At last year’s TechCrunch50 conference, Socialwok made a big splash, winning the award for best demopit startup and launching its enterprise-friendly, FriendFeed-like layer for Google Apps. The web-based application was praised for launching a social network that wrapped around the very unsocial Google Apps. Today, the startup is launching a gadget to allow users access all the features of Socialwok without leaving Gmail. Previously, you could access Gmail, YouTube, Google Calendar and even conversations in Wave from Socialwok’s Friendfeed-like interface. You can even sign in with your Google Docs credentials. But with the new gadget, Socialwok’s interface will appear within Gmail’s main canvas. Users can view, post and comment on updates; access feeds, files and Google Docs and search for posts, people, feeds, and files. Socialwok, which employs a freemium model, has steadily been adding features and improvements to its application, including releasing a new version of its HTML 5 mobile version for Android and iPhone browsers. And the startup has managed caught Google’s eye. Socialwok was chosen as one of the showcase companies for AppEngine technology at this year’s Google IO Developer Sandbox (Socialwok is powered by Google App Engine). And the startup wroteGoogle Docs killer which was acquired by the search giant last year.

Zynga investor Fred Wilson remained mostly quiet during the Scamville debacle in October. But he’s starting to talk now, and he isn’t happy. In a post about Etsy a few days ago a commenter brought up the Zynga/Scamville stuff. Wilson replied “Citing techcrunch on the zynga stuff is a joke.” He waded into the subject again today on another of his posts , saying in a number of comments “i’ve tried hard to stay out of that debate because it is a false debate…zynga makes almost all of its revenue on virtual goods…the “scammy ads” thing is total red herring that everyone got excited about but is almost entirely irrelevant” and “nobody who got involved in that shitstorm took the time to really do the work and look at what Zynga did and did not do. or compare it to Google and everyone else who does way worse on a daily basis…the whole thing totally annoys me. it’s not fair.” He also said numerous times that we didn’t have our facts straight, and that we didn’t take the time to understand what really happened. Hogwash. Fred Wilson is a brilliant investor, but he’s conflicted and wrong yet again. There were a total of 22 Scamville posts (see updates) on TechCrunch alone. For the most part we left Zynga alone, until we were slammed in the face with CEO Mark Pincus on video saying “I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues” (how do you take that statement out of context?). Pincus also said “we need to be more aggressive and have revised our service level agreements with these providers requiring them to filter and police offers” in a post about Scamville. And Facebook took one of their games offline for a few days for a violation of their terms of service around scammy offers. Zynga had claimed in the past that fully 1/3 of their revenue came from offers. Some of that wasn’t legitimate, likely tens of millions of dollars, and other companies have said that the bad stuff tended to push out the good stuff. There is an excellent argument that you can continue to find most of these scams on Google and other search engines. But a big difference is the incentive that social games give users to enter into these scams via virtual currency, as well as the fact that they targeted teens without credit cards by pushing mobile subscription offers. Google is wrong to post these ads. But that doesn’t make what Zynga has done right. I think Pincus took the right steps to move his company in the right direction, and I think the industry is on the right track now, and Zynga looks to be a legitimate business even without scammy offers. I support Pincus as an entrepreneur. But to deny that there was ever a problem is irresponsible. And to suggest that we didn’t take the time to understand the facts is outrageous. In addition to the 22 posts where we spoke to dozens of sources on and off the record, I asked Pincus to go on video with me to tell his side of the story without editing. He declined. Zynga continues to be a very close partner to Facebook. They share a major investor, DST . A facebook board member, Marc Andreessen , is also an investor in Zynga. And Zynga is Facebook’s largest advertiser. The fates of these two companies are deeply aligned, and there has been more than a little evidence of wrongdoing. The relationship between Zynga and Facebook needs more scrutiny, not less. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Old media loves nothing quite so much as writing about their own impeding death. And we always enjoy adding our own two cents – the AP not knowing what YouTube is , the NYTimes guys reading TechCrunch every day , etc. Speaking broadly, I like what Reuters , Rupert Murdoch and Eric Schmidt are saying: the industry is in crisis, and the daring innovators will prevail. Personally, I still think the best way forward for the best journalists, if not the brands they currently work for, is to leave those brands and do their own thing . But as one of the innovators in the last go round, I think there’s a much bigger problem lurking on the horizon than a bunch of blogs and aggregators disrupting old media business models that needed disrupting anyway. The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly. Old media frets over blogs and aggregators that summarize content and link back to the original source. They can’t make a business in that world, they say, so they run the other way and try to find a way to protect and charge for content. These are the cavemen, or whoever, who were afraid of fire when it was discovered because it burned, or was too technologically advanced to really understand. The smart guys used it to cook their meat and keep them warm, and multiplied. For our part, we throw a party when someone “steals” our content and links back to us. High fives all around the office. At least there’s some small nod in our direction. And the aggregators like TechMeme can figure out who broke the news. Page views are lost, but reputation is gained . But for every link there are dozens of sites that outright steal our content with no attribution. Not just spam blogs, even the NYTimes does it . This isn’t a copyright issue – the stories are rewritten by actual people. But it’s far cheaper to simply take the news and rewrite it – if you can get away with it – than to hire people who do actual journalism. Over time, it becomes a competitive tax that is difficult to bear. But even then, companies like ours can find a way to compete. So what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines. On one end you have AOL and their Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media. That leads to a whole lot of really, really crappy content being highlighted right on the massive AOL home page. This article, for example, is just horrendous . One of AOL’s own blogs trashes the company’s spinoff, rambles for miles without any real point, and adds a huge factual error to top things off (”the company is losing money” ). Hiring a bunch of people who couldn’t keep their old media jobs and don’t have the stomach to go out on their own and then slapping little or no editorial oversight onto these masses of sub-par journalists leads to an inevitable conclusion – cheap, crappy content. And that crappy content is given a massive audience on the AOL portal. On the other end you have Demand Media and companies like it. See Wired’s “Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model .” The company is paying bottom dollar to create “4,000 videos and articles” a day, based only on what’s hot on search engines. They push SEO juice to this content, which is made as quickly and cheaply as possible, and pray for traffic. It works like a charm, apparently. These models create a race to the bottom situation, where anyone who spend time and effort on their content is pushed out of business. We’re not there yet, but I see it coming. And just as old media is complaining about us, look for us to start complaining about the new jerks. My advice to readers is just this – get ready for it, because you’ll be reading McDonalds five times a day in the near future. My advice to content creators is more subtle. Figure out an even more disruptive way to win, or die. Or just give up on making money doing what you do. If you write for passion, not dollars, you’ll still have fun. Even if everything you write is immediately ripped off without attribution, and the search engines don’t give you the attention they used to. You may have to continue your hobby in the evening and get a real job, of course. But everyone has to face reality sometimes. Forget fair and unfair, right and wrong. This is simply happening. The disruptors are getting disrupted, and everyone has to adapt to it or face the consequences. Hand crafted content is dead. Long live fast food content, it’s here to stay. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Google has quietly rolled out its own online dictionary, complete with multilingual support and accompanying photos. The new site was first discovered by the LA Times Tech Blog, and you can access it at Google.com/Dictionary . It works exactly as you’d expect: type in a word, and Google will give you the definition, part of speech, and maybe a similar phrase or two. If you’re logged in, you can star a word for future reference. The new dictionary obviously isn’t good news to the many other web dictionaries. Answers.com, in particular, stands to lose out, as it is currently Google’s default whenever a user clicks the “define” link on a Google results page. The Times article says that Google now uses its own dictionary as the default, but I’m still seeing Answers.com as the source, so apparently the switch isn’t live for everyone. Google has actually offered some dictionary features for a long time. If you Google a query using the format “Define: word “, the search engine will present you with a handful of definitions it finds on sites scattered across the web. Some of these definitions usually come from well known online dictionaries; others, from obscure web sites, which can make the results inconsistent. These aggregated definitions have been available on Google.com/dictionary before now, and now compliment Google’s own in-house definitions. For those wondering if Google might further expand into territory traditionally owned by reference books — it already has. Last year it launched Knol , a user-edited encyclopedia. That venture hasn’t gone very well: after failing to draw much interest as an encyclopedia, people started using Knol as a poor man’s Craigslist. Image by ElektraCute CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Gazopa , a search engine that uses features from an image to retrieve similar images, has been in private beta since it launched during TechCrunch50 last year . To recap, Gazopa lets users upload a picture, enter a URL of an image, create a drawing or right-click on an image anywhere on the web (via a plug-in ) and retrieves similar images. A thumbnail of a video is enough to look for similar videos. Results are mainly filtered through analyzing the color and shape of the object or person pictured. Upload a picture of a red car, for example, and Gazopa will find pictures of similar cars on the web – without you having to type any keywords (search via keywords is also possible though). Since September 2008, more than 40,000 users have tested the service, which entered open beta today. And Hitachi America , the company behind Gazopa, has used customer feedback to improve the quality of search results, tweak the site’s design and add a number of features in the past year. One of the most notable additions is the Gazopa iPhone app ( iTunes link ), which is pretty cool and lets you take and upload photos with your iPhone to quickly get similar images off the web. The app has all of the main features of the web version and is free. There’s also a new Gazopa Drawing Facebook application . Gazopa now allows users to browse through Flickr images and filter out those without a Creative Commons license. When you hover over a particular image, Gazopa will show you its size, how similar it is to the one the search is based upon, licensing details and a URL that will take you the picture’s Flickr page. Another new feature is the news tab under which users can find images related to the latest news. Those images can be filtered by time (uploaded within one month, a year etc.), shape and size. Granted these aren’t earth-shattering new features, but GazoPa has indexed over 60 million images so far that can be searched even if they have no or inaccurate meta data. The open beta version is still a bit buggy but more than OK for a test run. One major point that leaves room for improvement is that searching for inanimate objects with distinctive features seems to lead to significantly better results than searching for human beings that look similar. It would be nice if Gazopa could at least distinguish between men and women, for example, which isn’t always the case. Asked what differentiates his service from Google Labs’ similar search service , Gazopa project leader Hideki Kobayashi said that Google doesn’t let users find similar images of all images displayed and that uploading a picture by yourself isn’t possible. Gazopa also competes with “reverse image search engine” TinEye , which, however, doesn’t necessarily look for “similar” images but tries to find exact matches of pictures instead. Here’s a demo video for Gazopa’s open beta version: Screenshots: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors