eBrandz News

Facebook Disconnects Googles Friend Connect

2008-05-16T05:47:23+01:00

{mosimage}The industry thrust for data portability brotherhood hit a bump on Thursday when Facebook suspended Google’s Friend Connect service from accessing Facebook members’ information.

A post Thursday on Facebook’s developer blog, explains that the social network has suspended participation in Google’s “Friend Connect” project because “it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which does not respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service,” explained Facebook’s Charlie Cheever in the company’s developers blog.

“Now that Google has started Friend Connect, we have had a chance to evaluate the technology,” the post by Cheever read. “Just as we have been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we have had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance,” Cheever wrote.

Facebook has already contacted Google “several times” about the issue and is looking forward to finding a resolution, according to Cheever.

Google on Monday announced plans to make its applications available to outside Web sites. The offering, dubbed Google “Friend Connect,” will let webmasters add Google social features like chat to their Web sites with just a few clicks.

“Web sites will be able to easily incorporate Friend Connect to allow users to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, LinkedIn and others,” Mussie Shore, product manager for Friend Connect, wrote in a Monday blog post....

Ask.com Buys Dictionary.com To Give Out More Answers

2008-05-16T05:35:59+01:00

{mosimage}New York -- In a move that reflects a new strategy, Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp which owns Ask.com has acquired Lexico Publishing Group, an Internet media company that owns sites that includes Dictionary.com in its latest effort to distinguish itself from online search leader Google and other much larger rivals.

“A similar attempt last year was made by rival site Answers.com, but the deal eventually fell through.”

In addition to acquiring Dictionary.com, Ask is also picking up Thesaurus.com and Reference.com in its acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group. Terms of the deal were not being disclosed.

“The deal was accomplished with the sites’ owner Lexico Publishing and the estimated sale price is around $100 million.”

With the addition of the widely used reference tools, Ask’s move is aimed at distinguishing itself from Internet search giants like Google, Yahoo!, etc. Ask said the acquisition will help it “super-serve” its core audience, while hoping to make more money showing ads to people looking for answers to basic questions.

“We want to [super serve] those people,” said Jim Safka, who runs Ask for its corporate parent, IAC/InterActiveCorp.

The acquisition made sense, because of their traffic and growth; there is so much inbound interest as more than 30 percent of searches conducted on their search engine are in the reference category, the company said.

The sharper focus on reference tools does not mean Ask is abandoning its role as a “general, multipurpose search engine,” Safka said. “This (acquisition) is not all we are going to do. It is the first tangible piece...

YouTube Begins Offering Ads With Buzz Targeting

2008-05-14T07:13:13+01:00

{mosimage}YouTube Begins Offering Ads With Buzz Targeting

Early this week Google CEO Eric Schmidt in an alluded interview said that it plans to turn YouTube into a money-minting machine. And now Google is ready to share more details about its high priority of making more money off YouTube’s popularity, introducing an advertising product on Tuesday called “Buzz Targeting,” that makes a ton of sense.

“YouTube has started offering advertisers the ability to pair their in-video ads with videos the site believes are on their way to becoming viral hits.”

Since advertisers have no clue over what is going to be popular on the site, YouTube will watch over videos that are getting an acceleration of viewing, favorite and ratings, and give advertisers the capability to piggyback on this group of videos.

Buzz targeting may deserve the hype, though, as the statement continues. The YouTube product team created an algorithm it states can recognize videos that are on the up and up in terms of audience. It makes that evaluation by looking at factors such as the early acceleration of views on a given clip, along with the number of times it is “favorited” and the number of ratings it receives. The Google-owned platform hopes the feature will appeal to entertainment marketers and to those pushing products with broad appeal, according to a spokesperson.

“We believe buzz targeting is a strong marketing opportunity for any advertiser that wants to offer...

Yahoo Opens Up Geographic Data To Websites

2008-05-14T05:34:02+01:00

{mosimage}Yahoo! has lately opened its own catalogue of geographic information, at a developer preview of its new Internet Location Platform, thus opening up new application opportunities for developers to employ Yahoo data and services in their own applications.

As stated by Yahoo, the platform is “designed to facilitate spatial interoperability and geographic discovery; users can traverse the spatial hierarchy, identify the geography relevant to their users and their business, and in turn, unambiguously geotag, geotarget, and geolocate data across the Web.”

The company now provides an interface to the data, said Dan Catt, an engineer and geotagging expert at Flickr, Yahoo’s photo-sharing site.

A unique, permanent identifier, called the Where on Earth ID (WOEID), is assigned to various spatial entities. Thanks to this identifier, locations with similar names can be easily disambiguated.

“Yahoo has opened up their geo-database,” Catt said in a blog entry. One specific example is the Sydney Opera House, which has a WOEID of 28717584.

Currently, Yahoo! reports to have recorded about 6 million places categorized hierarchy according to a simple topological model such as country, town and street. This data structure is said to allow developers to query the geographic context of every place represented by a WOEID, and obtain its parents, children, and neighbors.

The offering is part of what Yahoo designates as Yahoo Internet Location Platform, a service currently in beta testing that is designed to help developers build geographic features into the internet.

Although regular attributes have not been yet included in the current beta release, web applications will be able to look up the geolocation ID of...

Google Fuzzes Out Faces In Street View Privacy Issue

2008-05-14T05:31:25+01:00

{mosimage}“Google faces criticism that Street View is an invasion of privacy.”

Burlingame, Calif. -- Google Street View has long been picked on for invading people’s privacy that has led the world's number one search provider to fuzz out the faces of people, responding to privacy concerns from the search giant’s all-seeing digital camera eye, including Google’s Street View product.

“Privacy crusaders have gathered against the company since it began collecting ground-level images of streets and features across the United States and around the World.”

Street View is a Google Maps product that provides a panoramic, launched in the US last May, adds street-level pictures of over 40 U.S. cities and their surrounding suburbs. The public in such areas are usually clearly identifiable.

A fleet of cars fixed with cameras have been trawling the streets of more than 20 American cities, taking pictures of the pavements to provide a complete visual map of the area. But the cameras also take photographs of any person who happens to be walking by at the time. While this has brought about disagreement among privacy campaigners in the US, it could result in serious legal problems in countries such as France with strict privacy laws.

Though the case in point on the subject certainly establishes that walking down the street and the exterior of your house visible from the street are not ‘private,’ most people are still leery of having their pictures posted on Google Maps as they walked down the road.