The interesting situation is whether they abuse their position in relation to the setting of standards for the industry…

At that time, there really was no evidence of this kind of thing except for their development of Google Wave, PubSubHubbub and the new Salmon protocol. I did not think these items were much of an “evil leaning” until I read some news this week.

First we have the release of the Google Go programming language. Go is described as “a systems programming language, expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected”. In the announcement, they talk about what go could do:

Go is a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing, a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, plus some cool features like true closures and reflection.

Want to write a server with thousands of communicating threads?

New languages are created all the time, so you would not think this is a big deal. However, it comes from a company that has a vested interest in the way you develop applications and websites. At least it did not seem like a big deal until I put it together with the announcement of SPDY:

SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.

So over the last few months, a few of us here at Google have been experimenting with new ways for web browsers and servers to speak to each other, resulting in a prototype web server and Google Chrome client with SPDY support.

This definitely puts Google into the territory of uncomfortable developments. If Google was not a major search engine that cared about how quickly they can crawl sites or a major web application provider that cared about how quickly the application responds to user actions, I would feel much better. However, they have a very significant interest in how quickly things move on the web. I can understand that everyone benefits from this, but Google probably benefits more than the user. This still does not really push them into evil territory though.

At the end of the week, I read about the one thing that made this all very possibly, damned close to evil. Your PageRank may soon depend on how fast your site loads:

Not long after that Google’s Matt Cutts has an interview with Mike McDonald from WebProNews were Matt lets the world know that Google is seriously looking at making the page load time a part of the algorithm used to calculate a web site’s PageRank. The idea being that the faster your site loads the better that will affect your overall score as calculated by Google and the better placement you’ll have in search results.

Now let’s look at Ed Richardson’s comment again, “The interesting situation is whether they abuse their position in relation to the setting of standards for the industry.” So, if you own over 70% of the search market, you are planning to release a new language that allows you to build faster and more concurrent servers that all talk this new faster SPDY standard, and you are saying that speed will be a part of your ranking algorithm for search results, you are using the monopoly hammer. There is another side issue to this problem that comes from a quote in the Inquisitr post:

Douglas Karr from Marketing Tech Blog doesn’t think so and he goes as far as to suggest that this is leaning to being evil.

How does a small personal blog hosted on GoDaddy for a few dollars compete with a company hosted on a platform that costs thousands of dollars with loadsharing, caching, web acceleration or cloud technologies?

This means that smaller bloggers may be pushed down in the rankings because of these new developments and not given the same chance to compete against larger companies when it comes to search. Now, I am not Google-hating, but I am trying to raise awareness of what is happening. Google is using their dominant position in search and the internet in general to move things in the direction they see fit. We need to be very careful about this trend of events.

This does not include the ideas that Google is building the Chrome browser which is focused on making JavaScript run faster or the new Chrome OS which is an internet-focused operating system that is likely to run on netbooks and other devices. I know people may consider this all conspiracy theories or just hating on a dominant player, but it is a disturbing trend. I just thought everyone should know

Disclosure: I use Google Search, GMail, Google Reader and Google Apps on a regular basis. I also do not see this changing anytime soon as they are the best products for me right now.

The longer I work in our industry the more I’m starting to think that most women never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Thankfully, the next day we see a counterpoint from Sarah Stokely. Disappointingly, she admits that it is tremendously difficult to keep women in tech for various reasons. In many cases, I can summarize the idea as technology tends to be a “good old boys” network. If you have ever worked at a tech company or a software development organization, you would understand why women may not want to work there. Sarah does offer a piece of advice:

if we really want to change the under representation of women in tech, and make sure we attract the finest minds we can, someone needs to budge and admit ‘we need to change things around’. Pointing fingers at each other while saying “I don’t need to do anything differently” is going to achieve exactly zip.

In addition to this, I think women need more role models in technology that are women. If girls cannot look up to a woman who has been successful in a male-dominated field, they will likely not pursue it. With this in mind, I decided to come up with a list of women bloggers and technologists that we should all be listening to. I apologize in advance to any women that I missed and should be included.

1. Kathy Sierra – Mostly known for her Heads First series of books, but generally a programming geek. Disappointingly, she no longer blogs, but does give us 140-character goodness on Twitter.
2. Valeria Maltoni - Not entirely a technical person, but she gives you an excellent look at how the business looks at things like social media.
3. Sarah Perez – Currently blogging full time, but she used to be a system administrator. You can find her on Read Write Web and Microsoft’s Channel 10.
4. Leah Culver – Programming geek on various startups like Pownce and now with Six Apart.
5. Corvida – Blogger, web designer, general technologist and social media maven. She blogs at SheGeeks, but you are probably more likely to find her at the current hot conference.
6. Tamar Weinberg – She seems to write for everyone at some point, but her home blog is Techipedia. She is also the author of The New Community Rules and a social media consultant.
7. Marissa Mayer – Obviously she needs very little introduction, but she actually is a software engineer and received her MS in Computer Science from Stanford.
8. Charlene Li – Formerly an analyst at Forrester and co-author of Groundswell. Most likely everyone is already listening to her. She started her own consulting company called the Altimeter Group.
9. Kara Swisher – More of a journalist than technologist, but she has been covering technology forever. She is included more for her take-no-prisoners style and the fact that she is not afraid of a fight.

Admittedly, there are probably several other bloggers and technologists that I should include, but this list should get us all moving in the right direction.

I don’t mean to be too grouchy, but this looks like just one more sweetheart Silicon Valley deal that has limited imagination and represents a lost opportunity for the kind of innovation everyone expects these kinds of companies to drive.

Marshall does have a point. Why make a big deal out of something like this? First, LinkedIn does not really want to be a purely stodgy old business network. It really wants to be Facebook, but for your business connections. They know they have opportunities to grow that they might be missing. Otherwise, why add status updates to LinkedIn at all? By making this “partnership” they add some of the Twitter buzz to LinkedIn.

In reality, this is more about not missing the boat. Twitter has become the de facto standard for microblogging. I am not saying this due to their level of traffic. If that were true, we would be saying this about Facebook. The difference is that you need to write an application on Facebook that meets specific requirements, and users need to install and approve the application before it can post updates for the user. That really limits what data gets into Facebook from third party applications.

Twitter has a read/write API that has been used for ages now. There are third party clients that people depend on and various applications like Twitterfeed and Tweetmeme use it as well. A read/write API is not news, but the number of people that use it is definitely news. More importantly, let’s look at who is using the API:

• LinkedIn
• MySpace
• Facebook (through applications)
• FriendFeed
• FourSquare
• BrightKite
• Google Reader
• Amazon

And, there are tons of smaller applications that write to Twitter as well. There are some interesting points to note as well. Three of the world’s most popular social networks push status updates to Twitter. Most of the mobile-location applications post updates to Twitter. Google Reader now allows you to post shared stories to Twitter. Finally, Amazon made it simpler to post affiliate links to Twitter.

Given that all of these applications work with Twitter, it is safe to assume that Twitter has become the infrastructure that the founders have always desired. So, if you are developing an application that works with social media in some way, there are two questions you need to ask yourself. First, how are you integrating with Facebook? Second, how are you integrating with Twitter?

First, to compliment their lists launch, they give us the List Widget. This widget allows you to embed the tweets of a list on your website. By itself, this is not major news, but we have not seen a new widget for a while.

Also this week, we got a small taste of trend curation. Twitter announced that they are finally going to do something about the trending topics:

we’re starting to experiment with improvements to trends that will help you find more relevant tweets. Specifically, we’re working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful.

This is interesting because it shows another step in the fight against spam. However, there is also no mention of whether what they are doing affects all searches or this will be a new feature or whether this is being put into the API. At this point, it almost sounds like it will be a web only feature for now.

We also saw the limited rollout of retweets. This has been talked about for a while, and the API changes have been in the works for quite some time as well. However, the Twitter.com implementation is purely a visual idea, not as much a data idea.

Finally, there were a few really new tidbits this week that make the week very interesting. Twitter posted a note on their status blog about a new notification feature:

We’re starting a limited test of notifications on twitter.com for when you have new tweets. So if one of the folks you follow has tweeted since you loaded your homepage, you’ll get a little notice saying “1 new tweet” that, when clicked, will display the new content.

This is not a shockingly new feature, it has been implemented on the search results pages for ages. However, the only reason you really need it is if you want people to know that something has been updated. Again, this is purely a Twitter.com feature and has no impact on the API.

They also announced that the Twitter web site will be available in Spanish. Localization is always a good thing if you are targeting a global audience. However, the question of why could arise. If you are dependent upon third party clients, and you expect the developer community to serve the users while you focus on infrastructure, localization is the last thing on your mind. So, why add localization? Well, if we have visual cues for retweets, a nice list implementation, notifications when new tweets have arrive and a better implementation for trending topics all available on Twitter.com, it almost sounds like you are sending a message to your developer community. It really looks like Twitter is beefing up its web client in order to draw more users back to the web. This is a great idea if you want to use display advertising as your revenue model.

There was another interesting note that came from Jesse Stay this morning. It seems like Twitter may be developing an iPhone application.

Twitter has long been criticized for the lack of a good native mobile client.  They have also admitted in the past that a new version of at least the mobile web client is in the roadmap.  Could they be taking this a step further and building an entire iPhone app out of it?

This raises an interesting question as well. If they are improving their web client and they are developing their own iPhone app, are they changing the rules? Are they finally going to compete with all of the third party applications that have sprouted up over the past few years? Jesse also brings up a very good point in his post, “your greatest competitor could just be your supplier”. Twitter developers have been put on notice, Twitter is improving its own applications and may be coming after you. So, how is that Facebook integration coming along?

First, we can look at the Google Commerce Search announcement. This is another foray into e-commerce for Google, where they have struggled significantly. However, this one has a good chance of sticking around as it puts e-commerce into Google’s core competency, search:

Search quality is a big factor in changing visitors to buyers online, and in making customers happy too. Visitors spend an average of just eight seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website, so having a good search tool is important for turning visitors into buyers. Google Commerce Search is hosted by and uses Google search technology to make online retail searching both fast and customizable — visitors to your online store can sort by category, price, brand or any other attribute.

This is an interesting move given what else Google has in its product list. If you combine Google Sites, Google Checkout and Google Commerce Search, you basically have all of the makings of a hosted e-commerce site. Granted it would not be entirely easy to setup, but these are all steps in that direction. This will definitely be an interesting choice for smaller e-commerce stores that can not afford the major platform vendors. Of course, a nice side benefit of all of this is that anyone with a Google account will probably be giving even more data to Google. Which brings us to the other two announcements.

Google finally announced a way to see almost everything Google knows about you. Google Dashboard gives you a quick look at your Google accounts:

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Google Dashboard. Have you ever wondered what data is stored with your Google Account? The Google Dashboard offers a simple view into the data associated with your account — easily and concisely in one location.

Generally, this would just be a nice thing to see, as people have been clamoring for a way to see all of their account data. However, I believe this is the start of Google’s account management component of their social network. I am not talking about Orkut, I am talking about the network they are building based on everything you do. All of your GMail contacts, Google Reader connections, Talk contacts, YouTube friends, and any other way you have connected with people through Google services are contained within your Google network. Google knows more about who you email, chat and talk to than anyone else on the web. It is a logical step for them to converge their services into your “real-life” network.

This brings me to the last announcement yesterday, the extension of Google Friend Connect. There are some really interesting features that have been added with this new update:

• A new “Interests” section on the friend connect account for site owners, where the site owner gets to ask questions of new members to learn more about them.
• The ability for people to send private messages to each other
• A new “Community data” section where the interests people share on your website are shown in pretty graphs
• A site owner can send custom newsletters to the community members
• The new personalized content gadget automatically presents a dynamic personalized set of links to your site’s content that matches each visitor’s specific interests.
• A site owner’s Friend Connect account now includes an “AdSense” section that lets you enable Google ad units that are matched to the site’s content and to the interests users publicly share on your website.

Some of these new features stress social and community, but some of this is entirely geared towards marketing and monetization. If people add interests, they can be marketed to through newsletters, custom content from your site and (hopefully) relevant advertising.

If you look at the Friend Connect features in conjunction with the other announcements it looks much more interesting. You are now expanding your network based on your communities and the interests that you have. By adding these interests, you will be shown more relevant advertising, which will likely be based on your commerce searches as well. It may not all seem related when you look at the separate announcements, but if you look at your new Google Dashboard, Google is already putting all of this together.

In order to make this process a little more concrete, I will use the software development discipline, and Java specifically, as my example. Let’s start with you just graduating from college. At that time, especially in software development, you have very little knowledge. You know enough to get a job, but most companies realize that they will spend two years giving you on-the-job training.

Step 1: Learning To Crawl

In software development, one of the first things you learn are data structures. These are things like arrays, lists, trees and assorted other things. Many modern languages have these structures built into the language, like Java and its Collections classes. You will also learn some basic ideas on how to collect input from the user and how to generate output to a file or the screen. To make a comparison to another industry, in accounting you will learn about debits and credits and maybe learn a little bit about the different types of accounts, like liabilities.

Step 2: Learning To Walk

After the basics have settled in, you can start doing some real work. You may look at developing your first application and realize that you need to know about data storage. Files as data stores are OK at first, but eventually you want to throw data into a database. Once the data storage is complete, you see the lameness of the console-based input and start working with web pages and servlets or CGI. Going back to the accounting comparison, you might learn about the various types of reports that companies need, like Income Statements, as well as how typical expenses and sales are entered into your accounts.

Step 3: Learning To Run

Now, you have all of this code that works as your Java web application. However, you start to see duplication in your efforts and you need some more advanced functionality. So, you look at frameworks like Spring to handle some of the more basic things and you can now focus on some harder problems. You want to start pulling data from other sources, so you start implementing some web services that need to parse JSON formatted data and RSS formatted data. Because you are pulling this data from multiple sources, you also want each of these sources to run at the same time, so you start looking at Threads and other concurrency related technologies. In accounting, you may not have concurrency issues, but you do have cash flow issues. So, all of your accounting data goes into some expensive system, or even something like QuickBooks for a small business. That takes care of the basic framework, but now you need to look at budgets, revenue and expense forecasting and maybe you even need to cut some costs to improve your profit margins.

Step 4: Learning To Juggle While Running a 3-Legged Race and Carrying 80 Pounds of Camping Gear

Yeah, this is a bit of a jump and it is where the real challenges arrive. Your little application may be morphing into a small startup. You have performance issues and your database is not scaling very well. You start looking at cloud computing, Hadoop and various other distributed technologies. You also realize that you cannot do this alone, so you also search for partners that might know the complexities of distributed computing. By the way, you need to get a mobile phone application developed soon, because your competitors just released theirs. Your accountant just realized that if you want to get venture funding you need to make some changes. Do you use cost accounting or encumbrance accounting? Do you really want to depreciate your computers? Are you planning on running your business like a services organization and charge for data access? Or do you plan to go the product route and charge for the application directly?

As you can see, there is a lot to learn no matter what your industry is. Do you need to master each of these steps to really be awesome? Absolutely not. You might be awesome and only have completed the first 3 steps. I am sure that people will also complain that I missed several steps. The point is not these specific steps, but that it is a journey to learn enough to master your discipline. The key to remember is that it takes time to become awesome. There is no magic button or switch you can turn on.

Private Lists

Private lists make sense for one particular reason, ease of use. When you start following more than 100 people, being able to track the conversations becomes unwieldy. Lists give you the ability to segment or categorize users into manageable chunks. Obviously, these are beneficial because each of the third party Twitter client have implemented them.

Previously, the problem with lists created within your Twitter client have not been very portable. TweetDeck implemented a server based synchronization process which helped a lot of people, but that was still within the world of TweetDeck. The other benefit of Twitter’s new private lists is the portability you will get. Once TweetDeck, Seesmic and others implement Twitter list support, creating lists and retrieving that list from another PC or Twitter client will be much simpler.

Public Lists

Public lists are supposed to be useful for discovery. The idea is that if Louis Gray or Robert Scoble creates a list of tech bloggers, then maybe you will discover some new Twitter users because if they listen to those people you should too. Generally speaking, this is where discovery falls down. Discovery is about finding people you normally would not find, not people that are likely in Scoble’s favorite bloggers list. Nothing against Robert or Louis, but they converse with different circles than most people. They have almost every A-list web celebrities ear when they want to talk. The real question is how to find those people that are on the D-list or Z-list? That does not occur through lists, but it requires things more like topic-based or similarity-based discovery. If you are looking for some popular entrepreneurs or innovators, Robert Scoble does have some interesting lists though.

The other problem with public lists is the number of lists people get included on. Congratulations folks, we now have another metric of how popular the A-list is. Shortly, we will see new “influencer” lists based on how many lists people are included on. Given that I am on a context kick lately, it was a major concern for me. I know that people like Ashton Kutcher will be on a bunch of lists, and he will be seen as a big influencer on Twitter. The question is not how many lists is he on, but who is following him? People following him are likely into pop culture and entertainment. If you want to influence those demographics, then target Ashton, otherwise his huge following may prove useless.

Why Have Public Lists?

Chris Brogan has an interesting post on Twitter lists, especially because he talks about being left out of lists. It is interesting because he will be on a lot of lists. He reiterates the elitism concern and how it feels to be on the other side. However, I think the problem is not elitism as much as popularity. Many of the people on a lot of lists are already very popular, so we could think of the number of lists a person is on as their popularity metric.

So, why have public lists at all? Many people tend to disagree with how Twitter has been built and how features have been added. However, one thing people are ignoring is that the Twitter team knows how to get more people using the service. This is all about viral growth. Think of the benefits of having someone find a list of tech bloggers from Louis Gray that has 200 people. If I decide to follow that list, I have just added 200 people to my subscriptions. By doing so, I have added a large batch of people without really cluttering my current user experience. By adding that many people quickly, I can quickly mention the list to someone and the network distribution effects begin.

Another interesting note about lists is the difficulty in creating a decent sized list. Twitter added the basic feature of a list, and made it fairly hard to really curate the list. However, they have a solid API, so they have effectively told the third party Twitter clients to create a good list management tool. This is an interesting move as it shows immense faith in the developer ecosystem, something that has been questioned in the past few months. This will definitely give a boost to the egos of developers and ensure that Twitter is still a popular development platform.

These two points are hugely important for Twitter, continuing viral growth and a thriving developer community. What more could a startup want? Do you think they had other reasons for adding lists the way they did?

So, why am I saying that Google has “gone evil”? It is still a bit of a stretch, but they are doing some very Microsoft-ish things. First, they have decided that they will own whatever interesting technical concept people come up with. They may not be first or the best, but they will kill you with free features. Microsoft never went free, but they definitely went cheap when they needed to. Let’s assume that Google’s core businesses are search and contextual advertising. What else do they have?

GMail was one of the early products, but web hosted email is not a profit center. GMail was a move to get more people to know Google. Free products are great for publicity, and this was one big advertisement for Google. Once you have an email product and a web crawler, an RSS reader makes a lot of sense, and now we have Google Reader. Still, these products were in the vicinity of the core products that Google offered. However, after some of the early products, we saw Google try to branch out more. If you want to see the full breadth of products, take a look at the “More Google Products” page. Yep, they really sneak up on you. Now we have Google applications, with the option of having Google host your corporate email. Just ask Microsoft, office applications and email management are a cash cow.

We also have Google Maps which recently put a damper on the GPS navigation market by adding turn by turn directions. They have a news site, a finance site and a blog platform too. Granted, some of these applications were acquired businesses, like YouTube, but acquisition into new business lines is still expanding the business. There are Google groups, a Google IM client, a picture sharing/editing application and a social network. Louis Gray, an admitted Apple fanboy, even devoted a post to the idea of going completely Google.

For a long time now, Google was the free option, free as in cheap but also “freedom” from the corporate chains that looked like Microsoft. If you look at Google now, they are not very different from the Microsoft of 10 years ago, except for the widespread disgust. Is Google spreading itself too thin? I did not mention many of their products as they have several pages dedicated to what they have created. They have also started to get into legal battles because of this, not the typical patent trolling battles, but getting into copyright issues with newspapers and book publishers and authors. By continuously expanding their business, under the banner of “free”, they have expanded to the point where they are now the big behemoth of a company. Many people have started to paint the big target Google’s back as well. Does all of this sound familiar?

So, is Google evil based on all of this? Not particularly, as some of this is just good business. However, many people state that vendor lock-in is a bad thing, including getting all of your services from one vendor. Google is actively pursuing this strategy. People complain that a company knowing too much about you is definitely evil and a privacy concern as well. Google definitely knows a lot about you, especially if you use more than just Google search. People considered Microsoft evil for entering different application areas just because they had the manpower to do it and there might be money to be made. Google just did that with their free turn-by-turn directions in Google Maps. You know what they say, “if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.”