There have been dozens, maybe hundreds, of companies that have tried to create useful Web browser start pages and content aggregation sites. Popular themes include RSS readers, widget collection pages, and user-filtered news hubs. I've seen and tried a lot of them but rarely use them after a quick look. A new project, iCurrent, has potential to break out of that swamp for me and other users.
iCurrent contains no magical thinking or head-slappy reconceptualizations of news. It's just an aggregation service done well, with useful and clear features for users, and a straightforward sharing mechanism.
You tell iCurrent what you're interested in (examples: Windows 7, Formula 1, the Public Option), and the system will find stories on that topic from its solid lineup of sources, and create a "channel" for you that exists in one of its mainstream categories (in my examples: Technology, Sports, Health).
I found that the system picked good stories in my channels, and from good sources, and that it categorized them mostly correctly. It's easy enough to recategorize topics and add or remove news items. For example, I wanted news on "San Francisco Muni," but iCurrent originally put it in "Business." I moved it to "News." I also added CNET News to the "Sources" list for the topic, just in case we ever cover it.
The iCurrent main screen blends your custom content with news categories you haven't yet flagged (orange box).
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)On the front page of iCurrent, you get stories from your designated topics in the middle column of the page, and general and trending news on the right. The blend is important -- it keeps you informed on topics you might not be looking for. And it's how you build up your channels at first, by adding topics from the general stories you see.
If there's a channel you like, you can invite other users to it, and invite them to join iCurrent in the process. If you invite someone outright, you can also pre-populate their channel lineup with your channels. This is an important method to spread the love on iCurrent, as it's going to be hard, otherwise, for people to hear about this product. And, as CEO Ramana Rao told me, "Google will probably whack it," meaning that iCurrent stories won't show up in the Google index.
Not that they should. The service doesn't repackage stories, it just links to them. When you want to read a story, you get it from the original source, with a frame at the top (which can be disabled) that leads you back to iCurrent.
iCurrent rewards the engaged reader, but it doesn't require much work at all to make it a compelling experience. As I said at the top of this story, there's nothing really amazing here, just a good understanding of how today's users consume news, and enough technology to put that news in front of them.
It's fast and easy to add sources to the default list for any category.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)There are some improvements that I'd like to see: The interface is just a little busy when it comes to adding and removing sources and channels, although it's not unclear. More importantly, coverage of local news is not that good, which is a shame in a news reader that can be highly personalized. I'd also like to see a mobile version.
The product is in private beta now and should be available shortly. You can sign up to be alerted when it goes public. I recommend that.
Rao says iCurrent will make money from advertising. It might. It's more likely it'll make money when Yahoo or Microsoft buys it.
See also: Meehive, YourVersion.
Former Current Media executive Robin Sloan appears to have posted Twitter's 5 billionth tweet, in the form of a reply to another user that otherwise read only "Oh lord."
A third-party app called Gigatweet has been measuring the service's total tweet count for some time now, and last week some onlookers picked up on the fact that it was getting awfully close to five billion. That said, Twitter's engineers have bumped up this number at least once or twice, and who knows how many test tweets were sent out in the company's early days.
But Sloan's tweet, which he has nicknamed "The Pentagigatweet," does get at least some landmark status because it actually has the number 5,000,000,000 in the URL. That's because the number at the end of a tweet's URL is apparently the running count of tweets that have been posted until that point. We've e-mailed Twitter co-founder Biz Stone for more information and will update if and when we hear back.
The guy who posted Twitter's 5 billionth tweet.
(Credit: Robin Sloan's Facebook profile)It's sort of fitting that Twitter's 5 billionth tweet came not from one of the celebrities or marketers who have flooded the service in recent months, but from one of the quirky Bay Area dot-com nerds who formed its first loyal pack of users.
Sloan, who lives in San Francisco, recently departed his gig at Current--which is headquartered only a few blocks away from Twitter's own home base in the South of Market neighborhood--to write a still unnamed novel" that he is funding through creative-microfinance site Kickstarter.
He may have just gotten a convenient leg up in publicity.
Meanwhile, some third-party observers have been remarking that Twitter's rapid growth may be slowing down. The company recently raised another round of funding at a valuation somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion.
This post was expanded at 10:20 p.m PDT.
Correction at 2:25 p.m. PDT Tuesday: This post initially referenced an incorrect title for the novel Sloan is working on. The novel is still unnamed.
Boxee, the open-source software platform that combines Internet media with personal content, announced a slew of updates Tuesday.
Most notably, the company announced that it has made Boxee publicly available to Windows users.
The public alpha version of Boxee for Windows will work with Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Users will also be able to run it on Windows Media Center, making it possible to bring Boxee to HDTVs through Microsoft's platform. A beta release of the software should be made available later this year.
MLB comes to Boxee
Boxee has also inked a deal with Major League Baseball that will bring MLB.tv Premium to the platform. According to the company, Boxee users will be able to watch "thousands of baseball games, live and on-demand in HD."
Users will be able to pause and rewind a live game. But in order for them to access those games, they will need to sign up for the MLB.tv Premium service, which costs $89.95 per year or $19.95 per month.
Even more content
Since Digg has a popular video section, it only makes sense that Boxee would sign a deal with the social-news site to bring its videos to the platform.
According to Boxee, users will now be able to watch Digg's most popular videos, as well as upcoming clips. Users will soon be able to Digg videos from within Boxee, but that feature is currently not available.
Boxee also signed on with Tumblr to give that site's users the option to stream music and slideshows to Boxee. The company said more Tumblr features are on the way, but it wouldn't divulge what those are.
As if that's not enough, Boxee also announced that Current TV shows are now available on the platform. Current is home to popular shows, including The Rotten Tomatoes Show, InfoMania, and SuperNews.
New navigation
Since Boxee has made so many content enhancements, the company apparently had to improve its user interface. Boxee now features two new categories: Applications and Local Media. The Applications menu will feature all the Internet content available for the platform. The Local Media menu lists content from the user's computer and local network.
Rotten Tomatoes, the popular online destination for movie buffs, will premiere in all its television glory (TomatoMeter and all) Thursday night at 10:30 p.m. EST on Current TV. The 30-minute show, which is hosted by Brett Erlich and Ellen Fox, will run weekly in that time slot where the hosts will discuss and review three movies.
Although the movie review space is crowded, Erlich and Fox believe their show is different from the competition. Both hosts told me in an interview on my Digital Home Podcast that while the basic premise--reviewing movies--isn't unique, bringing the audience in on the reviews will help distinguish their show.
"Users will be able to upload a three-word review of a movie and we'll create a Webcam ensemble with all those together where the community will review the film," Erlich said. "Users can even send in haiku reviews of the movies and the best will be picked and played on the show."
Once the Rotten Tomatoes team receives those contributions, producers will post assignments for the next week's show, asking viewers to go see a movie and record a Webcam review or haiku. Each week, the assignment will change, but users will always need a Webcam to participate.
Erlich said the "Rotten Tomatoes Show" will be "fast-paced." It will be, he said, a "comedic journey through the week in cinema."
After airing on Thursday nights, "The Rotten Tomatoes Show" will be made available on Current's show page, as well as on the Rotten Tomatoes home page, subsequent to the airing. Though there's currently no finalized schedule, the show will be made available on iTunes in the near future.
Mobile app developer BrowserMedia announced Thursday that it has launched an iPhone app for the Grammy Awards, airing Sunday. According to the company, it worked closely with The Recording Academy to develop the trivia game, which tests the user's knowledge about Grammy history. BrowserMedia is also developing a companion Facebook application that will provide ongoing trivia contests past the award show's airing Sunday.
Juicy Campus, a service that let college students manufacture gossip and spread it anonymously, announced on its corporate blog that it has decided to suspend operations. According to the company, it was enjoying strong user loyalty, but it didn't have a "steady stream of revenue to support it." The site's venture capital funding "dissolved" and it wasn't able to "survive this economic downturn." The site officially closed Thursday.
Live Current Media, a company that provides content and e-commerce in niche industries, announced Thursday that it has reduced its workforce by 38 percent. Senior management employees have agreed to relinquish their annual bonus and the company's CEO, Geoff Hampson, has deferred one third of his salary. All pay increases to other employees have been suspended.
On top of its cost-cutting, Live Current Media is also trying to sell its "non-core domain names" to "generate working capital to meet obligations through the end of 2009." It has also decided not to close a second round of private financing it announced last November.
Doggies.com, a site that provides information on almost anything you've ever wanted to know about dogs, announced Thursday that it will be launching a dog business directory that provides visitors with thousands of listings from North American businesses that specialize in dog-related enterprise. The directory will be populated by veterinarians, boarding kennels, groomers, and dog sitters. The companies can be searched for free by ZIP code.
YouTube will add ratings and titles to videos that are embedded on third-party sites. Embedded videos now feature a title in white lettering at the top of the display and a rating out of five stars beneath it. Prior to that, ratings and titles were only available on the respective video's YouTube page.
After broadcasting live Twitters during the U.S. presidential debate, Current TV had to go one notch higher for election night.
The cable channel, co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, has partnered with both Twitter and social news site Digg for the evening of November 4, during which it will feature a "multimedia dashboard" with live messages from Twitter, headlines from Digg, and video from both Current and "video status update" start-up 12seconds.tv. In keeping with the network's young target audience, electronica act Diplo will be performing DJ sets throughout the night, too.
The funny irony is that Digg reportedly once walked away from a $100 million acquisition offer from Current.
"The new pace of democracy is real-time," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a joint release. "Current is helping Twitter amplify the opinions, news, and trends that matter right now. Together, we're influencing more than media--we're evolving conversation."
Election night on Current will also feature (naturally) commentary, projected results, and a state-by-state map. So it won't be all fun and games and Kevin Rose, y'know.
Current, the edgy news and culture channel co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, has come up with a new way to broadcast the presidential debates: show Twitter commentary on what people are saying.
Through an official partnership with the microblogging service, Current will broadcast "Hack the Debate," which will live-stream on Current.com as well as air on the network. Twitter updates, or "tweets," will be shown in real time for all four debates (three with the presidential candidates and one with the vice presidential candidates), which begin on September 26. It makes a whole lot of sense, given Current's slant toward young and tech-savvy news hounds (i.e., the people who use Twitter) and heavy focus on user-submitted content.
"The debate stage is only set for two candidates, but Current was founded to make room for millions of participants," Current CEO Joel Hyatt said in a release. "We're thrilled to work with Twitter and take advantage of their extremely powerful communication platform, giving people a chance to speak directly to Current's nationwide television audience."
Last year, MTV featured Twitter as a promotion platform for the Video Music Awards, and featured some popular tweets on-air, but did not incorporate them into a live broadcast.
Current has not said how the tweets will be selected for on-air display, but it's likely that they will be hand-picked to provide a range of perspectives and serious commentary. So expect more about the candidates' differing views on the economy...and less about vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's hair.
Let's face it: Video search blows. It's easy to use YouTube's search box to find straightforward Internet video memes like cats playing pianos, skateboard tricks, or Rick Astley remixes; try for anything more intricate and you might be out of luck. There are established companies in the space, like the U.K.-based Blinkx, but none of them has captured the market share that video search potentially could.
Enter VideoSurf, a company launching later on Wednesday at the TechCrunch50 conference that's been getting a choice spot in the tech-blogger limelight thanks to a Los Angeles Times preview.
VideoSurf CEO Lior Delgo told the Times that instead of only being able to search text tags and descriptions, the company's search technology goes frame-by-frame to recognize specific people. Additionally, VideoSurf says it has already indexed multiple video sites, from hubs like YouTube and Hulu to the digital libraries of networks like Comedy Central and ESPN. The company has attracted investment funding from former Vice President Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, the co-founders of Current Media; Hyatt is chairman of VideoSurf's board of directors.
But there's a caveat: nobody in the tech press has actually seen this company in action yet. Search Engine Land was very impressed by a demo, calling the company "genuinely radical," but doesn't appear to have done anything hands-on. The last shadowy video company that was this hyped was arguably Joost, which is still trying to stay afloat after failing to catch on. So don't count the chickens before they hatch, even if we're talking about a grainy cell phone camera video of chickens playing "Never Gonna Give You Up" on a piano.
Plenty of would-be buyers have been named for social news site Digg, but one we haven't heard much about: Current Media, the cable and Web news channel that was launched by former vice president Al Gore.
It's one of the juicy tidbits detailed in BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy's book, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, which hits bookstores on Thursday. In an excerpt posted to TechCrunch, Lacy writes about how executives Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose turned down a $100 million offer from Current in 2006 because they had, as TechCrunch paraphrased, "issues with control going forward."
The thinking is consistent with what founder Rose told CNET News.com in February when asked about selling his company. "I've had several friends that have been acquired by the Yahoos and Googles of the world, and while there is some upside in certain things, for the most part, it slows things down," Rose said at the time. "You can't get a product out the door fast enough."
Current, which filed for an initial public offering in January, now operates Current News, where users can vote on the news Digg-style and then see the top stories incorporated into an hourly news show on the cable network. Digg, meanwhile, remains the subject of acquisition rumors on the part of just about every major tech and media company around.
As we wrote on Monday, CNN's citizen journalism pet project iReport was due to get a site of its own. Today the service finally went live as iReport.com, and is already filling up with user content both old and new.
iReport's site has a lot in common with YouTube, showing off a grouping editor-selected videos (and photos) on the top of the page alongside a queue of the latest news content that's been uploaded by users. Each iReport user gets their own page with a listing of their uploaded photos and videos. Similar to Current, content is marked to show if it's been featured on CNN's televised or Web news reporting. adding incentive for others to click on it.
In addition to hosting any news story videos uploaded by users, iReport dishes out assignments to fledgling videographers and photo journalists. On top of the list is the 2008 Presidential elections, alongside weather reports, the ever popular "offbeat images", as well as "stories from Second Life," Linden Lab's MMORPG. Users can upload up to 10 videos and videos at a time, with each one taking up to 100MB in size.
Interestingly enough, the videos on iReport.com cannot be embedded on third party sites, although there are links to share it on five major social bookmarking and news services. Users also have the option of making the file downloadable, letting others grab it to play on their PCs or portable media devices. Syndication (albeit direct) is the name of the game.
In the future the service plans to increase the ties between stories, as well as where users are reporting from by integrating world maps. Already there is a "more on this story" feature that groups together content by assignment. The service also employs tags and a "newsiest" feature which "combines freshness, popularity, activity, and ratings" in an algorithm not unlike the ones found on social news sites like Digg and Reddit.
More screenshots after the break.
CNN's iReport site features playable Web videos and pictures submitted by users. Media that has been chosen to show up on CNN.com or CNN TV programming gets its own 'On CNN' badge seen in the top left of the player.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
