Rattleblog: Tales from the blogosphere

16-04-2007

by Damien Mulley

It's a mergers and acquisitions fuelled episode of Rattleblog with the usual mix of Second Life and Apple titbits too.

The Techcrunch news website is now itself being talked about in tech circles as a possible incubator of new companies after it hired an acquisitions executive from Fox Media, owner of MySpace. However Techcrunch could also go the route of other tech blogs and turn into mini new media empires offering specialist websites. Ratteblog assures readers we will not be branching out and starting RefridgerBlog, SandCastleBlog and BrusselSproutBlog.

Gigaom is reporting that PayPal, a bit late to the mobile revolution party, will at long last be unveiling a mobile version of the PayPal site, making it even more convenient for mobile commerce. Mother-company eBay already has a mobile version of its auction website.

The big news is once again about Google using part of its massive cash stockpile to buy web 1.0 ad company DoubleClick. The biggest beneficiaries of this deal have to be the private equity firm that bought DoubleClick two years ago for USD1.1 billion, sold off two parts of the company for USD525 million and then late last week sold what was left to Google for a whopping USD3.1 billion. Microsoft were initially meant to be buying this company for over a billion dollars but Google once again went after something Microsoft wanted and got it. Here at Rattleblog we're beginning to wonder if "Mountain View", the HQ address of Google, is actually referring to the mounds of cash it seems to have available to it.

Sticking with Google, which has been very busy in the past while, The Boy Genius Report talks about a new experimental service from Google called Google 411. (411 are directory enquiry services in the US.) Google 411 offers a freephone number for people to call in and request directory information and users can even get connected for free. All of this is an automated system, again enforcing the idea that Google does not like humans. As John Battelle points out Google is more than likely using this service to collect mass amounts of data on accents, pronunciations and other data around speech so they can greatly improve their datasets in order to finally offer a voice interface to its main search engine. Clever Google.

Meanwhile the Mashable website reports on the new Google MyMaps project which allows mashups of Google Maps and the ability to add your data to a Google Map. Up to now many companies lived off the fact that Google Maps provided great maps but only offered applications that could allow you add and save data on to the maps. Many companies must now be worried what this Google application will do to their future plans.

The most popular search engine in the world, with the claims of having the most servers, wasn't however the best-in-breed when it came to uptime. A survey showed that Google was unreachable for a total of seven minutes last year, which in fairness is quite tiny, but competitor Yahoo had no downtime at all. Feel sorry for third place MSN though with its 2 hours 45 mins of downtime. Ouch.

Moving to Apple, it appears that the AppleTV minicomputer is fast becoming the most modified Apple hardware ever, with people adding new functionality to it within days of its release. People now have turned it into a full working computer and even a web server. Not bad for something the size of a small biscuit tin.

Facebook, the on-the-block, off-the-block social networking site is now seeing its future as a type of publisher with blogs, photos and calendars all being merged into special feeds so stories can be created from all the information contained on the profiles of groups of people.

Lastly, we've all heard of the ideas of ghosts in machines but now there's God in virtual machines. Zack Exley reports that the popular mega-Christian churches seen around the United States now have a presence in the Second Life virtual world. We think the irony of having a church preaching about the second coming in a world called "second life" has been missed by these churches.

Damien Mulley is an Irish blogger and works as a technical writer in Cork.