The crazy truth: Google+ can thrive alongside Facebook

 It's easy to call Facebook the social network of the past.
It's harder to build the social network of the future.
To hear Bradley Horowitz tell it, though, Google is well on its way. Google+, he says, lets people share with others in a more natural way than its competitors. Easy privacy controls, an environment free from obtrusive advertising, and highly polished mobile apps combine on Google+ to deliver a next-generation social network, as Horowitz tells it.
"It's not attempting to chase the social networks of the past," he said inthis week in the buisness insuder conference held in New York, in an assertion that launched a hundred headlines. "We're charting our own course, and it's a different course."
The 15-minute interview with Google's vice president of product for Google+ showed off a refreshingly pugnacious side of a social network that's been rather quiet as of late -- and, in doing so, got the network its best press coverage in months. (Slagging on Facebook's increasingly advertising-heavy newsfeed, which no one besides Facebook investors are excited about, can do that for you.) Horowitz went on to suggest that Facebook fails to capture the way people interact in the real world. As a result, he drew renewed attention to the Facebook-Google rivalry that began in earnest last year when Google, a laggard in social software, launched Google+.

 

But the fascination with Google+ as a would-be Facebook killer obscures the larger story about what Google+ offers. Yes, Google+ competes with Facebook -- for users, for buzz, and ultimately, for ad dollars. But it means more to Google than simply fending off a fast-growing competitor.
Google+ is really two things. One is a destination for connecting with friends and subjects that interest them. When the press writes about Google+, it's usually in this context
But Google+ plays a second role, as a product that improves other products. Google tends to talk about this in abstract terms -- it's "a social spine;" it's a "fabric;" it "weaves" Google products together. Let's try to be a little more concrete about what Google+ is doing besides giving people a Facebook alternative.
Google+ is a feed of what your friends share online. Did your friend download an app in the Google Play store? Her name will show up front and center when you search for the same app. Searching Google Shopping? Your friend's reviews rise to the top. Did your friend click +1 on a link they found through search? You will see it when you run your own query on the same subject. Google calls these "social signals," and views them as an essential part of improving nearly all their consumer products. Expect to see more of them.
Google+ is a single sign-on system. Until the social network launched in June 2011, users of various Google services used different identities for each. You were one person on Gmail, another on YouTube, yet another on Blogger. When you visited the search engine, you were little more than an IP address. This drove Google crazy. (It wasn't much fun for users keeping track of different logins and passwords for each service, either.) By creating a single, unified login, Google gained the ability to personalize services (and ads) across all its products. This has not been universally popular, but it has almost certainly been simpler.
Google+ is a data mine. The unified login means Google can start tracking users' interests and behavior around the Web. Follow a bunch of ski resorts on Google+, and Google might eventually show you more search ads for skiing products. If your friends like a certain brand, that might show up higher in results, along with a "social annotation" informing you of your friend's endorsement. Advertisers are arguably way more interest in this stuff than users are, but Google contends that it leads to more relevant ads from which everyone benefits. (So far, companies have found that those social annotations boost ad clicks by double-digit percentages, Google says.)
"Over the past decade, Google has come to provide the products and services that have become essential to internet users... not only Google search but also the Chrome browser, the Ndroid Phone, YouTube, Gmail... the list goes on and on," Horowitz told me in an e-mail. "Google+ was designed from its inception as a foundational, unifying layer that makes these already great services even greater. So Google+ is different. It's not only an innovative new social network, it is also the identity, relationship and interest system for Google."
What's important about these aspects of Google+ is that they benefit the company and its customers regardless of whether Google+ ultimately wipes Facebook off the map. The social signals, personalization and improved ad targeting that Google+ creates are arguably by themselves enough to justify the entire effort from Google's perspective. It may be less compelling as a news story than a virtual death match between Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page, but it's real.
But don't underestimate FacebookThat said, Horowitz did say Facebook is the social network of the past. And for now that looks like a case of Google spin getting ahead of the facts.
Facebook's billion monthly active users make it 10 times the size of Google+, even if Google did hit the 100 million active-user mark in roughly a quarter of the time that Facebook did. Zuckerberg and Co. have made Facebook indispensable across a wide range of products. Its photos, events and messaging features are world class. Timeline has successfully enticed millions of people to upload their entire lives to the service, turning it into a virtual scrapbook that would be hard to abandon.  has become a wildly popular, near-universal login for countless apps and much of the Web. (The company says eight of the top 10 iOS apps, and 40 percent of the top 400 apps, integrate with Facebook.) Then there's the open garph, still in its early stages, which aspires to bring the rest of the Web directly into the news feed.
To this high-stakes fight over the future of social networking, Google+ has brought ... privacy controls. And video chat. And a promise to keep ads out of the news feed, at least for now. Plus some nice mobile apps.
It's little wonder, then, that according to (admittedly ancient) available statistics on the average amount of time users spend in each social network, Facebook is ahead of Google+ by leaps and bounds. Google said in the end of june active users spend 12 minutes a day on the site; we requested updated numbers from ComScore, which furnished numbers to the Wall Street Journal in February on the subject, and didn't hear back.
Of course, Facebook took longer than the 18 months that Google+ has been in the marketplace to become the juggernaut it is today. And it's easy to forget that people thought Google was hopelessly late to the party when it launched ... a search engine.
To date, Google has focused on using Google+ to improve its existing products. The bigger test of the network will come when it invests more heavily in turning it into a destination, giving users a reason to return to it constantly. Horowitz said he aspires to make Google+ the social network where you go to wish your friends a happy birthday. That's a long way off.
Even if Google+ never becomes the Web's hottest property, Google still stands to reap significant benefits from it. Facebook doesn't have to lose for Google+ to be successful. But Google will invest huge resources into seeing that it does. As Horowitz showed this week, Google is coming out swinging. Now let's see if it can land a punch.

Exclusive: Inside Google Spanner, the Largest Single Database on Earth

Each morning, when Andrew Fikes sat down at his desk inside Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, he turned on the “VC” link to New York.
VC is Google shorthand for video conference. Looking up at the screen on his desk, Fikes could see Wilson Hsieh sitting inside a Google office in Manhattan, and Hsieh could see him. They also ran VC links to a Google office in Kirkland, Washington, near Seattle. Their engineering team spanned three offices in three different parts of the country, but everyone could still chat and brainstorm and troubleshoot without a moment’s delay, and this is how Google built Spanner.
“You walk into our cubes, and we’ve got VC on — all the time,” says Fikes, who joined Google in 2001 and now ranks among the company’s distinguished software engineers. “We’ve been doing this for years. It lowers all the barriers to communication that you typically have.”

‘As a distributed-systems developer, you’re taught from — I want to say childhood — not to trust time. What we did is find a way that we could trust time — and understand what it meant to trust time.’

— Andrew Fikes

The arrangement is only appropriate. Much like the engineering team that created it, Spanner is something that stretches across the globe while behaving as if it’s all in one place Unveiled the fall after years of hints and rumors, it’s the first worldwide database worthy of the name — a database designed to seamlessly operate across hundreds of data centers and millions of machines and trillions of rows of information.
Spanner is a creation so large, some have trouble wrapping their heads around it. But the end result is easily explained: With Spanner, Google can offer a web service to a worldwide audience, but still ensure that something happening on the service in one part of the world doesn’t contradict what’s happening in another.
Google’s new-age database is already part of the company’s online ad system — the system that makes its millions — and it could signal where the rest of the web is going. Google caused a stir when it published a research paper detailing Spanner in mid-September, and the buzz was palpable among the hard-core computer systems engineers when Wilson Hsieh presented the paper at a conference in Hollywood, California, a few weeks later.
“It’s definitely interesting,” says Raghu Murthy, one of the chief engineers working on the massive software platform that underpins Facebook — though he adds that Facebook has yet to explore the possibility of actually building something similar.

Google’s web operation is significantly more complex than most, and it’s forced to build custom software that’s well beyond the scope of most online outfits. But as the web grows, its creations so often trickle down to the rest of the world.
Before Spanner was revealed, many didn’t even think it was possible. Yes, we had “NoSQL” databases capable of storing information across multiple data centers, but they couldn’t do so while keeping that information “consistent” — meaning that someone looking at the data on one side of the world sees the same thing as someone on the other side. The assumption was that consistency was barred by the inherent delays that come when sending information between data centers.
But in building a database that was both global and consistent, Google’s Spanner engineers did something completely unexpected. They have a history of doing the unexpected. The team includes not only Fikes and Hsieh, who oversaw the development of BigTable, Google’s seminal NoSQL database, but also legendary Googlers Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and a long list of other engineers who worked on such groundbreaking data-center platforms as Megastore and Dremel.
This time around, they found a new way of keeping time.
“As a distributed systems developer, you’re taught from — I want to say childhood — not to trust time,” says Fikes. “What we did is find a way that we could trust time — and understand what it meant to trust time.”

Time Is of the Essence

On the net, time is of the essence. Yes, in running a massive web service, you need things to happen quickly. But you also need a means of accurately keeping track of time across the many machines that underpin your service. You have to synchronize the many processes running on each server, and you have to synchronize the servers themselves, so that they too can work in tandem. And that’s easier said than done.
Typically, data-center operators keep their servers in sync using what’s called the Network Time Protocol, or NTP. This is essentially an online service that connects machines to the official atomic clocks that keep time for organizations across the world. But because it takes time to move information across a network, this method is never completely accurate, and sometimes, it breaks altogether. In July, several big-name web operations experienced problems — including Reddit, Gawker, and Mozilla — because their software was'nt prepared to handle a “leap second” that was added to the world’s atomic clocks.

‘We wanted something that we were confident in. It’s a time reference that’s owned by Google.’

— Andrew Fikes

But with Spanner, Google discarded the NTP in favor of its own time-keeping mechanism. It’s called the TrueTime API. “We wanted something that we were confident in,” Fikes says. “It’s a time reference that’s owned by Google.”
Rather than rely on outside clocks, Google equips its Spannerized data centers with its own atomic clocks and GPS (global positioning system) receivers, not unlike the one in your iPhone. Tapping into a network of satellites orbiting the Earth, a GPS receiver can pinpoint your location, but it can also tell time.
These time-keeping devices connect to a certain number of master servers, and the master servers shuttle time readings to other machines running across the Google network. Basically, each machine on the network runs a daemon — a background software process — that is constantly checking with masters in the same data center and in other Google data centers, trying to reach a consensus on what time it is. In this way, machines across the Google network can come pretty close to running a common clock.

Meet the most dangerous button on your computer

NEED TO KNOW

• 'Reply to All' can also function as a self-destruct button
• NYU student mistakenly replied all to 40k people this week
• 'The Internet doesn't just enable mistakes, it amplifies them'

We’re often told there is a fine line between love and hate. But did you know you can actually see this line? And by the way, it is pretty fine.
In fact it’s probably somewhere on your screen right now. It’s that tiny little vertical strip in your Compose Email box, which separates Reply from Reply to All.
Got a ridiculous group email from your boss to which you just have to fire off a snide reply to a co-worker? “Reply”.LOVE.
Got a ridiculous group email from your boss to which you just have to fire off a snide reply to a co-worker? “Reply to All”.HATE.
That button is flammable; capable of setting your career, friendships and relationships on fire. The first thing you hit is "Send". The next thing you want to hit is the Panic Button.
It’s a very fine line. And at this point in the long-enough history of digital communication, we all know someone (perhaps in the mirror, *facepalm*) who has crossed it.

 

Where it's @! Web's favourite ymbol to be honoured

This week, we met NYU student and computer science minor, Max Wiseltie who replied all to 40,000 people on a campus-wide email. A humiliating way to introduce yourself, but at least the benign content of Max’s email (a brief question intended for his mom) left him with a few shreds of dignity still intact.
And hey, it’s college. Someone else is bound to screw up even worse and more publicly any day now. Max will be off the hook (with the exception of any Google searches of his name from now until forever) and free of the piercing hallway glares in no time.
The same cannot be said, however, for the public relations professional who inadvertently replied all to her entire company -- with a confidential document listing the salaries of every one of their 200 employees.
Or the creative director who trashed his colleaguesin an email to a co-worker, unknowingly clicked Reply All on a message including those very colleagues and calmly went back to work. For about one minute – when the first of many messages alerting him of what he’d done landed in his inbox. Followed immediately, no doubt, by flop sweat, heart palpitations and a hastily booked plane ticket to anywhereintheworldohmygodjustgetmeoutofhererightnnow.
We’ve had how long now to figure out how to use email? And so many of us still keep making this basic, self-immolating mistake? Like, at what point in the 1930s did drivers finally stop stepping on the gas when they meant to tap the brakes? What’s that? It still happens? And several times an hour on Miami Beach? Well then. This whole thing may linger a bit longer than I anticipated.

 

Opinion: Your iPad is not babysitter

And yet the sides of the (standby for a phrase you haven’t heard in 20 years information Superhighway remain littered with the disposed reputations of those poor, poor bastards who committed the simple sin of merely misfiring on their mouse. The Internet doesn’t just enable our mistakes, it amplifies them.
A friend has deemed Reply All the Most Dangerous Button On The Computer and I’m pretty sure he’s right. But if that’s the most dangerous button, than Recall Message is the most useless.
It seems like your emergency digital zip cord in these cases, but the thing is a total tease. It typically only works if the recipient has not yet opened your regrettable message. So in most instances, no, it will not unsend your email, won’t scrub your humiliation off the Internet’s floors.
Basically all it does is send another message to everybody, drawing further attention to the fact you totally screwed up and that you now really, really want that one back. But you’re not getting it.
There are some functional out clauses: Gmail users can flip on a feature which spots you 30 seconds to undo any sent message and there’s a program for Outlook called "Reply to all monitor", which prompts you to confirm that you really want everyone receiving your message.

 

Whoops: 40,000 student in best/worst "Reply all" chain over

Which would be an excellent way to prevent the phenomenon known as an rmail storm. In this variation – which you’ve very likely experienced – the content of the message is nothing especially sinister or awful, but the “everybody’s got something super clever to say to everybody else” torrent of server-jamming replies, is. This is exactly what happened in that NYU debacle.
The email storm’s typical life cycle usually recharges when someone announces they want off this list. And 30 more "Please stop emailing everybody!" emails immediately follow.

Watch The World's Cheapest Tablet In Action, DataWind's $40 Ubislate 7ci

The lastest version of the Indian-designed Aakash tablet could shake up education in developing countries and double the number of people who have access to the Internet. Will DataWind deliver?

 

 

 More than 6 billion people in the world have cell phones of some kind. But only a quarter of the developing world has access to the Internet.

Suneet Singh Tuli, the CEO of DataWind, believes that the super-cheap Aakash Tablet(called the Sufislate 7ci) will give low-income Indians, and low-income earners in other developing countries, a shot at connectivity--fruit vendors and rickshaw drivers who can't or won't buy a computer, much less a third-screen iPad.
“We are used to new tablets that break some performance barrier,” Tuli tells Fast Company. The question DataWind goes after is this one: “What is the right set of specs for the entry level consumer, and what is the lowest price [it can sell at].”

It has the basic functionality of a smartphone, Wi-Fi connectivity, rear- and front-facing cameras, and a micro-USB port (!). The parts are assembled in China and India (a sort of nabulous supply chain). It runs Android 4, like many high-end smartphones, but Tuli plans to sell the tablet at a fraction of what many of those cost.
The Indian government has put in a bulk order for the device at $40, and then the plan is to offer it to students at $20. But beyond the educational market, Tuli believes there is a deep need for connectivity in India that his extremely cheap tablet will fill.
He has a point. World-wide, cellphone penetration is booming but Internet access lags by about 4 billion. "That gap is not because of connectivity or access—they’re using mobile phones, they have some way of charging those things. That gap is affordability. Killing the affordability gap is going to bring on the next 2 or 3 billion people." Tuli sees his tablets becoming as prolific as calculators once they catch on. Because of duties and taxes the tablet will almost certainly cost more when it is commercially sold. Though, Tuli hopes that if DataWind can bring the price down to a certain point, the government will waive some taxes altogether.
As an example, DataWind asked students at IIT Kanpur to build a series of test apps that could potentially work in such situations. Tuli says the “winner” was an app that allowed the fruit vendor to keep a track of his inventory, and customers, and record how much he was earning and spending.
It's not just the developing world. In places like the U.S. and Canada, Suneet Singh Tuli believes DataWind could be the Walmart of tablets, filling a need in households that want a spare Internet device without splurging on a smartphone or a new computer.
Tuli makes a good case for his budget device, but how quickly he will be able to make it available to students, much less put it on for sale to the rest of us, remains to be seen. The company's top priority for now is filling the Indian government's order of 100,000 . That’s a target Tuli is not sure they'll hit in time, but that won’t stand in the way of the project going forward, he says.

Apple App Store Revenue Dwarfs Android App Store Sales: Report

But the global sales gap between the Apple and Android app stores is "shrinking every month," according to a new study by analyst firm App Annie.

Global Apple App Store sales revenue in October totaled four times the revenue brought in by Google's Android Play Store for the same period, but the Play Store scored a huge 311 percent growth rate since January, setting the stage for interesting competition between the two vendors.
Those results come from a new research study from analyst firm App Annie, which has been following the app store marketplace for the past 18 months and sees Apple and Google ultimately reaching equilibrium at some point in the future.
In its 16-page App annie request for November the firm stated that the Play Store catch-up to the Apple App Store is under way. While Google Play paid revenue grew by 311 percent since January, Apple's paid revenue only grew by 12.9 percent, according to the study.

Court Rules Yahoo Must Pay $2.7 Billion For Mexican Yellow Pages Breach Of Contract

Yahoo says it “will vigorously pursue all appeals” of a non-final judgement by a Mexico City court ruling Yahoo must pay $2.7billion for breaching its contract with Ideas Interactivas and its parent company Worldwide Directories. The web giant seems to have had a partnership to work with Interactive Ideas to release a printed Yellow Pages of business telephone numbers for Mexico.
According to the brief press release, “The plaintiffs alleged claims of breach of contract, breach of promise, and lost profits arising from contracts related to a yellow pages listings service” but Yahoo says the claims have no merit. Yahoo filed an 8-K with the SECregarding the ruling.




Yahoo de Mexico struck a deal with Ideas Interactivas that was announced in 2003 to create “Yahoo Paginas Utils” which would help people find contact info for local businesses. As of now, though, the www.paginasutiles.com.mx domain is parked and doesn’t offer any Yahoo content.
The idea was to augment its online local business search with printed book. Yahoo hoped that the two-pronged strategy would let it compete with Google.The books will include maps, business and landmark listings, and a catalogue of offers and discounts. There would be flexible, low-cost advertising options in Yahoo! Páginas Útiles, which was slated for an initial circulation of 800,000 free copies followed by a second print run of 1.7 million units according to a April 2003 article from Mexican website Noticios Dot.
At some point, though, the partnership went sour.
The $2.7 billion ruling against the web portal is very steep, considering Yahoo’s total revenue was just $1.2 billion last quarter, and profit was just $226 million the quarter before. If appeals are unsuccessful, it could strike a major blow to the recovery new CEO Marissa Mayer is trying to mount. It could take months or years for the case to be finalized, and the $2.7 billion penalty could hang a dark cloud over the company’s head until then.
The scope of the contracts between the companies are not yet clear. If the deals were for Mexico alone the penalty would amount to $30 per resident. A 2005 study said there were4.29 buisnesses in Maxico which would mean Yahoo would pay $630 each. That seems somewhat absurd, so the total Yahoo has to pay could definitely get reduced if it doesn’t beat the charges all together during appeals.
We’re waiting to hear back from Yahoo about details of the originally agreed upon partnership with Worldwide Directories and Ideas Interactivas and its statement on the initial court ruling.
Here’s the full press release issued by Yahoo on its company news page:


 

Yahoo! Inc. Reports Judgment in Lawsuit in Mexico

November 30, 2012

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) today reported that the 49th Civil Court of the Federal District of Mexico City has entered a non-final judgment of U.S. $2.7 billion against Yahoo! Inc. and Yahoo de Mexico, S.A. de C.V. in a lawsuit brought by plaintiffs Worldwide Directories S.A. de C.V. and Ideas Interactivas, S.A. de C.V. Yahoo! believes the plaintiffs’ claims are without merit and will vigorously pursue all appeals. The plaintiffs alleged claims of breach of contract, breach of promise, and lost profits arising from contracts related to a yellow pages listings service.

Apple’s Wireless-Charging Patent Might Actually Free Us From Wires

 

Wireless charging is designed to set us free from the jungle of wires littering our desks and bedside tables. We’ll live in a world where we never again have to think about plugging in to power up. Our beloved gadgets will always be charged, always on, always ready to use.
That’s the promise, at least. The reality isn’t so rosy. Apple thinks it has a better way, and has filed a patent on it.
Most of today’s wireless chargers utilize inductive charging, which requires a charger and your gadget to be extremely close — usually touching — to do the job. So if your smartphone is capable of wireless charging (the Lumia 920, for example), it requires a wired charging base on which you place the phone to charge. Oh sure, you don’t have to deal with plugging the phone in, but that charging base still has a cord, and now you’ve got two gadgets to deal with — a phone and a charger. It kinda defeats the point, which is to make your life easier.
We first started seeing inductive wireless charging tech in 2009, and it’s still all about the same. Intel reportedly plans to embed the tech in its ultrabooks and smartphones, so we could see a whole lot more devices with inductive charging capabilities in 2013.
An Apple patent application published Thursday, wireless power utilization in a local computing Enivironment” uses a different approach. Apple’s implementation would utilize a near-field magnetic resonance (NFMR) power supply to deliver juice to nearby devices that have an NFMR resonator circuit within.

A figure from Apple’s patent “Wireless Power Utilization in a Local Computing Environment.”

This could create a “virtual charging area” within about a yard (1 meter) of this power supply, which would keep your mouse, keyboard, and other gadgetry juiced. The image above illustrates how it would work. Your iMac or Cinema Display could host the NFMR power supply, while your iOS device (208 in the diagram), keyboard (204), and mouse or trackpad (206) would reap the benefits of being constantly charged.
A secondary benefit is that wireless devices like the mouse and keyboard could ditch their batteries, helping the environment. Eco responsibility is a cause that, despite challenges with product repairability, Apple is quite dedicated to,
Of all the recent Apple patent application that have passed through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, this one is particularly interesting. It’s also particularly aligned with Apple’s ethos of providing a suite of products that work seamlessly with one another — just in this case, they also work wirelessly. Any chance Apple’s latest iMacs might have this tech already baked in? Unlikely, but give it a year or two and they probably will.