Tightly integrated with my Google contacts it takes a big chunk out of that side of the big FB. Why?

My contact list is mine.  It’s wirelessly synchronised to my iPhone and I can export it any time in CSV or vCard format.  As well as the fulfilling the principle of portability this means it’s also populated by people I actually communicate with – rather than those I sat next to at school.  My actual phone list is far more selective than Facebook’s (though that’s bound to come in useful at random points in the future).

Likewise with the photos.  PicasaWeb lets me download the lot and securely and selectively share with people who may not have Google accounts.  The service isn’t quite as polished as Flickr yet but for sharing albums of occasions and holidays with family and real friends (not FBF) it does the job better.  Photos of places that I was pleased with might make me dither between Flickr and Panoramio.

This is clearly part of Google’s drive to weave social structures into the web rather than have Facebook stitch their own  patch on top of it.  It won’t succeed overnight but if it can pull the threads together nicely there might be… [metaphor deforms under strain] …a nice jumper in it.

It’s an blogged update from Jyri Engeström, a co-founder of Jaiku (the micro-blogging service that Google bought). The wtf news is that Jaiku has been a 20% project up until now, with the sweetener:

In spite of the decision to not throw resources at building Jaiku into an independent Web brand, recall that the acquisition announcement stated that “Activity streams and mobile presence are important areas where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users.” Of course this statement still holds true, and you can bet your Android that there are completely new Wow!’s in store.

I wish – but I’m waiting to see.  Google’s track record in producing social software ain’t so great.  The single point that is worth reading again and again until you feel it’s wisdom in each of your 140 chars is below:

This is a step in the direction we all want to go: away from the tyranny of silos towards freely interoperable social networks. People should be able to post and follow status updates across servers just like they send email. No single service, no matter how large and powerful, is the platform. The Web is the platform.

Yet… we need a demonstration.  It’s not enough to produce a framework: you need a game-changing app to convince.  Can the Android-ecosystem come up with the goods in the new year?  Fingers crossed.

Kind of lite version of Second Life from Google which requires a simple download and a Google account. I’m guessing this is a strategic attempt for Google to stick a virtual rocket under their social networking effort. Coming to Orkut and Facebook soon, perhaps?

If someone had told me about this I can imagine I’d be sceptical; the bells and whistles of MSN turn me right off. But whilst there’s plenty to be said for a text-only chatroom, the strangeness of disembodied words stands out when you’ve got a chance to.. just be present.

Pros and cons, then. The urge to customise stuff to match your style is irresistible. But it’s nowhere near the level of sophistication of Second Life and it regularly crashes out. Sometimes the crash handler itself crashes, causing a cascade of apologetic alerts. Also, it’s only on Windows. It allowed PicasaWeb photo album feeds to be displayed in picture frame but that was buggy and it off right now. You can similarly have virtual TVs looping YouTube clips but that gets annoying very quickly. Public rooms devoted to sex seem to be irrepressible currently.

Still, I like the general idea and implementation and I think I could be a great place for certain small communities to just hang out. Just wish they’d done some testing on it first.

It’s a smart move to encourage users to correct and enrich their geo-content. Depending on your philosophy, you may prefer to contribute to OpenStreetmap but satellite images don’t come cheap and there’s no question that Google can do it bigger and slicker.

The general perception is that Google Maps is a public web utility anyway so why not contribute (except you live outside the US and Australasia)?

Google started it by releasing  a couple of useful bits.  Google Search for Nokia was supposed to be a shortcut to the Google mobile search page but happened to also include a significant browser upgrade which made it easier to navigate pages with lots of links with a virtual pointer.  On top of this, they released an extension to Map API which makes it a doddle to generate static map images without scripting.  Very useful for embedding within mobile pages!

In Selly Oak, opposite the landmark Selly Sausage, there was a raid on the security van loading the cash machine.  I just missed it by about 10 minutes judging by the stream of police cars that streaked past whilst I was waiting for the bus.  When I got down there I took some pics on the mobile and used them in some on-the-spot Bodder reportage.  I also tried tweeting it via SMS but it didn’t seem to get through, reinforcing my impression of unreliability for this aspect of Twitter.

Hot desking at the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Centre (EIC) seems to be working out pretty well.  I can still access my university staff account on the wireless network via my laptop so I’m nicely set-up with a proper work environment.  This helps me stay focussed with the added bonus of being able to hobnob with some of the SPEED sparks.  Hoping I can enjoy their hospitality a while longer and maybe get some feedback on the evolving Bodder model.

This has got to put a dampener on Twitter who were probably hoping to get snapped up by the big G in the same way Blogger.com was. I think it’s good news on the whole. It’s positively disruptive. It breaks Twitter’s conceptual dominance on mobile updates and it’ll help define the difference between micro-blogging and presence. Presence is an underdeveloped concept and it’ll be interesting to watch how these services deal with the issues once they recognise them.

New user registrations have closed for the time being as Google gets stuck in. If you want to try it out, and I know you, I can invite you.

Anyway, I was heartened to read a report that Google is planning to ‘out open’ Facebook. This means taking on Facebook by offering more freedom and control to the user.

It always puzzled me why Google neglected the crucial realm of social networking whilst it was putting out dominant applications for mail, calendar, chat and feed reading. Okut is home-grown but clunky. It makes total sense if Google is really rethinking how social networks should operate and working on that rather than trying to out-Facebook Facebook.

So, I’ve just dusted off the old Orkut profile in anticipation and was pleased to see it is no longer ugly and unreliable. Not yet as polished as Facebook nor, of course, as ubiquitous but if it helps toward an open ideal then I’m ready to cut it some slack.

This follows the commendable pattern of Google to buy something cool and then adapt it into a free, public release.  It did this with a company called Keyhole that got turned into the vertigo-inducing Google Earth. A nice tie-in is that you can place your models of buildings and landmarks in your own Google Earth. 

This, along with anything else you create, can be stashed in the 3D warehouse to share with the world.  I uploaded a birdtable.

First of all it's interesting to note what Google is up against (apart from the anticipatory hype of this essential tool). Yahoo has had a calendar for as long as I care to remember. A lot of people use it; I did for a while. MSN also pitched in with theirs a good while back so what's new here? In a word, the gaggle of technical tricks and philosophies that gets called Web2.0 where the ideal is an application that is as least as painless as a desktop application and extra handy by being online and shareable.

People have been expecting Google to fell the existing calendar systems from Yahoo and MSN as a matter of course and then go on to give the nimble upstarts a run for their money. Since these specialists exercise their money quite vigorously the odds are not impossible. Look at YouTube and Google Video.

On to the round-up:

Google Calendar does the minimum to keep up. Drag and drop events. Natural language event creation. Sharing and exporting. The only thing kind of new is the provision of an ad hoc message board for each event which should make parties easier to organise. Whilst I'm at it, Google needs to add birthdays as special events. A cake, a year and a link to a contact would be nice.

I'm still not sure whether Gcal beats Kiko, which became the smartest kid on the block after a major upgrade. Previously slick but simple, it's now slick and well-featured. This means it pushes past the well-featured but rickety planzo and the slick and reasonably-featured 30 boxes.

Let me know what you think. 

Google has barely released another service yesterday which addresses a particular niche; newbie webmasters. Remember Geocities and Tripod from the late 90s? Annoying ads and clunky interfaces? They’ve not really changed much, so competition from Google is well overdue.

I put a test page up at sixball.googlepages.com and I have to say, it’s pretty sweet. I dabbled with the CoffeeCup HTML Editor and Mozilla composer ages back to create pages but soon resigned myself to hand-coding my sites. I’ve never felt inclined to touch Frontpage.

I might now seriously consider using the Google page creator to quickly knock-up simple pages and would seriously recommend it to the many people I know who have a desire for a custom website without the urge to hack HTML and CSS.

Since there is currently a total absence of ads on the service, people who have cheaply bought www.theirowndomain.com will be able redirect it to googlepages site without looking cheap.