Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Aside from Firefox and Internet Explorer, there are many other web browsers around the web. Some of these browsers have come and gone, while some still remain simply trying to get a piece of the users’ pie being shared upon by Firefox and IE. One of these browsers which has remained steadfast despite the dominance of the other two browsers, is the social browser Flock.

Flock has been around the block, silently growing its user base and introducing new features here and there. And so, now responding to the socialization of the web, Flock has become even more social with the addition of support for a few major web players, Digg, Pownce and AOL Mail into version 1.2.

The three web services add up to the growing list of web entities being supported by Flock which already include Yahoo, Gmail, Flickr and Facebook among others. Taking a look at how the three newly added service works, Digg lets you submit news stories, videos and images from the Flock browser directly to the Digg website. In addition, Flock also supports Pownce, a mainstream microblogging tool similar to Twitter, and in addition to its file sharing functionality, Flock also lets Pownce members share comments. Finally the AOL Mail integration, this lets the browser send you alerts for changes in your mail box. This is similar to the email alerts that pops out of the Firefox browser from time to time.

Honestly, we think Flock is actually a pretty decent web browser that certainly has some top-of-the-class features. We couldn’t help wonder why it hasn’t gone mainstream yet and why its membership base has not grown that much. This might be the right time for Flock to get out of its shell and start spreading its wings. The web badly needs a good alternative to browser giants - Firefox and IE.

Via [Mashable]

Popular social networking site Facebook has introduced a new feature that will allow it’s users to share content from other sites via their Mini-Feed, which sends it to the News Feeds of their friends. Users can import stories, albums, and other content from such sites as Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us. This latest feature is yet another way for users to share information with each other easily and quickly. All they have to do is click the “Import” link at the top of their Mini-Feed. The site promises it will be adding even more sites, including Digg, in the near future.

Read [Facebook Blog]

The 2007 Crunchies awards were just held in California. These award are put on by TechCrunch, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, and Venture Beat. After 82,000 nominations in 20 categories. When you look at the list of nominations and winners, it makes you realize how big of a technological year 2007 really was. And the winners are…

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It looks likes rumors are going around the Internet about the possibility that Digg.com could be bought out by News Corp., or at least they are in acquisition talks. It seems that our current Web 2.0 Bubble is nearing its end and about to pop with all of these big names buying up these buzz word based startups. So far it looks like the biggest buys have been News Corp. and their purchase of MySpace and Googles buyout of YouTube.

It’s hard to say who will be next in this round, there are only a few contenders left to be bought and the big names are on the prowl to buy them. Hopefully we will not have to see Digg commercialized to that point, their current advertising framework is perfect and I can easily see Mr. Murdoch and his marketing team turning Digg into an advertising engine. Not to say MySpace was god awful before News Corp. purchased them, it just seems to have gotten worse.

Rumors have it that Digg is asking a minimum of $125 million according to Mike Arrington, who has been on top of all the board-room-rumor-mill-news lately. It seems that his crack team of insiders feed him with some of the best breaking merger stories available. We will follow this story and see if it turns into BS or into full on Bubble 2.0.

Read [TechCrunch]

This week we called up David Hayden, CEO of Jeteye. We talked to him about the social bookmarking arena, who the real competitors are, how Jeteye can come out ahead, why Jetpacks will not make you fly, and what Yahoo! messenger has to do with Jeteye. We also got a little hint that their may be some teamwork between Flickr and Jeteye in the near future--our assumption. Will they be purchased by Yahoo, listen in!

This podcast was once again sponsored by GoDaddy.com and comes with a 10% off coupon. It was also made possible by Gizmo Project, PodServe, and Logitech’s 350 USB computer headsets.

Listen In
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Host: Adam Berger
Guest: David Hayden, CEO of Jeteye
Producer: Greg Cherniet
Music: Dvir Tzadok
File size: 17.8MB
Length: 00:25:57

Sponsored by GoDaddy.com:
As a listener of The Gadgetell podcast, enter code GADGET1, that’s G-A-D-G-E-T and the number 1, when you check out, and save an additional 10% on any order. Get your piece of the internet at GoDaddy.com.

Interested in sponsoring the podcast or advertising on the site? Please check out our advertise page or send an email to advertise (at) gadgetell .com.  We are specifically looking to get the resources for some sweet podcasting equipment (microphones, a mixer, cables, etc.).

Feedback is much appreciated. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please email us at gadgetell (at) gmail.com.  Thanks for listening!

This week lots of news hit the stand such as AOL’s response to digg with the new Netscape.com, our interview with Michael Smith of Perplex City, some pictures hit the net of the new Motorola Canary (RAZR 2), and of course, the Motorola Q arrived in stores.  If you missed anything, here’s a list to get you caught back up.

Podcast

• Gadgetell Podcast 11: The Q Arrives 6/13/2006

• Gadgetell First Look: Google Spreadsheets Beta
• How To Tuesday: Mount your LCD/Plasma TV
• Gadgetell Interview: Michael Smith CEO of Mind Candy (creators of Perplex City)

• Circuit City confused over difference between 700p and 700w
• “You Choose Software” for free
• Clone Wars on iTunes
• iPod directions let you jam as you go
• Free 512MB Pro Duo Memory Stick courtesy SanDisk
• Energizer keeps your iPod/cellphone/PSP going and going and…
• INHD gets their MOJO on for technophiles
• Bluetooth’s abilities becomes easier to identify for the average Joe
• Superman Returns in 3D
• Mark Cuban has a T-Mobile Sidekick III, where’s mine?
• RCA’s Small Wonder captures the wonders of life
• Samsung BD-P1000 shipped (but not to my Best Buy)
• Crackberry detox hotel
• Nike + iPod kit available for preorder
• The world’s largest bookstore grocery
• Pimpin’ is easy
• Firefox 3.0 will not support Windows 98 or ME
• Google’s GBuy takes on PayPal
• AskMeNow, nah ask your cellphone
• Samsung Blu-ray player NOT DELAYED
• Digg upgrades to V3
• Who killed the electric car?
• Preface your life with PortalPlayer
• Samsung zips DVD writing along
• Carbonite offers unlimited storage for $5 per month
• How big are the folders in my directory?
• Map24.com on-line mapping and directions
• Motorola V195 available for T-Mobile
• Mobile phones of the future
• T-Mobile helps control you kid’s cellphone bill
• TVersity gets content onto your PSP
• 867-5309 hits phones
• David Beckham says, “Hello Moto”
• 3 more reasons to “Get a Mac”
• HDMI 1.3 specs support higher bandwidth
• Sirius wears Stilettos
• Neodigits World Cup contest
• Try toread…to read later

• Microsoft readying music player and store to compete with Apple
• Shots of the Motorola Canary (RAZR 2)
• Apple ‘ultra-portable’ expected in January
• Bluetooth 3.0?

Our friends over at Digg have been hard at work the past few months transforming Digg, the tech-head social bookmarking site, to a site for all. On June 28th, Digg will be adding multiple new categories including Business, World News, Health, and more. They redesign also shows a AJAX sidebar as well as new sorting options for the pages. We are sure that these are only a small glimpse of new features Kevin and the team will be rolling out.

Images are from a tipster to Valleywag, where he said:

“I’ve counted 25+ new topics in this build of the beta, and there is a new design top-to-bottom.”

Read [Valleywag]

A few weeks ago, Kevin Rose posted on the Digg Blog about their new visualization tool (shown above) that allows them (and soon us) to analyze trends on the popular social news site digg.com.  After mistyping a URL, I arrived at diggtrends.com, which oddly enough took me to the diggtheblog.blogspot.com (AKA the Digg Blog).  Could this be the location that Digg’s new visualization tool will reside?

Check out the videos of Digg’s new tool:
6-09AM 04/01/06
6-12PM 03/01/06 (Note the hard white line - potential bot activity)

Kevin Rose is well known in the tech community for his work on TechTV’s The Screen Savers, and Attack of the Show!  Since then, he quit his day-job to pursue projects like digg and Revision3 (his IPTV production company).  For more information about Kevin, check out his blog and Wikipedia entry.

Alright Kevin, lets get right into it… What is digg?

Digg is a news and content website that employs non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.  It prioritizes content based on actual user interest rather than editorial assumptions made by a few people.

How and when did digg start?

Digg started in September 2004 as a personal project.  It was a social experiment in how masses of users could control and promote content without the external editorial control.  After a very short time, we realized that we were on to something, as digg was becoming a great resource for breaking news stories, sometimes even before traditional media.  Today digg has more than 140,000 registered users - a figure that is doubling every three months—and more than 500,000 unique visitors every day.

How much money did you start the company with and what did you put it towards?

To get the initial site off the ground, probably about $1,500.  I spent the money paying my friend Owen Byrne, who is now the senior developer on digg, for his help.  Our servers were $99 first month, and a $99 set up fee.

How many employees did you start with?  How many currently?  How did Jay Adelson get involved in the mix?

Just myself at first.  After thinking through the concept, I wrote a scope document for my friend, and developer, Owen Byrne to create a beta of the idea to run out of my house.  My friend, Jay Adelson, the founder of Equinix, then joined as an advisor and eventually CEO.  Once we received our VC funding in October, we were able to hire several others.  In fact, we’re still hiring, so if you know any good developers, send them our way.

We’re currently at 10 employees.

Is there one thing that you would go back and change about digg or the company if you could?

When we initially built digg, we didn’t put a whole lot of thought into scaling the site.  It was just a social experiment at first.  Several months later (due to success) we had to spend several weeks rewriting several key parts of the site.  Lesson learned: Plan for wild success.

With such a simple, yet genius concept for a site, we have to ask… How does the backend work?

We are a proud LAMP site.  Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.

I have to complement you on the new Digg Spy.  What other features are you working on?

Soon, we’ll be expanding outside of the tech news category into areas like science news, political news, etc.  In this sense, we’ll be developing new areas for digg that will be similar to sections of a newspaper.  We’ll also be adding more tools and functionality to the site.  Our goal is to give users even more control and to provide real-time visibility into what’s happening on digg.

As you may know, we took questions from our readers for our interview with you.  “KSDigerati” has a great question for you…

“Congratulations with the success of Digg, Digg is so successful however that once a site makes the homepage it becomes “Diggoomed” or so heavy with traffic that access may be unavailable. Has there been any thought to caching sites when they are promoted to the homepage?”

We have to be very careful when caching content.  Reducing the number of hits to the source site may impact that publications advertising revenue and overall site traffic.  While caching would help some sites that crash under heavy load, the last thing we want to do is take traffic and users away from the sources that deserve it.

It’s amazing that a site can be run without editors or anything.  Do you feel like you’re placing too much trust in the digg community?

Not at all.  We definitely believe in the wisdom of crowds and that this phenomenon that is driving digg, Wikipedia and other user-driven sites is poised for strong growth in many different areas.  Our basic philosophy is giving users the power to change the site and the tools to change how they interact with each other.

And yet another question from a reader… “grizwald” asked the following…

“Is the moderation of digg strictly automated, or do you sometimes find it necessary to manually remove some entries?  If you have manually removed things, why do you do it, and how often?”

The moderation is entirely user-driven.  In very limited cases, if users violate the terms of service, digg will intervene.  But, the great thing about the digg community is that it is self-policing and thus, we rarely need to intervene because users have already done it for us.

I can’t even believe that digg’s only been around for a year.  It seems like it took off within weeks… Did you ever see it getting this big?

We really started this as an experiment and were hoping that the idea of web democracy would work.  We were really surprised how fast the website became popular.  When digg was indexed on Yahoo! and Google News after the infamous Paris Hilton cellphone hack, it created so much traffic that we knew we were on to something big.

When did you realize that digg was going to get so huge?

Definitely with the Paris Hilton cellphone incident.  That was a major turning point for us.  A user close to the hacker submitted the story to digg, and due to its *cough* traction with the digg audience it was quickly dugg to the homepage.  That same night Google and Yahoo! both indexed digg and gave us the top position for the keywords ‘paris hilton hack’.  At the time we were only running one webserver.  As you can imagine, for the next two days the site was hammered with traffic and digg hardly functioned.

You and Alex work very well together on the podcast.  Has that significantly increased the amount of hits that digg gets?

That’s hard to say.  I know that the popularity of digg has definitely driven a large number of people to Diggnation.  Diggnation continues to be a fun outlet for us to discuss our favorite digg stories, as well as an excuse to drink more beer.

Now to the business question… Tell us about this $2.8 million investment.  How did that happen?  How did you get in touch with the investors?  (Omidyar Network, the outfit led by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Greylock partners.)

In mid-2005 we realized that to take the site to the next level and accommodate the growing community on digg, we needed some funding to buy more servers and hire developers.  So, for this, we went to the VC community for a small round of funding.  We spoke with several and were in the fortunate position of being able to be selective.  In the end, we went with Greylock, Omidyar, Marc, and Reid Hoffman because we felt their understanding of our business and the perspectives of their organizations made them ideal partners.

And here are some final readers’ questions…

“What programming languages do you know?” -mddigger

In school I studied Pascal and C.  Later I picked up PHP and Perl.  However, this was years ago.  Owen is truly the man behind all digg code.

“How did you get your start in the tech business?”

I studied computer science in college and worked for several dot coms during the boom years.  Then I started working at TechTV, primarily to help them with the systems behind the scenes.  They brought me on the show a few times and eventually I became a regular and then host of The Screen Savers.

“What are some sites you visit daily?”

hmm, techcrunch.com, we-make-money-not-art.com, macrumors.com, makezine.com, boingboing.net, askaninja.com

“When you first left college, did you ever think that your career would reach this point?” -Christopher

No - I just pursued my geek interests and it led me here. I’m just happy and fortunate to be doing what I love.

And finally… “what would you say is the most time consuming… digg or Revision3?”

Digg is the primary focus at this point.  The site is growing so fast and we have so many plans to expand the community that it has been non-stop for the past year.  Revision3 has several full-time employees that are working on creating new shows and expanding the network offering in 2006.  I do however spend time working on Rev3 but right now it’s mostly on the weekends.

Thanks for your time Kevin.

We’ve gotten in touch with Kevin Rose of digg.com and we’re going to hold an interview with him.  We’ve decided to open up the floor to you, the readers, to come up with some good questions.  So if you have a question that you’ve been dying to ask Kevin, post it down in the comments.  You can ask as many as you want, and hopefully we’ll get some answers for you.