(* Source: Jason Kincaid *)

Jason says...

Snackfeed, a video recommendation site that tries to aggregate the web’s hottest videos, has made impressive progress since its launch last fall. We were first introduced to the site at the DreamIt Ventures (a startup incubator similar to Y Combinator and TechStars) first funding day, and it held its private launch three weeks later. Since then the site has seen impressive growth, with a reported 150,000 unique visitors in November. Snackfeed is currently in private “b’alpha” but TechCrunch readers can grab one of 1000 invites by visiting this site and entering the code “snacktastic”.

The site presents videos in a basic feed that is populated with videos shared by your friends, your favorite shows (which you can sign up for during the registration process), and clips that are currently trending in blog posts, Twitter feeds, and other places across the web. Users can also follow eachother using a Twitter-like follow system.

Snackfeed’s Jason Laan says that while the company initially concentrated on an extensive recommendation engine that segmented viewers into personalized channels, it found that most people were primarily interested in watching the web’s most popular clips. The site now serves these first, and then tries to fill in “the gaps” with recommendations based on the user’s favorite blogs, recently watched Hulu and YouTube clips, and favorite topics. The site’s homepage also offers a listing of the web’s current most popular videos to non-members, and acts as a sort of Hype Machine for video. Laan says that the site’s rapid growth can be largely attributed to an aggressive marketing campaign on Twitter and other social sites.

There are a few other players in this space, including ffwd (covered here), which is focused on created a powerful recommendation algorithm that allows users to “channel surf” across the web.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Jim Nail *)

At the October 29 ARF Transforming Research conference, there was a strong theme that market researchers should weave interesting stories about how consumers interact with brands rather than present reams of data to induce a Powerpoint coma. But storytelling risks creating a fiction that loses touch with the carefully gathered facts in our research. Perhaps the better way to think about it is tailoring...

I've been meaning to write this entry for a while then this weekend a program on NPR's "Speaking of Faith", spurred me to do it. A cancer doctor spoke of her evolution from speaking with patients about the facts of their disease to listening to their life stories and how the cancer has affected them. She eventually followed this into a psychotherapy practice.

What does this have to do with the market research industry? One line in the interview really caught my ear when she said that the facts of the disease don't mean anything about the person and their struggle. Their stories held greater truth about the person than what stage the disease was at, how tumors grew or shrank, what the various tests tracked, etc

Isn't this the same with market research, especially when we are trying to understand concepts like brand engagement? The facts - the demos, market share, even time spent with a medium or a web site - don't really say anything about the nature of engagement. For that we need a different level of understanding, one that is more qualitative, one that looks not just at the interaction between the brand and the person, but broadens the view of that interaction in the context of the person's life.

That's the power of ethnography. And that is the kind of story that social media analysis at its best delivers.

The challenge for market researchers is to prevent the "story" from crossing the line into fiction. While stories need to put data in the background and bring the narrative to the fore, they must remain true to that data. To be storytellers, researchers must leave the safety and security of the survey tabulation and create a three dimensional being.

But perhaps storytelling isn't the right way to think about it. After all, Homer was free to create characters like Hector and Achilles, whether they existed or not because his concern was to communicate his ideals of courage, loyalty, patriotism, etc. He could shape his characters to make his point.

Researchers, on the other hand, must first draw the characters, then figure out the "point": the person's motivations, the relationship with the brand, the likely behavior.

So perhaps we should think of the evolution of research more like being a tailor. We have a set of measures -- waist, chest, sleeve length, inseam -- and we must now make a suit that fits the person. If we deviate too far from the measures, the suit won't fit. But if we stick to the measures and carefully stitch them together, the end result is something far more compelling than the numbers alone would suggest!

Posted by brian tiong at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Marketing Charts *)

The internet has surpassed all other media except TV as Americans’ main source for national and international news and now rivals TV as the top news outlet for young people, according to research from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

Some 40% of Americans say they currently get most of their news about national and international issues from the internet, up from just 24% in September 2007, the study finds. For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%). Television continues to be cited most frequently as a main source for national and international news, at 70%.

For people under age 30, the internet is now tied with TV as the main source of national and international news. Nearly six-in-ten young Americans (59%) say they get most of their national and international news online, while an identical percentage cites television. In September 2007, twice as many young people said they relied mostly on television for news than mentioned the internet (68% vs. 34%).

The percentage of people younger than 30 citing television as a main news source has declined from 68% in September 2007 to 59% currently. This mirrors a trend seen earlier this year in campaign news consumption, Pew said.

Regarding TV channel selection, the study finds there has been little change in the individual TV news outlets that people rely on for national and international news. Nearly a quarter of the public (23%) says they get most of their news from CNN, while 17% cite Fox News; smaller shares mention other cable and broadcast outlets.

Top News Stories of 2008

While the 2008 presidential campaign attracted high levels of public attention, the economy was the top story of the year in terms of news interest, according to data from Pew’s Weekly News Interest Index. In late September, as the nation’s financial crisis deepened, 70% said they were following news about the economy very closely. This attention ranks among the highest levels of news interest for any story in the past two decades.

News about gas prices - both rising and falling - also attracted considerable public attention. In early June, two-thirds of Americans (66%) said they were tracking news about the rising price of gasoline very closely.  The falling price of gas drew broad interest as well (53% followed it very closely in October).

The congressional debate over legislation to stabilize financial markets also drew extensive interest. In early October, just after President Bush signed the financial rescue measure, 62% followed this story very closely.

Interest in election news remained at historically high levels throughout the lengthy campaign. Interest in the general election peaked in mid-October (at 61%), but approached that level at other points in the campaign. Public interest in the primary campaigns also was higher than during previous primary contests. In mid-February, 44% said they were following news about the candidates for the presidential election very closely.

The war in Iraq was not among this year’s 15 most closely followed news stories, Pew reports. In mid-July, a third of Americans (33%) said they were following news about the current situation and events in Iraq, the highest percentage measured this year. In 2007, interest in news about the war reached 40% in early January, just before President Bush announced his troop surge; the war in Iraq was the sixth-ranked story last year.

In Pew’s final Weekly News Interest Index for 2008, conducted Dec. 15-21, nearly four-in-ten Americans (37%) say they followed news about the Bush administration’s plan to provide emergency loans to US automakers. That is in line with previous measures of public interest in the debate over whether to aid the struggling automakers.

During the same period, three-in-ten (30%) paid very close attention to news about Wall Street investor Bernard Madoff, who allegedly cheated people out of billions of dollars. Nearly as many (28%) tracked news about an Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at President Bush very closely, and 25% said they followed news about slumping retail sales during the holiday season very closely.

Posted by brian tiong at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jason says...

After my first few weeks on Twitter I quickly came to realize that most people are not nearly as interesting as they think they are - my Twitter feed was constantly inundated with tweets describing such mundane topics as my friends’ favorite day of the week and what they had for breakfast. But within this apparent pool of mediocrity I found a few gems - Twitter users who managed to entertain me on a regular basis, and have kept me addicted to my Twhirl client for months on end. Now the time has come to bestow these great Tweeters with the honors they truly deserve.

The Shorty Awards, currently the top trending topic on search.twitter.com, is setting out to reward Twitter’s best and brightest with their own awards show. The contest is meant to identify the best Twitter users in over twenty predefined categories ranging from Business to Food, as well as any number of user-submitted custom categories (the site will weed out the ones that don’t get enough participation).

Posted by brian tiong at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Robin Wauters *)

Robin says...

Redanyway is a young startup out of India that aims to provide an alternate way to manage your ‘centralized me’ where your personal website or blog is your profile page outside of any walled gardens. The founders dubbed the application a ‘distributed social network’, but I look at it more like MyBlogLog on steroids, since it’s basically a way to get to know and interact more with your readers.

Signing up is invitation-only for now, but we’ve got some invite codes for the first 1000 TechCrunch readers that register for beta testing the application. You don’t need to comment on this post to get an invite, simply use ‘techcrunch’ upon registering or click here for a shortcut.

The essential idea behind Redanyway is that it should be easier for content publishers to build a social network around blog posts, photos, videos etc. and also enable users to follow / befriend on this centralized location, enhancing traffic, interactivity and reader engagement. In a sense, it also acts like a feed reader, by aggregating content from various sources and bringing it together in a single feed in the Redanyway dashboard. In a blog post, co-founder Kuldeep Kapade says they want to cut out RSS as the middle-man for subscribing to online content. If they’d add tabs and futher categorization capabilities, it would be even more useful, I think.

The setup is a bit tedious, though, as publishers are required to install a plugin / widget on their personal blog or website, which is still quite a challenge for many mainstream bloggers (i.e. Redanyway’s target audience). The startup integrated Gigya to make the whole process a bit less complicated, but I still feel this might be a hindrance for the company’s growth. I’m also having trouble looking at it from a different perspective than recent initiatives like Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. Furthermore, I ran into a couple of bugs when adding contacts in the initial setup process, and someone should really take a look at the design and usability of the application as well.

That said, Redanyway is still in private beta and has only been going for a couple of months, so maybe we’ll see some improvements in the future. All in all, I’m not really impressed, but maybe I’m missing something here. The startup was short-listed for the Techstars Summer program out of hundreds of applications, even though they eventually didn’t participate due to external circumstances.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jason says... 

Animoto, the impressive startup that automatically generates high quality music videos from a set of photos, has unveiled a new feature for the holiday season that will allow users to append any of their videos with a holiday intro/outro movie and a snow-themed backdrop, making for a perfect holiday eGreeting. To activate the special holiday look, just click on the ‘Santa’ button beneath any video. Of course, you’ll have to come up with photos suitable for the holiday season yourself - Animoto will just make them look festive.

We’re big fans of Animoto - the site may not offer an expansive list of products or features, but it does a great job of automatically spicing up photo albums, with little effort needed on the users’ part. For other holiday eGreeting options, check out MyPunchbowl’s eCards, which we covered last week.

To see a sample Animoto holiday video, click on the photo below.

Posted by brian tiong at 08:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Michael Arrington *)

Mike says...

Today’s the day that Facebook makes their big press push for their Facebook Connect service, which was first announced last May. The NY Times has a story giving a broad overview of Connect as well as competing services from MySpace (Data Availability) and Google (Friend Connect).

All three services are platforms for third party sites (Digg, Twitter, Citisearch, CBS, whatever) to let users sign in via their favorite social network instead of the normal approach. Some profile information flows with the sign in, which the sites can keep for a period of time. And activity that occurs on the site - Twitters written, Digg stories voted on, restaurant reviews on Citysearch, etc.) can optionally flow back to the user’s activity stream.

What the third party sites get out of these services: easy sign in for users, particularly new users. They can also use the profile data to help users create accounts at their site with little data input. The activity stream information published on the social networks includes links back to their sites. And one of the most interesting features, for Facebook Connect partners: sites can request friend lists from Facebook to help them make more connections on their own services. Digg CEO Jay Adelson recently gushed over the potential of Facebook Connect for his service.

Facebook also gives Connect partners most of the same tools as their application developers to promote their services via the news feed, invites, etc.

But the real value goes to the social networks. These services make users begin to think about their identity in terms of their MySpace profile, or Facebook login as they use it to sign into their favorite services. That makes it even more likely the users will maintain their profiles on those services, add friends, etc.

MySpace in particular wants to own user identities. Their MySpace profile is their name online, which is why they’ve embraced OpenID so completely in recent months. Data Availability and OpenID are two parts to a single strategy.

Facebook is probably less concerned with identity - there is no branded URL for users, for example. But they do want to own the definitive profile for an individual and, more importantly, their social graph. Knowing who you are and who your friends are is the key to their yet-unrealized business model.

And the biggest win of all is this free flow of data back to the social networks, which quite nicely fills out a user’s profile for advertising purposes.

Facebook is moving ahead alone with Connect, using proprietary standards for login and data sharing. They’ve also prohibited Google from trying to get in the middle of things with their Friend Connect service. MySpace, by contrast, is using mostly open standards in their approach, and is working closely with Google to make sure the services work properly together.

The battle for partners is intense. MySpace announced Twitter as a launch partner, but rumor is that Twitter is actually integrating with Facebook first (there’s no reason they can’t offer both, and they probably will). MySpace also announced Yahoo and eBay as launch partners. To date, though, they’ve only launched with Flixster and Eventful.

Posted by brian tiong at 08:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Robin Wauters *) 

Robin says...

There’s a new version of Songbeat, a simple but powerful desktop application for discovering music online, and I like it. When it was first released earlier this year, the client only enabled you to search for music online using Seeqpod, but the updated version lets you search more engines at once and also lets you easily play, export and download songs.

The music industry will be interested to know that the new iteration of Songbeat supports integrated search for Seeqpod, Project Playlist, SpoolFM, iASK ‘and more’. You can use the client to listen to music over the web, or listen and record straight from Last.fm. Music files can be directly exported to iTunes, Windows Media Player and Winamp or burnt on a CD, and you can download tracks or albums straight from the internet, or even a complete genre or artist thanks to integration with Mixtape. Songbeat even automatically tags your music files with lyrics and album cover art when you download them from the net.

The German company behind the Songbeat player offers the desktop app for free, so you can find and listen to as much music as you want, but you can only download 25 times. An upgrade would cost you 19.99 Euros (or $ 29.9), for which you’d get unlimited downloads.

Note that it only works on Windows XP and Vista for now. A Mac and iPhone version are under development, and should be ready by the end of the first quarter of next year.

Posted by brian tiong at 07:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)