In case there was still any doubt about the long-rumored “GDrive’s” existence, a page now appearing on Google’s search results offers a pretty clear indication that something is going on. On Writely.com – the online word processing service Google acquired in 2006 –  a test page is now appearing with a title that reads “test page for Platypus (GDrive).”

Well, there you have it.

Currently, the full title of the search result reads “Writely – The Web Word Processor – test page for Platypus (GDrive)” and the URL is www.writely.com/BasePage.aspx. Of course, when you click through, the link takes you to an error page of sorts, with a message reading “Unknown action. Please check the URL and try again.”

It should be noted that the www.writely.com domain itself redirects to Google Docs.

Platypus, for those unaware, was the codename for GDrive used internally at Google until it was killed off in 2008. But recent findings have hinted that Google Drive is making a return. For example, in September, MG reported that code found in Chromium (the open source Web browser which serves as the testing ground for Google Chrome) referenced the non-public URL drive.google.com.

Later that month, a screenshot from a presentation at a Google-sponsored event showed something that looks very much like Google Drive, complete with text that even reads “My Google Drive.”

From MG’s earlier reports, the forthcoming service is essentially a rebranding of Google Docs with an accompanying desktop software component, similar to Dropbox. When exactly Google will finally launch Google Drive, after years of waiting, is still unknown. But at least we know they’re working on it.

Thanks Dan Behun

Google made Google+service available for Google Apps users earlier today with much fanfare, but for me personally it was very disappointing.I have two google apps accounts which I use regularly - one for my gaming blog, one for my work - apart from my gmail account. Now google gives me the option to transfer all me activity to one of my apps accounts which is a moot point.Sure, there might be a lot of people who would love this feature but I expected the search giant to follow a more comprehensive approach when rolling out their social networking feature for google apps accounts. I thought I would be able to access my same google circles no matter what email id I logged in to, now that I can login to multiple gmail and apps ids.Facebook lets you enter your 'other email ids' and lets you login with any one of them. I thought this was a brilliant feature, since I would be alerted of any attempt to reset password of my Facebook account on all email ids. I though Google would follow a similar approach given the number of gmail ids that are hacked for various reasons. If there is a way to connect these email ids it's through G+, so if my gmail id is hacked I can easily recover them from my apps account instead of having to remember things like the day I opened my account and 20 most contacted people (which includes people I haven't been in touch for a while by the way).Instead Google goes ahead and tells me that I can import all my contacts and circles to apps account which doesn't help me all all. Doesn't Google see the amount of info that is waiting to be used if the accounts are integrated? How about automatically creating a circle for people who use email on the sub-domain let's say *@gamebashing.com and are in my inbox instead of going ahead with such a shortsighted approach?Google... are you listening?PS: I clicked on the share button/link on the top blogger bar above this post, but I didn't see a way to share it to Google+. What the hell Google?

Last August, Google asked us all to say good-bye to Google Wave. Some said Wave was ahead of its time, some said that the platform had enough features to sink the Titanic. However, Google today announced some significant updates to its social network, Google+, among them that Google Apps users can now sign up for G+ — the integration is finally live.

And one of these features launched today on Google+ seems a throwback to one now-defunct feature of Google Wave, called “Playback”. Or at least one might claim this as its genesis, with the feature having its roots in-house, as opposed to some sort of reaction to Facebook’s much bally-hooed timeline that launched this September.

Yes, today, Google launched its new Google+ Ripples, which will let users “re-live” the conversations, comments, and sharing that’s taken place over the history of their use of Google+. Check out Google’s blog post here.

In other words, Ripples is a “visualization tool for public shares and comments”, which users can access by simply selecting the “View Ripples” option in the drop down window to the right of the public post.

From there, Google+ pops open a new tab, where users can see the activity in a nifty graphical interface, zoom in on particular events — seeing the innerconnectedness of it all. The diagram shows the post spreading across the network as other users share the post, with arrows “indicating the direction of resharing” and the circles within circles representing the “resharing sequence” with the larger circles indicating the heaviest sharing (and sharers), according to the Ripples description.

Users can also see a feed of who shared the post as well as click play on a moving timeline that shows one how quickly the post spread and to what extent it has been shared over the days, months, weeks, and years.

The intention here, according to Google’s blog post, is to “rekindle that initial excitement” when one shared their post and to get a better understanding of how the post is flowing across the network and just what kind of reach and collective viewing it was (and is) getting.

Google says that Ripples is still experimental and is looking for feedback on how it can be more informative and “more awesome”. But so far, so good. And, just to make one thing clear: Yes, Google did name this feature after me. Thank you, Google.

But the interesting thing here is how similar Google Ripples is to Google Wave’s “Playback” feature, which allowed friends to get caught up on what everyone else in a wave has already been talking about. This was essentially like rewinding the wave to see what happened in the past, with the ability to watch it progress through its many changes. Playback allowed users to jump around and see all the edits sequentially as they progressed in time to take some of the confusion out of the feature-brimming communication platform.

Another notable update announced today is the so-called “Google+ Creative Kit”, which in part is a bit like a suped-up version of Instagram filters. Creative Kit allows a deeper way to edit one’s photos on G+, enabling users to sharpen their photos, add text, crop, rotate, resize, or overlay that vintage look now so often associated with Instagram and Hipstagram. (Or as one commenter and Google engineer has pointed out, Creative Kit seems to be the native integration of Picnik, a photo editing startup Google acquired last year.) According to Google, all you need to use Creative Kit is “an idea”:

In the spirit of Halloween, Google has added some limited-time, “spooky” features to Creative Kit and is launching a photo competition (through the end of October), in which users can share their frightening photos on Google+ with the hashtag “#gplushalloween”. A panel of celebrity judges will pick their favorite photos and prizes may even be awarded. Though we’re checking on that last bit.

Ripples, Creative Kit, and Google Apps integration are certainly notable enhancements to the Google+ platform, especially as the latter has been a much-called-for and needed feature for the millions of Google Apps users. Photo editing features are a bonus, too, considering Google+ users have added more than 3.4 billion photos to the platform since launch. While basic photo editing tools have been available, Creative Kit takes Google+’s editing options to the next level.

And, in terms of further narrowing the gap between itself and Facebook, Ripples is a natural addition for Google+ as a content sharing medium. Both Ripples and Facebook’s impending Timeline are both unique visual ways of presenting our social data. Timeline will essentially allow users to replace their profiles with chronological scrapbooks, tracking your “most important” photos, content shared, apps, and so on back to the day you were born (for photos), or joined Facebook for everything else.

Ripples has a slightly different use case, as it is designed to give users a visual look at the ripple effect of their content sharing, the directionality of that sharing, and the popularity of a given topic. Both are nifty visual features, but whereas Timeline seems to have the potential not only to change your Facebook and social footprint at a deep level, Ripples doesn’t quite get there. It has the potential for a nerdgasm as a cool data visualization medium, which Google rocks in spades. But, really, the question becomes: How much will you actually use Ripples? And, since, in the end, it’s all about money, which has greater value for brands and future monetization?

For more on these new Google+ features, here’s the blog post.






Crunchbase





GOOGLE
GOOGLE+
GOOGLE WAVE






Company:
Google


Website:
google.com


Launch Date:
July 9, 1998


IPO:

NASDAQ:GOOG



Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....






Learn more





Product:
Google+


Website:
plus.google.com

Company
Google


A Google project headed by Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, Google+ is designed to be the social extension of Google.

Its features focus on making online sharing easy for users.

“Circles,” think social circles, akin to Facebook’s lists

“Sandbar,” a user-unifying toolbar

“Sparks,” a search engine for sharing content between users

“Huddle,” a group messaging app that allows users to share with certain “Circles”

“Hangouts,” group video chatting designed to allow up to 10 users video chat at once

Each Google+ user can replace his...






Learn more





Product:
Google Wave


Website:
wave.google.com

Company
Google


Google Wave is a tool for communication and collaboration on the web, launching in the second half of 2009. Google announced that they would discontinue new development on Google wave in August 2010.

In Google Wave, users create and invite other people to “waves”. Everyone on a wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing,...






Learn more

Google Offers  has been on a slow roll out as it looks to get its footing in the daily deals space. But it’s taking a big step forward today with the announcement that it will start offering deals from 14 partners. It’s also implementing new personalization tools that help it deliver much more targeted discounts to users.

Google Offers will now start aggregating deals from these partners: Dealfind, DoodleDeals, Gilt City, GolfNow, HomeRun, JuiceInTheCity, kgbdeals, Mamapedia, PlumDistrict, PopSugar Shop, ReachDeals, Active.com Schwaggle, TIPPR and zozi. These deals will run alongside Google’s existing offers, which its sales staff will continue to source directly. Google’s goal is cover a range of verticals through its aggregation partners so it can have a wide array of offers that meet the tastes of users. The expanded selection of deals will first appear in San Francisco before expanding to Google Offers’ other markets.

Google Offers is not just trying to aggregate deals, something Bing Deals, Yipit and plenty of others already do. It’s trying to make the process a little smoother by allowing users to purchase and manage all their deals right through Google Offers without having to get directed to another deal site as many other aggregators do. Users can pay for any deal right through Google Offers. Google will also include a 1-800 number on deal vouchers so if there is any dispute with an offer, even one from a partner, consumers can resolve it through Google.

Google Offers is also introducing a new personalization quiz that allows people to pick out the categories they like and dislike and identify where they live, work and hang out. That feature, similar to what Yipit already does, will allow Google Offers to route the right deal to users and avoid flooding them with irrelevant offers. That’s one of the things that kills the enthusiasm for daily deals when you see a bunch of offers that have no value to you.

Google Offers is now up to 17 cities after launching in San Jose, San Diego, Baltimore and Minneapolis earlier this week. Google won’t say what kind of traction it’s getting but the move to aggregation shows that it’s trying to bulk up to better compete with Groupon and others. Nitin Mangtani, Group Product Manager for Google Offers, told me the updates to Google Offers is designed to help the company become more attractive to consumers and merchants. More deal volume and better personalization along with a more seamless transaction through one provider means consumers can find more relevant deals and also get a better overall experience.

With the Google Offers personalization tools, merchants can also home in on potential customers who are more passionate about certain categories and are better potential repeat visitors. Mangtani said Google also pays merchants 80 percent of their revenue share within  four days and the rest within 90 days.

Google has been looking to upgrade its local deals efforts after getting spurned by Groupon last year. It’s been pretty steady so far in its expansion and hasn’t tried too many innovative ideas. I just used my first Google Offers last week in New York and the experience was similar to using a Groupon. Aggregating deals and adding personalization features are not terribly creative but they show that Google is trying to improve the process. And I like that it’s handling purchasing and dispute resolution in one place. I’d like to see Google arm its merchants with Android devices so they could collect vouchers digitally, which would make life easier for consumers and provide better data to businesses.

At this point, Google Offers is still no Groupon killer, even if that title is now less attractive with the questions mounting around Groupon’s business. But this market for local advertising and customer acquisition for merchants is still a huge opportunity and Google is still one of the best to exploit it. Little by little, it’s trying to get there.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
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I knew this day would eventually be here, but it still saddens me: According to The Telegraph, Google’s Hugo Barra has said that the Nexus One smartphone won’t officially gain the Android 4.0 upgrade. That means no Ice Cream Sandwich features and updated user interface for my faithful (but dinged up) Nexus One. Unofficially, of course, there’s every reason to believe that my 22 month old handset will get a third-party port.

My Nexus has seen at least 100 custom ROM flashes, so one more is no big deal, especially if the hardware itself can handle it. I initially figured that Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich software would require a dual-core processor, but that’s not the case. Google will be bringing Android 4.0 to the Nexus S, which like my Nexus One, uses a single-core CPU.

The biggest internal difference between the two Nexus phones is actually in the storage capacity. My Nexus One has a scant 512 MB of internal memory, of which only 190 MB is available for application storage. In contrast, the Nexus S has 16 GB of storage, with 1 GB considered internal storage and the remaining 15 GB as external / USB memory. A third-part port of Android 4.0 then, could be a tight squeeze on the Nexus One.

This is just another sign that it might be time for me to let go of the ol’ Nexus. I hung on to it mainly because as a Google phone, it was often the first to see Android update – directly from Google itself, not from the carriers. Now that it won’t, and considering there are far more advanced Android phones available — yes, I’m looking at you Samsung Galaxy S II and Galaxy Nexus — I’m planning moving on to a new Android phone.

So long, Google Nexus One. Thanks for the ride and for showing me how Android has matured from a clunky touchscreen user interface to something far more useful and usable. Your dessert-named software always satisfied my tastes.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
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Groupon has filed suit against two former employees for allegedly taking the daily deals site’s trade secrets with them to their new jobs at Google. Bloomberg was the first to report on the news.

In a lawsuit filed in Cook County, Illinois last week, Groupon accuses two former employees — Michael Nolan and Brian Hanna — of taking information they learned at Groupon to their new sales jobs at Google Offers, Google’s daily deals site. Michael Nolan worked at Groupon for approximately 16 months, from May 2009 up to September 2011. Brian Hanna worked at Groupon for about nine months, from January 2011 to September 2011.

Both Nolan and Hanna are relative newcomers to the workforce: According to their respective LinkedIn profiles, Nolan graduated from DePaul University immediately prior to joining Groupon in 2009, and Hanna graduated from Michigan State in 2008.

It’s an interesting turn of events for Groupon, which was widely reported to have turned down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google less than a year ago, in December 2010. Since then, Groupon has come into its own as a standalone company that is moving toward a much-buzzed-about initial public offering on the stock market.

When contacted today, a Google spokesperson said: “We’re not party to the suit and have not seen a copy of the complaint, so we cannot comment.” We’ve reached out to Groupon’s press department and its general counsel for comment on the lawsuit, and have yet to hear back.

 

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
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A Google executive said the search giant is pondering a fiber network in Europe, perhaps based on its experience building out a gigabit fiber to the home network in the U.S. Google’s dedication to better infrastructure is essential to the success of many of its lines of business, and it seeks to understand what people and businesses will do with more bandwidth.

As for Europe, Marketwatch is reporting that David Drummond, a senior vice president said the search giant was interested in building out a fiber network across the pond. From Marketwatch:

During a meeting at the French Industry Ministry, Drummond said that Google was “looking very closely” at a potential project in Europe, without specifying where this project would be launched or when.

The story is short on details, but Google’s fiber efforts in the U.S. are both an attempt to understand the applications of tomorrow, but also to provide a new business and cost model for fiber deployments that could perhaps force ISPs into offering faster or cheaper services. Europe has some of the most advanced broadband countries, with places such as The Netherlands and portions of Scandinavia deploying fiber to the home. But it also has ISPs that filter content on behalf of copyright holders and those that seek to get providers like Google to pay for the privilege of accessing the end consumer.

If Google can shake things up in the U.S., it makes sense that it would look to disrupt the markets overseas.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
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Slowly but surely, Google is finding more and more ways to integrate Google+ into all of their other products. The latest tweak: a one-click button, smack dab in the middle of your search results, for adding the author of the relative content to a Google+ circle.

Google has been fiddling with the integration of Google+ into search results for weeks. It began with the integration of public Google+ postings into search results, and later grew to include blogger/author headshots (complete with links to their Plus profiles) next to relevant items.

This latest tweak is really just the evolution of the aforementioned addition of author bios. By removing that one step (having to click into the author’s profile to add them), adding someone on Google+ becomes less of a deliberate decision and more of an impulse move. It’s just further proof that, in the Battle of Facebook vs. Google+, Google is playing an entirely different game.

Most of Google’s tweaks regarding Plus in results seem to focus on drawing attention to bloggers/writers/online personalities — which, while I’m obviously a bit subjective here, is a rather keen move. While we’re but a drop in the hat in the grand scheme of things, writers do have a notable degree of influence (whether they intentionally utilize that influence or not) over the public’s perception of a product. Funneling followers to writers could easily give them the perception that a product is more lively than it actually is, which may in turn spin their writings on the product in a more positive way. Clever, Google.

Not seeing the changes? Don’t worry: like most things Google does, it appears that they’re testing this one on a small handful of users first.

[Thanks Muneer!]






Crunchbase





GOOGLE






Company:
Google


Website:
google.com


Launch Date:
July 9, 1998


IPO:

NASDAQ:GOOG



Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....






Learn more

Online social networks are everywhere these days, a truly global phenomenon. But where are the different social networks having the most success in terms of popularity? That is what we’ll try to answer in this post.

We have included 11 social networks in this survey: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Orkut, Tumblr, FourSquare, MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5 and Bebo.

Please note that this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list covering all social networks out there. There are literally hundreds of them.

To map popularity, we’ve used Google search statistics (their Insights for Search tool). This will give us a good indication of the interest – or popularity, if you will – of a social network in a given region. We’re basing this survey on search results from the past 90 days, so it’s a reasonably large, up-to-date sample. After all, we want to know the situation right now.

A few initial observations
We’ve gone through and summarized some of the information for you, but please feel free to scroll down and check out the individual social networks you’re interested in.

Top countries for each social network (in terms of interest)

Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Venezuela.
Twitter is most popular in Venezuela and Brazil.
LinkedIn is most popular in the Netherlands and India.
Google+ is most popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Tumblr is most popular in the Philippines and Brazil.
FourSquare is most popular in Indonesia and Malaysia.
MySpace is most popular in Puerto Rico and Myanmar (Burma).
LiveJournal is most popular in Singapore and Russia.
Hi5 is most popular in Thailand and Romania.
Bebo is most popular in Ireland and New Zealand.
Orkut is most popular in Brazil and Paraguay. The interest shown for Orkut in Brazil far outstrips that of any other country.

It’s worth pointing out that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the majority of users come from these countries. We’re talking about sheer interest in a service. The size of the local user base will depend on the size of the Internet population in that country.

Also note that we haven’t compared the social networks against each other. This is a survey that examines where each social network has managed to garner the most interest in its service.

Some standout countries in this survey

Brazil is in the top five for Twitter, Orkut, Tumblr and Bebo.
Singapore is in the top five for LinkedIn, Tumblr, FourSquare and LiveJournal.
The United States is in the top five for LinkedIn, Tumblr and MySpace.
The Philippines is in the top five for Tumblr, FourSquare and LiveJournal.
India is in the top five for LinkedIn and Orkut.
The United Kingdom is in the top five for LinkedIn and Bebo.
Indonesia is in the top five for Twitter and FourSquare.
Venezuela and Turkey are in the top five for Facebook and Twitter.

That was just a brief summary. Why don’t you go ahead and have a look for yourself? We’ve listed the results for all the included social networks here below. We’ve also included direct links to Google Insights for Search if you want to dig even deeper into the results and play around a little.

Facebook

Countries with the highest interest in Facebook:

Turkey
Venezuela
Tunisia
Colombia
Dominican Republic

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Facebook here.

Twitter

Countries with the highest interest in Twitter:

Venezuela
Brazil
Indonesia
Turkey
El Salvador

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Twitter here.

LinkedIn

Countries with the highest interest in LinkedIn:

Netherlands
India
United Kingdom
Singapore
United States

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for LinkedIn here.

Google+

Countries with the highest interest in Google+:

Taiwan
Hong Kong
Nepal
Finland
Honduras

(Ok, Hong Kong isn’t a country per se, but Google Insights for Search lists “regions”, which don’t always correspond to countries.)

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Google+ here.

Orkut

Countries with the highest interest in Orkut:

Brazil
Paraguay
India
Haiti
Oman

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Orkut here.

Tumblr

Countries with the highest interest in Tumblr:

Philippines
Brazil
Australia
United States
Singapore

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Tumblr here.

FourSquare

Countries with the highest interest in FourSquare:

Indonesia
Malaysia
Singapore
Thailand
Philippines

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for FourSquare here.

MySpace

Countries with the highest interest in MySpace:

Puerto Rico
Myanmar (Burma)
United States
Jamaica
Trinidad and Tobago

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for MySpace here.

LiveJournal

Countries with the highest interest in LiveJournal:

Singapore
Russia
Belarus
Ukraine
Philippines

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for LiveJournal here.

Hi5

Countries with the highest interest in Hi5:

Thailand
Romania
Peru
Laos
Portugal

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Hi5 here.

Bebo

Countries with the highest interest in Bebo:

Ireland
New Zealand
United Kingdom
Brazil
Australia

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Bebo here.

Final notes
As you noticed, we only included a limited list of social networks in this survey. For example, we didn’t include social networks that are regional by nature, i.e. don’t have a global focus. There are plenty of country- or language-specific social networks that are successful in individual countries, for example VKontakte in Russia and the Russian-speaking countries of the former Soviet Union, Mixi in Japan, RenRen and Qzone in China, Hyves in the Netherlands, etc.

If you’re curious, you can check out a similar survey we did three years ago, in August of 2008. We thought an update was long overdue, since things change so rapidly in social media.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

For one thing, Reader is only sort of a social network. In many senses it’s an anti-social network. Not in the sense that people in Reader are anti-social so much as the point is to harbor a small enclave of carefully selected people and create a safe-haven of sorts where that “carefully constructed human curated” list of shares and insights can flourish. In Reader, you don’t go after as many friends as possible. You certainly don’t see anyone from high school. Nobody shares photos of their kids. The discussions that do blossom are almost always very smart and focused. It’s the internet if the world were a more prefect place.

Google Reader was one of the last vestiges of the Internet where you could avoid all the 'friend-ing' and focus purely on content sharing. Of course, you had likes, sharing, and following friends but that was never primary goal of the service. Any communication you had with your 'friends' was focused on the content you shared.

Right on the heels of dumping stake in Bharatmatrimony, Yahoo is all set to bid its farewell to its Joint Ventures in India.

 Yahoo India has just announced that it is moving out of strategic investments in India - Tyroo and Callezee. The company’s board, as part of a Global Clean-up Plan, approved the complete divestment in India three weeks ago.

 The love story of Yahoo with India had begun in 2006 & matured in 2008. Subsequently, the 12% stake in Bharatmatrimony was offloaded in October 2011 to Bessemer Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund and Canaan Partners for INR 100 Crores. Yahoo is now about to finalize a deal for Tyroo and Callezee with Xplorer Capital, a fund floated by none other than former Yahoo employees including former senior VP Keith Nilsson!

 Gurgaon-based Tyroo, an online advertising network, had received Yahoo funding (Yahoo had acquired around 35% stake) in 2007 and has since grown to become the second biggest online advertisement network in India & comes in after Google with 100-150% growth over the last years! “Yahoo is exiting all its investments in India” a Tyroo executive revealed. This year itself it was also reported that Tyroo partnered with Slideshare to monetize their website in India. It was also reported that MediaMind and Tyroo tied- up with each other to launch their new ad format called VooDoo.

Callezee is a telephone directory search service. In 2008, Yahoo had acquired around 30% stake in Info Network Management Company Pvt Ltd (INMAC), the company that owns Callezee. Callezee was supposed to augment Yahoo’s search capability through its Voice Search offerings

With these warp-ups, Yahoo India appears to be on the brink of closure. However, Yahoo as a brand will always stay. Is Yahoo indeed right in its “Clean-Up” act or does it require some liquid funds for expansion / acquisitions elsewhere? Only time (or some Yahoo employee) can tell!

Author: Alap

Looking For A Social Media Agency?? - Contact WATConsult - India's Leading Social Media Agency

I used to tweet a lot, I used to use Facebook a lot and I've only been an occassional user of Google Plus. If there was one place I was overdependent on for breaking news, tech news and random justFORlol gifs it was Google Reader. Now it looks like Google is planning to axe the social features of the reader with a new update.People like Robert Scoble had complained earlier about how slow his reader experience is because of the number of people who have added him on the service. Looks like Google has bowed down to Scoble effect and screwed people like me over.If you want to know how I feel right now, let me explain how I spend my time online everyday. When I open a browser, the first thing I do is login to gmail and then to Google Reader. In Reader I had set the 'People you follow' tab as the default. That way I can see all the interesting stuff shared by people in my friends circle before dealing with the unread posts.This helps me save a lot of time which would otherwise be spent looking through thousands of irrelevant me-too tech entries. This tab remains open through out the day and I have become more dependant on this service for finding out information than any other. I would rather use Reader than be the creepy Facebook link sharing, which shows me what my friends are reading and tells the world what I'm reading, no thanks, I'll selectively share thank you! Oh and there's twitter which has a site which is such a pain to use that I hardly use it anymore. I like the discussions, I like folks there but the site really needs to be improved. Assuming this is THE END for the way I use the service, I would like to thank Manu, Roshnimo, Mahendra, Priya, Saurabh, Kavya, Surekha and Renganathan to name a few, who shared generously on reader and made my day many times over.  :-)PS: I'm not sure about you guys, but I used to subscribe to RSS feeds to folks before they made it social.PPS: By the way @chupchap here, this is my new blog. :-) I like the new blogger layout, both frontend and backend.

Google+ will soon support pseudonyms and other forms of identity, says a Google executive.

During a conversation at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, SVP of Social Vic Gundotra revealed that Google will eventually support other forms of identity. While Google started with only allowing users to sign up if they used their real names, it will be adding features that will “support other forms of identity” in the next few months.

The revelation comes a few months after controversy erupted when Google suspended users utilizing pseudonyms and nicknames instead of their real names. At the time, Google made minor changes in response to criticism, but stood firm on its decision to suspend users that didn’t use their real names.

Apparently the issue is technology, resources and the atmosphere the company wanted to set with Google+. The company wanted to create a community focused on real names, but now it realizes that some people have legitimate reasons to use pseudonyms.

Gundotra didn’t go further into how Google+ will support pseudonyms.

More About: Google, Pseudonyms

Google has a cool feature: an app, Follow Your World, that allows you to track satellite images of locations you specify within Google Maps and Google Earth. Each time Google updates its satellite and aerial imagery for the areas you’ve selected, it’ll send you a notification letting you know about the new info.

The feature’s been around since January; today, it’s expanding into 43 additional languages, from Arabic to Estonian, Serbian to Vietnamese. And while the app is a nifty thing overall — you could use it, say, to track changes in the neighborhood you grew up in, or on your college campus, or at the town you’ll be vacationing in this winter — the feature also provides potentially useful data for reporters. (Particularly in combination with Google Earth’s Historical Imagery showcase, which lets you compare satellite images as they’ve changed over time.) Think of, say, reporting on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards project. Or following the effects of the Gulf oil spill. Or visualizing the destruction and reconstruction that followed Haiti’s devastating earthquake.

“Whether journalists are covering their local communities or global events, aerial imagery often plays an essential role in shaping and sharing their stories,” Sean Carlson, manager of news industry relations at Google, told me in an email. “You might think of this feature like a Google Alert for the places that are important to you.”

But don’t expect your inbox to be flooded with updates. As the FAQ notes:

Imagery updates in any particular area can take months and even years. We’re continuously working to make this time span shorter, but we can’t guarantee a specific timeline for an update. Whenever we update your interested area, we’ll send you a notification email.

Google and Samsung launched the latest Android OS Ice Cream Sandwich and the Galaxy Nexus smartphone Wednesday morning in Hong Kong.

We’ve broken down the long-awaited phone and OS’s new features, so that you can see exactly what is now brought to the table. Our pick for most impressive new feature is that glorious camera, which includes native features ranging from filters to panorama shooting.

Big, fast and powerful: The Nexus Prime has a 4.65-inch display and LTE, runs one of the fastest 4G networks in the world and has a dual core 1.2ghz processor.
Everything about this phone is smoother. There’s a new font optimized for HD, software buttons replace hardware buttons and the keyboard’s improved.
Your face unlocks the phone, as facial recognition replaces a traditional pass code.
The new and improved camera has zero shutter lag, autofocuses, takes low-light photos, stitches together images into seamless panoramas and shoots 1080p, time-lapsed video. You also have lots of instant editing options such as removing red eye, adding a “hipster” filter or cropping.
The phone gives you a detailed analysis of your data usage, down to the very app sucking up all your bytes.
Android Beam eases sharing between phones — simply bump your phone against another Android to transfer videos, maps or other content.
Gmail and Google calendar have slick new looks and are integrated into the OS.
The People app innovates your contacts list, linking individuals with all of their social profiles.
You can multitask and view your recent apps.
Developers can download the SDK starting immediately. The phone will ship to the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia in November.

SEE ALSO: Google Ice Cream Sandwich, Nexus Prime Launch [LIVE BLOG TRANSCRIPT]

What do you think of Ice Cream Sandwich? Is it a game changer from Gingerbread or does it merely add some new bells and whistles? Let us know what you think in the comments.

More About: android, Google, ice cream sandwich, nexus prime
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I wrote a while back about the eventual necessity for the internet to become beautiful. The trouble is that the things in the world we consider beautiful in an informational context — magazine and book layouts, typography, etc. — are necessarily limited in the information they have to present. It’s this limitation, the known quantity aspect, that lets designers work effectively.

How should you design something, then, that presents effectively limitless information (say, all the world’s books) through a fairly limited medium (say, a web browser)? Google has one idea. Put them on a gigantic helix.

As you can see, they’ve got this WebGL-based demo up and running with about 10,000 titles that have been indexed by Google Books. It’s separated by genre, and you can zoom between genres with a thrilling effect. Makes me think of the Tower of Babel:

But is this really something people will want to navigate? Probably not. People like analogs in their digital catalogs, and this one seems a little bit too off the wall. Sure, there are books in rows. But it’s also a corkscrew extending to the sky. And people are used to seeing their books arranged spine out — which isn’t necessarily the best thing in the world, but it is a superior information density. And I wonder if it might be better to put people inside instead of outside?

Anyway, it’s a fun little experiment you can try out here. Note to Mac Laptop users: be careful how you swipe or you may accidentally navigate off the page or invoke some arcane gesture.

Google, the search company that started as two guys at Stanford, openly discriminates against entrepreneurs. At least for its Google News product.
Not only is that silly and short-sighted, but it should go against everything Google stands for.
Yesterday, I applied to have SplatF included in the Google News index. Beyond the hope to publish stories that might be considered “required reading” for the masses, I also figured that people searching Google News for, say, “iPhone 4S,” might appreciate my story angle to yesterday’s news, explaining Apple’s record-breaking sales weekend in context of its other iPhone launches. (Plenty of other sites liked it enough to link to it.) Even if I’m never featured in Google News, it seems logical to include SplatF — clearly a “news” site — in a news index.
But, it turns out, that Google has a rule about the sites that it includes in Google News: They can’t be one-person operations, and they have to appear to be “organizations.” Never mind solo shops practicing entrepreneurial journalism — Google wants news with overhead!
Here is the text of the email Google sent me to reject me:
Thank you for your interest in Google News. We’ve received your suggestion and we’re unable to include it in Google News at this time. We don’t include sites that are written and maintained by one individual. We currently only include articles from sources that could be considered organizations, generally characterized by multiple writers and editors, availability of organizational information, and accessible contact information.
If you have additional questions, please visit our Help Forum at: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/news?hl=en
We appreciate your taking the time to contact us and will log your site for consideration should our requirements change.
Regards, The Google News Team
This is especially disappointing because it feels un-Google-like. Here you have a company trying to use algorithms to organize and disseminate news and information, rejecting a news and information source because of the number of people listed on its about page.
I could easily (but dishonestly) stick a bunch of friends on the site as “contributors,” or something like that, to appease Google, but I would never do that. One of the things I decided right away is that I would never misrepresent SplatF’s size by using terms like “we” or disguising that it was a one-person attempt at self-publishing the news. But apparently, Google actually draws the line at how many writers you have.
So I figured I’d try to appeal my case to Google, explaining my situation and what I’m trying to do here.
In hindsight, I probably should have worded this differently, and included more information about my background — Medill journalism degree, employee no. 2 at Business Insider, reporter for Forbes, appearances on CNBC, lots of interest from mainstream media in syndicating my content verbatim, etc.
But in the interest of transparency, this is the email I sent in response:
Dear Google News team,
Thanks for your response, but I would like to appeal.
Your ad products, among others on the market, allow journalists to make a living by self-publishing — in essence, becoming their own news organizations. The readers that Google News could send to those publishers, in turn, could help those sites grow, potentially leading to them hiring more journalists in the future.
Why is that content not worthy of inclusion in the Google News index?
In my case, I am still under the exact same professional obligation to write original, accurate stories as I was at Forbes and Business Insider, my previous employers — it’s just a different economic arrangement. You had no problem indexing my stories and sending thousands of readers to them under those circumstances. Why now?
For what it’s worth, over the past 24 hours, editors at WSJ.com and a site affiliated with Time Inc. have both linked to my site. (Which, being Google, you already know. In fact, I assume you could easily call up all the “reputable” sites that have linked to mine since I started it three months ago.) So why is it that human editors at those sites can regularly link to my content, and send new readers my way, but Google News can’t?
It seems more Google-like to *support* those sorts of endeavors — and new journalism business models — by allowing sites like mine into Google News. Not to exclude them for frivolous reasons, like organizational structure.
Thanks for reconsidering.
Dan Frommer Founder and Editor, SplatF
That didn’t go over well, apparently. I was hoping for some reconsideration and reflection from a human, but instead, a few hours later, I received the same form letter in response. Sorry, pal, you don’t have enough coworkers to matter to our database. So, here I am, rejected from Google News, and now probably on some “flagged for being a troublemaker and questioning Google” list.
Putting myself in Google’s shoes, I can understand why they made this decision at some point. Most one-person sites probably aren’t reputable news sources. And this way, there are a lot fewer sites for Google News employees to sift through on a case-by-case basis — they can just reject all one-person operations automatically, and use their policy as justification. It’s easier and cleaner for Google.
But I still think it’s an outdated policy that needs changing. Or at least a reasonable appeals process, where a site like mine could be granted an exception. Why?
I can point out several factual errors and inconsistencies in stories written by bigger newsrooms that are indexed in Google News. (Not to mention huge ethical scandals, plagiarism, and fabricated stories — stuff you won’t find at SplatF.)I can find instances of big news “organizations” — Google’s preferred variety — adding little to no value, but getting the benefit of Google News inclusion anyway. Like this ABC News story yesterday (linked last night from the Yahoo homepage) rewriting a scandalous MacRumors forum post in the format of a news article, but adding little value and not doing any work to confirm that it is actually true. (“The whole thing may have been a joke,” it admits at the end. Yet it’s news! because it’s from ABC.)And I can point out plenty of information on one-person sites, such as John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, Michael Arrington’s Uncrunched, Horace Dediu’s Asymco, and even SplatF, that is easily worthy to Google tech news searchers.Moreover, this is a new age of media, where readers and writers are connected more closely than ever, thanks to tools like Twitter, Google Reader, and even Google+. I follow individual writers just as much as I follow the organizations that employ them, and I am hardly alone. Google News and other Google platforms should be encouraging and enabling this, not stifling it. You don’t have to look far to see that Google’s competitors — Amazon and Apple, in particular — are building platforms to support self-publishing, while Google apparently rejects it.
(Google also boasts on the About Google News page, “We do things a little differently, with the goal of offering our readers more personalized options and a wider variety of perspectives from which to choose.” But apparently, self-publishing journalists aren’t included in those perspectives.)
Google’s best future is one where legacy media is decentralized, and where an aggregator like Google News helps people make sense of it all. So why is it behaving the opposite, not supporting new entrants? (Unlike, say, Techmeme, which is a much better tech news aggregator and graciously supports entrepreneurial journalism.)
Why does Google discriminate between a post I write on SplatF and one I write for, say, Business Insider, where my editorial process is the same? (Perhaps Google has an outdated view of the publishing workflow at many online news organizations?) If anything, I’m even more careful since I started SplatF, because it is just me, and I have no one else to check my work and no corporate structure to hide behind.
Anyway, now, I assume, I am banned for life from Google News. But I recommend to Google management that they think a little more about the sort of news service they want to offer in 2011. Do they want to only lift the relevance of yesterday’s news brands? Or do they want to help support the future of media, where small operations can report and analyze news with the exact same accuracy and ethics as a large corporation?
The rest of Google’s business — publishing and search technology, advertising platforms, venture capital, etc. — seems aligned with entrepreneurism and small organizations challenging big incumbents. But for whatever reason, Google News is the exact opposite. And that’s too bad.
Related: Adventures in self-publishing: SplatF’s first quarterly report

Well it would seem that NTT DoCoMo, one of the largest wireless carriers in Japan, has let slip the Samsung Galaxy Nexus announcement just a couple hours early.

According to a tweet, “the latest Android OS smartphone with Google and Samsung Electronics [will be] announced on October 19 in Hong Kong tomorrow. DoCoMo is almost equivalent to the fastest in the world, scheduled for release in November. More later.” (Anyone who’s fluent in Japanese, please feel free to add clarity that Google Translate can’t.)

Although we’re still waiting to confirm specs that have already been leaked, an Italian blog called Android HDBlog seems to have an official image (full-size version after the break).

We’re not sure that this is 100 percent the real deal since we’d expect text in the image to be in Chinese. (The official announcement will be in Hong Kong.) Still, the blog claims that this comes straight out of Japan where what they call “the Japanese operator” has confirmed availability for November 20.

According to Android HDBlog, these are the specs we’ll be seeing on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus:

Dimensions: 5.4in x 2.7in x .35in (which is insanely thin, however the blog also mentions that its .45 inches at its thickest part)
Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
1.2GHz dual-core TI OMAP 4460 processor
4.65-inch 720×1280 AMOLED HD display (which may just be the Italian translation for Super AMOLED Plus)
5-megapixel CMOS rear camera with LED flash, capable of video capture in 1080p
1.3-megapixel CMOS front-facing camera
NFC!!
1GB of RAM, 16/32 GB of on-board storage

We’re still unsure whether or not there’s support for a microSD card, but I would be kind of shocked if there wasn’t.

Developing…

[First image via Ameblo.jp]






Crunchbase





GOOGLE







Company:
Google


Website:
google.com


Launch Date:
July 9, 1998


IPO:

NASDAQ:GOOG



Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....






Learn more





:



Website:










Learn more

As the iPhone 4S hype has peaked and is returning back to stable levels, users from the other school of thought are getting pumped for their own massive event. Ice Cream Sandwich, and the next purely Google phone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, are due to make an appearance in just two short days.

Though we’re sure to get some clarification on already-leaked specs at the debut, we might have access to launch dates and pricing just a bit earlier than that.

According to an anonymously leaked Verizon document published by Engadget, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the HTC Vigor (codenamed Rezound) are going for a minimum advertized price of $299.99 on-contract. Both phones are also slated for a November 10 to May 10 MAP period, suggesting they may launch as early as November 10. But before we go any further, it’s worth practicing a little cynicism in this case, since this leaked document could have been whipped up in Word in about five minutes. Then again, the model numbers seem to make sense, so we’ll just venture forward with caution.

As far as that November 10 launch date goes, nothing’s set in stone. Even if that’s when the Galaxy Nexus and Vigor’s MAP period begins, the actual launch may come a bit later as we’ve already seen Ice Cream Sandwich and the Nexus event get pushed back once. Either way, it should give you a little extra time to start saving up.






Crunchbase





GOOGLE
VERIZON






Company:
Google


Website:
google.com


Launch Date:
July 9, 1998


IPO:

NASDAQ:GOOG



Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....






Learn more





Company:
Verizon


Website:
verizon.com


IPO:

VZ



Verizon Communications Inc. delivers broadband and other wireline and wireless communication innovations to mass market, business, government and wholesale customers. Verizon Wireless operates America’s largest wireless network that serves nearly 102 million customers nationwide. Verizon’s Wireline operations include Verizon Business and Verizon Telecom, which brings customers converged communications, information and entertainment services over Verizon’s fiber-optic network.






Learn more

Are you a techie looking for work? We recently offered some tips on landing jobs at Google, Apple and Facebook, but there are more companies in the Valley than those three. And you might be wondering what the culture is like at each of these companies, as well as at LinkedIn, Twitter, Eventbrite, Gaia and Tagged.

Back in August, we brought you word of awesome perks at various startups; now, we bring you perks at a number of Silicon Valley’s largest and finest. From yoga to catered lunches, 401(k)s to dry cleaning, sports teams to vacation days, these tech companies seem to understand that quality of life affects productivity — and that having to run fewer errands after work means you’re more likely to stay at the office.

Check out the infographic below from ResumeBear for a breakdown of who offers what perks. Do you work at any of these companies and take advantage of any of these perks? Let us know in the comments below.

Social Media Job Listings

Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

Interactive Designer at Weber Shandwick / Powell Tate in Washington, DC
Digital Producer at Adkeeper in New York
Software Engineer — Front End at Yelp, Inc. in San Francisco

Infographic courtesy of ResumeBear

More About: Facebook, features, Google, infographic, job search series, jobs, linkedin, mashable, Tech, trending, Twitter
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The end of Google Buzz is near. Bradley Horowitz, the Vice President of Google, announced that Buzz, along with a few other Google products, will be closed down in the next few weeks.

Horowitz writes:

“We aspire to build great products that really change people’s lives, products they use two or three times a day. To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don’t work on. It’s why we recently decided to shut down some products, and turn others into features of existing products.”

There was a lot of hype surrounding Google Buzz when it was launched 18 months ago but interest quickly dwindled. Google also received a lot of criticism for its weak privacy settings. SF Gate reports that Buzz would automatically add everyone in your Gmail without asking permission.

But Buzz wasn’t a complete loss for Google.

Horowitz writes:

“Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past. We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today’s announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome.”

The company’s latest social network offering, Google Plus, has fared much better than buzz. Earlier this week Google announced that Google Plus had more than40 million users and that G+ data would soon find its way into search.

Larry Page said:

“Think about it this way. Last quarter, we’ve shipped the plus, and now we’re going to ship the Google part.”

Will you miss Google Buzz?

Google Kills Google Buzz is a post from: The Inquisitr

Jonathan Rick is a social media strategist in Arlington, VA. You can follow him on Twitter @jrick and read his blog at JonathanRick.com.

The pace and power of web-fueled innovation is stunning. One day we’re swearing by Outlook, the next, we can’t live without Gmail. These changes exemplify the beauty of the Internet — the possibility that greener pastures are but a click away.

On the other hand, the list of tech innovations that could have been is quite long. Before we get into those, a few caveats:

Some of the companies below may not have missed the boat so much as skipped the ride. Oftentimes, these businesses simply chose to perfect their core businesses instead of tacking on new features.
None of these companies has been “MySpaced.” To the contrary, each remains well-regarded and innovative in its own right.

So, how did tech companies miss the boat?

1. Google Docs missed the SlideShare boat. Sure, Google Docs can display PDFs and PPTs, but documents are slow to load, maximized by default, and can’t easily be shared or embedded. By contrast, SlideShare is known as “YouTube for documents” because it’s fast, user-friendly and social.

2. Google Docs missed the Dropbox boat. The search giant passed on adding synchronization to Google Docs (or GDrive). Meanwhile, Dropbox pioneered this feature, for which it’s now the gold standard. And, in an ironic twist, during a five-day, company-wide hackathon, Dropbox developed the ability to sync its accounts with Google Docs. (Although Google may soon unleash a Dropbox killer.)

3. Microsoft Office missed the Google Docs boat. Only after companies, governments and non-profits had “gone Google” did Redmond release a cloud-based, collaborative version of its cash cow, Office (along with a few videos that contrast Office with Docs).

4. iTunes missed the Spotify boat. Apple cornered the digital music market years ago, but besides the all-important $0.99 per song price tag, Cupertino never really innovated with iTunes. Specifically, the software’s lack of social and streaming services created massive opportunities that Spotify — and Pandora, Amazon, Google, and Facebook — pounced on. Apple now is playing catch-up with Ping (pathetic) and iCloud (promising).

5. Mapquest missed the Google Maps boat. When I was in college, “Mapquest” was so popular that we used it as a verb. Today, it seems the only people who use this site are those who still have an AOL email address. The reason: thanks to relentless innovation (mash-ups, Street View, GPS-enabled mobile apps), Google Maps has presented itself everywhere you want to travel.

6. Google Latitude missed the Foursquare boat. Ironically, the founder of Foursquare was a former Googler who left because Mountain View wouldn’t allocate enough resources to his team, “leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.” Google still hasn’t made it with Latitude, whereas Foursquare’s points system, partnership with American Express, and merchant features have generated growth of a million users per month. (Perhaps this is why Google may want to buy Foursquare instead of compete with it.)

7. Facebook missed the LinkedIn boat. When I learned of LinkedIn, I thought, can’t you already do this with Facebook? Well, yes, but not without some hassle. Reed Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, recognized that, while we want to be hip in our personal lives, we strive to be practical and maybe even a little boring in our careers. This is why we use one email address for pleasure and one for business, and why we use Facebook to socialize with friends and LinkedIn to network with colleagues. Recognizing this, Facebook continues to hype its business pages, while such professional credibility comes naturally to LinkedIn.

8. Facebook missed the Twitter boat. When I learned of Twitter, I thought, can’t you already do this with Facebook? Indeed, at its core, Twitter is merely the Facebook status update. Yet Facebook lacked Twitter’s simplicity and pith, a void that ascetic Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, was keen to fill. Apparently, 100 million people agree.

9. Blogger and WordPress missed the Tumblr boat. Finally, when I learned of Tumblr, I thought, can’t you already do this with Blogger or WordPress? Just write shorter. Again, you could, but not with Tumblr’s base-bones simplicity, dynamic community and effective reblogging feature. Microblogging, it turns out, is different from blogging. (No doubt, this is why Blogger just announced Dynamic Views.)

10. Yelp missed the Foodspotting boat. Even though Yelp remains the top social network for restaurant reviews, it overlooked an essential facet of the dining experience: pictures. Foodspotting seized this opening, made it mobile, and now is expanding its focus beyond foodies.

So why do these examples matter?

The beauty of the web is that it dramatically lowers the traditional barriers to entry, so an entrepreneur can penetrate an already saturated market. For instance, despite heavy competition from the likes of LinkedIn, Yahoo, Facebook, Google-owned Aardvark, and Answers.com, Quora plunged into the Q&A fray. In short order, it carved out and capitalized on a niche.

Examine the above list and you arrive at an under-appreciated conclusion: Internet innovation is so fierce and constant that it undermines the notion of zero-sum market share. Instead of vying for a piece of the same fixed and static pie, webtrepreneurs bake whole new pies. Not for nothing does Jeff Bezos insist that the Kindle comprises a “different product category” than the iPad. Just because a company maintains a seeming monopoly on a market doesn’t mean the market is devoid of opportunities. When there’s an innovator, there’s a way. With the web, Goliath is always vulnerable.

Sure, tech giants are somewhat limited. Just reference the lawsuit from the Justice Department, the investigation from the Federal Trade Commission or the hearing from Congress.

Internet innovation comes in tidal waves, big and bold. By contrast, when’s the last time your microwave got a radical upgrade? Or your shower head? And how’s that electric car coming along?

In the end, the web’s rising tides lift the only ship that matters: the user’s.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, aluxum

More About: Business, contributor, Facebook, features, Google, itunes, Tech, tumblr
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Talk of government regulation of web entities has been all over the news lately, from the near daily privacy complaints to Google’s antitrust woes to questions about how the Fourth Amendment applies to email. While these are important discussions to have, almost every attempt to shoehorn current practices into existing legal frameworks suffers from a common problem: Yesterday’s laws are antiquated in a web-driven world that rarely sits still.

Software development is always evolving and advancing, and business models and cultural norms evolve along with it. Entirely new capabilities spring up regularly, and business models can change overnight, meaning a law written to address a specific concern can fast become obsolete or, perhaps worse, a hindrance to innovation. Three recent situations illustrate what I’m talking about.

Netflix, Facebook and privacy
I’ve discussed the issue of online privacy in numerous posts, and two considerations strike me as absolutely critical. One is that in the free-to-consumers-but-ad-supported business model that underpins most social media, data is the currency. Failure to recognize this and allow certain freedoms could cripple not only the user experience, but also the high rate of analytics innovation that companies like Facebook produce.

Another — probably even more important issue — is an apparent failure to acknowledge that social norms are changing with regard to how willingly citizens share their information. My colleague Ryan Lawler wrote about a prime example of this disconnect earlier this week, in the form of congressmen debating the decades-old, reactionary and wholly archaic Video Privacy Protection Act that currently prevents U.S. consumers from automatically displaying their Netflix rentals on Facebook.

That law, which prohibits companies from publicly sharing viewer records, “was enacted in the wake of the Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination hearings (after Bork’s video rental records were released to a newspaper by his local video store).”

The problem — aside from the its reactionary and therefore inherently inflexible foundation — is that the law was written in an era when video stores still existed (and were the primary method of renting movies, in fact) and well before the advent of social media. In the latter world, automation and APIs rule, and many users really do want what Facebook calls “frictionless sharing.” Certainly, many more will want it in the future. That might not comport with many congresspersons’ views on personal privacy, but it’s reality.

Google’s violating antitrust laws in what market, exactly?
The recent congressional inquiry into Google’s trade practices highlights the bad fit between traditional antitrust law and the web. Mathew Ingram has written a lot about why the questions about Google’s search dominance are misguided, addressing the question of whether there’s such a thing as consumer harm when we’re talking about free products that no one is forced to use. That point alone highlights a big difference between the web and traditional businesses, but there’s another consideration that’s even more damning.

However, as Mathew also points out, the web world is one of constant disruption, and Google, despite its considerable size, is constantly fighting to define its place in the ecosystem. Antitrust violations require abusing one’s power in a particular market, and Google doesn’t operate in a clearly defined market of any sort. In its inquiry, Congress focused heavily on search as the relevant market, but that’s fast becoming yesterday’s news. As Google continues losing traffic to Facebook and other platforms, search becomes part of a broader effort that includes social elements, location services and other components.

This raises questions around how to define the market in which Google actually plays, and whether it’s actually even in the lead. Sure, there’s search for the sake of search, but if Google’s search engine is part of a greater platform market that aims to connect users with relevant information, services and other people, then it’s arguable that Google doesn’t have a monopoly position at all.

No warrant needed for tweets
Then there’s the old argument over what web-based activities are covered by the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure. This issue reared its head again when we learned that Twitter, Google and an ISP called Sonic.net had been forced to turn over information about a particular WikiLeaks supporter. The law in question, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (or ECPA), was enacted in 1986 — ages ago in technology terms — and services such as Twitter fall far beyond its scope.

There’s a fair amount of momentum to amend the act (something attorney Nolan Goldberg and I discussed during a chat at Structure 2011), but you have to wonder how thoroughly that actually can be done. We still don’t really know how it applies to email, especially of the web-based variety. But in the past few years alone Facebook, Twitter, text messages and other communication methods have usurped email’s dominance.

Assuming an amended ECPA fairly addresses today’s forms of electronic communications, it will take some careful wording to account for tomorrow’s methods that have yet to emerge. The alternative, given the pace of innovation, is a constant battle over what communications are constitutionally protected, which only serves to hinder adoption and stoke fears over undue government surveillance.

There’s no easy answer
Unfortunately, while it’s easy to criticize existing laws, figuring out a workable strategy for regulating the web is difficult. Laws and regulations by nature involve establishing boundaries so those of us tasked with following them know what we can and can’t do. But because code can be edited, added and rolled back with relative ease, nothing is ever static — and we don’t always know what we’ll be doing next.

Image courtesy of Flickr user RecoilRick.

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Sides are being taken in the argument over Google+ usage but do the numbers involved really matter at this stage? Not as much as you’d think.

A lot is being made of Google+ user numbers and traffic fluctuations with obvious comparisons being made to the social behemoth that is Facebook.

It is an achievement that the service has passed 40 million accounts in such a short space of time but naysayers are pointing out that these are just sign-ups and not active users; still, even if only a percentage of sign-ups are active this doesn’t actually matter at this point and still exhibits a reasonably healthy interest in the service.

Why is this?

We know that Plus is going to be part of everything that is Google – entwined through the very fabric of our experience; Larry Page has emphasised the point in this quarter’s earnings report:

“we’ve shipped the +, and now we’re going to ship the Google part.”

In other words we have the social network element and now it will be tied together with the social layer side which also helps to flesh out the identity service. We have the bait now here comes the hook.
 
The social networking component of Plus is just part of the whole and we are really only seeing the curious using it. Because of this holistic approach Google is not setting itself up as direct competition for Facebook and we should get away from any such comparisons.
Once the social layer has been integrated into other Google services we have a huge potential catchment – anyone who uses a Google Service and has a Google account is a potential Google+ user.

Privacy

There was a large potential user base for Buzz (anyone who used Gmail) but the privacy fiasco and failure to market the service effectively ruined any chance it had from the very outset. It was a nice idea to have a captive audience but, ultimately, the fact that Buzz was solely contained within Gmail was a major failing.

Some lessons have been learnt from Buzz - our existing contacts are suggested to us for inclusion in Circles rather than being automatically added - but it remains to be seen if Google accounts will automatically convert or – as is the case with YouTube at present – an account needs to be linked to, or permissioned for, Plus.

Privacy advocates will no doubt cry foul if all Google accounts are automatically enabled for Plus but if you haven’t set up your profile and added anyone to circles then there should be no issue as long as items from your existing services don’t go public by default. Even so, accounts will mostly likely need to be enabled manually to avoid any potential privacy arguments.

Persuading the masses

After launching the social layer Google’s problem will be convincing the masses that they should use the social aspects the service provides. There will have to be sufficient marketing and adequate communication in simple terms that the average user can understand – the benefits should be well outlined.

Back in April I suggested that our Google profile should have both a public and a private view - the private view could be our destination and include private data. Google+ user Marcin Cisewicz suggested that perhaps iGoogle could be dropped in favour of a new Plus landing page displayed for each logged in user: your services at a glance and an ideal opportunity to advertise the service. I like the idea but perhaps it is more likely the current page would be redesigned to make use of the social layer rather than being replaced.

If the process of getting users to enable Plus is handled correctly then numbers will not be an issue. Google does not have to persuade people to use a social network it just has to extol the virtues of sharing your content and interacting with the shared items of others; many people already share things with their friends and family by email and even more go to another social service - they just need to be convinced that sharing directly from the source is easier. Users may not access Plus directly but will still be taking advantage of its social capabilities. 

Android may well be a key factor in the push for Plus; just as iOS5 now boasts Twitter integration so Android needs to have full Google+ integration to make life easy. We already have instant upload for images but if you can simply share with just a couple of taps there is little need to go elsewhere.

What do you think?

How will Google best encourage the masses to use the social layer?

Image by eye/see

It’s a bit surprising that Google’s smartphone and tablet platform didn’t find a use for the @Android handle on Twitter until now, but that problem has now been rectified.

You won’t find much to read just yet, but if you want to follow the future adventures of iOS’ biggest nemesis, hop on over to @Android and hit the follow button.

The official account of the Android developer team is still over at @AndroidDev.

In one of its first tweets, the Android Twitter account posted a video of Google employees erecting a 10-foot tall Ice Cream Sandwich statue; check it out below.

More About: android, Google, Mobile, smartphone, social networking, Twitter
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Now we finally know who will buy Hulu: no one. The company announced on its blog Thursday afternoon that the sale process has been terminated. The announcement came with the following joint statement from Hulu’s owners and management:

“Since Hulu holds a unique and compelling strategic value to each of its owners, we have terminated the sale process and look forward to working together to continue mapping out its path to even greater success. Our focus now rests solely on ensuring that our efforts as owners contribute in a meaningful way to the exciting future that lies ahead for Hulu.”

Negotiations about a possible sale had been going on for weeks, and bidders initially included Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Dish and others. Yahoo seemed for a while like a likely candidate, but its bid was derailed by internal problems. Google apparently outbid everyone, but was asking for more content rights concessions that Hulu’s owners were willing to give up. Dish seemed most determined, but may have offered too little money.

Then again, Hulu may have been just too tough of a sale, as Ryan Lawler recently predicted:

“Hulu’s forecast of $500 million in revenues might look attractive, but there’s no guarantee that it will be able to hold the attention of viewers or continue to execute without favorable content deals and effective leadership. That is, anyone who buys Hulu right now might not actually get what they have bargained for.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Connected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shinesConnected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodesConnected Consumer Market Overview, Q2 2010

Google‘s 3 year-old Chrome browser just hit the 200 million user mark, CEO Larry Page announced Thursday.

The fast-growing browser had about 160 million users in May, up from 120 million in December 2010, according to eWeek, which correctly predicted Chrome would hit 200 million users in October.

Chrome’s growth had been noted elsewhere. The browser has about 15% market share and in some markets, like the UK, it has surpassed Firefox’s share to become the second most popular browser after IE. Among Mashable readers, meanwhile, Chrome is the most popular.

The huge installed base for Chrome is good news for Google, which just started rolling out its first Chromebooks in June.

More About: chrome, Firefox, Google

Google and Samsung have announced an Android press event Oct. 19 in Hong Kong.

While the event doesn’t specifically mention the focus of the event will be “Ice Cream Sandwich,” the next version of Google’s mobile OS, the invite itself features the iconic Android character in the form of an ice cream sandwich. You do the math.

The event will also be the official debut of the Samsung Nexus Prime, which will be the first smartphone to run the new Google OS. The Nexus Prime reportedly contains a dual-core 1.2 to 1.5 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 4G LTE.

The Google-Samsung event was originally scheduled for Oct. 11 but was delayed out of respect follow Steve Jobs’s death.

The other big question you all may have is why are Google and Samsung showing off the new Android OS in Hong Kong? Why not do it in San Francisco, where most technology journalists live? The answer is that the event corresponds with the AllThingsD‘s AsiaD Conference, which kicks off not long after the Google-Samsung press conference. Andy Rubin and a Samsung executive will be speaking at the conference, presumably about Ice Cream Sandwich and the Nexus Prime.

Bonus: Leaked Footage of the Samsung Nexus Prime

More About: android, Android Ice Cream Sandwich, Google, ice cream sandwich, nexus prime, samsung, Samsung Nexus Prime

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt has finally gotten the message and joined Google+.

The former Google CEO wrote his first public message on Google+ earlier today, a simple post with links to his thoughts on Steve Jobs (Schmidt served on Apple’s board of directors until 2009, when the competition between Android and iPhone became a major conflict of interest).

I recently criticized Google’s management for not eating its own dog food and using Google+. At the time, Schmidt didn’t even have a Google+ account. Only two Google executives — SVP of Chrome Sundar Pichai and SVP of Social Vic Gundotra — were active users of Google+ (at least in public — it’s important to note that additional Google executives may have been more active privately).

Since that article, several Google executives have started posting publicly to Google+. They include SVP of Search Alan Eustace and SVP of Ads Susan Wojcicki, and Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora.

To Arora’s credit, he directly addressed the points I made in my article. “Having worked closely with my friend Vic on this, I think I have lots of dog food in me,” he told a Google+ user. “I do prefer posting to circles and sharing with people who have expressed interest in following me. I intend to follow a lot of your advice. Perhaps if I have pearls of wisdom to share, I might do so publicly.”

Google+ has received additional scrutiny in recent weeks. Google+ traffic has fallen since the spike from its public launch and a Google engineer’s rant about how Google+ “is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo).”

via TechCrunch

More About: eric schmidt, Google

Google is giving Google+ users two enhanced ways to find information disseminating across the social network, with real-time search and hashtags.

“Now when you search in Google+, you’ll see a message about new posts the instant they’re available,” Vic Gundotra, Google’s SVP of social, explained in a post on Google+ Wednesday. “If you click on this message, or select ‘Most recent,’ then relevant posts will start appearing in real-time.”

Also, should you opt to put a hashtag in any of your Google+ updates, that hashtag will automatically link to search results for the term.

The improvements will come as welcome additions for Google+ power users, journalists and media types interested in keeping up with breaking news on Google+. The search updates may do little to convince more casual social networkers to stick around on the social site or give it second chance.

They have some long-term significance, however. We expect this technology to become the foundation for a revamped real-time search experience on Google.com itself.

You may recall that Google Realtime Search went on hiatus in July — after Google failed to reach an agreement with Twitter for continued access to its firehose of data.

More About: Google, Google Realtime Search, Search

If you watched last week's iPhone 4S announcement with your Android phone and went a little green with envy when Siri, iOS's new voice-recognizing personal assistant, was announced and demoed on stage, buck up. You've got a lot of great voice recognition apps to choose from on Android that can help you keep up with friends, look up the weather, find local businesses, and more. Here are a look at your options. More »

Last night, high-profile Google engineer Steve Yegge mistakenly posted a long rant about working at Amazon and Google’s own issues with creating platforms on Google+. Apparently, he only wanted to share it internally with everybody at Google, but mistaken shared it publicly. For the most part, Yegge’s post focusses on the horrors of working at Amazon, a company that is notorious for its political infighting. The most interesting part to me, though, is Yegge’s blunt assessment of what he perceives to be Google’s inability to understand platforms and how this could endanger the company in the long run.

The post itself has now been deleted, but given Google+’s reshare function, multiple copies exist on Google’s own social network and elsewhere on the web.

Google+ Is a Knee-Jerk Reaction
Here is the meat of his argument:

“Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.”

While Yegge doesn’t have a lot of good things to say about Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos, he does note that Bezos – unlike Google – understands that its not just about developing interesting products, but that it takes a platform to create a great product.

Besides Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft understand this, says Yegge: “It’s been part of their culture for a whole generation now. You don’t eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doing that is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes. Platforms are all about long-term thinking.”

“The Google+ Platform is a Pathetic Afterthought”
He especially criticizes the Google+ team for launching a product without an API:

“The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: “So is it the Stalker API?” She got all glum and said “Yeah.” I mean, I was joking, but no… the only API call we offer is to get someone’s stream. So I guess the joke was on me.”

Looking at the long term, Yegge implores Google to move away from being a pure product company to becoming more of a platform player:

“The Golden Rule of Platforms, “Eat Your Own Dogfood”, can be rephrased as “Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything.” You can’t just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate — ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it’ll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can’t cheat. You can’t have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front.

I’m not saying it’s too late for us, but the longer we wait, the closer we get to being Too Late.”

Overall, of course, I’ve been quite positive about Google+ and see it as a step in the right direction for Google. For the most part, Yegge’s arguments do ring true, though. It was quite a surprise to me that Google+ didn’t launch with a fully-baked API right away, for example, but I can also see why the team wanted to get the basic product out and see how people would react to it.

I assume Yegge’s post will kick off some major internal discussion about this at Google. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over the coming months.

Read the Full Post
Here is a copy of his full post (just click on the box to open it up):

Steve Yegge's Full Post
Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I’ve been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies — an impression that has been reinforced almost daily — is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it’s a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It’s pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn’t let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon’s recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they’ve made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don’t really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding – though again this varies by group, so it’s luck of the draw. They don’t give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don’t have any of our perks or extras — they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that’s the end of it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place.

To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. We wouldn’t take most of it even if it were free.

I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google.

I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it’s given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it’s created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.

But there’s one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon’s retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple’s Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally — wisely — left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn’t let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they’re all still there, and Larry is not.

Micro-managing isn’t that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn’t list it as a strength or anything. I’m just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We’re talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people “who runs the company” when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular… well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don’t get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.

So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He’s doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion — back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year — he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4) It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. Bezos doesn’t care.

5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.

7) Thank you; have a nice day!

Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.

#6, however, w[…]

Google is targeting its App Engine platform-as-a-service cloud to business customers with a new $500-per-month plan that includes “premier support” and a 99.95 percent uptime service-level agreement. But customers may only contact Google after attempting to fix errors themselves, and “downtime” only counts against the SLA if there is more than a ten percent error rate and five consecutive minutes of degraded service.

“When choosing a platform for your most critical business applications or standardizing on one across your organization, we recognize that uptime guarantees, easy management and support are just as important as product features,” Group Product Manager Jessie Jiang announced in the Google Enterprise Blog. “So today, we are launching Google App Engine Premier Accounts. For $500 per month, you’ll receive premier support, a 99.95% uptime service level agreement and the ability to create unlimited number of apps on your premier account domain.”






Read the comments on this post

Realtime search and analytics platform company Topsy Labs this morning announced that it has added Google+ as a source in its index.

A dedicated search engine for public Google+ posts, available here in beta, lets users search and access realtime and historical conversations occurring within the social network.

Topsy emphasizes that posts are ranked by the startup’s proprietary relevance and influence-ranking technology. You can find some screenshots below or give it a whirl right now.

Topsy’s algorithms calculate who the experts are for specific keywords, terms and links, updating influence graphs based upon the attention generated from Google+ and Twitter posts.

Says Vipul Ved Prakash, cofounder and CEO of Topsy Labs:

“We are proud to be the first search engine to provide comprehensive search over public Google+ posts. Beyond the 220 million daily tweets we are currently indexing, with the addition of Google+, we’ve extended our search technology to deeply index and rank long-form social conversations.

On Topsy, people can now search Google+ and Twitter for realtime, relevance-ranked results, and businesses can be better informed about what¹s important by using our APIs to mine the collective intelligence of posters on both Twitter and Google+.”

Headquartered in San Francisco and founded in 2006, Topsy has raised about $30 million from BlueRun Ventures, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund and Scott Banister.






Crunchbase





GOOGLE+
TOPSY






Product:
Google+


Website:
plus.google.com

Company
Google


A Google project headed by Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, Google+ is designed to be the social extension of Google.

Its features focus on making online sharing easy for users.

“Circles,” think social circles, akin to Facebook’s lists

“Sandbar,” a user-unifying toolbar

“Sparks,” a search engine for sharing content between users

“Huddle,” a group messaging app that allows users to share with certain “Circles”

“Hangouts,” group video chatting designed to allow up to 10 users video chat at once

Each Google+ user can replace his...






Learn more





Company:
Topsy


Website:
topsy.com


Funding:
$29.9M



Topsy, which launched on May 26, 2009, is a real-time search engine, with a focus on social media sites like Twitter. The site’s underlying technology examines popular links as well as the influence of each person citing a link. Topsy augments traditional search engines by finding information that people are talking about.






Learn more

The real-time search engine Topsy, which has until now indexed Twitter, today adds public Google+ posts.

In what it says is an improvement on Google’s newly added Google+ search feature, Topsy says it ranks search results by trying to determine which users and posts are most globally and recently relevant for the query, rather than whether a user is close to or within the searcher’s Google+ network.

Google isn’t handing out much access to Google+ to developers yet, so Topsy is crawling the site’s public posts. That’s different from how Topsy indexes Twitter, which is through an agreement to use the official Firehose of all user tweets.

It’s unclear how many people are using Google+ these days, though user registrations seem to have ballooned up to at least the 50 million mark. According to Topsy’s observations, the number of public posts and comments on Google+ had grown to two million per day as of last week, up from 200,000 when it opened to the general public.

It should be possible to use Topsy search to get a better idea of how big Google+ is — or at least how big public behavior on the site is. For instance, Topsy execs told me Google+ was already getting 100,000 videos posted per week, compared to 200,000 posted on Twitter. After I mentioned how much it seems Google+ people like to bitch about Facebook, they found 82,000 mentions of Facebook on the site in the previous day.

Those numbers change every day, but now that Topsy’s Google+ search is open to the public, users can check for themselves.

Topsy has worked on, but never released, search for public Facebook posts, which it said Facebook makes difficult by throttling API access and other means. The search start-up might next release search for sites like Quora or blogs, the execs said.

Ready to find the Higgs boson particle? A newly released Google Android app which provides live results from the Large Hadron Collider has debuted thanks to scientists at Oxford University and the application is 100% free to use.

The CERN approved application provides a live feed into what particles are being smashed at the moment and imagery is shown using computer-generated 3D models which allow users to see the particles from every angle.

According to Android Market statistics more than 10,000 people have already downloading the application.

Writing about the application Dr. Alan Barr wrote on the University of Oxford’s science blog:

“For ages I’d been thinking that with the amazing capabilities on modern smart phones we really ought to be able to make a really great app—something that would allow everybody to access the LHC data,” while adding, ”We’ve squeezed in a bunch of cool features. If you want to learn about the science of the LHC, then you can play with the animated tutorials. Then you can stream videos to your phone about the construction of the detector, and its operation.”

Users should be aware that not all data will be shown because the Large Hadron Collider uses several gigabytes of data every second.

According to PCMag:

One notable feature is called “Hunt the Higgs,” a game that sees the user try to find the Higgs boson, the so far never-seen particle that physicists predict will help explain how matter has mass (the LHC may find evidence of its existence in 2012). The game involves looking at slides of reactions and trying to discern which particles are present. It’s just a game, however—not actual research.

At this time the application is only available for Google Android based devices and programmers for the application have no plans to release an Apple iOS version.

 

 

Large Hadron Collider Debuts Google Android App, Says No Thanks To iOS is a post from: The Inquisitr

Traffic to Google+ spiked 1,200% in the first few days following its public launch Sept. 20, but has since plummeted by 60%, according to a report from a data analytics company.

Chitika tracked Google+ traffic before and after the social networking service opened its gates to all users.

“The data shows that, on the day of its public debut, Google+ traffic skyrocketed to peak levels. But, soon after, traffic fell by over 60% as it returned to its normal, underwhelming state,” Chitika says of its findings, as illustrated in the chart below.

Google+ hit 25 million unique visitors in its first month of operation, comScore found, making it one of the fastest growing social networks of all time. Google+ has since released a slew of updates and new features, and opened its doors to the public. It has even had public figures broadcast to fans via Google Hangouts.

But is Google+ a hit or miss? It’s hard to say. In mid July, Google CEO Larry Page revealed the Facebook-challenger had 10 million users who share 1 billion items each day. We haven’t heard from the company on how Google+ has grown in users, shares or traffic since. The most recent unofficial count pegged the number of Google+ users at 43 million.

Meanwhile, Chitika’s findings — likely a representation of traffic patterns and not a wholly accurate reflection — seem to suggest Google+ may not be convincing new users (or even Google executives) to stick around.

Mashable has reached out to Google for comment.

More About: Google, traffic

Google Plus is currently rolling out a feature to let users control who sends them notifications. There will be a new option in settings called 'Who can notify you.'

"We'll be rolling this out slowly," says Google engineer Kathleen Ko, "so if it's not available for you yet check back soon."

Sponsor

In this public post Ko outlines the notifications that users can now control:

This setting controls who you'll get notifications from, if they:
Share with you individually
Select 'Notify about this post' (when sharing to a circle you're in)
+Mention your name
Invite you to a hangout
Invite you to play or send you messages from a game

Users will still receive all notifications when someone comments on their posts or adds them to a circle. By default, 'Who can notify you' is set to extended circles. The options are: specific individuals or circles, all circles, extended circles or anyone.

This is a small update, but with traffic skyrocketing on Google Plus after opening to everyone, noise control options are a welcome addition. Earlier this week, Google Plus turned on new options to lock posts before sharing in response to user feedback.

Do you get a lot of notifications on Google Plus? Will this update help you manage them?

Discuss

The Dalai Lama has officially joined Google+ — and he’s already planning a Hangout with South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

The Hangout, announced Friday on the Dalai Lama’s Google+ profile, will take place Oct. 8 at 10:30 a.m. South African time (GMT+2.00). That’s 4:30 a.m. ET in the U.S. The live video conversation will be part of the Inaugural Desmond Tutu Peace Lecture in Cape Town, South Africa. The event coincides with the archbishop’s 80th birthday on Oct. 7. A link to the Hangout will be available approximately 20 to 30 minutes before it starts.

The Dalai Lama had originally planned on visiting South Africa in person this weekend, but visa woes prevented the holy leader from entering the country. However, that didn’t stop the Dalai Lama from posting a video (below) on Google+, wishing the archbishop — an activist who first rose to prominence opposing apartheid in the 1980s — a happy birthday.

This was all done on the same day the Dalai Lama joined Google+. Another post on the social network welcomes the Dalai Lama’s potential Google+ followers with a mission statement of sorts: “He frequently states that his life is guided by three major commitments: the promotion of basic human values or secular ethics in the interest of human happiness, the fostering of inter-religious harmony and the welfare of the Tibetan people, focusing on the survival of their identity, culture and religion.”

While the Dalai Lama may be new to Google+, this isn’t his first social media presence. He also has a Twitter account with more than 2.5 million followers, along with a Facebook page with more than 2 million fans.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Jan Michael Ihl

More About: Dalai Lama, desmond tutu, Google, Social Media, social networking

One of the most important rules in software is to eat your own dog food. The concept is simple: If you have confidence in your product, you use it.

Perhaps somebody should tell that to Google’s senior management, because the people in it are not eating their own dog food when it comes to Google+.

During the madness that was the launch of the iPhone 4S, we stumbled across an interesting post by Michael DeGusta. DeGusta decided to analyze how often Google’s senior management uses Google+. He counted how many times the company’s senior management, SVPs and board members have publicly posted on Google+.

The results aren’t pretty. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have posted publicly on Google+ 22 times. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt doesn’t even have a Google+ account, nothing short of an embarrassment when company bonuses are tied to social media success.

SEE ALSO: Google+: The Complete Guide

The rest of Google’s senior management isn’t any better. Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora has never posted on Google+ and Chief Legal Officer David C. Drummond doesn’t even have an account. CFO Patrick Pichette, to his credit, has posted several times publicly.

When you get to Google’s six SVPs, the story doesn’t change much. SVP of Video Salar Kamangar and SVP of Search Alan Eustace have never publicly posted. SVP of Ads Susan Wojcicki has publicly posted once and SVP of Mobile Andy Rubin has posted eight times (neither have posted since August). The only two people on Google’s management team I’d consider “active” are SVP of Chrome Sundar Pichai (58 posts) and SVP of Social Vic Gundotra (150+ posts).

Here’s another shocker: Not one of Google’s six independent board members have ever posted publicly on Google+.

Leading By Example

Let’s start out with addressing a few caveats. First, these senior Googlers could be posting a ton privately and we simply don’t know it. But it’s more likely that their lack of public engagement is indicative of their lack of engagement overall. This is especially true of Google’s management, which has an incentive to promote Google+ publicly.

You could also argue that the SVP of search or ads shouldn’t be expected to be heavily engaged on Google+, but given the fact that Google intends to integrate Google+ into everything it does, I don’t buy that argument either. When Google+ first launched, Gundotra told me personally that Google+ is an extension of Google itself, thus why the company chose the name.

It doesn’t matter how you slice it: If Google’s management truly believed in Google+ as the future of the company, they would be more engaged. Not being connected to a product that has such a direct correlation to the company’s future is dangerous. This is about leading by example. Why should Google employees be excited about Google+ if their managers aren’t excited?

The same rule applies to Google+’s million of users. The social network has more than 43 million users now and is being heavily promoted by Google. But if its creators aren’t interested enough in staying active, what’s to say its users won’t get bored just as fast?

Google’s management is a busy group, but having only three members of its management team post more than 10 times sends a terrible message. It makes people question the commitment Google has to social.

Our message to Google’s management is simple: Eat your own dog food.


Google+ Logo


This is the Google+ logo.

Google+ Icons


The Google+ icons. Starting top left and circling to the right: Circles, Hangouts, Home, Sparks, Profile, Photos.

New Google+ Navigation Bar


All Google sites will sport the new Google+ navigation bar. It includes notifications, profile information and content sharing options.

Google+ Stream


This is the Google+ Stream, where users share content and see what their friends are sharing. It is similar to the Facebook News Feed.

Google+ Circles


Google+ Circles is Google's version of the Facebook friend list or the Twitter List. Users can select multiple friends and drag-and-drop them into groups. This makes it easier to send stuff to friends, family or the entire world.

Google+ Circles Editor


This is the Google+ Circles editor in action. Google has created unique animations for adding and removing friends through HTML5.

Google+ Sparks


Google+ Sparks is Google's content recommendation and discovery engine. Users can search different topics and find relevant articles, videos and photos. Users can then share that content with their friends.

Google+ Hangouts


Google+ has a unique video chat feature called Hangouts, which lets you chat with up to 10 people at the ame time.

Google+ Photos


Google+ allows you to upload and share photos with your friends. It includes photo tagging and a simple browser-based image editor.

Google+ Profile


Google+ Profiles are like most profile pages -- it includes basic information about the user like interests, occupation and profile photos.

Lead image courtesy of Flickr, jremsikjr

More About: eric schmidt, features, Google, larry page, Opinion, Sergey Brin

Google Plus has enabled locking and closing of comments on posts before sharing. Users can now decide not to allow commenting or resharing before clicking 'Share,' instead of rushing to change the setting after the post becomes visible to others.

Engineer Ebby Amirebrahimi says this feature was added by popular demand. With today's opening of the API for search, comments and +1s, it's important that users have control over the conversations they start.

Sponsor

In his public post, Amirebrahimi says, "We've heard from many of you that you want these disable and lock options before you share, not after. So today I'm happy to say that we're doing exactly that." Here's his demo video:

Google Plus has offered extensive privacy controls since it launched, but it appears from today's update that users have been clamoring for even more. We found last month that Google Plus users are 2-3 times more likely to post privately than publicly. With the huge influx of traffic since the gates opened in late September, Google has to get user privacy right.

Do you feel like Google Plus has enough privacy controls?

Discuss

A sample Circulars ad for Macy’s.

Google is testing a new kind of ad unit called “Circulars,” designed to mimic the full-page inserts traditionally found in newspapers.

These large-format ads act like destination sites, where users can explore specials being promoted at nearby retail locations. The ad format is scheduled to be unveiled formally at an Advertising Week event in Manhattan later this week, a Google spokesperson tells Mashable.

The ads, which will be personalized based on a number of factors including location and query, will pop up when viewers click on search or display ads. The ad format is compatible with desktop, mobile and tablet devices.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Nick Fox, VP of product management at Google, said Circulars were designed in response to retailers’ requests for advertising that would drive online visitors into offline stores.

“[Retailers are] trying to understand what the answer is in the digital age to the offline print circular,” Fox said. “They’re trying to understand how to get their online visitors into their stores. And this is our answer to that.”

More About: Advertising, Google, google circulars

Google announced this morning that it has begun tests of a new service, Google Trusted Stores. The program will monitor and verify that an online store's performance, trustworthiness and customer satisfaction all meet certain standards. The company will even offer free insurance for up to $1000 in online purchases from stores deemed Trusted by Google.

People have long said that it's in Google's best interest to support performance improvements to the Web, because the better surfing works, the more ads users will see. So too, though, does Google have an interest in improving the reliability of the purchasing experiences that users have when they click through any ads online. The more people trust online stores, the more they will click on online ads. That makes me think that this experimental new service could prove very big for Google and for the rest of the Internet.

Sponsor

The video above had leaked online a month ago, but no further information had been available until the official announcement today.

Google's trusted brand, extensive reach and offerings throughout the supply chain all combine to make this a significant effort. It's also further indication of the company's long-term goal of offering analytics far beyond old-fashioned website visitor numbers.

Just as Google Offers aims to drive traffic, Google Places offers reviews for offline real-world stores and AdSense delivers traffic, now Google Trusted Stores aims to provide reputation insurance that will supercharge online stores.

On the other end of the purchasing cycle, Google just released real-time Google Web Analytics and is making major investments in Google Wallet for offline purchasing. Put it all together and it looks like an end-to-end, cradle-to-grave, high-touch platform that could enable all the better the company's stated goal of being able to offer up recommendations for web and other content before users even know they want to ask for it.

It makes sense and is incredibly ambitious. We'll see how many of those different programs the company can pull off.

Discuss

Google, Apple and Facebook are the tech trifecta, so we found facts that could help you land a job at one of these companies. No doubt, there will be stiff competition: Nearly one in four young professionals wants to work at Google, for instance, but there’s more room in the Googleplex for software developers. Facebook gets 250,000 applications a year and sifts through them to find the cream of the crop, preferring those who build things, whether they’re apps or organizations. And Apple wants, well, Apple fanboys to help create the next generation of gadgetry, but you ought to have a reference from an existing Appler.

The tech field is booming, and the industry needs bright young talent to keep innovating. Some facts:

An IT manager can make more than $110,000 a year
Android app developers are especially coveted
Data mining and statistical analysis are ideal collegiate specializations

So, if you’re like most other young professionals and are looking to nab a job at any of those three companies, take a gander at the infographic below. There are tips on how to optimize your resume, how to land an interview and how to impress the HR team. If you’ve landed a job at any of these companies, feel free to offer tips and insights in the comments below.

Social Media Job Listings

Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

Marketing Manager: New Product Development at The Motley Fool in Alexandria, Virginia
Lead Developer – Director of Technology at Attention in New York
Product Manager – Local Business Products at Yelp, Inc in San Francisco

Infographic courtesy of MastersDegree.net

More About: apple, Facebook, Google, infographic, job search series, Tech
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Google News just announced a redesign of its U.K. and India sites in order to unify the experience across editions. The improvements are designed to be more browsable and present trending and popular stories more clearly, as well as to offer more customization and sharing options.

The U.S. edition was redesigned in May, introducing a one-column format, highlighted top stories and more multimedia links. These same improvements will now roll out for the U.K. and India editions.

Sponsor

Last weekend, Google News introduced the <standout> tag as a way for publishers to highlight their best content for Google News to aggregate. Now is a good time for British and Indian publishers to optimize their content for Google News. If you're looking for tips on how to do that, check out our post, How To Rank Highly on Google News.

What news aggregators do you use? Let us know in the comments

Discuss

Earlier today, Microsoft and Samsung disclosed that they reached a cross-licensing agreement over patents. The key point: it’s a bad blow to the notion that Android is free. Instead, it’s more like “free” with huge Android OEM partners like HTC and now Samsung agreeing to pay Microsoft to use Android. Google must be pissed off.

And they are. Here’s their statement:

“This is the same tactic we’ve seen time and again from Microsoft. Failing to succeed in the smartphone market, they are resorting to legal measures to extort profit from others’ achievements and hinder the pace of innovation. We remain focused on building new technology and supporting Android partners.”

Yes, they used the word “extort”. Wow.

Today’s maneuver is only the latest in a series of moves by Microsoft to destroy Android, or get paid trying. CEO Steve Ballmer is on record as saying that Android isn’t free, you have to pay Microsoft for the patents it violates. And Microsoft has gone out of their way to ensure they maintain the patent upper hand. It’s either evil, or evil genius.

Google’s move to buy Motorola gives them some leverage, but clearly not enough if Samsung is still willing to enter into an agreement like this. You have to wonder if there is something else Microsoft is throwing in to sweeten the deal.

This back and forth will not be over anytime soon.

Update: Microsoft Responds To Google’s Extortion Claim: “Waaaah.”






Crunchbase





MICROSOFT
GOOGLE






Company:
Microsoft


Website:
microsoft.com


Launch Date:
April 4, 1974


IPO:

NASDAQ:MSFT



Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software.

Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured.

Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market.

Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...






Learn more





Company:
Google


Website:
google.com


Launch Date:
July 9, 1998


IPO:

NASDAQ:GOOG



Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....






Learn more

A curious hacker named Matt Mastracci was diving into the Google Plus code yesterday, trying to turn on access to the new Circle-sharing feature, when he uncovered several new features apparently in the works. One, referred to in the source as "Google Experts," appears to be a Quora-like question and answer feature with the same posting, commenting and sharing features as regular Plus posts.

Mastracci also uncovered Google Voice integration, which will not require phone numbers; new photo browsing options including photos from Messenger; new, clearly labeled privacy presets and a feature like Facebook's wall, letting users post on each other's profile without showing up in others' streams.

Sponsor

Part of the code for Google Experts

Mastracci is co-founder at a social customer service site called gri.pe, and he's a former StumbleUpon employee. He's also the developer of a Chrome extension for Google Plus called Replies and more. He shared his discoveries in a blog post and several subsequent posts on Plus. He was able to turn on the privacy and photo features and post UI screenshots.

The new privacy presets range from "Public on the web" to "Lockdown," with two intermediate options. They're not optimal for all users, but the menu Mastracci discovered includes clear explanations of what each preset does. For users who don't feel like painstakingly adjusting privacy settings, these four choices are clearly labeled and can be selected with one click.

If Google does launch Experts as a Q&A service, it could have interesting implications for Quora, who just announced threading, voting, images and editing to its comments yesterday. These are major overhauls for the preeminent Q&A site, but they only bring it up to par with Google Plus' commenting features. If Google Experts has the same posting mechanics as Plus, it will launch with Quora's conversation features right out of the gate. Quora has excellent topical browsing and tagging, but Google's pretty good at identifying and serving up relevant search results. This would be a neat move for Google Plus, especially considering Facebook Questions' failure to fly.

If Google launches Experts as a Q&A feature in Google Plus, would you use it?

Discuss

Data is in demand on college campuses, and it’s putting a strain on shared school networks. The iPad is partly to blame, according to University of Missouri-Columbia IT director Terry Robb (via The St. Louis Post-Dispatch), but it’s mostly acting as a gateway drug for the real culprit: online video.

The report from the Dispatch describes slow or severed connections that students at the University of Missouri-Columbia experienced when coming back to classes this September. At that U.S. school, the number of wireless devices active on the network at any one time maxed out at 900 last year. Already in 2011, it’s hit 8,000 devices actively using the school’s connection at once.

The iPad is the biggest change in terms of the mobile connected-device landscape in recent years. Apple’s tablet still owns the market for that category of device, and it’s an optimal device for consuming streaming video, since it features a much larger display than smartphones, but is much simpler to turn on and hold than a cumbersome notebook computer. The iPad alone was already equal to Android’s share of online mobile video consumption back in May, and Apple’s other devices occupy a huge slice of the pie, too.

While Apple’s iPad may have multiplied the problem, iPhones and other smartphones have already significantly affected demand for Wi-Fi on college campuses. Students now expect strong on-campus Wi-Fi as one of the perks associated with going to school–it factors into their feeling of satisfaction over what they pay in tuition. Washington University’s Andrew Orstadt, who is the associated vice chancellor for information services and technology, says the demand for high capacity should be met within reason, no matter what students end up using the bandwidth for. He told the Dispatch that since students live on campus, schools should “make sure they are doing what they want to do” with their recreation time, too.

The challenge now is for schools to be able to meet the growing demand for reliable Wi-Fi with a growing population of connected devices with increasing technical specs. Next-gen devices will be able to stream higher-quality video to and from the web, and do more than one task at a time without as much of a cost on battery life or processor power. Students two years from now could likely be streaming one full HD video to their tablets while downloading another two equally high-bandwidth files in the background.

Apple’s devices may only be fuel for the fire that is demand for college Wi-Fi Internet access, but the iPad’s success and the rise in connected-device usage seen by the University of Missouri-Columbia in the wake of its introduction is a good sign that as far as fuel goes, it’s the rocket-powering kind.

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The Google+ team has just announced that you can now share your favorite Circles with anyone you like, publicly.

Part of the allure of Google+ Circles was that they were hidden, so it will be interesting to see what kind of traction this gets.

Obviously if you’ve created a master circle of funny people or tech bloggers, they’re perfect to share with a friend. If you’ve created a circle of ex-girlfriends, perhaps you won’t want to share that. This is very similar to Twitter’s list feature, and of course Facebook’s latest list upgrades.

Here’s the video from the Google+ team explaining the Share a Circle feature:

Owen Prater, Google Engineer explains:

From your circles page… select the circle you want, add a comment, and then share it.

When your friends receive your circle, they can then pick and choose who to add to their own circles.

Note that when you share a circle, you’re only sharing its members at that time. The circle name is always private to you, and any changes you make to your circle afterwards are private as well.

Will you be sharing Circles with your friends?

UPDATE: Google says the new feature should be available to everyone within the next few hours.

While the world awaits Apple’s next iPhone, the Android smartphone juggernaut continues to gain momentum, according to new figures from Nielsen. Android smartphones accounted for 43 percent of all smartphone owned in the U.S. as of August, up from 40 percent in July. And among recent purchases within the past three months, 56 percent of them have been Android devices, said Nielsen, which presented the data at GigaOM’s Mobilize Conference.

The iPhone continues to hold its ground with 28 percent of both the entire smartphone market share and recent acquisitions. RIM, meanwhile, slipped in overall U.S. market share to 18 percent, down one percentage point from 19 percent in July while it has 9 percent of recent acquisitions.

These figures could change quickly with the arrival of Apple’s next iPhone. With the usual annual summer iPhone launch pushed back at least into fall, it’s likely that there’s a lot of pent up demand for the next model. And with the device expected to debut on Sprint , it should open up even more sales opportunities. Apple, in fact, has to be pretty confident, considering it hasn’t lost any ground even with an aging iPhone 4 still selling well against an army of much newer Android devices.

But the Nielsen figures show that the Android train has kept on chugging and may have benefited from a later start for the next iPhone. A recent Nielsen survey found that among consumers expecting to buy a smartphone in the next year, both Android and iPhone got about one-third of the consumers. But without a new iPhone to buy, some smartphone buyers may have sprung for an Android. It will be interesting to see how the market changes with an iPhone available on three of the top carriers in the U.S. Apple got a boost when the iPhone debuted on Verizon and could see another increase, though probably not as big, when it launches on Sprint.

And the entire smartphone market continues to grow with 43 percent of all devices now smartphones, up from 40 percent in July. Among recent purchases within the last three months, smartphones now make up 58 percent of all mobile phone buys. That means we’re continuing to inch closer to the day when smartphones will make up more than 50 percent of all mobile phones. Nielsen had predicted that milestone would be reached by the end of this year and it may still happen with a big holiday season ahead.

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Facebook sucked up most of the oxygen in the technology world on Thursday, with the launch of a series of fairly radical transformations of the giant social network, which now reaches about 800 million people (we’ve collected our coverage of the f8 conference here). So where does that leave Google and its Google+ social network, or Twitter and its goal of becoming a real-time social newswire? Facebook’s changes have clearly upped the ante for Google, which desperately needs the signals that come from social activity to feed into its search and advertising algorithms, but Twitter is playing a somewhat different game, and Facebook seems more like it could be a partner rather than a competitor.

At Facebook’s last f8 conference in April 2010, the social network launched its “open graph” platform and plugins, which allowed any website to create Facebook “like” buttons and widgets and connect those to its content — and millions of websites have done so in the months since that announcement. In a sense, Facebook extended its tentacles outward and grabbed hold of activity that was occurring elsewhere on the Internet, then incorporated that into the site and showed it to users. Masterminded by CTO Bret Taylor, this was a fairly massive shift in what the site was about. No longer did people have to go to Facebook to interact with content; they could do it anywhere.

The latest changes are partly about reversing that process, and creating more reasons for users to spend time on Facebook itself and engage with content there. Social apps like the ones launched for Spotify and Hulu let users watch movies and listen to music within Facebook; social-reading apps like the ones launched by The Washington Post, The Guardian and News Corp.’s The Daily let users read stories from those publications within Facebook and share them with others; and other social apps let users share their physical activity and so on. All this takes place on Facebook — which is a risk for media companies, as I tried to outline on Thursday.

The introduction of “frictionless sharing”
In addition to the launch of social apps, Facebook changed the way sharing of that activity happens, and effectively removed the necessity for publishers or services to use the “like” button — a fairly significant move, as MG Siegler noted at TechCrunch. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described it, the need to click a button to share things was getting in the way of users sharing, so the new process (where users give an app or service approval once and then all their activity is automatically shared) creates what he called “frictionless sharing.” Items a user is reading or listening to or otherwise interacting with simply show up in the new “ticker” section of a user’s page.

These substantial changes to the way users interact with Facebook and Facebook-based apps are a significant threat to Google in trying to grow its Google+ network. Before the new features were launched, as well as others that came before f8,  Google’s new offering looked pretty competitive: the addition of “Circles” to create groups of specific friends was something Facebook didn’t really have (although it has had Lists for some time), and it made it easy for people to share photos and other content. It also had the advantage of being an “asymmetric” network like Twitter, which meant that anyone could follow another user without having to get their explicit approval.

Then Facebook launched “smart” lists, which make it easier to group friends and connections on the network, and just as quickly launched a “subscribe” feature that added an asymmetric aspect to the service — allowing users to get updates from people even if those other users weren’t their friends. Now, the social apps and frictionless sharing have upped the ante even further: what does Google have that can offer these same kinds of features? Although Google+ has an API now that allows developers to connect their apps and services to it, there are no “social apps” for Google+ yet, and no services that can feed content into the network as seamlessly as those from Spotify and Hulu.

Even when those apps appear, which they undoubtedly will, Facebook has something Google doesn’t have and may never have: namely, 800 million users who spend huge amounts of time on the site — according to Zuckerberg, the network saw over half a billion users in a single day recently. Google may be huge, but the idea of it as a social network is still relatively new, and so it has an uphill climb even to gain awareness with non-geek users, let alone chip away at Facebook’s dominance. There will be a certain contingent of users who resent the fact that Facebook is trying to take over their lives and become “the consumer OS,” as Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff put it, but their numbers might be too small to make a real difference.

Google gets frozen out, but Twitter plays a different game
The risk for Google, as we’ve described before, is that through these new services and features, Facebook starts to accumulate an even larger body of data about the activity of those 800 million people — and about their desires as well, since the network is expected to launch a “want” button soon. That is gold for an entity like Google, not only because those signals are important for search but because they are increasingly important for advertising. And there is virtually no chance that Facebook is ever going to share any of that information with Google, or provide it in a form that allows for easy scraping.

And what about Twitter? As I’ve argued in other posts, I think Twitter is playing a different game — one that Facebook may be trying to get into with some of its changes, but isn’t well-suited for. In a nutshell, Twitter isn’t a social network at all, and never really has been. It allows for social behavior around information, but it is not in any sense a one-size-fits-all social destination with timelines and social apps and games, and all the other things Facebook (and Google) want to offer. It’s designed to do one thing well: short bursts of information, like a real-time social newswire. And it can target users based on that.

Real-time news isn’t something Facebook is very good at. It may talk about changes to its news feed making it “your personal newspaper,” but that news is still mostly about friends and what they are doing. The addition of news sources via the subscription feature — and the rollout of social apps from news publishers — may change that mix somewhat, but it’s not going to provide what Twitter provides. There’s also the risk that Facebook’s frictionless sharing simply produces too much noise for many users, as the site tries to be all things to all people. So long as Twitter focuses on doing one thing well, that will be its ace-in-the-hole. Google, however, badly needs some more cards.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Tambako the Jaguar and See-ming Lee

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After last year’s f8 keynote, my initial thought was pretty straightforward: I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The Internet. Between the Like Button, the Open Graph, and the Open Graph API, I felt like we were shifting from Google being the fabric of the web, to Facebook taking over. A few days later, a now unpaid blogger declared it: The Age of Facebook.

Both of these declarations pissed a lot of people off.

Facebook is the new AOL! Walled garden! The end of open! Blah. Blah. Blah. While everyone else has been busy whining — including plenty of competitors — Facebook has been kicking ass and taking names. And today is proof of that.

For the past year, Facebook has been working on the beautiful re-imagining of the Profile, which they call “Timeline“. I just got it enabled on my account. Going back in time and seeing the past several years of my life displayed in this way is nothing short of profound. Facebook has used software to make something meaningful. Something emotionally powerful.

Because of this impact, some people will undoubtedly hate it. But more will love it. It’s incredible: Facebook has become a tool that’s a reflection of who we are. Just in case it wasn’t painfully obvious already, they’re far more than just another web startup that will flame out in a few years. They are the real deal.

And they just made their competition look rather foolish.

All we’ve heard about in the blogosphere the past few months is how Google+ could take down Facebook. How Google actually did something halfway decent in the social space — watch out Facebook! And look — now Facebook is even copying them!

Please.

I have no doubt that some of Facebook’s little moves over the past few months have been in reaction to Google+. But focusing on that is silly. Those are tiny features compared to what Facebook just unveiled today. They weren’t even worthy of being on stage at f8.

While Google was busy rushing to get a social network that could compete with Facebook out the door, Facebook was thinking about the next phase of social networking. They were building the next Facebook! Google+ does compete with Facebook — the old Facebook. It does not compete with what Facebook launched today.

In that regard, Facebook pulled an Apple. Apple releases something, and everyone in their space rushes to do the same thing. But they never realize that it’s a losing position. They’re skating to where the puck has been. Apple skates to where the puck is going to be. Facebook is skating to where the puck is going to be.

Also reminiscent of Apple: when Facebook unveiled the Like button last year, they were hardly the first to do a button. But they were the first to do a button in the correct way. One click. Done. Suddenly, everyone needed this one-click button.

But while all the competitors were busy making that button, Facebook was busy making the button obsolete. Today’s Open Graph changes represent a world where the button isn’t needed. Sure, it will continue to exist for certain types of content. But it will be more like an on/off switch.

With the new Open Graph, you’re sharing stuff as you do it. You don’t have to think about it. You’re listening to music on Spotify and it’s being shared with your friends automatically in the Facebook Ticker. The only button you hit is “play”.

Obviously, that’s not ideal for all content. But for some of the best content, it’s beyond ideal. The idea of hitting a share button to push your favorite song to Facebook is stupid. Enjoy the music, don’t worry about having to remember to share it. That’s how this should work.

There’s one massive problem in the social space: everyone is competing for the same user time. But most services compete by piling on features that erode that time even quicker. They’re offering up services that if I use, it means I’ll have even less time to actually enjoy life. That’s not a sustainable model. Being “social” online has become far too much work.

Facebook has clearly been thinking about this problem. And now they have a way to tap the power of social without thinking about it. That’s the future of the space. It’s not about needing a share button. It’s about not needing a share button.






Crunchbase





FACEBOOK






Company:
Facebook


Website:
facebook.com


Launch Date:
January 2, 2004


Funding:
$2.34B



Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.

The original idea for the term...






Learn more

The verdict is rolling in. Commentator after commentator is ruling Google+ a failed experiment.

Dan Reimold, Google+ Social Media Upstart ‘Worse Than a Ghost Town’

Google+ is dead. At worst, in the coming months, it will literally fade away to nothing or exist as Internet plankton. At best, it will be to social networking what Microsoft’s Bing is to online search: perfectly adequate; fun to stumble onto once in awhile; and completely irrelevant to the mainstream web. To be clear, I do not buy the beta argument anymore. G+ still being in beta is like Broadway’s “Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark” still being in previews. It has premiered. Months have passed. Audiences have tried it. Critics have weighed in. It is a show — just not a very entertaining one. Worse Than a Ghost Town As it stands, my Circles are sparse. The stream of updates has basically run dry — reduced to one buddy who regularly writes. My initial excitement about signing on and inviting people to join me has waned. Nowadays, I apparently get tired just thinking about it.

I paraphrased Rainbow Russell in the title, saying its not even haunted, because it’s a ghost town that was never really inhabited.

And this is another proof of the Rule Of Switching:

To get someone to drop an existing application that does X for a new application that does X, the new application must do X an order of magnitude better, because the costs of switching are too high otherwise.

I also known as ‘is the juice worth the squeeze?’

And, of course, with social apps the costs are the highest.

What do we expect Google will do? The only caveat I have about the imminent death of Google+ is what I wrote at the time of the launch:

Stowe Boyd, Life Is A Mosaic, Not A Monolith

Apps are the tiles of the new mosaic, our composite life online.And Google+ is a deft straddle, with one foot in the old world and the other in the new. Google+ is currently a browser based system, but it is relatively easy to imagine the core functionality implemented in a next generation Android, and all the tools — like Circles and Hangouts — accessed as complementary apps, along with dozens or hundreds of others built by Google or a growing ecology of developers.Of course, Apple will respond in kind, and is perhaps a step or two ahead with its Twitter partnership, and its plan to integrate Twitter into iOS 5. So we can expect a similar flowering of iOS 5 apps that build on a core of social capabilities, and that will allow app developers to leverage profiles, following, streams, and other foundational social componentry at the OS level.By lowering the core elements of sociality into the infrastructure, Google and Apple will be setting the stage for a new generation of app development, and therefore, user experience. Which will mean an acceleration of the transition for us, as users, from monolith to mosaic.Google+ shows that Google is going to make that transition, and it will be Apple and Google that will be defining the next ten years of the social revolution, as a result. Facebook and Microsoft may be fated to fall into each others arms, just to catch up, or survive at all.

Of course, the failure of Google+ as a monolithic competitor to Facebook, today, doesn’t bode well for Google’s future efforts, when it might be able to shift into a different modality, with apps as the tiles in a mosaic. 

They better roll out a socialized version of Android pretty quickly, or they will have fumbled the future again.

related

The Influencers Verdict: the Google+ example (loiclemeur.com) — Loic says its too early to tell if Google+, you need to wait for the average people to use it not just early adopters , he’s having a great time in Google+, and asks Reimold ‘who are you, anyway?’. Not convincing to me, Loic.
What Facebook needs to do in order to populate the Subscriptions ghost town (thenextweb.com) — Macale suggests that Facebook Subscriptions is an attempt to adopt Google+ semantics, and its not being adopted widely: a failure, or too soon to say?

When the 2-D to 3-D terrain mapping doesn't work as well as it should.

"After we exclude serials, we can finally count all the books in the world. There are 129,864,880 of them. At least until Sunday."

Google counts all the books in the world and explains how it did it. This does not however represent all the human knowledge which may be contained in mediums other than books. Yes, that includes blogs too.

"All of these phones have some magical features, to be sure. I loved having the EVO be a wifi hotspot. I like some of the apps better on Android, in particular, Google Voice, Google Maps, and Google Buzz. All are way better than anything on the iPhone.
But still I can’t kick the iPhone habit. Why not?"

"What’s the difference between the new version of YouTube’s mobile Web site and the Apple-created YouTube application that is installed on every iPhone? The Web site is a lot better." So much for that native apps are better than web apps. I assume now there is no reason to complain about the locked-down app store if you can make web apps better than device apps.

"The Android ecosystem doesn’t seem capable of producing devices that are great on day one. Yet Apple consistently pulls it off." The promise of "It'll only get better" leaves us with an unfulfilled promise of today.

With 2 questions and 2 minutes, you can see how Google Apps can help your company

"OffiSync Supercharges Microsoft Office, enabling users to significantly improve the way they create, collaborate and share their documents by integrating Microsoft Office with Google Docs, and Google Apps."

A Google Chrome extension that transforms partial feeds to full feeds within the feed reader.

"According to the latest Hitwise analysis, Google's lost its crown as the most-visited Web site in the U.S. last week. The new king of Web site traffic is, of course, Facebook."

"In your Web browser, create a new bookmark containing the following JavaScript code as the URL"

Google has poured resources into improving its automatic translation service. Some of these systems are better than others at handling particular pairs of languages, and it is impossible to evaluate them fully using small bits of text. But here are some quick comparisons of human translations and computerized versions from Google and two competitors.

The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand. You don't have to be a data expert to navigate between different views, make your own comparisons, and share your findings.

If Schmidt doesn't think people's privacy is important he should post his own search history and email contact list on the web and get back to us with a lecture on the Patriot Act.

"It’s kind of like the Photoshop Problem: when people want to crop a picture, we give them Photoshop. Photoshop is a behemoth application with nearly every image editing and touchup function imaginable, and it is terribly complex. Now Photoshop is an impressive tool, but only a very tiny percentage people need the power it offers. The vast majority just want to crop their ex-husband from the photo and let their friends look at it."

"Google Buzz: revolution, evolution, or devolution? Many of you have asked me for my take. So here's how it stacks up against my five next-generation product & service design principles — the principles of "design for meaning.""

"After spending a few hours on Google Buzz, we’re proud to present you with 12 simple tricks to help give you a better Buzz."

To create the bookmarklet (this is how you do it on Firefox—other browsers should be similar), just right-click your bookmarks toolbar, select New Bookmark, and paste the text below into the Location field:

javascript:var searchterms = escape(prompt('Enter Artist and Album'));var query = searchterms + ' site:mediafire.com';window.location='http://www.google.com/search?q=' + query;

"Google just launched Google Buzz, the company's new social networking service which will be tightly integrated with Gmail. There can be little doubt that Google Buzz looks a lot like FriendFeed, the social aggregation service that was acquired by Facebook in August 2009."

"The new beta release of Chrome for Mac offers extensions, bookmark sync, and more."

Feeling overwhelmed by the bevy of social networking services? Google wants to help — by adding one to the list. On Tuesday the company unveiled Google Buzz, another way for people to tell other people what they’re doing, thinking and feeling.

Adobe better have a great story to tell at SXSWi, because that’s where a lot of the Web elite gather each year. That means Adobe has six weeks to get an answer together for why Flash is relevant. Can it do it? Can Flash be saved?