Google Adds Monetize Button to Blogger

I noticed that Google has silently added a "Monetize" button to Blogger's interface.

MySQL at Google by Mark Callaghan

Mark Callaghan is taking the stage to present his Key Note at the MySQL Conference and Expo, “This is not a web app: The continuing evolution of MySQL at Google.”

I am going to take notes as fast as I can. Excuse any typos etc.

Mark worked on DBMS internals at Informix and then at Oracle. He worked on embedding BerkeleyDB at a startup. He joined Google in August, 2005. At Google his team is working to enhance MySQL and to support a large production deployment. He blogs at mysqlha.blogspot.com and has helped publish Google patch for MySQL at code.google.com. In addition, he agitates for MySQL.

What is MySQL at Google?

He will give details but some numbers he won't give. It is a large MySQL deployment. The QPS rate is tremendous. The number of machines they use is reasonably large. MySQL is used in a large, important enterprise deployment. They run many commodity machines. Google depends on replication, InnoDB and stability. MySQL is sharded with many replicas per shard. At Google, database service must always be available. They have been successful with it and happy with the results.

The database itself is providing change management. If you just push changes, you are more than likely to have a debugging nightmare.

A number of replicas can be connected to MySQL without crashing the master. You'll be surprised at how many replicas can be deployed.

MySQL is solid and easy to improve. InnoDB from Heikki Tuuri and company is amazing. Inspiration provided by Yasufumi Kinoshita and Percona. InnoDB is the most beautiful database software Mark has worked on and he has worked for a few database companies.

Prehistory

• MyISAM and another RDBMS were used.
  
• Not much is known about that time.
• Search for "xooglers mysql"

Recorded history begins
- MySQL 4.0 and Innodb arrive

Consistency matters most. When chosing between consistency and availability, you want to be consistent. You shouldn't have two servers claiming to be masters. Generally, the full schema is understood by few people.

Audit is a big concern. Who is doing what change? Legacy is a another concern.

Control is an issue. You have to show you can control access to the database.

Finally, the focus is on transactions, they don't want to lose any data.

Data quality is important to Google.

How do we build this?
A bad build ruins everything. He inherited a dedicated build machine. They moved to hermetic builds and cross-compilation fun and eventually learned to love autoconf.

How de we test this?
MySQL has a suite of regression tests but they are easy to pass. They have queries running in production, how can they use those? They sample queries in production using a Python script and then replay them to simulate sample production workloads.

They built stress tests generally around replication. If you kill a slave, it can come back and start from where it left off.

Use valgrind
Eventually they realized that MySQL has valgrind and started using it.

They also discovered the value of compiler warnings.

How do we deploy this?
Simple approach is put it out there and hope for the best. Search of error log files is automated. On a daily basis, crashes are categorized. Machines are removed automatically removed from service. Finally, they have automated replacement of machines.

How do we monitor this?
He has a feature request: SHOW USER STATISTICS.

They archive SHOW PROCESSLIST and SHOW STATUS. Add SHOW USER_STATS and SHOW TABLE_STATS. It's amazing what you can do with awk and bash. They prefer to take a top-down approach for monitoring. They generate daily and weekly load reports, including QPS. QPS on critical servers was going 2x per year. After deploying a better monitoring tool, they determined it was queries that weren't really crucial for those servers.

How do we improve this?
Understand your problems and deploy what you build. If you are just building and not deploying, you are not going to learn the tradeoffs. Also, monitor to learn what the problems are.

Replication features added At a high level, they are slowing moving towards self healing.

At a low level, somewhat crash-safe slaves. They use mirror binlog which keeps a copy of master binlog on slave. Other fewatures include semi-sync replication, binlog event checksums and global transaction IDs. They are currently in the process of having fully crash-safe slaves.

They have monotonically increasing global transaction IDs.

Performance features added

high level

• run (much) faster on multi-core and multi-disk servers

low level

• faster read-write mutex for InnODB
• less contention for InnoDB mutexes
• faster IO for InnoDB
• faster parser,
• integration with tcmalloc
• backport connection pool from MySQL 6 to 5.0.
  

Manageability features added

high level

• make it easier to support MySQL
• a UI is nice, but never enough. they focus on command-line more.
  

low level

• SHOW USER_STATS, SHOW TABLE_STATS
• archive and query SHOW PROCESSLIST samples
• roles for authentication and access control
• tools for monitoring servers.
  

Other features added

• row-change logging
• online data drift checking (based on Maatkit but with more features)
• Flapulator (to look for crashes)
• Query tester (runs queries in parallel and compares the results to ensure new binary is getting same results as old binary).
  

Row-change logging

• keep MySQL and something else in sync
• similar to row-based replication
• fast parallel queries
• change noditifaction is possible
• full audit log.
• allows for real time replication
  

You can do batch extraction but then your data is stale.

Online data drift:
- how do you compare continuously updated tables?
- technique is similar to mk-table-checksum
- deployment is more complicated

More to life than software development
Engineers at Google

• SRE: Site reliability engineer
• SWE: Software engineer
• SRE focus on running services in production.
  

MySQL has a new set of problems for SREs

Production crises

• OOM v1
• unstable kernel
• yes we have no core files
• we don't need no stack traces
• underpowered slaves
• database load growth
• query storms
• corrupt relay log events
• failover
• long lock waits
• OOM v2
  

open problems

new features

• online schema change
• failover automation
• frameworks to manage large deployments
• synchronous replication
• minimize replication delay on a loaded server
  

new hardware

• performance on multi-core and many-core servers
• performance with SSD
• performance with too much RAM.
  

Soap box:

• run a server in production
• work at a large systems company
• learn about a DBMS other than MySQL
  

out of time. :)

Thank you for sharing, Mark! This was an informative session (of course, it would be great to actually get some numbers but still ...)

Create free online charts with Google Chart API

I came across Google Chart API today which lets you create charts online for free*.

Supported charts include:

1. Line charts
2. Bar charts
3. Pie charts Updated!
4. Venn diagrams
5. Scatter plots
6. Radar charts
7. Maps
8. Google-o-meters
9. QR codes

The sample charts look really cool.

Venn diagram


Pie chart


Radar chart


* If you plan to call Google chart API more than 250,000 times a day, you should let the chart developers know by emailing chart-api-notifications@google.com

Google Ventures is almost here

Rich Miner, creator of Android, is moving to jump start Google's latest venture, Google Ventures, which will provide capital to startups.

Google has been working on this for quite some time. In 2007, Business Week reported that Google is going to take on a new role as a Venture Capitalist. WSJ reported last year in July about Google's new venture capital arm.

TechCrunch thinks Google Ventures is a bad idea and that "Starting a venture fund is not really the best use of Google’s capital." I disagree with TechCrunch mostly because I think it can be an effective way for Google to outsource innovation and give some of the big billions back to startups.

Stress, Load and Performance Testing in Quality Assurance

Next session is Stress, Load and Performance Testing in Quality Assurance by Goranka Bjedov of Google.

I have been wanting to hear Goranka for some time now as her sessions usually end up becoming the highlight of the event. For record, she passionately hates Power Point (I don't blame her).

I couldn't find a video of her Velocity talk but here is a video from her previous talk that's equally interesting.



Goranka spends all her time doing performance testing at Google. She tests Adwords, AdSense and hates any kinds of presentation tools.

• focus on the backend. Steve Souders is the client side performance guy.
• she works on the servers.
• what are the bottlenecks?
• QA people should be able to tell you what to expect.
• 2 purposes: what is going on in application? and monitor application for changes.
• a small code change can cause tremendous performance decline.
• first thing is if a mistake is made, everyone should know right away. Finding it later can cost a lot
• 80% of the performance problems can be worked out with one front end and one backend as long as you have the right database.
• figure out what is happenging with important transactions
• if you don't know what important transactions are, make a guess. it's better than nothing. don't be paralyzed, then worry about perfection
• there is nothing as perfection in performance testing. she cannot guarantee the exact results. All tests are run as statistical tests and run 5 times or so.
• big proponent of open source tools: jmeter, grinder and funkload. In Windows environment look at Open SDA.
• Vendor tools do reasonably job. (and solve the problem of having too much money)
• Open Source tools do exactly the same job. they are not free completely as time is required.
• if you're not willing to spend time on OS tool, then why even spend half a million dollars?
• she is happy that OS tools don't have monitoring built into it.
• monitoring is absolutely essential and must be done separately.
• for majority of things you can troubleshoot and benchmark within 3 weeks.
• check google blog for her posts: open source performance testing tools
  

Also see:

• Performance Testing: Blog post by Goranka Bjedov
• Google Testing Blog
• Optimizing Linux Performance by Ezolt
  

Google Patenting 'FriendRank' - Stealing Jeremy Zawodny's Idea?

Just found on Slashdot that Google is attempting to patent 'FriendRank', an idea that Jeremy Zawodny came up with in, get this, 2004!

“A computer-implemented method for displaying advertisements to members of a network comprises identifying one or more communities of members, identifying one or more influencers in the one or more communities, and placing one or more advertisements at the profiles of one or more members in the identified one or more communities.”
Way to go Google!

Seth MacFarlane and Google Strike a Deal

Five minutes after entering my office after a week long trip to CA, I learned that Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy, and Google have struck a deal. Under the deal, Seth MacFarlane will create 50 two-minute episodes exclusively for the web. There will be a number of new characters introduced in this new web-only series which will be distributed through the AdSense network. There will be a four way revenue share.

Source(s):
- Google and Creator of 'Family Guy' strike a deal
- The Family Guy Strikes Deal with Google

Working the Clouds: NextGen Infrastructure for New Entrepreneurs

Now there is a panel, Working the Clouds: NextGen Infrastructure for New Entrepreneurs. Panelists include:
* Geva Perry GigaSpaces
* Jason Hoffman Joyent
* Tony Lucas XCalibre
* Lew Moorman Rackspace
* Christophe Bisciglia Google
* Joe Weinman AT&T


CB: Google App Engine can be called a cloud but it is a little different that allows you to only focus on very high levels.

Q: Are we selling our souls when moving to cloud? Or should we not worry about lock-in?
There are no standards yet. To take advantage of cloud you need to embed it into code. It does create some locking issues. Hopefully in future there will be standards. If you're going to scale on EC2 and have scripts to automatically launch instances then moving to a different cloud will create issues. A lot of clouds that are gaining traction have very custom APIs. There is going to be a proprietary stack. On the other hand we will see convergence towards standards based platform. Then we end up with choice where you will then make decision based on your strengths.


There is still value in proprietary technologies. The more value you are going to build for your customers, the more proprietary the technology behind it would be. Both open and proprietary markets have their potential.

Even though App Engine is proprietary, the documentation is very open. If you are using Big Table, you are kind of selling your soul. Until Google open sources BigTable so users can export their data, it is locked-in.

API that Google provides isn't specific to BigTable. One of the criteria is how scalable the platform is. Christophe Bisciglia thinks that Google is a step ahead of Google when it comes to BigTable and their platform.

One shouldn't be locked into proprietary data store, period.

But, CB insists that BigTable performs better. There are things for which relational databases don't perform well. There is a sacrifice but it allows you to scale. What differentiates providers is how low their latency is and how scalable the infrastructure is and how protected the data is.

LM: A lot of companies are not right away ready for cloud.

The dirty little secret model for cloud computing is that if licensing models don't catch up, everything can drop dead.

Cloud has become an overused term. duh!

Google has geographically distributed clusters.

Cloud computing is architecture 3.0.

There is a live stream going out at http://www.mogulus.com/structure08

Application development 5-10 years from now will be focused on the need to scale. The challenge is to move people up to cloud and provide them with tools to develop their applications the right way.

Thought shift is required for enterprises to move to cloud. CB gives an example of how people were hesitant to use banks when they came around as people were nervous of keeping their money with someone else. But then, as people realized the dangers of not keeping money at bank, banking became the norm.

AT&T will be spending $20 billion on their infrastructure.

Enterprises want to sign a contract. They don't want to just go and use credit card to start a relationship like this.

There is a big marketing problem. The word cloud means less and less everyday. Cloud is getting into the enterprise through the backdoor.

OpenSocial and Google App Engine

Patrick Chanezon (API Evangelist) and Paul McDonald (Product Manager for Google App Engine) presented a technical overview of OpenSocial and Google App Engine at Graphing Social Patterns East. If you aren't familiar with OpenSocial see the second presentation below, first.

Adam Lovallo of Inside Facebook was live blogging the session.
Introduction to Google OpenSocial

Here's a video of Patrick Chanezon:


If you're interested in building OpenSocial Applications using Google App Engine, you may want to check out the article Building an OpenSocial App with Google AppEngine by Lane LiaBraaten, Google Developer Programs.

Open Social: Open for Business

Next up is the session Open Social: Open for Business. Panelists are Patrick Chanezon (Google), Paul Lindner (hi5), Max Newbould (MySpace) and Sachin Rekhi (imeem).

Open Social offers a standard for everyone. The IT rights of Open Social are owned by Open Social Foundation. Among Open Social members are hi5, imeem, bebo, ning, Oracle, Yahoo!, six apart, LinkedIn, viadeo, friendster, AOL and many more.

Open Social is 88 days old and reaches 275,000,000 users with 66 million installs of 2000+ apps developed by 20,000 developers. 10 million users use applications on Open Social.

Two client APIs : one for javascript and the other for REST.

Three areas:

• people and friends: access friends information programatically.
• activities: see what friends are doing
• persistence: provide state without a server and share data wth friends.
  

Some examples follow next.

An Open Social application has 80% code that can be readily implemented on other OS containers.

If you have a social site and want to implement OS you can use Apache Shindig which has PHP and Java version of it. Shindig makes it really easy to implement. There is a very active mailing list for it.

SocialSite by Sun: Open source project that utilizes Shindig and builds on top of it. Dave "Roller" Johnson announced it at JavaOne. Heavy potential at Enterprise.

iGoogle: 50% userbase in US!

Google Friend Connect:

• Users... more ways to do more things with my friends
• Site owners... more and engaged traffic for site.
  

MySpace Developer Platform:

• 7 months old
• Supporting REST APIs - over a year old
• #1 social network
  

Why Develop for MySpace?

• unique demographics: users you can't find elsewhere
• forthcoming metrics / analytics focused on small to medium developers
• user base is so large, you just need to get a small portion of MySpace users by popularity not virality.
  

Some Metrics of MySpace:

• 60K registered developers
• 1800+ apps
• 15 million installations (3 months)
  

MySpace Developer platform at developer.myspace.com

• IRC: irc.freenode.net #myspacedev
• Email: developerrelations at myspace.com
• Twitter: MySpaceDevTeam
• Dev Jams: range from 2-8 hours, devs bring their laptops and get first hand instruction and help from MDP team members
• Myspace offers free application press releases apply at myspace at spark.pr.com
  

MySpace Developer Platform future:

• application communication channel
• custom notifications
• invites - requesShare App
• Metrics/analytics to playing field
  

Sachin (Imeem):

• Imeem is social network focused on sharing and discovering all kinds of media.
• 24m unique users per month and third largest social network based on US traffic.
• http://imeem.com/developers
• they have made their content licenses to developers allowing them to utilize imeem's legally licensed media.
• Types of applications
• originally Adobe ActionScript 3 Flex Apps
• OpenSocial Javascript APIs (in May)
• External iFrame
• OpenSocial extensions
• immem-specific extensions that allow access to imeem media metadata, including music, videos and photos.
• Example:
• The Echo Chamber application example built on imeem.
  

My.Aol.com

• newest partner with OpenSocial
• 4 brands
• 16 locales
• 12 languages and more on the way
• 55 myAOL portals
• 2-3 new locales per month
  

My.AOL.com Gadgest

• myAOL is an AJAX basde web applciations (uses Dojo)
• moving to Google Gadgets
• this summer their platform will be completely transformed to work with Google Gadgets and Open Social.
• jennifer.consalvo at corp.aol.com
  

Internet Trends

A Morgan Stanley team consisting of "Queen of the Net" Mary Meeker, David Joseph and Anand Thaker recently did a presenation on Internet Trends.

The presentation focused on the topics of usage patterns, social networking, widgetization and componentization, measurability and transparency, customer satisfaction, video, monetization, mobile, emerging markets and last but not least, recession.

According to the presentation, consumer IP traffic will surpass business IP traffic in 2008 as consumers use more than 5,000,000 TB of data per month. Since 2005E, there has been a 58% CAGR in IP traffic.

Just this week, AT&T revealed that without significant investment, the Internet's infrastructure will reach it's capacity in 2010. No wonder, some are calling it the d-day of the Internet. Jim Cicconi, SEVP of External and Legislative affairs for AT&T warned:

"The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today. In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today."

If that's hard to believe, keep in mind that Apple recently announced that it will start offering DVDs throught iTunes on their release date.

Consumer Information Technology (CIT) Advancing Faster than Enterprise

No surprise here, really, thanks to Web 2.0 and media intensive applications.

Google's ex CIO, Douglas Merrill, who has since then left Google to join EMI Digital as President, is quoted in the presentation:

"Fifteen years ago, enterprise technology was higher-quality than consumer technology. That's not true anymore. It used to be that you used enterprise technology because you wanted uptime, security and speed. None of those things are as good in enterprise software anymore (as they are in some consumer software). The biggest thing to ask is, 'When consumer software is useful, how can I use it to get costs out of my environment?'"

Douglas originally gave this quote in a WSJ interview while answering the question, "What's driving the "consumerization" of tech in the enterprise, where companies are borrowing tech ideas from the consumer Internet?"

Massive Transition in Available Ad Units
This part of the presentation shows massive decline in the number of page views Yahoo! used to enjoy since 2002. At the same time the Alexa graph comparing Yahoo!'s page views to Google, Facebook and Youtube shows interesting patterns. Specifically YouTube's rapid rise to become the #2 destination on the Internet. This slide also touches on an important point that Supply of ad units is now greater than demand. An important thing to note is that Alexa changed their ranking algorithm recently. The latest Alexa graph for these sites doesn't go back to 2002, however it tells a slightly different story:

- Page views wise, Yahoo! is still number 1, followed by YouTube, Google and Facebook.
- Reach wise, Google is number 1 followed by Yahoo!

Social Networking Characteristics - Fast Growth and Low Penetration

Next slide has a graph from from comScore's "Digital World: State Of The Internet" report which highlights growth in Emerging Internet Markets. The graph shows very fast growth for social networking sites but at the cost of low penetration. In contrast, the online search sector showed very high penetration but low levels of growth. Online personals, retail movies and Retail music industries depicted significant decrease in growth. Multimedia, on the other hand, shows decent growth but much higher penetration than social networks. Visitors growth to community focused sites that aren't social networks also decreased although these sites still have a strong penetration (even stronger than social networks).

Some other interesting findings from the comScore report that weren't in the Morgan Stanley presentation:

• more than 300 million Internet users from Asia Pacific region, 15 years of age or older, were online in January 2008. This shows an increase of 14 percent over 2007 numbers (compare this to 10.4% increase in worldwide users). According to comScore, this increase "makes Asia Pacific the largest of the five worldwide regions"
• Latin America and Middle East-Africa are two other regions that have also experienced "above average audience growth" since 2007. Latin America experienced 16.6% growth where Middle East-Africa experienced 20.2% growth, the highest percentage of growth among five worldwide regions.
• US online audience now only represents 21% of worldwide Internet users.
• Visits to social networking sites by global Internet users increased 34%
• approximately 2 out of every 3 Internet users now visit a social network site with total visitors to social networking sites exceeding 530 million
• MySpace and Facebook both now attract more than 100 million visitors per month
• YouTube leads the way in online entertainment. Video is now the "dominant online entertainment format." More than 250 million visitors visited YouTube in January alone.
  

Social Networking Sites Gaining Significant Share of Online Traffic
The next presentation slide highlights new entrants in the top-10 list of Alexa as well as top-10 sites of 2005 that have lost significant traffic. The sites that lost their top-10 ranking since 2005 include ebay.com, amazon.com, microsoft.com (not counting Microsoft Passport), google.co.uk, aol.com and go.com.

The new entrants in the top-10 list as of 2008 (based on old Alexa ranking model) included youtube.com, live.com, facebook.com, hi5.com, wikipedia.org and orkut.com. If the ranking list was a top-15 list, my employer would have been included at number 13.

How People Worldwide Spend Their Time Online

• 22% time is spent in online communication
• 16% time is spent in social communication. The presentation makes a note that this category didn't exist 3 years ago.
• 8% time is spent in online shopping activities
• 14% time is spent in entertainment and leisure activities
• 6% time is spent in work, business and education activities
  

Another interesting point made by the presentation, although no surprise, is that younger users (aged 15-24) tend to communicate more via Facebook whereas older Internet users (aged 44+) tend to use Yahoo! Mail more to communicate. The presentation raises the question whether email is becoming more archaic.

Comparison of popular sites

Facebook (#4 in global minutes) has experienced most growth (305%) since last year reaching 101 million members according to comScore. YouTube (#3 in global minutes) had the second highest growth (94%) with a total of 258 million users. Other two sites mentioned are PayPal and Skype, both eBay properties.

Two interesting facts about YouTube that I didn't know: A very high number of YouTube visitors (51%) visit the site weekly and half of the users "watch all videos to the end"

What is the most important source of Information?

Citing a study titled "Online World As Important to Internet Users as Real World?" conducted by Annenberg School for Communication , the presentation makes an important point: personal and online sources are two most important sources of information, and together they are the "essecnce of a social network."

The original report by digitalcenter.org also says that "online communities are a catalyst for connection and activism" and that "involvement in online communities leads to offline actions. More than one-fifth of online community members (20.3 percent) take actions offline at least once a year that are related to their online community." The original report also states that online activism is making online users get involved "in causes that were new to them when they began participating on the Internet" and that "more than 40 percent (43.7 percent) of online community members participate more in social activism since they started participating in online communities."

Another interesting point is that according to the Digital Future Project, Internet users 17 years of age or older trust Internet more (80%) than personal source (73%)

Some other important findings from USC-Annenberg Digital Future Project's report:

• 64.9 percent are involved in new causes
• 43.7 percent now participate more in social activism
• 56.6 percent log in to their community once a day
• 70.4 percent of community members "sometimes or always interact with other members of their community while logged in"
• 7.4 percent of American Internet users maintain a blog
• 23.6 percent of Internet users now post photos online. Previously only 11 percent were posting photos online.
• 12.5 percent of users now maintain their own website.
• Internet users meet an average of 4.65 "friends online whom they have never met in person" and 1.6 "friends met in person whom they originally met online"
  

Facebook growth

Next, there are some metrics from Facebook's growth. Some highlights

• as of 03/08 there were more than 14 million photo uploads a day being uploaded to Facebook and 6 million active user groups on Facebook.
• there are 55,000 total networks (partitions?/shards? :) ) and 50% of the networks are outside of college. I wonder how many networks are location based?
• Segment of users who are 25 years or older are the fastest growing segment. No surprise for me as my mother in law just joined Facebook.
• There are more than 250,000 new registrations per day since January of 2007.
• There are more than 859 million installations of 20,000 applications
• Super Wall by Rock You! is the most popular application with 28 million installs on Facebook followed by Top Friends (26 million installs) and Fun Wall (25 million), both by Slide
• Both Slide and Rock You! have 3 applications each in top 10 applications.
• Facebook's own Video application is ranked #7.
  

Reasons for Facebook growing faster than MySpace

• advertising that is considered less intrusive
• news feed that is personalized
• UI that is cleaner
• friends section that receives more prominence
• ads that are more personalized
• more applications
• more mobile friendly
• facebook focusing more on monetizing word-of-mouth and conversations
  

The presentation titled Internet Trends is available on Slide Share, thanks to Tech Crunch.

Other Sources:

• Online World As Important to Internet Users as Real World
• Digital World: State of the Internet
• Alexa Ranking Algorithm Changed
  

The Strategy Chronicles #1

This is the first edition of a new series of blog posts that I will try to write regularly (no hardcore promises though). I will be calling it, for the lack of better imagination and because it's 3:09 in the morning, The Strategy Chronicles, or TSC. The primary purpose of this series is to help me keep track of what's happening each week. So whether you liked it or hated it, please let me know. So, let's get started.

Microsoft makes Yahoo! investors very unhappy: At least some of the Yahoo! investors are now worried about an increased Microsoft bid to acquire Yahoo!. The primary reason being that there are several Yahoo! investors who are also Microsoft investors. Separately, several share holders are blasting Yahoo! for rejecting Microsoft's bid.

Yahoo! losing another ground: Opera has now decided to dump Yahoo! in favor of Google for its mobile browser.
- "every month, Opera Mini users browse more than 1.7 billion pages"
- most of the page views were related to search. Yahoo! has a serious relevancy problem in addition to the problem of effectively monetizing its search traffic. I can see how easy it was for Opera decision makers to ditch Yahoo! in favor of Google.
- Google has been Opera's choice for desktop browser for 7 years.

Even more troubles for Yahoo!: Remember the time when Yahoo! handed over the information about its Chinese users to the authorities? Well, that issue continues to haunt Yahoo! as yet another lawsuit was filed against the company by its Chinese dissidents. Yahoo!'s submitted evidence lead to one year imprisonment of a plaintiff.

Finally!: Meanwhile, Google has finally re-launched JotSpot as Google Sites. Exactly how that will hurt Microsoft's similar initiatives is yet to be seen, however the outlook according to the media, doesn't look so promising as far as Microsoft is concerned.

Clean console!: Consumerist reports about an incident where a passionate Xbox user lost his beloved collection of autographs and custom artwork drawn on the console by prominent members of the gaming community. Perhaps, the Microsoft employee responsible for this thought the collectible autographs were making the Xbox unit look dirty.

Bill Gates now LinkedIn!: Facebook's loss is LinkedIn's gain. Bill Gates recently quit Facebook despite Microsoft's recent investment in the social networking powerhouse, and decided to start a profile on LinkedIn. Once his profile was created, Gates then asked a question that received more than 1,000 answers. Interestingly enough the same day I noticed the featured question, Facebook changed their site's theme.

Sliding the Social way!: Slide, the media and gadget distribution powerhouse announced recently that it will create new applications to for MySpace users using MySpace Developer Platform. This could increase Slide.com's profile and reach significantly. Earlier this year, Slide announced that it raised $50 million in its latest funding round.

The 6% of Internet that can make you rich beyond your wildest dreams

A new research study by SVM Group shows some very interesting statistics regarding the Internet population that generates a big percentage of overall clicks.

According to the study, only 6% of Internet users are responsible for generating 50% of "all display ad clicks." Interestingly enough, this 6% doesn't represent general Internet population. Most of the users represented in this population are from 25-44 age group and have household income of less than $40,000.

Could this be the reason for Google admitting the troubles they are having with being able to monetize on social networks such as MySpace?

What implications does this have as far as the click fraud issue is concerned?

If a majority of 50% of these clicks is made by those with household income of less than $40K, are they just clicking on ads for curiosity? Should the advertisers be paying for their curiosity?

Is Google's smart pricing justified then? Google slaps publishers with smart pricing when it determines that clicks generated on the publisher's site aren't resulting in conversions on the advertiser's site. This is what Google says about Smart Pricing (also see facts about smart pricing):

...if our data shows that a click is less likely to turn into business results (e.g. online sale, registration, phone call, newsletter sign-up), we may reduce the price you pay for that click. You may notice a reduction in the cost of clicks from content sites.

One site getting hit with smart pricing can affect all sites in the network of the publisher. It seems that if these statistics are in fact true, most sites will run the risk of being smart priced.

Google tests Ajax AdSense Ads

Today, I noticed something very interesting on my MySQL blog. Google has started using AJAX functionality in their AdSense ad units.

Notice the two blue arrows on bottom-left? Clicking on these buttons does an in-page refresh of ads so you can see more Google's ads. An excellent addition from publisher's point of view. However, as far as I am concerned, Google's attempt will be of no use to me. Are they serious? Do I browse so I can go from site to site clicking on these buttons to keep seeing an endless supply of ads just so Google can make more money.

So, let me ask you a question. Do you think you will be clicking on these buttons the next time you see them? Will they help publishers monetize better?

Google does it again!

Just received email from Google Press and damn, Google has done it again:

"Google reported revenues of $4.23 billion for the quarter ended September 30, 2007, an increase of 57% compared to the third quarter of 2006 and an increase of 9% compared to the second quarter of 2007. "

Recently I found out Google has been sending people Nokia Internet Tablets. I guess they need new ways to spend money.