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Posts Tagged ‘oneriot’

OneRiot’s recently ventured into the advertising world with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. A few weeks ago, the realtime search engine launched a pilot program of RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web. And today, after partnering with select iPhone Apps, Twitter Clients and Search Engines (Including UberTwitter and Digsby), OneRiot’s Realtime Ad Network, RiotWise, is now available to all developers.

RiotWise’s ads are comprised of content that similar to within Google, are served up via keywords being searched for. But unlike Google, advertisers aren’t bidding on keywords. Instead, content producers strike a deal with OneRiot to place their content in an emphasized (but clearly labeled) place in their realtime feed within the search engine. In the end, OneRiot’s ambitions are to help the content producer improve click-through rates by sending highly-targeted readers whose intent is to find specific content.

RiotWise’s Trending Ads will match trending topics with display ads that are highly relevant to the same topics within an application such as a Twitter client or iPhone app. Similar to the ads displayed alongside search engine results, OneRiot says the realtime relevance results in a higher click through rate on the ads. The system is enabled by OneRiot’s realtime search technology and PulseRank relevancy algorithm. OneRiot helps developers monetize social web applications such as Twitter apps, IM clients and iPhone apps and shares advertiser revenue with the application developer.

Now OneRiot is reporting that RiotWise ads have been performing at 3 to 4 times the average industry standard click through rates (CTR) for ads in realtime web apps (Twitter clients, iPhone apps, etc.). Developers also have flexibility to display RiotWise ads in the stream or correlating to trending topics.

Of course with these realtime ads, OneRiot runs the risk of surfacing irrelevant or spammy content. But as a realtime search engine, OneRiot has invested heavily in spam prevention and is constantly sorting through millions of pieces of content to determine what is relevant and what isn’t. As long as OneRiot produces quality advertising content, the new ad format looks to be a viable and profitable monetization tool for both publishers and developers.

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We recently wrote about OneRiot’s foray into the advertising word, RiotWise, which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. Because people are becoming more and more interested in realtime search and getting access to information that is going on right now, OneRiot believes in the strong potential of serving relevant ads beside results. Today, the realtime search engine is launching RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web.

RiotWise will match Trending Ads display ads that are highly relevant to the same trending topics within an application. OneRiot says says the “realtime relevance” result in a higher click through rate on the ads. The system is enabled by OneRiot’s realtime search technology and PulseRank relevancy algorithm.

OneRiot says the Trending Ads offering is a perfect fit for monetizing social web applications such as Twitter apps, IM clients and iPhone apps. The third-party Twitter client makes particular sense considering how many of these clients incorporate trending topics as a feature within their apps. OneRiot will share advertiser revenue with the application developer. OneRiot has already signed up an IM application developer, Digsby, to feature Trending ads on its application.

RiotWise Trending Ads are available via OneRiot’s API, as well as a new Mobile Ad Unit. OneRiot syndicates its search results and realtime advertising across a partner network of over 90 applications, websites and search engines that are utilizing the OneRiot Realtime Search API, including Yahoo and Microsoft.

We’re bullish on RiotWise’s ad platform in general and this new offering seems like a compelling product as well. Trending Ads could be a useful way for third-party Twitter apps to advertise contextually relevant and dynamic content. As long as the OneRiot produces quality advertising content, the new ad format may work.

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Yesterday, Google published a long manifesto on the “meaning of open” in the form of an email to all employees republished as a blog post. In it, senior VP of product management Jonathan Rosenberg, makes an eloquent argument for why open systems always win and urges Google’s employees to always strive to be open when designing products. An open Internet spurs innovation and brings more consumers on board, which ultimately means more searches and increased use of Web applications.

The gist of his argument is that a bigger, better Internet is good for Google. He writes that Google employees should resist the impulse to create closed products and systems, and even makes a swipe at Apple for doing so (bold added for emphasis):

. . . open systems win. This is counter-intuitive to the traditionally trained MBA who is taught to generate a sustainable competitive advantage by creating a closed system, making it popular, then milking it through the product life cycle. The conventional wisdom goes that companies should lock in customers to lock out competitors. . . . a well-managed closed system can deliver plenty of profits. They can also deliver well-designed products in the short run — the iPod and iPhone being the obvious examples — but eventually innovation in a closed system tends towards being incremental at best (is a four blade razor really that much better than a three blade one?) because the whole point is to preserve the status quo. Complacency is the hallmark of any closed system. If you don’t have to work that hard to keep your customers, you won’t.

It all sounds great and Google certainly is a champion of open systems with Android and Chrome and countless other projects. Google is making a very public effort to claim the mantle of openness. But the battle for this mantle has been going on for a long time. Two years ago, I wrote a post titled “Who Is The Opennest Of Them All?”. What I noted then bears repeating:

But don’t be fooled. Companies are very selective about the areas where they choose to be open, and they very rarely open up their core source of profits voluntarily. . . . So the next time a company touts how open it is, ask yourself how that will help it make more money. Don’t confuse openness with altruism.

Google is only open when it is convenient for them. Google will never open up the source code to its search algorithms or its advertising system, or share the core data which gives it a competitive advantage in those areas because that is where it makes all of its money. Again, I pointed this out in that post two years ago:

Just because industry pressures and increased interconnectedness are forcing companies to embrace open technologies, don’t confuse openness with profitability. Open standards tend to be good for spurring the adoption of new technologies, but not so good for generating profits directly. That is why companies choose to be open along axes where they don’t compete. Google, for instance, is a big proponent of open standards in social networking, mobile networks, Web applications, and practically everywhere —except the one place it makes money. Its advertising system is a black box. You also never hear any talk coming out of Google about opening up the search algorithms that drive all of those advertising revenues. In contrast, Google has no problem championing open standards in industries that it is hoping to disrupt (by commoditizing existing business models with open standards, and making money with advertising instead).

Rosenberg realizes there is an incongruity between what he is saying and what Google is doing. He takes a stab at rationalizing this huge exception to Google’s embrace of everything open:

While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in. In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users.

Maybe, but it is more likely it would hurt Google. The company has good reasons for keeping those things closed tight. Opening up those black boxes would make it easier to spam search and game AdWords and give competitors valuable data to make their own search engines and advertising systems better. If it opened all of that stuff up, it would have to work harder to keep its customers.

And really nobody should begrudge them the right to keep products they’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and money building to themselves. But don’t give us this song and dance about how everything should be open and how Google is the opennest company in the world. Google has nothing to lose if operating systems, mobile phones, browsers, books, news, and every other industry becomes open and free, as long it can make money from search and advertising. That is exactly why Google is so disruptive. It can offer products for free that other industries charge for, as long as those products result in more searches or other advertising opportunities.

There is nothing wrong with this strategy. The fact that Google is pushing openness in so many industries is generally a good thing for startups and consumers alike. But Google should just be honest and say that they think everything should be open—except for search and advertising.

(Image via j/f/photos).

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If you’re reading this, you clearly use the Internet. And if you use the Internet, you clearly know Google AdSense. It’s pretty much everywhere (even on this site in places). But as much as Google would like you to believe they are serving up ads that users want to click on because they are relevant, these are still ads, and most people do not want to click on them. OneRiot’s new product, RiotWise, has an interesting spin on relevant ads.

You see, RiotWise’s ads are only ads in the sense that someone is paying to place them in a certain highlighted position on the page. But in fact, all of these “ads” are content. And I don’t mean content like the homepage of a website, I mean stories/posts/articles about a particular topic. Just as with Google, these are served up via keywords being searched for. But unlike Google, advertisers aren’t bidding on keywords. Instead, content producers strike a deal with OneRiot to place their content in an emphasized (but clearly labeled) place in their realtime feed.

The reason they would want to do this should be obvious: Clicks-throughs. Any content producer who is likely to use such a program undoubtedly already has a strategy in place to monetize their site. That is quite likely based around the traffic their site receives, and RiotWise’s goal would be to help the content producer increase that traffic. But more importantly, it would be to increase the traffic by sending highly-targeted readers whose intent is to find specific content being displayed on the page, OneRiot CEO Kimbal Musk tell us.

The obvious question is: How can OneRiot be sure this is relevant content and not just a spam blog looking for clicks? As a realtime search engine, OneRiot already devotes a large percentage of its team to spam prevention, OneRiot general manager Tobias Peggs says. And OneRiot’s engine is already doing the hard work of going through millions of pieces of content to determine what is relevant and what isn’t. With RiotWise, it’s just a question of taking the content from the providers who are using the service and pulling it out to highlight it.

So where will it be highlighted? Initially, RiotWise will roll out on OneRiot’s main site. This sponsored content would be housed in a right-hand column, separate from the main realtime feed, as you can see in the picture above. Yes, it looks a lot like AdSense, but it’s content. This aspect of RiotWise will be launching next week.

But the bigger picture for RiotWise is to include this sponsored content in the feeds that OneRiot sends to all of its partners. This means that third-party sites using OneRiot search results will eventually see RiotWise as well. Also, it means that places which pull in one OneRiot feeds, such a some Twitter feeds, will start getting these sponsored results as well.

Musk realizes that it’s important to be delicate when inserting ads into streams. He notes that just as with sponsored results, sponsored items in feed streams will be clearly labeled as such. He also notes that it’s important not to overload users with too many of these sponsored results in that setting. Ideally, OneRiots algorithms would be tailored to serve up just one sponsored result a day that a user would want to click on, he says.

The key to all of this is the realtime aspect of OneRiot. Because people are becoming more and more interested in realtime search, getting access to information that is going on right now, OneRiot has been seeing strong click-through rates on items and big numbers when it comes to users doing multiple searches, we’re told. And OneRiot’s RiotFeeds product, which sends OneRiot results surrounding certain topics over to Twitter has been gaining popularity, and is also seeing big-time click-throughs on its links.

A solution like RiotWise seems like the perfect idea for a new or second-tier blog that feels its content is good, but isn’t getting the exposure that some of the big guys do. As long as the content is good, OneRiot is happy to accept it, and strike a deal with the producer to take some fees on a CPC-basis, the majority of which would then be handed over to OneRiot’s partners that serve up its content.

“This is the way to monetize the real-time web,” Musk says.

As I mentioned above, the plan is to launch RiotWise on OneRiot first as early as Monday of next week. A couple weeks after that, the company hopes to roll out the sponsored results to its partners, letting the money sharing begin.

A month ago, OneRiot raised a new $7 million third round of funding.

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Have you gotten your Google Wave invite yet? Just kidding — they’re not out yet. The team (which is based in Australia) decided to push them out later today so they could be up to deal with issues surrounding the massive influx of new users. And judging from the response on the web, “massive” is also the perfect word to describe the anticipation for the service.

Ever since it was unveiled at Google I/O this past May, it seems that everyone wants to know everything about Wave. And yesterday, when it was revealed that a big roll-out to more than just developers was around the corner, interest spiked again. Since then, the term has not left Twitter’s Trend Topics area. But there is always a downside to so much hype, and I’m pretty certain we’re going to see it in the coming days and weeks with Google Wave too: Backlash.

Actually, some amount of backlash started immediately after it was first revealed in May. While we were wowed after a hands-on demonstration we got, writing that Wave “drips with ambition,” there were plenty in the press and general public who quickly jumped on the other side of the coin. Upon seeing the public demonstation, reactions ranged from “Wow” to “I don’t get it.” But the real test will come later today when many of those people actually get to use it for the first time.

We have been using Wave since Google I/O, and while it has been very buggy, the team has worked hard to iron out a lot of the kinks since then. Still, there will be plenty who begin using it today who will be disappointed. It’s a tricky situation for the Wave team. From the get go, they’ve said that the ultimate vision is for Wave to be a new communication platform for the web — meaning they hope hundreds, if not thousands, of other services are built with Wave as the backbone. But that’s a long ways out. Today, all we have to play with is Google Wave, the service, which is still very early in its lifespan.

It’s really Google Wave’s ambition that is a dual-edged sword. Because the team is trying to do so much with the product, there will be plenty of people who find it confusing and cluttered. And to some extent, they’re right. But anyone who labels it a failure at this point is either a curmudgeon or an extremely shortsighted person claiming to have foresight. It’s a nice thought that every product should be a taut bundle of execution with an easy path to monetization. But the web, and really the world, would be a much more boring place if that were the case.

Part of Google’s strategy with Wave, and part of the reason they’re putting it out there early, is to see what developers and the users make of it. In that regard, it’s not all that different from Twitter, which started as a simple status-update side project, and transformed into something much different thanks to its users and the third-party developer community around it.

Wave is much more complicated than Twitter, and that could well be a downside (remember, keep it simple, stupid). But there’s a difference between clutter and ambition, especially when you have the resources of Google behind you. Shooting for the Moon is a good thing, and Wave has a unique opportunity to do that.

I’m not saying Wave will be a success. Many of the most ambitious projects often crash and burn — it’s the nature of high risk/high reward. But we’re still way too early in its lifespan to make that call for Wave. I can see the backlash already, and I think we should give it a chance. The end result could well be something that greatly benefits us all, but getting to that point, if it ever does, will take time.

[images: Paramount Vantage]

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Realtime search for the most part is still mostly about searching Twitter. So it is probably a good idea for fledgling realtime search engines to make it easy to share specific Tweets found in the search results back on Twitter. Since most of the results are Tweets, and search is just another form of navigation and discovery when it comes to the realtime stream, you want to be able to retweet directly from your search results.

OneRiot already does this, and today Collecta is adding a similar sharing feature. Although, Collecta also lets you share any result on Facebook, Mixx, Reddit, Delicious, and Stumbleupon as well (but, oddly, not on Digg). Collecta launched last June.

In addition to sharing individual results, you can also share the entire search by clicking on “Share this search” under the search term in the left-hand column to pass the link around for your specific query. For instance, here is what people are saying right now about the death of Edward Kennedy.

You normally wouldn’t think about sharing regular search results other than as a link, but realtime results operate under a different dynamic. Collecta’s results also now include a little avatar in front of each one, giving it more of a social feel, and making it more familiar to Twitter users. Is this search or a new way to navigate the stream?

With realtime search, you are mining the conversations around the Web, tapping into the collective consciousness. So each result should be a jumping off point to start a new conversation.

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There’s no shortage of people who use their Twitter accounts for both personal and business use. That includes plenty of bloggers who send out links to all their articles along with their more mundane updates throughout the day. Some people love this, others hate it, as they just want the links. And while some sites, like TechCrunch, have an account basically just dedicated to those links now, it can still be a hassle to find and follow all of those for every site you want to read. That’s where RiotFeeds comes in.

The service basically hand curates tweets from the top sites in various categories on the web. The end result are feeds that just contain tweets with links from sites of the same ilk. For example, PulseonTech account features tweets with links to stories from TechCrunch, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb, Wired and others. The PulseonNews feed features the NYTimes, CNN, Fox News, and others. But those are obvious categories — there are also plenty of not-so-obvious ones, like my personal favorite, TightPantsPulse, with is all about hipsters. Here’s the description of that feed: “Links you probably won’t be into from sites that don’t even exist yet.”

While each of these over 20 feeds are curated, they are also powered by OneRiot’s PulseRank technology, which it considers the “PageRank for the realtime web”. As we’ve written about before, OneRiot is a real-time search engine that is all about finding the most relevant links being shared on the various social sites in real-time. And by identifying the most popular and relevant shared links, it is able to build consumer friendly-fare like RiotFeeds.

OneRiot envisions that RiotFeeds will be a good tool for novice users of Twitter to use to get to their favorite content easier without having to track down and follow each of the sites they care about most. While Twitter has a “Suggested User List”, it doesn’t currently offer bundle packages of people to follow depending on what you’re interested in, which is something that Google Reader, for example, has. OneRiot also hopes this project will shed more light on its APIs, which were recently opened to the public, so others can use the data they’re collecting.

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Twitter and blogs are increasingly feeding into each other. A blog post can go viral if it gets retweeted enough time. But what if it was easy to retweet a comment? TweetMeme, which powers the retweet buttons increasingly found on blog posts (like this one), is working on bringing retweets to comments, at least to comments on its own site. But once it does that, blogs will be able to implement the system using TweetMeme’s APIs.

In a post on the TweetMeme blog, founder Nick Halstead gives a preview of the commenting system he is getting ready to release On TweetMeme itself in the next few weeks. Right now, headlines such as this one show recent Tweets linking to the story. TweetMeme will be adding a commenting feature there as well. The goals of the system are:

1. Promotion of quality comments
2. Works seamlessly with Twitter
3. Reply mechanism that feels familiar to Twitter users
4. Ability to embed media into comments

Each comment will have its own retweet button, and visitors will be able to reorder comments by most retweeted first. In effect, it becomes a voting system for comments with each retweet acting as a vote (and you can only vote once). You can reply to a specific commenter both within comments and on Twitter simultaneously. Another nice feature is that short links get elongated back to the original in the comments, and if the link is to a photo or other media, you see a thumbnail image in the comment itself.

While TweetMeme is doing this for itself, the functionality will be available through its APIs (the documentation is not there yet though). I’d love to see this implemented as a blog commenting system where each comment could be retweeted and comments can be reordered by the resulting votes.

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For some, it’s useful to go to OneRiot to search for links being tweeted or dugg in real-time. But for a lot of people it’s better if the sites and services they’re already using have the functionality built-in. That’s OneRiot’s intention in opening up its API to the public today.

The site’s API, which has been in use with selected partners for several weeks, will give third-party developers a chance to bake the results right into their sites or apps. One of the big developers that has already been using it is Microsoft, which has a version of its web browser, IE 8, with OneRiot built-in.

Another partner that has been using the API is the desktop social messaging client Nambu. You can imagine that a lot of the clients that offer Twitter functionality may also want to offer real-time link search capabilities, which OneRiot’s API will be perfect for.

Here are four of the main options that OneRiot will offer with the API:

Realtime Search Results – a realtime stream of related web pages and videos that the social web is buzzing about right now for any search query.
PulseRank Search Results – a feed of search results ordered by relevance using OneRiot’s PulseRank algorithm, PageRank for the realtime web.
OneRiot Trending Topics – a feed of emerging topics heating up across the web right now.
Simple Web Search Interface – allowing developers to provide innovative search integration with minimal investment.

OneRiot CEO, Kimbal Musk, will be participating in our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp this Friday.

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The Europas, the tech startup awards from TechCrunch Europe, will be streamed live from this post from 6pm tonight London time/GMT (10am SF, 1pm NYC). We’ll kick off with a startup pitch competition, followed by a panel of some of the leading lights in tech consisting of: our own Sarah Lacy, Jolicloud founder Tariq Krim, MyDeco’s Brent Hoberman and Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo. The actual announcement of The Europas winners will be from around 8.30pm GMT onwards. he winners will be announce first on TechCrunch Europe (RSS and Twitter). After that, well, a huge party. Over 300 people are attending from all over the European tech scene. Our streaming partner is TechFluff.tv. If you couldn’t get to the awards, if you’re somewhere in Europe working on your own startup, then tonight raise a glass, put the projector screen on in the bar and have your very own Europas awards with us. We salute you.