Google Buzz is social Swiss army knife
Google Buzz, announced today, aims to bring together a slew of Google services and a stew of social networking ideas.
The challenge for Google is to make its Swiss-army-knife complexity appealing to a public that might prefer the separate simplicity of 140-character tweets and the close social connections enabled by Facebook. Read more
Facebook’s growth spurt
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, like so many private company bosses, is notoriously coy when it comes to numbers. He only periodically provides updates on the all-important number of active users (250m was the last official tally). And don’t bother trying to get Mr Zuckerberg to estimate revenues (unofficial estimates are $500m for the year). But in a rare moment of candour, Mr Zuckerberg provided Bloomberg with two interesting figures.
He said that Facebook plans to expand its headcount by as much as 50 per cent this year. The recession has resulted in a surplus of talented engineers, and Facebook plans to scoop up some of these workers while they are on the market. Though the engineers at FriendFeed were gainfully employed, Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed two weeks ago clearly fits into Mr Zuckerberg’s bulking-up strategy. Read more
Reaching for the moon in real time
Our notion of real time as it relates to the web is still fuzzy in its newness.
The Real-Time Stream Crunchup event in Silicon Valley was the first major conference to look at this year’s buzz trend – the real-time web. Ironically, it was running over an hour late by the time I got there on Friday. Read more
TweetDeck moves closer to real-time browser
The web browser has undergone a renaissance in the past year, compared to the Dark Ages of underdevelopment of the first half of this decade after Microsoft crushed competition from Netscape.
Google has introduced Chrome, Apple has just issued a lightning-fast version of Safari with a new user interface and HTML 5 is being adopted to enable browsers to run every kind of program normally associated with native desktop applications.
But the browser’s basic design is still centred around representing web pages rather than the activity of users and their connections. Read more
Real-time web is for real on FriendFeed
Facebook talks about it, Twitter feels like it, but only FriendFeed has managed to pull it off.
The web is moving to another gear, with the lifestreaming site founded by former Google workers launching the first truly real-time social media service today. Read more
Facebook’s identity crisis
The social network Facebook, with 175m members, is a far bigger service than Twitter or the lifestreaming site FriendFeed.
So, as the big kid on the block, it really ought not to have a complex about the capabilities of its pipsqueak rivals. Read more
New Facebook follows Twitter and FriendFeed
Facebook is launching a new-look home page for its 175m users and adding features that can boost the presence of businesses and brands on the social networking service.
In a presentation at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, founder Mark Zuckerberg talked about making Facebook more “real time”, referring to the popularity of the micro-blogging service Twitter. Read more
| About this blog | Blog guide |
Richard Waters has headed the FT's San Francisco bureau since 2002 and covers Google and Microsoft, among other things. A former New York bureau chief for the FT, he is intrigued by Silicon Valley's unique financial and business culture, and is looking forward to covering his second Tech Bust.
Chris Nuttall has been online and messing around with computers for more than 20 years and since 2004 has reported from the FT's San Francisco bureau on semiconductors, video games, consumer electronics and all things interwebby.
Maija Palmer has been writing about technology for the FT since 1999 and is fascinated by cybercrime, privacy and all the other issues of the information society. Based in London, she covers European tech companies and hopes that they won't all get acquired by American rivals.
Robin Kwong is the FT's technology, media and telecoms page editor in London. Formerly he was the Taipei correspondent and wrote about the companies that manufacture the vast majority of the world's computers and gadgets. He is interested in the intricacies of the technology supply chain and how China is increasingly changing the tech landscape.
Tim Bradshaw is the FT's digital media correspondent, and has just moved from London to join our team in San Francisco. He has covered start-ups such as Twitter and Spotify, as well as the online ambitions of more established media companies, such as the BBC iPlayer. He also covers the advertising, marketing and video-game industries. Tim has been writing about technology, business and finance since 2003.
