Ex-Googlers Launch Beluga for Mobile Group Chat

Simple social apps, from photo sharing to intimate networks, to group texting services are gaining in momentum with the success of TextPlus, GroupMe, Path, Instagram and others. A new entrant to the scene is a company called Beluga, not to be confused with the Fail Whale, headed up by a small team of 3 ex-Googlers who hold pedigrees from Google AdSense, Google AdWords and Gmail. The slick product has dedicated applications for both Android and iPhone platforms, and chat archives are accessible through the company's Web site as well.

Diving into the trend of more intimate social networking, where you can share with a small group of people instead of broadcasting to an unfiltered list of friends on Facebook and Twitter, Beluga asks you to create "Pods", like groups, of people, and you can send text messages, complete with photos and embedded emoticons, to those in the Pod. The service helpfully taps into your phone Address Book so you don't have to remember everybody's number, and it lets you connect with Facebook to find friends who may already be in Beluga as well.

   Beluga Pods and Conversations, With Photos

As one tech friend suggested (within Beluga), the service is actually a lot like Brizzly's Picnics feature, but mobile. I quickly found myself sharing photos of my kids to both my wife and my mom within the app, and setting up separate lists for Geeks or other contacts.



   Beluga On the Android Market and One Photo In Line

Behind the app are a trio of former Google employees, including Ben Davenport, Co-founder and CEO, who sports Google AdSense on his resume, Lucy Zhang, Co-founder and President, who helped design AdWords, News and Docs while at Google, and Jonathan Perlow, also a co-founder, and CTO, who was a senior staff engineer at Google, with responsibility as the tech lead of the Gmail front-end team. He also lists Gmail Chat and Mail Goggles among his successes.

The Web View of Beluga Pods In Action

Beluga's approach asks you to "Start a Conversation". Add a person by name, email or phone number, and keep adding until you have the right folks. Then you can start sharing. On Android, the app leverages your existing photo gallery or prompts you to take new photos if you like.

For recipients who are not yet Beluga members, texts come from a 703 area code number, and include texts from both the initiator of the conversation and all respondents. If you have Beluga installed, new updates can come as notifications within the app, and don't live in your central messages folder.

textPlus has forged the way in this market with innovative pieces, including Communities, and photos, both items Beluga has from day one. You can find Beluga on the iTunes store or in the Android Market. If we're already connected on Facebook, you'll find me in your Beluga as well.

As for the name? No fail whales yet that I can see. So that can't be the reason.

Don't Fear Being Fireballed or Slashdotted if on Blogger

It can be difficult to plan for an unanticipated spike in Web traffic. One of the most amusing parts of reading Macolyte John Gruber's Daring Fireball blog is the near certainty that at least once per day, one of the poor saps he links to goes down due to the resulting crush of curious onlookers. It happens so frequently that it's practically second nature to see him update a post saying the link has been "Fireballed", opting instead to point to Google's cache of the original. This phenomenon, of course, is not a Gruber exclusive. For years, otherwise innocent bloggers have been Slashdotted, TechCrunched or even Scobleized, seeing their sites crack under pressure. But from what I can tell, if you're hosted on Blogger, this isn't an issue at all. The company was just recognized for perfect uptime during a survey by Royal Pingdom, and I've seen my own site spike in traffic following controversial posts with no ill effects.

Blogger was not always known for a stellar uptime record. In late 2006, the service practically had to write "a novel" about continued outages. In fall of 2007, I railed against Google for ignoring users during another major outage. But services mature and times change.

Royal Pingdom's Downtime Report. Blogger Scores a Zero.

With the backdrop of Tumblr's highly-publicized downtime of more than a day earlier this month, Royal Pingdom also spotted occasional outages at WordPress, TypePad and Posterous, each of whom looked great compared to Tumblr's unfortunate blip, but not as spotless as the often overlooked Blogger.

Getting Slashdot, Scoble and Spiegel Bumps Simultaneously

While escaping system-wide downtime is a major win in itself, that doesn't speak to the services' ability to scale under pressure. Gruber recommends the WP Super Cache Plugin for WordPress, letting users serve more than a page a second, as it's self-hosted WordPress blogs that often get crushed with one of his links. But I've been linked from Daring Fireball a few times and lived to tell the tale. Same for Slashdot, Techmeme, Hacker News and the Huffington Post, all of which are capable of sending solid and sustained traffic on good days.

Techmeme, Hacker News and Scoble Don't Bring Down Blog

Similar to how Google is well known for its Web site never going down, I have to assume Blogger has mastered Google's distributed architecture, and makes no single blog, or its hotspotting, an instrument for failure. This blog didn't slow or go down when tens of thousands of visitors dropped by this July to tell me I was an idiot for switching from iPhone to Android. It also didn't go down when I questioned the usefulness of Google Wave last year, or when the Huffington Post liked my recap of David Kirkpatrick's Facebook Effect.

Not Even Daring Fireball Could Take the Blog Down

Even the largest services have occasional downtime. Facebook was down last week, intentionally, due to a code push ahead of schedule. Twitter has had its share of bumps, though the site has gotten much better in the last year, and even Facebook subsidiary FriendFeed went down this weekend. But Blogger users are sitting pretty knowing their blogs are going to be up and responsive, even under pressure.

NOOKColor Combines Specialization, Potential & Android

In a world full of multi-purpose gadgets which ping, beep and blink at you to signal more messages coming your way to demand your attention, there's something remarkably comforting about a device like Barnes & Noble's NOOKColor, which is designed not to distract you with many things at once, but instead, to bring a powerful reading experience. I've been using the NOOKColor as my primary reading device for the last month, and it's easy to see what the product does very well. The availability of instant access to popular titles on demand, color magazines and newspapers, included apps and simple access to the Web if you want to take a break between books has made the NOOKColor an easy add to our house. I am reading more, and saving money as well as bookshelf space by going fully electronic.

Electronic book readers are not new, of course. Amazon's Kindle epitomizes the market, while the NOOKColor is B&N's second go at it, after their first generation black and white device claimed 20% share. The iPad has its iBooks application, and Sony is still somewhere out there with its eReader. But the NOOKColor hits a very interesting middle point of being impressively designed for reading, while building on extras in the background that actually make the device have incredible potential - including apps from their specialized market, and a real Web browser that can tackle even the oddest of page layouts, thanks to its Android core.


   
My NOOKColor Library, Reading the Big Short

I've long been interested in an electronic book reader device, but none of the Kindle's iterations have been appealing to me - looking like a 1980s throwback with 1950s TVs' color options. The iPad's iBooks application is nice, but the device honestly seems too heavy and cumbersome for long periods of reading. In contrast, the NOOKColor's reading space is about the size of one paperback's page, and is easily held with one hand, flipping pages with the other.

While it can be tempting for Android fans to beg the NOOKColor to add the full Android market and essentially become a low-priced 7-inch tablet, its focus on access to new reading material and having a versatile reading experience define the product. B&N's expertise is in its cultivated lists and access to titles, along with offering WiFi access in every store, along with the ability to preview any book while on their network, just as you could thumb through any book in any retail store. A nice twist.

Browsing Twitter.com On the NOOKColor

One of the reasons I was intrigued by the NOOKColor was its promise to bring interactive children's books that could be read aloud by professionals, and not tired dads. Sure enough, those titles are widely available, with all the bright color imagery in most youth titles these days. But for my age, I was more than happy to pick up the latest Stephen King and John Grisham novels, finally get access to The Big Short by Michael Lewis and yes, even read Decision Points by our 43rd president - something I had no dream of doing in hardcover. Using a fun feature, I was able to post that I'd finished the book to Twitter. You can even post your status mid-way through the book if you want to keep social connections updated.

You wouldn't even know you were running Android 99% of the time you use the device. The home button displays your purchased items, and a second click brings up options for the B&N store, your library, and more. Where Android kicks in are "Extras", which includes some apps, like Pandora and Chess, and "Web". While you're probably not going to make the NOOKColor your primary Web surfing device, it's great to have in the background if you absolutely must check a few news sites, blogs, or even Twitter. As the Market offerings expand with the NOOKColor's growth, I would expect the app experience to play a larger role, of course.

In contrast to my experience with my Android phones (the HTC Evo and the Samsung Epic 4G), battery on the NOOKColor is fantastic. I haven't had it go head to head with the iPad or the Samsung Galaxy Tab, but all three tablets can go days without a charge, and see several hours of use without decrease.

The NOOKColor can also be connected to a laptop via MicroUSB, to transfer files, charge, or pass over screenshots. I pulled MP3 files from my laptop to the NOOKColor and can listen to music in the background as I read, or I can take pictures of my kids and make them the device's wallpaper. This makes it much more like a simple Android tablet than a simple reader.

I Can Update Social Services With my Reading Status

The NOOKColor is only $249, which is lower than the Galaxy Tab or iPad, and comes with integrated WiFi, but not 3G. The low price is enticing, and actually plays into the same strategy of Apple's iPod, with the device leading to more software sales. I am now buying books for $10 again, when I had pretty much walked away from long-form reading off the Web. You can even buy editions of the Wall Street Journal for a buck, if you like. The device's form factor is sturdy and comfortable and is playing a major role in our home's gadget hierarchy.

You can find out more at Barnes & Noble's NOOKColor site. Sales have been fast and furious, so it's probably too late to pick one up for Christmas, but it should be on your personal list, even if you're not gifting it to someone. It's the best reading device in our house, and it's got a Web browser to boot.

Delicious' Decline Already Evident In Traffic, Sharing Trends

The age-old guidance of buying low and selling high has appeared to escape the halls of Yahoo!. If we ignore the Microsoft and Yahoo! acquisition dance of 2008, which ended up in Yahoo!'s staying independent, but losing dramatic market capitalization, search market share, and accelerating an employee exodus, both voluntary and involuntary, it's still clear the company intends to wring all the remaining value out of its vestigial pieces before selling - effectively promising low to no returns on every deal.

Yesterday's news leaked that Yahoo! had plans to kill or spin off a number of Web services, including Delicious, Alta Vista, MyBlogLog and others. Given the abandonment and mismanagement of these properties, this is not too surprising.

AddThis Shows Decreased Use of Buzz, Delicious In Last 90 Days

Alta Vista's mismanagement goes back more than a decade. In 1999, I wrote a story (this is pre-blog, so I'd love to say "post") on Internet Valley's Web site about how Compaq was not leveraging Alta Vista after they acquired Digital Equipment Corp. (See: Warning: Compaq is On the WWWarpath) The site is a shell of its former self, once being my go-to search site.

But Delicious is what has everyone up in arms, as the company was among the first Web 2.0 darlings, and is still widely used, as the Web's definitive bookmarking site. I've personally tagged more than 3,000 items in the last few years, most of them capturing external links to the blog. Yahoo! has managed to take a site with a deep bench of fans, considerable use, and make it obvious they would love to give it away. It's not even clear if anybody really works on it any more, or if it's just being maintained by the company's techies.

Compete.com Shows Traffic Freefall at Delicious

On this background, both Web traffic stats and sharing statistics from third party sites show the party long since ended at Delicious. Compete, whose traffic graphs are anything if not suspect, still manages to display some trendlines right, showing a decrease in traffic of nearly one half in the last year. In parallel, AddThis, the social sharing site, shows decreased Delicious bookmarking, down by 14% in the last three months, the fastest declining site of its kind on the service.

AddThis Displays Delicious Dive To the Bottom of the Bookmarking Pile

The moves Delicious has made have been odd or delayed. The long-awaited "New Delicious" was way behind schedule, and recent bumps made sharing to external services even more difficult. It's as if the company wanted to punish the users it had left.

If you want to get a fantastic return on a sale, the best time to sell is when you don't have to, when things are going fantastic and you have real momentum. Yahoo! has essentially telegraphed to the world that it wants to ditch Delicious to someone, anyone. But the catch is, its users already started ditching it themselves. Buy high, kill.... sell. That's the wrong order of things, Yahoo!.