Open Source
Google Friend Connect Makes Any Site Social
|
Written By Drupad Sil | May 12, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Last week we discussed MySpace’s move to position itself as a central web hub by allowing the portability of user data to a host of other social networking sites. Facebook quickly responded with Facebook Connect and its partnership with Digg, and today Google has revealed a similar feature, aptly called Google Friend Connect. From the release at the
“Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social – and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming – picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sits on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.”
Naturally, in the end this move is all about controlling user data, despite what Google may claim about liking a healthier Web for everyone. We spoke to this a couple weeks ago with this post on Google locking in user’s files and preferences data, another form of control. This slew of announcements shows that these companies are rushing to be that one website that users choose to store their data at and export it from. Unfortunately for Google, they don’t have the millions of user profiles that Facebook and MySpace do simply because they aren’t a social network (outside of Orkut), but this may not as limiting as it appears at first glance. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch explains why:
“Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contrast, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it. That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it.
But what’s clear is that Google wants to get in between social networks and the web sites that want access to 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.”
It’ll be interesting to see which of the Big Three is able to become central for more people, but if Google manages to stay in between Open Social and end users, they may turn out to be the big winner, again.
MySpace Joins DataPortability Project
|
Written By Drupad Sil | May 9, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Some news that broke late yesterday. MySpace announced that it had officially joined the DataPortability Project, an initiative that pushes for user control over personal data access and use by other applications, open source solutions, and bottom-up distribution solutions for said data. From the official DataPortability blog:
“MySpace joins other existing corporate members such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, SixApart, and Digg. We are excited that MySpace will join the rest of the community to continue the design, documentation, and implementation of a set of best practices for inter-operable Data Portability between trusted applications and vendors.”
MySpace’s announcement basically stated that they are embracing the DataPortability best practices and had already started data sharing partnerships with Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter, and Photobucket. Eric Eldon at Venturebeat explains what the data sharing entails for users:
“Users will be able to do things like update their own photos on their MySpace profiles, then have those photos automatically update on other sites that use MySpace photos. Besides photos, information that will be shared will include publicly available basic profile information, MySpace TV videos, and friend networks…
If you want to be able to control what information goes from MySpace to Twitter, you will be able to access a central control panel that will be provided on the MySpace site, that will let you stop information from going from MySpace to Twitter.”
This seemingly small change has major implications for online social networking. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch explains:
“Historically MySpace has lagged Facebook in terms of innovation. But they definitely “get it” this time. Sharing user data so openly (with user permission) is a terrific way to incentivize users to store all their core data at MySpace to begin with. Users eventually need one place on the Internet to store their data, or lots of places to store different types of data. But what they don’t want is today’s world where they are recreating and storing the same data over a plethora of social networks just because all those sites refuse to share. We’re starting to see the floodgates open and the idea of data sharing become a reality…
By acting first, MySpace takes the lead and has a shot at being the long term winner – meanings lots of people use MySpace as their place to store data, and share it out to other applications from there. Look for Google to make their move next.”
It’s definitely an overdue concept, and timely for MySpace as NewsCorp owner Rupert Murdoch went on record as stating the social networking site had missed his financial targets. We’ll have to see if the world’s biggest social network can get any bigger.
Google Integrates with CRM
|
Written By Drupad Sil | April 14, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Earlier today Google and Salesforce.com officially announced the expanded partnership of Google apps and Salesforce’s online enterprise apps, the result of a 10-month-old collaboration between the two companies. Docs, Calendar, Gmail, and Gtalk have all been integrated directly into the Salesforce interface, enhancing the company’s productivity suite as described by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch:
“Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentation can be created from within Salesforce’s CRM application. GTalk works as the de facto instant messenger within Salesforce. With one click, sales people who use Gmail can send any email correspondence with potential or existing customers to Salesforce, where it becomes recorded as part of the sales cycle. Sales events and marketing campaigns can be overlayed onto a Google Calendar (see screen shot below), as well as colleague’s schedules for figuring out convenient meeting times.”
Additionally, Salesforce is offering a service called Salesforce for Google Apps Supported that includes user telephone support, unified billing and provisioning, and additional premium application services for $10 per user, per month. There is no question that the move was made squarely with Microsoft and its Office franchise in mind, although there is some disagreement over whether businesses will spring for the ability to word process anytime, anywhere at the risk of losing all their data due to a server malfunction.
Either way, the future certainly looks rosy for the Google and Salesforce partnership – so much so, in fact, that it has led to speculation that Google may outright purchase the customer relationship management software company. At the least, one wonders if there will be crossover between the Salesforce App Exchange, and the newly launched Google App Engine. At this point, it seems a plausible scenario, and we’re keeping our eyes peeled for more integration between these two companies.
Four Questions with Nasser Manesh, Frucall CTO
|
Written By Sepideh Saremi | April 9, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Nasser Manesh is an entrepreneur and the co-founder and CTO of Frucall, a mobile comparison-shopping site. Manesh also writes a blog at Unixica, where he comments on startup news. Searchviews asked him for his insights on mobile development and advertising. Here’s what he had to say.
Searchviews: On your blog Unixica, you recently referenced an article about the decline of mobile development. As CTO of Frucall, a mobile shopping search engine, what do you think about this report that discourages developing products just for mobile, and how has it changed the way you approach your business?
Nasser Manesh: Mobile applications have caused a lot of hype over the past decade and a lot of companies were built around making mobile applications mainstream. Unfortunately most of these companies are not around any more, and the others, for the most part, have shifted their focus in order to be able to survive. For a number of years now industry analysts have been predicting the mobile application space to be the next revolution, similar to what happened when the PC was introduced to the market and when the Web was put to mainstream, commercial use.
But this revolution has not happened in the US market, and that’s what this report is talking about. Personally I agree with most of the writer, Michael Mace, has written. He has had very high positions within Palm and PalmSource, front runners of the mobile application space, and what he says comes from first-hand experience. There are a number of reasons for where we are today, mostly inter-related, and I think US mobile carriers are at the heart of these issues.
Carriers have tried to prevent what made the Web successful from happening in the mobile space: An open and free paradigm of delivering content and applications. Access to the handset is highly guarded and the carrier wants to have a share – usually the lion’s share – of whatever a content or application owner wants to deliver to a handset.
Mobile data plans have been a source of revenue to carriers rather than a means to an end, i.e., monetizing content and applications. As a result, consumers have been reluctant to adopt and use data plans. Those who have been more curious to pay have not found enough useful applications that would justify the cost, because mobile carriers have failed to create the right ecosystem to attract third-party application developers.
All of this has resulted in a psychology of “it’s just a phone” in the US consumer market. There is a reason for hearing the term “cell phone” from the average US consumer while average European or Asian users carry “mobile devices.” What we did at Frucall was to leverage this psychology. Instead of building a fancy mobile application, we built a voice application, which users can call to get information. In the back-end, Frucall is all web API calls and integration with Internet retail services, but to the caller it’s just a phone call. People in the US are used to touch-tone applications, as pretty much all banks and large organizations operate with touch-tone services. So why not use the same for a mobile application to make it familiar? Later, we added text (SMS) services and finally mobile web. We avoided downloadable mobile applications. You can see the reasons clearly verbalized by Elia in Mace’s article. The economics of supporting a vast number of devices for such a small percentage of users simply does not make sense for a startup.
SV: You’ve also noted on your blog that monetization is very difficult in mobile. How do you think the mobile space needs to change to spur more advertising dollars and opportunities for monetization?
NM: I have to admit I’m not a big fan of advertising on mobile phones. The mobile user experience is very different from the PC – there’s less screen space and the device is constantly with the user, making the nature of mobile advertising more intrusive. Add to that the fact that the mobile device “knows” more about the user – the incoming and outgoing calls, the location of the user, and other things we usually consider private. Just how companies like Yahoo! and Google analyze the content of your hosted email to show you relevant ads on the side bar, a mobile application can analyze these more private pieces of information to serve a more targeted ad. Location-aware advertising is on the radar of many companies. Think of Tom Cruise walking in the mall in “Minority Report” and how the voices were trying to sell him things. It will become real much sooner than we think, thanks to the mobile phones we carry with us.
There are a few companies though, such as AdMob, that have adopted the same ad-brokerage model used on the Web and are serving ads for mobile web pages. Unfortunately, iPhone aside, the user experience for mobile web browsing is unpleasant and usually slow, so users keep it to the absolute minimum.
I think one aspect that is less explored is tying mobile into the web. A lot of applications have natural mobile extensions and components. We do not have to port the whole application to the mobile device just because we can; we should study the usage and see which parts of the application can be “mobilized” to add value to the end user. Obviously one monetization strategy is to charge more for those mobile components, the other is to collect data from such components that would help serving more targeted ads later on when the user is browsing the web on a PC.
For example, in the case of Frucall as a mobile comparison shopping, if the user calls Frucall to search for a Nike shoe, next time they visit the Frucall web site we can show them a sports-related ad, or an ad from Nike or a competing brand. Companies are doing a lot for behavioral targeting these days. I would like to think of the mobile components of applications as extensions that can collect more behavioral data related to a certain application. All of that, of course, is still limited by the way carriers are controlling the applications.
SV: With the overwhelming popularity of the iPhone and increasing ubiquity of more sophisticated handheld devices for US consumers, how should companies be approaching the mobile market in the United States now?
This is a tough question and what I say here is my personal view, but I think the iPhone is going to have a big impact and at this point it might make sense for some companies to only focus on the iPhone and forget about the other platforms. This is not because of Apple being behind iPhone, but because of the user experience which has made it easy – for the first time – for users to use applications on a phone. Statistics, for example, show that Google searches are 50 times more prevalent on iPhones than other phones. That’s because there is less friction in using search on an iPhone. I am not particularly a fan of Apple’s model of controlling application distribution, bit still it’s much better than the traditional carrier model, and the fact that AT&T has agreed to Apple’s way of application distribution is a huge leap forward. There are some limitations within the iPhone SDK but I’m sure they will be resolved over time. It’s Unix underneath, after all, so capabilities such as multiprocessing are built in. It’ll just take some time.
There are two other platforms currently showing traction or at least hype – Google Android and LiMo. Personally, I expected more from Android. Creating the Open Handset Alliance was a very good move by Google and the promise of an open source mobile operating system is a good - and only a company with high levels of influence such as Google can pull it off. But in retrospect it looks like they were not ready for the prime time. Things are moving very slowly.
LiMo, on the other hand, is backed by a number of phone manufacturers and has actual handsets. The problem there is that LiMo supporters don’t come from an application software background – they are phone manufacturers. So LiMo seems to lack the developer ecosystem to add value to it. Look at how many people are trying to do things around Android, even though there is no phone out there. That’s what Google can do. Limo is ahead of Android in terms of availability, but the development support is practically non-existent, which in the long run can kill it.
Note that most of the things I’m covering is consumer-oriented. There’s a whole different mobile market out there for enterprise users, and Blackberry has done a great job there. Apple is aggressively targeting that market through their integration projects with Microsoft and Cisco and there will be application opportunities there, but as usual, enterprise sales in general is much tougher so I think small companies and startups have a smaller chance of making money in that market.
SV: Your company, Frucall, has a social network element, with users able to create profiles and connect to friends, as well as presence on Facebook via an application that allows users to share product lists with their friends. What were your considerations in creating your Facebook app? Do you think it’s more valuable for new companies to build in social network capabilities or for them to leverage existing user bases on highly-trafficked sites?
NM: I certainly think social networks are a viable marketing strategy. Obviously one has to find the right angle and come up with something that fits naturally within both their application and a social network’s expected behavior, otherwise it will fail. But if there are aspects in an application where sharing make sense, leveraging the social networks will reduce both the user acquisition cost and time. In older days the ACPU (Average Cost Per User) which is an indication of how much money one should set aside to get users, was in $10-$20 range. A good, useful web application with clear messaging and meaningful value can expect less than that, maybe in $3-$7 range. But that’s still too high – getting a million users will cost you a few million dollars. So what do you do? You make your application viral, to let users bring in new users without you spending. Now, you can either build the viral elements inside your application, or you can leverage the tools and the platform that inherently exists within a social network and just create the right hooks between your application and that platform. It’s still easier said than done though. It’s been very hard to predict how users react to these viral mini applications added to their social network such as the ones on Facebook. Most of the ones that are very viral are not adding value (depending on how you define value); they are just for fun. The problem with the “fun” applications is that they become viral quickly, but they also die down and disappear quickly. So there is no recipe out there for tapping into a social network to do the marketing, but it’s definitely one of those things that should be on the task list of a good marketing manager to look into how they can design their marketing strategy to take advantage of social media.
Microsoft Shifts Business, Will Open Up APIs
|
Written By Sepideh Saremi | February 21, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Microsoft today announced it will change the way its operations and philosophy to open up many of its products and encourage interoperability with third-party developers. With news of Microsoft’s ambitions to buy Yahoo still reverberating in the tech business world, the move is seen by many - and acknowledged by Microsoft execs - as at […]
Microsoft today announced it will change the way its operations and philosophy to open up many of its products and encourage interoperability with third-party developers. With news of Microsoft’s ambitions to buy Yahoo still reverberating in the tech business world, the move is seen by many - and acknowledged by Microsoft execs - as at least partly an effort to stave off European antitrust issues. The “strategic shift” aims for the following:
- Ensuring open connections
- Promoting data portability
- Enhancing support for industry standards
- Fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities
Last month, Microsoft was one of several high-profile companies to join Dataportability.org, a group that promotes Internet users’ ability to access/use/own their own data, regardless of platform. The move also comes at a time when companies are increasingly relying on outside development to spur their growth (see Facebook, in which Microsoft has a stake).
And because Microsoft has a bunch of products which will be affected by this initiative, the most familiar of which is its Office suite, this really points to the emergence of cloud computing and the increasing importance of Web 1.0 desktop-based software to be able to compete with free Web 2.0 products that basically do the same thing. The company seems to be applying the Facebook model to itself; could we see Microsoft apps on Facebook soon, as we had proposed the company consider? From the press release:
According to Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect, the company’s announcement reflects the significance that individuals and businesses place upon the ease of information-sharing. As heterogeneity is the norm within enterprise architectures, interoperability across applications and services has become a key requirement.
It will be really curious to see what an open API could do for Office and how it will all work; though Microsoft isn’t going open-source, it is “providing a covenant” (so ominous, so biblical!) not to sue open source developers. But Matt Asay at CNET notes the “we won’t sue” promise is not new, and the biggest news is in the open APIs and the 30,000 pages of documentation that Microsoft will be revealing to developers.
Further reading:
[Full disclosure: Microsoft is a client of Reprise Media, which owns Searchviews.com.]
Microsoft To Reveal .NET Framework
|
Written By Sepideh Saremi | October 4, 2007 | Share This
|
|
Microsoft yesterday announced that it’s allowing developers to download the .NET Framework code, which caused some confusion that the move was open source. But though the software giant is letting developers see the code (which, as I understand it, is essentially what Windows is made of and otherwise looks totally incomprehensible to a non-programmer), actually modifying and distributing the code remains strictly verboten. Webware clears things up:
The source code will be released under Microsoft’s Reference License. This means that you can only use the source as a reference for debugging, maintaining, or enhancing your applications. You cannot modify or distribute the code for any purpose. This happens to be the most restricted shared source license that Microsoft has. This announcement confirms that .Net is going to be shared source, not to be confused with open source.
Despite this increased transparency from Microsoft, developers that look at the .NET Framework will have to be extra diligent about not accidentally writing code that’s too similar, perhaps causing them to stay away altogether. Mary Jo Foley notes:
While Microsoft isn’t requiring developers to sign any non-disclosure agreements to view the .Net source code, I’m sure anyone working on an open-source project would need to think twice about looking at Microsoft’s code in order to avoid potential IP conflicts.
Yahoo! Continues Shopping Spree, Buys Zimbra
|
Written By Sepideh Saremi | September 18, 2007 | Share This
|
|
Yahoo yesterday announced its third acquisition in as many weeks: the company just purchased Zimbra, an open-source office suite, for $350 million. Yahoo recently bought news aggregator BuzzTracker and ad network BlueLithium. From Yahoo’s blog:
Zimbra is a global leader in email and collaboration software and its services are aimed at universities, businesses, and ISPs worldwide, which is a major driver of what made the company so attractive to us. We’re constantly being approached by these entities for our expertise in email and communications. Combining the best of Zimbra with what’s made Yahoo! Mail the top dog in web mail will not only allow us to cater to these markets better than anyone, it will allow us to expand our presence to partners and consumers at school, work, and home.
Ars Technica has a better explanation of what Zimbra actually does:
Zimbra currently offers open source e-mail, calendaring, and contact management solutions that can be used both on- and offline, and services small businesses and educational institutions. The company also encourages users to create “Zimlets,” which tie information from other web services into Zimbra’s suite. The Zimlets essentially act as widgets that can be customized and placed around Zimbra’s e-mail or calendar tools so that users can access information quickly and conveniently. The companies believe that Yahoo’s broad reach with its advertising and content network, combined with Zimlets, will make for a nice pairing.
It all sounds so very Google-like, doesn’t it? Ashkan Karbasfrooshan at HipMojo.com indeed notes that this acquisition gives Google a run for its money, and Read/Write Web likens it to Microsoft’s offerings. Both blogs also mention Zoho, which launched the first Facebook app this summer. Zimbra targets universities, Zoho targets students, and Zoho is considerably smaller than both Google and Microsoft, so Zoho looks to me to be in greatest danger of obsolescence, even though it’s largely an afterthought in much of the discussion generated thus far. But who knows: maybe Yahoo will buy Zoho next week.
Mozilla Plays with Social Search
|
Written By Kate Zimmermann | April 4, 2007 | Share This
|
|
Mozilla’s new “Coop” Firefox extension aggregates your existing social networks within the browser. As TechCrunch reports,
“The Coop product will allow Firefox users to “subscribe” to friends in the browser, bringing those friends into a sidebar. Those friends can share content and web pages with you…Content will be pulled from that person’s Flickr photo feed, del.icio.us tag feed, MySpace status , YouTube favorites, etc. When you want to share content with that user, you simply drag it into their avatar.”
Techcrunch has some theoretical screenshots of the plugin - though, still in labs, the design and functional details are apt to change before its formal release.
As many have pointed out, Mozilla’s aggregation of social data could be the beginning of the end for Flock, a privately-developed social browser that is built on Firefox. StartupMeme lists some other collaborative tools from Mozilla. Based on StartupMeme’s list, it looks like Mozilla is following a trend that Adobe, Microsoft, and others, have already vocalized - the increasing demand for interoperable systems that can transition data across different types of media.
Algorithm Wins All? Competition and Success in Web 2.0
|
Written By Kate Zimmermann | January 29, 2007 | Share This
|
|
Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures has a written a very insightful post on “What’s Next” for internet technology. He’s articulated some of my own thoughts about the direction of online services and how economies of abundance develop,
“The web services that seem to explode onto the scene like Facebook and YouTube did not get there by providing exceptional reliability, accessibility or security. In fact many have suffered outages that would have killed other service providers. These services succeeded because they effectively gather and use data. They are differentiated not by the quality of their service but by its nature. Competitors can offer much better service levels but without access to the same data, they can not offer the same utility.”
“The genius of Craigslist is in its governance system…that allows 21 people to administer 300 sites in 35 countries. I believe that the basis of competition in web services will shift from the data to the system that manages the acquisition, and use of that data.”
This is especially well exemplified by the emerging online music industry. Last.fm uses behavioral data to make their recommendation engine perpetually more relevant to individual users. Sellaband is an independent music label funded and promoted virally by community members who in turn profit from the company’s success. AmieStreet, similarly, uses popularity to set purchase prices for music downloads. Each of these companies has found a way to profit from their innovative systems of governing community-generated data.
Perhaps, however, the Onion says it best.
Wikipedia Watchdogs Need Their Own Doghouse
|
Written By Kate Zimmermann | January 24, 2007 | Share This
|
|
According to blogger Rick Jelliffe, Microsoft attempted to pay him to edit their Wikipedia pages. The story broke first on the Age:
“Microsoft has landed in the Wikipedia doghouse today after it offered to pay an Australian blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced web encyclopedia site.”
As expected, Jelliffe’s post circulated through tech blog aggregators to the mainstream news. Rather than deny the allegation, however, Microsoft employee Doug Mahugh freely admitted to asking Jelliffe to correct an XML entry,
“…we feel that it would be best if a non-microsoft person were the source of any corrections…Feel free to say anything about the process, about our communication with you, or anything else…”
For a full account of the gossip, check out TechCrunch or Valleywag’s account of the story.
In the meantime, taken in context with Wikipedia’s recent addition of rel=”nofollow” tags on outgoing links (see “Heated Point / Counterpoint Debate on Wikipedia NoFollow Attribute“), this brings into question the whole notion of “spamming” Wikipedia. If the Wikipedia community is so robust that, as one editor claims, “spam” stays on Wikipedia for a “day on average”, does it really matter if someone alters information about their company? Clearly a tech-heavy subject like XML has innumerable editors that will keep any Microsoft alterations in check.
For that matter, why are edits to Microsoft’s information by a Microsoft employee really so improper? As Scott Karp writes,
“And, it now appears that if you are a corporation that feels Wikipedia is inaccurate or slanted on a topic that is of substantive importance to your business, you’re pretty much screwed. If your employees try to change the information directly, you’ll get slapped… And if, like Microsoft, you try to engage an independent expert to make changes — completely independent and without your review — you’ll also get slapped.”
Forgive me for questioning the authenticity of Wikipedia’s “open community” in which real people with real interests, and jobs with really big companies, get slapped for trying to communicate their opinions. Perhaps the appeal to Jelliffe was underhanded, but of all “community” members, you’d think an employee of Microsoft should feel free to correct any false information about their own company.
On that note, Rexblog points out an article about Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ multiple edits to his own profile.
Discussion:
- Wikipedia taboo? (JD on EP)
- Wikipedia Doghouse for Microsoft (Bloggers Blog)
- Microsoft: If You’re Going to Game Wikipedia, Do It Right (Deep Jive Interests)
- Microsoft in Hot Water over Wikipedia Edits (CNN)