Saravanan Sahadevan

Many people dream about owning a social media platform someday. Not everyone is able to build such platforms though. But now there’s something in the air. Google’s Friend Connect. Reported to be launched shortly, Friend Connect is based on the Data Portability efforts. In simple words, It allows any site to become social.

In english it means, a site owner may now add social features such as user profiles, adding friends, and more to his or hers site without much of a hassle. One may just quickly add a snippet of code to his/hers site and instantly they would be able to be running some social media features. For a start, website owners may choose from built-in functionality such as user registrations, invitations, member gallery and reviews. 

Since this is a Data Portability project of Google’s, it also would allow third party applications built by the Open Social developer communities. This was said on an earlier press release by Google. 

Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more

One of the main concept of Friend Connect is to also remain Open at all times. Therefore it will be also running on the current standards such as OpenID and Open Social. 

Earlier today, @Gigaom, twittered a reasonable question towards me on what and how would I implement Friend Connect on my site as I told him that I do plan to have such things on my site sometime.

Well here it is, first of all this site runs on a blog concept where we all know that there is not much of a social media interactivity available. The most that famous blogging platforms such as Wordpress currently do offer, would be comments & user registrations with profiles. Its pretty basic.

So how would growing communities such as blogs have more interactivity? So my simple answer would be Friend Connect if it could delivery what is being promised. In order to allow such interactivity to happen here, Wordpress development team would rather need to develop a simple integrating plugin that would simply add Friend Connect features.

But so why social interactivity is needed or important on blogs such as mine? Well my answer to this would be that as a blogger we always value our readers and ever-growing community. The hard built community would need to be sustained by some reasonable features that would allow them to be more exposed with interactivity. As well some kind of feature that would centralize a community with its blog owner rather then decentralizing it to other media streams such as Facebook or Twitter. I really hope twitter as well would be added into the Open Social project. Allowing faithful readers to interact with the blog owner and it’s other users at the blog it self. Centralized.

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Launched moments ago, Powerset is a contextual based search engine. It search query is way different from Google or Yahoo. It is not even powered up by a web crawler or etc but instead it tries to match a list of keywords from various articles. Currently, Powerset only queries wikipedia and I must say, the way results are organized are simply astonishing.

You could discover facts, places, things and etc in a more effective way and more organized based on wikipedia’s database. In plain english, the search engines tries to understand what your question phrase is and provides related queries. For example, I did a search on “when did caesar cross the rubicon“, below is what you get.

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Quite a bit happened this week. Just highlighting some. Lots from Techcrunch on my radar.

• Facebook To Lift 5,000 Friends Limit - I reminded my self that, Leo Laporte once said, that he saw a bug that seemed to allow more than 5000 friends. Now this is some good news. 
• Apple’s iPhone To Land In India, Australia, Italy, Seven Other Markets - India!, when would ever Malaysia get such news. I believe not in this century. 
• Google Confirms Plans To Put Display Ads On Google.com- One unique thing that google had on it’s front-page since day one was it simpleness. Hope ads don’t loose my faith but hey, who does not need money!
• Yahoo’s Answer to Google’s Universal Search is Glue - Head to Yahoo! India and search for soccer, you would understand what is this all about.
• Three’s Company Or Three’s A Crowd? Google To Launch “Friend Connect” On Monday - Open Social Related
• Amazon ‘Forgets’ to Pay Taxes - That worries you?

• Ferrari launches teaser website for upcoming 2+2 -  Ferrari launched a website featuring the new car’s exhaust sound. Now this is weird!

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Finally Microsoft did something right by withdrawing the offer to acquire Yahoo. Since the beginning of the talks for the deal took place, I was seriously astonished of the move by Microsoft. 

With early bids rejected and then resubmission of a higher bid with a humble threat made Microsoft look very desperate. At thats solved now. Few hours ago, Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer, withdrew the offer letter to Yahoo regarding their acquisitions. 

As reported by press, it seemed that the folks at Yahoo rejected the deal by quoting the minimum offer to be considered was at only $37 or above per share. On the other hand, Microsoft was only willing to offer $33 maximum per share. So practically the deal would not go any further. And I believe if Microsoft was to rebid, not only me but the rest of the tech analyst would have grouped Microsoft under desperation.

Why monopoly? Instead of looking into new approaches, Microsoft was trying to simply use a typical short cut. Hire one of the largest competitor of Google. Why? It’s clear that Microsoft is under pressure in terms of the hardware business and OS business by Apple and in terms of office and online applications , Google on the other hand with Google Docs for example. Yet I’m never convinced that, trying to acquire Yahoo was the best thing to do. All the best Microsoft !

Couple of reaction links for posterity. Pretty amazing reactions. I can’t believe as some people actually wanted the deal to happen:

Breaking: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Bid; Walks Away From Deal
Microsoft walks away from Yahoo
Full text: Yahoo CEO, chairman respond
Report: A peek behind the Yahoo-Microsoft meltdown
Breaking: Microsoft Corporation Rescinds Offer For Yahoo Inc

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Its a official and known fact that Google is heading towards Malaysia, sometime end of this year. I was just wondering on the opportunities that Google has in Malaysia. 

I believe Google is going to have a hard time getting used to the Malaysian style. With bad technology infrastructures (not all), Google is for sure going for a ride. Malaysia is one of the countries that provides its internets users with bad ISP services. Having less than 6 ISP companies and monopolized companies such as TMnet, has failed to provide its users the real bandwidth.

TMnet that has the most number of users due to its so call cheap(crap) prices. With connections that claims to be broadband, which can’t even play a Youtube video without buffering. With such slow services, many web 2.0 or social media services are having problems to venture into the country and even are killing great startups ideas in the country it self. 

So, Google who is known for its data centers and hubs are certainly not going to look into the Malaysian public market. Its just going to sit comfortably as one of their regular hub and operating centers in Cyberjaya with a MSC status. It obviously with slow broadband growth, they can’t do much. This would not bring any other benefits to the local public besides job opportunities as claimed by media representatives. Most to most, there might be a PIKOM fair with Google as a platinum sponsor. 

With lack of service provides, the broadband revolution in Malaysia is not going to be in pace with the growth of technology overall. Even Malaysia’s neighbor country, Indonesia has more than 150 ISP’s. Maybe, with Google’s presence, the local ISP’s might take an initiative to move forward? 

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There are tons of web sites and services that provide you search services for your needs. But sometimes its just too many and at times you don’t get what you want. This is because you are not using the right service at the right time. This guide is basic and is meant for newbies. So if you consider yourself a newbie, I’m sure this would help. Listed below are 5 best search services that I would personally recommend.

• Google - This would be the best search engine for web sites and blogs of your search terms. There are people who would use Yahoo for instance but I certainly would not recommend that at all. Yahoo is too messy and its search term results are not appropriate. Google has a better bot that crawls flawlessly. Hence providing you the best and closest results. 
• Flickr - Instead of using Google image search, use Flickr. Flickr provides you a pool of professional snapped images and most of the time you are in need of high quality images. If you are specifically searching for good images for your projects and assignments, Flickr is your choice.
• Technorati - Technorati is a place for you if you are interest in the blogosphere. Basically every blog in this world is pinged to this services. You may find your interest by searching tags term of your choice. Normally all blog post would be tagged to specific terms that makes it easier for you to find what you want. 
• Alltop - Don’t you have time to search or to know what’s latest ? Perhaps you do not know a reliable source of web sites that could provide you informations ? Then use Alltop. Alltop is a news aggregator site that mash-ups RSS feeds from reliable and famous website into various topics. This then allows you to select a particular topic and to know what’s latest in a top 5 chronology. For more, all you have to do is click on the website/blog title and it would redirect you to the respective site. 
• Youtube - Even though you are a newbie, I’m pretty sure you would have heard about youtube sometime around. If you have not, its not a big deal. Youtube is a community powered web 2.0 video sharing service. People from all over the world upload favorite videos of theirs and its searchable. You may even upload your own videos. If you are finding some videos for your references or entertainment, youtube has sufficient content today which would simply fulfill your needs.

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