Bing picked up half a percentage point of market share in June.
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)Bing took a baby step up the search engine ladder in its first month on the Internet.
Microsoft's share of the search market increased from 7.81 percent prior to the launch of Bing to 8.23 percent for the month of June, according to data from Statcounter picked up by Reuters. Bing got a noticeable bounce during the first few weeks of June, but settled back after the novelty wore off.
Google's share dropped ever so slightly, from a dominant 78.72 percent of the search market in May to a perilously shaky 78.48 percent of the market in June, a drop attributed by more than a few news outlets to Bing's success but one unlikely to cause too much concern in Mountain View. Statcounter was a lone voice suggesting that Bing surpassed Yahoo during its first week of existence, but now reports that Yahoo actually gained share during June in maintaining its second-place position, up from 10.99 percent in May to 11.04 percent in June.
The changes may look small, but all Microsoft ever wanted out of the Bing relaunch was a few percentage points' worth of extra market share, according to executives. One month does not a comeback make, however, and tweaks to both Google and Yahoo's core search products are expected over the rest of the year.
Gdgt, a new site co-founded by Peter Rojas (founding editor of both Gizmodo and Engadget) and Ryan Block (former editor in chief of Engadget) is opening up today.
It is--surprise--yet another gadget site, but it's quite good, and more useful to real people than the gadget porn sites these two editors came from. It's a community-driven site, wiki-like in features and general atmosphere, so it's the site's users that will make it succeed or fail.
Meanwhile, the new version of Retrevo (previous coverage), another tech product site, launched on Monday of this week. It's a more sober site, useful but not as exciting as Gdgt. It's more of a buyer's and owner's resource.
Gdgt: By geeks and of geeks
"It's the gadget site we always wanted," Rojas and Block say about their new site. Conceptually, it's quite simple, and potentially powerful. Users on the site pick the products they have, want, or once had, and write up quick reviews of them if they like. It's social, it's fast, and if the product you want to write about isn't in the database, it's pretty easy to add it.
If you're looking for solid advice on a product--how to fix it, if you should buy it--the community could provide value. You'll be able to see what users are saying about products and dive into discussions about particular features. If you like researching what the people who are really passionate about their gear say, this will be helpful.
But the people who get the most out of Gdgt will be product geeks and fanboys who like chatting about toys. The service has a very high social component. You can follow people, friend them, get alerts when your friends write reviews or respond to yours, and so on. There are also free-floating discussions about product companies, and "feature" stories (blog posts) by the editors that will serve as jumping-off points for community chatter.
It sounds like an straightforward concept, but Gdgt wins points for execution. It's fun to use. It's fast (at least the unloaded beta I tried was) and most of the pieces are where you expect them to be. Those that aren't (like the site's preference for using product model numbers instead of more popular brand names) will likely be fixed based on user feedback.
I admit I do have issues with sites that encourage people to define themselves by what they own, and Gdgt definitely does that. There's a tacit game of one-upsmanship in the "I have" list. But if you do have the gadget bug and see no issue with feeding it, I think Gdgt will end up being a great place to hang out.
Gdgt is as much about products as it is about their fans and owners.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)
Retrevo: Get in, get info, get out
In contrast, the new, recently launched version of Retrevo is designed to "make the shopping journey simple and enjoyable," an anodyne pitch if ever there was, but attractive, no doubt, to people freaked out by the idea of buying a digicam or a flatscreen.
Retrevo has an AI core that gathers up product review and pricing data from numerous sources (including CNET), to present overall recommendations on products. What's new is its Farecast-like feature of telling you if the product you're looking at is at its peak of popularity, or heading toward or away from it, plus indicators telling whether users like it, and if it's a good value or not at the moment. If you trust the Retrevo machine, it provides good info to reduce buying anxiety.
A new automated "product catalog" also gathers up information on entire categories of products and puts into a catalog-like format that's supposed to be comfortable to users. I found the information on the catalog pages poorly organized, however.
The site will now also telegraph the essentials it knows about products to you via Twitter if you send it a query, which is potentially useful if you're in a store and curious about a product you're looking at on a shelf, and if you don't care if all your Twitter followers see when you query the Retrevobot. Another handy feature (which I don't think is new) is an electronic "shelf" for keeping product manuals. Retrevo has a nice library to stock it from.
This should make it easier for you to part with your money.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)If you're a gearhead, try Gdgt for fun and community, but don't skip Retrevo when you're looking to make a purchase.
And to keep me employed, be sure to check out CNET reviews as well. Thank you.
Disclosure: In past jobs at Red Herring and Ziff-Davis, I have worked with people now at both Gdgt and Retrevo.
Revamped privacy settings are coming soon to Facebook.
The social network's privacy controls had gotten so sprawling that they were distributed across six separate pages and 40 different settings, according to a conference call the company held on Wednesday.
"These can add up and pile up and not be as clean as one would like," Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly said on the call. From what it sounds like, they'd gotten so complicated that many members just ignored them altogether--something that Facebook certainly doesn't want as it encourages its 200-million-plus members to post and share even more content.
As a result, Facebook's new controls will be more streamlined so as to offer easier and simpler controls about how much everything from entire profiles to individual pieces of content are shared. Users will be introduced to this through "transition tools" that allow them to toggle how open everything on their profile will be--totally public, friends-only, restricted to company or school networks, etc.
One of the biggest changes along with the new controls is that Facebook is getting rid of "regional networks," the opt-in way that members could designate themselves as residents of certain geographic areas. Only half of members even joined these networks, according to Facebook. It's a change that's been anticipated for some time, and privacy controls regarding regional networks have already been phased out.
"Networks were kind of the bedrock of privacy," product manager Leah Perlman said on the call. "When we expanded past college and work (networks), we created the concept of regional networks in order to have our privacy model expand." Members could share content selectively with members of their regional network, but representatives said that it was never quite clear as to exactly who else was in that regional network, and the delineation of networks was messy--some were defined by city, other by broader region or state, and others encompassed entire countries.
Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly is also considering a run for attorney general of California.
(Credit: Kelly2010.com)There were, for example, separate networks for each of New York City's five boroughs, but most residents just chose to join the broader "New York, NY" one instead. Facebook says that this shouldn't affect locally targeted advertisements: the company will be porting regional network data to its "Current City" field, and has already been using other data like IP address information to hone local ad targeting.
Facebook is keeping school- and company-based networks intact.
This comes in the wake of an announcement that Facebook would be tweaking its "publisher," the toolbar that lets members update their status messages or post content like individual photos and videos. The "publisher" will now have a privacy toggle for individual pieces of content, letting a user choose whether to make them available to friends only, custom friend groups, or--for the first time--to the Web at large. Making content available publicly will bring Facebook better in line with the thirst for real-time, searchable mass information that Twitter has captured so effectively thus far.
So how will this be handled? Facebook members will be guided through one of the aforementioned "transition tools," which representatives said will take one of two forms: either an ultra-specific set of granular, custom controls or a more no-brainer set of radio buttons. The new controls will first be tested with 40,000 users in the U.S. before rolling out to a bigger, international group of beta testers and then worldwide.
Last updated at 12:20 p.m. PDT.
Starting Wednesday, Gmail users will find their labels farther up the left-hand side of their screen.
(Credit: Google)Google is rolling out another tweak to its Gmail user interface that makes its labels behave a little bit more like folders.
Gmail has never used folders, at least in the traditional sense of the familiar classification system used by other e-mail clients. Instead, it encourages users to "label" messages with notes like "Work" or "Travel" instead of putting them away in folders, which has the primary benefit of allowing a single message to be given multiple labels and therefore appear in multiple categories, rather than having to decide whether the itinerary for a business trip should go in "Work" or "Travel."
But earlier this year, Google acknowledged that traditional e-mail users were treating the labels like folders anyway, and it began allowing them to hit a "move to" button to label a message and store it away. A further tweak being rolled out Wednesday moves a Gmail user's list of labels from the lower left-hand corner of the navigation screen to the upper left-hand corner, right underneath the usual labels such as "Inbox" and "Sent Mail," where they will look just like a traditional list of folders.
The concept of labeling isn't going away, said Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager. "We wanted to add some functionality that would make labels more useful for people used to folders," he said in explaining some of the changes.
The primary addition is the ability to drag and drop messages using the mouse "into" labels. If you were pretending that the labels were folders before Wednesday's tweak, you had to use the "Move to" button at the top of the screen to label, and then archive a message to get it out of your in-box. You can also drag a label onto a message, rather than using the "Label" button at the top.
And now that the list of labels has been moved up, pushing the chat list down, Google has minimized the number of labels that appear in the default list as to not push the chat bar down too far. For those who have dozens of labels in use, clicking on the "more" button will bring up the additional labels without going to a different Web page, and the number of labels shown in the default view can be set by the user.
The changes forced Google to kill its first Gmail Labs project: right-side labels, although dozens remain. Google is moving everyone on Gmail to the new design as of today.
Is Twitter getting possessive of its own name? Maybe.
A developer building an application using Twitter's API was told via e-mail that Twitter took issue with the user interface of his application, allegedly very similar to Twitter's own, as well as his use of the word "tweet" in the application's name.
The developer forwarded the e-mail to TechCrunch: "Twitter, Inc., is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own."
Uh-oh. If Twitter is staking a claim to the word "tweet," that could mean a problem for TweetDeck, TweetMeme, PoliTweets, and some of the other extremely popular businesses built atop Twitter.
A few things to keep in mind here. One, the developer was also creating a service that looked a lot like Twitter, the TechCrunch post explains, which means that the use of the word "tweet" may really have been less important than the e-mail made it out to be. Second, it's a personal e-mail coming from a Twitter employee--not a company representative or executive--which means that it may not be perfectly aligned with the company's official stance on things.
(Case in point: A Twitter investor hinted to The New York Times that the company would be making money with virtual coupons. One of Twitter's co-founders said in a comment on a blog that the investor was "brainstorming on his own.")
But the tech industry does have a history of getting into one skirmish after another over names similar to their trademarks. Several years ago, Apple started sending cease-and-desist letters to some third-party equipment companies and fan blogs that were using the word "pod" in their names. Google, too, has taken issue with the word "googling" being used as a generic verb.
And as TechCrunch points out, Twitter has filed for a trademark on the word "tweet." On the other hand, being possessive of this term (which, it goes without saying, has been a dictionary word for centuries) might not be the smartest strategy, if Twitter indeed wants to be a Digital Age communication standard "like electricity," as one executive said last month. So we'll see how this one unfolds.
UPDATE at 11:49 a.m. PT: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has, as the company's executives often do when there's a rumor flurry about something Twitter's doing, put up a blog post to clarify. The answer, not surprisingly, is that these things are handled on a case-by-case basis.
And "tweet" is not a target, he said.
"We have no intention of 'going after' the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter," Stone assured readers. "In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet."
It's more complicated when developers choose to use the word "Twitter," though it had been a dictionary word long before the microblogging company adopted the term.
"Regarding the use of the word Twitter in projects, we are a bit more wary although there are some exceptions here as well," Stone wrote. "After all, Twitter is the name of our service and our company so the potential for confusion is much higher. When folks ask us about naming their application with 'Twitter' we generally respond by suggesting more original branding for their project. This avoids potential confusion down the line."
If any class of financial-services firm should have become extinct in 2008, it's the hedge fund. Hedge funds bled $154 billion in 2008, according to Lipper Hedgeworld, with 1,500 hedge funds closing shop, as reported by The New York Times.
Amazingly, however, 659 new hedge funds launched amid this financial bloodbath, and these new hedge funds are looking to build high-performance trading platforms on the cheap, a trend that bodes well for Marketcetera.
Hedge funds need to save money. Who knew?
It's important to remember that today's aren't yesterday's spendthrift hedge funds. I spent the morning with a friend who left a large financial-services firm to join a small, $250 million hedge fund in June. He represents a new demographic in the hedge fund world, one that cares about fund performance and cutting fund costs.
A lot of hedge funds still in business saw their top traders leave when the economy imploded, only to set up new funds. These new independents couldn't make money at the old firms because their performance was so underwater, it would take years to get back enough in positive gains to start cashing in on performance fees. Meanwhile, fund sizes under management began shrinking, with redemptions and fees getting slashed in the process.
This means a new breed of leaner hedge fund is rising, hedge funds that arguably could spend lavish sums on trading platforms but learned enough from the market implosion to save money wherever possible.
Marketcetera fills this need, particularly now, with its hosted offering. I've covered the company before but continue to be impressed by its speed of innovation.
The company launched Marketcetera 1.0 in January 2009, then hit version 1.5 in April 2009 (adding support for multiple traders and some key data feeds and real-time analytics), and now, in June 2009, the company's open-source trading platform is sitting on the NYSE's high-performance cloud.
Pretty impressive.
Equally impressive is where the company expects to take open source next, as can be seen in this YouTube video. The proprietary-software industry serving hedge funds and other financial services companies just got a wake-up call.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay. Perhaps if enough people follow me, I'll be able to afford to lose an investment in a hedge fund.
Considering that it's based on Mozilla Thunderbird, it was a bit of a surprise that add-ons weren't available for Postbox when it debuted. That's now been remedied in Postbox beta 13 for Windows and Mac. Given Postbox's emphasis on social-networking technology and Mozilla's own success with add-ons, this move puts the e-mail client in an excellent position to attract more users.
The latest Postbox introduces add-ons to its users.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)A Webware 100 winner, the list of supported extensions isn't long at the moment, and notably it doesn't include Thunderbird's calendaring tool Lightning. Since Postbox doesn't have its own supported calendar, this could prove to be a deal breaker for some. However, the list does include several plug-ins that Thunderbird users should be familiar with, including ReminderFox, QuickText, and MinimizeToTray. MozBackup and Zindus are listed as "coming soon." There's new support for localized dictionaries from Mozilla, too.
Users who wish to install Postbox add-ons while running Firefox can either save the XPI file to their desktop and then install it manually, or drag-and-drop it into Postbox's open Add-ons window.
Other changes include fetching profile pictures from your address books in Postbox, Mac OS X, Twitter, and Facebook for the Inspector Pane. Settings can be imported from Mail.app. Multiple attachments can be dragged to your desktop. Along with a large number of stability and usability fixes, the security improvements made to Firefox 3.0.10 have also been folded in. Full release notes can be read here.
Twitter is in the process of rolling out a new user interface update to its users.
This update focuses on Twitter's Following and Follower pages. In addition to a better looking list, Twitter has added more social actions to the page, including @replies, direct messages, and mobile update subscription. An extra collapsed "List View" has also been added to the traditional "Expanded View" and makes for a much more readable and quickly scannable page.
Twitter's new following list UI adds social actions like @replies, DM's, and Follow/Unfollow
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Due to the lack of a good way to browse, filter, and search through these lists, they are largely underused. This update is the first step in making Twitter's Following and Follower lists into much more usable and functional tools. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if Twitter continued to build out these features more in the future, bringing in some of the functionality that third party applications have long included, such as TweetDeck's groups.
Click through to see what Twitter's new List View looks like.
... Read more
Firefox 3.5 (for Windows, Windows Portable, Mac, or Linux) forges ahead with strong developer support, but most improvements for casual users will probably strike them as minor. See what's new for the second-most popular browser in this slideshow.
Updated on July 2, 2009, at 9:02 a.m. PT with more from Skype regarding push notification for the iPhone/iPod Touch app.
Skype is certainly on a roll this week. Just yesterday it converted the latest beta of its Windows Mobile phone software into a full-fledged release. On Tuesday, the VoIP company did it again for Skype 4.1 for Windows. In addition, Apple green-lighted Skype 1.1 for the iPhone and iPod Touch, which you can download now.
Skype 4.1 for Windows
Skype 4.1 beta brought back features like accessibility, birthday reminders, and the capability to send a contact record to another contact. These had been left out when Skype first updated its interface to the 4.0 style, the company citing a wish to get core features out the door before piling on the extras. It's these extras that users nevertheless clamored for. This minor point update also contains a major new feature that was first introduced in Skype 4.1 beta: screen sharing.
The red border indicates your recording field.
(Credit: CNET/Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt)Screen sharing initiates a video call, using the technology to broadcast a recording of your screen--either a portion or the full screen--to one other viewer. Screen sharing has some limitations: you can't simultaneously see a video of your buddy and their desktop, and since only one viewer at a time can peep at your screen, you can't use it as a free replacement for collaborative Web conferencing. It doesn't help that the picture quality is still choppy and fuzzy, in both partial-screen and full-screen view modes.
Make no mistake, though: it's a great feature that we're happy to see added, but we'll be even happier to watch it improve.
In addition to screen sharing, Skype 4.1 lets you feed a contact search from outside address books, including those in Gmail, AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Microsoft Outlook, and a host of other players. If you have it installed, the Web toolbar will highlight phone numbers within contact lists so you can call them through Skype.
Skype for iPhone
Skype 1.1 for iPhone and iPod Touch reintroduces the capability to listen to Skype voice mail and to send and receive SMS messages. These features had been available on the desktop version, but were not activated when Skype first came out for iPhone.
There are a few visual tweaks, also, which gloss up the look and feel of a few screens, most notably the dial pad. To top off the changes, this iPhone update pours on multilingual support, making it available in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, and Traditional Chinese.
Skype for iPhone still has far to go if it's to get all of the extra features that round out the Skype experience--games and conference calling are but two. Push notification is another that Skype users are now asking for. Skype told CNET that they wanted to first integrate SMS and voice mail, the two most-requested features. As for push notification, Skype isn't making any commitments at this point, but a representative from the company vaguely stated, "Where we're able to use functionality provided by the iPhone OS to support a rich Skype experience on the iPhone platform, we will endeavor to do so." Still, it's a fair guess that a future version could notify you when someone is calling.
In the future, we're looking forward to what Skype might do with video calls now that the iPhone 3GS has its shiny new video recorder.
