Googolopoly

Earlier today I wrote about my eagerness for Google GDrive, a cloud-based file management service that has been rumored for years now.

The idea that Google could swoop in and dominate the online storage market certainly doesn’t help the founders of several startups sleep better at night. But they aren’t without their arguments for why a Google solution would be bad for consumers.

Box.net has come up with the following clever response to the idea that Google should control all of our information, including our files (click for a bigger view).

As the company describes it:

The goal of the game is to use Google shares to buy as many properties as you can without landing in the deadpool and losing your stock. As with any great board game, there’s a very real metaphor to what’s going on…. What happens when the Google monster gobbles up all that is left in the web world, is present on your cell phone, desktop, and even controls your health information? For all their product excellence, the threat of amassing this much data is too serious to ignore.

So the real question is, does placing Box.net on the board (between none other than LinkedIn and Facebook) mean the company sees itself as Google acquisition bait? And how do fellow startups Loopt and Scribd feel about being placed on Mediterranean and Baltic?

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

New iPhones rumors a-swirlin: iPhone shuffle?

What’s the most ridiculous thing you can imagine? An “iPhone Shuffle” with no video playback? Funny, that’s what I was thinking too! That is why this rumor is, at least partially, completely ridiculous. The thicker, 3G iPhone with a super-battery is much more likely, though it would be the first time Apple made their flagship product bigger.

But an iPhone Shuffle, half the thickness of a regular iPhone but with the same screen, with 4GB of memory and (it bears repeating)no video playback? Does it come with a manticore?

Hit the “more” for the full details from hot tipper Doug.

Just as the iPod lineup developed and branched out, so does Apple have plans for the iPhone lineup. Here’s some of what is being considered:

A “Pro” or “Max” model, that is noticeably thicker than current model (over 15mm, versus 11.6mm for existing iPhone), to incorporate a battery with almost triple the duration of the existing iPhone. This model is also the 3G model. It is targeted for power users and enterprise, meaning people who may use their phone 2-3 days in a row (on a business trip) without accessing a PC or having the time or opportunity to charge it.

Existing iPhone stays the same, along with no 3G, just Edge.

Also being considered, and with engineering and development basically done, is a new entry model, that is slimmer than the iPod Touch (an amazing 6.2mm versus iPod Touch’s already amazing 8mm), and slightly less wide (58.6mm versus 61.8mm for iPod Touch). Screen size is the same; this width reduction comes from the casing. It does not offer video playback and has only 4GB. Could be as low as $159. Name to be determined, internally referred to as iPhone Shuffle, definitely not the final name. Edge, of course.

-”Doug”

They say he’s “faithful,” but that’s a long way from being right.

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Making harmonious use of Webmaster Tools and Analytics

Written by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality Team

Occasionally in the discussion group, webmasters ask, "Should I be using Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics?" Our answer is: use both! Here are three scenarios that really highlight the power of both tools.

1. Make the most of your impressions
One of my favorite features of Webmaster Tools is that it will show you the Top 20 search queries your site appeared for along with the Top 20 clicked queries. The data from the Top Search Queries allows you to quickly pinpoint what searches your site appears for and which of those searches are resulting in clicks. Let's look at last week's data for www.google.com/webmasters as an example.


As you can see, Google Webmaster Central is receiving a great number of impressions for the query [gadgets] but may not be fully capitalizing on these impressions with user clicks. Click on [gadgets] to see how your site appears in our search results. Does your title and snippet look appealing to users? As my colleague Michael recently wrote, it might be time to do some "housekeeping" on your website -- it's a great, low-to-no-cost way to catch the attention of your users. For example, we could work to improve our snippet from:

To something more readable such as "Use gadgets to easily add cool, dynamic content to your site..." by adding a meta description to the URL.

And what are users doing when they visit your site? Are they browsing your content or bouncing off your site quickly? To find out, Google Analytics will calculate your site's "bounce rate," or the percentage of single-page visits (e.g. someone just visiting your homepage and then leaving). This can be a helpful measure of the quality of your site's landing page and the traffic your site receives. After all, once you've worked hard to get your users to visit your site, you want to keep them there! Check out the Analytics blog for further information about "bounce rate."

2. Perform smart geo-targeting
Let's imagine you have a .com that you want to target at a Japanese market. Webmaster Tools allows you to set a geographic target for your site, where you would probably pick Japan. But, doing so is not an immediate solution. You can confirm the location of your visitors using the map overlay of Analytics, right up to the city level. You can also discover what types of users are accessing your site - including their browser and connection speed. If users cannot access your website due to an incompatible browser or slower connection speeds, you may need to rethink your website's design. Doing so can go a long way toward achieving the level of relevant traffic you would like.

3. Control access to sensitive content
One day, you log into Analytics and look at your "Content by Title" data. You shockingly discover that users are visiting your /privatedata pages. Have no fear! Go into Webmaster Tools and use the URL removal tool to remove those pages from Google's search results. Modifying your robots.txt file will also block Googlebot from crawling that section of your site in the future.

For more tips and tricks on Analytics, check out the Analytics Help Center. If you have any more suggestions, feel free to comment below or in our Webmaster Help Group.

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Google’s Don’t Be Evil Not “Ordained Motto” Says Marissa Mayer

Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto, first uttered by Googler Paul Buchheit (now founder of FriendFeed) in 2001, has long been the pillar of their self-imposed code of conduct. It was amended somewhat in 2006 when CEO Eric Schmidt, under fire for entering the Chinese market with censorship restrictions, said “We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil.” He turned it into a sort of evil minimization algorithm.

But the core motto is still displayed prominently on the Google Investor Relations site, and the company appears to be supporting it up 100%.

Not so, apparently. Last week, however, Google’s Marissa Mayer said “It really wasn’t like an elected, ordained motto” during an interview in Australia, adding “I think that ‘Don’t Be Evil’ is a very easy thing to point at when you see Google doing something that you personally don’t like; it’s a very easy thing to point out so it does get targeted a lot.”

There’s a certain disconnect between paragraph two above and what Marrissa says in paragraph 3.

This is most likely not a precursor to an official move away from the motto. I imagine it’s little more than a venting of a frustration that Google continues to be held to a promise made six years ago, when they were under significantly less scrutiny than they are today. Google can’t ditch the motto (the press would eat that up), and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to live up to it. What can they do? Not much. They made this bed. It’s too bad they couldn’t get Buchheit to take it with him when he left to found FriendFeed.

(Hat tip to reader Asher Moses for pointing this story out to us).

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

InstantAction and Cafe.com: Browser-Based Games Growing Up, Becoming More Social

I’ve recently had the chance to preview two new websites that promise to significantly advance the quality of social gaming as delivered through the browser.

The first is a project led by GarageGames and backed by IAC called InstantAction that brings straight into the browser graphically complex games that appeal to competitive gamers.

The second is a site called Cafe.com by an international company called Boonty. It is intended more for casual gamers who want to use gaming more as a way to meet people and socialize online rather than compete.

InstantAction is going live today so anyone can go and check it out (they’ll have four games available to start and more coming soon). Cafe.com will remain in private beta for awhile longer, but the company has given us 10,000 invitations - just go here and enter “techcrunch” as your invitation code. You’ll also start off with 10,000 CafeCoins, the site’s virtual currency, which are worth about $10 and can be used to buy virtual goods.

InstantAction

With InstantAction, you can play games in-browser that look more like Xbox or PC games. To fully appreciate the quality improvements, you have to see them for yourself:

What’s especially impressive is that these games are not even based in Flash or Silverlight. Rather, they run on top of a cross-browser compatible, 150k custom plugin that only has to be downloaded once. The plugin, which has been developed for two and a half years, works with games that are programmed in pretty much any language (C++, Java, Python, etc.).

Right now the following four titles are available - Marble Blast, Screw Jumper, Think Tanks, and Cyclomite. The first two are actually popular Xbox games that have been ported over to InstantAction’s platform. While these games have single player versions, the focus is on competitive multiplayer games. And inviting your friends to the service is easy; you only have to give them a URL and they can join you quite quickly, even if your game has already begun.

The site does use a good deal of Flash and Ajax to manage game lobbies, friends lists, and chat. When playing games, you’ll always see a list of the people in your party and a chat room on the right-hand side of the screen. You can use this area to communicate with others and quickly switch over to new games while keeping the same group of people participating.

The games to be included on the site will come mostly from smaller game studios run by veterans of the bigger studios who have escaped their more corporate environments. These include Wideload Studios, run by the same guy who founded Bungee and came up with Halo.

Among the advantages of running games from the browser is the ability to make updates and fixes without imposing downloads on users. Producers can also make money from new revenue sources such as the sale of virtual goods, subscriptions, and tournament fees.

I suspect that over time we’ll see even more advanced games run through InstantAction; ones that appeal even more to hardcore gamers who just don’t have the time to buy, install, and learn new games anymore. The next game to be added - Fallen Empire: Legions - is particularly impressive and will certainly take the platform in that direction (see a sneak preview of the game here).

Cafe.com

Browser-based casual gaming is nothing new (see Kongregate, the gaming networks on Facebook, and the astronomical popularity of Scrabulous in particular). But Cafe.com is the most developed social networking-gaming hybrid that I’ve seen so far, both in terms of the integration of social features and the quality of gameplay.

In contrast to InstantAction, Cafe.com will appeal to a broader audience that includes housewives and females in general (who actually make up the primary audience for online casual games). CEO Roman Nouzareth says that the target demographic is Generation X, which consists of 25-40 year olds.

The design and functionality of the site reflects that it was designed for a less “gamer” audience in mind. The tone is lighthearted and only mildly competitive. Games include pictionary, chinese checkers, Sodoku, and billiards.

As with InstantAction, the focus is on multiplayer games that can be played instantly with friends (Cafe.com bases its games primarily in Flash and HTML). But Cafe.com has also been constructed with an emphasis on member reputations and personas. Users can build out profiles with highly customizable 3D avatars (called “MiniMes”) that will be loaded into games themselves to represent characters there. As with other social networks, you can make friends with other members and message them. Nouzareth says that he wants Cafe.com to be the place where people manage their online gaming personas, while they go elsewhere to manage their more generic personas.

Virtual currency and the purchase of so-called “boosts” are particularly central to Cafe.com’s ecosystem. Members can purchase CafeCoins using real money and then use them to buy three main types of goods: attacks, defenses, and social items like virtual flowers. Gaming-specific goods can be purchased outside of gameplay and added to one’s collection for use when the time comes during gameplay. CafeCoins can also be used to buy things like new clothes for your avatar.

Two APIs are being worked on for Cafe.com: one that allows for the integration of games into the site, and one that will allow for the exporting of data elsewhere. The former is already available and being used both by the company’s own developers and by the handful of outside developers that it has worked with so far. The idea with the latter API is that users eventually will be able to export their Cafe.com profile information elsewhere, for example, to display their gaming reputations other social networking profiles.

Nouzareth says in reference to Pogo.com, one of the biggest social gaming sites in the United States: if Pogo were to have a baby with Facebook, that baby would be named Cafe.com. Grab your invitation and CafeCoins (see above) to find out yourself how that comparison holds up. This will give you a taste:

CrunchBase Information

GarageGames

Cafe.com

InstantAction

Information provided by CrunchBase

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Blogged with Flock

Flock 1.1 Beta: Where are my feeds, favorites, etc? How do I get them back?

The Flock 1.1d public beta (available at www.flock.com/beta/download) creates a unique profile folder, so as to protect your data from potential bugs in the beta.

This means that your favorites, feeds, passwords and more from 1.0.x will not appear in the 1.1d beta. This information is not deleted, it is simply not accessed. The 1.1 general release will return to using your 1.0.x profile folder.

If you would like to access your 1.0.x profile within the Flock 1.1d beta, follow these instructions.

On Windows Vista:

1. Shut down Flock

2. Go to C:\Users\[your login profile name]\AppData\Roaming\Flock

3. Make a copy of the “Browser” folder

4. Delete the “BrowserBeta” folder (this will delete any favorites, feeds, etc you’ve added in the 1.1 beta!)

5. Rename the copy of the “Browser” folder to be “BrowserBeta”

6. Open Flock

On Windows 2000 and XP:

1. Shut down Flock

2. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\[your login profile name]\Application Data\Flock

3. Make a copy of the “Browser” folder

4. Delete the “BrowserBeta” folder (this will delete any favorites, feeds, etc you’ve added in the 1.1 beta!)

5. Rename the copy of the “Browser” folder to be “BrowserBeta”

6. Open Flock

Mac OS X:

1. Shut down Flock

2. Go to (your home folder)>Library>Application Support

3. Make a copy of the "Flock" folder

4. Delete the "FlockBeta" folder (this will delete any favorites, feeds, etc you’ve added in the 1.1 beta!)

5. Rename the copy of the "Flock" folder to be “FlockBeta”

6. Open Flock

Linux:

1. Shut down Flock

2. Go to ~/.flock/

3. Make a copy of the “browser” folder

4. Delete the “browserbeta” folder (this will delete any favorites, feeds, etc you’ve added in the 1.1 beta!)

5. Rename the copy of the “browser” folder to be “browserbeta”

6. Open Flock

PLEASE NOTE: By doing this you are making a COPY of the profile that Flock 1.0.x uses. When the official release of Flock 1.1 is available, it will return to using the “Browser” folder. At this time, to retain information you’ve added while using the 1.1 public beta, you will have to rename the “BrowserBeta” folder to “Browser” once again.

Blogged with Flock

EU ponies up $22M for BitTorrent development, sees it as future of content distribution

BitTorrent is getting more legitimate with each passing day. There’s word today that the European Union will put up $22 million, or €15 million, for the development of an open source BitTorrent client—P2P-Net—that supports live streaming. (Wow that sounds like a lot of money to spend for what amount to some kid’s summertime Google Code entry.) Of note is who’s partnering with the in-development service, namely the BBC, which will stream its TV shows using the application.

How long until CBS et al. embrace P2P technology, especially BitTorrent?

Ah, yes. Never.

EU Invests $22 Million in Next-Generation BitTorrent Client [TorrentFreak]

ShareThis

Blogged with Flock