blogger on SWiK

Seeds Of A Social Network: Blogger Adds New “Following” Feature

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:53:52 -0700

Blogger has announced a new “following” feature that enables members to list themselves as fans of other members’ blogs.

By following a set of blogs, your username and avatar will not only show up among other followers in a MyBlogLog-like gadget that can be placed in the sidebars of these blogs. You can also view the latest posts from the blogs you follow in a special feed reader on the Blogger dashboard.

Since Blogger is owned and run by Google, the posts from the blogs you follow on Blogger can also be accessed with Google Reader in a special “Blogs I’m Following” section.

While the new following feature will be useful for staying on top of your favorite content, the main benefit to Blogger will come from introducing a better sense of community, one that can be built out gradually into a more functional social network. The Blogger team has already announced its intention to implement Google Friend Connect throughout the blog network, so it’s definitely heading further in this direction.

On the one hand, this new feature roll out can be seen as just an attempt to stay competitive with Moveable Type and WordPress, both of which have already developed social features of their own (and the former of which has run into the arms of Google’s social networking nemesis, Facebook).

But Google also conspicuously lacks a social network with any significant amount of popularity in the United States (Orkut hasn’t made much headway here). So perhaps it has decided to pin much of its social networking hopes on Blogger, which could be leveraged to bolster the usage of Google Friend Connect and eventually OpenSocial as well.

If you’re a Blogger user and don’t see the new following feature yet, you may have to wait a few weeks - they are rolling it out gradually.

[News via The Social]

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Could Google be stymied by a lack of openness?

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:51:19 -0700

It seems almost churlish to wonder whether Google could be even more successful than it already is with a different strategy, but the company’s approach to open source and open development has come into focus in recent weeks.

On last week’s podcast we discussed whether the company should see the AGPL as more of an opportunity than a threat following Jay’s post about the company releasing more code under open source licenses.

Nik Cubrilovic over at TechCrunch, meanwhile, has written an interesting article about Google’s acquisition strategy and whether its apparent insistence that acquired companies migrate to its technology platform (C++, Java and Python/MapReduce/Big Table/Google FS) causes the acquired projects to stagnate.

“One of the first main challenges for a company that has been acquired by Google is adopting the proprietary technology stack used within the company. Google does use Linux and open source, but their core technologies are all internal to the company,” states Nik.

“Because of the difference in technology, it can take a company anywhere from a year to three or more years to move over to the Google infrastructure and architecture,” he adds while detailing how the likes of JotSpot, Blogger, Dodgeball, GrandCentral and MeasureMap have lost ground during the move.

As he notes this issue isn’t unique to Google (it’s one of many problems associated Microsoft’s pursuit of Yahoo) but the widespread use of .NET and the Win32 API make it less of a problem for Microsoft in most cases. Meanwhile a significant number of the companies Google is targeting will be based on the likes of MySQL, Apache, Python, and PHP.

In concluding his article, Nik states: “The solutions for Google are either to adopt a more open stack in parallel to what they currently use, or to open source their internal technologies (as Facebook and Yahoo! are doing) in the hope that they will spread and gain adoption from more developers.”

However, Google has been open with the concepts behind technologies such as MapReduce and Big Table, if not the code, and the release of App Engine should help create a new generation of projects that are much easier to integrate into Google’s portfolio. It could be that the problem is a matter of the platform’s maturity and ubiquity, rather than its openness.

Then again, the company’s attitude towards openness related to the development of Android has also come in for some stick this week. Could it be that the company is about to find out that there is no such thing as being half-open?

Theme Redesign and W3C Validation for Blogger Templates

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Here is how I managed to get my Blogger template to almost validate on W3C. It's however, not possible to fully validate on Blogger New. I have managed to reduce the errors to a more professional number.

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Inside The Twitter-Summize Deal

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:54:25 -0700

Twitter has confirmed that it is buying Summize and rolling it into the San Francisco-based company’s main offering. After the rumors of the deal were reported by Josh Chandler last week, I was able to confirm that the deal was done and would be announced on time. So right on time, the two companies made a joint announcement.

As indicated in the post, I promised to get some more financial details on the acquisition. Peter Kafka pegs the price at $15 million in stock and cash, though I am much more confident on the information from my sources, who say Twitter gave away north of 10 percent of the company to acquire Summize. My sources peg Twitter’s value at around $80 million. If you remember, I had reported about $15 million in new funding earlier this summer. As part of the deal, Summize employees are going to join Twitter, though CEO Jay Virdy is going to leave and do something else.

We’re excited to announce that Twitter has acquired Summize—an extraordinary search tool and an amazing group of engineers. All five Summize engineers will move to San Francisco, CA and take jobs at Twitter, Inc. This is an important step forward in the evolution of Twitter as a service and as a company.

As I outlined in my posts last Monday and yesterday, I think it is a super-smart move by Twitter, and if the company plays its cards right, it’s going to pay dividends in the long run. What they have given away is chump change compared to the potential. As I wrote last week:

The deal would be a good move by Twitter, and would be putting some of its recently acquired $15 million in VC funding to decent use as it would help the company get hold of of a business model.

Summize has come up with a clever way of peering through Twitter’s vast data stream and finding out what’s hot, where and how. The results are essentially keywords — topic-, person- or location-based — and thus can be used to show contextual advertising next to the pages that show these results. Summize has thereby developed an ability to monetize conversations without being intrusive.

Unlike a lot of others, I am not ready to throw my lot with some of the newer services just yet. One of the things that continues to attract me to Twitter, warts and all, is the relatively simplicity of it core service. I fell in love with it long before it became a Silicon Valley diva with a bad drinking problem. Of course, we all know recovering divas can slip into bad habits again. That is one thing I worry about: ability of Twitter to actually harness and not mess up this new acquisition.

Update: Michael Arrington interviews Ev Williams, one of the founders of Twitter about the company’s plans in an extensive interview.

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