HN: How can I contact Google?
10 comments
I believe (naively) if Google knew about my technology we may be able to talk business...
I suspect you will find that if you are not capable of making this a PR issue for Google they have absolutely no desire to talk business with you, because you have nothing to offer them. (An example of someone who could make it a PR issue: 37Signals, when Google duplicated the core functionality of one of their products as a tech demo.)
Google is not a kind or gentle corporation. They're a huge multinational whose business is built on a combination of pixie dust and the ground-up bones of folks whose business models came into contact with Google products.
That said, if you're serious about contacting someone, find someone inside the Googleplex (cough if only their were a site where you could get LinkedIn in with professional peers cough) and get them to make an introduction to the Product Manager for Reader. This is essentially the way you do inbound contacts targeting any large corporation.
Again, just telling it to you straight: it is vanishingly unlikely that you're going to succeed in this.
I suspect you will find that if you are not capable of making this a PR issue for Google they have absolutely no desire to talk business with you, because you have nothing to offer them. (An example of someone who could make it a PR issue: 37Signals, when Google duplicated the core functionality of one of their products as a tech demo.)
Google is not a kind or gentle corporation. They're a huge multinational whose business is built on a combination of pixie dust and the ground-up bones of folks whose business models came into contact with Google products.
That said, if you're serious about contacting someone, find someone inside the Googleplex (cough if only their were a site where you could get LinkedIn in with professional peers cough) and get them to make an introduction to the Product Manager for Reader. This is essentially the way you do inbound contacts targeting any large corporation.
Again, just telling it to you straight: it is vanishingly unlikely that you're going to succeed in this.
The other problem you're going to have is that there are a lot of small sites out there that are doing similar things... I know of 4 or 5, and that's without really looking for them.
As an aside, I feel your pain - I've been working on something pretty similar to this as well; unfortunately the change detection piece is pretty simple to implement so it's easy to duplicate.
As an aside, I feel your pain - I've been working on something pretty similar to this as well; unfortunately the change detection piece is pretty simple to implement so it's easy to duplicate.
<i>I suspect you will find that if you are not capable of making this a PR issue for Google ... </i>
Although op's PR skills in the social news aggregation space appear to be remarkably good. But the arguments still hold that this stuff is valuable if it has users, not because of the tech.
Although op's PR skills in the social news aggregation space appear to be remarkably good. But the arguments still hold that this stuff is valuable if it has users, not because of the tech.
If they've blogged about it, it's highly likely they are well in to the development phase this feature. Second, the challenge in most features is in implementing it on their infrastructure in a scalable manner. Scalable implementation on Google infra is their core competency. I find it hard to believe they would want/need to talk to you about their core competency.
It appears that you are alluding to the recently-announced ability of Google Reader to track pages which don't have an RSS feed.
We're talking about a company which came up with an ultra-efficient way to send program updates (which involved disassembling an EXE, custom diffing considering jmp offsets, followed by reassembly).
Could you explain what unique unreproducible technology you have which Google might be interested in?
Best case scenario I foresee is a tiny "employment by acquisition" deal, if you can charm the right people. Good luck!
It appears that you are alluding to the recently-announced ability of Google Reader to track pages which don't have an RSS feed.
We're talking about a company which came up with an ultra-efficient way to send program updates (which involved disassembling an EXE, custom diffing considering jmp offsets, followed by reassembly).
Could you explain what unique unreproducible technology you have which Google might be interested in?
Best case scenario I foresee is a tiny "employment by acquisition" deal, if you can charm the right people. Good luck!
CQuery is directly colliding with Yahoo's YQL (http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/, look for "CSS Selectors"), which was there loooooong before cquery.com was even registered.
Idea about "tracking changes on pages" was there for ages. For ex. http://searchenginewatch.com/3574636 (Jan 2006)
You won't convince Google to change anything. It's still "Go" language despite huge PR coverage and years and books behind other "Go" language.
Idea about "tracking changes on pages" was there for ages. For ex. http://searchenginewatch.com/3574636 (Jan 2006)
You won't convince Google to change anything. It's still "Go" language despite huge PR coverage and years and books behind other "Go" language.
The general concept's ancient, e.g. http://www.changedetection.com/ has been up since 1999. Merging it with CSS selectors seems newer, but it's hard to keep anyone who has a CSS-selector library from duplicating that functionality.
You could try contacting Matt Cutts and asking him to put you in touch with the right people. He's pretty much the public face of Google for people like us....
or Don Dodge?
I would recommend trying to contact Matt Cutts and see if he can point you in the right direction.
Not to sound discouraging though, I am sure that Google gets hundreds of calls a month from small companies with products that the companies feel Google should either buy or do business with. As such, you may be climbing a very steep hill here. If you truly believe your products offer value to the Google platform, I would recommend building some PR buzz around the products first. Since Google is developing something similar it validates your product and with some clever marketing skills you should be able to get some of the bigger blogs to at least evaluate your product. My plan would be to make Google come to me instead of trying to get into Google. I think your chances are better of getting them to come to you, especially if you already have an active and growing user base.
Not to sound discouraging though, I am sure that Google gets hundreds of calls a month from small companies with products that the companies feel Google should either buy or do business with. As such, you may be climbing a very steep hill here. If you truly believe your products offer value to the Google platform, I would recommend building some PR buzz around the products first. Since Google is developing something similar it validates your product and with some clever marketing skills you should be able to get some of the bigger blogs to at least evaluate your product. My plan would be to make Google come to me instead of trying to get into Google. I think your chances are better of getting them to come to you, especially if you already have an active and growing user base.
On a tangentially related note, before Feedburner (acquired by Google in 2007 for ~$100 million), the folks behind Feedburner had a startup very similar to femtoo.com. It was called SpyOnIt.com and was launched in 1999 and purchased by a competitor, I think in 2004. One of these folks (Dick Costello) is now the COO at Twitter.
I don't like to be a pessimist, but seriously, don't hang your hopes on cutting some kind of deal with Google on this. Both monitoring websites for changes and scraping content from sites are ideas as old as the web. There must be dozens if not hundreds of tools and websites in this space and while some will do it better than others, it is just not that hard of a technology to duplicate. It is possible, although unlikely, that you've come up with something remarkable and new on the technology front, but I think it is more likely you simply have a nice implementation of a solution to a problem many people have solved before.
On the bright side, I think you have better chance of succeeding on this without Google than with them. Your post reads like you're trying to sell a technology; that the algorithm is the selling point. Presumably your deal with Google would be on that basis. Don't do it like that. Instead, focus on using this technology as a tool to solve someone's specific business problem, the more specific the better (you can always expand the scope later). The fact that someone technically savvy could use Google Reader or Yahoo Pipes to hobble together equivalent functionality doesn't matter to the people who will be your customers. They are looking for a turnkey solution to their specific problem, and you're going to hand it to them at a reasonable price. The technology you've implemented is only the foundation. Find a specific business problem you can solve with it, that's where your money will come from. (Not to sound like a broken record, but reading up on "Customer Development" may help you on this front.)
[Edit: Fixed typo]
I don't like to be a pessimist, but seriously, don't hang your hopes on cutting some kind of deal with Google on this. Both monitoring websites for changes and scraping content from sites are ideas as old as the web. There must be dozens if not hundreds of tools and websites in this space and while some will do it better than others, it is just not that hard of a technology to duplicate. It is possible, although unlikely, that you've come up with something remarkable and new on the technology front, but I think it is more likely you simply have a nice implementation of a solution to a problem many people have solved before.
On the bright side, I think you have better chance of succeeding on this without Google than with them. Your post reads like you're trying to sell a technology; that the algorithm is the selling point. Presumably your deal with Google would be on that basis. Don't do it like that. Instead, focus on using this technology as a tool to solve someone's specific business problem, the more specific the better (you can always expand the scope later). The fact that someone technically savvy could use Google Reader or Yahoo Pipes to hobble together equivalent functionality doesn't matter to the people who will be your customers. They are looking for a turnkey solution to their specific problem, and you're going to hand it to them at a reasonable price. The technology you've implemented is only the foundation. Find a specific business problem you can solve with it, that's where your money will come from. (Not to sound like a broken record, but reading up on "Customer Development" may help you on this front.)
[Edit: Fixed typo]
How old are you? This kind of stuff has been around for many years. Charging for it would probably fall into Google's 'evil' category since it is so simple to do. It's cool, but you didn't invent it and you don't own the idea.
That's no reason to stop what you are doing, though. If you can get a user base and keep improving the product and making users happy, more power to you.
That's no reason to stop what you are doing, though. If you can get a user base and keep improving the product and making users happy, more power to you.
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NEXT - I really need to contact Google - they have recently blogged about a new Google Reader feature that maybe be in a collision course with my own product... eek!
I believe (nievely) if Google knew about my technology we may be able to talk business... if they don't know about me - I'm afraid they will roll straight over me without knowing I was even there!
If anybody has had success contacting anybody in the 'product' division of Google - please could you share the trick with me!!! (I've gone round and round in circles sending email and trying to find 'Google Groups' that don't seem to exist).
(if you're interesting, the sites are: femtoo.com & cquery.com)
thanks, tom