Wowd Blog

CES 2011: Let’s Get Connected

Every year, hundreds of thousands of technology lovers gather in Las Vegas to geek out on the latest and greatest in technology at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES).  At CES, we saw a plethora of ingenious ideas that are sure to make quite a splash this year from tablets that are neat to appliances that tweet.  One central theme we saw was connectivity.  A majority of the platforms, gadgets and more shared in common the goal of making people’s digital lives more connected whether from one device to another, one network to another, one country to another – you get the idea.

2010 was deemed the year of social.  We are in an era where everything is headed in that direction.  We have evolved from simply connecting with our friends on Facebook to checking-in on Foursquare at our local Starbucks.  One of the reasons everything is going social is because we all crave connectivity – to our friends, family and even total strangers.  2011 will be the year of connectivity.

At CES, the “Internet of Things” – the idea that everyday objects have the ability to connect with the Internet and each other – became a reality.  Using “smart technology”, LG, Panasonic and Samsung are revolutionizing household products by enabling them to email, browse the Internet, and even tweet.  Yes, you read correctly, tweet.  Many of you are probably asking yourself, “Why would I tweet from my fridge?”  The truth of the matter is, it’s not about IF you would tweet from your fridge, but the fact that you CAN.  Want to give your laundry an extra tumble but you’re not at home?  Not to worry, you can tell your dryer to do it from your smartphone.  Patrick Steinkuhl, LG's product insight manager explains, “Imagine an oven that's so smart that on the day of the big game it's able to send you a text and say, 'Hey, your roast is about done. You'd better get in the kitchen’.”

As household appliances and digital devices, such as tablets, TVs and more become more connected, social media will be a huge element.  Our TVs will suggest what we should watch based on what our friends watch because the TVs are connected through Facebook.  We’ll tweet our friends from the fridge to tell them what to bring over for dinner.  Social media integration will be a key element in the age of connectivity.  But with all this connectivity will come clutter.  Tools like Wowd will be necessary to cut the clutter to surface the people and topics that you actually want to be connected with.

What struck you most about CES news this year?  Is there something in your digital/social life you wish was more connected?  Tell us your thoughts!

KEEP your New Year’s Resolutions with These Helpful Apps

Every New Year, we sit down with ourselves and come up with resolutions – things that we’d like to change or improve in our lives. Many of us occasionally, okay almost always, fall into the pattern of either not seeing the resolutions through the whole year, or giving up before we’ve even begun. With the plethora of applications at our disposal these days, keeping our resolutions might actually be possible this year. In the spirit of the New Year, the Wowd team decided to take a look at the most common resolutions and find applications that will help us all achieve our goals – once and for all!

1.     Shedding those extra pounds

The most common New Year’s resolution seems to be to lose weight. The good news is there are many applications that can help you track your weight loss progress and count calories all in the effort to help you stick to your goal and keep you honest.

 Lose it from Fit Now is a free application, available for both the iPad and iPhone, that helps you organize your weight loss. Users can plan their diet and exercise routine to the infinite detail. You also can share the information with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.

2.     Getting organized

If you haven’t been blessed with the organization gene and have trouble keeping track of receipts, business cards and other things, you’re not alone and these apps aim to help you take control.

 The very popular Evernote, available for almost all smartphones , lets you scan your notes, receipts and business cards, and uploads them to Evernote’s website. Time to recycle all that paper you have floating around!

 And of course, if you want to organize your social life on Facebook and keep better track of your favorite friends, topics and more, we think Wowd is a pretty great desktop app, which by the way also now has a Web version.

 3.     Getting in shape

If you want to get back in shape, perhaps to run a marathon or to simply live a healthier lifestyle, there are tons of apps that can help get you there.

The RunKeeper Pro app is a must have for runners. The app allows runners to track their activity, interval workouts and target paces, and maps the route you take on your runs. Additionally it has iPod access and Facebook, Twitter and email integration. The app is $10, but is free through January.

As many of you probably already know, Nike and Apple have partnered to offer the Nike+ app, which when combined with the shoe sensor, allows you to track your runs. As you run, the app tells you your progress, including distance, pace and calories burned. You can even program a specific “power song” to motivate you while you run!

4.     Managing your money

If you need help keeping track of your finances, or want to reach a financial goal or two, there are of course, a few apps for that too.

Mint.com’s free app is a personal finance tool that helps you track, budget and manage your money. You can access your finances both online and though the mobile app (both on iPhone and Android devices). It also helps you set, track and reach financial goals, such as saving for retirement, paying off debt, saving for a trip, etc.

Another helpful app is Expenditure. This one lets you track your expenses and set up recurring payments. It also provides you with the ability to track your income.

What are your New Year’s resolutions? What apps do you think you’ll use to help achieve them?

Happy New Year from all of us at Wowd!

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

 

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!

It's Time to Cut The Social Clutter

Social media is meant to connect people and each of the many available social platforms connects you to various groups in slightly different ways. Facebook began as a platform for college students and has now been fully embraced by more than 500 million people of all ages for keeping in touch, photo-sharing and more.  Twitter encourages you to keep it short and sweet and lets you share thoughts and information with friends, colleagues and complete strangers. And trusty LinkedIn lets you network, job search, connect to colleagues, and generally maintain professional relationships (we’ll stop at these main three, otherwise this blog post will become the never-ending story.)

 

Most likely, you are being constantly bombarded by social media invitations, updates, social gaming spam and more, and this digital noise can begin to crowd your social world and make social media a burden rather than a benefit. Many people even have multiple platforms to manage, so with the plethora of ways to be social online today, there is a serious need for social filters that can cut through the digital clutter. As these platforms evolve, they are constantly trying to find ways to simplify your social experience and there are some helpful tools out there that do a pretty good job of this, and yes Wowd is one of them.  J

 

This week, Facebook unveiled its new “Modern Messaging System.” The new feature integrates Facebook chat, SMS and email into a single inbox. The newly improved Facebook Messages will be initially accessed by a small group of beta testers and over the next few months, Facebook’s 500+ million users will be given access to the new system. All of your messages, whether instant or SMS, will be kept in one “social inbox” where all conversation history will be saved, so you can stroll down your social memory lane whenever you like.  Users can access this inbox with their own email address or through a Facebook email address.

 

It appears that Facebook is working towards simplifying your social experience and cutting through the social clutter in your inboxes by filtering your social messages. Instead of losing your Facebook updates in your email inbox, all your information will be filtered into one unique social inbox. At the press conference, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "It seems wrong that an e-mail message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. It's not that those other messages aren't important, but one of them is more meaningful. With new Messages, your inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into other folders where you can look at them separately."

 

Facebook’s new “Modern Messaging System” seems like a step in the right direction. It’s about time we cut the clutter! What do you think of Facebook’s new messaging feature?  Does it solve a problem that you’ve got?

 

A New Social Web Browser ... Is It Something You Might Use?

There are new social media tools coming out of the woodwork at, what seems like, an almost daily basis.  Some aim to give you more options, some to simplify your life and some aim to do a little of both, which never really works out because you just can’t be everything to everyone.

On Monday, a new site called RockMelt unveiled its social-centric web browser to a limited number of beta testers – are you one of them?  If so, what do you think?  The company, which is backed by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, is based on the open source Chromium code originally developed to support Google’s Chrome browser.  RockMelt runs on your desktop, storing data in the cloud which can be accessed from any computer, at any time.

It’s certainly not the first of its kind.  We’ve seen browsers integrate social media platforms in the past – most notably Flock, which launched five years ago as the social media browser with MySpace integration.  Unfortunately, it was ahead of its time and wasn’t adopted in large numbers.  According to InformationWeek, Flock has only achieved a global market share of .05 percent. 

Facebook integration is the central element to the RockMelt browser.  According to WIRED, the browser uses Facebook to log you in, the chat function runs through Facebook, and information shared through messages are sent as Facebook mail.  Additionally, search results incorporate information from your social networks.  Some might like the integration and one stop-shop idea behind the browser, but our online social lives have become so cluttered, this kind of offering almost adds another level of complication by cluttering the browser.  What we’re hearing from you is that you want tools and applications that have the one-stop shop element, yes, but also that cut through the clutter and help simplify your social world.

The browser market is extremely competitive and dominated by Microsoft Internet Explorer and the loyal underdog following of Mozilla’s Firefox.  Even major technology players like Apple and Google, have only achieved 14.33 percent market share combined.  Will browsers like RockMelt be able to gain significant market share attracting users with social media integration?  Or, will the potential resulting social media clutter be a crippling obstacle?  The jury is still out on that one. What do you think?

What makes people click on an ad?

What makes people click on an ad on a web page?

You might think that you just have to make the ad 'relevant' (somehow) to the person who's viewing the ad.

But it's not that simple.  You need to understand user tasks, and interruptibility, and design ad placement taking task flow into account.

Check out our monthly Search Engine Watch column to learn more!

 

 

 

Wowd helps you organize your Facebook experience with SmartFeeds -- New Feature Available!

If you’re having a hard time keeping track of what your friends are saying on Facebook, then we have great news.  Starting today, Wowd is introducing a new feature called SmartFeeds.  SmartFeeds automatically finds natural groupings of friends and creates customized views of your Facebook news feed that let you instantly see what these groups of friends are talking about on Facebook.

The new SmartFeeds feature is helpful because it automatically analyzes your Facebook account, figures out who is related to whom and what natural groups exist, and then creates SmartFeed views of your Facebook news feed.  The SmartFeed views let you easily see what different groups of your friends are talking about and lets you finally get your social information overload under control.

When I ran the SmartFeed feature over my own Facebook account, it helpfully found some interesting groups of friends and colleagues right away.  For example, I used to work in Artificial Intelligence and software at NASA, and Wowd’s SmartFeeds found a group of my friends from both the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and NASA’s Ames Research Center. 

With one click on the new SmartFeed, I was able to see what those friends were talking about.  SmartFeeds automatically created a title for the new feed, which in this case used the names of three friends from the list.  You can choose to leave the title alone, or edit it to reflect how you know this group of people came about.  In this case, I renamed the new SmartFeed to be “NASA friends”.

Wowd’s SmartFeed feature also found all my family members from Facebook… my sisters, cousins, my mother, and even my aunt!  Two clicks later, and that SmartFeed was called “Family”, and now it’s really easy for me to keep up with what’s going on in their lives.  It’s definitely a time-saver.  It was also great to have the SmartFeed constructed automatically -- I didn’t have to laboriously go through a long list of names, picking out only those people who are family members.

Personally, I find the new SmartFeed feature particularly helpful in the context of Wowd’s ability to summarize conversations.  For some time now, Wowd has delivered a summary of topics in any feed you select.  We call this the “Hot Topics” for a feed. 

You get a Hot Topics summary for all feeds that exist inside Wowd, so of course you get Hot Topics for a SmartFeed, too.  This means that when I click on the NASA friends SmartFeed, I see the list of posts, updates, comments, etc. from those friends, but I also see a nice compact display of the topics that summarize the conversation.  Each of the topics is a clickable link, so with a single click on any interesting topic, I can find all the posts, updates, etc. that mention that topic. 

This has really transformed how I use Facebook.  I use my SmartFeeds to pick out specific groups of people, I use Hot Topics to figure out what they’re talking about, and then use Wowd’s social search to dig in deeper, to explore specific topics.  It really is an awesome experience, and I encourage you to download the Wowd client to try it out for yourself.  Please also share your feedback with us on Twitter, @Wowd.

With this new feature, we hope Wowd will be even more helpful to you when it comes to organizing your online social life and cutting through social networking clutter. 

Stay tuned for more updates and exciting new features in the coming weeks!  We're working on some really powerful features, and will be talking more about them soon.

To read more click here, or check out this excellent Techcrunch article by Erick Schoenfeld about SmartFeeds.

 

Facebook groups & custom feeds -- cutting through social clutter

Hey, check out our latest column at Search Engine Watch, "How to Cut Through Social Media Clutter".

Are you getting too many updates in Facebook?  Are you overwhelmed by updates on topics you really don't care about?

And do you feel that you're missing updates from people that you do care about, on topics that are important to you?

Facebook can be an incredibly valuable source of social information, and with Wowd's custom feeds to filter and rank it all, you can actually have a good time (again), in your on-line social life.

Try Wowd today, and be sure to send us your feature suggestions and ideas for how Wowd can help manage social clutter.  We live and work to help you find the very best stuff from your social networks!