The Mossberg Solution » social networking

A Downsized BlackBerry Bold With Oomph

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:16:08 +0000

Almost exactly one year ago, Research In Motion introduced what I then called the Buick of BlackBerrys: the BlackBerry Bold. It was bulky, heavy and seemed made for the holster-wearing set. But what it lacked in style it made up for in comfort. It had a generously sized keyboard, bright screen and even a leatherette back to accent its luxurious side. The Bold was RIM’s first BlackBerry to run on the fast 3G network, and AT&T was asking $300 for it—$100 more than the least expensive Apple iPhone at the time.

Much has changed in a year, most notably the growing number of serious competitors vying to steal customers from RIM (RIMM) and Apple (AAPL), and the surge of applications (“apps” for short) available for these super smart phones.

[ See post to watch video ]

This week, I tested RIM’s new BlackBerry Bold 9700 (na.blackberry.com), which will be available on Nov. 27 for $200 with a two-year T-Mobile contract. Like the original Bold, the Bold 9700 has a leatherette back. But that’s where the similarities end. This new version reminds me of the original Bold after a diet: smaller in every dimension—width, height, depth and weight—and, physically, it’s a lot like the newer BlackBerry Curve models. (I use the Curve 8900 every day, and after using the two together for a week I still mistook them for one another at a glance.)

RIM has long been proud of its diverse selection and the fact that it doesn’t force a “one size fits all” theory on its users. Instead, it offers BlackBerrys in all shapes and sizes, ranging from the Pearl Flip, a flip phone with a built-in BlackBerry, to the Storm 2, a touch-screen device without a physical keyboard, and several models in between.

Now, the Bold has dropped its distinguished characteristics. The Buick of BlackBerrys has become as common as the Toyota Camry. Is there nothing left for the user who likes a large, luxurious BlackBerry?

In a side-by-side comparison between this new Bold 9700, the Curve 8900 ($150 after a $100 mail-in rebate) and the Tour 9630 ($150 after Verizon’s $100 online discount), the physical differences are almost imperceptible. And these models don’t look all that different from the Curve 8520, which costs $50 with a two-year T-Mobile contract when bought at Wal-Mart (WMT).

The new Bold’s smaller size means its keyboard also is slightly smaller than its predecessor: It measures about 5.5 centimeters across rather than 5.9 centimeters. I still found it relatively comfortable to use. But this keyboard is almost exactly the same as the keyboard on the BlackBerry Tour, except the new Bold’s bottom row of keys is slightly shorter. Unlike the keyboard found on the Curve 8900 and other less-expensive Curves, the keys on the Bold 9700 are positioned side by side with no spaces between them, and horizontal rows are divided by chrome frets.

Look familiar? The BlackBerry Bold 9700 now resembles existing BlackBerrys.

While the Bold 9700 looks rather undistinguished, it has a few less-obvious attributes that give it a little oomph. For starters, it uses a trackpad for scrolling the screen. Longtime Blackberry users will remember the original scroll wheel, which was on the right side of the device. In 2006, the scroll wheel was replaced with a trackball on the front of the device. This September, that trackball was replaced by a trackpad as first seen on the Curve 8520, and its appearance on this new Bold confirms RIM’s decision to use it as the navigational tool of choice.

This trackpad is a tiny, touch-sensitive square that works by sensing a finger’s directional movements. Pressing in on the trackpad, like pressing in on the trackball, selects something on the screen. At first, I missed the satisfying physical feel of scrolling with the trackball, and the trackpad felt fast and less controllable to my thumb. But I soon got used to the trackpad and appreciated that it does away with all moving parts that could possibly get stuck—a trackball hazard for many BlackBerry users. The trackpad also establishes a flat layer beneath the screen that looks sleek and smooth in line with the four navigational buttons.

Another advantage of the Bold 9700 is its battery life. If you take off this BlackBerry’s leatherette back, a battery that measures almost the size of the device itself lies beneath. This large battery supplies the Bold 9700 with enough juice to last up to 19 days in standby mode. By comparison, the BlackBerry Tour and Curve 8900 last for up to 14 days each in standby. The new Bold’s talk time is up to six hours, slightly better than the Curve 8900’s 5½ and an hour better than the Tour’s five-hour talk time.

This thinner, lighter, smaller Bold is more comfortable to use for phone calls than the original, which could make users feel like they were holding a small piece of toast up to their ear during calls. I made several calls with no problems. Emailing on this Bold 9700 was as simple as always, and I set up four email accounts for testing.

Despite its fancy new BlackBerrys, RIM needs to overhaul the way it handles apps. The Bold 9700 comes preloaded with a prominently positioned icon for RIM’s BlackBerry App World store. But apps downloaded from here still go right into the “Downloads” folder, sending users unfamiliar with this system into a frantic search for their newly downloaded app.

And not all apps go into that folder; the Facebook app goes straight to the “Apps” folder. Why not put every new app right on the home screen and let me put them into folders if I so choose?

Once apps are downloaded, RIM neglects to notify you when all apps need to be updated. On my personal Curve 8900, I recently dug into the settings of my TwitterBerry and Facebook apps and manually checked to see if updated versions were available for each. This was the case, and I downloaded the new versions, but most people would never think to check for this kind of thing. Instead, RIM should send notifications about available updates for all apps.

The Bold 9700 runs on T-Mobile’s 3G network, which isn’t nearly as established as the 3G networks that Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) offer. It also can connect to Wi-Fi and allows voice calls to be made over Wi-Fi. (The BlackBerry Tour connects to Verizon’s 3G network but doesn’t have Wi-Fi—a huge downside. The Curve 8900 connects to Wi-Fi but not to 3G.)

The other attributes of the Bold 9700 are like the BlackBerry Curve 8900 and Tour: They all have cameras with flashes that are capable of capturing 3.2-megapixel photographs, bright 480×360-pixel displays, built-in GPS and slots for microSD memory cards so as to expand their memory.

If you’re considering a BlackBerry upgrade, the Bold 9700 offers 3G and Wi-Fi, a combination not offered by another BlackBerry with a full physical keyboard—other than the original Bold. But since many of the Bold 9700’s features are about the same as less-expensive BlackBerrys, it’s worth considering the Tour and Curve 8900 before you spend $200 on a device that no longer lives up to its bold name.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Fitbit Sees How You Run, Walk and Sleep

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:28:38 +0000

Everyone knows they ought to be eating well, exercising and getting enough sleep. But when they take the elevator up one flight of stairs, drive six blocks instead of walking and skimp on sleep to watch the end of the big game, it’s their little secret.

Not for long.

[ See post to watch video ]

I’ve been testing Fitbit, a tiny $99 device with a motion-detecting sensor that, when worn, digitally records one’s distance (walking or running), calories burned and steps taken—as well as sleep patterns. The Fitbit wirelessly sends the data to its Web site, fitbit.com, for storing these minute-by-minute details. And the site has space where users add details like food and water consumption so it provides a more accurate picture of calories burned versus calories consumed.

I’ve been using Fitbit almost nonstop for the past week. I occasionally forgot to wear this lightweight tracking device because I was dog-sitting for a friend’s puppy and barely remembered to wear my shoes, much less Fitbit, as we dashed out the door for walks at 5:30 a.m. But after just a couple days of using Fitbit, I got hooked on the idea of keeping digital tabs on myself, and I liked looking back at my activity log over a period of time. I started taking the long way walking to and from my Washington, D.C., Metro stop. Rather than rolling my chair over to the printer to grab a printout, I stood up and walked the four feet over to it so I could log a few extra steps.

The idea of tracking one’s own fitness is nothing new, as anyone with an old pedometer will tell you. But Fitbit’s technology makes it easier to record and store data, and its corresponding Web site analyzes the data in relation to personal information like gender, age, weight and height. Unlike some other products, it attempts to track your body’s activity while you’re asleep and awake, rather than one or the other. For instance, the $29 Nike + iPod Sport Kit specifically monitors running or walking; the $399 Zeo Personal Sleep Coach records people’s brain waves to analyze sleep behavior.

The $99 Fitbit has a motiondetecting sensor and measures distance, calories, steps and sleep patterns.

But the Nike + iPod and Zeo offer Web components that Fitbit currently lacks. The Nike + iPod lets you upload your workout details to see how you stack up against others or to compete against friends. The Zeo, too, lets you upload your data to its Web site, where sleep patterns can be analyzed and daily coaching tips are offered.

Fitbit data is automatically transferred to Fitbit.com, but for now, this site isn’t particularly social and doesn’t offer as much in-depth personal analysis and coaching. The site doesn’t allow you to use your data to interact with a community of other users. The company says it plans to launch its online community by December, giving people a forum for anonymously comparing their data or working with a group toward a goal, like losing a certain amount of weight. And while the Fitbit.com site is free, the company is considering plans to charge a monthly fee for additional personal data analysis and coaching—a feature that may launch early next year.

At two inches high and a half-inch wide, Fitbit reminded me of the rectangular iPod Shuffle that clips onto clothing. It weighs just four-tenths of an ounce. The device also has a tiny holster for a firmer hold. I used this holster just to be on the safe side and the combination was still so small and weightless that I often forgot I was wearing Fitbit. While sleeping, I wore a Velcro wristband that held the device in place. Fitbit Inc. says the wrist is the best place to measure activity during sleep; let’s just hope you don’t dream about conducting the Vienna Philharmonic.

A button on the Fitbit shuffles through four blue screens that show calories, distance (in miles), steps, and a Tamagotchi-like flower that grows when your activity increases and shrinks when it decreases. This flower learns your behavior over time, so if you start working out heavily, it raises its standards and won’t grow as quickly.

Along with its holster and sleeping wristband, Fitbit comes with a base station—a small USB-connected stand for charging. The battery takes an hour to fully charge and lasts five to 10 days. Battery status can be checked through Fitbit.com.

First-time Fitbit setup isn’t as easy as it should be, though. Unlike some USB devices, this one doesn’t come with preloaded software, so you have to go to Fitbit.com/start to download software for the Mac or PC. This allows the plugged-in base station to act as a receiver: Whenever a Fitbit is within 15 feet of a base station plugged into a computer that’s turned on and has Fitbit software installed, its data is automatically sent to Fitbit.com in 15-minute intervals.

The device will hold seven days of minute-by-minute data and 30 days’ worth of daily data, so you don’t have to worry about losing everything if you aren’t near your base station for a while. Using the device is as simple as moving; it’s always on—there’s no on/off button. Setting the Fitbit to record sleep sessions is almost as easy: You press and hold its button for two seconds until “Start” appears; do the same until “Stop” appears when you wake in the morning.

The data that show up on Fitbit.com reflect the device’s 3-D motion-detecting sensor. Rather than simply counting your steps, Fitbit can accurately read your motion intensity and therefore sorts motion into sedentary, lightly active, fairly active and very active. Running with the dog registered as very active movement, as did my power-walking trips to the Metro. Predictably, my time spent writing this column registered as sedentary. I got up and did five minutes of jumping jacks, which were recognized on the Web site minutes later as very active movements. If you change data on Fitbit.com, like your weight, this transfers to the device so it’s calibrating as accurately as possible.

According to my sleep records, I wake up often while I sleep—11 different times in one night—but don’t remember doing so. I wanted to know more about these different sleep states, but Fitbit doesn’t analyze that sort of thing.

Fitbit.com bases its Web-site information on biomechanical studies performed by government agencies and universities over several years. It sets goals for each person according to his or her base metabolic rate, which is determined by gender, age, weight and height—all details that users can opt to enter, or not, during setup. On a typical workday, I met 80% of my calorie-burning goal and 71% of my miles-traveled goal. All of these goals can be adjusted from what Fitbit.com sets. An easy-to-read pie chart displayed my four levels of motion in color-coded percentages.

Extra activities and food consumption can be manually added, and though bookmarking tools make it easier to do this, I opted not to do this.

Fitbits began shipping at the end of September and will continue shipping to customers who pre-ordered the devices. In January, Fitbit Inc. will start delivering new orders and Fitbits will appear in retail stores.

–Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Netbooks That Are Easier on the Eye

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:07:40 +0000

Like clockwork, retailers were ready for Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT) Windows 7 release last week with new desktops, laptops and netbooks, those inexpensive, smaller laptops that have become popular in the past year. Included in this selection of netbooks are some that improved the poor screen resolutions that have plagued these tiny PCs.

[ See post to watch video ]

Screen resolution isn’t the same as the size of the screen itself. Rather, it is related to the number of pixels—or distinct dots—on a display, and an indication of how much material can be seen on the screen without scrolling. A higher-resolution screen allows you to see more of a Web page, spreadsheet or list of emails than a lower-resolution screen, even if both are the same physical size.

Because higher-resolution screens cost more, most netbooks come with low-resolution screens to keep prices down. But poor resolution combined with a small netbook screen results in frustrating visuals, like Web pages that display just a small portion of their contents, forcing you to scroll down or horizontally to see the rest of the page.

This week, I tested two Windows 7 netbooks with unusually high-res screens: Hewlett-Packard Co.’s (HPQ) HP Mini 311 with an 11.6-inch screen and a resolution of 1,366-by-768 pixels, and Nokia Corp.’s (NOK) Booklet 3G with a 10.1-inch screen and a resolution of 1,280-by-720-pixels. Both these small computers display the bulk of most Web pages without any scrolling necessary—a big relief on a netbook.

Though high-resolution screens make these netbooks easier on the eyes than others, I still had trouble adjusting to their shrunken features. I liked typing on the HP Mini’s generous keyboard, which H-P says is 92 percent of full size. But its touchpad buttons felt stiff and uncomfortably located at the edge of the computer. The Nokia Booklet had the opposite problem: Its touchpad and buttons worked fine, but its tiny keys made me feel like I was typing on a kiddie computer.

Nokia’s Booklet 3G has a long battery life and sleek design.

Nokia is a bit more of a newsmaker here, because when the Booklet 3G (nokiausa.com) comes out in mid-November, it will be the first foray by the Finnish mobile-device company into the laptop space. Best Buy (BBY) began taking advance orders for them this week. It costs $300 if purchased with AT&T Inc.’s (T) two-year Data Connect plan, which costs $60 a month for five gigabytes of data and allows users to toggle back and forth between two kinds of wireless connections, cellular 3G and Wi-Fi. If purchased without the AT&T plan, the Booklet 3G costs $600—a lot for a netbook—including only Windows 7 Starter, the low-end version of the new OS, and one gigabyte of memory.

The thing most people will notice right away about Nokia’s netbook is that it seems to take its design cues directly from Apple Inc. (AAPL) Like the MacBook Pro, the Nokia Booklet 3G is made from a single piece of aluminum, and its keyboard is made of black Chiclet-style keys. Its edges are rounded and smooth. I used one with a glossy black lid, but it will also come in shades of ice white or azure blue.

Nokia boasts that this netbook’s battery will last for 12 hours; after running it through a harsh test with its screen cranked up to the brightest setting, Wi-Fi on, music playing on a continuous loop and all power-saving features turned off, it ran for almost eight hours straight. This means that under normal circumstances, the battery might last for a remarkable 10 hours.

The Booklet 3G that I used differs from Nokia’s final release version in a few ways: Mine wasn’t loaded with AT&T’s Connection Manager software, which enables switching between Wi-Fi and 3G; it lacked the Nokia Social Hub software, which the company says allows users to track social-media feeds and text messages; and the GPS wasn’t yet connected to the U.S. map data server. My Booklet 3G included Ovi Suite, a Nokia-designed software program to bridge the connection between some Nokia smartphones and the Booklet 3G, like iTunes for the iPhone or BlackBerry’s Desktop Manager. But the software I had wasn’t the final version.

Unlike Nokia, H-P is no stranger to netbooks, having released nine of its Mini models in the past year. The HP Mini 311 (hp.com/go/mini) costs $400 when purchased with Windows XP and costs an additional $50 when loaded with Windows 7 Home Premium. The Mini that I tested costs $474 because it also had two gigabytes of memory rather than one gigabyte.

The H-P model is a little bigger all around compared with the Nokia, with an inch-larger screen; it weighs 3.22 pounds compared with 2.76 pounds for the Nokia. Both felt relatively thin and light, and I carried them home together from my office with ease. The HP Mini 311 had H-P’s subtle Black Swirl pattern on its lid—a faint pattern of silver swirls noticeable only at certain angles. It also comes in White Swirl.

I ran the same battery test on the HP as I did with the Nokia, and it lasted four hours and 15 minutes, giving it roughly six hours of juice under normal circumstances. H-P estimates that the Mini 311’s battery will last for six hours and 25 minutes.

I didn’t run into any problems while installing and using several programs on each of these netbooks, including Windows Live Essentials, Mozilla’s Firefox browser, Picasa 3, TweetDeck, Adobe (ADBE) Reader and iTunes. The HP Mini felt more responsive and, in fact, loaded some programs a little faster, but it had twice the memory.

Both netbooks have slots for memory cards, HDMI ports for connecting to HD screens and three USB ports. And they come with built-in Web cams, a common feature on netbooks.

A cold start on both the Mini 311 and Booklet 3G required roughly the same amount of time: one minute and eight seconds for the H-P, and a minute and 12 seconds for the Nokia. But restarting was a different story. While playing a song in iTunes, running three Web pages in Firefox and using TweetDeck, I selected Restart. The HP Mini 311 took a minute and 20 seconds while the Nokia took nearly two minutes.

Even without the AT&T discount, the Nokia Booklet 3G’s extra-long battery life and sleek design will be worth the extra money for some people—just beware its tiny keyboard. The HP Mini 311 is a good all-around netbook with a comfortable keyboard for typing. No one will be disappointed by the terrific screen resolutions.

-Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Yahoo Renovates Its Home Page

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:52:02 +0000

Makeovers are always fun to watch. Someone swoops in on an unsuspecting fashion “don’t,” improves him or her with a new hairstyle, makeup and wardrobe, and presents the finished product to overjoyed friends and family.

Last week, Yahoo (YHOO) unveiled the results of its latest makeover: the revamped home page. Carol Bartz, the company’s relatively new CEO, has said that Yahoo’s home page needed just such a makeover. After not changing significantly since 2006, the home page fits the role of a fashion don’t. And consumers, like family and friend observing the aftermath of a makeover, will either be overjoyed or nonplussed by the finished product.

Yahoo’s cleaner, streamlined home page emphasizes its ability to view content from other Web sites.

I’ve been using this new home page for over a week now and I can report that Yahoo followed one of the most important makeover rules by doing more with less. Gone is the busy screen saturated with advertisements and clutter. The new home page is clean and easier to absorb.

Favorite ‘Apps’

Yahoo’s home-page makeover goes beyond surface improvements. Its most useful feature is a list called My Favorites, which contains a variety of Web sites from within and outside of Yahoo. When your cursor hovers over one of these entries, which Yahoo calls “apps,” a pane opens with a preview of content from that site. This turns your Yahoo home page into an aggregator of information, bringing glimpses of information to you in one place so you don’t have to waste time navigating to other sites.

But if a greater number of these apps were more robust, you would be able to do more right within the hover pane, like watch videos or play a game. Currently, the hover preview pane only lets you see content, update social-network statuses and enter search terms, the results of which are shown on a new Web page.

[ See post to watch video ]

This makeover comes at an interesting time in the world of online news aggregation. Competitors like Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) incorporate data from all over the Web into iGoogle.com and MSN.com, respectively. And the concept of the home page as a starting point isn’t as popular as it once was: Many people now start browsing the Web by first clicking on a link in an email or in one of many social-networking sites, like Twitter.

Traffic Driver

Of course, Yahoo plans to use this redesigned home page to drive traffic to the company’s own sites like Shine, Answers, Health and OMG (a celebrity gossip site). These Yahoo sites make up half of the 65 apps designed especially for My Favorites. Yahoo says that its apps for other sites, including WSJ.com, were made by Yahoo and the outside company running the Web site. An ad runs on the hover preview page of each app and the revenue for this ad goes to Yahoo, not the content provider.

Yahoo will use your list of My Favorites apps to learn about what sites you use so as to target ads at users. This proved true for most of the ads I saw on my home page, but strangely, the AllThingsD.com app displayed ads for Mars chocolate and Del Monte fruit snacks rather than technology products.

Module Thinking

My Favorites is fixed on the far left of the Yahoo home page and a large search box sits prominently at the top of the home screen.

The top middle section of the screen shows a carousel of images and current news that Yahoo calls the Today Module; below this is the News Module, which houses tabs labeled News, World, Local, and Finance. The Local and Finance tabs can be customized by entering a ZIP Code and stock tickers, respectively. The Today and News Modules can switch positions if you click on a small arrow.

The revamped home page will serve as a starting point for the Yahoo Application Platform, or YAP. Sometime around late September, Yahoo will open its YAP (no pun intended) to software developers so they can make all kinds of apps with a variety of functions for the home page, not just apps that are tied to Web sites.

You can customize the home page for style or content changes if you sign on using a user ID and password. Changes should appear the next time you log in. But this didn’t work as well as it should. I set my page to display in a tangerine color, one of six colors offered for customizing the page, but the home page wasn’t tangerine-colored the next time I logged in.

Some Problems

I had trouble logging into my Gmail account using a special Gmail app, but this and the color problem were fixed by the time this column went to press.

Some apps didn’t work at all, like the Facebook app, which couldn’t connect to my Facebook account. Yahoo said the problem should be fixed this week.

The home page seemed to have a longer memory when it came to the list of My Favorites. I edited my list, adding more pre-made apps and creating some of my own using a built-in tool that lets you enter a Web site. Yahoo has preloaded icons for some popular Web sites such as cnn.com; otherwise, it will use a generic star.

Permanent Apps

Two apps are permanent fixtures at the top of the My Favorites list: One shows a list of all Yahoo sites and the other shows Yahoo Mail. Everything else can be deleted, added and moved around in the list. One of my favorite apps was for Epicurious.com, the food and recipe site. When I hovered over the Epicurious app, images of food with recipe names appeared in the hover preview pane. One click on an image sent me to the Web site for the full version of the recipe.

After adding many of my own apps to My Favorites, I wished Yahoo had a one-click tool for converting my browser bookmarks into apps. Yahoo says this is something it hopes to introduce in the future.

Mobile Rollout

This week, Yahoo started rolling out a mobile Web site made to run on the iPhone’s Safari browser that coordinates with the more robust version of the home page. I used this Yahoo home page on the iPhone and liked that it immediately pulled up the My Favorites list I had carefully constructed on my computer. Similar offerings will soon be available for other mobile devices.

The new Yahoo home page is a refreshing way of bringing content to you rather than you chasing around the Web looking for it. The My Favorites apps need a little more power to be truly useful and to encourage people to use the Yahoo home page every day, but Yahoo hopes to solve some of that problem in a couple of months when it opens the site to developers.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Software That Makes Twitter So Much Tweeter

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:02:03 +0000

Most people who aren’t familiar with Twitter are eager to list the reasons why they don’t use this social-networking service. It’s for narcissists. It’s for teenagers. It’s for people who have nothing better to do. It’s a forum for oversharing. While all of these things may be true in some cases, I find Twitter’s 140-character messaging network to be an incredibly useful tool in my everyday life.

I use Twitter as my personalized news feed by following people who “tweet” (write updates) about things that interest me. In one glance I can read White House correspondent Mark Knoller’s tweets about President Obama’s activities, a recipe tweeted by Martha Stewart and WSJ.com tweets with links to news stories.

[ See post to watch video ]

But Twitter works best with a little help from its friends, namely those programs that are designed to make it more customized and useful with minimal work on the user’s behalf. Here’s a rundown of just some of these helpers. I’m focusing only on ones that run on your computer, either in Web browsers or as stand-alone programs. There is also a plethora of Twitter applications that work on mobile devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry, too many to go into here. A few Twitter programs let you lurk and read tweets without a Twitter account, but in most cases these programs require a Twitter user name and password so they can better organize tweets of the people whom you follow.

To get a Twitter account in the first place, you will need to sign up with a user name and password at Twitter.com and start following people—or subscribing to read someone’s updates. These may be friends or people you simply find interesting, like journalists whose work you read (my Twitter user name is kabster728). You can see whom one person follows, and then opt also to follow those same people and the people those people follow and so on. Though it’s possible to lock your account so it’s private, very few people do so because Twitter encourages open communication throughout the Web.

That said, you can always choose to block someone from following you or stop following someone’s Twitter feed. You can comment on a tweet by sending the person who wrote it an “at reply,” named because the reply starts with the “@” sign followed by the user name of the person to whom you are replying. You can also send direct messages to another Twitter user as long as he or she is following you.

All-Purpose Programs

TweetDeck and Seesmic are two programs that do a good job of filtering others’ tweets and aiding the process of writing tweets. Both use Adobe Air, a tool that lets the program work in the background while continuously refreshing its content. This increases productivity because the programs can be set to display pop-up notifications whenever certain tweets appear.

TweetDeck (a free download at TweetDeck.com) organizes tweets into columns that you designate, such as a column of all tweets that mention your name, your company’s name or the word “Wimbledon.” It eases the process of writing tweets by building in ways to shorten Web links, post photos or translate a tweet into one of 35 languages. TweetDeck also integrates with Facebook so that one TweetDeck column displays your Facebook friends’ latest status updates.

The most recent version of TweetDeck enables synchronization of accounts with an email and password. This means that you can download TweetDeck on several computers, log into your account and see the same columns and settings on all platforms. The new version also includes fun extras like search within each column and the option to show how many followers a user has by displaying that number below his or her tweets.

Seesmic (a free download at seesmic.com) is another all-purpose Twitter program. It works much like TweetDeck, but has a few differences. Seesmic also integrates with Facebook, but does so in a more robust way, showing when Facebook friends share photos or Web links and letting you comment on or “like” someone’s status; TweetDeck only shows Facebook status updates.

Seesmic lets you drag photos into a small window for sharing via Twitter. But its overall look isn’t as visually appealing as TweetDeck’s and it lacks some of TweetDeck’s extra features.

Twhirl (twhirl.org) also runs on Adobe Air, working in the background as you use your computer for other activities. Like the aforementioned programs, it also enables easier tweeting with built-in tools for photo uploading and URL shrinking. Unlike TweetDeck and Seesmic, which focus on Twitter and Facebook, Twhirl enables logging into four types of accounts: Twitter, FriendFeed, Laconi.ca and Identica. But Twhirl shows only one category at a time, like a screen of replies, rather than showing all of these categories at a glance like TweetDeck and Seesmic.

Browser Power

Some Twitter programs run in browsers, not as stand-alone programs. This saves you from downloading a program on multiple computers because you can simply log into your account on any computer using its Web browser. But these programs won’t use the helpful pop-up notifications of Adobe Air; instead, you will need to look in your browser to see new information—like opening Twitter.com.

One such browser-based program is HootSuite (HootSuite.com), which uses an owl as its mascot. HootSuite’s unique features include its ability to set tweets to send at a later time or date, giving your followers the illusion that you are tweeting when you’re actually not, and a built-in statistic-tracker to measure how many people opened a link you posted using its ow.ly URL shortener. Like Twhirl, HootSuite shows only certain categories at a time rather than one overall glance at many categories of tweets.

Twitter.com is getting better, though it’s still weak compared with these other programs. I’ve used add-ons in my Firefox browser to enhance Twitter, and one called Power Twitter is like steroids for Twitter.com, adding photo uploading and link shortening right into the Web site. It also makes friends’ tweets richer by displaying details about any Web links that they share.

No Sign-Up Necessary

If you’re just curious about Twitter and want to see what people are talking about without signing up, try sites that are open to everyone. Twitterfall.com, for example, displays tweets about trending Twitter topics and custom search results in a waterfall-like visual with new tweets spilling over the top every half second. TwitterVision.com cleverly displays tweets around the world on a global map as they are posted, showing where the tweets are from, geographically.

Twitter isn’t limited to Twitter.com, and I wouldn’t likely use it as much were it not for programs like the ones I’ve mentioned and others. So give them a try and find out what makes Twitter useful for you.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Organizing Your Online Shopping

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 13 May 2009 00:20:03 +0000

Last winter, I spent a good hour shopping online for the perfect black leather boots. I used tabbed browsing to open at least 25 Web pages, comparing each pair’s cost, heel height, zipper, leather and toe style. I emailed a friend with links to a few sites so I could get her opinion. And when I finally decided on the right pair, I dug through my email inbox to find a coupon code for 20% off.

This week I tested a solution that might have made my quest for boots a little simpler. Snipi, which became available as a free download from Snipi.com on Monday, helps you organize your online-shopping results by gathering, or “snipping,” product information from Web pages and saving the information to lists.

These lists are stored on your personalized Snipi page, where you can access them later. Snipi also can save photos and videos to lists. And it has a coordinating iPhone app that shows up-to-date versions of the lists created on the computer, so you can have them with you on the go.

The Snipi Toolbar collects and displays the user’s online research.

To do all this, you use the Snipi Toolbar, a horizontal window that pops up within your browser so you never have to navigate away from the site where you’re shopping. If you see an item you like, simply drag and drop an image of it into the toolbar, where details about the item — including its title, price and image — are automatically filled in. If the item was previously snipped by another Snipi user, a description box will be filled with whatever that person wrote or pasted in from the product page; you can fill in the box yourself, too.

Snipi has a partnership with Shopzilla Inc., so the Snipi Toolbar also has comparison shopping built in: It displays links to Web sites where your snipped product, or products like it, can be found at lower prices.

One of the big drawbacks to Snipi is that it currently works only as a browser plug-in with Mozilla’s Firefox, not Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer or Apple’s (AAPL) Safari. Snipi says it plans to introduce versions of its toolbar — though less functional ones — for IE and Safari by early to mid-June. Even so, downloading and installing a browser plug-in isn’t yet a routine thing for most people. And often, people who use plug-ins forget to keep them up-to-date.

Another downside to Snipi is that its comparison-pricing feature failed with apparel. The feature only really worked when used with “hard goods” like electronics, which are sold at retailers that participate in price-comparison networks. Yet Snipi still makes pricing suggestions for clothing and shoes, however irrelevant. For example, when I snipped a $150 Banana Republic dress, a link to $16 eye shadow sold at Sephora.com appeared in the Price Compare column. To reduce confusion, Snipi shouldn’t make such suggestions for apparel.

A handy feature built into the Snipi Toolbar lets you immediately share items via email or post them on Facebook, Twitter or Wordpress blogs. This would have been useful while I was shopping online for boots because I could have more quickly shared my finds with friends, rather than copying and pasting URLs into emails.

While browsing on BestBuy.com (BBY), I found a Sony (SNE) Cybershot DSC-W220 with 12 megapixels and a 4x zoom lens for $199. Selecting a small icon in the Firefox browser’s bottom right corner, I opened the Snipi Toolbar and created a “Digicams” list, including the Sony. Snipi suggested alternative prices for this camera, including $159 for the same thing on Amazon.com (AMZN).

I got an early start on bathing-suit shopping by browsing Web sites for J. Crew, Victoria’s Secret and Macy’s. As expected, the price-comparison suggestions didn’t make sense. For one $58 Victoria’s Secret bathing suit, Snipi suggested a list of alternatives, including a $170 Kohler shower door, $203 Giorgio Armani glasses and an $82 corded telephone. I assure you that the bathing suit looked nothing like any of those items.

Confusing alternatives aside, I liked using the Snipi Toolbar as a place to gather my online research. It displayed images of items neatly lined up in a row, and when I selected an item, the description appeared. Someone like my sister, who is planning a wedding, might enjoy using the Snipi Toolbar for saving photos of various locations in a list she could call “Wedding Venues.” She could then share the entire list with me in one step. Or she could go visit some of the places and bring an iPhone with the Snipi app to see her list.

I tried the iPhone app, and it was a cinch to tap My Lists to see the online research I’d gathered. Here, as on the browser toolbar, visuals make it easy to glance through many products.

The toolbar can save various lists that you name and categorize into Shop, Photos or Videos, and these can be kept private, shared with friends or made public. Public lists are seen by all other users on Snipi.com, which is also a social-networking site. I wouldn’t use it as such, because I already rely on other social-networking outlets, but some people might.

Snipi, which uses a guessing algorithm to fill in details like a product’s price, says its toolbar will improve as more people use it. If you do a lot of research or online shopping or you simply want an online tool for saving images and videos from the Web, Snipi will work well for you. Its price-comparison suggestions need some improvement, but I felt more organized after using the Snipi Toolbar for a week’s worth of browsing.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

Buying and Selling Among Friends

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:28:03 +0000

Gone are the days when giving away your old stuff involved getting in the car and hauling bags to the local Salvation Army. Now, with a little Web know-how, you can find a number of ways to turn your trash into someone else’s treasure — from companies that send you prepaid shipping materials to people who will pick up the items from your house.

But even though you can use these services without leaving home, many of them still require you to go to a specific Web site — one you wouldn’t necessarily visit regularly. Sites like Gazelle.com and Venjuvo.com that pay cash for old electronics (or just recycle them) aren’t exactly online destinations.

Now one of those ways to unload your stuff involves a Web site you might visit many times a day. A site that has considerable sway in the social-networking world, where over 175 million active users go to share personal stories, photos and videos with hundreds of “friends.”

That’s right, I’m talking about Facebook. Tuesday, the social-networking giant announced its new Facebook Marketplace, Facebook.com/Marketplace, an integrated application powered by Oodle, known for its work with online classified ads. Marketplace uses colorful icons to represent four actions you can take in its app: Sell It; Sell for a Cause; Give it Away; and Ask for It.

Facebook Marketplace users can pick from 12 categories of listings, as well as buy or sell items for a favorite cause.

Oodle granted me early access to the Marketplace app before it became available Tuesday. A friend of mine and I were both set up with test accounts so that we could see one another’s fake Marketplace items and interact with one another within Marketplace; hundreds of Oodle employees also were testing this. (It was fun to see what people offer for sale when they’re just pretending, like one person who offered to sell everything on a colleague’s desk when he was out.)

Facebook’s original iteration of Marketplace started back in 2007, but was geared toward services like housing and jobs. The Oodle-powered Marketplace is merchandise-centric and includes more detailed organization, deeper integration with Facebook, and ways to buy or sell things to raise money for 1.7 million causes.

It still lacks a built-in electronic payment system, such as PayPal or Discover card, for exchanges between users or donations to causes. Instead, Marketplace encourages its users to exchange money however they choose, like traditional classified ads. And that could cause some obvious problems. For instance, if an item were sold for a cause, the seller could later donate the amount via credit card after closing a listing. But there’s no guarantee that the seller will actually do this. Oodle says it will listen to feedback from the Facebook audience and will try to integrate e-payments, if preferred.

Every posted item can include a location, description, category, photo and an explanation of why it’s in the Marketplace. Each item is reviewed by Oodle’s fraud-detection program, which looks for inappropriate content and suspicious activity, and a post could take up to 30 minutes to appear online after you submit it. My posts displayed almost instantly in the Marketplace newsfeed. Users also can opt to publish their posts to their Facebook profiles.

One example of Marketplace’s newly detailed organization comes in its browsing options. The old version of Marketplace had options to browse through jobs and housing, but not specific categories of items for sale. Now, users can browse through 12 categories of specific items including “Home & Garden,” “Baby & Kid Stuff,” “Tickets” and “Musical Instruments.” Items that don’t fit into these 12 categories are put into an “Everything Else” category.

Each item in Marketplace integrates with Facebook’s familiar format, like having its own online “wall” where questions and comments appear. If you’re looking for something in Marketplace by using the “Ask for It” option, you can recruit people to help you find the item by selecting from your list of friends, which works the same way people can suggest Facebook people to friends who might know them. Glancing at an item shows the seller’s profile photo, a link to all of the person’s listings and a brief history of his or her overall Marketplace activity, such as “3 listings in the last month.”

The integration of charitable causes into Marketplace gives supporters new ways to raise money for a favorite group like the World Wildlife Fund or Habitat for Humanity International. On the Marketplace home page, causes are displayed in a right-hand panel with a daily featured cause. This Featured Cause shows who else supports it and how many items you can buy or sell to support it.

Privacy is a natural concern in online marketplaces. By default, your posted listings are visible to any Facebook member in Marketplace. Users can opt to remain anonymous — they’re listed as “Facebook user is selling a bike,” for example. In that case, the only way someone can contact that person is by posting a comment and waiting for the seller to respond.

People who aren’t members of Facebook can see your listings by browsing and searching Marketplace, but they can’t post, comment or contact users. Unlike online marketplaces or services that can be used by anyone, Marketplace requires that users be members of the site to interact with sellers, which can be a downside. Plenty of people who aren’t on Facebook might not want to join the social-networking phenomenon just to offload the old couch gathering dust in the garage.

All user notifications — messages indicated in red at the bottom right of a Facebook page — will reflect friends’ activities in the Marketplace, unless you reset the notifications of the Facebook Marketplace app to not notify you. I suggest doing this, unless you really want to know about all your friends’ activities in Marketplace.

Four color-coded icons represent activities in Marketplace and are useful when reading lists of items at a glance: A green dollar sign represents Sell It and a red heart represents Sell for a Cause, for example. And details about each cause are integrated within Marketplace.

The Oodle-powered Facebook Marketplace is straightforward and well organized, and if you’re a Facebook user, its format will be familiar. If you’re not, and you’re looking for a way to sell or give items away for a charity or otherwise, Marketplace might encourage you to join the giant social network. But its payment program could be made a lot easier with electronic options.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

Organizing Your Web Life in One Place

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 02:06:02 +0000

If you use the Internet regularly, your activities are likely spread out all over the Web. You might be sharing photos on Flickr, emailing via Hotmail, posting status updates on Facebook, following tweets on Twitter, sending instant messages on Google (GOOG) Chat and keeping a calendar on Apple’s MobileMe. You hop from one site to the next, juggling different user names and passwords.

Last month, Microsoft unveiled Windows Live, its Web-based attempt to consolidate many of these activities. Windows Live can be found at home.live.com and includes programs that cover a lot of ground: Hotmail (email), SkyDrive (online storage), Spaces (blogging), Calendar and Events (online invitations). Four new Windows Live categories — Profile, People, Photos and Groups — create a Facebook/MySpace-like feel by following activities of networked users and sharing that data with others.

[ See post to watch video ]

If you’re using a Windows PC, you can additionally download a suite of seven free desktop applications called Windows Live Essentials from download.live.com that enhance and coordinate with the Windows Live services. These include Messenger, Photo Gallery, Mail, Writer, Movie Maker Beta, Family Safety and Toolbar. I downloaded the Essentials and enjoyed using many of them, especially Mail, Messenger and Toolbar.

But I focused my testing this week on the Windows Live Web services, which, as advertised, let me control various elements of my digital life in one place with one password. SkyDrive is a simple and approachable online-storage repository that will be truly useful for a lot of folks who want a central place to keep files. The Windows Live Profile offers handsome personalized pages with bright colors and designs; compared side-by-side with a Facebook page, it made Facebook look dull and sparse. I also used Windows Live Photos to upload digital photos onto my Profile and then shared them with friends and family in three quick steps.

New Windows Live programs include Profile, which offers personalized pages.

Microsoft (MSFT) smartly realized that most people already visit a variety of sites for online pursuits and will want to add those activities to their Windows Live Profile. Users can currently link to 12 other sources, including Twitter, Flickr, Photobucket, WordPress, Pandora and Yelp — but not Facebook or MySpace. Microsoft says that it’s working to build relationships with Facebook and MySpace and hopes to have related news next year.

But though various Web activities can be added to a Live Profile, this connection isn’t as productive as it could be. Take Twitter, for example. I added my Twitter account to my Live Profile, but on Live Profile I could see only tweets from myself and from people in my Windows Live network. To see tweets from the 50 people I follow on Twitter, I had to go to Twitter.com.

I had a similar experience with Pandora. I added my Pandora account to my Live Profile, and when I bookmarked Keith Urban as a favorite artist, this tidbit appeared on my Live Profile page. But when I listened to Christmas tunes for a few hours, nothing on my Profile page reflected this (i.e., “Katie is listening to Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ ”).

After linking my Live Profile to my Flickr account, I posted photos on Flickr.com, and seconds later, these pics appeared on my Live Profile. But other activities from Flickr weren’t reflected on my Live Profile, such as when my contacts posted photos or when those in a Flickr group of which I’m a member posted photos. To see this, I had to visit Flickr.com.

Microsoft says that in the case of Web activities, the outside companies choose what to show and what not to show. But I can’t use Windows Live as a home base for my other online activities unless it displays useful data that save me trips to other Web sites.

Messenger displays friends’ updates.

Like many social-networking services, Windows Live gives special privileges to those who are in the network. To belong to a Windows Live network, one must first have a Windows Live ID, which anyone can get by signing up for Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger or Xbox Live.

Windows Live also allows interaction with people outside the network. For instance, I can share any of the photos that I upload to my profile with friends and family who don’t have Windows Live IDs by simply emailing a link to them. These people don’t need a Windows Live ID to look at the photos.

When I used Windows Live to share photos with my sister, who has received hundreds of digital shots from me on every photo-sharing Web site I’ve tested, she wasn’t impressed. She correctly pointed out that other sharing sites, like Shutterfly, allow full-screen slideshow views; Windows Live limits slide shows to the size of the browser window.

Windows Live Web services work best on Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer browser, version 6 and up, and a special quick-photo-upload tool works only with Internet Explorer. This uploading tool doesn’t work with Apple’s (AAPL) Safari browser or the Mozilla Firefox browser; instead, you must slowly add each photo to your page, selecting them one at a time.

If you’re using a Windows PC, the Windows Live Essentials are definitely worth installing. Photo Gallery enables simple photo publishing directly from your computer’s collection of My Pictures, and specific faces can be labeled and tagged in each shot. Windows Live Mail, which replaced Outlook Express last year, is a smoothly designed program that I rely on every day for use with three different email accounts. Windows Live Messenger links into the Live Web services specifically by retrieving the status updates for each person in your network and displaying those in a ticker-like panel at the bottom of Messenger. The Windows Live Toolbar works only in Internet Explorer but shows an at-a-glance view of your network’s updates, along with photos, email and calendar — all in the top panel of the browser.

Windows Live Essentials are still in beta, or testing, mode, and Windows Live Web services will add more partnerships next month. I’ll be anxious to see if these new partnerships operate more productively with the Live Profile. Aggregating content from across the Web isn’t worthwhile unless that content is fully and usefully accessible in its new home.

Still, Windows Live Web services and Essentials provide solid tools that can help you organize your email, messaging, photos, storage, scheduling and social networking in one place with one password. That, by itself, is a relief.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

Birds of a Feather Twitter Together

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 01:20:02 +0000

If you’ve heard of Twitter but don’t exactly know what it is or how it works, you’re in good company. In the past two months a bunch of my friends, ranging in age from early 20s to late 30s, have asked me about Twitter — or Tweeter, as one person accidentally called it.

To clear things up, I’ve put together a basic Twitter guide that explains how to use it, Twitter lingo, privacy options, mobile applications that can be used with the service and problems that it has. Let’s get started.

Twitter limits social-networking updates to 140 characters or less. The service is surprisingly useful, but leaves room for improvement.

What is it? In short, Twitter is a free social-networking tool that keeps people connected with one another and with sources of information. Twitter users submit updates about whatever they’re currently doing, and these updates cannot exceed 140 text-based characters.

Lingo: Twitter is the name of the service. The term twittering describes the activity of updating a Twitter account. A tweet is an individual Twitter update. Twitterers are people who use the service.

Followers, not Friends: Social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace use the term “friend” to refer to people who are connected with one another, but Twitterers can simply follow one another’s messages by finding a person’s username and selecting a “Follow” option. This alerts the person that you’re following them, and they can reciprocally choose to follow you, or not.

Why use it? While some people primarily use Twitter to post updates about their activities or comments on the news, I use the service more as a follower, allowing me to see quick snippets of news as it occurs. Most tweets are written by real people, while others, such as updates from news organizations that you’ve selected, are automatically generated. Many tweets include the addresses of Web sites with relevant articles that tell readers more on a topic.

Where is it? Twitter works on your Web browser at Twitter.com, where user updates appear in a simple list form as they are submitted. After you’ve signed up and started following other people, those people’s updates, or tweets, will appear when you log onto Twitter.com using a username and password.

Twitter also works on mobile phones, where the 140-character limit allows messages to be sent and received via SMS text messaging. Tweets can also be sent and received via email. Users with smartphones like BlackBerrys or iPhones can use one of the many popular mobile applications for accessing Twitter, which offer much richer options than simple SMS does; I’ll get into these later.

Privacy: Unlike other social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter isn’t focused on holding and sharing personal information about its members. Indeed, the service operates with a majority (80%, according to the company) of users opting to keep their updates public, that is, follow-able by anyone, without permission. This openness encourages people to follow one another or to see who others are already following, and then follow the same people.

However, users can opt to protect their updates, meaning they must grant permission for others to follow them. If you’d like to sign up for Twitter, but aren’t comfortable putting your first and/or last name on the site, you don’t have to; instead, just tell others your username.

Twitter Page Personalization: Each user has a Twitter page showing all of his or her updates, or tweets. (Mine is twitter.com/kabster728, and you can follow me.) This page also shows the number of people a user follows, how many people follow her and how many total updates she has posted.

Twitterers can customize their Twitter page by uploading a photo to be used as the background. The icon representing each user can also be personalized, and this is important because it appears beside that person’s tweets on Twitter.com, where followers recognize and appreciate its familiarity. Some people, including me, use pictures of themselves as their icons, while others use random shots.

Apps/Clients: Twitter works on any browser, and will also work on a mobile browser. If you have a mobile device like the BlackBerry or iPhone, you can jazz up the experience by downloading a third-party app like TwitterFon, TwitterBerry, Tweetie or Twitteriffic. Twittervision, another mobile app, plots points on maps to show where tweets originated. Desktop clients also abound, including Twhirl and TweetDeck. Twitterfeed will set your blog to automatically post content to Twitter.

@Replies, Direct Messages: Each tweet that appears in your Twitter feed can be replied to using a shortcut arrow that appears beside the tweet, and these responses to tweets are called @Replies. So if JoeSchmo tweets to say he saw the new James Bond movie and hated it, you can reply to this with a tweet of your own that says, “@JoeSchmo I still adore Daniel Craig.” These @Replies appear for everyone to see, and must start with @ plus the username of whomever you’re responding to.

Direct Messages differ from @Replies because they can be sent only between people who are following one another. These messages aren’t posted publicly. They appear on your Twitter.com page in a right-side section labeled Direct Messages and will also be sent to your mobile device if you have one registered with Twitter.

Favorites: If you read a tweet that you really like, you can save it as a favorite by selecting a small star beside the tweet, thus adding it to a Favorites section on your homepage. Anyone can see anyone else’s Favorites, regardless of whether or not they’re following one another.

Problems: Twitter’s bare-bones approach gets to the point quickly, displaying tweets in a simple, quick-read format. But the site is lacking in many areas. It used to enable searching for people on Twitter, but that capability is currently down. Now, to search for friends on Twitter, you must upload your email contacts from a Web-based mail service. The company says it plans to have people-search working again by the end of the year. Meanwhile, search.twitter.com enables keyword or location searches.

Twitter lacks the ability to sort tweets according to what the user wants. If I just want to see tweets from real people and not those that are automatically generated, I’m out of luck. Same goes if I want to keep certain friends’ tweets in a prominent place on my homepage; Twitter has no way of doing this.

Twitter users aren’t notified when someone responds to their tweet with an @Reply. I recently happened to look at @Replies on my Twitter homepage and found three from people who follow me (I don’t follow them).

If you’re adding a Web address to a tweet and the characters in the URL take up too much space, Twitter will automatically use TinyURL behind the scenes to shrink your long link into a shorter one when you post your tweet. But this works only if you have enough remaining characters in your tweet to fit the long version of your link. A built-in TinyURL converter on the page would help immensely.

Twitter says it’s working to make @Replies more effective. It also says it plans to do more with filtering and sorting, so that the Twitter interface is more useful. In the meantime, Twitter does a good job of giving people simplified news about others and the world around them. If you’re often in a rush, Twitter can be a great resource for fast information.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

A Search Engine With a Real Eye for Videos

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:52:03 +0000

Web video has transformed the way the Internet is used, but finding the exact clip you want can be incredibly hard. And it’s no wonder, considering that sites like YouTube conduct their hunts by looking at a clip’s “contextual metadata” — tags, video title and description — and thus can often be misled by false information. For example, a homemade video about cooking might be inaccurately tagged with a popular search word like “Obama” so as to get more traction.

At the top of a VideoSurf results page for ‘Mad Men,’ users can search for clips featuring specific characters.

This week I tested VideoSurf.com, a site that claims to be the first to search videos by “seeing” images that appear in these videos. The company says its technology can analyze a clip’s visual content, as well as its metadata — especially when searching for people. VideoSurf has analyzed and categorized more than 12 billion visual moments on the Web to understand who the most important characters and scenes are in a video, and it uses this knowledge to sort clips according to relevancy.

Search results on VideoSurf spread out videos in a filmstrip-like format, distinguishing one scene from the next. Users can choose an option to show only faces, which helps if you’re looking for a specific person in a long video or movie. And when looking at videos from certain sources, you can select a scene from the filmstrip and jump ahead to that scene rather than sit through the entire clip.

When it works, VideoSurf is one of those technologies that make you wonder why someone didn’t think of it sooner. The site aggregates content from about 60 sources, including YouTube, CNN Video, Hulu, ESPN and Comedy Central, and a sorting tool weeds out unwanted results like the irksome slideshows that are labeled as videos. VideoSurf can find videos on all kinds of subjects, but it really shines when it finds well-known people.

But VideoSurf has some rough edges and doesn’t always work as it should. In its defense, the site is still in its public beta, or trial, stage, and plans to be full-blown by early next year. Right now, one of its best features, the ability to jump ahead to specific scenes, works with video from only a handful of sources including YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion and Google (GOOG) Video. Videos from Hulu.com confusingly allow jumping ahead only from certain screens.

Additionally, I came across a couple of videos that were no longer available, though they were listed in search results. And a customizable VideoSurf home page for users with accounts on the site saves searches but not specific clips; VideoSurf plans to fix this next week by adding a favorites page where users can store and share favorite videos with others.

Still, I really grew to like VideoSurf’s clear way of displaying content that would be otherwise buried within videos. Rather than trying to guess a video’s contents by looking at a single representative image, VideoSurf’s filmstrip views showed me exactly what I’d be watching. In many cases, I viewed a video I might not have otherwise watched because its filmstrip showed shots of scenes that looked interesting.

On the left-hand side of the search-results page, VideoSurf users can narrow results according to Content Type, Categories and Video Sources to see just what they’re looking for — or, often more important, what they’re not looking for. Content Type, for example, includes slideshows, Web series, full television episodes and full movies; a search can include only videos in a particular category (say, slideshows) or exclude that category altogether by unmarking the box beside it.

Most search-results pages include tiled still images at the top representing the characters in the videos. By selecting one of these characters, users can refine search results to show only videos with that character. For example, I typed the title of a favorite television show, “Brothers and Sisters,” into the search box and saw the names and images of seven actors on the show at the top of the screen. I selected Sally Field and was redirected to results of videos featuring only the mother she plays on the show.

I used VideoSurf to search for Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” music video, and then changed the date parameters to find only videos posted this week. This retrieved a Saturday Night Live skit in which the pop singer spoofs her own video with help from three men in tights — including Justin Timberlake. While the SNL skit ran, a list of related videos appeared in a column on the right, including clips of J.T.’s past SNL skits.

Occasionally, annotations appear on videos, but these come from the source — not VideoSurf. If overlaid text appears on YouTube videos, it can be turned off using an icon in the bottom right of the YouTube screen. Video-sharing sites that use introductory pages such as pre-rolls before each video will still show those pages.

VideoSurf makes it easy to send specific clips of videos to friends. I did so by selecting a Share option and adjusting slide bars to trim the clip to start and end at scenes I preferred. Clips shared with friends via email are sent with the VideoSurf filmstrip, giving others the ability to also know what the video will include so that they, too, can discern whether or not they want to watch it.

Clips can be shared on social-networking sites like del.icio.us, MySpace and Facebook, though VideoSurf’s helpful filmstrip didn’t show up on these sites like it did in emails.

I also tested an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser called Greasemonkey that works with VideoSurf. When installed, this displays VideoSurf’s helpful filmstrip beneath search results from Google Video, YouTube, Yahoo (YHOO) or CBS.com (CBS). Once installed, filmstrips illustrating important scenes appear along with the normal text results for videos, and some of the filmstrips enable jumping ahead to specific scenes. This somewhat techie Greasemonkey extension can save people the extra step of making a separate visit to VideoSurf.com to watch a specific clip.

VideoSurf uses smart technology that can save people the aggravation of watching videos that aren’t what they appear to be. Since so much Web content now includes videos, a visual search tool that can better assess videos like VideoSurf is a good idea. When this site improves its now-flaky ability to jump ahead to specific scenes in videos, it will be even more valuable.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com