Google launches OpenSocial. Mark?

That's why Google is different. That's why Google was not bothered when Microsoft bagged the FaceBook deal last week. Google with all his style and decorum and attitude, launches "OpenSocial", the Social Networking Platform that is not limited to orkut only but any social networking site site that supports OpenSocial can avail its features. That's big news and it also comes when every one was excited about Facebook and its social graph funda. As per the launching announcement

One of the most important benefits of OpenSocial is the vast distribution network that developers will have for their applications. The sites that have already committed to supporting OpenSocial -- Website Partner A, Website Partner B, Website Partner C, etc. –- represent an audience of well over 100 million users globally. Critical for time- and resource-strapped developers is being able to "learn once, write anywhere" -- learn the OpenSocial APIs once and then build applications that work with any OpenSocial-enabled websites.

Several developers, including Gadget Partner Z, Gadget Partner Y, Gadget Partner X, etc., have already built applications that use the OpenSocial APIs. Starting today, a developer sandbox is available at http://sandbox.orkut.com so developers can go in and start testing the OpenSocial APIs. The goal is to have developers build applications in the sandbox so they can deploy on Orkut and ultimately other OpenSocial sites.

The best thing about Open Social is that is in line with the Google philosophy "Do No evil" and hence every body has the chance to create the social network of their own type and features and have benefits of big already existing userabase starting from launch.

The APIs exposed by the Google are

The OpenSocial APIs give developers access to the data needed to build social applications: access to a user's profile, their friends, and the ability to let their friends know that activities have taken place. OpenSocial resources for developers and websites are available now at code.google.com/apis/opensocial.

Developers will have access to:
- Three JavaScript and Gdata APIs to access social functions
- A live developer sandbox on Orkut at sandbox.orkut.com

Websites will have access to:
- A tool to help OpenSocial-enable their websites
- A support forum for communicating with Google and other websites

All of these resources and the live developer sandbox are available now.

Developers already at work

Dozens of developers have helped test early iterations of the OpenSocial APIs and Google is grateful for the extensive feedback they have provided.

Links to these gadgets are available at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial.

I think its Googles another big idea after Search and Earth and this has potential to make the Google winner in social networking wa which is still not started yet.

Who will buy Facebook ?

Mark Zukerberg would be delighted after selling the 1.6% stake in facebook to Microsoft in USD 240 million. This lead to the estimation of facebook around USD 15 billion, which is huge amount. Now every body understand very well the future of social networking in coming years and hence web 2.0 development is also headed in
the direction guided by the rules of social networking. Imagine web after 10 years weher everybody(almost) has a web identity and all the transactions, admissions, intreactions, sharing would be done by social networking. This potential has alreday been dentified by Mark zukerberg and orkut couple of years back and hence created there gems.

Now big players in the game (MS, Yahoo, Google) are trying to acuire these new age entrprenuers dreams and convert them to revenue generating businesses. That's why when MS and Yahoo offered Mark USD 1 Billion some time back for buyout. Creator of FaceBook was smart enough to know the value of his assets and ideas and refuses. Now more then 100 thousand developer community has been build upon Facebook and people are really excited to use the new facebook applications.

Now the real question is, Who will buy Facebook? That's because not every one is as smart as Larry and Sergey (Mark?), who will save itself from big fish in the sea and dwell on its own in early years and then grown up with confidence. Google guys already set up the example and now we have to see weather Zukerberg has the that gut or increasing size of company force him to sell it out to biggies.

One major difference is that, Google came into business very silently and at that time nobody on biggies identified Google as possible threat, and also Google offered such high quality and that's why they created there own business. But here in case of Facebook its already been hyped much (as we saw in Web2.0 summit) and also such a service is need of the hour as broadband is ubiquitous and more and more peoples have started to spent more time on internet to collaborate with there friends. MS and Yahoo didn't want to loose a big share of possible business to a boy and also they didn't want to repeat there mistake again (The Google Fiasco - as seen by MS Guys).

Steve Ballmer , The Micorsoft Chairman, might estimate Google as a 3 year boy in the world but he very well understands the age of the Google and also when this kid growing really fast. Buck Up Mark! Do a Google.

Modest billion dollor Idea by Alex Linhares

I was reading through the blogs and just stumble upon this nice proposal for Adobe, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others who are interested. This guy (Alex Linhares ) has done lots of research and also has good understanding g if the what is going on the web currently and what can impact the future. Any one out there in biggies to grab this oppotunity!!!

A Modest (billion-dollar) proposal

Imagine the following scenario. A secretive meeting, years ago, when Apple´s Steve Jobs, the benevolent dictator, put in place a strategy to get into the music business. It included not only a gadget, but also an online store, iTunes. I have no idea how that meeting went, but one thing is for sure: many people afterwards must have been back-stabbing Jobs, and mentioning "the music business? We´re going to sell music? This guy has totally lost it."

Fact of the matter was, technology had forever changed the economics of the music business, and Jobs could see it.

Having said that, I´d like to make a modest, billion-dollar, proposal, to the likes of Adobe, Yahoo, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and whomever else might be up to the task.

Cui Bono?

Think about science publishing. I publish papers for a living. My first paper came out in Biological Cybernetics, a journal which cost, in 1998, over US$2000 for a one year subscription. I live scared to death of Profa. Deborah, who reviews my scientific output. And there are others like me in this world. Oh yes, many others.

The economics of science publishing is completely crazy for this day and age. Authors give enormous effort to bring their work to light, editors and journal and conference referees also put in enormous effort. All of that is unpaid, of course (or at least indirectly paid, in the hopes of tenure and/or prestige). But then, our masterpieces go to a journal, which obliges me to transfer copyright to the likes of Elsevier, or Springer, or someone else. Then some money starts to show up! According to wikipedia, Springer had sales exceeding €900 million in 2006, while Elsevier upped the ante to a pre-tax profit (in the REED annual report) to a staggering €1 billion (on €7.9 Billion turnover). But for those who brought out the scientific results, for those that bring the content, and the fact checking by referees and editors, all that work goes unpaid. The money goes to those who typeset it, then store it in a server, then print it out and mail it to libraries worldwide. And let´s not forget those which actually pay for the research, the public, as most research is government-financed. In the words of Michael Geist, a law professor:

Cancer patients seeking information on new treatments or parents searching for the latest on childhood development issues were often denied access to the research they indirectly fund through their taxes

How did we get here? A better question is how could it have been otherwise? In the last decades, how could a different industrial organization appear? Cui Bono?

Lowly (and busy) professors or universities were obviously not up to the risky and costly task of printing and mailing thousands of journals worldwide, every month. A few societies emerged, and, mostly funded by their membership, they were up to the task. So, in time, the business of science publishing emerged and eventually consolidated in the hands of a few players. And these few players could focus on typesetting, printing, mailing much better than the equation-loving professors or the prestige & money-seeking universities.

The other day I tried to download my own paper published in the journal " Artificial Intelligence", and I was asked to pay USD30.00 for it. That´s the price of a book, and I was the author of the thing in the first place!

Now, if you ask me, technology has forever changed the economics of the scientific publishing business, and it´s high time for someone like Jobs to step forward.

Adobe Buzzword is specially suited to do this. Most scientific publishers (Elsevier, Springer) and societies (IEEE, ACM, APA, APS, INFORMS) have just one or two typesetting styles for papers. I imagine a version of Buzzword which carries only the particular typesetting style(s) of the final published document, and researchers would already prepare those manuscripts ready for publication (there are glitches today, of course, like high-quality images and tables and equations--but hey, we´re talking about Adobe here!). A submit button would submit the papers for evaluation, either to a journal or a conference. Referees could make comments and annotation on the electronic manuscript itself, or even suggest minor rewritings of a part here and there. The process would be much smoother than even the most modern of online submission processes. And, since Adobe has flash, this means that they´re especially positioned to bring up future papers with movies, sounds, screencasts and whole simulations embedded. Wouldn´t that be rich? Doesn´t that beautifully fit with what´s stated in their page?

Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information .


But Buzzword is just my favorite option (because it enables beautiful typesetting, is backed by a large, credible, player, works on any platform, and enables worldwide collaboration between authors, editors, referees). Other options could be desktop processors (MsWord, Pages, OpenOffice, etc). There would be a productivity gain by using something the likes of Buzzword, but using desktop processors wouldn´t affect the overall idea.

Now, why would the people in Adobe, Yahoo, SUN, IBM, Microsoft, Google, or others actually want to do a thing like that?

There are two reasons. The first one is goodwill, the second one is money.

Goodwill

I recently had a paper outright rejected in the IBM Systems Journal. In retrospect, I now see that it was a very bad call to submit there. I had mentioned that choice to the editor of a very prestigious scientific journal, and he responded by saying: "They´re going to hate it. They´re not in the business of publishing great original science for a long time now. That´s just a marketing thing; they´re in the business of trying to impress customers." I responded that I thought that they´d be open-minded; that the journal had had some great contributions in the past and I thought it was just great. I was, of course, wrong. They didn´t even look at the thing; they didn´t even bother to send back a message. After a quick check, I felt enormously stupid: all papers, or maybe not all but something way above 90%, come from IBM authors. The IBM Systems Journal, it seems to me, is now a branch of IBM´s marketing department. And while it may impress less sophisticated customers, it´s definitely a huge loss for IBM.

The Systems Journal (and their R&D journal) used to be a fountain of goodwill for IBM. Scientists took pride in publishing there, and hordes of researchers (not customers) browsed it and studied it carefully. It was a fountain of goodwill--with a direct route to IBM´s bottom line: it attracted the best scientists to IBM. Now that it´s in the hands of marketing, you can hardly find any serious scientist considering it as a potential outlet. If I were in IBM, I´d be fighting to change things around. But I´m not there, I can speak the truth as I see it, and I can just submit somewhere else. The BELL LABS Technical Journal also seems to be meeting the same "marketing department" fate. Don´t expect to see nobel prizes coming from these journals any time soon.

When these journals didn´t belong to marketing, they brought, at least to this observer, a huge amount of goodwill and good publicity for their respective companies. The HR department must have loved choosing among the best PhDs dying to get into IBM. Sad to mention, I doubt that the best PhDs are now begging to work on these companies anymore.

Yet, IBM could change things around. As could Adobe, SUN, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and many others. What I feel they should do is establish a platform for online paper submission, review, and publication. This platform should be made openly available for all scientific societies, for free. From the prestigious journal "Cognitive Science" to the Asia-Pacific Medical Education Conference, this platform should be free (to societies, journals, and conferences) and the papers published online should be freely accessible to all, no login, no paywall, nothing in the way. Copyright should remain in the hands of authors. Gradually, one after another, journals and conferences would jump ship, as the platform gained credibility and respectability.

Now here´s the kicker. It´s not only about goodwill. There´s money to be made.

Money

One crucial point is for the platform to be freely accessible to all. But you can do that, and still block the googlebot, the yahoobot, and all others "bots", but your own. Let´s say, for instance, that Microsoft does something of the sort. In some years time, not only it gets the goodwill of graduate students who are studying papers published by science.microsoft.org (as opposed to hey-sucker-pay-thirty-bucks-for-your-own-paper-Elsevier), but also the way to search for such information would be only through that website. As we all know, advertising is moving online: according to a recent study, the last year saw "$24 billion spent on internet advertising and $450 billion spent on all advertising ". Soon we´ll reach US$100 Billion/year in advertising on the web. And imagine having a privileged position in the eyeballs of graduate-educated people, from medicine to science to economics to business to engineering to history.

I hope someone will pull something like this off. Maybe for the goodwill. Or maybe for the money.

Many companies could pull it off, but some seem specially suited to the task. My favorite would be Adobe--with buzzword and AIR and flash and pdfs, that´s definitely my choice. Google might want to do it just to preempt some other company from blocking the googlebot to get its hands on valuable scientific research. Microsoft, the Dracula of the day, certainly needs the goodwill, and it could help it to hang on to the MS-Word lock in. Maybe Amazon would find this interesting--fits nicely with their web storage and search dreams. Yahoo would have the same reason as Google.

I don´t see Apple doing it. I think it could actually hurt their market value, as investors might think that they would be over-stretching, ever expanding into new markets.

I don´t see IBM or SUN doing it either; in fact, if anyone in a board meeting ever proposed this, I can only see the exact same back-stabbing that must have gone through, years ago, in Apple: "Science-publishing? This guy has totally lost it. This is IBM, and that´s not the business we´re in." They´re to busy handling their own internal office politics, who´s getting promotion and pay packages. Innovation is hardly coming in from there (though both have been embracing open-source to a certain degree).

One thing is for sure. The open-access to research movement is getting momentum everyday. It´s time to sell that Elsevier stock.

Just a final note. If any player is willing to do this, use an org domain name. Don´t name it "Microsoft Science". That won´t work with intelligent, independent scientists. Use a domain name such as science.yahoo.org, science.adobe.org, and name it as "Open science", "World of Science", anything... but please don´t try to push your name too far. Let it grow slowly.

And just in case someone wants to pull this off, and is actually wondering... I´m right here.

Now Google Health - A reason to smile

As I always speculate that Google might launch as many product as many types of services exists....and my speculation is now a reality with Google Health. Google will launch its Health service. Below are some screen shots of the product from official Google blog.

There are two tabs to be seen in Google Health: Profiles and Medical Contacts. The profiles tab has several sub-sections, including “Services and health guide,” “Conditions & symptoms,” “Medications,” “Age, sex, height...” and “Family history.”
A privacy policy at the bottom disclaims that “Any information you enter will remain private. Google will not share it with anyone without your permission.”

This “Conditions & symptoms” dialog includes an auto-completion feature, just like other input boxes in Google Health. You enter “head”, and Google suggests “Head and Neck Angioedema”, “Head Injury”, “Head Pain” and more.

The “Services and health guide” section reads: “Get the most out of Google Health - If your medical providers or pharmacy offer secure downloading of medical records, you can find and add your records to a profile. You can also browse for websites that connect securely to Google Health and provide services for managing your health care.”
Under the headline “Google health guide” this explanation follows: “When you add some information to your profile, Google Health will search trusted medical sources and create a health guide targeted for you. ... Google Health will check for relevant updates to your guide whenever you add new information to the profile.” You can use the health guide, Google writes, to learn about drug interactions, treatments, tests and preventive measures.
A side box warns, “Be sure to discuss questions about your medical care with your doctor or medical provider before making changes,” and a footnote reads, “Built in collaboration with www.safe-med.com”.

The “Allergies” tab. The “Add an Allergy” box suggests “e.g. penicillin.”

You can add a procedure or surgery on this page. As an example, Google provides “appendectomy.”

The “Test results” section. You can add e.g. “cholesterol LDL”.

The “Add an immunication” interface does not allow free-style text input, but restricts you to a selection box instead. Available entries include “Diphtheria, tetanus toxoids, acellular pertussis vaccine (DTaP)” or “Hepatitis A vaccine.”

The “Age, sex, height...” page collects various personal information such as date of birth, gender, ethnicity, blood type, weight, or smoking habits. One of the questions asked is, “Do you drink alcoholic beverages?” Another question is, “Have you smoked more than 20 cigarettes in your lifetime?” Google explains that they ask for your date of birth to “keep your age up to date and show the most relevant guidance.”

The “Family history” dialog lets you add a relative and their respective conditions. The selection box includes entries like “Husband”, “Wife”, “Mother”, “Father”, “Son”, and Google provides the condition example “diabetes.

Microsoft would be on Buying Spree

This is what Microsoft Chairman Steve Ballmer said in the recent Web 2.0 Summit in San Fransisco.

What are you interested in that Microsoft currently isn't doing?
"We'll probably buy 20 companies a year for the next five years. Most of them will be footnotes - we're talking about acquisitions of $50m, $100m, $200m. Those are good acquisitions and are important to us, and it's of strategic value. There aren't many things in the $6bn to $15bn price range, you're talking about a handful of things. In the meantime we'll probably buy a lot of companies from $50m to $1bn, so we'll continue to buy a lot of stuff. Email steveb@microsoft.com if you something to sell!"

Now Microsoft has started it again but this time MS is imitating Google by targeting only small ones. Yahoo hasn't declared the acquisitions strategy officially, but he is also in queue.

New Definition of information.

Google Riddle : Its Simpsons

The Following Riddle posts on Google Blogoscoped and many Google followers like me solved it quickly with Google Docs. Actually it can't be solved by MS Excel and that's the main point behind posting this Puzzle by Philipp Lenssen. You can't add more then three rules in MS Excel Conditional Formatting and that's what google wants to highlight.

3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,4,4,3,0,4,4,4,3,4,3,4,3,3,3,3
3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,4,3,4,4,4,0,4,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,0,2,2,0,4,3,3,3
3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,2,2,2,2,0,1,2,2,1,2,1,1,1,2,2,2,2,2,4,3,3,3
3,3,3,3,3,3,2,2,2,1,2,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,4,3,3,3
3,3,3,3,3,3,4,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,4,3,3,3
3,3,3,3,3,3,4,2,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,4,3,3,3
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Do Yahoo! Yahoo again?

I have just read the Jerry Yang's blog about the strategic changes which Yahoo will incorporate soon. This ends the much (or little...) speculation about "What is yahoo doing?". It was nice to read the "founder's" insight about the company and its plans for attempting revival of the internet giant(?). Jerry sounds reincarnated and also wrote about from ending up some services to narrowing down the 3 points agenda, rather trying to hit all over approach. Jerry's 3 point agenda on which company would concentrate in coming years are:

1. To concentrate on the Yahoo services which are the starting point of yahoo access such as mail, search etc. On this front Yahoo has large user base already(even it is diminishing every second and switching to Google).
2. To aggressively invest on Panama and increase the revenue from online ads. (Again there already Google sits at first place with AdSense but Yahoo is on 2nd place.)
3. To create the Platform for developers and publishers for creating application/gadgets for yahoo user base.

I think with this strategy in place and Jerry as a leader Yahoo can compensate some of its losses but not all because the Google ghost is there for all. Google's "Do no evil" motto sometimes paradoxes itself as it does lots of losses for other giants and they are now forced to think for their survival in the Web 2.0 world.

What about minternet!!!

As the world turning to mobile devices connected to internet i thought internet needs to be redefined and thus coined the term "minternet". Obviously its Mobile Internet and should be used all over in place of internet/web wherever mobile devices talked about.

I think Minternet should be consist of the contents which recides only on mobile devices and shared with others over the network. the contents need not be loaded on to big servers or PC's. As the new age mobile applications are allowing the users to post directly on web through mobile and handheld computers. But there is data which is only residing on the users phone and just like currently sms's presents....

So be ready as minternet might be the coming years new buzzword :)