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Yahoo and the Associated Press have announced that they have inked a deal to keep the AP’s content appearing on Yahoo’s properties. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

We’ve known for a while that the non-profit Associated Press has been suffering due to the recession and rapidly falling newspaper revenues. It has accused web companies such as YouTube and Facebook of exploiting the AP’s content.

With this deal, the AP will likely get a revenue boost to help bolster its finances. In return, Yahoo will get the continued stream of AP stories and content that has helped it grow into one of the world’s largest websites. As a top destination for news, Yahoo definitely wanted to get this done.

Where does this leave Google, whose Google News hasn’t hosted any AP content since December? In a statement received by both Mashable and Search Engine Land the company said:

“We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. Right now we are not adding new hosted content from the AP. The licensing agreement is the subject of ongoing discussion so we won’t be commenting further at this time.”

While Search Engine Land translates this to mean that the AP and Google have signed a new deal, that is far from clear. It seems just as likely that Google and the AP are still hammering out the details and will announce a deal in the near future. While Google has less to gain from the AP’s content, it’s still a valuable source of pageviews and ad revenue.

[via Associated Press]

Tags: ap, content, Google, google news, newspaper, Yahoo

In the wake of Google’s threat to forgo the China market, the question we ought to ask is: Should Google go home?

In the flurry of Internet commentary, hopeful stock analysts have focused on language in the company’s announcement regarding pending discussions with the government about operating an unfiltered search engine inside China. At worst this reflects naivete regarding the Party’s determination to control the internet. At best this is sop to Wall Street – a feeble attempt to demonstrate that management tried to maximize shareholder value. Don’t be misled – Beijing will no more negotiate with an American Internet company about free speech than Tel Aviv would negotiate with hostage takers about ransom. Google is most likely going home.

Other commentators have tripped over the issue of cyber attacks – the suggestion by Google that their decision to abandon the booming China market was motivated by hackers trying to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Recall, however, that Google does not maintain on Chinese soil any services that involve personal or confidential information. In other words, the Gmail servers are not located inside China and pulling out of the country will have zero impact on future cyber attacks. More bluntly – the hacker story, while certainly true, is a public relations cover.

Still other pundits fall into the tempting cynical trap. Google, they say, would bring in a mere one percent of its 2010 profits from China, and thus the apparent principled stance is really a commercial retreat from a market dominated by domestic rival Baidu. But Google’s search market share has climbed from 13 percent in 2006 to 36 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009. Given the number of Internet users in China, the remaining vast expansion potential and a distinguished list of foreign failures that includes Yahoo! and eBay, Google’s adventure in the Middle Kingdom is not a commercial defeat.

That leads us back to our initial question: Should Google go home?

To find an answer we must first establish an objective. Google’s goal, as stated during Congressional hearings in February 2006 regarding the collaboration of American technology companies with China’s efforts to control the Internet, is to make the world’s information accessible to everyone, everywhere, all the time. During those same hearings, representatives of Google argued that it could provide more access to more information for more Chinese citizens more reliably by offering a censored search service inside China than by staying away.

What has changed since those Congressional hearings? Not a thing, except Google’s mind.

The core question, however, remains: Was Google right four years ago when it decided to provide censored search inside China, or is it right now in deciding to go home?

The next step toward an answer is to ask what will happen when Google is gone. The competition in China is Baidu, which commands a 58 percent share of the search market. If we assume that Baidu will grab at least that much of Google’s current market share, it would enjoy a 79 percent slice of China’s search market pie. What might this domestic Chinese company do with that kind of market muscle?

Although Baidu’s corporate mantra isn’t “be evil,” their policy with respect to paid search contrasts rather sharply with our friends from Mountain View. Google decided long ago that their search results would be as good as they could make them, unbiased and objective, clearly labeling paid search results as advertising. Baidu, on the other hand, offers paid search results, as alluded to in its most recent annual report. The vast majority of Baidu’s revenues come from their pay for placement service that literally auctions off to the highest bidder priority placement of links in key word search results.

An example might help to drive home the point. Let’s take the Chinese word for beer – the first local term learned by many expatriates in the Middle Kingdom. On Google China the top five results include news articles, a Baidu encyclopedia entry, general pages that list many beer companies and Google maps with the location for bars and restaurants. Baidu? The right side results, which look like advertisements, provide company names, a tagline and a link. The left side, which look like pure search results, have four beer companies and the Baidu encyclopedia entry.

With or without Google, search inside the Great Firewall will be the world according to Chinese law. Without Google, search also becomes the world according to Baidu.

During China’s tainted milk scandal that followed the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it was alleged that Sanlu, the Chinese company that put more melamine industrial chemical into their infant formula than any other, attempted to pay Baidu three million renminbi (US$440,000) to censor out negative search results. Baidu denied the allegation.

Eight months later, however, an Internet post suggested that the wealthy family of a hit and run driver who killed a university student in Hangzhou also attempted to pay Baidu to filter out the bad news. The vast majority of people commenting on the post believed that Baidu took the money. Although the cynics were apparently wrong this time, the risk of Baidu auctioning off not only priority placement services, but also censorship services, is more than a theoretical possibility.

And so we return to our original question: Should Google go home? On behalf of the company’s shareholders and its China-based users, I say bye bye Google – we are sad to see you go.

Nathan Green is the pen name for a long time China hand and author of The Great Firewall, a forthcoming novel on China’s internet adventure.

For many traditional IT companies, the lure of energy efficiency efforts is two-fold: data center costs are becoming dominated by power use, so greater efficiency will both save them money and provide them with products and services that they can sell to other companies. These efforts also fall nicely in line with the goals of the Department of Energy, which is now using some of its stimulus money to fund data center efficiency projects from companies like Alcatel-Lucent, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Yahoo. Meanwhile, Google has decided it needs greater control over the power coming in, and will be launching its own utility, which will focus on supplying it with renewable energy.

The new DOE grants were announced on Wednesday. “By reducing energy use and energy costs for the IT and telecommunications industries, this funding will help create jobs and ensure the sector remains competitive,” stated DOE head Steven Chu.  “The expected growth of these industries means that new technologies adopted today will yield benefits for many years to come.” The total funding was relatively small, at $47 million, but (like many DOE-funded efforts), it will require matching money from the industry involved, which will bring the total expenditures up to over $100 million.

In 2009 the web as we knew it changed dramatically. Twitter graduated to become a media darling and a mainstream communication staple. Facebook became the most significant social network of this day and age. And Google changed the way we search.

When historians look back on 2009, they’ll be forced to acknowledge Google’s role in shaping the future of how we search, how we browse, how we communicate, how enterprises store information, and how the population at large has adapted to a web-rich mobile environment centered around applications.

Here’s a look back at Google’s big releases, major accomplishments, and a few faux pas in 2009.

Google in 2009: The Timeline

The Evolution of Search

Google started the year with 63.5% market share in the search space (source: comScore January 2009 data), with a commanding lead over its closest competitors Yahoo (20.5%) and Microsoft (8.3%). Facing competition from Microsoft’s overly-promoted new search entity, Bing, and the recently finalized acquisition of Yahoo! Search, Google spent 2009 modifying and enhancing the search experience like never before.

We first saw slight tweaks made to the search experience in March, with support for longer queries and related searches getting a semantic makeover. Then in April, Google search became more intelligent in relation to local search results, using your IP address to display multiple results to simple queries like “food” on a map. Of course, the bigger play here is to highlight local businesses, as Google would later make a not-so-subtle move to replicate Yelp with Place Pages and encourage vendors to display decals with QR codes.

Google also made efforts to improve search filtering options with the addition of time-based search options. They also experimented with the look of their iconic homepage, extending the search box, testing a permanent search sidebar, and switching to a fade-in homepage.

The social possibilities of search results became apparent when Google Profiles were added to search results for people queries. While insignificant when compared against the future release of Google Social Search, this was a carefully crafted maneuver to encourage Googlers to complete their profiles for more search relevance. Identity in search came full circle when the Google Labs experiment, Social Search, added relevant results based on content shared by friends associated with the social networks in your Google Profile.

Google Music Search made its debut late in October and offered up yet another new addition to the search experience: streaming audio previews for artist, album, song, and lyric searches powered by MySpace and Lala. The deal has major implications and could disrupt iTunes digital music market share, position Google as this generation’s billboard, and even make MySpace relevant again.

Of course, the search experience has forever been altered with the addition of real-time search. The initial announcement was made immediately after Bing touted their Twitter integration in October, but the rollout didn’t arrive until early December. We were all blown away by the fact that search results automatically update with fresh content from Twitter, Facebook Pages, MySpace, Yahoo! Answers and news articles in a real-time box on standard search results pages.

Though Google only made marginal gains in the search sector this year, finishing November with 65.6% share to Yahoo’s 17.5% and Microsoft’s 10.3, what’s important is that they continue to have a commanding lead and are clearly focused on improving the search experience into 2010, especially as it pertains to speed.

The Maturation of Gmail

After five years bearing the “Beta” tag, Gmail has finally shed its adolescent label. The move, though mostly symbolic, was accompanied by big improvements to the web-based e-mail service throughout the year. New additions worthy of mention include send and archive, offline support, undo, Google translate, and duplicate contact merging.

Unfortunately removing the Beta tag did not guarantee up-time, as Gmail suffered several debilitating outages over the course of the year, casting doubt on the notion that cloud-based apps have become more reliable.

Going Google for Business

Google spent much of 2009 attempting to attract enterprise customers for the Google Apps suite of products. The company even went so far as to place billboards in New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco, targeting IT professionals and encouraging them to make the switch.

The campaign ultimately proved successful with two notable new customers: the City of Los Angeles and the US Government. The LA deal was announced in October, completed in December, and included a $7.2 million price tag. As for the US Government, they officially started pushing agencies to switch to Google Apps in September, with the White House launching Apps.gov to serve as a directory of cloud-based IT services.

Google Goes on a Spending Spree

To say that Google whipped out their credit card this year is quite the understatement. The search giant focused on acquisitions and investments to not only enhance their bread-and-butter search offering but to also solidify themselves as leaders in other territories.

The spending spree didn’t start until August of 2009, but once Google purchased On2 Technologies, a video compression company, for $106.5 million, they just kept on spending. The following month they acquired reCAPTCHA to apply the technology to improve Google Books. That purchase was followed by the yet-to-be-finalized AdMob acquisition for $750 million. The mobile ad network represents a huge opportunity for Google in the mobile advertising arena, but the deal is facing scrutiny from the FTC and consumer advocate groups who see the deal as anti-competitive in nature.

Most recently we’ve seen Google snatch up Teracent and AppJet. The later was primarily a talent acquisition, with plans to transition the engineers of EtherPad, a collaborative word processor, to Google’s Wave product development team. The former was motivated by Teracent’s impressive technology around targeted display advertising. Teracent can optimize ads in real-time to match a visitor’s location, language, and even adapt to the content on a website.

Despite rumors to the contrary, Google did not acquire Twitter this year. The two companies have developed a synergy around real-time search, with Bloomberg speculating that that the Twitter deal cost Google $15 million.

Chrome Blossoms

September was the one year anniversary of Google’s Chrome browser. Introduced in 2008, the browser began with a big name but lackluster feature set. All that changed in 2009, as incremental updates helped make Chrome competitive with Firefox and Safari.

Chrome version 3 introduced support for HTML5, promised a much faster experience, themes, and an enhanced Chrome Tab page. In December, Mac and Linux users were finally gifted with their own version of Chrome, though the newly released Chrome Extensions Beta is still Windows-only.

Perhaps even more significant than the improvements to Chrome, the browser, was the announcement that Google had also turned Chrome into an operating system.

Google Chrome OS is based off of the browser, open source, and slated to run on netbooks in 2010. In November, we were able to get up close and personal — thanks to new photos and video provided by Google — with Chrome, the 100% web-based operating system. We also learned that the browser is the OS, security is a priority, all apps are web apps, Chrome only works on netbooks, and it boots in seconds.

Mobile Maneuvers

Android skyrocketed to mobile operating system fame this year, with dozens of devices toting Google on the inside in the hopes of competing with Apple’s iPhone. While the OS currently only accounts for 3.5% of the whole market, it’s fast gaining ground and becoming a recognizable platform among consumers.

The king of all Android phones was none other than the heavily advertised — and TIME’s gadget of the year — Motorola Droid. And while sales have been impressive, rumors of Google’s own phone, the Nexus One, surfaced just a few weeks later.

The HTC device most certainly exists, and reports assert it will be sold by Google, with support from T-Mobile, as soon as January 5th. A real Google phone is bound to resonate with consumers, but the device could also splinter the Android market, creating angst between Google and manufactures and carriers selling Android-powered devices.

Wave Goodbye to 2009, Hello to the Future

A post on Google in 2009 would not be complete without paying proper attention to Google’s newest game-changing product: Google Wave. The May announcement brought instant fanfare from the entire blogosphere, creating an immediate demand for a product that only a small group of individuals had ever seen. As the September rollout date fast-approached, hype and anticipation hit an all time high. But as more and more individuals started receiving their invitations (that number is now upwards of one million), anticipation was met with confusion.

While we’ve already seen the platform used for spectacular and inspiring real-time collaboration purposes, the average person still struggles with how best to leverage the new communication medium. Of course it didn’t help that Wave was — and still is — every bit a preview version not ready for prime time. Some initial flaws, like the absence of undo, have since been corrected, but as it stands, Google Wave is a product with potential that is only being realized by a small minority.

Tags: 2009, Google, Google Android, google chrome, Google Wave, Mobile 2.0, nexus one, Search

Internet discussion groups have been around for decades. Startup Grouply offers a wrapper for Yahoo Groups and Google Groups that makes them more comparable to Facebook and Twitter, while not changing the underlying technical architecture. The company just rolled out a new set of features that make Yahoo and Google groups look more like Facebook and Twitter.

Grouply also makes it easy for group administrators to make a small amount of money from a group, by optionally serving ads to group users and/or collecting payments from them.

Yahoo Groups currently claims 120 million users who belong to one or more of its 10 million groups. Yet “when you go to Yahoo Groups, it’s like a time capsule,” Grouply CEO Mark Robins said in a phone interview. “You’re stepping back fifteen years” into Yahoo’s page designs.

Groups have at least three advantages over social networks:

• Because they’ve been around for so long, discussion groups have been debugged to the point where they are very reliable.
• Groups were designed from the start to be archived for ages. People can go back and read messages from 10 or 20 years ago as if they were from this morning.
• Groups are designed to host lengthy discussions among people who may be strangers, rather than trading quick messages among established friends.

Regarding that last item, Robins recently blogged about how group discussions compare to social network chatter:

“The BASKETBALL group on Facebook has over 5,000 members.  About 10 posts per month appear in the discussion forums there.  The third most popular discussion is titled “I love basketball” and includes the postings “I love it too, basketball rocks!!!” and “basketball is the best sport ever.”  Compare this to Coaching Hoops, a typical basketball-related group on Yahoo! Groups.  The 500 members of Coaching Hoops include practicing high school and college coaches, and the group generates about 250 posts a month on topics such as shooting techniques and the most effective way to provide feedback to players.”

Grouply adds these features on top of existing groups:

• A more Web 2.0-style layout. Grouply has themes which are customizable.
• Support for video and more image-driven content.
• Lists and graphs that show users what’s going on right now on their groups. This includes activity feeds that look like Facebook’s.
• Search engine optimization tools and a Grouply directory of lists designed to promote membership and readership.
• Analytics tools for group maintainers to study user activity.
• Optional ad service and a payment system to collect membership fees, donations and event fees.

Grouply has created two videos at Screencast.com. One shows a basic Yahoo Group makover, and the other demos customizations.

To promote its services, Grouply has chosen Eric Snyder, who maintains the FullCircles Ottawa group on Yahoo, on which members exchange used goods rather than throwing them out. Snyder told me his reasons for using Grouply atop Yahoo:

“Yahoo Groups is kind of boring. This is Technicolor and we can pull on lots of other things. There are 9,400 people on this group. A lot of them are resisting Facebook and Twitter and it’s kind of difficult to drag them over.
“I wouldn’t try to restart FullCircles on Facebook. There’s five years of history embedded in 135,000 messages. Grouply gives that a modern interface that young people are expecting.”

In a prepared statement, Snyder also said, “”Grouply has enabled me to break free from the constraints of Yahoo! Groups. I embedded educational videos in my site on Grouply, created over 20 pages of content related to recycling and the environment, and applied a new grassroots theme and color scheme that visually communicates our objectives.”

So far, though, the company isn’t sharing numbers on how much money anyone is making. Snyder doesn’t run ads on FullCircles.

What’s ironic is that Grouply also charges customers to NOT see ads. The company currently makes its revenue by selling premium services atop its free core product. For $20 a month, Grouply will remove its own promotional links from a group page. For another $20 monthly, they’ll stop serving all ads to the page. (There are other services, too, such as a personalized Internet domain name  instead of ____.grouply.com, for $5 a month.)

Grouply is based in Redwood City, California. It was founded in 2006 and has 6 employees. The company has raised a total of  $3.3 million in two rounds, with Harvard Angel Group, SoftTech VC and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman among the lead investors.

Ning is sometimes cited as a competitor, but Ning is for building social neworks, not groups. Grou.ps is much more like Grouply. Robins says he considers Yahoo Groups and Facebook his serious competition, because these sites could add features that persuade their users not to switch to Grouply.

It’s been rumored that archenemies MySpace and Facebook have turned friendly in recent months, discussing the possibility that MySpace users might actually be able to sign into the social network using Facebook Connect.

Now, a more detailed report from the blog Inside Facebook says that this will become reality “in the first part of 2010.” According to their sources, MySpace is thinking along the same lines as Yahoo, who earlier this week announced major Facebook integration across many of its services. That thinking could essentially be summarized with the old proverb: If you can’t beat them, join them.

For MySpace’s purposes, that hypothetically would mean users accessing the site with their Facebook credentials, and then sharing back the increasing amount of exclusive entertainment type content that the site has been acquiring to their Facebook friends. In turn, MySpace gets more traffic that it can sell to advertisers, but ultimately cedes the race to be the Web’s social identity provider.

That space is seemingly a war that will be waged between Facebook and Google. The latter just launched integration with Twitter earlier this week, that allows users to sign into Google Friend Connect — its Facebook Connect rival — with Twitter. Maybe social identity ultimately won’t be that complicated after all.

Tags: facebook, facebook connect, Google, myspace, social networking

Every time you click results in Google, Yahoo, or Bing, a special URL tracks your click—and makes it annoying to copy and paste. The CyberNet blog runs down click-track-preventing tools for all three search engines.

On the Google side, CyberNet recommends a familiar Greasemonkey Script and extension, both of which we’ve covered before. CyberNet’s post goes the extra mile, though, in covering tools that remove click tracking and block HTTP referral sniffing on Yahoo, Bing, and Google, offering up some clever tricks to pull off with AdBlock Plus and privacy lessons along the way.

Hit the link for a good read on being a bit more anonymous when you’re searching the web.

Here’s a very familiar story that we all know: A pair of college kids launch a directory of the Internet that grows to become the most visited site on the web and makes them very rich. Then a few years later, another pair of college kids start a search engine, laser focused on one goal: to become the only search engine anyone uses. That upstart search engine ends up blowing past the first company while they were off courting Hollywood, and indeed becomes the most popular site in the world.

Those companies, of course, are Yahoo! and Google, and it looks like that same story is playing out again in the social networking space with Facebook playing Google to MySpace’s Yahoo! But in this second story there’s another variable, and it’s called Twitter. And with this third site in the mix, it is starting to get a bit tougher to tell if Facebook is on the Google path to riches and dominance, or if it’s more like Yahoo!, fated to lose focus and struggle to find its identity.

Background: Google and Yahoo!

Google and Yahoo! grew up along different paths. Yahoo! went from incorporation to IPO in just over a year, and quickly began acquiring companies and diversifying its product line from its main offering of web directory/search. It bought Rocket Mail in 1997 and launched Yahoo! Mail. Acquisitions of Classic Games, Sportasy, Viaweb, and Webcal followed in 1998, which became Yahoo! Games, Fantasy Sports, Store, and Calendar, respectively. In 1999 Yahoo! spent $5.7 billion for Broadcast.com and $3.6 billion for GeoCities, and the acquisitions continued year after year. Clubs, messages boards, news, instant messaging, chat rooms, over the next few years, Yahoo!’s portal strategy led to the creation (either in house or via purchase) of hundreds of products.

Google meanwhile, which was incorporated in 1998, didn’t make its first acquisition until 2001 (Deja, which became Google Groups), and only made two before 2003. It took 6 years for the company to go from founding to IPO, and they didn’t really start releasing non-search related products, like Blogger (acquired in 2003), Orkut and Gmail (released in 2004), and Maps, iGoogle, Reader and Analytics (2005), until years after they launched. By that time, Google had already firmly established itself as the web’s number one search engine.

In its early years, Google was laser focused on one goal: to become the best search engine on the web.

“Our mission is to provide the best search experience on the web,” said Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in a 1999 press release. “Everything we do is focused on delivering the highest quality search results through significant advancements in interface design, relevancy, and scalability.”

The result of that focus was that Google has grown into one of the most profitable, powerful, and popular destinations on the web. Yahoo!, meanwhile, still has gobs of traffic but their lack of focus caused their market capitalization to shrivel, led to the departure of many of their top executives and engineers for other companies, and made them lose their competitiveness in the ultra-profitable search market. (To the point where, 2006, their CFO actually said they’d given up on competing with Google in search.)

How Does This Relate to Facebook?

Even to those who are too young to have witnessed the Google and Yahoo! story play out directly, it should sound familiar. There are plenty of parallels to be drawn between that story briefly recounted above, and the more recent one that has seen Facebook rise to prominence and steal the social networking crown from MySpace.

Facebook, too, was founded by a group of young college upstarts and stayed laser focused on its core product (social networking) for its first couple of years. In fairly short order, Facebook has grown to become the world’s largest social network, and indeed one of the largest sites on the Internet. The comparison isn’t exact, of course, but there are enough similarities that the analogy makes sense.

The major difference is that while search was generally a two horse race (Ask and Microsoft never really put up much of a fight), there is a third upstart in the social networking story: Twitter. And when you add Twitter to the mix and take a closer look, Facebook starts to look like a company that has the potential to flip the script and start heading down Yahoo!’s path.

The Peanut Butter Manifesto

In 2006, then Yahoo! senior vice president Brad Garlinghouse wrote what would become known as the Peanut Butter Manifesto. In the memo, Garlinghouse gave a scathing and brutally honest critique of Yahoo!, saying that the company had lost focus, lacked a “cohesive vision,” lacked “clarity of ownership and accountability,” and was indecisive.

“We have lost our passion to win,” wrote Garlinghouse, accusing Yahoo! employees of “phoning it in,” and pointing out numerous confusing redundancies in the company’s product line. Garlinghouse compared Yahoo!’s strategy as that of “spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities,” but said the company was spreading itself too thin. For a company with (at the time) the web’s largest audience, Yahoo! was floundering.

Over the past year, or so, it has started to feel a little like Facebook has begun to spread the peanut butter. Their web site has grown bloated with Groups, Events, Fan Pages, Gifts, Marketplace, and Chat, not to mention the thousands upon thousands of third-party applications developed for Facebook’s App platform.

Each of these features has been met with varying levels of success — the Marketplace never really got off the ground, while Events is one of the most popular of its kind on the web — but from a user perspective, the bloat is evident. Navigating Facebook has become complicated, the site’s privacy settings are overwhelming and complex, and confusing overlaps between services (like Pages vs. Profiles vs. Groups) have begun to exist. To a casual observer, it has started to feel like Facebook is, at least on some level, employing the “let’s try anything and see what sticks” strategy that failed so miserably for Yahoo!

Twitter, on the other hand, has projected a very Google-like feel. In the same way that Google took a concept that everyone on the web was familiar with — finding web sites — and stripped it down to only the necessary core elements, Twitter has stripped down social networking to its base form. Now in its third year of existence, Twitter has created a simple mass communication platform and has remained singularly focused on refining and improving that core concept, much the way Google stayed focused on its search product for so many years.

Too Early To Tell

Of course, things at Facebook aren’t quite so peanut buttery as they were at Yahoo! in 2006. At that time, Garlinghouse outlined eight different redundant initiatives within the company (i.e., Yahoo!-owned products that had Yahoo!-owned competitors), which is a problem that Facebook doesn’t really have. Facebook also hasn’t started aggressively diversifying through acquisition.

Facebook is still on top of the social networking world, and smart initiatives like Facebook Connect have helped solidify their role as an integral part of the social web.

Still, recent major Facebook moves — clearly inspired by Twitter (and in some cases perhaps even made to compete with Google) — such as launching a real-time search engine, adding @mentions, and opening up Facebook Lite have a distinctly Yahoo!-like feel to them. Right now, Facebook still probably has more in common with Google than Yahoo!, but the social network feels like a company on the verge of a potential identity crisis as it struggles to figure out if it wants to be a full-featured social network, an application platform, an identity platform, a microblogging platform, a real-time search engine, or something else entirely.

It would be wrong to say Facebook’s recent moves are desperate — they’re not — but the company’s moves over the next year or two will certainly be important in determining whether they’re the next Google, or the next Yahoo!

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, DivaNir4a, Suzifoo

Tags: facebook, future, Google, Yahoo

Google Book Search is a Google project that has promised to offer millions of books and published material to the masses in an archived and online format. While useful and convenient, it’s also been very controversial. Last year, book authors, the Authors Guild, book publishers, and the Association of American Publishers filed two separate class-action lawsuits over Google Book Search encroaching on their intellectual property.

In late 2008, the case was settled with an agreement that not only gave Google access to millions of books, but provided for the compensation of authors and publishers.

Seems like a done deal, right? Wrong. Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, and multiple library associations have joined forces with the non-profit internet Archive to challenge the Google settlement and are pushing for revisions.

Antitrust and Privacy Concerns?

According to The Wall Street Journal, the coalition was organized by Internet Archive because it believes there are huge antitrust implications that the settlement poses. They argue that the agreement also doesn’t do enough to protect user privacy. They’ve spoken with the Department of Justice, which is currently investigating the matter.

Here are the companies and organizations that are said to be on board or likely to be on board:

- Internet Archive
- Microsoft
- Yahoo
- Amazon
- Special Libraries Association
- New York Library Association
- American Society of Journalists and Authors

It’s apparent why some of these organizations have an issue with Google’s settlement. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon are all involved in the related ebooks market, most notably Amazon due to the Kindle.

Interestingly enough, the coalition will be co-led by Gary Reback. You probably know him best as the one of the most prominent lawyers involved in the huge Microsoft antitrust investigation that occurred 1990s. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, it seems.

We’ll see how far this goes, but don’t expect something dramatic like the settlement to be overturned. At most, they’ll lightly tweak it.

Tags: amazon, Google, google books, microsoft, Yahoo

Yahoo’s board of directors is meeting tonight over Microsoft search partnership — The Wall Street Journal reports that another meeting over a potential search advertising partnership happened today.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos apologizes for erasing customers’ e-books — Last week, the company remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 from the Kindles of customers to whom Amazon had accidentally sold copies to which Amazon didn’t have e-rights. Bezos said at the start of the company’s earnings call, “Our solution to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.” TechCrunch has more context on the story.

The Associated Press creates a news registry to protect its content — The AP has struggled to find a way to prevent its oh-so-usable reporting from being run for free by websites. “The system will register key identifying information about each piece of content that AP distributes as well as the terms of use of that content, and employ a built-in beacon to notify AP about how the content is used,” says the AP’s report on itself.

Autodesk offers free training for unemployed potential designers — The Autodesk Assistance Program offers free training in Autodesks’s AutoCAD, Revit, AutoDesk Inventor Professional, and AutoCAD Civil 3D software, all of which are industry standard tools for 2D and 3D design professionals. There’s also a discount on these pricey programs for employers who hire people who’ve completed the . Autodesk’s website explains the details.

Google announces comics-based custom themes — Peanuts, Batman, Iron Man, Superman, Transmetropolitan, Garfield, Popeye, Renee French, Hellboy, Ziggy, TOKYOPOP, and another 40 themes for Google are now available for iGoogle members. The company licensed the images so that users can have them for free, but it’s a clever hook to get users to login as iGoogle users. Google search princess Marissa Mayer blogs about the new themes.

The New York Times swept Knight-Batten awards for innovations in journalism — The Gray Lady’s quaterly profits dropped 42 percent from last year, but the paper dominate this year’s prestigious Knight-Battens. A half dozen NYT newsroom and technology department projects, from the Times’ Document Reader for posting documents that go with a story, to Living with Less, a series of video and audio portraits of how the current recession has affected people, were deemed “excellent, innovative journalism, news and information” by the Knight Foundation.