The blogosphere is buzzing today with rumors on Microsoft intending to buy just the Search portion of Yahoo and then buying Facebook. It's a strange world we are living in, but some argue that the move appears to make sense in a twisted sort-of way.
This should be an interesting week...
JP Rangaswami has written a really beautiful posting with the title “Interesting, but of no commercial value”: The problem with emerging social media tools on his confused of calcutta blog today.
The article is a well written tour through the history of computing and the resistance being put up against new and innovative technologies that have the potential to change the way we work, communicate, or do business.
I'll quote just the first few introductory paragraphs here:
I can remember a time when people thought e-mail was a complete waste of time. I can remember a time when spreadsheets and storyboarding software were similarly disdained. In fact, I can even remember a time when no senior executive would be seen dead near a computer. You know something? It wasn’t that long ago, maybe 20 years ago?
I can remember a time when people thought the internet was a complete waste of time. When browsers had no future, when search engines were nothing more than toys. It wasn’t that long ago that Google was something that a few people played with, and the rest thought…. that they were wasting time. I can remember a time when people thought eBay was a plaything, someplace
that people went….to waste time. I can even remember a time when packages marked Amazon or Fedex were unheard-of in enterprise mail trolleys. You know something? It wasn’t that long ago, maybe 10 years ago.I can remember a time when people thought social media, software
and networks were a complete waste of time. When Facebookers were fools, Twitterers were twits, when even blogs and wikis and IM were viewed with deep suspicion, when everyone thought that the people who were using them…..were wasting time. You know something? It wasn’t that long ago. Maybe it’s still happening now.
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... ☺
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...?
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:
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.
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, just announced that the real-time search function is now live on Twitter.
All you need to do is set up your phone or IM on Twitter, and then you can send a command like track NYC to automatically receive an update whenever anybody twitters about "NYC".
Very cool feature!
P.S. You can follow the XML Aficionado on Twitter, too...
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."
You can now also follow the latest updates from the XML Aficionado on Twitter (a social networking and micro-blogging service).
"We could not find contacts from Gmail for you to add."
talk about Facebook in the blogosphere already, so I won't recite it all. Instead, I'll just say that it was these things that got me excited:
fb: namespace) that are described by this XML Schema (yes, I know, they call it a DTD, but it's really an XML Schema - I should tell them to use the DTD and XML Schema tools in XMLSpy to fix this). In addition to the FBML describing the user interface, the 3rd party applications call a Facebook API, where most parameters and results are transmitted in XML (e.g. see the description of the Events.getMembers API call).
