Author: Liz Gannes

Now here’s a killer app for the throngs of geeks about to descend on Austin later this week: TabbedOut. The iPhone application allows users to order, review and pay for their tabs at local bars. It sounds like the perfect fix for those full-to-the-gills parties SXSW is known for. Unfortunately, TabbedOut is only available at a limited selection of venues for now — just 35 in Austin, including popular SXSW party stops The Blind Pig Club, Beerland and Mohawk.

“Having just launched in January, the integration hurdle is where we are now,” said Rick Orr, CEO of TabbedOut maker ATX Innovation, in a phone interview. But the company is trying to make the most out of an influx of its exact target audience of smartphone users at crowded bars by releasing an Android app on March 15 and handing out three free tabs to all users in Austin during SXSW.

The way TabbedOut works is you store your credit or debit card account on your phone, then file your order through the app. It pops up on the merchant’s point-of-sale system for them to fulfill your order and accept your payment (right now TabbedOut is integrated with Future POS and Jumpware). Users pay a convenience fee of 99 cents.

The concept is similar to one of my favorite iPhone apps, Taxi Magic, which lets me hail and pay for cabs without dealing with a phone dispatcher, cash or credit cards for a $1.50 fee.

Orr said that TabbedOut’s next core locations will be New York, New Jersey, LA and the San Francisco Bay Area. ATX has raised a Series A round from investors including Trellis Partners and Raven Capital Partners.

SXSW seems like an opportune time for other payments startups to have their own coming out parties. We contacted Square — the mobile transaction company founded by Jack Dorsey of previous SXSW breakout success Twitter — to ask about its SXSW plans but haven’t heard back yet.

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While social sites drive an increasing portion of traffic to content publishers compared to long-time referral giant Google, one sharing service reminds us today that email is still a major source of shared links and clickthroughs. Email — the original social network — is responsible for 70 percent of total shares and 48 percent of visits generated by shares, according to data collected by link tracker Tynt.

Widget maker Gigya recently attributed 44 percent of its shared items to Facebook and 29 percent to Twitter, while competitor AddThis said Facebook accounts for 33 percent of its shared items and Twitter, 9 percent. Both companies gleaned their data from user activities on the buttons they publish on thousands of sites. But Tynt — which has a slightly different method of tracking copy-and-paste activity from users on its 400,000 publisher partner sites — says they’re both way off, with Facebook accounting for 25 percent of shares and Twitter 1 percent, behind email’s 70 percent.

Tynt claims that its data is more comprehensive, estimating that 2 percent of the web’s page views results in content sharing via copy and paste, while .04 percent come from button-based sharing and .2 percent from link shorteners. While I find it a bit hard to believe that 2 percent of page views are then shared (I’m a pretty avid sharer, and I don’t think I share that much), some of Tynt’s data tells a compelling story. For instance, Digg accounts for only 0.2 percent of shared links, but 5 percent of new visits generated by shares, meaning Digg users are much more likely to click on links they find on the site (which is, after all, the purpose of Digg). What I’d like to see are figures for sharing via instant messenger — for me, probably the source of links that I’m mostly likely to click through.

In the spirit of this post, I should say that I found the Tynt blog post via the new site Mediagazer, where the company is an advertiser.

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Geeks and design lovers are aflutter on Twitter this morning with the news that President Obama has appointed infographic guru and PowerPoint hater Edward Tufte, a professor emeritus of political science, statistics and computer science at Yale University, to the U.S. Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. Tufte explains on his own site that he’ll help advise the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, “whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds.”

Tufte has attracted worship for his work on information design. Through books, lectures and essays, he advocates infographics that give relevant data room to breathe rather than “chartjunk” that pretties up information without giving an understanding of why it’s useful. He has particular disdain for PowerPoint, writing in a 2003 Wired piece, “If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won’t make them relevant.” He argues,

Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these data graphics would turn into a nasty travesty if used for a serious purpose, such as helping cancer patients assess their survival chances. To sell a product that messes up data with such systematic intensity, Microsoft abandons any pretense of statistical integrity and reasoning.

Google has gobbled up another small productivity company with today’s purchase of DocVerse, a plug-in that makes Microsoft Office software collaborative. The only surprise about this latest acquisition, perhaps, is that its founders didn’t previously work at Google. Word of the deal was first reported in December by TechCrunch, and today the Wall Street Journal pegs the price at $25 million.

Buying DocVerse is an obvious shot at Microsoft, given the product was exclusively designed for Office, and the company was founded by ex-Microsoft employees. As Google Apps Group Product Manager Jonathan Rochelle put it in a blog post, “With DocVerse, people can begin to experience some of the benefits of web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop applications.”

San Francisco-based DocVerse, which was founded in 2007, raised $1.3 million in a first round of financing from investors including Baseline Ventures, Michael Dearing, Naval Ravikant and Chris Dixon circa in 2008. (Om pointed out then that the startup’s main competition was Google Docs — well, that’s no longer the case.) Our sister site WebWorkerDaily published an in-depth review of the software, which is Windows-only and shares documents in browsers using Flash. DocVerse had a free version with premium subscriptions of $6 to $49 per month based on number of users. It’s not accepting new sign-ups at the moment, though Google said the product will remain available for those who already have it.

Also today, Google open-sourced the code for reMail, the iPhone email search application it recently acquired.

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The major search engines and many upstarts are doing their best to innovate to make search quicker, in part by incorporating Twitter’s full “firehose” of results. Google, in addition to being the biggest search engine on the planet, has the deepest and longest integration of the Twitter firehose, showing tweets and other real-time updates on its main search results page for three months now.

Though you can’t find something until it exists, so real-time search is a bit of an oxymoron. An eye-tracking report from OneUpWeb posted by Kara Swisher today rightfully compares the challenge of finding information that’s both relevant and new to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. But the study did find that users are already responding to real-time results, especially when they’re seeking out news. Those seeking products, on the other hand, clicked less and found real-time results less useful.

OneUpWeb found Google searchers seeking current news and information clicked on real-time results 30 percent of the time, while users seeking products clicked 20 percent of the time. It also noticed a bias for Google to display real-time results (when it does, which isn’t for every search) lower for consumer goods than for information, which probably had an effect on whether people looked at them or not.

However, the study also found it took participants more than 10 seconds to fixate their gaze on real-time results — which means they may not even make use of them, given the previously reported average time on a search results page before clicking off is within 10 seconds.

News seekers were willing to spend more time on a page than consumers, allowing their eyes to rest on the real-time results page during OneUpWeb’s observation. I’d say that suggests they may actually be getting the information they’re seeking without clicking through.

OneUpWeb also found by surveying participants that news seekers said they liked real-time results more; 47 percent of that group gave real time the thumbs up, compared to just a quarter of those asked to search for products. But more participants from both categories said they were indifferent to real-time results.

None of these measures make real-time results a runaway success, but I’d say they’re actually pretty positive for a change to a product like Google search that’s so often used in our daily lives, and a feature released only this past December.

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search_gone_wild

TripIt, the handy travel tool, has raised $7 million in a third round of funding led by Azure Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. “We were on a track to get profitable with that [previous] round but we’re just increasingly feeling like we’re scratching the service of the opportunity here,” CEO Gregg Brockway told us today. (TripIt has now raised $13.1 million, including its last round circa April 2008.)

TripIt aims to help users organize and access their travel information, and derives its revenue from a paid product ($69/year for alerts and alternate flights), advertising and licensing deals with travel agents. The basic service formats all your reservations to be readable from mobile apps (including offline) through the simple mechanism of forwarding emails to [email protected].  This week the San Francisco-based company ventured into the enterprise market, with a new product that enables users to contribute their itineraries to a company group. That’s currently offered for free, but Brockway said more premium options are on the way.

Brockway prefers to talk about TripIt’s growth by number of trips planned per month by its users: up to 230,000 in January of this year vs. 70,000 in January 2009. He said he aims to use the funding to make hires in mobile, business development, sales and marketing to add to TripIt’s 27-person, engineering-focused team.

While the idea of forwarding travel reservations to an email account is so simple it seems hard to justify $13 million in funding, the charm and promise is in TripIt’s integrations with accounts, services and devices, both internally developed and through its API. For instance, I’d love to see all the upcoming trips of my colleagues automatically plotted on our internal Google Apps calendar.

“Really the magic starts to happen when you aggregate information,” Brockway said. “When we take all the information we know about you and all the information we know about what’s going on in the world and give you actionable travel intelligence back.” TripIt competitors include WorldMate and Kayak.

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The big daddy awards show, The Oscars, is getting with the social-media picture this year and live-streaming from its red carpet to the web. A live show on Oscar.com from 3-5 p.m. PT on Sunday will be followed by behind-the-scenes clips and interviews posted that night. The live show is a Facebook Connect integration where hosts will be asking Facebook fans’ questions of stars as they arrive for the ceremony.

In the year since Facebook and CNN’s landmark integration for the Obama inauguration, every major live televised event has made efforts to become social. Of course, these are baby steps; we’re not planning on watching the Super Bowl streamed live online any time soon.

Last year, by contrast, industry publications like Variety were the ones to integrate a newly released Facebook Connect widget for the Academy Awards; this year Oscar.com — jointly produced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and ABC — is playing host to the social TV chats itself. This is coming from the recent past of a couple years ago when the Oscars provided barely any online video content of their own while aggressively taking down YouTube uploads of memorable moments from the ceremony.

What’s now the industry standard is to live-stream from the red carpet of an event, often using Ustream or Livestream. (That trend has extended past actual live events to movie premieres for highly anticipated films like the Michael Jackson biopic and the Twilight Saga’s “New Moon”.) Earlier this year the Golden Globes went so far as to bring in Facebook (along with Digg and Twitter) for red carpet coverage of its own, with Facebook employees interviewing celebrities over a live stream using fan questions asked online.

The Social TV phenomenon — where viewing becomes a shared experience using the web or mobile — is at its best for live, simultaneously events. And giving fans access to stars through red carpet streaming is a perfect application, even though it’s a bit of a facade, since red carpets end when the invited guests head indoors for the main event.

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The Onion has a spot-on spoof today of Google’s alarming level of clarity about our personal lives: “Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology.” The article plays on the Goog’s knowledge of its users through search terms, chat, email, street view, and its ability to communicate with them in all the online and mobile locales they frequent: the Google homepage, Chrome browser, YouTube and Android phones. You’ll probably giggle:

“We would like to extend our deepest apologies to each and every one of you,” announced CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking from the company’s Googleplex headquarters. “Clearly there have been some privacy concerns as of late, and judging by some of the search terms we’ve seen, along with the tens of thousands of personal e-mail exchanges and Google Chat conversations we’ve carefully examined, it looks as though it might be a while before we regain your trust.”

It goes on:

“I’d like nothing more than to apologize in person to everyone we’ve let down, but as you can see, many of our users are rarely home at this hour,” said Google cofounder and president Sergey Brin, pointing to several Google Map street-view shots of empty bedroom and living room windows on a projection screen behind him.

Picture is part of a composite image from The Onion; please click through to see the whole thing and their full text.

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Perhaps inspired by the speed of the medium, the integration of real-time tweets and other updates into major search engines has happened more quickly than I might have expected. It’s pretty amazing that raw Twitter posts already show up by default right on Google search results pages (they’re a little more buried on Bing and Yahoo, but still quite prominent and also launched in the last couple of months). Today at the Search Marketing Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., product managers from the three major search engine gave insight into their companies’ approaches to the quickened pace of the web.

BING: Following a hearty endorsement by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a keynote interview — “I’ve fallen in love with our real-time search; there’s nothing better than our Bing Twitter search” — Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft’s Search Technology Center, talked about the value of analyzing not only tweets but links shared on Twitter and Twitter user sentiment about trending topics.

Bing at this point uses only Twitter for real-time search, though it’s supposed to have a deal with Facebook to integrate public status updates. Suchter had no comment as to when that deal would be implemented, but said the Bing team is evaluating how to share the many different ways Facebook users communicate, including giving signals about other people’s relevant real-time updates by saying they like them.

Suchter showed a cool graph (embedded above) of the difference between a network of tweets on an organic topic — the conference we were attending — vs. a spam topic — teeth whitening. It’s pretty easy to see the difference.

Suchter didn’t get very specific about Bing’s real-time special sauce, but he said one of the most interesting ways his team improves Bing real-time search is to look at the past. It takes snapshots of the information available in the world at any one time, evaluates what the biggest thing was, and tries to figure out how Bing could have surfaced that.

YAHOO: Yahoo’s Ivan Davtchev, senior product manager of search, gave a bit more insight into how that company is building a model to determine what tweets are relevant. He said Yahoo emphasizes speed in real-time search but also allowed that freshness is deceptive as a measure of real-time success. Yahoo, which is rolling out real-time search on many of its properties, has built an internal tool called TimeSense (illustrated below) to determine what topics are spiking in real time. It uses language models to group words and then compares them to the body of time before and after. Since real-time updates don’t often include “anchor text” to directly tell search engines what they’re about, promotional factors become more important.

Davtchev spoke more specifically about what Yahoo considers real-time spam: content with “multiple buzzing terms,” overuse of URL-shortening services and overuse of hashtags.

Even though he focused more on the research side of things, Davtchev was the only panelist to get specific about where revenue specific to real-time search might come from. He said he anticipates that one of the most monetizable areas would be local promotions around events.

Davtchev also said to expect Yahoo to use what it learns from real-time relevance on non-search properties — which seems fitting, given Yahoo’s search share and also the fact that so many people use Yahoo as a portal to what’s new on the web.

GOOGLE: Google senior product manager Dylan Casey offered some insight as to how the search giant determines if a real-time update is relevant. “How old was the account, how often do they post, were they often outlinking or inlinking, are they often pointing to the same URL?” He said that Google is trying to emphasize comprehensiveness by including non-Twitter providers such as MySpace and Identi.ca (but Google currently has less access to Facebook updates than Microsoft does, so that might not be his best selling point). However, Google plans to soon publish a standard way to publish directly into the Google indext using pubsubhubbub, he said.

Casey said perhaps the most complex project in real time is to determine when to trigger the appearance of real-time results in search results. “We have huge internal debates on: Is this a good answer to this question, or are we just creating a tool for low-quality content?” he said.

Casey spent some effort justifying Google paying to include Twitter’s real-time firehose of tweets, saying it was an intensive technical integration on both sides, and that tweets are a fundamentally different form of communication due to the restrictions of their form. For example, Google has developed a “complex system” for removing users’ public tweets that are later deleted or marked private.

But even as the giants are sprinting to keep up with real time, they come off as fairly conservative about tweaking their core search experiences. After hearing from the major search players, a mostly emptied-out room was treated to a second edition on the real-time track from four leading startups in the space: OneRiot, CrowdEye, Topsy and Collecta. Seeing things like Topsy’s image search compared to Google’s makes clear the big guys have a lot to learn from the little ones.

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Despite significant improvements to the responsiveness of web applications over the last few years, they remain hampered by the fact that web browsers can only communicate with servers over HTTP. “It’s as if everyone’s using fancy phones, but they’re still using ham radio to communicate with the server, where you have to hold the button down to talk,” is one metaphor Kaazing CEO Jonas Jacobi uses. He also described it as a kid on a car ride, asking, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” instead of just looking out the window to see whether they’ve arrived or not.

Jacobi relies on such metaphors because he’s trying to describe an as-yet-unseen paradigm shift in real-time web speed being pushed by his company, Mountain View, Calif.-based Kaazing, by way of a new protocol called web sockets. Rather than AJAX-type hacks to make web apps speedy, web sockets are a full browser upgrade to send and receive data between a web client and server simultaneously. That two-way communication is supposed to make web applications dramatically faster (and cheaper, too, because they require less infrastructure, says Jacobi). This could be super useful for things like chat, live event Twitter feeds and automatic lookup features like Google Suggest.

Kaazing’s team wrote the web sockets (aka TCP communications) proposal that was included nearly wholesale in HTML 5. Now, as it waits for browsers to implement web sockets (the latest Chrome version include it, and Mozilla is supposed to be next up), Kaazing is trying to build a business around real-time bi-directional communications. The company, founded in 2007 and privately funded (though raising venture capital now), already has customers in the financial services and gambling sectors — the kind where a difference of a split second on a site is material. Kaazing has built a web socket server and emulator so that users who visit web sites through older browsers can get a preview of what web sockets will provide.

Jacobi recently came by our office for a video interview to explain some of these concepts in person and talk about Kaazing’s place in such an early market.

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Twitter on Monday gave seven real-time search and discovery companies ranging from “funded startups to part-time, one-man operations” access to 100 percent of its tweets. Twitter’s so-called “firehose” is a valuable asset; the company has made partners like Google, Microsoft and most recently Yahoo pay to use it in their own real-time search. The move is part of a new, yet-to-be-standardized initiative of metered access for people and companies that build on Twitter.

From what we can gather, the startups aren’t yet paying much if anything for what they’re calling a “commercial licensing agreement” to Twitter’s firehose. Which is fair — you can imagine that someone like Ellerdale wouldn’t really be in the same category of demands on Twitter’s infrastructure as someone like Google. What the deals represent is an effort towards formalization of Twitter’s developer community, which now operates more than 50,000 applications.

New Twitter communications head Sean Garrett told us that while Twitter isn’t disclosing the terms of the current partnerships, it plans to make them readily available in the future. As he put it:

“As the agreements standardize, we hope to make the terms well known so developers know if the firehose is right for their business. Additionally, for current partners, we would like to help them plan for the future (as licensing costs increase with their business’ maturity).”

Twitter had previously given firehose access to startups including Summize (which it later bought) and FriendFeed. Garrett today called those arrangements “a dalliance” that was “short-lived” when Twitter shifted focus to its core service in light of extreme growth. He said the new deals are, by contrast, “sustainable and scalable.”

The startups that were just given access are Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search. Previously they’d only had access to a limited rate of tweets — clearly a handicap when you’re trying to respond to search queries and track trends in real time. In blog posts and tweets (except for Chainn Search, which doesn’t appear to have a web presence yet), the companies said they were grateful for the integration. Kosmix, for one, said it’s not “ready to showcase or demo the integration just yet.”

CrowdEye’s Ken Moss had a more personal response, saying he was grateful Twitter delivered on relationships with developers after it had previously shown preferential treatment to paying companies.

Twitter isn’t formalizing these relationships out of the good of its heart; it’s gearing up for a major monetization effort and will clearly expect developers to contribute a tithing. It’s in the company’s best interest for its developers to grow the ecosystem and contribute back.

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Google today announced it has acquired the web photo editing tool Picnik. The Flash-based Picnik, which faces lots of competition from services like FotoFlexer, Snipshot and Photoshop Express, is perhaps the cutest of the bunch, and is also integrated tightly with Yahoo’s Flickr. Picnik was self-funded and said to be profitable for more than a year based on premium services.

This falls right into line with Google’s recent string of buys of companies started by its former employees: AppJet, Aardvark and reMail. Picnik co-founder Jonathan Sposato had sold a previous company, Phatbits, to Google in 2005. The desktop apps platform became Google Gadgets. According to Sposato’s LinkedIn, he stayed with Google less than a year.

Along with being profitable, Picnik had 20 employees so this wasn’t just small change for Google (well, everything’s small change for the Goog). The Picnik team is supposed to move over to Google’s Seattle offices. Google hopes to maintain the product’s integrated position across web services; it took time in a short blog post to emphasize, “[W]e’d like to continue supporting all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks.”

While web-based photo editors are incredibly useful — I know I’ve used them all rather than put my computer through the rigors of running Photoshop — perhaps a more interesting emerging area is mobile photo editors. There are a whole bunch of popular, creative and paid photo apps for the iPhone — though not with a ton of crossover to the Picnik category, probably because of Apple’s exclusion of Flash.

Today the news came out that Platial, a first-generation map mashup startup, was throwing in the towel on its product and encouraging users to export their data. The company actually ran out of money 18 months ago, said co-founder and former CEO Di-Ann Eisnor in an interview today. Since leaving Platial in July, she joined the crowdsourced mapping service Waze as Community Geographer, and other key employees have joined Motorola to work on the Droid and Nokia to work on Ovi Maps. Portland, Ore.-based Platial, which was founded in 2005, had raised something like $3.4 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Keynote Ventures, the Omidyar Network, Ram Shriram, Georges Harik, Jack Dangermon and Ron Conway. An edited transcript of our conversation with Eisnor follows:

GigaOM: What is your current involvement in Platial?

Di-Ann Eisner: Since I left Platial as CEO in July I’ve been chairman, so I’m involved with the wind-down of the site and the porting of all the info to GeoCommons and Google. We’re not shutting down the company but we really have zero resources. It’s been really a hard road for the last year and a half, with no staff on salary. The hosting and bandwidth is about $7,000 a month because we serve over 10 million widgets a month with heavy Flash and it’s still quite expensive. We were carrying that out of pocket.

GigaOM: What have you been trying to do with the company for the last 18 months?

Eisnor: We had a series of deals fall through related to acquisitions, one of them that I can disclose, with National Geographic.

GigaOM: What were the assets you were trying to sell?

Eisnor: Mostly the data. We have a thriving user community, with over 5 million maps created. If we started today we wouldn’t have the legacy overhead that we had starting in 2005. We spent a lot of time building web infrastructure, making all the widgets in JavaScript and Flash, and working out all the distribution. If we were starting today we’d focus much more on mobile, we’d use other APIs, and we could jumpstart it.

GigaOM: So are you saying that the main reason the company failed is it was too early for the market?

I’m not saying we didn’t have our own executional issues, but we were pretty well in front. We all assumed that the location-based advertising market would heat up a lot faster than it has. We’ve worked with all of them over the years: ReachLocal, AT&T/Ingenio. Advertisers are still thinking that within a city means location-targeted, so all of the benefits we were providing around a specific location were not very real.

Sixty percent of our widgets are Flash, and there remains no location targeting on the ad side for Flash. Google has one coming, I’m certain, but that wasn’t there. Another 26 percent were sidebar widgets from blogs that we would never clutter up with advertising.

GigaOM: What does that mean for other startups in the location space?

Eisnor: I’m still bullish. Even if no dollars are made till 2011, people raising money now will be able to get over the gap.

GigaOM: Were there any companies from your generation that succeeded?

Eisnor: Google! Obviously they have done a tremendous amount of innovation, and if it weren’t for them that movement that we started wouldn’t have. OpenStreetMap isn’t making money, but they’re a foundation, so they have been able to get money through grants. I think if you look at amount of users we have today, if anyone would have been out in front it would have been us.

There’s two kinds of companies: One where you see new behavior is possible, but it’s risky because you don’t know if there’s a market. The other is you know a huge market is there and you are disrupting something that exists. This is the Waze side. Until the location-based marketing nut is cracked there are service companies, but those are not venture-backed opportunities, and there are premium services, but I think maps are something that need to be accessible to everyone.

GigaOM: What was the role of your investors in decisions about the end of Platial?

Eisnor: Everybody is still supportive in a friendly kind of way, but no one’s giving us more money. They were very helpful in creating opportunities over the last 18 months, and everyone has really made an honest effort.

GigaOM: Since you’ve moved to Waze, would you be able to help revive Platial if that were possible?

Eisnor: I’ve stayed on as chairman, but in an advisory capacity for sure. My husband, Jason, is still working on it and will lead the charge. I don’t think we’re going to be raising money, but trying to [make] do with the assets we have. We’re finished with the mourning stage. We’re trying to really give ourselves some credit for our role in the ecosystem and when this blows over see how we can further the movement.

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Photo by Flickr user tracy the astonishing

With the 2010 Winter Olympics wrapping up this weekend in Vancouver, I hope we can put the past behind us. That is, the past of crappy U.S. online coverage of a major global sporting event, with the key offender being exclusive distributor NBC.

NBC knew at the outset of the games it would be losing money on broadcasting them due to licensing costs but still took an extremely cautious approach to making events accessible online, rather than experimenting with the web to goose revenue. To its credit, the network finally opened up a couple of high-profile events toward the end of the Olympics for live streaming, allowing access to users without requiring them to authenticate themselves as paying cable subscribers. But I found it incredibly frustrating that given the major advances in live-streaming video and video advertising since the Beijing Olympics (see my sub req’d story on GigaOM Pro about adaptive bitrate streaming), NBC ratcheted down its content so tightly — offering an estimated 400 hours of live video coverage compared to 2,200 two years ago.

As a card-carrying cord-cutter, I got my video access to the Olympics through highlight clips on my laptop screen or hooked up to my TV, friends’ cable subscriptions, and my gym (which, awesomely, has personal TVs with cable on every treadmill). Let’s just say it was a limited, frustrating and delayed experience. I fully accept that some of that is my fault for not paying up to get access to content I wanted to see. But NBC — by aggressively limiting anyone else from hosting video content (so as to drive us all to NBCOlympics.com, which was horrific to navigate), limiting most video-viewing access to paying television subscribers, and delaying content posting until the day after it was relevant — killed off the opportunity to give high-quality long-form viewing experiences, which are increasingly monetizable.

And to be sure, the Olympics have been exciting, and made for good television — they are supposed to be the most-watched foreign Winter Games since 1994, and some of that is attributed to user engagement around online social media. But that doesn’t mean TV watchers are satisfied with the tape-delayed coverage they’re getting either.

What I don’t understand is why the network couldn’t have shown most everything live online (and on TV too, as much as possible!). Then, at night, show us the TV-only primetime version, complete with commentary, sob story packages, Bob Costas. Millions of people have been trained to enjoy that produced Olympics experience by tuning in at 8 p.m., and will continue to do so. You don’t lose much by offering the same content two ways. It’s frankly absurd that Americans are complaining en masse to the nation’s newspapers about spoiling the results of the Olympics by publishing them right after they happened. It is not physically possible to have a spoiler for a live sporting event.

Other networks have more forward-thinking approaches than NBC. CBS has had tremendous success monetizing the at-work online watching of the March Madness college basketball tournament, much of which happens while people are in the office at their desks. Disney and ESPN are on record saying if they got the Olympics rights in the future they would be “committed to live.” Maybe the U.S. rights to an Olympics broadcast could be split up between multiple entities so they are more economically feasible and more open to pockets of innovation.

By the way, that hockey game, the first one that NBC tore down its online paywall for? It was the single most-watched live video event of the games, with nearly 500,000 live streams. The Olympics as of Thursday had accrued 28.9 million streams over 2.5 hours of online video. Sure the Summer Games are a bigger event, but you want to know the Beijing numbers? 75.5 million streams and 9.9 hours of video served. That’s hardly a competition.

Social networking behavior — endless repetitive page views, unvetted content — isn’t a great fit for traditional forms of online advertising. Early attempts to bring search or brand ads onto sites like MySpace and Facebook had pathetic results compared the trajectories of the sites’ popularity and attention. But now, a few years in, social media companies are starting to discover how to advertise to their own audience. And in the last five months, Digg has figured out a model that makes sense. So much so that its new site-specific ad formats already account for more than a third of its revenue.

Digg, through its savvy users’ curation of news, facilitates tons of page views, comments and clicks to publishers’ sites, but as we here at the GigaOM network have seen firsthand, such bursts of traffic do nothing for advertisers’ click-through rates (CTR). So the company last year launched a program called Digg Ads (it kicked off with paying customers in October) in which advertisers submit or sponsor content with the look and feel of Digg. The company’s publisher and chief revenue officer, Chas Edwards, who came to Digg from Federated Media, told us that it realized that its “local language” is blue headlines and yellow vote boxes. So now ads are made in the “vernacular” of Digg.

Five months in, Digg Ads are contributing 25-30 percent of the company’s revenue, said Edwards. The site also runs Digg-looking ads in its standard IAB spots, bringing in about another 10 percent of its revenue. The company doubled its revenue in 2009, becoming profitable on an EBITDA basis, and expects to do the same or better this year, according to Edwards.

While Digg — which has an 11-person sales team and uses Microsoft to sell its remnant inventory — had initially thought Digg Ads, with their cheap cost-per-click pricing, would be most useful for e-commerce advertisers like Best Buy and eBay, that changed quickly out of the gate. Now, the big spenders are brand advertisers from sectors like automotive, entertainment and financial services — the folks who would traditionally be running banner ads and the like, said Edwards.

Digg Ads as a whole see about a 1 percent click-through rate, but what’s interesting is the spread between more successful ads and less successful ones. Campaigns that mimic the style of Digg — using a numbered list, for example, or pointing to articles rather than product information — were much more effective, with up to 4 percent CTRs compared to 0.3 or 0.4 for the worst-performing Digg Ads. Toyota, for example, ran 16 different creatives for a Prius campaign with Digg (this was before the recall), said Edwards, with one of the most successful being a link to an Toyota-sponsored eHow article on “10 Tips From Happy People.” Of course, how many cars were actually sold through the promotion (and perhaps later recalled), we don’t know.

Alongside sponsored story submissions, Digg also invites advertisers to buy ad units and fill them with relevant organic Digg content. So, for instance, in conjunction with CES in January, Intel ran a package of the top-ranked stories out of the trade show that updated automatically within an ad unit on Digg’s site. It was actually Intel that came up with the idea of running the same dynamic Digg units on other sites where Intel advertised, said Edwards, something Digg hopes will become standard practice. Overall, those ads get o.9 percent CTRs in standard IAB units, said Edwards, up to 2 percent when put in a Unicast slider ad unit that comes across the page.

What’s next for Digg, which at 40 million monthly uniques is a long ways from where it wants to be? As the site redesigns itself this spring to become a personalized news home page by harnessing more signals about what each member is interested in, targeted ads will follow, said Edwards. And the Digg Ad formats will come along for the ride, bringing in dynamic feeds of relevant sponsored stories.

Digg Ads, by definition, aren’t the solution for every other social media site hankering to monetize, but other sites should also be able to find value by mimicking and blending in with their own particular mix of user activity and engagement. Which, if all goes well, will bring value not only to the companies’ bank accounts but to their users’ experiences, too.

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Monetizing the Social Web Isn’t One Size Fits All

Facebook was on Tuesday granted a U.S. patent for aspects of its news feed, as was first reported by AllFacebook. The patent, which covers methods for dynamically parsing and distributing information about what users have done on a social network to other users of that social network, names CEO Mark Zuckerberg as inventor along with other Facebook engineers and product people. It was originally filed in August 2006, before the Facebook news feed launched that September.

The patent is particularly valuable because news-feed style communication has become pervasive since it was launched on Facebook. However, it’s not clear that there aren’t precedents for the technology; for instance, the social network Multiply.com had a similar interface for keeping track of friends’ actions before Facebook launched its own.

Facebook, which said in a statement it was “humbled” and “pleased” by the patent, may well choose not to enforce it. In fact, one of the more important social networking patents, from the early site Six Degrees, was bought by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Tribe.net/Zynga’s Mark Pincus explicitly to promote an open playing field for the sector by taking it away from people who might choose to enforce it in the courts. However Friendster, which was recently bought by a Malaysian company, made much of the fact that had obtained five U.S. social networking patents, at times using the patents to scare off the competition, at least in the press.

The core invention of the Facebook patent is as follows:

A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. In some embodiments, the method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items. The method further includes limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further includes displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers.

Here’s Facebook’s statement, provided by email:

The launch of News Feed in 2006 was a pivotal moment in Facebook¹s history
and changed the way millions of people consumed and discovered information
on the site. We¹re humbled by the growth and adoption of News Feed over time
and pleased with being awarded the patent.

Related content from GigaOM Pro: Monetizing the Social Web Isn’t One Size Fits All

Please see the disclosure in my bio with regards to Facebook.

Polyvore, a fast-growing fashion community site, is in the interesting position of pushing forward both search and user-generated content creation at the same time. The company this week announced it was bringing in a new high-profile CEO, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, a former long-time Google exec. In advance of her actual start date next Monday, Singh Cassidy stopped by our office to share some fascinating stats and observations about the company.

Here’s why Polyvore — which raised $8.1 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, Harrison Metal Capital and Matrix Partners — should catch your eye, even if you’re not interested in fashion:

• The site is building a vast user-generated index of products, with members clipping products from around the web (and capturing associated metadata) in order to collect them in fashion collages (aka “sets”). It now indexes products from more than 10,000 sources — far more than you could feasibly get via individual API integrations.

• Expressing yourself creatively online is something that’s become infinitely easier in the last 10 years, but not everyone takes great photos or makes coherent videos. Creating a collage of products can be a lot more accessible than painting on a virtual blank canvas. Further, pictures of clothing and other products are cross-cultural. Singh Cassidy says in the interview that more than half of Polyvore’s traffic comes from outside of the U.S.

The site grew to 6 million uniques last year from 1.5 million The vast majority of users consume content rather than create it, said Singh Cassidy, though it sees 30,000 new sets created daily. It has 140 million page views per month, 22 million of them from embedded sets, which are often found on fashion blogs. Singh Cassidy spoke of opportunities to monetize (the site already has brand ads and affiliate relationships) by enabling contests for brands, for instance — a recent promotion on Coach’s Facebook fan page encouraged users to make Polyvore sets out of Coach products, then featured finalists for other fans to vote on them, she said.

PeerPong has raised $2.8 million for social search from DCM, First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures and Partech International, reports paidContent (part of the round was made public in an SEC filing earlier this week).

PeerPong isn’t open to the public yet, but the service describes itself as “an easy way to connect with the right Twitter users to get direct answers fast.” Its presence on Twitter explains “Please ask us your question by DM (d AskPeerPong) and we will match you to Twitter users who can provide timely relevant answers.” (DM means direct message, Twitter’s method of sending private correspondence to another user.)

That’s quite similar to Aardvark, the social search startup Google just bought for a reported $50 million. Building such a service through Twitter does make it a little more idiosyncratic: I can’t yet ask PeerPong a question because you can’t direct message accounts on Twitter that don’t follow your own account (as of today AskPeerPong only follows 1,229 people). By contrast, Aardvark uses your Facebook connections, with questions inputted on its own mobile, web and IM apps and then sent to relevant friends and friends of friends who’ve been identified through Facebook Connect.

PeerPong is led by Ro Choy, who was in charge of business development and revenue for RockYou before leaving late last year.

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Google’s Social Scheme Hinges on Fears, Not Fortunes

Yelp was yesterday slammed with a prospective class action lawsuit over unfair business practices. To that I say, it’s about time! There have been rumblings and whining and stories for years about Yelp salespeople pressuring local businesses to pay to remove negative user reviews. Yelp has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing, but the rumor mill persists. Let’s take it to a court and see if anyone can make the dirt stick.

The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles by Long Beach, Calif.’s Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital Inc and first written about by TechCrunch, alleges that Yelp demanded $300 per month in order to hide a false and defamatory review of the pet hospital. (Cats and Dogs, by the way, currently has a respectable four stars on Yelp with 27 reviews.)

Though there has been chatter online in the past about filing Yelp class action suits, an online court search shows only a couple of actual lawsuits against the company, one over trademark infringement that was settled and one over patent infringement that involves a whole host of tech companies. The would-be class action suit hasn’t showed up in the system yet.

Yelp gave us a statement on the lawsuit, attributed to Vince Sollitto, VP Communications:

“Yelp provides a valuable service to millions of consumers and businesses based on our trusted content. The allegations are demonstrably false, since many businesses that advertise on Yelp have both negative and positive reviews. These businesses realize that both kinds of feedback provide authenticity and value. Running a good business is hard; filing a lawsuit is easy. While we haven’t seen the suit in question, we will dispute it aggressively.”

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How Social Networks Could Help Yelp, Not Kill It