Today 'human-powered' search engine Mahalo is launching a new Firefox toolbar, which has some unique functionality that could potentially convert users from Google Search, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com and other major search engines. The new toolbar, once installed into Firefox (IE version is due in September), displays a sidebar every time you do a search on a popular query in Google and other major search engines. For example if I do a search on "digital camera" in Google, a sidebar will pop up with Mahalo results. Note that the sidebar only displays if Mahalo has a match for the search query - e.g. if I search for "richard macmanus" I get no sidebar.
Mahalo is also releasing a "synchronous search" feature called Mahalo Follow - which reads the keywords on the page. For example a search on "digital camera" displays these keywords: cameras, digital, models, new, camera, resolution, megapixels, small, zoom, electronics, ratings, take, health, our, few, range, buying, image, lens, slrs. Essentially the algorithm reads the density of page, giving headlines more weight etc - and Mahalo says it is constantly tweaking the algorithm to learn.
I spoke to Jason Calacanis, Mahalo CEO, yesterday to find out more about Mahalo's goals. He made no bones about the fact they're gunning for Google, Yahoo and the other major search players. Jason's goal is that people will become so impressed by Mahalo results compared to the major search engines, that they will convert to Mahalo as their search engine of choice. What's more, when you download the toolbar you are prompted to add Mahalo as a search engine in your Firefox toolbar.
This week we are talking about personalization and privacy is an important, related topic.
To personalize pages companies need to know things about us - what we like, what we've seen,
what we read and what we purchased. Online retailers are in the business of capturing our information
to give them a competitive advantage over their competitors.
On the other hand with the rise of social web we have begun voluntarily putting our private information online. We blog our corporate strategies, share our family photos, and make lists of our interests. Yet most people are still concerned about privacy. They may not know exactly what it is that makes them so concerned, but they are concerned. In this post I will look at privacy in the context of personalization from user concerns to target advertising and ownership of clickstreams.
Online classifieds startup edgeio has just launched a new paid content product, which will be of particular interest to online publishers and media producers. They're calling it "transactional classifieds", which is an awkward name for a potentially very useful e-commerce service. Other terms being bandied around to promote this are "distributed commerce" (better) and "peer to peer commerce" (hmmm).
edgeio CEO Keith Teare explained it in an email to R/WW as "a classified ad where the steps to buying the product or service advertised are reduced to a single "in-place" purchase flow. These transactional classifieds are entirely distributable via "share this" buttons." In other words, you can purchase a product or service online, on any website, via an e-commerce widget. All that both buyers and sellers need is an account with edgeio.
Premium content (reports, analysis, etc) is a business model that Read/WriteWeb will be entering into very soon - I've been planning this for some time. So potentially I could use edgeio for that. Indeed edgeio used R/WW as a potential example on the Paid Content homepage (I didn't find out till I was briefed on this news).
The software developement community -- especially the open source community -- has long used "bounties" to help lure developers to certain tasks. OpensourceExperts.com keeps a bounty list on their site, for example, that displays a number development projects for which people have laid down cash awards to anyone who gets them done. microPledge, a startup from Christchurch, New Zealand, launched today with the aim to organize the process of creating and paying software bounties, and bringing together project funders and developers.
microPledge is an escrow service that allows people to do three things: set up, contribute to and pay out software bounties, accept donations for projects, or set up a fund/bounty for an in house project (as a developer).
At the end of June, US cable network Home Box Office launched an ambitious new web video project entitled HBO Voyeur. The concept was easy to grasp, avante garde, and wholly addicting. HBO called the project, which was also broadcast on the HBO on Demand pay cable channel, "a multimedia experience that gives you a peek into what happens behind the countless windows we pass everyday."
The premise was simple: Using a single, stationary camera angle and no dialogue, viewers would be invited to literally peer into the apartments of the show's characters. Stories would unfold strictly through action, often times in multiple rooms at once (and often times multiple story lines at once). A mellow soundtrack for the project is provided by musical artists like Clint Mansell, who did the music for the movie Requiem for a Dream, and Interpol's Carlos D.
Today Microsoft announced Windows Live SkyDrive, the final product name for its online storage solution - previously known as Windows Live Folders. Windows Live SkyDrive has a few new features and enhanced UI, in line with upcoming changes across other Windows Live services.
Windows Live SkyDrive offers users 500MB of web space for storing and sharing files. Microsoft says it is like "a personal 'harddrive' on the internet". By default, you get several protected directories which you can store your files in, meaning they are private and protected from public viewing. You can also share folders publicly, or just to specific people on your Windows Live Contacts list. The service allows you to set 'read' and 'write' permissions for folders. Windows Live Folders was first discussed back in April 2006, so this is the culmination of over a year's work.
Currently SkyDrive competes with a host of other online storage solutions, including Omnidrive, Steekr, XDrive, box.net and others. Many of these startups attempt to differentiate themselves by offering 'value add' services such as social networking functionality (e.g. Myfabrik), APIs and partnerships with other web 2.0 services (e.g. Omnidrive). Some also focus on specific parts of online storage - e.g. Egnyte is focused on collaborative document sharing. Also a lot of the so-called WebOS startups offer online storage as a key part of their package. Finally, social networking services such as Twango, recently acquired by Nokia, have online storage as an essential part of their make-up.
As part of our Personalizing Google Week, we conducted an email interview with Google's Sep Kamvar, who is Lead Software Engineer for Personalization at Google. Sep was the founder of Kaltix, a search engine that was acquired by Google in 2003 and is thought to be the basis of Google's current personalization efforts.
Here is our interview, with questions derived from a number of the R/WW authors:
R/WW: In a general sense, do you think privacy is less important now than it used to be - due to the popularity of social networks and social software? Because it does seem that to achieve true personalization, some sacrifices need to be made in terms of privacy (note: we're not getting at Google here, but in terms of web technology it is a noticeable trend these days).
Sep: Even despite the current trends, it is incredibly important to design products with the utmost respect for user data and we do this in the following ways:
Last week we profiled an online video startup, Operator11, that lets users host their own live, streaming video shows. In the comments on that post, a number of readers wondered if there was a similar service for audio. Shortly after the post ran, we were contacted by the CEO of BlogTalkRadio, a startup founded a year ago to provide live, call-in Internet radio hosting services to users for free.
On Tuesday, I chatted with CEO Alan Levy about how the company has fared over its first year and where it's heading in the future.
It wouldn't truly be "Google Personalization" week if we didn't talk about iGoogle. After all, it is the epitome of personalization for Google. It was their fastest growing product in 2006 and is available in 40 countries and 26 languages. Formerly known as Google Personalized Homepage or the abbreviated Google IG, iGoogle is a personalized AJAX start page.
This week in our Read/WriteWeb Files feature we're taking a look at personalization tools in development at Google. In April of this year Google added a personal touch to their Maps service with the addition of the MyMaps feature that lets anyone create a maps mashup. The feature, though four months old, is still tagged as "New" by Google.
Some bloggers thought that MyMaps was a response to enhanced personalization tools that Microsoft added this year to their Live Local service. But as ProgrammableWeb reports, Google's mapping API has inspired by a large margin the most mashups of any API offered on the web. So, it is natural that Google would want to capitalize on the popularity of their maps mashups and offer simplified map mashing tools to the masses.
