The latest from TechCrunch
- Is Google Asking The Wrong Question With Social?
- Google Gets All Designy With Updated Homepage, Search Results And Free Fonts
- Keen On… Michael Fertik: Why People Will Pay for Privacy (TCTV)
- Fitocracy Brings Games And Social To Your Workouts (Invites Within)
| Is Google Asking The Wrong Question With Social? | Top |
| Editor's note : Guest contributor Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer internet, and social networks. He is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semilshah . Today’s soft-launch of Google’s new social galaxy, Google+ , raises one interesting question: Can Google, a massive, multinational, cash-rich, consumer technology company with multiple successful productivity applications and services, take its dough out of the oven and bake a social network into their bread? Over the past year, Google has undergone some big changes. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt stepped down. Co-founder Larry Page stepped in, reshuffling the deck and tying employee bonuses to creating a successful social experience. The result seems to be a slick-looking yet potentially Wave-like confusing constellation of social “circles,” “huddles,” “hangouts,” and ”sparks” that could, theoretically, lay the foundation for new, more nuanced social networks to form. In the middle of all the reactions to today’s release, I believe it’s important to step back and ponder whether Google is focusing its efforts on the wrong problem, and in doing so, to investigate a potentially better fit that coincides with the company’s own DNA. What made Google “Google” was its groundbreaking PageRank technology that allowed us to search the web more efficiently. Powered by a mandate to organize the world’s information online, Google trained all of us over more than a decade to tune our online search behavior to entering in keywords and symbols. As obvious as that seems today, this is not how humans as a species are wired to search for new information. Before the Internet, most “search” was conducted through offline directories and by the time-honored evolutionary tradition of asking questions. “ Where would you recommend I stay on my trip to Hawaii? ” “ What dish did you order at that new restaurant in the hotel? ” “ Where can I get the best deal on that hotel? ” Google has elegantly stripped down these queries and trained us to, instead, enter the following text in a search box: “Hawaii + hotel deal” or “Hawaii + restaurant + popular dish.” Now, that might be how some geeks actually ask questions in real life, but this is not how we are wired to search. We are most accustomed to asking questions as an extension of our own curiosities. And while Google keyword search is incredibly efficient, the content it points us to is unfortunately declining in quality. There’s been enough debate about the proliferation of run-of-the-mill and high-end content farms, so I won’t beat that drum. The bottom line is that although it’s never been easier to search online, it’s getting harder and harder to find exactly what we’re looking for because there are perverse incentives to not only create, but also promote, keyword-optimized content. The alternatives, however, don’t provide a clear path yet either. The idea of shifting search back to questions isn’t new. Ask tried it, as did Yahoo! Answers . More recently, companies like Aardvark (acquired by Google), Fluther (acquired by Twitter), Formspring , Quora , and AnyAsq are picking up where the 1.0 versions left off, each taking a slightly different tack and growing in slightly different ways. On Formspring and AnyAsq, users can invite the audience to ask them direct questions, provide answers to the ones they want to, and then remain searchable for others to peruse. On Quora, users can pose questions within topics or, if the question has already been asked, to search within the site for the answer, assuming someone has provided one. No doubt, Google and Twitter were thinking about capturing questions when they acquired the Aardvark and Fluther teams, respectively. I wanted to lay all of this out to demonstrate that it’s the questions posed by people—not the people themselves—that are most central to Google’s DNA. In spite of this, the company has trained all of us to ask questions in unnatural ways. The flurry of new companies trying to get back to questions demonstrates just how powerful that force can be. With the threat Facebook is posing to the company, Google’s search strategy has been two-pronged: (1) to crop-dust the emerging mobile handset landscape with Android and, thereby, to have a huge footprint on mobile search; and (2) to “bake” social retroactively into its overall makeup, the digital equivalent of genetically modified food. On #1, Google’s acquisition of Android will prove to be one of its most important moves, though there remains much work to be done to provide some controls on the platform. On #2, however, I believe that while social isn’t perfect (can it ever be, online?), that war has already been won. The fear for Google is that as more people spend more and more time on Facebook , people will search less by keyword and conduct more searches by discovering things through their friends online. We may chose our next vacation based on seeing where our friends have been, but we’re still going to ask them questions about the trip. This type of search, or social discovery, will become important, but it won’t dominate search—it’s just one channel, and different social networks exist for different parts of our lives. Google still holds tremendous mindshare and user-intent for search. While in a perfect world it would have been helpful to require every GMail user to create a Google Profile account when they signed up (Whoops!), the reality is that Google is in a better position to organize all of the social signals we broadcast online rather than to organize all of the individuals making those signals. Instead of building another social network, I’d like to see Google focus on helping us search through all the user-generated signals and content and to help us with our search, much of which is done offline through social questions, not keyword-speak. (Although, the threaded comments approach Google+ is using in the main stream it presents to users does lend itself to friends asking each other questions and answering them). This approach would let Google focus on what it excels at, helping us find information online, especially information created by our friends and friends of friends, perhaps even in an instant. Now, that would be a huge plus. Photo: Stefan Baudy CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Google Gets All Designy With Updated Homepage, Search Results And Free Fonts | Top |
| Oh, so you thought Google was done after it rolled out Google+, Circles, Sparks, Huddle, and Hangouts ? No, no, no. Google will be done when that’s Google-brand oxygen you’re breathing. This afternoon, the search giant’s rollout announcements have continued, as the official Google blog quietly declared (relatively speaking) that the Google Search page (and products across the Google empire) will be getting “a bit of a makeover” over the next few months. And there are new web fonts, too. OMGoogle! Basically, these updates will focus on adding enhanced usability, cleaner design, and an improved UX to Google products. While these changes will roll out across all Google products, it looks like the focus will be on cleaning up Google Search, Maps, and Gmail. According to its blog, the intention behind this iterating is to succeed in “bringing forward the stuff that matters to you and getting all the other clutter out of the way”. But what does that mean? More specifically, Google will be adding bolder colors for actionable buttons, hiding those that aren’t essential until they’re actually needed, etc. And, as you can see below, the results page will also be getting a bit of a new look. Users will find a new gray bar and a blue search button to highlight the search box at the top of the page. Oh, and how about a black nav bar? Other updates to search and results include an updated design for the left-hand panel of tools, in which Google has muted the color of the tools and reserved the use of bolder colors to highlight key action buttons, tools and filters. The URL will also be relocated directly beneath the headline for each search result, and links on the homepage moved to the top and bottom edges of the browser, all in the name of cleaning up the search experience. These updates also are a sign of the enormous array of gadgets and devices on the market today, and frankly, of Google’s ubiquity across these platforms and devices. Google is essentially rolling out more featherweight design that will be optimized for use across mobile, high-res monitors, TV, and so on. Consistency in the face of fragmentation is everything. Oh, and Google also mentioned that, as part of this new look, there will also be some new technologies put to use, like HTML5 and WebGL, to name two familiar faces. Google is also adding to its collection of free, open-source fonts — another hundred-plus fonts, to be precise . So, now you can search or browse hundreds of font families, then add them to your Google Font Collection , view them in a sample layout, and then grab the Google-served code to add them to your website. Just like that. Google Web Fonts are available via the Google Web Fonts API, which you can learn more about here . But ‘will there be Comic Sans 2?’, you ask. I’m not at liberty to say. CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Keen On… Michael Fertik: Why People Will Pay for Privacy (TCTV) | Top |
| Will people pay for online privacy? Yes, they will – at least according to Michael Fertik, the founder and CEO of Reputation.com, one of the early leaders in the new online privacy ecosystem. Indeed, Fertik believes that privacy is the next big thing in the online economy – a necessary antidote to Reid Hoffman's Web 3.0 economy of pervasive personal data. As Fertik told me when he came into San Francisco's TechCrunchTV studio earlier this week, companies like Reputation.com give control back to the consumer in our Web 3.0 world. With products like the $75 a year MyPrivacy and MyReputation services, Reputation.com offers consumers a relatively affordable way to both block cookies and protect their online reputations in our increasingly public social media world. Fertik may well be right. Reputation.com has already raised $25 million in three rounds of financing from a number of blue chip VCs including Kleiner and Bessemer. And while Fertik hasn't received a lot of attention in the technology press, he is a frequent commentator on privacy issues in mainstream media and even recently starred as a "Web Avenger" in ABC's new reality show about ruined online reputations. This is the first of a two part interview with Fertik. Tomorrow he explains why data is the new oil and why consumers are the only people not benefitting from this avalanche of personal information. Why people will pay for privacy Michael Fertik, the founder and CEO of reputation.com. Michael, are you the most handsome CEO founder in the valley? You must be the most handsome interviewer in all of San Francisco. Well two very handsome men together intimately in the Tech Crunch studio. Michael, reputation.com of the most is one of the big stories now in our reputation economy. When and how did you start the company? I started the company in 2006. In Louisville, Kentucky where I was living at the time. And I was reading articles that were basically now what we'd call cyber bullying. No, that term, I think, was not used so much at that time. And I thought there was something wrong in the state of Denmark that, you know, in the blink of an eye somebody could just tattoo you forever in a way that was unfair or inaccurate or libelous or alternately just invade your privacy and exposed the personal information about you on the internet in a way that was very invasive. And I realized that the entire, kind of, momentum of the internet was, was facilitating, and that there was virtually no, if any, infrastructure that would be contraveiling to that momentum. I couldn't get the idea out of my head, and in this country, you put up or you shut up. So I started this company. Two questions. Firstly, what were you doing in Louisville, Kentucky? And secondly, you're a graduate of Harvard Law did you study this whole issue of privacy and reputation at Law School? I was clerking for the Chief Judge of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Kentucky, that's why I was there. His name is Denny Bogs, his actual name is Denny, not Daniel. Really neat guy. And actually some of your viewers might like knowing a tid bit of the internet. In order to apply for the clerkship for the chamber, is very famously in the law community, you have to take a quiz of general knowledge, which is extremely humiliating to take, because its very hard. One of these quizzes actually some years ago, was published on the web. So you can find it if you Google Danny Bogs quiz. And you can test yourself, its kind of hard. No, I didn't study this at law school, reputation and privacy. I studied constitutional law, which implicates privacy. But not really in the internet. In fact, I didn't take so much internet stuff at law school. I got to know some of the professors who teach it, who are big voices, Trey Lesig and Paul Freig and so forth in the field. I was not focused on this. I just stumbled into the topic, and it turned out to be a, you know, a foreshadowing of what we now know is important. The Wall Street Journal has said that this is a hot new area of privacy. But it, it's always seemed to be the obvious area. Why were you first, why didn't everyone realize there was going to be a need to protect people's privacy on the internet. Well, I think there has been a low level anxiety about privacy for a long time. When it comes to the Internet, it has been surging in prominence recently because the, the invasion has become more obvious and the consequences are now becoming more obvious. And, just a few days ago the FTC approved the launch of a, of a company that is doing manual searches for social media information about you and is gonna be using that information for background checks for. Which company is that? It's called Social Intelligence. And, there are a lot of companies that are lining up to try to do that. And the Wall Street Journal reported last year that, just last year, that, that insurance companies are mining social media data for information about you, presumably to assess premium levels and so forth. So, the consequences are just coming into focus and the scope of the problem is coming into focus. But, a number of people have predicted that privacy would be some kind of topic for at least some time, though privacy is a phrase that covers all matters of sins and it's kind of frustratingly non specific at many times. The question has always been, will people pay for privacy? And as in a lot of topics, there's a lot of received wisdom in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of acerbic and confident received wisdom in Silicon Valley and so for a while we have had to lean against the acerbic conventional wisdom that no one will pay for privacy, and we've shown, I think. Knock on wood. That people will, and now there's a lot of commercial interests and venture guys who are trying to get into the field, which is great. Because in order to make this work, we need a full on ecosystem of smart people building interesting products and interesting companies to lean against the entire infrastructure of the internet. Which is essentially about, getting | |
| Fitocracy Brings Games And Social To Your Workouts (Invites Within) | Top |
| You may not have heard of them quite yet, but a startup called Fitocracy is pretty hot right now. Six months into its private beta and Fitocracy has already gathered 18K users and has 8K more on the wait list. (And we have 1,200 free beta invites here , so click away!) But, ‘why is Fitocracy so hot right now?’ you ask in your best Zoolander impression. Well, for starters, Fitocracy brings role playing game mechanics and a social aspect to online fitness — and it’s got a great name. What’s more, Fitocracy blew up on Reddit and a few fitness forums because it has a backstory that a lot of people (especially the nerdly-inclined) can identify with. Fitocracy Founders Brian Wang and Richard Talens are college friends and are both currently fitness buffs and have been known to even compete in a body-building competition or two. But it wasn’t always that way. Wang is a self-described skinny kid and Talens a self-described chubby guy. Their not-exactly ballooning in muscles (and the inspiration for their startup) is largely due to the fact that both guys are long-time gamers, having been playing MMO and RPGs since Ultima Online and Chrono Trigger. Of course, today, they look like this . (Oh, and here’s a before-and-after picture of Richard, FTW .) So, the founders decided to approach fitness exactly as they did their favorite RPGs: Give people a reason to get excited about, or addicted to, fitness by bringing the gaming reward system to workout routines. For example, when you join, it won’t be long before other users are offering you Fitocracy’s version of a workout plan, called “quests”, in which you are encouraged to do a certain number of squats, lifts, crunches, etc. The platform awards you with points, the ability to level-up, badges and more to get you dedicated to your fitness and treating it like a game, rather than some arduous task you’d rather put off until never. Of course, you’re going to be a lot less likely to adopt (and stick to) a workout routine without a little encouragement. Points are nice, but we need that carrot — that positive reinforcement to keep going. Which is why Wang and Talens have added a social aspect to Fitocracy — to build an environment of support and social reinforcement to keep people trucking on their personal fitness quests. You can interact with friends, share regimens, points-earned on social networks, get advice from others in various forums, and so on. Another reason why fitness has such a high drop out rate is that, for any number of reasons, many people fail to see quick results from their workouts. (See any exercising infomercial on television if you think this isn’t a problem.) A lot of times, we’re too lazy to seek out advice or research the right routines. Adding game elements, social layers, and significantly shortening the feedback loop all work towards increasing retention and keep you coming back. I had one Fitocracy user tell me that, in just three months of using the site, he had already dropped a waist size and added significant muscle mass. With a platform targeted at tech-savvy people, and for those of us who may live largely sedentary or laptop-centric lives, this is music to our ears. Of course, Fitocracy does face some competition from another hot startup — Boston-based RunKeeper, which is building a platform that allows users to integrate all of their various health gadgets and apps in one place online. While RunKeeper has built a data-driven service with an open API (as part of what they call their “HealthGraph”) and is mobile on iOS, Fitocracy is more focused on gaming and, of course, less on running. In light of its competition, Fitocracy could definitely use some more information on nutrition and some mobility — it would be great to be able to tap into Fitocracy when at the gym or on-the go. Though, as I understand it, both of these are at the top of the team’s priority list. Fitocracy is currently looking to raise a seed round, somewhere in the ballpark of $500K I’m told, and is courting fitness-loving investors. It’s a cool site, and a great idea. It’s about time someone created a RPG for fitness, so that nerds can get back to doing what they do best: Kicking ass. And also earning XPs. CrunchBase Information Fitocracy Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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