Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080512-google-friend-connect-to-bring-social-networks-to-your-site.html
The barriers around social networking sites are finally crumbling as all the major players bring out their demolition crews. Both MySpace and Facebook have announced new data portability initiatives that will let users exchange data, make friends, and interact with third-party social networks. Now, Google has donned its own hard hat in the form of Google Friend Connect, promising to bring social networks and their features to the rest of the Internet.
Previewed by Google in a press release, Google Friend Connect will provide secure authorization APIs for any website owner to embed applications and features of any social networking site that hops on board. The advantage, however, is that these features will be provided as snippets of code that website owners simply place where they want on their sites. This removes the expensive overhead of programming these features and brings social networking integration to the "long tail" of the rest of the web.
Google illustrates the potential of this new platform with the website of independent musician Ingrid Michaelson, who used Google Friend Connect to embed music features from iLike into her site. Once Google Friend Connect goes live tonight (for a hand-picked group of whitelisted sites), Michaelson's visitors will be able to see comments from their social networking friends, who's going to one of Michaelson's concerts, add her music to their profiles, and more without having to visit iLike's site.
"We want to bring ourselves to every eyeball, not bring every eyeball to us," said Hadi Partovi, President of iLike. Indeed, the next evolution of social networking has been marked as the liberation of data onto the rest of the web. Facebook Connect, for example, will allow users to see which of their Facebook friends are on digg and what they're digging, and MySpace’s Data Availability initiative will let users plug their profile data into Twitter with links to their MySpace page and even favorite blogs.
As Google has so far failed to make any significant inroads with a social networking site of its own, Google Friend Connect mirrors Google's similar efforts like OpenSocial to position itself as a platform provider with tools that power social networks. While Facebook and MySpace's efforts focus more on plugging into established social networks, Google Friend Connect has the rest of the Internet in its crosshairs with simple tools that any owner can embed in their site. That said, Google Friend Connect is not without its drawbacks.
First, Google Friend Connect is sandboxed in an iframe when embedded in a site, according to ReadWriteWeb. At least for now, it sounds like the features provided through Google Friend Connect are essentially just a doorway to a customized portal for whatever social network is being embedded. While there are obvious and significant privacy implications with this idea, this also means that site owners won’t be able to plug directly into the data transferred from social networks either. From the limited details we have on Google Friend Connect right now, it doesn’t sound like this will allow site owners to tie, for example, Facebook identities to the user profiles, comments, and history that their visitors may have already built up on their site.
Google has a bit of work to do on Google Friend Connect, though, as it will only be a wait-list-based preview release once the switch is flipped later today. As it stands, Google Friend Connect sounds like a compelling way to allow social networking data and features to travel beyond the confines of a single website.
Monday, May 12, 2008
News - Google Friend Connect to bring social networks to your site
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Google Speaks in Tongues
Teaching a computer to understand languages isn't rocket science -- it's not nearly that easy, said Peter Norvig, director of research at Google
(Nasdaq: GOOG) .
It takes a limited number of calculations to send a spacecraft to the moon, Mars or other planets. And while the calculations aren't so simple, they are fairly easily managed by a computer, he said.
But learning what words mean, how they fit together and how they translate into other languages is much more challenging, he said.
"In physics, we've been able to use computers very well for a long time. We can get our spacecraft to the moon or Mars very accurately," Norvig said. "But part of the problem with language is there's lots and lots of rules, and there are lots and lots of exceptions to those rules." Rather than using grammar, about two years ago Google started to take a different approach to teach a computer how to understand languages, which is more like the way humans learn them, he said. What the strategy comes down to is programming the computer to learn through examples. By exposing it to an abundance of texts in a specific language, it can learn to pick out patterns, Norvig said. And if you teach it to compare two different languages side by side, it can figure out which words or characters generally correspond to one another. "Most of the answer to how you do this is counting -- it's just the fancy phrase for counting is 'probability theory,'" Norvig said. What Google's language tools do, for example, is let you do a word or phrase search in English. Then it will find results for that search among Web sites written in Spanish. And it will translate them so the English-language user can sort through those links in English. So far, it works with about 15 languages, but the hope is to add more soon, he said. The tools also let you translate Web pages and text, among other things. The key to building the language tools program was to feed it lots and lots of texts, gathering them from groups that already have documents translated into several languages, such as international news sites and United Nations archives, Norvig said. "Then we build a model that says, 'Here's all these translations, and we know this page is a translation of that page, but we don't know exactly which corresponds to which,'" Norvig said. "What we have, though, is probabilities. Like the first sentence in English is similar to the first sentence in Chinese, but it could be the first two sentences, the first three, or it could be one to one." After one example, the computer is still confused. But after a million examples, it starts to make associations that make sense, he said. For instance, a Chinese character may come up often in relation to the English word "dog" or "terrier." And from that the computer learns to make a connection, he said. "We've been able to do this, and our translation software is usually right at the top of a search," Norvig said. "And we've even been able to do this in some languages where nobody on the team speaks the language." More............ Rules and Exceptions
Every Word Counts
Building a Collection
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Google pulls some map images at Pentagon's request
Google Inc has complied with a request by the Pentagon to remove some online images from its street-level map service because they pose a security threat to U.S. military bases, military and company officials said on Thursday.
Gen. Gene Renuart, head of the military command responsible for homeland defense, said the Pentagon had talked to Google about the risks and expected the company to cooperate in removing selected images from its Street View service.
"We have been contacted by the military," Google spokesman Larry Yu said. "In those instances where they (the U.S military) have expressed concerns about the imagery, we have accommodated their requests."
The Defense Department, which is still studying how many images are available, has also banned Google teams from taking video images on bases.
"We've got to get a sense of what is there and see how we can mitigate it," Renuart said.
But because many images were taken from public streets, the military may not have a legal right to request that videos be pulled.
Street View, a feature of Google Maps, offers ground-level, 360-degree views of streets in 30 U.S. cities. Web users are able to drive down a street, in a virtual sense, using their mouse to adjust views of roadside scenery.
The feature has become a popular service for drivers seeking to plan a trip to an unfamiliar neighborhoods. But from the outset, Street View has been a magnet of controversy over potential privacy invasion of people captured in the images.
In one instance, a man was pictured exiting a San Francisco strip club. In another case, a woman was shown sunbathing. Complaints have even included a woman asking that a picture of her cat be taken down, a request Google denied.
The images that worry the Pentagon include views of bases, including security at the entrances to those installations.
"It actually shows where all the guards are. It shows how the barriers go up and down. It shows how to get in and out of buildings," said Renuart, commander of U.S. Northern Command.
"I think that poses a real security risk for our military installations," he told reporters at the Pentagon.
The Google spokesman said his company's policy was to photograph only those images visible from public roads.
"It is against Google's policy for a driver to seek access to a military base," Yu said.
Street View has yet to be introduced outside the United States. Web-based Google Maps and a related computer-based service called Google Earth have drawn criticism from a variety of countries for providing images of sensitive locations, such as military bases or potential targets of terror attacks.
The services rely on civilian versions of satellite maps that it licenses from commercial mapping services.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/, Google pulls some map images at Pentagon's request
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Google Urchin Available For Download
Urchin Software from Google analyzes traffic for one or more websites and provides easy-to-understand reports on your visitors - where they come from, how they use your site, what converts them into customers, and much more. If you have content behind a security firewall or on an intranet or internal network that prevents you from using the Google Analytics service, Urchin Software from Google is for you.
Urchin Software from Google is supported exclusively through Urchin Software Authorized Consultants. Note this product is still in beta and should not yet be used for critical business decisions.
Urchin can be used on servers having content behind a security firewall or having restrictions which does not allow use of Google Analytics.
Urchin Software from Google features the following upgrades from Urchin 5, among many others:
• More accurate geo-identification of visitors
• Cross-segmentation options similar to Google Analytics
• E-commerce and campaign tracking included (no longer requiring additional modules)
• Vastly improved embedded scheduler to more easily manage processing and re-processing jobs
• Improved user interface
• More robust log processing
Supported
* FreeBSD 4
* FreeBSD 5.3+
* FreeBSD 6
* Linux with 2.4 or 2.6 kernel
*
Google logo
Google has had several logos since its renaming from "BackRub". The current official Google logo was designed by Ruth Kedar. The company also includes various modifications and/or humorous features, such as cartoon modifications, of their logo for use on holidays, birthdays of famous people, and major events, like the Olympics. These have become known as Google Doodles.
Download Google Earth 4.2 (beta) for PC, Mac or Linux
Zoom from outer space to street level in seconds, or explore the stars. View geographical and astronomical imagery, 3D buildings, maps, and local business information. Whether your business depends on location-related information or you simply love to explore, Google Earth is for you.
download : http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html
