Google launches internet browser

Google is set to introduce on Tuesday a new Web browser designed to more quickly handle video-rich or other complex Web programs to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Google Inc plans to launch a web browser called Google Chrome in a challenge to Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Internet Explorer, the Wall Street Journal reported on its website on Monday.

The browser is designed to be lightweight and fast, and to cope with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and multimedia.

Called Chrome, it will launch as a beta for Windows machines in 100 countries, with Mac and Linux versions to come.

"We realised... we needed to completely rethink the browser," said Google's Sundar Pichai in a blog post.

The new browser will help Google take advantage of developments it is pushing online in rich web applications that are challenging traditional desktop programs. Google has a suite of web apps, such as Documents, Picasa and Maps which offer functionality that is beginning to replace offline software.

"What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build," Mr Pichai, VP Product Management, wrote.

The launch of a beta version of Chrome on Tuesday will be Google's latest assault on Microsoft's dominance of the PC business. The firm's Internet Explorer program dominates the browser landscape, with 80% of the market.

- Download Link -

The Wall Street Journal

Firefox claims download success

Mozilla is claiming a download record for the release of Firefox 3.0.

In the first 24 hours the web browser was available the software was downloaded more than eight million times, says its creator Mozilla.

Statistics from the download servers are being scrutinised to produce an official figure that will be passed to the Guinness World Record organisation.

But the launch was marred by news from computer security firms who have found the first flaws in the software.

The attempt to set the download record was scheduled to begin at 1300 PST (2000 GMT) on 17 June.

However, the record attempt was almost wrecked from the start as the servers handling the downloads collapsed under the weight of visitors checking to see if new version was available.

Once the servers were up and functioning normally the record attempt began.

At their busiest the servers were handling more than 9,000 downloads per minute. Within five hours the number of downloads for Version 3.0 exceeded the 1.6 million set by Firefox 2.0 in October 2006.

In total Firefox 3.0 was downloaded 8.3 million times over the 24 hour record setting period. The figure beats the five million Mozilla predicted before the day.

Logs from the download servers have been handed to the Open Source Labs at Oregon State University for auditing. The scrutiny will ensure duplicate and unfinished downloads are not counted. The verification process could take a week to complete.

The surge of interest in Firefox 3.0 has continued and Mozilla has reported that the software has now been downloaded more than 10 million times.

However, some of the shine of the launch was removed by reports that a security firm had already found a flaw in the browser.

DV Labs/Tipping Point reported a flaw only five hours after Firefox 3.0 debuted. The flaw potentially lets an attacker take over a PC if a user clicks on a booby-trapped link.

Google to get new space age home

Google is to get a new home after signing a 40-year lease to build a high-tech campus on land owned by Nasa.

The 1.2m sq ft site will include a huge office complex, and research and development facilities.

The search giant will pay an initial base rent of $3.66m a year for the undeveloped land at the Nasa Ames Research Centre in Mountain View.

Google says it needs the space for the thousands of workers it expects to hire as the company expands its business.

"This long-term lease agreement is a key component of Google's strategy for continued growth in Silicon Valley," says David Radcliffe, Google's vice-president of real estate and workplace services.

In the last four years, Google has added more than 17,000 employees to boost its payroll to 19, 156 workers.

This workforce expansion has spurred the company to lease or buy many of the smaller offices circling its Googleplex headquarters, a 1 million sq ft campus that Google bought for $139m two years ago.

The deal is being seen as a win-win situation for Nasa as it endeavours to establish itself as a high-tech centre of excellence

"With this new campus, we will establish an era of expanded collaboration with Google that will further enhance our Silicon Valley connections," says Ames director S. Pete Worden.

"This major expansion of Nasa Research Park supports Nasa's mission to lead the nation in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."

Nasa will use the money for improvements and maintenance costs at the Research Park.

Mr Radcliffe agrees the agreement will enhance Nasa's reputation and allow the company to draw on the brain power that will be available on its new doorstep.

"We believe this collaboration between Google, Nasa and the city of Mountain View is emblematic of the mutually beneficial partnerships that can be created between the public and private sectors. "

Google has not said how much it will cost to build the new campus, which is also expected to include housing for employees, sports, conference, dining and child care facilities and perhaps some retail outlets.

Building work is expected to get under way no later than 2013 with the final phase of work starting in 2022.

After the 40-year lease expires, the agreement could be extended by as much as 50 more years.

Microsoft's cooperation with HP

In a bid to boost its Web search traffic, Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced a deal that will make its Live Search the default on Hewlett-Packard Co. personal computers shipped in the U.S. and Canada, starting in January.

The deal also calls for HP, the world's largest PC maker, to install copies of Internet Explorer with an extra Live Search toolbar on those computers. Microsoft said the toolbar also links to HP services such as its Snapfish digital photo printing site.

Since Microsoft called off its $47.5 billion offer to buy search competitor Yahoo Inc., the company has been under pressure to prove it has a new plan for attracting more people to Live Search.

Google Inc. fields more than 10 times Microsoft's search traffic and has parlayed that into billions of dollars in advertising. Yahoo, the No. 2 search engine in the U.S., attracts more than twice as much as traffic as Live Search.

Microsoft has already made a similar arrangement with the much smaller, China-based Lenovo Group, while Google has a distribution deal in place with Dell Inc. and Mozilla's Firefox Web browser.

"Every Dell machine we buy at home that comes with the Google toolbar, it's not a good day in my family when that happens," Ballmer said to a gathering of employees on May 1. He told them Microsoft is now willing to invest more in distribution deals.

Microsoft would not reveal financial details of the deal or say how much additional search traffic it expects to gain.

Angus Norton, a senior director in Microsoft's Live Search group, said about 40 percent of Web surfers use whatever search engine is set as the default on their PC.

The Washington Times

Google accused over privacy law

The search engine giant is being asked to write the word "privacy" alongside other information links.

"It's a short, seven letter word and in the world of privacy it's a very important word," said Beth Givens of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

Google says its policy is easy to find and it gives "accessible information".

The issue has been building momentum following a series of blogs in the New York Times questioning Google's compliance with the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003.

The law requires any commercial website that collects personal information about its users to "conspicuously post its privacy policy on its website".

Google maintains that it already does and that its privacy policy can be found by going through its search engine or by clicking on "About Google".

In a conference call, a coalition of privacy organisations told journalists that was not good enough and it has written to Google.

The groups involved include the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, the World Privacy Forum, Consumer Action, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of Northern California.

Reuters

WWT will take you to infinity

Computer users now can fly through the universe, viewing stars, planets and celestial bodies as an astronomer would, with the introduction of the WW Telescope by Microsoft.

A free program launched today will effectively turn every computer that downloads it into a mini-planetarium capable of displaying high resolution images of millions of stars, planets and other celestial bodies.

The project, called the WorldWide Telescope (WWT), is the result of several years of hard labour by a small team at Microsoft Research, the software company's key R&D centre.

It has drawn lavish praise from some of the world's leading space scientists and educators, including Dr Roy Gould of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

"Galileo's telescope started to give us views of the universe that no one else had seen before and we started asking what was out there and why. And I think the WorldWide Telescope is going to do the same thing for the rest of us," he said in a telephone interview.

"In terms of pushing the envelope, this really pushes the envelope.

The program works in the same way as many online mapping tools, allowing users to zoom around on an interactive canvas combining images and data drawn from the world's leading astronomical research organisations.

At launch, the WWT has access to 12 terabytes of data - enough to fill the equivalent of 1.2 million books. But like the universe, this will expand as new images are added.

Dr Gould believes the WWT will give amateur astronomers and even complete novices an opportunity to assist the scientific community in furthering their research.

"This is going to change our relationship with the night sky in a significant way," he said.

WWT is being offered without strings attached from today as an educational tool and was created to honour the memory of the late Dr Jim Gray, a leading Microsoft computer scientist who was lost at sea in 2007.

Dr Gray believed that the vast amount of space data being collected would change astronomy from being an observational science into a computational one, said Dr Curtis Wong, a leading Microsoft research scientist and the head of the WWT project.

With the growth of the internet and the increasing processing power of standard computers, Gray could see the internet becoming the platform for a worldwide virtual observatory which anyone could use.

A key feature of the program is the ability of users - any user, not just the experts - to create rich media tours to showcase features found on the WWT database.

For instance, one of the tours takes you across the Martian landscape using images captured in the Mars Rover program.

"For millennia ... every different culture has their own story about the heavens," said Dr Wong in a telephone interview. "The WorldWide Telescope is an opportunity for people to create and share those stories."

The Microsoft project is being launched almost nine months after Google rolled out its Google Sky service, a layered map of astronomical images that its part of its Google Earth program.

But there is no sense of a space race between the two giants of the technology world. Both projects have no commercial application and exist as public service tools.

Dr Wong would not be drawn on making comparisons between the two although it has been previously reported that the WWT packs in much more data and imagery than its Google counterpart.

The WWT comes as a 20MB download and is available from the WorldWide Telescope site. The program only works on the Windows operating system.

Stephen Hutcheon

Google launches Friend Connect

Google has launched a preview version of Friend Connect which allows non-technical website owners to add a range of social networking features.

Mussie Shore, a product manager at Google, wrote on the company's official blog: "There are a number of great social networking sites out there that let you stay connected, but the rest of the web typically hasn't been social. Yet."

Website owners can use free code segments to add a range of interactive features and applications which visitors can access through AOL, Google, OpenID or Yahoo log-ins.

Google hopes that the new service will connect sites and users from around the world with similar interests by adding web 2.0 functionality to previously static web pages.

"You will be able to see, invite and interact with new friends or, using secure authorisation APIs, existing friends from social sites on the web like Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, LinkedIn, Orkut, Plaxo and others," wrote Shore.

Friend Connect will initially be limited to a handful of applicants while Google gathers feedback from site owners, developers and users to refine the service and expand the gallery of applications.

Google Wants to Facebook Friend You

Thanks to a new Google project, soon any Website can be its own Facebook.

Upping the stakes in its ongoing battle with the popular social network, Google announced today that it was getting into the "social plumbing" business — giving every website a way to add a limitless number of applications and a means for those sites' users to communicate among themselves.

The initiative is called Friend Connect and it begins tonight when any site can apply to be in the Google pilot program (they call it a "preview release") here. Note: that site won't be live until Monday night. During the next few days, Google will choose one or two dozen sites to participate. Over the course of the next several months, the company will collect site, user and developer feedback on how the program is working. Then, if all goes well, in a few months Google will open up Friend Connect to any website or blog that wants to participate.

Here's how it'll work. (And forgive me for using my blog as an example; we need the traffic.)

My wife and I have a teensy blog that covers real estate and other stuff of interest to people in our hometown in Northern California. It's hosted via Blogger, which happens to be Google's free hosting service. (The Friend Connect program, however, is open to any website or blog — you'll just have to cut and paste a few lines of code onto your site.) Anyway, when we first set up the blog, we chose from a short a la carte menu of standard features we wanted to add — things like "blogrolls" which recommend our favorites blogs, post archives, pictures and so on.

Once Friend Connect is up and running on blogs, however, we'll be able to go to a page and choose from thousands of applications, and add them, free, to our site. (Here's a list of some of the applications. As Friend Connect grows, expect the list of applications to explode; Google, like Facebook before it, is trying to create a "platform" for developers to make money by reaching an audience of millions.)

But users will have to sign in if they want to use all those cool new apps. How? Google's using a standard known as OpenID, which many of the world's biggest sites — from Google (of course) to AOL — utilize. So, for instance, sign into AOL, or your g-mail account, and you're logged into Friend Connect. One of the advantages of this system is it makes it easier for users to take their friend lists with them. Having signed in, users can follow the activities of their friends on Friend Connect sites. So, in my real estate blog example, if I installed a Wall app (just like the one on Facebook) people could comment on stories. However, those comments would only be visible to their friends; if a user didn't sign in, they wouldn't even see the Wall.

Better yet, as Friend Connect picks up steam, perhaps some applications developer will create a specialized app for all the real estate blogs out there (there are tons of them) and make it easier for, say, real estate agents and home sellers to connect with home buyers. Or, consumers searching out contractors in a specific area.

If Friend Connect works, the ramifications are huge, of course. It's another smart move for Google, which would be able to serve up even more targeted advertising to users — and make even more money. Through a project called OpenSocial, Google has been working to fight back against Facebook's closed network while mimicking, on the wide-open Web, Facebook's core advantages — Facebook is a place where a user not only defines his or her set of friends, but the applications he or she wants to use. Those two things — your friend list and the things you like to do — create a pretty good idea of who you are, which is priceless to advertisers. Only five months in, 2008 is shaping up to be a pivotal year in the Web's development. I can't wait to see what happens next.

Google helps the web to go social

Google has joined the drive to make the web more social by introducing tools to enable people to interact with their friends.

Friend Connect follows plans announced last week by the world's two biggest social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook.

Data Availability and Connect let users move their personal profiles and applications to other websites.

"Social is in the air," says Google's director of engineering David Glazer.

During a conference call at Google's California headquarters, Mr Glazer told reporters: "Google Friend Connect is about being the 'long tail' of sites becoming more social."

"Many sites aren't explicitly social and don't necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard."

Charlene Li, principal analyst at Forrester, told BBC News: "Google is tapping into the 'all things social' heat of the moment, but it's adding a different perspective, not as a data source and social network 'owner' but as an enabler."

Gamut of uses

At the heart of Google's service is the use of Open Social which will allow third parties to build and develop applications for the site.

Social networking is going mainstream David Glazer Google

The company says with Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running right away without any complicated programming. This will run the gamut from invitations to member's gallery and from message walls to reviews.

In an example of how it will all work, Google cited fans of independent musician Ingrid Michaelson who can now connect with other fans without having to leave the site.

Visitors will be able to see comments by friends from their social networks, add music to their profiles and see who is attending concerts all at Ingrid's website.

"Social networking is going mainstream. It used to be proprietary, but now it's going to be open and baked into the infrastructure of the net, not just one site or one source," says Mr Glazer.

Walled garden

MySpace was first out of the gate when it announced plans last Thursday to loosen its grip on the estimated 200 million personal profiles its users store on its site.

Data Availability will allow members to share select information with four partners, Yahoo. PhotoBucket, Twitter and eBay.

Google doesn't do anything without thinking about... how can it benefit Google Charlene Li Principal analyst, Forrester

Essentially the user will still be tied to MySpace which aims to put itself at the centre of the web by encouraging users to store all of their core data at the site to begin with.

One day later Facebook entered the fray with a service called Connect.

With its 70 million users worldwide, their plans differ from MySpace by allowing users to take their personal profiles to any website that wants to host them and not just the sites that have partnered up.

So what's driving this move to dismantle the so-called "walled garden" where social networking sites have jealously guarded their users profiles?

Charlene Li, principal analyst at Forrester told BBC News in the end it all comes down to money.

"It's a smart move by Google which is trying to play the role of United Nations secretary general by making sure everyone talks nicely to one another, getting the data to where they want to move it back and forward, and participate in open standards.

"Remember Google doesn't do anything without thinking about, not only how can this benefit the larger community, but how can it benefit Google."

As 99% of sites are not currently socially enabled, Friend Connect has a big potential market in front of it and Ms Li says the route to all things profitable in this space will be through tapping into "the deep profit and user data flowing through Friend Connect."

In other words, mining that information through advertising.

Google is being cautious about approving sites to use the new code and is creating a waiting list for requests to use Friend Connect. It says it expects to give the go ahead to a few dozens sites in the next few days.

As to opening out to a wider audience, Google says it estimates that will happen over the coming months.

Meanwhile MySpace and Facebook anticipate rolling out their offerings over the next few weeks.

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Alarm at Google Yahoo partnering

Regulators in the US are being urged to investigate any potential online advertising and search partnership between Google and Yahoo.

The call by a coalition of 16 American civil rights and rural advocacy bodies comes despite the fact no firm deal has actually been announced.

"We all suffer in such mega mergers," Gary Flowers of the Black Leadership Forum told BBC News.

The justice department is examining a trial the companies did in April.

It has been widely reported that it is looking into the anti-trust implications of last month's two-week test.

However, the department says it has no comment on the coalition's demands because there is no definitive agreement between Yahoo and Google at the moment.

But reports say that the two companies are presently hammering out the intricacies of a future potential advertising and search agreement, and are sharing their plans with antitrust regulators.

At Google's shareholder meeting on Thursday, Chairman Eric Schmidt said: "If there were a deal [with Yahoo], we would anticipate structuring the deal to address the anti-trust concerns that have been widely discussed."

'Never positive'

This assurance is not good enough for the coalition which is made up of the League of Rural Voters, the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the American Agriculture Movement.

It also includes the Black Leadership Forum, an umbrella group of 36 civil rights organisations including the NAACP and the National Urban League.

In a letter to Assistant Attorney General Thoma Barnett, head of the Justice Department's anti-trust division, the coalition argues that such a deal would give Google almost 90% of the search advertising market and strengthen its influence over internet users' access to information.

"We face a possible future in which no content could be seamlessly accessed without Google's permission," the letter states.

The effect Mr Flowers says of such large partnerships is never positive and would for the black community, as for other communities, "condense competition, increase prices and limit new business opportunity on the internet".

'Do no evil'

League of Rural Voters' executive director Niel Ritchie claims that the do-no-evil mantra may no longer apply in today's marketplace in which Google's reach is apparently without bound, touching more and more aspects of our everyday lives.

"We believe the government should give this agreement very careful scrutiny," he says.

Mr Flowers says:

"Google has already exhibited a pattern of violating privacy, engaging in anti-competitive conduct and using its monopoly power in the search market to drive internet users to its affiliated services and its viewpoints on policy matters.

"Any joint combination with Yahoo could dramatically worsen these problems."

The Centre for Digital Democracy, a consumer advocacy group, is also willing to push regulators to block any deal and wants European consumer groups to raise concerns with European Union officials.

"You can't allow Google to operate a portion of its leading competitor out of its back pocket," Jeffrey Chester executive director of the CDD told the Associated Press.

There has been no comment from Yahoo or Google.

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