The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘availability’

It’s hard to imagine a Web sans URL shortening services nowadays but you can rest assured that they’re here to stay – for better or worse. Question is: how do the likes of bit.ly, TinyURL and Goo.gl score in terms of speed and availability?

That’s exactly what Dutch startup WatchMouse sought to find out, by monitoring the performance and uptime for 14 popular URL shorteners for a whole month.

Turns out most really don’t perform all that well, and that URL shorteners actually increase the load time of pages significantly. As you can tell from the graph embedded above, a lot of URL shortening services add half to nearly a full second to page load times.

To measure this, WatchMouse checked each URL shortener every five minutes from one of its monitoring stations, which are located across the globe. For each short URL, only the redirection was measured, not the actual loading of the target page.

Pingdom did similar research on the speed and reliability of URL shortening services in August 2009, although they only looked at independent URL shorteners and not the ones from Microsoft, Facebook and Google.

Google does a pretty good job in terms of performance with Goo.gl and YouTu.be, but it still takes those about 1/3 of a second to resolve pages, which makes a world of difference if you think about how many website addresses get shortened on a daily basis.

According to WatchMouse’s findings, Facebook’s FB.me is by far the slowest of the pack, adding over two seconds on average to the page load time after the click on a link.

Another interesting thing the company noticed is that only a few of the URL shorteners optimized their name servers for international use – i.e. it takes half a second for some of the URL shorteners just to look up the IP address that is needed for a browser to retrieve a Web page.

As for the availability of the URL shortening services: most do reasonably well in this regard, with snurl.com performing worst of the bunch with south of 98% uptime. Facebook’s fb.me registered the third worst uptime out of the 14 services that were tracked, although that still means about 99.5% availability – which isn’t terrible.

Now all they have to do is speed it up a little.

We’ve written about Twitter client Sobees, which is working to create the best social media client on the market, competing with both TweetDeck and Seesmic. Today Sobees is releasing a new version of its Windows native desktop app built in .NET, complete with realtime search, a redesign and more.

The new client includes support for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed and LinkedIn (which was added late last year). The most significant addition is the availability of realtime search on the client, with the ability to search Twitter, Friendfeed, OneRiot and FacteryLabs from within the application. Sobees integrated elements of its newly launched realtime web dashboard to power search in the client.

Sobees has also added drag and drop technology for columns in order to change the place of a column within the client. Other technical updated include the ability to preview Tweets and maps, translate messages, and see pictures posted on TwitPic from within the Tweet. And Sobees will break out threaded conversations you have with friends.

Sobees is competing in a crowded space where each client continues to innovate and offer users more options for managing their social media accounts and the reealtime web. For example, Seesmic has incorporated Ping.fm, to allows users to update more than 50 different social networks at the same time. And TweetDeck now incorporates YouTube and Flickr within its client. For now, Sobees doesn’t have any mobile clients but we are told that iPhone and Android apps are coming soon.

There was some hoopla yesterday about the news that Hulu had broken the 1 billion videos viewed in a month threshold in December. And rightfully so, it’s the first video service to do that other than YouTube. But there’s another hot property that is rising fast in the streaming video realm as well: Netflix.

The movie rental giant crossed into the top 20 video sites on the web for the first time in December, according to numbers from ComScore. Specifically, they now sit at number 19, just ahead of Break Media, and just behind Justin.TV. And with over 127 million views last month, and rising fast, it shouldn’t be long before they’re in the top 15 with the likes of Facebook and ESPN.

As a streaming service, Netflix has seen huge growth over the past year as it continues to cut deals to get its content on different living room set top boxes. The service clearly believes that streaming is its future, even as it alienates some of its current bread-and-butter DVD rental customers by doing things like agreeing not to rent new DVD releases until they’ve been out for 28 days (something which hurts the availability of the most popular movies on the service). And that’s the right stance, but they’re going to have a hard time convincing the studios to ever give them newer release films to stream since those guys still believe they can sell DVDs no one really wants to own.

This week, Netflix also announced the addition of a bunch of new indie films to its streaming catalog. And during their quarterly earnings report last week, they revealed that nearly half of their subscribers are now streaming some content.

Here are the top 20 video properties by number of videos streamed per months (in thousands)

If you co-founded the company that became Google AdSense, as Gil Elbaz did with Applied Semantics, you don’t have any problem finding investors when you want to start a new venture. Elbaz sold Applied Semantics to Google for $100 million in 2003, and launched his latest startup, Factual, last October. He doesn’t really need the money, but so many all-star investors were clamoring to get in that he raised just over $1 million in an angel round.

His angel investors include Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz via their Andreessen Horowitz fund, Bill Gross via Idealab, Esther Dyson, Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos, as well as New York City seed fund the Founder Collective.

Factual is setting out to get people to create as many open databases as possible by providing tools for creating table son any topic, embedding them and sharing them. There are already hundreds fo thousands of tables on Factual, dome large some small. For instance, Creative Commons created a database filled with Websites using Creative Commons licenses that contains 4 million rows. All the data in Factual is editable in a wiki-like fashion and is available through Factual APIs.

Chris Dixon, founding partner of Founder Collective (and CEO of Hunch) says they invested because of Factual’s “huge ambition.” In order for the Web to become programmable, it needs data and lots of it. “I think of it as Wikipedia for structured database-like information,” says Dixon. It joins many other efforts pursuing similar ambitions, include Freebase, Wolfram Alpha, and even Google.

Startup KnowEm, which helps both large companies and small businesses stake their brand claim in social media landscape and manage their presence on these sites, has recently acquired FriendsCall.Me, a similar service, for an undisclosed amount.

FriendsCall.Me launched in April 2009, and like KnoweEm, helped both individuals and companies mange and secure their identity in the social web. FriendsCall.Me was the brainchild of Darius Monsef IV, the creator of the design community, COLOURlovers.com, and community organizer for Microsoft’s Photosynth.com. Existing FriendsCall.Me customers will automatically be transferred to KnowEm’s service.

On KnowEm’s site, brand owners can instantly check the availability of their branded usernames and keywords on more than 330 social media networks (for free). KnowEm returns a list of social networks where the brand is and isn’t registered. Brands can then choose to have KnowEm secure company and product brands across networks and will also set up profiles for each company or brand. And companies will have a dashboard on KnowEm where they can access all of their profiles on social media sites from a centralized platform. The dashboard also includes an aggregated feed of mentions of a brand across the social platforms, including Digg, Twitter, and more. KnowEm’s freemium packages range from $49 to $349 and users only pay a lifetime flat fee. Over 200,000 profiles have already been secured and created through KnowEm for a range of clients whose names cannot be disclosed, including one of the three major search engines (Yahoo, Bing or Google), a large pharmaceutical company and restaurant chains.

As social media becomes a more necessary playground where companies and brands need play, KnowEm’s services become necessary. With reasonable pricing and growth of brand engagement on social media platforms, KnowEm is gaining a loyal following and growing.

Social software startup KickApps this morning announced that it has appointed Grant Cerny as Senior Vice President of Product Marketing. Prior, Cerny spent 5.5 years working for AOL, most recently as Vice President, Entertainment, Living & Real-time Products.

In a blog post announcing his decision to chase after ‘the next big thing’ following his resignation from AOL last month, Cerny has nothing but kind words for the company he’s leaving behind, which he believes will thrive in the years to come.

“My decision is a personal one; I am as bullish for AOL as ever, and even today spent an hour on AOL Music’s CD Listening Party devouring the new RJD2 album… AOL’s leadership and strategy is strong, and as a leaner, now-public company, I believe AOL will thrive.”

That’s nice, and arguably venture-backed KickApps seems to be doing a great job building a solid network of over 100,000 publishers, web professionals and small business operators who rely on its social media applications stack, so it looks like a great opportunity for him.

On his personal blog, Cerny mentions that he’s been working with KickApps’ Mike Sommers and Alex Blum over the past few years in his role as Product VP at AOL, so that also makes his decision more understandable.

But Cerny is only the latest in a series of executives who have been with AOL for a long time and jumping ship. Most recently, we talked about the departures of ‘chief lifestreamer’ David Liu, Product Manager of AOL’s Lifestream Platform Frank Gruber, former AOL Advertising SVP Eric Bosco and we’re also hearing rumors about CTO Ted Cahall being on his way out.

And that’s not even counting the 2,500 employees AOL is leaving behind in light of its IPO.

It will be very interesting to see how the company performs on its own again in the coming months and years, but chances are not many veteran execs will remain to try and make an impact on the ‘new AOL’.

A couple days ago we caught wind of a new Seesmic product called Seesmic Look. Today it is launching and we finally get a look at it. As suspected, it is a streamlined Twitter client aimed at the Oprah crowd. But it is also a Tablet-friendly client that tries to organize the stream into easily browsable channels, some of which are sponsored by brands.

Seesmic Look is the company’s second Windows client. As such, it works on touchscreen Windows Tablet computers, and can also be controlled by a remote on a computer-connected TV screen. It comes with pre-populated channels and interest streams so that users can dive right in without even creating a Twitter account.  Once you do log in, you can see your inbox (@replies and direct messages) and “social” stream, which is what the people you follow are Tweeting about.

As Tweets move down the screen they get smaller, or you can literally watch Tweets come in and fade-away in what looks like a screensaver mode. Linked photos appear in-line, and soon so will videos. Also, the background images are pulled in from each individual Twitter user’s account whenever you look at their Tweets.

The main navigation menu includes trends, favorites, interests, channels, and searches. When you select one, the app brings up Tweets, categories, and pre-selected accounts, which you can explore further.  Interests and channels are pretty much the same thing—curated lists of Twitter accounts by topic—except that the channels are sponsored by brand advertisers such as Red Bull, Live Nation, and Kodak, while the interests are not. Interests include news, sports, politics, music and celebrities.  The branded channels show a logo in the corner, but the actual Tweets are from real people. For instance, Red Bull puts together Tweets from athletes.

This is the first time Seesmic is offering any advertising spots in its stream reader. Since the branded channels are essentially just lists (although they are controlled by Seesmic, not Twitter), down the line they can be added into Seesmic’s other various desktop and mobile clients. Seesmic is also speaking with tablet and computer manufacturers about distribution deals.  And the app seems to be officially sanctioned by Twitter.  It has a “Powered by Twitter” icon at the bottom, which is notable given Twitter’s prior guidance that third-party apps not use the Twitter trademark.

Seesmic Look’s user interface reminds me of stripped-down interactive TV interfaces designed for a 10-foot experience.  The intention is definitely to make Twitter more accessible and TV-like.  The channel metaphor is there for a reason.  But do people really want to sit back and watch Tweets flow by?  I guess power users do that all day long squinting at their text-only streams.  Maybe to the extent that photos and videos are attached to Tweets, mainstream users will begin to find it addictive as well.

TVs with Internet connectivity are nothing new , but this is pretty cool: As the world’s first TV makers, Panasonic and LG are cooperating with Skype to incorporate the software, which will make it possible to video chat in 720p HD quality, into TVs.

Read the original: 
Panasonic and LG plasma TVs to offer 720p HD video chats via Skype

Microsoft announced the availability of Silverlight 4 in beta at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) today. Some of the new features include more fluid animations, Webcam, microphone and printing support, 200 percent faster start times than Silverlight 3, deep zoom and multi-touch support and more. It now also supports Google Chrome, even though it’s just a rounding error of a browser.

One of the big capabilities of Silverlight 4 is its ability to take rich-media experiences outside the browser in client apps which will compete with Adobe AIR. The non-browser apps fully support HTML, allowing tight integration with content from the Web. It also supports notifications.

During one demo, Microsoft showed what a Silverlight version of Facebook might look like. Using Facebook’s APIs, Microsoft created a demo app which was completely reskinned, complete with news feed, contacts, and photos. Cycling through photos in the Silverlight Facebook app, for instance, was much faster than doing it in the browser. Although I’m not sure we’re oing to start to see a whole bunch of Facebook desktop apps like we do with Twitter, but the it was a good demo.

Some screenshots below of what Facebook would look like as a Silverlight app. They show a reskinned stream view, Facebook photos, and a grid view. Sorry they are so blurry. I took them directly from the live video.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

As the iPhone is increasingly used by businesses, more large companies and startups are providing customized productivity apps to serve this community. Roambi, which launched a free app earlier this year, allows for data in spreadsheets and documents to be easily viewed on the iPhone in customizable charts and graphs.

MeLLmo, which has develops Roambi, is making a play for the enterprise market today with the availability of Roambi Pro, a secure, hosted service that lets companies transform data from Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, or business systems like Salesforce.com into interactive visualizations that cab be viewed on the iPhone.

Roambi’s web-based platform lets users upload their data from Excel spreadsheets, Google Spreadsheets, HTML table data, CSV files, and Salesforce CRM reports to the online Roambi Pro Publisher. After the data is downloaded, you can select a pre-designed template to deliver the data (i.e. pie chart, graphs etc.). Once published, the data
transforms into interactive visualizations for the iPhone.

The view of the data within Roambi’s app is impressive. Data-filled spreadsheets are automatically turned into interactive graphs and charts which allow you to easily understand the information that’s being delivered. Within graphs, you can also delve deeper into certain data points by simply touching the screen. And the app itself intuitively stores various charts according to subject matter and category, making it easy to access various visualizations quickly and efficiently.

And once you integrate your spreadsheets or database with Roambi’s web platform, you can update any data in a published spreadsheet and the info will be delivered directly to any iPhone user in real-time.

Roambi, which costs $99 per user per year, is meant to allow business professionals to access visualized data from anywhere. While Roambi Pro uses the cloud to host data, MeLLmo assures users that security is optimized for all businesses, with the ability to shut out and add users easily. For businesses which don;t feel comfortable leaving data in the cloud, MeLLmo offers Roambi ES, which uses a scalable on-premise server for enterprises. MeLLmo recently raised $4 million in angel funding from undisclosed investors.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.