Yesterday we showed you the first Microsoft Bing commercial. We didn’t like it and neither did you. Today we have two new commercials which are, better. Yes, we have to admit, this is starting to look like something.
Could it be that Microsoft has a new “First announce shit, follow up with improved shit” strategy? They show us something dreadful which every blogger jumps on and then follow up with something which is better. We, the bloggers, users and Twitters, have to admit then that the second version is better. Result: more PR and readers are left with the memory of the second, more positive, review.
In these new ads Microsoft focuses on the downside of keyword based search. It limits the output. This isn’t necessarily a Google problem though: all search results improve radically when you use more than two keywords in your search. Still, these ads look more like they could be part of a campaign with a philosophy behind it than the cut and paste, no character, stock video mash-up we saw yesterday.
Written on 29th April 2009
1 COMMENT Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Friendfeed’s co-founder Bret Taylor has officially launched the new Friendfeed at Friendfeed.com. There’s been a fair bit of controversy over the new release, particular on the UI front, but overall the feedback has been positive.
So what’s new?
A fair bit actually. Most significantly, the new UI and a focus on real time notifications. Friendfeed have also introduced more complex search features and the ability to save these providing an awesome way to filter content shared.
Friendfeed have also provided a space to enter profile info into your Friendfeed profile, an enhanced reshare option, keyboard shortcuts and more.
Whilst the new Friendfeed has been available to all via beta.friendfeed.com, ‘Friendfeed by Email‘ is a brand new feature released just today.
Taylor explains:
Post new items to your FriendFeed by emailing share@friendfeed.com. You can post to groups by emailing groupname@friendfeed.com, and you can direct message your friends by emailingusername@friendfeed.com.
You can also choose to get your FriendFeed posts and comments delivered directly to your email inbox (see your email preferences), and even comment on entries simply by replying to messages.
While we’ve been testing this new feature, we’ve used FriendFeed groups to completely replace all our internal mailing lists. And we’ve loved it! It’s been easier to share screenshots and links, and we’ve loved being able to post and respond to all entries from the comfort of our email inboxes. Try it for yourself instead of a mailing list.
There’s bound to be plenty of neat new features even we have yet to discover so for now, we recommend visiting Friendfeed.com to check it out and read the new FAQ’s.
Written on 20th April 2009
0 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Google have just introduced two new ‘Google Labs’ apps to the public. The first, ‘Similar Images‘ which does exactly as it says on the tin, finds images similar to any image you’ve selected. Enter something you’re looking for then click ’similar images’ under the image you’d like to find similar images for. Currently, there doesn’t seem to be a way to upload images from your desktop – hopefully a ‘coming soon’ feature.
Here’s a video tour of similar images if you’re interested:
The second is Google News Timeline, an extension to Google News, where you can enter a search term and view results from Google News, magazines, wikipedia and multiple other sources neatly by on a interactive timeline. You can further customize sources by selecting exactly where you want to Google News Timeline to grab content from and where not to. (more…)
Written on 20th April 2009
7 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
The guys over at IDEO Labs were fortunate enough to grab a tour of WATG’s Wimberly Labs and EON Reality’s new immersive 3D room.
The iCube is described as being:
“comprised of three white walls and a floor, all about 10′ x 10′ in size. Onto each surface is projected a high-resolution, stereoscopic image. A viewer stands in the room wearing polarized 3D glasses — like you might use in a 3D movie — with small markers that stick out a bit from the frames.
The markers are illuminated by IR LED floodlights located on the perimeter of the room, and IR-sensitive cameras use those positions to determine the precise location of each eye within the room. From those positions, stereo images for each projector are calculated and rendered on the fly, and the result is absolutely amazing.”
A video demo can be found below but I highly recommend you watch the HD version here.
Written on 11th March 2009
10 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Last week Facebook announced their latest round of updates, bearing remarkable similarity to some of Twitter and Friendfeed’s trademark features.
The most notable change, for the average user at least, will be changes to the homepage. From real-time stream updates, to the publisher and enhanced filtering options – all added to supposedly enhance sharing between your friends.
We reviewed all the updates last week and Facebook provides a decent introduction to them in a post today. You can also a take a screenshot tour of the updates here. Come back and let us know your thoughts on the new feature, it will be interesting to see what everyone’s reactions are.
Written on 4th March 2009
37 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Facebook have made two important announcements today, both of which which show a step towards the ‘follower’ based services we have come to know.
Zuckerberg has also posted a lengthy announcement on the Facebook blog, with particular focus on Facebook’s current interpretation of the social graph and their vision for the Facebook stream.
New: No more limit on 5000 friends.
Fan ‘pages’ appear to be gone whilst Facebook profiles have now been revamped to act much more like regular Facebook profiles. This has been launched particularly for celebrities, brands and high profile individuals, with launch partners including U2, Obama, Oprah Winfrey, CNN and 24 more.
Profiles in general can now have unlimited friends and ‘followers’. Privacy settings are now available so you still have your intimate friends, but maintain a following on Facebook too.
New: Real Time Homepage.
Prior to today Facebook profiles were updated frequently but not in real time. On the new homepage, this will be different, your stream will show real time updates and you’ll also see a highlights widget on the right of the page featuring news from the friends you interact with the most.
The new homepage also highlights a new priority to “lists” on Facebook with your lists places to the left of the homepage – giving you far greater control over who’s news your reading.
New: Publisher
Publisher is a new sharing tool to share content (photos, notes) onto your wall which will then appear on your Friends streams.
YES, Friendfeed users, one look at the shot to the right and you should see the similarity. Almost exactly like Friendfeed’s sharing tool - undoubtedly a bookmarklet will be on the ways soon.
The Similarities
To those of who who use both Twitter and Friendfeed, it should be very apparent how similar Facebook has become, grabbing trademark features from both services.
What will be interesting to see is whether features such as Twitter’s ‘followers’, Friendfeed’s real time feeds, ‘likes’ and lists combined with Facebook’s “real friend” mentality will catch on. This is an exciting time for the WWW.
WordPress 2.7 is still scheduled for release in November and it is going to be huge! Here are some of the planned features for this version:
Dashboard Redesign, Drag and Drop arrangements, Sticky posts, Single Insert Media button, Quick Inline Editing, Comments API, Dashboard comment replies, Threaded comments, Keyboard Shortcuts, Automatic plugin/theme install in browser and more!
in anticipation of this huge update the people at Wordpress have published a trailer highlighting some of the cooler features:
“Check out some of the upcoming new features and design changes in this sneak preview video, including how to customize your dashboard, the new comment reply feature, the new navigation system, and the customizable posting screen.”
On the Internet you can find many people who are totally passionate about certain things. This time we will have a look on t-shirts, they are great Internet products, because you can show the whole print online, they are cheap, everyone needs a few new ones each year and has a pretty good idea of what to expect from a t-shirt, and in contrast with music or films it is impossible to download them. A year ago I got the idea that it would be cool if there was a blog that would keep me updated about the latest t-shirts. Of course after some searching I found out that there where at least 65 of those blogs out there. Nevertheless I thought I could add something extra, so I started with Shirtlog and it hasn’t disappointed me yet.
Besides shops and blogs there are also sites who do something more experimental and innovative on bringing the best t-shirts to the mass. I had an e-mail interview with two interesting sites that mix old and new ideas about blogging, community voting, and user generated content. (more…)
No search engine since Google has been able to captivate me for more than a few seconds. But this morning I found one that I sorta kinda maybe liked. A bit. And that is huge news!
The service I am talking about is ManagedQ, a Palo Alto based startup company founded by engineers from Stanford. ManagedQ is officially in ‘deep stealth’ right now but apparently not THAT deep because anyone can use it.
ManagedQ is not a Search Engine, or so they say. They aspire to become the first Search Application. The difference? Well according to their blog “A Search Application is dedicated to helping you manage your entire Search Experience: from the keyword, to results, to previewing, to refinement and repeating with a new query”.
Their story is that regular search engines are not helping you much. It is simply a matter of entering a search query and getting a bunch of results spat back without any form of interaction beyond that. This makes the Search engines of today little more than front-ends to large databases. ManagedQ wants to guide you through the whole search process by showing you a large screenshot of every result from your query and then create an ‘Executive Summary’ of each link they found. Then they shows you Persons, Places and Things that are related to your query. By hovering over menus you see new results clustered around your query. This works amazingly well.
Traditionally you do a search and then click through to the results pages, eyeballing each one for the information you want. If the results aren’t good enough, you’ll go back and refine your query, doing a complete new search.
With ManagedQ, you’ve suddenly got an interactive refinement stage that lets you poke and prod the result set and easily get a lot more information. You can instantly narrow your search by ignoring bad results that don’t contain terms you want, without throwing away all the others that could be interesting. You can get a quick feel for whether the results are worth exploring by throwing in good indicator terms that are likely to be in the ones you want.
So will I trade in Google for ManagedQ? Probably not. But I might use it to visualize connections between people, things and places connected to stuff.
UPDATE: I got a message from the management team at ManagedQ with some comments:
The reason we call ourselves a Search Application is because we actually run on top of Google. So you’re still getting the exact same Google results except with a radically improved Search Experience. So for all the Google users out there, you’re not going to suffer any reduction in Search quality, only a drastic improvement in the Search process.
Additionally, the back-end is modular so we can connect it to Yahoo, Powerset, enterprise search engines, or any combination of the above.
We know we’re still brand new to the game, and Rome wasn’t built in a day. But we are constantly improving ManagedQ and with the help of the community we’re going to have the best Search Product.
With some time Boris, we hope to win over all of your Searches. But for today, thank you for searching with ManagedQ.
Written on 4th June 2009
16 COMMENTS 
Written on 29th April 2009
Publisher is a new sharing tool to share content (photos, notes) onto your wall which will then appear on your Friends streams.
Written on 25th June 2008
On the Internet you can find many people who are totally passionate about certain things. This time we will have a look on t-shirts, they are great Internet products, because you can show the whole print online, they are cheap, everyone needs a few new ones each year and has a pretty good idea of what to expect from a t-shirt, and in contrast with music or films it is impossible to download them. A year ago I got the idea that it would be cool if there was a blog that would keep me updated about the latest t-shirts. Of course after some searching I found out that there where at least 
No search engine since Google has been able to captivate me for more than a few seconds. But this morning I found one that I sorta kinda maybe liked. A bit. And that is huge news! 
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
