Silicon Alley Insider - Fred Wilson | August 17, 2008 10:07 AM

I believe web services benefit from doing less, not more. I believe that allowing the users to stitch web apps together to get increased functionality is better than a web service trying to do everything for everyone. The Facebook app ecosystem is one proof point of this approach.

Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey, founders of Twitter, have talked often of the “constraints” that are built into the Twitter app. You can only post 140 characters in a single message, for example. And because Twitter didn’t have desktop client when it launched, a number of them were created and they are probably better than anything Twitter would have created. Same with the iPhone apps like Twinkle and Twitterific.

Read the rest of this entry »

Silicon Alley Insider -  Michael Learmonth | August 15, 2008 11:22 AM

ComScore (SCOR) is making a case against Google (GOOG) that will no doubt get traction among cash-starved Web publishers: the search giant’s new AdPlanner measurement tool consistently undercounts Web traffic. In other words: Google is going to take your precious advertising dollars from you. Don’t work with them!

Google introduced AdPlanner, a free analytics tool for agencies and media planners aimed squarely at comScore’s costly “Plan Metrix” service in June. Since then, comScore has been on a mission to discredit the service using two arguments:
Read the rest of this entry »

InformationWeek - Posted by Thomas Claburn, Aug 6, 2008 10:57 PM

Robert “RSnake” Hansen, CEO of SecTheory, and Tom Stracener, senior security analyst at Cenzic, had some harsh words for Google at their Black Hat presentation, “Xploiting Google Gadgets.”

“Google cares more about tracking users than they do about consumer safety,” said Hansen.

Hansen said that four years ago, he found a Web redirection vulnerability that was being actively used by phishers. He alerted Google, eBay, DoubleClick, and Visa. Visa closed the hole in hours. DoubleClick had a partial fix in place in days. It took eBay several weeks to fix the problem. But Google still hasn’t fixed all the vulnerabilities.

Read the rest of this entry »

BUSINESSWEEK - The Associated Press  August 6, 2008, 5:09PM ET

By ANICK JESDANUN

NEW YORK. The search box is everywhere online these days. It’s built into Web browsers. It’s incorporated into Web sites of all sorts. And it’s a major driver of traffic and revenue for Google Inc. and the like.

So it should come as no surprise that nearly half of Internet users conduct a search on a typical day, up from about a third in 2002, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said Wednesday. Search is approaching e-mail as the most popular thing to do on the Internet; about 60 percent use e-mail on any given day.

Users with college degrees, higher incomes and broadband connections are more likely to conduct a search. So are men and younger users.

Read the rest of this entry »

InformationWeek - August 6, 2008 09:00 AM

An upgraded version of the Google Search Appliance can handle up to 10 million documents, more than triple the previous maximum of 3 million documents.

Thomas Claburn

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) on Wednesday plans to introduce a new version of the Google Search Appliance that can handle up to 10 million documents.The previous GSA, Google’s search hardware for businesses, topped out at 3 million documents.

“We’ve made some drastic changes in our server architecture which allow us to scale to 10 million documents,” said Nitin Mangtani, lead product manager for Google enterprise search.

Mangtani declined to provide specifics but said that the changes had to do with indexing documents more efficiently and with hardware-based improvements.

GSAs in standard configurations can support up to 30 million documents and can support more in custom configurations.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sillicon Alley Insider - Eric Krangel | August 6, 2008 8:00 AM

NBC will bring 2200 hours of Beijing Olympics streaming video to the web, starting today. But Americans will miss some of the best parts. Why? Because NBC, which has exclusive rights to the games in the United States, still makes a whole lot more serving up TV ads than Web ads. So for many of the most-anticipated events (volleyball, gymnastics, swimming, boxing) US-based viewers have to either watch on TV (often on tape-delay) … or they will have to get sneaky.

Easiest steps first: Figure out when the event you want to watch is on (the NY Times has an excellent event tracker for this) and then try to figure out if it’s on nbcolympics.com (NBC’s broadcast schedule here). You’ll also need to download Microsoft Silverlight, which NBC.com requires to watch the game. We were ready to complain about that, but found it fairly painless, as these things go.

Read the rest of this entry »