Google helps the web to go social

Google has joined the drive to make the web more social by introducing tools to enable people to interact with their friends.

Friend Connect follows plans announced last week by the world’s two biggest social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook.

Data Availability and Connect let users move their personal profiles and applications to other websites.

"Social is in the air," says Google’s director of engineering David Glazer.

During a conference call at Google’s California headquarters, Mr Glazer told reporters: "Google Friend Connect is about being the ‘long tail’ of sites becoming more social."

"Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard."

Charlene Li, principal analyst at Forrester, told BBC News: "Google is tapping into the ‘all things social’ heat of the moment, but it’s adding a different perspective, not as a data source and social network ‘owner’ but as an enabler."

Gamut of uses

At the heart of Google’s service is the use of Open Social which will allow third parties to build and develop applications for the site.

The company says with Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running right away without any complicated programming. This will run the gamut from invitations to member’s gallery and from message walls to review

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Powerset Semantic Search of Interest to Microsoft

There is an article on CNET that speculates that Microsoft may be interested in acquiring Powerset search engine, which is close to publicly rolling out its semantic search engine. The early reviews of the Powerset semantic search have been favorable.

Instead of basing its search results on keyword as Google does, Powerset uses word relationships, concepts and meanings plus other linguistic aids in order to deliver more meaningful results. For instance, if a user types in a phrase or question, they may be directed to part of page where the answer appears and not just the page itself.

During user testing of Powerset, the Powerlabs testers will be able to give search results a thumbs up or down, which will help the developers in refining their algorithms. Google has also experimented with this feature on a limited scale.

However, Powerset may change more than how a search engine delivers results. It may change user behavior in those searches. When Ask.com was AskJeeves.com users were encouraged to type in questions that affable butler would try to answer.

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