The latest from TechCrunch
- The Post-Optical Disc Era Gets Off To A Rocky Start With The OS X Lion Beta
- Google's Wizard Of Oz Search Algorithm And The Threat Of Facebook Search
- Wordchuck's Shelly Roche On The Challenges Of Being "RV Profitable" [TCTV]
| The Post-Optical Disc Era Gets Off To A Rocky Start With The OS X Lion Beta | Top |
| If there was any doubt in peoples’ minds that Apple intends to kill off the optical disc , it was put to rest today. This morning’s unveiling of the OS X Lion Developer Preview came with the news that it would only be available one way: through the Mac App Store . And while Apple wouldn’t say if they intended to release the final version of Lion to consumers this summer in the same way, it’s pretty clear that they’re going to do just that. But this important push into the post-optical disc era hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for all so far. Since the beta was first put up for download this morning, angry developers have flooded Apple’s forums. Why? Because many can’t install the software. But it’s not a bug in the OS itself that’s preventing them from doing it, it’s a bug in the distribution method — the Mac App Store. In the past, when Apple has distributed test software to developers, they’ve done so through a website devoted to that. Once a developer entered their credentials, they could get access to a download link to get the software. But with the new method in place for OS X Lion, Apple had developers log in and get a special redemption code that they were told to use in the Mac App Store to get OS X Lion. For some, that worked just fine. But once a large rush of developers started hitting the Mac App Store, deployment slowed to a crawl. And at points, things were at a total stand-still, several developers tell us. Given the interest, that’s somewhat understandable, except for the fact that if the connection to the Mac App Store was interrupted, paused, or cancelled after the download had started, it then became impossible to download OS X Lion at all. This is apparently a bug in the deployment system. It seems that Apple is limiting downloads of the beta software installer to one machine. You can install the software on multiple machines, but you have to copy the installer from one machine to another manually. You cannot re-download it as you can with other software distributed through the Mac App Store. And once the one-time download starts, Apple apparently assume it’s going to finish and they cut you off from being able to resume or restart a download. Hence the swarm of angry developers unable to get access to Lion today. Clearly, this more strict distribution model is in place to prevent piracy and to ensure that regular users don’t move over to Lion before it’s ready to really show its stripes. But the situation today has been bad enough to lead many developers to question why Apple just didn’t stick with the old method for developer distribution. And it’s lead others to question the distribution method itself for such a high-scale roll-out. Presumably, by going this route today, Apple wanted to further test the CD-killing system they’ve spent time and money building. Up until now, it has run pretty smoothly since its launch in January. And Apple undoubtedly needed to test the ability to dish out huge software downloads via this method — things like the final build of OS X Lion. It’s definitely better that they get the bugs out now, rather than when consumers flood the store to get Lion this summer. I suspect we may end up seeing a hybrid launch this summer, with Apple using both DVDs in their retail stores/website and the Mac App Store to sell Lion. And perhaps Apple may even give those who decide to go the Mac App Store route, a discount. The one tricky thing about pure software distribution are system restores. Apple got around using an optical disc for this with the new MacBook Airs by using a USB stick. Perhaps they’ll include details on how to make your own such stick/disc if you download OS X from the Mac App Store. With talk of MobileMe and other retail boxes vanishing from Apple Store shelves, this software distribution method is clearly the future for the entire platform. But it’s a future that’s still a work in progress. CrunchBase Information Apple Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Google's Wizard Of Oz Search Algorithm And The Threat Of Facebook Search | Top |
| Google search is powered by algorithms. Computers slice and dice data looking for signals that a web page is more or less interesting than other web pages for a given query. PageRank is a big part of this, where Google looks at inbound links to a site as well as the text relevant to that link. But Google also uses lots of other signals to determine the relevance of a web page. They have to, because PageRank on it’s own is infinitely gameable. If no one ever tried to game search results PageRank would work just fine. Inbound links are simply votes for various web pages. If you take the authority of the site linking into account, it makes for really good search results. That’s why Google was so great in 1999, when there was less incentive to game search results, and less expertise by the people doing it. But today all that’s changed. There’s a feeling that Google’s algorithm is falling further and further behind the very motivated people and companies out there fighting that algorithm. It’s an arms race, and Google is losing that arms race. Today we saw yet another algorithm change by Google, designed to fight some of the more annoying internet polluters - content farms and scrapers . The arms race continues. No Humans Involved! What fascinated me most today was Google’s insistence that they are not directly using the block data they crowdsource from their Chrome extension in determining search relevance. It's worth noting that this update does not rely on the feedback we've received from the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension, which we launched last week. But then they talk about how the algorithm is coming up with very similar decisions anyway: However, we did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits. The more I think about this, the more strange it seems to me. There’s a good explanation for not relying on that data – if they publicly said they did there would then be a huge incentive for SEOists to start to manipulate that block data, too. Forget linkfarms, just hire thousands of people on Mechanical turk to download the extension and block competitor’s sites. Another angle on the arms race. But I don’t think that’s why. Like the Wizard of Oz, Google hides behind their mighty and mysterious search algorithm. If good search was as easy as analyzing simple clicks of a mouse on a web page, all the magic could vaporize. And if you could somehow remove as much spam as possible from that data, and even slice it demographically, geographically and even personally for a given user, then things might really get sticky. Particularly if Google didn’t have access to any of that data. And Facebook did. One of the most interesting experiments going on in search right now is Blekko’s Facebook Like powered search engine . Search results and search relevance is determined by what your friends have “liked” on Facebook, a very deep store of data indeed. Facebook has more than half a billion users, and half of those log on every day. These people spend 700 billion minutes on the site and share 30 billion pieces of content. Links are being shared and people are clicking “like” to vote for that content. And it turns out that it all adds up to a pretty useful search engine experiment on Blekko. Imagine what Google could do with all that data and you start to understand why social is so darned important for them right now. Not to kill Facebook, but to try to neutralize the threat that the next great leap in search engine evolution doesn’t happen completely without them. A lot of the searches that Google is really bad at – commerce and travel, for example – can get really good really fast if you can look at deep data from friends about those very things. I don’t need pages and pages of results. Just a nice hotel in Paris that a friend vouches for. Or a movie I’ll enjoy. Or the right set of pots and pans. All that data is right there on Facebook. It may take Facebook a few years to really start to get interested in search. But there is so much advertising revenue in that business that they can’t ignore it forever. And that must scare Google more than just about anything else . | |
| Wordchuck's Shelly Roche On The Challenges Of Being "RV Profitable" [TCTV] | Top |
| Offhand internationalization doesn’t seem like it should be a problem for websites, or at least it should be a problem that should be easy to solve. Well not so much, at least according to Wordchuck founder Shelly Roche. We brought Roche into the newly redesigned TCTV studio to talk about her efforts at automating translation (in over 20 languages!) for the Ruby on Rails community, what its like to not win a TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon as well as her future plans for the internationalization of web content, a project which evolved out of her own attempts to make localization less painful for her own personal development efforts. Workchuck received 100K of angel funding shortly after TechCrunch Disrupt, and Shelly’s been working on wearing multiple hats ever since, building a startup by herself out of her 17-year-old 23′ Class C RV. Watch the video above to catch up with Shelly and get a taste of her “RV Profitable” adventure. You can also catch Shelly back in the day here , or in the Wordchuck walk through, below. CrunchBase Information Wordchuck Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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