Google

By now we’ve all read the recent data portability announcements by Google (Friend Connect), MySpace (Data Availability) and Facebook (Facebook Connect) to extend social functionality outside of their walls to any website.

Since these announcements were made I’ve been asked for my opinion about what it means to web publishers, the market and KickApps. I believe all three will be useful but the key point if you’re a publisher is to what degree do YOU want and need to own YOUR site’s audience’s’profile data and activities data. This will dictate how you use or don’t use any of the three.

At the highest level, core to every publisher is its brand, editorial content/voice and relationship with its audience. As the web becomes more social, access by the publisher to their audience’s Profile and Social Graph (audience data and activities) becomes extremely important. Having this information becomes a powerful tool that delivers deep insight into their audience, which informs editorial programming and marketing. Crucially, it plays a huge role in delivering truly targeted advertising. more »

Randall Kennedy is out today with a bold prediction, "Office will clobber Google Apps, eventually driving the search giant out of the hosted applications business altogether." He says that there are three major reasons this will happen: full office functionality, true offline access and the future of windows application development is the streaming office.

Will there be a showdown between Google Office and Microsoft Office? Sure. Will Zoho play a part in this showdown? Yes, if Yahoo acquires them which I think might make sense. IBM could also make a run for Zoho. However the showdown won't only be about the office suite - it will be about the full Web offering. The full offering includes more than just the office, other products like advertising, analytics, social media, search, local, travel, etc will be included in the battle. This is where the real showdown will take place. On the grand Internet stage, not on the smaller office suite stage.

Both Google and Microsoft will continue to add features while keeping the cost as low as possible and even take an income hit to move user adoption up. Both companies have very large bank accounts and the battle will certainly put some amount of hurt on their free cash.

Just wait until the Google and Microsoft salespeople sell-in full, exclusive packages. That's where the real blood will start gushing.

Matt Dickman has put together a good overview of how Google touches him from the minute he wakes up until the minute he goes to bed. Matt begins by noting that his post the year prior about the same topic was one of his popular ever. Our post about "My Life Without Google" is one of our most popular of all time as well.

From mobile to YouTube to online purchases to billboards on the highway, Matt's day touches nearly all of the aspects of what Google offers. Here are a few of the good bits:

• 5:15am: Ugh. The day starts to my blaring clock radio. There is an ad running that Google has sold through ClearChannel.
• 9:00am: I surf my favorite blogs, most of them have Google AdWords placed on them even in the feeds. I am reading those feeds with Google Reader.
• 10:00am: Finally! I am free from...damn...it's another Google SMS alert on my phone. No peace. (from the toilet!)
• 3:45pm: Just in surfing the web I come across 2 or 3 major sites that run Google for searching site content. MySpace is one of those.

Though Matt misses a whole bunch of Google services... here are a few:

• Did any of his phone calls come in from GrandCentral?
• What about feeds - how many aren't served by FeedBurner?
• And probably the one he overlooked the most - Google Analytics - how many sites that he visited during the day aren't running Google Analytics?

What other ways does Google touch us behind-the-scenes that Matt may have missed? Leave them in the comments.

Google is coming to NYC with their App Engine! The Google App Engine Hack-a-thon will be held on May 7th at the Googleplex -- if you want to attend, register straight away. You can choose to code your own app with the help of the Google team or watch a live demonstration of how to build an app using Python on the Google App Engine framework.

Google wil provide food and power as well. Should be an exciting day and I will be there to (hopefully) build the first CN App Engine app (with some help from the congregation).

If you are a developer or engineer who has considered working for Google, this might be a great opportunity to speak to some of the lead players at Google and begin to build a relationship.

Pingdom, the Web site monitoring tool (we use it on CN), has published a list of some of the weird domain names Google owns. As someone who used to manage a very large domain list, most of these are smart moves. Things like "googlesucks" and "gmailblows" are good to purchase to make sure they don't end up in the wrong hands.

Some others on the list include:

• googlepoo.com
• googlewebmonitoring.com
• googlewarez.com -- aah the early 90s
• googlesex.com - call girl search engine
• googlenewyork.com - oh yea!
• googledaycare.com - get them while they are young
• goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com - yep, can you even count them without getting dizzy?
• thesecretofburritos.com - uhm, perhaps Google is getting into the content business?

Check out the full list on the Pingdom blog.

As a side note, if you are working on a startup, the Pingdom blog is a great learning tool about how to effectively use a blog to generate buzz and traffic. When people click the Pingdom link above to read more, they might venture out to the main Pingdom service. In any event, having a blog that pushes more than the normal product updates is critical to organic buzz generation.

BusinessWeek is out with the yearly review of the most innovative companies -- the 2008 edition launched today. Apple is rated highest in innovation in the technology category and second in the media/entertainment category.

BusinessWeek editor Jena McGregor explains how they determined the list. This year the theme is "innovation during a recession". They surveyed a variety of senior executives to determine who are the leaders in innovation in a variety of areas.

The technology innovators are (in rank order): Apple, Google, AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft, Nokia, Cisco, IBM, Intel and RIM. In media/entertainment, the innovators are (again in rank order): Disney, Apple, News Corp., Google, Sony, Time Warner, GE, Nintendo, Viacom and Facebook.

If you want to bypass the confusing navigation on the BW Web site, here are the winners in each category. I find Google as an entertainment winner a bit suspect - sure they own YouTube, but we create the entertainment there and in general Google isn't an entertainment company. IBM as a technology innovator? I thought they did business process consulting these days.

How much innovation is going on at the small-to-medium companies? I'd suggest that's where the real innovation lives.

Harrison Hoffman is reporting that Microsoft has launched Live Search News which is part of the Live family. Hoffman notes that it's a lot like Google News. He also puts in a TechMeme reference with the "related" links. The innovation appears to come from the automatic local news stream on the right.

What I'd like to see is a truly live news offering. Maybe a nice Adobe Air desktop app that just keeps popping up as new news hits. With all of these news sites, I have to sit there and refresh or wait for the feed to update. Drop the news onto my desktop with nice immediate alerts and you might get somewhere. Remember that to beat Google, you can't be 2% better, you need to be MUCH better.

Andy Beal notes that there are no RSS feeds currently available. While this has made him a bit miffed, let's all remember that most of the world has not a clue (nor cares) what a feed is. With that said, it would still be good to have if they want to hit the tech and reporter communities.

Google and Salesforce are announcing the launch of "Salesforce for Google Apps" today at no cost to Salesforce customers. Adam Ostrow at Mashable was part of a demo last week and has details on the deal. Adam notes that the following Google Apps are now integrated into Salesforce: Gmail, Google Talk, Google Docs, and Google Calendar. Salesforce also integrates Microsoft apps into the Salesforce platform.

Salesforce has a platform which allows developers to build upon called AppExchange and with the deal launching today with Google, you can now build apps that leverage both regular Salesforce and Salesforce for Google Apps.

Will this make Google Apps sexier to the enterprise market that Salesforce serves? Ostrow says yes. I suggest maybe but in the long term (4-7 years). Switching isn't as easy as it looks. I do agree with Ostrow that this is a win for Web apps. I believe this marriage with Google and Salesforce is a large win for the small to medium business, not the large enterprise customer.

Kevin Delaney at the WSJ is reporting that Yahoo is close to signing a test partnership with Google where Yahoo will run Google advertising on the Yahoo search. The test will run on a very small subset of queries as a test of a potential larger, long-term advertising relationship.

Is this a ploy to keep Microsoft away? John Furrier says yes and calls this potential deal the "silicon valley poison pill."

I just don't understand Yahoo - I want so much to believe in them and that they can come back and kick some major ass and yet each time their product releases are half-done and now they will give away their ads to their biggest competitor? Someone tell me why this makes sense please!

MG at VentureBeat has details on a new product launch tonight from Google called the "Google App Engine" (link will work after midnight). MG notes, "With this new release, Google is aiming squarely at Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically the popular Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services." Brady notes that the app must be in Python for now.

The first 10,000 developers to signup using the link above at midnight will get access to the Google App Engine. The accounts come with enough free power to handle up to five million pageviews a month. Pricing past that has not been release as of yet. You know it's the crack model - give them a bit for free so they get hooked for life.

While development language information hasn't been shared yet, you can assume it will be robust. Will this be enough to take out Amazon? Leave your thoughts in the comments. My first question would be to get answers around the privacy of the information in the apps. Let's assume the pricing is the same as Amazon's, what else does Google stand to gain?

We've been using the Amazon S3 service for storage and static file sharing and except for the one outage last month, it's been rock solid. Pages load faster on CN and our monthly bill is less than a couple of extra foam coffee drinks at Starbucks.