Webware

Web site publishers using Google Friend Connect can now allow users to connect through profiles, and serve them targeted ads based on those profiles.

(Credit: Google)

Google Friend Connect is adding a few features that make it easier for Web site publishers to build their own social networks.

Visitors to Web sites that use Google Friend Connect will soon have the option of filling out a profile on that site that can connect them to like-minded individuals who frequent those sites. They can then search for other profiles on that site with matching tags, introduce themselves to those users through the site without having to post an e-mail address, and see content on the site tailored to their interests, said Mussie Shore, product manager for Google Friend Connect.

The whole idea behind the Google Friend Connect tool "is to make it easy for site owners to add social features to their site without having coding capabilities," Shore said. Google offers several services for Web publishers like this one, such as Google Web Elements.

The new features expand on ones unveiled last year. Site owners using the service will also be able to create and target newsletters based on the new profile information, and gather data about their interests as to make decisions about site content.

And, of course, it all comes back to the ads. Google Friend Connect publishers can now serve extremely targeted AdSense ads to individual visitors based on the preferences they declare on their profile page.

Hyper-local publishing company Examiner.com is set to launch its service in five Canadian cities.

According to the organization, Examiner will now provide localized content to those living in Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver. The company will also offer national content for all those not living in the five cities.

Examiner is growing up quickly since its launch in April 2008. Examiner now provides localized content in 162 U.S. cities, according to a company spokesperson. It plans to add 40 more markets in the coming months. With the expansion to Canada now under way, the spokesperson told me in a phone conversation on Wednesday that the company plans to bring its service to the U.K. and Australia by the first quarter of 2010.

Examiner's foray into the Canadian market follows its strategy in the U.S. market, the spokesperson said. When it launched in the U.S., only five cities were covered. Today, local "examiners" are posting more than 15,000 stories per week.

Examiner is currently looking for Canadians who are "passionate about their interests and areas of expertise" to join one of the markets' local sites. When Examiner chooses a writer, they provide training on how to write articles. All writers are paid based on performance and other metrics.

Yahoo continues to pull out all the stops in hopes of convincing investors and advertisers that even though it's a massive media and technology company today, it has a plan for the future.

"Today is the beginning of a journey back to respect," said Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz in a meeting with financial analysts at Yahoo's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. "Yahoo was the big shining star in the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, and then somehow we weren't so shiny anymore."

The all-day meeting, which is being Webcast, is designed to reconnect Yahoo with the financial community, something Bartz hinted earlier this year was long overdue in comments she made in New York. Ever since former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang turned down a $33 per share offer from Microsoft in 2008, Yahoo's stock has languished at about half that value, and with the economy taking a turn for the worse, even a tepid recovery has been seen as welcome news.

Bartz brought a team of Yahoo leaders up on stage to show off what they've been doing to take better advantage of Yahoo's enormous reach across the Internet. For example, Tapan Bhat, senior vice president for integrated consumer experience, talked about how Yahoo's redesigned home page has increased the amount of time spent on that page by 20 percent, and click-through has likewise improved on both ads and content on that page.

Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president for applications, pledged to improve spam filters and duplicate the Yahoo Mail experience on mobile phones. And Jimmy Pitaro, vice president of media, ran through all of the plans his group has to increase the number of people who come to Yahoo for news and entertainment.

Clearly, Yahoo already operates on a grand scale. "We are a broad-based Internet technology company that serves up the most interesting content on the Internet to 600 million people," Bartz said.

But advertisers "are looking for a safe neighborhood," Bartz said. She meant that in order to get high-quality advertisers to spend lots of money with Yahoo, they have to give them high-quality content that they can feel confident about putting their message beside. Perhaps Bartz could throw that lesson in for free as part of the search deal with Microsoft.

Throughout the revival story Yahoo has tried so hard to push this year, there's a sense that the company is a little defensive about being seen as a place where innovation no longer happens. Bartz admitted that "we had kind of lost your respect" over the past few years. "We are a 14-year-old Internet company that somehow got boring."

Analyst days are not exactly the most exciting events produced by public companies. But it's all part of Yahoo's attempt to re-insert itself in the conversation about the future of the Internet, and investors will need to be on board for the company to make any real progress: not to mention that employee retention could get easier if the stock starts to climb.

Corrected 3:35 p.m. PDT with the correct spelling of Bryan Lamkin's name.

It's official: GeoCities, once one of the most trafficked sites on the Web, has officially seen its last day. It's a sad time for many of us who cut our Web teeth on GeoCities.

GeoCities might have featured millions of sites that were ugly and poorly designed, but the site let us get on the Web for free. It was simple. And it brought value to millions of folks around the globe.

That's why I wanted to take a quick moment to send off GeoCities in, what I hope, is the right way. Let's use this space as a place to share our favorite memories of using GeoCities. Whether it's browsing its many sites or creating a site of our own, I think it might be neat to share at least one experience we had using the old site.

So, allow me to get that discussion started.

Back in the late 1990s (the exact year escapes me), I came across GeoCities. It seemed so revolutionary for its time. I didn't have the Web expertise to develop a site of my own, so I relied on GeoCities to do the job for me.

My site was ugly. There's no doubt about it. But for the time, it wasn't too bad.

I used my little corner of the Web to review video games. At that point in my life, video games meant (almost) everything to me. Every spare moment I had was used up by the digital characters I controlled on the screen in front of me.

Perhaps that's why the idea behind my GeoCities site made so much sense to me at the time: to offer reviews like those I had read in the many video game magazines I subscribed to. I had a scoring system, gave my take on everything from controls to gameplay, and ended each review with a "bottom line." It was fun.

But in the end, I slowly drifted away from my Geocities site. Ironically, I never thought a career in writing was for me. I moved on with my life. And, much like GeoCities, my small part of the Web was left to live out its final days alone, without much interaction.

Even so, that small site was my first foray into the online world. And although I would have liked to spend more time refining my GameSpot-wannabe, I have no regrets. It was fun while it lasted.

Now it's your turn. Tell us your own GeoCities stories or experiences in the comments below.

Imageshack's Yfrog, the image- and video-hosting service for Twitter, can now record videos from a user's Webcam. The recording tool also doubles as a way to take photo stills, either manually or with a five-second delay. These images are then attached to an outgoing tweet which can be penned right from the site.

The move differs from some recently released services like Twitcam and Camtweet which can record video as well as stream it out live for your followers to watch and interact with. On the plus side, Yfrog's implementation has very generous time limits, as my test video went well past the 40-minute mark.

For now, Webcam recording will remain a site-specific feature, and not a part of Yfrog's API, meaning third-party posting tools cannot take advantage of it. However a representative for the company told CNET News that that could change if developers are interested in integrating it into Flash-based video widgets. In the meantime, many developers have already integrated video into their apps using Yfrog's existing video uploading API.

Want to record a video of yourself to put on Twitter? You can now do that through Yfrog.

(Credit: CNET)

Google has added new personalization features to Reader, its RSS feed aggregator, the company wrote in a blog post Thursday.

One new feature is dubbed Popular Items. Using algorithms, Reader will "find top-rising images, videos and pages from anywhere (not just your subscriptions)." From there, the app will lump all those pieces in the new Popular Items section. Based on a user's subscriptions and what someone is reading, Reader orders those stories by what it thinks a person likes best.

Reader's recommendations have been moved to the app's Explore section. Google also renamed it Recommended Sources. Like before, that feature will employ the user's Reader Trends and Web History to find a list of feeds he or she might like.

To make it easier for users to find the information they're most likely to care about, all Reader feeds now feature a sort option called Magic. According to Google, Magic "reorders items in the feed based on your personal usage, and overall activity in Reader, instead of default chronological order." Google said that the ranking is tailored to the user. The more the user clicks the "like" and "share" buttons on stories, the better the Magic sort will be.

Here is the Magic setting in action:

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Amazon already has a free Kindle iPhone app. And soon it will have a free Kindle app for Windows PCs.

While the new app won't be available for download until next month, Microsoft demonstrated it at the Windows 7 launch event in New York City on Thursday. Like the iPhone app, Kindle for PC turns your PC into another reading device that can be linked to a Kindle account (you don't have to own a Kindle to set up a Kindle account). You can then choose to send Kindle e-books and periodicals to your PC via a wired or wireless network connection. Also, you can read an e-book on your PC while at home (or elsewhere), then send that same e-book to your iPhone or Kindle and pick up reading where you left off.

"Customers have told us that they want access to a wider variety of content and an increasingly diverse set of form factors," said Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows Platform Strategy at Microsoft. "With the announcement of Kindle for PC, Amazon is making its massive selection of Kindle books available on the world's most widely used platform."

Both Amazon and Microsoft are quick to note that Kindle for PC takes advantage of capabilities in the new Windows 7 OS, including Windows Touch technology. Also, the app isn't compatible with Windows 7 machines only, but will also work with Windows XP and Windows Vista computers.

Here's a list of features:

• Purchase, download, and read hundreds of thousands of books available in the Kindle Store
• Access your entire library of previously purchased Kindle books stored on Amazon's servers for free
• Choose from over 10 different font sizes and adjust words per line
• View notes and highlights marked on Kindle and Kindle DX
• Zoom in and out of text with a pinch of the fingers (Windows 7 users only)
• Turn pages with a finger swipe (available in a future release for Windows 7 users)

And what about a Kindle app for Macs? Well, Drew Herdener, Amazon.com's Director of Communications, tells us, "We will be coming out with Kindle for Mac in the next few months." Herdener also confirms that Kindle for Blackberry will debut soon.

To receive an e-mail when Kindle for PC is available for download, sign-up at amazon.com/KindleforPC.

Comments?

Google announced on Tuesday that its Google Analytics Web site-tracking tool has been improved with a slew of new features for enterprise-class users.

To start things off, Google announced that it has added the option for users to measure user engagement and branding success. The company said users will be able to "to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit."

With the help of a new feature called Advanced Table Filtering, Analytics users will now be able to filter content more effectively and view that content in a table. According to Google, users can "filter thousands of keywords" to find, for example, "just the keywords with a bounce rate less than 30 percent and that referred at least 25 visits."

Going mobile
Google is also looking towards mobile phones. Analytics will track traffic to the user's mobile Web site. According to Google, whether or not the device visitors use to access the mobile site has JavaScript running won't matter, which means most mobile phones will be supported. That said, users who want to track mobile traffic will need to add "a server-side code snippet" to their mobile site. Google said the code will be made available in the coming weeks.

Continuing on its mobile focus, "iPhone and Android mobile-application developers can now also track how users engage with apps, just as with tracking engagement on a Web site," Google said.

For those users who want more capable usage data than simple page views and unique visitors, Google has added a Multiple Custom Variables option. Users can now "define and track visitors according to visitor attributes, session attributes, and by page-level attributes. This feature isn't currently available to Analytics users. It will be making its way to all user accounts "in the coming weeks," Google said.

Intelligence, anyone?
Perhaps the most interesting announcement coming from Google is the company's contention that Analytics can now "tell you what to pay attention to."

Dubbed Analytics Intelligence, Google's new tool will analyze traffic data and alert users when there is a "significant" change in data patterns. Although the company didn't define "significant," it did say that if it sees a "300 percent surge in visits from YouTube referrals" or "bounce rates of visitors from Virginia dropped by 70 percent two weeks ago," users would be alerted.

Since so-called "intelligent" tracking can get a little annoying at times, Google has also implemented a Custom Alerts feature, allowing users to tell the service what to watch for. According to Google, users can set "daily, weekly, and monthly triggers on different dimensions & metrics, and be notified by e-mail or right in the user interface when the changes actually occur." Like many of the other features Google announced, Analytics Intelligence will make its way to Analytics accounts in the coming weeks.

If you're interested in learning more or seeing some of these features in action, click here.

Hewlett-Packard is announcing two projects Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit that it hopes will give new life to print--books and magazines in particular.

BookPrep and MagCloud let content that's been too expensive or difficult to print reach readers more easily.

Andrew Bolwell, director of new business initiatives at HP, told me these products are based on an understanding that the publishing industry is undergoing a fundamental shift--which he sees as the move away from printing items ahead of time, distributing them to locations in the hopes that people will buy them, and then disposing of the products that are unsold--into the more contemporary model of printing on demand. Each year in the U.S., 2 billion magazines, or 62 percent of all those printed, end up unsold and in landfills, Bolwell said.

Books are printed in advance in the same way, for the most part, and unsold copies are likewise destroyed. Furthermore, most of the books ever printed are unavailable to buy: Bolwell said only 4 percent of the 90 million books ever printed are available to purchase.

BookPrep

HP is set to rescue old books, making them fit to print again.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

HP's BookPrep is built to address that. The service takes in scans of book pages, cleans them up automatically, and preps them for sale as print-on-demand paperback editions.

The service, which has been in testing for about a year at a university library, is getting some high-profile partners and a business model. The service now gets scanned books from Google and from the Internet Archive, and sells its books on Amazon.com.

The books are printed by various on-demand book printing houses. The covers are done on HP Indigo printers, but the book pages themselves are created on who-knows-what printer. Bolwell doesn't care, as the revenue comes from the sale of the books via Amazon royalties. HP said it will share a portion of its revenue with the source of each book's scan--in most cases, a library.

Unlike the Archive's more disruptive Book Server project, which is about making current books available online, BookPrep is about older, public-domain books. And the BookPrep service does not index the actual text in books--it leaves that to Google, Amazon, and the Internet Archive. All BookPrep does is take crufty scans of old books and make them presentable enough for print. It also can create nice covers for print editions.

So if you want a print edition of the 1887 White House Cook Book, this is how a surviving, aging copy of the book can appear new again.

MagCloud

The company also has a way for today's magazine publishers to print for less.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The MagCloud business addresses magazine printing. It's a custom magazine printing site, like Lulu but for glossy magazines, that's been live since February. The service lets people create their own print publication and customize single copies for users based on location or other factors. When a reader buys an issue, MagCloud prints a copy at a printer as close to the person's location as possible to save shipping costs and time.

The new addition to the product is a link into Wikia community sites. Users can now print "magazines" of Wikia pages, and the service will format them so they look nice. It reminds me of Offbeat Guides to an extent.

MagCloud isn't a complete magazine publishing system in the sense that it helps people create periodical publications. It doesn't do subscription management nor does it automate print advertising. But it does look like a nice way to get a fancy-looking color magazine-like publication created and distributed easily.

MagCloud publications are printed on HP's Indigo printers.

Taping up old pages

Bolwell has a modern yet conflicted appreciation for print, which is not surprising for someone who works at a one of the largest printer manufacturers. He believes that people will continue to love and want printed products and that, "especially for rich four-color content, the experience of the printed page is the preferred way of reading content." However, he also believes that the process for creating a printed product must change: "It's only a matter of time until the entire (magazine) industry moves to print on demand," he adds.

Both BookPrep and MagCloud seem to be Band-Aids for likely terminal patients. The demand for printed books and magazines won't vanish tomorrow. Nor will the demand for newspapers evaporate suddenly, though that's an industry even Bolwell doesn't think printing technology should try to fix.

The question is to what level the book and magazine printing industries, even streamlined, will decline, and how fast they will get there. I hope Bolwell has exit plans for this business, and I don't mean selling it to Google.