"Social is going mainstream. It used to be hard and proprietary; it's becoming easy and open." That's the confident proclamation Google Director of Product Engineering David Glazer made Monday to trumpet the arrival of not only Google's Friend Connect data portability service, but those of MySpace and Facebook, which launched in quick succession Thursday and Friday last week. Three major data portability chess moves in three business days. How can anyone stand it?

In anticipation )or fear( of a Google-Yahoo search outsourcing tie, 16 organizations comprising rural and minority groups opposed the pact in a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice. The Google-Yahoo deal was tested last month but so far the vendors have yet to formally announce the partnership, in which Yahoo would run Google paid search terms alongside its search results.

MySpace is set to make a major announcement in about, oh, 20 minutes. I've been told it is NOT an acquisition even though CEO Chris DeWolfe, COO Amit Kapur and SVP Jim Benedetto are scheduled to speak. A MySpace spokesperson told me only that it's "tech focused and it features a suite of high profile partners." Anyone want to guess what it is? I realize the company just opened up its developer platform to the public a couple weeks ago,

Competition from Microsoft, Nokia )via Symbian(, Palm and Apple aside, one of the issues I had last year with anointing Android the next big mobile operating system was the apparent lack of a major distribution partner. Sure, plenty of vendors, such as handset maker Samsung and carrier Sprint, signed on to support the OS,

I've covered Facebook's poaches of Googlers from time to time, sometimes with a wow and sometimes with an eh. But the latest coup involves something a little closer to home than programming or ad sales: public relations. That's right; the big PR. Elliot Schrage, Google's vice president of global communications and public affairs, or to journos like myself the top gatekeeper to what Google corporate information I can access when, has joined Facebook in the same capacity,

During an appearance of Fox Business News this morning )following, rather frighteningly Fox's score of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet live from Omaha(, I was asked what was next for Microsoft after it failed to land Yahoo this weekend for $33 per share. I said Microsoft would not just walk away, but that it would have to make another go-around. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, I noted, can not afford to lose this battle.

What a long strange trip it's been. Three months after Microsoft offered $31 per share for Yahoo, and after many seed stories in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times about who was running hot and cold about what, Microsoft has withdrawn its offer for No. 2 search provider Yahoo. The chief reason? Microsoft is concerned about Yahoo's recent test of, and subsequent inclination toward, outsourcing its paid search to Google. This means what Google and Yahoo did,

Making good on its pledge to help advertisers plant ads across all mediums, Google today began selling TV Ads. The company created a digital system, in beta since last June, to help U.S.-based advertisers buy TV advertising. "Television is a great way to reach new customers who might not be familiar with your product or service," wrote Christian Yee from Google's Inside AdWords crew.

Parsing CEO Q&As can be valuable because they sometimes lead to insight into the company's direction. There are some tasty morsels in this game of pepper between BusinessWeek and Google CEO Eric Schmidt . The primary topic was innovation but Schmidt made some comments about acquisitions that we can't ignore, which I call attention to first. Schmidt said the "alleged recession" could make for some tasty acquisition targets. Wow, if that isn't an open door to lure new talent,

Google researchers are cracking the nut that is image search using the company's maligned PageRank computation it uses to assign Web sites scores based on relevance. Google programmers Yushi Jing and Shumeet Baluja use so-called "authority" nodes on an inferred visual similarity graph and propose an algorithm to analyze the visual link structure that can be created among a group of images. In a technological approach the programmers are unimaginatively calling VisualRank,

What is the definition of hell? Chicago's O'Hare airport after it shuts down. You'd be surprised how a little bit of rain affects so many lives. I didn't expect to eat breakfast at a Denny's in Arlington Heights this morning anymore than I expected writing this blog from the Doubletree next door. This is what I get for three straight 12-hour days of coverage at Web 2.0 Expo? Aaargh. All right, enough whining. Last night,

So now the DOJ is peering into the suspect deal Google and Yahoo struck two weeks ago to run Google ads alongside Yahoo's ads on Yahoo's search engine . I haven't been able to confirm this yet, but assuming it's true it's something most people watching the sector suspected. Google did well to get the DoubleClick deal past the Federal Trade Commission,

Google is being peppered by yet another lawsuit regarding its advertising technology, according to a suit filed in San Jose district court by consumer crusading legal eagles Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP. An advertiser alleges that Google is taking money from him because he is leaving blank an optional box that allows Google to charge customers for ads placed through AdSense, Google's third-party ad network. Here is the backdrop.

When OpenSocial launched last November many Google watchers suspected it would be through the iGoogle home pages that Google consumers would be able to enjoy the fruits those APIs had to offer. Google took the step many assumed it would and opened an iGoogle sandbox for developers to help them build richer gadgets for the home page. This is the start of a social network, Google-style,

For the second year running, Google was named top brand out of a list of 100 composed by research and consulting firm Millward Brown Optimor. The search company is worth a staggering $86.1 billion, followed by GE at $71.4 billion and Microsoft at $70.8 billion. The consulting firm gauged the brand values based on the financial performance of the company combined with a brand equity survey of more than 100,000 global consumers. What does this mean?

Mess with Google's mindshare, and feel the backlash. That's the lesson comScore learned Thursday after Google handily beat first quarter financial expectations by announcing a 31 percent profit and paid click growth of 20 percent. No one is disputing Google's paid clicks are down - they grew 30 percent last quarter - but comScore foreshadowed something worse than what it was and found itself at the business end of an 8 percent drop in shares. Meanwhile,

U.S. Representatives feel that they let Google manipulate the 700 MHz spectrum auction. Electronista and other blogs are reporting that three U.S. representatives lamented the fact that Google bid for 700 MHz spectrum to ensure the winner must open up access to all devices and applications. Republicans Cliff Stearns and John Shimkus and Democrat Eliot Engel complained in a hearing on Capitol Hill that Google's $4.6 billion bid for spectrum deterred other bidders.

Zoho's FUD blast after Google and Salesforce.com announced their tighter integration yesterday was surprising. While blasting Salesforce.com for spending too much on marketing and not enough on R&D, Sridhar Vembu, CEO of AdventNet, which owns the Zoho SAAS property that competes with Salesforce.com CRM and Google Apps, let slip that Salesforce.com tried to buy Zoho last year. Companies don't normally air dirty laundry in such a wickedly detailed fashion.

Would today's enhanced integration between Salesforce.com and Google had happened if Salesforce.com bought Zoho last year? That's the multi-million-dollar question raised in my mind by AdventNet CEO Sridhar Vembu, whose company owns the Zoho unit, which makes SAAS collaboration and business applications to rival Salesforce.com and Google. Vembu blasted Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's "business model bloat" in a blog post Monday afternoon, claiming that Salesforce.

A couple of sites have put together some interesting information on Google's clandestine datacenters. Datacenter Knowledge has logged an incredible amount of data about the 36 or so centers worldwide, painting a broad picture of what to many were almost mythical entities. Royal Pingdom followed this up by mapping out the locations for us . The post lists the locations of the sites, including some under construction, such as one in and Goose Creek, S.C., as well as Pryor,