Wowd Blog

2010: The Year of SOCIAL

With the year drawing to a close, it’s only appropriate that we take a look back at what’s occurred in 2010. The theme goes a bit like this – social, social, and more social. Nearly everything this year seems to have some kind of social element, from checking in to your hotel for points to giving Farmville credits as a virtual holiday gift.

1.     Search: Social search became popular this year. Wowd’s free, client software and sites like Bing.com and Google added real-time social search features to their offerings to make your search experience more personalized.

2.     Location-Based Services (LBS): Are you checked into wherever it is you are right now? Wherever that might be, there’s a good chance the person next to you is checked in to their favorite LBS. According to the Mobile Marketing Association, one in four U.S. adults uses mobile LBS. It’s human nature to want to be connected to people and LBS have made this possible. LBS, like Gowalla, Google Latitude and Facebook Places allow us to know where our friends, family and complete strangers are hanging out. Foursquare took the lead in 2010 with 4.5 million users. LBS went a step further by becoming integrated and utilized by various companies. This summer, for example, Virgin America customers had to check into a local taco stand through Loopt for a free ticket to Mexico. In 2011, we should expect to see the amount of people using LBS increase even more.

3.     Gaming: Does anyone need help watering their crops on Farmville while they read this post? According to AllFacebook.com, 56 million people play Facebook games on a daily basis – that’s more than the population of England. Social gaming exploded this year with games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars taking the lead.  

4.     E-Commerce: As social gaming continued to rise this year, social commerce did as well. Discount sites like Groupon and LivingSocial came on the scene letting us purchase cupcakes, spa treatments, trips and more at insanely reasonable prices. As we mentioned in Wowd’s December 3, 2010 blog post, e-commerce and social good went hand in hand this year with new sites and applications that allow you to donate to your favorite charities. Don’t know what to get your loved ones for Christmas? Well, why not buy them gaming credits? Virtual goods – think Facebook gifts circa 2009 – became very popular towards the end of 2010. We can expect to see more e-commerce integration across social platforms and applications.  

5.     Social Networks: Facebook went through various facelifts this year and modified its news feed, personal profile page, messaging system, added groups and added its own LBS. What’s next Facebook?  Twitter exploded this year as well with a massive 25 billion tweets sent in 2010. Users turned to Facebook to protest, celebrate, and unite during life-changing events in 2010. With the plethora of social networks and the copious amount of updates we receive on a daily basis, there is definitely an increasing need for applications that cut the clutter and help us manage our online social lives – a la Wowd.

What was your favorite social trend from 2010?

Happy Holidays from all of us at Wowd!

 

P.S.  Check out our new home page at Wowd.com

 

Wowd Takes to the Web to Cut through Social Network Clutter

 Now you can enjoy the benefits of Wowd on the Web with our new Web version available now!  To get started, just go to www.wowd.com and click Facebook Connect. It’s true – Wowd is now only a mouse click away!

 

We’ve heard the feedback from some of you Wowd fans and decided to provide a Web option in addition to the downloadable client.  This new version focuses exclusively on cutting through the clutter to help you organize your Facebook by surfacing the updates that matter to you most.

Here are some the features you’ll get with the new Wowd Web version:

• Custom Feeds:  See only what you want from your Facebook news feed whether it’s specific people, topics or both.
• SmartFeeds: Automatically see natural groupings of Facebook friends, like your family, colleagues and more.
• Social Search Inside Facebook:  Search for any topic in your Facebook news feed.
• Conversation Summaries:  See at a glance what your friends are talking about.
• Plus!  Update your status, comment on posts, ‘like’ items, and browse your social graph.

 

There are a few features that are still exclusive to the downloadable client, including:

 

• Private Web History:  Easily find any Web page you’ve visited.
• SearchStream:  Your Web searches update live in real time.
• Hot Topics:  See a summary of what’s popular on the Web by category.

 

The Wowd team looks forward to your feedback and we try to incorporate it as much as possible when updating our features.  Stay tuned for new features on both the Web version and downloadable client in early 2011.  Until then, tell us what you think about Wowd on the Web. What other features would you like to see?

 

 

The Evolution of Search: From President Eisenhower to Facebook

In the past 60 years, search has evolved dramatically.  Let’s take a quick look into its history.

Many people don’t know that the modern Internet arose in response to the Russian launch of Spuntnik, the first Earth-orbiting satellite, in 1957.  Present Dwight Eisenhower ordered the creation of the Advance Research Projects Agency which developed the ARPAnet in 1969.  The Grandfather of all search engines, Archie, came on the map in 1989 as the first indexer searching and indexing FTP site files across the Internet.  In 1993, W3Catalog became the first search engine for the Web.

Between 1993 and 1995 numerous search engines popped up.  The most popular were AltaVista and Yahoo!  AltaVista revolutionized search with its fast crawler and keyword search approach.  AltaVista was the first experience that most people had with keyword search.  Yahoo!, which provided results in a directory format rather than as full-text copies of web pages, became a favorite for finding popular web pages.

In the following years, additional players came on the scene – Netscape, Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com), MSN Search, AOL, and Google Search.  Ask Jeeves gave users the ability to get answers to everyday questions in natural language.  MSN Search first launched using search results from Inktomi and later blended results from Looksmart and AltaVista.  In 2004, it began to use its own search technology with the web crawler ‘msnbot’.  MSN Search was rebranded last year, becoming Bing and now powers Yahoo! Search.

The now dominant player in search, Google, arose in 2000 with its unique PageRank system.  According to Cnet.com, Google currently has about 66 percent market share with Yahoo at 16 percent and Bing at 11 percent.  In the last few years, there have been several upstarts clamoring to steal a little thunder from Google, including Cha Cha, Cuil, Mahalo, Powerset, and Wikia Search to name a few, each with a different offering – but none have had much success.

So, where is search going? Here are a few predictions for you to mull over:

• Social and real-time:  The dominance of traditional “reference search” is coming to an end.  With the ever-growing popularity of social media, particularly Facebook, search engines – such as Google and Bing – are leveraging personal social graphs and incorporating real-time results from social networks into their platforms.  Danny Sullivan, the “search engine guru”, considers social search to be “trusted search” because it draws upon our circle of friends for relevant results.  At Wowd, we obviously believe that social search is a real opportunity.

 

• Personalization:  The social approach (integration of extended social media connections) relies heavily on personalization.  As this amplifies, there will be a greater need for players that can streamline results and pinpoint the best nuggets from our busy social graphs.  Wowd’s clutter-management solution obviously plays in this space, too.

 

• The underdog era:  There are a handful of leaders in the space that dominate search, social, real-time, etc.  It will become increasingly clear that the challenges this category faces are too big even for the dominant players as their size becomes a hindrance rather than a benefit to evolve and address consumer demands.  The result will be a fragmentation and emergence of smaller players addressing problems the big players are unable to.

 

• E-commerce and vertical:  These will become much more social and user-driven and there will be a new generation of players in common Internet verticals (comparison shopping, auto, travel, jobs, real-estate, etc.) which solve for social, real-time and personalization in their respective verticals.  Sites and apps, such as Groupon, LivingSocial, and Foursquare already have a head start here as they are nascent social tools that provide consumers with social, personal and vertical benefits, not to mention awesome deals.  We expect a search element to be incorporated eventually.

 

• Visual search:  We are an extremely visual and audio driven society, which will demand rich search experiences that incorporate these elements into our results.  Instead of reading a Wikipedia page on Spain, we will listen to it with relevant images integrated.  A new search engine, Qwiki – currently in Alpha, incorporates multimedia clips into its search results.

 

Where do you think search is going?  Let us know in the comments, or in our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/wowd).

Going Social for Social Good

 Everything seems to be going social these days – from checking in to your bed on Foursquare at night to tweeting at your wedding. We have platforms specifically designed for following everyone and anyone (Twitter), for professionals (LinkedIn), for friends and family (Facebook and Wowd), and for your favorite hotspots (Foursquare). Therefore, it really should come as no surprise that social has moved into the philanthropic realm. Recently, we have witnessed a rise in social platforms and applications designed specifically for doing social good. Social media for social good – it has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it? 

 

This week, Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes launched Jumo, a social network that aims to help you find, follow and support the causes important to you. The platform lets you choose charities in particular issue categories – Education, Health, Human Rights, Poverty, etc. Once you decide which issues you are most interested in, you can decide to follow a particular charity, similar to how you would on Twitter, and then you will begin to see specific information on that charity, including news and status updates. For example, on the project page of Heal Africa you see top HIV/AIDS news, suggested related charities and links to relevant sites.

 

 Jumo incorporates several different social media elements including: posting directly to your Facebook from the project page, liking a particular story and seeing how many people are following the project.  Your main page looks similar to your Facebook page with your picture (linked from your Facebook profile), updates on your activities on Jumo, top news stories and a social media news feed from the charities you follow. Jumo helps you stay informed and up-to-date on your favorite charities in hopes that you will take steps towards volunteering or donating. I wonder how long it will take them to partner with an e-commerce site or virtual/digital payments platform, so Jumo members can donate directly to their favorite causes via their Jumo pages online or via a Jumo app on their mobile devices, as has become popular in the recent past.

 

If Jumo seems too complicated, you don’t have time for yet another social media platform or you’d rather just donate to your favorite charity, then you’re in luck, as there are applications for precisely that purpose. According to Mashable, CauseWorld is a free mobile phone application for both Android and iPhone devices that lets you check in to locations and earn “karma points”, which you can donate to your favorite charities. Some of the organizations that benefit from this program are: Feeding America, The American Red Cross, LiveStrong and National Breast Cancer Foundation. Instead of just checking in with apps like Foursquare, why not earn points to do some good, such as buying chimps in Congo a pound of food?

 

With social media continuing to creep its way into every aspect of our lives, I think it’s safe to assume we’ll be seeing more in the realm of social good and more ways for us to change the world one tweet, status update or check-in at a time. Are you using social media for social good? This holiday season may be a good time to get started!