Ajax Girl

LP33.tv, the experimental music site that was once called myAWOL (but changed its name to avoid confusion with MyAOL), has launched to the public. The site will compete against a strong field of competitors like MySpace Music, but hopes to distinguish itself with a dedicated content production team and an innovative approach to signing new artists, as well as its experienced team of executives.

At first glance, the site bears many similarities to MySpace and a host of other music sites. Artists are allowed to create profile pages, which they can use to stream their music for free in an effort to increase exposure. But LP33.tv is adopting a somewhat unique approach to driving traffic to each of these bands. The site’s editors handpick the most promising musicians from the crowd and feature them in original TV-like video content that is similar to MTV’s Total Request Live program. In the future, the site will also give some of its most popular artists the chance to sign on to its own record label (though this is still a ways off).

Because the site has a heavy focus on producing new, unique content multiple times a week, it can effectively be used by its visitors as an “MTV for the web” (the actually plays music). Unlike most music sites, users don’t have to explore the site to find a potentially good artist - they can sit back and see what bands they like on the site’s free shows. Alternatively, LP33.tv features a rich social network, which allows users to swap favorite bands as they would on other music-based sites.

The site also has an array of tools for artists, which allow them to create and sell ringtones, merchandise, and their music. Artists and their fans can also embed the LP33.tv video player throughout the web, which allows them to play entire playlists of their favorite videos.

I really like the idea behind LP33.tv - it’s a new approach to helping bands gain exposure, and gives them an alternative to the traditional music labels that are growing significanty less appealing. That said, the execution needs some work. Artist storefronts consist of very basic shopping widgets that look very bland, and the site only supports PayPal for the time being (though it will be implementing support for more payment methods in the near future). I also find some of the UI choices to be unintuitive, with some key features appearing as tiny links that could easily be lost among the dozens of photos and video clips. Then again, I could have said the same thing about MySpace’s old layout, which obviously hasn’t hindered that site.

LP33.tv’s consumer site is only part of the company’s effort to serve the rapidly evolving music scene. Last month the company launched The MIDB, a site that aims to become a database for all music-related professionals.

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It’s literally been ten years since Yahoo updated its online calendar. And it’s been more than two years since Google launched its Web-based calendar. But tonight it will start rolling out a new drag-and-drop, Ajax calendar in a closed beta to Yahoo Mail users in the U.S., UK, India, Taiwan, and Brazil. You can sign up for it here.

The new Yahoo Calendar doesn’t do much that you cannot already do with Google’s or other online calendars. It is based on underlying technology from its Zimbra enterprise e-mail unit, and supports both iCal and CalDEV standards for the easy import and export of events. The new features compared to Yahoo’s Web 1.0 calendar are:

1. Drag & drop interface.
2. Layering (view multiple calendars in different colors or subscribe to someone else’s calendar)
3. Zoom in when adding an event or appointment
4. Integration with Flickr
5. Can set email, IM or SMS reminders.
6. To-Do list.

Compared to other onlne calendar’s such as Google’s. there is nothing novel here other than the zoom-in function and the Flickr integration. The Flickr feature adds some nice eye candy by randomly selecting highly rated Creative Commons photos as background thumbnails for up to eight days each month. In the future, Yahoo will let you upload photos from your own Flickr stream. It is also planning on letting users add events from Upcoming.org, or subscribe to calendars from Yahoo Sports (game dates), Yahoo Finance (earnings schedules), Yahoo TV (programming schedules for your favorite TV shows), and other properties including from partner sites.

Despite being a me-too offering, this should help Yahoo grow its market share in online calendars. It is already the market leader, even with its 1.0 product (consumer inertia is on its side). According to comScore, Yahoo Mail has 285 million users worldwide (88 million in the U.S.), and of those 8.1 million use the calendar (3.7 million in the U.S.). Google Calendar has 5 million users worldwide, and 2.4 million in the U.S. The Web 2.0 makeover should help Yahoo maintain its lead for at least a little while longer.

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Source: TechCrunch
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Jimmy Wales is opening up the Wikia Search engine to anyone who wants their own data or application to show up in results. Called Wikia Intelligent Search Extensions (WISE), it lets developers create search results based on certain keywords or rules. Wales tells me:

It is like Facebook Apps for search results.

Wikia Search is launching the WISE framework with a bunch of partners: Digg (returns recent frontpage headlines as results), Indeed (for job search), Kayak (for travel searches), Last.fm (for music searches), and even Twitter (relevant Tweets). The other partners at launch will be AccuEather, AcronymFinder, Amie Street, Creative Commons (CC images), PleaseDressMe (T-shirt results) Thomson Reuters, Snooth (wine), and Yelp (local reviews). Partners can customize results not just for keywords, but create their own search apps. (Kayak’s, for instance, let’s you enter departing and returning dates when you search for a flight). So like Yahoo BOSS and Search Monkey, WISE lets developers change both the result ranking and the look and feel of customized results. In fact, anything that can be written in HTML can turn up as a result.

Already, regular users can help improve results on Wikia Search by voting individual results up or down, adding in their own links, or submitting “good” sites to Wikia’s index via a Firefox add-on. But now with the WISE API, Wikia Search is tapping into professional developers as well. In this way, Wikia Search is hoping to make its search engine better by relyingon the work of others. Says Wales:

One of the things we are interested in is vertical searches with a good API and sensible results (otherwise the community will give it a thumbs down). Hopefully, it will drive some traffic to them and make our search results better.

And what about gaming the system? Isn’t this just a free way to get sponsored search results? To prevent that sort of thing, each new app will be manually approved before it is rolled out. Wales criteria is that he will approve them as long as “they are not awful.” (Everyone else gets to test their apps in a developer sandbox until then). And like any other search result, users will be able to vote them up or down.

Will adding all of these apps be enough to make WikiaSearch itself relevant? Currently, it is averaging a measly 50,000 search queries a day. That gives it a whopping 0.013 percent share of the U.S. search market. (Even AOL does about 17 million search queries a day).

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It wasn’t so long ago that we wondered if YouTube would ever start to flex its marketing muscles. Now it is trying to squeeze more money out of the ads on its homepage and just today it introduced the YouTubevertorial. Starting with music and videogame partners, YouTube will begin inserting click-to-buy links below select videos. Right now, these affiliate links connect to iTunes and Amazon (see them at the bottom of the screenshot above?), but more are coming. From the Google Blog post on the subject:

Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features. Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products — like songs and video games — related to the content they’re watching on the site. We’re getting started by embedding iTunes and Amazon.com links on videos from companies like EMI Music, and providing Amazon.com product links to the newly-released video game Spore(TM) on videos from Electronic Arts.

This is just the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube. Our vision is to help partners across all industries — from music, to film, to print, to TV — offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos

The affiliate links work with claimed user-generated videos as well (i.e., ones that use a potential advertiser’s content without permisssion). In June, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney suggested that YouTube could grow to become a $500 million business by next year simply by pumping up its display ads. It is going to have trouble hitting that revenue number now, but at least Google is thinking creatively.

Anyone want to take a guess at how many of those 5 billion views a month can be turned into advertorials?

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Facebook’s integration of Microsoft’s Live Search raises two main questions: first, how does Facebook stand to benefit? And second, how does Microsoft? To answer these questions, we must recognize that each company faces its own type of problem and, therefore, stands to benefit uniquely.

Facebook and social networks in general still struggle to prove that they can monetize their vast inventory of pages effectively. When Facebook users browse their friends’ profiles, they tend to pay little or no attention to advertisements - even when those ads reference friends or target the users’ particular interests. In contrast, web searchers are generally more attentive to advertising because they are actually seeking information about the things being advertised. Therefore, adding a dose of search to Facebook should lift overall returns on the site’s advertising efforts.

Live Search has a bigger and more life-threatening problem. Whereas Facebook can continue its gradual accumulation of users without monetizing them effectively, Live Search usage keeps getting smaller and smaller (both in terms of market share and, less consistently, in terms of total queries). So Microsoft needs this integration to deliver it raw users and their queries even more than it needs to monetize the ones it already has but who are slipping away.

As the graph below from September shows, Microsoft’s U.S. search share has dropped from 9.8% to 8.3% since the start of this year. Total monthly search queries stand at nearly 1 billion, compared to Google’s 7.4 billion.

We know from ComScore that the site draws about 41 million unique users per month in the US. Assuming each of those users conducted just one web search per month, that would be a boost of 41 million queries to Live Search - just a drop in the bucket. If each user made 10 queries, the boost would be a much more substantial 410 million, almost 50% of Live Search’s current US search volume. Still, you would have to factor in the unknown revenue split that’s made with Facebook for each search ad. 

On a worldwide basis, Facebook had 154 million unique visitors in August. As it so happens, ComScore currently places the total number of worldwide search queries on Facebook at 186 million.  That comes out to about 1.2 queries per user on average, which would come to 50 million U.S. search queries a month.  However, as Sitepoint noticed, Facebook itself pegged search volume at over 600 million a year ago, so the average number of queries per user could be higher.

Given how prominently Facebook has integrated Live Search, and how accustomed most users are to searching elsewhere, it would not be surprising if the number of queries per user stayed closer to 1 than 10, even when lumping new web searches together with old profile searches. Much of this can be attributed to the user interface, since it requires users to be fairly proactive if they want to conduct a web search vs. a regular profile search. The layout of search results also leaves much to be desired, since it doesn’t return advanced results like images and it’s also a bit of an eyesore.

As far as branding for Microsoft goes, there’s only a small “Advanced search on Live.com” label at the top of results that directs Facebook users to the main Live Search site. This, too, can’t be expected to do much for Microsoft given how discreet it is.

Of course, this is just the start of an integration that will probably get more elaborate over time. We can only hope that Facebook make Live Search not only more visible but more useful as well by, perhaps, incorporating social data into the results. While they’re at it, they should enhance the search functionality for querying Facebook’s own data since that too leaves much to be desired.

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Docstoc founder Jason Nazar sends in a humorous screen capture from Digg. Refresh this story titled “Living With A Drug Dealer As A College Roommate” enough times and you’ll see a house advertisement for upcoming Digg meetups. That ad, matched with the story, begs the question, which one is the drug dealer?

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At $249, the Samsung SC-MX20 falls delicately between cheap flash-based camcorders and more expensive hard drive-based camcorders. It strips down some features that may not be necessary in the first place – high definition video, still photos, etc. – but adds something that most less expensive flash camcorders don’t have: an optical zoom. A big optical zoom, too, at 34x. That, coupled with long battery life, user-friendly codec support, and relatively low price make the SC-MX20 a winner.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/3nhPdOLrEow/

MySpace has partnered with computer giant Hewlett-Packard to introduce a number of new print options to the popular social networking site. Beginning in November, users will be able to click an HP-branded “Print” box embedded on their MySpace pages to access a printer-friendly version of any portion of their profile that can be printed from their home printer. The announcement was made today by MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe and HP EVP of Imaging and Printing Vyomesh Joshi at HP’s Imaging and Printing Conference in San Diego.

It seems a little excessive - I can’t imagine wanting to print out anyone’s MySpace profile, and running promotions to print across the entire site isn’t very green either. I wonder if MySpace’s official Green site Our Planet will include the Print widget, too.

That said, I’m sure many users will be happy to have an easy way to print their photos from MySpace (which reportedly now has over 4 billion images). I can’t say I’ve ever had much desire to print a photo directly off a social network - I’ll usually just copy and paste the ones I like into iPhoto. But many users have been (and will continue to) print photos off the site, and will welcome the new feature. MySpace and HP say they also hope to eventually give users the ability to print to merchandise like mugs and other items, which may give them added incentive to use the service.

But really, who even prints photos anymore?

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It’s been a long time coming, but it appears as though Facebook finally has begun integrating Live Search into its main search bar, thereby providing web search in addition to its preexisting profile search capabilities.

The functionality appeared earlier today for users, only to disappear again. Facebook published an official post about it only to take that down as well . Microsoft’s own post, however, can still be found here.

Update: Web search is now back, as is Facebook’s post about it. See our observations below.

The integration is a natural consequence of Microsoft’s $250 million investment in Facebook last Fall. Google has a similar deal in place with competitor MySpace.

Once it’s back up we’ll get a chance to see how web search affects Facebook’s autocomplete suggestion system, and whether or not results are tailored to your profile information. After more time pasts, we’ll also see whether this partnership can stem the continual loss of Microsoft’s search marketshare to Google.

According to Microsoft’s post above, Facebook is using adCenter to display advertisements alongside results.

Venturebeat managed to capture the following screenshots before the integration was removed (presumably only temporarily).

Update 2: Since it’s back, we’ve had a chance to try it out and make a few observations:

• The search bar still suggests friends as it did before. If you enter a term that doesn’t match a friend’s name, it will ask whether you want to search the web or Facebook. The option for web search is second and requires users to hit the down arrow on their keyboards, so it will probably suffer from that.
• The advertisements appear to be a mix of Facebook’s own ads and those served by adCenter
• The formatting of the results is a little clunky. It would be better if they stuck to the traditional formatting found on Live.com itself and other engines like Yahoo and Google
• The Facebook web search implementation doesn’t show image results, etc — just basic webpage results
• The results are not the exact same as on Live.com but they’re close
• Sponsored results do not show up on the top of all other results. The advertisements are all placed in a right-hand rail
• If you view search results by all types, the “Web” tab is the furthest to the right on top of the page, after People, Pages, Groups, Events, and Applications. It really doesn’t look like Facebook is giving web search much prominence, at least in its current incarnation.
• Facebook’s blog post says this is only available to visitors from the United States, but Orli in the comments below seems to have access from Israel

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Found this happy honeycrisp apple at the farmers market Saturday.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1278-nipple-apple-napple