Webware

Some of the tweaks that arrived with the launch of Gmail Labs are fairly silly (Mail Goggles and Old Snakey spring to mind), but a new option that arrived Thursday makes it increasingly apparent that Google is doing something right with the e-mail service.

The company launched Advanced IMAP Controls in Gmail Labs, a feature that lets users fine-tune the behavior of the IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) technology that outside e-mail services or software can use to access Gmail accounts.

For example, you can limit which of your mail labels are exposed as folders to outside e-mail clients to improve performance. That's useful, according to the Gmail blog posting, "if you find your mail client choking on a big All Mail folder," the often-overstuffed location where Gmail messages are archived so they're still available but not in the way.

Of course, technically savvy folks might enjoy this option. But the bigger reason this is interesting is it shows how flexible an infrastructure Google has built under Gmail. That's powerful because the company can monitor how often people use the options, and how that affects Gmail's performance and utility.

And because the Gmail Labs options are largely independent of each other, Google can test many improvements simultaneously. The overall approach lets the company gradually morph Gmail rather than release massive, disruptive overhauls. Perpetual flux aside, though, I still think that it's time to take Gmail out of beta.

(Via Google Operating System.)

Gmail Labs lets people fine-tune settings for IMAP, which is used to let other e-mail software access mail stored with Gmail.

(Credit: Google)

"We are going to lose some good companies." That's the warning cry from investors in tech these days.

Some we won't miss, of course: the lame, me-too, or single-featured "products" masquerading as businesses. But be prepared. Some Web 2.0 start-ups that are well-loved by many are in serious danger of falling off the cliff.

The problem is that being loved is no guarantee for success. Even being used isn't enough. Remember Kozmo, the munchie messenger service from the last bubble? Not a person who used it didn't love it. In the interest of building a user base, the company was OK with losing money on every transaction in its early days. But when the time came for it to become a real business, it was too late. It couldn't transition to a viable company, and it folded. It was a tragedy.

Here, in no particular order, are 11 online services companies that could face a similar fate. Several of them are 2008 Webware 100 winners. Like I said, popularity isn't enough.

Twitter

Meebo

TripIt

Social-network builder Ning has deployed its support for developer applications for OpenSocial, something that it has been planning to do since Google kick-started the open-source project nearly a year ago. (It is now an independent organization.)

A Ning profile with the OpenSocial 'BuddyPoke' app added.

(Credit: Ning)

As part of the launch, a directory of 30 applications will be available for Ning members to embed in their profiles, which they use for any of the hundreds of thousands of networks created with Ning. They'll have variable "skins" to adopt the design of the profile around them and blend in, the company has said. Incorporation into the OpenSocial app directory on Ning will be selective, so it won't be a developer free-for-all.

A few OpenSocial apps had gone live on Ning in beta over the past year, including one from social music service Last.fm (which is owned by CNET News publisher CBS Interactive).

You still can't embed OpenSocial apps on Ning networks, just profiles--but that will change, CEO Gina Bianchini said to CNET News, when future versions of OpenSocial (the current one is 0.7) are developed. "In its first incarnation, it looks and feels a lot like what you'd be doing on a MySpace profile or on a Facebook profile in terms of adding apps," she explained, "but what's unique about us is that we have half a million social networks and they'll want an app for their network as well."

From the Future of Web Apps conference in London, Google engineer Kevin Marks praised the incorporation of Ning into OpenSocial, which he helped build. "The nice thing about Ning is that we're going from about 100 social networks to about 500,000 social networks," Marks said to CNET News.

The question still remains, though as to whether Ning would opt to support Facebook applications--still not compatible with OpenSocial--the way social network Friendster has.

"We'd love to support Facebook apps," said Bianchini, who co-founded Ning with veteran entrepreneur Marc Andreessen. "Right now, Facebook hasn't neccessarily set it up in a really clear, programmatic way...(Facebook) has talked about it, then came back from it, and it's a little bit in limbo right now in terms of really what and how they would want other social networks to support Facebook apps."

Friday at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is set to announce an interesting update to the curated Web directory. The front page will get a ticker, or in modern terms, "live blog," of news items, updated in real time by a dedicated team.

Calacanis told me that the Mahalo home page has been getting some traction as a repeat destination site for visitors, and he wanted to get those, and other, users to stick on the site for longer. He also believes that news is a major driver of Internet traffic. So he's adding the ticker, and aims to have 20 updates an hour running through it. There will be eight people staffing the feature, with four to eight online at any one time, around the clock, every day of the year. "We're going to live-blog every single thing in the world," Calacanis says.

The ticker will have a dedicated page of its own, as well, with more live features: during certain hours of the day, a Web cam will be pointed at what can only be described as an anchorperson, and there will be a chat room where Mahalo users can talk about the news.

Each ticker item will be flagged by content area, and eventually the pages for those areas (like politics, sports, and weather) may also get tickers, as may high-traffic pages such as those for political candidates during an election.

Calacanis says he's not yet worried about monetizing this feature. He believes it will make the Mahalo site more sticky, which will drive clicks to pages that carry advertising. (I'll have more on online advertising in a future post.) With a claimed four years of operating capital in the bank, Calacanis says he can afford to experiment and aggressively launch new features. He also said he's looking forward to, possibly, picking up distressed online properties--either companies that are having trouble raising operating capital now, or projects that he expects the big online companies will soon be interested in offloading as not core to their business.

Regardless, I think the new live blog feature is smart for Mahalo, and a precursor to a new round of one-upsmanship in live news coverage on the news portals, as their teams try to figure out how to get users to stick to their sites for longer times per visit.

The new Mahalo home page will have a live ticker of news from around the Web, staffed 24/7 by a team of eight.

The ticker will have a page of its own, with a live news desk and chat room.

Fitbit tracks your activity.

A month after wowing attendees of the TechCrunch50 conference with its personal motion sensor and associated online service that tracks your physical activity, fitness gadget company Fitbit has raised a modest early-stage funding round.

The company has closed a $2 million round led by True Ventures, with additional money from SoftTech VC and "a group of angel investors," according to the company's statement.

The cool little product is still not available. The company site projects a December or January shipment of the first units. The funding will help kick-start the manufacturing process.

Related reading:
Fitbit will get you off the couch.
Best of shows: Top 10 from DemoFall, TechCrunch50.
A rant on risk: Swype vs. Fitbit.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--It only took a few years for the science of information retrieval to move from an obscure academic niche to the secretive research departments at the heart of multibillion-dollar Internet companies.

But one of those companies, Yahoo, is trying to give a little more power back to the professors and grad students through a program called BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service). The service lets academics and start-ups build their own search sites around Yahoo's search engine for free, manipulating results however they want.

Two dozen researchers and students from Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue, and other universities met here at Yahoo for a day in September to hear the company's BOSS pitch, show off some ideas they've had for how to use it, and try to coax Yahoo into sharing even more information through BOSS. Overall, their response to Yahoo's program was favorable.

MIT's Harr Chen would love even more data from Yahoo.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

"It enables a lot of research that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do," said Harr Chen, an MIT researcher at the event.

If it works out as hoped, Yahoo will make some money out of the program: corporate users who reach large scale with BOSS will have to show Yahoo's search ads. The academic side is a step removed from direct revenue, instead giving Yahoo some prominence with potentially influential thinkers in a market Google dominates. Piquing the interest of researchers at universities with a reputation for incubating the next big ideas is smart, though, and Yahoo and Google themselves both grew out of Stanford.

And honestly, with Google hogging 63 percent of the U.S. search market to Yahoo's 19.6 percent, what does Yahoo have to lose?

"We're not a market leader," said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search. "From a strategic standpoint, it does make sense to let other people innovate on top of us. If the pie grows, our share of the pie grows at the expense of somebody else."

The ultimate hope is that BOSS will mean money, too.

Yahoo has made the investment in a massive infrastructure that constantly scans and re-indexes the Web, filters out some of the dreck, interprets search queries, and provides search results in high volume in very short order. This infrastructure is prohibitively expensive for start-ups, just as it is for academic researchers, so Yahoo is letting companies use BOSS as well. Those operating on a small scale may use BOSS for free, but Yahoo requires larger efforts to either show ads or sign a custom revenue-sharing deal.

Mashing up Yahoo results
One possibility for BOSS is that Yahoo's search results can be combined with other data sets. "Other parties may have more info about their users," said BOSS engineer Vik Singh. For example, a social-networking site can track movies or the activities of friends that could be useful in shaping search results. "This is stuff we may or may not have," Singh said.

Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Chengxiang Zhai and Bin Tan of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign showed one example of BOSS in action that uses this idea of modifying Yahoo's search results. Their application steered Yahoo's search engine in particular directions based on the data stored on a user's own computer.

In the example, the computer was able to discern what type of jaguar the user was more likely to be looking for--the cat, not the car, or the version of Mac OS X--based on evidence on the computer.

"We believe the client side of personalization has a few advantages over the server side," Zhai said. "It can alleviate concern over privacy and it can provide more information about user activity. And it can naturally distribute computation," so a search company's machines share work with the user's own computer.

Qualitatively different
Researchers could investigate search and related technologies such as natural-language processing (NLP) without BOSS. But with it, that research is vaulted into a different domain. It isn't just a matter of taking more time; with BOSS's vast index of the Web, the possibilities are qualitatively different.

"You gain enormously from access to the data. There are all sorts of things you can do with tons of data" that you can't with a smaller set, said Stanford's Christopher Manning.

Manning works in the active field of natural-language processing, technology that aims to let computers discern the meaning of real human speech or text and that's behind search technology from search start-up Hakia and Microsoft-acquired PowerSet. NLP benefits tremendously from having large-scale data sources, Manning said.

"To understand what words mean, you look at how they're used. We do that on a large scale, (examining) usage and context to learn about meaning," Manning said.

Please, sir, I want some more
It also was clear the researchers' appetites were whetted by BOSS. Nobody sounded ungrateful, but heck, as long as Yahoo is sharing some important data, why not share a little more?

Yahoo is headed that direction. On the research day, it opened up access to another slice of search-related "prisma" data.

Vik Singh, an engineer behind Yahoo BOSS

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Prisma powers Yahoo's search assist feature that suggests searches based on what people have begun to type into the search box, which can make searching more convenient for users, but for researchers trying to build more technology atop Yahoo search results, prisma data is bigger than that. For example, it can show a search term's variations, its membership in categories such as place names, movies, and government, and the likelihood that people search for the term by itself or as part of a larger query.

"That's got a lot of potential," said Dan Ramage a natural-language processing Ph.D. candidate at Stanford. Ramage said BOSS is useful for his research, which focuses on determining the various relationships that can connect a pair of words, he said, but he'd like it better if he could get better control over the snippets of text Yahoo shows with its search results.

Yes, Yahoo will share more
Yahoo plans to release more. "Over time you'll see we'll offer a lot more ingredients, a lot more power," said Ashim Chhabra, senior product manager with the BOSS project.

Some researchers are hungry for as much as they can get. Chen, for example, hoped Yahoo could become an engine to run software supplied by researchers that plumbs its entire Web index.

"We give you a little code, you run that code on every document, then you give us a number," Chen suggested. It would be useful, for example, "to track evolution of themes and memes on the Web, different buzz trends."

Graham Mudd, product marketing manager for Yahoo search, said the idea is "not as crazy as you think," though he also gave the impression that researchers shouldn't hold their breath for that level of access. But Yahoo clearly wants to offer what he could.

When it comes to search research, "The pool of talent is divided between a half a dozen companies," Raghavan said. "We think it behooves us to open up."

Maybe it's advice he heard from a career counselor at Harvard and took to heart: Do what you love, and the money will follow. For now, what Mark Zuckerberg wants most for Facebook is to see it grow and grow and grow some more, without too much fretting over the bottom line.

In an interview with a blogger for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Facebook's co-founder and CEO minced no words on the matter: "Growth is primary, revenue is secondary."

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg at the D6 conference in May.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News)

Of course, it could be less a philosophical matter than a practical one for a site that's still sketching out its plans for making money to match its popularity. And bless his heart, even in a tanking global economy, Zuckerberg suggests there's plenty of time for that. He elaborates:

But what every great Internet company has done is to figure out a way to make money that has to match to what they are doing on the site. I don't think social networks can be monetized in the same way that search did. But on both sites people find information valuable. I'm pretty sure that we will find an analogous business model. But we are experimenting already. One group is very focused on targeting; another part is focused on social recommendation from your friends. In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, said essentially the same thing over the summer--the social network's focus is on growth.

How do the two executives divvy up their responsibilities? Zuckerberg said of Sandberg, who joined Facebook about six months ago:

She is an excellent manager. She is very good in building our international organization. I'm focused on the direction of the company, especially of the product development, and the overall strategy. I spend a lot of time working with engineers and product developers. We work together hand in hand.

He also made it clear who's boss: "Me!"

On Friday, Zuckerberg will be taking part in a "fireside chat" at the Future of Web Apps conference in London.

For the full interview, including Zuckerberg's take on Facebook's Windows Live Search deal, its international growth, and the possibility of an IPO, see " Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Our focus is growth, not revenue."

Finetuna is a dead simple collaborative image annotation tool. Meant mostly for casual designers, it lets you make a few short notes on an image and send it off to someone else. As soon as they get it, they can view your edits, make their own, then send it back. This keeps the paper trail out of your e-mail in-box, and in a single place.

Finetuna's key appeal is that it does several simple things with ease. You can highlight, underline, and cross out text. There are also simple tools to insert text and make comments, which are essentially the same thing; you just get a box to write in suggestions to the sender. There's no free-form doodling tool to make mark-ups, which photographers might yearn for, but the highlighter comes close.

Finetuna lets you make small suggestions or edits to an image, then send it off to someone else--all for free.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

There are a handful of ways to get images into Finetuna, although the easiest is just to upload the shot from your computer. You can also drop in a direct URL from where the image is hosted, or download the Firefox extension which lets you mark up an image from any page you're on.

I'm not sold on professionals using this over tools like ConceptShare and ProofHQ, but if your basic needs are highlighting, making small comments, and you don't want to sign up for anything, it's tremendous.

AOL has begun notifying bloggers who've used its Journals site that they should move their content to Google's Blogger or bid it adieu.

The company, which is winnowing down its properties to improve its financial performance, published a notice last week that it's closing its AOL Journals blog site as well as its Hometown/FTP site for hosting Web pages on October 31. And now it's begun sending users notices that it's time to move.

AOL set up a partnership with Google's Blogger.com so that people can migrate their blogs, and Jack Krupansky is one user who made the move successfully. "It was mostly painless since I already have a Google account and a number of Blogger blogs," he said in a blog posting. He did have to manually republish all the old blogs, though.

Krupansky also quoted a reminder letter AOL sent him:

Dear AOL Journals user,

As we wrote in an e-mail on Sept. 30, AOL(R) Journals will permanently shut down on Oct. 31. It's never an easy decision to shut down a feature, especially one like AOL Journals that some of our members have used for a long time. But with a decline in Journals usage, we have to look carefully at all of AOL's features to make sure we're providing as much value to our members as possible.

Though we know this might be an inconvenience, the good news is that we've partnered with Blogger.com to provide a smooth transition for your journal. Blogger is a free service from Google that makes it easy to share your thoughts with friends and the world. Blogger supports most of the features you've come to expect from AOL Journals, and it's easy to get started. If you wish to transfer your journal to Blogger, they will move your posts, comments and photos to your new blog on their service. When you're ready, go to this link to get started.

Remember, it's very important to save your Journals content before Oct. 31. If you choose not to move to Blogger, you'll need to save your information manually (for example, by copying and pasting its contents into a word processor).

Again, we appreciate your patience and understanding as we make this transition, and we hope you enjoy using Blogger.com.

Sincerely,

The AOL Journals Team

AOL didn't arrange such a smooth transition for the Hometown service. "Unfortunately, we're not able to offer a replacement Web hosting option at this time. If you go to AOL Search and search for "Web Hosting," you will find reviews of different services and viable options," the company said, and members need to manually download their files stored at the site.

Microsoft's Live Labs team has just released a new way to track political discourse on the Web. Called Political Streams, the tool tracks news stories on both blogs and traditional-news sites, and ranks it based on velocity and overall coverage.

What's really neat is that it also keeps track of mentioned names and places in each story, to show how much coverage that person or part of the world has received within the last 30 days.

Each item can be drilled down into a little further, which is where you can see a small one-paragraph summary and the two charts for the coverage of people and places. Each of these places and names also gets its own page that lists related news, which makes it a very topical experience. The information itself comes from Freebase, the Wikipedia-like open-database project.

Political Streams tracks popular political headlines and tracks their mentions in both traditional media and blog sources.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Much like Google's recent Blog Search page efforts, Live Labs' Political Streams also keeps track of a very important number--how long a story has continued to get play. This number stems from the first time it began getting tracked through the service's crawling engine, which doesn't necessarily dictate where it sits on the list of top stories.

One interesting thing I noticed is that the top stories on the blog side were less than half the age of those on the traditional-news side. That, of course, is bound to change, depending on the day's news.

Political Streams is the first site of its kind from the Live Labs team. I expect that we'll see additional "streams" pages for tech, world, sports, and celebrity news after the presidential election.

See also: Memeorandum and Blogrunner.