3G iPhone On Track For Next Year

In remarks at the Churchill Club, AT&T’s CEO confirmed what most Apple-watchers have been suspecting: a 3G iPhone will come out next year. Sounds like they fixed that battery-drain problem. Hopefully, these things won’t start exploding like those laptops a year ago.

Mike makes fun of me for toting around a Blackberry, but I’d rather wait for the 3G version of the iPhone to come out before thinking about switching. AT&T’s slow-as-molasses EDGE data network cripples the current iPhone (IMHO). The WiFi option for surfing the Web on the iPhone today is a nice backup, but you can’t really count on it for constant mobile connectivity. A 3G iPhone would certainly become yet another Apple lust object/upgrade, but will it be enough to accelerate sales to hit the 10-million mark Steve Jobs set as a goal for next year. It all depends on the price, and you can be sure that isn’t going to be cheap. A guess is $599.

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Microsoft Acquires Mobile Focused Social Networking Site WebFives

Microsoft has acquired Seattle based social networking site WebFives.

WebFives was initially founded in 2004 by former Microsoft engineer Mike Toutonghi as Vizrea and offers social networking with a focus of mobile media, including video, music and photos. Users are provided with standard social networking profile pages complete with blogging, and have the option of accessing their sites via computer or via a WAP specific page.

According to The Seattle Times, Toutonghi told WebFives users that the service will stop at the end of the year because of the Microsoft acquisition, making the acquisition a technology buy as opposed to a community buy. Toutonghi went on to encourage users to sign up to MSN Spaces and/or Windows Live for their social networking experience.

Price of the acquisition was not disclosed.

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Google Reveals 2008 Plans For Google Apps

Google is usually fairly tight lipped about future product releases. But they were surprisingly revealing about upcoming plans for Google Apps at an event in Ann Arbor earlier this week. Blogger Andrew Miller took some great notes from a presentation by Googler Scott Johnston, the VP of Product Development at wiki startup Jotspot prior to their acquisition by Google a little over a year ago.

First, Google Sites, an evolution of Google Page Creator, will launch in 2008. Google Sites will be based on JotSpot collaboration tools and will allow businesses to create intranets, project management tracking, extranets and other custom sites.

We should also expect Google Docs, Gmail and Calendar to soon work offline via Google Gears. This has been widely predicted, but it’s good to see it coming more formally from Google (note that Zoho, a Google Docs competitor, already has offline functionality via Google Gears).

Some of the other stuff is more speculative, but worth the read (pivot tables on Google Spreadsheets? I doubt it).

* Google Sites: Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.

* Will users be able to edit docs, spreadsheets and presentation offline? Scott’s answer was yes, and that the Google Gears plugin would handle the offline work. In addition, Google Gears support is in the works for Gmail and Google Calendar.

* What happens when somebody edits a document offline at the same time another user is editing the online version? The same algorithm that reconciles simultaneous editing will apply here when the offline version is merged back into the online version. Changes will be versioned the same way, so basically in chronological order.

* Will Google docs have OCR capabilities for importing .pdfs or other graphical files? Not yet, but perhaps someday. Scott couldn’t comment on the “roadmap” for future enhancements. However, the collaborative Google Sites (based on JotSpot) will allow for upload and storage of any file type.

* Will GrandCentral be integrated into Google Apps? If so, when? Again, Scott didn’t comment on the timing but said they are working on it and it is a “huge priority” for them.

* Will Google Spreadsheets ever have advanced features like pivot tables, macros or offline database integrations? (This was actually my question) Scott said they are constantly trying to find the balance between speed and utility. It will never be a heavy duty analytics program because that would be too heavy and bulky for the average user.

* Will Google Apps support video conferencing in addition to Google Talk and Chat? Scott’s answer, “Not yet”. I got the impression from his body language that it’ll come someday, but nothing more was said.

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Google Reader Gets Recommendations, Drag-and-Drop

Google has released two new features for its RSS reading product, Recommendations and Drag-and-Drop.

The Discovery recommendation feature suggests new sites a user may wish to read based on current subscriptions and (interestingly) browsing history. Google has previously offered feed bundles based on subjects, but this is the first time it has offered customized recommendations in this way.

The drag-and-drop functionality allows users to re-order or move subscribed feeds within a folder or to another folder. This style of functionality isn’t unique, and as Google itself points out, RSS readers such as Bloglines and NewsGator already provide drag-and-drop functionality.

Google thanks a number of interns and ex-interns for the new features, a nice thing to do.

As a Google Reader user I know I’m certainly going to use the drag-and-drop functionality, and I’m even looking at some of the suggested feeds as well, but I’ve got to ask: how is it that we can get drag-and-drop in Reader and not Gmail? Surely Gmail could do with this functionality. Maybe the Gmail team needs some interns as well

Google Testing OpenID With Blogger, May Offer OpenIDs To Users

Google’s “Blogger in Draft” program that tests functionality for Google’s popular Blogger blogging platform has rolled out OpenID support for comments.

Read complete article here

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Solid State Drives replacing HDD laptops in 2009

Very interesting article discussing the benefits of the new 64GB solid state drives, and just how soon HDD's will be a thing of the past in laptops (just like MP3 players).

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Protests force Facebook to change

Facebook members have forced the social networking site to change the way a controversial ad system worked.

More than 50,000 Facebook users signed a petition calling on the company to alter or abandon its Beacon advertising technology. Read more here

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Iceland’s Largest BitTorrent Tracker Shut Down

Torrent.is, the largest BitTorrent site in Iceland has been taken offline due to efforts from a coalition of anti-piracy organizations. Their request to seize all computer hardware associated with the site was rejected. more

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Who will Microsoft buy next?

A panel of venture capitalists and a Microsoft dealmaker chatted Tuesday about how Microsoft picks the two dozen or so companies it buys each year. more

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MySpace Continues Domination of Facebook

Gian Flugoni of ComScore released some data the company recently presented at the Forrester Consumer Forum that speaks to the ratios of visitor and ad impression shares between MySpace and Facebook. The numbers are interesting, and the implications admittedly difficult to interpret, but the raw numbers come as no big surprise.

MySpace still maintains a clear dominance of the visitor share, with 69% as opposed to Facebook’s 31%. The dominance in advertising is exacerbated by MySpace’s tendency to deliver advertising with a little bit of content to its userbase. The numbers appear crushing to Facebook, in that sense, with roughly 87% going to MySpace and 13% going to Facebook in terms of delivered advertising impressions.

The data was collected in September, so it doesn’t include any new changes to the Facebook or MySpace systems, most notably Facebook’s Beacon or Pages initiatives. Clearly the impact of those will be both difficult to measure and significant, given their infomercial-ish nature.

What is perhaps most interesting is that despite all the interactivity inherent to the Facebook developer program, MySpace visitors still consume an average 1.4 times more pages per visitor than Facebook users.Yesterday, I also posted a very long diatribe that hopefully will cap off my rants against Project Bacn. If you were masochistic enough to read until the end, you probably remember my slamming of Facebook for walling off their garden so very much. Note that MySpace, while it does have fences around their garden, they are very weak white picket fences (to over-extend the metaphor). Their blogs are RSSified, profiles are publicly indexable, and most content on the site is available without the need to log in.

Most of that content also includes ads. In the run down of the ComScore study, they didn’t specify whether or not they measured non-registered visitors to the MySpace site, but I imagine the passive visitor also contributes significantly to the MySpace bottom line. That’s something Facebook, as of present, can’t claim.

That’s the price of erecting a 20-foot concrete wall around your garden. You may keep the riff-raff out, but it is the riff-raff that pays your bills in the end.

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