About a month ago Kevin Rose, from digg.com, announced a few features that we should be expecting. The most popular of which would be digg’s ability to determine the type of articles you are most interested in and suggest those articles to you.

Beating digg to the punch is Thoof - which is in an invite-only beta mode. Similar to digg, users post articles with the url, title, and a description. After submitting the article it is then placed in a pool, which Thoof will use to compare against users that may be interested in that article’s content.

CEO Ian Clarke says Thoof knows what you’re going to like, “from the first moment you visit the site.” There’s a lot of information feeding into the system. For example, it takes all the information your browser passes to it, such as your platform and IP (which it uses to take a stab at your physical location), and correlates that with items that other similar people have clicked on. Of course, it also records what you click on, but it doesn’t yet develop a profile based on your Web history outside of Thoof or from other clues you leave on your system.

• 0 Comments

Powerset.com has been keeping it’s search product under lock-and-key for a long time now. Michael Arrington from Techcrunch got to see a demo and was pretty impressed with the results.

Powerset recently released a sample query that shows great promise. The query “politicians who died in office” returns some amazing results - results for politicians who actually died in office. If you try a search like this on Google or Yahoo - well, you’d be pretty disappointed in what was returned. Powerset even recognized that governors are politicans.

This query shows a little bit of the beauty behind Powerset but I am curious as to how much physical manipulation was required to actually get the engine to return these results. Was this automatic - straight from the spider and parsing engine?

Powerset will be releasing a new query each week on their blog.

• 2 Comments

eBay’s Developer’s Conference kicks off today and right from the start they are announcing a lot of great products. First, the company announced a more developer friendly shopping web service, that provides an API for bidding and a way to notify users about an auction via automated alerts.

Probably the most highly anticipated announcement of the conference is the eBay San Dimas project - eBay’s desktop application. The application is built on Adobe’s AIR platform and will provide a more fluid interface for interacting with auctions. I’m not sure if this application will make it’s home on a large share of the eBay user base - but I can definitely see it becoming a welcome tool in the power-seller’s toolbox.

Alan Lewis, the program manager for Sam Dimas at eBay, announced during the morning keynote that the beta program is open. People who attend the developer conference will get preferred access to the program, Lewis said.

• 0 Comments

Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is the official name of the Apollo cross-platform runtime environment that has been receiving so much press as of late. Adobe AIR will allow developers to create cross-platform desktop rich internet applications using the technologies they already leverage: HTML, Javascript, and Flash.

Creating AIR applications using HTML was a feature that was originally planned during Apollo’s initial announcement but dropped off the radar for a short period of time. With the new name announcement, Adobe has confirmed developers will be able to use HTML to develop their applications using the AIR runtime.

Adobe AIR will officially be released sometime later this year but you can download the beta SDK at the Adobe website.

• 1 Comment

Ask.com, the fourth most popular search engine, has recently increased their efforts to gain a more controlling portion of the search market share. Last night, they launched a brand new interface that features a lot of improvement based on their AskX test interface.

The new interface takes a couple of clues from Google’s interface. There’s a lot of whitespace although you can select a variety of skins which will change the background image of the page (in the future you’ll be able to upload your own). Google recently added this feature to their own iGoogle start page feature.

When Google launched it’s Universal Search last month, the competitors took note. Ask’s search results now feature a 3-column structure. The first column features the search box as well as various queries to further narrow or expand your search. The middle column is your typical search results with sponsored ads controlling the top three positions. Finally, the third column features results from various other types of search, such as images, blogs, and video.

Many search engines are moving to this “all for one” search approach - but is it really what the user’s want? To be perfectly honest, if I didn’t know the changes beforehand I would have simply ignored the search filters as well as the third column simply due to ad blindness (my browsing skills are trained to just ignore items formatted/positioned like this).

Is this enough for Ask.com to pull into the top 3? I doubt it. We’re people of habit and right now - our habit is Google.

• 0 Comments