Facebook, Google Vie for Connect Services

One hour after Google did a public launch of Google Friend Connect, Facebook launched Facebook Connect. The simultaneous launch is not a coincidence -- the two competing services are battling for mindshare as they strive to be the frontrunners in data portability.

The companies want users to be able to use their Google and Facebook logins to enter third-party sites. It benefits users and third-party sites and allows Facebook and Google to collect more information about what users are doing online.

There are some key differences between the services. Google's service uses OpenSocial. This means sites using Google Friend Connect can use OpenSocial's open-source applications, such as message boards and ratings gadgets. Google also lets users sign in with their Yahoo!, AOL and MSN usernames.

It's also easier for site owners to use. Google requires adding a few "snippets of code to your site," Stan Schroeder at Mashable reported. However, "adding Facebook Connect apps is a much more convoluted process," he said.

However, Facebook has an advantage in terms of partnering with large third-party services. Facebook Connect is already working with Digg, StumbleUpon and Loopt. Google Friend Connect's partners seem to be smaller sites run by individuals, such as Billboard for the People and Qloud.

It's too early to say how either service will fare, but the Internet is already buzzing with early feedback from site owners.

Loopt, a company with a social-mapping service that lets mobile phone users see whether their friends are in close proximity to them, was one of Facebook Connect's first partners. Evan Tana, the Director of Product Management & Marketing of Loopt, is optimistic about the service.

"Working with Facebook Connect widens the circle of friends Loopt users can interact with, combining the power of Loopt's social-mapping service with an established network of Facebook friends," he said in a press release. "Loopt users will be able to receive an alert whenever Facebook friends are nearby, discover restaurants and bars recommended by their Facebook friends, and integrate their location into their Facebook feed," he added.

Google Friend Connect has also garnered some positive feedback.

Hyperact Design Group is using Google Friend Connect to attract more users to one of its sites - Billboard for the People. The group is trying to raise US$25,000 to create a large billboard in Manhattan to congratulate President-elect Barack Obama.

Danny Peraza, one of the creative directors of Hyperact Design Group, told The Industry Standard that more than 1,000 users signed up for the site through Friend Connect within a few days. He added that hundreds of users have invited their friends to visit Billboard for the People through Google Friend Connect, and that the service has also enabled users to easily add comments to the site.

"There are a few other things I'd like to see," he said. "Like now we've got all these users, and I'd like to have a way to message them, and have a way for them to message each other."

Orli Yakuel, who uses Google Friend Connect on her site GO2WEB20.net would also like to see messaging.

"I think this is a must have feature and needless to say, it's the real way to communicate with someone," she wrote on her blog.

Peraza is hopeful that those additions will come soon. Meanwhile he is happy with what he has.

"It's a step in a right direction," he said. "It means we don't have to set up an online group elsewhere."

source:pcworld.com

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Chrome Grabs 1 Percent of Market in Under 24 Hours

Gregg Keizer, Computerworld Google Inc.'s new Chrome browser grabbed 1 percent of the browser market in its first day out in public, Web metrics providers said today.

Both Net Applications Inc., a U.S.-based tracking company, and Irish vendor StatCounter put Chrome's total market share at around 1 percent less than 24 hours after its launch, passing rivals such as the current Opera and the ancient Netscape in the process.

"This is a phenomenal performance," said CEO Aodhan Cullen in a post to Statcounter's blog on Wednesday. StatCounter, which provides free visitor statistics tools to Web developers, monitors traffic on the sites run by its 1.5 million members.

Net Applications also tracked Chrome's debut, and echoed StatCounter's numbers. "We saw them peak at 1.48 percent last night, and they're hovering around 1 percent currently," said Vince Vizzaccaro, the company's executive vice president of marketing at Net Applications, in an e-mail Wednesday morning.

According to Net Applications, which is tracking Chrome's hourly numbers, Google's browser jumped from zero to 0.4 percent during the hour it was released yesterday. Nine hours later, at midnight EDT, Chrome accounted for 1 percent of the browsers used to visit the 40,000-some sites that the company monitors for clients.

As Vizzaccaro noted, Chrome peaked at 1.48 percent early Wednesday -- 4 a.m. EDT, 1 a.m. PDT -- and as of 11 a.m. EDT, held a 0.98 percent share.

"I'm certain usage will increase at night and on weekends, as companies won't want people testing Chrome at work," Vizzaccaro said.


Net Applications typically sees the same cyclic behavior from Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox, which jumps in share on weekends and during off-work hours.

Vizzaccaro wouldn't speculate on what browsers Google Chrome's users may be leaving. "We won't know that for a couple of weeks, as most people will test it along side of their normal browser for a while," he said.

With 1 percent of the market, Chrome immediately overtakes Opera Software ASA's Opera, which Net Applications pegged with 0.74 percent at the end of August, as well as the moribund Netscape, which the company said accounted for 0.72 percent of all browsers used last month.

AOL LLC, Netscape's owner, killed it last February when it issued the venerable browser's last update and urged users to switch to Firefox or Flock.

Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer held 72.2 percent of the browser share last month, said Net Applications earlier this week, while Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox and Apple's Safari owned 19.2 percent and 6.4 percent, respectively.

Google launched Chrome Tuesday around 3 p.m. EDT. Currently, a version for Windows XP and Vista is the only one available for download. Chrome, which is built on the WebKit rendering engine -- the same open-source code used by Apple Inc.'s Safari -- features a privacy mode, a combination address-and-search bar, and runs each tab as a separate process to prevent a single site from crashing the entire browser.



source:pcworld.com

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Google Chrome vs. Internet Explorer 8

Randall C. Kennedy, InfoWorld

Vs.

They're back! Just when you thought the "browser wars" were over, with the two camps -- Microsoft and Mozilla.org -- settling in for a kind of intransigent détente, along comes Google to stir things up all over again. Clearly Google is unhappy with the current state of browser geopolitics and feels it needs to roll its own in order to ensure a robust base for its myriad hosted applications (e.g. Gmail, Google Docs, etc.)

To that end, Google has designed an almost completely new Web browser. In fact, other than the core rendering engine -- which is based on the open-source WebKit standard of Safari fame -- everything in Google Chrome constitutes a rethinking of how you engineer a browser application. For example, with the current versions of Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, individual Web page tabs are hosted in a single process -- a model that is efficient (in terms of memory and resource consumption) but also prone to catastrophic failures: A single crashed tab can easily take down the entire browser application.

Chrome seeks to eliminate this problem by isolating each tab within its own application process and then leveraging the built in memory protection capabilities of modern, preemptively multitasking operating systems to keep code and data in a failing tab from stomping on other processes. So now, when that buggy Flash applet on your favorite humor site goes belly up, it won't necessarily take down the entire browser -- the processes running in other tabs will keep chugging along.

This is a big deal for Google, which is banking on wider adoption of its hosted application offerings and battling the perception that browsers are unreliable, especially when you start running multiple Web applications in a tabbed format. Nobody wants to trust their line-of-business applications to an unstable environment, so Google hopes that Chrome will provide the kind of robustness that can assuage customers' fears.


Double Stuff Browsers

Of course, few technology ideas are truly original, and the case of the multi-process, tabbed browser is no exception. In fact, Google can't even claim to be the first to market with this model -- Microsoft beat them to the punch by a week when it released its own take on multi-process browsing in the form of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2.

Like Chrome, IE 8 uses multiple, discrete processes to isolate and protect each tab's contents. However, while Chrome takes a purist approach and literally launches a new process with each opened tab, IE 8 uses more of a hybrid model: It creates multiple instances of the iexplore.exe process but doesn't specifically assign each tab to its own instance. Thus a look at Task Manager under Windows will show an equal or greater number of Chrome instances than running tabs, whereas IE 8 will generate a fewer number of instances -- for example, six copies of iexplore.exe to support 10 discrete tabs -- and share them among the running tabs.

How these two variations on a theme will hold-up in the real world remains to be seen. My take is that Google's purist approach will ultimately prove more robust, but at a cost in terms of resource consumption. In fact, both Chrome and IE 8 stretch the limits of current PC hardware by gobbling up enormous amounts of RAM while saturating the system with lots of concurrent execution threads.

This new development -- browsers chewing-up more memory than their host OS -- is something I documented in my Enterprise Desktop blog earlier this week. At the time, I was shocked by how bloated IE 8 had become, consuming 332MB of RAM to render a simple 10-site/10-tab browsing scenario. Then I evaluated Google's Chrome and my expectations were reset yet again. Not only did the "fresh start" Chrome use nearly as much RAM (324MB) as the legacy-burdened IE 8 during peak browsing loads, it actually "out-bloated" IE 8 over the duration of the test, consuming an average of 267MB versus. IE 8's 211MB (you can read more about these test scenarios at the blog).

Clearly, these are products targeted at the next generation of PC hardware. With nearly 20 percent of a 2GB PC's memory consumed by Web browsing, and with IE 8 spinning more than 170 execution threads on Vista to complete the same aforementioned 10-site scenario (Chrome spins a much more conservative 48 threads), we'll need to rethink our ideas of acceptable minimum system requirements. At the very least, you're going to need multiple processing cores and many gigabytes of RAM to support this new, more demanding take on Web-centric computing.

To be fair, I must mention that both IE 8 and Google Chrome are still in the Beta stages of development. Chrome, in particular, is in its first public test release cycle, while IE 8 is only now being made available in a "feature complete" form (previous IE Betas were notably short on innovation). And it's also important to consider all of the non-architectural changes that these browsers bring to the table -- most notably, enhanced rendering performance and usability.



source:pcworld.com

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