I guess the holiday vacation gave a lot of people time to examine search results they were seeing from Google.  More and more has been written about Google’s search quality and the fact that spam is appearing in search results more often.  I don’t pretend to know the algorithm that powers Google search results, but the basic rule of thumb is data in and data out.  The more data you put in, the better the data you would get out, or so you would assume.

That brings me to local.  Location, when available, should always be used to help with the data that goes into search.  I am most intrigued by Google’s Near Field Communication (NFC) test going on in Portland, Oregon.  The idea behind this test is that you can go to a business, hold your phone up to the sticker in the window, and get reviews on the business.

Google is taking location so seriously that Marissa Mayer is now in charge of their local strategy.  The key is realizing that location and proximity are not the same thing.  The use case Google is giving for their NFC test is not so valid to me.  I usually search for a restaurant review or business review before I leave my house, but a use case that may be interesting is to know what has happened at a given location via rich media (photos, videos) or if the business is a previous Groupon participant.

Location is a huge component to the data in for search.  It is used today on the iPhone as well as Android to help find places nearby.  It can be used for things other than places however.  Location can help find results based on what others in your area are clicking on as well.  Can local solve spam in search?  Definitely not, but it can be part of the data in that makes search results more relevant.

Last week Skype released their latest iPhone app that supports video calling.  Color me impressed.  I tested it out on my iPhone 3GS (I had to give up my iPhone 4 when I left AOL).  2011 is definitely shaping up to be the year that the battle over video goes to another level.  If Apple and Google both plan on opening up their own technologies for 3rd parties as well as innovate on their own products, the battle between Skype, Apple and Google should be a great one to watch.

In my experience with Skype’s latest release, video calling from the iPhone to another iPhone over 3G is really pixelated and choppy, but still usable at least in suburban Washington DC.  When I tried Skype over WiFi from my iPhone to a computer at home it was terrific.   The image below shows the quality from my iMac and my iPhone.  The Butterfinger package is not pixelated and it looks as clear as the stream from my desktop.

One thing Skype took great care in handling is keeping the call connected even when using other apps on the phone.  The advantage Skype has over Facetime is that it is a full fledge communication application.  If I want to send an IM to my contact, or search for someone I can do that easily.  It will be interesting to see how Apple responds to Skype’s release.

One of my favorite shows of all time was The West Wing.  Martin Sheen played President Bartlett and one of his catch phrases was asking his staff, “What’s next?” when he was ready to move on from the current topic.

As I start 2011, I decided to move on from my job as the technical lead for AIM and AOL Lifestream, and I am ready for “what’s next.”  Back in November, I reconnected with a friend of mine who works at Clearspring.  He asked me if I wanted to come by and see what was happening at Clearspring.

Well one thing lead to another, and I am super excited to join the team at Clearspring as their director of product for AddThis.  I am really looking forward to working with the team at Clearspring, lead by Hooman Radfar.  AddThis currently has 1 billion monthly unique users and is used by 7.2 million publishers.  Right before Christmas the team did a great job on releasing a set of analytic tools for publishers.

I can’t wait for what’s next at Clearspring and working with the team at delivering great experiences to both users and the publishers.

Here are some of my favorite personal moments of 2010:

• Getting blitz by snow two times in February leading to a 5 foot drift in front of the house.
  
• AIM launches Facebook Chat integration in February. AIM is the first major IM application to integrate Facebook Chat into AIM
• We relaunch location services in AIM via AOL Lifestream in March. Instead of the AIM plugin we launched for desktop clients back in 2006, we integrated it with status updates and photos in AOL Lifestream’s iPhone and Android applications.  TechCrunch calls AOL Lifestream the product that Google Buzz should have been.
• I spoke to a standing room only crowd at SXSW with Josh Babetski and Naveen Selvadurai about geo location and the challenges of dealing with data from a variety of services.
• Got to travel to Tel Aviv in May to work on the transition of ICQ to DST.  It was sad to say goodbye to the team there but we got to see an awesome Metallica concert.
  
• In August we worked really hard to put together a custom experience for Lollapalooza in Chicago.
  
• In September I traveled across the country to watch Syracuse get crushed by University of Washington, but my Husky friends were awesome in not rubbing it in too badly.
• In November we launched Google Talk integration in AIM which is important for users who used AIM in high school and move to college and get a Google Apps account.  Now users can get AIM, Facebook Chat and Google Talk.
• In December I left AOL after an 11 year plus tenure at the company.  It was a great run that I covered in a previous blog post.

I can’t wait for 2011 and the new adventures.

AddThis created a great infographic on sharing across the internet for 2010.  With 1 Billion users and over 7 million publishers they have great insight into what content is meaningful to users on the web.

They also shared what were the top 10 most shares in 2010.

I wrote last week about a hedge fund in the UK using Twitter to trade stocks and in theory make money by reading trends in the stream.  I asked the question about using Twitter or other social network data to help with trends, predictions and recommendations.

I spent a while working on trending in 2010 inside AOL Lifestream.  We started with trending and analyzing only data coming in via AIM and Lifestream

While we were sparred from the blizzard yesterday in DC (see the green donut hole below), the rest of the northeast was not as lucky.

The storm actually looks like a hurricane from space, and based on the time lapse video it was very reminiscent of the 3 blizzards we had in DC last year.

Yesterday reports surfaced that the FCC was ready to approve the Comcast and NBC merger, but there are “conditions for the approval.” The statement reminded me of what happened in 2001 when the AOL and Time Warner merger closed.  Back in January of 2000, the world woke up one morning to see that AOL bought Time Warner with AOL’s inflated stock price.  We all know how the merger turned out, and I hate to say it but the day of the announcement, I thought to myself this is either an ingenious move or this will end in a disaster.

It was interesting living through the year between the announcement and the closing of the merger (to be exact the closing took 362 days).  The exact headline from the FTC website says “FTC Approves AOL/Time Warner Merger with Conditions” and that they did.  The issue was that in the 12 months the merger took to close the world changed.  No longer was AOL the dominant force on the internet and Time Warner was not the only broadband provider.

The two main conditions the FCC imposed are as follows:

• Comcast must provide broadband to low income houses and expanding the broadband network to rural communities
• Comcast must provide online video content to a web service if rivals do the same

Its the last one that could be most troubling because one would assume Comcast would want to control their own content.  Now in many ways the FCC has made the decision on how Comcast’s content will be distributed.  I wonder what these conditions on the merger may mean in 12 or 24 months for NBC and Comcast.

No one considered the conditions placed upon AOL and Time Warner to be that big of an issue at the time, and we were both ready to close the deal.  I think the same goes for the NBC and Comcast marriage.  While they may be excited to get over the regulatory rulings to close the deal, they may not be considering what these conditions mean even 1 year from now.  Eventually a bunch of the conditions placed on AOL were removed due to changes in market conditions, but it was too late to change the fate of the merger.

A couple of weeks ago I said goodbye to an old friend.  Leaving the AIM team where I spent 11 years working on so many different parts of a product that has over a billion registered users and millions of active users was bittersweet.  I am definitely going to miss the people I worked with the most, and I am going to miss all the great moments we celebrated together.

In 1999, I started on the AIM Windows team working on the user interface coding up buttons, the user preferences and making sure the client installed properly (though there was one time where my code accidentally deleted a QA Engineers HD, sorry John).  

By 2004, I moved to the core infrastructure team.  While it did not have the most elegant name, the team was responsible for writing the cross platform code that powered every real time messaging experience at AOL, ICQ and even Apple and Google.  I worked really hard with a bunch of great engineers in opening up this cross platform library so every developer who wanted to build on our network could.

When we opened AIM in 2006, it opened a whole new world to me, where I could work with developers and some really awesome partners.  I realized that I really enjoyed working with our partners and that it was important for the future of AIM to embrace our partners.  I also happened to build a very popular plugin called AIM MusicLink which allowed users to share with their communities what music they were listening to at that moment.

In the last 2 years, I have spent almost all my time leveraging my relationships with our partners like Apple (iChat), Google (GTalk), Facebook and Twitter into building a great experience into AIM.  Today we have AOL Lifestream, Facebook Chat in AIM and Google Talk in AIM.  So much credit goes to the design team and developers who delivered the final experiences today but I am proud of my contributions to the project.

Its off to new challenges, and I will share where I am going and what I will be doing in a later blog post.