Google is the elephant in nearly every corner of the Internet, from search and advertising to web-based e-mail, online mapping, and home-brewed video. With its share price setting new highs this fall, its market cap ($188 billion) is now large enough to buy the New York Times, the Washington Post, Gannett, and Time Warner – twice. Or Facebook many, many times over.
The problem is, Facebook’s not for sale. And that’s got Google running scared. It’s an open secret in Silicon Valley that the company has been shopping around a nondisclosure agreement outlining its plan to create its own massive social network – and asking anyone with a pulse to sign it.
Google has to do something fast, because some of its best talent is starting to head for the exits. In July, Gideon Yu, finance chief at Google’s YouTube, left for Facebook. Now other Google guys, stuck in the Googleplex and smelling a Facebook IPO that could turn early employees into early retirees, are also jumping ship.
The latest defector: Benjamin Ling, the top engineer at Google Checkout, its online payment service. A Stanford comp-sci Ph.D., Ling will be overseeing Facebook’s entire software platform. Losing finance types is one thing. But smart engineers are the lifeblood of a great tech company, and Ling was worth a pint, insiders say.
Facebook’s threat to Google, of course, is bigger than a talent war. In fact, the stakes here are about as high as they get in the Internet business. Something is going on that we haven’t seen since Microsoft challenged Netscape and helped define the wide-open web.
Now the social networks are trying to do the opposite – to build what I call the Innernet. It’s the place you occupy with family and friends and where you exercise almost absolute control, showing the world only as much of your true self as you care to while protecting you and yours from the evil that lurks on the wider web, from spam artists to identity thieves. Whoever builds that walled garden stands to make the next great Internet fortune.
Facebook, until recently little more than a student hangout, is the odds-on favorite to win that race. In March founder Mark Zuckerberg opened the site to independent software developers, inviting them to write Facebook applications and reap a share of whatever revenue they generate.
Because creating Facebook applets was so easy, programmers could throw lots of stuff at the wall and quickly see what stuck. Take, for example, Super Wall, a little app that lets users add text, photos, video, or drawings to one another’s Facebook pages. It took a couple of developers part of a June weekend to write. Within three weeks, two million people were using it. Today, more than ten million do.
That’s a real economy (or could be, if someone figured out how to make money from it), and it explains why Facebook has suddenly pulled out of the slipstream of MySpace, growing from 20 million active users in April to more than 45 million today.
More cool apps mean more reasons for people to hang out there – and more reasons for developers to launch new apps. Worst of all for Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin: They can’t participate – for privacy reasons Google’s search engine is barred at Facebook’s door like an unwanted encyclopedia salesman.
How does Google plan to fight back? It’s gearing up to do for the web what Facebook did for its network, starting with its social networking site Orkut (which is big in Brazil) and extending it to Gmail, You Tube, iGoogle, and so on.
Imagine Google as the command center for your entire social life; you could chat and read your e-mail there, give your closest friends access to your calendar, and get minute-by-minute updates on their whereabouts. All the big social networks were invited to join the new coalition – even, presumably, Facebook. (No one from Facebook or Google would comment.)
Will it work? Google’s effort, I’m told, is being led by Joe Kraus, the founder of Excite. Though he is as Web 2.0 savvy as they come, I think Google’s plan may be too little too late. Everyone these days is opening up his network – even MySpace.
Besides, there’s no compelling reason for users to leave Facebook now. The developers will stay as long as they can reach a mass audience there. Google’s trying to fix something that isn’t broken – just as Microsoft has been doing for years with search and IBM tried to do with operating systems for PCs. Maybe Google should stick to organizing the world’s information, and let this little mouse roar.
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Posted in Facebook, Internet, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »
Received this email from PayPal 2 days ago:
We’re updating your payment buttons in late October
Dear XXX,
If PayPal hosts your buttons
You don’t have to do anything. All of your payment buttons will update to our new “sunrise” color automatically.
If you host your buttons
Just log in, click Merchant Services, and go to the Create Buttons section to get them.
Will this affect your business?
1. No. It won’t disrupt your ability to accept payments. And the new buttons are designed with the same dimensions as the old ones.
2. Plus, the new buttons on your site represent a consistent PayPal checkout experience – which makes buyers feel safer when they make purchases.
3. Preview the new buttons at https://www.paypal.com/newpaymentbuttons.
You’ll stay in sync with PayPal – the safer, easier way to get paid.
Thank you for your business.
Sincerely,
PayPal
Then this morning they sent me this:
Dear XXX,
Earlier this week, you may have received an email from us announcing our planned changes to the appearance of your payment buttons. We’d like to apologise as this email was sent out too early and is not relevant for you yet. You can simply delete the email.
Don’t worry. We’ll let you know in advance before these changes are implemented. UK buttons will be updated in early 2008.
We are sorry for any confusion this may have caused.
Sincerely,
PayPal
Like i’d delete the email… DIGG DIGG DIGG!
Posted in General | 1 Comment »
Apple’s unveiling of the Macintosh nearly a quarter century ago heralded a new era of computing.
The Mac was the first computer to use a graphical user interface and a mouse. It was the computer for the masses that didn’t want to bother with command line interfaces and balky hardware.
The computer was finally a completely self-contained package, and as an added benefit was an attractive piece of hardware, even when it wasn’t turned on.
Few can doubt that personal computing would have charted a different future without the Macintosh. Yet, as things turned out, within six years the Mac would see a steady decline in sales following the introduction of Windows 3.0 and the desire among computer users to work outside of the Mac’s confinements.
Where once consumers found the Mac’s turnkey simplicity reassuring, they now hungered for additional hardware which, quite literally, didn’t fit inside the box Apple provided. This luxury was standard on the competing IBM-compatible platform, allowing users to add their own hardware and software with ease.
As a trailblazer, the Macintosh was a milestone in the development of home computing, and by extension, the Internet. The Mac also earned a pedestal in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art for its design aesthetic. The sustaining elements of the computing revolution weren’t unique to Apple–the company merely made those elements more attractive.
Nearly a generation later, Apple is once again trying to create a totally controlled, self-contained environment–this time not for computers, but for music and entertainment. However, the market served with Apple’s iPod devices is far more digitally sophisticated than those early computer users. And today’s legions of tech-savvy music listeners are not likely to accept the company’s shackles for long.
Despite popular conception, Apple did not invent the digital portable music player. What Apple did was take a product that was slowly working itself into the hands of willing consumers and make it sexy. In addition to making the product attractive to consumers, Apple was able to sell the concept of portable digital music, just as it had with home computing decades earlier.
But even as consumers have purchased Apple’s devices in droves, they’ve come to realize that there’s more to digital music than what’s contained in the little white box. Other, arguably superior devices are now on the market; more are being introduced regularly. These players offer features that will become the sustaining elements of the digital entertainment revolution–they will be smart devices with IP connectivity and increased onboard storage.
We’re already beginning to see this paradigm shift. Consider the following industry changes, which have occurred in the last several years:
- Traditional audio manufacturers–Denon, Yamaha, Bose–are bringing to market equipment boasting super storage, connectivity and the ability to play multiple audio formats.
- TiVo and other set-tops are tapping their storage and processing abilities for more than time-shifting TV shows.
- All the major cell phone manufacturers have phones with increased storage, processing power, connectivity and use of different audio and video formats in their five-year design plans. This year alone we’ve seen a significant increase in the number of new music phones and a clear shift in the marketing to consumers.
The greatest objective for today’s music listeners–what they regard as their inalienable right–is absolute portability: music that can be accessed anywhere, at anytime. Today’s consumers want their music immediately available at home, in their car, at work, on their phones, at a party, or while working out at the gym, without the hassle of using multiple devices that are each tethered to different services.
In such an open-source world of unfettered digital entertainment, the device is a means, not an end, to set listeners free. Why then, in the long term, would anyone accept the limitations of the proprietary lockout of the iPod and iTunes? Once the digital revolution stabilizes, we’ll be left with a wide range of devices that can play music seamlessly. Everything from car dashboards and cell phones to stereo consoles at home or work will give us access to our entertainment.
In the not-so-distant future, Apple will again be acknowledged for introducing consumers to new technology and marketing the first truly successful line of digital music players–products that the masses lusted after, but eventually moved beyond.
The technological aesthetic created by Apple has earned it a rightful place in design history. However, a new generation of device makers and consumers is writing the next chapter in digital music history.
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Posted in Apple, Hardware, Ideas, Software | 2 Comments »
