Friendfeed (now owned by Facebook) attempted to do the same but Friendfeed suffered from a perception that it was mainly for the geek elite.

Google Buzz and Friendfeed can be viewed as attempts to create a ‘one ring to link them all’ model that many other businesses are also shooting for. If you can own that ring, you rule them all.

You can see that strategy at Facebook, Twitter… and at other companies in their fields, such as Salesforce.com in enterprise apps.

Owning instead of linking…

Google has an advantage in that it owns many web services such as email, photo sharing, document sharing, voice calls, text messaging, maps, news readers, etc.

Facebook is also trying to become the ‘one ring to link them all.’ And like Google, it has its own services; it is about to launch a new souped up email system; it integrates Twitter updates; it has become one of the largest photo and video sharing sites; it has event services, and more services are on their way.

Microsoft Live has a similar strategy and similar services. And other companies are moving in the same direction, for example Nokia, with its OVI push around mobile maps, and other online services.

It will be important to own your own Internet services because third party services will undoubtably start to limit how much of their user data they are willing to share with other businesses. Such data is made available through open APIs (application programming interfaces). Open APIs are essential for social networking and sharing across many different Internet sites.

Increased competition will very likely be reflected in constraints on open APIs. Why make it easier for another business to roll up your user data? Each business will try to make life difficult for its competitors, and for future ones.

From open APIs to ajar…

APIs will become ‘ajar’ in that they will be partially open. Limited APIs are hated by the geek community but they make perfect sense for businesses trying to stop competitors from profiting from their user communities.

Limited APIs will make it very difficult for Google, or any other company, to create a ‘one ring to link them all’ model. We are much more likely to have a series of separate ‘rings,’ each one representing a fairly closed, self-contained world, where common Internet services are aggregated.

Unfortunately, this all points to a future Internet that is increasingly closed and proprietary.

Google has way too much info about US citizens…and the NSA has a history of spying on US citizens. That can’t be a good combination.

The NSA–a component of the Department of Defense–is an intelligence collection agency with few effective checks against abuse and no public oversight of its activities. In the last decade, the NSA’s vast dragnet of suspicionless surveillance has targeted everyday Americans, in violation of the law and the Constitution.

…The specific terms of the proposed deal are very unsettling. Google announced that they’re asking the NSA to find “vulnerabilities.”

What assurances do we have that a spy organization like the NSA would fix the holes they find and won’t instead use them to tap into our personal data? Cybersecurity for the American people should not be handed over to a military spy agency that has a history of secretly exploiting vulnerabilities, not fixing them.

The ACLU asks that people send a message to Google that strongly opposes a deal with the NSA.

What is interesting about this proposed alliance is that the two sides are still negotiating the terms. This must indicate that Google has not been happy about terms that the NSA has specified.

Good point here from ACLU:

If companies like Google think they need the government’s help to secure their networks, then a civilian agency needs to step up to the task. Cybersecurity for the American people should not be handed over to a military spy agency, one that is insulated from public oversight and has a history of secretly exploiting vulnerabilities, rather than fixing them.

And…

The NSA sucks up the equivalent of the contents of the Library of Congress every six to eight hours, every single day. In the last decade, the NSA’s dragnet, suspicionless surveillance has targeted everyday Americans, in violation of the law and the Constitution.

Google + NSA doesn’t look good…

Send a message to Google that strongly opposes a deal with the NSA.

Please see:

» Tell Google Not to Enter Into an Agreement With the NSA

» Cybersecurity is Not Your Gig, NSA!

Mr Mills was in town Monday evening to meet with a handful of media and chat about IBM’s green initiatives around municipal infrastructure projects.

I had a chance to go off topic and ask him about SAP and the changes at the world’s largest business software company.

Mr Mills said that he welcomed the changes and that it would not impact IBM’s SAP related business. “SAP is a valued partner and we don’t expect any affect on our SAP related business.”

SAP business is a big business at IBM. The company makes money on consulting services and hardware related to SAP implementations. For every dollar that SAP receives in license revenues, IBM and other systems integrators, make about $9 in services and other revenues.

Take a look at this article on BBC News about early British computer pioneers.

By splitting data into packets and threading them on the same line, the carrying capacity of that link could be boosted and the whole network made more powerful.

Roger Scantlebury, who worked with Dr Davies, presented the ideas about “packet switching” to a conference in the US, where they were picked up by the creators of the nascent Arpanet, the fledgling internet.

Does that mean Britain invented the internet?

“Yes and no,” said Mr Scantlebury. “Certainly the underlying technology of the internet, which is packet switching, we did invent.”

British researchers also worked on hyperlinks…

David Yates was project manager of a program called Scrapbook which rolled together word processing, e-mail and hypertext - a system that incorporated many elements of the World Wide Web.

Scrapbook went live on 28 April 1971…Scrapbook helped people across the 28 acres of the NPL campus collaborate or projects without having to sit next to each other.

Tim Berners-Lee, is a Brit and he invented the world wide web… So maybe the British did invent the Internet but with typical British modesty, didn’t want to blow their own horn. At least until now.

The Fight over Prices on the Internet - NYTimes.com

On some pages of e-commerce sites selling products like televisions, digital cameras and jewelry, a critical piece of information is conspicuously missing: the price tag.

Customers have to go to the online checkout to see the price. These missing prices are more likely to be methods of thwarting price comparison engines rather than manufacturers’ price controls.

Retailers have long managed to get around pricing controls by giving other things away. For example, Apple dealers aren’t allowed to under cut each other on price but they can give away printers and other products, which effectively undercuts Apple’s recommended retail prices.

What is much more interesting is this tidbit, buried deeper in the NYTimes article, almost at the very end:

Instead of selling e-books wholesale to retailers like Amazon.com, the publishers want to sell them directly, setting prices and having the retailer act as an agent, taking a fixed 30 percent commission.

Wow. Turning Amazon into an affiliate! How ironic, since Amazon is one of the largest affiliate marketers, offering a percentage of revenues sold by third parties.

This is the danger that online retailers now face: what if their suppliers want to sell direct?

A search engine, such as Google or Bing, would be able to make it very easy to find the online stores of the manufacturers of many goods. This would be like a huge outlet store in the cloud.

In most cases manufacturers are already drop-shipping orders on goods collected by online retailers. Why not cut out the middle man?

In addition, the manufacturers would be collecting important customer data — data that is currently kept by the retailer. They would be able to develop a direct customer relationship for the very first time (beyond the voluntary ‘warranty’ cards found with many products).

And if you know who bought what and when, it becomes easy to work out who will probably be needing a new washing machine, or computer, because the old one is on its last legs. Your marketing goes direct — which cuts out a lot of costs.

Fortunately for the retailers, manufacturers don’t know how to market well, or how to manage a direct customer relationship. At least, not yet…

Amazon has some protection from this trend in that it has layered on a lot of cool features and services, such as customer reviews, and secure online payment systems. That will help in retaining customers and making it less attractive for its suppliers to sell direct.

But it’s clear that there are troubling signs ahead, that the Internet does make it possible for manufacturers to sell direct; and that search engines could create the storefront; they could aggregate customer reviews; and offer secure payment services (Google Checkout).

Online retailers are caught between a rock (search engines) and a hard place (suppliers selling direct). Both have sound business reasons to squeeze out the middle guy.

This is less true for retailers that also have physical locations such as Wal-mart or Best Buy. Will Amazon make a bricks and mortar acquisition?

Rick Edmonds, over on Poynter Online, notes that the classified ads sector dropped to $6 billion in 2009. This compares with $10 billion in 2008, and $19.6 billion in 2000.

Classified ads used to be a basic bread-and-butter revenue source for newspapers. It helped subsidize news gathering operations, and it is the loss of this important source of revenue that is partly to blame for the newspaper industry’s financial troubles.

The reduction in the value of the classified ads market is not a measure of the number of classified ads. There are still masses of classified ads, it’s just that they cost nearly nothing to post, if you use Craigslist.

There are about 30 people working at Craigslist. This small team has managed to pull tens of billions of dollars out of the classified ads sector over the past decade. And it has replaced the work of tens of thousands of people that used to work in newspaper classified ads departments.

And Craigslist doesn’t charge for most of its classified ads because it doesn’t want to. And it doesn’t need to. Servers and bandwidth are fairly cheap and Craigslist’s paid job ads cover all the costs of the business.

For newspapers, it’s difficult to compete with a business that doesn’t want to profit from your bread-and-butter revenues. It’s one thing to have a competitor ‘eat your lunch,’ but in this case, Craigslist takes the lunch away and doesn’t bother eating it. If Craigslist did charge for classified ads, that would at least, provide newspapers with something to compete against.

I don’t mean to criticize Craigslist, I’m a huge fan and I have tremendous admiration for Craig Newmark, the founder, and Jim Buckmaster, the CEO. I see them fairly often around San Francisco, where I live.

But Craigslist is an excellent example of how the Internet can be used to devalue a large industry sector. And I mean ‘devalue’ in a strictly monetary sense — Craigslist’s free ads create a massive amount of value as social capital.

Please see: The Internet devalues everything it touches . . .

- U.S. trust in technology is 78 percent, China at 83 percent and India at 88 percent.

- Tied for the second most trusted industry is Biotech and Automotive at 63 percent, followed by Energy, Retail and Food at 61 percent.

- Only 38 percent trust media (as an institution) to do what is right, down from 46 percent in 2008. Media companies (as an industry) have declined in credibility by 16 points (from 48 to 32 percent).

- In the U.S., media companies are tied with the insurance industry for last place. Banks are second from the bottom.

Although media as a whole lost trust. Does this mean that tech industry media has a higher level of trust because it’s about the tech industry?

The finding that jumped out at me was this:

- Trust in information from friends and peers, “people like me,” dropped by 20 points, from 47 to 27 percent.

- Trust in information from digital media–blogs, social networks, and free content sources like Wikipedia or Google news, remains low: only between 11 percent and 22 percent of respondents express trust in information about companies from these sources.

This is bad news for PR agencies because social media has been the ‘point of the spear’ for so many firms. This is what brings in new business.

This is bad news for all the ’social media experts’ out there trying to convince companies to buy their services because of the potential brand damage from not responding to ‘conversations’ in social media.

What’s the point in jumping to engage if people don’t trust their peers anyway?

This is bad news for many startups that offer real-time monitoring of the ’social’ web. There is less need for their services.

But it’s not just social media…

Other types of media have also fallen in the Edelman Trust Barometer, but not to the same degree as trust in peers.

- Trust in credibility of TV news declined by 20 points, from 44 to 24 percent.

- Trust in news coverage on the radio dropped by 17 points, from 48 to 31 percent.

- Trust in newspapers fell by 14 points, from 46 to 32 percent.

- Only 38 percent trust media (as an institution) to do what is right, down from 46 percent in 2008.

- Media companies (as an industry) have declined in credibility by 16 points (from 48 to 32 percent).

- In the U.S., media companies are tied with the insurance industry for last place. Banks are second from the bottom.

- Top trusted industry is technology and it has widened its lead over other industries.

- Tied for the second most trusted industry is Biotech and Automotive at 63 percent, followed by Energy, Retail and Food at 61 percent.

But why is ALL media less trustworthy?

- Is it because we now have more media now than ever before, both social and traditional sources of media?

- Is it because more of any thing, devalues that thing? We have more media in more forms, at more times, than at anytime in our history. Is trust in media being lost because trust has become more diluted?

- Traditional media still leads as a source for social media. But traditional media is under pressure, with fewer resources. That means more mistakes, less time to check sources, resulting in a lower quality product. That can’t be good for building trust in media.

- Is social media losing trust because of all the social media marketeers that seem to be the loudest voices in many streams?

That would make it seem as if social media can be manipulated, or used to an advantage by businesses. Which is exactly what the social media mavens are saying. A key finding of the Edelman Trust Barometer is that trust in businesses is fragile.

Therefore, is it business involvement in social media that is affecting people’s trust in social and traditional media?

The Edelman survey has raised some interesting questions…

British business executives dealing with China were given a formal warning more than a year ago by Britain’s security service, MI5, that Chinese intelligence agencies were engaged in a wide-ranging effort to hack into British companies’ computers and to blackmail British businesspeople over sexual relationships and other improprieties, according to people familiar with the MI5 document.

Was sexual blackmail an issue in the recent Google Chinese spying incident? This also involved some 30 other US companies.

Cyber hacking is just one of several techniques used by Chinese spies. Is there more to the Google v China story?

Yes, it is a salacious topic. But it’s best to get it out in the open. Otherwise people won’t know what to look out for, and the Chinese spies will have the upper hand in future missions.

- - -

I would like to inform Chinese spies that I have a lot of secrets but I’m immune to any type of sexual persuasion. You are welcome to try. Here’s my address.

The computer/Internet industries were the third largest industry lobbying Washington, well above the oil and gas industry.

Here are the top five industries lobbying Washington in 2009 from data compiled by Opensecrets.org.

Pharmaceuticals/Health Products $1,788,456,774

Insurance $1,328,484,288

Electric Utilities $1,221,825,728

Computers/Internet $1,011,127,902

Business Associations $935,616,339

Oil & Gas $901,093,876

- - -

Please see:

In Silicon Valley, Oracle spent the most in 2009: $5.1 million, followed by Google with $4 million. However, in Q4 2009, Google outspent Oracle.

Since 2005, Google has increased its spend on lobbyists by nearly 16 times, from $260,000 to $4.03 million in 2009.

It’s interesting to note that both Oracle and Google are in the anti-trust spotlight. Oracle has had to fight many antirust issues because of its acquisitions, and so far, it has won. Google has not done as well. In 2008, Google had to abandon a search advertising agreement with Yahoo because the DOJ said it would file suit to block it.

The San Jose Mercury has put together a great graphic on how much, and who, has spent the most in Washington:

Silicon Valley Lobbying

Chris O’Brien at the San Jose Mercury News spoke with Alan Davidson, Head of US Public Policy at Google. [O'Brien: Google joins the titans of Silicon Valley lobbying]