mag 17

Beyond search: Twitter joins the discovery wave

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With the rise of social platforms and emergence of new mobile and connected devices, we have seen an explosion in the amount of information being created and consumed. It is not a surprise that we have quietly entered the post-search world.

And with information exploding on the web, companies big and small are finding ways to organize it around constructs such as “knowledge” and “interests.” Think of these as attempts to push the Internet into “discovery” phase.

Yesterday, Google announced its Knowledge graph. Today, Twitter is introducing a way to follow others based on interests. In a blog post, the company said:

Currently, when new users come to Twitter, we show them all almost the same suggestions for what or who to follow. That isn’t ideal. Since you have individual interests, you should get individual suggestions. To make it easier and faster for everyone to get started on Twitter, we’re beginning some experiments with tailored suggestions in a number of countries around the world.

The first experiment will show new users a list of accounts that we recommend you follow, alongside a timeline filled with Tweets from those accounts. If you’re part of the experiment, you’ll see a Twitter experience that’s relevant to you right when you sign up. (Of course, you can always choose to not follow the suggested accounts that don’t interest you.)

If you’re a current user, you may see tailored suggestions in Who to follow so you can constantly find interesting and relevant accounts that are new to you.

In doing so, Twitter is also telling the world that Google and Facebook aren’t the only game in town and it has a reach to match those mega-billion dollar giants.

These tailored suggestions are based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem. We receive visit information when sites have integrated Twitter buttons or widgets, similar to what many other web companies — including LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube — do when they’re integrated into websites. By recognizing which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular sites, we can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last ten days.

(That paragraph also explains why Twitter was talking about its new do not track privacy policy earlier this morning.)

Twitter is trying to solve what my colleague Mathew Ingram calls its “filter” problem. It isn’t the only one. Zite, a mobile app, for example has tried to organize articles and blog posts around “interests.” Prismatic, arguably one of the best of all new services, is building the digital daily newspaper.

Back in 2008, I wrote a post, Can serendipity make you rich? arguing:

The problem is that there’s too much data coming online too quickly, and the traditional method of search that involves first finding and then consuming the information is not going to work for much longer. There just won’t be enough time for us to do that and still have a life. It’s a problem, and therefore solving it is an opportunity — a very big opportunity.

Well, looks like many companies are looking at the opportunity and licking their chops. And that can’t be a bad thing for us, the people of the Internet.

 

Zite and new notions of content discovery will be part of the discussion about the ever-changing media landscape at paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads on May 23 in New York City.

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mag 17

Scoop: Google, Microsoft both targeting Amazon with new clouds

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Google is hard at work on a cloud computing offering that will compete directly with the popular Amazon EC2 cloud, according to a source familiar with Google’s plans. Not to be outdone, other sources have confirmed Microsoft is also building an Infrastructure as a Service platform, and that the Redmond cloud will be ready — or at least announced — before Google’s. According to my sources, Google should roll out its service for renting virtual server instances by the end of the year, while Microsoft is slating its big announcement for a June 7 event in San Francisco.

Although Google declined to comment on whether the offering is indeed on the way, an IaaS cloud would make a lot of sense for the company. It already has a popular platform-as-a-service offering in App Engine that is essentially a cloud-based application runtime, but renting virtual servers in an IaaS model is still where the money is in cloud-based computing. Google also has an API-accessible storage offering — the aptly named Google Cloud Storage — that would make for a nice complement to an IaaS cloud, like Amazon’s ridiculously popular S3 storage service is for EC2.

Microsoft clearly got the message on where developers are spending in the cloud, too, which is why it’s reportedly expanding its Windows Azure cloud to compete with Amazon more directly than it already does. That means the ability to rent Windows and Linux virtual servers by the hour as well as, it has been reported, support for Java on the PaaS side of Azure. The speculation that Microsoft will make these moves at some point is nothing new, and tweets last week  from a Microsoft analyst saying “Infrastructure as a Service is on the roadmap” only stoked the flames.

We’ll no doubt hear a lot more about Microsoft’s plans at our Structure conference next month, when I sit down to talk Azure with Microsoft Server and Tools Business President Satya Nadella.

Google and Microsoft are two cloud providers that should have Amazon Web Services shaking a bit, in a way Rackspace and the OpenStack haven’t yet been able to. Google and Microsoft both have the engineering chops to compete with AWS technically, and both have lots of experience dealing with both developers and large companies. More importantly, both seem willing and able to compete with AWS on price — a big advantage for AWS right now as its economies of scale allow it to regularly slash prices for its cloud computing services.

In terms of timing, this looks like a case of both companies realizing they got ahead of themselves and the market by centering their cloud computing plans around PaaS rather than IaaS. If Google really does roll out an IaaS offering, maybe it’s also a sign of its newfound maturity when it comes to rolling out new services that fit naturally into its existing business and that it can actually sell. Although AWS has a commanding lead in market share — estimates start at 50 percent and only go higher — there are still a lot of developers left to win over and even some opportunity to poach a few from AWS if Google and Microsoft can keep up in the innovation game.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user James Thew.

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mag 17

Chameleon: A must-see home screen for Android tablets

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Android tablet owners may have opted for their device over an iPad due to support for widgets, but a new home screen app called Chameleon is like widgets on steroids. And Chameleon’s developers are using Kickstarter to sell their app before it’s even released: A $5 backing will get you a copy of Chameleon if the project funds hits the $50,000 goal by June 15 (hat tip to Liliputing). After just a day on Kickstarter, Chameleon has already passed $6,700 in funding. After you see the software in action, you’ll understand why.


Instead of simple widgets, Chameleon is a dynamic set of home screens that you can customize on an Android tablet running Honeycomb 3.2 or better. The minimum screen resolution supported is 1280 x 800, so some of the early, small Android tablets may not work. What’s interesting about Chameleon is that its developers understand that users often open up groups of apps repeatedly at different times of the day or in different locations. So the app will change what it displays based on those two attributes, as configured by you.

Given how I use my tablet — and I suspect how many others do as well — Chameleon is brilliant. The first thing I do upon waking is grab a device and hit up the same apps every day for information: Twitter, CNN, email and a few select websites. When I’m working later in the morning at the office (OK, just down the hall) I’m listening to music on Rdio, reading RSS feeds and hitting Facebook. Chameleon could automatically show these apps for me on the tablet at the appropriate time and place. And aside from the smart contextual aspect, the home screens actually look good, which is something most don’t say about Android tablets.

The other intelligent bit here is that development team is looking to Kickstarter for the app. Of course it could build it, submit it to Google and get Chameleon in the app store for the same $5 price tag. By using Kickstarter, however, it guarantees a minimum amount of revenue up front instead of using Google Play and hoping to gain traction in a sea of apps. Clever on both accounts and good enough for my $5 pledge.

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mag 17

Why Google needs the Motorola deal for tablets

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China is expected to rule soon on Google’s proposed acquisition of Motorola, with the deal already approved in the U.S. and Europe. When Google announced its intention to spend $12.5 billion on Motorola — one of its own Android hardware partners — the purchase was considered to be a play for Motorola’s mobile patents.  There’s additional opportunity as well, in the form of Google having direct control over Android hardware and one research firm suggests this aspect is key for Google to have any success in the tablet market, while also improving its revenue stream on mobile search.

Goldman Sachs published a detailed research note on Thursday suggesting how critical the Motorola deal is for Google to battle both Apple’s iPad as well as Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, which is actually built upon the Android platform. Google gains no benefit from the Fire, however as Amazon has created its own browser and curates an app store specific to the device. And although Google is the default search engine on the top-selling iPad, it actually pays Apple for that privilege, which offsets Google’s revenue from ads on Apple’s tablet.

The research report explains it this way:

“On a tactical level, while we estimate mobile queries account for just 20% of searches, we believe they are growing 4-5x as quickly as desktop queries. Thus, MMI’s patents would be important for protecting Android and improving mobile economics, as we estimate Google pays Apple roughly 75% revenue share to be the default in the Safari search bar, which we estimate accounts for roughly one-third of all mobile queries.”

The issue then is fairly simple to understand: Although mobile search volume is up, Goldman Sachs thinks it is costing Google too much — more than on the desktop — to acquire mobile search and ad revenues. In order to reduce this expense and boost net revenues in mobile, Google has to get consumers to buy more Android tablets.

The Motorola buy can surely help this: I explained why in a GigaOm Pro report (subscription required) last month and took it one step further recently. Aside from Google using Motorola to develop tablets, it could even take advantage of Motorola’s LapDock hardware which uses an Android handset to power a notebook-like shell. Instead of a proprietary Motorola software environment, Google could use Android or even the Chrome OS for such a device.

However, some of these arguments could be moot points now. Or they could be part of a larger strategy. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google is considering to work with several hardware partners on Nexus phones and tablets. That would help ease the minds of  Samsung, HTC, LG and other Android partners who might be concerned over the Motorola purchase by Google. In either case, these types of strategies are ideas I had hoped for when I adamantly suggested Google find a way to take more control over Android.

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