Google

Friend Connect, Google's popular online service that enables Internet users to, well, connect with friends on different web sites by standardizing the look of social applications and content, has added more features, IDG News Service's Juan Carlos Perez reports:

Google's Friend Connect has expanded its roster of social networking and social media services that participating Web publishers can add to their sites.

Friend Connect now has a new section called "Interests" that lets Web publishers pose questions to visitors who register with their sites about their likes, hobbies and preferences.

Other new features allow web publishers to 1) offer people the ability to use their site profiles to send private messages, and 2) fine-tune their sites by aggregating and analyzing data that users make public about their interests, Perez writes.

Launched in May 2008, Friend Connect is now deployed by 9 million web sites worldwide and is available in 59 languages.

From the title of his new book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, you might suspect that author and longtime New Yorker magazine media critic Ken Auletta may blame the Internet for the ongoing demise of traditional media. Not so.

Auletta says in an upcoming edition of C-SPAN's "Q&A" program -- his first interview for the new book -- that old media essentially blew it.

"What really bugged me about the time I spent with traditional media...is how late they were to understand the new digital world and how the Internet changed the game. And they had to change and play a new game, and they weren't doing that..."

Auletta does reserve some ire for the hubris displayed by many tech players.

"There's a conceit that people in Silicon Valley have that the Internet is the most transformative technology that the world has ever seen. That's crap...electricity was much more transformative."

The interview will air on C-SPAN Sunday (Nov. 1) at 8 and 11 p.m. ET and Monday (Nov. 2) at 6 p.m. ET. Here's a preview:

MySpace announced that it is delivering streaming music on Google search results following the feature's implementation by the iLike team, which completed iLike's integration into MySpace Music Video and Artist Dashboard last week.

MySpace will provide Google search with audio tracks from major and independent labels, as well as links to music videos and upcoming tour information.

The social-networking site said in a press release from MySpace Music president Courtney Holt:

Today's implementation is only the beginning: Not every MySpace song or tour date is integrated into today's launch. In the coming days, we’ll continue to add additional MySpace songs, video links and tour info to Google search results, leveraging the breadth and depth of content available from the millions of artists on MySpace.

The Google integration is a direct result of the MySpace acquisition of iLike. I'm especially proud of the agility with which we evolved an iLike/Google initiative into a deeper integration with MySpace. I know this is only the beginning of what we can achieve working together and I thank the iLike team for their hard work in bringing this product to life.

We believe the future of MySpace includes enabling the socialization of content not only on MySpace but also on other Websites. Working with partners like Google is an important part of this strategy, and we have plenty of other opportunities ahead of us.

Following on the heels of Bing's announcement earlier Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco that it would aggregate real-time search results from social-networking services Facebook and Twitter, Google got into the act.

Vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer announced on The Official Google Blog that the search-engine giant will include tweets in its search results.

Mayer wrote:

At Google, our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world. In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged—real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.

Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

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When Twitter wants to discuss data-mining deals, it goes right to the big guys. AllThingsD reported that the social-networking site is involved in separate discussions with Microsoft and Google on agreements that would result in those companies licensing full feeds from Twitter to integrate into their respective search engines.

For the information that could be mined from the data stream of billions of tweets by Twitter's 54 million monthly users, the company would be paid several million dollars or enter into revenue-sharing proposals that would give it a piece of the revenue made from search results, according to AllThingsD.

The New York Times Co. senior vice president of digital operations Martin Nisenholtz spoke at the OMMA Global conference last Monday, and Beet.TV executive producer Andy Plesser captured it on video. He discussed the margins his company's About.com gains from Google AdSense and the fact that the latter does not perform well for news coverage in The New York Times.

For the second time this month, Google's popular email service is experiencing outages.

The search giant's Apps Status Dashboard today registers a "service disruption" for Gmail.

Users are being informed that Gmail is "temporarily unable to access your contacts." As is now custom, users are turning to Twitter to report problems sending and receiving emails, seek solace, and complain.

Perhaps Twitter user @federina puts it best:

Gmail ora è down (spero non come demonoid), probabilmente un nuovo attacco...

Gmail also went down on Sept. 1 before returning to full operability about 18 hours later.

(What am I, the outage reporter today?)

Seizing the opportunity, Mashable RTed the link to Barb Dybwad's Sept. 1 column on 5 Things to Do While Gmail is Down. Thing No. 1: Break the news on Twitter! (As I just did.)

Thing No. 5: Go outside.

Yeah, right.

More than 1,860 issues of LIFE magazine from 1936-72 are now available online via Google Books, giving users access to the issues in their entirety: stories, photographs, advertisements, covers, letters to the editor.

This announcement follows a previous partnership between the two parties, announced in November, under which LIFE made the contents of its image collection available through Google Image Search.

Life Inc. president Andrew Blau said:

LIFE magazine was there for every historical event, cultural shift and pop-culture occurrence. From our first issue in 1936 featuring President Franklin Roosevelt's work-relief project to coverage of Apollo 11, Marilyn Monroe, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, The Beatles, the beehive and everything in between. Every day we receive requests from readers looking for these issues for research purposes and to find photos and articles featuring family members, hometowns and other memories. Now with these full issues available online, readers will be able to browse through history as it was being recorded.

And Google strategic-partner-development manager Andrew Madden added:

We're tremendously excited to partner with Life Inc. Our partnership will enable millions of people around the world to discover and access LIFE magazine's iconic archive online.

A "solution to the future of journalism"? A "path to peace" with traditional publishers? Or yet more competition for battered news web sites?

Predicting how Google's "Fast Flip" news-reading service will impact the online publishing industry is a matter of speculation at this point. After all, the service was unveiled just today. But at the very least it's an interesting experiment in how information is presented to Internet users. More to the point, it offers something tangible -- money -- to publishers who long have complained that the search giant's Google News service is robbing them of readers and revenue.

From the New York Times:

On Monday, the company introduced an experimental news hub called Fast Flip that allows users to view news articles from dozens of major publishers and flip through them as quickly as they would the pages of a magazine. Google will place ads around the news articles and share resulting revenue with publishers.

Fast Flip, which is based on Google News, tries to address what Google considers a major problem with news sites: they often are slow to load, and so they turn off many readers. Google, the leader in Web search services and advertising, argues that if reading news online was closer to the experience of scanning through physical newspapers or magazines, people would read more. ...

The service is being initiated with the cooperation of about three dozen publishers, including major news outlets like BBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsweek; magazines like Cosmopolitan, The Atlantic, Esquire and Good Housekeeping; and Web-only publications like TechCrunch, Salon.com and Slate.

Some of the publishers said they viewed the experiment with caution, adding that no single solution could address the industry's main problem: plunging advertising revenues.

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The battle over Google's right to access and control millions of digitized books moved to a New York court today. From Network World's Buzzblog:

A group of prominent authors and privacy advocates, including the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation, is urging a New York judge this morning to reject a proposed deal that would grant Google access to and control over millions of digitized books.

The authors include security expert Bruce Schneier, as well as best-sellers Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem. ...

This morning at 10 a.m. was the deadline for that New York judge to stop accepting comments on the case from interested parties, of which there have been plenty.

Indeed there have. Here's coverage of the ongoing arguments from BayNewser and WebNewser.

The crux of the argument against the settlement is detailed in a press release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

[T]he sweeping agreement to digitize millions of books ignores critical privacy rights for readers and writers.

The coalition is concerned that Google's collection of personal identifying information about users who browse, read, and make purchases online at Google Book Search will chill their readership.

Meanwhile, internetnews.com reports that European Union officials offer only "tepid" praise for the settlement. Which, when you think about it, really isn't praise.