Webware

Google is getting ready to add social-networking features into Gmail as it attempts to jump-start its social Web strategy.

Gmail users can already set their status within the service, but Google plans to expand that into a stream of status updates found in services like Facebook and Twitter, according to sources familiar with the company's plans. Users will also be able to share photos and videos through the service, which is expected to launch shortly.

Google has doubled down on its social Web strategy in recent months, with new hires and plans to devote more energy to understanding the social-media phenomenon. The company has tried to get momentum behind its ideas for several years, but hasn't gained much traction to date.

Separately, Google is building Google Wave as a similar stream of updates designed to improve collaboration. That service, which is unrelated to the Gmail status updates Google is preparing, is expected to become completely open sometime this year.

The Wall Street Journal first reported Google's plans for status updates inside of Gmail.

One key factor surrounding Google's plan will be the degree to which the service works with other popular social-networking services, namely Twitter and Facebook. Users who are already accustomed to sending updates across those services won't switch to the Gmail interface unless they can get all their messages in a central spot.

Yahoo offers something similar inside Yahoo Mail, letting users see updates to services like Twitter and Flickr from their contacts within the Yahoo Mail home page.

A Steve Jobs keynote is technology journalism's Super Bowl equivalent. And as with the Super Bowl, they're best enjoyed in real time. Thus the healthy growth of the live-blogging platform CoverItLive, which enables journalists to file live reports that are transmitted, as they type them, to their online readers.

The company, started in 2007, has been growing well and winning the support of journalists not just in the technology realm, but in sports, politics, and other fields. It has become the largest live-blogging platform there is. The embedded CoverItLive live blog player is popping up on sites across the Web. (For a sample CoverItLive live blog, see this replay of a Google press announcement.)

But CoverItLive fell apart during the January 27 iPad announcement. Just as the event was getting started, incoming Apple fans were turned away from embedded CoverItLive live blogs on important sites like TUAW, MacWorld, and MacNN. Readers quickly abandoned many of these sites and headed to others, like Gdgt, that were using home-grown live-blogging tools. To stop readers from leaving, some sites, such TUAW, abandoned CoverItLive on the spot and began publishing frequent updates on their standard platforms. Regardless, it appeared to be a disaster for the small live-blogging company.

The Steve Jobs keynote also temporarily overwhelmed other sites, including CNET News and our sister site ZDNet (read what went wrong). CoverItLive competitors include services like Scribble Live and live video services like Qik and Justin.tv.

This was not CoverItLive's first failure during a Steve Jobs keynote. On January 15, 2008, during the MacBook Air announcement, the platform also collapsed. Since then, CoverItLive flourished nonetheless, winning over journalists in other fields, mostly in sports and politics, who started to use the product regularly. And then the tech sites started to come back.

"The problem isn't the size of the nightclub. It's getting people in the front door.

--CoverItLive CEO Keith McSpurren

Sites like MacNN used the service to great advantage. Publisher Monish Bhatia says that building his own live-blogging platform would have been too expensive, and that CoverItLive offered a good blend of features. MacNN used it about six times before the recent failure, he said. But, he told me, "I wish they were a paid service." He wanted a contract to fall back on with the company should anything go wrong.

Between the 2008 failure and the recent one, CoverItLive has not had a failure during a major live event. And many of these events, such as President Obama's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in December of 2009, got more live blog traffic (9 million views) than a Steve Jobs keynote had until then.

So what is it about Jobs' keynotes that is so toxic to CoverItLive? And how can the company regain the trust of tech journalists?

... Read More

Hot on the heels of a visual face-lift, Facebook on Friday announced that the prototype version of its photo uploader, which was introduced in mid-November of last year, will soon be rolling out to all users.

Unlike the existing version of Facebook's photo uploader, the new uploader requires the installation of a browser plug-in. This inconvenience is rewarded with the option to leave Facebook entirely, while the photos continue to upload in the background. Previously, users would have had to leave that window or page running while the uploader did its magic.

Facebook also said the new uploader supports a few extra photo formats, though it did not specify which ones. The company has, for some time now, had unofficial support for a handful of alternate formats, including raw images. However, on its official spec sheet the company says only .jpg, .gif, .bmp, and .png files will work.

Facebook currently gets 2.5 billion photo uploads per month. To put that in perspective, the company hit the 10 billion mark in October of 2008, a whole three years after first introducing the photo-sharing feature in 2005. In other words, any small change that makes it easier for people to get their photos onto the social network could end up having a big effect on how fast Facebook's photo collection will continue to grow.

If you can't wait for Facebook to activate the uploader on your account, you can do it yourself. Just head over to Facebook's prototype page, and turn it on.

For a reason beyond any fathom I can measure, I failed to follow Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz on Twitter. Now I am attempting to kick myself. I am missing.

You see, Schwartz decided that the best way to tell folks that he was leaving Sun-- recently purchased by Oracle seemingly because Larry Ellison still can't find a hostile way to grab the Golden State Warriors by their Nikes--was to confirm rumors of his departure in a tweet.

"Today's my last day at Sun. I'll miss it," he wrote at Twitter.com/OpenJonathan. Then he added, mystically, "Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more."

One assumes that the haiku upon which Schwartz ended, after suffering from this painful haiku d'etat, was accompanied by a sum of money that will not prevent Schwartz from visiting his favorite hairdresser as often as he would dare. However, one wonders if his former employees were charmed by this disarming farewell.

What would you do if you were to attempt a twittering haiku as your public farewell? Might you, instead of offering a sweetly self-serving, self-referential reminder of your thwarted, or perhaps Schwarted, excellence, offer a small good-bye--in true haiku form or something a little less true--to your fellow man and woman?

Something like, "Wish you got/As much as I did/Sorry you won't."

Or perhaps, "I climbed/On the back of good people/To riches."

Or even, "Gosh/You're all screwed/I'm so sorry."

I am sure that Schwartz believes that he has been deeply progressive by using Twitter to announce his move on to, no doubt, better things. But, when he was CEO, how might he have reacted, if one of his employees had decided to take a hike(u) and tweeted a resignation?

Say, "Useless management/On to better things/FU Sun."

I have a feeling that the looser parts of him might have twitched. Still, perhaps he has, indeed, started a progressive trend, one that might encourage freedom of speech on departure. Perhaps corporate lawyers will soon be unable to keep up with an avalanche of this new style of adieu.

Be a Twitter quitter. It makes you look good. It makes you feel good--about yourself, that is.

Yahoo has shed another property deemed expendable by CEO Carol Bartz, selling HotJobs to Monster for $225 million.

Part of the deal includes a provision that installs Monster as the exclusive provider of job ads on Yahoo's home page for three years in the U.S. and Canada, according to a joint press release. In addition, Yahoo will receive annual payments from Monster based on traffic metrics, allowing it to bank some job-search related revenue for a few years without having to actually run the operation.

"The sale of Yahoo HotJobs to Monster, and the three-year traffic agreement with Monster, represent an attractive opportunity for Yahoo," it said in a statement. "The transaction will provide Yahoo with an upfront cash purchase price of $225 million; the ability to focus more on its core business and delivering exceptional experiences to its users, partners and advertisers; and the opportunity to drive longer-term value through the traffic agreement by allowing Yahoo to continue to generate revenue from the online recruiting space while continuing to provide users with valued online career and recruiting services."

HotJobs has long been on the chopping block at Yahoo, which has sold properties such as Zimbra amid a focus on Yahoo's "core" assets as determined by Bartz: content and technology. But Yahoo might actually be easing back on divestitures such as Zimbra and HotJobs in favor of smaller acquisitions, Bartz said on Yahoo's earnings call last month.

Yahoo and Monster don't expect the deal to close until the third quarter of this year. The content and traffic deals won't begin until the deal is official.

Updated 3:45 p.m. PST with note of the filing made by the Open Book Alliance.

Objections to the Google Books settlement are once again filling the mailbox of Judge Denny Chin, as another deadline in the saga looms.

It's the second go-round for objectors to the settlement, which would allow Google to partially display in-copyright but out-of-print books alongside books authorized by publishers and public domain works in Google Books. Google and the plaintiffs--the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers--came within weeks of getting their settlement approved by the U.S. Federal Court for the Southern District of New York before the Department of Justice intervened. The Justice Department cited a host of concerns it had with the document.

Now that a revised settlement has been reached, those opposed to the settlement in general are once again making their voices heard before today's deadline to submit objections. The Wall Street Journal noted objections were filed by many of Google's familiar opponents, including Amazon and a group of academics led by University of California at Berkeley Professor Pam Samuelson.

The Open Book Alliance, an opposition group led by the Internet Archive that counts Amazon and Microsoft among its members, had not filed a new objection of its own as of Thursday morning but did highlight objections from several other groups, including a new one from authors based in India.

The final hearing on whether or not to approve the settlement will be held in New York on February 18. Authors affected by the settlement have until the end of today to opt out of the settlement and preserve their right to sue Google.

Updated 3:45 p.m. PST: The Open Book Alliance did wind up filing an objection of its own after this story was published. In the filing, the group said the revisions to the settlement were "...paltry proposals offered by the parties for amending the Settlement - truly, a disdainful response to the vast outpouring of global criticism - change little, but clarify much."

Yahoo is making a major tweak to the major home page redesign it rolled out last fall: it's dumping the automatic hover.

CEO Carol Bartz announced the change during the company's fourth-quarter earnings conference call, responding to a question from a financial analyst about how the new home page has helped Yahoo increase traffic. Traffic has gone up, she said, but so has the blood pressure of Yahoo users and advertisers.

One of the signature features of Yahoo's home page redesign from last year was the addition of a "hover," which generated a new window overlaying the Yahoo.com page when visitors rolled their mouse over one of the category links on the left-hand side of the home page, such as Yahoo Mail or Facebook. That window allowed users to see status updates or subject lines of e-mail, and allowed some limited interaction before heading off to the other site.

And now it's gone. "It just so happened there were enough people we were driving crazy and enough advertisers we were driving crazy because we were covering their ads," Bartz said. The hover blocked out two prominent ads on Yahoo's home page underneath the news stories and the trending topics.

Users can still see that overlay that used to be generated by the hover. Rolling a mouse pointer over the links on the left-hand side now prompts the user to "Open Quicklink," requiring a deliberate action to bring up that window.

Home page redesigns for Web companies as massive as Yahoo can be painful for users, as any Facebook designer is probably well aware: you're going to make somebody mad. But this particular feature was one trumpeted by Yahoo at the time it was revealed for allowing advertisers to put targeted ads next to specific applications, like Autos or Finance. Looks like the major brand advertisers on the home page won out, but they also struck a blow for anybody who hates automatic rollover pop-ups.

It's not spring yet, but Justin.tv is cleaning house. On Tuesday the video host is rolling out a new version of its broadcasting tool that makes it easier to get a live video stream going.

According to the company, a simple change has led to a 700 percent increase in the number of people who make it from clicking the "broadcast" button on Justin.tv's front page to actually beginning a live stream. At least that was the metric for a beta test the company ran on 10 percent of new users who were beginning a stream from Justin.tv's front page.

Now, when a user clicks the large, red broadcast button on the front door of Justin.tv, the site takes them to a page that requires just a few settings to get going--many of which can now be skipped. That quick transition means more streams, and a bigger potential to turn first-time Justin.tv users into frequent live streamers.

Another part of the change entails putting everything in one window, whereas before the options were spread out. For publishers, this means no more jumping back to their channel pages to stay on top of user chat, which now sits to the right of the video player. Also, the publishers now get a better view of what they're streaming since it displays the same sized viewer and chat window their viewers will be looking at. Previously the show controller tools looked akin to an airplane cockpit (see the side by side below):

What I think is more interesting than the tweaks to Justin.tv's broadcasting tools is the shift in what its users are broadcasting. A Justin.tv representative told me that one of the biggest changes in the past year has been the growth of people who start live streaming themselves playing video games--be it consoles or on the computer they're streaming from.

For Justin.tv this ends up being a boon, not only for being able to sell the often-lucrative game related ads, but also for its users who can often see a game ahead of its street date release as gamers in "future" time zones can get the title a day early in some cases. More importantly, Justin.tv is filling in the gap left by places like Vimeo, which actually banned video game clips back in 2008, and YouTube, which does not yet offer live streaming with chat.

Justin.tv's revamped broadcasting tool should be out to all users Tuesday morning.

Yfrog, ImageShack's image- and video-hosting site for Twitter, has a new trick up its sleeve. It can now cross-post whatever you've just uploaded over to both MySpace and Facebook.

Users will see the new option to post to one or both of these services if they're uploading directly through Yfrog.com. Once you've given either service authorization, Yfrog will then cross-post whatever you've uploaded, from anywhere--be it a desktop or mobile app.

The system worked well enough in my testing. Though, out of the three social networks, it's the hardest to find your photo back on MySpace, as it shows up as a rather nondescript link wherever your status updates are set to appear. Another small quibble is that if you're uploading from a third-party Yfrog publishing app, it will automatically post the photo to these services--that is, once you've authorized them through Yfrog.com. The only way to make sure an image you're uploading won't show up in these other places is to upload it directly through Yfrog. Hopefully an API update can change that.

Those who are serious about cross-posting something from one social network to another should check out a service like Ping.fm, Updating.me, or Tarpipe. All of these can be set to watch one feed and transmit them elsewhere. This can be a huge help if you don't feel like fiddling with options on each specific network.

Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET

Sharing alert on YFrog