Ajax Girl

Yahoo launches the much anticipated Yahoo Buzz tonight - a Digg-like site that takes stories from pre-approved news publishers (100 to start) and let’s users vote on stories and push them up to the top of the page.

To see it in action, click on the buzz button at the end of this, or any, of our posts. Like Digg, the more users that vote for a story, via the embedded button or on the Buzz site, the higher the story goes on Buzz.

But there’s another part of Buzz that will get publishers excited - every day a few of the most popular stories will also be features on the Yahoo home page. Yahoo has been experimenting with linking to third party news directly from their home page since last year. In one case, the Buzz team told me, 2 million visitors were sent to Wired for a linked article in the two hours it was on the Yahoo home page.

Of course, many publishers won’t be able to handle that kind of traffic flow. But Yahoo is also prepared for that. Smaller sites will only be linked on a fraction of the total home page views - in effect, Yahoo is turning down the firehose for those that can’t handle it.

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Source: TechCrunch
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Yahoo will soon be allowing third parties to enhance the Yahoo Search experience. The new platform, codenamed “SearchMonkey” and officially called Open Search Platform, will consist of a set of APIs that allow third parties to modify search results on Yahoo by adding images, structured data and additional deep links.

The altered results can contain far more information than the current link and a bit of text from the website. For example, Yelp (a user generated local business review site), one of the launch partners, will include a photo, review information and the address and phone number of the business.

The alterations only appear for users who’ve chosen to add them. Amit Kumar, the product lead for the Open Search Platform, says that the desired effect is similar to Greasemonkey, a Firefox addon that allows users to see modified versions of websites (thus the codename SearchMonkey).

Third parties will have an incentive to get users to add their Yahoo search modification, which in turn can drive more traffic to their sites. One thing third parties cannot change, though, are the order of results. They can simply change the way a result linking to one of their pages appears to the searcher, and add additional rich media and links to structured data.

When this launches anyone will be able to create their own modifications and promote them - users can add as many as they like.

Below is a screenshot of a different search, for “hillary clinton.” The New York Times has altered the result to include links to other election news, debate analysis, and added data for current delegate count and total money raised:

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You can tell FriendFeed was built by ex-Googlers because it is so spare, yet brings forth an avalanche of information. The social feed aggregator lets you keep track of your friends across 28 Websites and services, including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, YouTube, blog posts, shared items on Google Reader, Amazon wish lists, and what they are watching on Netflix. It launched in private beta last October, but as of now it is open to the public.

The company also raised $5 million in what is practically a self-funded A round. Co-founders Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, who created the first version of Gmail when they worked at Google, led the round. But they let Benchmark Capital put in some money as well. After all, Benchmark is where the co-founders, including Bret Taylor and Jim Norris of Google Maps fame, conceived the idea for FriendFeed when they were doing a stint there as entrepreneurs-in-residence. Says Buchheit:

This is different than when another startup raises $5 million. We won’t rush out there and start hiring like mad. We just wanted to have the funding issue taken care of so we could focus on the product and users.

Buchheit’s is part of the Google Mafia of early employees who are now avid angel investors. By his count, he has put his own money into about 20 startups, including Xobni, Justin.tv, Zenter (acquired by Google), Meraki Networks, Mint, and ScanScout. At FriendFeed, though, he is one of six employees building it by hand.

FriendFeed is a way to become aware of what people you know or respect are doing across dozens of different Websites. That super-aggregation of feeds from popular social sites, however, is quickly being copied (see Spokeo, Iminta, Plaxo Pulse, and—one that just launched today—Second Brain). Even Facebook wants to get in on the action by allowing feeds from other services to show up on the News feed of its members.

Facebook here is the biggest threat. At some level, slurping up feeds from across the Web is just a feature. But that is not what FriendFeed is all about. FriendFeed is a way to filter the Web through the eyes of your friends. And it is a way to have semi-private discussions about what you find. It is a social discovery engine and a communications platform. Most great Websites are built around communications. You can add a comment on any post or Twitter or Flickr photo shared by your friends. Not surprisingly, that communication is one of the most active ways members in the beta have been using the service. Says Taylor:

The content imported into FriendFeed from other sites becomes fodder for discussion and socializing around that content. One thing we learned is the importance of that discussion aspect. In particular, because the discussions are limited to the social network of the person, they do not devolve to lowest common denominator of discussions on the Web.

For instance, click on the thumbnail at left and you will see a discussion thread in response to our post about Facebook targeting FriendFeed. It very much reads like a discussion among friends. The trick for Friendfeed now that it is open is to keep that sense of intimacy.

As you add more friends to FriendFeed, following them all can quickly become overwhelming. That is why the company is building in algorithms to automatically promote the most important stuff and help you filter out the rest. Any items that are commented on or starred as being “liked” get more play. You can see those items from friends of your friends, even if you don’t subscribe directly to their feeds.

There are also extremely granular controls. Do you have a friend who suffers from Twitter disease and spams the minutia of his life 20 times a day? You can turn off his Twitters to hide them from view, and just enjoy the occasional YouTube video he finds. And if he is really annoying, unsubscribe from his feeds. Subscribing and unsubscribing to people does not yet carry the same social meaning that unfriending someone on Facebook does. Right now, it is just about information flow. That won’t last however.

FriendFeed is still very much a work in progress. There is no search box (coming), there is no mobile version (coming), and there is no way to group or organize feeds other than chronologically. The site just added tabs earlier today (”friends,” “me,” and “everyone”). Yet there is something pure about FriendFeed that I hope does not get lost as more people (and features) join.

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Social calling widget Jaxtr has just released a new destination called Jaxtr Cafe. Their widget, like Jangl’s, provides users with an anonymous number to call each other with the added bonus of cheaper long distance calling.

Up until now, Jaxtr users found each other more or less randomly on social networks of email signatures that listed links to the service. Jaxtr Cafe, however, is a social network of sorts where some 10 million users (50-60% active) of the service can find each other and carry on conversations about whatever they want. It also gives Jaxtr the opportunity to start monetizing their free service through advertising on the site. Jangl, on the other hand, has monetized on a case by case basis (rev share on Match.com, ads on PlentyOfFish).

Every user of Jaxtr is grandfathered in to Jaxtr Cafe’s profile database. You can search amongst these profiles based on interests and geography. For instance, if you want to talk to someone who’s an Australian and interested in food, you can easily do a search through the directory for just the right person. You can then call or text them using Jaxtr’s widget.

I was surprised no to see an offering closer to Ingenio’s Ether, but that may be an additional feature in the coming months. Rather the service seems a lot like Skype Live. However there’s the added advantage that while people aren’t always on Skype, but pretty much always have their phones. It does come at the cost of your local calling minutes, but you’ll wind up with a cheaper long distance chat.

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Source: TechCrunch
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EA is relaunching The Sims Online as a free service with a new name and new features, including UGC, commerce and land ownership.

EA-Land is the new, free Sims Online (TSO). The 12 different cities from TSO are being moved to EA-Land and the game area is being expanded to be “100 times bigger than the previous size of any city.” Existing TSO users will be able to purchase land in EA-Land before the new (reincarnated) world is open to the public with paying TSO users becoming “EA-Land subscribers” in a similar fashion to the way Linden Lab charges for land in Second Life.

Users of EA-Land will have the ability to upload custom content and (more importantly) buy these customizations from other players. Sounding a lot like Second Life? It gets better:

We heard from the community that the economy was broken in TSO. That was true, too many users were billionaires, and the goal of the game was mostly about extracting money from Maxis. I can now say with satisfaction that we have fixed the economy on EA-Land. This took many features, from establishing a real estate market, where users can easily buy or sell lots to one another, and a dynamic object pricing market where the prices of objects purchased from maxis is based on supply and demand, enabling stores and entrepreneurs to earn a living. We also enabled users to buy simoleans directly from Maxis. While there is no need for users to do so in the game (we give subscribers simoleans every week), it can help new users build their dream house faster with a simple paypal transaction secured by us.

There is one significant difference though to Second Life: EA-Land won’t become the wild west as EA will be “approving all of the content [so] this user content is safe to be viewed by everyone.”

Second Life fans will point out that TSO/ EA-Land has a lot of difference to Second Life in terms of capabilities, and that is true. And yet really basic 2D service such as Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel have millions of users compared to Second Life’s 100-200,000 regular users over a 60 day period. As much as I hate the name, free is a great selling point and EA-Land has the potential of catering to users who want something more from their online words than the basic services, without the hassles of Second Life.

(in part via GigaOm)

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Google has announced that it has joined a consortium to build a new trans-Pacific cable between Japan and California.

The Unity consortium is a joint effort by Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, Google, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet and SingTel and will initially increase Trans–Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second.

Google’s Manager of Network Acquisitions, Francois Sterin, explains the deal:

“[Google’s] participation in building Unity ultimately helps provide our users with faster and more reliable connectivity.

If you’re wondering whether [Google is] going into the undersea cable business, the answer is no. We’re not competing with telecom providers, but the volume of data we need to move around the world has grown to the point where in some cases we’ve exceeded the ability traditional players can offer. Our partnership with these companies is just another step in ensuring that we’re delivering the best possible experience to people around the world.”

Google was rumored to be in talks about participation in Unity in September 2007, although at that stage it was believed the cable would go to Australia via Guam.

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Source: TechCrunch
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Another content aggregator launches publicly today, this one with the aim of bringing all of the user generated content you upload across the web into one place where you can organize, search, and share it more easily.

The site is called Second Brain and takes advantage of APIs provided by the likes of Flickr, Blogger, YouTube, and eleven other web services. With each, you can provide your username and password, and Second Brain will start keeping track of the content you post there. This content can be kept private or shared with others.

The service is essentially a social network for sharing UGC with friends, which in a way makes it a more advanced version of the website sharing functionality you’ll find on Facebook and other social networks.

Public content sucked into Second Brain shows up in the recent updates areas of your friends pages and the homepage. All content can be categorized, allowing for the grouping of similar content found across different web services (Flickr photos and YouTube videos about technology, for example, can be grouped together on Second Brain). You can also comment on all the content brought into the site, allowing discussions to form around people’s contributions.

I can see this service appealing to people who upload content to several destinations around the web. However, I also expect more established social networks to eventually allow you to automatically pull in, say, all your Delicious bookmarks automatically and share them with your friends. Wait a minute, you can already do this with a Facebook app. And Facebook has announced that it’s opening up its news feed to third party services. Oh well.

Second Brain isn’t exactly charting new territory - FriendFeed, Spokeo, and Iminta are three others that already have been trying to solve the problem of content dispersion. Second Brain founder Lars Teigen argues that they are taking things much further than those other companies by building a more comprehensive library of users’ content. Imported items retain their tags, which are used to create a “meta-tag cloud” of all different types of content. Content can be indexed and searched in more advanced ways, and the company is working on two-way data push capabilities so that you can not only retrieve content from other web services but update it from Second Brain as well. With these longer term features in mind, Second Brain hopes to be your go-to destination for all UGC management.

Below is a promotional video for Second Brain:

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Source: TechCrunch
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Network Solutions and ICANN are being sued over “front running” domain registration practices.

“Network Solutions has forced millions of people to buy Internet domain names from them instead of cheaper competitors through a scheme that’s netted the firm millions of dollars,” according to the federal class action lawsuit filed by Kabateck Brown Kellner. The suit also alleges ICANN is guilty by association as its policies allow Network Solutions to front run.

For those not familiar with the practice, Network Solutions (and some other registrars) lock up domain names as soon as a user searches for them, taking them off the market and forcing users to use their service to register the name they want.

Kabateck Brown Kellner give this example:

“Imagine if you asked a car dealer if they had a black convertible and were then forced to buy the car from them. Would you get a good deal? Each time someone asks Network Solutions about a domain name, the firm creates a monopoly for itself, forcing consumers to pay the price they demand.”

It was not clear what amount, if any is being asked for as damages in the suit, however Kabateck Brown Kellner boast at the end of their release:

Kabateck Brown Kellner is one of the nation’s foremost consumer law firms. Its clients have won more than $750 million against Google, Yahoo!,
Farmer’s Insurance, Eli Lilly and others. As a plaintiff’s-only firm, Kabateck Brown Kellner is always on the consumers’ side.

(via Network World)

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Source: TechCrunch
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Of all the apps on Facebook, here is one that might actually make you money—depending on how smart your friends are. Cake Financial, a social finance site that lets you track and share the performance of your actual brokerage accounts, just launched its Facebook app. The app lets you compare your real stock-picking prowess to that of other Facebook members who install it on their profile pages. These are not fantasy portfolios. They show your actual returns in percentage terms (no dollar amounts are revealed), and let you compare your returns with that of your friends across brokerage accounts. Every time you or a friend makes a trade, it shows up in your feed. Talk about timely information.

Cake Financial launched at the TechCrunch40 conference last year. Since then, nearly 10,000 members have signed up who track portfolios collectively worth about $1 billion. CEO Steve Carpenter hopes that Facebook will help Cake Financial grow faster.

The potential power behind Cake—as with other social finance sites like Covester, SocialPicks, and Motley Fool CAPS—is the ability to follow the best stock pickers no matter who they are (amateur or pro). Carpenter has plans to create exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that mimic the portfolios of each of the top five percent members on Cake. It would be a personal ETF. He is still working through the details. But imagine if one of your friends on Facebook was in that elite group and you could automatically start trading alongside him. Would you do it?

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Source: TechCrunch
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This news will disappoint a lot of people in the Valley. After being urged to run by a Facebook group, then launching a Lessig08 site, Stanford Law professor and free culture champion Lawrence Lessig is not running for congress.

Lessig believes that running for Congress will not help the Change Congress movement. Video explanation above.

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