Google Chrome OS: Distraction or Opportunity?

This afternoon I had the pleasure of being a guest on Randall Bennett’s TechVi video show. I worked with Randall back in the old AOL/Weblogs days, and I enjoy talking tech with him. TechVi uses a two-guest format, so I always get to chat with new folks in this space. Today it was Ross Rubin from The NPD Group, whom I generally only see once a year at CES. Besides being an analyst at The NPD Group, Ross authors the weekly “Switched On” column for Engadget.

Today’s chat was focused on Google’s Chrome OS announcement, but not from a nuts-and-bolts standpoint. Read more…

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Scheduling Software With Full Google Calendar Integration

We’ve covered a lot of scheduling software here on WWD. For example, I wrote about When Is Good, a lightweight solution that offered very basic, easy-to-access scheduling for busy folks, and there are many other services available, too, as apparent from the “Calendars and Schedules” section of this post. A new service, ScheduleOnce, advertises itself with the tagline “Find a time in no time” and claims to deliver “more scheduling power for your Google Calendar.”

If I believed the hype from all of these scheduling services, I’d have to assume that we were all just careening around haphazardly, making and breaking so many appointments and meetings that we lose all sense of time and date. In practice, I think that most of the time the most scheduling software I need is my iPhone and its built-in Calendar application. That said, there are definitely times when scheduling using Google Calendar, which I already use for group-related activities, would make more sense.

Using ScheduleOnce’s Google Calendar Firefox Add-on, that’s exactly what you can do. Just install the add-on via the ScheduleOnce web site, restart your browser, and then log into your Google Calendar to get started. From there, you can use the ScheduleOnce control panel in your sidebar to pick Tentative Availability times which are then optionally connected back to your Google Calendar. Once you’ve chosen your available times, ScheduleOnce generates a link that you can email to other potential attendees so that they can choose from the times you suggest.

Once invitees reply, you’ll be notified in the ScheduleOnce sidebar window. You’ll also receive a notification email from the web app with a direct link to allow you to view what times your invitee has chosen. When you click on it, you’ll be presented with a view of which times overlap, as indicated by a green block on ScheduleOnce’s daily agenda display. Connecting to your Google Calendar, selecting a time, and clicking “Schedule Meeting” will confirm the chosen slot and send a notification to all attendees. It’ll also add the event to your Google Calendar and those of your fellow attendees, so long as you all have the ScheduleOnce add-on installed. Read more…

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Twitter Nabs a Legal Eagle From Google

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, has stolen a prominent Google lawyer.

The start-up has hired Alexander Macgillivray, deputy general counsel for products and intellectual property at Google, to be its general counsel, according to a person with knowledge of the hiring.

Mr. Macgillivray has been an important member of the Google legal team, spearheading the controversial settlement with authors and book publishers over Google’s scanning of millions of out of-print library books. The settlement, if accepted by a federal judge, will clear the way for Google to make available online millions of historic books that would otherwise be difficult to find. The Justice Department has said it is inquiring into whether that settlement violates antitrust laws.

Mr. Macgillivray, 36, has also represented Google in a wide variety of other matters, including Viacom’s copyright lawsuit against YouTube and complaints from The Associated Press that Google improperly used its content.

Before he joined Google, Macgillivray was with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the prominent Silicon Valley law firm. Read more…

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Seesmic Launches Web-Based Twitter Client & New Version of Seesmic Desktop

Today, Seesmic, the developers of one of the most popular Twitter clients, unveiled a web-based version of Seesmic, as well as a new version of the Seesmic desktop. The web-based version of Seesmic basically recreates most of the features that are currently available in the desktop application. A few features like groups and support for multiple accounts are currently missing (though they will be added soon), but the web app also includes a number of features the desktop client doesn’t currently have, including a specialized view for direct messages and syncing persistent searches with a user’s Twitter profile. Among other things, the new version of the desktop app now sports a Twhirl-like single-column view, the ability to hide the sidebar, and it uses less memory and CPU power.

Seesmic on the Web

Maybe the niftiest feature of the Seesmic web app is its new messages view. Here, you can overview of all your private DM’s, which are then displayed like IM conversations. If you open up multiple conversations, they will appear in separate columns, making it easy to keep track of more than one discussion at a time. For now, this view only works for direct messages, but it would also be great if Seesmic expanded this for @replies as well.

One feature we really liked, and one that we hope more desktop apps will recreate (including the Seesmic Desktop), is Seesmic’s ability to sync persistent searches back and forth with your Twitter profile on Twitter’s own site. Whenever you add a search on Twitter, it will appear in Seesmic and vice versa. Read more…

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Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me

THE battle between Microsoft and Google entered a new phase last week with the announcement of Google’s Chrome Operating System — a direct attack on Microsoft Windows.

This isn’t the first salvo in a war that has already seen Google lob its Chrome Web browser against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google pit its Android smart-phone operating system against Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and Microsoft, in turn, aim its new search technology, Bing, against Google’s very heart — the Google search engine.

This is all heady stuff and good for lots of press, but in the end none of this is likely to make a real difference for either company or, indeed, for consumers. It’s just noise — a form of mutually assured destruction intended to keep each company in check.

Microsoft makes most of its money from two products, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Nearly everything else it makes loses money, sometimes deliberately. Google makes most of its money from selling Internet ads next to search results. Nearly everything else it does loses money, too.

Neither company really cares because both make so much from their core products that it simply doesn’t matter. But companies, like people, strive and dream and in this case both dream, at least sometimes, of destroying the other. Only they can’t — or won’t — do it in the end, because it is against the interests of either company to do so.

The vast majority of Google searches are, of course, done on PCs running Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. It is not in Google’s real interest to displace these products, which have facilitated so much of its success. Chrome products are given away, so they bring in no revenue for Google, and they don’t even provide a better search or advertising experience for their users, the company admits. So why does Google even bother? Read more…

Some of resources: CAD Services, Handwriting Experts

Analysis: Five Ways Google Spits on Microsoft

Google really really doesn’t like Microsoft. Even the headlines this week fed off that animus. Google Drops A Nuclear Bomb on Microsoft said one, Google Launching OS, Firing Torpedo Into Microsoft, went another.

The 655-word blog post that announced Chrome OS started it all, of course. But almost lost in the hoopla over that manifesto were the shots Google took at its rival, five taunts that jabbed at Windows’ most notable, and cliched, shortcomings.

Google says: “…the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no Web.”

Translation: Windows is old — it celebrated its 25th anniversary last November — and creaky, with roots that go back even further into the dark days B.I., or Before Internet. And old equals bad.

Google, which is less than half that old — it turns 11 this September — wants to reminds people that it’s a Net-centric firm, unlike Microsoft, and so should know better how to build an OS where the Web is the application platform.

An undercurrent here is the dig that, even though former CEO Bill Gate’s famous “Internet Tidal Wave Memo” ( download PDF) was issued in 1995, Microsoft still didn’t see search, and Google, coming. Read more…

Some of resources: CAD Services, Handwriting Experts

Microsoft Bing Booming; Yahoo Appears in Its Sights

Reports released this week showed that Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search tool continues to gain ground in the search engine wars, but how much ground is a bit up in the air.

For the second time since Bing’s launch just over a month ago, StatCounter Global Stats, which analyzes Web site traffic, reported that the new search engine’s market share has passed that of the Yahoo search tool. According to the StatCounter report released today, Bing held a 12.9% share of the U.S. search market, while rival Yahoo held 10.15% at the start of July.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo are still well behind market behemoth Google, which commands just about 75% of the market, according to the report.

The traffic tracker had reported last month that Bing had surpassed Yahoo on one day shortly after its June 1 launch.

Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter, said in a statement that the latest figures may have resulted from a positive review of Bing that appeared on the New York Times Web site on July 8 and in its print edition a day later. “While its lead over Yahoo may not last into next week, our data suggests that it is slowly but surely closing the gap.” Read more…

Some of resources: CAD Services, Handwriting Experts

Popular Twitter App TweetDeck Raises $2M More

TweetDeck , a desktop application for organizing messages from microblogging service Twitter, has raised $2 million in a new round of funding. The investment was revealed in a comment made by angel investor John Borthwick at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp in Redwood City, Calif.

By dividing Twitter’s stream of messages into different groups and columns, the UK-based company wants to help sort through the barrage of tweets that many Twitter users have to deal with. Built on AIR, Adobe’s platform for desktop applications that also connect to the web, Tweet Deck seems to be the most popular of the Twitter desktop apps (competing software includes Twhirl). It also recently released an iPhone version. Read more…

Some of resources: CAD Services, Handwriting Experts

EBay’s Traffic Drops Amid Identity Crisis

It has been a year and a half since Meg Whitman said she would hand the chief executive’s office at eBay to John Donahoe, and at least by some measures, the company continues to lose traction with both buyers and sellers.

Ina Steiner, the editor of AuctionBytes, a news service for eBay sellers, just published an analysis of eBay’s Web traffic. EBay’s audience — measured by the number of unique visitors in a month — has historically been significantly higher than that of Amazon.com. But eBay’s traffic began to decline sharply last fall, and it dropped below that of Amazon in November, based on numbers from Nielsen.

By May, the last month for which data are available, eBay nudged ahead of Amazon again. But eBay’s audience of 51 million users was down 14 percent from May 2007. The site looks even worse when it comes to Nielsen’s count of the total number of pages the site displayed. By that measure, page views in May were down 32 percent from a year earlier. Read more…

Some of resources: CAD Services, Handwriting Experts

Feeling Tweety in ‘Web Site Story’

From the ArtsBeat blog:

What if Tony and Maria had met on Facebook? If Anita Twittered, would she feel tweety? Those are some of the questions posed by “Web Site Story,” a video parody of “West Side Story” that’s making the virtual rounds.

The video was written and directed by Sam Reich, the president of original content for CollegeHumor.com (where other theater-related offerings include “Waterworld the Musical” and “Food Court Musical.”). The music and dancing in the slickly produced piece mimic “West Side Story” almost note for note. Read more…

Some of resources: CAD Services, Handwriting Experts