About a month and a half ago, Google switched to its own WebP image format in its Google+ Android app, the company revealed at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco today. This, Stephen Konig, a Google product manager who focuses on WebP and Chrome Remote desktop, and Make the Web Fast team member and Chrome developer advocate Ilya Grigorik said in today’s presentation, is saving Google – and its users – about 50% in bandwidth.

Google+ App For Android Quietly Switched To WebP Image Format A Month And A Half Ago, Saves 50% Bandwidth

Google+ is obviously a very image-heavy service and given that Android can display WebP natively since the introduction of version 4.0, this was a pretty logical move for the team. The team, however, also said that the plan is to introduce WebP to virtually every other Google product, too – and possibly within the next year. The slide the team showed during the session including the logos of YouTube, Google Image Search and virtually every other Google product (and sadly I didn’t catch it in time).

The company made this switch very quietly, just like it did with the Chrome Web Store earlier this year. In the Store, the team reiterated today, using WebP resulted in image sizes that were about 30% smaller than using PNGs.

The current problem for WebP – which can save developers a good amount of bandwidth thanks to its improved compression ratio – is that it’s only natively supported in Android, Chrome and Opera. For other platforms, developers still have to service traditional JPEG or PNG images or use other tricks to display WebP. The WebP team, however, also said that it believes Firefox will support it within the next year, too, and seems pretty optimistic about the format’s future (but then, of course, they would say that…).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook place pages now include an option for users to give star ratings to businesses and locations directly from their page on Facebook.com, even if they haven’t been to the location.

Previously, users could rate places from the Local Search section of the mobile app, and only if they had previously checked into the location or been tagged there. Facebook would also use the desktop sidebar to randomly prompt users to rate places they had been. We hadn’t seen a way for users to rate any place at any time they wanted until now. This enables users to go back and rate the places they might not have checked into on Facebook, but it also opens the door to rating manipulation. For instance, a business could ask friends or incentivize fans to give them five-star ratings.

This feature on desktop pages also gives users an easy way to change their rating. Before, the only way we could find to change a place rating was to do so through the activity log, but it could be difficult to find the rating among all of a user’s other actions. Changing a rating is not possible to do from the mobile app.

We also noticed that unadministrated pages now include a way for users to rate and recommend the place. Unadministrated places are often cities, public parks or local businesses that haven’t claimed their page on Facebook.

Although Facebook has had a “recommend this place” feature since 2011, it has only recently begun to emphasize ways for users to share more feedback about the locations and businesses they visit. The social network is also developing the same for content, with users now able to rate books, movies and TV shows as of this week. All of this is building Facebook’s potential as a local search and entertainment discovery platform, and has implications for the businesses and organizations that manage their presence there. More user generated reviews and ratings gives page owners a bit less control over what is displayed on their page and the sentiments revealed there. These ratings could also begin to influence Graph Search and News Feed distribution, introducing another factor for marketers to consider and optimize for.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Phew. Google just spent three hours or so showing off new developer tools, APIs, service overhauls, and the occasional gadget, but not everything the search giant rolled out today got a turn under the spotlights at the Moscone Center. Case in point: according to a post on the official Google Commerce blog, Google Wallet support has been baked into Gmail, so users will soon be able to send each other money by simply shooting each other emails.

In the coming weeks and months, a dollar sign will start popping in Gmail accounts of people who already use Google Wallet, and a quick click lets users define the recipient and the amount they’d like to send along as an attachment. Since all of these transactions run through Google Wallet, the usual caveats are in place — sending funds from a connected bank account is totally gratis, but those who prefer to pay with credit or debit cards are subject to an additional 2.9 percent fee tacked on. You also need to be over 18 to take part in the funding fun, though.

Google is far from the first company to tackle the concept of sending money via email — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo rolled out a method of transferring funds to people if you had their cell phone number or email address two years ago, but the setup process involved could be more than a little tedious if the recipient wasn’t a member of the same bank. At this point, it’s too early to pass judgment on Google’s approach, but the company seems intent on making the process much easier on all the parties involved, even if the person receiving the money isn’t a Gmail user.

More importantly, it’s possible that folding a level of Wallet support into Gmail could see adoption of the payment platform tick upward. After all, Google said around this time last year that Gmail played home to 425 million users, and a considerable chunk of them will eventually find themselves able to transfer money without many headaches involved. Google’s announcement of its Instant Buy APIto streamline the process of buying things from within an Android app could certainly play a role in expanding Wallet’s prominence. These developments may not seem as downright prominent a push as, say, a Google-branded Wallet card that would solidify the service’s presence in meatspace, but former Wallet chief Osama Bedler is out, and that ship has sailed.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Using Google Maps today is great for what it’s supposed to do, get you from point A to point B. But there’s a lot of information that Google collects that you never get a chance to glance it, or don’t have a reason to. Google wants to give you more reasons to explore a map, and it’s obvious with the preview of its latest version. This truly is a re-imagination from the ground up, and exactly what the recent leaks tipped off.

I sat down with Jonah Jones, Lead Designer, Google Maps and Bernhard Seefeld, Director of Product Management, Google Maps to discuss the thoughts behind the revamp, one that’s being rolled out in preview mode today — seemingly because it’s such a drastic departure from what’s available now. The main element of navigation is now the map itself, rather than the search box and left-hand information that we’re used to. Once again, it’s taking cues from the mobile versions of Maps, running smooth and fluidly and providing the information that you need within the context of the map itself, rather than take your focus away with search results along the side.

Jones explained me: “What if you could create a billion maps, one for each user. That’s what we’re doing here.” What this means is that Google Maps will now adapt to the things that interest you, including restaurants you’ve been to, ones that you might like and what your friends have done. The brilliant imagery that Google Maps has at its disposal is being pushed to the forefront, running along the bottom of the page. Until now, you had to click buttons to look at some of these images, now it’s all integrated. Google Earth is even making its desktop debut, thanks to WebGL.

Here’s a look at your main navigation screen for Maps on the web:

In case you’ve forgotten, this is how Google Maps looks today:

The extra white space and sidebar navigation in all of Google’s products are getting completely wiped out, thankfully.

A new map, over and over

As you click around the map, drilling into specific areas, the screen is redrawn to adapt to your personal interests and tastes. This approach makes all of Google’s previous offerings seem static. When you click on a point of interest, like a restaurant, you’re doing so from the map itself, and a Google Now style card pops up on the left-hand side with user and Zagat ratings, reviews from your friends and quick entry points to photos of the venue from Street View, both inside and outside of the venue:

Jones noted subtle changes on the map as you interact with it over time: “The map has gone from being this anonymous blank slate to one that I’ve started coloring in myself, because it has become my map. When you go and rate places, it makes them friendlier, they become more prominent with the new design. Places now show up as personal landmarks. Some icons have a yellow glow, and these are places being recommended, for example.”

Here’s what he’s talking about:

There are now over 100M “Places” on Google Maps, with more being added every second.

“The map gets more useful, the more you use it.”

New direction(s)

The way that directions are laid out on the map has been changed, as well. No longer do you have to click on one driving route over another to see the differences, they’re now all laid out on the map at once for you:

Here’s a neat trick, too: If you want to go from point A to point B and don’t have the exact addresses, you can simply click on the map to plot it out on the fly. This is something that I’ve wanted to do on any decent mapping product for quite a while, since dense cities like San Francisco are easy enough to navigate if you know the general direction in which you want to go.

Speaking of dense cities, public transportation has gotten a new treatment with this redesign, as well. Not only does everything look better, but you’re actually given more information to make decisions in the future. For example, if you’re looking up a Caltrain route, you’ll be able to dig in deeper to see the times throughout the week so that you have an idea of how to plan out your day. The quick information that comes up in the Card is just as handy:

Finally, flights have been integrated into Google Maps. This has probably been one of the requests that I’ve heard the most for the product. It makes complete sense that if you’re sitting on a map and are able to put in two locations, like airports, that you should get flight information back…especially since Google already provides this data within its Search product. Well, it’s here now:

It’s absurd to try and figure out why this hasn’t been available to us until now, especially since Google has been leaving money on the table with the sponsored links and results for buying flights.

Visuals

The nice, but not necessarily most-used part of Google Maps is its imagery. You can essentially “visit” a place that you’ve never been before with Street View photos, outdoors and indoors. Digging into those photos hasn’t been easy, so you’ll always have the ability to click through to them within the new Maps experience.

Jones and Seefeld walked me through Google Earth’s integration, which now requires no plugin or software download. Still, the features seem to be more than the regular person would use, unless they have a lot of time. It’s clear that Google wants people to see its Maps product as a place to discover new places, plan an adventure and then explore.

The new visual effects to zoom in and out of locations is seamless, and pretty neat. One moment you can be looking at a flat map, the next, a 3D rendering with satellite imagery:

Keep pulling back and then you’re in the solar system. Want details? The renderings of Earth come complete with real-time clouds:

My favorite part has to be the photo tours, which stitches the photos taken by Google, as well as users, and morphs them all together into a “walk-through” tour. This works really well for big tourist destinations, like this example in Rome:

Too much?

If you want to try the new Google Maps experience, you’re going to have to sign up and wait in line here: http://maps.google.com/preview. I’m told that some of the functionality from this will find its way into the iOS and Android versions of the app, but for the most part, this is very similar to what you’ll find on those apps. Not much is missing.

The effects are stunning, with shadow effects, new design elements and social cues to check things out. Will it encourage people to use Google Maps longer, or will they just come to get directions, send them to their phone or print them out and then be on their way? That remains to be seen, but Google has definitely thrown the kitchen sink into the product. Everything that the Maps team has been working on over the past ten years is here.

Luckily, it’s all formatted in a way that doesn’t stop you from performing simple tasks. The imagery sits at the bottom of the screen, but is more readily available than it was today. The team tells me that they’ll be collecting feedback, which should make the eventual transition to the new design a little easier for everyone to take.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today, Google announced that its conversational search that is available for its Android and iOS apps would be coming to the desktop within the Chrome browser. Until now, you could search for things using your voice…but you couldn’t ask questions.

Now, you’ll be able to keep your mic open without clicking a button, by waking Google up with the prompt “OK Google.” This is similar to the prompt that wakes up Google Glass.

You can say things like “Show me things to do in Santa Cruz” and get results quickly, and with the context that you need to take an action. It’s very similar what you can do with Google Now right now. The familiar voice will respond to you, answering your question. That’s what Google Search is all about now, asking questions.

Without having to worry about “how” to search for something and asking a simple question, you can get more done, faster. That’s Google’s goal. You’re not going to get answers to all of your questions, but the company does collect information about those failed searches. It gets smarter, like all of their products.

Will you sit and speak to your computer? Asking it questions? It sounds odd, but no more odd than talking to a microphone on a pair of lensless glasses.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In the first half of 2013, Facebook has made a number of moves to improve its platform for entertainment and lifestyle applications.

New Timeline sections give users a place to save and display their favorite books, movies, TV shows and music. Developers can use new common Open Graph actions like “want to watch” and “want to read.” Users can share what they’re listening to, eating, feeling and more through structured status updates. Graph Search lets them find content and recommendations through friends and others. And a deal with Rovi gives Facebook a detailed database of information about movies, TV shows and celebrities

We spoke to Facebook Manager, Strategic Partnerships Ime Archibong about the new opportunities for entertainment apps on the platform, Facebook’s expanding role in content discovery, and how Open Graph can represent our offline activities and memories. The following is an edited transcript from that interview.

Inside Facebook: So it seems like a good time to talk to you now with the the new Timeline sections, News Feed and Graph Search all launched. Let’s start by talking about the state of Facebook’s entertainment platform.

Ime Archibong: I’m really excited about the suite of assets that are available for apps right now, in the entertainment space particularly and in the music space, which is one of the things I’m most excited about. You have things that are great for users. Take sections in the Timeline redesign that came out. Users now have a home for where their music consumption goes, and I’m pretty excited about that.

News Feed continues to be an important piece of distribution property for apps. With the redesign and the prominence of the music section coming out, that’s another huge asset. Graph Search. I think we’re still a ways away from where we’re going to go with Graph Search, but there’s no mystery that Open Graph actions will be showing up in Graph Search at some point, and that’s going to be a good source of traffic for these entertainment apps.

And I like what we’re doing in mobile right now. The new pages redesign is slick, it’s user-centric. If you think of that as a music artist’s home base in the Facebook ecosystem, and as we make it more engaging for users, it’s a good piece of real estate for artists themselves. I look at all these assets starting to stack up and how they come together and make us a meaningful distribution platform for these apps.

What were some of the observations and insights since the start of Open Graph apps and Timeline that that led to these changes like the new About page sections?

One of hypotheses we had when we started with apps like Spotify for instance was that people want to share and publish back what they’re listening to in a way that will round out their identity. We had a decent home for it with profile and aggregations that were showing on Timeline, but now we have a great home for it, and we’re really honoring that content. Someone can dig down deep and see what’s trending with you right now, what you’ve been listening to a lot, or get a good snapshot of what historically is important to you. That just feels right to me.

I moved a few weeks ago, and I was trying to downsize so I took all my books, all my CDs, all my DVDs and I literally went to my Timeline section and put in “Catcher in the Rye,” “Heart of Darkness” and so on. And then I put these things in a box to give to goodwill.

There’s always been this conversation about how as things move toward digital we lose this attachment and ownership of content. But I think we fill a pretty big void there. This (Timeline sections feature) shows how I’m emotionally attached to this Mary J. Blige CD or this Jay-Z CD without me having to take it every place I go in some form factor I don’t even listen to anymore. So it’s just observations like that that influence product and design and made us do some very interesting and compelling things for users.

For the distribution channels like News Feed and music feed, and why that became more prominent is because historically Facebook has been a hub for where people talk and have conversations around music. Music is inherently social and we just got to be sure it’s a compelling product for people to discover stuff and for artists who can get their stuff out there. That music feed is fantastic and I’m excited to see how we continue to evolve it.

The music feed is definitely one of the most compelling of the feeds. It always has been really advanced in terms of showing the power of Facebook’s data for recommendations and discovery. The key is, though, can you get that in front of people and will they click over to it? It definitely has more prominence than before, but it’s existed for a long time without people knowing about it.

One of the things I’m excited about is mobile and the prominence (the music feed) can have at the top there. Half a billion people access Facebook through the mobile application and that is what’s going to be in front of people. Making sure that we get the stories right and hit discovery in this environment is exciting.

So that addresses music, but what are the most interesting opportunities for other entertainment apps and platforms?

Going back to sections, I think things like books and movies are more tied to your identity than music in some sense. The fact that you consumed something like a book or a movie, the time investment that you put in there, is more than you do with a song. So the sections are important for those two media types. It’s like the bookshelf I had in my apartment for years.

How does your team measure success and judge where you are since f8 and the launch of Open Graph apps?

I would say we’ve been successful and we continue to want to do more and more work to take it to the next level clearly, but I think what continues to get us excited is being the No. 1 source of traffic for apps, whether that’s on the desktop or increasingly more mobile. We’re happy that a bunch of people are out there trying to solve the problem, but going back to the point of the different unique assets that we have, we think we have a unique opportunity to be the major source of traffic for these music apps or video apps or book apps. So that’s the ultimate goal and what gets us super excited to come to the office everyday.

What would you say that you try to instill to those platform partners as far as how they should be building for Facebook and what you can offer them back?

There’s a couple different pillars. One of the things for a lot of these partners for a number of years has been the identity piece. There are a lot of people (before Facebook) that didn’t think about what a media consumption product that knew who the consumer was could be. You have their name, where they’re from, who some of their friends are. And when you can go and build a product with that rich social information, it changes the bounds of what you can do as a designer, a user experience person, a product person. Then, there’s no lie we’ve been a great source of distribution. I think a lot of the smaller partners and apps that we worked with in this media space have seen great success.

What types of companies or experiences do really well? Is it those new experiences or the existing players integrating Facebook into what they have already?

It goes both ways. One of the models we had for our team was ‘We want to make social companies big and big companies social.’ The folks that have done really well are the ones that have leaned in and bought into the vision and understand that we move at the fastest pace of any platform or technology company that touches so many people and developers. Folks that can move really fast with us know that at the end of the day every meaningful metric to them, what they’re trying to get out of the integration, is going to be up and to the right.

We’ve seen it play out with something like Songza, really small team, leans in, wants to be along for the fantastic ride, willing to pivot and move really quickly with Facebook and take advantage of the stuff that we launch. And we see it with big companies like Clear Channel with iHeartRadio (which it owns). Massive, massive old school radio technology company and they sat down with us two years ago and said ‘yeah this is a mission, something we want to do.’ And iHeartRadio has seen tremendous success on the Open Graph and continues to grow and do well.

What are the types of companies that should be developing for Facebook and building into the Open Graph that aren’t yet? Is there a theme to the type of companies that aren’t but should be?

I would say, if you are a company that is building a product that is inherently social offline, that looking into the Open Graph and the hooks of the platform is where the opportunity is. We saw that with the fitness app ecosystem that sprouted up recently.

So, I’m not really a runner. I’m more of a team sports person, but all of a sudden I’m trying out this Nike fitness app and my friends are cheering me on as I run and it’s like ‘ooh ok, people are actually paying attention.’ People talk about running marathons and they run faster or it’s more enjoyable because you have the crowd there cheering and giving you support. The fact that I can now do that with just my phone, my earbuds and my Facebook friends? That my mom can cheer me on from North Carolina and my aunt can cheer me on from Kenya? That’s fantastic and great and turned me into a runner. Whether it’s digitally or a person giving me a thumbs up as I’m running by, that starts to change things. I think that was the most exciting thing for me, seeing something offline change as a result of the online integration that a company chose to do with Facebook because it is inherently social.

I think if you’re an app where you see an offline behavior that can be changed, enhanced or supported by doing it at scale, breaking down geo-boundaries, that’s where your opportunity is to plug into the Open Graph.

Yeah, I’m still waiting for a really good social book club app that takes advantage of the ability to make asynchronous experiences feel synchronous, so where I can see where a friend is in a book, leave notes for them, see what they say about something.

That’s exactly it. That’s an offline experience, that book club that people love to have. That’s exactly those folks that should be leaning into the platform.

So we’ve talked about Facebook’s role for app discovery and these new feeds and Timeline and Graph Search. There have always been opportunities for people to serendipitously discover things in News Feed, but now it seems like there are more ways for people to purposely discover content. To what degree do you guys want to be that source for serendipitous discovery versus — or together with — that intentional discovery?

The launch of Graph Search launched us into that foray where someone can come do the pull model of discovery. I know exactly what I’m looking for, I can now go type it into my search and find it. Historically in Facebook we hadn’t quite put that into the forefront or made it a great user experience, but we did the push model really really well. We’re going to continue to do that well. I continue to be excited about how good we will get at that, especially when it comes to these different content types like music. I keep going back to this idea, which is the different assets that we have at our disposal to make sure and knock that push discovery to an experience that’s really exciting for users. But yeah, our role is going to be interesting to see how it plays out. The push is going to be big for us, but as Graph Search scales out more that is going to be a good use case.

It definitely seems like Facebook is one of the most obvious companies that should be doing this for people, but then it seems like you’re in a tricky position because then what is the role of third-parties? Many of these apps start out or were created for that same sort of discovery purpose. I think of Rotten Tomatoes bringing in your friends and letting you share what you want to watch and helping people discover movies. How do you see the role of these third-parties in push and pull discovery and how does that balance with what you guys are trying to do?

You’d have to talk to each of these companies to figure out strategically what’s most important to them. Let’s default back to music again. I think if you talk to some companies, they’ll tell you that the consumption experience is the most important thing to them. They want to be where people go when they either download music or are streaming music. And once that happens, they’re happy. As a result of that philosophy, wherever the music discovery happens, whether it’s inside of the app or Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, they don’t care as long as they’re driving that consumption experience. And then there’s going to be folks that understand and really like the discovery aspect. They’re building follow graphs and want to do the pull-push model for music or video or whatever it may be.

I think the role we play with the first bucket is clear: we want to make sure we’re a major source of traffic for those folks and we’re driving as many eyeballs to apps, websites, wherever that consumption experience can happen. For these other folks, they can use Facebook Login, they can get identity and friends and figure out how to use those things on their side for discovery. Most recently, we’ve opened up ‘want to watch,’ ‘want to listen,’ ‘want to read’ as an API that a Goodreads, a Netflix or a Spotify can go and hit so that when you log in as a brand new user and you’ve already told Facebook you want to read or watch or listen to these things, boom, here they are. So I think we play a role in both worlds, and it’s going to be a case by case thing depending on whether they’re focused on consumption only or discovery and consumption.

What do you find are the biggest barriers for companies to decide to go ahead and build on the Open Graph and create these experiences? For the people who aren’t, why aren’t they?

Sometimes it just boils down to engineering resources. At the end of the day, they’re making prioritizations and judgment calls. I won’t speculate what one company is deciding versus another, but a lot of times it comes down to prioritization and have they have to go do business and they know what they need to focus on. We talk to a lot of these folks and we have great relationships with all of them. How they integrate Facebook, whether it’s in a lightweight way or a very deep way with the Open Graph, there’s just a spectrum of options that they’re always weighing and considering versus the priorities they have on their side.

But what about those companies that aren’t even started or wouldn’t even come up with these ideas on their own? Are you guys going to companies and saying, ‘hey, what if you did this?’ Like, I’d want to go to AMC and tell them to hook in Open Graph with their membership card program to share what movies people are going to see. Do you guys go out and do those types of things?

We love to brainstorm.

So when  you come to companies with pie-in-the-sky ideas and give them ways they could be like Nike, too, how do they respond?

They’re typically well received. My team focuses on non-game partnerships so we can go and have conversations with companies like Delta. Big, big, traditional company. When you go in, you don’t know what to expect. We could paint them the craziest social vision right now and they’re either going to be way over here (not getting it) or they’re going to kinda get it, or we sit down and we’re pleasantly surprised. Delta has a new mobile app and iPad app that has Facebook integration and login. They’ve been super progressive about how social ties into what has historically been somewhat of a transactional industry.

What does the app do with Facebook?

First and foremost it’s identity. Then they’re looking at how you can leverage friends and social connections as your’e going from one destination to the other. They have an in-flight app that shows you the map of the ground of where you are at any given moment on the plane and shows you where your friends are. So you have conversations like that which are pleasantly surprising.

You brought up the idea of travel, and that’s a big area for apps. For Facebook, it sort of went from games to now we’re really in this entertainment, fitness, lifestyle phase, which travel fits into. Are there sights on what the next big category might be?

For one thing, categories pop up. You know, someone could go out tomorrow and build that book club app we just talked about and before you know it, book club apps are what emerges on the platform. The developer ecosystem just forms around these different ideas and concepts, so for us we want to keep building the foundation and the tools and the infrastructure so that any offline experience or even online experience that is interested in social can go and do something meaningful for their company, for their industry and also for over a billion users.

And another thing — this is for me personally and also more broadly here inside these walls — we’re still really focused on the media space. The job’s not done there. Even sitting here in the last couple minutes we’ve talked about all the different assets that could be helping the discovery of apps. Really nailing that experience and getting that right is something we remain excited about.

Do you guys ever talk about the potential for apps that are private? So many of these apps are about sharing with friends, but how do you feel about apps that for things that people don’t necessarily want to share but they want to document or save in a structured way. Say like Weight Watchers, which is personal but might be something people want to have saved as part of their identity and milestones on Timeline. Do you ever talk to companies like that with experiences which maybe aren’t super social but are really important to people?

Identity is definitely one of the pillars of Facebook that has always been there and really emerged with the refresh and push of Timeline. That’s exactly where that space lies. We could enumerate and talk about apps for a while that might make sense, whether it’s Weight Watchers or my financial information. I could potentially see a world where we get there, but I think in order to get there we need to focus on the most social industries and app experiences that make sense so that users understand this is a place where you can save, represent, collect whatever it is that is important to you as a person.

On top of that, one of the things I’ve been most proud about with Facebook is the work that we’ve done around privacy to make sure that people are saving, publishing back, sharing to Facebook, you do have the granular controls of saying ‘I want the whole world to understand and know I love Mary J. Blige, but I only want me, myself and I to know that I love Justin Bieber.’ And maybe I want to save that because 10 years from now I want to come back and look at what kind of phase I was in there, even if it’s just for myself as a keepsake.

So, in my move recently, I pulled a cassette tape — the first cassette tape I ever had, ‘Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt Em’ MC Hammer — and I can’t play this anywhere, but I’ve been keeping it and dragging it along because it represents the first thing that I got that was musical. I remember the Christmas I got it. So I added it to my music section, and maybe it’s only me right now, but nonetheless it’s there and it’s there for me to keep.

To learn more about this topic, join us at Inside Social Apps in San Francisco June 6-7. One of our sessions is “Going Social with Entertainment and Commerce Apps.” The panel will highlight the social features that best drive engagement in these apps.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

We’re just a few days away from the start of Google I/O, the search giant’s annual developer conference, and while we actually know very little about what Google plans to announce during its massive, 3-hour keynote on Wednesday, there is something brewing in Mountain View that has Microsoft’s Office division on edge. Over the course of the last week, Microsoft started a very negative anti-Google Docs campaign that fits the mold of its more general Scroogled anti-Google ads. But why the sudden focus on Google’s productivity tools? That reason, I believe, is Quickoffice in the browser.

Quickoffice, which Google acquired last June, allows users to read and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on the iPad, iPhone and Android. Unlike Google Docs, which remains a relatively limited productivity suite when compared to Microsoft Office, Quickoffice does a very nice job at allowing you to open and edit Office files without losing the document’s layout and other advanced features that Docs can’t currently handle. Just last month, Google brought Quickoffice to Android and the iPhone and introduced the new Chrome Office Viewer for displaying Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Google doesn’t say so explicitly, but it’s a fair assumption that this tool uses some of Quickoffice’s magic as well (it was previously only available for Chrome OS).

When it comes to editing Office documents in the browser, Microsoft’s own Office Web Apps are an underrated gem in the company’s lineup and right now, Google doesn’t have anything in its repertoire of web apps that comes even close.

Quickoffice, however, is coming to the web. When Google introduced the Pixel Chromebook in February, it also dropped a hint that it was porting Quickoffice to Chrome, using its own Native Client technology. At the time, Google’s Sundar Pichai said that many people love Google’s productivity apps, but in the business world, Microsoft Office is still the de facto default. Having Quickoffice available for Chrome and on Chromebooks, he said, “completes the story for a lot of users.” During the February event, Google said that it would take about three months to launch the browser-based version of Quickoffice with full editing capabilities – and that puts the launch date almost exactly in line with next week’s I/O.

Microsoft knows that the competition in the online productivity space is about to heat up and may just put it on defense. For many potential Office 365 and Office Web Apps users, a full-blown Office-compatible productivity suite in the browser from a company like Google presents a very viable alternative to using Microsoft’s tools. It’s no surprise then, that the folks over in Redmond are launching their anti-docs marketing campaign now.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google is well known for its regular bouts of spring cleaning when it kills off a number of products in one fell swoop, but it also sometimes makes quick changes in between the bigger announcements. One of those has now hit its portfolio of SMS-based products aimed at users of lower end devices: Google has quietly closed down SMS Search.

People began to notice the service stop working on Friday, and asked about it in one of Google’s Product Forums (good thing those haven’t been closed down yet) and on Reddit. Jessica S., a Google employee, set the record straight:

“Hi everyone,

Closing products always involves tough choices, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. Streamlining our services enables us to focus on creating beautiful technology that will improve people’s lives.

Thanks,
Jess”

For those of you who didn’t use it, SMS Search was a service Google had created that let users send search queries by text message to a short number, in this case 466453. The search results would also come back as text messages. These would not be links to further web pages, but actual information, playing on the many services that Google offers on its desktop search portal for things like currency conversions, weather and local listings. This was mainly intended for feature phones without data connections:

But the search could also be used on smartphones:

Google’s SMS services page hasn’t removed a link to SMS Search yet, it goes to a 404 page.
Trying to find a picture of how SMS Search looked, I came across (on Google) a link to its Canadian SMS Search page, which appears to still have an active link, but as Ghacks points out that won’t work because it uses the same short code number as the U.S. service did.

In some regards, you can see why Google would choose to axe SMS Search. The number of feature phone sales is on the decline worldwide as more and more people make the shift to smartphones.

In the last quarter of 2012, Gartner says the number of mobile phone sales worldwide was a 472 million units, compared to 478 million a year ago, but at the same time smartphone sales increased by 58 million to 208 million (it has yet to release its quarterly figures for Q1 2013).

It could be that Google is simply doing this to stay one step ahead of the times. Or it could be that, as with other products like Google Reader, it was not getting enough use of the service.

For now, Google’s other SMS products that let you check your calendar, update your Blogger blog, check your Gmail, and send and receive SMS text messages through Google Voice, appear to still be working; but users will inevitably start wondering if these will be next on the chopping block.

We’re reaching out to Google to ask and will update as we learn more.

Photocredit: SEORoundtable

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook is not the only company to invest in development of products that take better advantage of the Android homescreen. South Korean messaging app KakaoTalk also recently announced its intentions to release a rival Android launcher. And now,  Highland Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and others have invested $1.8 million into Aviate, an ex-Googler backed intelligent homescreen for Android devices.

The round also included participation from Freestyle Capital, Draper Associates, and other angels, including Dan Rose, Facebook VP of Business Development and Monetization. The company actually closed on the funding in December, but is only announcing now. The funds will be used to grow the team quickly, and further develop the product.

The company behind Aviate, Palo Alto-based ThumbsUp Labs, was founded in November 2011 by a team with backgrounds in computer science, search and OS development. Co-founder Mark Daiss majored in Cognitive Science at the University of California, and previously founded Pupil, an image based Q&A app, where he also focused on the problem of bringing relevant information to smartphone users when it was most useful.

Meanwhile, Stanford grad Will Choi worked for Google on its front-end search team; and Paul Montoy-Wilson, also a Stanford grad, worked as a Product Manager for the Android Marketplace (now Google Play), and had previously co-founded customer feedback app HaveASec.

Each founder had his own take on how to make mobile phones more effective – Daiss having seen the app discovery and engagement challenges firsthand; Montoy-Wilson with insight into the Android ecosystem itself; and Choi coming at the problem from the search perspective – he wanted to rebuild mobile search from the ground up.

What Aviate Does

With the Aviate, the goal is to help mobile users de-clutter their Android homescreens, and instead view relevant information adapted to their surroundings, rather than a grid of apps. Where Facebook Home has taken over the Android environment as something of an “apperating system,” to use the term coined by Wired (referring to something in between an app and operating system), the team at Aviate believes there’s more that can be done with such technology, beyond simply optimizing your social networking experiences.

Users today have a number of mobile applications on their devices which they access regularly, and that serve a wide variety of functions. It may not make much sense to give over complete control to just one, such as is the case with Facebook Home. (Early adopters of Facebook Home seem to agree, ranking and reviewing the new app poorly.)

Other means to view app information comes in the form of push notifications and homescreen widgets – neither of which tend to be personalized or contextually aware, outside of location-aware weather widgets, perhaps. In addition, app notifications these days are borderline spam, as developers feel increased pressure to get their app’s users to return and re-engage.

How It Will Work

Aviate wants to be different by working with your favorite applications to pull in information and surface it when you need it. (The app is not yet available for testing, so we can only speak of the company’s intentions here, rather than the real-world results.)

What we do know – and the team is being cagey so far – is that the app will be downloadable from Google Play, and after installation, it will integrate deeply with the phone to upgrade the overall experience. Like Facebook Home, it’s more than an Android launcher. Aviate will organize all your applications for you, and then based on context (time, location, etc.), it will begin to adapt to you individually as it learns what apps you need, when and where.

For example, Aviate will know that when you’re at work, you may need one subset of apps, but when you’re at the gym, you might use another. It also learns what information you need at your fingertips, and surfaces that more proactively, and in a more personalized manner over time. Details on that aspect are still sparse.

Frankly, it sounds a lot like the Google Now concept, but applied to the broader world of mobile applications. Already, it seems like something Google would want to snap up for itself, but it remains to be seen how well it all really works. The company is in the process of filing several patents around the technology now, however, and if granted, those could make the company more valuable in time.

Though obviously Android is where such innovation can take place, Aviate says it has plans for an iOS version in the future.

The app will launch into private beta in the next couple of months. Users can join the waiting list here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is a guest post by Bill Hankes, a director at Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.

The amount of data Facebook ingests every day is roughly equivalent to the total amount of Internet traffic at the height of the Internet bubble. Think about that. The amount of data back in 1998 was so immense that search technology couldn’t keep up, and a company called Google was founded to help people access this burgeoning corpus of information.

Interestingly, we face the same dilemma today with Facebook that users of the World Wide Web faced years ago. We know there’s a wealth of useful knowledge housed in social networks that we’d like to intelligently access, but the tools today are still relatively young.

The data created every day on social networks is just as important as any other content being published on the web. Maybe even more so because it’s from a source you may know or trust. Suppose your friend posted a photo using her new Olympus underwater camera on a recent scuba trip, or your foodie friend checked in on Facebook or Foursquare at the new local gastro-pub? How might that information influence your decisions or help you get something done? What are the implications for brands given the availability of social data in search?

How many times have you seen a friend post something like, “Atlanta peeps: know a good plumber?” Or “Need a restaurant reco in Seattle?” Facebook is great for getting advice from friends and family about any number of topics ranging from trip planning to shopping and more. The problem is that the information quickly gets buried in the News Feed and finding it again, or using it to help others, is no easy task.

At Bing, we think the information is invaluable and can help you take action. In fact, we think for search engines to ignore the wealth of information readily available on the social graph is tantamount to malpractice. Anything else is simply incomplete.

That’s not to suggest that the problem is an easy one to solve. On the contrary, we have been working to find the right way to integrate social into search for a few years, which was industry leading work that other search providers were not attempting. We tried a few things and learned a lot as we blazed a new trail, which we used to launch the Bing social sidebar less than a year ago. At first we provided close integration with Facebook to surface basic information your friends may have shared. Then we added data from Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, Klout, and also influential bloggers into the sidebar, which sits on the right-hand side of the search results page.

Now you can see information relevant to your Bing searches directly from your Facebook friends and other social connections: things like photos from places they’ve visited, questions and advice posted in status updates and comments, and check-ins. All of this information can help you make faster, more informed decisions – isn’t this why you turned to search to begin with?

I recently shopped for a digital camera, but I haven’t used an SLR since high school. Where did I turn for help? Search, of course. I see the usual shopping information in the search results, but I also see that my friend Alam has posted a link to a new Canon camera that he’s purchased. This is naturally helpful to me, but it is equally important to brands. Marketers for these brands should think about how they will now show up in Bing’s sidebar, and ensure that product and service information is socially sharable, just like Canon does in this example.

I’m also planning a family vacation this summer to Iceland, so I recently did a search for Reykjavik. In addition to normal results you’d expect any search engine to provide, Bing shows me that three of my friends have been to this city and have either posted photos from places they’ve visited in and around Reykjavik, or posed questions asking for advice. This is the type of information I’m actually looking for and can immediately help me in my planning, so I can now follow comments that their friends have provided in response, and join the conversation by posting my own comment directly from Bing that will also show up on Facebook. What’s interesting here, again from a brand perspective, is the possibility of linking to hotel or attraction information.

I consider this experiential information from my Facebook friends to be far more valuable than links to sites with reviews by people I don’t know. And when actionable social content is added to existing useful resources from across the web that comes up in organic search results, a much more holistic view of the information becomes available. Considering the number of friends we all have on Facebook, as well as connections on other social networks, the information they post is important and helpful to your search experience.

We are still in the early days of social search, but give it a try and let us know what you think. Just go to Bing.com and in the top right corner of the page connect your Facebook account to Bing.

Bill Hankes is a director at Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, where he focuses on social search, the company’s work on entity understanding, and cross-company efforts to integrate Bing capabilities into Windows, Xbox and other devices and services.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook