Facebook has launched a major redesign for games, bringing back some viral components that were turned off after users complained about random alerts cluttering their news feeds.

The updates were announced Thursday evening, just hours after Google unveiled its games network that offers game makers a larger cut of the revenues than Facebook does.

Facebook’s new features will likely be favorable to developers, who are constantly looking for new ways to get players to discover their games, but it’s questionable how the social network’s audience will react.

It’s been more than a year since Facebook shut off developers’ ability to post messages to people’s walls — messages that asked friends to help look for their lost cow or plow their crops. When users complained, Facebook cracked down significantly, which made it much more difficult for developers to find new players for their games.

Meanwhile, Google announced today that it is trying hard to contain all game activities to a particular tab under a user’s profile to steer clear of ever being accused of spamming a person’s communication flow.

Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product for Google+, told me that there’s a name for unwanted solicitations: Spam.

“We do not want to inundate you with things that are not relevant,” he added.

It seems that Facebook is now looking for some middle ground to give developers another way to find new consumers.

In a blog post, Facebook said its began rolling out a new ranking system with the goal of only surfacing relevant items to friends, including “high quality content from apps.”

Messages will even appear in the feed of a person who doesn’t already use the app.

Apparently some of the responsibility will fall on the users to determine what they end up seeing. For instance, apps that post content which results in high usage will be posted more often; conversely, apps that have content “that is frequently hidden or marked as spam” will be posted less often.

Given that users will have to manually participate in marking alerts, it’s hard to understand how this does not represent a reinstatement of the social network’s old viral channels that people loved to loathe.

Beyond reinstating some viral components, Facebook users will also notice other obvious changes, like a live ticker of real-time game-related updates; bookmarks, where users can select their favorite apps; and leaderboard-type features, where users can post achievements and scores to make game play more competitive.

Another major update will give developers the ability to expand the size of their games so people can expand the game to the full screen of their browser.

At least once a day, BoomTown gets a call from investors, analysts or other troublemaking types–you know who you are!–wondering why Yahoo is still plugging away in search.

With a declining market share in the arena and a search technology outsourcing deal with Microsoft, it’s not a bad question to ask.

But Yahoo begs to differ, introducing a new feature called Yahoo Search Direct at a press event in San Francisco today.

I liveblogged it, natch.

10:14 am: I was late, as per usual, but walked in just as the session was getting started.

Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving–looking fetching in a purple cashmere sweater–was talking about search.

He immediately turned it over to Shashi Seth, Yahoo’s head search dude, who immediately said: “Answers not links.”

Huh?

Actually, the product is pretty nifty, showing a lightning-speed box that shows more robust search results, although not unlike offerings from both Microsoft’s Bing and, of course, Google Instant.

While both have different takes, it is essentially a direction in which search brings in maps, photos, and–of course–advertising.

You can see a movie times example here (click to make the image larger):

10:23 am: Wait, it was over before it started! Whoa. No more bells and whistles?

And I still was enjoying Irving’s sweater and I wanted to touch it, but that would have been wrong.*

Seth then took questions from the reporters.

“We believe the next generation of search…people are looking for answers,” he said.

Very true, but perhaps not so much from Yahoo anymore.

Still, Yahoo Search Direct is a laudable try and it’s also nice to see some innovation from the long-troubled company.

“We are the premier digital media company,” said Seth, parroting a new description of Yahoo that the Silicon Valley company is now using since its recent sales meeting in San Antonio.

I asked a question about whether there is a dedicated app for the tablet of Yahoo Direct Search, which sources had also told me was shown to the troops in Texas.

Yep! It will be ready later this year.

I also asked about how much all this search innovation was costing compared to return on the investment.

No answers from either Irving or Seth.

Someone then asked if there would be a lift in market share from the feature.

That’s the plan, Stan!

10:41 am: More questions about the comparisons to Google Instant. Of course, it’s the same type of thing, in the contest to win the King of Relevancy crown among consumers.

Google Instant. Yahoo Search Direct. Quora. My dentist, who seems to know everything. In case you didn’t know, dentists are very erudite.

Seth noted that even though Yahoo has only 15 categories covered in Yahoo Search Direct, there will be hundreds to come, as well as more features on top of this feature.

Personally, I want my search delivered to me on a silver tray by a man in a purple cashmere sweater.

Speaking of purple, the demo dude kept putting Elizabeth Taylor into the query box, which depressed me. Violet eyes now closed forever.

That was the real story today.

As if to round out the event, someone asked whether critics are right about whether Yahoo should still be in search.

“We’re in this for good,” said Irving firmly.

“Look, we are not focused on the past,” added Seth, who was not here in this very room at a similar Yahoo search event years ago, when similar promises were made about search going away from a page of blue links. “I don’t even know if you’d call it search in three years.”

What would you call it then?

“Find,” joked Irving. And later, “It’s actually ‘found.’”

Apparently, Yahoo was lost and now is found via Yahoo Search Direct.

*By the way, I touched the sweater, which was–in fact, Blake–periwinkle, which is a twee version of purple.

(You can see a video interview I did with Seth after the demo here.)

Now, five months into the job, Williams is finding a voice of his own, separate from Digg founder Kevin Rose’s, and trying it out on the Digg community; the longtime veteran of Amazon recently participated in a well-received Digg Dialogg video interview, posted on Tuesday, to answer user questions. (It’s viewable here).

“There was a launch that was in violent disagreement with what our community expected out of the Web site,” Williams told Leo Laporte, who facilitated the interview based on Digg users’ questions. “It’s truly a tragedy of the ages, to some extent.”

But Digg is still a “very vibrant Web site,” with close to 20 million monthly unique visitors, Williams said, and the opportunity to hone a focus on social news that other companies may not have.

(Plus, despite layoffs, a perceived lack of relevancy relative to other social start-ups and multiple leadership changes, Digg still has plenty of money in the bank.)

“It is our top priority to rejuvenate the community,” Williams said.

Digg’s latest launch, called V4, was seen by many as a move to devalue the site’s homegrown community. V4 was the most significant in a string of product changes that took power away from the small body of users that set the agenda for the news site and gave a stronger voice to publishers and Digg’s own curators. And V4 was also an overdue, complete technology overhaul that left out many much-loved features.

In the Laporte interview, Williams quickly tackled precise details about previous features the Digg community wants reinstalled, noting, for instance, that the site has already brought back the “bury” button, allowing users to counteract other users’ votes on submitted stories. He said Digg is also planning future features such as a honing of its news-ranking algorithms for slower weekend traffic, when less-worthy stories may make it to the top.

Beyond those tweaks, Digg will make large-scale efforts to become more personalized, said Williams, and to create communities around specific topics. That’s not necessarily something that the old-time crowd will love, but it may make the site more useful for a broader audience.

Williams encouraged users not just to visit the site, but to comment on and vote up stories with Diggs; those participatory behaviors have decreased as a portion of overall traffic since the launch of V4, he said.

Being the voice of Digg is no small task, and it’s not just because of the company’s hypercritical user base. Digg has long been associated with the founding presence of TV and online video host Kevin Rose. And until Williams joined, Rose had been interim CEO after longtime leader Jay Adelson was pushed out of the company in April. Now Rose is occupied with his many angel investments, a new video show and a newsletter called “Foundation.”

Digg users were uncharacteristically positive in the comments section of the Williams interview entry. (The friendly tone makes me wonder if the old crowd has indeed high-tailed it somewhere else!) “Digg is in good hands,” said one. “I must say that Digg is doing a fantastic job listening to the community and implementing new features,” said another. One user even acknowledged, “I realize changes take time to implement.”

Federated Media Publishing, which recently bought a community platform aimed at parents, announced tonight that it was making another acquisition.

This time, it’s a site called Foodbuzz.

According to the site, which calls itself a “food blog community,” it has exclusive deals to sell advertising for 4,400 independent food bloggers, making it a top food property.

Foodbuzz has raised $1.75 million in funding.
FM declined to give any financial details of what it paid for the San Francisco-based start-up.

FM bought community platform BigTent earlier this month, as it seeks to create large networks of niche content to better sell premium advertising.

In an interview with BoomTown after the BigTent acquisition, FM CEO John Battelle said the move was to further strengthen its tools for both the advertisers and publishers it serves, especially to create better “content conversations.”

Battelle also said that the additions to FM’s offerings are moving it toward helping content makers and advertisers create more relevancy, well beyond simply serving ads.

Here is the official press release from FM:

Federated Media Publishing Acquires Foodbuzz

Combination creates the largest and best collection of independent food bloggers

SAN FRANCISCO–Federated Media Publishing (FM), a media company that powers the best of the independent web, today announced the acquisition of Foodbuzz, the leading online food property.

Exclusive relationships with more than 4,400 independent food bloggers allow Foodbuzz to reach more than 14 million unique users per month. Combined with FM’s premier food sites, including Serious Eats and Bakerella, the new offering is the best way for marketers to engage with top-quality audiences discussing food.

“There’s a reason so many people share recipes, watch their favorite chefs on TV and talk about where they ate last night,” said Deanna Brown, President and Chief Operating Officer of FM. “Food is a universal topic that everyone loves to discuss. With Foodbuzz, FM can invite brands into the very best of those discussions at significant scale.”

“When you look at the innovative display-ad units, content marketing and blogger outreach programs created by both of our companies, this combination is a natural fit,” said Ben Dehan, the Founder and CEO of Foodbuzz, who is joining the senior management team at FM. “The sales teams, product mixes and great bloggers from both FM and FoodBuzz belong together, and we can’t wait to put this new offering in front of the best brands.”

FM’s purchase of Foodbuzz comes on the heels of three other significant transactions:

• The acquisition of BigTent, the leading community platform for local groups, especially groups of parents.

• The acquisition of semantic-search technology from TextDigger.

• A partnership with the Clever Girls Collective to reach audiences on more than 1,000 top-quality lifestyle blogs.

It’s no secret in Silicon Valley dealmaking circles that Yahoo has been looking at what insiders have called a “transformative” acquisition to jumpstart the company.

And while many think that has to mean grabbing one of the big content companies–such as AOL (AOL) or Demand Media–right in Yahoo’s wheelhouse, sources said it is actually training its attention on, drum roll, commerce.

That would be local commerce, most specifically, innovative companies such as the hot start-up Groupon, which dominates social couponing across cities globally.

Sources said Yahoo (YHOO) has been eyeing it for possible acquisition, which would put it smack dab in the hot space around local purchasing and consumer information.

Such a deal is far from done, and Groupon investors have expressed a desire to stay independent many times.

In any case, it is an interesting shift for Yahoo, which–after a lot of executive turmoil–could use something interesting right about now.

The Internet giant, as well as Google (GOOG), had looked at social reviews site Yelp for purchase previously, and everyone is watching Groupon’s quick progress.

Sources close to the situation said that Yahoo execs involved in the strategy think of such efforts as content, providing its users with relevancy and also definite benefits.

In addition, these kinds of sites are profitable and increasing in revenue–think accretive!–and also fast-growing, which Yahoo desperately needs.

They’re also expensive, with Groupon recently garnering a valuation of well above $1 billion in a massive venture funding.

That means Yahoo might have to pay much more, up to $2 billion. It certainly has more than enough cash on hand and, of course, has its moribund stock. Yahoo has a market cap of $19.5 billion.

Groupon has been buying up companies in the U.S. and internationally with that cash, trying to solidify itself as the dominant player.

Such a move would be bold for Yahoo, which it has lacked in its merger and acquisition strategies over the years, as others like Google have bought big properties such as YouTube.

Yahoo almost bought the massive online video site, as well as Facebook, many years ago.

It also tried, and failed, to buy Foursquare, the social check-in start-up, recently.

Today, BoomTown gassed up the MINI and headed down to see one of the more innovative new start-ups I have encountered of late.

That would be a new social magazine concept called Flipboard, which is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via a rich app on the Apple (AAPL) iPad.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In this social magazine, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of content linked out to. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.

Co-founded by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard decloaked itself tonight, announcing both a $10.5 million funding from top Silicon Valley power players and also the acquisition of Ellerdale, a relevancy search engine for the real-time Web.

The funders include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of high-profile investors, such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz, angel investor Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. (NWS) exec Peter Chernin.

Flipboard currently has about 20 employees at its downtown Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“Flipboard is a social magazine filled with all the the things your friends are sharing,” said McCue, who co-founded Tellme, the speech recognition service acquired by Microsoft (MSFT). “We’re trying to bring the timeless principles of print to social media.”

(You can read The Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret’s review of Flipboard here.)

McCue left Tellme a year ago and was casting about for a new start-up when he settled on creating a new way to digest and present the noisy flood of information being spewed 24/7 by social networks.

Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr, who backed Tellme, said he was immediately intrigued by the idea.

“It is at once intimate and alive and beautiful,” he said in an interview with me earlier today. “This is the next wave of social media and redefines what magazine is…and I think it will be one of the defining apps on the iPad.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

Ellen Pao, also of Kleiner and a member of Flipboard’s board, said she hoped publishers, whose Web sites are reconfigured from tweets and other social links by the app, will welcome the new distribution format.

“Traditional publishing is facing a crossroads and this imagines it from the ground up,” she said. “I hope it paves the way.”

We’ll see about old media reactions, which has been decidedly mixed to aggregation apps like this.

The New York Times (NYT), for example, attacked rather than embraced another terrific news reading iPad app called Pulse, accusing it of misusing its content.

It was a stupid move against inexorable concepts such as Pulse and Flipboard, which are beginning to make sense of the changing digital information landscape.

Here’s the video interview with McCue, followed by the official press releases about Flipboard:

FLIPBOARD LAUNCHES WORLD’S FIRST SOCIAL MAGAZINE

INSPIRED BY THE BEAUTY OF PRINT AND DESIGNED FOR iPAD, FLIPBOARD TRANSFORMS THE SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERIENCE

Raises $10.5MM From Legendary Investors KPCB and Index Ventures and Media Innovators Including Jack Dorsey, Dustin Moskovitz, Ashton Kutcher and The Chernin Group

Acquires Ellerdale, Names Arthur van Hoff CTO

FORTUNE BRAINSTORM TECH–ASPEN, COLORADO – JULY 21, 2010–Founded by Mike McCue, former CEO of Tellme, and Evan Doll, former senior iPhone engineer at Apple®, Flipboard™ began a quest today to transform how people discover and share content by combining the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media. Flipboard also announced the immediate availability of it’s Flipboard App for iPad™, a social magazine that brings to life the stories, photos, news and updates being shared across Twitter and Facebook. Flipboard’s first public demo will happen at the FORTUNE Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado at 4:40pm MDT tomorrow.

“With over 1 billion posts shared every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web. The result is a huge influx of incoming messages and links people must sort through across multiple web sites just to stay up to date,” said Mike McCue, Flipboard’s CEO. “We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.”

Designed from the ground up for iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. Simply launch Flipboard and “flip” open the cover to get started. From the Table of Contents readers can view their sections and personalize the magazine.

The Facebook and Twitter sections let readers quickly flip through the latest stories, photos and updates from friends and trusted sources. Because Flipboard renders links and images right in the magazine, readers no longer have to scan long lists of posts and click on link after link – instead they instantly see all the stories, comments and images, making it faster and more entertaining to discover, view and share social content.

Flipboard also lets readers easily create sections around topics or people they care about. Choose from Flipboard’s suggested sections on topics such as sports, news, tech and style, with content hand-curated from popular and interesting Twitter feeds. Or, create an entirely new section by searching by topic, person or Twitter lists to make Flipboard even more personal.

The Flipboard App is available for free at www.flipboard.com or from the App Store on iPad or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

ACQUISITION OF ELLERDALE
As part of it’s quest to fundamentally improve the social media experience, Flipboard also announced the acquisition of Ellerdale (see press release: “Flipboard Acquires Ellerdale”). Ellerdale’s advanced semantic analysis of large, real-time data streams will enable Flipboard to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks. Flipboard will also retain the world-class engineering team at Ellerdale, including Arthur van Hoff, a leading Silicon Valley technologist who played a major role in the creation of Java. Arthur will become Flipboard’s Chief Technology Officer and spearhead the company’s technology strategy.

INVESTORS
Flipboard is backed by legendary investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures. Other key investors also include Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, The Chernin Group founded by Peter Chernin, Ron Conway, Alfred Lin, Peter Currie, Quincy Smith, and Ashton Kutcher. The company has raised $10.5 million in a Series A venture capital round.

FLIPBOARD ACQUIRES ELLERDALE TO BOOST CONTENT RELEVANCY IN NEW SOCIAL MAGAZINE

Arthur van Hoff Joins Flipboard as Chief Technology Officer

PALO ALTO, Calif.–July 21, 2010–Flipboard today announced it has acquired Ellerdale, the real-time Web intelligence company. The acquisition concurs with the launch of Flipboard, a social magazine designed for Apple’s iPad, which provides a faster and more engaging way to discover, view, and share what matters on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Ellerdale, founded in 2008, has developed a Web Intelligence technology that applies semantic analysis to large, real-time data streams to extract relevant and valuable information. To date, Ellerdale has indexed over 6 billion messages from around the social Web and currently processes nearly 70 million messages per day. This technology and data set will be become the relevancy engine for the next release of Flipboard, enhancing the reader’s experience by always surfacing the most important and personally interesting information from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

Designed from the ground up for the iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. With Ellerdale’s technology, future versions of Flipboard will be able to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks.

“Ellerdale has developed an impressive solution for understanding the ever-increasing stream of social data coming at us every day,” said Mike McCue, CEO and co-founder of Flipboard. “This technology will add deep relevancy for our readers, enabling us to present social content in a way that is not only more beautiful, but also more meaningful. It’s a great combination.”

Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale, is joining Flipboard as the company’s new chief technology officer. Van Hoff, who played a major role in the development of the Java programming language at Sun Microsystems, and was founder of six high-tech companies, including Marimba, Strangeberry and Zing, will spearhead Flipboard’s technology strategy.

“Combining the two companies creates a situation in which one plus one equals three, bringing together Flipboard’s innovative front-end with Ellerdale’s powerful real-time relevancy engine on the back-end,” said Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale and Flipboard’s new chief technology officer. “Our technology will play a key role in providing readers with the content that matters most to them.”

Mike McCue and Evan Doll founded Flipboard earlier this year and received $10.5M in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. The founding team members come from Apple, Netflix, Tellme/Microsoft, Aardvark and Adobe. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100720/meet-flipboard-mike-mccue-talks-about-stealth-social-magazine-start-up-that-just-nabbed-10-5-million/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20090707/analyst-bings-nice-but-google-still-works-better-unless-youre-booking-a-trip-or-have-a-rash/ http://allthingsd.com/20090707/analyst-bings-nice-but-google-still-works-better-unless-youre-booking-a-trip-or-have-a-rash/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:30:49 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=9010 An endless ad barrage may be enough to get you to sample Bing. But it can’t ensure you’ll like the results once you try it.

That’s the conclusion Citigroup’s (C) Mark Mahaney reached after taking Microsoft’s (MSFT) new search engine for a spin and comparing it to Google’s (GOOG) and Yahoo’s (YHOO). The result: Google still delivers better results most of the time. In 71 percent of searches, Google either supplied the most relevant answer or tied with other engines. Bing did that 46 percent of the time.

But it’s worth checking out the results of Mahaney’s test to see exactly how the search engines stack up. For one thing, as he notes, Bing’s results are getting better as it matures–it’s only been live for about a month–and as it adds bells and whistles (for instance, it is catering to vanities of certain bloggers by including their Twitter stream in search results).

And Bing also performs better for at least two kinds of searches: Health and travel. So if you need to book a trip, or if you pick up a rash on that trip, you might want to think about Binging before you Google.

First, Mahaney’s methodology:

Over the past two weeks, we conducted 200 queries across the three major Search engines–Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Most of the queries we picked came from Google Zeitgeist, Microsoft’s xRank and Yahoo! Buzz, along with some personal queries. These queries spanned multiple categories, including Entertainment, Health, Local, News, Retail, Sports, Travel and Other. After conducting the same query across all three Search sites, we picked a winner based on: 1) relevancy of the organic search results; and 2) robustness of the search experience, which included factors such as image and video inclusion, Search Assist, and Site Breakout.

And his results. Overall relevancy (click to enlarge):

Relevancy by topic (click to enlarge):

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