Webware

A look at the newly tweaked Facebook homepage.

(Credit: Facebook)

Facebook members will start to see a new look for their home page "news feeds" on Friday, with the design now featuring a toggle view between a main view, featuring the top stories from their friends list based on their Facebooking habits, and a "live feed" featuring real-time updates from their whole network.

"When the user wakes up in the morning, you go to Facebook and you see (the) news feed," product manager Peter Deng told CNET News. "You see the stuff that you missed, the best of the previous day, to basically catch you up on what your friends have been up to."

This is sort of bringing Facebook's design back to an earlier version. This spring, likely inspired by the hype surrounding Twitter's "stream," Facebook converted its home page news feed into a feed of live updates and relegated "highlights" to a small column on the right side of the page. Plenty of members absolutely hated it, even though Facebook execs have since said that the redesign didn't result in a drop in traffic or usage.

Deng said that the design released Friday, which will be rolling out to the social network's massive user base over the course of the day starting at 10 a.m. PDT, was put together by "responding to a lot of feedback along the way."

Birthday and event alerts are now more prominent, and the news feed also contains stories that stopped appearing when Facebook launched the stream-inspired home page: relationship status news, photos added and tagged, and the like. Brands' fan pages will be worked in there, too, but Deng said Facebook does not allow them to pay for higher placement or prominence. User controls will stay the same: you can opt to see fewer updates from a given person or fan page.

The upcoming redesign was leaked earlier this week via a document distributed to advertisers. But Deng said that the company has "made a few user interface tweaks since then."

Bing's Twitter search starts with a zeitgeist view.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Microsoft is getting into the real-time search business, as we reported earlier Wednesday from the Web 2.0 Summit. It's good to see a mainstream product dive into this stream, as one of the big issues with searching Twitter is that timeliness can swamp relevancy.

Bing has the opportunity to leverage its well-developed search engine chops to address this--not only will public tweets will show up in search results, Bing can rank results based on relevance of the post, the popularity of the writer, and other, more complex factors.

Uncharacteristically for Microsoft, the new search feature went live shortly after the announcement. (We're told the Facebook integration, which was also announced, will be rolled out in the future.) Here's how Twitterized Bing works for users so far:

The main page give a nice overview of trending topics with a search cloud at the top of the page and a list of popular links that are being shared below it. It's a good way to get a sense of the buzz on Twitter at any moment.

Bing's basic Twitter search result page gives you both live tweets (at the top), and shared links (below).

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Search results pages themselves are likewise split into two sections, a live feed at the top with just four tweets, and a list of shared links at the bottom. Results stream in live at the top of the page, but you can pause the influx.

The "Best match" search juggles the display order to put relevant tweets up top, even if they're not the most timely.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

If you click on the link to "see more tweets" on the main result page, you get a full page of tweets on your query, with the interesting option to sort the results by "Best match." If you choose this, Bing takes a stab at ranking results based on their content and possibly other factors, like popularity and online status of the writer.

Timeliness is still a factor in "Best match" results, so you won't get day-old tweets at the top of the list on a hot topic, but adding a relevancy sort on top of that does make the search results more useful. This is especially true for hot topics where tweets feeding into a time-only sort can end up pushing useful and relevant content right off the page.

Bing unpacks short URLs to show you what people are sharing, with no surpise links.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Back on the main result page, there are links related to your search query. These are automatically unpacked from URL shorteners like Bitly. The link results have under them tweets that included a short link to the page, even if different shorteners were used to get there. Bing's Twitter search thus does a good job of pulling commentary together on a topic (a link) even from people who've never communicated with each other on the service.

None of what Bing does with Twitter is startlingly new. Twitter's own search gives great real-time Twitter results. Other engines like Twazzup and Scoopler combine relevancy rankings into their results. And OneRiot does a very good job with shared links. But it is good to see real-time content start to bleed into mainstream search. It could be useful and relevant for everyone.

But this story won't get truly interesting until the real-time feeds, from Twitter and elsewhere, start to infect the mainstream Web search results. When a trending topic or popular shared link on Twitter starts to change the way standard results are ranked, we'll start to have truly real-time search for all content. Twitter will have an impact across the Web, even for people who never use it.

SANTA MONICA, Calif.--Drive about 350 miles down U.S. 101 from Yahoo's Silicon Valley campus and you'll find what CEO Carol Bartz appears to believe is the future of her pioneering Internet company.

Yes, we're talking about Yahoo's often-ridiculed Media Group headquartered about two miles from the famous Santa Monica pier and a world away from the technology-oriented plans of Bartz's predecessor, company founder Jerry Yang.

Yahoo is turning its focus back toward content with an eye to shows like Prime Time in No Time, starring Frank Nicotero.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Just a few years ago, amid the ruins of the disastrous reign of former Yahoo media boss Lloyd Braun, that notion would have been laughable. Sure, lots of smart people agreed the Internet was going to be a big deal for content creators, and Braun, having selected hit show after hit show for ABC, was at one point considered one of the smartest and best-suited individuals to build a real media business at Yahoo.

But his tenure was a flop--perhaps most notable for a controversial Los Angeles Times piece that declared, among other tech industry heresies, Braun received a special parking space and a deluxe office. (The historical record was disputed by some, including All Things D's Kara Swisher.) He lasted a little more than two years, and former CEO Terry Semel soon followed him out the door. Then came Yang, a renewed focus on search as Yahoo's bread and butter, the distracting--and equally disastrous--takeover fight with Microsoft and Yang's eventual departure from the corner office.

It's possible, however, that the Internet content idea was clever, even if the execution was terrible. Bartz, the former CEO of CAD-software maker Autodesk and no tech-industry dilettante, appears to believe this. Yahoo's new strategy hinges on a basic premise that many have figured out, but some still don't get: The Internet demands a unique approach to content creation. You can't just pick up a newspaper or television and plug it into an Ethernet jack.

And you can't take the network TV approach to Internet programming, as Braun's failures demonstrated. Yahoo executives are finally trying to marry the huge audience afforded by its technology products such as e-mail and instant messaging with news and entertainment content designed for the 21st century.

We're talking about shows like Prime Time in No Time, a 3- to 5-minute recap of last night's prime-time television shows, perfect for giving you a few quips to share over the coffee machine at work without having to actually watch the shows. Or Yahoo Sports Minute, which won't get confused with ESPN's SportsCenter but gets the basics across.

The result could be a page-view machine. Yahoo lost the second round of the Internet advertising wars to Google and its ubiquitous search engine, but as Yahoo prepares for its third-quarter earnings call Tuesday it's hoping that by increasing its focus on quality, home-grown content it can attract the types of brand-name advertisers that still plow most of their money into television.

By the numbers
Yahoo has the second largest collection of Web sites in the world, as measured by unique visitors, trailing Google by 5 million unique visitors. 160 million people visited a Yahoo site in September 2009, according to ComScore, and Yahoo Media counted 85.9 million unique visitors, up from 80 million a year ago. Those sites include Yahoo News (48 million unique visitors in September), Yahoo Entertainment (44 million), Yahoo Sports (38 million), and Yahoo Finance (22 million), among others.

If it was counted as a separate entity, Yahoo Media would be the seventh-largest property on the Internet as measured by unique visitors. That's not the best way to look at it--since many of those visitors first entered Yahoo's world by checking their e-mail or customized home page--but any way you cut it, it's a lot of people.

Those visitors--a mass that covers many demographics--are the kind of people that big-brand advertisers covet. Yahoo Sports and Games get the guys, and Yahoo has launched a number of women-oriented sites over the last year--such as OMG and Shine--drawing readers, viewers, and advertisers with a conscious decision to focus on "sunny and friendly" entertainment and women's news, said Sibyl Goldman, vice president of entertainment at Yahoo. That's compared with some of the more tawdry sites in this category--think TMZ--that draw a lot of traffic but not necessarily the kinds of high-profile advertisers that Yahoo likes.

Bartz has set clear priorities for the Media group: do what you do best, and we'll find resources to invest in your business by getting rid of dead weight. Yahoo announced a round of targeted layoffs in April that were designed to funnel investment toward businesses the company wants to stay in for the long haul, and the Media group will be perhaps the largest beneficiary of that investment. And that doesn't even count the savings that will eventually be realized if Yahoo's search outsourcing deal with Microsoft is approved by federal regulators.

What does Yahoo plan to do with that money? Yahoo's content sites currently obtain their content from three different buckets: aggregation, original content created in-house, and content partnerships. At the moment, that division roughly breaks down at about 80 percent aggregation, 10 percent original content, and 10 percent content partnerships: the divisions are slightly different for different properties.

During the next year, managers such as Goldman are being asked to increase the amount of original content they produce. That means building on the success of shows like Prime Time in No Time--which Yahoo claims is the most-watched original show ever developed for the Internet--and avoiding the mistakes of the past.

By the Internet, for the Internet
Jimmy Pitaro, head of Yahoo's Media group, wants to make it very clear that Yahoo is not in the sitcom business.

Pitaro has been with Yahoo's media operation forever--or nearly forever, joining the company after it acquired Launch Media in 2001, where he had been vice president of business affairs. As a result he has seen all the ups and downs of the previous decade at Yahoo, and while he refuses to slag Braun directly he does admit that the company has learned its lessons from that era.

Jimmy Pitaro, vice president of Media at Yahoo.

(Credit: Yahoo)

During a recent lunch in the restaurant below the Yahoo's Santa Monica offices, Pitaro makes roughly 5,397 attempts (perhaps a slight exaggeration) to make sure I understand that Yahoo is not going to be producing 22-minute programs with earnest moms and dads solving life's little crises, or searing crime dramas ripped from the headlines.

Instead, Yahoo wants to continue developing shows similar to Prime Time in No Time, a Talk Soup-like show featuring comedian Frank Nicotero that glibly summarizes the previous evening's prime time network shows. ("The gift that reality TV gave us," Goldman chortled.)

The company claims Prime Time in No Time is the most watched original show in the history of the Internet, with 280 million streams since it launched in early 2008 and several million viewers per day, comparable to a mid-tier broadcast network program and much easier to produce: Nicotero rolls into the office after watching the east-coast network feeds at home to tape the short show.

News and entertainment will be Yahoo's focus over the next year, Pitaro said. He wants to make Yahoo known as a source of breaking news developed by professionals, building on several high-profile scoops involving college athletics and recruiting generated by the Yahoo Sports team, which he built in his prior role as vice president and general manager of Yahoo Sports. He wants to expand Yahoo's original programming to include longer 10- to 12-minute scripted programs with more of a documentary or news magazine style. And he wants to bring in people who can offer point-of-view content, as opposed to straight news or flame bait opinion.

But whatever Yahoo ends up producing, it has to take advantage of the Internet's proclivity toward short-term attention spans and viewer participation, Pitaro said. This was the fatal mistake of the Braun-era Yahoo, which Yahoo execs tried to replicate the TV production process on the Internet.

Yahoo learned that approach is simply too expensive and too fraught with risk to work on the fast-moving Internet. TV executives green-light dozens of programs to fill out the clock, knowing full well that only a handful of those programs will turn into long-term successes. But they have to fill airtime to sell commercials, whereas Internet businesses don't need to "program" against time slots and they can develop programs that fill specific needs rather than trying to ram another hospital show down our throats.

Developing short Internet-focused scripted comedy or drama shows is equally risky. There have been a few successes, but more failures, and such programs don't necessarily fit in with the rest of Yahoo's newsy content.

Will it blend?
Yahoo's strategy with the Media group hinges on a couple of factors. One is that advertisers will increasingly invest in display ads. That's Yahoo's historical strength, but it's a category advertisers have considered less attractive than search ads for several years.

In the first half of 2009--albeit a terrible six months for Internet advertising--companies spent $5.1 billion on search ads and $3.8 billion on display ads, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, with search ad spending rising slightly and display ad spending falling slightly year over year. Display ad spending grew from 2007 to 2008, but search grew faster, and some analysts think that pattern will repeat as the industry emerges from recession.

Another risk is the competition: Advertisers might prefer to work with Google's YouTube as they build out their display advertising strategy: CFO Patrick Pichette said last week that Google is now monetizing 1 billion video views a week and sold out 90 percent of its home page inventory in the third quarter.

Google recently launched a revamped display ad exchange that has a long way to go to catch Yahoo but could create problems for the company if Google is able to sign more content deals with publishers to put professionally produced content on YouTube. Still, Google seems unlikely to get into the content production business itself.

A third risk comes from the establishment media: Will they finally get their act together online? At the moment, they've mainly focused on ways of getting their television content online through partnerships like Hulu, but they haven't put a strong focus on developing shows unique to the Internet, with a few exceptions like The WB that was once a television network and is now an online-only destination.

But with Bartz at the helm, Media group execs no longer feel like Yahoo's weird cousins from Southern California. "With Carol coming on board, she's providing a clarity around becoming a destination," said Kyle Laughlin, head of sports and games at Yahoo. Jerry Yang had famously attempted to describe Yahoo as "a place where you start your day," but Bartz is attempting to refine that definition by making sure Yahoo develops the kind of content that gets people in the door--any door, any time--and encourages them to stay.

And so, the fate of one of the Silicon Valley Internet industry's seminal companies might be determined by a group of Angelenos. The perennial Yahoo debate--is it a technology company or a media company?--is entering another round.

SAN FRANCISCO--By late afternoon on Tuesday, it was getting awfully hot in the conference venue hosting TechCrunch50. Blame it on the body heat, or maybe the scores of laptops humming away.

But the air was sure to get a little hotter when it came time for the "Social Media Streams" category of start-ups to present.

The organizers of TechCrunch50 decided to save the last slot on the final day of the event (you know, right before everybody starts downing booze at the cocktail reception) to showcase new start-ups that deal with Silicon Valley's most hyped niche of the moment: real-time social media. As if Facebook and Twitter couldn't be dominating enough headlines here, there were six start-ups filling up the "stream" category: Threadsy, Lissn, Radiusly, Stribe, Clixtr, and The Whuffie Bank. And the panel of judges was joined by Twitter-savvy rapper Chamillionaire as a surprise guest.

Guess what? The judges, some of whom have been known to drink Silicon Valley hype Kool-Aid as though it were the world's finest wine, didn't think we needed most of these companies.

Oh, boy.

Threadsy's CEO Rob Goldman demos the site.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Threadsy, whose founders called it "the world's first integrated commnications client," was the best received of the bunch by far. It's a messaging client that aggregates e-mails, Facebook messages, Twitter replies, instant messages, and also "unbound" communications like general tweets and status messages that aren't necessarily geared to you. "We built Threadsy to pull you back together," CEO Rob Goldman told the audience, citing the rapidly growing percentage of Americans who are using more than one messaging client ona regular basis.

It's got a slick interface, can also aggregate automated profiles for your contacts' social-network feeds, and can track Twitter queries in an almost dizzying visual format.

"I think Robert Scoble's head was about to explode," conference organizer Jason Calacanis commented afterward, referring to the Valley mainstay's near-pathological obsession with social feed aggregation.

Scoble's response was remarkably pragmatic.

"I'm just wondering if it has the FriendFeed problem," he said, "which means there's not enough people in the world that care about aggregating all their friends' social networks," but added that he wanted to try it out as soon as possible. A few of the other judges raised questions about how Threadsy will make money, considering inboxes have never been a huge trove for ad dollars. Goldman's answer was a little bit convoluted, which this reporter took to mean that Threadsy hasn't quite figured it out yet.

Up next was Lissn, which appeared to be a combination of a news aggregator, a chat room, and a question-and-answer service. "Lissn starts with a conversation," founder Myke Armstrong said, and then demonstrated the app by posting the question "What would happen if the moon disappeared?" and watched comments and answers roll in. What wasn't really clear was exactly why anyone would use it, what with Twitter, Facebook statuses, and various "conversation" trackers out there already.

"Why would I leave Twitter to join this?" Scoble asked. Harsh words coming from the guy who loves to rave about the next shiny thing that streams words across your laptop screen.

Lissn lets people begin conversations about whatever they want.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Lissn was followed by Radiusly, which aims to solve scaling and communication problems for companies and brands that want to use microblogging and other social-media tools--many of which aren't terribly customizable. A company can build a Radiusly profile to create a directory of official social-network profiles for its employees, manage them internally, and share media like product images and videos for marketing and customer service purposes.

"I think you guys aimed at the right target but your dart hit the wall and not the target," Scoble said. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman chimed in, "In a rare position I agree with much of what Robert (Scoble) was saying." Ouch.

Next in the lineup was Stribe, which is in the same vein as Meebo's chat toolbar and Google Friend Connect--in other words, something that a smattering of established companies are already trying--adding social-networking features to any site by adding a chunk of code. Stribe can provide metrics pertaining to traffic and engagement, too.

Stribe's social network on a page (click to enlarge).

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

This was another well-designed one, but it was met with more skepticism. "I think one of the hardest things about these networks is actually getting the community to sign up," Facebook exec Mike Schroepfer said on the panel of judges. Dick Costolo gently reminded the Stribe team, "You can do too many things and then it becomes difficult for people to understand what they should use your product for...when you try to do a lot of things at once, it confuses people as to how they should use it and then they just don't use it."

The fifth company in the lineup received a somewhat better reaction. Called Clixtr, it's an iPhone app (and eventually expanding to more handsets) that combines photo-sharing with location awareness, turning the phone into what CEO Fergus Hurley called "the ultimate social camera." Clixtr's hook is event photos: The iPhone app lets you browse pictures from geo-tagged events, send photos instantly to other Clixtr users' phones, and find events near you.

"I think that was awesome," Schroepfer said, but expressed some confusion over exactly how geotagging could sync up to an event. Scoble complimented its sign-up process, but said "I'm not sure it causes enough gameplay, or enough something-else that gets me into this." He wasn't the only one to point out that getting people to use the app would be a challenge. "I would up the level of incentive for participation," Reid Hoffman said, and added that Facebook could easily build location-awareness into the photo feature of its mobile apps.

The last company was what Calacanis called "one of our wild-cards," The Whuffie Bank. Named after the deplorable term preferred by marketing-buzzword-loving social media consultants everywhere (basically, it's slang for social capital, a term coined by science fiction author Cory Doctorow), The Whuffie Bank is a non-profit organization for building a virtual currency around online reputation and influence. You can then use that currency to pay others with "whuffie," like tossing a bribe someone's way to ask them to retweet something you've posted on Twitter.

Note to the Whuffie Bankers: At the very least, please choose a different name for your organization. "Whuffie" sounds like something that would happen in porn movies. And the judges seemed to think that however cool of an idea it might be, it might be best if the currency stays in science fiction.

"The problem with these kinds of currencies is you generally need some kind of banking system to regulate them," Reid Hoffman said. "A lot of cool things...I think conceptually it's going to be extraordinary difficult."

"I want to hear in one line, what do I get?" celebrity judge Chamillionaire asked. "It seem like you've got to do a lot of work for them to raise your reputation...It seems like you can fake it."

And with that, it was happy hour. Or so everyone hoped.

SAN FRANCISCO--Two new companies are launching products designed to get the news to users faster--and from a wider variety of sources. Both are in private beta and not yet available to the general public but were demoed live at the TechCrunch50 conference.

Thoora is a new tool that clusters and aggregates news. It offers people a way to track the latest headlines with a simple ranking tool, ordering incoming stories by "Web reaction." It uses a mix of sources, including Twitter messages, blog posts, and breaking stories from more traditional news outlets. These stories are then filtered and pushed to a front page as well as Thoora's category pages.

One of the things that factors into what ends up on Thoora's front page is real-time chatter. The company tracks how many news-related tweets there have been about that topic in the last hour, as well as "Twitter impact," which is a percentage of density about that topic per 500 messages across all of Twitter over the past hour. It also tracks things like blog comments and linkbacks.

Thoora tracks hot news topics across a variety of chatter networks including blog comments, tweets, and news stories.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Insttant, on the other hand, cuts out traditional news sources entirely and uses Twitter's public stream instead. It takes these tweets and turns them into an interactive news page that covers people, places, and companies, including a way to track trending topics and user sentiment. All of this goes on a front page, which can be reordered and personalized with topics the user wants to see.

One of the service's more interesting tricks is that it automatically creates profile pages for people containing links and interests based on what they've shared in their tweets. This also happens for trending news topics, which makes for a more in-depth news-reading experience, since you can drill down on any topic and see things like recent mentions, related news and links, and a history of how popular it's been in the past few weeks.

Instant's front page is made up entirely of real-time chatter.

(Credit: Insttant)

Related:
Yahoo's Delicious adds a little Twitter
Full TechCrunch50 coverage

Google Fast Flip, a new service in testing for Google News.

(Credit: Google)

Google is testing a service that will let newshounds read Web pages of magazines and newspapers like they were flipping through an old-fashioned paper copy.

Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, plans to demonstrate Google Fast Flip later on Monday at TechCrunch50. It's a Google Labs project that expands the presence of publishers on Google News, organizing and displaying authorized screen grabs of news stories--not snippets--within the Google News site.

For example, readers will be able to scroll through a series of screen grabs bearing the publisher's logo that display stories on the weekend's NFL games or Kanye West's opinions on best female video of the year, also allowing them to browse by categories organized around Google News sections, the most popular stories, or news sources. They'll be able to read some of the story within a section of the Fast Flip site but will need to click through to the publisher's Web site in order to read the full story.

Fast Flip is being tested in partnership with 36 publishers, including The New York Times, Newsweek, and Salon.com, which will get a portion of the revenue from ads that Google plans to sell alongside Fast Flip pages.

Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations at the Times, called Fast Flip "a modest R&D project" designed as an experiment to gauge click-through rates and traffic, rather than any sort of money-making venture. He declined to comment on how much revenue Google would be sharing with the paper.

Google News, of course, has been a lightning rod for criticism from the struggling newspaper industry. Some publishers believe that Google News siphons their content and discourages readers from clicking through to the source of the story by including the headline and a snippet of the story. Others grouse about the way bloggers who are merely writing and commenting on a piece of original reporting can sometimes get more exposure on Google News than the author or publisher of the original story.

Readers will be able to see a portion of the article, but will have to click through for the whole thing. Publishers will get a cut of the revenue from ads sold on the right hand rail.

(Credit: Google)

Fast Flip gives publishers more of what they want: a chance to share in the ad revenue generated by Google News combined with the spotlight and traffic that comes along with inclusion in Google News. Mayer hinted that something like this was coming in May, when she testified before Congress that "the structure of the Web has caused the atomic unit of consumption for news to migrate from the full newspaper to the individual article."

But Fast Flip requires publishers to showcase more of their content than a simple Google News listing requires, which could allow readers to completely skip clicking through after getting the gist of the story from the first few paragraphs. On the other hand, a more attractive presentation of the story could attract more clicks than a single headline might.

Since it's a partner-only service for the moment, criticism of Fast Flip will probably be muted. Nisenholtz acknowledged that the Times is trying lots of things these days to gauge what works in Web publishing. "We're in the business of learning around here in part, and we felt that this was an interesting test."

This isn't Google's only attempt to work with an industry that has been so critical of the company in the past. Google is also said to be testing a micropayments service for other publishers that don't want to embrace the free-content movement.

Here's a visual of how status tagging works on Facebook.

(Credit: Facebook)

Facebook on Thursday announced that members can now link to other members' profiles in their status messages by using the @ symbol. The move is clearly inspired by the popularity of Twitter's "@-replies."

This new feature basically means that you can link to the profiles of your friends and other pages on Facebook, and that your friends will be informed when they've been tagged. It's currently rolling out to members' profiles.

Engineer Tom Occhino explains it in a post on the Facebook blog:

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend's name to something you are posting, just include the "@" symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications, and (fan) pages.

The feature will soon expand to third-party services that let you update your Facebook status, presumably including status message aggregators such as TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop.

The development prompted some of my industry competitors to use the word "BREAKING" in their headlines (Really? Can we please leave this term for things on the level of earthquakes, election results, and stampedes at Jonas Brothers concerts?) because it's yet another big sign that Facebook is gradually but aggressively encroaching upon Twitter's territory in its attempt to own the Web's trove of real-time conversation. Twitter is nowhere near the size of Facebook, nor is it anywhere near as feature-rich, but it's enough of a disruption in the space to make Facebook keep trying to get the upper hand.

As you may recall, this back-and-forth has included Facebook's failed attempt to buy Twitter, the "real-time stream" upgrades to the social network's home page, and its acquisition of FriendFeed, a streaming feed aggregator.

On an unrelated note, for brands using Facebook's fan pages, this could result in an interesting analytics product. The company hasn't yet said whether or how the managers of fan pages will be notified that they have been tagged--for a brand with a lot of fans, this could be a lot--and you might imagine that some of the demographics regarding who's talking about them and how often could be packaged into a nice marketing tool.

It'd also be a formidable rival to the "analytics dashboard" that Twitter plans to start selling to businesses later this year, which would be the San Francisco-based company's first concrete revenue model.

The meeting scheduler utility TimeBridge is growing up and expanding its mission. No longer just a schedule helper, the service is getting more tools to keep meetings that have already started running on time.

The company is still selling an online meeting product, based on DimDim. It's adding now a tool to let attendees collaborate on the agenda beforehand (I doubt it will ever get used, people are too lazy), and more importantly, it's getting a nag feature that will let a meeting organizer set the service to ping people via SMS or e-mail right before a meeting starts. Once a meeting is underway, there's also a new option to nag laggards to show up, again via SMS or e-mail.

The TimeBridge Web and e-mail UIs are cleaned up a little.

(Credit: TimeBridge)

The ping features have a feedback mechanism as well. Messages come with short URLs that direct to response page that includes quick-reply options such as "Be there in 5 minutes" or "Sorry I can't make it." Unfortunately, "Sorry but I have to vacuum my cat" is not in the quick list, but you can type whatever you want as a reply instead. The ping feature will eventually be part of the paid TimeBridge Plus service for $8.95 a month, but it's free at the moment.

The iPhone and other mobile interfaces for TimeBridge let you gracefully (or not) bow out of a meeting.

(Credit: TimeBridge)

There's also a very interesting new iPhone app for TimeBridge currently pending approval at Apple. It lets you scan your agenda (with a time line for your meeting), or ping the late people. You can also use the iPhone app to dial in to a TimeBridge conference call directly.

The service gets a cleaned-up user interface overall, which should help reduce the annoyance that people may feel when they get TimeBridge invitations but aren't familiar with the service. And there's an improved way for people to set up one-on-one meetings; it appropriately allows a little more schedule sharing than many-person meetings.

CEO Yori Neklin told me these changes reflect his belief that "TimeBridge solved scheduling, but meetings themselves are still screwed up." I'm not so sure scheduling is indeed solved, but I do agree that most meetings are awful. I believe the new features will help more meetings start on time, and might just make a tiny dent in the content of meetings themselves. But that's fine. Every little bit helps.

See also Tungle launches non-annoying scheduling service and Beyond freemium: The Timebridge business model works.

Is this Facebook's big assault on Twitter?

(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Baptiste)

Facebook, it appears, was not about to let Google get this week's award for shadowy new projects. On Tuesday night, a number of users--including Mashable blogger Ben Parr--received notifications that they were beta testers for something called "Facebook Lite."

The notifications, as well as the site hosted on the subdomain lite.facebook.com, disappeared within minutes. It seems to have been rolled out prematurely by mistake.

"Last night, the test was temporarily exposed to a larger set of users by mistake," an e-mailed statement from Facebook representative Brandee Barker read. "We have not opened up access to lite.facebook.com to all users at this time. People who are not part of the test and are trying to access 'Lite' will be directed to Facebook.com as usual.

From what it looks like, Facebook Lite is a simpler version of the site and pares down profiles to basic information and a stream of status updates. The easy conclusion is that this would make Facebook's service look a whole lot like Twitter. And given the fact that Facebook had attempted to acquire Twitter, got snubbed, and then acquired the significantly smaller real-time streaming site FriendFeed this week, a Twitter-like service would be rife with implications.

Here's Facebook's official explanation: "We are currently testing a simplified alternative to Facebook.com that loads a specific set of features quickly and efficiently. Similar to the Facebook experience you get on your mobile phones, Facebook 'Lite' is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept friend requests, write on people's walls, and look at photos and status updates."

Blogger Jason Baptiste managed to get screenshots.

The obvious guess is that this is yet another attempt on Facebook's part to stay abreast of Twitter in the race to own the "real-time streaming Web." There are, potentially, other reasons for launching a simplified site:

• For use on slower connections.

• For stripped-down computers in developing markets, where the 250,000,000-member Facebook wants to make inroads.

• As a more "portable" profile that could potentially tie into Facebook's aim of being all over the Web rather than a destination site.

Facebook hinted that the "developing markets" answer could be an accurate one. "We are currently testing Facebook Lite in countries where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience," the statement from Facebook explained.

Got any guesses, speculation, or conspiracy theories? Comments are welcome.

This post was updated at 7:46 a.m. PT.