Wowd Blog

A big update from Wowd...

Hello, and thanks for visiting the Wowd blog.

As you probably know, Wowd's focus has been on delivering great newsfeed filtering and ranking services. Our goal has been to give you tools that you can use to find the good stuff in your Facebook newsfeed.

After a great run, the team has decided to pursue new opportunities. We're particularly pleased that some members of our engineering team have plans to join Facebook, where they'll work on a variety of products.

Others here at Wowd are already busy at work on a brand new mobile social search app.

If you'd like to be among the first to know about our forthcoming mobile app, please just leave your email address at www.wowd.com.

Cheers,

Your friends at Wowd.

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!

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!

 

 

 

Search Engine Watch article -- The Circles of Search

There's been a lot of talk lately about "social search". 

In this month's Search Engine Watch column, I argue that all (useful, interesting) search is social search.

You can see the column here: http://searchenginewatch.com/3641336

 

Who owns the social graph?

In a Search Engine Watch post today, I take John Battelle's question, "Who owns the social graph?", and use that to explore what it means to have API-based access to a social graph, and what this implies for graph ownership and control.

Wowd's real-time discovery and search -- now available for Facebook

We're delighted to announce the general availability of Wowd 4.0.  You can get it today, from the Wowd website.

This new version of Wowd takes our existing real-time discovery, summary, and search capabilities, and makes them available inside Facebook.

Using Wowd, you can view your Facebook data without "game spam", you can define a list of favorite friends, and also easily create "standing" real-time searches based on a combination of people and topics. 

The benefits to you are that you don't have to suffer through endless updates and other information that you don't want to see, and you're able to find information from people that you do care about, on topics that you care about.

You might ask yourself, why is this a client application?  Why do I have to install some software on my own computer?

One benefit to you is that your Facebook account data stays on your own computer (and with Facebook, of course).  You're not sharing that data with a third party.  Given existing privacy concerns and considerations around Facebook data, we thought that it would be a good idea to keep your Facebook data in a place that you directly control.

Try Wowd for Facebook today, and let us know what you think.