Sherbango soup

Google just introduced an interesting new feature for Google Calendar: Smart Rescheduler. This new feature, which will be available in Google Calendar Labs today, will automatically find the best time to reschedule a meeting. If you have ever tried to reschedule a meeting that includes more than two people, a conference room, equipment and a team that is distributed across multiple time zones, you know how hard this can be.

With Smart Rescheduler, Google Calendar will give you a set of alternative dates based on a ranking algorithm that keeps everybody's availability and other criteria in mind.

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Rescheduling Meetings Doesn't Have to be Hard

As Ken Norton, Google's product manager for Google Calendar, told us yesterday, the Calendar team decided to tackle this problem after realizing how much time administrative assistants spend on trying to reschedule meetings every day. Starting today, Smart Rescheduler will be available as a Calender Labs product for all Google Calender users (including all Google Apps users with access to Calendar Labs).

Now, assuming your team uses Google Calendar, you can simply click on "Find a new time" and Google will present you with a list of the most appropriate times for a new meeting. The algorithm will rank alternative times based on criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms and time zones. As Norton told us, the algorithm is actually quite complex and will also suggest a new meeting time when two participants in a larger meetings are scheduled for a one-on-one meeting at the same time or when there is a scheduling conflict but a meeting participant hasn't RSVPed to this other meeting yet.

Users can also refine the search criteria by changing the meeting duration, ignoring certain conflicts and by setting the earliest and latest date for the rescheduled meeting.

It's interesting that Google is only using this algorithm to reschedule meetings for now. It would also be interesting to see how well this system would work for scheduling meetings in the first place.

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Panda Security is reporting a second incident of malware on Vodafone's HTC Magic, a Google Android smart phone. it provide a clear example for how smartphones are prime targets to become botnets once connected to a user's personal computer.

The incidents provide real-world examples of how companies can inadvertently spread malware. It also raises questions about the quality assurance testing done by manufacturers and the carriers.

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After the first discovery earlier this month, Vodafone said it was an isolated incident. But two days later the company announced the HTC Magic would be discontinued. Vodafone also deleted questions about the issue from its forums.

A Panda employee discovered the "Mariposa," virus after connecting it via USB her PC. Her Panda Cloud Anti-Virus software detected the malicious code, revealing that the smart phone was infected and spreading the virus to the PC.

Mariposa is a program that turns infected machines into botnets. it has infected more than 13 million computers, stealing credit card and bank log-in information.

In the second incident, an IT security expert who had bought the phone learned about the virus discovery. He decided to test his phone, using AVG anti-virus protection. Sure enough, his device also showed it had malware on it.

According to Panda Security:

This guy had also purchased an HTC Magic direct from Vodafone's official website the same week as my co-worker. He hadn't connected the phone to his PC yet, but as soon as he saw the news hurried back home, plugged it in via USB and scanned its memory card with both MalwareBytes and AVG Free. Lo and behold, Mariposa emerged again, exactly in the same way as in our original finding.

The HTC Magic has historically been sold in Europe.

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Google Apps is offering migration for Microsoft Exchange. The service is free with Google Apps Premiere or Google Apps Education.

Last July, Google Apps began offering migration from IBM's Lotus Notes. Most enterprises are standardized on either Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes, which means that Google now pretty much can migrate any organization to the cloud. Google also offers connection to Blackberry Enterprise Server.Google Apps is providing migration for Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007.

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Microsoft has very limited capability to offer a cloud-based email environment. Most of the offerings it provides are locally installed, single-hosting services. Concerns will wane about cloud security. The ability to offer a cloud-based email environment for easy access will be the norm, not the exception. But even though Google has a jump, Microsoft will have its own offering. In the meantime, Google has an opportunity to make another leap into the enterprise.

This does represent a tipping point for many companies shedding IT assets. The question about email often comes up when companies consider moving to the cloud. It's an important part of the migration. In recent weeks, we have seen how email is becoming a foundation for the evolution of a web oriented, social enterprise. Google Apps Marketplace offers the capability to offer third party applications that integrate with Google Apps. Email is a critical part of the equation in this Google ecosystem. It provides a backbone for companies to connect its employees with Google Apps and the associated third-parties.

The process to migrate looks relatively simple. Through Google Apps, a customer enters their Microsoft Exchange user name and what it calls "two-legged OAuth," consisting of a consumer user key and a consumer "secret". They then upload a .CSV file consisting of the email adresses, calendar and contact information. It is optional what to migrate. For example, an IT administrator may upload email addresses and contact data but not the calendar. Email service does not get interrupted during the migration.

This is a compelling offering for companies moving to the cloud. But it's only part of the equation. Google still needs to prove it is robust enough for the enterprise to migrate to Google Apps. In the meantime, Microsoft needs to act fast and provide a cloud offering that at least gives its own community the option to move Microsoft Exchange to the cloud.

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In the world of risk management, it's all about probability. But often, it takes considerable time to get an answer to important questions. But as of late, risk management is seeing a transformation, in most part fueled by the advent of real-time communication.

The most recent example comes from Crowdcast, which has entered into a partnership with SAP's risk management group.

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Crowdcast is a service that provides real-time capabilities for understanding the collective intelligence of an organization. At first look, the service seems a bit gimmicky. To get answers to questions, a group inside the enterprise is targeted with specific questions. The respondents then give their answers, placing bets on what they view as the probable outcome. But the betting forces the respondents to look at an issue, apply logic to the issue, judge the different factors and make a decision.

For example, as Crowdcast points out, let's say that SAP's Governance and Risk Compliance group is working with a pharmaceutical company. The pharmaceutical company faces a delay in a drug launch. The drug is highly anticipated in the market and any delay can be costly. It's calculated that it costs $10,000 for every minute the drug is late to the market.

Managers need to make decisions but any misjudgments will be costly. Now is the time to go to the community and ask for answers. The community is given "play money," to make a bet about the drug's launch. If the respondent is accurate in their bet then they receive more play money.

The chief risk officer gets access to the bets that people make. Using that data, the risk officer may conclude that 70 percent of the respondents believe the product will be two weeks late to market.

Crowdcast is one of a number of crowdsourcing services that have entered the market. Two in particular come to mind:

Jive Software recenty launched what it calls "Ideation," (a perfectly awful product name) that allows employees to offer ideas across different groups, allowing people to comment and collaborate. Ideas may be voted up or down, filtered or scored. Like Crowdcast, the service has a rewards component.

Smartsheet provides a way to use wikis and spreadsheets for crowdsourcing information from services like Mechanical Turk and Live Works. Smartsheet integrates with Google Apps. Clients can work from Google Apps to crowdsource information through Smartsheet.

Crowdsourcing makes sense in our social world. Decisions no longer need to be only made by a few. The tools are there to filter out the wisdom of the crowds.

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One of the most significant developments for Enterprise 2.0 happened last week when Google Apps Marketplace announced that it would be standardizing on OpenID.

Google is leveraging its strength as an identity provider to create a single sign-on ecosystem for third party applications and enterprise customers. This does not mean that we will see immediate adoption of single sign-on across the enterprise landscape. But it does represent a shift that will lead to more seamless application integrations, platform diversity and a sizable community of enterprise customers.

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Today, we spent some time talking with Vatsal Sonecha, vice president of TriCipher who gave some perspectives about the impacts of the Google announcement and what it means for the enterprise marketplace. TriCipher offers MyOneLogin, an OpenID service.

OpenID Means Choice

Google Apps Marketplace is the first major platform to adopt OpenID. Salesforce.com AppsExchange provides support for developers that integrate federated identity but they do not have it standardized across the platform. Microsoft's Federation Gateway does not support OpenD. Google's move means that competing platforms will have to consider entering the OpenID ecosystem. As more platforms do adopt OpenID, the aggregate user base will diversify and grow. Platforms that do not adopt OpenID will have to convince the market that its proprietary network is more robust and valuable than all the rest.

A Critical Mass of Users

Service providers now have a potential critical mass of users. They are beginning to adopt OpenID but now they have further incentives. The dynamics of demand aggregation now come into play. With a universal identity foot print, a service provider may now reach deeper into the enterprise. Enterprise customers are

The Cloud and OpenID

Cloud computing makes it easier for companies to adopt OpenID. Services like MyOneLogin and OneLogin provide infrastructure for security authentication markup language (SAML) integration and single-sign on with multi-factor authentication. The identity services provider becomes a hub that keeps track of updates, new protocols and the other issues that come with keeping up to date with federated identity issues. With the services in place and a marketplace to explore, service providers will greet an already qualified customer. These customers will be ready to buy without concerns about registering new user names and passwords. It's like a club. You join once. That's it.

Watch the Carriers

According to Sonecha , the carriers have a material advantage if they decide to offer OpenID. They have a user base. They understand how to manage scalable systems. And they never worry about captial expenditures. They may borrow a sheet from Google and open their own marketplace or next generation service catalogs.

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Last night, during Digg's annual SXSW party, Digg's CEO Jay Adelson announced a set of significant changes to Digg. Among the changes Adelson announced are a streamlined submission process, a personalized homepage, an unlimited amount of topic pages, a new commenting system and better curation tools. Earlier this morning, we got a chance to sit down with Adelson to discuss these changes in greater detail. Some of these changes will surely be extremely controversial in the Digg community and might also make some publishers who rely on Digg's traffic a bit nervous.

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It's hard to underestimate the influence these changes will have on the Digg community. Not only did the Digg team create a completely new backend architecture, but Digg is also making a lot of changes to how the site will work from a user's perspective - some of which will surely be controversial among Digg's most active users.

Digg will launch the new site in alpha in a few weeks. You can sign up for an account here. It's important to note that Digg plans to work directly with its users and is looking for feedback from its alpha users. The alpha site, for example, will feature a large feedback bar at the bottom of every page.

Personalized Homepages as Default

On the new Digg, every user will get a personalized homepage which will be populated with stories that are popular among this user's friends and relate to topics this user has expressed interest in. This personalized homepage will become the default Digg frontpage for all users who have signed in to Digg. Users who are not signed in will still see the old Digg homepage. With this, the Digg team is clearly looking to get more users to sign up for the service. Digg will also update its users' profile pages.

Submitters Lose Power

Another major change to Digg - and one that will surely create some controversy among the most active users of the service - is that the new Digg will de-emphasize the power of submitters and put an even stronger emphasis on who votes for stories, as well as on outside signals from third-party services like Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, the new Digg will now allow publishers to auto-submit their stories through RSS feeds and a number of other mechanisms that the company plans to unveil in the next few weeks. Until now, while Digg didn't forbid publishers to submit their own content, this behavior was generally discouraged by the Digg community.

As Adelson told us, on the new Digg, submitting a story will basically mean that you are the first voter. Currently, a relatively small group of submitters has a lot of power over which stories will appear on the Digg frontpage.

Signals from Twitter, Facebook and Co.

While there will still be a role for those users who regularly discover new and interesting content, the new Digg will put a strong emphasis on votes and signals from your friends on third-party sites like Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, Digg will create a social graph for you that will take all of this information into account when it create your personalized homepage. On the homepage, Digg will also expose why a story appeared in your feed.

While Adelson couldn't go into details, it seems like Digg has established a very good relationship with Twitter and has had access to Twitter's firehose feed to almost a year.

Once the new digg comes out of beta, anonymous users will also be able to vote on stories. While the team is still working out the details, it is clear that Digg is looking to get as many signals as possible to augment the current voting process. It will be interesting to see how Digg will weigh all this information in the creation of personalized pages and the new topic pages.

The submission process for stories that haven't been submitted to Digg already will now be a one-click process.

Digg will also soon use third-party sign-on systems, including Google, Twitter Connect and Yahoo to allow its users to sign in.

Working With Publishers: What Will Happen to the Digg Effect?

Obviously, quite a few publishers will worry that the old Digg effect - which would often take sites down because of the huge amount of traffic a story on Digg's frontpage can create - will now disappear. Adelson, however, who also noted that Digg "wants to be a good source for traffic for publishers," thinks that this new system will create a more regular stream of traffic to publishers.

In the long run, Adelson noted, Digg also plans to open up its advertising platform to share revenue with publishers. This project is still in its early stages, but according to Adelson, this could involve using a widget on the publisher's site or by using Digg's salesforce to sell ad inventory on these sites directly.

To make all of this work, Digg completely stripped out the old infrastructure and started over by building a completely new platform. This, said Adelson, will allow Digg to easily make changes to the frontend and react to user feedback during the alpha and beta phase. At some point in the future, Digg might also open this platform up to third parties.

A Completely New Platform

Digg is clearly taking this new version extremely serious. The company plans to hire 50 engineers this year to help with scaling the architecture. Adelson was clearly proud of the work his team has done on the backend architecture. The new site will be "wicked fast," thanks to a complete retooling of every aspect of the site, up to the point where the bottlenecks for Digg are now network speed and latency. This is quite a feat, given that Digg now offers an almost unlimited amount of topic pages and a personalized homepage for every user - all of which will have to be recalculated constantly.

How Will Users React?

It will be very interesting to see how users will react to all of these changes. Adelson and the rest of the Digg team are very aware that this will create some controversy, but Adelson clearly thinks that this is the right way to go for Digg. The topic pages will allow Digg to cater to users who care about every type of news, be it the Boston Red Socks or the latest gadget news.

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Facebook plans to announce the availability of a firehose of user data at its F8 developers conference in April, we believe based on research. Such an offering could be similar to the firehose that Twitter has shared with large partners and select small developers building the famous Twitter ecosystem of 3rd party applications around the web. A Facebook representative did not offer a denial, saying only that the company would not comment on speculation.

The huge social network was once private by default, then made controversial changes in December that pushed hundreds of millions of users toward publishing their information in public and now appears aimed to complete the about-face at its F8 developer conference by offering up public user data in a huge river that outside parties can consume, analyze and build on top of.

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The first F8 conference saw the unveiling of the Facebook Platform, a way for app developers to build games and utilities inside of Facebook. This announcement would represent Facebook as a platform and enable far more to be built outside and on top of the social network. Privacy concerns? For sure. Genuinely world-changing potential? There's a lot of that too.

It's not clear exactly what would be included in this firehose, it could be a stream of low-value Fan Page promotional content, for example. The most likely thing content to be included though is user activity data published under public privacy settings. There's far, far more of that today than there was just a few months ago.

If you've participated in a supermarket loyalty program, you're familiar with the concept of opting-in to sharing data about your activities with outside parties in exchange for benefits. In that common practice, though, consumers gain shopping discounts but get nothing from the analysis of the data they emit.

In the case of the Twitter Firehose, the much sought-after full feed of public user data from across the site, users gain access to all kinds of interesting applications and insights based on analysis of their use of Twitter.

A Facebook firehose would be much bigger.

A firehose of public Facebook user activity data could function like a living, breathing global census. Cross reference that data with any other data set and we may find an ocean of insights into the human condition, around the world, for slices of people, second by second or over time.

This is something we've been calling on Facebook to do for some time. I've sat with founder Mark Zuckerberg and discussed the importance and potential of releasing aggregate user data at length.

That, though, was before last December when the privacy policy changed.

Privacy Concerns

Just because something is posted publicly on the web, Microsoft researcher danah boyd said in her opening keynote at SXSW yesterday, doesn't mean people want it to be broadcast more generally. Making something public is not permission to publicize it.

Is the inclusion of public activity into a firehose programatically available to outside developers a case of broadcast that violates user control and thus privacy?

I don't think it's clear either way. In a discussion about aggregate Twitter data analysis late last year, a representative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told me that Twitter users had no reasonable expectation that their data wouldn't be redistributed and analyzed in bulk because Twitter was a public forum.

Facebook used to be different. It was private by default, our actions were shared only with friends and family that we gave permission to see our status messages and photos.

Then in December the company made a dramatic shift, prompting users to re-evaluate their privacy settings and making "share with everyone all over the internet" the new default for most options. Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was only changing to reflect the way the world was changing, but we argued that was a disingenous rationalization of Facebook's culture-changing actions driven in part by its own profit motive. We also argued that by pushing users toward being more public the company was reducing user control over data and spreading distrust about making data available online at all. That put at risk the idea of sharing your data in a way that could be analyzed.

Is there a reasonable expectation that online social networking activity set to "public" will not be redistributed in bulk to outside parties? How can a company like Facebook respect user privacy as much as possible while still achieving the incredible things that can be achieved by making aggregate user data available for analysis?

Let's begin to discuss it.

Discuss

We write this for you, the tired, the weak and the weary, the dogged attendees of the South By South West festival in Austin this weekend. We know that you're exhausted, but it's not from the booze, the parties or the product pitches - it's the endless location based check-ins. If only someone had solved this in time, right?

From what we can tell, the folks over at Brightkite have the solution with Check.in, but have yet to release it to the achey-thumbed, smart-phoned masses.

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According to the splash page we found at Check.in, the app, which looks to be for both iPhone and Android, will be the "one checkin to rule them all".

"Check.in takes the hassle out of checking in on multiple services," the page reads. And at the bottom, we're told that the service is "made by Martin May, Brady Becker, and Jordan Harband of Brightkite after sever check-in fatigue."

When you take a closer look at the sole image on the page, which depicts a Check.in app on both iPhone and Android, we can see that the service appears to handle check-ins for Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite, and we would assume others are on the way. But we have to wonder how it would check in to Gowalla, as the company's API is currently read-only.

Check.in would be the first of its kind in the market and would surely co-opt a large amount of traffic and make the "severe check-in fatigue" that much more manageable.

When we first wrote about this at the beginning of the month, the only response we received was "no comment". We asked again today, but have yet to receive any comment. We've also asked the folks over at Gowalla and they had this to say:

"We currently do not allow write access to our API. For now we're excited to see creative use of the read API while we continue to polish our own native clients."

If this service is in the pipeline to be released soon, it looks like Gowalla would not be included in the check-in service and that would be a shame. It's only Friday and there are a number of days left to SXSW Interactive, AKA "Nerdfest 2010", but wouldn't it be that much more enjoyable if you didn't have to spend the first 10 minutes any time you arrived somewhere new checking in?

With that said, we have to wonder how much we would lose out on the features now offered by these services. Will Check.in also offer tips, photos, check-in commenting and all of that or will it just let us broadcast our location? For now, we'll just have to wonder, but either way, fear not, a solution looks to be on the way.

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Buzz, Google's controversial attempt to unseat Facebook as the most mainstream of social activity stream readers, just made some much-needed changes that Facebook could learn from as well.

Buzz users now have more granular control over what social interactions with content trigger an email sent to their email inboxes and explicit explanations for why each piece of content was sent by email to them. These changes are a good start but ought to extended into the body of Buzz as well.

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Just like most Facebook users can't explain the difference between the new algorithmically filtered News Feed and the raw bulk flow of the Live Feed, Buzz too could benefit from explaining the mystery behind the magic. As social networking analyst danah boyd said at the opening talk of SXSW today, privacy online is grounded in user control.

Buzz violated the basic understanding of email as private when it surprised users by layering the new social network on top of their private Gmail. By granting users more control over information, today's changes are a small move in a better direction.

Why Not Give Users The Tools to Drive Their Own Experience?

Might social activity stream participation become more mainstream if users had clear and more complete control over what they see, what they expose and to whom? Many people believe that users are incapable of dealing with too many settings and need these decisions made for them. Perhaps it's just a user experience challenge, though. Nobody said creating the ultimate interface for mainstream users to drive their online activity was going to be easy.

Google's move with Buzz today looks like a nice first start. Hopefully it will be extended beyond the Buzz and Gmail relationship.

See also: How Google Buzz is Disruptive: Open Data Standards

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We're seeing a lot more discussion on the topic of single-sign on for SaaS environments. The issue is becoming more important as security emerges as a top concern for companies considering making the move to cloud-based environments.

OneLogin is a new company that offers single sign-on, cloud-based service that allows for small and mid-sized companies to enjoy the same level of security as large enterprise companies.

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Most small companies do not deploy security methods that employ SAML, (Security Assertion Markup Language) an XML-based standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between security domains. It's expensive to deploy. Open-source tools do exist but require someone to understand how it works and deployed in a work environment.

OneLogin configures a browser to give the experience of a single sign in. It bypasses the traditional user name/password system, which often has gaping security holes.

To us, this is a big reason why the new breed of SaaS services are not taken seriously by security conscious enterprise customers. The security can not be trusted.

With OneLogin, a person would be directed to a login page that would automatically fill-in the information for the person. The person is provided their own OpenID account. OneLogin knows the person's session so no second authentication is required.

OneLogin's infrastructure sits in the cloud, which means that a customer does not have to maintain dedicated servers and people to keep the system working.

There is no install. Rackspace hosts the web server and the database.

Two-factor authentication is available. People may use a Yubi key, which used a USB port to plug in and activate a random number authorization. People may also soon be able to use Verisign's VIP service that gives a mobile device the capability to generate a new password every 30 sec. You then input the number within 30 seconds to receive permission.

The OneLogin service works on most SaaS services, including Google Apps. There is a free service. For SAML capabilities, the cost is $8 per user per month.

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Real-tme feed publishing startup Superfeedr has quietly turned on automatic location data in the feeds it republishes from around the web, we confirmed with the company today. Founder Julien Genestoux explained the feature using Twitter as his example, but the same content extraction and analysis is being done on all kinds of feeds run through the service.

"If you turn geolocation on in Twitter, then your feed will include geolocation in your Tweets and we'll just push that through," he said. "If you don't do that but you Tweet about Austin, we will deliver the latitude and longitude for Austin in the XML." In other words, developers building apps on top of Superfeedr's real-time feeds will now know programmatically what geographic locations are discussed in the content coming through the feeds. Future feature? Subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL.

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Genestoux says he is using a number of 3rd party services to extract this data, including the Yahoo Placemaker API. Along with this location data, the service also offers automatic language identification and is working on entity extraction and sentiment analysis.

The prospect of subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL is an exciting one, though Genestoux says he's just beginning to develop it. Could that facilitate a location data stream that crosses and goes beyond the siloed location based social networks so widely discussed these days? We suspect that it could.

Superfeedr could be described as "FeedBurner 2.0" - for a more real-time and meta-data savvy web. The company was funded this Fall by real-time incubator Betaworks and media mogul Mark Cuban. Betaworks announced today that it has raised $20 million more to build out its portfolio of companies like Superfeedr, Bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Tumblr and more.

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If you visit the DreamHost blog today, chances are you'll give a quick guffaw, shake your head in dismay at the state of the Internet and quickly close the browser tab.

But if you take a moment to read all the way to the end of the post, you'll find that the company has just announced the implementation of a one-click install for its open-source, white label microblogging service Status.net.

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The blog, which features a tattooed beer belly and a cat sitting at a keyboard, is really showing off the proof-of-concept (hopefully) tongue-in-cheek site, PetStatus, a micro-blog for pets.

Buried down at the very bottom of the post is the following nugget of exciting information:

Status.net, our new one-click software package, powers the entire operation. DreamHost customers can now install Status.net to their own domains with a single mouse click - making specialized Twitter clones at whim in a matter of seconds!

Triss Hussey first noticed the real announcement, saying if it hadn't been for an email subscription to the blog it would have just passed on by.

We first wrote about Status.net a year ago, saying that the service could be an "incredible opportunity to analyze a rich and dynamic set of data about interpersonal conversation." The company just announced the launch of its public beta last Tuesday. And our Own Alex Williams just took a closer look at the service's future in the enterprise last week and argued that it "has the features that the enterprise customer wants and it has a strong developer community." A one-click installation means we may start seeing specialized Twitter-clones reproducing like rabbits across the Internet.

We can only hope that PetStatus isn't an omen of what's to come.

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We’d love to have a drink with all of our Twitter followers after work, but we still haven’t found a bar big enough for 1.6 million people. So we’re showing the love the only way we know how: by selling even more cheap stuff. Introducing Woot Happy Hour. Every so often, after a particularly rough day on the job, we’ll whisk you away at 4 p.m. Central to a mini-Woot-Off that will last exactly one hour before it turns into a virtual pumpkin. But when, exactly?

There’s only one way to find out: follow @woot on Twitter. We’ll be announcing Happy Hour there and only there. Yes, we’ve finally discovered a compelling reason to join Twitter. Turn up your nose at your peril. While you’re sitting in splendid isolation on Superiority Island, the more pragmatic of your fellow wooters will be feasting on deals the likes of which you can scarcely imagine.

(Unless, of course, you can imagine a condensed Woot-Off without the Woot-Off killers.)

To further encourage the Twittification of America, Happy Hour sales will not be accompanied by the usual discussion forums. If you want to shoot your mouth off about a deal, tweet about it using the #woot hashtag. You can dive right into the flow of comments yourself, or wait for our forum moderators to scour these tweets for the best and most insightful. We’ll feature those on the front page of the sale a la our Quality Posts. But shorter. And faster. And with an extra helping of Web 2.0.

Woot Happy Hour is better than your regular old happy hour in one important way: it’s much less likely to lead to an awkward, regrettable make-out session with one of your co-workers. Wait, maybe that means it’s worse than your regular old happy hour.

Whatever the case, we hope to see you following our Twitter feed (@woot, remember?) and getting happy with us once or twice a week. Just do us a favor: if we get a little carried away, take away our car keys and call us a cab.

 

Google just announced that the mobile version of Google Product Search can now tell you if a certain product is in stock at nearby stores. Currently, Google is only working with a handful of retailers, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn and West Elm, but the company is actively looking for more partners. To see these results, just browse to Google.com on your mobile phone (Android, WebOS or Android), click the "more" link and then "Shopping." The local inventory will be updated in real time and is currently only available for users in the U.S.

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Google obviously thinks that providing the best local results possible is the future for a large number of its services. Now that most modern mobile browsers can forward your location data to web apps, it's become even easier for Google to offer these kinds of local results and Google's initiatives around Google Maps and Place Pages show how serious the company is about local search.

For now, with this small number of participating retailers, this isn't necessarily the most useful feature yet. If Google actually manages to get more businesses to use this feature (and/or to expose their inventory through an API), then Google Product Search - which has remained relatively underused - could easily establish itself as the go-to local shopping service.

For more details about the mobile version of Google Product Search, have a look at this video (the introduction of Product Search starts about 19 minutes into the presentation)

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Most hosted blogging platforms offer their customers a set of standard templates with relatively few options for customizing these sites. Starting today, however, bloggers on Google's Blogger platform will be able to take full control over the layout of their sites thanks to Google's new Blogger Template Designer without having to edit a single line of HTML and CSS code. The Template Designer will give Blogger's users the ability to change the layout, fonts, colors and background images of their blogs through an easy to use WYSIWYG editor.

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For now, the Template Designer will only be available through Blogger in Draft, Google's experimental section for new Blogger features.

Features

Every template allows users to choose different body layouts with up to four columns. Google partnered with iStockphoto to bring more background images to Blogger. For now, Google won't allow users to upload their own background images yet, but advanced users can always use the CSS code to point to their own images.

In the template designer, users can also change the size and number of the columns on their blogs and edit the design of their blogs' footers.

Change your Color Palette With One Slider

One of the niftiest new features in the Template Designer involves the option to change the complete color palette of your blog with one simple slider. Based on your choice, the application will simply set all the colors of the fonts and other design elements on your site based on your preference while still ensuring readability.

As Siobhan Quinn, Google's product manager for Blogger told us yesterday, Google's users really want to be able to customize their sites and make them look as unique as possible. Just offering a set of rigid templates, Quinn noted, simply isn't enough to give users the feeling that a site is truly theirs. Until now, customizing Blogger sites - while possible - was a bit of a hassle and making any major changed involved editing the HTML and CSS code by hand, which a lot of Blogger's users weren't quite ready to do.

Other blogging platforms like Wordpress.com and TypePad and also allow their users to individualize their blogs to some degree. On Wordpress, however, editing the CSS code comes at a price ($15/year) and unless you are an advanced user, changing the layout of your blog on most hosted blogging platforms is going to involve a steep learning curve.

According to Google, Blogger currently has over 300 million active users and more than 388 million words are published on Blogger every day.

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Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we've learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website earlier today.

Evri launched just short of two years ago and raised $8 million from Vulcan, the fund of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More interesting than the business side of this story, though, is the technology. Evri brings the semantic and the real-time web together in some very interesting ways.

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We profiled Evri as one of 10 intriguing companies in the real-time web space in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future. Also included was the now Google-acquired Aardvark. (See our coverage: How I Loved and Lost an Aardvark)

Here's how we described the real time part of what Evri does in that report:

Evri is a semantic Web recommendation service for online publishers. The company tracks the real-time Web to know when it needs to create or update a topic page for one of its emerging news topics.

Evri watches news sources to see when a news topic is trending, including articles on Wikipedia that publicly available data shows have leaped in page views. Then it visits structured databases like Wikipedia and FreeBase to check for updates to entries about related entities. It then creates or updates a topic page with news links, photos and Twitter search results. The language used in those Twitter posts is analyzed and the names of news entities in the posts are linked to other Evri topic pages, like pivots.

Evri has done lots of other things as well, including a blog widget, an iPhone app, automated content portals for publishers and a sentiment analysis product. The company didn't see a particularly large amount of hype but was closely watched. Robert Scoble, for example, named Evri one of his top startups to watch for 2010, even a year and a half after it launched.

We haven't been able to identify the company that has acquired Evri yet but the most obvious candidate would be its neighbor and kin Microsoft, where the service would compliment the Powerset team nicely and change the Bing user experience in news search dramatically. Now that we know that Google is working on building a real-time index of the web (our coverage) the prospect of a competitor upping the ante with near real-time semantic parsing, riding on top of real-time indexing, sounds like a hot move.

A number of people have raised the possibility of an Amazon acquisition as well. Evri was also tested out by Yahoo! starting last Fall as a way to facilitate navigation throughout its Sports content pages.

Take that, semantic web doubters.

We'll update this post when the acquiring party is identified. Geeky types interested in an in-depth explanation of Evri's work would be well served by checking out a 6 part video series on YouTube wherein Deep Dhillon, CTO of Evri, discusses the company's technology with students at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

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Since the announcement went live yesterday about the Google Marketplace, we've had a number of companies come to us about how its applications will fit with the service.

We'll do a fuller look at these companies this week but for some immediate perspective we decided to take a look at Zoho, a service that competes with Google Apps. So it is it interesting that the company joined Google Apps Marketplace in its launch.

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Buy why would Zoho offer its applications to integrate with Google? Yes, the companies compete. But Raju Vegesna of Zoho says that it is far more important to complement Google Apps. Over the past few years the company has worked to make it simple for Zoho customers to use its services in tandem with Google Apps. Zoho offers Google Sign-in, Google Apps Sign-in and recently it integrated with Google Docs.

Vegesna gave us three reasons why Zoho decided to be part of the launch. His perspectives should provide some insights about the symbiotic relationship Google Apps Marketplace will foster.

Extending The Relationship

For many developers, integrating with Google Apps represents a significant business opportunity. Google announced at its launch that it passed the 25 million customer mark over the weekend.

Vegesna:

"First, we have 50% more apps than Google, especially on the business side (CRM, Project Management, Web Conferencing etc). This means, these additional apps can really complement Google Apps. Google has over 20 million users on G Apps and our Business apps can be sold to those customers. "

Google Dominates The Landscape

To play in this era, you have to play with Google. They dominate as much as any company has in the past 30 years. The domination in large part is now solidified by its investment in its cloud infrastructure.

Vegesna:

"Second, we understand that this is going to be a Google dominated eco-system (IBM dominated Mainframe era, Microsoft dominated PC era and Google will dominate the web era) and we wanted to be an important player in this web era. We talked more about this here and here."

A Platform Built On Email, Not CRM

Yesterday, we touched on why the marketplace makes sense for companies standardized on Google Apps. With all the contacts in one place, people can add applications to fine tune Google Apps. Does a company start with the same foundation if the platform is built on CRM?

Vegesna:

"Third, when someone builds a platform, email is a great app to build the platform around, rather than CRM (which salesforce did). We think it'll be a good and succesful platform for online apps which will move the web app momentum forward and we want to be a key player (the same way Adobe was a key player in PC era)."

For more about the Zoho integration:

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Google just launched a new Google Labs product for Google Reader: Google Reader Play. Reader Play is a new, highly visual way to browse your Google Reader subscriptions that is somewhat reminiscent of Google's Fast Flip. It replaces the busy Google Reader interface with an interface that focuses on a single story. Whenever a post includes videos or images, Play with highlight these and give you the option to read more of the text as well. This new interface allows you to browse through the feeds you already subscribe to, but Google Reader Play also emphasizes Google Reader's ability to recommend items from around the web for you based on your preferences.

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Big on Recommendations

As Google notes, Play will learn from your preferences, based on the articles you read and "like." You can also choose from a set of categories (tech, entertainment, arts, business, etc.) and Google Reader will create a personalized stream of items just for you. According to Google, Play uses the same algorithm as the Recommended Items feed in Google Reader.

Play will even work if you don't have a Google account. While you can't star, like or share items, you can still browse interesting posts based on the categories you choose. This should make it a good tool for those users who don't want to go through the effort of setting up a feed reader and subscribing to hundreds of different feeds.

Get Started

To use Google Reader Play, just head over here or look for "View in Reader Play" in the folder settings in Google Reader. You can switch stories by using your arrow keys or choose the slideshow mode that will automatically forward to the next story after a few second.

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Microsoft Outlook has historically been at the heart of document-based environments that for many years have ruled the enterprise.

But the walls that have guarded this document-based world are crumbling fast. Outlook is now more than a message center. It is becoming a collaborative space where the lines between Google Docs and other social applications start to blur.

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Three extensions exemplify this trend. These services are quite similar. Xobni has the longest track record. it started as a consumer-based service, gaining a following for its search capabilities in Outlook. Search is Outlook's inherent weakness. Neither DocVerse nor Harmony have deep search capabilities like Xobni. That may only be a temporary issue for DocVerse. Last week, Google announced that it had acquired DocVerse. We expect that will in some way translate into better search in the weeks and months ahead for the DoVerse service.

Harmony

Harmony is the newest of the group. The Mainsoft service is a mash up between Google Docs and Outlook. It also puts SharePoint directly into Outlook. Like most Outlook extensions, Harmony pulls Google Docs or Sharepoint into an Outlook sidebar.

The service is intended to ease attachment overload by creating a central place where people can access Google Docs. It's a drag and drop environment that allows people to drag email attachments into the Harmony sidebar.

A document may also be dragged into an email where it appears as a link for the recipient. The recipient may access the document by signing into their Google Docs or Google Apps account.

The service is now available as a free download. It is compatible with Sharepoint 2007 and Sharepoint 2010. It will be available later this year as an extension for Microsoft Office.

DocVerse

DocVerse plays a similar role to Harmony. The service synchronizes in the Outlook Sidebar. The widget associates a link to the document that is getting the edit. Every modification is synced. When multiple people work on a document, the updates are made through the plug-in and versions are stored online.

Xobni

Xobni provides what Outlook really needs. Great search. It will search Outlook and external social networks and third party applications to get a fuller profile of the contact. In November, the company released Xobni Enterprise. The service gives I.T. administrators the ability to deploy and manage the plugin across the enterprise. it also offers integration across services such as Salesforce CRM and Sharepoint.

Outlook Has Come A Long Way

The old days are over for Outlook. It's now entering an era where the degree of collaboration will center around a hyperlinked environment more so than document-based systems. The enterprise is becoming more web-oriented and Outlook is no exception to the change.

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Get Satisfaction, the popular online customer service company, just announced that it is bringing its service to Facebook fan pages. This new service, the Facebook Social Engagement Hub, will allow companies that have a presence on Facebook to easily answer questions from their customers on Facebook. The Social Engagement Hub recreates the Get Satisfaction experience on Facebook and allows users to ask questions about products or make suggestion for new features. One key feature here is that the discussion on Facebook and the Get Satisfaction topic pages are synchronized, so that questions that get answered on a company's topic page on Get Satisfaction also appear on Facebook and vice versa.

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Liberating Content from Facebook

The new Social Engagement Hub on Facebook will cost Get Satisfaction customers an additional $99 per month. As Get Satisfaction's co-founder Lane Becker told us yesterday, however, this expense could easily be worth it for these companies, as users on Facebook tend to be very active on these fan pages and really want to interact with these companies and brands on the social networking service.

As Lane also noted, conversations that happen around a brand in Facebook tend to be trapped in this silo. Thanks to the synchronization between the two platforms, however, brands can now take this content and make it useful outside of Facebook as well. Another problem for brands that Get Satisfaction is trying to solve here is the simple fact that conversations on Facebook only have a very short lifespan. Get Satsifaction now allows companies to capture these conversations.

Overall, this looks like a very smart way for brands to interact with their customers on Facebook and to streamline their social media customer service efforts.

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