Google Code Reviews

Google Code Reviews is, as the name implies, aimed at developers. It allows developers to share code for review and propose changes.

Google Moderator

Google Moderator is an application that Google first released for the App Engine just about a month ago. Moderator is basically a forum for group discussions and Q&A sessions, with the ability to vote questions and answers up and down.

Google Short Links

Short Links is a URL shortener like TinyURL or snurl, but works with your own domain name. This allows you to turn complicated and long URLs into short, more memorable ones.

More to Come

According to Google, these are just the first three in a long list of products that will make their debut in Labs for Google Apps. Google also intends to open this platform up to all App Engine developers, but it hasn't provided a timetable for this yet.

Google Gears Turns One: Future is in Open Standards

Google Gears, the offline web application API it debuted last year at its developer conference, turned one this week. To celebrate, Google dropped the company name from Gears. The name change is a symbolic move aimed at reinforcing Google's commitment to working with existing standards communities and helping them to define better open standards for bridging online applications and the offline world.

See also: Google App Engine Announces Pricing Plan, APIs, Open Access; Why Google is Wooing Web Developers

The Ultimate Yahoo! Pipes Creations List

Yahoo! Pipes is one of the coolest ways to mashup the RSS feeds of various sites and sources to get the data you want. Since our initial coverage of Yahoo! Pipes, thousands of creations are now available. However, finding the best picks can be tough. ReadWriteWeb has done the hardest part and comprised a list of some of the best Yahoo Pipes created by users. We give you the ultimate Yahoo! Pipes list.

Strands Lifestreaming: What They're Doing and Invites for Readers

Recommendation service Strands.com launched a lifestreaming service this week that aims to pull together the company's wide range of services in particular media and online activity into one central place for users to share socially. The new Strands is a way to share your music, bookmarks, blog posts and other activity with friends, family and groups. It's a major entry into one of the most interesting sectors of the new web. We give it a mixed review...

See also: Recommendation and RSS: A Look at Two Readers Filtering the Noise

Semantic Tagging with Faviki

Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool that offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, and Diigo do not - semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki's suggestions don't just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.

Freebase: Dispelling The Skepticism

Freebase, the first product of semantic web company Metaweb, is an open, semantically marked up database of information that we called one of the "10 semantic apps to watch" last year. With $57.4 million in funding, a smart team, and a tech legend in Danny Hillis at the helm, Metaweb is considered to be one of the most serious players in the Semantic Web space. Yet the company's efforts to date have been met with skepticism. Particularly, people have asked how is Freebase different to Wikipedia? Jamie Taylor, the Minister of Information at Metaweb, spoke at the SemTech 2008 Conference that took place in San Jose last week in an effort to dispel some of that skepticism.

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality

For a few years now people have been talking about semantic search. Any technology that stands a chance to dethrone Google is of great interest to all of us, particularly one that takes advantage of long-awaited and much-hyped semantic technologies. But no matter how much progress has been made, most of us are still underwhelmed by the results. In head-to-head comparisons with Google, the results have not come out much different. What are we doing wrong?

See also: Making the Web Searchable: The Story of SearchMonkey

Android Is Out For iPhone Blood

Wednesday, at Google's I/O Event, the company demonstrated their Android prototype phone, a device which has been greatly improved since its last public outing at this year's CES and Mobile World conferences. Today, Android looks classy enough that you half-expected them to pull a Steve Jobs and announce that you could run out and buy it right now. During the demo, the company showed off some of the applications that will run on Android - like a Google Maps Street View app that drew cheers from the crowd. From the buzz surrounding the Google Phone at this event, it's clear that Android has a shot at knocking that other touchscreen phone off its pedestal.

See also: Google's Android: How Will it Compare to iPhone?

The Social Networking Arms Race

Last November, when Google launched Open Social we asked readers if Facebook would join Google's platform. The results were split right down the middle, but as we get farther from the Open Social launch, and the two sites continue to launch competing APIs (Google FriendConnect vs. Facebook Connect, for example -- the former banned by Facebook), that seems less and less likely. This is becoming a social networking cold war.

See also: How Many Friends is Too Many?

The Fork in the Road for Social Media

Social networking is at a major fork in the road. Down one road is adding more features to a walled garden and opening up just enough, so that users seldom need to leave. Most sites are going down this yellow brick road and the prize is clearly a big one. But they may end up back in Kansas. Down the other road, lies a future of being the primary repository for your connections (aka the social graph), but with this data available via open APIs to anybody who needs it. That is a utility type model, and as with any utility, it can be hugely valuable at scale.

See also: Sometimes Crowds Aren't That Wise

Who Are The "Digitally Savvy?"

A new report put about by consumer and media research firm Scarborough Research has revealed some interesting information about the section of the U.S. population that's being called the "digitally savvy." These are the consumers who are more likely to own high-tech items like DVRs, satellite radios, and VoIP phones and are more likely to engage in Internet activities that include blogging, downloading music, and other web 2.0 activities. In other words - they're us.

See also: When User-Generated Content Goes Bad

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Some wondered after Google's App Engine announcement Monday evening when Microsoft would offer a competing cloud computing platform. The biggest tip off from the job advertisement that Red Dog is it, is that the CIS team wants the platform to "lead the marketplace as the best platform for rapid development, deployment, and maintenance of internet services and applications." Microsoft will supposedly roll out a first version of Red Dog to "external customers" (defined later as "ISV customers who are ... early adopters") this year.

As Kniskern points out, not much is known about Red Dog at this point, but indications seem to point to some sort of platform as a service offering from Microsoft dropping within the next year.

Note: No, that's not a real Red Dog logo. It's just Clifford The Big Red Dog with a tiny Windows Live logo dangling from his collar...

"We're flattered Google thinks Campfire is a great product, we're just disappointed that they stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout," said 37Signals founder Jason Fried by email. "We thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe its time to reevaluate what they stand for." We sought comment from Kyle Consalus via the official HuddleChat support room, but received no response other than confirmation that he, Delaye, and Kowitz are Googlers.

This is not the first time that an application has taken design cues from 37Signals. Many early Ruby on Rails applications end up looking similar to 37Signals' own creations (HuddleChat was built in Python), such as forum software Beast, which borrowed what it calls the "sheet of paper" design from 37Signals. But this goes beyond design inspiration, Jason Fried told us.

Another interesting wrinkle to this story: 37Signals is supported by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who invested in the company in July 2006, and the Chicago-based company's web apps all run on Amazon's web services platform, a competitor in many respects to Google App Engine. Could it be that Google purposely chose to clone one of Amazon web services' greatest success stories specifically to show off the power for their new platform? Perhaps it wasn't a coincidence that Google unveiled App Engine at an event it called Campfire ...

Let us know your thoughts on the controversy in the comments below.

UPDATE: Google Takes Down HuddleChat After Complaints About 37Signals Ripoff