There’s been plenty of discussion about how Google, Microsoft, and other players in search are going to address “the Twitter problem” – the service’s ability to unearth breaking news and links far quicker than traditional search engines.
In fact, just last week, Google launched a new search option that allows users to filter search results to show only links that are new within the last hour.
However, competition might not even be necessary. According to The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital, Twitter is talking to both Google and Microsoft about licensing deals that would allow them to integrate Twitter data into their search engines.

From the report:

“According to sources familiar with the situation–Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines.”

Continuing, All Things Digital says that such deals would be worth “several million dollars” to Twitter and potentially include ongoing revenue sharing.
There are of course plenty of search engines that already utilize Twitter data, and Bing actually already launched one. Twitter could conceivably provide added value in the form of a truly full feed that includes all tweets (currently, Twitter search only goes several days back).
It’s certainly an interesting new twist on the evolving Twitter business model story, that points towards the company’s desire to remain independent and become financially viable, as opposed to get acquired by someone like Google or Microsoft. Now, we’ll have to wait and see if this actually happens, or gets filed away with the seemingly dozens of other Twitter business rumors we’ve seen pop up in recent months.

Most Gmail users are familiar with Google Labs, a nifty set of experimental features which aren’t quite ready to be rolled out to all users, but are good enough for a select subset of users who like to try out new things.
According to Cnet’s Natali DelConte, Twitter is planning a similar feature for the near future. At the FOWA conference in London, Twitter’s user experience and front end engineering lead Britt Selvitelle said that it’s coming “soon”. The idea behind it seems to be a bit different from Google Labs; while Google is using it to test their own ideas, Twitter will let developers create add-ons for the site.

While tech-savvy users can already browse through the hundreds of available third party Twitter apps, various add-ons, plugins and scripts to try out something new, Twitter Labs could help the rest of the user base, who don’t have time to do that much digging.

Google Wave has arrived. The real-time communication platform has been one of the hottest and most anticipated products in the tech and social media space for months. Soon around 100,000 people will be messaging each other in one of Google’s most ambitious projects to date.
So what if you’re one of the lucky ones to get an invite, or just want to understand exactly how this new tool works?
While not comprehensive, our guide on getting started with Google Wave will help you quickly learn the interface and important keyboard commands that will open up the full potential of Wave.

General Interface

The Google Wave interface is divided essentially into four boxes: Navigation, Contacts, Inbox, and your current Wave. Here’s a rundown of each of these core pieces of Wave:

Navigation: This is not your standard left-hand navigation bar. Yes, it has similarities to Gmail, but navigating Wave is definitely a new experience. Each of the items essentially filters your inbox for waves that fit what you’re looking for. “Active” refers to waves that have new activity, “History” checks for old, archived waves, and “Settings” lets you manage things like your extensions. You can also add custom searches (i.e. waves that discuss your company) and add folders. Adding a wave to a folder is as simple as drag-and-drop.

Contacts: Your contacts are more prominent in Wave. That’s because you drag and drop them to add them to waves, rather than type in an email address or a username. You can search through your contacts and manage them via your Google account. It’s still a bit buggy – Wave will tell you some people don’t have accounts when they do – but overall it’s smooth.
Inbox: The inbox in the middle of the Google Wave interface doesn’t work like an email inbox. The key to navigating the inbox are search and search commands. It’s the easiest way to filter different waves. We have a list of key search commands below.
Wave Box: This is the box on the right hand of Wave. This is where conversations happen. Add participants, discuss what you’d like, and add multimedia through Google Wave gadgets and extensions (for more on Wave Extensions, check out Google Wave Extensions: An Inside Look

This is the pure overview of the interface. However, if you want to learn more about the features and the terminology, we suggest checking out Google also created a quick YouTube video tutorial of Wave, courtesy of Wave’s mascot, Dr. Wave:

Starting a Conversation

Getting a conversation started in Google Wave is rather easy – it’s understanding all of the available conversation features that’s difficult. Let’s explore a few steps to get started with a new wave:

1. Click on the “New Wave” link. This will start a new conversation.
2. Drag and drop friends you’d like to have join your wave from your contacts box into the top of the wave.
3. Start typing.

Remember, Wave is different than email. You can reply to messages as threaded conversations and, more importantly, you can edit the text of anyone in the conversation. These options become available when you click on the downward facing arrow at the top of any message (a blip) within a wave.
Also note the top bar, with “Reply,” “Playback,” “Archive,” “Mute,” “Spam,” and “Read.” While most of these are self-explanatory, the feature you should be using liberally is “playback.” If you join a wave in progress, always start by playing back the wave to see how the conversation transpired.

Wave Search Commands
A big part of navigating through your Wave inbox are the search commands. They help you find public waves, your archived messages, or just waves related to work. Here are some of the most important commands to keep in mind:

is:read and is:unread: This will help you find all of the waves you have or have not read. is:active is the same as is:unread currently.
is:mute and is:unmute: The same type of deal – This helps you find conversations you may have muted or unmuted.
title:(keyword): This command helps you find waves with a specific word in their titles.
caption:(keyword): This helps you find waves with a keyword in the captions of attached images and files.
from:(address): This command will help you find waves from specific people. On the same token, from:me finds waves from you. to:(address) finds waves where it’s just you and the person you’re searching for.
past:(date), previous:(date), after:(date), and before:(date): These four commands help you search for waves in time periods, based on days, weeks, months, and years. Use “d” for day, “w” for week, “m” for month, and “y” for year. So, if you want to find something from before 3 months ago, you’d type “before:3m”. Yes, it’s complicated.
has: The has command will search for whether a wave has an attachment, a document, an image, or even a gadget (has:gadget).

There are actually a lot more commands. To read them all, we suggested checking out Google Wave’s advanced search terms list.

Wave Navigation

There are an abundance of keyboard shortcuts that make using Google Wave a more streamlined experience. Thanks to a list first created by Google’s Greg Dalesandre in the development version of Google Wave, we can bring you a full list of keyboard shortcuts, which we’ll update periodically.
First, here are the commands for Wave Navigation:

Up/Down Arrows: As you might expect, use the arrows to navigate messages.
Tab/Shift-tab: Same functionality as the Up/Down arrows (outside of edit mode).
Home/End: Moves you to the first or last message.
Space: Go to next unread message (note: it doesn’t have to be within the same wave).
Left/Right Arrows: Switch focus between digest panel and wave panel.
Page Up/Down: Currently doesn’t work properly due to a bug.
Ctrl-Space: Marks all messages as read.

Messages in Wave

Enter: Replies to messages. Your reply will appear just below the selected message. If it’s the first reply, it will not be indented (but otherwise it will be).
Ctrl-R: The same as enter.
Shift-Enter: Replies to messages at the end of a thread. Replies of this nature appear at the bottom with the same indentation in almost all cases.
Highlight Text + Enter: Creates an inline reply. Your reply will be indented inside the current message.
Ctrl-E: Edit a message.
Ctrl-Enter (while editing): Inserts an inline reply at the caret.

Text Editing


None of these commands will really come as a shock, but they’re still good to know.

Ctrl-B: Bolds text.
Ctrl-I: Italicizes text.
Ctrl-G: Adjust the color.
Ctrl-L: Currently links to another wave if you hightlight the text and put in the URL or Wave ID, but the keyboard shortcut will be changing soon according to Google.
Ctrl-C: Copies text.
Ctrl-X: Cuts text.
Ctrl-V: Pastes text.

Structural Formatting

Once again, not too many surprises here:

Ctrl-<#>: Changes the current line to a different-sized heading – 1 is biggest, 4 is smallest.
Ctrl-5: Adds bullets.
Ctrl-6: Normalizes text/removes bullets and headings. Does not remove italics, bold, or text edits.
Ctrl-7: Left alignment.
Ctrl-8: Right alignment.

Much, Much More to Come
Google Wave is far from a complete product. They will add new features, tweak the interface, and change entire chunks of it based on user feedback and the data they gather from this initial release. Because of that, we will continue to add to this guide and tweak it.

The web is buzzing with excitement and anticipation. In less than 24 hours, Google Wave will launch to 100,000 early adopters. The real-time communication platform has been making headlines ever since it was announced back in May as a result of its potentially game-changing features.
And while we’ve received our fair share of questions about Google’s newest product, one keeps popping up time and time again: how do I get an invite to Google Wave?

There Are Four Ways to Get an Invite

Google clarified things earlier today with an update to their blog. They specifically highlighted the four key ways you can secure an invite. Here are the methods and what you need to know:
1. You signed up early on for a Google Wave account. Google put up a request form for Wave invites not long after Wave was announced. Most of the invites arriving tomorrow will go to people on that list. Your chances improve if you signed up early on and wrote a message to the Wave team.
2. You have an account on the Developer Preview of Wave. The Sandbox version of Google Wave has been active for a select group of developers for several months now, allowing them to test Wave, report bugs, and build Wave extensions. They will all get accounts.
3. Some paying users of Google Apps will get accounts. It’s likely several companies asked Google for invites when the real-time tool launched. They will get accounts. Some schools that use Google Apps will also get early access.
4. You are invited by someone currently using Wave. This is the most intriguing revelation made today by the search giant. Here’s how Google explained it:

“We’ll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.”

Do you know what this reminds us of? Gmail. Do you remember when it first came out and there were a select number of invites users could send out? I remember that people were willing to pay cold, hard cash for one of those invites. You might see the same type of frenzy over Wave.
Regardless, these are currently the only four ways to get an account on Wave. So if you don’t get an invite tomorrow, you still have hope. You’ll probably have to beg someone for an invite, though.

You’re probably familiar with Google AdSense and AdWords, Google’s flagship advertising products. It’s how Google makes its billion of dollars. Highly targeted text ads appear on Google search and third party websites that are part of the AdSense program. Advertisers buy ads based on keywords, with more popular keywords costing more per click than less popular terms.

This has only applied to text ads though, not banner or display ads. But speculation was rampant that Google would apply its unique and lucrative ad model to display ads after its $3.1 Billion DoubleClick acquisition.

Now that speculation has become reality. Google has just launched the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and it is just like AdWords and AdSense, except that it is a marketplace for display ads.

First, here is what Google said in its announcement:

“We’ve been working hard to put these principles into practice, and today we’re excited to announce the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a step towards creating a more open display advertising ecosystem for everyone. The Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers on one side; and ad networks and agency networks on the other, buy and sell display advertising space.

These publishers and ad networks manage and represent large volumes of ads and ad space from lots of advertisers and websites. By bringing them together in an open marketplace in which prices are set in a real-time auction, the Ad Exchange enables display ads and ad space to be allocated much more efficiently. This improves returns for advertisers and enables publishers to get the most value out of their online content.”

Essentially, the small-time advertiser or business can now buy targeted display ads on thousands of DoubleClick ad-serving websites. This could have some major repercussions on the entire web. Some possibilities:

- It could significantly increase revenue for Google, as a highly targeted ad marketplace means people are paying more for the ads they want to serve.

- It increases Google’s competition with Yahoo, the current leader in display advertising.

- Highly targeted ad campaigns could effectively reach everywhere. This could be a major boon to marketers.

If you want to learn more, Google has a PDF explaining the Ad Exchange, as well as a video overview:

Is reading online news broken? Google seems to think so as they just launched Google Fast Flip, a Google Labs experiment that’s designed to help you flip through news online as fast as you would if you were holding a print magazine or paper.

Fast Flip is essentially just a funky way to flip through articles from three dozen Google partners including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Fast Company. Partners share in advertising revenue generated through the labs experiment.

With Fast Flip you can flip through snapshots of the day’s popular news, drill into specific sections and topics, or narrow stories by publisher source. Once you select a story, you can view the article in its totality and use the arrows to flip to the previous or next story.

Fast Flip comes with additional features like the ability to share stories via email, story liking, dynamic content based on your viewing experience, and mobile-friendly versions.

According to Google’s post on the launch, the point is to replicate the magazine or print reading experience and make browsing stories faster. The company writes:

“Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting.”

On first look, Fast Flip feels like a bit flop. While certainly unique, it’s likely to appeal to a very small segment of online news consumers. Sure, the online news reading experience could be improved, but Fast Flip is more of a tangential approach than it is a step in a revolutionary direction.

What’s your take on Fast Flip? Share your thoughts in the comments.

If the Newspaper Association of America and Google were to display their relationship on Facebook, the description would read “It’s complicated.” As newspaper revenues continue to tank, the NAA has stepped up its sort of passive-aggressive lashing out at the search giant for, well, essentially being more effective at monetizing the distribution of its content than they are.

In a twist that’s probably a surprise to almost no one, the potential suitor for saving the newspapers from the bugaboo of Google might well be… Google. The company submitted a document indicating it is in the process of building a sophisticated micropayments system based on Google Checkout that would allow publishers to charge for individual pieces or bundles of content.

It’s clear that the system is still only in the very early planning stages at this point, but Google says in the document it expects the new payment structure to be “available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year.” That sounds like the micropayment system will be fast-tracked to deliver reportedly “extremely simple” merchant integration and a solution to the major problem of transaction costs that currently inhibits micropayment plans from being implemented widely on the web.

Google Micropayments: An iTunes-like Model?

We’ll give you one guess whose playbook Google plans to borrow from on the business model side of things: Apple’s App Store (1.8 billion downloads can’t be wrong, it seems). In a brief paragraph Google discusses a similar revenue share to the iTunes model as well as its own Android Market, which both take a 30% cut of the total revenue and pay out 70% to the developer (or in this case, publisher).

Still, they make sure to include a cautionary warning about the pipe dream notion that suddenly charging for content on the web is the solution to newspapers’ woes: “We do not believe it will be the norm for accessing content.”

Check out the full document Google submitted to the NAA below. Let us know in the comments: what would it take for you to spend money for online content? What kind of payment packages might make sense in a brave new world of micropayments? Or will ducking back inside the paywall only hasten print news’s demise?

Google’s proposal to the Newspaper Association of America

Google Wave arrives on September 30th. On that day, Google will start sending out 100,000 invites to non-developers to its much-anticipated real-time communication platform.

It’s not even released and it’s generating more hype than almost any other web product in recent memory. The reason stems from its game-changing features and their potential applications on business, education, customer service, email, social networking, and more.

So with Wave on the way, we wanted to explore some of the potential of Google’s upcoming product. We have a few of our own ideas and included some from Google Wave developers, but more than anything, we want your ideas, so be sure to leave your great Google Wave invention in the comments! Who knows, maybe we’ll feature them in the future!

1. Wave-Powered Forums

This idea’s actually been in my head before, but it’s articulated with some depth by Andrew Camel in the Google Wave API Google Group:

“So I thought that it would be an awesome feature of google wave to have it power a forum. Each thread, instead of being multiple different posts, it would just be a google wave. So, instead of having to try a discussion by posting and going back to the page and checking for new replies and while you were posting, you missed a new part of the discussion, you can post like you are having an instant-message session and you can also save the posts like forum threads. I really think that this would be a great use of the google wave api.”

Real-time threads? Saving waves like forum threads? Google Wave?! Sign us up!

2. Wave-powered Commenting System

“One possibility: Google Wave Embeds may be a real-time replacement to static comments. If Google perfects wave embeds, you could even see YouTube.com comments replaced with waves, although it is way too early to make any calls on the potential of this.”

Now that we’ve had some time to play with Wave, we think more than ever that Wave as a commenting system is a real possibility. Each blog post or YouTube video could have a new wave, where users could converse about practically anything in real-time. Anybody who comes in late can just play back the wave and get up to speed. It could be a whole new era for commenting.

3. Wave-Based Content Management System

A thread in the API group discusses the possibility of using Wave as a project management system. I’ll be honest – even I’ve been toying with this idea. Here’s what Jason Salas said in the thread:

I think that maybe many of the major CMS vendors will create extensions (if we don’t do it ourselves) to integrate their products with Wave. That’s what I’m working on now. But that is a neat idea to actually use Wave as its own CMS platform, with assumed features
like document creation/management, scheduling, RSS feeds, (micro) blogging, archival/search, etc.”

Can’t you see it?

4. Wave for Customer Support

This idea actually comes from a thread in the Google Wave development preview titled “What Will You Use it For?” It’s a remarkable discussion and brainstorming session over the potential of wave. One of the most fleshed-out ideas in the thread, though, is Wave for customer support. Here are some of the bullet-points for how Wave could be used in customer support:

- Sending trouble tickets
- Incident tracking can be a wave
- Call center analytics gadget
- Distribution list gadget
- Customer meta-data gadget
- Surveys can be a wave

Real-time customer support? Yeah, someone please build that.

5. Wave for Education

Google is giving some schools and businesses an early look at Google Wave. But why? What could Wave possibly accomplish in the realm of education and business? A lot, we firmly believe.

I refer once again to the “What Will You Use it For?” Wave in the dev preview for some ideas for how Wave can be used in education.

- Building a more interactive / creative learning environment
- Proofreading / writing papers
-Brainstorming potential project ideas
- Interactive tutoring from home
- Collaborative Environment for Cyber Schooling

With more widgets, you could embed streams and communicate with professors in real-time. We’re excited about Wave’s potential to transform education.

What Are Your Ideas?

We’ve highlighted some of our ideas and many ideas from enthusiasts across the web. So now it’s your turn. What is your idea for Google Wave? We want to hear your thoughts and your opinions in the comments.

Oh, and if you need a little inspiration for your idea, be sure to check out our comprehensive Google Wave coverage:

Exactly one year ago today, the Google Chrome browser was launched to the world. And, in Google-like fashion, they took the unconventional route of announcing Chrome via comic book. Do you remember all of the discussion around Google’s decision to enter the browser market?

Now, 365 days later, Google is commemorating Chrome’s first birthday with some impressive stats. To get the full picture of where Chrome stands today though, we need to look at all the numbers.

The Chrome Road Ahead

While Google’s commemorative blog post talks a great deal about birthday cakes and birthday balloons, the numbers-oriented company did reveal a plethora of interesting facts about the browser. Here is what Google shared:

“Since September 2, 2008, there have been:

– 51 developer releases, 21 beta releases or updates, and 15 stable releases or updates
– Over 20,600 bugs filed (4367 of them were duplicates, 3505 have been fixed, which leaves a whole lot left to go!)
– 11 external committers and bug editors, 46 external code contributors
– 50 Chrome Experiments
– 26 posts on the Google Chrome blog
– 12 Chrome Shorts, a collection of short films about Google Chrome
– A sequel to the comic in Japanese

More importantly, we’ve improved by over 150% on Javascript performance since our initial beta.”

Those numbers are impressive, but they’re almost entirely development-related. The stat that industry analysts, media, and early adopters care about though, is market share. So in 12 months, how much ground has Google made?

The answer: not much. According to stats from Market Share/Net Applications, Chrome only has 2.84% of the market, far behind Internet Explorer’s 66.87% or Firefox’s 22.98%.

Still, it’s only had a year, and it isn’t even officially out for Mac yet (disappointingly). And big developments, like the the Google/Sony deal to pre-load Chrome on Sony PCs are going to boost its market share.

More time is needed before we know whether Chrome was a smart project or a failed endeavor. Will Google push Chrome even harder as it fixes the bugs and makes it into a viable browsing alternative? Or will Google lose focus as it builds the related Google Chrome OS? Only time will tell.

Google keeps on adding and testing new features for its Chrome browser. Things like extensions and Chrome for Mac are still missing, although available if you are adventurous and install Chromium, the open-source project for Google Chrome. Chromium has beta and development features that Google is testing before adding to the Chrome browswer.

Chromium got a new feature, as it occassionally does, but this one definitely caught our eye. The Chromium team announced the addition of bookmark syncing in the developer’s build of Chromium. The new feature will let you keep the same set of bookmarks on multiple machines as well as store them in your Google Docs. This is not unlike the very popular Firefox extension Xmarks.

Here’s how Google explained the new addition, as well as how to implement it:

As of today’s dev channel build, we’re adding a brand new feature to Google Chrome: bookmark sync. Many users have several machines, one at home and one at work for example. This new feature makes it easy to keep the same set of bookmarks on all your machines, and stores them alongside your Google Docs for easy web access.

To activate this feature, launch Google Chrome with the –enable-sync command-line flag. Once you set up sync from the Tools menu, Chrome will then upload and store your bookmarks in your Google Account. Anytime you add or change a bookmark, your changes will be sent to the cloud and immediately broadcast to all other computers for which you’ve activated bookmark sync (using the same XMPP technology as Google Talk).

A note: the Chromium Dev version is the least stable of the Chromium browsers. Windows can crash, new features can need tweaks, and we may never see bookmark syncing ever reach Google Chrome itself. However, this new feature still tickles our fancy, so if you’re brave, subscribe to the dev channel and get the update.

Facebook’s been evolving right before our very eyes. It started back in March, when Facebook rolled out a new homepage design and redesigned Facebook Pages. At the same time, they started announcing changes to open up the platform: public profiles, profile fans, public status updates, real-time search, and earlier this morning, Facebook Lite. Facebook’s been busy.

All of this is part of a process we sometimes describe as Twitterification. Facebook is opening up in parts in order to combat Twitter – another reason why Facebook completed that blockbuster acquisition of FriendFeed. But since these privacy and profile changes have occurred in parts, they have created a lot of confusion.

That’s why we have written this guide to Facebook’s most recent changes to profiles, status updates, and privacy features. We highlight the big changes and explain what is likely to come next. Here’s how the new Facebook is set up:

Profiles

In terms of privacy, there have been two major changes. The first one, which occurred back in March, is that you can make your Facebook profile public. You can make all elements or just parts of your profile public: photos, details, videos, work information, etc. This can be managed in Facebook’s profile privacy settings.

The other major change to profiles, announced in June, is the ability to have profile fans. It’s just like Twitter followers: they will be able to see your updates and info without you friending them. This feature is not yet launched, but will be coming soon:

Status Updates

Status updates have also changed. In the past, only your friends could see your publish posts and status updates (you know, that big “What’s on your mind?” box at the top of the homepage). But as of June, you have the ability to post status updates not only to your friends, but to friends of friends, to your networks, and to everyone. You may need to activate it in your Facebook profile privacy settings.

You’ll also notice that there’s a custom setting. You can post status updates just to specific friend lists. For example, post a personal update just to your top 20 friends, or you can let everyone on Facebook find your update about your big tweetup next week.

The change brings it more in line with Twitter, which is public by default. Really though, this was the prelude to yesterday’s big Facebook Search launch.

Realtime Search

As we covered in-depth yesterday, Facebook is currently rolling out realtime search. While the old search only could find things like apps, groups, and people, the new search is like a beefed-up version of Twitter Search. The new search crawls the last 30 days of news feed activity – photos, notes, images, videos, links, and status updates – and lets users search them all by keyword. Want to learn more about the FriendFeed acquisition or chatter about Mashable on Facebook? The new search helps:

So where does Facebook privacy play into all of this? The search covers all of your friends, but on top of that, it searches all public profiles and public status updates. So if you want to be found in search, you better change your Facebook privacy settings. Remember though, what you say will be visible to everyone then, so don’t say anything you wouldn’t discuss on your public Twitter feed.

What’s Next?

Facebook’s many new features can all be described with one word: openness. It has seen Twitter steal the spotlight and the attention, especially when breaking news and world events occur. Facebook, with its hundreds of millions of users, should be able to do the same thing, but cannot due to the network restrictions that have existed since Facebook’s inception as a college social network.

Facebook will encourage all of its users to join in on the world conversation by opening up their profiles, making their status updates public, and promoting its new realtime search tool. It will also promote users having conversations around news items – a la FriendFeed. The acquisition provides Facebook with a lot of technology that focuses on realtime updates, public conversations, and in-depth discussions. You will see integration with the world’s largest social network very quickly. FriendFeed may even become the model for public discussions on Facebook.

Luckily, you have a choice in these matters. If you want to keep your Facebook profile private between you and your closest friends, you can – just adjust your privacy settings to your network of friends. However, as Facebook opens up more and more, the pressure to open up your profile will increase as well. So prepare yourself for a new Facebook, one that intends to take down Twitter and even give Google a run for its money.

Back in 2005 (a long time in the social media world), Yahoo acquired Delicious, the popular social bookmarking website. Both Yahoo and Delicious founder Joshua Schachter had big plans to change the way we share, remember, and discover information on the Internet. Yahoo even promised “to give Delicious the resources, support, and room it needs to continue growing the service and community.”

So where is it now? Unfortunately, in the case of Delicious, nowhere. It’s been stagnant in terms of development and growth for years (at least until recently, when it started launching new features). Delicious has hit a perpetual ceiling, and understandably its founder is not happy about it. So he spoke out.

He made his comments during a conversation on Hacker News. Joshua responded to a comment claiming Yahoo was cool with “Since when is Yahoo cool?” Then he described Yahoo as a “sausage factory” before making the following statement:

I guess. I think the folks that pay Linus or whatever have done more for OS. Sun’s opensolaris, too. MySQL, etc too. Just by sheer weight of code.

The problem is that the number of cool projects is pretty minimal. They’re in duck and cover mode. They’ll get pushed to trim employees further and further to stretch the revenues out.

I wish I had not sold it to them. The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a big, popular product.

We cannot blame Joshua for his frustration. Delicious’s growth has stagnated for at least a year and has completely dropped in terms of relevance. Even a few years ago, it had huge prospects and strong potential. Joshua (who is now at Google) put his heart and his soul into the popular bookmarking service. What he got in return wasn’t the same commitment.

Does Yahoo have a chance to turn Delicious around? Yes. But Delicious could have been a lot more relevant and useful right now, and Joshua knows it. Knowing that has to be heartbreaking.

It’s no coincidence that Facebook launched a new real-time search engine on the same day that it bought FriendFeed and Google announced a new infrastructure project aimed at speeding up its indexing time. Make no mistake about it: people that know search believe that there’s gold in real-time and social data, and Facebook’s blockbuster acquisition of FriendFeed was a lob squarely across Google’s bow.

Facebook has always been in a position to take a lead in real-time and social search because of the sheer amount of data the site has collected about what people are doing, the things they’re interested in, and what their social graph looks like. About 15 months ago, Paul Buchheit, the founder of FriendFeed, actually wrote that the human link data at sites like Facebook “could ultimately be more valuable than the link data from the web” that Google’s search engine is based on – someone just needs to mine it. Now he may have his chance.

What Facebook Has

Here’s the bullet point list of what Facebook got by purchasing FriendFeed:

• A collection of very smart, ex-Google engineers that really know real-time search
• A social status platform that is arguably better than TwitterTwitterTwitter’s
• A powerful, ready-made real-time search product
• A small, but influential user base full of early adopters willing to try and evangelize new products

Some might think FriendFeed was a second choice acquisition for Facebook, since the company couldn’t land Twitter last year. But FriendFeed was probably the smarter choice. At just under $50 million it cost less than 1/10th as much as Twitter would have, and comes with arguably a better platform and a team that’s just as strong. Yes, Twitter has more than 20 times as many users, but the acquisition of FriendFeed was clearly about technology and engineering talent – one thing Facebook is not lacking, after all, is users.

Google Worry

Facebook has one major asset: users, lots of them. 250 million registered users, to be exact, 30 million of whom update their status at least once per day. What they don’t have is users who are used to sharing their status updates with the world, but they’re trying to change that.

Google still gets more than twice as many visitors as Facebook, but how might that change if Facebook and the new engineering additions from team FriendFeed figure out how to slice and dice that user data in real-time? No one has yet really cracked the real-time or social search egg, but if Facebook can do it, its approximately hundreds of millions of monthly visitors could become hundreds of millions of monthly searchers – and that’s very monetizable and very dangerous to Google’s core business.

And what of Microsoft? Let’s not forget that Microsoft’s BingBingBing powers web search results on Facebook, already. What if the two companies mash it all together and Facebook’s real-time, social web search results find their way out onto Yahoo! (which will soon serve Bing search results)? That’s a very plausible eventuality, and another that’s very dangerous to Google.

What should really worry Google, though, is Facebook’s track record. Facebook has a knack for taking the technologies geeks love and adapting them for mainstream audiences. They did it with the news feed (FriendFeed), photo tagging (Flickr), link sharing (Delicious), and even status updates, which Facebook had before Twitter, but only pushed to the forefront once Twitter got hot with early adopters.

Sometimes a vocal minority fights against these features when they are first introduced, but Facebook has proven that it has a knack for knowing when to tweak and change features and when to stand their ground to find that sweet spot for features that users eventually come to love and rely upon.

Given their past track record, it seems likely that Facebook will be able to get most of its tens of millions of active users to embrace whichever of FriendFeed’s features it co-opts and if they can then succeed in convincing those users to use its combination real-time/Bing-powered web search – look out Google, you have a new and very worthy competitor.