I’m sure the dream of most of the founders of Web 2.0 companies today is being bought by Google; famously Google acquired YouTube late last year for $1.65bn. From the other perspective, the acquisition of startups can allow Google to move into new areas and develop current activities. I thought it would be interesting to write a post with a couple of my acquisition targets, if I were entrusted with the Goog’s billions.

FeedBurner
If I were Google, FeedBurner would be pretty high on my list of priorities. FeedBurner is a free feed analytics tool, which GizBuzz and most other ‘serious’ blogs use to see how many people are subscribing to their RSS feed and reading their content. FeedBurner works by reprocessing your feed, and if it has enough subscribers, it gives you the option to sell adverts in your feed, through the FeedBurner Advertising Network (FAN). So, whilst initially FeedBurner appears that it is a tool for publishers, in reality it is an advertising company. What does that remind you of? Google.

Google looks like a search company, but is actually an advertising company. As such, it is always looking for more places to stick its adverts, and more ways to help advertisers measure how those ads are performing. FeedBurner is a perfect fit, as it has access to far more inventory in RSS feeds than Google has. Google could simply incorporate FAN into their Adsense programme, and keep FeedBurner as a tool for blog publishers to manage and measure their feeds. I recently wrote why I think negotiations may be happening already between FB and Google.

Pluggd
Pluggd is a podcast directory. However, that’s not what the exciting part of their technology is. They recently released a search technology for podcasts called HearHere (demo and information), which allows you to select a podcast episode and enter a search term. It will then produce a heatmap showing where that term is being spoken about on the podcast, which enables you to go straight to the relevant part of a podcast, finding the relevant information quickly.

An increasing trend around at the moment is that of podcasting, and a vast amount of information is being published in audio files to the internet. Google prides itself on indexing and searching information on the internet. At the moment, however, Google can’t see inside those audio files. This will become more important going forward, and it is a problem that must be solved. Pluggd’s technology goes a long way towards solving it, and does it in an innovative and useful way. It would be a great fit as Google currently has no (published) technology in this area. I also guess that Pluggd would be fairly cheap, as it hasn’t got much of a network effect going and isn’t even funded yet.

RSS is one of the cylinders firing the juggernaut that is Web 2.0. For the uninitiated, RSS is the technology which allows you to take a feed of news from a given website and display it in another place, usually in an ‘aggregator’ which displays a number of feeds in the same place. RSS has always been intended for delivering pieces of information which belong in chronological order, like blog posts, twitters or the latest items on the Digg homepage. It does an exceptionally good job of that, ensuring that I always have the latest posts sitting in my Google Reader account, and that I don’t miss anything I don’t want to.

The problem is, not all data on the web that we might want to syndicate conforms to the template which RSS is designed for of chronological snippets of information. For example, RSS would be inadequate for delivering a music chart to me. In a music chart, it is not the chronology which determines the order, but the popularity of a given song. RSS is therefore not the right tool for the job, as when delivered via RSS the information would make little sense, with a series of songs appearing in my aggregator in a seemingly random order.

This wouldn’t matter if snippets of information in chronological order were the only things which it would be useful to syndicate. I think it would be quite nice to input a feed URL into Google Reader and be able to see, at any time, music charts. Or maybe the new Digg Top Ten list (look on the right sidebar), which isn’t based on the chronology of the stories but on the activity surrounding them. Maybe RSS isn’t the best format to syndicate conventional web search results in. I genuinely think it would be useful to be able to syndicate things like this, and this is currently not possible to any meaningful extent under the current situation where the only technologies around are RSS and Atom.

Before I continue, I think its probably a good idea to say that I am by no means an expert in syndication technologies (and neither am I a developer of any quality), and so if I’ve made a technical mistake feel free to set me straight. Nevertheless, I’m going to get ideas above my station, and tentatively suggest what the answer might be.

It would seem impractical to have a multitude of new syndication standards, with one for charts, one for web searches and to have to develop a new standard everytime someone thinks of a different type of information they would like to push around. Instead, a standard XML document could be used, with a common set of tags such as <title> and <description>, and the ability to invent new ones (as one can currently with the RSS namespace idea). What would be new is that instructions on how the information contained in the tags should be used should be contained within the XML document itself, obviously in a machine readable format. This would be far more flexible, and enable all sorts of uses that I haven’t thought of.

This is just an idea that I’m putting out there; perhaps its not possible, or maybe it isn’t necessary. Someone might have even done it already. It just seems to me like a logical next step if we want to make what is already an incredibly useful idea even more useful. Thoughts?

As promised yesterday, I want to take a look at Twitter, a fairly new web application from Evan William’s Obvious company (who also developed podcasting directory Odeo).

The essential concept of Twitter has been called ‘nano blogging’; it allows you to answer the question ‘what are you doing’ in 140 characters or less and recieve updates on how your friends answered that question via the web interface, instant messenger (IM) or your phone. It acts as a constant status message, and unashamedly advocates the ‘what I had for breakfast this morning’ style of blogging, which is so vehemently shunned by the tech blogosphere normally.

When Twitter first emerged some months ago, I dismissed it out of hand as a stupid idea which would never get traction. I doubted that anyone would choose to use an inferior blog interface to publish updates of incredibly restricted length, making use of a basic friends system, when depending on their needs they already had the choice of anything from their own installation of WordPress, to Vox, to Facebook and MySpace.

I was obviously proved wrong. What I failed to take into account were two factors. Firstly, the ease at which one can recieve updates. If I chose to, I could have Twitter updates follow me everywhere I go, and every time one of my friends posts an update, I have a reminder to use the service. So all I need is one friend on Twitter who is posting regularly, and I have an incentive to respond, either directly to their ‘tweet’ or by posting one of my own. I do not have to remember to visit the Twitter site every so often to check for updates – they come to me. It is surprisingly addictive.

Secondly, Twitter fills an important niche for many of the tech bloggers among whom it is so popular. Take Robert Scoble. He is a ‘web celeb’, whose blog is essential reading for many wanting to understand new media and Web 2.0. He posts many times a day, usually with his thoughts on a particular trend, person, blog or product, often with personal anecdotes to support his arguments. Through these glimpses into Scoble’s life, people have come to be very interested in what he is up to, but his blog does not exist to tell his readers what he had for breakfast this morning. That’s a good thing, because most of his blog readers really couldn’t care less, but there are many who could care, and for them Twitter provides this. In return, Scoble gets the ego trip of having 100s (about 700 at time of writing) of followers who do care what he had for breakfast. He must be doing something right!

Expect Twitter to carry on growing. Twitter will never reach beyond the tech crowd. I tried to explain what it was and why it was addictive to a non-techy friend only yesterday, to be met only by scorn. However, the ‘early adopter’ market will continue to grow, and so Twitter stands every chance of remaining healthy (at least in terms of user numbers) in the coming years.

IMified, an instant messenging bot which allows you to easily control various different third party web services through their APIs (see explainer post) has risen to popularity over the past couple of weeks.

It’s easy to see why – with IMified you can currently post to WordPress, Blogger, Livejournal, Moveable Type and Typepad blog, keep yourself organised with Remember the Milk, Google or 30boxes calendar and Backpack and collaborate with Basecamp. That’s on top of their own Todo, Reminder and Notes apps, all of which work very nicely.

The three services I’m making use of are IMified’s own Reminders and Todo list functions, as well as using it to post to my personal blog. At first I was a little sceptical as to whether it was a gimmick or a genuinely useful product, but I have actually found it the latter.

IMified represents one of the good things about Web 2.0 – open architecture. It would be brilliant if this could be expanded so that over my IM I can have notifications of new email, updates on selected feeds and maybe even TV listings.

I’m particularly keen to see IMified and Twitter integration. A post about Twitter, a ‘nano blogging’ service which allows you to answer the question ‘what are you doing?’ in 140 characters or less and recieve updates from your friends via IM, text message and web interface, is coming soon on Gizbuzz. Despite the fact that Twitter already uses IM, it would be nice to be able to use it from one bot which does everything.

Over time I would hope that more and more services would be added. At the moment, services must be added by the IMified team, and so perhaps they should look at developing an IMified API that would allow third party developers to integrate their systems into IMified without any help from IMified.

IMified is a service I’m really excited about, and I think it could do extremely well in time. On a sidenote, as far as I can tell, IMified is a side project for its developers and unfunded. I think it’s an excellent example of how far a good idea can come without needing to enter the private equity game.

Stock markets slipped across the world today, probably fuelled by a drop in China’s Stock Exchange. The Nasdaq (the NY technology SE) has slipped just as all the others have, raising the possible question of a Web 2.0 bubble burst, brought about by other economic factors. Since the question ‘is this a bubble?’ is asked (or answered) by someone just about everyday in the tech blogosphere, I thought this would be a good opportunity to take a look at what might happen from here, using some common-sense economics.

In order to work out if we will see a bubble, we need to take a guess at what this stock slip means for the rest of the economy; this is either a correction of stock prices which were becoming slightly over-optimistic, or it is a more sinister economic downturn.

In the first case, there will be little or no impact on Web 2.0, because private equity is over-funded at the moment anyway, and they want to spend that money. If other areas of the economy, such as advertising and consumer spending, are doing well, then there is no reason why web companies shouldn’t continue to succeed. Therefore venture capital will continue to be available, and companies will continue to succeed.

However, in the other option, there could be a significant impact. Crucially, if the advertising market is hit (which can be one of the first cuts companies make if they are short of cash) then monetisation for much of the Web 2.0 sector becomes much harder. Companies will also have less cash to make acquisitions. Therefore, in a situation when it is difficult for Web 2.0 companies to succeed, the good venture exits (such as that seen with YouTube and Skype) will not happen because a) the companies won’t be making any money, and will have little prospect of making money, and b) no-one will be able to afford them anyway. In this situation, we could see a ‘bubble burst’, although it will be far less dramatic than that seen in 2000.

We’ll have to watch over the coming weeks to see what happens; I’m fairly hopeful that this is just a recognition by the markets that they were getting a little too excited. Given that the economy is inevitably cyclical, it seems much healthier to have mini booms and mini busts with sustained net growth than enormously successful booms and devastating busts.

Google Finance is the best place to get stock prices for the US stock exchanges. Unfortunately they don’t display the FTSE (the UK index), so you have to use Yahoo Finance for that.

I was just skimming through my feeds when I noticed that a YouTube player popped up in Google Reader. That, as far as I know, didn’t happen yesterday, and so it appears to be a new feature:

As far as I know, Google is the first company to add this to their feedreader, and it certainly makes a useful feature. Google Reader really is innovating in a way which we are not seeing with the other feed readers (such as with their ‘trends’ feature), and whilst the display of embeds is hardly revolutionary, it is overcoming a major usability barrier to the widespread adoption of RSS feed reading. It is also a step towards integration of YouTube with existing Google products (it may be that Google has added the ability to view other embeds as well, however; I haven’t checked).

It is somewhat ironic that Peter instructs in the post pictured above to ‘click through for a YouTube embed’. I’m pleased that that is no longer necessary!

Google has outlined some of its future strategy regarding Google Video and YouTube, in a blog post by Salar Kamangar, VP of Project Management. It was always going to be interesting to see what Google did after its acquisition of YouTube given the close similarity of YouTube to its pre-existing Google Video.

They appear to have thought what the two products are for, to work out what to do with them in the future. They came up with this:

Google’s strength — and its history — is grounded in search and in innovating technologies to make more information more available and accessible. YouTube, meanwhile, excels at being a leading content destination with a dynamic community of users who create, watch and share videos worldwide.

What lays behind that statement is a recognition that YouTube is supported by an enormous network of users who enjoy using its social networking features. Google Video does not have such a network. It therefore makes sense to find a role for YouTube which leverages this network, and a role for Google Video which moves away from attempting to build such a network and into an entirely different sphere.

It seems that Google are doing this by moving Google Video back to its routes as a way to search for video content (initially Google Video was a way to search within video content, although it did not host the videos, and you weren’t able to watch them). Kamangar writes:

Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world’s online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.

To that end, Google is including YouTube videos in results for Google Video from today.

So, where could they move Google Video to in the future in order to further support their vision? One idea might be to buy Pluggd, the podcast directory and now search engine. Pluggd has a great technology which allows you to search for terms inside audio files, and then see where they occur the most on a heat map. Whilst this currently works only for audio files, I imagine it would be trivial to make it work with video codecs. It will be interesting to see whether Google is willing to include videos hosted on rivals to YouTube on Google Video; on the one hand, it would make GVideo infinitely more useful, but on the other could move significant traffic to competitors. Definitely a conflict of interest there, and it will be a test of Google’s “evilness” to see what their decision is.

All in all, as rich media becomes more and more important on the web, it is clear that Google is aware of the need to make sure that it is in a good position to become dominant in the new area as well as the old, and the strategy they announced today looks like it will go a long way to achieving that.

The Guardian Unlimited reports that the BBC is in talks with Google over plans to distribute BBC content over Google Video initially, followed possibly by YouTube, which will be announced on Wednesday by Eric Schmidt. This is in line with many similar deals Google has struck, such as with ITN and Channel 4. However, there are a couple of interesting points raised in this case.

Firstly, it looks as though the type of content being made available may be different from that seen in most of the other deals; large broadcasting companies tend to use Google Video and YouTube primarily to promote their main distribution channel, rather than using it mainly as a way to make money. This has changed to some extent with the advent last year of the US Google Video which allows producers to sell their content, but that is currently not possible in the UK. The Guardian suggests that the BBC is looking into a revenue sharing deal with advertising shown alongside their content; if the BBC were to make full, primetime programmes available on Google’s sites funded purely from advertising that would be unprecedented.

This is important because it gives the BBC a chance to really monetise its content directly. At present some excellent content which would appeal to international audiences (particularly the US market) is simply not available outside the UK, and thus the BBC isn’t making any money on it. This money is important because it supplements the license fee paid by TV watching Brits. This situation would change if the BBC, at the touch of a button could upload its content which hadn’t been bought by a US network to Google Video and YouTube and watch the advertising money roll in from US viewers who would otherwise have been unable to watch.

For little additional expenditure, this deal will allow the BBC to monetise content it owns but has not been able to use to generate money before. This is surely a good thing, particularly given the lower than hoped for license fee increase this week.

Note from Huw – This is a guest post by my brother, Jack Leslie, edited by me.

Spore is a revolutionary new game, from the designer and creator of Sims, Will Wright, in which you essentially create your own character, evelove it and attempt to make it successful in the universe. It recieved much attention at the (now discontinued) E3 gaming conference last year, and its launch in the second half of 2007 is expected to be an enormous success. The game is built upon a series of stages in which you advance your creature. You start out as a single celled life form in the tide pool phase, in which you control your creature and eat things to evolve. This stage is quite similar to Pac-man, as it is in 2D. Some creatures can hurt you and others can be consumed. The evolution is the amazing thing about Spore; you can even change the bone and muscle structure. You can add parts like spikes and different forms of feeding e.g. filter feeding.

More after the jump.

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I recently signed a petition on the 10 Downing Street website asking for the legalisation of making a private copy of a copyrighted work for personal use. This already happens anyway, and so it makes sense for this right to be enshrined in law.

I got an email from Downing Street today to notify me that the Government had responded to the petition, and I was pleased to see that they were in favour (my emphasis):

As you may be aware, in December 2005 the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced that there would be a review of the intellectual property framework in the UK, led by Andrew Gowers.

The findings of this review have now been published and recommend the introduction of a private copying exception for the purposes of format shifting. This would allow individuals to copy music which they have legally bought on compact disc onto an MP3 player without infringing copyright.

The Government welcomes this recommendation and is currently considering how such an exception should be created in UK law.

From this statement, it would seem that the ‘format shifting’ exception extends beyond copying from music from CDs to MP3s to copying music from, for example, Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM to MP3. It being legal to format shift songs from a DRM format to a standard format would, for example, render any DRM cracking tool perfectly legal in the UK, and thus it would not be possible to order it to be taken down.

If my supposition is correct, and this law does come into effect in such a way as DRM cracking is legal, we could end up with an arms race of far greater proportions than seen before between the content owners who wish to be protected by DRM and those who don’t wish to have their content restricted. Given that all DRM is inevitably susceptible to cracking, I have little doubt that ultimately DRM would become unworkable if this law were passed.

That would make for an interesting situation.