Posts tagged What’s
Q&A: Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley on What He’s Learning From Twitter and What’s Next
Feb 8th
Foursquare, about to celebrate its third birthday, is big but not huge. It has signed up 15 million users, hired over 100 employees and now boasts several million check-ins per day. That is impressive work for three years, but it must keep growing.
To do so, Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley says the company is in the process of redesigning its mobile app for a broader audience, disassembling it and trying to put its features back together in a way that’s more useful and interesting. It has also launched new features on its Web site, such as the neat and powerful “Explore” tool, which can help you find cool places to visit in your neighborhood or in an entirely new city.
As Twitter realized a few years ago, Crowley says Foursquare is seeing a big chunk of its growth from people who want to use parts of Foursquare, but not necessarily broadcast to the world. That means building a service that’s useful to more casual users, and not just early Foursquare diehards.
I recently sat down with Crowley at the company’s brand new, roomy headquarters in New York City, for an idea of what’s next. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our chat.
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ReadWriteWeb: Where is Foursquare right now?
Dennis Crowley: I think we’re starting to get to the point where people are starting to see where the product is going and where the vision is going. The most exciting stuff for me to watch is all these people who have been Foursquare users for a year or so, writing their own blog posts and tweeting their own stuff about “oh, now I get it.”
After we launched Explore on the Web, they’re like, “This isn’t about points and badges anymore. This is about using the data that Foursquare’s getting from check-ins in order to do all this interesting stuff about surfacing things that are nearby, things that I might like, places I should go, experiences that I should have.” That’s been our goal all along.
One of the big tasks that we have this year is getting people to think of the product more as something that’s all about discovery and introducing them to new places, and making their experience in new cities and unfamiliar neighborhoods easier for them. As opposed to just checking in to unlock points and badges. I think we’re still stuck with a little bit of that stereotype, and this year’s about us getting out of that.
Foursquare’s new Web-based “Explore” feature.
How do you get past that stereotype and grow?
The challenge isn’t really that dissimilar than some of the growing pains and hazing that Twitter went through. For a long time, Twitter was “oh, it’s just people tweeting what they had for lunch, or that they’re going to the movies.” That wasn’t interesting for a lot of people.
Then they hit a moment that was a little bit of critical mass and a little bit of clarity, where people started using it to break news and share headlines and spread information. And that’s when it started clicking for a lot of people. For me, I was always interested in it, but when the plane landed in the Hudson and that’s how you were learning stuff faster than CNN was breaking it, or when Michael Jackson died, those were the big moments that I think solidified Twitter’s importance for a lot of people.
For us, we’re starting to get to that point where people see that we’re more than just a standard check-in app. You can go into Foursquare any time of the day and it will recommend interesting things that are nearby. So it’s not analogous – it’s not exactly the same as the Twitter experience. But we have that problem of perception that we’re still working to overcome.
I look at what those guys went through, and if you just keep pushing at the vision long enough, it will eventually turn itself around or make itself clear to people. That’s why, looking at those blog posts, it’s really rewarding for me, because I can see that the change is already happening already.
What will you change?
There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done in the app. We’re in the process of going through a redesign in the app, in a sense. We’re basically taking all the stuff we built over the last two years or so, disassembling it… You put all the pieces on the table, and figure out, “Okay, what is the best way to put these pieces back together so that it tells the story of Foursquare in the way that we want it to be told?” And I think if we can do that properly, then that’s our ticket to really being able to effectively communicate how powerful the data is and how powerful a lot of the tools are.
A peek at Foursquare’s brand-new, sunny headquarters in New York
What about making money? Will we start to see more advertising-based content in streams?
It’s a project for the near term. That’s a lot of what the Amex stuff is. (Foursquare has a broad partnership with American Express.) It’s experimenting with merchants to figure out a way that we can put products that are monetizable into the Foursquare product, in a way that you don’t look at it and say, “I can’t believe Foursquare put advertising in the stream.” You say, “this is great, there’s a $10 discount here.”
Since 2009, we’ve been pushing different ways to get merchants involved in the conversation with users. If users are looking for places to go, put merchants in there to help entice them. We did it initially with mayor specials, we’re starting to do it now with the Amex stuff, and we’ll be continuing to push that.
Our belief has always been, in order to connect people to places, and places to people, there’s a way to insert a dialogue with a merchant that in a way doesn’t feel like advertising, because the users are getting some tangible benefit out of it. It can be just special treatment, like you get to cut the line. It could be that you save a couple bucks. It could be that when you bring your friends, you get something special. There’s a whole wide variety of it. It’s just rewarding the user for things that they’d be doing anyway with Foursquare.
This is a bit out-there, but Netflix has built up a huge advantage for its streaming movie service by getting it installed everywhere, from new TVs to videogame systems. Can you use that concept for Foursquare, in a car perhaps?
Yeah, why not? I think anywhere where you see maps. Any map should have Foursquare dots on them. The dots could be representative of a number of things. It could be where your friends are right now. Or once you put your car in park, these are the five things you should be doing in this neighborhood.
And you could see a world where it’s like, here’s five things that I’m looking at, and I instantly send them to my phone, and then as I’m walking around, Radar (a serendipity-manufacturing Foursquare feature) buzzes me to let me know about them. When you think of all the other places that you’d probably encounter maps, being able to put Foursquare dots on them is a really interesting thing for us.
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Q&A: Former HuffPost CTO Paul Berry on Scaling to 1.7 Billion Pageviews and What’s Next For Mobile
Jan 13th
Paul Berry, the Huffington Post’s CTO since 2007, is one of the best regarded tech leaders in New York. After helping build one of the biggest news sites in the world, Berry announced this week that he’s leaving AOL soon to focus on two new ventures: A social startup called Rebel Mouse and an incubator called SoHo Tech Lab to goof around with a bunch of different ideas and see what works.
I caught up with Berry this week to learn more about his experience growing HuffPost and what he’s planning for his new projects. Following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
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ReadWriteWeb: I think a lot of people don’t realize how big Huffington Post is and what a technical challenge that can be. What’s a current snapshot?
Paul Berry: We’re 120 million unique visitors a month, 31-day view by Google Analytics. We’re at 1.7 billion pageviews, still growing fast. To give an indicator of the velocity, at acquisition [about a year ago], we were 55 million uniques and about 700 million pageviews. So just by sheer volume of traffic and audience, those are big numbers.
The other piece is the complexity of my CMS, and sort of how wide and deep the technology is. The team that I was leading as CTO of the Huffington Post Media Group, I had product, design, and engineering for the Media Group. There are a bunch of domains that are powered by the technology. When I started at Huffington Post, it was metaphorically day two. We were 3 million unique visitors and 70 million pageviews a month and there were three of us in the tech team. The team that Tim Dierks takes over as the new CTO is about 220 people.
Paul Berry at Google I/O, 2009. Image by David Newman, ipadportraits.com.
And these 220 people are…
That includes a lot of designers and product and project managers. The core of Huffington Post… we had some innovations in how we would put the team together that were built out of a combination of our own character and culture and out of necessity. I was born in Mexico City, my wife is Bulgarian. International, I always knew, would mean a great deal to me. And in the last ten years and in previous jobs, I started to work out: How can you truly put together a dynamic global team? That was vital to Huffington Post.
The election year growth was driven by figuring that out. It was pretty stressful – we had no money. I couldn’t just buy another server. And we had so much to accomplish. And what everyone wants from their tech team is to pull an all-nighter every single night. But you know that’s not sustainable, so you know as much as you want it you can’t have it. You can actually do it by playing that timezone game and passing batons. That was insanely vital to all of our growth at HuffPost. Literally HuffPost has people on every continent in every time zone. Eastern Europe and Latin America, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Philippines.
What were some of the technical challenges you had to deal with?
Scaling was always a point of pride that we never talked about. And we never talked about security. If you’re spending a lot of time talking about security, it’s because you’ve gone through a horrible Gawker hack type of moment, and it’s terrible. You do internally talk about security, and you have a security team, and you do a lot to make it happen. But at the board or ops level, if you’re talking about security or scalability, you’re generally suffering. It’s a point of pride that that was never a big topic at ops or board meetings. We had very, very few moments of actual downtime.
It’s CES week: Are there any personal technologies that you’re excited about?
The emergence of mobile and the emergence of HTML5 together is what’s really interesting.
Personally, I think people are making a lot of mistakes in developing everything as native apps completely, when you can have a thin shell as a native wrapper around HTML5 plus responsive web design. And now you solve the problem. This really drove me crazy at HuffPost. We had so much to do, and then all these tablets kept on launching with different screen sizes and different OSes, and everything we did was native because at the time that was the way everyone was doing it.
And now what I think key companies and developers are realizing is that HTML5 and responsive web designs solves for whichever dimension and whichever OS. And you have to get really, really, really good at it before you can pull that off and still have it be a smooth app. But that’s where our focus will be.
The most interesting stuff to me was how could we keep up, how could we push the whole industry farther than it was.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter were all fairly frustrated with the media landscape – how slow media companies were to implement stuff, how slow they were to be creative and to push the envelope. And that became the roadmap pillars: Editorial efficiency and pushing the envelope with partners. A lot of the stuff that I plan to take into the incubator and into the new company is that culture of pushing those limits.
So what are these new projects?
There’s two parts to it. Both, unfortunately, I have to remain a little stealth about, or I guess a lot, annoyingly. Part of my contract with AOL allowed me to work on things during this transition. So I’ve actually had a team working on Rebel Mouse for a while. I’m really excited about releasing some alpha and beta stuff in recent months.
Rebel Mouse is the startup company that’s well defined – it has its name and its logo and it’s a really well-defined concept that we’re deep into. The incubator is a way to give us space to throw a lot of stuff up on the wall. It’s not meant to be a 500 Startups thing, where there’s a ton of companies. It’s going to be much more sharing a technology stack and a social approach. And it will be social, web, and mobile that defines the companies that we end up creating. What we’ll be doing is trying with a very small but elite and awesome team to take things into prototypes that start to gain real traction and go viral, and at that point, fund those into companies that we build into really big businesses.
My definition of viral is: We don’t spend on marketing and ads. And that was another point of pride at Huffington Post. We never spent on SEM, it was always SEO. We never went and bought Facebook ads, we just did really well at social. These things have to have their own organic growth, where they hit this mark where you see them growing by themselves. Then you realize we have something now that we can double down on and go raise money and built that toward a big business.
Are there any specific technologies that have been particularly useful to you at HuffPost?
When I started with HuffPost about six years ago, there was still debate about whether open source would win or not. I think that has been answered. The open source stack – whichever you end up using – you have tremendous potential. It’s crazy how much has been built out the last five years. The trick has really been to keep up with those sorts of things the way you keep up with a Facebook, or a Google, or a Twitter, and their product releases.
One of the surprises has been that MySQL – when Oracle bought MySQL, everyone thought it would die – and it’s actually very much alive. We use Redis (“sort of a database alternative”) a lot at Huffington Post, for example. There are some of these core technology stacks and open-source libraries and etc. that we’ll definitely be using at the incubator.
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SEO Has Crossed “The Chasm:” What’s Your Business’ Long-Term Strategy? – SEOmoz (blog)
Jan 13th
 SEOmoz (blog) |
SEO Has Crossed "The Chasm:" What's Your Business' Long-Term Strategy?
SEOmoz (blog) The author's views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. In the early days, SEO was about keyword density, stuffing titles and meta keywords, putting misspellings on the page… After that, there were directory … |
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What’s Coming in jQuery Mobile 1.1 and Beyond
Jan 10th
Lots of fun stuff coming down the pike from the jQuery Mobile folks. According to a post today by Todd Parker, the 1.0.1 maintenance release for jQuery Mobile will be coming out in "the next two weeks." After that, Parker provides a look at some of the new features that we’ll see in 1.1 and 1.2.
Parker says that the jQuery Mobile project is moving to regular releases every three months (or so). The first of the timed releases is 1.1, which is expected in February.
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What’s in 1.1
On the presentation side, 1.1 will add support for "true" fixed toolbars and smoother AJAX page transitions. According to Parker, the old method of using fixed toolbars did not work as well as hoped. With the 1.1 release, users will have true fixed toolbars if they’re using Android 2.2 or higher, iOS5, BlackBerry 7, the Kindle Fire and others. You can read all about the problems with fixed mobile positioning on Brad Frost’s blog.
As a result of the fixed toolbar support that’s going into 1.1, the touchOverflow feature is going to be deprecated in 1.1 and removed in 1.2. Says Parker, "Now with the significant changes to fixed headers and transition planned for 1.1, these will improve the experience in an almost identical way as touchOverflow, except it will work on a lot more platforms and with less complexity so we’ve decided to retire this feature."
Parker says that the jQuery Mobile team tried to make transitions smooth in 1.0 "but there were two significant constraints that we couldn’t avoid: the need to scroll the viewport between transitions and Android’s poor animation performance." With 1.1, Parker says that they’ve fixed the problems with a lot of work. On most mobile browsers. Older Android devices are going to be excluded from complex transitions and see the fade transition instead.
Figure: jQuery Mobile Flip Demo
If you want, you can check out a demo of the page transitions that’s in progress. I tried it out on iOS5 and it worked quite well.
Less visible to users, but more fun for developers, jQuery Mobile 1.1 will also add support for JavaScript’s Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD). Parker credits James Burke for "jumping in and helping us polish our AMD implementation."
Springtime for jQuery Mobile
In the spring, look for the jQuery Mobile 1.2 release. It’s too early to say exactly what will be in that release, but Parker says that one likely feature is the popup component. This would give users popup menus, photos, dialogs, etc. on mobile browsers – while developers only need to add a few lines of HTML and a link.
As Parker points out, the feature is a bit buggy right now if you check out the demo. I tried it on iOS5 and most of the demo buttons popped up and disappeared before a user would have any time to react. The menu is relatively stable, but the tooltip, form, dialog and other demos are still pretty rough.
Now that jQuery Mobile has passed the 1.0 milestone, things seem to be humming along nicely. What else do you think that jQuery Mobile needs? If you’re interested in trying it or pitching in, jQuery Mobile is on GitHub and released under the MIT and GPLv2 licenses.
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Big Question (Answered): “Hey girl… What’s Your Favorite Riff of the Ryan Gosling Memes?”
Jan 6th
Ryan Gosling is the focus so many memes lately… From well-educated preservationist to staunch feminist, from NPR junkie to Silicon Valley power player, these Tumblr memes have made us all giggle. Which is a good thing because we all need to laugh with a potential SOPA crisis on our hands. But, don’t worry, Ryan is all over that.
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So far my favorite iteration of “Hey girl…” comes from a Tumblr that imagines Ryan is a crafter, or in love with one. HandmadeRyanGosling pokes gentle fun at crafters, and the folks who love them, as only a fellow crafter could.
Hey girl… What’s Your Favorite Riff of the Ryan Gosling Memes?
We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and presented them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.
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After A Trillion-View Year, What’s Next For YouTube?
Dec 20th
YouTube reflected on its banner year today, announcing that it served over 1 trillion playbacks in 2011. “That’s about 140 views for every person on the earth,” YouTube’s Rewind blog post says. YouTube saw record traffic and mobile growth this year. It gets 3 billion views per day, and video uploads have doubled since last year.
Looking at the trends, it’s clear YouTube viewers are looking for quick entertainment, music and humor. The report excluded content from major music labels, and it’s still full of songs. The most viewed video was “Friday” by Rebecca Black, of course. For the year of a trillion views, the success of this weird, bad video is reassuringly YouTube-like. But YouTube began some major changes and unprecedented deals this year. What will YouTube’s next Rewind be like?
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The Google+ Shift
For the first 11 months of the year, YouTube was still its own network. The launch of Google+ felt like a separate project. In October, Google gave users the ability to link YouTube and Google+ accounts, but that was just a new way of browsing videos.
In November, however, we caught YouTube beta testing a whole new YouTube, and it arrived on December 1. YouTube’s grid had been replaced with a social stream. It’s designed around channels now, and channels from your Google+ and Facebook friends are main features. This rearrangement didn’t get a mention in the 2011 Rewind. Next year at this time, we’ll know how YouTube’s new way of presenting content affected its use.
Major Content Deals
The rearrangement of YouTube around channels sets the stage for the unveiling of the major content deals on which YouTube has been working. This year, YouTube sought deals to broadcast pro sports games and rentals of Disney movies. Google chairman Eric Schmidt has been on a world tour of TV executive get-togethers talking up the future of Google as a mainstream video platform.
As Google’s top brass cut deals with media execs, it’s also worth noting that Google has started discouraging file sharing in unsubtle ways.
Big Promises for Google TV
All this leads up to Schmidt’s big, huge, giant promises for Google TV. This year has been smoking with rumors of Apple’s big TV move, so the content platform showdown in the living room is nigh. Earlier this month, Eric Schmidt told the Le Web conference that, “By the summer of 2012, the majority of televisions you see in stores will have Google TV embedded in it.”
That was a big, brave thing to say. Google’s TV platform has foundered this year. As The Verge reported, the set-top box cost manufacturer Logitech “well over $100M in operating profits.” Logitech CEO Guerrino De Luca called the Google TV launch “a mistake of implementation of a gigantic nature.” Can Google really turn that ship around in six months?
Google shipped an important Google TV update in October that revamped the user interface and made it more interesting as an app platform. But content is still a problem for Google TV. Apple has a vast library of premium content available on Apple TV through the iTunes store. But we haven’t seen the results of Google’s wheelings and dealings with content providers yet.
In Google’s video content strategy, YouTube is the killer app. This was a big year for the YouTube we knew, but expect major changes next year.
Here’s YouTube’s 2011 Rewind video:
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What’s in Store for SUSE in 2012
Dec 12th
It’s been a long, strange trip for SUSE. What started in 1992 as a small German company (SUSE was an acronym derived from “Software und System Entwicklung,” or “software and systems development”) with a derivative of Slackware Linux became a mighty Linux distribution in its own right. Money problems led to a sale to Novell in 2003, which had its own share of troubles.
Finally Novell was sold to Attachmate in a deal that closed in April of this year. Attachmate then decided to spin SUSE off into its own business, and tapped Nils Brauckmann as president and general manager of the unit.
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To get a sense what SUSE is in for in 2012, I talked to Brauckmann this morning. Brauckmann’s involvement with SUSE started with Attachmate’s purchase, so the first time we spoke was earlier this year just after he took over the role. This time I found him much readier to discuss details of the SUSE strategy, if not every minor product detail.
Cloud Focus
The big focus for SUSE in 2012 will be the enterprise server market, naturally. According to the platform lifecycle that SUSE provided today, expect to see SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 service pack 2 (SP2) sometime in the first quarter, and SP3 late in 2012 or later. SUSE Linux Enterprise 12? We won’t be seeing a major refresh until 2013.
SUSE announced its commitment to OpenStack in October, along with a development preview available via SUSE Studio. This includes the three major components in the Diablo release (Nova, Glance, and Keystone). Brauckmann wasn’t sure about specific contributions that SUSE would be making to OpenStack, but did say that the company plans to follow up with a second technology preview in Q2 of 2012. (The “Essex” release of OpenStack will come out in late Q1 if it sticks to schedule.)
When’s a SUSE-based OpenStack offering going to be production ready? Probably no sooner than Q4 of 2012, after the Essex+1 release of OpenStack. I asked Brauckmann if this was trailing the market a bit, considering that VMware, Eucalyptus and Amazon Web Services (among others) are already being widely used. Brauckmann says that they’re in conversations with SUSE customers and that they seem to be in sync with actual enterprise deployment plans for private clouds.
Though a minor update, SP2 should bring some important features to SLES. For example, in addition to the usual driver updates and such, Brauckmann says that SUSE will be rolling out btrfs support for copy on write (COW), checksumming and filesystem snapshots. They’ll also be providing support for Linux Containers (LXC) and YaST and Zypper (SUSE management and software management tools, respectively) will have features to manage system snapshots and rollbacks.
Though SUSE isn’t quite ready yet to host private clouds, the company is well under way with its plans to be a good guest in the clouds. Brauckmann mentioned the SUSE Studio 1.2 release earlier this year, and the ability to build custom versions of SUSE and openSUSE and deploy them directly to Amazon Web Services (AWS) from SUSE Studio. Assuming that companies want to deploy an OS with the application (instead of just deploying an application on a PaaS provider), SUSE is in a pretty good position here.
Another area that SUSE is in a good position, but you don’t hear much about, is embedded in storage devices and other appliances. For example, Brauckmann mentioned one major customer – GE Healthcare – that is using SUSE Linux for some of its medical devices. However, SUSE is essentially an invisible part of the system and doesn’t get a lot of notice for its role there.
Desktop
One of the lingering questions over SUSE right now is the fate of its desktop offering, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED). If you comb carefully through Novell and SUSE announcements from the last two years, you’ll find little if any mention of the plans for SLED. This morning, Brauckmann noted that when they were planning for products to focus on and products to discontinue, SLED fell… someplace in the middle.
Brauckmann says that the three focus areas for SUSE are “enterprise computing, cloud and cloud infrastructure, and integrated systems.” But when the question about what to stop doing, SLED didn’t make that list either. So SUSE will continue to “invest in the desktop,” but the lack of attention effectively ensures that SLED isn’t going to be a growth area for the company in 2012, and certainly not a focus area.
I also asked about SUSE’s commitment to LibreOffice, and Brauckmann hedged a bit about talking numbers. Since SUSE is no longer attached to a public company, they’re not obligated to provide any sales figures, Brauckmann noted. The company policy, he says, is not to provide numbers. However, when I pressed about LibreOffice’s general prospects he indicated that when averaged out it was a “slightly growing” portion of the SUSE business.
Brauckmann also specifically called out SUSE’s relationship with the openSUSE community, and noted that the company had been keeping its promises to support and work with the openSUSE community. Indeed, the openSUSE community does seem to be thriving these days. The 12.1 release, aside from the silly version bump (from 11.3 to 12.1 with no intermediate 12.0) is one of the best openSUSE releases in some time.
Going into 2012
Going into 2012, SUSE looks like it’s in a solid position. I don’t see any indication that SUSE is poised to try to take the crown from Red Hat, or make any risky moves at all. But it does seem like it’s in good shape to keep its share of the enterprise market and maybe start carving out a position as the preferred private IaaS on top of OpenStack. Since Red Hat isn’t one of the many joining the OpenStack chorus, it’s between SUSE and Canonical to carve out that market – if it appears. Given that SUSE has a long history with enterprise customers, they’ll have a good shot at a lot of that business.
It hasn’t been easy being green for many years, but it looks like 2012 is going to be a bit easier than the last few for SUSE.
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Guess What’s Showing Up In The Facebook News Ticker
Nov 22nd
Today Facebook began rolling out its newest update: Sponsored stories will begin appearing in the news ticker, that annoying, never-ending additional noise contributor located in the upper-righthand corner of your Facebook homepage.
Dropping sponsored stories into the news ticker was the next logical move for Facebook. But users weren’t happy about the news ticker launch in the first place. It received a ton of complaints; teens, for one, called it a stalker tool. Now the news ticker is more akin to a spammer tool.
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The big secret here is that sponsored stories already appear in the news feed. Facebook surfaces them based on a user’s page likes, page posts, page post likes, check-ins, app shares, apps used, games played and domain stories. There is no way to opt-out of them completely, but you can click on the little “X” in the upper right-hand corner of those stories if you want to hide them. We reached out to a Facebook spokesperson who confirmed that sponsored stories would work the same in the news ticker: “The X on Sponsored Stories in ticker behaves much like the X on Sponsored Stories or other ads elsewhere on the site. You can hide the individual story, or all stories from that Page or App.”
Before the official news ticker rollout, sponsored stories were only showing up on the canvas pages of apps, or the pages that appear when users are playing a game or using an app.
Are you peeved about sponsored stories in your news ticker? Tell us how you feel in the comments below.
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Google Reveals 10 Tweaks To Search Algorithm: What’s Changed?
Nov 14th
Google revealed 10 recent changes to its search algorithm today, including one to favor “fresher” results over older content in certain situations. Detection of “official” sites or pages has also improved. Other updates improve search snippets and page titles, as well as info retrieval across languages, among other tweaks.
In addition to the algorithm itself, Google has changed features of the search interface recently. It eliminated the “Timeline” view of results to organize them by date range, and it has integrated Google+ social content in a variety of ways.
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Changes Affecting Page Content
Google continues to improve rich snippets and learn how to pull relevant page content into search results. Recent updates make Google smarter about pulling page body content, rather than header or menu content. Others improve page titles by de-duplicating anchor text in links, and improve details in rich snippets for applications.
Google has also retired a signal for image search that looked for images referred to by multiple documents around the Web. Another change improves detection of which pages are “official” for a topic or brand.
Changes To Time-Sensitive Results
Google is making a concerted effort to shift from basic chronological results to real-time search. Its recent updates to the Caffeine search infrastructure semantically determine when a user would want recent, “fresh” results instead of the all-time ranked pages. For example, it may determine that users searching for “olympics” are more likely to want results about the upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics than the Wikipedia page for the Olympic Games.
By eliminating the “Timeline” view and applying “freshness” adjustments to queries with specified date ranges, Google is pushing timeliness as a new priority in how it determines relevance.
Google is also improving “freshness” signals by incorporating Google+ activity into overall search. After its real-time search deal with Twitter expired this year, it needs new signals for what’s currently trending. Google+ offers just such an opportunity, and Google is trying out real-time search within the social network.
Other Search Changes
Several recent tweaks to Google search improve cross-language results, using Google’s powerful translation to retrieve content for searches in languages that have limited Web content. Another improves query auto-completion in Russian, which used to produce some arbitrary and unhelpful predictions.
To see the rest of Google’s bullet-point search improvements, visit the Inside Search blog.
Do you think Google search is improving over time?
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What’s Your Morning Tech Routine?
Nov 11th
Some people get their news from TV, some from radio. Some folks still catch up with the world by reading the morning paper with their coffee. Me? I tap into Google Reader and Twitter before even getting out from under the blankets. Everybody has a morning routine, and most of us in the tech industry have a morning routine of getting in touch with the rest of the world.
I can’t remember when I last used an alarm clock, or staggered out of bed to check the computer first thing. These days, my iPhone is my alarm clock and first form of contact with the rest of the world. After turning off the alarm, I start skimming Google Reader to see if there’s any news afoot.
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If not, then I check Twitter, then Facebook and Google+. After I’ve had a chance to digest the news of the day, I start plowing through email. But some folks want to tap into Email first thing, like our own David Strom.
Jared Smith, RWW’s webmaster, says that he checks in with Google+ first thing in the morning.
Jon Mitchell says he has an extensive routine. “The iPhone is actually the thing that wakes me up in the morning, so I tend to begin by stopping the alarm, turning off Airplane Mode and then just putting it down and waiting for push notifications while I brush my teeth. I always get a few Twitter notifications overnight, so I check those first and then see what’s happening in my stream at the moment. Then I take a few minutes away from screens while getting dressed and caffeinated before sitting down at my desk. I then check my personal email first, then the Skype room for work to see if anything urgent is happening. Then I check work email and go through that. Once that’s done, I’ll check Facebook and Google+, and I’ll open up Twitter for Mac, which I leave on and streaming alongside my work all day.”
Alicia Eler listens to NPR on the radio, then gets up. Over breakfast she checks email from her phone. Then she jumps on the computer, where she reads Facebook, email (again), Twitter, ReadWriteWeb, Google Reader, and then Skype.
John Paul Titlow says, “After my first alarm goes off, I grab my iPad from my nightstand and check email, Twitter, Facebook, Techmeme, Google Reader and Flipboard, typically in that order. I’ll start emailing myself story ideas for the day.
Then when a second alarm goes off, it’s time to head downstairs, iPad in tow, and make some coffee and breakfast. I’ll go back upstairs to the desk in my home office, check in with Skype and start drafting stories. I often wait until I’ve published at least one story to shower. By early afternoon, I typically relocate to a cafe to continue working.”
Scott Fulton is old-school. By old-school I mean he checks the phone, and not just one line, but two. Then five (yes, five) email addresses, RSS feeds, then Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Our community manager Robyn Tippins says that she starts with email on the iPhone while still in bed. She takes the phone with her on the morning jog with puppy and catches up on a podcast or some other brain builder (currently brushing up on Spanish with an Audible download). A quick shower later, she’s ready to check Hootsuite for Twitter, frees the evenings comments from moderation on ReadWriteWeb, stocks TinyTower and then checks Facebook. “And I’m only slightly joking about TinyTower…”
Dan Rowinski says Twitter is his first check-in. “My TweetDeck has two comprehensive lists that gets me all the news that I need to start the day, either from the tech or general news worlds. I then go to Google+ and check on notifications before heading to my work email to delete the first 50 or so messages that have come in overnight. Then I open the ReadWriteWeb Skype chat room and start bantering like a crazy monkey for the rest of the day, making sure to pay special attention to making fun of our colleague Jon Mitchell.”
Abraham Hyatt says “the first thing I check is my iPhone for Boxcar notifications: emails from key contacts, DMs, headlines from important news sites, and other alerts. After I sit down to work I click a bookmarklet that opens ReadWriteWeb, Gmail, G+, Techmeme, Mediagazer, and Backpack’s Calendar in that order. Once I’m done with those tabs I open Skype and an RSS reader I use to follow media news for a daily newsletter I run. Later in the morning I’ll open Reeder, which I use for non-work-related feeds.
Sean Ammirati, our COO, says, “I like to check my iPhone in bed as soon as I wake up starting with Email and then a scan of Twitter. After that most days, I’ll do a short quick inspirational reading from a daily plan I’ve setup on YouVersion before jumping into my day.”
Finally, RWW founder Richard MacManus says he kicks off the day checking over ReadWriteWeb.com itself. Next up, email and then the social trio: Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. After the social part is done, Richard says he looks over RSS feeds using Google Reader/Flipboard, and then Techmeme and Mediagazer.
It’s worth noting a lot of RWW’ers are also avid NPR fans, so there’s a lot of NPR in the mornings and afternoons here.
How about you? How do you catch up on tech news? Let us know in the comments!
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