Posts Tagged Facebook

NaggieGoogle mulls stand-alone version of Buzz

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

Google may create a stand-alone version of its Buzz social networking product but won’t separate Buzz from its Gmail service, a linkup that has spurred controversy over privacy, said the company.

The world’s No.1 Internet search engine, Google has launched Buzz earlier this week in a bid to tap into the fast growing social networking market dominated by companies like Facebook and Twitter.

Similar to Twitter and Facebook, Buzz allows users to broadcast messages and share photos and videos with friends and colleagues online. But unlike those services, Buzz is built directly into Google’s Gmail and the product automatically creates each user’s social network based on the person’s most-frequently emailed contacts.

According to Google spokeswoman Victoria Katsarou, they have considered among all other features that they add to Buzz in the future, to create a stand-alone experience in addition to it being in Gmail.

In the days since the product launch, a number of online blogs and publications have argued that the Buzz-Gmail link creates a privacy problem since the Buzz contact network is publicly viewable by default and could expose people’s private contacts.

Google announced Thursday, a couple of changes on its corporate blog designed to address some of the concerns, including making it easier for Buzz users to keep their contacts list private.

The blog Search Engine Land quoted Google Vice President of Product Management Bradley Horowitz as saying the company was considering removing Buzz from Gmail, but Google’s Katsarou said that that was not the case and the blog later reported that Buzz would remain in Gmail.

In the blogs posted, Google said that more than 9 million posts and comments have been created on Buzz since its launch and that tens of millions of people have “checked Buzz out.”

Gmail is the world’s third most popular Web email service, with 176.5 million unique visitors in December, according to comScore, behind Microsoft Corp’s Windows Web email services and Yahoo Inc’s email.

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NaggieApple’s IPad, Oracle’s Plan for Sun Share Limelight

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

This week, it was seemed that all eyes were on Apple’s unveiling of the long-awaited iPad, and on the same day Oracle revealed its plans for Sun Microsystems’ technology, while those at Sun braced for the merger and began their public goodbyes. We also had a flurry of financial reports this week and some Internet weirdness associated with President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address.

1. Apple announces iPad, Apple iPad: 25 unanswered questions, How does the iPad compare to netbooks? And iPad as netbook-killer concept ignites controversy: After months of rumors, speculation and fever-pitch media hype, Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed off the iPad tablet. While there was plenty of the customary swooning over a new Apple product to be found, the general consensus seemed to be: That’s it?! We’ve been all excited for this?! Jobs insist that the iPad is better than a netbook, but that notion has ignited a debate.

2. Oracle to scale back Sun server line, make other changes Oracle hails Java but kills Sun cloud: Meanwhile, Oracle began to lay out its plans for Sun technologies and products this week.

3. With emotion, Sun’s long good-bye nears the finish and Sun’s Scott McNealy: Thanks for a great 28 years: Sun leaders, including James Gosling, the father of Java, and former Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy offered public farewells to a company they have loved.

4. ACTA talks in Mexico to address transparency concerns: Secret talks that have been ongoing among nations aiming to craft an anticounterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) haven’t seemed to draw a whole lot of attention, but for our money this is some seriously big news. Negotiators got together again this week to work on the measure in Mexico.

5. Congressional Web sites hacked near Obama speech, US House leaders ask for investigation into hackings and No lie! Wilson to respond to State of Union on Facebook: At about the time that President Obama’s State of the Union speech began, dozens of congressional Web sites were hacked. U.S. House of Representatives leaders, predictably given their fondness for holding hearings, called for an investigation into the site defacements. Meanwhile, in an even freakier bit of related news, Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, gave a response to the speech via Facebook. His was not the official GOP response. For those who have forgotten, Wilson was the congressman who yelled out “you lie” during President Obama’s speech on the now-stalled health-care reform.

6. Wall Street Beat: Economic concerns shadow tech profits: IT bellwethers including Microsoft and Apple released quarterly earnings reports this week, with good news from many on the financial front, but IT investors remained skittish.

7. EFF: Browsers can leave a unique trail on the Web: According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, web browsers leave a unique footprint for individual PCs with information that online advertising systems can then gather for purposes that concern privacy experts. The EFF has created a tool that reveals the information that a browser collects. The EFF further warned that users should not be misled into believing that disabling cookies provides real protection.

8. FCC’s McDowell: Net neutrality would face legal challenge: If the U.S. Federal Communications Commission goes forward with net neutrality regulations, its authority in that regard will be challenged in court, Commission member Robert McDowell said.

9. Microsoft posts Windows Mobile 6.5 SDK by mistake: The “oopsie” entry this week comes from Microsoft, which inadvertently posted the WIndows Mobile 6.5 software developers kit online. Some developers downloaded it before Microsoft yanked it off the Web, but had trouble using it, which was a good sign that it really was not ready for release yet. They reported that the SDK includes widget tools and an emulator for the most recent version of Windows Mobile.

10. 419 Internet scams on the increase: This news truly unfathomable, 419, or advance-fee, frauds on the Internet soaked victims for at least US$9.3 billion last year. Most of the scams continued to originate in Nigeria. We’re scratching our heads over why it’s so hard for people to resist responding to e-mails rife with misspellings, typos and bad grammar that want them to advance money to someone they have never heard of who promises the recipient fantastical wealth.

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NaggieNews Brief: Facebook Sponsors Apache Software Foundation

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

After spending years using open source Apache Software Foundation (ASF) technologies to help build its social networking site, Facebook is now spending its money to give back to effort.

Facebook is now a gold sponsor of the ASF, contributing $40,000 per year to the open source foundation and its initiatives. Facebook uses a number of Apache technologies, including Hadoop.

“A sponsor provides a direct monetary contribution to the ASF, which we can use for a variety of functions, such as increasing or updating our infrastructure, sponsoring project meet-ups and paying our bills,” ASF Chairman Jim Jagielski told InternetNews.com. “This extends and enhances the relationship that the ASF has had with Facebook.”

The ASF just recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, and is home to many popular open source projects including the Apache HTTP Web server. One of the hallmarks of the ASF is that it is a meritocracy for developers, and that money is not the key influencer for technical decisions.

Jagielski noted that his group is a volunteer-based, individual membership organization, and it is not possible for companies or other non-person entities to “join” the ASF.

“All code development, including governance and direction, is done by the members of the project community itself,” Jagielski said. “It is also a factor of how the ASF works … that people are recognized via their individual contribution, regardless of what company they happen to have employment with.”

Under that framework, sponsors don’t have any additional “pull” or “power” related to actual projects, Jagielski said.

Facebook is no stranger to the ASF, and according to Jagielski, it was Facebook developer David Recordon who approached the ASF about a potential sponsorship.

“If you read our engineering blog, you’ll know that it’s not possible to scale a site like Facebook simply by sharding your databases, but rather takes a combination of specialized technologies,” Recordon wrote in a blog post. “Open source allows us not just to make technologies like memcached scale beyond its original intent, but to release technologies like Thrift for others to build upon as well.”

Thrift is a framework for scalable cross-language services development that was originally known as Facebook scribe. It was contributed to Apache in October of 2008.

Even as a gold sponsor of the ASF, Facebook does not contribute as much to the open source effort as proprietary vendor Microsoft. Starting in 2008, Microsoft began sponsoring the ASF with a $1 million a year commitment.

The ASF would like to continue to see other organizations join with Facebook, Microsoft and others to pad its roster of sponsors.

“Our hope is that any organization that finds value in the ASF and what we do will give back to the community,” Jagielski said. “Obviously, one prime method of doing this is by submitting patches and bug reports, allowing us to further improve the various ASF codebases. But we also realize that some organizations would prefer a more direct, financial way of supporting us, and we created the sponsorship program specifically to address that need.”

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