Save our bookmarks: Yahoo's Delicious should become an aggregator

Delicious founder Joshua Schachter left Yahoo in 2008 and now works for Google. Credit: Joi via Flickr

Yahoo's social bookmarking website Delicious is looking less appetizing nowadays.

Once the king of online link sharing and a pioneer in the concept of tagging content, Delicious has been eating all of the wrong things as of late. The site hadn't changed significantly since Yahoo bought it in 2005. Until recently.

Over the last four months, the site has undergone a spiffy redesign, gotten a prettier mobile site and improved search features, filtering and graphing. The most recent announcement details its integration with other Yahoo properties, mainly Yahoo Updates.

What the heck is Yahoo Updates? Looks like a Twitter clone that practically no one is using.

All of these changes appeal to the few niches that still use the site. Graphic designers will appreciate the resurfaced interface and statistics geeks will love the info overlays and doodads.

Delicious is failing to address the elephant in the room -- that over the last few years, start-ups and big players have emulated all of its original features and helped them reach a wider audience.

Betting that Brizzly will be huge, ex-Googlers are working on things

Thing Labs in their San Francisco office. Chris Wetherell, middle left, and Jason Shellen, middle right. Credit: Mark Milian / Los Angeles Times

The mad scientists at Thing Labs have a very impressive track record.

On the sixth floor of a trendy building in San Francisco's recently renovated Mint Plaza, four former Google employees -- scratch that: five former Googlers, with today's addition of FriendFeed's (now Facebook's) Ben Darnell -- and a few others are working on things. Some very interesting things.

Founder Jason Shellen is purposely fuzzy with his description of ongoing projects. Whereas Google famously has "20% time," a policy that lets engineers spend one-fifth of their day working on anything they want, Shellen says his workers get "100% time."

For the last five months, the majority of that time has been spent building Brizzly, a Web application that combines your Twitter and Facebook profiles into a single interface.

After gaining some viral interest through its invitation-only sign-up system -- a strategy that has worked exceedingly well for Gmail and now Google Wave -- Brizzly is unlocking its doors today. Anyone can sign up and plug in their social network credentials.

But Brizzly remains in beta despite having tens of thousands of users. The product is ahead of most desktop apps in its stability and interface but is not yet a replacement for Facebook because you can't fully browse friends' profiles, view events or upload pictures. And the app currently lacks some newer Twitter features like geolocation, which is available in only a few programs anyway, and standardized retweet, a project originally spearheaded by Thing Labs' vice president of technology, Chris Wetherell.

So why should you care? There's plenty of websites and apps for accessing Twitter. TweetDeck and Seesmic, like Brizzly, can pull in Facebook as well. And while Brizzly is stuffed with potential even now in such an early stage, Shellen's track record hints that there's much more to come.

On Brightkite, ladies' night never ends

Two teens listen to music and send text messages on their cellphones in a coffee shop. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times.

When Jonathon Linner describes his social networking website Brightkite, he sounds more like a savvy nightclub owner than the chief executive of a bleeding-edge Bay Area start-up.

Whereas most new technologies tend to favor the early adopter -- a generally male-skewed, try-everything, fad-friendly crowd -- Linner is focusing on a different audience: hot girls.

"Guys will go where the hot chicks are," Linner said over lunch a few months ago. "The target demographic is a girl in college," he reiterated in a recent phone interview.

How do you get girls in high demand to cozy up to a social network that asks users to pull out their phones and check in multiple times a day? Linner employs what he calls "the ladies' night approach."

"Bars do things to make women come there -- reduced-price drinks or free drinks," he said. "So we do things in our system to make it more inviting to women."

Brightkite's landing page is bubbly and colorful with cute cartoon characters and an emphasis on words like "simplicity."

Compare that to competing location-based network Loopt, with its shiny, sleek buttons and big map overlaid with widgets. Or the smaller but much-hyped website Foursquare, which is quick to highlight that it plays nicely with high-end smart phones.

When adding new features, Linner and his 32 or so employees have to take care not to tick off Brightkite's pioneering female users.

For example . . .

EA buys Playfish for $400 million, jumps into social games

Electronic Arts, looking to jump into the exploding market for games on social networks, this morning said it has agreed to buy Playfish in a deal valued at $400 million.

The transaction calls for $275 million in cash, plus $25 in retention bonuses for executives of the tiny London-based developer of games such as Pet Society and Restaurant City. It also includes up to $100 million in bonus payments should Playfish meet certain, undisclosed financial targets.

Playfish, a privately held company, does not release its financial data, but has said the venture is "substantially profitable," so much so that it has not touched the $21 million in venture money it raised in its last round of funding.

With just 125 employees, Playfish has focused on a lean operation with fewer than a dozen games played on popular social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Though rudimentary, the games have attracted hundreds of millions of players. The fact that they are free to play is part of their appeal, but so is their social nature and the fact that players can pull their friends into the games.

EA, based in Redwood City, Calif., has been expanding its reach into free-to-play online games that make money by charging small amounts for extra features.

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

Web ads that learn from you [Updated]

This might surprise you, but the holy grail for many online advertisers is to make an ad that people actually like. Based on the current state of the banner ad economy, that might not seem like the case.

Thanks to the simple addition of thumbs up and thumbs down buttons on many websites, advertisers are finally getting a sense of how enjoyable (or annoying) their ads are.

The Internet has long provided a measurement of how effective an ad is -- that is how many times it was clicked versus how often it was shown, a metric called click-through rate. But that's based simply on how loud and flashy a banner can be in order to attract a reader's attention.

A click doesn't necessarily convert to a purchase, or "conversion" as they call it, nor are visitors guaranteed to associate the product positively. If an ad mimics a virus alert, it might get clicked out of fear or urgency but won't elicit a pleasant reaction once users realize they were duped.

Many social networking sites, including Facebook, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, are beginning to shift toward a subjective ad model. Initial results from allowing users to rate ads have been mostly positive. The success may be inspiring a trend, as advertisers throughout the Web seem to be toning down on annoying ads.

One of the boldest implementations is Digg Ads, which publicly launched in August and has tested exceptionally well, according to Mike Maser, Digg's chief strategy officer.

The new sponsored posts appear in the main content space and look almost identical (save for a thin gray line and small "sponsored by" text) to user-submitted news stories. Whereas an isolated graphic ad on Digg gets about eight clicks out of every 10,000 impressions, Digg Ads are pulling click-through rates of 2% to 3%.

"The results were astounding to us," Maser said. The advertisers are "writing copy and headlines in a way that's almost as if you'd want to share it with someone."

Google starts testing Social Search. 'Creepy,' naysayers mutter. [Updated]

Just about any social-networking-focused product that Google rolls out brings a group of naysayers pointing fingers and calling it creepy.

Right on cue, those folks are welcoming Google's new real-time search feature with less than open arms: "Google Social Search is creepy.... Just perfect for child preditors [sic] to use," wrote Greg House on Twitter.

OK, let's turn it down a notch.

Google Social Search is available for testing in Google Labs, a section of experimental search features. Social Search stems from a deal Google recently struck with Twitter.

[Updated at 6:28 p.m.: An earlier version of this post incorrectly said Google had announced a deal with Facebook.]

Microsoft announced a similar deal and promptly rolled out BingTweets along with news of a partnership with Facebook. No one has yet disclosed financial terms.

Google’s Social Search works much like its standard search, but instead of sifting through the Web at large, it culls links from friends’ pages on the user’s social networks. 

In order to know who your friends are, Google asks you to fill out a profile that includes links to your pages on networks like Twitter and FriendFeed -- which is now owned by Facebook. A deal with Facebook could be on the horizon -- at which time, Facebook's notoriously change-averse users would no doubt bemoan the feature.

Are today's reactions any worse than the ones to Google Web History, which shows you a list of past searches? Or to Google Latitude, which shows you where on a map you and your friends are? Or to Gmail's targeted ads, which, for example, promote concert tickets if you receive an e-mail about U2? Or to Google Voice, which logs your phone usage, voice mails and text messages?

Maybe not, but what happens if Google rolls out Facebook search?

-- Mark Milian

Twitter: @markmilian

Facebook digs through user data and graphs U.S. happiness

Facebook released a graphical breakdown showing the collective happiness of the site's millions of active U.S. users.

The company combed its database of short user-updates and looked for words indicating a theme of happiness or sadness correlating to the day it was posted. The breakdown was released Monday.

What we learned from the analysis of our nation's Web chatter: Holidays make people happy, celebrity deaths make people sad.

As Facebook notes, Thanksgiving and Christmas are some of the happiest days, while the deaths of Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson were among the lowest.

Indeed, the findings are completely obvious, but could become more interesting with years of data collection -- especially when aligned with economic indicators.

But, hey, do we really want Facebook to keep peering into updates meant just for friends and family? The research serves as a good reminder about cybersecurity -- after all, it is National Cybersecurity Month.

If you put something on Facebook, no matter how tight your privacy settings are, Facebook Inc. can still hang onto it, analyze it, remix it and repackage it.

Despite its silly name, the Gross National Happiness indicator is creepy. We're in there.

Mint, a personal finance website similar to (and now owned by) Quicken, also does this sort of data analysis. The company combs through millions of bank and credit card accounts that its users inputted for the purpose of personal finance tracking -- key word being "personal" -- in order to determine "America's most frugal cities" or "global wealth distribution."

We're going to send a link to this post on our Facebook pages along with the words "mad" and "unhappy." Maybe Facebook will notice the graph dip the next time it digs through my profile.

-- Mark Milian

Follow my commentary on technology and social media on Twitter @markmilian.

Image courtesy of Facebook

Twitter adds social-grouping feature called Lists

Twitter is testing a new feature today called Lists, which allows users to subscribe to and share groups of friends.

Months ago, Facebook added a similar grouping feature, also called Lists, but each user is required to customize his or her own list on the social network. That created a barrier for lazy folks, who refused to wade through and categorize friends.

The ability to subscribe to your Twitter buddies' lists means you can check in on groups of users without actually following them. In the test version, tweets from users on a list you follow don't show up in your main stream, but rather in a separate list stream.

The test feature, which Twitter Inc. wrote is only available to a small group of users for now, isn't 100% functional yet. We could subscribe to and create new lists, but we couldn't add users to those lists.

This small roll-out comes the day after we wrote about the recent Twitter uprising of sorts against the Suggested Users list -- the master scroll that's shown to all new users. Those frustrations prompted bloggers Robert Scoble and Salon's Kathy Riordan to create lists of their own.

Scoble asserted in a phone call early this morning that the Suggested Users list is a Pandora's box that has dramatically transformed the service.

Last we heard, though, Twitter intends to eventually update the Suggested Users, which its co-founders say was added to point newbies to well-known accounts, with more robust technology. Maybe this crowd-sourced-list feature is a step toward that.

-- Mark Milian

Calm down! Twitter's featured-users list has been there since the beginning

Some Twitter users demonstrated a renewed upheaval over the weekend in response to the site's Suggested Users list, but everyone seemed to forget that a similar list was there during the site's infancy.

The list of notable accounts, as designated by Twitter Inc., is shown to newcomers when they create a site profile. Yeah, the new list went up in January, but a post by technology blogger Robert Scoble again turned the spotlight to Twitter's own user spotlight.

Scoble spilled his not-so-secret spite over not being selected for inclusion on Twitter's exclusive list and highlighted several others he considered notable -- even though, tragically, "they can’t get on Twitter’s Suggested User List."

"Unfair!" cried the underlings.

"I'll be honest...slighty annoyed im not on the 'suggested user' list on twitter!!" wrote David Powell (@powlo981) in the first tweet on his profile, which has amassed one follower since then (a user named @powlo88).

"A lot of the celebs on here with millions of followers is only because they are featured in the 'SUGGESTED USERS' list when u sign up," wrote reality TV star Tila Tequila. "So it's almost kinda like cheating since every new user who signs up to twitter, those celebs get added by default."

As people gripe and bloggers create their own lists, Gabe Rivera, founder of popular news aggregator Techmeme, summed up the overall frustrations. Though apparently joking, in a recent tweet he called Twitter's list an "insult" and "injustice to the service's pioneering users."

But here's the thing: The list was there from the beginning.

You may not remember (or, most likely, weren't actually on the site early enough), but Twitter.com had a box on the right side ...

Twitter said to be near a deal for $100 million in venture funding

Twitter may be close to locking up a deal for $100 million in new venture funding, a sum that would nearly triple the total venture capital poured into the 3-year-old messaging start-up.

The new investment round, which would include investment firm T. Rowe Price and Insight Venture Partners, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, would value Twitter at close to $1 billion. 

Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Among the most familiar refrains in the social media business is that companies do best to build value and audiences before they focus too heavily on generating revenue. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone reinforced the features-first, money-later approach this week when he said "it'll be awhile" before users see any advertising on Twitter.

Twitter has also said that it will support what it calls "commercial accounts" for businesses, which would offer paying customers more tools for analyzing their Twitter traffic. That feature may arrive by the end of the year.

Twitter's last round of funding came in mid-February, when it collected $35 million from the likes of Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital. Spark Capital and Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos's Bezos Expeditions participated in the round before that. 

In recent days, Twitter has been adding to the slate of sites and services that are allowing users to tweet, including MySpace and AOL's Lifestream platform.

-- David Sarno