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Random Sampler: Being like Google, JBoss worth the wait, and more

So many good stories, so little time....Here are a few of the best posts today:

You might not be able to get Google-like profits, but at least you can treat your employees more like how Google treats its own employees. There's a good lesson in there.... Most of the music on the iPods of UK youth has been pilfered. Surprising? No. There are two interesting factoids in the data, however: "80% of those who admit to illegally file-sharing are prepared to engage with a legal file-sharing service, and place a considerable monetary value on it"; and The older people get, the more they pay for music. 55 percent of youth aged 14 to 17 illegally download music, jumping to 60 percent when they're aged 18 to 24, but dropping down to 39 percent when aged 25 and above. Does this mean that "old fogey" music is more likely to be monetized than Britney Spears?… Read more

Google's Joe Kraus explains the social Web

Joe Kraus, Google director of product management, gave a brief talk about the social Web at the Supernova 2008 conference without a single mention of Google's own social-networking service, Orkut. However, he did focus on Google's Friend Connect service, which lets Web developers add social features to their sites. Webware chief Rafe Needleman did a thorough job of covering Kraus' remarks, and below is a video of his presentation.

Google's view: Three trends in social networking

SAN FRANCISCO-- "Social is the new black," Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management, said at a talk on the company's social-computing efforts at the Supernova conference here.

Kraus' view, which can be fairly said to represent Google's, is that these are the three big trends in the social Web:

Discovery is becoming social This was the most telling tidbit from Kraus' talk. He noted that searching on Google is good, but having your friends help you find what you're looking for is better. He gave an example of how social discovery can work--putting … Read more

Google Docs gets limited PDF support

Google Docs, the online office suite from the search giant, now has some limited but still useful support for PDF files.

People using the service now can upload and view documents encoded with the widely used and now standardized Portable Document Format initially created by Adobe Systems. People also can transfer PDFs stored on the Web. (Look below for a screenshot showing the two-pane PDF view.)

The move, announced on the Google Docs blog Friday, isn't much of a surprise. In addition to the fact that it makes eminent sense, close observers already had begun seeing signs that hinted … Read more

Why senior management should have their own Glassdoor.com

We've already got salary.com, jobvent.com and even, yes, rateyouremployeramerica.com.

Sites where America's downtrodden and downhearted employees voice their opinions about their bosses.

On the the latest, Glassdoor.com, a creation of three former Expedia executives, the CEOs of Cisco and Google do very well and the CEOs of Microsoft and Yahoo, shockingly, do not do so well.

But why no overpaid.com? Or uselessemployee.com? Or even a worstemployeeinamerica.com?

I can see the Valley's finest (and not so finest) working on it now.

The online superhighway seems to be a one-way street. A … Read more

Google prepping broadband-monitoring tools

When it comes to your broadband connection, Google wants you to know that it has your back.

The Internet giant is developing a suite of tools to help broadband users identify traffic discrimination by their Internet service providers, according to a report in The Register.

"We're trying to develop tools, software tools...that allow people to detect what's happening with their broadband connections, so they can let (ISPs) know that they're not happy with what they're getting--that they think certain services are being tampered with," Google Senior Policy Director Richard Whitt said Friday morning … Read more

The Yahoo + Google - Microsoft spin room

With the Microsoft/Yahoo/Google triangle taking a new shape as Microsoft exited and Yahoo and Google connected, the analysts covering tech industry sports are weighing in with their opinions.

Some Wall Street analysts believe Microsoft will take another run at Yahoo if the company can't get back on track or Carl Icahn wins his proxy fight to control the Yahoo board. That may be wishful thinking. Kara Swisher reports that Microsoft is done with its courtship of Yahoo and nothing will bring them back to the negotiating table.

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch called the Yahoo-Google deal a massive destruction of shareholder value, … Read more

Circling the wagons against Nick Carr

What is it about Nick Carr, a very bright guy, that inspires the not-so-bright guys to bring out the knives? Criticism of his recent Atlantic piece has ranged from the predictably ungenerous to the downright bitchy.

So it goes. The chattering class always gets irritated when convention gets challenged. After Carr published his thoughtful Harvard Business Review article in 2003, "Why IT Doesn't Matter," many technology leaders and trade press opinion makers reacted harshly.

They so caricatured Carr's nuanced thesis that they entirely missed his bigger point about IT's declining importance as a competitive asset. … Read more

Google-Yahoo deal good news for IM, but...

Instant-messaging power users, rejoice: a barrier between two previously isolated realms of online chat is coming down.

A minor sidelight in the Yahoo-Google search ad deal announced Thursday is that the two companies "agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant-messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users," the companies said. They're not sharing further details at this stage, but it's safe to bet that means people on Yahoo's IM network will be able to chat with those on Google's and vice-versa.

That's a big step in the right direction.

IM is … Read more