Jim Lanzone: Vengeance in Video?
In January 2008, Ask CEO Jim Lanzone stepped down. He moved to Redpoint Ventures, a VC firm, to be their entrepreneur-in-residence. But his latest project brings him back to search: Clicker, an online TV video search engine. Kinda.
Lanzone is CEO of the video service, which launched yesterday at TechCrunch50 into private beta. Clicker aims to be a TV guide for online video—”the most comprehensive way to find the video content you’re looking for on the web.”
What makes Clicker different from the myriad other video search engines out there? TechCrunch reports:
[Clicker] creates a structured database of programming, organizing shows by things like network, genre, and show name. This type of data not only allows for better search results, but it allows you to browse content without having to do text-based searches, which you probably won’t be doing when television and future web-enabled tablets start to serve up this content. Clicker already has a deal with Boxee.
The goal is really to be the best search engine for video content. Clicker will point you in the direction of whatever you are looking for (and will do embeds if they’re available), but won’t serve up the videos themselves. They will also delve into surfacing content not explicitly produced for television, but is still high quality web video content. But they don’t want to be YouTube, which is cluttered with user-generated content. Clicker is going for a different market.
Clicker will also allow users to edit and submit information about shows wiki-style.
My question: what’s with all those vowels?! Are you sure you didn’t mean “clickr”? Way to shoot yourselves in the foot, guys. 
Naturally, the first real question is what’s their business model. And the answer is typical of search engines: advertising, both search and display. However, they also plan to offer premium accounts, “which the company envisions might be used for storing your favorite videos online, kind of like a DVR of sorts.”
We’re obviously still learning new things about how to do online video all the time, as Hulu has shown us. But is there room for another video search engine—and if so, will Clicker be it? What do you think?
Technorati: Desperate to be a Twit Relevant Again
How long has it been since we’ve heard about Technorati? When did you last visit the erstwhile-preeminent blog tracking site? And even then, didn’t you get the sense they were going downhill? While that may just be what happens to every media (or blog) sweetheart, Technorati has seen a decline. Many have attributed this to a lack of features, innovation, relevancy of results, etc.
But Technorati is fighting back. With Twitter. Launching today, Twittorati is Technorati’s latest effort to make us think they’re still relevant. The site aggregates the tweets of bloggers in the Technorati Top 100. (They don’t, however, explain why you’d want to do this. Too lazy to read their blogs?)
Twittorati integrates with both Twitter and Technorati, but there’s not a lot of crossover. For example, this pane of the right-most column of the site:
I expected the Technorati tags there would segment the Tweets shown by the genre of the blog author—but the tags led straight to the Technorati tag page. (Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra tells TechCrunch that the capability I wanted is in the works.)
While this might attract some attention for @Twittorati, ultimately I don’t think this is going to help Technorati regain its popularity or find the following it once had.
What do you think? Is Twittorati worth watching? Will it help bring Technorati back to the fore of social media?
