Google’s Orkut has started accepting social applications, letting the first OpenSocial app developers submit their apps for use by 50 million Orkut users. The completed apps must be submitted by Friday in order to be ready when the apps are rolled out to users later this month. Interested developers can participate in Orkut Hackathons Thursday and Friday in the Googleplex, and via teleconference in Google New York.
Google ran this Doodle logo to celebrate Carnival, an annual five day long bash that sweeps Rio de Janeiro and other places in Brazil.
Also, because Orkut is the biggest thing on the internet in Brazil, it too ran a special logo to mark the event.
(via Zorgloob)
Some people say Carnival is bigger and wilder than Mardi Gras, with celebrants pruchasing expensive, elaborate costumes, and foreigners buying the costumes so they can join in (and embarrass themselves with poor dancing, often).
images by Jesse The Traveler and carf under CC license
Orkut, Google’s social networking service, turned four years old last week, proving that it is indeed a fighter and a survivor in a tough market.
While Orkut is not all that popular in the United States, it enjoys millions of international users and is ranked in some places among the ten most popular websites in the world and the number one most popular site in Brazil. As of last August, Orkut had grown to a community of over 67 million users. Three years ago, idiots like me were saying Orkut was a failure and should be scrapped, and it has proven itself and won the test of time.
How many long-running websites became successes this “late” in their run? Keeping in mind that 3 or 4 years is an eternity on the internet, it’s hard to picture anyone succeeding by growing slowly and smartly, but Orkut did it. Google should be proud. Orkut’s growth sends a message to the rest of the internet that patience is possible on the net, that a community can be grown slowly and that we shouldn’t quit on a website just because it hasn’t turned into YouTube in the first seven months.
Check out this Blogoscoped thread to see how the Orkut birthday logo, seen above, is actually a cut-and-paste job from previous Google Doodles and Google Talk avatars. Google has apparently built up a resevoir of clip art for its logo designers to draw from.
Google, Facebook and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup, pledging to allow users to export their contacts from one social network to another. Facebook has been particularly bad in this regard, hijacking your data and not letting you export it, as witnessed when Robert Scoble tried to export his data to Plaxo and had his account shut down for a few days. With these companies joining up, their pledging to do better by their users, and that’s good news for everyone.
Whether Facebook makes available usable data or just the basics is a big question. Currently, there are Facebook-approved methods for applications to pull data out of Facebook, but they are not given enough access to be usable. Usually, you get the picture, the name, and a tiny sliver of actual data. Hopefully, Facebook lets you pull out enough data that switching social networks is as simple as pressing a button, and enough that you can put all your Facebook contacts into Outlook.
I’m really surprised with Facebook. It seems like every time its users complain about privacy or permissions, Facebook always gives in and hands the users what they want. This is very different from the attitudes at major tech companies, who will only buckle under the worst of damage control scenarios. If Facebook always gives in to its users, it’s going to survive as the rare company that puts the user first, and it definitely won’t fall into the “evil” category that most growing companies find themselves in.
Google is slowly and haphazardly integratings the various contact management implementations in its seperate products, now letting you find your Gmail contacts’ Orkut accounts, if they have one. Google’s also building a profile section for your Google Account, though it apparently overlooked privacy in every reasonable way, including leaving you no way to opt-out from profiles and no way to block sharing Reader items with contacts, short of mass-deleting your address book.
It looks like Google is pushing integration of its contact elements too fast and with barely any thought as to the privacy of its users. Google does this every time it launches a new service, and winds up fixing the problem a few days letter. If I worked at Google, I’d send a mass email to the entire company today asking all developers to put a step in the development process that checked for this before any product or feature was released, since they seem to keep screwing this one up every damn time.
UPDATE: Google Maps MyMaps also now has comments and ratings for your custom maps. Google is pushing strong in this area, just missing a lot of details.
There’s been a lot of stuff going on about OpenSocial, and so you don’t have to read everything on the internet, I’ve done it for you (and still found 86 seconds of time to pay attention to the wife).
Who’s using OpenSocial? These guys have signed on:
Wait, is that a lot? 
This video is from Google’s Thursday night “Campfire” event, introducing OpenSocial, and introducing the OpenSocial partners to each other (since the project was so secret that no one knew who else was in);
Here are more Campfire highlights:
Here’s a weird one: Just as Google’s announcing OpenSocial, it lunches an Orkut-only application, an ask-your-friends application similar to a recently added LinkedIn feature and a common Facebook app. You can use it to ask a community question to your friends or the entire Orkut network. The app, available here, isn’t an OpenSocial one, it runs on the Orkut platform, code-named Mobius. Why not make it OpenSocial?
The Orkut Sandbox, for running and testing OpenSocial applications, is live now, and you can see one developer’s experience with it.
Valleywag’s was running charts on Wednesday, when it seemed like OpenSocial’s biggest partners were Orkut and LinkedIn, showing how Google’s network paled in comparison to the mammoth market share of Facebook. Then, on Friday, they had to run a new chart showing how the full network, including surprise addition MySpace, has more than six times the market share of Facebook in the U.S..
Plaxo is the first (or the first non-Orkut site) to support OpenSocial, giving interested developers a place to have their applications run, even if the OpenSocial standard is at 0.5 and is hardly set in stone. Plaxo users can add OpenSocial gadgets to their profile, gadgets get a full canvas page inside Pulse profiles, complete support for profiles and friend-list APIs, activity stream and activity data can be published by gadgets, and activities can receive comments in Plaxo Pulse.
Ning went live with OpenSocial a bit later.
Bebo, the major U.K. social network, is playing both sides, both joining OpenSocial and developing a tool for Facebook application developers to port their Facebook apps to Bebo. If Bebo becomes truly compatible with both Facebook and OpenSocial, it won’t be giving up its British crown anytime soon.
Meanwhile, Facebook is launching some sort of integrated sales data/advertising network. Basically, online stores will send Facebook purchasing information of Facebook users, and if those users choose to allow it, their purchases will be shown to their friends in their News Feed. Besides the giant privacy concerns, and the need to get commerce sites to play along (with the success of the whole thing depending on it integrating with actual important stores), there’s the Microsoft thing to consider, since MS is supposed to be Facebook’s ad network. Wait till this one gets announced, supposedly Tuesday, and I’ll probably have thoughts on InsideMicrosoft.
Google formally announced its OpenSocial social network application platform today, and there was a bombshell announcement that they held back till the end: MySpace is in! MySpace, the most popular social network, bigger than even Facebook, is a partner in OpenSocial and will support OpenSocial applications.
Also announced as joining: SixApart, owners of Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal, and Vox; plus Bebo, joining previously announced partners Orkut, Oracle, Ning, XING, Tianji, Viadeo, Salesforce.com, Plaxo, hi5, imeem, Hyves, Friendster, Engage.com and LinkedIn. Many complained when word leaked out yesterday that Google’s partners, aggregated, barely register in the U.S. compared to Facebook, but the totality of this group has to have twice the market share of Facebook, with MySpace beating it all by itself.
OpenSocial just went from being an opening shot to a sure-fire game changer. With MySpace supporting it, it’s important; with everyone but Facebook supporting it, it becomes the de facto new platform. Basically, there are now two platforms, Facebook and OpenSocial, and unless OpenSocial fails due to poor infrastructure or implementation, both will be major market forces.
Facebook was offered a place in this group, but it declined, and with “big evil” Rupert Murdoch even joining the movement, they now look like the entrenched anti-user corporate entity, a big blow. OpenSocial won’t kill Facebook, it may not even convince Facebook users to leave, but it does kill Facebook’s network effect. There is no longer a pressing need to switch to Facebook because all the applications are there, the lock-in is pretty much over.
In the long run, this isn’t the Facebook killer, not even close. Facebook will thrive because Facebook users don’t want to switch; they like Facebook. However, Facebook wants to have a thriving developer community, and to get it, there’s still a good chance they’ll join Open Social, or try to compete with it. If Facebook joins, it’ll make switching around easier for users, and if it doesn’t, we’ll have a two-player war here, and those are always exciting to watch.
On one side, we’ve got Facebook and Microsoft, on the other, Google, Fox, and a lot of little guys. Of course, most of the important little guys (the developers, not the networks) already work on Facebook’s side, making them the most important players. The two sides are going to fight over developers, and Microsoft is very good at courting developers. If they can get some integration between Facebook’s Markup Language and Windows Live Spaces, the world’s most popular blogging service, perhaps via Microsoft Gadgets (which also run on Windows Vista), we’ve got a powerful closed solution on Facebook’s side.
The most important thing to remember is that we have no idea what Google supposedly gains from this. Yes, there’s a chance that Google just became the operating system of the internet, but there’s nothing in this so far about monetization. Google can’t sell the platform, and with MySpace in Orkut doesn’t look so important anymore. The programming languages are too standard for Google to sell developer tools.
We don’t know yet what Google stands to gain, except for being important and making no money at it. The only real gain: Google diminishes Facebook’s influence, and thus avoids Facebook becoming a major competitor, if this play succeeds. Things just got so interesting, nobody knows where it’s all going to end up.
Coverage: Mashable, TechCrunch
Google has decided that when it comes to Facebook, if you can’t beat ‘em, API ‘em. Google’s OpenSocial, which will launch at code.google.com/apis/opensocial tomorrow, will be a set of APIs that developers can use to create applications that work on any participating social network. Google’s goal is to create an open layer that runs atop all social networks, diminishing the power of all the networks in the process.
It’s a smart plan, especially with the “fad” nature of most social networks, giving up on trying to have the most popular social network and instead trying to be the application layer that everyone uses. Google failed to buy Facebook, it’ll never get MySpace, Orkut will never be popular in the U.S., and a year from now, some unpredictable new network could be the new Facebook. Even if Facebook doesn’t use OpenSocial, new startups will use it, ensuring the next Facebook is a Google partner, not a competitor.
OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, handling profile information, friend/social graph data, and activity data (news feeds). All participating networks have to do is agree to accept the API calls and give back the requested data, and all that does is the hugely important step of opening up the data in the networks to be used by external applications, or by other social networks.
At launch, participating social networks are Google’s own Orkut, plus Ning, Plaxo, Friendster, viadeo, Hi5, LinkedIn and Oracle. Application providers already signed up are Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide, already the most popular Facebook developers, making it likely that the most popular third party Facebook features could soon be arriving at its competitors. The presence of Google’s Orkut, hugely popular outside he U.S., will be enough to make OpenSocial important despite lacking Facebook and MySpace.
One thing OpenSocial doesn’t do is let one social network access the data from another network, something Marc Canter has been pushing for lately. While the applications can use profile, friend and activity data, it can’t actually grab it and create a profile on a another network, like taking your LinkedIn data and using it to build a Friendster profile. You’ll still need to sign up with and create a profile on every network seperately.
Also participating are ING, Hyves, Tianji and Salesforce.com. There will be a developer sandbox at sandbox.orkut.com. No word on if Yahoo plans to participate, and you can expect Microsoft to stay out of it (Windows Live Spaces is a major social network, and Microsoft’s Facebook ownership stake will make it want to stay out of this war).
The draft press release, reprinted from VentureBeat, after the jump:
Search Engine Land points out a post on the Orkut blog that announces a feature rolling out over the next few days. This feature will show you updates from your friends, including pictures and videos they’ve uploaded, changes in status or profile entries, and other things. It’s very much taken from Facebook’s News Feed feature, but that’s not a bad thing.
If you ask me, News Feed is the feature that made Facebook usable, letting you keep track of a large amount of information about everyone without much effort. Without the News Feed, Facebook would be too much work, and the introduction of it no doubt increased growth and utility at Facebook. There’s no reason competitors can’t introduce features invented elsewhere, though the market will gravitate towards those who innovate the most.
Orkut got a really nice redesign, softening the colors, rounding the corners and streamlining some of the interface. You can see the redesign above on the right, and the old version on the left. Michael Arrington calls it borrrrrring (yes, he used six “r”s).
According to Wikipedia, Orkut currently has 67 million users, most of them outside the US, especially Brazil. According to comScore, Orkut currently has more pageviews than Facebook, 38.2 billion to 30.4 billion, but Facebook’s current growth should take it past Orkut within less than six months.
Screenshots by .dan and thatjonesboy under CC license
Here are a few Google Doodle holiday logos that ran recently:
Google China ran this Doodle in recognition of the one-year countdown to the Beijing 2008 Olympics:
Zorgloob points out the the “366″ in the logo originally read “365″, until someone reminded logo designer Dennis Hwang that 2008 is a leap year, and the one-year countdown is 366 days. Zorgloob has a screenshot of the logo that appeared on Google.cn for a mere short period of time.
Google also ran this logo for India’s Independence Day:
And for South Korea’s Independence Day:
They also ran this logo for the Swiss National Festival:
UPDATE: Missed this one. Orkut ran this Doodle for Indian Independence:
Yahoo India’s running this:
The two guys who founded YouTube (and earned a butt-load of money selling it to Google) gave an interview to the Associated Press, talking about the Pentagon’s decision to block U.S. Army troops from accessing YouTube, MySpace, and other popular sites over Defense Department networks. They spoke honestly, joking that if the army has a problem with internet bandwidth, it’s their own fault, seeing as they invented the internet.
It’s great to see Chad Hurley and Steve Chen speaking up for our soldiers right to view hamsters eating broccoli, but one wonders how much longer they get to speak for the company. Most founders wait out until they can take all their stock and walk away (usually one or two years), and if that’s the plan, these guys can’t stay the face of YouTube much longer. It’d be nice to see them stick around at Google for the long haul, shepherding YouTube into becoming a mature company, but when has that ever happened?
Now, no one’s going to suggest YouTube has passed MySpace to become the number one trafficked website on the internet (assuming MySpace is even that), but Google’s aquisition can claim one thing: #5 on Alexa’s rankings. It’s quite an honor, to be moving up a questionably accurate, non-respected, easilly spammed service. Also, not how Google’s Orkut is now number 7, giving Google spots 3, 5 and 7, a nice bit of symmetry.
Google should think about linking Orkut to YouTube, maybe just encouraging YouTube users to move over, or giving YouTube users ready-made Orkut accounts. Gotta take advantage of the power of both properties.
(via Smaran Dayal > Digg)
Google has had a rash of missteps in the last few day, leaving a negative feeling going into the new year.
First off: Google accidently deleted the inboxes of some 60 Gmail users, leaving them with none of their stored email (and, surprisingly, Google’s vaunted server architecture didn’t have any backups either). Google says it tried to salvage what it could, but was left with helping users figure out how to restore the data themselves. There’s been a belief that Google keeps multiple copies of everything, so this has to leave a lot of people with a little less trust in keeping their data on Google’s systems. At least when I blow my hard drive, it’s my fault.
Also, Orkut, which was Google’s surprise mini-success story of the year, went down for 22 hours on Friday and Saturday. It won’t tank Orkut, but Orkut used to suffer massive uptime and server problems, and the last thing anyone wants is for Orkut to lose the trust it has gained from its users.
There was even a panic in the sexblogosphere, as a bunch of prominent sex blogs accidently received a penalty normally given to spam sites. The problem was eventually corrected, but sites with less powerful friends might not have gotten the publicity that forced Google to fix everything over a holiday.
Besides all that, there’s the continuing dismissal of Google’s 2006 Zeitgeist as made-up bunk, and a little bit of anger over how Google has been putting “tips” of its services atop search results. Even Blake Ross of Firefox fame came out against Google, and Google’s own Matt Cutts said that the “tips” are poorly targeted and should be scaled back.
Om Malik says Google has just reached the point that happens with every high-flying startup, the part where market disillusionment catches up with the company, and everything goes downhill from there. Michael Arrington talks of a “tipping point”. The fact is, Google is as high as an internet company can get, and it is hard to go anywhere but down from here. I think the easiest prediction for 2007 is this:
By the end of next year, no one will like Google as much as they do today.
Maybe we’ll hate Google, maybe they just won’t be as loved, and they won’t be the darlings of the net, but there is no way things will ever be as good as they are now. I’m sorry, Google, but it looks like you peaked. Don’t worry, it isn’t all bad from here, but the magic is going to fade, you can be sure of it.
The US government has issued its report derived from all the user search histories it subpoena’d earlier this year. Seth Finkelstein says the findings include: “About 1 percent of the websites in the Google and MSN indexes are sexually explicit. About 6 percent of queries retrieve a sexually explicit website. Nearly 40 percent of the most popular queries retrieve a sexually explicit website.” I’m thinking this proves that adult sites have very successfully targeted the top search queries, and that Google has been unsuccessful in stopping them.
Google OS writes that there are ways to customize the Google Video Flash player, including a “simple” PlayerMode that removes most of the UI while the video is playing. I’m hoping Google releases a method for fully skinning the player in the future.
Google UK and Canada ran this logo for Remembrance Day, which commemorates the sacrifices in World War I:
Nick Douglas left Valleywag. Damn, I’m gonna miss him. He really turned the blogosphere on its ear. Hopefully his new gig, whatever it is, will be as interesting. In the meantime, Gawker bigwig Nick Denton writes the blog, while looking for a new head gossip. Who will it be?
Finally, Orkut has joined the Google Network, as evidenced by this AdWords landing page, which means we should probably expect ads on the social networking site. Now I see why Orkut’s been getting a major push lately. Well, that and the absurdly high Alexa ranking.
Google linked Orkut and Google Talk, letting Orkut users links their Orkut account to their Google Talk account and see presence status. The presence icon (a Googly round ball) can be clicked to start a chat/voice session. Also, Google Talk users can send scraps back to their Orkut friends, and Google Talk’s toast* now shows Orkut scrapbook notifications, just like it shows new Gmail emails.
The Google Video blog Google Group, which reposts everything from the Google Video blog, and makes it easy to subscribe to that blog (and other Google blogs) via email, says somehow the W32/Kapser.A@mm got sent out to a bunch of their email subscribers. Big oops, but next time you have a security vulnerability, don’t use the opportunity to pimp the Google Pack.
Word was Google is looking to buy a billion dollars of Clear Channel ad inventory. Quite the gutsy move. Google would have to resell all that inventory at a profit, a billion dollar beta test of its Dmarc/AdSense Audio system, putting a ton of money where its mouth is. Hope the new system is up to snuff.
Peter Abilla did yet another aquistion mashup/timeline, this time putting Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s aquisitions on the same timeline. I only wish it went further back than 2001.
GAYD (Google Apps For Your Domain, or WPNE, Worst Product Name Ever) rolled out its customized start page, letting those running GAYD create a branded homepage, complete with Google Gadgets.
* - the toast is the little notification box that slides up from the bottom of the screen and then goes away. So named for its similarity to toasted bread, popping up from a toaster.
Okay, I saw today’s move to open up Orkut’s invite-only registration as an attempt to revive a flagging service; I didn’t realize Orkut had actually been a success lately. However, Biz linked to Alexaholic, which says it is:
Now, those are only pageviews, and the rank and reach graphs tell a different story, but if Google could monetize well those pageviews, it could be sitting on a service that is trending higher than YouTube, and closing on MySpace. All typical Alexa disclaimers apply, obviously.
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
Google has (finally) removed the invite barrier to Orkut, letting anyone with a Google account register for the service. Orkut has been an invite-only service since it launched 33 months ago, and never gained much traction outside of Brazil (where 9% of the country has an Orkut account, making up for 63% of the total users), although the service does have an impressive 30,089,043 users. Probably inspired by Facebook’s success with moving away from an exclusive system, Google has opened the service to all, hoping there are a lot of people who might like what they see.
Based on performce already, get used to seeing this:
Bad, bad server. No donut for you.
Orkut has some new features, according to Dreamchaser, including an easy reply method, language restrictions (i.e. - people from languages you don’t understand can’t message/spam you), and moderator for communities.
There is an InsideGoogle community on Orkut, and I will accept friends requests (and kick you fast if you spam either).
(via Amit Agarwal)
| |||
| GoDaddy.com promo! $6.95 .COM code: BNC695 |
