What Google is doing today is making some careful tweaks to weave social signals into search: Most notably, bringing social search results up from the bottom of the page and parsing links shared by friends.

Google has tried to bring in new blood to help it “get social,” most prominently hiring the PayPal and Slide founder Max Levchin by acquiring Slide. Today’s social search launch was put together by another serial entrepreneur who came into the company through an acquisition: Mike Cassidy. His last company, an online travel guide called Ruba, was sold to Google last May.

Cassidy was a significant get for Google, though he’s stayed under the radar till now. Prior to Ruba, Cassidy had founded and sold three previous companies: Xfire, Direct Hit and Stylus Innovation.

While his title at Google–product management director for search–doesn’t have the word “social” in it, Cassidy noted in a phone interview on Wednesday that Ruba was a social company; it was specifically focused on recommendations by friends. In fact, he said, an early name for Ruba, which was backed by Benchmark Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, was “Friendstips.”

Back to Thursday’s launch: Google already has a “social search” product that turns up for a minority of queries in the No. 9 and 10 spots at the bottom of its results page for logged-in users who have connected their Google accounts to social services like Twitter.

Now those results will show up scattered throughout regular results. But that’s only for users who are logged in, and only when a social result is deemed relevant.

The other big change is Google will also now give higher ranking to URLs that are shared as links by friends on public sites like Twitter and Quora. Google will try to determine on a per-user and per-tweet basis if a link is relevant to a certain searcher based on which users shared it.

So, for instance, if an article was shared by a person you are friends with on multiple services, Google will think it’s probably more important to you. Or if a video has been shared by a lot of people, including your friends, there’s a good chance it will turn up high in your results on that topic.

Lastly, Google is tidying up some stuff so users can link social services to their Google accounts without displaying them for all to see on their public Google profiles.

Google’s search folks are not necessarily in alignment about the importance of social. Cassidy said Wednesday, “Recommendations from friends are some of the most powerful recommendations in the world. We’re trying to turbopower that. Google’s mission is organizing the world’s information, and this is an extension of that.”

But one of Google’s search scientists was recently quoted pooh-poohing the potential for social to change search. “Social is just one signal. It’s a tiny signal,” Amit Singhal told Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison from Search Engine Land about what social signals Bing and Google used as of December. Since then, Bing has upped its special integration with Facebook to include pages “liked” by searchers’ friends.

The lightweight blogging company Posterous volunteered to open its books recently, coughing up every product stat NetworkEffect asked for during a recent visit to the company’s oversized San Francisco Mission District office situated below a yoga studio whose clientele is way more clompy-footed than I might have thought.

The Posterous team, led by CEO Sachin Agarwal, was pimping its new groups product, launched Dec. 15, that’s kind of like a nice-looking Web interface for an email product like Yahoo Groups, turning messages into blog posts and smoothing photos and other attachments into easily viewable form. Used mostly for private communication (like a neighborhood group or a small business team), the groups tool supports users who participate by email without opening a Posterous account.

First of all, Posterous Groups is still quite small: Posterous has 12.3 million total blogs, and only 134,000 of them are groups. About 3,000 groups are created per day, or about 20 percent of total daily sign-ups.

Overall, Posterous has 9.2 million monthly visitors on its own site and on custom domains, according to Quantcast, which measures the service directly with its permission. That’s up from 6 million in September, but still quite a bit less than competitors like Tumblr and WordPress, which have 59.6 million and 517 million people, respectively.

The new groups product sends a ton of email (with user permission, and with the help of SendGrid): 230,000 messages per day. Half of Posterous group distribution is over email rather than the Web, and 30 percent of users are not registered.

As I mentioned earlier, most groups–76 percent–are private. And a quarter are for corporate groups–an alternative to business collaboration tools like Yammer. Business groups have an average of 15 people, while family groups have about 10.

As for revenue numbers? Negligible. The company is only starting Google AdSense revenue sharing and talking about business accounts.

Posterous has raised about $5 million in funding from investors including Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures, SV Angel, Founder Collective, Lowercase Capital and Y Combinator.

Either way, Assistly helps companies deal with our problems by providing a Web-based customer service and support platform that combines more traditional methods like email, chat and phone with Twitter and, as of today, Facebook. The idea is to make support more efficient and coordinated.

So now, if you post about your problems on the Facebook walls of Assistly customers like 37signals, Vimeo, Rdio, Grooveshark and even Twitter, you might get a quicker and better-delegated response from employees there. (Though the new Assistly Facebook option just rolled out today, so they may not be using it yet.)

There are many (so, so many) social media management tools, but Assistly is more competitive with customer support providers like Zendesk. (Both Zendesk and Assistly already offer Twitter support, but Assistly is first to offer Facebook. Twitter itself uses Zendesk for customer support via email and Assistly for customer support via tweet.)

Assistly CEO Alex Bard and members of his team have been working on customer support software dating back to 1996 with eShare Technologies, followed by eAssist Global Solutions, founded in 1999. More recently they made the Goowy widget analytics platform that was bought by AOL in 2008. Their current company has raised about $5 million from investors True Ventures and Social Leverage.

For its own customers, Assistly starts at $39 per month per full-time user, but it also has an hourly rate so companies can spread the responsibility for customer support across all their employees.

The money was actually raised last fall in two rounds after the company completed the Y Combinator program, but for whatever reason it’s been kept under wraps. NetworkEffect took the opportunity to talk with co-founder Rudy Adler about his year-old start-up this week.

“The Internet was missing a past tense,” is Adler’s quip to explain the motivation for 1000Memories. The site offers a central place for mourners to contribute pictures, stories and the like, with the promise of becoming a permanent collaborative obituary and eulogy.

Sites like Facebook don’t have a great way of dealing with people who pass away, because they are designed for living participants, Adler said. Creating accounts for dead people can be awkward, but perhaps less so on a dedicated, nicely designed site.

Future premium products for 1000Memories may include custom domains, physical memory books, personalized designs and additional storage, Adler said. The company currently helps its users do things like rip and post DVDs, in part because they are often much older and less tech savvy than the average social media user.

1000Memories recently launched a groups feature that was used to memorialize those killed in the Egyptian protests. It went viral, with more than 400,000 page views, Adler said.

In addition to Greylock, participants in the $2.5 million Series A round included Caterina Fake, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Mike Maples, Paul Buchheit and Chris Sacca. It came through just a couple of months after 1000Memories had raised an angel round worth $500,000.

Steele is a longtime marketing exec with previous stints at the video ad start-up Tremor Media and Coca-Cola. She comes to Twitter at a time when the company is finally focusing on turning its service into a business. Twitter is expected to have about $100 million in revenue in 2011. It was valued at $3.7 billion in its most recent funding round, and well above that in off-and-on acquisition talks with Facebook and Google.

Steele’s Twitter account is here. Appropriately, we first learned of the news on Twitter, from Advertising Age editor Michael Learmonth. A spokesperson for Twitter confirmed the hire this afternoon.

But Sittig is now back at the mother ship, having rejoined in January with the title “product architect,” as Kim-Mai Cutler at Inside Facebook reported Friday.

This comes at a time when Facebook has more than 2,000 employees, plans to move to a corporate campus within the next year and says an IPO is likely in 2012. It’s a lot different from when Sittig first joined in 2005.

Sittig had been away from the company only six months before accepting an offer to return. He told NetworkEffect that he felt the outside world lacked the “scale and ambition” of Facebook. Plus, he was lured by some of Facebook’s recent hires: Sam Lessin and Justin Shaffer, brought in through the acquisitions of their companies Drop.io and Hot Potato, respectively (both of which occurred while Sittig was away).

Here’s Sittig’s explanation:

I left Facebook last June because I’d been there for five years and wanted to see what else I could apply myself to. I didn’t expect at the time that I’d head back.

I spent my time off advising companies and looking for new ideas. But for each idea I wanted to build myself, I kept realizing that Facebook was the only place with the scale and ambition where I could build my ideas successfully.

So that, combined with the steady influx of talented people like Sam Lessin and Justin Shaffer, convinced me to say yes when I was approached with an offer to rejoin.

Prior to Facebook, Sittig worked at Napster, after it bought the Mac client Macster that he had helped develop. He studied philosophy at UC Berkeley. Sittig has made angel investments in companies such as Hearsay, which makes corporate social media management tools.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The company has a not-too-shabby 35 million downloads to date of its Wall product, and is the default media gallery for Google’s Android. But now it’s venturing out into the oh-so-hot mobile media-sharing space (see: Instagram, Path, Picplz) with a photo app called LiveShare–for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7 and the Web–that’s focused on groups.

Cooliris is also announcing today that it’s raised $9.6 million in Series C funding from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (which also recently backed Path), Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture, DAG Ventures and the Westly Group. The five-year-old Palo Alto-based company has now raised a total of $28.6 million and employs 45 people.

Cooliris’s new LiveShare app helps users create photo streams for a particular event or group of people. Everyone who is invited to a stream can share photos, taken on a phone or elsewhere. Cooliris CEO Soujanya Bhumkar said that he thinks this “hyperpersonalized” approach fits with how people think about sharing: With respect to the four aspects of space, time, interests and relationships.

What does that actually mean? While Path pushes users to identify their closest 50 friends for intimate sharing of personal photos and videos, LiveShare gives users the option of sharing with whoever is appropriate for any context.

There are many alternatives to LiveShare, especially for Apple’s iOS platform. Will users want to install yet another app because of its particular set of nifty features and the flexibility of its sharing options? Perhaps not, but people seem to increasingly utilize tools to segment their online identities, so LiveShare could become part of that trend.

There’s also competition from the social Web giant Facebook, which provides a similar way to filter its Web site based on designated friend groups (though it has not disclosed how popular the product is with users). LiveShare, like many social apps, gets its friend network information from users plugging into Facebook.

But Cooliris isn’t starting from scratch with this product. For instance, the company is making use of its existing relationship with Google, so LiveShare will be incorporated into Android’s Gallery. But with nearly $30 million raised, expectations for LiveShare will be very, very high.

The VC arm, which gets $100 million from Google each year to invest as it sees fit, wants to give more early-stage companies seed funding, and to that end has taken over an enormous Google-owned building in Mountain View, Calif., and started filling it with companies. The space is mostly empty; there are just about 20 people working there now.

Google Ventures Partner David Krane took us on a tour of the Startup Lab, which opened in October and is currently occupied by start-ups like LawPivot (legal Q&A) and OpenCandy (software discovery), a product group from the vacation rental roll-up company HomeAway, and the yet-to-be-launched company of GrandCentral (now Google Voice) founder Craig Walker (which Google Ventures hasn’t invested in yet, though it’s made Walker an entrepreneur in residence).

The companies each pay $5 per month for as much space as they need, filled with recycled furniture from AdMob. They get a ping-pong table, free bikes and a microkitchen filled with snacks, courtesy of Google. They also added their own barbecue for the universal getting-to-know-you activity of grilling meat.

“This is not to be thought of as any sort of curated environment,” Krane said, anticipating the are-you-copying-Y-Combinator question. “This is merely work space.”

Krane said he mostly leaves the companies at the Startup Lab alone, stopping by about once a week. Google Ventures occupies its own floor of a building over on the other side of campus, right below Google’s autonomous car team, and also has offices in New York City, Cambridge, Mass., and Seattle.

Google Ventures has made about 30 total investments to date, with one exit: Ngmoco to DeNA. Just last week, it closed its first deal with a company led by former Google employees, the Web security provider Dasient.

It’s kind of crazy that a two-year-old venture firm with a staff of about 20 former Google employees wouldn’t have stumbled into investing in a former Googler’s company before now. And this is at a time when Google is fighting a talent war against its own employees’ entrepreneurial urges, which often lead them to join younger companies or start their own.

Krane said to expect more deals with former Googlers as Google Ventures “will do substantially more than 30 deals” this year.

“We don’t advocate or want people to leave Google,” Google Ventures Partner Bill Maris said, “but if someone has the entrepreneurial bug at that exit interview…”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110212/google-ventures-sows-seed-funding-with-new-startup-lab-video-tour/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20110211/wael-ghonim-egypt-was-revolution-2-0-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110211/wael-ghonim-egypt-was-revolution-2-0-video/#comments Fri, 11 Feb 2011 18:57:49 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3498 Wael Ghonim, the Google marketing executive who was detained for his role in organizing the Egyptian uprising on Facebook, was jubilant today after longtime Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak finally capitulated to 18 days of protests and stepped down.

“If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet,” Ghonim said in an interview with CNN.

Ghonim gives credit to the young Egyptians who organized themselves on Facebook, dating back to last June when activist Khaled Said was killed. Ghonim commented on how a video posted on Facebook (where he is administrator of a page commemorating Said) would be quickly shared by 50,000 people, calling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg a personal hero.

Ghonim said he plans to write a book on the topic called “Revolution 2.0.”

Mubarak’s government had shut down much of Egyptian Internet access and SMS service for nearly a week during the protests, then made concessions to not run for another term, but protests only intensified until he finally agreed to step down today.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110211/wael-ghonim-egypt-was-revolution-2-0-video/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110210/facebook-moves-to-disallow-apps-from-running-google-ads/ http://allthingsd.com/20110210/facebook-moves-to-disallow-apps-from-running-google-ads/#comments Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:07:46 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3475 Facebook announced this week it will begin enforcing a policy that requires app developers to run advertising from a list of approved providers. The list is not short–it includes 40-some options–but it notably does not include Google’s AdSense and DoubleClick.

Facebook is not necessarily targeting Google specifically, but it’s an obvious omission. The social networking giant said ad providers can join the list if they agree to certain restrictions on advertising, which include a commitment to never utilize Facebook user data.

Facebook and Google have warred over transmitting user data in the past, with a back-and-forth over exporting user email addresses turning nasty in public last fall.

Facebook will start enforcing the whitelist ad provider policy starting Feb. 28. At that point, app developers who run Google ads–which seems a natural thing to do, given so many publishers use Google ads on other platforms–will have to shut them off and find another provider.

A spokesperson for Facebook said, “We are continuing to work with various ad providers and will add them to the list as they sign the terms. Note that the policy doesn’t go into effect for a few more weeks.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Google declined to comment.

The CEO of an approved ad provider commented that Facebook’s efforts to “restore control and authority of how third-party companies work within its platform” make sense and are generally good for users. (And also good for him, with Google out of the hunt!)

Image via Flickr user bulliver.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

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