fidzu : AJAX

Google just opened up Knol, its Wikipedia competitor, to the public after announcing a private beta of the service last December. Unlike Wikipedia, Knol puts a stronger emphasis on authorship and even encourages users to start different 'knols' for the same subject. Google is also serving up AdSense advertising on the site, whereas Wikipedia stays away from any advertising on its site.

In many respects, Knol is similar to Jason Calacanis' Mahalo, though its scope seems even more ambitious and its tools a bit more refined. It does, however, validate the Mahalo model.

Authorship/Identity

Knol puts a lot of emphasis on authorship and, somewhat akin to Amazon's "Real Name" scheme, authors can validate their identity on Knol through either a credit card or phone number.

The default setting for every Knol is "moderated collaboration." In this mode, anybody with a Google account can suggest changes to an knol, but the author has to accept these changes before they go live.

Authors can also invite others to contribute to their articles and given them the same rights as the original author.

There is also an option for authors to write a short bio of themselves in Knol. While this is interesting here, it will be even more interesting to see if Google might start sharing these Knol identities (and maybe even the users' reputation) among more of its properties.

Usage

Setting up a Knol is as easy as clicking the "Write a Knol" button. The text editor, too, is pretty straightforward, especially in the face of the often cryptic mark-up language most wikis use.

Knol uses a rich text editor, which presents users with all the typical editing functions, including basic formatting options, links (all set to 'nonfollow'), and the ability to add references.

As of now, you can not embed any videos or other content, except for the New Yorker Cartoons that Google incensed for this project for reasons only Google knows.

Users who don't want to write their own articles can review and rate knols. There is also an option to leave comments on every knol.

Creative Commons

Users can choose between three licenses for their articles, the Creative Commons Attribution License, the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and an "All Rights Reserved" license. The Attribution license is the default setting. Users can chose a different license for every knol.

Advertising

Authors on Knol can enter their AdSense data into Knol. Besides the cut Google already takes from the advertising through AdSense anyway, authors will get the regular AdSense payout for every click on an ad. This seems like a smart way to reward users who write the best (or most popular) content, while still making money for Google.

In the competition with Wikipedia, this might mean that some authors could divert their attention from editing Wikipedia articles to Knol. However, the question will also be if spammers can find a way of abusing this.

New Yorker Cartoons?

While there is no option to embed any videos or other content into the site, authors can embed cartoons from the New Yorker. This is done through a rather cumbersome process where users have to first search for a cartoon in the New Yorker store and then enter the ID number of the cartoon into Knol. Why Google chose the New Yorker's cartoon archive for this is anybody's guess, but chances are that Google will announce more content partnerships in the near future.

Is Google Going After Wikipedia?

Given how often Wikipedia results appear as Google's top results, it would make sense for Google to look at this and decide to start its own competitor. By incentivizing authors through AdSense and by giving its users simple, but powerful tools to start their articles, Google might just be on the right track. While Google keeps reiterating that Knol is not meant to compete with Wikipedia, it's hard to see how that wouldn't be the case.

Knol, of course, has far fewer articles now than Wikipedia, but as it grows, it will be interesting to watch if Google is going to give preference to its own pages over the Wikipedia results. After all, Knol carries Google advertising and Wikipedia doesn't, so Google would clearly have an incentive in doing so, though the potential public outcry if Google would try to do this might prevent them from even attempting it.

23 Jul 2008 8:50pm GMT

Kicking off Facebook's F8 conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the social network's translation tool can now be used by developers to translate their applications into different languages. The tool will work both ways - developers in English-speaking countries can translate their applications into the 15 languages that Facebook currently supports, while developers in non-English speaking countries can translate their applications into English.

Zuckerberg notes that Facebook has now been translated into nearly 70 different languages, with the official launch of them all coming soon. Overall, Facebook now has 90 million active users, with 2/3rds of them outside of the US.

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Facebook Launches in Spanish
Facebook Launches Community-Driven Project to Add Foreign Language Support
Facebook Adds 55 More Languages to Translations Application
Google's AJAX Translation Apps Make You Global, Fast.
Facebook JavaScript Now Live
More Details Emerge on Facebook's User-Driven Translations Application
Google Analytics for your Facebook Apps

23 Jul 2008 8:49pm GMT

Here at San Francisco Design Center, the F8 '08 event is being held all day. The keynote with Mark Zuckerberg is the expected highlight of today's event, a year after the launch of the Facebook Platform. Most are expecting Zuckerberg to announce initial partners with Facebook Connect, which would come a day after MySpace had its announcement of Data Availability.

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

The Daily Poll: Who's to Blame for the SXSW Keynote Fiasco?
Zuckerberg to Keynote SXSW Conference
Zuckerberg Saves SXSW with Open Q&A
When an Interview with Zuckerberg turns into a Revolt
Mark Zuckerberg Sells Stock, Makes Some Nice Pocket Change
Dinner Keynote at Web 2.0 Summit: Rupert Murdoch and Chris DeWolfe
Mark Zuckerberg Spotted in Seattle

23 Jul 2008 8:35pm GMT

New startup Pixily lets small businesses and individuals send paper documents by mail in a Netflix style envelope, then scans, uploads to Amazon S3 and lets you search them in 3 to 5 days. It's the kind of service that big companies spend a lot of money on, now made affordable enough for anyone.

Boston Globe writer Scott Kirsner tested the service last week and saw even faster turn around - his documents were available on the Pixily website in one day and returned to him in paper form in two days after sending them. That's pretty awesome.

Keeping Costs Low

Pixily offers subscription plans from $5 to $60 per month, for your first 50 to 200 pages mailed in and with 1,000 to 12,000 pages of storage. All stored documents are made available in PDF format, so there shouldn't be any concern about losing them if you cancel your subscription.

This is the kind of service that cloud computing makes possible. The Amazon Web Services blog has a brief description of how Pixily uses multiple AWS offerings to keep their prices low.

Trusting People With Your Mail

The "mixed media" nature of this company, combining real world and digital, is one of the things that makes it so interesting. There are other services like this but each are a little different. See also Earth Class Mail, which intercepts your mail before it gets to you and lets you sort it online and Scribd's Paper to iPaper service, which is free, takes its sweet time in scanning your documents and then serves ads next to them online.

Are you willing to send important paper documents to a startup company online? Privacy and security could definitely be a big concern. We are quite interested to see how Pixily works and will report back after spending some time with our new subscription.

You can watch a 5 minute screencast about Pixily here.

23 Jul 2008 8:24pm GMT

The TechCrunch team is on site at the Facebook Developer conference, and we'll be live blogging the news. Mark Zuckerberg's Keynote starts at 1:30 pm PST.

Live Coverage

1:45 PM: "We're opening up the translation tool to allow apps to be translated as well…We now have more than 400k developers building on top of the platform. The developer community is spread around the world. More than half are outside of the US.

1:43 PM: Mark is now talking about opening up Facebook for translations made by users. They started with Spanish and French, and now the site is available in over 60 languages.

1:41 PM: Mark is looking back over the last year and says it's been pretty crazy. Over 24 million people were using Facebook a year ago - today they are at 90 million people.

1:38 PM: Mark says its time to take the Facebook platform to the next level. On a recent vacation he realized (1) they want to build a product that really lets you connect with people, and (2) they want to extend the concept of presence, have more open connections and share more. They want to make the world a more open place

"The most important information is only available if people share it, and have the power and the tools to do so"

1:35 PM: Mark takes the stage and welcomes the crowd.

1:30 PM: Still waiting for Mark Zuckerberg to take the stage.

Press Release
Facebook Expands Power of Platform Across the Web and Around the World
Users and Developers Gain New Ways to Share and Stay Connected through the Power of Feeds

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - Facebook f8 Conference, July 23, 2008 - Facebook today introduced the latest advancements to Facebook Platform during its annual f8 developer conference, calling on its more than 400,000 developers to connect their Websites with Facebook through Facebook Connect, extend their applications to dozens of languages worldwide, and make use of new developer resources to help them succeed.

"We opened Facebook Platform with a belief that community innovation can give people the tools, and the power, to share and communicate in ways that Facebook can't build on its own. We're humbled by what our developer community has accomplished," said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. "We're confident that the changes we're presenting today help developers build more meaningful social applications that enable users to share more information."

Facebook earlier this week released its new site design for users to preview and test, which is being gradually rolled out to Facebook's more than 90 million active users over the coming weeks. The changes announced today, along with those launched earlier this week, leverage Facebook's powerful feed system to give developers a new way to gain visibility and help users share and discover more information.

Leveraging the Power of Feeds

"Across the Web, content creation has become easier and more immediate, resulting in a continuous stream of information through what we call 'feeds'," said Zuckerberg. "The power of feeds on Facebook is their ability to move you into a world where you receive relevant information in a social context wherever you are on the Web."

The new site design emphasizes dynamic content and surfaces the most recent and relevant information and activity through feeds, both on News Feed and the Wall. For developers, the new site design enables even deeper integration within the profile for their applications. By taking advantage of the improvements with feeds on Facebook and the other new features, developers can more efficiently distribute their applications and gain more ways to engage meaningfully with users.

"We're confident that the new profile and integration points will give entrepreneurs and developers even greater opportunities to build their businesses and deliver on the promise of Facebook Platform," said Ben Ling, director of platform program management, Facebook. "One goal of the new site design is to align Facebook Platform with users' interests who will see a new class of applications emerge that provide deeper engagement and a better experience."

Making the Web More Social with Facebook Connect

Facebook announced that 24 Web sites and applications have joined its efforts to make the Web more open and connected through Facebook Connect. A developer 'sandbox' is now available so developers worldwide can start working with Facebook Connect.

Facebook believes that enabling users to take their identity and friends with them around the Web, while trusting that their privacy is protected, makes the Web more open and connected. Facebook Connect allows users to bring their Facebook account information, friends and privacy to any third party website, desktop application or device.

Digg, Six Apart, and Citysearch were featured live during Zuckerberg's keynote today demonstrating their planned implementations of Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect will be generally available to users in the fall.

"Digg surfaces the best content on the Web as voted on by its community of 26 million," said Kevin Rose, founder of Digg. "Facebook Connect will help us promote more conversations on Digg by giving Facebook's 90 million users an opportunity to sign-in to Digg with their Facebook accounts and become part of the active Digg community. This allows both Facebook and Digg users to more easily share the content they care about with the people they care about."

With Facebook Connect, users benefit from the following features:

• Trusted Authentication - easily authenticate into partner sites using their Facebook account

• Real Identity - leverage their real identity across the Web in a trusted environment

• Friend Linking - take their friends with them wherever they go, enabling trusted social context anywhere on the Web

• Dynamic Privacy - assurance that the same privacy settings users have set up on Facebook will follow them wherever they decide to login throughout the Web

• Social Distribution - share actions on partner sites with their friends back on Facebook through feeds Additional planned participants at launch include: Amiando, CBS.com, CNET, CollegeHumor, Disney-ABC Television Group, Evite, Flock, Hulu, Kongregate, Loopt, Plaxo, Radar, Red Bull, Seesmic, Socialthing!, StumbleUpon, The Insider, Twitter, Uber, Vimeo and Xobni.

Expanding Facebook Platform Internationally

As a result of the worldwide success of Facebook's translation system, the company has opened up the Translation Application to any developer using Facebook Platform. Beginning today, any Facebook developer can make their application available in any of the 20 languages that are currently available on Facebook, with 69 more coming soon.

Developers can now access the Translation Application to either translate their applications themselves, or open up translation of their application to Facebook users around the world, who will work together to define it in their native languages.

This innovative approach combines the passion of Facebook users with technologies that are systematic and manageable. The Translation Application enables developers to get high-quality, fully-translated applications in front of users, no matter where they live or what language they speak - much faster than ever before, and without ever having to pick up a dictionary.

"Through Facebook's international platform, the possibilities are endless for both developers and users," said Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president of growth, Facebook. "With no language barriers to break through, developers can take the stage with an even larger audience of users from all over the world, and users will have access to even more great applications than ever before built by the world's best developers."

Helping Developers Succeed

When Facebook Platform launched in 2007, it gave developers the opportunity to create applications that are deeply social and meaningful to users. More than 400,000 developers and entrepreneurs from 160 countries have signed up and developed applications. For the next phase of Platform, Facebook has focused on ensuring that developers have the resources and incentives they need to build applications that deliver on the vision of Facebook Platform.

Facebook launched four new and expanded developer programs and resources:

1) Great Apps Program Facebook's Great Apps program rewards applications that deliver value to users and advance the Facebook Platform vision. Great Apps embody Facebook's guiding principles for social applications through their meaningful, trustworthy and well-designed user experiences. Great Apps will gain greater visibility on Facebook, earlier access to new features and more feedback from Facebook. Facebook will open the Great Apps selection process to developers in September.

Facebook is excited to announce iLike and Causes as the inaugural Great Apps. "Facebook Platform provided iLike with an unprecedented opportunity to become one of the world's leading online music services in just over a year," said Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike. "I'm delighted that Facebook is committed to recognizing the apps that are most appreciated by users. We expect the Great Apps program to have a very positive impact on the entire Facebook Platform ecosystem."

"The Causes application enables socially-conscious Facebook users to unlock the power of their social network in order to raise money and awareness for the causes they care about," said Sean Parker, chairman and co-founder of Causes. "With more than 100,000 causes created by 12 million Facebook users, we've had remarkable success building user trust and value on Facebook and we're excited to join the Great Apps program."

2) Application Verification Facebook is introducing the Application Verification program which is designed to offer extra assurances to help users identify applications they can trust - applications that are secure, respectful and transparent, and have demonstrated commitment to compliance with Platform policies. Verified applications will benefit from added visibility on Facebook. The program is a complement to Facebook's ongoing policy enforcement to keep the Platform ecosystem robust, and will be open to developers in September.

3) Expanded fbFund Competition In an effort to grow the Facebook ecosystem, fbFund was introduced last year to provide resources to developers, by eliminating some of the challenges of starting a company. As part of a new competition, Facebook will award nearly $10 million in non-recourse grants to the top 25 applications. In addition to the Facebook judging committee, this year users will test applications and vote on their favorites after the first round deadline of August 29, 2008.

Winners from the first fbFund competition were announced today and include: ConnectedWeddings, CourseFeed by Classtop, GoalCamp, HotBerry, J2Play, LuckyCal, MyListo, Podclass, Trazzler, and Zimride Carpool App.

4) New Developer Website Facebook is introducing a new website for Facebook Platform. Improvements include better navigation and cleaner access to the blog, wiki and forum to encourage community involvement. Facebook will also start highlighting social, meaningful and trustworthy application case studies.

For additional information on the announcements made today at f8, please visit the f8 Press Page at: www.facebook.com/f808Press.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

23 Jul 2008 8:23pm GMT

After years of ceding the upper hand in online travel to booking sites like Kayak and Orbitz, American Airlines is about to fight back. According to the CEO of a competing travel site, American Airlines is about to pull its airline listings out of Kayak and is considering doing the same with Orbitz. If it does so, other airlines such as Continental and Northwest may follow suit.

Airlines don't like the booking sites because they have to pay them a referral fee for every ticket they sell, as opposed to capturing the full fare when travelers book on their individual sites. Even though that only amounts to a few dollars per ticket, every dollar counts to the troubled airlines-especially now with fuel prices going sky-high and the consumer spending going down.

American Airlines has a particular beef with Kayak because it tends to show AA flights through its partnership with Orbitz instead of directly from American. That means American has to pay a double tax, once to Kayak and once to Orbitz. (The deal between Kayak and Orbitz, charges the competing CEO, was meant to drive up traffic numbers on Kayak as it was potentially seeking an IPO prior to raising $200 million instead last December).

The decision to sever ties with Kayak supposedly has already been made. The only question is whether Orbitz can salvage its relationship with the airline. This should strengthen competing travel sites, especially newer ones that link directly to the airlines like Mobissimo and Yapta.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

23 Jul 2008 7:56pm GMT

Today Google has launched Knol, its Wikipedia alternative that holds authors accountable for the articles they write. Each article is created by a team of authors who receive attribution, and are allowed to take part in a rev-share for AdSense ads on their page. Other users can submit changes, but they have to be approved by the article's original authors before they go live on the site (it's basically a moderated Wikipedia).

Google says that it will allow multiple people to create Knols on the same subject. Knol allows users to rate and review Knols, and will likely include ranking as part of search results so we don't have to sift through countless articles on the same topics. You can see an example article (a Knol that tells you how to write Knols) here.

The big news here is that by assigning ownership and allowing authors to include AdSense ads on their articles, Google is effectively offering a monetary incentive to create good content. In theory, the best articles will get the most attention, and in turn the most revenue.

Unfortunately, this plan may backfire on Google. We're going to start seeing a flurry of articles on the most popular content - expect to see dozens of biographies on Barack Obama and John McCain in the next few days. For these popular subjects the system should work well - a few lucky (and hopefully credible) articles will rise to the top, and the rest will fade away. But for less popular topics there won't be any incentive for anyone to write anything.

Wikipedia works well because it's almost like a charitable organization. Everyone contributes what they can in the hopes of furthering the world's knowledge. Knol's community will likely be far more concerned with earning money than the general welfare, which may hurt both its credibility and the amount of participation it sees from the community.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0

23 Jul 2008 7:32pm GMT

According to the latest data from Hitwise, Facebook, which is kicking off its developer conference today, grew 40% over the last year, while its biggest competitor, MySpace, saw a 6% drop in visits since June 2007. The numbers for average time spent on these two sites almost directly mirror the numbers for visits, with MySpace being down 4% and Facebook up 41%.

Even though Facebook is slowly catching up to MySpace, the gap between the two is still large, with Facebook having a 17% market share and MySpace 72%.

While Facebook users are starting to spend a lot more time on the site, the average MySpace users still spends about 10 more minutes there than the average Facebook user (21 min).

MyYearbook

MyYearbook, interestingly, saw the largest gain of all social networks, a trend we have observed for quite a while now. It grew by almost 320%, though it only has a market share of 1.5%. Its users are also among the most loyal and spend about 30 minutes on the site. MyYearbook, as the name implies, mainly targets the high school market.

England

The data for the UK social networking market is quite different. There, Facebook already has a 45% market share, up an astonishing 172%, while every other major social network there lost between 20% (Bebo) and close to 50% (Friends Reunited and Myspace).

Facebook Still Trying to Catch Up

While Facebook is the fastest growing network and MySpace is bleeding users at a slow by steady clip, Facebook still has a long way to go before it will catch up to MySpace. Even though MySpace has a bad reputation in the blogosphere (though, thanks to some recent initiatives like Data Availability and OpenID integration, this tide might be slowly turning) and Facebook gets a lot of the hype, if advertisers and developers want to reach the largest number of potential users, MySpace is still the place to go for the foreseeable future.

23 Jul 2008 7:26pm GMT

MySpace's upcoming music joint venture with 3 of the 4 major labels, first announced in April, will launch in September (EMI is still a holdout, but from what we hear they may be ready to fold soon). Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, mentioned that date and gave other details about the joint venture in an interview today with Adam Lashinsky at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Half Moon Bay, CA.

Afterward, he told TechCrunch Co-Editor Erick Schonfeld, who is attending the event, that MySpace Music will be a combination music store/subscription service, with unlimited playbacks of full tracks, but for free. The revenue model will be advertising and paid downloads. Advertisers are already lining up, with some eight-figure deals being negotiated.

This is the first time a launch date has publicly been revealed. MySpace is counting on the music store as a new growth business - and bringing in the major labels as equity partners helps ensure their long term buy-in. The seemingly successful Hulu business model which brought in News Corp and other content owners last year will set the example.

Music almost certainly plays a part of MySpace's continued dominance of Facebook in the U.S. Market. Facebook continues to rely on iLike for music - MySpace, by contrast, has already had a deep music offering and hosts pages for 5 million artists. MySpace says that 65% of their users embed music on their MySpace pages, and over 5 billion songs are streamed on MySpace each month.

There are still a lot of details that need to be explained about the MySpace music venture, and we still eagerly await announcement about the CEO of the new venture.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

23 Jul 2008 7:11pm GMT

We've discussed some tactics to get your company better engaged with social media. Lest you think there's a limit to how you can connect with business and customer facing audiences, we've assembled this list of more than 35 companies who are experimenting with social media in a host of different ways.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and it represents a wide variety of businesses, industries and social media tools. As you can see, engagement takes many forms. Some are likely to generate more discussions with the company while others might result better connections between customers. Some will fade away over the next 6-12 months while others will continue to grow and evolve.

There are no rules to what form your engagement has to take. Look at your company, identify its strengths, what types of conversations energize employees and determine how you can best grow/shape/build/join your own community.

If you have other examples of corporate social media engagement, please share them in the comments.

Blendtec is famous for its bevy of inexpensive "Will It Blend" videos posted on YouTube and shared by millions.

Adobe maintains a list of interesting company related websites and conversations on the social bookmarking site Delicious.

Best Western sponsors a blog,"On the Go with Amy," where the author travels the country writing about her experiences.

Cadence recently relaunched its website that now prominently promotes the company's community.

Cisco hosts 12 blogs addressing a variety of audiences for their global business.

Coca-Cola Conversations is a blog written by company historian Phil Mooney that focuses on Coke collectibles.

Dell leverages a variety of social media platforms for customer engagement, including an island in the virtual world of Second Life.

Ford publishes news releases with lots of multimedia content and employs a social media news release format to display them in their newsroom.

Fujifilm recently launched a social network to build a community of photo enthusiasts around its newest camera.

GM uses blogs to communicate directly with its customers around topics ranging from design to green tech.

H&R Block created a Facebook fan site to aggregate its social media activities, engage customers and offer tax advice/resources.

HP used Twitter to power a scavenger hunt at a recent conference.

HSBC built the HSBC Business Network to connect entrepreneurs using blogs, videos and forums.

IBM was the first large enterprise to embrace employee blogging and now boasts thousands of blogs related to every facet of its business.

Intel has also developed many social media touch points with its software communities, which includes blogs, Twitter and virtual worlds.

Intuit sponsors the Tax Almanac wiki, where anyone can find and contribute to this resource for tax information.

Jeep connects with customers via a community page with links to photos on Flickr, the company's MySpace and Facebook pages and a list enthusiast groups.

JetBlue employs social media as part of its training for JetBlue University, as this video explains.

Johnson & Johnson uses this blog to show another side of the company, with frequent video posts and interviews.

Lenovo launched "Voices of the Olympics Games" to aggregate posts from the athletes competing in Beijing.

Marriott CEO Bill Marriott posts regular updates and stories from his travels to Marriott properties around the world to fuel the content for this entertaining blog.

McDonalds maintains a blog to highlight the company's corporate social responsibility efforts.

National Geographic uses Google's new virtual world, Lively, to bring people together around its new show, LA Hard Hats.

New York Times is beta testing a Firefox add-on that allows users to share and comment on stories through a decentralized social network.

Nike started a social community on Loopd to connect athletes interested in surfing, BMX bike racing and similar activities with the brand.

SAP sponsored a global survey of social media professionals to learn more about social media worldwide.

Sears partnered with MTV to create a social network around Back to School shopping.

Southwest Airlines employees share their stories and communicate directly with customers through the "Nuts About Southwest" blog.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog is the example most often cited for what the CEO blog can be.

Starbucks started MyStarbucksIdea so that customers can submit ideas for the company which are then voted on by other users, the best of which will be implemented by the company.

Toyota started its own virtual world to promote its products in Japan (site is in Japanese).

Visa launched The Visa Business Network application on Facebook to connect small business users and to help them promote their businesses to a larger community.

Wells-Fargo blogs target two audiences; one examines the company's history and the other is for students interested in getting their finances in order.

WWE has a Facebook application, among other social networking tools and widgets, to bring fans closer to the action.

Xerox blogs address several of the company's core B2B constituencies.

Zappos uses Twitter for employees to communicate with Zappos customers about their shared love of footwear.

[Disclosure: Aaron Uhrmacher works with several Fortune 1000 companies, some of which are included in this list.]

Aaron Uhrmacher is a social media consultant at Text 100 Public Relations. In addition to his posts for Mashable, he blogs at: www.disruptology.com.

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

LinkedIn Launches Corporate Blog
Social Media Marketing FTW!
Save the Date for the New Communications Forum 2008
Be a Digg Rockstar with Social Media Firefox Extension
Communitelligence Executing Social Media Conference in Los Angeles, May 21-22
Ticket Giveaway to SMX Social Media in Long Beach, CA
WWE Smackdown Gets a Social Network

23 Jul 2008 6:38pm GMT

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on stage right now at Fortune's Brainstorm conference being interviewed by Fortune's David Kirkpatrick. Here are my notes live:

Q: What is Google's next great revenue stream?

Schmidt: How about text ads?

Q: The biggest knock against Google is that it is a one-product company. how do you respond to that?

Schmidt: Google is a one-product company. It is called Google. We think about features, not products. People usually talk about text ads when they say that. While the vast majority of our revenues comes from text ads, there is no single large category of text ads or geography. It is well diversified. We serve text ads against content that is not searchable.

Q: We select for people who share our values. We don't value experience very much. We also select for people who want to work with other people. Because it is collaborative.

Q: But you are known for saying that it is hard to manage larger groups?

Schmidt: If you look at the history of software development, all the interesting things that have been built have been built by two people. It is the nature of software technology.

Q: Isn't working in larger teams going to be necessary?

Schmidt: this is an unsolved problem. You start small, then you have big projects. You follow a traditional S Curve, but the time you have become like this you are entirely predictable {talks about 20 percent time as driving creativity and helping to recruit top technical people]. It serves as pressure cooker release valve.

Q: Almost every challenge you have has to do with scale. I hear more people saying I don't feel safe that Google should have so much information about me.

Schmidt: Because of the way technology works, all the technology companies are aggregating information about people. It is a political debate. Countries differ on this question. England has the largest number of closed circuit cameras by a factor of ten, but they also let you sue the papers if you feel you are defamed.

We get into constant problems with some prosecutor who subpoenas information we don't want to give them, and we resist it. Which is why we don't fully operate in China. Our argument is that information is not available in your domain. So countries are now trying to rewrite their laws to say this information cannot be available anywhere on the Internet.

Q&A from audience:

Q: What about mobile?

Schmidt: Our wireless initiative was a perfect outcome. It was the cost of an outcome. I am on the board of Apple. Last night I was in Palo Alto and there was a line outside. It shows the device is a step forward. IPhone's competitors all have dec A phone is GPS, a camera, a computer, and a browser. The Phone is tehfirst one with a really functional browser. We show full ads, so that is a huge for revenues/

The new category of apps that have not come out yet really is a breakthrough. One winner of the Android apps, it looks around, names the buildings it sees and tells you what is happening inside of them. That is a really interesting product. In mobile there are a lot od product that have that WOW factor, because of the use of GPS.

I think all the most interesting next-generation social apps will be mobile.

Q: [Sam Whitmore asks if Google does any work for the government related to the Patriot Act]

Schmidt: Regarding the Patriot Act or any of the three-letter organizations, absolutely not. We do provide the federal government with some search and other services through our [government] sales group.

Q: enterprise plans?

Schmidt:
The easiest for us to enter the enterprise is to address high pain levels like e-mail, messaging, calendaring.We have something like a million companies using these services, mostly small. My view is that it will be a many-year process, but we will create tools that will eventually go to the top.

[Interview is over].

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

23 Jul 2008 6:24pm GMT

Comscore has just released the latest data on Facebook growth patterns, which clearly show that Facebook's recent push to expand abroad has paid off. The site has seen extremely high growth rates across Latin America, The Middle East, and the Asia Pacific. Europe, which accounts for a much larger user base, continues to grow at a steady clip as well.

North America still accounts for nearly 40% of Facebook's monthly growth, but its rate remains fairly constant, hovering at an increase of around 47,000 uniques over the last seven months.

Earlier this year Facebook finally managed to catch up to MySpace's total unique visitors, largely on account of its rapid global expansion (MySpace continues to dominate in the US market).

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

23 Jul 2008 6:23pm GMT

Google has just launched Knol to the public, dubbed by many as the search giant's Wikipedia killer. My first reaction: not so fast. While Knol offers a way for anyone to create content about any subject, there are a few big differences.

First and foremost, each "Knol" is created by a single author, who can then choose to either accept or reject edits made by others in what Google is calling "moderated collaboration." Beyond that, Knol authors can insert AdSense on their Knols and earn revenue based on clicks. In reality, this sound less a lot less like the community collaborating on authoritative articles (Wikipedia) and a lot more like a potential land grab to create content for lucrative keywords.

However, Google does offer some options that should keep would-be opportunists at bay. Each Knol offers the ability for anyone to review or comment on it, which in turn raises or lowers the authority of the article. Google says that they "expect that there will be multiple knolls on the same subject, and we think that is good."

In giving a single author control over each Knol and its edits, it's hard to imagine the service will be as authoritative as Wikipedia (which, many would argue has its own biases). It seems more like Squidoo, where knowledgeable people can create good content and be rewarded for it, with the community at-large determining how valuable it is and recognizing that there may be some bias in the article.

Meanwhile, Knol could still be a huge traffic generator for Google and steal visitors from Wikipedia if it's integrated in search results - something Google has not been shy about doing with other properties like YouTube.

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

The Daily Poll: Is Google Knol a Wikipedia Killer?
16 More Years (at least) of Brin, Page, and Schmidt at Google
The Daily Poll: Which of Google's New Products Will Be the Most Successful?
Google Knol - More Of The Same
The Daily Poll: Is Yahoo Shine Competing with YPN Publishers?
The Daily Poll: What is Google?
Google Introduces the 'Knol'

23 Jul 2008 6:21pm GMT

San Francisco-based social network Hi5 is touting some data from comScore today pertaining to its Q1 and Q2 2008 performance. It claims to have grown 79% since the start of the year. Which, on its face, seems like an impressive figure. It charts an increase of unique monthly visitors from 31.4 million, circa December 2008, to 56.4m this past June. 25m more visitors in the space of 6 months looks quite good, yes?

Indeed, it looks especially sunshiny if sized up against the growth charts of Facebook (roughly 35%), MySpace (10%), Bebo (12%), et al. (Again, this data comes from a singular source.) While some of the hi5 membership are based within the US, the vast majority are located elsewhere, taking advantage of the network's renowned support for literally dozens of languages. Such fast-paced international growth doesn't only mean good news for hi5 itself, but the broader market in general. The global race is coming on strong.

That being said, however, it's necessary to put hi5's ascent into perspective. It may be showing commendable grow in the sheer volume of unique visitors recorded. But perhaps the most standard metric for the market is the simple statistic pertaining to registered members. In that case, hi5 is still quite far from a commanding leadership role. For instance, Facebook is now said to have a membership surpassing 120 million. MySpace has been showing slowing growth for some time (hence its seeming paltriness of its 10% rise over the last half year), but it still maintains a very close position to Facebook. (For all intents and purposes, both giants are more or less neck-and-neck at this point. Now the game for gold and silver is very much about sustaining current trends, since it is unlikely that a second major boom will endure for them specifically.)

So, on one hand we see hi5 making considerable strides. On the other, those strides don't make so vast a splash as they may seem to. Of course, one could take a quick look at the numbers espoused by comScore for spring and summer '08 and see that hi5 has itself a nice, solid following and think that its placement among the top 10 international networks is largely irrelevant. And in some sense, this is true. Hi5 has quite a few strong points, particularly in the Latin American market. But the fact is that now that we see the world-is-flat ideal making its way more and more into the mainstream consumer realm, competition is competition.

How a network exercises its position and how well it is able to climb the proverbial ladder after transforming from sapling to a literal tour de force is key to long-term strength and long-term validity. That's why points for sheer numerical popularity are part of the game. And in that sense, Hi5 is not dominant varietally and nor is it seen posting MySpace-like levels of revenue.

If you're curious about hi5's future, though, it's safe to say that the network will remain a strong contender. It has shown to be very quickly willing to bridge itself with projects like OpenSocial and has even allowed its language translation efforts to be tapped through that very system. It also acquired PixVerse recently to pursue cross-network chat. And internal development is proceeding apace. Suffice it to say that we'll still be hearing regularly from hi5, if not more so.

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

comScore Report Shows Global Growth of Social Networks
Facebook Apps Contribute 37% of Recent Growth
Social Networking Grows Significantly in the U.K.
Mindtouch Wiki Software Surpasses 100,000 Installs
Google Growth In Europe Outpacing The US
comScore Reports 89% Increase for Facebook Users
Skype Co-Founder Resigns as CEO

23 Jul 2008 6:19pm GMT

Sports fan community eFans has relaunched today with a larger focus on the community aspects of its site. As with many sports fan sites out there, the access to news regarding a wide array of sports categories is readily present. Some parts of the site, though, such as scoreboards, feel a bit unfinished and not interactive enough for a social network. But some new features with eFans' relaunch improve the way in which fans are connected within the community around sports news.

The most notable new feature for achieving this is probably the new module option that appears on users' profiles, displaying information about the sports categories and athletes in which they're interested. These modules act as mini applications, similar to the widgets you see on a Facebook profile for applications that have been added by that user.

In order to encourage more activity amongst users, the modules are interactive, and a visiting user can follow the modules' athlete or sport directly from the module, purchase any available items from the modules' shop, or purchase tickets for upcoming games. As eFans can also be used as a marketing platform for teams and athletes (provided through a separate type of eFans user account), promoting their merchandise, tickets and news updates through these modules could be quite beneficial within a sports community.

These modules would even be useful as external mini applications that can reside on other blogs and social networking profiles, enabling news content and product sales to occur on a much larger scale. Social media users are becoming quite familiar with the concept of having interactive "pieces" of content integrated with their profiles in this manner, and eFans has a unique offering of this that can be expanded in a number of different ways.

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Sports Social Network eFans Goes Out of Beta
iWon's Relaunch: Does it Need a Social Network?
Rootly's Third Relaunch Offers More Customization
Shelfari Relaunches (Again) with Better Search
MeeVee's Acquisition of Top 10 Sources Enhances Site Relaunch
mywaves Relaunches with New Mobile Features and Support from Nokia
crackspace Loses the "Bad" Name, Becomes ihiphop

23 Jul 2008 6:17pm GMT

PlayCrafter is a new web application that lets anyone create custom games by dragging and dropping elements around the screen. Built with Flex, Adobe's Ryan Stewart calls PlayCrafter part of "a whole new world of Flex!" It's really easy to use and a whole lot of fun.

If you read our coverage of the awesome drag and drop widget building tool SproutBuilder, think of PlayCrafter as the same kind of tool but for game creation. Read on for one example game and a demo video.

PlayCrafter is another example of the way the new web is enabling users to become creators and blowing up the world of content options everyone has to engage with. We love this kind of stuff. Adobe's success in creating tools that allow other people to create tools that enable other people still to create content is remarkable.

Below is one of the games the site offers as an example of what you can build. It's fun to play. If you create a cool game in PlayCrafter, embed it someplace and leave a link in the comments below.

23 Jul 2008 5:44pm GMT