High-profile startup Gravity launched its group conversation website to the public tonight. Founded by three former MySpace executives – Amit Kapur, Steve Pearman, and Jim Benedetto – and backed by Redpoint Ventures and August Capital, Gravity “connects people with shared interests and helps them engage in meaningful and fun conversations.”

Unlike other social networks that rely on previous relationships, Gravity connects users with others “you should know and should be talking to because they share your passions.” Rather than rely on existing social connections, Gravity encourages users to make new ones.

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Using metaphors from astrophysics Gravity allows users to create “Worlds” (topics)
that they can “orbit” (follow).  This metaphor does not extend to “Amir, the friendly neighborhood dinosaur” that serves as the guide.

There are real-time notifications to conversations that one “orbits,” and the company indicates there will be an API that allows widgets to be embedded elsewhere.

Although Gravity seeks to do something new, the dinosaur might be an apt mascot, for the site seems to be in most respects a combination of forums and groups – two of the Internet’s earliest forms of social networking.  The threads are organized chronologically, with embedded comments and the ever-popular “like” feature.

Liz Gannes wrote tonight on GigaOm that “the back end is a dynamic ‘interest graph’ with deep analytics about people’s participation.” She notes though that Om Malik “thinks the company is just hoping to latch onto general tech industry excitement about big data.” TechCrunch had in-depth coverage of the companies plans for its data in December.

The service has been in private beta since December, and those who are active on Gravity already seem to be pleased with the service and with its look-and-feel.  I did get quick and friendly responses to the conversations I started there, although admittedly the topics seemed, well, conversational.  Contrast this with an informational site like Quora, a site founded by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, where users participate less in conversation than in Q&A. SnapGroups, a site started by Yahoo Groups inventor Mark Fletcher earlier this month, is similar as well.

Some say there are two types of people in social networking:  those who like Facebook and those who prefer MySpace.  The difference between Quora and Gravity might just echo this.

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Finding specific online videos from TV networks and independent producers can often be a daunting challenge. Some TV shows are on Hulu, some can only be found as paid downloads on iTunes or Amazon and some are only available for streaming on the network’s and producer’s own sites.

Clicker wants to change this by making it easier to find shows from TV networks, music videos, and web videos from across the Internet. Clicker is currently in private beta and only available in the US. The company gave us 1000 invites for our readers. Read on to find out how you can get yours.

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Clicker aggregates over 300,000 episodes from over 1,200 networks, as well as 50,000 music videos and thousands of movies.

Features and User Interface

There are, of course, already numerous video search engines like blinx or Truveo. Few of these make it as easy as Clicker to find the videos you are looking for, however. With auto-completed searches, a smart categorization system and well designed search results page, finding the right video on Clicker is a snap.

Whenever possible, Clicker uses video embeds to play videos right on its own page, though if a show can’t be embedded, Clicker will point to other sources. It’s important to point out that while most of these videos are available for free, Clicker also indexes shows that are only available for paid downloads and streams on services like iTunes or Amazon. Clicker also indexes shows from Netflix – though you need to be a Netflix subscriber to stream these.

A very useful feature on Clicker is that users can subscribe to shows and build up a personal library of shows and playlists. Every episode page gives users the option to add this episode to the playlist or to subscribe to the complete series. Clicker also keeps a record of all the shows a user has watched already.

All of these features are nice and useful, but the area where Clicker really shines is in how it presents the search results and how easy it is to browse the site and discover shows.

Taming the Wild West of Online Video

With its focus on indexing high-quality videos and making it easy to find them, Clicker manages to stand out from its competition. Earlier this week, Clicker added Blake Krikorian, the founder of Sling Media to its board of directors, whose experience in this market will definitely be a boon for the company.

As Clicker’s CEO Jim Lanzone told us earlier today, online video is still going through its Wild West phase. Thanks to services like Clicker, it’s now getting a lot easier to find and play online videos without having to search through dozens of sites.

Invites

Clicker gave us 1000 invites. Simply click here, sign up, and you are ready to go.

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The next version of popular web dashboard service Netvibes will push “near real-time” updates from feeds to the browser, a dramatic change in how the service works. Those feeds will be served up along with the standard suite of functional widgets the company has always provided.

As the number of real-time feeds available around the web has rapidly grown over recent months with the rise of real-time publishing technologies, the big question has been: when will a major feed reader consume these feeds? Google Reader may be too complex and too slow-moving to be first; that Netvibes is going to steal the show should be no surprise.

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In an unembargoed presentation sent to press this morning, Netvibes said that it would be adding support to its next version for both Pubsubhubbub and RSS Cloud protocols. When those technologies are used to tell Netvibes that new items are available, the items will be pushed automatically to the browsers of subscribers – with no browser refresh required.

Code named Wasabi, the version will go into private beta later this week and will launch to the public at December’s Le Web conference in Paris, where the theme of the event is the real-time web.

Support for real-time feeds has so far been much stronger on the publisher side than the consumer technology side. With blog publishing services WordPress, Blogger and Typepad all adding Pubsubhubbub or RSSCloud feeds to their offerings, there are now hundreds of millions of real-time feeds available in those two formats. So far only a few small feed readers have begun consuming these feeds; RSSCloud developer Dave Winer’s own River2, a complex but customizable desktop feed reader, and LazyFeed, a simple but enjoyable feed-powered discovery engine, have turned on full support for real-time feeds. Real time didn’t come up in interviews this week with the creators of NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

Google Reader implemented very limited support for PubSubHubbub in August, just pushing a Hubbub feed of “shared items” from Reader to the now-Facebook owned FriendFeed. In that case Google Reader was playing the part of the publisher and FriendFeed was the reader. Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick has told us that when PubSubHubbub support allowed FriendFeed to wait for updates from Reader, instead of polling regularly to check for updates, traffic between the two services was cut by 85%.

From decreased server costs to an improved experience for users to increased time-on-site, the benefits of real-time feeds can be many. Can Netvibes pull off integration of real-time feeds into its existing dashboard product? Some developers experimenting with these new real-time feeds elsewhere have reported stumbling blocks in the process, and Netvibes hasn’t had a perfect record of service for users in all locations around the world, either. Long caching of feeds has been an issue for Netvibes, though, and this update will cut down substantially on the delays that users see after feeds of interest have published new content.

Invitations to the private beta will roll out later this week, giving a few hundred users an opportunity to see the new Netvibes for themselves.

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Google Wave, the company’s new real-time collaboration platform currently in private beta, is more secure than traditional email, claims the company. According to Greg D’alesandre, Google Wave product manager, that’s because Google has focused on addressing privacy and security issues as the product was built from the ground up instead of waiting to deal with them later. Speaking to media in Sydney today, he detailed several of Wave’s security features which are meant to stop criminals from exploiting the new technology and harming Wave users.

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Built In Features to Prevent Spoofing

As reported by Australian news outlet ITNews, Wave has multiple levels of security which are designed to prevent email spoofing. Spoofing, meaning when you receive an email that claims to be from either a person or company you know but is actually from someone else – a hacker in most cases.

D’alesandre says the Wave protocol is more secure because it includes something he jokingly refers to as “crypto fairy dust.” That’s obviously meant to be a simple and fun way to explain the security complexities built into Wave which involve detailed authentication mechanisms to keep users safe from malicious attacks. In Wave, every bit of info you receive from another Wave user has already been authenticated as to its origin so you can be assured that they are who they say they are.

“You know you are getting the Wave from the person that is sending it to you and it has not changed mid-stream. This is a very big problem in current communication technologies – data can be changed mid stream and you will never know," said D’alesandre.

HTTPS Enabled by Default

For an additional layer of security, all Wave traffic is by default encrypted via HTTPS, a protocol for secure communications. That represents a big change in Google’s standard policy regarding use of this protocol. It wasn’t until July of 2008 that Gmail users were even given the option to encrypt messages using SSL and to enable it, you had to go into your settings and make a change – something that most mainstream users would never have bothered with. By the end of 2008, Google was only offering SSL as a feature in its other Google Apps programs if users were on either the Premier or Education editions. That meant that for non-paying consumer users, Google Docs, Calendar, and other online offerings were only available via unencrypted HTTP sessions.

Today, little has changed. Still, only users of Premier and Education Editions have access to SSL and it’s not switched on by default. The protocol is now available for Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Docs, and Sites but not the Start page, Google Video, or the Google Talk desktop client. Consumers using free Google apps like Docs still don’t have SSL unless they type it in the address bar manually.

D’alesandre admitted that switching on encryption in Wave slows down the service a little (which probably explains the company’s hesitance to switch it on in other products, too), but they ultimately decided that the security it provides was worth it.

Whitelisting Kills the Noise

A third security feature of sorts coming to Wave in the future is the ability to do “whitelisting.” Wave users will be able to select which people they want to collaborate with and place them on a whitelist of approved persons. Only those who are on the list will be able to contact you via Wave and everyone else will be ignored.

That feature should certainly help to address the concerns certain folks have about Wave’s “noise level,” to some, an overwhelming amount of activity that led them to call out Wave as a distraction and a time-waster instead of the futuristic productivity product it intends to be. By allowing those who can’t seem to embrace Wave’s cacophony the ability to limit their collaborators, Wave could transfer from noisy attention killer to useful tool in an instant.

Of the three features, the first two are already in place. No date was given on the whitelisting feature, only that it will be “coming soon.”

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