One of the reasons I love Techmeme is that it gives me an almost instant snap shot of what’s going on in the technology world. The last time I checked it was around 5 pm last night. This morning I was nearly bowled over by all of the news and announcements that were spat out in the short period of time that I wasn’t watching.

You could do the same thing I did - read through about 100 blog posts, news articles, etc. Or… you could just keep reading here for a nice big overview of the evening’s events:

eBay Confirms StumbleUpon Acquisition

We’ve all been hearing the rumors for weeks. Well… it’s now official. eBay announced last night that it had acquired StumbleUpon for $75 million. For the time being, eBay has no plans to change anything about SU’s business (except for the insertion of one eBay employee into the SU ranks).

People are already reacting and speculating about what’s to come:

Since one of the strengths of StumbleUpon is its comunity, expect more Skype and communication tie-ins, but the real change will probably take place in StumbleUpon Shopping or product recommendations based upon StumbleUpon user behavior. - Search Engine Journal

I don’t quite see the connection. Do you get it? - Marketing Pilgrim

The company hardly needed StumbleUpon to build its brand recognition. And if they just start injecting eBay auctions willy nilly into stumble results, they’ll pretty much break the community they bought as members begin to evacuate the spam-laden sinking ship. Still, a separate “stumble to find books, computer parts, or hummels” section could make a lot of sense. - Download Squad

By marrying the [StumbleUpon] toolbar to Skype client, eBay can do an end run around Google’s dominance of the search business. A simple search box inside Skype client is all it would take. It is not that far fetched: Skype has been slowly integrating various different services (including PayPal) into its client, and slowly becoming eBay’s desktop backdoor. - GigaOM

One interesting aspect to this sale is the immediate feedback from the StumbleUpon community. The page was immediately ‘stumbled‘ and the community immediately started voicing their opinion. So far the majority of the feedback has been negative and against the deal. Here are just a few of the comments so far (many can’t be printed here)… - 10e20

I’m not going to pass judgment on this one just yet. I trust that eBay knows what it’s doing. And while the SU community might be up in arms at the moment, we’ll have to revisit the topic after the dust settles. If eBay really does leave StumbleUpon alone then the uproar will have been for nothing.

But I doubt eBay will leave it alone forever.

Mahalo - the human powered search engine - launches in Alpha

The idea behind Mahalo isn’t to replace Google, company CEO Jason Calacanis told Search Engine Land. The purpose of a human-edited search engine is to become a destination spot for starting searches on popular keywords.

So how does it work? Human editors - called Guides - write search results pages for popular keywords that bring the best of the web together. So far the company, which is still in alpha, has written 4,000 keyword pages. 10,000 are planned by the end of the year and 25,000 by the end of 2008. Calacanis told SEL that he knew it’d take a few years to get a really good product built.

What does the rest of the blogosphere think about it?

Mahalo forces people to change their searching behavior, requiring them to calculate when to use Mahalo versus say Google or other engines — all things that make this a long-shot for quick, big success. - VentureBeat

My question is: why bother spamming it, when it won’t gain enough users to send any real traffic? - Tropical SEO

“Humans Are Better” was literally the motto of the Open Directory Project when it launched back in 1998, but that human model hasn’t scaled well. That, along with other human-powered failures, are enough to make Mahalo seem interesting but ultimately not likely to succeed. - Search Engine Land

1) It takes too long to scan the results. They’re categorized, but there aren’t descriptions - it’s hard to differentiate one link from another. […] 2) It’s all human powered, which means it’s arbitrary. […] 3) Who are you people? It’s funny, I wouldn’t really trust my friends to choose the most relevant search results for me. I have very few friends […] with whom I share the vast majority of interests and preferences. I don’t even trust all the links the email and IM me. So why the heck would I trust Lon, Lelah, and Jonathan [some of the ‘guides’]? - Inside the Marketers Studio

If you’ve never heard 10,000 people laugh at the same time, my guess is you could have scratched it off your List of Stuff To Do around 3pm Pacific today if you were at the Googleplex. […] So, to recap. It won’t send traffic. It WILL give you an abundance of information on stuff you’re NOT looking for. It directly funds their biggest competitor. And it’s exactly what you’d get if Wikipedia dressed up like Kobe Bryant and went to the Colorado resort that Netscape worked at. - Scoreboard Media Group

Ok… so overall… not the best reaction to get on a new launch. I understand where these concerns are coming from. Human-edited projects have not faired well in today’s algorithm-based computers-own-us world. They’re subjective and what I think is most relevant might not be what an editor thinks is relevant. It’s also trying to splinter my search habits. Why should I start with Mahalo just to find out if they have a page built yet… when I could just go to Google or Yahoo and pick my own top results?

That being said, the company says it needs a couple of years to get good. So I’m going to give them a couple of years to get good. It’s easy to throw out harsh words and critiques of a product on its first day of launch. And while I understand the fundamental flaws in the design, I’m not above giving them the benefit of the doubt to see what they can come up with.

Google Makes Offline Applications Easier with Gears

Google announced a new product for application developers, called Gears, that helps them create offline-able web-based apps. As a proof of concept, Google Reader has already been Gearified and can be used offline with the new product. Gears comes in the form of a browser extension that lets you download application data to your computer, go offline, and sync back up with the online version of your program when your Internet connection is restored.

Lots of blogs and websites are covering this one and about half of them have screenshots and step-by-step guides on using it:

Of course we can’t discount the fact that Google is moving towards the desktop setup and perhaps give Microsoft’s long time domination of the offline arena a little shake up. But Google’s success would depend on the open source developers’ participation on this open source project. Google could easily make its various apps available through Google Gear. But those apps wouldn’t be enough to sustain users’ interests towards this tool. - Search Engine Journal

Google expects to have a consumer-ready release of Google Gears, which will be under 1 megabyte in size, “within months.” It also expects to submit the code to a standards body so that it will eventually be built into all standards-compliant browsers […] - C|Net

Google Operating System and Search Engine Roundtable both have hands-on step-by-step posts to using Gears. I think it’s interesting to note that Google chose to show off Gears using Google Reader - a very Internet-dependent application. Does this suddenly thrust Google Reader into the offline feed reader category as well? Is it a hybrid?

On a side note: I, for one, can’t wait to see how this thing works with Gmail (assuming Gmail gets “Geared”).

So there you have it… an overview of the ruckus going on in the blogosphere, some initial reactions, and links to discover more content. It was apparently a busy night in the Valley.