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Posts Tagged ‘Google Yahoo’

The Yahoo Cycling Team Is Going To Love This New Google Maps Feature

Yahoo is backing a cycling team. I don’t know why — but they’re doing it. And today their passion got a little boost: from Google.

Google is announcing tomorrow at the National Bike Summit in Washington, DC that Google Maps will now include biking directions in the U.S. Apparently, this was the most-requested feature for the service, as some 57 million Americans ride bikes.

Thousands of miles of bike trails have been added to the maps. And there is also step-by-step directions, much like you can see for driving or public transportation directions in the maps. There is also a new layer that shows bike trails and bike-friendly areas on roads. Yes, it’s a bike-lover’s dream.

To make this new feature happen, Google partnered with Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, a nonprofit group that converts old rail lines into bike trails. The group have given Google information on some 12,000 miles worth of trails in the U.S.

To coincide with the launch, Google also has a cycling contest. To enter, you simply have to tweet with the hashtag #bikewithgoogle. The randomly selected winner will get a voucher for $2,500 to be used at American Cyclery.

I fully expect that hashtag to be dominated by members of Yahoo’s cycling team tomorrow.

Find out more about the new feature in the video below.

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Information Blocked: The Racial & Gender Makeup of Google & 4 Other Tech Giants

The Obama Administration told the country on Wednesday about all of the jobs saved since the U.S. Congress passed the stimulus package one year ago. This got us to thinking about how the technology world is faring in these hard times.

Unfortunately, some of the largest technology companies in the world don’t want their story to be told. In this post we tell the story about the racial and gender makeup of technology giants in Silicon Valley; and how diversity has changed over the past several years.

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Recently, federal regulators ruled in favor of five technology companies that waged an 18-month battle to block a San Jose Mercury News Freedom of Information request for employment information. The federal regulator ruled that collecting the data would cause “commercial harm” by potentially revealing the companies’ business strategy to competitors.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, Google, Yahoo!, Apple, Oracle and Applied Materials argued that the race and gender of its work force is a trade secret that cannot be released.

It’s a decision that borders on the absurd. It’s unbelievable that the racial makeup and gender of a company would reveal its strategy to competitors.

We highlight this news to point out how the lack of diversity in the tech sector prevents minorities from enjoying the high salaries and benefits that come when working for large technology companies.

Plus, as the Mercury News reports, it prevents us from understanding what the civil rights legislation should be in this day and age. Technology companies like Apple did not exist back in the 1960s when civil rights legislation first passed.

The issue about diversity in the tech economy is especially relevant when you look at what communities are suffering the most during this current recession. Joblessness among blacks is twice that of whites.

The Mercury News eventually did get access to Department of Labor data and the results show how great the gap is in the Silicon Valley:

“The Labor Department data ultimately obtained by the Mercury News shows that while the collective work force of 10 of the valley’s largest companies grew by 16 percent from 1999 to 2005, an already small population of black workers dropped by 16 percent, while the number of Hispanic workers declined by 11 percent. By 2005, only about 2,200 of the 30,000 Silicon Valley-based workers at those 10 companies were black or Hispanic.

In addition, among the roughly 5,900 managers at those companies in 2005, about 300 were either black or Hispanic — a 20 percent dip from five years earlier. Women slipped to 26 percent of managers in 2005, from 28 percent in 2000.”

We look at Google, Apple and Oracle as leaders in technology development. How they fare in terms of diversity is a matter that unfortunately will be kept in the shadows under the cloak of trade secrecy.

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Facebook and the Future of Free Thought

The consumption of news — that formerly-respected category of information outside of humorous cat and music videos that impacts hundreds of millions of peoples’ lives — could be substantially improved by new methods of subscription offered online. Unfortunately, that’s not happening. Numbers from web traffic analysts Hitwise released tonight indicate that almost nothing has changed in 10 years when it comes to popular consumption of news online. The big portals and search engines, delivering their version of news, remain in control. That’s bad for independent thinking and human free will.

If you were hoping that a new world of web technology would empower free-thinking people to subscribe to diverse sources of information and analysis about the world’s news, then Facebook, albeit a little awkward as a news-reading platform today, may be your best hope.

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On Monday we argued that Facebook’s call to users to subscribe to news outlets on the social network could soon make it the world’s leading news-reading platform. Hitwise picked up on that story and ran some numbers today. Their conclusion: Facebook already drives 350 times as much traffic to other websites in the “news and media” category (3.5%) as Google Reader does (.01%). Perhaps more importantly, though, Facebook, Google News (1.4%). and Google Reader together account for less than 5% of news sites’ total traffic. The #1, 2 and 3 drivers of traffic to news sites? Google, Yahoo and MSN – portals and search engines where the editorial judgement is made by centralized algorithms and powerful front-page editors.

So Facebook is the web’s most popular subscription-enabled place to read news; be it from links shared by friends or by becoming a Fan of news organizations like Facebook is now encouraging. That doesn’t mean that Facebook is yet a better news-reading service than dedicated RSS readers are. But it has certainly caught on as a way to read news far better than dedicated news-reading software has. In fact, it may offer the only meaningful chance that the technologies of online self-publishing and simple subscription are going to change the world like they ought to.

According to Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins tonight:

Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%. Facebook was the #4 source of visits to News and Media sites last week, after Google, Yahoo! and msn. News and Media is the #11 downstream industry after Facebook, receiving 3.69% of the social networking site’s traffic. To offer a comparison, 6% of downstream traffic from Facebook went to Shopping and Classifieds last week and 6% to Business and Finance and 15% went to Entertainment websites (YouTube in particular).

We detailed on Monday a number of ways in which Facebook was already the best place for millions of people to read and share news, but when looking at these Hitwise stats it’s important to realize that it’s traffic that’s being counted. So full feeds inside Google Reader deliver the whole story, whereas Facebook snippets require that readers click all the way through to the source site. None the less, a multiple of 350 is a multiple of 350.

Google News, the 2nd leading news reader according to Hitwise, made some nice changes this week around starring stories to track over time. That could increase its marketshare. But Do-It-Yourself subscription to diverse selections of news sources may be contrary to the contemporary human condition, as desirable as it may be. As web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman said in an unrelated post this week about the closed nature of the iPad: “The bulk of humanity doesn’t want a computing experience it can tinker with; it wants a computing experience that works.” The same could probably be said for news about the world, and look where it’s gotten us.

I’m not saying Facebook is a better way to read news than through an RSS reader. I’m saying no one uses RSS readers, even after years of their being as obviously life-changing as many of us know they are. Instead, people are beginning to use Facebook to read news. That’s good, because platforms that encourage independent subscription instead of just consumption of pre-selected news are very important.

Facebook Could Be Our Only Hope (Online)

The big story is of course that the vast, vast majority (like 95%) of traffic to news sites doesn’t come from news readers like Google Reader, Google News or Facebook at all. It comes from search engines and portals. Google, Yahoo and MSN. That’s what these numbers appear to indicate. Sure there’s a long tail of other sites like Twitter, Digg, HuffingtonPost etc. but it’s hard to imagine all those other sources at less than 1% each are adding up to much in aggregate. (We’ve asked Hitwise and await their response.)

Hitwise reported in September that of traffic leaving Twitter, for example, only 3.4% of it went to News and Media sites.

In other words, consumption of online news may not really have changed much for almost anyone in the last 10 years. You, dear reader who probably came here from Twitter or Google Reader or Facebook (maybe Digg if we’re lucky), appear to remain part of a freakishly small minority.

That minority may be disproportionately powerful, driving market trends (maybe) and running circles around information streams online (definitely), but the experience of finding out news about what’s going on in the world may not be a structurally different thing for almost anyone else, as it is for us.

This is your news on portals.

That doesn’t bode well for the long-tail of publishers, small voices given volume by easy publishing tools online. The subscription tools to make those long-tail voices a regular part of our news life have arrived – but no one is using them. Except Facebook, in growing numbers.

Above: News outlets post to Twitter using RSS, manually or with applications like Networked Blogs.

Facebook is the player to watch. Facebook – the dreaded privacy-violating, Farmville-drenched, closed-data, social networking megalith (which is also fun to use and great in many ways) – could be the web’s best hope for transforming the world through the power of online syndication and subscription.

So what are you going to do, Facebook? Are you going to move news about the world to an honored and important place on the site, are you going to reverse your December move pushing Fan-page subscriptions irrevocably public (a hostile environment for subscription) or are you just going to post an occasional post to the company’s blog about how you can use Facebook to subscribe to news feeds – through a tedious process?

I’m hoping Facebook will take this opportunity and encourage its giant nation of users to add subscriptions to diverse news sources to their news feeds of updates from friends and family. That could deliver a tangible improvement to the world’s information landscape, like the internet was always supposed to do.

Become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook and get all the most important web technology news and analysis delivered to you on the world’s leading news consumption platform!

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Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo compared at the macro level

We all love a good debate about how the tech giants of today are competing with each other, but rarely do we get a handy reference sheet like this to point people to. Nick Bilton of the New York Times has put together a segment-by-segment comparison between America’s tech heavyweights, which does a fine job of pinpointing who competes with whom and where. We find the gaps in coverage more intriguing than the overlaps, though, with Microsoft’s only unticked box — mobile hardware — raising habitual rumors of a Pink phone. Apple’s absence from the provision of mapping services might also soon be at an end, given the company acquired map maker Placebase in July of last year (see Computerworld). Anyway, there should be plenty more for you to enjoy, so hit the source for the full chart and get analyzin’.

Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo compared at the macro level originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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P2P cutoff "reserve powers" get reconsideration in UK

UK lawmakers behind the controversial Digital Economy bill have agreed to “refine” provisions that would allow the Secretary of State to modify sanctions against P2P users at any time without Parliamentary approval. Though the Department for Business insists that it’s not backing off from the provision, it is considering ways to narrow the scope of power.

The Digital Economy bill was introduced late last year and is meant to modernize the UK’s approach to everything from copyrights to broadband, video game ratings, and domain names. The bill itself doesn’t explicitly discuss sanctions for suspected file-sharers, but one section (Section 17) introduces “reserve powers.” In effect, whenever the Secretary of State decides that speed throttling or Internet disconnections are a good idea, he can implement them with a simple order. The government insisted at the time that such power will be introduced only against the “most serious infringers” and only “in the event the initial obligations do not prove as effective as expected.”

Unsurprisingly, these proposed powers generated an uproar of criticism, not only from users, but Internet companies and other lawmakers as well. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and eBay sent an open letter saying that such a bill would stifle innovation, while some House of Lords members have threatened to vote against it. As a result, the government is conceding—a little—by saying that it may make it more difficult to make changes except under “significant” threats, or without Parliamentary review.

This doesn’t mean section 17 is going away, though. “The Government remains squarely behind the aims of clause 17,” a spokesperson for the Department of Business told the BBC. “We have tabled a series of amendments which aim to clarify the breadth and scope of the clause and further reinforce the transparency of the process and the scrutiny of Parliament.”

Indeed, it’s clear that no one has reversed course here, but the reconsideration means that there’s still some sanity left when defining the scope of this bill.

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Google Brings Friend Connect, Social Features to Drupal & Joomla

Google has just announced that its powerfully social Friend Connect features are now available for open-source content management systems Drupal and Joomla.

Google Friend Connect (GFC) allows sites with these CMSes to integrate many social features without having to write any code. The impact of the integration has the potential to be significant, as Drupal in particular is one of the most widely-used content management systems in use on the Web today, powering sites from WhiteHouse.gov and NASA.gov to TheOnion.com and websites for celebrities and musicians like Britney Spears and Eric Clapton. Joomla is used by such institutions as Harvard, MTV and Citibank.

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Friend Connect essentially allows site visitors to become site members by using profile information from services such as Google, Yahoo!, Twitter and more. With user accounts authenticated via OpenID, site administrators can add Friend Connect’s social bar, a site members gadget, the Friend Connect comments gadget or recommendations in any part of the site they choose.

In addition to adding social gadgets, Friend Connect also allows site admins to conduct polls, monitor community growth, create and distribute email newsletters, run ads through AdSense, export user data for a site’s entire community (as XML or JSON) or create their own apps using the GFC APIs.

“Even site owners without programming experience can add these plugins,” writes developer and open-source aficionado Mauro González in Google’s Social Web blog post. “Now that Friend Connect is integrated with these popular open source CMS platforms, site owners can make registration easier for users and offer them a set of social features – all without writing a single line of code.”

GFC represents an interesting – and perhaps underused – suite of tools in an increasingly competitive space. Many site owners are adding social features to blogs and sites through systems such as JS-Kit’s Echo or Disqus, and Joomla and Drupal both have many extensions and plugins to allow for the same kinds of features and functions. Still, making GFC available for the CMSes that power many highly visible sites around the Web might do a lot of good for that product.

Overall, we see this announcement as indicative of a set of trends: Portable user identities, highly interactive content, portable communities and open-source software.

What do you think: Will more site users be integrating Friend Connect to allow for more social website experiences? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

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Google Experimenting With Browser Login For Chrome OS

Google has made a change to Chrome OS to move the user login from the machine to the browser. Our guess is Google is, or will eventually use, Google Friend Connect to facilitate login.

The feature was first mentioned on October 13: “Using Chrome as our login manager has a number of potential benefits.
Explore these tradeoffs and decide what to do about the login manager.” The code was checked in on December 14: “An early version of this change is finally in. It’s not ready for daily use yet, and we haven’t gotten the network picker on there or anything yet, but at least we’ve got a baseline in there. I’m filing issues for the follow-on work.”

There are lots of potential benefits to having users log into machines via the browser. In particular it makes syncing easier and furthers the notion that you can log into any Chrome OS machine and have exactly the same experience as you would on any other machine. The fact that users can’t download any software to Chrome OS computers furthers this experience.

But it’s also clearly interesting from an identity standpoint. Facebook and Twitter are both making strong plays as the defacto online identity for hundreds of millions of Internet users. Facebook Connect in particular is becoming a very popular way for third party sites to easily add identity and login features to apps (it’s what we use on our own CrunchBase).

But people using Chrome OS devices will be logging into the Internet first and foremost with a Google account, or via Friend Connect (which currently allows signin via Google, Twitter, Yahoo, AIM, Netlog, OpenID, etc.). By centralizing authentication once, Google can then use the same Friend Connect credentials to automatically login to sites that support it.

If Chrome OS becomes popular, it will be a very powerful weapon for Google to compete with Facebook Connect.

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Facebook Will Be Google-able (If Your Profile is Set to Public)

At Google’s event today, the company announced not just a number of fantastic new features, including real-time search, but a new partnership as well: real-time search of public Facebook status updates.

A Google/Twitter partnership was announced months ago but we assumed that Facebook wouldn’t allow Google to index many details of its site because the two are fast becoming big rivals. Thus today’s announcement is a very big surprise.

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The integration of Facebook updates into Google search isn’t live yet; Google just said “soon” at its event today. The company also declined to comment on whether they were paying for access to this information. It has been presumed that Twitter is being paid by partners including Google, Bing and Yahoo for access to its firehose of updates.

SearchEngineLand’s Danny Sullivan pointed out at the Google event today that there was some real irony in the fact that these real-time sources may be receiving millions from the search engines, while newspapers have demanded payment from Google for inclusion in search, but have been rebuffed.

Want your Facebook updates to stay out of Google? If that’s a concern, you needn’t worry. Only people who have changed their privacy settings to Public will have their content show up in Google. Facebook would like you to change that setting, but you don’t need to worry about your private content being sold to Google without your opting-in by changing your settings.

If Facebook is able to prod more users into sharing more content publicly, then it could rival Twitter in importance among real-time sources. Facebook has approximately 10 times as many users as Twitter today, but the fact that its default privacy setting is private means far less content is available for indexing. In addition to a potential for greater quantity, Facebook also holds far more personal information about its users, meaning that search tactics like personalization and localization would have more data points to process.

Ultimately, the real-time web remains larger than both of these sources and the newly-included MySpace partnership (also announced today). There is so much implicit real-time data online that few real-time search startups use only explicit data, like shared links, from social networks. For example, user click-streams are being indexed by real-time startups like OneRiot and Wowd, and user presence data is a valuable piece of real-time data being leveraged by startups like Aardvark. Google could try to revise its contract with users to allow indexing of click-streams, though, and TechCrunch reported last night that the company is trying to acquire Aardvark as we speak.

This real-time search stuff is just beginning.

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