iPhone browser traffic disproportionate to market share

I've said it all along - the iPhone's UI and especially the Safari browser on the iPhone are a quantum-leap over existing other smartphone technologies (e.g. Windows mobile, Symbian, Blackberry).

The NY Times has an article today on iPhone traffic on Google and confirms this by stating that despite a market-share of only 2% (compared to 63% for Symbian and 11% for Windows Mobile) the majority of mobile browsing traffic on Google over Christmas came from iPhones - that is simply astounding: more than 50% of the traffic from iPhones that have only a 2% market share!

The article also cites an analyst opinion:

"The iPhone has taken the frustration out of browsing on a mobile phone, said Charles Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Company."

Related discussions and other blog links can be found on TechMeme, as well as in previous iPhone-related posts on this blog...

Atomic Clocks, Street Views, and Flash Disks

A few random things caught my eye today:

GPS has brought atomic precision time to us in the form of small portable GPS devices, as well as network time-servers that sync with the GPS data. The time from the GPS satellites comes to us with such precision, because the satellites carry cesium atomic clocks on board and are synchronized with ground-based clocks and being corrected for relativistic effects.
But for some folks getting the atomic time from GPS is not enough - they call themselves "Time Nuts" and have atomic clocks (such as the 5071A) at home as a hobby. See also this nice article in Wired today. Wow! I've always loved time, clocks, calendar calculations, leap seconds, and physics. I guess that's a hobby that I could get into, too....

From atomic clocks and GPS it is only a small leap to navigation, which brings us to cartography, which brings us to Google Maps - and the second item of interest today: Google has launched Street View in eight new cities in the US, including Boston. Very cool.

Last, but not least, here is something I want in my next laptop: Toshiba announced a 128GB Flash HDD yesterday. My current laptop has a 80GB conventional disk drive, and it looks like the form factor of that Toshiba drive would allow for an actual replacement.

XML 2007 (or not), IE8, and Google on the iPhone

XML 2007 ended in Boston today and despite planning to go to the conference today, I unfortunately missed the event due to some time constraints at work. Elliotte Rusty Harold blogged from the conference (thank you!), and he was asking if nobody else was reporting live from the event. Well, I was planning to do so, but couldn't. Sorry.

The one talk that I had really wanted to go to was by Irina Kogan (IBM) and Dr. Nick Nagel (Altova) who spoke on "XML-Driven Database Design and Information Retrieval" this afternoon - fortunately the presentation slides can be found here so I can read up on what I missed.

In other interesting news today:

• Bill Gates semi-announced Internet Explorer 8 to bloggers
• There is now a "wicked cool" iPhone version of the Google Mobile website

I've already played with the Google interface on the iPhone and it is really nicely done. I get Google search, GMail, and Reader all nicely integrated and with a slick iPhone like UI.

Google's Open Social API - is this the end of Facebook?

Google is holding a press conference right now, and it appears that they have everybody's support for the new Open Social API in an attempt to stem the popularity of Facebook among 3rd party Web 2.0 application developers. Supporting sites include MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Friendster, etc.

UPDATE: Full text of press release here.

TechCrunch has reported on this topic before and has some details on what the APIs contain.

Marc Andreessen also writes about the API and concludes that the Open Social API is "the next big leap forward". He cites two big differences compared to the Facebook APIs: (a) with Open Social API there can me more than one container, whereas with the Facebook API there is always only one container (i.e. Facebook); (b) the Facebook API requires the use of FBML and FQL, whereas with the Open Social API developers can use any standard HTML and JavaScript.

I haven't seen the actual Open Social API documentation yet, but I bet it'll be using XML all over the place. Good news for the XML Aficionado... ☺

Google switches to its own translation system - machine translation still questionable

I've been closely following the various attempts at getting automated machine translation to work for the past 10-15 years, and often found the outputs from those systems laughable at best. Be it BabelFish, or the various commercial systems, the bottom-line is always the same: automated systems cannot do even a half-decent job at translation, because they lack human comprehension - and we are still 20+ years away from any AI...

So I was very intrigued today to learn that Google has switched from Systran to its own translation engine.

As a simple test-case, I asked Google Translate to translate this XML Aficionado blog from English to German, and this is the live result: XML Aficionado in German. For those of you who understand German, this will be a delightful joke!

Bottom-line: machine translation still sucks...

Jaiku has been bought by Google

Very interesting! Google apparently moved into the micro-blogging or "lifestreaming" space today by acquiring Jaiku. That they acquired Jaiku instead of Twitter came as a surprise to some.

Maybe it's time for me to switch from Twitter to Jaiku...?

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo - interesting synchronicity

I could not help, but notice an interesting synchronicity between the various announcements and news clips about these three firms in the last 2-3 weeks or so:

Sep 9, 2007	Microsoft fails to win ISO approval for OOXML. A review of detailed country comments does, however, show that they are likely going to succeed in the next round in March 2008.
Sep 16, 2007	Yahoo launches Mash - a new social networking site designed to compete with Facebook.
Sep 17, 2007	Google adds slide-show/presentation application to Google Documents in an effort to increase competition with Microsoft Office.
Sep 24, 2007	The The Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft is in talks with Facebook to acquire a 5% stake in the social networking site.
Sep 27, 2007	Microsoft announced an updated Search capability in the Live Search engine. Incidentally it is also Google's 9th birthday.
Sep 30, 2007	Microsoft unveils its answer to Google Docs called Office Live Workspaces.
Oct 1, 2007	Yahoo announced a new Search Assist function to improve Yahoo Search.
Oct 2, 2007	Steve Ballmer speaks in Europe and says that the craze for individual social networks such as Facebook risks being exposed as a "fad". UPDATE: Robert Scoble responds that Steve Ballmer doesn't "get" social networking.

Office, Social Networking, Search, Office, Social Networking, Search, ... — is it just me, or is there some kind of pattern here?

And it all seems to revolve around online advertising platforms. Hmmmm.

Yahoo launches Search Assist

Yahoo announced a new Search Assist function to improve Yahoo Search:


The Search Assist function brings suggestions for related concepts and point-and-click query refinement to the search box.

Looks pretty cool - and nice to see that the fourth suggestion when searching for "XML" is "XML Spy", Altova's XML Editor.

Microsoft releases updated Live Search

Microsoft has announced today that the updated Live Search engine includes a 4 x increase in index size, significant enhancements in the core algorithms, increased focus on query refinement, and a new web data extraction model.

More details about these technical improvements are promised to appear in the LiveSearch Blog over the next couple of days.

I've tested the new Live Search today, and it indeed produces more accurate results than Google: e.g. searching for the term "XML Editor" on Google produces a whole bunch of irrelevant web pages and entries on the first page of the search results - including websites like Peter's XML Editor that aren't even supported/maintained anymore. Ironically, the #1 best-selling XML Editor and de-facto industry standard tool - Altova XMLSpy - is not even listed on that first page of results.

In contrast, the same search for the term "XML Editor" on Live Search will produce only highly relevant entries, including Altova XMLSpy as well as some competitors that are indeed maintaining their software and keeping it current.

It may have taken Microsoft a while to get Live Search right, but that's simply how they work:

• The first version of Internet Explorer wasn't the killer, but subsequent versions kicked Netscape's butt.


• The first version of Visual Studio wasn't damaging the Borland developer tools, but future releases forced them out of the market.


• The first XBox wasn't hurting the PS2, but the XBox 360 is showing Sony who's boss, or rather who's Master Chief.

Extrapolate from those examples to the field of search, and I'd say now is a good time for Google to start to fear Microsoft...

Microsoft in talks to buy a stake in Facebook

The Wall Street Journal reported just now that Microsoft is in talks with Facebook to acquire a 5% stake in the company. The deal is said to result in a valuation for Facebook of $10 billion.

Both Google and Microsoft are said to have been in negotiations with Facebook at one time or the other, but Microsoft has an advantage at the moment, due to an exclusive agreement with Facebook to deliver ads to Facebook users that was signed last year and runs until 2011.

Question: why wouldn't either Google or Microsoft want to buy all of Facebook instead of just a 5% stake?

Answer (according to the Wall Street Journal):

"Microsoft has considered trying to buy the company outright, but people familiar with the matter said it's unlikely at this time. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has steadfastly kept his company independent with the goal of eventually taking the company public. In a round of negotiations last year, Mr. Zuckerberg rebuffed acquisition approaches from Microsoft, Yahoo and others."

See also my previous article "Facebook: it's not just for kids anymore..." on my XML Aficionado blog.

Also seen in Valleywag and TechCrunch today.

UPDATE: New posting in the WSJ Deal Blog has an interview with Bo Peabody, the 36-year-old founder of Tripod Inc. - one of the first social networks, all the way back in 1992.

GMail, Lotus 1-2-3, and why history repeats itself

Joel Spolsky just posted a brilliant article about software optimization, the downfall of established giants (such as Lotus 1-2-3 in the 80s), and why history is prone to repeat itself in front of our very eyes.

Those of us who were around in the software industry in the 80s will become dreamy-eyed as we think back to the "golden age" of computing and nod in agreement. And all you youngsters should read this very carefully, because history can ineeed teach an important lesson here!

I almost agree 100% with Joel, but would point out one additional aspect that he has overlooked: the browser isn't static, and so it's not just about inventing a "NewSDK" with JIT-compiler for JavaScript and better AJAX apps. The new paradigm (i.e. NewSDK) that will sweep away all current Web 2.0 apps could also come from those that provide the browser (e.g. Microsoft), and its predecessor could be under our very nose today in the form of XAML, Silverlight, etc.

Google Reader growing up

Google Reader announced that it has dropped the "Google Labs" designation and is now a mainstream offering.

If you are still using another feed reader to stay up to date with blogs and other RSS or ATOM feeds, you should give it a try.

In an unrelated move, Google Docs today added Presentations (which can upload PowerPoint slide shows). For a quick example check out the LifeHacker blog.

What if.... Google turned evil?

Fantastic science fiction story "Scroogled" by Cory Doctorow appeared in Radar today - based on the premise of what would happen if Google became evil and supported a totalitarian regime...

Oh, wait. Isn't Google already cooperating with the Chinese government today?

See also Cory's related posting on Boing Boing.