The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Twitter and Me! Why It’s The Only Social Media Tool I Use.
- From A Geek’s Geek: Daniel Raffel’s Favorite New Projects, Products and Features of 2009
- TenYears: The Biggest Product Flops of the Decade
- Wibiya’s Powerful Web-Based Toolbar Adds Twitter, Facebook, And Video Chat To Any Site
- The Top 10 MobileCrunch Posts of 2009
- The Google Countdown Reveals Its Explosively Colorful Secret
- Google 2009: We’re Power Bloggers And Frickin’ Love Twitter
- Twitter Reigns Supreme On The Tube
- Whiskey Media Raises $2.5 Million To Launch More Structured Content Sites
| Twitter and Me! Why It’s The Only Social Media Tool I Use. Posted: 01 Jan 2010 08:00 AM PST With all the excitement about the Crunchies awards, I thought I should cast my ballot: Twitter. No, not because it's the best product (I think Android is), but because it has impacted me the most. To young TechCrunch readers, this post will seem pretty lame. An old professor trying to seem hip by writing about social networking. Yawn. But I've never been a fan of social media. I have more than 500 connections on LinkedIn, but have never invited anyone to network with me. I've never used LinkedIn to ask anyone for an introduction. I never had a blog (I find it much more effective to write for BusinessWeek and TechCrunch). I never had a Myspace account (does anyone still use Myspace?). Even when I signed up for Facebook, I did it reluctantly because I kept getting friend requests and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. But Twitter is a different. I get a stream of concise notes from people who want to bring things to my attention and from news outlets. I can follow anyone who seems extraordinarily interesting (and doesn't tweet about brushing their teeth every morning). I can read up about people I'm not following any time I want. And I get immediate feedback to my ideas. I didn't feel this way a few months ago. To me, Twitter seemed like another silly tool for kids to tell each other how much alcohol they had just consumed. But a respected professor of journalism at Columbia University, Sree Sreenivasan (@sreenet) kept sending me emails suggesting I sign up for his webcasts on Twitter for journalists. And he kept telling me I would "be a natural" on Twitter. Why would I send streams of short messages to people I don't know, I wondered? Sree insisted I try it. So I did. And he became my first follower.
Last July, my research team published a paper about the backgrounds and motivations of entrepreneurs. I created a slide show on this for BusinessWeek. One reader asked me a question which haunted me: what is the difference between a small business owner and an entrepreneur? I had assumed that everyone who starts a business was an entrepreneur. But the more I researched this topic, the more obvious it became that there was no clear answer. So I went to my new friend: Twitter. I asked my followers if they could help me solve this puzzle. Before I knew it, I had received several insightful responses. I ended up writing this BusinessWeek piece which featured Sue Drakeford, Miss Nebraska 2001 (yes, she does tweet). Since then, I've had my Twitter followers help me with most of the articles I've written. They provide a sounding board, valuable feedback and examples. I've quoted several followers who offered themselves up as sources (see my last post on stealth companies – Preetam Mukherjee(@_marcellus) was one of my followers as was Alex Kosorukoff(@alexko3), who I highlighted in a post about the Founders Visa). More recently, I've been getting demands from my Twitter followers for articles. My post on selling and why everyone in a tech company should have sales training came about after a series of Twitter requests. I'm writing a piece on women in engineering which is inspired by Women 2.0 founder Shaherose Charania (@shaherose) and Cisco CTO, Padmasree Warrior (@padmasree). And I'm writing a follow-up to the post on stealth because twitter followers have been bombarding me with questions about protecting intellectual property. I've joked that my Twitter followers seem to be setting my research and writing agenda these days and it’s not that far from the truth. So, Twitter has become a very useful tool. I hope I never become like Sarah Lacy (@saracuda), though. On our recent trip to Jaipur, India, she tweeted while sitting on an elephant. I kid you not. She wanted to let Twitter founder Evan Williams (@ev) know she was the first to do this. At present I have 3600 followers and they keep coming out of the woodwork. Many are amazing people. I follow only a few because I can't keep up with all the conversations. If a follower looks very interesting I do try to at least read some of their tweetstream. I click on their names on Tweetdeck and read their last 20 posts. I have a few people I like to read closely for different purposes and topics. In that way, too, Twitter is amazing as its the most efficient mechanism I have ever seen to allow me to peruse the thoughtstreams of others who live all over the world. I firmly believe that of all forms of social media, Twitter (or more accurately, microblogging) is the only one that could have achieved this sort of effect. Writing a full blog post is time consuming and comments can be lengthy. Who wants to read or police all of them? IM is essentially a one-to-one communications tool. Facebook has elements of microblogging but it's not really the kind of place where I want to share thoughts about immigration reform, if you know what I mean. With Twitter, I learned it in an hour, became proficient in a few more, and spend no more than 20 minutes per day on this. Because the message size is so concise, I find people say important things (or silly things, but at least they are short silly things). So Evan and Biz, you have my vote for the Crunchies, guaranteed. Editor’s note: It should go without saying that Vivek doesn’t get any special votes for the Crunchies other than what any TechCrunch reader gets. You can vote for your favorite startups for the Crunchies here. And you can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| From A Geek’s Geek: Daniel Raffel’s Favorite New Projects, Products and Features of 2009 Posted: 31 Dec 2009 04:17 PM PST
As the year winds down, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at my favorite tech launches this year. As I started assembling my list and bouncing them off friends I started to group them into the following categories: New Projects, New Products and Services, Feature Updates, and iPhone Apps. This list is an admittedly subjective batch. For instance, you’ll notice I am clearly interested in these trends: games, geo services, HTML5, identity, mobile, music, social updates, and web development. I’d love to hear what you think were exciting developments this year! New Projects Dive into HTML5 Music Hack Day OAuth WRAP (Web Resource Authorization Protocol) Playdar PubSubHubbub and Simple Update Protocol Webfinger New Products and Services Cloudkick Flavors.me Foursquare Google Chrome Browser GDGT Hunch Kickstarter New Super Mario Bros. Wii Square Feature Updates Android 2.0 Apple iPhone OS 3.0 Apple Snow Leopard Boxee Beta Facebook Flickr Photo People Tagging Google Voice Kindle Software Update 2.3 Firefox and Webkit Support for Geolocation APIs in HTML5 Firefox Support for the HTML5 File API Spotify Twitter Lists YQL iPhone Apps Dropbox Drop7 Eliss Evernote Orbital Tweetie 2 Zillow Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| TenYears: The Biggest Product Flops of the Decade Posted: 31 Dec 2009 02:22 PM PST  It's almost January 1st, 2010 and we've been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present another installment of our "TenYears" list. We already did the biggest losers in the tech industry but why not talk about the biggest product flops? Here are a few of the biggest failures of the decade, starting with one monster release from a fairly well-known company.
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| Wibiya’s Powerful Web-Based Toolbar Adds Twitter, Facebook, And Video Chat To Any Site Posted: 31 Dec 2009 02:00 PM PST There’s no shortage of web-based interactive toolbars to choose from. This week, a new Israeli startup, Wibiya, is publicly launching its compelling web-based, customizable toolbar to publishers. Wibiya’s toolbar for blogs and publishers integrated services, social media sites, applications and widgets. Everything is customizable, giving publishers the ability to add Facebook Connect, enabling Twitter alerts, and more fairly easily. The toolbar has a fairly in-depth integration with Twitter, Search, latest tweets, Tweets about each page and more. Publishers can also bring their Facebook Fan Page stream to the toolbar. Interestingly, Wibiya has an “app store” of sorts, where publishers can customize their bars with a variety of apps, including Google Translate, YouTube, games and more. Unfortunately the app store is limited with only 25 apps at the moment. Wibiya also has deep integration with TinyChat, which lets publishers have their own video/text chat feature on their sites. As users login to chat, they can Tweet out the URL to the page they are in, helping publishers build traffic. Of course, Wibiya is still not as feature-rich as some of the other toolbars but it’s certainly off to a good start. But it’s a competitive space with Conduit, Meebo, MySpace, Yahoo, Digg and many others in the game. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| The Top 10 MobileCrunch Posts of 2009 Posted: 31 Dec 2009 01:02 PM PST
The iPhone isn’t alone on the list, of course; Android makes a handful of appearances amongst our most popular stories, including one that I never would have seen coming. Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >> Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| The Google Countdown Reveals Its Explosively Colorful Secret Posted: 31 Dec 2009 12:31 PM PST
Today, Google has flipped the switch on its New Years surprise. No, it isn’t an amazing new free web service. Instead, it’s a cheesy digital fireworks display that overlays the classic Google homepage with multicolored stars and ‘Happy New Year’ banners dancing across the screen. I can’t help but be slightly let down, but then again, it’s only five more days until the rumored launch of the Nexus One. And it is kind of funny. If you’d like to see the fireworks for yourself, head over to Google.com and adjust your computer clock to midnight (note that this could possibly mess up your Email or other programs). Hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button with no search query, then sit back and enjoy the show. Thanks to Michel for the tip Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Google 2009: We’re Power Bloggers And Frickin’ Love Twitter Posted: 31 Dec 2009 12:21 PM PST
The multi-billion dollar company has a post today patting itself on the back for a solid five years worth of blogging. More notably, they talk about how the amount they’re blogging has increased significantly over the years. In 2009, Google had 423 posts on the Google Blog, which is just one of dozens of blogs they run. That represents a 15 percent increase over 2008. They also note that just about 14.5 million people stopped by the blog this year, which is a 21 percent increase over the previous year. Make no mistake: Google is taking its blogging very seriously. So what were Google’s most read posts this year? By far, their post about Chrome OS was read the most. Over 2.5 million people read it, and it contributed over 12 percent of their total unique page views. In second was the post about Google Wave. And in third was one about Google Voice. All of this makes sense as these are arguably Google’s three most potentially disruptive products. And these stats are also pretty much inline with what we saw at TechCrunch this year in terms popularity among posts about Google. (Though Nexus One is quickly catching up.) Google also takes the time to note how committed they are to using Twitter. Since starting to tweet in February, Google has sent over 1,000 messages (almost all of which are self-promoting, like any good Twitter user). And while their account isn’t quite as popular as Lady Gaga’s (something which they bemoan), they do have about 2 million followers of their main account now. Oh, and they’ve set up some 75 other Twitter accounts for their various properties (they actually have a directory) — something which we poked fun at in July. Even CEO Eric Schmidt finally joined up. But perhaps the most interesting stat that Google shares is that Twitter was the biggest non-Google referrer to its blog in 2009. Google notes that this is “a clear sign of its rapid growth in popularity.” That’s a nice big wet kiss to a company it was supposedly in talks about acquiring earlier this year. Something else I’ve noticed about Google’s 2009 in blogging is that they’re actually getting better at it. It used to be that we would summarize company blog posts (which, naturally, I’m doing here) because they were awful at getting their point across. Or, as a colleague of mine who shall remain unnamed put it, “thanks for five years of cheesy headlines, meandering and grandiose ledes, and self-serving misinformation about openness.” But this year, it seems that Google (and a number of other companies) are getting better at using these in-house blog posts to announce things. And I’m all for that. Not having to re-explain something that’s already out there frees us up to do better posts as well, such as deeper analysis about what the companies are announcing. That said, the point about Google’s self-serving posts remains an issue as we saw very recently. But not to worry, we’ll still be here to call BS on those posts when we see them. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Twitter Reigns Supreme On The Tube Posted: 31 Dec 2009 12:10 PM PST Snapstream, a startup that makes a device that lets enterprises record thousands of hours of TV (from both satellite and digital cable sources) and search inside the recordings for keywords, recently launched a trending topics site for TV. Snapstream has released its top trends on TV for 2009, with the mention of “Twitter” used more often than Facebook, MySpace and other social media platforms. . TV programs used the word "Twitter" in their programming three times more often in December 2009 than they did in late 2008 and January 2009, according to the data. SnapStream also released the top keyword mentions on TV, which are in order: Iran, Michael Jackson, Swine Flu, North Korea, AIG, Pirates, Hamas, (The) Inauguration, Ted Kennedy, and Balloon (boy). SnapStream also revealed that mentions of “health care” eclipsed mentions of “economy” towards the end of the year thanks to President Obama’s healthcare initiative. SnapStream’s trending topics site lets you see the hot words (those that are ascending in mentions) and cold words (those that are descending in mentions) on national television. And you can also enter couple of keywords (up to 5) into TV Trends and you'll get a graph showing you the relative frequency of mentions of those words on mostly-news national programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, MSNBC and CNN. Snapstream crawls closed-captioning text for programs that they record. They filter out local programming, sitcoms, and sports and then cleans-up, analyzes and indexes data for the trends site. When you graph a keyword, the site will give you a view of excerpts of stories at selected points along the curve and you can also filter the results by network. For example, you can chart trends of the mention of "Twitter" on CNN alone. As we’ve written in the past, SnapStream's site isn't updated in real-time (it is updated every 3-4 hours), which puts its topics at a disadvantage to Twitter and Google's topics, that are close to real-time. But many of SnapStream’s top mentions did match Twitter’s top trending topics. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Whiskey Media Raises $2.5 Million To Launch More Structured Content Sites Posted: 31 Dec 2009 11:37 AM PST Cnet founder Shelby Bonnie and other angels have put another $2.5 million into Whiskey Media, which operates niche media sites such as ComicVine (comics), GiantBomb (gaming), and AnimeVice (anime). The company, which has been around since 2007, previously raised about $1.5 million in angel money as well. Whiskey Media’s sites are wiki-like content sites in the vein of CrunchBase or GDGT, which built around structured databases which can be edited by the readers. (In fact, CrunchBase was inspired by Whiskey Media’s first site, now-retired PoliticalBase). Mike Tatum, a partner at Whiskey Media, tells me via email:
The company will use the money to launch more structured content sites on the same technology platform across different niche media, which is a popular strategy these days. Bonnie, for his part, is always thinking of new media models and thinks it’s time to kill the CPM. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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It was pretty lonely at first, tweeting to myself, and I was rapidly losing interest. Having six followers (two of which wanted me to check out their sexy pictures) seemed pretty embarrassing. Then BusinessWeek's former community editor, Shirley Brady (@shirleybrady) came to my rescue and tweeted to ask her followers to follow me. Soon I had over a hundred people to talk to and it didn't seem so bad. But my tweeting quickly went beyond conversations and into new and better ways of accomplishing tasks.
When 
Ever wonder what stories of 2009 the people of the Internet found most interesting? I can’t really help you there, but I can tell you which stories on MobileCrunch got the most pageviews. Now, you might assume that most of our popular stories involved the iPhone, but — well, actually, you’d be right. 
Many bloggers take December 31 each year to do a recap of their year in blogging. Google is no exception.
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