Disruptive Conversations

Today's Squawk Box will discuss "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

On today's Squawk Box conference call/podcast at 11am US Eastern, we'll talk about Nick Carr's essay in the Atlantic Monthly called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Are his concerns valid? Or overblown?

Some of the other links I provided for background:

• Commentary from CNet
• Jon Udell's post
• Paul Graham: Disconnecting Distraction

Knowing the Squawk Box "regulars", it should be a fun discussion.

If we have time, we might talk about continued information coming out of Apple's WWDC event and/or the Microsoft TechEd event happening this week. For instance, what do people think about the MobileMe service that I discussed in my blog post.

You are welcome to join us at 11am US Eastern via the Free Conference Calls application for Facebook. The show will also be available for download later in the day on Alec Saunder's weblog.

Technorati Tags: squawk box, alec saunders, nicholas carr, google, internet, culture, evolution, attention, distraction, future

Google's orkut to launch application platform based on OpenSocial

Does anyone still use Orkut?

Obviously some people do and the first visit to my page in eons showed me that a couple of people I know had actually been by there recently. But in the grand "battle" between Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc., orkut doesn't seem to get much mention these days. I know that I joined orkut back in 2004 when it launched and you had to have an invite to get in. But a year or so later I had basically left it behind (except that my account is still there and now and then does get friend requests).

So I was a bit surprised to encounter over on Official Google Blog the post "orkut going more social" that contains this text:

"Starting this month, we're enabling developers to make their social applications available to orkut users. We'll start ramping up to more than 50 million people over the next few weeks.

To prepare for this growth, we're now accepting social applications. For a while now, developers have been able to write, test, and play with applications on orkut. Later this month, however, we're going to start rolling them out to orkut users. OpenSocial developers can submit their completed applications (deadline: Feb. 15).

To help developers ready their applications, we're offering engineering support and training. We've scheduled orkut hackathons on Feb. 14-15 from 10 am-6 pm at the Googleplex in Mountain View and via videoconference in New York. For more information or to RSVP, please email hackathon.rsvp@gmail.com. If you can't attend, we hope to see you in the OpenSocial forums or on chat (irc://irc.freenode.net/opensocial)."

The post obviously has more information and the relevant links.

That Google is doing this is no surprise given their backing of the OpenSocial initiative. It is interesting to see the note about "ramping up to more than 50 million people". Is that the current number of active orkut users? If the Wikipedia entry is accurate (that states 67 million users in August 2007) that would certainly be plausible.

Regardless, it is great to see another social network indicating that they will have working support of OpenSocial apps soon. The more there are, the more incentive it is for app developers to develop for OpenSocial.

Technorati Tags: google, opensocial, orkut, socialnetworking, applications, application platforms, apis

New "Shindig" project will be open source OpenSocial implementation

Google's OpenSocial effort passed a milestone yesterday when the first pieces of code were uploaded for Shindig (tip of the hat to Mr. Topf for pointing this out), an open source implementation of the OpenSocial API. Why is this important? Quite simply, I see an open source implementation as critical for the success of any API. As noted in the Shindig Proposal on the Apache Software Foundation's web site:

Shindig will provide implementations of an emerging set of APIs for client-side composited web applications. The Apache Software Foundation has proven to have developed a strong system and set of mores for building community-centric, open standards based systems with a wide variety of participants. A robust, community-developed implementation of these APIs will encourage compatibility between service providers, ensure an excellent implementation is available to everyone, and enable faster and easier application development for users. The Apache Software Foundation has proven it is the best place for this type of open development. The Shindig OpenSocial implementation will be able to serve as a reference implementation of the standard.

The key part is that last sentence. A "reference implementation" does a couple of things. First, for developers for whom the license terms are appropriate, they can simply incorporate the code directly into their products and... ta da... they are writing OpenSocial applications. Second, for developers who can't directly use the code verbatim due to licensing, they can at least study the code and understand how it works. They can see how the OpenSocial interaction occurs in a working example. Getting an open source reference implementation out there enables developers all over to rapidly use and learn about the API. While this news yesterday represents only the very first step in the development of the project, it's a good start down the path. Now, developers can download the existing code, try it out, and, hopefully, contribute patches/fixes/etc. back into the code base. Shindig will be a good project to watch. There does not yet seem to be an official project web page, but there is a "project status page" on the Apache Incubator site. P.S. And for those wondering, "shindig" is an English word for "a social gathering" which makes it rather appropriate.

Still thinking about Google's Open Social... does it truly tear down the walls of social networks? Or just make widgets work across socnets?

Unless you have been under a rock for the past few days, you should by now be aware that Google released an API called OpenSocial. There is a new Google blog that had the announcement, which included this:

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs that will work on many different social websites, including MySpace, Hi5, Ning, orkut, and LinkedIn, among others. In addition, this allows developers to learn one API, then write a social application for any of those sites. Learn once, write anywhere, if you will. And because it's built on web standards like HTML and JavaScript, developers don't have to learn a custom programming language.

The list of OpenSocial partners is quite extensive... basically everyone in the social networking space except Facebook, but also including other companies such as Salesforce.com and Oracle. Having the big players like MySpace and LinkedIn is definitely key. Google has also provided a wealth of information:

• FAQ
• Articles (including tutorials to help get started)
• Documentation
• Developer's Forum

I find it all intriguing. There is a great amount of talk in the blogosphere about how this "tears down the walls" of social networks... and it does - in one aspect. It seems to me that this is really a direct shot at the Facebook Platform in that it gives application developers the ability to create applications that work across multiple networks. So from the point-of-view of a developer, this truly does open up the world of social networks. You can now write an app that is not just restricted to the confines of Facebook's walled garden, but instead can run in any of the other social networks out there (that support OpenSocial).

So it solves part of the problem out there in social networking... and it looks like quite a compelling way to do so. I'm certainly going to be reading the tutorials and experimenting with sample code.

But please let's remember that there are other issues with the walled nature of social networks. For instance:

• Why do I have to sign in with a different username and password to each of them? Why can't I just have a common (and secure) username/password that I use? (such as OpenID)
• Why do I have to recreate my friends list in each social network? (something the "social network portability" folks are looking at)

OpenSocial lets apps be created that work across multiple networks. I commend the folks behind it and supporting it. But let's please remember that it solves only one part of the overall "open" issue.

I need to really play with it more before I can comment further. In the meantime I'm capturing here a number of links related to OpenSocial that I have found useful:

• Marc Andreessen: Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web - and also a screencast and screenshots
• It’s Official: Google + MySpace = OpenSocial
• Facebook’s dilemma: To be OpenSocial or not to be
• Read/Write Web: OpenSocial: Three Big Concerns
• Read/Write Web: Confirmed: MySpace Joins Google's OpenSocial (includes link to video from Scoble)
• Wired: Salesforce and LinkedIn: OpenSocial Means Better Business-Centric Apps and Services

Stay tuned for more...

Technorati Tags: apis, applications, facebook, facebookplatform, google, opensocial, socialmedia, socialnetworking

Google's "Shared Stuff" lets you share web sites/URLs publicly, or with Facebook, del.icio.us and others (review with screenshots)

Google yesterday quietly rolled out their "Shared Stuff" social bookmarking/sharing service and predictably there were a slew of postings in the blogosphere. Here's my little quick tour for you. First, you add a link on your bookmark bar:

Now you just click on the bookmark whenever you are on a page you want to share, very much like you do with del.icio.us, Facebook, digg or any of a zillion other services. The result is a popup page that looks like this:

Once you do any of the optional things like add a comment, change the picture or add tags, you simply hit "Share" and you get a page telling you of your success and giving you the link to your Shared Stuff page:

Clicking on the link brings me to my own private version of the "Shared Stuff" page (because I'm logged in with my Google account):

which looks sort of like the public page you all will see (which I get by clicking the "As everyone sees it") link:

You'll immediately note that the page everyone sees only has one of my two items on it. I can't explain why... and I've forced a browser refresh multiple times to try to see if it was a browser issue but that seemed to do nothing.

Now I could not for the life of me figure out any way to edit the listing I had on the page, but by simply sharing the same URL again, it seems to have corrected the issue (and I also could change the picture associated with it).

It is somewhat annoying that for the "article preview", it grabs the blog subtitle instead of the first bit of the actual post text - and there seems to be no way to change that, although you can add a comment. However, I have the same problem with Facebook "Shared links" and its preview.

Speaking of Facebook, the Google Email/Share feature has a "More..." link that brings you to a second page where you can share the link on Facebook, Furl, del.icio.us, Social Poster (which I'd not heard of), Reddit and Digg:

I clicked on "Facebook" and got the standard Facebook sharing screen:

You also can email a link (and add it at the same time) which is naturally integrated with Gmail:

The "Shared Stuff" feature does have some other interesting aspects, such as RSS feeds, the ability to see stuff shared by others (based on your Gmail address book) and the ability to search for stuff shared by other users based on domain or tag. However, as I discovered, there is this minor detail that tags must be separated by commas although it doesn't tell you that! Being used to del.icio.us, I put a space between my tags, with the resulting amusement:

It is looking here for the most popular stuff tagged "pme podcastexpo podcasting socialmedia" all as one giant tag. Oops. I shared it again and inserted commas, after which it worked fine. However, I did have to change the image again as it defaulted back to the first image (my picture) instead of the one I had chosen.

Given that I am a heavy user of del.icio.us and am already all set up to use that, and that I'm also sharing stuff within the walls of Facebook, I'm not really sure how much I'll use this new Google service. However, given that it's Google and one might expect that some of this information might ultimately show up in search rankings (or at least affect search results), there's a good chance it might be worth at least continuing to experiment with it.

What do you think? Will you use this new service? Or will you stick with the others?

Some other articles:

• Read/Write Web: The Best and Worst Things About Google's Shared Stuff
• Google Operating System: Google Shared Stuff
• Marketing Pilgrim: Shared Stuff is Delicious
• Guardian Technology: Google Shared Stuff slips out, disappoints

Technorati Tags: google, sharedstuff, tools

Feedburner frees their TotalStats and MyBrand services (previously part of the PRO subscription)

It would seem that those of us who use Feedburner are seeing an early payoff of the acquisition by Google - per the Feedburner blog announcement today:

Beginning today, two of FeedBurner's previously for-pay services, TotalStats and MyBrand, will be free. Not in the sense of soaring high above the clouds or recently sprung from the hoosegow, but free like you'll no longer gladly be billed on Tuesday for a burned feed today.

Very cool to see!  I've already activated what is now called "Feedburner Stats PRO" on my main feeds and am looking forward to seeing what other stats I wind up getting.

I'm also VERY pleased to see the "MyBrand" service being made free.  One of my biggest concerns about using Feedburner all along is that people subscribe to the RSS feed at Feedburner's site.  They are essentially all now Feedburner's customers (well, now Google's!).  If for some reasone I ever want to move my feed to some other site, or to host it myself, I basically lose all those folks who have subscribed to the feed via Feedburner.  I have to somehow get them to re-subscribe to my new RSS feed.  The beauty of "MyBrand" is that instead of having an RSS feed set up as:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DisruptiveConversations

I can instead have the feed appear off of my own domain name like this:

http://feeds.disruptiveconversations.com/DisruptiveConversations

While this URL does look a bit repetitive, the point is that should I need to move the RSS feed elsewhere - or should Google someday shut down Feedburner (which I can't see happening) - the feed URL is under MY control!  I might need to do a web redirect to point "/DisruptiveConversations" to some file like "/rss.xml" but that is something that I can do on my server or service provider.  I'm no longer locked into Feedburner's service and systems.

Now, I have no reason whatsoever to leave Feedburner.  I'm a very happy user who is not paying a dime and enjoying the stats and all the other many capabilities that Feedburner offers.  But that's today... and who is to say that sometime in the future I might want to move my feed to somewhere else?  The MyBrand service gives me this flexibility and "insurance".  Sometime in the next few weeks I'll make the time to make this transition for all of my feeds.

Thanks, Feedburner team, for making both of these services available to all of your users!

Technorati tags: feedburner, feeds, rss, google

At least Google Maps has a sense of humor with regard to trans-atlantic travel (Vermont to Stockholm!)...

Curious to know approximately how many miles it was from here in Vermont over to Stockholm, Sweden, I hit the "Get Directions" link on a Google Maps window I happened to have open.  I was a bit surprised and very amused to get the response shown in the graphic on the right (click on it to see the larger version), particularly step #16...

Yes, indeed, I'll go do that right now... drive down to Boston and dive right into the Atlantic!  :-)

Nice when a company has a sense of humor in its products!

Technorati tags: google, google maps

Google's "Web History" lets you search your searches and history: there's a catch, of course, involving privacy...

 Being a user of Google products, I was naturally curious when I saw a link on one of the various Google product screens (Gmail, I think) saying that I could look at my "web history".  Indeed, Google has rolled out a new app, named, in the very simplistic Google style, "Web History".  You can see the login screen to the right along with the various statements about what it can do:

• "View and manage your web activity" - you can search across the full text of pages you've visited. You can also remove pages from your web history.
• "Get the search results most relevant to you" - using the data in your web history, Google can personalize the results to the most relevant sites.
• "Follow interesting trends in your web activity" - what are the sites you visit the most and when do you visit them?

This last one, while a bit Big Brother-ish, is actually kind of intriguing to me.  The whole package is, really.  I mean, if you remember seeing a web page but you didn't bookmark it, wouldn't it be great to search back through all the pages you went to in order to find that page?

Of course, there naturally is  a catch. As shown in the image on the left, this really only gives you the full capability when you install and enable the Google Toolbar. Now, the toolbar itself sounds not too bad... you can search various sites, have better searches, easily blog or email web pages - or bookmark them (using Google Bookmarks, which would like to be my bookmark service, a role currently filled for me by del.icio.us). In fact the latest toolbar for Firefox has a whole host of goodies.

On one level, the toolbar could be a great thing that allows you to maximize your usage of Google's applications.  Perhaps many of you are already running it. Part of me is curious to run it for the PageRank display alone.

But recall this... I'm a "security guy" with a relatively high degree of paranoia about privacy and disclosure of information, even in aggregate form.  I know that Google has a lengthy Toolbar privacy policy, but part of me does worry about the usage of my browsing data.  From their policy:

• We process your requests in order to operate the Google Toolbar. For example, by knowing which web page you are viewing, the PageRank feature of Google Toolbar can show you Google's ranking of that web page. Likewise, by processing the text on a web page, SpellCheck can offer spelling suggestions and AutoLink can provide useful links to information.
• In addition, we use log information about aggregate Toolbar usage to improve the quality of Toolbar and other Google services.

So by using the Toolbar with its Advanced Features (which are some of the more interesting) you are basically consenting to let Google monitor everything you view on the web.  Of course they "log information about aggregate Toolbar usage" because it is a phenomenal way for them to understand the browsing habits of web users.  I would, too, if I could convince enough people to install a toolbar like this into their browser window.  In fact, there are a lot of unethical companies out there who try to install these type of browser add-ons, but in the security industry we generally call those "spyware".  And I guess that's my dilemma - is the Google Toolbar "spyware" or is a tool to help us be more productive in our web searches?  Is the difference really only one of perspective?  In many ways, it comes down to:

Do you trust Google and their "Do No Evil" mantra?

Overall, I personally do generally trust Google... I know enough people there to know they are very serious about privacy and safeguarding information.  But do I trust them enough to install the Google Toolbar?   I don't know...

Do you trust Google?  Have you installed the Google Toolbar?  Have you used the Web History function yet?  What do you like best about it?

Technorati tags: google, privacy, web history, web

Google to add PowerPoint/presentation capability... but will it work when you are presenting offline?

You knew it had to come. Google already had documents and spreadsheets-  the remaining major office category was, of course... presentations.  And so yes, sure enough, here comes word from Google that they'll be adding presentation cababilities this summer through the recent acquisition of a company called Tonic Systems.

As a huge user of PowerPoint, I'll certainly be curious to check it out.  From a collaboration point-of-view, I could certainly see the benefit.  It also makes it rather easy to get your presentation to the conference staff or display it, i.e. no need to plug in your laptop to the display, just pull up a web browser and login.

However, I think about the fact that very often when I am presenting I am either:

• At a conference in a room/facility with NO Internet access.
• At a conference in a room/facility with crappy/overloaded Internet access.
• At a customer location presenting behind a corporate firewall - and not always with Internet access.

In all of those places, you really need an offline version.  Perhaps Google will provide a way to export to PowerPoint or PDF.

For public presentations I could certainly see the utility.  Many of my own presentations include proprietary info, though, and so I wonder what the security of the system will be... will companies feel comfortable putting their data up into Google's servers?

It will also be curious to see if Google just puts it up as a presentation tool or whether they will include social networking aspects like those in SlideShare.

Anyway, it's interesting to hear about... I look forward to seeing it whenever it comes out this year.  Meanwhile, I'm still waiting to see what Google does with JotSpot, which is annoyingly still undergoing "integration" with Google.

Technorati tags: google, powerpoint, presentations, tonic systems, collaboration

Google's home page in Arabic helps me not at all... (but is amusing!)

Logging onto the Internet here at the hotel in Cairo (for the glorious sum of $26 USD/day) had a rather amusing consequence - the main page for Google is entirely in Arabic! (click image for larger image) The text you enter in appears on the right side of the search box, and the results, as shown on the right (click image for larger image) appear on the right side as well.  Google icon on the right... essentially everything the reverse of the way it appears on the English page (as is appropriate for the way it would be in the Arabic language).

Now, there's a link there that allows you to easily get to the English search page... but I did have to say that this was definitely an entertaining side note of connecting to the Internet from an IP address range obviously known to be Egyptian!   No, Toto, I'm very definitely not in Kansas anymore...  :-)

Technorati tags: google, egypt, localization

New "Podcast Google Gadget Widget Kit" will let users easily put your podcasts on their Google Desktop pages

The ever-amazing Christopher Penn over at the Financial Aid Podcast has put out the word that next weekend at Podcamp Toronto he will be releasing the Google Gadget Widget Kit. I have to say that his example with his own podcast is very cool (picture on the right of it installed on my own Google Desktop).  I'll look forward to trying it out for Blue Box once he releases the kit.  Chris indicates that it can be added to any web page, so I'll be intrigued to play with it a bit more once it's out.

Thanks, Chris, for sharing these tools... and for all the other little projects you are doing. :-)

Technorati tags: podcasting, google, google gadgets, christopher penn

Google launches "Build Your Campus in 3D" contest... and linking SketchUp to SecondLife?

 Per a post in the Google blog, Google is launching a "Build Your Campus in 3D" competition to encourage students to create a 3D version of their campus using Google's SketchUp tool... that are then linked in with Google Earth, of course.

As a guy who used to play around with creating 3D objects in the now ancient era of VRML in the mid-1990s, it's intriguing to see how far the tools have come.

It also makes me wonder... while many folks are experimenting with building 3D objects in virtual worlds like Second Life, is Google evolving its own 3D world that might have a similarity to our own real world?  (Right here they will be getting, I am sure, a good number of campuses submitted...)

Another interesting question - could SecondLife someday import things created by Google's Sketchup?  (Well, it seems people are working on exactly that here and here.)

Note to self: add Google SketchUp to the already insanely long list of things to check out sometime...

Technorati tags: google, sketchup, 3D, virtual worlds, second life