TechLuver.com

MySpace will open its doors to software developers allowing them to create games and media-sharing applications for the popular social network, reports the BBC.

MySpace will formally launch its “Developer Platform” next Tuesday but is already allowing people to sign up. The tools have been developed with Google and will allow programmers to create programs similar to those used by millions on rival site Facebook.

Facebook opened up its site to outside developers last year. It has since had great success, with nearly 15,000 applications written for the site.

These include photo-sharing and music recommendation tools as well as games such as scrabble. However, despite its popularity, Facebook still lags behind MySpace in terms of overall users. MySpace has around 200 million registered users, compared to 63 million who use Facebook.

Last October MySpace announced that it would join OpenSocial, Google’s platform designed to allow developers to build applications that will work on any website.

Other networks such as Bebo, LinkedIn and Orkut already use the tools.

The tools, available from 5 February, will allow developers to build applications that make use of MySpace member profile information and their connections with other users.More at BBC News.

A federal appeals court handed Google a setback in a patent fight on Wednesday, Dec 26, tossing out part of a summary judgment in Google’s favor in a lawsuit filed by Hyperphrase Technologies.

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit revived part of HyperPhrase Technologies’ lawsuit, throwing out a lower court ruling that Google’s AutoLink feature didn’t infringe the company’s patents.

As part of the Google toolbar, AutoLink gives users more information than standard links. It recognizes data such as addresses and book titles, then provides links to online maps or books at Amazon.com.

The appeals court ruled that Google’s immensely profitable AdSense did not infringe on Hyperphrase’s patents. It handed down a split decision on AutoLink, agreeing that Google did not infringe, as claimed, on one of the Hyperphrase patents. But it vacated a summary judgment in Google’s favor on two others and sent it back to the Wisconsin district court.

HyperPhrase claimed in an April 2006 suit that Google used its inventions without permission. It sought cash compensation and an order blocking Mountain View, Calif.-based Google from using the technology.

More at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruling here (in pdf).

Dec 25, `07 — Slashdot reports on Google linking up Google Reader with Google Talk to make shared items visible to your contacts on Google Talk.

“One week ago Google Reader’s team decided to begin showing your private data to all your GMail contacts. No need to opt-in, NO way to opt-out. Complaints haven’t been answered. Some users share their problems, including one family who says they won’t be able to enjoy this Christmas because of this ‘feature.’ Will Google start doing this with all their products? You can browse the thread in Google Groups.”

Comments from Google Groups

User ‘banzaimonkey’ writes:
“I think the basic mistake here, as Modulo has noted, is that the people on my contact list are not necessarily my “friends”. I have business contacts, school contacts, family contacts, etc., and not only do I not really have any interest in seeing all of their feed information, I don’t want them seeing mine either. This is a major privacy problem.”

User ‘Paul Russell’ writes:
“Using my Gmail contacts as a friends list is a dangerous thing. Especially because a lot of the addresses in there were added automatically when people emailed me. I understand that sharing is a public activity, but to date Google reader shares were pseudo private by obscurity. In reality the only people that were going to see my share were people I told about it. I don’t like the idea of an opt out only mechanism. Facebook just took a bath on this concept. Granted Beacon was a complete disaster, but I think the lesson to be learned is when you change personal sharing to become more public it should be an opt in process.”

Chrix Finne at Official Google Reader Blog invites your feedback on Google Reader features here at Google Groups.

On Dec 13, Udi Manber, VP Engineering at Google announced - Knol - a knowledge project.

On official Google blog he elaborates, “The web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has helped to make that information more easily accessible by providing pretty good search facilities. But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable.

There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that. The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.”

Manber further goes on, “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.

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.

Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.

We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

We do not want to build a walled garden of content; we want to disseminate it as widely as possible. Google will not ask for any exclusivity on any of this content and will make that content available to any other search engine.

As always, a picture is worth a thousands words, so an example of a knol is here.” More at Official GoogleBlog.

Dec 07, ‘07 — UNICEF, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Google today announced the launch of ” Our Stories “, a joint initiative to preserve and share the histories and identities of cultures around the world by making personal stories available online in many languages.

Using laptops, mobile phones and other recording devices, children will record, in their native languages, the stories of elders, family members and friends. These stories will be shared globally through the Our Stories website, where they can be found on a Google Map.

By making these stories accessible around the world, the Our Stories project hopes to contribute to a better understanding of our shared humanity across countries and cultures, across religious traditions, across languages, and across generations.

Low-cost XO laptops by One Laptop per Child will serve as a foundation to help build this digital archive of personal stories by providing children in developing countries with easy-to-use technology to record their stories and interviews.

The Our Stories website will initially include stories collected by Brazil’s Museum of the Person and stories recorded for UNICEF by young people in Ghana, Pakistan, Tanzania and Uganda.

Our Stories has taken inspiration from the StoryCorps project in the United States founded by MacArthur Fellow Dave Isay. “StoryCorps is proud to lend its experience in recording the conversations of nearly 30,000 Americans to this global undertaking,” said Isay. “These efforts teach us that the lives of everyone – whether they are in New York or Nairobi – matter, and that they will not be forgotten.”

More stories from more countries will be added to the site every month in an effort to preserve an oral history of humanity in the 21st Century.

Leading figures have already lent their voices to the project: Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah, Queen of Jordan and UNICEF Eminent Advocate for Children, and Ishmael Beah, UNICEF Advocate for Children Affected by War and best-selling author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, have all recorded messages welcoming users to the site and encouraging them to share their stories.

Listen to a story today at OurStories.org.

Dec 07, ‘07 — iPhone Dev Team has released the code for anySIM iPhone unlocking tool on Google Code today.

In their words, “You may know anySIM, the most popular and free unlock solution for Apple’s iPhone. Because of the public request and to archive a constant code quality, we now opensourced it!

The source will go online at firday, the 7th of december. Anybody is welcome to contribute patchs to the software on the proper way. You will be able to submit potential changes to the tree via svn by than. We are looking forward to your contribution!

Feel free to join IRC as well at irc.osx86.hu”

More at iPhone Dev Team

Dec 04, ‘07 — Gmail rolled out a new feature to make it even more convenient and useful to chat from Gmail: AIM support.

Now you can now chat with all your AIM buddies right inside Gmail. Just click on the upside-down triangle next to “set status here” in your Gmail chat and select “Sign into AIM” from the drop down menu. Once you’ve entered your AIM log-in information, your AIM contacts will appear intermingled among your Gmail contacts, and you can select an AIM contact and chat with them directly.

This is just one of the first new features Google’s email service launched using Gmail’s new code structure. This is rolling out in the newest English version of Gmail first and will be available in other languages soon. More at Google.

Nov 27, ‘07 — Google wants to offer consumers a new way to store their files on its hard drives, in a strategy that could accelerate a shift to Web-based computing and intensify the Internet company’s competition with Microsoft. Says  Kevin J Delaney and Vauhini Vara of The Wall Street Journal.

The WSJ further writes, “Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives — such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password, and share them online with friends. It could be released as early as a few months from now, one of the people said.

Google’s push underlines a shift in how businesses and consumers approach computing. They are increasingly using the Web to access applications and files stored in massive computer data centers operated by tech companies such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft and Google. Such arrangements, made possible by high-speed Internet connections between homes, offices and data centers, aim to ease users’ technology headaches and, in some cases, cut their costs.

Other companies offer various Internet-based file storage services, but most have been slow to catch on with businesses and consumers. Some offerings, such as Yahoo’s Briefcase Web-based storage service, require users to go to a Web page and click through a few screens to upload a new file and set various limits.

For its part, Microsoft offers a test version of a service called Windows Live SkyDrive with one gigabyte of free storage.

Google faces hurdles on issues such as data privacy, copyright, the economics of adding storage capacity and the technical challenges of offering service without interruption.

For Google, one advantage of offering a broad data-storage service would be to potentially draw consumers to existing Google services that compete with Microsoft’s Office applications suite, which includes Word, Outlook and Excel.

The company has been tackling technical issues including how to get the storage service to work seamlessly with software on users’ computers so it appears like just another hard drive, say the people familiar with the matter.

A document Google inadvertently released on the Web in March 2006 said it was moving toward being able to “store 100% of user data,” citing “emails, Web history, pictures, bookmarks” as a few examples. The document referred to what appeared to be unannounced Google initiatives, including one dubbed “GDrive” and said they could help compete with Microsoft.” More at WSJ.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. –(BUSINESS WIRE)– Nov 13, ‘07 — GoDaddy.com is working with Google as the pilot partner for a new effort to seamlessly integrate Google Webmaster Tools into customers’ Web hosting accounts.

With Google Webmaster Tools, Go Daddy users are now able to see how Google views their site, diagnose problems and share information with Google in order to improve their site’s visibility in search results. This service, combined with Go Daddy’s Sitemap Editor, provides a free and easy way for Web site owners to manage and improve traffic to their site.

“When Google approached us about incorporating their product into our hosting accounts, it was an easy decision,” said GoDaddy.com CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. “Our customers are always looking for simple ways to make their sites easier to find and attract new visitors. Thanks to these easy-to-use tools, customers can quickly tap this valuable Webmaster resource without having to be technical wizards.”