketing Association on board so this idea won’t increase the amount of spam in my life, and then get back to me.

Verdict: Sad. Noble concept, but this incarnation is doomed.

Google Squared not a Wolfram killer, will kill PriceGrabber instead

Posted by joel on May 12, 2009 No comments

Despite the over-hyped headlines over at TechCrunch, Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared will not compete in the same space. Wolfram is for scientists and researchers, and Google Squared will be suited for real end-users. Squared is built to compare large sets of “things” (dog breeds, roller coasters, digital cameras) that have specific, machine parseable metadata, while Wolfram has a human-curated database that is built to give deep, specific data about one thing.

Here are a few queries I think Wolfram will answer, but Google Squared wouldn’t:

France’s GDP (graphed over time)
Bank of America stock price (graphed over time)
Where is the International Space Station right now?

All of these queries can be answered by Wolfram because it has a rich set of data around each of these objects. However, Google Squared seems to be tailored to help you compare objects making it suitable for queries like:

Finding digital cameras with X megapixels or Y focal length
Finding a USB hub with more than 5 ports
Finding a dog breed less than 15 pounds suitable for people with allergies
Finding a 50″-56″ LCD with at least 3 HDMI outs, a contrast ratio of > 1000:1, and a three-year warranty

The two products serve two markets, and should not be compared. In essence, Wolfram will give you information about a thing, Google Squared will help you find that thing.

For the record, Google’s approach is much more technically impressive, and, I’d say, something of a Holy Grail of web spiders. This is the first time a general web spider has been designed to actually figure out metadata about things that it finds on the web so that those things can be categorized and compared against each other. Wolfram relies on human data entry to make sure it has this level of intelligence, but Google Squared is imitating human intelligence to automate the process.

Google Squared is certain to be integrated with Google’s Shopping Search in the near future, making it a serious competitor to PriceGrabber and other price comparison engines, because it will let users filter and sort by even more fields than they could before. If you watch the video on the TechCrunch article, just imagine a column on the right side with prices. Watch out, PriceGrabber.

Wolfram Alpha is a feature, not a search engine

Posted by joel on April 29, 2009 4 comments

Update 4/29, 5:21pm: Wolfram updated his blog today and linked to his demo video, and the product does look as niche as I feared. It is “smart answers” on steriods, and while it may complement regular search results nicely, it’s not moving the field of Internet search and indexing forward at all. Perhaps it’s the press’s fault for pumping up Alpha as the next Google – clearly it is not, nor are they trying to be. They’re tackling a relatively small problem (compared to indexing the entire Internet) and they appear to be targeting a small audience (academics and scientists), so we should probably stop discussing Alpha in the same breath as Google, Yahoo, and the rest. Please move along, nothing to see here.

Much ado has been made lately about Wolfram Alpha, a new-fangled “search engine” due to release in May that promises to give answers to questions that are asked in plain English. Predictably, it’s much ado about nothing. Techcrunch responded today to leaked screenshots by sitting on both sides of the fence, saying it’s unlikely Wolfram has “something Google doesn’t or can’t build in a year,” while also saying that their own guest editor’s predictions of Wolfram’s search greatness are “persuasive.” Which is it, guys?

Let me boil it down for you based on what I’ve read so far: Wolfram Alpha’s pitch is that their search engine is built to answer plain English “computational” questions, i.e. questions that have specific answers that can be calculated. To do this, they are sucking in all the databases they can find – population stats, weather stats, census data, geographic data, and any other corpora that are readily available.

Once they have all the data compiled, they make it mine-able using plain English queries. In his TechCrunch guest article, Nova Spivack gives three sample queries that are supposed to show the awesome potential of Alpha:

What country is Timbuktu in?
How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?
What is the average rainfall in Seattle?

It’s great that Alpha can answer these, but did Spivack bother to try these queries in Google? Google gives an answer to every single one in the summary of the top result. I didn’t even have to click through. Hopefully these are just shoddy examples from Spivack rather than an example of how lame Alpha actually is.

Here are a few query types I’m hoping Alpha can answer that Google cannot:

What was Bank of America’s stock price at close on September 11, 2001?
Is next year a leap year?
How have home prices in San Diego, CA changed in the last 5 years?

These are questions that have specific answers that can be calculated from readily available data, but (here’s the key) are unlikely to have been written about on the web in a way that would make them findable by Google. These questions are so specific (long-tail), that Google just won’t have answers sitting around in its index.

I can hear your next question already: if Wolfram Alpha is only good for such long-tail questions, how can it possibly compete with Google? The answer is: it can’t.

For all the glowing talk, Alpha appears to be a large set of regular expressions that parse natural language so users can mine a massive database. This is not dissimilar to how Ask.com worked in the late 90′s when they had a huge, human-built database of question templates allowing them to parse queries and provide links as answers. Remember how well that worked?

Alpha must be an acquisition play. They must be developing this answer engine with an eye towards selling it to one of the big players (Google, Yahoo, MS, or even Ask.com) so they can beef up their search results. All of the majors already have smart answers features (a la Ask.com) that give exact answers to a small set of templatic questions, so acquiring Alpha would make an existing smart answers feature more robust.

TechCrunch reported that an Alpha “insider” today leaked the screenshow below in an attempt to show how Alpha is so much cooler than Google’s smart answers:

Wolfram Alpha Leaked Screenshot

On the left, we have Alpha’s result for a search on “ISS.” The result it gives is a map and technical details of the Internation Space Station’s orbit. Wow. That is a truly horrible result. Why anyone would leak this to show the power of the engine is beyond me. Here’s what’s wrong with it:

Who says I want information about the International Space Station? Maybe I wanted Internet Security Systems or International Schools Services or info about the company ISS A/S out of Copenhagen. How about a little disambiguation guys? Clearly Alpha is not trying to be a comprehensive search engine.
Who wants data like that? If I want info about the International Space Station, I would probably rather see its homepage than some crazy technical data about where it is right this second.
What happened to the natural language queries, eh? Showing that your engine can figure out what I meant by a search on “ISS” hardly shows any natural language parsing ability, and conversely shows the complete lack of disambiguation as I discussed above.
Lastly a nitpicky Product Manager thing: at the top, it says that International Space Station is the “input interpretation” of ISS. ”Input interpretation”? Really? How many users would have any idea what you’re trying to say there? This is a product made by nerds for nerds. I’m a nerd, so I can say this.

On the right, we see Google giving a fantastic answer to the query “maine population”. (I’ll assume that someone changed the text in the query box to read “california population” after looking up Maine first.) Google 1, Alpha 0.

Ultimately, Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine, but rather a data mining language for answers about a relatively small set of known entities. If you want to know about the International School Services, use Google. If you want to know where Timbuktu is, use Google. If you want to know the inclination and orbital period of the International Space Station, then by all means, go ahead and use Wolfram Alpha. (Note: Google gives a pretty good result when searching for “International Space Station Inclination.”) When Alpha finally sells to one of the majors, it will mostly likely settle in as a feature of a search engine, not a search engine itself.

Caveat: all conclusions I’ve drawn are from the information available now. We’ll see what it’s actually capable of when it launches in the coming weeks.

Don’t comment on this blog

Posted by joel on August 7, 2007 11 comments

Who cares about comments on a blog? Answer: No one.

Think about it. How many times have you read a blog and actually read the comments on that blog? Maybe one time out of ten? Now, think about how many times you’ve read a blog and actually left a comment. Maybe one time out of 20? 50? Yeah, if you’re like the vast majority of internet users, you comment on a blog almost never.

So why are we now seeing all this activity around blog comment systems? You’d think that blog comments are the Friends List of 2007, at least to hear Techcrunch go on about them. Of course, TechCrunch tries to make everything sound interesting so they can justify all the articles they churn out every day despite the fact that there are only one or two Web 2.0 happenings that are actually important enough to write about on any given day.

But back to my point: blog comments just aren’t that important. In the big scheme of things, no one really cares. Read through the sites that have the most active commenting community like Digg and Slashdot, and you’ll see that most commenters:

don’t know what they’re talking about
don’t bother to read the other comments
are illiterate
can’t assemble their thoughts into a coherent point

The blog commenters have become victims of their own enthusiasm. These trolls who reside under the most-frequented bridges of the Internet have so much zeal that they ignore common rules of composition, grammar, and logic, and have therefore doomed themselves to irrelevancy. These trolls make up less than half a percent of the visitors to these sites (source: my flawless intuition), and they never click on ads, so they do little to actually contribute to the sites they comment on.

So, why do we need four companies (mentioned in TechCrunch’s article) devoted to helping us keep track of our comments? Why does the tiny, tiny fraction of people on the ‘net who comment frequently need such powerful tools to organize the dreck they serve up daily to the rest of us?

Of course, they don’t need them. No one needs them. These services exist because we’re in a bubble again, and any idea remotely related to social networking — or the new buzzword: conversations – can raise VC money and hope for a buyout by a company that makes a valid, useful product. And these companies are only buying because they’re also sucked in to the Web 2.0 hype, and they think they need some of that Ajaxy hawtness to justify their valuation multiples.

These comment systems are trying to exploit bloggers into sharing user data with them so they can because big all-powerful comment aggregators.Â Perhaps they’re trying to take over MyBlogLog‘s market position?Â If so, they’d better focus more on what they can offer the bloggers and less on what they can offer the commenters.

So stop it, guys. Let’s make products for people who really need them. And for God’s sake, don’t comment on this blog.

Facebook looks to change the game…again

Posted by joel on July 19, 2007 No comments

So, I already blogged about Facebook’s Platform and how it will generate new business models and economies on the web. But today brought news of Facebook’s future plans to change the face of the Internet altogether with an online operating system. Facebook, in their first corporate acquisition, bought Parakey, makers of an online OS that is still under wraps.

We’ve been hearing rumors of an “online operating system” for years now, mostly in the context of Google acquisitions, but this is the first time we’ve heard it from a major social network. What exactly is an online operating system, you ask? Well, the definitions vary, but from what is known about Parakey, it looks like they will allow users to do a variety of unique things.

The most important functionality this presents is the ability to directly access files on your hard drive from within a web application. This would let you edit documents, photos, and movies from your hard drive using a web-based application (no more buying and installing software?), and then you can publish your work directly to the web (or your Facebook profile) with a click or two – the software takes care of moving the file from your hard drive to a web server, and it synchronizes the files on your hard drive with your files on the web. It’s possible that the platform would be open as well (it seems like Facebook’s style), allowing other companies to build applications for the online OS, so you could choose which one you wanted to use to write your documents, mix your MP3s, edit your baby videos, etc. etc.

If any upcoming technological development has the capacity to bring user-publishing and user-generated content to the masses, it’s this. Of course its success will depend on the execution and the actual ease of use, but this technology, plugged into a social network that already counts as members a huge number of the people in a demographic that is likely to be interested in publishing their own content, has the potential to revolutionize how we use the web.

For those of us who are already savvy enough to publish our photos and movies to the web, this could offer a different paradigm shift. I blogged a while back about my orgasmic scenario of not having to rely on my home computer and its hard drive, and of keeping all my files online (with automatic backups) so that I could access my MP3s, my movies, and my documents, from any device, at any time. An online OS takes this model one step further – not only can I access my files from anywhere, but I can work with them – I can view them, edit them, and share them – from any device that supports the online OS, be it my computer, a computer in a library, a kiosk at the airport, my Xbox or PS3, or potentially even my phone. Then we would be able to truly unplug. What would be better than that?

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Product management in media and tech