SFWeekly Web Editor Alexia Tsotsis (not pictured left) spent some time early this morning trying out Chatroulette, a website that connects random strangers for a video chat. The results are unlikely to surprise you. Unless you are new to this whole Internet thing. Screen shots of some of her more entertaining chats are below the post.

Harkening back to the days of A/S/L, the random vidchat service Chatroulette is one of those online arenas where not being a white male looking to get off puts you in a definite minority. Founded by a 17 year-old Russian high school student named Andrew Ternovskiy, the service is a more successful Omegle, combining elements of the MTV show Next with vidchat capabilities.

Aspiring chatees click to play and as an escape latch you or your partner can hit Next anytime if you get bored, scared, or have to get back to work. The Report video as inappropriate button also seems to provide some comfort, but by judging by the nsfw fare served to me last night, doesn't provide much of a threat.

I pressed play last night at around 3:00 am PST and after about 45 clicks on Next encountered 5 straight up penis shots, a lot of camera disabled chats, two women who automatically clicked Next once they figured out that I too was a female, and a lot of very grateful looking guys, including a Chinese fan of Google and a French guy in indoor sunglasses, who asked me whether I was a more dominate lady or submissive woman in the hope that I would be the former.

Out of the 10,920 of my fellow Chatroulette participants, my Roulettees were a good cross section of Internet humanity. And while I did not encounter the suicide hanging videos alluded to in many of the chats, things like did you hear the one about the guy who shot himself in the bath tub, were brought up in conversation quite a few times, as examples of just how crazy Chatroulette can get.

Anywhere you get a mass of people communicating uncensored (and yes much like 4chan.org, China has not yet blocked Chatroulette) will be subject to typical groupthink behavior like urban myths and requests for interaction better left to the casual encounters section of Craigslist. Nonetheless, the service's potential for more substantial acts of communication is formidable.

Chatroulette is what you'd expect it to be, micro-interactive reality TV with a large heaping of cybersex. While most people are (whether they admit it or not) voyeurs the fact that Chatroulette lets the both participants see each other limits the site's potential user base to the weirdos and despite piquing VC Fred Wilson's interest it doesn't seem like there's currently enough weirdos to turn the humble startup into something mainstream.

One Roulettee, when asked what he thought the service was most useful for, responded, connecting with people around the world. Yeah, and asking them to show you their boobs.

Google's two new announcements: integrating a Twitter-like service into Gmail and a goal of a real-time speech translation service shows what direction they're taking the company: Into the space between you and every other human being on the planet.

To be fair, these two developments are really far apart in their delivery dates. The Gmail status update could come as soon as tomorrow, whereas the the speech-to-text-to-speech translation system is still a ways out. You can definitely see just how much work Google needs to do by trying to read your Google Voice voicemail transcriptions. (Voice search works better on Android 2.1 because you're talking slower and enunciating.) But both these features point in the same direction many of the company's other products have been hinting at. Here's a list of Google's major products, in case you forgot, and which sector of communication they want to dominate.

Google Voice: This is a big one, and it'll be the most natural interface for Google to slot in the voice-translation into. If you're using it the way Google wants you to use it, you're already piping all your voice calls and SMS through Google's tubes. And refining speech to text gives them a good idea of your interests and what you're talking about, allowing them to better serve up the relevant ads to you during calls.

Gmail: Having access to at least one end of everyone's email conversations, outside of business emails, gives Google the ability to be a gateway for most of your written communications. But that's not enough for Google, which is why they developed...

Google Wave: It's email, message boards, chat rooms and collaboration software all in one, except every participant needs a Google account. This closes that "openness" loophole that email has, and forces everyone into Google's biosphere. So this, and Gmail, should make sure that every medium-length communique passes through Google's maw for analysis. But what about shorter and longer forms? Update: Thanks commenters, for reminding me that Google made Wave open, so people can create their own Wave servers to talk to each other with the Wave protocol. The point still remains, that if you were going to use a service, wouldn't you rather use the service from the company that created the protocol, for performance and feature reasons?

Google Docs: For longer documents.

Google Talk: For short blasts of instant messaging, video chats and some audio chatting.

Picasa and YouTube: Communication doesn't have to be all text-based, you putting your photos and videos online count too.

Android and Chrome OS: By getting you down at the operating system level, Google can theoretically know every kind of communication you perform. It knows who you talk to, how you do it and when you do it. It can even shape the how by delivering the experience themselves.

Everything else. There's Checkout, Finance, Maps, Reader, News and other apps, which fill in the other forms of communication or expression that aren't quite covered by the major products above. One major missing piece is social networking, where Google basically failed before with its Orkut service (except for Brazil), so this new Twitter/Gmail hybrid might be their next entrance into the space.

But why do they want these things? Why would Google want to be the middleman between you and the world? To sell you ads, of course. And don't think Google is going to stop at just helping you talk over the internet or over the phone, they're going to reach into meatspace as well. How? One step is making that speech-to-speech translation portable, so you can do a sort of near-field communication with someone else with the same device while at the same time being able to look them in the face. Then, blast you two with the appropriate ads on the billboard next to you.

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

Having just experienced a seriously nerd hyped event in the last week that let me down, I'm sure hoping that Apple can live up to the hype.

If they can pull off a Twitter type coup they are set.

When Twitter launched even the nerds were saying things, I don't get it and What's the point of these short messages? And now, Twitter rules the communication buzz and has taken in over $100m in funding.

Apple doesn't need the funding but as a computer company that has become an electronics company with a few key products, this new tablet and its success are paramount for the growth of the company over the next 5 years. Even with their billions in the bank, the iPod and iPhone are getting tired.

The success of the tablet depends heavily on the user experience that can be created for it. The most important elements that create that experience will first be the form factor. Judging on Apple's reputation for impeccable industrial design, I would suspect they have nailed this one.

Next in that line of elements is speed. It needs to boot instant on with the ability to be used immediately. That goes for any software that is on the device, even if it is web connected. There shouldn't be any lag time in getting up an running. It's the real-time web and this needs to be the real-time tablet.

Lots of news on this today and we'll follow it diligently for you and throw in our two cents.

If you're looking for updates throughout the day check out @tabletville on Twitter.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Apple, the iPhone Company [Apple] (gizmodo.com)
• Design students transform junk into unique objects (cbc.ca)
• Apple results boosted by iPhone sales (newstatesman.com)
• All eyes on unveiling of killer' Apple tablet (thestar.com)

Apple Device Needs to be the Real-Time Tablet is a post from: TechStartups.com

Shared by Kristopher
max klein

I use google wave every single day. I start off the day by checking gmail. Then I look at a few news sites to see if anything of interest happened. Then I open google wave: because that's where my business lives. That's how I run a complicated network of collaborators, make hundreds of decisions every day and organise the various sites that made me $14.000 in december.

It was not always like this. There was a time just a few months ago when I did not have google wave. I think of that time with horror - because that epoch was marked with conflicts, total chaos, money was being lost every day, fights were happening between me and my collaborators. Google wave came in, and within a couple of weeks, a heavenly peace had descended on my business.

But let me start from the beginning. I am involved in about five different web based businesses. Niche sites, iPhone apps (simple ones), developer tools, downloadable desktop software and a subscription based web service. They all have varying degrees of success, but all bring in some income every month (well, apart from the web service one). Each business has a different set of collaborators (people who work with me on them, partners, employees, freelancers). Each business requires quite a lot of management, because they all are made up of a lot of individual software that have an update cycle, reaction to new releases, customer email answering and so on.

Before google wave, I was in a period I like to refer to as the age of chaos and anger. This was when I collaborated by email. When something needed to be done, I would send out an email. When I discovered something new I would send out an email. After two months, one of my freelancers replied my email with a screenshot. It showed his inbox, and there were about 50 unread emails from me, 10 of which where various threats about why he was not replying my emails. We would use skype messaging to communicate and skype conferences every two days, in addition to the emails.

At the time, we would also send designs and screenshots by email - needless to say, things would get lost - hardly anything would get done on time, and the most common reply I would get back is that they missed the particular instruction in the mass of emails I would send.

To compound my trouble, we were collaborating across multiple time zones - UK, US Pacific Time, Indian time and Singapore time. Emails would arrive in the night and it is depressing to wake up to 35 new emails from different people.

Then I got my google wave invite. First of all, I didn't really get it. I was not really sure how this would help me. However, after I had a skype conference and one of my partners complained for 15 minutes about how I would write unimportant emails like

"I need a status update next week"

I decided to try something new. All emails that were NOT time critical would be done with google wave, and all important emails could be written normally. We started off doing that.

Things changed.

Suddenly, communication habits of everyone changed. People started grouping their communication into topics and resurrecting old 'waves' when it was about the same topic. For example, if we were talking about bonuses, and then spoke about something else for two weeks, then came back to bonuses, we would simply resurrect the old wave. Business became structured.

Then something unexpected and suprising emerged. Google Wave took over from skype chat. Previously, we had been using instant messenger to communicate things quickly, but the problem was that because of our time zone differences, we would have 3 out of 4 people usually on. So one person would totally miss the entire conversation. But with google wave, we could hold long discussions as a chat, then when the other people woke up, they could contribute.

Another suprising effect was that chats became slower and more thoughtful. Because google wave functions both as email and as chat, it is not unusual to wait 5 minutes to get an answer to something you wrote. On skype, this would not happen. This slowness is very beneficial, because it makes the answers more permanent (like an email) and not so hurried (like an IM).

And Google Wave is even great for massive fights. The indentations and the ability to review what you said in the past means that you can go back and answer to an accusation. It's like a WWF cage rumble for fights, multiple people can rage on about different topics at the same time. But the thing with it is that because the fights can last for days, they slow down, and then people are no longer angry and solutions start to appear. Contrast this with IM fights, where one person shuts his messenger and that may be the end of your partnership.

What has Google Wave done for me?

* My stress level is way lower
* Conversations are now organised in topics, and no longer flat
* Fights have become more constructive
* Working across multiple time zones is no longer a problem
* I can share screenshots, design documents with multiple and different people with ease
* I have a single control panel to manage all my conversation with everyone I am working with
* Before Google Wave, I felt like I was working very much and getting very little done. After google wave, I feel I am doing little work, but I am making more and more money every month
* I feel in control of my business - with my iPhone I can access the heart of my business anytime and anywhere

What's missing from Google Wave?

* You cannot manage your contacts or create contact groups. It's easy to add people to waves that you don't want in there.

But in general, if you are collaborating with people and you have not tried Google Wave, then you are perhaps missing the greatest thing to happen to small web based businesses since Dropbox.

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

Are you the sum of your thoughts? It's a hard question to answer, right? I'm trying to sort this out and would like your help.

The dissonance between the physical and ethereal nature of disembodied communication like the internet is a minefield for human interaction. Primarily because we rely heavily on physical cues and environmental variables to base our levels of connection with a person. We rely on their actions, not just words.

My assertion is that social networks exacerbate this inability to fully understand the people we are linked with in these networks due to experiencing their random thoughts.

Sure it is interesting to read what someone is doing throughout their day, but the only value is what the reader places on that thought to make it a reality in their own mind. Maybe that is the nature of connection?

What I am really trying to understand is that if a person can create real bonds simply through sharing their thoughts in social media?

I've personally been at what turned into social media for over 7 years. I've become many things to many people based on the types of content that I was producing. Much of that content was dependent on what I was interested in or experiencing at that time. Like this piece.

The sum of interactions in social media are related to those fleeting thoughts. When shared repeatedly with networks of people a notion of who that individual is are created. This give us the ability to create baselines for who we think a person is. A baseline for example being, they're nice or they are a jerk.

Again, we are only dealing with thoughts to create these notions. They are assumptions as to the true nature of a person that most have yet to meet. I would posit that what happens in social media and across social networks is the connecting of thoughts. If you like someone, you like their thoughts. If you dislike someone, you dislike their thoughts. Any judgments are based on these and most likely very little on physical actions. So, if you met them in the real world you would need to attempt to ascertain all over again who that individual in front of you is.

Maybe we're connecting thoughts first and then people with social media?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is Social Media Worth Your Time? (blogs.harvardbusiness.org)
• The value of silence (smartblogs.com)
• My twitter Ethics (socialmediatoday.com)
• When authenticity isn't a choice (smartblogs.com)

Social Media: Connecting Thoughts Not People is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

I am a huge fan of unconventional problem solving and taking approaches to situations that aren't populist. Doing so often requires inspiration from another source unrelated to the matter at hand.

Finding that inspiration is as easy as looking around for a place to stand that you have never stood before. A simple change in perspective is all that it can take to trigger something within you.

.

Example: A Place To Stand

About twice a year I to get some inspiration I stand in a different place online. Since I spend most of my time in front of a computer and the ambient transiency in my space is pretty static I'll stand on the corner of internet and Jeff Bridges dot com and visit his latest posts.

Bridges' website is an exercise in the basics of human communication with static images and image map links to other content but the simplicity is amazingly effective. Why? Because the web has come become a complicated mess of information and displays that vie for attention while Bridges keeps it simple. The site is art.

The effectiveness is deduction of distilling a message down to a graphic is reminiscent of something that Madison Avenue creatives would crank out for a print campaign. With simple copy in the images that he creates they're easier to grasp than a Tweet. The visual tapestry that Bridges creates is linear like a blog, textured like a painting and conversive like asking your grandmother about her past.

What Bridges has done with his personal site is so far from the norm that it has taken me nearly 250 words to describe. I should have done it with an image instead!

Whether you are planning your next startup, in the middle of one or looking to do a site redesign it is helpful to find the right sources of inspiration. Often they are at the very edges of your comfort zone and occasionally just beyond it. Let them gestate and the assimilate them when the time is right.

Photo credit: Screen shot from www.jeffbridges.com

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

How To Get Inspired is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

Update: Threadsy is offering Tech Startups readers access to the private beta get your access on! Thanks @dskendall.

The story here really is theory vs. utility. Wave is a tool that comes from a part of Google dedicated to R&D and future earnings, Google Labs.

Threadsy comes from a startup with an agenda like making money in the short term with its software.

Both applications are ambitious in trying to solve a couple of problems at once.

Centralize tools that we use to communicate

Online communication tools are decentralized because most of them are products of individual need. They are solutions to problems that certain users were having with other ways of communicating. It wasn't a lack of vision that caused this. It was market demand. The same demand that is making it necessary to begin to centralize these tools.

Twitter, Facebook and email are the dominant players right now. Sure I know email isn't really a player but it is a mode of communication that is decentralized. It is really a collective of the GMail, HotMail and Yahoo!

This new aggregation of the communication modes makes it easier for end users to locate conversations and friends across networks. Think of it as that nebulous space between AT&T and Verizon where there networks connect. The difference in this case is that Wave and Threadsy are destinations where these connections are made.

Organizing the diaspora of personal brand

Users of the social media tools that are integrated into Wave and Threadsy have worked countless hours building a brands on varying sites. By combining the communication mechanisms they essentially combine a users online brand by centralizing a the users identity.

A users communication styles do vary based on the tool they are using but when centralized into one application it forces users to organize their collective into a single brand. It is a necessity of using the tool, Wave or Threadsy.

At this stage of Google Wave vs. Threadsy, I'm placing my bet on Threadsy to produce a tool that quicker than Google that will meet market need simply based on utility.

Google has a long way to go with the theory of Wave, especially on the front-end if they choose to compete in this space. I would assume that they will continue down a path to make Wave the platform that powers other real-time applications like Pulse from Novell.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Google Wave vs. Threadsy is a post from: TechStartups.com

This is part 3 of a three-part series on the fundamental characteristics of the real-time Web.

In part 1 and part 2, we looked at how the real-time Web is a new form of communication, creates a new body of content, is real time, is public, and has an explicit social graph associated with it. A final characteristic of the real-time Web is that it carries with it an implicit model of federation.

Sponsor

A number of sources both generate and consume real-time streams. As a result, many of these new companies are becoming communication carriers, passing their users' real-time threads through their networks to other networks. This is more than simply being open (i.e. more than allowing data to be imported and exported). Just as in shipping and transportation and other communication industries before it (telephone, Internet packets, and email, to name a few), the real-time Web is developing a federated model of transmission whereby companies formally or tacitly agree to facilitate transmission and perform actions on behalf of end-users within the eco-system.

It's hard to say whether this model has arisen because of a conscious strategic effort to build a new industry, or because building a fully closed world would have required just too many resources, or because of a collective effort among business friends and acquaintances to develop open products and open interactions so that cool new things could be created. It's probably a combination of all three, but considering the history of the people at Twitter and FriendFeed (Paul Buchheit, one of FriendFeed's founders, is credited with coining Google's unofficial "Don't be evil" slogan), the open and cool factors are probably a big part of the equation.

At this point, there seems to be a general willingness to accept and transmit messages from outside sources (carrying costs are not significant, and transmission is automated via APIs, and so overhead is minimal). That said, infrastructure costs are bound to increase, competition will heat up, illegitimate companies will spot opportunities, and monetization strategies will be devised, which will all put strain on this truly open exchange.

As in the past, formal carrier agreements could be set down, governments could decide to regulate markets, or other forces could come into play that would transform what is now essentially a free-for-all bazaar into a marketplace with hierarchy. All the same, the expectation of openness and transparent transmission will be difficult to counteract or stop. So, new companies that enter the space, even bigger and better funded ones, will have to adhere to the same model of federation that these pioneering companies have established.

Summary

Whether Twitter will remain the focal point of the real-time Web or be supplanted by another or several companies (as happened in the social network space, first with Friendster, then MySpace, and now LinkedIn and Facebook) is unclear. The underlying characteristics of the real-time Web, however, are defining the next major stage of the Internet and will spread throughout its infrastructure in years to come.

Broader trends on the Web point to users having discrete data and services follow them as they move around the Web. Fred Wilson, a principal of Union Square Ventures, has called this the "de-portalization of the Web," and John Borthwick, CEO of betaworks, has co-opted Chris Anderson's phrase "small pieces, loosely joined" to describe the fast-moving risk-taking small companies that work in the space. Both individuals are leading investors in Twitter and other real-time Web companies.

The Internet is shifting from discrete units of websites and Web pages to discrete units of information (e.g. people, organizations, articles and videos, product offerings, store listings, and blog posts) and associated meta data (e.g. images, addresses, reviews, ratings) that move seamlessly around the Web, being slotted where appropriate. These units of information can be organized in ways that are relevant and personal to each individual, using data gleaned from social graphs as well as recommendation and personalization services that allow users to set their preferences.

In some cases, locations are integrated into these units as supplementary information. For example, Google and Yahoo now include map locations and reviews as part of their search listings. Their search engine algorithms read markup formats in the form of microformats and RDFa that are embedded on Web pages. These formats contain tags denoting names of people and organizations, geo-locations, and ratings and reviews. Both companies report great results from the inclusion of this data, both in increased click-through rates and reduced bounce rates. Support for other structured data is almost sure to follow. Reading tags on a page and doing something useful with them in a search result is not a novel concept, but the rapidly growing support of these tags across the Web is a clear sign that data is becoming much more identifiable and actionable.

This trend towards open and accessible data is even more obvious when you consider the real-time stream for all of the reasons mentioned above: atomic real-time messages, public accessibility, attached social graphs. In a sense, this is similar to the vision of the semantic Web. Tim Berners-Lee said at the TED conference in the fall of 2008, "Twenty years ago, I asked everyone to put their documents on this Web thing... Now I want you to put your data on the Web." The difference is that the effort to make data accessible and more actionable on the real-time Web is being made through methods and interactions not necessarily prescribed by the W3C.

Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C use the term "linked data" to refer to the latter's initiative to expose data and make it accessible. "Actionable data" might be a better term to use for the real-time Web because it doesn't imply a particular approach but merely refers to the concept of making data more identifiable and independent. Linked data refers specifically to using RDF and other W3C protocols to link important concepts, a prescription that is overly complex and not likely to address many of the usage cases on the Web.

The real-time stream is a massive body of continously created and authentic content that by itself would be significant. But when it is added to and integrated with other information on other sites, and when derivatives can be created in a number of dimensions, this concept of actionable data reaches the tipping point. In non-Silicon Valley business circles, Twitter is criticized for not having a solid revenue model. Those on the inside (investors and advisers), however, believe the criticism is short-sighted. As with most communication platforms, the value of the network increases exponentially as the size of the network increases.

By having a low barrier to adoption, the network is able to grow quickly. Only after a critical mass has been reached, and after other companies and communities of interest have helped shape how the platform is used, will it become clear what people are willing to pay for. While they may not have a solid grasp yet of exactly how to make money, those who are building companies and investing in the space do know there will be opportunities. In their minds, the real-time stream is at an early stage in its cycle, one that will likely last 5 to 7 years.

If the real-time Web and its fundamental characteristics are widely understood, its benefits and opportunities can extend throughout the Internet and across all industries.

Read part 1 and part 2 of this series.

Guest author: Ken Fromm is a serial entrepreneur who has been active during both the Internet and Web 2.0 innovation cycles. He co-founded two companies, Vivid Studios, one of the first interactive agencies, and Loomia, one of the top recommendation, discovery, and personalization companies. He has worked at the leading edge of recommendations and personalization, interactive development, e-commerce and online advertising, semantic technologies and information interoperability, digital publishing, and digital telephony. He is currently advising a number of startups and looking at the next big thing in Web 3.0. He can be found on Twitter at @frommww.

AOL, rather than fixating on building business and staying relevant post Time-Warner, is suing search and display platform provider Advertise.com for trademark infringement and unfair competition. Furthermore, the company is also partly responsible for the near-done sale of the domain name Ad.com for a reported $1.4 million falling through, leading to the seller of the domain name subsequently suing the buying party, says DomainNameWire.

But first lawsuits first.

Advertise.com, which was purchased by ABCsearch.com earlier this year and rebranded as such a few months ago, is a variation on AOL-owned Advertising.com, the beleaguered Internet company claims. In legalese, that translates as follows:

Advertise.com recently commenced use of the virtually identical and confusingly similar designation Advertise.com and design in connection with the same and complimentary services as those offered by Plaintiffs under their federally-registered Advertising.com name and marks and their Ad.com name and marks.

Update: looks like Advertise.com sued AOL first (August 17, 2009)

A search of the USPTO database shows that AOL does in fact have three registered trademarks for Advertising.com, but all are design trademarks, which means they stand little chance of exercising trademark rights over something as generic as the domain name advertise.com. Granted, the logo looks vaguely similar, but virtually identical and confusing' it ain't.

Note that AOL doesn't even effectively market Advertising.com as a business unit anymore - although it may soon recommence doing just that - and redirects the domain name to its Platform-A website instead (AOL rebranded it to the name of this whole-owned subsidiary in April last year and now prefers AOL Advertising as the overarching denominator).

So why would anyone confuse Advertise.com for an AOL property? It just doesn't make any sense to try and claim ownership over any domain name with a variation on the word advertising' in it. What's next? Ads.com? Advertisement.com? In the court documents, embedded below, AOL even boasts the fact that Advertise.com has only about 25,000 unique visitors per month, so what's really at stake here?

The second case is even more bizarre: although often used in its communication, Ad.com is apparently not a trademark owned by AOL, although the company has filed an application for it in the past. But that domain name is actually owned by a Marcos Guillen, who recently sold it to Directi and Skenzo for $1.4 million. Well, almost sold it, because the deal fell through after all, according to industry watchers due to the fact that the mark has not yet acquired distinctiveness for any of the applicants - including AOL - following a recent examination. Guillen has now filed a lawsuit against Directi and Skenzo for backing out of its auction purchase of Ad.com, seeking $1.4 million, prejudgment interest, and/or damages according to proof.

Aol

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors