Google Reader Asks Us to Play

Google Reader Labs is adding a new way to view your feeds—Play. According to the blog announcement, this was conceived as a way to help introduce people to Google Reader—people who “aren’t interested in taking the time to get Reader set up” but are interested in using it. I hope both of you are happy .

But really this layout is primarily designed for people who want to view graphics or video—on autoplay, oh joy—and only a couple lines of any accompanying text. The white-on-black layout works well for showing off images, but not so well for that text.

Plus, to read a full article, you have to click on a “read more” link, which opens the full post within Google Reader Play—so still in the white-on-black layout that’s always so popular among people who read things online:

The layout includes many of the social features of Google Reader—the star, the Like button and the share button (the RSS button on its point). It also has a few settings: hide the thumbnail viewer, use magic layout (I only pushed that button when I had an all-text post up, though, so it didn’t do anything), view settings (All items, New items, Starred items, Liked items or Categories (to view top items in select categories)), or view the images in a post in a slideshow.

While it looks slick, I’m not sure this is going to make it any easier for people to overcome their initial aversions to the setup process—and if they want to, I don’t know, read blogs with Google Reader, they may not be a big fan of Play.

If you want to experiment with Play, you can log in to your Google Reader. View a folder and select View in Reader Play from the folder settings (above the items) or from the drop down:

I’ve tried just going to Google Reader Play, but after letting it load for ten minutes, somehow I doubt I’m going to get anything.

What do you think? Would you like to Play?

Human-powered Search Gets More Humans: ChaCha Hooks up with Facebook

Human-powered search engine ChaCha has hung on (let’s face it) longer than anyone thought possible. Although it abandoned guided web-based search almost two years ago, ChaCha is still thriving in the mobile Q&A market. Back in December, they raised $7M in funding—and it looks like the ultimate result of that cash was an API and a Facebook app.

Yep—ChaCha’s getting into social search. The Facebook app takes questions users post to friends and connections and broadcasts them to ChaCha. The app checks the database of pre-loaded answers to see if they’ve already covered that topic.

Definitely not an app I’m interested in. I’ve joked with friends in Gmail chat that Google should just popup with the answer to any of our factual questions right in our chat window. But really, we definitely wouldn’t appreciate the intrusion (even if we were just going to google that same question in a minute anyway—although TechCrunch doesn’t clarify whether ChaCha actually supplies the answer or just suggests that it might already know the answer). Most of the questions I pose my social network are going to be opinion-based, rather than factual—so ChaCha’s can’t to help there.

However, ChaCha has also turned this into a kind of game—the more participating questions you answer, the more points you get. They’ve also added a number of social features, including the option to have an “Ask ChaCha” box on your profile, share questions and their answers on selected friends’ walls and more.

Meanwhile, ChaCha has also developed an API to allow other developers to interface with their Q&A database. They’re also the #1 SMS search service, according to Nielsen Mobile, answering more than a million SMS questions a day.

What do you think? Should ChaCha even count as a “search engine” since they’re serving up solely structured data? Do you use ChaCha, and will you use their new apps and APIs?

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Dear Twitter, We Want to Be You. Love, Yahoo

Let’s face it—everyone wants to be popular, at least when it comes to business. And these days, you can’t deny Twitter is popular (or at least it sounds popular with all the media attention it’s getting—though that may be about to change). So you can’t really blame other companies for a little envy.

Especially when that company is a perennial second in almost everything they do. Yahoo looks like the latest Twitter wannabe, according to Matt McGee at Search Engine Land, and you can see it in so many areas. All of their social pursuits seem to resemble the most popular microblogging service in some way, including:

• Yahoo Meme—Microblogging site, plus pictures, video, and following and reposting others’ posts. (Launched a few months ago, Portuguese only.)
• TweetNews—created by a Yahoo developer, this search engine resorts Yahoo news results based on their Twitter popularity.
• Yahoo’s new homepage—now with status updates
• Yahoo Mail—more status updates and socialy features

The list goes on. And on. Seriously: Yahoo Mojo, Important People and Sideline are the three newest projects, and all are Twitter-related, analyzing your tweets and others’.

Now, let’s pause here. Aside from the tools based directly on Twitter, do all these moves mean Yahoo is courting or competing with Twitter?

Yes and no. Yes because of scarcity (hello, Econ 101)—we all have a limited amount of time online, and in that time we generally have to choose between Yahoo and Twitter (or, you know, some other site). It’s hard to use them simultaneously, even if you do tile your windows.

But just because they’re looking to add more real-time social features to their products doesn’t mean that they’re taking on Twitter per se (except when it does, of course). It’s a good sign that Yahoo sees real time and social as two important directions the web is going today—woot for hopping on that clue train, eh?—and they’re trying to incorporate the features people want and expect into their products.

So good on Yahoo. But seriously, quit copying Twitter.

What do you think? Is Yahoo coveting Twitter’s traffic? Are they courting an acquisition? Or are they just part of the larger real-time social trend?

Google Gadgets Go Down Under

Google has given the good folks who use their Australian engine some social networking features that come with a gaggle of Google gadgets. Looks like the only way to get the social networking aspects of the gadgets is to be putting your shrimp on the barbie. Smart Company tells us

The new gadgets include the “Updates” feed, which is similar to those seen on the Facebook home page. Other gadgets include news.com.au, Biggest Brain, YouTube, Photos, Chess, Flood-It!, NY Times Crossword, To Do, Go Comics, Trivia, Timeline, and Tile Game.

Users outside of Australia can use the gadgets, but only Australians can use their social features. Regan also said in his post that the social features are completely optional.

The gadgets are for those who use the Google Australian iGoogle page. The post on Google’s official Australian blog has the screenshot below and explains

Your friends are able to see what you share or do in social gadgets through the gadgets themselves, or through a new feed of information called Updates, a way to see what your friends are doing on iGoogle without adding all the gadgets that they have. Updates can include everything from favourite YouTube videos, to recently shared photo albums, to movie plans for the upcoming weekend…the list goes on and on!

Holy gadgets Batman! Your friends can see your gadgets through your gadgets! Will Inspector Gadget be the mascot of this new service? Ok, that was over the top but it is a ridiculously slow news day outside of the FaceFeed deal so I guess we are all just going to have to live with it!

Yahoo: Pay No Attention to the 10 Year Search Deal: Look at What’s New on Delicious!

Not to be all Wizard-of-Oz on us, but Yahoo really doesn’t want us to pay attention to the man behind the curtain (Steve Ballmer). No, they want to focus us on their new SERP and their new Delicious search tools and fresh bookmarks.

Don’t you worry—don’t think for one moment that I, the paragon of journalistic integrity, could be distracted so easily from decrying Yahoo’s abdication of control over its search—ooh, shiny emailing and tweeting tools!

So Delicious does have some cool new stuff to show off—and maybe it’s not just a distraction ploy. Maybe it’s a ploy to remind us that Yahoo can still do cool new stuff.

Anyway, Delicious has a new search tool to help its users find bookmarks (theirs and others’) more easily. Yahoo says “with advanced timeline and tag filtering controls so that you can search within a given date range or filter the results by tag. We’ve also enhanced the search results page to display rich content including YouTube videos with inline playback, Flickr images, and Yelp local data when applicable.”

Delicious has also added a feature to highlight new and popular bookmarks—but not on the Delicious site. The Fresh Bookmarks tab on the homepage features up-and-coming bookmarks (gee, no other social site has ever done that )—the bookmarks that are most popular on Twitter (as opposed to the most popular bookmarks on Delicious, which are under the Popular Bookmarks tab).

On this new feature yesterday, the Delicious blog quotes Wired, who touted the predecessor app, TweetNews, as possibly “the best mashup we’ve ever seen.” Hopefully the Delicious version gets the same positive reception.

Finally, Delicious also added more social features to the add bookmark page. You can add recipients in the Send field—and get the option to email or even tweet bookmarks.

Delicious looks to be doing a good job of adapting to the most popular social site with the media today, instead of decrying Twitter as a poor man’s competitor.

What do you think? Will these new features be enough to keep Delicious users happy—and relying on Delicious? Or does this just push more users toward Twitter?

Google Reader: Now with More Social!

Over the last couple years, Google has pushed more and more social features in its apps. They’ve converted our contact lists into friend lists, they’ve added notes to shared items, they’ve even moved the conversation that normally takes place in the comments onto Google Reader itself. And now Google Reader is getting even more social with its latest additions: following your friends and “liking” stories.

Google Reader has long had a feature to subscribe to your friends’ shared stories. Now you can subscribe to just about anyone’s shared stories. Search for someone by name or enter their email address to follow their shared stories. Searching by name integrates the Google profile:

These stories are kept in a separate pane on the left-hand panel. This pane also tracks the people who are following your updates—whom you can block on an individual basis.

If you want to block everyone from seeing your shared stories, you can set access levels under your sharing settings:

And in a move that looks a heck of a lot like Facebook, Google Reader also add the “like” button to the bottom menu of its stories:

The Google Reader blog reminds us that all “likes” are public, as you see in the line below the attribution line.

So, what do you think of these new additions to Google Reader? Will you use these features?

Google Getting in on Real Estate

Real estate sites like Zillow and Trulia have been hard at work for the last few years, offering social features to house hunters and homeowners. And now real estate sites are getting more competition from a rather prominent Internet company: Google.

Yep, Google’s making a land grab with Google Maps, as SEL cleverly puts it. You can find real estate listings by entering the term “real estate” or bringing up the search options (the link to the right of the search button on Google Maps) and selecting Real Estate from the pull down menu. Type in a location and you get a map with results, the options to narrow your search in the left panel, and the first ten listings below that. (Also note the text ad at the bottom of the map.)

Naturally, Google also has listings for the individual properties. Aside from vital stats, however, the listings don’t offer much.

The feature has also launched in Australia and New Zealand. House Hunters International, anyone?

Hitwise reports on Google’s growth in this area:

Hitwise data reveal that last week, Google Maps sent 2% of its US traffic to websites in the Real Estate industry, making it the #19 downstream industry (among more than 160). Yahoo! Real Estate, Realtor.com and Trulia all accounted for a larger volume of traffic to real estate listings than did Google Maps.

These other real estate sites currently offer many more social features—property comparisons, values over time, etc. But since this is just the beginning for Google, I foresee plenty of growth in this area.

What do you think? Will Google work to make this product more full-featured, or is this just a side offering of Google Maps?

YouTube XL Coming to TV

YouTube is finally preparing to take on Hulu with premium content and better quality video from YouTube XL—preparing for a real big screen interface. You know, such as a television. Hulu is rather adamant about not going to television, so this could get to be a bit of a big deal.

Mashable’s Ben Parr reviews YouTube XL and says it looks pretty impressive:

what exactly does YouTube XL offer? First, the interface: everything is bigger and is of variable width. The menu is on the left hand side, with options for watching videos, searching for videos, and controlling specific settings. Once you have selected a video, you can watch it, expand it full screen (it looks great fully expanded on a big screen), and browse through related video playlists or create your own. YouTube XL also supports HD video, and from watching clips of the Detroit Red Wings vs. the Chicago Blackhawks at YouTube HQ, the quality stands up to its cable and satellite counterparts.

Parr says YouTube XL’s menu is more like a DVD than the typical YouTube menus—no scrolling, simpler navigation—appropriate for TVs. It also removes comments and other social features that don’t seem as fitting for televisions. Aside from video quality, the functionality is basically the same. It’s more like a new skin, Parr points out, than an entirely new entity.

Of course, since it is just the same old site, a lot of the content isn’t going to look good. However, YouTube has been making deals with professional content providers for a long time—including Disney, MGM, and Lionsgate in the last year.

Now, if only they could find a way to make money off all this. . . .

What do you think? Are you getting a browser on your television in the near future (with several gaming systems and newer televisions, that is), and are you looking forward to your favorite piano-playing cat on the big screen?

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