Rafe's Radar

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.

Want to own a piece of Tesla Motors? Facebook? LinkedIn? Unless you're a founder, employee, or a funding source for these companies, you're out of luck. That's what separates "public" companies from private: anyone can buy a piece of a public company on an open exchange. There are no wide-open exchanges for private company shares.

But there is now, at least to a degree. Sharespost is a marketplace where people who own pre-public shares can connect with investors who want that stock. Since these private companies also don't have open, audited books where potential investors can study up on the companies, Sharespost collects analysts' research on the companies in its market to help buyers and sellers agree on a value for shares being transacted.

The added values of the Sharespost marketplace, according to CEO Greg Brogger, are several. First, it connects buyers and sellers. Second, it helps with "price discovery," as noted above. Third, it facilitates the transactions by handling the paperwork and helping buyers and sellers work through contingencies attached to employee stock awards. And fourth, through an arrangement with US Bank, it processes and clears all the money.

Sharespost is not for the casual investor who wants to nab a few shares of Facebook for fun. Each transaction incurs a $2,500 fee (for both buyer and seller) from US Bank. And you must be an "accredited and sophisticated buyer" under SEC Regulation D, which limits the universe of buyers to people with substantial invested assets and experience. There is no such limitation for sellers. So if you're sitting on a few thousand shares of beached stock at a biggish private company, and baby needs a few thousand new pairs of shoes, Sharespost might be able to help you out.

Sharespost has only 100 companies in its market so far, and most have no activity.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Bizzarely, Sharespost does not collect a piece of these transactions. Brogger doesn't want to make his company a brokerage. He doesn't want it to be seen as profiting from individual transactions on his site. Instead, he charges buyers and sellers a $34 a month fee for using Sharespost. "There are a lots of transactions happening now in coffee shops," Brogger says, and with his model, he doesn't care if that continues or if the sales are closed through the US Bank clearing system. Although with the amount of money per transaction involved here, I don't see why he doesn't go for a small bit of the action.

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Twitter's own search engine.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

To follow what's happening in the real world, you need real-time search. Google doesn't have it (yet). Neither do Bing nor Yahoo. But a number--a large, growing number --of new search services scan Twitter and other sites in nearly real time, and will find for you the absolute latest update from the real-time social Web. I looked at more than two dozen products that search Twitter (and other sources) to find the best tools for uncovering the beating pulse of whatever topic you may be interested in.

To set the stage, let's look at Twitter's own search service. It's not bad. It's simple to use, presents results in a very clear way, and does a good job of balancing users' needs to see results in real-time with their inability to actually read the stream of tweets flying by: It updates a counter at the top of the page as new tweets that match your search come in, but you have to hit a link to actually see the updates.

Twitter Search also has an extremely good advanced query builder, and you can subscribe to search results via RSS.

The downside to Twitter search is that it's dumb, at least for now. Results are only sorted chronologically. There's no algorithm to give you the most read, most authoritative, most linked-to, or most re-tweeted items. And it only searches Twitter.

There are three services that do a much better job than Twitter Search, and several others are also worth looking at for special cases. Here are the top three:

Best three real-time search services

Twazzup: As I've said before, Twazzup is a very useful and flexible Twitter search tool that provides almost all of what Twitter Search does itself, plus a few columns of algorithmically generated results such as most influential tweeters on a topic, related photos, and a great list of keywords based on your search results that you can use to refine your query.

Unfortunately, the Twazzup results page can be overwhelming to read, and it only searches Twitter (excusable for Twitter Search, not for other services).

Twazzup has a complex presentation, but it combines the best of real-time search with algorithmic results.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Former CNET exec Vince Broady launched on Tuesday ThisMoment, a new social publishing service designed to collect and save personal and family memories, or "moments." I found it an attractive and enjoyable service to use. But its feature set is ambitious, and there's a big question of whether it can succeed in a market already flooded with social publishing services.

ThisMoment creates little self-contained items made up of text, media files, people, places, and links. I've seen other tools that do similar things, but ThisMoment is slicker than most sites, both in the creation and the viewing.

To make a moment, you just type in a little emotional impression and how it made you feel (e.g., "happy"), then you add your media. You can upload images from your computer or pull them over from sharing sites like YouTube, Flickr, and Picasa Web. You can add places, people, and Web links too. Adding content to a moment is easy and intuitive, and ThisMoment doesn't make an artificial distinction between photos and video.

ThisMoment content items get a nice media viewer at the top, and loads of details below.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

You can also invite people into a moment so they can work on it with you. This could be good for vacation moments, family events, and so on. Moments can be created for future events, too. You could create a moment for an upcoming trip and invite people to contribute locations and links for things to do. There's an iPhone app for "momenting" from the field. However, you can't snap a picture from a laptop's Web cam, which is a shame.

Each moment gets its own privacy level. You can share with everyone, just your family or friends, only the other people mentioned in the moment, or nobody. I like this granular sharing control--it's reminiscent of Vox, which also does this well.

ThisMoment content looks great. Broady told me, "I want life to come through," and his design achieves that. Items are engaging and fun to read. The moments get very attractive headers where all the media goes, and then a page underneath with map links, people, related stories, and comments. Broady says the page design is very search engine-friendly, and that his moments are already indexed well on Google and Bing. Moments can also be embedded in Web pages and blogs. (See an example after the jump.)

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As start-up pitches go, "Never run out of toilet paper" isn't the most compelling I've heard. But the new online packaged goods store Alice, which is behind that scintilatting come-on, isn't quite the loser Pets.com clone I thought it was at first.

While Alice appears to the end use to be a reseller much like Drugstore.com or Diapers.com (I'm a Diapers.com customer, it's great), it's actually built on a fundamentally different business model. Alice is not a traditional middleman reseller. It takes no markup, CEO Brian Wiegand told me. Instead, it collects a "fee" from the consumer packaged good (CPG) manufacturers--the people who mix your toothpaste and put it into tubes--for shipping products out, and it passes all the customer data it collects from people buying the products back to the companies that make them. The manufacturers set their own prices.

The aim is to give CPG companies a direct pipeline to data about consumer buying behavior, and to consumers themselves. This is a move that puts them clearly in competition with their traditional retailers, but as Wiegand says, big retailers are already fighting the CPG industry by launching their own store brands. These house brands have already grabbed 20 percent of the CPG market.

Furthermore, the CPG companies are "losing their megaphone," and need better ways to connect with their consumers. Wiegand says the efficacy of the 30-second TV spot is in steep decline. It was until recently the best way to make the world aware of things like a new scent of Palmolive. Likewise, the drop in the distribution of newspapers and their circulars is cutting off CPG companies from consumers.

Alice has a decent selection of products, and a superior management system for scheduling repeating purchases.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

But to connect to consumers, the manufacturers can't launch their own stores, online or physically. They're not set up for it, and furthermore customers don't want to have to go to three different sites to buy toothpaste, dog food, and paper towels. What CPG companies are set up to do, though, is collect data on consumer buying behavior, and act on it.

"There's a tremendous opportunity between the consumer and manufacturer," Wiegand claims, and Alice is how he's playing it.

The company is doing deals with the CPG companies--it's got 5 of the top 10 signed so far--to sell their products and shunt the data back to the companies. Alice, as a company, is not so much about moving a lot of boxed goods but about moving information back to the manufacturers so they can continue to refine their offerings. Alice will also help the manufacturers run coupon programs.

From the consumer's perspective, Alice looks like a good online retailer. It's got a very nice interface and a strong selection. (During the launch period, even manufacturers not yet doing business with Alice are represented on the site; for those products, Alice buys and resells products just like a typical retailer. After the site is established, only CPG companies with Alice contracts will be represented on the site.)

The site watches what you buy and will try to come up with a regular box delivery schedule if it gets enough data on your habits. It'll remind you that you might be running low on shaving cream, for example, and offer to ship some out to you before you run out. Shipping from Alice is always free.

There's also some social network feature on the site, but I couldn't get past the "Me, My Shelf, and I" pitch and furthermore have no desire to form social connections over trash bags, so I skipped it.

Wiegand says he expects the CPG companies will start directing customers and potential customers over to Alice.com to buy their products.

I found Alice a very good online store. But what's really interesting to me is the business model, for two reasons. First, because it points to a growing channel conflict in packaged goods that I wasn't aware of. And second, because while Alice looks a lot like a typical retailer, under the covers it's quite a different beast.

The site is launching Monday night.

The rise of 3D technology for movies and television will force a change in how directors tell stories.

Say good-bye to gut-wrenching drops off cliffs and swoops through asteroid fields to call attention to 3D effects. Be prepared for directors to use slower pans, less cutting, and more deliberate camera moves to blend the technology into the story. These new 3D movies may look boring in 2D, but they'll end up feeling more engaging when seen in three dimensions.

"Unfortunately, the history of 3D is bad 3D," says Sandy Climan, CEO of 3ality, a company that makes, as he calls it, "end-to-end technologies from image capture to processing" for three-dimensional entertainment. The technology hasn't been up to snuff until recently, he says. He claims his company's tech is leagues better, naturally. But the art hasn't advanced, either, and no amount of technology can fix that. Directors need new rules.

The film, 'Up,' was released in 3D as well as 2D.

(Credit: Pixar Animation Studios)

I talked with Climan about the changes coming to cinematography and television in the move to 3D, as well as to Didier Debons and Isabelle de Montagu, CEO and business development manager of 3DTV Solutions, which makes 3D video recording products, and Tuyen Pham, CEO of A-volute, a 3D audio encoding company. The short takeaway: if you're in the video or entertainment business, forget what you know about directing and editing. 3D changes everything.

Think 3D is a gimmick and that professional cinematographers and television directors don't take it seriously? Financials, Climan says, dispute this. 3D films in 3D theaters gross two to five times what the 2D versions of those films do. Commercials in 3D yield better recall rates. And it's not just the novelty factor, Climan says. If so, the trend would have faded. Grosses for 3D films are growing.

"The family movie business has largely moved to 3D," Climan continues, pointing to films like "Journey to the Center of the Earth," "Coraline," and "Up"--the last two having being taken far more seriously than standard 3D matinee fare. On the grownup front, Climan says that for sports and concerts, there's nothing like the 3D movie or TV experience. The upcoming James Cameron film, "Avatar" is a 3D production and is expected to be a watershed for mainstream 3D entertainment.

For now, the growth of 3D looks inevitable. The next step for the medium, after family films and fantastic blockbusters, is for 3D to move into independent and artisan films. Climan thinks the technology is becoming straightforward enough to make that likely.

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There's a new version of the Tweetdeck Twitter client, 0.26, launching tonight, following the earlier release today of a preview of Seesmic Desktop 0.3. Both updated Twitter clients look like significant improvements from their previous versions. Tweetdeck is also getting an iPhone app.

Tweetdeck 0.26

The big new features on the Tweetdeck side are synchronization and multiple account support. The sync feature means that users who have Tweetdeck on multiple computers won't have to re-create their groups and search queries on each computer. They'll log in, instead, to a new Tweetdeck account, and their Tweetdeck client will automatically download the saved data from whatever installation of Tweetdeck they last ran.

Tweetdeck is also getting multiple account support. The lack of that has become a greater issue for Tweetdeck as more marketers and Twitter power users experiment with different online personas. The client continues to support Facebook, 12Seconds, and a few other networks. It also gets support for viewing Qik videos in the client itself, and for replying to them.

Tweetdeck won't store Twitter passwords in on its servers, but other than that, the sync feature will also replicate users' account settings across installations.

The sync feature will also connect to the new iPhone app. You'll be able to swipe to change columns, and the client will ready your saved searches and groups from your desktop Tweetdeck installations. The iPhone app has been in limbo in the Apple approval process for about 10 days, Tweetdeck creator Iain Dodsworth tells me, but he hopes to see it released to the app store soon. Kevin Rose got a preview.

Also coming in Tweetdeck: a new column for Tweetdeck newbies that highlights Twitter accounts recommended by Tweetdeck staff. Like Twitter's own recommended accounts list, it could help new users get started in the network, and make a big difference for the Twitterers who get a place in the column. Dodsworth is aware that there are issues around fairness and transparency on the Twitter default list, and he says he's open to experimenting with it. "If people flood us with [financial] offers to include them, then that may be the next test," he told me.

My take, based on a conversation with Dodsworth but no actual hands-on experience with either of the new Tweetdeck apps: The sync feature is key to locking users into the client, since it increases the value of each installation of the app for busy, multi-machine users, and by that I mean anyone with a computer and an iPhone. Dodsworth likes lock-in, as any smart CEO would. His vision for Tweetdeck is that, "It's a platform. It's a browser for the real-time Web."

I'm a multi-computer Tweetdeck user and am looking forward to trying this new version. It should be available tonight, 9 p.m. Pacific Time.

Seesmic Desktop 0.3

Tweetdeck challenger Seesmic Desktop is now in its 0.3 version. A younger app, this client is showing more differences between versions than Tweetdeck, and it's getting markedly better in each. Seesmic has also supported multiple Twitter accounts for longer than Tweetdeck, and the new client makes short work of posting a tweet to one Twitter account or to several, or to Facebook as well. There's also a nice tweet entry box that automatically shrinks unless you're typing in it. That's a nice space-saver that makes up, in a small way, for the way the client still hogs the left-most pane of the app with a list of accounts, groups, and saved searches. While that part of the interface is clear and useful, when I'm on a small laptop I do wish I could get it back for content.

Facebook users will find more features for them as well, including support for adding comments to friends' updates and a quick way to "like" posts.

Seesmic Desktop lets you participate more fully in Facebook.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Seesmic now also includes support for personal Bit.ly accounts. Almost all Twitter clients, including Tweetdeck, let you post short URLs using Bit.ly, but Seesmic Desktop is the only I know that will access your personal account on the service, from which you can see stats on all the short URLs you've created.

Version 0.3 also fixes bugs, like the previous version's tendency to want to reply to a Twitter post with a Facebook message, and is generally slicker and more enjoyable to use.

The Seesmic Desktop 0.3 version I tried is a "release candidate" and can be downloaded directly here. Existing users' installations of Seesmic Desktop will not auto-update to this version until later in the week, Seemsic CEO Loic LeMeur told me.

Which one?

Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop are both freaking great Twitter clients. Seesmic appears to have a bit more horsepower for dealing with multiple accounts and Facebook, but I still find Tweetdeck's single-account Twitter experience slightly more enjoyable. If Tweetdeck delivers on the synced multi-computer support tonight, and the iPhone support ends up being is as good as I'm hearing, it will make it very difficult for the mainstream Twitter user to move off of it.

Both developers continue to update their apps, though. So this battle is far from over.

Several hundred journalists who cover Facebook, including me, were told by the company last week that their names had been reserved by Facebook ahead of the scheduled Saturday morning land grab. We were told that we didn't have to line up with the masses, that no matter when we got on the system, we wouldn't see our names on someone else's account (image link, NSFW language).

At the time, this appeared to be a deft media relations move. Without it, some influential journalist somewhere would probably not have gotten the URL he or she wanted, leading to a backlash story about the perils and anxiety of lining up to reserve your own name. By giving us this special treatment, unearned and unrequested, Facebook quite possibly forestalled at least one, and possibly a raft of negative stories.

Facebook vanity URLs not hooked up for all yet.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

But here's what actually happened: Journalists' vanity accounts went into limbo. Our domain names are reserved, but as of this writing, those URLs are still offline. Meanwhile, the three million people who grabbed their names the honest way on Saturday morning got just what they signed on for: a working Facebook vanity URL. Guys like me are still just a number (I'm 500023340).

I know: Boo hoo. Pity the privileged. And you can find me and my compatriots on Facebook easily enough by searching for us via Facebook or Google. But as of this writing, if you type Facebook.com/rafeneedleman, or if you try to find other journalists online by typing their direct URLs--for example, CNET's Caroline McCarthy and Josh Lowensohn, and other prominent writers like Om Malik, Pete Cashmore, or Marshall Kirkpatrick, you'll find their branded domains are not yet hooked up.

Oh, well. I never asked Facebook for special treatment. But I wasn't expecting anyone to squat on my Facebook ID either, except possibly out of malice, which, as I said, would have made for a juicier story.

A Facebook e-mail says that the reserved usernames could get hooked into the URLs, "in the next few days (or more), while we work through the process."

Meanwhile, I'm @rafe on Twitter.

What's happening in meetings I've been in here is likely similar to what's happening in other corporations: People are gathering to figure out how to use, exploit, or simply not get their companies embarrassed on Twitter. But no matter what we agree to in these rooms (which, in my experience, isn't much), one thing is sure: You can't manage a major corporate Twitter presence on Twitter.com itself. Nor, for that matter, can you in one of the popular client apps like Tweetdeck or the current Seesmic Desktop. You need something built for customer service or brand management. New tools are emerging for just that.

The two I recommend are Invoke's HootSuite, which is in open beta right now (version 2.0 is in private beta), and CoTweet, which is still closed. I've tried them both.

Common features

The products have much in common. Both allow you to control and monitor multiple Twitter accounts, and give other people access to those accounts as you see fit. In both, you can maintain password control of your Twitter accounts -- users need only know their HootSuite or CoTweet login to see their assigned accounts and reply on your company's behalf. You can add or take people off accounts without having to get into the weeds in Twitter itself.

Both products let you post from any of your configured Twitter accounts, or all of them together if you like. And the both support the automatic addition of "cotags," like the short, signed bylines (example: "^RN" for Rafe Needleman) you're beginning to see in multi-person corporate Twitter accounts. You can also set up posts to go out at future times in both products, nice for running rudimentary marketing campaigns.

Both give you stats on links you share from the service. HootSuite uses its own shortener, ow.ly, and its stats are very deep. CoTweet uses the capable Bit.ly but displays only the most rudimentary stats from that service, unfortunately.

HootSuite: Power tool with torque

HootSuite is the geekier tool, and it's more powerful than CoTweet in some ways. The 2.0 version (due out by July) supports multiple columns, like Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop. Its statistics, as I said, are deep. It can show you things like the most influential re-tweeters of your links.

HootSuite will also monitor RSS feeds and send headlines out in your Twitter feeds automatically. That's a pretty slick feature. I've used Twitterfeed to do that in the past (that's how the @Webware feed works), but like the idea of integrating the RSS harvester into a more comprehensive tool.

In the user management category, HootSuite lets you follow or unfollow people from within the client, as well as report spammers to Twitter HQ with one button click.

With HootSuite, you can have multiple people manage multiple Twitter accounts.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

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I got an impenetrable pitch from Meebo Monday about some new features in the company's "Community IM" program that we covered in October. The note said, "Content sites interested in increasing the volume of content sharing, but without their own social graph, can use the multi-network IM feature to expand their reach and drive social interactions."

Following up -- because I do love a puzzle and I remain curious about Meebo's business -- I learned that Meebo is expanding its chat product that sites like CafeMom are using with a few features that link those users into the broader Meebo network and into new Meebo features. And also that Meebo's making money, which I never expected.

Features first: Meebo has had a third-party embeddable (and free) chat product that Web sites can use to give their readers the capability to chat with each other in real time. It works much like Facebook chat, and looks much the same as well. One new feature lets users connect a site-specific chat service into their main Meebo account, which then can connect them to friends from other sites and services.

Meebo adds chat and sharing functions (outlined in orange) to sites like CafeMom.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

So, if I'm on CafeMom, the chat function will show me all my users on Yahoo IM and AIM, and let me publish to my Twitter and Facebook accounts -- all services that Meebo connects to. Another new feature makes it very easy to share Web pages with my Meebo contacts. These additions thus make it easy, and make me more likely, to share a page on the site I'm on with my larger community.

Meebo's Community IM customers like this, since it adds to the viral spread of their content.

As to the revenues, Meebo is claiming that on the main site, its ad banners are getting a 1 percent click-through and that the interactive ads that pop up from the banners have a hard-to-believe minute-and-a-half interaction time, compared to the 0.2 percent / 15-second metrics from standard ad banners (data from Meebo). User dwell time on Meebo is high because the value on the site comes from sticking around on it. Meebo is a real-time social and instant-messaging app. You don't get much out of it if you just check in and leave.

Meebo will soon be goosing its Community IM product by doing two things: It will ad small advertisements to the embedded chat function, and it will share ad revenues with sites that use the feature. Sites will also be able to buy their own ads on the chat service that will appear in the chat window. These new advertising products roll out later this month.