Steam is gathering on the rumors that Google is planing to launch a Facebook competitor that will focus on social gaming. The company is supposedly in talks with a number of online game makers in order to build a stable for launch, according to unnamed individuals speaking to the Wall Street Journal . However, even if Google succeeds in launching a social network that will keep users’ interest, it seems unlikely that it will make much of a dent in Facebook in the near term. According to the WSJ ’s sources, Google is currently talking to Playdom, Electronic Arts’ Playfish, and Zynga (maker of the popular Facebook game Farmville ).
If you are a bit of a command-line junkie and ever wanted to use APIs but wished you could get that data straight from your favorite shell, GoogleCL is for you. GoogleCL is a new open source project that allows you to utilize major Google APIs without writing code. It defines a set of commands that you can use as command-line utilities and access a number of Google services. For example, you can upload pictures to Google Picasa Web, create a new event in your Google Calendar, upload a blog post to Google Blogger, export your contacts to a file and much more.
The ongoing game of cat and mouse between China and Google continued today as the Internet search behemoth announced it is making some changes in an attempt to please the Chinese government. The dust up began in January of this year when Google refused to censor any results on Google.cn after accusing China of orchestrating a cyber attack on its servers. Threatened with losing its license to serve content, Google eventually decided to redirect users to its Honk Kong homepage – a work-around which until today had gone unchecked by the Chinese government.
Back in January, with big balls, Google wrote the following: We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. In March, Google backed that talk up by redirecting google.cn to google.com.hk , writing the following: Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement.
Following trailblazer Oregon , two more U.S. states are adopting Google Apps in their educational systems statewide. Colorado and Iowa join Oregon in Google Apps for Education , which offers Gmail, Docs, Sites, Video and Groups to elementary school, junior high and high school students across both states. Sponsor Part of the motivation for states adopting Google Apps is financial
Today Sprint announced the extension of 4G to three new cities. Richmond, Virginia; Salt Lake City, Utah; and St. Louis, Missouri are all live today. With the recently introduced Sprint HTC Evo 4G , the first 4G phone, Sprint will need more service areas for it to be a compelling offering.
Yesterday, Microsoft communications head Frank Shaw put up a post on The Official Microsoft Blog rattling off some numbers regarding many of Microsoft’s products. The intention was obviously to lend some perspective to some of the negative coverage Microsoft has been getting recently. There’s no way around it, the numbers are impressive. And I think it’s smart for Shaw (and Microsoft) to do things like this
Google announced today that it was moving domains for its encrypted search from https://www.google.com to https://encrypted.google.com . In May Google launched an encrypted version of its Web search, allowing users to enable a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection to encrypt their information as they searched. Sponsor As ReadWriteWeb reported , this move ran afoul of some school districts’ web filtering requirements, forcing them to possibly block access to other parts of the Google secure domain. Today’s move was a response to educators’ concerns, says Google, noting in the announcement that “if school network administrators decide to block encrypted searches, the blocking will no longer affect Google authenticated services like Google Apps for Education.” Discuss
The release of Chrome OS looms ever closer, but still there are a number of enhancements and changes being rolled in that should make for a somewhat nicer experience, and TechCrunch has highlighted a few. Perhaps most major among those changes is the ability to browse the internet without signing in, but if you want to update your bookmarks or save any form data you’ll still need a Google account. There’s a new side bar that appears to give access to other apps, replacing tabs on top, and it also adds in battery and WiFi strength indicators. There’s also something of a debate going on regarding whether Chrome OS should have support for compressed archives (.zip and .rar files and the like).
At the Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco today, Google gave an update of its rich snippets initiative – which adds extra information to Google search results. For example, showing restaurant review ratings. It’s an experimental Semantic Web feature, but today’s update shows that usage is increasing and Google wants to ramp it up significantly. Rich snippets was announced in May last year and began to be seen in results around October
That right there friends, is a real life Google employee and his trusty camera capturing the internals of a fine New York City bodega. It’s all part of a pilot launched back in April to photograph the insides of businesses for Google Places. The idea here is that by seeing the actual facilities, merchandise, layout, and decor Google can help consumers make a better decision about which businesses might best suit their particular needs.
Google won a big decision in its long-running court fight with Viacom yesterday, as a U.S. District Court in New York ruled that, as long as web entities offer to work with copyright holders to prevent infringement when it’s found, they are protected against claims of infringement by the safe harbor of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Venture capitalist Fred Wilson calls the ruling a victory for entrepreneurs, the web, and user-generated content . The TorrentFreak blog points out , too, that it’s also a win, if only as grounds for appeal, for torrent trackers like isoHunt and miniNova that similarly offer to take down infringing material when it’s found
Google is going to step into the online music business according to The Wall Street Journal, which cites to sources familiar with the matter. The search giant is reportedly in talks with the music industry to offer a music download service that will leverage Google’s position as the top search engine worldwide. The service will be available both on the web for all platforms and on Android handsets. Look for the music search and download service to launch later this year with an add-on subscription option slated for early 2011
Bing’s iPhone app isn’t the only thing getting an upgrade today at Microsoft’s search engine. Bing is also starting to roll out close to 100 new features to its main search engine on the Web. The biggest change is a new major search category under Bing Entertainment , which will include better ways to search for music, movies, TV shows, and games. “We did travel, health, shopping and local last year,” explains senior VP Yusuf Mehdi
Earlier this month, Apple unveiled a new site to showcase HTML5 . On it, Apple showed off a number of impressive web demos coded using only HTML5 technologies. However, at least on the main page, these demos were restricted to working on only Apple’s Safari web browser. So now Google is countering with its own HTML5 site — called, get this, HTML5Rocks
