Facebook, Google in a social-networking PR scramble?
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Facebook has scheduled a high-profile advertising announcement for Nov. 6. Google has reportedly changed its social-networking announcement from Nov. 5 to later in the week. Coincidence?
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Google has not had anything big for us since it went public some time ago. Now, it is back with some news that could worry biggies like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
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Hitwise&#8217;s Bill Tancer recently posted about the distribution of Google&#8217;s traffic across its many properties. As you might expect and has been historically true, that distribution is dominated by search.  Right now, Google owns the &#8220;brand&#8221; in search. But Yahoo and Microsoft have more &#8220;diversified&#8221; traffic across multiple properties. Without some more effort and &#8212; dare I [...]
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Facebook.com reveals even more than its online exhibitionists want.
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Signs are pointing to a potentially big announcement out of the company this week, but the notoriously tight-lipped social network isn't providing any answers.
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Gullible time-rich polyglot? Facebook wants you! Facebook is headed for a problem. In the wacky innovation-lite and revenue-poor world of web 2.0, you have to be able to show your investors and the hordes of "I want to believe" journalists some sort of growth.â¦
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Major advertisers are hesitant to use popular social networks to publicize their products, fearing to be associated with some potentially questionable user-generated content.
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Once Google filtered out all of the questionable, offensive and not-safe-for-work search terms, looks like the people Googling on Google were in fact searching for the names of various social and 2.0 offerings: 1. bebo   2. myspace   3. world cup   4. metacafe   5. radioblog   6. wikipedia   7. video   8. [...]
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Social network firms reveal tools and technologies that aim to make the sites more than places to keep in touch.
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Social-networking sites like the big three -- MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn -- act as a sort of shared address book, letting people post profiles, leave notes for one another and find out whom they know in common.
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Three Fools chime in on the social-networking site's valuation.
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Another set-to over social networking is centered on Google this week, as users testing the "share" feature in Google Reader find they're sharing a lot more widely than they might have wished to do. Atlas-like, Google shrugged, but says it may make minor tweaks at some point.
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CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks about changes at Facebook, his super-popular social-networking site. By Aria Pearson from Wired magazine.
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Nearly one-fourth of companies are now using Web 2.0-social networking software in some form.
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I&#8217;m playing the devil&#8217;s advocate here, so keep that in mind in case I end up trampling all over anything you hold dear :) Google has taken a lot of flak on a lot of issues in the past few years - it&#8217;s a price an industry leader invariably has to pay.  Apart from Blogger spam [...]
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Google fourth-quarter financial results indicate that making a fortune on social ads may not be as easy as poking a friend.
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I don't know what Bebo is, I guess it's a social network, they say it's #3 in the USA, #1 in the UK, but they just did something that's pretty likely to work, if it's technically possible. They're cloning Facebook so that their service will run Facebook apps. What this means, if they can pull it off, is that they won't have to fight to get support from developers. That's a big deal. Google could have done this with OpenSocial. Watching the panel assembled by Marc Canter at LeWeb3, I was reminded of every tech conference I've been to for almost 30 years. Some big company sitting in the center, and lots of smaller ones sucking up to them, not daring to say what's obvious, that the big company is only interested in limiting the growth of an upstart (not present on stage of course). That's where the Fear comes in Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. We don't say anything because we're too scared to. Even the outspoken Marc Canter, who's smart and has been around this block many times, doesn't dare say what's obvious.  Now Bebo decides to get in lockstep with Facebook, not Google. Of course! Facebook has the juice. But this is a dangerous place to be if Facebook doesn't want them there, and being a big company, they probably don't. The only value of having clones to FB is that it negates the threat from Google. Sometimes having clones is a good thing, but usually the clones take over the market. Witness MSIE and Netscape, and then Firefox. Compaq et al and IBM. dBASE and Fox. It's possible to depose an installed leader if it's possible to clone them. As a user and developer, I'd like to see FB be open to cloning. If I were a FB shareholder I'm not so sure. One constituency that's sure to like the existence of clones are Facebook developers. Without choice in platform vendors, they have nowhere to go when the sole vendor decides to take over their market. With a viable alternative, unless FB is incredibly aggressive and builds its competitive features so they can run on competitive platforms, at least developers will have a place to run their apps when FB encroaches. Platforms are a game, like Risk, with rules and strategies. Google did not play the game wisely with OpenSocial. I chalk this up to inexperience on the part of the strategists. So far Facebook has been doing what's needed to keep its dominant position. Bebo deciding to clone the Facebook API ratifies that position, it's a gutsy move, but the best one available to them, and to other would-be Facebook competitors. PS: The news is slow to reach Europe. Facebook said yesterday that they support what Bebo is doing. Very enthusiastically. That should be the end of OpenSocial.