Google has bought FeedBurner, which runs more than 400,000 RSS feeds. By this, for last week, Google also bought three companies - GreenBorder Technologies, Panoramio and FeedBurner which is more than usual.Google announced the purchase on its blog under the headline Adding more flare (presumably a pun on flair), saying: "FeedBurner offers a feed advertising platform for advertisers to reach engaged feed readers through targeted in-feed ads and innovative techniques like RSS feed-driven ads."
On its own blog, FeedBurner said It's True-gle! and pointed to an FAQ at http://www.feedburner.com/google
The purchase is a certainly fantastic way for Google to insert itself between tens of thousands of Web sites (FeedBurner users) and millions of RSS reading consumers and make pots of money. Thanks to the power of AdWords, it should get back the rumoured $100 million purchase price very quickly.About the purchasing, I copied a portion of some opinion from Guardian as follows ;
Chris DiBona is Google's open source programme manager and a respected . He was in London for one leg of Google Developer Day, and I grabbed a few minutes to speak with him about Google's approach to open development.
How much does Google use open source? And how do you support the community?
CDB: Google does use open source a lot - our servers, for example - it gets used in different parts of our tools. That's what our office in the open source group is tasked with. We also run events like the Summer of Code - we'll have 917 students coming to work on projects this year. And then there's just internal code release - over the last year we estimate that we've put out around 1 million lines of code for everyone. The idea is to bring the open source ethos into everything we do.
But Google Developer Day is mostly about APIs - which might be open for developers to use, but they're not actually open source.
CDB: It's absolutely true that when you create some kind of feed or interface for, say, Google Calendar, you can't say it's open source. But it's about as open possible.
So if Google is a big contributor to the OSS world, does that mean that most of the is now from big businesses with a vested interest in these free, widespread products?
CDB: Well, the best data I have goes back to 2003 - and that says about 40% of people who contribute to open source work for other companies in an IT capacity, 40% work in academia and the other 20% are enthusiasts. I've always thought that's a really great balance, but over the last 10 years it has got a lot more company participation.
Can you name any actual products that have been improved this way at Google?
CDB: If you look at how Sitemaps evolved, it's a great example. Since we'd chosen proper licensing around the protocol, other people were able to get involved and asked can we work to make it better? Sometimes it makes sense when you're trying to create a standard.
But overall, there must be a business case for this: since the flotation, Google has a duty to its shareholders.
It certainly improves the bottom line - as the internet gets bigger, so goes Google. Part of what we do is to make sure the internet is as lively as possible. That way we're able to leverage our strengths; for example we're able to bring lots of people to any new service.
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Mary Kalin-Casey looked at Google's new StreetView and "as she zoomed in, she could see Monty, her cat, sitting on a perch in the living room window of her second-floor apartment," reports The New York Times.
"The issue that I have ultimately is about where you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people's lives," Ms. Kalin-Casey said in an interview Thursday on the front steps of the building. "The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged."
She agrees there is other information about her on Google, but:
"People's jobs are pretty public," she said. "But that doesn't mean they want a shot of their sofa on Google." She has asked Google to remove the image of her building, which was still online as of Thursday evening.
She has a point, in that there is a difference between what anybody can see walking down a particular street and making all streets viewable on a global basis.
But a collection of the Top 15 Google Street View Sightings at Mashable suggests there's not a lot to get worried about, even by the standards of people who don't get out much.
The same issues have already been raised by CCTV, satellite imagery, YouTube and Google itself. Compared to those, StreetView looks rather less threatening.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
eBay has bought StumbleUpon, a site for sharing web sites, for around $75 million. The press release says it's grown 150% over the past year and "delivers approximately five million new recommendations a day to its large, highly engaged user base". What eBay doesn't explain is why. With previous purchases such as PayPal, Skype and Shopping.com, there did seem to be a rationale, but this one escapes me.
StumbleUpon currently has tabs for Websites, People and Videos, so it could possibly add one for Bargains on eBay, but that doesn't sound particularly useful.
The StumbleUpon blog says:
Looking to the future, we think that joining eBay is the right thing to do to help us to grow StumbleUpon to its full potential. We think eBay is a great fit for us because eBay and StumbleUpon share similar approaches - we're both driven by our community of users, and we are both dedicated to connecting people.
Since it's increasingly hard to find a Web site nowadays that isn't driven by connecting its community of users, this will give eBay lots of scope for future takeovers.
There are no such doubts about today's other takeover: Google buys Panoramio. The Panoramio blog says:
Of course, Google buys so many companies that it hardly seems worth mentioning the smaller ones....The integration of photos from Panoramio in Google Earth has been so successful since John Hanke suggested it that we see the acquisition of Panoramio as a natural consequence.
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Google's $3.1 billion cash purchase of DoubleClick has attracted FTC scrutiny, according to The New York Times. The story says:
The inquiry began at the end of last week, after it was decided that the Federal Trade Commission instead of the Justice Department would conduct the review, said the executive, who asked not to be identified because he had not been authorized to speak. The two agencies split the duties of antitrust enforcement.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a citizens rights organisation, the Center for Digital Democracy and the United States Public Interest Research Group filed a complaint that the takeover would "give one company access to more information about the Internet activities of consumers than any other company in the world." The EU also has privacy concerns.
It's probably good news for Google that the FTC is taking on the case, because it has a consumer focus. The FTC investigated both Microsoft and Intel without taking any significant action. However, it does mean that Google is now on the anti-trust radar screens, which could have repercussions down the line.
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Don Dodge, who works for the Microsoft Emerging Business Team, has put a few numbers on the value of search. Working from Google's published financial results and market cap, he reckons that "each 1% of search market share is worth over $100M in revenues" and "the stock market values 1% market share at over $1 billion".
A single search in the US is worth about 12 cents, on average.
In a comment to Don's post, usability guru Jakob Nielsen, points out:
In other words, content providers (including The Guardian) get 1c for creating content but Google gets 99c for indexing it. And, of course, if you don't let Google index it, you probably don't get the 1c ;-)The value per page view on a content site tends to be about 0.1 cents. Thus, pointing people to content is more than 100 times as profitable as actually writing that content. (This is why I called search engines leeches on the Web, at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search_engines.html )
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"European data protection officials have raised concerns that Google could be contravening European privacy laws by keeping data on internet searches for too long," says The Financial Times.
This repeats issues raised by the Norwegian Data Inspectorate last year, "as part of a larger investigation of Norwegian search engines. Sesam and Kvasir".
Peter Fleischer, European privacy counsel for Google, said the company needed to keep search information for some time for security purposes - to help guard against hacking and people trying to misuse Google's advertising system.
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt recently prompted a round of Big Brother scare stories by saying Google wanted to know so much about users that it could tell them what to do -- a competition won by The Independent.
This story included a couple of interesting paras:
Ross Anderson, professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University and chairman of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, said there was a real issue with "lock in" where Google customers find it hard to extricate themselves from the search engine because of the interdependent linkage with other Google services, such as iGoogle, Gmail and YouTube. He also said internet users could no longer effectively protect their anonymity as the data left a key signature.
"A lot of people are upset by some of this. Why should an angst-ridden teenager who subscribes to MySpace have their information dragged up 30 years later when they go for a job as say editor of the Financial Times? But there are serious privacy issues as well. Under data protection laws, you can't take information, that may have been given incidentally, and use it for another purpose. The precise type and size of this problem is yet to be determined and will change as Google's business changes."
Apparently the Information Commissioner doesn't care because of "the voluntary nature of the information being targeted". Yeah, right.
If Google wants to make it voluntary, it can put a big tick box on its home page that says: "Yes, you can compile, store and analyse information about me and my searches." The default, obviously, is NOT. At the moment, Google (like most other search engines) is doing it by the back door. Seems to me that it's involuntary for those not aware enough, and geeky enough, to stop it.
Google complained about Microsoft's IE7 saying it was too hard to change the default search engine. Here's a tip: you can "don't be evil" by making it even easier to opt for privacy protection when using Google.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There were plenty of reasons to be interested in the news that Google has invested almost $4m in 23andMe, the genetics company created by Anne Wojcicki, who married Sergey Brin earlier this month.
As our Wall Street correspondent Andy Clark noted, 23andMe "aims to unite people with copies of their genetic blueprint".
My first thought was that I wouldn't necessarily be too happy if I was a Google shareholder. Regardless of the intrinsic value of 23andMe or its potential, there are always going to be questions when the principals are as closely related as this. In Google terms, though, $3.9m is a drop in the ocean when it's prepared to invest zillions in other companies so it might not become a topic of debate.
The second thought was about the long-term implications of this investment. What happens when you can sequence your own genetic code? What can we find out about the human race when that data is searchable? And what happens when that data is owned by a third party?
Back in 2004, Glyn Moody wrote a piece for us about the ethical questions of googling the genome - at that time it was a possibility, now it seems a probability.
Of course, this isn't Google's first foray into genetics. In 2005 Craig Venter - the legendary businessman/biologist who launched his own commercial genome sequencing scheme in competition with the Human Genome Project - said that he was working with Google to catalogue the genome and make it searchable.
It seems the mission to organise the world's information has stepped up a notch or two.
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Back in 2004, a company called Perfect 10 sued Google on the grounds that its use of thumbnails violated its copyrights. This attracted attention because of the subject matter -- nude photography -- and because it represented a significant challenge to the working of the Web. (Perfect 10 also sued Amazon.)
Google has now won the case on appeal, according to the Washington Post. It says:
The appeals court ruled that the thumbnails fell within a "fair use" exception in copyright law because they play a role in the search process and thus have a function different from that of the original photos.
However, "Yesterday's ruling was not a complete victory for Google, because the judges directed the lower court to reconsider a separate finding in the company's favor," says TWP. Basically, it seems the problem is that while Google's thumbnails may not infringe copyright, it was linking to sites that do infringe copyright -- and knowing that, not stopping it."We conclude that the significantly transformative nature of Google's search engine, particularly in light of its public benefit, outweighs Google's superseding and commercial uses of the thumbnails in this case," Judge Sandra S. Ikuta wrote for the panel.
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"When you search on Google, we collect information about your search, such as the query itself, IP addresses and cookie details," says the official Google blog. It certainly collects enough information to indetify you, and quite possibly to hang you (depending on the punishment strategies of your local jurisdiction).
Google doesn't have to collect this information, but it does, so if you put sufficient value on your privacy, you have to figure out how to protect it on Google and other search engines.
However, even Google has now come to recognise that it isn't necessarily to keep all these records forever. The blog says:
Today we're pleased to report a change in our privacy policy: Unless we're legally required to retain log data for longer, we will anonymize our server logs after a limited period of time. When we implement this policy change in the coming months, we will continue to keep server log data (so that we can improve Google's services and protect them from security and other abuses)--but will make this data much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users, after 18-24 months.
Thankyou, Google: that represents a very welcome advance.
However, 18-24 months still sounds far too long to me. Frankly I don't believe that two years' personal data delivers any significant benefit for users over three months. But of course, I'm not allowed to know.
Yeah, I know: if it bothers you, you can always stop using Google. There are at least a few search engines that don't retain any user data at all, such as Scroogle (a "Google scraper"), ixquick and Clusty. Is anybody going to switch? Thought not. Why give up real and immediate short-term benefits to avoid a potential and possibly unreal long-term risk?
Would you switch to Yahoo or Windows Live Search if either of those pledged not to retain data for more than three months?--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Microsoft lawyer Thomas C Rubin duly delivered his speech on copyright (Searching for Principles: Online Services and Intellectual Property) at the Association of American Publishers annual meeting, and you can read the full text here.
And as Bobbie reported earlier, this did include an attack on Google. The main one was on Google's Book Search project, but Rubin also covered Google advertising for pirate sites, and copyright violations on YouTube.
In one sense, there isn't anything surprising about this: Rubin was simply preaching to the choir. The Association of American Publishers -- the audience -- filed a lawsuit against Google in 2005, following legal action by the Authors Guild. As CNet reported at the time:
"The publishing industry is united behind this lawsuit against Google and united in the fight to defend their rights," AAP President and former Colorado Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder said in a statement. "While authors and publishers know how useful Google's search engine can be and think the Print Library could be an excellent resource, the bottom line is that under its current plan, Google is seeking to make millions of dollars by freeloading on the talent and property of authors and publishers."
Microsoft is also a member, with Yahoo and many others, of the Open Content Alliance. This is doing the same as Google in digitising libraries, except that, unlike Google, it asks for permission first.
In other words, it is absolutely clear that Google is trying to advance its own interests at the expense of the book publlishing industry. On the other hand, Microsoft is just as clearly trying to advance its own interests (it's a major content provider through Microsoft Books and things like Encarta, and a major supplier of digital rights management systems), and it's not even clear that Google is in the wrong.
Google is not printing books and shipping them to Borders, and it's not even making electronic texts publicly available. That would be wrong. It's aim is to make books searchable, just the way it makes the web searchable. Sure, I think Google should ask permission, because printed books have no equivalent of a robots.txt file to say content should not be indexed. But even if the AAP wins in court and it is ruled illegal, it's still a good thing to do: it's not inherently evil.
Google could have made the whole problem go away very easily, just by joining the community effort in the Open Content Alliance. This would also have cut out duplicate scanning and thus speeded up the whole digitisation processs. Google's arrogant decision to go it alone in the face of a hostile book trade is what has left it open to attack -- and for no good reason.
Of course, joining the community effort would have meant Google had the same data as Yahoo and Microsoft. But Google already searches the same World Wide Web as Yahoo and Microsoft, and Google is winning that battle by miles. I think it would have won in book search, too.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Google is one of the world's biggest copyright infringers, through its project to digitise books and through its YouTube video site (let's not even think about Google's cache or its news services, which certainly ought to count as "fair use"), so it's interesting that the don't-be-evil company now says offering copyright protection is "one of the company's highest priorities". According to Reuters:
"We just reviewed that (issue) about an hour ago," [CEO Eric] Schmidt told Reuters when asked what Google was doing to make anti-piracy technologies widely available to video owners. "It is going to roll out very soon ... It is not far away."
Later:
There's not much to go on, but it sonds as though Goolge plans to add yet another DRM (digital rights management) system to the ones from Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Real Networks, IBM, Macrovision and others.Schmidt declined to give a specific timeframe of weeks or months to cover all potential users, saying that any move would take time to cover all Google's services, including YouTube, and to be made available to all copyright holders wishing to use the anti-piracy technology.
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AFP has a funny story. It seems a group of Polish poets, Grupa Mlodych Artstow I Literatow (Group of Young Artists and Writers) owns http://www.gmail.pl/ and Google wants it. So it's using its lawyers to try to get it, rather than admit its own incompetence and just offer to buy it.
Izabela Krawczyk of GMAiL told AFP: "We bought the name legally, with our own money. Nobody gave it to us for free. We refuse to be deprived of what we consider is our property."
Krawczyk, a poet and IT fan based in the central Polish city of Lodz, said that at the end of last year her group was surprised to discover that www.gmail.pl was available.
They decided to buy the rights to the domain name in order to raise the profile of GMAiL, which publicises the works of young unknowns who have not yet found a conventional editor.
"Our site has a use. There's no financial gain involved. And we're not competing with the US company," she said.
So is the message that after three years of beta testing Gmail, and stashing many billions in the bank, the droids at the Googleplex either have not yet heard of Poland or still can't figure out how to buy a Polish domain name? No problem! They may not be able to figure out how to spend $10 on a domain name, but they can easily afford $100,000 worth of lawyers.
What was that bullshit about "Don't be evil" again?
Hat tip to Profy.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's not a great news week for Google, which has not only been accused of encouraging piracy but now faces the latest twist in its fight with Belgian news publishers.
A court in Belgium this morning ruled that Google News must stop reproducing articles, because they can be read even when the articles have disappeared behind a paywall. Here's what Reuters has to say:
The case was brought by Copiepresse, which manages copyrights for Belgium's French- and German-language newspapers and has also demanded that the French division of Internet portal Yahoo (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) stop displaying Belgian press reports.
Copiepresse argues that versions of news articles stored on Google can be seen on its service even after the articles are no longer freely accessible on a newspaper's Website.
Personally, I think the Belgian newspapers are foolish and short-sighted for pursuing this - and I can't understand why they've gone through the courts (surely a robots.txt file would suffice, if they want Google to stop indexing their paywalled content).
I hate paywalls, and I hate news executives who don't realise the internet has changed their game. It's as if they'd been banning their papers from being sold on certain newsstands because people can read the headlines from the street. In cases like this, the only long-term victims are likely to be the newspapers themselves.
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As part of its strategy of being helpful and giving users the best possible information, Google used to add map links that would take you to three major mapping services: Google, Yahoo and Map Quest. Sadly, things have changed. Google no longer cares about giving users the best information. What it cares about is promoting its own services to the exclusion of rival services. So now you only get one link: Google Maps. (See Google Blogoscoped for an illustration.)
Of course, there's really nothing to complain about here. Google is a hugely rich multinational corporation and needs to keep its founders in private jets etc. It's just doing what almost any other capitalist corporation would do in serving its own ends. The only thing it needs to do to normalise things is to drop the arrogant pretence that it occupies some kind of moral high ground against "evil" rivals. In sum, Don't Be Hypocritical.
Search Engine Land covered the maps story and Danny Sullivan has followed up with New Google Checkout Promo; New Google Trust Worries. He says:
In technology terms, Google is rapidly becoming Big Brother, capturing more and more information about people's lives. It knows what you search for, which sites you visit (if they have Adwords), what's in your mail (at Gmail) and so on. Will you still use Google's services if it loses your trust? Or doesn't anybody care any more?Outcry over the tips issue got Google to drop them. Clearly it heard the concerns over trust and reacted. But clearly it also didn't learn anything from that. Google failed to have an official discussion or mention of the concerns via its blog. Now we've got Google Checkout shoved at us and map links dropped, both moves that someone should have realized would raise new concerns about Google's self interest.
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Former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki has had a fantastic first year blogging, and he rapidly climbed into the top 50. His round-up says he got "2,436,117 page views for an average of approximately 6,200/day".
The drawback is: "Total advertising revenue: approximately $3,350 = $1.39 cpm"
As Chris (Long Tail) Anderson quickly pointed out: "A best-selling author and genuine tech celebrity writing a thoughtful essay nearly every workday on a top-50 blog for an audience of around 30,000 people/day. And the pay for that is about $280 a month." Don't quit your day job, he said.
At which point dozens more people chimed in to point that they were making five times that (or whatever) and it was Guy's fault for using Google AdSense.
Aaron at BlogKits did the sums for his post, Google Adsense A Huge Failure For Guy Kawaski's Blog, and reckoned he should be making at least $100 a day instead of $9.17.
Result: "Guy is switching to Federated Media, as we suggest for blogs of his size. BlogKits estimates that he'll make anywhere from $50-$100k/year using that system."
Isn't it nice when stories have a happy ending....
Update: The story has been picked up by CNN in Kawasaki: long tail success or failed "meganicher?"------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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