Month: January 2007

Google Reader just added a Reader Trends feature that highlights blog posts users have read, starred, and shared in the past 30 days.

A post by Paris Lemon Blog, via Digg: What’s completely clear now is that the user statistical data is there and ready to go…the question is how long until Google utilizes it to showcase the ‘most starred’ or ‘most shared’ of Google Reader?

The Google Reader Blog announcement describes Reader Trends as an efficiency tool to allow users to identify subscriptions wanting removal or a catch-up read.

YouTube’s failure to create a copyright detection software to help avoid legal entanglements may put spell trouble for the GoogTube. Since the announcement of Google’s purchase of YouTube on October 9, the answer to every question of copyright violations and lawsuits has been this software. It was the also arguably the pretext that allowed Google to imagine partnerships with major media companies and music labels. Probably more to come on this…

Financial Times:

YouTube said on Friday the technology would not be formally launched this year and YouTube’s offices were closed until the new year. While providing no further details about when the system would be made formally available, it said tests of the system had been under way with some media companies since October and the system remained “on track”.

If the delay lasts for more than a week or two into the new year, suggesting more than just a slight technical hitch, “this is certainly going to be a serious issue”, Mr McGuire (a digital media analyst at Gartner) added.

Read More

Speaking of dominating a list of the best search engines, in case you missed it, the New York Times recently did a piece on a trio on entrepreneurs setting their sights on just that: besting the giant. (“In Silicon Valley, the Race Is on to Trump Google”) ReadWriteWeb has a summary and follow-up that breaks the competition into categories of competition to Google: Better Technology, Better UI, and Vertical Search. Well worth a read, but the conclusion Alex Iskold draws is that no one’s quite ready to battle Goliath yet.

A post on Skrenta heralds Google as the winner in the third age of computing. Worth a read, some major points include:

* Yahoo is effectively letting $1.5 billion in revenue sit on the table so long as they chose not to allow AdWords to handle their search monetization.

* “Google is the start page for the Internet. The net isn’t a directed graph. It’s not a tree. It’s a single point labeled G connected to 10 billion destination pages.”



* Alluding to Battelle’s database of intentions: “Google’s CPMs are $90-120, vs. $4-5 for an average browse page view elsewhere. This value premium on search vs. content is because of the massive concentration of choice potential which exists on the decision point, Google.”



* Next step, dominating the verticals: “It’s actually not inconceivable that they could eventually own all of the destination page views too. Crazy as it sounds, it’s conceivable that they could actually end up owning the entire net, or most of what counts. Complaints are already being heard about Google using their starting point power to muscle into verticals.” Here Skrenta is referencing the new Google Tips on their homepage, on which Firefox brain Blake Ross, generally a friend of Google, just posted a scathing note of criticism.

Read More