Some people are suggesting that Google CEO Eric Schmidt may have just created a Facebook profile for himself, after signing up for Twitter in early December 2009 and right on the heels of Microsoft founder Bill Gates setting up an account on the wildly popular social networking service.

Evidently, we can’t be 100% sure that this is his real account at this point – unlike Twitter, there’s no ‘verified account’ stamp for Facebook profiles and the man has yet to confirm our friendship (I forgive him, since it’s the middle of the night in the United States).

The information that is viewable is mostly restricted to his Facebook friends, as it shows only a profile picture, his sex (Male!), a website (Google.com!) and his location (Mountain View, CA!).

Nevertheless, my esteemed colleague MG Siegler says the mutual friends they have on the social network are all Googlers, so it is likely Schmidt (unless of course the Google employees were tricked into befriending a faker).

Update: further proof that it is him – the person who created the profile linked the email address EricSchmidt1@yahoo.com to the account, and that happens to be Schmidt’s personal email address too. (thanks, Stephen!)

One thing is for sure: unlike on Twitter, Schmidt did not obtain a nice vanity URL for himself (facebook.com/ericschmidt has already been taken by someone else) and his profile picture paints a picture of a soft-spoken man in casual clothing rather than that of a bad-ass.

So do you think this is legit or not? And more importantly, are you going to try and befriend him so you can poke him all day?

(Thanks to @RomilPatel for the tip)

Opera is set to unveil Opera Mini for iPhone in a press and partner preview during the 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week, the Norwegian browser software company said in a statement released earlier today. In addition, the company will be introducing a slew of other Opera-powered devices at its exhibit at MWC.

Small caveat: Opera has yet to submit the iPhone app for approval in the App Store.

The company foresees zero issues with the approval of the app, and hopes Apple will “not deny their users a choice in Web browsing experience”. Frankly, I hope Apple won’t block the app from appearing in the App Store either, but you never really know with Cupertino.

Once the app is completed and live in the App Store, Opera Software hopes people will be enticed to leave the iPhone’s Safari browser for what it is primarily based on the speed of its own product. The company says that Opera Mini for iPhone is up to 6 times faster than the native browser thanks to its compression technology, based on internal tests. (Can’t wait to try that for myself)

Furthermore, Opera says users who pay carriers per MB or roam a lot, will be able to reduce browsing cost up to 90%.

I’ll be heading to Barcelona for the congress next week, attend Opera’s press preview and hopefully be able to record a video of the app in action.

When Google bought mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million in November 2009, 4IFNO CEO Zaw Thet said that he received a couple of phone calls from investment bankers and potential buyers who where were sniffing around the space. When Apple bought Quattro Wireless for $275 million two months later, he says his phone started to ring off the hook.

Why? Because 4INFO is usually described as the AdMob of SMS advertising. That isn’t a very good description of the company, but it’s enough to make everyone think that the company is next in line to close a big acquisition. And that last part just may be true.

The company, which has raised around $40 million in venture capital, is where companies go when they want to create a “mailing list” of SMS subscribers. For example – when Zynga began testing SMS notifications in December, they turned to 4INFO to power the product. 4INFO has 250 premier publishers, plus a couple of thousand more that use its self service platform.

4INFO offers customers a publishing platform, which is tools to manage SMS subscribers and send them content. They also run an ad network for SMS ads, and a SMS gateway to handle the carrier relationships and charges. 4INFO’s larger publishers pay as much as $15,000 per month to use the platform. Those publishers can run their own ads, or use 4INFO’s ads with a revenue split (self service customers have no choice but to accept 4INFO’s ads).

4INFO has 50 million U.S. phone numbers stored on behalf of publishers. And they are beginning to roll out an international product as well.

I sat met with Thet last week to see the company’s San Mateo offices and talk about the 4INFO business. He answered all of my questions, and even said the right thing at the end when I asked who’d be acquiring him. “We’re building an independent company,” he said. Which is exactly what everyone says right before they get bought.

Last night, the news started to come out about Glitch, the new massively multiplayer online game that a few of the key cogs that built Flickr had been developing in secret for much of last year. Today, I got to see a still relatively early build of the game. It is both beautiful and impressive.

I met up with Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders of Flickr, so he could demo Glitch for me. Sitting in a hotel lobby on a WiFi connection being used by who knows how many other people, the game, which runs in the browser and is Flash-based, was incredibly smooth. Even more impressively, Butterfield was able to manipulate the game from the backend (using his “God” mode tools) to add new elements on the fly right in front of me. This is a key part of what will likely make or break Glitch.

While Glitch itself as a game is still coming together (it’s not going to be released until Fall 2010), Tiny Speck, the company behind the game, has spent much of the last year creating a backend that can allow them to quickly and easily build out an expansive multiplayer world. In fact, up until this point, about 80% of the time has been spent on building this backend, with only 20% devoted to the frontend of the game itself, Butterfield says. Over the next nine months, that will flip.

So how easy is it to add elements to the game? Right before our meeting, Butterfield asked one of his developers to create a Michael Arrington element in the game. When we sat down, there was Mike, in the game, ready to go (see picture below). Butterfield also dynamically altered worlds on the fly and added new elements all with a few mouse and keyboard clicks.

One reason Tiny Speck is able to do this is because they decided to focus on making the game 2D rather than 3D like some of the more popular MMOs out there right now, such as World of Warcraft. This saves them countless hours of rendering time for countless angles. More importantly, Butterfield says he realized during his last gaming project, Game Neverending (which eventually gave birth to Flickr, before it was bought by Yahoo), that how a game looks matters less to a lot of users after a few minutes of play. All of that peels back to the fundamental gameplay, which Glitch is focusing on.

And that’s not to say Glitch doesn’t look nice. In fact, as I noted above, it looks great. Tiny Speck has several artists developing the landscapes for the different worlds in the game, as well as different intricately designed elements that you use in the game itself. The game already has a distinctive look even though Butterfield is quick to point out that maybe the key element, the characters you inhabit in the game, aren’t done yet.

So what’s Glitch all about? Well, it’s a bit convoluted, but basically you start out in the future and travel backwards through time to save the future. In doing so you jump in and out of the minds of eleven giants. Or something. See? Convoluted. But that shouldn’t matter — many of the best games are.

Ultimately, it’s a collaborative puzzle solving game on a massive scale. Interacting with people in the game is key, and meant to be fun. It’s a big part of Tiny Speck’s goal to do for MMOs what the Wii did for console gaming — which is to bring it beyond the stereotypical players and to the masses. Butterfield notes that while World of Warcraft is huge, its player base is just a fraction of those who play Farmville, for example. The goal is to find a middle ground.

And that middle ground applies to revenues too. While World of Warcraft is pulling in a ton of money for each player (thanks to its subscription model), Farmville pulls in much less (because it’s mostly based around micro-transactions). Butterfield sees a middle ground here too that Glitch will try to tap. While the core game will be free to play, users will be able to buy items in the game, and hardcore users will probably be able to pay for special rights, maybe even voting on new features (an interesting idea that Butterfield floated out there).

Since the game is Flash-based, I asked Butterfield for his thoughts about the recent controversy surrounding Flash-maker Adobe since Apple and Google appear to be moving away from Flash and towards HTML5. Butterfield said that while they have no allegiance to Adobe, there is simply no way they could have made Glitch the way it is trying to use anything but Flash. And while performance is often a knock of the technology, Tiny Speck has done a ton of work to optimize things on their end to keep the game running smoothly, even as it scales (obviously, they test that sort of stuff even in this early stage).

I also asked Butterfield why not just build Glitch as a Facebook game, like Farmville? His response was that their vision for Glitch was to use more than the small window within a social network. Fundamentally, it’s an extension of what he started with Game Neverending, but they’re far beyond what was capable back then, so the technology is finally matching the vision.

And as a best case scenario, Butterfield also hopes to see Glitch extend beyond the browser and onto systems like the Wii and Xbox 360. And while there may not be a full iPhone app, he foresees them using that platform (and Android) to make app mini-games of sorts that give you power-ups in the game when you play them.

On top of being a co-founder, Butterfield is serving as President of Tiny Speck. His other co-founders include Eric Costello (also the Client Lead), Cal Henderson (the former head of engineering for Flickr who is now Tiny Speck’s VP of Engineering), and Serguei Mourachov (who is the Server Lead). As we noted back in September, they also hired Digg’s lead designer to be their be their Director of Design, Daniel Burka. There are about a dozen or so people working on Glitch now, with most based in San Francisco or Vancouver (where Butterfield spends most of his time).

Tiny Speck quietly raised a seed round of funding last year led by Accel Partners, and including angels such as Marc Andreessen, and Jeff Weiner. Butterfield said they’ll soon raise a larger Series A as well. They’re going to need it for such a lofty goal. And they’ll get it, when the VCs see how nicely the game is coming along.

AOL Instant Messenger is integrating Facebook Connect to allow AIM users to chat with their Facebook friends. The image to the right shows how the initial sign up will look.

We expect AOL and Facebook to make an announcement on the product on Wednesday, but you can try it now if you like at x.aim.com/facebook/preview.html. That’s a beta version, no word on when it will move into normal production.

We’ve been covering the growth of  Meebo’s chat bar extensively since its launch: after a fairly slow ramp up in 2008, it’s since been deployed to 130 partner sites and now has a reach of 100 million unique visitors. Now that the company has landed partnerships with a number of large publisher sites and social networks, it’s settings its sights on a new target: shopping. The company has been approached by various online retailers to see how they could help make shopping sites more social, and now they’re making an effort to expand into the market.

From a functionality standpoint, Meebo isn’t changing much about the bar to suit retailers — you’ll still drag and drop items to share them with friends, and you can chat with buddies using integrated services like Google Talk, Facebook Chat, and AIM. The big differences will lie in the monetization strategy and the level of analytics retailers will be able to take advantage of.

Revenue from the Meebo Bar primarily revolves around the ad unit that appears at the far left side of the screen. So far, the company has been getting an interaction rate of around 1% (which is relatively high) with ads from major brands. But while these ads have been targeted to some extent, they haven’t typically been promoting products on the site the user is currently browsing.

With the tweaked Meebo bar, retailers will be able to promote their own sales, and brands can pay to promote certain items on the store. For example, if I was browsing Best Buy online and ran a search for “printer”, HP could run an ad pointing to their newest model (note: this is hypothetical, Best Buy isn’t a partner site). Meebo also intends to use ad retargeting across its various partner sites — if you ran that query for “camera” and later went to MyYearbook (which runs the Meebo bar), the bar might show you ads for cameras.

As with publisher sites, retailers will be able to tweak what meta data their shared items include on sites like Facebook and Twitter. So if I decided to share the printer from the example above with my friends, my shared item on Facebook could include its price and rating in the shared link, as opposed to the generic summary that’s usually produced. Meebo is also planning to release a real-time notifications API in the near future, which will let these retailers send out promotions to users as they’re browsing their sites.

At this point, Meebo’s roster of retail partners is small — the only partnership they’d confirm at this point is with ValueClick Brands, which is behind sites like smarter.com, couponmountain.com. But the company is currently in talks with some large online retailers.

Of course, turning shopping social is easier said than done. This isn’t a new idea — we’ve been covering sites trying to figure it out for years, some of which have failed. Competitors include Kaboodle, ThisNext, and plenty of others. Meebo may be able to rise above the rest because it will be directly integrated into these retailer sites, and won’t rely on a destination site or bookmarklet for sharing. That said, it’s going to have to convince these retailers that it’s worth their time and screen real estate to integrate the bar in the first place.

Image by myklroventine

Naturally, which you launch a new product with a huge amount of hype, like Google Buzz, you’re going to want to own the .com domain name for it. And Google obtained googlebuzz.com just in the nick of time, according to a document from the National Arbitration Forum.

On November 13, 2009, Google, represented by Meredith M. Pavia (presumably, a Google lawyer), filed a complaint that BuzzNews Network was using the googlebuzz.com domain in bad faith. Further, they argued that it was “confusingly similar” to Google’s trademark on the company name. This was an easy one for the forum to rule on since BuzzNews Network never responded to the complaint.

The presiding panelist also cited Google as being one of the most recognized brands in the world, and clearly that part of the name overcame any claim to “buzz” BuzzNews Network might have had. It probably didn’t help that BuzzNews bought the domain from GoDaddy in 2004 and had parked it with links ever since.

On December 23, 2009, the panelist ruled the name had to be turned over to Google. And though it doesn’t yet forward anywhere, you can bet Google will soon set up googlebuzz.com to point to the service, just as googlewave.com points to Google Wave. While Google launched the service today, it originally planned to do it at a later time, we hear. That had to be moved up for some unknown reason, so they’re lucky they got the domain when they did.

Of course, it looks like someone else just registered buzzgoogle.com and is parking it. The fight continues…

[thanks Shmuel]

In less than six months, online restaurant reservation site OpenTable has seated an additional one million diners via its mobile apps. In late October, OpenTable had reached the milestone of seating one million diners via its mobile offerings, a year after its iPhone app launched. It took only four and a half months to seat another million diners. Additionally, the site says that based on an estimation of a $50 average check per diner, OpenTable claims that diners using its mobile applications have generated more than $100 million in revenue for its restaurant partners.

OpenTable allows diners to find and book reservations at more than 11,000 different restaurants in multiple countries via mobile applications for the iPhone, Palm, Blackberry and Android. Other smartphone users can book reservations through OpenTable’s mobile-optimized Web site.

The company also reported strong earnings this afternoon, with Q4 2009 revenue coming in at $19.2 million, representing a a 32% increase over Q4 2008 revenue, which was $14.5 million. OpenTable’s total revenues for 2009 were $68.6 million, up 23% over 2008 revenues of $55.8 million. In 2009, OpenTable increased its number of participating restaurants in North America by 17%, with a total of 10,850 partners by the end of 2009. The number of international partners also increased, rising by 44% to 1501 participating establishments. Total number of diners in North American were 11.8 million, a 39% increase from Q4 2008.

Last year, OpenTable filed for a healthy IPO, despite recessionary conditions in the markets. OpenTable is a solid internet company that has a viable business model. On the restaurant side, OpenTable delivers reservation management software to establishments through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues, similar in theory to the offerings that software companies like Salesforce sell to clients.

Today, Google’s social strategy took a big step with the launch of Google Buzz — a new FriendFeed-like feature that’s integrated into Gmail, mobile search, Maps, and more (you can see our live notes from the announcement here). Shortly after the event, Google co-founder Sergey Brin fielded questions backstage from members of the press. Our own Steve Gillmor was there to record the conversation (and ask a few questions himself). We’ve embedded the footage below, and have transcribed some of his answers.

In the video, Brin answers questions covering a broad array of topics, including Google Buzz, Google’s current situation in China, and the company’s research in clean energy. Among the revelations: Brin hopes to eventually remove the task of having to choose between Email, Buzz, and IM, so expect those to converge more in the future.

Note: The video starts off with some loud music in the background, but it gets turned down after a few minutes

Regarding the appeal and potential of Google Buzz, and the company’s ability to make it useful:
“Extracting signal from noise is one of our core competencies, it’s one of the key things we do in our web search product every day. And I think that now peoples’ personal communications are getting to be on a scale comparable to that of web search, so those technologies are becoming far more critical.”

On getting relevant results, and internal use of Buzz before now:
“I think there is huge potential. Right now if you look on the recommendations, there is some ordering that we do that uses these signals. We’ve been testing this internally, and even there, there’s quite a lot of noise internally, you’d be surprised. But I think that to really get the algorithms large scale we needed to wait for today and we need to have noise, people using this. That’s when the relevance technology is really going to come into play… ” [On the signals Google will be paying attention to] “We’re going to see which articles you like, which ones you comment on, which posts you read, things like that. And I think we’ll be able to try to tailor things to you that you’re likely to be interested in.”

Brin says that he’d like to make the recommendation technology more transparent (as opposed to a black box) but hasn’t yet discussed those details with the Buzz team.

On integrating real-time into Buzz in an accessible way, and possibly working that into Wave:
“I think we want to see what the experience with Buzz is in the wild and then make decisions from there. I know we’ve learned a lot, we’re very happy with internal testing. Actually that’s why I am very excited for the Enterprise product. But before we make plans like that I want to see how Buzz gets used from today on out. I think the integration [into Gmail] has proved valuable, and that’s definitely something we’re going to be looking into for Wave.”

Why he thinks Google Buzz might work, when other social services integrated with Email haven’t made much of a splash:
“I think if you look at the history of technical products, there are a lot of details that matter. It’s not just the general idea, oh I have Email and social. And you know maybe, maybe we got the details right, maybe we didn’t, we’re going to see from today on out. Internally I’ve been very happy with the result. There are a lot of detailed things. If you look at the success of the world wide web, you look at Xanadu (an ongoing Hypertext project founded in 1960) for example by Ted Nelson that had a lot of these concepts yet it wasn’t so successful. There are a lot of details, perhaps chance and timing. I wouldn’t discount something because it’s similar to something in the past…”

On his experience using Buzz:
“It’s been internally, probably half a year I’ve been testing it internally, with an increasing number of other people, the whole company has been on it for a while now. It has really enabled me to communicate, you get far better information about what’s going on in the company. Now if I have a question about something I don’t have to dig up who is the person who is particularly responsible for this, I can just throw a question out there, I know there are enough people out there who pay attention to my posts, and also now with the recommendations it should get recommended to the right person anyway. And I don’t worry that I’m disrupting people because the social expectation on Buzz is different than on email.”

On users having to make the choice between Email, IM, and Buzz:
“I think it is stressful today to have to make those choices. And I’d like to move to a situation where people make that choice less. You have to decide what medium you’re using, you have to decide to whom you’re sending it to, and sometimes you have to decide what is the heading going to be? There are a lot of decisions you have to make. And Google Buzz at the very least you do have to choose Buzz as the medium today. Though I would like to simplify that in the future. But you don’t have to decide to whom to send it. You can always type an @reply in the mid stream. You don’t have to necessarily pick a heading. Those lower the barrier a lot. But I agree that there is definitely room left to further simplify it. Because the very act of choosing Buzz to do that is in itself a bit of work.”

The conversation then changed to the situation in China. Brin was asked about this topic repeatedly and directed reporters to read the company’s blog post on the matter (which he says reflects the consensus view of the company). Eventually he did explicitly say, “We have not pulled out of China”, going on to give a general timeline of Google’s initial steps to launch in China in 2006 and how things have progressed since then (you can see this start around 15:45).

Finally, the interview closes out with a few questions and answers about Google’s initiatives in energy, and how the economy is affecting the company.

As soon as Google Buzz was released earlier today, all the early adopters piled in to give it a spin. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail and a founder of FreindFeed, was among them and his initial reaction was: “This seems vaguely familiar . . .” Or, as he put it elsewhere, “There’s a FriendFeed in my Gmail. Sweet! “

It is vaguely familiar to him on various levels. Like FriendFeed before it (which was acquired by Facebook), Buzz acts as a way to bring together different social streams together—Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader shared items, status updates, shared links and videos. It presents them all in a single stream from everyone you follow from you Gmail contacts. Each item can be commented on, “liked,” or taken into a private email or chat conversation. You end up getting comment strings around a single shared link, photo, or video, just like on FriendFeed, except FriendFeed can import items from many more social websites. (Although FriendFeed is not enabled as a connected site for most users, strangely enough it is enabled for Buchheit’s account.).

But the other reason Buzz is vaguely familiar to Buchheit is because it lives right inside Gmail, which he launched when he was a Google engineer. It appears right under your “Inbox” link, and takes over the entire window where your 10,000 unread emails usually stare you in the face. It replaces it with a living, breathing, never-ending social commentary. My first reaction when I saw Buzz was to wonder what happened to all my mail. I didn’t miss it.

Unlike Google Wave, which lives in its own silo, the fact that Buzz is a feature of Gmail makes me want to use it, despite it’s deficiencies. Right now, Buzz only consumes communications from outside Google in a one-way fashion. You can see other people’s Tweets, for instance, but you can’t Tweet back to them. And those Tweets definitely don’t come in realtime either. There is a noticeable lag.

Buchheit agrees. When I asked him via email how he feels about Google channeling him, he responded: “It seems nice. Integrating into Gmail is the right way to go. It’ll be interesting to see how much activity it gets.” The fact that I was sable to gather his thoughts from Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter, and Gmail speaks to the disjointed nature of our communications. Back in November, I had the opportunity to interview Buchheit on stage on whether he thought that email is dead. He defended email and admitted he had not yet tried Google Wave. But he’s already jumped into Buzz.

The question is not really where email is dead, but whether it will continue to be the primary form of electronic communication, or merely recede to the background as convenient dumping ground for archiving our realtime conversations. Whether Buzz puts more people at ease with using a realtime communication mode as their primary communication mode remains to be proven. But it points towards the inevitable direction that all Web communications are taking: more realtime, intermingled, disjointed, and multimedia.