Betanews - Web Apps

Bing bonked by service outage Thursday, Microsoft configured the wrong server

Scott M. Fulton, III — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:16:17 -0500

For about 40 minutes starting at approximately 9:30 pm EST Thursday evening, by Betanews estimates, the main page of Microsoft's Bing Web site was inaccessible to users. In its place was a message filled with hexadecimal code, leading off with the message, "This isn't the page you wanted!"

No kidding. But was Bing being hijacked? As Microsoft acknowledged this morning, its own administrators were responsible for the outage.

"The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences," read a blog post from Online Services Division Senior VP Satya Nadella. "As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior. Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use bing.com."

Nadella's explanation seemed to imply that Bing doesn't have a backup server, or a "production server" and a "staging server." In a normal environment, configuration changes are made to one server offline, while the other one continues to face the public. Is Bing's public-facing Web server the only one there is, as Nadella implied?

Having experienced enough problems this week with Microsoft's having not said something being interpreted as Microsoft having said something, Betanews posed the question directly first to Microsoft itself. Yes, the company replied, Bing does have a staging server.

And that was actually the problem, as its spokesperson revealed to Betanews this morning. Bing's admins were configuring the wrong server by mistake.

"A configuration change was mistakenly propagated to production from staging," the spokesperson told us. "It was supposed to stay in the test environment -- it was a mistake. As we mentioned in the blog post last night, we are looking at process to ensure it does not happen again."

Survey reveals there are more women then men, including on social networks

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:51:44 -0500

By Denis Pombriant, CRM Buyer

This just in: Females outnumber males on social networking sites. The site Pingdom did a survey, and concluded that 16 out of 19 (84%) of the most popular social sites have more women populating them than men. The super geek sites Digg, Reddit, and Slashdot have more men on them, but the more popular sites including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, all have more women visiting them.

The average ratio of all sites surveyed, according to Pingdom, was 47% male, 53% female.

Am I surprised? Not really. This strikes me as proof that women really are better communicators; certainly the data indicates that they work more at it. But while a six-point spread is significant, it is not a landslide. More research that corrects for job types and access to the Internet might be needed to see if there's much difference.

Forget the averages for a moment. Bebo had 66% female users, and MySpace and Classmates each had 64%. Slashdot had over 80% male visitors. What does that say? If you are in business or designing messages for social media, you might want to start focusing your messages better. I am sure there are other studies in a similar vein -- and if you know of some, please let us know -- and if there are no other studies, I bet there will be.

Fundamentally, if we are at a point in the explosion of social media where we are beginning to see this kind of demographic specialization, then the trend is long passed its salad days. Early in a new paradigm, there aren't the number of choices or specialization that we are now seeing in social media.

This has huge implications for business. For example, we already knew from more exhaustive research that women account for more than three quarters of domestic spending. If you add that to the Pingdom research, you must conclude that if you think you can market in cyberspace as if you are selling car batteries at halftime, think again and again.

There's so much I would like to know that this data does not illuminate. Think about the skill set that we prize in sales and marketing people. How does that skill set align with the people in the social strata?

Also, since men and women make up equal halves of the population, the data suggests that a considerable number of men are not participating. Does this mean that those who elect to participate share some characteristics with women that the abstainers do not?

Not long ago I was at a conference, and I can't recall if someone said this or if I read it, but the statement was that men went to social sites because women went there.

If that was the case, I would have expected the numbers to be closer. Who knows -- maybe another survey will reverse these findings, but for now it sure is curious.

Denis Pombriant is the managing principal of the Beagle Research Group, a CRM market research firm and consultancy. Pombriant's research concentrates on evolving product ideas and emerging companies in the sales, marketing and call center disciplines. His research is freely distributed through a blog and Web site. He is working on a book and can be reached at denis.pombriant@beagleresearch.com.

This story was originally published on CRM Buyer

Cover photo is of Molly Holzschlag, Web consultant and former group lead for the Web Standards Project, and a prominent example not only of a woman, and of a successful businesswoman, and of a successful businesswoman on the Web, but of a leader in technology and practices who just happens to be female.

Online advertising evolves away from display, toward interactive software

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:01:24 -0500

By Dan Neumann, MacNewsWorld

Digital advertising is evolving beyond the desktop computer, leaving companies relying solely on Web sites and display advertising woefully behind the eight ball. More and more, brands are relying on software development to create engaging consumer experiences that span multiple open platforms. Branded mobile applications are fast becoming an important element of this new digital ecosystem, as evidenced by Apple's announcement that its App Store had surpassed 100,000 apps in early November.

This shift away from more familiar mediums for brand communication has important implications for the composition of, and interaction between, established groups within agencies. The pervasive dynamic between technology and creative groups is not always conducive to more technically demanding campaigns because of a fundamental disconnect between these two groups' proficiencies.

Companies need people who are passionate about the creative aspects of branding and effective messaging, as well as the technical elements of software development. Without someone to bridge the divide, brands risk winding up with apps that are either unsuited for their purpose or projects that make unrealistic demands on developers.

While an influx of "do-it-yourself" app platforms have reduced the cost of entry into this new channel, these solutions often depend on inflexible frameworks that limit creativity, leading apps to fall short of the mark when delivering an engaging customer experience to a brand's target audience.

Considering that enterprises must still invest a significant amount of capital into these template-based apps, it makes more sense to leverage a creative technologist's expertise rather than create a cookie-cutter app. Leveraging one app build and re-skinning it for multiple brands is an efficient way to enter the channel, but companies need to focus on how their consumers engage with their brand within the context of a mobile app to ensure they are creating a positive experience for customers.

CTs bring creative and technology groups together to develop branded software. That's made plain by their title, but what does that really entail? How do they create value? The first area seems like the most obvious but is critical to the success of any marketing campaign -- education and evangelism.

To attract interest in a new technology or platform, a CT needs to be able to communicate its value in terms that everyone, both clients and agency peers, can understand. People are scared of what they don't know. It is still difficult to connect the dots from clicks to sales to real ROI. So then, if after 10 years, the industry is just now getting good at calculating ROI for display advertising, who wants to invest in tactics that don't have established measurement practices attached?

CTs are the catalysts behind big, new ideas that get marketers excited and then validate their strategies by identifying key consumer interactions within an app/platform and help analytics groups craft measurement plans that will accurately tie back to strategic goals.

The ability of a CT to identify best practices before they are established provides confidence and guidelines for brands seeking first-mover lift. In a development phase, CTs should ensure that their best practices are observed within the architecture of the application.

While this can be very difficult to do, depending on the category, the key here is to remember that the number of downloads is not the only means to measure success. Because it does a brand little good if an app is downloaded and seldom used, consumer engagement is an important metric that should be taken into consideration.

A key consideration when establishing metrics for success and promoting your application is its role within the brand's broader campaign or messaging. It is the CT's responsibility to craft sensible connection points between the campaign and your app.

How does your audience move from media, to engagement, to realization of a strategic marketing goal? Does your online advertising promote the app? What sort of CRM model makes sense for people using your app? Should actions from within the app generate a post to Twitter or Facebook?

What, if any, content generated by your campaign should be consumed from within the app? Where are the friction points between discovery, download and regular usage? A CT should be able to create user-flow and experience map documents that illustrate the experience as a whole, and how users are expected to move through various elements of that experience without requiring users to create an account.

While the experience architecture is important, CTs create value for clients and agencies by understanding the nuances of users' interaction on new platforms and develop apps that work within these behaviors.

Consider developing an application for a newly open platform -- Verizon's FiOS widgets, for instance -- that allows users to stream video content from your library. Do you make search a primary navigation element without realizing that users will need to rely on a virtual keyboard? The better alternative would be to design a menu structure optimized for the remote's D-pad.

CTs are often the quickest route to effective branded apps because they can serve as translators who are fluent in the languages of technology and creative groups. This skill allows them to help brands temper cutting-edge ambitions with the realities of building experiences that work across multiple platforms in multiple channels.

As connected open platforms approach ubiquity, opportunities for marketers are proliferating at an astounding rate. A brand's ability to capitalize will be vastly improved by staffing with people who can predict which platforms have the potential to alter consumer behavior and which will fade into the sunset.

Dan Neumann is an emerging platforms strategist for San Francisco-based creative marketing firm Organic.

This story was originally published on MacNewsWorld

Google begrudgingly adjusts news crawling for paid publishers

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:27:58 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

With a group of blog posts this morning, one of which literally said paid content was probably not a good idea anyway, Google announced it was making an adjustment to its First Click Free aggregation scheme for news publishers. The adjustment to the service, first rolled out in 2007, will now enable readers to sample more content before subscribing through the publisher's own portal.

"While we're happy to see that a number of publishers are already using First Click Free, we've found that some who might try it are worried about people abusing the spirit of First Click Free to access almost all of their content," reads this morning's post to Google's Webmaster Central blog. "As most users are generally happy to be able to access just a few pages from these premium content providers, we've decided to allow publishers to limit the number of accesses under the First Click Free policy to five free accesses per user each day."

Google charges nothing for its search, as everyone knows; and the whole point of search is to let users sample content throughout the Web. Some of that content is for publishers' paid subscribers. But if all of that content were put behind a pay wall, as publishers are free to do, then Google can't index it, and users can't find it. So in 2007, the search provider established First Click Free as a way to enable publishers to let readers see a sample in Google's index, and click through to read the page associated with that sample, for free. Should the reader click elsewhere in the site, he's directed to that site's signup page.

That sounded nice on paper, at least at first. The problem was that readers found a simple way around being directed to the sign-up page: simply hitting the Back button, returning to Google, and finding another First Click Free page from the same index. Publishers got around that problem by instituting a method that Google calls cloaking. Since a site "knows" when it's being crawled by Google or another index, it has the power of treating the crawler like a pre-paid subscriber, giving it free reign to index everything. When the user clicks on an indexed page, the reader goes directly to the subscriber sign-up sheet.

That sounded nice on paper as well. The problem there, as Google put it this morning, was a security issue: If a Web site can make nice with Google while directing the user somewhere else, that other location could be a malicious misdirection.

The changes to First Click Free today don't actually solve that problem, although this morning, Senior Business Product Manager Josh Cohen cited the need to avoid deceiving the reader as the principal reason for today's adjustments. He did not cite rumors of News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch making an exclusive indexing deal with Microsoft's Bing, although Murdoch's appearance yesterday at an FTC workshop certainly brought the issue to a head.

"If you're a Google user, this [adjustment] means that you may start to see a registration page after you've clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day. We think this approach still protects the typical user from cloaking, while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis."

Google will also be instituting a system, Cohen said, capable of crawling the first few paragraphs of a story rather than the entire page, as long as the publisher makes those few paragraphs available in a preview page to regular users as well. This doesn't actually differentiate itself very much from what Google already does for non-cloaking publishers that produce preview pages, according to Cohen's description, except that now, preview page content will be labeled in Google's indexes.

"Because the preview page is identical for both users and the crawlers, it's not cloaking," Cohen wrote. "We will then label such stories as 'subscription' in Google News."

But Cohen then closed with a parting kick in the teeth for any publisher that insists on charging for content, and bothering to use the First Click Free program: "Paid content may not do as well as free options, but that is not a decision we make based on whether or not it's free. It's simply based on the popularity of the content with users and other sites that link to it."

Microsoft 'worked with Apple' for Silverlight on iPhone, says Goldfarb

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:37:59 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

It was an impressive demonstration, once they got it working: H.264 video streaming wirelessly (and slowly, at least during the caching sequence) using Microsoft's Silverlight video streaming, to an Apple iPhone. It's all the more impressive when you realize that Flash video still has not made its way (permanently) to the iPhone, not for any technical reasons we know of...simply because Apple wants to control the video channel for streaming media to its devices.

And yet here it is, a Microsoft stream. You'd think Apple would have stood firm against Microsoft at least as aggressively as it has against Adobe, if not more so. How did this happen? We asked Microsoft User Experience Platform Manager Brian Goldfarb last week at PDC 2009, and the answer was a huge surprise...followed by some caveats. But it contained these four amazing words: "We worked with Apple."

"The promise of Silverlight is that it's a cross-device, cross-browser, cross-platform solution, and it works the same on Macs as it does on Windows," Goldfarb responded. "The iPhone is a unique scenario. We talked to our customers...and they said, 'Look, we just need to get our content there, and it's mainly in the media space like broadcasting, and we want to put it on the iPhone.' They have a great solution for that; if you're surfing the Web, and hit YouTube and hit 'Play,' it'll play your video because they've created an environment where they can safely play media, and they're comfortable with that.

"So we've worked with Apple to create a server-side based solution with IIS Media Services," Goldfarb continued, "and what we're doing is taking content that's encoded for smooth streaming and enabling the content owner to say, 'I want to enable the iPhone.' The server will dynamically make the content work -- same content, same point of origin -- on the iPhone. We do this with the HTML 5 <VIDEO> tag, in many ways."

Goldfarb showed a standard HTML page where the <VIDEO> tag is embedded, linking to a familiar "Big Buck Bunny" animation that Microsoft has used before in demos. That video is located on an IIS server that now knows how to respond to a request from a QuickTime playback system. "We're translating the content to support the MPEG2 v8 [decoder] format [of] the iPhone; we're moving it to their adaptive streaming format. So it's the same IIS smooth streaming content, the same server, the same point of origin, but now I can get that content to play without any code changes, without any real work, on the iPhone. That's the critical thing for our customers."

What did it mean to "work with Apple," I asked Goldfarb. As it turns out, it's a little lopsided: "We did all the work," he responded. "We just made sure Apple was comfortable with it. We have to have a strong partnership with our partners, we have to have trust, and that's key."

From there, Goldfarb could not go into much further detail, but the extent of the achievement could present interesting lessons for others who have been endeavoring to "work with Apple" over the years: Apparently Microsoft didn't spend most of its energy talking about it, negotiating, and making its point. It simply made the technology work first, and Apple said OK.

When Silverlight first started out, it was intended to be a programming platform that extended .NET into the cross-platform realm of Web apps, by way of the browser. To give Silverlight a bigger push, Microsoft incorporated more video capabilities into it last year, with the result being a strong contender against Flash. Now the marketing effort is coming full circle, with the company now re-emphasizing its programmability, to maintain a par against AIR and keep active on both fronts in the battle against Adobe.

In its guise as a media platform over the past few years, Goldfarb admitted to us that Silverlight "has gotten pigeon-holed in many ways, because of just the way the features came together. It was a sequencing and a timing thing. I don't look at that as a bad thing; I look at is as, what are the requirements for a software platform? It needs to be ubiquitous. That's a great way to reach into the consumer space; what we've done in media is absolutely a critical part of our strategy. And we've executed on it flawlessly. Now with the business features coming in printing, bi-di, all the language support, the accessibility, the rich data access, the networking...you really do get that level of rich business applications that's required."

Goldfarb here was referring to Silverlight 4's upcoming support for functionality that extends beyond the traditional security sandbox -- another dangerous pigeon-hole for plug-in developers. For a real, business-class Web app to be considered legitimate, it needs to print. That means it needs access to the printer beyond what the browser can provide.

This gets into the whole area of where the security boundary lies, and who gets to marshal it -- Silverlight or the browser. Earlier in the week, Microsoft President Bob Muglia told Betanews he believed the browser would always provide some sort of basic, standardized security context. But Muglia left open the possibility that Silverlight, or something like it, would push the boundaries of that context.

As long as the browser provides the basic sandbox, the level of vulnerability for any future Silverlight 4 Web app will be determined by the weakest browser. I asked Brian Goldfarb, does this present an argument in favor of Silverlight providing its own security context, over and above the browser? "You're welcome to make any argument you'd like," Goldfarb responded at first, his face showing some signs of sweat. After he collected his thoughts, he proceeded with a more thorough response: "We've been through rounds and rounds of this, and we've tightened it up, and we think the sandbox that's generated by the browser is the most secure place to run software. It's not perfect, but it's the best...The majority of applications today are all inside the sandbox, even the out-of-browser applications. What we've done with [Silverlight] 4 is extend the sandbox space by giving more features in that secure zone -- drag-and-drop, all the things our customers have demanded -- and now we're creating a Trusted Application model, which is more like regular software, where you need to have a trust relationship with who you're installing it from. You wouldn't go to www.hackmysite.com and install some .EXE, but you'd feel pretty comfortable going to the NBA or to Betanews, or whomever you have a trust relationship with."

What about Google Chrome, then? Can Microsoft trust Chrome the way it would trust Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox to establish the trust framework? "It's a browser, like any other browser," Goldfarb responded.

Clicker.com cuts through the Web video chaos

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:21:02 -0500

By Chris Maxcer, TechNewsWorld

Let's put this simply: If you want to stream free, professional videos online, Clicker makes finding the video easier than most other solutions I've seen. In fact, it's one of the few online television and video search guides that I've felt compelled to create an account with. Why?

Easy. It targets the content I want -- full episodes of network television shows, and what's not a network television show is professional-grade content. It might be full-length movies or Web originals, but there's also some free music videos, though there seems to be plenty of holes, and some old videos are bafflingly popular.

But let's focus on Clicker's core strength strength -- online network television.

Clicker says its mission is to make it simple for you to find the show you're looking for online, and that it does. The search function isn't trying to scan the entire Web, so its results are usually right on target -- search for a show name, say "FlashForward," and you're going to get "FlashForward" at the top of the list. Same goes for titles like "Castle," which brings up the comedic murder mystery show's available full episodes -- rather than old buildings and such. ("Castle?" you might be thinking ... yup. Remember Captain Hammer from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog? That's the star of "Castle.")

But Clicker isn't just a search engine with a clean database. It's also an online directory that gives you multiple, intuitive ways to drill into the content -- it's got a handy square alphabet grid for browsing by show name, categories for finding action & adventure, drama and whatnot, plus shows by media type, which are TV, movies, Web originals, and music.

Right now, Clicker contains more than 450,000 episodes from over 6,000 shows, from over 1,200 networks, tens of thousands of movies, and 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists.

If you've got a show in mind that's actually available online in full episodes, you can find it easily enough with Clicker.

After you find your show, you can click on it to view specific episodes and where they are available to watch. While Clicker embeds some shows, most of the bigger network shows click through to network sites for streaming, for example, on ABC.com or CBS.com. Of course, Clicker also clicks through to sites like Hulu.com and TV.com. So if a show like "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" is available from CBS, Clicker will give you options to stream it from CBS, including what appears to be an alternate CBS streaming site, which I didn't realize existed. But that's just "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." What about "CSI: Miami"? That particular crime drama sibling is available on both CBS and TV.com ... and clicker gives you links to both.

What gives? In this case, "CSI" has two full current episodes available online on CBS.com but only one on TV.com. Why? There's either a lag in the different services or there's some esoteric online video rights clauses and licenses that restrict what episodes of which televisions shows can be made available from various online outlets at any given moment. Current episodes of "The Mentalist," for example, aren't available anywhere online that I can ascertain at the moment, except for Apple's iTunes, which is, of course, a pay-to-buy download option only.

Because Clicker is about finding and pointing you toward available shows, you usually end up streaming the show directly from the host site. This means your browser may need to be compatible with the host site's stream. In the case of "FlashForward," you get two choices -- ABC.com and Hulu. Since I already use Hulu, I'm more likely to choose that. But I also tried ABC and realized that no, I don't want to download the ABC.COM Video Player Software plug-in and agree to ABC.com's end user license agreement. So, a few back button hits on my browser and boom, Hulu it is.

The best feature of Clicker is its Playlist. If you create a free account, you can easily add shows to your playlist. You can add a single episode, all available episodes, or just all new episodes. It's pretty simple to manage. In about 10 minutes, I suddenly found myself with hours and hours of great content on my playlist. There's a reason I'm not recording every new episode of "The Simpsons" on my DVR, but hey, maybe I'll find time to watch the latest "Treehouse of Horror" episode at my desk. It's just a click to add "The Simpsons" to your playlist.

So now you know that I receive network television and I have a DVR. I've also got a decent HDTV and an old couch. Pair the two together, and most of the video I want to watch is on a big screen, in network television high definition -- much better than streamed TV content. Clicker and other online television guide sites -- like TVGuide.com, Channels.com, OVGuide.com, and SideReel.com, et al. -- have years before they'll compete with the average consumer's living room and more traditional HD television delivery methods.

Still, sometimes I run into episodes or shows that I haven't been following or haven't recorded or heard about and want to watch them, like "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." I can't take the time to enjoy Jon Stewart on a daily basis, but once a week or so, I can check out the guests and recent action via my Clicker playlist. Nice.

The playlist, though, isn't a perfect system. For example, many shows have online publication rights that let only a certain number of the most recent shows be made available online. Take "Castle," for instance. I just recently ran into "Castle," and it's a decent show. I'm not sure how long it'll be able to sustain my interest, but I'm willing to give it a try. I started watching one of the episodes late at night and got sidetracked. The next day, the episode was off my playlist. Obviously, Clicker only tracks that it sent me to the online video and didn't realize that I didn't actually watch it. When I managed to find a link, I learned that the episode had expired on both Hulu and ABC.

Bummer. And the limited time frames of availability is a fundamental problem with online streaming video in the world today. Byzantine broadcast rights are hard for regular consumers to follow, if not tolerate. So the episode that I had watched a portion of? The only way to finish it would be to wait for a rerun ... or buy it from iTunes.

Clicker is new, easy-to-use, and clutter-free. Similar guides offer similar functionality, as do video search engines like Blinkx and Truveo, and perhaps because they've been around longer, they tend to be crammed full of information, if not a lot more advertising.

Hopefully, Clicker will be able to retain its clean ease-of-use as it balances its need to generate revenue off the service. Meanwhile, I'll be using it for those moments when the couch and HDTV aren't readily available.

Originally published on TechNewsWorld

With YouTube Direct, now users can yank videos from big media

Tim Conneally — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:10:19 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Google today announced YouTube Direct, an open source platform that lets media organizations directly connect with YouTube users to request and rebroadcast their YouTube clips.

The application allows custom YouTube uploaders to be built into another site, so users can submit their videos directly and track the viewing metrics in their own profile. Google highlights the rise of citizen journalism as a major reason for the program.

ABC News, NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post and more have already picked up on YouTube Direct, and examples can be seen on their respective sites. All involved content remains hosted by YouTube, and the only cost incurred is associated with the media company's Google App Engine account, and is based upon the amount of traffic being served.

"Though we built YouTube Direct to help news organizations expand their coverage and connect directly with their audiences, the application is designed to meet any organization's goal of leveraging video content submitted by the community," Steve Grove of YouTube News and Politics said today. "Businesses can use YouTube Direct to solicit promotional videos, nonprofits can use the application to call out for support videos around social campaigns and politicians can use the platform to ask for user-generated political commercials. The opportunities to use the tool are as broad as the media spectrum itself."

In short, the idea is to pull free content from YouTube and syndicate it on high-traffic sites.

But the most interesting part of this idea is that it puts the shoe on the other foot in terms of content control.

One of big media's problems with YouTube has been that it lets anyone upload copyrighted content, regardless of ownership. As a result, we've seen TV networks, record labels, performing artists, and every type of copyright holder force users to take down content that may have contained copyrighted material.

But in this situation, the bigger media organizations would be looking to syndicate the users' content, and the user retains the right to pull the video whenever he feels like it.

To quote YouTube Direct's FAQ:

"If a user decides to delete a video after he or she has submitted it to your site via YouTube Direct, then this video will be removed from YouTube, and thus will no longer play anywhere on your site that the video has been embedded or linked to. When this happens, there will be a flag visible in the moderation panel indicating that the video is not longer live on YouTube, and any reference to it on your site should also be removed."

Pirate Bay closes down torrent tracker

Tim Conneally — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:58:45 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

After months of legal controversy which were followed by months of uncertainty about the future of the service, the Pirate Bay's popular torrent tracker has been shut down for good.

But it wasn't a court-ordered takedown or the result of regulatory shuffling, the old Pirate Bay torrent tracker simply became obsolete. As a result, the Pirate Bay is no longer running its old tracker, and has switched over to listing "magnet links," a method for locating DHT (Distributed Hash Table) or PEX (Peer Exchange) nodes.

The Pirate Bay team posted in its blog today, "DHT (combined with PEX) is highly effective in finding peers without the need for a centralized service. If you run uTorrent you might have noticed in the tracker tab of your torrents that the [Peer Exchange] (PEX) row is often reporting a lot more peers than the trackers you might have for that torrent. These peers all came to you without the use of a central tracker service! This is what we consider to be the future. Faster and more stability for the users because there is no central point to rely upon."

Twitter to abandon 'politically biased' suggested user list

Tim Conneally — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:02:54 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Twitter reportedly will be abandoning its suggested user list following some unfavorable attention it received last month.

When a new user signs up on Twitter, the site offers him a long list of suggested users he may be interested in following. The list consists of about 500 prominent users in various fields, including politics.

But the Center for Governmental Studies noticed the suggested users did not equally represent both Republican and Democratic political interests. One of the main points brought up was that prospective Democratic candidates in the California gubernatorial race were listed, but prospective Republican candidates were not.

At the Web 2.0 summit last month, Chief Twitter exec Evan Williams said "'The suggested user list has been controversial for a while...I desperately want to kill it or evolve it."

Today, co-founder Biz Stone followed up with the Associated Press, telling reporters, "That list will be going away...In its stead will be something that is more programmatically chosen, something that actually delivers more relevant suggestions."

Neither Stone nor Williams has presented a date for when the feature will be changed.

iTunes Preview doesn't go far enough to create Web-based option for store

Tim Conneally — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:50:19 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Yesterday, Microsoft launched Windows Marketplace for Mobile's Web component, a version of the store fully accessible through any browser.

I lamented that Apple had not yet created a similar face for the iTunes App store, even though it is the most popular download shop among the smartphone competitors. Users who want to browse the contents of the iTunes store, be it music, videos, or applications, must have the iTunes desktop software installed or otherwise browse it on their iPod Touch or iPhone (in which case they're almost guaranteed to have iTunes installed on their PC anyway.)

So the problem was that there was really no way to browse the iTunes store if you didn't use the iTunes software.

One reader was quick to point out that I didn't cite iTunes Preview, a Web-based iTunes store which was rolled out less than 24 hours after Microsoft's announcement.

So in the interest of fairness, let's talk about what Apple has brought to the table with iTunes Preview.

As I said before, iTunes Preview is a Web-based iTunes storefront which finally begins to address the accessibility gap created when Apple's downloads are only browsable within iTunes itself.

So now, users can browse the entire iTunes catalog by genre or artist name, and read album reviews as well as customer reviews and ratings.

But things run into a bottleneck very quickly when it comes to actually consuming music. There is no way to preview songs within iTunes Preview (ironic, I know), and no way to purchase and download music. These can only be completed if the user hits "View in iTunes," which launches the desktop software.

So iTunes Preview creates a sort of "look, but don't touch" window into Apple's downloadable music library if you don't have iTunes installed.

While it's currently for the music portion of the iTunes Store and not the movie/tv or app sections, iTunes Preview is actually a step in the right direction that arguably should have been taken long ago.

Google acquires Gizmo5, builds IP telephony portfolio

Tim Conneally — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:33:38 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Google today officially announced that it had acquired IP telephony software company Gizmo5, a service many users have already tried to use in conjunction with their Google Voice accounts to make SIP calls.

In the Google Voice blog, product managers Wesley Chan and Craig Walker said, "While we don't have any specific features to announce right now, Gizmo5's engineers will be joining the Google Voice team to continue improving the Google Voice and Gizmo5 experience. Current Gizmo5 users will still be able to use the service, though we will be suspending new signups for the time being, and existing users will no longer be able to sign up for a call-in number."

Since last summer, a number of Google Voice users have published methods of integrating a Gizmo5 account with a Google Voice account to enable free incoming and outgoing calls over SIP.

The integration of Gizmo5's technology has the potential to vastly grow Google Voice into the proverbial Skype killer.

Windows Marketplace for Mobile now available in browser, iTunes' App Store still not

Tim Conneally — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:48:22 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Sure, Apple created the most popular and well-stocked mobile app store in the market, but does Apple provide a Web-based interface to it? No. Through Apple's official channels, you can only browse the store's contents in iTunes or on your iPhone/iPod Touch.

There is an unofficial site hosted on Google App Engine which provides roughly the same experience Apple provides in iTunes, but it lacks search functionality, and if you try to download something, it launches the iTunes installer.

To prevent this problem, Windows Marketplace for Mobile, the app store for Windows Phones, launched a Web-based storefront yesterday. Users can now go to marketplace.windowsphone.com to browse, search, buy, and download Windows Mobile apps from within their browser.

When users select an application from the site, it's put a the download queue which will immediately run the next time the Marketplace client is run on the user's mobile device.

"Marketplace has been extremely active and I couldn't be happier with the reactions from both developers and customers," Microsoft's senior director of mobile services, Todd Brix said. "We've been open for just over one month and already we can see that there's demand for an application marketplace that doesn't compromise on quality or experience."

Out of the many app stores put up in the last year, only a few storefronts have been brought to the Web browser. The Web-based Android Market, for example, provides a weak overview of what is available instead of an actual database of the more than 10,000 Android apps available. Users cannot buy directly from the official Web interface, either.

The Web interface for BlackBerry App World, however, has a substantial catalog which can be browsed, and apps can be sent as emailed links to the user's device.

Bing vs. Google rematch on video search

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:08:06 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

We've known that Microsoft still has work remaining in its itinerary to build Bing into a more competitive search engine -- we knew at launch time that not every feature would compete on an absolute par against Google. If it did, then MSN and Windows Live would have been far more popular. But when Microsoft steps forward to say, "Now, we really have something competitive in this department," it's difficult to give Bing the same number of "Mulligans" as we did at the beginning.

This morning, Microsoft rolled out some replacements to its old MSN Video search engine -- which had remained online all this time -- to produce Bing Video. Like Google Video and unlike YouTube, Bing Video is not a host; it's a search service for publicly accessible videos. So YouTube videos, although hosted by Google, should appear on Bing as well. The differentiator here, theoretically, should not be inventory, since both services should have access to the same material. Instead, it should be how the material is presented, and whether the search process provides access to not only what the user is looking for, but material that may also be pertinent, relevant, and interesting.

So this Betanews comparison does not pit Bing against YouTube -- let's be clear about that. This compares Bing Video against Google Video, similar to our initial test of the two services last June.

With today being Veterans' Day in the US, I decided to devote our search themes for this contest to the bigger, braver battles that Americans have fought in the interests of our freedom and prosperity, so that we're able to spend time dealing in more mundane things like browsing through videos. I began with an easy search for "D-Day" footage -- I want to see if I can locate the small amount of actual footage shot of the Allies storming the Normandy beaches.

What's D-Day to some of us who appreciate the extreme sacrifices of the Allies in saving the world, isn't D-Day to everyone, apparently. Since search engines trust the titles of videos to be truthful about their contents, 6 of the first 20 results returned by Bing actually showed amateur video of paintball competitions called "D-Day," and one was a stop-motion animation using plastic soldiers attacking a beach fortification made of Styrofoam.

By comparison, the first 15 items returned by Google were of legitimate historical D-Day footage, while #16 was the same silly Styrofoam recreation. (The title does say "D-Day Lost Combat Reels," but the word "stop-motion" might also give other clues.) In all, 17 of the top 20 videos Google returned contained D-Day footage, while one contained recent footage of the D-Day Memorial in Normandy.

You'd think adding material to the search would narrow things down significantly -- for example, making the query "D-Day" footage Normandy invasion. And for Google Video, it does, with the first 45 items retrieved showing authentic Normandy footage. Only item #46 in Google's retrieval shows footage from paintball competitors (even though "Normandy" is nowhere close to "Oklahoma"). Item #12 for Bing Video involves paintball, while #11 shows footage of a legitimate amateur D-Day recreation in Ohio (again, nowhere close to Normandy).

In browsing through selected videos, Bing continues to show one of its bright spots: the ability to play a segment of the video directly within the thumbnail, complete with sound, before the user actually selects it. This gives the user more of an opportunity to see whether this is actually something she really wants to be seeing. Google Video currently has no counterpart to this, and it really should, although one wonders whether Google's looking for an opportunity to roll the feature out when no one is noticing.

This is especially useful for previewing videos hosted by other sites, especially universities, where embedding isn't normally supported. For example, when we tried a search for the classic 1952 Edward R. Murrow See It Now documentary on "Christmas in Korea" (the query here being Korea Murrow "See It Now"), most of the sites with the longest relevant clips (some of them including the Korea show, some not) are on a non-embedding site, such as Kansas University's Journalism Dept. Pulling up the whole video would mean leaving the search engine.

However, a video's thumbnail alone doesn't often tell you whether it might contain a minute or two from the edition featuring Murrow's tour with US troops in the Korean War. So Bing's ability to preview even non-embeddable videos here is extremely helpful; with only a thumbnail to go on, the only way for you to test a video pulled up by Google is to travel off-site.

Next: Presentation is the key...

Once you've selected a video from a site that supports video embedding (so that you don't leave the context of the search engine), Bing is capable of displaying it in a more pleasing frame than Google. A dark grey viewing region, coupled with light grey text on dark for the description, is much easier on the eyes than Google's layout, which essentially hands over a pre-annexed rectangle to whatever service is providing the feed (YouTube, DailyMotion, MySpace, etc.).

Google Video does add an extra space below the playback region, for "Related Videos." Now, you'd think that your other query results would be full of related videos; but there's a good reason why these are here: A pre-catalogued index placed these items here, as belonging to the same general category as the video being viewed.

That's an important feature that Bing Video lacks, although the "More from the Web" section does present more items from the query in a more optimized layout: two rows of five each, rather than one long column of ten like Google.

Bing Video would still benefit from stepping aside even further, however, from its former role as a YouTube competitor. Like Google Video, Bing Video should realize that the user of a search engine isn't really a browser, or a "person who browses" -- he's someone who's looking for something specific. So showing "Recently Commented Videos" and "Most Watched" videos on unrelated topics to the search at hand, is not a help but a hindrance in this context. When I care about D-Day, I don't care about Lady Gaga. (Frankly, I don't care about Lady Gaga at any other time either, but that's beside the point.)

Another feature Bing Video could stand to lose is "Up Next," a holdover from the MSN days. Here, the service has pre-selected a queue of videos for you to watch -- not videos pertaining to your search, just something it happened to pull up. In our case with D-Day, Bing Video (or rather, MSN) pulled up an interview with the star of Fox Television's "Glee," and an award ceremony interview with Oprah Winfrey's friend Gayle.

If Bing is supposed to be a "decision engine," as Microsoft's ads put it, then there is no reason for these videos to be here unless they pertain to the search at hand. This is no longer MSN Video, the place to go when you have no place to go and you want the Web to take you somewhere -- the Internet equivalent of Sominex. Bing Video is a tool, and should be treated like one. For more on that subject, I would recommend that Bing's people pay a visit to Bob Muglia at the Tools division of Microsoft.

The verdict

Last June, in our initial test just after Bing's premiere, I gave a very slight edge to Bing Video over Google Video for presenting more sensible results. But I issued a warning to Bing about adopting strange, Microsoft-ian patchwork features like adding wild terms like adlt=strict to the end of queries to guarantee explicit content filters work. There shouldn't have to be "guarantees;" the feature should either work or not. However, Google, in a never-ending race not to be outdone even with questionable features, has since added a similar feature to Google Video.

The qualitative distance between the two video search engines remains very slight. In some cases -- like with the query "Civil War" Appomattox re-enactment -- the search results were essentially identical, just shuffled around a bit. However, for the most part, it does not appear as though Google has devoted as much effort into improving not only the video search process, but also the presentation, as Microsoft with Bing Video.

Now, those frivolous and unnecessary holdover features from the dark ages of MSN, such as "Up Next," can be let go anytime. But being able to preview videos as videos is a very compelling feature that still tips the scales toward Bing for now. For Google Video to catch up, it needs to add this feature, and it needs to rearrange the layout of its search results to something more functional. That's something that can happen tomorrow.

But that's the thing with Google these days, isn't it: These things can happen tomorrow, and they don't. You never know with Google when something will get back on-track, or fall back off the track. That uncertainty may be Microsoft's key to maintaining the edge in this and other key departments for Bing, and reclaiming search share one bite at a time.

Bing gets geekier with new Wolfram Alpha integration

Tim Conneally — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:56:04 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Since Microsoft's Bing search engine debuted, it's made a strong charge against Google, the search market's dominant player. It has had diverse and attention-grabbing advertising campaigns, its partnership with Yahoo is one of the biggest search collaborations of the last decade, and it regularly rolls out timely and compelling new features like the recent integration of Twitter and Facebook feeds.

Because of this, Bing has been steadily gaining traffic and revenue, according to recent figures by Hitwise and IDC.

Today, Bing is beginning to show a geekier and more productive side through a partnership with computational search engine Wolfram Alpha. Now, in addition to doing Web searches, Bing can process raw numerical data in areas such as nutrition, health and advanced mathematics.

"By using our API, Bing will be able to seamlessly access the tens of thousands of algorithms and trillions of pieces of data from Wolfram|Alpha, and directly incorporate the computations in its search results," Wolfram Alpha's Schoeller Porter wrote today.

For an increasing number of topics, Bing can create more sticky search results pages. One of the examples the Bing team used in its blog today was the query "dodecahedron," a twelve-sided polygon (and character in Norton Juster's kid's story The Phantom Tollbooth). On the Bing results page, it now shows an image of the polygon, its combinatorial properties, its geometric properties, and more. On Google, it also provides images, but everything else is presented as a link, immediately shuffling the searcher off to another site. The more useful data Bing can deliver, the longer it will be able to keep the user aboard.

These features began rolling out today, but will not be complete for a few days, so availability of Wolfram Alpha results will vary. In Betanews tests today, the calculation capability was not yet online.

How would you rewrite Google's '10 Things?'

Joe Wilcox — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:08:48 -0500

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

More and more people are using the M word -- that is "monopoly" -- to describe Google. Certainly there is an argument that, globally, Google has a monopoly on search. According to combined analyst reports, Google's worldwide search share is about 60 percent, even 70 or 80 percent in some geographies -- and that's just from the desktop or portable PC. Google also is rapidly gaining search share on mobile phones as well; 60 percent, or even more, in many countries.

Google's influence is a hot topic this week because of media mogul Rupert Murdoch's threat to put most, if not all, his content behind a paywall and remove that content from crawling by Google search bots. Is Google doing evil to traditional media publishers like Murdoch, by making their content easily available for free? In August, over at my Oddly Together Website I tackled this topic in post: "Can You Charge for News? Ask Google."

As Google's might increases, it's reasonable to ask how the company's business practices are changing and whether or not it can stick to corporate philosophy "Ten things we know to be true." Perhaps the best known is No. 6: "You can make money without doing evil." But can Google does this? That's the question I pose to Betanews readers.

I'll go further and ask: How would you rewrite Google's "10 Things" to more appropriately fit how the company conducts its business? I offer my list below but ask for your adaptations in comments. By the way, my revision is a bit hard-ass with a purpose: To generate discussion. The revised 10 Things don't necessarily reflect how I personally feel about Google, which otherwise gets knocked around in my revised 10 Things.

I got the idea to rewrite the 10 Things from a Twitter exchange, late yesterday. I tweeted: "Q: Does YouTube diminish if Bing Videos easily collects videos from many sources? If Microsoft taps in social sharing/networking?" Windows developer Mugunth Kumar responded: "I wish it would. Google videos is like too much inclined toward YouTube :-( "don't be evil, no non-google videos for you"!" I shot back a revised No. 6, which you can read below. With that introdcution...

Google's 10 Things -- As revised by Joe Wilcox

1. "Focus on the user and all else will follow" should be: Focus on the algorithm and all else will follow.

Google's core business is really about ranking the relevance of Websites. If keywords are any indication, the focus is not on the user. Keyword search is hugely inexact, and it's unnatural to how people look for things (e.g., they ask questions). But keywords are important to how Google makes money from search.

2. "It's best to do one thing really, really well" should be: Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

While cliché, the saying is appropriate to Google. In the early 2000s, Google did search "really, really well" -- better than any competitor. But end users and even keyword customers could still easily switch to another search engine (just type a different URL into the browser's address bar). Google extended its search technology and brand success by releasing many products with cross-integration benefits. Today, Google search is sticky, because of supporting products or services. Few of them are another thing done "really, really well," however.

3. "Fast is better than slow" should be: Slow is better than fast.

With the exception of perhaps Chrome, most Google products or services stay in perpetual states of beta before release. The development process is anything but fast. Gmail spent five years in beta. Exactly what is fast about that? The slow process allows Google to get something to market, while it's refined to reach a "good enough" threshold (see #10).

4. "Democracy on the web works" should be: Monopoly on the Web works.

Microsoft showed the power of monopoly when Internet Explorer tied to Windows ruled the Web. Contrary to democratic concepts about the Web, a minority of Websites account for the majority of traffic. Increasingly, the means for getting to these majors, and most of the minors, is search: Google search. And there's nothing really democratic about one company, or its algorithm, controlling access to most information.

5. "You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer" should be: You don't need another search engine to find the answer. Google is king of the search hill. Early on, this was because of its technology and keyword business practices. Google has extended its reach through its own services and by way of partnerships, such as being default search engine in every major Web browser but one -- Internet Explorer.

6. "You can make money without doing evil" should be: You can do evil without making money.

Other than search, most Google services don't directly make money. But they do take money from someone else -- what other businesses might call "evil." Google gives away for free something someone else charges for. For example, last month, shares of turn-by-turn mapping manufacturers plummeted after it was revealed that Google would include turn-by-turn mapping features with Android 2 for free.

7. "There's always more information out there" should be: There's always more information that Google can cannibalize for free.

The core dispute Robert Murdoch has with Google: He pays talented people to produce valuable content, which Google profits from through keyword search. Google doesn't produce content, but like a human parasite leeches nourishment (e.g. revenue) from the host.

8. "The need for information crosses all borders" should be: The need to index information crosses all boundaries.

Google wants to catalog everything. The practice has generated some corporate -- and even government -- backlash about privacy and security. Google produces none of this information, owns none of it, but looks to profit from it.

9. "You can be serious without a suit" should be: You can't be taken seriously without a suit.

Sure, regular Googlers dress however they want. But how does Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt dress? In a suit!

10. "Great just isn't good enough" should be: Good enough is good enough.

Few Google products or services are great, nor does the company strive to make them so. The majority, especially those competing with something already available, strive to cross the "good enough" threshold. When something is good enough for less or free, people will adopt it and even give up some more valuable that costs more. Microsoft has repeatedly demonstrated the "good enough" principle with its products, such as Internet Explorer in the late 1990s.