New Friend Connect features will let web sites offer personalized information and ads.
By Erica Naone
Google's
stepping up its social networking efforts with new features for Friend Connect
today, and the
features provide some clues as to how Google thinks social data can be used to
make money.
Friend Connect
provides a way for website owners to give their site social features without
having to build an entire social network from scratch. This type of add-on
social network tool has been increasingly popular in the last year and a half--Friend
Connect competes with offerings such as Facebook Connect, which was announced
around the same time, in the first half of 2008. Google says that about 9 billion web sites use Friend Connect,
and that the service receives about half a billion unique page views each
month.
The new Friend
Connect features collect more data about a site's visitors and provide several
ways to use it. A polling gadget gathers information about visitors' interests,
which is then shared between sites.
Using this
feature, a music site could find out which bands are their viewers' favorites, and
a fashion site could discover a user's favorite clothing brands. A new direct
messaging feature also allows Friend Connect users to contact others with
similar interests. The music site could, for example, send newsletters targeted
to users who've expressed an interest in certain 90s grunge bands. Or visitors
might be served links to the most recent articles about these bands.
But perhaps
most importantly for advertising dollars--and one must always remember that
Google is an advertising company at heart--user profiles come with an
integrated set of tools that a site owner can use to provide personalized
information, ads, and services.
Most
conveniently, Google has now integrated AdSense with FriendConnect, allowing
site owners to fine-tune the ads displayed based on users' interests, as well as
site content.
Google's
vision of advertising has always been about presenting ad content at the moment
people are actively seeking such information, and the company has always
employed sophisticated analytics to do this.
FriendConnect's
new features look like a solid step toward monetizing social data. While social
networking sites still struggle with this--users of those sites are usually
looking to socialize, and not to buy things--FriendConnect's advantage is that
the social data can be used to catch users when they're looking for useful information
or even thinking about making a purchase.
Verizon and Motorola unveil the Droid and confirm its features and pricing.
By Erika Jonietz
Verizon Wireless and Motorola officially launched the Droid phone this morning at an event in New York. The announcement confirmed the device specifications that leaked last week--and made official the phone's rumored $199.99 price.
Verizon's "Droid Does" ad campaign has already positioned the smartphone as a direct competitor to Apple's iPhone. The Droid's combination of features and price--which essentially match those of the iPhone 3GS--also put Verizon and Motorola in a strong position to challenge the prestige and smartphone market share that AT&T and Apple have enjoyed for the past two years.
Motorola's new Droid is the first smartphone to run Google's Android 2.0 OS. (Courtesy Motorola)
The Droid is the first device to run the second generation of Google's Android operating system, which the company released to developers yesterday. Android 2.0 adds support for the ubiquitous Microsoft Exchange e-mail server and makes it easier for users to access contacts and multiple e-mail accounts. Android 2.0 also supports HTML5, the next major revision of the core markup language of the Web; eventually, the W3C hopes that HTML5 will replace the need for proprietary "rich-content" plugins such as Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight.
A few of the Droid's features--such as a physical keyboard, built-in voice recognition for many applications, and multitasking--could give it a slight edge over the iPhone. The biggest potential advantage, however, is Verizon's 3G network, which is much larger than AT&T's. iPhone owners tend to use much more bandwidth than other AT&T customers, which has slowed Web browsing, e-mail syncing, and overall application performance, as well as increasing the number of dropped calls that users experience. Currently, many users and analysts assume that Verizon will be better able to support the network traffic that such a device generates--but just how well remains to be seen.
The Droid is the first Verizon smartphone that will support outside applications. Indeed, the number of applications available is one area where Apple is likely to maintain a significant edge over Google, at least for a while. Apple has already approved more than 100,000 applications for download from its iPhone App Store; Google is its next closest competitor, with just over 10,000 applications available in its Android Marketplace.
Analysts are skeptical that Apple will hold the lead, however, as the Droid is just the first of a wave of Android phones expected from major carriers such as Verizon Wireless. On Tuesday, research and consulting firm Gartner predicted that Google's Android platform will be more
popular than the iPhone OS by 2012.
The iPhone has radically changed the smartphone game in just over two years; I can't wait to see what some solid competition does for the field.
The company's Data Liberation Front offers information on "escaping from App Engine."
By Erica Naone
Last
fall, I wrote a review of Google's App Engine, a product designed to help
developers easily host and run Web applications. I praised the service's
engineering but warned that developers should be careful about getting locked
in. I wrote:
No matter
how quick and easy building Web applications is with App Engine, and no matter
how good Google's infrastructure is, the service's lack of openness remains a
serious drawback. While Google's representatives say that they want to avoid
locking companies into their system, the reality is that as long as important
components such as the database remain proprietary, developers will have
limited flexibility...
While it's possible to get data out of App Engine and move it somewhere else,
Stocky says that not all the features that would allow an application to be
transferred to some other system have been built yet. In the meantime, a
developer who wanted to move away from App Engine would have to find a way to
deal with, for example, losing the Google database system and having to move
back to one like MySQL. A developer who was taking full advantage of Google's
database would have to do a lot of work to make the application function well
on a different one.
"Google App Engine was a very important product to liberate, because if
we're going to get you as a developer to use App Engine, it means you're going
to put your users' data in our systems. We don't want to lock you and your
users in," says Brian Fitzpatrick, who leads the Data Liberation Front.
This is a great first step, and I'm glad to see Google making good on its
promises. This doesn't, however, remove all the concerns I expressed in the
review. For instance, an app that's tailored to take advantage of Google's
system would likely still suffer if it were moved. Lori Macvittie has also noted that the
stored data often isn't the only thing needed to successfully move from one
service to another.
That said, Fitzpatrick's team seems to be making a good faith effort. Macvittie
points out that sometimes "liberated" data comes out in an
inconvenient format, particularly when there isn't a real open standard. But that's
more the result of immaturities in the industry than the specific failings of
Google.
Fitzpatrick wants to "let our code speak for itself." I'm looking
forward to seeing further developments to App Engine and other Google products.
And I hope efforts like this will spur the creation of more true open standards
where they're needed.