Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

With so many websites to join, users must decide where to invest significant time in adding their same connections over and over. For developers, this means it is difficult to build successful web applications that hinge upon a critical mass of users for content and interaction. With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful.

Only public data

The API returns web addresses of public pages and publicly declared connections between them. The API cannot access non-public information, such as private profile pages or websites accessible to a limited group of friends.

Based on open standards

We currently index the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections. By supporting open Web standards for describing connections between people, web sites can add to the social infrastructure of the web.

Google Under Fire Over a Controversial Site from the Wall Street Journal has an outstanding summary of all the controversy, politics, legalities and moral issues Google has run into due to their Brazilian favored social networking site, Orkut.

The article covers how Google had to pull the ads on Orkut back in August due to them showing up next to “pictures of naked children and abused animals.” From the article:

The head of Google’s Brazilian operation is facing criminal contempt charges for refusing to turn Orkut users’ data over to police. And next month there is a hearing in a case brought by a São Paulo prosecutor threatening daily fines of $100,000 or the shuttering of Google’s Brazil office. “We have won,” says Thiago Tavares Nunes de Oliveira, a 28-year-old Brazilian law professor who wrote the graphic report and has crisscrossed Brazil making the case that Google allowed Orkut to become a redoubt of criminal activity, including child pornography and racist speech.

Imagine your cell phone as a mini marketing machine. As you head into your car after dinner, a text alert pops onto the screen of your handset announcing the 9 p.m. lineup at a nearby cineplex. You choose the Jodi Foster flick “The Brave One,” and a promo video for the next Warner Bros. release, a George Clooney movie, starts running. Afterward, more text appears, prompting you to launch the phone’s Web browser so that you can click through to buy the movie’s ring tones and wallpaper.

That kind of 24/7 advertising engagement — on a phone, no less — may sound like a nightmare. But what if you could determine the kinds of products you get pitched? Or when your flight gets canceled in a faraway airport, text messages pop up for the best hotel deals in town? No random insurance ads or airline deals for trips to places you never visit.

Best of all: Watch or read the custom ads, and your phone minutes are free.

For big cell carriers, that’s the real nightmare. And it may be coming in the form of a Google phone.

Wireless-industry consultants and marketing executives with knowledge of Google’s plans say it has been showing prototypes of a new phone to handset manufacturers and network operators for a couple of months.

Its plans have been kept top-secret, but Google (GOOG, news, msgs) is expected to tap a company on the Pacific Rim that specializes in mobile design and manufacturing to build a handset to its specs. Google could then apply its expertise in operating software and user applications, says Paul Catalano, a partner at consultancy RelevantC Business.

Google officials won’t talk about phones, and industry sources don’t expect one before the second half of 2008.