Google Labs is testing a new way of viewing images that it is calling Image Swirl. When you search for a term in Image Swirl, 12 different sets of related images appear.
For example, if you search for "Kentucky," you will get sets of Kentucky state maps, Kentucky flags, the Kentucky Derby, and various scenery of the state. As you drill down further into the results, you get to see more tightly refined sets of images based on what you choose.
A search for Paris' Arc de Triomphe on Google Image Swirl.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Image Swirl's interface is very similar to Google's Wonder Wheel. It also employs Google's previously developed technology for finding similar images as well as facial recognition. This is definitely a smarter image search than what we are used to.
Unfortunately, Image Swirl is not available for all search terms currently. It is reserved for 200,000 terms (which auto-complete in the search box) that Google has deemed worthy of being included. The company did say, however, that it plans to add more queries to the list moving forward.
So what do you think? Is Image Swirl cool? Lame? Important? Irrelevant? Let us know in the comments.
Pandora, with new Facebook, Twitter, and Gift sharing features.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Pandora on Wednesday announced the arrival of some new sharing features for the service. In the past, you have been able to share Pandora stations, but you were forced to do it via e-mail instead of taking advantage of one of the modern social networks. Now, Pandora is enabling station and song sharing via much more efficient means: Facebook and Twitter.
These features work pretty much exactly how you would think they would. Clicking on the Facebook icon pops out a Facebook window, allowing you to share either the current song or station. The Twitter integration works in much the same way, enabling you to tweet out a link to the current song or station. When you click on the station link that someone has shared, it whisks you away to their Pandora station and lets you listen. However, the song links only go to a landing page that gives you a 30-second preview and an option to create a station based on that song. Oddly, this page does not give the user the "Buy from Amazon/iTunes" option that Pandora's main app features.
In addition, Pandora is bringing more attention to its station-gifting feature. This feature basically allows users to create an entirely new station, pair it with an eCard and send it off to someone. Pandora is essentially trying to create the modern version of the mixtape. This feature has been around for a little while, but it has gained little attention to this point. The more prominent placing in Pandora's music player may change that.
These new sharing features should boost usage of Pandora. Tapping into the previously untouched power of Facebook's social graph and Twitter can only be a good thing. Pandora is just coming off of reaching an agreement on new royalty rates for music this summer and it's working toward its goal of being profitable by the end of the year. They're also facing some stiff competition from companies like Slacker. Pandora still has a long road ahead, but opening up its service to sharing on Facebook and Twitter is definitely a step in the right direction.
I've written about social recommendation network Glue before, noting that it is a social network that is just along for the ride as a Firefox/IE extension that slides out when you need it. The basic idea is that when you visit a site that's supported by Glue (IMDB, Amazon, Wikipedia, Last.fm, and a lot more), the Glue extension will slide out and tell you what your friends thought about that particular piece of content and give you the option to review it yourself. It's a great concept where the information comes to you instead of you having to seek it out. Today, Glue is adding a more traditional profile-based system to the site, which provides more incentives for users to contribute regularly.
Glue investor Fred Wilson's new profile on the site, complete with Stickers and Guru.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Adding a "game dynamic" to your service is a proven technique that boosts user engagement. Glue is hoping to do just that with its new profile system on GetGlue.com. It is taking a page out of Foursquare's book and adding "Stickers" for user accomplishments and declaring "Guru" status for those who comment most frequently on a particular piece of content.
The similarities to Foursquare's Badges and Mayor features are pretty apparent here. Glue's Founder and CEO Alex Iskold commented, "We've been admiring what Foursquare did to encourage people to engage with their service." On the subject of the Guru feature, Iskold told us that, "Guru is something that we developed to encourage people to really engage around things they love. Unlike Mayor, being a Guru is a bunch more work, since you need to actively comment on things to stay the Guru."
Glue is also adding suggestions, presented in the form of a stream. As you give the thumbs up to pieces of content throughout the Web, these suggestions will evolve and become more targeted. Their algorithm also takes into consideration what your friends' favorites are as well as the overall favorites for the community. Hopefully your own ratings have some more weight than popular content, or else Metallica fans might be staring down streams filled with Miley Cyrus.
Even though I like the hands-off nature of Glue's browser extension, I think that their profile system is a strong addition to the service. The new game dynamic will certainly drive more user interaction as people compete for Guru status and collect Stickers for their profile. Glue also threw a couple of new statistics our way to give us an idea of their growth. Currently, the service is getting a new rating every three seconds and a total of 1.2 million new interactions between people and things every month.
Here's a nice video that the guys at Glue put together for this release to explain the service:
Google is notoriously slow and calculating about changing it the user interface of its services.
In fact, Google hasn't made any major changes to the look and feel of Google Maps since its launch in 2005.
On Friday, the company launched several refinements to Maps--the biggest changes to its look since launch. While you might not notice these changes immediately--unless you are a hardcore Google Maps user--they are designed to enhance the readability of the maps.
As seen above, the thick street outlines that can make maps harder to read have been eliminated.
Google describes the update here:
(L)ocal and arterial roads have been narrowed at medium zooms to improve legibility, and the overall colors have been optimized to be easier on the eye and conflict less with other things (such as traffic, transit lines and search results) that we overlay onto the map. Hybrid roads have gained a crisp outline to make them easier to follow, and the overall look is now closer to an augmented satellite view instead of a simple overlay.
This morning, Fred Wilson introduces us to one of Union Square Ventures' portfolio companies that is coming out of stealth and launching publicly. Tracked.com is a sort of re-imagining of a business information service that provides personalized information on businesses and the people associated with them.
The start-up is positioned to be a competitor to Google and Yahoo Finance, which are largely ticker-based, as well as user-driven information sites like CrunchBase, Wikipedia, and, to some extent, LinkedIn.
Conceived by Mike Yavonditte, formerly of Quigo, Tracked.com, of course, provides extensive information on ticker-based companies, including company financials, much like Google and Yahoo Finance do, but it's not just a stock service. Its strong point is that it also tracks privately held companies, gathering any available information on them. For all of these companies, Tracked shows a wealth of information and news as well as the people associated with the company, complete with fleshed out profiles on them as well.
Tracked helps you keep an eye on the companies and people that you find important in the business world. It has a completely customizable "My Tracker" section that allows you to pick what companies and people to watch. For public companies, it has more robust functionality than Google or Yahoo Finance. It even calls out a lot of interesting data like executive compensation. For example, you can view a list of the executives with the highest compensation in 2006. For private companies, Tracked might be the most extensive, publicly available database in existence (aside from Wikipedia) and it's sure to grow even more.
One thing that is notably different about Tracked as compared to Wikipedia or CrunchBase is that users cannot edit current entries or add new ones. This ensures that the data on Tracked is accurate since the team can check all of the data that comes in. The downside to this is that it cannot possibly include as much information as a user-driven site.
Overall, Tracked.com is a strong, customizable alternative that will pull some users away from Google and Yahoo Finance. It is a convenient and highly addictive way to browse through information on public and private businesses as well as people. The information is so extensive and interesting that you should plan to burn a couple of hours the first time that you check the site out.
You may notice that Tracked.com is operating a little slow right now with the surge of traffic from its launch. Hopefully, as they work out the kinks, performance will improve.
Here are some additional screenshots to give you a better idea of the site's functionality, but you should really just check it out yourself. ... Read more
Twitter on Wednesday announced a long-awaited feature to a small subset of its user base for testing. "Lists" lets users group Twitter accounts together for easy filtration.
For example, you can create a list of all of your work friends or one for all of your drinking buddies. By default, lists are public (although private ones can be created), so they can be shared with anyone on Twitter. Other users can then subscribe directly to one of your public lists if they are interested.
List sharing opens up a lot of possibilities for list curators to emerge on the service, creating a whole new class of influential users. This should help with the discovery of new Twitter accounts and hopefully help to keep fresh content flowing to you.
One of the big complaints about Twitter is that after you pass a certain number of people that you are following, the stream of tweets is impossible to keep up with. By giving users the ability to group people together, it becomes a lot easier to keep track of the accounts that you are interested in at a given time. This will certainly allow people to use the service much more effectively.
Lists has been one of the most requested features for Twitter for some time and it's great to see that they are finally rolling out the functionality. Twitter has said that information on how Lists will work in their API will come in a few days.
Google Docs' summer interns this summer were tasked with working on improvements and additions to the service geared toward students.
The results of their work, now available to try out, include new features such as an equation editor, superscripts and subscripts, document translation, improvements to surveys, and more outlining options.
Google Docs' new equation editor.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)While none of these features is groundbreaking on its own, collectively, they help round out Google's productivity suite, fulfilling some specific needs that probably prevented some from using the service.
A lot of people complain about the minimal feature set of Google Docs, as compared to market leader Microsoft Office, which got a 16-year head start on Google's offering and is sometimes criticized for being feature-cluttered. Students comprise one of the core groups of users and potential users of Docs, so it makes sense to build out the feature set to support the kinds of word-processing, spreadsheet-tweaking, and presentation-building tasks that they typically need to perform.
TechCrunch is reporting that Nokia has just acquired social travel start-up Dopplr. The rumored acquisition price is between 10 million and 15 million Euros, which is around $15 million to $22 million.
In an effort to stop the bleeding at the cell phone giant, Nokia has been acquiring a string of smaller companies. With intense competition from Apple's iPhone and RIM's Blackberry, Nokia has been struggling to keep pace in the mobile industry. Om Malik compares the acquisition spree at Nokia to what we have seen at Yahoo in the last few years.
It will be interesting to see how Dopplr as a service fits into Nokia's strategy. It's unclear at this point if it wants the business as it exists, its technology, or its talent. Dopplr has a fairly small, but hardcore user base and has intense competition from companies like TripIt, so it is a curious acquisition choice. If it keeps the service intact at all, look for Nokia to roll out a mobile version of Dopplr out as an exclusive app on their devices.
We knew that Facebook had bigger plans for vanity URLs/usernames when it opened them up for registration this summer.
The popular bet was that it would create a mention/reply system similar to Twitter's @replies. That was shot down this week when Facebook launched its mentions system, which uses real names. But on Thursday, Facebook started letting users log in with their usernames.
(Credit:
Facebook Blog)
This might not seem like a big deal at first glance since most Web sites use username log-in. But this is a time saver, compared with typing in your full e-mail address every time. I still suspect that we will see our Facebook usernames being used for more things in the future, though it's unclear what those things may be.
Vreebit is an immensely complex social-networking site, launched in beta on Thursday.
After seeing that it has taken Facebook five and a half years to become cash flow-positive, it seems that founders Michael Fleischmann and Chuck Donnelley are trying to create a new revenue model for their social network.
Vreebit includes a wealth of features, including a calendar, tasks, resume, docs and photos, links, discussions, polls, petitions, expert advice (think Yahoo Answers), and the ability to create your own 11-page Web site.
Upon signing up, users are given 100 "VreeBees," which are a virtual currency that can be used to buy actual goods on the site. You can earn more by participating in surveys, referring users, clicking on ads, and providing expert advice.
The VreeMarket offers a ton of things for users to buy with their VreeBees, ranging from books to video games to clothing. Not only can Vreebit post items for sale there, but actual users can post items as well, setting their price in VreeBees. This section of the site could also benefit from partnerships with some outside retailers.
VreeBees can also be used in exchange for services on the site, such as placing an advertisement, getting expert advice, and creating a survey. All of this activity creates an interesting economy on the site designed to motivate users to participate more.
The elements of this site that participate in the VreeBee economy seem to make sense, if the site can gain enough users. They are pretty unique and will drive more use of the service. However, other aspects of the site may greatly benefit from hook-ins with third-party services.
For example, instead of having to fill out your calendar on Vreebit (which doesn't sound overly appealing) the service could pull from Google Calendar for its content. And even though it is competing with Facebook, I think that Vreebit could benefit from using Facebook Connect, which can speed up account setup, automatically bringing in contact information and user data, as well as maintaining the same log-in.
Although Vreebit might be a bit crowded with not-so-enticing features, and users will likely be a bit wary of being rewarded specifically for clicking on ads (this will surely sink its ad rates through the floor), its virtual-currency model may have some potential.
With the addition of hook-ins for some third-party services, Vreebit may have a chance at becoming a viable social network, but for the moment, some users might be scared away by the amount of site features and the amount of time it takes to set up a new account--not to mention the fact that there's not much incentive to join a social network unless your friends are already there.
