Google is getting into the 'Like' business

Google's new +1 feature challenges Facebook's 'Like' for the future of influence

Google announced this week a new social search feature called +1. The new offering competes in some ways with Facebook's "Like" button.
By clicking on an optional new +1 button on your Google search results, you can tell family and friends that you recommend certain links.
Big deal, right? Well, actually, it could soon be a very big deal.

What Google's +1 adds up to

Google's +1 isn't what Google would call a "shipping" product. It's a "Labs" experiment, a cross between a beta program and a trial balloon. But it's available to everyone and easy to use. You just go to the Google Labs page and click "Join this experiment" in the section about +1. Once you've done that, when you're searching on Google, you'll see a +1 button on every search.
All your +1 recommendations are retained on a new tab viewable on your Google Profile. You can choose to make them public or keep them private. When your Google contacts conduct searches of their own that bring back links you've flagged with +1, they'll see your recommendation on the results page.
For now, the feature is limited to Google Search. Google plans to roll out the feature for websites of all kinds, including blogs.
Google also says it plans to "record information about your +1 activity in order to provide you and other users with a better experience on Google services." That could mean just about anything, although Google says +1 activity does not affect search rankings.

How +1 is like, and unlike, 'Like'

Once Google offers the ability for website owners to add +1 buttons on their sites, the service will be a lot like Facebook's "Like" feature. With Facebook, everything you "Like" anywhere on the Web is viewable by friends on Facebook. And that's one of the differences.
With +1, your recommendations are currently unlikely to be encountered "in the wild" by contacts. It requires both opt-in by contacts, plus the unlikely event that the other person searches for something you've already flagged.
Google +1 is currently useful only for seeing someone's preferences after you've run across them on your own, while Facebook "Like" is better for discovery. Both could be a lot better for discovery. What's missing from both Google's and Facebook's recommendation engines is the ability to pool all that data in a single space. The ultimate application would be open APIs by both parties, with some scrappy startup building the ultimate Digg replacement site where both systems are combined into a single popularity contest for content.
One advantage of +1 over Like is that it lets you recommend things without appearing to approve of them. When I encounter a blog post headlined "Tickets for Apple's Developer Event Selling for $3,500 on eBay" and click the Facebook "Like" button, it appears on my Wall above the phrase "Sachin Jagtap Likes this." It makes me look like a sociopath. Google's +1 is more neutral.
Google currently has two incompatible systems. You can click +1 on search. But on Buzz, where the +1 could really find some use, Google uses the word "Like" in a system that's disconnected from the +1 recommendations. This is especially awkward because Google went to great pains to connect Profiles and Buzz. But +1 recommendations show up in Profiles, and "Likes" remain in Buzz. It's a fractured mess. Meanwhile, Facebook's "Like" system is unified.

Why +1 and Like matter

Social recommendation tools like +1 and Like can potentially help users do things such as the following:
• Get and give recommendations to friends (replacing link sharing).
• Bring attention to cool stuff (replacing or enhancing Digg and Reddit).
• Bookmark and remember things (replacing browser bookmarks, Instapaper and StumbleUpon).
• Set up popularity polls (replacing poll plug-ins on blogs).
• Engage in social science research (replacing text-based voting on American Idol).
The exciting thing about the Like-button concept is that it can, and probably will, spill over into the real world. Within a few years, you'll probably be able to "Like" TV shows, locations (via existing location-based services like Foursquare, Google Latitude or Facebook Places.
Smartphone app-based services are getting better and better at recognizing songs and TV shows (by the sound), and soon they'll be able to recognize objects that you photograph with the camera in your phone. So you'll be able to "Like" all kinds of content and objects in the real world.
Google's +1 system is new and experimental and therefore isn't changing the world yet. Facebook's "Like" system is becoming influential, but it's still overshadowed by Twitter, link sharing and other ways of sharing and recommending content.
The reason this is a big deal is this: History tells us that obscure, trivial services like Twitter and Facebook and even Google itself can rise to dominate user attention, and make billions for the entrepreneurs who get it right. Whoever dominates "Like"-type services could end up making enormous amounts of money.
The whole "Like" idea is potentially superior to link sharing, bookmarking, social bookmarking, polling and other technologies that millions of people use every day. If the concept really takes hold, it could become the primary way for people to share content, links, opinions and much more.
And don't even get me started on the marketing potential. Once companies get us to start "Liking" and recommending the products and services we buy, they'll have found a lucrative enhancement to advertising and marketing campaigns.
Google +1, Facebook "Like" or some other service we don't know about yet could one day rise to dominate the lucrative new world of social influence.

Microsoft stands by decision to ban IE9 from XP

IE again loses share, but Microsoft won't second-guess move to limit newest browser to Vista, Windows 7

Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) again lost ground to Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome last month, even as the company launched its newest browser, Web metrics data showed today.
But Microsoft stands behind its decision to limit IE9 to users running Windows Vista and Windows 7.
"It was a very deliberate decision," said Ryan Gavin, senior director of IE, talking about the move to exclude XP users from IE9. "You simply can't build on something that is 10 years ago."
According to California-based Net Applications, one of several companies that regularly publishes browser usage data, IE lost nine-tenths of a percentage point of share in March, falling to 55.9%, another record low.
IE9, which debuted more than two weeks ago, accounted for 1% of all browsers, a five-tenths of a point jump over February.
But older editions of IE dropped by more than what IE9 gained.
IE6, the browser Microsoft wants to kill, fell by four-tenths of a point to 11%, while IE7 slipped by two-tenths of a percentage point to 7.9%. And IE8, until last month Microsoft's current browser, dropped half a point to end March at 34.4%.
IE8's slip was the first for that browser since Net Applications began tracking it three years ago, a full year before it shipped in final form in March 2009.
Some rivals, meanwhile, continued to gain share at Microsoft's expense.
Google's Chrome grew its share by six-tenths of a point to account for 11.6% of all browsers used worldwide last month, a record. And Apple's Safari posted a gain of three-tenths of a point to end the month at 6.6%.
Even Mozilla's Firefox, which has lost share eight out of the last 12 months, managed a slight increase of one-tenth of a point, the first increase since December 2010, to account for 21.8% of all browsers.
The March 22 launch of Firefox 4 contributed to Mozilla's small turn-around. Net Applications' statistics show that Firefox 4 boosted its share to 1.7% last month, a 1.1-point increase over February.
Microsoft and Mozilla have each touted the number of downloads of their newest browsers, but the latter has clearly won that battle, claiming 7.1 million downloads on Firefox 4's first day of availability and a record 8.75 million the following day.
Gavin has argued that IE9's numbers should be calculated solely by its use on Vista and Windows 7, and its success or failure judged accordingly.
Net Applications put IE9's share of browsers running on Windows 7 at 3.6%, more than three times the overall average, a fact that Gavin stressed during an interview today. "That's about five times the rate of adoption in a comparable period for IE8," Gavin said.
But Net Applications' data also shows that the newest IE9 rivals -- Chrome 10 and Firefox 4 -- have significant chunks of the Windows 7 browser market. Chrome 10, which Google began pushing to current Chrome users via the browser's silent update mechanism almost a month ago, accounted for 10.2% of Windows 7 browsers in March. Firefox 4, on the other hand, lagged behind IE9 with a 2.8% share on Windows 7.
Ignore the numbers for now, Gavin said earlier this week when he blasted early comparisons as "premature at best, and misleading at worst" because of the differences in the upgrade mechanisms of IE, Chrome and Firefox.
Microsoft plans to add IE9 to Windows Update sometime this month -- today he declined to set a date -- from where it will be offered to Vista and Windows 7 users. Mozilla has yet to offer Firefox 4 to customers running older versions of its browser, but will do that soon, a spokeswoman said Thursday.
The roll-out of IE9 via Windows Update and its Automatics Updates option will wrap up by the end of June, Gavin said today.
While the numbers may not provide an unambiguous case for the success of any of the newest browsers, one thing is clear: Microsoft has bet on IE9 and won't back away from that bet.

EC enters talks with Microsoft for new licenses

The European Commission confirmed that it is in talks with Microsoft with the aim of keeping its licensing agreement for Windows.
The current deal with Microsoft is set to expire May 31. The commission decided to start negotiations with the software giant rather than hold a public tender. The decision has sparked controversy among supporters of open standards. Those talks started on March 24.
However, the negotiated procedure measure is allowed by European Union rules under certain conditions and allows the commission to acquire software made by a single vendor. But the length of such contracts may not exceed three years.
Everything the Commission has done is above board, said Antony Gravili, commission spokesman for Inter-Institutional Administration, on Friday. "The commission is committed to getting value for money and negotiates on behalf of all the E.U. institutions, agencies and other bodies - 42 in all. Representing such a large number allows us to drive costs down and we will drive a hard bargain."
The commission assesses products and must make a business case in terms of feasibility and total cost of ownership. At a task force meeting in December, when the decision was made to take the negotiated procedure route, representatives from the budget department (DG BUDG) asked why it was not being put out to tender. But the Directorate General for Informatics (DIGIT), which sets the commission's IT strategy, said Microsoft met all the requirements.
Under the license agreement, the commission already has the right to upgrade to Windows 7 . "This is standard for big corporate contracts with Microsoft, and is highly unlikely to change under a new contract," Gravili said.
Any deal will have a huge knock-on effect potentially worth millions of euros to Microsoft, as other bodies and organizations seek to keep pace with the commission's technology practices. European governments represent 19% of all software purchases in the E.U., according to IDC with more than 36,000 desktop computers in European institutions.
But the commission's plan to stick with Windows appears to be at odds with its own European Interoperability Framework, a set of guidelines for governments installing IT systems, which broadly supports the use of open specifications and warns of the danger of being locked in to one software vendor. The head of the task force deciding on the current Windows licenses said that it was important that "decisions taken now do not lock the Commission into any technology providers for more than a few years." DIGIT was also told that it should "inform the group of other mainstream IT supplier negotiated procedures where contracts are approaching their end date."
Jan Wildeboer, the EMEA evangelist at Red Hat, said that "comparing [Digital Agenda Commissioner] Neelie Kroes' statement at the OFE conference on unintentional lock-in being a waste of public money with the commission negotiating a deal with Microsoft on cementing exactly the lock-in that Neelie Kroes warned of leaves me wondering about practicing what one preaches. We, the open standards and open source implementers, are ready to compete -- if proper tendering is done."
"In tandem with negotiations on the licenses, the commission will also seek to renew its services contracts," explained Gravili. "The current agreement includes a baseline service agreement for all the institutions, but larger institutions such as the Parliament and the commission have a services contract to help manage any issues that require a deep knowledge of the software at code level. As recently as last week when we came under cyberattack, we made use of Microsoft experts, who worked alongside our own," he added.

Facebook cracks top 10 in ComScore U.S. ad rankings

The massive audience at Facebook helped it take a top-ten ranking for the first time in ComScore's January survey of the number of unique visitors to U.S. Internet sites and advertising networks.
The Internet research company said Facebook was viewed by 153.0 million unique visitors in January, or 72.2% of the overall U.S. Internet audience that month, putting the site in 10th place in ComScore's Ad Focus survey of U.S. sites and advertising networks. The top spot went to Google Ad Network, with 197.1 million unique visitors, or 93.1% of Americans online, ComScore said.
Facebook's rising popularity has helped it move up significantly in ComScore's rankings. Last June, Facebook ranked 26th in the Ad Focus survey with 141.6 million unique visitors, or 65.9% of the U.S. Internet audience that month. In December of last year, however, Facebook was already on the verge of the top 10, sitting in the 11th spot.
Excluding the advertising networks, Facebook ranked fourth among the top 50 Web properties in the U.S. in January, behind Yahoo sites, Google sites and Microsoft sites, respectively. Twitter, the popular micro-blogging site, was not among the U.S. top 50 properties in January.

Pillar kicks Intel's SSD to the curb, upgrades storage array

It blames the solid-state drive for operations time-outs

Pillar Data Systems Inc. said this week that it's replacing Intel's X25-E solid state disk (SSD) drive as an option for its storage arrays with a drive from STEC Inc. because of firmware problems with the Intel's drive that lead to performance slowdowns.
The SSD change was one of several upgrades to Pillar's modular storage array, the Axiom. The company also said it is now doubling the available cache on the array to 192GB, shipping boxes with 2TB hard drives -- double the capacity of previous drives -- and replacing the current dual-core processor controller blade with a quad-core AMD Opteron 2354 chip.
The new hard disk drives push the Axiom's overall usable capacity to more than 1.6 petabytes per system, while cutting overall power consumption by 50% and reducing the space required for the array. The change-over to STEC's SSD also means the company will be able to offer higher capacity 256GB flash drives, since Intel's X25-E tops out at a maximum capacity of 64GB.
Bob Maness, Pillar's vice president of worldwide marketing and channel sales, said the company decided to go with STEC's Mach8 SATA SSD because it proved to have better performance in the array. Intel's X25-E, which has had firmware problems in the past, causes operational timeouts, Maness said.
Pillar is continuing to test its arrays with the X25-E and said Intel is working closely with it to solve the issue. Intel has admitted to firmware problems with the X25-E SSD in the past, but said it resolved them with an upgrade.
Intel did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Pillar's decision.
Based on commodity hardware, the Pillar Axiom acts as an application-aware storage-area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) server all controlled by a single management interface. The company's claim to fame is the software used to manage the array by automatically allocating CPU, cache and storage capacity separately to applications as they need more resources.
In June, Pillar announced it would begin shipping the Axiom storage system with Intel's X25-E solid state drive as one option. STEC's Mach8 SSD is a consumer-rated drive not normally used in high-performance storage arrays. STEC's Zeus-series SSDs have a Fibre Channel interface normally used for enterprise-class data center operations. Maness said Pillar's Axiom achieves the maximum performance capable with the Mach8 SSDs, which use a serial-ATA interface and are less costly than the Zeus SSD.
"I'd like to get back to Intel's SSD, but I think STEC has a corner on the market," Maness said. "STEC is just a little further along in terms of their drive."
The Pillar Axiom enables users to use any number of drive types, from serial-ATA hard disks to SSD in order to tier storage and utilize the level appropriate to the application being supported. Maness said a single tray that houses SSD drives for the Axiom will retail for $49,000, roughly the same cost as Fibre Channel hard disk drives, but with six times the performance.

Microsoft files European antitrust complaint against Google

Microsoft filed an antitrust complaint against Google with the European Commission on Thursday, accusing Google of taking technical measures to squeeze Microsoft and other competitors out of the advertising and search markets.
Google has been engaging in a "broadening pattern of conduct aimed at stopping anyone else from creating a competitive alternative," Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith alleged in a blog post detailing Microsoft's concerns.
Microsoft joins four other companies that have filed complaints about Google with the European Commission. U.K. price comparison site Foundem, French legal search engine ejustice.fr, and German product review and shopping site Ciao, now owned by Microsoft, filed their complaints in February 2010, prompting the Commission to launch a wider investigation of Google's practices in November. Then in February this year ejustice.fr's parent company 1plusV filed another complaint against Google.
The Commission will ask Google for its views on the complaint, but no further information will be released, said a spokeswoman for Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia.
Google said, "We're not surprised that Microsoft has done this, since one of their subsidiaries was one of the original complainants. For our part, we continue to discuss the case with the European Commission and we're happy to explain to anyone how our business works."
Microsoft's antitrust filing, its first ever according to Smith, shows how frustrated the company is with Google. Smith wrote that some people will point out the irony in the filing given Microsoft's extensive legal battles in Europe concerning Web browsers and interoperability of its systems with competitor's products.
"Having spent more than a decade wearing the shoe on the other foot with the European Commission, the filing of a formal antitrust complaint is not something we take lightly," Smith wrote.
Microsoft and Yahoo together hold about a 25 percent share of the market for search in the U.S. Microsoft's Bing search engine powers searches on Yahoo after the two companies reached a deal in July 2009. But Europe is different: Microsoft, Yahoo and other smaller players hold less than a 5 percent share, while Google has around 95 percent.
Google, Smith alleged, has walled off some of its content to prevent indexing by Microsoft's Bing search engine, and consistently undertaken measures to lock advertisers into using its systems.
Bing is prevented from "properly accessing" Google's YouTube video website, Smith alleged. Microsoft's latest mobile phone operating system, Windows Phone, also has problems accessing the site, with Google restricting the rich metadata associated with videos to prevent Windows Phone devices from offering the same user experience as, say, Android phones do.
"We just need permission to access YouTube in the way that other phones already do, permission Google has refused to provide," Smith wrote.
Microsoft also alleges that Google prohibits advertisers that are using its online advertising services from formatting their data in a way that could easily be used with competing ad platforms, including Microsoft's adCenter.
As for search, Smith also complained that Google prohibits leading websites from distributing other search boxes on their sites.
"It is obviously difficult for competing search engines to gain users when nearly every search box is powered by Google," Smith wrote. "Google's exclusivity terms have even blocked Microsoft from distributing its Windows Live services, such as email and online document storage, through European telecommunications companies because these services are monetized through Bing search boxes."