Monday, May 12, 2008
BlackBerry Bold Not Quite iPhone Beautiful
Google calls its latest data portability effort Friend Connect, but a better name might have been AdWords Connect. Because, like most Google (GOOG) initiatives, that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Connecting people to ads? And there’s a lot more opportunity for that when the Web itself becomes a social network. Which is exactly the sort of thing you hope for when those unobtrusive little contextual ads you sell are as ubiquitous as street signs on the Web.
Designed to help Web publishers easily add social-networking features to their sites, Friend Connect requires just a snippet of code to bring social features to a site along with a means of coordinating them with other social networks like Facebook, Plaxo and Google’s Orkut. It’s another in a recent string of data-portability efforts that hope to apply the distributed model to social networking and put an end to its so-called “walled gardens.”
“The distributed model has worked well for the Web,” David Glazer, Google director of engineering, told Outside the Lines’ Dan Farber. “That is what the Web does–many points of light loosely coupled and massively distributed, allowing users to connect to pages of information. Now it is working to connect people to other people.”
And all of them to Google AdWords, of course. More Internet usage. More ad revenue.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Stop Making the Sixth Sense
Best Little Whorehouse in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Air Force One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
Bad Taste Santa
…in 80 milliseconds.
We sat next to each other in math. We didn’t get on, remember? Want to be my friend?
PRO TIP: You can create an effective diversion using sheep or cattle brains.
Just killed one inside. Pics for proof. This is insane.
With antlers on a headband
The Death Star over San Francisco
Inferring personality from email addresses
A lifetime of CNN in two minutes
With Apple CEO Steve Jobs sitting in for the lovable tiger …