Archive for the 'Google' Category

Is FriendFeed Doomed?: Jarred Guest Posts at SarahInTampa.com

Published
by
Jarred
on May 20, 2008
in Blogging, Computing, Data Portability, Facebook, Google, Social Networks, Tropophilia and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

Jealous of Taylor’s recent gig as a guest poster, I decided to accept an open call for contributors made by Sarah Perez for her excellent blog sarahintampa.com. Sarah regularly blogs for ReadWriteWeb — one of the preeminent resources for technology news and analysis on the web . Thanks to Sarah for letting me jump in!

My guest post talks about how FriendFeed is going to encounter enormous, if not deadly, pressure from the recently launched Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect initiatives.

Facebook and Google realize that people are tired of filling out profile after profile, uploading user picture after user picture, connecting to friend after friend… on site after site after site. In “the real world”, we have one social graph of our friends and one identity. Both are centrally located in our brain. We block and expose different facets of our identity to different parts of our graph. This is how the web should, and will, work. Google and Facebook want to be our digital, social brains. [...] When you visit a website, you’ll no longer have to create your identity — Facebook or Google will load it for you. You’ll be able to concentrate on leveraging your identity in the context of the website you’re visiting and the services it provides.

What does that have to do with FriendFeed? Well you’ll have to head to Sarah’s blog to find out!

Scaled Automation: Google and Facebook Start To Connect Your Dots

Published
by
Jarred
on May 12, 2008
in Data Portability, Facebook, Google, Privacy, Social Networks and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

A few weeks ago I wrote about Google’s baby step into the social networking game, when it announced it was testing social features in its branded start-page, iGoogle. In an attempt to be a blogger rock star (hah!), I coined the term “scaled automation” to describe the web giant’s approach to this arena. In a nutshell, it combines Google’s penchant for automatically interpreting your social graph (”automation”) with its “long-tail” philosophy of breaking down barriers to the flow of information across the entire web (”scaled”).

To its credit, Facebook — the reigning champion of social networking — picked up on the “scaled” trend and announced Facebook Connect last week. This new feature will serve as a gateway to Facebook’s so-called “walled garden” of social graphs. Websites external to Facebook will be able to offer users the option of logging in using their Facebook credentials. Additionally, users can port some of their social graph data (friend connections, photos, etc.) to those external websites. From the Facebook Developers’ Blog:

Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites. Developers will even be able to dynamically show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites. [...] As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date. For example, if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external website.

While Facebook will begin scaling across the web, however, it has not embraced the “automation” side of Google’s philosophy. Indeed, in response to Facebook Connect, Google revealed the rest of their social networking plans today with the announcement of the similarly-named Google Friend Connect. Google’s VP of Engineering describes his company’s vision of the social web, and you can instantly see how it differs from Facebook’s:

The distributed model has worked well for the Web. That is what the Web does–many points of light loosely coupled and massively distributed, allowing users to connect to pages of information. [...] Now it is working to connect people to other people.

Google is basically launching the same initiative as Facebook, but the spirit behind the implementation is different. Google wants to connect you everywhere, just like Facebook; however, Google also wants to connect you to everyone.

Continue reading ‘Scaled Automation: Google and Facebook Start To Connect Your Dots’

Do You See What I See?

Published
by
Jarred
on April 29, 2008
in Computing, Google, Privacy, Search and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

The Problem

Unsurprisingly, the ever-innovative Google is conducting intensive research into improving image search.  The web giant’s mission – ”to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — requires that its computers be able to interpret and index images, in addition to text.  To date, as Mike Arrington explains, computers have not been so good at this:

Today when we talk about search all we really mean is text search. That’s sort of like only being able to see in one color. And when we search for image, video and audio content, the only data that search engines use to do those searches is the text that is associated with those files. That’s like trying to describe the color green when you can only see in red.

One approach to solving this dilemma is giving humans an incentive to label images themselves (see my earlier post on human computation).  Luis Von Ahn, the brain behind Google Image Labeler (an addictive game that pairs users together to attribute labels to images), says that all the images on the web could be sufficiently labeled in a short amount time with a critical mass of participants; to drive home his point, he often references the millions of potentially productive hours that go wasted on Solitaire each year.

There are two major shortcomings to this approach.  First, it is still completely text based — what happens when a certain image is only labeled in a certain language, or when pranksters “Google bomb“ image results (imagine every result for “miserable failure” being the face of George W. Bush)?  The second, major shortcoming of this approach is that there are untold numbers of new images being uploaded to the Internet every day.  Flickr alone gets as many as one million new photos from its users every 24 hours.  Is a human-centric approach to putting images in context sustainable?  Google doesn’t think so, and so it is beefing up its computer-based image search strategy.

Continue reading ‘Do You See What I See?’

iGoogle Goes Social: The Birth of Scaled Automation

Published
by
Jarred
on April 24, 2008
in Advertising, Facebook, Google, Privacy, Social Networks and Web 2.0
. 3 Comments

The Heat Is On

The cold war between Google and Facebook just warmed up a whole lot, and this time it’s Google with its fingers on the dial.

Garrett Rogers reports that Google is releasing tools for developers to begin building social applications for the iGoogle homepage, built on the OpenSocial API.  For those who don’t speak geek, this basically means that individuals and companies are able to tap into the social graph you’ve created through Google — primarily through your Gmail contacts — to build useful gadgets for your homepage.  Users will be able to see “updates” from their friends (see right column of image), paralleling Facebook’s News Feed and Mini Feed features

Who cares, right?  Well, as Garrett points out, the potential for a coup is enormous:

I wonder if this will have a significant impact on Facebook since there are twice as many people who set Google as their default browser homepage than Facebook according to comScore? Who knows, Google might win by default if they get it just right.

With this move, Google is forging together two movements that it has been leading under much scrutiny and controversy: scaling and automation.  Together, they become what I’m going to call scaled automation.  Like Tom Friedman says, if you name an issue you own it… so if this term somehow becomes popular, well, remember you heard it here first.

Continue reading ‘iGoogle Goes Social: The Birth of Scaled Automation’

Monday Links: April 21st, 2008

Published
by
Taylor
on April 20, 2008
in Careers, Design, Energy, Environment, Google, Monday Links, Politics, Space and Sustainability
. 1 Comment

Another week closer to Spring…or so we hope.  This week’s links are very heavy on environmental stories.  I apologize for the one-dimensionality, but Jarred has some Web 2.0 stuff planned for this week to even things out a bit.  Links:

  • Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. offers three major environmental policies for the next president: a carbon cap-and-trade system (wisely endorsed by Senators Obama, Clinton, and McCain); smart grids and modernizing energy delivery infrastructure; and drastic improvements in energy efficiency for buildings and machines.  Sounds like a start [Hat Tip: Grist].
  • Treehugger features stories on space debris (click through to see the image…pretty unbelievable) and the “Pacific trash vortex“–an area twice the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that’s entirely covered in garbage (more here).  Further proof of the attitude that out of sight is out of mind…until our children grow up, anyway.
  • The latest version of Google Earth includes a feature that shows users when a satellite image was taken; this is enormously important for conservation efforts aimed at tracking land and water conditions over time.  Also helpful for spies.

You could train a recent college graduate to do your job well in a few days or less - This demonstrates you do not need any experience or knowledge learned over time to complete your tasks, which implies busy work or menial duties.

  • The New Yorker featured a really fascinating article on something I rarely give a second thought: elevators.  The story includes an account of the horrific experience of a guy trapped in an elevator for 41 hours.  The time-lapse video of his ordeal makes me think I’ll be taking the stairs for a few weeks.
  • I keep procrastinating on a green architecture post; in the meantime, this is one of the coolest green building concepts I’ve seen recently: urban skyscraper farming, courtesy of the Dwell Magazine blog.  Check out this design, and follow the link for details:

dwell city farm

  • I’m giving Jarred this raw meat themed iPod case for his birthday, just to send Ashish (and Steve Jobs, for that matter) over the edge.  Fortunately for you, Ashish, it’s way too expensive for a gag gift.

Enjoy those links while I go read the NY Times magazine “green issue.” More to come….