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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Maybe it was because Google preaching to the social-networking choir, or maybe it was the toasty campfires and hot cocoa, but demonstrations of Google's new Friend Connect service seemed generally well received Monday night.

Google executives showed off the technology, a Google-hosted application that designed to let Web site coders easily add social features to their sites, at the company's third Campfire One event at the company's headquarters here. Previous debuts at the events were of two other significant developer-oriented software technologies, OpenSocial and App Engine.

Program manager Mussie Shore gave the central demonstration … Read more

Google's third Campfire One event Monday night featured the debut of Friend Connect. David Glazer, Google director of engineering, has described Friend Connect as a "salt shaker full of social to sprinkle social features on a site in a matter of hours."

At this juncture, the salt is in short supply, but Google plans to make it broadly available to developers over the next few months. More on Friend Connect here.

Web masters and developers can sign up to get on the Friend Connect waiting list here.

Check out the Google video on Friend Connect below.

See … Read more

Google updated the iPhone version of its Reader product Monday. For the first time, mobile users will be able to star items for later and browse through items in a large list similar to the desktop version of the Web app. To view stories, users simply need to click on the headlines and the story will expand. In previous iterations, clicking a headline would take you to a new page, requiring users to click back before expanding another story.

One thing you can't do is expand several stories at once, meaning mobile users will need to have access to … Read more

Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability, OpenID, DataPortability: Managing a bunch of different log-ins and passwords suddenly seems easy and straightforward.

Within a matter of days, some of the biggest names on the Web announced new projects that all have a roughly similar aim of making it possible for Web users to have a single social-media identity across the Internet--"data portability," as the general term has come to be known. MySpace.com was first out of the gate with the announcement of Data Availability, a way for members of the News Corp.-owned social network … Read more

Users of Microsoft's instant-messaging service found themselves unable to share links to YouTube videos on Friday evening and Saturday morning, sparking brief worries of a possible Microsoft-led effort to block access to the Google-owned video-sharing site.

Microsoft said in a blog posting Sunday that the issue was a mistake made by the third party that handles blocking of potentially unsafe content for MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.

"As some of you noticed, we had a problem from Friday night to Saturday morning where our Messenger service was incorrectly blocking some legitimate IP addresses," a Microsoft employee … Read more

Google just concluded a press conference call regarding its new social widget strategy, Google Friend Connect (see "Google brings Friend Connect to the masses"). I was on the call and live-blogged it. See the live blog in the window below.

Caroline McCarthy is working on a follow-up post looking at where Friend Connect fits in an increasingly crowded market of social aggregation plays.

See also:

People in the United States watched about 11.5 billion videos online in March, and Google extended its dominance in the area, according to new figures released Monday.

Google's sites served up 38 percent of the total videos watched, and YouTube accounted for 98 percent of Google's tally, ComScore said. Google gained 2.6 percentage points of market share since February.

Rivals are far, far behind: Fox Interactive Media, with 4.2 percent share; Yahoo with 2.9 percent, Viacom with 2.2 percent; and Microsoft with 2.1 percent.

Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock in 2006. … Read more

Solid-state disks, which use flash memory instead of spinning magnetic platters to store data, may have just won an endorsement from a demanding, high-prestige customer: Google.

According to a Monday report in DigiTimes, Google is using Intel SSD technology combined with Marvell controller chips in servers at the company's headquarters. The technology is due to ship late this quarter, the report said.

SSDs offer energy consumption and performance advantages over conventional drives, but they can't match the earlier technology on capacity so far. Google, with thousands of servers, is very sensitive to all those issues.

Given the increasing … Read more

Google has released basic software called Vidnik that lets Mac OS X users record video with a Webcam or built-in camera, trim its length, add tags and a title, then upload it to YouTube.

The software also can be used to upload other videos to the company's video-sharing site, and other editing software can be used on the videos taken by Vidnik, David Phillip Oster of Google's Mac team said in a blog posting.

The software is among a host of Mac applications the company has produced. (Another interesting one is Visigami, which lets people search for images … Read more