Anything Else

Forbes:

So what is Facebook's destiny?

Microsoft's investment in October 2007 was based on an estimated valuation of $15 billion. If we apply a 15X revenue multiple (higher than that of Google's 11), and let's assume for a moment due to its extraordinarily high monetizing potential (See: " Facebook's Monetization Strategy") to its estimated revenue of $350 million, its optimistic valuation turns out to be $5.25 billion. Based on that, we get an EBITDA multiple of 105, which is much higher than Google's 29. Moreover, we may see Facebook's valuation get a cold shower, given that even Google just missed its earnings because it is finding it difficult to monetize its social networking sites. Even News Corp.'s MySpace, which Google has pledged to support to the tune of $900 million over three years, is having trouble figuring out how to monetize its popularity.

No investment banker in his or her right mind would be willing to take Facebook public at a $15 billion valuation. Facebook could try the same kind of auction-based initial public offering that Google popularized. But investors have to be really stupid to pay this astronomical value for a company that is still in its adolescence with an unproven road map for sustainable revenue and profitability (at that scale).

Would anyone buy the company? Most certainly not at that valuation.

Looks to me like Facebook has been frozen--frozen by Microsoft's brilliant business acumen, and by Zuckerberg's adolescent ego.

...

Microsoft must have reasoned like this: "Google must not acquire Facebook. Neither should Yahoo!. Let's play to this kid's ego, and by sprinkling $250 million on the exercise, we can establish an artificially high valuation that would bring their options of exit down to zero."

On the receiving end, 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg must have been thinking, "I must be a real stud. I've got Microsoft eating out of my hands!" If some adult at the investor table tried to mumble that this valuation may cause problems, he was appropriately silenced by the euphoria of the $15 billion.

Smart indeed.

Just read this post by Jeremy, and some part of me is completely refusing the possibility that this is a mere praise to Google product. He is just building the groundwork for upcoming Yahoo! Office.

Lots of stories have been written on recent release of Google Desktop for Linux. A good news for Linux users, but what this really is about is gadgets. Their developer's site says:

The Google Gadgets API is a simple way to create little applications that run on multiple sites, including iGoogle, Google Desktop, Google Page Creator, and thousands of sites all over the web that use Google Gadgets for Your Webpage.

Google won't jump as much, but they sure are wooing the developers right now. Ajax Feed API, Google Gears, and now this. They are even offering money for developing gadgets.

Developers are a big part of what made Microsoft what they are. Google is making some quite strong silent moves to woo them.

Commendable.

According to information from Heise, Google warned that they might disable Gmail in Germany as last fallback should the German government maintain its position in regards to a newly passed law on record-keeping and supervision of internet traffic. According to this law, email services here will be forced to maintain personally identifiable records attached to email accounts.

Lets see how it unfolds.

One of the most important factor in a users percieved performance of a website is the initial page load time. Initial load time depends on backend performance, time it took for the backend to generate the HTML page, and front end performance, the time it takes for the browser to download and render the HTML and all its dependencies. And it turns out that browsers typically take much longer to download dependencies than the original HTML page, due to browser pipelining. Look at the chart below:

As one can see, most of the time is spent in downloading the images, especially problematic for image heavy sites. Read Yahoo! UI Blog's entries on this topic for futher details.

Google recently released GWT 1.4, and one of the features introduced in this release is ImageBundle. The basic idea is to bundle all the images into one at the server side, and use CSS sprite technique to render them. Inspired by it, I just finished an implementation of "Image Bundling" for Django. Here is a demo of the same. The original template to generate the page is here. Look at the bundled image. And the image bundle template tag library can be downloaded from djangosnippets.com. As an added bonus the size of bundled image is about 70% of the total size of individual images, so one can save both total bandwidth, and number of http requests.

This is still the first cut solution. Both this and Google's ImageBundle face an issue when dealing with images with padding, google suggests to avoid padding, or put a wrapper div around the image and put the padding on it. Another issue is images in CSS. They are to be handled slightly differently, but to still keep the output image count to one, some kind of bundle naming is to be done. Google's approach here is creating bundles and using them as two separate steps, I have tried to combine the two together for greater flexibility.

Latest blog from Lessig:

Remember (and I did a 30 minute preso here to explain it) Google Books proposed to scan 18,000,000 books. Of those, 16% were in the public domain, and 9% were in copyright, and in print. That means, 75% of the books Google would scan are out of print but presumptively under copyright.

The publishers and Google already have deals for the 9%. And being in the public domain, no one needs a deal for the 16%. So the only thing the publishers might be complaining about is the 75% which are out of print and presumptively under copyright.

With respect to these, Google intends to index the books, and make them searchable. If a hit comes through the search engine, Google offers snippets of the text relevant to the search. The page includes links to libraries where the book might be borrowed; it includes links to book stores where the book might be purchased. And, I take it, if the “publishers” were to choose to publish the book again, it would also include a link to that publisher.

Finally, any author who wants to be removed from this index can be removed. As with Google on the net, anyone can opt out.

Context.

Page and Time:

HOW MUCH DO PEOPLE USE GOOGLE TO LOOK FOR PORN?

PAGE: It's a small, single-digit percentage.

Fact or driven by business?

Google realized the little point I was talking about, here is their statement to Human Rights Caucus:

At the same time, the launch of Google.cn did not in any way alter the availability of the uncensored Chinese-language version of Google.com, which Google provides globally to all Internet users without restriction.

Censorship is not censorship unless you started censoring anything.

If you notice carefully, you will see something different in this blog.

Presenting you

Currently under beta as every self respecting web 2.0 application has to be :-P. There still may be some stuff left to debug, so you will have to hold off for the moment, my day job takes lot of time of mine. In the meanwhile if you want to beta test it, please drop a comment here, or mail me.

Enjoy!

They revolutionised the mail by introducing the concept of labels, but for online bookmarks they picked folder structure. Makes me think do they really evaluate idea on their merit, or are driven by extreme case of NIH!.

Just came across Google's official statement on China Censorship, and this I would consider the PR blunder of the decade. This is the the first two paragraphs:

Google users in China today struggle with a service that, to be blunt, isn't very good. Google.com appears to be down around 10% of the time. Even when users can reach it, the website is slow, and sometimes produces results that when clicked on, stall out the user's browser. Our Google News service is never available; Google Images is accessible only half the time. At Google we work hard to create a great experience for our users, and the level of service we've been able to provide in China is not something we're proud of.

This problem could only be resolved by creating a local presence, and this week we did so, by launching Google.cn, our website for the People's Republic of China. In order to do so, we have agreed to remove certain sensitive information from our search results. We know that many people are upset about this decision, and frankly, we understand their point of view. This wasn't an easy choice, but in the end, we believe the course of action we've chosen will prove to be the right one.

Lets look at the fact: Google claims to do it because their services were slow or down for upto 10% of the time. Now its totally easy to understand that Google has such high quality requirements that this is not acceptable, but if they say this is the their only problem, then they should highlight very clearly that Google is such great company that 10% downtime is not acceptable to them. Their next sentence should have been:

This bad quality of service is due to censorship imposed by Chinese Govt. who is trying to limit access to politically sensitive information. Now we understand that about 93.45% of our usage is not about politically significant matter, and is about matters of science and technology, something that we strongly believe citizens of emerging countries like China should have access to. Considering all this, smart brains at Google, that we managed to preserve after an alian spaceship crash at Google Headquarters sometime in 1998, decide the following: we will create a www.google.cn which will conform to China's censorship, but do not worry, as our stats tell us only (100-93.45 = )6.55% of queries results will be affected by this censorship, in return the youths of China will get unabated access to Google archieves and search results. And we also promise, once again, www.google.com search results will be uncensored going with our spirit. Chinese citizens are welcome to use it if they think their query is not suitable for www.google.cn, although the quality will not be as great as we would like to, due to factors beyond our control. Let me reiterate we are not hiding any information from them, we are just making a smaller subset of inforation more readily available.

Some will say this is a slippery slope, and acceding to one country's demand will force us to do the same for other country, to which all we can say, maybe, but this is one fifth of population we are talking about, and if for their progress we have to dilute the Google brand that we have worked so hard to create, and love so much, its a sacrifice worth making. Atleast we would know we listened to our hearts, and we did our level best.

How could they screw up so bad!

Wasted Opportunity

(Score:5, Insightful)

by fbg111 (529550) on Thursday January 26, @03:59PM (#14572459)
(http://sciencecrisis.blogspot.com/)

Google states that "while removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission." Assuming that Google's only alternative was to refuse to censor their results, and hence be completely filtered by the Great Firewall, I would argue that that option would have been more consistent with their mission than their chosen path.

The absence of the world's largest, most popular search engine inside the Chinese firewall would have been as glaringly obvious as a pink elephant. The Chinese people aren't idiots, they know their government censors information [breitbart.com], and they would know why Google had suddenly been blocked by the firewall. Word would get out, through the grapevine and other unofficial channels, and it might even constitute an embarrassing loss of face for the Communist party. Of course, the Chinese would much prefer that Baidu, Sino, or one of their own home-grown search engines be the #1 search engine, but they would still know that the only truly reliable search engine, the one that refuses to censor their information, was Google, and had been blocked by their government. Unlike Americans, the Chinese have long memories, and such an association would pay off in PR and face for Google in the long term.

Google on the other hand might take a stock price hit, but no investor could say they were't warned that Google might make decisions based on long-term considerations rather than short term stock-price-propping, or that Google's corporate values might sometimes conflict with the best interests of their stock price. However, such a move would certainly solidify the image of Google as a singular organization with the most honest and accurate search results worldwide, truly dedicated to its mission of organizing all the world's information.

Furthermore, Google's refusal to cooperate with the Chinese Government might have opened the door for other search engines, media, and businesses to follow suit, and emboldened the Chinese people and businesses to demand more unfettered access to information and less government interference. Someone mentioned on /. in a comment on one of the other articles about Google's recent decision that one problem that international businesses, particularly media, face in dealing with China is that they all deal individually with the Chinese government, and hence have little to no leverage. The Chinese government needs multinationals right now as much as, or more than, multinationals need China, but China needs them in aggregate rather than individually, so can take a divide-and-conquer approach at regulating them. What is needed is an industry organization, formal or informal, dedicated to upholding freedom of the press, to which all media companies operating in China can belong, a support network that mutually resists the pressure by the Chinese government on any one company to censor information. Google refusing to censor its results could have been a step in that direction, and if any company has the clout to the lead the formation of such an organization, it's Google.

So this appears to be an unfortunately wasted opportunity, for Google to make a strong political statement based on its values, that might have hurt it in the short term but most likely have paid off in PR and face in the long-term.

Google, we expected better.

--
All that is human must retrograde if it do not advance.

...it's more likely that Google is worried about the results of its search queries and not the technology that powers them. The compromise the Department of Justice has worked out with Google's rivals calls for the search engines to let the government see how often certain search terms were used, but won't let it look up specific IP addresses to what individuals looked for.

That alone could prove embarrassing enough for Google. A public disclosure of exactly how much pornography is on the Internet and how often people look for it--the two data points that will result from fulfilling the government's subpoena--could serve to make the Internet look bad. And Google, as its leading search engine, could look the worst.

Interesting. I wouldn't like news all over the world saying 80% of the users go on internet for porn when everytime my family asks me what I am doing I tell them I am on internet, or when they ask me whats my work and I tell them its related to internet.

Google to BellSouth: We won't pay

Google standing up against DOJ

Everyone hates Microsoft Windows, and it seems Google is planning to do something about it at the upcoming CES, reports LATimes:

“Google will unveil its own low-price personal computer or other device that connects to the Internet.

Sources say Google has been in negotiations with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., among other retailers, to sell a Google PC. The machine would run an operating system created by Google, not Microsoft’s Windows, which is one reason it would be so cheap — perhaps as little as a couple of hundred dollars. (...)

Larry Page (...) will give a keynote address Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Analysts suspect that Page will use the opportunity either to show off a Google computing device or announce a partnership with a big retailer to sell such a machine.”

So it begins.

Using Gmail as My Spam Filter