MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).
Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services. See my post on the Centralized Me for more of my thoughts on this.
The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).
If what we hear is correct, Google’s offering may not be as attractive as MySpace’s and Facebook’s. Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contract, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it (with strict terms of service in case they violate that trust). That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it.
We’ll have to wait until Monday for the exact details, though. But what’s clear is that Google wants to get in between social networks and the web sites that want to access their data. By controlling the flow through Open Social and the new Friend Connect product, they can effectively become a huge social network without actually having a, well, social network (unless you count Orkut).
Google’s been scrambling for partners to announce on Monday as well. So far our understanding is they have their own Orkut and Plaxo. Compare that to MySpace (Yahoo, eBay and Twitter, plus their own PhotoBucket) and Facebook, which announced Digg as an early partner.
Another limiting factor with Google’s product is that, unlike Facebook and MySpace, they do not already control user profiles for tens of millions of active users. That means they’ll quickly need to get big partners on board as well. Will MySpace help them? They may - MySpace is already part of Open Social and said on Thursday that they will adopt Open Social initiatives in this space once they are defined. We’ll see.
More details as they come in.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
So, yeah, basically it’s a photoblog. You can easily set it up to automatically send your messages to Twitter and Facebook too, though, which is useful. My Twitxr account is here. Here’s an example of a message that was copied over to Twitter. Another feature I like is the fact that you tell it where you are, so location information is included.
Varsavsky says it’s specially designed for the iPhone, and they’ve created software that makes uploading text and a photo from the iPhone very easy. As a third party application, though, it isn’t officially available for the iPhone. You have to “jailbreak” the phone before you can install their application. It looks like you can’t simply grab a photo that you’ve taken normally from the iPhone, either. You have to initiate the photo through the Twitxr application. The application automatically adds location information to your photos and updates.
Twitxr is the upteenth variation of Twitter to appear (see Jaiku (acquired by Google), Pownce, etc. One clone has even gone to the deadpool. This isn’t even the first Twitter-variation to include photos - see Zannel . This is something Dave Winer has been working on with his FlickrtoTwitter project as well - which sends links of your new Flickr photos to your Twitter account. And photoblogging is nothing new. So as pretty as Twitxr is, perhaps FON should stick to wifi.
Update: I’m actually going to re-jailbreak my iphone to test the software - the fact that uploading is so easy and it adds location information is worth noting. If it works really well, this could actually be a reason for me to stop posting directly to Twitter.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Blogged with Flock
igThemer is a simple way to create iGoogle themes. This week, Google released an API for creating themes, but if you don't want to read the documentation and create the theme files, igThemer lets you select the colors and the necessary images, while previewing the theme on the same page.
igThemer doesn't let you create themes with multiple scenes, but it hosts your theme so you can share it with your friends or submit it to iGoogle's directory. Regardless of the way you create a theme, an easy way to preview it is to use this URL:
http://www.google.com/ig?skin=SKIN_URL
(replace SKIN_URL with the location of your theme's XML file)
An even cooler solution lets you edit the theme directly in iGoogle and see the changes in real-time. Just go to iGoogle, copy the code below and paste it in the address bar (you could also bookmark the script):
javascript:var s=document.createElement('script');s.id="igteid"; s.type="text/javascript";s.src= "http://igoogle-theme-editor.googlecode.com/svn/" +"trunk/iGoogleThemeEditor/dist/ige.js?lang=en&" +new Date().getTime(); document.body.appendChild(s);void(0);
{ The first screenshot is based on the photo Colourful life, licensed as Creative Commons by BlueSunFlower. }
Blogged with Flock
After allowing you to authenticate your comments using an OpenID, Blogger is now an OpenID provider. To use any of your blogs as an OpenID identity, you need to check "Enable OpenID for blogs" in your Blogger profile (the feature is still experimental, so it's not added in the public release yet) and save the settings.
Blogger inserts this line in the head section of your template:
<link rel="openid.server" href="http://draft.blogger.com/openid-server.g" />
so now you can use any of your blogs as an OpenID. Some simple things you can do with your OpenID are to claim your blog at Technorati (you still need a Technorati account), sign in using your OpenID at Plaxo, Zoomr or post comments in a LiveJournal blog, like Brad Fitzpatrick's blog. A small inconvenience is that Blogger uses the subdomain of your blog instead of your name.
Yesterday, Yahoo announced it will support OpenID 2.0 (Blogger is a provider for OpenID 1.1), so the future is bright for this authentication system.
Blogged with Flock
Google’s Picasa photo management software is often regarded by many (particularly Windows users) to be the best basic image editing and management software on the market. Although a desktop app it’s crucially a conduit to Picasa Web Album’s, Google’s challenger to the Yahoo owned Flickr.
I was struck this morning as to how prominent the Picasa logo on Google banners and employee T-Shirts was at Macworld, particularly given that there’s no Mac version of Picasa, although there is a stand alone image uploader.
I asked if Picasa for Mac was coming, and as luck would have it I managed to pick the Google employee with the least amount of media training and immediately put her on the spot. Her response: Picasa for Mac is under-development and will be launched later this year.
She then tried back tracking and pointed me to the people who were suppose to answer these queries. After explaining that I’d been told by their colleague that Picasa for Mac was coming and all I wanted now was the release date, they said that they wouldn’t confirm or deny the fact, saying that the use of the logo was part of a promotion for Picasa Web Albums, but said all of this whilst smiling like Cheshire cats. They then put me in front of a camera and made me tell them how much I liked Google as punishment (after I told them I was writing the story anyway) and gave me a free pair of thongs (flip-flops). Sorry guys, the bribery needs to be better than that 
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Blogged with Flock
This is the first time that either Yahoo or eBay has syndicated these listings. In one fell swoop, Proximic will gain an ad inventory of 50 million ads (20 million from each eBay and Yahoo, and 10 million from other sources). Proximic estimates that Google, in contrast, has an inventory of about one million unique ads. Proximic’s ad network based on this massive inventory will launch at the end of January.
Prospective advertisers will be able to place an ad widget on their sites. Proximic will index the sites and serve up contextually matching products as text ads along with contextually relevant content links (see demo screen shots below). The ads and contextual Web links will also appear in a sidebar for anyone who has downloaded the Proximic Firefox add-on.
So if you are reading about Mideast peace efforts, books about the Mideast might appear in the ad widget. If you are reading about the Mozilla Foundation, you might get an ad for Firefox track jackets from the Mozilla store, along with a link to Twitter message about Mozilla hiring the guys from Humanized. (This is what actually came up in the Firefox sidebar when I tried it. Proximic also populates its widget results with the content links from 900,000 RSS feeds it has indexed and the top 500 or so Websites.)
What makes Proximic different is that it does not come up with contextual matches based on keyword search like Google or Yahoo would. It doesn’t use semantic or statistical methods either to figure out what a page is about. “Semantic systems are not able to scale,” sniffs Proximic co-founder and CTO Thomas Nitsche, a former computer chess champion. “If you hold more than one million documents, you run into a problem,” he concludes. Semantic search, he thinks, is too slow at this point for ad serving.
Instead of keyword, semantic, or statistical approaches, Proximic uses proximity analysis. Nitsche is vague about exactly how it works, but it boils down Proximic’s algorithm translating each body of text into a pattern of characters that then becomes represented by a mathematical vector. Matches are done through traditional vector analysis. Or, as Nitsche explains:
We look at patterns of letters. We get a profile. The profile is a vector. We compare two vectors, and compute proximity by pattern distance. We can generate proximity between texts. The text can be one word, two words, 15 words, or a complete page.
Using this method, Proximic can also create matches between product listings and Web pages, thus opening up what is now an inventory of product search results to the world of contextual advertising. In tests, Nitsche says Proximic is seeing click-through rates as high as 1.5 percent, which is much greater than the 0.25 percent or less that is typical for an AdSense campaign. Of course, Proximic has to split any ad revenues it makes with Yahoo and eBay on one side and the Web publishers on the other. Proximic plans on giving participating Websites 70 percent of any revenues after eBay and Yahoo take their cut, leaving it with a very small piece of the pie. The only way to make up for it is by generating much higher click-through rates (by improving the relevance of the ads).
It is an ambitious undertaking for a German startup which has raised only 3 million Euros from Wellington Partners in 2006. But what Proximic is trying to do is combine contextual search advertising with affiliate marketing. By analyzing the patterns of characters on a page, it is creating a machine intelligence of sorts. The nice thing is that Proximic does not need to leave cookies on anyone’s browser or track you across the Web. It makes its own judgements about what is contextually relevant based on what you are reading.
If Proximic is successful in matching relevant products, imagine what it could do as a general-purpose search engine? But Nitsche knows better than to try to take Google head-on in search. He is happy, for now, focusing on the advertising end.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Blogged with Flock
Then Apple’s all, “Hey Google, sorry I haven’t called in a while. Thanks for the upgrade, you’re looking real good. Have you been working out? I’m gonna bump you up a couple notches in my speed dial. Maybe you could make me some dinner tomorrow night after the keynote. Then I’ll go hit some parties and you can wait up for me.”
Seriously though, it’s a good overhaul. Wise move too, in light of the recent traffic-splosion Devin told us about earlier today. I find myself using my iPod Touch more and more for Google-related activities, wishing it had some sort of phone function built into it so I could take it with me as I skip gleefully about the streets of Boston. Oh well.
Google announces faster, more customizable Google experience for iPhone Users [Google Press Release]
Blogged with Flock
