Ebay takes Craigslist on in the US with Kijiji
Not content with owning just 25% of online classified ad site Craigslist, Ebay has launched competitor Kijiji in the United States. Kijiji, which means “village” in Swahili, has been available in many parts of the world for awhile now but Ebay hadn’t felt that it could gain much marketshare on its home shores. The services are being offered at a pretty good price point: Free. The site hopes to later charge its users for premium services or perhaps listing ads.
At launch Kijaji supports 220 cities in every US state but it’s questionable if the attractively designed site will lure away the vibrant community of Craigslist. Odds aren’t looking good. At launch time there are only a handful of ads posted for each area. Most of the new site’s features are clones of Craigslist features with a few exceptions. Messaging is handled on site - without the need for using an external email client. Most notable is that Ebay is leveraging their acquisition of Skype by enabling “Click to Call” to put buyers in touch with sellers via VoIP. Managing the posts you made and tracking those that you’re interested in are made easier by the “My Kijiji” section, but this portion seems a bit sparse.
Other than the updated contact features and attractive interface Kijiji is a feature-for-feature copy of Craigslist without the massive number of users that makes Craigslist successful. It looks like Ebay should just be happy with the portion of the market that they already own.
del.icio.us Digg Reddit StumbleUpon TechnoratiFlock flaps closer to takeoff with a new version 0.9
Flock, a web browser based on Firefox but filled with more “Web 2.0-y goodness”, has released a new version. This time they’re up to 0.9 beta. The browser is tightly integrated with a lot of the popular social web services like Flickr, LiveJournal, Ma.gnolia.com, Xanga, YouTube and many more.
The most prominent new feature is “My World” a glorified personalized Start Page like iGoogle. It’s a specialized feed reader for updated photos, videos and feeds to make it easy to track your social-web “world” along with a list of your favorite bookmarks. The integrated view exposes many features that were previously shunted into toolbars tacked on to the browsing experience.
The photo bar, now known as the Media Bar, has also experienced a big upgrade with the addition of video support for YouTube and AOL’s Truveo which is experiencing a lot of growth. Navigating through images and video has improved with new controls, search and filtering capabilities. The thumbnail images in the Media Bar can also be previewed with a mouse much like Microsoft’s Live Search for images. For those of you uploading images to Flickr and Photobucket, these interfaces have been revamped as well although it’s not as feature-rich as many 3rd party applications.
Thankfully the built-in feed reader has received some attention. It actually may be a contender for some people. The feed reader now supports a “river of news” view and the speed has improved immensely. I’m a big fan of readers that only mark articles that have been displayed on the screen as read, and Flock’s reader certainly does that well. The ability to add feeds and media discovered on web pages has also been improved. Those who pride themselves on being super organized will be pleased to find that they can now create nested folders for categorizing feeds. This functionality has been extended to local bookmarks as well. Even with all the new functionality the user interface remains remarkably intuitive.
A new addition to Flock is the “Web Clipboard”, a sidebar that you can drag photos, links, some web video and text into. You’re able to organize items into folders or click the “blog” button to open up Flock’s integrated blog editing tool. Here you can author a post and add descriptive tags. Unfortunately embedding audio and video isn’t supported at this time. A few new blogging platforms are enabled by version 0.9 including Xanga and Blogsome. It’s not the best editor but it’s certainly acceptable. I think the Web Clipboard will be invaluable for people looking to quickly save off web content that interests them and then quickly enable them to add their own comments.
The updated Firefox underpinnings have added features that have been present in Firefox for awhile now: In-line spell check, anti-phishing and restore-able browser sessions. I imagine quite a few security vulnerabilities have been addressed as well.
With the addition of some new features Flock is shaking off users’ perception that it’s just a collection of Firefox plugins that have been bundled with the browser. It’s clear that a lot of effort has gone into integrating the features with each other in a manner that isn’t overbearing. Even so this browser is clearly for people that are already comfortable with a lot of social websites. Otherwise the sheer number of items that light up, can be clicked on or animate when you hover the mouse may be too much to bear. The problem is that this market is already familiar with adding plugins to Firefox, so they may opt for best-of-breed offerings like Fire Uploader, PicLens, Sage and ScribeFire and more. Worse yet, Mozilla has its sights set on adding social network integration to Firefox with something called The Coop. This may pull the rug right out from under Flock. In the mean time Flock is a pretty darn good product and I’m sure their developers are hard at work coming up with new features to differentiate themselves from the competition.
del.icio.us Digg Reddit StumbleUpon TechnoratiHistory repeating itself: Facebook as AOL 2.0?
There’s been a lot of talk recently about how Facebook, MySpace and other social networks are basically the second coming of AOL. The term “walled garden” pops up a lot, usually with a derogatory meaning. With the sheer volume of buzz lately Facebook has been a popular subject. A few days ago Steve Rubel linked to his coworker Leah Jones’ blog about a comment that equated the media to Gramarcy Park. Gramarcy Park is the quitesential walled garden:
Gramercy Park is a beautiful, soft, manicured park in the city. It is the best park, luxurious and green. Gramercy Park is gated. Only the wealthly people who own property around the park are allowed to access it. What would happen if NYC raised the capital to buy the park and take the gate down?
It would get dirtier. There would be more people. It would be harder to police. There would be graffiti. There would be more crime. Gramercy Park would no longer be Gramercy Park.
The web, like everything else, is subject to the pendulum-like swings. At first websites were very distributed and usually available only to the very geeky. Along came AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve. They made the online world accessible by crafting a careful and friendly user experience. Eventually the world wanted more features and less hand-holding. People migrated away from these services to the fullness of the Internet. For the longest time AOL tried to keep their gates shut, but that didn’t keep people from leaving. Years have gone by and opinions are changing yet again. Now with so much of peoples’ lives being conducted on the web there’s just too much to keep track of, too many different user interfaces to navigate and people just want to manage their lives simply. They’re tired off all the dirt, graffiti and crime. They want a single source to manage their social life.
I find it very interesting that the people who espouse the wonders of GTD and feed aggregators don’t recognize that many of these social networks fulfill the same needs. Where many use RSS for blogs and news, Facebook functions very similar and arguably better for social uses.
Why better you say? Because it lets them manage their identity (and identities). They don’t have to deal with the lack of support for authenticated feeds. They don’t have to worry as much about who is looking at their photos or reading their posts. They can track who has access and they understand that the Internet is not a safe place. Not everyone believes that the fullness of their life should be broadcast to the world. Pageviews and ‘Net-reputation don’t have the same lure to those outside the A-list and wannabe A-List bloggers. Best of all it limits the sheer number of random accounts and passwords they have to remember. Remember UselessAccount.com? Facebook also helps you identify others as well. Spam and phishing problems are vastly reduced. If I receive a message from a friend, then I’m pretty sure that they’re actually the one that sent the message. I don’t have nearly so much confidence in email.
As Dare says Network Effects Mean Walled Gardens are Here to Stay:
To me it seems pretty obvious why the average person would want to to use one application for managing photos, blogging, IM, reading feeds with updates from their friends, etc instead if using half a dozen products. Especially if the one product fosters a sense of community better than any of the other individual products does on its own. Of course, I’ve said this all before in my post Why Facebook is Bigger than Blogging so I won’t repeat myself here.
Facebook succeeds because it automatically provides all of those applications for a user without them having to hit 10 different websites to provide the same functionality. There are certainly a lot of people that prefer an integrated suite over best of breed. By using a platform like Facebook I don’t need to manage the links between those services for myself or the hundreds more from my friends. It all just works and becomes even more useful as more friends begin using it. All of that is presented in a much richer interface than most feed readers.
If Facebook is a walled garden then it definitely exploits one of the genre’s best qualities by providing a consistent user interface. Unfortunately many of the new applications diminish the clean utility of the Facebook layout but it’s still better than learning to navigate Flickr, random blogs or worse MySpace profiles.
Facebook really as “walled” as AOL was? You don’t have to pay for access thanks to the wonderful world of advertising. You’re also not being denied access to the fullness of the Internet. Facebook lives inside of the envelope. The fact that everything doesn’t bleed into Google is a good thing. It may reduce some of the richness but for most users that’s a welcome trade-off compared to losing their job or having too much of their embarrassing “private life” publicly recorded until the end of time.
I think it’s unfair to dismiss Facebook entirely as useless closed-system. It certainly tries to offer a good number of the benefits of an open system balanced with the advantages of a well-designed and easy to manage information hub. It is true that once your information goes in that it may never come out… but perhaps that’s a feature, not a bug. It may just be me, but the aforementioned pendulum seems to be swinging faster these days. It’s quite possible that Facebook will recognize the value of completely open systems and learn from AOL’s mistake of not adapting quick enough. Time will tell.
del.icio.us Digg Reddit StumbleUpon TechnoratiPowerset Opens Up
I had the pleasure of attending a small gathering at Powerset’s office in San Francisco this evening to get a preview of what’s to come from the highly publicized start up. A lot of interesting demonstrations were given and we heard a lot about the technology and platform they’re building.
Powerset is based around Natural Language Processing and to that effect they’ve licensed key technology from Xerox PARC to better index the web. Where Google focuses on the statistical features of web pages, Powerset’s technology examines the actual meaning and relationships of words in each sentence. It important to note that this processing isn’t applied solely to the web, but also the search queries. For examples of how this is superior you can check out Powerset’s blog and learn how Powerset can kick Google’s butt at figuring out “What Steve Jobs said about the iPod”. (I’m sure all the people I saw camped out at the Apple Store on my walk back to my hotel would be interested in that.)
The NLP technology they’re using isn’t new, in fact it’s been under development for 30+ years now. What they’ve managed to do, and what they think will keep them ahead of the competition, is the fact that Powerset has reduced the processing time for indexing one sentence down from two minutes to one second. The plan is to “ride Moore’s Law” to make processing the web as a whole a possibility. Currently they’re limited to a select few sites to crawl: Wikipedia, New York Times and ontological resources like Freebase and WordNet. Their improvements certainly sound impressive… but if you take Wikipedia’s almost 2 million pages, each with an average length of 25 sentences it would take almost a year and a half to index the information. Yikes. Spreading that work across Powerset’s ~750 servers would still require nearly a day to process. Of course they’ll be using Amazon’s EC2 and building out their data centers to improve this. Even so, expanding this beyond Wikipedia and indexing billions of web pages may prove to be problematic. Their next goal is to index blogs… and I wish them luck. According to Technorati that’s 1.7 million new posts per day.
The real challenge will be getting users transitioned (back?) to using natural language search. Keywords do a pretty darn good job as a shortcuts and pointing us in the right direction. Most keyword based searches handle the most common question about an entity by default… and Google sends us on our way… fast. Being blazing fast is definitely key given how quickly people can become dissatisfied when searches take longer than a second. From the demo earlier today, it looks this delay will definitely affect Powerset. Most of their example queries took a second or longer to complete. Performing the semantic analysis of the search query takes time and a lot of computational power which leaves Powerset at a disadvantage. Many employees were quick to point out that their technology falls back to keyword based search if their semantic analysis fails, but the delay involved could prove to be their undoing. They’re also not Google (or any another keyword focused search engine), so for many short queries they may not be competitive.
It’s quite timely to note from Dare’s notes on Google’s Scalability Conference:
NOVICE QUERY: Why doesn’t anyone carry an umbrella in Seattle?
EXPERT QUERY: weather seattle washingtonNOVICE QUERY: can I hike in the seattle area?
EXPERT QUERY: hike seattle areaOn average, it takes a new Google user 1 month to go from typing novice queries to being a search expert. This means that there is little payoff in optimizing the site to help novices since they become search experts in such a short time frame.
I’d contend that most users have already made that jump and that a lot of younger users are conditioned to search via keyword. I’m convinced that with the evolution of text messaging people have begun to natively communicate with keywords. This may be a temporary state however. Verbal communication still retains a lot of the richness that Powerset will be poised to take advantage of, especially in the mobile space. They’re definitely looking at this and have key team members with experience in the area. It will remain to be seen if Powerset can pull together a strong enough product within the next 9 months, which is the amount of time they have until they “have” to go live.
So I’ve spewed forth a lot of doom and gloom about a company that I’m really excited about. What gives? Steve Newcomb, COO and Founder of Powerlabs, has said that he wants his company to be the most open start-up out there. They’re going to publish their predictive modeling for data center growth to match their user growth. Ruby developer Kevin Clark said they’re looking to release some of their internal tools around packaging, monitoring and more. Newcomb also talked about how they were sharing some of their innovative practices with other startups. There’s a large sense of giving back to the community… and they want the community to help decide where their company goes.
Speaking of community, Powerset will open up a section of their site called Powerlabs in September. Their goal is to create a social networking site focused around their technology. They’re off to a good start with over 10,000 people registered already. According to current thinking, users will be able to suggest and vote on features, make profiles and gain reputation. Like most of Powerset this is all subject to change. Even the user interface for Powerlabs is radically different from screenshot released last week. Ultimately users will be able to submit ideas on how to shape Powerset’s core product, even it’s name, something that Newcomb admitted isn’t set in stone.
To me it sounds like we have a company with a great underlying technology that doesn’t quite know how to apply it to the end user or if the end user will even like it. In the months approaching the September launch I believe Powerset will attempt to address some of the technology issues and continue to search internally for their killer-app that is good enough with the existing limitations. Barring that they’ll have a ton of buzz, a kickass staff, a handful of good ideas and a technology with a lot of potential. Sounds like a great target for acquisition, right? Can you think of any companies out there that already know how to scale? In the meantime the genuinely altruistic management will help other startups with the tools and processes they’ll need to ultimately be successful… or they’re just making it easier to start their next company. Everyone wins.
del.icio.us Digg Reddit StumbleUpon TechnoratiBabble Babble Baeble Babelgum
In keeping with projections that Babelgum is going to position itself content-wise between the mainstream (Joost) and the torrent of questionable quality user-generated content (YouTube), yesterday the upstart Internet TV provider announced a partnership with Baeble Music. Baeble Music provides high-quality concert video of up-and-coming bands. Despite the similar names they’re two completely separate entities. This partnership gives Baeble a wider distribution audience and Babelgum gains more sorely needed content. Honestly, if you’re interested in the indie music scene, especially bands that are crossing the barrier into the mainstream, you’ll be well served: Mando Diao, Art Brut, and more. Not too shabby.
VeohTV vs. Joost Comparison
Today Veoh, an Internet video site, has announced its upcoming VeohTV application. VeohTV will be an Internet TV offering in competition with highly publicized Joost and challenger Babelgum. I’ve already compared Babelgum and Joost, with Joost clearly being more compelling right now. How does VeohTV compare? Right now very few people have access to the private beta, so we’re going to have to go by what information has been made public. With that caveat out of the way let’s find out how VeohTV stacks up against the incumbent.
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