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Posts Tagged ‘Public Profile’

Google Responds to Critics: Makes Small Changes to Buzz

Google Buzz, which launched two days ago, has been widely criticized for making the lists of who you follow and who follows you public by default. Until now, the check box to turn this “feature” off was hidden in your Google Profile settings – which many people never even realized they had. Now, however, Google announced that it is making it more obvious to new users that these lists will be public and will offer clear instructions to turn the public disclosure of this information off. In addition, Google now also allows Buzz users to block people from following them, even if they haven’t created a profile yet.

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Even though Buzz now makes it clearer that your public profile will include a list of users and makes it easier to turn this feature off, this remains an opt-out feature. We think that it would be far better for Google to make this an opt-in feature so that those users who don’t read the disclosure information closely when they first use Buzz won’t inadvertently share information they would rather keep private.

“Tens of Millions” of Users Already

In addition to announcing these changes, Google also notes that “tens of millions of people have checked Buzz out, creating over 9 million posts and comments.” In addition, Google is currently registering over 200 posts per minute through the mobile interface. Given that Google is giving Buzz a prominent spot in the Gmail interface, this doesn’t come as a surprise, but it also shows Buzz’s potential as a mainstream geo-social network.

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Email as Identity: Google Turns on WebFinger

If you’ve been on the Internet for long enough, you may remember the old UNIX finger command. With finger, you could just type in a command like finger email@readwriteweb.com and the email server would return more information about this person. Today, Google enabled the next generation of the finger command – WebFinger – for all Gmail accounts. WebFinger provides users with a standardized and decentralized way of sharing their profile and identity information online

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Google began a small beta test of WebFinger in August 2009. Today, Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick announced that the company has now enabled WebFinger fall all Google accounts with public profiles.

Making Your Email Address More Useful

You can think of WebFinger as an email-centric cousin of OpenID. While OpenID associates your identity with a URL, WebFinger links your identity to your email address. WebFinger can store metadata about your account and make it publicly accessible. This data can include your public profile data, information about other services that are used by this email address, a URL to your avatar, or – if you choose so – a declaration that this address doesn’t have any metadata associated with it. The WebFinger metadata can also point to an alternative identity provider, which can be an OpenID server.

Currently, there are not a lot of user-facing projects that expose this data, but you can find a small demo service written by Google engineer DeWitt Clinton here.

Adding Value to Google Profiles

With Buzz, Google already put a lot of emphasis on Google Profiles and today’s announcement increases the value of these profiles even more. It’s important to note, though, that WebFinger is an open and free protocol, so any email service and identity provider can implement it. You can find more detailed information about the WebFinger protocol here.

Image Credit: Flickr user purpelslog.

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Google Social Search: Twitter And FriendFeed Highlighted. What About Facebook?

Last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer took the stage for two reasons. The first was to formally announce the Google/Twitter search deal, but the second was the show off a new product: Google Social Search. The on-stage demonstration was interesting, but left a lot of questions unanswered. Today, the Google Labs experiment goes live, and we’ll get those answers.

Social Search essentially pulls in information from social networks to augment Google search results. But a major question is: What social networks get pulled it? While the experiment isn’t quite live yet, it would seem that from the video below made by Google’s Matt Cutts, Social Search, at least at first, will be able to include results from Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa, Blogger, and Google Reader.

The last three are obvious since Google owns all of those. Twitter seems obvious too because of the new Google/Twitter search deal. FriendFeed is an interesting one though since Facebook bought that service in August. As expected, it doesn’t appear that Facebook data will play a big role in Social Search (if any), as Google and Facebook continue their social profile stand-off. Cutts makes it clear that public data is the key to all of this, and Facebook doesn’t exactly have the most public information. That’s too bad since Facebook is, after all, the largest social network.

Cutts explains that the idea behind all of this is to utilize your “social circle.” The key to populating this social circle is your Google Public Profile. On this profile, the different social networking profiles you list yourself as being a member of will be a signal to Google to scour those networks for social data to serve up in its new results.

Interestingly, in the second video below, explaining how Google Social Search works, a Facebook profile appears in the lists of profiles. But again, in all the experiments, no data from Facebook seems to show up.

For its social circle, Google is going deeper as well. For example, if you follow 100 people on Twitter, Google will look at their public updates when you search for things, but it will also look at the friends or your friends for even more data. This is similar to what FriendFeed has done in the past to help surface other information that may be relevant to you. Google calls this your “extended social circle.”

Google also uses your Gmail chat buddies to build out your social circle.

When it’s live, you’ll be able to find Social Search here on Google’s Experimental search page.

Update: And now it’s live.

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Things Have Changed: Facebook to Open Public Messages to Search

Facebook began as a place for college connections, secluded from the prying eyes of the outside world, but today that era is officially over. Major Facebook investor Microsoft announced this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit that it has closed deals to bring status messages from both Twitter and Facebook into the search results of Bing.com. Twitter search is live now, Facebook is forthcoming.

Facebook is opening up to a search engine – that’s very big news. Only content from accounts marked public will be indexed by Bing, but it’s a sea change none the less. Facebook has an explicit, acknowledged agenda to make more people comfortable sharing more information publicly – once they do, that information will be searchable on Bing. This ‘aint your big sister’s Facebook anymore.

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Facebook opened on-site search across user profiles and messages late this summer. The company has been careful to only expose information from people who have opted-out of their own default privacy settings and we don’t expect this Bing deal to be any different. While some people like Facebook because of the privacy settings, a growing number of users like it for the promotional and networking advantages that can be maximized with a public profile.

You don’t want to be public with your Facebooking? Facebook will respect that, but the company does hope you’ll change your mind.

Facebook status messages used to be entirely closed to outside search engines – and now they will not be. Even these public search results won’t be full participants in the open web, though. It’s very unlikely that Bing will be allowed to cache the Facebook messages it serves up. Facebook prohibits other software from keeping user data in cache because the company says users must be allowed to change privacy settings and have those reflected everywhere around the web that Facebook data could be found. That’s an unusual arrangement for a search engine. It breaks one of the fundamental laws of the internet – that what you publish publicly once is public forever.

Will the company make a similar deal with Google? Probably not. Twitter may have gone both ways, but Facebook’s long term ambitions to challenge Google and the Microsoft backing could mean that the world’s leading search engine will never be allowed to index the world’s leading social network.

Say hello to the new Facebook, now a partial player in one public part of the rest of the web.

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Dotopen Opens For Business – It’s Like FriendFeed For Companies

Barcelona-based dotopen has launched its B2B communication platform in public beta today in another attempt to create a successful matchmaking service for businesses where decision makers could come to collaborate and connect with each other.

We’ve heard that a million times before, but I got an early peak of the platform when I was in Spain for the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference last month and there is one thing that I think differentiates dotopen from the likes of LinkedIn, XING, etc.: it’s not so much focused on connecting people in companies than it is to provide an up-to-date, stream of information on the company itself and start from there.

When I got the demo, I immediately thought of it like some sort of ‘FriendFeed for companies’, and the startup’s founders Rudy De Waele and Carles Ferreiro said there are effectively some comparisons to be made in that regard. The idea is for companies to set up a public profile on the service and dynamically and manually populate it with streams of information, creating a virtual ecosystem of businesses that decision makers could use to find new partners and clients.

I registered a startup I’m involved with myself, Oxynade, to see what kind of data can be added to the public profile (which you can find here). Apart from basic company information, you can add streams and social networking profiles for key management, indicate what you’re looking for as a company (e.g. ‘new partnerships with media publishers’) and insert a stream of feeds from blogs, Twitter accounts, etc. You can also detail your financials and which companies you’ve partnered, affiliated and/or competing with.

You could deem dotopen to be a potential competitor for our own CrunchBase, but the difference is that dotopen focuses more on wrapping an open community feel to the service targeted at company management only, while CrunchBase is a free wiki-based database accessible to everyone.

It’s an interesting concept, but time will tell if it will be able to attract enough companies to register a profile and effectively use the platform to expand their business. As usual, there’s the chicken or egg problem: dotopen can only be really useful when there are lots of companies sharing data, so the goal would be to try and get as much traction from day one (that would be today) and make the experience good enough for them to share and recommend the service to others.

What’s your take?

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