Search guru-supreme Danny Sullivan got an answer out of Google this weekend concerning the search engine's long-suspected practice of punishing websites in search results when they are alleged to have sold outbound links not including a nofollow tag. It's a controversial policy that has an unclear impact on the search landscape.
As critics point out, however, Google still allows advertisements for paid links to be run through the Google Adwords service. Though they don't pass on pagerank, AdSense ads themselves are of course paid links that do deliver traffic for a fee. Perhaps Google just doesn't like paid links that they don't get a piece of the payment for.
Links bought with the intention of increasing not just traffic but conferring pagerank authority from the seller to the buyer may in many cases give artificial authority to the sites of link buyers. Punishing this practice, though, may hurt the pagerank of reputable sites that the public fully expects to appear high in search results but whom happen to sell links.
Tim O'Reilly and team have done some interesting research into the rise of Facebook as an application platform. They released a report entitled The Facebook Application Platform, which we've been looking at in the virtual offices of Read/WriteWeb. One of the findings in the report is that Facebook apps follow the now familiar power law of popularity - a point also made by Alex Iskold in a R/WW post at the end of September. As the O'Reilly report put it: "a Facebook developer needs to build a huge viral hit to get anywhere near the top. As the aggregator, the company that benefits the most from niche applications is Facebook itself."
Top 10 Facebook Apps Usage; chart by Alex Iskold, 27 Sept 2007
Google gained 15.57 today to close at $609.62/share today, breaking the 600 point barrier for the first time. That puts the company's market cap at over $190 billion, and means Google is worth more on paper than companies like Wal-Mart (the world's largest retailer) and Coca-Cola (the world's top brand).
Google is trading more than 7-times its IPO price of $85 per share and went from $500 to $600 per share in months less time than it took to go from $400 to $500. According to the Associated Press, the average target stock price for Google is at $614.64, though some analysts predict it will cross $700 per share by the end of 2008.
While Henry Blodget's $750 billion target market cap may be far fetched, Google's stock price continues to rise with few signs of slowing down. Still a darling of the Valley and still trouncing all comers in its primary (and most profitable) business (search), Google has pleased investors by consistently beating earnings estimates since going public in 2004. The company's stock has risen 30% so far this year and earnings are expected to rise 40% according to Thompson Financial.
Google and IBM are betting the (server) farm on cloud computing. The New York Time is reporting that the two tech giants are investing up to $30 million to develop programs to help teach cloud computing concepts to students at six American universities. Google is building a 1,600 processor data center that will run both Google and IBM machines and open source software (including Linux, XEN virtualization software, Apache Hadoop, and open source versions of Google's own internal systems including the Google File System). IBM is also supposedly working on a data center.
For the six universities involved in the project, that means access to a small scale version of the type of data center that runs Google's own search engine and applications on which to teach students about cloud computing. Distributed computing works by creating clusters of commodity hardware that run on an interconnected grid and allow web applications to scale without the need for expensive, large-scale server farms.
"This project combines IBM's historic strengths in scientific, business and secure-transaction computing with Google's complementary expertise in Web computing and massively scaled clusters," said Samuel J. Palmisano, chairman, president and chief executive officer of IBM in a press release. "We're aiming to train tomorrow's programmers to write software that can support a tidal wave of global Web growth and trillions of secure transactions every day."
Two Wharton academics released an interesting paper last week that asks whether online recommendation services are a threat to the aggregate diversity of items discovered by their users. The study is titled "Blockbuster Culture's Next Rise or Fall: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity" and I found it via a good summary article at PaidContent this weekend.
All indications point towards a rise in importance by recommendation engines, so this argument deserves examination. From eBay's acquisition of StumbleUpon to the CBS acquisition of Last.fm to this weekend's MSNBC acquisition of Newsvine - recommendation engines are big money. We've covered quite a few startups in this space and I'm sure it will continue to grow in prominence.
Perhaps more importantly, the "Long Tail" of diverse discovery is an important part of the meritocratic and democratic promise of the new web.
Good recommendation engines are also just plain fun.
After just a little consideration, the Wharton study seems more meaningful as a cautionary tale than as a critique of the inherent nature of recommendation engines. In discussing this with others I've found that most people swing quickly from believing the study is either obviously wrong or obviously correct. It's a more complex question than it might seem.
Recommendation engines should strive to be smarter than simply finding that "there is a high correlation between people who liked X and people who liked Y." I would argue, for example, that recommending other users of a system and highlighting their less popular discoveries could be a good way to solve the problem. Getting it right is probably easier said than done, but it seems there's still plenty of potential for recommendation engines to expand the long tail. The study's arguments are important to consider, though.
There are a ton of free gift apps on Facebook, which begs the question, why would you ever spend $1 on one of Facebook's official gifts? Or even more ludicrous, why would you spend $1 on gifts from a third party application? Non-profit gift giving site Changing the Present has an answer for that question.
Changing the Present is a 501c3 non-profit organization that matches people with gift donations. They offer thousands of ways to give to hundreds of non-profits making the process of donating to a social causes in someone's name a painless one. They've just launched a Facebook application that they hope will turn the site's 42 million users on to non-profit giving by tapping into the virtual gift fad.
Today Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson contacted Read/WriteWeb to announce that his citizen journalism startup Newsvine has been acquired by MSNBC, the Microsoft/NBC joint venture, for an undisclosed sum. Davidson told us that "Newsvine will continue operating independently, just as it has been since launching in March of 2006." He also indicated there would be little change in the features of the site -- which is great news, because in our review of Newsvine in July, we noted that Newsvine "is probably more advanced in its design than other CJ [Citizen Journalism] sites, often trying new things and design techniques." Indeed I can't wait to see how MSNBC integrates some of the Newsvine features, which Davidson said will occur: "Over the next few years, Newsvine technology and content will make its way onto msnbc.com, and vice-versa where it makes sense."
Newsvine officially became part of MSNBC on Friday, October 5th, but Davidson said they'd "been talking since May." The company will continue to be based in Seattle, the home of MSNBC.
What is MSNBC getting, other than a slick and feature-packed website? Newsvine is also a thriving Citizen Journalism community, with solid stats. In our July review of Newsvine, we noted that Newsvine gets about 1.2 million unique visitors per month and it has grown at an average rate of 46% per quarter. Newsvine community members view an average of 21 pages per day and spend an average of 143 minutes per month on the site. The site gets about 80,000 comments a month and 250,000 votes a month.
The explanation of why Newsvine sold to MSNBC, from Davidson, makes interesting reading. It is all about scale and partnering with MSM to achieve that:
The star of Adobe's annual MAX conference, held this year in Chicago between Sept. 30 and Oct. 3, was the web application. Web apps and their creation permeated nearly everything that Adobe announced at the massive event, which attracted over 4,000 web developers. With a growing family of products based around Flash, Flex, Cold Fusion, and the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), Adobe is demonstrating a commitment to making easier the lives of web application developers.
Adobe kicked things off at MAX by announcing a handful of web apps and services of its own. The largest the company's announcements was their purchase of Virtual Ubiquity, the makers of the Flex-based online word processor application Buzzword. Buzzword is a very strong entry into the online office space and in our review I said that it was "the first online word processor that I have used that made me forget I was using an online word processor."
Sponsor:
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.
Adobe Acquires Virtual Ubiquity - Enters Web Office Fray
Josh Catone was at the Adobe MAX 2007 conference in Chicago this week, where several Web-related announcements were made. The biggest was Adobe's acquisition of Waltham, Mass.-based Virtual Ubiquity for an undisclosed sum - and in doing so officially entering the Web Office fray. Virtual Ubiquity are the creators of Buzzword, an online, collaborative word processing application powered by Adobe's Flex framework. Buzzword is built on Adobe's Flex framework and runs in the browser using the Flash player. The interface is slick and seems reminiscent of recent Adobe imaging applications, such as Lightroom.
See also:
Lone Remaining Burmese Blogger Uses Lightweight Messaging Service to Broadcast to the World
The story of the monk-led protests in Myanmar, or Burma, and subsequent police crack-down was a widely reported one this week. Bloggers were particularly important as the events unfolded, posting news accounts and photos to the internet from a country that very few outside reporters have access to. At least one blogger remains active in the country, posting to a lightweight messaging service with an embeddable widget for output - click on our story to see the widget in action.
Microsoft Launches Office Live Workspaces
This week Microsoft announced a new online office service called Office Live Workspace, plus re-named its Office Live service to Office Live Small Business. Both moves are attempts to complement Microsoft Office, its dominant desktop office suite - rather than replace functionality present in MS Office. Office Live Workspace will allow users to store, access and share 1,000+ documents in an online workspace. It will also synchronize contact, task, and event lists with Outlook. The service is free and is being marketed as an "online companion to Microsoft Office".
R/WW editor Richard MacManus asked: Is this what Microsoft's answer to the Web Office is - tacked on features to its all-powerful desktop suite? Apparently so.
Trillian Astra, the next version of the popular Windows multi-client chat application Trillian, is being developed for the Mac. Cerulean Studios, the makers of Trillian, has released a limited and experimental Mac version to approved testers of their new Astra platform. Hopefully a working version will be made available for general release someday; Astra itself as been in invite-only Alpha stage for nearly a full year now.
Testers can grab the download here and readers interested in becoming testers can go here.
Trillian on Mac is something that many people have waited for for a long time. It's an aesthetically pleasing, feature rich service with a very loyal group of users. Trillian Astra users can chat seamlessly with friends on Yahoo!, ICQ, AIM, Bonjour, Windows Live, Google Talk and MySpace IM. There's a web component of the new service, an RSS ticker and more - see a screenshot of the pared down Mac version below.
The particulars of this service as opposed to others are better experienced than they are described. Other multi-client chat tools include the open source Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM) on Windows and Adium on Mac.
See a screenshot of the current Mac build below the fold.
