Month: November 2005

TechCrunch ? Comparing The Flickrs of Video Techcrunch is out with a great round up that compares the “flickrs” of video. They have a great quick chart that compares CastPost, ClipShack, DailyMotion, Grouper, OurMedia, Revver, Vimeo and vSocial. Nice work.

Scobleizer – Microsoft Geek Blogger ? Slide your way into new photo sharing site I think that although photo sharing is interesting, unless this site embraces community building it probably will not be very succesful.

Scobleizer – Microsoft Geek Blogger ? Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon” Yes, I was one of those who was kind of immediately turned off my live.com even though I liked the idea because Firefox wasn’t supported. Scoble says this is coming very, very soon.

TiVo and Yahoo deal in the works? | PVRblog Well remote record is a great feature from MSN that allows you to remotely (via the web) schedule recordings for your Media Center PC. It looks like Yahoo! and TiVo have partnered to offer a similar type of remote scheduling of your TiVo via Yahoo! This is a very strong feature to add.

Of course this service doesn’t work with either my Series One TiVo or my DirectTV TiVo (only a Series Two TiVo). But this shouldn’t be surprising.

A smart partnership between the two companies.

Update: Gartenberg says that this is no big deal.

I think you have to look at this thing in it’s infancy though and see if there is not something else that it might represent. Yahoo! recently has been more and more vocal about getting into the production and content business. Partnering with TV (with this remote record thing as the first step) could potentially represent a path for Yahoo! to the living room.

The standalone HDTV dual tuner TiVo, supposedly due out mid next year, could be a blockbuster of a machine. It might be nice to get Yahoo! content that will be developed over the course of the next year over this box.

Yahoo! should buy TiVo. TiVo has a poison pill in effect right now which would make it tough for anyone to buy them without paying up and their Board most likely feels that their stock is worth a heck of a lot more than it trades at today, but by allowing themselves to be bought by Yahoo! they would gain needed momentum, money and traction to really do this internet TV thing right.

LibraryCrunch: Building Community Intelligence at Yahoo: The New York Times is out with an article entitled, A Journey to the Center of Yahoo! The article profiles Yahoo! and especially looks at the possibilities for social communities in Yahoo! and their subsequent implication for search. Lately I’ve been coming more and more to the realization that social communities as human filters can have powerful implications for search. We are only just seeing the beginning of this.

From the article: “The idea that human judgment can improve a search engine’s automatic findings is hardly new. From the dawn of the Web’s history – that is, over the last 15 years – companies have invented tools to help users assess the quality and relevance of information, often by relying on others’ opinions. Examples include Amazon’s user reviews, eBay’s feedback ratings and ‘trusted networks’ created on many sites.”

Whether Flickr’s interestingness or Digg’s interestingness, search firms are applying serious leverage to their results by giving their algorithms more and more human input. This human input from larger and larger communities will act as a kind of miracle grow for search and will enhance relevancy to degrees that we have not seen hence.

Already Flickr’s interestingness photos trump anything you will find in terms of rank relevance at either Yahoo! or Google.

So real value in search will come from those who successfully build communities. This is not an easy thing and although it can occasionally be bought — as Flickr is a prime example, companies must be careful as the value of a community can suddenly turn to zero and it’s members scatter like leaves in the wind if not tended to carefully. Communities and people are fickle and you generally have to give more than you get. People have to believe that you are sincere and the community dynamics cannot be clouded by short term financial metrics whether grown organically or through acquisition. The most successful communities will create many disparate and even contradictory sub communities.

The exciting thing is that there are so many new ways that we can potentially come up with to delight and inspire people to be a part of something online in this whole new/old Web 2.0 thingy. People want community — especially young connected people online.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

The article is ended with a quote from Flickr’s Caterina Fake: “You can think about the way people will interact, as you sit in the usability lab, but until you put it in front of very large numbers of real people, you don’t really know,” Ms. Fake said. “So you have to release products early and often, like perpetual beta.” Indeed.

Stephanie’s Cheese Sandwich Blog ? Flickr Wishlist: Stephanie Booth says that she wishes that she could find out where her Flickr traffic is coming from. I agree. I did actually ask Stewart at the Flickr presentation at the Apple store in San Francisco about this and he said he’d be worried about spam. Derek Powazek who was in the audience suggested using Technorati to do this and this seems to work fine. It doesn’t give you a stats breakdown like sitemeter or anything but it will show you who is linking to your Flickr stream and where. Here is mine.

Flickr Newness at wongaBlog You can now replace a photo after it has been uploaded (helpful if you see an imperfection later and want to correct it but don’t want to resubmit it per se) and added some tag and privacy options for uploading via email.

Will Google Acquire TiVo? It isn’t the first time it’s been brought up, but more fuel for the rumor mill.