ReadWriteWeb

Google Buzz: The Mainstream's Geo-Social Network?

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:43:30 -0800

Google Buzz could quickly become the most popular location-based service on the Internet. Not only does Buzz integrate itself into Gmail, which will give it a large mainstream user base, but Buzz also puts geolocation front and center on its mobile sites. In addition, the new Buzz layer in the Google Maps mobile interface makes it incredibly easy to find geotagged Buzz messages around you.

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Nobody is Geotagging Tweets - So Can Buzz Geolocation Succeed?

Twitter introduced its own geolocation API in August 2009, but while we were very excited about the possible applications of this API, very few users and developers actually use it today.

ReadWriteWeb's full coverage and analysis of Google Buzz:

While location-based apps and services like Foursquare and Gowalla (which launched its own API today) have quickly grown in popularity, only 0.23% tweets currently include location data. Unlike Buzz, however, neither Twitter itself nor any of the popular Twitter client really put geolocation at the center of their applications.

Buzz's Advantage: It Already has the Users

Now, however, Google is releasing a product to millions of people that makes geolocation a major focus of the service. Already, you can bring up the Google Maps layer and find buzz messages in virtually every location. This quick adoption makes sense, given that Google is putting the colorful Buzz logo in a prominent place on its mobile interface.

The Google Buzz mobile site also makes it very easy to see messages from nearby users (including those you don't follow). The "nearby" button is very prominent and takes you right to a list of nearby messages, which feels a bit like BlockChalk (though without the anonymity of that service). Thanks to this, you can even get good use out of the service if none of your friends are Gmail users. You can, for example, just ask a Twitter-like question that's related to your location ("Where can I find good pizza around here?") and anybody on Buzz can see your message and post an answer.

Worries about Privacy.

By default, location sharing is turned on in Buzz, which raises concerns about privacy. Just today, as the European Union celebrates "Internet Safety Day," the E.U. warned users to turn off geolocation services whenever possible. Clearly, we do feel a lot more comfortable with sharing what we had for lunch than where we are right now. It would be nice, though, if Google allowed users to easily control the precision of this location data. A lot of people would be very comfortable with sharing what city they are in, for example, but don't necessarily want to disclose the exact coffee shop they are sitting in right now. On the other hand, that would also dilute the value of the information and it looks like Google opted to go for precise locations that are couple to Place Pages for this exact reason.

Geolocation: The Killer Feature for Buzz

By connecting Buzz to Google Maps Place Pages and by having a huge built-in user base, Google will be able to deliver a better location-aware social networking experience than any of its competitors. The question, of course, is if users are actually looking for this. The early reactions to Buzz are mostly positive, but we still have to wait and see if this will be another failed attempt by Google to create a social networking service, or if the tight Gmail integrations and Google's aggressive push to put Buzz front and center on its mobile services will be enough to convince users to use Buzz regularly.

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Apple's Virtual Reality Store: Second Life or XBox Live?

Dana Oshiro — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:38:00 -0800

While the rest of the world was caught up with Google Buzz, Apple was quietly granted a patent for a virtual reality App Store. The store patent encompasses details such as seasonal and time-based lighting, color schemes and a basic storefront representation. A few bloggers have already criticized the patent as a relic from SecondLife past, the store may have more use when we consider it in the context of the XBox Live marketplace.

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According to Patently Apple, the patent is one of several awarded to Apple today. First filed by David Koski in 2006, the abstract explains that a storefront representation is deployed, a store visitor is acknowledged and subsequent visitor shopping cart activity is shared with others.

Rather than thinking about this in the context of Second Life, it may be more appropriate to look at the XBox's emergence in the home entertainment space. Although primarily highlighted for its gaming features, XBox Live offers integration with Last.fm and Netflix, as well as social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Each user creates their own avatar and profile and then shops for games and videos within the XBox Live marketplace. Apple's attempt to move into this space may have interesting implications.

Someone who plays exercise-related games might receive a recommendation for a diet cookbook, a workout soundtrack, a yoga video, a calorie counting app and several portable devices to help you manage your routine. As well, the group shopping experiences may allow for virtual fitness groups, book clubs and even discounted group buying experiences. When we consider the time spent per user in games, this could be a lucrative business. While Koski may have simply filed the patent to receive his company patent bonus, there's also the chance that Apple is preparing for a more immersive future in entertainment.

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Foreign Startups Looking to U.S. Incubators for Help

Chris Cameron — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:40:00 -0800

Entrepreneurship in Europe has a problem. A lot of their talent is "crossing the pond" to increase their chances of finding early-stage funding. A lot of venture firms in Europe tend to play the safer hands that they are dealt, investing in proven companies rather than new startups looking for seed funding. Though organizations like Seedcamp are doing what they can to reverse this trend, incubators in the U.S. like TechStars are still seeing an increase of international applications, many likely from Europe.

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In a recent blog post, TechStars Boston director Shawn Broderick shared statistics about the demographics of the companies which applied in both 2009 and 2010. The data showed an increase in the number of companies either wholly or partially international in nature - up from 14% in 2009 to 24% in 2010.

"My a priori expectations were that the number of [Massachusetts]-based companies had increased 2009 to 2010, but clearly I was incorrect," writes Broderick. "I did not expect the big change in international applicants."

Massachusetts-based applications held steady, dipping slightly to 31% from 32% the previous year, while exclusively U.S.-based applications as a whole dropped from 89% in 2009 to 80% in 2010. While these aren't drastic changes, they do imply a significant trend and echo the state of early-stage startups outside of the U.S. ecosystem.

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham would likely say that these numbers need to be higher. Graham was one of the first proponents of the so-called "Startup Visa" program which would provide a special visa for international entrepreneurs to bring their ideas to the States.

"The biggest constraint on the number of new startups that get created in the US is not tax policy or employment law or even Sarbanes-Oxley," Graham wrote last April. "It's that we won't let the people who want to start them into the country."

A program like the Startup Visa would give even more incentive to international startups that are already tempted by the Silicon Valley culture and the numerous opportunities presented by American incubators. Startups are one of the few industries successfully creating jobs in America during a difficult period of economic struggle.

Just today, Yelp announced it would be expanding its company to the Phoenix area and hiring 200 employees, increasing its workforce by nearly 60%. The stats from TechStars are another indication that international entrepreneurs are increasingly looking to America to get their companies off the ground - companies which could play a significant role in creating American jobs.

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Weekly Poll: Is A Private Cloud Just A Glorified Data Center?

Alex Williams — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:00:00 -0800

We are in our third week here at ReadWriteCloud. One of the weekly features we do is a poll about an issue related to cloud computing or virtualization.

Last week we asked if you plan to invest in virtualization. This week we are asking: Is a private cloud just a glorified data center? You'll see the poll in the right sidebar of the main ReadWriteCloud page.

We had a pretty small sample to work with last week but the results show that virtualization is living up to its promise as one of the most important IT investments being made in the enterprise.

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This week, the question turns to an issue that gets its fair share of debate. For detractors, private cloud computing is not cloud computing at all. It's virtualization applied to a data center. It does not have the capacity that you get with a public cloud infrastructure.

From Andre Ye:

"And, the cost to expand that variability means additional capital expense for the company. That seems to run counter to some of the inherent benefits of cloud computing."

Proponents, like Gartner's Thomas Bittman, say the debate is a foolish one.

"There's an argument over whether the term "cloud" can be used to describe the changes taking place in internal IT architectures. How silly! Regardless of the term, there is a major trend playing out over the next few years where internal IT providers want to make fundamental changes so that they behave and provide similar benefits (on smaller scale) as cloud computing providers."

What do you think? Is private cloud computing for real?

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Can Google Buzz Succeed Where FriendFeed Couldn't?

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:20:50 -0800

Google just launched Google Buzz, the company's new social networking service which will be tightly integrated with Gmail. There can be little doubt that Google Buzz looks a lot like FriendFeed, the social aggregation service that was acquired by Facebook in August 2009. Today, FriendFeed's developers are Facebook employees and aren't likely to continue to improve the service in any meaningful way, while the active user community on FriendFeed continues to shrink rapidly. Given the similarities between the two services, we can't help but wonder if Google Buzz will be able to succeed where FriendFeed couldn't.

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ReadWriteWeb's full coverage and analysis of Google Buzz:

As Louis Gray points out, Google Buzz validates FriendFeed's ideas, but it also marginalizes the service even more. While some will look at Buzz as a Facebook/Twitter competitor, it also represents the final nail in FriendFeed's coffin. We will surely see a lot of FriendFeed's features appear on Facebook in the future, but FriendFeed as a stand-alone service has now lost its relevancy before it ever got a chance to go mainstream.

The real question, though, is whether Google Buzz will be able to succeed where FriendFeed couldn't. FriendFeed never made it out of the early-adopter phase and slowly became a self-referential community that was never quite accessible enough for a larger audience.

Looks Familiar?

If you are not familiar with FriendFeed, just have a look at these two screenshots:

Google's Advantage: Lifting FriendFeed's Best Ideas and a Huge Built-In User Base

Google Buzz has a number of advantages over FriendFeed. While FriendFeed tried to attract early adopters and mostly catered to their tastes, Buzz has a built-in audience already. While FriendFeed had to work hard on building a thriving community and never managed to attract a large mainstream audience, Gmail is one of the world's most popular email services and thanks to this, Buzz has millions of potential users from day one.

Also, while FriendFeed tried to allow users to connect to as many social services as possible, Google Buzz is just starting out with a few core Google and third-party services for now (Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader and Twitter). This will make it far more accessible than FriendFeed ever was.

Google is also putting a lot of emphasis on location-based and mobile services here, which is something FriendFeed never did. FriendFeed, for example, never offered a mobile app, while mobile apps and sites are one of the areas where Google is focusing on with Buzz.

The Buzz team has also been able to lift some of the best ideas from FriendFeed. You can "like" items, comment on them, you can see who liked a post (which looks identical to FriendFeed's implementation of this feature) and Buzz will recommend items that it thinks will be interesting to you because your friends also liked them or commented on them.

What do you Think?

Do you think Buzz's built-in mainstream user base help it to succeed where FriendFeed failed?

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How Google Buzz is Disruptive: Open Data Standards

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:31:27 -0800

Google rolled out a social stream service today called Buzz. It looks on the surface like Facebook, FriendFeed and other stream reading and writing services. It will compete with Facebook and Twitter. Under the covers, though, this major product was built by a team of people taking a radical new approach to online publishing: Buzz is all about open, standardized user data.

Google Buzz data can be syndicated out to other services using the standard data formats called Atom, Activity Streams, MediaRSS and PubSubHubbub. That couldn't be more different from Facebook. Google has taken open data standards to battle against a marketplace of competitors that are closed and proprietary to varying degrees. This is a very big deal.

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ReadWriteWeb's full coverage and analysis of Google Buzz:

Google Buzz was presented as a destination site, but a look at its APIs and developer roadmap indicate that it may actually intend to be a platform - the central hub for a world of distributed social networking. "This is a downpayment on where we're going with the open, social web," Google Open Web Advocate Chris Messina told us.

It's tempting to recoil at the thought of Google powering one more part of our lives online, and our friends' activity streams are a very important part of the online experience now. But if the growing number of data portability and open web advocates the company has hired can do their jobs well - then Google Buzz could be a big force for good.

People will build services on top of analyzing your public Buzz activity. They will build new applications for publishing to Buzz, just like the Twitter ecosystem has today. Planned support for things like the Salmon commenting standard mean that comments left on Buzz could appear out on blog posts around the web, and comments on blog posts could be viewed inside of Buzz when the post links are shared.

The use of full email addresses in @ public replies demonstrated today seems to indicate that it will be a cross-platform messaging service. Facebook users can only message other Facebook users but Buzz users may be able to reply to people using email IDs from other networks. That's hot stuff.

Once Activity Streams consumption, @ messages that look like Webfinger profiles to me and Salmon are in place then Buzz users should be able to read, comment on and message to conversations with people who have never seen Buzz in their lives, simply by subscribing to their feeds. There's huge potential for interoperability here.

Facebook and Twitter will face renewed pressure to publish and consume standardized data feeds as well now. If Buzz is big enough, it could break the dam holding back a flood of standardized data. Where there is standized data, there is scalable network effects, consumer choice, competition and thus innovation.

Buzz's embrace of the open web could make it a very important player in the development of the future.

Update: One critique to take into consideration is this. Google has scooped up a substantial number of formerly independent open web advocates - most recently Chris Messina, who was the leading spokesperson for the Activity Streams standard. See How Chris Messina Got a Job at Google. In that article we included the following argument from Yahoo's Eran Hammer-Lahav, the best-known technologist working to develop and support open login standard OAuth. This perspective is important to consider in thinking about the Buzz announcement and standards.

"This is clearly a big win for Google," Hammer-Lahav told us.

"Messina and Smarr are huge assets in the social web space. My concern is specific to Google. With Messina, Smarr, [inventor of OpenID and more Brad] Fitzpatrick and others all working for Google, focusing on the Social Web, there is less and less incentive for Google to reach out. Google has a strong coding culture which puts running code ahead of consensus and collaboration. Now with so many bright minds in house, they are even less likely to reach out. A week ago, you would have to get at least Google, Plaxo, and Messina (representing the independent voice) to collaborate. This week it's just Google.

"While I am certain that Messina and Smarr will keep their independent voices, and am not suggesting they will 'sell out' or alter their principles, they no longer need to surface many of their ideas out to the community. They can just have an quick internal meeting and ship products."

Is Google centralizing too much of the decision making about the future of an ostensibly decentralized web? Time will tell, but this may be the heart of the battle for the future of the social web.

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Mobile Health: Will Network Applications Help Us Get Healthy?

Mike Kirkwood — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:30:00 -0800

Last week, we were at the mHealth initiative conference in Washington D.C. The keynotes were all about the impact mobile health applications are having in shaping the future of the health care system. Nothing demonstrates that more than the iPhone. In the 18 months since it was released, it has been perhaps the biggest thing to happen to health care electronic records, which has seen billions of dollars worth of investment in past decades.

Mobile and wireless health applications directly impact the individual's health and have the promise of ensuring that when a patient leaves a doctor visit, they don't become "lost" in the system. It allows consumers to be engaged with health and wellness in their daily lives and connect back to their health care provider.

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For citizens in the United States, this movement could offer a future where there is allocated wireless spectrum that brings a wealth of health information into our homes and to our personal devices. This could be in the form of streaming health record transactions and content targeted to us where we consume our daily media and social interactions.

Dr. Mohit Kaushal, health care director for the National Broadband Taskforce, gave a summary of the issues surrounding health care and mobile health in a keynote today. We had a chance to catch up with him afterwords and dig in deeper to a few the key considerations of health IT as part of FCC investment.

Barriers

First, he described a few barriers that have existed in the past.

Connectivity between systems is a major issue and challenge in health care.

Adoption of electronic health has been slowed by reimbursement incentives and regulatory issues.

Data utilization is growing to become a part of the mobile spectrum and also is being driven by intensive applications such as video and imaging.

Key Challenges

Next, Dr. Kaushel shared a few of the hurdles to overcome with a national broadband policy to support health applications.

The US needs to invest in infrastructure to meet the growing needs of a mobile-enabled population.

Spectrum must be allocated (or reallocated) to meet the needs and the right areas of growth

Regulations need to be designed to maximize incentives for innovation in care delivery.

There must be reimbursement incentives and viable business models for companies to succeed in delivering profitable services. In the health care system, we know that fee for service doesn't work nearly as well as an outcome based approach for delivery of health, rather than more procedures.

The question is how we can take this learning and apply it to spectrum or infrastructure that is allocated to consumer facing health care solutions. Should the U.S. include mobile health care in its considerations for the next phase of allocation of spectrum?

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Foursquare Partners with Zagat, New York Times

Mike Melanson — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:17:23 -0800

Foursquare has come out strong in recent weeks with partnership deals that look to put it at the top of the location-based app game. Last week, it announced a partnership with Bravo, the style and fashion-centric television network, and today it has come out with a partnership with Zagat, the restaurant guide, and the New York Times.

As we wrote last week, Foursquare is competing in an increasingly crowded space. These partnerships may help it attract a whole new audience and remain competitive against other services like Yelp that are just joining in the location-based arena.

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According to the New York Times' Bits Blog, the partnership will provide Foursquare users with new "Foodie" badges when they check in to Zagat rated restaurants. The service will also provide restaurant ratings and reviews from Zagat. Just as with last week's deal with Bravo, the high profile connection is likely to draw attention to Foursquare in more than the bar-hopping techie crowd where it found its initial popularity.

In addition to its partnership with Zagat, Foursquare just announced this afternoon a partnership with the New York Times, which will start this Friday. Working together, Foursquare and the Times will put out special badges and features for the Winter Olympics. One such new feature will be "recommendations for visitors and local residents on restaurants, popular attractions, shopping and nightlife in Vancouver, Whistler and the town of Squamish ... The tips will be pulled from the Times' travel and entertainment coverage on the cities."

We have to say, with partners like these, Foursquare seems like its not only here to stay, but it won't be long before you hear even your less techie friends and family talking about this app.

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Live Blogging from Google: Launch of Google Buzz

Jolie O'Dell — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:11:59 -0800

This morning, Google is announcing some exciting new features for two of its most popular applications.

Team Red, as we affectionately call ourselves, is present at the Googleplex in Mountain View, and we'll be live blogging the event, giving you, dear reader, a fascinating play-by-play. Stay tuned for updates!

The event will begin at 10 a.m. Pacific (UTC -8). Just refresh this post to see new content as events unfold.

Additional on-the-fly research and images from RWW journalist Frederic Lardinois.

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ReadWriteWeb's full coverage and analysis of Google Buzz:

11:11: The event is over! Time to chase people down and ask some more pointed questions. Stay tuned to RWW for ongoing analysis.

11:08: Developers, here's the Google Code page for Buzz's APIs.

11:06: Will Buzz results appear high in Google search results? They're not doing anything special to promote those results, but users can search within Buzz. And all posts are indexed in real time.

11:04: Buzz is live.

11:02: Buzz will pull in tweets, and will publish to Twitter as a Twitter client in a later version. The team has put a lot of spam controls in place.

10:58: Will Google's social products succeed? Brin says he's seen a lot more productivity from using Google Buzz internally. Horowitz says the approach - creating something useful, not just entertaining - is different from "anything else I've tried."

10:56: Buzz user feeds will be available via PubSubHubBub/XML. Google will be releasing APIs. Google intends to make it as open as possible. They also want to integrate Buzz with other Google products such as the homepage.

10:52: Sergei Brin takes the stage. Fangirl here is very excited. Q&A starts. Buzz could integrate with Wave - a lot of functionality is inspired by Wave.

10:51: Buzz will launch at 11 a.m., when it will begin to roll out to Gmail users. Journos here will get it first. For the rest of Gmail users, they'll get Buzz within a few days.

10:50: Google is launching Buzz as an enterprise product soon, as well. "It will change the way businesses work around the world." Wasn't Wave supposed to do that?

10:45: Mobile Buzz will have a "nearby" setting to see posts and pics from folks around you. Makes the product a bit of a Foursquare/Yelp competitor?

10:42: Buzz allows for mobile posting by voice. The user speaks, and Google transcribes the audio into a geotagged text post.

10:40: You can use Buzz from Google's mobile homepage, mobile apps, and from a new Google Maps app for the major platforms. These apps will translate latitude and longitude into "real locations." Buzz will take its best guess and ask for confirmation. It's tied in with Place Pages.

10:39: You can use Buzz from Google's mobile homepage, mobile apps, and from a new Google Maps app for the major platforms.

10:37: Location is a powerful signal for relevancy. In the digital world we have not yet elevated location as a powerful signal. Computers speak latitude and longitude, but humans have a hard time interpreting this information.

10:35: Mobile: "You are going to love the new product experiences we will launch today." Consume and use Buzz on your mobile. One of Google's great insights was pagerank, which gave websites relevancy. Now, we need to find relevancy in social expressions on Twitter and other social networks. "It's easy to start drowning in this." How do we find relevancy in the real world? What signals do we use?

10:32: Google Buzz will have @replies with auto-complete. Users who are @ replied will receive inbox notifications.

10:29: When a user posts to Google Buzz, he can share publicly to followers and his Google profile, or privately to his existing Gmail groups or custom groups. Notifications of shares and comments will appear in a user's inbox with a special Buzz icon next to those items. Comments will appear in real time.

10:25: The Buzz tab will be located right below your inbox tab. Gmail will "know" who your friends are. The social stream features Yahoo! Meme-like content previews and will play nicely with Flickr and YouTube. Pictures will open in a lightbox-type UI. Shared links will feature headlines and thumbnails.

10:22: Buzz will surface your social graph by having you auto-follow the people you email and IM with the most. It will have a rich and fast-sharing experience for multimedia sharing. Sharing will be public and Google-indexed, or private - just depending on how users choose to share. It'll be integrated with your inbox in a way that goes beyond normal email. Finally, it will filter out the garbage and leave "just the good stuff."

10:20: Google is launching Google Buzz, a Google approach to sharing. Todd Jackson is the product manager, and he reveals that it's built into Gmail.

10:15: Google VP Product Marketing Bradley Horowitz kicks off the event: "I've got something exciting... We're going to talk about sharing." He's talking about finding the right audience for your content, real-time sharing and tools for attention management.

10:13: Wondering how much trouble I'd get in for casually paging through the slide preso on the podium laptop before the event starts... Probably not worth the scoop.

10:00: The event's a wee bit late kicking off, but Dodge is chatting about his work with Google Apps. He says the product range is already quite broad; they're working now to create a deeper set of features.

9:48: The music is pumping and the luminaries are trickling in and getting caffeinated. I'm sitting next to Jeremiah Owyang and Don Dodge.

Discuss

Europe's 17 Golden Rules for Keeping Safe on Social Networks

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:05:24 -0800

Are you using your real name on your social network profiles? According to the European Union's Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), that's a big mistake. A new report, published to coincide with Europe's Safer Internet Day, details the dangers of using social networks and lays out 17 "golden rules" for keeping safe on social networks. The report's authors are especially worried about the proliferation of mobile social networks and, among other things, recommend that users turn off all location-based services whenever they are not absolutely needed.

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The report argues that you should always protect your social networking accounts by using a pseudonym. After all, the authors say, your real friends will know who is hiding behind your nickname and will still be able to find you easily. We are not quite sure if this is a very realistic proposition, though some of the ENISA's "Golden Rules" are quite reasonable.

17 Golden Rules

Here are the rules:

Pay Attention to What You Post and Upload:

Consider carefully which images, videos and information you choose to publish
Never post sensitive information
Use a pseudonym

Choose Your Friends with Care:

Do not accept friend requests from people you do not know
Verify all your contacts

Protect Your Work Environment and Avoid Reputation Risk:

When joining a social networking site use your personal e-mail address (not your company e-maill address)
Be careful how you portray your company or organization online
Do not mix your business contacts with your friend contacts
Do not let anyone see your profile or personal information without your consent
Do not leave your mobile phone unattended
Do not save your password on your mobile phone
Use the security features available on your mobile phone

Protect Your Mobile Phone and the Information Saved on It:

Be careful what you publish about someone else

Inform Yourself:

Read carefully and in full the privacy policy and the condition and terms of use of the social network you choose

Protect Your Privacy With the Privacy Settings:

Use privacy-oriented settings (check who can see your pictures, who can contact you and who can add comments)

Report Stolen Phones Immediately:

Be careful when using your mobile phone and pay attention to where you put it

Pay Attention to Location Based Services and Information of Your Mobile Phone:

Deactivate location based services when not using them

What do You Think?

Most of these rules seem quite reasonable, but are you really going to use a nickname for your social network profile? Do you find it hard to keep your private life and work life separate on Facebook? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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Flickr Co-Founder Unveils Glitch: "The Greatest Game There Ever Was?"

Mike Melanson — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:40:00 -0800

Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and his company Tiny Speck have come out today with a game they boldly assert could be "the greatest game there ever was". The massively-multiplayer, Web-based Flash game was unveiled this morning and will be opening for private alpha testing soon.

While the game will not be fully open to the public until late in 2010, the current site not only gives us a preview of what Tiny Speck has been working on, but offers a way for you to keep track of what's new and sign up to be one of the game's testers.

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What's Your Glitch

First, let's get the name out of the way:

It's called Glitch because in the far-distant and totally-perfect future, the world starts becoming less and less probable, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and there occurs what comes to be called the "glitch" -- a grave danger of disemprobablization.

We had a chance to talk with Butterfield this morning about what to look forward to and the game he described was certainly something different. Though he says they haven't determined the pricing structure and are now just halfway through development, the game will primarily be free, with additional features and in-game goods available for purchase.

Glitch, from the looks of the preview video, looks like a standard side-scroller game with a Flash look that will be appropriate for all ages. As the FAQ states, the only thing you'll be killing in this game is your time. Butterfield said that, from the beginning, they were looking at creating an "something that's non-violent, a little bit more absurd and surreal."

In The Minds of Giants

The game, Butterfield told us, "takes place in the minds of these giants that are walking along and singing and humming the world into existence" - a reference to aboriginal myths of the world's creation. This backbone gives the whole game a flexibility that seems to be key, both in the experience of the game as well as the game-play itself.

"If you're in someone's imagination, even the rules can change to a certain extent based on location," Butterfield said, noting that games visual and aural design will change throughout.

Calling the game an "emerging collaborative situation," Butterfield said that the players would really create the game's dynamics as they went along.

"The social, economic and political structures that people evolve will change the direction of the game," he told us. "You can have a supply and demand economy."

But on it's most base level, the game is still a puzzle-based side-scroller, with some interesting new potential.

Where Will It Go?

One of the things we're immediately wondering about is the connections with social media made available by a Web-based platform. Already, the public beta testing sign-up offers a connection with Facebook Connect. The brief FAQ on the site hints at the social nature of the game, reading "We'll make it easy for you to find [your friends]. And since it is all one big world, there are no worries about who is on what server."

This could be a big leap from other MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft, where you have to chose a server, only to later find out that half your friends are on this server, while half your friends are on different servers and you can't play together.

In addition to the potential for social interaction, such as tweeting your in-game location - one example offered by Butterfield - Glitch also provides an API that will allow for even more extra-game interaction and expandability.

The game's development in Java and Javascript "means we'll be able to push new content -- new items, new places, new characters -- on a daily basis," states the FAQ. "It also means that we'll have lots of APIs with which the game can be expanded and extended."

For now, get there quick and sign up for private alpha testing, which starts soon. Public beta testing will begin this summer.

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After Success in Boulder, Open Angel Forum Marches Onward to San Francisco and New York

Chris Cameron — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:10:00 -0800

The talk of the venture capital and entrepreneurial towns these days is the Open Angel Forum which after its second event in Boulder, Colorado is now announcing two more events in New York and San Francisco. Brainchild of Jason Calacanis, the Open Angel Forum (OAF) is an opportunity for startups to get face-time with active big-time venture capitalists and angel investors - all for the low, low price of free.

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As we mentioned back in January following the debut event in Los Angeles, the OAF was formed out of frustration over events and investors which charge startups to present their companies - the so called "pay to pitch" debate. In a true example of making the best of a bad situation, the OAF has created a place where the both the best startups with the most potential can meet the top VCs and angels who are looking to invest.

At last week's Boulder event, six startups from over 100 applicants were chosen to meet with twenty hand-picked VCs, and all seemed to walk away from the event satisfied and thrilled by the event. In fact, all six companies - FaceFile, Grogger, TeamSnap, Odojo, Decasun and Kijubi - have all since blogged about their experiences.

"This fairness to us and others presenting plus the rule to only allow active investors makes OAF the best event we've attended since we started two years ago," writes Beckie Mostello of FaceFile. "The couple of hours we just spent with the OAF Forum tonight in Boulder, Colorado was the most valuable investment-oriented experience we have yet to be involved in," echoes Dave DuPont of TeamSnap.

The Open Angel Forum will keep its current momentum at full-speed-ahead as it rolls into San Francisco in March with a little help from local hosts Kevin Rose and Chris Sacca. The following month, Calacanis and Co. will travel to the east-coast for OAF New York, hosted by Brian Alvey and Charlie O'Donnell.

Mark Solon, an investor with Highway 12 Ventures and one of the selected VCs at last week's event in Boulder, believes the OAF is a further example of the changing landscape in the venture capital industry. As Solon notes on Highway 12's blog, Calacanis and OAF Boulder hosts Brad Feld and David Cohen represent a "groundswell of young investors" that are dedicating their lives to improving the entrepreneurial community across the country.

"These guys didn't go through a ton of effort recruiting 30 qualified investors from near and far, getting sponsors for the evening, securing a meeting place, and going through about 100 applicants for personal gain," writes Solon. "They did it because it was the right thing to do; to set an example for angel organizations everywhere that it's about the entrepreneur."

In an interview with Colorado Tech TV (embedded below), Calacanis expressed his satisfaction with the reception of the OAF, as well as his thoughts on the event's impact on the evolving venture funding ecosystem.

"We're not trying to replace other events like Open Coffee or the Tech Meetup -- those are great events for networking," said Calacanis. "[But] there is definitely a market need for a legitimate angel forum. The other forums out there were not really filled with angel investors, [...] and people were paying to pitch to a room of a hundred people with maybe two or three possible investors."

For those considering applying for the San Francisco and New York events, Boulder participant Mike Stemple of Odojo says that submitting a video application is not only a good way to stand out from the crowd, but it also helps you rehearse your pitch in a short form before the event. While he considers himself and his company extremely lucky to have been able to attend the OAF event, he encourages other startups to not count themselves out before applying.

"I believe for any given event ANYONE with a well thought out idea that solves a real world problem, can articulate it, has gotten beyond the idea stage and has actually built a company around the idea, could make it to present," writes Stemple on his blog.

The Open Angel Forum is now accepting applications for New York and San Francisco, so don't hesitate to get your application in early because there is bound to be hundreds. What cities would you like to see the Open Angel Forum come to next? Let us know in the comments!

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Amazon Simple Storage Service - Not So Simple Anymore

Tim Hastings — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:02:56 -0800

Today Amazon Web Services announced the availability of a new feature of their Simple Storage Service (S3).

Object Versioning now joins the ever growing list of features supported by S3. This proves once again that Amazon Web Services are listening to their customers and putting plenty of distance between them and their competition.

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They Grow Up So Fast

In March 2006 Amazon publicly launched S3, the first of their web services. In doing so, they also unveiled their new Web Services division of their business.

The service will soon celebrate its 4th birthday; to date, Amazon S3 holds over 102 billion objects and at peak times, handles over 100,000 requests/second. That is approximately 17 objects for each person on the planet! By anyone's standard, the service is successful.

Amazon S3 provides storage buckets that allow users to PUT files in and then GET them back later. Simple right?

Taking things beyond the simple GET and PUT might have a lot to do with S3's success. Amazon has added many features making S3 suitable for many different use cases.

Pick and Mix Features

The different S3 features can be switched on and off for individual buckets allowing users to pick different features depending on what they want to do.

For example:

Backups - buckets can be private and because they are securely hosted by Amazon far away in the cloud, they are an ideal "other place" to store a copy of important files.

File Sharing - access controls can be used to white-list other users to have access to your buckets.

Content Distribution - buckets can be made publically available via HTTP. This makes it perfect for websites to offload the serving of static content such as images. The CloudFront feature takes this one step further and makes your content available to users via their nearest Amazon Internet presence; so a user in Japan or Europe would not have to download your content from servers in the USA.

Versioning (today's announced feature) provides primitive version control of objects. When an existing file is uploaded to S3 it will create a new revision instead of overwriting the original. If you have ever accidentally deleted your backups you will appreciate the benefits of this feature! This simplifies the use of S3 for backups where you want to avoid overwriting a good backup with a corrupt one.

Many cloud storage companies support versioning (like DropBox and GitHub) and S3's support should not be seen as a threat. It's a required part of a mature storage offering, so it makes a lot of sense that S3 should support this too. Not in a "me too" kind of way, it genuinely plugs a gap in the Amazon Web Services storage offering and will undoubtedly be very useful for its users.

Is Time to Drop the "Simple"?

Unlike the beta label that some web services wear with pride, the "Simple" in S3 is telling of its humble beginnings. The simple days of just GET/PUT are definitely gone. Given the fun packed feature list, it must be time to drop the 'simple.' Or should S3 be re-branded altogether?

Let's crowdsource some suggestions:

Amazon Fully-Featured Storage Service (F2S2)
Amazon Storage Service Now All Grown Up (S2NAGU)

Can you think of any better ones?

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Google Wave Coming to Google Apps this Year

Sarah Perez — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:00:37 -0800

Google Wave, the maddeningly confusing yet highly innovative real-time collaboration tool, will become a member of Google's online office suite Google Apps later this year. The service, still in closed beta, is meant to be a modern-day revamp of email - what email would be if it was invented in 2009 instead of the 1960's. Yet the interface, a mashup of email, chat, and collaborative document editing, left many early adopters with mixed feelings about the product...at least in its current form. Called "unproductive," "complex," and "overwhelming" by the same people who usually embrace new technologies, it seems an odd choice to add the still-developing Wave service to the Google Apps line-up at this time. But Google has confirmed they will do exactly that.

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As mentioned in a blog post late last year, Google is now preparing to roll out Wave to Google Apps customers along with the VoIP service Google Voice and 200 other improvements and updates to their current suite of office tools.

Google Wave: Innovative, Confusing

The technologies at the core of Google Wave are impressive. With an HTML5-enabled interface and real-time protocols for instant interaction, Wave was highly anticipated among tech enthusiasts prior to its launch. However, once beta testers gained access to the redesigned inbox experience delivered by Wave, the results were those of confusion, feelings of being overwhelmed and apparently, eventual abandonment.

That's not to say Google Wave is a failure. The service is just a little too raw right now for everyday use by a majority of internet users. The problem with Wave stems from its overcrowded inbox of "waves" - threads of conversation updated in real-time. Within a wave, users can have IM-like chats, share and edit documents, and even "replay" a wave to see a history of the changes made. At launch time, anyone using the service could add any other user to a wave - even if that other user had no interest in participating. This led to an inbox filled with waves, only some of which may have been relevant or interesting. In addition, communicating in real-time, while nice for IM, may not be as productive when attempting to share the sort of longer thoughts and instructions typically sent out via email.

There are ways Wave could be streamlined for better ease-of-use, though. Whitelisting and blacklisting tools could lock down waves to invited participants only and better filtering mechanisms could help high-priority waves rank higher than others. Not all of these tools are available yet in the current version of the product, though, and some may never be.

Google Apps Users to Become Beta Testers?

Google is also investigating how to integrate some of Wave's features into their other products. According to Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard, the company is "trying to learn and see what sort of use cases evolve from it and how it changes." Yet even he admitted that Wave is "not nearly at the level of understanding and readiness of the core Google Apps services."

So why is Google rushing to roll it out this year? The answer may be that Google simply wants a larger test bed to help them generate ideas for improving the service. Although we've highlighted several use cases for Wave in the past, a good many people still say they don't see the need for it. But all the effort and development that went into building a product like Wave isn't likely something Google wants to abandon so soon.

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Google Exiting China? Not Just Yet

Sarah Perez — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:55:22 -0800

Last month, Google received high praise from human rights supporters after threatening to exit the Chinese search market, claiming it was no longer comfortable with censoring search results per government demands. But here it is a month later and Google has made no move to withdrawal its Chinese search operations, with censored results still appearing on Google's Chinese portal, Google.cn. In addition, the company may now be investing in a Chinese digital media company, as well. According to unconfirmed reports, the Internet giant is said to be a member of a Disney-led consortium looking to invest in a Chinese media and advertising company called Bus Online.

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Google's decision to exit the Chinese search business was alluded to in their January blog post detailing what appeared to be state-led cyber attacks which hit the Internet giant and other Silicon Valley companies in mid-December. As a result, Google announced it would review the feasibility of its business operations in China. The company claimed it would engage in discussions with the Chinese government to see if there was any way for it to remain in China, but few expected positive results from those discussions.

Because the attacks were focused on gaining access to the email accounts of human rights activists, Google received a lot of praise for taking a stand against the Chinese government, the alleged perpetrators of the hacking attempts. However, only nine days later, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt took a softer tone during the company's fourth quarter earnings call. "We wish to remain in China," he said. "We like the Chinese people, we like our Chinese employees, we like the business opportunities there."

Google to Invest in Chinese Media Company

Google does like the businesses there, apparently. It's a month later and the company seems to be no closer to shutting down their Chinese search operations business than they were back in January. In addition, anonymous sources say Google is planning to invest in China's largest in-bus digital media and advertising company, an outfit called Bus Online whose revenue was about 314.5 million yuan ($46.07 million) last year. A consortium led by Walt Disney Co. is reportedly in advanced talks with the Chinese company and has plans to buy a 30%-40% stake for more than $100 million in shares, both public and private. Google is said to be among the investors.

This move, if it happens, would lead credence to the argument put forth in January which had cynics claiming that Google's withdrawal from China had less to do with their so-called "moral high grounds" propped up by the company motto "don't be evil," and had more to do with the fact that Google's Chinese search business simply couldn't compete with the more popular Chinese engine baidu.com.

Hacker Crack Down Could Help

The reality of the situation may be a bit more murky than a simple case of "good" versus "evil," though. Of course Google couldn't sit idly by as the Chinese government directed attacks on its infrastructure, but it also would be bad business to ignore the massive potential of the Chinese Internet market.

Yesterday, new reports from Chinaview.cn stated that the Chinese government had shut down the nation's largest website responsible for training hackers. The implication of this news - and especially its timing, given the actual shut down occurred in November - is that the Chinese government wants to appear as if they're "playing nice" with regards to Western interests. That move may be precisely the sort of thing Google needs in order to maintain an appearance of concern regarding the cyber attack situation while also not making a regrettable, revenue-impacting business decision by ceasing Chinese operations altogether. The only question now is whether or not the public will forgive Google for doing so.

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