The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘google-reader’

Google launched a new service today in from its Labs called Google Reader Play. It is a more visual way to browse through the most popular items being saved and shared on Google Reader. When you launch it, you are presented with a large photo, video, or text excerpt on the main part of the screen, and can flip through by clicking on arrows or selecting an item from the filmstrip at the bottom of the screen.

Google Reader Play doesn’t require you to sign in, but if you do then you can star, share, and like items, and it starts to recommend things to you based on what your friends share, star, and like in Google Reader. The user interface seems to borrow a lot from StumbleUpon, with its concept of randomly flicking through the best stuff on the Web. In particular, it’s very similar to StumbleVideo, except it includes more than just videos. It is very image-heavy. The user interface reminds me of some elements of enjosythin.gs as well in the way that it presents images and text excerpts in a blown-up manner. The arrows are very Fast Flip, another Labs experiment for the Google News in making magazine and newspaper articles more visually browsable.

Like many of its other recent efforts, especially with Buzz, Google Reader Play is an attempt to encourage more direct sharing and to capture that sharing data. More and more Website referral traffic is coming from sharing service such as Twitter and Facebook. Google wants to be in the sharing game as well.

Google Buzz was pushed out the door too early and force-fed to users by placing it in Gmail. The launch has been marked by both privacy and usability issues. But the team at Google behind it, led by Bradley Horowitz, is working hard to fix problems and respond to user feedback. In fact, earlier today, Horowitz pointed people via Buzz and Twitter to an official Google product idea site for making suggestions to improve Google Buzz. The site is powered by Google Moderator, which lets people suggest ideas and then vote them up or down.

Below are the top ten ideas and feature requests on the site right now, which already has 13,607 votes on 338 ideas from 692 people. They range from making comments more manageable to fixing Twitter update imports so that they are more realtime to better filters and a ReBuzz button.

1. “Collapsible comments.”
2. “Allow me to “star” or “favorite” a buzz to read later just like Gmail, Google Reader, Google Groups and Twitter.”
3. “Fix the Twitter feed so they update in realtime instead of hours later in giant batches.”
4. “A “ReBuzz” button that forwards someone else’s buzz (including links, photo’s, etc. but not reactions) to your followers with a @reference to the original poster.”
5. “Move “Mute this post” from the menu to the Buzz item itself (e.g.: next to ‘Like’ etc.).”
6. “Buzz filter. Some people may not be interested in posts coming from certain sources (e.g. Twitter). It would be nice to have a simple way of filtering those out.”
7. “Labels. Or any other way to group either people or buzzes (or both?) into categories. The ability to group information or people according to topics or personal preferences, etc.”
8. “Allow multiple links in one buzz and let me add photos after adding a link. Currently only allows one link, and must add all photos before the link, or the photos option disappears.”
9. “View the stream chronologically, without bumping buzzes back to the top every time a comment is added.”
10. “More options for sharing posts from Buzz to other places”

Hmm, sounds like people want it to be even more like FriendFeed. What’s your top feature request for Buzz?

When Google Buzz launched three weeks ago, the product wasn’t ready. There were basic privacy issues that still needed to be hammered out (and were quickly addressed by Google), but beyond that Google Buzz simply did not work smoothly enough to force feed it to 175 million Gmail users without any warning. (MG covered some of the usability issues last week).

So why was Google Buzz pushed out the door too soon? I have three interrelated theories:

1. Google still wants to buy Twitter, and putting Buzz into Gmail might be enough of a threat to bring Twitter back to the table.  Buzz did not launch in some Google Labs backwater.  It is placed front and center in Gmail.  Buzz is Google’s strongest effort yet to enter the stream.  If Buzz can gain traction it would certainly help Google’s negotiating position with Twitter.
2. Independent of any pressure it may place on Twitter, Google needs to have its own realtime micro-messaging communications system.  The micro-message bus is just a more efficient way to communicate than email for many types of messages so it makes sense to add it as a layer to Gmail: broadcast your public messages via Buzz, and keep private ones on email or chat, all from the same place.
3. The other reason Google needed to establish its own social stream pronto is that links passed through social sharing are beginning to rival search as a primary driver of traffic for many sites.  Part of Google’s prowess stems from the fact that it is the largest referrer of traffic to many other Websites. It doesn’t want to lose that status to social sharing streams such as Facebook or Twitter.  Already, Buzz is helping to boost sharing through Google Reader.  While Google doesn’t benefit directly from that traffic (yet), simply knowing what links people are sharing and clicking on is valuable data which can help it improve its search results.

Google needed to get into this game as fast as it could, even if there were bumps along the way.  The question now is whether Buzz can keep building.

Photo credit: Flickr/ Chelseagirl

Social sharing is becoming a big contributor to traffic for many sites. While Facebook and Twitter drive more sharing than any other services, Google is trying to compete with Buzz, which is now part of Gmail but shares links to article and blog posts through Google Reader. Over the past month, according to AddThis, sharing through Google Reader is up 35 percent, with a big jump on February 9, the day Buzz launched.  This number only measures sharing through the AddThis button, which is on more than 600,000 Websites and gives you the option to share content through more than 200 services. So it is only a proxy for total sharing on Google Reader, but a decent one.

Google Reader still barely registers when compared to Twitter and Facebook, which account for 31 percent and 8 percent of all sharing via AddThis, respectively.  But Buzz is definitely giving it a boost.

You can now chart how different services do against each other on the sharing front via a new services directory on AddThis. For instance, Google Bookmarks does much better than Google Reader, with 5 percent of all AddThis activity.  It even beats Digg (which has 3 percent).  Google Bookmarks is probably used more for personal bookmarking than for social consumption, but it is smack in the middle of Twitter and Digg when it comes to activity via AddThis.

Another comparison is Tumblr versus Posterous, which suggests that Tumblr  is much more popular as a reposting tool, and is about neck-and-neck with WordPress.

It’s the type of scenario that keeps even the most seasoned entrepreneurs up at night. Your startup toils away for months on a new product or feature and – boom – a giant like Google comes along and walks all over it.

That appears to be the case for Dublin-based music video site, Muzu TV (see previous TCEU coverage), which today launched its new music video jukebox feature. A sort of Spotify-for-video, it’s not too dissimilar from Google-owned YouTube’s recent disco beta or ‘Music Discovery Project and Playlist Creation Tool’ to give it its full name.

Back in October of last year, Google Reader rolled out a nice little update that added a new “Popular items” feed to the “Explore” area of the service. In here, you would find items from around the web that were gaining popularity fast. Of course, one person’s gem of popular content is another person’s crappy video. So today, Google has rolled out another update to Reader, to recommend items more personally tailored to you.

The new “Recommended items” feed replaces the “Popular items” feed in the same Explore area. “With the latest round of improvements, we’ve started inserting items selected just for you inside the Recommended items section,” Google writes.

What’s not entirely clear from Google’s post is how they’re pulling together these recommendations for Reader users. I have to assume it’s the same way they’ve long recommended news feeds to you, which is by looking at your Reader Trends and web browsing history (if you have that turned on), and comparing it with other users.

A quick scan of my own new Recommended items area shows results that are pretty hit-or-miss. But maybe that’s because I’m a writer who has to scan hundreds of sites every day even if not all of them particularly interest me.

There’s another small new feature in Reader today too: related feeds. If you trigger the drop down menu on a certain feed, and hover over “More like this,” you’ll see a list of feeds for what Reader considers to be similar sites. Subscribing to them is then just a button click away.

Using Google Reader this past week has been interesting as Google Buzz has multiplied the number of users following the items I share several times over. This is of course because Buzz and Reader (and the other Google properties) share the same social graph now — the same highly controversial social graph which saw you automatically friending certain people you contact on Gmail or over IM. In fact, Google had to stop doing that.

I’m still not sure Reader, or Google as a whole, gets this whole social thing, but they’re certainly growing their graph quickly now.

As we noted this morning, Google isn’t wasting any time in responding to user criticism about Buzz.  Now they’ve rolled out another set of changes to further address Buzz’s privacy issues. The biggest change involves the automatic follow system: it’s now being switched to a suggestion model, where Google will present you with a list of friends it thinks you’d like to follow, but gives you a chance to deselect them before you start using the service.

That’s a pretty big change — when Buzz launched four days ago, one of its selling points was that it took no work on the user’s part to get started, because Buzz would automatically follow the people you interact with most on Gmail. Of course, that isn’t always a good thing — there are plenty of cases when you wouldn’t want people to know who you’d been communicating with. After an initial backlash Google made it easier to hide which users you were following, but now they’re ditching the auto-follow model entirely. Fortunately it only takes a minute to go through the suggestions, so it’s not much of a hurdle.

New users will see a screen like the one above, and Google’s post says that existing Buzz users will be shown a version of this friend selection screen in the next few weeks to confirm that they’re comfortable with everyone they’re following. The service is also going to stop automatically connecting Google Reader and Picasa albums to Buzz accounts, though those options will still be available.

Finally, Google is adding a Buzz section to Gmail’s Settings. Why this wasn’t there from the start is beyond me — before now, if you wanted to adjust your Buzz settings you had to go to your Google account page, which made very little sense because most people use Buzz from Gmail.

Earlier today, Google made yet another change to Buzz’s privacy settings by fixing a bug that could cause users to inadvertently expose their friends’ private settings.

All of these are good changes for Buzz, and I’m optimistic about its future, but I can’t help but wonder how they all made it through months of internal testing.

Maybe the single most useful feature of Gmail for me is how you can “star” items to highlight them to come back to later. In Google Reader, this starring feature also exists and is hands-down the best feature of the service. Today, Google News added the same feature, and it’s also awesome.

Now, I’ve never been a big fan of Google News. In fact, I think it’s pretty awful in many ways. But this is a great addition. Much like with Google Reader, I can now scan through Google News and pick out the stories I want to save to read later simply by clicking on the empty star icon to the left of the headline. Even better, by using these stars, Google News is actually able to better tailor its news surfacing experience for you. When there is new news about a headline you previously starred, Google News will bold it for you, making it easier for you to find on a quick scan.

There are a couple of downsides to this feature. Sadly, you can only star the story that Google News deems to be the most important in the cluster (that it places first). Clicking on a more detailed view removes the option to star any articles. Also, they say that you can only keep track of your last 20 starred items in the new Starred area — that seems pretty low. Also odd is that if the cluster changes after you star it (meaning a different story rises to the top), it appears to also change in your starred items area.

Still, this makes Google News much more interesting to me already.

[image: MGM]

Who exactly is the market leader in textbook rentals is no longer just an academic debate. Online textbook rental service Chegg recently sent its rival BookRenter.co a lawyer letter (embedded below) demanding that it stop using the phrase “#1 In Textbook Rentals” on its Website. That is Chegg’s marketing slogan, and it even registered the phrase as a trademark in 2008.

But how can a company trademark being No. 1, especially in a nascent market that is evolving rapidly? In addition to Chegg and BookRenter, bigger players such as Barnes & Noble are getting into the textbook rental game. Chegg’s trademark isn’t going to do it much good in fighting off such encroachments. And even if Chegg is the biggest online textbook renter, the offline book rental market is much bigger with companies like Follett dominating.

BookRenter.com CEO Mehdi Maghsoodnia stands his ground and says Chegg doesn’t have a case. To begin with, there are many ways to define “#1″: customers, revenue, selection, service. “We have the largest selection of textbooks in the U.S.,” claims Maghsoodnia, referring to the inventory of 3 million textbooks that BookRenter can rent out by tapping into partner inventory such as Amazon. Chegg operates its own warehouses, but it claims to offer “more than 4.2 million titles” and has rented out more than 2 million books to students so far. BookRenter.com says it serves 5,000 universities in the U.S.? Okay, Chegg claims 6,400. BookRenter says its revenues are growing 400% annually? Chegg tops it with a claim of 600% growth. Needless to say, none of these assertions are backed by any audited financial statements.

The point is that this market is growing fast and Chegg wants no one to question its undisputed number-oneness. Maghsoodnia concedes that in terms of customers and revenues, Chegg is probably five to seven times bigger than BookRenter, which recently passed 100,000 customers. And Chegg certainly has more capital. It has a massive war chest from raising $144 million over the past few years, whereas BookRenter.com only recently raised $6 million. But Maghsoodnia points out that estimates of the total online textbook rental market are $200 million, out of a $7 billion overall market. So for any online player to claim to be #1 in all textbook rentals is laughable. The fact that Chegg is trying to assert its trademark on such a dubious claim, he says, “tells me they are a lot more nervous than their advertising shows.”

Regardless, he doesn’t think Chegg can defend its trademark claim on such a common phrase, unless it could establish some sort of secondary meaning in the eyes of the public. At least that is what his lawyers tell him. In the meantime, he is thinking of changing the language on his Website just a little bit to, “We’re Numero Uno in Textbook Rentals!”

Chegg Letter To BookRenter.com

Fynanz, a peer to peer lending platform for student loans, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, DFJ Gotham Ventures, The Brazos Group, Zelkova Ventures and JBR Media Ventures. This latest round of funding brings the startup’s total funding to over $8 million. Fynanz will use the funding to expand its credit union and student lending marketplace, and for the development of additional lending programs including financial literacy initiatives.

Fynanz, which launched in 2008, applies the peer-to-peer lending model of starups like Prosper to student loans. Students can apply for loans and participants can help fund these loans. Unlike Prosper or other P2P lending sites, Fynanze guarantees each loan. And since they are qualified educational loans, the students can deduct the interest from their taxes once they start paying back. To reduce its risk, the startup looks at other factors in addition to credit scores when evaluating each student borrower, including grade point averages and what school the student is attending.

The loans are co-payable to the school, and Fynanz takes into account tuition and other expenses to make sure students don’t take out more than they actually need. The plus for the student is that loans are offered to students with low interest rates, often 0.60% to 1.0% lower than what a student would get from a bank. Fynanz faces competition from fellow student lending platform GreenNote.