Author: Liz Gannes

After I participated in a rousing SXSW panel about content recommendations, Emmanuel Marchal, general manager of London-based LikeCube approached me in the hall to tell me about his company. I thought it was pretty cool, so I captured a video interview with him right there.

LikeCube was co-founded by a semantic web technologist and an anthropologist four years ago, and funded by the UK’s National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts. It combines metadata, user activity and personalization to help clients recommend locations on a per-user basis (watch the video for more specifics). The service works around the idea that the wisdom of the crowds is too general to make recommendations for everyone. Of course nobody would disagree with that idea when it comes to music or movies, but the principle probably applies to restaurants and hotels too.

The company powers recommendations for Qype, which is a European version of Yelp, and is working to secure other such deals in categories such as travel. LikeCube charges a licensing fee and also splits revenue with its white-label clients.

Marchal pointed out that on TripAdvisor, the single worst dirty U.S. hotel is a place in San Francisco. If you check out the hotel’s reviews, 80 percent of reviewers said they wouldn’t recommend it to a friend, which necessarily means that 20 percent of reviewers would recommend it. Perhaps those folks just aren’t very kind to their friends, but Marchal’s point is that people’s tastes differ; for some, this hotel would be the right value for the price.

Here’s the interview:

“The web is becoming a live medium — sales and auctions happen in time, product launches, chats with celebrities, live video events and audio, games, events in virtual worlds — there are a huge amount of scheduled things taking place,” says Nova Spivack, who recently sold off his semantic web search engine Twine to Evri. Now he’s setting out to create a massive programming guide to those live online events, called Live Matrix.

Spivack last year brought on Sanjay Reddy, who’d done corporate development at Gemstar-TV Guide and led its sale to Macrovision for $2.8 billion. Reddy knew from experience that TV watchers spend 10 percent of their time watching TV on the interactive programming guide (per set-top box data). The web has much more going on at any one time, but nothing like an IPG.

Does that metaphor carry over? That’s what Spivack, who’s serving as Live Matrix chairman, and Reddy, the CEO, want to find out. They plan to launch in May and gave me a look at the pre-release site under the condition that I not release screenshots. I’ll tell you a bit more about what they’re doing and describe in words what it looks like.

First of all, there’s the prototypical grid interface — though instead of listing channels due to preset numbers like on TV, they’re dynamically ordered based on demand. Log in during March Madness? That’s going to be on top. If a web metaphor is more your style, you can look at all the events in a Digg-like interface. Users can pull events into a personal playlist and receive reminders when they start. If you actually want to watch something, Live Matrix sends you to the host site rather than framing the content.

These ideas do need a bit more nuance — for instance, personalized ranking rather than global popularity will often be more helpful, and on days like the Obama inauguration there are going to be tens of duplicate or near-identical feeds running on various channels. Spivack and Reddy do say they’ll provide recommendations as well as social filtering based on what your friends are planning to watch. They’re also planning to provide widgets for syndication around the web.

I totally see the need for what they’re doing — in my time at NewTeeVee, we developed the “where to watch” franchise of posts after seeing the amount of people coming to our site trying to find the actual URLs for live video streams of major sporting and pop culture events.

The main way Live Matrix expects to list events is by partnering with content providers, plugging into publisher APIs and using a small editorial team. Then, it will sell advertising on programming based on demand expressed by its users. It will also maintain a page for every event after it’s over, pointing to archived video (which is excellent; so often people who do live completely forget about on-demand). And Spivack notes that pre-recorded videos released at a certain time will be considered “live” as well.

Live Matrix has a good problem but, like its on-demand cousin company Clicker, the web TV guide, it will need to aggressively build an audience for its site and through distribution partners, including hardware companies. The key is to make an interface that’s a significantly better option than searching for such events.

The company, dually based in San Francisco and Los Angeles with offshore development, has raised money from angel investors including Allen Morgan at Mayfield Fund.

While the Twitter keynote had SXSW attendees lining up an hour beforehand, with many being turned away from an auditorium fitting thousands, and volunteers flagging every last empty seat for a willing occupant, it wasn’t the festival highlight many had hoped. An hour-long vague and high-level conversation between Twitter CEO Evan Williams and Havas Media Lab director Umair Haque had listeners yawning, turning to their phones to complain on Twitter, and outright leaving. As I write — three-quarters of the way through the session — I’m surrounded by vacated seats.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams speaks on the jumbotron to a room full of vacated seats.

Williams did take the first few minutes of the presentation to preview a new Twitter product called @Anywhere. He described it as an “at platform,” playing on the similar-sounding “ad platform” and “app platform.” @Anywhere seems to be like Facebook Connect, in that it allows users to log in around the web with their Twitter IDs (something that’s already somewhat possible today), but it’s also more oriented towards consumption and publisher tools. It will allow content creators to invite readers to follow authors on Twitter directly from the page, and bring in information from Twitter when users hover over a button.

For users, Williams said, “Discovery is one of the hardest challenges — it’s putting these things in context where you’re already reading them.” And for publishers, @Anywhere will “give you a connection back to users that you didn’t necessarily have before, and keep them coming back.”

The product has no launch date, but it does have launch partners: Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo and YouTube. Twitter’s Biz Stone writes in a blog post released during the presentation:

“Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning.”

However, the world Stone describes that doesn’t sound that futuristic; you can already do many such things through integrations made by sites themselves or with the help of products like Tweetmeme.

I don’t think Twitter lost any users today, but it might have burst a few admirers’ bubblicious ideas of the company.

For the GigaOM network’s complete SXSW coverage, check out this round-up.

Google, to its credit, is rolling with the punches thrown in response to its Buzz launch from last month, making changes to the product to address user concerns, and staying committed to it despite a messy launch. Members of the Buzz product team spoke on a behind-the-scenes-of-Gmail panel at SXSW today, addressing industry-wide criticism as well as a cutting attack over privacy issues from SXSW keynoter and researcher Danah Boyd delivered on Saturday.

Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Buzz

Google has been criticized far and wide for the way it launched and implemented Buzz, its new social web aggregation product. The primary complaint was over privacy — since Buzz exposed and made assumptions about pre-existing Gmail users’ relationships with each other. Buzz also has other problems: it’s noisy, limited to just a few services, and for many does not serve a distinct enough purpose from competitors.

Buzz product manager Todd Jackson, who spoke on the panel and to GigaOM afterwards, said he attended Boyd’s talk and found it “extremely insightful, fair and something we could work from.” He said he personally emailed Boyd afterwards and invited her to deliver the same talk at Google.

“It’s a challenging set of questions navigating in this space that’s fairly new and especially for Google,” Jackson said. He said some of Boyd’s most resonant points concerned how users perceive their different social groups, and the idea that making public information more public could violate users’ privacy.

Jackson said that he and his team are committed to Buzz as an idea and a product and will continue to have the support of Google to evolve it — for instance, this week Buzz released better inbox alert controls. Buzz now has “millions” of users (Google will only say that Gmail, Buzz’ parent product and its host, has “hundreds of millions” of users).

Next on the Buzz to-do list are more ways to control users’ streams, and moderation for how often an item bumps to the top, Jackson said. He also said that Buzz for Google Apps should be out “in next couple months-ish.”

The Buzz team also plans to experiment more with communicating with users before launching new features through things like its own “Google Buzz” account. “In general we don’t like preannouncing things,” Jackson said on the panel, pointing out that users will want to try something when they hear about it. But the Buzz team is finding through experience and through feedback such as Boyd’s speech that talking with its users will help them appreciate, expect and even influence product development.

You’d still hope they would have gotten this right (or a lot more right) the first time, but at least now they have the right attitude.

For the GigaOM network’s complete SXSW coverage, check out this round-up.

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Google Buzz’s True Home Is in the Enterprise

Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

Today social technology theorist Clay Shirky delivered a fitting counterpoint to Danah Boyd’s keynote on privacy at SXSW the day before. Where Boyd spoke of the danger of making information more public than users intended it, Shirky talked about new opportunities for sharing information online and elsewhere.

Here’s the Twitter-esque soundbite version of the speech:

• “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does.”

• “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” (Shirky’s fellow NYU professor Jay Rosen used this quote in what looked to be the most repeated tweet from the session, from what I could see, though I’m not sure it was the nugget of the talk.)

• “Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.”

• “We have a word for not sharing if there’s no cost to you: that word is ’spiteful.’”

• “How much value can we get out of civic sharing?”

That last point was Shirky’s main thrust — how can people use sharing information to effect change? Civic sharing, as Shirky described it, is “taking what the whole group knows tacitly and turning it into a public document.” By bringing that information to the fore, you can make governments and institutions pay attention to you. Shirky used the example of Ushahidi, which aggregates and maps text messages from crises to create a broader, crowd-sourced sense of what’s actually happening (and was profiled this weekend in the New York Times).

Shirky said that though people would like to think the government serves individuals, it really serves groups. He told the story of how a group of harassed Indian women were able to get the attention of the government to arrest members of the radical Sri Ram Sena group, which was beating them for going out in public to drink at bars. The women formed a Facebook group called the “Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women,” and mobilized people to mail pink panties to the leader of Sri Ram Sena. For the local Indian government, the Facebook group made the women a constituency, rather than individuals, so it merited a response.

So how do we create those groups and those collective bodies of information? By motivating people to share. Shirky referred to the new book Why We Cooperate that used research on monkeys to map out three types of sharing. Sharing goods means the giver no longer has them; sharing services takes some effort; sharing information is so easy that it makes us feel good when we do it, and if we don’t do it, we’re spiteful. Shirky asserted that this explains why users and the music industry are out of sync in situations like file-sharing on Napster and elsewhere — since sharing digital goods is just sharing information.

Wrapping it all together, Shirky contended that in the case of sharing information, “The link between intrinsic motivation and private action is just a coincidence.” The natural desire to share information isn’t just a matter of giving directions to an elderly lady because it’s the right small thing to do, it can be a broader movement to provoke change. People can be motivated — due to their feelings about sharing — to contribute to the public greater good.

Updated

How to deal with user privacy on social networks as they grow, mature and become more sophisticated has been a frequent topic of conversation at this year’s SXSW — and not just in researcher Danah Boyd’s keynote address that argued aggregating public information can be a privacy breach, and slammed Google and Facebook for their missteps with users’ expectations.

Is privacy just a technical problem? That’s what Google engineer Brett Slatkin, co-creator of the PubSubHubbub real-time syndication protocol, proposed on a Saturday morning panel. WebFinger, a cross-platform standard that conveys explicit privacy settings Update: user preferences, which could include explicit privacy settings from one social network to another, could take care of understanding the relationships between users and the information they want to control, Slatkin said. He added that he felt that the reason users are confused about privacy is because of inconsistency among the social sites they use.

But Microsoft program manager Dare Obasanjo contended that for-profit social web companies’ interests will always be at odds with user privacy, because there’s too much value in harnessing the crowd for things like Twitter’s trending topics and search. He said he felt the industry needs to “clean up [its] act” on privacy, citing Netflix’s cancellation of its second Netflix Prize contest this week due to concerns that the dataset it provided competitors could be matched to its customers.

Obasanjo also argued that approaches like WebFinger might not work because asking users to specify privacy controls introduces friction into their use of your site.

Collecta co-founder Jack Moffitt disagreed with Google’s Slatkin, but for a different reason. “I don’t think the solution is purely technical,” he said. “I don’t think users will understand the repercussions of these decisions.”

Google’s approach to the social web, where it has fallen behind competitors like Facebook, is heavily focused around standards, and Slatkin described things like OStatus, DiSo, Activity Streams and AtomSource as the key to solving all sorts of usability problems, privacy included. But Slatkin is far from the only true believer in standards. Jon Phillips of Status.net, on a later panel that focused on whether tweets can be copyrighted, spoke about how interoperability can help pass along information as to who owns information and where it comes from. Both Slatkin and Phillips said they feel that if information can be properly sourced and transmitted, rather than replicated, it can be better owned by users.

Still, companies like Google and Facebook don’t have the luxury of being able to start with a clean slate of user expectations and privacy settings, because they’re evolving to adapt to the enormous growth of online sharing and the increasing influence of social sites on the rest of the web through things like real-time search. Kerfuffles like the ones Boyd highlighted in her keynote are the result of changing what information is private and public after people have come to expect something else.

In yet another discussion at the conference, Flickr head of product Matthew Rothenberg said that his team has had to deal with similar privacy issues concerning displaying publicly when a user has favorited a photo on the site (which has always defaulted images to public). “Our bet is that by enforcing public behavior we’re going to change the nature of what they’re doing,” he said. But “you have to properly educate people as to what you’re doing.”

So privacy, it seems, is indeed a technical problem, but also a cultural problem, an educational problem and a business problem. Not to mention endless conversation fodder.

For the GigaOM network’s complete SXSW coverage, check out this round-up.

Updated to clarify WebFinger based on emailed comments from Slatkin.

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How Facebook Should Fix Its Privacy Problem

Researcher Danah Boyd brought fighting words to SXSW, where she delivered a well-received keynote Saturday on the interplay between private and public information online. She called out Google and Facebook for being cavalier with their users’ personal information by repurposing that which users intended for a smaller audience, implementing opt-out services that are public by default and changing settings without adequately informing users.

Boyd, who works with Microsoft Research and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, based much of her assessments on interviews with social media users, many of them teens. She took the stance that “Just because something is publicly accessible doesn’t mean people want to be publicized.” Probably the most radical accusation she levied against technology companies was to declare that “Making something more public that is public is a violation of privacy.” By “making more public,” she meant aggregating users’ updates and making them searchable, as well as repurposing users’ information in a way they didn’t originally intend.

Though some may argue that anything volunteered online should be assumed to be public, Boyd maintained that privacy and publicity are not a binary — just as in the physical world, where you can say something in a public place and not expect it to leave the room.

“Security through obscurity is not as ridiculous as it might seem,” said Boyd. “The fact is most people are pretty obscure, even online.” However, she pointed out that the privilege of the freedom to portray her life online is not something that all people share — for instance, one girl she interviewed moved to another town to escape an abusive father, but then had her participation on Facebook exposed publicly when she accepted new default privacy settings.

Boyd criticized Google for its rollout of Buzz and Facebook for its privacy setting changes that pushed users to make their online participation more public by taking advantage of the fact that users tend to click through pop-up screens and accept default settings. “I don’t want to let conspiracy theories get in the way of my analysis, but I can’t help noticing that more and more technology companies are exposing people’s information publicly and then backpedaling a few weeks out,” she said.

In addition to being potentially dangerous, embarrassing or damaging, changing the rules around information makes users confused and unempowered, Boyd said. Regarding Google Buzz, which tried to approximate and make public people’s closest friends from their Gmail topics but ended up making some users convinced other aspects of their accounts were being made public, Boyd said, “Google managed to find the social equivalent of the uncanny valley,” explaining that, “They have a tremendous amount of information about users, but it wasn’t quite perfect.” She advocated the extension of real-world practices to the online world. “Technologists assume the most optimal solution is the best one, but this tends to ignore a whole bunch of social rituals that have value.”

Meanwhile, Google and Facebook weren’t given a chance to respond directly to Boyd’s keynote. But I did see representatives from both companies as well as others at the conference and speaking on panels throughout the day, where privacy on the social web was a frequent topic. I’ll post later on their side of the story.

For the GigaOM network’s complete SXSW coverage, check out this round-up.

There’s a big geeky holiday coming this weekend — and no, I don’t mean SXSW. It’s Pi Day on Sunday, aka March 14, aka 3/14. But in the leadup to this year’s day most resembling the constant ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, many self-proclaimed nerds are ramping up for the longest extended Pi Day of our time, on 3/14/15. As a rapidly growing Facebook event, “The Only Pi Day of Our Lives,” explains,

Yes, the time is upon us. Everyone knows pi day is March 14th, but any true nerd realizes pi is not 3.14, but rather an irrational constant which continues infinitely in decimal expansion. Starting at 9:26:53 (.589… sec) AM, the longest extended Pi Day of our lives will come into action. The date, at the AM and PM hours, will be ” 3/14/15 at 9:26:53.589. Days like this only come once in a lifetime!

Sure, it might be a bit of an exaggeration to say “the time is upon us” for an event five years out, but honestly, what’s more charmingly nerdy than prepping for Pi Day? The Facebook event, which has 131,871 registered participants and encourages attendees to invite all the nerds they know, does note that 1592 was a better year for Pi Day, and that there are many way to interpret pi’s existence in all sorts of dates. Pi Day, by the way, is totally legit; it was officially recognized by the U.S. House of Representatives last year.

Image from piday.org. Video of a 6-year-old reciting 380 digits of pi in Japanese from YouTube.

Ohai has grand ambitions of jumpstarting an industry for social massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. Think World of Warcraft crossed with FarmVille — engaging and rich, but also easy to use and social. The San Francisco-based company has a great ambassador in CEO Susan Wu, a former venture capitalist who became fascinated by the emerging market for virtual goods, then teamed up with MMO tech wizard Don Neufeld, formerly of Sony Online Entertainment, and raised $6 million from August Capital and Rustic Canyon Partners. But it still has a long way to go.

Ohai’s first game, the vampire-themed City of Eternals, came out in November and has 40,000 players across Facebook and the web, and its second game, Project Unicorn Parade (“an evocative, interactive world environment” with animals, says Wu), is coming soon. Ohai needs to be prolific, efficient and innovative to take on gaming heavyweights like EA and new juggernauts like Zynga, while growing its user base and revenue per user. So the company has tried to make itself nimble, building a platform for Flash-based games that can be tweaked and expanded on the fly and transformed completely to build a separate game (Ohai aims to release eight games per year). “I don’t view us as being in the content business,” said Wu. “I view as as being in web services, where we look at things like data and conversion rates.”

We offered Ohai the chance to come in and show us what they’ve got, so they offered the one-two punch of Wu talking about the company and what it represents, combined with a Ohai content designer coming along to build, in pseudo real time, a virtual representation of the GigaOM office beset by “PR zombies” as a mission for City of Eternals. It’s a little hokey, to be sure, but it got me playing the game! If you’d like to help Om and I fight the PR zombies yourself, click here. The video of our chat with Wu is embedded above.

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• How the Next Zynga Could Reinvent Social Games
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One of the more solid and genuinely useful Internet startups out there, travel fare aggregator Kayak, was dissected in a report released today by NeXt Up Research for SharesPost. NeXt Up thinks that with a heavy advertising spend, Kayak should have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18 percent from 2009 to 2012. Based on estimated revenue and comparison to competitors, the report estimates Kayak’s market cap at between $705 and $771 million.

Is Kayak a promising IPO candidate? You decide. Here are some of the relevant assessments:

• Meta search engines like Kayak accounted for less than 8 percent of online travel booked in 2009, due mostly to low awareness.

• Kayak is spending heavily to make itself better known — NeXt Up estimates an advertising budget of $50 million a year, but Kayak has said itself it plans to spend $100 million on marketing.

• The travel industry should recover from the recession and see a CAGR of 4 percent from 2009 to 2013, with online travel agents growing with a 7 percent CAGR.

• Promising Kayak initiatives include its iPhone apps (see our story) and Travelpost, its TripAdvisor competitor.

• Kayak is projected to have revenue of $180 million in 2010, growing to $305 million in 2014 with EBITDA margins of 30-35 percent.

• Kayak has raised about $224 million in venture funding and debt from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Oak Investment Partners, Tenaya Capital, Trident Capital, Gold Hill Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and AOL.

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What Twitter Airfare Sales Tell Us About Real-Time E-Commerce

Foursquare, the New York-based location services startup, has more than 500,000 users and 1.4 million venues, it announced today, one year after it launched at SXSW. The company says it had its biggest day ever last Friday, with 275,000 check-ins from users declaring they were located at a certain venue. It also now has 16 employees and 1,200 venues offering specials (which is one revenue model the company is working on, alongside a coming small business analytics tool).

While we’re at the stats game, Foursquare also says it’s had 15.5 million check-ins and 1,000,000 badges awarded to encourage users to participate (in a bid to inspire further loyalty, it is offering temporary tattoo badges at this year’s SXSW). Foursquare raised $1.35 million in September and continues to be actively pursued by VCs.

The company is most definitely hyped disproportionately to its adoption, but at least it has more users than media mentions. The word “foursquare” has been used 4,140 times in articles indexed in Google News since 2009 and 89,311 times in Google Blog Search — but surely many more times on Twitter, which doesn’t offer a long-term index.

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How Social Networks Could Help Yelp, Not Kill It

We know there are lot of entrants in the group deals space — see my recent piece, Groupon and the Wannabes — but now the competitors are seriously bulking up. LivingSocial — which has more than a million daily email subscribers — is today announcing it’s raised a $25 million Series B round led by U.S. Venture Partners and including Grotech Ventures and Revolution Capital, bringing the company to a total of about $35 million raised. That follows Groupon’s $30 million B round from Accel Partners and New Enterprise Associates announced in December.

Setting up group deals does require capital, because you need salespeople on the ground to find desirable venues and negotiate with them — and given the now tens of competitors in some cities, elbow out your rivals’ salespeople. LivingSocial is currently in 13 cities (it launches four more today), still quite a bit behind category leader Groupon, which is in 40. But armed with this new capital, LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy said the company hopes to rapidly expand its business.

O’Shaughnessy said LivingSocial’s angle, beyond deals, is to help small businesses grok social media in order to keep in touch with their customers. The Washington, D.C.-based company, which has been around for two and a half years with products like online book reviews and drink coupons, launched the deals product last summer. “We’re basically creating marketing budgets for people who never had marketing before,” he said. “There are not a lot of ways to guarantee customer foot traffic like we do.”

LivingSocial, which is not currently profitable as it expands (again, regret the incessant Groupon comparisons, but they say they have been turning a profit for a while), takes a 30-50 percent split of revenue collected from its deals, but it only pays out if its customers spend money, so there’s little financial risk for participating businesses. It primarily brings in customers through daily emails, but it also has an iPhone app with push notifications and a Facebook presence. O’Shaughnessy pushes off the competitive angle, saying many more merchants want to work with his company than they have space for, but says he’ll work to stand out from the crowd with the launch of an affiliate program today and soon launching more personalized subscriptions.

P.S. For those of you who are skeptical of group buying and competing in such a jam-packed space, I should say I’m a total believer. In the course of writing this article, I happily bought a half-off coupon for my neighborhood sushi joint, which happened to be LivingSocial’s San Francisco deal of the day. Speaking from personal experience, group deals totally spark spending and loyalty.

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Facebook redesigned its site at the beginning of February, moving its search box from the right side to the top middle of its home page, and it seems to have paid off, with the company’s U.S. search queries growing 10 percent in February, according to new data released today by comScore. That’s a significant one-month jump, and it’s great news for Bing, which powers Facebook web search and announced last month that deeper integration is on the way.

Facebook had 436 million U.S. searches in February — still a drop in the bucket compared to Google, which had 13.5 billion search queries. Google was down 4 percent for the month, but then, February is short, and every single site in the top 20 listed by comScore showed a monthly drop except for Facebook.

Facebook still has a long way to go to compete on search, though it has recently made its internal search tool much more useful by including sortable results from friends’ status messages, pages and events. The site sits at 15th in comScore’s ranking when you split out the major properties’ sub-search engines, such as YouTube and dedicated search domains like Ask.com. But this trend seems likely to continue. Understanding information through a social lens can be incredibly useful. Not to mention, half of Facebook’s 400 million users log in every day, so they will likely become accustomed to searching through the site where they live on the web.

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Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

Thing Labs has acquired two “passion projects” from former Apple and Google developers to expand its social web aggregator, Brizzly. Birdfeed, a premium Twitter app for the iPhone made by Buzz Andersen (formerly of Apple, now at Square) will become the free Brizzly for iPhone app (existing Birdfeed customers, who paid up to $4.99 for it, can continue to use the app but Brizzly won’t provide support or updates for it). Brizzly for iPhone is live in the App Store today. Thing Labs CEO Jason Shellen said some of its coolest features are around geolocation and Twitter support.

And Wikirank, a visualization for Wikipedia data from Small Batch (the makers of Typekit, formerly from Google and Adaptive Path), will serve an as-yet undecided purpose for exposing data in interesting ways. One of Brizzly’s goals is to help people explain the real-time social world around them — e.g. what do these Twitter trending topics mean? — which with Wikirank will help (on that note, Brizzly is also releasing publicly accessible guides to buzzing topics today).

Shellen said the acquisitions mark a turning point for his company, which is now committed to focusing on Brizzly as its core product (previously it had been posed as one of potentially many) — similar to what happened to Obvious Corp. and Twitter. He didn’t disclose the price of either buy. Shellen said Brizzly, which opened to the public in November, has had “hundreds of thousands” of signups.

Get Satisfaction, which offers web-based community support tools, this week became the recipient of a couple of influential integrations. While not official endorsements per se, both Facebook and Google brought on the company to help their own customers offer social CRM.

Facebook recently approached Get Satisfaction about helping with its fan page product, said co-founder Lane Becker in an interview earlier this week. The site was apparently concerned that many small businesses and brands are using their fan pages as a point of contact with users, but wall posts have a very short shelf life, are not easily archived, and thus result in customers asking the same question over and over. Now, with Get Satisfaction’s “Social Engagement Hub,” available to customers for $99/month on top of whatever they pay Get Satisfaction, brands can have a tab for support on their Facebook fan page (implemented with help from the startup Involver).

When users ask questions on Facebook, Get Satisfaction searches its archive and shows similar queries. Those questions and responses (provided by the company or community members) are stored, made accessible on Get Satisfaction proper, and SEOed for Google. Users do have to be logged into Facebook to use the support tab, but they don’t have to be fans of the product or company they’re asking about.

Also this week, Get Satisfaction was one of about 50 launch partners for the new Google App Marketplace, so it will offer integration of employee moderation tools for its customers within the Google Apps environment.

Becker said that Get Satisfaction does make some effort to integrate with Twitter as well, offering customers a simple “Overheard” feature that brings in mentions of their name in tweet. But that’s minimal. Twitter has yet to offer specific tools to help companies using tweets to hear from and talk to their customers, though it has promised they are coming at some point.

Get Satisfaction has about $5 million in funding, 20 employees, and 20,000 participating organizations, including major brands like many products from Procter & Gamble

Did you know that Google Maps’ most-requested feature addition is biking directions, in large part due to a vocal 50,000-signature-strong group of “Bike There” petitioners? I wouldn’t have guessed it! The petitioners’ wish is being granted tonight, with bike directions for 150 U.S. cities and 12,000 miles of Rails to Trails Conservancy data going live. Product manager Shannon Guymon will announce the product tomorrow in Washington, D.C., in an eagerly anticipated talk at the National Bike Summit.

Google’s biking directions will route users around freeways and busy streets, minimize hills and recommend wide and dedicated bike lanes. They are built using Google’s newly expanded base map dataset from last October, and will as much as possible be accompanied by Street View and Trail View imagery captured by Google cars and trikes. Guymon told us that about 10 percent of Maps usage today is for walking directions, with public transit on the rise and driving directions still owning the majority. Personally, while I love mountain biking, I’m kind of a wuss about urban riding — but maybe Google will find a way to route me around my fears.

Google Apps is moving closer to being an integrated corporate dashboard with the announcement tonight of Google Apps Marketplace at a developer event at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The company will give vendors multiple hooks into its own products, handle billing and take a 20 percent cut of revenue in return. Apps, which is now used by more than 2 million businesses and this weekend crossed the mark of 25 million business users, will support enterprise resource management, document management, security and compliance, and a variety of other outside products — about 50 at launch.

Though Google had previously offered some enterprise application partnerships with companies like Salesforce and a “solutions marketplace” that linked to outside products, and users themselves could add gadgets they chose, the new Apps Marketplace integration is deeper. Once installed by a corporate admin, vendors’ apps will show up in a drop-down menu alongside Google’s own offerings at the top of every Apps page.

Outside apps will have multiple points of contact with Google, both within their own environment and in email, with logins coordinated through OAuth. So, for instance, you could have a Google-made app like chat or docs show up within an outside product management tool — Atlassian rigged this to pop up a chat session with a developer every time his or her build breaks. Or, soon, developers will be able to trigger their own widgets within emails — just like YouTube links turn into embedded videos in Gmail. Right now there’s no mobile app integration but that could be a future addition, said engineering director David Glazer on a call earlier today.

Google will charge vendors a one-time listing fee of $100 and make them undergo an approval process in order to ensure their apps are business-oriented. Starting later this year, it will integrate billing and collect 20 percent of revenue generated, by whatever method vendors choose — freemium, monthly, use-based or user-based, Glazer said. You’d think that would have been ready for launch, but for now vendors will have to handle their own billing.

I’m on record saying I would love to see my colleagues’ travel plans on our communal calendar via TripIt, which is a launch partner. Our technical guru Chancey tells me he’ll happily integrate products we already use like MailChimp and EchoSign, also launch partners. Another thing that might be super useful would be corporate social tools, though Google has already said it will put Buzz in Apps. Still, the marketplace is trying to welcome direct competitors, with Zoho a launch partner as well. It will also be interesting to see which larger, more powerful companies sign on to be in Google’s sandbox — Intuit is already on board with its online payroll.

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Facebook plans to add friend location information as soon as next month, reports The New York Times Bits blog today. Honestly, this news is so expected that the fact that it was reported using anonymous sources attributed as “several people briefed on the project” only makes it a little more certain than it was before.

But Bits’ Nick Bilton does offer the following details:

• Facebook plans to announce the feature at the Facebook developer conference f8 in April.

• It will offer users the ability to share information with friends as well as provide developers with APIs to bring in location info from other services.

• Facebook wants to target small business advertisers.

• Because of that strategy, Facebook thinks its competition is Google rather than Loopt, Foursquare and Gowalla.

I think a lot of the current fuss and hype over location services can get overblown because location makes the most sense at the platform level. Knowing where a user is can make just about every product useful — it’s not an end to itself. However, encouraging sharing and storing of location information is touchy, especially with Facebook’s history around privacy issues. Ultimately, Facebook — with its 100 million-plus mobile users — won’t be able to avoid competing with location-based startups, but it may be able to help them in the meantime by treating them as applications and/or games on top of its immense platform.

In other news today, Twitter started showing on its web site when users submitted geolocation information about a tweet using an application.

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When you have a group of friends that likes to get together, the planning tools — long email threads, calling people individually, SMS or Foursquare when you’re already at a location — aren’t ideal. Sure, if you’re really on top of things you could create a Facebook event or send an Evite, or even do something with the relatively fuzzy Plancast, but those services ask you to propose an activity at a place in the future. Go Tribal, a new service launching today, aims to be more casual. Users input their upcoming availability (not just by figuring out when their calendar has holes, but also by explicitly stating they are “down to hang out”). Then the system identifies overlaps within a group of friends and helps “rally” them and negotiate a semblance of a plan.

I am fully on board with this idea — I was on a 66-message dinner party email thread just this week — but I’m not sure how Go Tribal can implement it without requiring a ton of work on the part of its users. Something like this might be much easier to bring to critical mass if it were fully integrated (or a product of) a site like Facebook, MySpace or even Google that already has a social graph and good points of integration for availability through instant messaging and calendars. CEO Shruti Challa told us in an interview that Go Tribal doesn’t require all participants to be members of its site, and that it has worked to make indicating availability as simple as choosing a green, red or yellow dot.

Challa, who along with her three co-founders all graduated from Stanford last spring, is setting out to attract users to Go Tribal by marketing it as a planning tool for young women. She thinks women crave more collaboratively planned social interaction. “The big epiphany was when it comes to social coordination, it’s not about structured time,” she said. “Even something as simple as saying ‘we’re getting coffee’ is too formal.” I’m not sure about the women-specific angle — after all there were men on that 66-message email thread, too — but at least Go Tribal isn’t bubblegum pink with flowers and bows.

Go Tribal is giving accounts to the first 10,000 people who sign up starting today. It doesn’t have a mobile version yet but that’s coming soon. It is currently funded by friends and family and advised by folks like Bijan Marashi of Xoopit, Ross Mayfield of Socialtext and Adam Rifkin of Renkoo (which tried to do a similar Evite alternative a few years ago but has since closed).

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