Google is shuttering their answer to a Second Life clone. Looks like it will be toast at end of year. The project team is requesting that all affected parties capture their work/programs in anticipation of a shutdown.

In July we launched Lively in Google Labs because we wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways. Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it’s the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people’s lives. But we’ve also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off.

That’s why, despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we’ve decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.

Not everything that Google touches is Gold.

Linky.

The folks at Google Gmail Labs have finally released the long anticipated video chat service. What can I say other than this is a game changer for the Skype folks. Skype is a noncontributor to eBay’s bottom line so when a well heeled competitor like Google shows up only one thing can happen — demise.

Since sometimes reading “lol” doesn’t deliver the same punch as actually hearing your friend laugh at your jokes, you can now use voice and video capabilities in your Gmail chat. From within Gmail, you can have an actual conversation with someone (seriously, out loud), or even chat face to face over video.

Here’s what you’ll need to get started:

• Download the Gmail voice and video chat plug-in, quit all open browser windows, and install the plug-in.
• Sign in to Gmail.
• In the Chat section of your Gmail, select the contact you want to call. If they have a camera icon next to their name, you can make a voice or video call to them; just click Video & more.

If your friend doesn’t have a camera next to their name in your chat list, you can invite them to download the Gmail voice and video chat plug-in from the Video & more menu in a chat window. Even if your friend doesn’t have a video camera, you can still make a voice call or a 1-way video call.

The downside? They don’t have it out for Linux yet. Bummer.

As for Skype, the only thing they have going now is a Skype to PSTN service to differentiate them. Nor do I think that will last. Google will do their usual external partner thing and have that gateway service from somebody going very quickly. Now consider, estimates are there are 50m Gmail users in the world. Compared to 12-13m Skype users on any given day. So the impact could be a massive shift away from Skype if Gmail video goes viral.

The other impact this has is Google Mail is becoming the one-stop shop for anything communications wise. What would be missing you might ask to crown GMail king? How about a whiteboard capability and multiparty support for all these services in a nice bundle. Being able to do a 5 line conferences for free would be nice. Anything else would become superfluous once that happened.

What would be really really cool? How about a stripped version of Firefox that supported all the above burned into the firmware from the Splashtop folks? Ring, Ring! You press your blue tooth headset and start talking, sit down at a bench and open up your eePC and start having a live video conference over your WiMax connection. Kickin’ and it changes the paradigm of communication totally.

HT: Google Operating System.

Google is in the unique position of being the closest thing to a printing press for money even in difficult times. Google’s unique revenue generator is the world’s most effective contextual advertising system. According to a group of software developers, the system Google is using is actually theirs and they claim to have the patents to prove it. They further claim that this entitles them to 15% of Google’s revenues.

Could this be a valid claim that will shake to very foundations of searchzilla, or is it the mother of all  patent troll shake downs?

The CEO of the Russian company told to the Russian CNews branch (in Russian) that the technology of displaying ads related to content of a web page was invented by his company back in 1998. The technology was made public in a series of patents a year later, in 1998, and it took Google another year to implement the technology and start earning money off it. Some part of the enormous revenues generated with the technology the Russian developers want to get back.

The irony is that the guys from the development company do not intend to sue Russian search engines using the same technology Google does: from the very beginning they have decided to choose the most lucrative target of all - which is obviously Google. The reason stated is that the internal 5-year-long investigation made the guys believe that Google used their original patented technologies to implement their contextual ads while the search engines that introduced contextual ads later simply copied the idea from Google but worked on technologies of their own.

The official amount of damages claimed has not been announced yet and will need to be determined by experts prior to filing the lawsuit but for now it is supposed to be in the range of $3 billion - 15% of Google’s profit. (profy.com)

Google backs out of the Google-Yahoo Ad trade deal that was announced in June. It appears that concerns from regulators is at the crux of the matter as noted in the presser –

We feel that the agreement would have been good for publishers, advertisers, and users — as well, of course, for Yahoo! and Google. Why? Because it would have allowed Yahoo! (and its existing publisher partners) to show more relevant ads for queries that currently generate few or no advertisements. Better ads are more useful for users, more efficient for advertisers, and more valuable for publishers.

However, after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn’t have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement.

We’re of course disappointed that this deal won’t be moving ahead. But we’re not going to let the prospect of a lengthy legal battle distract us from our core mission. That would be like trying to drive down the road of innovation with the parking brake on. Google’s continued success depends on staying focused on what we do best: creating useful products for our users and partners.

Linky.

Google about 18 months ago started a service that provided excerpts of books for your viewing pleasure. Now technically they had the whole book digitized, but only permitted you to see a given number of pages. Now I assume they were invoking ‘fair use provisions’, but even I can see this steps over the line. Part of the fair use clause is that of intent. It gets very tricky for a business to utilize fair use over that say of a college professor using the same content. –

The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google have announced a settlement in a 2005 lawsuit over its book-scanning project.

Google will pay $125 million to resolve claims by authors and publishers and to pay legal fees, as well as create a Book Rights Registry where copyright holders can register works to get a cut of Internet ad revenue and online book sales.

The agreement will also make many in-copyright, out-of-print books available for readers in the U.S. to search, preview and buy online. And instead of small snippets, copyright protected books will now have 20 percent of the content available for preview.

That is a really big stab at folks like Safari Books who use the same model. Google has more presence than Safari so they win as a consequence.

The big news ” as well as create a Book Rights Registry where copyright holders can register works to get a cut of Internet ad revenue and online book sales.”, is offered almost in passing. This is huge. Under current Copyright law, I can produce a work, and I don’t have to register with the Copyright office unless I want to. Just state that the work is under Copyright in the work itself and you have standing. Well that leads to the orphan works problem that is talked about from time to time. A user of that work, gets caught in a catch-22; they can’t find the author to work a renumeration deal, they use it then get sued. Many good works go unused as a result.

With Google stepping up to the plate to provide such a registry service the orphan works problem is now limited to how stupid or lazy the author is to not register. Google’s win in this? Well hey if go to them to validate the ownership, might you also go THROUGH them to swing the deal or purchase a copy of the work? Sure you will. Even at 20% take rate that’s huge numbers folks. I don’t need to say Kaching do I?

Linky.

While Google has repeatedly invested big in dubious technology, their shotgun approach has also produced a number of real advances. A new system that indexes spoken words within audio content could be another big game changer. While it’s currently being applied to YouTube in its limited beta, the possibilities for its use are endless. For example, indexing podcasts by thier actual content comes to mind.

Google, the current king of the Internet and all-around innovator, has announced a new technology called Audio Indexing–actually it’s called GAudi, which sounds more like a car than a web service.

Either way, it’s one of the slickest things I’ve heard of in months.

GAudi will catalog every word uttered in a YouTube video and add it to a searchable archive.  Translation:  you will soon be able to search videos by keywords used within the video.

For now, the product is still in Beta (limited testing mode), and will only be indexing YouTube videos related to the current political races.  So you can search for a soundbite you read about in a news article–maybe something Obama or McCain said–and then use GAudi to search for video of the speech on YouTube. (Keystone Blog)

Since we’re about to get spoken word content as we want it, perhaps being able to hum a few bars of a tune your are trying to find can’t be that far off (that’s a hint for Google).

The HTC Dream with Android beta code will debut at selected T-Mobile stores nationwide.

Linky

The pulp media has a treasure trove of existing content they could put online, index and monetize, but they remain clueless. While there are times Google appears to be a ship without a rudder, the company’s management is anything but clueless. As evidenced by their savvy monetization of the pulp media’s archives, Google is further solidifying their position a one stop shop for information at the pulp media’s expense. Since it’s a partnership, pulp media will benefit, but the all important portal position stays with Google.

Google is making searchable, digital copies of old newspapers available online through partnerships with their publishers, the company said Monday.

Under the ad-supported effort, Google will digitize millions of pages of news archives, including photos, articles, headlines, and advertisements, Google said.

“Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. And it’s our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily,” said product manager Punit Soni in a blog posting about the effort. “The problem is that most of these newspapers are not available online. We want to change that.”(Cnet)

Google announces Chrome a new browser they are developing. They even provided a comic book style explanation of the intended features, here. Chrome bulds on three big chunks of technology — Mozilla, WebKit, V8. Each is a particular advancement in their own rights.

Highly suggest one read through the comic book first to get a flavor. But here is what Google is trying to accomplish –

• Provide a multi process capable browser. The user can have several instances running under one user interface.
• The single instance of any process can be contained in a sandbox to jail any malicious code that the browser will detect.
• The browser will be inheriently ‘google gears’ enabled.
• The Javascript (aka V8) code can be contained within a process. It is not necessary for the script to complete before the browser is usable again. In some cases the javascript can be converted to what I presume is byte code for faster execution.
• The UI is rippable. Chrome will use tab metaphors. Similar to but no like how Firefox and IE do it today. Chrome intends to permit one to ‘rip off’ a tab from the UI and set it down on the desktop as a separate instance. Since each tab was its own process that is easily doable.
• A more intelligent autocomplete on the location bar.
• The browser will support a rich agent environment for the web.

Why?

To tell you the truth were I Google I would probably come to the same conclusion. The big three browsers — Firefox, IE, Safari — have essentially reached a impasse on futures. Its a browser after all for display of content and really no more. That Google was able to shoehorn the capabilities of Gears into to them is a testament to their ingenuity. But even Gears has its limits being a asynchronous transport layer.

I’ll give you an example. Some that from a human perspective looks simple — screen pops based on a incoming phone call. Practically every call center in the country relies on them. But my, go look at the technology used to accomplish it! A lot is curses based today. Of those that use a browser one must have an active instance open for the pop to occur, etc. If the browser crashes the entire session and data is lost. Worse you can only do one pop at a time, queuing the balance behind the IVR. Another words not optimal.

Google is proposing to do to the browser is like the difference between DOS and Linux. Permit the browser to work multi threaded and be able to react to differing types of content coming at it. They want a platform that is more malleable to a true client < --> server model. Possibly free of the restraints of REST and SOAP.

From a business perspective if Google can get inside of Microsoft’s IE development cycle it forces Microsoft to focus in an area not quite as profitable to them. Not only that but it tends to blunt the Software+Service model Microsoft has championed. If Google pulls it off they cut Microsoft off the net so to speak for at least 2 years. That would be the exptected development time for Microsoft to come out with a competing product.

Google’s biggest hurdle? Standards. Chrome is supposed to be inherently standards based. But Gears as far as I know is not part of the W3C standards nor being proposed for same. So it leaves a open question about ISO level adoption, be it Gears or Chrome.

Questions

Even with all of this. What about? —

Is XUL to be part of Chrome? If it is will Google assist in the development of XUL editors?

Is Google Gears to be extended or displaced in the Chrome development?

Is there to be a lightweight version suitable for Android?

Its Open Source. So will Google be teaming up with Mozilla to assure cross compatible coexistence where possible?

Interesting times ahead. We could very well see nettop boxes with no official OS but a boot routine and a Chrome based UI that handles everything else. Your applications lay in the SSD or the cloud even though they themselves are not web aware applications.

The enormously popular Wikipedia has revolutionized the recording of and access to information. Anyone who takes the time to learn it’s obscure markup language can contribute and edit. The openness has also been it’s greatest problem. Abundant disinformation and hostile edits by trolls has required vigilance both for the person using it as a research tool as well as those who have an interest in subject matter accuracy.

It should come as no surprise Google wants into the Wiki business. Most subject based searches on Google return a Wikipedia article at or near the top of results. That’s a lot of eyeballs moving away from searchzilla’s sandbox that could be reading their ads along with the articles that it has already indexed.

In Private Beta for some time, Google’s Wiki is now open to all. Knol seeks to rectify the anyone can edit related problems and control trolls. Authorship is recorded by name, and entries are moderated. Mutiple entries on a subject will be contributed with no one editing the work of the another. While this is potentially a better way to do a knowledge base, it also presents pitfalls. More controversial subjects may lose contributions due to loss of anonymity. Moderators with their own agendas to push can be just as if not more problematic than trolls.

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people’s heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.
The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.

With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call “moderated collaboration.” With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it! (Google Blog)