1-800-GOOG-411 is a very cool Google service, currently in Google Labs, that provides free voice 411 using high quality voice recognition and speech synthesis.  To use it, just dial that number from any phone and say the city. state and business you’re looking for.  

Here’s a sample voice session from DownloadSquad:

1-800-GOOG-411 joins 1-800-FREE-411 from Jingle Networks and Tellme’s mobile 411 app. 

1-800-FREE-411 already controls six percent of the US mobile directory market.  Tellme’s application allow users to search using their voice and interact with the results on their phone’s screen; Tellme was recently acquired by Microsoft.

All of these applications are signs of the coming collapse of the walled garden that carriers have traditionally enacted around voice and data services, spurred by advances in mobile phone platforms and the reduced cost of VOIP and voice recognition applications. 

The aggressive positions being staked out by Google and Microsoft in the mobile data services space will undoubtedly disrupt the carriers’ business models. 

That’s great news for customers’ wallets– carriers formerly used their virtual monopoly over the customer to charge $1.25 for directory assistance. 

It’s also great news for innovation and the growth of a mobile services ecosystem. Carriers have the potential to offer tremendously valuable mobile services to their users, and tremendously valuable data to advertisers, but have lacked the technical firepower to effectively do either. In the end, for the more enlightened carriers, the disruption caused by open mobile platforms and data services will work to their benefit as well.

Google’s announcement that they are discontinuing support for their Search API has added urgency to the development of open search platforms. 

Alexa and Nutch approach the problem from different directions, each of them interesting. 

Alexa provides a hosted, scalable search service that you pay for; you can access their full-text index of their web, distributing computations across their cloud, and creating new indices to capture the results of those computations. Costs are modest. 

Our goal is to give unparalleled and unlimited access to search. Just think of it… where else can you:

• Take the reins of a Web crawler and direct it to crawl specific pages on specific domains and collect specific document types
• Mine the documents in the crawl and generate custom indices
• Reorder search results and create custom verticals
• Use your own advertising solution

This is by no means a complete list. I just put it together to illustrate a point.

Where other search engines may give you access to their search results, they will tie your hands. You won’t be able to access the raw documents in their crawl, create your own index, reorder the results or even use your own advertising solution. In some extreme cases they will only provide results if you give over part of your page to their ajax script. Why would these search giants create search solutions that are obviously limited and of little use to inventors? Because they are not interested in helping to create their next competitor.

Alexa on the other hand… that’s exactly what we are here to do. We are here to build a platform for you. We are designing our services to be consumed and manipulated by developers and inventors. We fully expect that the next great search engine will be unimaginable to us and won’t be based on a plain vanilla search index from one of the big boys. It will be built and based on a new idea and it will require the kind of access that only Alexa can provide.

You can get started in the new and revamped Developer’s Corner.

Nutch, on the hand, is a fully open source web search engine; the work of creating a cloud to run Nutch on is up to you or a partner:

Web search is a basic requirement for internet navigation, yet the number of web search engines is decreasing. Today’s oligopoly could soon be a monopoly, with a single company controlling nearly all web search for its commercial gain. That would not be good for users of the internet.

Nutch provides a transparent alternative to commercial web search engines. Only open source search results can be fully trusted to be without bias. (Or at least their bias is public.) All existing major search engines have proprietary ranking formulas, and will not explain why a given page ranks as it does. Additionally, some search engines determine which sites to index based on payments, rather than on the merits of the sites themselves. Nutch, on the other hand, has nothing to hide and no motive to bias its results or its crawler in any way other than to try to give each user the best results possible.

David Brin has an interesting response to Time’s decision to vote “you” (as in the You of YouTube and the internet) as Person of the Year.  He argues that this designation is premature, because today’s net is not an “arena” or a commons. 

Brin’s post is frustratingly incomplete in some ways, however, because he fails to discuss explicitly the existing mechanisms for identifying quality on the internet, be they collaborative (e.g. Digg) or technical (e.g. Google). More on that latter, first let me quote from his arguments.

The internet, writes Brin, is a great platform for self expression, but it lacks the cultural norms and institutions that allow true quality to rise to the top, as seen in older institutions such as markets, the scientific process, courts and democracy. (I like the way Brin has highlighted the common traits in all of these institutions.)

Some of you have read my extensive essay - written for the American Bar Association - about the underlying common traits of markets, science, courts and democracy — the “accountability arenas” that have empowered free individuals to compete and create without tumbling quickly into repression and outrage…. for the first time, ever. Alas, over the years since, I have found that people have trouble perceiving some of what the paper describes… or why today’s internet just does not yet have what it takes to empower us with a “fifth arena.”

Here is one of the key difficult concepts. I describe how markets, science, courts and democracy each have “centripetal vs centrifugal” social phases.

I see these opposite trends having much the same effect for accountability arenas that INHALING and EXHALING have in living mammals. You need both for the system to thrive.
In science, markets, courts and democracy, the CENTRIFUGAL PHASE is when each individual participant may disperse, find allies/collaborators, and safely organize with others under some degree of protection, in a zone where product can be refined and readied for competitive testing.

In science, this zone is your tenured professorship or lab etc: in markets the safe zone is the company/corporation: in courts it is attorney-client privilege and the power of coerced deposition; and democracy has parties.

That’s the centrifugal phase and it took civilization thousands of years to realize how necessary it is, in order for these four arenas to function.

Note that this is the phase that exists now, copiously, in the nascent “fifth arena” of the internet!

The key lacking in the internet are formalized processes and safeguarded institutions that place competing ideas in competition with each other and allow the better idea to win.

What the cybersphere does NOT have is anything even remotely resembling the CENTRIPETAL phase that also empowers the four older, more mature “arenas.”

What is the centripetal phase? This is where in all of the disparate and dispersed participants in an arena are summoned together by a ritual CALL TO COMBAT. What ensues is a battle - competition - that has transformed ancient human bloody-mindedness into something much more like a game. One in which rules have been laid down to ensure that the outcome of competition correlates at least somewhat with quality of product, and much less with power or influence or other means of cheating.

In science the centripetal competition phase compels researchers to publish papers and present them for criticism. In markets the ritual battleground is retail sales - where customers compare goods and services. In democracy the role is filled by elections, and courts have trials.

Presently, on the internet, THERE IS NO EQUIVALENT CENTRIPETAL PHASE that allows us to test ideas, opinions, arguments against each other, using competitive processes to cull wheat from the chaff.

Pearls are said to float upward in shit. But so MUCH of the ranting online today is BS, how can anyone hope for good ideas to actually coalesce and for bad ones to finally die, as they eventually deserve?

Brin overstates his case a bit too much here, although I think his overall conclusions still stand. 

Collaborative filtering sites like Digg do provide a way for better ideas to rise to the top, but their algorithms for selection are hidden and can be gamed or subverted from within.

Likewise, Google has a metric for quality based on sifting through the linking behavior of millions of pages, but this metric is opaque and shifting. Google has mixed motives given that they are also trying to increase their own Adsense revenue and deliver value to shareholders.   (There has been some controversy in this area already, see Google Pimps Own Services in Search Results on Google Blogoscoped.)

To attempt to complete Brin’s (David’s, not Sergei’s!) thought: There are clearly mechanisms for finding quality on the internet, in some ways uniquely powerful, but not institutions for doing so. 

By institutions, I mean systems that have a degree of underlying stability and trustworthiness based on history, checks and balances, transparency, and so forth. Such institutions take a great deal of time to evolve and are at least as much social as technical in nature, often requiring multiple revolutions and upheavals before being solidly established. Perhaps its unrealistic to expect secure institutions of quality and competition would evolve in internet time, even on the internet.

Update: There is some discussion of different forms of internet filtering in the comments section, with responses from Brin. Here’s one such response:

Rob asks: “Are any of those examples of centripetal force?” and cites crude reputation-based systems. And yes, such systems do provide a very very coarse and primitive quality feedback methodology…

…roughly equivalent to “democratic elections” based on screaming matches or court trials by public lynching. Worse, of course, because there is simply no way for bad opinions to lose so much standing that they simply wither up and blow away. Freedom of speech is great, but that right was established in part in ORDER to secure, forever, the benefits of the centrifugal phase. CRITICISM is the centripetal tool that corresponds, and for it to work at the pragmatic goal of providing us all with improved human solutions it must be applied in sophisticated and effective ways!

I tried to explain all this at Google, a few weeks ago. Very smart guys. I think maybe two of them sort of dimly got it. It is HARD, apparently.

Brin seems to suggest that this is more of a “tools” issue than a social one.

Well… I don’t agree that the tools are there, at all. In fact, this appears to have been the obsession that has pulled me away from science fiction for many years. My holocene invention, reputation management, attention management, transparency, indignation addiction, prediction registries… I have been probing at a wide variety of tools that are desperately needed — and that currently are languishing for lack of serious attention out there. All of them are pieces to a puzzle that could bring us a mature, fifth accountability arena… and nearly all of them are simply missing.

Michael Arrington introduces the Crunchboard Job Site, designed to create a more efficient ecosystem for connecting Techcrunch readers who are hiring and looking for work:

A good percentage of emails coming to me every day are from people asking me which companies are hiring, or from companies asking me if I know someone who would be a good fit for a job.

I keep a separate email folder with these emails and introduce people as often as possible. But this isn’t a scalable system, and I wanted to do more to match companies with people. So we built a job board and launched it today at CrunchBoard.com. Now these people can connect directly.

Our goal with CrunchBoard is to build the ultimate web insiders network. A thirty day ad costs $200. I’ll consider CrunchBoard a success if we manage to put the right people together and make the entire ecosystem a little more efficient.

Techcrunch joins the 37signals job board, which charges $250 for a 30 day posting.

These ultra-targeted job boards are signs of a general trend towards more distributed and targeted ways to advertising jobs on the internet.

Companies are realizing that they can get a better ROI and less resume spam by targeting relevant jobs to the right audiences. Publishers are realizing that they can deliver real value to their community by helping to connect the right people with the right jobs, as well as increasing revenues.

In order for this new ecosystem to really take off at a large scale, a goodly amount of technological heavy lifting is required. The following are all things we can expect to see in the next few years:

1. Standards for automated posting of jobs, as well as technology that hides the inconsistencies between different destinations. The Atom and RSS based formats specified by Google Base are examples of emerging standards for representing job postings.
2. More intelligence to help select the right advertising venues for jobs. A certain portion of jobs advertised in a venue will be both posted by and read by members of the community, but other jobs will come from outside the community and will need to be correctly targeted to that community.
3. More relevance and personalization in the display of jobs within the community job board. The selection of jobs a particular user sees in the community job board should be seen as highly relevant based on context and history.
4. The integration of community and networking with job search. As Arrington says, Techcrunch is working to build an insiders network, not just a traditional classifieds business.

It has been gratifying to see the attention and usage that our recent updates to the Jobster site have been receiving. As usage increases, we’re working set the right tone and standards so that the community will be valuable to everyone who participates.

Recently, the new site was covered in the Wall Sttreet Journal, CNN (streaming video), the front page of Digg, and the Washington Post.

People are discovering innovative ways to express what’s unique about their company culture, whether it’s Eric talking about what’s unique about an established leader like Bose, or Joe talking about the up-and-coming startup Snapvine. In comparison,, using HR boilerplate to talk about a company comes off looking stale and uncompelling.

We’re working to develop and document a set of community standards that encourages authentic answers about companies while discouraging unverifiable hearsay, prepackaged corporate advertisements, and personal attacks. We draw some metaphorical inspiration from the standards of communities such as the Wikipedia.

For example, although it wouldn’t make sense to go as far as Wikipedia’s standard of verifiability, we encourage answers that include a factual component that can be verified in addition to personal opinions.

These facts are often neither “good” nor “bad” in and of themselves, the real measure is in the eye of the reader. (Consider private offices vs. open plan, city vs. suburban, big company vs. small, or flat vs. hierarchical organization.) Answers that capture the unique details of each company really are more useful and more likely to sell the company to the right people than unsubstantiated emotions or advertisments.

Not all verifiable facts will be positive for all readers, of course. It might come out in an answer that a company does not provide child care, for instance, and for some prospective employees this could be a deal breaker. Revealing this fact in a forum such as Jobster is not inappropriate or unfair, since these facts end up being uncovered in the interview process anyway.

On the balance, we believe that a balanced and informed look at companies benefits both companies and jobseekers through better career matches.

Last night, we shipped some significant new features for professionals on the Jobster.com site, as well a more streamlined user experience. These new features allow a jobseeker to not only find jobs from anywhere on the web, but also to get an inside look at what it’s like to work at different companies.

The Jobster site update is covered in a Wall Street Journal article Getting the Inside Scoop on a Future Boss.

In the latest expansion of the Web phenomenon of social networking, more sites are launching features that make it easier for job seekers to connect with the employees of prospective hirers…

Jobster Inc. is scheduled to launch a revamped job-search Web site today that includes people’s posts on what it’s like to work for their employers. Job hunters can link to these employees and ask to contact them.

Robert Wilson reviews the new features favorably:

With the new Jobster, job search feels like sitting down with friends to find the best opportunity for my future … it’s about MY Life, and fitting in, and having fun! Sure I have to work, and I want to leverage my skills, and I want to get the highest return on my human capital; BUT that’s just the ‘work’ side of the equation. What I live for is to make a difference, embark on new challenges, support my coconspirators, and wake up happy each morning (even Mondays) at the prospect of another day.

Below are screenshots of some of the key features. In combination, these create a web of content that allows users to easily navigate between search results, user profiles, and authentic experiences at companies. (Exploring jobs and people ought to be at least as easy and interesting as finding books on Amazon!)

1. The home page allows you to search millions of jobs from across the web. It also features recent profiles, tags, companies, and trends in search behavior.

2. Search results include links to what employees and former employers are saying about the companies.

3. Company pages allow you to explore related jobs, experiences, images, and profiles:

4. Individual profiles include past and current experiences and relationships.

These features are just a start of course, and we have a long roadmap of improvements to the site we’re working on now. (We’ve built the new site using Ruby on Rails which allows us to iterate rapidly on top of a firm architectural foundation.)

[Speaking of an authentic look inside companies: the team that builds the Jobster.com site has its own collaborative blog; worth checking out. If you’re a developer, SDET, or program manager, and would to join a high quality, fast moving team that works on problems like these, please get in touch with me.]

As Jobster welcomes Jobby to the fold, I thought it was worth sharing some of the ideas that we think make Jobby special.

Jobby applies folksonomies to career skills, to make the process of creating and searching profiles faster, more entertaining, and more relevant.

1.  When you create a profile, you can quickly click on relevant skills in a tag cloud for your speciality (say web geek).  AJAX means instant responses as you add skills.   Instead of hardcoding the set of skills in the system, Jobby relies on the community to create and weight the different skills, ensuring that they stay up to date and relevant. 

2.  If you have a skill that’s not in the system, you can add your own tag. Jobby will search for similar tags already in the system to avoid duplication.

3.  The AJAX search interface allows users to quickly rapidly filter down the set of users by clicking on tags.

These ideas become even more compelling when integrated with other social search features we have in development for professionals and recruiters.

Jobster is delighted to welcome Brian and Tony from Jobby to our product team, as chronicled by Jason and Alan and reported in Michael Arrington’s Techcrunch.  

The Jobby team has a good blog post describing their experiences meetingJobster the team. I’ve never seen two people click right off the bat so well as Brian and Tony. They were smart yet modest, and passionate about exactly the same things we were– using technology and innovative user experiences to make meaningful career matches.

We have a great roadmap of shared ideas about how to combine the two sites, as Jason notes in his subtle wink.

Here’s how Ajaxian describes Jobby:

Ever wondered when the online job searching sites would get out of the “old web” and into a more Web 2.0 kind of attitude? Well, a new site, Jobby, is looking to change that image.

Jobby is a new way to think about resumes that lets you show off your
qualifications and make it easy for hiring mangers to find you.  Instead of digging through job postings and submitting resumes to countless companies and recruiters, Jobby lets users make their qualifications available in an easily to search format.

Jobby uses a tag cloud-based qualification entry interface, and AJAX powered search filters based on category, name, level, location, and more. The search page also lets you subscribe to customized search filters via RSS in case you don’t find the person you’re looking for right away.

The site combines a solid combination of interface and functionality to create an easy to use kind of user experience. As as hiring manager, you can search on a term and get the results. The real fun starts when you apply filters to the data dynamically. Your list is fine tuned down to a few candidates as you narrow the field in different categories like Location, Business, and Availability.

They’re also working up a system that would allow developers to add a “drop in” script to the page, linking directly to their information on Jobby. You can keep track of this and other advancements they’re making on their blog.

Laurel has a
insightful comparison of the different software development philosophies of Joel on Software and 37 Signals.

In a nutshell, Joel says programmers are most productive in a splendid bubble of specialization and isolation (”A programmer is most productive with a quiet private office… a tester to find the bugs they just can’t see, a graphic designer to make their screens beautiful, a team of marketing people to make the masses want their products, a team of sales people to make sure the masses can get these products”, etc, etc.)

37 signals, in contrast, says developers are most effective when roles are blurred (”When the edges are blurred, and one thing is many things, you can achieve so much more with less time, effort, and people.”)

I love startups precisely because of the chance to blur roles and to experience first hand the end of end process of understanding and meeting the needs of users.

At Jobster, as Laurel explains, we are working to retain this level of ownership and experience even as we grow from a small company where everyone has to do everything to a medium sized company where’s the luxury of specialization is possible:

At Jobster, in the past few months or so, we’ve been gradually growing our development team past the point where it makes sense for everyone to work on everything. At this point, we could decide to slice things horizontally – define everyone’s roles more strictly, have core developers, library developers, project managers, product managers, program managers, UI developers, UI designers, graphic designers… But we’re taking the approach of slicing vertically. Spinning off parts of our product into independent chunks worked on by independent teams. This wouldn’t work if everyone was stuck in their roles. We simply don’t have enough people to fill a small independent team with specialists. Sure, I’m not a good UI designer. But our good UI designer is busy with other projects right now, and we can’t hire another one before I want to demo my project next month. So this project won’t work if the 3 of us “software developers” can’t come up with a UI design that’s adequate enough that the decision makers get what we’re trying to do and believe in it enough to give ours priority over the designer’s other projects.

At a medium sized company like Jobster instead of a really small one like 37signals, we have the luxury of having people who specialize in certain areas (we certainly have a lot of sales people who call people at Fortune x00 companies and try to get them to sign big contracts). But we’re not big enough to be able to move people around efficiently. This is an opportunity and a challenge – at a small company people have to do everything; at a large company people can’t do everything. At our size we could do either, and we have to figure out what makes sense both for the group and for each individual.

Alan Steele continues the thread in it’s not all about productivity:

This is why optimizing for the ability to type ’svn commit’ makes no sense at all. If you break down a software project by elapsed time, it usually looks like this: 70% figuring out what the problem is, how best to solve it elegantly, efficiently and in a manner that delights the customer, and getting everyone to agree that this is the best way forward; 3% writing the core code; 27% getting the code you just wrote to work as intended, fleshing out the supplementary features and closing in down with a minimum of bugs.

Not only does the up-front part represent the vast majority of elapsed time, it’s also the part that affects the end-result most dramatically. And it benefits enormously from people talking to each other, which is rather more difficult when those people are ensconced in their private, temperature-controlled offices hooked up to their caffeinated carbonated beverage IVs.

If you don’t believe me, try this: go buy a really, really nice new computer; load it up with the newest bad-ass development tools on the planet; learn how to program (ok, this part could take a little while); and then write some great software. Right between steps 3 and 4, you’ll find yourself facing something that feels remarkably similar to writer’s block. In fact, it’s pretty much the same thing as writer’s block, and it happens to organizations just as it does to individuals.

The good news is that designing software, unlike writing, benefits enormously from having a small team of people working together to overcome that block. Getting a few people together to think about a problem produces far superior results than putting someone in an office and saying “Think!”, particularly if each has a slightly different take on the problem (say, one with more of a business/customer focus, another with a design/usability focus, and a few techies). The myth of the lone wolf programmer is crap: great software is built by teams of people. The reason Excel is such a kicking piece of software is that literally hundreds of people have worked collaboratively for many years to make it great. Software development is a team sport.

The secondary argument is simply against Joel’s attitude of coddling his programmers to the ridiculous degree of comparing the rest of the company to the servants of the Roman army. This kind of attitude doesn’t do much for collaboration with those supposed servants, many of whom have very good ideas about how the software should be built. It also encourages a distasteful kind of laziness where developers expect everything brought to them on a silver platter. Any software manager who has witnessed the electrifying effect of a customer visit on a previously insulated developer knows what I’m talking about: there is nothing so powerful as getting out in the world, watching and talking to people to learn what is actually needed from your software. It’s also a lot more fun that way.

There is one sentence of Joel’s recent article that I agree with, which is that an abstraction layer is needed between development and the rest of the organization. But he’s got it backwards: a software manager needs to create for the rest of the organization an abstraction (more like an illusion, really) that makes product development look like a predictable shipping machine, producing regular deliveries of software containing bright new innovations, when the reality behind the scenes is considerably messier. Otherwise, it gets very hard to justify the fancy computers, comfortable salaries and free soft drinks…

I feel lucky to be part of an industry new and vital enough that it’s still possible, meaningful, and impactful to have conversations like these.

Jobster is unusual (or perhaps not, I really don’t know) in being a company that does extensive development in both Rails and J2EE/Spring/Hibernate, and that has developers who move fluidly between the two worlds. (If your company has experience with both worlds, we’d be interested in sharing learnings.)

Our flagship employer application is built on Spring, and a new consumer application (now in development and soon to be released in a limited beta) is written on Rails. The consumer application was developed rapidly by a small team of developers and is one that we intend to iterate rapidly on.

There is a tendency in most companies, I think, to believe that the whole company needs to standardize on a single technology stack, or at least that specific developers need to specialize.

Given the very different audiences and requirements of the two major applications we are building, I think the “one stack to rule them all” argument is false. For the end user application, rapid iteration and learning is essential, while we have to be more deliberate and careful about how we change the experience for recruiters using the application. Conversely, our employer application plays more to the strength of J2EE through requirements for things like multi-column primary keys, distributed transactions, and so forth.

Our experience has been that a team of strong developers grounded in the MVC model of Spring finds the transition to Ruby and Rails easy and enjoyable, and that they do enjoy greater productivity. We’re very excited about what Rails allows us to do.