NEW YORK--Web pioneer and conference honcho Tim O'Reilly warned the audience at the Web 2.0 Expo here on Tuesday afternoon that he thinks "we're headed into another ugly time." Namely, everybody is just being really nasty to each other. And it makes his hippie soul hurt.
For example, Rupert "Dr. Evil" Murdoch keeps threatening to pull News Corp.'s pay wall-guarded content from Google, perhaps offering an exclusive deal to another search engine for one hundred billion dollars (give or take a few bucks).
Those ubiquitous URL-shortening toolbars are throwing Web addresses behind a cloak of invisibility, O'Reilly said, and they "don't let you navigate freely like the Web used to work." With Google's Chrome hurling itself into the mix, the browser and operating-system wars are starting to look less "Mean Girls" and more "Aliens vs. Predator."
But O'Reilly's attitude isn't "bring it on, and get me a large popcorn with extra butter, while you're at it." Rather, he hinted that at least in some cases, he's willing to embrace Google as a big, cuddly, benevolent dictator in the midst of it all. It's "a monopoly that's a service of value to users," he said, adding that generally, when Google makes a product with the primary goal of one-upping the competition--Knol vs. Wikipedia, Checkout vs. PayPal--it's not a success.
That's probably because, at least right now, among all the giant robots stomping about the series of tubes, Google is the one that most resembles O'Reilly's vision of the "open Web." In a blog post prior to his speech, he predicted that Microsoft could take over this role. Or not. Either way, he insisted that "it's time for developers to take a stand."
Setting off this kind of electric shock in the Web's punditocracy is a great way to drum up attention and newsworthiness that doesn't have anything to do with philosophizing about the recession, extolling the possibilities of the real-time streaming Web, or predicting which dot-com figurehead is going to be the most plastered at South by Southwest this year. Thank goodness! That stuff was getting so boring!
And O'Reilly's rallying cry has already gathered reactions. Barbarian Group executive Rick Webb, for one, posted a colorful retaliatory blog post, in which he said that "setting aside the 'boo hoo, the Internet is becoming a bunch of walled gardens' arguments, when rational people have conversations about how to make the Web actually usable and not 95 percent piracy, spam, and fraud, almost every discussion starts with the proposition that there is no other realistic option but to chuck the whole thing and start over."
Of course, the Web should be in a state of "war." When have things been any different? It's a hub of innovation, competition, and constant change, and I think we all knew that already. The barrier to entry is low enough so that if there's a glaring problem with something, users will flock to whoever can create a better alternative. In fact, O'Reilly brought that up on Tuesday, when he talked about expensive in-car GPS navigation systems.
"The turn-by-turn directions from TeleAtlas cost $99 [on the iPhone], but Google is giving it away for free. This is a natural kind of extension for Google. I don't think Google is being evil here by being disruptive," O'Reilly said. "That's a massive user win, even though it is incredibly damaging to some existing companies and some existing business models. When Google offers free speech recognition, [that would be] an amazing win."
Is that legitimate innovation? Yes. But let's hope the "win" doesn't stop there. If Google manages to throw a sucker punch to Apple, Microsoft, or whoever else by offering something once-pricey for free, I should hope that the rest of the industry makes sure that it doesn't grow too complacent.
So let's get this straight: monopolies are bad, unless they're "nice" ones on behalf of companies that extol the virtues of Razor scooters, wheatgrass smoothies, and lava lamps. Competition is great, as long as everybody's nice to each other.
Doesn't quite make sense to me. But, hey, it's his show.
LOS ANGELES--Already the far-and-away leader in search, Google wants to be a big player in music discovery, too.
The pop-up MySpace player that will appear when clicking the 'play' button in a Google search.
(Credit: MySpace)The search giant teamed up with News Corp.'s MySpace and streaming service Lala for the Wednesday debut of the new Google music search feature at the historic Capitol Records building in Hollywood. With the new music search, which had been internally code-named "OneBox" when news of the project broke earlier this month, search queries pertaining to something like a song, artist, lyrics, or album will bring up links to streaming songs from iLike and MySpace, as well as links to artist information on Pandora, Imeem, and Rhapsody. The lyrics search is provided through a partnership with Gracenote.
"It is directly embedded and integrated into Google search. There's no special button to push," R.J. Pittman, director of product management for search properties, said in a phone interview with CNET News. Currently, due to licensing and availability issues, the music search is U.S.-only.
There also won't be direct download links in Google: those will be handled through Lala and MySpace. "We push all the music engagement and commerce down through the partners," Pittman said.
Additionally, if a relevant music video is available, the MySpace window that pops up when someone clicks on the "play" button in search results will display a link to that video through MySpace's new music video portal. That's interesting, considering music videos are some of the most popular content on Google's own YouTube--but YouTube video results will continue to show up independently of the new music results in Google searches.
Financial terms of the partnerships aren't yet clear. "Everyone's keeping their own revenues and we're not messing with anything," Lala founder and Chairman Bill Nguyen told CNET News. But MySpace Music President Courtney Holt was a bit more tight-lipped, saying "we're not discussing the financial details."
The MySpace deal is a little more complicated to begin with, though. Google had been in talks with music start-up iLike about integration into music search, but then iLike was acquired by MySpace in a deal that closed earlier this month. Indeed, a statement from Holt says that "this relationship was secured and implemented by the iLike team." But iLike founder Ali Partovi (who's currently on board MySpace's music team) explained that the partnership now has "MySpace branding, (and) MySpace content licensing." Through the integration of iLike's technology, it'll also have concert notifications if someone searches on Google for a band that's currently on tour.
"I think MySpace, along with (Apple's) iPod, is one of the most trusted brands in music, one of the most resonant to consumers," Partovi said. MySpace is also reported to be in talks with Microsoft to power a music feature on MSN.
Music search is something that Google could really dominate. According to traffic firm Experian Hitwise, 6 percent of Google's top 1,000 search-related terms deal with music, and already 30 percent of traffic to sites that Hitwise classifies under the "music" umbrella comes from Google.
Considering Google's reach, it's a big win for both MySpace, currently struggling to redefine itself as a pop culture powerhouse rather than a social network through its MySpace Music service, a joint venture with major and independent record labels, and Lala, which also has a new song-gifting deal with Facebook. "We think (Google's music search) going to have a thousand percent increase in our sales, an order of magnitude more," Lala's Nguyen told CNET News.
This also means that music-related search results are getting a sheen of legitimacy on Google. With official partnerships, Google's most prominent music search results will be from sites that have licensing deals in place with the major labels, rather than potentially pirated content. Google's history with the music industry is spotty at best: it's had to strike its own deals with the major record labels, and relations haven't always been positive. Music search puts it all into order, partners in the deal say.
"Instead of ending up with a pirate site and a page with a bunch of ads or random lyrics sites, you wind up with a play button," Nguyen said.
Updated 4:30 p.m. Just after Google and Lala made the announcement official (in what was probably not a coincidence) Yahoo released a blog post designed to point out that they've been offering this kind of music search for a while. "We've made it easier to find music videos, artist information, and play full length songs from within the search results page. This is just one of the many ways Yahoo! is enhancing the search experience for music lovers," said Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products for Yahoo Search.
Video might've killed the radio star, but the Web sure hasn't killed music videos. Less than a week after News Corp.-owned social site MySpace announced its MySpace Music Videos portal, video search engine Blinkx announced the debut Tuesday of "Blinkx Music," a search tool specifically designed to trawl through music videos across the Web.
"There are hundreds of thousands of music videos available on the Web today which makes it nearly impossible to navigate and find what you are looking for," Blinkx founder and CEO Suranga Chandratillake explained in a release. "Based on the success of blinkx Remote, our online TV guide, we recognized there was a need to help organize music videos and make them easily searchable on the Web. By leveraging our award-winning video search index, we built Blinkx Music to help our users find their favorite music videos quickly, easily and in one place."
Blinkx says that its search engine has thus far indexed more than 33,000 hours of music videos from about 10,000 artists. While it says that Blinkx Music will let users "post comments and interact with other fans, and also offers background information about bands and their work," the release doesn't say whether it will provide links to streaming or download partners, from which it could potentially rake in revenues shares.
But this is a tight space, and MySpace's music video portal won't be Blinkx Music's only competitor. Universal Music Group is still putting together Vevo, a Hulu-like portal for music videos that aims to bring artists and labels the revenues they might not be getting from YouTube (though the Google-owned video platform is providing Vevo's technology).
Also looming in the background is Google's forthcoming music offering, which the company plans to formally unveil in a press event on Wednesday in Los Angeles. This could instantly run away with a huge market share in music video (and music download) search.
Some background on Blinkx: it's a publicly traded company based in the U.K. It merged with a search engine called Autonomy and then was spun off from it when it went public in May 2007. When rumors started to swirl last year that Google and News Corp. (which, coincidentally, owns MySpace) were interested in acquiring it, shares of Blinkx stock soared.
A correction was made at 11:31 a.m. PT on November 2: Blinkx has been de-merged from Autonomy.
SAN FRANCISCO--Tim Armstrong is such a tease.
The AOL CEO, speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday, didn't have any high-profile announcements like many of the other speakers at the conference. But instead, he hinted that one might be on the way.
"We have been working on something for the last three months that I think is a fairly substantial shift in our technology," he said. "When that's ready to announce, maybe we'll come back and talk to you about it."
Interviewer and conference organizer John Battelle tried to pry more information out of him, to little avail. But it sounds like it has something to do with the framework that powers AOL's network of blogs and content properties.
"It's a broader platform with more information around content and the creation of content," he said. "We see that platform evolving to a much higher scale."
Armstrong, who joined AOL in March after a stint as head of sales at Google, said that recently the company has increased its roster of journalists from 500 to over 3,000, and that over 3,000 pieces of content are posted every day to AOL properties. It's also now creating three to four times as much video as it was several months ago.
"We've hired people from places like The Wall Street Journal and ESPN," Armstrong said. "You're not just hiring a person, you're hiring the community they come with, and I think that has been an important part when you look at the network effects of that."
It's still not clear how AOL, currently in the process of being spun out from parent company Time Warner, will rake in profits from this huge investment in media content. Armstrong seemed unfazed.
"If you're not going to take risks and you don't think the future is bright," he said, "the Internet is probably not the right place for you."
SAN FRANCISCO--He wasn't on the program, but nobody was disappointed that Google co-founder Sergey Brin showed up at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday afternoon and agreed to sit down for an onstage chat with conference organizer John Battelle.
Sergey Brin, Google co-founder
(Credit: Google)Battelle said Brin had been extended an invitation to speak but turned it down, to which Brin joked, "I didn't say no, I just never responded."
But it was an appropriate time to hear from one of the minds behind Google because one of the most evident trends at the conference is that the search market is heating back up. On Wednesday alone, Microsoft announced a partnership with Twitter and Facebook for real-time search results, Google announced a similar deal with Twitter, and Google executive Marissa Mayer previewed a new "social search" feature in Google Labs.
Brin talked about the new competition with a "bring it on" attitude. "I think what Bing has reminded us is that search is a very competitive market," he said. "There are many interesting companies out there." He said he's disappointed that Yahoo is retreating from the fight and planning to strike a deal with Microsoft instead.
"I think Yahoo had a number of innovations there, and I wish they would continue to innovate in search," Brin said. He didn't go into specifics.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz had been slated to speak at the conference on Wednesday but canceled at the last minute, citing a bad case of the flu.
SAN FRANCISCO--Google Vice President Marissa Mayer made a surprise announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday: "Social Search," a new Google Labs experiment that will bring in search results from a member's social-network contact circle.
It'll be launching as an opt-in project in the next few weeks. Then, you'll need to have a Google account and set up a Google Profile to fill in information about the social networks that you use. Google first launched Profiles about a year ago.
"What we've done here is inserted, on the bottom of the page, content written by people in your social network," Mayer said, adding that Google hopes this will "really improve the overall relevance, comprehensiveness, and quality" of search results. A search for a local restaurant, for example, could bring up your friends' Yelp reviews for the same establishment. A search for travel destinations could bring up a post from a friend's blog.
This comes on the same day that Google announced that it had entered into an agreement with Twitter to bring real-time "tweets" to search results. That's another product that has yet to actually launch.
"The idea is for...these fast-rising queries, where there's a period of time (when there are) actually tweets about that topic, and the definitive news source hasn't been written yet," Mayer said of the Twitter partnership, declining to disclose its financial terms.
This post was updated at 4:25 p.m. PT.
Updated 4:30 p.m. PDT with additional details from Google.
It was indeed a nonexclusive deal: Google is going to be indexing real-time Twitter messages in search results, in a deal announced just hours after Microsoft debuted integration of "tweets" into its own search engine, Bing.
A post on the official Google blog by Vice President of Search Marissa Mayer explained it: "We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months," the post read. "That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information."
Google has "reached an agreement," but the search results have not gone live like Microsoft's have on Bing. Reports started to surface earlier this month that Twitter was in separate talks with both Google and Microsoft--which also has a deal with Facebook that will be launching down the road.
Google plans to turn on the service "soon," said Johnna Wright, product manager for Google Search, declining to provide further details. The company has been working on this "complicated" problem for some time, she said; Mayer said earlier this year that microblogging search was a priority for Google in 2009.
It's just way too difficult to manually crawl Twitter for tweets, said Jack Menzel, group product manager for Google Search. Google would have to bombard Twitter's servers constantly via its public API, and the result wouldn't be pretty for anyone. So, instead Google and Twitter have cut a deal where Google is essentially licensing a data feed from Twitter to get that information in search results.
How will it be presented? Google isn't ready to talk about that yet in detail, but Wright said tweets would be presented within regular search results. "Relevancy is paramount," Menzel said, but it's also tricky: sometimes you might want the result from the guy with only 30 followers who knows what's happening on a given street corner, sometimes you might want the industry expert's quick take on a product announcement.
So will Facebook strike a Google deal, too? Onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said that Facebook has "nothing to announce" regarding rumors of a search deal with Google.
Google wants to work with lots of different companies that are providing this type of information, Menzel said, although he declined to comment on any specific company. Following Google's announcement regarding Twitter, it announced a Google Labs product called Social Search for organizing streams of status updates and news feeds.
Microsoft executive Qi Lu will reportedly make a big announcement onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco later on Wednesday morning: that its search engine, Bing, has inked deals with both Twitter and Facebook to bring real-time status updates and tweets into search results. That's something you can't find on Google.
According to AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, neither partnership will actually turn into a product for "weeks, if not months," and that both Twitter and Facebook have also been talking to Google about similar deals.
When asked about the deal announcement earlier on Wednesday at Web 2.0 Summit, Microsoft director of search Stefan Weitz declined to comment, saying, "I have no idea."
Facebook's mum, too. "We don't comment on speculation," a statement e-mailed on Wednesday morning by Facebook spokeswoman Kathleen Loughlin read. "Later today, COO Sheryl Sandberg and VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer will be speaking at Web 2.0 at which time they will be available to answer questions regarding Facebook."
Rumors started swirling earlier this month that Twitter was looking to make big search-results partnerships with Google and Microsoft.
Microsoft already has a stake in Facebook, which it obtained when it invested $240 million in the social network--allegedly beating Google to the punch then, too--two years ago.
While Twitter is far smaller than Facebook, it's already a step ahead in searchability: it acquired third-party Twitter search app Summize last year and built it into the powerful, real-time Twitter Search. Facebook used to keep all of its data behind a log-in wall, but two years ago started to make the first steps toward becoming more accessible to search engines when it gave members the option to let their profiles show up in "people search" queries on the likes of Google.
More recently, it's been making additional small moves toward opening profile content to the Web, like redefining its privacy controls so that members can specify which of their information and updates can be made public.
This post was updated at 9:53 a.m. PT.
Are Microsoft and Google hoping to get into Twitter's treasure trove of real-time information? Yes, says Kara Swisher of AllThingsD, citing sources who indicate that the two companies are separately in talks with Twitter about data licensing deals.
This would involve the exchange of several million dollars plus a revenue-share to "compensate Twitter for its huge and potentially valuable trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from the data stream of billions of tweets of its 54 million monthly users," Swisher wrote.
What's unclear is whether either deal will actually come to fruition. More concrete is the likelihood that Twitter won't strike any exclusive deals, considering the company is (according to Swisher) "seeking to create a large open platform, which many could plug into, from search engines to marketers to publishers to developers."
Twitter, which just raised about $100 million at a valuation somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion, doesn't have a significant revenue stream in place yet. It's slated to launch a premium-services package later this year, but big search-data deals with the likes of Microsoft and Google could be a significant additional source of cash.
Something that could be complicated for Microsoft, should it choose to pursue this opportunity with Twitter: It has a stake in Facebook, which has been making moves to make its own stash of real-time information--potentially far richer than Twitter's, with 300 million active users posting links, photos, status messages, and what-have-you--more searchable and open. Facebook has gone a long way from keeping all its content behind a log-in wall, but Twitter still wins in the openness category.
A recent minor product launch from Facebook, the "Gross National Happiness" app, illustrates this by using keywords in status message content to track how "happy" the Facebook population is on a given day.
Oops! Facebook posted this screenshot of a new feature to Twitter and then pulled it.
(Credit: Facebook)It looks as if Facebook was a little premature in using its Twitter account to announce "Prototypes," a Google Labs-like operation that lets members beta-test new features for the social network and offer feedback.
The tweet offering a screenshot of Prototypes was swiftly deleted--but props to The Next Web for snagging it before it was pulled.
So what are the "prototypes" in question? Facebook seems to be experimenting with desktop notifications, content discovery, and upgrades to its Events invitation service. Next to each test feature is a star-based rating system through which, presumably, users can offer their feedback.
Facebook plans to take the stage at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco early on Tuesday afternoon to make a developer-related announcement. It's pretty likely that this has something to do with it.
