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Please welcome blogger Bob Walsh to Webware. Walsh has worked as a reporter for UPI, as a software developer, and now consults with start-ups and independent software vendors. He also writes at 47hats.com. –Rafe Needleman

Yes,Cubic Zirconia jewelry, you can pick your friends.

Users of Google’s RSS reader got a new social networking feature today: the capability to selectively pick and choose who of your Gmail/Gtalk friends get first crack at the items you want to share.

There still is a static public URL for the GReader items you decide to share, assuming someone knows it. If part of your job description is finding posts that matter to your company or organization,Hermes Watches, GReader’s new sharing feature is tailor-made for it.

See also: Official Google post on the new feature.

Back in May, Google turned on the capability for users to share RSS picks with all their Google contacts from GReader,LONGINES Watches, but it was an all-or-nothing choice. The new feature lets you create a custom Friends list for the RSS items you want to share. Friends lists are the meat and potatoes of social networks.

The new GReader feature goes head-to-head with FriendFeed’s RSS social-networking style. Sharing “the news” with people you know is natural; this new feature makes it just that much easier to do online.

Six degrees of separation posits that a person is a step away from people they know and two steps distant from people known by the people they know–thus the magic number six.

We present a study of anonymized data capturing a month of high-level communication activities within the whole of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging system. We examine characteristics and patterns that emerge from the collective dynamics of large numbers of people, rather than the actions and characteristics of individuals. The dataset contains summary properties of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. From the data, we construct a communication graph with 180 million nodes and 1.3 billion undirected edges, creating the largest social network constructed and analyzed to date. We report on multiple aspects of the dataset and synthesized graph. We find that the graph is well-connected and robust to node removal. We investigate on a planetary-scale the oft-cited report that people are separated by “six degrees of separation” and find that the average path length among Messenger users is 6.6. We also find that people tend to communicate more with each other when they have similar age, language, and location, and that cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender.

See also Nature, “Six Degrees of Messaging”

Following is a more in-depth explanation of the phenomenon from an updated version of the research (PDF) posted on arXiv.org:

Via Roland Piquepaille on ZDNet

(Credit:
Wikipedia)

In a research paper from June 2007, titled “Worldwide Buzz: Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network (PDF),” Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Jure Leskovec of Carnegie Mellon University analyzed 30 billion conversations among 240 million people using Microsoft Instant Messenger in June 2006. It turned out that the average path length, or degree of separation, among the anonymized users probed was 6.6.

Within the span of the weeks since I last wrote about the
iPhone, its ubiquity has grown even more. Sales are through the roof. iPhones and PDAs have been used in jury trials or should I say mistrials. Half of all web mobile device traffic is conducted on iPhones. Applications are blossoming. More goodies such as the 3.0 OS are in the pipeline. Even my die-hard Verizon holdout friends have made the switch to the network that constantly drops calls.

Recently, thanks to a targeted Facebook ad, I switched to State Farm for my
car (the Good Neighbors slogan people) and found out that there is such a thing as iPhone insurance against loss or theft. Praise be State Farm.

I’ve settled into a comfort, perhaps even complacency, with the iPhone of late. I used to be a worrier about not being contactable. When I used to travel I used to fret about not having my laptop along. Now I could care less; I still have access to my email, news and AIM/Gtalk via the iPhone. In fact, my laptop’s power supply has been broken since November and I am only now getting around to replacing it. The comfort of being enabled and connected by pulling out this amalgam of plastic, silicon, metal and glass is both a blessing and curse. Good in that you can be contacted almost always, but bad because you can almost always be contacted!

So the logistics: State Farm sells iPhone insurance so long as it is tied to a personal effect like a laptop or something like a musical instruments (bicycles do not count sadly, but furs do apparently). The premium for my laptop and my iPhone (16 GB) was $35 a year. It makes sense that someone is finally selling iPhone insurance because they are everywhere. It must also be a good market sector to get into - the moral hazard is relatively low now because of people are used to safeguarding their iPhones, lest they have to bear the costs of replacing it. Now, there’s one less thing to worry about. Hope I’ll never have to use it.

But more practical concern is that iPhone has become increasingly valuable as a repository of, well you and your information. Losing it could be costly in terms of personal information in the hands of a stranger and it can be costly in real money terms. Being a risk averse lawyer I’ve taken the step of having a passcode on my iPhone. At least I have a fighting chance at protecting my information. But, if an iPhone is lost or is stolen, it would cost $500 to replace it. Neither AT&T or Apple sell insurance or has a non-warranty replacement plan. Also, iPhones are not typically covered under your homeowner’s insurance unless it is subject to theft or fire. So when ill befalls your iPhone who do we look to?

Brown became CEO in January after former CEO Ed Zander was forced to step down amid pressure from investors due to the company’s worsening financial situation.

The biggest problem Motorola has been facing is a lack of compelling and popular handsets, especially in Europe. The company hasn’t had a hit phone since the Razr. Amid the turmoil, the company announced last month that it is considering “strategic options” to get the company back on the right track, which could include selling its handset business. Still, top executives are adamant that the company does not want to sell the handset business, and it’s looking for other alternatives.

Liska, who had been a partner for private equity firms including MidOcean Partners, CVC Capital Holdings and Ripplewood Holdings, will take the top finance spot at the company starting March 1. He will replace acting CFO Tom Meredith, and he’ll report directly to Chief Executive Officer Greg Brown.

Liska has experience helping get value out of businesses. While working in private equity, his task was to go in and help run companies, which were typically underperforming. And before working for private equity firms, Liska had been at Sears, where he ran its credit business. While there, he helped Sears sell the division to Citigroup in 2003 for $6 billion.

Mobile phone maker Motorola has named Paul Liska, a former private equity executive, as chief financial officer, the company said late Thursday.

Motorola has been shaking up its top management as it struggles to get its fledgling handset business back on track. The company has seen its market share in the handset market fall dramatically over the past year. The company fell from second place to third in terms of handset shipments during 2007. Meanwhile, market leader Nokia has grown market share to about 40 percent.

Skype says it doesn’t permit even that. Which means that it’s the most privacy-protective mainstream method of communicating through voice or instant messaging. To the FBI’s legions of eavesdroppers, that sounds a lot like a challenge.

The upshot is that if Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, or so on received a wiretap order for text or voice flowing through their IM networks, they could (and would) be able to comply because the services are centralized. Even if the users’ conversations are encrypted through the Off-the-Record Messaging protocol, an eavesdropper still knows who’s talking to whom–this is called a pen register or trap and trace device in wiretapping parlance, and it can still be privacy-invasive.

Because the company’s SkypeIn and SkypeOut services send data through the traditional telecommunications network, they presumably can be wiretapped at that point. But voice communications that flow exclusively through the company’s peer-to-peer network–and are encrypted using AES–are a different story.

This isn’t entirely a surprise. Skype, which claims something like 300 million user accounts, has said in the past that it “cooperates fully with all lawful requests from relevant authorities” but that it is not subject to the U.S. must-provide-a-wiretapping-backdoor law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. Police in Germany, for instance, already have complained of Skype’s lack of ready wiretappability.

Jennifer Caukin, Skype’s director of corporate communications replied to us: “We have not received any subpoenas or court orders asking us to perform a live interception or wiretap of Skype-to-Skype communications. In any event, because of Skype’s peer-to-peer architecture and encryption techniques, Skype would not be able to comply with such a request.”

One of the more interesting tidbits from News.com’s survey published this morning on instant messaging privacy came from Skype.

We asked Skype: “Have you ever received a subpoena, court order or other law enforcement request asking you to perform a live interception or wiretap, meaning the contents of your users’ communications would be instantly forwarded to law enforcement?”

There’s no guarantee that Skype’s AES encryption is implemented properly or that there aren’t lingering security flaws. A 2006 presentation at the BlackHat Europe conference in March said the right algorithms were being used, but that there’s “no way” to know if a backdoor for eavesdropping exists. A Skype-commissioned independent evaluation, however, gave it a thumbs-up. Here’s more.

The eBay-owned company says it is unable to comply with court-authorized wiretap requests.

What do you think of the new address bar in Firefox 3?

(polls)

Similar threads exist in Mozilla’s own community forums, although most quibbles are linked up to Mozilla’s knowledge base articles which show how to tweak and edit certain features step-by-step.

There are, in fact, several ways to disable this feature entirely. One way is to follow the instructions on this page, which involves a small tweak to your about:config file. Doing so will disable the drop-down of links completely, but not your auto fill. There’s also an add-on extension that mimics the behavior of the address bar found in
Firefox 2 with slightly smaller favicons, link text, and sorting.

There’s no better way to incur user wrath than to change one of the fundamental features of a product. Apple’s been doing it for years with each revision, usually prompting a positive cheer from most while alienating a certain margin of its fervent user base that vows to never buy or use the product again. Browser maker Mozilla is not without its own minority that appears to be up in arms about the updated address bar.

Reader Jim points us toward this post on Mozilla Links about the feature back in the second beta that has accumulated nearly 300 user comments. Notice the date though (November 2007), and the latest comment was just a few minutes ago. Most of the comments praise the new feature, while some power users are complaining about the structuring of the links and want the option to disable bookmarks as part of the equation.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

The Smart Location Bar, dubbed the “awesome bar” by the company, drops in a mix of your bookmarks and browser history as you type. For example, if you’ve got CNN.com bookmarked, or have visited it in the past, simply typing in a “C” would drop down a stream of links with some of the most relevant or highly visited sites rising to the top. It’s been designed as a time-saver, but a group of users have come down on the new feature because it can’t be turned off easily and has a quirky habit of putting some links in front of others.

The site needs a few tweaks–the “search” button at the top of the page seems to return random results (maybe it’s a list of what other searchers are looking for?), so you have to click the logo and return to the home page to conduct additional searches.

Enter a song title or artist’s name, and Just Hear It returns a list of possible matches–including not only audio tracks, but also YouTube videos. (Songerize didn’t offer choices, but started playing what it thought was the best match, and it didn’t have any video content.)

Often, the engine turned me on to alternate versions–live tracks, cover versions–that I didn’t know existed. You can play results immediately or compile them into a playlist, but you can’t save playlists between searches, unless you’re a member, which makes this feature kind of worthless. (Membership is currently available by invitation only.)

The fact that the entire site is a Flash application makes navigation difficult–the “back” button doesn’t work, and if you click on “About,” you’re stuck there with no way to the home page except reloading. The light-gray text on black background isn’t the best design choice. Still, this is the best service I’ve seen so far for hearing that song you need to hear right now.

Follow me on Twitter.

I’ve been looking for a replacement for playable search engine Songerize, and this morning, I stumbled across Just Hear It, which offers a much better experience than Songerize ever did.

According to the “About” page, the site is legal–it pays for licenses from the three major organizations, BMI, ASCAP, and CESAC, and it apparently pays publishers royalties based on the number of plays they receive. (I can’t imagine how it’s accomplishing this, given that the site’s free and so far doesn’t have advertising.) But although paying publishing rights is sufficient for traditional (”terrestrial”) radio, Internet radio stations must also pay performance royalties, which are owned and managed by a completely different group of bodies.

In my tests so far, Just Hear It has always delivered the song I was looking for somewhere in the first-page results, though sometimes, I’ve had to enter both artist and title–for example, searching “Thrasher” didn’t return the Neil Young song of that name until I entered Young’s name.

There’s been an ongoing debate over the last two years regarding a proposed rate increase for performance royalties–CNET’s Greg Sandoval wrote a detailed account of the latest developments in February–but suffice it to say, claiming that you’re legal doesn’t necessarily make it so.

In other words, enjoy Just Hear It while it lasts.

This is the most muted patent release yet. Perhaps this is in part due to the fact that it’s China, and the intellectual property issue cannot seriously be a major driver. But perhaps it’s also because Novell may have finally persuaded Microsoft to downplay its IP fetish, which helps no one (including Microsoft).

As for whether this will have much of an impact on the Chinese market, I doubt it. Novell has been doing increasingly well in the U.S., but I just can’t see a Windows-plus-Linux interoperability message doing much in China, which already has a strong and growing domestic Linux market. China doesn’t need to curry favor with Microsoft.

I bet! I suspect Nie Hua was crying himself to sleep at night before Microsoft and Novell approached him with this. You can just imagine his fretting: “How will I deal with the uncertainty of Linux’s intellectual property position unless Microsoft, which has attempted to introduce the uncertainty, blesses my Linux distribution?” Give me a break.

Still, I give Novell credit here. Why?

“We are very pleased with the original approach by Microsoft and Novell to address our concerns about deploying and managing a complex high-performance computing infrastructure across two platforms. It is essential for our future competitiveness and success,” Nie Hua, vice president of Chinese company Dawning Information Industry, said in Microsoft and Novell’s Sunday night press release. “We fully understand the concerns surrounding intellectual property rights and feel reassured that these issues have been addressed by our vendors.”

It is almost certainly true, however, that both Microsoft and Novell need to curry favor with China. Microsoft, because Windows is already free (as in pirated) in China. And Novell, because Linux is, oddly enough, pirated in China and to the extent that it’s paid for, Red Flag Linux dominates the market.

How much do you think that China cares about U.S. patents? It has been pirating Microsoft’s Windows for years (though at least, in theory, new PCs don’t ship with pirated Windows)–and now suddenly it’s concerned about making sure it has patent protection for Linux? My mirth runneth over.

I’ve heard from Novell sales representatives that Microsoft sales executives have started calling the Suse Linux Enterprise Server coupons “royalty payments,” with an immediate, furious response back from Novell. Good. Perhaps Novell can teach Microsoft to play nicely with IP. Someone needs to do so.

I will admit, I am laughing as I type this. The news that Microsoft and Novell are taking their interoperability roadshow to China is hilarious on a number of different levels.

commentary

The source also suggested that Google and the plaintiffs have been working on the settlement for years, so whether the outcome is “years plus two months or years plus four months is neither here nor there.”

“Upon consideration of the letters, I will grant approximately a four-month extension,” Chin wrote.

“This is my understanding of how this goes,” a source close to the legal matter told CNET News. “(Google, the Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers) blanket the Earth and try to let everybody know about the agreement, and right now (they) believe (they) have blanketed the Earth.”

Federal judge Denny Chin granted this four-month extension to a group of authors involved in a class action against Google over the search giant’s Book Search service. Click image to enlarge and read page one of his order.

Chin’s ruling Tuesday seemed to be a direct response to a request made last week by seven authors for a full four-month extension due to the proposed settlement’s complexity.

In an interview given to Publisher’s Weekly, Gail Knight Steinbeck, one of the seven authors who asked for the four-month extension, praised Chin’s decision. “We now have (the) time to really sink our teeth into what this agreement will mean,” she told the magazine, adding that she felt that the authors now had the time they needed to figure out whether modifications to the settlement will make it suitable, whether to opt out or whether to fight the settlement.

But, the source added, those involved in promoting the book service are eager to see it get off the ground and that the four-month extension just means delaying that for two months longer.”

As proposed, the settlement of the case filed by the Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers in 2005, revolves around Google’s ability to include content from books online, and in particular “orphan” works that are still under copyright, but are out of print or written by authors who can’t be found.

Google had sought an extension to the settlement of 60 days. On Monday, the company’s associate general counsel for products and intellectual property wrote in a blog post explaining the request for a 60-day extension that, “The settlement is highly detailed, and we want to make sure rightsholders everywhere have enough time to think about it and make sure it’s right for them.”

“We’re excited about the proposed settlement agreement regarding Google Book Search,” said Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesperson, in an e-mail to CNET News. “As we’ve said previously, the settlement is highly detailed, and we want to make sure rightsholders everywhere have enough time to think about it and make sure it’s right for them.”

Update at 3:11 p.m. PDT: This story now includes a comment from Consumer Watchdog.

A federal judge has granted authors worldwide four more months to decide whether to participate in a settlement involving Google’s online Book Search service.

Absent the ruling, made by Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, authors would have had until May 5 to decide whether to join the settlement or opt out.

But some parties to the deal are objecting to Google’s proposed settlement.

Chin cited a letter from the authors, as well as a separate letter from a group of academic authors in making his decision.

But according to a law clerk in Chin’s court, as well as one of the lawyers in the case, the deadline to opt out of the settlement is now September 4, 2009, and the final fairness hearing in the case will be held on October 7, in New York.

“The four-month extension is a big victory for those who oppose the Google Books settlement,” said John Simpson, a consumer advocate with Consumer Watchdog. “It’s a clear recognition by the judge that there are problems with the proposed deal. The extension also gives the Justice Department more time to consider the antitrust issues that we and others have raised and discussed with them.”

Joanne Zack, an attorney for the author sub-class and the Authors Guild, said she had no comment on the settlement extension.

“First, two months’ time is insufficient to understand the implications of a settlement of this scope,” the authors wrote in their request (PDF). “Second, substantial defects in notice of the settlement undermine authors’ ability to assess their rights; and third, more time is required simply to understand the complex terms of the agreement.”

In fact, though, Google may not be happy with the outcome, and some suggest that the very fact that the company asked for a delay at all indicated it didn’t have much faith in its ability to prevail in the end.

It’s also got a neat take on the built-in RSS reader that reminds me of the latest release of Netvibes. I don’t think it’s as robust or as easy to use, but it’s got some handy features like letting you sort blogs by post authors and bookmarking stories for sharing using a small drag-and-drop tray. For instances where the formatting is a bit off, there’s a built-in browser in case you want to view the post on its home site.

I’m not a heavy user of widget engines. Besides OS X’s Dashboard, I usually steer clear of having any more processes running on my machine and opt to go with a Web option instead. A new player called Sobees has piqued my interest though. Based out of Switzerland, Sobees is one of the neater ones I’ve seen, placing a heavy emphasis on style and first-party widgets over building out an open platform for people to develop on (which is coming later on).

There are all the usual widgets to play with, like weather, a clock, sticky notes, and a monthly calendar. What sets it apart from other widget engines, though, is the universal log-in, meaning if you’ve got it installed on two machines you can share the same set of widgets (including saved notes and feeds) without having to juggle them back and forth. This is a feature often overlooked by some of the big guys and aimed at people who want to share a similar experience at home and on work machines.

Sobees is a really slick-looking widget desktop that's got a few small quirks. (click to enlarge)

Sobees is in private beta and Windows only at the moment. We’ve got a dozen invites to hand out. Leave your e-mail in the survey linked below. The first 12 folks will get in.
Update: All invites all gone now. You can sign up to get on the waiting list here.

See also reviews of Sobees on: DownloadSquad and CenterNetworks.

View Survey

I did run into a few problems though. It’s not a 1.0 release, so I’ll give it some slack, but widgets were slow to respond and not nearly as conscious of my desktop real estate as I’m willing to tolerate. While it’s great to have some killer design, if it means I can’t fit more than three widgets on my screen, there’s a problem. It also takes forever to shut down. I clocked it at about a minute and a half, which would be tolerable if it didn’t place a small splash screen over all my other windows to let me know it was closing.

Despite some of the irks, there are a ton of nice touches that stand out. You can skin the entire environment in one of three ways. Text and object size can also be manipulated, letting you fine-tune the look and feel of each widget with simple sliders. These are the kind of things I want in every widget engine.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

commentary

It’s actually similar to a problem that I’ve long had. I’ve wanted to start a company for a long time, but I don’t know many developers that I could go to in order to build out the ideas that I’ve had. Venture capitalists will fund the idea of an established entrepreneur with a track record of success, but most need to have something to demonstrate before getting the ear (and cash) of a VC.

Anyone know of a good place to connect “PhDs” and “MBAs”? In Silicon Valley, they’re often one and the same, but most people aren’t gifted with equal talents in business savvy and development prowess. How to connect the two worlds?

This week I had two people contact me to ask separate but related questions. One was a developer in search of a business person to help raise money and exploit his technology. The other was a business person with an idea but no one to build it for him. I had no idea where to send them.