Social Apps

Google, following plans announced by two biggest social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook, has launched their own open social engine called Friends Connect.  Friends Connect allows website owners to add social networking functionalities without any complicated programming. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, Orkut, and others to interact on their site. Then main feature of Friends Connect is Open Social which will allow third parties to build and develop applications.

The Friends Connect is available to selected partners now

 Link

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Friends Connect, Google, MySpace, OpenSocial

Representatives from Google, Yahoo, and MySpace outlined the initial plans for the OpenSocial Foundation, a new nonprofit organization whose purpose is to organize the various aspects of the platform. With an early framework already in place at OpenSocial.org, the foundation will primarily serve as a resource hub and communication portal for the developer community.

Link

Technorati Tags: Google, OpenSocial, OpenSocial.org, Yahoo. MySpace

Google announced a new tool for publishers with the beta launch of Google Ad Manager. Directed at addressing the ad management and serving needs of publishers with smaller sales teams, Google Ad Manager is a free, hosted ad and inventory management tool that can help publishers sell, schedule, deliver and measure their directly-sold and network-based ad inventory.

It offers an intuitive and simple user experience so publishers can spend more time working with their advertisers and less time on their ad management solution. And by providing detailed inventory forecasts and tracking at a very granular level, Ad Manager helps publishers maximize their inventory sell-through rates.

Google Ad Manager effectively complements the DoubleClick Revenue Center, which is focused on publishers with larger sales teams.

Link

Technorati Tags: ad manager, DoubleClick, Google, Google Ad Manager

User-generated news site Digg has been working with investment bank Allen & Co. for a few months now, and pitching big tech and media companies on a sale.

Four companies are in heavy due diligence with Digg - two media/news companies, and two big Internet companies - Google and Microsoft. And Google and Microsoft are on the verge of making their bids.

Digg is prepared to take less than the $300 million.

Link 

Technorati Tags: Digg, Google, Microsoft

Google released the Google Social Graph API, which will allows developers to build apps that can link up people on the Web. The API takes the publicly declared relationships about your accounts, on Twitter, MySpace.com, and other social network sites, and then your friends and their accounts, and makes that information publicly accessible for new apps. So, when you join a new network built using the API, you won’t have rebuild your social-network contact list.

Link

Technorati Tags: API, apps, Google, MySpace, social apps, social graph API, Twiiter

Here is the list of companies utilizing Google’s OpenSocial:

Example Applications

Technorati Tags: Google, OpenSocial, social networking

Google is working on a Wikipedia-style online repository of user-submitted “knols,” which the company said stands for “a unit of knowledge.”

“Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it,” Google vice president of engineering Udi Manber wrote in a post on the company’s blog.

“There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it.”

Link

Technorati Tags: advertising, Google, Knols, Wikipedia