Before that Google threw its hat into the OS arena with Google Chrome OS. In my earlier post, I was not so impressed but others seem to be excited with it.

Now listen…. they want to pick a fight with Facebook and Twitter in the social networking business as well. Google is rumored to be set to release new features on Gmail allowing users to update their status for friends to see as part of a move that sees the search giant embrace social media initiatives popularised by other social networking sites (SNS).

The new service is reportedly similar to the status-bar tools seen on Facebook and Twitter, and will further incorporate photo and video sharing.

This new development – which is widely expected to be formally announced sometime this week – comes one week after Facebook marked its sixth birthday by revealing it has more than doubled its number of users in the last year to 400 million.

Google and Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, have recently looked to incorporate social-media services to make their offerings more relevant for users also active on SNS. In October, both Google and Bing announced they would adopt a Twitter function to reflect audiences’ growing interest and trust in social commentary. Microsoft was first to launch its Bing Twitter Search function and further connected with Facebook to offer search results on users’ updated statuses.

Further blurring the lines between search, portals and SNS, Friendster and Yahoo Southeast Asia last month also entered into a multi-year strategic partnership that lets mutual users more efficiently share information.

Now what?

Gmail certainly has a lot of users nowadays because of its simplicity to use. Many users have ditched Yahoo mail because of the clutter of news and other content that Yahoo tried to shove down the users throat. Will this move marked a grave mistake by Google?

As it is, Gmail is already pretty heavy to load with all the complex pageload. On days when the trust-worthy Streamyx typically hit bottleneck speed – one will have to switch to basic-view. Imagine, if status-update and more photo and video is added – can the users cope?

Whatever it is – welcome to the social networking bandwagon, Sir. May I introduce you to your fellow latecomer… Tan Sri Vincent Tan from Malaysia. Please get acquainted!

Update Wed 10 Feb 2010

Here it is! I checked my Gmail account this morning and there’s a new line ‘Buzz’ at the left menu column. Just under the Inbox link. Clicking on the link, it opens up a new Buzz page with a welcoming note that informed me that Gmail has conveniently made me follow 14 other people in my contact list – but for some reason none of them has a reciprocal follow on me. It also tells me that my post on Picasaweb photo services will be automatically posted into my Buzz.

If anyone is concerned about Facebook privacy… by comparison Google has even less care about my say who I want to follow or what I want to share with other people. If earlier, I was saying about how Yahoo shove unwanted content at its Yahoo! mail service… this time Google just shackle me down with forced connections. What if I’m a minor and some of those my contact list is shady characters? (contact list is, by default, automatically added based on your email sent put

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The cheek and arrogance of them. In fact Google executives were reported at the Buzz launch to say that online social networking has become so widespread and disorganized that only Google, with its massive reach and immense computing power, can make sense of it all.

“It has become a core belief of ours that organizing the social information on the Web is a Google-scale problem,” Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager, said at the launch.

Yes… Gmail may have 176 million users. But not everyone is an active user and as I speak, a few people I checked who are inactive registered users, noted that the Buzz component isn’t in their page.

Related articles:

• Google Takes On Facebook, Twitter With ‘Buzz’ (wired.com)
• Microsoft, Yahoo Diss Google’s Buzz (wired.com)
• Facebook is the new threat to Google (guardian.co.uk)
• Google’s Bad Buzz: Microsoft, Yahoo Mock New Social Product (dailyfinance.com)
• Google flexes muscles against social networks (ubergizmo.com)

After launching a jab at Google via the Office Web announcement, Microsoft today delivered a left hook that it hoped will deliver the solid punch to rock its rival, Google the Cloud King.

Microsoft and Yahoo seal web deal screamed the headline today. Microsoft’s Bing search engine received a shot in the arm with this deal that allows Microsoft to take control of Yahoo’s search engine and search advertising technology.

Funny eh.. Yahoo! who once ruled the search engine world ago is now resigned to be the sales-rep. Yahoo! new CEO, Carol Bartz, thought that this is a great deal. Let someone else deal with the techie stuff headache, we’ll still get to keep 88% of the ad-revenue – plus the deal would “boost Yahoo!’s annual operating income by $500m and secure $200m in savings“. The income is from guaranteed revenues per search for the first 18 months of the 10-year deal + rights on premium adverts. Premium Adverts is trade talk for advert deals that are concluded face-to-face (usually with major accounts) as opposed to those placed online by mere mortals like us and these deals accounts to almost half of Yahoo!’s advert income.

Apparently, it does not matter that Yahoo! doesn’t get a single cent of cash upfront out of giving away its family jewel. Some CEOs sure think ‘out-of-the-box’. Maybe she’s been visiting PKFZ to pick up some tips. Using my Casio calculator, I can’t figure out how (US$500 million + US$200 million) x 10 is better than US$47 billion – that’s before taking into account the fact that the income is only coming in over ten years.

Ask this: What happens in 10 years, when the partnership ends and Microsoft’s Bing engine powers all of Yahoo’s search queries? Maybe the same way when Yahoo! send the out-of-date Geocities to its demise.

On the other hand, Microsoft is obviously delirious that its effort to take control of Yahoo! since late 2007 has finally borne fruit. And it appears to cost Microsoft a lot less than US$47.5 billion that was offered in Jan 2008.

“Through this agreement with Yahoo, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers, and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company,” said Mr Ballmer. “Microsoft and Yahoo know there’s so much more that search could be. This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search,”

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What does this mean?

• In one stroke, Microsoft will now get to control 30% of the US advert market. (We wonder how will this translated into iron-clad features of the to-be released Windows 7) and Microsoft finally gets to be a genuine contender in the search-ads world
• Yahoo! is now no more a search engine company, but is an advertising and media company (like AOL)

The King of Cloud, meanwhile, still controls over 2/3 of the ad-sales market. Looking down at the Babel Tower being built by the pretenders. As at the time of writing, we haven’t received any reports of shudders from the throne yet.

Hey… how dare you youngsters ask what is Geocities and what’s so great about it? Heck, this is the service that democratize the internet. Before Geocities come about in 1996, Internet has been around long before but it was the domain of geeks and university scholars (yeah.. geeks as well). But with Geocities, suddenly any Ahmad, Mutu and Ah Beng can have their own webpage on the world-wide-web for all the world to see. Anybody can have a page (something like http://www.geocities.com/~coolashreport) and post information about themselves, pictures of their dog and cat, list of midi-files and other banal stuff.

By today’s standard, the Geocities pages are gawdy. Pages with black background with neon yellow flashing text and oh-so-cool java-scrolling text are common. Why not, even the homepage is… just have a look yourself down here.

What Geocities look like in 1996

Geocities arrranged pages into community with like minded interest. When you register, you need to choose one community to park your homestead (that’s what yet call your pages). “Area 51″ “Beverly Hills” “Silicon Valley” etc. There are other free community pages like “Angelfire” “Tripod” but Geocities are the grand-daddy of them all. At its peak in 1997, it is the 5th most visited sites in the world and hosting 3.5 million sites. Certainly impressive even compared with today’s community sites like Facebook or MySpace.

Geocities demise started when it was acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for US$3.6 billion. Yahoo! actually paid over US$100 per profile (out of which US$200 is attributed to yours truly). Not long afterward, the dot-com bubble burst and caused serious decline in advertising money.

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It will not be so bad if Yahoo! had let Geocities evolve into web 2.0 and kept up with alternative community sites. Instead, Geocities remain trapped in the time zone.

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Cyworld. An example of what Geocities could not become

The picture above is from Cyworld, a leading Korean social networking site. The site is targeted at teens and 20-somethings – people who have time to create networks, homepages and 3-D virtual rooms. Users can buy virtual items to decorate their 3-D rooms. A staggering 25% of the Korean population have an account with Cyworld. Cyworld is now in Japan, China, Taiwan and USA. And it’s profitable too – bringing in a cool US$300,000 a day.

This is what you can do in Cyworld:

• Create your own 3-D room in pixel art
• Create a pixel art avatar of yourself
• Fill your 3-D room with virtual items
• Slick and cute interface
• Photos, videos, journal, sketchbook, file storage, etc. all integrated
• Add friends as “neighbours”

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Now that’s cool. And if Yahoo had the vision to transform the 3.5 million homesteads and get the teenage and 20 somethings to buy stuff for their virtual world, we would not have abandoned our Geocities pad. Actually we can say the same thing to Yahoo! the classified-listings turned search-engine too.

So here’s an ode to Geocities – the grand-daddy of webpages. And as a rememberance, here’s a typical Geocities page for you. (for obvious reason, I can’t put up my own Geocities page or I’ll be the butt of joke of the office for the next ten weeks

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RIP Geocities!

P/S : Don’t be shy, please leave here the URL of your geocities pages before they disappeared in October.