Google Learns To Crawl Flash Files

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Google has improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology. In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find. More >>

Google New CFO Starts Job At $4 Million

Google's new CFO has already taken care of finances (for himself) even before he starts his new job on August 1. Patrick Pichette, who was previously the president of operations at Bell Canada will take over from George Reyes.

Pichette will be getting:
1) Signing bonus $ 500,000
2) Six month bonus $ 500,000
3) Base salary $ 450,000
4) Regular bonus $ 675,000
5) 910 Google shares $ 500,000 ($549 x 910)
6) 910 Google shares $ 500,000 ($549 x 910)
7) 5,556 Restricted shr $3,052,747*
8) 11,112 Stock option $6,105,494*
*based on offer date

As well as Relocation fees and other benefits offered to Google employees.

George Reyes had a total compensation of $5.1 million in 2007. According to Wikipedia Reyes's brother is Greg Reyes former CEO of Brocade. On August 7, 2007 Greg Reyes was convicted of stock manipulation and sent to prison. On August 28, 2007, George announced the resignation from this post at Google.

You can view the entire filing with the SEC here.

Microsoft - Verisign Partner For Online Health

One area where Microsoft is leaving Google behind is in online health care. Today Microsoft teamed up with Verisign to offer OpenID for users of HealthVault, which is a free service that enables consumers to store and manage their health information online.

"HealthVault is about empowering people to take control of their personal health information, and that means making their Web experience easier while also helping them safeguard their privacy," said George Scriban, senior product manager, Microsoft Health Solutions Group. "That's why we're happy to give our users the option of using a VeriSign OpenID with a VIP credential."

Microsoft is moving very fast in this space because it is doing the opposite of what it traditionally does. The company is partnering with others versus building. Where as Google is doing the opposite building versus partnering. Further there is a hesitancy among some companies to use Google's health solution due to the fact that the company lacks a clear privacy statement on patient information. Online advertising in the health care vertical command some of the juiciest add dollars and given the aging population it will be a long wave to ride.

Google's Ad Planner A Game Changer Many Nervous

Google's new web audience measurement service is intended to help advertisers identify the best places to buy online ads by providing them data on which web sites their target audiences visit. The goal is to connect advertisers and publishers and provide them with demographics and usage patterns of target audiences. The service is available to select parties at the moment but it is expect to be freely available to anyone shortly.

Presently, ad buyers use services such as comScore, Nielson, Hitwise, Compete.com and Quantcast to analyze audience usage patterns to allocate their media spend. Everyone of these services uses a different methodolgy to gauge usage and their results vary greatly. Ad buyers spend alot of money on these services for the data that they provide.

According to the WSJ, some ad executives are leery about placing even more power in the Google's hands. "For an advertiser, the last thing you want to do is to have your adviser be the same person you are spending your money with," says Sarah Fay, chief executive of Aegis North America, the media-buying giant owned by Aegis Group of the U.K.

Some ad executives say they are concerned that Google could use the data it compiles about their campaigns to make a business pitch to a competitor. They imagine a scenario in which the biggest online advertiser in a category is running its campaign through Google's ad-serving systems. Not only would Google be helping that marketer deliver ads to particular web sites; it would also be capturing data about which Web sites and types of ads work best. Advertising executives fear that Google could then resell that same intelligence to competitors.

Google's new tool could bring more efficiency to the process of buying online ads, ad executives say. Google already has one of the dominant systems for online ad-serving, which helps Web publishers manage their advertising sales and serve up ads each time a consumer opens one of their Web pages. The Web-audience data could be combined with the ad-serving system, so that advertisers would be able to find out whether they would reach the right audience before they committed to placing an ad. Existing ad-serving systems don't currently provide detailed Web-audience data about the sites where they place ads. By giving away the new tool, Google could presumably attract more ad business and shake up the web audience measurement business.

Ad executives weren't the only ones nervous. Today comScore's stock dropped 22% on the announcement of Google Ad Planner.

Visa Tries Social Marketing On Facebook

Visa will be giving away $100 in Facebook ad credits to the first 20,000 small businesses that download the Visa application on Facebook. The goal of the application is to connect small businesses on Facebook. Both Facebook and Visa hope to cash in on the 80,000-plus small business that have already signed up on Facebook.

Facebook hopes that if the businesses receiving the ad credits are impressed enough with the results they will continue marketing on the site. "That's what we certainly are hoping for," said Dan Rose, Facebook's VP of business development.

Google will provides software such as maps, calendars and more — to Visa's small business network. The Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur magazine provide articles to network members.

Visa will promote the effort with an awareness campaign beginning next month.

Start-Up Sues Google Potential $1 Billion In Play

LimitNone LLC, a tiny start-up that builds a tool for migrating customers off Microsoft's Outlook email software and on to Google’s Gmail as filed a trade secrets lawsuit against Google.

The suit claims that Google had initially promoted the migrating tool. Google then copied the idea and went into competition with LimitNone.

LimitNone is seeking reimbursement from Google of actual damages, attorney’s fees and punitive damages. LimitNone’s case details the company’s meetings starting in March 2007 with Google to build a tool it named, “gMove.” This tool was used to move the e-mail, address books and calendars of corporate customers from Microsoft’s Outlook to Gmail. David Rammelt, lead plaintiff’s attorney said that LimitNone had been told by Google that 50 million subscribers was "just too big to come from someone else." A simple calculation of the lost revenue for LimitNone "very quickly gets you up to about $950 million."

The case hangs on the fact that LimitNone claims it entered into a confidentiality deal with Google to share trade secrets of its e-mail migration tool with the search giant’s engineers, sales people and key Google Apps customers.

The meat of the case is the fact that Google introduced a free, competing e-mail migration tool earlier this year called "Google Email Uploader." The lawsuit alleges that this tool is "almost identical" to gMove and that "both operate under a similar conceptual design."

Following news that Google had decided to compete with it instead of continues its partnership, LimitNone shifted its business to focus on the emerging market for business software designed to run on the Apple's iPhone.

Wikipedia Entry On Tim Russert Gets Employee Fired

When Tim Russert died on June 13, NBC held off reporting the news for almost two hours and asked other TV networks to hold off reporting it so that his family vacationing in Italy could be notified first. However, long before Mr. Russert’s death was reported on air, it was on the Web, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia entry on Mr. Russert’s page was updated at 3:01 p.m., forty minutes before NBC made the announcement on air. His biography had the date of this death and it was rewritten in the past tense. Many journalists had heard something had happened to Mr. Russert but did not know the outcome because of the black out. So, when they searched for news on Tim Russert online many ended up on his Wikipedia page and learned the details of this death. Someone from IBS, a news reporting service had posted the entry.

The word quickly spread that the details of this death were posted on Wikipedia. However, as many landed on his Wikipedia page there we no details of this death. What happened? According to Wikipedia's records, 11 minutes after the first entry, someone working at IBS had deleted the date of death and turned all the past tenses back to present tenses.

IBS says a "junior-level employee" changed the Wikipedia entry to reflect Russert's death because he or she thought it was common knowledge. When NBC discovered the entry, and freaked out, someone else at IBS deleted the date of Russert's death and changed all of the verb tenses back.

IBS also said that the company had taken the necessary measures against the junior-level employee and apologized to NBC. NBC News said it was told the employee was fired.

The world has changed tremendously in the past 5 years. Today in the age of blogs, Wikipedia, MySpace, and Twitter, the news services do not have the same control they had even as recently as the build up to the Iraq war. Was the employee told about the news black out? What if the employee had learned of the news via Twitter from a friend? What should company policy be on such things. What if someone else that learned about it on Twitter went public with the information? The media is not the only party that has lost control; so have all of us. Every time each of us uses a search engine, for example, we have created a record that is not in our control. What are your thoughts?

Ballmer Says Google A One Trick Pony

In an interview with the Financial Times Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gives credit to Google for seeing the potential of search and innovating in search. Ballmer admits:

1. Microsoft didn't see the business model for search.
2. The five year development cycle of Windows partly to blame.
3. Online represents a huge opportunity for Microsoft.
4. Live Cashback is not a strategy to buy market share.
5. Cloud computing and world’s media moving online.
6. Google is a single product company.

Here is the interview transcript.

FINANCIAL TIMES: So, you finally got rid of that other guy. Now we want to know what you’re going to do.
STEVE BALLMER: Onward and upward, baby. Onward and upward.

FT: What does it mean to lose Bill Gates from his full-time role?
MR BALLMER: Well, in a way you lose a talent like Bill, you lose a talent like Bill. But the culture of the place is built on a lot of things. It’s not just built on the leaders; it’s built on the leaders and the experiences that we’ve had, and the successes and the failures. At some point it’s not what leaders say, it’s the accumulation of sort of direction and experiences, successes and failures. The culture builds up itself.

I think his legacy will sustain itself, the kinds of things, you know, Bill values - intelligence and intensity. I don’t think Bill going away actually will detract from the culture. I’ve seen this at Wal-Mart. I mean, Sam Walton has been gone now quite a while, and yet the culture lives on in many ways. So, I don’t really think that’s a very big deal at all.

FT: How have you prepared personally for this?
MR BALLMER: [In college] we had to read some passages from [Max] Weber on the routinisation of charisma, talking about how governments in this case primarily move on and transition after a charismatic leader. So, you could say I’ve thought a little bit, and I picked it up and dusted it back off and looked at it. The truth of the matter is the important thing is to point forward and to keep people pointed forward. This is a funny transition, because - how do I say this the right way? Bill started the company, but for the people in the company it’s as much my company almost as it is Bill’s, in a sense. So, it’s not like we’re passing it to let me call it a second generation. I feel relatively first generation, let me say it that way, to our employees. I’m not Bill, but I have some of that first generation fairy dust sprinkled over me, so to speak.

FT: Microsoft’s share price hasn’t done much for years. Why not?
MR BALLMER: Well, I think in general we’re not that inconsistent with most large cap stocks. [Also,] for all companies there is a period in which your stock is priced very high on the expectation of growth, and then you go through a period where you’re in “show me,” you’re going to do that growth. This is what the market is supposed to do, it’s supposed to bid your price up in advance of profit, if it thinks you’re going to have them, and then it holds on for a while until you can surprise the market with yet another surge beyond expectations.

So, I think we have grown into what people expected of us in the late ’90s, and now people are trying to decide what do they expect of us, and that gets down to essentially three or four key questions. Are we going to stay strong in the businesses where we have established ourselves? Are we going to be able to move into big, new businesses like online, TV, and phone? Are we going to continue to drive [the] enterprise business, because I think that’s a sleeper for many people, it’s been the thing that’s really propelled a lot of our growth over the last several years, and are we going to be able to get emerging markets really figured out with the high software piracy there?

You know, our share price was sort of on a different trajectory. Then we announced our bid for Yahoo, and that kind of changed the trajectory a little bit. As investors try to think, how are they going to succeed in online, what kind of investment is going to be required, how much value can they create, I feel very good about our prospects. Certainly I feel very good about our results. We’ve out-performed most of our industry in terms of profit growth over the last five years.

FT: The Yahoo bid was taken partly as a tacit admission that you needed to do something fairly radical. Was that a fair response?
MR BALLMER: No, it’s inaccurate. It may be fair; I can’t comment as to fair. In a sense online is our best deal, isn’t it? We’re small; the other guys are big. There’s a market out there. We have only one way to go, and it’s up, baby, up, up, up, up, up!

We thought we could accelerate the upside in a way that was value-creating. At the end of the day, Yahoo was not an online strategy. It was a way for us to accelerate our own online strategy. They didn’t want to sell. We were relatively disciplined about the financials You know, it’s funny, because we’re founders, I think [shareholders] wonder whether we really care about creating shareholder value, and yet I think we were far more disciplined than 95 out of 100 companies would be.

FT: What lessons are there from Microsoft’s late move into search?
MR BALLMER: I think we have to keep agile. I do fault us for the speed with which we dove into search, primarily because we didn’t see the business model. And I give Google credit for innovating in the business model around search. They did a nice job on that, and that’s why they won.

I think one of the mistakes we made, and I think we’ve said this before, is having a five-year gap between Windows releases did calcify our ability to react to anything, because there was a five-year window basically where a big part of our R&D resources were fairly locked in. It doesn’t mean everything should be a six-month cycle, I don’t believe in that, but we’ve got to have more flexibility in our R&D commitments than that.

FT: How do you deal with search now?
MR BALLMER: I think we have three things we’ve got to do. There are some things that we just have to, as we say, ante up to be in the game: relevance, cap-ex, responsiveness. There are areas in which we’re going to differentiate and make Google play catch-up. And then there are areas in which we’re trying to change the rules. I think Google is going to have to decide whether they want to come with us. If this Live Cashback thing is successful, they’re going to have to decide if they want to play the game or not. [Note: Microsoft’s Live Cashback service, announced last month, pays a rebate to internet users if they make a purchase after finding an online merchant through a Microsoft’s search engine.]

FT: Is Live Cashback a way to buy market share?
MR BALLMER: No. Well, I don’t know. If somebody else comes out with a product and says my product is better and cheaper, is that buying market share because they made the thing cheaper? That’s all we’ve really done here.

Search looks free, but, of course, search isn’t really free. It’s not free to the advertisers. So, what we’ve said is we’re going to change the way the money gets divided. In today’s world the search provider basically keeps everything, and we’ve said, look, we’re going to share that money differently, some to the advertiser, some to the user, and some to us. Is that buying market share? I think that’s called reinventing the business model in a way that makes the business more competitive, and we’ll see if it works or if it doesn’t.

I’ve got to tell you, in every - other than the battle with Open Source, every other competitor, I love being able to come into a room and saying we’re better and we’re cheaper. We’re going to try to say we’re better and we’re cheaper basically. I don’t think this is sort of the end of the story by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it tells you we’re going to do things a little differently.

We’re going to have to climb up one [market] share point at a time, one innovation at a time. I don’t think this is something that changes, flips overnight.

FT: Why hasn’t that approach worked so far? You’ve been at it for some time.
MR BALLMER: No, no, we’ve been building up the basic ante primarily. We had no search engine and we had no paid search engine. We had to build. Then we had to get one round of feedback on where we weren’t up to snuff. Then we had to start tactical differentiation. Now we’re starting some business model differentiation. We’ve got some UI innovation.

You know, the world isn’t very smart about technology businesses in the sense of thinking they move super quickly. Things do move quickly, there’s no question, but generally at the end of the day you have to be fairly patient and persistent with innovation in order for it to beak through.

FT: A lot of people are now saying Yahoo was Web 1.0 and would have been difficult to do, and you should instead be looking at the next thing - Facebook or social networking, whatever comes after that.
MR BALLMER: I think people don’t understand what they’re talking about. At the end of the day, this is about the ad platform. This is not about just any one of the applications. The most important application for the foreseeable future is search. It’s where you start things. It’s where you express intent. It is important.

I don’t think we can say, okay, well, we’re going to be in the ad platform business, and we’re going to do it just on the strength of non-search based assets. We have to be in the ad business, and we’ve got to have a good chunk. We don’t have to dominate, but we’d better have a darn good chunk of the search market over time, and we’re working away at it.

FT: How long are you going to do this job for?
MR BALLMER: I’ve told everybody I think I’d like to do it until my youngest goes to college, which would be nine years from now. I mean, it might wind up less, the board might not want me here, but that’s kind of my life planning horizon.

FT: How do you want to be judged? What goals have you set yourself for that period?
MR BALLMER: I set two kinds of goals: innovation goals, and what I’ll call relative goals.

The relative goals: I’d like to see our company increase its share of profit from all companies who have software as a core capability. I’d like to see us increase our share of the pool. What we are is we’re a software innovation machine. We can turn that machine and apply it in different places. We’re not just a desktop company or an enterprise company; we’re an online company, we’re a software embedded in devices company. And we should be able to outgrow the rest of them.

We’re not going to do that without the right innovation. [That] rolls up into five or six big themes. How do you redefine the way people interact with technology, big screen, little screen, medium-sized screen? How do you redefine the user experience and redefine the definition of how these devices relate to each other? We’ve got some big ideas in that area. I’d like to get those accomplished in the next nine years.

All of the world’s media advertising communications is moving online. I would love to be the company that does the best job at helping people put information online, create new forms of information and communication for that online world, and then that helps people - helps businesses monetise them and consumers consume them.

[We’re] going to move to a world in which more and more of computing is done in the cloud as opposed to corporate datacentres We’ve got a big initiative about transforming essentially enterprise computing and taking costs and complexity out of that.

Last but not least, the ability to let people not only get at information but then to analyse it and use it, we’re already talking about this some in the context of consumer search. We say it’s not really about search; it’s about the task. How do I find and act, find and analyse, find and get insight. I think we haven’t even scratched the surface of innovation in that area.

FT: What sets Microsoft apart as it pursues all these things?
MR BALLMER: I think we’re the only company in our industry that’s got any track record of persistence. Some companies get it right once. We’ve gotten it right twice, because we stay after it.

FT: Is that he core attribute of this company, persistence?
MR BALLMER: I think our long term - I’d call it our long term approach, which is a combination of taking on bold challenges, being patient, being persistent, being relentless. There’s an accountability and in some senses you’ve got to be relentlessly accountable and you also have to be willing to stick with things. We don’t pull back; it’s not what we do.

Sometimes we get shareholders who will question us on that, but I think it’s our great strength. It’s what built Windows, it’s what build Office, it’s what built our enterprise business, and what’s going to let us build the search business. It’s what letting us build a TV business.

FT: Have you learned anything from competing with Google, for instance their speed?
MR BALLMER: I haven’t seen speed out of Google really. I mean, come on. They have one product. It’s been the same for five years - and they have Gmail now, but they have one product that makes all their money, and it hasn’t changed in five years.

I mean, they have a gestalt, but gestalt is gestalt. Let’s talk about the reality. The reality is one product makes 98 percent of all of their money, search. Oh, they have two products, AdWords and AdSense. They have two products, both search-based, that make all of their money, and it hasn’t changed a lot in five years. I’m not giving them a hard time, but we’ve got to learn - if you say, what have you learned, we try to learn from people’s successes, not from people’s gestalt. The gestalt is yet to be proven.

Interactive Map of Obama's Journey To The White House

Interactive Map Of McCain's Journey To The White House

Sergey, You Can't Be Serious!

Sergey you can’t be serious. Dinging users 20 cents every time they use Google CheckOut! This is addition to hefty fee you are charging users and merchants for using the service. Yet somehow everyone seems to think the service is FREE. Furthermore, you are also dinging users 20 cents every time they cancel an order. You can’t be serious.

Even worse, merchants are charged 20 cents every time a user cancels an order - even if it is of no fault of the merchant and on plain simple errors made by users. Over 10 million transactions that could add up to $2 million dollars that merchants and users are out of pocket. Do you need everyone’s 20 cents? You can't be serious.

Let's get serious. The service is full of bugs. The callback API malfunctions half the time. It is not even a reliable payment service as users are led to believe. In fact, it is merely a check out service.

In many instances, users' credit cards are charged for goods that never arrive. The goods never arrive because the merchant does not receive the order nor the payment. The money stays in Google’s master account. Users think that the merchant has taken their money and not sent the goods. Next, you send the user an email asking them to rate their satisfaction with the merchant. The merchant can’t deliver the product because they have not received the order nor have they been paid for it because the money is sitting in Google’s account. Seriously Sergey, you can't be serious about not being serious!

Google Apps Crashes And Stays Grounded

The Google service that boasts that any developer working in their basement, can all of a sudden work at the scale of Google using its infrastructure with high reliability got a rude awakening today. The service crashed and remains grounded. A few weeks ago Google's Pete Koomen boasted that signups were "reaching 150,000 people" per week, however there was no mention of it on the official blog to developers about the service being down. I would think any service that is signing up that many people per week would have the courtesy and responsibility to inform their customers. After all you are selling them RELIABILITY. Further, if there were that many developers I would think there would be a BIG OUTBURST. But nothing. Not even a whimper. How can that be?

Webinar - All About Google Gadgets - 6/19 at 12PST

Want to know where Google is going with their popular Gadgets project? Join the Visual Ajax User Group webinar Thursday, June 19 at 12 PST.

This month's meeting will feature Adam Sah, Architect, Google Gadgets, on Ajax-enabled Widgets/Gadgets and Ads. Adam has been the founder and technical visionary behind 4 successful startups.

Adam will give you the inside scoop on how to develop new Google gadgets, use gadgets in your Ajax applications and demystify Google ads via gadgets.

Register for this webinar!

If you are in San Francisco, you can also register to attend in person by emailing rsvp@visualajax.org

If you missed our past meetings, here are write-ups:

• A Dojo Tutorial: Saving Ourselves From the Unweb - Alex Russell of Sitepen
  
• WYSIWYG Ajax Tooling: Making Widgets Toolable - Steve Orvell and Scott Miles of WaveMaker

NY Times Father's Day Gift To Jerry Yang: Its's No Longer Your Baby

To: Jerry Yang
From: Joe Nocera
Re: Shafting Yahoo’s Shareholders

Dear Jerry,

Congratulations — you pulled it off. You got Microsoft to walk away from your beloved Yahoo for good. The final word went out on Thursday...

...announcing a Google deal just a few hours after you and Microsoft revealed that your talks had officially ended. According to your press release, Yahoo will soon begin running ads sold by your archrival...

...you’ve chosen to become a pawn of the most dominant company on the Internet. How exactly is that going to lead to a brighter future for Yahoo?

...Here’s the problem, Jerry. It’s not your baby. It hasn’t been since 1996, when Yahoo went public.

...It sure didn’t look as though you ever took those negotiations seriously. You rarely brought any of your investment bankers... and sometimes the only person you brought along was Mr. Filo — who isn’t even on Yahoo’s board!

...Yang engineered an ingenious defense creating huge incentives for a massive employee walkout in the aftermath of a change of control... The plan gives each of Yahoo’s 14,000 full-time employees the right to quit his or her job and pocket generous termination benefits at any time during the two years following a takeover, by claiming a ‘substantial adverse alteration’ in job duties or responsibilities.”

... it actually encourages Yahoo employees to quit after a takeover, by guaranteeing them a financial windfall that Microsoft would have to pay. And since it cannot be upended even if the board is ousted, or the company is taken over, it also discourages anyone from trying to take over Yahoo.

Jerry, you’re a billionaire because people all over the world bought your stock, and trusted you to do right by them. That’s the compact you make when you take a company public: you get to be really rich, but in return, you have an obligation to do everything you can to ensure that shareholders get a healthy return on their investment. It doesn’t matter that you would like Yahoo to remain independent, or that you can’t stand Microsoft. Your feelings aren’t supposed to get in the way of your fiduciary duty.

A takeover by Microsoft was your last, best hope of rewarding your long-suffering shareholders. Now that opportunity is gone. It says here Mr. Icahn is not going to go as gently into the night as Mr. Ballmer did — and if I were a betting man, I would be taking odds that your days as Yahoo’s C.E.O. are numbered.

It’ll be better for everyone to have someone in that role who understands who he’s supposed to be working for. Wouldn’t you agree?

For entire NYT Post.

Yahoo To Pay Google $250 Million Break Up Fee

I am puzzled, was Yahoo in such dire straits that they could not negotiate a better deal? Yahoo has agreed to pay Google a break up fee of $250 million if the partnership falls apart within the first two years.

If the Services Agreement is terminated by either party within 24 months ... Yahoo! is required to pay to Google the sum of $250,000,000...

Under the proposed deal Yahoo anticipates on making $250 million to $450 million in operating cash flow in the first 12 months following implementation. On a profit basis Yahoo could probably be even losing money.

Not only is Yahoo in a position to lose money but in 2 years its search advertising business will be obliterated by Google, Yahoo would have become dependent on Google for its search advertising and in the process handed Google a multi billion dollar monopoly.

See: Yahoo's Casualties in Search War

Sergey Sets Sights On Space

It's a plane! No - it's a bird! Wait! It's our social networking expert Sergey. The San Jose Mercury is reporting that Sergey plans on going to outer space in 2010, via an investment in Space Adventures, which books flights on Russian Soyuz rockets. Sergey has invested $5 million into the venture that is in addition to the $25 million that Google has already invested via the Google Lunar Project and the XPrize Foundation. Other billionaires such as Tabula Rasa's Lord British have paid as much as $35 million for a seat to fly to outer space in addition to the $100 million he has invested in the project. Lord British emailed me to say that he is presently in training for this space flight and plans to orbit the earth sometime in October. See also: Shoot for the Stars

We have had a challenge...with social networking... I hope to be able to report more progress in the future ... I was fortunate to meet with Lord British of Tabula Rasa and hear his amazing story about humanity's last stand.

Search Report: Google Up, Yahoo & MSN Down

Google accounted for 68.29 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending May 31, 2008, Hitwise announced today. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 19.95, 5.89 and 4.23 percent respectively. The remaining 41 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.63 percent of U.S. searches.

Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers

Domain	May-08	Apr-08	May-07
www.google.com	68.29%	67.90%	65.13%
search.yahoo.com	19.95%	20.28%	20.89%
search.msn.com	5.89% *	6.26% *	7.61% *
www.ask.com	4.23%	4.17%	3.92%

Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending 5/31/ 2007, 4/26/08, 5/26/2007 from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. * - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com.

In the U.K. market, Google search properties (Google.co.uk and Google.com) accounted for 87 percent of all UK searches in May 2008 representing a 12 percent increase compared to May 2007. Yahoo! search properties accounted for 4.09 percent of UK searches in May 2008, a 2 percent increase compared to April 2008. MSN search properties accounted for 3.72 percent and Ask search properties accounted for 3.07 percent of searches. MSN increased two percent compared to April 2008 and Ask increased 6 percent.

Percentage of U.K. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers

Domain	May-08	Apr.-08	May-07
Google Properties	87.30%	87.69%	78.28%
Yahoo! Properties	4.09%	4.01%	8.58%
Microsoft Properties	3.72%	3.65%	5.46%
Ask Properties	3.07%	2.89%	4.96%

Note: Data is based on UK Internet usage over the four week rolling periods (ending 5/31/ 2007, 4/26/08, 5/26/2007) from the Hitwise sample of 8.4 million UK Internet users. Note that the percentages for the search properties include the .uk and .com domains.

Google an Increasing Source of Traffic to Key U.S. Industries
Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing May 2008 to May 2007, the Travel, News and Media, Entertainment, Business and Finance, Sports, Online Video and Social Networking categories showed double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

U.S. Category Upstream Traffic from Search Engines and Google - May 2008

Category	Percent of Category Traffic from Search Engines, May-08	Percentage Change in Share of Traffic From, Search Engines, May-08 - May-07	Percent of Category Traffic from Google, May-08	Percent Change in Share of Traffic From Google, May-08 - May-07
Health and Medical	45.76%	3%	30.86%	5%
Travel	34.81%	11%	24.26%	21%
Shopping and Classifieds	25.48%	2%	16.84%	8%
News and Media	21.70%	7%	14.53%	10%
Entertainment	24.33%	17%	15.76%	22%
Business and Finance	18.15%	14%	11.73%	22%
Sports	13.09%	17%	8.81%	24%
Online Video*	29.94%	37%	20.78%	52%
Social Networking*	16.50%	18%	9.98%	21%

All figures are based on U.S. data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million Internet users.
* denotes custom category
Source: Hitwise

Social Networking - Leave It To The Pros

Yet another social network is shutting down. This time is it Verizon's social network. The social network which let users write blogs, post photos, and discuss in forums, will close June 16, 2008. The existing social network on the Verizon website will be moved over to the Verizon page on Facebook. Verizon jumped into social networking like many other companies, thinking it would be easy. They even branded it as "Join The Conversation" however they soon realized that branded social network wasn’t worth the effort and they are moving to where the conversation is. In January, Conde Nast folded its social network called Flip into a Facebook app less than a year after launching. Flip was a social network for teen girls. Conde's strategy was to get teen girls to migrate to Flip from Facebook and soon Conde discovered that they did not stand a chance said Sarah Chubb, its president. "If you're a teenage girl, all your friends are already there. And every friend you might want to have but haven't met yet is already there," she says. "What is possibly going to make you go somewhere else?" When it comes to monetization of social networks even the pros are having a hard time. How hard you ask - MySpace and all of the other FIM properties say saw Q3 revenue drop to $210 million from $233 million in Q2. This is despite experiencing strong growth. Also, about 30 percent of MySpace's revenue comes from a 3-year guaranteed deal from Google, which Google is losing money on. We have some words of wisdom from Sergey. Source: Google Conference Call - Sergey Brin Speaking

We have had a challenge ... with social networking inventory as a whole and some of the monetization work we were doing there didn’t pan. We’re running lots of experi- ments. We had some significant improvements but as I said, some of the things we were working on in Q4 didn’t really pan out and there were some disappointments there. ...I don’t think we have the killer best way to advertise and monetize the social networks yet. I hope to be able to report more progress in the future ...

Google Got a Little Too Big For Me

It is being reported that the man who held the toughest job at Google, Shashi Seth, head of monetization for YouTube has left the company for greener pastures - after only a year on the job.

"I think part of being a Googler is that you like smaller environments, and I think Google got a little big for me," says Seth.

This is yet another indication that monetizing video is a lot harder than many thought it would be despite YouTube's huge viral popularity and lead in the online video sharing market. Irrespective of the fact that YouTube made $80 million in '07 and is estimated to make $125 million this year, the Viacom lawsuit is a stumbling block. Even if Google manages to keep copyright violation payoffs to the $400 million allocated for that purpose in their $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube, they have a long video row to hoe in terms of pulling more than a revenue pittance per video view. YouTube is experimenting with video ads with text overlay ads, expanded text ads, placement targetting image ads, and click-to-play video ads.

There has been a steady stream of exoduses from Google in the last year. In March Sheryl Sandberg, Google's Vice President of Global Online Sales left to become the chief operating officer at Facebook. In November, Gokul Rajaram, aka Google Adsense God, who was involved with the launch of Google Adsense quit. “When we started AdSense, it was just me and four engineers. The night before we launched, Sergey spent five hours with me testing the system and pointing out bugs” said Gokul. Not too long ago, Bret Taylor, who was one of the key people behind Google Maps left to start Friendfeed.

Facebook Platform Now Open Source

Facebook announced today that it will be opening up its code. Dubbed