The latest salvo in the fight for owning users’ identities revolves around URLs. Google just earlier this week promoted profile search and with it URLs of the form http://www.google.com/profiles/awenger (when I signed up for gmail a long time ago I thought shorter would be better – now wish I had chosen albertwenger, as I have on most other services). Facebook is clearly getting ready to launch their version more broadly and is apparently asking users whether they would pay to have a specific...

The latest salvo in the fight for owning users’ identities revolves around URLs. Google just earlier this week promoted profile search and with it URLs of the form http://www.google.com/profiles/awenger (when I signed up for gmail a long time ago I thought shorter would be better – now wish I had chosen albertwenger, as I have on most other services). Facebook is clearly getting ready to launch their version more broadly and is apparently asking users whether they would pay to have a specific...

Maybe yesterday was a big news day or maybe this has been known for a while and I simply wasn’t aware, but I thought that Google’s announcement yesterday of the Google Friend Connect API was a big deal (and yet seemed to pass virtually unnoticed – was off Techmeme within hours). When Friend Connect was first announced, I was pretty negative about how they had chosen to implement it. I did hedge at the time by saying “at least in its current incarnation” – and now Google has shown that they ar...

Maybe yesterday was a big news day or maybe this has been known for a while and I simply wasn’t aware, but I thought that Google’s announcement yesterday of the Google Friend Connect API was a big deal (and yet seemed to pass virtually unnoticed – was off Techmeme within hours). When Friend Connect was first announced, I was pretty negative about how they had chosen to implement it. I did hedge at the time by saying “at least in its current incarnation” – and now Google has shown that they ar...

I am taking today off from my mini-series on debt because of something that I believe will turn out to be important. Google announced this week that they would become a provider of authentication under a scheme based on OpenID. While there are several modifications to the OpenID standard, one of them is crucial. In Google’s scheme endusers use their gmail address instead of a URL to identify themselves to accepting sites. I believe that this is a crucial step towards widespread consumer adopt...

I am taking today off from my mini-series on debt because of something that I believe will turn out to be important. Google announced this week that they would become a provider of authentication under a scheme based on OpenID. While there are several modifications to the OpenID standard, one of them is crucial. In Google’s scheme endusers use their gmail address instead of a URL to identify themselves to accepting sites. I believe that this is a crucial step towards widespread consumer adopt...

Jason Calacanis takes google to task for becoming a content company and competing with publishers. While much of what Jason writes may seem clear to folks who have been competing with the content parts of google, I have come to believe that it is far from clear to googlers themselves. This is based on a number of conversations I have had with googlers on various inititiatives. Most of them seem (a) blissfully unaware of the awesome power that google wields and (b) genuinely convinced that the...

Jason Calacanis takes google to task for becoming a content company and competing with publishers. While much of what Jason writes may seem clear to folks who have been competing with the content parts of google, I have come to believe that it is far from clear to googlers themselves. This is based on a number of conversations I have had with googlers on various inititiatives. Most of them seem (a) blissfully unaware of the awesome power that google wields and (b) genuinely convinced that the...

As everyone knows by now Google released results that exceeded expectations for both revenues and earnings. Analysts have attributed Google’s strength to folks shifting advertising from display to keyword because it is more effective. But there has definitely been some slowdown in Google’s US growth. Google claims that this was due to its improvements in search quality. Both of these arguments are related in a way that may put a larger crimp into Google’s growth in the long term. I am convinc...

As everyone knows by now Google released results that exceeded expectations for both revenues and earnings. Analysts have attributed Google’s strength to folks shifting advertising from display to keyword because it is more effective. But there has definitely been some slowdown in Google’s US growth. Google claims that this was due to its improvements in search quality. Both of these arguments are related in a way that may put a larger crimp into Google’s growth in the long term. I am convinc...

A while back I had argued that there was great potential for visual search now that we have a lot of images available. Well now someone has delivered and it is Google Labs with it’s Similar Images prototype. In fact, they did exactly what I had proposed in my original post, which was to make this a refinement to the regular search process, saying:In fact, Google has had a close analogy in text search for a long time. Results from a search have a link for “similar pages.”Well now there is “sim...

A while back I had argued that there was great potential for visual search now that we have a lot of images available. Well now someone has delivered and it is Google Labs with it’s Similar Images prototype. In fact, they did exactly what I had proposed in my original post, which was to make this a refinement to the regular search process, saying:In fact, Google has had a close analogy in text search for a long time. Results from a search have a link for “similar pages.”Well now there is “sim...

Of course the big news yesterday was the (one day premature) announcement of Google Chrome, Google’s much rumored browser. I am looking forward to trying it out today. Based on the comic strip Google used to describe it, Chrome has some nice innovations in it. First and foremost are the use of processes to isolate tabs and significant improvements to Javascript execution. The fact that Google released Chrome as open source is positive, but I wonder whether it would not have been healthier if ...

Of course the big news yesterday was the (one day premature) announcement of Google Chrome, Google’s much rumored browser. I am looking forward to trying it out today. Based on the comic strip Google used to describe it, Chrome has some nice innovations in it. First and foremost are the use of processes to isolate tabs and significant improvements to Javascript execution. The fact that Google released Chrome as open source is positive, but I wonder whether it would not have been healthier if ...

So Google dropped any pretense of Chrome being anything other than a full fledged entry into the browser market by introducing extensions. At the same time Microsoft has released IE8 as the latest installment for Internet Explorer and something tells me that automatic upgrades are on their way. Welcome to the latest installment of the browser wars. This wil ultimately be good news for endusers as it spurs innovation. In the meantime, it means even more of a nuisance for developers as there ar...

So Google dropped any pretense of Chrome being anything other than a full fledged entry into the browser market by introducing extensions. At the same time Microsoft has released IE8 as the latest installment for Internet Explorer and something tells me that automatic upgrades are on their way. Welcome to the latest installment of the browser wars. This wil ultimately be good news for endusers as it spurs innovation. In the meantime, it means even more of a nuisance for developers as there ar...

Just trying out a slightly attention grabbing headline. Of course Google didn’t do anything directly for the Palm Pre, but while I was out on vacation last week (and not blogging), Google did release a significant upgrade to the mobile version of gmail for the iPhone. What makes it significant is that it makes use of the iPhone browser’s local database capabilities (via Javascript) to provide not only a more responsive UI, but also offline access to email. All of that is delivered strictly as...

Just trying out a slightly attention grabbing headline. Of course Google didn’t do anything directly for the Palm Pre, but while I was out on vacation last week (and not blogging), Google did release a significant upgrade to the mobile version of gmail for the iPhone. What makes it significant is that it makes use of the iPhone browser’s local database capabilities (via Javascript) to provide not only a more responsive UI, but also offline access to email. All of that is delivered strictly as...

Google announced and released a number of innovations to their core search product this week, including search options and support for microformats/RDFa. What I think is most interesting about this is not so much the specifics of what they have done, but that they continue to innovate in core search. This contrasts with several other big names on the Internet, such as eBay, which for years have not really improved their core offering. One thing this suggests is that Google has in fact built a...

Google announced and released a number of innovations to their core search product this week, including search options and support for microformats/RDFa. What I think is most interesting about this is not so much the specifics of what they have done, but that they continue to innovate in core search. This contrasts with several other big names on the Internet, such as eBay, which for years have not really improved their core offering. One thing this suggests is that Google has in fact built a...