Later today, Google is due to launch a social product that will compete with the currently popular social networks - Facebook


and Twitter. As Wall Street Journal reported, Gmail will get a new module that will stream media and status updates of online friends. This module sounds like a Gmail Labs feature which could be enabled or disabled by account holder’s choice.
However, it’s less likely to be a rival since Google itself has integrated Twitter updates in its search. Maybe Google will bring Orkut updates integration in Gmail - well, that’s just one of the many possibilities. Michael Arrington, TechCrunch CEO, noted that Google’s upcoming social product will go beyond Gmail integration.

Google has already enabled watching YouTube videos in Gmail Chat. Also, YouTube, Flickr and Picasa media previews in mail have been there since a while. Whatever the integration into Gmail would be like, there’s always a kill switch to bring the service back to normal.

If Google’s upcoming social product affects Gmail, the fear of outages and security always persists. Not to forget that this announcement follows Facebook’s homepage redesign and as we know, Google’s online rival Microsoft is one of the stake holders in Facebook. In August 2009, Yahoo had introduced social features in its mail, search and messenger service.

By Catherine Dodge and Julianna Goldman

President Barack Obama called small businesses the “engine” of the U.S. economy and said too many are still struggling to get the credit they need to operate.

In his weekly address on the radio and Internet, Obama said the nation’s banks, supported by taxpayers in the economic crisis, now need “to stand by the creditworthy small businesses.”

“It’s time for those banks to fulfill their responsibility to help ensure a wider recovery,” Obama said. “We’re going to take every appropriate step to encourage them to meet those responsibilities.”

The president this week announced measures to open up credit for small business, such as capital injections for community banks to spur lending. Obama also asked Congress to raise the limits for Small Business Administration loans from $2 million to $5 million and as much as $5.5 million for manufacturing.

“The goal here is to get credit where it’s needed most — to businesses that support families, sustain communities, and create the jobs that power our economy,” Obama said.

The president has asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and SBA administrator Karen Mills, to convene a conference of regulators, congressional leaders, lenders, and entrepreneurs to come up with additional steps to improve the flow of credit to small businesses looking to expand.

Business and Insurance

In the radio address, Obama said his health-care overhaul plan would allow small businesses to buy insurance for employees through exchanges that may offer better coverage at lower costs.

The “crushing” costs of health-care are discouraging many entrepreneurs from even trying to start a business and causing others to cut benefits and jobs, or close their doors, Obama said.

“Small businesses have always been the engine of our economy — creating 65 percent of all new jobs over the past decade and a half — and they must be at the forefront of our recovery,” Obama said.

In the Republican address, Senator Mike Johanns focused on Obama’s number one domestic priority — overhauling U.S. healthcare.

The Nebraska Republican said Obama’s plan would drive up costs and lead to higher premiums and more government mandates. Older Americans would see funding for hospice care and home health care services “cut off,” he said.

Impact on Paychecks

“We have a record budget deficit, and many families are working hard just to put food on the table and to pay the bills,” Johanns said. “Yet, there’s no doubt about it: these proposals will negatively impact pocketbooks and paychecks across America.”

The president’s aides worked behind the scenes this week with Senate leaders to merge legislation designed to curb costs while covering tens of millions of the uninsured. The changes could be the biggest since the creation of Medicare in 1965 and would affect one-sixth of the nation’s economy.

Johanns criticized Obama for not fulfilling a campaign promise to hold open and transparent health care negotiations televised on C-SPAN saying, “a 1,500 page bill, full of carve- outs and back room deals, is currently being brokered behind closed doors.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Catherine Dodge in Washington at Cdodge1@bloomberg.net; Julianna Goldman in Washington at jgoldman6@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 24, 2009 06:00 EDT

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When Jason Harrison joined global communications firm Universal McCann as its CIO in 2006, he was asked by the company’s executives to find a way to better connect the 3,000 employees spread out across more than 60 locations around the world. The usual tools, mainly email and telephone, hadn’t yielded the results the company wanted in terms of building a common company culture.

The company’s IT infrastructure was heavily Microsoft-based, with the 2003 version of SharePoint already installed and the 2007 SharePoint on the way. With the latter, Harrison knew that Microsoft had added social software capabilities to SharePoint, including MySites, social networking profiles for the enterprise.

Harrison decided to start with social networking, and has since built a social network mixing the built-in social tools of the SharePoint platform with technology from NewsGator, a vendor that offers enterprise Real Simple Syndication (RSS), a technology that streams relevant information to employees over portals such as corporate intranets. In this case, such information is centered around industry news and deals with Universal McCann’s clients, which include large corporations such as Sony, Johnson & Johnson and Exxon Mobile.

“We wanted everyone to feel one culture and one set of objectives,” Harrison says. “Because we’re so distributed, we had to build a common social fabric virtually.”

Google Trends was originally released as a tool that let you see visual comparisons between search volume of keywords. That hasn’t changed, but Google now also gives us the keys to more data about actual popularity of websites based on daily unique visitors.

This data is similar to what companies like Alexa already provides, but it’s not ready to be a complete replacement yet. There is not as much data available through Google Trends as there is in other tools. Searches are currently limited to the domain level — so blogs.zdnet.com would translate to zdnet.com before the search happens.

If you have a popular enough website to be included in these results from Google Trends, you may be disappointed to know that there is no way to remove your site if you wanted to. Google doesn’t think that rule should apply to them though, as they have removed all their web properties — searching for things like google.com or youtube.com comes back with nothing.

Last November, when Google launched Open Social we asked readers if Facebook would join Google’s platform. The results were split right down the middle, but as we get farther from the Open Social launch, and the two sites continue to launch competing APIs (Google FriendConnect vs. Facebook Connect, for example — the former banned by Facebook), that seems less and less likely. This is becoming a social networking cold war according to Duncan Riley.

Even though the battle for social networking supremacy is a fight between Facebook and MySpace, the social networking arms race is really being played out between Facebook and Google. Google has demonstrated the unique ability to bring rival social networks together around its proposed open standard APIs, such as Open Social, FriendConnect, and the Social Graph API. Google has built up its own little iron curtain with MySpace, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Ning, and the Google-owned Orkut to prop up its open source platform initiative. (Don’t bother trying to follow the Cold War analogy all the way through — it doesn’t really work.)

Facebook is now planning to follow Google’s lead and open source their platform. Previously, Facebook’s platform technology only powered an app development platform on one site outside its own — that of rival social networking site, bebo (recently acquired by AOL). An open sourced platform means that any social network could implement Facebook applications. More details should emerge in the next couple of days, according to TechCrunch, who broke the story.

Two questions immediately spring to mind following this news: 1. Does this help users? 2. Do platforms even matter?
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