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Google has an infamous propensity to keep projects in beta for an unusually long time, and now somebody has gone to the trouble of quantifying just how widespread the testing tag is at the Internet giant.

“Of the 49 Google products we could find, 22 are in beta. That’s 45 percent,” not including Google Labs projects, according to a Wednesday blog post at Pingdom, a Web site performance monitoring company. “We’re so used to seeing the little ‘beta tag next to the various Google product logos that we almost don’t register it anymore. We even had to double-check that Gmail really still was in beta.”

Google told me a few months ago the beta tag would come off Gmail “soon,” but clearly the company is leery of doing so.

Royal Pingdom was mystified by Google’s criteria for beta labeling, and I have been, too.

It’s true that it’s easier to treat Web-based apps as a work in progress: a company can upgrade the entire user base to a new version of Flickr, say, just by updating the software on the central servers rather than having to cajole millions of users to install a patch. But there comes a point where labeling something as beta gives the impression that the project’s backer is scared to make a commitment to prospective users or customers.

And sometimes Google seems conflicted. For example, Google offers a Gmail service level agreement to paying Google Apps customers, and the point of an SLA is to assure business customers they can count on something working. Yes, Gmail has been in flux since its introduction in 2004, but enough is enough. I’m a little surprised Microsoft doesn’t make more hay of this when taking potshots at its rival.

Here’s Pingdom’s full list of Google beta projects:

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–Ning co-founder and CEO Gina Bianchini started off her keynote speech at the MIT Emerging Technology Conference by describing Ning as the social network you’ve never heard of.

Unlike Facebook, which is more of a beehive with 100 million members buzzing around, Ning allows individuals and groups to create their own social networks.

Bianchini said here Wednesday that Ning is gaining traction, minting a new social network every 30 seconds. That’s more than 86,000 per month on top of the nearly 500,000 social networks (65 percent actively used) already on Ning. Among those half a million sites, 3 percent are paying for premium services ($19.95 per month), which allow people to run their own ads and have their own domain. The company reserves the right to run ads on pages of the free service. Ning is launching an iPhone application this week, and also plans to support Android phones.

In her speech, which was devoted to showing off Ning, Bianchini compared her company’s social networks to “hosting a fabulous party.” These hot “parties” range from a social network for the music artist 50 Cent to one dubbed Twitter Moms.

She tried to make the case that Ning is a “platform” that provides creative freedom, whereas Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and LinkedIn are “walled gardens” that limit freedom. In this context, freedom is the ability to have more control over the user experience and data.

Ning CEO Gina Bianchini compares Ning social networks to hosting a great party.

(Credit: Dan Farber)

Her “open” social network argument is not a very convincing to me, though. Ning users can move components around on the screen and choose from 50 design templates. Ning also has APIs that allow for data portability and access to member data. However, the primary code that runs Ning is proprietary. Ning does allow some modification of code, such as the photo component, under an Apache 2.0 license. Programmers can change the way a photo is displayed or sorted, for example.

“Platforms win because they enable people to do things because they are programmable and give people control,” Bianchini said. Ning and other more open platforms will make walled gardens obsolete, she contended. “It’s not the case today, but this is what happens throughout history when people have choice.” Facebook, MySpace, Google, and others would argue that they are platforms, which are defined by having a robust ecosystem and developer/user community. And, they are open to the extent that they have APIs allowing access to their social graphs and other data. In addition, supporting open standards, such as OpenID, should be part of an open platform. Bianchini said that OpenID is not user friendly enough at this point and still has some security issues.

Overall, Ning is more “open” than other social networks in terms of the flexibility it gives users, but it serves a different purpose than Facebook and other social networks. Facebook’s growing membership seems to appreciate the consistency of the user experience, the growing feature set, and the APIs, such as Friend Connect.

Bianchini expects that there will be millions of social networks and that people will express themselves “for every conceivable niche, need, location and language, with an infinite choice of features.”

“If we do this right,” she added, “it will happen on the Ning platform.”

Clearly, something is happening on Ning. Whether it will become the next Facebook or MySpace in terms of growth and user activity remains to be seen.

Excerpt from:
Ning closes in on 500,000 social networks

I took a premature look at PlanetEye in June. I found a conceptually interesting product that wasn’t ready for real-world use. Since then, the site has opened to the public and gone through a redesign. It’s now worth checking out for planning vacation travel.

The organizing principle of PlanetEye is the “Travel Pack,” which is a way of categorizing your destinations. You can create a Travel Pack for anywhere you’re going and then drop restaurants, hotels, and activities into it. Photos of your destination or activity (from other users) show up on a Pack page, and PlanetEye will put a Pack’s items all on a map for you and let you easily share your Pack with others. I’m thinking of creating a “Rafe’s S.F. Visitor Guide” pack to send to people who come to visit our home.

Activities, restaurants, and hotels get useful summary pages.

(Credit: PlanetEye)

Packs also recommend alternate activities. At some point, they’ll will be prioritized based on a social formula; right now they just seem to be highly rated professional reviews. Which brings us to the best part of this service: the content. PlanetEye aggregates professional reviews and makes them all easy to find and discover. There are a few useful expert articles on the site as well. And it’s a very attractive site–more travel magazine than utility. Combined with its recommendation system and Travel Pack organizational scheme, it makes for a good system to collect activities, lodging, and dining options for a location.

However, the system doesn’t do enough for you once you’ve built your checklist. Yes, it does connect you to hotel sites for reservations and to OpenTable to book restaurants. But there’s no timeline view of your activities to go with the map view, so planning your attack on a vacation spot is still a manual process. I’d like to see a planner like TripIt, or a printed city guide like Offbeat Guides, to go with my Travel Packs.

Travel Packs can be private, or you can borrow a public one.

(Credit: PlanetEye)

Read the rest here:
PlanetEye upgrade makes it more useful

I had a quick meeting last week with Sachin Agarwal, the CEO of the online games marketplace, Dawdle. There’s nothing technically revolutionary about this service. It, like countless online auction, classified, and swapping sites, lets users offload their used goods (in this case, console game hardware and software), and buy other users’ goods too.

What’s interesting about Dawdle, though, is the economy it fits in to. The used market for console games is peculiar, at least compared to other digital media (like CDs and movies), in that it is a sizable portion — Agarwal estimes half — of the entire gaming market. That’s a half of an $18 billion (U.S.) economy that the standard big-box stores (WalMart, Best Buy) are not seriously involved in. But in malls all over the country, mom-and-pop independent storefonts and GameXChange franchises do a healthy business in the resale of used computer games.

Dawdle has a consumer-facing site, where end users can buy and sell their used games, but its real volume comes from the used game shops, which can use the service to put the games they buy on the broader market. (Most retail game franchises prohibit their stores from running their own online businesses.)

Store owners could just list their items on eBay, but this focused site makes things a bit easier. The interface is designed so bored sales clerks can enter in games when they buy them from customers, or in the lulls between customers. There’s no fancy description to enter, just condition of the package. There’s as yet no pricing advice on the site (although an upcoming partnership might take care of that), so the service does require its users know the market they are playing in.

A new design for the site is coming October 8, as well as an improved search function and integration with the Wolftrack game store point-of-sale system.

I like this service because it adds size, and thus efficiency, to a market of otherwise isolated storefronts.

Listing a game for sale on Dawdle.

Source:
Dawdle games the console game economy

On Thursday afternoon social aggregator FriendFeed pushed out its new look to all its users.

Several things have changed since the company launched its beta program late last month, with the biggest being the look and feel of the site, including a change in navigation from the top of the page to the left side. The heart of the service still lies in linking up various sites you use, but as part of the re-design the FriendFeed post box was also given an overhaul with the inclusion of photo hosting.

The biggest change besides the look is one of the most subtle, and smartest. It now figures out when your friends have posted the same item and will link them together. This serves two purposes: one to keep you from seeing the same thing multiple times, and another to condense conversation into one feed item that you don’t have to hunt down. A big problem before this was completely missing related items your friends might have liked or discussed. The new system simply brings all of that together in one place and puts the latest items on the very top.

If there's another item that's somehow related to something that's shared FriendFeed will do its best to let you know. Multiple related entries are sorted by the time they were posted, letting you read through them like a stream of news.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

One thing to note is that Beta.FriendFeed.com, which served as the test bed for the new design will no longer be any different from the regular FriendFeed. Site founder Paul Bucheit tells me they may use it once again to test new features, but for the time being it will simply re-direct.

Excerpt from:
FriendFeed solves noise problem with redesign, duplicate roll-up