Google Knol

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word "knol" as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we'll do the rest.

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

Official Google Blog: Encouraging people to contribute knowledge

Android Demo

Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz discuss the availability of the SDK, that it will be open source in the future, and demo applications on the Android platform:



YouTube - Android Demo

Facebook Beacon for Social Distribution

Facebook announced today that 44 websites are using Facebook Beacon to allow users to share information from other websites for distribution to their friends on Facebook. These sites are participating in the launch of Beacon, a new way to socially distribute information on Facebook. Beacon is a core element of the Facebook Ads system for connecting businesses with users and targeting advertising to the audiences they want.

The websites participating in Beacon can determine the most relevant and appropriate set of actions from their sites that users can distribute on Facebook. These actions can include posting an item for sale, completing a purchase, scoring a high score in an online game or viewing of video. When users who are logged into Facebook visit a participating site, they receive a prompt asking whether to they want to share those activities with their friends on Facebook. If they do, those friends can now view those actions through News Feed or Mini-Feed stories.

Facebook | Press Releases

Keep things out of Google's hands

The Economist.com on Microsoft buying 1,6% of Facebook:

"Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, the world's largest software company,suggested that online social networks such as Facebook were probably “fads”. So they may be, but Mr Ballmer was simultaneously throwing himself into talks with Facebook, founded by 23-year old Mark Zuckerberg, to buy a share of the firm. On October 24th he succeeded. Microsoft will pay $240m for 1.6% of Facebook. That is a very small stake, but it nonetheless values the three-year-old firm at $15 billion, an amount that experts think is mad.

Microsoft clearly thought that it had no choice. For about three years, it has realised that while software-licence fees are its past and present, its future has to be online advertising—even though Google, the world's largest search engine, is the clear leader in this young industry. Microsoft has built its own online-advertising network, called adCenter, to try to compete with Google's."

Facebook , a chapter in history

In his postFacebooksofting and Facebacklashing Antony Mayfield makes the following observation:

"Facebook has lost some its context for me, as Danah Boyd put it recently. I'm drawing more on my more focussed, more private networks for personal communications and general networking fixes...

Facebook is bringing networks into the lives of many people for the first time. Think of Facebook as a chapter in the story of the rise of online networks as the defining media model of our age and you'll have a clearer understanding of what's going on than micro-focussed doom-mongers..."

Android

Google are not announcing a Gphone (yet?), but claims that Open Handset Alliance and Android is more significant and ambitious than a single phone.

Android includes an operating system, user-interface and applications - all of the software to run a mobile phone.

We have developed Android in cooperation with the Open Handset Alliance, which consists of more than 30 technology and mobile leaders including Motorola, Qualcomm, HTC and T-Mobile. Through deep partnerships with carriers, device manufacturers, developers, and others, we hope to enable an open ecosystem for the mobile world by creating a standard, open mobile software platform. We think the result will ultimately be a better and faster pace for innovation that will give mobile customers unforeseen applications and capabilities.

Google see Android as an important part of their strategy of furthering Google's goal of providing access to information to users wherever they are. Recognizing that many among the multitude of mobile users around the world do not and may never have an Android-based phone, Android will complement, but not replace, Google's mobile strategy of developing mobile services through partnerships with handset manufacturers and mobile operators around the world.

It's important to recognize that the Open Handset Alliance and Android have the potential to be major changes from the status quo -- one which will take patience and much investment by the various players before you'll see the first benefits. But we feel the potential gains for mobile customers around the world are worth the effort. If you’re a developer and this approach sounds exciting, give us a week or so and we’ll have an SDK available. If you’re a mobile user, you’ll have to wait a little longer, but some of our partners are targeting the second half of 2008 to ship phones based on the Android platform. And if you already have a phone you know and love, check out mobile.google.com and make sure you have Google Maps for mobile, Gmail and our other great applications on your phone. We'll continue to make these services better and add plenty of exciting new features, applications and services, too.

Open Handset Alliance

Turning every Google App into a social application

Google already has so much data on you, depending on how many Google apps you already use. It just needs to bring everything together. Your contacts are in Gmail. Your feeds are in Google Reader. Your IM buddy list is in Gtalk. Your upcoming events are in Google Calendar. Your widgets are in iGoogle. And don’t forget about your search history. Overtime, Google will connect all of these together in different ways, along with data about you from other social services across the Web, and give developers access to the social layer tying all of these apps together underneath. The real killer app for Google is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve joined yet another social network.

Techcrunch

Attacks Facebook where it's weakest

Om Malik:

OpenSocial attacks Facebook where it is the weakest (and the strongest): its quintessential closed nature. Several Facebook developers have groused that a special Facebook-only mark-up language makes the task of writing Facebook apps tougher.

Recommended reading: Anil Dash on the historical limitations of proprietary development platforms.

What about privacy?

Despite her "general love of open systems", Jill Walker thinks OpenSocial give cause for concern:

What of privacy? What of the fact that social networks aren’t always a one-size-fits-all proposition? Just two days ago, danah boyd wrote that she is having to limit her “real” Facebook profile to real, f2f friends only, and that she is creating a second Facebook profile for her professional connections. She’s obviously not happy about “un-friending” her professional connections, but writes that she has to do this in order to protect her personal relationships. In a paper danah boyd wrote with Jeffrey Heer (pdf link), they give another example of this jarring of networks that should never have been connected: the teacher whose young students find her friends’ profiles and are horrified at them. Will OpenSocial allow for the distinctions between different kinds of friends?

Some initial concerns

Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/WriteWeb has several questions about OpenSocial Among others he is concerned about the "openness" of the APIs:

While most APIs tend to be read-only, the OpenSocial APIs might be capable only of allowing widgets to be published from one network to another. Will one network be able to pull in bio, friend and interest data from another? That's not being discussed at all.

The phrase Open Social implies portability of personal and social data. That would be exciting but there are entirely different protocols underway to deal with those ideas. As some people have told me tonight, it may have been more accurate to call this "OpenWidget" - though the press wouldn't have been as good. We've been waiting for data and identity portability - is this all we get?

Open and Social

Quite a few companies seem to have found each other in this venture

Wonder if Google & co are going to be both "open" and "social".

Most of us can agree that the web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues.

From a technical perspective this seems pretty exciting. The question is, however, whether Google is seeking dominance or real openness.

This blog intends to follow how this develops.