Offline access to Google Docs

Posted by Janani Ravi, Software Engineer

Our team has a real affinity for free-spirited types, and so we spend a lot of time thinking up ways to make Google Docs friendlier even to people on the go. If you're one of those, you already know how you can access your Google Docs from anywhere, how nice it is to avoid having to email yourself files or back up docs with a thumbdrive, and how easily you can collaborate with others.

Of course there was a teeny thing missing: you needed an Internet connection to make Google Docs work for you. Now, for documents, that's no longer true. As you'll read on the Google Docs blog, starting today and over the coming weeks we're rolling out offline editing access to word processing documents to Google Docs users. You no longer need an Internet connection when inspiration strikes. Whether you're working on an airplane or in a cafe, you can automatically access all your docs on your own computer.

To see how offline access works, watch this video:

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Apple Reveals iPhone SDK

Today at a town-hall meeting at Apple's Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino, Steve Jobs showed off the iPhone software developer's kit for the first time. There has been a lot of speculation about what the kit would include, and what it specifically wouldn't. Now Steve Jobs says it will have the same APIs and Tools that Apple itself uses to develop iPhone apps.

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What Would a Combined Microsoft-Yahoo Look Like?

Microsoft’s $31 a share offer for Yahoo is made possible by Yahoo’s slumping shares (Yahoo’sstock was trading at about $31 a year ago). While Yahoo has rejected Microsoft’s entreaties in the past, with Terry Semel stepping down as chairman of the board yesterday, things might be different this time. I ran some quick, back-of-the-envelope numbers to see what a combined Microsoft-Yahoo would look like financially, and how it would compare to Google.

* Microsoft figures are trailing four quarters and headcount is from June.

Those headcount numbers and operating expenses  could be cut significantly.  The real impact to Microsoft, though, is not visible in these numbers because Yahoo represents a new growth opportunity for Microsoft in advertising revenues and online services.  During the last four quarters, Microsoft’s revenues for its online services (MSN, Windows Live, etc.) were $2.8 billion and it lost $949 million.  So just combing Yahoo wih that business, you getrevenues of $9.8 billion, but Microsoft would still be showinga net loss for that business of $289 million.

[Source: TechCrunch]

UVLayer: Watch and Share Videos on AIR

UVLayer is a new application that works on Adobe AIR. The service revolves around a video player and sharing tool, letting you search for clips across the web, and share them with friends with drag’n'drop capabilities. Once you’ve downloaded Adobe AIR and the UVLayer application, you can login and begin watching clips.

The videos available on UVLayer can be organized, pretty much however you’d like them to be. If you perform a search, than you’ll see all the videos from your query displayed in a box. You can watch any one of these, share it with friends, see related clips, leave a comment or see the activity going on around this clip. You can also remove it from the search query (which acts as a saved search) and create a “stack.”
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Stacks act as channels for these videos. You can name stacks, and add other clips you’d like to include in a particular stack. These collections can be shared with friends, as can individual videos and search queries. Sharing videos with Facebook is easy enough, as there’s an option to login to your Facebook account directly from UVLayer. Otherwise, sharing with other UVLayer friends is as simple as dragging a clip over your friend’s avatar, which displays (like a buddy list) on the righthand side of the UVLayer application.

One thing I found particularly buggy (or nonexistent) is the related videos option for clips you access through another related search. This greatly halts the search and discovery process for such an application as UVLayer. I also wonder how the adoption rate will be for UVLayer, as there is a two-step download process for new users, and little interaction for the application itself. If only looks could be everything! At least UVLayer recognizes the need for integration with other social networks, so hopefully the company will continue to build in this direction as it launches its service to the world.

[Source: Mashable]

Microhoo! What Does it Mean for Users?

Presuming you've seen the news that Microsoft has moved to buy Yahoo! for $44 billion, the next logical question to ask concerns what this means for users and lovers of technology.

If its business analysis you're looking for, go read Paul Kedosky. Here at ReadWriteWeb we focus more on the cultural impact of innovation in technology. On that front, I think this acquisition could be very good news.

It's going to validate a lot of innovation at Yahoo! Many people, including Microsoft on the conference call early this morning about the news, are focusing on what this means for advertising and for search. Since when is Yahoo! particularly good at either of those things, though? Yahoo! has created a web presence with more traffic than almost anyone else on earth. That's what they are good at and the issue is that they haven't been able to make money off of it.

Yahoo! is great at content and online innovation, though. That's what Microsoft needs right now. Google is posing a threat to Microsoft not just because it is winning in advertising, where Microsoft is a relative beginner, but because Google is shifting the software world to online.

Microsoft is serious about innovation, they just haven't been doing much of it in house for awhile. The Live.com work and the Microsoft acquisitions in the health space indicate to me the company really is trying to do more than just catch up in search and advertising.

I think that this acquisition is going to mean a whole lot more energy put behind services like Flickr and Del.icio.us and innovative content sites like Yahoo! Sports and Finance. All of that will be good for Microsoft and it will be good for those of us who find those sites and services inspiring.

It's hard to know what the impact of layoffs will be, or if the Death Star culture of Microsoft will quash a lot of the Yahoo! spirit, but it's going to be a huge company and I'm hoping we will see some very cool things come out of it.

[Source: ReadWriteWeb]

Plaxo Pulse First to Use Google's Social Graph

Although only announced hours ago, Plaxo's Pulse is already using the new Google Social Graph API. They got a head start due to a collaborative effort between their Chief Platform Architect, Joseph Smarr, and Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick. Now, the Plaxo public profile pages will serve as the flagship example of what this new API has to offer.

An Open Social Web

Plaxo's Pulse platform, mistakenly thought of by some as just another social network, is actually an attempt at an open version of the social web where sites inter-operate with each other. Currently Pulse supports integration with flickr, YouTube, digg, LiveJournal, Windows Live, del.icio.us, yelp, MySpace, webshots, last.fm, Pownce, xanga, tumblr, jaiku, twitter, smugmug, Yahoo 360, Picasa, and Amazon.

A great example of the type of interaction Pulse aims to achieve on their platform is the new two-way synchronization feature between Pulse and Twitter. A little over a week ago, Pulse quietly launched a "status" feature. Then a few days ago, they announced that this feature could now be used to synchronize with Twitter, two-way. If you set up your Pulse status to sync to Twitter, when you update your status in Pulse, it instantly updates in Twitter. You can also update in Twitter, and this will be synced back to Pulse. And if you have the Twitter Facebook app installed, it will update there, too.

Dynamic Public Profiles

With the launch of Google's Social Graph API, Pulse is now giving users the ability to create a unified public profile enriched by some or all of the aggregated content streams from the social web.  Pulse uses the API to gather together your various URLs on the web to create a public identity that you can control. With this, you can manage your own data and content and determine how you want to present it to the world.

This is a new sort of public profile page. Instead of a being a static page, like the one you would have on MySpace, the page is constantly being updated by your stream of content that you create all over the web.

The public profiles are a completely opt-in feature. You decide for yourself what content and information is included. The resulting pages are tagged with microformats, so your profile page is readable by Google and other web sites.

Over the next few weeks, Plaxo promises to introduce even more in this area, as this is just the first release.

To get started setting up your Public Profile, Plaxo members can go to Pulse, then click on "My Profile" at the top. On the left-hand side, click on the "Public Profile" link to begin.

Google Releases Social Graph API

Google today announced the release of a new API for graphing social net connections on the web at large. The Social Graph API is a way for developers of social applications to let users easily find data on their social connections across the open web. The information the API returns can be useful in helping users locate and add their friends when starting up at a new social application.

It was only a few weeks ago that Google announced that it had joined the DataPortability.org work group. It didn't take them very long to make good on the promise of contributing to the cause of data portability, though I suspect that Social Graph API has been under development at Google since before they joined DataPortability.org.

The Social Graph API uses the same algorithms at play in Google's search engine to discover how people are connected across the Internet. In fact, it only uses publicly available data -- if it's not on Google, the API won't be able to find it -- which Google says puts users in control of their own data since anything they don't like showing up, they can change at the source level.

The API works by searching for connections between people based on how people are linked on social networks and via publicly available profiles and pages -- i.e., if Marshall Kirkpatrick and I linked to each other on our personal blogs, or if we followed each other on Twitter, the Social Graph API might consider us friends because we have a strong connection. So, if I then sign up for a new social service, I can feed it links to my social presence elsewhere (like my blog or Twitter profile) and it will analyze those public connections and suggest to me that maybe I should be friends with Marshall on this new service because it looks like I'm friends with him elsewhere.

As more and more users are beginning to suffer the effects of "social networking fatigue," anything that helps automate and make easier the process of adding your existing connections to a new network is a useful tool. The Social Graph API could be an important part of the data portability movement in that it allows users to find and evaluate their public social connections and take control of that information.

Google has set up a Social Graph API group as well as provided developer documentation.

Meebo Turns Chat Rooms Into A Web Service

Today, Web-based IM and chat room provider Meebo is releasing full-fledged APIs for its Meebo Rooms that will allow Websites to embed chat functionality in an automated fashion. Currently, Meebo Rooms can be embedded on sites or blogs manually by pasting in the appropriate code, which has already led to a proliferation of such widgets. There are more than 200,000 Meebo Rooms, attracting millions of visitors a month. (See our previous coverage here and here). Explains Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg:

Now, the servers of our partners can say, “I want to create a room.” It automates the creation process on a server-to-server basis. Also, we will be putting advertising into these rooms.

In addition to the APIs, the company is also announcing the Meebo Network, which will serve ads inside Meebo Rooms across the Web, splitting the revenues with the Websites hosting the rooms. Since each Meebo Room is formed around a particular interest, ads can be targeted. And to the extent that sites participating in the network have demographic data on their members, that can be used for ad targeting as well. Only Meebo Rooms created through the API will show ads, not the ones created manually.

The launch partners joining the Meebo Network are Piczo, Revision3, RockYou, Social Project, and Tagged. Revision3, for instance, will create a Meebo room on its site where fans can watch a synchronized loop of Web TV shows while chatting. Access to the full APIs and the ad network is by invitation only at this point. Social networks could use the new APIs to automatically add chat rooms to every group page. Rock bands or movie sites could add Meebo Rooms to their sites for visiting fans.

Comparisons can be made here to Userplane, a white-label chat service which was bought by AOL in 2006 and powers many of the chat rooms on MySpace. But there are subtle differences. Most notable is the fact that Meebo Rooms can spread anywhere on the Web. Anyone can grab the embed code and put it on their blog or MySpace page as I’ve done below. Notes Sternberg:

A user cannot take a room off of MySpace and throw it somewhere else. We have all our rooms networked. A user can take the CBS Jericho room, and throw it on their Wordpress blog. Our chat rooms are networked versus islands within Websites.

It is very hard to get a synchronous conversation going. You won’ get enough people on your MySpace page to have a conversation. But with Meebo Rooms, most of the traffic is coming from somewhere else. It solves the problem of the Web being so distributed.

The power of Meebo Rooms is that they let anyone create live conversations on their site by aggregating people with similar interests from other sites. In fact, it links people between sites. And that, hopes Sternberg, will give it enough scale to become an ad network of sorts. Meebo has raised $12.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

SproutBuilder: Drag and Drop Widget Builder

eBay Changes Fee Structure To Drive Growth

eBay yesterday announced a major shake up in its fee structure in an attempt to revitalize their core auction business.

Amazon surpassed eBay in US traffic in December for the first time according to Nielsen, and growth rates on eBay have been either static or minimal over the last two to three years.

Under the changes, eBay will slash listing fees by up to 50%, but in turn will increase its commission on items that do sell. Extras such as including photos with listing will now be offered for free. eBay will also increase fees on specific items, including goods sold for less that $25 to 8.75%, a 67% increase according to AP.

An example of the new price structure:

selling a purse at auction for $25 would have cost the seller $1.91, including 60 cents for listing the item plus eBay’s commission of $1.31. Under the new structure, the seller would pay $2.74, including 55 cents to list the item plus a higher commission of $2.19.

Another AP report suggests that eBay sellers are not happy about the changes, with one eBay user saying that “It looks like what they are trying to do with the fees is make it more difficult and expensive to sell low-end items. The people that are selling low-end items are going to feel this fee increase the most.”

comScore stats show that eBay still retains a lead of Amazon (graph right) but the gap is closing. Amazon has continued to build a non-auction based alternative to eBay, complete with independent sellers and a used items marketplace that has seen solid growth at Amazon at a rate eBay simply hasn’t matched. With new leadership at eBay after the announcement of long term CEO Meg Whitman’s retirement this announcement will likely be the first of more to come as eBay looks to find growth from what is still one of the leading Ecommerce providers on the planet.