Google Earth Helps Solve A Plane Crash Mystery

The idea behind Google Earth has always been a powerful one: It allows users to explore places that they either can’t or won’t go. But with its vast amount of maps and topographical data, it also is a very powerful tool for combing the Earth — and that can be very useful when you’re searching for something. Which is exactly how it helped a grieving family find a plane that crashed, and took the lives of loved ones, that had been missing for over two years.

Despite countless time spent searching all the areas in Arizona that authorities and the family thought the plane might have gone down, there had been no luck all this time in finding the plane. Then, something rather incredible happened. A person who had also been involved in the attempts to find millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, found a picture of a forest fire that had been taken the same day as the crash and in what was thought to be a similar area. He alerted the family, which had set up a website to aid in the search. Remarkably, they were able to find the exact area in the picture using the different viewing angles and topographical data of Google Earth.

The family and some volunteers then set out to the area they had pinpointed in the program, using its coordinates. Sure enough, they found the wreckage. While it’s not exactly a happy ending for the families of the two people lost in the crash, Marcy Randolph and William Westover, it does provide closure, Randolph’s family says.

And now the family is hoping to help others do similar types of search and rescue using Google Earth. The family has set up a system called MARSI, which stands for Mapped Archive of Rescue & Search Information. On the website they set up for it, they detail exactly how they were able to use Google Earth’s data to find the missing plane. It’s very interesting stuff. And MAST (The Missing Aircraft Search Team), a team which contributed to the Fossett search, apparently wants to use MARSI for future searches, Liz Johannesen, Marcy Randolph’s cousin, tells us.

These types of stories remind us that while projects like Google Earth may not be the most important to a company’s bottom line, they can provide something much more valuable to a lot of people. Last week, we heard about the woman who got her stolen purse back thanks to Google Latitude. And this week we have this much more important story involving Google Earth. It is nice to see that the technology we sometimes take for granted in a quickly evolving space, actually can help people in a meaningful way.

Facebook To Let Others Play In Its Stream

Seeing the explosion in growth of Twitter right now, it’s pretty clear that the hot trend on the web is to have a service which acts as a central hub for information, and allows third-party sites and services to built on top of it. For most of its life, Facebook has been almost the exact opposite, insisting that developers work from within its walls to keep much of the data — and the users — there. Tomorrow, it looks like Facebook may be knocking down its dam to let its streams of data flow more freely.

Facebook is expected to announce that third-parties will now have access to data from the site that was previously unavailable, before an event set to take place at 4PM PST tomorrow. The Wall Street Journal has a few of the details, including that developers should be able to access the all-important photos and videos that users upload. Apparently, these third-party developers, assuming they get users’ permission to use this data, could build their own sites and services with some of it.

Also of note is that apparently Facebook will begin supporting more open standards for the transporting of data. It’s not yet clear exactly what this will mean, but presumably it could help alleviate some of the issues I wrote about last week in noting that Facebook, Google and others were creating what were essentially proprietary profiles, that forced all of us to actively use and update all of their services. I’ll be very interested to see what this means when it comes to Facebook Connect.

If Facebook really is opening most of its data, it would seem to me it’s a smart move to stop some of the momentum that smaller rivals, like Twitter, are getting. After all, Facebook still has its big stick — over 200 million users and more importantly, their data. Now it may be able to fully swing it.

AOL Launches Online “News Magazine” PoliticsDaily

AOL is adding a twist to old-fashioned political journalism with the launch of its new political news and blog site, PoliticsDaily.com. The site, which will primarily focus on in-depth political commentary as opposed to breaking news, will only provide original content, from long-form analysis to blog posts on issues in the U.S. political landscape. Led by former New York Times Washington Correspondent, Melinda Henneberger, PoliticsDaily wants to tie the old media’s in-depth political analysis with a sustainable digital medium

PoliticsDaily is the brainchild of Martin Moe, senior vice president at AOL and is built under Bill Wilson’s new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself. MediaGlow, which recently launched topic directory Love.com, runs AOL News, Engadget and TMZ.com, among other properties. PoliticsDaily is part of the AOL News network, which received more than 27 million unique visitors in March, according to comScore stats. New York Times Digital by comparison had close to 46 million unique visitors in March.

PoliticsDaily has enlisted a “dream team” of experienced political journalists from both new and old media, including Walter Shapiro, former columnist for USA Today and former Washington bureau chief for Salon; Jill Lawrence, former national political correspondent for USA Today and columnist for the Associated Press; Carl Cannon, former Washington bureau chief for Reader’s Digest and White House correspondent for the National Journal and the Baltimore Sun; Lynn Sweet, blogger and Washington Bureau Chief of the Chicago Sun-Times; and Patricia Murphy, founder of Citizen Jane Politics, a non-partisan website for women.

The site will include blogs such as “Woman Up,” a blog focused on political issues from a woman’s perspective; “The Daily FLOTUS,” a blog which focuses on First Lady Michelle Obama; and “The Cram,” a student-focused blog on political news.

Consumers are more frequently looking online news for political news, as we saw in the past presidential elections and during the current downturn in the economy. PoliticsDaily hopes to be a mainstream source of analysis and news and shuns the idea of being a news aggregator. While the all-original content includes both long-form articles and blog posts, the site will not be primarily focused on breaking political news—perhaps leaving the real-time, short-form news to other political news competitors like The Politico,The New York Times, The Huffington Post and the A.P.

The competition in the political news sphere is tough, especially online. PoliticsDaily will have to build a credible brand with its original content, going up against media organizations that have long been offering in-depth analysis, like the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Atlantic and The Huffington Post. PoliticsDaily will also face some competition from The Politico, which incorporates blogs, breaking news, interactive multimedia features and in-depth reporting into one site. And while the New York Times and Washington Post are hemorrhaging money from their print publications, their in-depth political coverage and analysis on their websites is strong, deploying a wide array of multimedia, blogs and long form commentary.

News broadcasters sites also provide popular political coverage—CNN.com. MSNBC.com, and FoxNews were among the top five trafficked news sites following the election in November. Moe maintains that PoliticsDaily’s long-form magazine content will differentiate the site from The Politico and other real-time focused news sites.

Moe pledges that the differentiation between PoliticsDaily and the Huffington Post will be even more clear. Moe says that while the Huffington Post is largely a content aggregator, has a leftward bent, and doesn’t pay many of its bloggers, PoliticsDaily will be 100% original content from “experienced” paid writers, and will be “poly-partisan” with perspectives from the liberals, centrists and conservatives. Of course, with the financial backing of AOL, PoliticsDaily has the advantage of being able to pay all those editors and reporters. But if PoliticsDaily is supposed to be an online new magazine, why isn’t AOL’s sister subsidiary Time Inc. running it?

YouTube Starts Rolling Out Video Download Program For Partners

YouTube is trying to find more ways to monetize the popular web service, and recently started a test project with selected partners who were invited to start offering video downloads to interested viewers (they subsequently killed our own download tool, presumably because they want to minimize the risk of losing money on unauthorized download apps). Now it seems the Google-owned online video community site is ready to expand the program to other interested partners based in the U.S. (see screenshot below).

As we noted earlier when we first caught wind of the download service, selected YouTube partners can offer their video downloads for free or for a fee (determined by the partner), paid through Google Checkout. Most videos in the test charge about $1 each. The partner can also decide how the downloadable video will be licensed to the user – whether it will be restricted to a private non-commercial use video, or whether it can be used under Creative Commons.

It’s not entirely clear if Google / YouTube is currently taking a cut on the for-fee downloads during the test period, but it will most likely do that at some point if it isn’t already.

Recently, Crédit Suisse analyst Spencer Wang estimated that the video site will lose approximately $470 million this year alone (although we should note that another analyst, Youssef Squali from Jefferies & Co., predicted YouTube revenues to amount up $500 million in 2009).

Either way, in this economy, YouTube needs to be monetized as much and as soon as possible, and the video download option is just another way the company hopes to generate income from the popular site. Other steps it has taken up until now include YouTubevertorials, selling search results, and ad revenues from big content partners.

MySpace Local Now Open To The Public

It may be in the process of hiring a new CEO, but the MySpace machine keeps on rolling. Last month we got our first look at MySpace Local, the joint project between Citysearch and MySpace that combines the popular social network with Citysearch’s extensive database of business listings. The new property has quietly launched the public, and you can check it out here.

While MySpace is relying on Citysearch’s massive database of business listings (which includes hours, addresses, photos, menus, and videos), it’s starting from scratch on the review side of things. That might have handicapped a smaller site, but given MySpace’s audience, it shouldn’t take too long for the site to get populated: since it went live seven days ago, MySpace users have already written over 60,000 reviews.

At launch MySpace Local is offering reviews on restaurants, bars, and other ‘nightlife’ listings, with more categories coming in the near future. The site is also going to begin to allow users to book reservations to restaurants in its directory.

MySpace is taking advantage of its social graph to personalize the site as much as possible, highlighting reviews left by your friends and syndicating your actions (such as writing a review) back to your MySpace activity steam. Because the reviews are being written by the people you know, you’re more likely to look at them and leave one of your own.

These features are certainly appealing, but why is MySpace creating a new destination site when MySpaceID could presumably do many of the same things (Citysearch integrated Facebook Connect in December)? MySpace says that while MySpaceID is coming to Citysearch eventually, the two sites will likely appeal to two different audiences, which is why Citysearch was on board in the first place. Because MySpace Local is directly connected to the social network, users can jump to it seamlessly without having to worry about logging in. Through MySpaceID, users would still have to go through a brief authentication process, which raises the barrier to entry (and is still a fairly novel concept for most people).

The other reason why MySpace is building out its own product? Advertising. The site allows local businesses to take advantage of MySpace’s self-service MyAds product, which will allow them to selectively display their banner ads to local MySpace users. This opens up MySpace (and Citysearch, which is participating in a rev-share deal) to new sources of revenue from both local establishments and national brands, like Coors and Outback Steakhouse.

Google Product Search now plays friendly with iPhone and Android

Oh Froogle, how far you’ve come.

As they’ve been doing with products throughout their services suite, Google announced this morning that they’ve revamped the Google Product Search page for iPhone and Android.

If you’re familiar with Google Product Search from within a standard browser, you’ll feel right at home. Search for products by name or type, sort by various criteria (low to high, high to low, rating, etc), and view product details or reviews. Outside of the aesthetics, there wasn’t much that needed changing for the jump to mobile – so not much changed.

An increasingly common practice in the smartphone space is the idea of price comparison and product research by camera-based barcode scanning, something which Google has yet to really build upon in Product Search. Having begun to play up the convenience of Product Search when on the go, might they be considering adding a Product Search-powered barcode scanner to the Google iPhone App or the Android platform?

Yahoo Quietly Pulls The Plug On Geocities

Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Yahoo! is unceremoniously closing GeoCities, one of the original web-hosting services acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $2.87 billion. (Fun venture fact: Fred Wilson’s Flatiron Partners was an investor). In a message on Yahoo!’s help site, the company said that it would be shuttering Geocities, a free web-hosting service, later this year and will not be accepting any new customers. Existing customers will still be able to access use GeoCities but Yahoo! is encouraging these customers to upgrade to Yahoo!’s paid Web Hosting service.

GeoCities’ traffic has been falling over the past year. According to ComScore, GeoCities unique visitors in the U.S. fell 24 percent in March to 11.5 million unique visitors from 15.1 million in March of 2008. Back in October, 2006, it had 18.9 million uniques.

There are plenty of other Website creation and hosting services out there, including blog platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, and Typepad, as well as Website creation and hosting services such as Ning, Webs, Jimdo, Snapages, Weebly, and countless more. GeoCities never really kept up with the times, but always remained a decent pageview generator.

One of the pioneers of web-hosting sites, GeoCities gave users personal publishing tools and created “neighborhoods” within its web platform for users to be able to create pages, add a picture, text, a guest book and a website counter. Long before MySpace, Geocities was known as a place where teenagers, college students, and eventually others could impose their own garish taste upon the rest of the world. Here is one Geocities homepage we found from 1996: In honor of GeoCities and all that it has given the Web, whoever can come up with the worst GeoCities homepage design of all time will get a TechCrunch T-shirt.