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Google Reader is one of the best RSS aggregators out there. But with more blogs and newspapers broadcasting their content on Twitter and Facebook, RSS feeds are becoming less relevant.
Cue the new "follow" and "like" features, which were rolled out to Reader users Wednesday.
"Follow" might sound familiar to Twitterers. The term describes connecting with people and sharing content on the social network. Reader has adopted the idea, which it implemented similarly with "friends" before. But now you can search for users to follow.
Reader also added a Twitter-esque status input at the top. Twitter's box asks, "What are you doing?" Facebook asks, "What's on your mind?" And Reader wonders, "Have some thoughts to share?"
Reader's new "like" feature might seem familiar to Facebook users -- though, FriendFeed had it first. In Reader, you can click the "like" button at the bottom of any feed article to publicly announce your affinity for a particular story.
Google has been trying to follow along with the continued success of the big social networks for a while.
Adding the share feature, which lets you forward interesting content to friends on your Gmail and Google Chat lists, was ...
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Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Credit: Google.
Google this afternoon said its revenue rose 3% in the second quarter in spite of the global economic downturn. Profits also grew 18% to $1.48 billion from last year's $1.25 billion.
The Mountain View, Calif., search giant's revenue of $5.52 billion in the quarter ended June 30 was up from $5.37 billion in the same period last year. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, in a statement, said the results were positive in light of the challenging economic climate:
Google had a very good quarter, especially given the continued macro-economic downturn. While most of the world's largest economies shrank, Google's year-over-year revenues were up 3%. These results highlight the enduring strength of our business model and our responsible efforts to manage expenses in a way that puts us in a good position for the economic upturn, when it occurs.
But investors were unimpressed. Its shares, which closed up $4.43 at $442.60, shed more than $12, or close to 3%, in after-hours trading following the company's earnings release.
Though Google's performance beat analyst predictions, expectations were heightened after Intel earlier this week posted strong results and signaled that a possible recovery may be on the way.
-- Alex Pham
 Newspapers in a Vienna coffeehouse. Credit: Alex Barth via Flickr. Is Google stealing our content? That, anyway, seemed to be the suggestion when a European publishing group announced last week that it had garnered a number of supporters for its Hamburg Declaration, which calls for "urgent improvements in the protection of intellectual property on the Internet." This week, Google had a reply, which basically boils down to: Put up or shut up. In a post written by Josh Cohen, senior business product manager, on the company's public policy blog Wednesday afternoon, Google said publishers can easily tell search engines to take a hike. All it takes is a two-line piece of code, which he helpfully included in his post. Tuck that on your website, and no search engine will crawl it; the stories won't show up when people look for content using search engines. It's unlikely that newspapers will call Google's bluff. Here's why: Google's search engine and its Google News site sends 1 billion visits to newspaper websites each month. Those visitors drive up the traffic numbers that website ad rates are partially based on. More readers = higher ad rates, which is why few publishers will say no to Google's traffic referrals. Granted, most of those readers don't pay for the stories they read. And that leads to statements like this one from the Hamburg protocol, which was signed by James Murdoch of News Corp., Robert Thomson of the Wall Street Journal and Ian Smith of Reed Elsevier, among others: Numerous providers are using the work of authors, publishers and broadcasters without paying for it. Over the long term, this threatens the production of high-quality content and the existence of independent journalism. Sam Zell, whose Tribune Co. owns the Los Angeles Times, has said much the same thing, if only in more colorful terms. "If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?" he told a group of incredulous Stanford University students in 2007. Google's retort to publishers is that it is open to work with them on whatever business model they deem fit. Want only paid subscribers to read? Fine, it can steer clear of the site, or follow a model like that of the Wall Street Journal, which lets readers referred from search engines see the article for free but makes them subscribe if they want to read any other articles on the site. Want the articles to expire after a few days and go into an archive where readers would have to pay to see? There's a line of code for that too. Right now, the vast majority of newspaper sites serve up free, ad-supported content. And Google said it's happy to send traffic to those sites. Unless, of course, they don't want all those readers.
-- Alex Pham Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.
 Despite an onslaught of hype this month, Bing's performance is ringing hollow.
The new Microsoft search engine increased its share of the search market by just four-tenths of a percentage point, according to an unreleased survey by Web ratings firm ComScore Inc., rising to 8.4% from 8.0% in May. Any expectation that the service was siphoning traffic from leader Google (65% of market share, unchanged from May), would appear to be unfounded. If anything, Bing sliced off a fraction of the traffic from second-place Yahoo, whose share dropped half a percentage point to 19.6%. The lack of any major uptick by Bing has been cited by other Web analytics companies. In its numbers, Compete.com found that Bing helped Microsoft increase its market share by three-tenths of a percentage point, pegging it at 6.5% (still less than the 7.2% Microsoft had in June of 2008). And HitWise observed a slight drop in Microsoft's market share in June. Analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. sprinkled a few more raindrops over Bing's parade, noting in a preview of Google's second-quarter earnings that, "we estimate that Google lost up to 120bps [1.2%] of US search query share to Bing, but expect these losses to be temporary." -- David Sarno
 Take that, Google Docs!
Microsoft today said it will make a free Web-based version of its popular Office suite for the 400 million people who have its Windows Live service. The product, which would include lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, would debut next year and compete with Google's free online Google Docs suite.
Like Saturn eating its young, Microsoft risks cannibalizing its most profitable business in doing so, says Reuters. The Redmond, Wash.-based business software division, which includes Office, made $9.3 billion in profit from $14.3 billion in sales during the first three quarters of its 2009 fiscal year.
The announcement is the latest tit-for-tat in an increasingly intense rivalry between Microsoft and Google. The Mountain View, Calif., search giant last week said it would develop an operating system designed to lure users away from personal computers, Microsoft's home turf, to using applications on the Internet, where Google has a dominant presence.
Dubbed Chrome OS, the software would be made available to the open-source community, which implies that it would, like Android, be free, unlike Microsoft's Windows operating system, which powers more than 90% of the world's computers.
Here's another way that Google and Microsoft compete. Both are in contention for the title of technology's 800-pound gorilla, a designation that entitles the winner to intense regulatory scrutiny, fear and distrust. As tech blogger Anil Dash pointed out, inheriting the mantle means being subjected to the axiom of "Hanlon's Razor" -- once a company dominates its market, mistakes from oversight or stupidity will be attributed to malice.
-- Alex Pham
Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.
 Have you noticed some new data points on your Google Maps app? Well, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority has just hooked up with Google Maps to make it easier for passengers to plan trips using the MTA's buses and trains.
As mentioned on the LA Now blog, the MTA is the latest to add its info to Google's interactive maps. And you can tap into that on your iPhone as well. By tapping the transit icon (the bus in the middle), you can access schedules for the road and rail public transportation options to your destination. It includes the departure times, estimated travel time and price to hitch a ride.
The BlackBerry Google Maps app also offers transit details -- routes, times and distance. The MTA's info wasn't accessible when we tried to call it up with plans for a trip from downtown L.A. to Glendale and one from downtown to Irvine. Foothill Transit directions from L.A. to Claremont came up without issue.
Other transit agencies currently available through Google Maps include Foothill Transit and Metrolink.
-- Michelle Maltais
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Google CEO Eric Schmidt, top left, and co-founders Larry Page, right, and Sergey Brin in 2004. Credit: Ben Margot / Associated Press. Sun Valley, Idaho -- In one of his first public discussions since announcing plans to launch the Chrome OS operating system, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said his Mountain View, Calif., company's decision was based on the belief that there "is an opportunity to build an operating system built around the ubiquity and power of the Internet." Speaking to reporters at the annual Allen & Co. Sun Valley conference along with Google co-founder Larry Page, Schmidt said Chrome OS, which is designed to work with Google's Chrome Web browser, would be faster for consumers because it would boot up almost instantaneously. Page added that the "browser is a great way to do most things" and that Chrome OS will get the computer "out of the way." Schmidt said that Page and Sergey Brin, Google's other co-founder, had been pushing to create an operating system for six years. "Previous attempts on the Web have had various problems.... They haven't been zippy enough," Schmidt said. "We think the technology is now there." As for working with computer makers such as Dell, Toshiba and Hewlett-Packard, Schmidt declined to identify individual companies but said "everybody we have talked to is very excited about the plan.... Hopefully later this year we will see some announcements." Although Chrome OS is clearly a shot across the bow of Microsoft, Schmidt declined to discuss whether Google's operating system is designed to compete with the Redmond, Wash., software giant. Asked whether Google's ambitions may raise eyebrows with federal regulators, Schmidt answered that his company is "pro-consumer." -- Joe Flint
Andreas Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and chief development officer of Arista Networks, a Silicon Valley cloud computing company. Credit: Alex Pham / Los Angeles Times. Google made waves in the tech world this week when it announced plans to release an operating system that would encourage wider use of something called cloud computing. Although most have never heard of cloud computing, many do it every day. By uploading photos to Facebook, sending messages via Gmail or playing Club Penguin online, users are accessing programs and software files that live far away in cavernous, climate-controlled rooms containing thousands of computers. To help explain this shift in the way we use computers, we turned to Andreas Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and chief development officer for Arista Networks, a Silicon Valley startup that supplies networking equipment used to build these massive arrays of cloud computers. As it turns out, Bechtolsheim was also one of the first people to invest in Google back in 1998, when the company was just two Stanford geeks with a laptop. His $100,000 investment in the company started by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, along with several other shrewd calls, turned the Birkenstock-wearing engineer into a billionaire. We spoke to the 53-year-old serial entrepreneur recently about cloud computing, his investment philosophy and his latest venture, Arista Networks. An edited version of the conversation is below. Q: What do you make of the potential for cloud computing, both as a market and a technology? Bechtolsheim: It is a surprising evolution in the history of computing. Every application can now shift to the Web. You can access any application remotely. My startup does the networking plumbing for this.
IDC has estimated that by 2012 the market for cloud computing infrastructure will grow to $42 billion, up from $16 billion in 2008. It’s the fastest-growing slice of the spending on information technology. Right now, it’s small sliver of the overall pie. Most of the spending is for the applications. But it’s a growing slice of the pie. Q: What are some uses of cloud computing? Bechtolsheim: Hollywood uses high-performance clusters to ...
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 Taking direct aim at Microsoft's dominance in personal computers, Google last night announced plans to launch an operating system that would compete with Windows and be available to consumers in the second half of 2010.
Dubbed Google Chrome OS, the operating system is designed to work with the company's Chrome Web browser, launched nine months ago and downloaded by 30 million users. Google said the software will be optimized for small, lightweight laptop computers called netbooks, a fast-selling category of inexpensive machines that sell for as little as $250 and are used primarily to surf the Web and check e-mail. In a blog post announcing the product, Google's vice president of product management, Sundar Pichai, and its engineering director, Linus Upson, said: Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work. Google did not say whether it would charge for the software, but references that it would work with the open-source community of developers suggest that the company may make it freely available. Microsoft, on the other hand, charges about $200 for each copy of its Windows Vista operating system. "The release of an operating system is just another part of Google's strategy to more rapidly and cheaply spread access to the Internet via a multitude of different devices -- desktops, netbooks, mobile phones, set top boxes, etc.," Ben Schachter, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech, wrote in a note this morning to investors.
Schachter said Google wants to eventually lure businesses away from Microsoft's Windows operating system towards so-called cloud computing, in which businesses can use lightweight computers to access applications and data that are managed via large data centers and served over the Web.
"Longer term, Google hopes a free operating system may encourage more small and medium-sized businesses to move towards an enterprise software solution in the 'cloud' and away from Microsoft," Schachter said. -- Alex Pham
 The U.S. Department of Justice said today that it has launched a formal investigation into the proposed agreement between Google and book publishers and authors.
"The United States has reviewed public comments expressing concern that aspects of the settlement agreement may violate the Sherman Act," wrote William F. Cavanaugh, the Justice Department's deputy assistant attorney general, in a letter to Federal District Court Judge Denny Chin, the judge overseeing Google's settlement.
The letter goes on to say that although the department has "no conclusions as to the merit of those concerns," it did see issues that "warranted further inquiry."
Google emphasized that it is cooperating with the Justice Department investigation and maintains that the settlement would be good for consumers.
"The Department of Justice and several state attorneys general have contacted us to learn more about the impact of the settlement, and we are happy to answer their questions," said Google Spokesman Gabriel Stricker. "It’s important to note that this agreement is non-exclusive and if approved by the court, stands to expand access to millions of books in the U.S."
The settlement reached last fall between Google and the Authors Guild and the Assn. of American Publishers stemmed from the search giant's project to scan millions of books and create a searchable digital library of works that would potentially become the basis of a digital book market.
Paul Aiken, executive director of The Authors Guild, downplayed the significance of today's move by the Department of Justice. "It appears to be just an official acknowledgement to the court of an investigation that we have known about for weeks," Aiken said. "It’s no indication that anything has changed."
Reports surfaced in late April that Justice Department regulators had questioned Google and several advocacy groups that have spoken out against the settlement. Weeks later, publishers and The Authors Guild also confirmed receiving civil subpeonas from Justice seeking more information on the settlement. But until today, the Justice Department has not said whether those inquiries constituted a formal antitrust investigation.
In recent months, a number of parties have objected to the agreement, including a group of libraries, a consumer rights group and the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization that seeks to digitize public domain books and make them freely available online to all readers. Many of the objections involve concerns that Google would create a monopoly for millions of "orphan" books whose rights holders cannot be located.
The Justice Department did not immediately return calls for comment.
Updated 4:25 p.m.: This post has been updated to include comments from Google and the Author's Guild.
-- Alex Pham and David Sarno
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