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 »
For the third time in about a month, Google has been sued for patent infringement.
Last week, Performance Pricing filed a lawsuit against AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, charging the four companies with infringing upon its patent, “Systems and methods for transacting business over a global communications network such as the Internet.”
The suit was filed in the Eastern District of Texas, where a large number of patent cases have been filed in recent years due to the district’s perceived friendliness to ostensibly wronged inventors.
According to the Coalition for Patent Fairness, a group that counts Google and Microsoft as members, there were 218 infringement lawsuits filed in Marshall, Texas, from January 2004 through April 2006.
At the end of August, AOL, Amazon, Borders, Google, IAC, and Yahoo were sued in the same district by Texas-based Polaris IP for violating a patented method of automated e-mail routing.
Illinois Computer Research sued Google in Illinois’ Northern District Court in mid-September for violating a patented method of navigating through online books.
Performance Pricing alleges that Google AdWords, AOL Search Marketplace, Microsoft adCenter, and Yahoo Search Marketing all violate its patent, which was filed in 1999 and granted in 2005.
The patent describes a system for competitive bidding.
“The present invention comprises a business model used to determine the price of goods and/or services to be provided from a seller or sellers to a buyer or buyers,” the patent explains. “Various forms of electronic competition and/or entertainment are used as intermediary activities between said buyers and sellers to ultimately determine a contract price.”
The patent claims to cover a wide variety of activities: video games, electronic board games, crossword puzzles or other word games, sports betting, card games, or any other activity or combination of activities.
Presumably, the plaintiff believes the patent covers Internet ad auctions, too.
In a September 4th blog post, Google policy counsel and legislative strategist Johanna Shelton and Michelle Lee, head of patents and patent strategy, urged Congress to pass patent reform legislation.
“Google and other technology companies increasingly face mounting legal costs to defend against frivolous patent claims from parties gaming the system to forestall competition or reap windfall profits,” Shelton and Lee said.
Three days later, on Friday, September 7th, the House of Representatives passed the Patent Reform Act of 2007. The Senate is expected to vote on a version of the bill shortly.
If the Patent Reform Act passes the Senate and is signed by the President in its current form, monetary damage awards for patent infringement are likely to decline and venue shopping will be curtailed.
“Certain district courts have become notorious for rarely invalidating a patent, and have tilted the balance too often in favor of plaintiffs,” said Shelton and Lee. “We support judicial venue provisions to ensure that patent lawsuits are brought only in district courts with a reasonable connection to the case.”
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Yahoo Inc is making Web search faster by introducing new ways of predicting what users are looking for, while seeking to keep pace with rivals by including video, audio and picture results as answers to text searches.
The company said the new features it announced on Monday were aimed at better understanding the intention of users conducting particular types of searches and to get them to the information they desire within a single search.
Yahoo said it was trying to combat what it calls “Web search fatigue.” Research conducted by Harris Interactive for Yahoo found that roughly 15 per cent of online adults find what want on their first search while most need three to four searches.
Yahoo is seeking to stem the steady gains Google, the dominant supplier of Web search, has made in market share for most of the past two years. Market research firm ComScore said Google’s share grew to 56.5 percent of the U.S. Web search market in August, up 1.3 percent from July.
Yahoo Search Assist suggests related concepts to instantly refine a search, drawing on the wealth of information Yahoo has about what users across its sites are saying when they comment upon Web links, photos, video or the like.
Search Assist is designed to be especially helpful when a person is searching for information on an unfamiliar topic. The feature senses when a searcher needs help with a search and it appears as a drop-down menu under the main search results box.
For example, a user seeking information on British Prime Minister Gordon Brown might see suggestions about Gordon Brown and Scotland, Gordon Brown and budget or Gordon Brown and Iraq.
In addition to the new Search Assist feature, Yahoo Search has also combined searching for links to video, audio and photos with traditional text links it has long offered.
Google Inc, IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Ask.com and Microsoft Corp introduced similar features earlier this year on their rival search services.
Yahoo is tapping the millions of tags users contribute on its properties such as photo-sharing site Flickr to improve the relevance of its general search service.
The company is looking to take advantage of sites it has acquired in recent years including Flickr, bookmark categorization site Del.icio.us and the internally created Yahoo Answers to enhance Yahoo’s general search.
“We hope the data in those Web sites will help make Web search better,” Vish Makhijani, general manager and senior vice president of Yahoo! Search, said in an interview.
A third feature Yahoo is introducing is Search Shortcuts which are designed to help consumers save time when searching for popular categories such as events, music, movies, travel, sports, health, shopping, businesses and restaurants.
Yahoo Search Shortcuts weave in ratings and reviews, photos, official Web sites and other potentially useful information to augment a consumer’s search on these topics.
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Posted in Internet, Yahoo | 1 Comment »
