Realtime Twitter search is not a Google killer

Posted on March 8, 2009 by Rakesh Agrawal

There’s been a lot of hype lately about “realtime search” using Twitter being a Google Killer. John Battelle talked about it in searchblog. Mike Arrington talked about it in TechCrunch.

There are two scenarios that have been talked about with Twitter and search: using Twitter to ask questions of the Twitterverse and using Twitter search to search Tweets.

In the first scenario, you send out a Tweet looking for information. An example is a Tweet by Om Malik on Feb. 2 at 7:02 p.m. “suggestion for great Indian restaurant in or around Palo alto. needs to be authentic”. Within a few minutes, he got a bunch of responses. (I recommended Amber India in Mountain View, which was a frequent recommendation.) By 8:19 p.m. Om was “eating at amber India in mountain view.”

Wow! Send out a query and you can get answers from real people right away. Who wouldn’t want that?

Not so fast.

This reminds me of latenight TV commercials for miracle diet drugs. You see pictures of people who have: lost 75 pounds in 8 weeks! lost 10 pounds overnight! gone from a size 24 to a size 6 while eating cake and sitting on the couch! You usually see a line of fine print that says “results not typical.”

That’s exactly the case here. You get atypical results when you have tens of thousands of followers as Om (23,000+) and Battelle (11,000+) do.

I posted a Tweet yesterday “Looking for good wineries in napa. Focus on ambiance and red wines.” To give the Tweet extra chance of success, I posted it using Twinkle, an app that adds a location layer to Twitter. Given the nature of my query, my friend network and location in the Bay Area, I expected success. At 200+ followers, my follower count is well above the median for Twitter.

Three hours later, I got one response from a friend. By that time I’d already decided which wineries I was going to visit. Hardly a Google killer.

Suppose for a moment that I just picked a tough query. What if I’d gotten a dozen responses?

Then the problem becomes how I decide which of those responses are better than the others. Many queries have qualitative components: “What’s a good winery in Napa?” “Is the Nikon D80 a good camera?” The value of the answer depends on my needs as well as the expertise of the answerer.

With a typical search result, you have a number of clues as to quality of the answerer. If something appears on the first page of Google, presumably a lot of people have found that resource valuable. If I get a page from dpreview, I can see that they’ve reviewed hundreds of other cameras, so they probably know what they’re talking about.

With Twitter answers, I get limited information about the source and limited content.

In some cases, this is OK. I did a Tweet a while ago wondering if it was sunny at the Beach Chalet in San Francisco. You’d have to be a jerk to lie about the answers, there’s not much expertise required to answer the question and the answer fits within 140 characters.

But a query like “Is the Nikon D80 a good camera?” is tougher. If @maryvale says “yes, absolutely” then that’s all I need. I know her, I love her photography and I know she knows a lot about cameras. That doesn’t hold true for most of my other followers. And it certainly doesn’t hold true for people I don’t know at all. Someone may say “D80 is a piece of crap” because they would never consider anything less than the $2,000+ D700 or because they aren’t very technically savvy. A Tweeted answer doesn’t provide that context.

Part 2: Challenges of searching Twitter

More on: Twitter, Google

Posted in google, search, seo, social networking, twitter | 3 Comments

The hospitality industry gets more inhospitable

Posted on March 3, 2009 by Rakesh Agrawal

For an industry that markets itself as catering to the whims of its guests, the hotel industry sure goes out of its way to make a bad final impression. I just had a wonderful stay at the Westin Resort & Spa in Whistler, B.C. A super comfortable Heavenly Bed. A great room with a fireplace and kitchenette. A location right next to the slopes. Friendly service.

Keep your gear out of your roomYet my final impression of the hotel was sullied when I got my bill under the door the last morning. The bill had nearly $70 in charges for the “ski valet.”

Hotel policy doesn’t let you keep skis in your room. It makes sense: it keeps people from dragging wet gear through the hotel, keeps the hallways and rooms free of ski damage and reduces the hotel’s risk that someone trips and gets injured. What they don’t tell you is that they charge for it. Not when we checked in nor when we checked our skis.

When I complained at check out that the charge wasn’t disclosed, the woman at the front desk mentioned that they get that complaint regularly.

This is the latest in a long line of “gotcha” charges from this industry. Instead of being seen as valued guests, we’re seen as sources of “ancillary revenue.”

I’m not talking about the charges we’re all familiar with: anyone who uses the hotel phone for anything other than calling the front desk or concierge clearly doesn’t care about their (or their company’s) money, or minibar items that cost 5x-10x their retail value.

A few other gotchas that I’ve noticed recently:

  • Dynamic currency conversion. In this scam, which applies when traveling abroad, the hotel will automatically convert the amount of your bill into U.S. dollars. (At a horrible exchange rate.) Never mind that they could charge you in the local currency and have your credit card company do the conversion. (At a much better rate.) The credit card companies, not wanting to miss out on their cut, are now tacking on fees even if the hotel does the conversion to dollars. Most of the big credit card companies such as Chase, Citi and Bank of America tack on 3% for most of their cards. (Of the major card issuers, CapitalOne is a rare exception.)  Between the dynamic currency conversion and the credit card company, this can tack 8% or more on to your bill.
  • “Guaranteed” U.S. dollar rates. This is a related scam that I encountered at the Sheraton Centro Historico in Mexico City. I was guaranteed a rate of  USD $99 a night. But instead of charging my credit card in U.S. dollars, they converted the bill to Mexican Pesos. (At a horrible exchange rate.) The rate was about 5% worse than the credit card company rate. The hotel gets the benefit of protecting their revenue in a realtively stable currency while at the same time generating additional revenue by cheating people on the exchange. There’s really no reason that they couldn’t make the rate 15% worse or 50% worse.
  • The hidden room service markup. Room service is expensive. OK, we all know that. At the W Seattle, they disclose the delivery charge of $4 and the service charge of 22%. Fair enough; someone has got to bring the stuff up from the kitchen. What they don’t tell you is that they’ve also raised the menu prices of items $4-$5 above what they charge in the restaurant.

In many cases these charges don’t show up until you get your bill. If you’re in a hurry, you might overlook these charges altogether or not have time to contest them.

At least 3/4 of my hotel bills have some sort of unexpected charge on them. Often the discrepancy is $5-$15 — just in the sweet spot where about half the time I don’t bother to challenge them.

Unfortunately, I don’t see the situation with these gotcha charges getting any better. Faced with low occupancy and declining room revenue, hotels will be looking at every opportunity to extract more ancillary revenue.

Maybe they’ll even do what Ryanair’s CEO has talked about.

Posted in hotels, travel | 1 Comment

6 ways a DVR is better than hulu

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Rakesh Agrawal

I recently wrote 10 reasons why hulu is better than a DVR. Here are six advantages that DVRs have over hulu.

  1. You get higher quality video. If you have an HD source, chances are the video quality on your DVR will be much better. Hulu offers a very small selection (13 full episodes last I checked) of HD programming. Note that some local TV distributors charge extra for HD service. With AT&T u-Verse, the $15 for the DVR becomes $25 when you add HD.
  2. It’s designed for your living room. DVRs, despite the horrible UIs, were designed to be controlled from a distance and connected to your TV. It’s still only the geek set that will bother connecting their PCs to a TV for hulu. There’s hope though: Boxee is bringing hulu and other Internet video to a variety of platforms. A killer device would be a DVD player or game console that has boxee/hulu built in, similar to the LG blu-ray/Netflix player. (Boxee itself is based on XBMC Media Center, which runs on XBox.)
  3. It’s more network efficient. This isn’t a concern for most people today. But it may become one as incumbent TV providers wake up to the threat of Internet video. With a DVR, it doesn’t matter to the cable company how many people watch a show; the more the merrier. With hulu, every stream takes incremental bandwidth. Comcast is capping monthly bandwidth at 250 GB. It’s unlikely that ordinary Internet usage would come anywhere near that, but two or three people regularly watching hulu could hit that.
  4. You can record virtually anything. Although some DVRs restrict recording of some content (e.g. pay-per-view movies), the rule-of-thumb is that you can record whatever comes down the pipe. Hulu’s content comes from a select (though large) list of partners. You can’t, for example, watch ABC shows on hulu. Partners have Byzantine restrictions on when content appears. While many shows appear on hulu the day after broadcast, others appear eight days later. (House, Monk, Psych) I strongly suspect that this is because of Nielsen’s Live plus 7 TV ratings.
  5. You can keep what you record as long as you like. DVRs don’t generally expire content; as long you have free space you can keep it around. Or until you move and have to give the DVR back to the cable company. Most of the recent content on hulu expires within a few weeks.
  6. You can skip commercials.

I also came up with two more pluses for hulu:

  1. You get bite-sized content. Many of the shows I watch, such as talk shows or variety shows, are really collections of discrete elements. With hulu, I can get to just the parts I want easily. I don’t have to fast forward through the inane comedy bits to get to an interview I want to see.
  2. You get uncensored content. hulu offers content you won’t see on basic cable, such as scenes with nudity or bad language. (You must be logged in to see these.)

More on: hulu

Posted in consumer electronics, hulu, media, movies, television, video | 1 Comment

Tellme about Ford

Posted on January 8, 2009 by Rakesh Agrawal

Yesterday marked my one year anniversary at Tellme. I spent the day where I started a year earlier: at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Coincidentally, Ford officially announced its next generation of SYNC, which incorporates Tellme services. It’s the project I’ve been working on. The first version of SYNC, which allows users to control their cell phones and MP3 players, has been tremendously successful for Ford. Cars equipped with SYNC have been selling nearly twice as fast as those without. The new  features let motorists search for businesses, get turn-by-turn directions, check traffic and get other information using just their voice. The Ford press release goes into depth on the features.

Microsoft’s Robbie Bach, president of the entertainment and devices division, referenced the service as part of Steve Ballmer’s opening keynote.

Robbie Bach introduces enhancements to Ford SYNC (photo from Engadget)

Robbie Bach introduces enhancements to Ford SYNC (photo from Engadget)

Posted in cars, launchpad, microsoft, mobile, mobile search | 2 Comments

Tech lessons from a trip to Borders

Posted on January 6, 2009 by Rakesh Agrawal

On my way home from work today I decided to stop by Borders to pick up a guidebook for my birthday trip to Mexico City.

Step 1: Figure out if the Borders near my house is open. I called 1-800-555-TELL using my car’s Bluetooth to get the phone number. Tellme connected me to my neighborhood Borders. “Thank you for calling Borders… for our store hours and locations press 1.” FAIL. With more people relying on cell phones and increasing legislation requiring hands-free systems while driving, Touch Tone-only systems need to go away. After 2 1/2 minutes and three full loops of the menu I was finally connected to the store.

SnapTell screenshotStep 2: Arrive at the store and look for a guidebook. No one was behind the information desk. Two computer terminals allowed me to search for a book. The search results include books that are only available online, aren’t yet published and a few that are “likely available in store” in a seemingly random order. FAIL. Gee, wouldn’t you want to sort the books that I can walk out with first? Otherwise, why am I here? The screen says my book is in section “B020,” with no indication of where that it is.

Step 3: I notice on my way out of the store a book in the bargain bin on Sonoma wineries. I figure this is the perfect opportunity to try out SnapTell, an iPhone comparison shopping application. Take a picture of a book, CD or DVD and SnapTell shows you how much that item sells for online. (It’s like Shazam for shopping.)

My first picture wasn’t good enough; I got an error message. Second time was a charm, despite taking a picture of a book that was too wide to fit in the frame. I could scroll through a list of prices from online merchants.

While I was impressed with the image recognition, the data quality needs work. The results included older editions of the book; the 1 cent price shown on the summary screen was for an older edition. Even when the current edition was shown pricing didn’t correlate to the merchant. Clicking on the $1.99 link pictured shown showed a price at the merchant of $6.99.

Data errors like this aren’t unusal in large databases, but I suspect will improve over time.

SnapTell is an interesting tool for research. And with access to location information, they could build a nice database of what people are searching for and from where.

That’s assuming that stores like Borders improve service to the point that I’ve got other reasons to come in than “I can’t wait for shipping.”

Disclosure: I work for Tellme, a company that makes speech recognition systems for many large companies. I have a bias against poorly implemented telephone systems.

Posted in customer service, iphone, mobile, mobile search, search | Comments Off on Tech lessons from a trip to Borders

VOIP: Alive, well and full of potential

Posted on January 5, 2009 by Rakesh Agrawal

Om Malik asks on his blog whether VOIP is dead or alive. It’s an interesting question and the answer is very different depending on how you define VOIP.

Many people associate VOIP with cheap voice calls using the Internet. This is what many early VOIP pioneers (Vonage being the biggest name) gravitated toward. They did this for one big reason: that’s where the money was. You could deliver services comparable to what PSTN providers were charging $40-$60 a month for at a much lower cost. The arbitrage opportunity provided a clear value proposition and revenue stream.

Unfortunately for Vonage and the others, that’s also where the sleeping giants were, with billions in revenue they needed to protect. Incumbent telcos have largely marginalized the standalone cheap call providers through more aggressive pricing, bundling, regulatory hundles and IP claims. At the same time, incumbents and cable operators have used VOIP technologies to lower their own operating costs.

But that’s also the least interesting, transformative aspect of VOIP. If you expand the definition to include voice paired with other aspects of communication such as presence and video, things get a lot more interesting — and we’re just beginning to see how transformative that cane be.

Skype has been a key innovator in this space. Over New Year’s, we introduced my parents to Skype. My mom could see our family in India, whom she hadn’t seen in months. My parents are very much laggards when it comes to technology; they don’t know how to text. But the clear value of Skype’s voice and video service had my dad pulling out his camera to buy a Webcam.

For work, I use Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 to interact with colleagues. No matter where I or my colleagues are in the world, I can see what they’re up to and communicate with them using text, voice or video. Or all of the above.

Communicator integrates with Outlook so I can see when they’re in meetings and don’t interrupt them. There’s also integrated conference calling. My office “phone” rings on my laptop. (It also rings on a dusty hunk of plastic on my desk, which I haven’t touched in months.) It’s the most powerful communications tool I’ve used.

There are two big challenges for this definition of VOIP: getting the technology in front of nongeek users and migration of more and more communications to wireless, where the carriers rule with an iron fist.

I’ll talk about each of these in future blog posts.

Posted in im, instant messaging, microsoft, mobile | Comments Off on VOIP: Alive, well and full of potential

10 ways hulu is better than a DVR

Posted on January 2, 2009 by Rakesh Agrawal

I’ve been using a DVR for at least 8 years. I started off with a Replay 2020 and have since used other Replays, TiVos and cable company DVRs. Now my primary DVR is the whole home DVR that comes with AT&T’s u-Verse service.

DVRs have transformed the way I and many others watch TV. Besides breaking news and sports, I rarely watch live television.

But less than a decade after their inception (and before they’ve reached 50% penetration) they’re headed the way of the dodo, vinyl and cassette tape. The DVR’s kissing cousin — placeshifter Slingbox — will have an even shorter life.

The reason: Hulu. Here are 10 reasons why Hulu is better than a DVR:

  1. It’s free. DVRs typically cost $10-$15 a month for service. For a TiVo, add $150-$600 in hardware costs. Many people can use hulu to ditch their cable TV subscription altogether and save $60-$75 a month.
  2. You don’t have to program it. Sure, programming a DVR is a lot easier than programming a VCR. But it still takes work. And with 300+ channels, a lot of scrolling. Most DVR UIs are atrocious. While Web interfaces can make things easier, AT&T’s interface (powered by Yahoo! and recently redesigned) feels like Web 2004.
  3. You don’t have to manage it. A lot of the UI on a DVR is devoted to managing conflicts among recordings, managing recording space, etc. Many a user forum has been devoted to identifying the logic behind what gets recorded and deleted on DVRs. I just know that on my AT&T DVR, things don’t work the way I’d expect. (e.g. deleting programs I’ve watched before deleting programs I haven’t watched.)
  4. It’s infinite. You have access to thousands of TV shows and movies, way more than a DVR can hold. That’s only going to expand as programmers recognize the power of hulu and television on the Internet.
  5. You don’t have to know what you want to watch beforehand. If you hear about a program you’re interested in, you can go to Hulu and watch it.
  6. It has fewer ads. For many people, skipping ads is a big part of the appeal of a DVR. But it’s still a hassle. You have to pick up the remote at the right time and you usually end up watching 7-10 seconds of ads anyway because things don’t line up right. I’d rather sit through one 30 second ad. This isn’t bad for advertisers or TV networks either. (More on that later.)
  7. It helps you discover. Hulu recommends shows you might be interested in. Most DVRs don’t. (TiVo is a notable exception.)
  8. It’s social. You can share programs that you like with your friends on social networks.
  9. Your shows won’t be screwed up due to cable system outages, storms, power outages or a football game that goes long.
  10. It’s searchable. As a search geek, I’ve been impressed with the quality of Hulu’s search interface. They’ve made it easy to find content you want.

There are some advantages that DVRs have over hulu. I’ll write about those later. In the meantime, check out my list of ways to improve hulu.

Posted in consumer electronics, hulu, media, movies, television, video | 9 Comments

Stuff I learned in 2008

Posted on December 31, 2008 by Rakesh Agrawal

This year I realized how little Stuff matters. For more than four months, almost everything I owned was in a warehouse somewhere. Even when I got it into my place, I spent a good chunk of the year on the road – many miles away from my Stuff.

While unpacking I found many generations of electronics Stuff: more than a half dozen cell phones, three or four generations of MP3 players, two GPS units and miscellaneous gadgets and adapters of all kinds. Some of it is still in its original, unopened blister pack.

Then there’s the clothing Stuff: shoes I thought would look good but have never worn, souvenir T-shirts and clothes I might be able to fit into again if I went back to my high school weight.

And the kitchen Stuff: a breadmaker that hasn’t been used in three moves, an abundance of pots, shot glasses from around the world, promotional mugs, water bottles, etc.

Way more Stuff than you can stuff into a San Francisco apartment.

Stuff is bad. It costs money to buy, transport, store and dispose of. You worry about it getting lost, stolen or damaged. And there’s the environmental impact of Stuff.

I’ve been relatively good this year about acquiring new Stuff:
•    My electronics purchases have been limited to a digital camera and an iPhone.
•    I didn’t buy any souvenirs for myself, despite having traveled more than I have in any other year. (Not counting a couple of Aloha shirts I picked up in Hawaii.)
•    I didn’t buy any physical media such as CDs or DVDs.

I feel like a bad American for speaking out against buying Stuff, especially given the state of the economy. But I’ve been spending money on experiences, which in the end may be better for the economy. Eating at locally owned restaurants and staying in hotels generates more dollars than buying crap made in China.

And there’s the bonus that I get to see my friends.

Posted in random | 1 Comment

A tale of two media companies

Posted on December 29, 2008 by Rakesh Agrawal

You’ve got a competitor with deep pockets, huge brand recognition and a lot of traffic that is interested in your content. What do you do?

Here are two very different approaches:

GateHouse Media is suing The New York Times Co., whose Boston Globe has been linking from its hyperlocal site to stories on GateHouse’s Wicked Local site.

Wicked awesome Hulu is co-opting archrival YouTube’s traffic. If you do a search for Simpsons clips on YouTube, you’re likely to see clips uploaded to YouTube by Hulu. Here’s one I found:

Rather than try to rewrite more than a decade of Web practices (if not copyright law), Hulu is working the system to reach a lot of interested users where they are. It’s a brilliant move and the kind of thinking that is virtually nonexistent within the newspaper industry.

The clip promotes Hulu as the destination for premium content on the Internet. Users have a clear choice: watch excerpts with an annoying Hulu ticker on YouTube or go to hulu.com where they can watch the full video in higher quality without the ticker.

In the short run, this helps Google by providing content for popular queries. In the long run, hulu is the big winner.

More on: hulu, newspapers, YouTube

Posted in google, hulu, journalism, newspapers, television, video, web 2, web 2.0, YouTube | Comments Off on A tale of two media companies

Ads that work: CapitalOne Card Lab on flickr

Posted on October 15, 2008 by Rakesh Agrawal

There’s so much ad clutter out there that it’s rare to see an ad that really hits the nail on the head. Here’s one that jumped out at me: an ad for CapitalOne’s Card Lab. CapitalOne lets you customize many features of your card, including the interest rate and promotions. It even lets you upload your own image for the front of the card. A perfect fit for flickr users.

Posted in adsthatwork, advertising | Comments Off on Ads that work: CapitalOne Card Lab on flickr