Microsoft still wants to be welcomed to the social

Microsoft showed off two social-networking projects at TechFest on Tuesday that show that the company wants to do more in this area than just invest in Facebook.

One project, known as Salsa, aims to use one’s corporate data to piece together their social network, or at least their network of co-workers. In its current form, the software is a plug-in to Outlook that shows social-networking information such as a photo and profile next to an incoming e-mail message. The program also pieces together a list of “friends” based on e-mail frequency and other data.

“When you start looking there is a surprising amount of information that gets locked in e-mail,” said Shane Williams, one of the Microsoft Research team that worked on Salsa.

Lili Cheng, the Microsoft veteran who heads the social-computing team at Microsoft Research, said that part of the power of Salsa is simply putting a human face on e-mail. She said her own use of the site has borne out the power of that, noting it is harder to argue with a colleague when she sees a picture of them with their cute kid or pet.

“E-mail can be very dehumanizing,” Cheng said.

Cheng said that in addition to deploying it inside Microsoft, she’d like to see how Salsa works within one or two other large companies to see if it is more broadly useful.

In another project from Cheng’s group, known as C2, Microsoft researchers have created a Windows application that pieces together contact data from a variety of social-networking sites. For the purposes of Tuesday’s demonstration, the researchers focused on Windows Live Spaces and Facebook. Researcher Steve Ickman said he chose those two because they represent among the most open (Spaces) and closed (Facebook) when it comes to data sharing.

Although Facebook is notoriously restrictive when it comes to members scraping their data, Ickman said that he believes he was able to stay within Facebook’s terms of service by grabbing only approved data from one’s own contacts and not caching the information long-term. “It’s totally legal, at least at this point.”

The project is more of a technology demonstration than anything geared toward a specific product, Ickman said, adding that he hoped it would demonstrate to the product teams that they can be more ambitious. “We tend to cancel things because they are too hard,” he said.

Facebook targets FriendFeed; Opening up the news feed

Facebook is planning on allowing users to add activities from third party social networking site directly into their Facebook news feed, we’ve confirmed. The goal is to centralize all that activity in one place.

Third parties can already integrate directly today via the Facebook API, Beacon and the Facebook Platform, but adoption from these companies, which are indirectly also competing with Facebook, has been slow. Now, users can add the content stream directly. Users simply tell Facebook what third party services they use the most, along with their credentials or public feed for the site. The content stream is then pulled into your Facebook News Feed.

What this means: in your friends news feed, you may start to see more content from Flickr, Twitter, Digg and other third party services. This competes directly with what a number of startups are doing - namely FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and the more recently launched Iminta.

This is certainly an opening up of Facebook. And given that so many tens of millions of users spend so much time on the site already, it could remove the wind from the FriendFeed/Plaxo sails.

But don’t expect to see a RSS feed or widgets showing what you or your friends are up to any time soon. The data feeds that Facebook opened up last year do not extend to the News Feed. And from what we hear, Facebook hasn’t made a decision to open it up yet. Until they do, there is still plenty of breathing room for competitors.

Why Silicon Valley is digging Digg

The innovative news aggregator site has the big boys queueing up. Dominic White reports

There aren’t many places in cyberspace where you can find stories about Super Tuesday, CIA interrogations and high-speed photography next to a video of man having a tennis ball fired at his testicles. But Digg.com is one, if the mid-week running order on its homepage was anything to go by.

Digg’s eclectic cocktail of serious politics, tech news, celebrity gossip, conspiracy-theorising bloggers and puerile video has got millions hooked. It is the runaway leader in a wave of web-only news sites that have replaced news editors and sub-editors with the readers themselves, who vote to move stories or clips to the front page of the site, or to bury them.

Digg attracts 24m unique users a month from a demographic dominated by 18-40-year-old tech-savvy males with money to spend. Advertisers are salivating, traditional news companies are looking over their shoulders and Silicon Valley bankers are tipping Digg as one of the big takeover targets of this year.

Last year, Microsoft struck a deal to sell banner adverts on Digg in a three-year agreement which upset some of Digg’s many left-leaning, anti-establishment users.

Some think Digg could be next on Bill Gates’ shopping list after Yahoo! but Digg chief executive Jay Adelson steadfastly refuses to be drawn when probed with questions about potential M&A. “We are growing and we are very happy with the relationship we have established with Microsoft,” says the 37-year-old Californian, whose last job was taking $2.5bn data-centre giant Equinix to market. “We have a fully funded business plan. We don’t require capital in our opinion to reach profitability.”

Digg’s growth story is remarkable even by Web 2.0 standards. It began life in September 2004, the brainchild of web pioneer and cable TV presenter Kevin Rose. Rose, now 30, developed an algorithm that would allow web users to control and promote news and other content on a single site, without external editorial control. Within weeks he realised that, combined with a social-networking element, the site had serious commercial potential He hired a clutch of net veterans, led by Adelson, to help turn Digg into a business.

“Kevin was inspired by small enthusiast news-aggregation sites [for technology types] such as SlashDot and MacRumors,” says Adelson. “But he wanted to take it to the masses.” From the largest online news destinations such as The Wall Street Journal and CNN to the most obscure blog, Digg users can recommend - or “Digg” - their favourite content and provide links to those sites. To stop users rigging Digg, the closely guarded algorithm is constantly updated.

Rose, who started the business with $1,000 of his own money, remains the largest individual shareholder, but he has been backed by a Who’s Who of Silicon Valley investors, including eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; Facebook backer David Sze at Greylock Partners; social-networking pioneer Reid Hoffman and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen.

Even with all that financial muscle, Digg remains a low-cost operation, employing just 40 staff. It is spared the massive infrastructure costs of operations such as video-sharing site YouTube, now owned by Google, because Digg merely provides links to other sites.

Ian Maude of industry-watcher Enders Analysis says Digg’s cross between news and social networking sits in a sweet spot on the web. “News is a very good subject to pick because it has a very high appeal,” he says. “Our research shows that 70 per cent of internet users in the UK regularly visit news websites.”

Despite its US base, Adelson says London is Digg’s number one city in terms of “user density”, adding that 7 per cent of all of Digg’s traffic last month came from the UK.

Not surprisingly, Digg’s growing power has caused concern among established news organisations - until recently unused to competing for readers’ attention with content from random individual bloggers.

But Adelson insists Digg has a symbiotic relationship with traditional publications. “It took a good six to 12 months for people to understand, but once they got it they realised we actually drive a tremendous amount of new users to their online publications, so we are helping expand their reach.

“Digg is levelling the playing field but quality still matters: so while we believe it’s important for Digg to allow any author to be exposed, our users recognise that when reporters get paid and have training, it shows.”

Most major news sites - from The Washington Post to CBS to The Daily Telegraph - now feature a Digg button, which readers can click to recommend articles to Digg’s community. These generate more than 1bn page impressions every month, says Adelson.

But Digg’s “wisdom of the masses” approach has backfired before, exposing the tightrope its business model walks between freedom of information and litigation. Last year, under pressure from the owners of the technology behind next-generation DVDs, Digg threatened to take down stories featuring a way to crack their copy protection.

The users staged a rebellion by voting en masse for the stories to stay up. Rose and Adelson reversed their decision, and Rose wrote on Digg’s company blog to explain why. ” You’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell… we died trying.”

Digg didn’t die, and now Adelson and Rose are looking forward to putting a host of new personalisation features on the site. But perhaps the biggest challenge, as Digg gets bigger, is to maintain the backing of the site’s so-far loyal - but sometimes volatile - user community.

Web predictions 2008

Interesting post written by Sid over at rev2.org lists his top eight predictions for 2008:

1. Acquisitions: The following startups and companies will be acquired (and two most possible buyers in that order):

• Twitter (Yahoo! [the Yang revival?], Microsoft [the Ballmer promise?])
• Digg (New York Times, Microsoft)
• Technorati (Google, Yahoo!)
• Techmeme (New York Times, Yahoo!)
• Pownce (Microsoft, Yahoo!)
• Tumblr (Yahoo!, Microsoft)

2. Facebook: Facebook won’t die. The new Facebook is Facebook. Instead, it will continue to grow and grow — internationally more so. How will they do that? Simple, like they’ve always been — introduce revolutionary new features, fail, fail, fail, jackpot, fail, fail, fail (note that I use the term “fail” very loosely — a more appropriate phrasing would be “wen’t nowhere” or even “didn’t make the NYT.”) Contrary to many of the skepticisms over Facebook’s revenue model, Facebook will find a revenue stream and thus a way to keep its $15b valuation. If 2007 was a sky-rocketing year for Facebook this year, 2008 will be a period of steady growth, where things get a little more settled and stable. Less valuation talk, more actual work done.

3. Google: The number and rate of new Google products introduced will decrease. Instead, what will increase is the quality and reach of them — Google Reader will very possibly be among the first RSS readers to make the mainstream, the Google Office suite products (i.e. their eventual “release” updates) will continue to offer unique and interesting functionality pushing some consumers to ditch the Microsoft, Google Video will branch out into a niche: video search and attempt to do it in an awesome way, and lastly, Google News will turn into an AJAX startpage-esque product (or opt for some of that functionality). Oh, and speaking of startpages, iGoogle will either hit the mainstream jackpot or die in the minds of its current users.

4. Yahoo!: 2008, in general, will be a huge test for Yahoo! and its revival. For years they’ve been thriving on the old mainstream model, and as the web’s current highest trafficked website, they’ll be needing a Plan B to keep it alive, or simply put, hit a few jackpots from their current 10 - 20 “lab tests.” I’m not sure what to think of Jerry Yang’s recent 60-day revival strategy period and it’s fairly difficult for anyone to predict what — if anything — came out of it, but surely, Yahoo! doesn’t seem like one that is going to go away anytime soon. They won’t grow as fast as they’ve been, and at worse mostly irrelevant to the Internet industry, but as a company I think they’ve got some big challenges ahead and the advantage of playing a contender where failure isn’t a possibility but success is the golden cookie. And one of the things that’s going to be trivial in their revival strategy, I think, is going to be acquisitions and lots of them. (read: point #1)

5. Microsoft: As if Steve Ballmer’s Web 2.0 keynote wasn’t enough to say it, 2008 will be a big year for Microsoft. Obviously, we’re looking at a lot of acquisitions, products, and murders (yes, I’m talking to you, the 5 or so Live products that no one uses.) In any case, I think 2008 will be the year we know Microsoft’s stance on the web. We’ve been trying to figure it out for years and it always seems like there’s something right around the corner that is going to make it for them (remember the new MSN Search, anyone?) In any case, Bill Gates’ exit — for the good or the bad — will mean that there is increased activity in Microsoft’s Web properties. And will we find out whether the Web Office is Microsoft Office? I don’t think so, I think we’ll be needing two or three more years for that, but this won’t be stopping them from trying.

6. Buzzwords: “AJAX” will die. “The Long Tail” will die. “Folksonomy” is dead. “Crowdsourcing” hasn’t really gone anywhere, and it may or may not. “Web 2.0″ is at its peak, so I think next year is going to be when its use really reduces, and 2009 when it dies completely. RSS will be replaced by “feeds”, and the buttons with simply “Subscribe.” “New media” will survive for a couple more years. “Podcasts” will survive. “Social Network” will survive to refer to anything not Facebook, and “social graph,” until Facebook is alive, will be used to refer to Facebook. And lastly, “Web 3.0″ is the most unoriginal and ambiguous word that ever exists, so it’s NOT going to be the successor of Web 2.0. At least, I hope so. Need I say more?

7. iPhone: If 2007 was a big year for the iPhone, I think 2008 will be when its survival is really tested. That 10 million mark Apple’s aiming for? They’re going to get it, and not only that, I think they’ll surpass it. And with more iPhone users comes increased activity on the mobile web, which, iPhone user or not, I think is good for everyone. Of course, with the web apps not really getting anywhere among users web developers have something to cringe about, but native apps coming February and more iPhones in circulation will in the long run will prove best for all developers — web or not. And what about iPhone 2.o, you’re wondering? I’m not one to predict specific features, but I think the web experience will continue to get better and better and I can imagine a day where I’d opt for the iPhone because it’s close to me than open my Macbook and wait for Firefox to boot (yes, I know the iPhone has a great web browser interface already, but I’m still really attached to the traditional Firefox on my traditional Macbook. Either I’ll change, or the iPhone will.)

8. OpenSocial: I know you’re only reading this paragraph to find out where I think it will flop or not, so I’ll cut to the chase. I think OpenSocial has a lot to offer, but I think Facebook apps — and their usage — is more powerful that all the others combined, and there lies the future of OpenSocial. I think it’s a good attempt — great attempt — by Google, and better than any social network they could’ve built (or have), but it won’t be enough to bring down Facebook or even hurt it in any way. If anything, OpenSocial is going to validate Facebook’s model of social apps and attract more developers into the landscape. However, this doesn’t mean developers are going to not adopt it. They are, and many existing Facebook app developers are too, but what won’t equate to the Facebook advantage is the number of users and the usage.

Tasticulo.us - submit your irc and other chat quotes

A new competitor to the IRC chat quotes market (e.g. bash.org) is tasticulo.us, a website which allows you to submit, browse, comment and vote for chat quotes in IRC, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo etc.

The site looks promising with a cool AJAX voting system and the ability to add your comments (something bash definately lacks).

Check it out… http://tasticulo.us