Webware

Location awareness is hot, from gamelike social services such as Foursquare and Gowalla to platforms such as Google Latitude. Now one start-up is hoping to make it as easy for any company to integrate into a Web or mobile service as it is for retailers to use PayPal. Meet SimpleGeo, which on Thursday is launching into a private beta.

Boulder, Colo.-based SimpleGeo, co-founded by former Digg engineer Joe Stump and Socialthing founder Matt Galligan (who sold the would-be FriendFeed competitor to AOL), started out as a company called Crash Corp. earlier this year. The goal was to make augmented-reality applications for mobile devices like the iPhone, but the founders said that building the location-aware infrastructure for their first game took a whopping three months.

So they changed their company name and angle: SimpleGeo's purpose is to build that infrastructure for other companies to eliminate the development hell, hoping to do for "geo" apps what PayPal did for sites requiring payment systems or Facebook did for sites requiring logins and social-networking features. The complete offering, which can also build in augmented-reality features, encompasses storage, analytics, and a software development kit (SDK).

Three versions are available: free, $399 per month, and $2,499 per month. A public version is slated to launch in the spring.

Nobody's really doing this yet, though apparently a few other start-ups are toying with similar business plans, and SimpleGeo is still new enough that it has not yet closed a round of venture funding. Because it's in private beta, we also haven't yet seen just how powerful it is (though Galligan has posted some test video to Flickr) so it's not yet possible to answer the big, glaring question: what if Google makes a big, developer-focused Latitude push that could snuff out smaller competition?

New start-up Factery Labs is launching its first service on Tuesday, a technology called FactRank that can tear through Web pages and collect what it calls "facts." These are bits of information from each source page that Factery Labs' algorithm then organizes into an order of importance.

What this means for you is that developers will soon make use of the technology in third-party search engines or on Web pages to very quickly deliver reading summaries. This cuts out most (or all) of the parts you don't care about, while organizing the bits you might. It also manages to do all this in real time.

The FactRank technology was created by Paul Pedersen, who has a good background in search, including gigs at Inktomi, Google, and Powerset. CNET News met with him and co-founder Sean Gaddis (former Skype and eBay'er) on Monday to get a demo of how the technology works.

In a nutshell it goes like this: FactRank goes through each Web page or source (in whatever index it's searching from) finding semantic tip-offs like declarative sentences. It then cross references each of those against one another, surfacing some of the most relevant ones to the top, as well as factoring in the order of how they appeared. What the user then gets is a tidy list of statements, each of which is sourced and given a level of relevancy based on their appearances in all of the indexed source pages combined.

Whew. Got that? Great, here's an example of what it looks like in motion, as seen on a basic search for Sarah Palin on Twitter:

One of the Factery Labs example applications is a search engine that finds facts from Twitter source results.

(Credit: CNET)

Of course, one of the problems with Factery Labs' approach across multiple sources--be it Twitter, or multiple URLs is accuracy; like how can it realize something like The Onion is not the same as the Associated Press?

The short answer is that it can't. Factery Labs can't determine the truth value of what it finds, nor will it ever. "It goes beyond any existing technology. And nobody knows how to do that. I mean, I don't even know how to do that--people don't even know how to do that," Pedersen said. "We are absolutely neutral. We have nothing in the system that has any bias in terms of anything. The only mechanism we maintain is egregious spam, the bad guys."

Along with maintaining a blacklist of these bad sites, FacteryLabs also keeps a list of good sources, or ones that continuously deliver. The more often an author successfully recommends a usable page, the faster they'll accumulate rank among the results.

What you can play with today
As for applying that technology to some consumer products, Factery Labs is launching with a handful of development partners, each of which has already built a tool that makes use of FactRank. The most notable one comes from Sobees which is using the service to add relevancy to Twitter and FriendFeed search results--something that's no small feat.

Users can do a search on Sobees' Silverlight-based Twitter client as usual, but there will now be a FactRank button that can sort through those tweets. It does a quick once-over of all of the results, and will filter the most relevant information to the very top. Included in each of its results is also a shortlist of the facts it finds on every page.

One of the first third-party apps to make use of Factery Labs is Sobees, which is adding its fact finding filters and relevancy tools to Twitter and FriendFeed search.

(Credit: Factery Labs)

Advanced users might find more utility in an updated version of Ultimate Info, an extension for Firefox that does a number of things with on-page data. Starting Tuesday, it will let users select links on a page, each of which gets the fact-finding treatment using FactRank.

In our demo, Gaddis used Ultimate Info on the front page of popular site Drudge Report, highlighting about six or seven URLs that were on the page, then running a FactRank query, which brought in its fact results in just a few seconds. As Pedersen explained, users could run something similar on a long article (or several long articles about the same subject), and FactRank's algorithm would be able to provide a fact summary in short order.

Not launching on Tuesday but where the company expects to see the most development is on mobile devices. "Our analysis shows that mobile devices are a prime target for this technology because the latency produces a lot of resistance in the browse experience," said Pedersen. Instead of a user just getting back a link dump of all the URLs it finds, the FactRank engine will go out, process those results, then deliver users with a summary of the best selection of facts--a move that will save the end user from having to wait for any extra pages to load.

If you want to give some of the third party Factery Labs tools a run, you can find them on the company's implementations section. There you'll also find a test search engine that's running off of Twitter's index.

Google Social Search is ready to surface content created by your friends in regular search results pages.

(Credit: Google)

Google is ready to show off its concept for social search while it figures out what to do with Twitter's fire hose of data.

Last week at the Web 2.0 conference Google's Marissa Mayer demonstrated the service, which will go live as a Google Labs project on Monday. Google Social Search links the concepts of so-called "real-time" search with Google Profiles and custom search results, allowing searchers to find content created by friends or contacts with Google Profiles.

Google Social Search was developed separately without the Twitter deal in mind, said Amit Singal, a Google fellow. The opt-in service provides your Gmail contacts and friends on public social-networking services with the content you've linked to your Google Profile, such as blogs, Twitter or Friendfeed accounts, or any number of published material.

That means that if you've linked your personal blog to your Google Profile, your contacts will be able to see your blog posts related to a given query directly in their search results pages. Those links will be placed at the bottom of the search results page for now, and searchers will also have the option to refine the search results page with a new "social" link on the left-hand side of the page to focus just on content from your network.

Public social-networking content from friends of friends will also be available through this service, with a description of how that person's content is linked to your network appearing within the search result.

Evan Williams (left) and John Battelle (right)

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--In anticipation of an onstage interview with Twitter CEO Evan Williams at the Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday afternoon, conference organizer and Federated Media CEO John Battelle told the audience to expect "a surprise" during the talk.

Turns out that "surprise" was actually a recently unearthed video clip of Williams in 1994, explaining the Internet on behalf of a company called Illumination Labs and sporting a haircut that looked like it belonged on the set of '90s alterna-teen flick "Empire Records." (No, we don't have a snapshot of it yet.)

Williams didn't really say a whole lot else about where Twitter's going, beyond what the world already knows: it's been growing fast. It turned down a buyout offer from Facebook. It just raised a ton of money. It still hasn't disclosed a long-term revenue model.

Evan Williams

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

"It's not like we're spending our days looking in the couch cushions for the elusive revenue model, but obviously we've done a lot of thinking about it," Williams said, declining to comment on the potential of search deals with Google or Microsoft. "I can't tell you exactly what the model is, but it's pretty obvious to you that there may be some advertising that makes sense...there's a lot of commercial activity on Twitter today, there's a lot of brand marketers who use Twitter today, and it works. We think of Twitter (as) not a social network, it's an information network...a substantial part of that is commercial and theoretically monetizable information."

Williams, who previously founded Pyra Labs and sold its flagship Blogger product to Google, took over as CEO of Twitter from fellow co-founder Jack Dorsey last year. Dorsey, who remains Twitter chairman, is working on a new mobile commerce start-up called Square.

In his talk at Web 2.0 Summit, Williams mentioned new features like user-generated "lists," currently in beta, and said that they may end up replacing the site's current (and much-maligned) "suggested user" list altogether. ("It's gone on too long, and I desperately want to kill it or evolve it.") He also said that "some things we're launching" may counteract recent slowdowns in Twitter's U.S. Web-based traffic, which was growing exponentially not so long ago.

"We are seeing slowing of growth in some areas and accelerating growth in other areas. Twitter is very hard to measure, even for us," Williams said. "The biggest two areas that we're seeing growth is on mobile and internationally." Last week, the company inked new mobile deals in India and Japan; currently, its five biggest markets are the U.S., the U.K., Japan, Brazil, and Indonesia, which has been "growing like crazy lately."

So what does he think of the other players in the real-time Web? He's not sure what to make of Google Wave ("I sure as hell don't know what Google Wave is going to be. I haven't wrapped my head around it yet") but underscored that in Twitter's early days he wasn't sure what that would turn out to be either. And as for Facebook, he shrugged off speculation that the social-networking giant started aping Twitter when it was unable to actually buy it.

"I don't know how Facebook's feature prioritization works. I suspect that they came to a lot of the same conclusions we did," Williams said. "In the global sense, I'm pretty sure the world is big enough for Facebook and Twitter, and fundamentally I think they're good at different things. Facebook is phenomenal at communications among people who know each other."

Facebook ultimately purchased a far smaller streaming-information start-up, FriendFeed, this summer.

"We had a few conversations with our friends in Palo Alto (Facebook) and ultimately I just didn't see a reason to sell if that opportunity would have presented itself because it's not the point," he continued regarding the failed acquisition. "The point is really to see what we can build. We believe very strongly in that at Twitter, and enabling the open exchange of information is a good thing for the world."

It's his usual schpiel. Aside from the Nirvana-era haircut, there wasn't a whole lot to tweet about here.

This week we got a sneak peek at a new social tracking site that's launching a little later this year. Called Strings, it's made up of tools that let you passively share your various on- and offline activities with others online, all in the hopes of both getting and giving recommendations from its online community.

In many ways Strings feels a lot like FriendFeed. For example, just like FriendFeed you're able to tie Strings into to various services you're using like Amazon, Netflix, and social-bookmarking tools so that it can implicitly share information about what you're doing on each of those services with others. And like FriendFeed, this information can be tracked and filtered depending on what type of content it is, and what group of friends it's coming from.

Where it differs though, is that this data feed begins with complete anonymity; nobody ever has to know it's you who is feeding the site. If and when you decide you want to start identifying data as your own, Strings has a very deep set of privacy controls to protect what other people can see.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--The month of September was jam-packed with the launch of more than 100 new start-ups and services at high-profile conferences like Demo Fall and TechCrunch50. In a much smaller gathering Tuesday night at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus, just 10 companies--all in the seed stage--got to pitch as part of Vator.tv's Juice Pitcher event.

Some were new, while many were already launched and looking to pick up investments to get off the ground. These range from a new service that helps you rent out your car to strangers when you're not using it, to a mobile app that lets you haggle with local retailers on prices for goods and services. Here's a rundown of the presenters:

Viralogy (which actually launched back in May) calls itself an "Alexa for people." It lets you pit people and blogs against one another to determine who has the higher online social rank. Its "Vscore" system figures out those rankings using a mix of things like Google Pagerank, how much traffic your blog gets, how many people are linking to your blog, and your popularity on services like Twitter.

All these factors are rolled into a person or blog's Vscore, which can be compared with others and tracked over time.

In Viralogy's pitch, CEO Yu-kai Chou said that the Vscore system will eventually incorporate other social services like Facebook, YouTube, Digg, LinkedIn and FriendFeed.

IDNTITI is a social-rating tool that's trying to get rid of a standardized rating system in place of having users etch in the merits of a particular business or product using one of the rating systems it provides.

What's really odd about the system is that IDNTITI is not making these ratings a public affair. If you rate a business or product, others cannot see that you left that rating unless you decide to make it visible, either through a widget, or if a user goes out of their way to request to see who left that rating. That's a very different approach to something like Yelp, where a users' reviews define them.

RelayRides is a peer-to-peer car sharing network. Car owners can put their car up for rent so that they can make money when it's not in use. RelayRides then provides insurance and keeps a records that cars, and all the times it's rented out to others.

The company installs an unlocking and starting mechanism similar to something like ZipCar, so that the owner doesn't have to worry about being around to swap off the keys. Owners also get to pick how much they charge, where they're going, and when they're available. In turn, the company picks up a 15 percent transaction fee for each rental.

The service is launching in Baltimore in the next few months and plans to roll it out to other markets if successful.

TribeVibe lets users track how content is seen shared and linked around the Web, basically providing a dashboard to see all the places it goes once it's up. It measures its reach across the Web, then turns that into a "drumbeat." This number can then be stuck into any particular piece of content's to show users how popular it is--kind of like the retweet or Digg button but more passive.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

The company is currently in stealth mode and going into private beta later this month, and plans to go mainly after bloggers who want to know a little more about their audience. Along with its core analytics tools, TribeVibe will also have a way for users to plug the system into their own analytics tracking tools for $20 a month.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Facebook has unleashed a Tornado, and it's hoping that some eager engineers will go catch it.

Earlier this month, Facebook released the open-source Web server framework called Tornado, which powers the real-time streaming behind its latest toy, social feed aggregator FriendFeed. And on Wednesday evening at the office that most recently housed the FBFund incubator program, senior open programs manager David Recordon and director of products Bret Taylor held a "tech talk" to pitch Tornado to a crowd of several dozen interested members of the Web development community.

"We had actually been planning on open-sourcing (Tornado)" prior to Facebook's acquisition of FriendFeed, said Taylor, who had served as CEO of the start-up. "When we got to Facebook we thought it was a really good opportunity to do it."

The slant of Wednesday evening's talk (which was quite technical, so I won't be going into significant detail): if you're dealing with real-time, streaming content, Facebook thinks Tornado is for you. And if you've been listening to anything that Facebook has been saying recently, it believes the real-time Web is the future for everyone--not just its own company.

"FriendFeed's a real-time system," Taylor said as he described how the Python-based Tornado framework's non-blocking nature was ideal for real-time Web services. "Essentially, every active user of FriendFeed maintains an open connection to the FriendFeed servers."

Both Recordon and Taylor are recent arrivals at Facebook: Recordon joined Facebook last month as its resident open-source guru, and the company had acquired FriendFeed a few weeks earlier in a deal that brought on board both a top-notch engineering team (its founders, including Taylor, were Google veterans) and cutting-edge technology for amassing and indexing real-time Web conversations--so cutting-edge, in fact, that it was unclear as to how the mainstream would ever actually accept it.

At the time, there were questions about what, exactly, Facebook would actually do with FriendFeed. In the meantime it's become clear that acquiring the would-be Twitter rival allowed Facebook to leap ahead with some of its development of new, real-time-focused features as well as to enhance existing ones with FriendFeed's technology and brainpower.

Open-sourcing the technology doesn't have an obvious financial end for Facebook. But it will ideally mean that some of the developer community will be marching to Facebook's beat, at a time when the company continues to compete with the far smaller Twitter for a majority share of what's come to be known as the real-time Web.

As for its Python foundations, Taylor said that FriendFeed had been looking to build Tornado in a manner "sophisticated enough that we could do all the things we wanted but well known enough so that a new engineer could theoretically understand our code base right away...Python has a lot of its flaws, I wish it had real inline functions like Javascript, but for all of its flaws it's actually pretty nice to use in practice."

Taylor told me afterward that no concrete plans have been put into action as to which Facebook features may be getting a FriendFeed makeover (so as to speak) but hinted that one getting talked about for some enhancement from the former FriendFeed team is Facebook Chat, the site's instant messaging client, because of its obviously real-time nature.

Tornado isn't the first technology that Facebook, still criticized by some of the open-source community for its heavy reliance on proprietary technology and a login wall, has released as open-source code: well over a year ago, the company released the code for a significant portion of its developer platform.

Adobe AIR applications are typically well designed. They feature a sleek look and relatively fast response times. TweetDeck (Windows | Mac), a popular Adobe AIR app, has put the platform on the map. It has caused some developers to view AIR as a viable alternative platform to building a Web site.

Nomee (Windows|Mac), a company that helps users see what celebrities, prominent figures, or their friends are up to online, is one such app.

The basics
Nomee is based on "cards." When you first sign up for the site (you can use OpenID if you don't want to create unique Nomee credentials), you'll be presented with celebrities and prominent figures who currently have cards on the site. But before you start thinking that there are scores of celebs on Nomee, think again: for the most part, those cards were created by Nomee users, not the celebrities themselves.

When you view a card, it displays an image of the person, followed by several sites or services that are related to them. When you click on one of those services, you'll be brought to its respective Web page. For example, if you click on the Twitter logo on my card, you can view my Twitter page.

That's me on Nomee, even though I didn't create the page.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

If you like what you see, you can "add" the card to your Nomee Dashboard. From there, Nomee will track all the card updates. It will alert you when there's something new for you to check out.

Nomee's Newstream lets you view all the updates from every card you follow. Thanks to such a nice design and some filtering options, you shouldn't have any trouble finding exactly what you're looking for. It's arguably Nomee's best feature.

The Nomee Newstream in action.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Card creation
Of course, Nomee isn't just a place where you can see what your favorite celebrities are up to. You can also create your own card to share with friends. Those same friends can create cards and share their social profiles and links with you.

At the risk of sounding like a complete tool, the best way to describe Twones, which launched Thursday, is "FriendFeed for music." The Amsterdam-based start-up aggregates a variety of social and not-so-social music services--currently a total of 28, including Imeem, iLike, Blip.fm, iTunes, Grooveshark, and Last.fm (owned by CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News)--through a Firefox browser plugin.

Once you've set up your account, Twones (which I'm guessing is pronounced "tunes," rather than rhymes with "phones") will compile your playlists and listening history but will also, much like iLike, provide artist information, upcoming concert dates, and photos and videos sourced from Flickr and YouTube. You can also bookmark favorite songs and find out what your friends are listening to.

Twones doesn't actually host licensed music and the company doesn't seem to want to, which is good to hear: streaming music start-ups are one of digital media's most troubled niches, plagued by both legal issues and difficulty making money.

The moneymaking prospects for Twones, which has already taken investment dollars from the Holland arm of concert and promotion giant Live Nation, aren't yet clear. The company will serve ads, but hopes to also make money by offering premium accounts down the line for users as well as business accounts for artists and marketers who want more detailed information about who's listening to their music and who could be untapped marketing targets (among other things). But these are all obviously dependent on an active user base, and relying on an installed browser plugin may deter some users--especially since it's currently Firefox-only.

Twones is in private beta but we have 500 invites available for CNET readers. Use the promo code CNET09 when you register.