Welcome to Technology News

The Yahoo + Google - Microsoft spin room

Autor admin | 15.06.2008 | Category COMPANIES, Google, Internet News, Microsoft, Yahoo

With the Microsoft/Yahoo/Google triangle taking a new shape as Microsoft exited and Yahoo and Google connected, the analysts covering tech industry sports are weighing in with their opinions.

Some Wall Street analysts believe Microsoft will take another run at Yahoo if the company can’t get back on track or Carl Icahn wins his proxy fight to control the Yahoo board. That may be wishful thinking. Kara Swisher reports that Microsoft is done with its courtship of Yahoo and nothing will bring them back to the negotiating table.

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch called the Yahoo-Google deal a massive destruction of shareholder value, employee morale, and the Interent balance of power:
Yahoo’s hatred of Microsoft runs so deep that they were actually, in the end, willing to destroy the future of their company just to keep it independent for a short while longer. They’ve ignored the wishes of their shareholders, employees and many now former key employees in killing that deal. And apart from Google, CEO Jerry Yang, President Sue Decker and possibly Tim O’Reilly, I don’t believe there is anyone in the world that is happy with what has happened.

In a further lambasting post, Arrington called Yahoo desperate and possibly neurotic:
Quite simply, it looks to me like Yahoo is effectively paying Google off to step in and (1) keep Jerry Yang, Sue Decker and the current board of directors in power, and (2) avoid a desperation deal with Microsoft for as long as possible, or longer. It’s not even clear to me that Google wants this deal, based on the terms. It almost looks like they’re just doing Yahoo a favor, and trying to keep them out of Microsoft’s hands.

At the other end of the spectrum, venture capitalist Fred Wilson thinks that Yahoo did the right thing by choosing Google over Microsoft as a partner.
Yahoo! finally woke up and did what they should have done years ago, cede search monetization to Google who simply does it better and will always do this era of search better than anyone else.
Now Yahoo! will do what it needs to do. Clean house, get lean, get out of businesses it shouldn’t be in. Focus on what it’s good at. And start making money and growing again.
They may need new leadership to do that. But selling this asset to Microsoft just because they had the wrong leadership and probably still have the wrong leadership is a mistake.

From my reading of the events over the last five months, Yang regrets that Microsoft walked away from the acquisition talks. “We all felt and understood a combination done right has a tremendous amount of power and leverage,” Yang said during an interview with Walt Mossberg at the D6 conference.

As a founder, Yang preferred that Yahoo stay independent and that he have the chance to turn the company around as CEO. Microsoft historically was not the kind of partner that Yang considered for a marriage. And his board of directors, led by non-executive Chairman Roy Bostock, seemed to go along with that line of thought.

But the entire affair turned out to be mostly about the money, as Decker admitted. “We never got through the price door,” she stated during the same D6 interview. Yahoo’s board believed that the company was worth more than $35 per share based on future promise, and Microsoft wasn’t on the same page. In effect, Microsoft called Yahoo’s bluff.

It also wasn’t helpful that Yahoo was negotiating the search deal with Google at the same time Microsoft was pursuing its hostile bid. After months of rejection, Microsoft basically became less enchanted with the potential marriage, and despite the pummeling from the shareholders, Carl Icahn’s camp, and the press, Yang and his advisors held out for more money.

Unable to come to terms with Microsoft on a generous deal just for the search business, Yahoo took the less complicated, non-exclusive Google deal that allowed the company to remain in the search game.

As I wrote in my post “The battle for Yahoo’s soul,” Jerry Yang and Sue Decker have a short runway–about six months–to prove that they can “redefine” the essence of Yahoo in a way that yields more revenue, profit, and positive buzz. With the continuing board room distractions, employee defections, and morale issues that go along with being under siege by various parties, the duo have their work cut out for them.

Google grows stronger in Microsoft-Yahoo fallout

Autor admin | 14.06.2008 | Category Google, Internet News, Microsoft, Yahoo

SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft Corp.’s abandoned takeover bid for Yahoo Inc. appears to have culminated with a disheartening thud for those two companies but amounted to yet another coup for online search leader Google Inc.

What began in January as Microsoft’s most audacious attack yet on Google instead paved the way for the Internet’s most powerful company to gain even more clout through a deal that gives Google access to a large chunk of Yahoo’s advertising space.

By submitting to a partnership that endorses Google’s search advertising technology as a better choice than its own, Yahoo is giving online marketers even more incentive to spend most of their money with its biggest rival, according to industry analysts.

It looks like such a sweet deal for Google that the U.S. Justice Department and lawmakers are expected to take a hard look at the arrangement to make sure it doesn’t give Google too much control over the Internet’s search advertising market.

Google currently has about 75 percent of the U.S. search advertising market followed by Yahoo at 9 percent, according to the research firm eMarketer Inc.

Although they contend their alliance won’t lessen competition, Google and Yahoo have agreed to wait until late September to begin working together so the U.S. government has more time to assess the potential impact.

Even more importantly to Google, the Yahoo partnership keeps a potentially valuable weapon out of Microsoft’s control.

Without Yahoo’s renowned franchise, Microsoft once again is scrambling to find a way to fix its unprofitable online operations and narrow Google’s commanding lead in the Internet’s rapidly growing ad market.

Google shares gained $18.56 to close Friday at $571.51 while Microsoft shares added 83 cents to close at $29.07 — an indication that some investors were relieved the world’s largest software maker concluded it would be too expensive and troublesome to buy Yahoo.

On the other side of the fence, Yahoo shareholders had been clinging to the possibility that Microsoft would revive its last offer of $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, to buy the Internet pioneer. But those hopes evaporated late Thursday after Yahoo disclosed Microsoft had “unequivocally” rebuffed an attempt to renew the negotiations.

In a sign of investors’ frustration, Yahoo shares dropped as much as $1.77, or 7.5 percent, Friday before rallying late in the session to finish at $23.47, down five cents. The downturn marked Yahoo’s lowest stock price since it closed at $19.18 at the end of January, just before Microsoft launched its takeover attempt.

That leaves Yahoo’s market value 29 percent below Microsoft’s last offer, which was withdrawn May 3 after Yahoo asked for $37 per share. Yahoo’s stock hasn’t reached that price since January 2006.

At least Microsoft still has a strong, highly profitable backbone — a suite of software products that run most computers around the world.

Yahoo, though, may have made a Faustian bargain by hiring Google to show ad links next to a significant portion of the ad links appearing alongside search results on its Web site in the United States and Canada. The Sunnyvale-based company also will pluck Google ads to show on other Web sites in its marketing network.

Yahoo expects its annual revenue to get an $800 million lift from the arrangement with Google while still showing show the majority of its own ads alongside its own search results. But most analysts viewed it as an act of desperation, asserting it’s only a matter of time before advertisers shift all their business to Google because they know their messages will show up on Yahoo either way.

Deutsche Bank analyst Jeetil Patel described Yahoo’s decision to farm out advertising to Google as “one of the worst strategic maneuvers seen in the Internet industry.”

Google will get such great access to Yahoo’s highly trafficked Web site that it should be able to gather more insights about the correlation between search requests and advertising, ThinkPanmure analyst William Morrison wrote in a Friday research note titled “Giving Away The Store (To Google).”

And that additional data could help Google further improve its advertising formula to become an even more compelling marketing magnet.

The partnership also cast doubt on a turnaround plan Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang began drawing up year ago after he replaced Terry Semel as the Sunnyvale-based company’s chief executive.

A big part of that strategy hinged on Yahoo becoming a “must-buy” for advertisers — a strategy that the Google deal appears to contradict.

“This raises very important questions about the long-term vision for (Yahoo) and its place in the industry,” said Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Derek Brown.

Yahoo shareholders will get a chance to vent their frustration at the company’s annual meeting Aug. 1 when activist investor Carl Icahn will seek to replace the board with nine alternate candidates.

Icahn was primarily interested in selling Yahoo to Microsoft, so his campaign to replace the board may be hurt if he can’t persuade shareholders he has other viable ideas on how to boost Yahoo’s stock price. He didn’t return a call seeking comment Friday.

Yang and his top lieutenant, Susan Decker, defended the Google deal as a profitable move that will better position the company to capitalize on the Internet advertising market’s growth from roughly $40 billion worldwide this year to a projected $75 billion to $80 billion market in 2011.

Microsoft contends it offered Yahoo a better alternative even after losing interest in buying the entire company.

When the latest talks broke off June 8, Microsoft was prepared to buy Yahoo’s search operations for $1 billion and pay $35 per share to accumulate $8 billion worth of Yahoo’s stock, according to an internal note sent Friday by Kevin Johnson, who oversees Microsoft’s online operations.

Microsoft also would have offered guarantees that could have boosted Yahoo’s operating cash flow by an estimated $1 billion annually, Johnson wrote.

Yahoo estimates the Google partnership will increase its operating cash flow by $250 million to $450 million annually.

“Regardless of Yahoo’s decision, we will continue to move forward on our strategy in online services and advertising,” Johnson assured Microsoft employees.

Microsoft left the door open to renewing talks about buying Yahoo’s search operations. Yahoo also gave itself some wiggle room by including a clause in the Google partnership that would end the alliance for a termination fee of up to $250 million.

Some analysts and investors still think Microsoft eventually might try to buy Yahoo in its entirety, although at a price well below $47.5 billion.

“Yahoo seems to have backed itself into a corner pretty effectively here so it would appear Microsoft has a lot of leverage,” said Dan Davidowitz, a portfolio manager for Polen Capital Management, which owns about 750,000 shares of Microsoft and 37,000 shares of Google.

Davidowitz said he isn’t interested in owning Yahoo’s stock.

Yahoo!

Google lets users measure the power of words

Autor admin | 11.06.2008 | Category Google, Internet News

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Number-crunchers can rejoice as Google Inc offers deeper access to the underlying figures for users’ Web searches, giving some insight into trends based on the relative popularity of various words.

The Internet search leader is expanding its existing Google Trends service to allow users to see underlying numerical data on the popularity of any particular search in Google’s vast database of search terms, relative to others.

Google Trends was begun two years ago as an entertaining but limited way to indicate what the world is thinking about over time, at least in terms of Web searches.

Now Google is giving users the ability to search across terms in its database, instantly chart how they compare to other search terms, then export the underlying numerical data into a common spreadsheet format to compare with other data.

Google Trends (http://trends.google.com/) lets users compare demand for various search terms and see how popularity differs across geographic regions, cities or languages.

A year ago, the company introduced Hot Trends, which gave users insight into fast-rising Web search trends with data refreshed several times daily. The tool’s power only grows as people conduct more and more of their everyday activities online, with Web search often their primary starting point.

The data in Google Trends stretches back to 2004. While the service is based on the many billions of individual searches performed each year, Google Trends only reveals data on the aggregate numbers of searches, not the searches themselves.

National differences in the endless human search for sex or love can vary widely, according to a Google Trends chart. http://tinyurl.com/5jt5ce/

Google Trends users can also chart the explosion of interest in the term “backdating” since 2006, reflecting the scandal over how hundreds of companies backdated options for executives. http://tinyurl.com/5l8osu/

Searches for the word “Microsoft” had a more than two-to-one-lead in searches over “Apple” three years ago, but Apple had virtually closed the gap by the end of 2007.

Then news reports of its takeover bid for Yahoo appears to have stoked a recovery in Microsoft this year. Searches for Microsoft have outnumbered those for Apple by about 7 to 5 in recent weeks, according to Google Trends data.

Users must be registered and signed into a Google account to use the service. One can then see the evolution of new terms or concepts through Google searches, including the rise of “Google Trends” itself. http://tinyurl.com/6zd6pg/.

(Editing by Braden Reddall)

Yahoo!

Amazon working again, but what went wrong?

Autor admin | 07.06.2008 | Category Media News

A two-hour Amazon.com outage is over. Now on to the post-mortem: what triggered the problem?

Amazon declared itself clear of the problem this afternoon. “The Amazon retail site was down for approximately two hours earlier today beginning around 10:25 a.m. The site (is) back up,” the company said in statement.

But as to the explanation, the company only hinted that its complicated computing infrastructure was, unsurprisingly, a culprit.

“Amazon’s systems are very complex and on rare occasions, despite our best efforts, they may experience problems. We work to minimize any disruption and to get the site back as quickly as possible,” the company said, declining to comment further.

Human error?
The most likely culprit was simple human error, in the estimation of Shawn White, director of operations for Keynote Systems, which monitors Web site availability.

“Some engineer might have made a particular change, not knowing it could cause a trickle-down effect” that eventually brought down the site.

For example, he said, somebody in charge of maintenance might have been directing Internet traffic to a particular group of servers, but selected the wrong group.

But at Amazon? “What I find still so surprising is it happened in the middle of the day. Typically you do that in off-peak hours,” White said. “They rank on the top with performance and availability, consistently, time and time again.”

Network attack?
Another possible explanation is an attack such as the distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack that struck Amazon and other high-profile sites in 2000. White thinks it unlikely, though, that a crushing load of network traffic brought Amazon down.

“These guys are experts at dealing with flash floods of users,” including those that routinely arrive during peak shopping days. “Usually, when you see a site going under because of traffic issues or a denial-of-service attack, you see a gradual slowdown in performance and drop in availability. Here we saw at 10:16 a.m. it completely dropped off 100 percent.”

Soups Ranjan, a senior member of the technical staff of network protection and management company Narus, hasn’t yet found any attack evidence.

“It doesn’t seem to be the result of a network-initiated attack, at least from my preliminary analysis from our probes,” Ranjan said.

Human error may not sound as gripping a tale as a network attack, but there’s plenty of drama for the people responsible. And it’s the career-limiting variety of drama, said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff, who hazarded a guess that Amazon’s problem involved its front-end Web servers.

The security group of WebSense, a Web site and communications protection company, also saw no evidence Amazon’s problem was security related.

CNET staff writer Robert Vamosi contributed to this report.

CNET news.com

US blogger released on bail in Singapore

Autor admin | 05.06.2008 | Category Internet News

SINGAPORE (AFP) - A US-based blogger who allegedly accused a Singapore judge of “prostituting herself” was released on bail Thursday and had his passport confiscated.

A judge ordered Gopalan Nair, a former Singapore lawyer who is now a US citizen, to be released on 5,000 dollars bail (3,676 US) after more than four days in custody.

A prosecutor told court there was no need for him to be detained while further investigations were carried out.

Nair, 58, who declined comment to reporters, is due back in court for another hearing next Thursday.

He was arrested in the city-state on Saturday and charged Monday with insulting a public servant, his lawyer Chia Ti Lik earlier told AFP.

According to a court document, Nair is charged with insulting Justice Belinda Ang Saw Ean last week by sending an email which said she “was throughout prostituting herself during the entire proceedings, by being nothing more than an employee of Mr Lee Kuan Yew and his son and carrying out their orders”.

Chia said the comments essentially repeated those Nair made in a recent blog about a defamation case filed by Singapore’s leaders against an opposition party and its members.

In the blog, Nair strongly criticised a three-day legal hearing last week at which Singapore founding father Lee Kuan Yew and his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, testified.

In another post on his blog Saturday, Nair taunted authorities, saying he was in Singapore at a particular hotel, and also gave his phone number.

“I am now within your jurisdiction… What are you going to do about it?” Nair wrote.

He is charged with insulting a public servant, which on conviction carries a maximum fine of 5,000 dollars (3,660 US) or one year in prison.

Nair’s lawyer told reporters outside court that he expects a fresh charge to be laid against his client, without elaborating.

Yahoo!

Google lets sites tailor what searches users see

Autor admin | 03.06.2008 | Category Google, Internet News

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Internet search leader Google Inc is expanding an existing service to let businesses customize the search results that visitors see when they search for information within their own sites.

Instead of offering visitors to a particular website the same slice of search results they find by searching Google.com, the new Google Site Search Service lets website owners show previously untracked pages deep inside their sites.

The new Google service is hosted on Google’s network of computers instead of requiring customers to install and maintain search equipment of their own. Google aims to improve the search quality of sites with rich content but cluttered ways of finding information lodged within the sites.

Site Search is the new name for Custom Search Business Edition, which Google introduced in late 2006.

It adds business integration features through a machine-readable computer programming interface, the option to turn off advertisements, a more tailored look-and-feel for searching the site and technical support via e-mail or phone.

“Google Site Search is targeted more for businesses and government sites that want search but don’t want to display ads,” Nitin Mangtani, a product manager in Google’s Enterprise division, said in a phone interview.

Hundreds of thousands of website publishers rely on Google’s AdSense program to offer classic Google Web search. They make money running advertisements from Google’s network of online advertisers.

Site Search is an alternative to the Google Search Appliance, which Google offers to sites wishing to maintain their own search services inside their own data centers. Google counts more than 10,000 active Search Appliance customers.

Google is the only mainstream Web search provider to offer businesses a hosted service. By contrast, rivals like Autonomy Corp Plc and FAST, which was recently acquired by Microsoft Corp, require customers to install and manage their search software in-house, Mangtani said.

Other features allow site administrators to add their own customized synonym dictionary, allowing website visitors to use site-specific terminology geared to a particular industry or culture. Google Sites also offers users a spell checker.

Webmasters have the option of fully customizing Google Site Search to the look and feel of the website, or they can rely on Google’s simplified Web page style and make clear the ties to Google’s services.

They can also weight search results to favor more recent documents or specific pages such as product catalogs. While the service encourages sites to customize site search results, the service does not affect the ranking of searches done via Google.com, which promises to keep search results impartial.

Yahoo!

Schools eyeing virtual campuses

Autor admin | 01.06.2008 | Category Video & Games

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - An Internet fantasy universe teeming with faux worlds devoted to socializing and video games is expanding to include virtual classrooms and universities.

A new trend in online education involves students acting through animated characters called “avatars” mingling in simulated school settings and even rocketing off, via the Internet, on quests for knowledge.

San Jose State University in the heart of Silicon Valley has built a campus at Second Life, the popular virtual world created by Linden Lab in San Francisco.

The virtual university spans 16 digital acres dotted with school buildings that Library Sciences Department students use for classes and experiments.

“When I teach with Second Life, I think of it as an experience generator,” university professor Jeremy Kemp told AFP.

“I can send a student in to have an experience in an unstructured environment, and then come out and have a conversation about it.”

Thirty students signed-up for Kemp’s 15-week virtual-world class, which includes learning about the application driving the Second Life program.

“I ask them to volunteer on (an in-world) reference desk, or take a tour of Second Life with snapshots,” he said. “Students can even design a library program with a speaker and invite the public.”

Kemp is trying to simulate real world experiences by building virtual buildings and audiences so students can learn in realistic, but safe and controlled, settings.

“We’re experimenting with using Second Life to prep students to face the terror of public speaking,” Kemp said. “That’s very difficult to do in any other way.”

While Kemp’s class simulations are unconventional, industry analysts say his methods are not unique.

“Second Life is just one of those technologies that allow you to have a more robust classroom experience,” said Sloan Consortium survey director Jeff Seaman, who researches education trends.

The catch, according to Seaman, is that while teachers are interested in this technology, it is a challenge finding constructive ways to use it.

“I know schools that bought their own land in Second Life to figure out what it was, but never used it,” Seaman told AFP.

The University of Phoenix specializes in long-distance learning in the United States and is among schools that invested in virtual property without developing it, according to Provost Adam Honea.

“It’s not that we don’t think Second Life is good, it’s that we can’t fit what we’ve already done into it,” Honea said.

Instead, the University of Pheonix has created its own immersive environments, such as a fictitious company websites that contain realistic documents for business students to analyze.

“Most of our systems are proprietary, so it’s easier for us to create our own immersive environments than to use commercial products,” Honea said.

Only a tiny fraction of the more than 3.5 million people in the United States that took online classes last year did so in virtual worlds, according to the Sloan Consortium.

“I think that it is going to take plenty of time for groups and communities to realize the affordances and limitations of Second Life,” said Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at University of California at Berkeley school of information.

The University of California at Berkeley doesn’t have a Second Life campus, but it makes some courses available via webcasts and podcasts, enabling students to stream lectures to their computers or listen on iPods or other MP3 players.

The pace of academic institutions moving into virtual worlds such as Second Life promises to build as students growing up with the technology become educators themselves, according to Kemp.

“This is an adolescent technology that’s lurching and pushing in different directions and getting a sense of itself,” he said.

“The things we’re learning from Second Life will eventually help distance educators do their work. It’s very promising.”

Yahoo!

Yahoo chief says Microsoft not interested in renewed takeover tr

Autor admin | 29.05.2008 | Category Internet News, Microsoft, Yahoo

CARLSBAD, California (AFP) - Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang said Wednesday that Microsoft is “no longer interested” in buying the pioneering Internet firm, but is considering “other partnerships.”

Yang also maintained that Yahoo is “not under siege” despite a threatened stockholder revolt led by billionaire corporate raider Carl Icahn.

Yang’s comments came during a speech at an “All Things Digital” conference organized by the Wall Street Journal in the Southern California city of Carlsbad.

“Microsoft is no longer interested in buying the company and they are discussing various other partnerships with us,” Yang said, echoing comments made the prior evening by Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.

“We are listening.”

Yang implied that sparring that took place between the companies while Microsoft’s nearly 50 billion dollar offer was on the table has given way to talks aimed at finding a way for them to work together.

Microsoft could have taken a “much more hostile” tact and tried to oust the Yahoo board of directors that rebuffed advances by the Redmond, Washington, based software giant, according to Yang.

Yang stressed that it was Microsoft, not Yahoo, which walked away from the bargaining table.

Microsoft says it broke off takeover talks in late April after it upped its February 1 bid of 44.6 billion dollars by three billion dollars and Yahoo’s board still wanted more.

Yang defended the board’s handling of failed takeover talks with Microsoft and pleaded anew the case that the struggling Internet firm is poised to recapture its former glory and a bigger share of online advertising dollars.

Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo to better take on Google, which dominates the lucrative world of Internet search and advertising.

“They definitely have an interest in Yahoo,” Yang said of Microsoft. “With the right circumstances, not only price, our board is open.”

Talks between Yahoo and Microsoft may be centered on letting Microsoft handle Yahoo’s online advertising in the belief it can pump more cash out of the promising revenue source.

Yahoo successfully tested just such an arrangement with Google during Microsoft’s takeover try.

An alliance with Microsoft, or even Google, could be a salvation for Yahoo board members facing a showdown with Icahn.

Icahn has reportedly bought a stake of more than four percent in the California firm and says he plans to oust board members he accuses of botching takeover talks with Microsoft.

Icahn has nominated a Microsoft-friendly slate, which includes him, to replace all ten Yahoo board members at elections to be held at an annual meeting in late July.

Yahoo delayed the shareholders meeting to an unspecified date because it needs time to prepare for the threatened coup attempt.

“The perception of us being a company under siege is just not accurate,” Yang said as he was peppered with questions about Yahoo’s future.

Yahoo’s potential to make money online stretches far beyond search, according to company president Susan Decker.

Internet search accounts for only 10 percent of the space for placing online advertising, and Yahoo boasts 500 million people that routinely use its properties, which include free email and user groups.

“It’s an enormous asset,” Decker said at the conference. “It’s undervalued. We want to do more with it.”

Yahoo!

Google could pick Git to manage Android code

Autor admin | 24.05.2008 | Category Open Source

Releasing 8.6 million lines of source code and expecting open-source programmers to join Google in its development is a technological challenge.

But when Google does make its Android mobile phone software an open-source project later this year, it looks likely it will take a page from the Linux playbook and use a tool called Git to manage that part of the work.

Linux leader Linus Torvalds originally developed the Git source-code management software in 2005. He didn’t like available open-source tools for the chore, but encountered resistance in using a proprietary tool, BitMover’s BitKeeper.

Torvalds liked the distributed approach enabled by BitKeeper and Git, in which individuals could maintain their own “trees,” variations of a project that branch off a main trunk. Git also can be used to track and manage software patches sent “upstream” by contributors working on code branches to the programmers responsible for maintaining various open-source projects.

Google currently uses a source-code management tool called Perforce to manage Android, but the company is moving to another code repository technology in preparation for moving Android into an open-source project, said Android leader Andy Rubin.

“We need an open-source repository. Currently we’re on Perforce. That has to be moved to Git,” and there’s an effort now to make the transition, Rubin told me in an interview about Android.

That sounded to me like Android had settled on Git, but Rubin wasn’t willing to go that far. “We have no announcements at this time,” he said.

Maybe we’ll hear more at the Google I/O conference next week for programmers interested in Google’s work. One theme of the conference is Android.

Benjamin Lynn of Google’s developer programs group offered a basic guide to Git on a Google open-source blog posting this week. And Google uses Git elsewhere, for example, to help Linux kernel programmers with support for Qualcomm mobile phone processors.

Junio C. Hamano currently maintains Git.

One choice Google won’t pick for source code management is the centralized Subversion software.

“Subversion we don’t think is enough of a repository to handle 11 million lines of code. If this is adopted, and there are 10,000 people checking out, it’ll die,” Rubin said. (Android today consists of about 8 million lines of Linux code plus 11 million lines of higher-level code; of the latter, about 8.6 million will become open-source software.)

CNET news.com

The new look of facebook

Autor admin | 22.05.2008 | Category Internet News, Social networking

On Wednesday, after months of nothing but ambiguous screenshots, Facebook finally talked about its upcoming site redesign. It’ll make it easier for members to see immediate, dynamic updates from their network of friends, a company representative said, and it’ll cut down on some of the profile clutter by distributing user information across a set of tabs rather than having it all on one page.

The big question: Will members like it?

“Any user interface changes, large or small, carry with them a certain risk,” developer Kyle Bragger told CNET News.com, adding that big decisions can easily create more confusion. “Audience really should always be considered when making user interface decisions.”

And considering Facebook has more than 70 million members, many of whom don’t consider themselves particularly tech-savvy, a massive overhaul won’t go over smoothly with everyone.

One developer who asked to remain anonymous speculated that members might not like the fact that you can no longer view a Facebook profile on a single page. “(It takes away) the user’s ability to create a unique profile page that they identify with,” he said. “Even your Twitter profile seems to do a better job of representing you these days.”

Ultimately, it’s hard to tell how the general response will be, especially since no one outside the company has tested the new design yet. Major changes to Facebook have a spotty history: Facebook members freaked out about the News Feed but welcomed the ability to spice up their profiles with developer applications, and while some prominent critics lambasted the Beacon advertising program, members as a whole didn’t seem to care.

But none of those situations involved a total redesign that will put some information in different sections of the site and require users to click around in ways the site didn’t before. “Completely switching up the profiles on people will be like upgrading Windows (from XP) to Vista,” said Nick O’Neill, the blogger behind All Facebook. “I think Vista looks cool but I have no idea how to use any of the tools, (so) I stayed with XP.” The problem is that Facebook members won’t have a choice: everyone’s getting the new design, like it or not.

Then there are the thousands of developers who have created applications for Facebook’s platform and who will have a chance to test out the new design several weeks before the greater membership. Although the code for application creation isn’t changing, the way that Facebook users interact with apps certainly will: posting to feeds and “walls” is different, and some applications will have their own browser tabs whereas others will be an additional click away. Some developers have already voiced concerns that Facebook’s platform is dominated by “corporate” apps and that it’s hard for an indie creation to catch on. With applications on separate tabs, it’s inevitable that some will say this worsens the situation.

“Not all of the details have been announced for what changes need to be made. What is clear is that applications are going to need to readjust how their content is displayed.” O’Neill said. It’s true: a lot of information was left unsaid, including how it might tie into the extension of Facebook’s API into Friend Connect. He estimated that some developers likely are “going to be forced to make substantial changes to their applications.”

At the same time, some developers say they appreciate the fact that Facebook will now be able to convey more immediate information into “news feeds” that are more advanced, and are looking forward to an expanded profile environment that isn’t crammed into a single page.

“Much, much better. More dynamic. More room for breathing,” a developer who asked to remain anonymous told CNET News.com regarding the new design. “The older design was very constricted.”

CNET News.com