Is the Barnes & Noble Nook better than the Amazon Kindle? Yes, at least right now. I bought one recently and I love it.

Here is what is great about it:

• looks great, sexier than all current Kindles

• books are EPUB, an open book format also supported by most other readers

• good native support for PDF; adding files is as simple as drag-and-drop

• 3G + Wifi, with great shopping experience from the reader

• color LCD touch screen for navigation + soft keyboard

• great screen contrast, especially outdoors

• removable battery

• borrow digital books from the local library in EPUB or ADE-PDF – I already checked out several from the San Francisco Public Library while sitting at home, and read a couple

• lend books to friends for 14 days; all they need is to download the Nook software on their PC or phone

• read any full ebook when inside a B&N store for free, and it remembers where you were when you come back

• ebook prices usually same as Amazon, and no sales tax

• decent web browser

• plays music through speakers or headphones, so it supports audio books or you can listen to music while you read

• Android OS – some people have hacked it to load Pandora and Google Reader apps

• great accessories – I got a pretty cool cover which also keeps it upright for reading on a table

• in-store specials like free Godiva chocolates last weekend and free downloads

The Nook solves most of the issues I wrote about in my earlier post about the Kindle. In fact, I think the Kindle 3, which is coming out this week, is Amazon's response and catch up to the current Nook. Overall, the Nook feels like a cross breed between a Kindle and an iPhone (with its color LCD and soft keyboard).

Of course, not everything is perfect. The book selection is a bit smaller than that at Amazon; not a huge difference, but noticeable. Still, a much wider selection than Apple's iBooks. Also, battery life is much shorter than on Kindle. I am trying to gauge how long it lasts, but it looks like it may be half of what Kindle has. At least it has removable batteries so I can pop another one in when stranded in the jungle in the middle of a novel!

I am pretty happy with my Nook and I am going to keep it. I am sure that in the future most ebook reading will be happening on smart phones and tablets – users will just load the Kindle, Nook, or iBook apps on them. For hard core readers, however, a dedicated device is a must these days.

Those who say “I prefer the feel and smell of real paper” just haven't experienced how much better a digital reader really is!

Who was on the panel:

• Andreas Weigend - moderator, lecturer at Stanford, former Chief Scientist at Amazon - he kept us entertained with his witty humor
• Todd Levy - cofounder of leading URL shortener and social analytics engine Bit.ly
• Jan Pedersen - Chief Scientist for Bing search, ex-Yahoo :)
• Kevin Burton - founder and CEO of Spinn3r and co-creator of RSS 1.0
• George Zachary - Partner at VC firm Charles River Ventures, invested in Twitter, Yammer ("corporate twitter"), GupShup ("the Twitter of India"), advisor to X PRIZE

The discussion opened with some cool stats, such as what happens each minute on the web: how many blog posts go live (mostly in Asia!), 100,000 bit.ly links clicked, 500,000 items shared on Facebook. See the photo in this post. Andreas has a wonderful way of presenting things, straight from what seemed a Microsoft Office document, and editing what's on the screen as the discussion went on.

Todd shared the history of Bit.ly, which fascinatingly enough started with a handful of employees and to this day has a single digit number of engineers. Their head of science is a woman (this came as an answer to the inevitable question why so few women are in tech). Bit.ly grew out of the needs of other startups getting incubated at Betaworks in NYC - they needed a URL shortener, and they needed to track social analytics, so why not kill both birds with one stone? Today bit.ly offers free analytics, and a premium $995 per month Pro package for companies. I have been in touch with Bit.ly for a long time, a huge fan of the company and the team, and plan to look into (read: buy) their Pro offering soon.

There was an interesting discussion about social implications of the real time web. Does the ability to output bite-sized pieces of info in real time, and keep a bunch of people updated on where you are and what you are doing actually diminish the need for real face to face human contact? In the past you needed to catch up with people, talk at length, and nurture a personal connection. Now you just check on Facebook and voila, you learn all about their last vacation or new baby. Jan made the point that services like Facebook make it much easier to keep in touch with people with whom you normally would not, such as acquaintances or remote friends, and so those relationships are strengthened. Todd made an interesting observation: in the early days of the internet when email was king, you basically had long-latency asynchronous communication. Now with low latency protocols and links, you have real time, sort of what face to face communication is, albeit digital. So we are coming back to the synchronous more direct communication that we lost when email appeared. Interesting...

George Zachary was passionate about real time social services disrupting outmoded corporate and government hierarchies (think Yammer, but also the public services). The Coase theorem states that firms and other organziations exist to lower the cost of transacting business, but these days meeting and bureaucracy make it harder to get things done in-house than if you were to use IM or call someone outside the organization. George expects profound social structure changes in the next 20-30 years as a result of technology allowing us to communicate and express ourselves in real time globally.

Privacy was suprisingly little mentioned. Jan Pedersen spoke about Bing's reluctance to show public Facebook updates which appear to be intended for private use based on some sort of automated analysis (or perhaps he was describing a policy choice, not clear). Here I was reminded of the public expression freedom that Twitter allows in comparison. That, and how I could easily tweet (and did) using SMS with just one bar of phone signal reception, while posting to Facebook on my iPhone would have been a drag (and although it can be done via SMS, who does it?)

The event was superb, one of the best I have attended in recent memory. The handout they gave to the audience had things like a chart of the real time web space (who the players are in the various niches), some interesting analytics of the growth in content over the past year, and definitions of terms like Pubsubhubbub. Kudos to VLAB, and I look forward to attending more of their events!

In the past two days, I attended Chirp, the first developer conference organized by Twitter. It was a fun event with plenty of familiar faces and interesting new announcements.

What was most interesting?

Annotations were by far the most intriguing concept mentioned at Chirp. Being able to attach up to 2 KB of metadata to each tweet has set the developer blogosphere on fire.

Here is a great and rather technical post by Marcel Molina from Twitter about annotations: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/fa5da2608865453

Dave Winer predicted that annotations would be the most exciting thing at Chirp, and has eloquently explained some product ideas here: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/09/howTwitterCanKillTheTwitte.html

It looks like most people are thinking that annotations will just add another 2k bytes to remove some of the limitations of the 140 characters – for example, removing the need for URL shorteners, or at least removing the need to dereference a short URL. Or using the 140 char tweet as a title / summary, and attaching more text in the annotation. Or adding richer geolocation tags in the annotations.

I am personally more intrigued by the possibility of using opaque human-unreadable binary annotations which turn Twitter into a real time message bus. For example, imagine traffic lights tweeting their status (red, green, maybe even congestion estimate via traffic camera), and your new GPS receiving tweets from traffic signals in the vicinity, decoding them, and deciding which route will be fastest. No need for you to personally read such tweets, right? Or you can have encrypted annotation payloads which can be a way to broadcast premium content, while possibly keeping the title in the tweet for everyone to see. By the looks of it, though, Twitter probably wants all annotations to be in clear text and usable by the whole community by developers, discouraging building proprietary advantage.

@anywhere and Yahoo!

There is no doubt that the most ready-for-primetime new Twitter product discussed at Chirp was @anywhere: http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere

The hack day on Day 2 was also largely focused on this. Yahoo! announced several integrations with @anywhere which will no doubt be among the most visible on the web.

Here is a presentation and video by Cody Simms, head of the Yahoo! Developer Network: http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/04/a_report_from_chirp_twitters_developer_conference.html

What about Monetization?

Sponsored tweets sound interesting. However, it seemed like the concept is far from ready or well thought out, and here are a number of issues with it: Tweets will be sold on CPM, per impression model. They will initially be available on search.twitter.com only, and that is not a big destination; most of the action still happens in third party Twitter client applications. The ad quality metric called “resonance” (which also seems to be the overall tweet relevance metric developed by Twitter) is rather fuzzy and unrelated to click/action performance, and there is no behavioral or demographic targeting. Basically, ads on Google or Facebook still sound a lot more compelling and better targeted. Which is not to say there isn't a lot of potential for sponsored tweets, but I was hoping a lot more of that to be spelled out at the conference.

How to make Chirp better

It seemed like the conference this year was all about Twitter and what they want developers to hear and do (i.e. adopt @anywhere and think of annotations ideas). It felt too much like a PR event for Twitter. It would have been better to hear directly the voices of the ecosystem. By that I do not mean just Q&A using hashtags on Twitter. Unlike what Microsoft does with their developer conferences for example, there was no dedicated space (booths etc) for partners and developers to show off their applications and talk with potential partners and customers. There were random connections and conversations for sure, but there are a ton of great companies building products around Twitter that I wanted to chat with but could not – and I am sure they were actually at Chirp! Perhaps if the venue were larger and had an area with tables where attendees could post signs and logos, this already would be a major improvement. That said, Twitter did an awesome job organizing the conference this year and getting the developers excited, and I am looking forward to their next developer event!

Here are the slides from my brief talk at this SMX panel this morning - http://searchmarketingexpo.com/west/2010/full_agenda#312

It was a great session, and as always it was a pleasure to catch up with my former colleague Sean Suchter, now heading real time work at Bing.

Here is something exciting we launched last night: for breaking news topics, search users will see a module on top of the page which combines official news sources, photos, videos, and tweets. This is probably the most visible and useful integration of Twitter content in a major search engine until now, but I may be biased :)

The new module looks like this:

See the tabs on top of the page right below the search box?

Here is what it looks like when you click the Twitter tab:

Here you see a couple of relevant tweets and a couple of related videos shared recently on Twitter.

How does this work? To decide to show this news experience in the first place, we use an algorithm to identify hot spiking queries. When it comes to selecting which tweets to show, we use a ranking algorithm which takes into account not only how recent the tweet is, but also how popular the author is, URL link that may be shared in the tweet, linguistic analysis, and some other secret sauce. The algorithms are not perfect, but they seem to work reasonably well and we are always looking for ways to improve them.

I want to thank the team that worked on this, and especially Gilad, Nitzan, and Shiv, without whom this would not have been possible.

Stay tuned for more interesting search product launches along these lines in the future!

Today I discovered Nigma.ru -- a highly innovative and brand new search engine developed by a small team in Russia. Check it out: www.nigma.ru

There has been a lot of hype lately about real time web and search, and total Twitter mania. I have been working on these issues inside Yahoo! Search lately, and here are some of my observations.

However, there are practical considerations that mitigate the problems above:

Any search engine worth their salt can handle redirects, and will handle short URLs right as they become more prevalent. Plus, given that we search by keywords in the content, rather than URL itself, search engines will always be able to surface what you are looking for as they do today, regardless of whether the shortener is down or not.

Browser anti-phishing features and antivirus programs today handle unsafe links, detect spyware, etc. In fact, given usually we click on anchortext without checking or seeing the destination URL, this is not much different than short URLs. This level of protection will only get more comprehensive in the future.

As for user friendliness: these URLs usually look ugly and inscrutable, but I bet users will learn to live with them. In many occasions the site that display them could hide the URL and just say "link" or something visually friendlier. Another option is to pre-expand short URLs, either server side or through a browser extension. No big deal.

Philosophically speaking, short URLs are used for bookmarking ephemeral content. For quick sharing of huge URLs in email and now increasingly on Twitter as well. For sharing things in the now, relevant in the present. How often do you revisit ancient email or random thoughts on Twitter? It does not matter in fact if those links stop working -- over time, this old content becomes irrelevant anyhow. Most of it was short-lived to begin with.

In conclusion: short URLs are here to stay, and if anything, they should become easier to use, straight from the browser.

This Monday I attended the Alt Search Engines conference in SOMA in San Francisco. Many thanks to Charles Knight of altsearchengines.com for organizing this interesting event! Clearly there are quite a few startups who are unhappy with the status quo of search = ten blue web links on white page :)