A little over a week ago, I went to the 15th anniversary celebration of the Mayfield Fellows Program here at Stanford.  Between the VC;s, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and professors in attendance, it was a pretty inspiring group of Valley professionals.  My favorite part of the day was a portion dedicated to former Mayfield Fellows speaking about their current endeavors.  Of those, I was most struck by Dave Merril of Sifteo.

Sifteo is the company behind Siftables, a product described as “building blocks that think.”  These blocks have a color display and are equipped with accelerometers which allow users to manipulate various installed programs via tilt and motion.  As a UX guy, I’m really fascinated by the marriage between physical and virtual.

When I was little, I loved building things out of legos, blocks, kinetx and other snapfit objects. Now as a 20-something (almost) young professional, I rarely have the opportunity to play with physical interfaces.  Instead, when people of my generation think of “play,” they usually think of video games.  While I’m not really a gamer, most of my friends have the latest consoles and crowd around tv screens.  I think that this activity is inherently not social (have you ever seen a room of guys playing Halo?).  There are of course exceptions, especially the Nintendo Wii which have made games more social and collaborative.

My point is that “playing” in video game format today lacks the same social behavior and learning experiences that you get when collaborating to build physical objects.  Sifteo has created a nice bridge between the virtual and physical to create an educational experience that is relevant.  Some of the demo programs are pretty compelling (e.g. boggle type games which update frequently or color mixing palettes), and I’m sure a rich ecosystem of programs could be developed if they open up their platform to third parties.  What if these blocks were location-aware and could upload programs relevant to your surroundings (e.g. a program on animals if you’re at the zoo).

While it appears that Sifteo is focused on early education, I would love to see something compelling made for adults. As I’ve mentioned, I miss interacting with legos and other physical objects, and I know there are others like me.  In any case, I’m excited by these siftables, and looking forward to trying them out.

As of last Friday, I am officially returning to Topsy Labs, Inc. for a full time position. I’m really excited to be rejoining the team after my summer with them during the Mayfield Fellows Program. I’m staffed on some exciting projects, and I’m looking forward to my start date. Expect to see some future posts on insights into the real-time search space…

The web was abuzz yesterday about the Facebook acquiring FriendFeed. Some pundits claim it to be a huge blow to Twitter in the real-time war–others think the acquisition was not as important as the rest of the web claims.

To me, this is huge, and I think that this could potentially be a massive blow to Twitter search. Real-time search is going to be lucrative, and one thing facebook is lacking is powerful search functionality (new facebook search was announced moments after the acquisition news). Friendfeed had an exceptional search experience (the only problem was that it its index was limited to the few friendfeed users out there). This team and the core FriendFeed search technology can really help facebook ramp up their search offering. Just think: a real time, social search engine where all of your friends are. To me this is really the way to actually monetize for facebook. I really don’t think twitter search is that great right now, especially because only ~40 of my real friends are on twitter (although I do like seeing what shaq has to say). I’d love to get more socially relevant search results based on my friends’ activity, and that’s what facebook can now provide (since all of my friends are on it) with a good search offering.

Working at a small startup which sits at the intersection of real-time and social search, I was a little concerned about Topsy’s prospects for the future after the acquisition news. After all, if Facebook can now offer a much improved search experience–one where users can find links, photos, videos, news articles that their friends are talking about–it’s going to be tough for other social search companies to compete since everyone is already on Facebook. One thing that keeps me positive about Topsy’s prospects is that the company has been in 3 years of R&D to develop authority based pagerank. That is to say, part of the algorithm to determine pagerank in Topsy is based on how influential people are who talk about various topics you search for. So, if I search for “Obama” in Facebook, I’ll get a lot of hits, but I won’t know which ones are important or meaningful results. Topsy serves you the most important links as deemed by the Twitter community. I think as Topsy begins to expand its index to Disqus, Yelp, Amazon Reviews, and eventually all of the conversation streams on the web, it will be in a unique position with its author based search. After all, Facebook and Twitter search are limited to searching their index of users (although they can received some activity from outside sites, e.g. through FB Connect), but Topsy is attempting to index everything. Things should get exciting in the next 6 months…

Back to the acquisition, everyone agrees that the FriendFeed team is great, and they certainly were the beloved by bloggers and developers alike for their culture of openness and their APIs. We will see what happens to them at Facebook, but my guess is that FriendFeed’s culture of openness will give way to that walled garden of facebook which is a bummer. I’ve read that they plan to keep the FF API the same, but we’ll see.

Here’s a story from Mashable highlighting Facebook as a major search contender.

Here’s one from Techcrunch.