Predicting the future

A colleague recently pointed at this chart from Google Trends showing searches for 'recession'. It's interesting to see this relatively technical economic term catch the zeitgeist in real time. But what he was really showing me was the way searches for recession rose sharply significantly in advance of Monday's financial markets bloodbath. His supposition of course was that you can use these data to predict the market and stay one step ahead.

Now, obviously this single data point does not incontrovertible evidence make, but I'd be willing to bet that the aggregate query stream is full of insights that could help you predict short term future. To that end I think that this initiative which google.org is funding is especially exciting. Essentially they want to use all sorts of analysis of data (think news sources, query streams, blogs, anything you like really) to try to predict rising epidemics before they get too big to contain. I'd trade the ability to spot the next recession for that sort of capability any day.

That said, I'm interested what people think we can predict using these data and more importantly what keyword I should be tracking to spot the bottom of the downturn!

I love friendfeed

For a few months now I've been using a new web service that is super useful. It's created by a few ex-Google luminaries and it's called friendfeed.

At it's core friendfeed keeps track of all my activity on a dizzying array of social web services (delicious, flickr, picasa, last.fm, twitter, google reader, posts to this blog and more) and republishes it as a news feed to which any of my friends can subscribe. I can also add directly to my feed using their handy bookmarklet.

At the same time, I can subscribe to other peoples' feeds and friendfeed will aggregate all their news along with mine into my own personal digest. In this digest, I can comment on activities, 'like' them and generally discover great stuff on the web.

That all sounds pretty useful, but what has exalted friendfeed to 'loved' status? It's a bunch of little things really, all of which start with user focus. Things like:

• Open-ness - my friendfeed is available pretty much any way I like. On their site, RSS, iGoogle, Facebook, embedded on the right hand side of this blog!
• Listening to their users - since they got up and running there's been an active Google Group in which the founders talk to users and listen out for bug reports and feature requests. Within a couple of weeks of launching they responded to user feedback that last.fm was clogging up their feeds by changing the way they reported the last.fm activity. Simple, and great.
• Change, change, change - new services added. New features seemingly every day. Using friendfeed is the gift that keeps on giving!
• Using their own product - Paul, Brett and the team are active friendfeeders. In the early days their feeds were the glue that held it all together and now they are regular participants in long debates and continue to post great things.
• Speed - the team at friendfeed are seemingly obsessed with speed (not surprising given thru heritage). They had a distributed crawler from day 1. They experimented tirelessly to speed up the updates from twitter.

So what next for friendfeed. Well I second the requests for upgrades from Louis Gray. The big thing for me is that friending is an all or nothing thing. It'd be great to be able to opt out of specific services (mainly twitter actually) for certain users. Actually, I'm confident that this and many other little bundles of innovation are on their way, so I'll give them a bit of grace on this one!

Another question is, given that they are creating bags of user value, are they creating shareholder value (for their backers at Benchmark)? I think yes, and on lots of different levels.

At the most basic level they are creating ad inventory and there's the ability to include sponsored elements in peoples' feeds similar to Facebook. I think the chaps at friendfeed are too smart for this. It's way too early in the life of the service to consider ads and anyway I think it would undervalue what they are building.

The second level is that they are creating loads of beautiful data. Relationships between people, information about webpages and services. The sort of stuff that search engine would be pretty interested in and the sort of data that the 'social revolution' is all about. In their privileged position as aggregator they are like delicious, twitter, and Google Reader all rolled into one.

The third and potentially most interesting level is that they are creating a platform that is a genuine competitive advantage. The focus on speed and scaling is something you don't often see in early stage start ups (see twitter's downtime issues). It means that even if a Yahoo or Google releases a competitive product friendfeed will continue to have a competitive advantage. A head start in knowing the nuances of crawling these various web services in the most efficient way is a defensible advantage (when you have smart people at the helm).

Anyway, I wish them the best 2008 can offer them and I hope I'll continue to be one of their happiest users...

2007 Top Picks Number 1 - Arcade Fire

So here it is. Late as usual - sorry - but better than last year.

I got turned on to Arcade Fire (as with many other things) via Fred Wilson's blog. Their first album Neighbourhood is a cracker: raw, rousing and full of drama. Well the follow up, 'Neon Bible' takes everything to the next level.

Fred thinks they've gone 'a bit U2' with this one, but I completely disagree. For me they've ratcheted up the drama and refined their songwriting. The songs may be a little slicker than last time but it's the passion of the performers that really continues to shine through. No other band can belt out a big chorus or squeeze such an astonishing array of sounds from a ridiculously diverse set of instruments as these guys. Everything on this album is 100% for real. As far from pomp-rock as you could ask.

If you like Heroes-era Bowie and donning a velvet jacket then look no further than this masterpiece of an album.