Google Releases New Beta Version of Browser, Chrome

Google has jumped into the browser wars against Microsoft with the debut today of long-waited Google web browser, called Chrome.

The browser, a slimmed down, no frills, open source program, will likely put a dent in the Firefox browser's market share, but analysts expect it will take longer for Chrome to take a bit out of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

Currently, the Internet Explorer has a market share of about 70% of the browser market, according to National Public Radio.

Ironically or not, the Chrome browser is only available for Microsoft XP and Vista operating systems, meaning a growing chunk of the Apple PC market will have to wait, or continue using Apple's fairly popular browser, Safari.

At first, even experienced browser users may be unimpressed by Chrome, mostly because it does not even include a menu navigation or incorporate more long-standing Google features and services like as the popular Gmail or Bookmarks plug-in. Other key features include thumbnail bookmark icons and search box suggestions created as words are typed in the browser address bar.

And rather than forcing users to comply, Google has allowed first-time downloaders of the application to choose whether they want Google to be the default search engine while using chrome.

Download Google's Chrome

Google vs. PayPal-eBay: Silicon Valley Titans Battle To Dominate The Online Payment Processing Market

The new tech titans' war in Silicon Valley these days is between eBay-PayPal and Google for control of the future of the highly lucrative online payment processing business.

Currently, PayPal, which eBay purchased in 2002, is the leading payment processing service in the world with a claim of 143 million users in 50 countries.

Google wants a piece of the action, and they want it bad. At stake are billions of dollars and potentially dominance of ecommerce transactions in the future.

The battle between eBay's PayPal and the global Internet's most popular website - Google - has been brewing for two years following a bizarre war chant targeted at Google during a PayPal company meeting.

But tensions heightened dramatically last month when eBay suddenly pulled all of its U.S. advertising from Google's search results service - Adwords (for which companies pay millions of dollars to be featured prominently in targeted certain search results).

EBay announced it was divesting approximately $25 million a year from Google's Adwords on the heels of a Google-sponsored event in Boston during the eBay Live convention in Bean Town that reportedly infuriated eBay's CEO Meg Whitman.

Whitman headlined the annual eBay Live convention where some 9,000 eBay sellers and merchants attended, making it one of the largest conventions in the United States.

Google, which is aggressively positioning itself to compete with eBay's PayPal service by marketing the Google Checkout service, welcomed buyers and sellers to a "Let Freedom Ring" party in Boston but canceled the event at the last minute.

The title of Google's party was apparently a play on the tiff between Google and PayPal. For more than two years now PayPal has refused to offer Google Checkout as an option in any of its variety of payment processing and fund transfer services.

PayPal is offered as an alternative payment option on websites for companies like Dell and Apple. But, PayPal's core base is from eBay and thousands of other merchants who sell on their own but offer PayPal as a payment alternative.

Annually, online payment processing is a multi-billion dollar business expected to grow by leaps and bounds in the next five years worldwide. That said, it makes perfect sense why Google wants a piece of the action, and they have the money and brand name to seriously threaten PayPal's dominance of the market.

According to Whitman the move to pull eBay advertising from Google's Adwords service was out of spite, but in fact a long-planned "test" to see what the "response" would be if eBay divested ad dollars from Google and used that money to sprinkle across a number of less popular search engines (like MSN, Yahoo and Ask.com) .

"We were not pleased by this notion of the Google Checkout party and the marketing around it, I will tell you that," eBay CEO Meg Whitman told the Associated Press last month.

"But you don't (deploy) these kind of tests [diverting ad dollars to other search engines] with no planning. You can't. Because you have to know how you're going to redeploy these US dollars."

Apparently, the pilot must have crashed because eBay reinvested its millions to Google's Adwords service in less than two weeks following the tiff.

A larger storm may be brewing for eBay that few on the outside fully understand.

Stayed tuned for Part Two of The Titans Battle To Dominate The Future of Online Payment Processing: "PayPal Declares War on Google" will be published tomorrow.

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Google Adds Auto-Save Functionality from Gmail to Blogger

Google has made a wish come true!

My wish. No, not yet the dream job I crave, but a wish fulfilled nonetheless.

After losing countless postings on Blogger - usually due to slow posting responses or failed postings, I regretfully was forced to switch tactics.

Since I could not afford to lose any more postings or updates using the Blogger interface, I wrote in Word and simply copied and pasted my text into Blogger. Since Word has an auto-save feature, I didn't have to worry about losing text.

That got me thinking like Abe Lincoln.

As I wrote a couple of months ago, before the latest logical update to Blogger, I was peeved that Gmail had an auto-save feature for more than a year, but it was absent in Blogger.

From what I know working in the industry, I can't be that difficult to duplicate the code for the auto-save feature into the Blogger interface. Now I'm happy to say it has been done (thanks!).

Ego aside, I wonder if someone at Google read my blog and said something like: "Hey, he's right, this shouldn't be hard to do and the users want it of course."

More likely, Google engineers already had the auto-save enhancement for Blogger on their to do list and at last got around to implementing it.

Google Goes Into The Toilet With New Wireless Router; Mooninites and South Park Fight Back

Google is the world's most visited website, but today they put themselves in the toilet.

Offering a free broadband service called TiSP, Google says that by lowering a wireless Google-made router into a toilet, consumers can link computers to fiber-optic node through existing sewer tunnels.

Can't tell yet how many Googlites will latch on to the new service, but if you figure that every household in the "developed" world has a toilet, the number of subscribers over a period of time could be into the tens of millions.

There is good reason to ponder how Google will handle such a demand, but if there is any Internet company on the planet right now that can figure it out, it has to be Google. I think everyone gets that now. Worldwide, Google is one of the most commonly recognized words next to Pepsi and McDonalds.

Viacom Files Complaint Against YouTube and Google Over Videos

After a year of intense criticisms and threats of lawsuits against YouTube for sponsoring user-submitted video clips on its website, mega-media conglomerate Viacom, Inc. filed a complaint in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

In the complaint, Viacom alleges that approximately 160,000 video clips of Viacom's entertainment programming have been posted to YouTube on a near-daily basis, resulting in more than 1.5 billion incidents when someone viewed an unauthorized video from a Viacom owned program, such as Comedy Central's Colbert Report. Viacom also owns Paramount Pictures, MTV, Dreamworks and other cable channels nationwide.

"YouTube appropriates the value of creative content on a massive scale for YouTube's benefit without payment or license," Viacom said in its complaint. "YouTube's brazen disregard of the intellectual-property laws fundamentally threatens not just plaintiffs but the economic underpinnings of one of the most important sectors of the United States economy."

But Google disagrees responding to the complaint in a statement.

"[We] are confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders and believe the courts will agree.

"YouTube is great for users and offers real opportunities to rights holders: the opportunity to interact with users; to promote their content to a young and growing audience; and to tap into the online-advertising market. We will certainly not let this suit become a distraction to the continuing growth and strong performance of YouTube and its ability to attract more users (and) more traffic, and (to) build a stronger community."

In its complaint, Viacom asked the court for an immediate injunction, holding the video submission websites accountable for allowing Viacom video clips to be posted on their websites.

YouTube started removing and placing disclaimers on Viacom content two to three months ago, but it's nearly impossible for the websites to track down and delete Viacom video, from music videos to segments from Comedy Central.

This author had a personal experience with this controversy a couple of months ago because there were hundreds of visitors to my other site (named for a Colbert segment, ironically) linking to the video segment in which Stephen Colbert jokingly (more like tongue-in-cheek) theorized that it would take 10 monkeys to type the Bible (not sure which version) in one weekend.

The filed complaint is a bold move against the number one video website on the Internet and a company - Google - that has tremendous influence, capital and sway in the Internet industry.

The debate of recycling of intellectual property without any regulations (such as use fees) on third-party websites is very much like the music industry's battle against shared music networks.

Stay tuned! I'll be covering this issue regularly on this site as events materialized.

Has Google Blogger Publishing Tool Been Upgraded?

During the last few weeks, Blogger's publishing tool seems to have been upgraded.

After months of intermittent outages and long delays in publishing (and even a few outages), Blogger appears to have received an upgrade.

The problems started last summer when there were a number of hacks and outages of the Blooger publishing tool.

Blogger is publishing faster than even a couple of months ago, and the company has added a number of new features and services to Blogger, including dynamic tools for formatting a web page or blog and the ability to publish to your own domain.

Not a bad deal for anyone that wants an email account (although Gmail is currently closed to new members), blogger account, word processor and spreadsheet software tools, promotion and advertising services, calendar, email news alerts, maps, photo hosting, webmaster tools, and more.

A search of the Blooger blog did not unearth any news of the upgrade to the functionality of the publishing tool. (We just had an earthquake here in Los Gatos, CA in the Bay Area, it was fairly strong. The epicenter was Lafayette, CA, about 25 miles from here; my place shook and the windows and wood creaked and rattled and then it slowed down to a rolling affect. That was one of the strongest I've felt in 12 years of living here. It's the third in a week and people here are getting nervous. Google is also about 25 miles away from here and they felt it too. Anyways...)

But such tremendous growth and demand from computer users worldwide for access to Google's vast array of products and services will have its challenges.

One thing that would be great is if Google added to Blogger the auto-save feature used with Gmail.

In Blogger, you need to remember to Save As Draft (before you want to finally Publish), but with Gmail it runs a script to auto-save whatever email you are drafting just in case of a technical glitch, or more likely, a crash using Windows Explorer.

For now, just get in the habit of repeatedly clicking the Save As Draft button until you are ready to publish.

I'd love to hear from someone at Google about an auto-save feature for Blogger. From what I know of my work in the profession, it shouldn't be that difficult to apply the auto-save functionality for Blogger. Perhaps there it is just not on the engineering team's long, long list of priorities. Google hires something like 10 or 15 new engineers a week!

Some helpful Blogger resources:

Blogger Status page

Known Issues page

Blogger's newest features

Extraneous link: Tonight's official USGS eartquake report

Is You-Tube's Revenue-Sharing Plan A Threat To Cable?

YouTube's announcement that it has plans to create a revenue-sharing agreement with the contributors to the popular website is eerily not being discussed by the 'traditional media' even as YouTube has become an Internet sensation and a household name.

Is YouTube's latest move yet another a nail in the prepped coffin of mainstream television and cable programming?

As more information, videos, photographs, music and so on premiere on the Internet first nowadays - including announcements from presidential candidates - even regularly scooping mass media organizations on important news, there seems to be no way to stop the decline of traditional media. Can you stop a slip and slide that is in full motion? I doubt it.

In a few years, just about anyone will be able to report over the Internet on breaking news - they only need be in the right place at the right time and have a modern cell phone, which increasingly offer quality, real-time video.


The media cannot be everywhere, but the millions of people who post to the Internet can be. That's going to be the fundamental difference, as it is already playing out.

I remember telling friends and family back in 1995 that the Internet will revolutionize not just commerce, but that it would find its way into every nook and cranny of ordinary life. One classmate told me that I was crazy after I predicted the majority of people would eventually get their music from the Internet and that record stores were at peril. (I'm not saying I'm a fortune teller, it just seemed the natural progression at the time).

Just like I'll say right now that video stores will disappear as well and the majority of people will download their movies on the Internet and have the ability to watch them on their televisions, big-screens, iPods, computers, and so on. Services such as Vongo.com and Movielink.com are the seeds of this revolution.

The Internet continues to change almost everything we do (except buy groceries, sorry PeaPod). It was simply the natural progression of a relatively easy and accessible technology with broad exposure to get your message out for very little money (in comparison to, say, newspaper and magazine publishing).

Ordinary people, like bloggers, programmers, artists and users of the Internet are setting the trends for news reporting, entertainment, communications, commerce, fashion, business, social networking, banking and finance, and the list goes on.

How will television as we know it fit into the enormous Internet culture of bloggers, web sites, online media and so on? This has been a question for years and now seem more of a threat than ever before. TV has suffered (except for American Idol), especially local news programming, and most especially those that have been in denial and not provided a web alternative to their newscasts or print editions. There is 24/7 access to anything anyone wants to read, watch, listen to or download.

How many people will abandon their cable companies because they can more easily, cheaply and quickly get whatever they want commercial-free from the Internet (connected to a TV or Widescreen) when they want and how they want. CNN Pipeline at $2.95 a month is one fine example.

A decade ago, Microsoft introduced what was touted as a revolution in the history of online media, claiming it would change how every household uses the Internet and television.

Remember WebTV?

The service allowed subscribers to surf the Internet on their televisions. However, the service was clumsy and unreliable, and therefore never gained the popularity anticipated by Bill Gates and others at Microsoft.

Most damaging to the WebTV model was probably the approach MS initially used, luring people into accepting it's model (or vision) for the future of Internet and computer use. It was, at its best, a novelty.

But in the last decade, the Internet has become a mass communication channel - the most extensive, widely-used and globally significant communications device in the history of mankind.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that the natural progression of technology-on-demand is the future, and the industries involved will need to adapt or be replaced.

What is the Deal With Blogger's Profile Random Question Feature

Has anyone else noticed the bizarreness of Blogger user profile page's Random Question? I must be missing something.

My first 'secret' question was: "If you had to dig a hole to China, where would you start? "

What?! Where? I dont' know, Peoria? Las Vegas? The Mayan temples? Under the White House? The basement of a fortune cookie manufacturer in Brooklyn?

How the hell do I know? Am I supposed to make something up that I'll forget? Should I have just put in my hometown? What if it was 'wrong' would my profile changes not be saved?

There was no help link or icon so I didn't really get it, and there is no way I can be the only one person out there that doesn't get it. I also saw nothing about it in Google Help Center or their company blog.

So I reloaded the page to get another 'random question': "What's the best time you've ever had licking stamps?"

Ok, now I'm thinking this is just a joke and I don't get it. Like there is some secret answer on the Google website somewhere and I have to somehow find it. Do I have to enter a treasure hunt?

Considering most stamps haven't been "lickable" for years now, what's the trick here? Should I say Marilyn Monroe? Snoopy? How about this (fictional): The best time I had licking stamps was when I got really drunk in high school and I was sending out college admission applications. Geeeez.

Come on Blogger folks, at least have a clickable help icon to make it clear what the heck this is about.

So, I can't answer this question because it quite frankly is the stupidest thing I think I've ever been asked. Well, except the time when I was a teenager and I was working at the gas station and an older woman asked me what the "N" was on the shift in her car. I asked her if she was serious and made sure it wasn't April 1st.

"I always wondered what it was for but I was scared to see what it would do." I kindly explained what it was and wondered if I had just been played with or if there was a mental health issue. It couldn't be that she was serious. I mean, come on.

So, Google folks, please clarify what this random question thing is all about.

Third and last question was the final straw and I gave up. Swear to whatever that this was the question:

Paper or briefs?

Well, now that is interesting. Because I could give the Clinton answer or the Gore answer. Which do you wear? Maybe I should just say NASA aluminum, hydro-suction diapers. Would anyone ever know, or even care?

Google has funny ways of doing things, and sometimes they are brilliant; other times they are pure nutty (or an inside 'joke' - like the Valentine's logo) and sometimes they are completely in violation of fundamental usability design, content and common sense.

Try it for yourself, what is your favorite Blogger Random Question and how would you answer it?

I love to hear other people's experience with this or other strange usability oopzies.

Google Seeks Web Domination

Google is conquering the world. Be Googly or not. Or, is there competition out there in the works that threaten to dethrone the giant of the Internet?

Yahoo of course is fighting tool and nail to keep up, but it's a difficult battle when you're revenues are not growing even near the rate, and in raw dollars, of the competition.

But then there is Web 2.0. I will have a full series of stories on this blog in coming weeks so sign up for my feed or check back.